Andrew Gallimore

It's unfathomable.

When you compare...

The rest of human history, it's like an exponential thing.

You know, we've gradually been developing and technologically improving.

And then we hit some point in the last century where we reach this kind of technological computer informational age and everything is accelerating.

Exactly like Terence McKenna was saying, things speed up very, very quickly.

And it feels like we're on the cusp either of killing ourselves, which is one option, or...

undergoing some profound transformation as a species, whether it means becoming a space-faring nation, sorry, a space-faring civilization, or whether it means going in the opposite direction and becoming some kind of post-biological civilization that exists beyond space and beyond time, perhaps, and kind of joining the crowd of these intelligences that have made that transition perhaps billions of years ago, you know...

I mean, I think that generally there's a fundamental principle that the most interesting things happen at the edge of chaos.

Right.

You know, and this applies to the brain.

The brain actually sits at the edge of chaos.

In complex systems, we have lots of interacting parts.

They can display behavior from perfect order all the way to complete chaos.

Now, perfect order is boring.

Nothing happens.

Complete chaos is useless because it's not actually technically random, but it's a complete mess.

Whereas when you get that balance right, you reach a point that's called the edge of chaos where order and disorder are perfectly balanced.

psychedelics, as I said before, they nudge the brain into that slightly disordered state.

But all things, all cells, all living organisms, complex society and societies, they operate at the edge of chaos.