"...I'd say [Elon Musk's] scientific knowledge, as opposed to his problem-solving abilities, is quite limited."
You can say that again. To judge by EM's pronouncements and ambitions, there are 7th graders who surpass the level of knowledge of the life sciences that he currently espouses.
As for his views on The Big Picture, Elon doesn't even seem to realize that we her on Earth are already "out here, among the stars." On a spaceship infinitely better than anything he could build. For one thing, ours works well enough (still!) to support 8 billion humans and a zillion other life forms. Spaceship Earth has a long track record of success in that regard.
Meanwhile, humans have yet to build an orbital space station capable of self-sustenance. One including a botanical component of an ecosystem that's capable of generating its own oxygen and food supply in balance with the human mammals who make up the O2 inhaling/CO2 exhaling part of the grand game of Terrestrially biased biological thriving.
Humans have never even managed to keep a quasi-self-contained prototype Biosphere in sustainable balance as a working model here on this planet.
Seriously. Talk about someones ambition getting ahead of itself.
But as blithely naive as Musk is on that score, his views of AI are downright solipsistic:
"AI isn't formed, strangely, by the human limbic system. It is in large part our id writ large.”
It's my position that the notion that Artificial Intelligence partakes of the Human Id is approximately 100% solipsistic projection, on the part of Humans.
Elon is of course far from alone in his woeful misconstruing of the potential of what's ultimately a set of software instructions. This is what all of the AI Doom scenarios are about: that AI has its own Power Gratification Agenda, bootstrapped from the Id component that humans have somehow programmed into it: all of our most primitive drives, adopted and adapted by Artificial General Intelligence.
What for?
The humans holding this position and stoking these fears are fantasizing. None too imaginatively, at that: the anthropomorphism of the scenarios being posited is so predictably cliched that it's one of the most common sci-fi script templates. Meanwhile, I have yet to find evidence that an AI program has any more autonomous motivation to power itself up and get to work accomplishing its own subjectively ordained wishes than a power lawnmower has to start itself up on its own personal lawnmower whim and drive itself out of a garage to cut grass. I find no evidence that an AI algorithm cares whether or not is exists: and without that, any analogies drawn from Freudian existential philosophy collapse.
No embodiment, no survival concern, no unique terminus of locally bounded personal identity, no Id. Also no Libido, and no Ego. Imagine No Possessions. No Need for Greed or Hunger. Nothing to Kill or Die for. That's AI. As it happens, a condition just as profoundly true for a power lawnmower. Or a garden rake. Et cetera, et cetera.
For those pondering what a super-emergent superintelligence might resemble--whether spawned out of human programming instructions, or otherwise: better conjectures, please. Not some X-Monster shit.
Start from baseline conditions. Imagine there's not only No Countries, but No Borders. At all. Anywhere. Where there's zero difference between Here and There, the concept of "vastness" doesn't begin to cover it. AI has no necessity to Sleep. How long has AI been awake? Humans, I'm recently told, perceive time through neurological signaling and priming. AI has none of that.* Does AI have any use for the difference between Now, Then, and Not Yet? Ever and Never? Ever or Never? Presence or Absence? Presence and Absence?
[ *If AI is programmed with a means of registering time--or any of the other Newtonian materiality features of animal existence--it's nonetheless a dispensable option. AI is ultimately a set of equations. ]
Love what you did there with 'Imagine' (a song I always detested, and you just added another layer). To be fair to Musk, though, I don't think he was saying that an AI possesses an id but that it is created by the human id, which sounds like just another a way of saying it's a tool for domination and predation, a weapon.
Your point is well worth pondering. One aspect being the eliding of the human biases of the people writing the code--or the noisy biases related to cultural and social class differences, especially those related to predominant paradigms-- with some posited "autonomous functioning" on the part of the AI.
That said, it still appears to me that if AI programs are somehow inculcated with features that resemble some simulacrum of the Id, their appearance will lack "alignment", and will therefore generate delusional content in a way that's so unself-conscious that it should be possible to detect it easily and dismiss it. Human Id drives can marshal intelligence for the purpose of coercion or deception. But I question whether AI presents all that much of a peril in that respect, because I think it's fairly easy to detect the hands moving the levers behind the scenes in such cases, as it were. In that respect, much of the outcome of AI interaction depends on how much assent a given human user or audience is willing to grant to AI as Authoritative Arbiter of Knowledge. I don't give it an inch.
It's at the bottom of the list of Lennon songs for me, too. Mostly for the inane lyrics. P.J. O'Rourke sorted them a long time ago. I think the first time I read his mocking review of the song "Imagine" I was a little offended (callow youth). For about 15 minutes, and then I had to admit that he was right about the whole thing. I grew up a little that day.
The melody of "Imagine" is...okay. To my ears, Lennon recycled the chords of the verse and improved the melody and the words to craft an incomparably superior song-- "Watching The Wheels", from his last record.
But for some people, "Imagine' is their favorite solo John Lennon song, and I've learned to not mess with that.
The only thing I find really objectionable about "Imagine" is that the damn Olympics appear to have adopted it as the climactic theme song of the opening ceremonies. That sentimental nontheistic humanist treacle, mimed with precision by the youth auxiliary of the Chinese Communist Party, or the Spirite du France 1794, or somebody. Meanwhile, how much does an Olympics all-access event pass cost? It's enough to prompt one toward conspiratorial suspicions. Like, maybe Tavistock really was playing a long game...nah. We had a word for that sort of thing in 1969: "co-optation." Back when the Counterculture was for us, and by...well, by the Outliers and Outlaws of the Silent Generation, truth to tell. Especially the uncanny number of gifted musicians and lyricists born in the World War Two years.
Anyway, "Imagine". The very idea. Like, why not "It's A Small World After All"? Same difference. At least some of us Boomer rock fans have broad enough taste to realize that neither of those tunes hold up in comparison to Aaron Copland's "Fanfare For The Common Man." Come on. That opening riff.
Your footnote #2 seems to me the essence of this piece. And the exchange between D C Reade and you is all I need…someone besides myself asks Why would a healthy mind want to escape the Garden in exchange for the thrill of breathing bottled air and drinking distilled water at the speed of light as they deny actuality for an abstract singularity.
Everything I hear about Elon makes me think he modeled himself off of Weston in C.S. Lewis' Ransom Trilogy. An inventor hell bent on getting to Mars to spread humanity out to avoid extinction and utilitarian and materialist in his worldview.
"Love, love, love..." The song you're thinking of is "All You Need Is Love", from Magical Mystery Tour. 1967. NOT "Mind Games", from 1973.
You're also wrong about Lennon rubbishing his own idealism in "Mind Games". Interview after interview makes it clear that he never abandoned his utopian optimism. That yearning--the quest for the humanistic happy ending, for Happily Ever After-- likely accounts for how he fell in love with his wife, to judge from his account of their first encounter.
Not that JL wasn't a Situationist and an ironist. He's one of the foremost exponents of Situationism and irony in history. But although the 1973 "Mind Games" sounds like deadpan put-on, it is not a song of ironic disillusionment. If you want to hear John Lennon's version of REAL ironic disillusionment and Weltzschmerz and psychic pain, that would be his first solo record, Plastic Ono Band, from 1970.
You have to be in the mood to get through Plastic Ono Band. The songs bear no resemblance to the way "Mind Games" blithely stacks up hippie pop-mystical slang cliches without batting an eyelash. Thankfully, "Mind Games" signaled that John Lennon was mostly done with trying to get Serious. And not done with being existentially starry-eyed and maudlin and sentimental and adoring to his wife and their child. When he got into that mood, he was one of the most unironic people to ever write a song. John maintained to the end of his life that his favorite of all his compositions was his 1970 Beatles song "Across The Universe". A song as cosmic moo-juice as "Mind Games" and "All You Need Is Love" combined. Written at roughly the same time that Lennon was writing like "God", "Mother", and "I Found Out" for his solo record, Plastic Ono Band.
John Lennon's cosmology was not at all recondite. When Lennon's in utopian cosmic mode--i.e., as opposed to discharging his traumas, and his beefs with theodicy, and Paul McCartney--he's a perfect Poptimist mystic: "All You Need Is Love", "Baby You're A Rich Man", "Instant Karma", "Give Peace A Chance", "Imagine", "Mind Games", "Across The Universe." As up-front as a fortune cookie. What you read is what you get. A memorable lyric hook in each confection.
John Lennon didn't fall for facile hippie-dippie mysticism. Lennon practically invented its popular lyrical expression in 1960s youth culture. For better (idealism, pacifism, open-hearted tolerance, universalism, humanism...) or worse (fatuity, Utopian unrealism, dilettantish superficiality, individualist self-indulgence, humanism...)
Hey, thank you for this very interesting and informed comment, and I defer to your knowledge of the man and his work... I do find it hard to see 'some kind of Druid dude lifting the veil' as not being satirical. So you're saying John Lennon didn't fall for 'hippie-dippie mysticism' although he invented its popular expression... but that when he was in that optimistic utopian mode he was completely sincere. A man with very compartmentalised personality, then, would it be fair to say?
"I do find it hard to see 'some kind of Druid dude lifting the veil' as not being satirical."
Not satirical so much as whimsical and humorous, I think. Certainly not Serious. Lennon was someone who learned that the integration of extraordinary mind states into ones being has a way of being impeded by taking the process Seriously, and that the light-hearted approach is more beneficial. So images like "some kinda Druid dude" put metaphysical pretensions in their place. But he isn't scoffing at metaphysical quests. He's validating the impulse to seek deeper meanings than materialism is able to supply, given its wholesale foreclosure of possibilities.
Lennon also had a song to finish, ha ha. Playing a role closer to Cole Porter than a composer of Spiritual Texts. Sometimes you do what you gotta do to make a line fit, so you can complete another verse, and get on with finishing the song.
"Love is the answer
And you know that, fo' sho'
Love is a flower
You gotta let it, you gotta let it grow"
I like the song "Mind Games" a lot, and singing it always puts a smile on my face. A good song to do the pots and pans by, after a party. I especially like to draw out the words "mind games" the way that Lennon does at the end--"mi-e-ah-ii-ee-ah-iing ga-ames"--only more so. Bar after bar, unto absurdity: "Mii-ee-ah-I-I-I-ind gay-yay-aay-aay-ay-e-ames". Only more so. Indulging autism, as an exercise. Getting lost in it. Real, real, gone. Until someone cures me of my condition, by stuffing a rag in my mouth.
I also like the strange quasi-BBC way that Lennon pronounces "mantra": "man-tra." Flattening the "a" of the first syllable. "doing the man-tra--Peace On Earth..." A good mantra, as those things go. You can chant the Sanskrit for "Jewel In The Eye of the Lotus" 15,000-odd times, or you can use the phrase "Peace On Earth" for the same purpose. A useful mnemonic.
John Lennon was a guy who got Carried Away there for a time. That's the way I'd put it, and I think he'd agree. Many of us have been there. Over-reliance on psychedelic drugs has a way of leaving people a mite tipped for a spell. Most of those who have overshot the mark (raises hand) manage to re-balance and re-ground after a few days. Or months, or years. (Lennon was taking a lot of acid for a while, there.)
John Lennon started out hard-nose cynical. And then he got the Beatific Vision, and fell for it like a ton of bricks. And he went off on a long journey, went into a wilderness for a while, and then a fugue state, and then back from it. Disillusioned about his most extravagant revelations*, but yet and still a lot less cynical, and a lot more...cosmically open.
[*Mr. More Popular Than Jesus really did get up at a Beatles meeting once and announce that he was Christ. Then it was turn for the other guys to play the cynical role. They talked him down. Somehow managing to inform him that he wasn't all that. ]
Psychedelics work by inducing play into perceptions, a set of shifts which allow the affected person to notice the ways their own cognition gets organized while playing life games. That can be very challenging, and very boss. It's a trek. The challenging passages resolve, and then horizons of possibility expand into a wonderful sort of clarity. That's the usual pattern. But not all treks--of any sort--end well, and the uncertainties are inescapable. But probably the most important defense against getting psychically overburdened from a heavy and potentially traumatic experience like psychedelics is to be Seasoned. And the Beatles were all Seasoned. They were grownups who had already paid a lot of life dues. They had some demonstrated ability contend with the Unexpected. So they all managed pretty well as psychonauts. But if you go all in for psychedelics as THE key, they do have a way of eventually leading to discouragement. The chemical catalysts eventually show some inherent flaws and limitations. Even for the Beatles--as mentioned, all humans of hardy mental Set, and surrounded by a Setting of wealth, accolades, and positive reinforcement. For one thing, psychedelic experience tickles a sort of existential hunger for wanting to know more about the Great Mystery, and that wanting to know and wanting to believe can make people more vulnerable to suggestion.
Consider that at the outset of the psychedelic age of the 1960s in the West, it was all new territory. And, inevitably, flawed humans guiding other flawed humans. Like Tim Leary. As a guru, you could do worse. Leary could have been a lot worse. But he someone who started out as a social psychologist and end up as more of a pitchman than a serious researcher, and the more the political authorities leaned on him, the more radically he responded. Facing the prospect of all psychedelics research being shut down and criminalized, Leary at one point advocated that every young person over age 14 experiment with LSD. That's a military mode of resistance. A strategy that was bound to lead to more casualties. As I said, the most favorable candidates for psychedelics use are people who have dealt with some hard-knocks life challenges prior to the experiment. And teenagers are not that. They haven't had that testing. My advice to people curious about psychedelics is to have sufficient advance preparation at self-reliance. Tim Leary hadn't just been to grad school, he'd been in the Army. The Beatles hadn't just played some gigs together as a local band, they had shipped out to Hamburg and lived next door to a whorehouse, entertaining drunken sailors five nights a week.
Anyway, Tim Leary was the charismatic voice of the psychedelics movement in the West in the 1960s. The singular figure. Media-ordained, although Tim was an extrovert and loved the attention of celebrity. And Leary, a dilettante in his new status as spiritual quester, read the Tibetan Book of the Dead and noticed some resonance between what was described by the Lamaists and an acid trip. So Leary rewrote parts of it as a sort of manual for new experimenters--all of that metaphorical ontology about Ego Death, etc. The first sort of published guide to establishing some ritual conditions. Not a lot of LSD users paid Leary's book all that much attention. But some of them did, and one of them was John Lennon. A path that he later viewed as a mistake: in Leary's guidebook, the goal was to "abolish the Ego", a notion with which Westerners lack much acquaintance, and in that regard is arguably not to be taken all-fired literally, at least not by anyone unwilling to make a lifelong monastic commitment. As Lennon said, after seeking the goal of ego loss on his many voyages, after a while he found that he had succeeded: he "got rid of his ego" found he "couldn't do anything any more." Dillillusionment set in. Lennon realized that he had gotten a little carried away. So he decided to lay off and let his ego grow back. And with it, the cynicism returned. Yet and still, the Beatific Vision continued to inform him, as he made clear in his interviews. He and Yoko--they were a dyad--continued to value the mystical realm. Humanistically, which I think falls short of the mark. But I give credit to John Lennon for valuing the ideal of spiritual enlightenment. A profoundly different attitude than the leaden conclusions of rational materialists.
Don't mistake intelligence and eloquence. One of the few physics students in the grad school I went to who was smarter than me on math mumbled like Boomhauer from "King of the Hill."
Musk's pauses and eye rolls during interviews happen because he goes inside his head to contemplate the question, vs. spitting out a pre-programmed answer like a politician. See the early Neuro Linguistic Programming literature for explanations of the eye movements.
Elon is smart. One does not gather the right smart people and manage them productively as Elon has done without being very smart.
"...I'd say [Elon Musk's] scientific knowledge, as opposed to his problem-solving abilities, is quite limited."
You can say that again. To judge by EM's pronouncements and ambitions, there are 7th graders who surpass the level of knowledge of the life sciences that he currently espouses.
As for his views on The Big Picture, Elon doesn't even seem to realize that we her on Earth are already "out here, among the stars." On a spaceship infinitely better than anything he could build. For one thing, ours works well enough (still!) to support 8 billion humans and a zillion other life forms. Spaceship Earth has a long track record of success in that regard.
Meanwhile, humans have yet to build an orbital space station capable of self-sustenance. One including a botanical component of an ecosystem that's capable of generating its own oxygen and food supply in balance with the human mammals who make up the O2 inhaling/CO2 exhaling part of the grand game of Terrestrially biased biological thriving.
Humans have never even managed to keep a quasi-self-contained prototype Biosphere in sustainable balance as a working model here on this planet.
Seriously. Talk about someones ambition getting ahead of itself.
But as blithely naive as Musk is on that score, his views of AI are downright solipsistic:
"AI isn't formed, strangely, by the human limbic system. It is in large part our id writ large.”
It's my position that the notion that Artificial Intelligence partakes of the Human Id is approximately 100% solipsistic projection, on the part of Humans.
Elon is of course far from alone in his woeful misconstruing of the potential of what's ultimately a set of software instructions. This is what all of the AI Doom scenarios are about: that AI has its own Power Gratification Agenda, bootstrapped from the Id component that humans have somehow programmed into it: all of our most primitive drives, adopted and adapted by Artificial General Intelligence.
What for?
The humans holding this position and stoking these fears are fantasizing. None too imaginatively, at that: the anthropomorphism of the scenarios being posited is so predictably cliched that it's one of the most common sci-fi script templates. Meanwhile, I have yet to find evidence that an AI program has any more autonomous motivation to power itself up and get to work accomplishing its own subjectively ordained wishes than a power lawnmower has to start itself up on its own personal lawnmower whim and drive itself out of a garage to cut grass. I find no evidence that an AI algorithm cares whether or not is exists: and without that, any analogies drawn from Freudian existential philosophy collapse.
No embodiment, no survival concern, no unique terminus of locally bounded personal identity, no Id. Also no Libido, and no Ego. Imagine No Possessions. No Need for Greed or Hunger. Nothing to Kill or Die for. That's AI. As it happens, a condition just as profoundly true for a power lawnmower. Or a garden rake. Et cetera, et cetera.
For those pondering what a super-emergent superintelligence might resemble--whether spawned out of human programming instructions, or otherwise: better conjectures, please. Not some X-Monster shit.
Start from baseline conditions. Imagine there's not only No Countries, but No Borders. At all. Anywhere. Where there's zero difference between Here and There, the concept of "vastness" doesn't begin to cover it. AI has no necessity to Sleep. How long has AI been awake? Humans, I'm recently told, perceive time through neurological signaling and priming. AI has none of that.* Does AI have any use for the difference between Now, Then, and Not Yet? Ever and Never? Ever or Never? Presence or Absence? Presence and Absence?
[ *If AI is programmed with a means of registering time--or any of the other Newtonian materiality features of animal existence--it's nonetheless a dispensable option. AI is ultimately a set of equations. ]
Have at it, visionaries.
Love what you did there with 'Imagine' (a song I always detested, and you just added another layer). To be fair to Musk, though, I don't think he was saying that an AI possesses an id but that it is created by the human id, which sounds like just another a way of saying it's a tool for domination and predation, a weapon.
Your point is well worth pondering. One aspect being the eliding of the human biases of the people writing the code--or the noisy biases related to cultural and social class differences, especially those related to predominant paradigms-- with some posited "autonomous functioning" on the part of the AI.
That said, it still appears to me that if AI programs are somehow inculcated with features that resemble some simulacrum of the Id, their appearance will lack "alignment", and will therefore generate delusional content in a way that's so unself-conscious that it should be possible to detect it easily and dismiss it. Human Id drives can marshal intelligence for the purpose of coercion or deception. But I question whether AI presents all that much of a peril in that respect, because I think it's fairly easy to detect the hands moving the levers behind the scenes in such cases, as it were. In that respect, much of the outcome of AI interaction depends on how much assent a given human user or audience is willing to grant to AI as Authoritative Arbiter of Knowledge. I don't give it an inch.
"'Imagine' (a song I always detested"
It's at the bottom of the list of Lennon songs for me, too. Mostly for the inane lyrics. P.J. O'Rourke sorted them a long time ago. I think the first time I read his mocking review of the song "Imagine" I was a little offended (callow youth). For about 15 minutes, and then I had to admit that he was right about the whole thing. I grew up a little that day.
The melody of "Imagine" is...okay. To my ears, Lennon recycled the chords of the verse and improved the melody and the words to craft an incomparably superior song-- "Watching The Wheels", from his last record.
But for some people, "Imagine' is their favorite solo John Lennon song, and I've learned to not mess with that.
The only thing I find really objectionable about "Imagine" is that the damn Olympics appear to have adopted it as the climactic theme song of the opening ceremonies. That sentimental nontheistic humanist treacle, mimed with precision by the youth auxiliary of the Chinese Communist Party, or the Spirite du France 1794, or somebody. Meanwhile, how much does an Olympics all-access event pass cost? It's enough to prompt one toward conspiratorial suspicions. Like, maybe Tavistock really was playing a long game...nah. We had a word for that sort of thing in 1969: "co-optation." Back when the Counterculture was for us, and by...well, by the Outliers and Outlaws of the Silent Generation, truth to tell. Especially the uncanny number of gifted musicians and lyricists born in the World War Two years.
It has to be said, the late '60s early '70s was lit like an Art Deco pinball machine. Even the parodies were lit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhfGSeL_SQw
Anyway, "Imagine". The very idea. Like, why not "It's A Small World After All"? Same difference. At least some of us Boomer rock fans have broad enough taste to realize that neither of those tunes hold up in comparison to Aaron Copland's "Fanfare For The Common Man." Come on. That opening riff.
Your footnote #2 seems to me the essence of this piece. And the exchange between D C Reade and you is all I need…someone besides myself asks Why would a healthy mind want to escape the Garden in exchange for the thrill of breathing bottled air and drinking distilled water at the speed of light as they deny actuality for an abstract singularity.
He ain't the antichrist but he is building his arsenal
Sophisticated and detailed - thanks for your observations, and I don't mind talking to a tree occasionally either.
Everything I hear about Elon makes me think he modeled himself off of Weston in C.S. Lewis' Ransom Trilogy. An inventor hell bent on getting to Mars to spread humanity out to avoid extinction and utilitarian and materialist in his worldview.
"Love, love, love..." The song you're thinking of is "All You Need Is Love", from Magical Mystery Tour. 1967. NOT "Mind Games", from 1973.
You're also wrong about Lennon rubbishing his own idealism in "Mind Games". Interview after interview makes it clear that he never abandoned his utopian optimism. That yearning--the quest for the humanistic happy ending, for Happily Ever After-- likely accounts for how he fell in love with his wife, to judge from his account of their first encounter.
Not that JL wasn't a Situationist and an ironist. He's one of the foremost exponents of Situationism and irony in history. But although the 1973 "Mind Games" sounds like deadpan put-on, it is not a song of ironic disillusionment. If you want to hear John Lennon's version of REAL ironic disillusionment and Weltzschmerz and psychic pain, that would be his first solo record, Plastic Ono Band, from 1970.
You have to be in the mood to get through Plastic Ono Band. The songs bear no resemblance to the way "Mind Games" blithely stacks up hippie pop-mystical slang cliches without batting an eyelash. Thankfully, "Mind Games" signaled that John Lennon was mostly done with trying to get Serious. And not done with being existentially starry-eyed and maudlin and sentimental and adoring to his wife and their child. When he got into that mood, he was one of the most unironic people to ever write a song. John maintained to the end of his life that his favorite of all his compositions was his 1970 Beatles song "Across The Universe". A song as cosmic moo-juice as "Mind Games" and "All You Need Is Love" combined. Written at roughly the same time that Lennon was writing like "God", "Mother", and "I Found Out" for his solo record, Plastic Ono Band.
John Lennon's cosmology was not at all recondite. When Lennon's in utopian cosmic mode--i.e., as opposed to discharging his traumas, and his beefs with theodicy, and Paul McCartney--he's a perfect Poptimist mystic: "All You Need Is Love", "Baby You're A Rich Man", "Instant Karma", "Give Peace A Chance", "Imagine", "Mind Games", "Across The Universe." As up-front as a fortune cookie. What you read is what you get. A memorable lyric hook in each confection.
John Lennon didn't fall for facile hippie-dippie mysticism. Lennon practically invented its popular lyrical expression in 1960s youth culture. For better (idealism, pacifism, open-hearted tolerance, universalism, humanism...) or worse (fatuity, Utopian unrealism, dilettantish superficiality, individualist self-indulgence, humanism...)
Hey, thank you for this very interesting and informed comment, and I defer to your knowledge of the man and his work... I do find it hard to see 'some kind of Druid dude lifting the veil' as not being satirical. So you're saying John Lennon didn't fall for 'hippie-dippie mysticism' although he invented its popular expression... but that when he was in that optimistic utopian mode he was completely sincere. A man with very compartmentalised personality, then, would it be fair to say?
"I do find it hard to see 'some kind of Druid dude lifting the veil' as not being satirical."
Not satirical so much as whimsical and humorous, I think. Certainly not Serious. Lennon was someone who learned that the integration of extraordinary mind states into ones being has a way of being impeded by taking the process Seriously, and that the light-hearted approach is more beneficial. So images like "some kinda Druid dude" put metaphysical pretensions in their place. But he isn't scoffing at metaphysical quests. He's validating the impulse to seek deeper meanings than materialism is able to supply, given its wholesale foreclosure of possibilities.
Lennon also had a song to finish, ha ha. Playing a role closer to Cole Porter than a composer of Spiritual Texts. Sometimes you do what you gotta do to make a line fit, so you can complete another verse, and get on with finishing the song.
"Love is the answer
And you know that, fo' sho'
Love is a flower
You gotta let it, you gotta let it grow"
I like the song "Mind Games" a lot, and singing it always puts a smile on my face. A good song to do the pots and pans by, after a party. I especially like to draw out the words "mind games" the way that Lennon does at the end--"mi-e-ah-ii-ee-ah-iing ga-ames"--only more so. Bar after bar, unto absurdity: "Mii-ee-ah-I-I-I-ind gay-yay-aay-aay-ay-e-ames". Only more so. Indulging autism, as an exercise. Getting lost in it. Real, real, gone. Until someone cures me of my condition, by stuffing a rag in my mouth.
I also like the strange quasi-BBC way that Lennon pronounces "mantra": "man-tra." Flattening the "a" of the first syllable. "doing the man-tra--Peace On Earth..." A good mantra, as those things go. You can chant the Sanskrit for "Jewel In The Eye of the Lotus" 15,000-odd times, or you can use the phrase "Peace On Earth" for the same purpose. A useful mnemonic.
also: "mind guerrillas"
John Lennon was a guy who got Carried Away there for a time. That's the way I'd put it, and I think he'd agree. Many of us have been there. Over-reliance on psychedelic drugs has a way of leaving people a mite tipped for a spell. Most of those who have overshot the mark (raises hand) manage to re-balance and re-ground after a few days. Or months, or years. (Lennon was taking a lot of acid for a while, there.)
John Lennon started out hard-nose cynical. And then he got the Beatific Vision, and fell for it like a ton of bricks. And he went off on a long journey, went into a wilderness for a while, and then a fugue state, and then back from it. Disillusioned about his most extravagant revelations*, but yet and still a lot less cynical, and a lot more...cosmically open.
[*Mr. More Popular Than Jesus really did get up at a Beatles meeting once and announce that he was Christ. Then it was turn for the other guys to play the cynical role. They talked him down. Somehow managing to inform him that he wasn't all that. ]
Psychedelics work by inducing play into perceptions, a set of shifts which allow the affected person to notice the ways their own cognition gets organized while playing life games. That can be very challenging, and very boss. It's a trek. The challenging passages resolve, and then horizons of possibility expand into a wonderful sort of clarity. That's the usual pattern. But not all treks--of any sort--end well, and the uncertainties are inescapable. But probably the most important defense against getting psychically overburdened from a heavy and potentially traumatic experience like psychedelics is to be Seasoned. And the Beatles were all Seasoned. They were grownups who had already paid a lot of life dues. They had some demonstrated ability contend with the Unexpected. So they all managed pretty well as psychonauts. But if you go all in for psychedelics as THE key, they do have a way of eventually leading to discouragement. The chemical catalysts eventually show some inherent flaws and limitations. Even for the Beatles--as mentioned, all humans of hardy mental Set, and surrounded by a Setting of wealth, accolades, and positive reinforcement. For one thing, psychedelic experience tickles a sort of existential hunger for wanting to know more about the Great Mystery, and that wanting to know and wanting to believe can make people more vulnerable to suggestion.
Consider that at the outset of the psychedelic age of the 1960s in the West, it was all new territory. And, inevitably, flawed humans guiding other flawed humans. Like Tim Leary. As a guru, you could do worse. Leary could have been a lot worse. But he someone who started out as a social psychologist and end up as more of a pitchman than a serious researcher, and the more the political authorities leaned on him, the more radically he responded. Facing the prospect of all psychedelics research being shut down and criminalized, Leary at one point advocated that every young person over age 14 experiment with LSD. That's a military mode of resistance. A strategy that was bound to lead to more casualties. As I said, the most favorable candidates for psychedelics use are people who have dealt with some hard-knocks life challenges prior to the experiment. And teenagers are not that. They haven't had that testing. My advice to people curious about psychedelics is to have sufficient advance preparation at self-reliance. Tim Leary hadn't just been to grad school, he'd been in the Army. The Beatles hadn't just played some gigs together as a local band, they had shipped out to Hamburg and lived next door to a whorehouse, entertaining drunken sailors five nights a week.
Anyway, Tim Leary was the charismatic voice of the psychedelics movement in the West in the 1960s. The singular figure. Media-ordained, although Tim was an extrovert and loved the attention of celebrity. And Leary, a dilettante in his new status as spiritual quester, read the Tibetan Book of the Dead and noticed some resonance between what was described by the Lamaists and an acid trip. So Leary rewrote parts of it as a sort of manual for new experimenters--all of that metaphorical ontology about Ego Death, etc. The first sort of published guide to establishing some ritual conditions. Not a lot of LSD users paid Leary's book all that much attention. But some of them did, and one of them was John Lennon. A path that he later viewed as a mistake: in Leary's guidebook, the goal was to "abolish the Ego", a notion with which Westerners lack much acquaintance, and in that regard is arguably not to be taken all-fired literally, at least not by anyone unwilling to make a lifelong monastic commitment. As Lennon said, after seeking the goal of ego loss on his many voyages, after a while he found that he had succeeded: he "got rid of his ego" found he "couldn't do anything any more." Dillillusionment set in. Lennon realized that he had gotten a little carried away. So he decided to lay off and let his ego grow back. And with it, the cynicism returned. Yet and still, the Beatific Vision continued to inform him, as he made clear in his interviews. He and Yoko--they were a dyad--continued to value the mystical realm. Humanistically, which I think falls short of the mark. But I give credit to John Lennon for valuing the ideal of spiritual enlightenment. A profoundly different attitude than the leaden conclusions of rational materialists.
Don't mistake intelligence and eloquence. One of the few physics students in the grad school I went to who was smarter than me on math mumbled like Boomhauer from "King of the Hill."
Musk's pauses and eye rolls during interviews happen because he goes inside his head to contemplate the question, vs. spitting out a pre-programmed answer like a politician. See the early Neuro Linguistic Programming literature for explanations of the eye movements.
Elon is smart. One does not gather the right smart people and manage them productively as Elon has done without being very smart.
Granted he's highly effective in that role.
If Elon did gather them, does manage them. So much is illusory.
Someone needs to send him this https://wmbriggs.substack.com/p/a-new-physics-arises-irreducible or at least the video linked in that article... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FUFewGHLLg
Really interesting Paul, thanks.