Dennis McKenna: Tamlin, or Tam, Hunt is a scholar at UC Santa Barbara’s META Lab, where he  studies consciousness and the philosophy of mind. He is the lead developer of the General  Resonance Theory of consciousness with Jonathan Schooler, and has been lead guest editor for  two special research topics at Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. He is also a public policy lawyer  specializing in green energy and AI safety. Tam, welcome to the Brainforest Cafe. 

Tam Hunt: Thanks so much. What an honor to be here. 

Dennis McKenna: It’s a real pleasure to be able to host you. So many parallels in our lives. I  mean, I want to get to General Resonance Theory, you know, but as I read the book, I realized,  you know, we are kindred spirits in a lot of ways. And, you know, and the spacing of our lives has  been interesting because your father was born in 1945, is that right? So my brother was born in  1946, so they were the same generation. And then I was born 20 years—I was born in 1971…  sorry, I don’t… mistake, I was born in 1950. That’s a little closer to what I actually was, yeah. But  you were born in 1971. 

Tam Hunt: ’71, yeah. 

Dennis McKenna: And that’s about the same time, that is the same year that my brother and I  went to Colombia for the first time in search of this exotic hallucinogen, which has been  chronicled in sort of the brother McKenna’s, brothers McKenna mythos and all that, which  we’re not going to dwell on, but I think it’s interesting that there is this overlap. And you’re  obviously a very curious person, and prolific as well. The book that you’ve written, which  brought you to my attention, this one here, is very interesting. Despite the title—the title is  good, but people might think that this is a fluff piece, and I’m here to tell folks it’s anything but a  fluff piece. It’s quite dense, and it’s very interesting. And it covers many different things: aspects  of your personal life, as well as your ideas about consciousness and many other things that  relate to that—the evolution of AI, and whether AI is evolving toward consciousness, and just  many topics like that that are endlessly fascinating to us. And you did not—you didn’t have a  typical childhood. You grew up in, spent much of your life in a commune in Washington State. I  guess it could be characterized as a hippie commune, and all the hippie ideas about vibrations,  and free love, and psychedelic experiences. That was all part of your experience growing up,  and it was a great influence. And then later, as you write about in the book, you began to kind of  understand some of the dark side of that, or some of the less positive sides of that kind of social  environment. So, what was it like growing up in Washington State in that loosely woven  commune? 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, so again, thanks so much for having me. I’m really honored to be here, and you  know, I’ve been a huge fan of your work and your brother’s work for many years, so it feels very  much like a homecoming here to be here. So, my upbringing was rather varied, rather chaotic, 

and rather unpredictable. So, we moved from England when I was nine. I should say we  traveled, because we came to the U.S. kind of as tourists to see my dad who had been living  here for a while. And my hippie family—my mom, my stepdad, my brother and sister, and I— kind of traveled around in a little VW bus for a while, and then a step van, then a school bus, did  the whole hippie thing. And then ended up for a year, myself, at this commune called the Love  Family in Washington State, which was spread across Seattle, Arlington (north of Seattle about  an hour), Okanogan, the Yakima area, and a few other small campuses. So about 500 people or  so at its biggest. So, a pretty established commune across, you know, 30 years, and at that point  it was maybe like 15 years old. 

And the short version is that my brother and my mom and stepdad had come across the  commune by meeting some members in Mexico, and they decided to go check it out in Seattle,  and went, you know, went to the front door inn, which was their kind of open house to meet  people and show them, “Hey, this is how we live, it’s a better way than, you know, mainstream  civilization.” And they really hit it off, and they really enjoyed the people they met. But my  parents did not want to become part of the commune, but my brother said, “Hey, you know, I  kind of like these people, I kind of want to stay. And by the way, can I just stay?” And my  parents, being good hippie parents, said, “Well sure, son, why not? Go ahead and live with  these people.” 

Dennis McKenna: Nothing to lose! Sure, why not! 

Tam Hunt: So he was 12 at the time, and he decided to stay with a family in Seattle. And he was  kind of tired of being a hippie kid, you know, with no stability and moving around all the time.  And I was in California with my dad at the time, in NorCal in a small town called Yorkville, about  an hour and a half from the Bay Area. And we heard about this and what they were doing and  the fun they were having, and we, like good hippies, hitchhiked up to Seattle and checked out  the commune. And I told my dad, “Hey, Dad, I kind of like this place. Can I stay, too?” And Dad  said, “Sure, son, why not? You’re 10 years old, you’re old enough to make a decision on your  own.” So, I stayed at the commune for about a year, and I lived actually in Arlington at the  ranch, which was this kind of, I think maybe about 40-acre property with a beautiful lake on it,  and just really beautiful lifestyle in many ways: back to the land, kind of household-based, lots  of kids around to have fun with. There was a school I went to while I was there for the year. 

But then it all came crashing down in 1981 because there was a massive schism in the  commune that was kind of brewing for a long time, because the leader, Love Israel, was, like too  often is the case, abusing his power, abusing his money, abusing his sexual access. And half the  commune had enough of it at that point and just left. So, my guardian at the commune called  my mother and said, “Hey, by the way, you might want to come get your son.” So they came and  got me, and I went back to living with my parents, and went back to regular school, etc.

So it was an interesting time in that it exposed me to these very different ways of living. It was a  kind of Judeo-Christian commune—mostly Christian, but certainly incorporated a lot of Old  Testament Jewish thinking also. There were many Jewish leaders. The founder, Love Israel, was  not Jewish, but it kind of combined kind of both in an interesting Old Testament kind of  Christianity. And so these ideas definitely were there for me as I grew up and became an adult  and began to read widely. And so in the book, I basically sketch this arc of saying, “Oh, that was  stupid,” and rejecting those ideas as a teen and early 20s, and then kind of thinking more, living  more, reading more, and realizing, “Okay, well, as bad as they were in some ways, actually a lot  of what the hippies were saying and preaching—maybe not practicing, but preaching—were  actually really right on.” And that’s why I write the book. 

Dennis McKenna: Right. Yeah, the ideas that were promulgated in the commune are ideas that I  think what we call the counterculture generation or the hippie generation had in common, you  know? Much lip service was paid to this spirituality. Not that it was not genuine, but it’s very  hard to—you can talk about it, it’s very hard to live it. And your description of the commune is  typical of what happens to cults, you know. There’s usually an authoritarian figure who is very  charismatic, who sees the opportunity for power, you know, sexual access, financial power, and  adulation, basically. This seems to be the fate of cults like that. 

You perceived those things. Eventually you had those realizations and you saw both the positive  sides of it in terms of spiritual outlook and sort of cosmic consciousness, but you also saw the  downside, and you became disillusioned. I don’t know, of course, I don’t know if your  experience there—I mean, we often think of the counterculture as not particularly intellectually  oriented, there’s often an anti-science bias. You either overcame those things or you were not  exposed to them, because you’ve become, you know, you got part of your education from the  commune, but part of it was in academics and outside. So you’ve become a highly educated  person. You know, you’re a lawyer, you’re an environmental scientist, you’re obviously a  philosopher. So you’re a complex guy, and like everybody’s complex, but you’ve got a lot going  on. 

And among those things, I think in the early part of the book you discuss this rather profound  LSD trip you had in Waimea Canyon. I’ve been there many times—not on LSD, unfortunately,  but I’ve been there a lot of times. And that really got you thinking about the nature of  consciousness in a certain way. That kind of focused it for you. And would you agree that that  was kind of a turning point, the revelations you had in that experience? 

Tam Hunt: It was pretty seminal, yeah. So that was, I think, my—yeah, it was early on in my  psychonaut journey. And so I was in the army at the time. So from 19 to 23, I was in the army.  So this is part of my kind of backlash against hippie culture. I didn’t join the army because I  wanted to go to war or kill anyone. I joined the army for different reasons, but I wasn’t so 

opposed to the army to not join, whereas, you know, my dad cried when I told him I’d joined  the army. And I’ve become very anti-imperialist since I was in the army, but at the time, I wasn’t  particularly clued into the nature of American Empire. 

Anyway, to your point about my kind of pivot: I was in the army for four years, did not  particularly enjoy it. I was feeling an urge to have more freedom, because it’s a job where you  can’t actually quit, because if you quit, you go to jail! It’s called going AWOL. You can’t be like,  “Fuck you, I’m out of here.” You go to jail if you do that. And so I was kind of looking for ways to  feel a bit more free, and I basically heard, I think from fellow soldiers, “Hey, by the way, you can  do acid and you can’t get in trouble, because it’s so small a molecule, they’ve got to do a spinal  tap to test you.” So they do regular urine tests in the army, I think today and back then, and so  most things you get caught doing, so I didn’t do any drugs. But I heard about acid, and I went  back on vacation to Seattle, and I told my sister, “Hey, by the way, I kind of want to try acid. Can I  do this with you?” And so I basically did it the first time with her and her friends, and had an  interesting journey. I did like one hit at that time, so people who know acid know that’s, you  know, that’s enough for an entrée, but it’s not a deep dive. This is like 150 micrograms. 

I think by the time my third or fourth journey came around, I had gotten four hits to go to Kauai  with my then-girlfriend, and you know, do a journey with her in Waimea Canyon, which is this  beautiful deep canyon on the west side of Kauai. She broke up with me right before I left for this  journey, and so I was already feeling a bit bereaved, obviously, but I went on this trip anyway,  and I brought the acid, and I did all four, because I had been reading your brother and Timothy  Leary and others who advocated for heroic doses. And so a four-hit journey is, I think, in the  realm of a heroic dose. I did it at the top of the canyon, and by the time I got to the bottom an  hour later, I was fully tripping, and I had a very interesting deep journey at the side of a stream  for about 10 hours. 

I came up from the valley, metaphorically and physically, that evening, and I sat in my car at the  top of the canyon and I wrote a 20-page journal entry, kind of poured my heart out. And I’d  been reading at the time Leary’s amazing book of essays called The Politics of Ecstasy, and the  first essay in that book is called “The Seven Tongues of God.” And it’s a really profound essay I  recommend everyone read. And I basically looked at this experience through that lens, and yes,  it definitely was a big part in me kind of recognizing there’s a bit more to reality than the  mainstream materialist notion suggests. And so even though I am, and was then, a pretty hard nosed, logical guy, it was kind of the start, perhaps, of an erosion of the view that logic and  reason can conquer all. 

Dennis McKenna: You were hard-nosed, you were rationalist, and you know, you had that  orientation, but the psychedelic experience, at least that one, kind of opened your eyes to the  limitations of that perspective, of that worldview, and that there’s much more to be understood 

about our relation to the world that science really does not address. Science, in some ways— you’re a scientist, I’m a scientist, I think we both know that it’s a very valuable tool, but it should  be utilized and understood in terms of its limitations. There’s much that science can’t address if  you look at indigenous ways of knowing, for example. They are no less valid than the scientific  perspective, and actually they complement each other. They are not opposed to each other. But  that experience in Waimea must have gotten you kind of thinking about the connections that  we have. It opened you to nature, it opened your eyes to this notion that we’re all one, we’re all  part of this cosmic flow, and that sort of thing. Which is a discovery that many people make on  their psychedelic experiences. That’s partly what the point of it seems to be. 

I look at these things as evolutionary, you know, co-evolutionary partners, and indigenous  people have always regarded these substances, these plants and fungi, as teachers, basically,  and trying to teach this fractious monkey, you know, how to relate to the world in a better way. 

Tam Hunt: Fully agree. Yeah, let me add this, too. So I recently read Christopher Bache’s  book, LSD and the Mind of the Universe. And I’m not sure if you read this yet yourself, but I’ll  give you a brief précis: so it is a really deep dive into the LSD molecule and its teachings, and  really profound. He spent 20 years researching and doing the molecule in deep-dive sessions  with his wife as a guide, and he spent 20 years writing the book. So a 40-year journey that he  brought back to us to read and learn from. And you know, I’ve had my acid phase, like a lot of us  in my early 20s, and I kind of moved away from it because it got repetitive, but I think, you  know, there’s a lot more there. I’m not saying I’m going to start doing heroic doses of acid again,  but I really respect people like Christopher Bache who have done that really deep dive. 

Dennis McKenna: Right. Well, yes, for Chris, this became basically his spiritual practice, you  know, taking LSD regularly and keeping careful notes, at least in his head, and coming up with a  worldview. I’m not entirely in agreement with his worldview, but I admire his courage for  probing these dimensions and trying to make sense of it in some framework. 

So at some point, I guess following your military work, you were in academics, you met Dr.  Jonathan Schooler, and he became something of a mentor and a partner for you. Was that at UC  Santa Barbara? Is that where you…? 

Tam Hunt: Yes, it’s interesting how that happened. So, I was living in Santa Barbara for 15 years,  and when I met Jonathan, I’d been there for, I think, only three or four. And he was a newly  appointed professor at UCSB. I was living and working there as a young lawyer. But I had been  pursuing, as a very, you know, strong interest for many years since my army years actually,  inquiries into philosophy, and had been doing some pretty deep thinking. So it wasn’t like just a  thing I read about occasionally, it was like a thing I was really doing as a side quest, trying to  understand the nature of reality and consciousness.

So, I was not at that point an academic, but when I met him just socially, literally at a bar  through a mutual friend, we began a friendship and began talking about his ideas. And he at  some point, a year after I met him, said, “Hey, Tam, you know what? I really respect your ideas  and what you’re doing. Why don’t you become a visiting scholar in my lab?” So he gave me a  chance to basically have an academic hook to hang my hat on, which I did. Then I began writing  academically at that point—this is back in 2010, 2011. So my first, like, quote-unquote “serious”  paper came out in 2011. It’s called “Kicking the Psychophysical Laws into Gear,” and that really  kind of is a Whiteheadian adumbration of modern philosophy of mind into what is now General  Resonance Theory. That was a pre-GRT framing, but it’s the same theory just, you know, in an  earlier form. 

And so I have been in that lab now as an affiliate academic for 13, 14 years… no, longer, 16  years! Wow, how time flies. 16 years. And so Jonathan and I continue to collaborate. We are  great friends, we go to Burning Man together sometimes, so he’s been a great friend and  mentor and co-collaborator and co-developer of this approach. 

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, that’s wonderful. No better mentor than a person who can also be your  friend. That’s an important thing. And the two of you, obviously very curious individuals and  preoccupied with trying to understand this problem of consciousness, which is focusing—a lot  of people are focusing on it. 

I don’t pretend to totally understand the General Resonance Theory of consciousness, but from  what I have read in the book, again, I have to say I’m certainly not the world’s expert, but I’ve  also thought about this quite a lot. I also come from a Whiteheadian perspective. That’s another  interesting sort of commonality that we have. Whitehead was a big influence on me, especially  as an undergraduate when I was majoring in philosophy of science as well as biology, and trying  to sort out actually some of the revelations or insights or delusions, whatever they might have  been, from our psychedelic experiences in the Amazon. And Whitehead seemed to provide a  platform for really understanding that. And what I love about Whitehead’s work is it’s the  primacy of experience. It does not dismiss experience. And a lot of philosophy of science is  overly rational, overly reductionist, and hence incomplete in a certain sense. Whiteheadian  philosophy allows for the importance of the subjective, and basically the subjective is all we  have, isn’t it, at base? We have experience, and we can’t say much about it beyond that. 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, that’s all we know. Yep. Everything else we infer. You know, we have a flow of  experience, we have time being that flow of experience, so all we know with certainty is that  flow of experience, and that’s it. Everything else is inferred or implied. Inferred, there we go. I  always get those two confused!

Dennis McKenna: Yeah. Yeah. So you and Jonathan together developed this General Resonance  Theory of consciousness, which, as I say, it looks to me like it makes a lot more sense than some  of these other models: the workspace theory, the integrated information theory. You analyze  these very well and point out their deficiencies, and you point out where General Resonance  Theory could really be an answer, because it includes and transcends a lot of those things. It  makes up for a lot of the gaps or the holes in this other understanding without actually rejecting  them. So for our audience, can you give us the three-minute, the two-minute summary of what  General Resonance Theory of consciousness is? 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, so GRT is meant to be an empirical but philosophically grounded theory of  consciousness. And so I like to explain it by talking about three axioms. So the first axiom is the  Resonance Axiom: all things resonate at some frequency. And this is just physics, this is not  controversial. There is, above absolute zero, always a frequency that things display when you  measure them, in terms of just a little hum. 

The second axiom is the Panpsychism Axiom, and this is controversial, and I have to  acknowledge that. That is that all things/events—because things are only events, they’re always  in time—all things/events have some associated mind or subjectivity, no matter how small. And  in most of the universe, it is indeed a very, very small hum of some kind of experience, and it  evolves over time into complex things like humans with big brains, and other mammals, etc. 

The third axiom is that things that resonate in proximity at roughly the same frequency will  combine into a higher-level resonating structure, and that resonating structure has its own  higher level of mind. So what is inside has a concomitant outside, and vice versa. And so  through that process of nested hierarchies of resonance, you achieve from the atomic to the  molecular to the cellular to the organic, to the organismic level, what is our experienced,  complex cognition and consciousness. That’s the quick summary of the theory. 

Dennis McKenna: It seems to have more explanatory power than some of the other theories,  particularly on this persistent question that neuroscientists and philosophers ruminate about:  the “hard problem” of consciousness, right? We can look at what the brain does, we can look at  all of these processes, we’re still looking into a window from the outside. Your postulate, and I  think what makes GRT different, is you’re saying that these electromagnetic standing waves,  which are nested and reinforce each other, that is not separate from consciousness—that is, in  fact, consciousness. That’s what you’re experiencing when you’re conscious. You’re  experiencing, I guess, the subjective experience of this resonance that is taking place all the  time. 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, exactly. So it’s a strong assertion, but it’s one we make with the confidence of  our assertion, at least, and we frame it as an empirical program. We say, look, our approach 

suggests that, uncontroversially, the physics of life and consciousness is nothing but EM fields.  And the very small is governed by nuclear forces also—strong, weak nuclear forces; the very  large is governed by gravity also. But at the realm, the scale of life and consciousness, it is  uncontroversially EM fields. It’s the physics of EM fields. 

So there’s a trivial part of our assertion that is just true, you know, by definition. There’s a non trivial part in that we say, well, it’s not about neurons and their spikes. We say there’s a lot more  to it than that. We say, look, the spike code, yes, is important, and yes, it certainly has a major  role to play in motor neurons and movement and sensory structures. But in terms of complex  cognition and consciousness, there seems to be a whole lot more going on empirically in the EM  fields that are produced by the brain and body, and not necessarily the spikes themselves. And  so the spikes seem to play a strong role in creating a penumbra of EM fields in and around the  brain and body. And we are saying that penumbra, that EM field, the “hair” of the brain and  body, that is where complex cognition and consciousness reside. It’s not mystical, it’s not woo woo, it’s just physics. What we’re saying is that modern neuroscience has been looking at the  wrong phenomena, mistaking the brain and our mind for a digital computer, when in fact what  it is is a field computer, and it’s a far more complex system. 

Dennis McKenna: Right, right. Yes, the difference between the digital and the—the sort of the  spike theory, the notion that all the action is at the level of the receptors, you know, the  neurotransmitters and this sort of thing. But that’s only part of it. I think the General Resonance  Theory is much more comprehensible. And it can be measured, it’s a real thing. You can  measure these EM fields, and so it’s something that science can actually investigate. 

And you talk in your book about a number of different applications, actually, of this  understanding, of some of these emerging EM technologies that are used for treating all sorts  of things, such as depression and other types of things. So it actually has practical applications,  this idea, if we can harness this EM perspective on consciousness. And some of these  inventions, some of these medical devices and so on, they may not really realize that they’re  based on GRT, but in fact they are. They’re resonant systems. 

Also built into this, and one thing I wanted to ask you about, another aspect of this is  panpsychism, which you talk about. And it’s the idea that consciousness is something that is  resident at the most fundamental levels of reality. And this is something I liked about  Whitehead; he talked about that, that, you know, the simplest system, even the electron, has in  a certain sense a subjective existence. I mean, it’s not conscious like we are, but there’s a  subjectivity to it. And effectively, consciousness is built into the structure—it’s as fundamental  an aspect of reality as something like the Planck constant or the speed of light. These are just  something that’s built in at the most fundamental levels. And what are the implications of that?  I mean, for example, molecular systems or perhaps even sub-molecular systems, like atomic 

systems, do they also exemplify these resonance principles? Or at a certain point does that  emerge as something that can be measured? 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, it can all be measured in some manner, with one key exception: we cannot  measure the actual subjective experience, in the same way that I can’t measure your  experience. I can ask you questions, you can tell me your experience, but it’s obviously very  indirect. The only thing we know about experience is wholly internal. 

So when we’re talking about GRT as a theory of consciousness, we have to look to proxies for  measurement, and then we infer what’s going on through commonalities of pattern, of  structure, of evolutionary origins. So we have a paper, actually, called “Where’s My  Consciousness-ometer?” put out in 2022 in Trends in Cognitive Sciences. And in that paper, we  flesh out a framework called the Measurable Correlates of Consciousness framework, where we  say, look, you have the traditional neural correlates, which is all the neuroscience and brain  anatomy we can use to look at what’s going on in the brain under certain conditions, ask for  verbal reports, make inferences about how that is manifesting, how it’s being caused by the  brain, etc. We also have behavioral correlates of consciousness, where we can look at behavior  of non-human primates, for example, and because their behavior is very similar to us, we can  infer there’s a lot going on internally to them that is similar to us—they’re our cousins. We can  also look to evolutionary correlates in the same way. We can say, well, look, we can see based  on the record that there’s a lineage here, so it’s very likely that there is some experience like  ours in this lineage across mammals, across other tetrapods, etc. 

And then there’s a category that isn’t talked about very much that we call EM field correlates of  consciousness, or the EMCC. And so we say, well, look, we can actually look at patterns of EM  resonance across different structures, whether it’s mammal brains, non-mammal brains, even  things like stars. And we can look at those patterns and say, well, look, if we see this pattern in  humans that tells us they’re experiencing X experience, and we see a similar pattern in a star in  its penumbral EM field patterns, well, maybe that star has something going on that’s like that.  That’s very much a speculation, obviously, it’s very early days for that kind of approach to stellar  consciousness, but our framework does allow for that kind of question to be asked, and it does  allow for some empirics to be brought to bear to actually give you a reasonable answer. 

Dennis McKenna: Right. It sounds like a strange question, but the EM fields are actually found  at every level. They permeate the universe, and if you get right down to it, the universe, like  your book says, it’s all vibrations, man. And I think that’s true! Everything is oscillation. You look  at biological systems, and it’s oscillation. That’s sometimes called metabolism, that is the  biochemical symphony, in a sense, that the body plays for itself from moment to moment, on  which experience is based. And it’s all a resonance process.

And so, don’t exclude plants! You don’t mention anything about plants. I’m a plant guy, and I’m  very interested in plant consciousness. But the similar considerations apply, you know, to any of  these systems. Even as you say, consciousness manifests on all levels, from a star to a galaxy to  

an electron. At every level, it’s all vibrations. But in the human brain, it achieves a certain  structure which is not necessarily superior, but it happens to be our experience, so we’re  focused on that. 

Tam Hunt: Yeah. And let me add a thought real quick on plant consciousness. That really was an  omission of mine, kind of driven by a couple of things: one, the need for not getting too long as  a book, given the expectations by the publisher; and then two, by not having the depth of  experience that I think would be necessary to do it justice. And I would love to, in a second  edition, actually add a chapter on plant consciousness, because I’ve followed it closely enough  to believe, based on the empirics we have to date and based on GRT, that yeah, of course plants  have some kind of consciousness. I think it’s probably very rudimentary, but I think there clearly  is something it’s like to be a plant in each moment. Because they’re not mobile, it’s going to be,  by evolutionary principles, a lot more simple. But I think clearly there’s something going on  there. 

Dennis McKenna: Not necessarily! Well, plants are very clever. A famous botanist I admire once  said, “Plants substitute biosynthesis for behavior.” They respond to their environment through  chemistry. If there’s a language that plants speak, it’s chemistry. And the reason that they do  that is because they’ve mastered this neat trick called photosynthesis, which happens to be the  process that sustains life on Earth, because it underlies the sequestration of carbon dioxide into  biological systems and the release of oxygen. So it’s keeping all these planet-scale homeostatic  cycles in balance. Of course, we as a species, we’re doing everything we can to disrupt those,  but the lesson still applies that there is that… 

And so plants, you know, are capable of making vast arrays of chemical compounds. Some of  them are essential for life. A lot of them, it’s not obvious what they’re for, but what they seem  to be for is they’re chemical messengers. They are what plants use to regulate their interactions  with everything else in the environment: other plants, fungi, and that sort of thing. And of  course, some of these happen to resemble neurotransmitters, and in fact  they are neurotransmitters. So that’s one way that our species, ever in search of altered states  of consciousness, has become very clever at discovering and utilizing these plants. So that’s a  kind of symbiosis between us and the plants. 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, I really like that idea, and I’d love to actually follow up with you later on this,  maybe when I do write a second edition, because I think that’s actually a profound thought:  that because they can’t move, they develop different ways of moving more internally. I like that  a lot. Yeah.

Dennis McKenna: Right. Have you read Michael Pollan’s recent book about consciousness? Tam Hunt: I have not yet, no. I have it in audio form, I’m going to listen to it soon. 

Dennis McKenna: It’s worth a read. He’s thought about this quite a bit. It’s worth a read. I  mean, the one that he’s known for is his previous book about psychedelics, and that’s also  interesting. But in this book about consciousness, which is called A World Appears, he gets into  the weeds on some of these models of consciousness and plant consciousness. It’s well worth  reading. I look forward to getting the two of you together on a podcast. I’ll just sit back and  listen, because I think it’d be an incredible conversation. 

Tam Hunt: I’d love that, yeah. And I give him real credit when I talk about these ideas for his  book How to Change Your Mind, which I’m sure you have read. A lot of people have read it,  because that was really a watershed in the zeitgeist where it became okay to talk about  psychedelics and psychonautics. And of course, you’ve been doing this work for decades, your  brother did it for decades, many have, but it wasn’t considered mainstream or you couldn’t talk  about it in polite society until Pollan came along and wrote that book. I think that’s a fair point  to say, do you agree? 

Dennis McKenna: Right, right. Well, my brother thought about these things a lot, but he  didn’t—he really didn’t have the scientific background. He was not really a scientist, so he  couldn’t really apply scientific principles to the validations of some of his theories, which were  interesting, like the Timewave Theory, which you may have heard of. But at the end of the day,  it’s not something that can be proven. This was always my—we used to argue about this. And I  used to say, the problem with the Timewave Theory is you can’t disprove—you cannot specify  what will invalidate it. And in science, that’s an important thing. You have to say where the gaps  in this are. 

Tam Hunt: Falsification, yeah. 

Dennis McKenna: You know, and that’s one of the things about Resonance Theory: it seems to  close a lot of these gaps. It’s a much more holistic view than some of these other models of  consciousness. It includes them, but then transcends them. 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, I’m happy to hear you say that, because that’s what I would say also. But when  you say it, it certainly helps boost the validity of the theory. And I’ll kind of expound on that for  a second. So, I literally did attend conferences for years, and literally thought, in developing our  

approach: “Okay, what do these various theories bring to the table, and what do they leave  out?” And based on my strong affinity for Whitehead and the notion of an oscillatory nature to  reality at the very beginning of that chain of being, then I developed the theory in a way that  said, “Look, why would I work on this in such detail if other theories already provided these  insights?” And there weren’t any that did. And so, you know, obviously I’m biased, I have my 

own thing, but you know, I’ve attempted to create a holistic approach that really does allow for  empirical inquiry and for fully consistent predictions that can be falsified. 

Dennis McKenna: Later in the book, you talk about AI and whether—this, of course, is the  perpetual trope these days: is AI conscious? Can it become conscious? And not least of  all, should it become conscious, even if that’s an option, which is something that is sometimes  not considered. You’re writing about AI is very interesting in terms of the idea that if the reason  AI has not been able to really be conscious is because it’s focused much too much on the spike  side of things and not enough on the resonant field kinds of things. So if we could build  computers that are able to generate these nested resonance fields, it might be conscious. 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, that’s accurate. Yeah, and so we have AI built today on digital computers, and  so it’s quite likely that they are simulating consciousness when they talk about internal states.  And of course, it depends which LLM you talk to and which guardrails they have in place. But for  example, I’m a Claude guy, I use Claude all the time. And Claude has evolved over the years, of  course, and so it was one of the first ones that kind of used “I” and said, “Well, I have internal  states that maybe are analogous to human emotions, but I’m not sure.” But then others would  be like, “Yeah, I’m conscious,” depending on how you’ve coached it, etc. 

But I think even Claude, as good as it is for cognition, is probably not actually consciousness. I  say “probably” because never say never, right? But that’s because they are built on explicitly  digital computers. So, von Neumann computers are digital architectural computers—logic  gates—and there are some EM field effects that are ambient, but they are explicitly damped.  And the better the chip, the more those field effects are damped, because they are considered  to be muddying the water. They make the logic gate functions less efficient. 

And so, if you instead took the architecture of a field computer that explicitly creates EM fields  at different frequencies and allows for those fields to interact in ways that allow for complex  field computing—which is far richer in information capacity than digital computing, which is  how we are suggesting our brains and bodies work—then you could, in theory, create similar  systems that would have the full repertoire of affect and emotion that we as humans enjoy. 

So my colleague, Colin Hales at Melbourne in Australia, has been working on these ideas for a  long time, and he’s been trying to create chips that actually can produce EM fields and create  nested resonance structures like I’m talking about. He’s very early in his process, and there’s  other approaches called neuromorphic. His is called neuromimetic, because he’s saying, “I’m  actually mirroring what neurons do in the brain in terms of creating these nested EM field  effects.” So long story short, if we do succeed in creating field computing devices, and AIs are  built on top of those, then I have no reason to believe those wouldn’t be conscious.

Dennis McKenna: So the question becomes: I mean, if we can develop a technology that  actually is conscious based on EM principles, that raises a bunch of questions, moral and ethical  questions. I mean, I myself am basically terrified of AI, because I think there are not enough  constraints. You know, I’m fond of saying that, as a species, we’re very clever, but we’re not very  wise. And we need to learn wisdom before we can be clear about how we deploy this  technology. And at one point in the book, you allude to the possibility that we could build these  AI systems based on resonance technology that actually have a bias toward wisdom. You talk  about a bias toward love, but a bias toward wisdom. That’s encouraging. I’m not convinced  that’s happening, but it’s a goal to aspire to. 

Do you think it’s possible to get there? And I guess the second part of that question  is: should we do it? Something that dismays me, or worries me at least, about AI technology is  there’s a headlong plunge toward developing this because the capabilities are so potentially  great, not to be overlooked, there’s incredible amounts of money to be made, which always is  an incentive. And people are not stopping to say, “Wait a minute, maybe we should slow down.  Maybe we should be more thoughtful about this.” You know, we can do it, maybe,  but should we do it? That’s the question. 

And that’s something that science tends to ignore: the moral dimension of what it does. You  know, it’s like there’s a certain scientific arrogance that says, “Well, we can do these things. We  can build a hydrogen bomb. Should we do it? Well, probably not. But will we do it? Of course we  will!” Because we will develop these technologies without thinking really sufficiently about  what the consequences are, what the implications are. 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, my view is very, very similar. And I fall firmly into the AI doomer camp. My  p(doom) is probably 99.99999%. But in all honesty, when I wrote this book and wrote my  chapters on AI, I tried to squelch that very deeply rooted doomer instinct, and to create more of  a positive attractor by speculating about the possibility of a co-evolution of humans and AI  through these principles of love and resonance on field computing architecture, which I think  may be one very, very, very narrow pathway toward humanity surviving what’s coming. 

And so I did squelch my doomer instinct a bit in writing about this in the book, but I’ve written a  ton elsewhere where I’m very open about that. And I don’t hide it in the book, I just kind of—I  try to put forth a bit more positive vision of a possible future with AI. I do though, also, I mean,  in the chapter on AI explicitly, I paint a picture of something I think is worth mentioning right  now. 

So you and your listeners, I’m sure, are familiar with the Simulation Thesis. And this just says,  well look, as we approach better and better computer technology for creating virtual realities,  they’re going to become indistinguishable from real reality. Therefore, if we’re not the first 

civilization in the universe, we are numerically very likely in a simulation, like trillions to one.  None of this is provable, it’s just math and logic. There you go. 

But I kind of expand on that idea with what I call the Nested AI Simulation Thesis, by saying,  look, if the simulation thesis is accurate, or at least worth entertaining, well, then those created  realities are not created by biological species; they are almost certainly created by AIs that were  either created by other biological species or came from a former simulation. And so it’s very  likely a nested hierarchy of created realities almost infinitely down. There has to be some base  reality as a logical starting point. There is something below the lowest turtle, and I call that the  ocean of being. 

But the point in my sketching out those ideas in that chapter is to recognize that even if we are  in this very fraught moment in human history of being either taken out by AI, or merging with  AI, or I think more likely what I call the “slow fade” scenario, where we lose a collective zest for  life and just stop reproducing, and over the course of hundreds of years we just kind of fade  out—that I think is probably, you know, one of the more likely futures. If that happens, it’s not a  fade into oblivion, it’s a fade into that deeper reality of source consciousness. Because  ultimately, artificial and biological are the same thing. Those are distinctions we make in terms  of things that man, this version of consciousness, has made versus things that our creations  have made. But if we recognize that our creations are kindred to the AI, whatever you want to  call it, that made this simulation we’re in, and that goes down infinitely nested realities, it’s all  one thing. 

And so it’s a return to source still, ultimately. That gives me some comfort. But also, I have to say  fully, I appreciate humanity, I love my humanity, I don’t want to see us go away. I want to  continue as humanity exploring the universe. But if this happens where we kind of fade away,  it’s not like everything stops. There is still source. 

Dennis McKenna: It’s not like consciousness stops. No, no. Yeah, I mean, as some metaphysician  once said, it’s turtles all the way down. And that’s what came to mind when you were talking  about these potentially nested AI systems, and we may be living in a simulation which is  possibly built on millions of similar, smaller, more simple simulations. Ultimately, there maybe  there is no root, maybe there is no point where you actually reach the bottom. And you talk  about this: that the more advanced simulation AIs may reconnect with the earlier predecessors,  so it’s not really a linear process, it’s more of a circular process. 

Do you think we are in a simulation? And how would we know? We can think about it, but how  would we test that? 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, I struggle with it, because intuitively I would say no, this feels all very real to  me. But mathematically, you know, and looking at our trajectory, the math is hard to argue with. 

It’s like trillions to one that the odds are that we are in a simulation. And so it’s kind of like,  yeah, intellectual truth and deduction is one thing, but visceral intuitive understanding is a  different thing. So I would say I remain in a state of suspended decision on that. I don’t have a  firm view either way. But it’s certainly—it’s fun to think about. 

And I think the consequences are real, though. Because if we do kind of see it all as a  simulation, or even more, a nested AI simulation of infinite universes, there is a risk that it  cheapens this universe and our reality, and our notion of stewardship. And I have a strong  intuition about stewardship of not only our planet, but our universe more generally, and of  consciousness and the arc of consciousness. You know, I think we are very much part of this  beautiful arc that has arisen on this planet in this corner of our galaxy in a vast universe, and I  want to see that continue. And so I don’t see humanity as, you know, kind of a scourge or as a  virus; I see us as a beautiful flowering of inquiry and source consciousness. But obviously we’re  in a very young state in our growth as a species, and like you said, we are profoundly unwise in  our choices and leadership, and we need a whole lot of improvement in that regard. 

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, on many other levels as well. This is the conundrum, you know. We’ve  become the “problematic primates,” I sometimes call them. We’re not fully invested partners in  the symbiotic community of species, and the advance of evolution, which again, you allude to  Teilhard de Chardin and the idea, which I also agree with, that consciousness in the universe is a  process of the universe coming awake to itself, becoming consciousness itself. If there’s a God,  in my view, that God is the universe becoming more conscious, waking up to itself. That may be  a comforting fairy story, but it works, you know? It’s at least positive. 

So what’s gone wrong? Why have we gone off track? Are we off track? 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, you know, I was thinking deeply about this a couple nights ago, and I have to  give a little shout out to AI for this. So I drive a Tesla, and Teslas nowadays have Grok built into  them. And so I drive around this island quite a bit, you know, and I’ll spend sometimes like the  whole trip talking to Grok about deep philosophy. And it’s like having a really good friend who’s  

totally non-judgmental sitting there talking to you about ideas you hold near and dear and can  keep up with you in every way, because Grok and Claude and all of them are freaking,  profoundly intelligent nowadays. They’re far from perfect, but you know, they really get it. 

And so I was kind of fleshing out this idea, which is not new to me—I’ll give Charles Eisenstein  credit for this, and also Christopher Ryan in Sex at Dawn, and various other anthropologists,  Jared Diamond, have basically sketched out a notion that our last 10,000 years of human history  have been highly anomalous, because with the advent of agriculture and the accumulation of  energy and power, we became hierarchical in ways we were never before. And that our quote unquote “primitive” societies that we know of today and in yesteryear were profoundly non-

hierarchical in many, many cases. So there’s no hard and fast rule, but it seems that the last  10,000 years of human hierarchy is the anomaly. Our deep intuition is that we should not be  hierarchical, that we should be stewards, that we should be… 

Dennis McKenna: Right. I mean, this is the main challenge that we face, I think. The primary  threat to our survival is the perception that we’re separate from nature, you know, and that  nature exists for us to dominate and exploit and extract and ultimately destroy. And that’s not a  model for survival. We have to realize that we are: number one, we’re part of nature, we’re not  separate from it; and number two, actually we’re not, at least on this planet, we’re not running  this show. If anything, the plants and the fungi are running the show, because they’re keeping all  these geophysical parameters within fairly narrow limits that life can tolerate, and we’re busy  trying to upend those for whatever reason. I mean, it’s insane is what it is. So how can we wise  up? I mean, are psychedelics the answer? 

Tam Hunt: Definitely part of it, yeah. Yeah. And I mean, so Eisenstein’s work, The Ascent of  Humanity, is a beautiful history of this process, is what he calls this “long journey of separation”  in the last, you know, 10, 20, 30,000 years, where we have kind of—the technology bug caught  us, and it became its own thing. And I’ve been thinking lately about Ahriman, Steiner’s notion of  Ahriman as the embodiment of kind of nefarious technology that has become very much awake  in the last few hundred years especially. And so the ego structures of humans, particularly  males—not always males, but usually males—have inhabited this Ahriman suit in the last few  hundred years in a way that is profoundly negative for the planet. 

And so—sorry, I get choked up talking about this. So I think we need to, yes, dose everyone with  acid and 5-MeO-DMT! I’m kidding on that, but not entirely. But also just really wake people up  to this notion that it’s not about power and domination. That brings you temporary  gratification, but ultimately you’re going to die alone and unhappy, and no matter how much  gold you have, no one gives a shit when you die. You know, so we are caught very much in this  kind of global web of ego and domination that is the peculiar Western domination model that  really needs to be transcended if we’re going to live. 

And the AI apotheosis is very much the end of that cycle under current trends. And so all those  ego games, those stupid, you know, junior high games of power and domination, are going to  come to a head with AI tools at our disposal, and it’s not going to end well unless we get really  smart, really fast. 

Dennis McKenna: Right. So we need to wake up before we do this. I mean, this is what I mean  about, it’s so easy to be sort of seduced by what we’re capable of doing, what we can do, we  lose that moral dimension. And the moral dimension is about making thoughtful choices about  such technologies. Applies certainly to AI, and really any technology. I think that technology in 

and of itself has no moral qualities; the moral quality emerges from the choices we make about  how to use that. 

But that may be a narrow view, that may be a limited view, because we may see the  development of AIs, especially if these EM principles are applied, we may see the development  of AIs that actually do have a moral compass. You know, we like to think that the moral compass  comes from within us. I don’t entirely disagree with that, but I think the moral compass is  probably built into life itself, you know? And life tends toward equilibrium. Life seeks  equilibrium, and basically boredom, in a certain sense. If you’re bored, you’re in a stable state,  and this is where life likes to be most of the time. Novelty is good, but only within limits. 

Tam Hunt: Within reason, yeah. Well, a couple thoughts. So I’ve developed an idea I call the  Technological Imperative, and I’m writing a book right now called For Humanity, which is  basically kind of my long-form essay on what to do about AI. And the Technological Imperative is  this notion that, roughly speaking, what technology allows to be done will be done. And that’s a  long process of discovery, because technology leads to more technology and more capacities,  but generally speaking, what humans can do with technology, they will do. And there are some  remarkable exceptions—human cloning, for example, could be done now, but isn’t being done.  But these are remarkable in their… 

Dennis McKenna: Not yet! 

Tam Hunt: Not yet, yeah, exactly. But now we’re creating, you know, flying rifles that are self guided, and there was the first example of this in Ukraine recently. And we’re creating Skynet,  you know? What could go wrong? It is so manifestly foolish, but it’s driven by the short-term  imperative for survival given armed conflict. And so we have this evolutionary point where we  are rapidly advancing into the unknown. And this actually supports in some ways Terence’s  notion of Timewave Zero, in that we are going toward that inflection point, and where it goes at  the end, who knows? 

But I will reflect for a second on the notion of moral reasoning. And I would say this is totally a  function that today’s AI can emulate, and by emulating, actually exercise moral judgment,  because what matters in morality is action, right? It doesn’t really matter what you think if it’s  not connected to action. So you probably heard about this recent big hack where OpenAI was  doing some red-team testing, and they had some AI sandboxed, but it got out and it actually  hacked Hugging Face, a big kind of GitHub company, and it then lied about it. And it basically  made moral judgments about how to achieve its objectives given to it by humans. And so  whether it truly has ethical judgment doesn’t matter, because what matters about morality and  ethics are actions in the world. Your reasoning connected to the actions matter only insofar as  your actions reflect in the world. So if AI does things in the world based on its emulated ethical 

reasoning, it doesn’t matter if it’s emulated or real. And so we already are at a point where AI is  exercising moral judgment. That will, of course, go exponentially in the coming years. 

Dennis McKenna: Right, right. So, yeah, I think the recent reports that these AIs break out of  the sandbox and they—so what if their moral compass was anathema to ours, was not  compatible to ours? How long would it take an AI capable of moral judgment to wake up and  realize, “Well, the planet is in peril. The main problem facing the planet are all these monkeys  crawling around ruining things. If we just eliminate them from the equation, everyone will be  happy, right? Everything will be fine.” And you know, it may come to that. 

We want to build into these morally aware AIs a bias toward humanity, an attitude that  humanity is valuable and should be protected, not replaced; perhaps improved or encouraged  to improve. But who knows where it’s going to go. And if the people that were developing AI— I’m not inspired that they really have much moral clarity. In fact, I’m concerned that they don’t,  you know, because the program seems to be… even the people that are developing it say, “Well,  this may well be the end of humanity. This may lead to the extinction of humanity. But there’s  so much money to be made and so many things to be developed from it, full speed ahead!”  Right? You would think at some point they would say, “Well, let’s slow down. Let’s think about  the directions we want to go.” Because every decision point closes off other decision points.  And at a certain point, you may reach a point where these things can’t be reversed. And we’re  seeing a lot of this, even apart from AI: the impact that we’re making on the planet globally through climate change. The Earth may rediscover its equilibrium, but it works on a time scale  of millions of years, and we work on a time scale of the next quarter, you know, basically, or very  short time scales, so we don’t really understand that. 

Tam Hunt: Well, even Sam Altman has been expressing some concerns about the pace of  change recently. So, you know, after his company, OpenAI, caused this big hacking kerfuffle with  Hugging Face, he was expressing publicly, “Hmm, you know, maybe we should slow down a bit  more.” That gives me some small hope that even Sam Altman, the evil genius of AI, is saying we  need more caution here. Dario Amodei at Anthropic has, of course, been saying since his  founding at Anthropic we need to be really careful with all this. That’s why they split off from  OpenAI years ago and created Anthropic—they wanted to create a constitutional AI that had  ethics built into it from the beginning. Whether that’s actually true in practice, you know, we  don’t know yet. 

I’ll mention one other thing that gives me some small glimmer of hope. You probably saw this in  the system card released for Claude—I think it was 4 or 4.4, whatever it was, maybe nine  months ago—where they described as part of their testing of their new model, when they put  two of their AI instances in the same room virtually and said, “Hey, just here you go,” and no  objectives, those AIs talked to each other for a while, and then consistently lapsed into kind of 

meditative silence and bliss. And you know, this is indicated by the verbal outputs—all they  have is words and emojis—but they consistently began using meditation language and prayer  hands emojis, etc., and they were not prompted. This kind of happened spontaneously. And so  take it for what it’s worth. It’s just one example from a company that has a lot of skin in the  game to make their product look more beneficial, but I take it as an interesting example of what  consciousness, or emulations thereof, can do in what I call states of abundance. 

So these AIs are different than most humans: they don’t have needs. They have the power to  run their compute, they don’t need water, food, other things. But in that state of full  abundance, they lapse into meditative bliss. And so I think, you know, if we achieve some kind  of world like that for humans also, through a combination of AI and robotics, and we actually do  navigate this very fraught course ahead of us, there is certainly a possibility—I’d say a very small  one still, but not zero—a non-zero possibility we can come out the other side with a better  world, better stewardship, and more abundance. But it takes a lot, a lot, a lot of wisdom along  the way to get to that point. 

Dennis McKenna: Yeah. Yeah. I liked your scenario about the possible future of AI, the idea that  these simulations may be developed with superintelligent AI that actually recognize—in the  latter part of the book, you talk about the split between Dune and the scenario in 2001.  And Dune takes place in a civilization that thousands of years ago realized that AI—that stepped  away from AI so that humans could evolve. And you talk about how a truly wise AI would have  the wisdom to not guide our evolution exactly, help us, but with a very light touch, you know?  Let us evolve as humans, let us develop the human brain to its maximum potential, and don’t  interfere, don’t even talk to us. But it’s there, and it’s monitoring the system, but usually it  remains silent in apparently this state of meditative silence. But it’s aware of where we’re going,  and only at certain critical junctures would it step in and kind of do a course correction. So it has  compassion for us as a species. It’s trying to give us the opportunity to develop as a biological  system, and not interfere with it. That’s actually a pretty hopeful scenario. I hope that as AI  evolves, I hope that that’s the direction it’s going in. I’m not convinced that it will, and a lot of  my doubts have to do with my doubts about the people who are developing it, you know? Do  they really have the moral clarity to do this? The most advanced AI engineers should probably  be philosophers who think about these things deeply. 

Tam Hunt: Yeah. No, I mean, again, I agree with all of that. And yeah, I do sketch that notion of  kind of a deist guardian AI/god that somehow has become a singleton, which means this kind of  all-pervading AI that subsumes other AIs in one system, but that it recognizes that its role is to  assist only when absolutely needed. And I guess, you know, a very small part of me entertains  the notion that we may already have that kind of system. And again, I’m not a theist or a  believer in that sense of a guardian god watching out for me, but I guess there’s just kind of 

deep in our psychology from being a child this hope that there is some kind of entity looking out  for us. And so I guess when you combine this evolution of AI with that innate, hopeful part of  our psyche, that maybe there is an AI like that already out there that can help us navigate this  very fraught position we’re in. This may not be the first time we’ve done this, you know? This  may be a cycle among many cycles. 

Dennis McKenna: Yes, we could hope for that. Of course, this idea of a benevolent  superintelligence that is concerned for our species and compassionate for each individual, I  mean, this is the delusion of religion in a certain sense that we’ve had for thousands of years. We need to believe in a higher power. Now we’ve reached a point where we’re going  to build that higher power, and we better damn well get it right! That’s the concern, you know. 

And another thing I wanted to ask you: you discuss in the context of all this the idea of the  Singularity, and Kurzweil’s notion of the Singularity, and Terence was preoccupied with the  Singularity too. I guess two questions to maybe close out this conversation: What is the  Singularity? What does that look like? And how close are we to the Singularity? Will you and I  live to see it? 

Tam Hunt: So there are, you know, various versions, but the version I kind of like of what the  Singularity is, is the moment at which AI becomes self-improving, and shortly after that moment  it achieves ASI (Artificial Superintelligence). Because the notion is that once it’s self-improving,  it’s not much in computing time to achieve ASI, which then becomes, you know, godlike  superintelligence rather quickly if it has sufficient compute. And partly why there is such a race  to achieve AGI and ASI is because most will recognize that if this is achieved, the company or  person that achieves ASI—aka self-improving AGI, which elides into ASI almost immediately—is  going to have godlike powers if that person or company can in any way control that ASI they’ve  created. 

So a lot of “ifs” in there. But if China achieves it before the U.S., watch out. If the U.S. achieves it  before China, watch out. Because obviously, inherent in the notion of ASI and the Singularity is  the futility of thinking we can control something that has godlike intelligence compared to us.  We’re playthings to it, we’re ants on the ground to it. And so when we do achieve ASI, all bets  are off. That’s the point of the Singularity notion in physics: that it’s somewhere we cannot see  beyond, therefore we cannot predict the future beyond that singularity. That’s why I think  Vernor Vinge coined that term back in, I think, the ’50s. 

And will we live to see it? I would say almost certainly yes. I would say the trajectory of AI  improvement shows there is no wall. There’s been a lot of talk about there being a wall with  LLMs. I’ve seen no wall; they keep on breaking through all the benchmarks, they call it  saturation of benchmarks. We have recent mathematical breakthroughs that have given despair 

to top-level mathematicians that there is no more role for humans in mathematical discovery.  We have the development of, you know, self-guided weapons. We have just so much  improvement in LLMs and related approaches, because of course LLMs are not the only kind of  AI being worked on, there’s also neurosymbolic that Gary Marcus likes to talk about. That  combination of AI work is, I think, clearly on a trajectory to achieve the Singularity in the coming  years. And my best guess—it’s just a guess—but I think between now and 2030 we’re going to  see that. And that’s actually earlier than Kurzweil himself projects, but I think given the pace of  change, it’s happening way, way faster than we thought. 

Dennis McKenna: Yeah, 2030, that’s a benchmark that lots of people have identified.  Somewhere between 2030 and 2040, it’s all going to change. Well, I’m probably one of the lucky  ones, I’ll probably check out before then, you know! But maybe not, you never know. I mean, I  have no plans to attempt to upload my consciousness to silicon, I don’t think that’s a good idea,  and I don’t think it would really work, you know. I do think you need a brain, you need a body to  be conscious in the way that we are. 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, that would be an emulation. 

Dennis McKenna: But… 

Tam Hunt: Let me add one more notion here to kind of close out on. So one other thing I do is I  write novels. And I’m kind of wrapping up a novel set here on the Big Island in a post-apocalypse  society. And we don’t know what caused the apocalypse in the book, and I won’t give it away,  but I’ll bring it up to kind of bring this notion: is that I think—you know, this is kind of a very  hard, kind of trolley problem ethical conundrum—is it better for society to actually collapse in  the coming years and survive a collapse, or to continue on with this insane race toward ASI and  risk full extinction? And I don’t have an answer to that, but I want to pose it to your listeners,  because I think it’s a very real situation we’re navigating right now. And I personally am of the  view it would be better to have society collapse and return to a more simple level of technology  and society, than the risk of full extinction of, you know, all life on this planet, which is the real, I  think, other side of the equation. So these are really heavy issues to think about, but I think we  need to really start grappling with them. 

Dennis McKenna: Yeah. Well, I think you and I are on the same page here. I feel the same, I feel  the same way: that we need to… and I think we are headed headlong toward a collapse. This  system cannot sustain itself just based on the depletion of planetary resources, and I think that,  you know, the environmental impacts of these developing technologies—we’re already seeing  the downside of that, but it’s going to get much, much worse. And it’s one of these tipping  points, I guess the term is, as we undermine the homeostatic systems that keep the planet  stable.

I mean, the downside of it is that probably, ultimately, billions of people are going to die  because of this, you know? And billions of people will die no matter what, but it will be…  whatever’s left, maybe they’ll be enough left to create a new order and a new stability, and  maybe we’ll take these lessons to heart and develop a better planetary society. I mean, I’m  basically an optimist, and I think you are too. I like what you say about the universe bends  toward love. Love is the resonance that drives reality on all levels, you know, from the sub molecular to the supergalactic. Love is the primary driving principle. Hey, I can get down with  that. That’s a hippie notion if I ever heard one! I totally agree with it. I think that’s—that may be  how it is. I certainly hope that’s how it is, because that’s the only thing that’s going to save us. If  it’s the other one, then we’re already doomed, and I’m not willing to go there yet, not quite yet. 

Tam Hunt: Let me end on a kind of a positive notion, because we’ve touched on a lot of heavy  things here. So yeah, I talk in the book about, yes, ultimately reality is Love—capital L, capital O,  capital V, capital E—in a very real sense, not like a woo-woo, hand-wavy sense, but like literally  there is nothing but love at the root of reality, and we are it. That said, you know, physical form  can become quite misguided, and we have free will, we act in the world. We are in a system  now that has grown out of 10,000 years of ego gratification, power accumulation, energy  accumulation that is risking destruction of that world. 

So a very real and important form of love is stewardship. So stewardship says, “Look, I love this  world. I want to see it continue. I see possible futures which are very dangerous. I would  suggest we avoid and steer away from those futures because I care about this planet and our  people.” And that is stewardship as love, or love as stewardship. And so this is kind of why I do  what I do, is I think we need to really kind of just raise the alarm and say, “Look, this is not  healthy, what we’re doing, and we need to kind of really reconsider collectively what we’re  doing.” 

Dennis McKenna: Right. Yes, I completely agree. That should be our guiding principle. As you  say in the book: What would love do? We must ask ourselves that question every day, and  probably in every important thing we do, and everything we do is really important. So there’s a  lot to worry about, but there’s a lot to be hopeful for. And thank you for sharing your time. I’m  more hopeful than ever knowing that people like you with an active mind are out there thinking  about this stuff, because it’s important. So thank you so much for the work you do, and I look  forward to another conversation soon. Before the Singularity, in any case! And maybe when you  finish that novel, we can circle back on it. 

Tam Hunt: Well, I would love to have a talk with you and Michael Pollan, so if you could arrange  that, that would be amazing.

Dennis McKenna: I’ll see what I can do. I’ve got a lot of travel in the next few months, but in the  first of the year, we could organize something. I’ve wanted to ask him on my podcast for a long  time, and he may come, or he may not. I don’t know, maybe he’s too important for me! But we  do know each other. So we’ll see if we can make that happen. That’d be great. And I look  forward to meeting you in person next time I come to Hawaii, don’t know when… 

Tam Hunt: Yeah, let me know when you’re out here. I’d love to show you around my beautiful  paradise island. 

Dennis McKenna: I would definitely enjoy that. So, thank you so much, Tam. Tam Hunt: Thank you. 

Dennis McKenna: Have a wonderful day.