Conversations

David Luke, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Greenwich, co-founder of the Breaking Convention conference and author of Otherworlds: Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck’s online course The Future of Consciousness. Luke recounts the biologist Merlin Sheldrake, who spent three years in Panama studying a plant that does not photosynthesize and its fungal partner, taking LSD in Luke’s lab and experiencing himself as the fungus, which reframed how he understood the relationship and how he thought science might be done. Luke connects this to what Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls perspectivism, knowing something by becoming it, and sets it against the reductive method that isolates and deadens what it studies. He then reports survey findings on nature connectedness and shifts in metaphysical belief.

Warren Neidich, an artist and theorist known for his work on cognitive capitalism and neuroaesthetics, speaks in this excerpt from Pinchbeck’s Future of Consciousness online course. He cites research on London taxi drivers showing differences in the posterior hippocampus between those who navigate with GPS and those who do not, and argues that children raised on turn-by-turn navigation never build the parietal-hippocampal links that wayfinding requires. He calls this neural capitalism: capacities that were once a neural commons are externalized into devices that can later be metered and charged for, with ChatGPT extending the same logic to reasoning and research. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler and Gilbert Simondon, he describes exosomatic organogenesis, the co-evolution of brain and technology, and treats ayahuasca visionary art as the external side of an internal neural event.

Paul Levy, author of Dispelling Wetiko and a longtime practitioner in a Tibetan Buddhist lineage, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck’s Future of Consciousness online course. He explains terma, the Tibetan tradition of hidden treasures that surface through a discoverer, or terton, at the moment a lineage has grown stale or a crisis demands them, and compares the mechanism to a dream compensating for one-sidedness in the psyche. He proposes that quantum physics is a modern terma: a revelation that cannot be grasped intellectually but must be participated in, since it shows a universe that is not separate from the observer. Levy connects this to his own breakdown in his twenties, when he was hospitalized and diagnosed as mentally ill while understanding the episode as an awakening.

Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, and writer of the Substack BIG, discusses antitrust as the framework for understanding big tech power. He describes the think tank’s work researching monopolies in technology and health care, filing briefs, and running daily coverage of the federal antitrust case against Google at Big Tech on Trial. Stoller identifies himself as a populist rather than a progressive, tracing that lineage to the merchant and farmer movements of the 1880s and 1890s that organized against the railroads, and to Wright Patman, the Texas congressman he calls the last populist, who served from 1929 to 1976 and is the subject of his book. Pinchbeck raises online speech and censorship.

Chloe Macintosh, founder and CEO of the sexual-wellness education app Kama, describes building a platform that treats pleasure as a modality for wellbeing rather than as pornography or medical risk-prevention. She traces her interest to her first pregnancy nearly twenty years earlier, when the changes in her body made her realize she had never asked basic questions about pleasure, hormones and cycles, and says roughly fifteen years of research followed before she launched the app in 2020. Macintosh argues that sexuality is best understood not as who a person has sex with but as their relationship to their own body, and therefore as an indicator of general wellbeing. She and Pinchbeck, who met at Medicine Festival in England, discuss declining rates of sex, generational differences, and shame as the default frame.

An excerpt from a talk by Neil Theise, a pathologist at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and author of Notes on Complexity, delivered during Pinchbeck’s online course The Future of Consciousness. Theise argues that being inconsequentially small and being a complete expression of the entire universe are two simultaneously true descriptions, and that holding both is what human life consists of. Most of the excerpt is a family history: his father was sent from Germany to England on the Kindertransport while his grandparents were deported to Riga and killed. Visiting the site of the mass grave, Theise concluded his grandmother died believing her decisions had been wrong, though she was in fact the only one of her siblings who did not lose a child. He draws an ethic from it about acting without knowing outcomes.

Jeffrey Kripal, the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and author of The Flip, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck’s online course The Future of Consciousness. He recounts writing the 2018 book after his Chronicle of Higher Education essay Visions of the Impossible, and describes the flip as the moment when a scientist, engineer or physician trained in materialism has an anomalous experience and reverses the order of priority, taking consciousness as primary. He then reads a short paper laying out a set of what he calls wagers rather than certainties, centered on a dual-aspect monism in which consciousness and cosmos are two expressions of one reality. He invokes Schrodinger, Bohr, Pauli and Jacques Vallee’s Forbidden Science.

Alexander Beiner, author of The Bigger Picture, executive director of the Breaking Convention conference and a co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, talks with Pinchbeck in this excerpt from the Future of Consciousness course. Beiner participated in Imperial College’s extended-state DMT study and contrasts two readings of the DMT realm: that its entities are genuinely autonomous, and the view associated with the Qualia Research Institute that the states correspond to shifting geometries of experience. He says his own interest has moved from that metaphysical question to practical application. He criticizes how far medicalization has crowded out the cultural and consciousness-change agenda of the earlier psychedelic underground, discusses the FDA’s rejection of MDMA-assisted therapy as a setback for MAPS and Rick Doblin, and describes the psychedelic-assisted innovation work of the Minds organization founded by Bruce Damer.

Alexander Beiner, author of The Bigger Picture, executive director of the Breaking Convention conference and a co-founder of Rebel Wisdom, speaks in an excerpt from Pinchbeck’s online course The Future of Consciousness. He presents his theory of the age of breach, arguing that the fluid nature of online identity pools collective desire and resentment into archetypal communities, with QAnon as an example, and that these formations breach into physical reality with results their participants do not anticipate, as on January 6. He compares navigating online worlds to shamanic practice and argues that skills learned in psychedelic work transfer to a world saturated by generative AI. He draws on Jung, Terence McKenna, Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror and Jamie Wheal’s Recapture the Rapture.

An excerpt from philosopher Bernardo Kastrup’s session in the Liminal Institute online course The Future of Consciousness. Kastrup, executive director of the Essentia Foundation and the leading proponent of analytic idealism, argues that treating everything we have a word for as a separate thing with its own point of view mistakes the structure of language for the structure of the world, using the example of a fist that vanishes when the hand opens. He says the boundaries of distinct points of view follow the boundaries of biology. Kastrup adds that he finds ordinary experience mysterious enough that the paranormal holds little interest, but that synchronicity and telepathy follow straightforwardly from a single mind divided by imperfect dissociative boundaries. Pinchbeck raises the Kogi, the Hopi, and Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance.