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seeing when I actually go there.
Terence: I'd like to defend Ralph. I don't think that it's really a journey deeper into artificiality. Science has been dependent on instrumentality
for a long, long time. The natural world that Ralph's program would reveal is the natural world of syntax. In other words, language would
become a much more accessible object for study if it were visually explicit. And I expect that this is happening. It seems to me we have
reached a new fron-
tier in the natural history of this most complex and least understood of all behaviors; language. While the instrumentalities may be computers,
high-speed imaging, and so forth, it's no different from using the Hubble telescope to tease data out of a very distant part of the universe, and
then making it explicit. If we could understand language, we would understand something about our own place in nature that eludes us. It's
clearly the most complex thing we do, and we're the most complex thing we know. The feedback from language is culture, the most
anomalous phenomenon in the natural world.
Ralph: I want to end by saying this: Mathematics is part of the natural world. It's a landscape which can be explored, simply and directly, and
with incredible pleasure, delight and advancement, just like the psychedelic logos, or any other aspect of the world. The mathematical
landscape does not belong to the human species. It belongs not even to the earth, but to the sky. It's part of the infinite universe we live in.
Whatever microscopes, telescopes, kaleidoscopes, or computer graphic tools we can devise to enhance our vision of the mathematical
universe is definitely advantageous. How this will fit into society, however, is a problem. We are in an evolutionary challenge from which the
human species may not survive. I feel that part of our difficulty is our culture's rejection of mathematics. Mathematics is essentially the
marriage of Father Sky and Mother Earth. I've given my life work to understand this relationship between the psychedelic and the
mathematical vision. So I'll leave it there.
Notes
1. Hans Jenny, Kymatik. 2. Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods. 3. Rupert Sheldrake, The Rebirth of Nature. 4. See Terence McKenna, The
Archaic Revival
5. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962) and 6. Understanding Media: The Extensions of
Man (Toronto: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1965).
THREE
What Hawaii Tells Us About Evolution
Terence: The subject of this particular trialogue is Hawaii, what this island tells us about evolution, and how it relates to island ecosystems
and their evolutionary process generally. The task falls to me because as chance would have it, in the course of my life I have visited most of
the major theaters of evolution that involve island groups considered to be exemplars of the various types of island groups on the planet.
Hawaii, where we are recording this trialogue, is a group of mid-ocean volcanic islands. The only other mid-ocean volcanic island groups in
the world are the Azores, the Canaries and the Seychelles. They offer great contrast to Hawaii, particularly the Seychelles, which as a portion
of the Madagascar land mass has been above water some 300 million years, perhaps longer than any other place on the planet. There the
evolutionary process offers a dramatic contrast to the far more recent evolution in the Hawaiian Islands. The Hawaiian Islands represent the
unique case, because of the size of the volcanic calderas and of the vents beneath the Pacific floor that have created them. In fact, these vents
and volcanic conduits are the largest on the planet. What we have in Hawaii is a tectonic plate sliding slowly toward southern Russia and
Japan that is crossing over a weak place in the Earth's crust, a place where the core magma of the planet lies a considerable percentage closer
to the surface than anywhere else on earth. The result of this situation is a series of islands formed in the same spot that each, after its
volcanic birth, is rafted away on the continental plate towards the northwest.
The life in the Hawaiian islands shows 30 to 35 million years of endemnification using the ordinary rates of gene change that biologists
recognize. Nevertheless, geologically speaking, no Hawaiian island is over 12 million years old. The obvious interpretation of these facts is
that life arose out here on islands which no longer exist, and as islands rose and fell,
the life hopscotched from one island to another. Indeed, the dispersal rate of birds, tree snails, and other organisms moving eastward from
Kauai across Oahu, Molokai and Maui to the Big Island, Hawaii itself, shows that this gradient is still operable. The forests of Hawaii are the
most species-poor forests of the major islands. Hawaii is species poor because animals are still arriving here from the other islands.
Nevertheless because these volcanoes are so huge, Hawaii has a complete range of ecological systems, from sea level to 14,000 feet, virtually
the entire range on the planet in which life is able to locate itself. The volcano itself, Mauna Loa, is by volume the world's largest mountain,
because is is already a 14,000 foot mountain when it breaks through to sea level, having risen from the Pacific floor, and in this part of the
world the Pacific Ocean is 13,000 feet deep. This mountain was enormous before it ever broke water. It now rises 13,000 feet above sea level,
and its sister mountain, Mauna Kea, is shorter by only 120 feet.
What has been created out here is a very closed ecosystem far from any continental land mass. The forms of life which arise here arise on
rafted debris or tucked into the feathers of migratory birds or in some other highly improbable fashion. What we see here is a winnowing of
continental species based on extreme improbability. As an example, a very common Sierra Nevada wildflower of no great distinction
apparently arrived millions of years ago as a single seed on Maui, and by that crossing has created a mutated race of plants that we know as
the Hawaiian Silversword, one of the most bizarre endemic plants that the island has produced.
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