Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse: Book Review

In the relatively quick read Conversations On the Edge of the Apocalypse: Contemplating the Future with Noam Chomsky, George Carlin, Deepak Chopra, Rupert Sheldrake, and Others, an author by the name David Jay Brown interviews twenty-one brilliant thinkers and asks them questions about the future of humanity, the ways in which psychedelics have shaped their views on the world and how they see consciousness evolving over time. It is in some ways a follow-up to his previous book Mavericks of the Mind which features interviews with Terrence McKenna, Timothy Leary, John C. Lilly and more.

Two of the best passages are the back-to-back interviews with Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec. Kurzweil gives a fairly good summary of his observations of reality and describes how neural implants are right around the corner that would give one the ability to temporarily, "shut down the signals coming from our real senses and replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were in [a] virtual environment, [and] these can be as realistic, detailed and compelling as real reality." He describes the acceleration of evolution which is something worthy of its own post but can be almost entirely explained with this one graph.

Kurzweil and Moravec both discuss what they think consciousness is and acknowledge that even though there will be a philosophical question to whether or not you can believe the computers of 2030 when they claim that they are conscious, you will have to interact with them like they are so the question of whether you believe them or not will not really matter.

Throughout the next several years, Ray says, "We're going to reverse-engineer our own intelligence and understand in detail how it works. We're going to re-create it then in our technology. We will, in the process of doing that, greatly amplify it and merge with it. We will basically re-create who we are-both our bodies and our brains-through nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and vastly expand human intelligence."

Although Ray is optimistic, he does acknowledge that there is a lot of dangerous possible outcomes of exponentially growing technology but the fact humans have had the ability to nuke ourselves off the planet for more than fifty years and haven't yet is a good sign that we're not as foolish as we seem.

On the question of what he thinks happens to consciousness after death, he asks if he is even the same consciousness that Ray Kurzweil was a year ago. Sure he looks the same but nearly every cell in the human body is replaced every several months and even though brain cells live much longer they have their molecules swapped in and out meaning everyone is a completely different person every few months. The only thing that really stays the same is the pattern and a pattern is information. And information cannot be destroyed. In a few years it will be possible to upload that pattern to the internet which will extend our lives to lengths that we cannot yet imagine.

Dr. Hans Moravec is a professor at Carnegie Mellon where he directs the world's largest robotics research program. In his section he discusses robot consciousness and the nature of subjective experience. He has written two fantastic books called Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence and Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind. I have currently only read Robot but would recommend it to anyone who's willing to finish it. It may start slow but it is necessary to build a foundation in the history of robotics in order to truly understand the incredible heights that technological progress will reach within just a few decades.

Some of the other interviews that stood out to me were Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist who has studied psychic (psi) phenomena and collected an astonishing amount of scientific evidence in support of it, Dean Radin, a psychologist and engineer who has studied psi phenomena at Princeton.

Another one that stood out was with Robert Anton Wilson, a philosopher and author of over thirty-five books dealing with themes such as quantum mechanics, the future evolution of the human species, weird unexplained phenomena,synchronicity, altered states of consciousness and the nature of belief systems. He earned his doctorate of psychology from Paideia University and some of his popular nonfiction includes Cosmic Trigger, Prometheus Rising and Quantum Psychology.

The late comedian George Carlin gives a fantastic interview with some witty and insightful points about society as well as the interviews with spiritual teacher Ram Dass, founder of the most highly praised medical marijuana collective in California, Valerie Corral, magician Jeff McBride and the visionary artist Alex Grey.

Overall this is a fascinating collection of interviews with amazing people that will hopefully be seen as a guidebook for those trying to ask the right questions and do genuinely interesting research into some of the greatest mysteries of our world in the twenty-first century. All of the uncut interviews can be found on David Jay Brown's website Mavericks of the Mind.