🍄 Remembering Genius

Retrospection can be better appreciated when we chronicle how astonishing humanity can be. Visits with genius from our repository...

May 26, 2023

Exploring every rabbit hole there is. For more wanderings, become an Alice in Futureland subscriber—it's free.

🍄 AudioDose: this is Alice on Sonic Mushrooms. Greetings, fellow travelers of the digital realm.
🎧 Alice in Futureland Podcasts

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. For more than a quarter-century, Sputnik Futures (now Alice in Futureland), has been blessed with the rare opportunity to engage in intimate exchanges with the luminaries that grace our world. From Hi8 cameras to the realm of code and byte, our repository harbors remnants of thought that continue to forge what it means to be human. In the spirit of remembrance, we present to you fragments, culled from the vast tapestry of our archives, wherein dwell extraordinary beings who have indelibly brushed against the very essence of humanity. It was their drive, their creative urge to construct a vision, a map, a picture of the world that gave us a little more beauty and coherence than we had before meeting them. What unfolds below is our pilgrimage into the presence of unparalleled genius.

Cultural Cartography Through Remembrance...

John Archibald Wheeler on the nature of our existence...the intricate interplay between observation, consciousness, and the fundamental building blocks of reality.

"My hope is to understand how the physical world came into being and how it works, and where we fit into it all. But it may be something that will suddenly become clear in a few months or something that’ll take a few centuries. But one has to leave enough of a trail to get the whole show started for anybody following. I have on the windowsill of a cottage in Maine, a rock which comes from the garden of academe in ancient Athens which must have heard the discussions of Plato and Aristotle as they walk back and forth. All I need is some mechanism I can put that rock in which will bring forth a sound. But now it’s just imagination—thinking of those men, and how they got us going." —John Archibald Wheeler, ALICE interview 2002
John Archibald Wheeler (July 9, 1911 – April 13, 2008) was a theoretical physicist best known for popularizing the term “black hole”, “wormhole” and "it from bit", and for hypothesizing the “one-electron Universe”.

Karl H. Pribram and the holonomic brain theory...exploring the neural architecture of thought and feeling.

"The patterns in the universe are so interesting and there's just so many things to be spiritual about. So, of course, I always go back to the brain. Which part of the brain is involved in letting us get to these spiritual levels? So that’s “the science of spiritual”, a more holistic way of processing things. You’ve got both the process, a mechanism that you can point to, and the evidence from people who are scientists. Darwin was spiritual. He had lots of beliefs systems that he dearly believed in. Freud talked about all of the myths and so on. You know, what’s above is below. What you see out there is in your brain. I mean, all of these things that are in mythology is what I’m working on. But it’s politically not correct to say so. The more I study the brain and its functions, the more I feel that there may well be something outside the brain that accounts for its activity and capacity, the source from which the brain receives its “program” needs to be greater than the brain itself – the cause has to be greater than the effect it produces." — Karl H. Pribram, ALICE interview 2002
Neuroscientist Karl H. Pribram (February 25, 1919 – January 19, 2015) was best known for the development of the holonomic brain model of cognitive function and contribution to ongoing neurological research into memory, emotion, motivation and consciousness.

F. David Peat on synchronicities, epiphanies, peak, and mystical experiences…creativity breaks through the barriers of the self and allows awareness to flood through the whole domain of consciousness.

“Synchronicities are deep connections, more than a coincidence. Another way of thinking of synchronicity is it’s a marker in time. You can be in your life doing repetitive things. We talked about people in Strange Attractors, people trapped by an archetype. You could be in a relationship, and you get out of that, and you get into another relationship, which seems to have the same pattern. So you can have a pattern in your life. Synchronicity comes along and breaks it. It’s a marker in time. There’s a before and an after. Things are different afterwards. So synchronicities are a bridge between your outer world, your external world of your habits, your patterns, what’s going on outside, your friends, and your inner world. Somehow that’s bridged, in a mysterious way. And the whole thing is full of meaning. So it’s like, James Joyce would say the word ‘epiphany,’ it’s an opening up. In particular, as psychic patterns reach their peak; moreover they generally disappear as the individual becomes consciously aware of a new alignment of forces within his or her personality—it is as if the internal restructuring produces external resonance, or as if a burst of mental energy propagated outward onto the world.” —F. David Peat, ALICE interview 2002
F. David Peat (April 18, 1938 - June 6, 2017) was a holistic physicist who has carried out research in solid state physics and the foundation of quantum theory.

John Perry Barlow reflecting on patterns of information and perceptions of reality.

“There is a medium in mathematics where you find something like the Mandelbrot set, which is a feature of the universe which is as real as Mt. Everest but that was previously invisible to us until we had something with which to essentially photograph that reality. And there are many other media that we will never know because we are too bound up, our perceptions are physically contained. But if you think about the RNA/DNA interchange, the arrangement of nucleotide along the DNA molecule, what’s important there is the agency that stacks those proteins in the order they are. The proteins are kind of irrelevant, it’s the pattern of information that is relevant. You see what I mean? It’s not the 0’s and 1's. It’s the pattern. It’s the space between the 0’s and 1's.” —John Perry Barlow, ALICE interview 1999
John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947 - February 7, 2018) was, among many things, an American poet, lyricist, essayist, cyberlibertarian, champion of an unfettered internet, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a friend.

Lynn Margulis on a symbiotic planet...a new look at evolution.

"Random mutation has very little to do with, in my opinion, very little to do with real evolutionary novelty. And I think that recognition is going to have our evolution analysis changed. The topology of evolutionary trees are no longer a trunk with branching, branching, branching, branching, branching sort of divergence. It’s a trunk with branching, branching, branching, where the branches then come together fuse and make new forms that are really fundamentally novel, and fundamentally original, but you can trace their double or triple origins from predecessors. I think that’s going to be one of the very most important aspects of new evolutionary analysis.” —Lynn Margulis, ALICE interview 2002.
A prominent evolutionary biologist, Lynn Margulis (March 5, 1938 – November 22, 2011) was a primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. She co-developed the Gaia hypothesis with James Lovelock, proposing that the Earth functions as a single self-regulating system.

Brian Goodwin defining wellbeing as a coherent, integrated experience of that dynamic whole by a person.

"Health is one of these words, health or wellbeing, is essentially a word that relates to qualities. It’s a quality of feeling. If you think of your own health, it’s a quality of feeling that you experience and you know what it’s like to have a sense of wellbeing. But you cannot turn it into a number, like a number on a thermometer or a pressure or any of the quantities like blood cell counts or the pH of the blood. They will correlate with wellbeing but they don’t actually tell you precisely what wellbeing is. Because wellbeing is a coherent, integrated experience of that dynamic whole by a person, by a subject."—Brian Goodwin, ALICE interview 2007
Brian Goodwin (March 25, 1931 – July 15, 2009) was a mathematician and biologist, a Professor Emeritus at the Open University and a founder of theoretical biology and biomathematics. He introduced the use of complex systems and generative models in developmental biology, suggested that a reductionist view of nature fails to explain complex features, controversially proposing the structuralist theory that morphogenetic fields might substitute for natural selection in driving evolution.

Candace Pert on discovering our molecules of emotions…

"For a long time, neuroscientists agreed that emotions are controlled by certain parts of the brain. This is a big ‘neurocentric' assumption that I now think is either wrong or incomplete. But when I was a believer in the brain as the most important organ in the body, this assumption led me to do the right analysis in the lab for the wrong reason. Ultimately, it fueled my conviction that there are such things as molecules of emotion. The emotional brain has always been confined to those classical locations. But my research tells me that's not the case. If we accept the idea that peptides and other informational substances are the biochemicals of emotion, their distribution throughout the body's nerves has all kinds of significance. I like to speculate that the mind is the flow of information as it moves among the cells, organs, and systems of the body. The mind, as we experience it, is immaterial, yet it has a physical substate that is both the body and the brain. We all know something profound happens when we laugh and I am sure that 200 different neuropeptides get released and kind of move around. They are all triggering a whole body mind state. But it’s not the laughter that causes the release, or the release that causes the laughter. There is a moment of something, and then the chemicals follow. I think that really is true."—Candace Pert, ALICE interview 2002
A neuroscientist and pharmacologist, Candace Pert (June 26, 1946 – September 12, 2013) discovered the opiate receptor, the cellular binding site for endorphins in the brain.

… and Brian Goodwin on community and recovering a sense of community.

“The one prediction I would make, that if we're going to survive, we will survive in community and not as isolated individuals the way we are at the moment in our culture. People are now engaging in this process of going local, reducing energy use, getting into sustainable energy and renewable energy supplies, and recovering community and having local currencies. Now these are all things that I think are going to be part of future society and it'd be dominated by quality, abundance, celebration, joy, and a general high level of health and wellbeing—and a sense of meaning—we'll have recovered a sense of meaning in our lives. So that's the way I think things are going to move, but I don't know how far or how fast.” —Brian Goodwin, ALICE Interview 2002.

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