Mushroom.Man Page 3
I used to come here at weekends just to take mescaline, acid, peyote. Occasionally Jane would come with me, but she never took anything – she’d just watch over me. Maybe she thought I’d do something stupid like the psychotics in the anti-drug shorts they used to make – try to fly and kill myself. Sometimes I’d wonder why she left that world to me alone; why she didn’t want to share it.
Little by little these trips brought me closer to the natural world. I grew attached to the area. I associated it with freedom, while my apartment became associated with drudgery. The apartment was where I worked, where I received bank statements, paid rates. The hills were for letting my consciousness soar. I’d watch the kites as they circled and try to project myself into them, try to see myself as a speck on a hill-slope from a thousand feet up. They were the moments of freedom that made me give it all up for a life in the forests and hills.
I lost Jane along the way. She just wanted other things out of life, she took another road. That was eight years ago and it seems less of a trauma now. Back then it was; it took me a long time to come to terms with her absence. Moving had been a joint decision in every sense of the word; I began to doubt if it made any sense to be here alone. Slowly I began to redefine what being alone meant. It’s not company that I need or needed – I can find that in the pub – it’s someone to share things with; experiences, hopes and dreams. You need someone to be close to, someone who won’t judge, who’ll accept, who’ll share. I haven’t found that kind of relationship since Jane. I’ve found intellectual stimulation, sexual excitement and comforting bodily warmth, but never together. But then, as things have gone, it’s probably for the best. There is no tie that binds me to any particular world and without that freedom the journey ahead wouldn’t be possible.
Attachments are strange, illogical things. Not just to people, but to places. Why should a view of a mountain or a river valley exert such a pull? It comes down to how we define ourselves and our relationship to the world in which we live. The more attachments that you have to people and places, the more you are part of this world and the harder it is to leave it. Freedom comes with letting go. That’s the traveller’s way, not the way of the earthbound peasant. The peasant’s world is the earth, it’s on his skin, on his hands – it’s his daily universe. To be free to travel you must have no ties: otherwise you go only to visit and you return again to your starting place. You must loose your ties not just to people and places, but to the world itself. But to untie yourself you must first find the ties, and that’s easier to say than do.
That’s what I’ve been trying to do. Isolate a tie and then try to undo it. Singly, one at a time. That’s what makes me so angry about my roof. Somebody created an unnecessary tie that I inherited, and which binds me to a pile of rotting straw. First get rid of the obviously unnecessary ties, then work on the others. I don’t take that to mean people. I’m not a hermit; I have no desire to be physically isolated. I have no wish to deny my body and live only in the mind. All I want to do is to have nothing that I care about so much that I can’t leave. I want to keep my body happy, I’m not keen on mortification of the flesh; I might be taking my body with me. I’m not completely certain how the doors between various realities open and close. I still don’t know what you can take through them other than consciousness.
The trouble with all this is that there are no reference points, you can’t check your progress with anyone else. There are no physical markers that two minds can agree on. I’ve read what Huxley and Castaneda have said about alternative realities and some of it fits with what I’ve found and some doesn’t. Just like a fifteenth-century mariner you find that no two maps show the same features. That the major land masses exist is not in dispute, just their exact location and properties. Each psychic traveller remembers different bits, sees different things, and describes it uniquely. Like early explorers, travellers to these worlds are few and their tales contradictory. I find myself asking, Did they really go there? Why is their description so different from mine? Maybe these worlds change and bend under the view of each traveller, showing only what that particular mind can digest. But then wise men and philosophers rarely agree on the nature of the reality that we all experience every day. If you can’t get agreement on what is common to all then it’s not surprising that a few find their experiences incompatible from time to time.
It changes you, mind travel. After talking to someone for more than a couple of minutes I can tell if they have or haven’t travelled. There’s a look in the eye; a feel. Travellers can recognize each other even without saying too much, so much is unspoken. It’s a secret society; it’s feared by many and persecuted by the law. I don’t consider myself a pariah; exploring the largely unknown is a warrior’s task, it needs fortitude and determination. If I can bring back information from where I go, then more knowledge is the result. Someone should map the dreams.
Whoever the mushroom.man was, he was shy of society. This infant correspondence with me may well have been the first interaction with someone else he’d had for a long time. That might account for his trepidation in starting it. That and his fear of attachments. It felt strange; I had the sensation rightly or wrongly that I was learning something intimate about another person, yet I had no idea who that person was, didn’t know his name or what he looked like – all the things you would normally take for granted when getting to know someone. I began to realize that the net was a world with new rules, a place where only a piece of you could venture, a place where interaction with others demanded different protocols. At the turn of the century people had to learn telephone manners, a new etiquette to deal with this new means of communication. Talking to someone who wasn’t present was a new concept. Dealing with people electronically has its own novel possibilities. I was sure that netiquette would develop in the same way.
Looking back on it now I suppose I pressed myself on the mushroom.man because I wanted some kind of human contact, and even this remote, asynchronous communication was better than none. Like someone looking at a scene of gore, I found myself partly repelled by what I’d read and partly fascinated. But this was the joy of the net – I was able to communicate only the reactions that I wanted to and keep the rest to myself. It solved another problem for me: on the net my natural reserve and shyness with other people wasn’t a consideration. The normal rules of intercourse didn’t apply in this new world of electronic reality.
Armillaria mellea. Honey Fungus or Boot-lace Fungus.
Small to medium size. 2–4 inches high. Grows in clusters.
White to yellow. Strong mealy smell.
On rotting wood. Summer to late autumn. Common.
Edible when cooked: good when mixed with better mushrooms.
three
I spent my free time increasingly on the net, not researching and learning, but sending e-mail to the new contacts in my life. It was like joining a club – some of the older members were accommodating and encouraging, others aloof and remote, answering my queries with form replies. I was beginning to feel at home with netiquette. The net became like a window into another universe, where from the security of my armchair I could look and interact with its denizens. A friend told me that it was like having a ham radio: you end up talking to people for no other reason than that they have a radio.
The truth is that my own life was in something of a limbo. I had just moved to the University of Iowa, where I was doing post-graduate research in behavioural psychology. Iowa was a very different world from the rural England that I had grown up in; its manners and customs still held fascination and a little awe for me. I had no close friends, no one with whom I could share confidences. I was a stranger in a strange land.
What made the i-way so attractive was that here was a world of people you could contact without having to dress up, without any social embarrassment. Here my strange manners and accent caused no comment. I could find forums where researchers like myself shared data and opinions, and I could find a kind of social interaction.
I suppose I was simply lonely.
Part of my days involved teaching first-year students and giving tutorials, the rest in working on my own thesis. I had planned to examine drug dependency, treatment and recidivism, ranging from the physically addictive drugs like heroin to those whose long-term effects were less well understood, like ecstasy and the psychedelics.
I kept up contact with the mushroom.man, doing with e-mail what I knew I often did in the real world: using flattery as a tool to elicit more information. I told him that he wrote beautifully, that his ideas were inspiring. I encouraged him to send me anything he had written. The thought began to form in my mind that the mushroom.man could make an excellent subject for study. It occurred to me that there was something a little ignoble about using him as a case-study, but there seemed little harm in it. I kept asking for some more personal history and eventually he agreed to send me something. After three days it arrived.
College is where I discovered dope and acid. There was plenty of time to experiment and like-minded people to experiment with. Greg Holder was my soul-mate. He was studying computer science with me and was a mathematical prodigy. He didn’t fit the stereotype; he was tall and broad with looks that women seemed to like. He had long, thick blonde hair which he wore swept back, making his broad, high forehead his most obvious feature. He had an easy manner and a warm charm that made men enjoy his company as much as women did. A classic Nordic type with blue eyes, but with a sunniness of disposition more readily associated with the Mediterranean. He had a consistency of mood which made his company comforting. He was predictable without being boring. In fact, his emotional balance was part of his attraction. He made life look effortless, in his studies and in his play. He had the uncanny ability to remain friends with his parade of ex-girlfriends; something I envied in him more than anything else. They all appeared to give him an unconditional love, even after he’d left them for another. We spent most of our days together, talking, smoking dope. He had a mind like no other I had met, endlessly questing and endlessly questioning.
In our first year he wanted to build a water-powered computer as a project. The idea excited him. It would be huge, slow, cumbersome and messy; but it could be done. All the primary logic gates would be built out of easily available plastic plumbing fittings. Not, and, or, nand, nor; all these logic gates could be made to operate on water rather than electricity. The point? Only that it could be done. It would need hundreds of thousands of gates, millions of gallons of water, millions of one-way valves. It would be a giant engineering folly, a monument to his crazy ideas. His enthusiasm was infectious; after all these years I still have a hankering to build it as a tribute to him.
We were close, like brothers. When we weren’t finding out all we could about sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll we were immersed in the electronic reality of computers, trying to make a chip think. Neither of us had much time for the others in our year. They were dull, with no ambitions or horizons beyond the course and the prospect of a job with IBM. They were well suited to the donkey-work of programming. Never innovative, never trying new ways of coding, they simply ingested the textbooks and regurgitated them in an unimaginative spew of numbers. They were people you could sink a beer with, but only Greg stimulated my mind.
Artificial intelligence was our Grail; write a piece of code that could modify and replicate itself, learn from its mistakes. The idea was as absorbing to me as any philosopher’s stone. It represented a whole new evolution of machine, something more powerful, with more far-reaching ramifications, than the invention of the wheel. It would revolutionize our world, change our relationship to machines and the environment. We were standing at the gateway of a new and unexplored universe, virgin territory waiting for us to go in there and tame it. We were Viking warriors setting out to explore and conquer. Without this vision the drudgery of number-crunching would have smothered me. I could do it only because I believed that there was a use for this tool beyond the mundane, beyond the pedestrian accounting packages that filled so much of our time.
If it is our intelligence that lets us create and relate to our reality, then what would be the reality of a thinking machine? How would it perceive its world? Greg believed that that would be outside of our programming. Once self-awareness had been generated, then what the intelligence was aware of would be beyond our manipulation. It would be the recreation of Frankenstein’s monster, another myth made real.
How can you define intelligence? We know it when we see it, but it’s hard to pin it down to a definition. If we meet an intelligent response to an action then we assume intelligence is the agent. Greg wrote a simple program once that made conversation on screen with a human at a keyboard. He asked volunteers to assess whether they were interacting with a program or another unseen person connected to the screen by another computer. Most of them were sure that the seemingly intelligent responses were human. I suppose they were, in a way, since the program was the result of human intelligence. Yet an unthinking chip gave all the appearance of intelligence. Easy to confuse appearance with substance.
We tried to introduce these ideas into class, but the lecturers were prepared to tolerate only a brief discussion. They wouldn’t let esoteric ideas interfere with the business of making machines fit for the business world. It was no accident that the world’s largest manufacturer of computers called them Business Machines. Yet we knew there were places in the world where ideas like ours were taken seriously and funded well. Places where people talked of little else. Greg and I were developing our ideas in an intellectual vacuum. Occasionally there were snippets from the outside. I remember finding an article called ‘The Chinese Room’. Suppose, it suggested, you have a closed room with only a door and a postbox. You post a Chinese ideogram through the door and an English translation comes back out. Is this intelligence at work? It looks like it. If I then tell you that inside the room there is a man with a look-up table, who takes the ideogram, finds its English equivalent and posts it back out, then you have to re-assess. He knows no Chinese at all, he does not even have to understand what he is doing, he is only following a simple rule. If we replace the man with a computer program then it is easy to see that it is the look-up table itself that is the product of intelligence. Observing the room from outside leads us to assume intelligent interaction, and yet it is entirely mechanical. Real artificial intelligence has to have more than the appearance of intelligence, it must be able not only to follow complex rules, but to generate new ones for itself. It has to be capable of interacting with its environment, even modifying it.
We spent hours arguing whether artificial intelligence could eventually lead to artificial consciousness. That was a step as large as the evolutionary one between a fish and a man. It also seemed to me to be a distinction that was often overlooked: intelligence and consciousness may be linked, but they’re not the same. Greg believed that once an intelligent program could be devised, then it could modify itself generation after generation and might eventually become self-aware. I felt then, and still do, that without some kind of catalyst it couldn’t happen.
I was sure that incorporating a database of known information into a program had to be the starting-point. After all, that is precisely how we school our young. Our work had to be making a system not only use the database according to intelligent rules laid down in the program, but to create a system capable of finding new relationships within the database not envisaged by the programmer. Simple beginnings, but these were the ideas that led us to where we are now. It was becoming clear to me that mathematics had a very real use beyond the theoretical. Using it to infuse thought into silicon seemed almost god-like. Take a planet and give it the code it needs to generate life from its own raw materials. I liked the analogy.
By today’s standards the chips we had to play with were ludicrously small. I wrote a program once to play a simple game in 70 bytes; 72 bytes of memory was the limit for that little toy. In college we had mainframes, but we weren’t allowed to play on them, and a
nyway, our time allocations weren’t enough to allow for endless experimentation. We played with the first generation of programmable calculators, and then the first of the home computers. Back then 4 kilobytes of memory was considered massive. It was extraordinary how much could be made to fit if your coding was tight and compact. You couldn’t be lazy then; if your code wasn’t tight it simply wouldn’t fit. You worked and reworked the code, tightening and shortening it until it fitted. But that was where you stopped. Once it fitted there was no need to tighten it further, so you didn’t.
In the summer of that first year in college Greg showed me a package his cousin in California had sent him. Eight little buttons of peyote. He had a plan for them. He had organized a loan of a van from his brother who worked as a carpet-fitter. He thought we could go into the mountains and try them, away from the city, at the weekend. He was concerned that it might produce effects that we wouldn’t be able to handle, so he wanted to bring his current girlfriend along to keep an eye on us. I didn’t know her well, but I liked her. Her name was Jane.
Greg called around to my flat the following Saturday in a blue VW van. I got into the back and made myself comfortable on a roll of carpet. Greg handed me the buttons of peyote and I set to work removing the tiny, silken hairs from the underside of each of them. We had been told that the hairs contained strychnine, and were best not ingested. I finished plucking them off and asked Greg when we should eat the buttons. ‘Now’, he said, stopping at the side of the road, and we ate them, washing them down with orange juice while Jane looked on. Her hair was in plaits that she had wound into a bun at the back of her head. It showed off her long, slim neck. Briefly it occurred to me that she looked like Heidi. As Greg drove on I waited for effects, but nothing seemed to happen.