At the centre of both my new novel Receptor, and its predecessor, Limitless, is a fictional drug called MDT (re-branded for the movie as NZT). Commonly referred to as a “smart drug”, MDT has deliberate echoes of DMT and MDMA, and is clearly a wish-fulfillment delivery system for some of our most basic human aspirations. In the two novels’ original titles, The Dark Fields and Under the Night (taken from the last page of The Great Gatsby), I linked the drug to the theme of perfectability and the aspiration to transform or re-invent the self. In Limitless, this was at the level of the individual. It focused on performance enhancement and was something of a cautionary tale – because here was a short-cut to a smarter, faster, more charismatic you, but it came at a hefty price. Taking the drug also required hubris, the kind that finds its storytelling antecedents as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
In Receptor, however, I think I have put forward a different notion. It’s that this striving for transformation can be found at the level of our species, that it need not necessarily be hubristic, and that it may, in fact, be a matter of survival. But how to achieve – or even think about achieving – this transformation? During the course of the novel, I pitch MDT, a plant-based, psychoactive substance, against AI, a ones-and-zeroes-based system of computation, and it’s no surprise to reveal that the dial tilts heavily towards MDT.
Over the coming decades, the benefits to humanity of artificial intelligence will no doubt prove to be enormous, and its potential dangers may or may not prove to be real, but one thing is clear, and you can find it in the name: it’s artificial. This means that it doesn’t have what we have: consciousness. There is an idea abroad, both in science and in science fiction, that AIs will one day attain consciousness, or that, at the very least, we will fuse with the AIs and bequeath it to them. But given how little we actually understand about consciousness itself and how it works – the so-called hard problem – isn’t this really little more than a fantasy? AI may well eat our lunch in a thousand different ways, and may even eradicate us as a species altogether, but as it watches over us in the meantime it certainly won’t be doing so with anything close to what we humans would recognise as loving grace. And any attempt to smooth out the uncanny valley is on us – not on the machines, not on Dolores, or on Ava, or on Robby, or on HAL. It’s just not an issue that robots are concerned with. If you then take anthropomorphism out of the equation, as you’ll eventually have to do, with the Internet of Things, the uncanny valley won’t be an issue at all. Machines themselves won’t even be an issue. It’ll all be about the data and the algorithms. And when the inevitable transformations do take place, we as a species will have little or no say in the matter.
With MDT, on the other hand, we have a possible route forward to a form of superintelligence that is not artificial but human, that is not unmoored from consciousness but arises directly from it. By generating heightened cognition, boundless energy, and flow state on demand, what MDT delivers is a perfectly balanced, neurosis-free fusion of reason and intuition. Of course, in the real world MDT does not exist – so until such time as it does, substitute psychedelics in general for it, substitute the wide range of plant-based substances that every society in history has, at one time or another, used to explore, expand, or enhance consciousness.
But this is by no means an easy sell. Artificial intelligence will drive our cars for us, choose our mates, and recalibrate our genetics, whereas the benefits of LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT, or MDMA, are less tangible, and less practical. Also, the prospect of engaging with them is fraught with anxiety, not least because they’re illegal. But if humanity is to survive the coming blizzard of technological change, and if we are to break free of the limiting paradigms that got us into this mess in the first place, engagement at some level with these substances seems worth exploring.
Recently, in fact, there has been a great deal of optimism among clinical researchers about the therapeutic potential of psychedelics. Experiments have been conducted at John Hopkins, UCLA and New York University, as well as at Imperial College London. These experiments have shown promising results in the areas of addiction, depression, PTSD, and end-of-life care. In the 1950s promising research into psychedelics was also carried out and many psychoanalysts came to the conclusion that LSD could provide a cure for alcoholism in particular. But the drug’s applicability proved difficult to corral and by 1959 the actor Cary Grant was extolling the benefits of LSD therapy saying that the experience – conducted in a strictly clinical setting – had stripped his ego away and that he was “born again”. Nevertheless, and despite the more nefarious uses to which the CIA was putting the drug in their mind-control program, Project MK-Ultra, this was a legitimate and well-funded area of research in mainstream psychiatry.
But then with the opening of what Allen Ginsberg called an “inadvertant Pandora’s box” – i.e., the LSD-fuelled flowering of the so-called counterculture of the early to mid-1960s – a sort of moral panic took hold. Blame was then assigned and this promising line of research was summarily discontinued, with most of the findings being supressed or destroyed.
Many things have changed since the 1960s, not the least of which are public attitudes to drugs and mental health. There have also been astonishing developments in neuroscience and in our understanding of the brain. But will this second wave of psychedelic research fare any better than the first? Despite the promising results, and the many moving accounts of test subjects who claim to have had life-changing experiences (for more on this see Michael Pollan’s excellent new book, How To Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics) there does seem to be something of a kandy-kolored elephant in the room. This was perhaps best described by the writer and mystic Terence McKenna when he said that “psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third story window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.”
Yikes.
It might be instructive here to remember how two of the pioneers of that early phase of psychedelic research were to end up. Respected Harvard University professors Dr Timothy Leary and Dr Richard Alpert co-founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960, but such was the uncontainability of the endeavour that within a decade Leary would find himself dubbed “the most dangerous man in America” and Alpert would be on his way to becoming a beloved spiritual guru named Ram Dass. Because it turns out that no matter how professional and well-intentioned the average therapist using these substances may have been back then, and may be today, it’s really hard to keep a lid on the stuff – really hard to avoid thinking (and ultimately declaring to the world) that not only are LSD and psilocybin therapeutically effective, they might also have a key role to play in – oh, I don’t know – the evolution of the human species.
So if today’s researchers are to have any chance of establishing (or re-establishing) “legitimacy”, it’s clear that they have to keep that lid firmly on. Essential to this is the clinical environment, and specifically the protocols of “set and setting”. Protocols such as these have existed in one form or another, as rite and ritual, for thousands of years, but what is currently on offer – as described in Pollan’s book, and elsewhere – leaves a lot to be desired. Because if there’s a check-list for the modern psychedelic therapy session, there seem to be only three items on it. The first is a guide, which of course makes sense (though the potential variations are infinite). The second item is eyeshades, and the third is New Age music.
In what is apparently now standard practice, the subject will stretch out on a couch, don eyeshades and earphones, and head off on an introspective and soundtracked exploration of inner space. Afterwards, the experience will be recalled and analysed with the aid of a therapist. This is fine as far as it goes, and it actually does seem to go quite far in terms of producing positive results, but for those who have any experience of psychedelics in what we might call the real world, these protocols will seem alarmingly restrictive. Having music you may not like imposed on you could easily become a nightmare, and being cut off from any external visual field seems counterintuitive, to say the least. Surely a psychedelic experience can only be enhanced by direct contact with the visible and the tangible, with light and colour, with texture, with objects – with the moon, say, or a speck of dust. Not that it matters which, because one thing you’ll come to understand pretty fast, whether in the clinical setting or in the wider world, is that everything is connected.
And this is the problem. Or, rather, the issue. Treating specific psychiatric conditions using psychedelics does seem to work, but it’s a bit like trying to light a cigarette with a flamethrower. Fine, if the cigarette lights – it’s just that the flamethrower has other, broader applications, and while it might be convenient to ignore these in the short term, sooner or later people will find out about them and want to know more. That’s the point at which the curtain could easily come down again on research, just as it did fifty years ago. But it’s unlikely to play out the same way this time. The passion and commitment evident among those working in the field will be hard to extinguish, and widely-read books by respected authors such as Michael Pollan will surely bolster the case for continued funding and research.
What is likely to happen, though, in some form, is Pandora’s Box 2.0. When LSD and psilocybin seeped out of the research labs of the late 50s and early 60s, the imapct they had on the wider culture was profound – and not just at the level of all our lives seeming to go rapidly from black-and-white to colour. Arguably, there’s a direct link between insights into pattern recognition gleaned during the counterculture years and much of the hyper-networked IT and AI world we live in today. (At the start of Limitless, Eddie Spinola was even writing a book about this called Turning On: From Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley.) But whatever happens – and I tell a version of this story in Receptor – there there will be resistence, and of many shades, institutional, corporate, political. Because society has always had a low tolerance for what Thomas Pynchon calls “unauthorized states of mind”. But aren’t they usually the kind that save us in the end?