Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stop
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I am
Speaker 1: Christian Sager, and we're going to be talking about a
Speaker 1: great combination of things today isolation, tanks, dolphins, and psychedelics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the creature from the Black Lagoon will actually show up,
Speaker 1: Cold War era anti espionage, weird science. It's it's quite
Speaker 1: a package. You couldn't make this up. Like if you
Speaker 1: wrote a fictional account of a guy like John C. Lily,
Speaker 1: it would seem absurd, but this is a life he led.
Speaker 1: Yeah indeed. I mean even the fictionalized accounts of the man,
Speaker 1: I feel that they don't quite capture the weirdness and
Speaker 1: strangeness and just mind expanding awesomeness of his actual story.
Speaker 1: They don't know. So, but before we roll right in,
Speaker 1: because I think we should really just dive into the
Speaker 1: deep been no pun intended with John C. Lily. Uh
Speaker 1: do we just want to remind our audience that, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we don't just do the podcast Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind as a multi media conglomerate, and uh,
Speaker 1: you can visit us at Stuff to Blow Your Mind.
Speaker 1: Dot com where you can find blog posts by us.
Speaker 1: The podcast is obviously there, of course, but for every
Speaker 1: podcast episode we add related content so in case you're
Speaker 1: curious about learning more, uh, there's places that you can go.
Speaker 1: And then we also do videos as well. That's right.
Speaker 1: And Hey, wherever you listen to it, be it iTunes
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Speaker 1: giving us a positive rating and a positive review of
Speaker 1: the platform. Allows that kind of interaction. Yeah, and the
Speaker 1: last thing I'll say is before we get into Lily,
Speaker 1: is don't forget to follow us on social media. If
Speaker 1: you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter, you're on Tumbler. We're
Speaker 1: on all those platforms as Blow the Mind. And we
Speaker 1: don't only post our own stuff, but we curate lots
Speaker 1: of weird science e bizarre audity type stuff that we
Speaker 1: find throughout the day as we're doing our research. That's right.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about Lily first. Why are we covering
Speaker 1: him Because Lily, for people who don't know, comes up frequently.
Speaker 1: I'd say in the last year of doing the show,
Speaker 1: he's come up at least four or five times. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in past episodes, I'm I know that we haven't
Speaker 1: had at least three episodes that have dealt with him,
Speaker 1: at least in small portions. Right, Yeah, you guys did
Speaker 1: a dolphin episode. You and Julie did a dolphin episode.
Speaker 1: And then there was the what was it, the like
Speaker 1: kind of crazy rock star life of Scientists. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we did when there was just kind of a sampler
Speaker 1: platter of different real life scientists that had sort of
Speaker 1: a weird side to them. But Lily is one of
Speaker 1: those individuals first of all, that, as we've been saying,
Speaker 1: deserves a deeper dive, He deserves a closer look because
Speaker 1: he was just he was into too many things. He
Speaker 1: really lived too many lives to just try and condense
Speaker 1: it to a quick little segment about his psychedelic dolphin research,
Speaker 1: which is what most people may think of when we've
Speaker 1: mentioned John's will. This is one of those moments too,
Speaker 1: where I feel like the podcast format is really at
Speaker 1: an advantage here because in our case, you know, like
Speaker 1: lots of the stuff that I've read about Lily, like
Speaker 1: you said, either focuses on one aspect of his work
Speaker 1: or another. Right, It's like it's either like the isolation
Speaker 1: tanks or it's just the dolphins. But I feel like
Speaker 1: we have the opportunity here to like gather a lot
Speaker 1: of different resources, come together and kind of try to
Speaker 1: piece it all together and figure out this like epic
Speaker 1: figure somehow, and especially the like like you said to
Speaker 1: like um. For those of you who don't know, there's
Speaker 1: been two feature films, at least two that we're made
Speaker 1: based on Lily as a character. The first was Day
Speaker 1: of the Dolphin with George C. Scott, and then the
Speaker 1: second one is Altered States, of Course, which is you know,
Speaker 1: we're huge fans of here, and it stars William Hurt,
Speaker 1: you know, of course as this Lily kind of figure
Speaker 1: who takes acid in isolation tanks and then finds himself
Speaker 1: the evolving basically right into various forms of proto humanity. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he's he's he's a figure that had the castle
Speaker 1: a large shadow across our popular culture. And I think
Speaker 1: that can also be a stumbling block because you think
Speaker 1: of you might think of that older uh John C.
Speaker 1: Lily kind of a post hippie nut job with with
Speaker 1: a coonskin cap, talking about expanded consciousness and perhaps being
Speaker 1: something of a pariah. Uh, two individuals who were working
Speaker 1: in legitimate scientific areas that he was once a part of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there were certainly people who did not embrace the direction
Speaker 1: that he went in towards the latter part of his career.
Speaker 1: But so this is what's interesting to me about him,
Speaker 1: especially like once we got into I knew the surface
Speaker 1: level stuff, but going back and looking at his early
Speaker 1: life and how he started off and how kind of
Speaker 1: standardized his scientific career was to begin with, it's really
Speaker 1: fascinating to see where he goes and the kind of
Speaker 1: journey that he takes everybody on. Yeah. Indeed, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a guy that was trained and met us
Speaker 1: and psycho analysis, biophysics, um. And he went from being
Speaker 1: published as a researcher in scientific journals to writing his
Speaker 1: own books about spirituality and the self. And one of
Speaker 1: the things that's really important about Lily, I think to
Speaker 1: just like our general culture today, it's it's hard to
Speaker 1: think of this because it's from from my entire life.
Speaker 1: It's been this way. But people didn't used to think
Speaker 1: of dolphins as being intelligent mammals. That we're cute and
Speaker 1: cuddly and that we should try to keep from being
Speaker 1: killed in the ocean. Right, Yeah, that's right. I mean,
Speaker 1: you go back far enough. There are various myths that
Speaker 1: involve humans turning into dolphins or vice versa. But generally speaking,
Speaker 1: before the nineteen fifties, dolphins were a pest of fishermen.
Speaker 1: They were something. They were a fatty creature you might
Speaker 1: render down for various products, but nobody was giving a
Speaker 1: lot of thought to what they were thinking, or indeed,
Speaker 1: what their consciousness might consist of. Yeah, and so almost
Speaker 1: every account that I read about Lily traces his research
Speaker 1: with dolphins to how we treat dolphins today, even to
Speaker 1: you know, good or bad however you think of it
Speaker 1: of like theme parks of like Sea World and things
Speaker 1: like that, but like, uh, the interaction that human beings
Speaker 1: have with dolphins or other male uh mammals in the water,
Speaker 1: like whales, uh, you know, in in that kind of
Speaker 1: a setting, you know. Um, he really changed the way
Speaker 1: that we considered them as I guess partners on Earth
Speaker 1: is how he would probably put it. Right. Yeah, It's
Speaker 1: hard to imagine where we'd be right now, uh, considering
Speaker 1: dolphin intelligence without Lily. I mean, I mean, I think
Speaker 1: we would definitely get to this point where we we
Speaker 1: recognize the intelligence of the dolphin, uh and and even
Speaker 1: engaging discussions about its potential personhood. But would we have
Speaker 1: gotten there as quickly? Would we have would we have
Speaker 1: gotten there with as much media attention? And it all
Speaker 1: really came down to him wanting to map human consciousness,
Speaker 1: you know, the dolphin work, the isolation tanks, taking NSTI,
Speaker 1: all of it really boiled to his medical background and
Speaker 1: just trying to figure out, like the physicality of human
Speaker 1: consciousness where it was. Yeah, he in in his um
Speaker 1: later on, certainly by by the nineteen seventies, who would
Speaker 1: often talk about the province of the mind, which we
Speaker 1: reference in the title to this episode. Yeah. So here's
Speaker 1: the Lily quote that comes from you know what we
Speaker 1: what we based the title in the episode from He says,
Speaker 1: in the province of the mind, what one believes to
Speaker 1: be true is true or becomes true with certain limits
Speaker 1: to be found experientially and experimentally. These limbs are further
Speaker 1: beliefs to be transcended in the mind. There are no limits.
Speaker 1: That was in nineteen seventy two, so this was this
Speaker 1: was a post dolphin work going into LSD work, I'm assuming, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think it this is a It's a great
Speaker 1: quote because it mentions this idea of the province of
Speaker 1: the mind, something that he all of his work throughout
Speaker 1: his life, as you mentioned, seems to be questing for.
Speaker 1: And then it also touches on this idea of subjective truth,
Speaker 1: which becomes an increasingly important part of his work and
Speaker 1: at times a definite flaw in his scientific work. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's especially important to consider too. I mean, like
Speaker 1: we say, his whole life here. I read an account
Speaker 1: that when he was sixteen years old, he was verst
Speaker 1: starting to think about this in journals and things like
Speaker 1: that that he was working on, like as a kid.
Speaker 1: This was something that concerned Lily up until his death.
Speaker 1: So let's, uh, let's let's back up a bit then
Speaker 1: and just deal with the Lily timeline. Let's talk about
Speaker 1: where he came from and uh and take listeners and
Speaker 1: ourselves on a journey through his life whereas much of
Speaker 1: it as we can actually digest in about an hour's time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I'll say this too before we get into it.
Speaker 1: I found that there were a lot of differing accounts too.
Speaker 1: I mean, he was alive at just the right moment
Speaker 1: in time where it was. It wasn't like we couldn't
Speaker 1: log his life as we do now with social media,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean. And there's like some different accounts. So,
Speaker 1: like I said, sixteen years old, he supposedly wrote this essay.
Speaker 1: He was born in nineteen fifteen in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and this is the specific question that was quoted
Speaker 1: as being the title of his essay, how can the
Speaker 1: mind render itself sufficiently objective to study itself? That's pretty
Speaker 1: heavy for a sixteen year old. I don't think I
Speaker 1: had thoughts like that until much later. Yeah, that's that's
Speaker 1: a that that's he was thinking big for for that agent.
Speaker 1: Really Yeah, unless that's some like revisionist history on his part.
Speaker 1: But uh, the other thing that I thought was really
Speaker 1: interesting is my impression from the readings is that Lily
Speaker 1: came from a very wealthy family I think, uh, and
Speaker 1: his father, it sounds like, wanted him to become a banker,
Speaker 1: but Lily wanted to be a scientist, and so eventually
Speaker 1: his father kind of came around and supported him going
Speaker 1: to school to study science, but also backed him financially
Speaker 1: in some of his research after school as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the that's the sense that I get from some
Speaker 1: of the resources who are looking at uh. And I
Speaker 1: do have to to mention that, as far as we know,
Speaker 1: they're not a good, like solid concise biography out there,
Speaker 1: not yet. Hopefully somebody's working on it. There are some
Speaker 1: very fine resources that we used for this episode. Will
Speaker 1: cite those as we go. Yeah, this is a book
Speaker 1: slash movie dying to be made. Yeah. Yeah, I think that,
Speaker 1: like in the same way that characters like Reich that
Speaker 1: we've talked about on the show before Shulgun just make
Speaker 1: for great like potential fictionalizations. Uh. And I think you know,
Speaker 1: I just learned this after we recorded the Reich episode.
Speaker 1: There's a feature film coming out about Reich. Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: When I was searching for artwork for it, photos from
Speaker 1: the premier came out. Alright, So lially goes on. He
Speaker 1: gets his physics degree from cal Tech in receives a
Speaker 1: doctorate in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania two and
Speaker 1: as a faculty member, he studies biophysics and psycho analysis
Speaker 1: at the University of Pennsylvania's primarily interested in the physical
Speaker 1: structures of the brain where that the conscious self might
Speaker 1: be found. So that's pretty interesting, uh in that like
Speaker 1: he got his he got his doctorate in medicine, right,
Speaker 1: and then he continues to do research or take classes
Speaker 1: as well as he's a faculty member. Like my understanding
Speaker 1: was the psychoanalysis stuff wasn't quite yet in the field
Speaker 1: when he was in school, but he's still dabbling and
Speaker 1: learning more and adding everything to his resume. Yeah. From
Speaker 1: an early point, we're seeing in a guy who has
Speaker 1: this goal in mind, this mystery that he wants to crack,
Speaker 1: and he's gonna throw everything he has at it. And
Speaker 1: he's gonna throw he's gonna utilize what whatever tools he
Speaker 1: can draw on, be they uh, disciplines, pharmaceuticals, technologies. We
Speaker 1: see this throughout his life. Yeah, and in some cases
Speaker 1: it's also like where he's going to get the support from. Right.
Speaker 1: I think all of us who have like large scale
Speaker 1: creative endeavors that we're trying to push and can't find
Speaker 1: necessarily the financial backing end up making compromises and uh,
Speaker 1: come World War two, Lillie ends up doing research. Uh.
Speaker 1: Mainly it sounds like on the zology of high altitude
Speaker 1: flying uh, specifically for the Air Force, and he was
Speaker 1: inventing different devices to measure gas gas pressure for those purposes. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is one of the first times apparently that
Speaker 1: he used himself as a guinea pig uh lily at
Speaker 1: which he would go on to do quite a bit
Speaker 1: later in his career. In fact, I think he had
Speaker 1: sort of a uh like an ethos surrounding that right
Speaker 1: that I can't remember who it was, but I read
Speaker 1: that he um. He he took this from another like
Speaker 1: kind of big thinker scientist who basically said, like, if
Speaker 1: you're not willing to experiment on yourself, then you shouldn't
Speaker 1: be willing to experiment on other human beings. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this seems to be the case here where he participated
Speaker 1: in an experiment where he was studying the effects of
Speaker 1: explosive decompression on pilots at high altitudes. Uh. And by
Speaker 1: all accounts that I read, this was something that could
Speaker 1: have killed him, but he went about and did it anyways.
Speaker 1: And this is in the thirties going into the forties,
Speaker 1: all right, so after the war or we're getting into
Speaker 1: the post War War two area, we're getting into the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties at a time uh increasingly defined by Cold
Speaker 1: War paranoia. UH. During this area that literally turns to neuroscience,
Speaker 1: which is a logical next step in this quest for consciousness. Right.
Speaker 1: And he's motivated in a large part by pioneering brain
Speaker 1: surgeon Wilder Penfield at this point. UH. And in short,
Speaker 1: what he ends up doing is he applies electronic engineering
Speaker 1: to the monitoring and mapping of the central nervous system,
Speaker 1: again drawing on the best technology available at the time
Speaker 1: to try and crack this nut of consciousness. And what
Speaker 1: I had read this is one of the first stances
Speaker 1: of his father, sorry, instances of his father funding him.
Speaker 1: His father helped him pay for the design of something
Speaker 1: he called the baba Tron, which was a device for
Speaker 1: recording the impulses from within a rabbit's brain and they
Speaker 1: would project these impulses up onto like a television screen
Speaker 1: as waves. UM. So the Babatron included an array of
Speaker 1: sensors that where this is something we're gonna come back
Speaker 1: to over and over again with Lily basically putting electrodes
Speaker 1: on the surface of the brain of different animals and
Speaker 1: or human beings. Uh. And in nineteen fifty one, he
Speaker 1: published a paper that showed how to display these patterns
Speaker 1: in such a way projecting brain electrical activity on a
Speaker 1: television like screen. Uh. And I recently spent some time
Speaker 1: in the hospital. I had a family member and I
Speaker 1: see you, and I thought, wow, like, think of the
Speaker 1: just the standard hospital machinery we have that are like
Speaker 1: measuring and showing us things like oxygen levels and and uh,
Speaker 1: breathing and and and brain activity. You know, Lily was
Speaker 1: one of the pioneers, and that you can thank him
Speaker 1: for that. This is a guy who who really did
Speaker 1: like impact our understanding of medicine and of thought. And
Speaker 1: you know, despite where he went down further in his career,
Speaker 1: he really did have like some contributions. Yeah, down or
Speaker 1: or out or out, Yeah, however you want to look
Speaker 1: at it. Absolutely. From here he moves on to the
Speaker 1: National Institutes of Mental Health or NIM. Uh. And this
Speaker 1: is an area where he begins to get into a
Speaker 1: lot of interesting and and at times kind of creepy work. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I read an interesting thing that said that one
Speaker 1: of the reasons why he specifically went for this research
Speaker 1: position with NIM was that it gave him access to
Speaker 1: both the National Institute of Neurological Diseases because that would
Speaker 1: give him access to resources about the physical brain. But
Speaker 1: it also gave him access to the National Institute of
Speaker 1: Mental Health, which focused on the mind, and he really
Speaker 1: wanted to combine the two. Uh. And he experimented on
Speaker 1: living brains with all these different techniques he developed. So
Speaker 1: you know, we've got the rabbits, we talked about that,
Speaker 1: but then he moved on to monkeys. His goal was
Speaker 1: to stimulate monkey brains without causing trauma or damage to
Speaker 1: their brain tissue. So he was one of the first
Speaker 1: scientists to locate uh, this is a monkey brain, not
Speaker 1: a human brain, obviously, but he located their pain and
Speaker 1: pleasure centers, and his work there allowed him to map
Speaker 1: their neural networks and to link sensory events, muscle movement,
Speaker 1: and other behaviors related to the activity in their brain.
Speaker 1: This is going to be important later on when we
Speaker 1: get into dolphins. Yeah, and this is my understanding. Some
Speaker 1: it's pretty invasive surgery at this point in experimentation, and
Speaker 1: he spends essentially a decade working on it. Here uh again,
Speaker 1: connecting invasive of vivisections of the cranium and this is
Speaker 1: where things get into some creepier territory. Um. Again, he's
Speaker 1: laser focused on his goal, but he is an employ
Speaker 1: of NIM. He's working in the in the time of
Speaker 1: of nineteen fifties cold war paranoia. It's US versus the Soviets.
Speaker 1: There's they're all these fears of of of mind control, brainwashing, uh,
Speaker 1: all sorts of strange counter espionage techniques. And according to D.
Speaker 1: Graham Burnett's excellent paper A Mind in Water, which is
Speaker 1: published in Ryan Magazine and it's available online, will include
Speaker 1: a link to it on the landing page, says Lily
Speaker 1: later claimed not to care for this sort of thing,
Speaker 1: but in his prime as a government employee, he had
Speaker 1: high level security clearance. J Edgar Hoover knew him by
Speaker 1: name and was actively involved in research into brainwashing or
Speaker 1: reprogramming as it was then called, among the cognizanty sleep
Speaker 1: deprivation and operant controlled of animals with wires implanted in
Speaker 1: the pain centers of their gray matter. Unquote. Wow, so
Speaker 1: this gets back to when we were talking about we
Speaker 1: three on the animal weaponry thing. So yeah, I can
Speaker 1: imagine with all the things we learned from that episode
Speaker 1: of like people stuffing bats into bombs and trying to
Speaker 1: figure out ways to use bees to attack people that
Speaker 1: of course they would be looking at ways to try
Speaker 1: to stimulate their brains as well, and there, yeah, the goal.
Speaker 1: He was not just animals but humans. In an unpublished
Speaker 1: paper of Lily's titled Special Considerations of Modified Human Agents
Speaker 1: as Reconnaissance and Intelligence Devices, I really don't have to
Speaker 1: go much further, and then I just title, But he
Speaker 1: talked about such things as the quote covert and relatively
Speaker 1: safe implantation of electrodes into the human brain for the
Speaker 1: push button control of the totality of motivation and of consciousness.
Speaker 1: I wonder how much Lily's sort of like beginning work
Speaker 1: set the stage for brain computer interface work, you know
Speaker 1: that's being studied today, because that's obviously like a big
Speaker 1: field of of inquiry right now. Yeah, I mean to
Speaker 1: to whatever extent his his ideas here were actually applicable
Speaker 1: given that the technology of the time, and he's certainly
Speaker 1: foreshadowing where the technology would go. He's certainly dreaming in
Speaker 1: the in the direction that we're that we're still headed.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that I was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out what we're doing the research was whether or
Speaker 1: not these were pain free methods. And I believe later
Speaker 1: in his career he definitely wanted to get to a point, right.
Speaker 1: Like I mentioned earlier that you know, his goal was
Speaker 1: not to cause trauma and the monkeys and not to
Speaker 1: damage their brain tissue. But I imagine it wasn't comfortable
Speaker 1: having these electrodes stuck in their brains, right, Yeah. And
Speaker 1: my understanding it also depended on what he was working on. So, um,
Speaker 1: you could use anesthetics on certain animals, but as we'll discuss,
Speaker 1: there are other animals that that simply stop breathing if
Speaker 1: you put them under an anesthetic, right, Yeah, And there's
Speaker 1: always there's a very interesting like, despite his profound respect
Speaker 1: for dolphins later on, there's some weird stuff that goes
Speaker 1: on with the dolphin research as well too, in terms
Speaker 1: of like kind of treating them humanely. Yeah, and uh,
Speaker 1: and and certainly at this point in his career he
Speaker 1: has he's a very unsentimental guy. He's laser focused on
Speaker 1: this consciousness to enigma. Uh, but he's not necessarily he's
Speaker 1: not he's certainly not the sort of hippie mythic figure
Speaker 1: counterculture figure we see later on quite the opposite. This
Speaker 1: is a guy who's on first name basis with Jaguar Hoover.
Speaker 1: He's very much a part of the establishment and kind
Speaker 1: of a scary part of the establishment. Yeah, and he
Speaker 1: is going to do what needs to be done to
Speaker 1: get the results right. So it's during this creepy period
Speaker 1: that literally first learns from an oceanographer colleague that the
Speaker 1: largest brains are found in small tooth whales. Intrigued, he
Speaker 1: sets out to implant electrodes in the brains of captive
Speaker 1: dolphins at Florida's Marine Studios. Now this place still exists
Speaker 1: today under the name Marine Land of Florida. Some of
Speaker 1: our listeners have been there and can speak to it.
Speaker 1: But at the time they specialized in B movies. Really
Speaker 1: of particular note, they shot the Creature from the Black
Speaker 1: Lagoon here and Revenge of the Creature from NT WOW.
Speaker 1: So John C. Lily was like peripherally involved with like
Speaker 1: Universal Horror, specifically the Creature from the Black Lagoon. I
Speaker 1: would I think you might have mentioned this before the podcast.
Speaker 1: How cool would it be for them to be like
Speaker 1: a Creature of the Black Lagoon remake that like mixes
Speaker 1: in some of the John C. Lily ideas of you know,
Speaker 1: both dolphin human communication, but also isolation tanks and hallucinogenics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and in fact, we'll get back to the
Speaker 1: creature from the Black Lagoon in a minute, because the
Speaker 1: connection between Lily and the creature he is even closer
Speaker 1: than you might be thinking right now. Okay, cool, cool, Okay,
Speaker 1: So he he engages in this work, right he's uh,
Speaker 1: he's he's putting the electrodes on the dolphins brains. One
Speaker 1: of the problems here, as I mentioned, is that dolphins
Speaker 1: stop breathing when they're under anesthetic, and this has to
Speaker 1: do with the conscious nature of dolphin respirations that it's
Speaker 1: it's not as as much of a you know, a
Speaker 1: subconscious activity is as it is for us surface dwellers.
Speaker 1: Uh So, it's it's pretty rough work. Dolphins are dying
Speaker 1: during the experiments, but one of them, before it passes,
Speaker 1: makes a series of sounds, and Lily has this really
Speaker 1: this epiphany. He he feels he's listening to the sound
Speaker 1: that this dolphin is making. It sounds as if they're
Speaker 1: attempting to mimic his voice. They're attempting to mimic the
Speaker 1: voice of the other researchers in the room, and and
Speaker 1: and it's just this, this Eureka moment for him. He's
Speaker 1: been searching for for consciousness, searching for for some sort
Speaker 1: of you know, ultimately connection to another mind, and he
Speaker 1: feels as if he has glimpsed it. So this is
Speaker 1: sort of a good segue, I guess then from his
Speaker 1: dolphin or actually this isn't even the really scratching the
Speaker 1: surface of his dolphin research, right, is where he first
Speaker 1: sort of dabbles in it. Yeah, this is where, yeah,
Speaker 1: he dabbles in it. And and the light bulb goes
Speaker 1: off and he realizes, I have to work with these dolphins.
Speaker 1: Everything else I'm gonna I'm just gonna walk away from
Speaker 1: because this, this is where I need to be. And then,
Speaker 1: in order to facilitate this type of study, he develops
Speaker 1: he invents the isolation tank, which most of us know nowadays,
Speaker 1: right because it's a fairly popularized thing. I was first
Speaker 1: familiar with it from Altered States. That was the first
Speaker 1: time I'd ever heard of it. I think I probably
Speaker 1: saw Altered States when I was like nineteen or twenty
Speaker 1: or something like that. But just last year, maybe two
Speaker 1: years ago. My wife for my birthday got me um
Speaker 1: a gift card to go visit an isolation tank center
Speaker 1: here in Atlanta. Yeah. I think we've likely been to
Speaker 1: the same place. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you've done it as well, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: For those of you who are not familiar with it,
Speaker 1: uh yeah, you can probably find a float a place
Speaker 1: in your your area and you try it out for yourself.
Speaker 1: But essentially it is a chamber, a dark chamber filled
Speaker 1: with very buoyant salt water. You go in there, you
Speaker 1: you know, maybe you put on some goggles, maybe you're
Speaker 1: wearing a bathing suit, maybe not, and you're just floating
Speaker 1: there in the silence. Uh. You all your hearing is
Speaker 1: just the sound of the water, the sound of your
Speaker 1: your own heartbeat. Uh. And because you're floating, you don't
Speaker 1: really sense any touch, right. It's which is unusual for us.
Speaker 1: We're always like kind of bound to something by gravity,
Speaker 1: but this allows you to kind of just float there. Um.
Speaker 1: The darkness takes away your eyesight for the most part.
Speaker 1: The one I was in kind of I don't know
Speaker 1: about you, but it had like a little bit of
Speaker 1: a transparency to it, so natural daylight kind of came in. Um.
Speaker 1: And then there was what was the other Oh, they
Speaker 1: gave me earplugs? Did you get ear plugs? I may
Speaker 1: have gotten ear plugs, I can't remember now. I do
Speaker 1: remember seeing lights eventually, because I think I was in darkness.
Speaker 1: And I also have to say that the warmness of
Speaker 1: the water is tends to be calibrated so that it's
Speaker 1: about human body temperature, right, yeah, so that it's in
Speaker 1: a way the barriers of your body are no longer
Speaker 1: as obvious. So it's about isolating the mind. And and
Speaker 1: apparently like the idea for this came out of Lily's
Speaker 1: work at NIM Again, think back to the counter espionage work.
Speaker 1: How do you break down a potential spy? How do
Speaker 1: you get break into their mind and interact with their consciousness? Well,
Speaker 1: what if you were to put a scary latex mask
Speaker 1: over their face so they can't see anything, submerge them
Speaker 1: in this buoyant tank of salt water, and just rob
Speaker 1: them of their senses without actually harming them. So really
Speaker 1: it was a form of psychological torture that was being devised,
Speaker 1: and it was apparently pretty traumatic for some of the
Speaker 1: individuals who tested it out, but of course really tested
Speaker 1: it out as well, he solved the positive potential for
Speaker 1: the kind of inward focus that it allowed. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean the basic idea here was he wanted to test
Speaker 1: whether the brain would actually shut down if there was
Speaker 1: no stimuli received. Right. But yeah, it's really interesting. Again,
Speaker 1: so like the figure that he becomes, this kind of
Speaker 1: hippie psychedelic grew figure. You trace back his history and
Speaker 1: it's like ultimately connected to this kind of movement of
Speaker 1: torture and interrogation, right, I mean, like people, I don't
Speaker 1: know that they're necessarily using isolation tanks, but sensory deprivation
Speaker 1: is very much a thing that we do nowadays, we
Speaker 1: the United States military and government when we're trying to
Speaker 1: get information out of, you know, somebody that that might
Speaker 1: have something that's gonna you know, potentially affect a citizen
Speaker 1: or or an operation overseas. Oh yeah, or even just
Speaker 1: dishing out essentially punishment on individu rules that are in
Speaker 1: soliditary confinement. Yeah. And it's this is fascinating to me too, because, um,
Speaker 1: this is right around it's a little bit earlier, but
Speaker 1: around the same time that Michelle Fucot is really starting
Speaker 1: to look into sort of the philosophy of discipline and punishment.
Speaker 1: And I'm really curious if these two guys knew about
Speaker 1: each other, uh, and if they even or if they
Speaker 1: interacted to you know. Yeah, indeed, so Lily. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: really gets into the idea of the isolation tank. And
Speaker 1: this is this is kind of happening in the background
Speaker 1: to the dolphin stuff. We we just mentioned the beginnings
Speaker 1: of the dolphin stuff. Um, I'm gonna actually just read
Speaker 1: uh one quote from him and have you read another one,
Speaker 1: because I think Lily really captures what he saw in
Speaker 1: the tank, uh, what he saw in the tank's potential
Speaker 1: for the human mind. He said, all the average person
Speaker 1: has to do is get into the tank in the
Speaker 1: darkness and silence and float around until he realizes he
Speaker 1: is programming everything that is happening in side his head.
Speaker 1: You are free of the physical world at that point,
Speaker 1: and anything can happen inside your head because everything is
Speaker 1: governed by the laws of thought rather than the laws
Speaker 1: of the external world. So you can go to the
Speaker 1: limits of your conceptions. And so this is a good
Speaker 1: moment I think for us to sort of back up
Speaker 1: for the listener. For you out there listening, if you've
Speaker 1: never done this, and you've never seen it depicted or
Speaker 1: read about it. Um. People oftentimes report that during their
Speaker 1: experience in these tanks, they see colorful images, they have
Speaker 1: memories flashed by, they kind of have like waking dreams. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there's even there's an some people report an experience
Speaker 1: of levels of consciousness where they feel they're in contact
Speaker 1: with other intelligent being sort of outside of them. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's essentially a really meditative space. So I
Speaker 1: only floated once. I did not get that kind of experience.
Speaker 1: I understand that one needs to do it many times
Speaker 1: to get used to it. But but I have had
Speaker 1: experiences in meditation where I have I have seen things
Speaker 1: and felt things that that line up to a certain
Speaker 1: extent with this kind of you know, subjective experience. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's possible too. So this is another instance
Speaker 1: that I UM where the like, the reporting seems to
Speaker 1: be a little bit varied for me. I read that
Speaker 1: it's possible that he actually started dabbling in this before
Speaker 1: any of the dolphin research. Maybe it was more official
Speaker 1: later on. Yeah, No, I believe you're right on that. Okay,
Speaker 1: because he apparently considered dolphins and other water mammals because
Speaker 1: of the idea of consciousness that existed in the state
Speaker 1: of flotation. Uh, and it somehow brought that up. But
Speaker 1: so here's another thing. We were talking about, how you
Speaker 1: bring the temperature to about the same as the body,
Speaker 1: the body's temperature. Apparently, at one point, while Lily was
Speaker 1: experimenting on himself, he's trying to bring the temperature to
Speaker 1: the right thing, and he fell into a coma. That
Speaker 1: was another thing that I read. And I mean, it
Speaker 1: must not have been that long or serious, but I
Speaker 1: don't but don't quite know how that would happen, even
Speaker 1: especially given my experience in an isolation tank. But this
Speaker 1: was in one of the papers I read. He also speculated,
Speaker 1: now this is the beginning of the John C. Lily
Speaker 1: everybody came to know and love that in a tank,
Speaker 1: a person, meaning a man, could orgasm without ejaculating. So
Speaker 1: another thing that comes out of this, outside of his
Speaker 1: speculations on orgasms and ejaculation, is uh, that he also
Speaker 1: figured out that even in the tank, that the pure
Speaker 1: mental state that he was looking to achieve wasn't necessarily
Speaker 1: possible because it even eliminating all sensory stimulation, just that
Speaker 1: kind of isolation in the tank. Wasn't achieving that? Um,
Speaker 1: this is probably a good opportunity for me to read
Speaker 1: that second quote you mentioned. So this is from Lily
Speaker 1: wrote lots of books on his own outside of his
Speaker 1: work with the government, and that weren't published really by
Speaker 1: I wouldn't call them peer reviewed in any sense, right,
Speaker 1: And this is one of them. I believe it's called
Speaker 1: I love this title Tanks for the Memories flotation tank talks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is from this is definitely later after Yeah,
Speaker 1: So okay. He says at the highest level of satory
Speaker 1: from which people return, the point of consciousness becomes a
Speaker 1: surface or solid which extends throughout the whole known universe.
Speaker 1: This used to be called fusion with the universal mind
Speaker 1: or God. In more modern terms, you have done a
Speaker 1: mathematical transformation in which your center of consciousness has ceased
Speaker 1: to be a traveling point and has become a surface
Speaker 1: or solid of consciousness. It was in this state that
Speaker 1: I experienced myself as melded and intertwined with hundreds of
Speaker 1: billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness
Speaker 1: that was distributed around the galaxy a membrane. Now this
Speaker 1: definitely touches on some of his wackier theories that we're
Speaker 1: going to get into later. Yeah, it touches on some more, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the mystical ideas that he explores in his work. I
Speaker 1: do have to say, though, with ultimately what he's talking
Speaker 1: about here, and ultimately with with the experience of love
Speaker 1: of meditation, but also with the flow tank, a lot
Speaker 1: of what's happening is the shutdown of what's called the
Speaker 1: default mode network. Actually we understand it more now is
Speaker 1: a series of of of interconnected resting state networks involved
Speaker 1: in vision, hearing, movement, attention, and memory. But you can
Speaker 1: think of it as just that that knee voice what
Speaker 1: Ecartole calls the egoic mind, this sort of knee centered
Speaker 1: narrative that's always running in the background of our head,
Speaker 1: whether we are conscious of it or not, you know,
Speaker 1: worrying about the past, worrying about the future. And if
Speaker 1: you can shut that off, then you're in this point
Speaker 1: of clarity and now illness, and you can actually explore
Speaker 1: thoughts about yourself and the world around you in ways
Speaker 1: that you're often crippled from. Yeah, I mean, this is
Speaker 1: certainly like what I try to get out of you
Speaker 1: know with yoga and meditation in some situations, but but
Speaker 1: also I gotta say, after doing the isolation tank thing,
Speaker 1: I want one of those in my home. And maybe
Speaker 1: maybe if you did it too much, it would it
Speaker 1: would sort of defeat the purpose for achieving that sort
Speaker 1: of lack of self right of thinking about everything else
Speaker 1: around you. I don't know, I've never heard anyone say
Speaker 1: they do it too much. There, They're always people are
Speaker 1: really into it. Or if I could just like after
Speaker 1: every day coming home, just hop into one of those
Speaker 1: for thirty minutes, that would be great. I read an
Speaker 1: account about there was a woman in the nineteen eighties
Speaker 1: who was apparently like a I don't know that I
Speaker 1: would call her a student of Lilies, but she was
Speaker 1: somebody who followed his work closely. She was one of
Speaker 1: the first people to open like a business around isolation tanks,
Speaker 1: and she had one in her home on the twenty
Speaker 1: floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, and she I think at
Speaker 1: the time she charged people like twenty five dollars per hour.
Speaker 1: And one of her main clients was a television executive
Speaker 1: who would he said something along the lines of, how
Speaker 1: like after every light home back to Manhattan, after like
Speaker 1: you know, doing a bunch of television sales type stuff,
Speaker 1: he would before even going home, go to her place
Speaker 1: and hop into one of these isolation tanks. It's kind
Speaker 1: of fascinating that like a guy like that saw the
Speaker 1: value and just kind of slowing everything down. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it leaves a bit leads of busy life, so
Speaker 1: it would make sense. Alright, So let's at this point
Speaker 1: we're gonna return back to dolphins. I feel like we
Speaker 1: we've we've set everything up to to continue Lily's journey.
Speaker 1: We're going to around nineteen Uh. This is when Lily
Speaker 1: presents a paper before the American Psychiatric Association and he
Speaker 1: makes some rather dramatic claims about the intelligence and the
Speaker 1: linguistic abilities of the bottlenose dolphins specifically. Now that the
Speaker 1: evidence that he cites as a parent is arguably scant
Speaker 1: and and anecdotal, but it resonated pretty strongly, and it
Speaker 1: resonated with the right people. So soon you had prestigious
Speaker 1: federal research awards rolling in, and he uses the funds
Speaker 1: to build a dedicated dolphin laboratory on St. Thomas in
Speaker 1: the US Virgin Islands. The Communication Research Institute or c R. I. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And the most fascinating thing that you added to these
Speaker 1: notes is that at its height, this institute, under Lily's guidance,
Speaker 1: was receiving half a million dollars a year in grant money.
Speaker 1: It exploded crazy, especially when you consider what half a
Speaker 1: million dollars was worth back then. That's nuts, Uh, that
Speaker 1: that he was getting that much support. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: sounds like during this time he I guess he had
Speaker 1: a home in Miami. Sounded like he'd become fairly acclimated
Speaker 1: to Florida and liked it a lot there. But he
Speaker 1: had the lab in St. Thomas. Uh. And there was
Speaker 1: this really interesting nineteen sixty Time magazine piece that I
Speaker 1: was able to pull and it's this kind of fascinating
Speaker 1: like feature piece on on him, and they described him
Speaker 1: as a deep chested, sun tanned neurophysiologist. I like that. That.
Speaker 1: That must be where the idea for the George C.
Speaker 1: Scott character and the dolphin came from. But at the
Speaker 1: time that they came to visit him Time Magazine, that
Speaker 1: is uh, he was working on an elaborate system of
Speaker 1: jetties and pools at the center. The idea was that
Speaker 1: he was trying to learn about dolphins sonar for the Navy.
Speaker 1: They were paying for the expenses of this construction. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the idea was that they they felt that dolphins
Speaker 1: sonar was better than their own capabilities at the time,
Speaker 1: so they wanted to figure out a way to reverse
Speaker 1: engineer and mimic it. Yes, the Navy was definitely one
Speaker 1: of the interested party that was won over by his
Speaker 1: his arguments for dolphin intelligence and dolphin abilities. Well, I mean,
Speaker 1: he had some some convincing evidence. Like you said, it
Speaker 1: wasn't all like uh perfect, but when he he must
Speaker 1: have been a very charismatic guy, I'm imagining, because when
Speaker 1: he gives these presentations, people just fall head over heels
Speaker 1: for it. I mean, you hear it in his voice,
Speaker 1: and you will actually hear his voice at the end
Speaker 1: of this podcast. Like. One of the things that I
Speaker 1: think he convinced the Navy with was by dissecting dolphin brains. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, we we talked about this earlier. They're bigger
Speaker 1: than human brains obviously, but they also have as complicated
Speaker 1: a cerebral cortex. Uh. And so this is when he
Speaker 1: starts planting electrodes in the dolphin brains. Kind of along
Speaker 1: the same lines of what we were talking about with
Speaker 1: the monkeys earlier, trying to stimulate their pleasure centers, specifically
Speaker 1: with electricity. And this is the weirdest, Like this grossed
Speaker 1: me out. This quote from the Time magazine article. He said,
Speaker 1: when he first stimulated their pleasure centers with electrodes, the
Speaker 1: muscles around their blow hole smiled. That is the weirdest, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't know why. It just squeaks me out, Like
Speaker 1: the idea of a little smile forming around and the
Speaker 1: but the like dolphins got like its head peel, you know,
Speaker 1: it's scalp peeled back with all these electrodes wired into it.
Speaker 1: Whatever the case, the dolphins loved it. In fact, there
Speaker 1: was an apparatus that he used to sort of train
Speaker 1: them with it. They could give themselves the electrical jolt,
Speaker 1: and they did it so much that they became addicted
Speaker 1: to it. Uh. And this is this is so this
Speaker 1: is a different story from what I um you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 1: I In this nineteen piece, they say this is where
Speaker 1: he first encountered the dolphins mimicking human speech. He says
Speaker 1: that apparently, and maybe he's just you know, b sing
Speaker 1: them during an interview or something like that. But he
Speaker 1: says an apparatus broke down one day at the St.
Speaker 1: Thomas laboratory and he had left a tape recorder running
Speaker 1: and he heard a Donald Duck like voice on tape
Speaker 1: recorder later on that was imitating him saying the words
Speaker 1: three hundred and twenty three over and over again. And
Speaker 1: then he also said that the dolphins imitated the buzz
Speaker 1: of a transformer and the rattle of a movie camera
Speaker 1: that we're in, I'm assuming in the same laboratory space. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there's this feeling that he's getting here that not
Speaker 1: only is he reaching out to them to make communication,
Speaker 1: but they are reaching out to us, and he has
Speaker 1: to meet them in the middle. He has to find
Speaker 1: a way to make this connection. Uh. And towards that end,
Speaker 1: he starts like documenting what he thinks is dolphin language.
Speaker 1: And now, you know, I think that it's it's fairly
Speaker 1: well documented at this point that we know that there
Speaker 1: is such a thing. Uh. He learned one phrase in
Speaker 1: dolphin language that he reported back to Time in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty and it was what he called their May Day
Speaker 1: distress call, and he describes it as sounding like a
Speaker 1: wolf whistling, which I don't. I don't know that that's
Speaker 1: necessarily a description that immediately calls a sound to my mind.
Speaker 1: But maybe Lily was encountering more wolves than I do
Speaker 1: on a daily basis. But he specifically noted that this
Speaker 1: happened when he put a paralyzed dolphin in a pool.
Speaker 1: So one thing I want to stop and ask is
Speaker 1: why would you do that? He puts this paralyzed dolphin
Speaker 1: in the pool, right, the dolphin sinks to the bottom
Speaker 1: and immediately starts crying out with this may day distress call. Well,
Speaker 1: Lily says, the other dolphins all came to its rescue
Speaker 1: and pushed it back to the surface so that it
Speaker 1: could continue breathing. So maybe he speculated that that was
Speaker 1: going to happen, and this was just kind of a
Speaker 1: test of their I guess, like bond together. But it
Speaker 1: just again I was like wow, Like, uh, despite his
Speaker 1: fascination and love for these animals, he's willing to like
Speaker 1: let one potentially drown. Yeah, And I mean part of this,
Speaker 1: I think is that he's he's certainly working, you know,
Speaker 1: within the scientific atmosphere of the day and the attitude
Speaker 1: towards uh test animals of the day, and you can
Speaker 1: probably chalk a bit of it up to his uh,
Speaker 1: you know, his his laser focused vision, which we certainly
Speaker 1: saw during his NYM days and continues to a certain
Speaker 1: extent with the dolphins. It sounds from from the research
Speaker 1: I was reading that his his work with the dolphins
Speaker 1: definitely got less invasive. He got further and further away
Speaker 1: from the sort of the the harder stuff of the
Speaker 1: NYM days. But but he was still at times sort
Speaker 1: of accused of having an occasional cavalier attitude towards the
Speaker 1: test dolphins. Yeah. I think though that that sort of
Speaker 1: phases out over time, you know. Um. But not a
Speaker 1: year later after this time thing, that's when he published
Speaker 1: his like big dolphin book, right yes, nineteen one Man
Speaker 1: and Dolphin Adventures of a New Scientific Frontier. And this
Speaker 1: book just really becomes a big deal. Not only researchers,
Speaker 1: not only scientists and academics, but just the general public
Speaker 1: are eating this book up. And I'm just gonna read
Speaker 1: you a quick sample from so you can get just
Speaker 1: an idea of some of the things he's talking about
Speaker 1: in this book. He's documenting his work with dolphins thus
Speaker 1: far but he's also talking about where he thinks this
Speaker 1: work can take us. He said, quote, eventually it may
Speaker 1: be possible for humans to speak with another species. I
Speaker 1: have come to this conclusion after careful consideration of evidence
Speaker 1: game through my research experiments with dolphins. If new scientific
Speaker 1: developments are to be made in this direction, however, certain
Speaker 1: changes in our basic orientation, orientation, and philosophy will be necessary.
Speaker 1: So he's talking about just a game changing development here.
Speaker 1: He's talking about He discusses us reaching the point where
Speaker 1: we we teach dolphins to speak English, to speak English,
Speaker 1: and to even have to create a chair for them
Speaker 1: on the United Nations. So you know this, he's talking
Speaker 1: about finding an alien intelligence here on our planet and
Speaker 1: uh and and communing with them, um, communicating with them
Speaker 1: and actually inviting them into our rule of the world.
Speaker 1: And he's clearly going into his own soul searching too.
Speaker 1: If we sort of like compare this with the history
Speaker 1: of his life, you know, I mean, I think he
Speaker 1: he had like a very personal reason for feeling so
Speaker 1: strongly about this, given the way that he had experimented
Speaker 1: on these animals previously. He goes from that to thinking
Speaker 1: that they should be part of the United Nations. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and by the sixties he's this is when he's
Speaker 1: publishing academic papers glore showing that dolphins can mimic all
Speaker 1: kinds of human speech pattern by clicking, squeaking, and rasping. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he even talked, there's this British I got the
Speaker 1: impression from the article I read that this British anthropologist
Speaker 1: was a big deal at the time. His name is
Speaker 1: Gregory Bateson and the US Navy and and him and
Speaker 1: Lily were all kind of influenced by the research that
Speaker 1: was going on at the center. And Lily pitched human
Speaker 1: dolphin communication to NASA at the time, saying that if
Speaker 1: they were going to encounter aliens, this is the perfect
Speaker 1: way for them to sort of come up with a
Speaker 1: model of communications standards with an alien intelligence. Yeah to
Speaker 1: And it makes sense, right if you're attempting to communicate
Speaker 1: with a as a different yet equal form of consciousness,
Speaker 1: and this could conceivably be an experiment in that. And
Speaker 1: you can see now where Day of the Dolphin came from.
Speaker 1: I don't know what year that came out. I want
Speaker 1: to say it was early seventies maybe, but uh, if
Speaker 1: you've never seen the movie before it involves the George C.
Speaker 1: Scott as John C. Lily. They both had season the
Speaker 1: middle character teaching dolphins to speak English. They can speak English,
Speaker 1: and I believe it's on behalf of the U. S Government. Uh.
Speaker 1: And you know they say things like fall loves paw
Speaker 1: right like he's paw and I think he names them
Speaker 1: all things that rhyme with paw because it's easier for
Speaker 1: them to pronounce or whatever. It's kind of a silly movie,
Speaker 1: but it's also a little bit touching in a way. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: the book is a huge success in inspired of these movies.
Speaker 1: That's the idea just spells like spreads like wildfire. And
Speaker 1: this was a period again, the fifties and sixties, during
Speaker 1: which fascination with the underwater world is really taking off.
Speaker 1: This is the time of you know, scuba is really
Speaker 1: really exploding, Jacques Cousteaux is is making a big name
Speaker 1: for himself. It's the time of Sea Hunt. And in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three, of course, you see the television show Flipper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a mainstream television show about an intelligent dolphin that communicates
Speaker 1: with humans. Yeah, and this is where we come back
Speaker 1: to our connections to the creature from the Black Lagoon.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, hit me with it. Yeah, so I kind
Speaker 1: of had forgotten this, but that TV series Flipper was
Speaker 1: based on a nineteen sixty three film of the same name,
Speaker 1: a film co created by Ricou Browning. Okay, Riccou Browning
Speaker 1: worked at Marine Studios, which we mentioned earlier, the place
Speaker 1: where where Lily initially went down to study dolphins. And uh,
Speaker 1: Browning actually portrayed the creature from the Black Lagoon in
Speaker 1: the first two films. So Lily is actually the guy
Speaker 1: wearing the rubber suit. Yeah, he was a guy in
Speaker 1: the rubber suits in the first two Creature films. And uh,
Speaker 1: and again he co created Flipper, and Lily is actually
Speaker 1: thanked in the credits to the nine film Flipper. So
Speaker 1: that's nuts. Wow. Okay, well yeah, and it it also
Speaker 1: makes me think of God. The film version of twenty
Speaker 1: Leagues Into the Sea was made around that time to
Speaker 1: probably right, Um, I don't know the specific date on that,
Speaker 1: but yeah, there is that fascination with sort of under
Speaker 1: the adventure. Yeah, it's opening up to us in ways
Speaker 1: that it just had not been previously available, and so
Speaker 1: we're we're fascinated with this new world down there, and
Speaker 1: then to to to also have this potential revelation laid
Speaker 1: on our plate that there is an intelligence down there,
Speaker 1: uh more or less on par with our own. I
Speaker 1: wonder what John C. Lily thought of the abyss. I
Speaker 1: don't know, that would have been interesting. Huh. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: probably in a way. That's a very Lily movie, isn't it.
Speaker 1: So studies at the center continue again. Lily's approach gradually
Speaker 1: moves away from the sort of creepy world of nim
Speaker 1: is nim work and into less invasive techniques. He abandons
Speaker 1: the use of electrodes and instead attempts to essentially meld
Speaker 1: minds with the dolphins to understand the shape of their consciousness. Um.
Speaker 1: He turns increasingly to the flotation tank and attempt to
Speaker 1: achieve this. He hypes in hydrophone recordings of their sounds,
Speaker 1: and eventually too he starts using LSD. And this is
Speaker 1: where it's all coming together. Right. They seem like very
Speaker 1: disparate things when you say dolphins, isolation tanks, and LSD,
Speaker 1: But he's combining all of these things together. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: at the time it's legal, He's able to get it
Speaker 1: through his his connections his clearance. He's getting it totally
Speaker 1: on the board and uh. In beginning of nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: he also is injecting it into the dolphins to see
Speaker 1: what kind of effect it will. It will. Oh, I
Speaker 1: didn't know that really, And this was pretty standard for
Speaker 1: the time. This was a time when there were a
Speaker 1: lot of LSD experiments going on, and we were putting
Speaker 1: LSD into the bodies of various animals and tests I
Speaker 1: used to see how they responded. Uh, And apparently they
Speaker 1: did not really respond to LSD, which he was kind
Speaker 1: of disappointed with, but he kept taking it. He kept
Speaker 1: going in. Yeah, see if he could he could understand
Speaker 1: their mind. Um. So one of the things that I
Speaker 1: read when researching him, and I hadn't really realized this.
Speaker 1: Do you do you remember a video game called Echo
Speaker 1: the Dolphin? Yeah, I do. I vaguely remember it. I
Speaker 1: didn't play it. I talked to Joe about it, our
Speaker 1: co host, and he did play it. Uh. And apparently
Speaker 1: the whole game was centered around Lily, his research and
Speaker 1: his sort of philosophy. Yeah, I had no idea. It
Speaker 1: apparently gets really psychedelic as it continues. I only ever
Speaker 1: like played like the first level. So I have a
Speaker 1: very service level understanding of eco to think it's like
Speaker 1: something Joe said. It was something to the effect that
Speaker 1: like there's even like an alien sort of overmind that
Speaker 1: causes the events on Earth that make echo the dolphin
Speaker 1: have to try to, you know, go through this gamut
Speaker 1: of psychedelic levels and pervious save the world. That's cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's c r I. We continue to see him
Speaker 1: doing what he's always done. He's using the best technology,
Speaker 1: various methodologies, and an attempt to achieve his his goal here. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, he uses state of the art code breaking
Speaker 1: computers and an attempt to crack the code of dolphin
Speaker 1: vocalization patterns and uh as. As Bruce Clark points out
Speaker 1: in his Communication plus one paper from two thousand and fourteen,
Speaker 1: John Lily, The Mind of the Dolphin and Communication out
Speaker 1: of Bounds. He says, Lily mobilize the best available tools
Speaker 1: a cutting edge array of cybernetic concepts. In pursuit of
Speaker 1: his his breakthrough communication with dolphins. He employed quote information theory,
Speaker 1: bound up with first order cybernetics, and operated with the
Speaker 1: heuristic computational metaphors alongside the actual computers of his era.
Speaker 1: So that actually speaks to my my question from earlier
Speaker 1: about brain computer interfaces. It sounds like he did have
Speaker 1: quite a bit of influence on the BC. I yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it sounds like he did. Yeah, he was, you know,
Speaker 1: basically any area he applied himself to, he managed to
Speaker 1: influence that discipline. Uh, sometimes in a positive direction, sometimes
Speaker 1: in a negative direction as well, as we discussed. But
Speaker 1: but in all of this too, we're getting into this
Speaker 1: problem of projection, right. Oh yeah, you mean like actual
Speaker 1: vocal projection. No, no, no, actually like projecting, uh well,
Speaker 1: and maybe to a certain extent, but all so one,
Speaker 1: you know, projecting your consciousness on to another creature, okay,
Speaker 1: okay um. As Plart points out in his paper, projection
Speaker 1: short circuits a proper understanding of what others are thinking
Speaker 1: or meaning to convey when they make a communic communicative offer,
Speaker 1: so that in projection goes. It's a problem when we
Speaker 1: just try and communicate with each other, Like I'm not
Speaker 1: just community, I'm not communicating solely with you. I'm communicating
Speaker 1: with a version of you I have in my mind
Speaker 1: my expectations of you, and then the kind of feedback
Speaker 1: you provide as well. It's the inherent problem of human communication.
Speaker 1: Yet and and through a series of feedback and feed forward,
Speaker 1: we try to clear up like various psychological noise that
Speaker 1: gets in the middle there of our understanding of what
Speaker 1: one another are saying. But yeah, it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: like the human dilemma, right, is that, like we're we're
Speaker 1: never going to fully be able to at least, you know,
Speaker 1: with just our voices, uh, communicate what's going on inside
Speaker 1: our head to one another. Yeah, really really wanted to
Speaker 1: get past that. Yeah. And but one of the problems,
Speaker 1: of course, is that he's, despite his scientific background and
Speaker 1: all of the vigoris throwing into this, he seems to
Speaker 1: always be working with the certainty that communication can truly
Speaker 1: be established, and that not only is he reaching out,
Speaker 1: but they're reaching out to us. He said, to quote,
Speaker 1: we must keep the working hypothesis in mind that they
Speaker 1: are highly intelligent and are just as interested in communicating
Speaker 1: with us as we are with them. So you know,
Speaker 1: that's a potential stumbling block to your your efforts here,
Speaker 1: because you already have it firmly established in your mind
Speaker 1: that this can be done, that this connection is there
Speaker 1: to be made. I mean and Again, the intelligence of
Speaker 1: dolphins isn't in doubt, but to work with that kind
Speaker 1: of certainty, uh, with with the kind of certainty that
Speaker 1: they reflect our desire to communicate as well, that's problematic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And certainly I can imagine where that is where he
Speaker 1: starts to have stumbling blocks with funders like UH, Navy
Speaker 1: for instance, in the Air Force or just any like
Speaker 1: even NYM. Right, Like, when you start postulating that your
Speaker 1: test subjects are on an equal playing field with humanity
Speaker 1: and should be treated as such, that's going to be
Speaker 1: immediately problematic for them, right because it's outside of their
Speaker 1: world understanding, but it also doesn't fit their agenda. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and word of these experiments and some of his
Speaker 1: methods and ideas they're leaking out. He has some researchers
Speaker 1: that are leaving him and working exclusively for the Navy, uh,
Speaker 1: perhaps whispering about his his excessive use of the isolation tank.
Speaker 1: Maybe perhaps they even know something about the l s D.
Speaker 1: And they're definitely talking about the flooded dolphin cohabitation apartment
Speaker 1: that becomes a major project towards the end of c R.
Speaker 1: I actually I don't know about this particularly, but I
Speaker 1: know that he pitched an idea that basically there needed
Speaker 1: to be some kind of living space that humans and
Speaker 1: dolphins could cod this within to communicate. Is this his
Speaker 1: attempt at that? Yeah, it's I mean, And a lot
Speaker 1: of credit has to go to uh scientists. Margaret how
Speaker 1: love It, who was actually the woman who lived with
Speaker 1: the dolphins, and she she later wrote a book. There
Speaker 1: were a number of articles that came out about her experience.
Speaker 1: There's a great Guardian article actually titled The Dolphin Who
Speaker 1: Loved Me. And she comes up to the Lily with
Speaker 1: the idea like she's already researching dolphins, so she's drawn
Speaker 1: to his activities here. And according to her in the
Speaker 1: Guardian piece, she says, maybe it was because I was
Speaker 1: living so close to the lab. It just seems so simple.
Speaker 1: Why let the water get in the way. So I
Speaker 1: said to John Lily, I want to plaster everything and
Speaker 1: fill this place with water. I want to live here. Huh.
Speaker 1: So see what she had a scuba suit on or
Speaker 1: was it just it just was a shallow enough that
Speaker 1: she could wait around And basically they waterproofed this whole
Speaker 1: living area. They made like a floodable apartment so that
Speaker 1: she could live there with the dolphin four months of
Speaker 1: eventual eventually, I think they talked about it being a
Speaker 1: three month period, but it ended up being a six
Speaker 1: month period where she was living with this dolphin, handpicked
Speaker 1: dolphin named Peter Uh in an attempt to teach him English.
Speaker 1: She was going to teach him to speak English. And
Speaker 1: the idea here and Lily you know, bought into two
Speaker 1: was that she would be there just constantly as this
Speaker 1: kind of mother figure, that they would have this chance
Speaker 1: to to bond in a in a way that human
Speaker 1: and dolphin had not previously. And I'm assuming that like
Speaker 1: she must have approached this like linguistic effort, I guess,
Speaker 1: like using the same basis for which we teach young
Speaker 1: humans language. Right, Yeah, that's my understanding very much. It
Speaker 1: was like an adult human attempting to teach a child
Speaker 1: human how to speak UM, with the some added complications
Speaker 1: um that end up being important later on in that
Speaker 1: they helped us to scandalize the work here. But dolphins
Speaker 1: are pretty can be pretty sexual creatures. So yeah, I've
Speaker 1: heard the story. Yeah, this is probably where a lot
Speaker 1: of people are familiar with the story, because she would
Speaker 1: occasionally have to help relieve, help dispense Peter of his
Speaker 1: sexual urges, let's say, in order to keep the work going.
Speaker 1: And that's she says, that's the way she approached approaching
Speaker 1: and not from a sexual uh you know, vantage point,
Speaker 1: but it was this is a part of how Peter
Speaker 1: behaves as a dolphin, and we need to just sort
Speaker 1: of get that out of the way so we can
Speaker 1: continue working on language. Okay, well, yeah, I could see
Speaker 1: what that would be quite scandalous. It's one thing to
Speaker 1: pose it that a dolphin is on a sort of
Speaker 1: uh equal identity status, individual individualistic status with a human being.
Speaker 1: It's another thing to start engaging with them what people
Speaker 1: would consider bestiality. Yeah, he did get into a weird
Speaker 1: area here. We have to sort of explain yourself out
Speaker 1: of that, or attempt to explain yourself out of that
Speaker 1: to your your backers or By nineteen seventy five, actually
Speaker 1: Hustler magazine comes out with an article about it, and
Speaker 1: they didn't help. Oh yeah, they completely scandalized love It
Speaker 1: and It and the experiment. They had some sort of
Speaker 1: a provocative illustration and just made it sound like like
Speaker 1: love It and Lily were just engaged in a you know,
Speaker 1: a pan species free for all. There something which criticisms
Speaker 1: of this experiment aside. You know, clearly wasn't the point
Speaker 1: they were. They were trying to teach this creature to
Speaker 1: speak English. They were trying to to bridge this gap
Speaker 1: between the species and it. But it did get into
Speaker 1: some pretty weird areas. This sounds like another like we
Speaker 1: should add this to our our little document of ideas.
Speaker 1: This sounds like a great thing that we should cover
Speaker 1: for a future episode. Is like how much animal sexuality
Speaker 1: gets in the way of human animal experimentation. Uh, and
Speaker 1: and like this can't be the first time or only
Speaker 1: time that's happened, yeah, or the last. So by autumn
Speaker 1: of nineteen six, Lily is increasingly more interested in LSD
Speaker 1: research than the ongoing dolphin research. Uh. You know, you
Speaker 1: could say that he's probably spent more time in the
Speaker 1: tank with the l s D. The l s D
Speaker 1: becomes the thing that is holding his interest and seems
Speaker 1: to be the next logical place for his interest and
Speaker 1: consciousness to really focus and to keep it in perspective.
Speaker 1: He's he's kind of getting up to sort of sort
Speaker 1: of retirement age at this point, I would imagine, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I should say so. And uh. And so
Speaker 1: it's at this point, just as six months of cohabitation
Speaker 1: with Peter coming to an end, funding drives up at
Speaker 1: cr AT c r I and its closure is announced. Um,
Speaker 1: and they didn't even have a peer re viewed paper
Speaker 1: out yet. Again, this comes up on the back of
Speaker 1: rumors that are spreading about the experiments c r I.
Speaker 1: Apparently a visiting board of grant examiners also came and
Speaker 1: ended up giving just a scathing review of the operation.
Speaker 1: And and Lily charges that the Navy researchers effectively sabotaged
Speaker 1: him and all of this, and you know, maybe they did. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there's that sort of like this is a question
Speaker 1: that I had along. Like basically the whole journey for
Speaker 1: Lily is like where's the money coming from? Right, Like,
Speaker 1: he obviously has that went where he's working very closely
Speaker 1: with the government in the military, and then he gets
Speaker 1: into this phase where they're co funding stuff, but he's
Speaker 1: also got private resources, possibly even from his family. But yeah,
Speaker 1: I can imagine that if they're like coming by to
Speaker 1: take a tour or something like that, they're probably a
Speaker 1: little bit horrified. Well, it seems to be one of
Speaker 1: those cases where the establishment, if you will, We're certainly
Speaker 1: find funding Lily as long as his obsessions matched up
Speaker 1: with with with their goals and with their interests. But
Speaker 1: is his obsession uh drifted out of sync with theirs
Speaker 1: they stepped away from him. Well, it's fascinating, but it
Speaker 1: gets back to what we talked about in the Animals
Speaker 1: as Weapons episode, right, like nine times out of ten,
Speaker 1: that's where the money comes for this kind of stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so c R I is just completely taken apart. The
Speaker 1: dolphins are most of the dolphins are apparently released, though
Speaker 1: Peter apparently unfortunately dies in captivity later on. Well really
Speaker 1: told love It that Peter died via suicide. That tests
Speaker 1: dolphins have to consciously breathe, that if a dolphin is
Speaker 1: is significantly upset, it may just simply shut down and
Speaker 1: stop breathing. And that is allegedly what happened, and that
Speaker 1: it was upset by the suffering of its bond. Would
Speaker 1: love It perhaps that's why That's what Love it. That's
Speaker 1: what love It says in in in her book and
Speaker 1: in the interviews. Yeah, see so this is a little
Speaker 1: bit different from what I had read. And this is
Speaker 1: by Lily's own account, later on, he sort of defiantly
Speaker 1: goes on later on to say, like he in the
Speaker 1: face of the Navy and everybody else, he purposely let
Speaker 1: all the dolphins go. Uh. And he even said to
Speaker 1: the point he said, well, they were finished reprogramming me.
Speaker 1: So he you know, obviously like went to the uh
Speaker 1: far into the metaphor with the dolphins were performing the
Speaker 1: experiments on him. He wasn't experimenting on them, and that
Speaker 1: they chose to let him, Yes, indeed, and uh, you know,
Speaker 1: at this point where we really reached the point where uh,
Speaker 1: Lily begins to fall out of favor with a lot
Speaker 1: of folks. Certainly by the time that Hustler magazine article
Speaker 1: comes out in seventy five, Uh, as I pointed out
Speaker 1: in that Orian magazine piece of Mind in the Water
Speaker 1: that I mentioned earlier, Lily went on to just be
Speaker 1: widely reviled by professional dolphin researchers and working scientists have
Speaker 1: for some time tended to dismiss him as just a lunatic,
Speaker 1: you know, as this hippie nut job. And you can
Speaker 1: understand that, right, I mean, you're trying to do this
Speaker 1: serious professional work, and his figure is sort of looming
Speaker 1: in the in your peripheral vision the whole time people
Speaker 1: were perhaps bringing him up his he's he's tarnished your
Speaker 1: your your work, and your passions to a certain extent
Speaker 1: by his approach to tackling them. Well, especially knowing how
Speaker 1: competitive and sort of vicious unfortunly that like academic and
Speaker 1: research competition can kind of go. Yeah, I'm not surprised
Speaker 1: at all that sort of like the next generation of
Speaker 1: Dolphin researchers turned on him, although you know, it also
Speaker 1: does sound like he wasn't exactly producing uh, I guess
Speaker 1: like documented results, right, the kind of things that were
Speaker 1: that that were being looked for, both for the funding
Speaker 1: but also to justify you know, what he was doing exactly. Well.
Speaker 1: I I also heard that, uh, and I'm curious if
Speaker 1: this is still true. This is from around the time
Speaker 1: right before he died. Apparently the research station was going
Speaker 1: to be converted into a luxury condo living center that
Speaker 1: was called Dolphin Cove. Yeah, so I wonder if Dolphin
Speaker 1: Cove is still there with St. Thomas right, Yeah, Yeah, curious, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd love to hear from visited. I wonder if the
Speaker 1: underwater apartment is still there. You pay three hundred dollars
Speaker 1: a night to stay and there's no dolphin. You just
Speaker 1: you know, you just walk around the water. Yeah. So okay,
Speaker 1: this is really like the final I guess stage of
Speaker 1: Lily's research career, as it were. And he kind of
Speaker 1: goes whole hog into the LSD field right right, And
Speaker 1: this is pretty much the the path he continues for
Speaker 1: the rest of his life. Really, this is where this
Speaker 1: is where Lily truly becomes the the the coon skin
Speaker 1: cap wearing, uh, psychonaut counterculture mythic figure. This is when
Speaker 1: he gets his membership card into the Psychedelic Avengers we've
Speaker 1: been talking about on on our episodes for quite versus
Speaker 1: officially a part of the team now and I've seen
Speaker 1: photos of him hanging out with Timothy Larry and Allen Ginsburg. Yeah,
Speaker 1: during this stage, and he apparently continues a certain degree
Speaker 1: of of dolphin research. Uh. Some of it is um
Speaker 1: more is on the scientific side, like the use of
Speaker 1: musical tones. Some of it is more far more mystical,
Speaker 1: such as the looking into telepathy. But and it's and
Speaker 1: the dolphin continues to be kind of a mascot for
Speaker 1: him and for his work. So even though the c
Speaker 1: r I Center is gone, the dolphin still remains an
Speaker 1: important part of Lily's life. But of course so does LSD,
Speaker 1: and the use of LSD and other psychoactive agents too
Speaker 1: still crack that nut of consciousness in human existence and
Speaker 1: uh and and reached that providence of the mind. And
Speaker 1: one of my understandings is that like once l s
Speaker 1: D became illegal, he sort of moved into other psychotropics.
Speaker 1: Specifically ketamine was one that he used a lot um
Speaker 1: and and wrote about a lot as well. Yes, indeed,
Speaker 1: and and if his writings are in in any indication,
Speaker 1: and he wrote a lot about his experiences using LSD.
Speaker 1: Like the times he used it, he really used it,
Speaker 1: Like he went in Whole Hawk. He had access, legitimate
Speaker 1: access to pharmaceutical grade LSD and really attempted to just
Speaker 1: break through to the other side with it. And this
Speaker 1: was one of the actual, like primary resources you were
Speaker 1: able to get a hold of for this episode, right
Speaker 1: with one of his books specifically about these experiences, what's
Speaker 1: it called. It's called programming and metaprogramming in the Human
Speaker 1: bio computer. And this is just kind of his like
Speaker 1: lab notes of taking LSD essentially, it's hiss Yeah. His
Speaker 1: big book of LSD Observations published in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: and it's um god, it's a it's a very interesting
Speaker 1: book to read. It's a difficult book to to read
Speaker 1: as well. Uh, a lot of Louis writing on this
Speaker 1: sort of thing. Um. It seems to be a fascinating
Speaker 1: synthesis of converging discipline. So he's he's dealing with mysticism
Speaker 1: and new age thought. He's also using a lot of
Speaker 1: computer programming terminology and computer programming metaphors and as his
Speaker 1: evidence in the title Yeah, and that goes back to
Speaker 1: when he was talking about the dolphins at the end
Speaker 1: of it too, he said they reprogrammed him right. And
Speaker 1: then there's a lot of psychoanalysis in there as well.
Speaker 1: Like any discipline he has picked up, any technology is
Speaker 1: picked up, it goes into this writing and at times
Speaker 1: there's almost a stream of consciousness quality to the writings,
Speaker 1: as if all all three of these interpretive systems are
Speaker 1: working at the same time in different ways, and really
Speaker 1: is just sharing his thoughts in real time. And this
Speaker 1: can be at times alluring, it can be rather alienating.
Speaker 1: Their portions of programming the human computer that that read
Speaker 1: like the stuffiest trip guides you could possibly imagine. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I can sort of imagine, especially because right like he
Speaker 1: was beholden to no one. He's just kind of writing.
Speaker 1: I mean, if his present day he'd be publishing kindle
Speaker 1: e books or something like that, right, But like, isn't
Speaker 1: there still like a trust or something like that that
Speaker 1: manages his manages manages his publishing endeavors. Yeah, I believe so.
Speaker 1: I mean, all his books are still out there in
Speaker 1: one form or another. Um. But you know, even though
Speaker 1: at times there's stuffy, there other times where it does
Speaker 1: just read like pure um psychonautic poetry. He's uh, he's
Speaker 1: he's taking all of this these tools and he's trying to,
Speaker 1: you know, figure out what the self is, what consciousness is,
Speaker 1: what are the limits of consciousness? Uh? And yeah, at
Speaker 1: times it's beautiful and at times it's it's very difficult
Speaker 1: and alienating. And so this gets us into the lily
Speaker 1: phase that I have the hardest time identifying with. Up
Speaker 1: until this point, I'm on board, you know, I'm interested
Speaker 1: in what he's doing, interested in his findings, even when
Speaker 1: it comes to like, you know, uh, masturbating a dolphin
Speaker 1: and taking LSD to try to telepathically communicate with them
Speaker 1: like I'm I'm interested. But then we get into I
Speaker 1: guess it's the echo phase. This is where, by the way,
Speaker 1: like connected to the Echo the Dolphin video game. It's
Speaker 1: not echo e C h O, it's e c CEO
Speaker 1: because it's an acronym. Oh yes, Earth Coincidence Control Office. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this ends up coming about in in the
Speaker 1: seventies really, but you see the roots of it back
Speaker 1: as far as nineteen two. Okay, um, because with his
Speaker 1: counterculture celebrity status, he attracted a lot of peers, followers,
Speaker 1: hangers on from all corners, including some of the day's
Speaker 1: most brilliant freethinking minds, such as a young Carl Sagan
Speaker 1: For interesting, and by sixty two he'd organized the Order
Speaker 1: of the Dolphin and served as Grand Dolphin. And it's
Speaker 1: important to note that this was I kind of think
Speaker 1: of this as kind of like, um, it's kind of
Speaker 1: like a tool album. It's it's serious, but it's also
Speaker 1: not that serious. There's this performance are. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: certain amount of performance are. There's a certain amount of goofery,
Speaker 1: but then there are also some serious undertones as well.
Speaker 1: So this involves astrophysicist, radio astronomers, atmospheric chemists, computer engineers, um.
Speaker 1: And they even apparently have special special pins that they
Speaker 1: would wear. Man, can you imagine we could get ahold
Speaker 1: of some of those pins for a pretty penny on eBay? Yes,
Speaker 1: someone will sell onto me. Sure one of his ats,
Speaker 1: one of his and skin hats. Yeah, it was apparently
Speaker 1: a little Engrave dolphin. And eventually a lot of his
Speaker 1: more sci fi oriented ideas come out of this period
Speaker 1: as well. And again like I'm I'm I'm not a
Speaker 1: percent sure that Lily actually believed this stuff, right, I
Speaker 1: think it's we need to cover it in order to
Speaker 1: sort of get the full Lily picture here, Right. I
Speaker 1: get the feeling that this is sort of him, like yeah,
Speaker 1: performance aret, maybe creating like living metaphors in order to
Speaker 1: somehow communicate his ideas out to people, right, Like, the
Speaker 1: more absurd and spectacular the idea, the more attention it's
Speaker 1: possibly going to get. Yeah, I mean a literal interpretation
Speaker 1: of some of these things we're talking about here, of
Speaker 1: his later ideas and writing it. It seems a bit
Speaker 1: too uh simple for such a complex individual, especially when
Speaker 1: we looked at what Lily himself wrote about his early writings,
Speaker 1: in particular in uh the nineteen seventy two forward to
Speaker 1: a reprint of Programming and Metaphor and the Beta Programming
Speaker 1: in Human Biocomputer, he said, I had written the report
Speaker 1: in such a way that it's basic messages were hidden
Speaker 1: behind a heavy, long introduction designed to stop the casual reader. Apparently,
Speaker 1: once word got out, this device no longer stalled the
Speaker 1: interested readers. Somehow, the basic messages were important enough to
Speaker 1: enough readers so that the work acquired an unexpected viability.
Speaker 1: So he's all, he's already talking at that stage about
Speaker 1: a kind of coded nature to his work, that that
Speaker 1: he's hiding ideas that he's and that he's layering these ideas.
Speaker 1: So it seems, yeah, in light of that, it seems
Speaker 1: a bit counterintuitive to say that, for instance, when he's
Speaker 1: talking about the threat of a UM solid state intelligence,
Speaker 1: that he's lead speaking literally. Yeah, I mean, we have
Speaker 1: to remember back up, like, this is a guy whose
Speaker 1: whole purpose in life was human consciousness and uh, connecting
Speaker 1: human consciousness to other consciousnesses, right, and language. He's fully
Speaker 1: aware that language is the best way that we're doing
Speaker 1: that now in the ways to manipulate it in order
Speaker 1: to sort of best I guess you could almost look
Speaker 1: at that as a like tool of rhetoric, right, in
Speaker 1: order for him to get his ideas across. But yeah,
Speaker 1: let's back up with like the solid state and the
Speaker 1: echoes stuff. So this is this is pretty out there,
Speaker 1: Like he posits that there's like an alien intelligence that's
Speaker 1: kind of in control of everything, right, Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: where we get into that, uh, into this idea that
Speaker 1: is a hierarchy of coincidence control offices at the Earth level,
Speaker 1: solar level, galactic and cosmics. So again that's where we
Speaker 1: get down to echo right, Earth coincidence control offices, and
Speaker 1: these are essentially serving the same purpose of God as
Speaker 1: a controlling intelligence in the universe. So this is really
Speaker 1: this is really turning to two notions of spirituality, really
Speaker 1: thinking about God and putting his own spin on what
Speaker 1: God would be in his worldview. Yeah, yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: not that far off from like other I'm thinking like
Speaker 1: Philip K. Dick for definitely, like he's writing around the
Speaker 1: same period of time, so it's not that far off.
Speaker 1: I can imagine that Lily would maybe pick up something
Speaker 1: like Vallis and be like, Okay, maybe this is a
Speaker 1: cool idea for me to get my ideas of consciousness
Speaker 1: across now that the Navy has pulled my funding. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He also, as I alluded to earlier, he prophesied a
Speaker 1: future conflict between organic intelligence and machine intelligence, which he
Speaker 1: referred to as the solid state intelligence or s s I.
Speaker 1: So specifically, he said this would be a conflict over
Speaker 1: ideal environmental conditions for either humans or the sort of
Speaker 1: s s I created bioforms that crave cold and vacuums.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, well, I mean and then along this
Speaker 1: period of time too, is when he envisions what I
Speaker 1: was telling you about earlier, which I thought was where
Speaker 1: the apartment thing was going, but he called it the
Speaker 1: future communications laboratory, and he called it a floating living room. Uh.
Speaker 1: And the idea was that this is where humans and
Speaker 1: dolphins would come to connect. So I'm imagining something like
Speaker 1: along the lines of like a c world type thing
Speaker 1: that's less uh imprisoning to the dolphins, right where the
Speaker 1: dolphins can kind of come up and interact with human beings. Uh.
Speaker 1: And and so that that idea is like along those
Speaker 1: same lines, I guess but we have to remember to
Speaker 1: like nineteen seventy two, the same time he's he's he's
Speaker 1: getting into this real weird stuff. Lily's pivotal to establishing
Speaker 1: the Marine Mammal Protection Act within the United States government.
Speaker 1: You know, I mean he's grounded. He's actually affecting change
Speaker 1: and in how human beings are connecting with dolphins, but
Speaker 1: he's also you know, experimenting with some of this other stuff. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I have to say, just like backing up and looking
Speaker 1: at the big picture here, I think he was having
Speaker 1: a laugh, you know, or or or or maybe just
Speaker 1: trying to use, um some really out there ideas in
Speaker 1: order to draw attention to his more grounded philosophy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's more of a a mystical philosopher, dreamer, and to
Speaker 1: a certain extent, trickster. You can't wear a coonskin caps
Speaker 1: like that and expect to be taking taking seriously. You're
Speaker 1: kind of winking at the audience at that point. But
Speaker 1: but to your point, Yeah, he he was a was
Speaker 1: a major proponent of of not only the intelligence and
Speaker 1: value of dolphins, but they're in Wales, but there their
Speaker 1: rights as well. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean he believed that
Speaker 1: killing whales and dolphins was as immoral as killing other
Speaker 1: human beings, and they should be protected by law and
Speaker 1: humans should understand them as sentient beings. This is one
Speaker 1: of the big quotes that I saw pop up from
Speaker 1: him over and over and over again about dolphins. He said,
Speaker 1: they are not someone to kill, but someone to learn from.
Speaker 1: And I think you see that, And at least we're
Speaker 1: not quite there yet obviously, but I mean, like, think
Speaker 1: of all of the protests over the last couple of
Speaker 1: decades about like dolphins getting killed in tuna traps, right,
Speaker 1: like that kind of uh thought about dolphins would not
Speaker 1: have been possible without Lily. Indeed, So there you have it,
Speaker 1: John C. Lily hopefully a a much more complete picture
Speaker 1: of the man and his work, his seriousness, his madness,
Speaker 1: his his his imagination, and his just you know, intense,
Speaker 1: hyper focused intellect um, certainly more so than we've been
Speaker 1: able to do in previous episodes. Yeah, So, you know,
Speaker 1: I would love to hear from people out there who
Speaker 1: have maybe got some because it seems like there's just
Speaker 1: such a wide array of resources about Lily. Is there
Speaker 1: something that we missed here or is there more to
Speaker 1: the story. Maybe you know something about Echo that we
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe you've been in touch with the solid
Speaker 1: state intelligence. Uh, you know, you can talk to us
Speaker 1: on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler. Were in all those platforms,
Speaker 1: and of course the best way to get in touch
Speaker 1: with us is directly at our email address, which is
Speaker 1: blow the mind at how Stuff Works dot Com. Now,
Speaker 1: most of you are used to the show ending right
Speaker 1: are We usually end it right after dot com. But
Speaker 1: we're gonna end a little differently today, Right Robert, you
Speaker 1: found a particular gem that we're gonna add to the episode.
Speaker 1: That's right. We're going to close it out with the
Speaker 1: Art Department track The Agent, off of the two thousand
Speaker 1: fourteen album Natural Selection from number nineteen music there uh
Speaker 1: in O one nine music on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Speaker 1: This is a really cool track and it includes samples
Speaker 1: from John C. Lily's lecture through the Center of the Mandola.
Speaker 1: One problem in human existence It is the tendency to
Speaker 1: repeat repeat of the water control for moralness and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Does it How Stuff Works dot Com