Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday,
Speaker 1: so we're going on into the vault. And what do
Speaker 1: I see in the vault this time but a bunch
Speaker 1: of dolphins. That's right, we're going back to February. This
Speaker 1: was an episode that I did with Christian on John C. Lily.
Speaker 1: John C. Lily the Psychonaute. Yes, yes, the man has
Speaker 1: a very fascinating history, from counter espionage researcher for the government,
Speaker 1: to uh, you know, Maverick and even renegade dolphin researcher
Speaker 1: to to counterculture icon. Just a fascinating figure to look at,
Speaker 1: and that's what this episode does. Well, put on your
Speaker 1: Davy Crockett hat and get ready to listen to John C. Lily.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot Com. Hey, you're 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 end. No pun attended 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 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's be it iTunes
Speaker 1: or uh Spotify or any of the various wonderful platforms
Speaker 1: out there. You can support the show by simply giving
Speaker 1: us a positive rating and positive review of the platform
Speaker 1: allows that kind of interaction. Yeah, and the last thing
Speaker 1: I'll say is before we get into Lily is don't
Speaker 1: forget to follow us on social media. If you're on Facebook,
Speaker 1: you're on Twitter, you're on Tumblr. We're on all those
Speaker 1: platforms as Blow the Mind. And we don't only post
Speaker 1: our own stuff, but we curate lots of weird science
Speaker 1: e bizarre addity type stuff that we find throughout the
Speaker 1: day as we're doing our research. That's right. So let's
Speaker 1: talk about Lily first. Why are we covering him because Lily,
Speaker 1: for people who don't know, comes up frequently. I'd say
Speaker 1: in the last year of doing the show, he's come
Speaker 1: up at least four or five times. Yeah, and in
Speaker 1: past episodes, I'm I know that we haven't had at
Speaker 1: least three episodes that have dealt with him, at least
Speaker 1: in small portions. Right. Yeah, you guys did a dolphin episode.
Speaker 1: You and Julie did a dolphin episode, and then there
Speaker 1: was the what was it, the like kind of crazy
Speaker 1: rock star life of Scientists. Yeah, yeah, we did one
Speaker 1: that was just kind of a sampler platter of different
Speaker 1: real life scientists that had sort of a weird side
Speaker 1: to them. But Lily is one of those individuals first
Speaker 1: of all, that, as we've been saying, deserves a deeper dive.
Speaker 1: He deserves a closer look because he was just he
Speaker 1: was into too many things. He really lived too many
Speaker 1: lives to just try and condense it to a quick
Speaker 1: little segment about his psychedelic dolphin research, which is what
Speaker 1: most people may think of when we mentioned John C. Lewis.
Speaker 1: This is one of those moments too where I feel
Speaker 1: like the podcast format is really at an advantage here
Speaker 1: because in our ca you know, like lots of the
Speaker 1: stuff that I've read about Lily, like you said, either
Speaker 1: focuses on one aspect of his work or another. Right,
Speaker 1: It's like it's either like the isolation tanks or it's
Speaker 1: just the dolphins. But I feel like we have the
Speaker 1: opportunity here to like gather a lot of different resources,
Speaker 1: come together and kind of try to piece it all
Speaker 1: together and figure out this like epic figure somehow, and
Speaker 1: especially the like like you said to like um for
Speaker 1: those of you who don't know, there's been two feature
Speaker 1: films at least two that we're made based on Lily
Speaker 1: as a character. The first was Day of the Dolphin
Speaker 1: with George C. Scott, and then the second one is
Speaker 1: Altered States, of Course, which is you know, we're huge
Speaker 1: fans of here, and it stars William her you know,
Speaker 1: of course, as this Lily kind of figure who takes
Speaker 1: acid in isolation tanks and then finds himself devolving basically
Speaker 1: right into various forms of proto humanity. Yeah, so he's
Speaker 1: he's he's a figure that hit the castle, a large
Speaker 1: shadow across are popular culture, and I think that can
Speaker 1: also be a stumbling block because you think of you
Speaker 1: might think of that older uh John C. Lily kind
Speaker 1: of a post hippie nut job with with a coonskin
Speaker 1: cap talking about expanded consciousness and perhaps being something of
Speaker 1: a pariah. Uh. Two individuals who were working in legitimate
Speaker 1: 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 in medicine, psycho analysis, biophysics,
Speaker 1: um and he went from being published as a researcher
Speaker 1: in scientific journals to writing his own books about spirit
Speaker 1: ruality in the self. And one of the things that's
Speaker 1: really important about Lily I think to just like our
Speaker 1: general culture today, it's it's hard to think of this
Speaker 1: because it's from from my entire life. It's been this way.
Speaker 1: But people didn't used to think of dolphins as being
Speaker 1: intelligent mammals, that we're cute and cuddly and that we
Speaker 1: should try to keep from being killed in the ocean. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. I mean you go back far enough. There
Speaker 1: are various myths that involve humans turning into dolphins or
Speaker 1: vice versa, but generally speaking, before the nineteen fifties, dolphins
Speaker 1: were a pest of fishermen. They were some they were
Speaker 1: a fatty creature you might render down for various products,
Speaker 1: but nobody was giving a lot of thought to what
Speaker 1: they were thinking or indeed what their consciousness might consist of. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so almost every account that I read about Lily
Speaker 1: traces his research with dolphins to how we treat dolphins
Speaker 1: today even too, you know, good or bad however you
Speaker 1: think of it, of like theme parks of like Sea
Speaker 1: World and things like that, but like, uh, the interaction
Speaker 1: that human beings have with dolphins or other male uh
Speaker 1: mammals in the water like whales, uh, you know, in
Speaker 1: in that kind of a setting, you know. Um, he
Speaker 1: really changed the way that we considered them as I
Speaker 1: guess partners on Earth is how he would probably put
Speaker 1: it right. Yeah, it's hard to imagine where we'd be
Speaker 1: right now, uh, considering dolphin intelligence without Lily, I mean
Speaker 1: I think, I mean, I think we would definitely get
Speaker 1: to this point where we we recognize the intelligence of
Speaker 1: the dolphin, uh and and even engaging discussions about its
Speaker 1: potential personhood. But would we have gotten there as quickly?
Speaker 1: Would we have? Would we have gotten there with as
Speaker 1: much media attention? And it all really came down to
Speaker 1: him wanting to map human consciousness, you know, the dolphin work,
Speaker 1: the isolation tanks taking NSTI. All of it really boiled
Speaker 1: back to his medical background and just trying to figure
Speaker 1: out like the physicality of human consciousness where it was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he in in his um and later on, certainly by
Speaker 1: by the nineteen seventies, he would often talk about the
Speaker 1: province of the mind, which we reference in the title
Speaker 1: to this episode. Yeah, so here's the Lily quote that
Speaker 1: comes from you know what we what We've based the
Speaker 1: title in the episode from he says, in the province
Speaker 1: of the mind, what one believes to be true is
Speaker 1: true or becomes true with certain limits to be found
Speaker 1: experientially and experimentally. These limbs are further beliefs to be
Speaker 1: transcended in the mind. There are no limits. That was
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy two, So this was this was a
Speaker 1: 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 first
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, when he's sixteen years old, he supposedly
Speaker 1: wrote this essay. He was born in nineteen fifteen in
Speaker 1: Saint Paul Minnesota. Uh And and this is the specific
Speaker 1: a question that was quoted as being the title of
Speaker 1: his essay, how can the mind render itself sufficiently objective
Speaker 1: to study itself? That's pretty heavy for a sixteen year old.
Speaker 1: I don't think I had thoughts like that until much later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a that that's he was thinking big for
Speaker 1: for that age. Really. Yeah, unless that's some like revisionist
Speaker 1: history on his part. But Uh. The other thing that
Speaker 1: I thought was really interesting is my impression from the
Speaker 1: readings is that Lily came from a very wealthy family
Speaker 1: I think, UH and his father, it sounds like, wanted
Speaker 1: him to become a banker, but Lily wanted to be
Speaker 1: a scientist, and so eventually his father kind of came
Speaker 1: around and supported him going to school to study science,
Speaker 1: but also backed him financially and some of his research
Speaker 1: after school as well. Yeah, that's the that's the sense
Speaker 1: that I get from some of the resources who were
Speaker 1: looking at uh. And I do have to to mention
Speaker 1: that as far as we know, there's not a good,
Speaker 1: like solid concise biography out there, not yet, hopefully somebody's
Speaker 1: working on it. There are some very fine resources that
Speaker 1: we used for this episode and will cite those as
Speaker 1: we go. Yeah, this is a book slash movie dying
Speaker 1: to be made. Yeah yeah, I I think that, like
Speaker 1: in the same way that characters like Reich that we've
Speaker 1: talked about on the show before Shulgun just make for
Speaker 1: 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 Lily goes on. He
Speaker 1: gets his physics degree from cal Tech in night, receives
Speaker 1: a doctorate in medicine from the University of Pennsylvania two
Speaker 1: and as a faculty member he studies biophysics and psycho
Speaker 1: analysis at the University of Pennsylvania. Is primarily interested in
Speaker 1: the physical structures of the brain where that the conscious
Speaker 1: self might be found. So that's pretty interesting in that,
Speaker 1: like 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 a guy who has this
Speaker 1: 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 it. He's gonna utilize what whatever tools
Speaker 1: he can draw on, be they UH, disciplines, pharmaceuticals, technologies.
Speaker 1: We see this throughout his life. Yeah. And in some
Speaker 1: cases it's also like where he's going to get the
Speaker 1: support from. Right. I think all of us who have
Speaker 1: like large scale creative endeavors that we're trying to push
Speaker 1: and can't find necessarily the financial backing end up making
Speaker 1: compromises and uh, come World War two, Lily ends up
Speaker 1: doing research UH. Mainly it sounds like on the physiology
Speaker 1: of high altitude of flying, uh, specifically for the Air Force,
Speaker 1: and he was inventing different devices to measure GA gas
Speaker 1: pressure for those purposes. UM. And this is one of
Speaker 1: the first times apparently that he used himself as a
Speaker 1: guinea pig, uh Lily at which he would go on
Speaker 1: to do quite a bit later in his career. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think he had sort of a like an ethos
Speaker 1: surrounding that, right that I can't remember who it was,
Speaker 1: but I read that he um he he took this
Speaker 1: from another like kind of big thinker scientist who basically said, like,
Speaker 1: if you're not willing to experiment on yourself, then you
Speaker 1: shouldn't be willing to experiment on other human beings. Uh So,
Speaker 1: and this seems to be the case here where he
Speaker 1: participated in an experiment where he was studying the effects
Speaker 1: of explosive decompression on pilots at high altitudes. Uh And
Speaker 1: by all accounts that I read, this was something that
Speaker 1: could have killed him, but he went about and did
Speaker 1: it anyways. And this is in the thirties going into
Speaker 1: the forties, alright, So after the war, 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. It is during this area that Lily turns
Speaker 1: to neuroscience, which is a logical next step in this
Speaker 1: quest for consciousness. Right, And he's motivated in a large
Speaker 1: part by pioneering brain surgeon Wilder Penfield at this point.
Speaker 1: Uh And in short, what he ends up doing is
Speaker 1: he applies electronic engineering to the monitoring and mapping of
Speaker 1: the central nervous system, again drawing on the best technology
Speaker 1: available at the time to try and crack this nut
Speaker 1: of consciousness. And what I had read this is one
Speaker 1: of the first sences of his father, sorry, instances of
Speaker 1: his father funding him. His father helped him pay for
Speaker 1: the design of something he called the Baba Tron, which
Speaker 1: was a device for recording the impulses from within a
Speaker 1: rabbit's brain and they would project these impulses up onto
Speaker 1: like a television screen as waves. Um. So, the baba
Speaker 1: Tron included an array of sensors that were this is
Speaker 1: something we're gonna come back to over and over again
Speaker 1: with Lily, basically putting electrodes on the surface of the
Speaker 1: brain of different animals and human beings. Uh. And in
Speaker 1: nineteen fIF he want he published a paper that showed
Speaker 1: how to display these patterns in such a way projecting
Speaker 1: brain electrical activity on a television like screen. Uh. And
Speaker 1: I recently spent some time in the hospital. I had
Speaker 1: a family member in I see you, and I thought, wow, like,
Speaker 1: think of the just the standard hospital machinery we have
Speaker 1: that are like measuring and showing us things like oxygen
Speaker 1: levels and and uh, breathing and and and brain activity.
Speaker 1: You know, Lily was one of the pioneers and that
Speaker 1: you can thank him for that. This is a guy
Speaker 1: who who really did like impact our understanding of medicine
Speaker 1: and of thought. And you know, despite where he went
Speaker 1: down further in his career, he really did have like
Speaker 1: some contributions. Yeah, down or or out or out, Yeah,
Speaker 1: however you want to look at it. Absolutely From here
Speaker 1: he moves on to the National Institutes of Mental Health
Speaker 1: or NIM UH, and this is an area where he
Speaker 1: begins to get into a lot of interest and and
Speaker 1: at times kind of creepy work. Yeah. And I read
Speaker 1: an interesting thing that said that one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why he specifically went for this research position with NIM
Speaker 1: was that it gave him access to both the National
Speaker 1: Institute of Neurological Diseases, because that would give him access
Speaker 1: to resources about the physical brain, but it also gave
Speaker 1: him access to the National Institute of Mental Health, which
Speaker 1: focused on the mind, and he really wanted to combine
Speaker 1: the two uh, and he experimented on living brains with
Speaker 1: all these different techniques he developed, so you know, we've
Speaker 1: got the rabbits. We talked about that, but then he
Speaker 1: moved on to monkeys. His goal was to stimulate monkey
Speaker 1: brains without causing trauma or damage to their brain tissue.
Speaker 1: So he was one of the first scientists to locate Uh,
Speaker 1: this is a monkey brain, not a human brain, obviously,
Speaker 1: but he located their pain and pleasure centers, and his
Speaker 1: work there allowed him to map their neural networks and
Speaker 1: to link sensory events, muscle movement, and other behaviors related
Speaker 1: to the activity in their brain. This is going to
Speaker 1: be important later on when we get the dolphins. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is my understanding. Some it's pretty invasive surgery
Speaker 1: at this point in experimentation, and he spends essentially a
Speaker 1: decade working on it. Here uh again connecting invasive of
Speaker 1: vivisections of the cranium. And this is where things get
Speaker 1: into some creepier territory. Um. Again, he's laser focused on
Speaker 1: his goal, but he is an employ of NIM. He's
Speaker 1: working in the in the time of nineteen fifties Cold
Speaker 1: War paranoia. Uh, it's US versus the Soviets. There's they're
Speaker 1: 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 is available online, one could
Speaker 1: have linked to it on the landing page. He says.
Speaker 1: Lily 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 in the goal here, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the goal here was not just animals but humans. In
Speaker 1: an unpublished paper of Lily's titled Special Considerations of Modified
Speaker 1: Human Agents, as reconnaissance and intelligence devices. I really don't
Speaker 1: have to go much further than that just title, but
Speaker 1: he talked about such things as the quote covert and
Speaker 1: relatively safe implantation of electrodes into 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 um of inquiry right now. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: to to whatever extent his his ideas here were actually
Speaker 1: applicable given that the technology of the time, and he's
Speaker 1: certainly foreshadowing where the technology would go. He's certainly dreaming
Speaker 1: in 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
Speaker 1: point right Like I mentioned earlier that you know, his
Speaker 1: goal was not to cause trauma in the monkeys and
Speaker 1: not to damage their brain tissue. But I imagine it
Speaker 1: wasn't comfortable having these electrodes stuck in their brains, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I had my understanding. It also depended on what he
Speaker 1: was working on. So, um, you could use anesthetics on
Speaker 1: certain animals, but as we'll discuss, there are other animals
Speaker 1: that that simply stop breathing if you put them under
Speaker 1: an anesthetic, right. Yeah, And there's always there's a very
Speaker 1: interesting like, despite his profound respect for dolphins later on,
Speaker 1: there's some weird stuff that goes on with the dolphin
Speaker 1: research as well too, in terms of like kind of
Speaker 1: treating them humanely. Yeah, and uh and and certainly at
Speaker 1: this point in his career he has he's he's a
Speaker 1: very unsentimental guy. He's laser focused on this consciousness enigma. Uh.
Speaker 1: But he's not necessarily he's not he's certainly not the
Speaker 1: sort of hippie mythic figure counterculture figure we see later on.
Speaker 1: Quite the opposite. This is a guy who's on first
Speaker 1: name basis with Jaguar Hoover. He's very much a part
Speaker 1: of the establishment and kind of a scary part of
Speaker 1: the establishment. Yeah, and he is going to do what
Speaker 1: needs to be done to get the results. Right. So
Speaker 1: it's during this creepy period that little. He first learns
Speaker 1: from an oceanographer colleague that the largest brains are found
Speaker 1: in small toothed whales. Intrigued, he sets out to implant
Speaker 1: electrodes in the brains of captive dolphins at Florida's Marine Studios.
Speaker 1: Now this place still exists today under the name Marine
Speaker 1: Land of Florida. Some of our listeners have been there
Speaker 1: and can speak to it. But at the time they
Speaker 1: specialized in B movies. Really of particular note, they shot
Speaker 1: the Creature from the Black Lagoon here and Revenge of
Speaker 1: the Creature from ninety five. Wow. So John C. Lily
Speaker 1: was like peripherally involved with like universal horror, specifically the
Speaker 1: Creature from the Black Lagoon. I would I think you
Speaker 1: might have mentioned this before the podcast. How cool would
Speaker 1: it be for there to be like a Creature of
Speaker 1: the Black Lagoon remake that like mixes in some of
Speaker 1: the John C. Lily ideas of you know, both dolphin
Speaker 1: human communication but also isolation tanks and hallucinogenics. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: And in fact, we'll get back to the creu from
Speaker 1: the Black Lagoon in a minute, because the connection between
Speaker 1: Lily and the creature he is even closer than you
Speaker 1: might be thinking, right now, okay, cool, cool, Okay, So
Speaker 1: he he engages in this work, right, he's uh, he's
Speaker 1: he's putting the electrodes on the dolphins brains. One of
Speaker 1: the problems here, as I mentioned, is that dolphins stop
Speaker 1: breathing when they're under anesthetic. And this has to do
Speaker 1: with the conscious nature of dolphin respirations that it's it's
Speaker 1: not as as much of a you know, a subconscious
Speaker 1: activity is as as it is for us surface dwellers. Um.
Speaker 1: So it's it's pretty rough work. Dolphins are dying during
Speaker 1: the experiments, but one of them, before it passes, makes
Speaker 1: a series of sounds, and Lily has this really this
Speaker 1: epiphany that 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: it's just this, this Eureka moment for him. He's been
Speaker 1: searching for consciousness, searching for for some sort of you know,
Speaker 1: ultimately connection to another mind, and he feels as if
Speaker 1: he has glimpsed it. So this is sort of a
Speaker 1: good segue, I guess then from his dolphin or actually,
Speaker 1: this isn't even the really scratching the surface of his
Speaker 1: dolphin research, right, is where he first sort of dabbles
Speaker 1: in it. Yeah, this is where, yeah, he dabbles in it,
Speaker 1: and and the light bulb goes off and he realizes,
Speaker 1: I have to work with these dolphins. Everything else I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm just gonna walk away from because this, this
Speaker 1: is where I need to be. And then, in order
Speaker 1: to facilitate this type of study he develops he invents
Speaker 1: the isolation tank, which most of us know nowadays, right,
Speaker 1: because it's a fairly popularized thing. I was first familiar
Speaker 1: with it from Altered States. That was the first time
Speaker 1: I'd ever heard of it. I think I probably saw
Speaker 1: Altered States when I was like nineteen or twenty or
Speaker 1: something like that. But just last year, maybe two years ago,
Speaker 1: my wife for my birthday got me um a gift
Speaker 1: card to go visit an isolation tank center here in Atlanta.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I think we've likely been to the same place. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you've done it as well, right. Yeah. For those of
Speaker 1: you who are not familiar with it, uh, yeah, you
Speaker 1: can probably find a float a place in your your
Speaker 1: area and you try it out for yourself. But essentially
Speaker 1: it is a chamber, a dark chamber filled with very
Speaker 1: buoyant salt water. You go in there, you you know,
Speaker 1: maybe you put on some goggles, maybe you're wearing a
Speaker 1: bathing suit, maybe not, and you're just floating there in
Speaker 1: the silence. Uh. You all your hearing is just the
Speaker 1: sound of the water, the sound of your your own heartbeat. Uh.
Speaker 1: And because you're floating, you don't really sense any touch, right.
Speaker 1: It's which is unusual for us. We're always like kind
Speaker 1: of bound to something by gravity. But this allows you
Speaker 1: to kind of just float there. Um. The darkness takes
Speaker 1: away your eyesight for the most part. The one I
Speaker 1: was in kind of I don't know about you, but
Speaker 1: it had like a little bit of a transparency to it,
Speaker 1: so natural daylight kind of came in. Um. And then
Speaker 1: there was what was the other Oh, they gave me
Speaker 1: ear plugs? Did you get ear plugs? I may have
Speaker 1: gotten near plus I can't remember now. I do remember
Speaker 1: 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 it tends to be calibrated so that
Speaker 1: it's about human body temperature. 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: individuds who tested it out. But of course Lily 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 mean,
Speaker 1: the basic idea here was he wanted to test whether
Speaker 1: the brain would actually shut down if there was no
Speaker 1: stimuli received. Right, But yeah, it's really interesting. Again, So
Speaker 1: like the figure that he becomes this kind of hippie
Speaker 1: psychedelic grew figure. You trace back his history and it's
Speaker 1: like ultimately connected to this kind of movement of torture
Speaker 1: and interrogation, right. I mean, like people, I don't know
Speaker 1: that they're necessarily using isolation tanks, but sensory deprivation is
Speaker 1: very much a thing that we do nowadays, we the
Speaker 1: United States military and government when we're trying to get
Speaker 1: information out of, you know, somebody that that might have
Speaker 1: something that's going to 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 individuals that are in solitary confinement. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's this is fascinating to me too, because this
Speaker 1: is right around it's a little bit earlier, but around
Speaker 1: the same time that Michelle Fucot is really starting to
Speaker 1: 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 really
Speaker 1: gets into the idea of the isolation tank, and this
Speaker 1: is this is kind of happening in the background to
Speaker 1: the dolphin stuff. We we just mentioned the beginnings of
Speaker 1: the dolphin stuff. Um. I'm gonna actually just read uh
Speaker 1: 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 inside his head. You
Speaker 1: are free of the physical world at that point, and
Speaker 1: anything can happen inside your head because everything is governed
Speaker 1: by the laws of thought rather in the laws of
Speaker 1: the external world. So you can go to the limits
Speaker 1: of your conceptions. And so this is a good moment,
Speaker 1: I think for us to sort of back up for
Speaker 1: the listener for you out there listening. If you've never
Speaker 1: done this and you've never seen it depicted or read
Speaker 1: about it. Um. People oftentimes report that during their experience
Speaker 1: in these tanks, they see colorful images, they have memories
Speaker 1: 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. 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's 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 and
Speaker 1: I don't quite know how that would happen, even especially
Speaker 1: given my experience in an isolation tank. But this was
Speaker 1: 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: like speculations on orgasms and ejaculation, is uh that he
Speaker 1: also figured out that even in the tank that the
Speaker 1: pure mental state that he was looking to achieve wasn't
Speaker 1: necessarily possible because it even eliminating all sensory stimulation, just
Speaker 1: that 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, this 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 it touches on
Speaker 1: some more the mystical ideas that he explores in his work.
Speaker 1: I do have to say, though, with ultimately what he's
Speaker 1: talking about here, and ultimately with with the experience of
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 me voice, what
Speaker 1: Cartole calls the egoic mind, this sort of me 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 in 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 know,
Speaker 1: with yoga and meditation in some situations. But but also
Speaker 1: I gotta say, after doing the isolation tank thing, I
Speaker 1: want one of those in my home. And maybe maybe
Speaker 1: if you did it too much, it would it would
Speaker 1: sort of defeat the purpose for achieving that sort of
Speaker 1: lack of self right of thinking about everything else around you.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I've never heard anyone say they do
Speaker 1: it too much. There always people are really into it.
Speaker 1: Or if I could just like after every day coming home,
Speaker 1: just hop into one of those for thirty minutes, that
Speaker 1: would be great. I read an account about there was
Speaker 1: a woman in the nineteen eighties who was apparently like
Speaker 1: a I don't know that I would call her a
Speaker 1: student of Lilies, but she was somebody who followed his
Speaker 1: work closely. She was one of the first people to
Speaker 1: open like a business around isolation tanks, and she had
Speaker 1: one in her home on the twenty floor of a
Speaker 1: Manhattan skyscraper, and she I think at the time she
Speaker 1: charged people like twenty five dollars per hour. And one
Speaker 1: of her main clients was a television executive who would
Speaker 1: he said something along the lines of, how like after
Speaker 1: every flight home back to Manhattan, after like you know,
Speaker 1: doing a bunch of television sales type stuff, he would,
Speaker 1: before even going home, go to her place and up
Speaker 1: into one of these isolation tanks. It's kind of fascinating
Speaker 1: that like a guy like that saw the value and
Speaker 1: just kind of slowing everything down. Yeah, I mean it
Speaker 1: leaves a bit leads a busy life, so it would
Speaker 1: make sense at this point we're gonna return back to dolphins.
Speaker 1: I feel like we we've we've set everything up to
Speaker 1: continue Lily's journey. We're going to around nineteen Uh. This
Speaker 1: is when Lily presents a paper before the American Psychiatric
Speaker 1: Association and he makes some rather dramatic claims about the
Speaker 1: intelligence and the linguistic abilities of the bottlenose dolphins, specifically.
Speaker 1: Now that the evidence City cites as apparent is arguably
Speaker 1: scant and and anecdotal, but it resonated pretty strongly, and
Speaker 1: it resonated with the right people. So soon you had
Speaker 1: prestigious federal research awards rolling in, and he uses these
Speaker 1: funds to build a dedicated dolphin laboratory on St. Tom
Speaker 1: Miss in the US Virgin Islands, the Communication Research Institute
Speaker 1: or c r I. Yeah, And the most fascinating thing
Speaker 1: that you added to these notes is that at its height,
Speaker 1: this institute, under Lily's guidance, was receiving half a million
Speaker 1: dollars a year in grant money. It exploded crazy, especially
Speaker 1: when you consider what half a million dollars was worth
Speaker 1: back then. That's nuts, uh, that that he was getting
Speaker 1: that much support Uh. And it sounds like during this
Speaker 1: time he I guess he had a home in Miami.
Speaker 1: Sounded like he'd become fairly acclimated to Florida and liked
Speaker 1: it a lot there. But he had the lab in St. Thomas. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there was this really interesting nineteen sixty Time magazine
Speaker 1: piece that I was able to pull and it's this
Speaker 1: kind of fascinating like feature peace on on him and
Speaker 1: they described him as a deep chested, sun tanned neurophysiologist.
Speaker 1: I like that. Uh. That that must be where the
Speaker 1: idea for the George C. Scott character and the dolphin
Speaker 1: came from. But at the time that they came to
Speaker 1: visit him Time Magazine, that is Uh, he was working
Speaker 1: on an elaborate system of jetties and pools at the center.
Speaker 1: The idea was that he was trying to learn about
Speaker 1: dolphins sonar for the Navy. They were paying for the
Speaker 1: expenses of this construction. Uh. And the idea was that
Speaker 1: they they felt that dolphins sonar was better than their
Speaker 1: own capabilities at the time, so they wanted to figure
Speaker 1: out a way to reverse engineer and mimic it. Yes,
Speaker 1: the Navy was definitely one of the interested parties that
Speaker 1: was won over by his his arguments for dolphin intelligence
Speaker 1: and dolphin abilities. Well, I mean he had some some
Speaker 1: convincing evidence. Like you said, it wasn't all like uh perfect,
Speaker 1: But when he he must have been a very charismatic guy,
Speaker 1: I'm imagining, because when he gives these presentations, people just
Speaker 1: fall head over heels for it. I mean, you hear
Speaker 1: it in his voice, and you will actually hear his
Speaker 1: voice at the end of this podcast. Like one of
Speaker 1: the things that I think he convinced the Navy with
Speaker 1: was by dissecting dolphin brains. Uh. You know, we we
Speaker 1: talked about this earlier. They're bigger than human brains obviously,
Speaker 1: but they also have as complicated a cerebral cortex. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so this is when he starts planting electrodes in
Speaker 1: the dolphin brains, kind of along the same lines of
Speaker 1: what we were talking about with the monkeys earlier, trying
Speaker 1: to stimulate their pleasure centers, specifically with electricity. And this
Speaker 1: is the weirdest, Like this grossed me out. This quote
Speaker 1: from the Time magazine article. He said when he first
Speaker 1: stimulated their pleasure centers with electrodes, the muscles around their
Speaker 1: blow hole smiled. That is the weirdest, like I don't
Speaker 1: know why, it just squeaks me out, like the idea
Speaker 1: of a little smile for around and the but the
Speaker 1: like dolphins got like its head peel, you know, it's
Speaker 1: scalp peeled back with all these electrodes wired into it.
Speaker 1: Whatever the case, the dolphins loved it. In fact, there
Speaker 1: is 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 sixty piece, they say this is
Speaker 1: where he first encountered the dolphins mimicking humans speech. He
Speaker 1: says that apparently, and maybe he's just you know, b
Speaker 1: ssing them during an interview or something like that. But
Speaker 1: he 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 the
Speaker 1: tape recorder later on that was imitating him saying the
Speaker 1: words three hundred and twenty three over and over again.
Speaker 1: And then he also said that the dolphins imitated the
Speaker 1: buzz of a transformer and the rattle of a movie
Speaker 1: camera 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. Uh. But he specifically noted that
Speaker 1: this 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 was going
Speaker 1: to happen, and this was just kind of a test
Speaker 1: of their I guess, like bond together. But it just
Speaker 1: again I was like wow, Like, uh, despite his fascination
Speaker 1: and love for these animals, he's willing to like let
Speaker 1: 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 NYMN 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 uh, but he was still at times
Speaker 1: sort of accused of of having on an occasional cavalier
Speaker 1: attitude towards that the test dolphins. Yeah. I think though
Speaker 1: that that sort of phases out over time, you know. Um.
Speaker 1: But not a year later after this time thing, that's
Speaker 1: when he published his like big dolphin book, right, yes,
Speaker 1: nineteen one Man and Dolphin Adventures of a New Scientific Frontier.
Speaker 1: And this book just really becomes a big deal. Not
Speaker 1: only researchers, not only scientists and academics, but just the
Speaker 1: general public are eating this book up. And I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna read you a quick sample from it so you
Speaker 1: can get just an idea of some of the things
Speaker 1: he's talking about. In this book. He's documenting his work
Speaker 1: with dolphins thus far, but he's also talking about where
Speaker 1: he thinks this work can take us. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: eventually it may be possible for humans to speak with
Speaker 1: another species. I have come to this conclusion after careful
Speaker 1: consideration of evidence game through my research experiments with dolphins.
Speaker 1: If new scientific developments are to be made in this direction, however,
Speaker 1: certain changes in our basic orientation, orientation and philosophy will
Speaker 1: be necessary. So he's talking about just a game changing
Speaker 1: development here. He's talking about he discusses us reaching the
Speaker 1: point where we we teach dolphins to speak English, to
Speaker 1: speak English, and to even have to create a chair
Speaker 1: for them on the United Nations. So you know that
Speaker 1: this he's talking about finding an alien intelligence here on
Speaker 1: our planet and uh and and communing with them, um,
Speaker 1: communicating with them and actually inviting them into our rule
Speaker 1: of the world. And he's clearly going into his own
Speaker 1: soul searching too. If we sort of like compare this
Speaker 1: with the history of his life, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think he had like a very personal reason for
Speaker 1: feeling so strongly about this, given the way that he
Speaker 1: had experimented on these animals previously. He goes from that
Speaker 1: to thinking that they should be part of the United Nations.
Speaker 1: Uh and and by the sixties, he's this is when
Speaker 1: he's publishing academic papers glore showing that dolphins can mimic
Speaker 1: all kinds of human speech patterns by clicking, squeaking, and rasping.
Speaker 1: Uh And he even talked there's this British I got
Speaker 1: the impression from the article I read that this British
Speaker 1: anthropologist was a big deal at the time. His name
Speaker 1: is Gregory Bateson and the US Navy and and him
Speaker 1: and Lily were all kind of influenced by the research
Speaker 1: that was going on at the center. And Lily pitched
Speaker 1: human dolphin communication to NASA at the time, saying that
Speaker 1: if they were going to encounter aliens, this is the
Speaker 1: perfect way for them to sort of come up with
Speaker 1: a model of communications standards with an alien intelligence. Yeah
Speaker 1: to And it makes sense, right if you're attempting to
Speaker 1: communicate 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 eaching 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 Right,
Speaker 1: like he's paw, and I think he names them all
Speaker 1: things that rhyme with paw because it's easier for them
Speaker 1: 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. It inspires 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: I 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 suit in the first two Creature films. And
Speaker 1: uh and again he co created Flipper, and Lily is
Speaker 1: actually thanked in the credits to the 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 too,
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 undersea adventure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's opening up to us in ways that it just
Speaker 1: had not been previously available. And so we're we're fascinated
Speaker 1: with this new world down there. And then to to
Speaker 1: to also have this potential revelation laid on our plate
Speaker 1: that there is an intelligence down there, uh more or
Speaker 1: less on par with our own. I wonder what John C.
Speaker 1: Lily thought of the ABYSS. I don't know that would
Speaker 1: have been interesting. Huh. Yeah, that's probably in a way.
Speaker 1: That's a very Lily movie, isn't it. So studies at
Speaker 1: the center continue again. Lily's approach gradually moves away from
Speaker 1: the sort of the creepy world of nim his nim
Speaker 1: work and into less invasive techniques. He abandons the use
Speaker 1: of electrodes and instead attempts to essentially meld minds with
Speaker 1: 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 pipes 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 if they seem like
Speaker 1: very disparate things when you say dolphins, isolation, hanks, 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 he oh,
Speaker 1: I didn't know that really, And this was pretty standard
Speaker 1: for the time. This was a time when there were
Speaker 1: a lot of LSD experiments going on, and we were
Speaker 1: putting LSD into the bodies of various animals and testo
Speaker 1: just 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 into Yeah, see if he could he could understand
Speaker 1: their mind. Yea. 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 Echoes
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 sent it around Lily his research
Speaker 1: and his sort of philosophy. Yeah, I had no idea.
Speaker 1: It 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. I 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 nervious 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 lially 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 bring 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 well 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 also want you know,
Speaker 1: projecting your consciousness on to another creature, okay, okay um.
Speaker 1: As Clark points out in his paper, projection short circuits
Speaker 1: a proper understanding of what others are thinking or meaning
Speaker 1: to convey when they make a communic communicative offer, so
Speaker 1: that in projection goes. It's a problem when we just
Speaker 1: try and communicate with each other, Like I'm not just community,
Speaker 1: I'm not communicating solely with you. I'm communicating with a
Speaker 1: version of you I have in my mind, my expectations
Speaker 1: of you. And then the kind of feedback you provide
Speaker 1: as well. It's the inherent problem of human communication, and
Speaker 1: through a series of feedback and feed forward we try
Speaker 1: to clear up like various psychological noise that gets in
Speaker 1: the middle there of our understanding of what one another
Speaker 1: is saying. But yeah, it's it's kind of like the
Speaker 1: human dilemma, right, is that like we're we're never going
Speaker 1: to fully be able to at least, you know, with
Speaker 1: just our voices, uh, communicate what's going on inside our
Speaker 1: head to one another. Really really wanted to get past that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And but one of the problems, of course, is that he's,
Speaker 1: despite his scientific background and all of the vigoris throwing
Speaker 1: into this, he seems to always be working with the
Speaker 1: certainty that communication can truly be established, and that not
Speaker 1: only is he reaching out, but they're reaching out to us.
Speaker 1: He said to quote, we must keep the working hypothesis
Speaker 1: in mind that they are highly intelligent and are just
Speaker 1: as interested in communicating with us as we are with them.
Speaker 1: So you know, that's a potential stumbling block to your
Speaker 1: your efforts here, because you already have it firmly established
Speaker 1: in your mind that this can be done, that this
Speaker 1: connection is there to be made. I mean, and again,
Speaker 1: the intelligence of dolphins isn't in doubt. But to work
Speaker 1: with that kind of certainty, uh, with with the kind
Speaker 1: of certainty that they reflect our desire to communicate as well,
Speaker 1: that's problematic. Yeah, and certainly I can imagine where that
Speaker 1: is where he starts to have stumbling blocks with funders like, uh,
Speaker 1: the Navy for instance, in the Air Force, or just
Speaker 1: any like even NYM Like when you start postulating that
Speaker 1: your test subjects are on an equal playing field with
Speaker 1: humanity and should be treated as such, that's going to
Speaker 1: be immediately problematic for them, right because it's outside of
Speaker 1: their 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: 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
Speaker 1: R I. So this is actually I don't know about
Speaker 1: this particularly, but I know that he pitched an idea
Speaker 1: that basically there needed to be some kind of living
Speaker 1: space that humans and dolphins could coexist within to communicate.
Speaker 1: Is this his attempt at that, Yeah, it's I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of credit has to go to scientists. Margaret
Speaker 1: how Love it who was actually the woman who lived
Speaker 1: with the dolphins, and she she later wrote a book
Speaker 1: where a number of articles that came out about her experience.
Speaker 1: There's a great Guardian article actually titled to 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 have 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, 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 really 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 with the some added complications, um
Speaker 1: that end up being important later on in that they
Speaker 1: helped us to scandalize the work here. But dolphins are
Speaker 1: pretty can be pretty sexual creatures. So yeah, I've heard story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is probably where a lot of people are familiar
Speaker 1: with the story because she would occasionally have to help relieve,
Speaker 1: help dispense Peter of his sexual urges, let's say, in
Speaker 1: order to keep the work going. And that's she says,
Speaker 1: that's the way she approached approaching and not from a
Speaker 1: sexual uh you know vantage point. But it was this
Speaker 1: is a part of how Peter behaves as a dolphin,
Speaker 1: and we need to just sort of get that out
Speaker 1: of the way so we can continue working on language. Okay, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I could see what that would be quite scandalous. It's
Speaker 1: one thing to pose it that a dolphin is on
Speaker 1: a sort of equal identity status, individual individualistic status with
Speaker 1: a human being. It's another thing to start engaging with
Speaker 1: them what people would consider bestiality. Yeah, he'd get into
Speaker 1: a weird area here. We have to sort of explain
Speaker 1: yourself out of that, or attempt to explain yourself out
Speaker 1: of that to your your backers or by nineteen seventy five,
Speaker 1: actually Hustler magazine comes out with them with an article
Speaker 1: about it and didn't help. Oh yeah, they completely scandalized
Speaker 1: love It and It and the experiment. They had some
Speaker 1: sort of a provocative illustration and just made it sound
Speaker 1: like like love It and Lily were just engaged in
Speaker 1: a you know, a pan species free for all there
Speaker 1: something which criticisms of this experiment aside. You know, clearly
Speaker 1: wasn't the point they were. They were trying to teach
Speaker 1: this creature to speak English. They were trying to to
Speaker 1: bridge this gap between the species and it. But it
Speaker 1: did get into some pretty weird areas. This sounds like
Speaker 1: another like we should add this to our our little
Speaker 1: document of ideas. This sounds like a great thing that
Speaker 1: we should cover for a future episode. Is like how
Speaker 1: much animal sexuality gets in the way of human animal experimentation. Uh,
Speaker 1: and and like this can't be the first time or
Speaker 1: only time that's happened, yeah, or the last. So by
Speaker 1: autumn of nine, Lily is increasingly more interested in LSD
Speaker 1: research then 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.
Speaker 1: Um and they didn't even have a peer reviewed 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 point 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, Lily told
Speaker 1: love It that Peter died via suicide. That since dolphins
Speaker 1: have to consciously breathe, that if a dolphin is is
Speaker 1: significantly upset, it may just simply shut down and stop breathing.
Speaker 1: And that is allegedally what happened, and that it was
Speaker 1: upset by the suffering of its bond. Would love it
Speaker 1: perhaps that's why. That's what love It, That's what love
Speaker 1: It says in in in her book and in interviews. Yeah. See,
Speaker 1: so this is a little bit different from what I
Speaker 1: had read. And this is by Lily's own account. Later on,
Speaker 1: he sort of defiantly goes on later on to say,
Speaker 1: like he, in the face of the Navy and everybody else,
Speaker 1: he purposely let all the dolphins go. Uh And he
Speaker 1: even said to the point he said, well they were
Speaker 1: finished reprogramming me. So he you know, obviously like went
Speaker 1: to the uh far into the metaphor with the dolphins
Speaker 1: were performing the experiments on him, he wasn't experimenting on them,
Speaker 1: and that they chose to let him go. Yes, indeed,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, at this point we really reached
Speaker 1: the point where Lily begins to fall out of favor
Speaker 1: with a lot of folks. Certainly by the time that
Speaker 1: Hustler magazine article comes out in seventy five. Uh, as
Speaker 1: I pointed out in that Orian magazine piece of Mind
Speaker 1: in the Water that I mentioned earlier, Lily went on
Speaker 1: to just be widely reviled by professional dolphin researchers and
Speaker 1: working scientists have for some time tended to dismiss him
Speaker 1: as just a lunatic, you know, as this hippie nut job.
Speaker 1: And you can understand that, right, I mean, you're trying
Speaker 1: to do this serious professional work and his figure is
Speaker 1: sort of looming in the in your peripheral fision. The
Speaker 1: whole time people were perhaps bringing him up. His he's
Speaker 1: he's tarnished your your your work, and your passions to
Speaker 1: a certain extent by his approach to tackling them. Well,
Speaker 1: especially knowing how competitive and sort of vicious. Unfortunately that
Speaker 1: like academic and research competition can kind of go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not surprised at all that sort of like the
Speaker 1: next generation of dolphin researchers turned on him, although you know,
Speaker 1: it also does sound like he wasn't exactly producing uh
Speaker 1: I guess like documented results, right, the kind of things
Speaker 1: that were that were being looked for, both for the
Speaker 1: funding but also to justify you know, what he was
Speaker 1: doing exactly. Well. I I also heard that, uh, and
Speaker 1: I'm curious if this is still true. This is from
Speaker 1: around the time, right before he died. Apparently the research
Speaker 1: station was going to be converted into a luxury condo
Speaker 1: living center that was called Dolphin Cove. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: wonder if Dolphin Cove is still there with St. Thomas, right, yeah, yeah, curious, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'd love to hear from you visit it. I wonder
Speaker 1: if the underwater apartment is still there. You pay three
Speaker 1: hundred dollars a night to stay and uh, there's no dolphin,
Speaker 1: you just you know, underwater. Yeah. So okay, this is
Speaker 1: really like the final I guess stage of Lily's research
Speaker 1: career as it were, and he kind of goes whole
Speaker 1: hog into the LSD field, right, right, And this is
Speaker 1: pretty much the the path he continues for the rest
Speaker 1: of his life. Really, this is where this is where
Speaker 1: Lily truly becomes the the the coon skin cap wearing uh,
Speaker 1: psychonaut counterculture mythic figure. This is when he gets his
Speaker 1: membership card into the Psychedelic Avengers that we've been talking
Speaker 1: about on on our episodes for quite is officially a
Speaker 1: part of the team now. And I've seen photos of
Speaker 1: him hanging out with Timothy Learry and Alan 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: so is 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
Speaker 1: LSD and the use of LSD and other psychoactive agents
Speaker 1: too still crack that nut of consciousness in human existence.
Speaker 1: And uh, and and reached that providence of the mind.
Speaker 1: And one of my understandings is that like once l
Speaker 1: s 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 any indication, and
Speaker 1: he wrote a lot about his experiences using LSD. Like
Speaker 1: the times he used it, he really used it, like
Speaker 1: he went in Whole Hawk. He had access, legitimate access
Speaker 1: to pharmaceutical grade LSD and really attempted to just break
Speaker 1: through to the other side with it. And this was
Speaker 1: one of the actual like primary resources you were able
Speaker 1: to get a hold of for this episode, right with
Speaker 1: one of his books specifically about these experiences, what's it called.
Speaker 1: It's called Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human bio Computer.
Speaker 1: And this is just kind of his like lab notes
Speaker 1: of taking LSD essentially, it's hiss. Yeah, his big book
Speaker 1: of LSD observations published in nineteen seventy two, and it's
Speaker 1: um God, it's a it's a very interesting book to read.
Speaker 1: It's a difficult book to to read as well. Uh,
Speaker 1: A lot of Lui's writing on this sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Um it seems to be a fascinating synthesis of converging discipline,
Speaker 1: so he's he's dealing with mysticism and new age thought.
Speaker 1: He's also using a lot of computer programming terminology and
Speaker 1: computer programming metaphors and as his evidence in the title. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that goes back to when he was talking about
Speaker 1: the dolphins at the end of it too, he said
Speaker 1: they reprogrammed him. And then there's a lot of psychoanalysis
Speaker 1: in there as well. Like any discipline he's picked up,
Speaker 1: any technology has picked up, it goes into this writing.
Speaker 1: And at times there's almost a stream of consciousness quality
Speaker 1: to the writings, as if all all three of these
Speaker 1: interpretive systems are working at the same time in different ways,
Speaker 1: and literally is just sharing his thoughts in real time.
Speaker 1: And this can be at times alluring, it can be
Speaker 1: rather alienating. Their portions of programming the human computer that
Speaker 1: that read 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: if his present day he'd be publishing kindle e books
Speaker 1: or something like that, Right, but like, isn't there still
Speaker 1: like a trust or something like that? That manages his
Speaker 1: manages manages his publishing endeavors. Yeah, I believe so. I
Speaker 1: mean all his books are still out there in one
Speaker 1: form or another. Um. But you know, even though at
Speaker 1: times there's stuffy, there other times where it does just
Speaker 1: read like pure um psychonautic poetry. He's uh, he's he's
Speaker 1: 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 uh,
Speaker 1: I guess it's the echo phase. This is where, by
Speaker 1: the way, like connected to the Echo the Dolphin video game,
Speaker 1: it's not echo e C h O, it's e c
Speaker 1: CEO because it's an acronym. Oh. Yes, Earth Coincidence Control Office. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this ends up coming at about in the
Speaker 1: in the seventies really, but you see the roots of
Speaker 1: it back as far as nineteen two. Okay, um, because
Speaker 1: with his 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 too. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a certain amount of performance are, there's a certain amount
Speaker 1: of goofery. But then there are also some serious undertones
Speaker 1: as well. So this involves astrophysicist, radio astronomers, atmosphere at chemists,
Speaker 1: computer engineers, um. And they even apparently have special special
Speaker 1: pins that they would wear. Man, can you imaginef we
Speaker 1: could get ahold of some of those pins for a
Speaker 1: pretty penny on eBay. Yes, sir, someone will want to
Speaker 1: make sure one of his acts, one of his coonskin hats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was apparently a little Engrave dolphin. And eventually a
Speaker 1: lot of his more sci fi oriented ideas come out
Speaker 1: of this period as well. And again like I'm I'm
Speaker 1: I'm not a percent sure that Lily actually believed this stuff, right,
Speaker 1: I think it's we need to cover it in order
Speaker 1: to sort of get the full Lily picture here, Right.
Speaker 1: I get the feeling that this is sort of him, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: performance art, 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 simple for such a complex individual, especially when we
Speaker 1: 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 metaprom and the Better Programming
Speaker 1: in the Human Biocomputer, he said, I had written the
Speaker 1: report in such a way that it's basic messages were
Speaker 1: hidden behind a heavy, long introduction designed to stop the
Speaker 1: casual reader. Apparently, once word got out, this device no
Speaker 1: longer stalled the interested readers. Somehow, the basic messages were
Speaker 1: important enough to enough readers so that the work acquired
Speaker 1: an unexpected viability. So he's all, he's already talking at
Speaker 1: that stage about a kind of coded nature to his work,
Speaker 1: that that he's hiding ideas that he's and that he's
Speaker 1: layering these ideas. So it seems, yeah, in light of that,
Speaker 1: it seems a bit counterintuitive to say that, for instance,
Speaker 1: when he's talking about the threat of a um solid
Speaker 1: state intelligence, that he's leap speaking literally. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: we have to remember back up, like, this is a
Speaker 1: guy whose whole purpose in life was human consciousness and uh,
Speaker 1: connecting human consciousness to other consciousnesses, right, and language, he's
Speaker 1: fully aware that language is the best way that we're
Speaker 1: doing that now and the ways to manipulate it in
Speaker 1: order to sort of best I guess you could almost
Speaker 1: look at it as a like tool of rhetoric, right,
Speaker 1: in 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: there's 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 world of you. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's not that far off from like other I'm
Speaker 1: thinking like Philip K. Dick for definitely, like he's writing
Speaker 1: around the same period of time, so it's not that
Speaker 1: far off. I can imagine that Lily would maybe pick
Speaker 1: up something like Vallis and be like, Okay, maybe this
Speaker 1: is a cool idea for me to get my ideas
Speaker 1: of consciousness 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, and which
Speaker 1: he referred to as the solid state intelligence or s
Speaker 1: s I, so specifically, he said this would be a
Speaker 1: conflict over ideal environmental conditions for either humans or the
Speaker 1: sort of s s I created bioforms that crave cold
Speaker 1: and vacuums. So yeah, yeah, well, I mean and then
Speaker 1: along this period of time too, is when he envisions
Speaker 1: what I was telling you about earlier, which I thought
Speaker 1: was where the apartment thing was going, but he called
Speaker 1: it the future communications laboratory, and he called it a
Speaker 1: floating living room. Uh. And the idea is that this
Speaker 1: is where humans and dolphins would come to connect. So
Speaker 1: I'm imagining something like along the lines of like a
Speaker 1: c world type thing that's less uh imprisoning to the dolphins,
Speaker 1: right where the dolphins can kind of come up and
Speaker 1: interact with human beings. Uh. And and so that that
Speaker 1: idea is like along those same lines, I guess. But
Speaker 1: we have to remember to like nineteen seventy two, the
Speaker 1: same time he's he's he's getting into this real weird stuff.
Speaker 1: Lily's pivotal to establishing the Marine Mammal Protection Act within
Speaker 1: the United States government. You know, I mean, he's grounded.
Speaker 1: He's actually affecting change and in how human beings are
Speaker 1: connecting with dolphins. But he's also you know, experimenting with
Speaker 1: some of this other stuff. Yeah, I have to say,
Speaker 1: just like backing up and looking at the big picture here.
Speaker 1: I think he was having a laugh, you know, or
Speaker 1: or or maybe just trying to use um, some really
Speaker 1: out there ideas in order to draw attention to his
Speaker 1: more grounded philosophy. Yeah, he's more of a mystical philosopher, dreamer,
Speaker 1: and to a certain extent, trickster. You can't wear a
Speaker 1: coonskin calf like that and expect to be taking taking seriously,
Speaker 1: You're kind of winking at the audience at that point.
Speaker 1: But but to your point, Yeah, he he was a
Speaker 1: was a major proponent of of not only the intelligence
Speaker 1: and value of dolphins but they're in Wales, but their
Speaker 1: their rights as well. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean he believed
Speaker 1: that killing whales and dolphins was as immoral as killing
Speaker 1: other human beings, and they should be protected by law
Speaker 1: and humans should understand them as sentient beings. This is
Speaker 1: one of the big quotes that I saw pop up
Speaker 1: from him over and over and over again about dolphins.
Speaker 1: He said, they are not someone to kill, but someone
Speaker 1: to learn from, and I think you see that, and
Speaker 1: at least we're not quite there yet obviously, but I mean, like,
Speaker 1: think of all of the protests over the last couple
Speaker 1: of decades about like dolphins getting killed in tuna traps,
Speaker 1: right like that kind of uh thought about dolphins would
Speaker 1: not have been possible without Lily. Indeed, So there you
Speaker 1: have it, John C. Lily hopefully a a much more
Speaker 1: complete picture of the man and his work, his seriousness,
Speaker 1: his madness, 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 to do in previous episodes. Yeah. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I would love to hear from people out
Speaker 1: there who have maybe got some because it seems like
Speaker 1: there's just such a wide array of resources about Lily.
Speaker 1: Is there something that we missed here or is there
Speaker 1: more to the story. Maybe you know something about Echo
Speaker 1: that we don't know. Maybe you've been in touch with
Speaker 1: the Solid State intelligence. Uh, you know, you can talk
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Speaker 1: those platforms, and of course the best way to get
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Speaker 1: which is blow the mind at how Stuff Works dot com. Now,
Speaker 1: most of you are used to the show ending right there.
Speaker 1: We usually end it right after dot Com, but we're
Speaker 1: going to end a little differently today. Right Robert, you
Speaker 1: found a particular gem that we're going to add to
Speaker 1: the episode. That's try. We're going to close it out
Speaker 1: with the Art Department track The Agent, off of the
Speaker 1: two thousand fourteen album Natural Selection from Number nineteen Music.
Speaker 1: There uh in O one nine music on Facebook, Twitter,
Speaker 1: and Instagram. This is a really cool track and it
Speaker 1: includes samples from John C. Lily's lecture through the Center
Speaker 1: of the Mandala. One problem in human existence it's the
Speaker 1: tendency to repeat repeating wants control m. For more on
Speaker 1: this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com.