Psychedelic Salon episodes 259-260
Bruce Damer - The Great Crescendo Parts 1-2 (recorded March, 2011)

Program Notes:

“What’s interesting is the difference, or the counter-ballast, between the dialogue of doom and the voices of hope, and the innovators of hope for the future. And it’s something that you could refer to almost as like a great crescendo.”

“I think that in this year of 2011 and heading into the auspicious year of 2012 and 2013 and beyond we are in the great crescendo of humanity.”

“I think in a sense it’s the dialogue, it is the control of the dialogue that is the problem here. It’s the battle of the airwaves. It’s the people we didn’t nominate to talk back to us and tell us what our culture is and what our future is and what our politics are. That is the problem. That’s the primary problem.”

“There can’t just be protests, it can’t be like the Sixties. You can’t be just against. You have to find out what you are for, not just what you are against. That’s the key to getting through the Crescendo.”

“To some extent, the future is being made around us.”

“I would say it’s no more than 500 people in the United States who cause a vast amount of the grief.”

“A crescendo involves everyone. The singularity seems to be this nerd idea of reaching some kind of Omega Point. It’s very much the Christian idea of the second coming. It’s apocalyptic, etc., a bit of a downer because everything comes to an end, but it’s incredibly unlikely.”

“The crescendo will throw off all the old religions. It will throw off the conspiracy theories. It will throw off crusty old corporate jobs. And replace them with self-sufficiency, direct communication with nature, with other human beings, with media, and the creation of opinions directly.”

“So if you think of the computing, it’s not really computing, but the computing nature is doing all the time, it outstrips all our largest supercomputing grids.”

“So if we can’t do even one neuron [computer simulation] how are we going to upload consciousness exactly?”

“You’re here not because something put you here and fabricated you and guided the evolution and created the whole planet. It’s an emergent phenomenon and so are you. And you are an ongoing story, and the story is written in your genes, but it is also written in your mind. And you have responsibility for this amazing emergent phenomenon.”

“You don’t need religion for miracles. The fact that you exist in all this existence is stacked upon miracles, turtles all the way down. So if we grok that, we don’t need religious stories any more.”

“The virtual worlds and avatar spaces and multi-player games of now are the Keystone Cops of what virtual worlds will be in twenty or thirty years through AR [Augmented Reality], and big home holodecks, and stuff like that.”

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