In 1998, my friends Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and I sat down at the University of California, Santa Cruz to explore how machine intelligence might evolve in relation to our own. At that time, the internet was still young, and artificial intelligence belonged mostly to science fiction. Yet many of the questions we raised then have become part of daily life.
In this conversation, we explore whether intelligence is best understood as logic and computation, or as something embodied, participatory, and alive. Can the mind be reduced to code, or does life itself depend on forms of knowing that no algorithm can contain?
Artificial systems now outpace us in speed, reach, and memory. Yet the deeper mystery is not how far they can go, but what they reveal about mind and ourselves. Will machine intelligence reproduce the limitations of our mechanistic worldview, or might it help us rediscover dimensions of mind that transcend machinery altogether?
Looking back, it’s striking how near we now are to the possibilities we once only speculated about. Quantum computing, self-learning systems, large language models very much as Terence describes—and the looming prospect of superintelligence—have moved from the margins to the mainstream. But the heart of the conversation remains just as relevant today, if not more so: what is consciousness, and how might we participate in its unfolding evolution?
Notes
Terence McKenna (1946 – 2000) was a philosopher, ethnobotanist, and storyteller whose explorations of consciousness, language, and psychedelics opened new ways of thinking about mind and evolution.
Ralph Abraham (1936 – 2024) was a mathematician and chaos theorist whose work bridged nonlinear dynamics, consciousness studies, and the evolution of cultural systems.
This and other conversations were compiled in our book The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination & Spirit
Audios of our many trialogues can be found on my website.
This video was edited by Sebastian Penraeth, the architect and artist of most of the videos, websites and podcasts I share with the world.
Music during the credits is from my son Cosmo Sheldrake’s soundtrack for the Netflix documentary on the Galapagos Islands.
I hope the essays and talks I share through Substack will help to stimulate fresh thinking and encourage a more holistic approach to science. However, this is by no means my full-time job. I am mainly engaged in scientific research across several fronts, some of which I have yet to discuss publicly, and I regularly publish in peer-reviewed scientific journals (see the Research section in sheldrake.org for details). I also summarise my research findings in an ongoing series of videos called Findings, which I publish here on Substack.
Traditional funding institutions are reluctant to pay for these kinds of exploration, so the generosity of people who support my work makes this research possible. But if you can’t contribute financially, don’t worry. I am happy to share ideas, and much of my content will remain free and open-access.
Rupert Sheldrake
