Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

When I first encountered Hoyle’s radical panspermia theory (the notion that life is being seeded throughout the cosmos), I was naturally curious. Shortly after this, new scientific evidence coincidentally emerged that seemed to support at least part of his theory. A news flash in New Scientist declared that “molecules of life” had been detected in space. Hawk-eyed American radio astronomers had spied glycine—an amino acid and a potential building block of organic life—in a dense interstellar dust cloud near the center of our galaxy. This kind of finding is totally in line with Hoyle’s speculations. Indeed, a few years later, the comet Hale-Bopp was analyzed as it passed near the Earth, and it too was found to contain the molecules of which amino acids are made. Therefore, we cannot rule out all of Hoyle’s theory, and we must consider his assertions more closely.

The compelling aspect of Hoyle’s proposal is that it is assuredly grand, employing as it does a mix of science and near-mystical speculation. Hoyle attempted to account for the fortuitous nature of the Universe by arguing that the initial widespread presence of microorganisms somehow influences star and planet formation. Everything was engineered by some previous intelligence. However, we are still left without an explanation as to how this previous intelligence emerged. In fact, Hoyle appealed to the so-called steady state theory of the Universe that he himself helped to develop in the late 1940s as an alternative to the big bang scenario (it was, in fact, Hoyle who originally coined the term big bang in order to make light of such an explosion-from-nothingtheory). The steady state theory holds that there was no big bang at all (only “little bangs”), and that the Universe has existed indefinitely. Within this eternal Universe an intelligence has been forever modifying itself in order to survive the subtly changing laws of physics. Hoyle even concluded that the religious impulse of our species arises because we are born with an instinct that leads us to remember our origins, an instinct written into our DNA by the intelligence that preceded us.

It all seems very neat and tidy, and I am sure that there is some grain of truth in Hoyle’s “eternal intelligence” theory. However, the element that is lacking is the role and effect of entheogenic agents, unless of course they were also engineered by the intelligence that preceded us. If they were, then Hoyle’s theory might well offer us the ultimate truth about reality. Then again, we must accept that the Universe has been in existence forever with the caveat that the laws of physics continually change and force the intelligence to re-create itself. To my mind, this is not an aesthetically “clean” solution. As I said, how did the intelligence develop such sophistication and creative power in the first place? Moreover, how come the Universe has bits and parts conducive to creative manipulation? And how and why should the laws of Nature change? If the laws were to continually change, the Universe might surely run the risk of losing its existence completely at some stage due to destructive physical laws. And Hoyle did not convincingly show how microorganisms are able to mastermind the formation of stars and planets, nor was he able to deal a deathly blow to the big bang scenario currently accepted by most cosmologists.

As we have seen, it seems much more likely that all of the cosmic coincidences necessary for life and consciousness to arise are connected with the way the Universe was originally configured at the time of the big bang. If this is the case, we are again left with this one significant Universe fine-tuned from the start. Or, to put it another way, we are left with Nature, a system in which the capacity for ever-more-exquisite forms of self-organization reflects some kind of intelligence and intention.

Still, Hoyle’s intelligent Universe is certainly one of the most cogent scenarios I have yet come across that attempts to explain the mystery of reality in essentially scientific terms, even despite its failure to specifically address altered states of consciousness. I think it is possible to utilize some of Hoyle’s ideas and rework them. The prelude to the final option is over. Armed with the fantastic hypothesis outlined at the start of this chapter, we are now ready to focus on what I consider its most likely and most brilliant implications.

On a previous occasion I referred to the Other as a biospherical mind, a term that, although doubtless too far-fetched for some, nonetheless captures the planetary character of entheogenic flora and the rather spectacular organic visions they often induce. Sacred plants and fungi appear like carefully distributed “access codes” that create a different set of informational relations to converge within the brain/mind system, allowing one’s meaning in the context of the rest of Nature to shift up a notch. In this way, as if tuning in to the otherwise occluded “higher frequencies” of Nature, one can come to behold the numinous and intentional presence of the Other. Can we therefore locate the Other here upon the Earth, somehow woven into the evolving fabric of the biosphere?

The fine-tuning of the Universe really comes into effect through the evolutionary process that has dominated the Earth’s surface regardless of whether this process originally began on Earth or in space (we can concede that Hoyle may have been correct with his panspermia theory). Either way, organic evolution can be looked on as an information-gaining process, for life has gone from simplicity to astounding complexity, from relatively simple arrangements of organic information to highly organized arrangements, from simple proto-genes to hugely elaborate genomes, from primitive sensing to five fully fledged senses, and all because the fabric of the Universe encourages the evolution of carbon-based life. That evolution is essentially an information-gaining process is an important concept to bear in mind for what follows, for information-gaining is strongly associated with intelligently behaving systems, and I am from here on arguing that the biosphere is just such an intelligent system. Once again, information is a key factor in the ideas under discussion.

In its broadest sense, the evolutionary process is currently being channeled through human culture. The knowledge acquired by our predecessors can be stored in computer networks like the Internet, books, folklore, music, dance, spoken language, and so on, and this information accumulation—the growth in advantageous wisdom if you like—can be passed on directly to successive generations. In this way, accurate information about the world grows as uncertainty decreases, and this process of information accretion allows our species to dominate and understand the planet in next to no time compared with the otherwise slow rates of (biological) evolutionary development that preceded our species.

With computerized telecommunication swiftly evolving and connecting the Earth’s store of information, the biosphere looks to be wiring itself up into a bioelectronic superorganism. Our physical bodies may no longer be evolving, but our culture and our technology are, especially our digital-communications technology. Just as the neurons in our brains are able to transmit information to one another at astounding speed, so too are we now able to electronically synapse with one other across the globe.

This leads me to think that the assertion that the human brain is the most complex “device” we know of is in fact a fallacy and that the biospherical system in its interconnected totality is far and away more complex than a single human brain. It must be. A brain cannot be understood properly unless the context in which it exists is taken into account. This context is the environment, with its vast network of language-like relations. Nothing remains isolated within the environment. All organisms derive their meaning and their function according to the role they play and the relations they have within the entire biospherical system. The biosphere is thus unimaginably more complex than the parts of which it is composed.