John C. Lilly: Interview with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove (1998) • We are the INTERMORPHS

Thinking Allowed Also emerging from the discursive cradle of the counterculture, John C. Lilly worked as a neuroscientist, focusing on interspecies communication, specifically dolphins, before expanding his intellectual scope to become a consciousness researcher. Much of his work on human-nonhuman communication would serve as the basis for his self-experiments over the course of the ’70s with a systematic mapping of states of consciousness.

Through a series of books—part documentation, part mysticism, part autobiography—Lilly would attempt to chart psychic topographies within “quantitative systems of mind-consciousness.” His methods were notorious, involving extreme dosages of psychoactive substances such as LSD, DMT, PCP, and ketamine, as well as his development of the sensory isolation tank. In fact, Lilly’s lab experiments were one of the inspirations for the 1980 science fiction horror film Altered States. Picking up on the argument proposed in the previous video, Lilly’s conclusions are decidedly cosmo-informatic: the human mind is a “biocomputer” which can, through meditative techniques and self-experimentation, be reprogrammed to its optimal operational capacity.

In many ways Lilly exhibits the merging of the “scientific” (objective) with the “mystical” (subjective) within the noopolitical turn, as the modern glorification of “scientific truth” finds itself reappropriated within the capitalist imagination as pseudo-scientific speculation. Of note in this interview is Lilly’s belief in ECCO—the Earth Coincidence Control Office—an extraterrestrial cosmic agency, “one of God’s field offices,” responsible for programming long-term coincidences (that is, history) on planet earth.

Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1999) developed the term Noopolitik as a political strategy focusing on the use, and denial thereof, of information. The term, reminiscent to Realpolitik, was informed to establish a policy, that of “Being in Athena’s camp”, in the sense that the practitioner of Noopolitik should belong to the side that handles, correlates and uses the maximal amount of information in a rather decentralised fashion. The emergence of Intellipedia, the crowdsourced intelligence database, is a textbook example of Noopolitik. What this conception of Noopolitik did not, however, is codify a more general geopolitics of knowledge, in which power would not be subserving knowledge, but rather knowledge subserving power. The development of such a paradigm is the purpose of this article. It is especially important to focus on knowledge since early Noopolitik almost only focused on information, which is of a lesser quality than knowledge. Knowledge is intrinsically less perishable than information, for example, and wisdom, which is self-knowledge, is not information. Besides, well-informed is not synonymous with sage; a state or an individual can be erudite but foolish, and to this early Noopolitik offers no particular cure.

Though Lilly always couches his ideas in the idiosyncratic language of his personal explorations, his conceptualization of ECCO has much in common with simulation theory in physics, as well as with arguments from critical theory, such as Jean Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra and the Real. Indeed, Lilly’s intentions are to stimulate transformative modes of embodiment, and yet when approaching his work from a contemporary perspective in which notions of self-realization and substance-consumption are standardized and commodified, a decidedly neoliberal, micropolitical agenda is revealed: molecular technologies of mind, materialized as chemical supplementation, can permanently reprogram consciousness, whilst the body finds itself increasingly pushed to its limits of disembodiment, in which information flows reassemble the traces of the flesh—its affects, its soul—into virtual data.

John was 83 when this interview happened. He died 3 years after in 2001. He took his body and mind to the absolute limits of spatiotemporal awareness countless times during his long life. It is therefore not surprising that he mumbles a bit in this interview. A full transcript of it is available here.