At the Interface: Technology and Mysticism

As man approaches the three-quarter point of the 20th Century, it's becoming more and more apparent that he has reached a watershed. For the first time in history, the growth curves are flattening out: His rate of population increase is slackening in some areas; his speed of travel on Earth has very nearly reached its limits; if fusion is harnessed for peaceful purposes in the near future, he will have tapped the ultimate energy source for many years to come.

But progress has been purchased at a price: Accurate books have never been kept on the true costs of technology, and these costs are now coming to light in the form of a severely damaged environment. In addition to his ecological ills, man's institutions are no longer meeting his needs: His churches, his schools, his various bodies of constituted authority are crumbling under the onslaught of future shock. Attempts to solve his new problems by applying old solutions haven't worked; the problems are too deep and too pervasive. They affect all social levels and classes: The rich and the poor alike suffer from pollution; both the gifted and the backward bear the burden of an outmoded educational system; and war has yet to be renounced, though the state of the art has advanced to the point where it guarantees only losers.

Our trip from the forest to the precipice has been an incredibly short journey, and it's now time to take stock not only of where we have been but of where we are going. A number of ecologists and social scientists have pointed out the grim problems awaiting us in the future; whether or not we solve them will be determined not alone by what we try to do about them but by the very ways in which we think about them--and about ourselves.

This interface between philosophy and technology is where the options are; and to examine its areas of conflict, overlap and agreement, Playboy asked two leading spokesmen for the disciplines involved--Alan Watts and Arthur C. Clarke--to engage in a dialog on man and his world. The field for discussion would encompass not only man's problems and their possible solutions but nothing less than the nature of man himself and the role he plays in the universe. Both men readily agreed.

It would be difficult to find a more knowledgeable authority on mysticism than Alan Wilson Watts, probably the leading interpreter of Zen Buddhism in the Western world. Born in England, he became interested in the Orient at an early age and wrote "The Spirit of Zen" when he was 20 years old. He emigrated to the United States in 1938 and studied at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois, where he was ordained a priest of the Episcopal Church. He left the Church six years later--"not because it doesn't practice what it preaches but because it preaches"--and moved to California, where in the Sixties he became associated with studies of hallucinogenic drugs and their relation to states of meditation. His books include "This Is It," "Nature, Man and Woman" and the recent "Erotic Spirituality, Vision of Konarak." He last appeared in Playboy as a participant in our Playboy Panel on "The Drug Revolution" (February 1970).

Also a native of England, Arthur Charles Clarke lives halfway around the world on the lush island of Ceylon, a far cry from the frigid wastes of Mars and the scorching deserts of Venus that he often writes about. It was Clarke's interest in rockets and space travel as a former chairman of the British Interplanetary Society that led him to suggest --in 1945--the use of satellites for radio and television communication. His first book was "Interplanetary Flight"; his second, "The Exploration of Space," was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Famous for his flights of fancy as well as fact, he is probably the most successful science-fiction writer today. His career in the field was capped by his collaboration with Stanley Kubrick on the screenplay of "2001: A Space Odyssey," adapted from his short story "The Sentinel." His most recent fiction, "A Meeting with Medusa," appeared in playboy last month.

The dialog was taped in New York's Chelsea Hotel, temporary home for Clarke while he worked on a Cbs-tv documentary about the significance of space exploration. Watts flew in from California and for three days and several nights, he and Clarke sat as a kind of board of inquiry on the subject of man. Their dialog dealt with man's savage antiquity, his troubled present--and his surprising future. Logically enough, however, it began with the distant past.

Clarke: In discussing man and his problems, it might help if we start at the very beginning. In my opinion, one of man's basic problems dates back to prehistoric times: We're essentially hunting animals, and our entire complex of skills and abilities has been geared to that for hundreds of thousands of years. Then, about 10,000 years ago, we switched to another track--raising food. Perhaps this was inevitable; we had to go through the agricultural phase to build up (continued on page 130)At The Interface(continued from page 96) the wealth and stability, the traditions and continuity that enable us to have a civilization. But the fact is that we've been living under false pretenses for centuries and many of our psychological strains are due to this. We have all these skills bottled up--our great powers of perception, our binocular vision, our very agile hands and the like--all of which were developed for hunting and many of which were almost useless in an agrarian culture and are even less so in our industrial culture. Nigel Calder suggested in The Environment Game that we should spend part of our lives in parks or preserves, where we could all be hunters again and hunt animals--or each other--and, in that way, we might regain some sort of psychological balance. The argument is valid; for thousands of years, we were hunters, and now we're pretending to be stockbrokers and accountants and business executives.

Watts: Some of our hunting instincts come into play on Madison Avenue, Arthur. We talk about the business jungle and the dog-eat-dog attitude in business.

Clarke: I wonder if competition is really basic to human beings, though. There are societies, like the Eskimo, where you don't have this competitive spirit, where you have a high degree of cooperation. We might not have had any kind of society or culture at all if we hadn't been hunters, because this was the first time organisms had to cooperate. But I find the whole hunting syndrome very unpleasant; I can understand people wanting guns if they have to use them--professional hunters, game wardens and so forth--but I'm convinced there's something wrong with people who hunt and love guns, though I'm aware of the reasoning behind that marvelous speech by the Devil in Don Juan in Hell, in which he says man's heart is in his weapons.

Watts: It was his weapons that first distinguished man as something different from the anthropoid ape.

Clarke: This is also the beginning of 2001, Alan. One of the great moments in the movie is when you see an ape first pick up a bone to use as a club and he suddenly realizes the power he now has over the rest of the natural world. The music reinforces it, but I can never see this sequence in the film without almost crying; it's one of the most emotionally vivid things in the movie. One of the things that give it poignancy is that this sequence is also the beginning of war.

Watts: One of the sadder things about human society is that we cooperate as willingly in war as we used to in the hunt.

Clarke: This reminds me of the remark of William James so often quoted--that what we really want is the moral equivalent of war. For a while, the space program gave us exactly that.

Watts: War is incredibly difficult to understand; if you asked the computers, they would tell you that everybody could be living in luxury if we didn't spend all our money on nonproductive military hardware. The money that all the nations have spent on war since 1914 could have solved the economic problems of the entire world by now.

Clarke: It amounts to about a trillion dollars in the past ten years alone. But the reason we have wars--and I know I sound bitter when I say this--is that we probably like wars. If we're willing to pay for them, we must enjoy them.

Watts: I'm not so sure we enjoy them anymore. One increasingly sees the soldier portrayed as a hard-hat, involved in a demolition job on a grand scale. Perhaps the soldier is beginning to see himself that way; look at the march on Washington by the Vietnam veterans. I think we realize more and more that war is a luxury we can't afford, financially or any other way; the hydrogen bomb is a suicide bomb. Another factor that has given us doubts about war is that we've ceased to wage it for sensible reasons--to capture women or territory. War is now an ideological quarrel about abstractions. And they're the worst kind. Or you could take the point of view that the real reason for the war in Vietnam is that no country with a large standing military establishment can afford to have an army without veterans and, therefore, that practice wars in unimportant places are always necessary, just as the Germans trained troops in Spain before the Second World War and tried out their new aircraft. I think the United States may be doing a lot of that in Vietnam, like the way samurai used to test out their swords on the street yokels.

Clarke: I'm against hunting. I'm against war. I'm against killing of any kind for any reason. It's a blot on the human race and I hope to live to see the end of it, even for food. I'm a carnivore myself, but I feel moral qualms when a steak cringes beneath my knife. It's the old argument of whether we're morally justified in slaughtering animals for food.

Watts: This question about food, about man's purchasing his existence at the price of the existence of other living creatures, is fundamental. I wrote an article about it once that raised the basic ethical question: What are you to do when you're a member of a mutual eating society? The only solution I could see was to do reverence to whatever you killed by cooking it well.

Clarke: I'm not so sure it would appreciate the posthumous honor, Alan. But there is another answer. Eventually, we'll discover perfect synthetic food, really perfect, so that we'll be able to reproduce in every detail any food that's ever existed, using carbon dioxide, water, oil, coal, lime and so forth as our raw materials. This at once obviates the moral problem: We finally give up stalking animals. Not only could we eliminate that primal guilt but in phasing out agriculture, we'll liberate enormous tracts of land that have been taken over by farmers in the past few thousand years.

Watts: Has there ever been a really good synthetic food?

Clarke: There haven't been any yet, so far as I know, probably because foods are such complex combinations of materials. It's true that a lot of important components can be synthesized now; many vitamins can be, and the laboratory replica is identical to the so-called real thing. And there's no difference between salt made in the laboratory and "salt" taken from the sea, except that salt from the sea is much better because it's not only sodium chloride, it has a lot of other compounds mixed in with it.

Watts: Could synthetic food be produced in large enough quantities to stave off the world-wide famines that so many ecologists have predicted?

Clarke: It's possible. The first large plants have already been built in France to make several thousand tons of protein a year from oil through yeast processing. It would take only about three percent of the world's total oil production to feed the entire human race.

Watts: The possibility of converting coal or oil into really nutritive food would solve this whole ghastly ethical problem of the mutual eating society--but what would it taste like?

Clarke: Food chemists believe they can make high-grade beef for a relatively few cents a pound that would ultimately be indistinguishable in taste, appearance and texture from the real thing.

Watts: If they can really do it and make it nutritively excellent, I don't care whether it masquerades as beef or something we've never heard of before, whether they make it from oil or, for that matter, from rocks.

Clarke: Half the nutrients you need are in limestone, Alan. But the ideal food for man, of course, is man. It's been proven by historical evidence. I wrote about this once in a science-fiction story where, in the end, we succeed in making perfect synthetic man.

Watts: Perfect synthetic man!

Clarke: Why not? You just said it didn't matter if it tasted like something we'd never eaten before.

Watts: What you would have then would be ethical cannibalism.

Clarke: Everyone who has ever tasted man says that once you've acquired the taste for it, no other meat means a (continued on page 256)At the interface(continued from page 130) damn thing to you. Synthetic man makes a sort of sense, doesn't it?

Watts: I suppose it does; after all, Christianity was founded on the idea of cannibalism: "This is my body, which is given for you."

Clarke: You know, in this connection, I once remarked to a friend that I thought religion was a by-product of malnutrition and he answered with one word: "Balls!" But when you have a society in which millions of people live in hunger and poverty, it may be necessary to develop a kind of psychological fatalism, a belief in reincarnation, a belief in a better life. This was one element of my theory. The other was this: When you have starvation, fasting, you obviously have chemical changes in the body and you see visions and so forth.

Watts: I don't really think of religion in terms of strange visions, Arthur. I know that by taking certain drugs or by fasting or by altering the oxygen content of my lungs and blood, I can see things I wouldn't ordinarily see. But that, to me, is not religion. That is physics. Any kind of inquiry into parapsychology, telepathy, clairvoyance, ESP phenomena, psionics--all that to me is physics. I'm still investigating the vibrations of nature. Religion, as I see it, is understanding completely any vibration in nature. If there were only one speck of dust in this Universe--nothing else in all space but that one speck of dust--this would be a matter for astonishment--i.e., religion.

Clarke: Science has pretty much the same attitude--to find the general laws that govern the behavior of all the matter in the Universe and predict its future. The main difference between the religious and the scientific views of the Universe is that the religious mind tries to discover by contemplation, by logic, and the scientific mind says, "We can do only so much that way. We've got to experiment, to explore."

Watts: Oh, no, wait a minute! The religious mind as we know it in the Orient is strictly experimental; it's not interested one whit in dogma, in doctrine, in belief. It's interested in a certain kind of transformation of consciousness that is empirical and experimental.

Clarke: Then how is it that experimental science made such little progress in the Orient?

Watts: They felt they didn't have the techniques for changing the external environment and therefore they had to change the inner one, the consciousness. That's where they made their progress. Religion in the West is largely a matter of belief in a certain scheme of things, and in morals. Neither of these two questions looms very large in Hinduism and Buddhism. Morals to a certain extent, yes, but they aren't interested in whether you have the right beliefs and the right ideas so much as whether you have a certain kind of experience. And that can be reached only through an experimental process--the process of experimentation called yoga.

Clarke: What do you mean?

Watts: Like chemistry or biology, it's all empirical; it's trying to find out not what the right words for it are but the consciousness of the thing. Now, there are certain respects in which science is not empirical, certain ideas of the nature of matter that can be represented only in mathematical terms. That is really the most amazing kind of theological exercise, because it's all based on formulation, and formulation is dogma. The whole idea of dogma is the right word, the right formula. The controversy about whether God the Son is of one substance with the Father, or of like substance with the Father, could be compared to the current controversy about the steady-state Universe versus the big-bang theory.

Clarke: The difference, of course, is that thousands, if not millions, of lives were lost over the first controversy. As far as I know, very few physicists have been murdered by other physicists, though they have occasionally lost their jobs; nor have they slaughtered scores of innocents.

Watts: Don't forget Hiroshima.

Clarke: That was politicians, not physicists.

Watts: It was physicists, too; they can't absolve themselves, though they were hardly alone. The hydrogen bomb is the end result of a fundamental hatred for a life in which everything is regarded as an object and has attached to it only those values that we attach to unfeeling machines. Ernst Haeckel termed the force of the Universe blind energy and Freud called the psychological force blind lust, and both defined intelligent beings--ourselves--as statistical flukes in an essentially stupid process. As a result, there developed this hatred of process, of nature, this antagonism to it. Even though Haeckel and Freud and their successors call themselves scientific naturalists, they are against nature; they fight nature. Nature is unpleasant; nature is a nasty dog-eat-dog system and we are out to beat it.

Clarke: Alan, I have a long-standing bias against religion that may be reflected in my comments. It's always seemed to me that many religions made statements about the Universe that at first there was no way of checking. For the sake of argument, let's stick to the Christian view, which is the only one I really know much about--the early concepts of the Earth's being the center of the Universe, the world being created in seven days, that sort of thing. Now science has given us what seems to be definite knowledge about many of these matters that at one time would have seemed beyond the possibility of any knowledge. And in almost every case, it has turned out that the religious statements were nonsense. Because of this, I've always felt hostile toward those religions that made such assertions and then persecuted and even murdered the people who proved they were not true.

Watts: That sort of thing was almost uniquely confined to Christianity, Islam and, to some extent, Judaism. There has never been any ghost of a notion of a fight between science and the Hindu, Buddhist and Taoist traditions.

Clarke: Be that as it may, the Christians and the Jews and the Moslems have been pretty damned uptight about science. Look at the appalling atrocities, the religious wars, the Inquisition, the psychological havoc wrought on individuals by the Christian tradition right up to today. I was once tempted to state that I thought Christianity was the greatest disaster that ever overtook the human race.

Watts: I would agree with you--as far as any sort of official Christianity is concerned. Official Christianity has always opposed its own mystics.

Clarke: One of the great ironies of history was when Father Xavier's colleagues arrived in China to carry the knowledge of the West into the backward Orient. They found a culture that believed in a Universe that was infinite in space and time, an image of the Universe remarkably accurate in terms of the way the Universe really is. But the Jesuit priests brought with them their Dantesque Ptolemaic ideas of the Universe and rapidly convinced the Chinese--barbarians, you know--that the Earth was really the center of the Universe and the stars were in crystal spheres a little way away. And so the Chinese abandoned their cosmology. But now that we're finding out where we really are, we may regain our psychological balance.

Watts: Right, and get used to living in the vast dimensions of scientific astronomy that, in a way, the Hindus have, and therefore have a greater serenity about time and the future. That's been another of our major problems. Western man lived for centuries under the desperate necessity of thinking he was created in 4000 b.c. and that the Day of Judgment is coming any time. In this short, linear Universe, you've got only one life to make it, baby, and you better do right, because if you don't, you're going to be damned forever and ever. Fancy believing that!

Clarke: Millions of people still believe it. That's what I meant when I said what a disaster Christianity is. But I think one tiling should be made clear here. In this country, people tend to confuse religion with a belief in God. Buddhists don't necessarily believe in a god or a supreme being at all, whereas one could easily believe in a supreme being and not have any religion.

Watts: Most people don't realize how many alternative ideas of God there are. A Christian apologist will start out with excellent reasons for believing that there is, as a British Member of Parliament once said, "some sort of a something somewhere." And you immediately equate that with the Biblical God, who is really a barbarian modeled on a Near Eastern tyrant. Nobody would think of inviting that God to dinner.

Clarke: They wouldn't have much to say to Him if they did. But religion doesn't really serve the function for most people that it once did.

Watts: The standard-brand religions have been obsolete for years; nobody's interested in them anymore. They realize this and they're trying desperately to win people back by having things like jazz Masses and bingo. The Roman Catholic Church made the greatest of all foolish mistakes by putting the Mass in the vernacular to make it understandable to people, who then realized it wasn't very interesting, after all. When the priests muttered it in Latin, they were doing it for the sound, because the meditative exercise requires concentration on sound. You chant and get that one note going and that's a mantra and a magical thing. I can get large numbers of people interested in a religious observance that is pure ritual, a ceremony with everybody chanting, say, "Hare Krishna." A lot of people like to get together to have this sort of religious service, which is nothing more than a support for contemplation or for feelings of the weird and marvelous. I think a sense of awe is a rather necessary component of life, so I think there's going to be a revival of very colorful religious exercises with a minimum of sermonizing, of didactic elements. I'm not talking about the Jesus freaks, incidentally; to my mind, they're an unfortunate recrudescence of the lunatic fringe of Protestantism.

Clarke: The snake worshipers.

Watts: No, they lapse into a real religion, occasionally--like at a Negro religious service, where they soon stop talking so-called sense and genuine African religion finally emerges from its Christian disguise and the minister really gets the spirit and starts talking in tongues --glossolalia.

Clarke: Isn't that just an emotional ecstasy? Is it any different from square dancing or rock, 'n' roll?

Watts: When you really get going in dancing, you get into a dimension that is in some ways religious.

Clarke: But it's just a sort of primitive ecstasy. Alan.

Watts: I'm not willing to use the word primitive.

Clarke: I wasn't using it in the sense of pulling it down.

Watts: You get the same thing with almost all ritual dances, particularly those of animistic, shamanistic tribes.

Clarke: But does it mean anything?

Watts: Religion isn't supposed to mean anything. What's the meaning of "hallelujah"? It's just whoopee. What's the meaning of the galaxies, the spiral nebulae, the quasars? They're just immense rejoicings, like Mozart's Jupiter Symphony. These meaningless religious celebrations are not so much primitive as basic: and if you can't let yourself get into their spirit, you're only half alive. The result of all this is that you're going to get. and already have, a tremendous uprising of interest in mystical religion among the intelligent population of the United States.

Clarke: Also a tremendous increase among the unintelligent population, especially those seeking salvation and forgiveness for their sins.

Watts: For the most part, the Christian religions are nothing but sexual-regulation societies. The only thing anybody ever gets kicked out of the Chinch for is for a sexual scandal--especially a heterosexual scandal. You can get away with being homosexual if you don't Haunt it, and many good priests are. But, strictly speaking, the Church worries primarily about sexual sins. Its opposition to sex is not without reason, of course. In the late Roman Empire, it was considered a great kick to go to the Colosseum and watch floatloads of pretty girls hauled around the arena, waving and laughing, and then suddenly they were surprised by wild animals who tore them to pieces while the spectators masturbated in the stands. Naturally, when the Church got powerful enough, it moved in and said enough is enough. It may have gone too far. but that was understandable under the circumstances. The point, of course, is that circumstances have long since changed, but the Church's attitude hasn't, and many of the laity are now rejecting it or leaving the Church because of it.

Clarke: Some of those within the Church are refusing to accept it as well. But my own opinion is that morals are too important to be left to the clergy.

Watts: I think a lot of these questions about sexual morality have been confused with statistics. As when the sinner confessed, "Father, I've committed adultery." And the father asks, "How many times?" And the sinner says, "Father, I came here to confess, not to boast." In the sense of how many times, you're covering up sex with legalism. My entire approach to sexual morality is based on qualitative considerations, not on how often nor how long nor with whom--that has nothing to do with it. The feelings, the aesthetics of it, the good manners of it, the etiquette of it--to me, these are very important considerations.

Clarke: I often want to ask what right the Pope has to regulate marriage; what does he know about it?

Watts: That sexually inexperienced people such as priests should be marriage counselors is absurd, almost as absurd as the institution itself, which is based on the two completely incompatible principles of the old-fashioned arranged marriage between two feudal family dynasties, and romantic marriage, which is based on falling in love. I can understand marriage in the arranged sense, but then it was always assumed that there were concubines.

Clarke: Kenneth Clark summed it up very well in the Civilization series, when he said that marriage without love always means love without marriage.

Watts: Love without marriage has definite advantages for the race, Arthur. Marriage implies children, to continue the dynasty or your family line. But now, if man is to survive, he has to limit his numbers: and if he forgoes children, there's not much point in formal marriage, except to legalize or sanctify sexual relations.

Clarke: We have to look on sex as something other than a way of producing offspring.

Watts: We have to start seeing sex more and more as play. The playful element of it is obvious, because nature has always been playful: the economy of nature with respect to sex is extremely wasteful from a pinchpenny utilitarian point of view; nature is profligate in throwing seed around. Of course, I don't look upon nature as being utilitarian; I look upon nature as a gas. as a terrific jazz that's going on. Whether it's "successful" or not is completely unimportant.

Clarke: There's obviously a total mismatch as far as the utilitarian aspects of sex arc concerned, because a single man could fertilize the entire human race--and in about ten ejaculations, at that; statistically, we're as bad as the oyster. If you doubt that, look through the microscope at your own spermatozoa someday. It's a profound emotional experience to look down at those millions of you on the slide, incidentally; it's then you realize the truth of the definition of a human being as a disposable container for DNA. But nature is profligate with its seed, as you put it, Alan--as a hedge against the future. It's like people taking out insurance against possible disaster.

Watts: The future doesn't worry me, Arthur, because I know that deep within me I'm really God and that absolutely nothing can go wrong.

Clarke: You're mistaken, Alan; I am God.

Watts: It's true for you, too; it's true for everybody. Really, nothing at all can go wrong, because I know that I am God in disguise. That's a very difficult thing to say in Western culture, but it's very easy to say it in India, because there everybody knows it's true. Jesus knew this but couldn't possibly say it in his culture without being accused of blasphemy, which was what happened, and they killed him for it. Christians never understood him. They said, "Sure, Jesus is God--but nobody else is." and that strangled his teaching at birth.

Clarke: I believe a few things can go wrong. Fundamentally. I'm an optimist and I believe the future is not predetermined, that to some extent we can determine our own destiny. By thinking about the future and its possibilities, we do have a chance of averting the more disastrous ones. This is why I believe that the interest in the future that is so common now is a good thing. There arc suspect ways of looking at the future, of course--astrology, divination, that sort of thing.

Watts: The Book of Changes, the I Ching, is essentially the same thing as astrology and it's been used in a sophisticated culture for at least 2000 years, perhaps longer. I think astrology is highly unsophisticated and fumbling in its use, at least as a method of prediction, but it's entirely right in principle.

Clarke: My immediate reaction is to say that it's entirely wrong in principle, that it's absolute nonsense.

Watts: I don't believe in astrology as practiced. I consider it only as a way of looking at things that might have potential if it were seriously developed.

Clarke: An attempt to relate man to the Universe? That's a good idea, but I don't think it can be done with astrology, if it can be done at all. What all the astrologers are doing is a totally dead end; worse than that, it's misleading. Perhaps I'm biased against astrologers because I live in a country where so many people's lives are based on it.

Watts: My point is this: You ask for a picture, a chart, of a human being and the astrologer gives you a horoscope. This is a very crude map of the Universe as centered on that individual's birth. The defect of astrology is that not only is the chart incredibly crude, the astrologer doesn't know how to read it; he's got purely mythological meanings attached to the gravitational influences of the various heavenly bodies. The astrological chart of an individual is a map of an organism/environment, a field. Rather than trying to make sense out of highly localized events going on in that field, an attempt should be made to relate them to the total context of the area in which they're happening. The total context is the Universe, insofar as it impinges on us--and we don't know how far it impinges on us.

Clarke: I suspect very little. If the rest of the Universe suddenly disappeared, apart from the Sun and the Moon, it would make no essential difference to life on Earth.

Watts: The Sun wouldn't be here in the first place if it weren't for the galaxy. We have to enlarge our scope to see these things, because we are in a significant context. As for astrology, in the development of scientific ideas, all the major steps are made by calling into question some basic point of common sense. When we discuss space, for example, we discuss objects in space and processes in space, but nobody ever discusses space itself. Buckminster Fuller once told me that space is just "negative event" and I said, "Yes, but isn't it basic that you can't have nothing without something?" The basic assumption of Western thought is ex nihilo nihil fit--that out of nothing comes nothing at all. My assumption is that out of nothing comes something. You can't possibly imagine a solid without space; you can't imagine space without a solid. They're like positive and negative poles. But the common sense of Western man--and I include most Asian peoples as well--almost completely excludes the negative element. It's our definition of tragedy: The Universe runs down and in the end there is nothing. And we say, "Oh, that's so sad." What it comes down to is our terror of death. And though you may not agree with me, Arthur, this fear of death is one of man's major problems. Human beings will always be in the sort of situations we're worrying about now just as long as they are so terrified.

Clarke: Could you explain that?

Watts: For one thing, to rule people, you mustn't let them know that death is nothing to be afraid of, because then you've got no threat left. This fear of death is also one reason people are afraid to look into the future; they think it's going to end in death, and that's a major taboo. I recently read an article on the demoralizing effects ón a family group when the impending death of one of them is being concealed by all the others. That's stupid. In my function as a shaman, I've watched many people die and told them they were going to die and that this is the supreme opportunity for human happiness--to let yourself go entirely and stop caring. Just give in, give up. And when you do, you suddenly get this tremendous surge of energy.

Clarke: Like letting the current sweep you away.

Watts: And the energy of the current sweeping you away becomes yourself. You are that energy with which you're going out. Karlfried von Dürckheim, a German nobleman who once studied Zen Buddhism in Japan and now has a sort of ashram in the Black Forest, told me some years ago that a great deal of his work had to do with people who had survived almost certain death or utter hopelessness during the war. There may have been a bomb falling, they heard the scream, they knew it was all over--but the bomb was a dud. Or they were in a concentration camp without any hope of release, or they were displaced persons with no future. If, in each of these cases, the person completely let go and accepted the situation, he suddenly had that kind of experience we call cosmic consciousness. This is the feeling that I am the Universe and there is nothing to worry about. It is a joyous, ecstatic state. When they told their friends about this feeling later, their friends would usually dismiss it and say, "Well, of course you were under tremendous stress. You must have been a little insane." But Von Dürckheim told me that his work was, to a great extent, reassuring these people that they did, in fact, experience something very important.

CLARKE: The trouble with this feeling, this sort of transcendental feeling of cosmic consciousness, if you like, is that you can never prove it. It may be just a defense mechanism of our minds taking over in an emergency.

Watts: We can prove it, because a description of man from a biological point of view is more consistent with that way of feeling than with our actual feelings.

Clarke: Then why do we have these actual feelings if they're fundamentally false?

Watts: Because they come from prescientific cultures where they only occasionally have breakthroughs into a different kind of feeling, which they have to call mystical experience or some funny word like that, whereas actually they have broken into ecological awareness. But what I've been trying to say here is that accepting death is the key to freedom. There's a Zen Buddhist poem that says, "While living, be a dead man, thoroughly dead. Then, whatever you do, just as you like, will be all right." In other words, if you have let go of yourself, you're no longer worried about death. You feel very free. All time is borrowed time; it's all for gravy. The biggest hang-up that human beings have is this death thing, and Christianity hasn't helped much on that. It's being finite that confers individuality on us; it's death that enables us to be individuals, in the best sense. I'm not saying that individuality is unreal--it's very real--but individuality is a function of being an activity of the Universe, here and now. When you study an organism, human or animal or insect, it cannot be differentiated from its environment. The whole thing is a process; although there are differentiations within the process, it is a unified field of behavior. Unfortunately, the average man has no sensation of being an organism/environment entity.

Clarke: You know those works of art that are made up of a pattern of lines in which, when you look at it, you can make out a figure even though it's just a pattern of lines? You don't always see it at first and you can't separate the image from the background: it's all continuum. In the same sense, we're continuum, a part of nature. This accounts for the illusion of individuality that you're talking about, Alan. But whether or not individuality is an illusion, it's a damned convincing one.

Watts: It is. But this convincing illusion of individuality isn't quite an illusion. Each organism really is different from its environment in the sense that the north pole of a magnet is different from the south or the front of something from the back; they're different, but at the same time they're inseparable. The determinists will tell you that the organism is the puppet of the environment; the free-willists will say that the organism can kick the environment around to a great extent. I want to say that there's a single dance.

Clarke: You know, I tend to get impatient with philosophical questions, probably because I'm lazy and I have this grasshopper mind. But whenever I tend to get into deep waters or anyone tries to pull me into them, as you are trying to do now, I remember a remark of Stanley Kubrick's that is one of the many useful things I've learned from him. He once said that the only real problem is what to do next. And it seems to me that this is what we should really get down to--what should the human race do next?

Watts: This isn't as abstruse as it sounds, Arthur; it deals directly with what is perhaps our biggest problem of all--man's relation to his environment. And what we do about our environment will depend on our attitude toward it. I think our present altitude is a hostile one; we lack sensitivity toward it. To me, just as an apple tree apples, the Solar System peoples and, therefore, it's a human Solar System and, therefore, a human galaxy. That means we've got to have a great deal more recognition of the interdependence of all processes--and I fail to see any dichotomy between the human and the nonhuman. In 2001, for example, the characters begin to develop a real respect for HAL; they don't want to hurt its feelings. They always look toward the console--even though they know that HAL is not "at" the console--because it's polite to face the person you're talking to. I think that's a very sophisticated attitude. And if you can treat HAL 9000 as a person, you can also treat animals and plants with a special kind of respect that we simply don't have. I also think you should have these same attitudes in dealing with a river.

Clarke: That almost sounds like a religious attitude.

Watts: It's a form of animism, which is probably the most primitive of all religions, wherein all natural entities are treated as people and addressed and spoken to, whether it's a mountain or a plant or an animal or an ocean. We could use a little of this attitude when it comes to our ecological problems. For example, you know they want to turn Black Mesa into beer cans, don't you? They want to demolish this huge chunk of coal, which is the Hopi sacred mountain, slurry it with billions of gallons of water from the water-table area and send it to a power plant that will convert it into electricity for Los Angeles, where its primary industrial use will be in the manufacture of aluminum for airplane skins and beer cans. What I find lacking in all this is the recognition of our environment as something to be respected and shaken hands with in a brotherly way. We've got to recognize the right of this so-called external, objective world to be treated as something as alive and real as we are. This may not sound very scientific, but it makes more sense than the people who suggest that because we sent a man to the Moon, somehow we can use the same approach to handle our environmental problems.

Clarke: People who say that we could use the systems approach in cleaning up the environment don't fully understand the problems involved. These problems are thousands of times more difficult than going to the Moon, because they contain an incredibly complex network of human elements. You can't do anything to society without dealing with millions of people, all of whom have different ideas and objectives. The best the systems approach can do is to make a kind of map of the situation, and there's always the danger that something vital might have been left out because it's so inconspicuous--the equivalent of an underground river. Suppose we found out tomorrow, for example, that aspirin produces lethal mutations after ten generations? Then there's the theory that it was lead plumbing, lead pipes and lead utensils that contributed to the decadence, both physical and mental, of the wealthy Romans. You can never be sure about this sort of thing; we may have been nibbling at lead paint or its equivalent for the past 100 years without even knowing it. That's one of the arguments in favor of space travel, incidentally: We have too many eggs in one basket here on Earth. When we set up independent colonies, then disaster on one won't necessarily wipe out the whole human race.

Watts: Something that's always bothered me, Arthur, is what are we going to do about our atomic wastes buried in places like Hanford, Washington? Those concrete storage boxes are going to wear open sooner or later.

Clarke: There will be some very horrible surprises for archaeologists in the future, won't there? Perhaps the most practical solution would be to simply transmute them via some sort of nuclear process into something useful. I once said there's no such thing as garbage--only raw materials that we're too stupid to use.

Watts: What about this recycling of newsprint we hear so much about?

Clarke: This is an argument in favor of the electronic communications system that just hands you the information and not the wood pulp--you don't need that unless you want to light a fire or use it for toilet paper. And, incidentally, everything is recycled: we never use anything up. We're incapable of using anything up; we just convert it into something else.

Watts: You mentioned the dangers of not taking everything into account when it comes to problems of the environment or pollution and, of course, the obvious example is phosphates in detergents, which do a great job of cleaning and promptly caused the explosive growth of algae in our lakes.

Clarke: There are all too many other examples. You could take the case of Ceylon, which is a textbook study of the use of DDT. Ceylon has always been ravaged by malaria, which probably destroyed the Singhalese civilizations of the First Millennium, which had built some of the greatest irrigation systems and cities on this planet--fantastic engineering works with artificial lakes 20 or 40 miles in circumference. In the middle 1940s, there was another great malaria epidemic and thousands of people died, so Ceylon was one of the first places where they used DDT on a large scale. They wiped out the mosquitoes, the malaria rate dwindled to zero, and then the population rate soared, doubling in a generation. In addition, the DDT poisoned a lot of fish and other useful animals. The problem now is switching to something less dangerous, such as biological control--importing a certain fish that gobbles up the mosquitoes, and people, in turn, eat the fish. Biological control is usually much more satisfactory and often a lot cheaper.

Watts: One of my greatest friends is the poet Gary Snyder, who has also been very much exposed to Far Eastern thinking and is also tremendously concerned with our ecological problems. He claims that you cannot work effectively for good ecology unless you realize that it isn't necessary to do anything in the first place. You've got to work from the principle that nothing can go wrong in this Universe, that all mistakes and catastrophes are purely temporary occurrences and that nature has an infinite richness and will play all culture forms again and again, indefinitely. If you have that kind of confidence inside your gut, you won't work for proper ecological behavior with panic as your motivation.

Clarke: This is complete fatalism--why work at all?

Watts: What I'm trying to say is that while I'm very concerned about our ecological problems, I'm not worried, even if the human race blows itself to pieces, which would be what the Hindus call Kali Yuga, the end of the cycle.

Clarke: That sounds like a good reason for not doing anything.

Watts: I know it does. But you'll find this sort of philosophical paradox elsewhere in history. Calvinists, for example, believe that God in His inscrutable wisdom will damn some and save some--regardless of how virtuous or evil they may be--and there's nothing you can do to change it. Logically, you would think that Calvinists would be very irresponsible people; but instead, they're energetic, excessively moral people.

Clarke: I don't understand that at all.

Watts: The reason for it is this; If you have that kind of confidence in the first place, it gives you tremendous energy and an essential joie de vivre with which you can accomplish all sorts of things. You're not wasting energy in a lot of static emotion.

Clarke: That's not a philosophy; that's a psychological dodge.

Watts: I'll grant you it's a psychological dodge. As a Buddhist, I'm not really interested in philosophy, I'm interested in states of consciousness. Philosophy be damned! That's just conceptualization, that's trying to explain the music in words, whereas the important thing is to participate in the music and dig it. If you do, then there's energy available for working on our ecological problems. But I think you have to start to do this very urgent, necessary work from the standpoint of joy, not that of panic.

Clarke: As far as our ecological situation is concerned, I think we could do with a little panic in the right places.

Watts: At least we can both take some comfort that there is a good deal of awareness about our ecological problems now, particularly among young people. There have been ecology days and environmental teach-ins at some of the schools, and I'm sure ecology is even being taught at some universities--which brings up another of our institutions that are in trouble, Arthur: our educational system. The charge usually leveled against it is that it isn't very relevant.

Clarke: The educational system must always be at least a generation behind the times, because the teachers are out of phase with the students to that extent. This really didn't matter, of course, until about 100 years ago. We run into a feedback problem here; the time delay is now just too long.

Watts: A good deal of the problem with education is that it's compulsory, and that's a contradiction in terms. I think education should be free to anyone who wants it--and if they don't want it, to hell with them. But what we've actually got is compulsory university education, because for so many forms of employment, you must have a college degree and, therefore, if you can't afford it, the state must give it to you. So we've created these tremendous educational machines to the total detriment of scholarship. My idea of a free university is not one that's free from discipline but one where absolutely nobody has to go; you're there only if you're really interested. To pass the admissions examination, you would have to prove not only that you could perform certain intellectual disciplines but also that you liked doing them very much and that you would be happy belonging to a community of scholars.

Clarke: One of the difficulties is that life has become so much more complex; the number of interconnections and the rate at which everything happens have increased enormously; it's almost a quantum jump. What worries me is how we can increase the rate of our input to cope with it. Perhaps someday we'll develop the so-called mechanical educator, which will stamp knowledge into our brain the way a phonograph record is stamped out in a press.

Watts: Another problem is how we take in information, how we scan the environment. Our conscious thinking processes take in information bit by bit, one thing at a time; they're linear methods for scanning a nonlinear environment, one in which everything is happening everywhere at once. As a result, we're very limited when it comes to actually using our brains. We have an organism inside our heads that is able to deal with an enormous number of variables at the same time, but we don't have conscious access to it. The average person, without using a pencil, can deal with no more than three variables at once, while the practical situations of human life include 100,000 or more.

Clarke: I'm not so sure I can deal with more than one variable at a time, but it's probably just as well. If we were conscious of every single thing that's happening out there, we'd be overwhelmed by the Universe.

Watts: But our brain isn't overwhelmed.

Clarke: No, because it's operating a lot of automatic loops dealing with our breathing, our heartbeat, and so forth. Now, of course, we're discovering that we can control some of these things deliberately.

Watts: That's not what I was thinking; conscious control of the autonomic nervous system is something else again. What I'm suggesting is that we develop the other kinds of intelligence that we have--the nonlinear intelligence.

Clarke: Wisdom of the body? Frankly, I don't quite know what that means.

Watts: We call it flying by the seat of your pants, doing it by eye and playing it by ear. That's what I meant by using the brain instead of the mind. There are those incredible skills which we learn to use in athletics and skindiving and things like that, which our linear, bookish education doesn't recognize. At the time of all the scandal about Tim Leary and his investigations into consciousness changes, somebody at Harvard said no knowledge is intellectually respectable that cannot be put into words. And I thought, alas for the departments of fine arts and music and athletics!

Clarke: It depends on your definitions; you might say that isn't knowledge. In fact, the more you try to make it knowledge, the less you can do it, like the famous poem about the centipede who, when asked how it walked, promptly fell distracted into the ditch.

Watts: The reason learning theory is in such a muddle is that we're trying to solve the problems of learning in terms of memorization of what has been consciously inspected. But if we really want to learn a foreign language, for example, we learn it like we learned our own language--by ear. Like throwing yourself into the water to lean how to swim, you throw yourself into a foreign country and pick up the language by feeling its rhythms. How do you learn to dance? Some people have to have a diagram; others just get the feel of it. It's like learning Oriental music: You imitate the manual and breath movements of your teacher. Notation is used only for filing certain ragas or basic melodies, and it's very limited, because the movements of the body are far more subtle than can ever be written down in a linear language. The music is organic as distinct from mechanical, which is its tremendous appeal for people like Richie Havens and George Harrison. Learning, you see, is actually a Gestalt; you have to be able to see all the relationships. Unfortunately, the whole picture can never be stated in a linear language.

Clarke: What do you propose we use instead?

Watts: The Chinese ideograph, where instead of a linear meaning unit, you've got a picture with spatial interrelations in it that can be reduced to a linear formula. Children who are backward in their reading skills can be taught Chinese ideographs and form sentences with them in a very short time.

Clarke: I'm not so sure that the act of looking at ideographs or images is nonlinear, Alan. In a more subtle way, the eye always scans. Recently, they've discovered that if you can hold an image steady on the retina so that it's literally fixed, it will eventually fade out; the eye cannot see it. There's a microscanning system, a flicker, going on all the time.

Watts: There's a comparable auditory phenomenon.

Clarke: You mean this business of hearing a note after it's actually stopped, where if you make a note fainter and fainter, you go on hearing it even though it isn't there anymore? The Beatles used this phenomenon on one of their records.

Watts: We do the same thing retinally; that's why revolving a lighted cigarette in the dark gives the impression of a continuous circle.

Clarke: It's interesting, incidentally, to speculate that some extraterrestrials might be totally unable to see our television pictures if their persistence of vision were different from ours. Since the television picture is just a single spot at any instant in time, they might look at it and see only this spot of light moving back and forth and wonder what it meant.

Watts: Think of all the boring programs they would miss. But seriously, our present methods of education are a path to a way of life people don't want to live anymore, because it's dull. A boy looks at his father and says, "I sure don't want to be like you--you're miserable, you commute, you do all these dismal things just to have a plastic doll and a toy rocketship for a car and to live in smog." In the future, we're going to have to educate people to a different sort of life.

Clarke: The major educational problem of the future will be educating people for leisure. We live in a world that's heading for full unemployment, but unfortunately the uneducated will be unable to survive in a world with complete leisure: they won't know what to do with their lives. Work fills most of the life of the average man: going to work, working, going home from work.

Watts: And some people still have the notion that it's sinful not to work from nine to five.

Clarke: The old Anglo-Saxon guilt complex. You know, it's Nigel Calder's thesis that work is a fairly new idea, that it was invented some 5000 years ago. Primitive men don't work, hunters don't work. They live short, nasty, brutish lives--but they don't work. It's only farmers who work, who invented work, and it has grown more and more dominant in our lives ever since. One of the problems of the future, according to Calder, is that we are going to have to disinvent work. The hippies and the flower children, incidentally, were doing just that. But it would be dangerous for most people to just lie around; look at all those who die immediately after they retire. So the greatest industry of the future is going to be entertainment--that and education; I don't make a distinction between the two.

Watts: All good educators are entertainers. But you have to have intellectual discipline of some kind for every pleasure. Even if all we wanted to do was get roaring drunk, we'd still have to have the distiller's art.

Clarke: There will always be some people who will have to work, who will want to work--and who will bitterly resent those who don't and who will keep asking themselves why that lazy bum should be supported by me and do nothing.

Watts: But he's not supported by you; he's supported by machines.

Clarke: Somebody had to spend long, laborious hours designing and building that machine, Alan.

Watts: Yes, and that machine should pay the person who designed it in a fairly substantial way--but it has failed in its purpose if it doesn't also pay other people.

Clarke: I'll admit that it should pay its designer, but why should it pay anybody else?

Watts: Because the whole purpose of a machine is to do ever so much more than one man can do. It should at least pay its designer for his labor, but he has designed an ineffective machine if it pays only him. If it pays other people as well, then he has designed a truly effective machine; he has made a real contribution to society. But people still have ideas of a scarcity economics, of an age in which there simply wasn't enough to go around. But the designer's machine has changed all that, and now there's enough to go around. Or don't you think so?

Clarke: In principle, there's enough to go around. As far as materials and energy are concerned, there are unlimited resources. We're messing them up now--we have this pollution problem and power shortages--but those are temporary problems. Certainly, as long as the Sun shines, there's no question of a power shortage. What there is a danger of is an intelligence shortage. Where will we get the high-grade technicians to build and service and run the machinery in the world of the future? Look what's happening to the old-fashioned telephone system in New York right now; we can't even keep that running.

Watts: Why not?

Clarke: One of the reasons is lack of skilled labor--that and lack of labor that will let itself be skilled.

Watts: Why can't we eliminate that problem with machinery that can do that sort of labor? The automatic telephone eliminated thousands of operators.

Clarke: We can't do it until we can build robots that are essentially as versatile and intelligent as human beings are now, and this is at least a century away. For the near future, we've got to work with highly trained human beings. When it comes to simpler forms of labor, there's a different answer--and it's not robots. Through bio-engineering, it might be possible to develop superapes, superchimps, that can do the simple jobs. It's criminal to downgrade humans for manual, repetitive forms of labor--granted there are those qualified to do only this type of work and who should do it and be well paid for it. But I hope that eventually we can improve the intelligence standards of the race so that people won't have to do this sort of menial labor. Animals like the chimpanzee or others of the great apes would be ideal for it. It's a considerable scandal, you know, that we have domesticated no new animals since the Stone Age. The Egyptians had baboons waiting on table and elephants trained by the Indians as weapons of war could understand several hundred words of command. And if we can do this with existing animals, what could we do with specifically developed "new" animals, plus B. F. Skinner's techniques of conditioning? It would solve all our low-grade labor problems in a generation.

Watts: Some people would consider that exploiting the animals.

Clarke: There shouldn't be any moral problem to training apes. After all, we've been working with horses and dogs for a long time now. If you use their natural talents, or talents that we may train them to have, we should have no qualms. Most of our breeds of dogs are almost entirely artificial constructs by now and I think they're happy: I'm damned sure my German shepherds are. And I don't see why we couldn't do the same thing with the chimpanzees or other great apes, perhaps even with dolphins or whales.

Watts: I still think there's a lot we can do with machinery, though our machines frequently have a way of causing more problems than they solve. We seem to be constantly having to make a choice between technology and its unfortunate by-products or no technology at all. It's like the old saw about women--you can't live with them and you can't live without them. In the case of our machines, it's an impossible choice.

Clarke: The trouble with much of our technology is that it's too primitive; it isn't good technology. In fact, it's damned bad technology.

Watts: How do you tell the difference?

Clarke: This is the first age that has ever glimpsed good technology, real technology--and it's sitting right here in front of us: this miniature tape recorder that we've been talking into. Real technology refers to machines that will last forever or until you want to throw them away, which will have no moving parts and which will be sophisticated but very reliable. This recorder isn't perfect; it still has a tape going round and round: but compare it with the old Edison phonograph! In some areas, we're getting this kind of technology, but in others we're incredibly primitive--the modern automobile, for example. They've produced some very reliable and useful cars, but they're still very primitive and crude compared with what they should be, could be and one day will be.

Watts: In ancient India, when men walked barefoot on the ground, a certain king, out of compassion for human feet, proposed that hundreds of cattle be slain and their skins used to carpet the ground. And then one of his advisors said, "O King, live forever, but this is not necessary. All we have to do is slay a few cattle and bind small pieces of their leather to the soles of our feet." This was the beginning of technology, real technology--doing more with less, as Bucky Fuller puts it.

Clarke: That is the answer; you have to have some technology. There are places where you cannot walk over the ground barefoot, where you have to have shoes, where you have to slaughter some cows or make shoes out of plastic or whatever. There's an absolute minimum of technology that we need--and that minimum gets to be more and more every decade. There's no rational argument against technology as such--it's a matter of definitions. Farming is a technology at which we've worked for a long time and which is very successful. Consider the rice fields and the irrigation systems of Bali and Ceylon; from the technological point of view, it would be difficult to improve on them. They're a completely stable, highly developed technology that could last until the Sun went out. Why can't we do this on more complex levels? I believe we can. You can have any kind of technology you want; you've just got to think out the problems in much more detail than we have in the past.

Watts: Among young people today, there's an extremely sentimental, back-to-nature movement that would like to abandon technology, but I'm afraid if we did, millions of people would starve.

Clarke: There was never any question of abandoning technology, not since we picked up that first rock. It's true that we've got to get rid of bad technology, but we can't do with less technology, we need a hell of a lot more technology, and far more sophisticated technology.

Watts: Arthur, what makes us go into raptures about a miniaturized tape recorder and damn the automobile?

Clarke: It's very simple. Good technology enriches and enhances your life and bad technology diminishes it. When the automobile first came in, it enhanced and enriched life; it doesn't--very much --anymore. Tape recorders and cameras, on the other hand, definitely make life more rewarding. The recorder has effectively doubled my life, and cameras have added enormously to my pleasure; I can make a record of the events in my past that would be possible in no other way. Now the video-tape recorder is coming in and that is even more marvelous. It will do precisely what Bobby Burns said in his poem--"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!" Pardon my Scots accent. It will also, I suspect, enrich one's lovemaking a great deal.

Watts: I appreciate the aesthetics of good technology--a beautiful camera, a fine telescope, a microscope. It has something to do with our love of what space is, its beautiful transparency. Consciousness, depending on the sense, is a lens, and when you ask just what is clarity, which is also transparency, you get the answer: pure form, as in a sharply focused photograph.

Clarke: You mention the lens, which reminds me that one of the most life-enriching technologies we take for granted, though its impact was overwhelming and may have been responsible for the Renaissance, was the invention of spectacles. Eyeglasses must have multiplied by several times the useful lives of the monks and other educated people of the period who had blown their eyesight at an early age trying to read manuscripts by candlelight. Most historians seem to-tally unaware of this sort of thing; they describe the rises and the falls, the dynasties and the wars and the emperors, but they don't discuss the really important things like the invention of spectacles, the invention of the stirrup--which made it possible to shoot an arrow from a moving horse--or the invention of the horse collar, which multiplied the efficiency of horses by a factor of two or three. Some technologies, incidentally, are surprisingly ancient; the invention of a device that could go faster than the speed of sound actually dates back to prehistoric times.

Watts: What was that?

Clarke: The bullwhip--the crack it makes is actually the tip of the whip creating a small sonic boom.

Watts: Buckminster Fuller claims that all real culture derives from the primitive seafarers, that they were the first people to understand navigation, the first people to realize the world is round.

Clarke: I think Bucky may have been conditioned by the fact that he was in the Navy. What influence did seafaring have on the oldest culture and civilization, the Chinese?

Watts: Not much. But Fuller claims, and he has a good case, that there are much older cultures than the Chinese that were seafaring.

Clarke: Perhaps he's right. The Atlanteans and other nuts have been saying for years that there have been much older cultures.

Watts: I've always assumed there have been, especially in the equatorial regions, where wood and other impermanent building material would rot and crumble so the culture would disappear without a trace. There must have been many more cultures than those we know about, when you consider that man has existed for 1,000,000 years.

Clarke: Much less than that; Homo sapiens has been around for perhaps only 150,000 years. It depends on your definition of man, of course; you could take some of the early types of man and preman and many of them wouldn't look out of place in modern society. We've had our modern brain for at least 20,000 years, which means there were men back in the Stone Age who could have flown spaceships.

Watts: I've always felt that our archaeologists have picked at only a few tiny spots on the Earth's surface and that there are millions of square miles of surprises in store.

Clarke: Perhaps some devastating ones, like the discovery of the Antikythera computer. In 1900, some sponge divers found a wreck that contained some of the greatest treasures of Greek art, all of which were then stored in a museum in Athens. They included various statues, plus, among other things, a rusty mass of bronze. The bronze had been sitting there in the museum for about 50 years when Derek Price figured out what it actually was: a very complex analog computer to calculate the positions of the stars, a thing considerably more sophisticated than a grandfather clock, with graduated dials and gear wheels.

Watts: That kind of thing does not emerge except in a cultural complex that can support it.

Clarke: Precisely. It's dated somewhere around 100 B.C., and we didn't know anybody could build things of such complexity until Ben Franklin's time. It was discovered only by accident, incidentally; it had gone down in a wreck and therefore was safe at the bottom of the Mediterranean. Otherwise, it would have been destroyed, because bronze was valuable; it would have been melted down into something else.

Watts: It's fun to speculate whether we couldn't recapture the sights and sounds of the past if we had a sufficiently powerful detector of some kind.

Clarke: That's impossible--at least in the standard sense--because any sound very quickly becomes thermal noise and agitation and is gone. But at least one scientist thinks he's found a process that might have captured sounds in the past--and that's the manufacture of pottery on the potter's wheel. He's been analyzing old clay pots and trying to recapture the sounds that were occurring as the potter was making them, and in one or two places he thinks he's succeeded. You see, in making a pot, you have the clay on a revolving table and a pointer touching the clay, and this is actually a primitive, inefficient phonograph. If you spin the pot and have a stylus that can "play" it, you might be able to recapture the sounds in the potter's shop the day the pot was made.

Watts: We'll undoubtedly be able to do it someday, Arthur. If the progress of science can be represented by an exponential curve, then anything will eventually be possible.

Clarke: It isn't quite like that, Alan. The curves that between them govern man's life are the bell curve--the normal distribution curve--and the S-shaped growth curve, one that starts very slowly, then suddenly goes into an exponential rise, then flattens out and becomes a constant value again. Of course, you can have a later S curve superimposed on this. The best example of this is in transportation. You're stuck on one plateau for a long time, and then there's a breakthrough with the internal-combustion engine, which takes you up to the next plateau. Then there's another breakthrough with the airplane, another with the jet and, finally, another with the rocket. You can never be sure that the flattening-out period is really the final one. As far as speed in the Universe is concerned, perhaps there's a final flattening out with the velocity of light; as far as terrestrial speed goes, we've nearly reached the top.

Watts: It also leaves us with this problem: When the time lag is reduced between any two places, the two places tend to become the same place in space. So Tokyo has become a mixture of Los Angeles and Shanghai, and Los Angeles has also become Tokyoized to some extent, and so has San Francisco. We're getting this weird kind of jet-aircraft culture in which every place has become pretty much the same, so there's less and less point to going anywhere.

Clarke: The motto of the future may be: Don't commute, communicate. If we had absolutely perfect communication, so that we could be sort of physically present via some sort of hologram technique, there would be no point to having transportation at all, except for goods and services. Or if we had absolutely perfect transportation, where we could step through a door and arrive instantly in the other place, there would be no need for communication. I think we've gone overboard on transportation up to now, and there's going to be a swing toward communications. For example, the TV tape recorders we've mentioned may be not only the end of Hollywood but the start of a real world community. Shirley Clarke, the movie producer who lives here in the Chelsea, is planning on plugging her tape equipment into our hotel cable system so we'll have our own little urban commune. Everybody has his own TV set, so we can watch what Shirley's monitor is doing, and then perhaps somebody else will get his own equipment and pump his pictures into the system, so we'll just switch from channel to channel and see what Dave is doing in room 222 or what went on in room 1010 last night. Eventually, of course, we'll have a global TV community, so it won't matter where we are on Earth, we'll always be able to get in touch with people with common interests. In Ceylon, I'll just switch on my set and see what Shirley's doing here, and vice versa. One of the objections to this sort of thing, of course, is that it's still remote and impersonal. Conceivably, we could wind up with a pathological society where people avoided all physical contact and communicated only through electronics.

Watts: You know, Arthur, we reproduce in two ways, by sex and by art. Historically, the painter and the sculptor have striven to make more and more accurate representations of reality, a task that was eventually taken over by photography, cinematography and television. When television gives us three-dimensional holographic images in open space, we'll have attained new heights of realism. But. of course, we'll then demand tangible images for increased fidelity of reproduction, then images that respond to the viewer and the toucher in the same way as the original human who is being reproduced. Then there's Huxley's "feelies," which would not only reproduce but enable us to experience the actual sensations and emotions of the original televised person--a reproduction so perfect that we would have the sensation of being that person. Carrying all this to its logical extreme, we should ask: "Couldn't this have happened already? Isn't it possible that what I call life is watching just such a performance?" Another question could be, "Why go to all that trouble when you have the original in the first place?" There is also overpopulation in terms of this kind of reproduction or recording. It takes me as long to listen to one of my tapes as it does to record it. Beyond a certain point, seeing plays and movies takes up too big a chunk of my actual life. A camera can get in the way of the tourist's own eyes; reading about oneself in the newspaper can seem more important than the actual event. If our eventual progeny turn out to be mechanical systems, reproduction by art will have superseded reproduction by sex. Which is a rather curious asceticism!

Clarke: There was a clever cartoon some years back that sums it up rather well. It shows a man surrounded by all his gadgets and saying, "It's a full life!" Obviously, he's living an entirely secondhand life, because he's living only through his gadgets; that could be the danger. In this case, our electronic tape recorders would definitely not be considered life enriching.

Watts: That's equivalent to being hooked on drugs instead of using drugs as instruments of investigation.

Clarke: Speaking of drugs and electronic devices, is it true that you can, by purely electronic means, reproduce or simulate in a few hours' training the mental states that a Zen master or a yogi may take years and years of training to achieve?

Watts: Ordinarily, meditation is a very wide-awake state; it's totally alive, waiting, without expectation and without words. In contrast, most people report that their feelings of cosmic consciousness with an alpha-wave machine are achieved when they're on the brink of sleep. So I look upon the alpha-wave machine as a bit gimmicky, though it may be enormously interesting to explore with it the electrical capacities of the brain.

Clarke: This may be a personal question, Alan, but drugs--I'm talking about the hallucinogenic ones--are on the public mind nowadays and there are always two views, that they're strictly for kicks or that somehow they give a person insight into himself. I assume your view's the latter, but I wonder how they might work in that sense.

Watts: I consider them as scientific instruments used inside the skin, as distinct from those like microscopes and telephones, which are used outside the skin. Optical and electronic instruments offer to change our level of magnification, and to me that is one of the most interesting things about knowledge, to change your level of magnification so that you can see things on different levels and in different contexts. In the same way, drugs make certain alterations in the sensitivity of our nerves whereby we can change our vision. Now, that won't do anything by itself; any fool can look through a microscope and have a ball. But if a biologist or a chemist looks through a microscope, it's going to tell him something important. Some people can have weird trips on LSD, but to a student of the psychology of religion or the psychology of aesthetics, it can be extremely interesting and informative.

Clarke: Just how was it informative for you?

Watts: LSD has made me more tolerant. I can even understand in what way a Southern Baptist can be a manifestation of the divine principle, which I couldn't see before. Once when I took LSD on a Sunday evening, a group of us were listening to a religious service on the radio. A Negro revival minister made sense because he was pure, exuberant emotion, but the problem we faced was with a fundamentalist Bible preacher who was a real phony. He had an echo chamber so as to sound as if he were talking in a cathedral, and after his terrible moralistic preachments from the Bible, he always had a commercial: "If you want a copy of this address, send in a dollar to this station. Be sure to send in your dollar." But as we listened to his voice, we could hear this anxious little person saying: "I'm human, too, I have to live. Send in your dollar." Then we listened further into the sound and we could hear a frightened child crying for its mother. We listened further and heard the primordial blow of wind through a tube. We listened still further and then we heard the voice of God, the alpha and the omega. The basic vibration of the Universe was in this poor little preacher. And then we forgave him, saying, "What hath God wrought! What an extraordinary manifestation that it comes out in this weird little character." In this way, LSD has made me much more open to variations in human behavior and life style.

Clarke: I've always been skeptical of mysticism and revelations because I think they may turn out to be just psychological aberrations. It can be a very nice feeling, this feeling of cosmic consciousness, and I think I've had it once or twice, but I don't take it seriously, because you can be mistaken so often. I've had no previous experience with drugs, but under controlled conditions, with somebody who knew what he was doing, I would be quite interested in trying some experiments. But I think I have a sufficiently adequate imagination and I'm a little scared of what might happen if it were to be enhanced or accelerated.

Watts: Much of what people have read about drugs is misinformation, Arthur. I had a great worry about this when Aldous Huxley wrote about mescaline and let the cat out of the bag as to what these drugs could do. I felt that he hadn't said enough, but at the same time I was reluctant to say more, in view of the fact that it might stir up a wide public interest and could have terrible repercussions.

Clarke: As it did.

Watts: I knew pretty well that this was going to happen, so finally I felt it better to say something that I thought intelligent and important about it than to stay silent. I was trying to say that instead of sweeping these drugs under the carpet with legal prohibitions and horrors, we should bring them out into the open and let our best scientific and philosophic minds go to town on them. If we have to regulate the use of hallucinogenic drugs, then what we should do is license them the same as we do alcohol and have legally sanctioned centers where people could use them under careful supervision.

Clarke: That's a little like the English system, which somebody in Washington recently claimed was a failure. That's utter nonsense; compared with the American system, the English system is a howling success.

Watts: The American attitude toward drugs is a colossal racket. Our drug-abuse laws are so absurd and so raise the price of an inevitable vice that any official supporting them must be suspected of profiting from the trade. The separation of church and state should require that police not be asked to act as armed clergymen preventing and prosecuting crimes without victims, such as sexual irregularity, gambling and drug abuse. The prosecution of young people for use of hallucinogenic drugs has alienated almost an entire generation.

Clarke: Some of the hypocrisies of our society are so appalling that it's no wonder the young are disillusioned and rebelling against them.

Watts: It all comes back to personal freedom, doesn't it? There is more and more of a thirst for personal freedom at the same time that we seem to be passing more and more laws that restrict it. Yet it's obvious to any lawyer that the more law proliferates, the less intelligible it becomes. So I'm for a considerable reduction in the number of laws and a self-repealing clause in every one we do pass; if you need it again, pass it again. The difficulty is that when you handle dangerous instruments, such as automobiles or firearms, you have to curtail your freedom and obey certain game rules. There are an enormous number of rules we obey and have no objection to obeying because we see the sense of them; we couldn't be free unless we did obey them. Nobody wants to live in the 17th Century again, when we were all armed to the teeth. But freedom is a gamble. There cannot be a community without mutual trust, and yet not everybody is trustworthy. But the only alternative to taking the risk of mutual trust is the super police state. So, naturally, we're going to get burgled and we're going to have a certain number of accidents; but if you don't take that gamble, then life isn't worth living.

Clarke: Who was it who said no harm can come to a good man?

Watts: Nobody's a good man, Arthur. According to Hebrew theology, everyone has within him the yetzer hara, the wayward spirit, created by God and planted in the soul of Adam. I call it the element of irreducible rascality and every one of us has that within him as salt in a stew; it's an essential ingredient of human nature and I cannot relate to a human being who doesn't have it.

Clarke: Cutting down on the number of laws you have would help make for a government that's more immediately responsive to the people. There is a social invention that might well come into use within the next few decades that would help out on that, too: electronic voting. A referendum, for example, could be brought up, discussed and voted in a few minutes of attention to your TV set. The question is: Would we really need political parties with such a system?

Watts: Parties are as absurd as nations. They're the wrong emphasis. A party is always tied to an ideology, and one tends to vote with the party rather than about issues.

Clarke: The chances are very good that, with the establishment of a global society, both the party and the state will wither away.

Watts: How do we establish that global society?

Clarke: In the next quarter century, you'll see the development of more and more international organizations that do such vital jobs that everybody will have to cooperate with them. In the past, we've had the International Postal Union and the International Telegraph Union and today, of course, we have Intelsat, an organization of some 70 countries cooperating in the global communications system. We also have the organizations of the airlines, the World Health Organization and the World Meteorological Organization. These independent bodies and others like them will become so essential and supranational in the next few decades that they will be running the world. The nation-state will find itself a postal division, a cultural subsection in these organizations. This is how we'll merge into a world society.

Watts: I hope your world of 2001 will be a far different and better world than the one we're living in now. But between now and then, it looks as if it might be a rough go. Do you think we'll make it?

Clarke: If I thought we wouldn't, I probably wouldn't say so; I would just go and quietly shoot myself. But think back to 1945, when the atomic bomb first burst upon us with all its now feeble 20 kilotons. We've survived for 25 years since then and no more atomic bombs have been dropped in anger; the balance of terror has been a balance. It can't be a permanent nor a stable one, but even now there are indications of a loosening up of our political tensions. I think that our space program has contributed to this by giving man a new perspective on the planet; the Apollo program may have come just in time to save the human race. The concept of Spaceship Earth may be cliché now, but it was no coincidence that from the moment we first saw that photograph of the Earth hanging in space, we became aware of our human unity and of the problems threatening the survival of our planet.

Watts: You said at the start of our dialog that the space program had given us the moral equivalent of war and, if so, it was well worth it. But to the average man, it cost 24 billion dollars to bring back a load of Moon rocks, which makes them rather expensive acreage. Couldn't we have found out as much by just sending equipment there, or perhaps not have been in such a hurry, so that the cost of getting there might have been less? I know this is hindsight, but is there any element of truth to it?

Clarke: Well, we might have waited until we had developed the re-usable space shuttle and then done it cheaper and more efficiently. But it's done now and there's no point in arguing how we should have done it. In another generation it will seem incredible that intelligent men ever questioned the value of the space program. Anybody who can't see the value of it is a fool. The program has already paid for itself in terms of lives saved alone, the most dramatic example being the use of satellites to track hurricanes, particularly Hurricane Camille off the Gulf Coast in 1969. On the basis of what such storms did 30 or 40 years ago, the death toll on a single night might have topped 45,000, our entire death list in the Vietnam war to date. Communication satellites have already revolutionized global communications: Fifty percent of your phone calls to Europe go via satellite, and in years to come, ships and aircraft over the Atlantic and Pacific will be able to keep in contact with their home bases through satellites, especially during periods of ionospheric disturbance, when they would normally be out of touch. The revolution in education is just beginning. Continental television, which will be possible in India from a single satellite transmitter in orbit overhead, will provide veterinary and family-planning information, as well as other educational news and entertainment, for a cost of about a dollar per person per year, which is trivial compared with the social benefits involved. India may bypass the radio age like Australia bypassed the railroad age--to accomplish what this one satellite television transmitter will do would require hundreds of ground stations.

Earth-resources satellites are also, for the first time, starting to tell us what is where--minerals, fresh water, things like that. Color photographs from space will tell us where there is pollution; a Gemini photograph, for example, proved that illegal dredging was wiping out the oyster beds in Galveston Bay by showing where all the silt was flowing out to sea and killing the oysters. They'll be able to monitor global air pollution from space as well as show oil dumping at sea. Unmanned satellites will be running our world and discovering the potential of this planet; and as they become more complex, we'll be sending men up to service them. And, of course, there'll be space factories and space hotels and space hospitals. On the Earth-bound medical end, space scientists have developed sensors for monitoring people who are ill. These are particularly important in heart cases. Already a few ambulances have been fitted out with radio sensors and by the time a patient arrives at the hospital, the sensors have already diagnosed what should be done. This is entirely a spinoff from space technology. It's true it could have been done otherwise, but it wasn't; it was space technology that provided the cutting edge. But leaving all the technology aside, the most valuable thing we may have gained from space flight is a new perspective on the Earth.

Watts: The photographs they've taken of the Earth from outer space leave you with the feeling that it is the most beautiful of all jewels.

Clarke: The Earth is certainly unique in the Solar System, and that means it's going to be unique in our knowledge and experience for some centuries to come.

Watts: Then you don't envisage any intimate knowledge of anything outside the Solar System for quite a long time?

Clarke: Not unless there's a tremendous instrumental breakthrough, and I can't conceive of one that will enable us to get close-up views of any planets and of the stars without sending instrumented probes there, which will take centuries.

Watts: Do you think there's intelligent life out there?

Clarke: I hope that I may see the discovery of such extraterrestrial life and perhaps even intelligence in my lifetime, but I wouldn't put too high a probability on it. I don't think there's any other intelligence inside the Solar System, though it would be exciting if that were the case. It's perhaps more possible and would be almost as exciting if we discovered that there had been intelligence inside the Solar System--for example, if we discovered antiquities on Mars.

Watts: I think the chances that extraterrestrial intelligence exists are overwhelming; it may be a long way away, but it's obviously there. A thing that can happen here can certainly happen elsewhere in a Universe this big.

Clarke: Speaking of intelligence, I've often wondered if it isn't an accidental by-product of evolution, sort of like the armor of the dinosaurs, that ultimately dooms its possessors to extinction. You could make a very good case for this, of course, by reading any newspaper. So perhaps we and our intelligence are an accident, like the dinosaurs and their magnificent display of bone plates. Remember that the most successful animals on this planet are the great white sharks and insects like the cockroaches, which haven't a brain in their heads, so to speak, and which, unlike Detroit, haven't changed their designs for millions of years. Intelligence may doom a species; as soon as you develop it, you've had it. This is pure speculation, of course, but it's one of the reasons it's so important to discover extraterrestrial intelligence. If we pick up intelligent signals from space or discover artifacts on the Moon or planets or anywhere else--say we found evidence of early visits by creatures from another star system--this would be the first evidence we've had that intelligence has some survival value.

Watts: However intelligent they are, in our terms, someday we're damn well going to meet creatures from other worlds, and then there'll be the problem of communicating with them--along with a lot of other problems, I suspect. Gerald Heard once suggested we might learn how to communicate with beings from outer space by studying the dance language of bees. I thought of this when Cousteau first tamed an octopus and there were pictures of him in the paper dancing with it. I had a radio show at the time and I said that I thought a gold medal should be cast of a man dancing with an octopus to replace the one of Saint George and the dragon. Here was a man who had made friends with one of the awful-awfuls of life, the symbol of the devouring mother. Weeks later, when I was giving a lecture in Los Angeles, Cousteau was in the audience and I met him. I told him what I had said and he replied, "It was very simple--all you have to do is stimulate the sexual organ of the octopus!"

Clarke: It will be fascinating to study the psychology and philosophy of totally alien beings. Will there be anything at all in common? You mention the octopus; my own confrontation was with what once seemed to me to be the most hideous of all things, the giant manta. It's a totally strange and alien being but, nevertheless, a beautiful creature.

Watts: I really wonder how much space exploration we'll actually be doing, though. There was a great psychological letdown after Armstrong stepped onto the Moon, and then the budget cutting that's followed it since.

Clarke: In another ten years, that letdown will be part of the past and we'll go out to the planets and the stars and no one will even remember this little malaise of the Seventies. Man's future lies in space; we belong there--as well as in the sea--because it's only in those two places that we can be weightless and experience that same sense of freedom that we were born with hundreds of millions of years ago. I'm a skindiver and I always have a feeling of contentment, of belonging, when I'm back under water.

Watts: When Dr. D. T. Suzuki, the great Zen scholar, was asked the question "What is it like to have attained satori?"--that is to say, enlightened awakening according to Zen--he said it felt like ordinary, everyday experience except about two inches off the ground.

Clarke: Leaving the sea 500,000,000 years ago may have been a mistake. Perhaps the dolphins had the right idea: They tried it for a while and then said to hell with it, we're going back; this accounts for the vestigial rear legs of dolphins and whales.

Watts: There's another place where you get a rather odd feeling of contentment, Arthur, and that's out in the country on a cloudless night, far away from the lights of the city, so that you can see the stars. It's a spectacular view and undoubtedly good for the soul, but every now and then it occurs to me that we're midway out in one of the limbs of the galaxy, in the Milky Way's back yard, and I keep wondering what the view of the night sky might be like from the center of the galaxy.

Clarke: The sky would be much more spectacular--a perfect blaze of stars--but I think we'd be in deep trouble, because all hell is breaking loose in the center of the galaxy; it's probably blowing up.

Watts: We wouldn't be there for the simple reason that we couldn't live there.

Clarke: I wouldn't rule out the possibility of other things living there, though. In fact, the exploding stars, the neutron stars, are probably where all the action really is, because these storms of radiation and energy might be where very high-grade organisms or intelligences thrive because there's pure energy to live on. We say that organic life is possible only on the cold planets, where carbon-based reactions can take place. Well, we may be a very low type of organism, a statistical accident. The really spiritual beings might be in the centers of cosmic activity, right in the hearts of exploding stars and novae.

Watts: In looking at a galaxy, we might be looking at an intelligent organism. Douglas Harding had a wonderful article on this in the old Saturday Evening Post in the series titled "Adventures of the Mind." He explained the Universe as a living organism and in a very closely reasoned argument, showed that the fact that there are people on the Earth is symptomatic of the nature of the Earth. You wouldn't call a human being a cell-infested skeleton any more than you would call a planet a people-infested planet, as if the biosphere were a bunch of germs that came from elsewhere.

Clarke: Eddington once suggested that life may be a disease that attacks matter when it's in its old age, when it's too cold to sterilize itself.

Watts: But "attacks" implies it comes from somewhere else. I would rather say that life is something that happens to matter at a certain age, when it matures.

Clarke: Like a wine.

Watts: The aging of wine, the molding of cheese.

Clarke: There's a rather chilling thought here, Alan. The late John Campbell, the editor of Analog, suggested that we're looking at pollution in the wrong way. We're here as the result of global pollution of this planet approximately 500,000,000 years ago by early organisms that, as a result of their life processes, released enormous quantities of a deadly poisonous gas called oxygen. In so doing, they killed themselves off, but they made it possible for animals to exist on Earth. All the oxygen in our atmosphere is a result of this biological pollution. Now, perhaps, we're starting another phase; we've polluted our atmosphere so that something can supersede us--and that may well be our machines, the only organisms that could exist in the sort of atmosphere that we're creating.

Watts: That concept's not very comforting.

Clarke: The Universe wasn't designed for our comfort.

Watts: I think there may be a semantic problem with the word machine; it's loaded in the same sense as the word nigger.

Clarke: Of course. We use the phrase "mere machines." But they're not mere machines; no machine is "mere." Many machines are marvelous, very far from being mere--and they'll be even less mere in the future.

Watts: It's conceivable that as the next step in evolution, we could replace ourselves with solid-state electronic intelligences, which I think is what you're hinting at. They would probably keep us for a while in zoos and then finally decide that we were too sentimental and had too many irrelevant emotions that were pure static and an obstruction to the fulfillment of interesting purposes of their own. These machines would need no atmosphere, so the fact that we had polluted the whole planet and made it unbearable for us would mean nothing to them. These insectlike electronic beings would go on doing their permutations and combinations, being fully certified persons by virtue of having passed the Turing test, that fascinating test whereby you receive communications from a person and a machine, and if you can't distinguish which is which, then the machine counts as a person. I can conceive that this is exactly what might happen. But something within me rebels against all of that, because I feel that mechanical intelligence has fewer variables in it than biological intelligence. A biological intelligence contains a principle of randomness, so that it is an ever-fecund source of surprise. I think the preservation of that randomness is very important. Without it, everything would be completely predictable, and a predictable future is already past--like when the result of a chess game is known, we cancel the game and begin another.

Clarke: The question of the position of mechanical intelligence in the evolutionary sequence is one I've written a good deal about. It's one of the themes in 2001 and I've discussed it more recently in The Mind of the Machine, an essay in Playboy a few years back [December 1968]. I've suggested, as others have, that electronic intelligence represents the next step in evolution. The fact that we don't feel happy about it means no more than the fact that the Neanderthals probably would have felt pretty unhappy if they had known about us. That doesn't worry me unduly. And I don't agree with you that we wouldn't have variability with electronic intelligence. We could have just as much, if not more, because anything that can be done with biological systems can, in principle, often be done much better with nonbiological systems. The example I like to give is the eye as compared with the camera. Now, the eye is a fantastic achievement--the idea of building a camera out of jelly is incredible--but it's a lousy camera. Similarly, the idea of building a computer out of jelly, which is what our brain is, is marvelous, but I think the brain is a lousy computer. Nevertheless, the biological system is the only way you can get from a lifeless planet to an electronic intelligence. I can't imagine all the metals in a dead planet organizing themselves eventually into an IBM computer; I think they've got to pass through something like us, and this is our role in the evolutionary sequence. We are a transitional stage in the development of a high-powered, swift intelligence that is probably going to be electronic and that probably won't live on planets at all. It may live either in space or, as I suggested, in the real centers of energy in the Universe, where there are tremendous quantities of radiation and electronic activity. The first generation of electronic intelligences, which lies only a few years ahead of us if it's not already here, will be based on matter. There'll be printed circuits and electrons moving through wires and so forth, but ultimately we may get away from that into pure energy fields. The fact that we may be superseded by electronic beings upsets most people; because from a human point of view, anything that supersedes us is bad, period. But this is a self-centered, short-term point of view. We all know we're going to be succeeded by our children someday. We accept that without too much hysteria and we do our best to make them better than we are.

Watts: I don't expect my children to be better than I am; I expect them to be different but as good in their own way.

Clarke: The same argument is applicable to electronic intelligence, which, in one sense, may be our children.

Watts: The heart of the matter is that we really don't believe, and probably can't believe, that a machine is conscious, that it has that element of randomness, the ability to surprise. However perfectly it replicates whatever we can do, we always feel that there is no one at home in a machine, that there isn't inside it that mysterious awareness that we mean by being alive. Let me try to state the difference between a biological system and a mechanical one. Let's assume that the Universe is a self-exploring system and that no system can fully define itself--in the same way that my index finger cannot touch its own tip and my teeth cannot bite themselves. If this is so, then the Universe will always have two aspects: the known and the unknown but knowing. Living beings comprise both aspects, but machines only the first; their operations are entirely known. I don't mean that we know everything about the physics of their metals, but that we know their design because we created it. We don't fully know, and didn't consciously create, our own design--and therefore we always embody the ever-unknown aspect of the system. Despite my demurrer, however, I am fascinated by your vision of an intergalactic network of intelligences.

Clarke: They may already exist, you know.

Watts: I assumed they did. Arthur, your exploration of the imaginative future corresponds to my exploration of the present. You've shown me how I can appreciate myself as something bounded by my own skin but also in a network of relationships that includes the galaxies.

Clarke: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space." A very remarkable phrase for Shakespeare's time.

Watts: From my point of view, if your future is achieved, of course, it will only rerealize what is already here, in a way that makes it all the time seem different. That's what we want, after all, isn't it?

Clarke: We don't really want the future we foresee, because it would be so dull. Which brings up the charge frequently made against science-fiction writers that some of us have a nostalgia for the future. But I think it's much better to have a nostalgia for the future than for the past; it has better survival value.

Watts: I have a nostalgia for the present, because the present includes everything we know about the past and the future. There is only the present; there never was anything else and there never will be. Most people live for the future, and make all sorts of plans for it, but when those plans mature, they won't be able to enjoy them, because they'll be living somewhere else in their minds.

Clarke: Why should we bother about posterity, what's posterity ever done for us?--that's what you want to say.

Watts: I regard my posterity as myself.

Clarke: You don't believe in anything but the present?

Watts: I believe that the present is the way in which we apprehend reality, and that's where it's at.

Clarke: I guess that's fair enough.

Watts: There are people who don't even have words in their language for past or future. The Hopi, for example, conjugate their verbs according to the reliability of the statement. The first conjugation would be: I am talking about it now and it is happening. The second conjugation would be: I did, indeed, see it as if it were just a moment ago. Third conjugation: I heard it from a reliable source. Fourth conjugation: It may reasonably be assumed that it was so. Fifth conjugation: There is a rumor.

Clarke: Using the fourth conjugation, could it be reasonably assumed--as I have inferred throughout this discussion--that you have a basic distrust of technology?

Watts: Well, I feel that the ultimate end of technology is to control everything, and I'm not sure that I want to control it all.

Clarke: But you want to know it all, is that right?

Watts: No--knowledge and control are the same thing.

Clarke: Are they? There are people who are content to simply have knowledge. That means without any control; they just want to know, they don't want to manipulate. I think I'm rather like that.

Watts: I'll go along with that.

Clarke: It's curiosity, just curiosity.

Watts: There are two kinds of power; one is called, if I can use Sanskrit once again, prajna; the other, Siddhi. Siddhi is power in the technological sense; prajna is wisdom.

Clarke: And vidya.

Watts: Vidya, from which we get our video: vision. Prajna and vidya are more what I want than Siddhi, because I know however much technological power I get, I'll never be satisfied. It's like quenching your thirst with salt water. But I can be satisfied with wisdom. To my mind, changing the level of magnification and seeing things in different contexts and on different levels is in the interest of prajna rather than Siddhi.

Clarke: Wisdom is a peculiarly personal thing, Alan; it helps us not only understand our environment but also assess our own role in it. From this personal viewpoint, how do you look at yourself as an organism/environment, to use you phrase?

Watts: I seem to be congenitally incapable of understanding any scheme of the Universe that involves the notion that I, at the deepest level of me, am no "what's happening." When I look out a the galaxies, I see me--oh, not the Alan Watts me; that's only a superficial social game. But I see the same sort of me out there that is functioning in my molecules and cells, my blood and my nerves. All that to me is electronic unity. I am an occurrence of this system that, given enough time, can do me again and again and again. Every time the tune comes on, it's the tune that would be associated with Alan Watts. In that sense, I think we've got to realize that the individual life doesn't mean anything. It isn't important, except to people who are incapable of experiencing it fully--they're always left hungry and wanting more. But, as Confucius said, the man who understands the Tao in the morning can die content in the evening. I can't spell it out much better than that; when people ask to have the meaning of life explained to them, it's like asking Bach to explain his music in word. Only inferior music can be explained in that way. A Bach fugue doesn't have anything to say except itself. I want to look at the Universe in the same way.

Clarke: The purpose of the Universe, Alan, is the perpetual astonishment of mankind.

Watts: That's as likely as any other purpose I've ever heard about. But I think that now is the time to surprise the reader and call it quits. There comes a point when discussing man's problems has to give way to actually suffering through them. I think we could conclude that man's youth--like our dialog--has been spent seeking answers. His maturity--and ours--may come only when we stop asking questions.