Noted scientist Leslie Orgel’s famous ‘second rule’ that “evolution is cleverer than you are” is thus spot on. And the burgeoning biomimicry movement are not exaggerating when they say that we can learn from “Nature’s genius”. The thing is, until we start to acknowledge natural intelligence, until we stop bigging ourselves up above the rest of life’s great web, we will not find our right place within Nature. For sure, we are an expression of Nature (and an impressive one at that) — yet we are somehow blind to the true significance of life on Earth. To see and feel the biosphere for what it really is — namely a fabulous system of self-organizing intelligence — is to become a newly conscious expression of that intelligence. And that is the stuff the profoundest dreams are made of.

Google is the first psychedelically informed superpower to shape the noosphere and NASDAQ. I don’t mean that Googlers (necessarily) are all seasoned psychonauts, or (necessarily) take 4:20 breaks on-campus, or are well represented (necessarily) at Burning Man. Nor am I saying that psychedelics “caused” Google, any more than a Stanford education did. I do mean that the core mission comes right out of the psychedelic atlas: a vision of super-connectivity and super-conductivity that is a hallmark of the psychedelic landscape.

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

Yet surely having something wrapped right around your mind is different from having your mind wrapped tightly around something. What we live in is not the age of the extended mind but the age of the inverted self. The things that have usually lived in the darker recesses or mad corners of our mind—sexual obsessions and conspiracy theories, paranoid fixations and fetishes—are now out there: you click once and you can read about the Kennedy autopsy or the Nazi salute or hog-tied Swedish flight attendants. But things that were once external and subject to the social rules of caution and embarrassment—above all, our interactions with other people—are now easily internalized, made to feel like mere workings of the id left on its own.

Metaphors are useful, as they enable the thin skein of connectivity between bodies of thought; yet they are also a leaky mechanism, potentially losing much richness from original concept to translation. If we were able to spend more time sharing ideas, we might get somewhere. The danger, after all, is that systems and concepts are built around analogies, rather than anything truly deep.