Uploaded November 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
YouTube Members and Substack subscribers make these videos possible.
rupertsheldrake.substack.com
In 1998, my friends Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and I sat down at the University of California, Santa Cruz to explore how machine intelligence might evolve in relation to our own. At that time, the internet was still young, and artificial intelligence belonged mostly to science fiction. Yet many of the questions we raised then have become part of daily life.
In this conversation, we explore whether intelligence is best understood as logic and computation, or as something embodied, participatory, and alive. Can the mind be reduced to code, or does life itself depend on forms of knowing that no algorithm can contain?
Artificial systems now outpace us in speed, reach, and memory. Yet the deeper mystery is not how far they can go, but what they reveal about mind and ourselves. Will machine intelligence reproduce the limitations of our mechanistic worldview, or might it help us rediscover dimensions of mind that transcend machinery altogether?
Looking back, it's striking how near we now are to the possibilities we once only speculated about. Quantum computing, self-learning systems, large language models very much as Terence describes—and the looming prospect of superintelligence—have moved from the margins to the mainstream. But the heart of the conversation remains just as relevant today, if not more so: what is consciousness, and how might we participate in its unfolding evolution?
00:00 Preview of Talk
01:44 Terence McKenna Sets the Stage
05:16 Collectivism
06:47 Information and Nonsense
10:59 Artificial Super Intelligence
12:56 Handing Over Evolution to AI
18:26 Terence Concludes
21:42 Ralph Abraham Shreds Argument
23:24 Co-evolution and Co-dependence
28:27 Paranoid Fantasy?
30:08 Rupert Sheldrake Completely Disagrees
35:30 DMT for AI? McKenna's Vision
38:38 What Machines Can or Can't Do
39:59 Final Predictions
Notes:
Terence McKenna (1946 – 2000) was a philosopher, ethnobotanist, and storyteller whose explorations of consciousness, language, and psychedelics opened new ways of thinking about mind and evolution.
Ralph Abraham (1936 – 2024) was a mathematician and chaos theorist whose work bridged nonlinear dynamics, consciousness studies, and the evolution of cultural systems.
This and other conversations were compiled in our book The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination & Spirit
sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/the-evolutionary-mind
Our many trialogues can be found on my website.
sheldrake.org/audios/the-sheldrake-mckenna-abraham-trialogues
This video was edited by Sebastian Penraeth, the architect and artist of most of the videos, websites and podcasts I share with the world.
Media credits:
Music during the credits is from my son Cosmo Sheldrake’s soundtrack for the Netflix documentary on the Galapagos Islands.
Clip of Ribosome animation: by Charles Reilly, Drew Berry, The Walter + Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, wehi.tv
youtube.com/watch?v=morl5e-jBNk
Clip of computer built in Minecraft, by sammyuri
youtube.com/watch?v=-BP7DhHTU-I
YouTube Members and Substack subscribers make these videos possible.
rupertsheldrake.substack.com
In 1998, my friends Terence McKenna, Ralph Abraham and I sat down at the University of California, Santa Cruz to explore how machine intelligence might evolve in relation to our own. At that time, the internet was still young, and artificial intelligence belonged mostly to science fiction. Yet many of the questions we raised then have become part of daily life.
In this conversation, we explore whether intelligence is best understood as logic and computation, or as something embodied, participatory, and alive. Can the mind be reduced to code, or does life itself depend on forms of knowing that no algorithm can contain?
Artificial systems now outpace us in speed, reach, and memory. Yet the deeper mystery is not how far they can go, but what they reveal about mind and ourselves. Will machine intelligence reproduce the limitations of our mechanistic worldview, or might it help us rediscover dimensions of mind that transcend machinery altogether?
Looking back, it's striking how near we now are to the possibilities we once only speculated about. Quantum computing, self-learning systems, large language models very much as Terence describes—and the looming prospect of superintelligence—have moved from the margins to the mainstream. But the heart of the conversation remains just as relevant today, if not more so: what is consciousness, and how might we participate in its unfolding evolution?
00:00 Preview of Talk
01:44 Terence McKenna Sets the Stage
05:16 Collectivism
06:47 Information and Nonsense
10:59 Artificial Super Intelligence
12:56 Handing Over Evolution to AI
18:26 Terence Concludes
21:42 Ralph Abraham Shreds Argument
23:24 Co-evolution and Co-dependence
28:27 Paranoid Fantasy?
30:08 Rupert Sheldrake Completely Disagrees
35:30 DMT for AI? McKenna's Vision
38:38 What Machines Can or Can't Do
39:59 Final Predictions
Notes:
Terence McKenna (1946 – 2000) was a philosopher, ethnobotanist, and storyteller whose explorations of consciousness, language, and psychedelics opened new ways of thinking about mind and evolution.
Ralph Abraham (1936 – 2024) was a mathematician and chaos theorist whose work bridged nonlinear dynamics, consciousness studies, and the evolution of cultural systems.
This and other conversations were compiled in our book The Evolutionary Mind: Conversations on Science, Imagination & Spirit
sheldrake.org/books-by-rupert-sheldrake/the-evolutionary-mind
Our many trialogues can be found on my website.
sheldrake.org/audios/the-sheldrake-mckenna-abraham-trialogues
This video was edited by Sebastian Penraeth, the architect and artist of most of the videos, websites and podcasts I share with the world.
Media credits:
Music during the credits is from my son Cosmo Sheldrake’s soundtrack for the Netflix documentary on the Galapagos Islands.
Clip of Ribosome animation: by Charles Reilly, Drew Berry, The Walter + Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, wehi.tv
youtube.com/watch?v=morl5e-jBNk
Clip of computer built in Minecraft, by sammyuri
youtube.com/watch?v=-BP7DhHTU-I
