Interspecies Communication

From ecodelic triplit, the peyoteros’ sense of place, interspecies communication and animistic healing to ecocentric entheogenic rituals, psychedelic bioregionalism, biogenetic structuralist ecopsychology and transpersonal ecosophy – this special issue of the EJE explores the verdant intersection between neurobiology and botany, shamanism and animism, and psychology and ecology, fusing mind with Nature in a boiling cauldron full of entheogenic insight.

A feminist posthuman essay on the figurations in three ecological videos by Ursula Biemann: Deep Weather, Subatlantic, and Acoustic Ocean, published by Centre Cultural Suisse in Paris and Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art MAMAC, Nice, in French and English.

In 20th century, amaranth has been rediscovered as crop that could defend vulnerable areas of the world from hunger due to its tolerance for drought and poor soil. It still constitutes a minor cereal crop in the global scale, but as a labor intensive and resilient plant that does not benefit much from pesticides or genetic modification but supplies high quality nutrition, it models an alternative to neoliberal pesticide-driven monocrop agriculture and factory farming. This paper rewrites the history of human relations with amaranth in one of its centers of origin, Tehuacán Valley (Puebla, Mexico) since the times of Aztecs, through its colonial demise, till its rebirth in Proyecto Alternativas, aimed at remediation of poverty due to drought. While doing this I transform Toledo and Barrera-Bassols’ (2009) concept of biocultural memory to consider this memory as a hybrid phenomenon formed through interactions between humans and plants and viewing plants’ adaptation strategies as “living thoughts” (Kohn, 2013).

Primer capítulo de introducción de la publicación “Traducir un bosque”, editada y coordinada por Santiago Morilla y publicada por la Diputación de Granada (2021): Los estudios y experimentos sobre comunicación entre plantas nos indican que todos los seres vivos nos relacionamos dentro de un complejo tejido de interdependencias que nos afectan de manera simbiótica, más allá de lo que los humanos podemos ver u oír, o siquiera creemos saber sobre ellas. Es más, pese a que la biomasa planetaria está esencialmente por plantas, siguen siendo las grandes desconocidas en nuestra cotidianeidad antropocéntrica. Desde este planteamiento, el proyecto “Traducir un bosque” pretende, con ayuda de la mediación tecnológica, hacer perceptible aquello que no vemos ni oímos, que ni siquiera sabemos o creemos saber sobre las plantas. “Traducir un bosque” despliega un sistema experimental de interacción simbólica entre humanos y plantas; una red que nos invita a considerar que no somos únicamente espectadores, sino cocreadores de la realidad que compartimos con el ecosistema vegetal, pero cuyos datos necesitan ser traducidos y acotados para ser –de nuevo– reobservados y reinterrogados desde otro lugar para la convivencia multiespecie.

from: The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, Taylor and Kaplan, ed., published by Continuum, 2005 Although the term "animism" was originally coined in the nineteenth century to designate the mistaken projection of humanlike attributes -such as life, mind, intelligence -to nonhuman and ostensibly inanimate phenomena, it is clear that this first meaning was itself rooted in a misapprehension, by Western scholars, of the perceptual experience of indigenous, oral peoples. Twentieth-century research into the phenomenology of perception revealed that humans never directly experience any phenomenon as definitively inert or inanimate. Perception itself is an inherently relational, participatory event; we say that things "call our gaze" or "capture our attention," and as we lend our focus to those things we find ourselves affected and transformed by the encounter -the way the blue sky, when we open our gaze to it, reverberates through our sensing organism, altering our mood and even the rhythm of our beating heart. When we are walking in the forest, a particular tree may engage our awareness, and if we reach to feel the texture of its bark we may find that our fingers are soon being tutored by that tree. If the bark is rough and deeply furrowed our fingers will begin to slow down their movements in order to explore those ridges and valleys, while if the trunk is smooth, like a madrone, even the palm of our hand will be drawn to press against and caress that smooth surface. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his classic work, Phenomenology of Perception , suggests that the primordial event of perception is always experienced as a reciprocal encounter between the perceiver and the perceived, a open dialectic wherein my sensing body continually responds and adjusts itself to the things it senses, and wherein the perceived phenomenon responds in turn, disclosing its nuances to me only as I allow myself to be affected by its unique style, its particular dynamism or active agency.

Ted Chiang’s short story, “The Great Silence”, takes the perspective of a parrot living in the Rio Abajo forest in Puerto Rico, sharing its habitat with the Arecibo Observatory. The story first appeared as the textual component of a video installation by Allora & Calzadilla, a piece that emphasizes the entanglement of the forest habitat and the massive structure of the telescope). Chiang’s parrot-narrator wonders why humans demonstrate such a commitment to the possibility of interstellar communication while often ignoring the voices and interests of our terrestrial cohabitants. The parrot’s critically endangered species, the Puerto Rican parrot, once filled the forests of the island, and the narrator presents his/her narrative as a sort of final plea to humans, asking us to consider the speech of the nonhumans with whom we live. Bruno Latour’s notion of “the terrestrial” provides a useful framework for approaching the parrot’s narrative, specifically in terms of the demand to come “down to earth”, engaging in the politics of human and nonhuman agents who all have something at stake. The parrot asks that we turn more attention to terrestrial concerns, in order to communicate with those who are already speaking to us.

Paper presented at the "Anthrozoology as International Practice" Student Conference in Animal Studies, University of Exeter.

While research on other animal species and their forms of communication continues to yield fascinating insights into animal languages, other animals are still widely perceived as ‘voiceless others’ who are not heard because they cannot speak. This paper explores possible ways of overcoming this linguistic bias that keeps humans from responding to other animals as articulate, sentient individuals. To this aim, intercultural communication theory can be mapped onto interspecies encounters to identify strategies that might help us overcome species differences and anthropocentric notions of ‘animal otherness.’ I argue that we can draw on examples of multispecies dialogue in practice to see how mutual trust and attentiveness facilitate understanding across species boundaries and make interspecies communication possible.

Recording available on the AIP Conference's Youtube channel.

The human hearing range is from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. However, many animals can hear much higher sound frequencies. Dolphins, especially, have a hearing range up to 300 kHz. To our knowledge, there is no data of a reported wide-band sound frequency earphone to satisfy both humans and animals. Here, we show that graphene earphones, packaged into commercial earphone casings can play sounds ranging from 100 Hz to 50 kHz. By using a one-step laser scribing technology, wafer-scale flexible graphene earphones can be obtained in 25 min. Compared with a normal commercial earphone, the graphene earphone has a wider frequency response (100 Hz to 50 kHz) and a three times lower fluctuation (±10 dB). A nonlinear effect exists in the graphene-generated sound frequency spectrum. This effect could be explained by the DC bias added to the input sine waves which may induce higher harmonics. Our numerical calculations show that the sound frequency emitted by graphene could reach up to 1 MHz. In addition, we have demonstrated that a dog wearing a graphene earphone could also be trained and controlled by 35 kHz sound waves. Our results show that graphene could be widely used to produce earphones for both humans and animals.

In the light of ongoing research on other animal species and their communicative capacities, we may wonder how much other-than-human animals would have to say if we knew how to listen. Yet, even though scientific studies continue to yield fascinating insights into animal languages, other animals are still widely perceived as ‘voiceless others’ – beings without language who are too alien from us to be understood. This linguistic bias obscures not only their remarkable communicative abilities but also our moral responsibility of responding to them. Departing from the assumption that other animals do indeed speak and that dialogue between 'us' and 'them' is possible, this project explores whether there is a way from the long-assumed muteness of our animal others toward forms of communicating, including nonverbal behaviours, we share with them.

Welcome to Aesop’s Anthropology, an effort to theorize culture and society across species lines. This project pursues a basic question: what can we learn about culture from other species? Studies of nonhumans are generating new perspectives on intelligence, media, and
networking, but they’ve yet to impact how we understand sociality. This is because of the notion that culture uniquely characterizes us as a species—much like racial and classed conceits equated culture and cultivation with the highest achievements of European society in the last millennium.
This is also attributable to the dependence of social theorists on the notion of social construction. In this  view, we only ever engage nonhumans through representations, reflections of our cultural conditioning and social order. But the usefulness of social construction—along with certainty about the uniqueness of humans—has eroded. It’s time to recognize that sociality, in its origins and elaborations, begins with nonhumans. We’re late to the game of culture, and it’s time to catch up in our thinking about the social.

Luke, D. (2015, September). Ecodelia: Psychedelic plants and transpersonal ecopsychology. Invited lecture for Plant Consciousness conference, Regents Park College, London, 26-27th September.

Exploring interspecies interactions arising from the use of psychedelic plants this talk considers what can be learned from animism and shamanism in informing both psychology and ecology. Fusing research from parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, ecopsychology, ethnobotany and the investigation of psychedelics a perspective of transpersonal ecopsychology views plant-human interactions as meaningful, potentially transformative and sorely needed given the current rate of manmade species extinction on Earth.

In this essay I develop a systems-theoretical observation of John Lilly’s cybernetics of communication in his 1967 work The Mind of the Dolphin. The eight-year-old project that The Mind of the Dolphin recounts for public consumption details his aspiration to achieve an unprecedented breakthrough beyond companionate communion to fully abstract linguistic communication across species boundaries. Between 1959 and 1968 Lilly wagered and lost his mainstream scientific career largely over this audacious, ultimately inconclusive bid to establish and document for scientific validation “communication with a nonhuman mind.” In that effort, however, he mobilized the best available tools, a cutting-edge array of cybernetic concepts. He leaned heavily on the information theory bound up with first-order cybernetics and operated with heuristic computational metaphors alongside the actual computers of his era. As I will elicit through some close readings of his texts, in that process Lilly also homed in on crucial epistemological renovations with a constructivist redescription of cognition that may have influenced and motivated his colleague Heinz von Foerster’s more renowned formulations, arriving in the early 1970s, of a second-order cybernetics.

This essay engages recent thinking in animal studies in order to give fuller attention to birds’ voices in the Parliament of Fowls than has previously been admitted. In the context of allegory and medieval theories of articulate voice (both of which traditionally deny intrinsic meaning to nonhuman voices), I focus on the well-known, intrusive bird calls line to argue how Chaucer engages with issues of translation - an act which serves as an imagined opportunity to understand and appreciate what other species might have to say, which, in this respect, might be seen as a form of 'biotranslation' (the principle that genuine communication and translation between biological species is possible). I propose that Chaucer asks us to consider real birds’ voices at line 499 because they momentarily take us by surprise, crying forth in a strange semiotic mode. Linguistic translation is brought forcibly to our attention here because it momentarily breaks down, raising queries about categories of species and voice and, indeed, the poem's allegory. Exploring linguistic translations in the poem, that is, can have profound implications for the 'translation' acts that allegory performs upon the animal figure.

Psychedelic shamanism might be thought of primarily as a communication with Nature, for instance by asking the plants directly which ones can heal a particular illness, or by asking the plant spirit to teach them, or by using the plant in aiding the psychological metamorphosis into a plant or animal “allies.” Given that shamans have most likely been communicating with Nature in this way for thousands of years, it might well be asked what can be gained for humanity’s relationship with the ecosystem from such a dialogue and, perhaps more importantly, how can Nature benefit from this relationship?

Historical review of Communication Theory versus Information Theory, several models explained including Bühler, Jakobson, Ruesch & Bateson, Shannon, and Alexander. Focus on the contrast between Human and Machine communication. Winner of 2015 "Top Book Chapter", Philosophy of Communication Division, National Communication Association (USA).

The Music of the Plants project aims at investigating, in an artistic way, the reactivity of plants to their environment and their ability to communicate and learn. This research has not yet entered mainstream scientific investigation, so all the information available is offered by communities and individuals that, like myself, can see the meaning in terms of ethical, ecological and spiritual awareness.
We can improve our relationship with our environment by understanding the presence of something we can call "consciousness" in plants.

Author and historian Yuval Harari has foreseen a future where humans emerge as "self-made gods of planet Earth." Yet what may displace Homo Deus as the main mover in evolution? A prime candidate is a hybrid lifeform of greater scope. A new genus of superorganisms – Deus Narrans – will have an opportunity to engage actual and virtual beings across species lines in quests to co-evolve shared values, rather than advance a single genetic and memetic lineage. The art, technology and science endeavors arising from such new transspecies connectives may surpass in influence those of species-bound rivals. Exponential technologies will propel this transition. For eons, material scarcities prompted zero-sum rivalries among and between hominids and other species to reproduce at the expense of one another. As plenitude and longevity grow, new forms of non-zero sum interchange will arise among sentient beings. Evolution in a post-scarcity era will differ from earlier epochs by turning to the spread of lumenes -- replicable qualities of spirit (patterns of emotional response)-across species lines. New communication technologies and pattern languages can speed this shift. Technologies already are emerging for sentient beings to converse and share emotions among distantly-related animal and plant lifeforms. These tools will become central as evolution grows branchier. Genetic engineering and artificial intelligence soon will make Homo Sapiens the ancestor of myriad new cultures and species, many far surpassing our present capabilities. As a common ground for connecting sentient life forms, Deus Narrans can meet the need for spreading empathic resonances, understandings and collaboration among beings across species lines. The heart of such interactions may be a fractal system for co-creation in the realms of art, science, and technology. This paper maps how "social tetrahedrons" and “narrative fractals” can serve as interfaces through which sentient beings of all kinds can share experiences and create value at all scales in multiple realms. In the coming year, open source apps will begin testing such interfaces to bridge current cultural barriers in peer learning and online collaboration. If transcultural pilots succeed, they may set the stage for millions of humans – as well as individuals from new lifeforms to come – to explore, thrive, and co-evolve in relationships made possible by Deus Narrans.

Projects that bring the ‘hard’ sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few focus on regions beyond Europe and Anglophone world. Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens.

These transdisciplinary projects shed light on how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas. They may also be understood to ‘decolonize’ science in the Latin American context. They do so by seeking alternatives to the logic of extractivism, emphasizing nonhuman intelligence, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human, and (re)connecting Western science with other forms of knowledge and practice. This book focuses particularly on Latin American artists who are engaging with scientific ideas and methods to create new imaginaries for a post-anthropocentric world, in dialogue with decolonial thinkers and political ecologists from the region.

Semiotics (sometimes spelled “semeiotic”) is the name first given by John Locke, and later reprised by Charles S. Peirce, for the “doctrine of signs,” or the study of how some things can stand for other things to still other things. This deliberate inquiry can be contrasted with “folk semiotic” accounts, which assume that there is some intrinsic feature about, say, the human voice or a painted board that makes them capable of signifying. Such a naive assumption does not withstand serious scrutiny. From a philosophical standpoint, what makes something a sign is an involvement in a specific sort of triadic relation. This relation is found in human/nonhuman and deliberate/nondeliberate signs alike. Semiosis, the action of signs, is what permits communication, but it is wider than communication. For example, if while in an adjacent room I smell that the turkey in the oven is ready, my pet dog can smell it too, and the turkey is not trying to “tell” us anything. But if the cook in the kitchen tells me it is ready, I receive that message, while my dog hears the sounds but is none the wiser (in contemporary semiotic parlance, my dog and I couple our Umwelten via indices, but the symbols at hand generate interpretants only in my anthroposemiosis). In spite of the fact that it has a long and distinguished history (especially during the medieval period), general inquiry into signs became an organized research program only in the mid-20th century. Today, in addition to philosophers, semiotics attracts a wide range of scholars, such as ethologists, cognitive scientists, linguists, art historians, logicians, media theorists, literary critics, computer programmers, biologists, sociologists, and so on. From a methodological standpoint, then, parochialism is not an option. The scholarly literature can nevertheless be fruitfully divided into theoretical and applied strands. Not surprisingly, most philosophers drawn to semiotic questions work in the former strand. Semiotics is not to be confused with “semiology,” a (now largely defunct) project that originated in the lectures of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and which was active in the 1960s, mainly in France. Semiotics, by contrast, is a vibrant tradition that continues to flourish worldwide. Although some persist in employing the term “semiotics” when discussing narrow studies that focus exclusively on cultural codes, such terminological misuse masks the fact that a study of signs is broader than a study of language. A sustained philosophy of signs, then, promises (as Locke initially surmised) to yield truly novel insights.

In this thesis I analyse examples of intersubjectivity in five science fiction films, two books and one TV show, between humans, and with fictional aliens. I describe the visual and narrative forms these exchanges take – like speech, sign, movement and metamorphosis – and consider, by drawing on film phenomenology, how they affectively catch up the viewer. I also excavate their conceptualisations of intersubjective relations by comparing them to the relations between anthropologist and subject. I argue in favour of a valuation of alterity and the transformative experiences that occur on contact with an alien Other in fiction, but critique those figures who undergo a complete dissolution of self. I argue that in order to foster an interspecies ethics through watching science fiction cinema those fictions must narrate intersubjectivity in a way that does not flatten that Other into knowability. I ultimately then work towards uncovering the ways particular
visual exchanges can be supportive of a posthuman ethical strategy for better future interspecies relations.

Article paru dans le numéro 9 de la revue Litter@ Incognita, hiver 2017.
Résumé de l’article
L’auteur propose de prendre à revers la thèse heideggérienne selon laquelle « l’animal est pauvre en monde ». Examinant la lettre de cette théorie, il montre comment elle est traversée d’un dualisme symptomatique de la Modernité. L’acosmie prêtée à l’animal devient alors un paradigme utile pour décrire le « cercle de désinhibition » qui régit cette Modernité, notamment avec l’avènement de l’anthropocène. Paradoxalement peut-être, c’est le « versant animal » qui survient alors comme donation d’un sol depuis lequel contrer les menaces de l’acosmie.
Abstract
This paper criticises the Martin Heidegger’s thesis on the animal as “poor in the world” (weltarm). Actually, it’s merely the supposed “world-forming” human which is threatened by the acosmy. And, in the Anthropocene, the animals, specially the wild ones, give us chance for « re-earthing » our condition of being.

Paper presented at the HASI Annual Conference, Tel Aviv University, 1-3 June 2021

While research in the emergent field of 'multispecies studies' is diverse, it shares a central aim of expanding our ways of looking at and making sense of the world, inviting in the more-than-human in myriad shapes. In fieldwork, this calls for new or adapted methodologies, such as multispecies ethnography, which seek to include other-than-human animals whose perspectives traditionally get eclipsed or distorted by human-centred methods. However, ethnographers who actively incorporate multispecies methodologies in their research recognise difficulties of doing so. Anthropocentrism and human bias are deeply ingrained in ethnographic research and hardly allow for an unmediated participation of other animals. A key challenge here is that traditional ethnographic methods rely heavily on language, and multispecies ethnographers thus often point towards the lack of linguistic capacity in other animals as an obstacle to engaging them as active participants in their work. Drawing on examples of this rhetoric, I argue that it is less a deficiency on the animals' side but rather a narrow conception of language as human language that hampers our thinking about alternative, more inclusive ways of doing research. Based on this, I explore how attentiveness and respect towards our animal others may foster understanding between 'us' and 'them' through interspecies dialogue.

The ayahuasca research community is familiar with the concept of plant intelligences; however, they have yet to be adequately accounted for by commonly used research practices. This chapter is a call to examine the ontological and epistemological assumptions that underlie research practices and how these practices and assumptions may reinforce hierarchies of knowledge and animacy. The first part of this chapter describes some absences created by following a " methods as usual " approach when researching ayahuasca, based on ethnographic fieldwork at the World Ayahuasca Conference in 2016 (AYA2016). This highlights the need for researchers to acknowledge the methodological, disciplinary, and identity-based limitations on our abilities to produce and represent certain knowledges. Secondly, this chapter is a call to seriously and humbly engage with Indigenous sciences and epistemologies. This requires an honest reckoning with how research has contributed to colonial appropriation and marginalization of Indigenous knowledges. Indigenous ways of knowing have precedent for collaborating with teacher plants in producing knowledge and have much to contribute to discourse on multispecies perspectives. Lastly, I discuss possibilities for including multispecies sensibilities and Indigenous standpoints in research practices to create more collaborative and decolonial knowledges.

*This is just the abstract of the paper - send me a private message if you'd like a copy of the full paper - I'm not allowed to post it freely for download, but can share for non-commercial purposes*

At an urban parrot sanctuary in the Midwestern USA, humans care for eightysome
parrots from more than a dozen species. Many of these parrots have personal histories
that include various forms of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. The article explores the
forms of interspecies communication through which human caretakers interpret and respond
to the psychic lives of these parrots—psychic lives that are marked by troubles ranging
from social withdrawal to self-destructive behavior. These interspecies communications
include body language, gesture, nonverbal vocalizations, and human-language phrases. While
biosemiotic theory offers a provocative starting point for understanding these communications,
sanctuary interactions destabilize certain semiotic distinctions, drawing attention to
ambiguities between semantic and nonsemantic vocalization, vocalization and body language,
informative speech and expletive, and communication and symptom. Building on ideas about
metacommunication in animal play, I suggest that both psychic trouble and interactions to
ease that trouble might be considered forms of biosemiotic creativity. By loosening and opening
up the distinctions frequently drawn between human and other-than-human semiosis, it
is possible to develop subtler accounts of the semiotic improvisations that emerge in uniquely
configured multispecies communities such as the sanctuary.

This article interprets Jakob von Uexküll's understanding of different beings' Innenwelt, Gegenwelt, and umwelt through Deleuzian insights of multiplicity, context, and particularity. This Deleuzian interpolation into Uexküll's insights acknowledges the absence of a unitary 'human' view of nature, recognizing instead that plural viewpoints of cultures, subgroups and individuals understand and interpret natural signs variously not just because of ideology but because of physiology and contrastive fundamental ways of accessing the world. Recent formative research in comparative neurobiology suggests that universal anthropological claims of cross-cultural semiotic similarity are incorrect. Interpreting biosemiotics as the investigation of apprehending the Innenwelt of radically different others (species), such semiotic understandings themselves are not necessarily generalizable between different members of the same species in a group, same-species groups in different natural cultural contexts, or even (as with humans) the same animal at different points of time (based on new understandings, patterns, or events of meaning altering interpretations of self and events). Conjoining Deleuze's insights of the complexity of multiplicity with Uexküll's scientific-imaginative system of comprehending other creatures' ways of understanding their world offers an increased self-reflexivity regarding the simultaneous levels of actual semiotic activity for biosemiotic inquiry.

Powerful collaborative relationships between horses and humans have existed for thousands of years. Much of man’s success on the planet can be directly attributed to this inter-species relationship – a relationship based on an unspoken kinesthetic intelligence. Much attention is spent looking at the role of emotional intelligence (EQ) in developing effective leaders. Yet, kinesthetic intelligence (PQ) is the overlooked and under leveraged learning construct when developing effective leadership capacities. This interactive and experiential workshop explores this gap in contemporary leadership theory and development and shows how the horse just might be our guide once again to new leadership horizons.

Octavia Butler’s 1988 novel, ​Dawn,​ and Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel, ​The Lathe of Heaven,​ each present human-alien relationships that disrupt anthropocentric hierarchies by inserting themselves their nonhuman selves into human social spaces (both as agents and byproducts of manmade change). While most discussions of SF aliens focus on physical appearance, the estranging ‘alien-ness’ in both texts come from the aliens’ use of species-specific languages in the form of chemical exchanges and machine-produced translations.

Luke, D. (2017). Otherworlds: Psychedelics and exceptional human experience. London: Muswell Hill Press.

A psychonautic scientific trip to the weirdest outposts of the psychedelic terrain, inhaling anything and everything relevant from psychology, psychiatry, parapsychology, anthropology, neuroscience, ethnobotany, ethnopharmacology, biochemistry, religious studies, cultural history, shamanism and the occult along the way.

Staring the strange straight in the third eye this eclectic collection of otherworldly entheogenic research delivers a comprehensive and yet ragtaglledy scientific exploration of syanaesthesia, extra-dimensional percepts, inter-species communication, eco-consciousness, mediumship, possession, entity encounters, near-death and out-of-body experiences, psi, alien abduction experiences and lycanthropy. Essentially, its everything you ever wanted to know about weird psychedelic experiences, but were too afraid to ask… 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1908995149

“Emphasizing parapsychological aspects of the psychedelic experience, Luke’s new book fills in a fascinating and previously neglected lacuna in the burgeoning field of human studies with these compounds. ” – Rick Strassman, PhD

“A psychedelic Indiana Jones. ” – Matt Colborn, PhD

“David Luke’s delightful one-liner about his book is that it’s ‘about weird people in weird places taking weird substances doing weird things and, importantly, having weird experiences’ . . . On reflection, it’s much more profound than that . . . So weird reader, forge ahead without fear. ” – Dean Radin, PhD

“In his fascinating book David plunges into this controversial topic and gives the backstory, the front story, and possible ways forward to bring paranormal and psychedelic research together, and further our understanding of both. ” – Dennis J. McKenna, PhD

“A remarkable collection and a necessary one. This body of research illuminates aspects of psychedelic experiences usually obscured or denied in the medical and clinical research and sensationalized in the popular press. ” – James Fadiman, PhD

“A real Dr Gonzo. ” – Will Self

Otherworlds:
Psychedelics and Exceptional Human Experience

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword – Dr Dean Radin
- Blasting Open the Doors of Perception

Preface
- Exceptional Psychedelic Experience
- Otherworld Cartographies
- A Strange Journey on a Crooked Path


SECTION 1: Explorations of Exceptional Entheogen Experiences

1: Notes on Getting Cactus Lodged in Your Reducing Valve: San Pedro and Psychic Abilities
- Cactus of the Four Winds
- Plant Allies and Plant Alkaloids
- Artificial Paradises or Natural Chemical Utopias?
- Cleansing the Doors of (Extrasensory) Perception
- Putting the Psi Back into Psychedelics
- Uncorking the Genie's Bottle
- Putting the Cork Back in the Bottle

2. Psychedelic Possession: The Growing Incorporation of Incorporation into Ayahuasca Use
- The Growing Incorporation of Incorporation in Ayahuasca Use
- The Prepossessing Power of Possession
- Psychedelic Possession Outside of Umbandaime and Barquinha
- Any Body for Anybody: Shape Sharing or Shape Shifting?
- Psychedelic Possession Outside of Shamanism, and Inside Ordinary People
- So Why is Umbandaime on the Rise?
- Shamanic… or Individualistic, Pluralistic, Consumerist and Technologized?
- Synthesis and Analysis
- Postscript: Flying High with Goose and Crow

3. The Induction of Synaesthesia with Chemical Agents: A Systematic Review
(with Devin Terhune)
- Methods
- Results
- Discussion
- Postscript: A Placebo-Controlled LSD-induced Synaesthesia Experiment

4. Rock Art or Rorschach: Is There More to Entoptics Than Meets the Eye?
- Entoptics as Hallucinations and Projections: Both, Either, or Neither?
- Multidimensional Form Constants
- The Extra Dimensions of Cyberdelia
- Turning a Blind Eye to Entoptic Phenomena
- Omni-directional Perception
- Paranormal Visual Perception
- Conclusions: Cleansing the Doors of Misperception
- Postscript: Hurling Algebra at the Hard Problem of Consciousness to Obscure Absurd Infinite Regress

5. Discarnate Entities and Dimethyltryptamine (DMT): Psychopharmacology, Phenomenology and Ontology
- History of DMT Biochemistry
- The Speculated Psychopharmacology of DMT, its Related Compounds and the Pineal Gland 
- Neurochemical Action of DMT
- Phenomenology of the DMT Experience
- Mental Imagery
- DMT and Veridical Visions
- Phenomenological Cartography of the DMT World
- Discarnate Entities
- Ontology of DMT Beings

6. Disembodied Eyes Revisited: An Investigation into the Ontology of Entheogenic Entity Encounters
- A Brief Glance at the Truly Forbidden
- Snake Eyes
- Sentient Entities
- Postscript: More Fishy Than the Greenwich Pie n Eel Shop

7. Psychedelics and Species Connectedness
- Turning Topiary
- Ecodelia
- Shamanism, Animism and Animaphany
- Interspecies Communication


SECTION 2: Do Psychedelics Like Psilocybin Really Cause Psi?

8. Psychoactive Substances and Paranormal Phenomena Review

9. Psychedelic/Neurochemical Models of Paranormal Experience
- Brain as Filter
- β-Carbolines, Tryptamines and Psi
- DMT, Near-Death and Other Exceptional Experiences
- Ketamine and NDEs
- Dopamine and Paranormal Beliefs and Experiences
- Overview of Psychedelic/Neurochemical Models of Paranormal Experience

10. Field Reports of Psychedelic Paranormal Phenomena
- Anthropological and Historical Reports
- Personal Views and Experiences
- Clinical Reports
- Evaluation of Field Reports

11. Surveys of Psychedelic Paranormal Beliefs and Experiences
- Surveys of Belief in the Paranormal
- Surveys of Paranormal Experiences
- Surveys and Out-of-body Experiences
- Summary of Survey Research

12. Experimental Psychedelic ESP Research
- Forced Choice Designs
- Free Response Psychometry (Object Reading) Experiments
- Other Free Response Clairvoyance Experiments
- Free Response Telepathy Experiments
- Summary of Experimental Research

13. Methodological Critique of Experimental ESP Research

14. General Summary and Conclusions on Psychedelic Parapsychological Research

Afterword: Pulling Magicians out of a Rabbit Hole

References

Index

This paper will be in two parts. The first will start from the premise that the term ‘performance studies’ means different things in different contexts. Specifically, the paper will address the distinction between i) “Performance Studies” understood as a discipline that emerged largely as a challenge to Theatre Studies in the US in the 1980s and 90s – thanks in large part to the work of Richard Schechner, and ii) performance studies understood as ‘the scholarly study of musical performance’ (Rink 2005: x) which, again since the 1980s, has constituted a rapidly growing area of research within music and musicology. Having outlined the distinction, but also areas of shared concern, I will offer some preliminary observations as to what the value might be of greater levels of communication between these two versions of performance studies. The second part of the paper will introduce the emerging field of Performance Philosophy as one site in which precisely these kinds of interdisciplinary exchange might take place. Here, I will focus on the concept of music performance as philosophy – drawing from scholars such as Andrew Bowie to suggest that we need not think of philosophy as simply one more source of methodologies which might be applied to musical performance, but of music performance itself as the site of a kind of philosophical thinking in its own right.

By examining two exemplary cases, this paper addresses the contemporary phenomenon of artistic collaborations between human and non-human animals, which is referred to as interspecies art. Interspecies art has become increasingly significant since the beginning of the twenty-first century and excels at challenging binary oppositions by crediting animals’ creative abilities. Located within the field of human-animal studies, this article combines art historical methods with agency concepts derived from praxeology and action theory. The innovative approach of connecting these ideas of animal agency with interspecies art provides the framework to analyse Aaron Angell’s Gallery Peacetime inhabited by axolotls and CMUK, an interspecies collective consisting of humans and parrots. In order to make the animals’ participation visible as well as to provide a deeper understanding of interspecies art, these specific human-animal relations are examined using Lisa Jevbratt’s and Jessica Ullrich’s criteria for interspecies art and Mieke Roscher’s concepts of entangled and relational agency. This analysis is complemented by a field study and proves to be fertile for revealing the animals’ strong involvement in the artworks as well as beyond the art context.
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Vorliegend werden zwei Agency-Konzepte nach der Historikerin Mieke Roscher in Fallbeispielen aus dem Kunstkontext erprobt und auf Aaron Angell's "Gallery Peacetime" und das Interspezies-Kollaborativ CMUK angewendet.

Prompted by the thesis that an organism’s umwelt possesses not just a descriptive dimension, but a normative one as well, some have sought to annex semiotics with ethics. Yet the pronouncements made in this vein have consisted mainly in rehearsing accepted moral intuitions, and have failed to concretely further our knowledge of why or how a creature comes to order objects in its environment in accordance with axiological charges of value or disvalue. For want of a more explicit account, theorists writing on the topic have relied almost exclusively on semiotic insights about perception originally designed as part of a sophisticated refutation of idealism. The end result, which has been a form of direct givenness, has thus been far from convincing. In an effort to bring substance to the right-headed suggestion that values are rooted in the biological and conform to species-specific requirements, we present a novel conception that strives to make explicit the elemental structure underlying umwelt normativity. Building and expanding on the seminal work of Ayn Rand in metaethics, we describe values as an intertwined lattice which takes a creature’s own embodied life as its ultimate standard; and endeavour to show how, from this, all subsequent valuations can in principle be determined.

Referential communication occurs when a sender elaborates its gestures to direct the attention of a recipient to its role in pursuit of the desired goal, e.g. by pointing or showing an object, thereby informing the recipient what it wants. If the gesture is successful, the sender and the recipient focus their attention simultaneously on a third entity, the target. Here we investigated the ability of domestic horses (Equus caballus) to communicate referentially with a human observer about the location of a desired target, a bucket of food out of reach. In order to test six operational criteria of referential communication, we manipulated the recipient’s (experimenter) attentional state in four experimental conditions: frontally oriented, backward oriented, walking away from the arena and frontally oriented with other helpers present in the arena. The rate of gaze alternation was higher in the frontally oriented condition than in all the others. The horses appeared to use both indicative (pointing) and non-indicative (nods and shakes) head gestures in the relevant test conditions. Horses also elaborated their communication by switching from a visual to a tactile signal and demonstrated perseverance in their communication. The results of the tests revealed that horses used referential gestures to manipulate the attention of a human recipient so to obtain an unreachable resource. These are the first such findings in an ungulate species.

This paper asks how AI can change the consensus around the notion of sentience, through a specific focus on the intertwining of culture and materiality, as well as human-nonhuman relations. The question of sentience in machines is generally regarded as a rather fetishizing notion that obscures the specific assemblages of AI. We would like to open up this notion of fetish, and provide a theoretical map for an inverted way of understanding how fetishization of AI could be mobilized in cultivating an interspecies community. [1] The ideas reflected in this paper are drawn from a research-creation project that took place in Spring of 2019, Machine Ménagerie , in which a collection of small autonomous robots serve as a medium for considering different understandings of human-machine interaction. Machine Ménagerie creates the basis for interrogating the exclusive definition of sentience as a measurable property. We argue instead for an approach that would emphasize (1) the relational nature of the notion of sentience, and (2) the rituals of care and friendship in relating to nonhuman others. In this context, sentience is not something that beings own, or that humans bestow upon things, but rather is something that is continuously achieved and in which humans and nonhumans participate.

Biosemiotics postulates that signaling between organisms is a complex process that can often occur across multiple channels simultaneously. Olfactory pheromonal cues, aural vocalizations, and visual movements and patterns, for example, often all transmit important elements of the overall message intended or conveyed. It is also well known that some species' conspecific communications are " eavesdropped " by other species (such as primates reacting to birds suddenly taking flight as signaling a potential approaching mutual predator), even if the original signal was not directed at the inter-specific. Purposeful interspecific signaling is common, however, such as hares signaling their presence to foxes when they feel reasonably secure in order to avoid an energy consuming hunt, or plants using volatile organic compounds to signal that certain prey insects are feeding on the plant to other insects which feed on the prey insects and may free the plant from them. Intentional and unintentional symbiotic semiosis results from many generations of interaction between the involved species, creating grooves in the semiosphere where organisms' overlapping Umwelten open the possibility for ethical action. Due to the more constricted semiotic bandwidth interspecies communication touches upon, I postulate that interspecies semiosis is more scripted by generational meaning-inscription, and that such signaling is less improvisational than conspecific signaling. While western ethics traditionally esteems ethical events to the degree that they are voluntary, nonhuman interspecies ethics urges considering plural ethical frameworks, based upon species-specific and interspecific semiotic understandings. For many organisms, the fact that their signaling relies more on genetic than spontaneous dispositions does not necessarily indicate that instances of their convivial cohabitation are less valid ethically, however, than more flexible semiotic interactions.

Zusammenfassung. Die Biosemiotik postuliert, dass die Signalgebung zwischen Orga-nismen einen komplexen Prozess darstellt, der sich oft gleichzeitig auf vielfältigen Kanälen abspielt. So vermitteln beispielsweise olfaktorische pheromonische Hinweise, auditive Vokalisationen sowie visuelle Bewegungen und Muster allesamt wichtige Einzelele-mente einer beabsichtigten oder tatsächlich überbrachten Nachricht. Ebenso ist bekannt, dass die Kommunikation zwischen Artgenossen mancher Spezies von anderen Spezi-es " abgehört " wird (so reagieren etwa Primaten auf Vögel, die plötzlich auffliegen und damit das potentielle Annähern eines gemeinsamen Fressfeindes signalisieren), selbst wenn das ursprüngliche Signal nicht eigentlich an sie gerichtet war. Absichtsvolles inter-spezifisches Signalisieren ist ebenfalls verbreitet, so signalisieren etwa Hasen Füchsen ihre Anwesenheit, wenn sie sich sicher genug fühlen, um ihnen die Energieverschwendung einer unnützen Jagd zu ersparen. Durch die Absonderung flüchtiger organischer Verbindungen weisen Pflanzen auf einen Insektenbefall hin, wodurch andere Insektenarten herbeigerufen werden, die die Pflanze vom Befall befreien. Absichtliche und unab-sichtliche symbiotische Semiosen sind das Ergebnis von Interaktion zwischen beteilig-ten Spezies über viele Generationen hinweg, wodurch sich Spuren in der Semiosphäre bilden, in denen sich überschneidende Umwelten von Organismen die Möglichkeit für ethisches Handeln eröffnen. Aufgrund der eher eingeschränkten semiotischen Bandbrei-te, welche die Interspezies-Kommunikation berührt, postuliere ich, dass Interspezies-Semiose stärker von generationenübergreifenden Bedeutungsfestlegungen geprägt und weniger improvisiert ist als Signale unter Artgenossen. Während westliche Ethiken traditionellerweise die Wertschätzung ethischer Geschehnisse an den Grad ihrer Freiwilligkeit knüpfen, verlangt eine nicht-menschliche Interspezies-Ethik die Berücksichtigung pluraler ethischer Kontexte, die auf speziesspezifischen und interspezifischen semiotischen Konzepten beruhen. Dass die Signalgebung vieler Organismen überwiegend gene-tischen Ursprungs ist, heißt nicht zwangsläufig, dass ihrem Zusammenleben ein gerin-gerer ethischer Wert beizumessen ist, als sich aus flexibleren semiotischen Interaktionen ergeben würde.

Minoan gold signet rings dating to the Neopalatial period (1700 – 1450 BCE) are well known for their depiction of ritual events. Of the 334 known examples, thirty-one ring images depict scenes of tree cult in which human figures interact with trees in various types of ritual capacity. Such scenes include the offering of sacrificial animals, dance performance, the enactment of sacred gestures, and communication with resident nymphs. The majority of figures in the scenes approach the trees in a calm and reverential manner; however, eight examples depict the ritual participant clasping and vigorously shaking the tree. This frenzied, kinetic activity suggests that the human figure is in an altered state of consciousness and such images may depict prophetic consultation of the tree during which the answer to inquiries was supplied by the rustling of its leaves. Such a scenario proposes that through being in an ecstatic state the ritualist was able to understand the voice of the tree, which was considered animate, and subsequently translate it into a language comprehensible to a human querent. That trees were believed to speak in a mantic capacity in the ancient world is evident from Near Eastern and Greek literature such as the Hebrew Bible, the Ugaritic Epic of Baal and Hesiod’s Theogony, as well as later Greek tree oracles such as that of Zeus at Dodona. Late Bronze Age Minoan religion partook in this wider eastern Mediterranean koine in which trees were considered both sacred and animate. This paper will consequently focus on the auditory transaction between the human ritual participant and the sentient tree.

Large carnivores are usually studied by biologists in reserves using vehicles, telemetry, and non-invasive methods. So what happens when a clan of spotted hyenas, Africa’s second largest of carnivores, is studied up close, by an anthropologist, in a city of 100,000 inhabitants? Marcus Baynes-Rock’s very personal story of encounters with hyenas and the people who coexist with them dissolves the space between human and animal so that only subjects matter and personal transformation inevitably follows.

This one-day workshop examines how we might use technologies to support design for playful interspecies communication and considers some of the potential implications. Here we explore aspects of playful technology and reflect on what opportunities computers can provide for facilitating communication between species. The workshop's focal activity will be the co-creation of some theoretical systems designed for specific multi-species scenarios. Through our activities, we aim to pave the way for designing technology that promotes interspecies communication, drawing input not only from ACI practitioners but also from those of the broader HCI and animal science community, who may be stakeholders in facilitating, expanding, and/or redefining playful technology.