What a time to be alive
Commencement Speech at Berkeley Cognitive Science '22
What a time to be alive. Humanity is hyphaer-connected. The trees growing around us in the Berkeley Hills are talking to each other through these branching filaments called hyphae that form this interconnected network of mycelia - the Wood Wide Web. Humans have finally caught up.
Yet, despite the mycelia that spawned out of our silicon valleys connecting us to each other like never before, we have grown further apart. We live in these siloes, runaway echo chambers fuelled by algorithms designed by our peers in Wheeler Hall, and the effects are all around to see. The illusion of a peaceful post Cold War order has evaporated in the flames from the Russian gas the world burned to propel the Ego Dominator of capitalism forward. And these flames are choking us! Berkeley Earth researchers say that breathing the air of New Delhi is equal to smoking a full pack of cigarettes, every day. And all of this is happening while AI becomes Singularly capable.
What a timeline indeed. And what a timeline to be graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in Cognitive Science. Despite everything going on in the world, I feel hopeful for the future and a big reason why is an insight I’ve found and honed these past four years at Cal.
It began my freshman semester when I took David Presti’s Drugs and the Brain. I learned that we are amidst a tremendous resurgence of a class of compounds known as psychedelics. A couple of sessions with psilocybin, a molecule found in 200 species of mushrooms, and people heal from a Pandora’s box of ailments like PTSD that modern medicine has no treatment for. And the key is that this knowledge of how the natural world harbored powerful healing properties was and is present in indigenous communities around the world.
We already knew the solutions to many of the problems we now face. The Ohlone, whose land we now stand on, did not need satellites and ML models to prevent the fires that California faces today.
What we need to do is to simply relearn how to listen. To tune in to each other and our beautiful planet. To build bridges between all the cognitive islands and echo chambers and meaning abysses we dug ourselves into. To illuminate, like the campanile in the fog of war. To remember that while we may never know what Truth (with a capital T is), truth (with a small t) lives amongst us. And no matter what those in power say or do, we can live with conviction in this truth.
A psychedelic journey doesn’t heal just by the chemical action of the compounds in our skulls. It is dependent on the ‘set and setting’ of the experience – the mental state and physical space. We are all collectively in this fever dream, this pandemic psychedelic trip, from which we will emerge completely changed, paradigm shifted. But how we end up depends on our set and setting. As students of Cognitive Science infused with an interdisciplinarity that knows few limits or boundaries, we are in a position to set this ‘set and setting’, to push the frontiers, to ‘shake things up’, to dream, manifest and build a brighter, more equal, flourishing future. I’m incredibly excited for all of us.
I’ll end with a phrase my dad often likes to sagely quote. You need two things in life - strong wings and deep roots. May all of our wings propel us strongly into the horizons and may our roots connect us deeply to our ancestral past.
Thank you.
Video of my speech -