[MUSIC PLAYING]
There's a fascinating new book by Diana Slattery called
Xenolinguistics-- Psychedelics and the Evolution of Language,
which builds on McKenna's notions
that the world is made of language.
And if you know the words the world is made of,
you can make of it whatever you wish,
kind of like Neo in The Matrix when he sees the code.
And so what does this mean, this notion that reality
is made of language?
Is it mere metaphor, is it mere poetry?
McKenna and Diana Slattery say that actually the metaphor
is literalized, when you actually
look at the big picture.
Even biology is made of language.
Biology is code.
DNA is code.
It's software that writes its own hardware.
The words come before the matter emerges.
Just think about that, because it resonates
in all kinds of transcendental ways,
this notion that mind came before matter.
That mind didn't emerge from matter, but rather
that mind preceded matter.
It's a wild idea, but it does seem
to be that everything can be described in terms of words,
whether it's music, whether it's the atoms that
describe the laws of physics.
It's all describeable.
It's all information.
It's a wild idea.
It's worth thinking about.