Message #36486

[Bianca]

Despite his demurs, though, he wants to expand on the topic which has interested him since his teens when he saw Bernard Shaw's play Back to Methuseleh. The idea of living to be 300 absolutely obsessed me. His own novel The Philosoper's Stone played around with the idea and he's become convinced that even today human beings possess a certain power which switches on at certain moments.

His idea is that we possess a kind of robot which has the purpose of performing certain tasks for us. You learn to type slowly and consciously and then the robot takes over and does it quicker than you could, and you learn to drive or whatever. The robot, he explains, is what makes humans the most advanced creatures on earth but it is also the source of most of our problems, because we are always being taken over by the robot, and when we don't want to be. We listen to a symphony and it moves us deeply. The third time we listen to it, it's the robot listening instead of us.

The normal person, he believes, is about 50% robot and about 50% real person. In curious moments of happiness, in great moments of intensity, what happens is you suddenly become 51% real you and 49% robot. And I'm sure that in mystical experience you become something like 55% real and only about 45% robot. That's what mystical experiences are. If we could only switch into such moods, he thinks they are what psychiatrist Abraham Maslow called peak experiences, all the time, he believes we would be capable of amazing things. I've got a feeling that all these so-called psychic faculties take over in those moments when we are non-robotic.

As for the notion of surviving the death of the physical body, Wilson accepts that it's probably true but doesn't think it is particularly relevant or important. Unlike Dostoevesky who thought that the truth of life after death could be the most important thing that we could know, Wilson believes the most important questions are how to live now we're here, how to escape the robot, how to live on a sort of higher level? If we become preoccupied with life after death, he thinks we're wasting our time.