Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer.pdf

JOHN C. LILLY, M. D.

Programming and Metaprogramming in THE HUMAN BIOCOMPUTER

All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed

biocomputers. None of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities. Literally,

each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less.

Despite the great varieties of programs available, most of us have a limited set of

programs. Some of these are built in. In the simpler forms of life the programs were

mostly built in from genetic codes to fully formed adultly reproducing organisms. The

patterns of function, of actionreaction were determined by necessities of survival, of

adaptation to slow environmental changes and of passing on the code to descendants.

Eventually the cerebral cortex appeared as an expanding new highlevel computer

controlling the structurally lower levels of the nervous system, the lower builtin

programs. For the first time learning and its faster adaptation to a rapidly changing

environment began to appear. Further, as this new cortex expanded over several millions

of years, a critical size cortex was reached. At this level of structure, a new capability

emerged: learning to learn.

-John C. Lilly. M.D.

Also by John C. Lilly, M.D.

THE MIND OF THE DOLPHIN

MAN AND THE DOLPHIN

THE CENTER OF THE CYCLONE

JOHN C. LILLY M . D. is a graduate of the California I Institute of Technology and

received his Doctorate in Medicine from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942. He has

worked extensively in various research fields of science, including biophysics,

neurophysiology, electronics, and neuroanatomy. Dr. Lilly has done many years of study

and research on solitude, isolation, and confinement and is a qualified psychoanalyst. He

spent twelve years working on research on dolphinhuman relationships including

communications and two years at Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California, as a group leader,

resident, and associate in residence. Recently he spent eight months in Arica, Chile,

investigating and participating in the Arica Training Group of Oscar Ichazo, the Master

of a modern esoteric school in the mystical tradition.

PROGRAMMING AND

METAPROGAMMING

IN THE HUMAN

BIOCOMPUTER

THEORY AND EXPERIMENTS

JOHN C . LILLY, M.D.

THE JULIAN PRESS, INC., PUBLISHERS

New York

A11 rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 7379777

Reissued in revised format, 1972, by

The Julian Press, Inc., Publishers

150 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10011

Based on a series of Seminars given at the Department of Psychiatry, Schools of

Medicine, Johns Hopkins University, University of California at Los Angeles, University

of Minnesota; at the Medical Seminar, Edgewood Arsenal; and at the Conference on

Science, Philosophy and Religion, Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, in 1966.

Manufactured in the United States of America Design & Composition by Freda Browne,

New York

Foreword to Second Edition

This work has a curious history. It was written as a final summary report to a government

agency (National Institute of Mental Health) concerning five years of my life work. (The

agency paid my salary for the five years.)

It was conceived from a space rarer these days than it was then: the laws suspending

scientific interest, research, involvement and decisions about dlysergic acid diethyl amide

tartate were passed just as this particular work was completed; the researchers were

inadequately consulted (put down, in fact). The legislators composed laws in an

atmosphere of desperation. The national negative program on LSD was launched; LSD

was the big scare, on a par with War, Pestilence, and Famine as the destroyer of young

brains, minds and fetuses.

In this atmosphere (19661967) Programming and Metaprogramming in The Human

Biocomputer was written. The work and its notes are dated from 1964 to 1966. The

conception was formed in 1949, when I was first exposed to computer design ideas by

Britton Chance. I coupled these ideas back to my own software through the atmosphere

of my neurophysiological research on cerebral cortex. It was more fully elaborated in the

tank isolation solitude and confinement work at NIMH from 1953 to 1958, run in parallel

with the neurophysiological research on the rewarding and punishing systems in the

brain. The dolphin research was similarly born in the tank, with brain electrode results as

parents in the further conceptions.

While I was writing this work, l was a bit too fearful to express candidly in writing the

direct experience, uninterpreted. I felt that a group of thirty persons' salaries, a large

research budget, a whole Institute's life depended on me and what I wrote. If I wrote the

data up straight, I would have rocked the boats of several lives (colleagues and family)

beyond my own stabilizer effectiveness threshold, I hypothesized.

Despite my precautionary attitude, the circulation in 1967 of this work contributed to the

withdrawal of research funds in 1968 from the research program on dolphins by one

government agency. I heard several negative stories regarding my brain and mind, altered

by LSD. At this point I closed the Institute and went to the Maryland Psychiatric

Research Center to resume LSD research under government auspices. I introduced the

ideas in work to the MPRC researchers and l left for the Esalen Institute in 1969.

At Esalen my involvement in direct human guttogut communication and lack of

involvement in administrative responsibility brought my courage to the sticking place.

Meanwhile, Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Truck Catalog (Menlo Park, Calif.)

reviewed the work in the Whole Earth Catalog from a mimeographed copy I had given

W. W. Harmon of Stanford for his Sufic purposes. Stewart wrote me asking for copies to

sell. l had 300 printed photooffset from the typed copy. He sold them in a few weeks and

asked permission to reprint on newsprint an enlarged version at a lower price. Skeptical

about salability, I agreed. Book People, Berkeley, arranged the reprinting. Several

thousand copies were sold.

I had written the report in such a way that its basic messages were hidden behind a heavy

long introduction designed to stop the usual reader. Apparently once word got out, this

device no longer stalled the interested readers. Somehow the basic messages were

important enough to enough readers so that the work acquired an unexpected viability.

Thus it seems appropriate to reprint it in full.

On several different occasions, I have been asked to rewrite this work. One such start at

rewrite ended up as another book. (The Center of the Cyclone, The Julian Press, Inc.,

New York, 1972.) Another start is evolving into my book number five (Simulations of

God: A Science of Belief). It seems as if this older work is a seminating source for other

works and solidly resists revision. To me it is a thing separate from me, a record from a

past space, a doorway into new spaces through which I passed and cannot return.

J. C. L.

February 7, 1972

Los Angeles, California

n Preface to Second Edition

All human beings, all persons who reach adulthood in the world today are programmed

biocomputers. No one of us can escape our own nature as programmable entities.

Literally, each of us may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less.

Despite the great varieties of programs available, most of us have a limited set of

programs. Some of these are builtin. The structure of our nervous system reflects its

origins in simpler forms of organisms from sessile protozoans, sponges, corals through

sea worms, reptiles and protomammals to primates to apes to early anthropoids to

humanoids to man. In the simpler basic forms, the programs were mostly builtin: from

genetic codes to fullyformed organisms adultly reproducing, the patterns of function of

actionreaction were determined by necessities of survival, of adaptation to slow

environmental changes, of passing on the code to descendants.

As the size and complexity of the nervous system and its bodily carrier increased, new

levels of programmability appeared, not tied to immediate survival and eventual

reproduction. The builtin programs survived as a basic underlying context for the new

levels, excitable and inhibitable, by the overlying control systems. Eventually, the

cerebral cortex appeared as an expand-

*Quoted in entirety from John C. Lilly, Simulations of God: A Science of

Belief, in preparation, 1972.ing new highlevel computer controlling the structurally lower

levels of the nervous system, the lower builtin programs. For the first time learning and

its faster adaptation to a rapidly changing environment began to appear. Further, as this

new cortex expanded over several millions of years, a critical size of cortex was reached.

At this new level of structure, a new capability emerged: learning to learn.

When one learns to learn, one is making models, using symbols, analogizing, making

metaphors, in short, inventing and using language, mathematics, art, politics, business,

etc. At the critical brain (cortex) size, languages and its consequences appear.

To avoid the necessity of repeating learning to learn, symbols, metaphors, models each

time, I symbolize the underlying idea in these operations as metaprogramming.

Metaprogramming appears at a critical cortical size-the cerebral computer must have a

large enough number of interconnected circuits of sufficient quality for the operations of

metaprogramming to exist in that biocomputer.

Essentially, metaprogramming is an operation in which a central control system controls

hundreds of thousands of programs operating in parallel simultaneously. This operation

in 1972 is not yet done in manmade computers-metaprogramming is done outside the big

solidstate computers by the human programmers, or more properly, the human

metaprogrammers. All choices and assignments of what the solidstate computers do, how

they operate, what goes into them are still human biocomputer choices. Eventually, we

may construct a metaprogramming computer, and turn these choices over to it.

When I said we may be our programs, nothing more, nothing less, I meant the substrate,

the basic substratum under all else, of our metaprograms is our programs. All we are as

humans is what is builtin and what has been acquired, and what we make of both of

these. So we are one more result of the program substrate-the selfmetaprogrammer.

As out of several hundreds of thousands of the substrate programs comes an adaptable

changing set of thousands of metaprograms, so out of the metaprograms as substrate

comes something else-the controller, the steersman, the programmer in the biocomputer,

the selfmetaprogrammer. In a wellorganized biocomputer, there is at least one such

critical control metaprogram labeled I for acting on other metaprograms and labeled me

when acted upon by other metaprograms. I say at least one advisedly. Most of us have

several controllers, selves, selfmetaprograms which divide control among them, either in

time parallel or in time series in sequences of control. As I will give in detail later, one

path for selfdevelopment is to centralize control of one's biocomputer in one

selfmetaprogrammer, making the others into conscious executives subordinate to the

single administrator, the single superconscient selfmetaprogrammer. With appropriate

methods, this centralizing of control, the elementary unification operation, is a realizable

state for many, if not all biocomputers.

Beyond and above in the control hierarchy, the position of this single administrative

selfmetaprogrammer and his staff, there may be other controls and controllers, which, for

convenience, I call supraself metaprograms. These are many or one depending on

current states of consciousness in the single selfmetaprogrammer. These may be

personified as if entities, treated as if a network for information transfer, or realized as if

self traveling in the Universe to strange lands or dimensions or spaces. If one does a

further unification operation on these supraself metaprograms, one may arrive at a

concept labeled God, the Creator, the Starmaker, or whatever. At times we are tempted to

pull together apparently independent supraself sources as if one. I am not sure that we are

quite ready to do this supraself unification operation and have the result correspond fully

to an objective reality.

Certain states of consciousness result from and cause operation of this apparent

unification phenomenon. We are still general purpose computers who can program any

conceivable model of the universe inside our own structure, reduce the single

selfmetaprogrammer to a micro size, and program him to travel through his own model as

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