puff the magic dragon of eden
I finally got around to reading Carl Sagan's Dragons of Eden. I didn't pick it up to get a cutting edge review of the science of the mind -- it's almost three decades old, after all -- but like all of Sagan's writing, it's accessible and interesting. Even if Sagan's guesses about the brain don't entirely pan out, they're still amazingly impressive given the foreignness of the field to his primary area of expertise. And although Sagan's left versus right versus oldbrain paradigm has problems, echoes of it can be found in ideas like Dennett's multiple drafts model.
But since the book's no longer that relevant, the best bits come from just enjoying Sagan for his own sake, and for the moments of the book that reveal something about the extraordinary guy that wrote it. And to that end, some of the most illuminating are the parts of the book directly or tangentially related to marijuana.
Sagan was a pot enthusiast. His last wife, Ann Druyan, is vice-chair of NORML's board of directors, and Sagan spoke about the drug enthusiastically, albeit quietly and rarely. In DOE Sagan talks about pot by recounting the experiences of an unnamed third party "informant" -- it's easy to read between the lines. He even goes so far as to take various strange, irrelevant jabs at alcohol in a weird sort of reefer elitism.
The only part where Sagan's enthusiasm for the drug really intrudes is in his suggestion that marijuana's mechanism of action might involve suppressing the activity of the left hemisphere of the brain in order to free the creative and associative powers of the right. So far as I know there has never been evidence to back up this flight of fancy.
But it's fascinating to read Sagan's hypotheses about the evolution and future of intelligence on this and other planets through the lens of his enthusiasm for pot, because many of his ideas really do have the ring of typical stoner philosophizing... with the caveat that they're blown out to the level of genuine insight by Sagan's genius. This strange intersection between undeniable scientific merit and cartoonish burnout-isms comes into sharp focus in this interview with Ms. Druyan, which contains both a thoughtful discussion of Sagan's heartfelt belief in the liberating power of science, and the phrase "I'd like to ride on a solar sail and smoke a joint in space!"* It also reveals that Sagan and Druyan collaborated to have an EEG recording of her meditating about human history, nuclear war and love included on the Voyager Interstellar Message. I mean, c'mon -- you'd have to be totally high to come up with that idea.
So do you see? Maybe you should have written down all those brilliant insights instead of just eating three dozen chicken wings. Oh well -- spilled milk.
* To be fair, Druyan doesn't say this, the interviewer does. But she was building the solar sail in question and, presumably, would be fine with any of its potential passengers smoking joints.
