The payoff was vague, but in his mind immense

February 29, 2024 3:08 AM

Though Bateson was never truly on board with Lilly’s project of teaching dolphins how to speak, he spoke vaguely but fervently of the institute’s work as somehow connected to his larger goal of healing a sick society through interdisciplinary science. “I hope from the dolphins we may learn a new analysis of the sorts of information which we need — and all mammals need — if we are to retain our sanity,” Bateson pronounced grandly to reporters at a fund-raising gala for the institute. Anyone observing his daily work at the lab might have been surprised by such claims. from Tripping on LSD at the Dolphin Research Lab [Chronicle of Higher Education; ungated]

An excerpt from Benjamin Breen's recent book, Tripping on Utopia

posted by chavenet (24 comments total)

anything that brings bateson back is an unalloyed good
posted by graywyvern at 3:28 AM on February 29 [3 favorites]

For some reason when I load the page I get the header, a ton of whitespace (I assume where the article should go) and then all the stuff at the bottom starting from "We welcome your thoughts..."

Ah, the ungated version loads for me. Off to read it now, but is this story a prelude to the recent Scalzi novel?
posted by Literaryhero at 3:55 AM on February 29 [2 favorites]

As a weird sidenote to this article, the author, Benjamin Breen, was review-bombed on Amazon by an organization called the Bateson Idea Group, 'a nonprofit organization whose mission is to further the exploration of the ideas of Gregory Bateson'. You can read his response here in a post on his Substack blog, and a more detailed rebuttal here.
posted by verstegan at 4:30 AM on February 29 [3 favorites]

That is indeed the most censorious and strange paywall I've encountered. Maybe it's different for other browsers/platforms but, on Firefox for Android, I was also greeted by a white wall.

The ungated article was fascinating. I only vaguely knew the story, so the appearance of Bateson, Sagan, and Flipper were pleasant surprises—dots that in retrospect I might've supposed were connected.
posted by criticalyeast at 4:45 AM on February 29 [1 favorite]

Related is this fiction short story previously: "My best friend is a dolphin and sometimes it's weird."
posted by AlSweigart at 5:55 AM on February 29 [2 favorites]

See also Kititirik Tikrikitit in the also previously Halo Jones Book 2.

Also Darwin on Seaquest DSV (not as yet Fanfared).
posted by biffa at 6:15 AM on February 29 [1 favorite]

I have Lilly’s book The Scientist, a Metaphysical Autobiography. He invented a sensory deprivation tank to experience ketamine injections, a lot of them. Very fascinating what he was able to write about it. I have a lot of respect for his work.
posted by waving at 7:01 AM on February 29 [2 favorites]

Is.... This the one with the, uh, interspecies living arrangements that got..... .....weird? Or is this a different dolphin mad scientist?
posted by Jacen at 7:28 AM on February 29 [1 favorite]

Ah yes, John Lily, author of Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (TIL you can read it on archive.org!), which I can affirm that the title promises more than the contents deliver. The 1970s psychonaut trying to draw upon the experience of predecessors came up empty-handed after diving into that.

The 1960s were a weird time in psychology.

I'm getting a blank page from archive.is (Yet Again), and a glitch of some kind on TFA original. At archive.org I can load a whole page but most of the article is missing and there's a notice

We're sorry. Something went wrong.

We are unable to fully display the content of this page.

The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network.

whichi I am guessing is a malfunctioning paywall.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:34 AM on February 29 [2 favorites]

I think maybe I had heard of Bateson at some point without really knowing who he was. Looking at his wikipedia page I wonder if he was not a post-WWII version of David Graeber: somebody who presents as a polymath if you don't have expertise in the areas he's talking about, and as a misguided dilettante if you do. Trained as an anthropologist, winds up carrying on about the origin of schizophrenia, publicly misunderstanding evolutionary biology, and suggesting that age-old problems of epistemology can be solved by the newfangled field of "cybernetics."

Of course he has a group of people stanning for him in Amazon reviews 40-some years after he's dead, while the rest of the world leaves his work in the obscurity it deserves.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:58 AM on February 29 [2 favorites]

I have Lilly’s book The Scientist, a Metaphysical Autobiography. He invented a sensory deprivation tank to experience ketamine injections, a lot of them. Very fascinating

The one I've always got at hand is Center of the Cyclone, I suppose because it manages to walk that fine, fine line between proper science and woo. I love this bit from the wikipedia summary:

One of the key insights put forward by Lilly is the view that "in the province of the mind, what is believed to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind, there are no limits."[3] In this context, Lilly draws a distinction between the limitless province of the mind and the realm of the body, in which there are limits that cannot be transcended.

See also Altered States (the movie)
posted by philip-random at 9:25 AM on February 29 [4 favorites]

Is.... This the one with the, uh, interspecies living arrangements that got..... .....weird?

Sure is.
posted by atoxyl at 9:56 AM on February 29 [1 favorite]

I always had a certain admiration for the man, though, the kind one might have for people who go BASE jumping with wing suits.
posted by atoxyl at 10:05 AM on February 29 [1 favorite]

This is a very distant memory, but I recall, as a child, going into the lobby of the Time/Life building, then across from Radio City Music Hall, and seeing a video about dolphins being trained to understand a language. And from all those many years ago, I've remembered and carried somewhere in my head the sentence,"MAUI IMUA BIP OK." No idea what it meant or even if that memory was accurate.

Well, it turns out...on page 12 of the linked PDF, "MAN/DOLPHIN COMMUNICATION Final Report 15 December 1966 - 13 December 1967 - Prepared for U .S . NAVAL ORDNANCE TEST STATION, China Lake, California," that MAUI IMUA BIP OK means "Maui (the dolphin's name), hit the ball with your pectoral."

The contractors closed by writing, "In conclusion, the observation and discussion above ihat a basis for the development of a language between man and dolphin has been established." They included books by Bateson and Lilly among their references.
posted by the sobsister at 10:25 AM on February 29 [6 favorites]

I am consistently amazed at how much woo some of these 60s icons were involved with, or dark secrets they kept hidden. Timothy Leary ratted out people to the Feds. Margaret Mead was fooled by the Samoans (though I am still not sure after reading a lot whether this one is true.) R Buckminster Fuller was apparently a bit of a charlatan who relied on other people’s money. Now we learn Lilly was faking data. It’s like the entirety of the heroes of the Whole Earth Catalog were full of crap.
posted by wittgenstein at 10:34 AM on February 29 [3 favorites]

Is.... This the one with the, uh, interspecies living arrangements that got..... .....weird?

Sure is.

For clarity, we're talking about Lilly here, right? Was Bateman also included in ketamine-induced interspecies romance? Wasn't there also some connection to Sydney Gottleib as well? So many questions...
posted by slogger at 11:19 AM on February 29 [2 favorites]

I am consistently amazed at how much woo some of these 60s icons were involved with, or dark secrets they kept hidden

I assume there’s a generation gap here because as a guy in my mid-30s who took a lot of drugs in my early 20s, I certainly never had an impression that Leary and Lilly were not full of shit. That’s not exactly a skeleton in Lilly’s closet, reading some of the stuff he wrote. The animal cruelty might be, though (if not necessarily worse than what people have done to dolphins in the name of entertainment rather than science).
posted by atoxyl at 12:04 PM on February 29 [2 favorites]

to add to that, weird and/or dubious behaviour aside, I'm having a hard time finding anything on this:

Now we learn Lilly was faking data.
posted by philip-random at 1:16 PM on February 29 [1 favorite]

Aardvark Cheeselog: I wonder if he was not a post-WWII version of David Graeber: somebody who presents as a polymath if you don't have expertise in the areas he's talking about, and as a misguided dilettante if you do.

Dunno about that, I'm ridiculously-qualified for a westerner, and I'm grateful for Graeber for showing some of our civilisation's naked-emperor moments. I also get that Punks who become The Man have an obligation to the system they're part of, just like terrorist leaders who achieve peace by becoming politicians.

Even though we're on the cusp of a LLM-type animal translator, Dolphins are never going to sell out to the man.
posted by k3ninho at 1:52 PM on February 29 [2 favorites]

I thought the article implied Lilly was hand picking data to make the results look better. Maybe I misread it this morning?
posted by wittgenstein at 2:10 PM on February 29 [1 favorite]

No citations but I read somewhere that Dr Lilly became progressively more paranoid about a UFO invasion the dolphins had warned him about. He contacted the CIA and Richard Nixon many times about his concerns.
posted by Narrative_Historian at 8:36 PM on February 29 [1 favorite]

The article quotes Ted Nelson (the same known for coining the term “hypertext”) on his time spent working for Lilly. I went looking for the source and I found he has some recollections on YouTube.
posted by atoxyl at 9:16 PM on February 29 [2 favorites]

Hand picking data is typically accepted in biological studies, versus faking data, which is not. In my 32 years as a a researcher, most data generated is not used in publication given it doesn’t support the salient findings. If the null hypothesis is disproven by a handful of repeatable experiments, you’re generally golden to not mention much of your data generated because a million reasons can make the data irrelevant. While there is room to criticize any study or researcher, it’s their body of work that gives them their reputation. From what I have read, which includes only part of the ungated article because the ads were blocking much of it, he was not evasive about what he was doing, nor so about the unconventional nature of his conclusions. I’m not claiming to know everything or even most of what he’s been accused of in the scientific community though, I’m basing it on my own perspective of what I have actually read myself.
posted by waving at 4:00 AM on March 1 [2 favorites]

k3ninho I expect Graeber was more reliable the closer he stuck to anthropology. And yes he punctured some bubbles that needed pricking, where other disciplines had taken it on themselves to explain human nature. But his work will not in fact overturn the broad consensus understanding of human history.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 11:40 AM on March 1 [1 favorite]