tldr: salon 8 at makilala. filipino food, AI meets psychedelics, and a history lesson nobody saw coming.

here's a piece of history that almost nobody knows. in the 1940s and 50s, the josiah macy jr. foundation hosted a series of conferences in new york that quietly shaped the next century of human thought. margaret mead, arguably the most famous anthropologist alive at the time, and her husband gregory bateson, a polymath who moved between anthropology, psychiatry, and systems theory, brought together an improbable cast: mathematicians, neuroscientists, and computer pioneers. those conferences gave birth to cybernetics, the science of feedback loops and self-correcting systems, which is the direct intellectual ancestor of AI. but mead and bateson didn't arrive at those tables as technologists. they arrived as consciousness researchers. mead had studied peyote use among the Omaha and seen how psychoactive substances helped people cope with rapid technological change. bateson experimented with LSD himself. the 1954 macy conference was literally titled "problems of consciousness." so the people laying the conceptual groundwork for artificial intelligence were also, personally and professionally, investigating what happens to the human mind on psychedelics, convinced these were two angles on the same underlying question about how minds work, how they break, and how they transform.

benjamin breen traces the whole lineage in Tripping on Utopia, and the punchline is genuinely strange: AI and psychedelic science were born as siblings, in the same conversations, and then got separated into completely different cultures over the next fifty years.

last sunday at makilala, over lumpia and san miguel, 30 people spent the evening pulling on this exact thread. AI and psychedelics, consciousness and computation, what choices we actually have when the machines get smarter and whether the answer involves becoming more human, whatever that means. first-timers texted afterward about being impressed by the minds around the table, about talking AI with a cartoonist and finding friends from completely different parts of their lives already in the conversation. people showed up expecting a discussion about technology and left having talked about creativity, manipulation, climate, and the politics of consciousness itself, which honestly is the most MOSAIC thing that can happen at a dinner.

_{DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.}