John Lilly’s trajectory is often understood through a now-orthodox scholarly account about cybernetics and the information sciences. With variations, this account says that the cybernetics movement played a key and hegemonic role in exporting the concept of “information”—originally developed in cryptography—to adjacent disciplines like neurophysiology, resulting in metaphors like that of the brain as computer which would dominate Lilly’s later work. In this paper, I show that a significant group of neurophysiologists were far from eager to uncritically import a notion of information taken directly from cybernetics, and to trace the political and institutional reasons why Lilly’s approach toward computational metaphors differed from many of his colleagues.

Throughout the cybernetics “moment,” many neurophysiologists resisted the abstract mathematization of brain science. Instead, these scientists were committed to the traditions of laboratory physiology, and insisted on the brain as an analogue rather than digital organ. Far from flinging open their disciplinary gates to the invasions of mathematicians and computer scientists, many neurophysiologists resisted the computational metaphor of the brain; instead, what they meant by information was the content-ful messages conveyed within the nervous system facilitating the organism’s holistic adjustment to the environment. This faction of the discipline would eventually be instrumental in founding the first organization to call itself “neuroscience,” the International Brain Research Organization, which would be funded by UNESCO. This group was actively concerned with keeping neuroscience free from the deforming influence of militarized and nationalistic state science, and their resistance to computational metaphors facilitated one of their primary goals—international collaboration with Soviet scientists. In contrast to this group, Lilly’s embrace of computational metaphors was typical of the forms of neuroscience that had no critique of the militarized state, most notably the Neuroscience Research Project at MIT. By tracking the ways Lilly’s use of the information concept differed from many of his colleagues in neurophysiology, I argue for a genealogy of the informaticized brain that accounts for its multiple and contested political valences.

In the 1950s clinical researchers, psychologists, and other specialists paid growing attention to the phenomenon of hallucination. Simultaneously, amid the circumstances of the early Cold War, inquiries into the practice known as brainwashing often noted the hallucinatory states that prolonged interrogation or isolation could produce in subjects. In both contexts, accounts of such states converged around a syndrome that was called the “prisoner’s cinema,” a form of hallucination linked with epilepsy and migraine as well as with experiments in sensory deprivation. This paper looks at the sensory deprivation research of Donald Hebb and John Lilly and traces the quite different trajectories their work followed. Hallucination became intensely meaningful for both, but while Hebb ultimately sought to normalize it, Lilly, on the other hand, chose to radicalize its meaning.

John C. Lilly arrived at the NIMH Bethesda Clinical Center in 1952 with an ambitious agenda: bridging neurophysiology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis in the service of new therapeutic methods. One instrument through which this might be accomplished was a rather unassuming water tank, borrowed from a Navy funded project on the respiratory metabolism of scuba diving soldiers. Drawing on neurophysiological studies of the encéphale isolé— the nonhuman brain surgically isolated from both body and world through the severing of the brainstem— Lilly cast this tank as a similar means of “deafferentation,” submerging experimental subjects for prolonged periods, their faces covered by an aviation breathing mask smeared with tar. Immersed in this measured sensuous absence, what would the human subject become?

While a growing literature has approached Lilly’s NIMH work from a variety of angles, here I want to center the water tank itself, an experimental environment cobbled together from military detritus. To do so, I approach Lilly’s apparatus genealogically, re-situating both it and Lilly in relation to three projects by which it was subtended: the early Cold War imaginary of ‘underwater warfare,’ the uptake of water immersion by the Air Force space program as a means of terrestrially simulating extraterrestrial weightlessness, and the backyard swimming pool in Lilly’s DC suburb of Silver Springs, MD.

In the later 1950s and 1960s, the American neurologist John Cunningham Lilly undertook an unorthodox set of experiments on bottlenose dolphins. The centerpiece of this research was their bioacoustic practices, including hearing and phonation. Sound technologies, especially tape, were the conditio sine qua non of Lilly’s cetacean research. He used tape obsessively in his efforts to decrypt dolphin communications and later to liberate human consciousness from its tendency to get stuck in repeating loops. Strangely enough, he hardly noted the technical infrastructure of his quest for alternate worlds: many of his fantasies of immediacy and contact depended on signal-processing devices. As a tape and sound artist, explorer of the human-nonhuman border, and builder of technological interfaces, he is particularly important as part of the neglected history of tape recording, the most important sound medium between the 1950s and the 1970s.

Media theorist Friedrich Kittler famously argued that twentieth-century sound media, such as radio, vinyl, tape, amplifiers, vocoders, as well as rock and roll, were “the abuse of army equipment” (Kittler 1999: 96 – 97, 110 – 14; 1988). Lilly’s dolphin research belongs in this lineage. He sat at the heart of militarized bioacoustics, receiving financial support from such agencies as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institute of Mental Health, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Office of Naval Research. Many of Lilly’s techniques — isolation, tape loops, sensory deprivation, LSD, and direct stimulation of the brain by electrode — have affinities with top-secret intelligence work from the period. In this talk, I will follow Lilly’s by turns macabre and loopy quest for the dolphin’s voice and show his place in a wider intellectual confluence around tape as a privileged medium for listen¬ing to fragmentary and alien voices around 1960.

Near the beginning of The Mind of the Dolphin, John C. Lilly asserts a relation between the particular and the general that will be a recurring and foundational belief in his understanding of communication. For Lilly, communication is possible because of a general linguistic invariance between individuals but, by the same logic, the particularity of each individual acts as the limit of what can be communicated. Lilly thus highlights a structural paradox that has oft been found at the heart of communication, framing it as both an impossible and necessary condition for sociality (in the most expanded sense, as Lilly’s varied interests suggest).

Rather than understanding this paradox as a limit to communication, this paper instead takes the position that “communication” is an alibi. As much as it might appear to consist in exchanges that move information between communicants, communication equally names precisely the opposite: an ecology that is conducive to the production of novel isomorphisms. That is, it isn’t so much that an idea (for example) is passed from one person to another in conversation as it is that the appearance of passing ideas stands in for a collective, creative production of a topology wherein ideas can become together—for better, worse, and otherwise. A communication is an (in)exchange of something that is already shared, and indeed that could only come to be through the particularities of a given collectivity. In this sense, communication is an aesthetics of relation.

This paper takes up this assertion and demonstrates its importance by palpating two connected experiences I had leading up to the 2016 US Presidential election: a dream catalyzed by my arrival in Washington, DC for a short visit in the week before the election, and a Halloween party in that same city that took a bizarrely racist turn under the guise of exchanging liberal values. In considering these examples I do not aim to show, once again, the impossibility of communication, but rather to explore the psychedelic relations that are mapped by such communicative folds.

Given the state of the contemporary, all-encompassing, practically invisible, surveillance-driven internet; and given that different network structures afford different sets of relations, what can we learn from thinking more expansively about what constitutes an alternative network? More, as we try to imagine different network-mediated relationships than the ones we currently have, what and how can we learn from nonhuman networks such as those formed by the water-mediated clicks and whistles generated by dolphins? In this context, what is a packet and a node? What is the network topology? While it's tempting to think of this line of questioning as merely zaney or purely as a thought experiment, this paper is more an attempt to position John C. Lilly's work on the long distance transmission of dolphin communication in relation to Donna Haraway's notion of the cyborg as a necessarily impure, blasphemous hybrid and later Mette Bryld and Nina Lykke's work Cosmodolphins. In other words, I will attempt to think through dolphin communication networks in a way that builds on this playful-yet-serious lineage of thinkers who have produced modes of understanding human/nonhuman relations quite unlike the often fatal experiments performed on pigeons as nodes in service of human communication.

The technologies with which John C. Lilly developed his computational theories of mind spectacularized the event of communication—within one’s own mind, between minds, between species, and indeed between galaxies. The promise of expanded communication also came with an implied promise of an expanded human sensorium through which new channels of flowing information could be exchanged. This dual promise of expanded communication through expanded senses held a special appeal to composers, instrument designers, and musicians in the 1970s who participated in what has come to be called the “American experimental tradition,” which embraced technoscientific metaphors and practices in order to produce musical practices that similarly expanded human capacities for sensation and communication. This chapter explores the embrace of Lily’s philosophy in the American experimental music tradition—specifically by Don Buchla, Pauline Oliveros, and Alvin Lucier—in musical instrument design, philosophical writings, and musical compositions, respectively. It shows how Lilly’s thought acted as a “diffractive” catalyst for musical practices with diverging social, technological, and aesthetic aims in the 1970s, connected by a singular, novel understanding of musical communication.

Framed by Isabelle Stenger’s plea for wonder in science (Stengers 2011), the paper will revisit neurophysiologist John Lilly as a figure located in weird intersections of early space age high-tech science and (pre-)New Age speculations. I will approach this intersection through a reading of Lilly’s books on human-dolphin communication, among others his iconic first monography Man and Dolphin from 1962. I will focus on Lilly’s oscillations between a conventional positivist scientific approach, and mixed naturalist and wildly technooptimistic speculations - oscillations that resonate with early space research of the 1960s, which Lilly became involved in due to his dolphin research that (momentarily) was considered as pathway to learn to communicate with extraterrestrials. With inspiration from Jacques Derrida’s reading of the human-animal divide in Western philosophy, I will, on the one hand, discuss Lilly’s positivist approach to his research on the dolphin brain as iconic for the science of modernity, and its ingrained human exceptionalist ontology. On the other hand, I will discuss the ambivalences, which also characterize Lilly’s approach and that, in some respects, bring him close to naturalist traditions, which have been running as a submerged perspective through modern Western biology. Next to Derrida, I shall draw on contemporary human-animal studies, in particular, empirical philosopher Vinciane Despret’s (2021) study of scientists studying babblers in the Negev desert. I will study Lilly studying the dolphin species, and analyze his Janus-headed way of performing as both ’serious’ scientist studying brain functions, and as naturalist and (pre-)New Ager studying the uniqueness of dolphin individuals, which speak back to humans. I will pinpoint Lilly’s oscillations, and their overall framing within an amazingly naïve as well as violent approach to dolphins, but also take into account his wonder-based relation to them.

This chapter will consider Lilly’s dolphin work, and its reception and aftermath, from the point of view of recent shifts in dog training culture. Dog ownership is ground zero for the contemporary hands-on interspecies relationship. It is arguably the most intimate long-term relationship with another species readily available to the average human across the globe, without anyone eating anyone. And for many people, its emotional intensity far outweighs that of human relationships and puts training practices at the center of the experience of family and friendship. Training thus becomes a theater for some of the most pressing problems of human society, like what counts as a home, what counts as care, and what makes for a good life.

The model for pure positive reinforcement training for dogs is in fact the training of cetaceans in captivity. In the training imaginary, cetaceans and dogs both signify profoundly as intimate nonhuman companions/neighbors/potential interlocutors, with their trainability often submitted as evidence of their intelligence and/or similarity to humans. Positive reinforcement also begins from a question in which Lilly was deeply grounded: what is the animal’s point of view? But all of this is underpinned by more general assumptions about wild animality, captivity, and agency—cultural frameworks which continuously undergo change and are especially fraught in the Anthropocene. We’ve long since passed the point of being able to objectively and conclusively evaluate Lilly’s treatment of his dolphin experimental subjects “from here.” A more productive and honest approach is to map how fantasies and projections shape concrete practical engagements with both dogs and dolphins, like training or communication experiments, and to ask what is it we are seeking from these practices?

In 1974, a Los Angeles teenager shocked by a magazine article about commercial whaling had t-shirts made that read “Save the Whales” and sold them nationally through mail order, boosting the whale as a primary object of wildlife conservation, face of an environmental movement, and (perhaps ironically) object of consumption. In the same period, Southern California was also home to military experimentation on cetaceans for the purpose of improving sonar and related technologies. The work of John C. Lilly famously shaped both of these registers: he very publicly presented the whale as a unique creature worthy of singular attention and probed its cognition and communicative sensorium through physiological research. This paper takes contemporary efforts to prevent harm to cetaceans off the California coast and places them in dialogue with Lilly’s legacy, arguing that preoccupations with both cetacean anatomy and “mystical” whalesong reproduce a behaviorist paradigm animated by human exceptionalism. Whales’ emergence as an object of knowledge is inseparable from an extractive relationship to the nonhuman environment.

John C. Lilly’s long and varied career makes retrospective evaluation of his legacy a complicated prospect. His primary areas of historical impact are often thought to lie in the study of interspecies communication, the psychological and physical effects of sensory deprivation, and various techniques for altering consciousness through electronic and pharmacological means. In this essay, I highlight another side of Lilly’s intellectual legacy: his supporting role in facilitating the growth of digital culture and home computing. First, I examine Lilly’s concept of computing as represented in his 1968 monograph Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. I emphasize Lilly’s idiosyncratic view of computing. Next, I provide an overview of Lilly’s relationships and exchanges with a series of digital culture luminaries to place his historical legacy within a historical context that connects the rise of digital computing with parallel developments in American counterculture. This portion of the essay builds on written records and archival materials created by Timothy Leary and Ted Nelson. The essay continues with an analysis of Lilly’s role in digital culture during the 1990s and 2000s. This section presents a close forensic reading of Lilly’s first personal website, developed and hosted by Digital Garage, Inc. (a startup founded by future MIT Media Lab chair Joichi Ito), as well as an analysis of the Lillyesque aesthetics present in digital arts such as video gaming and computer graphics.

In conclusion, I argue that Lilly’s legacy in digital culture is that of a well-connected intellectual entrepreneur. Rather than contributing any particularly notable technical advancement, Lilly’s relationship to key figures and concepts in computing allowed his idiosyncratic interests to find expression in key texts from the burgeoning digital culture of the late twentieth century.

In 1982, Apple touted in a large-format ad that its latest model, the Apple II Plus, would set new standards as a scientific tool for cutting-edge research. As an example served John C. Lilly’s latest project: The new device would finally enable the famous researcher to successfully put his decades-old endeavour into practice and establish communication between humans and dolphins.

In 1980, Lilly had gathered a colorful team to continue his controversial dolphin experiments from the 1950s and 1960s. Operating from a GMC van converted into a mobile laboratory at the Marine World/Africa USA oceanarium in Redwood City, California, their goal was to develop software that could be used to generate an artificial whistling language – a kind of interspecies Esperanto that both dolphins and humans would be able to learn: “The humans and dolphins of Project Janus are learning new computer-based sonic codes designed to bridge the communication gap between the two species.” The project’s title was “Joint Analog Understanding System,” its acronym referring to the two-faced god of doors Janus, who symbolizes the connection between beginning and end in Roman mythology.

In my chapter, I will examine project JANUS aiming for a better understanding of the twofold role the computer played in Lilly’s experiments: On the one hand, the biological-computer metaphor helped Lilly imagine humans and dolphins as potentially compatible information-processing “biocomputers” in the first place. On the other hand, this notion was met by the computer as a concrete and material technology in his experiments. As I am going to argue, the use of hard- and software in project JANUS marks the beginning of the end of Lilly’s biocomputer utopia two decades before and unmask it as the misguided and cruel manifestation of a past cybernetic epistemology of information.

This paper will approach John Lilly as a psychonautical self-fashioner who repeatedly wrote himself into the storyworlds of his “fictional autobiographies” through an extended homage to Olaf Stapledon’s classic 1937 science-fiction novel, Star Maker. The narrator of Stapledon’s visionary narrative finds himself rising above his Earthly embodiment to become a ray of consciousness hurtling through space. During his interstellar travels, he witnesses an optical red shift in the light from nearby stars. In The Mind of the Dolphin, to “visualize” cetacean echolocation, Lilly borrows this incident from Star Maker to conceptualize an acoustic red shift in the frequencies returned to dolphin ears from objects at various distances. Stapledon’s narrator then encounters a world inhabited by human-like beings and assumes a “disembodied view-point” in order to witness their activities; eventually they become aware of his presence. In The Scientist, a “Notice to the Reader” explains that “Among the forms of expression used in this work, the author refers to not-human ‘Beings’ whom, in his own deep self, he has experienced at various times.” These alien observers are eventually revealed to be operatives of ECCO, the Earth Coincidence Control Office. Several years later, Lilly chronicles further adventures with ECCO in an unpublished 1982 document deposited in the archives of Lilly’s stalwart friend and moral supporter, the cyberneticist Heinz von Foerster, titled “Earth Coincidence Control Office: Access to the ECCO Computer,” a metaprogram updated from prior publication in The Dyadic Cyclone of 1976. To explore these texts in detail, I will assume the same posture as Lilly’s uncanny visitors, peering in from beyond with detached concern as Lilly’s accounts of his hallucinatory experiences oscillate between the psychic construction of virtual science fictions and the actual reception of telepathic messages from cosmic agencies.

In 1963, John Lilly offered the anthropologist Gregory Bateson a job as the associate director of Lilly’s eclectic Communications Research Institute. Romantically situated amid bougainvillea and surf on a spit of land in St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, Lilly’s institution featured a dolphin pool blasted out of granite by Navy frogmen, a cutting-edge LINC computer, and abundant funding. Bateson said yes. Within months, the older scientist began to regret his decision. Lilly was a highly erratic personality. The dolphins he studied were little better. By the time Bateson abandoned the project some eighteen months later, it was clear that something had gone decisively off the rails. One case in point: Lilly had begun dosing both himself and his dolphins with intramuscular injections of LSD – an attempt to pharmacologically jumpstart a research program of interspecies communication that Bateson had already decided was impossible.

Today, the saga of the CRI is mostly famous as an especially strange chapter of 1960s-era “groovy science.” Yet Lilly, Bateson, and their team were far from outliers. Indeed, they occupied the center of Cold War scientific culture. This article argues that collaboration of Lilly and Bateson really did turn out to be a key moment in the history of science, though not for the reasons that Lilly — with his dream of United Nations representatives from “the Cetacean Nation” — ever anticipated. Instead, the intellectual and social worlds of the CRI in this period marked a key moment in the early formation of the field of bioethics. Occupying the uncanny intersection between Cold War military funding, animal experimentation, psychedelic drug research, and an emerging mass culture of science communication (it is no coincidence that Bateson and Lilly’s visitors included a young Carl Sagan) the CRI was an early locus for many of the concerns which animate contemporary debates about technological change and the limits of techno-utopianism.

Couches, baptisms, mind-altering substances, sexual experiences – in midcentury America there were plenty of ways to lay back in search of that oceanic feeling. But the sensory deprivation tank proffered another, exceptional because its architecture was such that a person was supposed to go it alone. This is an essay about isolation, not as a sociological condition of modernity in which people were beset with anomie, but as a condition of feeling out what John Lilly referred to as “the province of the mind,” that is to find some agency over how the outside world gets in. I ground my analysis in the discourses floating around sensory deprivation tanks. I’ll argue that within a legacy of communications and intelligences, there is also a material culture of micro-withdrawals from the world. I draw out the anti-social vision of collectivity which continues to shape disavowal and suspicion of longings to be intersubjectively organized by relations, religions, hierarchies, and shared beliefs.

By the mid-1970s, the United States experienced a decline in its economic growth and the country was gripped by stagflation, which refers to a simultaneous increase in inflation and stagnation of economic productivity. Concurrently, the rise of personal growth centers and institutes was an unmistakable feature of the era, as well. New Age philosophies, alternative medical practices, countercultural approaches to mental health – all embedded within such personal growth centers and institutes – present counterpoints to the libertarian and conservative movements that were slowly emerging across the country. John Lilly, for his part, provided seminars, lectures, and sometimes week-long training courses across the US at such places as the California-based Esalen Institute and elsewhere. This paper, while built on personal correspondence, pamphlets, and other underutilized primary materials, critically analyzes a lesser-known entity called the Roscoe Center (in New York state). The paper will develop a richer understanding of not only Lilly’s educational outreach, how he and the Roscoe Center represented the shifting socio-political and economic firmament, but also what was a unique historical moment that trumpeted growth of quite different kinds.

“The Immersible Family” takes up John Lilly, Toni Lilly, and Gregory Bateson’s work at the Human-Dolphin Center in Saint Thomas. Undergirding even the most far out of John Lilly’s experiments are the simple, philosophical and psychological questions: how can we relate to one another, how can we bridge the gap between forms of communication, how can we listen so that we might hear? Lilly’s experiments took up these questions on the grounds of a number of pairings: humans and extra-terrestrials, humans and computers, and humans and their inner worlds. Most famously, he worked on interspecies communication—with dolphins.

Alongside his more psychedelic tendencies in his experiments and his thought, Lilly was also a classically-trained psychoanalyst, interested in the family form—whether that family was human or cetacean or a blend of the two species. Lilly thought that an immersive, psychoanalytic experience of re-mothering is what held the key to interspecies communication. His lab in the Virgin Islands attracted many celebrated counter-cultural figures, including Gregory Bateson, fresh off of his elaboration of the Double Bind Theory of communication, in which he claimed that contradictory statements in family communication could induce psychotic and schizophrenic states.

The experiments the researchers conducted were extreme in their aims: they wanted to foster human language acquisition in dolphins. The resulting conditions for that teaching were extreme as well: Peter, Pamela, and Sissy (literally, sister) were reraised as human children—by another scientist working under Lilly, Margaret Lovatt, around the clock (this arrangement became infamous because Peter the dolphin “fell in love” with her.) Additionally, Lilly demanded that his family and fellow researchers live on the water, and with their subjects, full time, going so far as to turn the architecture of the lab to family home in order to broker this kind of kinship. “The Immersible Family” traces the utilization of theories of family communication, mid-century notions of the effects of domestic architecture on family, and psychoanalytic theories of immersive re-mothering as they contributed to the infamous experiments at the Human-Dolphin Center, and later in John C. Lilly’s work with his third wife, Toni Lilly (a family therapist).

Recent work in science and technology studies has emphasized the agency of spaces such as laboratories, “the field,” digital spaces, and natural environments in shaping knowledges, subjectivities and social relations. Drawing on this work, the proposed paper analyzes the design and discourse surrounding a flooded house (aka the Dolphin House) in the US Virgin Islands which played a key role in the military-funded efforts of John C. Lilly, Margaret Howe and their collaborators to facilitate, study and promote communication between dolphins and humans in the 1950s and 1960s. The paper revisits the visual and textual discourses surrounding the flooded house in Lilly’s publications and in contemporaneous news stories and suggests that the flooded house was presented in these contexts as a form of cybernetic architecture that would enact what Andrew Pickering calls “ontological theatre” whereby the boundaries between human and nonhuman would be temporarily suspended so that new configurations of the dolphin (e.g., as speaking subject) might emerge. Yet, the flooded house, one of the most photographed and publicized aspects of Lilly’s work with dolphins in the 1950s and 1960s, was also a crystallization of masculinist and militarized practices of domesticating and reprogramming the dolphin as a communicating subject. The paper then turns to contemporary popular representations of the flooded house, focusing on the 2014 BBC documentary, The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins, and the considerable coverage surrounding it. While popular representations such as those in the BBC film to some degree challenge Lilly’s account of the flooded house as a radical cybernetic reconfiguration of the human-nonhuman, they also extend the fascination in Lilly’s accounts and in popular media during his period of prominence with the flooded house as a speculative architecture of human-cetacean futures. I suggest that the ongoing focus on the flooded house has to do with the manner in which its material configuration and popular representation both aestheticize and rationalize the exploitative communication practices taking place therein.