Bob Wallace was a software pioneer, the ninth employee at Microsoft, the world’s top amateur neuroscientist, and a visionary philanthropist who laid the financial foundations of The Heffter Research Institute. He was also one of the most patient and caring people one would ever meet. When he died of pneumonia at an untimely 53, we lost a great and good friend.
I first met Bob and Megan Dana his wife at their home in Sebastopol when I was meeting each of the major figures in Heffter, a process that led me to become the Institute’s first executive director. I recall Bob's part of the conversation well, and it went something like this.
“ I was very interested early on in how personal computers could expand the possibilities of the human mind. So I joined a small group of people who had the same idea, and we set up shop in Albuquerque. It eventually moved to Seattle, and you'd know it as Microsoft.
“ When I thought it was time to leave Microsoft my wife Megan and I set up Quicksoft and I wrote PC-write, an early word processing program. I sold the company and then left it in 1993. At that point I started to really think about what the next big way to expand capacity of the human mind would be. I looked around it became clear: psychedelics. They have an amazing capacity to change perceptions and consciousness, and their potential is almost wholly unexplored.
“ I have some money from my time at Microsoft, so I decided to invest in the scientific investigation of psychedelics. I think they have a greater potential for expanding the mind than PCs, so if computers were big, psychedelics could be much bigger. I looked around and the only group of neuroscientists in the world researching psychedelics are the people at Heffter, so I got involved.”
Bob got involved in a big way. He joined the board and became the chief financial supporter of the Institute, often contributing half its annual budget. Unlike most nonscientists, Bob had a keen interest in and understanding of basic science. He stayed current on the neuroscience literature. And he would ask probing questions about neurochemistry, consciousness, and the brain/mind interface in a way the Heffter scientists always found challenging and stimulating. In these discussions and at all other times, Bob had a way of making you feel you were both on the same side, pursuing a goal together. There was never any sense of him using his wealth or brilliance to force anything. Megan says he was an old hippie, and he had that gentleness about him. He had gained his wealth despite his philosophy of “we should make a living, not a killing." As this phrase suggests, he had an unusual compassion and elegance as an economic actor.
I remember again my first conversation with him. I asked Bob what he foresaw happening with psychedelics. It was clear what personal computers had let us to. What would psychedelics do for our capacities once we understood them better? I'll never forget his answer.
“ Well, I think they'll let us do work we haven't even thought about yet. Imagine this: you go to the office in the morning. You take a little blue pill. You lie down on a couch, and the pill lets your mind go somewhere else. You go there and you do work. You make things, do things, and solve problems in what may be a higher dimension, picking up from where he left off the day before. Then at five o'clock you return to your body on the couch. You wake up, stretch, say goodbye to the other folks in the office. You go home, see the wife and kids, eat dinner and watch TV. The next day you go to the office and take another little blue pill.”
I asked Bob what type of work we would do in that realm and his answer was, “I don't know, but I really want to find out. Don't you?" This was typical of his intense curiosity and focus.
Another time we are at a meeting in Santa Fe. I asked Bob if he thought having a physical body and brain was important for consciousness. “Absolutely not," was his answer. "I wouldn't mind being downloaded. In fact I’d do it if I could. Physical systems restrain consciousness." I asked what he might do if he were downloaded.
"Imagine the possibilities for play. You could have much better experiences of group consciousness. You could decide that you're going to join with a group of minds for a few days to work on some complex unsolved problems in topology. Then you could decide with a group of friends that you're going to be a pack of kangaroos for while to see what that was like. Wouldn’t that be nice?"
It seemed a lovely vision, and it still does. I'm pretty sure Bob's having a good experience of consciousness right now. And I hope we get to play at being kangaroos, or whatever else he has thought up, next time we meet.
