[FRIAM] Abduction

[Prof David West]

while typing my last response, the conversation took an interesting turn, prompting the following.

I went to college intending to become a quantum chromodynamicist. Before college I had read every 'popular' science book on Physics and Cosmology (Asimov, etc,) and monographs used in graduate classes on physics. Physics 101 was so dull, I quit.

What had attracted me to physics and cosmology were the "big" questions, the "how" questions, the "why" questions, the interpretation (philosophical) questions.

Serendipitously, I was taking an Asian Philosophy class the same first semester of freshman year. The philosophical questions raised were, like the speculative questions of quantum interpretation and cosmology,  so interesting I was hooked. I became a 'philosopher' instead of a 'physicist'.

 I wanted (still want) to know everything there is to know about the mind, including altered states of consciousness. My research included being hooked up to a computer and measuring brain waves, multiple forms of meditation, all of the seven forms of classical Yoga, and psychedelic drugs. LSD was still legal and my supply came through the auspices of the Psychology Department. Other experiments included LSD, psylicibin, and mescaline (not all at once) in a sensory-deprivation tank. Since then I have experimented with every psychoactive drug.

Never to get high.

The most serious side effect (other than  my obvious insanity) is extreme isolation/loneliness; and/or, if I have the temerity to raise the subject among my intellectual friends, ostracism.

Gillian posted recently about the psychedelic effects of incense. It was demonstrated long ago that not only does the incense but the ritual of church affects the same areas of the brain and induces the same effects as "augmented meditation" (microdoses of certain types of hallucinogen like ayahuasca. The context of the research was the Catholic Mass in Latin and the silent meditation of the Quakers.

There is such a huge area of interesting, at least to me, research, and not just for therapeutic use, here that it annoys me when a combination of puritan morality and scientific elitism dismisses the entire subject.

davew

On Wed, Jan 2, 2019, at 12:50 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:
> I claim the answer to your 2 questions is yes.  As Marcus (with the 
> usage classes) and Steve (with behavioral "drugs") point out, the reason 
> people engage in such things is to make their lives *better* (according 
> to some definition of "better").  To think anything else is to risk the 
> madness of morons like Nancy Reagan or those who think alcoholics suffer 
> from a moral failing, rather than a physiochemical one.
> 
> You want your insulin pump to make your life better than it would be 
> without it.  Simple.  Rational.
> 
> As Dave pointed out, though, we have some very promising therapeutic 
> agents that we've ignored because we've been hoodwinked by the moral 
> proselytizing of anti-science nutbags who think like Scientologists -- 
> Clear Body, Clear Mind and all that.
> 
> On 1/2/19 11:33 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> > So is THAT the spirit in which people take psilocybin?  Is that the spirit in which people welcome the legalization of LSD?  I fear I may have wronged them horribly.  To be so far from a moderately happy life to want to derange one's entire experience for even only a few hours, seems like  a terrible thing to me.  I regard sanity as an achievement, not a state of affairs into which life naturally folds.  I would no more take LSD than crumple up a piece of paper before I put it in the printer.  
> 
> -- 
> ☣ uǝlƃ
> 
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