[FRIAM] dystopian vision(s)

[Steve Smith]

The experience *I* have (or the way I have mostly interpreted it) with 
various ways of "playing around with my interface/membrane/boundary" is 
that alternatively addictive to the point of becoming "essential" and a 
"vertiginous stare into the abyss" at the same time.    I'm not talking 
particularly or specifically about ingesting entheogens or any other 
substance known to acutely adjust reality.  There are (obviously) many 
other ways to "play around with the boundary".  For what it is worth, 
Pandora is playing Denver's iconic "Rocky Mountain High" in the 
background as I complete this paragraph.

I currently attribute this to the alone/all-one duality and the 
flexibility (elastic and plastic) nature of self-other boundaries 
(membranes?) as a conscious ego.   (Sting - How Fragile we are on 
Pandora now, segueing into judy Collins' Both Sides Now).

If I take "the Uni/Multi-verse" to be nothing more/less than a single 
complex adaptive system which can(not) be reduced to a system of systems 
(only reduceable by an imperfectly isolated system (self) which has a 
compressed "model" of the universe as a system of systems of which 
it"self" is a perfectly isolated subsystem(self)) then the experience of 
self-other and "gaining insight/parallax into (R)reality" isn't all that 
puzzling (to this self's model of itself within the universal).

This of course still leaves (for this illusory "self") the "hard 
problem" of the fact (rather than the nature) of (subjective) experience 
itself...

I have a feeling (in my subjective experience as a self) that the 
"breath of consciousness" might be the compression/decompression cycle 
itself?   Talking (linearly) about this stuff is a fractal/recursive 
minefield of rabbit-holes worthy of Alice tripping on Entheogens?

- Steve

On 8/18/22 8:34 AM, glen wrote:
> Parallax is an important technique for getting at things just *beyond* 
> one's current representational power. So, were I to try to steelman 
> your argument, I'd suggest that, yes, the process by which our bodies 
> refine/focus/hone-down our attention to a smaller, compressed thing 
> from a larger thing (whether the largess is "noise" or not is a 
> tangent) is important. And the entheogens permute that honing down, 
> that reduction, to create a different transformation.
>
> It's reasonable to speculate that the transformation we execute under 
> the influence of an entheogen might be *less* reductive than that we 
> execute when "sober". But to argue that the transformation under the 
> influence is a more accurate match to reality is fraught. Less 
> reductive? Sure. More accurate? Well, that would require us to go into 
> that tangent. What do we mean by more accurate? Does randomness exist? 
> Etc.
>
> So we might want to be careful with that crossing between relatively 
> tame statements like "entheogens alter the cross-membrane 
> transformation providing parallax toward the out there" versus more 
> metaphysical statements like "entheogens provide a better 
> transformation (or no tranformation) across the boundary to the out 
> there".
>
> Thanks for clarifying. I think I have a better understanding of the 
> argument. Those of us who play around with our interface probably *do* 
> have a better understanding of reality than those of us imprisoned by 
> their one, sole interface. But we don't need to go so far as to say a 
> drugged mind is more capable of perceiving the real reality.
>
> On 8/16/22 17:16, Prof David West wrote:
>> If you assume, or believe, that the mind (body-brain-embodied 
>> mind-Atman) naturally processes 100% of the inputs and assume/believe 
>> that a survival enhancing mechanism filters that stream to create the 
>> illusionary subset that we call Reality, then entheogens work to 
>> dismantle the filtering mechanism and expose the Real Reality.
>>
>> Missing in my first post was a hidden premise, that any augmentations 
>> (Neuralink, et. al.) are almost certainly based on whatever we think 
>> we understand of the filtering mechanism, not the Mind, and therefore 
>> would augment/enhance that mechanism and therefore lead to results 
>> opposite of what is desired.
>>
>> The missing premise is pretty much conjecture on my part but is 
>> grounded in an advanced, but not expert, understanding of AI and 
>> neural network technologies; so it should be taken with a tablespoon 
>> (thousands of grains) of salt.
>>
>> davew
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 16, 2022, at 11:22 AM, glen wrote:
>>> Opposite of what? I don't understand how augmentation is the opposite
>>> of the entheogens (drugs or meditation). Are you saying that, e.g. the
>>> Mojo Lens or Neuralink further restrict, whereas the entheogens lessen
>>> the restriction?
>>>
>>> If so, then my guess is you could do the same sort of restriction
>>> modulation with any augmentation device. E.g. if there are 1 billion
>>> possible data feeds you could receive, decreasing them is like an
>>> undrugged person self-censoring and such, then increasing them is like
>>> taking a entheogen ... that is, assuming Church-Turing.
>>>
>>> If we reject C-T, then it seems reasonable to argue that the body
>>> "computes" something that any computer-based augmentation would
>>> restrict, by definition, making it impossible to expand beyond what the
>>> augment provides. Computer-based augmentaiton would provide a hard
>>> limit ... an unavoidable abstraction/subset of reality.
>>>
>>> On 8/15/22 19:04, Prof David West wrote:
>>>> The hallucino-philia (and Buddhist epistemologists) would argue 
>>>> that our brains (minds) already fully grasp / cognize / perceive 
>>>> our physical reality. But, for survival purposes, it self-censors 
>>>> and presents our consciousness/awareness/attention with a small 
>>>> abstract subset of that reality—an illusion.
>>>>
>>>> Drugs and meditation are 'subtractive' in that they dismantle the 
>>>> abstraction/reduction apparatus that generates the illusion hiding 
>>>> our 'full-grasping'.
>>>>
>>>> If such a belief were "true" then "augmenting our brains" would be 
>>>> the exact opposite, and exceedingly harmful, approach ...
>>>>
>>>>      ...   unless, the augmentation was a permanent [lsd | 
>>>> psylocibin | mescaline] drip.
>>>>
>
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