[FRIAM] Psychedelics

[glen]

Your mention of "invasive" and "watching from the sidelines" is interesting. I regard (high doses of) drugs as invasive. And trying to figure out why I think that, I'm forced to wonder if one *can* watch from the sidelines at all. In order to communicate, send and received encodings of what goes on inside one's self to/from another's self, requires similar structure between the sender and the receiver. So in the same way we can say that a person born without arms might have difficulty communicating well with a person born with arms, we can say that a person born with chemical mixture X might have trouble communicating well with a person born with chemical mixture Y. (Where "mixture" includes maintenance and production of steady states.)

Of course, communication between a person who was born with arms but who recently lost them with a person who still has their arms should be more well-formed. The same might be true of 2 people who usually have similar chemical mixtures, but where one of them temporarily changes their mixture. Like, maybe, someone describing a recent acid trip to a tea-totaler friend. But the key is "temporarily". The chemical mixture would have to go from similar, to dissimilar, and recover to similar. If the chemical mixture gets too dissimilar and stabilizes that way, then it's reasonable to expect communication formedness to monotonically degrade, like a slow speed *othering*. In this way, those of us who continually explore noetic space through manipulation/intervention might become *permanently* othered from those of us who follow a more sedate or accidental path from birth to death. Maybe this is why it's bad to have Billionaires running the country? Money is the ultimate nootropic.

In order to re-establish well-formed comms, you'd need to re-ground the communication in shared structure. Maybe throw some pots together, or perhaps some pair programming. I'm as skeptical about objectives as anyone. But sharing an objective, a concrete target towards which a group of people work, re-grounds communication quite nicely. But the key is that it has to be concrete. Getting a group of people together in pursuit of, say, "spiritual healing" is profoundly disturbing because the objective is not concrete: https://youtu.be/VHi_UusXdWM

So, I'm worried that you simply cannot "watch from the sidelines" and expect to have any understanding of what's going on. You can't win if you don't play.


On 4/29/22 09:23, Steve Smith wrote:
> re: https://psychedelicscience.org
> 
> It looks like Denver is carving a niche for itself as an early adopter/investigator in recreational drug normalization.   My younger daughter moved to Denver just about the time they were holding Marijuana Festivals (meetings) leading up to the decriminalization which  foreshadowed the legalization in CO, and then many other states falling like dominoes in their wake.
> 
> I'm fascinated by but somewhat aloof to the universe of "altered state" inducements.   Aside from mild doses of alcohol and caffeine, I'm not very practiced in chemical alteration.  My occasional indulgence in various modified ketogenic (including strict) dietary regimes have made me aware of the mental/psychological/metabolic differences that food/nutrition alone can yield.   My (mild) practice with mindfulness meditation is also informative.   There was a time when I worked hard(er) to generate altered states through synthetic sensoria (VR), but as VR/AR has become more mainstream, I've lost some focus/interest in that area.   Or maybe I'm just getting old.
> 
> I am happy for others who seem able (compelled) to dive deep into these (apparently) more acute shortcuts to "altered states" and particularly the "entheogenic" stylizations.   Having never really internalized any theology, this may be it's own mode of wishful thinking.   I don't have my own "Brigham Young" or "Brigham Old" * <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343182>to chat with across the brushfire in the arroyo, for example.  So I will continue to watch from the sidelines.
> 
> I *do* have some minor hope that psychedelics can have a meaningful play in "healing" traumatic injuries/experiences.   I lost a friend/housemate to suicide just a few years ago after decades of traditional (and often very invasive) approaches to trying to recover his "self" after a traumatic brain injury.   He was searching for help/support in the use of psilocybin as a possible alternative relief/remedy when he finally threw in the towel.   This was not long before Michael Pollan's "how to change your mind" brought the subject into the mainstream.
> 
> *It was a Dark and Stormy Night - Le Guin 1980 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343182>
> 
> On 4/29/22 8:52 AM, glen wrote:
>> Heh, I don't even know what I'll be doing next week, much less a year from now. But it's on the calendar!
>>
>> On 4/26/22 12:26, Prof David West wrote:
>>> I am planning to attend and have a condo/house for the week.
>>>
>>> Hope others might be interested.
>>>
>>> https://psychedelicscience.org
>>>


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