On 22 Feb 2013, at 17:21, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
"The people who most hate smokers are ex-smokers."
- PGC's father
Since this thread has become a bit personal, I offer the view of a
former judge of the German supreme court, who himself was not a
smoker, nor did ever smoke:
"It's not really the passive smoking that bothers people, with
exception of course to people trapped in a close working environment
where everybody smokes and smoking is permitted. It's not the smell
on their clothes either, since we have invented washing machines and
dry cleaning. We need an attitude change instead of more rules: I
think public spaces should regulate themselves and find creative
ways to not "lock anybody out", such as air vents over smoking
sections of a bar, or that smokers at a bar will restrain themselves
and be prepared to step outside if a guest with asthma arrives etc.
The main issue is that everybody has vices and everybody in Germany
has the constitutional right to act irresponsibly on personal choice
matters that do not significantly hurt others. Significant harm is
an open term here, to be calibrated by judges case-by-case. So the
outrage on public smoking is people projecting their judgement of
their own vices onto easy targets: passive smoking is a great
example. Nobody has a problem walking through smoggy Berlin, Los
Angeles, New York where particle emissions from fossil fuels of
their SUVs also driven by non-smokers 'make my clothes stink, make
me inhale carcinogens, cancerous toxins. Indeed, studies confirm
that some cities have been deemed equivalent to smoking a few
cigarettes a day, in terms of inhaled toxins.
So why the fuss? People like to project what they dislike about
themselves onto others behavior and feel the righteousness of
judging right from wrong. I know this because I have been a judge
all of my life; but I also know that the feeling is illusory and
that these questions are much more difficult than our personal
ethics. You can find temporary solutions to such issues and minimize
harm. But you'll never get rid of the problem via regulation. You
just move towards more extremism and uniformity.
After all it is our imperfections that make us interesting. I've
never smoked in my life, but passive smoke doesn't bother me, I even
appreciate the smell of pipe tobacco. It's like I am transported to
the orient."
On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 6:27 PM, Bruno Marchal <marc...@ulb.ac.be>
wrote:
On 20 Feb 2013, at 14:59, Quentin Anciaux wrote:
All classical psychedelics exhibit anti-addictive properties. Sure,
people can't do mescaline or LSD regularly enough, i.e. every few
days to every day,
How is using every day (or every few days) not an addictive
behavior ? Seems quite strange to say that to have **anti**
addictive properties, you should use it like an addict, seems
contradictory.
This does not necessarily follow. Many people can use some
medication daily, without getting addicted.
Taking salvia everyday asks for a big effort. I call it the "huile
de foie de morue" of the drugs (Cod liver oil).
...
In fact, except in forum, I see very few people developing an
interest for that experience (except as a medication). But then I
don't know so much people interested in the consequence of comp or
in "serious" theology either. Salvia has this in common with comp:
it does not go handy with wishful thinking. It has other
relationship with comp, like insisting on some secrecy of a part of
the experience, which corroborates the G/G* distinction.
And that is the part which I have difficulty with and why I keep it
at a close but rare distance. The joke seems immense and euphoric in
its own terms, but the relevant brain subroutines, if you permit,
are offended by every letter I type here, so there is some sense of
stepping over a threshold that is a prohibited hack. Intuitively a
question would be: "So why was I invited?" The small composer and
the skeptic in me don't like this, even though they know ultimately
"resistance is futile".
Yes, I understand.
I will not add much, as I might say things on which I have to remain
silent ... if I want to maintain good relation with the "lady". :)
Now, the secrecy problematic is a constant problem in theology, but
also in a large part of psychology and medicine. We can guess it is
normal, as brain are wired for terrestrial survival, which on some
point can conflict with other form of survival. Then with comp it can
be formally related to the fact that Bx -> ~ x, admits solutions, like
self-consistency (Dt) by Gödel's second incompleteness theorem. The
whole G* minus G describes the landscape of the correct machine's
secret. Comp makes some secret "conditionally" communicable, in the
form "as far as I am consistent then ...".
As for Quentin, I think he's right: poisons are a contradiction. For
beside their danger and pleasure, they are equally solvents,
medicines, cleansers or Cod liver oil (hemp seed oil trumps
industrial fish farms with antibiotics etc., as I am sure you know,
it is cheaper too). Perhaps they harm us when we don't have our
numbers right, concerning dosage and context. "Be precise with the
values" Paracelsus said famously.
Also Quentin, have you mixed MJ with toboacco when you suffered?
Because that mixture is narcotic, when MJ on its own is more self-
limiting.
That's a good question.
MJ + alcohol can also be quite narcotic for some person. Combination
of medication is known to be hazardous, and should be handle with
caution.
I agree with what you say below. I think that prohibition is just a
criminal technic to sell more drugs, without control of quality, nor
control of price, in a way making it possible to target the kids, at
every corner of every street. LEAP (http://www.leap.cc/) provides many
evidences. The evidences are monumental that the more a drug is
severely prohibited in a country, the more it is consumed in that
country.
Prohibition makes de facto a nationalization of health, which is the
complex locus where safety can be maximized by augmenting the
competition.
If we legalize all drugs, and tax them relatively to genuine
statistics of problems, people would quickly see which products are
"really" dangerous.
The very idea of criminalizing an abuse problem, that is an health
problem, is a total non sense. It makes a fake sense through the myth
that the good should fight the bad, where the good can only help the
bad toward less bad.
Addiction can be cured with iboga, together with some psychological
accompaniment. Jail only aggravates the "problem of drugs", itself
brought by prohibition.
bruno
However I assume, with no rigor whatsoever or claims to validity in
this discussion, laying Salvia's particularities aside for a moment,
that consciousness is "poisonous" by default; working locally
through pain and pleasure system, every operation, whether thought
or behavioral, is linked to: how someone gets their appropriate kick
in life, from jogging, to cocaine, or to performing their "true
social role" for years... is not for anybody else to judge if harms
to others are not clearly expressed (what? Somehow the kicks we get
for flaunting our nourished identities and accomplishments are not
subject to reward/pain histories? Just "transcendental soul" or "the
facts" expressing who we "really are", so we're better than that
junkie under the bridge? We've reached a state beyond interpretation
and prejudice? - this seems insecure at best, with overtones of
delusion: again, the drunk knows things are not ideal at this level.
This reasoning is based on prejudice of guess who?). Simply because:
who would have the data to make such final judgement?
And since we are "this wired" to pain and reward balance sheet of
our histories, we are default junkies of sets of routines, even if
we've never touched an illicit substance in our lives. There are
often quoted neurological links between for example cocaine use,
sex, and the rush of a financial trader making money. Pets and
children elevate production of opiates (enkephalins, endorphins,
dynorphins) in parents; similarly chatting with friends + other
forms of social behavior.
I am not saying, that all these activities are equivalent in some
normative/ethical sense or all conceivable levels... just that they
all tend to become increasingly "addictive, druggy" with
inappropriate numbers; e.g. entailment of negative connotations when
parents start to over-protect children, or give too little or too
much, or the trader looses sleep and burns out, or the cocaine guy
goes into daily use several times, etc. Sorry, but shooting heroin
or smoking pot + tobacco on the couch has the potential to ruin one
life and be a bit of a burden on others. But children with warped
sense of reality, traders who's collective behavior destroy
pensions, people becoming aggressive through excessive stimulant
use: isn't this at least just as much of a problem as "couch
potato"? I would say these things can be far worse, because no couch
potato endangers my balance sheets long-term. But such is just
personal judgement/opinion, no claims to validity.
So from point of view of somebody unwilling, just plain too lazy, to
discriminate between how universal machines/people "get their kicks
or reward routines" or how their histories shape them to employ
pleasure/pain strategies, as long as an increasingly general level
of harm is minimized and the opposite maximized, the question
concerning plants and molecules that have a disruptive effect on our
usual pain and reward system, resulting in less toxicity, less
excessive stress states, less harmful anxiety, and more deserved
peace of mind, becomes plausible for some machines, irrespective of
the discrimination against them.
It follows that the question of "anti-addictive" is more accurately:
how can consciousness calibrate its routines (plant- and molecule
based or not), making use of recursive quality, towards a more
appropriate, healthier, less toxic equilibrium between routine and
perturbation, that places those routines in question by altering its
own frames of reference.
Analogy for anybody who has problems with that wording: What looks
like this complex statement is merely an entity with self-
referential abilities putting their own cognitive/behavioral loops
into question to engage different sets of locally accessible
questions directly. Reality will inevitably place us in front of the
next catastrophe, so instead of fighting our loss of control, that
wave that's approaching that cannot be "beaten", some people dive
right in and permit the wave to pass over them + train for waves in
pools + gather data on how they react to waves, not panic, learn to
control nervous system in abnormal states etc.
Assuming comp, the computations going through the state of a machine
with sufficiently long history include a lot of junk and redundancy
(e.g., speaking less digitally, like stress levels elevated because
somebody's lack of emotional control endangers somebody else life on
the road, or colleagues and bosses are being assholes, inputing
redundant media, technology fetishes and related information,
reading idiots like myself squabbling in forums, behavioral loops
without merit, emotion unchecked etc. :) It's these kinds of
computational streams that can arguably require a bit of poison,
some solvent from time to time for cleansing, an appropriate amount
of amnesia, if some machine wants to open programs other than
survival and strategic routines, thinking about competition etc.
Assuming comp consciousness in this non-literal sense, some molecule
or plant will serve as a poison, a disrupting agent or solvent to
usual patterns of consciousness and behavior. The "rationale" is to
keep toxicity low and pleasure/pain displacement appropriate. But
others approach that question with a diverse and less linear
selection of means to perturb routines. This way, craving for one
"kick" or "behavioral loop" is countered by undecidability of the
potential engagement of another. They increasingly start to cancel
each other out and overall behavior becomes less dependent on
histories of routines, pains, and pleasure, as a broader, "less
literal" history of how somebody engages pleasure and pain starts to
emerge and... This is no rainbow I'm talking about btw: we're
talking poisonous plants and propositions here. Ok, sometimes you DO
find rainbows, but if you come looking for them you might find the
drain of your consciousness bathtub clogged by years of grimy
delusions in the way.
And "yes" to the woes of everybody on how exhausting these things
can be: it is exhausting for mind, body, soul, or whatever identity
conception you have signed a "consciousness mortgage" with. And due
to the nature of the thing, you might be modifying those mortgage
terms, or even switch contracts altogether. But the opportunity to
try something within acceptable safety parameters (excessive Iboga
does not meet this standard for me, too many toxicity markers at the
interesting levels), then indeed, this is the kick of kicks: not one
of some machine's favorite things, but going where you've never been
before or taking someone there with you.
And having tried something, doesn't mean the machine can interpret
things "correctly". Plants may make machines dream and can create
moments where we escape the mortal coil and share the best moments
of our lives with loved ones; but the hard work of translating said
dreams to work for the machine... No plant can do or facilitate this.
But I agree with everybody that if there is unease, you can't or
don't really trust your doctor, with all the wonderful things
prohibition brings, like the millions of people who have to remain
uncertain about what they put into their bloodstream from some
shoddy lab without hygiene standards, not speaking of quality and
dosage (µg scale or at least one decimal behind mg, when we are
taking, especially longer duration things), then it would be more
prudent to not trust the doctor. Exception is of course cannabis,
where people risk only getting ripped off with oregano or being sold
flower with glass particles sprayed on to look like flowering crystal.
I think the mad hatter said to the eternally late and worried rabbit
in one of the Alice books something like: "But HOW could you ever
have the time, if you never take it?"
“There is one class to whom reflection is a fault; is not only a
fault, is a sin; is not only a sin, is an atrocity - who cannot bear
to exist without their own existence dis-existencing somebody else's
existence.” - Dale Pendell
PGC
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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