On Wed, Apr 16, 2014 at 10:21 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 4/16/2014 6:38 AM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote: > > If you say psychedelics are trivial, did nothing for research in medicine, > resulted in nothing, check maps.org or for concrete articles: > > > But the question was whether the produced useful ideas in those who took > them - not in whether they were useful for studying brains function, which > seems to be what all these papers are about. > > Depends of course on what you consider "useful". I'll give the effects question another personal shot for those interested, so if you're not its ot: One thing that the NYT article picked up concerning effect: increased capacity to relate, which translates into the "I feel more, but I am more vulnerable. But I'd rather feel than merely function," of the quoted research subject. Trivially, the increased capacity to relate, given correct dosage, administration, settings etc, is brought about by some perturbation of brain chemistry. Comp as some loose, not sanctioned by Bruno's high standards, metaphor offers a good dinner cocktail explanation: Let the first person experience be some stream of input and output values on an unspecified number of channels. These days I like a huge virtual sound mixing board as an image: you get input all manner of external signals or programs, which can be output, limited, compressed, blended into buses, routed internally, convoluted, processed, and effected in various ways. Master output is then subject's first person experience. The mechanisms of psychedelics on brain chemistry level differ in function of subject and the molecule, its receptor sites, dopamine regulation, inhibition + stimulation of different receptor pathways and so on. What distinguishes them from other consciousness altering agent, is their particularity: not merely euphoric stimulation of some sort (cocaine or coffee to some degree) or sedation (opiates and sleep medication) or even both at once (tobacco), but all channels of our mixing bord being altered in very particular ways. As if another sound mixing engineer had come in overnight and changed the entire mixing studio of the subject in very particular ways. Albert Hofmann noted about LSD in "My Problem Child", that remarkably memory of the extreme alterations of experience stays largely intact, which was counter intuitive to him given "the extreme degree of inebriation". And the awareness of the extreme degree, its perturbing horror trip anxiety aspect, is proof that the subject becomes aware of where "normal" is to them, and how peculiarly strange and relativistic their notion of "true normality" is. The upside of this perturbing weirdness is the subject learns more about relating to a more complete weirdness of their mixing desk: The overnight engineer might have made some valid points in that say: molecule x at dosage y increases tactile response, sexual appetite, general mood parameters etc. before it starts to impede on motricity, while attention span and focus of things sexual is increased with less daily clutter evaluations, master value of orgasm is 7 out of 10 on these parameters, time dilation favorable etc. That would be horny engineer's settings. What about all other kinds of experiences and engineers? "What would be output then?" which is the central driver for kids trying something weird, not merely naively but openly and hopefully seeking new experiences, and the central question of scientists like Shulgin, pushing the envelope to develop new psychedelic molecules with this open ended mystical quest. Because the particularity of subject is multiplied by particularities of the molecule in question, one trips for a few minutes to a few days. The connection with creativity is not somehow artificially restricted to art and entertainment, but to the entire faculty of whatever it is that we are; and since most creativity is derived by combining at least two ideas (e.g. horseless + carriage; not that Benz tripped but even Jobs himself made such a statement "creativity is just connecting things that nobody thought of connecting/relating") in some original fashion, the prevalence of weird ideas and their combinations is increased when conditions are favorable and this sort of multiplication is applied. If something like a Nobel prize could be conceived without all the political bs, Shulgin would deserve one; not just for his advances in pharmacology of these substances, but because he was a careful composer: developing some molecule from a good pharmacological perspective, deriving structure and properties from known substances and trying to optimize them, had one huge benefit: The man tasted all his own works first. On a daily basis, starting 10 to 1000 times below the active dose of the closest derivative he would increase the dosage level in tiny increments until he hit "activity" or gave up. Why Nobel prize again, one could ask: his molecular designs are one of the main sources for blueprints of everybody wanting to make a quick buck from an unscheduled designer substance. So his daily practice and diaries, the choices that led to them, the dosage results are to me centrally responsible for keeping these designer substances "relatively safe" in that we don't see tons of kids and people dying from use of unregulated substances due to prohibition. Most of the drug reports I read of concerning designer substances, are mostly his work, or structurally derivative. So our kids had that margin of error working in their favor, despite prohibition. Unfortunately, publication wise, we seem on our own now without his kind of work, and I'm starting to see structures revert to seemingly more toxic tries on solvents, stimulants etc. as everything marginally safe in this area is already scheduled. The analog laws penned in too many countries can't be taken seriously. I haven't to this day seen convincing criteria of what constitutes a parallel or analogous substance, and what doesn't. It just seems like helpless legislation to get whatever is on the dance floors and streets swept under the rug so that more toxicity/uncertainty is thrown into the mix. Public safety is a useful idea it would seem to me, beside all the crossovers between say science fiction and science, to which prohibition is completely opposed. If Jobs had been truly hip, he'd sue the US government with his army of lawyers for that failure in public safety and education resulting in millions of deaths for the money of a few; instead of just using them to scavenge the world's databases for copyright infringements. Give the types of Shulgin some of the cash and PR means; and this education might not save our children, but at least make them party safer if they so choose. PGC > > https://www.erowid.org/references/refs.php?C=Hof > > > Brent > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
