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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