Program Notes
Guest speaker: Wrye Sententia
[NOTE: All quotations below are by Wrye Sententia.]
“How can we have confidence in what we think we know, in our particular version of reality, in our particular take on the world? … What is real and what is false, and does it really matter if there is a difference.”
“Mind is built on consciousness. It’s an accumulation of life-experience over time. … Consciousness, for me, is sort of a snapshot in the photo album of the mind.”
“Cyberpunk, I think, is about altered states of body and altered states of mind.”
“And the reason I mention the decade of the drug wars [in connection with cyberpunk fiction] is because there are a lot of overlays between altering your mind through drugs and altering your mind through technologies, hard technologies.”
“Now we can’t protect ourselves from misconceptions. But I think we can keep from evolving them, maybe by taking the doctrine of signs and saying, instead of finding the purpose find the consequence.”
” ‘Augmented reality’ supplements the physical world, the external world, with additional information.”
“If we put filters on cameras to enhance the picture, what kinds of filters can we put on our minds to enhance our day-to-day walk?”
“If cognitive liberty is the right of each individual to think independently, or autonomously, and to engage in the full spectrum of thought, and to have access to multiple modes of consciousness, if that’s what cognitive liberty is, it’s something that is a political goal.”
“The cultural machinery never rests.”
The Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And the first thing I’d like to do today is to give my heartfelt thanks to first-time donor Wilma Van Tee and also to David G. and Garrett W. who all sent in donations this week.
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And David and Garrett have also done so in the past as well.
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So Wilma, David, and Garrett, I hope you have as happy a Thanksgiving holiday as mine will be,
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in no small part thanks to you and all of the other wonderful supporters of the salon.
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Now before I get into today’s show, I ought to mention that I just received a notice from Google,
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who now owns FeedBurner, which is the source of the feed that some of our fellow salonners are using to subscribe to these podcasts.
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Now, they tell me that there should be no interruption in your service when they do a changeover that they’re planning.
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But just in case they do slip up, you can always download each program directly from our psychedelicsalon.org blog.
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Or you can use the alternative feed over at matrixmasters.com slash podcast slash psychedelicthinking.xml.
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And the P and T are capitalized in psychedelic thinking.
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You’ll figure it out.
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Now, let’s get to today’s program.
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And I think you’re going to find it quite fascinating.
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Unless, of course, you are completely locked into believing that what you see is actually there.
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Yep, we’re going to talk about a few different kinds of reality today.
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Our guest speaker is another friend of mine, Rye Sententia.
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And you’ve heard me mention her in previous podcasts when I spoke about the Center for Cognitive Liberty,
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which she co-founded with her partner, one of our tribe’s most preeminent lawyers, Richard Glenn Boyer. Thank you. her professional accomplishments, my first thoughts are of her and Richard as parents of two great little kids.
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But in addition to raising a family, here are a few other aspects of Rye’s life that
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I just now read about on various websites.
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As a director of the CCLE, puckish and brilliant Rye Sententia, I like that, don’t you?
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Puckish and brilliant.
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Fits her like a glove, I think.
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And it goes on.
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Rye Sententia oversees projects that aim to focus public attention on cognitive technologies in relation to individual rights of mind, neuroethics,
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as well as drawing attention to neuroethical concerns about trends in psychopharmacology and related cognitive neuroscience fields. Thank you. writing program. Now, when I play this talk in a few seconds, you’ll hear that every once in a
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while, Rye will refer to one of the slides she was showing along with her talk. And I can remember
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some of them, and it’s really too bad that this is only an audio podcast because they certainly
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were thought-provoking. But for the most part, I think you’ll be able to follow her talk without
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the accompanying images. And now, Rye Cententia talking about reality syndromes and cyberpunk symptoms.
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Have you ever woken up and said to yourself,
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Oh my God, everything I think I know is wrong.
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This happens to me periodically, and I have different ways of dealing with it,
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and hopefully it doesn’t happen to you on the day that you’re giving a talk. But there’s a
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person who I really admire for his creativity and his roving philosophy. His name is Timothy Speedlevich,
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and he lives in New York City.
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And he’s a double-decker tour bus guide who gives eloquent, poetic, philosophic speedosity.
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Yes.
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And in his recent book, Speedosity,
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he had the phrase,
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suffering is an addiction to self-doubt, maybe.
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So I think, how can we have confidence in what we think we know,
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in our particular version of reality, in our particular version of reality,
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in our particular take on the world.
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And what is real and what is false,
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and does it really matter if there’s a difference?
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There’s been a lot of talk here about consciousness and mind
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and what’s what and how do we parse out one from the other.
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and mind, and what’s what, and how do we parse out one from the other.
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And for myself, I try to bracket the two different concepts, as in consciousness is a combination of thoughts combined with perceptions.
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It’s what you feel, what you see, combined with the thought of the moment.
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Mind is built on consciousness. combined with the thought of the moment.
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Mind is built on consciousness.
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It’s an accumulation of life experience over time.
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It’s all those little fleeting moments that you remember and forget and then re-remember and tweak them along the way.
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You never remember them the way they were.
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It changes along the way. You never remember them the way they were, and it changes along the way.
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So consciousness for me is sort of a snapshot
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and a photo album of the mind.
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When I try to think about consciousness,
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I think, you know, sure, there’s those detectable traits.
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There’s the things that cognitive neuroscientists
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have been sort of tracking increasingly in the last 10, 20 years.
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They’ve been looking more and more about not just the conscious states,
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the difference between being awake, asleep, attentive, dulled,
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looking at those things, looking at your tactile sensations,
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moving more and more towards how do our memories function,
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where does memory come in, what about experience, belief.
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And that, I think, is where you touch on mind
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and it becomes much more interesting and much more complex.
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interesting and much more complex. The idea of an objective reality was foisted on us in the 18th century. There were two camps. There were the rationalists who said that reality is based on,
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it was sort of growing out of Descartes, and the idea that we could know things through our intellect and explain them
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in that way. And then there were the empiricists who were focused on the senses and thought
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that everything was sort of tactilely revealable, that you could know things because you experienced the world. And the idea of objective reality has pretty
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much been debunked today. People have been squabbling about it for a while, but Kant
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made a valiant effort to try and reconcile the two, but he fudged it because he said
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that we all share the same basic take, the same rational categories together, that there was a uniformity
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at base in our minds, and that with that, we could then go out and experience the world
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and somehow come to a common ground.
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But we know from our own individual experience that this isn’t the case.
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Individuality is dizzying. It’s beautiful.
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It’s the complexity of the universe. It’s what makes living fun. But in another sense, we’re all
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sort of caught in what Scott Buchatman calls the terminal identity. And by terminal identity, he sort of means that, you know, at this stage in human
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evolution, we see things through screens. Our bodies are a screen. Our ideas, our experience
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are another type of screen. And so what we know is always necessarily subjective.
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When I think about getting a handle on consciousness, I often think of mirrors
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and metaphors with mirrors and particularly houses of mirrors. And Eric Davis, who will be speaking,
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I guess, on the next panel, he once had a thought that he said when he was a child,
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that he said when he was a child he would stand between two opposing mirrors
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and try to turn his head to get around it
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and said, if I just didn’t have a head
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I could see into infinity.
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I think he’s still trying.
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But self-awareness is like this
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and so the question is, how do you get around your own head?
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Is it possible?
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Is it possible to think of a way to do so?
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Take these two upside-down heads.
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All right, I’m not going to say any more.
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Strange.
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It’s another one of those brain teasers.
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But unlike the ones yesterday that Susan was
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sharing it’s not inattentiveness to the two heads it’s an attentive blindness it’s a suturing of
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reality that our eyes fill in the difference but the issue in what I’ve just shown you is orientation.
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When you’re oriented with the faces upside down,
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and I intentionally did not say these two similar faces because I didn’t want to lead you linguistically into the illusion.
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But I just think it’s interesting that a simple inversion,
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this is called the Thatcher effect,
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and the first order relations between the inversion, this is called the Thatcher effect, and the first
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order relations between the eyes, the nose, the mouth change dramatically according to what
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position your head is in. Right before this talk, I got inverted, and if you haven’t been inverted,
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I highly recommend it. It’s basically being laid on your back,
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and someone supports you like this,
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and you’re suspended in air.
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It’s a great experience for clearing your mind
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and also giving you a different way of thinking about the world.
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So the purpose of this talk that I want to give today
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is to think about mind fiction,
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and specifically cyberpunk literature, I think, is mind fiction.
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There’s a lot of different things about it,
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and I’ll describe it in a minute,
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but for me it’s really about getting into your head
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and thinking about the space in there
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and how to better navigate it.
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So mind fiction’s both in the sense of
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a literature and also the head trips that we play on ourselves.
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Now, I want to talk a little bit about models and particularly reality models.
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But models are funny things. A couple weeks ago, my son, who’s two and a half,
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was invited to participate in a study on cognitive mapping
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or the way that toddlers perceive spatial relations.
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And the exercises that the researchers had him do
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were related to taking a map and a model.
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And the map had representations of, you know,
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chairs, sofas, things like that.
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And the model was color-coded the same,
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and it was 3D replicas.
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And each time that the researcher would have my son
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find a little object hidden in the model
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and then ask him to show her on the map where it was, and he would find it sometimes,
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sometimes he wouldn’t, but the refrain was,
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you see, Finn, the map and the model are the same.
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That’s how you knew the map and the model are the same. That’s how you knew the map and the model are the same.
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And I shuddered at each repetition of that
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because I just felt like the map is not the model
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and the map is a representation of a fictional model
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that is representing a larger fictional world.
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So it really caused me great distress, and I had to do a lot of
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de-indoctrination once he got home.
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So maps are useful, and so are
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models, but we should not mistake them for what they’re representing.
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And a lot of people like to make models, personally and
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professionally. Artificial intelligence, people working in artificial intelligence are working on a lot of models.
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Cognitive scientists, anthropologists, linguists, philosophers.
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There’s all sorts of models of reality.
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Spiritual models.
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Spiritual models that may say that the idea of a self is illusory
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there’s a Buddhist doctrine
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of anatta which says that the self
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is an illusion, the Hindu one
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the world is an illusion, the Christians follow the same
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more or less path by bracketing the world
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with heaven and hell
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and these are useful models in certain ways,
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but I would say that we need to remember
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that they’re just representations.
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Scientific models try and reduce us
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to a firing of synapses and neurons in the brain
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or other models of consciousness
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that are reductionist or mechanistic.
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And the mind may be an evolved machinery,
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but there’s always a lingering residue that we live with.
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And we live subjectivity.
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We live perception.
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We live in the perceptual world.
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So in my work, I’m constantly looking for models that
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will bridge those two opposing senses of the world. And the exclusionary nature of models,
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the way that when one adheres to a strong belief, whatever it may be,
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even believing that psychoactive drugs are the next salvation.
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There was an excellent article in Trip Magazine by James Kent in the last issue
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challenging us to think about psychedelics in our own allegiance to them.
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And models of false reality are something that,
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it’s a long-standing dilemma.
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It’s a philosophical conundrum that comes up again and again.
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It’s the problem in Plato’s cave
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when the figures are chained.
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This is a scene in the Republic,
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and the figures are chained into a cave
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watching shadows on a wall.
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And when the individuals who are stuck in this world are released
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and go stumbling out into the sunlight,
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they suddenly see a different layer of the world
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and realize that what they thought they knew, they don’t know.
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The Hindu wheel, Get me off now.
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This is the way that the Hindus,
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the idea that you’re on a cyclical wheel
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and that you can escape is again another model
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for conceptualizing what we live on a day-to-day basis.
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In the 1980s and 1990s, a new emerging genre of fiction called cyberpunk came on the scene and
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and cyberpunk fiction is some people say very dystopic it’s very grim and dismal because you
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have a lot of sort of corporate waste it’s the detritus of an overwrought capitalist society that’s
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just sort of out there. And then you have cyberspace. And in cyberspace, characters jack
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in with neural implants and electrodes attached to their brain. And, you know, it’s sort of a console cowboy free-ranging world.
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And there’s other things about it, but basically cyberpunk, I think, is about altered states of
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body and altered states of mind, because you constantly have body modifications,
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prostheses that are being added, enhancement through drugs or cognosuticals, and sort of a mind augmentation that’s going on as well.
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But the most prevalent characteristic is sort of a living in these embedded realities, these fictional worlds.
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these embedded realities, these fictional worlds.
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It’s about exploring the mind space that makes use of technology.
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Brain sockets, neural implants, nanobots, the whole gamut. But there’s three important considerations that I’d like you to think about.
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Basically, cyberpunk coincides with the decade of
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just say no politics
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that was the mantra and I think that it infused
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the authors who were working in this area
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with sort of that as the backdrop
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to what they were thinking about in terms of new technologies
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because the other prominent feature is of course
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computers and the home computer was just being developed, it was sort of getting integrated of new technologies, because the other prominent feature is, of course, computers.
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And the home computer was just being developed.
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It was sort of getting integrated.
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And Timothy Leary called the personal computer of the 80s, you know, the LSD of the 80s.
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So that’s sort of where the connection goes.
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It’s sort of an altered space. And the third thing is that these computer-generated
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realities were a new place to go mentally. It was a fictionalizing of what you could do with
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a computer space. And so it wasn’t really, I guess cyberspace didn’t exist yet. The term was
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invented in 1984 by William Gibson, which I’m sure all of you have
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heard. But what I find intriguing about it is that it was a fiction in itself. So it was the fiction
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before the virtual reality or the internet as we call it today, you know, so that virtual space.
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This is a very cyberpunk idea.
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It’s a particular thought experiment that philosophers use to consider consciousness and perception.
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How do we know that we’re not all brains in vats being stimulated?
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Our brains are being stimulated so that we think we are in bodies,
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and we think we’re living in this world.
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If anyone has seen The Matrix, which I’m sure many of you have,
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it’s the basic premise of Matrix 1 and, well, I won’t give away Matrix 2.
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But this is a slide from David Chalmers.
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He’s a philosopher who works at the University of Arizona, and he’s also the director of the Center for Consciousness Studies there.
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And so he lives in Tucson, and this is his way of putting that idea forward.
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And so, you know, the question is, are we being deceived?
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And in the brain- the vat scenario,
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most traditionally throughout 20th century science fiction,
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which again, the idea of mind and control via technology
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is something that is sort of a predominant theme.
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But cyberpunk took it one step further
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in that they self-select to be brains in vats.
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They want to go to that altered space.
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It’s not some malevolent scientist turning knobs and plugging things in.
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It’s, you know, they’re self-experimenters.
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And I think they have interesting models in this way for thinking about, you know,
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a self-selecting enthusiasm for altered states of consciousness.
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A few examples of that might be Neuromancer, which, how many people have read Neuromancer?
00:21:41 ►
Excellent.
00:21:42 ►
Okay, so, a half-informed crowd. Okay, so a half-informed crowd. Okay, so what’s that? Yes, yes, Philip K. Dick was, you know, pretty Out of Joint, in which there’s a character who’s living in a 1950s-style suburban reality.
00:22:14 ►
And he starts having this nagging sensation that what he’s living isn’t real.
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And increasingly, he gets frustrated.
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And then he starts having deja vu
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like sensations
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and that’s when he sort of moves out of this
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false reality but in Cyberpunk
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they go there, they force themselves to stay there
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even in Greg Egan’s Permutation City
00:22:42 ►
which technically isn’t Cyberpunk but it’s a good book
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and it’s
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on theme. But in this book, the character sends himself into a simulated reality and then
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deliberately before he does that, cuts off all the escape accesses that that character could
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employ to get back out. So he’s basically cutting himself off in that world
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and saying, you’re going to stay there
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and figure out what’s going on.
00:23:09 ►
So I want to introduce three models.
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I know there’s four images,
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but I want to introduce three models
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based on current and evolving computer interfaces
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and make analogies between these and reality and consciousness.
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This model is supposed to represent,
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the C is supposed to represent computers
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and the R is reality in a physical sense,
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the physical world.
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But what I’d like to do is tweak it a little
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and have the C be consciousness
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and the R be reality, not only in the sense of the physical world,
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but also more like Robert Anton Wilson speaks of the real universe,
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which he says is a hallucination learned by others,
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but which becomes self-induced.
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So in the first model, you have the graphic user interface and the second model is virtual
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reality proper and you can see where the x’s block off the outside world the ubiquitous computers
00:24:17 ►
i’m going to avoid because that would involve consciousness consciousness consciousness
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consciousness and it’s pretty much what i’ve got going here all of your minds are operating that would involve consciousness, consciousness, consciousness, consciousness,
00:24:27 ►
and it’s pretty much what I’ve got going here.
00:24:29 ►
All of your minds are operating,
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so I’m going to let you fill in the last model and tell me if it works at the end.
00:24:35 ►
These slides are taken from a book called Brave New Unwired World,
00:24:42 ►
which is a book by Alex Lightman about wearable computers and sort of
00:24:48 ►
shifting towards that phase of culture. But he got the image from Mark Billinghurst, who’s a
00:24:55 ►
researcher at the Human Interface Lab at the University of Washington. And as I said the C is intended to to be computers but but if you take C as consciousness
00:25:09 ►
what you get in this model is sort of a dividing line a gap between consciousness interacting with
00:25:17 ►
itself and reality that’s still going on but you’re not really paying attention to it. It’s sort of like sitting at a computer screen,
00:25:27 ►
and you’re involved typing or doing something,
00:25:30 ►
and you stop to sip a cup of coffee.
00:25:33 ►
You’re in both worlds, but they’re sort of distinct.
00:25:36 ►
Virtual reality.
00:25:39 ►
The problem child of Jaron Lanier.
00:25:42 ►
the problem child of Jaron Lanier.
00:25:51 ►
This is, as I said, the place where you try to create an entirely immersive environment
00:25:54 ►
where consciousness is interacting with itself.
00:25:57 ►
And there’s no, the outside world,
00:26:02 ►
the factual, consensual reality doesn’t matter. This might be
00:26:07 ►
John Lilly, how many people are familiar with John? Okay.
00:26:12 ►
Yes. The isolation tank. This might
00:26:16 ►
be what happens in the isolation tank or
00:26:19 ►
using ayahuasca in a
00:26:24 ►
heavy and
00:26:25 ►
all-encompassing way.
00:26:28 ►
It’s Huxley’s mind at large.
00:26:30 ►
And so the goal here is
00:26:31 ►
total perceptual
00:26:33 ►
immersion. And in
00:26:35 ►
cyberpunk, as I said, this
00:26:37 ►
is something that they really go
00:26:39 ►
for. They’re aiming at
00:26:41 ►
this. Pat Cadigan,
00:26:43 ►
this is not Pat Cadigan. Pat Cadigan is one of my favorite
00:26:50 ►
cyberpunk authors. And she once said that the only virtual reality worth exploring is the space
00:26:58 ►
between your ears. And she’s written a book, she’s written several books. And if somebody else has found another female cyberpunk author, please let me know.
00:27:09 ►
Because she’s the only one to date that I know of who’s written major books.
00:27:14 ►
But in a book that she wrote called Mind Players, she sets at the opening of the novel a character who’s never, never, never, ever used virtual reality technology before.
00:27:29 ►
She’s never been hooked up.
00:27:31 ►
And this character is sort of seduced into trying what’s called in the book a madcap.
00:27:41 ►
And so she’s going to do some mind play. And the way the technology works is first by
00:27:47 ►
placing a headgear on her head, and then a chemical bath is infused into her brain
00:27:55 ►
to relax it and get it in the right state. And then wire tentacles wrap around and pop out her eyeballs and then reach around and correct connect directly to
00:28:09 ►
the optic nerve so that you have a direct to brain connection and again this was a book that was
00:28:15 ►
written and I think it’s 87 possibly a little later but but it’s imagining like what would it
00:28:21 ►
be like to have technology that can connect directly to your brain and affect it?
00:28:27 ►
And the reason I mentioned the decade of the drug war is because there’s a lot of overlays
00:28:33 ►
between altering your mind through drugs and altering your mind through mind technologies,
00:28:40 ►
hard technologies.
00:28:42 ►
So when Allie tries this experience, this mind play,
00:28:48 ►
she has the experience of feeling a change in her brain chemistry
00:28:54 ►
that felt as natural as changing her mind.
00:28:58 ►
So it sort of crosses over between what is chemically induced
00:29:03 ►
and what is experientially real or palpable
00:29:07 ►
to someone.
00:29:08 ►
So after she tries this madcap, she gets dropped off anonymously at a mental dry cleaner, the
00:29:16 ►
equivalent of a brainwashing place.
00:29:21 ►
And then after that, she’s driven to the brain police, because in this novel, use of mind-altering electronic technologies is illegal.
00:29:34 ►
She’s charged with a mind crime and threatened with real jail time.
00:29:42 ►
threatened with real jail time.
00:29:46 ►
But in the process of review,
00:29:51 ►
her reality affixer finds out that,
00:29:56 ►
hmm, she shows evidence of mind play extensively.
00:30:00 ►
And so because it’s her first offense,
00:30:02 ►
the judge doesn’t throw the book at her. And because she’s a good suburban housewife
00:30:06 ►
with no other previous crimes in this area,
00:30:11 ►
which, again, I’m being facetious
00:30:15 ►
because this does mimic the drug war in a real way.
00:30:19 ►
And so she’s given the choice of rehabilitation.
00:30:23 ►
And she becomes a professional pathos
00:30:26 ►
finder.
00:30:28 ►
The choices were also
00:30:30 ►
reality affixer,
00:30:32 ►
neurosis peddler,
00:30:34 ►
bell jarer.
00:30:36 ►
It’s an interesting book.
00:30:38 ►
I highly recommend it.
00:30:40 ►
And so the remainder of the
00:30:42 ►
novel focuses on her
00:30:44 ►
self-realizations,
00:30:46 ►
her mental trips as she’s doing mind-to-mind contact and mind-to-many contact.
00:30:54 ►
And along the way, she’s looking for signs.
00:30:57 ►
She’s looking for signs under rocks, behind closed doors. She’s looking for anything that she calls alerted snakes of consequence.
00:31:12 ►
So the book is about reading signposts in your mind,
00:31:19 ►
trying to see out of one’s own mental habits
00:31:23 ►
the stasis that we get in.
00:31:26 ►
And understanding others’ empathy through the exchange of eyeballs.
00:31:32 ►
You pop yours out, I’ll pop mine out, and we’ll exchange them and we’ll get each other’s perspective really clear.
00:31:41 ►
So alerted snakes of consequence, you know…
00:31:46 ►
I just like this image.
00:31:52 ►
Signs are always supposed to mean something.
00:31:55 ►
That’s why they’re called signs.
00:31:57 ►
So make your own sign out of this, I’m not sure.
00:32:02 ►
But the idea of signing isn’t something new.
00:32:06 ►
In the 17th century, there was a guy named Jacob Bohem.
00:32:11 ►
I think I have a slide of him up here.
00:32:14 ►
Let’s see.
00:32:15 ►
Yeah, Jacob Bohem.
00:32:17 ►
He was a German shoemaker,
00:32:19 ►
but he’s also credited sometimes as being the father of modern theosophy.
00:32:26 ►
And he picked up on an ancient idea called the doctrine of signatures.
00:32:31 ►
And the doctrine of signatures, which has been around for centuries,
00:32:35 ►
and herbalists have been using it for quite some time,
00:32:39 ►
is the idea that all of God’s creation is marked with a sign
00:32:44 ►
that indicates what it’s useful for.
00:32:48 ►
Kidneys, kidney beans for kidneys, tomatoes or red flowers would be good for the blood.
00:32:58 ►
Nature becomes the ultimate book.
00:33:02 ►
And so the basic tenet of Bohm’s theory was that by observation you can
00:33:08 ►
determine the purpose of something from the characteristics, from the color, the place where
00:33:14 ►
you find a root was supposed to be indicative. It’s sort of a meta-semiotics. I really like this
00:33:22 ►
idea of, you know, sort of where did signing come from and the fact that nature
00:33:27 ►
itself could be something like that. And walnuts for the brain is another interesting one.
00:33:34 ►
Because it mimics the hemispheres of the brain, it was supposed to be beneficial for that organ.
00:33:41 ►
And this is still believed to some extent.
00:33:49 ►
I found an article suggesting that walnuts were helpful in preventing bipolar disorder.
00:33:52 ►
Also another one about the fatty acids,
00:33:56 ►
the omega-3 and omega-5 fatty acids that walnuts contain
00:34:01 ►
and can cross the blood-brain barrier
00:34:04 ►
are supposed to be components that help in the production of certain neurotransmitters.
00:34:11 ►
So there may be some truth to this.
00:34:14 ►
Welcome to walnut states.
00:34:22 ►
I have a story about walnuts.
00:34:25 ►
I like pecans.
00:34:28 ►
So I went to my local co-op one day, and I wanted to buy pecans.
00:34:33 ►
So I went to the bulk bins, selected out a half a pound of pecans,
00:34:39 ►
and then paid for them, left.
00:34:42 ►
And on the way home, I started munching them.
00:34:46 ►
And I stopped, and I was like, these aren’t pecans.
00:34:49 ►
And I looked down, and sure enough, the pecan pieces that I had in the bag were walnuts.
00:34:55 ►
And I said, well, shit, I paid for pecans.
00:34:58 ►
Those are more expensive.
00:35:00 ►
So I was miffed.
00:35:01 ►
And I thought, okay, what the hell?
00:35:04 ►
This had happened to me once before in a different store in a different town.
00:35:08 ►
So then I started speculating,
00:35:10 ►
maybe there’s some sort of conspiracy among the distributors.
00:35:18 ►
So I decided to do my good civic duty
00:35:21 ►
and call the co-op and let them know that they were being duped, or at least to
00:35:27 ►
get the employee who was dumping the walnuts into the pecan bin to, you know, get that straightened
00:35:33 ►
out. So the co-op manager thanked me, and he said he’d get back to me. So he did. He called me back about a half an hour later
00:35:45 ►
and he said
00:35:45 ►
he said ma’am
00:35:48 ►
and there was deep concern in his voice
00:35:51 ►
and he said I just wanted to let you know
00:35:54 ►
that I and two of my employees
00:35:56 ►
have just sampled the nuts in the pecan bin
00:36:00 ►
and the nuts in the bulk pecan bin
00:36:04 ►
were pecans. Now, I know what pecans taste like,
00:36:18 ►
and despite what I knew, what I thought I knew,
00:36:25 ►
and despite at least three different senses,
00:36:28 ►
I don’t know if this is synesthesia, but I don’t think so,
00:36:32 ►
I was living in a fabricated reality of my own making.
00:36:40 ►
And so this walnut conspiracy, it showed me that I was caught in some kind of loop.
00:36:45 ►
I was caught in a pattern in my mind.
00:36:48 ►
There was a false alignment.
00:36:50 ►
So I started thinking, how did this happen?
00:36:54 ►
This is the graphic user interface of walnut land.
00:37:00 ►
There was a disconnect between my views and obviously the experience that I was undergoing.
00:37:06 ►
And I started thinking, how is wanting to protect people from eating walnuts that they think are pecans any different from the mission of Christianity?
00:37:21 ►
From pandering democracy across the globe as some sort of benevolence.
00:37:28 ►
And it really got me going.
00:37:29 ►
So as Robert Anton Wilson has said, what the seer sees, the prover proves.
00:37:40 ►
What’s that?
00:37:41 ►
Is it the thinker?
00:37:42 ►
Could be.
00:37:43 ►
I could be wrong.
00:37:46 ►
The thinker thinks.
00:37:50 ►
He probably said them both.
00:37:55 ►
And so, you know, basically just that what you’re determined to know
00:38:00 ►
and what you’re determined to believe can become its own self-fulfilling reality,
00:38:05 ►
even overtaking multiple senses. Richard Lauenberg, a friend of mine and an artist in Northern
00:38:12 ►
California, had a show recently at which he had in dripping red latex the following poem that said,
00:38:22 ►
a deception is being perpetrated. It is not an overt deception.
00:38:27 ►
It is not a covert deception. It is the evolution of misconception. Now we can’t protect ourselves
00:38:36 ►
from misconceptions, but I think we can keep from evolving them. Maybe by taking the idea of the doctrine of signs
00:38:45 ►
and saying instead of finding the purpose,
00:38:49 ►
find the consequence.
00:38:53 ►
Augmented reality is a new form of computer interface
00:38:59 ►
that’s being worked on right now.
00:39:02 ►
And augmented reality
00:39:06 ►
is the graphic user interface
00:39:08 ►
that you saw like this.
00:39:12 ►
And what this says to me,
00:39:15 ►
if you still take the sea as consciousness,
00:39:18 ►
is that you have a permeable boundary.
00:39:21 ►
Augmented reality supplements
00:39:23 ►
the physical world, the external world with additional
00:39:27 ►
information. Now, there’s a number of different models that are being used to do this. But
00:39:34 ►
basically, in the augmented reality model, you have virtual objects that are added into the person’s view as navigational aids,
00:39:45 ►
as a way to better see.
00:39:48 ►
But you’ll notice there’s no R in this model.
00:39:53 ►
And actually, I emailed Alex Lightman because I was like,
00:39:56 ►
where’s the R?
00:39:58 ►
What happened to reality?
00:40:00 ►
And so I’m still puzzling it out,
00:40:03 ►
but I think that it’s simply that you are in reality
00:40:07 ►
whatever that reality is
00:40:09 ►
and I still am not making claims as to what that is
00:40:12 ►
but you’re in it
00:40:14 ►
so it’s all around you
00:40:15 ►
rather than cut off from reality
00:40:18 ►
augmented reality for me would be
00:40:22 ►
like opening the doors of perception,
00:40:27 ►
walking through them in a house of mirrors,
00:40:32 ►
not getting lost, not losing my nerve,
00:40:37 ►
and also not losing my keys.
00:40:41 ►
I think there needs to be sort of a combo world,
00:40:45 ►
and that’s why I like the idea of augmented reality.
00:40:48 ►
But that said, this is where it’s at right now.
00:40:53 ►
This reminds me of, I think, I’m not sure what museum,
00:40:58 ►
oh, maybe it’s the Space Museum in Washington, D.C.,
00:41:00 ►
where they have examples of very early submarine headgear
00:41:06 ►
or the suits that they wore the first trip to the moon.
00:41:10 ►
And I think that’s where augmented reality is at right now in terms of the technology.
00:41:15 ►
I’m sure there’s people in this room who could inform me of where it’s really at
00:41:20 ►
since I don’t have a computer science background.
00:41:23 ►
where it’s really at, since I don’t have a computer science background.
00:41:31 ►
But this is actually a helmet that’s being used on Columbia University to give virtual tours of the campus.
00:41:34 ►
And so it’s an example of an educational model
00:41:36 ►
where you supplement the viewer’s field with information like,
00:41:42 ►
that’s the library, that’s the psych building, things like that.
00:41:47 ►
So sort of practical information that comes on the scene.
00:41:52 ►
But in typical cyberpunk fashion for this sort of technology,
00:41:57 ►
the military is working on it for their program called OgCog.
00:42:05 ►
This is one of the guys who’s working on it.
00:42:08 ►
And the military model being developed right now by the Defense Advanced Research Projects
00:42:18 ►
Agency, DARPA, has certain objectives that they’re aiming at.
00:42:30 ►
And their objectives are phase one, to measure the cognitive state.
00:42:34 ►
Phase two, manipulate the cognitive state.
00:42:39 ►
Phase three, automate the cognitive state.
00:42:44 ►
And phase four, to demonstrate that this works in military operations.
00:42:49 ►
I guess this is because there aren’t very many smart people going into the military.
00:42:52 ►
They need to og cognition. So, but, you know, and the manipulative research that they’re doing is trying to get a one,
00:43:06 ►
is trying to get in less than one minute a response so that there’s no performance degradation.
00:43:11 ►
And so this is a military application.
00:43:14 ►
There’s also commercial aspects to augmented reality.
00:43:20 ►
This is not a very good slide, but it was one of the few that I could find.
00:43:24 ►
And in this picture you have a guy down here who’s looking at something over there,
00:43:30 ►
and then you have sort of a monster up top, and that’s supposed to be showing movie times.
00:43:36 ►
And up here in the far corner on the top, you have a bus stop showing the next local bus coming at, I don’t know, 523.
00:43:46 ►
And first I was thinking, the first people who have this technology
00:43:50 ►
are not the people who take the bus, probably.
00:43:53 ►
So that I thought was a little specious.
00:43:55 ►
But nonetheless, these are ways for real-world applications of so-called augmented reality.
00:44:07 ►
How can we think differently
00:44:09 ►
when we’re asked to do so by a corporation?
00:44:13 ►
So I guess I’m just showing you
00:44:16 ►
these different types of augmented reality
00:44:19 ►
so that we can better think about
00:44:22 ►
what our own strategy to augmented reality might be.
00:44:27 ►
If we put filters on cameras to enhance the picture,
00:44:33 ►
what kind of filters can we put on our minds to enhance our day-to-day walk?
00:44:39 ►
Cognitive liberty is a concept that basically updates freedom of thought for the 21st century
00:44:48 ►
in an age when things like manipulating mind states from DARPA become more and more.
00:44:55 ►
They’re not there yet.
00:44:56 ►
You saw the bulky headgear.
00:44:58 ►
They’re not there yet, but there’s an evolution.
00:45:00 ►
There’s something moving in that way.
00:45:02 ►
And if cognitive liberty is the right of each individual
00:45:06 ►
to think independently or autonomously
00:45:09 ►
and to engage in the full spectrum of thought
00:45:13 ►
and to have access to multiple modes of consciousness,
00:45:17 ►
if that’s what cognitive liberty is,
00:45:20 ►
it’s something that is a political goal
00:45:24 ►
in the sense that there are things that are outlawed currently,
00:45:30 ►
drugs specifically, which are tools to augmented cognition, but also on a more personal level.
00:45:38 ►
So the political aim of cognitive liberty and the work that Richard and I spearhead at our center,
00:45:46 ►
you know, is protective and preemptive.
00:45:51 ►
We’re trying to overcome constraints that keep one from having access to these tools.
00:45:58 ►
But on a personal level, on a metaphysical in the sense of philosophical level,
00:46:06 ►
level, on a metaphysical in the sense of philosophical level, I think it’s also a duty call to deal with our own messy interior, our own mind fictions, the way that we put tapes
00:46:14 ►
into the world and then play them out. And so the cyberpunk crossover with cognitive liberty may be the point where one says they can,
00:46:28 ►
the cyberpunk people say, I know I’m being manipulated from all sides.
00:46:32 ►
I know my free will may be a fiction in and of itself.
00:46:37 ►
But if everybody else is manipulating me, why can’t I manipulate myself?
00:46:42 ►
Why can’t I manipulate myself?
00:46:49 ►
So it’s sort of a headlong plunge into altered states of consciousness that can enhance your day-to-day walk.
00:46:53 ►
Cyberpunk, a cyberpunk operation of self-vivisection.
00:46:58 ►
Distrust, disorient, and de-story. Not destroy, de-story.
00:47:09 ►
Find another story. Pick another
00:47:11 ►
way to see yourself. There’s no monopoly
00:47:16 ►
on method for these things. And as I said, I’ve presented
00:47:20 ►
models for how this might
00:47:24 ►
how we might think about augmented reality.
00:47:27 ►
And I don’t know.
00:47:27 ►
For each person, it’s different.
00:47:29 ►
Some people are really good at yoga.
00:47:31 ►
I’m not.
00:47:33 ►
I have too much brain activity going on and can’t clear my head.
00:47:37 ►
And if someone’s got some way for me to overcome that,
00:47:39 ►
I’d be interested in hearing about it.
00:47:41 ►
But I also have a two-year-old, which makes yoga seem like a true
00:47:46 ►
luxury. So there’s no monopoly on methods for getting distance on ourselves. And in a sense,
00:47:56 ►
we’re all here at mind states today because we already know the value of alerted states of consciousness, the methods that you use to
00:48:06 ►
dismantle yourself, to find that humble spot, and then grow from there and become a better person,
00:48:13 ►
a more effective person in this world that’s so messed up. So I guess, you know, in closing, I’d just like to admonish you to think about cognitive liberty
00:48:27 ►
as not only a political aim, but a personal practice.
00:48:33 ►
And that’s all I have to say today.
00:48:36 ►
But, well, actually, I read something in the Arrowhead newsletter where Terence McKenna,
00:48:43 ►
he had words of wisdom, as he often does, and basically was saying
00:48:50 ►
that, this was the quote, it said, pay attention and remember to breathe.
00:48:59 ►
And that’s what I’d like to do. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
00:49:05 ►
Thank you.
00:49:06 ►
Thank you.
00:49:07 ►
Thank you.
00:49:08 ►
Thank you.
00:49:09 ►
Thank you.
00:49:10 ►
Thank you.
00:49:11 ►
Thank you.
00:49:12 ►
Thank you.
00:49:13 ►
Thank you.
00:49:14 ►
Thank you.
00:49:15 ►
Thank you.
00:49:16 ►
Thank you.
00:49:17 ►
Thank you.
00:49:18 ►
Thank you.
00:49:19 ►
Thank you.
00:49:20 ►
Thank you.
00:49:21 ►
Thank you.
00:49:22 ►
Thank you.
00:49:23 ►
Thank you.
00:49:24 ►
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Ryan will answer a few questions. Hi, I was wondering how you felt about irony
00:49:26 ►
and the obvious commercialization of cyberpunk evolutionary transhumanist concepts
00:49:34 ►
where everywhere we look we see a billboard that says take it to the next level.
00:49:40 ►
And I was wondering if a good answer would be to create Dadaist art sculptures
00:49:43 ►
with all these weird computer parts and have social political commentary
00:49:48 ►
because I think cyberpunk, like, it’s kind of dead in a way
00:49:52 ►
because, I mean, the Matrix, like, we came up with this stuff on the Internet
00:49:57 ►
like 30 years ago, and now the masses are finally catching on.
00:50:00 ►
So what’s the solution?
00:50:02 ►
Is everything ironic?
00:50:03 ►
Is everything some big art prank now?
00:50:10 ►
I’d say the cultural machinery never rests. And we need to always think of the next wave. And
00:50:18 ►
that’s not to say the next wave in fashion, because cyberpunk certainly became its own uniform.
00:50:28 ►
wave in fashion because cyberpunk certainly became its own uniform. And I’ll answer with a quote that I read an interview with William Gibson recently where he was talking about cyberpunk, you know,
00:50:35 ►
as being dead in the water in terms of a cultural movement, I think it is. In terms of what the
00:50:41 ►
fiction’s doing, I think there’s still a lot there. But he said it’s the equivalent of, you know, cyberpunk was about being a criminally intentioned bohemian with a
00:50:50 ►
computer. And that today that would be the equivalent of saying I’m a criminally intentioned
00:50:56 ►
bohemian with a washing machine. I do quantitative electroencephalography, brain mapping, and also neurofeedback.
00:51:10 ►
And so you’re talking about these mind machines and how we can merge the mind and external reality and computers,
00:51:17 ►
and neurofeedback is certainly a way to do that.
00:51:19 ►
But I also wonder about using different chemical substances or natural substances that may change your awareness and wake up parts of the brain
00:51:29 ►
that could enhance neurofeedback or other brain-mind technologies.
00:51:36 ►
Okay, so is your question then about drugs that you would take as a one-time thing
00:51:43 ►
and then that helps you to cope?
00:51:46 ►
Well, it’s another way to get more interfaced with the machine.
00:51:51 ►
I’m presuming people have had some experience with computers,
00:51:54 ►
and they take some substance,
00:51:57 ►
and they seem more interacted with the computer.
00:52:00 ►
Whether they are or not, I don’t know.
00:52:01 ►
But with the neurofeedback, all of a sudden,
00:52:02 ►
if you’re getting better scores, you can tell,
00:52:04 ►
hey, I really am doing better at this game while I’m taking this substance.
00:52:08 ►
Right, yeah, I think that the virtual reality model,
00:52:13 ►
where if you’re talking about a drug that you take and you have a self-enclosed experience,
00:52:20 ►
I think that those do give you tools for going back out into the world.
00:52:24 ►
But what I’m hoping for is the next phase in cognosuticals,
00:52:28 ►
which will allow you to be operating in the world,
00:52:32 ►
or micro doses of LSD that allow you to sort of see things differently.
00:52:38 ►
But again, it’s a very individualized, tailored need.
00:52:42 ►
And the way I understand science to be going is that we will be able to
00:52:47 ►
individually tailor drugs.
00:52:49 ►
There’s, what’s it called?
00:52:51 ►
I forget the name of it, but the drug delivery mechanisms for,
00:52:56 ►
tailored to your genotype.
00:52:58 ►
So we’re moving actually from what Annalie Newitz,
00:53:01 ►
who’s a great technology writer,
00:53:04 ►
she’s studying the lexicon of technology at MIT right now,
00:53:09 ►
and she said that we’re moving from cyberpunk to biopunk,
00:53:14 ►
which I think is an apt characterization of it.
00:53:17 ►
Well, the issue I see is any…
00:53:19 ►
Just briefly.
00:53:21 ►
Any chemical that might actually enhance your brain,
00:53:25 ►
they quickly make it legal before they can ever do any scientific studies on it,
00:53:28 ►
therefore really curtailing any scientific studies with these substances.
00:53:33 ►
Well, on the political side of those elements, we’re definitely working on that.
00:53:38 ►
Richard, my partner, does the legal aspects of the Center for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics,
00:53:43 ►
and so we’re trying to curtail that as well.
00:53:49 ►
Well, that was pretty much my question as well.
00:53:53 ►
So instead, since I haven’t thought up a second one,
00:53:56 ►
I was wondering about the latest state of affairs with Dr. Sell.
00:54:00 ►
I suppose that might be a little off topic.
00:54:03 ►
Cell. I suppose that might be a little off topic.
00:54:08 ►
Yeah, I think Richard would actually be much better versed in the Dr. Cell
00:54:11 ►
case. I’ll just explain to people who don’t know what the
00:54:16 ►
Dr. Cell case is. Our center currently has
00:54:19 ►
a case before the Supreme Court about
00:54:23 ►
the issue of a doctor named Dr. Sell.
00:54:27 ►
He’s a St. Louis dentist, and he’s being held on embezzlement charges, I believe,
00:54:34 ►
and the government has been wanting to forcibly drug him with antipsychotic medications
00:54:42 ►
so that he can stand trial.
00:54:43 ►
with anti-psychotic medication so that he can stand trial.
00:54:50 ►
Now, this is different from a post-conviction administration of psychotropic drugs.
00:54:52 ►
This is a pretrial detainee.
00:54:56 ►
So he’s saying, no, I don’t want the drugs.
00:54:59 ►
And the government’s saying, take the drugs so we can have a trial,
00:55:01 ►
get this over with, and get you out of the system.
00:55:05 ►
So that’s the issue in sort of a nutshell.
00:55:13 ►
But if you have questions about that case specifically, I suggest you address them to Richard, who will be up next on the control panel. Thank you.
00:55:22 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:55:30 ►
And in case you’re wondering how the Dr. Sell case turned out,
00:55:35 ►
believe it or not, the Supreme Court reversed the order
00:55:38 ►
to forcibly inject him with antipsychotic chemicals.
00:55:42 ►
And at least I think I read that decision right.
00:55:45 ►
It said in part,
00:55:46 ►
For these reasons, we believe that the present orders authorizing forced administration of anti-psychotic drugs cannot stand.
00:55:54 ►
The government may pursue its request for forced medication on the grounds discussed in this opinion,
00:56:00 ►
including grounds related to the danger Cell poses to himself and others.
00:56:04 ►
including grounds related to the danger Cell poses to himself and others.
00:56:10 ►
So they left the door open, but at least made them jump through a few more hoops before they medicate him.
00:56:16 ►
And I might add that Justices Scalia, O’Connor, and Thomas dissented from that opinion.
00:56:20 ►
Maybe one of our fellow slaunters will follow up on this someday and post an update on our blog over at the forum at thegrowreport.com.
00:56:26 ►
So, how’s reality in your neck of the woods these days?
00:56:30 ►
Is it real?
00:56:32 ►
Who’s to say what’s going on under the board, huh?
00:56:35 ►
Sometimes I think that I might even be a figment of my own imagination.
00:56:40 ►
One of the little sayings I once had on my desk said,
00:56:43 ►
Just your imagination? Of course it’s your imagination.
00:56:47 ►
The world is your imagination, have you forgotten?
00:56:51 ►
I found that written on my notepad about ten years ago,
00:56:55 ►
after an all-night solo mushroom session,
00:56:58 ►
and I don’t mean to sound mysterious about it, it was in my handwriting.
00:57:03 ►
Nobody else snuck in and wrote it, I just don’t remember doing it. But you know how that goes. As they say, reality is
00:57:10 ►
in the eye of the beholder. And didn’t you like that phrase Rye used when she spoke about
00:57:17 ►
living in a fictional world as being embedded realities? Embedded realities, a reality within another reality.
00:57:31 ►
And that got me to thinking about some of the immersive online games and even the more mundane social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook.
00:57:36 ►
In a way, those are all examples of embedded realities.
00:57:41 ►
I know that on a few occasions each month when I log into Tribe.net, my mind shifts gears ever so slightly and I can almost feel the playa dust in my lungs because on Tribe.net is where most of my Burning Man contacts take place.
00:57:57 ►
And before the psychedelic salon got kicked off of MySpace, I always felt a little different rhythm in my brain when I surfed my friends’
00:58:06 ►
pages over there. And now, just a few days ago, my youngest son shamed me into setting up a
00:58:12 ►
Facebook page. And now I find myself embedded in yet another reality within my already overflowing
00:58:19 ►
basket of alternate realities. And one of the things that kind of freaked me out when I first logged on was that a few
00:58:27 ►
minutes after I got there, I got an invitation to join a group called Fans of Lorenzo Haggerty
00:58:33 ►
or something like that.
00:58:35 ►
And I’d forgotten that a little while ago, my friend Tom Barbalay, who’s the host of
00:58:39 ►
both the Biota and the Naked Ape podcast, had set up that little page as a way for people to contact or find the others, so to speak.
00:58:49 ►
And at first I was a little freaked out by it and suggested to Tom
00:58:52 ►
that it really wasn’t necessary now that I had my own page.
00:58:56 ►
But here’s what he said when he came back to me.
00:58:59 ►
The purpose of this group is to find like-minded folk in shared locations.
00:59:04 ►
If you want your personal Facebook page to replace this group is to find like-minded folk in shared locations.
00:59:08 ►
If you want your personal Facebook page to replace this group,
00:59:12 ►
it would mean that all the fans of your work would have to befriend you,
00:59:15 ►
and potentially your kids and others who you are Facebook friends with,
00:59:17 ►
who aren’t connected with your podcast,
00:59:21 ►
could be contacted about your podcast by folks living close to them,
00:59:23 ►
or traveling through their town, etc.
00:59:45 ►
The model for this group was the biota.org community on Facebook, Transcription by CastingWords community page, but it was all about putting faces to what biota.org was doing, a different purpose than a personal page itself.
00:59:48 ►
So I guess we should just be discreet, but maybe this will work out over the long haul
00:59:54 ►
to be another way to find the others.
00:59:57 ►
However, I just want you to be aware of the fact that on my personal page, some of the
01:00:01 ►
first friends who found me were old classmates and former business
01:00:05 ►
associates. And how should I say this kindly? Let me just say that you shouldn’t assume that
01:00:11 ►
just because you’re connected to one of my personal Facebook friends, that you should
01:00:15 ►
automatically assume that you’ve found one of the others. As you know, I was still in the psychedelic
01:00:21 ►
closet during my business career. And that’s probably a good place to be if you’re in the business world,
01:00:27 ►
at least for the time being.
01:00:29 ►
So, hey, keep your heads down and don’t get separated from the herd.
01:00:33 ►
Now, where did that come from, huh?
01:00:35 ►
Maybe I better get back to business here
01:00:37 ►
and read something like this announcement that just came in from Nicholas Nager.
01:00:43 ►
Here’s part of what he had to say.
01:00:45 ►
I would like to bring to your attention a conference that my colleagues and I are hosting
01:00:48 ►
at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana campus.
01:00:53 ►
Self and Substance, Drugs, Culture, and Society
01:00:56 ►
will be a multidisciplinary, mainly academic gathering
01:00:59 ►
to examine and discuss the roles that chemicals have played
01:01:03 ►
in various aspects of the human experience.
01:01:06 ►
It is scheduled for April 10th and 11th, 2009, and I’m attaching the Call for Papers document.
01:01:13 ►
Already on board to speak is Curtis Maras, author of Drug Wars, The Political Economy of Narcotics,
01:01:20 ►
and several others from a wide variety of backgrounds.
01:01:24 ►
I was hoping that you could forward this call for papers
01:01:27 ►
onto various connections that you may have through the Psychedelic Salon.
01:01:30 ►
I’ve already contacted Susan Blackmore,
01:01:33 ►
but there are many others that have contributed to your podcast
01:01:36 ►
for whom I cannot find the contact information.
01:01:40 ►
Any way in which you could spread the word would be greatly appreciated.
01:01:44 ►
And I’ll post the call for papers document on our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog,
01:01:49 ►
along with the program notes for this podcast.
01:01:52 ►
But here is part of what that says.
01:01:54 ►
Drugs and drug users have generated a complicated and enduring dialogue with political and social developments,
01:02:01 ►
often spurring robust debate and influencing events throughout history.
01:02:07 ►
This conference will be a two-day interdisciplinary gathering of scholars studying a wide range
01:02:12 ►
of licit and illicit drug issues.
01:02:15 ►
The conference is particularly interested in how drug and addiction-related subject
01:02:19 ►
matter has been historically constructed through literary, institutional, and popular discourse.
01:02:25 ►
The program committee invites critical and theoretical work from scholars in the humanities and social sciences,
01:02:32 ►
as well as in other fields, including pharmacy, biology, and chemistry.
01:02:36 ►
The conference seeks papers on an array of topics, including, but not limited to, the following.
01:02:42 ►
Drugs, Health, and Community.
01:02:44 ►
The Science of Addiction, including Drug Treatment. Drug Laws and Drug Users’ Rights. Thank you. and classism, women and substance abuse, drug trafficking and globalization, the rhetoric
01:03:07 ►
of drug consumption and or prevention, and the confluence of the war on terrorism and
01:03:12 ►
the war on drugs.
01:03:14 ►
So if you want to get some notice in academia for your ideas about one of these topics,
01:03:19 ►
the instructions for submitting an abstract for consideration will also be posted on our
01:03:24 ►
blog.
01:03:24 ►
instructions for submitting an abstract for consideration will also be posted on our blog.
01:03:31 ►
And since we’re talking about paper submissions, I also want to mention the Psychedelic Salon Quarterly.
01:03:35 ►
As you know, we announced this new online journal a couple of podcasts back,
01:03:38 ►
and here’s what’s taken place since then.
01:03:43 ►
And this comes in an email from Dean Haddock, who is organizing this effort for us.
01:03:44 ►
He says, Hi, Lorenzo.
01:03:46 ►
We have four submissions so far, all of which are publishable.
01:03:49 ►
I haven’t gotten anyone to commit to any reviews yet,
01:03:52 ►
so it may be a good time to call for a few trusty volunteers
01:03:55 ►
who feel qualified to read and provide anonymous feedback on some papers.
01:04:01 ►
So if that sounds like something you’d be interested in doing,
01:04:04 ►
just go to psq.criticalmath.com and go to the comments section and let Dean know that you would like to be a peer reviewer for this new project.
01:04:15 ►
Now, just a couple more things and I’ll be out of here.
01:04:19 ►
The first is the recent MindStates announcements that John Hanna recently sent out.
01:04:24 ►
First is the recent MindStates announcements that John Hanna recently sent out.
01:04:32 ►
And if you’re not on John’s mailing list, you might want to get on it just to keep up with some of the events that sometimes slip under the radar.
01:04:42 ►
In his latest mailing, John points out some very cool holiday gifts for those who haven’t lost all their money in the stock market and still plan on giving gifts this year.
01:04:47 ►
In fact, there’s one gift that some psychonauts might want to get for themselves, and that is a complete set of the Entheogen Review on disc.
01:04:52 ►
As you know, the next issue of the Entheogen Review is unfortunately going to be its last.
01:04:58 ►
And since I only have about half of the hard copy issues myself,
01:05:01 ►
I’m going to get a copy of this disc just to be sure that I don’t lose
01:05:05 ►
access to all of that valuable material, most of which is not online. And also in this mailing,
01:05:12 ►
John lists five upcoming conferences and workshops that should be of interest to the psychedelic
01:05:17 ►
community. Plus he has a little teaser that says, coming in early 2009, a one-day conference in the Bay Area all about absinthe.
01:05:27 ►
Join our email list for more information.
01:05:31 ►
So, if you’re interested in absinthe and you live near the Bay Area and you want to go to this conference,
01:05:37 ►
well, probably the only way you’re going to find out about it is through John’s list,
01:05:41 ►
which you can sign up for at www.mindstates.org.
01:05:47 ►
And by the way, in addition to thanking Rye for giving today’s talk,
01:05:51 ►
I want to thank John for producing the Mind States Conference at which it was given.
01:05:55 ►
And I also want to thank J.T., who made the recording
01:05:59 ►
and then very graciously gave me permission to play it for you today.
01:06:02 ►
So get connected with John at his mindstates.org site,
01:06:06 ►
and you’ll be able to get this kind of news when it first comes out,
01:06:09 ►
rather than have to wait for me to mention it.
01:06:12 ►
Now, I’ve got one last thing I want to do here today,
01:06:15 ►
and this most likely is going to ruffle a few feathers with some of our fellow slaughters,
01:06:20 ►
and maybe even here in my own household.
01:06:23 ►
And that’s a good thing.
01:06:24 ►
You know, I think one of the most healthy signs about our community
01:06:27 ►
is that we don’t all see eye to eye on everything.
01:06:30 ►
We have disagreements, but fortunately for the most part
01:06:33 ►
they are quite civilized disagreements.
01:06:36 ►
I’m constantly impressed with the level of discussion
01:06:39 ►
that takes place on the forums over at thegrowreport.com.
01:06:43 ►
While there are many heated exchanges, for the most part they take place at thegrowreport.com. You know, while there are many heated exchanges,
01:06:45 ►
for the most part they take place at a very high level.
01:06:48 ►
They are very civilized discussions.
01:06:51 ►
And so I figure we can handle a little more controversy here.
01:06:55 ►
This time it’s about whether we should only use our sacred medicines
01:06:59 ►
in somewhat serious and focused ways,
01:07:02 ►
or if it also is okay to use them in a recreational setting.
01:07:05 ►
Now, one of the problems I’ve found here in the psychedelic salon
01:07:09 ►
is that we seem to spend way too much time in our heads.
01:07:13 ►
And I’m the primary culprit here because that’s my nature.
01:07:17 ►
But to be honest, I wouldn’t be here doing these podcasts today
01:07:20 ►
if in the beginning I hadn’t experienced a lot, and I mean a lot of fun using these substances.
01:07:27 ►
Now I’m not saying that long-term indiscriminate use of psychedelics in only a party setting is a good thing.
01:07:34 ►
And frankly, there aren’t many people who can stay on that path for a long time.
01:07:39 ►
What at least I see generally happening is that people who come to psychedelics only for the party
01:07:44 ►
eventually burn out or find something else that captures their attention.
01:07:48 ►
But there are always the few, the rare individuals,
01:07:51 ►
who progress to more sophisticated uses of these plant teachers,
01:07:56 ►
and they end up being professional psychonauts
01:07:58 ►
who seem to like hanging around the psychedelic salon with me.
01:08:03 ►
Actually, originally I came for the party,
01:08:05 ►
but I stayed for the spiritual renewal that these medicines brought me.
01:08:10 ►
Today I’d say that probably 95% of my use of these substances
01:08:13 ►
is in a very directed spiritual manner.
01:08:17 ►
But I still like to take something and dance all night every once in a while.
01:08:21 ►
And by the way, if you look far back into human history,
01:08:24 ►
you’ll see this type of behavior,
01:08:26 ►
getting high on a mind-altering substance
01:08:28 ►
and then dancing all night,
01:08:30 ►
is probably actually hardwired into us.
01:08:33 ►
We humans have been dancing around the fire all night
01:08:36 ►
and altering our consciousness in the process
01:08:38 ►
ever since we first began walking upright.
01:08:41 ►
It’s a very natural emotion
01:08:43 ►
to want to experience pleasure and joy.
01:08:46 ►
So the other day when I was listening to the Smashcast 11.5 from Black Light in the Attic,
01:08:53 ►
great podcast by the way, I really resonated with a little rant that Cody got going about
01:08:59 ►
people who look down on anyone who uses psychedelic medicines in a way that doesn’t seem serious enough.
01:09:05 ►
And believe me, that mindset makes up a very significant portion of our community.
01:09:11 ►
And I do respect their beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that theirs is the only approach to using
01:09:17 ►
these substances.
01:09:19 ►
Just like fundamentalist Christians don’t have a lock on the only way to experience
01:09:23 ►
their belief system, fundamentalist psychonauts might not have the only answers about our belief systems.
01:09:30 ►
But I still can’t express myself as well as Cody did in his last Smashcast.
01:09:35 ►
So what I’m going to do now is play that segment from his program and let you hear for yourself how Cody and I feel about this topic.
01:09:44 ►
Here’s Cody.
01:09:43 ►
you hear for yourself how Cody and I feel about this topic.
01:09:44 ►
Here’s Cody.
01:09:51 ►
And to move on to what I wanted to talk about here,
01:09:53 ►
I’ve got kind of a beef.
01:09:58 ►
I’ve got a little bit of a beef here with some of the psychedelic community,
01:10:12 ►
and I’m going to lay it on you guys here pretty much point blank. I take issue with this concept that these substances,
01:10:18 ►
specifically speaking of psychedelics, acid or LSD,
01:10:23 ►
all these different things, DMT, mushrooms, mushrooms, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that. I take issue with this concept that they should be used only in like a ritualistic sort of
01:10:33 ►
way, I guess.
01:10:34 ►
I’m taking big issue with that.
01:10:37 ►
I personally appreciate the idea that substances are extremely powerful and extremely insightful when used in the right context.
01:10:49 ►
And, you know, I appreciate the idea that, yes, you know, when used in proper ways,
01:10:57 ►
in especially a ritualistic sort of setting, the insights and ideas and, you know,
01:11:03 ►
knowledge you can gain from an experience like that
01:11:06 ►
um how much that’s really worth i i see that i get that um but at the same time i’ve got a problem
01:11:13 ►
with um this idea that we can’t or we shouldn’t be um taking them to have fun i just i just have
01:11:22 ►
a big fucking problem with that i don’t agree with it at all. I
01:11:26 ►
just, and I gotta say it, I think that, well, put it this way, I understand why some people,
01:11:34 ►
especially the people that are into those kinds of settings for these substances, really
01:11:38 ►
stand behind the idea that they should be used in a sacred or ritualistic sort of setting.
01:11:44 ►
the idea that they should be used in a sacred or ritualistic sort of setting.
01:11:46 ►
And I don’t disagree.
01:11:49 ►
I think that that’s definitely one way to use them.
01:11:55 ►
But I don’t see any problem with responsible people being responsible and taking these things to have fun.
01:11:57 ►
It just doesn’t make any sense to me.
01:12:01 ►
I want to know, can somebody out there tell me,
01:12:05 ►
any sense to me. I want to know, can somebody out there tell me, since when are we not allowed to take these drugs or substances, sacraments, medicines, whatever? Since when are we not
01:12:14 ►
allowed to take these things to have fun? When did that come about? Why? I just completely
01:12:20 ►
disagree. I, from personal experience, have found quite a bit of value in taking these substances in a not-so-ritualistic or sacramental manner.
01:12:34 ►
To take them flat out to have a good time.
01:12:37 ►
Is there something wrong with that?
01:12:38 ►
Can somebody please tell me why I shouldn’t be allowed to do that?
01:12:42 ►
Now, I’m not saying go out into the streets, drop a bunch of acid, run around and act crazy and disrupt people.
01:12:50 ►
And don’t get me wrong, I’ve done shit like and, you know, take some doses or eat a bag of mushrooms and watch a really amazing concert with a great light show
01:13:08 ►
and have, you know, just a great time, you know,
01:13:11 ►
or to be somewhere safe with some of your buddies
01:13:15 ►
and then you take some of this stuff and joke around and laugh a lot.
01:13:18 ►
I mean, I want to know when did that become a problem?
01:13:23 ►
I want to know why people think or why some people
01:13:27 ►
think that it’s not right i just uh i just completely disagree with you i propose to the
01:13:33 ►
naysayers out there who say that taking these substances for any reason other than a ritualistic
01:13:40 ►
or sacramental one i propose to you to of you, that some of the most powerful and
01:13:46 ►
enlightening and memorable moments of my life, of my entire life, have been on some of these
01:13:53 ►
substances in a completely non-sacramental or ritualistic manner.
01:13:58 ►
They were strictly me, you know, just in a buddy or two, you know, somewhere laughing about something crazy that happened or whatever.
01:14:08 ►
Or it was me and some friends or me by myself at some concert or show and witnessing some amazing, you know, lights and lasers and all this kind of stuff.
01:14:18 ►
And being part of a large crowd of people that’s really excited to see something.
01:14:25 ►
part of a large crowd of people that’s really excited to see something and you kind of pick up on the vibe of everybody being around you and you feel like you’re being part of one
01:14:29 ►
large experience that everybody around you is also experiencing.
01:14:33 ►
What the fuck is wrong with that?
01:14:35 ►
Does somebody have an answer?
01:14:37 ►
Does anybody have an answer?
01:14:39 ►
That’s what I want to know.
01:14:40 ►
I can understand people being reluctant to accept these substances to be used in that manner due to the idea or to the fact that a lot of people are irresponsible with them.
01:14:53 ►
And they can take them in a non-ritualistic setting and cause problems and create stories for the media to pick up and demonize us and things like that. But at the same time, I don’t think that the solution is to make some sort of unsaid rule
01:15:11 ►
or create a concept that we shouldn’t be taking them for any other reason other than, you
01:15:16 ►
know, a sacramental or ritualistic one.
01:15:18 ►
Because that’s just bullshit.
01:15:21 ►
It’s total bullshit.
01:15:23 ►
And, you know, I’m not one, like I said, to lay down my opinion or say something like, yeah, this is right and this is wrong.
01:15:30 ►
But I’ve been hearing, you know, comments and reading comments from some people that kind of allude to that.
01:15:36 ►
And it really bothers me.
01:15:38 ►
I think people need to, you know, loosen up a bit, man, you know.
01:15:41 ►
Forget about, you know, self-discovery for a second, and, you
01:15:46 ►
know, mind expansion for a minute, let’s have a fucking good time, dude, I mean, you only
01:15:51 ►
live once, and if, you know, and if taking some of these things at a show, or with some
01:15:56 ►
friends, just for the fuck of it, if that’s a good time, I just, I just don’t see what’s wrong with it.
01:16:05 ►
And if you’re not hurting anybody else and you’re not creating a situation where the media can sort of scapegoat you and broad brush, you know, the situation you’re created or that you created over all of us as a whole in a dark way, I don’t see anything wrong with it.
01:16:26 ►
And, you know, it’s like, I don’t know.
01:16:28 ►
And I’m not really sure why this is like something that’s like all of a sudden I felt the need to say,
01:16:35 ►
but it’s like really been bothering me.
01:16:36 ►
I’ve just been hearing numerous comments from people trying to like dub these things as medicines only,
01:16:42 ►
you know, and stuff like that.
01:16:44 ►
And yeah, I get it.
01:16:44 ►
Yeah, there’s medicinal values in it.
01:16:47 ►
But there’s medicinal values in smoking pot, too.
01:16:49 ►
And I don’t think any of you can tell me that you smoke pot for strictly medical reasons only.
01:16:55 ►
I mean, yeah, okay, maybe there are some people out there that do
01:16:58 ►
and that never would have smoked it if it wasn’t for the medical reason.
01:17:01 ►
But let’s be honest here.
01:17:03 ►
How many of you guys smoke pot only,
01:17:06 ►
I’m saying only,
01:17:08 ►
because you have a medical condition?
01:17:11 ►
Anybody?
01:17:13 ►
Anybody?
01:17:14 ►
I doubt it, you know?
01:17:16 ►
I mean, and if it’s so, I’m talking,
01:17:19 ►
it’s got to be very few,
01:17:21 ►
very, very small number of people.
01:17:24 ►
I guess all I’m saying is that in life, self-discovery, mind expansion, these kinds of things, yes, they’re all very important.
01:17:34 ►
But, you know, it reminds me of that Stephen King movie or book or whatever, you know,
01:17:41 ►
all work and no play makes Jack no boy, you know what I’m saying, and I think all work and no play in the psychedelic realm makes you
01:17:51 ►
dull too, you know, I just think people need to fucking let their hair down every once
01:17:55 ►
in a while, have a good time, and indulge, I mean, come on, let’s have some fun, relax
01:18:02 ►
a little bit, people, I mean, come on. That’s all I’m really saying.
01:18:06 ►
And, yeah, I don’t know.
01:18:08 ►
Maybe this will piss some people off.
01:18:10 ►
But, like I said, it’s been burning in my mind recently.
01:18:13 ►
And I just had to let it loose.
01:18:14 ►
So, there it is.
01:18:16 ►
I put it out on the table.
01:18:21 ►
Thanks for that, Cody.
01:18:23 ►
I really can’t improve on what you had to say.
01:18:25 ►
And by the way, I applaud you for your courage in speaking out.
01:18:29 ►
I don’t expect everyone to agree with us on this,
01:18:32 ►
but I am confident that the psychedelic community is strong enough
01:18:36 ►
to hold a few widely diverse opinions
01:18:38 ►
and still find enough love in our hearts to admit that there are a lot of different ways
01:18:44 ►
to experience what
01:18:45 ►
we think of as reality. After all, if we truly are one, why not have a few of us check out the
01:18:51 ►
less serious sides of life? And if you have never dropped a little pill and danced all night, well,
01:18:57 ►
you simply don’t know what you’re missing. But if I don’t wrap this up and get out of here right now,
01:19:03 ►
I’m going to be missing our family’s holiday dinner celebration.
01:19:07 ►
So I better wrap this up.
01:19:09 ►
But before I go, I also should let you know that there probably won’t be a podcast from the salon next week.
01:19:16 ►
You see, tomorrow morning, Mateo and I are going to slip out of the country and head back up to the mountains for a few new adventures.
01:19:24 ►
And we’ll be gone for about a week.
01:19:26 ►
From past experience, I know
01:19:27 ►
that it usually takes me several days to
01:19:29 ►
recover after some
01:19:32 ►
intensive fun and games with Mateo
01:19:34 ►
and friends, but never fear,
01:19:35 ►
I’ll be back before you know it.
01:19:38 ►
And now, as always, I’ll close
01:19:39 ►
this podcast by saying that this
01:19:41 ►
and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:19:44 ►
are available
01:19:45 ►
for your use under the creative commons attribution non-commercial share like 3.0 license and if you
01:19:51 ►
have any questions about that just click the creative commons link at the bottom of the
01:19:54 ►
psychedelic salon web page which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org and that’s also where you’ll
01:20:01 ►
find the program notes for these podcasts and for for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:20:08 ►
Be well, my friends.