Right. And it's not only that transformation begins *at* the sensor, but that any signal undergoes a steady sequence of
transformations, both reductions and fusions with other signals, as it "enters the brain" [⛧]. The only way
we could get to the naive conception Dave ascribes to the hallucino-philiacs/Buddhists is if we use either an expansive
definition of "brain" or a very reductive definition. Expansively, there are complex structures like the gut
ganglion and the vagus "nerve". Are they part of the brain? Heat-, pain-, touch- sensitive neurons? And, of
course, what about the para-, endo-, auto-crine signaling? Etc. There are serious, biological arguments that such
tissues do a significant amount of "thinking". Hell, even states like calcium deficiency or exogenously
triggered myelitis modify the matrix of transformations in deep and obscure ways.
My guess is, because of the literally stupid restrictions on psychedelic (and schedule I)
research, the extent to which they modify such peri-brain systems is unclear. Or maybe
I'm just ignorant. Regardless, it would be a stretch to say that there is anything we
might reliably call "raw". It's derivation upon derivation.
And reductively, we're long past phrenology. The intra- and inter-individual
variations in fMRI, even when tightly controlled for similar activities,
demonstrates that brain anatomy/morphology is only a rough heuristic. Unless
you want to assert, e.g. that the pineal gland is the seat of consciousness or
somesuch, we're left with correlating various tissues that, on *aggregate*,
modify function.
The only reason a device like the Mojo Lens might be considered less
mind-expanding than say, DMT is its mechanism of action. Broad spectrum
interventions that muck up something as pervasive as 5-HT *will* be different
from very targeted interventions. But speculation about the mind doesn't help
much, regardless of how popular such speculation is.
And because this post is already too long, I'll confess that even though I have
pretty good balance for a 50-something, I've taken to experimenting with
closing my eyes while I do various balance exercises. And it BLEW MY MIND how
bad my unsighted balance is. I can get into a fairly stable stance, close my
eyes, and immediately lose it. Proprioception my ass. 8^D
[⛧] The whole phrase in quotes because there is no "enter"; and there isn't a singular "the" brain.
And that's on top of the uncertainty I allude to in the rest about whatever "brain" might mean. I probably
shouldn't even be using the word "signal".
On 8/18/22 22:25, Marcus Daniels wrote:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1401501/
<https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1401501/>
Sent from my iPad
On Aug 18, 2022, at 10:01 PM, Marcus Daniels <mar...@snoutfarm.com> wrote:
The retina isn't perfect by any means, and the visual cortex must fix its
inputs to make vision seem better than the raw inputs. This is from memory,
but I can look up references.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Prof David West
Sent: Thursday, August 18, 2022 8:56 PM
To: friam@redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] dystopian vision(s)
An analogy that might clarify what was being conveyed in the original post:
A RAW image - no compression, no processing - is what the brain/mind can
perceive.
JPEG is the image after going through the "survival filter" - both compression and
adjustments to saturation, contrast, and sharpness. There are all kinds of advantages to JPEG, but
"accuracy/fidelity" is not one of them. Consider all the consternation amateur
photographers had a few months back with their phones failing to capture the redness of the sky in
San Francisco and other parts of CA.
Drugs, so the advocates claim, are not an alternate transformation—not HEIF—but
simply a removal of the compression/processing mechanism entirely.
Of course, even RAW is lossy: a few million pixels captured from the near
infinity of discrete photons available. I suspect the brain/mind is less
lossy, but to what degree?
And my own experiences, both chemical and meditative, suggest to me that some
kind of patterned sense making is still going on because my
'mind/consciousness' still interprets things — I still see the Argus Goat
(sometimess a ram instead of a goat, with multiple eyes, often conflated with
Argus Panoptes) allbeit It and I might have a conversation.
davew
On Thu, Aug 18, 2022, at 2:15 PM, glen wrote:
I'm glad you softened it. Codependence *is* "organic to the nature of
one's existence". What I worry about are those that idealize
themselves as only codependent on some singular thing, which is what
you're calling out when you talk about identification with thrill
seeking or whatever. It's the single-ness that's the problem, not the
codependence.
Marcus and Dave seem tightly analogous in their positive responses to
technological entheogens and physio-chemical ehtheogens, respectively.
And you, being a bit of an ehtheogen-teatotaler, if I've understood
correctly, align with Marcus. In contrast, I'm agnostic about the
origins and pathway of any entheogens I might become codependent upon.
Drugs, even very old ones brewed up by one-eyed witches in the outback
bush, *are* technology, nearly identical to the Mojo Lens or the
Neuralink. What's that stanza from Alice in Chains?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9GAEFTeWko
"
What's my drug of choice?
Well, what have you got?
I don't go broke
And I do it a lot
"
On 8/18/22 11:36, Steve Smith wrote:
On 8/18/22 9:47 AM, glen wrote:
Yeah. I'm not as concerned as you seem to be about the addictive nature of
alternative perspectives. Obviously, because my whole schtick is about
attempting to take alternative perspectives. The addict has to admit they have
a problem before treatment will work, eh?
My use of the term "addictive" was unfortunate. I didn't mean it
particularly perjoratively. I mostly just meant the awareness that one can become "codependent" on substances/experiences which are not otherwise organic to the nature of one's existence in-context. Tarzan and his friends may have done something vaguely similar to bungee jumping and skydiving (vine swinging and cliff diving), but those who have made the high-tech equivalents of those experiences part of their very persona have "given over" in some way that may or may not be something to "worry about"... it is just in a practical sense a "commitment". I have known plenty of people who have made "commitments" to all kinds of things/substances (caffiene, nicotine, alcohol, thc, gucose, lipids, parkour, etc) which they are virtually symbiotic with (addicted to?). I have my own practical commitments to all kinds of behaviours and consumptions which are effectively now *part of who I am*. I might have been a somewhat different person today if I had never become
"committed" to alcohol, caffiene, earning/spending $USD, driving planes, trains, automobiles, etc.
But if we adopt the perspective of the "longtermists", "transhumansits", or similar, and
believe that essentialist computation is the limit point, the thing just over the horizon toward which
evolution works, then our *brain* is one of the first/best instantiations of such computers. (Maybe I need
scare quotes, there, too ... "computers"?) Quantum comput[ers|ing] is a close second only because
too many people are ignorant enough of current computing to think hard about its limitations.
FWIW I was just re-introduced to Bostrom's Astronomical Waste
<https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste> arguement in the context of a New Yorker
Article on Effective Altruism which I think you have referenced a few times here. A more
computationally/entropic framed version of the Dyson Sphere
<https://nickbostrom.com/astronomical/waste> (or more originally the Stapledon Light
Trap):
An excerpt from/Star Maker/which mentions Dyson spheres:
Not only was every solar system now surrounded by a gauze of light
traps, which focused the escaping solar energy for intelligent use, so that the
whole galaxy was dimmed, but many stars that were not suited to be suns were
disintegrated, and rifled of their prodigious stores of subatomic energy.
So another form of Dave's argument, still metaphysical, is this Smolin-esque
(or even Schrödinger-esque ala negentropy?) concept that our objective(s) is
tightly coupled pockets of deep computation. And *that*, given that our brains
are fantastic computers, gives some weight to the idea that deep and broad
introspection gets one closer to God, closer to the objective, closer to the
real occult Purpose behind it all in much the same way as studying quantum
mechanics and quantum computation.
My argument *against* that is that even if tightly coupled (coherent) pockets
of computation are a crucial element, so is the interstitial space *between*
the tight pockets ... like black holes orbiting each other or somesuch. It's
not merely the individual pocket/computer that's interesting, it's the
formation, dissolution, and interaction of the pockets that's more interesting.
Actually, then, the *void* is more interesting than the non-void.
Tangentially:
Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy
Structure at z>3 with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Field
https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09428
I appreciate having near-peers who are "peering" into the same general (vaguely
familiar) areas of the fractal abyss that I am...
On 8/18/22 08:03, Steve Smith wrote:
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.
--
ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ
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