7 ms·

An interesting review. I'm surprised they only mention MKUltra in passing. It actually was the first example that popped into my mind. This is more joke than

by retrac 5y ago

An interesting review. I'm surprised they only mention MKUltra in passing. It actually was the first example that popped into my mind. This is more joke than serious argument, but not entirely. The CIA wasn't just dosing innocent citizen victims. They were dosing themselves with LSD at the time, too. The water cooler was a prank attested to in several places. If acid had the effects it allegedly does, then the CIA should have been a decidedly different place to work in the 1960s than it was. Anecdotally, my strong psychedelic trip dissolved a bunch of illusions for me. Including several that I had used to justify the value and importance of human life itself. I managed to retrieve or reconstruct them after, but I honestly felt completely out of it for days after. Seeing other humans the same way I feel when I look at a pig or a wolf. A large, possibly dangerous animal, with no real intelligence behind its eyes, only cunning. And I saw a capacity for all manner of evil in myself only barely contained. I wouldn't be half-surprised if some of that experience made me more conservative in a few ways. Who knows.

pope_meat 5y ago
Perhaps it might be worth examining your views on animals some more, while your perspective isn't uncommon, it might be worth analyzing it somewhat, as there are also a lot of people who look at a pig or a wolf and have a very different experience. It's always good to understand yourself more, and hallucinogens are a heck of a tool to do that, if you can sort out the root of the issue. I suspect you might have stopped a bit short of the root cause (fear/uncertainty towards non-humans) Could be wrong, but that's what jumped out at me.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  Same here. I see a wolf and see a giant puppy. Evidence of their giant puppy nature: https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1434488985066299395 https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1434488985066299395 https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1433949290485985280 https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1433949290485985280
- somehnacct3757 5y ago
  Yeah I have a similar experience to GP, a normalization of life value across species. But for me it manifests as a greater respect for life forms I normally take for granted, rather than a loss of respect for human life. I have trouble breaking branches off trees, pulling weeds, killing mosquitos after a trip. I still feel uneasy about it but have justifications to help. I also see life in superstructures. Stand on a skyscraper rooftop deck and look down at the city. The city is alive. The roads are its arteries, the people its lifeblood.
- Applejinx 5y ago
  I think it's quite possible to look at a wolf and see a creature with more powerful social dynamics and civilizedness than that of the human, by nature. Pack animals cooperate in ways that isolated predators don't, and as humans we live in a sort of strange halfway zone, neither fully pack animals nor fully individual predators. We get a little bit of everything. It makes perfect sense to me if someone took acid, saw the fundamental weaknesses of human consciousness, and then jumped to the conclusion that people had to be ruled by their superiors because there would always be inferiors that had to be kept in their place. That's one possible conclusion to draw, particularly if you seek a hardcore rationalist perspective where everything can be created through self-will and rational thought, and there's nothing else. I wouldn't draw that conclusion, but that's because I've studied chaos theory and artificial intelligence and the way evolution draws on diversity of population to surface useful traits out of a seething, unpredictable gene pool. As such, I can't look at the concept of 'inferiors' in the same way: to me, rationalist hierarchical systems mean 'local maximum, unable to further progress'. In short, a serious problem rather than a desirable state. Could you get chaos theory just out of taking acid? Could you interpret evolutionary mechanics? I don't think taking acid will give you fundamentals like that. What it's gonna do is shake up what you already have, and this can lead to very interesting reformulations, but it's not giving you anything that you don't already, in some sense, have.
  - FredPret 5y ago
    Wolves cooperate more than humans? Even when we compete, we cooperate on an enormous scale [0] [0] https://fee.org/media/33856/i-pencil-final-proof-for-website-pdf.pdf https://fee.org/media/33856/i-pencil-final-proof-for-website...
deertick1 5y ago
Agreed. For at least some people, there is something deeply, deeply wicked about acid. I can't put my finger exactly on it but I always felt that it changed your perceptions in such a way that made you feel like you were being enlightened and embracing universal love while at the same time making you capable of justifying enormous evil. Its like it makes you actually feel nihilist rather than just think nihilistic. Or something like that.
- ParanoidShroom 5y ago
  Would it be fair to say it makes you more 'radical'?
  - blululu 5y ago
    Your mileage will almost certainly vary. It changes people in interesting and unpredictable ways. Sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse. I know people who became much more grounded through their use of psychedelics. Others much less so.
    - ipnon 5y ago
      Some changes are predictable. For instance most people will stop abusing drugs after strong psilocybin trips. See the work of Rolland Griffiths.
      - blululu 5y ago
        Most but not all. The opposite trend is less common but totally possible from personal observations. saying that a psychiatric procedure will result in specific changes would be stretching the truth from probably to necessarily. The first result I found in Google related to Griffiths is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31084460/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31084460/ They are doing an anonymous online self selected reports and they find a strong effect but also 17% do not appear to exhibit the trend.
        5y ago
giantg2 5y ago
"Including several that I had used to justify the value and importance of human life itself. ... And I saw a capacity for all manner of evil in myself only barely contained." Honestly, that's terrifying. I mean all the anti-drug stuff parents and schools try to scare us with and this tops it.
- read_if_gay_ 5y ago
  That realization is not unique to drugs. If this scares you stay away from reading Solzhenitsyn.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    Knowing that one has a capacity to commit violence isn't the concerning part. The "barely contained" part is.
    - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
      Yeah, Solzhenitsyn has that too. Here's a famous excerpt. https://mbird.com/literature/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-on-the-line-running-through-the-human-heart/ https://mbird.com/literature/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-on-the-l... Except the way he came to that reealization was through spending a good while in the gulag instead of tripping balls. Pick your poison.
  - JasonFruit 5y ago
    There's a difference between coming to that point of view by reason, willingly, and being dragged to it by a substance, unreasoningly.
    - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
      True, some trips can get more deeply philosophiocal than you are comfortable with, but typically no matter what corner of philosophy you think yourself into, greater minds have been there and done that. For me for example it sparked some interest in reading Nietzsche.
godmode2019 5y ago
I enjoyed reading the second paragraph, I understand what you are describing. You have a way with words. My question is how do you define conservative? What you are describing is the raw nature of man, the shadow, the animal behind the smile. We are all animals but it is mans unique ability to transcend the animal world by having the will, to act, or even suppress mans raw individualistic animal desire often to better fit socially defined rules by the local tribe. I'm not sure how you drawing the borders between the left and right paradigm. Can you share more
- retrac 5y ago
  Conservative not so much in the political sense of who I might vote for. I meant in a psychological sense. More reactive to perceived threats, less trusting, more guarded. I was influenced by some recent research like this when I spoke: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/november/conservatives-and-liberals-motivated-by-different-psychological-.html https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/novemb... > Specifically, the studies by Jost and his colleagues, including Michael Strupp-Levitsky, who conducted the work as an NYU undergraduate and is now a doctoral candidate at Long Island University-Brooklyn, showed that those moral foundations known to be more appealing to liberals than conservatives—specifically, fairness and harm avoidance—are linked to empathic motivation, whereas the moral foundations that are more appealing to conservatives than to liberals —such as ingroup loyalty and deference to authority—are not. Loss of empathy, perhaps. Something in that vein. Man, I really am making a great case against acid, aren't I? I did rediscover empathy. I think I learned a thing or two of value in the process. And I don't feel that it actually fundamentally threatened my sanity, for what it's worth. But I guess I got what I was looking for. I won't be repeating it any time soon.
dmos62 5y ago
> Seeing other humans the same way I feel when I look at a pig or a wolf. A large, possibly dangerous animal, with no real intelligence behind its eyes, only cunning. I'd say people are pretty much talking animals. Not to discount language and what it entails, of course. If I had thoughts like you describe, I think I'd be more worried about the belief that I should consider animals (and only animals!) as something that's always dangerous and cunning. In my experience animals, especially mammals, have very similar emotional systems to mine, and that makes it pretty easy to have an empathetic relationship. A relationship with a pet won't be super intellectual, but who wants that anyway?
- timbit42 5y ago
  Some do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3njWjIimd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3njWjIimd4

by retrac 5y ago

pope_meat 5y ago

Perhaps it might be worth examining your views on animals some more, while your perspective isn't uncommon, it might be worth analyzing it somewhat, as there are also a lot of people who look at a pig or a wolf and have a very different experience. It's always good to understand yourself more, and hallucinogens are a heck of a tool to do that, if you can sort out the root of the issue. I suspect you might have stopped a bit short of the root cause (fear/uncertainty towards non-humans) Could be wrong, but that's what jumped out at me.

mkr-hn 5y ago
Same here. I see a wolf and see a giant puppy. Evidence of their giant puppy nature: https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1434488985066299395 https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1434488985066299395 https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1433949290485985280 https://twitter.com/nywolforg/status/1433949290485985280
somehnacct3757 5y ago
Yeah I have a similar experience to GP, a normalization of life value across species. But for me it manifests as a greater respect for life forms I normally take for granted, rather than a loss of respect for human life. I have trouble breaking branches off trees, pulling weeds, killing mosquitos after a trip. I still feel uneasy about it but have justifications to help. I also see life in superstructures. Stand on a skyscraper rooftop deck and look down at the city. The city is alive. The roads are its arteries, the people its lifeblood.
Applejinx 5y ago
I think it's quite possible to look at a wolf and see a creature with more powerful social dynamics and civilizedness than that of the human, by nature. Pack animals cooperate in ways that isolated predators don't, and as humans we live in a sort of strange halfway zone, neither fully pack animals nor fully individual predators. We get a little bit of everything. It makes perfect sense to me if someone took acid, saw the fundamental weaknesses of human consciousness, and then jumped to the conclusion that people had to be ruled by their superiors because there would always be inferiors that had to be kept in their place. That's one possible conclusion to draw, particularly if you seek a hardcore rationalist perspective where everything can be created through self-will and rational thought, and there's nothing else. I wouldn't draw that conclusion, but that's because I've studied chaos theory and artificial intelligence and the way evolution draws on diversity of population to surface useful traits out of a seething, unpredictable gene pool. As such, I can't look at the concept of 'inferiors' in the same way: to me, rationalist hierarchical systems mean 'local maximum, unable to further progress'. In short, a serious problem rather than a desirable state. Could you get chaos theory just out of taking acid? Could you interpret evolutionary mechanics? I don't think taking acid will give you fundamentals like that. What it's gonna do is shake up what you already have, and this can lead to very interesting reformulations, but it's not giving you anything that you don't already, in some sense, have.
- FredPret 5y ago
  Wolves cooperate more than humans? Even when we compete, we cooperate on an enormous scale [0] [0] https://fee.org/media/33856/i-pencil-final-proof-for-website-pdf.pdf https://fee.org/media/33856/i-pencil-final-proof-for-website...

deertick1 5y ago

Agreed. For at least some people, there is something deeply, deeply wicked about acid. I can't put my finger exactly on it but I always felt that it changed your perceptions in such a way that made you feel like you were being enlightened and embracing universal love while at the same time making you capable of justifying enormous evil. Its like it makes you actually feel nihilist rather than just think nihilistic. Or something like that.

ParanoidShroom 5y ago
Would it be fair to say it makes you more 'radical'?
- blululu 5y ago
  Your mileage will almost certainly vary. It changes people in interesting and unpredictable ways. Sometimes for the better sometimes for the worse. I know people who became much more grounded through their use of psychedelics. Others much less so.
  - ipnon 5y ago
    Some changes are predictable. For instance most people will stop abusing drugs after strong psilocybin trips. See the work of Rolland Griffiths.
    - blululu 5y ago
      Most but not all. The opposite trend is less common but totally possible from personal observations. saying that a psychiatric procedure will result in specific changes would be stretching the truth from probably to necessarily. The first result I found in Google related to Griffiths is here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31084460/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31084460/ They are doing an anonymous online self selected reports and they find a strong effect but also 17% do not appear to exhibit the trend.
      - 5y ago

giantg2 5y ago

"Including several that I had used to justify the value and importance of human life itself. ... And I saw a capacity for all manner of evil in myself only barely contained." Honestly, that's terrifying. I mean all the anti-drug stuff parents and schools try to scare us with and this tops it.

read_if_gay_ 5y ago
That realization is not unique to drugs. If this scares you stay away from reading Solzhenitsyn.
- giantg2 5y ago
  Knowing that one has a capacity to commit violence isn't the concerning part. The "barely contained" part is.
  - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
    Yeah, Solzhenitsyn has that too. Here's a famous excerpt. https://mbird.com/literature/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-on-the-line-running-through-the-human-heart/ https://mbird.com/literature/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-on-the-l... Except the way he came to that reealization was through spending a good while in the gulag instead of tripping balls. Pick your poison.
- JasonFruit 5y ago
  There's a difference between coming to that point of view by reason, willingly, and being dragged to it by a substance, unreasoningly.
  - read_if_gay_ 5y ago
    True, some trips can get more deeply philosophiocal than you are comfortable with, but typically no matter what corner of philosophy you think yourself into, greater minds have been there and done that. For me for example it sparked some interest in reading Nietzsche.

godmode2019 5y ago

I enjoyed reading the second paragraph, I understand what you are describing. You have a way with words. My question is how do you define conservative? What you are describing is the raw nature of man, the shadow, the animal behind the smile. We are all animals but it is mans unique ability to transcend the animal world by having the will, to act, or even suppress mans raw individualistic animal desire often to better fit socially defined rules by the local tribe. I'm not sure how you drawing the borders between the left and right paradigm. Can you share more

retrac 5y ago
Conservative not so much in the political sense of who I might vote for. I meant in a psychological sense. More reactive to perceived threats, less trusting, more guarded. I was influenced by some recent research like this when I spoke: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/november/conservatives-and-liberals-motivated-by-different-psychological-.html https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/novemb... > Specifically, the studies by Jost and his colleagues, including Michael Strupp-Levitsky, who conducted the work as an NYU undergraduate and is now a doctoral candidate at Long Island University-Brooklyn, showed that those moral foundations known to be more appealing to liberals than conservatives—specifically, fairness and harm avoidance—are linked to empathic motivation, whereas the moral foundations that are more appealing to conservatives than to liberals —such as ingroup loyalty and deference to authority—are not. Loss of empathy, perhaps. Something in that vein. Man, I really am making a great case against acid, aren't I? I did rediscover empathy. I think I learned a thing or two of value in the process. And I don't feel that it actually fundamentally threatened my sanity, for what it's worth. But I guess I got what I was looking for. I won't be repeating it any time soon.

dmos62 5y ago

> Seeing other humans the same way I feel when I look at a pig or a wolf. A large, possibly dangerous animal, with no real intelligence behind its eyes, only cunning. I'd say people are pretty much talking animals. Not to discount language and what it entails, of course. If I had thoughts like you describe, I think I'd be more worried about the belief that I should consider animals (and only animals!) as something that's always dangerous and cunning. In my experience animals, especially mammals, have very similar emotional systems to mine, and that makes it pretty easy to have an empathetic relationship. A relationship with a pet won't be super intellectual, but who wants that anyway?

timbit42 5y ago
Some do: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3njWjIimd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3njWjIimd4