[HN Gopher] Plants that change our consciousness
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Plants that change our consciousness
Author : Hooke
Score : 64 points
Date : 2021-07-02 18:01 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newstatesman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newstatesman.com)
| Wonnk13 wrote:
| Tim Ferris's recent interview of Pollan is excellent, definitely
| check it out: https://tim.blog/podcast/
|
| I think I might finally have the motivation to read his earlier
| book How to Change Your Mind
| sharadov wrote:
| How to Change your mind is a fantastic book. Most books which
| talk about drugs are written by overzealous, hippy types who
| claim to have seen the light. This was the first time that a
| serious yet entertaining author like Pollan reported on a
| controversial subject. I particularly liked his gonzo form of
| reporting.
| RemySoc wrote:
| Pollan's book "Caffeine" is weak in facts, don't fall for buying
| it.
| ur-whale wrote:
| https://archive.md/Xgrmp
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Dr Richard Evans Schultes' Extraordinary Research with Amazonian
| Shamans
|
| The incredible Amazonian expeditions of Richard Evans Schultes
| made this Harvard University researcher a legend of ethnobotany,
| and brought us a wealth of knowledge about Indigenous culture and
| plant medicine use.
|
| https://kahpi.net/richard-evans-schultes-amazon-shaman/
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| This review is much like Pollan's own writing, loose with the
| facts and wild with conjecture and speculation.
|
| > so perhaps it is little wonder that the permanently sozzled
| intellectuals of the Middle Ages were prone to magical thinking.
|
| What? Drinking alcohol adulterated water remained a common
| practice until the late 1800s. And we don't have reason to
| believe people were hammered all the time. Generally drink was
| lower in alcohol content then and it was usually cut with water.
|
| > It's unclear from the book (and from my subsequent Google
| searches) whether the spider was given the arachnid equivalent of
| a single cappuccino or a more Balzacian dose, which makes the
| comparison with other drugs less helpful, but Pollan's point is
| that caffeine changes us more than we realise.
|
| Is there even an equivalent? Spiders barely have what we consider
| a brain. I'm not sure much other than cellular science is
| translatable from spiders to humans.
|
| > societies tend to ban those plants that appear to pose a threat
| to the social order.
|
| That seems pretty suspect. Western societies after all have
| tolerated alcohol, probably one of the most destabilizing drugs
| there is, for centuries. It seems to me, they ban what is
| unfamiliar or rather, they ban anything that hasn't reached large
| usage among the power class of that society.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _> > societies tend to ban those plants that appear to pose a
| threat to the social order._
|
| _> That seems pretty suspect. Western societies after all have
| tolerated alcohol, probably one of the most destabilizing drugs
| there is, for centuries. It seems to me, they ban what is
| unfamiliar or rather, they ban anything that hasn 't reached
| large usage among the power class of that society._
|
| Enforcement of anti-drug laws falls pretty heavily on the lower
| classes of society, particularly minorities. The ruling classes
| can pretty much get away with doing whatever drugs they want,
| rarely with any serious legal repercussions.
|
| Psychedelics and cannabis were very strongly associated with
| the counterculture, religious and sex cults, social justice and
| antiwar movements, and with dropping out of the mainstream
| culture in the 1960's and 70's. This, along with wide-eyed
| sensational reporting of drug-related tragedies caused a full-
| blown moral panic that led to their being banned.
|
| Alcohol never had a history of use that was even remotely close
| to this and it was widely used among all classes in society
| (including the ruling class). It too was banned in the US in
| the early part of the 20th Century until Prohibition was
| recognized to be much worse than allowing alcohol to be legal.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| > Alcohol never had a history of use that was even remotely
| close to this
|
| Are you kidding? People used to get drunk and riot all the
| time in major American and European cities. Have you ever
| read about the gin craze?
|
| What is banned is certainly affected by the sensationalistic
| stories and the perceived scariness of it. But IMO the actual
| result of what does get banned has more to do with the
| cultural status quo, in group power and out group xenophobia.
|
| The repeal of alcohol prohabition is good evidence of this.
| Alcohol was traditionally accepted in Western culture for
| one. It's use was widespread and sometimes even seen as a
| "right of a passage" among the enfranchised class. America
| tolerated all kinds of other policy which lead to violence
| before, during and since prohibition. What got it repealed
| was that FDR and a lot of other politicians liked to drink. A
| lot of their voters liked to drink. They saw it as American
| to drink. They came from an alcohol tradition. Tobacco and
| caffeine are both intertwined with American middle and upper
| class identity, especially in the mid 20th century when these
| bans are really coming down. And of course, they weren't
| banned.
|
| Psychedelics may have been used by in-group white kids but
| they were banned before their use could become wide enough to
| integrate them to the culture. Native support didn't matter
| because they are such a tiny population and so thuroughly
| locked out of power.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I tried salvia divinorum a few times, and the biggest insight I
| got from it was that the human brain is a machine, and is
| designed to do a specific thing, but if you throw a bunch of
| chemicals into it you can convert it into a machine for doing
| other random things like generate visual garbage and noise. I
| felt like my working memory had been reduced to only persisting
| for a half second, and my thoughts were reflected back onto
| themselves, making me get stuck in a moment in time and making it
| impossible to hold onto a train of thought, and my visual field
| was looped back on itself like when you point a camera at its own
| screen. I didn't find the experience pleasurable, really.
| palimpsests wrote:
| did you consume this via smoking or sublingual administration?
|
| your experience sounds like that which can happen when salvia
| divinorum is smoked.
|
| the traditional method of consumption by the Mazatec people
| (who have used this plant medicine in ritual for thousands of
| years) is sublingual.
|
| creates an incredibly different effect than smoking it. tends
| to be much more pleasant and easier to integrate.
|
| I do know several folks who quite enjoy smoking it. They are in
| the minority, however.
| filoeleven wrote:
| From what I've read, the dissociative effects are much
| greater from smoking it than from the sublingual route. A
| minority of people enjoy dissociative effects, so your report
| makes sense.
|
| I'm curious about what makes certain people enjoy
| dissociatives, since most people find them very
| uncomfortable.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Smoked. Never tried it sublingually.
| [deleted]
| motohagiography wrote:
| The speculative stuff around this is super fun. Proceed at your
| own risk.
|
| How does an animal stumble on the existence of geometry? Impaired
| sensory input creates feedback loops that yield periodic
| patterns. How does it begin apprehend the scope of something
| greater than its senses? Impairing those senses and seeing the
| edges. How do ancient people hear supposedly divine messages?
| Inhaling smoke from burning plants that contain substances that
| cause said impairment, like if a common regional bush that
| contained these substances caught fire, on a mountain somewhere,
| just randomly. If the knowledge from this tree that contained
| this chemical were forbidden, how would you preserve it? Rituals,
| symbols, allegories, etc. Who would forbid it and why?
|
| Bonkers fun! I should pitch the Ancient Aliens people on a
| hallucinogens spinoff. If only there were someone with the right
| hair.
|
| While I'm partially joking, there is a deep internet rabbit hole
| on that stuff, and given we've evolved video games where you
| discover random things within the system to level up - and if we
| were in one (as some prominent tech figures suspect), we could
| probably find similar hints encoded in what we percieve as the
| biology of this one. It would be part of the design. To close the
| loop on the analogy, the logical substrate of a video game is in
| effect its own "biology," so to Super Mario, those mushrooms were
| as real as he was.
|
| When you look at how as biological entities, we have evolved our
| own artificial game systems where we practice "leveling up" using
| found artifacts within the games, and it seems reasonable that
| this is self-similar to the rules and our experience of the
| world.
|
| In that worldview, these plants, while of our same logical
| substrate, alter our perception of our physics and biology, and
| create a different experience of it where we percieve it without
| the same rules, and these are the clues within our logical layer
| that there is an encompassing set of rules to be discovered.
| Literally everything is a clue.
|
| The shamanistic rituals aren't there to make us believe in
| spirits, they are wisely and sufficiently ridiculous to make the
| leveled up experience seem somehow sufficiently un-real and
| dismissable so that we can take from it and re-engage
| constructively on this level after acquiring knowledge of what's
| beyond.
|
| Who wants to be on the show? :)
| generalizations wrote:
| Write a book and pitch it to the network. Could be fun. :)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| The note on spiders on drugs reminds me of the Canadian
| documentary bit: https://youtu.be/p2HipedgM3I
| cs2733 wrote:
| Priceless, thanks!
| throwaway284534 wrote:
| I would love to hear what you all think about addiction, or at
| least a lack of addiction. I've always seemed to have a very low
| pain tolerance, and over the counter meds just don't do much for
| me. On a few occasions I've been given stronger drugs like
| oxytocin and codeine -- and the first thing people say is to
| watch out for their addictive properties. I...don't seem to crave
| them, or anything else for that matter. Don't get me wrong, I
| _crave_ pain relief after having surgery. But once my wounds are
| healed, I can have a few pills sitting in my cabinet for months.
|
| It's the same thing with alcohol, weed, and Adderall. I enjoy
| their effects, but I've never felt that kind of magnetic pull
| other people seem to fear. I suppose the closest I've experienced
| to addiction is in dark chocolate. I suspect I have a magnesium
| deficiency that chocolate seems to sate every single time. Could
| it be that addiction is also a chronic deficiency in other
| physical needs?
| ruined wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park
| the-dude wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_Park#Replication
| palimpsests wrote:
| I am a counselor who works with a lot of people suffering from
| chronic substance/behavior misuse (i.e. addiction).
|
| check out the work of Dr Gabor Mate.
|
| addiction is much less an intrinsic property of a substance and
| has much more to do with a combination of personal factors like
| upbringing, ACEs (adverse/traumatic childhood events),
| modeling, and some genetics.
|
| it is not uncommon at all for someone to try an "addictive"
| substance like, say, cocaine, and never feel a pull to ever
| take it again.
| filoeleven wrote:
| Do you have insights/opinions on the difference between
| physical and psychological addictions? Everything I've read
| draws a distinction between the two, though not any hard-and-
| fast rules.
|
| I'm especially curious about your take on things like
| nicotine or caffeine, which are generally considered to have
| more physically-addictive properties, whereas cocaine in my
| readings lies more in the mentally-addictive space (strong
| sense of motivation and empowerment and maybe
| invulnerability) up to a certain point.
|
| Anything from shopping to SCUBA to hoarding can be
| psychologically addictive, so it seems like a much broader
| range of activities that is more affected by personal
| factors, whereas a physical addition is a craving/habit of
| the body. But I have no personal experience of viewing these
| in lots of people or from a trained counselor's perspective.
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(page generated 2021-07-04 23:01 UTC)