[HN Gopher] The enigma of Richard Schultes, Amazonian hallucinog...
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       The enigma of Richard Schultes, Amazonian hallucinogens, and
       ethnobotany (2020)
        
       Author : drdee
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2022-11-30 21:51 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (journals.sagepub.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (journals.sagepub.com)
        
       | photochemsyn wrote:
       | Interesting article. I understand what the author is saying here,
       | but there's a lot of value to be found in taking Schultes'
       | position:
       | 
       | > "For Schultes, the non-ordinary states of consciousness
       | elicited by ayahuasca were 'intoxications' and 'inebriations' -
       | curious for sure, but ultimately illusory. As a consequence, his
       | altered states had to be stripped of 'subjective' content as part
       | of their translation into 'objective', rational, and universally
       | applicable scientific knowledge."
       | 
       | That's precisely the value that the objective scientific approach
       | - measurement, observation, not subjective interpretation -
       | brings to discussions of psychedelic substances (and to the
       | knowledge of the world in general). Of course it's limited, but
       | it does provide an unambigous foundation of knowledge - we should
       | expect anyone, regardless of cultural history, to agree on the
       | same measurements and scientific observations. The flowers have
       | this pigment, the plants have these components, this DNA sequence
       | distinguishes this subspecies from that subspecies, etc.
       | 
       | Certainly the subjuctive view has some interesting features and
       | there's no need to discard it, but one must realize that other
       | peoples and other cultures will have quite different
       | interpretations of the effects of psychedelics than the original
       | users. People create expectations of effects, culturally
       | speaking, and then they experience those effects in the correct
       | set and setting, as the author describes:
       | 
       | > "This was a classification entirely opposed to that of his
       | informants. For Amazonians, it was exactly the subjective content
       | of their visions that gave rise to knowledge and insight about
       | plants in the first place. The Amazonian cosmologies he
       | encountered were directly engaged, informed, and tested through
       | the ritual ingestion of the plants in question. The non-ordinary
       | states elicited by ayahuasca provided access to realms of reality
       | that were perfectly real (Beyer, 2009).31 But because the
       | Amazonians' rich cosmological accounts did not fit within
       | Schultes's modern scientific world view, in his reading of the
       | enigma he systematically undermined their epistemological
       | importance and ontological validity by assuming that they could
       | be explained in terms of his own metaphysical position. Within
       | Schultes's cosmology there was no way for ayahuasca visions to
       | provide routes to genuine knowledge - unless they had been
       | implausibly scrubbed clean of their subjective content by a
       | trained analytical mind and reduced to bifurcating decision trees
       | that mirrored the bifurcating taxonomic keys of naturalists
       | guidebooks (narcotic, or non-narcotic? strong or weak?). There
       | was no way that plants could speak to humans about themselves, no
       | way for plants to teach people to sing, no matter how prevalent
       | these accounts are among Amazonian holders of plant knowledge
       | (Beyer, 2009)."
       | 
       | I have to agree with Schultes - the plants aren't teaching people
       | to sing, but they do make it easier for people to pass on vivid
       | cultural traditions to other people, by swinging open the doors
       | of perception within the human mind.
        
       | echelon_musk wrote:
       | Always happy to see Schultes mentioned.
       | 
       | I think it was Wade Davis that said if you were ever to find
       | yourself lost amongst any Amazonian tribe that you could say
       | Schultes' name and there was a high chance it would be recognised
       | due to the number of cultures he contacted.
       | 
       | Embrace of the Serpent is a great film based around some of his
       | exploits.
        
       | boole1854 wrote:
       | My favorite part was the claim that shamans are able to use their
       | plant-induced visions to "influence the weather".
       | 
       | I suppose my skepticism about the veracity of this claim is due
       | to my "Western cosmology". Mea culpa!
        
         | dang wrote:
         | Can you please not post snarky reflexive responses or shallow
         | dismissals? We want _curious_ conversation here.
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
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