email dialogue on entheogens and singularity

> also because set & setting continue to change. Even when the setting
> is clinically identical, the subject has a prior experience with which
> to anticipate experience.

Yes, but shamanic uses of psychedelics try to minimize this variation
via making the setting really intense and using psychological force to
influence set (mindset).

For instance, the "Union of the Vegetable" church in Brazil allows
ayahuasca use only in the midst of highly structured, highly intense
rituals involving music, dancing, preaching and so forth. In this context,
it's presumably hard *not* to experience the ayahuasca roughly the
same way as the other folks around you...

> I'm curious - what do you think would be a more "right" use of
> psychedelics ...or other mind-altering substances?

There are many "right" uses, of course...

But what's bizarre is that in modern culture psychedelics are mostly
relegated to the category of "party drugs" to take in rock concerts and
dance clubs and such ... which is not bad, but misses most of the
potential they have for leading to interesting mind-states...

> Can/should we allow the individual freedom to alter brain chemistry
> enough to literally leave the "normal" world for another? Consider
> how this answer applies to the use of neural-integrated hardware to
> directly access electronic/digital "other" worlds.

that's an easy one: yes ;-)

I would add that I found psychedelics more interesting before the
possibility of Singularity in my lifetime became palpable. Psychedelics
offer a greater variety of inner experience than most people can achieve
without years or decades of effective meditation ... but, even with the
help of these drugs, there are going to be strict limits to what the human
mind can experience ... whereas various transhuman technologies promise
the possibility of actually extending the human mind in much more dramatic
ways...

In short, although psychedelics offer way more than our culture generally
recognizes [visionaries like Huxley, Leary, McKenna, Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, etc.
being exceptions ;-) ] ... the Singularity will offer way more, if we conduct
it properly

It does seem plausible that use of psychedelics can provide some modest
insight into post-Singularity realities, in that it allows exploration of a wider
space of mind-states than we experience in ordinary waking life. But I wouldn't
assume the space of mind-states accessible using psychedelics comes close
to touching the full variety of post-singularity mind-states, of course....

Psychedelics push us to see beyond some of the implicit assumptions we
make in conducting our everyday mental lives. For instance this book asks
"Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion"

http://www.amazon.com/Illusion-Journal-Consciousness-Controversies-Humanities/dp/0907845231

and anyone who has taken a lot of psychedelics will know the answer is YES,
without needing to look at the neuroscience and psychology data (though perhaps
with answer in the latter). However, once these assumptions are dropped
(e.g. the assumption of the objective reality of the constructed subjective visual
world) ... then what? An awful lot of possibilities present themselves, and human
minds can only scratch the surface....

In fact, many psychedelic mind-states explicitly point at these limitations: for instance,
the aliens one talks to on DMT (read Terrence McKenna or Google "machine elf")
explicitly present themselves to the mind as lower-dimensional projections of
some higher-dimensional reality inaccessible within the constraints of legacy
human consciousness...