What a strange and interesting response by Bateson acolytes. I hope the effort ricochets in ways that raise the profile of the book. Congrats on the excellent reviews. I saw the Talbot piece and thought it was terrific.
This project - https://www.intoxicatingspaces.org/ - between Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (Germany), the University of Sheffield (UK), Stockholm University (Sweden), and Utrecht University (Netherlands) might interest readers.
Yes, great suggestion. Phil Withington's work (one of the organizers of this project) has been another major influence for me and I think for many others. Love his article on coffee in early modern England: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/707339
For the record, I have been hugely influenced by Bateson for more than forty years. Your treatment of Bateson deepened my understanding. You did an excellent job, and have made me want to dig deeper.
The early emergence of "Better Living thru Chemistry" societies that emerged on the early drug internet in places like "The Shroomery" where DreadPirateRoberts (silk road founder) got his start as "Altoid" there growing mushrooms. I had some personal interactions there with him when I was in my early twenties (2005-2007) and he was on an elite level of psychedelic mushroom cultivators among the community. Eventually after interacting with certain personalities on "The Shroomery" and displaying some of my early attempts at cultivating Amazonian strains which were quite successful but the scale was tiny in comparison to most...I saw the emergence of what would become the silk road start to emerge.
First it started out as trusted members of the community trading drugs thru the mail without ever bringing money into the equation. Usually thru secretive methods using the mail system. But eventually it did evolve specifically between TheDreadPirate & another personality from Vegas (I wont mention names) Heroin and other drugs started being sold among the small trusted groups. As well as Japanese members contributing some odd but fun drugs they could get in Japan that we simply couldn't here in the US. I recall them "inducting" me into the club by sending me hermetically sealed packages of pure Xanax powder & Phenobarbital.
Fortunately at that point in my life I had moved away from opiate abuse otherwise I may have fallen in deep with them. But when the beginnings of the silk road begin to emerge as basically word of mouth deals between trusted members I withdrew from the community. I had learned what I wanted which was to grow my own psilocybin in small personal amounts basically in order to use once or twice a year for spiritual journeys really to help myself overcome my previous opiate addiction.
So when the heroin and other things started to flow I stopped engaging with them. It was a wild time and I know it sounds crazy for me to say I had personal interactions with TheDreadPirate but I knew him then as "Altoid" and as an elite mushroom grower and he mentored me.
But he had picked up a philosophy that emerged there at the same time I mentioned before "Better living thru chemistry" which was mainly basically a group that thought if all of us Opiate users could openly and easily access them we could in fact operate as better human beings. And personally I still believe its true, opiates helped me overcome my social anxiety but the addiction aspect was the part that really hurt the community but the idea that we could somehow create a community where the idea of running out would never again become a reality.
But as I grew I realized the benefits of opiates are far surpassed by sane controlled used of amphetamines & other substances like 2CI or 2CB (derivatives of MDMA) you could truly elevate your thinking. There were times when I practiced this that I would be hit by what I can only explain as lightning bolts of knowledge that gave me understandings of extremely complex sciences that I had no previous education or reason to suddenly understand. Some of the most profound moments in my intellectual journey came from those strikes of bolts of intelligence emerging from a place I cannot explain. You'd suddenly understand quantum physics and have theories that to this day hold up. I remember after one such event writing 65 pages in my journal about the quantum wave decoherence before which I had no understanding of. I still to this day have theories I made during those events that I still believe are very profound.
One such example which may sound like insane rambling but I called it the theory cyberizing the brain breaking reality as seen in things like ghost in the shell. Imagine a future where we have a cyberbrain...an AI creation that lives in the cloud and is essentially a clone of your brain but functions in a way that simply carries out your unconscious will. Combine that with a cyberized brain, you could in theory adjust your conscious perception of time to milliseconds and lower. What would happen if you reduced that perception so low that you get close to absolute zero ( the point at which atoms even stop moving ). What happens then? In your perception of reality you'd be perceiving things so quickly or slowly that eventually everything around you would stop...simply because your sampling reality in time frames so small that the world appears to stop. What happens at this point? Does reality then become the result of two possibilities....A. something happens in the real world in real time that nudges you back to real time in which you stay in your current reality or does B. everything ceases and at this point does reality split into a new universe where that nudge never happened?
I believe the race to cyberizing the brain is to answer questions like these? If you could slow your sample rate of reality to such a point of even atoms cease to move what then happens?
I believe that the answer to brain computer interfacing is the very idea addressed in ghost in the shell....the hard question of BCI is the fact that we cannot biological equal the rates of which computers can transfer data but with the introduction of a cyberbrain...a clone of your brain that carries your will within cyberspace...is the answer this is where we could build the interface between the computer and our brain. The AI governing the cyber-brain can exchange information at the rate of computing and that cyber-brain can also transfer that information back into your physically modified brain. Thus solving the computing rate vs brain computation rates.
These are the kinds of things we explored during these early times in those forums and why TheDreadPirate started the silk road. Bc he truly believed that proper use of the proper substances could give us insight into things our naturally operating brain cannot.
He wasn't a bad guy at the beginning but he lost the vision and the money and power took hold.
Its truly sad that those communities have largely evaded to private groups that don't allow outsiders in bc we were on the frontier of discovering things about human physiology and consciousness that hadn't been explored before or since.
What a strange and interesting response by Bateson acolytes. I hope the effort ricochets in ways that raise the profile of the book. Congrats on the excellent reviews. I saw the Talbot piece and thought it was terrific.
Thank you Rob!
This project - https://www.intoxicatingspaces.org/ - between Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg (Germany), the University of Sheffield (UK), Stockholm University (Sweden), and Utrecht University (Netherlands) might interest readers.
Yes, great suggestion. Phil Withington's work (one of the organizers of this project) has been another major influence for me and I think for many others. Love his article on coffee in early modern England: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/707339
For the record, I have been hugely influenced by Bateson for more than forty years. Your treatment of Bateson deepened my understanding. You did an excellent job, and have made me want to dig deeper.
The early emergence of "Better Living thru Chemistry" societies that emerged on the early drug internet in places like "The Shroomery" where DreadPirateRoberts (silk road founder) got his start as "Altoid" there growing mushrooms. I had some personal interactions there with him when I was in my early twenties (2005-2007) and he was on an elite level of psychedelic mushroom cultivators among the community. Eventually after interacting with certain personalities on "The Shroomery" and displaying some of my early attempts at cultivating Amazonian strains which were quite successful but the scale was tiny in comparison to most...I saw the emergence of what would become the silk road start to emerge.
First it started out as trusted members of the community trading drugs thru the mail without ever bringing money into the equation. Usually thru secretive methods using the mail system. But eventually it did evolve specifically between TheDreadPirate & another personality from Vegas (I wont mention names) Heroin and other drugs started being sold among the small trusted groups. As well as Japanese members contributing some odd but fun drugs they could get in Japan that we simply couldn't here in the US. I recall them "inducting" me into the club by sending me hermetically sealed packages of pure Xanax powder & Phenobarbital.
Fortunately at that point in my life I had moved away from opiate abuse otherwise I may have fallen in deep with them. But when the beginnings of the silk road begin to emerge as basically word of mouth deals between trusted members I withdrew from the community. I had learned what I wanted which was to grow my own psilocybin in small personal amounts basically in order to use once or twice a year for spiritual journeys really to help myself overcome my previous opiate addiction.
So when the heroin and other things started to flow I stopped engaging with them. It was a wild time and I know it sounds crazy for me to say I had personal interactions with TheDreadPirate but I knew him then as "Altoid" and as an elite mushroom grower and he mentored me.
But he had picked up a philosophy that emerged there at the same time I mentioned before "Better living thru chemistry" which was mainly basically a group that thought if all of us Opiate users could openly and easily access them we could in fact operate as better human beings. And personally I still believe its true, opiates helped me overcome my social anxiety but the addiction aspect was the part that really hurt the community but the idea that we could somehow create a community where the idea of running out would never again become a reality.
But as I grew I realized the benefits of opiates are far surpassed by sane controlled used of amphetamines & other substances like 2CI or 2CB (derivatives of MDMA) you could truly elevate your thinking. There were times when I practiced this that I would be hit by what I can only explain as lightning bolts of knowledge that gave me understandings of extremely complex sciences that I had no previous education or reason to suddenly understand. Some of the most profound moments in my intellectual journey came from those strikes of bolts of intelligence emerging from a place I cannot explain. You'd suddenly understand quantum physics and have theories that to this day hold up. I remember after one such event writing 65 pages in my journal about the quantum wave decoherence before which I had no understanding of. I still to this day have theories I made during those events that I still believe are very profound.
One such example which may sound like insane rambling but I called it the theory cyberizing the brain breaking reality as seen in things like ghost in the shell. Imagine a future where we have a cyberbrain...an AI creation that lives in the cloud and is essentially a clone of your brain but functions in a way that simply carries out your unconscious will. Combine that with a cyberized brain, you could in theory adjust your conscious perception of time to milliseconds and lower. What would happen if you reduced that perception so low that you get close to absolute zero ( the point at which atoms even stop moving ). What happens then? In your perception of reality you'd be perceiving things so quickly or slowly that eventually everything around you would stop...simply because your sampling reality in time frames so small that the world appears to stop. What happens at this point? Does reality then become the result of two possibilities....A. something happens in the real world in real time that nudges you back to real time in which you stay in your current reality or does B. everything ceases and at this point does reality split into a new universe where that nudge never happened?
I believe the race to cyberizing the brain is to answer questions like these? If you could slow your sample rate of reality to such a point of even atoms cease to move what then happens?
I believe that the answer to brain computer interfacing is the very idea addressed in ghost in the shell....the hard question of BCI is the fact that we cannot biological equal the rates of which computers can transfer data but with the introduction of a cyberbrain...a clone of your brain that carries your will within cyberspace...is the answer this is where we could build the interface between the computer and our brain. The AI governing the cyber-brain can exchange information at the rate of computing and that cyber-brain can also transfer that information back into your physically modified brain. Thus solving the computing rate vs brain computation rates.
These are the kinds of things we explored during these early times in those forums and why TheDreadPirate started the silk road. Bc he truly believed that proper use of the proper substances could give us insight into things our naturally operating brain cannot.
He wasn't a bad guy at the beginning but he lost the vision and the money and power took hold.
Its truly sad that those communities have largely evaded to private groups that don't allow outsiders in bc we were on the frontier of discovering things about human physiology and consciousness that hadn't been explored before or since.