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Seldom

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Posts posted by Seldom

  4. Posted

    if i'm not on prac i'm tempted to go to this but show up early, & convince people who've never been there that i'm incognito, and then when he turns up convince them that he's just crappy boring seldom . . and meanwhile i would live . for a day . .

    • Like 4

  5. Posted

     

    Hey Seldom, I hope you can find the time to read the paper when it comes out early next year, and my thesis later this year. It would be very interesting to hear your reflections. I think you will find the methodology particularly interesting. Here is a sample:

     

     

    Mirroring the limits of knowing that social and cultural perspectives provide people with, the effects of ayahuasca are mysterious, ambiguous, powerful, and transcendent. An anthropological study that attempts to completely reduce the mysterious, ambiguous, powerful, and transcendent ‘effect’ of ayahuasca to epiphenomena of social and cultural conditions results in inevitable reductions in which the power that ayahuasca has at encompassing that which is beyond language, reason, and understanding, becomes diffused. While anthropologists can circle-around the ineffable experiences and pick-up the ‘markings, traces, paths, and ultimately, “evidence”’ (Blanes and Santos 2013) of the social and cultural in narrative accounts of ayahuasca trance and social action, the pronounced ineffability of ‘ayahuasca experiences’ may only ever be fully conquered by anthropologists at the expense of other modes of knowing that include, for example, nonverbal, aesthetic, and extracorporeal mode

     

     

     

    sure, send it i'll will read it

     

     

    i'm high but all i can say would be re. aya in Aus.

     

     

    Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation ... No one knows this as well as the philosopher [drinker]. He must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this industry; but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. - William James

     

     

     

    Materialism is not a doctrine but an expedition, an alpine break-out from socially policed conviction. ... Exploring pre-categorical matter navigates thought as chance and matter as turbulence beyond all regulation. It yields no propositions to judge, but only paths to explore. - N L

     

     

     

    And yes we definitely need higher infiltration of academia,

     

     

    Good vibes to you drugo

    • Like 2

  8. Posted

    "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." - H P Lovecraft

    • Like 3

  9. Posted · Edited by Seldom

    :) thanks for the response.

    I don't 'disdain social sciences', i graduated from a degree in psychology in 2013, and I'm currently a post grad student . But the social scientific research that I value is of the empirical kind!. this is not a scientific paper. it's obfuscating the nature of the Aya experience by filtering it through trendy academic jargon about a 'radical political imaginary' .

    I mean, what are the necessary and sufficient conditions that enable us to say 'ok, this act/event is political' within this context ? .. exactly what criterion is this indexed against?> sometimes when i take a dump i think about interpersonal relations, possible alternatives to capitalistic systems of exchange, etc etc - but that doesn't mean pumping a shit is a political act.

    To rescue the discussion from the lofty heights of nebulous speculation, i'll just ask 3 questions:

    1) What are the practical consequences of framing these experiences inside these flashy academic buzz-words ?

    2) who benefits from you having done this work, and in what ways ?

    3) if it indeed does exist in these circles, what does this 'radical political imaginary' look like? what does it do? what are the practical consequences that follow from it being in the world ?

    Maybe it's just that I reserve the right to say that Huasca experiences are primarily personal, and that i think you should resist the indignity of trying to speak on behalf of all Australians who drink Aya by feigning to have some privileged access to 'the truth' of what they're doing.

    I wonder what you think of the fact that typically all ayahuasca circles in Australia include a "sharing round" circle where people in the morning after a ceremony sit back down in the space and articulate and talk about their visions.

    I think it's an excellent way to bring meaning to the experience, and to concretize new insights about what it is to be in the world that've been gained by enduring the experience. There are things (like Huasca, and things in general) that alter the structure of the way things are presented to awareness, and then there are words that try (often in vein in these instances) to express what these things have changed, what has caused the things that appear to appear in the manner that they did. These things are noetic. You can, and should try to bring meaning to the things they've contributed to your experience, for the reason that this helps to allow these experiences to exert lasting influence in your life. But the map is not the territory. Simply, meaning is superficial, whatever Huasca is, it's f'ing deep.

    • Like 1

  11. Posted · Edited by Seldom

    Well, i do like you, so i will say, honestly:

    I think that by interpreting Aya through this academic jargon, you have done a disservice to this experience. I think you've tried to graft these ideas about a "radical political imaginary" onto the experience because you have an attachment to the way that using these ideas makes you look smart in the eyes of people from whom you want recognition. I find it hard to describe the talk as furthering any agenda other than the reification of your own attachment to being seen as [whoever you think you are] . It introduces nothing that I have not heard before, and I can pretty confidently say that there are 0 people that are going to think: "well, I'm really on the fence about the therapeutic applications of Ayahuasca, maybe I'll use this video to decide" .. in terms of your audience, you're knocking on the open door ..

    Your verbosity obscures, rather than illuminates .. "Ayahuasca indexes robust forms of cultural critique" - it just sounds a bit rich, mate.

    "not confined to critiques of unsustainable resources and anthropogenic ecological crises" - really! Wow!

    "capitalism, materialism and consumerism are put on trial" - well h o l y s h i t !

    (what does this putting on trial look like?)

    Darpan's idea that consuming plants from the forests we're destroying will somehow stop people killing the forest is simply a joke. I've seen posts by YOu, in this very forum, confessing that you've drunk brews made from Northern Brother wattle. Didn't stop it from getting smashed to bits in the wild. there's also a member here who you may know, who has made a fair chunk of money out of holding Aya circles - but again, it didn't stop him from wantonly decimating wild obtusifolia populations on the north coast, and helping others to do the same. if you ask him he even has the audacity to say that they told him to do it.

    Aya is not a truth syrum. you have distorted the experience by trying to make it fit into ideas that suit your own attachments.

    The 'truths' of Aya are noetic. Those who speak, don't know; and those that know don't speak. I dig that you're into this, and you would probably be a fun dude to hang out with, but you put this out there to be judged, and i feel if i have anything to offer, it's through honesty rather than disingenuous praise.

    Peace

    • Like 1

  16. Posted · Edited by Seldom

    .. hmm .

    why associate complexity or computational capacity with agency ? (by agency i just mean a capacity for self directed action) or even self awareness . ( think about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_brain ) . although it may be a fruitful idea if the recently popular idea about consciousness being the 4th state of matter is correct (see for eg. https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/why-physicists-are-saying-consciousness-is-a-state-of-matter-like-a-solid-a-liquid-or-a-gas-5e7ed624986d )

    but the reductive and supposedly 'distinct' faculties of reason and emotion have experiential, not computational validity . the huge number of parallel processes which produce the emergent property of experience do not involve symbolic representation, or emotion - they produce them, because they're useful for survival. most CNS activity is dedicated to processes related to homeostasis and movement, which is why there's around 4 times as many neurons in the cerebellum . it would be kind of rediculous to have these in any 'super-computer' .. imo the most promising AI projects relate to quantum computing, such as NASA's Quail project http://www.nas.nasa.gov/quantum/

    but either way the 'singularity' will be completely alien to our minds . the best example i could conjure quickly to explain why comes from the comparison of our intelligence to the intelligence of a horse in the following:

    Natasha Mitchell: Before we come to your own research. which is extraordinary too, in another scenario in your new novel Sum we're really reminded of what a unique experience it is to occupy the brains and bodies that we do. You have your character in the book, us, choose to come back as anything we want to in the afterlife and we choose to come back as a horse. And it all goes sort of potentially horribly wrong, doesn't it.

    David Eagleman: Right, so in this story you get treated to this generous opportunity where you can choose to come back as whatever you want. So you decide you want to come back as a horse because you want simplicity and the idea of being a horse seems so lovely to you. So a magic wand is waved, you start to metamorphose into a horse.

    Natasha Mitchell: You can feel your fingers 'blending hoof-ward', as you put it, 'synapses unplugging and replugging on their way to equestrian patterns...' I love it.

    David Eagleman: Yes, and this mat of strong hair erupts to cover you and your musculature and your skeleton starts changing, you start becoming a horse and it's really lovely for a moment. And then you become aware of the problem you overlooked which is that the more you become a horse the more you forget the original wish. You forget what it is like to be a human wondering what it was like to be a horse. And so this is this moment of revelation that serves as the punishment for your sins, because you realise you won't be able to ever return here and that your slide down the intelligence ladder is irreversible. And then the last line of the story is just before you lose your final human faculties you painfully ponder what magnificent extraterrestrial creature, enthralled with the idea of finding a simpler life, chose in the last round to become a human.

    Natasha Mitchell: And that's it, you will never understand what it was to be a human, you will never be able to wish to be anything but a horse.

    David Eagleman: That's right.

    i don't think there's any reason to assume even if it has agency that it will kill humans, for eg. in a Borg-like scenario. for the same reason that we don't really feel the need to kill goldfish.

    in the words of Douglas Adams - Don't panic!

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