Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird? | Hacker News Reader

Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?

slatestarcodex.com

Early psychedelic associated people who were not weird: - Alexander Shulgin, chemist who discovered and ate whole families of psychedelics over a long life, and who was always described as being practical, grounded, warm, and human - The CIA employees who were exposed to LSD during that era, remarkably few of whom went off the deep end - Owsley Stanley, pioneering sound engineer and production scale LSD chemist who also was not into woo-woo crap - Albert Hofmann, the guy who discovered it

The "weird" ones cherry-picked in the article didn't do much except loudly promote extravagant claims about said drugs and push their own personal brands-- They were the instagram influencers of the era, in a sense.

Shulgin was pretty weird, but maybe not as weird as some of the others.

Owsley moved to Australia because he was convinced a super cyclone was going to freeze all of north America and that would be the safest spot.

He also pretty much ate only 100% meat, and blamed the cancer that formed in his throat in his later years on the few vegetables his parents made him eat as a child.

But no woo woo crap =)

Interesting thoughts by Owsley: http://www.thebear.org/essays.html

Info about the storm he predicted: http://worldnewstrust.com/ice-ages-cause-of-glaciation-a-the...

For those unaware, Owsley was the focus of the Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne".

Maybe they're referring to the ones people know about, in pip culture? Why did pip culture glom on to them mostly? I don't know.

Psychedelics permanently increasing your openness to experience sounds true to me based on my own experiences, however not in the way that the author seems to be fearing.

It's not some subtle unconscious change. It's a conscious choice to be more open, in certain ways, based on the new insight gotten from your emotional psychedelic experience. It's a freshened perspective on life.

As for the examples of believing in astrology, aliens, doing yoga, or constructing models of consciousness. How weird are these really? To me these seem like viewpoints that regular Joe will discuss in a pub. Some, e.g. modelling consciousness, aren't even irrational, but I've personally found that almost everyone has at least one irrational pet idea anyway.

Psychedelics could certainly amplify your own beliefs, but I'm not convinced it can easily create new ones. It can make you more open to the idea of being honest about your thoughts, including sharing your alien theories.

Right? For me it was like: MOLY SHEET! I don't /know/ anything. What do you do with that dropped on your head? You can't rule anything out on the basis that other people would find it hard to swallow. If you've got a few extra watts of processing power in your head, you can take some wild ideas really far before you even have the chance to bounce the idea off someone; it's very likely that you might actually transmit the kooky memes you've been gestating, especially if you're a charismatic like Leary. Anyway, a sizable fraction of those crazy psychedelicists ended up having fun as happy cult leaders - who can fault them if they haven't caused harm?

What, is being a Ron Paul supporter in the new DSM? I’ve never tried psychedelics myself, but I find OP’s descriptions of weirdness to be feeble at best.

Quantum consciousness as far out? I earnestly believe that it’s irrational to thing something that so greatly impacts and is impacted by the physical world as conciousness is somehow not bound by physics. It’s perfectly rational and proven with multiple experiments that quantum particle pairs act synchronously across space(time). If conciousness is based in physical reality, then it is an emergent property of quantum mechanics.

At times my spouse and I have experienced an undeniable and unexplainable shared thought or emotion without communicating with the 5 senses. We have commingled so very much matter together that it’s most reasonable to assume some entangled particle pairs get split between us. I’ve encountered a plethora of antecdotes from others along similar lines- really without seeking them out.

Does constructing that type of argument ensure that I am ‘weird’ like the article suggests?

Maybe I ought to try some mushrooms and see what other weird ideas I’m missing out on?

It’s actually not reasonable to assume quantum entanglement has anything to do with your shared consciousness experiences.

Sure, but it is a common modern folk belief, so it isn’t “weird”.

The point of view presented in this article is not that psychedelics are necessary to achieve such opinions and perceptions, but rather that they can be helpful to such ends.

> At times my spouse and I have experienced an undeniable and unexplainable shared thought or emotion without communicating with the 5 senses. We have commingled so very much matter together that it’s most reasonable to assume some entangled particle pairs get split between us. I’ve encountered a plethora of antecdotes from others along similar lines- really without seeking them out.

It's a common experience, but that's not a maximum likelihood explanation. I've often been able to trace this kind of synchronicity to the both of us having just seen something in the environment, that then triggered similar thought patterns.

There are so many possible explanations that fixating on some quantum mumbo jumbo (without being able to do the math, or create a statistically meaningful test) is just magical thinking.

I think you hit the nail on the head. At our core humans are pattern recognition units, we're solving environmental puzzles all the time, and sometimes we solve this puzzle in the same way as the person next to us, and both have a similar leap of logic that seems to defy rationality.

Therein lies the limits of ontological reductionism. I didn’t posit any theory that needs defending, but if I did I would look to systems biology as a framework. It attempts to integrate reductionism (per your insistence on statistically meaningful tests) with emergence, the scientific approach to observing behaviors in chaotic systems that can be manifest in isolation.

The link below is truly an interesting read that explores the evolution of scientific approaches to study of biological phenomena. It attempts to integrate biology, physics, medicine, and computer science to show how nonlineal systems like you and me can be studied. We got to the bottom of the genome and found that things like gene expression (what really matters IRL) can’t be explained at the atomic level, but can with systems.

I love it also because it contains a coy attempt at biology supervining physics, stating that all understanding of physics is limited by human intellect and the machines we built out of that intellect to support our understanding. Like somebody read https://xkcd.com/435/ and had to win. #probablynotwrongthough

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1319562X1...

clearly the author is not hip to The Human Evasion by Celia Green. Those guys were just all OK with choosing a slightly different reality, because the mainstream reality tunnel is also equally flawed, and less interesting

  Human beings live in a state of mind called 'sanity' 
  on a small planet in space. They are not quite sure 
  whether the space around them is infinite or not (either 
  way it is unthinkable). If they think about time, they 
  find it inconceivable that it had a beginning. It is 
  also inconceivable that it did not have a beginning. 
  Thoughts of this kind are not disturbing to 'sanity', 
  which is obviously a remarkable phenomenon and deserving 
  more recognition.

http://www.theabsolute.net/minefield/humevas.html

> In fact he tried 1000 micrograms of it, one of the biggest doses I’ve ever heard of someone taking.

If this is at the threshold of your knowledge in this area, there's a heck of a lot more to learn. This whole article, with some interesting facts about a few cherry-picked researchers, emanates naivete.

It's also funny that the author mentions Ram Dass who tells the tale of tripping on LSD for several weeks at a time in his book 'Be Here Now. In his biography 1000ug is painted as child's play for some of the early explorers.

1000 ug aka "Heroic Dose".

To be fair, the post does start with

> [Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this all already]

And? Would you care to tell us more? It's not very helpful to just say "you're wrong" without providing any sort of correction.

I think GP is making the point that Kary Mullis isn't really a notable psychedelic explorer - just some scientist that took a large dose LSD. If you read into some of the notable figures of the psychedelic movement you will learn that many of them dove very, very deep.

I mean just google it, there is no lack of personal experience writeups from people who have done thumbprints or even higher doses.

For one thing we have no way of confirming what exact chemical compound such experimenters actually took, not to mention anything about the precise dosage. In many cases, the subjects don't either.

> For one thing we have no way of confirming what exact chemical compound such experimenters actually took

OK, but that's no different than any of the people in the Star Slate Codex article. If anything the people doing thumbprints are much more likely to have taken actual LSD than the people getting it indirectly from Sandoz since they were making it themselves.

the purity of "actual LSD" can vary a lot, and is more important than the purity of most other substances. I would expect it more likely to be as close to pure as possible by scientists at Sandoz than someone doing thumbprints at home.

But Owsley apparently did a great job from what I hear =p

Innovators are weird to begin with. Otherwise they couldn't resist the social pressure to be normal, get a 'proper job' and so on. Living on the edge keeps their minds active and creative. Plus they expect pushback for their innovations. So they're going to be militantly weird in some areas, maybe compensating for this by concealing their proclivities elsewhere.

(This makes sense if you consider that the greater part of being normal is trying hard to appear normal.)

Now psychedelics are personality-altering substances. As such they have the potential to make you considerably more weird or less weird than you were to begin with.

It follows that psychedelic innovation entails a double whammy of weirdness. It would have been enough to push a proportion of the pioneers over the edge.

OP forgets that Kary Mullis did most of his acid binging in the 70's and invented PCR in the 80's. So even if it did turn him into a crackpot, it didn't prevent him from doing useful work.

I offer an anecdote: as a young person I struggled with many of the self-actualization how to be happy type problems that young people do. I was depressed. I was never formally diagnosed, but I would wake many days and simply have no desire to assert any form of existence. I would just not get out of bed because there was no point.

I would then later have an LSD trip where I would "trip out" and lose touch with reality. During this, while tripping out, I would get into an altercation involving five police officers in rural Georgia and be arrested and sent to jail and charged with resisting arrest, battery against a police officer, and numerous other charges. The ramifications of this in my personal life were great. While I was being arrested in reality, in my trip I would also encounter many personal emotional demons. At one point I was tased in reality, and in my trip I interpreted this to be death and I would think to myself "this is all that I have become by the time of my death?" In my trip I would feel the physical sensations of being dragged away by my arresting officers, and I would experience this as the arms of Satan dragging me to hell as payment for all of my past sins. As I would be cuffed in the back of the police car being toted off, I would hear the laughter of everyone in my life who I had ever cared about echoing through the cosmos, ridiculing me for my ultimate failure.

Once I awoke, I could not recall any of this. But, as I came to wrapped in a prison blanket with my head resting on a drain set in a cold concrete floor next to a metal toilet, I could certainly perceive the seriousness of the situation I'd landed myself in. This forced me to consider the events in my life that had led me to this. Eventually, stoked by the story of the tow truck driver who towed the car I'd driven into a ditch that initially caused the police to arrive, of the epic Jackie Chan figure who waged war with five lumbering policemen, my recollection began to form. I realized that the demons I'd encountered in my trip were "real", insofar that they were amplified mental manifestations of constructs that had already been there. This much was not new information, at least not on all levels. What was different about this encounter with those demons, in addition to their relevance to my circumstances of being charged with five serious crimes, was that I had the context of my drug induced shifted consciousness. Any previous attempts to change these behaviors had proven too feeble to be effective, my methods used were too shallow to reach towards the roots of my problems.

With the benefit of knowing that my sober reality was not the only possible or perceptible version, I began to deconstruct the thought processes, patterns, and software that ran my cognitive experience. It was this realization that enabled me to rewrite my code to better serve my greater goals. Today, I am a confident and successful engineer with only a single misdemeanor (lawyers, a good one is worth it), who is bounds happier and who feels much more in control and in touch with what he wants and how to attain it, and who believes in his ability to actualize. I will spare you further corny details of my current improved state and let you form your own judgements. In writing this post a fitting metaphor strikes me — a psychedelic trip is much like allowing someone with an entirely different set of opinions to do a radical (and temporary) rewrite of your personal software. When running it, it will confuse you. Everything will seem novel. But you will begin to see the other ways in which code can hang together. It is a rearchitecting. And if you have only ever been exposed to and developed using a single paradigm of architecture, then well I shouldn’t need to explain the benefits of this. But be wary, because in this temporary rewrite, it is possible you will forget the product spec to which your software is built and be unable to distinguish between a feature and a bug. Another metaphor that fits is that for personal growth a psychedelic trip is much like a car for a physical trip — it is not necessary to travel the distance and it will help if driven correctly.

That's a crazy intense trip story. Glad it ultimately lead to some positive self actualization. You should expand on the experience and post it to erowid.org.

While I'm intensely skeptical across-the-board, why is it that the psychedelic examples in this article (aliens and so forth) are outrageous and signs of insanity... but commonplace beliefs like, and this is my personal pet peeve, astrology, is a norm? And I apologise if I offend someone in advance, but what about religions? Guys come back to life, angels, prophets. All that stuff is in the same category. And yet, that's not lunacy. But Ram Das is.

Here's a thought that isn't novel: societies dictate what's sane and what's not. Not rationality. Thank (insert deity) for science and its methods.

I think this article is unfair in dismissing Robert Anton Wilson offhand. RAW was an interesting character who created a body of interesting work. He definitely punches above his weight in cultural impact, and was certainly 'open to experiences' which the writer seems to be somewhat astounded about. Indeed, some of his best work could be considered as a guide to how one can programme oneself to become more 'open to experiences' whilst developing a healthier sense of scepticism and discernment about those experiences.

a companion post: http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/05/is-pharma-research-wors...

Here’s one hypothesis: at the highest level, the brain doesn’t have that many variables to affect, or all the variables are connected. If you smack the brain really really hard in some direction or other, you will probably treat some psychiatric disease. Drugs of abuse are ones that smack the brain really hard in some direction or other. They do something. So find the psychiatric illness that’s treated by smacking the brain in that direction, and you’re good.

Actual carefully-researched psychiatric drugs are exquisitely selected for having few side effects. The goal is something like an SSRI – mild stomach discomfort, some problems having sex, but overall you can be on them forever and barely notice their existence. In the grand scheme of things their side effects are tiny – in most placebo-controlled studies, people have a really hard time telling whether they’re in the experimental or the placebo group.

Nobody has a hard time telling whether they’re in the experimental or placebo group of a trial of high-dose MDMA. I think this might be the difference. If you go for large effects – even if you don’t really care what direction the effect is in – you’ll get them. And if you go for small, barely perceptible effects, then you’ll get those too. The dream of the magic bullet – the drug that treats exactly what it’s supposed to treat but otherwise has no effect at all on you – is just a dream. The closest you can come is something with miniscule side effects but a barely-less-miniscule treatment effect.

You could ask the same question about all people from a long time ago. Why are William S. Burroughs or William F. Buckley so weird (in our modern eyes)? They're not really weird. They were perfectly normal in their historical context and environment. We are going to look weird to people in the future, unless they're wise enough to avoid dismissing our ideas just because they don't mesh well with their culture.

I'm pretty sure being a heroin addict and shooting your wife in the head was not "perfectly normal" even in the 50s.

Easy, they were authors. Authors are fucked

Burroughs may have been semi-normal among the other beatniks, but he was far from a "perfectly normal" person.

I wouldn't call Ram Dass weird, but the others certain are. Especially that "amplified DNA of deceased famous people like Elvis Presley" stuff. So why exactly did they went this loon? Too high dosages? Or did they just realize they can imagine wildly and market that for profit?

It could also be that there were just weirder ideas floating around at that time, too.

Two things were less stifled/eradicated: creative thought, and pure drugs.

Because they scrambled their brains by taking too many drugs in the name of 'spiritual enlightenment'. I've personally have friends--previously really smart rational people--who've gone off the deep end after taking a few too many hits of acid.

Psychedelics can be great and all, and though I've never indulged myself I can see why someone might benefit from doing so. Your neuro-chemistry is altered in such a radical way that you're bound to see yourself and the world from a radically different perspective. The problem with prolonged use, I think, is that that radically altered state eventually becomes your normal state and you lose touch with reality.

I think this is a wholly unfounded post. Please provide sources if you're going to make bold assertions like:

"Your neuro-chemistry is altered in such a radical way that you're bound to see yourself and the world from a radically different perspective."

Anecdotally, on my end: I have seen and been involved with many similarly smart people, who were also heavily, heavily involved with psychedelics, to no ill affect.

There seem to be two different talking points here and I think we should separate them.

First is the one that psychedelics affect neuro-chemistry in a radical way. We can also include the radically different perspectives here.

I can confirm the perspective changes based on personal experiences. However there are also studies which track serotonin increase, and studies which document perspective changes in terminally ill patients.

Are these really something you're doubting though? If so, I can dig up some of the papers.

Second, and I sense this is your main concern, is that people go crazy from this.

I haven't seen any studies about this and don't have any personal experience with it. However I can definitely imagine gullible people going crazy with the experiences. The same kind of people who join Scientology and whatnot. They stop being self-critical and start imagining crazy reasons why their experiences are happening.

My point being that the going crazy part is a sperate issue from having psychedeleics cause radical neuro-chemistry changes and providing you with different perspectives.

If psychedelics didn't radically alter your brain chemistry they wouldn't be psychedelics. Many things can alter your brain's chemistry--like exercise, or pain--and I don't see why this claim should appear to be unusual or unfounded. Here's a study I found with 10 seconds of Googling: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00213-005-2183-.... I'm sure there are many more, better studies out there.

I think you're taking my post the wrong way. I didn't say psychedelics instantly turn your brain to mush the second you take them. I'm just saying that they CAN turn your brain to mush, and it does happen to people--especially in people predisposed to mental illness.

>"Your neuro-chemistry is altered in such a radical way that you're bound to see yourself and the world from a radically different perspective."

This should be pretty uncontroversial if you add “while you’re under the effects of the psychedelic”.

I suspect that long-term effects are more a result of having had intensely experienced these radically different perspectives, and your ability and approach to integrating this experience with the rest of your life.

I don't think it is unfounded at all. Over the years I've known many victims of psychedelics. There's a guy in my apartment building who lost his shit on a bad acid trip 10 years ago and hasn't been a productive member of society since then.

I've used them, but it's really impossible to say whether or not I have suffered ill effects. No control subject. The author of the original linked essay points out that they produce large permanent changes to personality. That's a really big deal, and potentially very bad.

The article assumes a two way split: normal versus weird. I think we need a three way split: solid-normal, cozy-weird, out-there-weird. If you grow up with something you treat it as normal, as do the people around you, and some of them work for main-stream-media, so you see it on TV too, treated as normal. And some of the stuff that falls into that category is really weird, you just cannot see it.

For example, I was reading an article in The Economist about food distribution in India. Back in the early 1950's there was a famine and hoarding. Fucking hoarders! So they banned ware-houses and cold-storage to stop hoarding. Not completely, but enough to cause trouble. Obviously that is a bit of a disaster. Agriculture is notorious for having good years and bad years and you need plenty storage to smooth things out and make sure people don't starve.

Here is where it gets weird. You'd think I was going through the archive, reading a story from the late 1950's about the repeal of the anti-storage laws (complete with little box explaining about how such a totally whacked out law got passed in the first place). No, the article was from June 27th 2015 and was lamenting that the law was still in place.

So it is not just weird. It is cozy-weird. People are trying to combat the volatility of agricultural production with laws against warehousing and cold-storage and it has become normal, just the way you do it.

Second example: Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome were born to a virgin, Rhea Silvia, who had been forced join a virgin priesthood. Her wicked uncle Amulius had stolen the throne from her father Numitor, and didn't want any grandsons turning up to reclaim their grandfather's throne. So no sex for Rhea Silvia. The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.

Well, shit! I'd always imagined that when Christianity was getting popular in 300 A.D. it was a case of "virgin birth, wow, like man, that is so totally amazing, nothing like that ever happened before. That is sooo cool, count me in, I'm a believer!". Now I've learned a little more history. The Christian Virgin birth is looking like a me-too story. "Our hero-founder was also born of a virgin, so there :-P". Let's abandon concerns about me having to change my mind again when I learn another little bit of history. The story so far has virgin-birth as cozy-weird not out-there-weird in 300 AD. (Which neatly gets me out of voicing an opinion on whether it is any kind of weird in 2016.)

Example three: People believe that if a scientific result is statistically significant at the p=0.05 level, then the probability that it is true is 95%.

I'm feeling really proud of myself for providing three examples of cozy-weird. If you think about it, I shouldn't be able to give any examples of cozy-weird at all. I say "X is cozy-weird" and every-one dog piles on top of me insisting that X is normal and every-one agrees that X is normal :-)

Anyway, there is a two way split normal(2) and weird(2). There is a three way split solid-normal(3), cozy-weird(3), out-there-weird(3). Here is how they line up

    weird(2) = out-there-weird(3)

    normal(2) = solid-normal(3) union cozy-weird(3)

For some psychonauts an important motivation taking LSD is the hope that one can break through to reality in the sense of becoming able to see what is so strange about the cozy-weird.

SSC asks "Why were Early Psychedelicists so out-there-weird(3)?" (my translation).

That seems like a really tricky question because it is so hard to see what happened to the cozy-weird. Lets define weird(3) as the union of cozy-weird(3) and out-there-weird(3). Suppose some-one trips on LSD and realizes that you should respond to the volatility of agricultural output with laws that favour ware-housing and cold-storage. Suppose it goes further and they think that alien space bats are attacking Earth with stupidity rays and that is why there are laws that oppose ware-housing and cold-storage. That is a solid helping of out-there-weird, and a worthwhile reduction of cozy-weird. Did total weird(3) go up or down?

The previous paragraph ends with a hanging question. I've no idea whether the early psychedelicists had any success with seeing the strangeness of the cozy-weird. Time for a case split.

Case I, the early psychedelicists had no success with seeing the strangeness of the cozy-weird. If so, this is in itself a reason not to take LSD. Seeing the strangeness of the cozy-weird is one of the motivations. If others have already tried it and it didn't work, then it is time to try something else.

Case II, the early psychedelicists had some success with seeing the strangeness of the cozy-weird. Then there is an upside to balance the downside of perhaps becoming out-there-weird. Also there is an extra contender for why the early psychedelicists got so weird. Seeing the strangeness of the cozy-weird is mentally destabilizing. You can still share solid-normal(3) stuff with normal(2) folk, but the cozy-weird(3) stuff is a barrier between you, making each think that the other is a bit daft. What happens when you are cut off like this? Does the loss of social anchors set you adrift and at risk of becoming out-there-weird. Does the experience of seeing the strangeness of the cozy-normal directly unsettle you, making it hard to know what to trust and how to judge things? The existence of the cozy-weird makes things very complicated.

I guess it's worth noticing the author of the essay is pretty weird himself in any number of ways.

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