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Comment by Noos | Hacker News Reader

Given this is Hacker News, I await the solution of LSD-assisted therapy to counter phone addiction to be proposed soon.

Lol I'm not proposing an LSD-based solution, but I do have a relevant anecdote from my first trip.

We were on the beach sitting on blankets, and my phone somehow got lost in the folds of the blanket while I was coming up. For the next ~4 hours I basically forgot "who" I was, being deprived of a phone that constantly shows me my friends, notes, and pictures. Eventually, I did find my phone and it was the weirdest experience ever to look at my phone and slowly start "remembering" who I am.

It sounds like you're correlating forgetting who you were and the phone, but you should be correlating the LSD and forgetting who you were. These drugs de-activate the "ego" forming parts of the brain, the parts that make us feel like an author/being/center of it all.

While it's certainly true that LSD is the primary reason I had ego semi-dissolution in this experience, I'm saying that phones serve to reinforce our understanding of ourselves by "interrupting" our raw conscious experience with memories and data that we correlate with our self. On other trips where I had my phone, or when I was at home in an environment I've known all my life, I had virtually no ego dissolution at all.

That's a pretty good short story plot.

ha, this reminds me of Manfred Macx forgetting who he was without his digital glasses and associated suite of external agents in Accelerando

Please invest in my new startup - we provide an app that recommends LSD microdoses to address your milliphone exposure count.

Might want to rethink your business model, unless you can get around the Apple store guidelines forbidding encouragement of drug use[0]

I'm afraid it's a pass from me on investment. ;)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605880

Tomorrow on Ask HN:

Which PAAS (psychedelic-as-a-service) would you pay the most money for?

Alcohol delivery services are already a thing everywhere, Berlin has "cocaine taxis", now all that's missing is pot delivery once it finally becomes legal...

I'd heard of weed maps but cocaine taxis seems like a brazenness I couldn't imagine working on either side, vendor or buyer.

I know a woman who managed to sell cocaine out of a taxi (in the US) for 8 years without being caught.

It's a great way to sell drugs because you can always claim that whatever is stashed in the backseat was left by one of your passengers.

Telegram has already got you covered.

https://aurynproject.org/pala

re: the business and yogafication of psychedelics

Quite a long story but I found it thought-provoking.

Wow that was profound to say the least, highly relevant to tech and entrepreneur crowd thank you for sharing!

LSD actually cured my surfing (while I was taking it). I'd just be consciously aware the whole time that I was sitting at a computer, trying to distract myself.

Yes, but LSD is only effective when coupled with fasting.

I am doing n-back cold water swimming to convert white matter into gray matter.

If you take enough of a psychedelic it becomes harder to read the screen ... so there is that.

It was on the front page earlier today, and still is.

Why bother stopping a bad habit? That takes effort. Much better to play Russian Roulette with mind altering substances.

The other discussion is about using psilocybin to treat depression, not phone addiction. They are different disorders and should be treated as such.

While you make a good point, I think the therapeutic dose to LD50 ratio of mushrooms is vanishingly small, meaning they are relatively safe

(Assuming you are referring to the article about mushrooms)

Well, except when people start jumping from buildings.

I know two people, one of whom successfully jumped from the 3rd floor of a building and another that had to be restrained from doing so. It's a real risk, although I personally have done psychedelics many hundreds of times and never felt the urge to jump even when climbing trees, building exteriors, etc.

I want to do it on the beach, I'm afraid of running into the ocean and drowning. What would you say is the probability of this scenario occurring for a first time trip?

I've been with dozens of people on their first trip with acid that I knew was acid. And I've had dozens more experiences with people thinking they were taking acid when it was really 25I or something even worse (if it tastes like something, it's not acid). When I was younger taking any drug anyone could get their hands on, I was usually in the latter camp. And I think very few people are privileged enough to not be in the latter camp as you don't tend to have much control over the drugs you get. Most normal people might get like one "acid contact" their whole life and they're taking whatever he has to sell them.

If you're in the former camp (taking real acid), I have a truly hard time believing the anecdotes of bad things happening. And I think most anecdotes are actually stories from the latter camp. Just take a small dose and know that you can take the edge off with a beer if you really needed to.

But if you're in the latter camp where you don't even know what you're taking, I'm not particularly surprised if something bad happens.

Although my original comment was specifically about the toxicity of mushrooms, as somebody who’s never tried any of these drugs I’m curious if there’s a distinct difference between the type of trip with LSD vs mushrooms? Is one more likely to induce a violent trip for example?

They are different, but maybe not consistently so for everyone. The visual distortions might be similar but the feeling will probably be different.

I get a certain uncomfortable bodily sensation on LSD, to the point that after fifty or sixty experiences with it I no longer use it. I strongly prefer mushrooms and suggest mixing them with small amounts of MDMA for an incredible experience.

That's basically what modern medicine tends to do, just in a more structured manner.

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