Comment by hosh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hosh | Hacker News Reader

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My wife has aphantasia. She knows she has aphantasia. It isn’t that she gets no visuals in her head at all. It sometimes happen on their own. But she does not know how to voluntarily do it. So she knows that other people are capable of visualizing even if she cannot.

When I was a kid, in order to procrastinate school work, I would vividly visualize things. Sometimes, they were simulations. Others were of abstract geometries in which I practiced rotating or inverting.

I lost much ability in my 20s though I was still able to manipulate things in a visual-spatial way without actually “seeing” it. It started came back after working with visionary plant medicines. These days, I noticed that it has steadily getting stronger.

Just so you know, that test you have not only fails to test for people who can visualize, it also fails to test for people who have aphantasia. Ed Cartmull, co-founder of Pixar has aphantasia. They had a discussion, and it turns out there is a small population of Pixar artist who have aphantasia. They can’t visualize, but they can work out a bicycle on paper.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256

> It started came back after working with visionary plant medicines.

In the industrialized west we simply call that "doing drugs".

I live and work in the industrialized west, and that characterization misses a lot of things.

Ingesting DMT is doing drugs, no matter how much hippie shaman woo or "traditional herbal medicine" adjectival touch-ups one sprinkles on top.

This isn't derogatory, but let's call a spade a spade.

I would like there to be less stigma around doing drugs. The stigma around boring ones like THC is already starting to fade. There never seemed to be any around the most commonly used drugs (nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine) in the first place, despite all of their massive harm (alcohol and the inhaled combustion byproducts involved in smoking primarily).

Pretending that hallucinogens are some special "medicine" in a different class than someone with an anxiety disorder slamming a double rye neat after work (or a double espresso beforehand, or a smoke on their lunch break) is doing neither drug user any favors.

We are all drug users.

All medicines are drugs, not all drugs are medicines. Depending on the purpose and use of a substance, pointing out that it is a drug is trivial and does not disqualify it from being a medicine.

I wasn’t necessarily talking about DMT. I was calling these plant medicine because there are interactions with the consciousness of the plant, and not just the material body of what is being ingested. As such, it is even possible to participate without ingestion. Certainly, the shaman and ceremony involved have a big impact on the experience and what is being worked on.

So yes. You want to call a “spade a spade”, and that is true from a mechanistic worldview, but it misses the point from a different worldview.

If you can "participate" in your "medicine" "without ingestion", then it ain't medicine.

Plants also don't have consciousness. Whoever told you that they do was lying to you.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00709-020-01579-w

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