Hacker News Reader

I can't help but keep rereading this. The statement "I've never done drugs" juxtaposed with "20 and 30 experiments" is kinda funny to me.

"I have been advised to let you know that I have never..."

”Doing drugs” evokes images of injecting hard drugs with all the unclean nastiness.

”Experimenting with psychedelics” is really, really far from that reality.

Which is silly because like the majority of drinkers the majority of illegal drug users aren’t like that stereotype either.

This just confirms why that image people have is completely ridiculous.

What nonsense, is it so much different really? How much experience do you people really have with drugs in america to be making such sweeping statements?

"Unclean nastiness"? And wriggling around on the floor on a big dose of LSD for 12 hours is casual clean fun? Getting psychosis from shrooms is not a big of a deal as getting hooked on heroin?

Romanticizing psychedelics is a good starting point for abuse.

Some subset of people do some subset of drugs in order to have an exciting/fun/heightened experience (e.g. cocaine on a night out to feel more confident and energised)

Some subset of people do some subset of drugs in order to settle addictive pressure (e.g. popping one’s codeine pills for the day)

Some subset of people do some subset of drugs in order to gain psychological or insight or have spiritual experience (e.g. taking psilocybin with an appropriate setting)

While the lines can be blurry, these are distinct use cases each with their own risks and considerations so they’re worth separating out.

The distinction you're making isn't the drug, it's the purpose, and you left one out: people also take drugs for medical reasons, with or without a prescription (aspirin is a drug).

For example, weed can be used for all five of those purposes. But what's the value you see in separating them?

Yep, exactly. Sure, I've left out medical reasons but principally it's not what most people have in mind when they talk about 'doing drugs' - even replacing aspirin with something psychoactive (e.g. SSRIs or anti-psychotics).

My point was in response to the parent's 'is it so much different really' question - when you insist that all varieties of reasons that people might be ingesting psychoactive substances stay under the same banner it's a fair bit harder to have a useful conversation about it.

> wriggling around on the floor on a big dose of LSD for 12 hours is casual clean fun?

Yes.

I'm going to just go ahead and inform everyone that experimenting with psychedelics is doing drugs.

I do hope to live in a world someday where informed consent is sacrosanct and legally protected; and people don't feel the need to split hairs like this.

It was clear to me he meant prior to taking the psychedelics.

Sorry, no. Drinking alcohol is "doing drugs." The imagery you're evoking is propaganda. Don't validate it.

So is drinking coffee. “Drugs” as an umbrella term is either too broad or too politicized to have much meaning without referring to specific substances. Even classing them by category can be tricky: caffeine and cocaine are both stimulants, for example.

Classifying drugs is, itself, a problem. For example, fentanyl is used in medical settings. The US has pushed an international categorizations of "no medical use" which paradoxically has prevented research into drugs that would find medical uses (research with a hypothesis that "drugs are bad," however, was allowed). We're finally seeing research into positive effects of what were once seen as recreational drugs. And that's why I dislike OC's statement about not using drugs -- it's playing to the propagandized distinction that drugs are evil (but coffee, nicotine, alcohol, thorazine and gabapentin are all fine)

Yes, exactly. According to both contemporary accounts and traditional usage, cocaine at low doses via brewed or chewed coca leaves is a an all-round better stimulant (meaning it has fewer negative side effects) than caffeine at similar dosage levels via coffee. I’d be interested in trying it. But the specter of being refined into a hard drug prevents coca leaves from being imported or even studied more thoroughly—and cocaine is schedule II with recognized medical use.

He ment before that "experiments".

precisely. I should have written "I had never" instead "I have never".

I had a strong Christian upbringing, but abandoned it at a young age. My adult life has been spent in natural sciences - research in physics, chemistry, biology.

Few years back I had my series of experiments with LSD & psilocybin. No enlightment was obtained, but one of the major realizations was that some serious psychotherapy is needed to understand and fix my warped self-image and the way of living originating from it. Been dissecting myself in a psychodynamic setting now, feel better.

I also often find myself using biblical terms in describing my actions and feelings. Sin, hell, heaven. Maybe this is some integration, maybe I watched too much Jordan Peterson videos in my dark days, heh.

One of the major takeaways is this near mystical feeling of awe about life. Having the education to understand things from the most fundamental building blocks just increases this. Protons and electrons, balls and springs, entropy maximization, phase spaces. Wiggling and docking macromolecules, interacting in the realm of low Reynolds number. Machinery using fundamental particles and photons, juggling photons, protons, and electrons to power the infinitely seeming finite complex machinery, molded by evolution. Freaking emergent properties arising from this - life, consciousness. And we have the capabilities to understand and actually fix some fundamental problems with this knowledge - eg. getting cryo-EM structures of covid spike proteins, docking millions of molecules through the computational methods created by the collaborative effort of our advanced cognitions.

This stuff was always cool, but now I look it like the most beautiful work of art, and feel the upmost priviledge to have the ability to pay my bills thinking about these things.

Was this written by GPT3?

Just by my (hopefully not fried) biological network :)

My experience is like this too. Most spirituality is kind of cornball seeking and trying too hard and missing the point to me, but I sure do find myself a lot more interested in astrophysics lately after certain experiences... Origin of life research too.

I'd say that spirituality and materialism can co-exist. There is a saying that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I'd say that any sufficiently complex blob of information about nature that you can only partially interpret is indistinguishable from spirituality. 200 ug is around the threshold after which really interesting things start to happen. I'd say that the spirituality part comes from the effect of these psychedelics: you can briefly interpret more from the things around you and it fills you with awe. It is also overwhelming, because you still can't understand most of what you're seeing and your brain struggles to make sense of it, hence the spirituality part. I'd recommend reading the "A New Kind of Science" from Stephen Wolfram, it talks a lot about our disability to fully interpret the information that's around us.

You should try going to an Orthodox Church and see how weird it is. It definitely makes you think of the spiritual meaning of things.

THC alone makes me all spiritual feeling, and often in a good way. I think psychedelics would just take me to a scary spiritual place, not a euphoric one.

Imagine how powerful it would be to be able to alter the setting so bad trips depict hell and good trips depict heaven.

Almost like they could be utilized in a way to provide a religious fervor for your adherents.

Isn't there some evidence to suggest earlier, pre-Christian European religions did sometimes make use of psychedelic substances in group rituals?

Even more fun, there's some evidence that one of the ingredients in the frankincense that was burned in the Jewish temple (at least the second temple anyway) was Marijuana

There are cave paintings, found all over the world, of humans with mushroom heads or covered in fungi fruiting bodies.

This truly doesn't work if you grew up going to an Orthodox Church as I did. I knew it was weird compared to, well, everyone else's churches and I absolutely hated that Easter was celebrated on a different day than everyone else. I hated it more when a teacher took me out in the hall to question me about it before concluding that I was too young to understand. (I was 9 and the teacher assumed I was Muslim). I do suggest the Easter service for an experience, though: It'll start late Saturday and into Sunday morning. It will be fairly crowded.

The churches can be difficult to find as well, at least in the US: It isn't unheard of for folks to travel an hour or so to their church of choice.

If you can't get to that, a gnostic mass will probably give a similar experience. It is, of course, Much more occult-theme religion, but it will keep some of the charm (possibly mixed with a bit of catholocism)

Specifically one of the old buildings where they use the most traditional music. It's quite literally trippy.

More conveniently, you could just say the words "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner" repeatedly to yourself. This prayer does things.

Repeating many other phrases "does things" too.

Any brief, reflective, perspective-shifting phrase is adequate -- there's no need to invoke any particular mythology.

Respectfully I disagree. Different phrases do different stuff. Some are outright dangerous. The above prayer is particularly healthy and helpful.

Equally respectfully, there is no contradiction in your disagreement. :)

Some phrases are more useful than others. Some have negative effects.

>The first time I did ... a very close relative to psilocybin,.... It was a 25mg-ish dose.... It was far more intense

You think? Jeebus! Terrance McKenna would call 10mg of psilocybin a heroic dose. Some of the most intense visuals I have ever seen were on 10mg of psilocybin.

So if close relative means that it requires 2.5x more, then okay, but if they are anywhere near 1:1, then that was a freaking monster dose.

25mg of 4-AcO-DMT taken orally is roughly equivalent to ~1/8th ounce of mushrooms.

Potency isn't quite as much as crystalline psilocybin (4-HO-DMT).

According to the psychonaut wiki, 25mg is the boundary between common and strong doses.

https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/4-AcO-DMT

In writing this message, I went back to my notes and see that I had taken 20mg, not 25mg, that first time.

I abbreviated my history of experiments in my original message, but I had actually had first tried a different tryptamine in a series of ramped experiments a few weeks apart. It was 4-aco-det, aka ethacetin or ethylacybin. 4mg, then 10mg, then 18mg, then 30mg. I chose that one because my reading indicated it was less intense than 4-aco-dmt. All were underwhelming, with little body load, no open eye visuals, and mild, gossamer closed eyed visuals.

When I switched to 4-aco-dmt I should have ramped as well, but the previous experiments led me to believe that I was a low responder to tryptamines, so I started at 20mg. That is when I learned my lesson to not make assumptions: always ramp with a new substance from a very low dose.

If you can ever get your hands on it -- might I recommend you give 5-MeO-MiPT a try.

There's not anything quite like it (and it's cognitively mild), either phenethylamine or tryptamine.

> it confirmed to me that the brain is all just chemistry.

Didn't it also confirm that what you perceive is not reality, but a model of reality?

I think being familiar with the basics of the standard model of physics (very basic, I don't claim to know much at all) influences one's perception of the experience induced by psychedelics. I would say that I am still more or less a materialist, though with greater appreciation for the idea of panpsychism, but really what I believe is that these ideas are not in conflict. The ephemeral, empty nature of all things is very much in line with our modern understanding of physics. The Standard Model bears surprising resemblence to certain Zen Buddhist ideas.

For me, panpsychism has never landed at all, though it is a fun idea to think about. I tend to see animals/humans as exceedingly complex (and most likely deterministic) systems, of which what we call "consciousness" is an emergent property. From that viewpoint, applying consciousness down the chain to the lower-level building blocks doesn't make a lot of sense.

You don’t have to go down the chain, you can go up, too. E.g., groups, organizations, ecosystems, etc.

It’s not that individual electrons need to be conscious. Instead, for instance, free energy minimizing systems might be conscious— and those are pervasive in the universe at large and small scale.

I feel like even that requires a pretty broad definition of consciousness that starts to diverge from what the term usually connotes. This strikes me as similar to the classic question of whether an ant hill could be considered conscious. In the end I guess a lot comes down to semantics/definitions.

Consciousness is qualia, feeing, experience. So, for instance, if the feeling of dissonance and harmony has some universal characteristic of the alignment of differences into a unified flow, then one can postulate that this characteristic may have a qualitative experience that is similarly universal in those systems where it occurs.

If you break consciousness down to its most basic element, qualia, I think it's plausible that even very simple systems might be conscious. Not conscious in the way humans or animals are conscious though. Perhaps consciousness is just something that is inherent to information states. The simplest form of consciousness might exist in a switch with an on/off position. If consciousness is indeed innate to information states, then it feels like something to be on or off. There is nothing the switch can do with this information, it's incapable of doing anything. All it can be is on or off. The switch isn't sentient, it just has a subjective experience of on or off.

At the risk of being "that other guy", psychedelic experiences come in many different categories of experience: ranging from mere distortions of our normal, subjective state of perceiving reality, to emotional processing, ego death, out of body and spiritual experiences. There is no formula for a spiritual experience, but there have been enough accounts of mystical experiences throughout human history that point to them being quite literally "spiritual" - ephemeral, outside of or interacting with this three dimensional space we inhabit in ways difficult to comprehend, a true mystery to this physical instrument through which we filter the universe.

I think it's a mistake to think we have it all figured out just because we've had an experience that either reinforces or contradicts our per-conceived notions of what constitutes reality.

From what I understand, part of the "point" of using Ayahuasca vs other methods is prolonging the experience long enough to have the ability to integrate insights... I am just going by what others have told me but something about combining the psychedelic with another drug that makes it last longer allows you to remember what you had gone through better than just a short few hour experience

Aya isn't super long lasting. A tab of acid might take you on a journey for 8 hours. Aya might be 3-4 depending on the brew.

The actual chemical is different and the way you take it (orally, by nealing in front of a shaman and drinking about a shot glass of it) has an affect on the duration and intensity (like a lot of drugs).

You can smoke dmt purified or a yagi mix and have different more intense experiences but that might only be 30 minutes.

As for integrating your thoughts, I can definitely put that down to the chemical. It's called "abuelo" by the native people because it's like your grandfather giving you advice. Mushrooms are known as the "ninos" because they're a lower level in comparison.

Understanding the sacredity of plants and developing a respect for native medicine has been a great part of my experience in South America.

I live in Latin America and I am strongly disinterested in that tourist side of things, it gives off smelly fake vibes

Have yet to have anyone indigenous try and sell me on this

I live in Latin America and I feel the same. It's important to pick your facilitator and shaman carefully. There are the yoga instructor turned shaman types that it's best to avoid.

There are also the "passing through want to try it" attendees.

However, given the power of this substance to have a positive effect on someone's life, I'm not going to build walls around it. Also, it's a very challenging experience and anyone that goes through it deserves a bit of respect.

Your brain is all chemistry but your experience is still variable. You can choose to live on matter or orient your brain on other directions.

It's said that some of these drugs can make one more social, more emotional, which imo is a better existence than other paradigms.

Psychedelics are known for amplifying existing emotions and thought patterns, the "set" in "set and setting."

Your experiment is very personal to your own mindset, and your focus on materialism likely influenced the outcomes.

I believe your experiments have confirmation bias.

Instead of doing your own controlled experiments, you should try doing ayahuasca, peyote or shrooms in their natural setting, with local people leading the way.

I bet you’ll have a completely different experience.

99% of the "local" people leading the way are just western charlatans.

By that reasoning, doesn't that mean you simply confirm the biases of the "local people leading the way" instead of your own?

I don't think the non-materialist argument is that the 'brain is not just chemistry'.

you've done drugs. the disclaimer isn't useful at this point in time until psychedelics are on par with alcohol and FDA approved substances, where those are separated from "drugs"

A survey? Nature seems intent on tarnishing their brand.