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Comment by mikepurvis | Hacker News Reader

But humans have been getting exercise for millions of years. It’s hardly comparable to taking a lab-created compound.

If by "lab" you mean the planet through millions of years of evolution, then yes, psilocybin is a lab-created compound.

Pretty much anything you do alters your brain. The five senses, what's put in your body, how you move your body, the thoughts you have. Though doing a larger dose of psychedelics definitely does a lot more rewiring at once and should be done with extreme caution and making sure schizophrenia/psychosis doesn't run in the family.

Humans as we are are only about 300 thousand years old, we haven’t been doing anything for millions of years.

Animals though have been seeking out mind altering substances for all we can determine, for as long as there were mind altering substances.

The oldest human religions used and still use mild altering substances, it is Christianity which is weird for shunning them (and most of where the abstinence drive comes from) and it was mostly xenophobia targeted against non Christians.

Psilocybin is often just taken by eating mushrooms, when it isn’t, a little isolation and purification doesn’t make much difference.

Psilocybin is a natural compound that has been used since recorded history.

Boy I have news for you about how long hominids have potentially been ingesting this particular compound

Psilocybin is not lab-created. It's the active ingredient in magic mushrooms.

Humans have been consuming psilocybin for 10k+ years

It’s not lab created. It’s entirely natural.

It's a random organism. While in itself it's natural, nothing about ingesting it by humans is natural.

Everything we consume is some random organism.

My point exactly. Nothing is natural for humans except for perhaps some tree fruits from Africa.

So saying "it's natural" is bs.

You have canine teeth for eating meat instead of tree fruits. Your body can also extract nutrients from this fungus versus merely passing it like if you ate some wood or something else entirely non-nutritious. You might be one of those people who are able to process lactose effectively. None of these things are unnatural to our species if we have natural mutations in our population that confer these adaptions.

> You have canine teeth for eating meat instead of tree fruits.

Probably not cows and pigs though. Maybe sobe birds. Maybe monkeys. Raw. Also no significant natural resistance to salmonella.

I'm sure I have exactly as much genetic adaptations to eating psylocybin mushrooms as I have for eating death caps.

Human consumption of a naturally occurring mushroom (food) that happens to contain psilocybin is absolutely a natural occurrence and as a result has a history of human consumption older than wine.

> Human consumption of a naturally occurring mushroom (food) that happens to contain psilocybin is absolutely a natural occurrence

Same could be said about death cap mushrooms. Something being natural or even being occasionally ingested doesn't make it any better. Natural, occasionally ingested organisms can kill you on the spot.

Except psilocybin-containing mushrooms are edible, death caps are not.

Edible just means it doesn't kill you immediately at doses you can fit in your stomach.

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