Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?

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<p>The &quot;weird&quot; ones cherry-picked in the article didn&#x27;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.

Psychedelics permanently increasing your <i>openness to experience</i> sounds true to me based on my own experiences, however not in the way that the author seems to be fearing.<p>It&#x27;s not some subtle unconscious change. It&#x27;s a conscious choice to be more open, in certain ways, based on the new insight gotten from your emotional psychedelic experience. It&#x27;s a freshened perspective on life.<p>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&#x27;t even irrational, but I&#x27;ve personally found that almost everyone has at least one irrational pet idea anyway.<p>Psychedelics could certainly amplify your own beliefs, but I&#x27;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.

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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Does constructing that type of argument ensure that I am ‘weird’ like the article suggests?<p>Maybe I ought to try some mushrooms and see what other weird ideas I’m missing out on?

clearly the author is not hip to <i>The Human Evasion</i> 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<p><pre><code> Human beings live in a state of mind called &#x27;sanity&#x27; 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 &#x27;sanity&#x27;, which is obviously a remarkable phenomenon and deserving more recognition. </code></pre> <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theabsolute.net&#x2F;minefield&#x2F;humevas.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theabsolute.net&#x2F;minefield&#x2F;humevas.html</a>

&gt; In fact he tried 1000 micrograms of it, one of the biggest doses I’ve ever heard of someone taking.<p>If this is at the threshold of your knowledge in this area, there&#x27;s a heck of a lot more to learn. This whole article, with some interesting facts about a few cherry-picked researchers, emanates naivete.

Innovators are weird to begin with. Otherwise they couldn&#x27;t resist the social pressure to be normal, get a &#x27;proper job&#x27; and so on. Living on the edge keeps their minds active and creative. Plus they expect pushback for their innovations. So they&#x27;re going to be militantly weird in some areas, maybe compensating for this by concealing their proclivities elsewhere.<p>(This makes sense if you consider that the greater part of being normal is trying hard to <i>appear</i> normal.)<p>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.<p>It follows that <i>psychedelic innovation</i> 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&#x27;s and invented PCR in the 80&#x27;s. So even if it did turn him into a crackpot, it didn&#x27;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.<p>I would then later have an LSD trip where I would &quot;trip out&quot; 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 &quot;this is all that I have become by the time of my death?&quot; 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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;d encountered in my trip were &quot;real&quot;, 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.<p>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.

While I&#x27;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&#x27;s not lunacy. But Ram Das is.<p>Here&#x27;s a thought that isn&#x27;t novel: societies dictate what&#x27;s sane and what&#x27;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 &#x27;open to experiences&#x27; 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 &#x27;open to experiences&#x27; whilst developing a healthier sense of scepticism and discernment about those experiences.

a companion post: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;05&#x2F;is-pharma-research-worse-than-chance&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;slatestarcodex.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;06&#x2F;05&#x2F;is-pharma-research-wors...</a><p><i>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.<p>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.<p>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.</i>

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&#x27;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&#x27;re wise enough to avoid dismissing our ideas just because they don&#x27;t mesh well with their culture.

I wouldn&#x27;t call Ram Dass weird, but the others certain are. Especially that &quot;amplified DNA of deceased famous people like Elvis Presley&quot; 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&#x2F;eradicated: creative thought, and pure drugs.

Because they scrambled their brains by taking too many drugs in the name of &#x27;spiritual enlightenment&#x27;. I&#x27;ve personally have friends--previously really smart rational people--who&#x27;ve gone off the deep end after taking a few too many hits of acid.<p>Psychedelics can be great and all, and though I&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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.<p>For example, I was reading an article in The Economist about food distribution in India. Back in the early 1950&#x27;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&#x27;t starve.<p>Here is where it gets weird. You&#x27;d think I was going through the archive, reading a story from the late 1950&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;t want any grandsons turning up to reclaim their grandfather&#x27;s throne. So no sex for Rhea Silvia. The God Mars helps out and soon Romulus and Remus are born to a virgin.<p>Well, shit! I&#x27;d always imagined that when Christianity was getting popular in 300 A.D. it was a case of &quot;virgin birth, wow, like man, that is so totally amazing, nothing like that ever happened before. That is sooo cool, count me in, I&#x27;m a believer!&quot;. Now I&#x27;ve learned a little more history. The Christian Virgin birth is looking like a me-too story. &quot;Our hero-founder was also born of a virgin, so there :-P&quot;. Let&#x27;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.)<p>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%.<p>I&#x27;m feeling really proud of myself for providing three examples of cozy-weird. If you think about it, I shouldn&#x27;t be able to give any examples of cozy-weird at all. I say &quot;X is cozy-weird&quot; and every-one dog piles on top of me insisting that X is normal and every-one agrees that X is normal :-)<p>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<p><pre><code> weird(2) = out-there-weird(3) normal(2) = solid-normal(3) union cozy-weird(3) </code></pre> 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.<p>SSC asks &quot;Why were Early Psychedelicists so out-there-weird(3)?&quot; (my translation).<p>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?<p>The previous paragraph ends with a hanging question. I&#x27;ve no idea whether the early psychedelicists had any success with seeing the strangeness of the cozy-weird. Time for a case split.<p>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&#x27;t work, then it is time to try something else.<p>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.