Drugs are cool!

That’s a sad truth. In mainstream culture whether you take drugs is mostly regarded as a lifestyle choice. The use is attuning your personality for how it appears to yourself and others. In this function drug use acts as a socialization agent which eases connecting to foreigners and can provoke recognition or even respect among peers.

Tobacco as an example probably derives most appeal from this within western culture. It suggests to perceive you as more exciting, rough, adventurous, or classy. You can see such traits as the predominate message in most cigarette advertisements. Hence this can also be considered a big factor for psychological drug addiction in general. If you feel like you can’t stop smoking, your ego might be struggling with the fear of losing one of its strong building blocks. From there it also becomes obvious why the risk of addiction is so much higher during adolescence.

I can’t pretend that I’m above those silly games. I’d very much like to be. But things like that are hard to escape, especially when a lot of people keep reflecting an image that arises out of expectations coming from such ideas. But I assume it to be among the most limiting factors that hinders powerful tools to unfold their true potential to the evolution of human existence.

But since this world is ruled by more logic based entities there is not much interest in such thing. Hence the widespread prohibition1 of any psychoactive with high potential for insightful experience and hence the common image of drug use as merely some sort of rebellious act. But if even the users tend to2 tint their self-perceived reasons with this image then there is not much benefits to reap for anyone.

Being against something is a rather poor reason for indulging in psychotropics. A much better incentive would be to tap into these foreign realms with the desire of gaining invaluable insights for spiritual growth. Personally and collectively.

Plea for the sane mind

It has been said a million times. It may take another billion times to achieve any kind of significant change. But it will be repeated and rephrased over and over again for all the closed minded people that keep swallowing and repeating the twisted insanity that has manifested all around us. If even a single one of those persons can be inspired to rethink these issues it was worth the effort.

Drugs are not a problem because they exist, but because they aren’t allowed to exist.<(Which is completely ridiculous, by the way.)>
I think that first and foremost everyone is responsible for themselves. No person, no authority or state or any kind of entity has the right to dictate and judge what you do, as long as – and this is the important part – you don’t pose any kind of negative influence on your environment.

Some argue that a drug addict harms the general public, because taking drugs prevents you from being a contributing part of society. They have it all backwards. In many social situations an addiction can be the very thing that enables people to remain a functional member of society. And based on my observations and life experience I think this holds true for the majority.

Nobody can tell you what is good or bad for you. Forget about it. I am convinced that you are in fact the only person that is able to find out what is best for you. To think that you can protect people from themselves by disallowing them to indulge in activities that you assume are not beneficial to them is so utterly fucking stupid that I honestly feel mentally disturbed to be part of a species where ideas like that can be sustained for such prolonged periods of time.

It is an unfathomable injustice that people addicted to the internet, social networks, games, porn, work, drugs that are not illegal or any other kind of tolerated dependency are accepted as proper members of society, while a person that requires heroin to deal with life is faced with criminal charges. Those persons generally tend to have had more than enough hardship in their lives as is already. If you constantly need to hide and run away from the very establishment that prosecutes you for the way you can actually cope with it, then ending in complete desolation and misery is the only logical result.

Some people tell me that I have a negative view of the world. I’d like to tell them, how the fuck can you uphold a positive view if there are things so evidently fucked up and so few people seem to care? These kind of problems don’t get solved by looking the other way. I like to believe that there actually is such a thing as constructive negativism.

I think that many aspects of this world get shaped by people that are addicted to power. Naturally they create a system that is beneficial to their needs. However, it most certainly is not the best way of life for everybody.

A possibly entirely irrelevant thought experiment

What if we could emulate Darwinist evolution in a digital environment?
The methodology of evolution in this theory can arguably be broken down to merely two basic principles: Change is brought by chance, random mixture and mutation of the information contained within the genotype, followed by a process of selection causing the more successful changes to persist while sorting out the others. This in turn leads to the impression of a directed development, which it actually is, but in an indirect way.

Now couldn’t we take those two principles and build them into a virtual system? For real randomness an external source can be used, e.g. a radioactive compound. How the data is modeled, how mutations can be applied to it and how the selection process needs to be designed are more tricky questions, directly related to the goal, that should be achieved. They determine the characteristics of the simulation.
Each iteration yields a new generation of data on which the process is recursively reapplied until infinity, or until the expected improvements of each new generation fall below a defined threshold, which means the data has reached the desired quality.

For sake of simplicity let’s explain this with a very basic example: Think of a chess problem, white wins with a certain number of moves. Let’s assume we are playing against a perfect opponent that makes no mistakes.
We start by randomly picking one of the available legal chess moves in each turn, creating a chain of moves until the end of the game. Doing this will most likely result in very dumb “play” and defeat. We then create numerous offspring from our parent data by randomly replacing any of the moves with others, and then evaluate the results as well as the parent. If all move chains cause us to lose the game, we take the data where we lasted the most number of moves before checkmate as a new parent, mutate, evaluate, and so on.
Eventually one of the move chains will lead to our opponents kings demise. All loser chains can now be discarded, as we have basically reached a new genus, the winning chain. Now we reverse the comparison and look for the chain with the shortest amount of moves to checkmate. At some point we will get an optimal solution to the problem. Further randomization won’t bring any improvements and will therefore be discarded.

Of course this example is not very useful, because we usually already know the solution to this kind of problem and even if not, we could utilize that “perfect opponent” to calculate our winning strategy. On top of that, it will perform poorly because the design is rather bad. However much more complex implementations of other problems with unknown outcomes shouldn’t be impossible to engineer.
In theory the concept could be taken one step further by taking completely random input data, and simply run it on the machine to test if it makes any kind of sense. This would require strong encapsulation and solid error handling of the runtime environment, otherwise the behavior would be completely unpredictable which usually translates to an instant crash. And for evaluation a highly sophisticated system would be required that, depending on the semantics of “making sense”, may lie beyond the capabilities of software architecture.

Now with this concept we just constructed, we can make some interesting observations:
The data structures reside inside their own confined system, which itself is subordinate to our world and incorporates a subset of our world’s rules. In other words, the awareness scope of the data is confined to the boundaries of the system it is contained in. The only possible connection to the higher world is through projection from sensory peripherals connected to the machine. Yet, while unable to become aware of it, the data models do exist in our world as well, are observable for us and do usually serve a higher purpose for this external world.

I guess by now you are aware of the parallels I am drawing here. It’s a very rough and incomplete concept but in my opinion it poses an interesting approach to ponder about the fabric of reality and where we stand in the greater cosmic everything.
It also provides a typical argument for the existence of (a) god. While it might be statistically possible for such a system to spontaneously pop into existence, it still seems just extremely implausible. As an agnostic this actually makes me believe it to be more likely that some kind of higher level entity has enabled our existence. But where is this leading? Would that entity be put into place by yet another superordinate force? And there are still other ways to think about this, like if we were to assume that absolutely every possibility actually exists, well, we’d also have to.

In any case, what also can be derived from this is yet another suggestion why there are things that we just don’t understand and maybe never will.
But rest assured that we won’t ever stop trying :]

Why I love mushrooms

Because they make you free.
Free of fabricated believe systems posed on you by civilization madness of every day.
Free of the thought that your quality of life depends on how well you fit into the game of social alignment and your reputation with those playing that game more successfully.

That is the reason why people are so afraid of psychedelics.
They don’t want to be free, because being free for once could make them realize how much they are trapped in their own little self constructed world.

I want to be free. But I can’t do it on my own, because my mind has been programmed by my perceptions of the society around me. All my life I’ve been subliminally taught what one should or should not do, what’s desirable, what’s the right path to a proper life. No one ever told me it was all a huge pile of shit.
That’s the real cancer. We are chasing the wrong ideals, brown-nosing our superiors that are even more fixated on their hunt for this ill defined success.

Mushrooms can help breaking down those mental structures to shake off the cognitive cage we all life in. In my own little believe system, getting rid of this mental obfuscation leads to the most blissful and profound state that any human being can ever experience.
It leads to the basic essence, the truth.

The truth has no meaning.
The truth yields no answers, because there are no questions.
The truth simply is.