Herbal Remedies

[catalog]

Was thinking about this coastline brain dha thing. The sea would obviously be very psychedelic. Of course thed breathing issue so there's that immediate stress. But all other senses as well, hearing and sight totally distorted.

 

[constant escape]

Yeah thanks @146 I.Q. Magical thinker for that video. Much I couldn't grasp, but it did manage to connect some critical dots for me.

 

[WashYourHands]

@WashYourHands - I don't think anyone but the daftest of hippies seriously suggests that psilocybin can reconfigure DNA. As I understand it, Stoned Ape posits that some, but not all, of our hominid ancestors had a genetic predisposition to somehow benefiting from the effects of psychoactive plants and fungi. I mean benefiting in the sense of it conferring some concrete advantage to survival or reproduction. Then this predisposition would have been positively selected for.

Whatever this advantage was, it must have been pretty substantial to outweigh the fact that a proto-person stumbling around prehistoric Africa in an ecstatic trance would have been easy meat for a leopard or crocodile. You can say that that's rather a tall tale, but it's somewhat less silly than mushrooms directly genetically engineering humans.

The chronological relationship between humans, foraged foods and more complex brain function is already established. Recognising the relationship between human and fungi is different, due to their category as both a food source and a psychic tool. It takes an already established frontal cortex to recognise such resources.

A tool is different to a salt lick.

 

[constant escape]

Not that I know anything really about the chemistry of psilocybin, but is it really out of the realm of possibilities that such molecules have some epigenetic impact? Shrooms busting the central dogma would work out rather poetically.

 

[WashYourHands]

Proof. Conjecture is fun, don’t get me wrong, but McKenna also thought he could pull an geometric object out from a psychedelic experience into a post-trip world. An actual physical birth across dimensions. And people laugh at the Dead.

 

[constant escape]

No I totally agree about proof, and I gather psychedelic research is gradually becoming accepted by more and more of science. Could just be wishful thinking though.

But regarding any prospective pharmacology that exploits this or that mechanism that sends information upstream the DNA>RNA>Protein river, it just doesn;t seem impossible. I'd be more surprised if no ground has been gained on that front.

And how would such things be distinguished from eugenics? Fine lines, surely.

 

[constant escape]

Hacking virions equipped with some kind of reverse polymerase, or just the proper toolbox of enzymes? I mean I'm still at the base of the palace and already the possibilities shine through.

Don't know about the state of the art here, or how wildly expensive such a genetechnics would be.

Whether or not any of this overlaps with this or that psychedelic molecule, I've no idea.

 

[luka]

Proof. Conjecture is fun, don’t get me wrong, but McKenna also thought he could pull an geometric object out from a psychedelic experience into a post-trip world. An actual physical birth across dimensions. And people laugh at the Dead.

Eh! That's a briilliant idea!

 

[haji]

Proof. Conjecture is fun, don’t get me wrong, but McKenna also thought he could pull an geometric object out from a psychedelic experience into a post-trip world. An actual physical birth across dimensions. And people laugh at the Dead.

Proof is overrated though, a thing can be true without being provable, isnt it?

 

[luka]

proof is an absurd idea. Utterly unworkable. Clearly ridiculous.

 

[version]

You can't handle the proof.

 

[constant escape]

Science is hyperdiscerning. An undeniable excess of proof. But yeah I;m with you @sufi not all truth is confined to proof.

 

[WashYourHands]

I’m not ruling out mushrooms influencing human systems or individuals, or ritual use across millennia, but evidence isn’t there yet of a direct influence on brain evolution or genetics. It’s a fairly focused point.

 

[haji]

I’m not ruling out mushrooms influencing human systems or individuals, or ritual use across millennia, but evidence isn’t there yet of a direct influence on brain evolution or genetics. It’s a fairly focused point.

what evidence could exist?

 

[luka]

None. That's the great thing about the distant past. You can make up any old nonsense. It's the broadest canvas for the imagination to work on, well, that and the distant future

 

[haji]

@version is getting an idea for a thread

 

[haji]

None. That's the great thing about the distant past. You can make up any old nonsense. It's the broadest canvas for the imagination to work on, well, that and the distant future

i think this goes for most of science tbh. distant past, distant cosmos, very big or small things, science is attenuated beyond usefulness into guesswork in every direction

 

[haji]

and blinded to its own shortcomings

 

[haji]

but that's nothing much to do particularly with mushrooms or herbalisms, as much as general resentment of scientificalism

 

[WashYourHands]

@sufi The anthropology of traumatic healing processes involving psychedelics, representing whole cultures and single individuals, macro and micro.

Better resolutions of analysis could show the amygdala changing from a system at an acute state of alert to less cortisol and glucose produced, possibly at a genetic level.

That would tweak it beyond a personality degree of openness, which is itself open to anecdote, more to a DNA sequence of mapped change. How the geneticists do this is beyond my knowing.