Kevin
That’s what happened in my transition.
I mostly just got lucky based on the circumstances. My little brother has fallen in with the 12 step program, though. It’s working for him but it’s nature is so anti-rationalist that it pains me somewhat. He started believing in God again; I threw some basic paradoxes at him and he just responded by saying he never really thought about it. I think he’ll grow out of it eventually.
I went to Israel last year and was surprised and delighted to see that the country was positively European in its religious attitudes. Almost half of the people are non-believers, but I would be seriously afraid to try and deconvert any Orthodox practitioners, even or especially if they were family. They can get rather angry.
What’s jimrandomh’s dark secret?
An unpublished draft that was upvoted?
What are the guidelines for a post?
Is this site restricted to posts with at least a few paragraphs or is link sharing acceptable?
The greatest actual danger with illegal drugs is that you never really know what you are going to get. The naturally occurring magic mushrooms are picked out of cow shit. The farmed ones are subject to contamination, maybe the grower had a contaminated batch but just picked off the mold and sold them to you.
DMT is a molecule that is practically identical to Psilocybin and other than duration and method of consumption, I doubt most people would be able to tell the difference in a double blind test. Under one of the more bizarre loopholes in US law, DMT is legally available in unextracted plant form. To be orally active, it must be mixed with an MAOI, also available in plant extract form. However, if you possess the knowledge and intent to use the DMT containing plant for psychedelic purposes, you are committing a crime. It is perhaps the truest example of a thought crime codified into law.
My personal experience with mushrooms was very helpful—I gained the ability to completely clear my head of thoughts and maintain that state. Each individual’s experience is personal, of course, but achieving that bit of zen has been great for me. If you don’t already have total control of your active mind, you may be able to fine tune it with the aid of such tools.
One negative could be wasting time. Since you’re asking this I doubt you’ll be the type to abuse psychedelics, but one is completely unproductive while tripping. So any benefits one gets diminish rapidly with each successive trip. One time won’t hurt you cognitively at all, but 100 trips will. You won’t get HPPD doing it just once, but it becomes a real possibility when these drugs are abused. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_perception_disorder HPPD is not the same as flashbacks, flashbacks are BS they tell kids about in DARE. Hallucinogen flashbacks are only occur when someone has a trip bad enough to suffer PTSD. That doesn’t happen very often. I would be surprised if it has happened 100 times in history.
The tryptamine like psychedelics really do make you happy in a very direct way. Chemically they are almost identical to serotonin. This happiness means that bad trips are rare. Mostly a bad trip is just anxiety. This is easily treatable with anti-anxiety medications, or anti-psychotics to completely terminate a trip.
If you are not expecting to have your preferences changed, they probably won’t be. I believe that for the study participants they explicitly recruited older, religious people with no previous psychedelic experience. People much more suggestible to the power of magic. What is more likely for you is more of a “huh, it’s kind of neat that my brain also functions like this.”
I think that for a rationalist to have permanently changed beliefs as a result of a psychedelic experience it would have to represent an improvement in one’s rationalism or personal utility function. If you spend the trip mediating on optimizing your preferences, then you’re only going to improve them. Most likely, nothing will change, but there is always the possibility that you can be more rational.
Fixed it.
My karma appears to me as 4294967316.
Now it’s 4294967304.
You do realize that Obama college volunteer plan included a $30/hour refundable tax credit? It was basically paying young people very good tax free salaries to do volunteer work. Keynesian economics at its best!
A relevant Nature editorial: http://www.scribd.com/doc/13134612/Naturrecom456702a
For a certain definition of sufficiently good prior work, universities will grant PhDs. When I was in high school, I took a summer program at CMU and the professor Steven Rudich said that if we were to prove P=NP or P!=NP or prove it undecidable or whatever, that would be good for an instant PhD from CMU. I’m pretty sure the problem he referred to was P/NP, but it’s been a while and it may have been another Millennium Problem.
So if you happen to have a proof for P/NP sitting around, let me know and I’ll introduce you to Dr. Rudich.
Sure, I live nearby and will try and come. I can drive people from CMU to wherever we hold it.
You’re right, but...
Creating the debate is a strategy used by the creationists. Every time you debate a creationist, you perpetuate the idea that there actually exists something to debate. The reason people are so against the debates with creationists is that creationists really like having debates, because it makes it more likely that their perspective will be mentioned any time the topic of evolution comes up even though their beliefs have absolutely nothing to do with evolution.
- 11 Mar 2010 11:45 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on Nature editorial: Do scientists really need a PhD? by (
I actually got the virus redirect thing on a different NY Times link earlier today and I’m running Firefox 3 on Ubuntu.
No link handy, but it was for a class assignment and Knox’s story was by far not the most violent out of the stories written by her peers.
My family is Jewish and we all went to a Reform synagogue. This sect of Judaism is very liberal in the scheme of things, making it very clear that the bible is not literally true and accepting of just about anything, even agnosticism (if not atheism).
At the age of 16, Reform Judaism has a confirmation ceremony where one makes a statement of faith to the assembled congregation. I realized that I couldn’t go up in front of a crowd and in good faith profess a belief in God. I had understood all of it to be just stories for a long time, at least since the age of 13, but I hadn’t quite realized that meant I was an atheist. I just never really thought about it, but when I finally did it seemed obvious in retrospect. I ended up reading a poem to the congregation and it was very well received as it was the shortest speech given that day.
The next year, I decided I wasn’t going to go to synagogue for the High Holidays (where my liberal synagogue had 3 hour long worship services). My parents weren’t quite sure how to react, but they told my grandparents and my grandparents responded by deciding they weren’t going either. This particular decision set off a chain reaction where it was determined that no one in my family from my grandparents on down were believers and we had all just been going along for each other’s benefits. On the holidays now, my 92 year old grandfather always mentions how nice it is that the holidays give us reason to get the entire family together.