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Nick Sand, Orange Sunshine LSD chemist, has died (psymposia.com)
285 points by Alex3917 on April 27, 2017 | hide | past | favorite | 82 comments



Beautiful quote from him in the article:

When I began to navigate psychospace with LSD, I realized that before we were conscious, seemingly self-propelled human beings, many tapes and corridors had been created in our minds and reflexes which were not of our own making. These patterns and tapes laid down in our consciousness are walled off from each other. I see it as a vast labyrinth with high walls sealing off the many directives created by our personal history.

Many of these directives are contradictory. The coexistence of these contradictory programs is what we call inner conflict. This conflict causes us to constantly check ourselves while we are caught in the opposition of polarity. Another metaphor would be like a computer with many programs running simultaneously. The more programs that are running, the slower the computer functions. This is a problem then. With all the programs running that are demanded of our consciousness in this modern world, we have problems finding deep integration.

To complicate matters, the programs are reinforced by fear. Fear separates, love integrates. We find ourselves drawn to love and unity, but afraid to make the leap.

What I found to be the genius of LSD is that it really gets you high, higher than the programs, higher than the walls that mask and blind one to the energy destroying presence of many contradictory but hidden programs. When LSD is used intentionally it enables you to see all the tracks laid down, to explore each one intensely. It also allows you to see the many parallel and redundant programs as well as the contradictory ones.

It allows you to see the underlying unity of all opposites in the magic play of existence. This allows you to edit these programs and recreate superior programs that give you the insight to shake loose the restrictions and conflicts programmed into each one of us by our parents, our religion, our early education, and by society as a whole.

---

Very much in line with what recent neuroscience results are finding:

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46421

http://www.nature.com/news/brain-scans-reveal-how-lsd-affect...


Surprisingly similar to what Lilly wrote in 1968: "PROGRAMMING AND METAPROGAMMING IN THE HUMAN BIOCOMPUTER" [0]

A very good book, even though you should not take it literally, quote from the preface:

Eventually the cerebral cortex appeared as an expanding new highlevel computer controlling the structurally lower levels of the nervous system, the lower builtin programs. For the first time learning and its faster adaptation to a rapidly changing environment began to appear. Further, as this new cortex expanded over several millions of years, a critical size cortex was reached. At this level of structure, a new capability emerged: learning to learn.

[0]: http://nekhbet.leary.csoft.net/biocomputer.pdf

Edit (further context):

To avoid the necessity of repeating learning to learn, symbols, metaphors, models each time, I symbolize the under- lying idea in these operations as metaprogramming. Metaprogramming appears at a critical cortical size-the cerebral computer must have a large enough number of interconnected circuits of sufficient quality for the operations of meta- programming to exist in that biocomputer. Essentially, metaprogramming is an operation in which a central control system controls hundreds of thousands of programs operating in parallel simultaneously.


This is the best book to read on LSD. Only a little bit though otherwise your pupils will dilate too much to read. Obviously.


The one you really need to read by him is "The Center of the Cyclone" ;) It is truly, truly incredible. This guy was a real-deal scientist.

I first discovered him through reading this https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/the-ketamine-secrets-of-s... and then went on to read every one of his books except for his last, which I want to save for the right time. This guy has had a profound effect on my life and I cant recommend his work highly enough.


Thanks for the recommendation! I like 'The Biocomputer' but I find it over the top, hope this one's a bit more sober.


I already need readers, so putting on my visor magnifiers will probably do the trick!


The Psychedelic Salon podcast has a few of his talks. He was insanely smart and well-spoken:

https://psychedelicsalon.com/category/people/nick-sand/

Especially interesting is episode 054, where IIRC he talks about how all the high-level LSD producers and distributors he was in prison with were the children of the folks who worked on the Manhattan project.


That's a truly well-put quote... its so easy to 'see' having done LSD a lot. I'm still it's sure hard to even come 1% of grasping it if you've never experienced though.


> I'm still it's sure hard to even come 1% of grasping it if you've never experienced though.

I'm not sure about that. I've done my fair share of LSD some years ago, but to me (to lift a simile from somebody else), it's a bit like a program's coredump. All the information is there, sure, less pre-categorized / pre-filtered, but it's not exactly guiding, so to speak. You're left on your own in a forest. Not always, and doesn't have to be like that, but I've seen diminishing returns after a while (meaning, it definitely does give you something the first time; and perhaps several more - when you can focus on thoughts and the world in a calmer way). The latter may not even be the case for some people, maybe, but I definitely think there is an overall "floor" in regards to the "depth" you can reach. Let me compare and contrast.

This may sound cheesy, but the quoted text above reminds me very much of Kant and the approach he had laid out in his Critique of Pure Reason, which I very much recommend and had the pleasure to (to a most definitely quite limited degree) grok, partly. (I think it's quite possible to just take it and read it - some guidance would definitely help - but in itself, it's very organized and (when he's not contradicting himself, which (under some interpretations) does happen) almost pedagogical at times. Familiarity with (especially) Hume and (perhaps) Leibniz, et al. would help, but I think there's value to be extraced by reading it just like that.)

In epistemology ("how do we come to know things, and what kinds of things can we know?"), Kant was all about the "Kantian filter/net" - the "raw experience" / sense data we get is not actually raw; not only is it filtered just by virtue of us having specific perceptual sense, but there appears to be structure in the very experience we get (for him, this was (first and foremost) spatial, temporal and causal structure; in addition to this, we have an arsenal of Kantian categories, which are something that all objects we get to experience have, our perception applying the former to the latter involuntarily and preemptively; Kantian categories are (so to speak) "conditions of the possibility of objects in the first place"). Kant goes into detail about this, attempting to deduce them and the associated "judgments" (we judge whenever we understand things, for him), and so on. His whole project does a reversal of the "how can we know laws of the world?" inductive approach done by Hume et al.; it's not observed temporal sequences -> causal relations between events -> aha! - general causal principle. Kant instead reverses the "direction" and shows how you inevitably have to have a general causal principle if you are to have any experience whatsoever (this is explain in part in his Second Analogy, for anyone interested). Thus it is that even though we cannot know how things in the world are "in themselves", we know things about our experience - their conditions. Consider a fish: a "normal" thinking fish would just think that all its world is water. But a Kantian fish would deduce that even though it does not know what the world "out there" truly is, whether it's water, not-water-deceiving-as-water, or a mixture - it can know something - namely: whatever it comes to experience, the experience itself is aquatic so to speak, having to come "through water". Kant applies this general approach to a number of things, going in detail about the "filters" and about what they tell us about the world, and how this can be used to revive metaphysics (which aims to know what things exist in the world a priori (known not empirically); no, we cannot know this, in a sense; but we can pin down the conditions of human experience, at the very least; these conditions will be a priori).

This kind of stuff was (in a way) quite more powerful than the "knowledge" from LSD. LSD is good for other things, and it can "bootstrap" your drive for knowledge (maybe), and give you initial insights. But for me, I prefer a debugger-symbols-loaded REPL vs. investigation of a binary coredump ;) (that said, I'll want to have a trip again some day just to compare).


Thank you for this!


"Another metaphor would be like a computer with many programs running simultaneously. The more programs that are running, the slower the computer functions. This is a problem then. With all the programs running that are demanded of our consciousness in this modern world, we have problems finding deep integration."

I find this part disturbing if he sees the different programs as competing viewpoints and wishes to enforce a "deep integration" by limiting the possible viewpoints to a single one. I see a mind that is in constant contradiction and disagreement as the only way to prevent a person from becoming a zealot of any particular viewpoint.


That's been my experience for sure. Found the underlying unity of all things and how duality is the root of all of the world's problems, man vs. nature, race, gender, class.


That's not a beautiful quote, it's incoherent nonsense. You're reading bones, mystic brute.


Your responses smack of an angry, small person looking to pick a fight from what you think is a position of superiority(not engaging in drug use). If you could actually explain what is wrong with the above quote, that'd be magnitudes more useful than this and your other screed elsewhere in the thread.


This is classic troll behavior.


Sure I'm classic, but a troll? Sorry, I don't think so.


Well then, you have a problem, because you're a troll who doesn't know what they are ;)


Oh my, what's the cure, doctor?


I couldn't care less.


I'm easily in the 99th percentile for physical strength, and anger is last in my repertoire of rich emotions. I'd say a peaceful, focused calm is probably number one.


"Small" doesn't have anything to do with physical stuff, bro.

Edit: English isn't even my first language, and I got that. If you're so bloody smart, how come you took the comment so literally?


Someone missed a subtlety, but I'm not sure it was him.


OK, I "missed a subtlety", you intimate. Only one comes to mind: His website, and all of his posts here, are fictional, an over-the-top parody of a terminally vain fool. But if that's the case, he's just trolling here, which is disruptive and sociopathic.


Care to explain?


I'm pretty sure Nick Sand's arrest in 1996 was the cause of the sudden scarcity of LSD on the market 20 years ago. According to Erowid ( https://erowid.org/culture/characters/sand_nick/sand_nick_bi... ), the RCMP tested samples from his lab and found their purity to be >100%, suggesting that their reference samples had degraded.


"According to court testimony, Pickard's lab produced up to a kilogram of LSD approximately every five weeks for short periods. Despite criticism for their methodology, the DEA contends that following their arrest there was a 95% drop in the availability of LSD in the US in the two years following the arrest.[1] Pickard himself has long denied these claims. In his 2007 paper "International LSD Prevalence — Factors Affecting Proliferation and Control", Pickard suggests that since the 1960s LSD production has always been de-centralized. As to a turn-of-the-century decline in availability due to his own arrest, Pickard highlights the fact that LSD availability had been on the decline since 1996, a fact which he correlates in part with the exponential growth of availability and demand for MDMA and other hallucinogenic drugs.[8] The actual quantity of LSD seized by the DEA remains unclear, with figures ranging from 198.9 grams to 41.3 kilograms."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Leonard_Pickard


Orange Sunshine (the recent documentary) was absolutely excellent. a++ http://www.orangesunshinemovie.com/


Glad to know it's actually worth watching. I really wanted a print of their movie poster, but for whatever reason they only made them in 11 x 17: http://belhistory.weebly.com/uploads/1/9/0/7/19079917/158004...


These people arguably changed the world. Early psychonauts and LSD use are tied to the beginnings of the electronic frontier foundation, and the concept of an open information space and an alternative reality for all of humanity to use freely. There is a documentary which shows in interviews that these ideals were at least partially inspired by LSD use.

I hope someday to conquer my anxiety to a degree sufficient to explore beneficial LSD use without fear of so called bad trips. Having tried a small dose, there is without question a power in LSD (and other psychedelics, e.g. shrooms) as a tool.


Bad experiences give light to possibly unrecognized problems. As someone who likes using psychedelics, nothing has pushed me more into good experiences and away from bad ones than having a good understanding of the arising and ceasing of mental phenomena as taught in buddhist teachings of meditation. Whats so scary about bad thoughts if you have a place where they arent there?


I fear that a particularly difficult experience could leave me with a permanent worsening of some problems.

I recognize that this is an unlikely case, however during my light trip I experienced a seemingly inexplicable sudden anxiety attack which was difficult to control. I feel like LSD is a toss up between potential euphoria/enlightment and dysphoria/mental illness.

Granted, I did experience a substantial tranquility following the attack and in the days after the trip, and I believe that cubensis provided me with a substantial months long relief from existential depression, and helped me realize the depth of the hole into which I was already aware that I'd fallen. So I probably just have a few self imposed walls to break down.


I can understand where you are coming from. I can always feel the anxiety coming back when I've taken them, and can see how that would make folks uncomfortable. I've a friend that won't take them because of this, in fact.

For me, having taken more psychedelics than one would like to admit, it just mellowed out over time. Those walls broke down some and i got more comfortable with that bit of myself. And oh, the depression lifting has been a real effect for me as well. Of course, mine didn't reach anxiety attack level either, and I think that would have scared me off.


'I hope someday to conquer my anxiety to a degree sufficient to explore beneficial LSD use without fear of so called bad trips.'

I wouldn't risk it. I suffered an acute psychotic episode, induced by LSD, that lasted for three days. I had to be hospitalized. It wasn't a nice experience for my family and friends. It was competely unexpected, I'd used psychedelics before with no ill effect, and have no mental health issues.

We don't fully understand the mechanism by which psychedelic drugs work, and so cannot guarantee a safe way to use them.


>there is a documentary

What's the title?


hypernormalization, i think - it's quite a saga of a documentary


Ah yes, that's the one. I was hoping someone would remember, as I could not.


> The mother of his godson Aidan remarked, "Nick didn't care about the stupid politics shit, he'd just laugh at it." Jon Hanna said Nick "became a criminal as a matter of principle and as an act of civil disobedience."

https://youtu.be/_Wy0k3j_a7E

[Note: that's actually him (Nick Sand) in the video clip above.]


“We got the whole prison stoned, this is what freedom is really about. It’s not about not being in chains, it’s about not having your mind enslaved,” Nick declared.


I like how the narrator emphasizes billion like he didn't just say "1/4 billion". I guess "250 million" doesn't have the same level of shock value.


There's a recent documentary about his... entrepreneurship called The Sunshine Makers. I'd recommend it. It's on US Netflix.


There's another one called Orange Sunshine also that just came out. I haven't seen either, but they both get 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.


Speaking as a meditation enthusiast, he probably did more to expand human consciousness than a thousand meditation enthusiasts.


I'm curious, have you ever combined meditation with psychoactive substances?

I've found that marijuana and amphetamines both make it substantially easier for me to meditate and calm my mind. I'm not particularly experienced though- just a handful of times a month for a few years...


I'd recommend combining microdosing (10 micrograms) with meditation. It can subtly take you to another level. It doesn't however render the "pure" meditation experience inferior.


And I recommend higher doses. But be familiar with both.


Oh I didn't intend to exclude those. I absolutely agree - 150 micrograms (and up, for experienced users) can absolutely have life transforming effects, if used with the right attitude and careful preparation.


ya, I have.


Great interview of Nick Sand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxiK827_rX8

parting words: "If we can keep moving from truth to love to beauty to preciousness, everything around us becomes sacred"


What was he trying to encourage with those words, exactly? Give up on reality and at the same time somehow force yourself to care deeply about things? Didn't humanity throw out this garbage philosophy thousands of years ago? Or is this instead some strange drug-fueled process I'm not meant to reason about but only experience?


Are the rest of you just too polite to knock a soul only looking for a saviour? Why are these comments exclusively basket-cases fawning over the 'world-changing' meditative power of an objectively useless and destructive drug?

I'll preempt the obvious response. Yeah, it doesn't kill you, but it irreparably alters your personality in a completely senseless way, turns you into Tim Leary, or someotherway spits in the face of the delicate and exhaustingly intentional intellectual and emotional process that has produced every genuine, valuable human insight in history. I haven't encountered a single LSD advocate that wasn't conspicuously unstable and self-hating, and we don't say a word when they encourage others to risk everything that matters to a functional person in exchange for fake spiritual nonsense.

Now they'll suggest I take some to free myself from the confines of the emotional equipment that grounds any reasonable value system. As an exercise, read the responses carefully. For nothing, they've bargained away their ability to argue this point with me, and they want me to join the club.

edit: As anticipated, this comment is unpopular. However, no one has yet attempted to articulate a criticism. I welcome any effort, and will try to respond with care.


It's a pretty late hour here in the USA (where I expect most would-be respondents are living), and yet you followup with a smug edit, since no one has met your challenge in a mere two hours:

> As anticipated, this comment is unpopular. However, no one has yet attempted to articulate a criticism

You aren't owed a fruitful discussion, and it's clear you're not looking for one. That's criticism enough, but I'll continue.

> spits in the face of process that has produced every genuine, valuable human insight in history

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychedelics_in_problem-solvin... and other anecdotal experiments and experiences seem to indicate otherwise.

> I haven't encountered a single LSD advocate that wasn't conspicuously unstable and self-hating

I'm sorry that this has been your experience. That hasn't been my experience. There are a lot of quiet users of LSD, so given your aggressive stance against it, you're most likely to only encounter the most outspoken/optimistic ones. How about someone like James Fadiman? How is he conspicuously unstable and self-hating?

> we don't say a word when they encourage others to risk everything

Many recognize that not every psychological experience is harmless or positive. I see a lot of people warning of the risk of correlation with schizophrenia, and others warning that a negative experience can do a number on your psyche. It's not for everyone, and not for anyone all the time, and many make the point to responsibly disclose that.


>>it irreparably alters your personality in a completely senseless way

There are many things that fit this description: being a parent, puberty, your first kiss, falling in love, a death in the family. Would you cling to a definition of yourself that has no room for major, perspective-changing, life-altering insights? You can try, but life has a way of changing constantly whether you want it to or not.

Recreational drugs serve no "purpose", as you say (objectively useless). But what purpose is there in being born, eating, making love, making friends, and eventually dying? Purpose is what you decide it is. If some people want to explore their brains using chemicals then what the problem with that? Yes, everything has risks, but so does getting up in the morning.

Live and let live. You may not like the fact that drugs can change personalities in a way that makes you uncomfortable, but this is a big world: I'm sure you will be able to find like minded company. Maybe even here on HN? Who knows.


I choose to raise children because they are beautiful and I owe the world more people like me. I was able predict beforehand the ways that it would change me, and they were all good.

I didn't have a choice to go through puberty. That was programmed through millions of years of adaptive evolution. It's the last thing from senseless.

I kissed my first woman because millions of years of adaptive evolution have tempered me to benefit from intimacy, bonding, and community.

If could do anything to help it, my family would never die. This is a terrible thing I never chose, and wouldn't wish on anybody if it were a choice.

All of these things that change us are nothing like a strange chemical we've stumbled upon and found to scramble our brains. Next.


Your comment is unpopular because it doesn't bring anything of value to the conversation. I'm not really sure what you want to say, or why you think that a thread about the death of Nick Sand is the right place to say it.

All you do is make grand, unsourced claims such as calling LSD "an objectively useless and destructive drug" followed by preemptive insults on anybody who'd dare to respond. You should work less on trying to sound clever and more on actually saying clever things. "the delicate and exhaustingly intentional intellectual and emotional process that has produced every genuine, valuable human insight in history", seriously?


> Your comment is unpopular because it doesn't bring anything of value to the conversation. I'm not really sure what you want to say, or why you think that a thread about the death of Nick Sand is the right place to say it.

Did you miss all the other comments celebrating LSD, and Nick Sand for providing it to the masses? This is absolutely right place to say it. You just don't like it, for completely different reason.

> You should work less on trying to sound clever and more on actually saying clever things. [my wonderful prose], seriously?

I was sloppily recording my honest thoughts at two in the morning, and I did a pretty good job.

Let's contrast with some words quoted in this thread, probably more carefully spoken at the time:

What I found to be the genius of LSD is that it really gets you high, higher than the programs, higher than the walls that mask and blind one to the energy destroying presence of many contradictory but hidden programs.

What do you think is more clever? What is being celebrated in the highest rated post of this thread, and what is being mocked near the bottom? That doesn't seem strange to you?


Objectively useless and destructive drug is quite a statement, when there is a lot of research that suggests it can have positive effects.

It doesn't kill you, nor does it irreparably alter your personality in a completely senseless way. There are studies that suggest people who has tried LSD has their personality altered in a positive way, in that they're more open to new ideas afterwards. It is true though, that some people get very enthusiastic when they first try LSD, some overly so.

I know a lot of people who do LSD now and then and the vast majority of them are successful upper middle class people who's had no ill effects and lots of positive ones.

There are also many people who's successfully used LSD as a problem solving aid http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70...

That's not to say people don't have negative experiences though and I don't think LSD is for everyone. Some people freak out completely by even small changes in their perceptual experience for example, though usually not if they know the basic of how LSD works and how the mind works. A very useful thing to know is that what we experience as reality is basically just one view of the underlying data from a set of sensors (our senses), there's a neural net with multiple layers that starts with simple things like edge detection or whatever and builds up the 3D model we consciously experience from a mix of the external data, but also internal data, etc., there's no right or wrong view of this data, we could have evolved to experience it completely different and we can make computer program to visualize data in numerous different ways and on psychedelics you can experience things a bit differently from what you're used to. The reason it's useful to know some of this is because if you experience something strange when doing psychedelics, you'll know you're not being kidnapped by aliens, going insane, talking to god or whatever weird thing that some people sometimes seem to think.


All recreational chemicals have people waxing evangelical notions of them. Heck, even that humble cup of coffee was originally associated with Sufi mystics (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22190802).

LSD is nothing more than a serotonin receptor agonist (although LSD has a bit more dopaminergic response than other serotonergic psychedelics). It produces certain effects in the body. That's it.

The evidence of long-term harm for careful use seems low to me. (There may be a potential risk of schizophrenia / paranoia disorders and similar, though from what I can Google there is nothing conclusive yet. So if anything, that's what you monitor for. Even in the worst case, I would doubt that a single use would trigger this.)

That certain kinds of psychedelics (serotongerics in particular, but also NMDA receptor agonists, such as the naturally occurring ibogaine... and maybe a few others) seem really prone to produce this sort of almost spiritual response actually fascinates me, for exactly that reason alone. I wouldn't call this "spiritual nonsense" "fake" per se. Maybe these molecules in reality are clues to the actual mechanism behind the emotion, right?


Yeah, and a bullet through the brain is just a little bit of metal, right?


Although there are a lot of unknowns (and I'd fully respect that sort of opinion), comparing a primarily-5HT2A agonist to a bullet in the brain seems wildly exaggerated given the current evidence I know. If you have scientific oriented links that say otherwise, feel free to share them. From what I know, I find this route of thinking rather hyperbolic.

To give another example, ketamine's another recreational hallucinogen; if it also was thought of as akin to a "bullet in the brain" and nothing more, scientists might not have recognized the potential anti-depressive nature of glutamatergic chemicals (as has happened in the last decade or so).


I'm hesitant to put in the effort to make a genuine criticism, since the care you claim you'll respond with is notably lacking from your original post.


You made a new account to say this?

What do you mean "a soul only looking for a saviour"?

Is calling people "basket cases" a reasonable form of argument?

I honestly don't know what question you are asking at the start of your post.


It is a new account, but it's not a new persona, given what I've read of his website. I can only imagine that it's an intentional caricature. That's fine for a website, but here, he's trolling.


> turns you into Tim Leary

Or Doug Engelbart, or Steve Jobs, or any number of the other pioneers of personal computing who cited their psychedelic use as formative or informative.

I also just want to note that there are at least three earnest, substantial responses to your vitriol (I do not count this among them), and no attempts yet from you to respond to any of them. Perhaps you are just in a different time zone and will get to them later.


I'm back, baby!

Steve Jobs was an idiot. That other guy is nothing special. Show me research mathematicians, hedgefund managers, landlords, or doctors.


Sounds like you need to try out some LSD bro.


There it is, ladies and gentlemen. He frames it as a joke, but he probably believes it.


Your perspective can't be dismissed.

From my perspective, to put my anecdotal experience beside yours, I know many very stable, very loving, very intelligent people who use LSD occasionally. These people generally don't talk about it, or haphazardly recommend it to others. But they do enjoy the experience of altered consciousness, and the experience of experimenting with new thoughts and perspective.

If it is a damaging drug, as you claim, then these people emerge from their trips strengthened from the harm. If it has irrevocably altered their personalities, then it has done so to their benefit.

LSD, like other drugs, is a way to play. There are those who take it too seriously - this crowd are as ridiculous to outsiders as the whisky, coffee, or marijuana enthusiast. But for most, it is simply a safe and reasonable way to spend a day in leisure.


His point is that you have come to a number of strongly expressed conclusions about a subject that you have no direct experience of.


Do I need direct experience to know about something? Was this empirical standard impressed upon you by a particularly wicked LSD trip, or are you unaware of the means by which the vast majority of knowledge and understanding is acquired? Does this lack of awareness play any role in your use of psychedelics to 'learn things'?


Sure, you don't need direct experience to know about LSD trips. But you obviously do, in order to actually know LSD trips. Really. Trust me. You have no fucking clue. You're like Hellen Keller, before that insight at the well.


I honestly feel bad for you people. Your inner world must be so miserable and barren. I get high just thinking about things several times a day, without any drugs whatsoever. There's no fucking way I'd ever risk that for same lame visuals and a poor man's ego death. You're basically a farm animal telling an Olympian he should try the corn feed.


You're evading the point. Say what you will, you don't know what an LSD trip is like. If you look back up the thread, you'll see where you went off the rails. But hey, maybe you're just here for the lulz.


I know everything anybody needs to know about it and more. All you people have is "you need to try it to understand," and you're talking to someone who knows better than you.


No, I didn't say that "you need to try it to understand". You don't need to do anything. Except to maybe learn a little humility, be less of a know-it-all, and observe the norms of the community that you've joined. Or not.

Anyway, I simply asserted that the claim to know an experience, before having that experience, is absurd. I'm pointing to the distinction between knowing something, subjectively, as opposed to knowing about it, objectively. That's just a fact.

Consider a less contentious example. Let's say that you've never eaten dry-aged beef. Would you claim to know the taste? Sure, you could understand the chemistry of the curing process. You could have loads of GC/MS data. People could tell you about it. You could have all sorts of brain scan data. You could have formulated all manner of suppositions. But even with all that, until you took a bite, you wouldn't know the taste.

In case this is a new concept for you:

> There are, however, other uses of the terminology related to objectivity. Many philosophers use the term “subjective knowledge” to refer only to knowledge of one’s own subjective states. Such knowledge is distinguished from one’s knowledge of another individual’s subjective states and from knowledge of objective reality, which would both be objective knowledge under the present definitions. Your knowledge of another person’s subjective states can be called objective knowledge since it is presumably part of the world that is “object” for you, just as you and your subjective states are part of the world that is “object” for the other person.

> This is a prominent distinction in epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge) because many philosophers have maintained that subjective knowledge in this sense has a special status. They assert, roughly, that knowledge of one’s own subjective states is direct, or immediate, in a way that knowledge of anything else is not. It is convenient to refer to knowledge of one’s own subjective states simply as subjective knowledge. Following this definition, objective knowledge would be knowledge of anything other than one’s own subjective states.

http://www.iep.utm.edu/objectiv/


"Acid is not for every brain .... Only the healthy, happy, wholesome, handsome, hopeful, humorous, high-velocity should seek these experiences. This elitism is totally self-determined. Unless you are self-confident, self-directed, self-selected, please abstain." --Timothy Leary


Oh, what a scholar! What self-determined elitism, being fired from a lecturing position at Harvard for not showing up to work! How skillfully he turns abject failure into victory!


I don't agree with you at all but given that you do present an unpopular opinion (which we need, there is too much "on the bandwagon" thinking at HN sometimes) and given the way you phrase the point I'm up-voting.


God bless. I respect the sentiment.


off topic slightly, your post comes across as serious, yet probably is not - the articles on your homepage are hilarious. well done


God bless, brother. I'm glad you were able to enjoy my work.


If this Nick Sand guy's most notable work is synthesizing large amounts of LSD, I celebrate his passing and hope with the best intentions that his legacy dies with him too.


Others would say he created culture. But culture of what? Culture of addiction and spiritual coaches, who are just vagrants in many cases? Enlighten me too.




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