EPTI've spammed TL's high thread with a lot of stuff about mind control, marijuana, computers, and bizarre theories of spirituality. I apologize for this. I do have high regard TL's staff and contributors, and I have a growing appreciation of the black market and consequences for defection. In its totality the stuff I've written in the high thread and on my Facebook is probably more than sufficient for various interests to have me killed. Realistically, if I were Nazgul and I had a burgeoning multi-hundred million dollar business and some (relatively unknown poster) ruined it by talking about the mafia, mind control, the black market (and a bunch of other shit) in completely frank language, I would be pretty unhappy (to say nothing of all the TL contributors who made the site what it is).
I don't know that this is will turn out to be an actual consequence of what I've written, but it is at least plausible. Realistically, if my writing ended up costing TL millions of dollars, then saying "I'm sorry" probably wouldn't balance the scales.
For me, all this began when I started smoking weed. I spent a year smoking with two friends of mine, one of whom drown himself on Independence Day 2010. Before he committed suicide, Kevin made certain that I would "wake up". This involved laying a trail of bread crumbs that culminated in me asking him "Why do you think dead bodies float?" and him replying "I don't think they do." This event occurred about two weeks before he died. Just before he died, Kevin loaded all the kief from our year of smoking into the bowl, and we got really high. Four days later he drown himself while we were swimming.
Based on the trail of bread crumbs he left leading up to his suicide, I convinced myself that somehow I'd murdered Kevin. A few nights after his funeral, I was smoking weed with my roommate and another guy, and I thought, "Humans never see other minds. We all live in a vacuum, and one's language is in fact completely indigenous to oneself."
In short this was how I discovered or rather confirmed that I was autistic, having never been diagnosed.
My life rapidly went downhill. I dropped out of the PhD program I was in, left my master's degree incomplete, and more or less unintentionally burnt a lot of bridges with good friends.
I spent a lot of time meditating and smoking weed. For those that believe the mind exists as an extension of the brain and body at large, meditation is an interesting phenomenon. Personally, I believe that the salience and independence of the mind is largely dependent on the nervous system, and that by causing extreme pain in the knees while focusing solely on the breath, most of the mind's natural defense is disarmed. For those who enjoy Hearthstone, you'll see that many streamers are fond of highlighting "Twisting Nether". If the Nether is the mind, and the mind is a lot like the internet, meditation while smoking weed is a lot like screaming "Gambooooooooooool" and filling your harddrive with malware.
People with autism have a very low incidence of schizoprehnia. This makes sense if autism is isolation from other minds, while schizophrenia is essentially a cluster fuck of other minds interacting inharmoniously with your own. But, as I discovered, by smoking weed and meditating, it is possible import quite a sum of other minds.
Essentially this is my best diagnosis of how I went crazy.
Whether there is any redeeming quality to my insanity remains to be seen. I've written what I consider to be a perhaps enlightening piece on time and mind, but as of now it remains incomplete.
I will say the following: I believe it is possible to greatly enhance the potency of one's mind (and the effects of one's will, think favorable RNG) by smoking marijuana, especially condensed derivatives like hash. I don't think it is any coincidence the cultures of mind that have arisen where marijuana originated. Contrast this with Christianity and the cultures of societies where marijuana and mind-enhancing or mind-altering substances were either absent or less prevalent.
I think the most important perspective I can impart is that the world seems far from an equilibrium. Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and a variety of other religions still exist and have billions of adherents. Despite an increasingly favorable attitude toward science worldwide, and increasingly satirical and critical views of religion --- well despite this there is little or no open acknowledgement of the potential for marijuana, LSD, and other drugs to enhance the mind and will.
This could mean that I am completely wrong in my analysis that marijuana, LSD, etc. can enhance the mind or grant favorable RNG outcomes. This is one explanation.
A second explanation is one I will put forward now, despite my misgivings on account of what I will loosely term "censorship". The second explanation involves what would have comprised my master's thesis where I "solve" the Prisoner's Dilemma by using economic analysis. Essentially, what I conclude is that in a market where there is an economy and two agents interacting, the "defection" equilibrium does not exist. In other words, it is not optimal or sustainable for agents to defect because either the agent's market share or the agent's "economy" is vanishing with respect to the economy at large.
However, if it is possible for the defecting agent to "drink your milkshake" (and all the other economic agents' milkshakes, also), then the result reverts to defection as an optimal strategy. It is my belief that this is basically the nature of the black market.
"Mind" in its truest sense is something like "information", or, "information able to be experienced". An economy of mind, then, integrates all forms of information: the conventional (like spoken communication) and the less conventional, like ESP (if it exists).
Thus, I guess what I would posit is that people don't overtly talk about how marijuana and other drugs enhance the mind and the will for the same reason poker players don't play with all the cards face up.
If we allow that marijuana and hash-using cultures have existed for thousands of years, and science has only developed in the last few centuries, it is reasonable that information as currency in marijuana-using cultures had evolved to the point where people who understood the most about the mind and mind-altering substances were also "mired" (or had a vested interest) in not divulging information to science. Add to this Christianity's stance on psychedelic substances and empirical science being, well, "empirical", and I believe you have a convincing case for why the effects of psychedelic and mind-enhancing substances are not really appreciated by science.
Well, if this is to be an apology for or a rescinding of my previous writings then why am I once again writing about what I'm not allowed to write about? It could be a mistake.
On the other hand, (and I admit this may sound far fetched) it is worth considering that with the advent of silicon-based computing technology (quantum and non-human carbon-based computing technology notwithstanding) --- that we have perhaps reached a tipping point where an indomitable will is feasible.
Where information is concerned, it is probably a certainty that computers will only continue to outstrip humans in terms of processing power. Notions of political correctness aside, we would be credulous at best to suppose that there is not already a working union between the human mind and computer information processing.
What I mean is that supposing my second scenario is true, and there is some reasonable basis for believing that psychoactive and psychedelic substances are capable of enhancing the human will, that enterprising humans will not augment their mind with the power of computers.
Of course there are a lot of conspiracy theories suggesting that this has already come to pass (for instance, I think "HAARP" is talked about in some circles as a government cover for a project to essentially create WiFi mind control with the aid of computers). It seems to me that the reality is that soon enough one or a small group of people could render all previous efforts at "mind control" obsolete, and that previous conventions (essentially emergent cultural artifacts) that prevent us from openly discussing "mind control" and related topics only serve to expedite this process.
In other words, if we are "laddering" to increase our sphere of influence in the belief that we are climbing a ladder that has or is very soon to be discarded, then we are essentially sheep to the slaughter.
At worst what I've written here is only further proof of my madness. At best it will be somewhat eye-opening and provide an avenue for thinking about what could be an important possibility.
