$100 is (almost) mine!

On October 09 2015 09:38 Seeker wrote:

So you only win the $100 if Lilbow goes to BlizzCon? Then that means if he loses in the Ro16, you're screwed :o

On October 10 2015 01:25 GGzerG wrote:
I'd give it to Nina to get you some good pot from YakoKano

On October 10 2015 03:12 JieXian wrote:


hahahaha YakoKano definitely has some

On October 10 2015 05:13 ZigguratOfUr wrote:


Does he? When you mentioned him I was thinking more along the lines of LSD.

On October 10 2015 07:52 YokoKano wrote:
Thoughts about being lilbow and your winning all this money. If I'm lilbow I would have some questions about how you're going to smoke your five grams when you buy it with your $100.

My bottom-line stance on smoking happiness and smoking marijuana: I feel abused living in a place where marijuana isn't legal because marijuana is legal in some places and there's no trouble at all in obtaining it. Obviously marijuana should be legal everywhere, but I'll come to my major concern after the next paragraph.

The last time I smoked I became convinced that not only my body but even my consciousness rarely exists and this is why I have such a bad memory. To me this isn't really surprising since I spent about 2 months taking 12,000mg of dextromethorphan every day and there are various scientific studies strongly in support of the conclusion that my brain probably melted.

Anyway, I'm not fixated on this fact because "not having" a brain has been great for my mood even though it has taken a pretty serious toll on my school work. Anyway, it seems like the worries with marijuana have a lot to do with past lives, future lives, and what the present "actually is." If you want to learn more about this there's a paper by Parfit (1971) called "Personal Identity" where he delves into q-memories, q-intentions, and so on. The paper is largely inspired by Hindu and Buddhists philosophies of mind. According to some smokers of LSD we can actually know the answer with perfect accuracy to certain questions like who and when we will get married, and who and when we will conceive children, and for instance in my own case what and when will we write our thesis, dissertation, etc.

My point is that it's fairly easy for most people to suggest what they think is a reasonable set of priorities for themselves and then to talk it over with loved ones, advisors and future spouses (for instance by contacting them on Skype). Therefore I guess we can update our priorities, accept suggestions from advisors, be sure to read certain books, visit certain places, own a Zippo, get a cool computer, etc. Since for the most part humans aren't realistically ready to take the step to full-blown omniscience, I think it's reasonable to suppose that most humans will desire monogamous marriages, questions of gender notwithstanding.

Probably the biggest obstacle and one to consider with some degree of seriousness when we talk about legalizing marijuana is whether the experience can be kind of watered down and whether this could be a good thing as a general methodology. My stance is that Marijuana isn't especially conducive to an overly rigid interpretation of the Ten Commandments, the Quran, Buddhist doctrine, etc. I say this because it seems like the biggest obstacle to legalizing marijuana is certain arguments of the EWG form (multi-universe hypothesis) where things get really messy. I'd say that in the universe we experience and get together there aren't that many important questions whose answers can't be fudged a little to one side or the other.

So my point is we should be able to script most of the important events in our lives by simply respecting our significant other, the approximate estimates of her eligible fertility, the necessary resources to send our children to military boarding schools for preschool, and to provide for certain aesthetic qualities that might prove important like visiting the Great Pyramids and taking pictures like Japanese people, in short living a good life while not neglecting the welfare of the 7 billion or so people who don't have any money (and so theoretically don't have a future by some approximations), and so on, and so on, but with some emphasis and priority on the well-being of family...

Anyway that's enough of listing possible futures and thinking briefly about the causal chains that might lead to a reasonably good approximation of where we want to go.

Scripting is really a major concern in establishing the identity of religious figures, especially the Dalai Lama:

It's a pretty well-known fact, at least where I live that if you take drugs you get to experience the past-lives and future-lives of holy persons in the Buddhist tradition, As Ram Dass (Richard Alpert Ph.D. Harvard) writes, "You can experience the prajna of Christ for 2 hours."

So consider the Dalai Lama, an Enlightened Buddha, a saint, a worldly incarnation of divinity. Most people didn't even know he existed until 1950 and then the Schroedinger's cat hypothesis went into effect. The peaceful nation of Tibet, presumably populated by incarnations of the Dalai Lama, friends and family, monks and nuns experienced first-hand and presumably "in this life" some of the worst treatment of any human people in the history of Earth as we understand it.

In short, everyone has a bone to pick with God, but everyone also has their own assessment and attribution of personal divinity, and everyone tells some kind of narrative about the deities they believe in or experience. But then there are rival deities or divine figures like the Buddha, Christ, Muhammad, Ram, Shiva, Osiris, and to a greater or lesser extent Richard Dawkins (representing Atheism). And it tends be sport among marijuana smokers to generate what I'll loosely term a priori narratives about rival deities in the same way they handle soccer games.

Obviously this hasn't worked out well if your epistemology supposes that certain a priori facts manifest eventually as synthetic facts in the world we can conveniently call "reality". Christianity puts this very well about narratives ("The Word was God"), and there's a fairly straight forward translation from language to quantum "information" through the resolution of quantum superposition and mapping onto "physical reality" of the atomic universe that most people experience. Read: the 6 billion or so people unable to smoke marijuana are helpless to defend themselves against the narratives that people smoking marijuana tell via language. Of course there appear to be various ways to outsmart notions of conservancy of information, entropy, etc. and so we suppose that through genius and so forth we can avoid exporting what I suppose Buddhists would gently call "unskillful states" but the extent to which this is true is a subject that remains pretty hazy. Presumably if things were working well with the a priori projects there wouldn't be 6-7 billion people who can't smoke marijuana legally and therefore can't actively contribute to the construction of the general background narrative of reality on planet earth.

My position isn't that marijuana shouldn't be legal. My position is that people should be responsible when they tell stories about other religions. In my opinion science, atheism, what have you, is not appreciably different than religion in that each religion and science also represents an epistemic system. It will likely prove the case in coming centuries that we prove the scientific method to be a single horn of a larger epistemic system. Such a future epistemic system would be a science hybrid or a science expansion embracing the little-known world of quantum mechanics and giving due and convincing explanation about important quantum thought experiments like "Schroedinger's Cat". The upshot of this is that science will be said to be observing the physical world which is not the only world but merely the world we humans are equipped to perceive. In fact the practical implications of quantum experiment lead us much more in the direction of the Christian sentiment I mentioned earlier (The Word was God).

The success of these competing epistemic systems: Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, etc. really shouldn't be surprising because in one sense they have strong historical backgrounds while science in a relative sense has only occupied a brief window in the history of humanity. And precedent exists, Judaism gave way to Christianity, etc. science will inevitably give way to expansions in the realm of quantum psychology, cognitive-theoretic apparatuses, procedurally generated synthetic counterparts for existing a priori worlds, etc. Ultimately these a priori worlds that I'm talking about are the worlds of religions both ancient and modern. Despite apparent differences, humans need to be ready to move forward with reality-theory and embrace truths obtained through a variety of epistemic systems. One good case for this is Paul Boghossian's Fear of Knowledge.

In short there are 6-7 billion people in the world who unfortunately for them are unable to smoke Marijuana on a daily basis, and they are rightly jealous of our ability to be transported into alternate narratives. If someone said to you, "Simply what Marijuana is, is a substance that readily bridges or translates a priori worlds into synthetic worlds", you would be right to be jealous, wary, and perhaps even actively hostile toward people who didn't allow you to smoke Marijuana. For instance, if there were regulation passed that you couldn't use a computer except on university time, the 95% of people not currently enrolled in university would be very suspicious of people whose personal power and wisdom was obviously greatly enhanced by access to information technology.

So obviously I won't attempt to make the case here that high quality Marijuana in the modern age lets you spin "real" physical worlds out of raw data or a priori worlds. I have no idea how someone would illustrate such a fact to someone else. My point is that such technology is justifiably within the expectation of humanity based on our developing understanding of quantum mechanics and the interplay of the subatomic and atomic universe. But if we are anticipating the reality of historical narrative, generally told from the standpoint of some religious institution: Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Africa (Azande), South America (Aztecs), Native Americans (Zunis), etc. we should be a lot more careful and respectful of religious doctrines and narratives told by these religions.

Yes, today, science exists in the form we understand it. But that doesn't mean that these old world religions weren't absolutely essential in obtaining science and empiricism. On the contrary, science, industrialization, the digital age, and so on, is rooted in advances facilitated by the religious institutions that science is disintegrating. Yes it's good that we aren't all Puritans, Islamic radicals, or Yakuza, and insofar as science has helped make those changes it's a good thing. On the other hand, if we are really moving toward the realization of a priori worlds, and in many respects our best a priori worlds were the fruits of such intensive labor as that of the Puritanical Christians, devout Muslims, Buddhists, etc. it obviously isn't in our best interest as humans to dissolve the good and the bad represented by these religions. It also isn't justifiable for "enlightened scientists" to co-opt the spiritual resources and narratives of these religions and convert them or edit them to create narratives that don't serve the adherents of those religions at least as well as it serves the scientists and atheists who are purportedly "rescuing" these religious people from their own ignorance.

In short, co-opting and rewriting these narratives without due respect for the interest of the groups represented by particular religions is "reality theft". A lot like stealing someone's ten page draft, rewriting a few pages and then signing your name on the top and handing it in. Except that in the case of quantum psychology and mind-theoretic reality theories you're not only stealing the person's work, you're stealing their world. If we really are going to benefit, as we undoubtedly have, from the work of other peoples and other religions which represent dramatically different epistemic system with respect to our own, we need to honor their investments at least as much as the changes we make to them. My point is that most of these religions are more than a thousand years old, and even today billions of people are still declared as belonging to one of the major world religions. If something like ten million people smoke marijuana on a daily basis it's like arguing that those ten million people have a superior epistemic system and therefore are entitled to actively interpret the narratives of billions of people from past and present and make important changes to the backgrounds against which they live their lives.

Obviously the right direction is for every human to have access to the cognitive technology, computational, psychoactive, etc. that directly translates a priori data into active language. Everyone should have the right to control their destiny while respecting the rights of others, and certainly the global legalization of marijuana is the right step in this direction. However, this entails a great deal of responsibility on the part of people who currently use cognitive technology, psychoactive medicines, information technology (wireless, quantum, etc.) working on behalf of the people who don't yet have access to such technology. One of the best ways of handling this situation is to treat every epistemic system with a great deal of respect and to as much as possible never neglect the fruits of labor in generating religious and scientific narratives across the centuries and millenia.

On October 10 2015 05:13 ZigguratOfUr wrote:


Does he? When you mentioned him I was thinking more along the lines of LSD.