self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
Are you trying to kill me or drive me insane?
I mean, you probably are, but you're usually more subtle about it. DMT is very low on the list of substances to try; I don't speak Machine Elvish, not even the LOTR kind. If they start talking shit about "universal love", I'm going to pull out a baseball bat.
Edit: I know it's unlikely to literally kill me. It's just not what I'm looking for, I don't want to lose contact with reality or risk truly mind altering or gnostic experience.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
6hr ago
I agree with you. That's my understanding of my the mechanics, though note that there's also a general increase in neuroplasticity as well as evidence of some neurogenesis.
In predictive processing terms: psychedelics relax your priors, which helps unstick the stuck ones (like depression).
For what it's worth, I was always fascinated by psychedelics even as a teen, and wanted to try them recreationally. But I avoided them for a decade, because I was too afraid of the risk. Then my depression got really bad, and I felt the clinical trial was a good shout before I resorted to IV ketamine and ECT (very annoying to get in my parts of Scotland). It worked wonders, and gave me more confidence that I could push things.
Uh.. Turns out there's a limit to how far I wanted to push things. I might try LSD again, but never at this dose. I've had my fun. I like my sanity. If you do specifically want a treatment for depression, the evidence for psilocybin is much more robust. You've probably read my blog post, but if you haven't, it's in my posts.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7hr ago
Every time I see someone using the YouTube app instead of a modded client like Vanced (which I use and love), I die a little inside. It's probably better to use the browser at that point, even on mobile.
Uh.. I have multiple answers to depression. I know psilocybin worked the previous time. I could have gone for IV ketamine or ECT. I know for a fact that I do not need religion to be happy, and that becoming religious has a very real risk of making me unhappy as well as, in a very real sense, delusional and insane.
My ego exists for a reason. I am fond of being mostly myself. The parts of me I wish to keep are present when both when I'm happy and when I'm sad, and that's a fact that's clearly documented in my notes. If the only way to live is to trick myself into religious belief? You better hope to ask when I've got a literal gun to my head. I am not read to compromise my epistemics for happiness except for a very large value of the latter and a small amount of the former.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
I'm sorry man. I genuinely am. Even during the experience (or very very shortly after the peak), I was grappling with multiple existential crises:
- Was the very vivid and literal visual metaphor real? Was it actually a "choice" to reject endless meaning and hedonium, or just my mind play-acting a decision I'd made well in advance while coming up with an entertaining visualization of it? I genuinely do not know. The opposite felt like a very real possibility. It terrified me.
- I understood the impermanence of qualia, the meaning of the self being a series of continuous snapshots. I vividly remember (and have live notes) of a version of me that was terrified of dying and being replaced by another me. He was practically screaming and begging to stay alive, or at least to be remembered. Then, a little later, a version of me that was more pragmatic but also meta to a degree that annoys even sober me: he had the self-awareness to find this all amusing while hoping he'd be gone soon. He got his wish.
- I understood why the brain's sober state is conserved the way it is. It's the only way to be functional, even if there's some wiggle room. Breaking something and being stuck like that? I'd call depression a broken brain too, but I'm not willing to go that far.
I don't know if you ever had a choice in the matter. I don't know if I did either. But I am so lucky to have made the choice of going the route I would have committed myself to going well in advance. Screwing with my brain's chemistry is pragmatically useful for therapeutic purposes and also... fun. But it's not a solution to metaphysics. If I claimed to have come up with one after the trip, my notes tell myself that I should consider the original me gone, maybe for good.
I hope you're doing okay. I wanted to be changed too, but I'm clearly the annoying kind of person who is just as analytical and self-scrutinizing when sober as they are zooted. I'm happy/sad about that. Uh, now that I think about it, I do understand the limits of language as a communication tool/expression of qualia better. That perhaps does constitute a change. Words genuinely cannot express the conflict within at the time. Good luck to you, if there is some residual damage, we will likely be able to cure you, speaking from a medical perspective. That is a promise I am mostly confident science can cash.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8hr ago
There but for the grace of God the Flying Spaghetti Monster go I. I've seen other people lose it with after using psychedelics, or outright go insane. And more who have become "soft" spiritual and woo-ish. I'm not saying I'd rather die than end up like that, but it's very, very low on the list.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
16hr ago
It happens to rhyme with Salman Rushdie.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
16hr ago
He fucking hopes so. But yes, it's over. Lasted way longer and took far longer to finish than he'd like.
Well, if one of Odin's ravens thinks so:
The long and short of it was that it went way harder and deeper than I accounted for. I genuinely felt the edges of my mind fraying. I was fighting ego death and struggling to retain the integrity of my consciousness. I might have described myself as "tripping balls" when I enrolled for a psilocybin trial, but it had nothing on what I experienced. Back then, and in this instance, my greatest fear was succumbing to woo or catching religion. I felt the pressure, that sense of cosmic significance. I genuinely told it to fuck itself. At that point, I was envisioning it as some kind of extradimensional tendril cracking open my skull and wrapping itself around my consciousness, while "I" was quite literally shearing it away it with a set of scissors.
Another very literal visual metaphor was trying to keep the "knot" of patterns that constituted myself from being unraveled under the tension.
Words can hardly describe it. I feel like the protagonist of Scott's short story, Samsara, except I actually faced the pressure of imminent enlightenment and chose to walk away. I don't need enlightenment, I need to be less depressed. Jury's out on that one.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
17hr ago
Sigh. It's probably not worth talking about. Any insights gleaned are personal and the kind of stuff I could have told you a week in advance if I was drunk.
Accurate on both counts, though the latter could be one of many potential extraplanar entities. Almost certainly just the outcome of the brain being reminded why certain mushrooms are not meant for consumption (though this one wasn't from a mushroom).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
I wish the distrust of pagers had extended to the NHS. I fucking hate bleeps.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
It's the annoying kind of trait, like schizophrenia or height. A gazillion genes that add up to increased propensity but do not guarantee homosexuality even when nearly maximally loaded. Then there's the environmental contribution, and that includes stuff like in-utero exposure to hormones and a bunch of other stuff.
Too much for me to get into, and I was using ChatGPT to look things up to my own satisfaction anyway. I promise that if there was a single gene or even a handful of genes that could reliably be used to gauge gayness, we'd know. There are ML models that can identify gay men with startlingly high accuracy off facial physiognomy alone, but they're hard to get because of Ethical Reasons™.
If you want a rough idea of why it's such a PITA to pin these things down, then look up Scott's relatively recent post on schizophrenia and polygenic inheritance. Even if you kill literally all schizophrenic people the moment they manifest, you will barely make a dent in the incidence rate for the next generation.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1d ago
There is no single gay gene. It's highly polygenic with significant environmental contribution. I did a deep dive into the topic for.... reasons, and also was slightly surprised to find out that the children of gay men and straight women are not meaningfully more likely to be gay/lesbian/bi.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
A transhumanist Catholic?
...
I suppose that is not technically impossible, and I've heard of queerer ideologies, like Posadism. Welcome to the club, at least for the transhumanist bit, and if you want to call the Singleton At The End of Time God, feel free.
It's well established that people with BPD or elevated borderline features show much higher rates of reported childhood adversity, including childhood sexual abuse, and borderline features are also linked to higher risk of later victimization or revictimization, especially in dating and intimate relationships. They're both more likely to be abused, to abuse, and to be later victims of abuse.
It might be a slight stretch, but I strongly suspect something similar is at play with trans people.
To engage in calisthenics further: autism is a factor. Autistic people are 3x more likely to become trans. That's associated with general dysphoria and being uncomfortable in one's skin. The most vocal parts of the trans community is more than happy to attribute such factors to being an "egg", and encourage transition.
Being trans, or being gay, or autism or very many other human traits, is impossible to pin down to a single gene. They appear to be extremely polygenic and also strongly influenced by environment. There's no neat and tidy answer to give, almost certainly because it doesn't exist.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
You're far too kind. I'm an absolute poser when it comes to football, but I might well take you up on it!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
This is trivial to do, in all honesty, and I'd do it for free if someone asked me to. Unusually, I do not usually accept offers to donate to charity, but I suppose Lightcone could use $100. It would take me all of a minute.
Note that the most popular (and most powerful) AI image tools are invisibly or visibly watermarked. This is unlikely to be an issue, because I doubt the people demanding proof are technically sophisticated enough to check. But caveat emptor. DM me if you wish, I'll do it, and I'm awake for a few hours.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I'm not surprised. Disliking the podcast but appreciating the community is... very common. Almost universal on the sub, in my experience.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I lurk /r/Redscarepod for fun (and field anthropology), so that gives me an unfair advantage when it comes to feminine insight.
Hell, even I'm a bit miffed at "only" 77th percentile for the site, I want to believe I'm special :(
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I want to say that's pretty much my intuition too.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
I encourage you to date her just so I'm around for the debrief. Tag me.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
Rip. I know you IRL so I find this surprising.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2d ago
92nd percentile for US. 96th for non-Western. 77th for the site. Raw score of 284.
Huh. That's an interesting outcome, some anesthetics are known to have dissociative properties, but I don't think that's quite what I experienced. Which one was it, if I may ask (or if you happen to know, it's not usually disclosed specifically because most patients don't care)?
I wasn't fighting parts of my self, or my body, per se. Most of the time, the voice in my head was gone, or the volume was dialed down significantly. This has happened to me before on or after psychedelics, and is something I carefully noted during the experience. I always have an inner monologue, at least when I check for it. It might be damped down or absent when I'm extremely focused, but how would I know?
At the very peak, I don't think I was thinking in words, just visual metaphors. I used words to write (because I was able to do so live, albeit not with great grammar), and that stream of text was my stream of thought at a certain point. Very hard to explain unless you've been there. I was literally typing at the speed I was thinking (the latter definitely slower than usual) and exactly as I thought. Not quite the same as what I do when sober, where I'm usually at least planning ahead and have a general thesis in mind.
My body usually felt heavy and leaden. Then it got lighter as the peak came down slowly. No sense that parts of it were alien or in conflict with me, which you'd see with dissociation/depersonalization.
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