Aging ("Ageing," to the obsolete)

[sus]

Friston x Carhart Harris on REBUS is another key text—its the origin/steelman of a lotta the thinking about psychedelics @pattycakes_ nods at:

REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics

This paper formulates the action of psychedelics by integrating the free-energy principle and entropic brain hypothesis. We call this formulation relaxed beliefs under psychedelics (REBUS) and the anarchic brain, founded on the principle that—via their entropic effect on spontaneous cortical...

pharmrev.aspetjournals.org

 

[Murphy]

Mdma might be as equally a refined route of working through trauma as psychedelics. People often have no idea cough splutter how tangled they are coughGus until they undergo the full weight of ineffable states of empathy and amazement and awe, not just ego death and even that’s proccessual as much as mystical, a means to yet more refined questions

With mdma, you have an enveloping emotional response rather than a mystical event and although mdma can get you there, it isn’t a psychedelic which anyone who’s interacted with these at any level is fully aware of. Mdma and lsd/psilocybin are surely among the finer compounds to mix? Without defining someone’s position for them @pattycakes_ , Rebus is a detective innit? There”s massive amounts of capital investment being poured in and if a compound (or compounds) have neuro-generative properties, you can cast possible future applications in any number of directions. Not keen on psych therapy playlists fwiw

Rebus seems too limited in its scope. The language is clunky and continually acts as a reductive filter for even a phenomenological interpretation to seep in. It assumes consciousness is a box, to be boxed, so misdirects away from the more solid pointers. It also fails to address the mechanisms by which trauma therapy like emdr can work, which uses zero compounds other than memory work, physiology and emotional graft. Overall, It comes across as a re-systemising, an enclosing off of the ineffable

On the flip, Griffiths can point immediately to where the ineffable could be experienced as part of a process of wholesale, positive reintegration of disbelief at current events and past experiences. I like Car-Harris but he’s a slippery devil too. Griffiths has’t got a single political agenda and he grafts in one of the most restrictive environments in the west, providing some of the most startling results that simply need repeating at small, local scale to work

Of course there’s a rush to provide best practices first, champion due process, authorial credits, grant funding bids, PhD enclaves while engineering a career, because that’s how academia, pharmaceutical manufacturers and big fish investment hedges work together, as your hero Moldbug would attest to. Institutionalised. Alternatively, brain imaging for dmt has pulled waveform variations and steady patterns right into focus. It only cracks the magic if you see it as a degree of separation away from wonder, when you don’t even have to adopt or integrate any of this into your own experiences. Fancy telling people what their visions should be, which pivots to a vision of Gus in 20 years

 

[sus]

> Since I don’t follow it closely how has the idea that there was some incentive to select for aging to promote evolutionary adaptation holding up? Essentially sans-aging the old gen would continue to monopolize the resources of the young and prevent them from being able to flourish, so they wouldn’t be able to reproduce as well, etc. I remember that being an idea that was popular many years ago around things like the ‘telomere shutoffs’, not sure if its still popular now.

 

[sus]

Suit man looks like a baller, and I haven't a bad trip in years because of how unbelievably untangled my psyche is—but keep trying old man

 

[sus]

> The frustrating thing about raising life expectancy is that evolution has zero incentive to make any parts live longer than other parts. When your heart gives out at 50 anyway, why give you lungs that can survive to 100? Why make joints that keep on working beyond? And so everything is corner-cutting to the least shelf life you need to be a successful organism. Knees suck because you don't, strictly speaking, need better ones! But now that we've raised the life expectancy by decades, we see how basically everything just falls apart at the end of life, and you have to invest more and more in repairs when really, it's time to get a new body, uh, make children and die, I guess.

 

[sus]

Hmmm. Modern PhD as a system for making young men old in the "seen it all / nothing new under the sun" sense?

 

[Mr. Tea]

> The frustrating thing about raising life expectancy is that evolution has zero incentive to make any parts live longer than other parts. When your heart gives out at 50 anyway, why give you lungs that can survive to 100? Why make joints that keep on working beyond? And so everything is corner-cutting to the least shelf life you need to be a successful organism. Knees suck because you don't, strictly speaking, need better ones! But now that we've raised the life expectancy by decades, we see how basically everything just falls apart at the end of life, and you have to invest more and more in repairs when really, it's time to get a new body, uh, make children and die, I guess.

Hearts only give out at 50 because their owners lack either the inclination or the opportunity to take care of them properly, bar the odd unfortunate person with a congenital defect.

 

[sus]

Perhaps true but a quibble, you could change that number to 100 and the point remains unchanged

 

[Mr. Tea]

Perhaps true but a quibble, you could change that number to 100 and the point remains unchanged

Eh? In your example you talked about some organs giving out at 50 while others could theoretically keep going for a further 50 years after that. If all your organs keep going fairly well until you're 100, then you've pretty much reached the limit for how long the human organism can keep going, haven't you?

 

[sus]

Mr Tea, this is all new levels of missing the point, even for you. Please work on your reading comprehension and report back

 

[sus]

the idea is expressed in the topic sentence (I did not write the excerpt, hence I've marked it with an indentation symbol, ">")

"The frustrating thing about raising life expectancy is that evolution has zero incentive to make any parts live longer than other parts."

The point being that even if breakthrough medical tech or nutrition doubles the life expectancy of, say, a heart or lungs, all the other organs are still ageing in a roughly commensurate way. We'll still have shit knees, our brain will go senile even if our body's in perfect shape, etc. So if you're working on life extension, you have to figure out how to extend the lifespan of nearly every organ/system because the course of natural selection synchronizes their lifespan/longevity

 

[Mr. Tea]

Quote marks exist, you know.

But whether those were your words or someone else's, do people in countries with very high life expectancies have that life expectancy because they can call on the services of expert cardiologists, neurologists, kneeologists etc. to fix them up when parts of them have already started to go wrong? Or is because people there live healthier lives in general? With better diets, more exercise (as distinct from backbreaking labour), less exposure to pollution and less smoking/alcoholism compared to other countries?

 

[sus]

The answer is "yes, both, but it's irrelevant"

 

[woops]

Tonight... I've dug deep for mindtwisting rarities to open your third eye & lead you through the doors of perception, across the black seas of infinity to the hill of dreams... if you leave now you have time to get there, so see you later!

 

[sus]

> I knew it was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does not warm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one was younger. More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latter half of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more in order. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for new scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw more strongly

Poet-naturalist John Burroughs on the vagabond camping trips he took with Edison, Ford, and Firestone in the early 20th C. @Clinamenic do you know about the Vagabond Trips? Very Promethean, maybe up your alley

 

[sus]

Folding camp-cots are poor conservers of one's bodily warmth, and until you get the hang of them and equip yourself with plenty of blankets, Sleep enters113 your tent very reluctantly. She tarried with me but briefly, and at three or four in the morning I got up, replenished the fire, and in a camp-chair beside it indulged in the "long, long thoughts" which belong to age much more than to youth. Youth was soundly and audibly sleeping in the tents with no thoughts at all.

 

[Clinamenic]

> I knew it was a risky thing for an octogenarian to go a-gypsying, and with younger men. Old blood has lost some of its red corpuscles, and does not warm up easily over the things that moved one so deeply when one was younger. More than that, what did I need of an outing? All the latter half of my life has been an outing, and an "inning" seemed more in order. Then, after fourscore years, the desire for change, for new scenes and new people, is at low ebb. The old and familiar draw more strongly

Poet-naturalist John Burroughs on the vagabond camping trips he took with Edison, Ford, and Firestone in the early 20th C. @Clinamenic do you know about the Vagabond Trips? Very Promethean, maybe up your alley

No haven't heard of this before.... Don't know of John Burroughs.

 

[sus]

look up Vagabond Trips https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/the-vagabonds

 

[Mr. Tea]

No haven't heard of this before.... Don't know of John Burroughs.

William's much more boring older brother, who didn't share his enthusiasm for alien mind viruses, beautiful dusky boys, or heroin.

 

[sus]

On the site Scientists for 9/11 Truth, [Lynn Margulis] claimed:

Certainly, 19 young Arab men and a man in a cave 7,000 miles away, no matter the level of their anger, could not have masterminded and carried out 9/11: the most effective television commercial in the history of Western civilization. I suggest that those of us aware and concerned demand that the glaringly erroneous official account of 9/11 be dismissed as a fraud and a new, thorough, and impartial investigation be undertaken.

In addition to her Truth-seeking, she also came out as an AIDS denier in a 2011 interview with Discover magazine, saying, "Our claim is that there's no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There's no scientific paper that proves that the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, "There is no such document."

The problem here is that, though Margulis certainly was a pioneer in the fields of microcopy and microbiology and made some incredible advances, it seems as though a potent combination of ego and old age had gotten the better of her. As Tara Smith explained in response to the 2011 Discover article:

While confidence is certainly an important trait in a scientist, so is the ability to twist your ideas around, look for the holes, test them, revise them, lather rinse repeat. You can't let your ego blind you to the fact that, hey, *you might be wrong.* Margulis not only refuses to consider this, she admits that she has "no interest in the diseases" she's discussing, even while she claims to know more about their causes than the scientists who have spent decades studying them. In a lot of ways, this makes Margulis worse than the creationists she dismisses.