language

In case it isn't clear to anyone: the beginning of this article is basically a description of Terence's experiences in the Colombian Amazonas, described with more detail in a book of his called "True Hallucinations." The content of this article is significantly more coherent and poignant if one takes the time to look into that book.

To summarize briefly: in his early 20s, Terence and some colleagues went to Colombia with the intentions of finding and studying a certain entheogen. After (I think days or weeks) of consuming psilocybin (mushrooms), their investigations became more focused on the mushroom, and their collective ideas about the matter become increasingly "out there." Terence and his brother become convinced by their experiences that extra-dimensional entities are instructing them to conceive of an "experiment" (that involves them taking both psilocybin and ayahuasca) which will trigger some sort of eschatological event. The "experiment" then causes Terence and his brother to have mutually re-enforcing psychosis and hallucinations that last for something like two weeks.

The book is very interesting. Terence was a hell of a writer, and the general concepts touched upon are highly interesting.

From the article: "Does the delusion of one visionary ecstatic validate the delusion of another? How many deluded, or illuminated ecstatics does it take to make a reality?"

With regard to "vestigial monotheism": I think what you're describing is just a property of discourses in general, in that they're all built around bodies of knowledge which have fixed points [assumptions/truths/whatever], and that participants act in such a way as to keep those things stable.

Definitely seen things like this before, very poignant. Not to knock on Kurzweil and friends too hard [lots of interesting stuff in both spaces obviously], but I've had this vibe from talking with self-described Singularitarians as well (there's some overlap between those circles).

>"We should think about all the variables an outsider might bring to our attention, and then about how to embed that outsider perspective as an integral part of our organizational culture."

>How many times has this question been asked, with the common answer of "We do, and then ignore or dismiss 'the outsider'"??? Far more than most care to admit I suspect.

What makes this so interesting to me is that this seems to a property of social systems in general (individuals included). There is a constant push/pull of "maintenance of identity" and "importing novel information from the environment." Take "human conversation" or "argument" as an analogue of this situation and you come to the same conclusion: people prefer to maintain their identities/boundaries/opinions/perspectives/etc.

And you're right, the answer to that question is overwhelmingly negative in reality: that seems like the point that the author is making. Something about how "innovation" involves the way that organizations and outsiders generate interdependencies/come into conversation.

Very interesting article (I need to read this a couple more times).

>Any such question and any possible answer are still pheonomena that arise inside consciousness.

This is an important point, but I don't think the best course of action is to mark consciousness as something that lies outside the scope of science. I certainly think that there are some broader problems to be solved which involve how one deals with investigation into a domain that appears to be reflexive. "Consciousness" is a valid domain of investigation, but the question to ask becomes "Can we come to an agreement over how to distinguish what we are investigating?" Additionally, can we really call consciousness an "object" of investigation? The problem is that we, the subject, are investigating an object, which is us, the subject. It seems like there is some analogue of the subject-object problem that injects itself into the situation at that point.

The investigation of consciousness (among other things) becomes muddled when the majority of participants in the discourse can't stabilize on how to actually distinguish or demarcate consciousness as an object of investigation - that problem is tangled because the act of explaining consciousness presupposes consciousness.

Similarly, we must use the condition of living in order to explain life, and we must use the condition of "being embedded in language" in order to describe language. One cannot escape those systems in their attempts to describe them. A scientist's description of consciousness must necessarily account for the process by which he describes it.

But this isn't anything too radical or new. I'm not sure this means that it's something beyond the grasp of science.