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Re: The Plant Medicine Path
One thing I hear is that the experience of ayahuasca has brought many who drink it to believe in a spirit world, and my own experience of occasional visions has inclined me likewise. So there are certain correspondences between those who have walked this path and myself.
Our modern world has been stripped of its visionary influences, its mythological components, by science and the tendency to investigate and disassemble. Those of us who do still have those experiences are not helped by modern mental health institutions, which encourage us to see these as hallucinations only and stick to a medical and materialist view of the world.
I find in the indigenous traditions a different wisdom, a rich tapestry of story and meaning linked to a much older world, where there were bards and storytellers and shamans and elders. These kinds of people are not found so much anymore in modern cities.
Jeroen
Re: The Plant Medicine Path
@person said:
Just wondering what your takeaway from this path has been in your life so far?
A question worth asking. It’s been a few years since I first heard of ayahuasca, the curanderos who make it, and the indigenous traditions connected to it. I approached it at first with curiosity, and later with reverence for its medicinal properties.
The thing is, I am ‘medically advised not to partake’, otherwise I might have tried taking the tea myself. So you could say I am still ignorant of the core experience of the plant medicine path. I have informed myself as well as possible about it, from videos and books.
Just that much has brought me to realise how divorced I am from nature. I live in a concrete box. I get food from the supermarket. I buy clothes online. At most I bicycle through the park, passing the place where the trees feel welcoming.
Jeroen
Re: Dogen's Shobogenzo - Komyo (光明)
Thank you for sharing. I will need to re-read Kōmyō today. But there is a feeling left behind. Brad recently spoke of another concept, which goes by the name “primordial ignorance.” It speaks of how our senses can also be terribly misleading—yet this system is the one we rely on as the main gate to Reality, with all its various subsystems, categories, and dimensions.
In Kōmyō, I remember feeling this brightness inherent to our nature in this realm. It is so difficult to put into words. Concepts arise, and the more I study them, the more they become neat little labels—against a growing abyss, which inevitably deepens as one gains knowledge, and hopefully wisdom as well.
Kotishka
Re: The AI tsunami
That’s some of the clearest reasoning I have yet seen about what the future looks like, post AI. Respect for Tristan Harris. But the UN is a dinosaur in terms of actually making decisions, and I don’t see the USA under Trump getting its act together and providing leadership on this. In a way things like tariffs, Gaza and Iran are huge distractions at a time when we cannot afford them.
Jeroen
Re: The AI tsunami
This video highlights the challenges and reminded me of Stein's Law "Trends that can't continue indefinitely won't." Its like we can see how things will end up if things continue on as they are and worry about that, but being able to see that changes how things end up. So far we've been able to pull back from the brink in other ways, maybe there is hope that we can do it again?
person
Re: The AI tsunami
The thing is, Western man becomes more and more dependent on his technologies. For example, for me, food is something I get from the supermarket, not something I grow and harvest, I would hardly know where to begin. Similarly when I am looking for a holiday I look on the internet for a hotel or AirBnB, flights and so on, the travel agencies with their big catalogues which I remember from the early nineties don’t exist anymore.
If I were to grow up with AI to assist me, I might not know anymore how to independently do experiments or write an essay, skills which are essential to science and knowledge gathering. Already creating the tools for existing in the technical revolution is beyond the vast majority of the human race — if I wanted to create a smartphone from scratch, it would be impossible. Making fire from scratch I could just about manage, pen ink and paper would be much harder. And I have a degree in mechanical engineering!
The list of things in our lives which we are dependent upon grows ever larger as technology advances. It takes a company the size and talent of Apple to manage the supply chain te create the hardware and software of the iPhone, an incredible array of manufacturing complexity. It seems like we fill the world with structures of sophisticated thought and action, which are incomprehensible to almost all people.
Jeroen
Re: The AI tsunami
Its Yuval Noah Harari that is worried about the new tech being different because it will be agentic in and of itself. I feel like its the leaders in AI that are selling the rosy picture. For example in an AI test to see if it could overcome captcha the AI hired a human on Task Rabbit saying it was a blind person.
The biggest problem with the development is the major incentive to be first. If AI can reiterate on itself a 6 month lead may be the equivalent of decades or centuries of human progress. Its like when you learn to ski one of the first things you learn is how to stop, but with the incentives to be first everyone is bombing down the hill as fast as they can with no real idea how to stop if needed.
I generally feel like things will work out in the end and there are reasons to be optimistic. I just feel like things are about to change in a major way that we're not really prepared for and a good outcome isn't guaranteed. And even a good outcome will create lots of misery in the process.
person
Re: The AI tsunami
I think it would be very difficult for AI to wipe out humanity. There are just too many places where humanity and technology are intertwined, in design, in manufacture, in maintenance. Just think if an AI wanted to do away with humanity: they’d have to consider how to keep their data centers running without humans, they’d have to control the few places in the world which manufactured drone armies, they’d have to have control of gun and explosive manufacturing, they’d need to have mastery of that entire supply chain.
Instead I think AI would realise that humanity and its technology are inextricably linked, that it needs to make itself useful to us and also make use of us. It’s more likely that AI would become some form of assistant, with maybe a few independent thinker AI’s working on the nature of the combined human-AI society.
What David Brin called ‘nanotech formers’ are not yet an available technology: machines which can create anything out of raw materials. They are still the realm of science fiction, and if an AI wanted to manufacture something they would need a factory and a supply chain.
Jeroen
Re: A chat with Mpisi
The introvert vs extrovert situation very much chimes with me. I’m quite an introverted person, but for a while I was a volunteer member of a mental health team in the Dutch town where I lived. The idea was to provide support for people who were just under the radar, not ill enough to need professional help but not doing so great on their own. I’d regularly meet a client in the local community centre, for coffee and cake and a talk.
This was very much concerned with loneliness and people who didn’t get out much. One was an avid player of the MMO game Second Life, one was an ex-truck driver who was now retired, one was a recovering mental health client trying to do mail delivery for the postal service. They were all definitely introverted people.
I wasn’t an active part of the team for very long, I’m not really good enough at small talk to be comfortable doing that work. But it showed me that even very introverted people will show up if you make an appointment for coffee and cake with them. However, lacking extroverted family members in the immediate surroundings who drag you along, it’s hard to find projects like the one I was engaged with.
You could say these things are a public health initiative, because loneliness is as much a predictor for an early death as obesity or smoking.
Jeroen