Well to be fair, I came in asking about whether the community thinks introducing "psychedelic dissociation" was a valid phenomenological construct in the context of the framework we use (we want to be as open, fair and scientifically possible of course.) The simplest course would have just been to say "this substance seems to be really super duper ego death-y, like DPT and such" and just leave it at that, but I wanted to see if there were alternate explanations for heavy psychedelic states by very experienced psychedelic users.
FWIW I have high functioning autism, and yes, it does lead to overelocution (which, to demonstrate, is partly why I am drawn to psychonautwiki, because writing pages for it forces me to pare my writing/thinking down). TBH it is kind kind of hurtful that all you can see is that ("while you might not be saying much"), when I am just trying my best to lay a solid, comprehensive framework as a basis for constructive dialogue (I wrote this while dead sober, btw, just after having the issue on the back of my mind for a while).
The principal reason for me coming here is to spark some discussion on the experience and phenomenological construct of what is colloquially known as "Ego death" and whether the very intense states able to be reliably produced by certain psychedelics on even two or three times the common dose needed for the core activity (within a "sensible" dose range) are actually able to be separated from what we describe as an entirely cognitive phenomenon (i.e. this is not the ++++ type ego death, but rather just a basic description of what happens when you take heavy doses of strong psychedelics, which can reliably induce potent short and long term disruptions in memory encoding and retrieval that we are actually beginning to understand on a neurological level using brain imaging techniques).
But yes, boiled down to the essentials, the question that inspired me to come here relates to my curiosity as to whether anyone else noticed that ETH-LAD seems to produce that "I am viewing my consciousness in a far-away screen in a totally dark movie theater" effect, and why do certain psychedelics also seem strongly associated with "psychedelic dissociation" when the current theory is predicated on direct NMDA receptor antagonist binding activity and efficacy? Is it just to do with higher degrees of temperature regulation suppression and overheatiing leading to partial delirium? Is it just normal extreme hallucinogenesis? Also, why does this seem hard to just tie this down to memory suppression or states of boundary-lessness? Instead of charitable dialogue, I am brought to the stand to defend why the whole site does something a certain way (I'm not in charge of it, it's a Wiki and I am trying to retool the framework precisely by making adjustments like these and using them as prompts for discussion). Then I am told to "clean house" first by just removing ego death from large swathes of pages before having this discussion, which as I have discussed in the post above, can make things incredibly convoluted >.<
Not I am not in disagreement with this notion but it seems like there's a bit of underlying hostility delivered with it (which I'll admit I could just be misperceiving). But really, all I am really trying to do is make the site more scientifically and phenomenologically accurate and grounded, while writing from a generally conservative, harm-reduction oriented perspective (again, considering like half of our base only spend 10 seconds on the site looking up etizolam doses and whether they're gonna die if they mix it with heroin and 1,4-BD and flunitrazolam). I am wary of the impression we could give (particularly to new users interested in the psychedelic) that psychedelics are so predictable in behavior that we can very precisely categorize which ones are efficacious enough to induce "ego death", as this may give them the impression that there is some sort of evidence-grounded hierarchy. Although this information is extrapolatable/hypothesizable to some degree there is no currently methodology in which we can really present this information in a simple way that we've found, which is why I am asking questions about retooling the framework, and trying to comprehensively describe the factors in a way that our user analytics informs us as to how the information we present is being consumed.
Note that our base is _not_ comprised of Bluelight oldheads who have spent years lurking here and really hashing out the nuances of the varieties of psychedelic experience. I didn't just come in this forum making a thread about how we our construction/presentation ego death and how OUR site can fix it (it seems a little bit inappropriate for me as a guest). I put this in here to spark some discussion because I am truly fascinated by this compound and enjoy it immensely, while also trying to tie the divergences it displays to even a basic neurophenomenological explanation.
However, I do understand if this is seen as unwelcome, that people here don't really care about providing constructive input about the site (which I do understand if you don't feel any connection with it) and I should just be tl;dring. Like I put out something that I clearly label as a guess/speculation and then get an admonition of advancing warrantless conjecture (which I would argue is actually not so warrantless, even if it is heavily simplified, you will find not even an inkling of such speculation on that page). They are based on recent studies released by Carhart et. al on 5-HT2a associated disruptions to the "DNM", alterations in network synchronicity/oscillatory activity and trying to go deeper down the rabbit hole of the downstream cascade(s) that just get initiated by initial 5-HT2Ar binding/activation; as well as Vollenweider et al who talks about both dissociatives like ketamine + psychedelics in tandem and hypothesizes about cortico-striatal-thalamo loop collapses as the neural basis for ego dissolution, extrapolating from recent neuroimaging studies and the general principles of neurobiology. For those interested, I will post the papers I am using below as the basis of this very weak, simplified conjecture and welcome any alternate models to use as the neural basis for the phenomonology observed in hallucinogen-induced altered states such as the one ETH-LAD produces.
"Notes on short term memory and long term memory are valid, in the context of adding to a body of evidence, but not enough testing has been done to evaluate comparisons. This ties overall to the same issue as stages of "continuity of identity suppression". Well to be fair, I don't think enough studies have been conducted on psychedelics overall, but we are doing the best we can with the studies that are just coming out. For example, even if you just go back to Strassman's pilot DMT phenomenological studies you see a measurable correlation with dose compared to what the subjects describe as "ego loss", forgetting and not being able to remember who they were or why they were in the "place" they found themselves in, and I believe this dose-dependent response has been further validated within the last decade with the works of Carhart and Nutt, Griffiths, Vollenweider, Nichols and others.
Again, I would like to appreciate more constructive dialogue on this topic, if it is welcome here of course. It seems like I am receiving two different points of views arising from the same underlying sentiments, however, which is kind of confusing. Perhaps my post above was not clear enough; I am neither beholden to the framework we currently use regarding "ego death" but also cannot disentangle it from the feeling here that people are beang distracted by s kneejerk rejection to the word/label (again I don't like it either, but up this site is intentionally trying to balance rigor with accessibility, and the vast majority of substance users are not the type to conduct extensive research on the substances they use, like the regulars here on bluelight).
This wiki entry is not meant to be a scientific paper, if that wasn't clear. Nor is the entirety of the site. I am not proposing a theory, but rather a hypothesis and an invitation from the community to propose what they think would be an improved conceptual framework from the current "leveling" system we have for ego death, which is really very basic and can be described in this manner: 1) Partial suppression of short term memory, 2) Total suppression of short-term memory, 3) Partial suppression of long term memory and 4) Total suppression of long term memory.
I will not go so far to suggest this is a wholly linear progression. "Ego death" is just the colloquial descriptor of memory suppression in its fullest cognitive manifestation; we do not attribute it any inherent profundity. I do think continuity of identity suppression is more precise but I am worried about sacrificing accessibility for the average drug user at the expense of total precision (though I will probably add it to the page it links to itself even if I don't go with it as a label). If that term proves to be too wordy so as to be easily communicable. I am also able to entertain changing it to "ego loss" or "ego suppression/disruption" with descriptions of what we mean by "ego" (which for us is just a coherent, stable, personal identity continuum). Again though, what is the criterion and metric that should be used to compare, given the fact that research has been held back for decades, and how complex neuropsychopharm is? What to do about the edge cases? We could provide descriptions for each one I suppose, but they largely won't be read and will also result in a combinatorial explosion of claims that by their nature have incredibly little data on them. I mean I think it's pretty easy to assign "ego loss" to simple substituted tryptamines like 5-MeO-DMT, DMT, the classicals or even "disconnectivity" to ibogaine, but what about substances like 2C-I, 2C-C, escaline or 4-HO-DPT, DiPT, DET/DPT or bufotenin or salvia?
Okay, I will put an end to this here. Again, if this kind of discussion is not welcome here, I will not waste either of our time. At the same time it would be nice if we didn't have people wagging their fingers at us at a distance instead of dialoguing with us constructively. We really are just trying to be a trusted, reliable, and adaptive resource for the entire community. Like, a point of feedback that isn't just "I like that name better than the other one" rather than a re-evaluation or suggestions to retool the entire construct is more of what I was trying to provoke with this. Perhaps I am being too sensitive here, I don't know. Anyways, thank you for taking the time to respond.
P.S. the page has been updated to incorporate the latest feedback received. The revision is available for view here:
https://psychonautwiki.org/w/index.php?title=ETH-LAD&type=revision&diff=102924&oldid=102865
Thank you again to everyone for taking the time to read it.
Sources:
Simplified powerpoint on hallucinogenic action and what it suggests about the nature of visual processing and consciousness (focuses on corticothalamic interactions):
http://visionlab.harvard.edu/Members/Olivia/tutorialsDemos/Hallucinogens&Percept.pdf
Vollenweider, F. X., & Kometer, M. (2010). The neurobiology of psychedelic drugs: implications for the treatment of mood disorders. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(9), 642-651.
https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2884 (includes some discussions about similarities in network alterations between ketamine and psychedelics)
Vollenweider, F. X. (2001). Brain mechanisms of hallucinogens and entactogens. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 3, 265-280. PMCID: PMC3181663.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181663/
Carhart-Harris, R. L., Muthukumaraswamy, S., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M., Droog, W., Murphy, K., … Nutt, D. J. (2016). Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1518377113
Carhart-Harris, R. L., Leech, R., Hellyer, P. J., Shanahan, M., Feilding, A., Tagliazucchi, E., ... & Nutt, D. (2014). The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020