You see this with cannabis all the time (minus the violence), with users defending it to the hilt and trying to hand wave away any notion that cannabis might not actually be all positive. The great irony of that is unfortunately to all the sober straight people that lends weight to their position that cannabis isn't completely harmless, because all they see are people (users) defending something absolutely when they should be more nuanced about it. It is a glaring contradiction, especially when many smokers like to believe they are open minded.
Yeah I see it, too, and that's the danger of prohibition and government overreach. When you spend decades telling the public bullshit lies about "gateway drugs" and "reefer madness" type propaganda, of course there's gonna be some swinging of the proverbial pendulum in the other direction. All those lies killed the credibility of those who would point out some of the harm that cannabis / THC & associate cannabinoids can and do cause. So that "nuanced" approach to considering the pros and cons of cannabis use works both ways. The truth meets in the middle, and so should the public. The wrong response is labelling all of its users as criminals.
I don't think this gets enough attention, and it relates to what I was talking about above (entities). Call it the spirit of the plant/substance if you like, but it doesn't sit much different than a partner who is being abused by their other half and continues to defend them in public.
This is not an appropriate simile; the comparison is loaded. Not all people who use drugs abuse them, and this is a different abuse entirely than domestic abuse.
They are possessed by an idea, one which is false. It is also true that generally a user will not be able to recognize this dynamic until they get completely clean, because the substance (entity) is pulling the wool over their [third] eye i.e. intuition. It creates a closed loop of thinking they can't step outside of, until they stop and look back.
I have a few issues here. 1. I dislike and reject the term "clean" as its used here, even though I recognize how commonly the addiction recovery industrial complex likes to use this terminology along with other made up terms like "criminogenic", and even the word "addiction" itself was invented in 1958 by the W.H.O. in an attempt to define a drug's potential danger by correlating it to its supposed risk level of dependency and tolerance issues. So the word "addiction" was meant to imply "spoken for" which is why it shares etymology with the words "diction" and "dictionary". It's a less than perfect metaphor. Similarly saying "until they get completely clean" implies that drug use is inherently "dirty". This somehow never applies to prescription drugs though, even if they exhibit mind-altering effects. No one calls someone "not clean" bc they're taking their ℞ SSRI, or their insulin, or their ADHD medication, etc. It's temperance movement mentality ☞ it's like saying: "cleanliness is next to godliness, so drugs are dirty bc they are evil!" This is bad logic and superstitious thinking.
2. You're using an awful lot of metaphorical language here. "Pull the wool over the third eye"? Jesus H. Christ, man, my third eye rolled so hard I had a past life regression just now. You expect me to believe that using cannabis removes a person's sense of intuition? I can't agree with this.
3. Idk why you seem to think self-awareness is impossible for someone who smokes weed, or does any drug, really. Many times drugs can enhance our abilities to strip layers of illusion off of the world and off of the way we see ourselves. Drugs can enhance a person's sense of spirituality and serve as wonderful tools for exploring the depths of "inner space", as it were. This should be celebrated and encouraged much as it is in the tribal rituals of indigenous peoples all over the globe.
I know what I've experienced, and that is worth more to me than any peer reviewed paper or waffle of accredited psychologist. I can't deny my own experience, I know these things are there.
Ah the hallmarks of confirmation bias, or more to the point perhaps the availability heuristic bias. Of course you know what you've experienced. Personally I question my experiences and try to remain open-minded to the fact that even eye-witness testimony can be inaccurate.
What they are and how it all functions, that I can not say for sure.
I agree with you all the way on this point.
Right now my belief is they are functional, non-local parts of a wider biological system, that serve very definite roles in nature.
Is this a belief or a theory you're not sure about just yet? I know it seems like I'm spitting hairs, but the distinction is important.
Snippets of mental program, that are supposed to activate and guide the actions of biological life that has developed a degree of autonomy via neurological function and therefore must be guided at certain times to maintain the continuity of the system. For example, the 'violence' may be a snippet related to animal hunting and predation, and perhaps psychedelics open the mind too far and it touches a snippet it shouldn't, causing erroneous action.
Material science can only measure what it can touch,
What it can detect, but sure. Nothing wrong with that. It's logical, reasonable, and observable. These are things I value,
and we're talking about something beyond our current instrumentation.
But quite possibly not our future instrumentation.
But that doesn't mean it's not valid. After all, there are numerous points of contention within the biological realm, things science can not adequately explain. For example, biological 'form'. It is completely unable to explain how form is passed on, and for a long time it was able to ride on the assumption it was all genetics but after decades of that it still has no answers. Neither can science adequately pinpoint memory or perception in the brain; you have many people with almost the entire grey mass of the brain missing and just have fluid, but who are still functional, which completely contradicts the notion that it is 'all in the brain'.
Lotta misinformation and oversimplifications in this. Let's break it down. Saying science cannot explain something is usually too strong; it's more accurate to say science hasn't yet fully explained it.
Re: biological form ☞ this is partially true but misleading. While the precise mechanisms of morphogenesis (how organisms develop their shape and structure) are not fully understood, this doesn't mean there's no explanation. Genetics plays a huge role, but it's not the whole story. We know about gene regulatory networks, cell signaling pathways, and physical forces that influence development. The field of developmental biology is actively researching these questions, and significant progress has been made. Saying it's "completely unable" is an overstatement. It's more accurate to say the process is complex and not fully elucidated.
Re: genetics ☞ this is a simplification. While early genetics focused heavily on genes, developmental biology has long recognized that it's not
just genes. The interaction of genes with each other, with the environment, and the physical processes of development are all crucial. The field hasn't been "riding on the assumption it was all genetics" for a long time.
Re: memory and grey brain matter ☞ you're again being reductionist and misrepresenting neuroscience. While it's true that the brain exhibits plasticity and redundancy (meaning some functions can be taken over by other areas), the idea that people can be "missing almost the entire grey mass" and be "functional" is highly misleading. Hydrocephalus, the condition you mention, involves fluid buildup, but it doesn't mean the brain tissue is simply gone. The brain adapts, and the degree of functionality varies wildly. Furthermore, even in cases of significant brain damage, there are usually cognitive deficits. The fact that the brain can sometimes compensate for damage doesn't contradict the general principle that brain structure is essential for brain function. Neuroscience is actively researching the neural correlates of consciousness, memory, and perception, and while there are still many unknowns, the field is making progress.
Science is great, but it can't explain everything. Science would have me believe out-of-body experiences are a violation of the laws of physics and biology, an impossibility, but yet I've had many such experiences and so have thousands of other people. Clearly science does not have the entire picture.
With all due respect—and I mean that, not just blurting a rote phraseology; I do respect your thoughts on this—but perhaps you're looking at a portion of this the wrong way. You seem to think the two concepts—science and metaphysics/supernatural phenomena are somehow mutually exclusive. Saying science fails to explain this apparent discrepancy is not entirely accurate. It's just that our current understanding of science hasn't progressed far enough to explain every mystery to us. But virtually every time in the past when people were certain there were magic, sorcery, witches, etc., it turned out that it was just more science we had not quite figured out yet. But it was never evidence of the supernatural. Neither is consciousness and the existence of the individual's mind—or the illusions thereof; who knows for sure, right?—indisputable evidence that they exist outside of the realm of explainable science. Perhaps reality is stranger and beyond the comprehension skills of any human mind, bound as we are to our mortal biologies. But maybe not.
Ultimately, science doesn't unseat this spiritual concept to me. If anything, the elusive explanations and challenges to our understanding of science drives us ever further. I encourage you to distinguish between "we don't fully understand this yet" and "science has no answers." The former is a driver of scientific inquiry, while the latter can be a mischaracterization of the state of knowledge.
