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Terence McKenna

How would you get any useful information? It's not like they can tell us what is happening in their thoughts.

In general I just don't buy the whole theory. If there are some primates that lack the brain structures needed for high-level abstract thought and for more than very rudimentary language usage skills, WHY and HOW would being dosed with shrooms magically give them these abilities? McKenna takes the template of what shrooms do to HIS consciousness, and imposes it upon the not-as-advanced consciousness and brains of apes and leaps to all sorts of pulled from his ass conclusions. Interesting and fanciful, but really intended more as "food for thought" material than anything else I think.
 
dwaynehoover said:
how would you get any useful information? It's not like they can tell us what is happening in their thoughts.

In general i just don't buy the whole theory. If there are some primates that lack the brain structures needed for high-level abstract thought and for more than very rudimentary language usage skills, why and how would being dosed with shrooms magically give them these abilities? Mckenna takes the template of what shrooms do to his consciousness, and imposes it upon the not-as-advanced consciousness and brains of apes and leaps to all sorts of pulled from his ass conclusions. Interesting and fanciful, but really intended more as "food for thought" material than anything else i think.
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^+1
 
DwayneHoover said:
How would you get any useful information? It's not like they can tell us what is happening in their thoughts.

In general I just don't buy the whole theory. If there are some primates that lack the brain structures needed for high-level abstract thought and for more than very rudimentary language usage skills, WHY and HOW would being dosed with shrooms magically give them these abilities? McKenna takes the template of what shrooms do to HIS consciousness, and imposes it upon the not-as-advanced consciousness and brains of apes and leaps to all sorts of pulled from his ass conclusions. Interesting and fanciful, but really intended more as "food for thought" material than anything else I think.
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You can monitor a chimps brain and see what happens with the neurons and what not. Scientists can predict what humans are thinking just from brain activity, so there could be quite a lot of information gained from it.

Again like I said shrooms didn't magically give them the ability, it is a process which takes time. Why and how? Well shrooms make you more vocal and triggers imagination and visual hallucinations through your brain, this seems like a perfect foundation for modern consciousness. No ones saying this theory is perfect, and it is most likely "pulled out of his ass," but if you take a moment to think about it, it doesn't seem that far fetched.
 
I like T-Mac all right. Food of the Gods is worth a read for sure, but I don't take any of his theories at face value. I find it more beneficial to read his books as science fiction, or perhaps really whacked out cosmic poetry. Then it makes a lot more sense to me.

Basically, I'm with SKL in taking the underlying message rather than the ideas themselves.
 
killtheego said:
You can monitor a chimps brain and see what happens with the neurons and what not. Scientists can predict what humans are thinking just from brain activity, so there could be quite a lot of information gained from it..
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Ummm..... I think you got the wrong idea somewhere. They CANNOT tell "what you are thinking" by monitoring the brain. No way no how. Totally impossible. They can tell in general what TYPES of activities are getting the processing attention... but NOTHING so far as the actual content.

Also I am pretty sure they really don't have any comprehensive set of records as to what kinds of neural activity changes "typically" happen in humans on psychedelics to compare data from apes against. And I would be very surprised if such data were very revealing. Given the totally random and individualistic responses not just between people but from trip to trip... any brain area activation sequences are going to be totally idiosyncratic and have np explanatory consistent patterns of any kind.

It's a good concept for an experiment... in about 100 years when we really might be able to put a person under a helmet and display on a screen "what he is thinking." But not now.... nowhere even close, I'm afraid.
 
Best McKenna:
Invisible Landscape + True Hallucinations. The former only makes sense after the latter. Probably the best psychedelic works, ever (IMO, of course)
 
killtheego said:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-06/mind-reading-tech-way

Pretty close, I'm afraid.
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NOT.

Quote from that article:

But deciphering the patterns that result from one word or image is fairly simple. Unraveling the entirety of our thoughts is not. John-Dylan Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin and another panelist, says that the researchers are not truly reading minds: "We don't understand the language of the brain, the syntax and the semantics of neural language." At this point, he says, they are just using statistical analysis to analyze brain patterns during very specific object-oriented tasks.​

And making knowing whether or not you are looking at a cat or a mouse via a brain scan significantly easier is the fact that the images recieved by the eye are replicated in similar, though distorted manners, on the back of the brain in the visual cortex, obviously it contains a map of the retina, so the image thing is easy. This is just step 1 in a lengthy sequence of visual cognition processing steps. I totally doubt that an imagined or hallucinated image inside the end-stage "subjective visual cognition" output end of that pipeline is back projected into the retinal map at the beginning of the pipeline... no reason whatsoever for that to occur or think it might occur.

i.e., the machine CANNOT read what you are imagining, dreaming, or hallucinating like it can read what image is being received by your retinas.
 
This is why I said "pretty close" as opposed to your "nowhere even close". I never said they can read all of what our minds going through with or without psychedelics, but with what they can do so far you can definitely get quite a bit of interesting information out of monitoring a chimps brain on mushrooms.
 
Well maybe... especially if you looked at the before shrooms vs. on shrooms difference map, then compared that to a humans' before shrooms vs. on shrooms difference map. This would tell us if shrooms caused the same general types of changes in brain activity as they cause in humans.

But only if shrooms resulted in some consistent pattern of changes in brain activity. Which I find a questionable proposal.
 
i enjoy listening to his spoken word and audiobooks

and i guess his brother said it best in an interview

forgot exactly what he said but it was along the lines of "he says one thing then 10 minutes he says something that contradicts the previous thing" "has no evidence for his theory" etc
 
Neither of us know exactly how the brain works, or how the brain scanning MRI's work, so all we can do is speculate. But given how much information they already know I can only say, that a lot can be found out through these methods.
 
I like the slow, loping, sing-songy way he spoke.... very kind of childishly endearing, and sorta trippy in its own way.... it probably annoys the hell out of some anti-hippies, but it make me smile and feel good =D
 
If your really into Terence Mckenna and your willing to get into his deepest jargon read The Invisible Landscape, it puts me in an effective responsive mood for mushroom trips anyways. I love believing his theories and meditating to the ringing in my ears
 
I have read True Hallucinations, Invisible land scape and foods of the gods.

My dad gave me True Hallucinations when I was in high school and it was one and still is one of my favorite books ever. He then lent me his copy of foods of the gods later on and I read that, it was also very good. Only a few years ago did I get Invisible landscape, it is sure wacky but a great read as well.

He changed the way I think about psychedelic drugs. He was a great man.
 
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