Deinonychus
Bluelighter
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2012
- Messages
- 401
I'm of the opinion that people can debate subject, disagree with one another, or even call eachother out, and yet do all of this within the parameters of civilized discourse and simple, common sense human decency. All too often, people conflate a disagreement on a topic with a dislike of the person they disagree with. This isn't limited to the Internet either, and sure, maybe it is indeed more common to have people take a disagreement into the realm of personal attacks when they have the pseudo-anonymity that the Internet provides as many social commentators claim, but this happens in real life too. A perfect and highly visible example would be the political parties in America. Our members of congress and senators are supposed to be level-headed, intelligent people, capable of meaningful dialogue and compromise. But instead they take their ideological differences as some sort of evidence that their opposite number is fundamentally wrong and morally bankrupt, and disagreements rapidly become personal grudges and vendettas where the object of attack is not a politician's policies but the politician's character.
We don't need to do that sort of nonsense here on Bluelight. I would say we don't need to do that type of nonsense at all but humans are humans, and mistaking philosophical differences for evidence of moral or mental bankruptcy is a fundamental part of human nature. With that said one of the goals – albeit unstated – of Bluelight is to facilitate personal growth, whether that is the result of learning accurate information about the substances we enjoy or whether that takes the form of learning how to disagree with people in a civilized fashion.
More is not always better. You are definitely correct that we (members of Bluelight that hang around here in PD) are often seemingly pursuing any number of 'holy grails'. One example of this is ego loss, holding it above all other forms of psychedelic experience and trumpeting its virtues as being 'the point' of tripping. I've seen this a lot, and the mindset that follows this pattern is the same mindset that talks up ultra high doses of psychedelics.
Yeah, I could have been more clear. I guess a better way to put it is that certain chemicals, like certain subsets of steroids, may affect behavior, but they do this in a roundabout way. Instead of directly acting upon the receptors in the brain they may alter the balances of various semiochemicals, signaling factors or hormones or what have you, which in turn alter the levels of other semiochemicals, and so on, with this chain of causality eventually reaching into the brain. And then the behavioral changes may be brought about, in an indirect fashion.
Connecting perception and behavior is a perfectly valid thing to do. They're both parts of the mess of feedback and feedforward loops that underlie our consciousness. I think it is worth mentioning though that there's a lot more to consciousness than just perception, with a lot of interaction between consciousness and our unconscious mental systems, and psychedelics act on the whole entirety of our minds, making no distinction between the conscious and unconscious parts of our psyche. Indeed, psychedelics seem to sort of blend the two together, blurring the edges so that you can't be sure where the one begins and the other ends, allowing input into our conscious minds from the portions of our psyches that are normally closed off behind the curtain.
I don't think it was necessarily botching definitions, rather it's just that if we, speaking in the general sense of people engaged in a discussion, are going to be able to successfully carry out that discussion then there has to be some sort of consensus on what the various terms that may be used will mean. So if the definition of what is and is not psychedelic is going to get stretched in the course of a debate, that's fine, it's just important to make sure that everybody understands what's up, and is on the same page. And in this case I don't think that sort of consensus was there, so I pointed it out.
Yeah, it's a badass website! If we all just try to post the best we can that sort of awesomeness can be sustained. Accordingly I'm nothing special, there's many, many more people on this forum that put just as much time and thought and effort into their posts, and that's why we end up returning here time and time again I would hypothesize.
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Fascinating, this I did not know! Good to learn something (preferably more than just one thing) new everyday, now I get to look stuff up about neurosteroids!
I would still say that everything that has a direct effect upon our consciousness must as a prerequisite cross the blood-brain barrier, not that you stated otherwise, just reiterating the point. If a steroid is active in the brain, as is the case with neurosteroids, then by definition it has passed through that barrier.
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