Thanks for the time you sacrificed to illuminate the topic from a scientist's POV. That is exactly what my intentions were when opening the thread : The chance to get to listen to more
knowledgeable BLers. Anyway I wanted to comment your points earlier, but primarily I had no time due to having to work again and secondarily I was somewhat upstaged by your enormous block of clarifications.
I will answer a few points briefly and come back later on, when I had the chance to involve a broader range of references and can back up or disprove the claims with researched knowledge.
Deinonychus said:
Man, are you kidding? The ability of the brain to generate the impossibly complex, infinitely realistic feeling phenominon that is DMT hyperspace all because of molecules of a chemical acting upon our neurotransmitter receptors isn't amazing? Hell, if that's not amazing nothing is! I mean to me that's so far *beyond* amazing: that's standing in stunned, dumbfounded, slack-jawed religious awe at the majesty and mystery of the universe and the impossible beauty of being alive, in our tiny, impotent way, as we contemplate our practical non-existence within the terrible and indifferent vastness and immensity of the cosmos.
Hmm, sounds like you are pretty convinced, that the whole psychedelic experience happens inside our brains by dampening the neuronal stimuli in some and accelerate them in other places and that the perceived hightened probability of learning something about life is totally subjective and actually a result of randomness. That would correlate with the global scientific
view, that nothing happens out of purpose, but because nature works "opportunistically" by taking chances non deterministically, that pop up randomly. I fail to see anything amazing in that scenario :D Also the workflow of a NDA is difficult to imagine for me. It stays an abstract model.
I can't think of anything *more* amazing than honest to gosh conscious life consciously examining itself through the lens of the changes in that self-conscious consciousness that derive from ridiculously complex warps in our perception, wrought by the simple introduction of a small quantity of a specifically-shaped molecule. The wonder I feel upon contemplating this subject trumps anything I could ever feel for more the more esoteric and mystical spooky action at a distance that people invoke with their talk of DMT elves and actual external entities dropping them a line (on a phone, not a line of yayo).
I did not want to steer the discussion into that esoteric realm anyway. Just because I want to discuss the possibility that humans could communicate with other beings - let's be specific and talk about plants instead of surroundings - by reading parts of their DNA, that are transfered by emitted photons, does not mean, that I believe that magical elves are behind the curtain to manipulate our behaviour. Plants do that constantly, please see the references :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCYQHA-nNzI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isE7e0UhMGI (as mentioned the presentation is awkward)
If you take a piece of extracted DNA and put it into a photomultiplier, you can observe, that it also emits photons constantly. Cells communicate via photons. Can't it be, that we, or our cells respectively, just dismiss signs of plants all the time, because our consciousness is self-centered in the ordinary state ?
Science isn't distrust. It isn't anything other than a process used to try and understand things from a rationally rigorous perspective. Science doesn't speak in truths, it speaks in probabilities. Science isn't distrust, it is disproof, in the sense that hypotheses are made and then you and others try to disprove them. If the hypothesis surpasses those attempts at being disproven, then you may have the beginnings of a scientific theory (note that we say a scientific theory, not scientific fact).
It is in a sense distrust, as you do not believe anything, that goes on beyond the boundaries of human/mechanical perception and therefore is not measurable, yet.
religion = faith in the unknown
science = distrust in the unknown
If it is measurable, scientists put their trust in it, but : After quantum physicist there is the problem of the observer manipulating the outcome of an experiment.
Let's say I am a jealous person and set up my neighbor to spy my wife, so that he can tell me, when she cheated me. Who says, that he isn't the betrayer himself ?
Who says, that experiments do not cheat the observer ?
Sorry, that was offtopic. Because if I believed in the stuff I just mentioned, this discussion would be finished :D
Well, allowing that this is true for the same of argument, there's an issue here. That issue is the question of how we are receiving those photons, and how the information allegedly conveyed by photons is encoded. The encoding thing is the simpler of the two, and it boils down to the fact that we see an awfully small slice of the electromagnetic spectrum (the ranges of frequencies and their associated wavelengths that photons can possess). And the slice we see, visible light, is not really so good for transmitting information, because a lot of things scatter photons at these frequencies, and a lot of things stop such photons cold. So something like radio-frequency (and thus radio wavelength, since frequency and wavelength are directly connected) would be better for transmitting, but we can't see in the radio spectrum.
Thanks for bringing that up. The question would be, what is the frequency of the oscillation, the photons have ?
The second bit is the more thorny issue, and that's how we are able to receive these photons. Naturally the sensible thing to use would be our eyes, but our eyes are actually pretty limited as far as the amount of information that they gather in the range outside of the direct center of our vision. The comes are posted pretty much in the center of our eyes, and then their distribution rapidly drops to nearly zero as you move from the center of our field of vision outwards. So the problem then becomes that we have a limited area in which we could receive these messages via photons, because the collr sensitive cone cells are sensitive to single photons, and also have one nerve connection to the brain per come cell, whereas the black and white seeing rod cells are connected in such a way that like thirty of them all connect to a single nerve channel to the brain.
Furthermore, those cone cells work by actually having three populations of come subtypes: short wavelength, medium wavelength, and long wavelength (understanding that the difference between short and long wavelengths is actually incredibly small compared to the range of the entire EM band, from radio to gamma rays). Each of these three types is sensitive to a particular band of frequencies/wavelengths, and then the brain is what is responsible for turning these three channels of information into color. So not only must the frequency and thus wavelength of those photons fall within a bandwidth that is shitty for transmitting encoded information, that being the visible light spectrum, it must actually be in a smaller subset of frequencies, comprised of the sum of the short, middle, and long wavelength bands that the respective populations of cones are sensitive to. Medium and long wavelengths (green and red) are actually almost the exact same band, which makes sense when you remember that we only gained trichromatic vision by an imperfect duplication of the gene that codes for the long wavelength sensitive protein, where the imperfect duplication shifts the band of frequencies that the newly-created medium wavelength sensitive protein a very slight amount higher in frequency than the band that it was derived from, the long wavelength band. And then there's a big gap between the almost-the-same low and medium wavelength cones and the short wavelength sensitive cones (blue). So the photon would have to fall within the shared green and red bandwidth or the separate short wavelength band, leaving out a lot of the rest of the possible frequencies in the visible spectrum.
And then you'd have to wonder how the brain would interpret the photons. While its true that our vision relies on mathematical principles to function, there's a hell of a lot of interpolation and filling in of blanks that is done by our brain to take the limited, imperfect data streams from the ocular nerves and turn that into a coherant image. Most of that is 'fuzzy math', where the brain uses its past experiences with visual information to make guesses about what is actually being seen. A vivid illustration of the highly-processed and very much inferred/interpolated nature of our vision may be found within any common optical illusions. These illusions all rely on our brain incorrectly applying the heuristics that it has derived from past experience to the image, resulting in an incorrect perception of what is actually being seen, like circles of dots seeming to spin when they are very much static images.
Sorry for being abrupt. Let's dismiss the assumption, that the photons oscillate in frequencies of visible light. In the reference they told, that the transfer speed of the photons equals that of light, but it does not mean, that the wavelength/frequency is in the range of light. I suggest, that the wavelength is far too small to be seen. In my speculation, the visuals you get with psychedelics have nothing to do with the emitted DNA-photons. Let's also say, that the brain (i.e. the sum of its cells), our mind, does not have to interprete it correctly. It just reads it, and due to the similiarity with the internal DNA, it gets read, as it would be one of the own cells and in that way visions/imaginations are possible. Whether these visions are valuable or just random gibberish is written in another book.
By the 'DNA of your surroundings', what exactly do you mean? I assume you're using the phrase metaphorically, in the sense of 'the DNA of our surroundings' referring to some sort of deeper truth that is ordinarily invisible or visible but neglected by our perceptual processing regions within the brain, but I could be wrong and you mean something else entirely. Care to elaborate for my benefit please?
Okay let's define surroundings = plants, because that is the hypothesis, that Jeremy Narby tried to underline. Actually I meant exactly : "Is it possible, that the human brain is capable of parsing, understanding the DNA of plants subconsciously in certain states?"
DNA is encoded information, but it is not encrypted information. Encryption implies that some process has been performed upon the data, typically a complicated mathematical function, for the purpose of rendering it into nonsense for anybody who lacks the key to decrypting the message. This is emphatically not what happens with DNA. DNA may not be binary 0s and 1s, which is what we often think of when we imagine 'encoded data' thanks to computer science, but you can encode data plenty of other ways. In this case it is a quaternary numeral system, base-4 to the binary base-2 used by computers or the base-10 that humans tend to count with. A, T (replaced with U in RNA), G, and C are the abbreviations for the purine or pyramidine nucleotides that are attached to the alternating sugar and phosphates that make up the backbones of each strand of DNA. A, T, G, and C can just as easily be called 0, 1, 2, and 3, the numerals in base-4.
These values, 0 through 3, come in sequence, and every three of those values comprises a code for a specific amino acid. In this way you can take the combinations of three digits, with each digit taking one of the four possible base-4 values, and derive codes for the twenty basic amino acids used either directlt as proteins to construct a person or as enzymes and functional proteins used to catalyze reactions or produce non-protein building blocks respectively, in order to make a person. But there is no encryption here, just encoded data.
Thx, you are correct in indicating, that I should not have used the terms synonymously, I will correct the concerning parts. I'm with you, that DNA is primarily just encoded data.
But, who can certainly say that it not also contains an encrypted message ?
If we assume that the whole DNA-emitting procedure does really happen, but we are not capable to even parse the fractions of DNA in our normal state, let alone interpret them correctly, because the potentially receiving cells of our body are busy with seemingly more important tasks like playing their role the cell colony they are living in, our organism, in order to let it evolve and reproduce one time. In the normal state, their communication is so to say hard-wired for internal tasks like "production of skin-cells", "digestion of food", "reception of sensual input", depending on the localisation and type of the cell. Let's conventionally assume, that the DMT-molecule (or similar) modulates the communication at the serotonine receptors. Can't it be, that certain cells, that are regulated by serotonine levels, go into idle-mode and wait for input instead of doing their ordinary tasks ? Perhaps now they are able to read the messages (photons) of external sources (plant-DNA). In that case, the DNA code is not really encrypted, but you have to either open the box (using a microscope) or modulating your organic parser in order to read it.
The DNA could also be encrypted in another way (attention, bs-meter is very high in the next view sentences). Let's say, if we took the DNA-traces of all species together and would be the owners of a key (I don't know about the texture of it), that we could read a sort of hidden message that tells us something. We cannot disprove, that all the DNA taken together contains an encrypted message, as we do not know the DNA of all species.
Finally, there really isn't much in the way of garbage or junk DNA. While it is true that we do have duplicated genes, as well as fragments of viruses that got stitched into our genetic code by accident, the vast majority of what was once known as 'junk DNA' has turned out to be combinations of nucleotides that regulate the expression of our protein-coding genes. This means they regulate how often a given protein is going to be produced, or if it will be produced at all. This is what allows such a profusion of different subcomponents of a human body to be produced from a single inclusive set of instructions.
Okay sorry again, in the last 15 years, they solved the confusion with the "unknown DNA". Thx for revealing that fact.
Pretty much totally implausible to be honest. First there's the question of what entity is doing the transmitting, and how, since the entity doesn't seem to have a physical form (which is its own problem in and of itself). Then you have the transduction of photons into information, which would have to be performed by our brains with the cooperation of our eyes, and that isn't really something that is likely. Even if it were likely, it would probably be happening all the time, since the equipment would have to be already extant in order for a psychedelic to turn that 'machinery' on, so why would we have the equipment if we only used it when we were tripping? And then there's the issue of my not being quite sure what you mean about the DNA of our surroundings. I'm not sure what is meant by this turn of phrase but its probably pretty implausible too.
That said, it's a fascinating concept, so I don't see why we should limit ourselves to not discussing it simply because it doesn't actually happen. It holds value as a thought experiment, not as a predictive theory, so we should explore it as such, keeping in mind that it is in fact a thought experiment only.
I say, we can also achieve it without the ingestion of a chemical, speak of meditative practices, that also modulate the serotonergic system, when exercised thoroughly. As mentioned, I would exclude the cooperation of our eyes of the process of parsing DNA-photons. I am no biochemist/biophysicist, so have not enough clue to test ANY of the theses/options. All I can do is read and spread the word/the questions.
Thanks for your contribution again, I am coming back, when I have news to the topic or when someone replied to the speculations made. Maybe we can open a new thread with shorter/summarized posts, because in the current state it is pretty hard get through in the spare time.
morninggloryseed said:
Great thread. Now I feel stupid as I have nothing of substance to contribute....but I enjoy reading it.
Yeah, it is a great and versatile topic. As mentioned, all the ideas are taken from Narby.
Sorry for orthographic errors, will edit em out later on :D
