Why do Psychedelics exist?

[SeenSoFar]

Just want to point out that if you still live in that 'survival of the fittest, nature hates us all, the world is a physical meaningless bunch of stars and shit, everything is reducible to mechanics' worldview you're still living in 1900, and also you must be pretty unimaginative, uninspired and potentially depressed.

There are alkaloids in nature that affect particular receptors in the brain because nature grows as a whole and everything implies everything else. If over here you have 5HT2A receptors, then over there you have alkaloids that bind to it. The psychedelic experience is part of the natural functioning of the human organism.

The other attitude is, fuck no, it's all a big mistake, fuck you and any meaning you think there is I'm just here for the hedonism.

A completely immature and unintelligent opinion that is obviously too simple except to stupid people.

Before I start, I'd just like to point out that I'm not here to troll anyone or to belittle/mock the belief system of anyone present.

Now, that being said: bees_knees, I think that calling someone immature or stupid because they happen to believe in a deterministic universe or be a nilhilist or whatever else is showing just the kind of immaturity and closed-mindedness as you claim the people who that remark was directed against are. None of us here has even the slightest idea of the true origins, purposes, or ultimate fate of the earth, humanity, or the universe as a whole. Whether your belief system is grounded in observational science, faith, or some combination of the two, you are still only seeing a small piece of the whole puzzle.

Consider this: if you were to ask your average physicist or cosmologist today what the ultimate fate of the universe is, a good portion of them would probably tell you that, based on what science has observed so far, at some point in the future, uncountable gigayears away, the universe will most likely enter a state of maximum entropy where no further energy transfer, and therefor no further work, is possible. This is a condition that is referred to as 'The Big Freeze' or the 'heat death of the universe.' They would tell you that, as far as they can tell, this would mean the end of everything, with the universe populated by cold, lifeless balls of rock and spheres of dead iron where stars once lit the sky.

Pretty bleak, huh? Now consider another theory, one known as brane theory. Without going into lots of details that most people would not give two shits and a fuck about, brane theory allows for an infinite number of big bangs and an infinite number of resulting universes, all that is required is for two 'branes' (think: membranes) that exist on some higher dimensional plane, who's universe is beyond any comprehension by mere mortals like ourselves, to bounce off of each-other. At that point of impact in that higher dimensional space, a big bang takes place and a new universe is born.

Both theories are valid, both result from disparate ways of balancing out the various equations that physicists and cosmologists spend their lives pouring over. Now go ask a Christian that same question. I'm sure I don't have to detail the Christian theory regarding our world's ultimate fate for everyone here, it's common knowledge. Now: Who's right? Before you can answer, can you provide irrefutable evidence that you are right and they are wrong? No, of course not. If you did, you would have just ended global strife and ushered in a golden age for our species.

That same point applies here, too. You can argue that there is a higher meaning to the fact that these chemicals just happen to interact with those strange chains of amino acids in our brain that we call 'receptors', and many would agree with you. But unless you can irrefutably disprove the fellow who says that our universe is a deterministic place, where if one could observe the state of every particle in the universe down to the smallest subatomic particles that we may not even know exist yet, that you would be able to predict every future event, from tomorrow's lottery number to the end of everything, and that this means that free will is an illusion and therefor we should just give ourselves to the hedonism that these substances provide without looking for a deeper meaning to them, and at the same time irrefutably prove your own world-view as being the correct one, don't you think it might be wise to dispense with statements that one is 'immature' or 'stupid' because they believe things work differently than you do?

By the way, my belief system is far closer to the metaphysical, spiritual, "look-deeper" one than it is to the nilhilistic, deterministic one, before anyone cares to ask.

 

[Foreigner]

"Why" is such an open-ended question word. The fact is that humanity seems to need mind altering substances in some form or another pretty much all the time, even if it's just your cup of joe in the morning. We use them to learn and to enhance creativity, but also to just feel good and connected. Their utility is more important to me than why they exist.

 

[Ismene]

Why do psychedelics exist?

That's as unanswerable as why do we exist.

Seeing as we're all descended from a single common ancestor - fungi included - and share lots of the same DNA perhaps it stands to reason that some substances will work in both us and fungi.

As to why they have such a magical effect on the human mind, I can't imagine why that would be. Perhaps it's just a lucky coincidence.

I don't buy the "protection from predators" theory. Mescaline for example is produced mostly in old, gnarly, hard spined peyote that no predator would go near. The young, suculent tasty peyote have no mescaline in them. If it was protection from predators it would work the other way round. No reason for a gnarly tough old peyote to waste energy creating mescaline.

 

[gymstud]

Plants probably make compounds similar to our nerotransmiters for similar reasons to what we do
Because they ate similar but nit the same they have a strange effect on us

 

[psood0nym]

I don't buy the "protection from predators" theory. Mescaline for example is produced mostly in old, gnarly, hard spined peyote that no predator would go near. The young, suculent tasty peyote have no mescaline in them. If it was protection from predators it would work the other way round. No reason for a gnarly tough old peyote to waste energy creating mescaline.

That does make some sense, though the predator deterrent theory could still apply to mushrooms presumably (and it certainly applies to psychedelic toad venom). Couldn't insects or birds with long beaks still bypass the spines and prey on those older cacti without issue, and couldn't mescaline production at high levels simply not be a process that conserves enough energy to be viable for the energy intensive demands of quickly growing younger plants? I also have to wonder why "stressing" mescaline cacti increases the concentrations of mescaline. Presumably it's under conditions of environmental stress like drought that cacti become most alluring to predators -- suggestive of the theory. It's possible some natural psychedelics are merely byproducts of biosynthesis without a survival function, though, I suppose. Otherwise, what alternative do you suggest?

 

[weadazoid]

LSD is a derivative, a chemical form of a compound present in Ergot .... an odd kind of fungal growth found on the Rye plant. Ergot is quite poisionous, it took some good chemistry to be able to define the psychoactive part leaving the poision out of the equation.

It is a real possibility that Rye fields rotting with Ergot may have had a lot to do with the Salem witch trials... Ergot can be so volatile it can go air born if allowed to grow in great numbers. In this way it makes a lot of sense that it is so very closely related to the chemical forms of Peyote and Mushrooms. Well more mushrooms then Peyote, because both are a form of fungal growth I think.

Native Americans knew all about Peyote of course but it was not used a recreational drug, it was more of a right of passage, it was more ritual then recreational, and only there can one truly say it was used to gain greater universal knowledge.

There are of course stories of Viking consuming Amunita (toad stool) and going all berserk so in that case I don't really liken it to a psychedelic attempt..... and we now know that mushroom is more of a dissociative....... same goes for Deadly nightshade. In this case most people tend to agree it is more of a poision then a pleasure..

Somewhere along the way Western society demonized all of this..... saying it was all poisionous to modern man.,.. luckily we proved to be smarter then that.

They do serve a purpose... they allow for a greater understanding of nature and more importantly give the ability to achieve abstract thought. In some extreme cases they have helped the brain heal itself of simply put... opened up a new pathway.

To ask the question of "why" is more philosophical as apposed to logical... why does Nicotine in tobacco, and caffine in the coffe bean exist??? Why is it that some mushrooms are delicious and others are deadly...... why does the Venom a snake contain both good and bad chemicals.

 

[Drug_enthusiast]

Perhaps a more interesting question is not why these molecules exist, but why the states of consciousness that result from their ingestion exist.

I have pondered this many times. Very intelligent quote. They are tools to help us see the truth

 

[Si Dread]

Why do we dream?

It's said that we dream in order to digest & resolve the issues we face in our day-to-day lives.

If you buy that, then perhaps psychedelics exist, & the states of mind they produce exist, so that we might face, digest & resolve much greater issues such as the ecological concerns about the earth & other issues that might seem insurmountable.

 

[Psychonautical]

Shulgin once said, now... i might be wrong on this, so someone feel free to correct me.
That during the course of our evolution that perhaps many of these psychedelic feelings already existed.
This is why we have the receptors which are capable of perceiving these things. at one point or another in our evolution, we chose to sway away from that, because it wasn't helpful to our evolution to be caught up in hallucinations. Yet we discovered psychedelic plants which could take us back to that previous moment in our evolution. So naturally occuring psychedelic compounds, like mushrooms which we eventually learned how to use and control then influenced the feelings that we already had, helping to shape our brain modalities into what we have today.

 

[psood0nym]

I'm not sure whether Shulgin said anything like that or not, but strictly speaking the concept of evolution is entirely divorced from notions of "choice" or "will," "intelligence" or "intent" out in the world. Its such an eloquent idea because it precludes there being any further idea beyond itself inherently in nature. Evolutionarily speaking, psychedelics exist because they happened to synthesize originally through random mutation and nothing has happened since to make them stop persisting. The same holds for psychedelic states, and that's the whole story. The reason psychedelics function selectively for organisms that biosynthesize them, on one interpretation, as chemical deterrents, is because they cause survival dysfunction in predators that might have otherwise caused them not to exist.

One way this survival dysfunction can be thought to manifest itself is through 5ht2a mediated inhibitory action in the visual cortex, which leads to subjective visual states causing a degree of blindness in predators that leads to subsequent behavioral avoidance or even death. Compounds that are psychedelic to humans in phalaris grass, for example, can kill or cause great suffering through brain damage in sheep that attempt to graze on it. If a sheep could answer the question "why does DMT exist?" it might understandably say "because God is a sheep hater." It doesn't even strictly matter to evolutionary functioning what happens to individual organisms, just that the genetic code is able to persist one way or another in a way totally indifferent to joy, suffering, knowledge or anything else we assign meaning to. So the idea isn't that at one point we evolved to experience psychedelic states, chose to forgo them, then chose to attain them again by using psychedelics, it's that whatever effects they cause by natural forces that we happen to enjoy occur strictly as a consequence of chance. Insofar as there is a "why" to the existence of psychedelics an evolutionary perspective holds there is no intrinsically independent source in nature that informs it.

 

[atara]

Biomolecules have all sorts of strange intersections w.r.t. activity. For instance, dopamine and norepinephrine are neurotransmitters -- but they're also the precursors to melanin, the primary pigment produced by the human body. There's no obvious connection there other than that Nature basically ran out of molecular structures to work with and had to use something over. Alternatively, you could see it as a sort of efficiency. Similarly, keratin is the "armor" protein par excellence: skin, hair, claws, horns, fur/wool, scales, feathers, the lining of the digestive tract, silk, and spiderwebs are all keratin.

Because biomolecules tend to have intersecting activity, it's not unlikely that a sun-absorbing antioxidant from Cannabis sativa also binds to the CB1 nucleotide-linked-protein on mammalian nerve cells, or that antifungal alkaloids in Lophophora williamsii bind to 5-ht2a and 5-ht1a nucleotide-linked-proteins found also on mammalian nerve cells. These are both built from molecular tinkertoys found in many organisms -- isoprene and malonoyl-CoA in the case of THC, and tyrosine and S-adenosyl-methionine in the case of mescaline. We have more in common with the plants than we might initially imagine.

--

So why can we trip at all? Well, it's about as hard as the question as why we can perceive qualia in the first place!

 

[Clocktower]

One of the most common misconceptions about evolution is that everything has a purpose. Some traits were selected for by the environment, others were not - they may have piggybacked genetically on selected traits or simply appeared randomly.

 

[SeenSoFar]

One of the most common misconceptions about evolution is that everything has a purpose. Some traits were selected for by the environment, others were not - they may have piggybacked genetically on selected traits or simply appeared randomly.

This is actually a very good point. It is possible that, for example, a gene in cats that conferred their excellent visual accuity, and by extension made them better predators, and was therefor selected for preservation through some evolutionary stressor or another (a food shortage, perhaps,) also conferred some particular fur pattern, or the concept of purring, or anything else that may be seen as 'trivial' or 'useless' from an evolutionary standpoint. This is why it can be hard to decipher the purpose of any particular trait of an organism, especially a trait that doesn't solve an obvious problem. Its entirely possible that it serves no positive purpose at all, it was merely the side-effect of the selection of another gene. As long as it isn't detrimental to the survival of that organism, its attachment to valuable genetic material ensures it's survival. Excellent point Clocktower.

 

[p-helix]

The idea that we only use such a small proportion of grey matter leaves plenty of space to explore other avenues of consciousness, is an obvious answer. Shulgin suggested 'psychedelic states' as being normal and natural among earlier forms of our ancestral lives which had been bred out of us by hapless misfortunes, being eaten perhaps, a very long time ago, citing the existence of neurotransmitter triggers as evidence of their onetime normalcy. The drugs represent keys to doors we once had to learn to close in order to survive. We required sobriety as the norm, whereas nowadays we decide to take drugs to change things as we see fit, in an atavistic way possibly.

 

[psood0nym]

^We use 100 percent of our brain, just not all at the same time. At some point years ago somebody interpreted that as "we only use a small portion of our brains" and it got popularized. It'd be nice if we really did have a bunch of spare brain to use for whatever, but we don't really.

 

[SeenSoFar]

^We use 100 percent of our brain, just not all at the same time. At some point years ago somebody interpreted that as "we only use a small portion of our brains" and it got popularized. It'd be nice if we really did have a bunch of spare brain to use for whatever, but we don't really.

I think that probably came from a misinterpretation of the fact that a large portion of our brain (although far less than 90% ) is devoted to things besides cognition. Someone probably heard it stated that some parts of the brain are used for functions besides 'thinking', and that the 'thinking' regions don't all function at once, and took that to mean a large percentage of our brain is 'off' and just waiting to be tapped. Either that or someone just made it up to sell something that 'activates' the 'dormant' areas. That may sound like a cynical hypothesis, but I have seen such products marketed in the past, so I wouldn't put such a thing past some slimy snake-oil salesman...

 

[elucidator]

Why do psychedelics exist? .

In my opinion, psychedelics are here for the purpose of the universe being able to experience itself (and learn from itself), from the most amount possible angles.

 

[Vurtual]

I think the 10% of the brain thing might be down to scientology with those dianetics adverts that were always in the back of certain magazines.

As someone said, the question of why psychedelics exist begs the question why does a brain capable of experiencing psychedelic states exist. Both are a bit teleological as they would imply forward-thinking evolution (i don't necesarily think that's wrong - i like a bit of omega point (as sci-fi anyway)).

You could say though that if the psychedelic ++++ timeless state is the ultimate reality (ie reality experienced outside of time perception) then given a conscious awareness it may be more likely than not that this reality could be glimsped given time/neurochemical variation.

Also, you could say that consciousness implies psychedelia if the mechanisms involved are the same, but in normal consciousness they're low-level enough to not be noticeable, and a psychedelic chemical just turns up the gain. Therefore psychedelics exist because a psyche does, and that psyche has the potential to be amplified by certain chemicals (endogenous or otherwise). i don't know if that even makes sense though.

Or my other answer is: Y is a crooked letter and you should know better!

 

[Crashing]

This sort of seems like a no brainer right? They exist for the consumer

 

[ebola?]

I'd say they exist because certain types of compounds interact with serotonergic transmission so as to alter iterative, recursive processing of perception and cognition. Evolutionary processes somehow selected for the presence of such compounds in plants and fungi, perhaps because they act as a deterrent for animal consumption (I don't know enough about botany or mycology to come up with alternative hypotheses here). Or it could be that evolution simply did not select against their presence, and they're an accidental metabolic byproduct.

Without going into lots of details that most people would not give two shits and a fuck about, brane theory

I'd be into said details. . .

ebola