This is an archive version of 'Psychedelic Information Theory' Alpha chapters. The final version of this text can be found at:

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Chapter 22: Psychedelic Information Theory

Although we have covered a lot of territory discussing the cognitive effects of psychedelics, it is worth noting that there are a wide range of subtleties and extremities within the various experiences I have outlined thus far. All cognitive events are built on top of complex perceptual, somatic, and emotional effects to create a much larger, richer, and more immersive experience than a simple epiphany or a surreal blending of ideas would imply. We have covered the basics of neural connectivity, logic processing, and how raw sense data is passed from one area of the brain to the next in order to parse meaning and make accurate memory imprints. We have shown how the formation and recall of memory (in the form of synaptic connections) creates the very foundations of learning, identity, and creativity; the building blocks of all knowledge, personality, science, civilization, and faith. We have also looked at what happens when the logic processing networks become excited, interrupted, and just plain worked-over with psychedelic use, and have discussed the pitfalls of delusional ideation traps created in ritualized psychedelic brainwashing scenarios. And on top of it all, we have touched briefly on the notion of the universe as a series of fractal energy patterns recurring through time, and the very real mystical sensation that there is an interconnected web of "unified order" that encompasses everything, repeating, expanding, and unfolding ever-outward from a singular timeless point. And we have seen how all of these thoughts and rudimentary bits and pieces of the personal and transpersonal psyche get hyper-activated, hyper-connected, and hyper-analyzed in the psychedelic state — sometimes to absurd and paranoid extremes. But the question remains, have we learned anything yet? Are we any wiser for knowing all this?

When we take apart the pieces of the brain and see how they work, we don't always get a full picture of what we are studying. All we see are little bundles of specialized networks squirting analog data at each other to generate an "ordered glow" of logical current flowing through the cranium. Moving networked current through a salt-water medium is the ancient electro-chemical alchemy of thought itself, and it is quite a trick. Calcifying these electro-chemical patterns (thoughts and sensations) into networked synapses is the primal trick of organism-level information storage, or neural memory. I would say that these two tricks are the very basic elements needed for organism sentience, and these tricks have been coded in our DNA almost since the beginning of life itself. The more complex the neural network becomes, the more sentient, self-aware, and capable of memory storage it becomes. The more synaptic connections the brain matter holds, the more robust its logic-processing and memory structures will be. How we wound up with such a fancy processor in the dome is something neurologists and anthropologists have been analyzing for years now — the very trick of human sentience itself. According to evolutionary theory, there was a tipping point about a hundred thousand years ago where our cranial size and our manual dexterity evolved in such a way to allow us to develop specialized neural networks for manipulating tools and language, creating music and appreciating humor, manufacturing civilization and creating technology, and all the other behaviors that separate us from the feral beasts. In evolutionary terms, it did not take us very long to master these tasks, but once we did, we took off running. And all of this was made possible by the complex neural networks in our Homo sapiens neo-cortex.

The reality is that  the separation between Homo sapiens and the lower beasts is very thin, a few centimeters to be exact, which is roughly the width of the human neocortex. This few extra square inches of cranial space is all that was needed to stuff all the species-specific logic-processing routines that make us Homo sapiens what and who we are. This little miracle of cranial capacity is more than a function of luck, it is a function of successful design, and it is hard not to claim bragging rights in this respect. In the evolutionary race towards sentience, who figured the prize would go to the upright hominids first? But here we are. And what is a function of luck is that you and I were born into this exclusive club of sentient hominids, despite the long odds against such a thing happening. Just imagine being born a few rungs down the evolutionary ladder; we'd be little more than grunting dung-throwers, too afraid of fire to even dream of taming it. But we got lucky, yes, we caught a confluence of events in species evolution that granted us the gift of sentience, analytical thought, and all the miracles and plagues of modern humanity that go along with those things. We were born Homo sapiens, and apparently we are the only ones in our local universe to have evolved with the specific disease of perpetually needing to explore, discover, and build newer and more powerful things in order to explore, discover, and build even newer and more powerful things. Do you see a repetitive pattern here? If not, let me illustrate further:

A strand of human DNA contains roughly 3 billion base pairs (or bits) of data that contain the entire instruction set for building a living breathing person. This code, this genetic instruction set, is the end-product of billions of years of evolution. If the universe is indeed one giant function for churning out new iterations of successful organisms, then we, Homo sapiens, are the end product of this function spread over a few billion years. I am the end product of the universal function (to date). You are the end product of the universal function to date. The rats that eat our garbage (and our garbage, and the insects and bacterium that live in it) are the end product of the universal function to date. And this is the cosmic joke in a nutshell: As insignificant as you and I (or the insect, or the bacteria) may seem against the sheer size of the universe, the universe, so far, has all been prelude to us. You and I were not spun out of nothing, there is an unbroken chain of mechanistic causality that starts at the beginning of time and leads up to each and every one of our conceptions and births. There is fate at play; luck; destiny; whatever you want to call it. The odds of existing at all are slim; the odds of having a somewhat durable form amidst the chaotic background noise of the universe are even slimmer; but the odds of being self-aware and able to grok the universe in it's infinitely recursive fullness... The odds of such a thing happening seem astronomical indeed, yet here we are. It is a trick we humans can perform with ease. And this, of course, is the cosmic punchline: You matter. Yes, you. We. Us. People matter. Homo sapiens represents an evolutionary pinnacle that the universe has been frantically striving for, and now we are here. We represent the hopes and dreams of not only our families and genetic tribes, but of our species, and of all life on Earth. We are 21^st century Homo sapiens: animalistic in nature yet divine in spirit; at the top of our evolutionary game; primed with the tools to adapt and grow; self-aware and self-actualized; ready to take on any challenge...

So what do we do now?

To me, this is the one big un-answered, un-talked about problem with psychedelic exploration and theory in general. Within the psychedelic literature there is a lot of emphasis on what we know — the details of certain plants and substances, the pharmacology, the history, the botany, the chemistry, the lore, etc. — but very rarely do people talk about what we are supposed to be doing with these substances, or why we should be doing them at all. There is a lot of talk of expanded consciousness and species evolution, but what does that expanded consciousness or evolution ultimately get you? What is the capital you take away from the experience that makes all the work worthwhile? Does the experience change you? Does it make you a better person? What do you learn from it? How do you grow from it?

There are many sticky issues wrapped up in wrestling with the cosmic joke. Why are we here? Is there a God? Do I have a soul? Did God plan all this, or is it all sort of random? Did my existence somehow affect the unfolding of reality up until now? Was I fated to be? What am I destined to become? Do my actions affect the past as well as the future? Can I make a real difference in the universe somehow? If so, what kind of a difference can I, or should I make? These are the existential questions raised when one really digs into the "consciousness expanding" aspects of psychedelics. The human consciousness can expand only so far, and when it bumps up against the edges of the universe it realizes that it — the 21^st century human brain — is indeed the most powerful and complex computing machine going right now. So, by inference, the task of universal self-analysis has revealed that the responsibility for universal self-analysis belongs solely to us humans (how is that for a systemic recursive statement). We are literally the eyes and ears and minds of the planet, watching it all go down, tasked with keeping it all in order. Have a good laugh realizing that you spent all that time analyzing the universe just to realize that everything that is happening right now, in this moment, right in front of you, is still the most important thing that there is. How could you forget that? The existential crisis is now tipped over on it's head. The perspective of self-activation is refracted through a temporal lens, and the existential question is no longer "How did we get here?" or "Why are we here?" The question simply becomes, "Where do we go from here?"

Of all the issues confronted in the ongoing integration of psychedelics into modern culture, the question of "What next?" is the most troubling. Leary wanted to liberate minds, Manson and MKULTRA wanted to enslave them. McKenna preached of an Archaic Revival and an Eschaton, Huxley envisioned an elitist psychedelic priesthood ruling over a highly-ordered fascist utopia. Leary changed his story when the whole "tune in, turn on, drop out" thing fell apart, and decided that SMIILE (Space Migration, Increased Intelligence, and Life Extension) was the secret psychedelic plan for immortality among the stars. In many ways I think Leary's SMIILE is the most forward thinking of any psychedelic prophecy to date, and is conceptually much more attractive (to me at least) than other prophecies which rely on utopian visions or a vague singularity event (in 2012 or so) where something beyond our control happens that changes things forever. What all of these psychedelic prophecies are getting at, though, is the question of "What happens next?" Do we, as a species, wait it out and let good-old genetic mutation happen naturally when the time is right (singularity theory), or do we begin planning new utopian communities and trans-human migration into space right now (conscious evolution)? While the thought of designing our own destiny seems cool, it also seems unlikely given the current human geo-political squalor and general nation-state inertia. It would no doubt take a singularity event of some kind to jolt the world into adopting such a forward-thinking stance as SMIILE, or to really put the resources behind technology that would support human space migration or long-term species sustainability. This is happening already, maybe not in the U.S., but in China and Japan they are thinking seriously about a long-term destiny for humans in space. As for intelligence increase and life extension, these will continue to happen naturally as we learn more about health, medicine, and our own organic systems. But even if we are smarter and live longer, what should we be planning for? What should we be hoping for? As a species, and as the self-actualized representatives of life on Earth (and in the local universe, as far as we know), what should we be striving for? What do the enlightened psychedelic individuals (or any individuals for that matter) actually have to say in this regard that makes any sense at all?

Over the years I have noticed a few trends in the end-process of existential psychedelic thinking. The process of psychedelic self-actualization generally leads towards one or both of the following dualistic ideals: An embrace of transpersonal ideals that expand beyond the the self (transpersonal awareness); and an embrace of the sensual, reveling in the transient needs of flesh and the human form (hedonistic self-glorification). Psychedelic messiahs generally adopt both extremes of this platform, allowing for both pious moralizing about the fate of the Earth, the environment, and the evolution of the human species (transpersonal causes), while simultaneously proselytizing about the liberating effects of free love, ecstatic dance, mind expansion, tribal adornments, and all the trappings that go along with modern psychedelic hedonist culture. Many people confuse the transpersonal and hedonistic extremes, and actually begin to equate hedonistic things like free love and tattoos and trance-dancing with transpersonal causes like saving the rainforests and ending the spread of radioactive waste — as if all of these activities had the same kind of beneficial evolutionary impact. I am not saying that they don't, but I am more inclined to give credit to the people who actually take up transpersonal causes (such as academic research, activism, or political work) as opposed to those who spend their lives mostly partying and giving the occasional lip service to social causes and psychedelic spirituality. I believe there is a balance to be found here — and that values of hedonistic culture can mesh very well with larger transpersonal causes — but I also believe there is a lot of unchecked hypocrisy in the psychedelic underground in this regard. I have personally noticed that in psychedelic subcultures, the hedonistic urges often trump the transpersonal ideals. Not always, but often.

But not all of the going psychedelic dogma is hypocrisy. There is a truth to the transpersonal trends that have evolved from wide-scale psychedelic experimentation. The first one that I have personally noticed is that exposure to psychedelic consciousness often leads to personal changes in one's diet, be it in the form of vegetarianism, veganism, raw-foodism, organic foodism, or some other set of dietary habits that seeks to improve health, minimize toxins, reduce the slaughter of animals, and reduce the environmental impact of food production. This would be classified as a transpersonal ideal that also has marginally hedonistic implications: The hedonistic desire to eat animal flesh and ice cream must be repressed to embrace the transpersonal vegan ideal, but the vegan may also take just as much pleasure from eating an organic plum as the next person, and will also enjoy the long-term benefits of a low-cholesterol diet over the course of a lifetime. In many ways, this simple act of being more conscious about your personal diet creates a chain reaction of transpersonal effects that go far beyond you. And this is perhaps the best single example I can give on how psychedelic effects at the individual level eventually reverberate to affect the culture at large. Now I do not have any statistics on vegetarianism over the past fifty years, but I would bet that if you started in the 1950s and tracked the rise of vegetarianism in the US along with the popularity of psychedelic drugs, you would find a pretty startling corollary there. I cannot state there is a definite one-to-one ratio of psychedelic use = vegetarianism, but I will confidently state that the more exposure one has had to psychedelics as well as people who have been influenced by psychedelics, the more likely they are to experiment with vegetarian and other low-impact dietary choices. I say this because I have seen it to be true from my own experience in and around psychedelic subcultures. This is not to say that psychedelics are directly responsible for the vegetarian movement, but they are definitely part of the formula here.

In addition to the impact of psychedelics over personal dietary choices, there are also corollary increases in awareness over global issues like environmental degradation, third-world labor rights, starvation and famine, and animal rights. Some of these transpersonal causes may be spread virally throughout grassroots groups (like the "Free Tibet" and anti-Globalization movement), yet others seem to be handed down directly from the "plant spirits" in the thick of a psychedelic journey (as in the "Gaian Mind" wing of the environmental movement). And taking this thought to its logical conclusion, you would expect that with the simple application of a few psychedelic mushrooms you would be able to turn a sheltered, suburban, middle-class kid into a radical crusader for environmental rights almost overnight (dreadlocks optional). This propensity for radical psychedelic transformation among sheltered young adults has pretty much been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by now, which is why the government got so wrung up about them in the first place. But there is a lot going on in this psychedelic personality transformation that should be very carefully studied. Is the Gaian Mind actually exerting influence over these people in some way — turning them into soldiers for Mother Earth — or are these psychedelic ideals merely echoes of the liberal values we've been taught to embrace via sacred hippie mythology? And does the psychedelic fascination with New Age mysticism, Eastern religions, Native American spirituality, the occult, and Paganism have anything at all to do with all this? I can't help but think that it does. But how?

Perhaps the simultaneous awakening of transpersonal and hedonistic impulses conditions the mind to appreciate beauty and harmony over materialistic notions like industrial progress and personal gain. Thus, protecting the natural beauty of the environment and preaching the importance of keeping  harmony within our ecosystem are seen as more "psychedelic" values, while the goals of the socio-economic rat-race are exposed as competitive, short-sighted, petty, ugly, self-serving, and destructive on both emotional and environmental levels. But when we get beyond the vague notions of transpersonal and personal values and start getting into the root ideologies that create these cultural splits, we can see that the cosmic joke might be slightly different for every person. For people raised in the rigid Judeo-Christian culture of mid-to-late 20^th century America, the execution of the cosmic joke was huge. By design, Judeo-Christian faith and culture is rigidly hierarchical, top-down, monotheistic, and monopolistic: One God; One Prophet; One Church; One Book; One Message. This is what is known as a tight paradigm; everything you know about the world is locked into one box and viewed through one filter. But then along comes psychedelics and the tight paradigm shatters to pieces, totally busting through the "top-down" fallacy of spirituality on which our entire culture is based. We suddenly realize God is not mediated through the Pope or priests or anything like that, but that God is instantly accessible to all people, all the time. Mysticism is suddenly real, magic is suddenly real. The top-down model no longer seems right, it seems ugly and oppressive. Peer-to-peer models of viewing the world suddenly seem more attractive. So where do we turn? If the psychedelic mind sees oppression in the classic top-down design of monotheistic art — pyramids, cathedrals, columns, and cartoon scenes from ancient morality tales — it also sees beauty and existential truth in the mandalas and ritual symbols of Eastern mythology and the occult, and recognizes the universality of experiences they represent. Mandalas are not top-down and unidirectional — imposing order from above — but are instead peer-to-peer and cyclical, celebrating the ordered rhythms of life, nature, and the universe. The psychedelic mind looks to Native American spirituality, Buddhist spirituality, the occult, Paganism, Wicca, and any other spirituality that has a lexicon for personal transcendence or transpersonal union with spirits, forces of nature, higher-consciousness, etc., because that's what the psychedelic mind now seeks. Once the psychedelic mind has had an epiphany on the nature of spirituality and culture, the old top-down monopolistic paradigm no longer fits, it no longer rings true. So, time to explore some new paradigms, but where to look first? If God does not exists "out there," perhaps looking inward will provide answers.

It is only natural for young users of psychedelics to seek out new answers, and many of them do end up exploring Buddhism, veganism, and other eco-liberal political platforms that have a transpersonal underdog quality to them. I am not saying this is a good or bad thing, but I do believe the trend should be looked at very closely. There is no "default setting" for first-time psychedelic users to return to once they've had their minds blown open, and very often Buddhism (or some other eastern discipline like Yoga) — with it's peer-to-peer emphasis on personal mastery of the meditative mind — is the first place people go to look for answers. This, of course, leads to an exposure of more "enlightened" spiritual or transpersonal values, such as vegetarianism, concern for the environment, concern for human rights, etc. But at the root of all of these changes — the grokking of the cosmic joke, the awakening of transpersonal identity, the epiphany of universal consciousness, etc. — is that the human who has been "turned-on" by psychedelics no longer sees themselves as a lesser cog in a top-down hierarchy of monopolistic culture; constantly needing to "move up the social ladder" as it were. Instead, the self-actualized human being views themselves in terms of their peer-to-peer relationships with God, with other humans, with the environment, with Gaia, etc. This is at the very heart of the cosmic joke, that we are all just as important as anything or anyone else that has ever happened around here. We all matter, and the fate of human destiny is as much your and my responsibility as anyone else's. Yet, we are all designed to be greedy and scared, territorial like animals, too busy clinging to what is ours to even bother thinking about how to make things better. This is the human condition, the ugly truth the cosmic joke reveals. We are all trapped between the animal and the divine, wanting someone else to protect us and give us all the answers, yet yearning to be free to explore and discover new answers for ourselves.

The cosmic joke is that we humans are literally flying by the seat of our pants, making it all up as we go along, speeding forward through space and time towards who knows what. Nobody has all the answers, nothing is written in stone, and even the stuff that is written in stone eventually fades away and crumbles. One day our sun will burn out, our planet will grow cold and die. It is inevitable. Will we humans go with it, or will humans burn out long before that, possibly dried out by global warming, possibly killed off by super-viruses or nanotech or our own superior robot spawn... This is the kind of dismal stuff our esteemed futurist tend to think up: chaos gone fatally awry sometime in the very near future, goodbye humans. I personally hold out the hope that we will eventually find a way to all get along and work towards formulating a sustainable long-term survival strategy, possibly in space, possibly on other planets, or who knows where? Through the cosmic lens of expanded consciousness, these are the only questions that really matter: Where are we going? What is our ultimate purpose? What is our grand plan? The answer to those questions, unfortunately, are still up for grabs.

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