Nick Sand, Orange Sunshine LSD chemist, has died

Objectively useless and destructive drug is quite a statement, when there is a lot of research that suggests it can have positive effects.

It doesn't kill you, nor does it irreparably alter your personality in a completely senseless way. There are studies that suggest people who has tried LSD has their personality altered in a positive way, in that they're more open to new ideas afterwards. It is true though, that some people get very enthusiastic when they first try LSD, some overly so.

I know a lot of people who do LSD now and then and the vast majority of them are successful upper middle class people who's had no ill effects and lots of positive ones.

There are also many people who's successfully used LSD as a problem solving aid http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/01/70...

That's not to say people don't have negative experiences though and I don't think LSD is for everyone. Some people freak out completely by even small changes in their perceptual experience for example, though usually not if they know the basic of how LSD works and how the mind works. A very useful thing to know is that what we experience as reality is basically just one view of the underlying data from a set of sensors (our senses), there's a neural net with multiple layers that starts with simple things like edge detection or whatever and builds up the 3D model we consciously experience from a mix of the external data, but also internal data, etc., there's no right or wrong view of this data, we could have evolved to experience it completely different and we can make computer program to visualize data in numerous different ways and on psychedelics you can experience things a bit differently from what you're used to. The reason it's useful to know some of this is because if you experience something strange when doing psychedelics, you'll know you're not being kidnapped by aliens, going insane, talking to god or whatever weird thing that some people sometimes seem to think.

>>it irreparably alters your personality in a completely senseless way

There are many things that fit this description: being a parent, puberty, your first kiss, falling in love, a death in the family. Would you cling to a definition of yourself that has no room for major, perspective-changing, life-altering insights? You can try, but life has a way of changing constantly whether you want it to or not.

Recreational drugs serve no "purpose", as you say (objectively useless). But what purpose is there in being born, eating, making love, making friends, and eventually dying? Purpose is what you decide it is. If some people want to explore their brains using chemicals then what the problem with that? Yes, everything has risks, but so does getting up in the morning.

Live and let live. You may not like the fact that drugs can change personalities in a way that makes you uncomfortable, but this is a big world: I'm sure you will be able to find like minded company. Maybe even here on HN? Who knows.

"Another metaphor would be like a computer with many programs running simultaneously. The more programs that are running, the slower the computer functions. This is a problem then. With all the programs running that are demanded of our consciousness in this modern world, we have problems finding deep integration."

I find this part disturbing if he sees the different programs as competing viewpoints and wishes to enforce a "deep integration" by limiting the possible viewpoints to a single one. I see a mind that is in constant contradiction and disagreement as the only way to prevent a person from becoming a zealot of any particular viewpoint.

> I'm still it's sure hard to even come 1% of grasping it if you've never experienced though.

I'm not sure about that. I've done my fair share of LSD some years ago, but to me (to lift a simile from somebody else), it's a bit like a program's coredump. All the information is there, sure, less pre-categorized / pre-filtered, but it's not exactly guiding, so to speak. You're left on your own in a forest. Not always, and doesn't have to be like that, but I've seen diminishing returns after a while (meaning, it definitely does give you something the first time; and perhaps several more - when you can focus on thoughts and the world in a calmer way). The latter may not even be the case for some people, maybe, but I definitely think there is an overall "floor" in regards to the "depth" you can reach. Let me compare and contrast.

This may sound cheesy, but the quoted text above reminds me very much of Kant and the approach he had laid out in his Critique of Pure Reason, which I very much recommend and had the pleasure to (to a most definitely quite limited degree) grok, partly. (I think it's quite possible to just take it and read it - some guidance would definitely help - but in itself, it's very organized and (when he's not contradicting himself, which (under some interpretations) does happen) almost pedagogical at times. Familiarity with (especially) Hume and (perhaps) Leibniz, et al. would help, but I think there's value to be extraced by reading it just like that.)

In epistemology ("how do we come to know things, and what kinds of things can we know?"), Kant was all about the "Kantian filter/net" - the "raw experience" / sense data we get is not actually raw; not only is it filtered just by virtue of us having specific perceptual sense, but there appears to be structure in the very experience we get (for him, this was (first and foremost) spatial, temporal and causal structure; in addition to this, we have an arsenal of Kantian categories, which are something that all objects we get to experience have, our perception applying the former to the latter involuntarily and preemptively; Kantian categories are (so to speak) "conditions of the possibility of objects in the first place"). Kant goes into detail about this, attempting to deduce them and the associated "judgments" (we judge whenever we understand things, for him), and so on. His whole project does a reversal of the "how can we know laws of the world?" inductive approach done by Hume et al.; it's not observed temporal sequences -> causal relations between events -> aha! - general causal principle. Kant instead reverses the "direction" and shows how you inevitably have to have a general causal principle if you are to have any experience whatsoever (this is explain in part in his Second Analogy, for anyone interested). Thus it is that even though we cannot know how things in the world are "in themselves", we know things about our experience - their conditions. Consider a fish: a "normal" thinking fish would just think that all its world is water. But a Kantian fish would deduce that even though it does not know what the world "out there" truly is, whether it's water, not-water-deceiving-as-water, or a mixture - it can know something - namely: whatever it comes to experience, the experience itself is aquatic so to speak, having to come "through water". Kant applies this general approach to a number of things, going in detail about the "filters" and about what they tell us about the world, and how this can be used to revive metaphysics (which aims to know what things exist in the world a priori (known not empirically); no, we cannot know this, in a sense; but we can pin down the conditions of human experience, at the very least; these conditions will be a priori).

This kind of stuff was (in a way) quite more powerful than the "knowledge" from LSD. LSD is good for other things, and it can "bootstrap" your drive for knowledge (maybe), and give you initial insights. But for me, I prefer a debugger-symbols-loaded REPL vs. investigation of a binary coredump ;) (that said, I'll want to have a trip again some day just to compare).

Your responses smack of an angry, small person looking to pick a fight from what you think is a position of superiority(not engaging in drug use). If you could actually explain what is wrong with the above quote, that'd be magnitudes more useful than this and your other screed elsewhere in the thread.