Experts
Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
81–90 of 344 posts
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be that the mushroom just temporarily interferes with the substances the elves put in our water supply to keep us in the dark?
exactly, the real question is what the elves are doing while they’re unseen.
I can answer the what, that parts easy!
The real question is WHY they keep stealing my underwear and left-foot socks?
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things: 0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or…
I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.
I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips".
I'm not trying to suggest woo here, but there has to be some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat.
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#84So, about one mushroom species in five is poisonous. Why is the ratio so low, why are there lots of edible ones? Without hard-shelled seeds to spread, why be eaten? And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse". Meanwhile three of the deadliest spe…
> And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse".
Some of the poisonous ones even taste really good, and don't start making you sick for a day or two (and then you die horribly). You hear about it from time to time, where people have the best dinner of their life and then are dead.
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
xiǎo rén rén? Like “small people”? Okay, if the mushrooms are literally called little guy mushroom and you see little guys running around then surely this is an old discovery.
It doesn't count until an occidental university has written some stories about it and claimed to be the real discoverer due to having put some stuff in one of their taxonomies.
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Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific compound does.
What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals. The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a…
I think the point GP was making was to take issue with framing like "and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals."
More accurately we can say "an entirely newly described class of chemicals". Even before penicillin was isolated and described for the first time, soldiers would keep moldy pieces of bread and use them on wounds (Penicillium being the most common bread mold). Even Ötzi the iceman was found to be carrying a piece of fungi that we know was used to kill parasitic worms.
While these traditions didn't conceptualize their medicines as compounds or chemicals, they were certainly well aware of their effects. Sometimes intimately so.
All that aside though, there are bolete species documented to have tryptamine content so I would be a little surprised if the active compound(s) in question here aren't also tryptamines. Although I did read that Dennis McKenna hypothesized it could be an anticholinergic effect (i.e. Datura alkaloids)
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would expect this way of thinking about evolution would be common but unfortunately it isn't. I feel the way we say "X animal evolved to do Y" sets the ton as if it was a active, thought out decision. Instead, it was just 1000s of mutation happened and maybe a certain kind was able to survive while other wasn't. It is more of a mathematical concept than conscious one.
I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips". I'm not trying to suggest woo h…
That mechanism is a set of genes failing to procreate.
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#88So, about one mushroom species in five is poisonous. Why is the ratio so low, why are there lots of edible ones? Without hard-shelled seeds to spread, why be eaten? And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse". Meanwhile three of the deadliest spe…
I dig your style, you sound like my inner monologue :D
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific compound does.
What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals. The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a…
You would love the readings from Mckenna and the DMT, and the concept of Fractal Time.
https://serendipity.li/trypt.html
List:
https://serendipity.li/dmt/dmtart00.html
Yeah, I know, pseudoscience and the like, but biology it's weird and with the current scientific discoveries (and even reusing quantum mechanics for profit, such as chlorofilla with leafs and photons), Nature itself it's 'magical'. Not actually something from fairy tales, but from weird mechanics we are actually grasping a little today.
Instead of my comment from I-Ching being taken as numerology, I would think of the universe as something being 'computed over', kinda like numeric towers under Lisp. Because in the end nothing exists per se; it's just fields generating matter, waves, energy and probably, information. Thus, the Mckenna theory on Fractal Time (and the Chinese paper from Vixra) might be related to hypercubic equations (because of Hamming distance between changes) that we aren't fully aware.
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone Who Isn't Me?
In some online drug forums it was believed that if you used SWIM instead of I for all of your posts, the government was powerless to use any of the posts against you. You can still find threads on forums where everyone is saying SWIM did this and SWIM experienced that as if they have discovered a loophole to protect themselves from the law. It always reminded me of those FTP servers in the early days of the internet…
I feel like most people didn't actually believe it would somehow grant them legal protection but still used it kinda tongue-in-cheek. I think it's kinda cute and still use "my friend Swim..." in a joking way when talking about legally dubious escapades