Reminds me of Lem's The Futurological Congress. Where drugs were speculated to be used in wars to make people imagine war machines. Much cheaper solution to make opponent imagine a bomber plane than actually to build enough of them...
Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
211–220 of 344 posts
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
> some mechanisms to constrain the search space somewhat. Your perspective has the unfortunate bias of being posed at the end of a long stream of evolution that happened to emerge with an intelligence far superior from other living things. > Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just h…
> It's not just planet-scale, it's universe-scale. Lots of planets conduct the experiment, ours just happens to have resulted in intelligence. My argument doesn't depend on the existence of an intelligent species on the planet. The problem already arises when there are multiple species on ONE planet. If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute…
> If you calculate the pure combinatorial distance between the DNA of 2 species, you must find that you can't just brute force your way from one to the other before the heat-death of the universe.
Can you expand on this? I'm not seeing why it is implausible for one genome to mutate into another, that seems like it could be accomplished in reasonable time with a small, finite number of mutations performed sequentially or in parallel. After all the largest genome is only about 160 billion base pairs, and the average is much smaller (humans are 3 billion base pairs). So what's the difficulty in imagining one mutating into another?
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#213That reminds me of Mckenna/Peter Meyer and the fractal time. https://www.fractal-timewave.com/articles.php You can get a free-libre Unix timewave generator there: https://github.com/kl4yfd/timewave_z3r0 It's a bit pseudo-science but some Chinese wrote an article on the I-Ching and patterns and it can have a bit of truth on it. https://vixra.org/abs/2409.0093 [ Chinese, use whatever tool you like to translate it] I sa…
McKenna also talked quite a bit about talking to little elves on DMT.
These could be leftovers from genetical, hereditary fears (and helpful feelings) against wild beasts since prehistoric times.
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#214Earlier quoted context omitted.
All spices basically too afaik.
Chilis, tobacco and tomatoes are all in the same family (nightshades). And they are all "New World" plants. Which means Europe had to live without them until 1600 or so. If you can call that living.
Don't forget the potato! Europe before the potato seems like a miserable place
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
The search space is highly constrained. All life on this planet is based on hydrocarbon chemistry, more or less, and must operate in the face of high rates of oxidation and water as pretty much the only available solvent. Even with such constraints, the differences between what has evolved (bacteria to blue whales! viruses to polar bears! algae to orchids!) are staggering. The fact that you find something hard to bel…
Let's take human DNA as an example. It contains 3.2B GTCA base pairs. This gives rise to 4^3.2B possible combos. It's just not possible to navigate this space blindly. There is not enough atoms in the universe to do that. It is known that there is bias in what mutations are favoured.
Of course there is bias, the bias is provided by the natural environment where the organisms coded by the genome must thrive or die. The bias is applied after the mutation occurs, but the mutations themselves are random, or nearly so. Probably there is some differential rate between the likelihood of each of the four base pairs to mutate into each of the others, but I would guess its nearly parity, because that would probably be close to optimal (though that depends on the details of the genetic coding scheme, ie the triplet code that translates nucleotide triples into amino acid codons).
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#216So, 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…
It's really fucking suspicious that mushrooms evolved mechanisms to produce serotonin. But it helps when you remember that a mushroom is the fruit of a (usually) much larger organism. Then you can start applying normal fruit rules. Some want to be eaten, or picked up and moved around. Some want to keep insects from infesting the fruit. Others don't give a damn and release spores into the wind or water. Also remember…
It's not that suspicious- many molecules in nature are made from the same few precursors like cholesterol, amino acids, etc. and on top of that there's pressure for plants/fungi to evolve molecules similar to ones animals use in order to affect them.
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
The search space is highly constrained. All life on this planet is based on hydrocarbon chemistry, more or less, and must operate in the face of high rates of oxidation and water as pretty much the only available solvent. Even with such constraints, the differences between what has evolved (bacteria to blue whales! viruses to polar bears! algae to orchids!) are staggering. The fact that you find something hard to bel…
But is the diversity really that staggering? I mean most animals including possibly dinosaurs that have ever existed share a lot of internal organs, in the same place. They have eyes, brain (with a lot of the same brain areas, even birds have something like a prefrontal cortex but it's called something different). They all have legs, torso, head. I would say there is a lot more commonality than difference. The differ…
You're choice of samples is rather skewed towards ones sharing a relatively recent common ancestor. Octopus and Sea Squirts are also animals, and they don't have legs or torsos or, in the later case, heads or eyes. Octopus brains are also rather different from those of vertebrates, and they have 8 mini-brains for more distributed/localized control of each major limb.
That said, I agree with you that there is a lot of commonality in life. Even in the case of Octopus we share a lot of DNA. I just mostly think that is due to common ancestor and common environmental pressures, not to some fundamental limit in the breadth of evolutionary potential itself. Its probably worthwhile to wonder at how that actually works though. Maybe evolutionary potential could be improved.
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#218So, 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…
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…
If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model.
He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
All spices basically too afaik.
Chilis, tobacco and tomatoes are all in the same family (nightshades). And they are all "New World" plants. Which means Europe had to live without them until 1600 or so. If you can call that living.
And coffee didn't make the jump until around the same time, either. No wonder Europeans wanted to be anywhere on the planet except Europe.
Re: Experts explore new mushroom which causes fairytale-like hallucinations
#220So, 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…
> What do mushrooms want?
I think it's a way of mushrooms saying "We don't think of you at all."