Philip K. Dick On Predicting Selective Emotion and a Cautionary Warning of Ignoring Negativity

 In one of Philip K. Dick's most popular novellas, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", people dialled a number on an electronic device, a "mood organ", and would feel whatever they wanted: Erotic love, crippling depression, contentment, severe argument with spouse for two hours, any emotional state was immediately granted them once the correct code was entered.

Whether it was good for the person who was with the dialler was a different thing.

'So I left the TV sound off and I sat down at my mood organ and I experimented. And I finally found a setting for despair… So I put it on my schedule for twice a month; I think that's a reasonable amount of time to feel hopeless about everything...' How much time do you set aside each month for specific moods?" - Philip K. Dick

It isn't a huge leap of the imagination to see how by selecting a social media group(s) on Facebook, reddit et al. that people are immediately directed to a screen showing a Web page where people have posted content full of whatever anyone could choose, sorted by an AI algorithm  according to their likes and dislikes, judged by time spent viewing and no doubt other factors, shaped by society yet some content is more beneficial to some than others.

From cute animals, to footage of executions, with in-betweens such as road rage videos, pranks, cosplays of anyone and/or anything and so on, the explosion of memes and memetics is shaping society faster than ever before, thanks to the volume of data transferred worldwide on a daily basis.

As PKD noted, people would choose both positivity and negativity for themselves. After an hour of anime, someone may want to watch a documentary, then watch insects feasting upon a corpse, then cars crashing while people bungee jump between them.

The point is, that people choose what they want and the chemical response in the body and brain, combined with the emotional and informational stimuli received to mind and body is fed at a faster and faster pace on a newsfeed or equivalent. A social media user finding themselves with some free time, if they aren't careful (as I haven't been), scrolling through post after post, thoughts and stimuli become short-circuited by contrasting and conflicting inputs to the senses.

The number of times I've been reading a post and feeling empathic with the content of someone's eulogy, or the sweet nostalgia from a childhood item, only to be disrupted by a video of an obnoxious influencer selling stock market information with loud attention-grabbing music and my thoughts and feelings are disturbed. To watch a video of a kitten playing with a puppy, then switching to the latest Redband video trailer can cause unexpected results upon a person.

Worse yet, there is only the option to hide content, which would mean missing out on the topic altogether. Yes, I can keep scrolling or turn my phone off and contemplate what I have just received.

If not deliberately thought to do so, the mind would start to become conditioned to expect disturbance from another video or post, and in a dystopian Pavolovian response, cease to respond for more than a few seconds after receiving compatible appropriate responses to positive or negative information, both online and IRL.

People require an amount of time to fulfill their desires of various types and contrary to the above, if someone receives too much of a repeated  stimuli (Desire-response? Thoughtform? Answers on a postcard) the sense become bloated and deafened, or an addiction is formed via repeated feeling and chemical reaction. 

This could be ingrained into software the same as gambling software does: "You've watched this cat paw it's owner for five hours now, are you sure you don't want to watch/do something else?"

Facebook is worse than several other sites as it tries to remove negativity as a legitimate response.

When it was first released to the public after a brief stint in University, the only available reaction was a "like". A symbolic thumbs up. People posting their family had been murdered by rabid mongoose would receive 800+ thumbs-up 👍 responses from everyone else they knew. The effect on those in mourning was unprecedented. "My best friend said to me it's good and positive that happened! So did 799 other people! I can't be right for feeling 'like' this, I'm subconsciously changing....waaagĝhhh...." could be a viable thought process in the past, to varying degrees, despite the adaption of ironic likes that perpetuate still I.T.Y.O.O.Like. 2023.

After large public rebuttal, Facebook added love ❤️,  care, sad 😔, haha 😄 and angry 😡 to their list of acceptable reactions - hardly the gamut of human emotion and years behind the likes of WhatsApp, despite being owned by the same company and yet used by many millions (including me at the moment).

Still, it remains unacceptable to give a thumbs down to your mate who was mugged for a choc ice to feed a crack-addicted toddler.

In writing this, I hope we are soon at the time once more before corporate censorship, or government firewalls (as is in place in India, to a business extent the U.K., Morocco, and many other countries as reported by other users) where every type of conceivable data is accessible and integrated, rather than the failed approach of banning, country or Internet wide, data deemed unhealthy or in breach of ideals, leading to an underground of gore and rape fantasies for curious adolescents. 

Not that any of that damaged the 90's kids I write, pocketing the bloodstained lock of her hair, the only thing that still gives feeling to the blackened husk that is my soul as I prepare the next runaway child to be sacrificed to Moloch.

I mean, wasn't the free Internet of the 90's cooler, jaded and scarred as we may be now?

Immanentise the eschaton! Release full reality VR full haptic body sensors to respond authentically to every perceivable situation!

 Let the death waivers be signed and may the next Aeon be more glorious and terrible as is desired by the All!

Salvia Divinorum : The Shaman's Secret

I feel like trying Salvia again in a couple of days, and I guess I want to share my experiences with this powerful mental, physical and spiritual plant.

So what is Salvia? Where is it from? Who used it originally?

Courtesy of salvia.net :

"

Salvia is endemic to the Sierra Madre Mountains in Oaxaca, Mexico. In this region it is used by Mazatec curanderos and curanderas in different rituals. The plant is mostly used when these shamans felt they needed to discover the cause of a patient’s illness in the supernatural world. The shaman entered a visionary trance that allowed him to see what steps have to be taken to cure the patient. This is still a common usage of salvia under the present generation of Mazatec Indians. The plant is also used for prediction, meditation and the search for the divine.

Little is known about the usage of Salvia divinorum before its Western “discovery” in the 20th century. It's probably been in usage for hundreds of years, but it was only when R. Gordon Wasson, the famous botanist who also introduced psilocybe mushrooms to the Western world, brought back a specimen in the 1960’s that the plant became an object of scientific research. However, it remained an obscure plant until the 1990’s, when Daniel Siebert began his research on the plant. Nowadays, salvia is widely known and sold in many (web)shops. But, there is still a lot of research to be done into the chemistry and effects of salvia.

Modern research into Salvia divinorum started in the 1930’s. Salvia divinorum was first recorded in Western literature in 1939 by Jean Basset Johnson, who did research on the use of hallucinogenic mushroom in Mexico. He saw that the Mazatec Indians used the leaves of “Hierba Maria” to induce visions. R. Gordon Wasson continued research in the 1950’s and confirmed the psychoactivity of salvia. Together with Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, and Roberto G. Weitlaner, he was the first to bring back live specimens back to the west. They sent one of those specimens to Harvard University in 1962, where it was analyzed by Carl Epling.

It remains unclear how long salvia use dates back among the native inhabitants of Mexico. It is suggested that the plant was introduced after the conquest of the new world. The evidence to support this is that the Mazatecs do not have an indigenous name for the plantl: they use names referring to Mary or sheep herding(“Hierba Maria” or “ska Maria Pastora”), while both christianity and sheep were introduced by the Spanish. Moreover, the Mazatecs have a method of consumption that is quite inefficient, which suggests that they are not aware of the enormous psychoactive potency.

However, R. Gordon Wasson, and others after him, suggested that Salvia divinorum could possibly be the same plant the Aztecs called "Pipiltzintzintli" (literally "the purest little prince"), , which was described by a Spanish author in the 17th century. In the 1980’s researcher J. Valdés III continued to investigate the history of salvia prior to Wasson’s "discovery". He suggests that "Pipiltzintzintli" is most likely cannabis, not salvia."

OK, so now we know that it has been used since time immemorial, by Mexican Indian shamans to enter the spirit world, where they could identify illness in a person by looking inside them.

It was used in religious service as well, for meditation, and exploring the inner conscience that usually remains quiet within us.

Salvia is nothing like weed, save the easiest way to ingest it is to smoke it. If you eat anything on Salvia, you will likely vomit. I tried to give an Italian friend some water while he was tripping, and he poured it down his shirt. I held to his lips and he took small, frightened sips, his eyes rapidly blinking as he no-doubt reacted with madness to the feelings of the water trickling down his body.

So how long does it last? What does it feel like? Am I breaking the law taking it?

The effects of Salvia typically come on very fast, reaching their peak between 5 - 25 minutes after inhalation. The effects also subside quickly, leaving you (relatively) normal in a couple of hours.

However I cannot stress enough that Salvia is not a party drug. You will not be looking and acting your best while tripping. It is true that it can be hilarious to watch people tripping ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7dDGJo_qkc ), and it is always a good idea to find a trusted friend who is sober to sit with you while you explore another dimension.

I'm going to be quoting salvia.net a lot, and I reccomend that if you plan on taking Salvia, check their website - read trip reports, thoughts, opinions, and share your own afterwards!

"A number of people report that the effects of salvia became stronger after having used it a couple of times. Some people appear to become more sensitive and will reach a higher level of effects after a couple of times. On the other hand, quite a large percentage of people (around 10%) are fairly insensitive to salvinorin. Many of them will reach effects at a higher dose, but a minority will still feel nothing, even at higher doses.

If you are a first time user, it is advised to use only a small dose to test your sensitivity, because the effects can sometimes be overwhelming. Always make sure a sitter is present."

"Salvia is often grouped with other hallucinogenic psychoactives, but in fact its effects are unique. Salvia is sometimes marketed as a legal cannabis substitute, although the effects are in no way similar. During the trip several states can occur: 2-dimensional hallucinations, out of body experiences, becoming an object, traveling back in time, being in more places at once and uncontrolled laughing. On his website www.egodeath.com Michael Hoffman discusses what he considers the religious effects of Salvia Divinorum. Erowid mentions the following reported effects in their Salvia FAQ:

• Loss of physical coordination
• Uncontrollable laughter
• Visual alterations or visions
• Experiencing multiple realities
• A contemplative sense of peace
• Sense of profound understanding
• Dream-like veneer over the world
• Sense of total confusion or madness
• Seeing or becoming part of a tunnel
• Loss of sense of awareness as an individual
• Experiencing a “non-Euclidean” geometry
• Sense of flying, floating, twisting, or turning
• Feeling of being immersed in an energy field
• Feeling of being connected to a larger “whole”
• Feeling of being underground or underwater
• Appearing to travel to other places and/or times
• Becoming inanimate objects (a wall, stairs, a couch, etc.)
• Viewing patterns or shapes that are tube-like, snake-like, or worm-like

The famous salvia-researcher Daniel Siebert made up a scale for the strength of a salvia experience. His S-A-L-V-I-A trip scale shows 6 trip stages:

• S - SUBTLE effects, Relaxation and increased sensual appreciation may be noted. This mild level is useful for meditation and may facilitate sexual pleasure.
• A - ALTERED perception, colors and textures are paid attention to. Thinking becomes less logical, and more playful.
• L - LIGHT visionary state. Closed eye visuals (clear imagery with eyes closed).
• V - VIVID visionary state. Complex three dimensional realistic appearing scenes occur. With eyes closed you experience fantasies. So long as your eyes are closed you may believe they are really occurring.
• I - IMMATERIAL existence. Individuality may be lost; one experiences merging with the Divine.
• A - AMNESIC effects. Loss of consciousness. The individual may fall, or remain immobile or thrash around. Dangerous!

When smoking or chewing salvia leaves or extract, many people will be able to reach level 5. For them it is not necessary to experiment with stronger ways of taking salvia. We advise you to try smoking or chewing (or a combination of both) a couple of times and to gradually increase the dose, if you are experiencing little or no effects. Stronger forms of salvia should only be used if you have some experience and know how sensitive you are."

Music is extremely synthetic to a Salvia trip, but not in the way you'd suspect. In fact, it's nearly impossible to predict how you'll interpret music during a trip. Most people listen to relaxing music that doesn't have much in the way of vocals, so you should probably go with that until you really figure out what a Salvia trip is like. I also strongly advise against listening to any “scary” music until you have plenty of experience.

So there you have it. The best news about this drug is that it's (as of May 2011) legal to buy this amazing plant.