Artificial Intelligence is like almost every subject under the sun: it takes on a very different and ominous meaning when we view it in light of the modern world's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicine. Unfortunately, I seem to be the only one in the world who recognizes this fact; hence I have written this essay to attempt to awaken our indoctrinated and scientistic world to common sense.
I will begin my critique of this brainwashed blindness on the part of America's tech pundits by citing a typical triumphalist quote from Marc Andreessen, author of "The Techno-Optimist Manifesto":
"Medicine, among many other fields, is in the stone age compared to what we can achieve with joined human and machine intelligence."1
When I read such starry-eyed blurbs, my immediate response is: "Fine, Marc, but let us first find out what the human mind can accomplish with the help of plants and fungi before turning ourselves into humanoids programmed by Big Data companies! Besides, why do you think that modern medicine is in the stone age in the first place, Marc? It is due to the fact that we have outlawed almost all psychoactive medicines: medicines which, when used wisely, can prevent addiction, prevent suicide, prevent school shootings, and completely end the need for damaging the brains of the depressed with shock therapy -- medicines that can make us content in our own skins and so make us less addicted to using computers in the first place."
Unfortunately, modern materialists (a category which, alas, includes the vast majority of techies and scientists) are also blind to the power of happiness and feeling good "inside one's own skin" (not to mention the many therapeutic knock-on benefits -- both physical and psychological -- that are the natural holistic result of such states of mind). That's why materialist doctors like Robert Glatter cannot figure out if laughing gas could help the depressed: because they feel that efficacy must be proven under a microscope, and so if a depressed individual is laughing, it means nothing to the scientific powers-that-be -- unless a lab-coated materialist can vouch for the metaphysical reality of that laughter on the basis of reductionist and behaviorist principles. This is why our FDA actually champions brain-damaging shock therapy, while they yet fail to approve almost all drugs whose use could render brain-damaging shock therapy unnecessary! (Of course, there are vocational and financial motives at work here, too; my point is that the FDA relies on materialist ideology to give an air of "scientific" plausibility to their maliciously motivated rejection of obvious godsends -- those many godsend meds that simply "work," without any theoretical "by your leave" from materialist science.)
In other words, Americans are doubly blind to common sense about drugs: first, thanks to the Drug Warrior's Christian Science notion that drugs are evil, and second, thanks to the materialist notion that drug benefits do not exist unless they can be established by looking under a microscope: and so we ignore anecdote, history and psychological common sense when it comes to beneficial drug use. We are thus blinded twice over to the kinds of drug benefits that have been obvious to indigenous people for millennia. Soma inspired the Vedic religion, and yet the religion would have been outlawed had America's drug-hating sensibilities been operative in the Punjab in 1500 BCE. Such an outcome would have been hateful enough, of course, but imagine if we then told the Vedic people that we were going to solve all their problems in life by using computers, Big Data, and algorithms written by precocious but philosophically clueless coders in Silicon Valley.
What hateful presumption that would be! And yet this is precisely the kind of presumption that the tech community displays every time they discuss AI while yet ignoring America's unprecedented wholesale outlawing of psychoactive medicines.
It is one thing to outlaw all substances that can inspire human concentration, religiosity and compassion; that is evil enough, in all conscience, since it is the outlawing of the kinds of drugs that have inspired entire religions in the past; but this injustice is ratcheted up to an absurdist level when the powers-that-be then start telling us about the wonders of becoming drug-free robots so that AI can help us achieve benefits. And which benefits is AI going to help us achieve? Why, the very benefits that we have refused to accept from the psychoactive medicines that grow at our very feet!
To better grasp the imperialist hypocrisy of such AI triumphalism, I ask the reader to take part in a little thought experiment.
ANALOGY
Think of psychoactive drugs as a large collection of complicated toys that we westerners have never learned how to use wisely for human benefit. We have never sat down and patiently tried to figure out how to use them sensibly for the benefit of real people. And now, like the spoiled children that we are, we are shoving those complicated toys aside, completely unused, as we search instead for the next big thing: in this case, artificial intelligence. Talk about taking things for granted!
The world clearly needs an adult in the room who will stand up at this point and tell us antsy westerners to "Finish what you started, guys! You need to make your peace with drugs FIRST before moving on to something big like AI!" I need hardly add that I am that adult in the room -- not because I deserve the role in preference to all other philosophers in the world but because almost all other philosophers in the world have been blinded by drug prohibition to the very existence of the problems that I have highlighted in this essay. This is not surprising since such pundits have been shielded for a lifetime from hearing, seeing or reading anything about the positive use of drugs, this thanks to propaganda carried on at the highest levels of American life, with the help of the White House, Hollywood, our conglomerate-controlled media, and academics themselves, who, like the AI pundits described above, also dutifully reckon without drugs on every topic under the sun.
In response to this cradle-to-grave brainwashing, I will conclude this essay with some quotes depicting positive drug use, lest the indoctrinated reader be so bamboozled as to believe that the very term "positive drug use" is an oxymoron.
Sir Humphry Davy on the use of laughing gas:
"I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. "2
Mike Jay on the use of laughing gas:
"To breathe the gas was, simply and literally, inspiration."
English biochemist Robert S. de Ropp on the use of drugs for religious purposes:
"Drugs that exert these effects have long been endowed with a halo of divinity by the people who used them. The peyotl was sacred to the Aztecs, the coca to the Incas. The gods in the Vedas drank Soma, 'potent destroyer of grief,' and the hemp plant with its potent resin charas was described by the sages of India as the 'delight giver.'"4
Albert Hofmann on the use of LSD:
"The world was as if newly created. All my senses vibrated in a condition of highest sensitivity, which persisted for the entire day."5
Charles Grob on drug use:
"All the vegetable sedatives and narcotics, all the euphorics that grow on trees, the hallucinogens that ripen in berries or can be squeezed from roots-- all, without exception, have been known and systematically used by human beings from time immemorial."6
Mike Jay on the use of Harmaline:
"I think Harmal is an imagination-enhancer, rather than a true hallucinogen." 7
My comment: An imagination-enhancer! Just imagine! In a sane world, the fact that such drugs actually exist would be the big story! Instead, racist fearmongers have convinced us to think only of the potential misuse of such drugs by the white young people whom we refuse to educate about safe drug use!
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.
If anyone manages to die during an ayahuasca ceremony, it is considered a knockdown argument against "drugs." If anyone dies during a hunting club get-together, it is considered the victim's own damn fault. The Drug War is the triumph of hypocritical idiocy.
SSRIs are created based on the materialist notion that cures should be found under a microscope. That's why science is so slow in acknowledging the benefit of plant medicines. Anyone who chooses SSRIs over drugs like San Pedro cactus is simply uninformed.
In an article about Mazatec mushroom use, the author says: "Mushrooms should not be considered a drug." True. But then NOTHING should be considered a drug: every substance has potential good uses.
I could tell my psychiatrist EXACTLY what would "cure" my depression, even without getting addicted, but everything involved is illegal. It has to be. Otherwise I would have no need of the psychiatrist.
The real value of Erowid is as a research tool for a profession that does not even exist yet: the profession of what I call the pharmacologically savvy empath: a compassionate life counselor with a wide knowledge of how drugs can (and have) been used by actual people.
Today's Washington Post reports that "opioid pills shipped" DROPPED 45% between 2011 and 2019..... while fatal overdoses ROSE TO RECORD LEVELS! Prohibition is PUBLIC ENEMY NUMBER ONE.
NOW is the time for entheogens -- not (as Strassman and Pollan seem to think) at some future date when materialists have finally wrapped their minds around the potential usefulness of drugs that experientially teach compassion.
Almost all addiction services assume that the goal should be to get off all drugs. That is not science, it is Christian Science.
The FDA uses reductive materialism to justify and normalize the views of Cortes and Pizarro with respect to entheogenic medicine.
In "Four Good Days" the pompous white-coated doctor ignores the entire formulary of mother nature and instead throws the young heroin user on a cot for 3 days of cold turkey and a shot of Naltrexone: price tag $3,000.