Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

We need to push to make this stuff legal. I wouldn't go so far as to say lets sell it OTC vape pens at gas stations but a middle ground where you can go to a doctor to have this treatment performed.

I personally have never taken DMT though from everything I've read and heard on podcasts it's not something to be taken lightly. I think having a sort of "DMT Clinic" that you can go to would be the best middle ground of allowing the public access to these substances while also ensuring that there is a trained professional there to guide you through the process.

Saying "trained professional" in this context feels wired because this stuff has been underground for so long but I think it's starting to bubble up into the mainstream enough that we need to start bringing all that "into the light". Lets have training programs that teach people how to administer this stuff properly, how to deal with the negative side effects, etc.

One of the things that while I find understandable is ridiculous is the fact that Bill had to use a pseudonym in the community. I feel like if were at the point where you have C-suite types at Apple taking this stuff, it's time to think about making it available to the broader public.

Agree, but the proponents of "Big Reality" really really really fight against its disruption.

Could you explain what you mean by that? Who are the proponents of “big reality”? How do they fight against its disruption?

Psychedelics challenge the post-Enlightenment project of "rational" adulthood. Western civilization has a deep myth: the myth of necessary order - a yoking of rationality, order, and progress together into what forms the basis for modernity. Psychedelics cannot have intrinsic value outside of rationality, so, they must either be accepted on the basis of rationality and order or face rejection. We express this using the rational basis of improved mental health. The contradiction of course is obvious; psychedelics provide us with profoundly irrational experiences that don't obviously fit into our cultural value system.

The point is that western civilization values rationality, order, and progress in a self-justifying way. The values that our culture provides to us form a feedback cycle of myth and virtue. Every argument that assumes this basis, reinforces its truth.

"Order is obviously preferable to chaos", is one of many subjective perspectives. Why should it hold more truth than "Plurality of perspectives are obviously preferable to the fragility of one perspective for the sake of objectivity"? The apparatuses of the state[1] all rely on the same cultural myth and promote it in a way that crowds out all possible alternatives. Thus the myth of necessary order has become synonymous with reality.

Like all deeply rooted cultural myths, this is something that's going to appear obviously true which coincidentally serves as a way of shielding it from honest critique. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that questioning foundational myths feels like a cultural violation. René Girard’s theory holds; when a community is anxious or unstable, it lashes out most viciously at people who somehow threaten its central, but unspoken, truths or anxieties. The greater the received response that a cultural axiom obviously true; the more certain I am that it reflects a core cultural myth than any semblance of reality.

1. See Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1970.

The sheer existence of established and (partially) self-reinforcing sets of cultural standards doesn't strike me as a good basis to explore the fundamental complement of it all, or to describe it altogether as something assuredly misleading and "bad". This should be especially apparent if you've ever tried creating something that is self-justifying (it's usually a hard, valuable, and sought after effort).

Put differently, while an idea being established and self-justifying doesn't necessarily mean it's exclusive in these traits and should be bolted in, sure, an idea being fringe also doesn't necessarily mean it's unjustly fringe at all, or that it's being unfairly discriminated against. To claim so without evidence is little more than conspiratorial thinking and self-victimization.

It further sounds really quite self-serving to paint e.g. me as some misguided sheep part of some malicious cabal for this. It's a little more than just a variation on the all too common ill faith ways of argumentation; mixing in the semantic specifics of psychedelic experiences, name dropping people, movements, and quotes, and deferring to a "specific" culture's particularities serves at most as a distraction from this.

I'm not sure where you got "malicious cabal" from. Cultural values are the water in which fish swim. They look normal, obvious, trivially true, or just the way things "are". No one is secretly directing cultural truths while believing they are lies. Cultural truths are self-perpetuating ie: socially reproduced.

It's actually quite the opposite. True-believers overwhelmingly disseminate cultural myths. It's the police officer who believes they can positively affect the enforcement of order, educators who base values in the rational order of the mind. It's journalists and pundits who frame news as a tension between order (good, stable) and chaos (bad, dangerous). Where deviance is newsworthy primarily as a threat to order. See news cycles on crime, protests, economic instability, all in terms of order must be "restored."

Look at the modern workplace, for instance, obsessed with order, predictability, and process (think: KPIs, best practices, Six Sigma). And corporate culture manuals and onboarding training reinforcing norms of punctuality, control, and rational planning.

It's present in engineers, scientists, architects, IT managers - professions often celebrated as the apex of rational, orderly progress and as solutions to messy[chaotic] problems. Even here, it's easy to gain karma dunking on the liberal arts, all because science is assumed more value because it more closely aligns with necessary order.

None of these roles form a secret cabal. Still, they enforce and perpetuate the cultural value system whose results are judged on the basis of order.

No one is saying that chaos is good or order is bad. It’s that the binary itself is a function of our cultural mythmaking. When psychedelics make that myth visible, the reaction isn't to consider the critique, but to defend the myth as "reality."