Ontological Interpretations of Quantum Theory & Damn Fine Drugs

When I was younger I collected the entire encyclopaedic weekly publication of The Unexplained. My father must still have it I guess. I disappointed myself by failing to buy one or two issues out of hundreds so it's technically incomplete but actually it's a good primer on much of the unexplained which gripped me as a lad. 

It was all there. UFO's, spontaneous combustion and the like. I was a bit obsessed by it but then completely dropped interest until I think about 5 years ago when I started to question the veracity of 911 and then once again I was lurking about on some very unpolished websites where in one memorable instance I realised the content was so well researched but looked shabby so I emailed the author to beg him to stop using Times New Roman and to justify his columns as I do on my posts. You can take the boy out of advertising but you can't etc etc. 

Incidentally that site is now an' alt news-source' bible but I don't to want link to it because I think the onus is on all of us to not judge a book by it's cover but to assess information by it's internal logic, and qualitative dimensions such as credence, syntax and tone, not to mention supporting evidence and most importantly open receptive minds. That's a journey each must make for themselves. A resistance to heat is needed too. Fingers get burned all the time.

I'm not sure if that specific surfing pattern led to Doug Rushkoff but I definitely was introduced through his podcasts to Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson where I pretty much inhaled what I thought were all McKenna's available speeches online.

From there I learned a lot about entheogens, and ethnobotany of shamanism and all the other stuff that is pretty much thousands of years of history that contemporary living doesn't like to have a grown up conversation about. I think it was Timothy Leary who said "LSD is a molecule that causes insanity in people who haven't tried it". This is actually the case. People with no experience have virulent views. But let me tell you it's not the same as saying just because I've not been to Iraq doesn't mean I don't know what it's like. I'll elaborate more on that in a later post.

My own use of LSD when I was 18 or so, and later on when I was doing my degree were quite remarkable in so much as I had authentic revelations of a lucid nature about me myself and I. In my mind it seemed as revealing as modern therapy over extended sessions though I've never actually done that but listened to people who have. I'm not talking about flippant issues or fuzzy new age camp fire singing topics. 

No, I'm talking about the raw stuff of life. Sexuality, ego, morality and virtue etc. This isn't an attempt to suggest some sort of intellectual closure or elevated superiority. On the contrary I did too little and insufficiently strong enough doses to squeeze my way through the basics. I use that word 'squeeze' because the single most misunderstood point about effective-dose hallucinogenic experiences is that they are not necessarily fun. They can be extraordinarily hard work but there's gold at the end of them. They are most often powerful, boundary-dissolving ego-stripping processes.

I know a lot more now since reading up and listening on the subject of entheogens, DMT, Ayahuasca and Psyclocybin which living close to the New Forest in my youth, I've also had the blessing of trying. The latter is particularly satisfying in nature. The splendour of the complexity is profound and actually between you, I and the internet I'd eaten a dose Psilocybin when I did a bit of creative planning and got this tattoo on my chest. I don't recommend tattoos under hallucinogens. I can't imagine you would but if you really need to I have something to share that might help. But it's too private for here.

So getting back on track (as I obviously wanted to get that out of the way). I've been fascinated with Terence McKenna's experience of a transdimensional voice that shared something with him, under I think the effects of Psilocybin or DMT. (Very different durations those two. One is 3 to 5 hours. The latter 5 minutes or so.) I've been fixated on this voice not because it's necessarily real but because what it said is so compelling, so disruptive. The Logos said to him:  'What you call human we call time'. 

If we cut some big bang slack here i.e Pretend like Big Bang that it's so big and so bang that whatever the rationale it's a voice from somewhere else as opposed to borderline insanity; this actually makes a lot more sense if one were to consider the ontological interpretations of quantum theory. i.e The notion of for example trying to imagine a message being conveyed between say the 8th and 3rd dimension. It's simply not possible while shackled to three dimensions and a fourth of linear time.

OK that's a bit hard to convey without dipping in to string theory so I'll try and explain using dream analogy. Ever noticed that time is on a different level in dreams. It's not like that whole narrative you managed to remember takes place in a time anything like the way it does in a waking state. Some suggest it all happens at once. Or parts of it do. 

Think about that. 

It's part of the reason dreams so often frustratingly dissolve by the time we've hit the restroom in ten or 15 steps for our morning ablutions on awakening. It's frustrating but it explains why so much is lost or not even remembered in the first place. How can we lose that which we never recalled? The transfer doesn't compute into sentient space time. I'm sorry it doesn't. I don't make the rules...it just doesn't.

I've written another post about this sitting in drafts trying to explain what I've learned so far on this so I should finish that little fella off first, before going on and on here but I just wanted to finally share a story here because this post is about time.

I ask lots of people the same question about time. There's a reasonably consistent linear relativism argument which is always nice to hear articulated, because it's a conclusion I've reached too, in the past. It's quite exciting to hear a prior self-determined logic conclude by forcing it's way out from another person's voice as if proof that quite complex hypothesis can emerge from separate sources. A bit like magic.

 Some people call it 'great minds think alike'. I say great minds thinking alike is randomly meeting down the pub or something. This other stuff is more 'Have you ever thought that wearing sneakers inside super size Wellies keeps your feet dry and keeps a spare pair of footwear to chill out in the Saloon  without carrying anything seperately? Only to look down and see you've both done exactly that. OK that's a terrible analogy but if you have a better one I'll use it. Promise.

I digress. Let's wrap up. 

The thing is, I asked my friend Marcus Brown my usual question about time and he said something I've never heard before. You know, I don't really want to share it, but if you like ask him yourself for a robust explanation that time apparently really is speeding up outside of the oft concluded explanation I've just written about. 

I like Marcus explanation: It's allegedly stupid, but empirically bright. 

If that doesn't wet you're appetite to watch the video above then I've no idea what you're doing down here anyway and I've clearly just wasted too much of your rapidly diminishing time.

New York Romanticism

Via Marbury

Christopher Hitchens

I swear I wasn't going to do this and that I even started to write, but thought I'd be boring all three of you shitless so I canned it originally. However everything being seemingly connected I have to come back to it because Christopher Hitchens is in the news for debating Tony Blair on religion, so if you can indulge me, I'll just throw in those few thoughts on Christopher Hitchens that I fretted about at first.

I think he's a complicated man. I first became aware of him as a supporter of the Neocons when I was trawling through the Project for a new American Century's archives, and building my personal shit-list of people who I think are deeply venal. That also included Francis Fukuyama who added his name to the cosigners of PNAC fan boys, though it's now probably evident that it's more a case of the end of Fukuyama than the 'End of History' as he originally claimed, although to be fair Zizek think's we're all Fukuyamaists now if seen through the lens of neo-liberal economics. That point is debatable, though getting back on topic I find it hard to be totally binary on Hitchens because he's clearly an educated and interesting guy and unlike most British thinkers, is easy on the eye.

So I was schmoozing around on Youtube earlier, and the highest viewed clip on a search of his name, is the one of Hitchens going through the waterboarding torture process. That's when I realised I wanted to write about the man. Whatever I may think of his jumping ship to the right when in his earlier days he was a staunch socialists/leftist I admire a person who takes the trouble to find out for himself what something actually feels like rather than the armchair theologian debates on what constitutes torture by people who are mainlining on corn syrup and day trading in their pyjamas. 

I was particularly shocked to observe and later watch Hitchins describe the overwhelming sensation of the amygdala's adrenalin-release of fight or flight kick-in. You should watch at least the first 30 seconds of the video if you want to hear a pro Iraq invasion supporter articulate why water boarding is in no way fucking around. Then if you really want to dig into the obnoxious but moral relativism details of the act I'd read Fox News explaining why Khalid Sheik Mohammed was not actually waterboarded 183 times, but was mostly put through dummy runs of it even though Hitchens explains above that he had nightmares of the experience after only one girlyman waterboarding session in the film above. It's extraordinarily sobering.

So even though I think Christopher was somewhat ungallant when he debated Tariq Ali over here just last year, by resorting more to mild calumny than debating, it seems evident that the two men are of a similar generation and seemingly rely on an independence of thought which often finds them with more in common than not. That's a good thing.

So I think I can let Hitchens slide a little there. I also can't condemn a man for changing his political ideology when if you were to ask my Mr Carter, my physics Teacher at St. George Roman Catholic School if I were a solid socialist he'd laugh in your face and explain I was the most annoying of Conservative pupils he probably ever had. 

I was young, what can I say. 

That old trope about being a socialist when young and a conservative when older is for people who stopped evolving intellectually. Even though I have some unorthodox ideas on infrequent uses of hard core sandboxed capitalism to give the State sector a kick in the junk once in a while.

Then there's religion and Hitchens. The man is practically Richard Dawkin's atheist rottweiller security. Don't get me wrong, I'm particularly despairing of pretty much all religions but I find the absence of the awareness of God particularly troubling in lots of people when for me that subject is both not up for debate and yet at the same time is beyond our ability to fully comprehend. Or to quote James Ellroy; "If you're still an atheist when you get to my age then you don't know shit". Not that Elroy and I have all that much in common. But really, if the educated world are debating the subject what the fuck are we thinking of doing with the illiterate poor. Think about that one.

But I can let Hitchens slide on that one too. All in all it's probably that Neocon thing, though I definitely would like to paint the town red with the guy and score some tail if I were up for that kind of hedonistic life..wait a minute.

Anyway, on a more sombre three chord guitar riff, Hitchens is now afflicted with cancer and unlike say the Bush family and the rest of the war profiteers I wish him only the best of health and yes, a miraculous recovery as I think the world is a better place...generally speaking. But getting back to the second reason for this post, his debate earlier against Tony Blair about religion had him saying a line I'm very glad to know because it's a simple but scientific point for any of us interested in a better world for the impoverished and hungry. He said:

"The cure for poverty has a name, in fact. It's called the empowerment of women"

It's for this reason I felt compelled to come back against the far less important topic of waterboarding which I thought was a good one in the first place. But I didn't want to get too political.