Dani Dögenigt
1 HN recommender · recommended in 6 months, 2009–2023
8:39 · 848K views · Aug 18, 2007
A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.
Cited as the origin of the 'culture/philosophy as operating system' metaphor and as a quick introduction to McKenna's ideas.
6 comments from Hacker News
If you are interested in learning more about them, this is pretty much the best podcast on the Internet: [LINK] And many of the talks on Pyschedelic Salon are also very good, especially the one by the Erowid founders which I submitted this morning, called The Role of Drug Geeks in Society, and also the talk by Dr. Andrew Weil. Also check out some of the talks by Terence McKenna, the man was pretty much a living god: this video
"How does making you see things that aren't real challenge any hierarchies?" While LSD and psilocybin do sometimes cause people to hallucinate, this is only one small part of the psychedelic experience. The real value is in how the drugs change your thinking. It would take an entire book to explain this, but here are a few YouTube videos to give you the basic idea: this video [LINK] [LINK] It's difficult to explain how exactly they challenge hierarchies, but the 35,000 foot overview would be that psychedelics tend to make one more prosocial, whereas hierarchies tend to be fueled by antisocial behaviors. They also tend to give one self-confidence and internalize one's locus of control, whereas again hierarchies can only exist when people lack self-confidence and have relatively external locii of control. Essentially hierarchies are built on the backs of those trying to fill some sort of void in their lives, whereas psychedelics undermine this by giving one perspective and making one whole. Here is the best description I've found: "What is the psychedelic experience? For me it's the full and overwhelming realization of all the beauty, love, and pain, the wonder and possibility, of the human experience. For the first time you see your life truly objectively, what's going wrong, and what's going right. You grasp and grapple with how you can do better, and you are overcome by the newfound desire to strengthen your community, your relationships, and your karma. And so it proceeds for
If you want to know where the metaphor of philosophy as an operating system comes from: this video (The video is called Culture Is Your Operating System, but what he's talking about is the philosophical assumptions that are completely invisible unless you find a way to step outside your culture.)
Terry Davis and Temple OS. God communicated to him through the random number generator. This article is meant to be humorous, but I think it unintentionally hit on some important truths. Terry Davis Was Right Religion Is Computing, Computing Is Religion Terry’s big idea was that it is not possible to separate religion from computing. Since the beginning, every complex society has been based on a shared socio-cognitive operating system, a religion. Your religion says you must live a certain way. It tells you what is valuable and what is disgusting. It gives you your fundamental paradigm and ontology of belief through which you interpret the world. It tells you to read certain texts, listen to certain traditions of wise men, and meet with like-minded others at certain places and times. It tells you to avoid certain influences, and seek out others. It gives you techniques for structuring thought and mind and memory. When you have doubts, it gives you procedures to ask for and receive insight. It tells you who you are, and what your life is for. [LINK] I'm researching these ideas more since ChatGPT has shown me how to make certain religious and spiritual ideas more accessible. Levandowski shut down his AI church after he got in trouble with the law for something unrelated. He was too soon, so it's only a matter of time one starts up again. [LINK] Bonus link: Terrance McKenna. Culture is your operating system this video
1. Your operating system gets upgraded: this video 2. You lose your ability for self-deception, so when you come face to face with your problems you are forced to be completely honest about them. And once you're honest with yourself, it's very hard not to go through with changing your life for the better. 3. You get to diff your ordinary state of consciousness against your altered state of consciousness. This allows you to learn a ton about how your mind works, changes your theories about how lots of phenomena work, changes your assumptions about reality, etc. 4. If you take what Terence McKenna would call a 'heroic dosage', you might come up against 'the cosmic giggle'. That is, you come face to face with god or aliens or things that go completely against all of western science. And what's really interesting is that in double blind academic studies, multiple people have very similar encounters with alien entities even though they have no had no contact with each other. (C.f. Rick Strassman's book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.) (E.g. machine elves: [LINK] )