PCP was the granddaddy of the dissociatives. It could peel your brain off reality like an old bumper sticker. Othere are ketamine (much shorter acting) and high-dose dextromethorphan (yes, cough syrup). Ecstasy (MDMA) was a special member of the psychedelic family. The empathic/spiritual stuff without the sensory distractions. Speedy.
>The I is not in control, but it is providing the experience for itself and it is absorbing the
experience it makes. Any powerful experience changes one, even a purely internal one.<
Maybe at mid-dose. The event of full ego dissolution defies easy description - it's a Spiritual Experience. The "I" just isn't there sometimes, not even as a spectator.
>Where does this...
<<reason to doubt the continuity or permanence of a soul>>
come from this,
<<"ego dissolution".<
Gosh, that's hard for me to describe rationally. It's something I've experienced, something which Made Sense to me - a proof without logic that I am my meat, and the "spirit" is a fiction, an evolutionary appendix of our brains. Mind you, this is my opinion, an article of faith for me, and as such it does not lend itself to easy discussion. In any case - while this concept is startling and powerful to me, it does not kill our original topic of discussion. Genetic tinkering on people. This won't be reality for a century easy; we simply don't have the tool set. And unlike cars or planes or big hot bombs - it's not a technology that'll progress from first demonstration to universal technology in one generation. As a society we will tiptoe into it, and I'm confident that the disasters we bring on ourselves will be small enough in scale (Chernobyl, Dresden, Rwanda) that society will survive, learn what works and doesn't, and do it smarter the next time.
>I am convinced that mapping the human
genome is child's play to mapping the physical to the intangible in even one human.<
It may be like the Mandelbrot set. An awesomely complex and pretty pattern that can be generated anew the same way each time from an astoundingly simple set of equations. DNA might be like this. It sets the meat part of the human. I have not addressed social context - and this is a lot of who we are - once we get past the philosophical semantics. :-) Our experiences won't be dictated by the DNA - but I surmise our attitudes are beholden to our genomes - and thus the experiences of our children will have our new attidudes powerfully fed back into them.
I have no fear of genomancy. To me - the benefits outweigh the dangers. Does this make me a Dr. Frankenstein? Am I guilty of hubris, of "technical arrogance"? I cannot judge. But I will not submit to the judgment of Luddites either. Not you, PiMac, but there are those among us who would rather banish the genie rather than learn to ask the right questions. |
