From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Sep 05 2002 - 00:01:19 MDT
Ben Goertzel wrote:
> Samantha Atkins wrote:
>
>> Yet I often went to a particular mind-state on LSD that I might
>> describe as "being under the skin of reality". I called it that
>> because it was as if I could see all the hidden processes at work
>> within everyday things and, in some cases, influence a few of those
>> processes that are usually not accessible. It was a very hyper-aware
>> intuitive state. I used to walk the city all night observing
>> everything in that state.
>
> I experienced something similar to this and called it, at the time, the
> "inverse meta" ;)
>
> A phrase intended to evoke something similar to your phrase "under the
> skin"
>
> But one time I stayed in the inverse meta too many consecutive days,
> and I decided I was done with LSD for a while....
You know, by golly, I used to whack my computer with a sledgehammer every
morning, and it would sometimes give really creative results for word
processing and spreadsheet programs. Of course the hard drive caught fire
and the mouse ran away and you could actually hear the monitors screaming
just before they exploded; but it's better than boring old *normal*
operation, isn't it? Besides I once had a friend whose mother's uncle's
cousin's daughter's roommate's IRS auditor said that his computer worked
better if he whacked it with a sledgehammer.
Just trying to provide some perspective on what all this boasting about
"past experiences I have had burning out my own neurons" sounds like from
over in this corner of room. If you haven't done it yourself, the bizarre
tone of defiant pride in others' reports sounds *really really* odd, given
the subject matter. "Oh, yeah, when I was a kid, I used to go down to the
nuclear waste facility and snort radioactive cobalt up my nose, and I
think it was really a valuable experience, though of course I wouldn't do
it now."
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://intelligence.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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