What does it mean to be free? Is it the ability to let go of control and go with the flow? Is it a choice or an inherent way of being? Are some people born into this world less free than others? Or do the odds of being always tip positively? (We’re alive!) What about those who hold on to get by? The physically, mentally, socially “unfit?” The disadvantaged? And what kind of people can love us/them without conflating notions of freedom?
Tag: Philosophy
Question
Can we place irrationalities in a hierarchy or is everyone equal across inevitable irrationality? And if so, who decides?
* Thinking back to this question, this Huxley quote, and about the role of bioethicists and medical professionals in determining who can choose for themselves/others what.
Question
Can psychedelic therapy allow people to return to physical/structural origin without shame and denial? (This includes the biological, sexual, and thanatological.)
Could this therapy, if done well, and over time, decondition cultural norms (gender, too) and help people become more ambiguous and self-actualized, and lead to more tolerant, progressive societies?
Question
Why is nonconsensual, compulsory treatment widely accepted in mental healthcare? Why are many in the medical and bioethics community so certain that the “insane” are undoubtedly unfit to choose for themselves? Who is to say? Who is to decide what is the most whole/beautiful/meaningful/ “right” existence of another?
* Thinking specifically about nonconsensual electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) in schizophrenic patients, some who deny their diagnosis and treatment. See the case PBU & NJE v Mental Health Tribunal from 2018 in Victoria. Essentially, the patients won and were freed from forced treatment. For those on the side of patient advocacy and autonomy, this was good news. However, this ruling upset some psychiatrists and bioethicists.
Question
How can we talk about equality in healthcare without equality in society?
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There’s a direct correlation between remembering death and opening to love.”
-Tara Brach
The Four Remembrances
Question
Can the mentally ill, as certain medical systems see them, make rational, autonomous decisions for themselves? Do certain emotions halt capability to reason? Can anyone make autonomous decisions for themselves? Or are we all embedded in and influenced by altered/unaltered choice/default design?
Inevitable catastrophe
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Future-mindedness is as much the distinctive mental habit, and intellectual corruption, of this century as the history-mindedness that, as Nietzsche pointed out, transformed thinking in the nineteenth century. Being able to estimate how matters will evolve into the future is an inevitable byproduct of a more sophisticated (quantifiable, testable) understanding of process, social as well as scientific. The ability to project events with some accuracy into the future enlarged what power consisted of, because it was a vast new source of instructions about how to deal with the present. But in fact the look into the future, which was once tied to a vision of linear progress, has, with more knowledge at our disposal than anyone could have dreamed, turned into a vision of disaster… Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading towards catastrophe. (Either the too little and becoming less: waning, decline, entropy. Or the too much, ever more than we can handle or absorb: uncontrollable growth.) Most of what experts pronounce about the future contributes to this new double sense of reality—beyond the doubleness to which we are already accustomed by the comprehensive duplication of everything in images. There is what is happening now. And there is what it portends: the imminent, but not yet actual, and not really graspable, disaster.”
-Susan Sontag, 1989
AIDS and Its Metaphors
Question
Could psychedelic (and psychedelic-sexual) research bridge the dichotomy created between the natural and the cultural to propel feminism/equality/whateveryouwanttocallit forward beyond critique into solution?
Is Australia ready for psychedelic progress?
Notes from the Mind Medicine Australia launch, originally published on Medium
Psychedelic researchers, advocates, and skeptics alike met on February 13th, 2019 in Melbourne for the Mind Medicine Australia launch. Fresh from San Francisco and eager to meet people in this city also interested in psychedelic medicine, I bought an early-bird ticket.
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February 13th, 2019, 5:30 PM. At this point in life getting ready to go out involves more time bopping around with acid under my tongue than looking in the mirror. Microdosing quells my zapping nerves and oftentimes overactive mind, especially before larger gatherings.
So I took a small dose before biking to the University of Melbourne for the Mind Medicine launch. The bats weren’t out yet, but they would be soon, and the air was a perfect 23°C. I locked my bike, tried to tame my helmet hair, and entered the Sidney Myer Asia Centre. Immediately greeted, thick lashes ushered me to the left. More smiling eyes appeared around the corner, showing the way upstairs. I entered the full, bustling theater.
There were only a few seats left. Everyone was finding their space, finding their friends. I sat down in the back and observed the crowd. No matter if it’s in Melbourne, London, Berlin, or San Francisco, the general attitude and sense of psychedelic conferences remains the same: compassionate, curious, positive, and present. There’s this shared understanding, communicated with kind and sometimes cheeky glances that say: “We’ve seen a glimpse of the possible. That’s why we’re all here.” It’s usually a clash of characters, buttoned-up scientists, artists. The kind of people you might bond with at a music festival and never see again are there, anticipating a lineup of lectures.
Sound cultish? It really shouldn’t. People from all edges of the earth have been interested in psychedelic medicine and its potential for millennia. Many aboriginal people wonder what took us so long to make the connection. This goes beyond a Reddit thread.
“Hi neighbor,” the man next to me introduced himself. He was wearing a sheen suit and said he wanted a job.
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