psygnisfive
11-20-2007, 03:03 AM
There's this wonderful collaborative scifi universe, Orion's Arm, which teals with all sorts of topics revolving around the ideas of transhumanism, the technological singularity, etc.
One of the key ideas the idea of using artificial means to enhance cognitive capability, be they drugs, cybernetics, or full virtual minds (uploading or ai). Perhaps inspired by other scifi works is the idea of "toposophy", or the study of how minds work and what they can and can't do.
Within toposophy there's this notion of a toposophic barrier: Any kind of intelligence, based on certain paradigms of thought, will find that that paradigm has an upper limit in what manner of complex or abstract thought can be done, before being forced to shift paradigms entirely.
What I wonder is, maybe psychedelics could be a real world equivalent of something that could breach toposophic barriers within the OA universe. Or, given that psychedelics still leave you running the same neurological architecture, at the very least it alters the way in which you think, pushing you higher within the existing toposophic level of your cognitive architecture.
We know that LSD and Mescaline, in small doses, can increase cognitive abilities for a whole range of tasks, not just artistic and creative tasks but logical and formulaic tasks too. Perhaps we should study the effects of similar doses on other, non-problem solving tasks, to see if there's performance impacts, or propose tests to see if there are any identifiable mechanisms for how this works that can be targeted by designer drugs.
Maybe psychedelics are one of the routes we can use to instigate the technological singularity of Vinge et al.
One of the key ideas the idea of using artificial means to enhance cognitive capability, be they drugs, cybernetics, or full virtual minds (uploading or ai). Perhaps inspired by other scifi works is the idea of "toposophy", or the study of how minds work and what they can and can't do.
Within toposophy there's this notion of a toposophic barrier: Any kind of intelligence, based on certain paradigms of thought, will find that that paradigm has an upper limit in what manner of complex or abstract thought can be done, before being forced to shift paradigms entirely.
What I wonder is, maybe psychedelics could be a real world equivalent of something that could breach toposophic barriers within the OA universe. Or, given that psychedelics still leave you running the same neurological architecture, at the very least it alters the way in which you think, pushing you higher within the existing toposophic level of your cognitive architecture.
We know that LSD and Mescaline, in small doses, can increase cognitive abilities for a whole range of tasks, not just artistic and creative tasks but logical and formulaic tasks too. Perhaps we should study the effects of similar doses on other, non-problem solving tasks, to see if there's performance impacts, or propose tests to see if there are any identifiable mechanisms for how this works that can be targeted by designer drugs.
Maybe psychedelics are one of the routes we can use to instigate the technological singularity of Vinge et al.