/lit/ - Literature

>>11999940

On the other hand, you could believe that the essence of power is being somewhat personal (i.e. conscious/willful), and then you go through a sort of Neoplatonic rabbit-hole - which is where I believe a possible “other-side” of the discussion could go, namely, inwards, toward an understanding of the powers of the mind. It’s curious how Junger, after writing so much about technics, said that he as more interested in psychedelic drugs than in “the computer”. Why is that so? The experience of acids is often described as that of perceiving the world as “alive” - to say it Platonically, as an ensouled world. I find myself wondering whether there is some possibility for that and what place would these ideas have in a future society. PKD was another writer thinking about the philosophical problems of technology, and yet there is great deal of discussion about empathy in him. What I keep asking myself is whether there is space, in all this discussion of being absorbed as a species into a higher for of hive-minded living being (technological?) for these kind of things - namely, whether we will be part of something completely foreign and inhuman (which is what makes the whole thing nauseating and hideous) or whether we will meet the “familiar face” of mind, and intelligence, and consciousness again in being part of a bigger being - again, whether we will achieve some form of empathy with it and the other creatures that are part of it, or whether we will be simply tools for another being’s survival, estranged and yet incapable of separating from the machinery.

Also, in general, how do you place psychedelics in all of this? Do you think those are somehow relevant experience or just the mind playing with itself? Junger and some other intellectuals seemed to believe there was space for research there, and since they are reopening research just now after years of prohibitionism, there may be some new development there as well as new data start to emerge - there is a lot of recent research on how these drugs can help with addiction, PTSD, depression and other problems that seem to me directly related with being part of a social structure that is somehow growing independent from us.

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