Fortigurn wrote:Moron Brother wrote:Gravity is not beyond our physical senses. We have an organ in the ear that senses acceleration. Einstein proved that acceleration and gravitation are equivalent.
False. Scientists have often tested psychedelic substances. Research in this area is often limited because of the illegality of said substances.
I'm not so sure. Scientific discoveries often involve technological tools (like particle accelerators or telescopes for particle-astrophysics) that can detect "stuff" (like black holes, quasars, perhaps the elusive Higgs boson) that we can't with our senses. Drugs don't allow us to detect new subatomic particles or unexpected behavior of particles etc, but they do allow us to look at what is already known in an entirely context because they alter our thought pattern, as though they were to rewire the brain somehow.
Yeh, most drugs don't alter the input devices, but rather the processing devices. You could attack a high-resolution CCD camera to a large telescope and attach the camera to a 2-bit CPU and still get nothin. Or you could attach it to a Dual Core Pentium D (not trying to do product placement here :D). Of course it remains to be seen whether any drug does actually increase our "clock speed". The way I see it, our brains evolved in such a way to function in a way that ensures survival (those brains that didn't, died). However, since the invention of agriculture, fertilizer, industry etc, we have a little more spare time to deal with things other than immediate survival. Perhaps evolution has yet to catch up and allow for other brain-types to survive. In the mean time we can use drugs to do philosophy, the arts, and some psychological scientific stuff.
I see you didn't read my subsequent posts. Please do so.It should be noted that we have cannabinoid receptors in our brains.
Noted. And?It is said that the molecular shape of benzene came to Kekulé in a dream.
In other words, his mind was already working on a problem subconsciously, and came to the solution without the aid of hallucinogens. Exactly how this is an argument for the use of hallucinogens in solving scientific problems, I leave you to explain.Stuff like that could come up in a drug trip potentially.
Examples, please. People have been taking this stuff for over a century. Let's see all the results. All the fantastic scientific discoveries. All the scientists rushing to elevate their minds with these incredible mind expanding substances.
Do you think perhaps there might be a reason why scientists prefer the 'old fashioned' method of using their brains, the one which involves them staying coherent?
There does seem to be some evidence that Francis Crick, and other scientists at Cambridge were experimenting with LSD. Crick, if this story can be taken as true, admits his usage of LSD assisted in his discovery of the double helix.
Here is the report:
Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning father of modern genetics, was under the influence of LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA nearly 50 years ago.
The abrasive and unorthodox Crick and his brilliant American co-researcher James Watson famously celebrated their eureka moment in March 1953 by running from the now legendary Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge to the nearby Eagle pub, where they announced over pints of bitter that they had discovered the secret of life.
Crick, who died ten days ago, aged 88, later told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD then an experimental drug used in psychotherapy to boost his powers of thought. He said it was LSD, not the Eagle's warm beer, that helped him to unravel the structure of DNA, the discovery that won him the Nobel Prize.
Despite his Establishment image, Crick was a devotee of novelist Aldous Huxley, whose accounts of his experiments with LSD and another hallucinogen, mescaline, in the short stories The Doors Of Perception and Heaven And Hell became cult texts for the hippies of the Sixties and Seventies. In the late Sixties, Crick was a founder member of Soma, a legalise-cannabis group named after the drug in Huxley's novel Brave New World. He even put his name to a famous letter to The Times in 1967 calling for a reform in the drugs laws.
It was through his membership of Soma that Crick inadvertently became the inspiration for the biggest LSD manufacturing conspiracy-the world has ever seen the multimillion-pound drug factory in a remote farmhouse in Wales that was smashed by the Operation Julie raids of the late Seventies.
Crick's involvement with the gang was fleeting but crucial. The revered scientist had been invited to the Cambridge home of freewheeling American writer David Solomon a friend of hippie LSD guru Timothy Leary who had come to Britain in 1967 on a quest to discover a method for manufacturing pure THC, the active ingredient of cannabis.
It was Crick's presence in Solomon's social circle that attracted a brilliant young biochemist, Richard Kemp, who soon became a convert to the attractions of both cannabis and LSD. Kemp was recruited to the THC project in 1968, but soon afterwards devised the world's first foolproof method of producing cheap, pure LSD. Solomon and Kemp went into business, manufacturing acid in a succession of rented houses before setting up their laboratory in a cottage on a hillside near Tregaron, Carmarthenshire, in 1973. It is estimated that Kemp manufactured drugs worth Pounds 2.5 million an astonishing amount in the Seventies before police stormed the building in 1977 and seized enough pure LSD and its constituent chemicals to make two million LSD 'tabs'.
The arrest and conviction of Solomon, Kemp and a string of co-conspirators dominated the headlines for months. I was covering the case as a reporter at the time and it was then that I met Kemp's close friend, Garrod Harker, whose home had been raided by police but who had not been arrest ed. Harker told me that Kemp and his girlfriend Christine Bott by then in jail were hippie idealists who were completely uninterested in the money they were making.
They gave away thousands to pet causes such as the Glastonbury pop festival and the drugs charity Release.
'They have a philosophy,' Harker told me at the time. 'They believe industrial society will collapse when the oil runs out and that the answer is to change people's mindsets using acid. They believe LSD can help people to see that a return to a natural society based on self-sufficiency is the only way to save themselves.
'Dick Kemp told me he met Francis Crick at Cambridge. Crick had told him that some Cambridge academics used LSD in tiny amounts as a thinking tool, to liberate them from preconceptions and let their genius wander freely to new ideas. Crick told him he had perceived the double-helix shape while on LSD.
'It was clear that Dick Kemp was highly impressed and probably bowled over by what Crick had told him. He told me that if a man like Crick, who had gone to the heart of human existence, had used LSD, then it was worth using. Crick was certainly Dick Kemp's inspiration.' Shortly afterwards I visited Crick at his home, Golden Helix, in Cambridge.
He listened with rapt, amused attention to what I told him about the role of LSD in his Nobel Prize-winning discovery. He gave no intimation of surprise. When I had finished, he said: 'Print a word of it and I'll sue.'
http://www.hallucinogens.com/lsd/francis-crick.html
For what it is worth in the discussion.