Basel–World Psychedelic Forum

I returned recently from the World Psychedelic Forum in Basel, March 21-24, 2008. It was massive. It was beautifully organized. The shift to a psychedelically informed culture is well underway. 1900-plus people, from 37 countries attended the four day event, according to Dieter Hagenbach, of gaiamedia, organizers of the event. A big bookstore. [...]

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Xenolinguistics I: Aspects of Alien Art

Xenolinguistics: the scientific study of languages of non-human intelligences. Publications in this field tend to be speculative as few people have made the claim to have understood an alien language, at least not reliably.
—Wikuniversity
Hallucinations as Alien Art

The key to this discussion is a conceit of the extraordinary vision-producing ability unleashed in consciousness [...]

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Virtual Reality and Hallucination

Been working on this one for the last month–it’s the final paper for the Electronic Imaging conference upcoming in San Jose, 27–31 January, 2008. This is a giant conference made of of many smaller conferences–the one I’m presenting in is #6804: The Engineering Reality of Virtual Reality 2008.
Virtual Reality and Hallucination: A Technoetic [...]

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The Noetic Connection: Synesthesia, Psychedelics, and Language

Everything is deeply intertwingled.
—Ted Nelson
The literatures that touch on synesthesias—scientific, art-historical, literary, phenomenological, ethnographic, psychedelic—vary widely in their definitions, interpretations, and in their degree of comfort with the first-person, subjective nature of experiential reports. The significances given to synesthetic experiences are similarly wide-ranging. This article explores the relationships among synesthesias, psychedelic experience, [...]

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The Nomenclature of Psychedelic Experience

Well, what shall we call them, those substances you ingest, inject, inhale, incorporate into the bodymind that then alter consciousness past the tipping point: “We’re not in Kansas anymore.” We are in the country of alterities. This must be Oz, or one among many Oz’s. The multiverse hypotheses re-examined under [...]

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Psychedelics: My Problem Discourse

The title a knock-off, of course, of Albert Hoffman’s book, LSD: My Problem Child.
Terminology
Psychedelics: the discourse of the unmentionable by the disreputable about the unspeakable. Legitimizing the discourse becomes a cottage industry: placing the black sheep within a disciplinary fold: medical, psychotherapeutic, bio-chemical, spiritual, anthropological, ethnobotanical, neuroscientific, consciousness studies, and even [...]

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Thesis statement

Here’s the latest version of my thesis statement. The full document is posted on Google docs and includes a condensed version of my bibliography (very few journal articles listed yet).
Reality is truly made of language and of linguistic structures that you carry, unbeknownst to yourself, in your mind, and which, under the influence of [...]

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