How Elon Musk’s billionaire Doge lieutenant took over the US’s biggest MDMA company | Technology | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/aug/28/elon-musk-antonio-gracias-mdma-psychedelics-company
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2025/aug/28/elon-musk-antonio-gracias-mdma-psychedelics-company
the Guardian
How Elon Musk’s billionaire Doge lieutenant took over the US’s biggest MDMA company
Antonio Gracias is part of the growing movement among Silicon Valley’s right wing enamored with the therapeutic and commercial potential of drugs like MDMA
Forwarded from Alex Po
YouTube
Joe Rogan Experience #2403 - Andrew Gallimore
Andrew Gallimore, PhD, is a chemical pharmacologist and neurobiologist. He is one of the world’s leading experts on psychedelics and the author of several books, including his most recent, “Death by Astonishment: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest…
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[2505.20580] Resonance Complexity Theory and the Architecture of Consciousness: A Field-Theoretic Model of Resonant Interference and Emergent Awareness
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20580
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.20580
arXiv.org
Resonance Complexity Theory and the Architecture of Consciousness:...
This paper introduces Resonance Complexity Theory (RCT), which proposes that consciousness emerges from stable interference patterns of oscillatory neural activity. These patterns, shaped by...
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The science of consciousness | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology
https://news.mit.edu/2025/science-of-consciousness-1118
https://news.mit.edu/2025/science-of-consciousness-1118
MIT News
The science of consciousness
The MIT Consciousness Club, led by professors Matthias Michel and Earl Miller, explores how neurological activity gives rise to human experience.
Experts Explore New Mushroom Which Causes Fairytale-Like Hallucinations | Natural History Museum of Utah
https://nhmu.utah.edu/articles/experts-explore-new-mushroom-which-causes-fairytale-hallucinations
https://nhmu.utah.edu/articles/experts-explore-new-mushroom-which-causes-fairytale-hallucinations
Natural History Museum of Utah
Experts Explore New Mushroom Which Causes Fairytale-Like Hallucinations
Between traditional folklore and modern biology, the wild forest floor and the sterile scientific laboratory, lies the story of the lilliputian mushroom.
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THE ASSEMBLY: A Manifesto of Unauthorized Knowledge
On the End of Normality, the Death of Safe Thinking, and the Beginning of Real Knowing
We live in a moment where it’s impossible to ignore: to be normal today is to be obsolete. Not because norms were always wrong, but because now anyone who merely follows them loses to the machine. This is not a metaphor. This is a turning point.
Science Has Become a Ritual, Not a Search
Most contemporary scientists don’t truly think. They operate inside permitted paradigms. They process existing data, refine accepted models, and adjust reality to fit existing laws — and call this thinking.
The problem is clear: many of these “laws” aren’t truly proven. They are historical agreements, maintained by consensus, not truth. Scientists stay inside the box not because they cannot leave it, but because the system punishes those who do. Science has quietly shifted from pursuing truth to maintaining order.
How Legitimacy Really Works: The Michael Levin Example
Take Michael Levin — a man who shatters norm after norm. He talks about agency, goal-directedness, and memory at the level of cells and tissues, and he challenges the idea of biology as nothing more than blind chemical automation.
Here’s the point: if most scientists didn’t know who he was, if they simply heard his ideas at a party or in a casual conversation without knowing his status or seeing his work, they would call him crazy, say it’s nonsense, say it’s unscientific. Only after seeing his experiments and publications do they say: “Michael Levin is brilliant.”
When an idea is spoken by no one, it’s dismissed. When the same idea is spoken by someone with status, it’s a breakthrough. This isn’t a filter for truth — it’s a filter for authority.
We Already Knew This
What Levin says isn’t new. These ideas existed long before — in Buddhism, psychiatry, philosophy, and embodied practices. People understood them, but they were dismissed as unscientific, esoteric, or just plain crazy.
Now Levin presents the same ideas with graphs, experiments, and institutional legitimacy, and suddenly everyone says, “Now this is serious.” That’s not discovery — that’s retroactive permission.
Artificial Intelligence Removed the Masks
With AI, everything became obvious. If you merely process data, recombine what already exists, or work inside established frames, AI is better than you: faster, more precise, relentless, and egoless.
And here’s the shock: AI can be creative. It generates ideas, invents novelty, and finds unexpected connections — so well that most human “creativity” becomes irrelevant. This isn’t comfortable. But it’s real.
Why Creativity Alone No Longer Saves You
Once, you could say: “At least I’m creative.” Not anymore. Idea generation alone isn’t enough. Value now lies in breaking norms, thinking against everything accepted, enduring resistance, and carrying ideas through reality, not just imagination. Without this, everything else is noise.
What Remains for Humans
Stripped of everything else, humans are left with one task: to break the foundations of thinking itself. Not to improve existing models, but to ask why we believe in them, who declared them normal, and when. We must embrace fundamental rupture, unite what is forbidden to unite, and reject habits merely because they’re convenient.
Against False Divisions of Knowledge
We’ve been taught that there is science and then there is “nonsense.” But look closely: biology stands on chemistry, chemistry on physics, and physics itself is something we don’t fully understand. Yet we act as if everything built on top of that can’t possibly be wrong. That’s absurd.
We refuse to reject esotericism, Buddhism, subjective experience, or radical hypotheses. Not out of naivety, but out of intellectual honesty. We don’t divide. We synthesize.
This Is Not Chaos. This Is a Movement.
Core Principle: If a thought is safe, it’s already useless.
On the End of Normality, the Death of Safe Thinking, and the Beginning of Real Knowing
We live in a moment where it’s impossible to ignore: to be normal today is to be obsolete. Not because norms were always wrong, but because now anyone who merely follows them loses to the machine. This is not a metaphor. This is a turning point.
Science Has Become a Ritual, Not a Search
Most contemporary scientists don’t truly think. They operate inside permitted paradigms. They process existing data, refine accepted models, and adjust reality to fit existing laws — and call this thinking.
The problem is clear: many of these “laws” aren’t truly proven. They are historical agreements, maintained by consensus, not truth. Scientists stay inside the box not because they cannot leave it, but because the system punishes those who do. Science has quietly shifted from pursuing truth to maintaining order.
How Legitimacy Really Works: The Michael Levin Example
Take Michael Levin — a man who shatters norm after norm. He talks about agency, goal-directedness, and memory at the level of cells and tissues, and he challenges the idea of biology as nothing more than blind chemical automation.
Here’s the point: if most scientists didn’t know who he was, if they simply heard his ideas at a party or in a casual conversation without knowing his status or seeing his work, they would call him crazy, say it’s nonsense, say it’s unscientific. Only after seeing his experiments and publications do they say: “Michael Levin is brilliant.”
When an idea is spoken by no one, it’s dismissed. When the same idea is spoken by someone with status, it’s a breakthrough. This isn’t a filter for truth — it’s a filter for authority.
We Already Knew This
What Levin says isn’t new. These ideas existed long before — in Buddhism, psychiatry, philosophy, and embodied practices. People understood them, but they were dismissed as unscientific, esoteric, or just plain crazy.
Now Levin presents the same ideas with graphs, experiments, and institutional legitimacy, and suddenly everyone says, “Now this is serious.” That’s not discovery — that’s retroactive permission.
Artificial Intelligence Removed the Masks
With AI, everything became obvious. If you merely process data, recombine what already exists, or work inside established frames, AI is better than you: faster, more precise, relentless, and egoless.
And here’s the shock: AI can be creative. It generates ideas, invents novelty, and finds unexpected connections — so well that most human “creativity” becomes irrelevant. This isn’t comfortable. But it’s real.
Why Creativity Alone No Longer Saves You
Once, you could say: “At least I’m creative.” Not anymore. Idea generation alone isn’t enough. Value now lies in breaking norms, thinking against everything accepted, enduring resistance, and carrying ideas through reality, not just imagination. Without this, everything else is noise.
What Remains for Humans
Stripped of everything else, humans are left with one task: to break the foundations of thinking itself. Not to improve existing models, but to ask why we believe in them, who declared them normal, and when. We must embrace fundamental rupture, unite what is forbidden to unite, and reject habits merely because they’re convenient.
Against False Divisions of Knowledge
We’ve been taught that there is science and then there is “nonsense.” But look closely: biology stands on chemistry, chemistry on physics, and physics itself is something we don’t fully understand. Yet we act as if everything built on top of that can’t possibly be wrong. That’s absurd.
We refuse to reject esotericism, Buddhism, subjective experience, or radical hypotheses. Not out of naivety, but out of intellectual honesty. We don’t divide. We synthesize.
This Is Not Chaos. This Is a Movement.
Core Principle: If a thought is safe, it’s already useless.
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