The Mothman Is Not The Territory.[Trenchant Edges]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes, 3 seconds. Contains 1413 words
Welcome back to the Trenchant Edges, a newsletter about whatever weird bullshit that catches my interest.
I’m your host Stephen and today’s a quick one.
I had more existential crises than usual this week, delaying this by a couple days. Unusually they were about this newsletter: Short answer is that while I’d just kind of started writing about whatever interested me, I hadn’t really updated my model of it and a small part of my trouble with deadlines and such is I was trying to push this back towards it’s initial schema.
To hell with that we’re just going to chase my attention.
But this did burn up an awful lot of time and I want to stay more or less at a weekly pace, so I needed to find something I already knew about, haven’t discussed here, and makes sense to bring into a framework.
Like any hack I began to panic and decided to see if AI could help me. I asked copilot for some possible topics.
Coming to my senses I remembered that I, uh, own a lot of books I’m actually interested in and one immediately came to mind.
Psychedelic Information Theory
I love high quality attempts at blending mysticism and hard science and James L Kent’s PIT is one of the better examples I can think of. Published in 2010, it contains one of my primary models. Kent might be annoyed that it’s a minor one, but it’s very handy for our purposes.
Kent’s overall thesis is that psychedelic drugs work by generating new information that the brain then propagates and processes. He relates this tightly to neuropharmacology and goes into what, to me, seemed unnecessary detail.
But I was mostly uninterested in neuroscience when I read it and I’m not sure I’d keep that going.
I think his biggest technical point is that, and this is *heavily* paraphrased: Psychedelics get their novel information from recycling and amplifying intercellular and intracellular signaling mechanism. It’s randomish, but rooted in the mechanics of biology.
The thing most useful to us are his stages of ingestion.
I think of them alongside my own Taxonomy of Weirdness: Low, Middle, and High.
TLDR for everyone not reading this in 2021: Weirdness starts with pop culture kitsch/pulp fiction. Not much substance, but may be interesting on their own right or for cultural values. The kind of weirdness you get with tall tales and urban legends. If you go up the taxonomy a bit you run into middle weirdness which is more institutional and rigid but still explainable. Altered states induced by religious practice, for example, prophecy, etc.
High weirdness, though, is the good stuff. Authentic high weirdness is ambiguous and uncanny, genuine information outside whatever map you might try to apply to it. It can be dismissed, but almost always in a categorical way by those who weren’t there.
A direct confrontation with something Other, a rupture in personal reality.
Or maybe just psychosis.
Hard to say.
See how “psychosis” doesn’t address the substance of running into something fully outside your comprehension?
Philip K Dick’s gnostic experiences in the 70s are a good example.
But enough of me. Let’s get back to Kent.
How Psychedelia Spreads
His model is perhaps obvious, but it’s a good place to start. Rereading the section from the book, I may come back and revise this into something more suitable to my purposes. You’ll see why in a sec.
Ingestion
Internal Transmission
Internal Integration
Cultural Transmission
Cultural Integration
To spin this up quickly: For some reason a person ingests a substance that causes a shift in experience. Kent gestures at the way different cultures gatekeep crossing this line, but it’s enough for us to know that they do.
Once ingested, the experience begins and novel information is produced. Let’s take a look at Kent’s description:
Internal transmission is where the psychedelic interacts with the neural network and new information is generated. Information in the psychedelic state is generated spontaneously within visual and audio hallucination; ideas which pop into the subject’s imagination; novel juxtapositions of previous concepts; and removed perspectives that allow for new holistic analysis. This information can be literal or figurative; it can be abstract; it can come in words or phrases; it can be spoken or sung; it can be visual; it can emerge as epiphanies or brilliant ideas; it can be a recalled memory; it can be delivered by spirit entities in strange languages; and so on. The information density in a psychedelic session is layered, saturated, and colorfully detailed. Much of the information in a psychedelic hallucination may be accurately described as kaleidoscopic noise, but within this noise comes a wealth of salient content.
So, after ingestion a person experiences some amount of new information and the experience slowly fades with time. What happens next depends on a combination of the information itself, cultural context, and personal inclinations of the experiencer.
The experience may produce free floating psychological insights that needs collected and processed, which brings us to Internal Integration. If successful, the experiencer might understand themselves or the world in a new way. Through contending with this new experience they might change beliefs, habits, or gain a whole new mission in life.
My favorite example of this are the surprising number of people I know who, while high as hell on magic mushrooms, asked the mushroom spirit what their life’s purpose is and were told: Grow more mushrooms.
At least two of them now grow mushrooms professionally.
Ask a sex organ what to do and it’s gonna tell you to fuck.
After integration, a person might produce cultural artifacts inspired by their experience. Music, art, poetry, writing, solved technical problems. The form doesn’t so much matter as much as the reflection of the formerly unknown. Thus begins Cultural Transmission.
This is a point where in the world of art many creators hit a rut: Genuinely visionary art breaking new ground isn’t comprehensible as such at first. People need to digest it themselves.
Kent also discusses how powerful social bonding can be with psychedelic use, an underrated point.
As more people are directly and indirectly affected by transmission of novelty, cultures form, grow, and die to reshape themselves around or against psychedelia. Thus, Cultural Transmission.
This propagates outward from moments of ingestion into the values and habits of whole populations of people.
We can trace the influence of this on, say, the Beatles later albums and how those influenced a ton of artists and also backlash against the freedom they were promising. Not merely reactionary backlash, but reactions to real problems created by seeking full disinhibition.
What’s That To Trenchant Edges?
All well and good, but why do we care?
There are a few ways Kent’s model can help us navigate weirdness better. First, it puts some definitive structure around how stories about weirdness (distinct from weirdness itself).
The Mothman is not the Territory.
Whatever those kids in Point Pleasant saw in 1966, may or may not have anything to do with the mothy creature of our dreams.
The experience of someone’s high weirdness ends up as just another rumor to anyone unaffected by it… unless it gets built into some stellar art.
By understanding that someone can both be mistaken about what the cause of their experience is while the experience could still have happened, we can empathize with people we may be tempted to label frauds.
Sometimes you stumble into something untethered to your world. Maybe that’s a glitch or maybe it’s something all too real. It’s often hard to tell.
But we must also notice that there are some flaws in this model.
First, it’s very linear for a nonlinear process.
Second, it doesn’t really work with populations. If we’re interested at looking at networks of people affected by weirdness, it needs modification to describe the way ideas in the transmission phase compete, breed, argue, and position with and against each other.
But that, I think is a story for another time. If I’ve done my job perhaps we can see weirdness propagate better.
And Now For Something Entirely Different
Ok, so that’s pretty good. Only 8 days and some change between these.
Let’s see about next week, eh?
I think we’re going to finish some of Dabrowski’s work and then prep for an, uh, interlude of a few weeks before getting back into UFOs.
If I can stay on schedule here we’re going to have a spooky summer.
Alright.
So, thank you for hanging around and here’s to some more regular meetings between us, eh?
-S