Darwin's Pharmacy

Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere

Richard M. Doyle

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780295803005
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Evolution
• Index: Biological Sciences

Are humans unwitting partners in evolution with psychedelic plants? Darwin's Pharmacy shows they are by weaving the evolutionary theory of sexual selection and the study of rhetoric together with the science and literature of psychedelic drugs. Long suppressed as components of the human tool kit, psychedelic plants can be usefully modeled as "eloquence adjuncts" that intensify a crucial component of sexual selection in humans: discourse. Psychedelic plants seduce us to interact with them, building an ongoing interdependence: rhetoric as evolutionary mechanism. In doing so, they engage our awareness of the noosphere, or thinking stratum of the earth. The realization that the human organism is part of an interconnected ecosystem is an apprehension of immanence that could ultimately benefit the planet and its inhabitants. To explore the rhetoric of the psychedelic experience and its significance to evolution, Doyle takes his readers on an epic journey through the writings of William Burroughs and Kary Mullis, the work of ethnobotanists and anthropologists, and anonymous trip reports. The results offer surprising insights into evolutionary theory, the war on drugs, the internet, and the nature of human consciousness itself. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xof-t2cAob4

1

THE FLOWERS OF PERCEPTION

Trip Reports, Stigmergy, and the Nth Person Plural

This plant, although itself hardly mobile, casts a spell over what is wakened, for instance, by tea, tobacco, opium, often just by the mere scent of flowers.”

—Ernst Jünger, “The Plant as Autonomous Power”

Even though, as fungi, mushrooms do not blossom, the Aztecs referred to them as “flowers,” and the Indians who still use them in religious rituals have endearing terms for them, such as “little flowers.”

—Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, and Christian Rätsch, Plants of the Gods

IF WE ARE TO RESPOND ETHICALLY (NOT TO MENTION SCIENTIFICALLY) to the presence of psychedelic technologies in our cultures, then it would seem a good idea to evaluate what they are. This ontological question—“What are psychedelics?”—would seem to come before any reasoned or practical response to the systematic alteration of consciousness in interaction with plant compounds or their simulacra. We must at least pose, if not answer, questions about the kinds of practices they are if we are to respond with care to these ancient but nonetheless transhuman technologies.

As compounds, we could quite usefully group psychedelics under the categories phenethylamines and tryptamines. Alexander and Ann Shulgin used these categories as a way of organizing both their chemical research and their (fictional) writings about said investigations.¹ Even the chemistry of these “families” of compounds itself provides a kind of contact high, as the differentiation of various isomers or substitutions renders visions of a tinker-toy universe through which one can move imaginatively and, if one is a chemist of the caliber of Alexander Shulgin or various denizens of www.hive.org, endlessly toy with. Prospecting for novel psychedelics and the pathways for their synthesis becomes an endlessly differentiating glassbead game, the leading edge of a molecular evolution whose bounds are uncertain but ongoing.

The pathways to synthesize these compounds are remarkable works of creativity in their own right, and carefully following the cascades of reactions that lead one from aluminum foil to MDMA involves a cognitive and perceptual gymnastics no less intensive than listening to a symphony. Consider, for example, the group tinker of the “Brazil Caper,” wherein Shura (Alexander Shulgin's fictional alter ego) presided over the preparation of a batch of MDMA for a barely equipped clinic in Rio:

There was an old rotary evaporator which wobbled alarmingly; Shura patched it with duct tape. There was a superb Büchner Funnel among the treasures, but no sign of filter paper of the right size, so our boys cut out a substitute from a piece of paper towel.…Hooking up, pulling down, fitting on, screwing in, both of them were delighted with the challenge one moment, despairing the next, hoping all over again, and mildly hysterical most of the time. (Shulgin and Shulgin 1997, 92)

Yet however engaging the synthetic pathway of any given compound is—here we are watching MDMA become—the scientific literature of psychedelics is clear on this point: the compounds are interesting precisely and perhaps only because of their effects on a human consciousness. Alice—Ann's fictional alter ego—shares in “Shura's dance” even as she narrates it: “Hooking up, pulling down, fitting on, screwing in,” even the fabrication of MDMA seems to induce contagious and connective rhythms.

Hence while remarkable, the tinker toy, molecular definition of psychedelics is insufficient for any real apprehension of what they are, or why MDMA does or does not belong to the category “psychedelic.” This universe of play is quite helpful in the replication and differentiation of psychedelic compounds, yet even participating in this play tells us (almost) nothing about why anyone would replicate psychedelic experience in the first place. It teaches us the joys of molecular evolution and the sensus communis often at play in the psychedelic community, but it tells us little about anything specific to the molecular evolution of psychedelics, whether that evolution takes place in a plant ecoystem or a lab. Creativity, theologian and perennial philosopher Matthew Fox tells us, is “Divine.” But are psychedelics themselves involved in the divine in any fashion distinct from, say, the same sort of tinkering with a computer, a bicycle, a house, a greenhouse? This is the ontological question raised by “entheogen.”

For evidence concerning the nature of psychedelics, then, we must turn to the only kind of data we have: first person testimonies about experiences with these materials. In this context, trip reports are the “readout” produced by a human consciousness and a particular compound. This readout is itself usable in multiple ways, and interpretable only in the context of the possible differentiations of set and setting embedding any particular compound or plant. Thus when the Shulgins “wrote up” the diverse tryptamines and phenethylamines, it was not only the itinerary from one compound to another—the steps of synthesis—that demanded articulation; they also needed to provide character development and community analysis if they were to situate the effects of the compounds on any given psychonaut such that they could be usefully repeated. It is in this latter sense that the voices of Tihkal and Pihkal are as vital to psychedelic science as their famous chemical recipes: the multiply voiced, famously and obviously pseudonymic characters of Shura and Alice provide fluctuating but actual rhetorical frameworks for the investigation of psychedelic experience, softwares for further research.

And yet how are we to read this data? Testimony concerning psychedelic experience faces several rhetorical challenges. In a later chapter we will watch as Albert Hofmann struggles even to speak, let alone speak well and persuasively about his discovery, LSD-25. And language itself appears to be insufficient to the synesthesias and beyond of psychedelic research. Few elements in a trip report are more predictable than a version of “words fail me.” To make matters worse, psychonauts find themselves rhetorically challenged on yet another front: trip reports are written by users of psychedelic drugs. Why would we listen to such babble?

And yet properly contextualized, all of these features of psychedelic testimony can be viewed as aspects of ecodelic experience. The continual disavowal of language in language, for example, becomes a site for analysis—a rhetorical move made by psychonauts in response to psychedelic experience perhaps no less predictable than a reindeer's head twitch under the influence of Amanita muscaria mushroom. So too does the complicity of psychonauts with their own reports become a strength, as we avoid an all too common weakness in discourse about psychedelic “drugs”—researchers writing about compounds and plants they have themselves never assayed.

PARSING THE NTH PERSON PLURAL: HOW TO “READ” A TRIP REPORT

If our inquiry into psychedelics leaves us to read page after page of graphomaniacal claims to ineffability, an enormous question is nonetheless begged, not to mention repeated: How are we to read these texts? For besides the enormity of our task—the online repository The Vaults of Erowid alone offers over twenty thousand reports on over four hundred compounds and plants—there are also some very basic rhetorical questions to be asked about the trip report: to whom are they addressed? What, if anything, do they mean? What can they teach us about the nature of psychedelics and their frequent capacity to induce ecodelia?

Consider, for example, The Vaults of Erowid devoted to a phenethylamine, 2C-I. Invented by Alexander Shulgin in his Lafayette, California, lab, 2C-I is now being researched by an amateur network of worldwide psychonauts who synthesize the compound with the help of clandestine, online chemistry sites and Internet providers of research chemicals. A global market has emerged for this rare phenethylamine, with the bulk of production reputedly taking place in China. A sometime “club drug” in the United Kingdom and Europe, 2C-I has yielded, among other things, four hundred and thirteen experience reports posted to Erowid as of June 2010. Clicking from one report to another, I immediately come across a trope recognizable from other psychonauts: the mistake. The hilariously handled Nanobrain writes of an ill-disciplined tongue indeed:

T 0:00 The crystalline powder was diluted to a 1mg/g concentration in an aqueous vodka solution, which required vigorous shaking to dissolve completely. I drink 12 g of this solution, containing 12 mg active. Then, I make the mistake. I lick the inside of the paper envelope formerly containing the 2C-I, as well as swallowing a couple very small flecks that were noted near the scale.²

The mistake is legion in trip reports—hence Nanobrain's metadiscourse on the mistake—”Then, I made the mistake,“ rather than ”a mistake” reads like a refrain because it is one. Psychonautic research, like other technoscientific investigations, often involves making mistakes faster than usual, such that they might not be repeated. This is not to say that psychonauts are a particularly careless lot—since most research chemicals such as 2C-I are usually sold not as individual dosages but in gram and half gram quantities of loose (and, in the case of 2C-I, often sticky) powders and crystals, many have high-accuracy scales and lab equipment with which to pursue their research and ensure the purity of unknown and little studied compounds. Rather, when dealing with a mixture of psychedelic states and high potency compounds—an average dose of 2C-I is a mere 15 milligrams—the mistake amplifies the contingency of the psychonautic experience: even extreme care is insufficient. A two-hundred-dollar scale is only accurate (even when properly used) within two milligrams, while even a friendly compound like 2C-I has a sufficiently steep response curve to make two milligrams significant indeed. Although this mistake would not be lethal, it could radically alter the qualitative experience, reminding us that tuning psychedelics is an exceptionally delicate affair—they are extraordinarily sensitive to initial rhetorical conditions, including that favorite rhetorical practice of Protagoras, the “measure.” As we will see with the example of Albert Hofmann's accidental ingestion of LSD-25, the mistake can be seen to be foundational to modern psychedelic discourse itself, and is perhaps linked to the ego death that is frequently discussed in it.³

This atmosphere of extreme care and consistent error reminds us of the audience for Erowid trip reports and orients our (rhetorical) questions. While trip reports are certainly inflected by the gorgeous confessional style of Thomas De Quincey, whose opiated transmissions from the opera are among the most sublime texts in nineteenth-century British literature, they also carry an enormous burden of practicality and education. Psychonauts browse the psychedelic vaults to learn about the experience of other psychonauts with different compounds, dosages, programming, and intent, and carry out their experiments accordingly. Trip reports are, then, first and foremost protocols, scripts for the better or worse ingestion of psychedelic compounds and plants.

Thus within all the chatter of ineffability, it would be easy enough to miss an essential feature of the trip report: they must be repeatable. Generic to the trip report from Havelock Ellis to Murple is a quantitative description of dosage and delivery, as well as immensely detailed descriptions of the context and mindset of the psychonaut. Both capture repeatable elements of a psychonaut's trip—as do the frequent discussions of musical and artistic investigations under the influence. Perhaps more than anything else in his remarkable writings on psychedelic experience, it is Aldous Huxley's treatment of paint and light in Vermeer that is most persuasive in its rendering of entheogenic-mind states for this researcher, if only because it is a treatment often and easily repeated by psychonauts. Consider, for example, this trip report for another phenethylamine, 2C-E:

(with 20 mg) The view out of the window was unreal. The garden was painted on the window, and every petal of flower and tuft of grass and leaf of tree was carefully sculptured in fine strokes of oil paint on the surface of the glass. It was not out there; it was right here in front of me. The woman who was watering the plants was completely frozen, immobilized by Vermeer. And when I looked again, she was in a different place, but again frozen. I was destined to become the eternal museum viewer. (Shulgin and Shulgin 1991, 518)

What is the function of a Vermeer—or, a frozen menagerie of woman, plants, and water—for this researcher? Vermeer works as an avatar, a visualization technology for rendering the psychedelic experience. Although psychedelic experience presents itself with great immediacy—“when I looked again”—it is nonetheless actualized on an itinerary—”she was in a different place.” Here Vermeer—as an algorithm for making the dynamism of life still—helps render a vision by spatializing and visualizing an irreducibly dynamic sequence. That Vermeer located a “style” in which to do so was an enormous rhetorical achievement—to arrest life into a moment while attending to its luminosity is no minor innovation in the picture plane. Hence we can understand Vermeer's usefulness as a sample almost as much as the more ubiquitous treatment of the temporal unfoldings of psychedelic experience into spatial terms: the trope of a psychedelic experience as a “trip.”

What does the “trip” trope do? The ineffability of ecodelic states seems to be linked to their capacity to smear our usual rhetorical categories: inside/ outside, self/other, before/after. By contrast, an itinerary contains indubitable locales—first here, then there. By mapping the whorl of space-time characteristic of psychedelic experience, “trip” recuperates a psychonaut's capacity to articulate by compressing a thoroughly distributed experience into a serial one. Writer Philip K. Dick treated the psychedelic experience in more temporal terms, but the rhetorical effect is quite similar: a compression of an ineffable experience into a repeatable algorithm.

To put it in Zen terms, under LSD you experience eternity for only a short period…. (If you'd prefer to undergo the experience of LSD without taking it, imagine sitting through Ben Hur twenty times without the midpoint intermission. Got it? Keep it.) (Dick 1996b, 177)

The effect of this rhetorical practice of overwhelming visual repetition is to summon a reader willing to enact it. As an engagement with what contemporary psychonaut Jim DeKorne calls the “imaginal realm,” even the simulation of such a cinematic marathon erodes any ordinary serial experience of time—the beginning, middle, and end of the movie—and instead solicits waves of attention and confusion: Didn't I just see that scene with the Timex anachronism a minute ago? While Dick's imaginative rendering of an LSD experience is remarkably effective, it is by no means easy, as his query and challenge “Got it? Keep it.” would seem to imply. Like any good k

an, Dick's thought experiment of sending the reader to a repetitious theater resists interpretation even as it summons our attention. Only by both carrying out the rhetorical recipe, “I am seeing the chariot again,” and letting go of it, “Where was I?,” can one satisfactorily render the magnitude of ecodelic experience.

Perhaps this is why psychologist Roland Fischer suggests that Gödelian (self-referential) paradoxes are unresolvable only in non-ecstatic states; artifacts of our own (illusory) distinctions between self and world, such paradoxes are for Fischer less qualities of the universe than feedback on our premises, such as our inclination toward success or failure.

It is not generally recognized that Gödel's theorem refers only to the consistency of the normal state of daily routine associated with low levels of ergotropic arousal, or, in other words, to physical space-time with its constancies…and “Aristotelian” (yes-no, true-false) logic and language. The exalted states associated with the highest levels of arousal, as well as the meditative states at the lowest arousal levels, are the vantage points of a different dimension, with its symbolic (multivalued) logic, from which the subject literally “looks down” upon the “object-ive” normal state. (Fischer and Landon, 1972, 166-67)⁴

When even the premise of a self/non-self distinction is relegated to a different level of analysis—one where the self persists, but as an immanent rather than transcendental feature of a system, the next step in a recursively nested holoarchy—Fischer suggests that the paradoxes disappear as they become resolved in a framework of a higher logical type (Bateson). Hence for Fischer the egoic self, as a way of rendering the world, also entails very particular limitations, such as the problem of self reference:

Our point is to emphasize that the limitations established by Gödel, Turing, Church, and Tarski are inherent in man's self referential nature and may refer only to the internal consistency of a particular state of consciousness. (Ibid., 167)

Fischer here raises the interesting possibility that different states of consciousness may present different sorts of paradoxes and, if so, the careful “tuning” of a mathematician's consciousness may harbor tremendous potential, a technological enhancement perhaps analogous to the effect of physicist Stephen Wolfram's “Mathematica” software on the practice of mathematics.⁵

Yet even if we agree with Fischer that the isolated and alienated self is only a particular (quotidian) form of consciousness with its own capacities and incapacities, it is nonetheless to quotidian consciousness that trip reports, such as Dick's, are addressed. In this sense they face a situation similar to the rendering algorithms of computer graphics, where the actualization of a more abstract “wire frame” schema of an image requires computationally and rhetorically intense practices that would fill out the abstraction, actualize the virtuality into an image. Trip reports face a no less difficult task of compression—transforming the immanent experience and abstracting it into the alienated context of the separated experience of self, separable from an ecosystemic enmeshment. Trip reports are fundamentally rendering algorithms, clusters of recipes to be tried out, sampled, and remixed by psychonauts, a rhetorical treatment of distributed consciousness in serial terms. Hence to read a trip report is both to bear witness to a particular episode and provide context for further iterations of research. Indeed, in this context even the active avoidance of trip reports becomes an interesting practice in “Diamond Mind....

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Glimpsing the Peacock Angel
• 1 - The Flowers of Perception: Trip Reports, Stigmergy, and the Nth Person Plural
• 2 - Rhetorical Mycelium: Psychedelics as Eloquence Adjuncts?
• 3 - Rhetorical Adjuncts and the Evolution of Rhetoric: Darwin's Impassioned Speech
• 4 - LSDNA : Creative Problem Solving, Consciousness Expansion, and the Emergence of Biotechnology
• 5 - Hyperbolic: Divining Ayahuasca
• 6 - The Transgenic Involution
• 7 - From Zero to One: Metaprogramming Noise, with Special Reference to Plant Intelligence
• Epilogue: In Darwin's Dreams
• Notes
• References
• Index