Jack Symes

It's a bit of a, even then, it might seem like a bit of a problem, right? Take out, like, copy and paste teleportation to really put it out there. You know, I copy all of the parts of you, I destroy them and recreate them elsewhere.

Yeah, the Star Treks. I don't know much about Star Trek. It's different on Star Trek. It's not copying. It sounds so nerdy. Yeah, I'm really embarrassed.

But some nerd told me that when the beam, beam, don't you like Star Trek? Yeah, sure.

I shouldn't call you. It's okay. I was a kid. So when you're getting beamed around in Star Trek, it's not copy and paste teleportation. It's cut and paste. No, it's not cut. Oh, it's cut and paste here. Okay. So it would be cut and paste. I copy you. I recreate you. It'd be copy and paste if I made another Joe Rogan.

And then we've got the problem that sort of Paul Rudd has in that Netflix show, which is great, Living With Yourself. Have you seen that? Oh, no, I haven't. Oh, it's gold.

Yeah. I always said that.

If you can do it once, you can keep doing it, especially as technology advances. Oh, it's a gold, the Paul Rudd one. They recreate him, but as a better version of himself. Oh, no. So all of his friends want to hang out with the other one. His wife wants to be with him. Oh, no. Oh, no.

In Star Trek, what happens is you carry on having experiences. Someone told me there's an episode where you see what it's like to be teleported. And it's just like this world of things and lights around you. So it's not like the lights go out even for a split second. But on the copy and cut and paste version, it would be that second.

An antenna for it?

Because I've been unpacking philosophical arguments or reasons for holding these views. What's your motivation for like, I'm not sure if this is your view, but even like entertaining it, right? It might seem like they call them like just so stories, right? In philosophy, right? You can tell a tale about what it might be, but why take that tale you're telling seriously?

Yeah, I couldn't think of much worse. We're social animals, right? So we do look for that. But that's still something. You need something stronger there, right? So you go, we want to connect with people. We want to form these communities and bonds. In the face of tragedy, we come together and we support each other and we work. We empathize with each other and we love and support each other.

But like on a deep philosophical level, I'm still seeing the world through my eyes and not your eyes, right? So why think that gives us a reason to think that there is this unifying experience or mind that occupies all of space and time, right? What's the motivation for thinking something like that?

Hmm. Do you think there's a parallel with religious experience there? Yes, I think so.

Have their root, like Paul on his road to Damascus?

Yeah, do you think then, what makes you think that on the one case, let's say, someone takes a drug and they... think that there is a fundamental conscious unifying mind behind the cosmos, right? That's person A. Person B has it and they see like the Easter Bunny or something running down the road.

What makes, given that they have the same cause, person A's religious experience, caused by psychedelics in this case, more reasonable than person B's?

It seems that people have those experiences perhaps without those obvious triggers as well, though, right, in the literature. I do work with the Center for Inner Experience at Durham University. Some cool work from Jules Evans on this. It looks at people who have had like long-term negative effects because of taking psychedelics. He takes like 700 people because they're pretty underreported.

The data doesn't reflect them very well. Do you remember what they took? No, not off the top of my head. They say that a third of people who have long-term effects from the psychedelics, maybe you can pull this up, Jamie, Jules Evans, the guy's name, a third of people have negative effects lasting longer than a year.

And one sixth have it for longer than three years. And what were these effects? Like feeling the sunlight on them and shaking with terror, seeing things that aren't there, extreme forms of anxiety. What do they give these people, acid? Well, perhaps, I'm not sure. This is the thing I think I'm concerned with. Same kind of stuff when we're talking about free speech.

Who the fuck's not in favor of free speech? Everyone wants free speech, but people want to draw the line in different places. So we need a nuanced discussion about where that line is. Similarly with psychedelics, what we see are writers, philosophers, documentary makers, just give this blanket statement about them being good. but don't recognize or talk about some of the negatives.