"...today one can't responsibly advocate the use of psychedelics. The risks are too high. 'Bad trips' are an ever-present possibility. Informed consent is biologically impossible. For psychedelia is not just weirder than the drug-naive mind conceives, it's weirder than the drug-naive mind can conceive. One can't grasp, in advance, the nature of the sorts of experience to which one is nominally consenting. Yet in consequence of this taboo, quite astonishing alien state spaces of consciousness remain off-limits to most of us. Trapped in the squalid psychochemical ghetto of Darwinian life, we lack the necessary wetware to conceptualise radically altered states of mind. We haven't even names for the strange new textures of selfhood and introspection their metabolic pathways disclose; and alas pure reasoning is impotent to access their nature because it lacks the semantic primitives with which to do so. Yet when the vertebrate genome gets rewritten, and genetically-preprogrammed bliss becomes the norm of mental health, our veil of ignorance can be safely ripped aside. Armed with exquisite designer-drugs, even the most outlandish realms of psychedelia can then be investigated in depth. The study of consciousness can become a true experimental discipline. And crucially, we can explore other-worldly forms of mental life in the confidence that they will all, without exception, radiate the sparkle of earthly paradise..."
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