Lysergic Acid Diethylamide

Besides the usual suspects, those social effects associated with the 1960s counterculture, i.e. lots of questionable metaphysical speculation and sex, one of the things I've read that was supposedly a direct result of the psychedelic era is the huge explosion in information processing that's taken place, especially since the advent of the personal computer. Things like object oriented programming and the Internet as we know it today were, according to some, not possible until a bunch of the right sort of folks (those with a peculiar com sci predisposition) had shifted their neural processing, ever so slightly, in a way that allowed for a particular brand of visual logic that could be shared by a community of researchers and dabblers, and who would carve out the world we are living in today. Hence, the primary skillset driving this change was a highly attuned visual imagination, something traditionally associated with artistic ability.

Along my own travels, I've also noticed that musicians (people obviously tending more toward auditory than visual inclination) often have a tremendous intuition for data processing as well. I worked with a couple of concert level pianists, who were about the best programmers I've known. One was so close to being among the very best performers in the world that he gave up playing altogether, for a number of years, out of grief. The other was even odder, he could read in about nine different languages (most of which he taught himself) and was rumored to belong to some cultish spiritualist organization. I had a tape he had given me of one of his compositions, that he had played himself, with a few string players, something that reminded me of Debussey or Ravel, not anything overtly challenging (afterall, he was a COBOL programmer) but rich enough to inspire strong admiration on my part.

During this same period, the models of cog sci have filled out as well, going from Miller's, Gallanter's and Pribram's sequential TOTE (Test-Operate-Test-Exit) model, to complexities like Conceptual Blends, Emergence, Self-organizing Systems, etc., and even a term like "cognitive" has mutated from something akin to explicit rational thinking to a hydra-headed and self-reflexive analog system functioning mainly on the unconscious level.

But none of this should be taken too seriously. What we have here is no more than the current mythology. In fact, it might turn out that our current notions of complexity in the sciences are nothing but our recent scientific worldview trying to take into account those phenomena that only superstition could talk to previously.

Where once we had day and night, light and dark, Apollo and Dionysus, we now have conscious and unconcscious processes (not 'minds', anymore, btw).

I'd like to point out, however, that just because the sun shines on things, and makes them more available to the eye, doesn't necessarily make the world more sensible. Rather, the enormous amount of information that becomes available can in itself become a source of delirium. The god of poetry and medicine was (is?) just as much a drunkard as his wino brother, therefore. And the proof is that his spokeswoman, the Python Priestess of Delphi, often communicated in word salads which took a team of specialists (priests) to unscramble.

Once a poet, always a poet, but people usually don't think of Apollo as a Surrealist (or schizoanalyst).

What this comes down to is that there may be no such thing as gods and goddesses, darkness and lightness (other than relative perceptions), order and chaos, or even a conscious and unconscious mind. There are certain types of thoughts, perhaps, that are possible to be processed consciously, but they tend to be the simplistic kinds. The purpose of the conscious mind may not be thinking at all, but only awareness, and using the thoughts derived at from other functions to guide us.

The only way something becomes conscious is through distortion, overgeneralization, and filtering most of the information out. This is how we begin to distinguish polarities, such as black and white, Israel and Palestine, work and the rest of life.

One should remember, as well, that the Sun is only a star that's close enough to seem to take the night away.