“His conclusions are astonishing… And to some they will be horrifying. This book is not to be missed." — Dennis McKenna, PhD DEATH BY ASTONISHMENT: Confronting the Mystery of the World’s Strangest Drug. (St. Martin’s Press, Macmillan). OUT NOW

It cannot be understood… It cannot be brought under the aegis of rational apprehension… Reality outran apprehension… You do not measure the depth of a universal mystery with the neural network of a primate… Our role is not to understand but to appreciate… T.M. (video by We Plants Are Happy Plants) – at Musashino-shi, Tokyo

Next on the reading list (after Cormac’s bio) by @RCarhartHarris… – at Musashino-shi, Tokyo

“Don’t sell meth at the izakaya!”

Managing to get ripped off by FIVE different Kabukicho bars in one night for a total of 2 million Yen (close to $13,000) should come with some kind of award 🥇

Legendary Japanese chemist Nagai Nagayoshi (pictured) publishes his latest invention in 1893: Methamphetamine (synthesised from ephedrine which he also discovered)... The "Nagai method", using red phosphorus and hydroiodic acid (HI), remains a popular method for converting ephedrine (or pseudoephedrine) to methamphetamine among clandestine manufacturers (although Nagai used the much nastier white P rather than red)... A quintessentially Japanese drug... – at Musashino-shi, Tokyo

Still raining. 18 consecutive days of rain ☔️ 7 hours of sun over first 10 days of September ☁️

If you’re currently visiting Tokyo looking for that Blade Runner never-stops-fucking-raining vibe… You’re in luck. – at Suginami-ku, Tokyo

I love how, even with the audio removed, you can still hear her voice go up at the end of every sentence… Is this programmed into all NPCs??

Machine men with machine minds…

Excellent selection 👽

Thanks for reading! 👽

Tomorrow 👽

It's hard to find a perfectly smooth surface that will completely remove the interference/speckle effect, but yes, if you do so the code should disappear... As I've said from the beginning, the individual "speckles" form sensory scaffolds around which primitive lexical forms emerge... I wrote about it here: alieninsect.substack.com/p/o… This excellent article (not by me) explains it in detail... anthonyness.substack.com/p/t… "The code... is the finite set of topological primitives that the primary visual cortex extracts from every visual scene — 36 configurations generated by three junction types [in the primary visual cortex, V1] operating on three or fewer line segments. These primitives appear in every writing system in human history because cultural evolution selected for shapes that fit the brain’s processing architecture. DMT suppresses the assembly. The laser provides real input. What remains visible is V1’s raw extraction — the alphabet underneath all seeing. It looks like language because every language was built from it." Crucially, his model is very much testable: "The reported characters, collected as drawings from subjects, should be classifiable within the Changizi catalog [the finite list of lexical primitives] — clustering in the high-frequency types and absent from the rarest." If they are classifiable in this way then it's pretty much game over I'd say. There's still a high-impact neuroscience paper in that result, but not a code base for reality itself... – at Musashino-shi, Tokyo