soul_of_the_thing

1. I was still there to prevent things from getting worse to the best of my ability

I know what that’s like, in a different field. Sorry you had to go through that shit. It’s really easy for people to say what they would or wouldn’t have done.

This is better creative process advice than most hundreds-of-pages-long books on the subject.

As the other reply said, MDMA is in clinical trials now for therapy but it was already used extensively for therapy in the 1970s by several thousand psychiatrists. Couples’ therapy where both people were on MDMA was very common. So what the guy is describing here is just a 70’s therapy technique that predates widespread use of the drug for recreational purposes (that caught on during the 80’s).

Can’t speak to the shamanism.

Until it’s also programmed to experience fear and other more complex reactions to the stimulus (including simulated neural changes over repeat stimuli), no, it isn’t, because those things are part of “pain” in a biological organism. EDIT: Of course, programming a learned aversion would be ass-backwards for this particular use which is why it’s good in a sense that it ISN’T the same as biological pain.

Same goes for other complex biological experiences; you can program a robot to say “I love you too” when you tell it you love it, but that AI isn’t “experiencing love after a love-triggering stimulus”.

Are there historical societies that have faced major sudden climate change / severe wealth inequality that managed to avoid collapse, or is it a pretty strict 1:1?