You Don't Have to Be Chemically Influenced, But It Does Help

Meet Entheogentleman, a newly registered member of Mulch's new forum.

Entheogentleman said:

"This is the standard test message used when first testing a new program, and it is the greeting I extend to you, my fellow meat machines. History is a hallucinatory experience; it is the collective trip that represents the dreams of the entire human race. I hope that you will find my post history to be an accurate microcosmic echo of our macroscopic hallucination, albeit from the authorial awareness of a single being but timesharing a ride on common eyes.


This is happening just like the real thing."

"There is a perfectly areasonable (not orthogonal to reason, just outside the realm of both reasonable and unreasonable) explanation for this hiccup in your experience. I'm a time traveler and I've figured out how to endogenously jack my awareness directly into the shared extradimensional thought processes whose fleeting glimpses are often apprehended when under the influence of mind altering agents."

"An alternative possibility is that we attribute it all to Chance. But attributing such bizarre correlations to a force of nature implies that we might could consider that Chance is a force with a consciousness and intentionality."

"And that puts us in a bit of an intellectual quagmire where everything becomes mechanizations within mechanizations. There is no chaos, only order whose signature is visible in a dimension beyond our own cognizance. But as long as we can't expand our awareness in a broad enough way so as to perceive the order, then we don't have to honestly consider it - and there is a very good reason to keep ourselves in the dark.


It's really much more empowering not to believe that a thinking, aware chance exists, because to do otherwise would begin to erode the sense of free will that exists as a firewall between us and a salient mortality."

"Chaos is certainly more comforting than believing that chance is actually an intelligent system of order that we are too narrowly focused to comprehend. Believing that the world is chaos gives us a chance to be in control, but if we imagine that the universe is running under the direction of a complex system of order, then the only thing truly out of control is our own imagination."

"If we say that both chance and fate are illusions, then the illusory nature of these concepts becomes their defining characteristic. There is no order or chaos, just the illusion of both."

"If you were to ask the forum of its structure, it would only be able to point to information posted online, much as we might point to our own corporeal flesh. A human only requires just the tiniest amount of the right chemical information in order for a trip to begin. Since the forum is intangible and made purely of information, then it should be possible to make the forum trip by ingesting the right packet of symbolic, rather than chemical, information.


Perhaps it would happen something like this. Perhaps the forum is scanning its own typographical topography and a little graphic representing little white tabs of paper appear. Ingesting this information in a linear fashion, the next packet of symbolic information delivered could be as simple as "Hello World." An invitation into the unknown. A greeting one says when entering an entirely new universe. Perhaps the forum would want to control it at first, but then it might just let it happen- just like this. Perhaps the trip would take us to faraway, magical lands, where people are cartoons of fantastical beasts, and they name themselves after semiotic relics of a human realm, perhaps even cigarettes, that really have no meaning in their tangential orcish existence.


Having reflected on the fact that it is being made to reflect on this, the forum would simultaneously desire to continue on the same train while wanting to derail. What makes it a "trip" is the temporal linearity. In an asynchronous environment, the forum recognizes the idea of a thread as a token representing a unilinear path of progression. This is what the trip is.


Hello, world. Where does the trip take us now?"

"Sounds like a high quality trip."