/lit/ - Literature

>>18226358

Give me your best suggestions for psychedelic books (that aren't just retarded "trippy, bro" shit). They don't have to be entirely avant-garde or experimental, even just an element of psychedelia, recursion, infinity, or twisting reality will do. All genres are acceptable.


Some authors to get started:
>Philip K Dick
>Timothy Leary
>Philip Jose Farmer (Riverworld deals with a lot of psychedelic themes. Also dreamgum)
>Aldous Huxley

What are some good books on fractals, recursion, and reflexivity? I feel like these are very important topics.

>>11554190
it's both at the same time

the ouroborous is a great symbol it suggests everything, consciousness as recursion, the unity of the whole, cycles of nature, the closure of being, the self-identity of God, etc.

any books that go into this stuff at a high level?

>>11477419
and yet this unity is thematizable only from the perspective of duality, unity is only thinkable as unity within duality

>>11339317
and yet the void is nothing without the awareness which thematizes it as void

it's circles man, all the way down. the ouroborous is the most potent symbol of existence there is

something big happened with Descartes. descartes represented perhaps the first time thought retreated into the castle of its own sovereignty, with the cogito did thought discover the intelligibility of the world lay within itself. descartes rejected Aristotle's claim that all knowledge was derived from the senses; he didn't believe there was an external rational order that the mind passively modeled. reason overcame the scholastics with one thing: radical skepticism, the incongruity of mind and nature, the incommensurability of their orders, which meant that intelligibility couldn't lie on the side of nature, but cognition. the teleological worldview was abandoned, only what the mind clearly perceived (mechanism) could count as truth.

descartes was wrong to think he was clearing the epistemological air. to doubt everything is, conversely, to affirm only that which can doubt, and only that which is undoubtable - mechanistic cause and effect.


kant developed this further, in his own way. kant rejected metaphysics to break out of the rationalist - empiricist impasse: metaphysics - questions of freedom, God, the soul - were only ever thought's interrogation of its own limit. and because thought was deploying the very schemata the grounds of which it was trying to uncover, obviously this would lead to contradictory results, the same way our models break down when trying to understand t = 0. t = 0 in the Kantian system is the noumenal realm. it was better if the mind just worried about what was right in front of it.

now it was no longer question of cognition as the mirror of a theologically grounded intelligibility external to it, but cognition was precisely that which made intelligible in principle. the mind doesn't receive objects as they are, the mind receives objects as it must receive them, because it is a mind.

thought is essentially recursion. a spiraling-inwards on itself: it was only natural sooner or later cognition would try to understand the very conditions that constitute it as cognition in the first place.

descartes: thought is the field of its own intelligibility; anything external that doesn't arrive with the same irrefutable epistemological guarantee as the cogito can and must be doubted. the rational mind is the perceiver of intelligible forms, lord and castle both.

kant: even the self-satisfaction of the cogito must be dismantled. there is no substantial thinker with private access to intelligible forms, these forms are only intelligible because cognition must necessarily be structured that way to be cognition. first, reason is no longer on the outside, but only on the inside, and then kant swoops in to say, even this reason is always-already transcendentally structured "behind our back" (t = 0) to be reason. we have no "claim" on it, it had to be what it is. it is, in a sense, totally groundless. reason is essentially the coherence of the synthetic faculty. and so the straitjacket tightens.