High.
Insights on Marijuana.
Is it true that a marijuana high can lead to insights, as many consumers have reported? Even the famous astronomer Carl Sagan claimed that he owed many invaluable insights for his publications to marijuana in his classic essay “Mr. X”, which he anonymously published in 1971. High. Insights on Marijuana (dogearpublishing 2010) is an investigation which aims to support the "insights claim" and explains in depth the different ways in which a marijuana high can lead to various cognitive enhancements. The book argues, for example, that a marijuana high can lead to the enhancement of episodic memory, pattern recognition, creativity, introspection, and our ability for empathic understanding. In an accessible and entertaining tour de force through current cognitive sciences, evolutionary psychology, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind, the book delivers a novel perspective on the nature of a marijuana high and on the human mind itself.
"I'm loving it! Wow. What an amazing, important work! Your book is a treasure - a unique resource. Such a definitive statement of everything I've been thinking about when it comes to marijuana ... I now understand the benefits that Norman Mailer, Carl Sagan, and Richard Feynman got from Marijuana."
Jason Silva, filmmaker, gonzo journalist and founding producer/host for Current TV, the Emmy winning youth-oriented lifestyle cable network started by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore
Available here: amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, barnesandnoble.com, sebastianmarincolo.com
parapluie.de
"Mind Expansions"
(Issue no. 23, summer 2006, edited with Anke Bahl & Ina Jekeli)
parapluie.de is a German internetzine on literture, culture,and the arts. The issue "mind expansions"("bewußtseinserweiterungen") is dedicated to shedding light on various aspects pertaining to altered states of consciousness.
Alien Minds
"Alien Minds. Investigating Eliminative Materialism" is a comprehensive discussion of the philosophical position known as Eliminative Materialism. The roots of this doctrine go back to Paul Feyerabend, but it was most prominently revived by Paul and Patricia Churchland in the mid 1980's. Eliminative Materialism is an attack on concepts we use to explain and predict behavior known as folk psychology. Like Freudian psychoanalysis, Eliminativism advocates a skeptical attitude towards human self-knowledge. Freud argued that we do not really know our own minds: unbeknownst to us, the real causes for our behavior and thinking have to be explained by a dynamic process of unconscious beliefs and desires that significantly differs from that which is described by our common sense notions of psychology. Proponents of eliminative materialism, however, are even more extreme. They insist that new findings in the neurosciences are beginning to show that folk psychology as well as current scientific cognitive psychology which is based on the folk conceptual framework will turn out to be radically false and must therefore be eliminated. Folk and cognitive psychology need to be replaced by a new »psychology« which is inspired mainly by the »materialist« neurosciences. The critical refutation of this perhaps most radical philosophical thesis of our time surprisingly turns out to be a tour de force through the recent philosophy of mind and its related field of scientific disciplines.