It activates the same chemicals in your brain as cocaine! 
Well, yeah, there are only three[1] a few neurotransmitters. That’s not saying much.
You know what else activates those chemicals? Practically everything. When scientists breed “knockout” mice without dopamine, the mice just stand there until they die of thirst, because there is no reward for… living.
It contains more germs than a toilet seat! 
Germs like moist surfaces. We don’t want germs on our toilets, which is why we make them out of porcelain, which is hard, dry, non-porous, and easy to clean.
If it had more germs than your colon, then I would be concerned.
@Neuromancer49@midwest.social corrected me ↩︎
Yeah, this is just one of those weird occult things that worked its way into common thought
Like, this is why science fiction always has people doing telepathy or telekinesis because humanity was going to “”““evolve””" into being able to use more brain
oohhh, I’ve wondered about that. like huh, why is this form of magic so common in sci-fi?
So, this actually comes from our favorite psuedo-scientific psychologist, Carl Jung. It stems from his idea of the gestalt, or world-conciousness. In a similar way that Freud hypothesized the unconscious and subconscious mind that has radical influences on our behavior, Jung hypothesized an ‘over-conciouness’ from which all conscious beings draw behaviors from. Jung believed that the gestalt explained why migratory birds who were never raised with others of their kind knew to fly south in the winter, or why all humans have myths about floods and snakes, even when there are no floods or snakes present in their eco-system. It is considered mostly horseshit with some interesting philosophical implications, but it still has a dominating presence in the fictional writing world, with ‘The Hero’s Journey’ story type being created from a student of Jung’s.
As for science fiction writers specifically, they were in particular obsessed with the idea that we would eventually be able to evolve to communicate within the gestalt itself, thus being able to communicate through thought alone. This kind of thinking, which slotted neatly in with the previous fictional fad of Spiritualism, which also had these elements, but present within a supernatural context, dominated science fiction writing to the point that most authors don’t even really know what they are referencing anymore, as the results of extrapolations on this idea (telepathy, clairvoyance, extra-dimensional beings) are larger than the original idea itself.
fantastic writeup, thank you
see also, the noosphere?
This was very interesting, thank you
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I am not super-well versed in Jung myself, but my general understanding is that God would be the prime-mover of things, while the gestalt is created by us existing and being conscious. Think less Christian mythos and more like how the Warp works in Warhammer 40k.
The gestalt doesn’t have ‘a plan’ it is just the shared psychic world (literally this is where the idea of a psychic world comes from) that both is influenced by and influences conscious beings. Basically, enough humans are afraid of snakes that even humans that have no experience with snakes tell myths of snakes, because enough psychic energy has been generated by those that do, while it probably has more to do with all mammals originating from small burrowers and having an inherent fear of snakes was evolutionary beneficial, but that is evo-psych which is just as non-scientific. We just aren’t sure why.
To be blunt, I am not arguing for the existence of the gestalt, I am arguing that the idea of the gestalt has been extremely influential to fictional, and especially science fictional writing, and is, along with Spiritualism, the basis of ideas such as telepathy and clairvoyance.