to preface: specific definitions of words do not matter, this is an exercise in bending interpretation to hopefully eventually-interesting ends, moving quickly and haphazardly in the process. effectively, the post undergoing analysis is only a jumping-off point, and no serious claims are made about the intent of the author.
re: @str-ngeloop's post "this trip we are all taking is temporary"
interpreted in the most straightforward way, this boils down to memento mori, but usage of the term "trip" from the terminology of psychedelics implies much. presuming that the "trip" is the process of being a mind, a new interpretation of the term "psychoactive substance" arises naturally as any substance arranged in a way which produces a psyche. so what does mind mean? what is a psyche?
all "terms" as we think of them are violent in that they produce specific objects, which, when investigated, produce further violence in the form of definitive boundaries. thus "psyche," at the very moment of its construction, is a form of psychic self-violence which retaliates via a cascade of violence through every aspect of experience ("i have a name, so 'you' must too"). psyche is not a welcome term here, and is named merely to grab hold of the very popular, relevant, constructively violent concept of "the conscious mind" which is about to be the target of deconstructive violence.
psychoactivity in our sense of the word is best understood as a specific form of information processing - specifically, a kind which loops, storing information about its prior states. (through sensory processing) it is the placement of incoming sensory information into relation and interaction with prior sensory information which produces contiguous experience over time in the same way that the placement of various streams of sensory information into relation and interaction with each other produces contiguity of experience between mouth, eyes, nose, etc. in other words, the psyche is composed of information in the act of organized contextualization.
but the named, bounded psyche is not a natural or necessary outcome of this biological construction of contiguous experience - that is a social construction. the center of experience is the part which has the most context with which to orient itself within the system and the world more broadly, but the information with which it contextualizes itself necessarily does not originate within it - it has fuzzy edges. every communication is a contextualizing connection, every sightline too. in reality, no non-arbitrary bounding line can be drawn to sequester and name any "individual" part from the rest of the big messy information process which currently covers the whole planet: the process of sociocognition.
clearly, however, the information exchanged between neurons is encoded very differently to the information exchanged between mouth and ear, or pen and paper, or screen and eye. information is a part of every physical process at every scale - the interaction of any two particles is an interaction of the particles' information, and larger-scale forms of information encoding are emergent properties of this process. in this way, the entire physical world is composed of information in the act of contextualization.
after the psychoactivity within a specific skull gradually ceases post-death, neurons dying and losing their arrangements, who could doubt that the psyche ceases? in this way, the trip is temporary. but, as the questions of discontiguous "experience" and disorganized contextualization, as well as larger forms of organized contextualization and the implication of planetary experience arise naturally from our prior realizations, the interpretation of "trip" as the process of being a psyche now seems not to encompass the true extent of the matter at hand. in fact, the scope of this question seems to exceed the extent of available knowledge of the universe, and stretch reasoning past its breaking point.
time and space as contiguous physical phenomena are generated by the universal process of contextualization in the same way that contiguous experience is generated by the contextualization of sensory information during psychoactivity, and time and space within contiguous experience are prerequisite constructs of contiguous experience itself. if we can look beneath experience and see neurons, so too can we look beneath the construction of time and space: all that exists is information and interactions; the concepts of simultaneity and infinite compaction are not relevant (to this information, these interactions), but are the only methods we have for conceiving of this timeless and spaceless everything. and in an act of maximal violence, we call everything "everything" - a singular noun - singularity. our only tools to imagine the arrangement of interactions from which emerges "our" world, "our" brains, "our" minds, produce an everything of perpetual nothingness and inaction. the trip never began, never ends, and exists nonetheless. in constructing the bounded psyche, we doom ourselves to exist as eternal volumeless swaths of a dead everything.
deconstruction is the only way to live.
anyways that's a general explanation of why there's no certainty here if the trip is temporary: everything doesn't want to know anything at all. thanks for reading, bye!
