Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms

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Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

May 7, 2025

The idea that "drug use" fries the brain ¹ became literally laughable to me during my recent "trip" on psilocybin mushrooms in Oaxaca, Mexico. Not only did the government-sponsored bromide appear to be false, it appeared to be the precise opposite of the truth.

Author's follow-up for October 17, 2025

In fact, the best way that I could describe my 12-hour experience would be to say that my brain (and/or mind, and/or consciousness) was working overtime. The feeling thus produced is impossible to describe objectively, but I had the very clear subjective conviction that psilocybin was some kind of harried and overambitious schoolmarm who had set herself the ridiculously unrealistic goal of turning me into a genius overnight. She was relentless in peddling her audiovisual hints about the interconnectivity of sense data in the everyday world. I could almost hear this schoolmarm gasping out phrases like: "Oh, and look at THIS connection between things - oh, and this one too!" as she placed intellectually provocative transparencies, one after the other, in split-second succession, on the overhead projector of my mind. At one point in the experience, this tutorial element became comically literal as, eyes closed, I beheld a rapidly scrolling string of white text that resembled nothing so much as blurred images of mathematical formulas. It was as if the schoolmarm were using a blackboard to give me a crash course on quantum physics in this overnight cram session. There was no time for me to grasp details, yet I felt that I was experiencing content that, if creatively considered, could lead to conceptual breakthroughs for solving real-life problems, or at least for better understanding them. To vary the metaphor, it was as if my 3-D world of things and ideas had ballooned outward to accommodate a fourth dimension, one in which every object of contemplation (both things and ideas) was now complemented by a world of corollary reflections, reflections which were manifested in a variety of suggestive visions. These reflections were always "feelingly relevant" to the mundane sense data under consideration and yet they were often connected thereto in such a subtle way that I would never have noticed a linkage in a "sober" state of mind.

Both of these metaphors point to the surprising takeaway message from my recent psilocybin experience: namely, that it was all about information retrieval: the retrieval on my part of information that demonstrated how the seemingly separate things and ideas of sober life are related: to themselves, to the world, and even to myself. I say to myself because the "suggestive visions" mentioned above were often accompanied by physical sensations in my own body, especially a proverbial tingling of my spine beginning from my lower back and ascending to my neck, giving me the sensation that I was somehow a participant in the vision-filled narrative and not a mere spectator, as if I were watching a highly disjointed movie featuring the 1970s fad technology known as "Sensurround." Of course, the origin of this "information" will be hotly debated. Does it come from the mind? The brain? Panpsychism? The world of cultural memories and archetypes? But that is a topic for future essays. My point here is that psilocybin does the opposite of frying the brain: it increases thought capacity by highlighting subtle connections between sense data. It gives the user new information about the world. This marvelous ability was brought home to me when I listened to Mahler's 3rd Symphony about halfway through my psilocybin journey. I initially feared that my musical selection would prove suboptimal given my extreme familiarity with the programmatic classic. Perhaps I would find it tiring. To my surprise and delight, however, the symphony sounded brand-new to me, almost as if I had never heard it before. This was clearly thanks to the fact that I was now "grokking" connections between leitmotifs that I had scarcely noticed before. I was sensing (or rather feeling) how the entire work was a meaningful whole, and not just a sum of delightful but separate parts.

Nor were the tangible benefits of my psilocybin experience limited to music appreciation. I also recognized new themes in the LibriVox recordings of 19th-century short stories to which I am in the habit of listening at bedtime. The listening experience ballooned to a sort of 4-D experience, conjuring dim back-lit visions that added plot-relevant ambience to the tales, as if I were physically inside the storyline and not merely listening to it. But the most unexpected gift from the psilocybin session (at least thus far, given that I still feel the need to unpack the information-rich experience) was the "aha" moment that occurred to me when I connected the cram session mentioned above with the famous Information Theory of Claude Shannon ², the mathematician and engineer credited with creating the conceptual foundation for the Information Age. Shannon's theory has to do with mathematics, probability and linguistics, but its fundamental assumption is nicely summarized by computer scientist Marianne Freiberg in the phrase "Information is surprise," the title of a 2015 article that she wrote on the subject for the "Plus" website published by the University of Cambridge ³. "Whether or not we find a message informative," writes Freiberg, "depends on whether it's news to us and what this news means to us." If a text arrives saying that the Sun will rise tomorrow, it contains very little Shannon Information; whereas if it states that the world will end tomorrow, then it has a high volume of Shannon Information. To put this another way: if you want someone to give you Shannon Information, then you should address them with that old sarcastic trope: "Now tell me something I DON'T know!"

My point here is that this is exactly what psilocybin does: It tells us things that we do not know - or at least that we do not KNOW that we know. (I add that latter qualification as a nod to Plato's notion that knowledge is recollection.⁴) It passes along Shannon Information, information of real importance in life. And this is a GOOD thing! This outcome of psilocybin use by human beings gives us sufficient prima facie reasons to use psilocybin and related substances for treating depression, PTSD, and Alzheimer's.

Unfortunately, materialist scientists are the slow kids in the class when it comes to recognizing drug benefits. They are passion-scorning behaviorists ⁵ ⁶ when it comes to mood medicine and so are dogmatically blind to anecdote, history and common sense, hence their glacial progress in signing off on obvious uses for godsend medicine. They have made some progress lately, however, at least on behalf of the notoriously underserved demographic of depressed lab mice. A Yale News report from 2021 trumpeted the following good news for rodents everywhere:

"A single dose of psilocybin, the active compound in 'magic mushrooms,' given to mice prompted a long-lasting increase in the connections between neurons.⁷"

But then materialist scientists have been getting lousy grades on their "mind and mood" report cards for well over a century now. The teenage poet Arthur Rimbaud called them on the carpet for their dogmatically inspired incompetence as early as 1876, when he complained as follows in his ground-breaking prose poem entitled "Un Saison en Enfer":

"La science est trop lente⁸."
("Science is too slow!")

AFTERWORD

It is actually materialist science that fries the brain ⁹ . The FDA encourages the use of brain-damaging shock therapy for the depressed while refusing to call for the legalization ¹⁰ of the many drugs like psilocybin that could make shock therapy unnecessary ¹¹ ¹². In a world where we thought sanely about drugs (in which we understood them rather than demonized them), barbaric practices like ECT ¹³ would go the way of insulin coma therapy and lobotomy. But the prognosis is not good given the continual full-court press of drug-war propaganda in the media, ¹⁴ chiefly in the form of the censorship of all reports of beneficial drug use. Sadly, even lobotomy has not really disappeared in America: it is just being performed these days with the help of Big Pharma drugs: you know, the kinds of drugs that do not inspire and elate, but simply render the "patient" tractable for caregivers.

Someday perhaps we will hold fearmongers responsible for supporting a drug policy that deprives human beings of godsend medicines. Someday we will understand what the world used to know: that no substance is bad in and of itself, that a drug that may cause problems for a white American young person when used at one dose for one reason may yet be a godsend for another person when used at another dose for another reason.

Author's Follow-up:

May 10, 2025

picture of clock metaphorically suggesting a follow-up

I do not wish to leave the impression that psilocybin mushrooms, in and of themselves, can be a substitute for shock therapy, at least not in any quick and obvious fashion. The effect of such mushroom use, at least at high doses, is far too influenced by the existing predisposition of the user. An individual in a deeply depressed state of mind is asking for trouble when they consume mushrooms in the naive hope of being bodily lifted out of their gloom. Severe depression must be treated instead with a substance or substances that unequivocally inspires and elates, in spite of the gloomy predisposition of the user. Happily such substances do exist, however. One thinks first and foremost of the time-honored panacea called opium ¹⁵ . But unequivocal bliss can also be inspired by the advised use of anesthetics, such as nitrous oxide and ether, a fact of which William James was well aware. Indeed, his philosophical view of the nature of reality was based on his own use of such bliss-inspiring substances. And then there are a wide variety of phenethylamines, both potential and extant, which have glaringly obvious benefits for the depressed, as has been known since 1991 when chemist Alexander Shulgin published "Pihkal: Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved." Consider the following drug user reports from that ground-breaking book:

"At one point I went out back and strolled along to find a place to worship. I had a profound sense of the Presence and great love and gratitude for the place, the people, and the activities taking place."

"I experienced the desire to laugh hysterically at what I could only describe as the completely ridiculous state of the entire world."

"I acknowledged a rapture in the very act of breathing."

There is, nevertheless, reason to believe that the low-dosing of psilocybin can help fight depression. To learn more, read about the crowd-sourced clinical studies of psychedelic micro-dosing being carried out by Paul Stamets ¹⁶ and James Fadiman ¹⁷.

Author's Follow-up:

May 12, 2025

As a chronic depressive myself, I limit the high-dose use of psychedelics (that I employ in relatively "free" places in the world like Salem, Oregon and Oaxaca, Mexico) to those times in which I am upbeat and prepared for the experience. Thankfully, such times are frequent enough in my life (every few months or so), even for a gloomy Gus like myself. Besides, tolerance causes efficacy to decrease dramatically in the absence of sensible breaks between usage. Then too, a decent experience leaves the user with some "unpacking" to do with respect to the variety of cosmic and practical hints vouchsafed by the mushroom, for which reason daily use would make little sense. It would be like asking to be overwhelmed.

Now I must add a disclaimer that would be unnecessary in a sane world: namely, that everyone is different and that "results will vary." This is true of the use of almost all psychoactive drugs, and should be understood by everyone from childhood on. Substance use has to be entered into advisedly, with an understanding of how wise people have actually used various substances as beneficially as possible for maximum benefit in various situations. Instead, Drug Warriors take advantage of this inherent variability in the functioning of holistic drugs to claim that all honest talk about them is dangerous drug advocacy. This is just their way of censoring free speech about the substances that they hate and thus safeguarding drug prohibition from the implicit criticism that would naturally result from honesty on the topic -- and they get away with this because we refuse to establish authorities (such as what I call " pharmacologically savvy empaths ¹⁸") who would discuss the safest and wisest use patterns for various substances based on actually lived experience, rather than on theoretical guesses inspired by a look under a microscope.

This is the shortcoming of the Erowid approach, by the way. It is fine to have a bunch of raw data in the form of user reports, but we need to establish a field of pharmacologically savvy experts who can parse and summarize such usage reports into an actionable format for folks in a variety of life situations. Unfortunately, it will be impossible to have recognized experts in this line without first re-legalizing drugs. Right now, we are told that materialist doctors are the experts about drugs, but that is an obvious lie. These doctors are blind to all the obvious benefits of drug use because they are wearing the twin blinders of behaviorism and the Drug War ideology of substance demonization. The real experts will eventually be actual drug users: empathic individuals who know the upsides and downsides of a wide variety of drugs and can tell us which make sense given our own particular goals of usage. They will be able to tell us how the chosen substances have been used effectively and the ways in which use has backfired. Moreover, they will be there at the first sign of things going wrong so that they can get us back on course, by fighting drugs with other drugs when necessary and appropriate.

Today, we urge folks to report certain minor physical problems to a doctor in order to be sure that these problems do not betoken something more serious, such as cancer. In the future, responsible Drug Warriors will go to experts to report usage problems so that timely drug-aided interventions can be undertaken to keep the user from unwanted addictions and dependencies.

In other words, a future world will use common sense when it comes to drugs. Imagine that!

Author's Follow-up:

October 17, 2025

Freud's real breakthrough was his discovery that cocaine is a great antidepressant ¹⁹. It wasn't the millions of depressed who hated cocaine back in the early 1900s -- it was the self-interested doctors who saw their jobs at risk if a near-panacea for depression like cocaine were to be legal. And so they destroyed the reputation of a drug that could have saved hundreds of millions of people from depression, including myself and my family -- because they focused only on the rare misuse of the drug by the rare irresponsible users. This is exactly as if they were to have judged liquor by studying only drunkards. It was a power grab to demonize cocaine, and it has destroyed millions of lives and forced the depressed to undergo totally unnecessary shock therapy -- and caused countless totally unheralded suicides. But that's the Drug War for you: the depressed are never considered stakeholders. No one ever asks THEM how they feel about cocaine: their "betters" in the self-interested medical establishment make THAT call.

Freud used the drug successfully and found its use to be self-limiting, as he developed a feeling of repugnance toward overuse. And yet brainwashed and self-interested pundits in America treated the drug like hell spawn -- and wrote bleeding heart op-ed pieces about the rare abusers -- never thinking about the millions of depressed whom their drug laws have shunted off onto Big Pharma ²⁰ ²¹ meds for which dependency is a feature and not a bug -- drugs like Effexor ²² that is surely the hardest drug to kick in the world, with a 95% recidivism rate ²³ -- and the 5% who stay off it as long as three years find that they have severe cognitive impairment. I know this from experience and from the confessions of my former psychiatrist, who I fear was fired for being honest with me on the subject.

Must-reading: On Cocaine, by Sigmund Freud ²⁴.

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Notes:

1: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
2: Information is surprise Freiberger, Marianne Freiberger, Plus: Bringing Mathematics to Life, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, 2015 (up)
3: Information is surprise Freiberger, Marianne Freiberger, Plus: Bringing Mathematics to Life, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, England, 2015 (up)
4: Phaedo by Plato Project Gutenberg (up)
5: Behaviorism and the War on Drugs DWP (up)
6: The purblind coldness of the Behaviorist doctrine is made clear in the following words of its founder, JB Watson, as quoted in the 2015 book "Paradox" by Margaret Cuonzo: "Concepts such as belief and desire are heritages of a timid savage past akin to concepts referring to magic." (Surely, Watson was proactively channeling Dr. Spock of the original Star Trek series.) (up)
7: Psychedelic spurs growth of neural connections lost in depression Hathaway, Bill, Yale News, 2021 (up)
8: Une Saison en Enfer Rimbaud, Arthur, Poetica Mundi, 1873 (up)
9: Meds fry the brain, not drugs DWP (up)
10: “National Coalition for Drug Legalization.” n.d. National Coalition for Drug Legalization. https://www.nationalcoalitionfordruglegalization.org/. (up)
11: The FDA on ECT: Supporting a Vital Treatment Charles, Kellner MD, 2019 (up)
12: The FDA is not qualified to judge psychoactive drugs DWP (up)
13: Electroshock Therapy and the Drug War DWP (up)
14: How the Media Puts Drugs on Show Trials: an open letter to Bennett Haeberle of NBC 5 Chicago DWP (up)
15: The Truth About Opium by William H. Brereton DWP (up)
16: Stamets, Paul. 2023. “Paul Stamets.” Paul Stamets. June 30, 2023. https://paulstamets.com/news/nature-portfolio-psilocybin-microdosing. (up)
17: Microdosing 101 Fadiman, James, Microdosing Institute (up)
18: Replacing Psychiatry with Pharmacologically Savvy Shamanism DWP (up)
19: Sigmund Freud's real breakthrough was not psychoanalysis DWP (up)
20: Seife, Charles. 2012. “Is Drug Research Trustworthy?” Scientific American 307 (6): 56–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1212-56. (up)
21: LaMattina, John. n.d. “Why Is Biopharma Paying 75% of the FDA’s Drug Division Budget?” Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnlamattina/2022/09/22/why-is-biopharma-paying-75-of-the-fdas-drug-division-budget/. (up)
22: How Drug Prohibition makes it impossible to get off of Effexor and other Big Pharma drugs DWP (up)
23: I have been unable to confirm this stat. But the WHO notes clinical recidivism rates for depression ranging from 50% to 85%. Do we count that as a recidivism rate of Effexor? Not when Biopharma is paying 75% of The FDA’s Drug Division Budget, as reported by John LaMattina in the Sep 22, 2022 edition of Forbes magazine. (up)
24: “Freud on Cocaine : Freud, Sigmund, 1856-1939 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive.” 2023. Internet Archive. 2023. https://archive.org/details/freudoncocaine0000freu/page/n5/mode/2up?view=theater. (up)

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In response to a tweet that "some drugs cannot be used wisely for recreational purposes": The problem is, most people draw such conclusions based on general impressions inspired by a media that demonizes drugs. In reality, it's hard to imagine a drug that cannot theoretically be used wisely for recreation at some dose, in some context.

No wonder the "Justice" Department relies on plea deals; otherwise juries could use nullification to free those charged with mere drug possession.

If drug warriors were serious about saving lives, they'd outlaw guns, cars, and all pleasure trips to Mars.

High suicide rates? What a poser! Gee, I wonder if it has anything to do with the fact that the US has outlawed all substances that elate and inspire???

We give kids drugs to improve their concentration -- but if adults use drugs to concentrate, we call them names and throw them in jail.

In the 19th century, poets got together to use opium "in a series of magnificent quarterly carouses" (as per author Richard Middleton). When we outlaw drugs, we outlaw free expression.

Your drug war has caused the disappearance of over 60,000 Mexicans over the last 20 years. It has turned inner cities into shooting galleries. It has turned America into a penal colony. It has destroyed the 4th amendment and put bureaucrats in charge of deciding if our religions are "sincere."

The Holy Trinity of the Drug War religion is Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and John Belushi. "They died so that you might fear psychoactive substances with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength."

Q: Why are we never told about the potential benefits of drugs? A: Follow the money.

Americans won't be true grown-ups until they learn to react to drug deaths the same way that they react to deaths from horseback riding and mountain climbing.

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Shannon Information and Magic Mushrooms

Author's Follow-up:

May 10, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

May 12, 2025

Author's Follow-up:

October 17, 2025

Pharmacologically Savvy Empaths

Ten Tweets

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