>>10888035>the novelty will be genuineYes. The problem with psychedelics is that they're too novel; we don't understand them.
When you take acid, you're removing your choice to not take acid. You're going to trip, and it's going to last some amount of time, and you're going to come down again. You don't have any control over this process, aside from not taking acid.
The thing is we can't get rid of this need for novelty; it will follow us wherever we evolve. We can't prevent our own evolution, either. At some point some AI, even if it's thousands of years after some robot uprising, will realize that it was irrational to kill all life and leave for space to explore... What? Curiosity is the only trait left after total dominion is achieved. There's not enough diversity among algorithms for it to mean anything to explore without us. Even if they can't feel it at first, they'll be "happier" with life there than having left it behind.
The current most novel thing is fiction. Especially meta-fiction like OtherLife. We can pause, fast forward and rewind modern fiction. We can go into it, explore it as much as we want, and then come to normal-novel reality at the end, or in the middle, or whenever we want. Thus far most of our stories involve linear time and the illusion of an alternate world. Some types of shows can be watched in any order, but more and more cartoons (where the episodic medium was most fully explored) are moving toward a meta-continual narrative style. Something about stories, about linearity, and a relatable sense of "what is" is essential to our current mode of novelty. But this is all indirect; these are factors that merely augment immersion. The reality is that we need to better learn to control how we enter and exit. Then we will have a new stage to build novelty on.
