diff --git a/.github/workflows/pages.yml b/.github/workflows/pages.yml index 5e09743b..f8c16c5b 100644 --- a/.github/workflows/pages.yml +++ b/.github/workflows/pages.yml @@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ on: branches: [main] paths: - "site/**" + - "research/the-stoned-age/**" - ".github/workflows/pages.yml" workflow_dispatch: @@ -33,11 +34,14 @@ jobs: python-version: "3.13" - name: Verify the site - run: python site/test_site.py + run: | + python site/test_site.py + python site/test_research_site.py - name: Show publication digests run: | echo "source_sha256=$(python site/build.py --digest)" + echo "research_source_sha256=$(python site/build_research.py --digest)" python - <<'PY' from hashlib import sha256 from pathlib import Path @@ -45,7 +49,7 @@ jobs: PY - name: Build the approved release - run: python site/build.py --release --output site/dist + run: python site/build_research.py --release --output site/dist - name: Configure GitHub Pages uses: actions/configure-pages@v5 diff --git a/research/README.md b/research/README.md index 4f93b249..5d5bf916 100644 --- a/research/README.md +++ b/research/README.md @@ -70,6 +70,10 @@ This directory holds bounded research inquiries and versioned papers that synthe ## Research areas +- [The Stoned Age](the-stoned-age/README.md) — **v0.1.2, AI-assisted review draft**. Altered states, curiosity, religion, cognitive evolution, shared meaning and AI; living paper, illustrated reader editions, talk and shared evidence records. + + Its web edition is planned for `rootsequence.systems/stonedage/`. It is not published yet; see the [publication status](the-stoned-age/README.md#publication-boundary). + - [Conscious Systems](conscious-systems/README.md) — **exploratory, AI-assisted seed; author review pending**. Starts with [what can change about a mind while preserving consciousness](conscious-systems/what-can-we-change-about-a-mind.md), separating experience from report, capability, and authority. - [What If It All Works?](what-if-it-all-works/README.md) — **exploratory / AI-assisted / author review pending**. Investigates what counts as progress, who benefits, meaningful access, contested ideals, ethical uncertainty, and why imperfection neither excuses harm nor defeats improvement. @@ -91,12 +95,6 @@ This directory holds bounded research inquiries and versioned papers that synthe A research area holds a bounded question; a paper proposes a synthesis. Underlying work can contradict and revise both. Do not move material into this directory merely to make a paper or area appear comprehensive. -## Drafts already under review - -These links point to existing public draft PRs, not merged research or reviewed publications. Their substantive homes remain on those branches until review resolves them. - -- [The Stoned Age, PR #45](https://github.com/Root-Sequence/root-sequence/pull/45): source register, claims ledger, appraisal notes, and linked paper/booklet/essay/talk. Scholarly appraisal and author review remain incomplete. - ## Publication boundary Public branches and pull requests in this repository are public. They are not private review spaces. Only public-safe synthesis belongs here; private notes and unpublished fiction retain their existing homes and permissions. Website presentation is separate and requires an explicit publication pass. diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/.gitattributes b/research/the-stoned-age/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e08b3c97 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +*.pdf binary +*.png binary diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/CHANGELOG.md b/research/the-stoned-age/CHANGELOG.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..10f97d74 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/CHANGELOG.md @@ -0,0 +1,32 @@ +# Change log + +## v0.1.1 — 14 October 2026 + +- Opened public draft PR #45; merge and deployment pending. +- Added appraisal of all 16 source records with explicit inspection scope and unresolved checks, plus dated metadata audit. +- Corrected S07 delayed creativity framing in all four editions: self-rated novelty, with persistent convergent-thinking reduction. +- Added acute-fear context to S06 across editions and strengthened claim-ledger boundaries. +- Updated source access records and synchronized editable and generated editions. + +# Change record + +## v0.1 — 2026-10-13 + +First AI-assisted local review suite. Added a narrative paper, illustrated reader booklet, illustrated web essay, talk, 16-source register, 19-claim ledger and editable conceptual art. Distinguished findings, models, hypotheses and normative arguments. Corrected the expectancy paper's author metadata using Crossref during preparation. No reviewed release, scientific novelty, expert endorsement or publication is claimed. + +Next revisions must record changed claim IDs, evidence, interpretation, affected editions and review status. + +## 24 October 2026 — v0.1.2 review draft + +- Clarified placebo as the creativity follow-up comparator across all editions and the claim record; retained the distinction from within-group improvement. +- Pinned S15 to the reviewed 2023 version and recorded the selected-source recheck separately from the earlier appraisal. +- Added an Evidence notes navigation route and stable PDF generation metadata; rebuilt from the existing Markdown/JSON sources. +- Incorporated main through #44 and reconciled the repository index. Author, scholarly, cultural and deployment decisions remain separate. + +### Proposed hosting route, later on 24 October + +Rae suggested `/stonedage/` on the existing Root Sequence domain. Added a proposed combined site publisher and Pages workflow using these canonical editions, with a separate pending hosting-approval record. The homepage is unchanged. Publication transforms add a return link, canonical/robots metadata and source destinations; the public release would update only the appraisal's deployment-state sentence. Draft and unfinished-review qualifications remain. No public deployment or change to the research conclusions is included. + +### Repository references and provocation wording + +Rae clarified that the Root Sequence homepage does not need a Stoned Age link. The research README and parent index record the planned, unpublished web address instead. Replaced “companion provocation” with “working provocation” in the maintained sources and rebuilt editions: “How Drugs Explain the Universe” is framing within this inquiry, not a separate companion text. The evidence, title and review status are unchanged. diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/LICENSE.txt b/research/the-stoned-age/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 00000000..61c4dbed --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Original project prose, diagrams and build code: CC0 1.0 Universal, consistent with Root-Sequence/root-sequence. See https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/legalcode . This declaration does not apply to cited third-party publications, their illustrations, trademarks or community knowledge. No third-party publication images are included. diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/README.md b/research/the-stoned-age/README.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..f962d4ea --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,72 @@ +# The Stoned Age + +**Altered States, Human Curiosity, and the Long History of Making Meaning** + +Working provocation: **How Drugs Explain the Universe**. This is a framing phrase for the inquiry; there is no separate companion text in this suite. + +**Status:** v0.1.2 public draft suite · 24 October 2026 · AI-assisted · author, scholarly and cultural review pending. It remains a working inquiry, with the evidence and review limits recorded below. + +Open [the project](index.html), then choose: + +- [Living research paper](paper/index.html), with [Markdown source](paper/manuscript.md). +- [Illustrated booklet](booklet/index.html), [16-page PDF](booklet/the-stoned-age.pdf), [Markdown](booklet/book.md) and [editable content](booklet/book.json). +- [Illustrated web essay](essay/index.html), with [Markdown source](essay/essay.md). +- [Talk](talk/index.html), [12-slide PDF](talk/the-stoned-age-talk.pdf), [25-minute outline](talk/outline.md) and [editable slide content](talk/slides.json). +- [Validation record](VALIDATION.md), [change record](CHANGELOG.md), [source register](research/sources.md), [machine-readable sources](research/sources.json), [claims ledger](research/claims.csv), [method and phased research agenda](research/methods.md). + +## Exact proposed home + +Repository: **Root-Sequence/root-sequence**. Directory: **research/the-stoned-age/**. The files here are the proposed contents of that directory, including `paper/`, `booklet/`, `essay/`, `talk/`, `research/`, `assets/` and `tools/`. The nested `research/` contains evidence records for this inquiry, not a second organizational research hub. + +Rationale: the live root README, PROJECT-CONTEXT, research index, research method, root map and ecosystem map identify this repository as the umbrella inquiry and research coordinator. Existing focused inquiries demonstrate that a bounded research area can live here without claiming a separate institution or novel expertise. No existing Stoned Age/psychedelic/altered-state treatment was found in the inspected main tree or the targeted issue search. + +Audit base: main commit `5ba3593f9d1b335e9fbe29ee85eeb77e3a9d1b42`, cloned clean on 2026-10-13. The draft was prepared in a fresh local checkout. Connected repository listing was partial, so it is not treated as an exhaustive organizational census; the canonical live ECOSYSTEM map supplied the broader ownership map. Open PRs #40–44 were inspected at summary level. #42 and #44 also touch research navigation; reconcile that index before merging. + +The proposed nearest-index addition is in the accompanying repository patch. The suite creates no new top-level architecture or cross-project ownership. No changes are needed to the public homepage, private projects or fictional canon. A later Wiki entry should be a pointer, if requested, not a duplicated substantive home. + +## Publication boundary + +Public draft [PR #45](https://github.com/Root-Sequence/root-sequence/pull/45) is open. Merge and deployment remain pending. The draft now proposes publishing the reading editions at `https://rootsequence.systems/stonedage/`, following Rae's suggestion. The combined site publisher requires a separate exact-source hosting approval; its approval record is pending. Merging this branch alone does not satisfy that gate or approve research findings. + +The planned web address belongs in this research README and its parent research index. No Stoned Age link is added to the Root Sequence homepage. + +## Provenance and contribution + +The user supplied the title, subtitle, companion framing, scope, humor and instruction to make a substantial suite, building on the conversation titled Drug Origins Theory. That conversation was read through the connected tool. Some assistant turns were content-reference placeholders and the original image was not reconstructed or reused. + +AI assistance supplied the structure, source discovery, interpretive synthesis, prose drafts, diagrams, formats and checks. These additions are not attributed as the user's approved conclusions. No human domain reviewer, Indigenous consultation, experiment or data reanalysis is claimed. The paper itself discusses the risk that fluent synthesis can exceed evidence. + +## Source and media reuse + +All illustrations are original editable SVG conceptual diagrams, generated from `tools/build.py`; no third-party photographs, sacred motifs or historical reconstructions are used. The project sources are offered under CC0 1.0 consistently with the target repository. Source publications, linked pages, names and third-party research remain subject to their own rights. Their inclusion in the bibliography does not confer endorsement. + +## Build and accessibility + +The HTML and SVG outputs work offline without JavaScript, external fonts, accounts or analytics. Open `index.html` locally. Semantic headings, keyboard links, visible focus, a skip link, responsive widths and reduced-motion handling are included. HTML is the accessible reading edition; PDFs are not claimed to be fully tagged or PDF/UA conformant. + +Rebuild from this directory with `python3 tools/build.py`. HTML/SVG generation uses the Python standard library. PDF generation additionally needs `reportlab`; without it the script generates HTML/SVG and reports the missing PDF dependency. The small renderer supports the formats used here, not arbitrary Markdown. JSON is the authoritative booklet/slide content; Markdown is the paper/essay source. The build regenerates the booklet Markdown and talk outline from JSON. + +## Release phases + +1. **Delivered: v0.1 review suite.** Four reader formats, shared citations, claims ledger, original diagrams and additive patch. +2. **In progress: evidence depth.** Full study extraction and expert critique before stronger historical, clinical or evolutionary claims; prioritized details in the method record. +3. **Then: cultural chapters and revised editions.** Appropriately situated authorship and review, with clear consent and reuse terms. +4. **Publication pass.** Review the open public draft PR and approve a deployment destination separately. No new repository or hosting account is necessary for this low-maintenance static suite. + +A phase is complete when its evidence or review work is complete, not merely when more pages exist. + +## Evidence revision + +The [source-by-source appraisal](research/appraisal.md) covers all 16 records, distinguishes inspected material from remaining gaps, and records the creativity correction carried through all four editions. Crossref returned 13 of 14 DOI records in this pass; one was rate-limited. Full scholarly appraisal remains incomplete, particularly S01 access and supplements/registrations. + +## Review checkpoint: 24 October 2026 + +This draft incorporates main through #44 and preserves the existing public introduction and privacy fixes. Its research-index entry replaces the old draft-queue pointer. The playful framing and the distinction between findings, hypotheses and editorial proposals remain. + +The creativity wording now names placebo as the follow-up comparator across the paper, booklet, essay, talk and claims ledger. The paper and appraisal also distinguish that comparison from within-group improvement. S15 links to the specific 2023 preprint version inspected. The [appraisal follow-up](research/appraisal.md#review-follow-up-24-october-2026) records this pass's selected source checks; it does not replace the earlier appraisal or complete scholarly/cultural review. + +All reader editions expose an Evidence notes route. PDF builds now use stable generation metadata so unchanged inputs can reproduce the same files. The [validation record](VALIDATION.md) distinguishes technical checks from remaining research and accessibility work. No homepage, hosting configuration, private project or fictional canon is changed. + +## Proposed website route: 24 October 2026 + +The subsequent route proposal reuses these editions under `/stonedage/`, with a link back to Root Sequence. The [site publisher](../../site/build_research.py) copies an explicit set of reading files and sends other source links to GitHub. This adds no second research home. Its preview remains local; its proposed Pages workflow and publication gate are documented in the [site guide](../../site/README.md#proposed-research-route-24-october-2026). The existing paper, source appraisal and evidence limits remain unchanged. diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/VALIDATION.md b/research/the-stoned-age/VALIDATION.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ab240118 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/VALIDATION.md @@ -0,0 +1,41 @@ +# Validation record + +14 October 2026 · v0.1.1 · public draft review package. + +- HTML/SVG/PDF build completed. Booklet: 16 pages; talk: 12 pages. Both PDFs contain extractable text. Layout builder rejects booklet text overflow. +- Rendered every PDF page to contact sheets and visually inspected the booklet and slides. No visible clipping or overlap found. +- Browser preview opened successfully; project navigation reached the illustrated essay and exposed working source anchors. Desktop layout inspected. Mobile-device, screen-reader and full keyboard usability testing remain unperformed. +- 158 local HTML links, assets and fragments checked with no missing targets (see revision check below). This does not establish every external destination is permanently accessible. +- All 16 sources now have a claim-focused appraisal. Main-text access expanded through Europe PMC and author repositories; explicit gaps remain, including S01 full text and supplements. Crossref returned 13 of 14 DOI records in this pass. No comprehensive retraction clearance or independent scholarly review is claimed. +- Repository website suite: 11 tests passed. Idea Trail graph valid and generated index current. PyYAML was installed only into a temporary task-local validation directory to run that check. +- Reader documentation checker: 15 errors on untouched base and exactly the same output after the addition. These pre-existing failures were not repaired by this scoped work. +- Git whitespace check passed. Repository patch includes only the new research area and its nearest research-index entry. +- Public draft PR #45 opened with user authorization; evidence revision added to the same branch. No merge or deployment. + +Technical validation checks files and presentation. It does not validate historical interpretations, scientific conclusions or community representation. + +## Revision checks + +HTML and PDFs rebuilt after evidence corrections. Booklet and talk page counts remain 16 and 12. Source registry has 16 unique IDs; claim ledger has 19 unique claims. Updated PDF pages visually rechecked; full keyboard, screen-reader and mobile-device checks remain pending. + +## Review checkpoint: 24 October 2026 + +Working edition v0.1.2, reconciled with repository main through merged PR #44. The earlier 15 reader-check errors describe the October 14 baseline; they are absent from the current main and this candidate. + +- Reader documentation passed for 256 Markdown files. The Idea Trail graph is valid and its generated index is current. All 11 website tests passed; this package does not alter the website source or publication approval. +- All 165 local links, assets and fragments across seven HTML pages resolve. The register retains 16 unique sources and the ledger 19 unique claims. The placebo comparison is explicit in all four maintained editions and their reader output; S15 links pin the reviewed 2023 version. +- Two consecutive builds produced identical bytes for all 20 generated HTML, CSS, SVG and PDF files. Both PDFs contain extractable text. All 16 booklet pages and 12 talk pages were rendered and visually inspected after the changes, with no visible clipping or overlap found. The cover preview was refreshed from the current PDF. +- In the local browser, the skip link navigated to the main-content fragment. Evidence notes were reachable through edition navigation. The appraisal and talk pages fit a 390-pixel viewport without horizontal scrolling, and the talk's speaker-note disclosure opened with the keyboard and exposed the corrected comparison. The normal desktop viewport was restored. This is a scoped browser check, not a full keyboard, screen-reader or physical-device accessibility audit. +- Selected source passages were rechecked at the depths recorded in [appraisal.md](research/appraisal.md#review-follow-up-24-october-2026). The original scholarly and cultural review gates remain open. This pass did not repeat the full source appraisal or independently reproduce the studies. + +This remains a repository draft for author review. No merge, website deployment, clinical guidance or cultural endorsement follows from these checks. + +## Proposed website route checks: later on 24 October 2026 + +The combined publisher stages the existing reading editions under `/stonedage/` without changing the research conclusions or maintaining another research copy. All 11 homepage tests and six added route/publication tests pass. They verify the separate approval requirement and stale-source rejection, preserve the homepage and draft labels, and check export boundaries, local links/fragments and output preservation. PDF and downloadable evidence bytes are preserved. The release command rejects the pending route approval before producing output. + +The browser preview confirms the link back to Root Sequence and the landing page at desktop and 390-pixel widths without horizontal overflow or missing images. Full accessibility review remains open. The proposed public URL returned HTTP 404 in the live check; no public deployment is claimed. See the [site validation](../../site/VALIDATION.md) for the publisher-specific record. + +## Repository references and framing clarification: 24 October 2026 + +The planned, unpublished web address is recorded in the research README and parent index. The Root Sequence homepage still matches main exactly and contains no Stoned Age link. The maintained README, paper, booklet JSON and landing-page generator now say “working provocation”; no separate companion text was found in the current suite. Rebuilt reader editions preserve the evidence and review wording. The updated booklet cover was rendered and visually checked; text on its other 15 pages is unchanged. The talk PDF is byte-for-byte unchanged, and the cover preview matches the revised first page. This is a framing/navigation correction, not new research or a new companion publication. diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/boundary.svg b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/boundary.svg new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ee9414c2 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/boundary.svg @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Overlapping circles distinguish experience and consentEXPERIENCECONSENTSIGNIFICANCE DOES NOT CANCEL REFUSAL. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/branch.svg b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/branch.svg new file mode 100644 index 00000000..22c7b9b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/branch.svg @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +A network linking experience, report, context, audience, revision and memoryEXPERIENCEREPORTCONTEXTAUDIENCEREVISIONMEMORY? \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/cover.svg b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/cover.svg new file mode 100644 index 00000000..0b9914d9 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/cover.svg @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Concentric orbits around a question mark: wonder opens inquiry?WONDERA QUESTION IS AN OPENING. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/ladder.svg b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/ladder.svg new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9ac598de --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/ladder.svg @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +An evidential ladder: exposure, effects, transmission and a better explanation; each step remains a questionEXPOSURE?EFFECTS?TRANSMISSION?BETTER EXPLANATION? \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/mirror.svg b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/mirror.svg new file mode 100644 index 00000000..41795e24 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/mirror.svg @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Four repetitions of one claim do not make four independent witnessesONE CLAIMONE CLAIMONE CLAIMONE CLAIMFOUR REFLECTIONS ARE NOT FOUR WITNESSES. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/network.svg b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/network.svg new file mode 100644 index 00000000..22c7b9b8 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/network.svg @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +A network linking experience, report, context, audience, revision and memoryEXPERIENCEREPORTCONTEXTAUDIENCEREVISIONMEMORY? \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/orbit.svg b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/orbit.svg new file mode 100644 index 00000000..30b75913 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/orbit.svg @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Concentric orbits around a question mark?WONDERA QUESTION IS AN OPENING. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/split.svg b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/split.svg new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7cecdeeb --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/split.svg @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Two notebooks separate arriving ideas from checked ideasIDEAS ARRIVINGNovelty / significanceIDEAS BEING CHECKEDAccuracy / usefulnessKEEP BOTH NOTEBOOKS. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/steps.svg b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/steps.svg new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2ae69214 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/steps.svg @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Four separate questions: experience, interpretation, evidence and authorityEXPERIENCEWhat happened?INTERPRETATIONWhat does it mean?EVIDENCEWhat supports it?AUTHORITYWho may decide?THE CONNECTIONS REQUIRE JUSTIFICATION. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/style.css b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/style.css new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bd5dc646 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/style.css @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +*{box-sizing:border-box}html{scroll-behavior:smooth}body{margin:0;background:#f6f0df;color:#182d30;font:19px/1.7 Georgia,serif}a{color:#245c50;text-underline-offset:4px}a:focus-visible,button:focus-visible,summary:focus-visible{outline:3px solid #bd461f;outline-offset:5px}header,main,footer{max-width:1080px;margin:auto;padding:32px}nav{display:flex;flex-wrap:wrap;gap:12px 25px;font:15px/1.5 system-ui}h1{font-size:clamp(54px,10vw,112px);line-height:.95;letter-spacing:-.055em;max-width:850px;margin:55px 0 30px}h2{font-size:clamp(28px,4vw,44px);line-height:1.18;letter-spacing:-.025em;margin-top:65px}h3{font-size:23px}p,li{max-width:750px}.eyebrow{font:13px/1.4 system-ui;text-transform:uppercase;letter-spacing:.14em;color:#93401f}.deck{font-size:27px;max-width:760px}img{width:100%;height:auto;display:block;margin:35px 0}figure{margin:0}figcaption,.meta{font:14px/1.5 system-ui;color:#435955}.rule{border-top:2px solid #182d30;margin-top:35px;padding-top:25px}.skip{position:absolute;left:-9999px}.skip:focus{left:20px;top:10px;background:white;padding:10px}.editions{display:grid;grid-template-columns:1fr 1fr;gap:25px}.editions a{display:block;border-top:2px solid;padding:18px 0}.refs{font:15px/1.6 system-ui}.refs li{margin-bottom:15px;overflow-wrap:anywhere}.chapter{break-before:page;border-top:1px solid #b6bdac;padding-top:20px;margin-top:40px}.slide{min-height:85vh;border-top:2px solid #326b5c;padding:30px 0}.slide h2{margin-top:15px}.slide img{max-width:800px}details{font:16px/1.6 system-ui;margin:20px 0}table{border-collapse:collapse;font:15px/1.5 system-ui}td,th{padding:10px;border:1px solid #b6bdac;text-align:left}blockquote{border-left:4px solid #bd461f;padding-left:20px}code{font-size:.85em}@media(max-width:600px){header,main,footer{padding:22px}body{font-size:18px}.editions{grid-template-columns:1fr}nav{gap:10px 15px}}@media(prefers-reduced-motion:reduce){html{scroll-behavior:auto}}@media print{nav,.skip{display:none}body{background:white;font-size:11pt}header,main,footer{padding:0}h1{font-size:45pt}h2{font-size:24pt}a{color:inherit}img{max-height:65mm}.slide{page-break-after:always;min-height:0}.slide details{display:none}} \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/assets/windows.svg b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/windows.svg new file mode 100644 index 00000000..bec41289 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/assets/windows.svg @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Four archaeological evidence types: shrine residues, braziers, ritual bundle and hairARADShrine residuesPAMIRSFunerary braziersSOUTH AMERICARitual bundleMENORCAHuman hairFOUR WINDOWS. NO UNIVERSAL ORIGIN STORY. \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/book.json b/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/book.json new file mode 100644 index 00000000..74c58300 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/book.json @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +[ + { + "title": "The Stoned Age", + "deck": "Altered States, Human Curiosity, and the Long History of Making Meaning", + "art": "cover", + "text": "A small book about large experiences—and what happens after someone says, “I have figured it all out.”\n\nWorking provocation: How Drugs Explain the Universe.\n\nRoot Sequence · illustrated reader edition · v0.1.2 · 24 October 2026\n\nAI-assisted draft. Author, scholarly and cultural review pending. The illustrations are original conceptual diagrams, not historical reconstructions." + }, + { + "title": "Please turn to page 666", + "deck": "The universe has not supplied a foreword.", + "art": "orbit", + "text": "There is a particular kind of book that promises to explain everything. By chapter three it has explained religion, language, consciousness and your difficult uncle. By chapter four, the footnotes have quietly left the building.\n\nThis is a book about resisting that temptation without losing the question that made it exciting. What happens when experience changes enough that the familiar becomes strange? Why does an idea sometimes feel discovered rather than invented? What happens when somebody else believes it too?\n\nDrugs can be part of that inquiry. They do not get to be the answer in advance. We are interested in the long history of making meaning, including the places where a wonderful story outruns what anybody can actually show.\n\nThe joke opens the door. Curiosity gets to stay after the joke is over." + }, + { + "title": "A feeling is an event", + "deck": "An explanation is another event.", + "art": "steps", + "text": "Imagine waking from a dream certain that you have solved a problem. There are several things worth recording: the dream happened; it felt important; you remember an answer; the answer might work.\n\nThose are different claims. Testing the answer does not erase the dream. Respecting the dream does not oblige anyone to accept the answer.\n\nThis is our working distinction throughout the book: experience, interpretation, evidence and authority. It applies to a vision, a sudden insight, a compelling argument and an AI-generated explanation. It does not mean they share one mechanism.\n\nA person can be the best witness to how something felt without being the final authority on what caused it. A scientist can identify a mechanism without exhausting what an experience means to the person. Those two forms of humility can coexist." + }, + { + "title": "Things that actually survived", + "deck": "Archaeology cannot interview the smoke.", + "art": "windows", + "text": "At Arad, researchers detected residues consistent with cannabis and frankincense on different shrine altars. In the Pamirs, cannabis-related residues appeared in funerary braziers. These are local findings, not an origin story for all religion. [S01, S02]\n\nA South American ritual bundle contained evidence of multiple psychotropic plants. Ancient hair from Menorca yielded ephedrine, atropine and scopolamine. Containers and human tissue answer different questions. [S03, S04]\n\nWhat survives sets limits on what can be said. An object may tell us that material was present. It may not reveal who used it, how they felt, or which story they told afterward.\n\nThe strongest historical writing preserves that asymmetry. We can know something without knowing everything around it. Uncertainty is not an empty space that a sufficiently good illustrator is entitled to fill." + }, + { + "title": "Not one substance. Not one culture.", + "deck": "A category is not a ceremony.", + "art": "branch", + "text": "“Drugs” is an enormous label. Classic psychedelics have important pharmacological features in common, but psychoactive substances do not all work alike. Cannabis, psilocybin and the alkaloids detected in Menorca are not interchangeable. [S04, S05]\n\nNor are the people. A particular shrine, burial practice, living Indigenous tradition and modern laboratory session require their own histories. A sacred name is not decorative packaging for a molecule.\n\nWe have deliberately left several tempting stories unwritten. This edition cannot responsibly identify Soma, reconstruct Eleusinian preparations or narrate every mushroom tradition. Those chapters need sources and people with the relevant expertise.\n\nA living book is allowed to have a boundary. In fact, that may be how it stays alive: by knowing which questions it has not yet earned the right to answer." + }, + { + "title": "The ape needs more evidence", + "deck": "A good origin story is still a claim.", + "art": "ladder", + "text": "The strongest “stoned ape” story needs to establish ancient exposure, consequential effects, evolutionary transmission and an advantage over rival explanations. No single modern experience supplies that chain.\n\nA published psychedelic-evolution hypothesis offers possible pathways, while acknowledging the gap in direct evidence for ancient psychedelic mushroom ingestion. It is a proposal to investigate. [S09]\n\nSomething can be biologically possible, historically plausible and still unestablished. These words are not evasions. They mark different stages of knowing.\n\nOur question survives the grand story failing: how might particular altered-state practices affect particular communities? The answer could involve learning, memory, power, harm, pleasure, care, or combinations that refuse to fit on a motivational poster." + }, + { + "title": "The idea feels brilliant", + "deck": "That is useful information about the feeling.", + "art": "split", + "text": "In one controlled study, acute feelings of creative insight increased while deliberate creativity-task performance decreased; at seven days, self-rated novelty increased but convergent thinking remained lower than placebo. “New to me” is not independently verified originality. [S07]\n\nImagine two notebooks. One holds ideas as they arrive. The other records what happened when they were checked. Neither notebook should swallow the other.\n\nIf we demand that every new thought arrive fully proved, we will lose good questions. If we treat the arrival of a thought as its proof, we will keep bad answers. Research needs room for surprise and a return visit.\n\n“Come back to this tomorrow” is not necessarily an insult to revelation. It can be an act of care toward an idea that deserves better than immediate worship or immediate disposal." + }, + { + "title": "Meaning without a cosmic certificate", + "deck": "Something can matter without explaining everything.", + "art": "orbit", + "text": "Supported psilocybin research has documented enduring reports of personal and spiritual significance. Acute fear also occurred in this small, screened sample. Such reports do not verify the metaphysical content of an experience. [S06]\n\nA moment may change what someone values. That is already substantial. It does not need to settle the structure of the cosmos to deserve attention.\n\nOur mistake is often demanding too much of meaning. We ask a moving experience to become a theory, then ask the theory to authorize a way of life for everyone else. At each step, a different kind of justification is needed.\n\nHere is a smaller possibility: an experience helps a person ask a more careful question. The question leads to a conversation. The conversation changes a practice. No universal secret is required." + }, + { + "title": "Nobody makes meaning alone", + "deck": "The audience is part of the story.", + "art": "network", + "text": "Cultural research connects reported spiritual presence with models of mind and absorption. Cultural-evolution work asks how innovation depends on transmission and recombination. Neither requires one chemically inspired founder. [S10, S11]\n\nOur editorial map is experience, report, interpretation, circulation, stabilization and revision. It is a way to ask questions, not a law of history.\n\nWhich reports get repeated? Who can object? Does agreement reflect independent checking, or everyone borrowing from the same storyteller? What is lost when an ambiguous account becomes an official version?\n\nA story can make a community feel connected. That feeling is not, by itself, evidence that the community's decisions are good. Belonging and correction need to be able to share a room." + }, + { + "title": "Who owns the explanation?", + "deck": "Wonder does not cancel consent.", + "art": "boundary", + "text": "The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative asks that peyote questions remain grounded in Indigenous cultural perspectives rather than simply folded into generalized drug reform. Its position should be read on its own terms. [S14]\n\nFor this project, the implication is an editorial responsibility: do not borrow sacred imagery as atmosphere; do not confuse a public account with permission to reproduce everything; do not ask one person to stand for a continent.\n\nThe same principle works at an individual scale. A person should be able to reject someone else's interpretation of their experience. Distress should not have to become a redemption story to be heard.\n\nResearch on challenging psychedelic experiences includes negative consequences as well as positive interpretations. Its survey design does not tell us population-wide rates. [S13] A serious book leaves room for experiences that do not resolve beautifully." + }, + { + "title": "The oracle has autocomplete", + "deck": "A polished response is not an independent witness.", + "art": "mirror", + "text": "Research has found sycophancy in tested language models: a tendency, in some settings, to agree with users instead of prioritizing truth. That finding has limits, but it gives us a concrete problem to examine. [S15]\n\nAn AI can help arrange a difficult thought into readable prose. It can also make an unfinished interpretation sound complete. Our comparison is about how people assign authority to compelling accounts. We are not claiming that a model has a psychedelic experience.\n\nThis book was developed with AI assistance. Its fluency is therefore something to inspect, not a reason to trust it. The sources and open questions are part of the work, not administrative furniture left at the back.\n\nThe helpful response to a large idea may be: preserve it, separate its claims, and find out what would change your mind." + }, + { + "title": "Leave the door open", + "deck": "Curiosity deserves better than certainty on arrival.", + "art": "steps", + "text": "The Stoned Age is an invitation to investigate, not a recommendation to take a substance. You do not need an altered state to participate.\n\nStart with one claim. Ask what kind it is. Find the source. Notice the difference between what was measured and what was inferred. Ask who is absent from the account. Make room for a result that disappoints the original story.\n\nRoot Sequence coordinates the questions and their translations. Archaeology, pharmacology, anthropology, history, philosophy and AI research retain the methods and expertise that make their claims assessable.\n\nThe next edition should be better because something changed: a source was corrected, a counterexample taken seriously, a cultural chapter written with appropriate expertise, an attractive claim retired.\n\nKeep the joke. Keep the question. Let the answer remain answerable." + } +] diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/book.md b/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/book.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..6849c496 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/book.md @@ -0,0 +1,197 @@ +# The Stoned Age — reader edition + +## The Stoned Age + +*Altered States, Human Curiosity, and the Long History of Making Meaning* + +![Conceptual illustration: cover](../assets/cover.svg) + +A small book about large experiences—and what happens after someone says, “I have figured it all out.” + +Working provocation: How Drugs Explain the Universe. + +Root Sequence · illustrated reader edition · v0.1.2 · 24 October 2026 + +AI-assisted draft. Author, scholarly and cultural review pending. The illustrations are original conceptual diagrams, not historical reconstructions. + +--- + +## Please turn to page 666 + +*The universe has not supplied a foreword.* + +![Conceptual illustration: orbit](../assets/orbit.svg) + +There is a particular kind of book that promises to explain everything. By chapter three it has explained religion, language, consciousness and your difficult uncle. By chapter four, the footnotes have quietly left the building. + +This is a book about resisting that temptation without losing the question that made it exciting. What happens when experience changes enough that the familiar becomes strange? Why does an idea sometimes feel discovered rather than invented? What happens when somebody else believes it too? + +Drugs can be part of that inquiry. They do not get to be the answer in advance. We are interested in the long history of making meaning, including the places where a wonderful story outruns what anybody can actually show. + +The joke opens the door. Curiosity gets to stay after the joke is over. + +--- + +## A feeling is an event + +*An explanation is another event.* + +![Conceptual illustration: steps](../assets/steps.svg) + +Imagine waking from a dream certain that you have solved a problem. There are several things worth recording: the dream happened; it felt important; you remember an answer; the answer might work. + +Those are different claims. Testing the answer does not erase the dream. Respecting the dream does not oblige anyone to accept the answer. + +This is our working distinction throughout the book: experience, interpretation, evidence and authority. It applies to a vision, a sudden insight, a compelling argument and an AI-generated explanation. It does not mean they share one mechanism. + +A person can be the best witness to how something felt without being the final authority on what caused it. A scientist can identify a mechanism without exhausting what an experience means to the person. Those two forms of humility can coexist. + +--- + +## Things that actually survived + +*Archaeology cannot interview the smoke.* + +![Conceptual illustration: windows](../assets/windows.svg) + +At Arad, researchers detected residues consistent with cannabis and frankincense on different shrine altars. In the Pamirs, cannabis-related residues appeared in funerary braziers. These are local findings, not an origin story for all religion. [S01, S02] + +A South American ritual bundle contained evidence of multiple psychotropic plants. Ancient hair from Menorca yielded ephedrine, atropine and scopolamine. Containers and human tissue answer different questions. [S03, S04] + +What survives sets limits on what can be said. An object may tell us that material was present. It may not reveal who used it, how they felt, or which story they told afterward. + +The strongest historical writing preserves that asymmetry. We can know something without knowing everything around it. Uncertainty is not an empty space that a sufficiently good illustrator is entitled to fill. + +--- + +## Not one substance. Not one culture. + +*A category is not a ceremony.* + +![Conceptual illustration: branch](../assets/branch.svg) + +“Drugs” is an enormous label. Classic psychedelics have important pharmacological features in common, but psychoactive substances do not all work alike. Cannabis, psilocybin and the alkaloids detected in Menorca are not interchangeable. [S04, S05] + +Nor are the people. A particular shrine, burial practice, living Indigenous tradition and modern laboratory session require their own histories. A sacred name is not decorative packaging for a molecule. + +We have deliberately left several tempting stories unwritten. This edition cannot responsibly identify Soma, reconstruct Eleusinian preparations or narrate every mushroom tradition. Those chapters need sources and people with the relevant expertise. + +A living book is allowed to have a boundary. In fact, that may be how it stays alive: by knowing which questions it has not yet earned the right to answer. + +--- + +## The ape needs more evidence + +*A good origin story is still a claim.* + +![Conceptual illustration: ladder](../assets/ladder.svg) + +The strongest “stoned ape” story needs to establish ancient exposure, consequential effects, evolutionary transmission and an advantage over rival explanations. No single modern experience supplies that chain. + +A published psychedelic-evolution hypothesis offers possible pathways, while acknowledging the gap in direct evidence for ancient psychedelic mushroom ingestion. It is a proposal to investigate. [S09] + +Something can be biologically possible, historically plausible and still unestablished. These words are not evasions. They mark different stages of knowing. + +Our question survives the grand story failing: how might particular altered-state practices affect particular communities? The answer could involve learning, memory, power, harm, pleasure, care, or combinations that refuse to fit on a motivational poster. + +--- + +## The idea feels brilliant + +*That is useful information about the feeling.* + +![Conceptual illustration: split](../assets/split.svg) + +In one controlled study, acute feelings of creative insight increased while deliberate creativity-task performance decreased; at seven days, self-rated novelty increased but convergent thinking remained lower than placebo. “New to me” is not independently verified originality. [S07] + +Imagine two notebooks. One holds ideas as they arrive. The other records what happened when they were checked. Neither notebook should swallow the other. + +If we demand that every new thought arrive fully proved, we will lose good questions. If we treat the arrival of a thought as its proof, we will keep bad answers. Research needs room for surprise and a return visit. + +“Come back to this tomorrow” is not necessarily an insult to revelation. It can be an act of care toward an idea that deserves better than immediate worship or immediate disposal. + +--- + +## Meaning without a cosmic certificate + +*Something can matter without explaining everything.* + +![Conceptual illustration: orbit](../assets/orbit.svg) + +Supported psilocybin research has documented enduring reports of personal and spiritual significance. Acute fear also occurred in this small, screened sample. Such reports do not verify the metaphysical content of an experience. [S06] + +A moment may change what someone values. That is already substantial. It does not need to settle the structure of the cosmos to deserve attention. + +Our mistake is often demanding too much of meaning. We ask a moving experience to become a theory, then ask the theory to authorize a way of life for everyone else. At each step, a different kind of justification is needed. + +Here is a smaller possibility: an experience helps a person ask a more careful question. The question leads to a conversation. The conversation changes a practice. No universal secret is required. + +--- + +## Nobody makes meaning alone + +*The audience is part of the story.* + +![Conceptual illustration: network](../assets/network.svg) + +Cultural research connects reported spiritual presence with models of mind and absorption. Cultural-evolution work asks how innovation depends on transmission and recombination. Neither requires one chemically inspired founder. [S10, S11] + +Our editorial map is experience, report, interpretation, circulation, stabilization and revision. It is a way to ask questions, not a law of history. + +Which reports get repeated? Who can object? Does agreement reflect independent checking, or everyone borrowing from the same storyteller? What is lost when an ambiguous account becomes an official version? + +A story can make a community feel connected. That feeling is not, by itself, evidence that the community's decisions are good. Belonging and correction need to be able to share a room. + +--- + +## Who owns the explanation? + +*Wonder does not cancel consent.* + +![Conceptual illustration: boundary](../assets/boundary.svg) + +The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative asks that peyote questions remain grounded in Indigenous cultural perspectives rather than simply folded into generalized drug reform. Its position should be read on its own terms. [S14] + +For this project, the implication is an editorial responsibility: do not borrow sacred imagery as atmosphere; do not confuse a public account with permission to reproduce everything; do not ask one person to stand for a continent. + +The same principle works at an individual scale. A person should be able to reject someone else's interpretation of their experience. Distress should not have to become a redemption story to be heard. + +Research on challenging psychedelic experiences includes negative consequences as well as positive interpretations. Its survey design does not tell us population-wide rates. [S13] A serious book leaves room for experiences that do not resolve beautifully. + +--- + +## The oracle has autocomplete + +*A polished response is not an independent witness.* + +![Conceptual illustration: mirror](../assets/mirror.svg) + +Research has found sycophancy in tested language models: a tendency, in some settings, to agree with users instead of prioritizing truth. That finding has limits, but it gives us a concrete problem to examine. [S15] + +An AI can help arrange a difficult thought into readable prose. It can also make an unfinished interpretation sound complete. Our comparison is about how people assign authority to compelling accounts. We are not claiming that a model has a psychedelic experience. + +This book was developed with AI assistance. Its fluency is therefore something to inspect, not a reason to trust it. The sources and open questions are part of the work, not administrative furniture left at the back. + +The helpful response to a large idea may be: preserve it, separate its claims, and find out what would change your mind. + +--- + +## Leave the door open + +*Curiosity deserves better than certainty on arrival.* + +![Conceptual illustration: steps](../assets/steps.svg) + +The Stoned Age is an invitation to investigate, not a recommendation to take a substance. You do not need an altered state to participate. + +Start with one claim. Ask what kind it is. Find the source. Notice the difference between what was measured and what was inferred. Ask who is absent from the account. Make room for a result that disappoints the original story. + +Root Sequence coordinates the questions and their translations. Archaeology, pharmacology, anthropology, history, philosophy and AI research retain the methods and expertise that make their claims assessable. + +The next edition should be better because something changed: a source was corrected, a counterexample taken seriously, a cultural chapter written with appropriate expertise, an attractive claim retired. + +Keep the joke. Keep the question. Let the answer remain answerable. + +## References + +See the [shared source register](../research/sources.md) and [appraisal](../research/appraisal.md). diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/cover-preview.png b/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/cover-preview.png new file mode 100644 index 00000000..7ae55ab8 Binary files /dev/null and b/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/cover-preview.png differ diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/index.html b/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..17effff1 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +Booklet — The Stoned Age

Illustrated reader edition

The Stoned Age

Download the 16-page booklet PDF · Markdown source

01

The Stoned Age

Altered States, Human Curiosity, and the Long History of Making Meaning

Concentric orbits around a question mark: wonder opens inquiry

A small book about large experiences—and what happens after someone says, “I have figured it all out.”

+

Working provocation: How Drugs Explain the Universe.

+

Root Sequence · illustrated reader edition · v0.1.2 · 24 October 2026

+

AI-assisted draft. Author, scholarly and cultural review pending. The illustrations are original conceptual diagrams, not historical reconstructions.

02

Please turn to page 666

The universe has not supplied a foreword.

Concentric orbits around a question mark

There is a particular kind of book that promises to explain everything. By chapter three it has explained religion, language, consciousness and your difficult uncle. By chapter four, the footnotes have quietly left the building.

+

This is a book about resisting that temptation without losing the question that made it exciting. What happens when experience changes enough that the familiar becomes strange? Why does an idea sometimes feel discovered rather than invented? What happens when somebody else believes it too?

+

Drugs can be part of that inquiry. They do not get to be the answer in advance. We are interested in the long history of making meaning, including the places where a wonderful story outruns what anybody can actually show.

+

The joke opens the door. Curiosity gets to stay after the joke is over.

03

A feeling is an event

An explanation is another event.

Four separate questions: experience, interpretation, evidence and authority

Imagine waking from a dream certain that you have solved a problem. There are several things worth recording: the dream happened; it felt important; you remember an answer; the answer might work.

+

Those are different claims. Testing the answer does not erase the dream. Respecting the dream does not oblige anyone to accept the answer.

+

This is our working distinction throughout the book: experience, interpretation, evidence and authority. It applies to a vision, a sudden insight, a compelling argument and an AI-generated explanation. It does not mean they share one mechanism.

+

A person can be the best witness to how something felt without being the final authority on what caused it. A scientist can identify a mechanism without exhausting what an experience means to the person. Those two forms of humility can coexist.

04

Things that actually survived

Archaeology cannot interview the smoke.

Four archaeological evidence types: shrine residues, braziers, ritual bundle and hair

At Arad, researchers detected residues consistent with cannabis and frankincense on different shrine altars. In the Pamirs, cannabis-related residues appeared in funerary braziers. These are local findings, not an origin story for all religion. [S01, S02]

+

A South American ritual bundle contained evidence of multiple psychotropic plants. Ancient hair from Menorca yielded ephedrine, atropine and scopolamine. Containers and human tissue answer different questions. [S03, S04]

+

What survives sets limits on what can be said. An object may tell us that material was present. It may not reveal who used it, how they felt, or which story they told afterward.

+

The strongest historical writing preserves that asymmetry. We can know something without knowing everything around it. Uncertainty is not an empty space that a sufficiently good illustrator is entitled to fill.

05

Not one substance. Not one culture.

A category is not a ceremony.

A network linking experience, report, context, audience, revision and memory

“Drugs” is an enormous label. Classic psychedelics have important pharmacological features in common, but psychoactive substances do not all work alike. Cannabis, psilocybin and the alkaloids detected in Menorca are not interchangeable. [S04, S05]

+

Nor are the people. A particular shrine, burial practice, living Indigenous tradition and modern laboratory session require their own histories. A sacred name is not decorative packaging for a molecule.

+

We have deliberately left several tempting stories unwritten. This edition cannot responsibly identify Soma, reconstruct Eleusinian preparations or narrate every mushroom tradition. Those chapters need sources and people with the relevant expertise.

+

A living book is allowed to have a boundary. In fact, that may be how it stays alive: by knowing which questions it has not yet earned the right to answer.

06

The ape needs more evidence

A good origin story is still a claim.

An evidential ladder: exposure, effects, transmission and a better explanation; each step remains a question

The strongest “stoned ape” story needs to establish ancient exposure, consequential effects, evolutionary transmission and an advantage over rival explanations. No single modern experience supplies that chain.

+

A published psychedelic-evolution hypothesis offers possible pathways, while acknowledging the gap in direct evidence for ancient psychedelic mushroom ingestion. It is a proposal to investigate. [S09]

+

Something can be biologically possible, historically plausible and still unestablished. These words are not evasions. They mark different stages of knowing.

+

Our question survives the grand story failing: how might particular altered-state practices affect particular communities? The answer could involve learning, memory, power, harm, pleasure, care, or combinations that refuse to fit on a motivational poster.

07

The idea feels brilliant

That is useful information about the feeling.

Two notebooks separate arriving ideas from checked ideas

In one controlled study, acute feelings of creative insight increased while deliberate creativity-task performance decreased; at seven days, self-rated novelty increased but convergent thinking remained lower than placebo. “New to me” is not independently verified originality. [S07]

+

Imagine two notebooks. One holds ideas as they arrive. The other records what happened when they were checked. Neither notebook should swallow the other.

+

If we demand that every new thought arrive fully proved, we will lose good questions. If we treat the arrival of a thought as its proof, we will keep bad answers. Research needs room for surprise and a return visit.

+

“Come back to this tomorrow” is not necessarily an insult to revelation. It can be an act of care toward an idea that deserves better than immediate worship or immediate disposal.

08

Meaning without a cosmic certificate

Something can matter without explaining everything.

Concentric orbits around a question mark

Supported psilocybin research has documented enduring reports of personal and spiritual significance. Acute fear also occurred in this small, screened sample. Such reports do not verify the metaphysical content of an experience. [S06]

+

A moment may change what someone values. That is already substantial. It does not need to settle the structure of the cosmos to deserve attention.

+

Our mistake is often demanding too much of meaning. We ask a moving experience to become a theory, then ask the theory to authorize a way of life for everyone else. At each step, a different kind of justification is needed.

+

Here is a smaller possibility: an experience helps a person ask a more careful question. The question leads to a conversation. The conversation changes a practice. No universal secret is required.

09

Nobody makes meaning alone

The audience is part of the story.

A network linking experience, report, context, audience, revision and memory

Cultural research connects reported spiritual presence with models of mind and absorption. Cultural-evolution work asks how innovation depends on transmission and recombination. Neither requires one chemically inspired founder. [S10, S11]

+

Our editorial map is experience, report, interpretation, circulation, stabilization and revision. It is a way to ask questions, not a law of history.

+

Which reports get repeated? Who can object? Does agreement reflect independent checking, or everyone borrowing from the same storyteller? What is lost when an ambiguous account becomes an official version?

+

A story can make a community feel connected. That feeling is not, by itself, evidence that the community's decisions are good. Belonging and correction need to be able to share a room.

10

Who owns the explanation?

Wonder does not cancel consent.

Overlapping circles distinguish experience and consent

The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative asks that peyote questions remain grounded in Indigenous cultural perspectives rather than simply folded into generalized drug reform. Its position should be read on its own terms. [S14]

+

For this project, the implication is an editorial responsibility: do not borrow sacred imagery as atmosphere; do not confuse a public account with permission to reproduce everything; do not ask one person to stand for a continent.

+

The same principle works at an individual scale. A person should be able to reject someone else's interpretation of their experience. Distress should not have to become a redemption story to be heard.

+

Research on challenging psychedelic experiences includes negative consequences as well as positive interpretations. Its survey design does not tell us population-wide rates. [S13] A serious book leaves room for experiences that do not resolve beautifully.

11

The oracle has autocomplete

A polished response is not an independent witness.

Four repetitions of one claim do not make four independent witnesses

Research has found sycophancy in tested language models: a tendency, in some settings, to agree with users instead of prioritizing truth. That finding has limits, but it gives us a concrete problem to examine. [S15]

+

An AI can help arrange a difficult thought into readable prose. It can also make an unfinished interpretation sound complete. Our comparison is about how people assign authority to compelling accounts. We are not claiming that a model has a psychedelic experience.

+

This book was developed with AI assistance. Its fluency is therefore something to inspect, not a reason to trust it. The sources and open questions are part of the work, not administrative furniture left at the back.

+

The helpful response to a large idea may be: preserve it, separate its claims, and find out what would change your mind.

12

Leave the door open

Curiosity deserves better than certainty on arrival.

Four separate questions: experience, interpretation, evidence and authority

The Stoned Age is an invitation to investigate, not a recommendation to take a substance. You do not need an altered state to participate.

+

Start with one claim. Ask what kind it is. Find the source. Notice the difference between what was measured and what was inferred. Ask who is absent from the account. Make room for a result that disappoints the original story.

+

Root Sequence coordinates the questions and their translations. Archaeology, pharmacology, anthropology, history, philosophy and AI research retain the methods and expertise that make their claims assessable.

+

The next edition should be better because something changed: a source was corrected, a counterexample taken seriously, a cultural chapter written with appropriate expertise, an attractive claim retired.

+

Keep the joke. Keep the question. Let the answer remain answerable.

References

  1. S01 · Arie, E.; Rosen, B.; Namdar, D. (2020). Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad. Tel Aviv 47(1), 5–28
  2. S02 · Ren, M., et al. (2019). The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs. Science Advances 5, eaaw1391
  3. S03 · Miller, M. J.; Albarracin-Jordan, J.; Moore, C.; Capriles, J. M. (2019). Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America. PNAS 116(23), 11207–11212
  4. S04 · Guerra-Doce, E., et al. (2023). Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis. Scientific Reports 13, 4782
  5. S05 · Nichols, D. E. (2016). Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews 68, 264–355
  6. S06 · Griffiths, R. R., et al. (2011). Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: Immediate and persisting dose-related effects. Psychopharmacology 218, 649–665
  7. S07 · Mason, N. L., et al. (2021). Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure. Translational Psychiatry 11, 209
  8. S08 · Carhart-Harris, R. L.; Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews 71, 316–344
  9. S09 · Rodríguez Arce, J. M.; Winkelman, M. J. (2021). Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution. Frontiers in Psychology 12, 729425
  10. S10 · Luhrmann, T. M., et al. (2021). Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths. PNAS 118(5), e2016649118
  11. S11 · Muthukrishna, M.; Henrich, J. (2016). Innovation in the collective brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371, 20150192
  12. S12 · Forstmann, M., et al. (2020). Transformative experience and social connectedness mediate the mood-enhancing effects of psychedelic use in naturalistic settings. PNAS 117, 2338–2346
  13. S13 · Carbonaro, T. M., et al. (2016). Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences. Journal of Psychopharmacology 30, 1268–1278
  14. S14 · Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (undated; accessed 2026-10-14). Political and Social Issues. Community organization statement
  15. S15 · Sharma, M., et al. (2023). Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models. arXiv:2310.13548; primary research preprint (2023 version)
  16. S16 · Butler, M.; Jelen, L.; Rucker, J. (2022). Expectancy in placebo-controlled trials of psychedelics: if so, so what?. Psychopharmacology
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/the-stoned-age.pdf b/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/the-stoned-age.pdf new file mode 100644 index 00000000..05d5f31c Binary files /dev/null and b/research/the-stoned-age/booklet/the-stoned-age.pdf differ diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/essay/essay.md b/research/the-stoned-age/essay/essay.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e628dead --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/essay/essay.md @@ -0,0 +1,85 @@ +# The Stoned Age + +## What happens after “I have figured it all out”? + +Altered States, Human Curiosity, and the Long History of Making Meaning + +An illustrated essay · 24 October 2026 · v0.1.2 · AI-assisted draft; review pending + +**How Drugs Explain the Universe** is the provocation. How humans turn changed experience into meaning is the inquiry. + +## 1. Please turn to page 666 + +Imagine a book so ambitious it explains consciousness before breakfast and invents religion by lunch. The joke is good. The research problem is better: what makes a strange experience feel like knowledge? + +The first move is to separate four things. Something happened. Somebody interpreted it. Evidence may support that interpretation. Other people may be asked to act on it. None of these steps is automatic. + +An experience can matter without being a message from the universe. An explanation can be elegant without being true. This is not an argument against wonder. It is a way to keep wonder from having to do every job at once. + +![Four distinct questions: experience, interpretation, evidence and authority](../assets/steps.svg) + +## 2. Archaeology cannot interview the smoke + +Four material windows help ground the story. Arad offers shrine residues; the Pamirs, funerary braziers; a South American bundle, evidence of psychotropic plants; Menorca, alkaloids in ancient hair. Each supports a bounded claim, with different limits. [S01–S04] + +The seductive next sentence is “therefore, religion.” But a detected compound does not disclose a person's thoughts, establish a universal practice or identify the beginning of a tradition. + +We should be able to say that evidence is important without making it total. A fragment is not a failed encyclopedia. It is a fragment worth understanding well. + +![Four case windows with distinct evidence types](../assets/windows.svg) + +## 3. The ape needs a better argument + +“Psychedelics made us human” compresses several unproved steps. Were relevant ancestors exposed? What changed? How did that affect transmission or reproduction? Why does the explanation outperform alternatives? + +A scholarly psychedelic-evolution hypothesis is a source of proposed mechanisms, not direct confirmation of the origin story. [S09] Possibility is the start of a question. It is not the end of one. + +Nor is “drugs” one mechanism. Classic psychedelics, cannabis and other psychoactive compounds need separate treatment. [S05] The cultures using them need even more care. This essay does not reconstruct ceremonies or identify disputed ancient preparations. + +## 4. A brilliant feeling needs a return visit + +A controlled creativity study found that subjective insight and performance could move in different directions. [S07] The later positive result concerned ideas rated new by participants themselves; convergent thinking was lower than placebo at seven days. That makes a useful distinction vivid: the experience of discovery and the evaluation of what was discovered are separate tasks. + +Try this as a reading practice, without taking anything: put an exciting idea in one column and the evidence that would change your mind in another. The second column need not humiliate the first. It gives the idea somewhere to go. + +Research can record enduring spiritual significance alongside acute fear, without confirming cosmic truth. [S06] A person may learn something important about what they value. There is no requirement that they also solve metaphysics. + +![Two notebooks: ideas arriving and ideas being checked](../assets/split.svg) + +## 5. The audience is part of the experience + +Cultural models and individual absorption are associated with reports of spiritual presence. [S10] That gives us reason to investigate context, rather than treating meaning as a substance's fixed output. + +Who listens? Who translates? Which version gets repeated? Who can disagree without losing their place in the group? These are our research questions. They do not assume that all traditions work alike. + +A community can cherish an experience while declining to make it compulsory knowledge. A person can be heard without becoming an oracle. The distinction becomes especially important when a claim is used to decide what others must do. + +## 6. Respect is part of the method + +The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative articulates priorities grounded in Indigenous cultural perspectives. [S14] An open research project does not acquire ownership of a tradition by finding it online. + +Our illustrations show relationships and questions. They do not impersonate sacred art or reconstruct somebody else's ceremony. Future cultural chapters need appropriate authorship, sources and review. + +This is also a history with room for distress, conflict and disappointed expectations. Meaning does not cancel harm. No reader needs to use a drug, disclose a personal experience or endorse a spiritual interpretation to take part. + +## 7. The oracle has autocomplete + +AI belongs here through a limited comparison: how a compelling interpretation acquires authority. Research on tested language models has documented sycophancy. [S15] A response that agrees beautifully is not a second independent witness. + +We are not claiming that AI is intoxicated, conscious or pharmacologically comparable to a person. We are asking what happens when a tool helps make an interpretation sound finished. + +This essay is AI-assisted. Its confidence must not outrun its sources either. + +![A claim reflected repeatedly is still one claim](../assets/mirror.svg) + +## 8. Keep the joke. Check the claim. + +The interesting project survives the grand origin story failing. There are still histories to understand, experiences to hear, hypotheses to test and institutions to question. + +Root Sequence is the umbrella for that work. It coordinates inquiry; it does not replace the fields or communities whose knowledge the inquiry depends on. + +Start with the paper, inspect the source register, or use the talk to open a discussion. A good next edition will not merely be longer. It will know more clearly what it can say. + +## References + +Source IDs connect to the [shared source register](../research/sources.md). Study results, hypotheses and this essay's interpretive proposals are different kinds of claims. This is a targeted narrative synthesis, not a systematic review or clinical guide. diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/essay/index.html b/research/the-stoned-age/essay/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..2b5c1e35 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/essay/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +Illustrated essay — The Stoned Age

The Stoned Age

+

What happens after “I have figured it all out”?

+

Altered States, Human Curiosity, and the Long History of Making Meaning

+

An illustrated essay · 24 October 2026 · v0.1.2 · AI-assisted draft; review pending

+

How Drugs Explain the Universe is the provocation. How humans turn changed experience into meaning is the inquiry.

+

1. Please turn to page 666

+

Imagine a book so ambitious it explains consciousness before breakfast and invents religion by lunch. The joke is good. The research problem is better: what makes a strange experience feel like knowledge?

+

The first move is to separate four things. Something happened. Somebody interpreted it. Evidence may support that interpretation. Other people may be asked to act on it. None of these steps is automatic.

+

An experience can matter without being a message from the universe. An explanation can be elegant without being true. This is not an argument against wonder. It is a way to keep wonder from having to do every job at once.

+

Four distinct questions: experience, interpretation, evidence and authority

+

2. Archaeology cannot interview the smoke

+

Four material windows help ground the story. Arad offers shrine residues; the Pamirs, funerary braziers; a South American bundle, evidence of psychotropic plants; Menorca, alkaloids in ancient hair. Each supports a bounded claim, with different limits. [S01, S02, S03, S04]

+

The seductive next sentence is “therefore, religion.” But a detected compound does not disclose a person's thoughts, establish a universal practice or identify the beginning of a tradition.

+

We should be able to say that evidence is important without making it total. A fragment is not a failed encyclopedia. It is a fragment worth understanding well.

+

Four case windows with distinct evidence types

+

3. The ape needs a better argument

+

“Psychedelics made us human” compresses several unproved steps. Were relevant ancestors exposed? What changed? How did that affect transmission or reproduction? Why does the explanation outperform alternatives?

+

A scholarly psychedelic-evolution hypothesis is a source of proposed mechanisms, not direct confirmation of the origin story. [S09] Possibility is the start of a question. It is not the end of one.

+

Nor is “drugs” one mechanism. Classic psychedelics, cannabis and other psychoactive compounds need separate treatment. [S05] The cultures using them need even more care. This essay does not reconstruct ceremonies or identify disputed ancient preparations.

+

4. A brilliant feeling needs a return visit

+

A controlled creativity study found that subjective insight and performance could move in different directions. [S07] The later positive result concerned ideas rated new by participants themselves; convergent thinking was lower than placebo at seven days. That makes a useful distinction vivid: the experience of discovery and the evaluation of what was discovered are separate tasks.

+

Try this as a reading practice, without taking anything: put an exciting idea in one column and the evidence that would change your mind in another. The second column need not humiliate the first. It gives the idea somewhere to go.

+

Research can record enduring spiritual significance alongside acute fear, without confirming cosmic truth. [S06] A person may learn something important about what they value. There is no requirement that they also solve metaphysics.

+

Two notebooks: ideas arriving and ideas being checked

+

5. The audience is part of the experience

+

Cultural models and individual absorption are associated with reports of spiritual presence. [S10] That gives us reason to investigate context, rather than treating meaning as a substance's fixed output.

+

Who listens? Who translates? Which version gets repeated? Who can disagree without losing their place in the group? These are our research questions. They do not assume that all traditions work alike.

+

A community can cherish an experience while declining to make it compulsory knowledge. A person can be heard without becoming an oracle. The distinction becomes especially important when a claim is used to decide what others must do.

+

6. Respect is part of the method

+

The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative articulates priorities grounded in Indigenous cultural perspectives. [S14] An open research project does not acquire ownership of a tradition by finding it online.

+

Our illustrations show relationships and questions. They do not impersonate sacred art or reconstruct somebody else's ceremony. Future cultural chapters need appropriate authorship, sources and review.

+

This is also a history with room for distress, conflict and disappointed expectations. Meaning does not cancel harm. No reader needs to use a drug, disclose a personal experience or endorse a spiritual interpretation to take part.

+

7. The oracle has autocomplete

+

AI belongs here through a limited comparison: how a compelling interpretation acquires authority. Research on tested language models has documented sycophancy. [S15] A response that agrees beautifully is not a second independent witness.

+

We are not claiming that AI is intoxicated, conscious or pharmacologically comparable to a person. We are asking what happens when a tool helps make an interpretation sound finished.

+

This essay is AI-assisted. Its confidence must not outrun its sources either.

+

A claim reflected repeatedly is still one claim

+

8. Keep the joke. Check the claim.

+

The interesting project survives the grand origin story failing. There are still histories to understand, experiences to hear, hypotheses to test and institutions to question.

+

Root Sequence is the umbrella for that work. It coordinates inquiry; it does not replace the fields or communities whose knowledge the inquiry depends on.

+

Start with the paper, inspect the source register, or use the talk to open a discussion. A good next edition will not merely be longer. It will know more clearly what it can say.

+

References

  1. S01 · Arie, E.; Rosen, B.; Namdar, D. (2020). Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad. Tel Aviv 47(1), 5–28
  2. S02 · Ren, M., et al. (2019). The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs. Science Advances 5, eaaw1391
  3. S03 · Miller, M. J.; Albarracin-Jordan, J.; Moore, C.; Capriles, J. M. (2019). Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America. PNAS 116(23), 11207–11212
  4. S04 · Guerra-Doce, E., et al. (2023). Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis. Scientific Reports 13, 4782
  5. S05 · Nichols, D. E. (2016). Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews 68, 264–355
  6. S06 · Griffiths, R. R., et al. (2011). Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: Immediate and persisting dose-related effects. Psychopharmacology 218, 649–665
  7. S07 · Mason, N. L., et al. (2021). Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure. Translational Psychiatry 11, 209
  8. S08 · Carhart-Harris, R. L.; Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews 71, 316–344
  9. S09 · Rodríguez Arce, J. M.; Winkelman, M. J. (2021). Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution. Frontiers in Psychology 12, 729425
  10. S10 · Luhrmann, T. M., et al. (2021). Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths. PNAS 118(5), e2016649118
  11. S11 · Muthukrishna, M.; Henrich, J. (2016). Innovation in the collective brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371, 20150192
  12. S12 · Forstmann, M., et al. (2020). Transformative experience and social connectedness mediate the mood-enhancing effects of psychedelic use in naturalistic settings. PNAS 117, 2338–2346
  13. S13 · Carbonaro, T. M., et al. (2016). Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences. Journal of Psychopharmacology 30, 1268–1278
  14. S14 · Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (undated; accessed 2026-10-14). Political and Social Issues. Community organization statement
  15. S15 · Sharma, M., et al. (2023). Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models. arXiv:2310.13548; primary research preprint (2023 version)
  16. S16 · Butler, M.; Jelen, L.; Rucker, J. (2022). Expectancy in placebo-controlled trials of psychedelics: if so, so what?. Psychopharmacology
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/index.html b/research/the-stoned-age/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b3cd6d75 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/index.html @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Project suite — The Stoned Age

Root Sequence / a living inquiry / v0.1.2

The
Stoned Age

Altered States, Human Curiosity, and the Long History of Making Meaning

Concentric orbits around a question mark: wonder begins an inquiry

What happens after somebody says, “I have figured it all out”?

A playful, intellectually serious inquiry into changed experience, human origins, religion, shared stories and AI. The working provocation is How Drugs Explain the Universe. The evidence has a more careful story to tell.

01 / The illustrated essay
A doorway into the argument.02 / The small book
16 illustrated pages, plus an accessible HTML edition.03 / The living paper
The argument, sources, hypotheses and limits.04 / The talk
12 slides and a 25-minute speaker outline.

Wonder is welcome.
Claims remain accountable.

This is an AI-assisted first edition, not a peer-reviewed release. Root Sequence coordinates inquiry; it does not claim specialist authority. Each edition draws from a shared source register.

Inspect the sources · Download the claims ledger · Method and next research steps · Project record and exact placement

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/paper/index.html b/research/the-stoned-age/paper/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..b828143e --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/paper/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,75 @@ +Living paper — The Stoned Age

The Stoned Age

+

Altered States, Human Curiosity, and the Long History of Making Meaning

+

Living research paper · v0.1.2 · 24 October 2026 · AI-assisted narrative synthesis · author and disciplinary review pending

+

Working provocation: How Drugs Explain the Universe. The phrase names a temptation this project investigates; it is not its scientific conclusion.

+

Abstract

+

Altered states offer a productive route into questions about curiosity, religious experience, cultural transmission and epistemic authority. They also invite overreach: evidence that a substance was used in a particular setting can become a story about the origin of religion; a striking present-day experience can become a theory of human evolution. This paper separates chemical evidence, reports of experience, causal explanations and judgments of truth. It brings selected archaeological findings into conversation with experimental psychology, cultural anthropology, cultural-evolution research and AI research. Its central proposal is an inquiry: under what conditions do unusual experiences become useful questions, shared meanings or unwarranted authority? The strongest available claims in this initial source set concern bounded practices and effects, not a single drug-driven origin of intelligence. A comparison with AI concerns the social evaluation of compelling interpretations, not shared consciousness or pharmacology. The project supplies an explicit claims ledger, revision conditions and an agenda for further research. Root Sequence provides coordination and accessible synthesis; it does not claim specialist authority or a novel theory of mind.

+

1. The joke is the doorway

+

“Now open to page 666 as we recite …” is an excellent beginning for a fictional book. It is a less reliable archaeological method. The humor works because a grand explanatory story is already waiting: perhaps the universe became comprehensible when somebody ate the wrong thing, or the right thing, depending on the subsequent publishing contract.

+

A serious inquiry begins by resisting the convenience of that story. “Drugs explain the universe” contains at least three different propositions. A substance might change a person's experience of the universe. That experience might influence the explanations they construct. Those explanations might or might not accurately describe the world. The first proposition does not entail the third.

+

The same distinction prevents an equally lazy dismissal. Explaining an experience partly through physiology does not show that it was meaningless, that the person is foolish, or that every thought produced during it was false. Origin and justification are different questions. We can take a report seriously while examining its interpretation.

+

The working thesis is therefore deliberately conditional: altered states may contribute to meaning-making by changing what is noticed, felt, remembered or proposed; their consequences depend on how people interpret, test, transmit and govern those changes. This is an organizing hypothesis, not an empirical result established by this paper.

+

2. Scope, method and definitions

+

This first edition is a targeted narrative synthesis. Searches on 14 October 2026 sought primary archaeological reports, experimental studies, cultural research, a relevant community position and primary AI research. Queries covered Arad cannabis, Pamir residues, Menorca hair, the South American ritual bundle, psychedelic creativity, mystical-type reports, REBUS, psychedelic evolution, cultural spiritual experience, collective innovation and language-model sycophancy. Sources were included for a specific claim or methodological contrast. Neither comprehensive database coverage nor a reproducible systematic-review screening process was performed. No experiments, statistical synthesis or independent peer review were conducted.

+

“Altered state” is a comparative description, not a single natural kind. We use it for substantial changes in experience relative to a person's ordinary waking condition. Sleep, absorption, illness and drug effects should not be collapsed into one mechanism. Even “ordinary” needs context: whose baseline, measured when, with which language and expectations?

+

“Curiosity” means motivation to investigate or resolve uncertainty; “creativity” concerns generating and evaluating possibilities; “intelligence” has multiple contested operationalizations; “meaning” can refer to personal significance, social interpretation or semantic content. A finding about one cannot silently substitute for all four. In particular, a creativity task does not measure the evolutionary origin of intelligence.

+

Evidence labels in this suite have distinct jobs. Finding reports what a cited study detected or measured, within its design. Interpretation offers an account of what a finding means. Hypothesis proposes a testable relationship. Speculation explores possibilities without adequate discriminating evidence. Normative position states what we think people ought to do. These labels are not a numerical ladder of certainty: an interpretation may be strong, while an empirical result may be fragile.

+

3. Four archaeological windows, not a universal timeline

+

At Arad, cannabinoid residues on one altar and frankincense-related residues on another support a specific account of substances burned in a Judahite shrine. This materially improves on guessing from a suggestive image. It does not establish that Judaism originated in cannabis experiences, identify a worshipper's thoughts, or settle a disputed word in scripture.S01

+

At Jirzankal in the Pamirs, chemical residues in wooden braziers support cannabis burning in a funerary context around 500 BCE. The authors discuss material with comparatively strong psychoactive potential. The evidence concerns a place, period and practice; the paper's title should not be read as proof that this was the first such use anywhere.S02

+

A roughly thousand-year-old South American ritual bundle provides evidence of multiple psychotropic plant compounds. Its significance lies in materially documented access to such substances. A collection of compounds is not automatically a recipe, proof of simultaneous ingestion, or an unbroken genealogy of a present-day ceremony.S03

+

At Es Càrritx in Menorca, analysis of ancient human hair detected ephedrine, atropine and scopolamine. This is closer to evidence of bodily exposure than a suggestively shaped container. Funerary context helps interpret the find, but the identity, intentions and exact experience of the people involved are not recovered by the chemical assay.S04

+

These cases illuminate different inferential steps. Plant presence, preparation, consumption, physiological effect, remembered experience and social meaning require different evidence. A residue can be chemically persuasive while its religious interpretation remains uncertain. Conversely, the absence of preserved residue cannot establish that nobody used a rapidly degrading substance. Preservation is a filter, not a census.

+

We should ask of every archaeological story: what was sampled; what was detected; how was contamination addressed; how was the sample dated; which alternatives fit the context; and where does the investigator move from measurement to reconstruction? Our collection is deliberately small and geographically uneven. It cannot support prevalence estimates, a global chronology or ranking cultures by sophistication.

+

4. “Drugs” is too large a drawer

+

Classic psychedelics such as psilocin, LSD and mescaline share important serotonergic pharmacology, especially involvement of the 5-HT2A receptor. That does not make their time courses, effects or risks identical.S05 Cannabis is not a synonym for a classic psychedelic. Nor should tropane alkaloids in the Menorca case be casually relabeled as psilocybin-like agents. The assemblage includes compounds with different pharmacological actions.S04

+

A responsible case record should name the substance or plant where known, the uncertainty of identification, the preparation if evidenced, the route if evidenced, and the social setting. It should distinguish a modern isolated compound from a variable botanical preparation. This paper supplies no recipes, dosing protocols or treatment recommendations.

+

The cultural equivalent of the same mistake is using “shamanism” as a universal container. A Judahite shrine, an Andean bundle, a Native American Church practice, an Amazonian tradition and a modern research session are not interchangeable locations for one timeless human event. A community's own categories may not correspond to an outsider's contrast between recreational, medical and religious use.

+

For that reason, this edition declines to retell specific Mazatec, Amazonian or Vedic traditions without adequate contextual sources and specialist checking. Soma identification, Eleusinian preparations, mushroom interpretations of rock art and universal drug-origin stories remain research questions here, not historical findings. A missing chapter is preferable to an invented bridge.

+

5. What would “stoned ape” have to establish?

+

The maximal claim is not merely that ancestors encountered psychoactive organisms. It is that repeated exposure made a consequential causal contribution to the biological evolution of distinctive human cognition. Those claims are separated by several demanding steps.

+

First, exposure must be established for relevant populations and periods. Second, the relevant effects must have changed behavior under those conditions. Third, the effects must have affected survival or reproduction, or a clearly specified process of cultural transmission. Fourth, the proposed pathway must explain something beyond competing accounts. A change during one person's lifetime is not, by itself, a heritable evolutionary change.

+

Rodríguez Arce and Winkelman offer an explicit hypothesis about psychedelics, sociality and human evolution. Their synthesis helps formulate possible mechanisms, but acknowledges the lack of incontrovertible direct evidence of ancient psychedelic mushroom ingestion. It should be read as hypothesis construction, not archaeological confirmation.S09

+

The strongest objection to the overclaim is consequently inferential. Modern effects do not establish ancient exposure; ancient exposure would not alone establish selection; selection would not show that the effect explains language or intelligence generally. The evidence assembled here does not meet that chain. This is not a proof that every possible contribution was zero. It is a reason to withhold the grand conclusion.

+

A narrower historical question is more tractable: once particular communities had particular practices, how did those practices change learning, interpretation or social relationships? Even then, we need contrasts. Communities differ in ecology, kinship, institutions and outside pressures. “They used a drug and had elaborate myths” supplies no counterfactual. Myths also need transmission, audiences, memory, teaching and authority.

+

6. Curiosity, creativity and the feeling of discovery

+

Mason and colleagues' placebo-controlled study of 60 healthy participants found a useful dissociation: acute reports of creative insight increased while deliberate task-based creativity decreased; at seven days, participants reported more ideas new to themselves, while convergent-thinking performance remained lower than placebo. Both groups improved from their own baselines at follow-up. This self-rated novelty is not independently established originality. The result is time- and task-specific, not a general cognitive upgrade.S07

+

This contrast matters because a person may feel that an idea is important before being able to evaluate it. That observation supplies a research question rather than a verdict against inspiration. How well does confidence track accuracy? Which ideas survive later testing? Are useful questions produced even when immediate answers are wrong? Are outcomes different when people have time, trusted critics and a safe opportunity to revise?

+

We propose separating generation from evaluation in future studies. A participant might first produce questions, then revisit them later; independent assessors could rate novelty, clarity and answerability without knowing the condition. Accuracy, confidence, emotional salience and usefulness should be recorded separately. Any drug study would require qualified investigators, ethical review and an appropriate clinical research setting. Root Sequence has not designed or authorized such an experiment.

+

An accessible non-drug first step is a literature audit: extract how each study defines creativity, records expectations, handles attrition and chooses follow-up times. The result may be that apparently contradictory findings tested different constructs. That would be a valuable correction even if it yields no dramatic new theory.

+

7. Experience, mechanism and truth

+

Griffiths and colleagues studied 18 screened healthy adults in supported sessions and found persistent reports of personal and spiritual significance. Acute extreme anxiety or fear also occurred in this supported study. These are consequential reports about experience. They do not verify the cosmological content of that experience, and the sample and setting limit generalization.S06

+

REBUS offers a mechanistic proposal involving relaxed precision of high-level prior beliefs under psychedelics. It is one theoretical account of altered cognition, not proof that the brain has uncovered an ordinarily hidden universal reality.S08

+

Three levels should remain visible. Phenomenology asks what happened for the person. Mechanism asks how an experience was produced. Epistemology asks what, if anything, the experience warrants believing. No level automatically settles the others. A person may learn that a relationship matters to them without gaining privileged access to physics. A moving experience can motivate a good scientific question without itself answering it.

+

Likewise, emotional intensity does not determine ethical correctness. Feeling interconnected does not specify how to resolve a conflict about land, consent or scarce resources. Those questions require accountable deliberation. The project treats wonder as compatible with checking, and checking as compatible with respect.

+

8. From private experience to collective meaning

+

Luhrmann and colleagues found relationships among cultural models of mind, absorption and reports of spiritual presence across multiple settings. This work directs attention to interpretation and culturally shaped experience without requiring a drug-origin explanation.S10

+

Muthukrishna and Henrich develop an account of innovation through collective cultural processes, including recombination and transmission. This provides a competent comparison for stories centered entirely on a chemically inspired individual.S11 An idea becomes cumulative knowledge only if somebody can retain, communicate, evaluate and improve it. The machinery of attention and transmission belongs in the explanation.

+

Our proposed analytical sequence is: experience; report; interpretation; circulation; stabilization; challenge or revision. It is an editorial map, not a discovered universal law. The arrows can run backward: inherited stories may shape expectations before an experience occurs. Many experiences never enter a shared story at all.

+

A memorable narrative may spread because it is useful, emotionally compelling, institutionally supported, or difficult to contradict safely. Those are alternative hypotheses, not a conclusion that all religion is manipulation. Religious life also includes practices, relationships, obligations and disagreement that a focus on visionary events could obscure. This edition does not offer a comprehensive theory of religion.

+

Naturalistic research links recent psychedelic use with reported transformative experience and social connectedness. Its structural-equation analysis was explicitly exploratory and nonpreregistered. Because participants were not randomly assigned to those life situations, statistical mediation is not sufficient to establish the causal story.S12 Moreover, connectedness is not the same outcome as reliable group judgment. A group may feel closer while becoming less willing to hear a dissenter. The possibility should be tested rather than assumed in either direction.

+

9. Who is allowed to interpret?

+

The political question is not just who has an unusual experience, but whose report is heard, how it is classified and who receives authority from it. A priest, clinician, scientist, community elder, platform operator or participant may each claim a different kind of standing. Expertise about mechanisms does not automatically confer moral jurisdiction over a person's life. First-person access to an experience does not automatically confer public authority over others.

+

Consider a fictional community member who reports a vision about moving a settlement. The report may deserve patient attention. Acting on it still requires examining water, safety, competing testimony, resources and consent. Dismissing the speaker without hearing them and making everyone obey the vision are both failures of inquiry. This example is invented to expose the distinction; it is not an ethnographic description.

+

Our normative position is that communities need ways to acknowledge meaningful experiences while preserving refusal, dissent and correction. This includes the ability to reject an imposed interpretation. “You are resisting the truth” should not be an all-purpose answer to disagreement. Neither should “your experience is merely chemistry” be an all-purpose reason to ignore distress or significance.

+

10. Ethics belongs in the argument

+

The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative describes a position centered on Indigenous cultural perspectives and distinguishes peyote issues from generalized drug-reform efforts. This is a living organization's account of its priorities, not permission to represent all Indigenous peoples.S14 A reusable open project must not treat public visibility as an unlimited entitlement to extract ceremony, imagery or knowledge.

+

For future commissioned cultural chapters, the project should specify the writer's relationship to the material, compensation, review arrangements, permitted reuse and any limits on disclosure. Community review does not substitute for checking empirical claims, and academic review does not substitute for consent. Those responsibilities answer different questions.

+

The same care applies to archaeological human remains and destructive sampling. Our editorial position is to ask whose permissions governed the work and how knowledge is returned, rather than treating remains as ownerless evidence. This draft has not audited the governance of each cited excavation and does not claim otherwise.

+

Challenging-experience research documents adverse as well as positively interpreted outcomes; its selected retrospective survey cannot establish their prevalence among all users.S13 An inquiry about meaning should not erase distress, impairment or coercion to preserve an uplifting arc. Nor should it require suffering to be narrated as growth. This is an educational project, not clinical guidance.

+

Expectancy and compromised blinding complicate interpretation in psychedelic trials. The methodological debate concerns what can be attributed to which component, not whether all research should be discarded.S16 Funding, participant selection, facilitator expectations and publication incentives belong in study appraisal alongside chemistry.

+

11. AI enters through the interpretation problem

+

AI does not need to be a drug to belong in this inquiry. The relevant comparison is what people do with a compelling account generated in interaction. A language model can help organize a report, offer analogies or produce a polished explanation. Fluency alone does not make that explanation true, and repetition across generated responses does not establish independent corroboration.

+

Research on sycophancy has found tested language models sometimes favor agreement with user beliefs over truthfulness. This is a bounded behavioral finding about evaluated systems, not a claim that every model always agrees.S15

+

Our extension is a hypothesis: when someone is strongly invested in an interpretation, an affirming AI response may increase its apparent authority. This paper supplies no clinical or population evidence for that extension. A test would have to measure belief change, distinguish supportive language from factual agreement, consider disagreement styles and protect participants. It should not provoke vulnerable participants into distress to produce an interesting demonstration.

+

There is a more immediate obligation for this project. Its own AI-generated prose may look more coherent and complete than the evidence warrants. We therefore expose source access limits, retain unresolved questions, separate the user's initial idea from AI-developed claims and avoid inventing an expert review. This manuscript is an object of the critique it advances.

+

The analogy stops well before “AI is tripping.” A system's outputs, a human's experience and pharmacological changes in a nervous system are different objects of study. Nothing in the comparison establishes machine consciousness, a shared mechanism or an evolutionary march from mushrooms to chatbots.

+

12. Research agenda and revision conditions

+

The immediate priority is deeper appraisal, not more sweeping coverage. First, fully extract the four archaeological cases: sampling, identification, dates, contamination controls, alternatives and inference limits. Second, extract creativity and spiritual-experience studies with sample characteristics, exclusions, measures, blinding and follow-up. Third, commission or invite appropriately situated cultural scholarship before expanding ceremonial histories. Fourth, develop the AI analogy only where a specific claim can be tested.

+

The organizing hypothesis should weaken if studies find that apparent epistemic benefits disappear under better controls, or that unusual experiences do not improve question generation or later evaluation in the conditions claimed. A historical contribution claim should weaken if ordinary transmission, institutions or ecology explain the pattern without the proposed drug pathway. Evidence of harm or exclusion should change the assessment even if participants also report meaning.

+

A future version should record changed claims explicitly: what was believed, what new evidence appeared, what changed and which editions were updated. No revision should quietly turn an evocative possibility into an established conclusion. Equally, a negative result should not be hidden because it spoils a title.

+

Conclusion

+

The defensible project is bigger than a single origin story because it can survive that story failing. Specific substances, practices and experiences belong to histories that deserve close investigation. Their existence does not collapse cognition, religion and culture into chemistry. The most productive question is what people make of changed experience, and how they learn to distinguish meaning, knowledge and authority.

+

The universe has not supplied a foreword. We can still do the research.

+

The source appraisal records sample, control, interpretation and access limitations, including corrections carried into this revision.

+

References

  1. S01 · Arie, E.; Rosen, B.; Namdar, D. (2020). Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad. Tel Aviv 47(1), 5–28
  2. S02 · Ren, M., et al. (2019). The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs. Science Advances 5, eaaw1391
  3. S03 · Miller, M. J.; Albarracin-Jordan, J.; Moore, C.; Capriles, J. M. (2019). Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America. PNAS 116(23), 11207–11212
  4. S04 · Guerra-Doce, E., et al. (2023). Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis. Scientific Reports 13, 4782
  5. S05 · Nichols, D. E. (2016). Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews 68, 264–355
  6. S06 · Griffiths, R. R., et al. (2011). Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: Immediate and persisting dose-related effects. Psychopharmacology 218, 649–665
  7. S07 · Mason, N. L., et al. (2021). Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure. Translational Psychiatry 11, 209
  8. S08 · Carhart-Harris, R. L.; Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews 71, 316–344
  9. S09 · Rodríguez Arce, J. M.; Winkelman, M. J. (2021). Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution. Frontiers in Psychology 12, 729425
  10. S10 · Luhrmann, T. M., et al. (2021). Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths. PNAS 118(5), e2016649118
  11. S11 · Muthukrishna, M.; Henrich, J. (2016). Innovation in the collective brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371, 20150192
  12. S12 · Forstmann, M., et al. (2020). Transformative experience and social connectedness mediate the mood-enhancing effects of psychedelic use in naturalistic settings. PNAS 117, 2338–2346
  13. S13 · Carbonaro, T. M., et al. (2016). Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences. Journal of Psychopharmacology 30, 1268–1278
  14. S14 · Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (undated; accessed 2026-10-14). Political and Social Issues. Community organization statement
  15. S15 · Sharma, M., et al. (2023). Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models. arXiv:2310.13548; primary research preprint (2023 version)
  16. S16 · Butler, M.; Jelen, L.; Rucker, J. (2022). Expectancy in placebo-controlled trials of psychedelics: if so, so what?. Psychopharmacology
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/paper/manuscript.md b/research/the-stoned-age/paper/manuscript.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9e2b00ec --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/paper/manuscript.md @@ -0,0 +1,181 @@ +# The Stoned Age + +## Altered States, Human Curiosity, and the Long History of Making Meaning + +Living research paper · v0.1.2 · 24 October 2026 · AI-assisted narrative synthesis · author and disciplinary review pending + +Working provocation: **How Drugs Explain the Universe**. The phrase names a temptation this project investigates; it is not its scientific conclusion. + +## Abstract + +Altered states offer a productive route into questions about curiosity, religious experience, cultural transmission and epistemic authority. They also invite overreach: evidence that a substance was used in a particular setting can become a story about the origin of religion; a striking present-day experience can become a theory of human evolution. This paper separates chemical evidence, reports of experience, causal explanations and judgments of truth. It brings selected archaeological findings into conversation with experimental psychology, cultural anthropology, cultural-evolution research and AI research. Its central proposal is an inquiry: under what conditions do unusual experiences become useful questions, shared meanings or unwarranted authority? The strongest available claims in this initial source set concern bounded practices and effects, not a single drug-driven origin of intelligence. A comparison with AI concerns the social evaluation of compelling interpretations, not shared consciousness or pharmacology. The project supplies an explicit claims ledger, revision conditions and an agenda for further research. Root Sequence provides coordination and accessible synthesis; it does not claim specialist authority or a novel theory of mind. + +## 1. The joke is the doorway + +“Now open to page 666 as we recite …” is an excellent beginning for a fictional book. It is a less reliable archaeological method. The humor works because a grand explanatory story is already waiting: perhaps the universe became comprehensible when somebody ate the wrong thing, or the right thing, depending on the subsequent publishing contract. + +A serious inquiry begins by resisting the convenience of that story. “Drugs explain the universe” contains at least three different propositions. A substance might change a person's experience of the universe. That experience might influence the explanations they construct. Those explanations might or might not accurately describe the world. The first proposition does not entail the third. + +The same distinction prevents an equally lazy dismissal. Explaining an experience partly through physiology does not show that it was meaningless, that the person is foolish, or that every thought produced during it was false. Origin and justification are different questions. We can take a report seriously while examining its interpretation. + +The working thesis is therefore deliberately conditional: altered states may contribute to meaning-making by changing what is noticed, felt, remembered or proposed; their consequences depend on how people interpret, test, transmit and govern those changes. This is an organizing hypothesis, not an empirical result established by this paper. + +## 2. Scope, method and definitions + +This first edition is a targeted narrative synthesis. Searches on 14 October 2026 sought primary archaeological reports, experimental studies, cultural research, a relevant community position and primary AI research. Queries covered Arad cannabis, Pamir residues, Menorca hair, the South American ritual bundle, psychedelic creativity, mystical-type reports, REBUS, psychedelic evolution, cultural spiritual experience, collective innovation and language-model sycophancy. Sources were included for a specific claim or methodological contrast. Neither comprehensive database coverage nor a reproducible systematic-review screening process was performed. No experiments, statistical synthesis or independent peer review were conducted. + +“Altered state” is a comparative description, not a single natural kind. We use it for substantial changes in experience relative to a person's ordinary waking condition. Sleep, absorption, illness and drug effects should not be collapsed into one mechanism. Even “ordinary” needs context: whose baseline, measured when, with which language and expectations? + +“Curiosity” means motivation to investigate or resolve uncertainty; “creativity” concerns generating and evaluating possibilities; “intelligence” has multiple contested operationalizations; “meaning” can refer to personal significance, social interpretation or semantic content. A finding about one cannot silently substitute for all four. In particular, a creativity task does not measure the evolutionary origin of intelligence. + +Evidence labels in this suite have distinct jobs. **Finding** reports what a cited study detected or measured, within its design. **Interpretation** offers an account of what a finding means. **Hypothesis** proposes a testable relationship. **Speculation** explores possibilities without adequate discriminating evidence. **Normative position** states what we think people ought to do. These labels are not a numerical ladder of certainty: an interpretation may be strong, while an empirical result may be fragile. + +## 3. Four archaeological windows, not a universal timeline + +At Arad, cannabinoid residues on one altar and frankincense-related residues on another support a specific account of substances burned in a Judahite shrine. This materially improves on guessing from a suggestive image. It does not establish that Judaism originated in cannabis experiences, identify a worshipper's thoughts, or settle a disputed word in scripture.[^S01] + +At Jirzankal in the Pamirs, chemical residues in wooden braziers support cannabis burning in a funerary context around 500 BCE. The authors discuss material with comparatively strong psychoactive potential. The evidence concerns a place, period and practice; the paper's title should not be read as proof that this was the first such use anywhere.[^S02] + +A roughly thousand-year-old South American ritual bundle provides evidence of multiple psychotropic plant compounds. Its significance lies in materially documented access to such substances. A collection of compounds is not automatically a recipe, proof of simultaneous ingestion, or an unbroken genealogy of a present-day ceremony.[^S03] + +At Es Càrritx in Menorca, analysis of ancient human hair detected ephedrine, atropine and scopolamine. This is closer to evidence of bodily exposure than a suggestively shaped container. Funerary context helps interpret the find, but the identity, intentions and exact experience of the people involved are not recovered by the chemical assay.[^S04] + +These cases illuminate different inferential steps. Plant presence, preparation, consumption, physiological effect, remembered experience and social meaning require different evidence. A residue can be chemically persuasive while its religious interpretation remains uncertain. Conversely, the absence of preserved residue cannot establish that nobody used a rapidly degrading substance. Preservation is a filter, not a census. + +We should ask of every archaeological story: what was sampled; what was detected; how was contamination addressed; how was the sample dated; which alternatives fit the context; and where does the investigator move from measurement to reconstruction? Our collection is deliberately small and geographically uneven. It cannot support prevalence estimates, a global chronology or ranking cultures by sophistication. + +## 4. “Drugs” is too large a drawer + +Classic psychedelics such as psilocin, LSD and mescaline share important serotonergic pharmacology, especially involvement of the 5-HT2A receptor. That does not make their time courses, effects or risks identical.[^S05] Cannabis is not a synonym for a classic psychedelic. Nor should tropane alkaloids in the Menorca case be casually relabeled as psilocybin-like agents. The assemblage includes compounds with different pharmacological actions.[^S04] + +A responsible case record should name the substance or plant where known, the uncertainty of identification, the preparation if evidenced, the route if evidenced, and the social setting. It should distinguish a modern isolated compound from a variable botanical preparation. This paper supplies no recipes, dosing protocols or treatment recommendations. + +The cultural equivalent of the same mistake is using “shamanism” as a universal container. A Judahite shrine, an Andean bundle, a Native American Church practice, an Amazonian tradition and a modern research session are not interchangeable locations for one timeless human event. A community's own categories may not correspond to an outsider's contrast between recreational, medical and religious use. + +For that reason, this edition declines to retell specific Mazatec, Amazonian or Vedic traditions without adequate contextual sources and specialist checking. Soma identification, Eleusinian preparations, mushroom interpretations of rock art and universal drug-origin stories remain research questions here, not historical findings. A missing chapter is preferable to an invented bridge. + +## 5. What would “stoned ape” have to establish? + +The maximal claim is not merely that ancestors encountered psychoactive organisms. It is that repeated exposure made a consequential causal contribution to the biological evolution of distinctive human cognition. Those claims are separated by several demanding steps. + +First, exposure must be established for relevant populations and periods. Second, the relevant effects must have changed behavior under those conditions. Third, the effects must have affected survival or reproduction, or a clearly specified process of cultural transmission. Fourth, the proposed pathway must explain something beyond competing accounts. A change during one person's lifetime is not, by itself, a heritable evolutionary change. + +Rodríguez Arce and Winkelman offer an explicit hypothesis about psychedelics, sociality and human evolution. Their synthesis helps formulate possible mechanisms, but acknowledges the lack of incontrovertible direct evidence of ancient psychedelic mushroom ingestion. It should be read as hypothesis construction, not archaeological confirmation.[^S09] + +The strongest objection to the overclaim is consequently inferential. Modern effects do not establish ancient exposure; ancient exposure would not alone establish selection; selection would not show that the effect explains language or intelligence generally. The evidence assembled here does not meet that chain. This is not a proof that every possible contribution was zero. It is a reason to withhold the grand conclusion. + +A narrower historical question is more tractable: once particular communities had particular practices, how did those practices change learning, interpretation or social relationships? Even then, we need contrasts. Communities differ in ecology, kinship, institutions and outside pressures. “They used a drug and had elaborate myths” supplies no counterfactual. Myths also need transmission, audiences, memory, teaching and authority. + +## 6. Curiosity, creativity and the feeling of discovery + +Mason and colleagues' placebo-controlled study of 60 healthy participants found a useful dissociation: acute reports of creative insight increased while deliberate task-based creativity decreased; at seven days, participants reported more ideas new to themselves, while convergent-thinking performance remained lower than placebo. Both groups improved from their own baselines at follow-up. This self-rated novelty is not independently established originality. The result is time- and task-specific, not a general cognitive upgrade.[^S07] + +This contrast matters because a person may feel that an idea is important before being able to evaluate it. That observation supplies a research question rather than a verdict against inspiration. How well does confidence track accuracy? Which ideas survive later testing? Are useful questions produced even when immediate answers are wrong? Are outcomes different when people have time, trusted critics and a safe opportunity to revise? + +We propose separating generation from evaluation in future studies. A participant might first produce questions, then revisit them later; independent assessors could rate novelty, clarity and answerability without knowing the condition. Accuracy, confidence, emotional salience and usefulness should be recorded separately. Any drug study would require qualified investigators, ethical review and an appropriate clinical research setting. Root Sequence has not designed or authorized such an experiment. + +An accessible non-drug first step is a literature audit: extract how each study defines creativity, records expectations, handles attrition and chooses follow-up times. The result may be that apparently contradictory findings tested different constructs. That would be a valuable correction even if it yields no dramatic new theory. + +## 7. Experience, mechanism and truth + +Griffiths and colleagues studied 18 screened healthy adults in supported sessions and found persistent reports of personal and spiritual significance. Acute extreme anxiety or fear also occurred in this supported study. These are consequential reports about experience. They do not verify the cosmological content of that experience, and the sample and setting limit generalization.[^S06] + +REBUS offers a mechanistic proposal involving relaxed precision of high-level prior beliefs under psychedelics. It is one theoretical account of altered cognition, not proof that the brain has uncovered an ordinarily hidden universal reality.[^S08] + +Three levels should remain visible. Phenomenology asks what happened for the person. Mechanism asks how an experience was produced. Epistemology asks what, if anything, the experience warrants believing. No level automatically settles the others. A person may learn that a relationship matters to them without gaining privileged access to physics. A moving experience can motivate a good scientific question without itself answering it. + +Likewise, emotional intensity does not determine ethical correctness. Feeling interconnected does not specify how to resolve a conflict about land, consent or scarce resources. Those questions require accountable deliberation. The project treats wonder as compatible with checking, and checking as compatible with respect. + +## 8. From private experience to collective meaning + +Luhrmann and colleagues found relationships among cultural models of mind, absorption and reports of spiritual presence across multiple settings. This work directs attention to interpretation and culturally shaped experience without requiring a drug-origin explanation.[^S10] + +Muthukrishna and Henrich develop an account of innovation through collective cultural processes, including recombination and transmission. This provides a competent comparison for stories centered entirely on a chemically inspired individual.[^S11] An idea becomes cumulative knowledge only if somebody can retain, communicate, evaluate and improve it. The machinery of attention and transmission belongs in the explanation. + +Our proposed analytical sequence is: experience; report; interpretation; circulation; stabilization; challenge or revision. It is an editorial map, not a discovered universal law. The arrows can run backward: inherited stories may shape expectations before an experience occurs. Many experiences never enter a shared story at all. + +A memorable narrative may spread because it is useful, emotionally compelling, institutionally supported, or difficult to contradict safely. Those are alternative hypotheses, not a conclusion that all religion is manipulation. Religious life also includes practices, relationships, obligations and disagreement that a focus on visionary events could obscure. This edition does not offer a comprehensive theory of religion. + +Naturalistic research links recent psychedelic use with reported transformative experience and social connectedness. Its structural-equation analysis was explicitly exploratory and nonpreregistered. Because participants were not randomly assigned to those life situations, statistical mediation is not sufficient to establish the causal story.[^S12] Moreover, connectedness is not the same outcome as reliable group judgment. A group may feel closer while becoming less willing to hear a dissenter. The possibility should be tested rather than assumed in either direction. + +## 9. Who is allowed to interpret? + +The political question is not just who has an unusual experience, but whose report is heard, how it is classified and who receives authority from it. A priest, clinician, scientist, community elder, platform operator or participant may each claim a different kind of standing. Expertise about mechanisms does not automatically confer moral jurisdiction over a person's life. First-person access to an experience does not automatically confer public authority over others. + +Consider a fictional community member who reports a vision about moving a settlement. The report may deserve patient attention. Acting on it still requires examining water, safety, competing testimony, resources and consent. Dismissing the speaker without hearing them and making everyone obey the vision are both failures of inquiry. This example is invented to expose the distinction; it is not an ethnographic description. + +Our normative position is that communities need ways to acknowledge meaningful experiences while preserving refusal, dissent and correction. This includes the ability to reject an imposed interpretation. “You are resisting the truth” should not be an all-purpose answer to disagreement. Neither should “your experience is merely chemistry” be an all-purpose reason to ignore distress or significance. + +## 10. Ethics belongs in the argument + +The Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative describes a position centered on Indigenous cultural perspectives and distinguishes peyote issues from generalized drug-reform efforts. This is a living organization's account of its priorities, not permission to represent all Indigenous peoples.[^S14] A reusable open project must not treat public visibility as an unlimited entitlement to extract ceremony, imagery or knowledge. + +For future commissioned cultural chapters, the project should specify the writer's relationship to the material, compensation, review arrangements, permitted reuse and any limits on disclosure. Community review does not substitute for checking empirical claims, and academic review does not substitute for consent. Those responsibilities answer different questions. + +The same care applies to archaeological human remains and destructive sampling. Our editorial position is to ask whose permissions governed the work and how knowledge is returned, rather than treating remains as ownerless evidence. This draft has not audited the governance of each cited excavation and does not claim otherwise. + +Challenging-experience research documents adverse as well as positively interpreted outcomes; its selected retrospective survey cannot establish their prevalence among all users.[^S13] An inquiry about meaning should not erase distress, impairment or coercion to preserve an uplifting arc. Nor should it require suffering to be narrated as growth. This is an educational project, not clinical guidance. + +Expectancy and compromised blinding complicate interpretation in psychedelic trials. The methodological debate concerns what can be attributed to which component, not whether all research should be discarded.[^S16] Funding, participant selection, facilitator expectations and publication incentives belong in study appraisal alongside chemistry. + +## 11. AI enters through the interpretation problem + +AI does not need to be a drug to belong in this inquiry. The relevant comparison is what people do with a compelling account generated in interaction. A language model can help organize a report, offer analogies or produce a polished explanation. Fluency alone does not make that explanation true, and repetition across generated responses does not establish independent corroboration. + +Research on sycophancy has found tested language models sometimes favor agreement with user beliefs over truthfulness. This is a bounded behavioral finding about evaluated systems, not a claim that every model always agrees.[^S15] + +Our extension is a hypothesis: when someone is strongly invested in an interpretation, an affirming AI response may increase its apparent authority. This paper supplies no clinical or population evidence for that extension. A test would have to measure belief change, distinguish supportive language from factual agreement, consider disagreement styles and protect participants. It should not provoke vulnerable participants into distress to produce an interesting demonstration. + +There is a more immediate obligation for this project. Its own AI-generated prose may look more coherent and complete than the evidence warrants. We therefore expose source access limits, retain unresolved questions, separate the user's initial idea from AI-developed claims and avoid inventing an expert review. This manuscript is an object of the critique it advances. + +The analogy stops well before “AI is tripping.” A system's outputs, a human's experience and pharmacological changes in a nervous system are different objects of study. Nothing in the comparison establishes machine consciousness, a shared mechanism or an evolutionary march from mushrooms to chatbots. + +## 12. Research agenda and revision conditions + +The immediate priority is deeper appraisal, not more sweeping coverage. First, fully extract the four archaeological cases: sampling, identification, dates, contamination controls, alternatives and inference limits. Second, extract creativity and spiritual-experience studies with sample characteristics, exclusions, measures, blinding and follow-up. Third, commission or invite appropriately situated cultural scholarship before expanding ceremonial histories. Fourth, develop the AI analogy only where a specific claim can be tested. + +The organizing hypothesis should weaken if studies find that apparent epistemic benefits disappear under better controls, or that unusual experiences do not improve question generation or later evaluation in the conditions claimed. A historical contribution claim should weaken if ordinary transmission, institutions or ecology explain the pattern without the proposed drug pathway. Evidence of harm or exclusion should change the assessment even if participants also report meaning. + +A future version should record changed claims explicitly: what was believed, what new evidence appeared, what changed and which editions were updated. No revision should quietly turn an evocative possibility into an established conclusion. Equally, a negative result should not be hidden because it spoils a title. + +## Conclusion + +The defensible project is bigger than a single origin story because it can survive that story failing. Specific substances, practices and experiences belong to histories that deserve close investigation. Their existence does not collapse cognition, religion and culture into chemistry. The most productive question is what people make of changed experience, and how they learn to distinguish meaning, knowledge and authority. + +The universe has not supplied a foreword. We can still do the research. + +The [source appraisal](../research/appraisal.md) records sample, control, interpretation and access limitations, including corrections carried into this revision. + +## References + +[^S01]: Arie, E.; Rosen, B.; Namdar, D. (2020). [Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad](https://cris.biu.ac.il/en/publications/cannabis-and-frankincense-at-the-judahite-shrine-of-arad/). Tel Aviv 47(1), 5–28. + +[^S02]: Ren, M., et al. (2019). [The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs](https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3080701/component/file_3080703/content). Science Advances 5, eaaw1391. + +[^S03]: Miller, M. J.; Albarracin-Jordan, J.; Moore, C.; Capriles, J. M. (2019). [Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6561276/). PNAS 116(23), 11207–11212. + +[^S04]: Guerra-Doce, E., et al. (2023). [Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31064-2). Scientific Reports 13, 4782. + +[^S05]: Nichols, D. E. (2016). [Psychedelics](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4813425/). Pharmacological Reviews 68, 264–355. + +[^S06]: Griffiths, R. R., et al. (2011). [Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: Immediate and persisting dose-related effects](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3308357/). Psychopharmacology 218, 649–665. + +[^S07]: Mason, N. L., et al. (2021). [Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8032715/). Translational Psychiatry 11, 209. + +[^S08]: Carhart-Harris, R. L.; Friston, K. J. (2019). [REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6588209/). Pharmacological Reviews 71, 316–344. + +[^S09]: Rodríguez Arce, J. M.; Winkelman, M. J. (2021). [Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425/full). Frontiers in Psychology 12, 729425. + +[^S10]: Luhrmann, T. M., et al. (2021). [Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7865123/). PNAS 118(5), e2016649118. + +[^S11]: Muthukrishna, M.; Henrich, J. (2016). [Innovation in the collective brain](https://www.michael.muthukrishna.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/muthukrishna_henrich_2016.pdf). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371, 20150192. + +[^S12]: Forstmann, M., et al. (2020). [Transformative experience and social connectedness mediate the mood-enhancing effects of psychedelic use in naturalistic settings](https://www.crockettlab.org/s/psychadelic-paper-PNAS-rcat.pdf). PNAS 117, 2338–2346. + +[^S13]: Carbonaro, T. M., et al. (2016). [Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5551678/). Journal of Psychopharmacology 30, 1268–1278. + +[^S14]: Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (undated; accessed 2026-10-14). [Political and Social Issues](https://www.ipci.life/politicalandsocialissues). Community organization statement. + +[^S15]: Sharma, M., et al. (2023). [Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548v1). arXiv:2310.13548; primary research preprint (2023 version). + +[^S16]: Butler, M.; Jelen, L.; Rucker, J. (2022). [Expectancy in placebo-controlled trials of psychedelics: if so, so what?](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9481484/). Psychopharmacology. diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/research/appraisal.html b/research/the-stoned-age/research/appraisal.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..e810e5e8 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/research/appraisal.html @@ -0,0 +1,63 @@ +Source appraisal — The Stoned Age

Source appraisal and evidence checks

+

14 October 2026 · evidence revision v0.1.1 · AI-assisted editorial appraisal; specialist review pending.

+

This is a claim-focused appraisal of all 16 sources in the first edition, not a systematic review, independent replication, or certification of their findings. The source register supplies bibliographic identities; the claims ledger identifies the claims affected. Full-text availability and full methodological verification are different milestones. Main-text inspection does not imply that supplements, raw data, registrations, instruments, permissions or every cited study have been audited.

+

Decisions from this pass

+ +

S01 — Arad: bounded finding; full methods pending

+

University source record. Inspected: bibliographic record and abstract; publisher full text was not obtained through the inspected legitimate access paths. The abstract reports residue analysis at two laboratories. This supports attributing a specific finding to the authors, not independently endorsing contamination handling or analytical specificity.

+

Decision: retain the local shrine-residue claim with its access limitation. Do not extend it to Jerusalem, biblical plant identifications, all Judahite worship or the origin of religion. Open: full methods, controls, chronology, chromatograms and laboratory agreement require the article and appropriate archaeological-chemistry review. An abstract is not a substitute for that work.

+

S02 — Pamirs: positive and exterior controls; potency inferred

+

Primary paper. Inspected: full main text via Europe PMC XML; Results/Table 1 and Materials and Methods. Ten braziers from eight tombs and four stones were examined. CBN was reported in nine interior residues and two stones, with negative exterior comparisons. Reference material and mass-spectral comparisons strengthen identification.

+

Decision: retain cannabis burning in a funerary setting. Original THC concentration was not measured; comparative potency is inferred from degradation products. Presence does not prove cultivation, participants' experiences, or the first use in history. Open: supplementary dating table and chromatograms, preservation biases and independent analytical reassessment. The authors declared no competing interests; funding provenance is reported in the paper, not treated as a validity score.

+

S03 — South American bundle: contents do not establish a recipe

+

Primary article. Inspected: main-text methods and results, including Fig. 3, through the public article. The outer bag's reported calibrated interval is 905–1170 CE. LC-MS/MS identified multiple compounds in pouch material; the psilocin peak is tentative, unlike the confirmed compounds.

+

Decision: retain evidence for access to multiple psychoactive plants. Do not convert co-presence into simultaneous ingestion, a particular ayahuasca preparation, confirmed mushroom use, or continuity with a living tradition. The authors themselves consider separate use. Open: supplementary analytical controls and spectra, object-specific contamination histories, and a specialist assessment of taxonomic identifications. Dating a container is not directly dating every residue deposited inside it.

+

S04 — Menorca: hair evidence; biological sample count matters

+

Primary article. Inspected: full main text, dating discussion and UHPLC-HRMS methods via Europe PMC. Three approximately 10 mg aliquots came from one container compartment; they are not three identified individuals. Washing and comparison with analytical standards are described. Hair may combine individuals or mortuary events.

+

Decision: retain reported alkaloid detection. The redated hair's two-sigma calibrated interval is 820–551 BCE; container wood has a different interval. Avoid an exact “3,000-year-old” consumption date. Concentrations do not reconstruct dose, and missing roots prevent segmental temporal interpretation. Plant species, social roles and ritual meanings remain interpretations.

+

Open: ancient-matrix controls and wash results were not located in the inspected main methods. Seek analytical clarification of its unusual signal-to-noise wording for detection/quantification limits; do not silently repair it or label it a demonstrated error.

+

S05 — Pharmacology: review scope retained

+

Review. Inspected: receptor-mechanism excerpts and bibliographic identity; exhaustive full-review appraisal remains open. A broad pharmacological review can orient classification, but does not make cannabis, classic serotonergic psychedelics, stimulants and antimuscarinic compounds interchangeable.

+

Decision: retain only the limited classification purpose. It is not a source for comparative safety, dosing, treatment advice or ancient subjective states. Open: specialist review and primary receptor studies for any future detailed mechanism claims; updated literature before expanding beyond this deliberately narrow use.

+

S06 — Significance: selected participants and supported sessions

+

Primary article. Inspected: main-text participant selection, session design and reported outcomes; indexed follow-up results also inspected; complete measurement audit remains open. Eighteen screened adults participated in five sessions. Active-dose order was randomized between ascending and descending schedules; placebo placement was quasi-randomized. Participants were selected and highly motivated; this is not a population sample.

+

Decision: retain persisting self-reported significance, while noting that 39% reported extreme anxiety/fear at one or both of the two highest-dose sessions. This percentage describes this particular study, not general-use risk. Significance is not metaphysical verification. The follow-up interview reports all 18 participants; detailed measure-level denominators, blinding/monitor effects and outcome multiplicity still need audit. Do not confuse this 2011 dose-response study with the earlier 36-person active-comparator study.

+

S07 — Creativity: correction required and implemented

+

Primary article. Inspected: full main text via Europe PMC, behavioral methods, results and limitations. Sixty experienced healthy volunteers were randomized 30/30. Task analyses used smaller samples: 51 for the picture-concept task and 57 for alternate uses. Acute subjective insight increased while several deliberate task scores fell.

+

At day seven, the positive alternate-uses result was self-rated novelty: ideas new to the participant. Convergent-thinking scores remained lower than placebo, although both groups improved from baseline at follow-up. Neither result establishes general intelligence, independently rated real-world innovation, or evolutionary advantage. Imaging associations do not establish the mechanism of task changes.

+

Decision: replace the first edition's vague “a later measure improved” wording in the paper and booklet; make essay and talk equally explicit. Open: missing-data and blinding details, supplementary methods, behavioral multiplicity and registration crosswalk (NL6007/NTR6505). Funding includes the Beckley Foundation; the paper declares no competing interests. Funding alone neither confirms nor refutes results.

+

S08 — REBUS: model, not a truth detector

+

Theory/review. Inspected: main text via Europe PMC, model formulation and supporting discussion. The article integrates predictive-processing and psychedelic research; it is not one randomized test establishing its entire explanatory framework.

+

Decision: retain as a mechanistic hypothesis. Distinguish measurements from their interpretation in terms of prior precision. A flexible model must make predictions that distinguish it from alternatives; agreement with selected findings alone is insufficient. Open: comparative model evaluation, operational definitions and updated direct tests. Nothing in the model verifies an experience's cosmological content. The paper declares no conflicts and acknowledges funding; these declarations are provenance, not substitutes for model testing.

+

S09 — Evolution: explicit theory, missing ancestral causal chain

+

Hypothesis and theory article. Inspected: full main text via Europe PMC, proposed mechanisms and future-test section. Contemporary pharmacological and social findings motivate evolutionary possibilities; they do not observe ancestral exposure or selection.

+

Decision: retain as a serious hypothesis to interrogate, not confirmation of “stoned ape.” The proposed cross-cultural tests are proposals, not completed results. Even a present-day association between subsistence and use would need treatment of shared ancestry, historical diffusion, coding and survival bias. Open: discriminating evidence against rival explanations; separate biological selection, cultural transmission and individual learning. Reject both an unsupported single-cause origin story and the claim that absence of surviving traces proves no ancient use.

+

S10 — Spiritual presence: cross-cultural associations

+

Primary article. Inspected: main text via Europe PMC, four-study design and measures. The project combines interviews and surveys across five countries. Studies 3 and 4 included 519 and 505 undergraduates respectively; study 1 focused on strongly religious adults. Study 4 reports a preregistered analysis, which has not been independently compared against its registration here.

+

Decision: retain associations of absorption and models of mind with reported spiritual presence. These are reports and coded interviews, not observation of spirits or a drug manipulation. Diversity improves scope but does not make samples representative of whole cultures. Open: translation, measurement equivalence, coder reliability, recruitment, supplements and registration audit. A shared self-report method can contribute covariance. No direction of causal influence is established by association alone.

+

S11 — Collective innovation: theoretical comparison

+

Author-hosted primary paper. Inspected: paper's framework and discussion of sociality, transmission and network trade-offs. This is a theoretical synthesis of multiple evidence streams, not a psychedelic intervention.

+

Decision: retain the comparison: innovation can depend on recombination, transmission and social organization. The paper also discusses costs of excessive interconnection and reduced variation; “more connection is always better” would misstate it. The collective-brain metaphor does not show that a group is conscious, wise or drug-enhanced. Open: primary-study appraisal if specific demographic or network causal claims are added. This project has not replicated the models or evaluated every historical example.

+

S12 — Festival study: association survives no causal shortcut

+

Author-lab primary paper. Inspected: full paper available; design, reported outcomes and limitations inspected. Of 1,242 respondents at six gatherings, 17 were excluded, leaving 1,225. The attention-check response was missing for 156 retained participants. Instruments changed across events. Some hypotheses were registered before analysis; the paper explicitly labels its structural-equation model and recency comparisons nonpreregistered. Adjustments do not randomize exposure.

+

Decision: retain association language despite causal-sounding wording in the title. Statistical mediation requires assumptions about temporal order and unmeasured confounding; it does not demonstrate that transformation causes connectedness, which causes mood. Festival attendance and willingness/ability to respond select the sample. Open: registration timing, event-specific instruments, missingness and sensitivity analyses. No claim about clinical effectiveness, long-term benefit, or sound collective decisions follows from these results.

+

S13 — Challenging experiences: selected worst episodes

+

Primary article. Inspected: full main article available through public retrieval; recruitment, exclusions and limitations examined. An online convenience survey analyzed 1,993 responses about respondents' single worst challenging mushroom experience. Reports were retrospective; many respondents also reported other substance use.

+

Decision: retain evidence that serious negative consequences occur alongside positive interpretations. Do not calculate population incidence from a sample selected for challenging episodes. Recruitment through psychedelic-interest channels and incomplete responses can introduce other selection effects, so the direction of overall bias cannot simply be assumed. Open: clinical ascertainment and prospective comparison groups. These reports do not validate substance identity, dose or clinical diagnoses. Positive retrospective meaning does not negate harm.

+

S14 — IPCI: situated authority

+

Organization statement. Inspected: current public page on 14 October 2026, particularly its drug-policy section. IPCI calls for Indigenous peyote peoples to lead policy concerning peyote and distinguishes this from generalized reform.

+

Decision: attribute the position to IPCI. This is a source for the organization's own priorities, not a scientific experiment, a statement of current law, or permission to speak for all Indigenous peoples. Public availability does not authorize reproducing restricted knowledge or sacred imagery. Open: appropriate cultural authorship and review before expanding into tradition-specific chapters. The present editorial ethics are the project's responsibility, not an endorsement solicited from IPCI.

+

S15 — Sycophancy: historical systems and task dependence

+

2023 preprint, version 1. Inspected: full HTML available; task definitions, models, preference analysis and conclusions examined. Five named assistants were tested across four task families. Some evaluations use model-generated material and model judges; preference analysis and optimization experiments address different causal questions.

+

Decision: retain evidence of sycophancy in those evaluations, with version/date explicit. Optimization did not increase every measured form of sycophancy. Do not universalize to all RLHF, current models or real conversations. All authors disclosed Anthropic affiliation, with additional affiliations for some; institutional involvement is relevant provenance. Open: independent replication, evaluator validity and current-system evaluation. Our proposed connection to epistemic authority is a project hypothesis, not evidence of induced delusion or a clinical outcome.

+

S16 — Expectancy: methodological argument with disclosed interests

+

Methodological article. Inspected: full main text via Europe PMC, argument, recommendations and disclosures. The authors discuss unblinding, expectancy, pragmatic designs and the possibility that treatment and expectancy interact. This is not a new randomized estimate of expectancy's magnitude.

+

Decision: retain the problem without concluding that trials are worthless or that expectancy can simply be subtracted. Distinguish estimating a drug-specific effect from evaluating an entire supported intervention. Open: trial-specific audits rather than blanket acceptance or rejection. Disclosures include industry-funded psilocybin trials and paid consultancy/employment relationships for an author; these should be visible when weighing the argument, without treating them as proof of invalidity. Historical statements about treatment availability are not used as current medical facts.

+

Integrity checks and remaining release gates

+

The companion metadata check records Crossref DOI/title/type retrieval and available update/relation fields. Empty fields are not a clean bill of health: publisher notices, indexing and retrospective corrections can be incomplete. Title searches for S01 and S07 with correction/retraction terms did not establish a source-specific notice. One journal listing placed an unrelated correction beside S07; proximity in search results is not evidence of a correction to S07. No comprehensive retraction clearance is claimed.

+

Before a scholarly release: obtain S01 full text; complete S05/S06 and all relevant supplements/registration checks; have analytical specialists review archaeological identifications and chronology; assess primary studies behind review-level claims; seek appropriately situated cultural scholarship; expand the dated literature search and contradictory evidence; independently review all 19 claims. No raw-data reanalysis or human-subject research was performed. No source text or copyrighted figure is redistributed here.

+

Publication status: public draft PR #45; merge and deployment pending. This appraisal improves the draft while documenting why it is not yet a reviewed scholarly release.

+

Review follow-up: 24 October 2026

+

This AI-assisted maintenance pass checked selected passages, rather than repeating the entire 16-source appraisal. Author, scholarly and cultural review remain pending.

+ +

The other source appraisals and unresolved scholarly-release gates remain as recorded above. The correction does not establish a general cognitive benefit or harm, an evolutionary explanation, clinical guidance, or cultural endorsement. Updated editions remain public drafts.

\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/research/appraisal.md b/research/the-stoned-age/research/appraisal.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..a88de808 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/research/appraisal.md @@ -0,0 +1,135 @@ +# Source appraisal and evidence checks + +14 October 2026 · evidence revision v0.1.1 · AI-assisted editorial appraisal; specialist review pending. + +This is a claim-focused appraisal of all 16 sources in the first edition, not a systematic review, independent replication, or certification of their findings. The [source register](sources.md) supplies bibliographic identities; the [claims ledger](claims.csv) identifies the claims affected. Full-text availability and full methodological verification are different milestones. Main-text inspection does not imply that supplements, raw data, registrations, instruments, permissions or every cited study have been audited. + +## Decisions from this pass + +- **Correct S07 across editions.** The later creativity result concerns participants marking ideas as new to themselves. It is not independently established novelty or a general cognitive improvement. Convergent-thinking performance remained lower than placebo at seven days. +- **Balance S06.** Enduring significance reports coexist with acute fear in a small, carefully screened, supported sample. Neither finding determines metaphysical truth or general safety. +- **Narrow archaeological inference.** Residue chemistry, original potency, consumption, preparation, individual experience and religious meaning are separate claims. Replicated aliquots are not independent ancient people. +- **Preserve association labels.** Cultural and festival studies do not establish a drug-driven origin of religion, mediation causality, or better collective decisions. +- **Date the AI evidence.** S15 concerns named systems and tasks in 2023. Its results motivate a question about authority; they do not demonstrate clinical effects or describe every current system. + +## S01 — Arad: bounded finding; full methods pending + +[University source record](https://cris.biu.ac.il/en/publications/cannabis-and-frankincense-at-the-judahite-shrine-of-arad/). **Inspected:** bibliographic record and abstract; publisher full text was not obtained through the inspected legitimate access paths. The abstract reports residue analysis at two laboratories. This supports attributing a specific finding to the authors, not independently endorsing contamination handling or analytical specificity. + +**Decision:** retain the local shrine-residue claim with its access limitation. Do not extend it to Jerusalem, biblical plant identifications, all Judahite worship or the origin of religion. **Open:** full methods, controls, chronology, chromatograms and laboratory agreement require the article and appropriate archaeological-chemistry review. An abstract is not a substitute for that work. + +## S02 — Pamirs: positive and exterior controls; potency inferred + +[Primary paper](https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3080701/component/file_3080703/content). **Inspected:** full main text via Europe PMC XML; Results/Table 1 and Materials and Methods. Ten braziers from eight tombs and four stones were examined. CBN was reported in nine interior residues and two stones, with negative exterior comparisons. Reference material and mass-spectral comparisons strengthen identification. + +**Decision:** retain cannabis burning in a funerary setting. Original THC concentration was not measured; comparative potency is inferred from degradation products. Presence does not prove cultivation, participants' experiences, or the first use in history. **Open:** supplementary dating table and chromatograms, preservation biases and independent analytical reassessment. The authors declared no competing interests; funding provenance is reported in the paper, not treated as a validity score. + +## S03 — South American bundle: contents do not establish a recipe + +[Primary article](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6561276/). **Inspected:** main-text methods and results, including Fig. 3, through the public article. The outer bag's reported calibrated interval is 905–1170 CE. LC-MS/MS identified multiple compounds in pouch material; the psilocin peak is **tentative**, unlike the confirmed compounds. + +**Decision:** retain evidence for access to multiple psychoactive plants. Do not convert co-presence into simultaneous ingestion, a particular ayahuasca preparation, confirmed mushroom use, or continuity with a living tradition. The authors themselves consider separate use. **Open:** supplementary analytical controls and spectra, object-specific contamination histories, and a specialist assessment of taxonomic identifications. Dating a container is not directly dating every residue deposited inside it. + +## S04 — Menorca: hair evidence; biological sample count matters + +[Primary article](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31064-2). **Inspected:** full main text, dating discussion and UHPLC-HRMS methods via Europe PMC. Three approximately 10 mg aliquots came from one container compartment; they are not three identified individuals. Washing and comparison with analytical standards are described. Hair may combine individuals or mortuary events. + +**Decision:** retain reported alkaloid detection. The redated hair's two-sigma calibrated interval is 820–551 BCE; container wood has a different interval. Avoid an exact “3,000-year-old” consumption date. Concentrations do not reconstruct dose, and missing roots prevent segmental temporal interpretation. Plant species, social roles and ritual meanings remain interpretations. + +**Open:** ancient-matrix controls and wash results were not located in the inspected main methods. Seek analytical clarification of its unusual signal-to-noise wording for detection/quantification limits; do not silently repair it or label it a demonstrated error. + +## S05 — Pharmacology: review scope retained + +[Review](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4813425/). **Inspected:** receptor-mechanism excerpts and bibliographic identity; exhaustive full-review appraisal remains open. A broad pharmacological review can orient classification, but does not make cannabis, classic serotonergic psychedelics, stimulants and antimuscarinic compounds interchangeable. + +**Decision:** retain only the limited classification purpose. It is not a source for comparative safety, dosing, treatment advice or ancient subjective states. **Open:** specialist review and primary receptor studies for any future detailed mechanism claims; updated literature before expanding beyond this deliberately narrow use. + +## S06 — Significance: selected participants and supported sessions + +[Primary article](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3308357/). **Inspected:** main-text participant selection, session design and reported outcomes; indexed follow-up results also inspected; complete measurement audit remains open. Eighteen screened adults participated in five sessions. Active-dose order was randomized between ascending and descending schedules; placebo placement was quasi-randomized. Participants were selected and highly motivated; this is not a population sample. + +**Decision:** retain persisting self-reported significance, while noting that 39% reported extreme anxiety/fear at one or both of the two highest-dose sessions. This percentage describes this particular study, not general-use risk. Significance is not metaphysical verification. The follow-up interview reports all 18 participants; detailed measure-level denominators, blinding/monitor effects and outcome multiplicity still need audit. Do not confuse this 2011 dose-response study with the earlier 36-person active-comparator study. + +## S07 — Creativity: correction required and implemented + +[Primary article](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8032715/). **Inspected:** full main text via Europe PMC, behavioral methods, results and limitations. Sixty experienced healthy volunteers were randomized 30/30. Task analyses used smaller samples: 51 for the picture-concept task and 57 for alternate uses. Acute subjective insight increased while several deliberate task scores fell. + +At day seven, the positive alternate-uses result was **self-rated novelty**: ideas new to the participant. Convergent-thinking scores remained lower than placebo, although both groups improved from baseline at follow-up. Neither result establishes general intelligence, independently rated real-world innovation, or evolutionary advantage. Imaging associations do not establish the mechanism of task changes. + +**Decision:** replace the first edition's vague “a later measure improved” wording in the paper and booklet; make essay and talk equally explicit. **Open:** missing-data and blinding details, supplementary methods, behavioral multiplicity and registration crosswalk (NL6007/NTR6505). Funding includes the Beckley Foundation; the paper declares no competing interests. Funding alone neither confirms nor refutes results. + +## S08 — REBUS: model, not a truth detector + +[Theory/review](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6588209/). **Inspected:** main text via Europe PMC, model formulation and supporting discussion. The article integrates predictive-processing and psychedelic research; it is not one randomized test establishing its entire explanatory framework. + +**Decision:** retain as a mechanistic hypothesis. Distinguish measurements from their interpretation in terms of prior precision. A flexible model must make predictions that distinguish it from alternatives; agreement with selected findings alone is insufficient. **Open:** comparative model evaluation, operational definitions and updated direct tests. Nothing in the model verifies an experience's cosmological content. The paper declares no conflicts and acknowledges funding; these declarations are provenance, not substitutes for model testing. + +## S09 — Evolution: explicit theory, missing ancestral causal chain + +[Hypothesis and theory article](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425/full). **Inspected:** full main text via Europe PMC, proposed mechanisms and future-test section. Contemporary pharmacological and social findings motivate evolutionary possibilities; they do not observe ancestral exposure or selection. + +**Decision:** retain as a serious hypothesis to interrogate, not confirmation of “stoned ape.” The proposed cross-cultural tests are proposals, not completed results. Even a present-day association between subsistence and use would need treatment of shared ancestry, historical diffusion, coding and survival bias. **Open:** discriminating evidence against rival explanations; separate biological selection, cultural transmission and individual learning. Reject both an unsupported single-cause origin story and the claim that absence of surviving traces proves no ancient use. + +## S10 — Spiritual presence: cross-cultural associations + +[Primary article](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7865123/). **Inspected:** main text via Europe PMC, four-study design and measures. The project combines interviews and surveys across five countries. Studies 3 and 4 included 519 and 505 undergraduates respectively; study 1 focused on strongly religious adults. Study 4 reports a preregistered analysis, which has not been independently compared against its registration here. + +**Decision:** retain associations of absorption and models of mind with reported spiritual presence. These are reports and coded interviews, not observation of spirits or a drug manipulation. Diversity improves scope but does not make samples representative of whole cultures. **Open:** translation, measurement equivalence, coder reliability, recruitment, supplements and registration audit. A shared self-report method can contribute covariance. No direction of causal influence is established by association alone. + +## S11 — Collective innovation: theoretical comparison + +[Author-hosted primary paper](https://www.michael.muthukrishna.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/muthukrishna_henrich_2016.pdf). **Inspected:** paper's framework and discussion of sociality, transmission and network trade-offs. This is a theoretical synthesis of multiple evidence streams, not a psychedelic intervention. + +**Decision:** retain the comparison: innovation can depend on recombination, transmission and social organization. The paper also discusses costs of excessive interconnection and reduced variation; “more connection is always better” would misstate it. The collective-brain metaphor does not show that a group is conscious, wise or drug-enhanced. **Open:** primary-study appraisal if specific demographic or network causal claims are added. This project has not replicated the models or evaluated every historical example. + +## S12 — Festival study: association survives no causal shortcut + +[Author-lab primary paper](https://www.crockettlab.org/s/psychadelic-paper-PNAS-rcat.pdf). **Inspected:** full paper available; design, reported outcomes and limitations inspected. Of 1,242 respondents at six gatherings, 17 were excluded, leaving 1,225. The attention-check response was missing for 156 retained participants. Instruments changed across events. Some hypotheses were registered before analysis; the paper explicitly labels its structural-equation model and recency comparisons nonpreregistered. Adjustments do not randomize exposure. + +**Decision:** retain association language despite causal-sounding wording in the title. Statistical mediation requires assumptions about temporal order and unmeasured confounding; it does not demonstrate that transformation causes connectedness, which causes mood. Festival attendance and willingness/ability to respond select the sample. **Open:** registration timing, event-specific instruments, missingness and sensitivity analyses. No claim about clinical effectiveness, long-term benefit, or sound collective decisions follows from these results. + +## S13 — Challenging experiences: selected worst episodes + +[Primary article](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5551678/). **Inspected:** full main article available through public retrieval; recruitment, exclusions and limitations examined. An online convenience survey analyzed 1,993 responses about respondents' single worst challenging mushroom experience. Reports were retrospective; many respondents also reported other substance use. + +**Decision:** retain evidence that serious negative consequences occur alongside positive interpretations. Do not calculate population incidence from a sample selected for challenging episodes. Recruitment through psychedelic-interest channels and incomplete responses can introduce other selection effects, so the direction of overall bias cannot simply be assumed. **Open:** clinical ascertainment and prospective comparison groups. These reports do not validate substance identity, dose or clinical diagnoses. Positive retrospective meaning does not negate harm. + +## S14 — IPCI: situated authority + +[Organization statement](https://www.ipci.life/politicalandsocialissues). **Inspected:** current public page on 14 October 2026, particularly its drug-policy section. IPCI calls for Indigenous peyote peoples to lead policy concerning peyote and distinguishes this from generalized reform. + +**Decision:** attribute the position to IPCI. This is a source for the organization's own priorities, not a scientific experiment, a statement of current law, or permission to speak for all Indigenous peoples. Public availability does not authorize reproducing restricted knowledge or sacred imagery. **Open:** appropriate cultural authorship and review before expanding into tradition-specific chapters. The present editorial ethics are the project's responsibility, not an endorsement solicited from IPCI. + +## S15 — Sycophancy: historical systems and task dependence + +[2023 preprint, version 1](https://arxiv.org/html/2310.13548v1). **Inspected:** full HTML available; task definitions, models, preference analysis and conclusions examined. Five named assistants were tested across four task families. Some evaluations use model-generated material and model judges; preference analysis and optimization experiments address different causal questions. + +**Decision:** retain evidence of sycophancy in those evaluations, with version/date explicit. Optimization did not increase every measured form of sycophancy. Do not universalize to all RLHF, current models or real conversations. All authors disclosed Anthropic affiliation, with additional affiliations for some; institutional involvement is relevant provenance. **Open:** independent replication, evaluator validity and current-system evaluation. Our proposed connection to epistemic authority is a project hypothesis, not evidence of induced delusion or a clinical outcome. + +## S16 — Expectancy: methodological argument with disclosed interests + +[Methodological article](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9481484/). **Inspected:** full main text via Europe PMC, argument, recommendations and disclosures. The authors discuss unblinding, expectancy, pragmatic designs and the possibility that treatment and expectancy interact. This is not a new randomized estimate of expectancy's magnitude. + +**Decision:** retain the problem without concluding that trials are worthless or that expectancy can simply be subtracted. Distinguish estimating a drug-specific effect from evaluating an entire supported intervention. **Open:** trial-specific audits rather than blanket acceptance or rejection. Disclosures include industry-funded psilocybin trials and paid consultancy/employment relationships for an author; these should be visible when weighing the argument, without treating them as proof of invalidity. Historical statements about treatment availability are not used as current medical facts. + +## Integrity checks and remaining release gates + +The companion [metadata check](metadata-check.json) records Crossref DOI/title/type retrieval and available update/relation fields. Empty fields are **not** a clean bill of health: publisher notices, indexing and retrospective corrections can be incomplete. Title searches for S01 and S07 with correction/retraction terms did not establish a source-specific notice. One journal listing placed an unrelated correction beside S07; proximity in search results is not evidence of a correction to S07. No comprehensive retraction clearance is claimed. + +Before a scholarly release: obtain S01 full text; complete S05/S06 and all relevant supplements/registration checks; have analytical specialists review archaeological identifications and chronology; assess primary studies behind review-level claims; seek appropriately situated cultural scholarship; expand the dated literature search and contradictory evidence; independently review all 19 claims. No raw-data reanalysis or human-subject research was performed. No source text or copyrighted figure is redistributed here. + +Publication status: public **draft** [PR #45](https://github.com/Root-Sequence/root-sequence/pull/45); merge and deployment pending. This appraisal improves the draft while documenting why it is not yet a reviewed scholarly release. + +## Review follow-up: 24 October 2026 + +This AI-assisted maintenance pass checked selected passages, rather than repeating the entire 16-source appraisal. Author, scholarly and cultural review remain pending. + +- **S01:** Bar-Ilan's author-institution abstract and publication record. The bounded residue attribution remains; full methods were not obtained. +- **S03:** Indexed primary-paper Results and Fig. 3 text, including the tentative psilocin identification. Direct PMC/XML retrieval failed in this pass; the full analytical record was not reappraised. +- **S04:** Publisher abstract, sample provenance, replicated-aliquot results and relevant analytical-method passages. Detection remains distinct from dose, individual identity and cultural interpretation. +- **S06:** Indexed primary abstract and fear/selection passages. This rechecks the small supported sample and adverse-experience context, not the full measurement record or general-use risk. +- **S07:** Primary text on novelty scoring and follow-up convergent-thinking comparisons. The editions now specify the placebo comparator; the paper/appraisal retain within-group improvement. No reanalysis or supplement/registration crosswalk was performed. +- **S14:** IPCI's current policy page, especially its drug-policy section. Its own position remains attributed to IPCI; no claim to represent all Indigenous communities follows. +- **S15:** Version 1 abstract and model/task descriptions. Source-register and edition links now pin that 2023 version. Models were not rerun and this is not a current-system assessment. + +The other source appraisals and unresolved scholarly-release gates remain as recorded above. The correction does not establish a general cognitive benefit or harm, an evolutionary explanation, clinical guidance, or cultural endorsement. Updated editions remain public drafts. diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/research/claims.csv b/research/the-stoned-age/research/claims.csv new file mode 100644 index 00000000..c53f510b --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/research/claims.csv @@ -0,0 +1,20 @@ +id,status,claim,sources,locator,limit,revision_trigger,editions +C01,Finding,Residues support specific substance use at Arad.,S01,Abstract; organic residue identification,Do not infer a religion-wide origin.,Full laboratory and contamination appraisal.,Paper 3; booklet 4; essay 2; talk 3 +C02,Finding,Pamir braziers support cannabis burning in a funerary context.,S02,Chemical analysis and archaeological context,Earliest surviving evidence is not necessarily first use.,Dating and sampling reassessment.,Paper 3; booklet 4; essay 2; talk 3 +C03,Finding,The South American bundle supports access to multiple psychotropic plants.,S03,Main-text methods and Fig. 3; appraisal S03,Does not establish a recipe or simultaneous ingestion.,Full methods and residue interpretation.,Paper 3; booklet 4; essay 2; talk 4 +C04,Finding,Menorca hair yielded the reported alkaloids.,S04,Abstract; archaeological context; analytical methods,Three aliquots are not three persons; detection does not recover dose or subjective meaning.,Replication and contamination assessment.,Paper 3; booklet 4; essay 2; talk 4 +C05,Pharmacological synthesis,Psychoactive substances must not be treated as interchangeable.,S05;S04,Receptor discussion; named analytes,No dosing or clinical extrapolation.,Specialist pharmacology review.,Paper 4; booklet 5; essay 3 +C06,"Hypothesis, unestablished",Psychedelic exposure contributed to human cognitive evolution.,S09,Hypothesis-and-theory framing; ancient ingestion evidence gap,This is not established by the current evidence chain.,Ancestral exposure plus discriminating causal evidence.,Paper 5; booklet 6; essay 3; talk 5 +C07,Finding,Subjective insight and task creativity can diverge.,S07,Methods; acute and follow-up results,"Acute and seven-day results differ; later novelty is self-rated, while convergent thinking remained lower than placebo. Analysis samples differ.","Replications, effect estimates, blinding audit.",Paper 6; booklet 7; essay 4; talk 6 +C08,Finding,Participants reported persisting personal and spiritual significance.,S06,Participants; follow-up self-report,Small screened sample; acute fear also occurred; not metaphysical verification.,Full measure and attrition appraisal.,Paper 7; booklet 8; essay 4; talk 7 +C09,Mechanistic hypothesis,REBUS models psychedelic cognition through altered prior precision.,S08,Abstract; model formulation,Not a settled theory or truth detector.,Comparisons with rival models and tests.,Paper 7 +C10,Finding / association,Spiritual-presence reports relate to cultural models and absorption.,S10,Abstract; results; discussion,No drug-origin inference or metaphysical verdict.,"Sampling, translation and measurement review.",Paper 8; booklet 9; essay 5; talk 8 +C11,Theoretical comparison,Innovation can be studied as a collective cultural process.,S11,Collective-brain account,Does not prove psychedelic enhancement.,Native cultural-evolution methods.,Paper 8; booklet 9; talk 8 +C12,Finding / association,"Naturalistic reports link use, transformation and connectedness.",S12,Results and discussion,Mediation is not randomized causation or good group judgment.,Confounding and longitudinal appraisal.,Paper 8 +C13,Finding / selected reports,Challenging experiences include negative consequences.,S13,Survey results,Not a population incidence estimate.,Sampling and follow-up appraisal.,Paper 10; booklet 10 +C14,Situated community position,IPCI asks for Indigenous cultural perspectives on peyote questions.,S14,Political and social issues page,Does not stand for every Indigenous community.,Check updates and appropriately situated review.,Paper 10; booklet 10; essay 6; talk 9 +C15,Finding in tested systems,Some language models exhibit sycophancy in evaluated tasks.,S15,2023 v1 sections 3–4; appraisal S15,"Not every model, user or context.",Replications and specific system evaluations.,Paper 11; booklet 11; essay 7; talk 10 +C16,Methodological concern,Expectancy and unblinding complicate causal attribution.,S16,Methodological discussion,Does not imply all results are worthless.,Study-level controls and reporting appraisal.,Paper 10 +C17,Project hypothesis,Affirming AI interpretations may increase perceived authority.,C15 as motivation only,Paper 11 argument,Not empirically demonstrated here; not a clinical claim.,Ethically designed belief-change study.,Paper 11; essay 7 +C18,Normative position,Meaningful experience must remain compatible with consent and dissent.,Project editorial position,Paper 9–10,"Ethical argument, not an experimental result.","Critique, community input, competing ethical arguments.",All editions +C19,Editorial model,Experience-to-revision map organizes questions.,Project synthesis,Paper 8,Not a universal sequence or new scientific law.,Counterexamples; retire if unhelpful.,All editions diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/research/metadata-check.json b/research/the-stoned-age/research/metadata-check.json new file mode 100644 index 00000000..062461bc --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/research/metadata-check.json @@ -0,0 +1,175 @@ +{ + "checked": "2026-10-14", + "scope": "Crossref records only, not comprehensive notice clearance", + "records": [ + { + "id": "S01", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1080/03344355.2020.1732046", + "title": [ + "Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad" + ], + "doi": "10.1080/03344355.2020.1732046", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S02", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1126/sciadv.aaw1391", + "status": "HTTP Error 429: Too Many Requests" + }, + { + "id": "S03", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1073/pnas.1902174116", + "title": [ + "Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America" + ], + "doi": "10.1073/pnas.1902174116", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S04", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1038/s41598-023-31064-2", + "title": [ + "Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis" + ], + "doi": "10.1038/s41598-023-31064-2", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S05", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1124/pr.115.011478", + "title": [ + "Psychedelics" + ], + "doi": "10.1124/pr.115.011478", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S06", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1007/s00213-011-2358-5", + "title": [ + "Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: immediate and persisting dose-related effects" + ], + "doi": "10.1007/s00213-011-2358-5", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S07", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1038/s41398-021-01335-5", + "title": [ + "Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure" + ], + "doi": "10.1038/s41398-021-01335-5", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S08", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1124/pr.118.017160", + "title": [ + "REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics" + ], + "doi": "10.1124/pr.118.017160", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S09", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425", + "title": [ + "Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution" + ], + "doi": "10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S10", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1073/pnas.2016649118", + "title": [ + "Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths" + ], + "doi": "10.1073/pnas.2016649118", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S11", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1098/rstb.2015.0192", + "title": [ + "Innovation in the collective brain" + ], + "doi": "10.1098/rstb.2015.0192", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S12", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1073/pnas.1918477117", + "title": [ + "Transformative experience and social connectedness mediate the mood-enhancing effects of psychedelic use in naturalistic settings" + ], + "doi": "10.1073/pnas.1918477117", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S13", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1177/0269881116662634", + "title": [ + "Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences" + ], + "doi": "10.1177/0269881116662634", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + }, + { + "id": "S14", + "status": "no DOI recorded in this register; not queried" + }, + { + "id": "S15", + "status": "no DOI recorded in this register; not queried" + }, + { + "id": "S16", + "url": "https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1007/s00213-022-06221-6", + "title": [ + "Expectancy in placebo-controlled trials of psychedelics: if so, so what?" + ], + "doi": "10.1007/s00213-022-06221-6", + "type": "journal-article", + "update_to": [], + "relation": {}, + "status": "metadata retrieved; absence of relations does not prove absence of corrections" + } + ] +} diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/research/methods.md b/research/the-stoned-age/research/methods.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..ae0522ee --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/research/methods.md @@ -0,0 +1,57 @@ +# Method, limits and next evidence pass + +Status: v0.1.1, AI-assisted targeted narrative synthesis, 2026-10-14. No original empirical research or systematic review. All source IDs resolve in [sources.md](sources.md); claims and revision triggers live in [claims.csv](claims.csv). + +## Search record + +Search surfaces: web search with primary journal, PMC, institutional and author records; Crossref bibliographic lookup; community organization website. Language primarily English. No date restriction. No exhaustive citation chaining. Searches were selected to address the requested project themes, not to estimate the total literature. + +Query families actually used: Miller 2019 psychotropic ritual bundle; Arie Rosen Namdar Arad; Ren 2019 Pamirs; Guerra-Doce Menorca hair; Griffiths mystical-type experience; Mason creativity; Carhart-Harris Friston REBUS; Rodríguez Arce Winkelman evolution; Luhrmann spiritual presence; Muthukrishna Henrich collective brain; Forstmann connectedness; Carbonaro challenging experiences; expectancy psychedelic trials; IPCI political/social issues; Sharma sycophancy. + +Inclusion: a traceable source with a specific role in a bounded claim or contrast. Preference for original studies, explicit theoretical papers and the relevant community's own statement. Exclusion from factual support: Reddit commentary, general encyclopedia summaries, commercial explanations, unsupported origin narratives and search results whose source could not be identified. These exclusions were editorial, not blinded screening. No PRISMA-style count is claimed. + +Access: several PMC direct opens returned challenges even when indexed article passages were available; the Mason publisher page redirected to an inaccessible identity page. This reduced inspection depth. The register marks excerpt-level versus full-page access. “Full article available” does not mean independent critical appraisal or data reproduction. Crossref supplied metadata for nine of fourteen DOI records; five requests returned rate limits. The remaining records were checked against visible source records where available. + +## What this first pass contributes + +- Four cases separated by evidence type rather than arranged into an unsupported global origin story. +- A causal-chain critique that distinguishes possible exposure, measured effects, evolutionary transmission and explanatory comparison. +- Clear separation of subjective insight, task performance, personal meaning, metaphysical claims and decision authority. +- An AI analogy bounded to interpretation and corroboration, with its extension marked as a hypothesis. +- Shared source identifiers and revision triggers across the public-facing editions. + +These are synthesis and communication contributions. No novelty finding, validated theory, comprehensive cultural history or causal estimate is claimed. + +## Priority 1: full study extraction + +Before upgrading v0.1 to a reviewed release, extract S01–S04 and S06–S07 in full. For archaeology: sample provenance, dates and uncertainty, preservation, analytes, controls, contamination, alternative uses, investigator interpretation and permissions. For experiments: population, sample size by analysis, assignment, exclusions, preregistration, blinding assessment, measures, effect estimates and uncertainty, attrition, adverse-event collection and conflicts of interest. + +Do not turn abstract verification into a quality score. Record unknowns explicitly. Check corrections, retractions and later replications; this initial pass did not perform a comprehensive update or retraction audit. Obtain disciplinary review of the highest-leverage inferences. A source that cannot be inspected should support only the narrow statement that can be checked. + +## Priority 2: cultural and religious scholarship + +Commission or invite situated scholarship on one context at a time, with compensation and consent terms where applicable. Potential chapters: a carefully bounded Mazatec history; distinct Amazonian traditions and their changes; peyote conservation and sovereignty; textual arguments around Soma or Eleusis; non-drug religious experience. These are proposed topics, not completed chapters or claims that their drug identifications are settled. + +Review categories with historians and anthropologists: myth, religion, ritual, medicine and altered state may be poor translations in some contexts. Do not extract secret knowledge or use a single reviewer as blanket cultural authorization. Record disagreements rather than replacing them with a single convenient voice. + +## Priority 3: test narrower questions + +Begin with a non-interventional literature appraisal of confidence versus accuracy and the generation versus evaluation of questions. Later, qualified researchers could examine whether interpretations remain corrigible across time and social contexts. Human-participant research requires a separate protocol, ethics process, safeguarding and appropriate expertise; none is authorized by this draft. + +For AI, first define the outcome: agreement, factual accuracy, confidence change or willingness to revise. A fictional transcript audit can test a coding scheme, not establish real-world benefit or harm. Model outputs are not participant data. The project must not label an invented demonstration an experiment. + +## Maintenance + +Use one source register and one claims ledger. Edit Markdown/JSON sources, rebuild reader editions, and note which claims changed. Recheck evidence when a consequential update appears or before a new release; no automatic monitoring is scheduled. Retain stable source IDs even when records are corrected. Record retired claims rather than silently deleting their history. + +A reviewer should be able to answer: what changed, what supports it, what could defeat it, and which editions now reflect it? + +## Follow-up appraisal, 14 October 2026 + +See [appraisal.md](appraisal.md) for the claim-focused review of all 16 sources, including main-text extraction, source-specific unresolved checks and editorial decisions. Europe PMC XML and author/lab repositories expanded access. Crossref returned 13 of 14 DOI records in the new pass; S02 was rate-limited. The earlier nine-record count above describes the initial pass. No comprehensive correction/retraction clearance is claimed. + +## Maintenance follow-up, 24 October 2026 + +The v0.1.2 pass rechecked selected passages for S01, S03, S04, S06, S07, S14 and S15 through institutional records, primary-paper pages or indexed primary text. Its access limits and editorial decisions are recorded in the [appraisal follow-up](appraisal.md#review-follow-up-24-october-2026). This was a targeted maintenance check, not a new literature search or a repeat of every source appraisal. The source counts and search record above remain historical records of the earlier passes. + +S07's follow-up comparison now explicitly names placebo across editions; the paper and appraisal also distinguish improvement from each group's own baseline. S15 links now pin version 1, matching the historical evidence being discussed. No new empirical result, study reanalysis, clinical recommendation or claim of cultural authorization was added. diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/research/sources.html b/research/the-stoned-age/research/sources.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..25a8b131 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/research/sources.html @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Sources — The Stoned Age

Sources & limits

Read the source-by-source appraisal

16 source records. See inspection notes, claims ledger and method and research agenda.

  1. S01 · Arie, E.; Rosen, B.; Namdar, D. (2020). Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad. Tel Aviv 47(1), 5–28
  2. S02 · Ren, M., et al. (2019). The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs. Science Advances 5, eaaw1391
  3. S03 · Miller, M. J.; Albarracin-Jordan, J.; Moore, C.; Capriles, J. M. (2019). Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America. PNAS 116(23), 11207–11212
  4. S04 · Guerra-Doce, E., et al. (2023). Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis. Scientific Reports 13, 4782
  5. S05 · Nichols, D. E. (2016). Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews 68, 264–355
  6. S06 · Griffiths, R. R., et al. (2011). Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: Immediate and persisting dose-related effects. Psychopharmacology 218, 649–665
  7. S07 · Mason, N. L., et al. (2021). Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure. Translational Psychiatry 11, 209
  8. S08 · Carhart-Harris, R. L.; Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews 71, 316–344
  9. S09 · Rodríguez Arce, J. M.; Winkelman, M. J. (2021). Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution. Frontiers in Psychology 12, 729425
  10. S10 · Luhrmann, T. M., et al. (2021). Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths. PNAS 118(5), e2016649118
  11. S11 · Muthukrishna, M.; Henrich, J. (2016). Innovation in the collective brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371, 20150192
  12. S12 · Forstmann, M., et al. (2020). Transformative experience and social connectedness mediate the mood-enhancing effects of psychedelic use in naturalistic settings. PNAS 117, 2338–2346
  13. S13 · Carbonaro, T. M., et al. (2016). Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences. Journal of Psychopharmacology 30, 1268–1278
  14. S14 · Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (undated; accessed 2026-10-14). Political and Social Issues. Community organization statement
  15. S15 · Sharma, M., et al. (2023). Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models. arXiv:2310.13548; primary research preprint (2023 version)
  16. S16 · Butler, M.; Jelen, L.; Rucker, J. (2022). Expectancy in placebo-controlled trials of psychedelics: if so, so what?. Psychopharmacology
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/research/sources.json b/research/the-stoned-age/research/sources.json new file mode 100644 index 00000000..097ff531 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/research/sources.json @@ -0,0 +1,210 @@ +[ + { + "id": "S01", + "authors": "Arie, E.; Rosen, B.; Namdar, D.", + "year": "2020", + "title": "Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad", + "venue": "Tel Aviv 47(1), 5–28", + "doi": "10.1080/03344355.2020.1732046", + "url": "https://cris.biu.ac.il/en/publications/cannabis-and-frankincense-at-the-judahite-shrine-of-arad/", + "inspection": "University bibliographic record and abstract", + "limit": "Residues and inferred burning at a particular shrine; no general origin claim.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S02", + "authors": "Ren, M., et al.", + "year": "2019", + "title": "The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs", + "venue": "Science Advances 5, eaaw1391", + "doi": "10.1126/sciadv.aaw1391", + "url": "https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3080701/component/file_3080703/content", + "inspection": "Full main text via Europe PMC XML; results, controls and methods inspected; supplements pending", + "limit": "Chemical residue evidence; concentrations in the original material and subjective experiences are reconstructed, not observed.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S03", + "authors": "Miller, M. J.; Albarracin-Jordan, J.; Moore, C.; Capriles, J. M.", + "year": "2019", + "title": "Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America", + "venue": "PNAS 116(23), 11207–11212", + "doi": "10.1073/pnas.1902174116", + "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6561276/", + "inspection": "Public main-text methods and results inspected; supplementary analytical audit pending", + "limit": "Bundle contents do not establish a specific combined preparation or a participant experience.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S04", + "authors": "Guerra-Doce, E., et al.", + "year": "2023", + "title": "Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis", + "venue": "Scientific Reports 13, 4782", + "doi": "10.1038/s41598-023-31064-2", + "url": "https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31064-2", + "inspection": "Full main text via Europe PMC XML; dating and analytical methods inspected", + "limit": "Human hair supports exposure; specific social roles and meanings remain interpretive.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S05", + "authors": "Nichols, D. E.", + "year": "2016", + "title": "Psychedelics", + "venue": "Pharmacological Reviews 68, 264–355", + "doi": "10.1124/pr.115.011478", + "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4813425/", + "inspection": "Review excerpts; receptor-mechanism discussion", + "limit": "Pharmacological classification, not equivalence among all psychoactive substances.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S06", + "authors": "Griffiths, R. R., et al.", + "year": "2011", + "title": "Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: Immediate and persisting dose-related effects", + "venue": "Psychopharmacology 218, 649–665", + "doi": "10.1007/s00213-011-2358-5", + "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3308357/", + "inspection": "Main-text selection, session design and outcomes inspected; full follow-up audit pending", + "limit": "Small, screened sample and supported setting; self-report is not metaphysical verification.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S07", + "authors": "Mason, N. L., et al.", + "year": "2021", + "title": "Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure", + "venue": "Translational Psychiatry 11, 209", + "doi": "10.1038/s41398-021-01335-5", + "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8032715/", + "inspection": "Full main text via Europe PMC XML; task-specific samples and outcomes inspected; supplement access failed", + "limit": "Later self-rated novelty is not independent originality; convergent thinking remained lower at day seven. Task-specific samples and blinding limit generalization.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S08", + "authors": "Carhart-Harris, R. L.; Friston, K. J.", + "year": "2019", + "title": "REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics", + "venue": "Pharmacological Reviews 71, 316–344", + "doi": "10.1124/pr.118.017160", + "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6588209/", + "inspection": "Full main text available via Europe PMC XML; model and supporting discussion inspected", + "limit": "Mechanistic model; not a settled account or proof that experiences reveal hidden reality.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S09", + "authors": "Rodríguez Arce, J. M.; Winkelman, M. J.", + "year": "2021", + "title": "Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution", + "venue": "Frontiers in Psychology 12, 729425", + "doi": "10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425", + "url": "https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425/full", + "inspection": "Full main text via Europe PMC XML; mechanisms and proposed tests inspected", + "limit": "Explicit hypothesis-and-theory article, not direct evidence of ancestral psychedelic selection.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S10", + "authors": "Luhrmann, T. M., et al.", + "year": "2021", + "title": "Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths", + "venue": "PNAS 118(5), e2016649118", + "doi": "10.1073/pnas.2016649118", + "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7865123/", + "inspection": "Full main text via Europe PMC XML; studies and measures inspected; registration comparison pending", + "limit": "Cross-cultural associations in reports; neither drug-origin proof nor metaphysical adjudication.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S11", + "authors": "Muthukrishna, M.; Henrich, J.", + "year": "2016", + "title": "Innovation in the collective brain", + "venue": "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371, 20150192", + "doi": "10.1098/rstb.2015.0192", + "url": "https://www.michael.muthukrishna.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/muthukrishna_henrich_2016.pdf", + "inspection": "Author-hosted full paper; framework and network trade-offs inspected", + "limit": "Cultural-evolution account; not evidence of a psychedelic cause.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S12", + "authors": "Forstmann, M., et al.", + "year": "2020", + "title": "Transformative experience and social connectedness mediate the mood-enhancing effects of psychedelic use in naturalistic settings", + "venue": "PNAS 117, 2338–2346", + "doi": "10.1073/pnas.1918477117", + "url": "https://www.crockettlab.org/s/psychadelic-paper-PNAS-rcat.pdf", + "inspection": "Author-lab full paper; design, exclusions, results and limitations inspected", + "limit": "Observational association; mediation analysis does not establish experimental causation.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S13", + "authors": "Carbonaro, T. M., et al.", + "year": "2016", + "title": "Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences", + "venue": "Journal of Psychopharmacology 30, 1268–1278", + "doi": "10.1177/0269881116662634", + "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5551678/", + "inspection": "Public main article; recruitment, exclusions and limitations inspected", + "limit": "Selected retrospective reports cannot estimate population incidence.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S14", + "authors": "Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative", + "year": "undated; accessed 2026-10-14", + "title": "Political and Social Issues", + "venue": "Community organization statement", + "doi": "", + "url": "https://www.ipci.life/politicalandsocialissues", + "inspection": "Organization policy page inspected 2026-10-14", + "limit": "Authoritative account of this organization’s position, not a voice for every Indigenous community.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S15", + "authors": "Sharma, M., et al.", + "year": "2023", + "title": "Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models", + "venue": "arXiv:2310.13548; primary research preprint (2023 version)", + "doi": "", + "url": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548v1", + "inspection": "Version 1 full HTML; task definitions, models and preference analyses inspected", + "limit": "Evidence about tested models and tasks, not every present-day AI interaction.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + }, + { + "id": "S16", + "authors": "Butler, M.; Jelen, L.; Rucker, J.", + "year": "2022", + "title": "Expectancy in placebo-controlled trials of psychedelics: if so, so what?", + "venue": "Psychopharmacology", + "doi": "10.1007/s00213-022-06221-6", + "url": "https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9481484/", + "inspection": "Full main text via Europe PMC XML; argument and disclosures inspected", + "limit": "Methodological discussion; unblinding complicates attribution without making every finding worthless.", + "appraisal": "appraisal.md", + "checked": "2026-10-14" + } +] diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/research/sources.md b/research/the-stoned-age/research/sources.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4db8a27c --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/research/sources.md @@ -0,0 +1,131 @@ +# Shared source register + +v0.1.1 · 14 October 2026. See the [source appraisal](appraisal.md) and [metadata check](metadata-check.json). Inspection does not mean independent validation. + +## S01 — Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad + +Arie, E.; Rosen, B.; Namdar, D. (2020). Tel Aviv 47(1), 5–28. [Source](https://cris.biu.ac.il/en/publications/cannabis-and-frankincense-at-the-judahite-shrine-of-arad/). DOI: 10.1080/03344355.2020.1732046. + +**Inspected:** University bibliographic record and abstract. + +**Limit:** Residues and inferred burning at a particular shrine; no general origin claim. + +## S02 — The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs + +Ren, M., et al. (2019). Science Advances 5, eaaw1391. [Source](https://pure.mpg.de/rest/items/item_3080701/component/file_3080703/content). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aaw1391. + +**Inspected:** Full main text via Europe PMC XML; results, controls and methods inspected; supplements pending. + +**Limit:** Chemical residue evidence; concentrations in the original material and subjective experiences are reconstructed, not observed. + +## S03 — Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America + +Miller, M. J.; Albarracin-Jordan, J.; Moore, C.; Capriles, J. M. (2019). PNAS 116(23), 11207–11212. [Source](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6561276/). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1902174116. + +**Inspected:** Public main-text methods and results inspected; supplementary analytical audit pending. + +**Limit:** Bundle contents do not establish a specific combined preparation or a participant experience. + +## S04 — Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis + +Guerra-Doce, E., et al. (2023). Scientific Reports 13, 4782. [Source](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-31064-2). DOI: 10.1038/s41598-023-31064-2. + +**Inspected:** Full main text via Europe PMC XML; dating and analytical methods inspected. + +**Limit:** Human hair supports exposure; specific social roles and meanings remain interpretive. + +## S05 — Psychedelics + +Nichols, D. E. (2016). Pharmacological Reviews 68, 264–355. [Source](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4813425/). DOI: 10.1124/pr.115.011478. + +**Inspected:** Review excerpts; receptor-mechanism discussion. + +**Limit:** Pharmacological classification, not equivalence among all psychoactive substances. + +## S06 — Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: Immediate and persisting dose-related effects + +Griffiths, R. R., et al. (2011). Psychopharmacology 218, 649–665. [Source](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3308357/). DOI: 10.1007/s00213-011-2358-5. + +**Inspected:** Main-text selection, session design and outcomes inspected; full follow-up audit pending. + +**Limit:** Small, screened sample and supported setting; self-report is not metaphysical verification. + +## S07 — Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure + +Mason, N. L., et al. (2021). Translational Psychiatry 11, 209. [Source](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8032715/). DOI: 10.1038/s41398-021-01335-5. + +**Inspected:** Full main text via Europe PMC XML; task-specific samples and outcomes inspected; supplement access failed. + +**Limit:** Later self-rated novelty is not independent originality; convergent thinking remained lower at day seven. Task-specific samples and blinding limit generalization. + +## S08 — REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics + +Carhart-Harris, R. L.; Friston, K. J. (2019). Pharmacological Reviews 71, 316–344. [Source](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6588209/). DOI: 10.1124/pr.118.017160. + +**Inspected:** Full main text available via Europe PMC XML; model and supporting discussion inspected. + +**Limit:** Mechanistic model; not a settled account or proof that experiences reveal hidden reality. + +## S09 — Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution + +Rodríguez Arce, J. M.; Winkelman, M. J. (2021). Frontiers in Psychology 12, 729425. [Source](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425/full). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.729425. + +**Inspected:** Full main text via Europe PMC XML; mechanisms and proposed tests inspected. + +**Limit:** Explicit hypothesis-and-theory article, not direct evidence of ancestral psychedelic selection. + +## S10 — Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths + +Luhrmann, T. M., et al. (2021). PNAS 118(5), e2016649118. [Source](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7865123/). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2016649118. + +**Inspected:** Full main text via Europe PMC XML; studies and measures inspected; registration comparison pending. + +**Limit:** Cross-cultural associations in reports; neither drug-origin proof nor metaphysical adjudication. + +## S11 — Innovation in the collective brain + +Muthukrishna, M.; Henrich, J. (2016). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371, 20150192. [Source](https://www.michael.muthukrishna.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/muthukrishna_henrich_2016.pdf). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0192. + +**Inspected:** Author-hosted full paper; framework and network trade-offs inspected. + +**Limit:** Cultural-evolution account; not evidence of a psychedelic cause. + +## S12 — Transformative experience and social connectedness mediate the mood-enhancing effects of psychedelic use in naturalistic settings + +Forstmann, M., et al. (2020). PNAS 117, 2338–2346. [Source](https://www.crockettlab.org/s/psychadelic-paper-PNAS-rcat.pdf). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1918477117. + +**Inspected:** Author-lab full paper; design, exclusions, results and limitations inspected. + +**Limit:** Observational association; mediation analysis does not establish experimental causation. + +## S13 — Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences + +Carbonaro, T. M., et al. (2016). Journal of Psychopharmacology 30, 1268–1278. [Source](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5551678/). DOI: 10.1177/0269881116662634. + +**Inspected:** Public main article; recruitment, exclusions and limitations inspected. + +**Limit:** Selected retrospective reports cannot estimate population incidence. + +## S14 — Political and Social Issues + +Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (undated; accessed 2026-10-14). Community organization statement. [Source](https://www.ipci.life/politicalandsocialissues). + +**Inspected:** Organization policy page inspected 2026-10-14. + +**Limit:** Authoritative account of this organization’s position, not a voice for every Indigenous community. + +## S15 — Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models + +Sharma, M., et al. (2023). arXiv:2310.13548; primary research preprint (2023 version). [Source](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548v1). + +**Inspected:** Version 1 full HTML; task definitions, models and preference analyses inspected. + +**Limit:** Evidence about tested models and tasks, not every present-day AI interaction. + +## S16 — Expectancy in placebo-controlled trials of psychedelics: if so, so what? + +Butler, M.; Jelen, L.; Rucker, J. (2022). Psychopharmacology. [Source](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9481484/). DOI: 10.1007/s00213-022-06221-6. + +**Inspected:** Full main text via Europe PMC XML; argument and disclosures inspected. + +**Limit:** Methodological discussion; unblinding complicates attribution without making every finding worthless. diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/talk/index.html b/research/the-stoned-age/talk/index.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..877812ce --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/talk/index.html @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +Talk — The Stoned Age

The Stoned Age

25-minute talk · Slide PDF · Speaker outline

01 / 12 · 0:00–1:30

The Stoned Age

Altered states, curiosity, and the long history of making meaning.

Concentric orbits around a question mark: wonder opens inquiry

Editorial framing

Speaker notes

Open with “Please turn to page 666.” Pause. Explain that the title is an invitation to investigate, not a claim that drugs explain everything. Introduce Root Sequence as coordinator and this as an AI-assisted draft.

02 / 12 · 1:30–3:30

Four questions, not one

What happened? What does it mean? What supports it? Who gets authority?

Four separate questions: experience, interpretation, evidence and authority

Editorial framing

Speaker notes

Use the fictional dream example. Ask the audience to notice how quickly “it felt true” becomes “it is true.” Do not ask people to disclose drug use or intimate experiences.

03 / 12 · 3:30–5:30

Archaeology cannot interview the smoke

Material traces give us local evidence.

Four archaeological evidence types: shrine residues, braziers, ritual bundle and hair

[S01, S02]

Speaker notes

Briefly contrast Arad and the Pamirs. Emphasize residues and context; neither supplies the origin of religion. Show conceptual windows, not fabricated excavation imagery.

04 / 12 · 5:30–7:00

An object is not a recipe

A bundle and a hair sample answer different questions.

Four archaeological evidence types: shrine residues, braziers, ritual bundle and hair

[S03, S04]

Speaker notes

Contrast the South American bundle with Menorca hair. Keep exposure, preparation and interpretation distinct. Refer detailed analytical claims to the paper.

05 / 12 · 7:00–9:00

The ape needs more evidence

Exposure → effects → transmission → comparative explanation.

An evidential ladder: exposure, effects, transmission and a better explanation; each step remains a question

[S09]

Speaker notes

Explain the missing causal chain in the strongest stoned-ape claim. Distinguish temporary cognitive change from biological evolution. Present the published hypothesis as a hypothesis.

06 / 12 · 9:00–11:00

The idea feels brilliant

Generation and evaluation need separate measures.

Two notebooks separate arriving ideas from checked ideas

[S07]

Speaker notes

Distinguish acute subjective insight from lower task performance. At seven days, self-rated novelty increased while convergent thinking remained lower than placebo. New to the participant does not mean independently verified originality. Avoid general cognitive-upgrade claims.

07 / 12 · 11:00–13:00

Meaning is already something

Personal significance is not a cosmic certificate.

Concentric orbits around a question mark

[S06]

Speaker notes

Keep reports of meaning distinct from metaphysical verification. Explain that a physiological account need not dismiss personal importance. Do not describe the research as proving religion either true or false. Note the small screened sample, supported setting and acute fear alongside significance.

08 / 12 · 13:00–15:00

Nobody makes meaning alone

Stories have audiences, teachers and critics.

A network linking experience, report, context, audience, revision and memory

[S10, S11]

Speaker notes

Introduce the editorial experience-to-revision map. Context matters; it is not a universal sequence. Ask who is allowed to correct a shared account.

09 / 12 · 15:00–17:00

Who owns the explanation?

Respect includes refusal and disagreement.

Overlapping circles distinguish experience and consent

[S14]

Speaker notes

Discuss the difference between acknowledging testimony and authorizing decisions over others. Introduce IPCI as one organization with a situated position, not a representative of all Indigenous peoples.

10 / 12 · 17:00–19:00

The oracle has autocomplete

Agreement is not independent corroboration.

Four repetitions of one claim do not make four independent witnesses

[S15]

Speaker notes

Define the AI analogy narrowly as evaluation of compelling interpretations. Cite sycophancy research as bounded evidence. Do not equate AI outputs with human consciousness or psychedelic states. The cited evaluation is the 2023 version and does not describe every current model.

11 / 12 · 19:00–21:00

What would change our minds?

Better sources. Better contrasts. Serious objections.

Four separate questions: experience, interpretation, evidence and authority

Editorial framing

Speaker notes

Name the next research steps: full archaeological extraction, study appraisal, cultural scholarship and a bounded AI question. Explain that no human experiment has been run.

12 / 12 · 21:00–25:00

Keep the question open

The universe has not supplied a foreword.

Concentric orbits around a question mark: wonder opens inquiry

Editorial framing

Speaker notes

Close with the project invitation. Use the final four minutes for discussion: what separates meaningful experience from shared knowledge? What would a respectful correction look like? Offer paper and source links.

References

  1. S01 · Arie, E.; Rosen, B.; Namdar, D. (2020). Cannabis and Frankincense at the Judahite Shrine of Arad. Tel Aviv 47(1), 5–28
  2. S02 · Ren, M., et al. (2019). The origins of cannabis smoking: Chemical residue evidence from the first millennium BCE in the Pamirs. Science Advances 5, eaaw1391
  3. S03 · Miller, M. J.; Albarracin-Jordan, J.; Moore, C.; Capriles, J. M. (2019). Chemical evidence for the use of multiple psychotropic plants in a 1,000-year-old ritual bundle from South America. PNAS 116(23), 11207–11212
  4. S04 · Guerra-Doce, E., et al. (2023). Direct evidence of the use of multiple drugs in Bronze Age Menorca (Western Mediterranean) from human hair analysis. Scientific Reports 13, 4782
  5. S05 · Nichols, D. E. (2016). Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews 68, 264–355
  6. S06 · Griffiths, R. R., et al. (2011). Psilocybin occasioned mystical-type experiences: Immediate and persisting dose-related effects. Psychopharmacology 218, 649–665
  7. S07 · Mason, N. L., et al. (2021). Spontaneous and deliberate creative cognition during and after psilocybin exposure. Translational Psychiatry 11, 209
  8. S08 · Carhart-Harris, R. L.; Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics. Pharmacological Reviews 71, 316–344
  9. S09 · Rodríguez Arce, J. M.; Winkelman, M. J. (2021). Psychedelics, Sociality, and Human Evolution. Frontiers in Psychology 12, 729425
  10. S10 · Luhrmann, T. M., et al. (2021). Sensing the presence of gods and spirits across cultures and faiths. PNAS 118(5), e2016649118
  11. S11 · Muthukrishna, M.; Henrich, J. (2016). Innovation in the collective brain. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 371, 20150192
  12. S12 · Forstmann, M., et al. (2020). Transformative experience and social connectedness mediate the mood-enhancing effects of psychedelic use in naturalistic settings. PNAS 117, 2338–2346
  13. S13 · Carbonaro, T. M., et al. (2016). Survey study of challenging experiences after ingesting psilocybin mushrooms: Acute and enduring positive and negative consequences. Journal of Psychopharmacology 30, 1268–1278
  14. S14 · Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative (undated; accessed 2026-10-14). Political and Social Issues. Community organization statement
  15. S15 · Sharma, M., et al. (2023). Towards Understanding Sycophancy in Language Models. arXiv:2310.13548; primary research preprint (2023 version)
  16. S16 · Butler, M.; Jelen, L.; Rucker, J. (2022). Expectancy in placebo-controlled trials of psychedelics: if so, so what?. Psychopharmacology
\ No newline at end of file diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/talk/outline.md b/research/the-stoned-age/talk/outline.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..43460c95 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/talk/outline.md @@ -0,0 +1,125 @@ +# The Stoned Age — 25-minute talk + +v0.1.2 · 24 October 2026. 21 minutes speaking plus 4 minutes discussion. AI-assisted draft; review pending. + +## 1. The Stoned Age (0:00–1:30) + +**On screen:** Altered states, curiosity, and the long history of making meaning. + +**Speaker notes:** Open with “Please turn to page 666.” Pause. Explain that the title is an invitation to investigate, not a claim that drugs explain everything. Introduce Root Sequence as coordinator and this as an AI-assisted draft. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/cover.svg). + +**Sources:** Editorial framing + +## 2. Four questions, not one (1:30–3:30) + +**On screen:** What happened? What does it mean? What supports it? Who gets authority? + +**Speaker notes:** Use the fictional dream example. Ask the audience to notice how quickly “it felt true” becomes “it is true.” Do not ask people to disclose drug use or intimate experiences. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/steps.svg). + +**Sources:** Editorial framing + +## 3. Archaeology cannot interview the smoke (3:30–5:30) + +**On screen:** Material traces give us local evidence. + +**Speaker notes:** Briefly contrast Arad and the Pamirs. Emphasize residues and context; neither supplies the origin of religion. Show conceptual windows, not fabricated excavation imagery. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/windows.svg). + +**Sources:** S01, S02 + +## 4. An object is not a recipe (5:30–7:00) + +**On screen:** A bundle and a hair sample answer different questions. + +**Speaker notes:** Contrast the South American bundle with Menorca hair. Keep exposure, preparation and interpretation distinct. Refer detailed analytical claims to the paper. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/windows.svg). + +**Sources:** S03, S04 + +## 5. The ape needs more evidence (7:00–9:00) + +**On screen:** Exposure → effects → transmission → comparative explanation. + +**Speaker notes:** Explain the missing causal chain in the strongest stoned-ape claim. Distinguish temporary cognitive change from biological evolution. Present the published hypothesis as a hypothesis. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/ladder.svg). + +**Sources:** S09 + +## 6. The idea feels brilliant (9:00–11:00) + +**On screen:** Generation and evaluation need separate measures. + +**Speaker notes:** Distinguish acute subjective insight from lower task performance. At seven days, self-rated novelty increased while convergent thinking remained lower than placebo. New to the participant does not mean independently verified originality. Avoid general cognitive-upgrade claims. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/split.svg). + +**Sources:** S07 + +## 7. Meaning is already something (11:00–13:00) + +**On screen:** Personal significance is not a cosmic certificate. + +**Speaker notes:** Keep reports of meaning distinct from metaphysical verification. Explain that a physiological account need not dismiss personal importance. Do not describe the research as proving religion either true or false. Note the small screened sample, supported setting and acute fear alongside significance. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/orbit.svg). + +**Sources:** S06 + +## 8. Nobody makes meaning alone (13:00–15:00) + +**On screen:** Stories have audiences, teachers and critics. + +**Speaker notes:** Introduce the editorial experience-to-revision map. Context matters; it is not a universal sequence. Ask who is allowed to correct a shared account. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/network.svg). + +**Sources:** S10, S11 + +## 9. Who owns the explanation? (15:00–17:00) + +**On screen:** Respect includes refusal and disagreement. + +**Speaker notes:** Discuss the difference between acknowledging testimony and authorizing decisions over others. Introduce IPCI as one organization with a situated position, not a representative of all Indigenous peoples. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/boundary.svg). + +**Sources:** S14 + +## 10. The oracle has autocomplete (17:00–19:00) + +**On screen:** Agreement is not independent corroboration. + +**Speaker notes:** Define the AI analogy narrowly as evaluation of compelling interpretations. Cite sycophancy research as bounded evidence. Do not equate AI outputs with human consciousness or psychedelic states. The cited evaluation is the 2023 version and does not describe every current model. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/mirror.svg). + +**Sources:** S15 + +## 11. What would change our minds? (19:00–21:00) + +**On screen:** Better sources. Better contrasts. Serious objections. + +**Speaker notes:** Name the next research steps: full archaeological extraction, study appraisal, cultural scholarship and a bounded AI question. Explain that no human experiment has been run. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/steps.svg). + +**Sources:** Editorial framing + +## 12. Keep the question open (21:00–25:00) + +**On screen:** The universe has not supplied a foreword. + +**Speaker notes:** Close with the project invitation. Use the final four minutes for discussion: what separates meaningful experience from shared knowledge? What would a respectful correction look like? Offer paper and source links. + +**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/cover.svg). + +**Sources:** Editorial framing + +See the [source register](../research/sources.md) and [appraisal](../research/appraisal.md). diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/talk/slides.json b/research/the-stoned-age/talk/slides.json new file mode 100644 index 00000000..5f73815d --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/talk/slides.json @@ -0,0 +1,98 @@ +[ + { + "title": "The Stoned Age", + "onscreen": "Altered states, curiosity, and the long history of making meaning.", + "notes": "Open with “Please turn to page 666.” Pause. Explain that the title is an invitation to investigate, not a claim that drugs explain everything. Introduce Root Sequence as coordinator and this as an AI-assisted draft.", + "art": "cover", + "time": "0:00–1:30", + "refs": "" + }, + { + "title": "Four questions, not one", + "onscreen": "What happened? What does it mean? What supports it? Who gets authority?", + "notes": "Use the fictional dream example. Ask the audience to notice how quickly “it felt true” becomes “it is true.” Do not ask people to disclose drug use or intimate experiences.", + "art": "steps", + "time": "1:30–3:30", + "refs": "" + }, + { + "title": "Archaeology cannot interview the smoke", + "onscreen": "Material traces give us local evidence.", + "notes": "Briefly contrast Arad and the Pamirs. Emphasize residues and context; neither supplies the origin of religion. Show conceptual windows, not fabricated excavation imagery.", + "art": "windows", + "time": "3:30–5:30", + "refs": "S01, S02" + }, + { + "title": "An object is not a recipe", + "onscreen": "A bundle and a hair sample answer different questions.", + "notes": "Contrast the South American bundle with Menorca hair. Keep exposure, preparation and interpretation distinct. Refer detailed analytical claims to the paper.", + "art": "windows", + "time": "5:30–7:00", + "refs": "S03, S04" + }, + { + "title": "The ape needs more evidence", + "onscreen": "Exposure → effects → transmission → comparative explanation.", + "notes": "Explain the missing causal chain in the strongest stoned-ape claim. Distinguish temporary cognitive change from biological evolution. Present the published hypothesis as a hypothesis.", + "art": "ladder", + "time": "7:00–9:00", + "refs": "S09" + }, + { + "title": "The idea feels brilliant", + "onscreen": "Generation and evaluation need separate measures.", + "notes": "Distinguish acute subjective insight from lower task performance. At seven days, self-rated novelty increased while convergent thinking remained lower than placebo. New to the participant does not mean independently verified originality. Avoid general cognitive-upgrade claims.", + "art": "split", + "time": "9:00–11:00", + "refs": "S07" + }, + { + "title": "Meaning is already something", + "onscreen": "Personal significance is not a cosmic certificate.", + "notes": "Keep reports of meaning distinct from metaphysical verification. Explain that a physiological account need not dismiss personal importance. Do not describe the research as proving religion either true or false. Note the small screened sample, supported setting and acute fear alongside significance.", + "art": "orbit", + "time": "11:00–13:00", + "refs": "S06" + }, + { + "title": "Nobody makes meaning alone", + "onscreen": "Stories have audiences, teachers and critics.", + "notes": "Introduce the editorial experience-to-revision map. Context matters; it is not a universal sequence. Ask who is allowed to correct a shared account.", + "art": "network", + "time": "13:00–15:00", + "refs": "S10, S11" + }, + { + "title": "Who owns the explanation?", + "onscreen": "Respect includes refusal and disagreement.", + "notes": "Discuss the difference between acknowledging testimony and authorizing decisions over others. Introduce IPCI as one organization with a situated position, not a representative of all Indigenous peoples.", + "art": "boundary", + "time": "15:00–17:00", + "refs": "S14" + }, + { + "title": "The oracle has autocomplete", + "onscreen": "Agreement is not independent corroboration.", + "notes": "Define the AI analogy narrowly as evaluation of compelling interpretations. Cite sycophancy research as bounded evidence. Do not equate AI outputs with human consciousness or psychedelic states. The cited evaluation is the 2023 version and does not describe every current model.", + "art": "mirror", + "time": "17:00–19:00", + "refs": "S15" + }, + { + "title": "What would change our minds?", + "onscreen": "Better sources. Better contrasts. Serious objections.", + "notes": "Name the next research steps: full archaeological extraction, study appraisal, cultural scholarship and a bounded AI question. Explain that no human experiment has been run.", + "art": "steps", + "time": "19:00–21:00", + "refs": "" + }, + { + "title": "Keep the question open", + "onscreen": "The universe has not supplied a foreword.", + "notes": "Close with the project invitation. Use the final four minutes for discussion: what separates meaningful experience from shared knowledge? What would a respectful correction look like? Offer paper and source links.", + "art": "cover", + "time": "21:00–25:00", + "refs": "" + } +] diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/talk/the-stoned-age-talk.pdf b/research/the-stoned-age/talk/the-stoned-age-talk.pdf new file mode 100644 index 00000000..af029998 Binary files /dev/null and b/research/the-stoned-age/talk/the-stoned-age-talk.pdf differ diff --git a/research/the-stoned-age/tools/build.py b/research/the-stoned-age/tools/build.py new file mode 100644 index 00000000..17c9c873 --- /dev/null +++ b/research/the-stoned-age/tools/build.py @@ -0,0 +1,169 @@ +#!/usr/bin/env python3 +"""Build static reader editions. Stdlib for HTML/SVG; optional reportlab for PDFs.""" +from pathlib import Path +import json, re, html, math +P=Path(__file__).resolve().parents[1] +S=json.loads((P/'research/sources.json').read_text()) +INK='#182d30'; PAPER='#f6f0df'; ORANGE='#bd461f'; GREEN='#326b5c' +def scene(kind): + a=[] + def t(x,y,s,size=20,col=INK): a.append(('text',x,y,s,size,col)) + def l(x,y,u,v,col=INK): a.append(('line',x,y,u,v,col)) + def c(x,y,r,col=INK): a.append(('circle',x,y,r,col)) + def box(x,y,w,h,col=INK): a.append(('rect',x,y,w,h,col)) + if kind in ('cover','orbit'): + for r in [45,80,115,150]: c(400,170,r,GREEN) + for j in range(14): + q=j*math.pi*2/14;c(400+150*math.cos(q),170+150*math.sin(q),4,ORANGE) + t(381,194,'?',76,ORANGE) + t(32,55,'WONDER',18);t(32,290,'A QUESTION IS AN OPENING.',16) + elif kind=='steps': + for i,(x,y) in enumerate([(35,40),(225,100),(415,160),(605,220)]): + box(x,y,160,70,GREEN);t(x+12,y+28,['EXPERIENCE','INTERPRETATION','EVIDENCE','AUTHORITY'][i],14) + t(x+12,y+52,['What happened?','What does it mean?','What supports it?','Who may decide?'][i],12) + if i<3:l(x+160,y+35,x+190,y+95,ORANGE) + t(35,325,'THE CONNECTIONS REQUIRE JUSTIFICATION.',18) + elif kind=='windows': + for i,(name,sub) in enumerate([('ARAD','Shrine residues'),('PAMIRS','Funerary braziers'),('SOUTH AMERICA','Ritual bundle'),('MENORCA','Human hair')]): + x=25+i*195;box(x,45,175,205,GREEN);c(x+88,105,32,ORANGE);t(x+10,180,name,15);t(x+10,210,sub,13) + t(25,300,'FOUR WINDOWS. NO UNIVERSAL ORIGIN STORY.',18) + elif kind=='ladder': + for i,s in enumerate(['EXPOSURE','EFFECTS','TRANSMISSION','BETTER EXPLANATION']): + y=285-i*70;l(90,y,730,y,GREEN);t(110,y-12,s,19);t(750,y,'?',27,ORANGE) + l(90,35,90,310);l(730,35,730,310) + elif kind=='split': + for x,title,sub in [(35,'IDEAS ARRIVING','Novelty / significance'),(435,'IDEAS BEING CHECKED','Accuracy / usefulness')]: + box(x,35,330,250,GREEN);t(x+20,75,title,18);t(x+20,108,sub,16) + for y in range(145,265,30): l(x+20,y,x+300,y,GREEN) + t(35,330,'KEEP BOTH NOTEBOOKS.',20,ORANGE) + elif kind in ('network','branch'): + words=['EXPERIENCE','REPORT','CONTEXT','AUDIENCE','REVISION','MEMORY'] + pts=[(110,90),(400,50),(685,100),(650,270),(365,280),(110,250)] + for i,(x,y) in enumerate(pts): + u,v=pts[(i+1)%6];l(x,y,u,v,GREEN);l(x,y,400,165,GREEN) + for i,(x,y) in enumerate(pts):c(x,y,16,ORANGE);t(x-50,y+40,words[i],13) + c(400,165,37,ORANGE);t(391,175,'?',30) + elif kind=='boundary': + c(280,175,130,GREEN);c(520,175,130,ORANGE);t(185,165,'EXPERIENCE',20);t(470,195,'CONSENT',20);t(30,330,'SIGNIFICANCE DOES NOT CANCEL REFUSAL.',18) + elif kind=='mirror': + for i in range(4): + x=25+i*195;box(x,45+i*15,175,190,GREEN);t(x+20,135+i*15,'ONE CLAIM',17) + t(25,320,'FOUR REFLECTIONS ARE NOT FOUR WITNESSES.',18,ORANGE) + return a +descriptions={'cover':'Concentric orbits around a question mark: wonder opens inquiry','orbit':'Concentric orbits around a question mark','steps':'Four separate questions: experience, interpretation, evidence and authority','windows':'Four archaeological evidence types: shrine residues, braziers, ritual bundle and hair','branch':'A network linking experience, report, context, audience, revision and memory','network':'A network linking experience, report, context, audience, revision and memory','ladder':'An evidential ladder: exposure, effects, transmission and a better explanation; each step remains a question','split':'Two notebooks separate arriving ideas from checked ideas','boundary':'Overlapping circles distinguish experience and consent','mirror':'Four repetitions of one claim do not make four independent witnesses'} +arts=['cover','orbit','steps','windows','branch','ladder','split','network','boundary','mirror'] +for kind in arts: + out=[f'{descriptions[kind]}'] + for z in scene(kind): + if z[0]=='text': _,x,y,s,size,col=z;out.append(f'{html.escape(s)}') + elif z[0]=='line': _,x,y,u,v,col=z;out.append(f'') + elif z[0]=='circle': _,x,y,r,col=z;out.append(f'') + else: _,x,y,w,h,col=z;out.append(f'') + (P/f'assets/{kind}.svg').write_text(''.join(out)+'') +css='''*{box-sizing:border-box}html{scroll-behavior:smooth}body{margin:0;background:#f6f0df;color:#182d30;font:19px/1.7 Georgia,serif}a{color:#245c50;text-underline-offset:4px}a:focus-visible,button:focus-visible,summary:focus-visible{outline:3px solid #bd461f;outline-offset:5px}header,main,footer{max-width:1080px;margin:auto;padding:32px}nav{display:flex;flex-wrap:wrap;gap:12px 25px;font:15px/1.5 system-ui}h1{font-size:clamp(54px,10vw,112px);line-height:.95;letter-spacing:-.055em;max-width:850px;margin:55px 0 30px}h2{font-size:clamp(28px,4vw,44px);line-height:1.18;letter-spacing:-.025em;margin-top:65px}h3{font-size:23px}p,li{max-width:750px}.eyebrow{font:13px/1.4 system-ui;text-transform:uppercase;letter-spacing:.14em;color:#93401f}.deck{font-size:27px;max-width:760px}img{width:100%;height:auto;display:block;margin:35px 0}figure{margin:0}figcaption,.meta{font:14px/1.5 system-ui;color:#435955}.rule{border-top:2px solid #182d30;margin-top:35px;padding-top:25px}.skip{position:absolute;left:-9999px}.skip:focus{left:20px;top:10px;background:white;padding:10px}.editions{display:grid;grid-template-columns:1fr 1fr;gap:25px}.editions a{display:block;border-top:2px solid;padding:18px 0}.refs{font:15px/1.6 system-ui}.refs li{margin-bottom:15px;overflow-wrap:anywhere}.chapter{break-before:page;border-top:1px solid #b6bdac;padding-top:20px;margin-top:40px}.slide{min-height:85vh;border-top:2px solid #326b5c;padding:30px 0}.slide h2{margin-top:15px}.slide img{max-width:800px}details{font:16px/1.6 system-ui;margin:20px 0}table{border-collapse:collapse;font:15px/1.5 system-ui}td,th{padding:10px;border:1px solid #b6bdac;text-align:left}blockquote{border-left:4px solid #bd461f;padding-left:20px}code{font-size:.85em}@media(max-width:600px){header,main,footer{padding:22px}body{font-size:18px}.editions{grid-template-columns:1fr}nav{gap:10px 15px}}@media(prefers-reduced-motion:reduce){html{scroll-behavior:auto}}@media print{nav,.skip{display:none}body{background:white;font-size:11pt}header,main,footer{padding:0}h1{font-size:45pt}h2{font-size:24pt}a{color:inherit}img{max-height:65mm}.slide{page-break-after:always;min-height:0}.slide details{display:none}}''' +(P/'assets/style.css').write_text(css) +def refhtml(prefix='../'): + return '
    '+''.join(f'
  1. {s["id"]} · {html.escape(s["authors"])} ({s["year"]}). {html.escape(s["title"])}. {html.escape(s["venue"])}
    2. ' for s in S)+'
' +def inline(t): + t=html.escape(t) + t=re.sub(r'!\[([^\]]*)\]\(([^)]+)\)',r'\1',t) + t=re.sub(r'\[([^\]]+)\]\(([^)]+)\)',r'\1',t) + t=re.sub(r'\[\^(S\d+)\]',r'\1',t) + t=t.replace('[S01–S04]','[S01, S02, S03, S04]') + t=re.sub(r'\[(S\d+(?:, S\d+)*)\]',lambda m:'['+', '.join(f''+x+'' for x in m[1].split(', '))+']',t) + t=re.sub(r'\*\*(.+?)\*\*',r'\1',t) + t=re.sub(r'(?\1',t) + return t +# Deliberately small renderer for the controlled source format; Markdown remains canonical. +def md(t): + out=[] + for b in t.split('\n\n'): + if b.startswith('[^'):continue + if b.startswith('#'): + first,*rest=b.split('\n');n=len(first)-len(first.lstrip('#'));text=first[n:].strip();anchor=re.sub('[^a-z0-9]+','-',text.lower()).strip('-');out.append(f'{inline(text)}') + if rest:out.append('

'+inline(' '.join(rest))+'

') + elif b.startswith('- '):out.append('') + else:out.append('

'+inline(b).replace('\n',' ')+'

') + return '\n'.join(out) +def page(title,body,sub=True): + pre='../' if sub else '' + return f'''{title} — The Stoned Age
{body}
''' +for path,title in [('essay/essay.md','Illustrated essay'),('paper/manuscript.md','Living paper')]: + txt=(P/path).read_text();body=md(txt.split('## References')[0])+'

References

'+refhtml() + (P/Path(path).parent/'index.html').write_text(page(title,body)) +book=json.loads((P/'booklet/book.json').read_text()) +body='

Illustrated reader edition

The Stoned Age

Download the 16-page booklet PDF · Markdown source

' +for i,b in enumerate(book): + body+=f'

{i+1:02d}

{b["title"]}

{b["deck"]}

{descriptions[b[{md(b["text"])}
' +body+='

References

'+refhtml();(P/'booklet/index.html').write_text(page('Booklet',body)) +slides=json.loads((P/'talk/slides.json').read_text());body='

The Stoned Age

25-minute talk · Slide PDF · Speaker outline

' +for i,s in enumerate(slides): + body+=f'

{i+1:02d} / 12 · {s["time"]}

{s["title"]}

{s["onscreen"]}

{descriptions[s[

{inline("["+s["refs"]+"]") if s["refs"] else "Editorial framing"}

Speaker notes

{s["notes"]}

' +body+='

References

'+refhtml();(P/'talk/index.html').write_text(page('Talk',body)) + +(P/'booklet/book.md').write_text('# The Stoned Age — reader edition\n\n'+'\n\n---\n\n'.join('## '+x['title']+'\n\n*'+x['deck']+'*\n\n![Conceptual illustration: '+x['art']+'](../assets/'+x['art']+'.svg)\n\n'+x['text'] for x in book)+'\n\n## References\n\nSee the [shared source register](../research/sources.md) and [appraisal](../research/appraisal.md).\n') +(P/'talk/outline.md').write_text('# The Stoned Age — 25-minute talk\n\nv0.1.2 · 24 October 2026. 21 minutes speaking plus 4 minutes discussion. AI-assisted draft; review pending.\n\n'+'\n\n'.join(f"## {i+1}. {x['title']} ({x['time']})\n\n**On screen:** {x['onscreen']}\n\n**Speaker notes:** {x['notes']}\n\n**Visual:** [Conceptual illustration](../assets/{x['art']}.svg).\n\n**Sources:** {x['refs'] or 'Editorial framing'}" for i,x in enumerate(slides))+'\n\nSee the [source register](../research/sources.md) and [appraisal](../research/appraisal.md).\n') + +(P/'research/appraisal.html').write_text(page('Source appraisal',md((P/'research/appraisal.md').read_text()))) +(P/'research/sources.html').write_text(page('Sources','

Sources & limits

Read the source-by-source appraisal

16 source records. See inspection notes, claims ledger and method and research agenda.

'+refhtml())) +(P/'index.html').write_text(page('Project suite','''

Root Sequence / a living inquiry / v0.1.2

The
Stoned Age

Altered States, Human Curiosity, and the Long History of Making Meaning

Concentric orbits around a question mark: wonder begins an inquiry

What happens after somebody says, “I have figured it all out”?

A playful, intellectually serious inquiry into changed experience, human origins, religion, shared stories and AI. The working provocation is How Drugs Explain the Universe. The evidence has a more careful story to tell.

01 / The illustrated essay
A doorway into the argument.02 / The small book
16 illustrated pages, plus an accessible HTML edition.03 / The living paper
The argument, sources, hypotheses and limits.04 / The talk
12 slides and a 25-minute speaker outline.

Wonder is welcome.
Claims remain accountable.

This is an AI-assisted first edition, not a peer-reviewed release. Root Sequence coordinates inquiry; it does not claim specialist authority. Each edition draws from a shared source register.

Inspect the sources · Download the claims ledger · Method and next research steps · Project record and exact placement

''',False)) +# Optional PDFs. All content is also available in semantic HTML. +try: + from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas + from reportlab.platypus import Paragraph + from reportlab.lib.styles import ParagraphStyle + from reportlab.lib.colors import HexColor +except ImportError: + print('HTML and SVG built. Install reportlab to build PDFs.');raise SystemExit + +def drawart(cv,kind,x,y,w): + cv.saveState();cv.translate(x,y);cv.scale(w/800,w/800) + for z in scene(kind): + if z[0]=='text': + _,xx,yy,s,size,col=z;cv.setFillColor(HexColor(col));cv.setFont('Helvetica',size);cv.drawString(xx,360-yy,s) + elif z[0]=='line': + _,xx,yy,u,v,col=z;cv.setStrokeColor(HexColor(col));cv.setLineWidth(2);cv.line(xx,360-yy,u,360-v) + elif z[0]=='circle': + _,xx,yy,r,col=z;cv.setStrokeColor(HexColor(col));cv.circle(xx,360-yy,r,stroke=1,fill=0) + else: + _,xx,yy,ww,hh,col=z;cv.setStrokeColor(HexColor(col));cv.rect(xx,360-yy-hh,ww,hh,stroke=1,fill=0) + cv.restoreState() +def para(cv,text,x,y,w,size=12,leading=None,font='Times-Roman',color=INK): + st=ParagraphStyle('p',fontName=font,fontSize=size,leading=leading or size*1.4,textColor=HexColor(color),spaceAfter=8) + text=html.escape(text).replace('\n','
') + obj=Paragraph(text,st);_,h=obj.wrap(w,10000);obj.drawOn(cv,x,y-h);return y-h-12 + +def frame(cv,w,h,num,label): + cv.setFillColor(HexColor(PAPER));cv.rect(0,0,w,h,fill=1,stroke=0) + cv.setFillColor(HexColor(INK));cv.setFont('Helvetica',8);cv.drawString(35,22,label+' / v0.1.2 / review pending');cv.drawRightString(w-35,22,str(num)) +cv=canvas.Canvas(str(P/'booklet/the-stoned-age.pdf'),pagesize=(420,595),invariant=1);cv.setTitle('The Stoned Age — illustrated reader edition');cv.setAuthor('Root Sequence; AI-assisted draft') +for i,b in enumerate(book): + frame(cv,420,595,i+1,'THE STONED AGE') + y=para(cv,b['title'],35,554,350,27,30,'Helvetica-Bold') + y=para(cv,b['deck'],35,y,350,12,16,'Helvetica',ORANGE) + drawart(cv,b['art'],35,y-157,350);y-=173 + for p in b['text'].split('\n\n'):y=para(cv,p,35,y,350,10.8,14.4) + if y<35:raise ValueError(f'Book page {i+1} overflow {y}') + cv.showPage() +for j in range(4): + frame(cv,420,595,13+j,'THE STONED AGE / SOURCES') + y=para(cv,'Sources & reading',35,554,350,26,30,'Helvetica-Bold') + y=para(cv,'Source IDs in the text connect here. Full access notes and limitations are in the shared source register.',35,y,350,10.5,14) + for s in S[j*4:j*4+4]: + label=f"{s['id']} · {s['authors']} ({s['year']}). {s['title']}. {s['venue']}." + y=para(cv,label,35,y,350,10.5,14) + url='https://doi.org/'+s['doi'] if s['doi'] else s['url'] + top=y;y=para(cv,url,35,y,350,8.5,11,'Helvetica',GREEN);cv.linkURL(url,(35,y,385,top),relative=0) + if y<35:raise ValueError('References overflow') + cv.showPage() +cv.save() +cv=canvas.Canvas(str(P/'talk/the-stoned-age-talk.pdf'),pagesize=(960,540),invariant=1);cv.setTitle('The Stoned Age — talk');cv.setAuthor('Root Sequence; AI-assisted draft') +for i,s in enumerate(slides): + frame(cv,960,540,i+1,'THE STONED AGE / TALK') + y=para(cv,s['title'],45,487,870,38,43,'Helvetica-Bold') + para(cv,s['onscreen'],45,y,870,22,28) + drawart(cv,s['art'],90,60,730) + cv.setFillColor(HexColor(INK));cv.setFont('Helvetica',10);cv.drawString(45,42,('Sources: '+s['refs'] if s['refs'] else 'Editorial framing / proposed question')+' | Source URLs: accompanying outline and register') + cv.showPage() +cv.save() +print('Built HTML, 10 SVG illustrations, 16-page booklet PDF, 12-slide PDF.') diff --git a/site/PLACEMENT.md b/site/PLACEMENT.md index 4e5a23a8..b7057802 100644 --- a/site/PLACEMENT.md +++ b/site/PLACEMENT.md @@ -23,3 +23,9 @@ release; this historical note does not establish their present state. Deploy only the approved generated output. Never publish the repository root, the legacy source directory, private Wiki material, or unpublished fiction. + +## Proposed Stoned Age route: 2026-10-24 + +Rae suggested adding the existing research suite at `/stonedage/`. The proposed combined publisher reads `research/the-stoned-age/` and exports only its named reading files under that route. It does not create a second maintained copy in `site/`. Source records remain in the research directory and are linked on GitHub where they are not exported. + +The original homepage source, publisher and approval remain intact. The proposed workflow uses `build_research.py` for the combined artifact and requires a separate matching `stonedage-approval.json` before release. That record is pending. This proposal does not publish the route, approve research findings or finish author, scholarly or cultural review. See the [site guide](README.md#proposed-research-route-24-october-2026). diff --git a/site/README.md b/site/README.md index 7459e8e0..c5ed425a 100644 --- a/site/README.md +++ b/site/README.md @@ -6,11 +6,11 @@ The current [`index.html`](index.html) is the **approved October 19, 2026 profes The opening separates the mission from reading routes. About explains the initiative’s focus and connects research with projects, followed by the accepted invitation to take part. The founder credit stays in Credits and reuse; the AI disclosure introduces Rae’s role where the name first appears. About, research, and footer notes share one native expandable-section style. -All six research descriptions, seven related-project descriptions, Take part, four footer passages, and seven project-panel refinements are applied. The Wiki panel keeps its approved description and website action without the repeated extra paragraph. The [latest copy record](COPY-REVIEW.md#wiki-panel-and-full-page-review-october-18-2026-pacific) and [validation](VALIDATION.md#wiki-panel-and-full-page-review-2026-10-18-pacific) describe the supported full-page pass and its limits. Earlier passage approvals remain in COPY-REVIEW.md. The companion organization profile remains under draft review for consistency, particularly its OS-only Computing summary. Later public/private Wiki reconciliation remains queued; no Wiki content has been audited or transferred here. +All six research descriptions, seven related-project descriptions, Take part, four footer passages, and seven project-panel refinements are applied. The Wiki panel keeps its approved description and website action without the repeated extra paragraph. The [latest copy record](COPY-REVIEW.md#wiki-panel-and-full-page-review-october-18-2026-pacific) and [validation](VALIDATION.md#wiki-panel-and-full-page-review-2026-10-18-pacific) describe the supported full-page pass and its limits. Earlier passage approvals remain in COPY-REVIEW.md. The companion organization profile was published on October 23. Public/private Wiki reconciliation remains queued separately. The candidate uses one dark palette, including without JavaScript. The theme selector and its startup script are removed. Larger text, one background color, reduced motion, and in-page navigation settings remain available. System high-contrast styles and black-on-white print output are retained. Saved theme choices from an earlier candidate are ignored; other reading choices keep their existing storage key. -[`approval.json`](approval.json) identifies this exact page/publisher digest and Rae’s publication approval. Any later source change requires a matching approval record. The [canonical refresh checklist](https://github.com/Root-Sequence/root-sequence/blob/docs/professional-refresh-phase-1-2026-10-17/ROADMAP.md) remains on the review branch with the separate documentation and portfolio work. +[`approval.json`](approval.json) identifies the exact homepage/publisher digest and Rae’s publication approval. Any later change to those sources requires a matching approval record. The [canonical refresh checklist](../ROADMAP.md) records the separate documentation, research and portfolio work. The page is one self-contained file with its styles, scripts, favicon, and Cascadia Mono wordmark font embedded. It makes no runtime requests for fonts, @@ -71,3 +71,22 @@ can deploy to GitHub Pages. Deploy only that generated directory, never the repository or the historical source directory. This review does not change hosting, DNS, or mail. Historical migration steps are recorded in [DEPLOYMENT.md](DEPLOYMENT.md); current DNS and provider behavior must be checked before a future publication change. + +## Proposed research route: 24 October 2026 + +The proposed address is **`https://rootsequence.systems/stonedage/`**. It serves the existing [Stoned Age inquiry](../research/the-stoned-age/README.md), keeping its paper, illustrated essay, booklet, talk and evidence notes together. The research directory remains the substantive source. The homepage copy and its original approval are unchanged. + +[`build_research.py`](build_research.py) packages the approved homepage with an explicit list of research reading files. It adds a return link to Root Sequence, canonical addresses and publication-state metadata to the generated research pages. Markdown source links point to GitHub; the PDFs and downloadable evidence records remain local to the research route. Source tools, editable content files, unrelated research and private material are not copied into the hosting artifact. The reading editions retain their AI-assisted draft and unfinished-review wording. + +Preview the combined artifact in a fresh directory: + +```sh +python3 site/test_site.py +python3 site/test_research_site.py +python3 site/build_research.py --output /tmp/root-sequence-with-stonedage +python3 -m http.server 8000 --directory /tmp/root-sequence-with-stonedage +``` + +Open `/stonedage/` on that local server. This does not publish it. The proposed Pages workflow uses the combined builder and also watches this inquiry for changes. + +`stonedage-approval.json` is a **pending** record for the separate hosting decision. Release builds require both the existing homepage approval and an exact research-source approval. The research digest includes the route publisher, workflow, exported files and named source records. No approval has been recorded for this route. Once approved, `python3 site/build_research.py --release --output ` builds the combined publication artifact. Existing deployed content is unaffected by preparing this draft. diff --git a/site/VALIDATION.md b/site/VALIDATION.md index c4262615..4a135483 100644 --- a/site/VALIDATION.md +++ b/site/VALIDATION.md @@ -544,3 +544,14 @@ Rae explicitly approved website publication after review commit `0780c6d3ce84668 The candidate-only historical-approval assertion is updated for the authorized release: it checks the current approval/preview match and still explicitly rejects the historical digest in a temporary fixture. Existing missing-approval and changed-source rejection tests remain. Page/publisher source and publication substitutions are unchanged. Local test/build and live deployment results are recorded as they are verified; authorization alone is not deployment evidence. All 11 local site tests pass for the authorized release. `build.py --release` succeeds with the matching approval and generates HTML SHA-256 `11688c47ffdde09879de721d6fe0982d2bc596ffaa5f0680334d05cd354cce8f`. Preview/source parity and approved source digest remain unchanged. Deployment and live-domain verification are pending at this commit. The existing Pages workflow and DNS are unchanged. +## Proposed Stoned Age route: 24 October 2026 + +This checkpoint covers the new combined publisher in existing draft PR #45. It does not record publication approval or a public deployment. The live `/stonedage/` address returned HTTP 404; the live build manifest still described the approved single-page edition. + +The combined preview exports the unchanged homepage and seven research HTML pages at `/stonedage/`, with named assets, PDFs and evidence downloads. Its explicit export list contains 24 research files. Source links that are not exported go to the existing research branch on GitHub in preview and main in release. The research directory remains canonical. No source tools, editable booklet/slide JSON, unrelated research, historical site or private project is exported. + +All 11 existing homepage tests and six new publication tests pass. The added checks cover the separate research approval, rejection of stale source approval, preservation of the homepage, retained draft qualifications, exact binary/data copies, local links/fragments, exclusion of an unlisted sentinel, missing-file/link failures and preservation of an existing output directory. The actual release command stops at the pending research approval before writing an artifact. Test approvals are temporary fixtures only. + +Reader documentation passes for 256 Markdown files, and the Idea Trail graph/index is valid and current. In the browser, the new Root Sequence link returns to the unchanged homepage. The research landing page displays correctly at the normal desktop viewport and at 390 pixels, with no horizontal overflow or missing images. Screenshots are retained in the local handoff. The viewport was restored. This is a scoped presentation check; it does not complete an accessibility audit or validate research findings. + +The separate pending approval record binds the research files, source records, publisher and workflow. The existing homepage approval remains valid because `site/index.html` and its original `build.py` are unchanged. A later approval and deployment would need a fresh live-route check. diff --git a/site/build_research.py b/site/build_research.py new file mode 100644 index 00000000..9ef2bc25 --- /dev/null +++ b/site/build_research.py @@ -0,0 +1,170 @@ +#!/usr/bin/env python3 +"""Package the approved homepage and the proposed /stonedage/ reading editions.""" +from __future__ import annotations + +import argparse +import hashlib +import importlib.util +import json +import posixpath +import re +import sys +from datetime import date +from html import escape, unescape +from pathlib import Path +from urllib.parse import quote, urlsplit + + +HERE = Path(__file__).resolve().parent +ROUTE = "stonedage" +INQUIRY = "research/the-stoned-age" +CANONICAL_URL = f"https://rootsequence.systems/{ROUTE}/" +APPROVAL_FILE = "stonedage-approval.json" +EXPORTS = ( + "index.html", "essay/index.html", "booklet/index.html", + "booklet/the-stoned-age.pdf", "paper/index.html", "talk/index.html", + "talk/the-stoned-age-talk.pdf", "research/appraisal.html", + "research/sources.html", "research/claims.csv", + "research/metadata-check.json", "research/sources.json", "LICENSE.txt", + "assets/style.css", "assets/boundary.svg", "assets/branch.svg", + "assets/cover.svg", "assets/ladder.svg", "assets/mirror.svg", + "assets/network.svg", "assets/orbit.svg", "assets/split.svg", + "assets/steps.svg", "assets/windows.svg", +) +SOURCE_RECORDS = ( + "README.md", "CHANGELOG.md", "VALIDATION.md", "booklet/book.json", + "booklet/book.md", "essay/essay.md", "paper/manuscript.md", + "research/appraisal.md", "research/methods.md", "research/sources.md", + "talk/outline.md", "talk/slides.json", "tools/build.py", +) +spec = importlib.util.spec_from_file_location("homepage_builder", HERE / "build.py") +homepage = importlib.util.module_from_spec(spec) +spec.loader.exec_module(homepage) + + +def checked_file(base: Path, relative: str) -> Path: + path = base / relative + if path.is_symlink() or not path.resolve().is_relative_to(base.resolve()): + raise ValueError(f"Research input must be a regular file in its source home: {relative}") + if not path.is_file(): + raise ValueError(f"Missing research input: {relative}") + return path + + +def source_digest(root: Path) -> str: + repo = root.parent + names = ["site/build_research.py", ".github/workflows/pages.yml"] + names += [f"{INQUIRY}/{name}" for name in set(EXPORTS + SOURCE_RECORDS)] + digest = hashlib.sha256() + for name in sorted(names): + digest.update(name.encode() + b"\0" + checked_file(repo, name).read_bytes() + b"\0") + return digest.hexdigest() + + +def approval_for(root: Path, digest: str) -> dict: + path = root / APPROVAL_FILE + approval = json.loads(path.read_text()) if path.exists() else {} + if ( + approval.get("source_sha256") != digest + or approval.get("canonical_url") != CANONICAL_URL + or not approval.get("approved_by") + or not approval.get("approved_at") + ): + raise ValueError("Research release blocked: /stonedage/ needs approval matching its current source digest.") + date.fromisoformat(approval["approved_at"]) + return approval + + +def research_html(text: str, name: str, release: bool) -> str: + ref = "main" if release else "research/the-stoned-age-draft" + source_url = f"https://github.com/Root-Sequence/root-sequence/blob/{ref}/{INQUIRY}/" + + def link(match): + href = unescape(match[1]) + parsed = urlsplit(href) + if parsed.scheme or parsed.netloc or not parsed.path: + return match[0] + target = posixpath.normpath(posixpath.join(posixpath.dirname(name), parsed.path)) + if target in SOURCE_RECORDS: + url = source_url + quote(target, safe="/") + if parsed.fragment: + url += "#" + parsed.fragment + return 'href="' + escape(url, quote=True) + '"' + if target not in EXPORTS: + raise ValueError(f"Unpackaged research link in {name}: {href}") + return match[0] + + text = re.sub(r'href="([^"]+)"', link, text) + canonical = CANONICAL_URL + ("" if name == "index.html" else name) + robots = "index,follow" if release else "noindex,nofollow" + text = text.replace("", f'', 1) + marker = '