With an increasing amount of psychedelic research being published each and every year, those of us with an interest in consciousness have found ourselves needing a more specific framework and language that could be leveraged to analyze and discuss altered states of consciousness. MindApps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design, written by Dr. Thomas B. Roberts and published earlier this year, presents a so-called “multistate theory” as a potential framework to fill that need.
Although a lot of energy being pumped into psychedelic research is focused on finding ways to heal the sick, another equally viable application for these drugs is the betterment of well people and benefit optimization/maximization. After all, why should these powerful plants and chemicals be relegated to only those members of society who qualify as having a condition or disorder? In MindApps, Roberts explores this concept and many others in a unique, innovative, and intriguing manner.
In case you aren’t already familiar with the author, Thomas Roberts is professor emeritus at Northern Illinois University, where he’s been teaching the world’s first catalog-listed psychedelics course since 1981. He is a founding member of the Multidiscipinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a former visiting scientist at Johns Hopkins, editor of Spiritual Growth with Entheogens, and the author of the books Psychedelic Horizons and The Psychedelic Future of the Mind.
After a brief foreword by James Fadiman (author of The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide), Roberts opens the book with a description of his first psychedelic trip, which took place at Lake Tahoe in February 1970. As is the case for many psychonauts, Roberts’ first psychedelic experience had an enormous impact. While it wasn’t his first introduction to psychedelic ideas per se, it did send him further down the psychedelic path, which eventually led to the writing of this revolutionary book.
For those of you who don’t already know, the term “psychedelic” means “mind-manifesting,” and Roberts’ mind has graciously manifested several ideas that are introduced in the book: ideagens, mindapps, multistate theory, mind design, and mindapp artificial intelligences.
Roberts proposes the concept of the “singlestate fallacy,” which is the “hegemonic assumption that all worthwhile thinking takes place only in our ordinary, default mindbody state,” or what most people refer to as our normal waking state of consciousness. This fallacy has as its opposite a framework that Roberts has coined as “multistate theory,” a collection of many different kinds of “mindapps” into one single large, inclusive group.
You might be wondering, “What are mindapps?” Roberts explains them by using a clever analogy: “apps are to devices as mindapps are to minds.” In other words, you can “install” them on your mind for a variety of reasons and benefits. Mindapps include things like exercise routines, meditation, psychoactive plants and chemicals, yoga and the martial arts, sleep and sleep deprivation, chanting, dream work, breathing techniques, and many more like them.
MindApps explores an innovative concept dubbed “MindappAI,” which entails synthesizing new mindbody states and developing them to their highest potential. This will be a task for psychologists and other so-called “mind designers” to tackle, whipping up fresh recipes involving two, three, or even more mindapp ingredients, creating new mind-body states, relating their characteristics, and researching and perfecting them through trial and error.
Mindapps have a myriad of possible use cases—Roberts argues that they can be used to enhance the sciences and save the humanities, and that a newly emerging field of psychedelic philosophy will need to make use of them in order to reach it’s full potential.
The book closes with several points of justification for qualifying multistate theory as a new paradigm, and I have to say that I found Roberts’ argument to be quite persuasive.
But wait, there’s more! Three appendices follow the final chapter, exploring some very intriguing topics—a syllabus for a psychedelic class, how psychedelics can use the corporate system to spread around the globe, and the story of how Roberts created the LSD holiday known as Bicycle Day. These appendices are very thought-provoking and I’m interested to see what a world with widespread psychedelic college classes and psychedelic corporatism might end up looking like.
I found MindApps: Multistate Theory and Tools for Mind Design to be an excellent book. This is the first of Roberts’ books that I’ve read, and I was so impressed with it that I am looking forward to checking out his other works. If you have any interest in psychedelics, consciousness, mind design, or any of the other topics mentioned in this review then you will definitely like this book.
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