I was just thinking... and do you think its possible that the Consciousness we have today was brought on by ancient use of Cannabis and we sort of co-evolved with it? I mean we have cannabanoid receptors and stuff. So maybe the early pirmitive "man" was experimenting with burning things, and he still was driven by instinct, and he just so happen to use Cannabis and it made him introspective and begin to question everything... because I know I never really questioned anything until I first used the herb. What do you guys think?
well i dont know much about this but my two things i could say in contradiction with this is: 1. Maybe the cannabanoid receptors are just called cannabanoid receptors because thats what they recept, cannabis smoke. So if they recepted smoke from tobacco they would be called tobacco sensors..? 2. Also, maybe we didn't co-evolve to gain these cannibis receptors.. maybe we have had them since the beggining of time.
But I think its cool that we have receptors for cannabis... and what do you mean since the beginning of time? Man in his current form hasnt been around long at all.
Well author Terrence Mckenna thought , to tell you shortly, that our far ancesters' mind evolution was brought on by eating psilocybe mushrooms...I don't really believe this though. I think that when they figured out they could smoke , they were well on the way
Humans having cannibanoid receptors means that when humans were evolving into their present form cannibanoids were regularly ingested and it gave the proto-humans who ingested it an evolutionary advantage, or at least wasn't a disadvantage. There are lots of different types of cannibanoids. Chocolate contains cannibanoids (that why some people are addicted to chocalate and get a "chocolate high").
No, unless smoking cannabis altered our genes. Y'see, you can't really have physical evolution without inheritence. Also, the andanine receptors that THC binds to have been shown to play a role in learning, I.E. that good feeling you used to get as a child when you learned something new. It's kindof like thinking that our Endorphins evolved from using opium, instead of the other way round. (THC is kind of a poision to a wild animal/early human if you think about it, back in the day getting really hungry, tired, and mentally confused was bad when you didn't have a steady supply of food, were constantly threatened by predators, and had to know where you were at all times ((if you got lost you got dead))). Now, i think it played a role in our spiritual evolution, there definately is something other worldy in it, and many cultures used it as a devining plant. (Some people speculate that the word calamus was origionally cannabis in the O.T. recipe for annointing oil).
Unless the early men who did experiment with cannabis somehow gained an advantage that enabled them to survive while the ones who did not died, I don't see how it could've worked out like that. Evolution was not an individual process -- it was based on a large-scale, very long process of killing off the organisms that did not possess certain traits. For example, I believe that had treatments and surgery for appendicitis not been created, people with larger appendixes (and thus people more prone to appendicitis) would slowly die out and the humans who did not die of appendicitis (and their descendants) would be in possession of the gene that creates in them a smaller appendix, and maybe this would repeat itself to the point where we didn't have one anymore. That's how I explain evolution, anyway. But as much as there is apparent scientific logic to the contrary, the idea of early man toking is something I would really like to be true. That would really fuck up the anti-drug crowd.
No. Humans evolved in Africa, so did their consciousness. Cannabis is found in the Himalaya region (that's it's native, natural home). Humans were already fully conscious by the time they got there. The receptors, as someone said, are for natural, human-made neurotransmitters. Cannabinoids just happen to fit into them well enough to activate them.
animals have cannabinoid receptors too... drugs cannot cause evolutionary change. a lot of people believe ou amazing consciousness came about from using psychedelic drugs, but this makes no logical sense. the only thing that can come of drugs is thoughts, drugs dont change our genes. thoughts lead to culture and technology. humanity could be caused be drugs, but humans werent.
another thing that Terence McKenna said was that mushrooms acted as a catalyst for evolution in that when you eat only a little, your vision is improved and most likely your thinking, too. so if you can think better and see better, you become a better hunter. from that, you start eating more meat which has lots of protein, which causes the brain and skull to grow. so the ones eating mushrooms may have a better chance at surviving... maybe. oh yeah, then there´s another Mckenna thing where he basically says that mushroom spores were sent to earth via space from an "alien modality" or an "other" for the sake of aiding in our physical and mental evolution. this entity (aka, "logos") does this to other beings throughout the universe and we just happened to receive them.
of course humans have been using marijuana for ages (thousands of yers)... primary as a textile (rope, clothes, sails, paper, food, etc) but i'm sure they quickly figured out that smoking it did something... and no, marijuana is not responsible for our consciousness today. this is absurd. just because a drug interacts with the brain does not mean that our ancestors used that drug. and for the record, the native ligand is called anandamide.
It is not an absurd thought. It is just a thought... maybe the shit in cannabis made people start thinking and questioning more so that is what lead to a lot of the great thinkers and stuff, and like stoner bill said, maybe not humans.. but humanity.
humans were questioning things because they evolved a prefrontal cortex, not because people may have smoked weed.
yeh, but the nature and complexity of their answers to these questions is another thing, and it cant be ruled out that drugs played a part in this process
i would agree on the issue of mushrooms changing the ancient aztec and native american cultures. mushroom use for thousands of years has got to have a powerful effect on something.
Thats what I am saying. Psychedelic use of anything for thousands of years has to effect SOMETHING...
