20250707

My brain convinced me it’s morning again. Dopamine. Amazing stuff. Not at all like the simplistic desire/pleasure narrative we have. These night times. With the frogs singing. The peace. Nothing moving. These times are golden and there is a little bit of Mr Hyde going on here but hey - this is data.

The ethical implications of altering brain chemistry. Thing is, someone is going to do it; we need it to be someone who can stay the course. But can anyone stay the course when dopamine is involved? They can’t. It’s inherently impossible.

Depending on my dopamine levels I have felt invincible or tiny, sure, but it’s deeper than that. You cannot think without dopamine.

So each time I’ve had a ‘dosing issue’ I have also had an incredibly profound and difficult few days of emotional recall and lability. I am better able to recall and alter my memories and feelings. Right now I’m probably starting to look at ‘self’ and what it means to be. This kind of question feels answerable with dopamine, and the meaning of life felt coherent (and still makes sense: to find meaning).

Well you find meaning through dopamine so according to that logic, dopamine = life? It sure is. Dopamine is also the meaning of life. And it is the secret to being able to grasp your memories and wrangle them into some coherent form, I think.

The light bar I set to go off at bedtime just went off, and I just got up after 4 hours sleep. So strange. I’m going to use the word hypermotivated for this state because that’s what it is, but not in a jittery sense. It’s more a hyper-labile hyper-clear state. A state where someone would be incredibly receptive to brainwashing or suggestion.

And this is why I can’t rush this. 

This is why I need to train myself to be an ethicist before doing anything.

And even then, I’ll need 3 layers of redundancy for myself too.

202507062352

lability

So one reason I need to do this buddhism thing before I get real on the business is… this is real. AI is incoming. Tech can build a brain but it can not build an ethicist. It’s woefully unprepared and any ethics system that is bred _after_ money is involved will be inherently broken.

Right now I am retired and can spend 5 years not worrying about money. I can use this time to train myself to be an oldschool ethicist of the soul. I can translate the teachings of the buddha into modern language for myself, to get it ingrained into my psyche in 1s and 0s.

I can also leave some kind of interpretation online where appropriate.

I guess key points:

1 - Make sure this does not become a cult

2 - I forgot the other one haha. Still with the adhd but ari makes me chuckle about it

This med could be incredibly helpful for trauma therapy because of how easy it is to rewrite your emotional saliency. Easy is the wrong word. It give you access to a deeper stratum of real emotion, is how it feels. Everything resonates more. Like after a near death experience.

Another interesting thing when I started ari is that I started finishing / fixing old art pieces I hadn’t realised were unfinished / broken. I’ve never fixed an at piece. Ever. Adhd. I walk away. This is a big deal.

So this medicine, I think, could be exceptional for a 3 day trauma retreat. Or a 3 day brain washing retreat. We do not want to start another aum cult, that’s for sure.

I think I’d just want to be an advisor. I honestly don’t know. Because dopamine. Powerful stuff. The stupidest of ideas will seem genius if dopamine’s in town.

Anyway I’ve always used drugs to guide my own self-therapy. I can see that now, and it’s actually been very effective. I literally needed the dopamine from the weed in order to access the memories, because of how my brain works. It's science.

I can’t do talk therapy because I have a small memory and slow processing. What I can do with my brain is to take and idea and run the diverge/converge cycle on it a million times in 3 seconds and find god twice and somehow find out that the answer was a stubbed toe all along.

Because that's what dopamine does - makes a stubbed toe into your god.

So for someone like me, and I don't know how many people are like me if I'm honest knowing what I know now... 

But for someone like me I think that upping ari and writing in a log cabin for a few days would be a great way to process trauma. The best way. And easily replicable. But this is definitely not someone should do on their own if they might be as sensitive as me; I am a very experienced drug user and self-induced-mania user so I think I could hold on where many may not have.

I suppose I also need to train to spot these mind states within myself

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If you were hoping to lead an ethics organistion of the future wouldn't you be morally obliged to sample as many brain states as possible? People talk about empathy but what is more empathetic than trying to experience all the brain states so you can have all the data so you can better understand them?

Of course being autistic james i view them as something to be fixed or optimised but hey; that's better than being adhd james w.. I don't want to think about that. 0043

That's a new ability thanks to ari - the ability to look awayfrom a thought. Previously adhd disinihibition of thought would mean I got distracted then latched on. Sucked. Anyway nap. 0044

data

One thing you have to know about me: I’m real. I’m not so sure about you though. 

This is one thing I can say for sure and is the only thing I can say for sure. There is data from my senses and it is sensed. 

There is maybe a self when there is continuity in that sense data. In my case, these was no self, because the data from the senses was not coming through coherently.

So there was no self in terms of continuity and there is now. Maybe. I don’t trust it yet and it is never going to be anything like yours. More like pieces on a string in the wind. But connected.

There was always data from the senses though, ever there and ever changing. The ever present now, and either an eternity of heaven or eternity of hell if you have very short memory and little continuity. How much of this is normal and how much pathological? Do different scriptures deal with different mental health issues? Do they all deal with audhd? None?

I hated the ‘I’m an alien’ narrative with autism when I looked into it a few months back. Before this, autism was categorised with down syndrome in my mind after a schoolhood of fistfights and insults. No wonder I never looked at it. And hyperfocus precluded me from adhd, of course, symptom though it was.

I had a good 1.5 hours sleep then by the way. So thats 4 hours, 1.5 hours, and each time the churn can proceed and more wool can come out. It feels pretty nice right now; silken. This is day 3 of increasing the ari and I don’t like the feeling of coming up, but the butteriness is starting to slip in now and I know everything will be ok. I feel it in my bones, just like I feel the certainty of meaninglessness and doom without these now-2mg. I need to find the point on the tolerance equilibrium where it fades at the rate it builds, and then split my dosing between morning and evening, and then I can have the continuity that other people are born with and sit and work on my brain for once.

That will be so nice. To be able to work on the brain and have the work maybe stick.

We are the sculptor and the clay, but my clay was crumbly, cracking. Ari feels like someone kneaded water into it and made it all liquid and malleable again.

I have to remind you that to a normal brain this drug doesn’t apparently feel nice. It is flattening and makes them slow. For me it is incredibly uplifting and gives me about 40 extra IQ points while removing 80% of the friction in my life. Or it fools me into thinking this. Amazing. All those wasted years on the wrong substances.

My brain is broken and needs a plug for its synapses. Simple.

Anyway coffee time…

202507070205

ChatGPT reckons I've probably had a lifetime of migraines on top of the withdrawal, based on the steelwool page. 0224

Fuck man I have been haven't I and when I carved out those lines in recruitin' it alleviated them for a while because they're caused by psychic pain. All this time I was looking at others and wondering what my cross would be to bear. It still matters, even if you're only aware of it retrospectively.

quiet

Now the madman is subdued the quiet one can come to the fore. He’s a nice guy, but timid; he’s not been out before. The noise in his head was so loud that he didn’t even realise he was having a form of low-key migraine all this time.

I don’t know which one is the fighter. I think they both are. I think the loud one fights the outside world and the quiet one fights the inside. The loud one trashes the inside, and the quiet one tries to restrain him. Anyway.

What are my autistic traits? What even is autism? A difference in neuronal layout, I guess, but we are all laid out differently, and each differently is different.

For me I think that layout is that I’m stuck more in pegboard mode than most. When people have talked to me about logic I’ve always felt a little confused.

Logic in my mind is rarely a case of a b c. It’s more a case of a b z. It’s just easy, and sometimes the z is right and sometimes it’s not, but usually it’s not far off. This always made me annoyed that people couldn’t just ‘see it’, though apparently they were equally annoyed at me for similar things.

I’m new to autism so just starting to unpack it. The migraines are news to me still. I’m carving them into an art piece as I go through this.

So things I struggle with often overlap with adhd, of course, because dopamine and I’m a single system. Taxes are a good example. I hate them. And I struggle with them. But because I have adhd, I just hate them, and don’t do them. Same with shopping. Same with lots of stuff. Not going to happen.

When medicated with just guanfacine my autistic traits started to come out and I was more able to attempt the things like taxes. Crowds and lights and eye contact with strangers became more challenging; sounds, easily overwhelmed, etc. We live in a nice almost-country location thankfully; I couldn’t handle a city. I’d have to blast music in my ears all day. A farm sounds nice. A farm sounds very nice, given all I’ve learned.

Now. Just give me a sec. It’s a lot to sink in.

I’ve had sensory overload for my entire life

I am incapable of processing two sound sources at once

I have memory overload and migraines on a near-constant basis when talking with people face to face

Eye contact with strangers can result in flash-panic

I have monotropic thinking and fixate on things

I constantly rehearse and replay things in my mind

I am always on edge; always looking for threat

Everything has to have a purpose, a reason, including me

It’s exhausting just thinking about this so I am going to stop

I just pushed through before because adhd. There was no stopping to rub a meteor to let the memory overload subside. Ha. Weaving. Steel wool. It’s memory overload and allowing the process to finish by letting your dopamine system latch onto a simple repetitive motion so that the processing can happen in the background.

Steel wool.

Words.

It gets the job done. I’ll keep it.

Yeah I need to stop there. Time to potter or something.

202507070427

Alright my brain is slotting into place now. The metaphors are starting to click with the science.

It's kinda sad though. Same old. First time my brain works and first time I feel happy in my life, and everyone probably thinks I've lost it. When I was on the verge of killing myself, they'd have said I was fighting the fight, and now I've won, they think I'm at risk.

But then saying you've won is a red flag. How about you say you've found the medication that suits your brain? So you've won? Unless they stop making it. Pretty unlikely. So you've won?

Maybe it'll stop working. All the research suggests not. So you've won? Maybe. Not 100% on that one.

The one remaining question is cyclothymia, but this was so obviously caused by the med and feels so different to anything I've experienced before (the buttered joints and brain) that .. I don't think it is. I think it's the med. And I think that means I won.

But hey. Should probably just shut up and medidate. Enjoy these days.

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The thought of having to go back to living like that fills me with so much dread. All my research suggests that this can be a lifetime solution though so.... stop thinking about it James.

I honestly don’t know if I’m ever going to want to look at my old life again after this is all done.

All I see is pain, right now. A man struggling, barely keeping his head above water, everyone oblivious. 

My children. If I hadn’t made my children I would have killed myself long ago. Somehow. Some stupid swerve on the bike. Those dump trucks I trained next to looked pretty inviting. Surely there was a reason I was there. A reason I was in the back country alone. Surely I wanted to die.

So the kids kept me from killing myself consciously but not unconsciously. I was still out there, doing the things that a 40 year old father of two probably shouldn’t be doing, considering that his children are his literal world.

But I wanted to die.

Let’s get that said. I wanted to die. I didn’t know it always; there were times when I was fine. But my baseline was in the negative, and when I went back to my baseline, I wanted to die.

My child has been born with a similar baseline, and and people all the way up my ancestral line will have been too. Now; they have a prosthetic.

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For pure adhd you probably wouldn't see such a profound change. I think ari is borderline enlightenment for me because it hits both the adhd and the asd, and the asd processing overload logjam is significant. I've never known anything else so thinking has been like pushing water through a hole. Now the flow is open.

That said, I think ari could be both diagnosis and treatment and even therapy for people with my form of adhd.

There would be some difference between the adhd and normal brain, or a chart where you define a cutoff point. It would address dopamine related issues in the immediate day to day life. Attention, fous, etc. And it would enable encoding of memories from a fragmented life. On top of that it increases emotional lability so I think there's a very real chance that you could use this, along with a therapist, to 'detox' from adhd.

I can see a business model where we do something like a yoga retreat. You come in for a scan, get your ari, and it's like ayahuascua for 4 days, then therapy for 3 weeks, and then off you go with a treatment plan and a new outlook on life.

202507070635

Hmph. The monkey mind. One branch to the next. Gaps. Tamed by ari. I always assumed it was just because the monkey was a monkey but maybe it's also because it was swinging. 

These people around me have always loved me, always cared for me. I’m very lucky in that regard and would certainly have been dead before 20 if not for my parents and their unwavering love. I was just incapable of receiving it like a normal person would.

Any compliment fell on deaf ears. I don’t know why. My dad tried so many times to say he was proud of me. I never heard him. The internal dad was too strong, too loud, too venomous. Those microexpressions over the years. The pain, in hindsight. He probably has a saw in his head too.

All this data was gathered and my world was dark and scary and no reassurance would seem to work apart from work work working always moving never stopping. Barricade the doors.

But it wasn’t their fault. Your brain was damaged somehow. Maybe they have the same thing and taught you how to navigate it, as their parents taught them. Maybe this testing of the evolutionary tree is a dead end without medical intervention.

It’s not their fault though. It’s not your fault though, either, James. That’s the thing. That’s the main thing. You are in a dynamic of either/or and maybe that is something to do with how strong your devil and angel are but you are in there and it does not fit this situation.

The either/or is within you and not within the world. The world is grey, even if you are a constantly mixing black and white, yin and yang, pigment never settling. Or maybe… lets not get carried away. Positive god hypotheses are some of the most painful. Better to expect nothing.

202507070722

So I got to feeling sorry for myself that I will never be part of the water and never able to enjoy the dance, and feel love and express love the same way as the majority of humans. I need to cut that off now because it’s a foolish and harmful thought.

No two loves are the same. Even the same person, loving the same inanimate object, will love it differently every day because of the changes within themselves. Maybe I express love with random acts instead of words and hugs but I sure as hell feel it. Intensely.

This funnels into difficulties with my family. My first son is ND and similar to me and we communicate easily, but my second son is more social and we can clash. This is one major reason for seeking treatment: I want to be a better dad.

The bounciness and noise of cchild two overwhelms me; he’s borderline adhd so I’m wary that we don’t fall into the dynamic where he wants to play, I do too, but I get overwhelmed, microexpression, he picks up on it, rsd, lifetime of insecurity. I don’t want that.

But you can’t just get rid of microexpressions. So I had to find meds that actually got rid of the irritation.

Child one I don’t need middleware with, really, but child two I do. I need to plan how to express love to him so that he will feel it in a way that brings him warmth and comfort and security. Probably the best way to do that is to medicate away my pain so I don’t lash out. 

202507070836

I don't know if I can do this portrait of my old self yet. I feel like I should wait. He deserves respect. The effort that he made to support himself and his family. I think he only stayed alive to support first his birth family and then the family he built. 

This man deserves due respect for his service. I need to lay him to rest like a war hero. That's what he is. Brain chemistry is everything, and one madman will have a field day in a bloodbath while another... let's stop that now. That's enough self pity.

He won, James. You are he. He won. He found the solution. The only reason he doesn't exist any more is that he broke the cycle, escaped, through chemistry. It still sounds crazy and this idea of two people is just a conceptual one, don't worry. 

But they are so very different. I have done most of the drugs and nothing comes close to this. This is a different universe, where that was a new filter superimposed. This is regular dopamine signalling while you sleep which gives you a sense of security and wellbeing. 

But right now I'm a bit amped because the dose is increasing. As the day goes on, and particularly tomorrow, I should start feeling more smooth again. I can't believe I survived with the amount of friction in my body and mind.

202507070940

I can’t do it. I can’t lay him down to rest yet. He’s a hero to my wife and children. His suffering was not in vain. But the suffering was bigger than that so the result has to be bigger too.

Thinking about the self, and love, and identity. When I was first hit with this whole thing, 6 weeks ago, it felt like the entire world had me dancing to this tune for 42 years and I was angry. Unable and unwilling to dance any more. Now I am a little more considered, but still angry, and still unwilling to dance. Maybe able.

I need to decide what parts of my old persona to keep and what parts to discard.

The greed is gone. I have always tried to kill it. It will still echo. Medication was the answer.

I’ve not meditated enough today but again, it’s about attachment and craving. I tried to remove craving all these years but it was, actually, impossible. Now I maybe have a chance.

202507071158

I keep coming back to identity. I think I have one now. Still figuring out what it is. I think it’s like a walnut.

But you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. As an autistic person who is masking to themselves, I guess this is extra true. When my processing was smashed out of the park right after diagnosis it was easy to slip into black and white thinking.

Now I can be more granular though. I had to dance to the neurotypical tune of work and sausages, sure, but did my family make me dance? I don’t think they ever did. They taught me. They didn’t make me. There’s a distinction.

And did they love me or did they love the constructs? Again - monotropic thinking has subsided and it’s clear they didn’t actually care about the constructs. Some of the things I achieved might have impressed them, sure, but they never cared. It was never them who needed the validation.

The reality is that this is nobody’s fault. It’s not even from when you fell off that slide. It’s because you were born James Baird and you are of a certain lineage, and you have achieved great things through the suffering. But the great things were all self-oriented, because the suffering was of the self. Now the suffering is of the other and there is the high motivation from ari again so back on topic.

My family love me and they always have. They never asked me to be somebody else; they just asked me not to be a dick.

I wasn’t a dick. I was sick. But nobody knew; not even me. 2mg now at 25% the strength of dopamine. So even at 100% uptake over 3 days that’s only 2mg of extra perceived dopamine on the receptors. I know it’s a tiny molecule but still…

So - the people love you. Good. You love them. Good. That’s a foundation.

202507071227

How may others are living in hell. B-man definitely visited.

But yeah... the more I let it gestate the more I think that empathy issues are all because of fear. And fear is all because of irregular dopamine signalling. I am in a scary world so I solve the problems; you are on the beach so want me to stop making so much noise. When you think about it like this, they don't seem so insurmountable, if you can make the world less scary.

Then there's the low memory but that's more communication issues than empathy issues. Though how empathetic I'll be able to be, I'm not sure. This topography is likely fixed. But my son. He gets a better world. 1513

Just read about some people 'pulsing' ari and that kind of makes sense. I think it helps with emotional processing (it's not fun) so if you can set aside 72 hours for basically crying and working through shit, why not. For me though I just want stability. Fed up of this ascension phase. 1515

I am getting anxious that the ari isn't going to work, or we are going to overshoot and go into flatness, but right now I'm antsy because it's day 3 of the receptor ramp-up. I suppose worst case it's a few days of discomfort and then lower the dose again but I'm getting pretty tired of all this up and down now. I just want stable and boring. 1536

Did I actually feel that good or was it all in my head? Well. Silly wording. Was it a form of induced cyclothymia? Will I experience the same level of wellbeing again? I really don't want to go back to hungry ghost. I am so exhausted and just want to rest. These 6 weeks feel like 2 years to me. Not just because of the events, but I think the dopamine signalling. If 4 hours of sleep suffices where 8 hours used to. But was that even sleep? This is so strange. It's like a full hard reset of the brain. I hope I come out functional and good. 1547

Did I just hallucinate the whole thing? The whole adhd thing? The lack of identity? Was that a thing, or do I have an identity now? I'm still not sure on that one because my brain is changing so much day to day.

I do have a family. That's what I have. I delved into the depths of my mind and it was not nice and I found out a lot... some of it will be true and all of it was helpful. But what I come back to is my family.

It feels like another kind of realignment is going on in my right cheekbone. That sounds so strange but something about the tension there is changing and releasing. I carved these tension lines into that self portrait I was going to do but then I decided not to do the portrait. Why did I decide not to do it?

I broke some wood and was going to do a ragged one and show his pain but that was disrespectful so I decided to do a perfect one instead, but that isn't right either. I'm inclined to get a photograph of him printed out and framed, and put it on the wall to see until the emotional charge of my old life has gone.

I don't think I will cut him out.

He is still there but I can choose to keep him alive. He loves these people and I know he's me but I have to speak in dualities. I don't think I can cut him out but I cut out that pain and hopefully ari can keep it at bay in real life too.

I feel like this process is nearly over. I feel like I am going to go to the dentist tomorrow and have this tooth put in and that will be it.

I had a filling that took up half a molar bodged in as a kid in the UK, 30 years ago, mask-land. It fell out within 2 seconds of a chunk falling off one of my whetstones at the start of all this, and the tooth was rotten. I've spent the last 6 weeks going to the dentist and having a root canal done. This has been a good metaphor, though the dentist thinks I'm crazy.

I think... that tomorrow it will be done. I will be autistic and I will have accepted who I am and that will be that. And I think I am going to keep the soldier, as I'll call him. He died a hero. That was his dream. He died on the sword that saved his child. But he passed something to me and I will keep it.

This has been so incredibly strange. I don't know if it's over. I'm just writing whatever comes to mind because this is my therapy. I might wake up tomorrow and write even crazier shit. But it feels like it's been reeling in and it always happens like this; I look up and realise I'm at the end.

Maybe my family was the end. Of that journey. The beginning I guess, of going into the world as a new person. That was one hell of a trip, if that's what it was. 

But I don't think it was. I think my memory is different because of this medicine and I guess that increasing the dose has changed the perception of time again? These last 3 days feel like they have lasted an eternity. I am not sure if I'm motivated or tired or what.

I guess we will see tomorrow.

For the time being, if any of you guys are reading this, thanks for bearing with me.

I'm not sure what happened. Well.. I am. I had too many programs running and crashed, hard reset, had to choose what to keep. Lucky to be here, let alone sane?

I think I should have come out of it more genuine and more optimised, and if I can get medication sorted that makes my world less scary then I should be more empathetic... but it's going to be hard because new bike and I can't look at an emotional face so... practicalities.

Now you know I'm autistic.

Now I know I'm autistic.

Now you know I have adhd.

Now I know I have adhd.

We know what we are dealing with so we can create solutions. It'll be pretty easy. Like how I made presents to show how much I loved you. Those were the best things I'd made at the time, and I'm happy they weren't the last things I made.

I think I'll hold onto that James you liked. A bit of him; not much. The old James probably isn't the best for what coms next, whatever that may be. I might build a business or might not. I'll probably write a blog; people like me are very much alone in the world. I'll definitely spend time with my family.

That's the main one. My son. He doesn't have to suffer like me. My other son. He doesn't have to suffer me. My wife can be loved the way she deserves. 

I wonder what I can do to help people. Is just writing a blog the best thing? Build a business? Frankly I'd rather just tell other people to build one but don't know anyone I trust. Typical adhd.

Anyway I'm still me but I'm better, I think, and I'm pretty tired at the moment.

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