tldr: a few tickets left for salon_8 at makilala on april 20th, and why the oldest rooms and the newest science are asking the same question.
🔮 reflections
somewhere in 17th century paris, a woman opened her home once a week and invited the people most likely to say something dangerous. voltaire came. rousseau. diderot. the conversations that happened in those rooms eventually became the enlightenment.
go back further and you find the same logic in cairo, baghdad, istanbul. the arab coffeehouse as the first public intellectual space, where poets and merchants and astronomers sat in the same room and argued about god and mathematics and whether the caliph was doing a good job. the ottoman empire banned them twice because of what people were saying inside.
what made both of those rooms work wasn't just the ideas but the table, the shared meal, and the cup passed around. every culture on earth has worked this out independently and arrived at the same answer.
communion, seder, iftar, the japanese tea ceremony, the filipino kamayan. when you put food in the middle of the table, people slow down and they listen differently. there's a social contract in sharing a plate that you can't manufacture any other way.
that's what we're building on april 20th at makilala. the name means "to get to know" in tagalog, which felt almost too right to ignore. chef nuit and the regular family built a room that feels like you walked off a plane onto a manila side street, loud and warm in exactly the way a good dinner table should be. 25 people, prix fixe, shared apps, real conversation. a few tickets remain.
📡 the idea
a mega-analysis by canadians, the largest ever study on psychedelics conducted using AI, published last week in nature medicine pooled 11 brain imaging datasets, 267 participants, five psychedelic drugs, researchers across three continents. the headline finding: psychedelics flatten the brain's processing hierarchy, breaking down the wall between abstract thought and raw sensory experience. the parts that don't normally talk start talking.
geoffrey hinton, the uoft professor and the man who built the architecture behind every AI system you've used, started as a cognitive psychologist studying how the brain represents knowledge. he didn't just borrow from neuroscience. he reverse-engineered the brain's hierarchy and made it run on silicon. and now we have the most rigorous evidence yet that psychedelics specifically target and reorganize that same hierarchy.
consciousness research and machine intelligence are drawing from the same well. MOSAIC has been sitting at that intersection for two years. we're only beginning to say it out loud.
🥘 MOSAIC salon_8 / april 20
25 people. prix fixe with shared apps and your choice of main. real conversation on culture, psychedelics, and consciousness. only a few tickets left: lu.ma/7z53juq0
DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.
