Cognitive Security Meetup & Unconference: "Psychedelics — Opening the Mind or Expanding the Attack Surface?"

What is Cognitive Security

Cognitive Security or CogSec is an emerging interdisciplinary field studying mental self-defense against mind manipulation, social engineering and persuasion techniques.

Cognitive security can be thought of as the opposite of mind manipulation . Mind manipulation seeks to bypass a person’s critical thinking and influence a person’s behaviour or beliefs via psychological vulnerabilities. Cognitive Security aims to protect our mental autonomy in forming beliefs and making decisions as well as understand ways in which human minds are vulnerable in order to build resilience against various forms of manipulation and persuasion.

Cognitive Security as a field is certainly concerned with “conventional” bad actors such as charismatic individuals, private corporations, public organisations and governments manipulating cognition — be it intentionally or unintentionally. But the overall scope is more broad: it also aims to protect individual minds against hostile memes (self-replicating units of cultural information), hostile egregores (distributed thought entities), emergent social media dynamics and hypothetical future threats like superpersuasive AI.

There is also US-based group focused on CogSec, you can read their definition on their website .

Meetup Structure

The meetup will start with an in-person 45-min talk on “Psychedelics — Opening the Mind or Expanding the Attack Surface?” by Sasha Putilin (the meetup host & organiser), writer of the blog Psychotechnology .

Psychedelics can open the mind and make it more plastic. But the flip side of this is making the mind more vulnerable to external influence — for better or worse. This talk will discuss models of psychedelic actions in the brains: ReBUS (relaxed beliefs), neural annealing, ego dissolution, no-self, ontological shifts, iterating your ”epistemic aesthetic”, vasocomputation.

Psychedelics (and meditation) are the closest thing we have to the root access to our own mind. The talk will also examine how can this “root access” be used by malicious actors. When we are freed from rigid beliefs, in what ways does this make us vulnerable to new ones?

The frame will generally be pro-psychedelic and equip you with mental models that would help you understand how mind updates itself on psychedelics. But we will also examine case studies of psychedelic brainwashing and psychedelics use in various cults.

Some relevant posts from my blog:

Unconference