Totally separate from whatever this paper is claiming, I'm already dreading a conversation at some future party in which some person rambles on regarding a very unscientific understanding of this paper and something about burning man.
Terence McKenna would often say all sorts of crazy-sounding things but he never struck me as someone who took himself too seriously. Here's a short clip [0] which I believe perfectly captures his essence; at the end you can hear him laugh at himself and his story.
Edit: I've enjoyed listening to many hours of Terence McKenna speaking, but I wouldn't recommend swallowing all of his pills.
What is the Tao-drug connection? I feel like this is a case of Orientalism where Western drug culture is getting in the way of popular perception of Taoism, especially Chuang Tzu. Why aren't intellectual snobs trading in-jokes about Taoism and Zen and Mahayana Buddhism and the Diamond Sutra? It's like they ceded a huge swath of territory to the stoners, and for no good reason, I might add.
Why is there no popular Taoist movement? Why was it marginalized in the hippie movement? Why did intellectuals allow the hippies to control the perception of Taoism?
Chuang Tzu is just so fundamental. I can't see how you can go wrong adding it to a standard Western education.
YOUR LIFE HAS A LIMIT but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger. If you understand this and still strive for knowledge, you will be in danger for certain! If you do good, stay away from fame. If you do evil, stay away from punishments. Follow the middle; go by what is constant, and you can stay in one piece, keep yourself alive, look after your parents, and live out your years.
Everywhere I look cannabis use has virtually normalized outside of outdated and contrived legal frameworks, and 1%er business tycoons are micro-dosing on the job for presumed spiritual and/or perceptual advantages.
You need to consider your informational sphere, considering you are on HN its probably vastly different than 95% of the US. Most of the US still views drug use as a criminal issue, including psychedelics. Psychedelics are still central to large pieces of the counter culture.
I live and operate well outside of the typical sphere of Hacker News. Cannabis has been normalized across my country for decades. It's well known for it.
MDMA and LSD are marginalized? Everyone I've ever known has either tried them or knows someone who has. Psilocybin even more so. That was practically a rite of passage growing up in rural Canada.
I really enjoy his address to the Jung Society because he is a little more formal without the amusing speculative half-serious statements. He really broke through to me in this one ("the dime dropped"), whereas I didn't take him as seriously before.
Dismissing someone with a mind full of unique and creative ideas is generally a bad idea. It's okay to disagree but it's completely unnecessary for us to stand on an ivory tower staring down on people we don't understand
Another case where I didn't get my tone across - I admire McKenna and have listened to quite a bit of his stuff. He's close to being a genius if he isn't one. However, I didn't really sync up with the machine elve threads.
> Dismissing someone with a mind full of unique and creative ideas is generally a bad idea
As someone who smoked a joint with Terence, I can tell you why people dismiss him. He went totally over the edge with the "Timewave Zero" software nonsense. Aside from that, he was surprisingly pretty grounded.
Nothing in there says that he's dismissing McKenna in any way.
Also you could make this claim about literally any person in any situation. Not all people are worth listening just because what they have to say is "unique". People who think vaccines are being used to implant microchips have quite the "unique" and creative perspective. That doesn't mean they deserve to be taken seriously.
This is an important description, as when you think of a chemical creating impairment, it is essentially adding noise to signals in your brain, and a lot of the geometric and fractal artifacts we see resemble noise artifacts you would get from interfering with other analogue signals.
Given your brain takes sensory signal input and coheres it, impairing that ability is going to create signals-based feedback that is described in information theory and signal processing, which if there is any periodic sampling going on on the coherance layer, you're going to get shape artifacts that are a function of that period. It's essentially 1/f noise and the experience of "more" information in a hallucinatory state is really just noisy information, like feedback on a TV. (It implies your brain has a clock cycle, and probably something like an NTP service.)
Imagine your TV had worked perfectly for your entire life and the first time you experienced its signal was bad, but you didn't realize there was a world in which that signal could not exist, so it would be totally mind blowing and you might experience it as a rift in reality. It would demand the question, if the people on TV aren't the substrate of our shared reality, and they are only representations transmitted by signals our minds are cohering, what else isn't necessarily real?
You'd tell other people that you had an experience where there is something else, a true substrate of reality where the televisions weren't coherent and real, which seems impossible, but if you've experienced it, you know. Suddenly, the televisions and they things they say are fallible, but there is still a you without them, and one that is not bound to the identity you see reflected in what they broadcast and tell you, because when the TV signal fed back on itself or echoed with delay, now you know there is something behind it all. It seems profound, but it's really just the first time your TV didn't work because something had impaired the signal. This is what I think hallucinogens are: noise on your sensory channels that reminds you the signals you use to cohere your experience exist in a substrate, which is just a mundane fact and necessarily physically true, and "you" are more than what your manage to cohere into a narrative from your sensory input. Some people believe a substrate or perception of something "else" is inconcievable because they have never experienced jitter in their coherence cycles, and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really, it's not, and most of us just go back to chopping wood and carrying water.
I'm very skeptical of this interpretation, if only because LSD doesn't just (or even mostly) cause "noise" hallucinations. It makes you actually notice the tiny details and patterns in everyday things. Not a different reality so much so as a deeper awareness and appreciation of the reality normally perceived.
People who don't have first-hand experience with psychedelics tend to have this misconception, thinking of the experience as some type of delirium. The wonder of being on psychedelics is understanding that everything in typical day to day to life is hilariously unimportant, and also understanding that the impaired perception of the world is the one we normally have.
To keep with the TV analogy, let's say you are watching a movie, enjoying the story, the setting, etc... Then, noised is added to the signal and you start seeing all sorts of glitches.
For example, let's imagine that the boot of a character flickers a bit. That boot has its importance, the director wanted to give the movie a certain aesthetic and that boot is part of it, but it is not important in the story and you are not supposed to notice it, in fact it is especially designed not to be out of place.
But because of the glitch, you now have all your attention focused on the boot, which is interesting, but you lost the big picture, too hard to understand now because of the noise. Maybe the next glitch will highlight the pavement or a lamp post.
But that's not how it works, at all. There's nothing "flickering" to draw your attention to one particular bit etc; you still perceive the whole image at once.
The closest I can come to describing this is a higher resolution - like viewing the same photo, but you go from 640x480 to 4K, and from 256 to 32-bit color. Indeed, when consuming any sort of digital visual input, resolution differences (and compression artifacts etc) become much more noticeable, so perhaps this isn't merely an analogy. But the same also extends to sounds and even taste - it's not that things taste different, for example, but you can more readily identify and appreciate all the overtones that combine to create a particular taste, without subtracting from the experience of the whole.
This, by the way, is why watching fractal animations [1] can be so fascinating in that state - you still perceive the fractal as a whole, but you also simultaneously see the tiny details, and can observe that they faithfully correspond to the larger image, without having to individually focus on each.
I'm very nodding-along with this interpretation, but only because when I closed my eyes I realized that what I saw looked like the normal after image of staring at a lightbulb but shoved through some form of Fourier space filter. I came to this revelation that the entire experience, the sense of time, the visual distortions, the losing trains of thought, all of it could be explained if brain waves are representations of repeating patterns at that same time scale. The acid simply damps or phase shifts the larger time scales. Visual signals become time series in a manner similar to analogue TV.
The opposite of tiny detail happens. I looked at a brick wall and all the bricks were identical. Like lazy copy paste game texture identical. I knew that the bricks weren't actually like that. You see patterns in things because the frequency resolution needed to encode the difference is cut off. The result is like a JPEG artifact but instead of localized square pixelation you get globalized crystal pixelization. Everything looks like it fits a crystal pattern. Especially random noise. Here is some noise that worked particularly well one time.
https://ibb.co/D1rd6bN
You can't tell me you are seeing patters that are really there in literal randomness.
There's plenty of accidental patterns in purely random stuff. So the thing that the pattern corresponds to, according to your brain, isn't really there - but the pattern itself can very well be.
You know how trees sometimes look like they have faces, for example? They objectively do, according to our pattern recognition algorithm for faces, in a sense that people will find the same tree more or less anthropomorphic. But it doesn't mean that they actually have faces, of course! If you have a still photo of the forest, and stare at it long enough, you might notice more such than you would if you just glanced at it briefly. Same thing here.
Trees are not accidental. They very much have a pattern. Namely they are in the shape of a tree.
TV static is pure randomness. Looking at any pixel has no correlation with looking at any other pixel. Any pattern you see in static must therefore be an artifact of the way your brain encodes patterns rather than something that is actually there.
Trees with faces are accidental. Trees don't have faces. They do have various unrelated features, which sometimes combine to form something that objectively looks like a face to humans.
For a more abstract example, if you generate a random black-and-white static image, it will have a bunch of (short) vertical and horizontal lines in it, simply because random pixel values will sometimes cluster into sequences that produce lines. Such a line is "actually there" - different people will see it, and you can even write code that finds all such lines. The fact that its pixels were formed randomly, without correlation between each other, doesn't change this - it just means that the line has no meaning; it's data, not information. But even so, your ability to detect such lines in a static image can vary.
In a similar vein, there's a well-known issue with RNG in games, where a straightforward approach can sometimes result in e.g. repeating the same value in a row many times, which the players immediately notice (and perceive as unfair). Which is why in many games, the RNG is specifically tweaked to keep track of recent outputs and actively avoid producing more output that would form an easily recognizable pattern.
For me the (rather strong) trips from mushrooms showed me how some part of the brain (not sure which one though) is very good at interpolating bits and pieces of reality when there is no longer strong coming in via our senses. Its a blurry picture of reality, but the blur isn't the loss of detail but rather its fractalization (which in the end is the opposite of it).
The harder the trip the less real-world signal and more brains's interpolation. We all have highly unique brains so although the principles are the same (fractals in visual and in mind, strange colors, mixing senses etc.) we all have such a unique take on it.
And since the same brain is just guessing and smoothing input, and the one processing the guesses, its guesses are so 'self-compatible' that it can literally make its own feedback loops (I had it multiple times, when tripping with closed eyes I began wandering further and further away on a very consistent interconnected trip).
Its so strange. I can remember those trips so well, but the 'enhanced' version of it is simply too vast for my normal brain to grok. Just partial projections like 3d into 2d that don't give full picture or don't make much sense.
Indeed. Not only that, but our brain lies to us with regards to temporal placement of objects. Hence the old thing where when you first look at a ticking clock, the first second feels like it takes longer to lapse, because your brain filled in part of your vision with where it thought the second hand was, because when you shifted your focus towards the second hand, your eyes performed a microsaccade and thus in that precise moment, you were technically blind. This is why I think the effects of psychedelics have such a strong temporal factor.
It def feels like a raw vs jpeg. The straight sensor data vs a compressed and corrected view.
Problem is, you can get caught on certain intricacies of the raw input instead of just taking it all in at once. Taking it all in at once you can see how it's different than what you preconceived, and that your preconception is just one of infinite perceptions of the single moment.
Just an amazing comment. As someone who has experienced profound states of psychedelia, and having consumed vast amounts of data pertaining to such experiences, yours may be the most unique and original commentary regarding the topic that I’ve seen yet. Bravo, and I’ll certainly be returning to this comment at a later time and date.
Creating noise in the brain that the nervous system then makes sense of. Interesting theory.
Now if I put my mystical hippie hat on I'm going to ask you what you think noise is? Personally I think it's some fundamental property of the universe.
noise is whatever you're not interested in studying/analyzing at the moment.
it's more a property of a thinking agent than it is of the universe.
if you see it everywhere it's because we are the same type of observers, maybe other kinds of hypothetical agents can segments the universe in different ways.
Your retina does quite a lot of noise filtering at the beginning of visual processing.
Background radiation is also a noise property of the universe, as is the background microwave radiation from the start of the universe. Is this just noise because it's an artefact of the measurement aparatus?
I think it’s just the normal noise/lighting/etc that is always there. You just have no reason to actually notice it (it provides no benefit to e.g. a hunter gatherer) so the brain normally disregards it. It’s a fundamental property of the universe but then again so is everything else.
I was thinking of noise - or randomness. It crops up in many places. When I was studying visual perception a long time ago (back during the second wave of neural networks) it amazed me what a hostile mechanism light is for actually getting a coherent signal that looks well put together (like what our brain does)
It's all the more interesting because consciousness itself is often described as a consequence of a sensory loop on the brain. The book "I am a strange a loop" goes into detail about this theory.
I remember being 15 or 16 and an older adult friend in my computer club describing LSD to me: "You know when you turn on your computer and the cartridge isn't in right or you have some fault on the PCB bridging some lines on the data or address bus to the video chip? Something like that... LSD is like opening the case of your Commodore 64 and dropping in some loose metal screws..."
I feel like the analogy holds, at least for simple computers like that where the machine still runs, but with weird alterations. You can look at the patterns that the chip is generating and ... see something [for me never particularly visual, more philosophical]. But it's really just throwing things... off. There's something to learn there, I guess, but I never thought it was terribly metaphysical.
More just evidence that our experience is always mediated, and a sensory change [internal senses as well], a change in texture of mood and thought, and not a very functional one.
It's that the discovery that our personal coherence and experience is very narrow, is very jarring when we haven't experienced it before and haven't developed cognitive tools to manage that. It's like discovering that from some other perspective that exists in the substrate, it's likely that your entire experience of the world is as bounded and low-entropy as a drawing or a song. If the sudden apprehension that we may be this absurd isn't belly laugh funny, I am confident that someone else especially finds this fact of us not finding it funny even funnier. There's nothing we can do about it, so you just appreciate it for what it is, relieve suffering where you can, and be excited about what else you couldn't have known.
> it's likely that your entire experience of the world is as bounded and low-entropy as a drawing or a song
YES. I've been following some threads related to the Leiden Theory of Language, which basically proposes that human minds differ from other creatures' right now mostly because we're an advanced semiotic organism that has carved out and evolved an ecological niche inside of an specific area of a biological host organism: the human mind. Basically, the mundane world we live every day is not so dissimilar from the one we imagine as an otherworldly future where we might become cyborgs of tech and biology... but we're ALREADY an organic cyborg of language/semiotics and biology. As in, shit is already weird, we just can't recognize the weirdness so well. Perhaps our fellow travellers (other animals) see us best for what we are.
Anyhow, re: drawings/songs. Through this distorted lens, I've been trying to see the way that our stories and narratives are in some ways like our children. I'm trying to see humans as being more like songs or drawings than we care to admit. Or rather, I'm noticing that we find these other things more "disposable" and we feel less kinship with them when they're persisting in various non-human substrates. We don't mourn their loss as fiercely as the loss of a semiotic-biological cyborg that is wrapped inside another human. But that's just our own bias. Maybe some of these lost narratives and semiotic systems deserve to be mourned just as much. Maybe we should be just as sad for the loss of groups of meaning and narrative (other cultures), but we're just not hard-coded to sense it as well...
And really vibing with your use of the word "substrate" btw.
You can look at the EEG spectrogram or calculate its spectral entropy. When you think hard, it resembles white noise and has high entropy. If you close your eyes and relax, it gets more regular and entropy goes down. I've done this myself. And we've known about alpha and delta waves etc for more than a century. When you fall asleep, the signal goes more towards a sine wave, ie less entropy.
Many of these complexity or information content metrics work in similar ways. You can even turn EEG recordings from medical operations with anesthesia to a sound and listen to them. The frequencies are of course very low so you must speed it up. You can clearly say when the person fell asleep. A waterfall turns into a hum.
It makes sense, if you're making measurements of a complex system, of course white noise like results are more probable if there's actually something significant going on, than a simple sine wave. Or picture the modem calling sound. The low data rates are simple waves but the high data rate resembles white noise.
See Shannon's original paper, "Communication in the presence of noise".[1] In that view, where the goal is to reproduce the original signal, noise and information are not distinguished, because they look the same on the channel. Both "increase the fractal dimension". Adding noise will make a lossless compression of something much larger. Go add some noise to a simple picture in Photoshop, then export in some lossless compressed format, like .png.
Now, lossy compression algorithms, such as JPEG, MP3, and almost all video compressors, are different. They have some model of what the content is "supposed to be like", and fit to that model. This works badly for content that does not fit the model, such as the mess JPEG makes of hard edges.
The original author referenced Shannon. The tests he's running use signals from which he cannot extract meaning, so he can only extract the statistics you can compute from a signal you do not understand. There are other tests for "is it signal or is it noise" - looking at the spectrum, autocorrelation to look for repetition (they did some of that), correlation with other signals, and such - but "fractal dimension" isn't one of them.
Adding one random bit increases the entropy by a bit because there are now two possible messages - your message with a 0 or with a 1. Add a bunch of noise and you add a bunch of bits; entropy is average bits per message.
Lempel-Ziv compression is used by some file compression utilities.[1] The ratio of original size to compressed size is essentially the Lempel-Ziv complexity. If you compress a file of AAAAAAAA..., you will get a very small file, and a low complexity. If you compress a file of random numbers, the file will not compress much, if at all, and you get a high complexity.
"Lempel-Ziv complexity is the number of different sub-strings (or sub-words) encountered as the binary sequence is viewed as a stream (from left to right)"[2] This leads to a compression algorithm.
I like LSD quite a lot but have a hard time talking about it. I find it kind of highly embarrassing for some reason. Afraid of being judged a freak (I look and act pretty odd, but it's not because of LSD).
I am baffled how open some people are. I guess this is the curse of having conservative family you'd not like to upset.
There's some amount of social stigma associated with LSD and other psychedelics, but it seems to have faded away quite a bit since I used it in the late 1970s. Back then, and for some years afterward, the stigma was pretty strong. Admitting that you had used psychedelics was tantamount to admitting that you were crazy and possibly dangerous in many social circles. Thankfully, that doesn't seem to be so much the case anymore.
I've personally never minded admitting that I used psychedelics in the late 70s, but at that time I was accustomed to be seen as a weirdo and an outsider. Indeed, I was so accustomed to it that I didn't even realize that's what was happening. I didn't find out what it was like to be treated as someone ordinary until I took a job with Apple and moved to the SF Bay Area.
I liked LSD and other psychedelics a lot in the late 70s, and used them a lot--enough to find out how often I could take them without tolerance reducing their effects noticeably. I gave up psychedelics and pretty much all other mind-altering substances in the first half of the 1980s. I never liked anything other than psychedelics as much as I liked them.
Of the other substances I experimented with, I liked cannabis best, but I gave it up, too. The best reason I can articulate is that I was no longer getting anything new from them and, as the fellow said, when you've gotten the message, it's time to hang up the phone.
I do still drink the odd glass of whiskey or port or champagne once or twice a year, but that's because I like the sensations of drinking them. I try to avoid drinking enough to get tipsy.
I never cared all that much for drugs that are supposed to make you feel good.
I "discovered" that everything in the universe is fractal: space, time and causality. Every microsecond of existence contains within itself the whole existence of the universe and at the same time each one of those 'temporal universes' contains other temporal universes, every micrometer contains the whole space, and every moment there are millions of decisions that take us to the next 'frame', but the other decisions still exist and have their own decision trees.
I find this description quite unsettling because it is so common. I experienced it myself after trying magic mushroom: We are all one being(we call it the universe), it's consciousness subdivided between us all in order to escape it's solitude. It was scary at the time believing this sad possibility. I'm not so sure but the thought remains. Also follows: whatever you do to me you will be experiencing it.
> I find this description quite unsettling because it is so common.
More importantly, the description isn't just found in trip reports. It's found throughout history, in reports of people who have had what are called peak experiences, sometimes involving trauma. There are many stories of prisoners in the literature, for example, who come to the realization that both the jailer and the jailed are the same.
Jack Kornfield is one of many who is famous for relating the story about how the person being tortured suddenly observes that the person torturing them is the same entity. I believe there are also many reports from concentration camps coming to the same conclusion. It's difficult for us to admit this, because normal waking consciousness would have us sort things into us and them, but there is a level of perception that one can reach, where the interconnectedness of all things is seen.
Many people tend to toss these things into religion or spirituality, but there's nothing supernatural about it at all, it's a biological and ecological reality. The question, however, that doesn't go away, is why are these peak experiences trying to communicate the same or similar ultimate truths to us, truths that seem to contradict and oppose the conditioning and programming of our dominant culture, which tells us we are separate from each other and should be fearful, aggressive, and violent.
The boring possibility is that humans have to self-generate an ego- babies don't really know the difference between themselves and other people, it's one of the recognized developmental stages. So in unusual situations it's maybe not surprising that that particular ability could get disrupted, it might actually be quite fragile.
Agreed. This kind of ego dissolution starts to look like philosophical panspychism if you stare at it long enough, particularly when you read the reports of people identifying with non-human animals, plants, and yes, even rocks. At that point, there might be another mechanism at work. If life and mind are just emergent properties of organized and self-replicating matter, is it really crazy (or juvenile) to look back and reflect on everything around us and see it not as a discrete set of things, but as one continuous form? Maybe the problem isn't what we are experiencing, but how we think about it.
I'm an atheist (post-mormon) but I do consider it "spiritual" but I hate religion, so I don't group it in there, but I've been having some sort of "awakening" ... I'm not fully atheist though I guess, I could sign on to us all being one consciousness re-living until we experience them all, or just multiple consciousnesses that somehow floated through space and got attached to this earth...
Something something... I can buy an afterlife, just don't buy there's a God, at least not one like any worshiped on earth, they all resemble kings too closely, and are too narcissistic. Enki might be the only exception, he was a scientist - stood up for man, gave us knowledge, but basically is as most scientists humble and could give a rats ass about being worshipped, considers us just the discovery channel. Keyword: Aloof.
Of course, that's just a myth. Still, my favorite mythological character. Anyhow, tangent aside my point - is no God, no need to worship. however if we're all each other, and we are the universe, or part of it and it's all different layers of conscious "agents" as Donald Hoffman calls it, then I think maybe a religion based on that could at least encourage fairness. One tenet : All are one, treat all as you would yourself regardless of race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, etc.
Honestly, I see that as the penultimate human utopian ideal, but I think as long as we give elitism roots, we'll never get there, there's no room for elitism in a world where all are equal.
>I could sign on to us all being one consciousness re-living until we experience them all, or just multiple consciousnesses that somehow floated through space and got attached to this earth...
Why did they need to exist before they were generated here? Firefox didn't float through space before people invented computers and wrote it up in 2002.
By the anthropic principle, we happened to start here, of all possible places, in our heads, of all possible heads, and will end here. What's beautiful, I think, is being okay with that, and overcoming ego enough to realize how petty and small our differences from each other are -- you from me, us from Ancient Romans 2000 years ago, and us from the uncountable consciousnesses 2000 years from now, which will be witness to wonders we can only dream about. The local tragedy of death is a momentary drop of sorrow in an global ocean of adventure and beauty, experienced by people whose difference from ourselves and each other is a different sensory feed and a lonely, selfish conceit of the self. :p
You only need an afterlife insofar as you can't overcome the ego to empathize with those who come after you as much as you do with yourself.
OMG man, this is delusional. We are not all the same person. To be specific, you and I are not the same person by any reasonable non-trivial definition of a person. We may only be parts of some larger entity (duh) like humanity, which may or may not be considered a person (separate from us, its parts) depending on definition you choose.
It's considered an "ultimate truth" in those traditions. The question isn't whether or not this is delusional, it's why is this experience widely shared across human history.
Judging from the page description they make the same mistake of simply ignoring definitions and coming up with their own.
Is there anything special to this experience? Historically, all kinds of delusions were "widely shared". This is true even today. People "talked" to trees everywhere around the world.
What do you mean by "impossible"? I just described exactly how people get that experience: they mess up definitions. It is a perfectly logical description.
Under influence people think peeing in public is OK is plausible, though logically it is not the best action to take. So that is not unique either.
Use the concept of paradoxes in Taoism as a metaphor for nondualism:
> The paradox is that by talking about the Tao, and by attempting to define the Tao, we ensure that the reader does not actually grasp the concept. At its heart, the Tao is nonverbal in its essence, beyond the confines of language. The Tao is an experience rather than definition.
Each tradition has their own version. For the west, it's the coincidentia oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa. This goes beyond definitions because language can't describe it. This is not a failing, this is the essence of its impossibility.
You're starting to get it. Paradoxes, contradictions, and nonsense is how these traditions attempt to get the practitioner to overcome dualism. The problem is that you think you can use either-or logic to understand it when the practice is designed to destroy it.
As I explained above, what you call "dualistic thinking" is just refusal to follow common definitions for relatively simple concepts. For example, Wikipedia's entry for abovementioned personhood is clear enough to say, that I and you are two distinct persons. The two of us may be called a person, but it has nothing to do with the "way of thinking", and only has to do with the definition of a person. If a definition of a person had a clause, that would prevent congregates of persons to be a person, no amount of "dualistic thinking" would make two of us, or the entire humanity a person.
Sadly, this discussion appears to be at an end. Nondualistic thought processes are not based on definitions. They are based on direct experience of the ineffable, beyond words themselves. You keep trying to impose Aristotelian logic on to paradoxes, contradictions, and nonsensical attempts to break one out of dualistic perceptions. There are numerous ways this works, from dreaming, to creativity, to peak and flow experiences of all kinds, all of which aim to break the mind out of what is perceived as separate and to give it a new holistic POV. Just as you cannot have music without the notes that define it, you also cannot have the notes without the empty spaces between them. You can pretend that the notes represent the music, but it is also equally composed by its absence in the form of silence. They are one and the same.
There's nothing ineffable in anything you are referring to. Anyone can generate tons of bullshit by combining letters and words. You are clearly much worse at Seado than I am at non-dualism. Your thought process needs to grow much before you can realize significance of Seado. Then you will learn some truth (and still it will not be universal).
I would call spirituality in general the 'mapping' of these spaces, descriptions of the way to get there and navigate them, and the preservation of accounts of people who've visited them.
A religion, as I see it, is already focused on one particular version of the map. This can be fine, for example if the particular path is especially compatible with the rest of the culture that's around it. It starts being problematic once it discredits other versions and accounts. Irritating cults is what it becomes when it gets further warped by ego concerns and misinterpretations.
The relationship aspect is also an important feature of psychosis in paranoid schizophrenia.
I think it’s possible we, as a social species, just have an elaborate model of other people and things in our brain which gets mixed up with the experience of self under certain conditions and the brain is coming up with unifying explanations trying to achieve homeostasis under the influence.
Is it common because it's some sort of profound mystic realization, or just an expected replicable biochemical reaction?
One can experience fractal sensations from a strong cannabis high, are psychedelic ones any qualitatively different? Maybe that's just the way our minds are supposed to bend.
That sounds like a profound experience, would you say these insights had any lasting impact on your life? And, if may ask, in what way was it a bad trip? I once took LSD and was hoping for that level of experience, but only got nice visual sfx and some bad emotions later on.
I would say it has opened a door to different way of seeing reality, and I can open that door
whenever I want, but I don't think it has changed any of the practical decisions I've made.
It was a bad trip because the fractal nature of time implies that your life repeats itself infinitely many times (probably with the exact same details). You can never rest, it's all an infinite loop, and that idea made me extremely distressed, like this fractal nature was some sort of punishment or permanent purgatory.
"It was a bad trip because the fractal nature of time implies that your life repeats itself infinitely many times (probably with the exact same details)."
This echoes Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, which he thought would in fact be terrifying to the ordinary man, but the overman could live their life in such a way that the infinite repetition would be fully and unreservedly welcome.
“Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Here's Tom with the weather.”
Somewhat similar: Based on the fact that if you break a holographic picture in half then the two halves show a fainter representation of the whole and not a left and right portion, I imagined we each contain the whole mind of god, but a faint representation of it, since we are only a part of the whole.
I've noticed ... changes to existing facts in reality that shouldn't change. No, it wasn't bad memory. I have a bad memory, but when it's something I'm hyper (adhd) obsessively focused on, and then it changes within 3 days, that is different than a mis-remembered childhood spelling like Berenstein/Berenstain Bears.
I'm agnostic (exmormon), I think God(s) are narcissistic man-king-modeled control structures. However after experience reality shift -- all without any drug use... I've become somewhat "spiritual" in a sense, in that I feel there's a lot more to everything than I ever imagined.
Simulation theory is my strongest belief, but secondary would be entropic multiverses colliding when they have no more room to split into new universes.
Scientifically, I find the Cosmological Axis of Evil quite odd that it puts our solar system somehow "central" to the universe (on one axis), from a simulation perspective you could argue the simulation renders what's needed and started here on out.
Anyhow, i've been going down rabbit holes on "occult" wisdom trying to see if there's a way to actually change reality by one's accord. So far dead ends (or I haven't gone far enough yet to reach "enlightenment"), most promising idea is meditation (silencing brain completely) might open some "conduit" to learn from the universe or make changes, or both.
Looking at toltec (/r/castaneda), spiritual subs, buddhist, hindu, etc... that's the one common thread: quiet the mind. Learn to meditate. Lucid dreams may help. Astral Projections could help. I guess in other words train your brain to find some of the same things LSD brings organically without the need for drugs. Probably healthier that way, but it's a long process.
There is a big benefit though in working on meditation practices: anxiety goes way down. That's nice after last year. I've had panic attacks, etc. So, I guess if I figure shit out or not, there's at least a benefit for trying.
Had the same exact experience a year ago on my first trip.
We’re all the same person = experiencing one-ness/ego death.
For a lot of people it adds magic into their lives. For my materialist mind, not as much. Just confusion.
I think it gave me what Jordan Peterson calls ontological shock.
Having OCD doesn’t help since I now obsess about it and I also suspect it made me feel derealized.
I find these experiences like a video game. And since I have to take ketamine for my depression it sometimes provides entertainment to distract me from the other side-effects.
You mention microseconds and micometers. Those are on the scale of the edge of our various human senses.
Now, your quantum thingies happen on the scale of the Planck constant. I've just asked Google what h is and I got this beast:
6.62607004 × 10^-34 m^2 kg / s
Note the mixed suffixes and the silly precision for a web search result. I'm not a mathematician. If I was a physicist or chemist or whatever doing calcs for real, I probably wouldn't use Google to look up the latest result. I'd quote a paper. So 6.63 is more than enough for the number in a search result.
Units: metres squared kilograms per second. The notation for the number is different to the notation for the unit, so we can conclude that Mr Google is a bit slack. The number is given with negative exponent notation and the units with slash notation.
OK, so Google is a bit crap.
Back to my thesis: Your trippy self needs to really get to grips with the fabric of reality. That fabric is far more fantastic and granular than you have experienced so far on LSD.
You carved things up into 10^-3 (micro) when you stuffed some pretty funky drugs into your bloodstream. Mr Planck has shown that you need to worry about 10^-34 if you are going to really get to grips with the fabric of reality. You'll need quite a large lab and some decent funding .... or a bit more imagination.
There's a company called MindMed that's doing clinical trials with Psilocybin/LSD/MDMA and finding that micro-dosing has really positive benefits on human disorders linked to the brain (depression, PTSD, etc). Could be huge to harness the power of these drugs for the benefit of humanity.
Well, I'm not a downvoter, but I would disagree with the idea that this is related to the OP. OP is looking at mathematical properties of informational structure of brain scans, whereas this is just describing what people see when they trip. There's no reason the geometry of what you hallucinate should be related to the geometry of cortical activity while you see it.
I don't take downvotes personally. I've learned to accept them as meaningless gestures that make people feel powerful and in control, when infact no-one is really in control here. We're all acting :)
I never hallucinated after trying shrooms, even at high doses. I found this odd, since I have read about countless people saying they saw stuff that wasn't there or saw colorful fractal geometry.
So my conclusion is that shrooms simply increased my perception and allowed in more information, and that all this fractal geometry is already there, just waiting to be discovered.
It's just like tuning into a higher frequency. It's not fake or generated by the brain, simply observed for what it is.
I think it really depends on the type of lsd/shroom.
Myself and some friends recently came into a new batch of acid. I don't usually have major visuals but with this batch I really do, and so does everyone else who takes it. Eyes open and the whole room has turned into a beautiful shifting geometric fractal pattern. When I closed my eyes it was even more intense, incredibly colorful, beautiful, sexual, shifting fractal geometries. It really felt like I had stepped into one of those AI art generators except far more coherent and personally meaningful.
Also I had the opportunity to try DMT a few months ago and that really did take me to another reality (not literally of course). Incredible, beautiful multi-sensory experience that I won't try to explain here, however the visual and auditory components were extremely intense.
I don’t think either LSD or Shrooms causes hallucinations (like seeing a creature that isn’t there.) Mushrooms make me feel strange and see a bit blurry but it’s mostly an internal thing and makes my wind wander. LSD is a bit more intense, visually, like colors become more vibrant and my mind creates detail in even the simplest of items (peeing in the toilet damn near gives me a panic attack.) I’ve only ever heard of people seeing things in movies other than maybe sitting in the dark and seeing “demons” but my mind does that already by trying to give forms to the visual noise of darkness; again just not as intense.
Typically “movie” hallucinations like seeing elephants in the room or having strange people visit you or seeing bugs all over you are more typical of deleriants like diphenhydramine or datura, although high dose tryptamines can be so strong that there is no connection to the reality around you - overwhelmingly psychedelic. In that state hallucinations of a different type are possible (talking to entities, being somewhere else entirely, etc.) Movies are a very bad representation of psychedelics generally, though.
Maybe a stupid question but did you close your eyes?
I think you need a really high dose to see more than a bit of distortion when you have your eyes open. But with you eyes closed, your mind can run wild, making colorful visual much more likely in fact, you may not even need drugs for that.
Seeing things that aren't here, true hallucinations, don't happen often with psychedelics, and they are mostly caused by deliriants (ex: datura), or body reactions like fever. These are not fun and deliriants are not controlled substance for that reason, being classified as poisons instead. Psychedelics cause pseudohallucinations, it means they alter your perception but you are aware that what you are seeing is not real.
I decided to start a career in programming and IT oneday at 21 on a LSD bad trip from hell. It was really an eye opening trip and just realized this would be the best possible career path to take. I have never looked back since.
I believe it is possible to have a bad trip in this sense because it typically takes time to integrate the experience. The time spent trying to integrate can be scary, because you don't understand it yet.
I had a vision of a blonde child, perhaps six years old, burst out of a tunnel of light during a DMT trip. I still don't know what it means, and because my son is blonde, i can't help but feel that maybe there is a message im not seeing (this is coming from an ex-atheist of twenty years). It was a weird event, but it has made me make positive changes in my life regardless. For example, I try a lot harder to have the time for him. I've decided to stop trying to date because of it (so that I don't have to divide my time more), and that's given me a self esteem boost.
It is a complex thing, one that we don't understand. Its a beautiful experience, but one I don't take lightly. It needs respect.
Why is it even legal to conduct LSD experiments? There was some animal testing post earlier, but giving people illegal consciousness altering drugs seems so much worse.
I'll take the bait. A drug being regulated by narcotics regulation does not mean that its use has to be completely forbidden. Just because Average Joe is not allowed to do something does not mean that there might not be professionals who are. Opiates for example are both regulated and used for pain treatment.
Any study with human participants has to go through an ethics review and the participants have to be both informed about the goals of the study, possible risks and consequences of the procedures and also have to take part voluntarily. (Regarding "consequences": a brain scan could e.g. show a medical condition and having knowledge of that condition would mean that the participant would have to state this as existing condition in the future whenever they wanted to sign up for health insurance for example. So: it is complicated!).
You have to understand that because animals borrowed cell signaling form plants that most transmitter blockers and analogues can be found plant cell signal chemicals
Or to put in broad terms our brains are powered by degrees of getting high. Its more of the degree and method that produces bad social results
The similarities between very different species are absolutely mind-blowing indeed. Anesthesia works on plants for example! Jellyfish have to sleep, despite having no brain at all. They even suffer from disorientation when being sleep-deprived (afaik researchers frequently poked or otherwise disturbed them in their tank during their normal sleep-phase. On the "next day" they showed signs of sleep deprivation).
Psychedelics are a tool. You don’t ban powerful lasers because someone might get hurt. You regulate and prescribe how they may be used safely. And they are a very powerful tool, not only as a medicine to treat addiction and depression but also as a lens to inspect the nature of consciousness.
There is lots of potential benefits that far outweigh any downsides,so it's worth investigating. They were made illegal for political reasons rather than for scientific or evidence based reasons
They were criminalised to criminalise part of society. Lsd was similar - the govt was worried about losing control of people and their desires.
Lsd has never been an interest of mine, but I am aware many people find the experiences they have truly profound.
there was some excellent work in curing alcoholism that used Lsd and proved very successful prior to it being banned; BBC News - LSD 'helps alcoholics to give up drinking'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17297714
The Yale Manual for Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy of Depression (using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a Therapeutic Frame) https://psyarxiv.com/u6v9y
Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder. A Randomized Clinical Trial, Alan K. Davis et al., 2020
doi : 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.3285
LSD is one of the safest drugs there are. You may get a bad trip but it ends. Of course people in danger of psychosis should not take it.
People don't get addicted to LSD or psychedelics in general. It's not something you want to take frequently (excluding some who microdose at the levels where you don't feel the psychedelics effects).
Great, thanks for the objective response. My inquiry was substantially downvoted.
How can one determine if they are at risk of psychosis prior to consuming LSD? I've heard many stories of people who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD trips. It wasn't clear from family history or medical history that they were at-risk for such a reaction.
At least based on these outcomes, it might be a bit inaccurate to claim LSD is safe. I suspect it was outlawed in part due to observed risks decades ago, but am still curious about political motivations. (e.g. "they want to deny us access to knowledge, man." or racial reasons, etc)
Perhaps there will be technology advancements in support of ascertaining propensity for adverse reactions to psychedelics. I suspect there's a strong component related to dosage. Maybe this is related to the microdosing movement?
The idea that someone took LSD and "was never the same" is a common trope, but I doubt it's based much on fact. I wrote a paper years ago in college about the difference between what "public education" about LSD said and what the medical literature said (I attended a university with a good medical school and a good medical library), and the short version is that federally-funded "public education" about LSD was mostly a lot of scare stories made up to serve someone's social or political agenda. They had little or no basis in fact.
Things like that get repeated, though. People like to repeat scare stories. I wouldn't be surprised if that's where most of the "never the same" stories come from.
I will admit that I took LSD quite a few times at the end of the 1970s, and that at the peak of that period I spent a month or two in a fairly confused and impressionable state. Someone who had known me before and who encountered me during that period might be forgiven for concluding that I would "never be the same". It was temporary, though.
I gave up on psychedelics and other mind-altering substances by the early 1980s. They were no longer showing me anything new. As the fellow said, once you've gotten the message, it's time to hang up the phone.
The literature that I found in the late 70s made LSD look fairly harmless, as long as you were not already psychotic or close to it. That was peer-reviewed research, though, not news stories. It would have been scandalous at that time for anyone in the mainstream press to suggest that LSD was anything less than the scourge of Western Civilization.
Sometime around the late nineties or early 2000s, respectable researchers began to obtain permission to conduct research with psychedelics again, and have gotten some pretty interesting results, especially in areas like treatment of alcoholism, depression, and anxiety. By the way, they don't seem to be finding a lot of civilization-ending dangers in the process. Judging by the medical literature, they just aren't very dangerous.
As far as I know, based both on personal experience and medical literature, the main dangers from psychedelics are that they can be very disorienting and several of them amplify the experience of emotion. Bad trips mostly seem to be a combination of disorientation and fear, with the disorientation becoming frightening, and the fear amplified by the drug so that it becomes terror.
But bad trips end, just like good ones do.
So if you're going to experiment with them, you want to be in a safe place, in a reasonably sane and calm state of mind, and in the company of trustworthy people who have your best interests in mind--preferably mental-health professionals with some experience with psychedelics, if possible.
> I've heard many stories of people who were "never the same" (in a bad life-outcome sense) after having bad LSD trips.
This seems to be weird legend with very little fact behind it.
> claim LSD is safe.
Obliviously nothing is perfectly safe, but pharmacologicallly LSD is the safest drug there is. Safer than Aspirin. It's virtually impossible to overdose it, it's not toxic and LD50 is way 10^5 - 10^6 times of what is the usage. It is possible to get into accident during big LSD trip if you are not fully aware of your surroundings. Having trip sitter helps with that.
Frequent use of any drug when you are young is probably always more risky. Brain is fully developed late 20's.
This was addressed in my previous comment. I've known folks who took the stuff and had a horrible reaction, without family history as such.
Also, consuming street drugs of unknown quality in uncontrolled settings with uncontrolled dosages is quite different than controlled medical experiments.
> overblown
I never wanted to try the stuff after personally observing people change after having a "bad trip". If it permanently alters perceptions in unpredictable ways, then ingesting it likely catalyzes alternate life trajectories, also in unpredictable ways.
Seems like a double edged sword. Many report the positive benefits but the supporters seem to downplay risks or point to other factors without supporting evidence.
It's unclear how to determine safety with prospective victims/winners whose family history doesn't include mental illness. Again, I suspect dosage is a critical factor to trip outcome; this being common pharmacological wisdom.
All true, of course. I have had great success helping two people who had "bad trips" as a trip sitter. Both people had a troubled adolescence, but are now doing extremely well as adults and are highly successful. Whenever I see them, they always thank me for helping them. The truth of the matter, is that I didn't do anything at all, I just made them feel safe and let them knew that everything was going to be okay.
Szabo A. (2015). “Psychedelics and Immunomodulation: Novel Approaches and Therapeutic Opportunities”. Frontiers in immunology, 6, 358.
Abstract:
Classical psychedelics are psychoactive substances, which, besides their psychopharmacological activity, have also been shown to exert significant modulatory effects on immune responses by altering signaling pathways involved in inflammation, cellular proliferation, and cell survival via activating NF-κB and mitogen-activated protein kinases. Recently, several neurotransmitter receptors involved in the pharmacology of psychedelics, such as serotonin and sigma-1 receptors, have also been shown to play crucial roles in numerous immunological processes. This emerging field also offers promising treatment modalities in the therapy of various diseases including autoimmune and chronic inflammatory conditions, infections, and cancer. However, the scarcity of available review literature renders the topic unclear and obscure, mostly posing psychedelics as illicit drugs of abuse and not as physiologically relevant molecules or as possible agents of future pharmacotherapies. In this paper, the immunomodulatory potential of classical serotonergic psychedelics, including N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), 5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine (5-MeO-DMT), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), 2,5-dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine, and 3,4-methylenedioxy-methamphetamine will be discussed from a perspective of molecular immunology and pharmacology. Special attention will be given to the functional interaction of serotonin and sigma-1 receptors and their cross-talk with toll-like and RIG-I-like pattern-recognition receptor-mediated signaling. Furthermore, novel approaches will be suggested feasible for the treatment of diseases with chronic inflammatory etiology and pathology, such as atherosclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, depression, and Alzheimer's disease.
Lots (hundreds? thousands? a large cross section of the population of every music music festival on the planet for the last 50 years) of human beings report them encouraging a good time with increased enjoyment, openness, creativity, ability to do things, and they where praised by the creators of AA to be helpful in the treatment of alcholism. Very few of the doctors, nurses, lorry drivers, support workers, shop keepers, crafters, farmers, scientists who attend these events and lie about their participation go on to develop serious social or medical problems or they wouldn't have the money to go back year on year for more illegal fun. Unfortunately the majority of these positive experiences are not recorded by government backed science, since reporting LSD use to the government results in the loss of jobs, driving privileges, children and ultimately homes and freedom. Users complained about the war, lsd was banned (- over simplification for brevity.). Laughter has no accepted medical use and trying to prove otherwise is a crime
I would assume the people taking these drugs in a modern study would be participating having given their consent and under the supervision of an ethics review board. I’ve never taken LSD in my life but I would be willing to participate in a study like this and I can’t imagine I’m alone.
I agree that's the intended sense of what was said, but what a fascinating side-track! I can readily imagine the idea of illegal "states of mind" (1984/Orwell style: simply things the state made a law stating that it's illegal to think or whatever) but the idea of illegal consciousness is much more bizarre!
