It is pretty certain that the do not; there are anecdotal first hand accounts to be found of DMT cosmonauts putting the screws in and never TMK got anything verifiable, e.g, requests for factoring for large numbers, etc. Nothing.

But, the consistencies in how humans report and "feel" about these things, is also interesting, and this is a kind of gray area existence that is more than just word-play. I'd describe it as a domain in which one can experience and prod first-hand one of the higher levels of the "stack" of the human psyche, that is: the order, categories, logic, projected agency, etc., our own perceptual->cognitive processes imposes on the world.

One of the promises that psychedelics realize is the rare opportunity to see something akin to the console/debugger view of these processes, which by design are usually imperceptible to us.

The low levels of the stack (trippy visuals, coarse emotional tides) are popular entertainment.

The high levels of the stack (awe and foundational meaning and divine agency/purpose) are more dangerous maybe to engage for the lolz but there seems to be a lot there we can work with to our betterment which is real, in the sense that he universe we perceive and inhabit is real, whether we analytically know that it is fabricated or not.

Analogy that comes to mind: walking a 2x4 plank placed on the floor, while inhabiting open air 50 stories up with VR googles.

I knew damn well there was drop.

I couldn't step forward, or off, and had to crawl.

What we know to be real, is not always what is causally and experientially real...

Yes, stories like this one are reasonably common.

>There is no evidence that any of these spirits exist so I don't know why people seem to think that taking a hallucinogenic drug somehow connects them to another plane of existence or w/e.

This topic is fraught with pseudoscience and charlatans exploiting people, so I do understand your intense skepticism and desire for hard evidence.

What evidence would you require for proof of these spirits? Is there a minimum number of independent testimonies you need, which all claim the same event happened?

I've found most people have never given those questions serious thought. The most common initial answer is "I'd need to see these spirits for myself," but this answer is unscientific, as published research articles must automatically be dismissed (Have you ever seen CRISPR work in person? How do you know it's real?). I'm genuinely curious as to what evidence you would need.

The basic premise of minds as being independent from physical brains is desperate fantasy in any case.

I recognize the following example is extreme, but it does fit the bill: in the past years, we've had many people come forward claiming they were sexually assaulted by various powerful people decades prior. Now, I have not been sexually assaulted, but I understand that a certain portion of the population has been. While you and I did not observe those assaults, we still accept as true what these people are claiming without dismissing or disbelieving them.

My point is: society accepts testimony as evidence for things the judge and jury has not seen. Testimony from one witness is the minimum, and corroborating evidence from multiple sources will indicate something is occurring. I am generally inclined to dismiss claims of conspiracy in these cases, so I must accept their claims as true. Of both the original scenario and the one above, from a purely scientific perspective, it's difficult to lend credence to one and not the other.

We cannot confirm which reality is real. The drug induced experiences or the reality you experience while sober. However when you talk to sober people they describe a reality that is consistent. A shared consistent reality with concreteness. All other descriptions are inconsistent. This man's experience is inexact and will no doubt be very different from what another man experiences when high on some drug.

Bet on the shared consistent experience. Science and logic and common sense is the shared and consistent reality and these things point to man whose brain cells and judgement have been compromised by drugs. You don't even trust a man high in drugs to drive, you gonna trust his judgement about reality itself? Don't be stupid.

I'm now thinking of a society where the majority of people consume a variety of substances which impair their perception of reality. In that scenario, the majority of people believe their interpretation of reality is true. The unimpaired knows those people are incorrect, but the impaired don't know better.

But this case creates a potentially uncomfortable situation for us. If some substances impair, what's not to say other substances enhance? If we know both performance-enhancing and performance-inhibiting substances exist, it stands to reason that both perception-enhancing and perception-inhibiting substances also exist. We know the latter exists, and our primary issue is that it's presently claimed the former does not. A performance-enhancing substance allows an athlete to perform beyond normal limits, and it stands to reason a perception-enhancing drug would do similarly.

However, what if a group of people are under the influence of an identical substance and, at the same time, observe real things which the "unimpaired" do not? The tricky word in the previous sentence is "real": what is real depends on your vantage point. The shadow of a cylinder may be either a rectangle or circle; to only debate the difference between which shadow is "real" obscures the true nature of the illuminated object.

So, a line of scientific inquiry may be the following: is it possible for a mind-altering substance modify an observer's vantage point of the universe? In a more illustrative framing, can a person in Plato's Cave eat something to see beyond their slice of reality? I don't know, but I believe the question is worth consideration.

The key metric here to recognize is consistency. You give a thousand people psychedelics how consistent are there observations? Does every man describe the same thing? In addition how clear and exact are their observations?

Science and logic described by normal sober people is more consistent and more exact then the reality described by people on psychedelics. People who are sober generally agree on the basic principles of logic and mathematics. Consistent consensus is the diffentiating factor.

Additionally which drug better enhances the mind? Cocaine? Heroin? Bleach? Whose to say one experience under one drug is more enhanced than the other? This world described by drugs is cloudy and inconsistent not only among individuals but also across your drug of choice. So you not only have different descriptions of reality from different people, but different descriptions when they use a different drug. Which reality do I trust?

Trust in the consistent description of reality. It's the best bet in my opinion. But of course this also a personal choice.

No. I'd believe another person if they _credibly_ demonstrate that useful information was conveyed to them from sprits. The more people demonstrate this, the more I'll believe it.

In general, the more extreme the claim is, the better evidence I require to believe it. To put it in concrete terms: Given N reports of 2 different kinds of claims, I'd sooner believe that Harvey Weinstein is a sex pest than we made contact with interdimensional spirit entities.

Now, whether such revelations would have satisfied the Skeptical Inquirer crowd is another question.

It would be interesting if that crowd actually did some serious studies of psychedelic revelations, and doubly interesting if they themselves took strong doses psychedelics as part of the study, as psychedelics have a habit of making true believers even out of skeptics, and I suspect many of these skeptics would be a lot less skeptical after taking them... though that'll probably never happen on a large scale as many of them are really not as open-minded as they like to pretend, or are afraid of either losing their "objectivity" or their mind (not completely unfounded fears).

The spirit would tell me "I'm going to tell you a story you have never heard before, and I'm simultaneously going to tell it to 50 people around the earth, and I'm going to tell you the phone numbers of those people so when the trip is over you can call them and ask if they were just told a story by a spirit and if so what it was.

Something like that. Then we would need to somehow verify that those 50 people never communicated with each other before.

But spirits, I don't think they are interested in doing that, at least from what we've seen so far. And that gives credence to the idea that they don't exist because if they care about suffering there would surely be something they could tell us, how to prevent it from happening. Don't go out tonight, there's going to be a fight.

It goes back to the old question if there is God, why is there so much suffering in the world?

Perhaps higher-dimensional beings exist, and have an understanding of the universe that we don't -- but perhaps they are not capable of performing these "miraculous" events that people would consider irrefutable proof of a god's existence. I seem to recall an anecdote (I forget where?) where the human planned to ask the entity they encountered to factor some hard primes, or do something that they knew their own brain couldn't make up -- and the entity dodged it as something that wasn't important.

Some cosmologies (in the religious sense of the term) posit that there is a variety of spirits in the world, with a variety of natures and motivations, some benevolent, some malevolent, others indifferent.

So some may want to help you out, others might want to trick you, yet others might hurt you or use you.

Such a view is common, for example, in shamanistic religions, which frequently deal with what they understand as the spirit realm, often with the use of psychedelics.

Pertinent to this article, such a view is common in ayahuasca shamanism.

This is why the shaman uses all sorts of techniques to communicate with, appease, and direct the spirits. They're not, in the common view, spirits that would necessarily be benevolent and helpful were it not for the intervention and skill of the shaman... and there are dangers in the spirit world too, or so it is believed.

I think he said something more like I am now open to the possibility that they might be real.

But ... we know there are people who are schizophrenic, who switch from one personality to another. Which of them is "real"? They probably all are. But that does not mean they exist anywhere outside of one's head. If you can experience another you, then it seems not implausible that you would also experience "God" inside your head.

It is fun to think that there might be higher-dimensional conscious beings around us or even within us. But that's all it is, fun. There doesn't seem to be any practical implications of whether there are or not.

Another part of the article considers (quite materialistically) the possibility that "God" is something society creates in our heads. I think Sigmund Freud called that the "Super Ego". It is what makes us better survive as a species. It causes us to co-operate rather than just selfishly abuse others as much as we can. It is clear how such a function could evolve by evolution. We see it in all species, they don't spend their energy trying to kill other individuals of the same species. It's the Selfish Gene.

Well, it is fun, when you assume those spirits to be friendly. But if they exist and they are not allways friendly - then there would be very practical implications because of that.

Is your bad luck random, or did you anger some god or spirit? Then you would benefit from doing things to calm them. Many, many people believe that.

But yes, the point is, why assume their existence in the first place, when science so far is very good at creating a working model of the universe. But since we do not have a complete model at all and maybe never will, I would not assume it is proven that billions of people on this earth who believe in magic etc. are all wrong. Because if you do that - then you would never find hints that they do exist. There is a theory in the spiritul world, that there is a mind censor in ourself, that is blocking all information on those magic things as we would not be able to focus on the tasks at hand, if we would be distracted by ghosts all the time. So main technics there, are how to control your inner censor and open your eyes to see and do much more.

Well, what I can say for certain, is that the various magic traditions developed very powerful psychological technics to achieve various things with your mind. Whether there is real magic one has to see and decide for themself.

This alone is reason enough to study/practice "magical" concepts, which can range from CBT to various forms of meditation and cue spooky sounds sorcery. Having a hammer with which you can form your own mind is, like, extremely important.

The spookier stuff you can just think of as either A) fun, existential decorations or B) embarrassing accretions to otherwise useful ways of thinking.

Or heaven forbid you fall into the C) camp where you start to believe you're in some kind of spirit war for the aeons.

(schizophrenia) != (dissociative identity disorder == multiple personality disorder)

even though

etymology(schizophrenia) == "split mind"

> Is dissociative identity disorder a subset of schizophrenia?

No.

> Is there a simple way to tell the difference?

Yes. DID is what is colloquially referred to as having a split personality or multiple personalities. The easiest way to remember this is that a person with DID has multiple, alternating streams of experience and affect that do not share memories or volition.

Schizophrenia is more like what we might call "madness". Believing wildly untrue ideas, being out of touch with reality, having hallucinations,... these are some of the symptoms of schizophrenia.

So they're not really related.

I guess some folks with DID could have a personality who is also schizophrenic, and that would make for a difficult diagnosis and treatment, I'm sure.

On one hand everything is material and deterministic (whether you confess to it or not — eg Dan dennet), on the other hand you have the possibility of free will, of human nobility and virtue.

Selfish genes sounds like doublespeak to me. I’m sure it’s true to some extent, but I’m confident that it’s not the whole Truth.

It's the Russell's Teapot thing. It COULD be out there, and there COULD be something more.

But the Selfish Gene -- Evolution -- is reasonably easy to demonstrate. Different verities of viruses, like new strains of COVID, come to mind...

People use the word 'but' all the time to justify beliefs that they worry others will view negatively.

"I think Donald Trump is an asshole but..."

"I'm not racist but..."

"I'm a rational person but..."

I think, deep down, he believes the god stuff but is trying to justify it and soften it so that we don't think he's crazy.

Basically, I'm still working on integrating my experience into a rational worldview. I definitely had the experience of meeting entities and speaking to them, and that's hard to reconcile with our everyday "sober" experience of reality.

There are tons of testimonies of people reporting similar things, so that makes me feel less alone in the potential delusion of thinking it's all "real."

Whether it's real or not actually doesn't matter so much to me. The experience is the same no matter if it's coming from my brain or from elsewhere. The only thing that matters is how I live my life as a result after having these experiences.

I've made peace with not having all the answers. If you asked me "Do I believe in God?" I'd say yes. But my definition of God is probably very different from the usual one. Since I now think of God as being an emergent property of communities of people coming together and forming a social contract through shared stories, morals, and goals. Where they are trying to make sense of a shared mystery of life and capture the ineffable transcendental experience into stories and myths. Personifying that into a "real" thing is useful for some, and experiencing that personification is a very interesting phenomena that I don't really understand, yet I've had the experience myself.

Anyways, I hope that's helpful :)

The only thing I'd refer to as maybe experiencing "God" was when I went into a white light. At that point I have very little recollection of what actually happened. I remember going in, and then everything was white, there was no concept really of time, or of me, or of anything else like that. I wasn't "seeing" anything, it was all just white. Coming out felt extremely "weird," everything felt so full of meaning and "spiritual" for lack of a better word. There was no personification of "God" there, but it was just a feeling. The one thing I do remember when I was there in that light was a deep feeling of peace and one-ness.

I don't know if that's all helpful, but it's what I experienced, at least.

Then it's not a rational worldview.

I’d encourage you to try the experience for yourself. I may not be able to convince you that these visions are anything more than “scrambling of neurons” with my testimony. If you are intellectually curious enough and open to trying DMT/ayahuasca, then it can only give you more data to base your worldview on. Worth a shot imo.

The evidence of god, or higher dimensional beings is equivalent to the amount of evidence that exists for the cosmic hippo.

Both concepts do not have zero probability of existing but are you really open minded by being agnostic and considering the possibility of the cosmic hippo existing? I just made up the cosmic hippo, like just now. Zero material evidence exist for either concept. But we lend more credit to profound descriptions of god. This is human bias at work. Higher dimensional is a complicated word that is just as absurd as hippo in a tutu.

Agnosticism is not open mindedness it is closed mindedness because the logic behind agnosticism supports consideration of the cosmic hippo as a valid argument for existence.

The key insight is that all descriptions of god are equivalent in absurdity to the cosmic hippo and therefore agnosticism is an an absurd philosophy.

We do not know what created the universe. But because virtually zero evidence exists or hints at what created the universe I can safely say any guess you come up with is completely and utterly wrong. It's like guessing a number between 1 and 9999 trillion trillion. I can safely say if any human on earth made a guess about what this number is... They'd be wrong.

I have a giant box, guess what's in the box. I'm willing to bet 1 million dollars that any guess you make is wrong simply because there are too many possible things that could be in the box. Is that a reasonable bet? Yes.

I have a universe, guess what created it. I'm willing to bet 1 million dollars that any guess you make is wrong simply because there are too many possible things that could have created the universe. Is that a reasonable bet? Yes.

The agnostic makes a different bet. He says he doesn't know what's in the box but there's a 50% chance it's god and a 50% chance it's not.

The real probability is god is but a 1 out of infinite probability where the domain encompasses Bolzman brains and cosmic hippos. The better bet is to say it could be anything BUT god.

Anything but god yields a (infinite - 1)/infinite probability of being correct, aka 100%.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I can't use science to disagree with that opinion because it's religious flame war?

Then logically the article itself is instigating religious flame war.... He argues his side I argue mine.

I don't think your being impartial here. His post attacks my beliefs and I attack his in return who is instigating war here? Your saying he can attack my belief but I can't argue for mine.

Are you saying that if an article shows up on HN supporting logic and science and atheism no religious person can argue against it or offer their opinion?

Grandiose rhetoric on an inflammatory topic makes for low-quality threads and flamewars. We don't want that here.

I'm willing to bet your being biased here and you can't see it. It is very hard to recognize in yourself without asking for personal opinions. I'm willing to bet that you personally highly highly disagree with what I wrote.

If I am right then I think it's quite likely you are completely unaware that your personal opinion influenced you to see what I wrote as grandiose because frankly this entire topic is grandiose. He makes grand claims about the nature of reality citing drug induced experiences as evidence, is that not grandiose?

I give due respect to anything that stands the test of time, irrespective of our ability to measure it with modern instruments or understand it with our primate mind.

Yes, somewhere between jung and Oliver sacks — a biological basis for the collective unconscious. Religion IMO offers the most parsimonious explanation, to date.

This is in fact what Jung believed... long before Oliver Sacks.

It is quite common for psychedelic experiences to feel "more real than real", and often what has been revealed under their influence can feel like The Truth with a big fat capital T.

I suspect that most people who become true believers after such experiences (and there are a lot of them) are just not very critical thinkers, and don't have a habit of questioning themselves, the world, or what they experience, and so are more liable to swallow the revelations they get line, hook, and sinker without critically diving in to them or coming up with alternate explanations for what might have happened.

Then there are the die-hard atheists and materialists/physicalists, who may be err on the other extreme and hand wave everything they experience as "neurochemical noise" or whatnot. There are a bunch of these also, and when I read their dismissive reports I often wonder how strong their experiences were and how many of them they've had.

Sam Harris, a prominent figure in the so-called "new atheist" movement, actually gave a strong dose of a psychedelic mushroom a try, and reported on his experience.[1]

It's a fascinating account, given by a clearly intelligent and famously critical, anti-religious physicalist which I personally expected to be very negative and glibly dismissive, but to his great credit he treated it very respectfully, seriously, and not dismissively at all.

He did not become a true believer after his trip, but it really made me suspect that if he'd continued taking strong doses of psychedelics even he would have.

Such powerful, convincing experiences are how religious movements start, and no small number of them have started from psychedelics. In fact, some have theorized that many (all?) of the world's great religions ultimately had their roots in psychedelic experiences (see, for example, Allegro's "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross"[2]).

I hope one day there'll be some serious research in to what is going on here, beyond simply reporting that mystical experiences are common on psychedelics.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKGddvmU0fA

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cr...

For all intents and purposes physical evidence points to a brain that is compromised and intoxicated.

There has been a lot of serious research into LSD. The research points to an intoxicated brain just as common sense does.

Imagine there was some alien civilization that chose to transfer some enormous amount of information to you, flooding your senses and completely overwhelming you with information, visions, schematics, sounds, voices, and the emotional impact from having that sort of experience happen to you in a short amount of time.

You would not be fit to drive, because your experience would be completely overwhelming to you, or at the very least you'd be greatly distracted.

That says absolutely nothing about the value of the information you received and whether you should be believed.

Another example: dreams. Clearly you're not fit to drive while dreaming, yet significant discoveries (most famously Kekule's discovery of the ring-structure of beneze) have been inspired by dreams.

Creative, non-scientific output is yet another realm where psychedelic experience has value. You don't have to "believe" a song that someone composed or was inspired to make due to a psychedelic experience for that song to have value. Here [1] is a great example (it starts at about 49 minutes in to the video).

Artwork inspired by psychedelics is incredibly common, and its value is not a matter of belief but of aesthetic appreciation.

"For all intents and purposes physical evidence points to a brain that is compromised and intoxicated."

Compromised or enhanced? Research in psychedelics has clearly shown their healing potential -- quite the opposite of compromising people, they can greatly help them. Enhancing creativity, as mentioned above, is yet another potential benefit. There are many others, such as increasing emotional openness, enhancing empathy, and so on.

You should definitely not drive while on psychedelics.. just as you shouldn't drive while having sex. But it's ridiculous to judge the value of these experiences by whether you can drive safely while having them.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm5p9w63QN0