During a psychedelic trip, one might wonder "if I had been like this all my life, I would consider this to be reality, not what I'm used too".
It fundamentally shows you that what you consider reality might be very, very, very wrong. So how can I trust my own senses and perceptions if they can be so powerfully modified by such a simple molecule? What if the actual reality is what you experience during a trip, and what we consider reality is some kind of trip due to the lack of a molecule that allows you to fully experience reality(in the same way that the lack of nutrients and water can lead to mental confusion/delirium)? It opens up a world of possibilities.
Aldous Huxley touched on this idea of the brain acting as a valve or filter, wherein psychedelics loosen it and let through the stream of consciousness that you're alluding to.
At first glance this might sound like a reasonable thought but I have never been convinced by this idea. The mistake is to think about you in isolation. You alone might be unable to tell whether reality is like your normal perception or like your perception under the influence of psychedelics, but you are not alone, you can compare what different people perceive. You will probably find that normal perception mostly agrees while perception under the influence of psychedelics varies. Why would that be if psychedelics allow you to perceive true reality?
And you do not have to stop there, maybe all humans have the same kind of distortions in their perception of reality anchored deeply in our DNA. But we do not have to rely on human perception, we have invented devices to measure and quantify about everything we know of. You can just point a camera at a wall and figure out if it solid white or if it is covered in moving color-changing fractal patterns.
Sure, it might be possible that our perception is warpend in such a strange way that even devices we build would be unable to make this difference noticeable, but that seems really unlikely to me. So for all the agreement we have between our perception and what our measuring devices report, I would say our perception of reality is pretty accurate, at least within the limits of the capabilities of our senses.
I've tripped many times and none of what I saw was real, and everything I saw when I wasn't tripping was real. It's good as therapy, and reveals a lot about perception and thoughts, but nothing else.
Changing perspective, which can be instantaneous, is just shifting your view of reality.
My carpet is not changing color, my mother's face isn't melting. That's not happening on a physical level.
My sober perception is repeatable and verifiable. It exists no matter my state of mind.
It's novel to make yourself see things that are unreal. It's novel to have your emotions fluctuate wildly. But it's just novel, and unreal, and nothing more.
Updated for spelling
What does it matter that introducing substances to the brain can reduce your ability to perceive it?
There is evidence of reality, and childish mind games and semantic debates that it might not.
I drop you off in the Gobi desert with no water (or acid) and let's test the boundaries of reality. Let's see if you can perceive yourself some water.
The thing is, you can have a consistent model of reality when you're only looking at it from the inside. This tells you nothing about the outside.
Eg: if you're living in a simulated universe, everything is consistent, your cameras and the dry desert. Still, outside the thing you perceive as reality, there could be anything.
You seem stuck in circular reasoning. The point is that when in an altered state, your conventional, "sober" model of reality breaks down and no longer applies. I think people "break through" when they realize their model of reality was constructed according to what they perceived through their available sense doors, but it's still just a construction, a model, a simulation, not reality itself. Even though it might be consistent when sober, it's self-referential consistency.
Your sober model of reality 100% still applies. You are simply mis-perceiving what is happening in reality.
The reality your mind is attempting to model is the only one that exists. Inducing chemicals that hinder your ability to perceive it does not indicate that it is a simulation.
It is not a self-referential consistency because it is being tracked by many people, many forms of study, many computers and machines, and is repeatable. Chemically induced states of hallucination are none of the above.
I will leave the undoing of reality to string theorists and super-computers.
There are many parts of conscious experience, that might not be noticed, but become extremely obvious in a Psychedelic state. It is like one of those hidden-image patterns. You would never know theres an image there, but once you see it, you can't unsee it - and you are struck by how blind you were to it before.
There are many correct ways to experience reality, operating off of the same source-of-truth data. Someone born with one eye can go their entire lives not knowing what it's like to _experience_ depth perception. You can give them all the cameras in the world, and they can fully understand the spacial relationships of all objects in the room, but they still wont be able to _experience_ depth, in their mental model of the world, like everyone else. They can't even begin to imagine it.
So, the carpet might not actually be swirling with fractal patterns. But It can be insightful to experience love as a fractal. You might notice parts of it that seemed one dimensional to you before.
woh man, that tree is beautiful.
(A huge number of other evidences that sober people don’t have a full grasp of reality also exist: people misremember things all the time. People mishear things all the time. Check out that internet debate about the black-and-blue or gold-and-white dress!)
We have evolved to perceive some aspects of reality (the ones where perceiving them improves survival/reproduction) and to not perceive many other aspects of reality because those aspects of reality do not affect survival/reproduction success enough to make up for the cost of having the more accurate perception.
"Reality" can mean the physical patterns of atoms and electromagnetic radiation, which nobody suggests psychedelics change (although it's worth noting that you cannot completely eliminate subjectivity from your measurements even here, thanks to quantum physics). However we don't perceive atoms and radiation directly - we filter our senses through countless layers of filtering, interpretation, and abstraction. "Reality" for us encompasses a lot of concepts that are not so clear cut as "this pixel is that color". The clarity with which you perceive the world when sober is illusory, as evidenced by the widespread perception of paranormal phenomena by sober people - or even simple optical illusions.
> What if the actual reality is what you experience during a trip, and what we consider reality is some kind of trip due to the lack of a molecule that allows you to fully experience reality?
So, keeping our conversation on-topic, sober reality is a place of scientific validation. The leaves on a tree are not breathing, they are simply blowing in the wind. We know this because photosynthesis does not require movement.
The edges of your door may be fuzzy on a molecular level, but they are not expanding and contracting every few seconds, we know this because wooden doors do not have those transitive properties.
Acid, and therefore a hallucination, is altering your ability to perceive reality. It is not "unlocking" any form of reality that you cannot normally perceive. It might be fun to think about a ton of "what-ifs" but it is not as metaphysical as it is made out to be.
The one profound aspect of tripping is to identify that your perception can be altered. This has a litany of positive mental affects that should be studied and prescribed.
Actually, leaves are the primary method that trees use to breathe.
> Acid, and therefore a hallucination, is altering your ability to perceive reality. It is not "unlocking" any form of reality that you cannot normally perceive.
Every new type way of seeing the world unlocks a new form of reality. I would disagree with the "fully experience reality", but it can definitly provide new experiences with time, space, perception, identity and causality. Those are the very topics covered by metaphysics and this it seems entirely likely that same/many people change their metaphysical views as a result.
Huh, weird.
Show a picture to a fly and it will tell you: "you're tripping, this is not what reality looks like".
You are correct, we only know a model of reality that we can piece together. And we piece that reality together, bit by bit, with instruments and math and studying.
Regardless of how much you dream that there is an oasis in the desert, it is simply not there. No one else can see it, no instruments can detect it, you can't drink its water, it is unreal.
You can "what if" and "woah dude" until you are blue in the face, but you will never be able to drink that water.
So what is more real? The sun and the sand and your dehydration? Or an oasis that exists only in your mind? Many don't like the answer, but it is clear as day.
Have fun with that!
You only have one input and no way of testing how reliable it is.
None of those validate LSD induced hallucinations. If you have some ideas that those technologies are wrong, go enter the field and prove it! Until then this conjecture is intellectually lazy.
All the x-ray, heat, whatever readings all have to pass through your audiovisual senses before you know about them. If your eyes and ears deceive you, all the fancy technology outside your eyes and ears can't help you.
You are trying to find data to prove your theory, not simply study what is observed. It's not science. It's just conjecture.
No matter what evidence I bring to the table, they will simply say "but what if you are being fooled?"
You don't need to agree with it, but at least you can see where I'm coming from!
I understand your frustration with there not really being an objective argument that would be able to deal with this thought experiment - I myself argued your case for a long time!
For all practical uses, the distinction is mostly pointless anyways, but it does make for some fun philosophical thought experiments! :-)
What I would say is that our sensory data + mental models of that data are abstractions over whatever reality actually is, which I am guessing you agree with. On top of that I think something else that I am guessing you don't agree with: I think those abstractions are pretty arbitrary and hide important "implementation details" of reality that could turn out to have a big impact on what anything is or what we might do with it.
I am guessing the crux here is about how much those abstract models are constrained by the underlying reality. It seems like you believe that because sensory information/models converge in a repeatable and consistent way, that it must be close to accurate and complete, where by complete I don't mean we, eg, can "see" the whole EM spectrum, but that there being such a thing as an EM spectrum that we can only see part of gives us a reliable way to infer that our senses aren't missing any substantial chunks of conception space.
What I remain open to is that the abstractions are sort of self referential in that we're in a self constrained region of "potential sensory space," that we can sense and verify the things we can sense and verify, but that raw reality is deceptively huge and complex and a radically different sensory+model configuration might give us a qualitatively different picture of raw reality, even if it overlaps quite a bit with our current sensory bubble.
My main reason for being open to this is that it seems like QFT is an existence proof of our subjective awareness of reality being fundamentally askew from how raw reality actually works, and in fact we ended up narrowly optimized to experience things as we do and act as we do because of replication/evolution not because of correctness or how well our sensory abstraction carve reality at the actual joints.
I am guessing our disagreement is how much extra/unknown space there is, or how useful fundamentally different abstractions could be in interacting with raw reality stuff.
How would you possibly verify this claim?
What is reality if not your perception of it? Does objective reality exist? How do you know anything is objectively real and not a product of some brain process?
All of those are long-standing philosophical questions.
Here's [1] a quick intro on the problem space I found.
That "simply" is doing a lot of work there. Measurement is never simple, or correct. Yes, it's much, much more precise than it was in the past, but it's never exact. Until May 2019, the magnitude of many of the units composing the SI system of measurement, including most of those used in the measurement of electricity and light, were highly dependent upon the stability of a 142-year-old, golf-ball-sized cylinder of metal stored in a vault in France. The mass of this cylinder drifts when compared to copies, and nobody knows why. Yeah, the effect is super tiny, but the measurements are demonstrably _not precise_
How would you know? How do you propose we definitely prove it isn't?
You've declared we can measure everything important so reality is objective, but quantum physics suggests the things we can't measure may be astronomically large. The physicists who subscribe to the many world's theory believe there's a near infinite assortment of humans we cannot percieve or effectively measure, for example, and our own experience of self is inaccurate as we don't percieve ourselves to be branching in time.
I don't think measurements solve the problem of the uncertainty of reality.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
I find this whole conversation so incredibly funny. Go tell a person serving a life-time jail sentence that what they are experiencing is not an objective reality. Day in and day out, the same cell, the same 24 hour cycle. A gazelle being eaten alive by a group of hyenas. A person jumping off a building to commit suicide. All of these things are simply illusions created by something, who knows what. Even though we don't know anything about THAT part, you are certain of it.
You've seen some goofy particles and have some fun mental puzzles to unlock so yeah, none of it is real!
If that's true, then I know that brain processes are real.
I believe in myself more than that, sorry.
[also again, how do you know the Avogadro constant is real?]
Not sure what you mean by real there, the Avogadro number expresses precision at which you need to simulate reality to get something believable and a brain simply isn't big enough for this in purely quantitative terms.
> a brain simply isn't big enough for this in purely quantitative terms [quotation needed].
And again, what if all of this, avogadro numbers, hacker news, your conception of reality all were a hallucination? How would you know? How can you definitely prove it is not?
The only explanation that doesn't lead to absurdity is that drugs corrupt your perception. They interfere with and frustrate the healthy and proper operation of the brain and in doing so distort perception.
If you're willing to accept that you can't really rank or judge modes of mental experience quantitatively on some kind of non-relative scale (which would require access to a "reality" outside yourself), then it shouldn't be too much of a leap to say messing with how it functions within tolerable bounds could be more of an optimization (or equal but just different) to your experience.
Attaching doubt to things "just because" isn't rational and cannot be resolved rationally precisely because such doubts are not rationally motivated. If I say to you "I doubt that you are here", for no reason other than some arbitrary skepticism about my perceptual faculties, then there is no way that that doubt can rationally be resolved. The very idea of hallucination presumes a normative perception. That we can know that we can misperceive or be subject to illusions itself presumes that we can tell the difference. Otherwise, we are just positing idle and detached possibilities while tacitly, and paradoxically, drawing on various convictions about the real.
I understand you're looking at it from a scientific point of view, but the discussion is not scientific. Consciousness is probably the hardest body of knowledge to integrate with science. Nobody knows where consciousness comes from. Nobody knows how to measure it.
I can tell you: "I'm conscious and aware", but there's no way I can prove to you I'm not a philosophical zombie(someone that acts like it's conscious, but isn't). Currently, there's no way to measure consciousness.
>By your own standards, I could ask how you know there's something called a brain, that it has something to do with perception, etc. Maybe you hallucinated the brain? Maybe it's just some weird belief you have? Maybe hallucinations aren't a thing? How do you know what other brains do or don't do differently? And why can't some of them be wrong?
I think you nailed it. I don't know whether there's a brain, or if there is something else, and this something else is hallucinating this reality where there is a brain, or maybe something else entirely. Sure, we can make scientific claims about stuff when analyzing the reality within the bounds of our perception, but if you try to go beyondg that, you're own your own.
You can't prove that to yourself either, because a zombie has the same thoughts as you. You can't differentiate even subjectively whether you're a zombie or not.
I think the phrase "I think, therefore I am" is the essence here. A philosophical zombie does not "think". It looks like they do, but it's just a deterministic result of neurochemichal events going on in a brain that lives in the dark. Something like a neural network for instance. They can exhibit thought-like behavior without experiencing anything(as far as we know).
> You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result?
Isn't that a little bit like saying that you shouldn't change your views after reading a book, if you are aware that the book commonly changes views?
No, it's closer to changing your belief from "chocolate is bad for you" to "chocolate is good for you" after having a particularly good-tasting piece of chocolate. Unlike reading a book on the health benefits of chocolate, your change in belief does not logically follow from your experiences, at least not in an obvious way. Since drugs aren't going to alter your priors, it seems as though the change in belief is purely emotionally driven. Which is odd.
I do think there are rational realizations that rational people can come to under the influence of psychedelics, that they might not otherwise, though.
If a chemical alters perception, that just shows that consciousness is strongly affected by the material, but other non-contradictory hypotheses aren't thus disproven.
However, I am unsure what good evidence for a corresponding immaterial part might look like.
I think a better approach is philosophical, by considering the nature of thought and the spoken word.
In the same way, if this is a dream of sorts, the fact that certain dream behaviors can trigger certain changes in experience is also internally consistent. Of course, this "dream" has much greater stability to it, but the basic idea holds.
There is complex physiology going on producing a consciousness (so it seems to me) that can be altered when that physiology is altered. We can see at least some of this physiology. Suggesting all that physiology in our world is actually happening in the dream world of some other being doesn't seem very interesting as it still leaves us here in the same material (as we can measure it) reality that science is... still pretty damn good at describing. So why even bring it up? If there's evidence that points us that way, cool, otherwise, Occam's razor seems better.
https://maps.org/2004/08/08/nobel-prize-genius-crick-was-hig...
Simple put, psychedelics are used throughout the animal kingdom by all species for this same type of enlightnement. Arguments can be made that mushrooms brought about human evolution by waking us up to our own conciseness. We are the first generation of people to be tainted by the War On Drugs. And we will be the last to have forgotten it.
https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dolphins-seem-to-u...
Unfortunately, our generation has grown up being fed properganda about how Drugs are bad and religious is the saviour and the only pure way to live.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar%27s_Messiah
One just needs to look at MDMAs effectiveness on treating PSTD with Gods version of treatment that covers up the trauma with religion instead of unwinding it from the mind.
https://adf.org.au/insights/mdma-ptsd/ Source from gods chrous themselves where they claim MDMA and ecstasy arn't the same thing now because science is showing its "positive uses" - even though every "Just Say No" ad i saw as a child insisted they were both going to fry my brain into an egg.
These substances will not produce profound effects when taken recreationally - no healer from any aboriginal culture will claim that. They are to be taken with intent, with specific settings under specific conditions in a variety of doses for you to gain a better understand of oneself.
This claim, at the very least, is false.
[1] https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/neural-annealin...
Why are stories powerful?
The material world is the facts. It could be intoxicated man driving his car dies crashing into telephone pole. If the other facts could be he had just finished robbing someone and being abusive to a woman and then got in his car, your mind tells a story about “justice”.
Maybe the facts were he was a gay man who just came out to his conservative parents and they disowned him and he got drunk and drove into the pole out of sorrow. The story becomes “injustice”, “tragedy”.
But justice, tragedy, injustice aren’t material things. Psychedelics tend to set your mind on these things, and give meaning to what we’re just material facts. The meaning of them may or may not be true, but pondering on them and thinking about their meaning is sure to change your worldview (ie the root of meaning or how you “perceive” the world.)
The resulting experiences are basically religious visions (I'm an atheist). Often, an entity appears and reveals a vision.
> Maybe it's that psychedelics also induce feelings of having discovered something important, and a lot of people don't try to double-check whether they actually did.
I think psychedelics solidify or clarify feelings or ideas that you previously had. Lots of people take them as evidence of their superstitious feelings. For me, not being superstitious, they did not have that effect but they did clarify my worldview.
So if you have a strange and intense experience then your ideas about stuff are appropriately modified. Even if the experience and ideas don't align with convention/consensus/etc.
The similarity in thought I see among different users of psychedelics is just so big. Why should it be a surprise that it's chemical? Opiates can flip a switch in your brain that makes you way more habituated than a natural stimulus with the same level of pleasure(ie heroin users will say they don't like it any more they like spending time with their kids, but still will neglect their kids to do heroin because they can't say no). Marijuana can trigger latent psychological issues in those who are at risk. Maybe psychedelics pushes some switch that makes people think differently, even if they're aware of it and trying to convince themselves otherwise?
Of course, this will also open up new horizons for doubt, too. Ymmv.
Knowing the experience was triggered by a known substance doesn't mean you should throw out the entirety as some sort of manufactured sensation separated from reality.
The important discovery people make is lucid awareness a chemical did this to them
Unlike booze where you black out
Whether the brain gives rise to us it’s a medium that exists and it can’t be discounted it has a lot to do with our awareness
That we can be just chemistry is the shift in metaphysical belief I came away with
The oceanic connectedness being we’re all just a few micrograms of this or that from being the same. That perception of uniqueness is not uniqueness
You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are.
Maybe it's that psychedelics also induce feelings of having discovered something important, and a lot of people don't try to double-check whether they actually did.