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.
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.