Not that that’s a negative thing at all. The universe is perfect without any need for magic to arbitrarily insert its fingers into the clockwork.
Regardless, all this this conjecture is invariably happening within the boundaries of our minds, which seems to be composed entirely of physical phenomena.
We can’t see objective reality since all we see and sense have to go through our brains. What we can do is to interpret what we see and try to arrive at something that represents a consensus among our different perceptions.
The universe is a cosmic horror, life emerges and with it untold suffering.
The very notion of perfection is also emergent (not to mention self relative), outside of the conceptual framework of the observer's mind perfection does not even exist.
The universe is beautiful, life emerges and with it all understanding, love and joy.
Two sides of the same emergent coin, the nature of all experience was forged by what it took for our ancestors to survive to the next generation.
The belief was primarily based on a deterministic view of it, with the notion that everything comes from something, and becomes something else.
Every moment has two perfectly balanced sides, with perfect knowledge of the laws of the universe giving you a perfect understanding of all the transformations that took place from one moment into the next.
There is of course the debate over whether it is not deterministic, if the Everettian view is false then possibly not, but more to the heart of the matter, this idea that because a greater and greater understanding of the laws of the universe unravels all its dynamics, all its reasons for being and acting the way that it is. This idea that the fact that there is a reason for everything, an order to everything, is what makes it perfect.
The thing is I have a hunch that an inquiry all the way to the bottom will eventually leave us with a bunch of arbitrary laws and constants, which have no further explanation for their being just so, other than the anthropic principle.
It seems hard to me to ascribe such a scenario the quality of generic "perfection" even solely from the perspective of my biased human mind.
I agree with you that perfection is a notion alien to the objective reality, which simply is, without any judgements or qualifications.
So to go back to my original comment, I think it would be more accurate to simply say that I've seen no reason to believe that anything we experience cannot be explained by physical processes.
Maybe consciousness itself will be the most relevant concept left inexplicable? Not the process of sustaining it, but the actual subjective experience of it. Why not have a universe of automatons processing their worlds and inner minds in all the same ways, but without anyone home? Why are we home, and how are we assigned to our homes?
I don't know that these questions are enough to make me believe in the "supermaterial" or supernatural, my hunch is just that our current awe and inability to begin to approach the subject may simply be due to a lack of understanding of the processes at work, but that's admittedly based on faith.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/02/science/end-of-universe.h...
Why would that be the case? If anything, it seems to me, taking psychedelics will teach you that tiny amounts of chemicals can drastically alter how your brain works, especially how it perceives the world.
> [...] something as simple as deep and intense breathing for not more than 5 minutes can alter state of mind drastically.
?
Because it seems some people are voting as if you wrote "[...] the only thing that can [...].
I'd grant some exceptions such as a zen student receiving a lesson/koan that drastically changes their thought processes, but I'd argue that the change was already within them and the sound was just the catalyst - the same lesson/koan is unlikely to have similar effects on other people, and certainly not without the recipient having spent time studying that religion/philosophy.
If you say it is obvious that everything you ingest affects you, then what about time? Both of us are clearly ingesting time, it is simply another one of our inputs. And, of course, it is obvious that time affects our mind and body.
We are not ingesting time, we are in a certain sense creating it. We constantly observe the world and it changes over time but just observing the world alone is not enough to perceive time. You have to memorize the current state of the world as you just perceived it and later compare your new perceptions with the memory in order to determine that the world has changed in between.
Perhaps you are right, it is we who create time to observe.
In general it seems like attempting to live in human society without memory is a pretty traumatic experience. Or it would be, if you could remember experiencing it.
It's also very hard on the people around you.
Put another way: all things are not equal when you ingest them.
One chemical change is caused by the brain working as designed, while the other is a deliberate attempt to change the brain directly.
Actually it is the least researched field among the most important, in my humble opinion.
I would rather say that your statements in this particular topic and wise statements per se are separate things entirely and what you have just claimed is not at all.
This essence of "lossy transmission" is simply our reality.
Do you have a pretty diverse range of experiences on psychedelics backing this up?
"The most 'logical' explanation" is very often a function of psychedelic usage (and various other experiences one may have had, or not).
> and as said: I have yet to see even the slightest piece of scientific evidence pointing to something else. Whereas there's enough of science supporting the way I think.
In actual science, an abscence of evidence is not proof of abscence though.
> I remain skeptical of course, though it's more of a 'I want to belive' type of thing.
For both sides!
With 'just' and 'random' you are in a similar way derogatory to the 'religion of science' in favor of mysticism. If in a healthy and awake state it is our brains that model the full brunt of reality we perceive (an assumption, may be 'mysticism' involved here), then these hallucinations may be just as real seeming to a person, though not based on usual sensory input. Maybe based on past experience, memories. Maybe unconsciously collected until 're-lived' in the hallucination.
Maybe anyone except of me. I am really comfortable when hallucinations are called as hallucinations despite of does they have any esoteric sense or not. All esoteric understanding of hallucination are really better to keep distance from science before some study will give a ground to consider more.
You must distinguish known things from unknown things unless you are comfortable to be a not wise person.
We simply have more things to name, but still constantly run into things we cannot name yet. We think this will end but it will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it?
Heat death of the universe?
Humanity has the opposite problem - we invent names for things that don't exist. We have no idea what dark matter is, but we have a name handy just in case. Same with gods, elves, dragons, aliens, etc.
I can't find one example of people not being able to name something that exist. Worst case just name it "phenomenon X" where X is the first unused integer.
I can find lots of examples of people naming things that don't exist. See phlogiston and ether for example, if you don't like fantasy and religion.
How about "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters"?
But we also have names of things which are bad, because they are false. These the are names which are you talking about.
Dreams are blatantly not random neurological firings, but have no inherent relation to death or the concept of life after death at all.
Near death experiences are similar. The fact that humans have similar experiences when dying is probably not so different from how our behaviors and experiences line up in a multitude of ways, across cultures.
You’re the one dismissing hallucinations as simple or unimportant. Understanding them is crucial to understanding human perception and interpretation at large.
Pretty much all of what psychedelics taught me is that the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and make sense from anything. Close your eyes hard enough and put some white noise in your ears and see god now.
Fully agree. I've never done psychedelics, but years ago when overworked and by lack of sleep my mind went into a severe state of hyperassociativity. Though a serious health danger (feeling as if your brain gets cooked) it was a magnificent experience. Everything I saw with my eyes triggered an explosion of associations. I felt as if I could pierce the mysteries of the universe, perceive the future as it unfolded before me, and was sure that a higher entity existed. Until.. it became too much and I needed treatment and medication to bring me back to earth. The brain is a powerful machine.
Yes. I am not sure about the odds, but you might have been lucky. It’s a good way to end up properly insane.
I’ve never been anywhere near that state but even milder cases can be frightening. I’ve had 2 periods were everything worked, I was so clever and solved everything, and that was wonderful. Except that after that I could not get out of bed for days, had severe burnouts (no true depression though, thank goodness). And it turned out that what I did was so “clever” and complicated as to be almost re-done from scratch, and also contained mistakes hard to spot amongst the cleverness. It turns out that it does not make you a super-human, but mostly feel like one. I wonder if I had been a painter or a musician instead, if those mistakes would not have been seen as strokes of genius. Since then I’ve noticed that I get mentally tired much more quickly, and I need much more sleep.
Anyway, I’m happy for you that you came out of it in one piece and enlightened.
Not OP, but they are describing apophenia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
Many things can trigger it, even high doses of caffeine (such as drinking too much coffee).
Or was this the pattern you were primed to see?
I really wish more people would recognize this. I hear so much irrational thinking because people seem to think that random noise is somehow meaningful. Or because people choose to ignore all the information that doesn't match the "pattern", because they've decided what does match is important to them in some way.
It's very similar to being untestable. If a hypothesis provides a prediction, but can alter the interpretation after the event to fit the facts, then it's providing no predictive power. e.g. If someone predicts that <insert deity> rewards/punishes people when they die (which alters their near death experience), but then amends their interpretation of good/bad to fit the data, then it can't be used to predict anything.
Is this an accurate and comprehensive description of the situation we have before us though?
> If someone predicts that <insert deity> rewards/punishes people when they die (which alters their near death experience), but then amends their interpretation of good/bad to fit the data, then it can't be used to predict anything.
That you can identify one attribute of this nature is no guarantee that all attributes (which is not known) are of this kind.
There might still be a way we can test these hypotheses at some point in the future. It's just that we can't do it now.
But not being able to test it now, is no reason to dismiss it, because then we will never go down the path that might eventually result in it being testable.
Struggle, acceptance and (what I'm going to call) decay.
The first two I believe to be evolved mechanisms, the third whatever fits incidentally within the constraints imposed by the former two.
The struggle is obvious, we fight to survive or we do not replicate.
I think the acceptance is an aspect that emerges from the constraints applied to social organisms.
There is no evolutionary impetus for something that cannot survive to continue with the struggle, but there is the impetus not to harm its relatives in the process.
What remains is hallucinatory nonsense born of a failing mind, understanding is lost piece by piece - your conceptual framework perceiving what remains even as it falls apart.
We observe the world through our senses, which can impact our state of mind. Our state of mind impacts our senses, through which we observe the world.
We are always unreliable narrators.
That’s a good way to put it. Belief systems are fascinating in a way that resists being easily categorized. At least by me. Or such is my belief…
I find some of my friends who are the most dogmatically anti-religion or anti-spirtuality, really just replace it with some other tribal thing like politics.
There are questions we won't ever have an answer for, and we've been asking the same questions since as long as philosophers could record their writings.
If you open your mind too much your brain might fall out.
I'm going to take issue with this. Anytime we sufficiently understand something it stops becoming supernatural and becomes natural. For a long time lightening, and disease were considered supernatural.
To assume there cannot exist things or beings we do not yet understand about the universe simply because we cannot explain it is the height of huburis.
On what is this reasoning based? Do you have any idea of what “random neurological firings” can actually do? Particularly considering that you are not in a situation to understand what is happening when your own brain does its thing, so how can you get any certainty out of this?
It sounds a lot like the “complex behaviour cannot emerge from an assembly of simple systems” we see regularly, an updated version of the watchmaker fallacy. The truth is, you have no clue. More than that, you cannot have a clue because you are trying to observe something through itself, and the thing in question is behaving in such a peculiar way.
That’s why we have things like double blind studies and the scientific method: to try to tease some objective observations out of a complex mess. We don’t understand everything in the brain, far from it. But it’s not magical either. We do understand neurotransmitters, we can look in real time how some patterns change when we eat various substances or do various things.
What is the meaning of magical in this context though?
Tons of the greatest scientists were religious and therefore not materialists.
It's pretty easy to just brush it all aside, but I don't think we should.
Also - I suggest you don't need to take acid, but rather just look into your child's eyes to start to fathom something more. I mean, the notion that we are merely blobs of particles randomly bouncing around completely disintegrates pretty much everything we would otherwise believe, I mean, literally the notion of 'intelligence' itself, as such a thing cannot exist out of randomness.
Imagine if scientific materialists had to preface every time they said 'life' or 'intelligence' or 'love' or 'creativity' or 'communication' or 'knowledge' with 'supposed life' or 'supposed intelligence' etc. because after all, 'we know none of that exists, neither does consciousness, and we are not having a discussion, we just appear to be having it'.
What's funny is a '5th force' that we might crudely refer to as 'Spirit' or whatever that seems to somehow influence matter/energy in some way, is literally and logically a better and more intuitive explanation that 'we are randomness'. And that position would be in many ways much less hypocritical than those walking around professing that they are 'nothing but noise' and yet living every aspect of their lives as though they were not.
Random particles cannot have 'rights' folks, so pick a side!
Same goes with dreams and such. It’s the ‘religion of science’ defaulting to the ‘god’ of deconstructionism. Just hallucinations, nothing more.
I understand why, there’s certainly many things which were once said to be mystic, but ended up less so.
However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings.