An illusive broken firmware it is. Better stay sober. Also when learning new things being sober is better. You wont get your phd using drugs. You wont get your brains to a new state using drugs. You maybe think you do, but thats a illusional defect of your brains when using drugs. Stay sober.

Is the omniscience pure rationalists experience on vanilla consciousness genuine?

Douglas Engelbart - inspired by LSD to invent computer mouse

Steve Jobs stated LSD was “one of the two or three most important things I ever did in my life”

Francis Crick saw the double helix of DNA on LSD

Kary Banks Mullis, the biochemist who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his improvements to the polymerase chain reaction technique: “It [LSD] was certainly much more important than any courses I ever took.”

Ralph Abraham claimed the insights he had while on psychedelics such as LSD profoundly influenced the development of his mathematical theories.

And there's more and I am not even mentioning that most artists are using something.

So yeah, if you can get Nobel prize you can definitely get PhD. You do you, I don't know what you have achieved but don't claim you posses some universal truth.

Your examples are exceptions and are certainly not a justification. Drugs are destroying lives of a lot of people who otherwise could have good lifes.

That Francis Crick was under the influence of LSD when he discovered the double helix structure of DNA is a widely circulated myth, but I've seen no evidence for it. In “Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code,” Matt Ridley clarifies that while Crick did experiment with LSD, it was not until several years after the discovery of the DNA structure. The discovery itself was a result of rigorous scientific research based on experimental results, including the X-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin.

It is risky, but life comes with risks. And not facing risks can be risky, too. You might waste your life in boredom, instead of taking off.

You also might "crap on the roof with your ass on the ground" to (miss)quote Castaneda.

I agree as someone who was previously excited about the idea. Although to be honest, I think people overstate the changes. They did not last. Lots of salesmen in this industry like any other.

Reprogramming? Not at all, at least not with intense mushroom experience alone and laying with closed eyes, never did ayahuasca. But understanding way way more about myself, overall brain structure, and ie where religions come from? And by far the most intense and out-of-reality/body/senses experience I could ever go through?

Definitely, those few experiences will be with me till my last breath.

You can't pop a trip, go to a music festival and except a new mindset. You can however use these tools to deeply connect with yourself and this is where life altering experiences happen.

It’s less that you upgrade your firmware, but rather that some thoughts that never occurred to you are thought in such a setting. Having felt connected to nature, or even a specific tree, changes how you view trees and life in general. There are many other ways to gain such insights, like travelling or reading; any insight that resonates with you will »change your view on reality«.

When I had depression I used Salvia Divinorum and re-lived fragments of my childhood, I found that seemed to reset my brain back to last known good state bridging forgotten childhood memory in the short term to feeling like it was only a week ago. Certainly cured my depression though. It felt programmable with music, suspect it maybe more controllable with research. Interesting stuff strangely I found anti-addictive. Though equally could be majorily dangerous for some as it litterally sucks you out of reality and all perception of time for a bit.

> I often hear stuff like “and then my whole view on reality changed”. Unless there’s an easy way to upload the previous “factory image” so to speak, it feels pretty risky to experiment with that.

Some people say if you keep up to date on global news, the opposite may be even more true.

They say such things of travel too. “It will forever change how you see the world, international travel.”

I hope it's overstated cause damn do I not really feel like traveling. It's just a lot of work.

I'll probably travel a little within the US but in the space of therapy stuff, I'd much rather accept that I'm simply not a travel person, than actually bother traveling.

No one wants to talk about all the downsides of trips that include leaving the house.. It's almost like a sizable portion of GDP has been taken over by an industry of vultures that need to fight any cleaner, safer more environmental alternative that might be successful by word of mouth alone.

100%. Ask any one of these people to quantify how their view on reality changed and it'll be vague transcendentalist talking points and hand waving around things like something something spiritualism, something something deeper connection with nature, something something cosmic holographic kaleidoscopic reality.

On par with new age crystal healing and chakra points.

I'm an extreme materialist, I don't believe in gods or spirits or anything of the sort. I don't even believe in the magic some people call "free will".

I first tried LSD about 10 years ago and have taken various forms of psychedelics once or twice a year since. Some of them were, without a doubt, the most profound experiences of my life. You're right about the vague transcendentalist nonsense. The problem is there are no words to describe it adequately.

Despite only having pleasant experiences myself, I would never encourage any friend or stranger to try them. That is something only they can decide with their own research and risk appetite. There are absolutely serious potential consequences.

I think the worst consequence for me is that I have started to like weird music like psytrance even when sober.

As a materialist, do you believe in laws of physics?

I believe they're our current best approximation to how the universe behaves based on our empirical observations.

But that the universe behaves according to some laws?

I don't know.

The universe does not know or care about our laws and they are incomplete.

For example, we have no idea how consciousness works, so at this point we stop at "I don't know", rather than inventing explanations.

I don't know if consciousness is computable -- I suspect it isn't.

If it is not computable then we cannot come up with laws to explain it.

Or maybe the whole universe is computable but its kolmogorov complexity is larger than its information capacity.

I believe we know, based on any definition of knowing - I.e. assuming we can know anything at all, and realizing that any definitions of knowing are all circular to an extent, that the electron follows some laws.

I agree that the universe doesn't care how we approximate these laws, but only that they clearly exist.

If these laws exist, they are certainly not material, unless you redefine material, and that is why I am no longer a materialist :)

You're technically correct (the best kind of correct)!

However, I don't think any materialist would deny laws of physics exist. We might say that how materials interact with each other is an intrinsic property of material itself, just as an electron behaves as though it has a certain mass.

What definition of material would you use that separates it from its laws?

How does one quantify a conversation with a transdimensional being?

There are plenty of people who talk about how psychedelics helped them integrate and move past traumatic experiences, kick addictions, and come to terms with difficult truths like the mortality of themselves or their loved ones. The transcendental and indescribable is part of the experience for sure, but there's plenty of evidence for psychedelic experiences creating concrete, durable, quantifiable changes in worldview and behavior. MAPS (https://maps.org) has done fantastic work to compile literature reviews for the scientific studies that demonstrate these outcomes.

I'm not saying that psychedelics are for everyone, or that anyone should take them on a whim and without preparation. However, it's just incorrect to equate their ability to change people's lives for the better to crystal healing or similar.

Just because a subjective experience is ineffable and difficult to describe adequately doesn't mean it's nonsense. It's convenient to lump those things all together, but it's not accurate.

After all, asking someone what it was like to stand at the top of a mountain they'd just climbed, admiring the view, you're likely to get similar "hand-waving" answers about connection to something bigger than them, but you probably wouldn't argue that climbing a mountain and taking in the view is a worthless experience that amounts to nonsense.