No, but LSD helped me see things that couldn't be learned from outside. For some reason, it helps me recall childhood memories better. Sure maybe there's some guided therapy session that could have done that, but LSD gives it to me for free, along with a whole lot of other stuff.

Did it let you recall childhood memories, or invent new ones? How would you know the difference?

Historic events can be corroborated.

This. There are certain events that we already know happened. We have approximate dates, and we have talked about the events with others, who have given us their impressions of how we acted at the time. But sometimes we don't remember what our internal thought processes were at the time, or we simply held some certain belief about what had occurred (e.g. "I just decided I didn't want to go to school some day", or "I wanted to go to school but ADHD wouldn't let me!"). Sure LSD can give us some creative visualizations, but sometimes it also gives us ideas that just make more sense than what we had before. Instead of some spooky brain disorder just randomly Stopping me from going to school that day, randomly, maybe it was actually a fight between alters (yay for dissociative identity disorder!). And the more I thought about it (especially being - apparently !! but clearly - able to see what was me and what was the other during those fights), the more true it seemed, especially given all the more instances of this I've discovered over time, and that it's part of a longstanding pattern, but I digress. More and more has come out over the months and years that builds a progressively clearer picture of why we act the way we do and why we've done certain things we've done; why I feel certain things I do, why I remember certain things I do and why I don't remember certain things I don't. I'm not seeing any universal truth; I am discovering our own truth, and we are discovering our own truths, and this has done a lot of good for us, especially where we gain a better understanding of our past behavior in friendships (and elsewhere), and where we can still improve, etc.

Even if everything we've learned through LSD were false, I wouldn't even really care because we've still uncovered and figured out so much through this (much of it we've discussed with various others who were there during past events) that we are incredibly grateful to now know. So overall I think the experience for us has been positive, that we have gained much from it, and that we may stand to gain more over time since we are a regular user.

None of that new information you provided is something that can be corroborated against the historical record. The claim is that LSD gave you access to long-locked up memories that happened to corroborate with what you are going through now.

The vastly simpler explanation is that your brain did what brains do best and filled in the gaps in your memory be inventing a story constrained to corroborate with the bare facts you remember, but because LSD it feels so real and vividly detailed that it “must be correct.”

> None of that new information you provided is something that can be corroborated against the historical record.

> The claim is that LSD gave you access to long-locked up memories that happened to corroborate with what you are going through now.

I think it's more like it gave us different perspectives on the same memories. We've had those memories but we couldn't see them that way before.

Also, uncovering this stuff randomly is what starts these paths of discovery for us. It's not that we're working through something and conveniently happen to find apparently useful things in past memories, it's that something (anything) triggers a flashback to a past memory that upon closer inspection reveals something that turns out to have had real apparent effects because it resulted in obvious behavioral patterns that multiple other friends have confirmed to us and are only now being placed in proper context with what feels like a proper explanation. This isn't somewhere the proper explanation could be just anything and this isn't schizophrenia where completely unconnected ideas are considered together. The stuff we find in flashbacks can completely surprise us and often has nothing to do with what we think we're looking for or think we're going to get out of it. It sometimes just somehow alludes to something far bigger that we really can corroborate with multiple external sources. Our brain and the others in it play so many tricks on us and on me, I know not to trust any single experience as a source of truth, but it can show me where to look.

> The vastly simpler explanation is that your brain did what brains do best and filled in the gaps in your memory be inventing a story constrained to corroborate with the bare facts you remember, but because LSD it feels so real and vividly detailed that it “must be correct.”

I don't really know how to properly articulate that I've verified anything because it's hard for me to even verify to myself that I know any of the things I've discovered for quite sure, and not just trusting something that very well could have been made up. I know the specific experience of recall is very fabricated, I know that what I see and what I think I identify as different parts while recalling those memories could be completely made up, but I'm not deriving everything from that experience. I use it as a suggestion to guide actual research that is not grounded in flashbacks and feelings and we have discovered actual patterns that are consistent with our theories and that couldn't possibly just be convenient explanations. Past a certain point all of Dissociative Identity Disorder is technically made up in some way (neuroplasticity!) and it's damn near impossible to know with certainty how things work or have worked, but I am taking the same approach that I have always taken and that is using the best explanations and the best theories that I currently have at my disposal and constantly testing and looking for improvements I can make to our understanding of ourselves.

But like I said, I wouldn't even care if it was merely a convenient filling of the gaps, because it has resulted in material good for us, it has resulted in material advancement of our understanding of our own past actions and in discussing them with those who we have hurt in the past, and it has also given us direction on how to better ourselves for the future. It really doesn't seem like that'd be the case unless the gap filling was so good that it correctly accounted for everything we hadn't even figured out yet, everything that we hadn't even heard of from others yet, and basically all of the ways we've been testing and testing the theories and the explanations that we have now.

Even if whatever it gave us access to was not something already stored in our brain, whatever it did was sufficient to allow us to figure things out that could otherwise have taken us months to years or even longer, and we know that they are material things that impact others because they have helped us work through emotions with others who formed those emotions independently of any LSD, based on those past actions of ours which we now better understand.

So I choose to believe we have gained valuable insight as a result of these experiences, not based on the experiences themselves which I know take great creative liberties, but based on everything we've done informed by the experiences to figure things out the old-fashioned way, too.

All knowledge that can be gained through LSD is contingent and experiential, not universal and certain

I’m well aware through my own testing

EDIT: I’m not saying it is useless information for your life but it is particular to your life, not truths of the universe like the person I replied to claimed

Oh, of course, nothing about LSD can give me access to things that my brain just doesn't have access to. It can help with the things that already are in my brain though.

Your brain does have access to all rational truth

My brain has the ability to claim anything it wants as truth. I prefer for my truth to either be consistent with an objective or empirical truth, or be measurably opposed to truths I disagree with (and to a known degree). I don't always achieve this and I'm not always the best at being open-minded but it is the goal, I would think.

Empirical truth is a lesser form of truth, look for necessary truth, purely rational

Wha? Empirical truth is a lesser form of truth? What are you getting at there?

Empirical observation is contingent, so cannot be the basis of certain knowledge.

Everything is contingent on empirical observation. Our rational brains are the product of pattern matching algorithms trained on empirical reality. There is no basis for rational thought that is not downstream of empiricism.

Reason is overrated. Knowing that smoking is unhealthy is not sufficient to stop oneself from smoking.

It’s not overrated if you want to know the universal truths of reality, which is what the person I replied to spoke of. The truth is fully reasonable

> The truth is fully reasonable

Doesn’t this effectively hand wave away the hard problem of consciousness?

i.e. even a purely reason-based understanding of truth must acknowledge that the only thing we can be certain actually exists is the mind. With no true understanding of how the mind functions, and giant gaps in our understanding of existence, the idea that universal truth can even be comprehended — much less mapped wholly onto humans capacity for reason - is just a belief. An article of faith.

It seems to me that a purely reason-based worldview must by definition acknowledge that a statement like “the truth is fully reasonable” is untenable at worst and at best just a prediction.

We don’t need to understand how the mind works to derive the necessary metaphysical categories. That’s something Kant got wrong

I'm not sure upon what basis you think such a claim can be definitively made. Nor does declaring "Kant got this wrong" help the argument.

For sake of argument, let's say the simulation hypothesis is true. Would you acknowledge that the implications of such a thing being true would have vastly different metaphysical properties than other hypotheses, e.g. "consciousness is a fundamental property of existence and all matter is conscious"?

The mind is literally the only thing we can be certain exists. We've made so much progress scientifically mapping the territory available for us to explore, that I think many people have lost sight of the vastness of the gap between what we actually know and what we have yet to understand.

Forget about all that. Start with no presuppositions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_of_Logic

Then you’ll find out the truth

This doesn't pass the smell test for me.

It seems like you've taken a system of reasoning that was built through careful consideration (Kantianism), called the conclusions it meticulously built 'presuppositions' and hand-waved it without making substantive counterpoints.

The problem then, of course, is that burning down previous philosophy and starting 'without presuppositions' will lead inevitably to conclusions again, which you can once again call presuppositions and hand-wave.

If you have no external assumptions you can’t be wrong

This statement is self-refuting in multiple ways.

It is itself an assumption. It is assuming that it’s possible to have no external assumptions, that being wrong requires external assumptions, and that this principle is true. You’ve already violated your own standard.

Even basic logical reasoning requires assumptions. Like the principle of non-contradiction, or that our cognitive faculties can distinguish between valid and invalid inferences. Hegel’s work doesn’t actually proceed without assumptions either; it starts with the concept of “being” and builds from there using logical principles.

If you truly had no assumptions, you couldn’t even begin to reason or make any truth claims. You’d have no framework for distinguishing truth from falsehood, valid from invalid reasoning, or meaningful from meaningless statements.

You might avoid being wrong about empirical facts, but you’d also avoid being right about anything.

The real philosophical task isn’t to eliminate all assumptions (which is impossible), but to identify foundational commitments, examine them critically, and build carefully from the most defensible starting points we can find.

But those starting points are still assumptions, and at least for the time being, there’s no reason to believe we’ve sufficiently closed the knowledge gaps necessary to operate on anything but a base set of assumptions.

Those are all assumptions

Exactly

So forget about them and start from zero, from totally empty thinking

Can’t be done. That’s not how human brains work, and there’s no neurological basis for the claim that it is possible.

Look, this has come full circle and we’re both just restating our positions at this point.

If you’re not just trolling, I’d highly recommend you go read some of the criticisms of Hegel’s work.

You keep dismissing/side stepping the counterpoints raised here without providing substantive arguments to back up this dismissal, so I’ll leave it there.

> Forget about all that.

On what basis? The metaphysical substrate matters and can’t be simply hand waved away.

Your position here closely resembles religious faith, and that’s a bit of a problem if your goal is to convince other people of its correctness.

Religious faith is when you forget everything and do philosophy without assumptions? News to me

Yes it must be waved away, since the categories of metaphysics themselves must be discovered

Religious faith is when you take the words and ideas of a man - ideas that are highly controversial and not widely accepted by philosophers or scientists - and then claim with certainty that they are the absolute truth. It’s one thing to find those ideas interesting, but another entirely to bring this kind of absolute certainty.

Hegel’s work could be described as a hypothesis at best, yet you’re treating it as gospel truth despite the fact that most philosophers find his conclusions untenable and most scientists conclude that he couldn’t have had a proper understanding of science to reach the conclusions that he reached.

Your arguments up to this point are indistinguishable from the claims made by the religious folks in my life who say they have the absolute truth because of their belief in the Bible and relationship with Jesus.

Your only defense of Hegel’s work to this point amounts to “I believe it’s true” and have been entirely circular.

To me, it is just obviously wrong. Reality is not reasonable and it is actually unreasonable that we would even expect reality to be reasonable.

Our reason is a highly flawed instrument that we have pushed far past what it was designed for.

We have done an amazing job though as these social machines that live in various collective social delusions.

Seeing these collective delusions and the unreasonableness of reality is exactly the point of taking psychedelics.

Forget LSD, ask anyone who has taken salvia divinorum to describe how unreasonable reality can be lol.

How can you conclude that reality is not reasonable? That’s a straight up contradiction. If it were unreasonable you’d be unable to conclude that

You don’t need to take drugs to know things, but reason only covers a portion of what can be known. Reason doesn’t really help one understand the nature of experience itself. That’s a whole different kind of meta-factual knowing, an infinite subject that some people approach through meditation (and psychedelics too).

Reason can know the entirety of all necessary truth. There are experiential contingent things such as what I ate for breakfast that it of course cannot know. But it can know all universal truth, such as all metaphysical and philosophical truth

I’m a Hegelian though so I’m biased

I like this because it immediately accounts for truth not arrived at though reason and then just slaps on the word “universal” as the descriptor for the subset of truth reachable through reason. It is convincing because universal is a big word

Well the reasonable truth is not universal as in exhaustive but as in it always holds. I mean universal as in necessary, not contingent. Psychedelic and personal experience is merely contingent

At least for human affairs, there's more to it than that.

For example, we don't only care about humans having an understanding of, say, a moral choice. We also care about whether or not a given human can/will make a moral choice.

The latter happens in a different part of the brain. Sharpening one's teeth on the mere understanding of a moral truth is unlikely to improve one's ability to carry out even a well-understood moral act if that same person doesn't have experience doing it. On the other hand, personal experience-- say, with a mentor from a similar background, or even just grooming horses with a group of similarly cantankerous teens while talking about their feelings-- can sharpen a person's ability to make that moral choice, even on a consistent basis.

I'm not a fan of psychedelics, but people have told me they were instrumental in guiding them to make better choices-- sometimes choices that they knew were right but couldn't bring themselves to make.

It is of course totally reasonable to categorize all of this-- neurology, human self-knowledge, behavior, and socialization-- under the heading of reasonable truth. But for some reason, HN fans of reason of generally exclude it. So when you say, "The truth is fully accessible through reason," I agree in this larger sense. But the larger sense isn't the common usage, so it's often easier to just say you're wrong. :)

Edit: clarification

I think we're talking past each other (or maybe mysticism and Hegel don't mix!). These mystical experiences touch at something on a different level than reason, a little closer to base metal. I mean that no reason or representation can capture that most fundamental reality of being, the fundamental experiential truth. Reason can try to explain it, and reason can help guide some people to the experience of it (jnana yoga, getting a satori from reading Eckhart), but it cannot itself know it. Meditation, psychedelics, dance, or whatever else are the typical pathways to it. All reason, all facts, are subordinate to it and less true than it. Or can being be contained by reason?

Qualia. Black and white room.

This makes sense because experience doesn’t affect how a person reasons. This is why all truth is agreed upon

I know you’re being sarcastic but indeed if we reasoned properly we would all agree

A common fallacy is that if you and I are smart then we will agree. Conflicts of interest and personal value systems and world views provide easy inlets for various counter points.

Well it isn’t a fallacy because if you reason without presuppositions you do uncover the absolute truth

> if you reason without presuppositions

This cannot be accomplished, and the conclusion that such a feat leads to absolute truth is philosophically untenable.

Yes it can. Hegel did it in the Science of Logic

Many people have made philosophical claims. That does not make them categorically true, and Hegel certainly has his critics.

I used to know a guy that read some Hegel and then claimed dominion over Knowing the Truth and I used to piss him off by saying shit like “dogmatic people are slaves to their fears” and “discourse is a form of oppression”

And what elevates Hegel over any other philosopher, prophet, god, or performance artist?

Hegel is extremely satisfying on an emotional level to some readers. The idea that you —yes you, the reader— not only stand at the precipice of unfettered genius by the mere fact of possessing any critical faculty, but you also already possess the requisite tools to seize and contemplate the infinite truths of the universe, is very seductive.

Like everybody loves being told that they are smart, and Hegel tells the reader that they can be superlatively intelligent. It’s a hella thrilling idea to entertain, and the best way to keep that feeling going is by believing that it’s true, and the best way to convince yourself of that is to write defenses of Hegel.

> know you’re being sarcastic but indeed if we reasoned properly we would all agree

We would also lose everything that makes us human and will find no satisfaction in knowing.

Satisfaction in knowing comes from disagreement? I don’t think so

I've seen your post below about your bad trip. I fully respect your position, but that is not my experience. I realised I can't access things I find important through my reason. I'm just too dependent on my body for my mind to function, so I just followed what my body was telling me.

But I agree that you don't need to take drugs. That's why my advice wasn't a definitive one. It's an invitation for people to consider what they want in their lives.

Wish you all the best truthfully.