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Comment by hashberry | Hacker News Reader

Especially psilocybin. "Hero" or "ego-death" doses are fascinating. Filters/barriers break down. Each room in my house had a special vibration/energy based on how I spent my time there. Artwork had deep meanings not previously noticed. Projected families and friends onto chairs in my empty dining room and had conversations with them (with cussing & sobbing). Started to think about my ancestors and had "past life" schizophrenic experiences based on memories and impressions of history. Felt powerful daemonic energy, radiating from body out of my hands, and felt amazed by the incredible ability humans have to create & destroy.

THC/cannabis is too much of a recreational drug... though it's useful for taking the edge off at the end of a psilocybin trip.

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Not to take anything away from your experience, but I've noticed that in reading reports from various people taking larger trips, I get this impression that a big part of the experience is indistinguishable from schizophrenia. What I mean is nobody can properly define their terms in any commonly shared way, people believe and see things they can't possibly share in a relatable way. Not everything of course, but your feeling of your hands strikes me as something you certainly felt, but likely wasn't anything more than an emotional experience that your brain and consciousness imagined, rather than deduced from logic. But since it felt so real, it felt so 'true' but likely wasn't. I could be wrong though.

According to Wikipedia's definition , psychosis is an abnormal condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not. Speaking as someone who has taken a very large dose of LSD, the boundary between alerted consciousness(or consciousness at all) and psychosis is very blurry. All of human experience is merely an interpretation of our stimuli, and one person's perception of reality is likely to be quite different from other people.

A key difference between LSD-indused psychosis and schizophrenia is timespan. For most people, the psychosis fades and they just become normal people again. (some people do trigger schizophrenia that persists after their trips, though it's rare)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis?wprov=sfla1

That’s the thing with your brain: Everything is kinda like that! All the time.

Most of your brain literally cannot distinguish between fantasy, dream, stories, and actual experiences.

And the parts that do, will never be able to tell if it’s all just made up.

Philosophically, there is no ”reality“ but that what you perceive. Which, due to relativity, is, well, highly relative too. There is no absolute reality either. You can literally have conflicting facts about even simple things, that both are true, and scientifically verifiably so. (Like ”Who shot first?“. Or ”What particle came first?“.)

So be very wary whenever you are confident about such things. Because that is only possible with enough convenient ignorance.

Let's not confuse what's in our heads and what's outside of them.

Philosophy doesn't get us out of the gravity well, cure diseases, build computers, or feed the hungry. However, it does motivate people to prioritize those things.

> Let's not confuse what's in our heads and what's outside of them.

You can try not to, but ultimately you will fail because your brain works against you.

Schizophrenia isn't some binary thing one either has or doesn't, it's much more of a scale.

A base level of it is even required for our punny brains to rationalize not just all kinds of basic sensory inputs [0], but tying all kind of abstract human-created constructs together in such a way that it sill ends up making "objective" sense to the individual.

[0] https://www.livescience.com/21275-color-red-blue-scientists....

What do you mean ”outside“?

How can you tell there actually is an outside? (And if you can never tell, why would it matter?)

You're venturing into solipsism and that's a well trod dead end. There's certainly an objective world out there. That's where all the fun stuff happens, you know, the stuff with other people, consensus reality.

>> Let's not confuse what's in our heads and what's outside of them.

Well, everything that is at the boundary of our knowledge is also on the boundary between our heads and outside of them.

Let's say you think your partner loves you. How well do you know that? Do you think you know them well? What's the difference between them realising that they should move on in life later on and having planned it all along (getting rid of you in a few years)?

Do you believe in marriage? Is it something enforced upon us by the culture or is it emergent from each one of us individually? What if I only speak about you yourself? Is happy marriage a 5, 10, 20 year long thing? If your partner dies, how long do you wait before your marry someone else?

I would even go as far as saying that "curing diseases, building computers and feeding the hungry" is something that people with a certain slave mentality tend to think about. They need a rational purpose to live because otherwise they would need to admit they are not rational players - but in the end it's them you lose in the game of life by blaming everybody else for being so _irrational_.

What?

Personally I have always had amplified psychedelic experiences when pairing them with cannabis and since using psychedelics, I've been much more sensitive to thc. It's weird that people have so many different experiences from those chemicals.

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