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Comment by alexandercrohde | Hacker News Reader

I've noticed this too.

There are a number of common-phrases I'll hear like "everything is connected" or "everything is alive/sentient."

However, not everything is connected, effective thinking is very much about identifying independent problems. Also I certainly don't believe everything is alive, and I certainly don't think this opinion should be held on the basis of chemicals rather than scientific data.

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Edit: And what's most disconcerting is that they seem to think these phrases "mean" something. If they said "Well, there's really no way I can articulate it, but it's changed my emotional outlook on a lot of things" then I'd be much more receptive.

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I guess what gets me is that there is a hidden premise in scientific materialism that _nothing_ is alive and _nothing_ is connected, because it starts with inanimate fundamental parts and tries to build up to reality.

From a psychedelic perspective, that's backwards - if you start, instead, from "what are my perceptions" and try to extrapolate out, you start to find that the default assumptions assume there's a boundary somewhere - "light hits my retina so I see it" "my optic nerve sends a signal so I see it" "certain neurons fire so I see it" but there's no firm place to draw the line "this is where the light stops and where the perception begins", your body and the light are one machine, going from the big bang through the star through space through objects through your eye through your brain - there's no solid boundary between any of those things, it's one long unbroken string of causality.

Or, you're having a conversation with a friend, and you realize that all of the words, all of the concepts, the patterns of your speech, are all things that you got from somewhere else, they flow through you, from person to person, throughout history - you're not having a conversation, the conversation is having _you_

Or, you start thinking about your life and the world and you think about incredible pain you've experienced. And great beauty you've seen. And your greatest fear. And your greatest joy. And you realize - the palette of your experience has _incredible_ dynamic range, like your brain is some kind of magnificent radio and the music it plays is every perception you have - from colors and smells to the most complicated ideas are all things it can receive or transmit or something .... but who is listening?

Or any of thousands of other non-normal schemas. None of these function as scientific knowledge - they're shifts in perspective, but they don't make new predictions (or if they do, those predictions can be re-explaned back into the scientific materialist metaphor!).

And while the goal of science is to see reality as it really is, there's a default perspective to science, which is to isolate components to see how they work in a simplified context, and then to say "the complexity of reality is just like the simplicity of the simplified contexts, only without the simplification" which is a super interesting hallucination but I don't see why it's any more _correct_ than any of the other visions of complexity

One of the best explanations of it I've seen. Touches on the magic feeling of it (how would having a direct feeling of perception of the causal chain of the entire universe possibly not feel magical and profound) without depending on the reader having had a psychedelic experience to understand.

That state of direct sense of universal causal connection is achievable sober. Not meditation either (though I hear thats one reliable way too). I accidentally "clicked" into it one day while thinking about the border between my skin and inanimate objects. I thought about the idea of my skin being part of me, my control of this reality, and the objects being somehow just entirely separate. It started to seem to make no sense that I can understand and feel in a deep way that my hand is mine but what it touches is something else. I then started thinking about how the hand seems like its mine, but really only seems like that because of nerves etc. connecting it to my brain. That became a thought about how I can even maintain a coherent mind across the space the brain exists in, and soon enough it clicked and I knew it. It was simultaneously a bit exciting, and profoundly calming.

I don't think I had any direct major life improvement from that realization alone however. It took psychedelics to understand how to use that perspective to snap out of anger or rise above anxious fears.

This is one of the best articulations I've come across. For me, it sparked the realization that the boundary line between (to cite your example) light and perception is on some level an arbitrary distinction between words, that reality is continuous but language is quantized and the relationship between the two is malleable. There are numerous other paths to this insight, but for me it turned an intellectual understanding into a gut-level one.

Foucault, for instance, penned this anecdote about Borges in his introduction to "The Order of Things" five years before he took acid out in death valley:

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

> “everything is alive/sentient”

Here is a six hour mathematically rigorous lecture by John Conway in which he argues either everything has free will or nothing has free will. I’m not trying to convince you everything is sentient, but to introduce some doubt in your black & white thinking. https://youtu.be/tmx2tpcdKZY

That's a very particular definition of "free will": it's either everything follows a deterministic time evolution (so its future behavior is dependent only on what happened in its past light-cone) or not. It's not the "intuitive" idea of "free will" most people are used to, though that isn't a well-defined concept.

> However, not everything is connected

This assertion is just as unfounded as the opposite.

Probably a better explanation is everything is whole. The problem is you are trying to envision it from the perspective of analysis, when what they are describing is a visualization of their feelings, emotions, and perceptions sometimes we don't understand our feelings, psychedelics given the right circumstances can change the perceptions of our feelings and emotions, rewire our inputs and cause us to visualize/hear/physically feel them. That is why it sounds like gibberish when someone tried to describe them. It would be akin, to all the sudden you vision and touch where reversed, how would you describe touching blue, or seeing cold, how would anyone who has never experienced it relate.

This is also why, it can be an effective mental health tool, because it rewires inputs and outputs and allows different parts of our brain to experience our feelings or our thoughts. Sometimes profound ideas come from it, sometime it just a bunch of dumb gibberish.

"Everything is connected" is a description of the sensation, not a statement of a scientific fact.

My personal experience was like this: This was nearly 30 years ago, I was 13 and invested some time in 'accidentally' meditating - I just looked at a spot on my roof for a long time. Then suddenly - wham - I literally feel a deep connection between everything I look at. The trees outside my window, the world, everything.

Let me provide an analogue. You can feel pain, yes? You can feel moving your foot? You feel your hands are part of you? Well, it was like that, only, I felt that everything was connected.

Was it just neurons firing in my head, creating a strange mode of sensations for a while? Yes. Was it devoid of deeper scientific significance? Yes. Was it profound? Hell yes.

Deeply spiritual experiences don't need to be mystical or attached to a larger theological context. They can be taken as a non-magical, psychological state of mind just like sleep or orgasm. This does not make them any less profound.

Can you name two things that are not connected?

The souls of 2 individuals?

If those are say, you and I, or you and the parent comment, how are they seperate?

We're experiencing identical perception right now, me in the form of reading the words you wrote, and you in the form of reading these words. The words are just information which is now duplicated in both our minds. When the psychedelic "everything is connected" concept is brought up, this is what is meant. Its not some new magic that has been discovered, its realizing that the mundane everyday mechanics that allow our reality to function, are in fact quite magical, not mundane at all. But anyone can still choose to see it as mundane, its just a choice of lens.

That's the most prevalent modern Christian view but many traditions have some version of monopsychism, where the many souls are a manifestation of the one God, or Allah, or Brahman, or Buddha-nature

Dualism is one of the stupidest concepts ever imagined.

That assumes that a "soul" is a real thing.

wow.. deep, bro!

What you're fetishising is called "Scientism". It was pretty en vogue at the end of the 18th century, and arguably led to the rise of both fascism and communism: Both schools of thought, though widely different in almost everything, wanted to rid themselves of all the "feelings" and "sentimentalities" (and jews) that felt superfluous in the coming age of machines and facts and science and progress.

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