DMT drug study investigates the ‘entities’ people meet while tripping
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
I never believed they were anything other than hallucinations, but they were still some of the most positive and meaningful events in my life. I hope one day we'll know enough about consciousness to understand why DMT causes the formation of these seemingly other selves.
(The old: left hemisphere math, right art or vice versa has been debunked if I remember correctly)
As usual with biology, it's a bit more complicated than the '60s explanation ever revealed to the public. https://youtu.be/dFs9WO2B8uI
I don't think it necessarily shows that. The "two halves" may just be a phenomenon that arises when the brain splits, not something that's normally there. And I believe there have been recent studies that even brought the original split brain conclusions into question, i.e., there might still be communication happening between the two halves.
Which is not necessarily to discount it. I'm intrigued by his research and willingness to apply the scientific method to things other scientists would dismiss out-of-hand.
Think I should open it or read a digital copy now?
Half the book is in Middle German. So..there is that...I just admire the calligraphy.
On one trip I caught a glimpse of this and within the trip I moved towards it, curious what it was, and I was pushing closer towards it trying to discover what it was, and then it "shattered" and revealed itself as my own subconscious - that force within me that protects me and guides me and loves me, it was my own self at its purest essence, stripped of all the layers that we construct to deal with the rest of the world. It was a rapturous epiphany, I literally turned into a million smiles and my own subconscious welcomed me "home".
I know it probably sounds strange to some, but I do consider it a breakthrough. I haven't really needed to do any DMT since then. "Once you get the message, hang up the phone" - Alan Watts. I got the message. Oh wow, I got that message.
I never believed the "aliens" in DMT trips were anything like "aliens", because after all, everything that occurs during a DMT trip is happening within your own brain. These aren't "beings", they are you, yourself, or at least the inner workings of "the self".
A conspiracy theory fan, a priest, a therapist, or a hardcore fan of David Lynch movies will probably see their inner selves manifest differently when the subconscious pushes through to show itself to ego in a way were it can be seen with our "eyes" and heard with out "ears".
But this? This is pure genius. Thank you for the link! So many laugh out loud moments. I particularly enjoyed '“I demand a better answer than that,” I demanded.'
“I’m not going to make a deathbed conversion,” Tom said diagnostically.
The sentence indicates that Tom is dying and not currently religious, and the word "diagnostically" sounds like a mixture between "die" and "agnostic". They aren't quite funny when explained but when you spend 3 minutes trying to figure one out before it slaps you in the face it's a very good time
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/tom-swifties/
More examples:
“I went rock-climbing with my girlfriend,” Tom updated.
“The defibrillator worked!” Tom said, repulsed.
“My karate instructor died,” Tom said, desensitized.
This is hilarious :) Especially when you think of the entities he's arguing with as different aspects of his own consciousness.
There's parts of all of us that want to pursue knowledge of the world around us and those parts that want to pursue our emotions and knowing ourselves.
Basically, that we are a collection of inner-selves, not a single self. IFS provides a framework for working with our inner selves.
https://philosophynow.org/issues/97/The_Illusion_of_the_Self
There are multiple selves, and each one of them is not as set in stone as we think.
Is there a non-reddit reference to this "Internal Family Systems" thing? I'd be interested in looking into it more.
Somehow I'm not surprised that the tulpa in question is a batpony. There seems to be an interesting intersection between Tulpamancing and My Little Pony.
Perhaps something about escapism.
It’s why some but not all young children with imaginary friends can be considered fine. More strangely some adults have similar imaginary friends which they realize are mental constructs but they still enjoy interacting with them.
Shinzen Young's description on the nuts and bolts of Shingon Buddhist deity yoga practice is simply fascinating.
https://alvinalexander.com/personal/shinzen-young-shingon-sh... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_VizlDWcTA
If you want to trot out the doctrinal stuff, Dharmadhātu probably what you're looking for - it's the label given to purified mind in its natural state, free of obscurations. It is the essence-quality or nature of mind,
I'm pretty sure in a situation of conflict, it's beneficial to kick the ego in higher gear. Sure, when things calm down, relax that thing. I feel pretty strongly that's the evolutionary reason for having an ego to begin with.
But it seems that ambitious people usually have strong attachment to the ego and that what drives them.
And that's useful in a highly competitive society, where apartments are expensive, for example.
And once you out that into a larger perspective, some of that drive gets lost.
I invite you to directly experience it for yourself; come and see.
For full perspective: I've practiced various meditation techniques my whole life - Orthodox Christian, various flavor of yoga (mostly Raja and Kundalini related stuff), even some Buddhist techniques (mostly Zen). I'm fairly familiar with the Buddhist doctrine, and Christian, and the Hindu Dharma. I've had my share of experiences, including some that looked quite ego-free - and yeah, it's awesome.
I'm just saying, we shouldn't draw absolute lines here, or anywhere. The danger of narrow dogmatism is always present. And there's room for, and value in, the inner fire, the energy that builds things up and pushes things forward. That, too, is what we are.
You live in a wonderful, immense house; don't confine yourself to a couple rooms only.
Sorry to keep shilling for Shinzen Young, but he is one of the few authors who has legitimacy in traditional Buddhist lineages, but seems interested in exploring and systematizing alternate traditions.
You might find his thoughts on shamanism interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33u14OjeHpE
You're confusing the relative world with awakening and then making it out for wisdom. All of man's great achievements can be summarized in a few passages from "Ozymandias": gone tomorrow.
'Even if a whole mountain were made of gold, not double that would be enough to satisfy one person. Know this and live accordingly'
We should absolutely make out for wisdom what is wise and point out unskillful pursuits where we see them. Buddhist teachings aren't a postmodernist mash-up of whatever you like. It can sound rude, even condescending but it's not what you make it out to be. The suttas are there to offer wisdom, Right Understanding.
Practicing various meditation techniques your whole life sounds like you haven't made up your mind yet or haven't seen one through to the end. I know exactly how that feels and I'd trade the decade I spent sampling for depth in any one.
That is a point of view completely detached from reality. Have a nice day.
"Who said that?"
--Popeye
Now it doesn't, and our emotional evolution hasn't caught up to our society or our intellectual sophistication. You don't have to respond to conflict at all, in 99% of cases. There is no benefit to winning. If someone cuts you off in traffic, getting mad and honking causes more pain for you AND for the other person. The most beneficial thing is to not even react other than to prevent a crash.
I think the point is that you will do less to reinforce positive behaviour in others, than you will to amplify your own negative response conditioning.
Though I would add that if you sent your message across in a state of absolute zen then perhaps the reaction would be beneficial all round.
> A case in point is the teaching on not-self. Many students interpret this as the Buddha's answer to two of the most frequently-asked questions in the history of serious thought: "Who am I?" and "Do I have a true self?" In the light of these questions, the teaching seems to be a no-self teaching, saying either an unqualified No: There is no self; or a qualified No: no separate self. But the one time the Buddha was asked point-blank if there is a self, he refused to answer, on the grounds that either a Yes or a No to the question would lead to extreme forms of wrong view that block the path to awakening. A Yes or a qualified No would lead to attachment: you'd keep clinging to a sense of self however you defined it. An unqualified No would lead to bewilderment and alienation, for you'd feel that your innermost sense of intrinsic worth had been denied.
> As for the question, "Who am I?" the Buddha included it in a list of dead-end questions that lead to "a thicket of views, a wilderness of views, a contortion, a writhing, a fetter of views. Bound by a fetter of views, [you] don't gain freedom from birth, aging, and death, from sorrow, lamentation, pain, distress, or despair." In other words, any attempt to answer either of these questions is unskillful karma, blocking the path to true freedom.
> So if the not-self teaching isn't meant to answer these questions, what question does it answer? A basic one: "What is skillful?" In fact, all of the Buddha's teachings are direct or indirect answers to this question. His great insight was that all our knowledge and ignorance, all our pleasure and pain, come from our actions, our karma, so the quest for true knowledge and true happiness comes down to a question of skill. In this case, the precise question is: "Is self-identification skillful?" And the answer is: "Only up to a point." In the areas where you need a healthy sense of self to act skillfully, it's wise to maintain that sense of self. But eventually, as skillful behavior becomes second nature and you develop more sensitivity, you see that self-identification, even of the most refined sort, is harmful and stressful. You have to let it go.
https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/thanissaro/quest...
Sure, but I wonder how useful that is. After all, you're replacing one ego with another. Before, the controller was this group of processes running on this slice of the CPU, now it's a different (but similar) group of processes running on a somewhat shifted slice of the CPU.
Maybe if the new processes are better in some ways then it would be worth it? Less anxious, more confident, something like that.
I wonder if math problems, or even simple logic statements, are the most appropriate criteria for interactions.
One way this could work however would be if the same entity revealed itself to two participants. Then it would be quite straightforward to see if information/music/other shared by between one participant and the entity could be accessed by the other when participant when communicating with the entity.
R1 - Is the entity a projection of the participant or manifestation of a separate entity?
R2 - If the entity is a manifestation, can it process information that is not presented by the participant?
R3 - Can that information be presented to another participant with the entity acting as an intermediary? This would expand on your idea of "if the same entity revealed itself to two participants", then perhaps having Person 1 receive musical input, describe the entity's reaction, Person 2 does not receive the musical input and describes the entity's behavior. If there is are common reaction behaviors between the entities, it wouldn't prove they are separate from the host, but could lead to additional types of studies.
> I never believed they were anything other than hallucinations
I mean, dogs can't do math either, yet they are real.
I'm not necessarily arguing for the independent reality of the entities, I'm just saying that's not a super-conclusive test.
But yeah, still not conclusive either way (but the most likely answer is still that they're constructions of your own mind).
And then one night Kekule dreamed up the benzene ring, and the rest is history.
> [...] it’s a technique James claims to be responsible for 80% of the tracks of Selected Ambient Works Volume II. In a 1994 interview he explained, “I go to sleep, dream I’m in my studio with imaginary bits of gear and do a track. Then I wake myself up and recreate it. I can do this in about 20 minutes.”
https://www.factmag.com/2017/04/14/funny-little-man-the-fact...
The trick is you have to stop trying to solve the problem and just let your brain work on it in the background.
To then argue against that: Trippy aliens would not need to confront our simplest kinds of scarcity, like for land or food, in order to need to economize. Any world that offers choices offers tradeoffs by definition. Rational agents facing tradeoffs arrive at math.
Unless somehow emotional intelligence is more useful to them than economic rationality.
But one time, I tried smoking a small amout of it while chewing on some extract. I'd read that south American shamans would chew the leaves rather than smoking them.
It was a totally different experience. After about ten minutes I had this extreme sense of derealization, like everything in the world was flat and 2 dimensional the like backdrop of a play and if I tried I could have just ripped it all down to see everything hidden behind it. It was a really strange feeling.
Shortly after that though, was when the entity showed up. At the time, I was fairly addicted to minecraft. Like would spend ally free time playing that game.
All of a sudden there was a voice screaming in my head that i'm wasting my time and life...something made...I really don't know how else to describe it, stand up and start walking into the wall over and over while the voice kept going see, this is what you've been spending your time doing. If you've ever played minecraft, it involves a lot of walking into walls to mine blocks.
At that point, I started getting this overwhelming urge to go outside for a walk. I remember arguing with the thing saying it would be a bad idea to go outside. It ended up relenting and left.
The whole experience was strange...I swear that must be what it feels like to be possessed or something. I know it's like just a hallucination, but it sure felt real and even remembering it it feels real.
Real or not, I stopped playing minecraft after that. Haven't played more than a few hours since.
I tried Salvia once (35x extract which, yes, was incredibly dumb for a first timer), and my experience was so nightmarish and traumatic that I've never tried anything stronger than coffee since.
Salvia is its own deterrent.
And just so I don't have to write a second comment, to the above poster.
The 2d effect was one of the strangest things i've ever experienced. I've tried my fair share of hallucinogens, but nothing's been quite like that. It lingered a while longer than everything else. Again though, it wasn't the most pleasant feeling, my girlfriend and roommate were with me and even they had that 2d not real seeming look to them which was kind of disconcerting.
Overall it wasn't really something I regretted and feel like breaking my game addiction was a good outcome, but it's not an experience I'd like to repeat. Even after years, the memory of it all is still pretty vivid.
classic salvia
The underlying presumption seems to be that there are barriers to understanding a truth that can be "unlocked," which seems like a leap fraught with baggage. Even though using a poison that impairs the ability of our brain to reconcile its sensory inputs with its memory of itself is an out of "self" experience, this idea of viewing it through the lens of an enhancement or impairment yields different interpretations. A functioning society and civilization requires that people can be acted upon by - and respond to - the artifacts of language, so something that impairs that is going to raise hackles among people who think about those sort of things. But to grow it and survive we also need things that originate outside of it, so the insights people get from these trips can also be very valuable.
DMT elves I can't explain, but geometric patterns, just generate interrupts on a signal that has feedback. If they do exist, I'd have to assume they're some instantiation of tech support, as something is going to detect the signal jitter and check it.
Geometric visual hallucinations, Euclidean symmetry and the functional architecture of striate cortex
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1088430/pdf/TB0...
(I am not saying this as some kind of allure of the drug's effects, just interesting to think about why and how the perception change happens).
I think maybe it has to do with your brain trialing new pattern recognition algorithms.
warning more musing below
I mean what is to say how any signal from our perception should look or feel internally? Visually the input in just raw EM radiation. And our brain makes this vivid picture out of basically a field of numbers. In this case you could argue that the extra pulsing or moving is not from a signal in reality, but we also can easily be tricked with visual illusions into seeing a static image move while completely sober. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_motion.
There is no "right" perception of reality, or at least ours is subjective to begin with. I think drugs just allow new patterns or patterns recognition "algorithms" a trial run. Our biology ended up as it is to keep us alive; it is not "poison" or wrong to try to re-jigger it temporarily to see what else is possible - as long as you are in a good situation to do so. (Or not, who am I to judge).
The way the 3D view comes into perspective, that sensation of maintaining an altered mode engaging with the 3D image, with distractions or a decision to leave that view disengaging. It's very similar to how modal and deliberate interacting with hallucinations on psychedelics can be.
When I felt sick as a child I would do this with the pattern on our wallpaper to distract myself from the discomfort. Edit: Or to help myself fall asleep by doing something similar with the "noise" you see when closing your eyes.
This is a natural part of our brains I guess.
What I find interesting though is that almost everyone has nearly identical experiences with this. Almost everyone goes from sober -> geometric shapes -> "the others", advancing between the levels dependent on the dose.
WHO ARE YOU
i'm... me?
WHO IS I?
i am... ?
Reality breaks down as colors rush over me. Intense joy suffuses my hitherto depressed existence. I return from the trip shivering and crying tears of joy.
Strong shit.
Years later, during a music show, I close the time loop by going out of body and becoming that triangle, letting my past self know everything will be okay, and life is worth it.
DMT... yeah.
> I believe guys like Tesla, Einstein and so many others did have this same capacity
Sometimes when reading quotes by people like them, I get a similar impression, like they were "connected to the source", or "enlightened", and they intuitively followed that connection towards their achievements.
It also reminds me of a part in a documentary about Steve Jobs when a friend of his says "Steve was enlightened, and he blew it", hinting at him using that connection or "power" for what she felt was the wrong purpose.
Wow!
Even in a controlled test, expectations probably still play a meaningful role. Possible ethical issues with randomizing the active test.
It also helps that the whole thing is so otherworldly, the thinking mind is simply awed into silence. It takes a while before you could even begin to develop a conceptual interpretation of what is happening, and by then the whole thing is over and you are back to your sober self.
With other, long-acting psychedelics, there is plenty of time and opportunity for the mind to develop its own "spin" on the experience, and produce anxiety. Not so with DMT - it's like being shot out of a cannon and then coming back to earth just as fast.
It sounds terrifying and it is, when you're reflecting on it outside of the container of the trip. Somehow, while it's happening, you don't even have time to think about how terrifying it is, and as a result of that it ends up being OK. Tells you a lot about the nature of anxiety, really.
You are no longer player by the normal rules, so you can throw deterministic time measurements out of the window lol.
Really I can't even speak of time in this context. It felt more like a series of moment instants, and usually, before I even located "myself" in the experience, it was over.
I'm going to be bold here and say that if someone speaks of experiencing time dilation or loops on DMT, it is more of a question of the rational, linear mind, trying to make sense of a timeless, or non-linear experience of time (which it is not able to comprehend), by imposing familiar, linear concepts on it post-facto.
So, someone might speak of a time loop after the trip, but while you're actually having a DMT breakthrough experience, there simply is no "observer" there to generate the thought "oh, I am stuck in a time loop here". Therefore, the feeling of anxiety or terror, which might normally be associated with such a finding, will not arise.
At first I thought maybe the whole "friendly elves" (for lack of a better phrase) thing might just be because my friends and I had read the same things about the experience and as such were predispositioned to that experience. However, a few friends that had literally never heard of DMT tried it and had virtually the same experience. Everyone I know personally that's tried it has the same "friendly fractal elves trying to show you something" or "fractal basketball" (that's what we called it) story.
It's a delight and I'd at some point in the future like to try ayahuasca, but I'm very leery about MAOIs. I think a lot of people may not be aware of the very real risks associated with them. DMT itself may be relatively safe, but harmala alkaloids can be incredibly dangerous depending on the person. There was a Netflix show (I think called Wellness maybe?) that touched on the possible dangers of ayahuasca but didn't go so far as to describe the possible problems of inhibiting an enzyme (monoamine oxidase) that performs vital functions in your brain and body.
I'm really glad that more and more researchers are spending more time and resources on psychedelics in general and look forward to advances that may be made in this area.
i.e. We have a built in "entity" template and DMT puts us in such a state that we fill in that template
Sorry, too busy too look up the exact terminology and hypothesis now, but IIRC there's these 2 major theories on how the mind/drugs work: one camp (a bit like your statement) says things are built-in and certain feelings/states/thoughts/.. exist by default but in a 'normal' sober state the neural pathways to them are not active, and drugs just open the correct gates to be able to access them; the other camp (more like what I wrote) says drugs alter enough things in the brain to create those feelings/... from scratch i.e. not opening a gate, more like creating a gate then opening it and keeping on creating what lies beyond.
I can recommend the thought experiment of trying to figure it out which one it is, especially when on drugs, it's rather interesting :) Personally I settled for believing it's a mixture of the 2, mainly because I find it hard to believe the circuitry for some of the things I experienced is readily available whereas at the same time once you have a certain experience it can have a lasting effect and the neural connections remain somehow, making it much easier to have a similar experience next time.
OH WOW: self-transforming fractal machine elves ;]
Then...one can swipe the board with a wet finger that produces unintended non-negative consequences. Same could be said of DMT and the brain. Great comparison Stierlitz!
[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
With that we could schedule PPV events like Mescalito vs ShadowPerson cagematches.
This one too (sees the same entity as his friend): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHLpB38LNg4
we are chemical soups sloshing around within our meat sacs.
i am interested though.. in the imaginary friends children make...could it be that when we are children, the brain releases 'DMT like' chemicals or signals that make them hallucinate our imaginary friends. children lose this ability when they grow up.
same with ghosts and alien sightings. i think ..on a more diluted level..people with synesthetic proclivities. many religious and spiritual experiences can also trigger meeting 'other entities' not from our plane. angels and such. fairies etc.
finally, could be seizures. certain kinds of epileptic episodes can trigger hallucinations and visualizations.
"Ignatius also began experiencing a series of visions in full daylight while in hospital. These repetitive visions appeared as "a form in the air near him and this form gave him much consolation because it was exceedingly beautiful ... it somehow seemed to have the shape of a serpent and had many things that shone like eyes, but were not eyes. He received much delight and consolation from gazing upon this object"
Doesn't sound very holy. Then again he was quite the ambitious military officer before his post-injury convalescence.
To be honest, this sounds like some b.s. my mother picked up from 'Christian' radio (i.e. GOP propaganda meets X-files) and terrorized the kids with. There was a book called the beautiful side of evil that informed a lot of the kind of thinking you describe, and it is 100% purely anecdotal assertions from one person with extreme views. If you look across the spectrum at more individuals, those assertions fall apart pretty quick.
Believe me when I say I had both of these, and applied them earnestly in fervent & frequent prayer, study and self-denial for years. What did it get me? A whole lot of disappointment and confusion. The scientific world view has not brought me anywhere near the false happiness of believing I could become a blissful immortal, but it has at least given me firm ground to stand on, and to have rock-solid reasons for what I can still appreciate.
I'm glad for anyone who can experience a happy daily life in a religious worldview, but having the prideful audacity to claim that it is equally available to everyone (and by implication, that anyone who doesn't have the same response is a liar) is either dangerously ignorant or outright evil. I have known your kind before, because I was one. Think about it.
Right now it feels a lot like how UFO sightings have barely changed in the last twenty years despite over 2 billion smartphone cameras being pumped into the world, and countless millions more standalone digital cameras, tablet cameras, webcams, etc. A 1960s or 1970s recording from the "dawn" of tapes, a crackly recording of a woman in a mental hospital speaking in a distant place in a foreign language is extremely evocative, a far better story than a study at a dowdy chemical research lab in a flyover town.
Wonder how much of this is simply the fact this is a highly illegal and hard to obtain drug. By definition it would be an unusual experience for anybody and people tend to assign more meaning to the not-mundane. I sincerely doubt you'd be hearing all these stories if you could get these drugs in a grocery store.
DMT Dialogues: Encounters with the Spirit Molecule ( https://b-ok.cc/book/3688170/74a672 )
It really does seem like there's whole other levels/dimensions of reality and these things are real and independent of the person.
Maybe you can, but I think if you're acting in good faith you'll find you have to discuss the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the natural world. Now, this may still come to a simpler explanation than one involving extra dimensions but I think it's a lot more complex than "people hallucinating hallucinate" if you're being fair in your investigation.
Not the OP, but I think google's deep dream provides a nice analog to the process of hallucination that goes on within us on psychedelic drugs. Essentially our brains are wired to detect certain patterns in the world; our neural wiring is isomorphic to the structure found in the world. What these drugs do is increase the excitability of some neural structures, which structures are excited correspond to the kinds of experiences different psychedelics induce. The fact that DMT seems to universally induce encounters with "entities" suggests the areas of the brain that are excited.
As one who has hallucinated intensely, the experience is not just about what your senses create for you while certain neural structures are excited. Often times it's about what is left when your senses have gone off the deep end. For many it's a deeply spiritual experience, some experience a total ego death. Others experience lifetimes in different bodies, working jobs and having families that never existed here.
So while it's interesting to know something about what the neurons are doing, I don't think that gets us any closer to an explanation.
If you want to compare two explanations for the experiences of one who is hallucinating where one invokes extra "dimensions", and the other invokes "hallucinations mean you hallucinate", and you want to say one is obviously simpler than the other, from a certain perspective you might be right but from where I sit you're leaving a lot of potential discussion on the table.
An interesting observation I've had is that there seems to be something about the nature of human consciousness such that people are ~literally not able to fully grasp the idea that they often/usually don't actually(!) know what they think they know, with high accuracy. With some people, depending on the topic (it seems) of conversation, they are sometimes able to switch to an abstract mode of thinking and realize and admit that yes of course, they do not really know with 100% certainty that "<X> is True"...but often only if this abstract notion is pointed out to them by a third party. But upon resuming the object level discussion, this knowledge that existed mere minutes ago often seems to once again become inaccessible. And with some people, they seem unable to accomplish (or at least admit) this at all, and even more curiously, seem strongly motivated to resist even discussing the idea that they may have made an error.
On one hand, you might just write this off as people "being people" who want to "win an argument" and that sort of thing, and surely that's a big part of it, but is that all there is to it? As a terrible analogy, consider how difficult it is to say, recite song lyrics while doing mildly complex math in your head - considering this, is it so hard to imagine that the mind may also be sub-optimal to an unknown degree when it comes to reckoning about the complex reality we live in at the object level (physical reality and events), while concurrently executing a "proper" abstract background process to do things like evaluate logical consistency and epistemic soundness of the primary object level processing, particularly on sensitive topics?
Just pondering the general notion, I tend to lean strongly towards the intuition that I'd be surprised if we could do this in a skillful and accurate manner, rather than being surprised that we cannot (which seems to be the overwhelmingly default opinion), and observations of internet discussions (regardless of community) tend to strongly support this theory as far as I can tell. Might this help explain how do so many people believe so many diametrically opposed things (increasingly, as the complexity of the world increases), while also having an extremely strong self-perception of objective correctness, even despite objective correctness often being literally impossible for the topic being discussed?
How this relates back to the original topic, is that a lot of people perceive a dramatic increase in the ability to think (in more ways than one) deeply about extremely complex topics while under the influence of psychedelic drugs, and fMRI tests are now starting to illustrate some changes at the neurological level that may plausibly explain why this is, at least in part. I think it's quite philosophically interesting to consider what the real-world consequences might be if the situation is that our perception of reality is not 100% consistent with actual reality - might this possibly result in sub-optimal decision making at both the individual and societal/national levels from time to time? And what if it's not off by just a little bit here and there, but by a lot all over the place? If so, might this perhaps help explain the counter-intuitive human behavior and general state of world affairs that I've been reading about on the internet lately?
> //www.bildhost.com/images/2020/09/16/909.1_ABGEDUNKELTER-RAUM-KAMERAS...mar.15_FINAL.Mail.png ^^
Agreed. To add to the point, one can't help but consider given what we know of the evolution of the tree of life of which we are a part the particular factors that do and do not lend themselves to survival. Namely, "reckoning about the complex reality we live in at the object level" is probably not a skill needed for survival in the way that developing hunting, language, and social skills probably were- not to mention "while concurrently executing a "proper" abstract background process to do things like evaluate logical consistency and epistemic soundness of the primary object level processing"
In my own experience, had my experience in a severely altered state of consciousness persisted for more than maybe a day or two, I would have needed a lot of assistance for basic survival things. In that state I perceived the world differently, if not more objectively, but was not well equipped for survival.
So, no, I see no reason to think the mind is well equipped for that kind of reasoning when evolution might select against that kind of adaptation.
These things people see on psychedelic experiences are not completely dependent on the person but are also not the same for everyone, like most things we perceive with our other senses.