Comment by tajddin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tajddin | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"What's a color? What's a country? What's a "week"? What's a leader? What is solid? Which way is up? What's a job? Your brain starts trying to decompose every concept into basic principles, and you realize that for a lot of things in the human world, there are none."

While I've personally never tried LSD, my favorite is, e, which offers a similar, but different, opening of the mind. Since I've never tried LSD, I can only say that e opens one in an emotional way, one that allows you to empathize and understand the universe in a way that you otherwise wouldn't. It also invokes an odd existential dialog within oneself about how the world works and why we think the way we do.

I suppose I quote you because as a musician and software engineer, it is often the case that I ask myself why it is that certain things are the way they are. For example, anyone that's studies AI realizes that one of the harder concepts is that of _understanding_.

How do we make a machine understand when we ourselves don't understand the _why_ around us?

Drugs like e and LSD present an insight to us that allows us to realize that the answer is a lot more distant than just what we perceive.

I've never taken LSD, but I've done mushrooms once. After the effects started I was outside near a bay and it was humid. I started asking things like "What is wet? Is the wetness from the air different from the wetness of the water?" and I started putting my hands into water to discern the differences. Our "watcher" took us back inside and handed me Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

I read it cover-to-cover in about 2 hours and I thought it was the most amazing material. The structure of that book is very much like the thinking process of someone on hallucinogens, or rather, a dialogue between a person on LSD who's babbling and a completely sober person trying to refute the babblings. It ends up making sense though.

>The structure of that book is very much like the thinking process of someone on hallucinogens

Wittgenstein wasn't eating any hallucinogens as nice as that might be to consider. The structure of his works follow the thinking process of somebody who has grasped intersubjectivity at an unprecedented level.

>"What's a color? What's a country? What's a "week"? What's a leader? What is solid? Which way is up? What's a job? Your brain starts trying to decompose every concept into basic principles, and you realize that for a lot of things in the human world, there are none."

Sounds like a day with a toddler ...

Excepting the fact that mine have never got in to the "why" phase (I blame my need to over describe and analyse everything and constantly ask them why) - breaking down concepts gets complex pretty quickly. Explaining a day off turns in to the complexities of royal [male] succession. Life's fun.

The two are very different....

He said it perfectly when he said it "slaps you in the face" with this idea.

It's like all your input filters and mechanisms for categorizing things are stripped away, and your mind just gets raw input - filters you normally don't even realize are there. This makes a speck of dirt on the floor just as interesting as the hot chick standing next to you - and it can make it difficult to impossible to utter a coherent sentence, let alone put together a coherent thought - it's more like raw, pure sensation, unfiltered.

Of course, there's the psychedelic part, with visual disturbances and sensory weirdness too.....

There is no guarantee of good feelings or euphoria like you get with E.... it can best be described as simply "an experience"

if you were to read all of these posts, you would find a common theme: we all experience a new level of consciousness when we trip. However, regardless of what this new experience was or through what method it was achieved, the presence of a new conscious experience proves that their are different types even levels of consciousness.

this epiphany occurred to me through a drug induced change in consciousness. i realized that every material thing in this universe is just a product of my consciousness. this then got me thinking: how is it that material is a product of my consciousness, yet science tells me that my brain (a piece of material produces consciousness).

I flirted with this paradox for months. I concluded that everything in the universe is just a system of interconnected systems of the same energy. I thought of the things in the universe as just different manifestations of a single type of energy at different points in space and time.

Then I read about Amit Goswami and learned some very useful scientific jargon for what i was experiencing. Anyone who is interested in "conscioussness" should research this man - he is leading a thought revolution

http://www.amitgoswami.org/

I'm very suspicious of the use of the word "quantum" as a crowbar to pry open respectable science and fill it with new age bullshit.

I can definitely sympathise with the flavour of insight you're talking about though, and this guy seems to hold some credentials, but phrases like "make brain circuits of positive emotions" trip my hippie detector.

This is exactly what the doctrine of Theosophy is getting towards.

http://www.wisdomworld.org/setting/IntroductionByCompiler.ht...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com