Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

Comment by defaultname | Hacker News Reader

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Related but also not: One of the most interesting aspects about a "shroom" trip is the incredible ability to visualize. Visualizing is something that we all think we can do normally, but if you really try to picture something in your head -- specific faces, the design of a bicycle, the layout of a room -- it's quickly evident that we are actually terrible at it (it's hard to reverse information from that neural network). Even if you're drawing it's often an iterative process where each line drives the next.

Maybe other people are better at it, but when self-interrogating and inspecting one's own vision, it just completely falls apart. https://www.booooooom.com/2016/05/09/bicycles-built-based-on...

Normally.

I can only speak to personal experience, but under the influence of psilocybin I find that closing my eyes and visualizing complex environments and machines -- of literally inspecting and walking through gearing systems, for instance, and rationalizing their operation -- with complex lighting, etc, leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity. It literally feels like looking into another universe, the construction of the reality simply too complex to be imagined and visualized.

I've actually felt my head to ensure I'm not overheating, contemplating the process like the mind was a GPU.

> Visualizing is something that we all think we can do normally... we are actually terrible at it

> leaves me just in awe at the mind's capacity

Want a really trippy realization? All you ever see is brain activity! Sounds obvious, but most people haven't really internalized it. That's all regular perception, which feels totally real and solid, is. The psychedelic just gave you a greater ability to volitionally influence the percepts.

> All you ever see is brain activity!

YES. To put it crassly, it's like your brain is The Matrix.

I was driving the other day, thinking about reaction times and had the actual tangible feeling that I was just behind 'reality' because we don't actually see, feel, hear reality we see, hear, feel the brain's interpretation of it, and so it's ever so slightly behind 'actual' (are there variations in processing speed? And how do the fringes of these variations affect one's ability to exist in society?).

We are all living a very recent, rolling memory. Operating system loaded into RAM.

Related to this, I think the phenomenon of "being in the zone" is where the separation between reality and what we perceive of reality seems to get extra narrow (to the point of thinking that there isn't a separation between the two). In times like this, we tend to do things "without thinking" (such as in the case of athletes), but I suspect that we are either processing things (a background level of "thinking") so quickly that our minds can't/don't have time to explicitly form thoughts about reality and respond to these thoughts, so eventually they give up on doing these things during the duration of much of the remaining time in the zone, or so processing things so correctly (matching reality relatively better than in other times/contexts) that it's notable.

Some professionals take issue with this framing, but it's usually referred to in jargon-permitted settings as "controlled hallucinations".

Why do they take issue with it? It seems obviously true?

We've clearly got inputs, outputs, and when working correctly, some signal processing going on in the middle.

For one, the hubris of obviously-uninformed statements such as this one.

But more like: the inputs, processing, and outputs have much more complicated relationships than this causal chain that you have described. Modern neuroscience and research into NCC have shown that the brain, obviously, is not so simple.

Maybe they're the sort of professional who also get tax exemptions on religious grounds

A foolish supposition that draws a pre-supposed (and patently, absurdly false) binary across what people are allowed to believe.

I know there’s little tricks you can play with your visuals/perception of time by looking at clocks and away quickly.

yeah, those color illusions really demonstrate this. like when you stare at a point and the picture changes, the picture looks fully colored but in reality its turned black and white and your brain just hasnt realized it.

This happens to me (almost) every night, before i fall asleep, and for some short time right after I woke up

Amazing state, i love it!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia

Yes. I was very conscious of this state as a child and less so as an adult but when I am it is peaceful.

I like the way you are thinking here. Speaking of the brain as a neural network, what might be the counterpart of psilocybin in our cs neural networks?

Randomized weight updates?

along with amplifying feedback bleeding into unrelated parameters

> Maybe other people are better at it

The reality is that every individual's ability to visualize exists somewhere on a spectrum between aphantasia (complete inability) and eideticism (photographic memory).

That bicycle experiment is fun, and it certainly shows that most people are very far from the eidetic end of the spectrum.

But it can also (better) be explained by the facts that:

- people generally don't pay very close attention to any particular object, they categorize things and move their attention elsewhere (mostly to higher levels - e.g. the whole environment level)

- most people don't have a whole lot of experience with bicycles and how they work at a detailed mechanical level (anybody that does can draw a bike fairly well, from a technical accuracy perspective)

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