Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs
nature.com
nature.com
It is still better than the lowest for the study, the sample size of one: "Well this is what I experienced". Yet here I go.
I have always been a materialist, and I've also never done drugs (I'm in my 50s). A few years back I bought some lysergamides and tryptamines online, and over the course of two years did between 20 and 30 experiments, though never of high doses (at most, 200 ug LSD). I found the LSD to be quite interesting, but not the least bit spiritual.
The first time I did 4-aco-dmt (aka psilacetin), a very close relative to psilocybin, was a different story. It was a 25mg-ish dose, taken orally. It was far more intense, and dreamy, and soporific than LSD (for me), and it gave me a glimpse of what something I was hoping to experience: spirituality. It was unfortunately fleeting -- I was lost in "the light" but then became aware that I was actually lying in a bed, and without thinking, opened my eyes for a moment to confirm. I closed my eyes but that moment in the light was gone for good.
I've tried a few more times, but it has mostly been uncomfortable and confusing way to spend a couple hours.
Anyway, I came away from those experiments even more of a materialist than I was before. If a hundred micrograms or a few milligrams of small molecule can so disrupt one's mind, if it can profoundly change your perceptions, if it can induce a feeling of being in a divine presence, it confirmed to me that the brain is all just chemistry.
THC alone makes me all spiritual feeling, and often in a good way. I think psychedelics would just take me to a scary spiritual place, not a euphoric one.
Almost like they could be utilized in a way to provide a religious fervor for your adherents.
The churches can be difficult to find as well, at least in the US: It isn't unheard of for folks to travel an hour or so to their church of choice.
If you can't get to that, a gnostic mass will probably give a similar experience. It is, of course, Much more occult-theme religion, but it will keep some of the charm (possibly mixed with a bit of catholocism)
Any brief, reflective, perspective-shifting phrase is adequate -- there's no need to invoke any particular mythology.
Some phrases are more useful than others. Some have negative effects.
”Experimenting with psychedelics” is really, really far from that reality.
"Unclean nastiness"? And wriggling around on the floor on a big dose of LSD for 12 hours is casual clean fun? Getting psychosis from shrooms is not a big of a deal as getting hooked on heroin?
Romanticizing psychedelics is a good starting point for abuse.
Some subset of people do some subset of drugs in order to settle addictive pressure (e.g. popping one’s codeine pills for the day)
Some subset of people do some subset of drugs in order to gain psychological or insight or have spiritual experience (e.g. taking psilocybin with an appropriate setting)
While the lines can be blurry, these are distinct use cases each with their own risks and considerations so they’re worth separating out.
For example, weed can be used for all five of those purposes. But what's the value you see in separating them?
My point was in response to the parent's 'is it so much different really' question - when you insist that all varieties of reasons that people might be ingesting psychoactive substances stay under the same banner it's a fair bit harder to have a useful conversation about it.
Yes.
I do hope to live in a world someday where informed consent is sacrosanct and legally protected; and people don't feel the need to split hairs like this.
Few years back I had my series of experiments with LSD & psilocybin. No enlightment was obtained, but one of the major realizations was that some serious psychotherapy is needed to understand and fix my warped self-image and the way of living originating from it. Been dissecting myself in a psychodynamic setting now, feel better.
I also often find myself using biblical terms in describing my actions and feelings. Sin, hell, heaven. Maybe this is some integration, maybe I watched too much Jordan Peterson videos in my dark days, heh.
One of the major takeaways is this near mystical feeling of awe about life. Having the education to understand things from the most fundamental building blocks just increases this. Protons and electrons, balls and springs, entropy maximization, phase spaces. Wiggling and docking macromolecules, interacting in the realm of low Reynolds number. Machinery using fundamental particles and photons, juggling photons, protons, and electrons to power the infinitely seeming finite complex machinery, molded by evolution. Freaking emergent properties arising from this - life, consciousness. And we have the capabilities to understand and actually fix some fundamental problems with this knowledge - eg. getting cryo-EM structures of covid spike proteins, docking millions of molecules through the computational methods created by the collaborative effort of our advanced cognitions.
This stuff was always cool, but now I look it like the most beautiful work of art, and feel the upmost priviledge to have the ability to pay my bills thinking about these things.
Didn't it also confirm that what you perceive is not reality, but a model of reality?
I think it's a mistake to think we have it all figured out just because we've had an experience that either reinforces or contradicts our per-conceived notions of what constitutes reality.
Instead of doing your own controlled experiments, you should try doing ayahuasca, peyote or shrooms in their natural setting, with local people leading the way.
I bet you’ll have a completely different experience.
The actual chemical is different and the way you take it (orally, by nealing in front of a shaman and drinking about a shot glass of it) has an affect on the duration and intensity (like a lot of drugs).
You can smoke dmt purified or a yagi mix and have different more intense experiences but that might only be 30 minutes.
As for integrating your thoughts, I can definitely put that down to the chemical. It's called "abuelo" by the native people because it's like your grandfather giving you advice. Mushrooms are known as the "ninos" because they're a lower level in comparison.
Understanding the sacredity of plants and developing a respect for native medicine has been a great part of my experience in South America.
Have yet to have anyone indigenous try and sell me on this
There are also the "passing through want to try it" attendees.
However, given the power of this substance to have a positive effect on someone's life, I'm not going to build walls around it. Also, it's a very challenging experience and anyone that goes through it deserves a bit of respect.
Your experiment is very personal to your own mindset, and your focus on materialism likely influenced the outcomes.
It’s not that individual electrons need to be conscious. Instead, for instance, free energy minimizing systems might be conscious— and those are pervasive in the universe at large and small scale.
It's said that some of these drugs can make one more social, more emotional, which imo is a better existence than other paradigms.
You think? Jeebus! Terrance McKenna would call 10mg of psilocybin a heroic dose. Some of the most intense visuals I have ever seen were on 10mg of psilocybin.
So if close relative means that it requires 2.5x more, then okay, but if they are anywhere near 1:1, then that was a freaking monster dose.
Potency isn't quite as much as crystalline psilocybin (4-HO-DMT).
https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/4-AcO-DMT
In writing this message, I went back to my notes and see that I had taken 20mg, not 25mg, that first time.
I abbreviated my history of experiments in my original message, but I had actually had first tried a different tryptamine in a series of ramped experiments a few weeks apart. It was 4-aco-det, aka ethacetin or ethylacybin. 4mg, then 10mg, then 18mg, then 30mg. I chose that one because my reading indicated it was less intense than 4-aco-dmt. All were underwhelming, with little body load, no open eye visuals, and mild, gossamer closed eyed visuals.
When I switched to 4-aco-dmt I should have ramped as well, but the previous experiments led me to believe that I was a low responder to tryptamines, so I started at 20mg. That is when I learned my lesson to not make assumptions: always ramp with a new substance from a very low dose.
There's not anything quite like it (and it's cognitively mild), either phenethylamine or tryptamine.
You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are.
Maybe it's that psychedelics also induce feelings of having discovered something important, and a lot of people don't try to double-check whether they actually did.
[1] https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/neural-annealin...
So if you have a strange and intense experience then your ideas about stuff are appropriately modified. Even if the experience and ideas don't align with convention/consensus/etc.
I do think there are rational realizations that rational people can come to under the influence of psychedelics, that they might not otherwise, though.
In the same way, if this is a dream of sorts, the fact that certain dream behaviors can trigger certain changes in experience is also internally consistent. Of course, this "dream" has much greater stability to it, but the basic idea holds.
There is complex physiology going on producing a consciousness (so it seems to me) that can be altered when that physiology is altered. We can see at least some of this physiology. Suggesting all that physiology in our world is actually happening in the dream world of some other being doesn't seem very interesting as it still leaves us here in the same material (as we can measure it) reality that science is... still pretty damn good at describing. So why even bring it up? If there's evidence that points us that way, cool, otherwise, Occam's razor seems better.
If a chemical alters perception, that just shows that consciousness is strongly affected by the material, but other non-contradictory hypotheses aren't thus disproven.
However, I am unsure what good evidence for a corresponding immaterial part might look like.
I think a better approach is philosophical, by considering the nature of thought and the spoken word.
https://maps.org/2004/08/08/nobel-prize-genius-crick-was-hig...
Simple put, psychedelics are used throughout the animal kingdom by all species for this same type of enlightnement. Arguments can be made that mushrooms brought about human evolution by waking us up to our own conciseness. We are the first generation of people to be tainted by the War On Drugs. And we will be the last to have forgotten it.
https://www.inverse.com/article/34186-stoned-ape-hypothesis
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/dolphins-seem-to-u...
Unfortunately, our generation has grown up being fed properganda about how Drugs are bad and religious is the saviour and the only pure way to live.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar%27s_Messiah
One just needs to look at MDMAs effectiveness on treating PSTD with Gods version of treatment that covers up the trauma with religion instead of unwinding it from the mind.
https://adf.org.au/insights/mdma-ptsd/ Source from gods chrous themselves where they claim MDMA and ecstasy arn't the same thing now because science is showing its "positive uses" - even though every "Just Say No" ad i saw as a child insisted they were both going to fry my brain into an egg.
These substances will not produce profound effects when taken recreationally - no healer from any aboriginal culture will claim that. They are to be taken with intent, with specific settings under specific conditions in a variety of doses for you to gain a better understand of oneself.
This claim, at the very least, is false.
During a psychedelic trip, one might wonder "if I had been like this all my life, I would consider this to be reality, not what I'm used too".
It fundamentally shows you that what you consider reality might be very, very, very wrong. So how can I trust my own senses and perceptions if they can be so powerfully modified by such a simple molecule? What if the actual reality is what you experience during a trip, and what we consider reality is some kind of trip due to the lack of a molecule that allows you to fully experience reality(in the same way that the lack of nutrients and water can lead to mental confusion/delirium)? It opens up a world of possibilities.
The only explanation that doesn't lead to absurdity is that drugs corrupt your perception. They interfere with and frustrate the healthy and proper operation of the brain and in doing so distort perception.
If you're willing to accept that you can't really rank or judge modes of mental experience quantitatively on some kind of non-relative scale (which would require access to a "reality" outside yourself), then it shouldn't be too much of a leap to say messing with how it functions within tolerable bounds could be more of an optimization (or equal but just different) to your experience.
Attaching doubt to things "just because" isn't rational and cannot be resolved rationally precisely because such doubts are not rationally motivated. If I say to you "I doubt that you are here", for no reason other than some arbitrary skepticism about my perceptual faculties, then there is no way that that doubt can rationally be resolved. The very idea of hallucination presumes a normative perception. That we can know that we can misperceive or be subject to illusions itself presumes that we can tell the difference. Otherwise, we are just positing idle and detached possibilities while tacitly, and paradoxically, drawing on various convictions about the real.
I understand you're looking at it from a scientific point of view, but the discussion is not scientific. Consciousness is probably the hardest body of knowledge to integrate with science. Nobody knows where consciousness comes from. Nobody knows how to measure it.
I can tell you: "I'm conscious and aware", but there's no way I can prove to you I'm not a philosophical zombie(someone that acts like it's conscious, but isn't). Currently, there's no way to measure consciousness.
>By your own standards, I could ask how you know there's something called a brain, that it has something to do with perception, etc. Maybe you hallucinated the brain? Maybe it's just some weird belief you have? Maybe hallucinations aren't a thing? How do you know what other brains do or don't do differently? And why can't some of them be wrong?
I think you nailed it. I don't know whether there's a brain, or if there is something else, and this something else is hallucinating this reality where there is a brain, or maybe something else entirely. Sure, we can make scientific claims about stuff when analyzing the reality within the bounds of our perception, but if you try to go beyondg that, you're own your own.
You can't prove that to yourself either, because a zombie has the same thoughts as you. You can't differentiate even subjectively whether you're a zombie or not.
I think the phrase "I think, therefore I am" is the essence here. A philosophical zombie does not "think". It looks like they do, but it's just a deterministic result of neurochemichal events going on in a brain that lives in the dark. Something like a neural network for instance. They can exhibit thought-like behavior without experiencing anything(as far as we know).
Aldous Huxley touched on this idea of the brain acting as a valve or filter, wherein psychedelics loosen it and let through the stream of consciousness that you're alluding to.
I've tripped many times and none of what I saw was real, and everything I saw when I wasn't tripping was real. It's good as therapy, and reveals a lot about perception and thoughts, but nothing else.
Changing perspective, which can be instantaneous, is just shifting your view of reality.
My carpet is not changing color, my mother's face isn't melting. That's not happening on a physical level.
My sober perception is repeatable and verifiable. It exists no matter my state of mind.
It's novel to make yourself see things that are unreal. It's novel to have your emotions fluctuate wildly. But it's just novel, and unreal, and nothing more.
Updated for spelling
What does it matter that introducing substances to the brain can reduce your ability to perceive it?
There is evidence of reality, and childish mind games and semantic debates that it might not.
I drop you off in the Gobi desert with no water (or acid) and let's test the boundaries of reality. Let's see if you can perceive yourself some water.
The thing is, you can have a consistent model of reality when you're only looking at it from the inside. This tells you nothing about the outside.
Eg: if you're living in a simulated universe, everything is consistent, your cameras and the dry desert. Still, outside the thing you perceive as reality, there could be anything.
(A huge number of other evidences that sober people don’t have a full grasp of reality also exist: people misremember things all the time. People mishear things all the time. Check out that internet debate about the black-and-blue or gold-and-white dress!)
We have evolved to perceive some aspects of reality (the ones where perceiving them improves survival/reproduction) and to not perceive many other aspects of reality because those aspects of reality do not affect survival/reproduction success enough to make up for the cost of having the more accurate perception.
"Reality" can mean the physical patterns of atoms and electromagnetic radiation, which nobody suggests psychedelics change (although it's worth noting that you cannot completely eliminate subjectivity from your measurements even here, thanks to quantum physics). However we don't perceive atoms and radiation directly - we filter our senses through countless layers of filtering, interpretation, and abstraction. "Reality" for us encompasses a lot of concepts that are not so clear cut as "this pixel is that color". The clarity with which you perceive the world when sober is illusory, as evidenced by the widespread perception of paranormal phenomena by sober people - or even simple optical illusions.
> What if the actual reality is what you experience during a trip, and what we consider reality is some kind of trip due to the lack of a molecule that allows you to fully experience reality?
So, keeping our conversation on-topic, sober reality is a place of scientific validation. The leaves on a tree are not breathing, they are simply blowing in the wind. We know this because photosynthesis does not require movement.
The edges of your door may be fuzzy on a molecular level, but they are not expanding and contracting every few seconds, we know this because wooden doors do not have those transitive properties.
Acid, and therefore a hallucination, is altering your ability to perceive reality. It is not "unlocking" any form of reality that you cannot normally perceive. It might be fun to think about a ton of "what-ifs" but it is not as metaphysical as it is made out to be.
The one profound aspect of tripping is to identify that your perception can be altered. This has a litany of positive mental affects that should be studied and prescribed.
Actually, leaves are the primary method that trees use to breathe.
> Acid, and therefore a hallucination, is altering your ability to perceive reality. It is not "unlocking" any form of reality that you cannot normally perceive.
Every new type way of seeing the world unlocks a new form of reality. I would disagree with the "fully experience reality", but it can definitly provide new experiences with time, space, perception, identity and causality. Those are the very topics covered by metaphysics and this it seems entirely likely that same/many people change their metaphysical views as a result.
You seem stuck in circular reasoning. The point is that when in an altered state, your conventional, "sober" model of reality breaks down and no longer applies. I think people "break through" when they realize their model of reality was constructed according to what they perceived through their available sense doors, but it's still just a construction, a model, a simulation, not reality itself. Even though it might be consistent when sober, it's self-referential consistency.
Your sober model of reality 100% still applies. You are simply mis-perceiving what is happening in reality.
The reality your mind is attempting to model is the only one that exists. Inducing chemicals that hinder your ability to perceive it does not indicate that it is a simulation.
It is not a self-referential consistency because it is being tracked by many people, many forms of study, many computers and machines, and is repeatable. Chemically induced states of hallucination are none of the above.
I will leave the undoing of reality to string theorists and super-computers.
There are many parts of conscious experience, that might not be noticed, but become extremely obvious in a Psychedelic state. It is like one of those hidden-image patterns. You would never know theres an image there, but once you see it, you can't unsee it - and you are struck by how blind you were to it before.
There are many correct ways to experience reality, operating off of the same source-of-truth data. Someone born with one eye can go their entire lives not knowing what it's like to _experience_ depth perception. You can give them all the cameras in the world, and they can fully understand the spacial relationships of all objects in the room, but they still wont be able to _experience_ depth, in their mental model of the world, like everyone else. They can't even begin to imagine it.
So, the carpet might not actually be swirling with fractal patterns. But It can be insightful to experience love as a fractal. You might notice parts of it that seemed one dimensional to you before.
woh man, that tree is beautiful.
Huh, weird.
Show a picture to a fly and it will tell you: "you're tripping, this is not what reality looks like".
You are correct, we only know a model of reality that we can piece together. And we piece that reality together, bit by bit, with instruments and math and studying.
Regardless of how much you dream that there is an oasis in the desert, it is simply not there. No one else can see it, no instruments can detect it, you can't drink its water, it is unreal.
You can "what if" and "woah dude" until you are blue in the face, but you will never be able to drink that water.
So what is more real? The sun and the sand and your dehydration? Or an oasis that exists only in your mind? Many don't like the answer, but it is clear as day.
You only have one input and no way of testing how reliable it is.
None of those validate LSD induced hallucinations. If you have some ideas that those technologies are wrong, go enter the field and prove it! Until then this conjecture is intellectually lazy.
No matter what evidence I bring to the table, they will simply say "but what if you are being fooled?"
You don't need to agree with it, but at least you can see where I'm coming from!
I understand your frustration with there not really being an objective argument that would be able to deal with this thought experiment - I myself argued your case for a long time!
For all practical uses, the distinction is mostly pointless anyways, but it does make for some fun philosophical thought experiments! :-)
What I would say is that our sensory data + mental models of that data are abstractions over whatever reality actually is, which I am guessing you agree with. On top of that I think something else that I am guessing you don't agree with: I think those abstractions are pretty arbitrary and hide important "implementation details" of reality that could turn out to have a big impact on what anything is or what we might do with it.
I am guessing the crux here is about how much those abstract models are constrained by the underlying reality. It seems like you believe that because sensory information/models converge in a repeatable and consistent way, that it must be close to accurate and complete, where by complete I don't mean we, eg, can "see" the whole EM spectrum, but that there being such a thing as an EM spectrum that we can only see part of gives us a reliable way to infer that our senses aren't missing any substantial chunks of conception space.
What I remain open to is that the abstractions are sort of self referential in that we're in a self constrained region of "potential sensory space," that we can sense and verify the things we can sense and verify, but that raw reality is deceptively huge and complex and a radically different sensory+model configuration might give us a qualitatively different picture of raw reality, even if it overlaps quite a bit with our current sensory bubble.
My main reason for being open to this is that it seems like QFT is an existence proof of our subjective awareness of reality being fundamentally askew from how raw reality actually works, and in fact we ended up narrowly optimized to experience things as we do and act as we do because of replication/evolution not because of correctness or how well our sensory abstraction carve reality at the actual joints.
I am guessing our disagreement is how much extra/unknown space there is, or how useful fundamentally different abstractions could be in interacting with raw reality stuff.
All the x-ray, heat, whatever readings all have to pass through your audiovisual senses before you know about them. If your eyes and ears deceive you, all the fancy technology outside your eyes and ears can't help you.
You are trying to find data to prove your theory, not simply study what is observed. It's not science. It's just conjecture.
Have fun with that!
How would you possibly verify this claim?
What is reality if not your perception of it? Does objective reality exist? How do you know anything is objectively real and not a product of some brain process?
All of those are long-standing philosophical questions.
Here's [1] a quick intro on the problem space I found.
You've declared we can measure everything important so reality is objective, but quantum physics suggests the things we can't measure may be astronomically large. The physicists who subscribe to the many world's theory believe there's a near infinite assortment of humans we cannot percieve or effectively measure, for example, and our own experience of self is inaccurate as we don't percieve ourselves to be branching in time.
I don't think measurements solve the problem of the uncertainty of reality.
That "simply" is doing a lot of work there. Measurement is never simple, or correct. Yes, it's much, much more precise than it was in the past, but it's never exact. Until May 2019, the magnitude of many of the units composing the SI system of measurement, including most of those used in the measurement of electricity and light, were highly dependent upon the stability of a 142-year-old, golf-ball-sized cylinder of metal stored in a vault in France. The mass of this cylinder drifts when compared to copies, and nobody knows why. Yeah, the effect is super tiny, but the measurements are demonstrably _not precise_
How would you know? How do you propose we definitely prove it isn't?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem
I find this whole conversation so incredibly funny. Go tell a person serving a life-time jail sentence that what they are experiencing is not an objective reality. Day in and day out, the same cell, the same 24 hour cycle. A gazelle being eaten alive by a group of hyenas. A person jumping off a building to commit suicide. All of these things are simply illusions created by something, who knows what. Even though we don't know anything about THAT part, you are certain of it.
You've seen some goofy particles and have some fun mental puzzles to unlock so yeah, none of it is real!
I believe in myself more than that, sorry.
[also again, how do you know the Avogadro constant is real?]
Not sure what you mean by real there, the Avogadro number expresses precision at which you need to simulate reality to get something believable and a brain simply isn't big enough for this in purely quantitative terms.
> a brain simply isn't big enough for this in purely quantitative terms [quotation needed].
And again, what if all of this, avogadro numbers, hacker news, your conception of reality all were a hallucination? How would you know? How can you definitely prove it is not?
If that's true, then I know that brain processes are real.
At first glance this might sound like a reasonable thought but I have never been convinced by this idea. The mistake is to think about you in isolation. You alone might be unable to tell whether reality is like your normal perception or like your perception under the influence of psychedelics, but you are not alone, you can compare what different people perceive. You will probably find that normal perception mostly agrees while perception under the influence of psychedelics varies. Why would that be if psychedelics allow you to perceive true reality?
And you do not have to stop there, maybe all humans have the same kind of distortions in their perception of reality anchored deeply in our DNA. But we do not have to rely on human perception, we have invented devices to measure and quantify about everything we know of. You can just point a camera at a wall and figure out if it solid white or if it is covered in moving color-changing fractal patterns.
Sure, it might be possible that our perception is warpend in such a strange way that even devices we build would be unable to make this difference noticeable, but that seems really unlikely to me. So for all the agreement we have between our perception and what our measuring devices report, I would say our perception of reality is pretty accurate, at least within the limits of the capabilities of our senses.
Of course, this will also open up new horizons for doubt, too. Ymmv.
Why are stories powerful?
The material world is the facts. It could be intoxicated man driving his car dies crashing into telephone pole. If the other facts could be he had just finished robbing someone and being abusive to a woman and then got in his car, your mind tells a story about “justice”.
Maybe the facts were he was a gay man who just came out to his conservative parents and they disowned him and he got drunk and drove into the pole out of sorrow. The story becomes “injustice”, “tragedy”.
But justice, tragedy, injustice aren’t material things. Psychedelics tend to set your mind on these things, and give meaning to what we’re just material facts. The meaning of them may or may not be true, but pondering on them and thinking about their meaning is sure to change your worldview (ie the root of meaning or how you “perceive” the world.)
The similarity in thought I see among different users of psychedelics is just so big. Why should it be a surprise that it's chemical? Opiates can flip a switch in your brain that makes you way more habituated than a natural stimulus with the same level of pleasure(ie heroin users will say they don't like it any more they like spending time with their kids, but still will neglect their kids to do heroin because they can't say no). Marijuana can trigger latent psychological issues in those who are at risk. Maybe psychedelics pushes some switch that makes people think differently, even if they're aware of it and trying to convince themselves otherwise?
Knowing the experience was triggered by a known substance doesn't mean you should throw out the entirety as some sort of manufactured sensation separated from reality.
The resulting experiences are basically religious visions (I'm an atheist). Often, an entity appears and reveals a vision.
> Maybe it's that psychedelics also induce feelings of having discovered something important, and a lot of people don't try to double-check whether they actually did.
I think psychedelics solidify or clarify feelings or ideas that you previously had. Lots of people take them as evidence of their superstitious feelings. For me, not being superstitious, they did not have that effect but they did clarify my worldview.
> You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result?
Isn't that a little bit like saying that you shouldn't change your views after reading a book, if you are aware that the book commonly changes views?
No, it's closer to changing your belief from "chocolate is bad for you" to "chocolate is good for you" after having a particularly good-tasting piece of chocolate. Unlike reading a book on the health benefits of chocolate, your change in belief does not logically follow from your experiences, at least not in an obvious way. Since drugs aren't going to alter your priors, it seems as though the change in belief is purely emotionally driven. Which is odd.
The important discovery people make is lucid awareness a chemical did this to them
Unlike booze where you black out
Whether the brain gives rise to us it’s a medium that exists and it can’t be discounted it has a lot to do with our awareness
That we can be just chemistry is the shift in metaphysical belief I came away with
The oceanic connectedness being we’re all just a few micrograms of this or that from being the same. That perception of uniqueness is not uniqueness
I would've considered panpsychism to be totally absurd before I discovered LSD, for instance. Now it's my daily driver.
My rational mind always goes back to atheism when sober, but the idea is always there in the back of my mind.
I'd recommend reading his books, The Way of Zen was excellent.
This is what I just read: "but the difference is that for the analytic idealist the universal mind is a reality which underlies the physical world, whereas for the cosmopsychist the universal mind is the physical universe."
In my personal experience psychedelic use seemed to almost solidify materialism for me. The idea that reality, your self and soul is nothing but an illusion is uncomfortable but I think tripping can reinforce that idea.
Less about the psychedelic experience itself. I also think that the existence of these drugs show that someone's reality is constructed from chemicals and cells doing what they do. Psychedelics are like throwing a wrench in a machine. The chemicals and mechanics are working differently now and the conscious experience changes with it. Depending on the drug introduced the perception changes, or consider some drugs like anesthetics where you can be awake and responsive but not have any personal awareness of whats going on.
On DMT trips I felt abstract thought fall apart along with the idea of my self(Ego death maybe?). I couldn't form ideas, and there was no longer an idea of self. "I" didn't exist. But this happens because a chemical is introduced into a system that is generating a conscious experience and it changes because of it. A typical brain creates these abstract ideas, your self identity, interprets senses in a certain way. That's the illusion created.
Since drugs being introduced into the system can turn off that sense of self, I, your soul(anesthesia, ego death) I don't think dualism is really applicable, the mind seems to be generated by the brain/body and its chemicals.
Hope i explained my self alright, not a topic I get to talk or think about much
Have you ever experienced your sense of time becoming immaterial? I've had one such trip where I genuinely believed that time stopped, and I was present in some eternal plane, though my ego no longer was present. I can definitely see how such an experience could lead someone down a path of panpsychism.
a different, fresh point of view, a heightened sense of empathy?
I once wrote a paper for epistemology class (https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/Righting/blob/master...). In it I argue that there is a category of propositions that are knowably unknowable. These are things that we know that we will never be able to know. One example of such a proposition is:
> We're living in a simulation that's too complete for us to escape
You can believe it, or you can disbelieve it, and neither stance is more rational than the other. Beliefs in such a space can't be motivated by evidence, so they have to be motivated by something else--like whether they cause you to live the kind of life that you want to be living, or maybe you just think it's fun. My beliefs re: panpsychism are like this. I don't anticipate ever being able to prove them, nor do I expect to run into evidence that disproves them. They go something like this:
I like to imagine that there is more than one temporal dimension. When we humans have cause to believe that a certain part of the universe has a mind, it's because that part of the universe is doing something that creates an arrow of time that is parallel to our own. Its future is also our future. This lets us communicate with it (maybe).
By contrast, when we encounter a rock or a lightning bolt or something that you'd generally call dead. Well, whatever machinations that part of the universe is having towards supporting its experience--they create an arrow of time that is orthogonal to ours, so we can't communicate with them. It's not so much that each rock is alive, or each lightning bolt, but that the whole universe is alive. The part of the universe that I get go call myself has come up with names for the other parts, but those names are just part of the story that I tell myself. Other perspectives might group things into entities worth naming in other ways. Maybe what I call "my" behavior is functioning like a neuron in something... else.
I like to mess with people who are having arguments about abortion: I believe that life begins not at conception, not at birth, but at the big bang. There are very few ways that this belief affects my life, but it does occasionally motivate me to meditate. If I can get my own thoughts to settle down for a while I feel like I can tap into a bigger awareness. It's not having any thoughts that I can decipher, but it feels nice anyhow.
Can’t imagine life without it now. I feel enlightened and awakened. Alive for the first time in a long time.
Microdosing helps me every day in my everyday encounters - I don’t have a negative voice in my mind, I can think about things from a more logical vantage point versus getting caught up in emotions or triggers.
Macrodosing to me can best be describes as getting a UART debug port to your brain. It’s also helped me develop (or perhaps in my case: expose/identify/become aware of) my mind-body connection. Sometimes for an entire trip I’ll just foam roll, meditate and try and unwind years of abuse and trauma on my body. I got into a lot of accidents in my youth and my conditioning led me to ignore the needs of my body to recover properly.
One downside to macrodosing (for me) has been the vasoconstrictive effect of psilocybin. Long story short, I’m particularly susceptible to this and it can crush me. A big 5g Terrence McKenna ego-death dose can basically put me right to sleep due to the way my neck and muscles will get so tight that I can’t breath and essentially chokehold myself. Benadryl has been a helpful tool in this scenario.
All this being said - I haven’t measured this stuff scientifically so who really knows. But I do feel more compassion for everyone and I am able to observe things in others that used to bother me tremendously from a place of non-judgement. I see the journey that I am on, and I can see the journey that everyone else is on too. I can hold those in my mind without judgement, and it gives me strength where before I would have been perturbed.
If anyone has questions please don’t hesitate to email me privately. This medicine can and will change the world.
Really appreciate this comment, thank you.
I feel like a key distinguishing factor between microdosing and macrodosing appears to be the crossing into a certain boundary of uncontrolablity (both physiologically and in terms of the mental anatomy of the processes) in the spectrum of conscious control (from a cybernetic perspective?)
I’m caffeine-sensitive so microdosing is definitely a better alternative to cope with city life. I'm still practicing not to lose my narrative and get carried away by noises, bright lights, odor and unintended emotions.
Macrodosing-wise, I find being mathematically minded, etc, to be immensely useful. I've been in a quest to formalise the effect of thc (eg as performing a natural transformation to the attention mechanism in the brain) though I feel like this is only touching the surface as lsd/psilocybin/etc would always demonstrate how the world of qualia is much stranger than one can imagine.
This phrase is quoted in "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences" by William A. Richards (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28121728-sacred-knowledg...), yet I find it the most suitable summary of this overview of scientific research on psychedelics and religion.
We hear about mystical visions from LSD ("acid"), psilocybin ("shrooms"), and DMT from many "spiritual but not religious" people and self-proclaimed shamans. But how does it relate to vision by ordinary people (ones who never tired, and wouldn't try if it weren't for legal, scientific research)? And how does it relate to prayer, mediation, and mystical visions by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hinduists? How do monks and priests compare their psychedelic experience with their regular practice? Do they all turn to Zen Buddhism, or entrench in their religious background?
Regardless if you are deeply religious, or a non-spiritual atheist, I believe you will reconsider a few things after reading this book.
"My hardcore materialist atheism was beginning to be challenged. But my identity was so solidly based on my materialist atheism that I soon attributed the entire experience to merely a "drug trip" with no meaning for my life!
Perhaps the greatest lesson here is that. No matter what you experience, your identity can write it off as unreal if it conflicts with who you think you are."
http://tafkajestdr.blogspot.com/2013/01/intro-to-tafka-jestd...
I recommend meditation.
Ram Dass the Jewish Psychology Professor at Harvard/Hippie/Hindu. See his famous book Be Here Now. [1] He passed away last year
Fr. Stephen De Young and Fr. Stephen Damick (PhD), Eastern Orthodox Christian priests. Psychedelics are mentioned near the end of episode 2 of their podcast. [2]
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41580312-be-here-now
A few days later I opened it to read it and a dried, pressed cannabis leaf (not the flower) fell out.
The book did not disappoint, but it was definitely odd.
Psychedelics deliver strange experiences.
Thus psychedelics affect your beliefs, make them strange or whatever.
Seems perfectly reasonable.
Loss of ego and a sense of interconnectedness are some of the main effects from mushrooms and MDMA... Meditation does the same.
There's a lot of evidence, if you look around, that us WEIRD people (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) are rather estranged from the base state of humanity (which psychonauts and meditators explore).
There's a lot of evidence, if you care to accept it, that psychedelics can dramatically help us to better realign with ourselves, and even with fundamental reality.
In short, these strange experiences can actually reduce our own strangeness, while increasing our well-being, in quite specific and important ways.
1. That materialism is much less popular than I expected. I wonder how much is due to selection bias.
2. That idealism didn't enjoy a bigger bump than it did. I predict that dose size would correlate with increase in idealist views, as larger doses are more frequently nondual, and nondual experiences tend to inspire idealist beliefs.
I myself think there are various strong reasons to believe in idealism. I've written about them here: https://www.essentiafoundation.org/reading/on-the-self-valid...
The overwhelming majority of human beings both now and historically are dualists, so this isn't surprising to me at all.
Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. Usually it's something along the lines of emergent behavior, but no mechanism is ever given for how or why said emergence occurs.
This seems pretty bad faith, I'd imagine you're getting lost for other reasons.
For one, inanimate matter probably needs to be animate before it can think.
Secondly, perhaps the difficulty in explaining the mechanism comes from the fact that materialists are honest about the uncertainties of this (extremely difficult) problem and are burdened with an epistemology that requires evidence from the actual world, unlike other approaches.
We could talk a bit about the mechanism behind the process where aggregating sufficient water molecules creates a liquid. But we can't talk at all about how that same process could ever be responsible for the experience of "wet", because the experience of wet is wholly subjective.
Similarly, even if we were to be able to fully describe the materialist processes taking place in a system that has qualia, nothing in the description can ever explain the experience of having experiences, beyond saying "well look here - see all this stuff going on? that's how qualia are possible", which is not tautological, but not a mechanism for qualia.
Speaking of "thinking" more generally is even worse than focusing on qualia. It's not hard to agree on what qualia are - that it is like something to be something, in Nagel's words - but agreeing on what would count as "thinking" and what wouldn't is not likely to see any agreement at all.
> because the experience of wet is wholly subjective.
I can't distinguish this from "wetness is a quale." In which case the analogy water : wetness :: brain : qualia reduces to water : qualia :: brain : qualia.
Also:
> the experience of having experiences
The fact that we sometimes slip up and use recursive language like this is a suggestive sign to me. We intuit that experience is somehow "already present," or fundamental, as idealism claims. If idealism is true, then you _are_ consciousness, and already know it at some level.
this is not recursive, really. It is not written to imply that experience is universal, in fact quite the opposite. Most of us generally posit that rocks do not have experiences. Most of us posit that humans do, and likewise (famously) so do bats. But what the experiences that a bat has? It's not unreasonable to assume that they are quite different from the ones a human has.
Ergo, we cannot really compare the experiences of a bat with those of a human. But we can note that they both have experiences, and that is the magical part. I was just being flowery by using "experience" twice in a row, but in another sense I was trying to differentiate between the questions of "why are our experiences as they are?" and "why do we have any experience at all?" This is something that I think Dennett in particular fails spectacularly at (and he agreed with me, once :)
As for the "wetness is a qualia" point, yes, that is good summary of my point, but I am sorry, I do not understand the notation you are using after that.
"Water is to wetness as brains are to qualia" reduces to "water is to qualia as brains are to qualia."
Certainly physically ingesting a small amount of certain psychedelic chemicals can have profound effects on subjective experience, so it can't be too disconnected from physical processes.
The whole issue of qualia / experiences seems like it is an extension of the dualist/materialist perspectives rather than something that sheds light on it one way or another - dualists will view qualia as something non-material and so something that materialism can't explain, and materialists will view qualia as something material along with consciousness itself.
…or is it possible that qualia are phenomenological?
I imagine that you are making some kind of point here, but this is just exactly what loses me every time. Is that some kind of mental deficiency on my part? I suppose it could be, but if it is then I don't think it's one I want to correct.
I’ll try to explain even if it seems less profound here than in the video. Basically, all concepts are emergent behavior of “stuff.” There really isn’t a chair, but “stuff” arranged chair-wise. And humans decide what that boundary is for both chairs and consciousness as they are concepts we apply to stuff that is “chairing” or “being conscious.” A collection of neurons may or may not be conscious by defining how they behave. And the details on where we draw the line for consciousness is no different than where we draw the line for how many atoms we can scrape away from a chair and it still be a chair.
Define "thinking." Is an ecoli deciding to move towards or away from a chemical signal "thinking?"
> I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order.
How much have you read from people researching consciousness, vs reading half-baked layman ideas about materialism on web forums?
Do you find "souls" to require less handwaving than materialism? Because if not, I have a lot of questions about souls that I'd love you to answer. Here are a few.
- when you were a wee child, was your soul also unable to think sophisticated thoughts and was also afraid of monsters under the bed?
- does your soul sleep when you are asleep, or is it just waiting for you to wake up?
- how does a soul manifest its influence on the physical body? Do you posit that it violates physical laws to make the material body do something other than follow the physical laws, or is there some undiscovered force of nature that allows a soul to "tunnel" into the physical world?
- at what point does the soul attach itself to the physical body? That is, does a blastomere have a soul? If so, what happens when a blastomere cleves fully in two, making identical twins -- does another soul pop into existence? Does the original soul split into two as well?
- when a person develops dementia, does the soul suffer from it too? or does the soul get frustrated that it can no longer communicate with its associated body?
- is there one soul that everyone taps into, or does each person have their own soul?
- do souls get one "life", or do they get recycled? if they are recycled, do souls specialize in one type of creature, or can a soul be a worm in one life and a physicist in the next?
Define "defining". Is a definition the thing that is being defined?
> How much have you read from people researching consciousness, vs reading half-baked layman ideas about materialism on web forums?
Will I not learn anything from dialog with you because it's on a web forum?
> Do you find "souls" to require less handwaving than materialism?
Do you find "materialism" to require less handwaving than dualism?
> Do you find "souls" to require less handwaving than materialism? Because if not, I have a lot of questions about souls that I'd love you to answer. Here are a few.
Did I somehow give you the impression that I'm an apologist? I'm here to talk about how conscious intelligence could arise from dumb matter, not about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and other such nonsense.
The upside to materialism is that the gap in our knowledge, namely why networks of neurons cause consciousness, is something we can acknowledge we don't know and try to understand. Resorting to an explaination relying on objects we can't observse seems... inelegant.
Does your objection hold for dark matter and dark energy too?
At which level do the existing rules of the material world start to seem less plausible to you than a second unseen world with different rules, that interacts with this one under specific circumstances (if that's what you mean by dualism)?
As we can presently see with computers and machine learning, pretty complex behavior is possible through systems that operate via known physical processes.
I started looking into Alan Watts and Terence McKenna because of psychedelics, and I did not even consume psychedelics. They may alter metaphysical beliefs without consumption, too! :)
This reminds me of "Waking Up" by Sam Harris where he talks about split brains, brain trauma, and other acute changes to people's personalities.
Secondly...I don't think beliefs(as in the proper sense) themselves are that easily altered by psychedelics.Psychedelics can and more often than not do induce a very profound spiritual & metaphysical experience, but beliefs are deeper than that,more glued to the "gut" & unconscious: they're constructed in combination to previous experiences usually not by the "self".I guess this study's conclusion comes as a result of the fact that spirituality and belief is still probably at the lowest levels in the west.Thus you have such "conclusions" where people think they believe in something in a spiritual and metaphysical manner just because of stronger trips.From what i recall upon studying this subject, granted about 10 years ago(though that was still when the biggest boom of research about brain & cognition happened), belief is even deeper than cognition, so that's why i'm reluctant to this theory: i think it's universally true that we're aware when we take psychedelics, it affects our unconscious as far as in the cognition we do during the trip triggers it mainly as a way to either glue memories or as a defense mechanism.
Then again i'm probably in the minority to say that belief is in big part mostly unconscious,and predates cognition in the "traditional" sense: i.e thoughts of the usual self. I base this on the fact that memory "indexing & glueing" happens unconsciously, and also that for me anecdotally psychedelics (and very rarely nootropics) usually either reinforced a belief or completed a belief through a new experience.
And then, there's a chance that taking a drug might just shake things up a bit. Maybe you'll get a new start.
Worst case, you'll have a little fun.
How long has it been since that happened?
That is how people become eager to alter their mind. Their minds are a sucky place to be. If it were a house it would be condemned.