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Comment by night-rider | Hacker News Reader

Terrence McKenna talked a lot about encountering alien intelligence whilst tripping. You can reliably experience The Universe, in a much more heightened fashion, in your own living room with shrooms or DMT and many people have reported the same motif of ‘machine elves’ who speak in an elvish tongue and are trying to communicate some meme or message. Yes, the old yearning to explore the cosmos and discover new intelligence is still valid, but what do we get from being 1 million years ahead in technology? Our current human condition would be out of context if we suddenly were 1 million years ahead in technological evolution. Also I imagine aliens don’t bring meat suits whilst doing interstellar travelling and are some sort of digital robot that can still think and has consciousness but just lacks any organic makeup. Just my 2 cents.

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If so many people have experienced the same thing while basically hotwiring their brain why is the first thought you would have aliens are sending us messages? It seems way more likely that so many so the same thing because the basic structures in everyones brain is the same.

How do you know the shrooms giving people this gateway experience are not alien bio-tech that got to Earth via panspermia?

Because it is physically impossible on physical and information theory grounds.

This is nothing more than handwaving and means nothing. Shrooms could be planted here by aliens, they also probably weren't. But 'physically impossible' is not something you can say for sure. And what does on physical and information theory grounds even mean?

I imagine that parent is referring to the ability to measure the total possible information capacity of a signal, or a signal carrier. If you compare the size of the 'message' being sent to the size of the 'envelope' it's (hypothetically) being transmitted through, parent is asserting that the message doesn't fit in the envelope.

That information analysis falls within the purview of Information Theory, and the physical complexity of the types of molecules which give shrooms their psychological effects is limited, and therefore the maximum message size they can carry is limited. That's the physical analysis.

But that's all just off the top of my head. Hope it helps.

Pretty much that. The drug would have to be some sort of key to unlock access to the alien consciousness. The key (drug) is definitely too small to encode such a complex mechanism, so the logic would have to be with the thing the key fits into, the way it interacts with our brain. But when you consider that it would have to remain stable over millions of years of evolutionary changes, or be redundantly specified strongly enough to survive such genetic drift... it really stops making any kind of sense from an information theory standpoint.

From a physical standpoint, it's just not possible that our minds could communicate with an alien consciousness when you consider the effects of speed of light on communication latency, and the speed of the nervous system. We have a hard enough time preventing VR headsets from making the user nauseous from latency, to say nothing of communicating with some sort of non-local alien entity.

If you're willing to throw all that out.. well then we're in pure fantasy land.

> ‘machine elves’ who speak in an elvish tongue and are trying to communicate

The difficulty on our side is not only trying to understand possible messages from intelligences a million years ahead of us - but to even recognize that there are messages at all. We're more likely to disregard the experience as dreams, hallucinations, psychosis - since the information these visions contain is so beyond the context of our everyday lives.

> aliens don’t bring meat suits whilst doing interstellar travelling

I lean toward what the sibling commenter dismissed as "secret aliens living in a parallel reality" but literally, beings inhabiting other dimensions, their minds travelling through space and time. Their "Hello, how are you?" is like an angel looking through your soul and entire existence as a hyperspatial object..

Although if they are hyper intelligent, extra-dimensional and all that, presumably they would have the nouse to send a message that we could properly comprehend. Unless they just like showing off. :-)

It's infinitely more likely that you're tapping into internal circuits in your brain that are not normally exposed to ping directly, than that you're tapping into secret aliens living in a parallel reality (the latter would require breaking assumptions for about 100 layers of the scientifically understood and verified stack we are running on).

I had very connected-universe and even very spiritual experience (as an +-agnostic) when on shrooms, consistently every time since I took my time with setting and mood (and was alone).

It didn't bring me a nanometer closer to believe in religions, in contrary - when you know some tweaks to brain chemistry and receptors can produce this, religions are very close, just another tiny step, and eventually somebody charismatic will pick it up and succeed.

It did bring me much more respect for my brain and deeper insights into my personality than I could ever gain even doing ie very intense dangerous sports (which definitely do make you know yourself much more, and even redefine personality a bit).

> You can reliably experience The Universe, in a much more heightened fashion, in your own living room with shrooms or DMT

There is a big difference between actually doing something and hallucinating that you are doing something.

  ‘machine elves’ who speak in an elvish tongue and are trying to communicate some meme or message.

the message is "Universal love and Transcendent joy" ;) ¹

1) https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...

Each moment is eternal, yup. This guy knows whats up

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