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Comment by Jeff_Brown | Hacker News Reader

I had open heart surgery once, and was given a lot of drugs. It was extremely intense and strange, and I felt like I was at the edge of discovering something immensely important. In retrospect I believe I learned nothing.

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I think I posted it on here before but I recall a story of someone who said they would speak to God on LSD and that everything was profound.

So one time they decided to ask "God" what the meaning of life was and they would write it down to study the next day. The next day all that was written down was "Walls". It felt profound but meant nothing.

That is unless walls is the answer and it is just too blunt for us to understand but that is a question for another day. ;)

Assume this was a valid scientific experiment, then there has to be some combination of a reasonable number of written words that would prove they had communicated with the divine.

People have been writing texts for thousands of years and it's obvious to me that no such word combos exist. If they did, they'd have been discovered and well-known.

So, all that was shown with the walls experiment was that experimental design was flawed. Nothing about whether the person could or could not speak to God on LSD.

Due to the nature of higher powers and quantum randomness, I don't believe there's an algorithmic way to distinguish acts of God from acts of an Alien from happenings of extremely improbable (out-of-distribution) quantum randomness.

Truly, the meaning of life is walls. Without cell walls, where would we be? Without delineation or separation, how could we make sense of the world? This article is about piercing the veil, a wall between life and, well, that would be telling. Gradients are necessary for life, but walls are necessary for meaning.

I dunno, I'm not high but I can see some plausible depth here. I'm not arguing that your friend talked to god, of course, but as an answer to the meaning of life, "walls“ is pretty excellent.

I used to do this a lot as a kid. Ascribing high meaning to tiny things like words or patterns. Some of it was just plain magical thinking. Later I learned it's called the "Hindsight Bias" usually mixed in with a little grandiosity and juvenile narcissism. I never understood why no-one could see my genius! Being a teenager is so cringey in retrospect...

Although, as a buddhist I like to think of the meaning of life as tearing down walls that never existed anywhere but our own minds. Of realizing interconnectedness. But at the same time I'm always aware that I'm not THAT far from the cringey know-it-all teenager!

Yeah, I was just having fun with it. I was reared in a spiritualistic environment, so I kinda know the lingo. So help me if I actually believed those words I wrote :)

I was tempted to ask you to do "Balls" next! I love those kinds of games.

Not THAT kind of game!

Universal Love said the Cactus Person https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...

Trump vindicated

I'm very happy for your recovery, wishing you many more good years.

"It was extremely intense and strange, and I felt like I was at the edge of discovering something immensely important. In retrospect I believe I learned nothing."

I love that the "it" in this sentence could be lots of things, heart surgery, marriage, school, and even life as a whole itself.

Just a words thing

It sounds like it was a really heartfelt experience.

I certainly felt it.

I'm sorry, I had to. Re-reading your response though, there's something unclear to me. What part was intense and strange? Wouldn't it just be like going under and then waking up? Was there a sensation of going in and out as they performed surgery?

I remember nothing of surgery itself, but for weeks after that I was on Vicodin and half-crazy. I remember a dream that felt like I had spent a hundred years on a submarine, with almost no input but the ping of a radar. I remember being mostly unable to participate in a Skype conversation my visiting parents had had with some friends from fifteen years ago, putting my head down, and seeing that everyone was in fact a tiny ship on a great expanding sea, getting farther and farther from each other, ala the big bang. I remember identifying with a pinball in a two-dimensional pinballish world -- somehow my sense of self was inside that world but my perception of it was from outside in the z-direction looking at it -- and the certainty that that pinball had to eventually get flushed down a certain exit pipe, and yet it never seemed to. Everything felt pregnant with metaphor for everything else -- the bed was school, a book was traffic, speech was rain.

It all sounds trippy and enjoyable to me as I write it now, but really, it sucked.

This sounds very familiar to when I was a young man and I was given a lot of painkillers and had a very high fever due to an infection. I had a very intense waking dream where I felt like I was hurtling into an infinite void. I had a few flashbacks in the next week while totally sober. Overall it was an intensely unpleasant experience.

When I was about 11 I had a bad flu with fever for a number of days. I was eventually hospitalized for dehydration as I could not drink or eat without vomiting. I don't remember a lot of detail but there were several periods of vertigo and a blurring of dreaming and being awake.

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