Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics
qri.org
qri.org
Which for me, makes this claim a bit absurd:
> At a theoretical level, this confirmation is significant because it is the first clear demonstration of a real perceptual computational advantage of psychedelic states of consciousness.
LSD fans might hate this conclusion, but there's no "computational advantage" to having a 2.5x to 4x slower processing speed, which his the only thing actually being shown here.
I’ve always been efficient and quick at learning new things and doing work. So it’s like being given a superpower to “slow” time.
(Obviously time hasn’t slowed down only for me. It’s just how I personally perceive it now.)
That's a bold claim. You can try multiple different substances, the test subjects know they ingest a psychedelic, but don't know which, which allows you to have a control group.
Clinical trials would face other issues, but not this one.
The radical changes in mentality from psychedelics is well documented. Not understood but documented.
Humans do all the time. A person does very seldomly.
Was that not self-evident?
Also, countering a point is itself a point in a conversation.
For more information, see this paper for instance – Psychedelics and Immunomodulation by Dr. Attila Szabo of the University of Norway, published in 2015: https://doi.org/10.3389%2Ffimmu.2015.00358
It's okay to recognize that people consistently claim an effect, and to affirm that it is indeed a possible effect without knowing why.
What problem exactly? This seems like a dismissive take on someone's positive experience.
Are your referring to the scientific problem of studying cause & effect of the psychedelic experience? Science is figuring that out.
The way you are doing it, could maybe be improved.
"The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change"
You clearly judged here based on little information. How do you know, that he cannot know?
(Unless you argue about philosophical limits of "knowing")
When till time X there was behavior Y and at time X there was a strong trip - and afterwards differences,then it seems pretty linked to me.
(I did not take part in the conversation before).
So you are not really in a position to tell me, what to do, yet you did. And I am not in a position to tell you, what to do. I merly answered your open question on what I think you could improve.
But if you would like a meta comment from me: I think you might benefit from not considering every online discussion as something you have to win.
(I have been there as well)
Sure, "person ready to take drugs to have epiphany" might mean they were on the cusp of one anyway, but it doesn't really matter.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00194
> Our position contrasts the idea that subjective effects of psychedelics may be irrelevant to their therapeutic effects.
> The meaning and significance attributed to psychedelic experiences has been well established in laboratory settings. Psilocybin administration studies have repeatedly shown that participants frequently rate their psychedelic experiences as among the most meaningful of their entire lives (5,6,8,16−19) and they are sometimes compared to the birth of a first-born child or death of a parent. Due to their salience, such experiences may serve as narrative “inflection points” in one’s life that could provide an impetus for changing one’s identification with certain patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
It'd be like if you said 'I had an idea yesterday...' and I responded with 'Did you though? Maybe you just overheard it and thought it was yours! Maybe you just thought of it now and incorrectly associated it with something you did yesterday!' It doesn't add any extra information while dismissing your own conscious experience completely.
No, there's no problem. It doesn't change the fact that the dose is when it happened.
There are still theraputic uses for this impairment, and definitely a lot of recreational ones that allow you to discover things about yourself like any other testing or resistance, but hallucinogens are at best biohacking via chemical glitching, not spiritual gateways.
Spiritual experiences have been about recreation, understanding others, the self, personal growth, coming of age, etc…
I feel like your post in general is full of acknowledgment of these drugs capabilities followed by attempts to downplay it with pejoratives like “chemical glitching” or “lower dimension”. It’s quiet confusing that you seem to think positively of the drugs but then dunk on them in the same breath.
I don’t think being able to explain, categorize and describe phenomena needs to make them less significant or impact. The mechanism of action being non mystical doesn’t need to change the significance of the experience.
This reminds me of a quote from Margaret Boden about her work on understanding creativity in a academic context.
> A scientific understanding of creativity does not destroy our wonder at it, nor does it make creative ideas predictable. Demystification does not imply dehumanization.
How does that surprise you? I mean do spiritual gateways exist at all? Is there even a concrete definition and concept? Or are they just a conjecture without any basis whatsoever?
It seems you start from baseless beliefs and blindly assume they are require no validation and afterwards feel surprised others don't share your wild assumptions.
Plenty of people have had that shared effect from psychedelics.
I’m sure what baseless belief you see.
If not, what do you mean?
I believe, the slowing down of the "clock" can be said for meditation as well in some sense. Because even in a deep meditation you lose a sense of "time" and that's when it gets slightly "psychedelic", for a lack of a better word.
One thing that is different with meditation is that the senses are somewhat rendered inactive. So that means, the feedback artifacts are generated on our internal networks, i.e. consciousness and not from external stimuli ?
or for a narrower slice this paper is reference [6]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11500666_What_Geome...
The full mathematics are quite challenging, but the gist of the result (iirc) is basically: many common hallucinatory experiences, including the geometric patterns reported from both psychedelics and migraines, can be explained by the inherent connectivity patterns in the visual cortex. Consistent with this idea, there's other strains of research (sorry, too lazy to look up more citations) that show that psychedelics tend to decrease input from the primary sense organs, so that during a trip we really are literally turning inward. (if you want to look it up, iirc the effect is called "thalamic gating" or something? the senses all come up the spinal nerves into the thalamus which helps gate our attention, but during psychedelic experiences all thalamic input is turned down.)
So what happens when you turn down the dimmer on external senses, is that you "see" only from the "higher" cortical areas: suddenly the neurons that are several synapses removed from primary sense activity are the 'loudest' in our experience. This is why "set and setting" are so important in a trip, because you're going to literally experience your mood and emotional state more strongly than usual, since it won't be mediated as much by external sensory events. That's not to say there's no external senses- most people report experiencing a sort of psychedelic remix of ordinary reality. But back to the geometric patterns -- sometimes what you see really does seem to be based on the fundamental connectivity matrix. it's like in absence of strong input, the visual cortex just has activity rippling across it along its own wiring.
anyways hopefully this rambling with a few sources cited helped a little.
I don't entirely discount the spiritual aspect or disrespect it either, in spite of my original comment. While I've never used DMT, the experiences of friends who have used ayahuasca could not just be feedback and distortion artifacts of impairment, they are a complete break, where the needle on the player of self just lifts off the record entirely. But for milder recreational stuff like lsd and mushrooms, it's nice to just have the self shut up for a little bit by impairing it.
Especially for something like spirituality, which is almost by definition something experienced within.
If you believe that our perceptive filters, evolved over millennia of survival requirements, is the only or even best way to perceive our reality, I would invite you to consider that hummingbirds will never enjoy Mozart, and you will never be as relaxed as a sloth.
> and you will never be as relaxed as a sloth.
Also FWIW, does the sloth also consider itself to be relaxed or rather just "normal" ;-)
Isn't the perception of being relaxed itself exactly reflective of how artificial* the experience actually is.
*: With the context that I have no intention of prescribing whether it is positive or enjoyable.
I'm assuming this discussion is all within the context of the original article "Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics" --- in which case understanding these specific messages actually don't require psychedelics.
Not implying psychedelics have no utility, just that whatever utility they have probably doesn't lie in interpreting these "slowed down scan" animations.
Also what is being done here isn't simply slower processing speed. It's more like the information from old states persists into new ones. My understanding is that this would be considered low dose territory.
There's more to the story here, and I don't think this test, is even scratching the surface. It is neat though.
They didn't "experience an eternity". They experienced an emotional feeling they likened to an eternity. This is the difference between your computer running a program for a thousand years and you changing the date settings. These people did not go through an eternity of perception, processing, and thought; they had the label on their memories altered.
No, psychedelics really can speed up thought. It's not uncommon to experience a lot more in a much shorter amount of time than normal. For example, I've experienced this first-hand where I could not even finish a single sentence before I was so far ahead in thought that I completely forgot what I was originally trying to say.
I used to call it "an entire universe happening between each instant" which, while inaccurate, is an apt enough description of how it feels, but also how it actually is, because the volume of thought is still much higher than normal.
To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic cases given the same amount of "real time".
IIRC earlier papers (that I am too lazy to find) shared on HN that have done this seem to show the opposite, that there is no measurable difference on the task yet the participants reported a difference in their label of the experience. (I think the paper then was related to some form of creativity and showed that there was no post-hoc measured difference despite a significant reported experiential difference).
It's not the only evidence I have, but one of the main problems with trying to describe psychedelics is that the experience is... well, indescribable. As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't even properly decode most of the memories I made with it.
> To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic cases given the same amount of "real time".
LSD probably doesn't make it faster for me to process things. It just makes me jump between things more quickly so I have more distinct experiences at any given time. I know that while in voice chat with people, I would have moments where I would have a bunch of thoughts, completely forget what just happened, and only a couple seconds of real-world time had passed. In that scenario the other person is my time reference but I've also checked actual clocks and observed that effect.
I don't think LSD makes me better at computation at all (in fact, it probably makes me a bit worse at computation).
If well formulated I suppose this could be scientifically tested too. Given the right kind of task and measurement. My earlier point is only to tie to the parent about differentiating actually having "more distinct experiences" with just _feeling like_ you had them. This is something that, as the subject and knowing the intervention, you cannot determine by yourself. You'd need an experimenter doing a double-blind experiment to really test this out.
As an anecdote there's nothing wrong --- subjective experiences aren't any less "real" to the experiencer --- just that claims about the mechanism and effect are probably not generalizable.
> As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't even properly decode most of the memories I made with it.
There's also lots of metaphysical questions about whether indescribable experiences are "real" or not that are probably too long to get into on HN :)
This can honestly be applied to basically anything about thought. I sort of get it though, because claiming a difference implies "citation needed". I would just feel weird if I wasn't really having all the thoughts that I thought I had.
It's not exactly possible to communicate exactly what validation I've done over those memories, especially since my brain could have fixed stuff after the fact (as brains do). I just can't find anything that would suggest it was modified after the fact, since even my behavior at the time would support the theory.
Worth noting that I have a lot of experience with things that my brain simply makes me think are happening, because I have Dissociative Identity Disorder and that happens with all sorts of things all the time. (That's not to say I can completely rule it out, rather that I know it happens and roughly how un-rule-out-able it can be.)
My brain will simulate something happening and then also create the memory of it happening, which becomes almost indistinguishable from it actually having happened. I would say I can usually tell those memories apart if I really study them, but whether I am correct or not, it is objectively impossible to know or say for sure, because if I missed something it would simply be missing from my knowledge (to the point where I wouldn't know something was missed).
Sounds identical to me on a bad ADHD day.
After every instance of that, it felt like I had spent so much time in that fractal that it was difficult to recall what had happened previously. It's not like ADHD where I get distracted and lose something from my short-term memory—it's that I had so many other thoughts that it was difficult to backtrack past them all.
It's just a trick your brain is playing on you man. I was playing Rainbow Six Siege with friends, and during the 30 second setup phase I played for what was surely several minutes doing all the things you do with the drone and looking everywhere and planning all sorts of things, and then I looked at the timer and only 5 seconds had passed.
Your brain's interpretation of time passing is a completely made up fiction for it's own benefit. Police officers report seeing shootings going down in slow motion, watching individual shell casings drop to the floor and reading the numbers stamped on the bottom.
When this kind of time dilation was scientifically investigated, we found that what actually changed was your MEMORY of that time, not your cognition during the dilation itself. You aren't actually experiencing things quicker, your brain is just timestamping stuff poorly. Your brain's time tracking system just gets out of whack, and that screws with your consciousness because it relies heavily on timestamping of things.
I swear, you people turn science into a religious ritual.
First-hand observation (which we have here) is the gold standard for knowledge-derivation. Science is just a method for ensuring that our models hew close to that.
What you assert here is mere convention.
Humans are TERRIBLE at knowing reality. That's like the whole point of the scientific process. People's self reports are literally the worst evidence ever used in science, and you have to actively work against your subjects and their brains to tease any actual signal out of that noise.
Consider for example, many airplane accidents have people reporting the plane was hit by a missile, even though we can have independent evidence that they weren't even looking in the direction until after the event.
We KNOW the brain lies to you as a matter of course, and makes up pretty much everything it can for the purpose of being lazy. Your entire consciousness is a fiction, vulnerable to all the normal human biases. We KNOW it is incredibly easy to mangle, twist, modify, and combine memories, and that pretty much everyone has memories that don't match reality.
You see how that is rather inconsistent.
How about this instead.
We can offer, in addition to our observation, the method by which we arrived at the observation. The method of our "experiment".
We might also compare our observation with that of our "peers".
(And we might also cultivate ourselves, to make better observations. If you think such a thing is possible)
But however you slice it, the validity of the observation stands upon the authority of the observer. There's no getting around that.
Since we're talking about things that happened inside my own head, how can I know whether I actually experienced a certain period of time, or only created a memory of having experienced that time? My own recollection of it may be flawed, so it logically follows that in order to know for sure, I have to find some way to objectively quantify it. I don't know how I'd objectively quantify the number of thoughts I'm having, though, lol.
It's funny. You distrust your eyes but trust your thoughts.
It's not the only tool available though. You could also use other tools like coercion, intimidation, violence, negotiation, etc. to also arrive at a single conclusion. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
Well no, it is not. If you spot an UFO, chances are your "first-hand observation" is lying to you.
Sometimes I could recall the thing after spending a lot of time backtracking, but sometimes not.
Because first-hand observation just isn't good enough.
Not sure exactly what point you are trying to make.
There's no telling what time perception is "correct" or "real". It is actually within the realm of possibility that they did experience an eternity-scale (but sub-infinite, natch) amount of experiences.
Perception is always, always false, the same way that our internal reality is imperfect. The only way to trust perception is to go through repeatable experiment and see that results conforms to prediction, eg. science.
Science is the only and sole way to determine our shared reality, anything else is literally lucky heuristics, including the behavior of scientists. The worst deceit from those heuristics being our conviction that there is any kind of truth in what we think, preventing the whole thing to fall appart.
Perception Isn't false, it's subjective. It's real in its own domain, but that domain may not generalize or overlap with a shared physical reality or perceptions made by other people.
For the processing, the subjective part of the perception, lot of things falls appart, attaching any notion of reality and trustiness looks like a choice to enable some lines of reflection. A choice heavily oriented by our own experience of existence, nobody wants to see themselves as a bag of more or less working heuristics with conscience as meta processing and data acquisition for self-correction mechanism.
But if you have a solid source or line of thought that manages to explain one's sense of reality being more than «it's how I feel it for me, so that must be true of others, otherwise it's quite scary», I'm really (really) interested.
> if you have a solid source or line of thought that manages to explain one's sense of reality being more than «it's how I feel it for me, so that must be true of others, otherwise it's quite scary», I'm really (really) interested.
The best example I can think of is a dream. Dreams are real experiences despite not being shared with any other human. It would be absurd to say that you can't have dreams because they aren't perceived by or true for other people. The same holds true for thoughts and feelings.
People don't get sent into an existential crisis because they feel happy while someone somewhere is unhappy. Having a feeling is a real experience, despite being personal and subjective.
> The state of consciousness is much more than just the processing of external signals.
Complex life evolution is 100% based on best survival interpretation of surrounding environment. I understand how we can try to figure out what is more in the human way of doing it, but I really think that has to hold on something before getting past it.
> It would be absurd to say that you can't have dreams because they aren't perceived by or true for other people.
It is, and yet, if you do the exercise of imagine that dreaming is a social construct that you are the only one to really experience it, discarding that idea is solely based on belief. A belief I share, based on trust in others, and what seems the most probable. If it's absurd, it's only because we can rule it out as highly improbable.
>Complex life evolution is 100% based on best survival interpretation of surrounding environment. I understand how we can try to figure out what is more in the human way of doing it, but I really think that has to hold on something before getting past it.
I agree that evolution is driven by Fitness, and a large part of Fitness is understanding the world around you. That doesn't mean 100% of behavior, or especially experience, serves a purpose of advancing Fitness. Evolution is messy. It has mistakes, byproducts, artifacts, and maladaptive traits. Not everything done is done with a purpose.
>It is, and yet, if you do the exercise of imagine that dreaming is a social construct that you are the only one to really experience it, discarding that idea is solely based on belief. A belief I share, based on trust in others, and what seems the most probable. If it's absurd, it's only because we can rule it out as highly improbable.
Really struggle to grasp your meaning on this one. It seems that the existence of belief itself, independent of social truth, and contrary to trust in others, is evidence to the contrary. Are you saying that humans wouldn't have feelings, thoughts, or dreams, unless they have a social expectation to do so?
There is a distance between your experience and the shared reality (a bunch of signals, perception and processing) that we use science to try to overcome
Is this claim not self-referential? Did you apply its ~~recommended~~ necessary methodology to itself?
> Science is the only and sole way to determine our shared reality, anything else is literally lucky heuristics, including the behavior of scientists.
This too...plus, who will be performing these experiments if scientists are not trustworthy?
Maybe this is brand new territory and we need new theories (&/or revisit old ones) and techniques.
I've been extreme in the formulations, but no, you don't need other methods, repeatable experiment with accurate predictions is enough. The heuristics are quite reliable. It's just that we tend to forget/ignore that everything that what we think of being true is just a large compound of beliefs, and that the only way to validate those beliefs is to use them to make prediction, and validate it through experiments.
It involves perception, and you believe it despite not having gone through what you claim is necessary to acquire the knowledge.
> the whole idea holds on that if you manage to do predictions that are confirmed, you still have to assume that your perceptions are consistent across time.
YOu may have to do this, but I certainly don't - in fact, I believe essentially the opposite of this!
> As an individual you can check you perceptions across time, with several people you remove yourself as a variable.
That could depend on the nature of your relationship with the people - it's possible, but not guaranteed (and knowing which situation you're in isn't easy).
> I've been extreme in the formulations, but no, you don't need other methods, repeatable experiment with accurate predictions is enough.
This is only true if it is actually true though - how do you confirm that it is true?
> The heuristics are quite reliable.
...the heuristic process suggests.
> It's just that we tend to forget/ignore that everything that what we think of being true is just a large compound of beliefs, and that the only way to validate those beliefs is to use them to make prediction, and validate it through experiments.
It is true that there is value in science, but there is also risk.
Nonsense. Where's the thousand years of creative output? If my mind existed for a thousand years I'd be immediately filing patents and writing papers based off all the things I came up with during my eternity of thought. Further, if there was a simple chemical way to accelerate actual brain processing thousands of times, you don't think evolution would've built it into our brains? There is no difference between this and hypnotizing someone to believe they've lived an eternity.
Not OP, but I'd counter that evolution is doing an imperfect multivariate optimization over a pretty big state-space. Even if it might be easy to change one simple chemical and thus speed up processing, the question is whether the speed-up has other costs.
E.g. the brain is already using a lot of energy, increasing processing speed which probably increases energy usage might not be optimal.
We still don't understand sleep well, it could be that if you process faster more consistently you might need more sleep to organize your thoughts and memories, which is counterproductive if you don't want to be eaten. It's hard enough with our sleep requirements to keep up with nature.
A third point is that evolution only needs to find good enough. We're already the apex predator due to our ability to think. Anything above what we currently have might just not be necessary so has no evolutionary pressure.
What if the only thing it's capable of doing is perceiving the passage of time? If the biological clock is the only measure of perceived time, then it feels like more time is elapsing. If the brain measures and feels time as sand slowly falling into a bucket, what happens when you dump a truckload of sand into the bucket? That doesn't mean that you're necessarily capable of doing more work in that time, but maybe you still feel the additional passage of time.
For some people that may be true; but for many of us, these drugs only make our brain reel faster and faster until it just goes full blown into fight or flight mode.
I'm with the other posters. I believe people should be able to put whatever they want into their bodies (as long as they fully understand what they're doing), but also should absolutely know that panic attacks, and ongoing anxiety disorders could be a side effect.
Source: My anxiety disorder that exists now after recreational hallucinogen use for about a decade.
This isn’t a “both sides” argument wherein some highly unlikely hypothetical is trotted out to debate the consensus. Plenty of people have had bad experiences with long term ill effects.
Which if true, sounds like an artifact from less processing power to me.
Every electronic device you use requires low pass signal processing to function and transfer information.
It isn't just about speed. A clear image on your TV is a clear advantage over static.
Similarly, there is a clear "computational advantage" to processing data at the right rate it is being transmitted. You can process a binary signal at faster rate than transmission, but 100% of your data will be lost.
Maybe the slower processing speed is the cost of better processing power? Kinda like the tradeoff between high torque and high speed for gearboxes.
Some tribes use psychedelics for hunting, and others that use psychedelics for introspection: maybe they are perceiving something that we ignore during normal processing modes.
OP saying slow doesn't mean that it's actually slower. If you process more information time _appears_ more slowly, but you're processing more, i.e. faster.
In hunting it might be good to have improved pattern matching abilities at the cost of a higher false-positive rate.
That being said, I can't imagine having to hunt while on a lot of psychedelics
Also, I think if you'd ever used LSD, you would never think it was "slowing your thoughts down".
Under mushroom, food tastes amazing, because you can suddenly perceived a lot more details.
Persistence of vision type of tricks/effects have always been a favorite of mine. Even without LSD, I still enjoy finding ways to "trip" the mind. I have a ceiling fan with dark tone blades hanging from a white ceiling. When laying down in bed, I can stare at the ceiling fan for a couple of seconds, and then when I close my eyes, I still "see" the ceiling fan but in a negative view where the ceiling is now dark and the blades are light color. Cheap LEDs and fluorescent lights with cheap ballasts also cause me to see weird flickering when using averted vision or by turning my head back and forth in a rapid manner.
Maybe it's because of the training my brain has undergone from using psychedelics, but I've tried to get other people that have never used psychedelics to see the same things without success.
> having a 2.5x to 4x slower processing speed
I'm confused. Wouldn't this imply a 2.5x to 4x faster processing speed?
Decoded using:
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf tmix=frames=36:weights="1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1" output.mp4
ffmpeg -i output.mp4 -vf "curves=all='0/0 0.05/1 1/1'" bright.mp4
- If weights are repeated, you only need to specify the last unique one
- You can chain filters using a comma
- You can drop that last point in the curve
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf tmix=frames=36:weights="1",curves=all='0/0 0.05/1' output.mp4Haha, I knew there was some way of doing this, but I couldn't remember how (tried semicolons which didn't work), thanks :)
What do you mean exactly?
Like, you want us to take 150ug just to see your puzzle? Well that could be fun in the right context, not on HN though
Here are the photos from my phone
It might be useful for looking at stars and galaxies. Not so much for everything else.
Psychedelics give all perceptions including mental concepts "long exposure" as well, causing them to overlap in ways which rarely happen sober.
This allows for forming wholly new connections and insights otherwise out of reach for the sober mind.
> This allows for forming wholly new connections and insights otherwise out of reach for the sober mind.
For me, LSD seemed to reveal some brand new type of thought or concept that could be recognized by the sound or impression that it made. My speech center would spit out complete gibberish when fed these types of thoughts. Actual quotes I typed while on LSD:
"can have a haves and take a three sixteenth quarters"
"can have an um somethings or others .... mmm much of somethings or others.... can havings a taken umpteenth very good time ...."
Normal thoughts for me are based on words and images, but these ones were based on some sort of "proximity". I could somehow sense the strength of certain patterns, recognize them, and manipulate them, even if they had no actual meaning. It felt like I got to re-learn very basic fundamental concepts in the form of this brand new type of thought. Some of them just felt pleasant to think about even if I didn't know what they meant, so I'd commonly find them looping in the background. I still find this extremely fascinating and it's probably one of the biggest reasons why I hope to have more psychedelic trips in the future.
I learned plenty of patterns and have plenty of memories of them, but seemingly can't decode those memories when sober, probably because those mental patterns simply aren't visible to me right now. I can remember certain types of artifacts generated by them though, like the gibberish words, some sounds, etc., at least the ones I committed to memory.
It was fun though!
psychedelics, specifically LSD and psilocybin, are like a software change, enough is like a firmware change. When it comes to sight, its more like some side image decoder in the image processing pipeline is modified, as opposed to your eye hardware or brain/storage itself. some people experience a latent side effect called HPPD (Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder) where they get these visual distortions for days to years after every other affect has gone away. this is an area that needs research but is quite obscure and getting there is too vilified right now.
Honestly, I probably would if I wasn't all out of LSD, hehe. It sounds like a fun experiment and I still hope to try it one day.
I feel like this is technically true but also misleading towards the belief that there is an overall perceptual computation advantage of psychedelic states. You can maybe get a higher score on certain tests, but it comes at a loss on other tests. I'm willing to bet basic tests like an eye exam will score worse when all the letters are dripping. The reality is psychedelics effect a particular band of brainwave frequencies, and so is not like the blunt general stimulation or inebriation of other drugs. It may be better for your brain to be in a psychedelic state on certain tasks, but if it was better in the general case evolution would have already made it so. Remember, I can rig a system with absolute perfect perception just so long as you don't mind a rate of 100% false positives.
Still congrats to QRI on this research. Very impressive result. Seems like they had some of the same method ideas I've had, or thought my ideas were worth taking last I spoke with them.
Would the same not be true of delusion, psychopathy, and various other human shortcomings?
They persist in the general population to an extent for the same reason other hereditary illness persists. "I would die for two brothers or 8 cousins". A gene that is to your detriment in 1/3 cases but carries an advantage in the other 2/3 is still selected for. We have lots of examples of this in other heritable disease types, though admittedly no one is quite sure what advantage there might be to you if your brother or cousin is schizophrenic (for example).
It varies per delusion - for example, most successful people suffer from the delusion that they have ~omniscient level knowledge of what's going on - if it were not for this misplaced confidence within human consciousness, I suspect it would be much more difficult to get things done (though, a lot of the dumb stuff that's done would get avoided as well, so it's a tough call what's net best).
Long story short, the theory goes that being schizotypal (but not full-blown schizophrenic) could be an advantageous trait in human society, usually by filling some spiritual, ritual, or religious role in the group. These people are high status in their societies, and have many chances for passing on their genes.
You're saying that diseases persist in humans because they're selected for, because they're beneficial to others? That's interesting, do you have some examples?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPGhw4nACfk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pqzaZcivh4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMI8HWhqEc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress
>The book opens at the eponymous congress. A riot breaks out, and the hero, Ijon Tichy, is hit by various psychoactive drugs that were put into the drinking water supply lines by the government to pacify the riots. Ijon and a few others escape to the safety of a sewer beneath the Hilton where the congress was being held, and in the sewer he goes through a series of hallucinations and false awakenings, which cause him to be confused about whether or not what's happening around him is real. Finally, he believes that he falls asleep and wakes up many years later. The main part of the book follows Ijon's adventures in the future world — a world where everyone takes hallucinogenic drugs, and hallucinations have replaced reality.
In the same way that the epic movie Blade Runner was based on Philip K Dick's classic book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, both movies are deeply inspired by but quite different than the books, so they both have unique important things to say and are worth reading and seeing.
Both pairs of movies and books are among my top favorites!
Many of Lem's books and stories are also excellent mind bending gems -- especially The Cyberiad!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem
>[...] The Cyberiad (Cyberiada) provide a commentary on humanity in the form of a series of grotesque, humorous, fairytale-like short stories about a mechanical universe inhabited by robots (who have occasional contact with biological "slimies" and human "palefaces").[11][35] Lem also underlines the uncertainties of evolution, including that it might not progress upwards in intelligence.[36]
In addition, does anyone have a version of the video with the messages visible, as outlined in the first description:
Entire message can be seen clearly by using video editing software and applying a tracer/echo effect and having 60 images in a trail that each are 0.033 seconds after the previous. This process can also be repeated with code.The second one contains some intricate pattern or maybe letters, but still more like flowers. I was unable to make out any definite shapes.
The third one contains letters in the vertical columns. I could not make out enough to read a complete message, but certain letters, like R, S, or E in the left columns are pretty clearly visible after several repetitions. The largest fragment I could detect with enough certainty is ...ERS IS THE... in the leftmost column.
Disclaimer: absolutely clean, no psychedelic or other mind-altering substances.
(The text is stationary; if it were moving, that would make the following fiddly and annoying, but not genuinely difficult. So it would provide the illusion of security, but no actual security. For this (kind of) reason, "psycrypto" strikes me as a rather bad idea.)
I transcoded the video to gif with:
ffmpeg -i ZNpfcfHwdhA.mp4 -pix_fmt rgb24 -r 6 ZNpfcfHwdhA.gif
The text says "UNIVERSE IS THE GATE" in a obnoxious ultra-stencil font.
edit: the first word could be like INVERSE. Not 100% sure
The bottom is definitely covered with repeating non-letter shapes.
Edit: You're right, the text is only in the middle and next largest "fold." The rest is, spoiler, alien face glyphs.
Indeed the regular pattern can be seen as alien faces. But they are so close by that to me the slanted "eyes" and the cup-like "chins" more readily form plant shapes, with pairs of "leaves" and "flowers" above them instead.
Edit: The emoji was indeed stripped. This one https://emojipedia.org/alien/
Tips to make it stand out more: HDR monitor at max brightness, increase playback speed to 2x
Try not to follow the movement, but keep your eyes on a fixed location (e.g. a speck of dust on your screen)
First time heard about this. Do you think that you have more "buffer space" for past visual input than average, or do the older and newer visual input "merge together" in the same "buffer space"? What I'm trying to get at is that does this come at cost of blurring vision or reaction speed, or do you have no problems related to those?
I believe it is WE LOVE YOU with some aliens.
But that's cheating -make it fast enough any anyone can see it I suppose.
1. What's the proper way to experience this?
No information is given on how the judges experienced this content. Did they watch it in 1080p or 360p? Did they watch it over YouTube or on a local player? Did they watch it on a loop or did they have to manually play it every loop? Did they watch it in a dark room or with the lights on? Did they watch it on a phone or a monitor or a TV?
2. What is the transmission speed?
How much time did someone tripping take to see the message? These methods could be ineffective if it takes someone sober the same amount of time to read the message.
3. What is the transmission method?
I specifically avoided the descriptions before watching the videos so I wouldn't bias myself by knowing the answer. I was still able to read the messages when I sat myself down in a dark room, put the videos on loop, and "spaced out" for a few minutes. I suspect these messages rely on the tendancy of someone tripping to stare off into space so the afterimage effect can come into play. I understand that the authors are coming from a non-scientific background and cannot pin down the specific traits of tripping on LSD that causes these methods to be effective. I strongly suspect these messages work by watching the content in a specific manner instead of the result of an altered function or altered reception of visual stimuli.
Not necessarily. I've taken LSD before and it legitimately seems to increase persistence of vision (otherwise known as tracers). If I wave my paw in a circle on LSD, I can see a short trail behind it, and it seems to slightly lag behind its actual real-world position (by around a quarter of a second?).
It looks a lot like this: https://youtu.be/ggFKLxAQBbc?t=26
Once on truffles I shouted out there is a snow lion in the painting.
Very vividly the pattern of the composition turns into a snowlion in 3d on truffles.
Sober I can now see the patterns in there, but not the strong visual representation.
They defintely put it in there on purpose. Not sure what tools they use to alter their vision.
Not sure the rest saw it, not everyone recognizes Tibetan symbols.
I have reverse image searched to provide a higher resolution image https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Shakyamu...
And the Tibetans have a strong culture of visions in dreams and real life.
For instance they often meditate long times without food & water, and they speak about how to protect against "demons" persuading you to jump of cliffs.
Although most or much more positives, projections of buddha forms appearing next to teachers etc.
There are also some shamanistic leftovers from the Bon Tradtion before buddhism took over. And some claim substances where used in certain traditions.
So I wouldn't be surprised if certain painters could see things like this, since it was so vivid while on truffles I think someone knew what they were doing, but who knows.
Like today there are people who experience things like psychedelic flashbacks or HPPD, many report being able to trigger those experiences willingly, and sometimes uncontrollably.
I think you can train yourself to see this way, and meditation is a great way of peeling back your brains' pattern matching and assumption making to do it. It's similar to learning to "see" as an artist, or the artist's eye. When you first start out, you have to learn to look past the generalizations your mind fills in for what you think you're looking at to actually "see" what needs to be seen to capture what you want in art. It's a different type of perception.
For that reason, I don't think drugs need to be involved at all to make art like this, just a different way of perceiving things.
It is more like “Experiencing a visual trip compatible with the image whilst also still lucid enough to communicate and remember”
Tripping comes in all varieties of strengths and effects. Often the effects are barely visual. Also you can be so out of it that you cannot speak and perhaps also cannot remember the test image when you’ve come down.
This is a pretty strong claim, considering that while psychedelic states of consciousness do allow you to see these messages, they also have a lot of other side effects.
I'm pretty sure you can do the reverse too, create a message which can only be seen in a normal state of consciousness - for example you use the same tracer phenomenon to obscure instead of to reveal the message.
So a psychedelic state is not strictly superior to normal state, it's just different.
I bet someone could read the messages in these videos quite easily under the influence of cannabis, but I doubt most would be comfortable at that level of intoxication to enjoy the experience while it occurred.
ime/imo the main reason why it's so uncommon is because you have to go _comically_ far over your tolerance to hit the truly-psychedelic effects, and, as you said, it can be deeply uncomfortable. I've only ever managed to hit truly-psychedelic effects by ex. eating 600mg of RSO with a low tolerance, or doing a dab after a t break and way overestimating my tolerance.
I tried taking something like 50mg THC once and it just made me feel like my head was imploding for around five hours. No visuals or altered thoughts or anything. Made me conclude that my brain probably just isn't receptive to weed or something.
Exactly. The goal was to take a really high dose, to see if it would do anything—I was getting impatient tapering up with 2.5mg (or so) edibles, so I bought some tincture, did some calculations, and took 50 milligrams' worth. (Just drank it directly from a dropper.)
Now that I've tried such a high dose and not detected any desirable effects, I can basically rule out THC completely as a recreational drug. And it didn't require being uncomfortable more than a single time; pretty efficient if you ask me.
> Altered visuals on cannabis are very rare, its almost entirely a psychological effect in my experience.
"Visuals" includes imagination / mind's eye, but I also got no effect there whatsoever. I mentioned it because I know someone who claims that THC edibles added more "depth" to their imagination, almost like they could see it more clearly when they closed their eyes. I had no such effect. (The effects of THC seem to differ for every brain, depending on the location of the cannabinoid receptors or something?)
> As far as altered thoughts - did you think something was physically wrong with you? That paranoia 100% counts
Not really. I have dysphoria normally though, so I probably wouldn't be able to tell if it was coming from the THC.
I did experience very strong dissociation, since THC is a dissociative, but I already have a dissociative disorder, so that's not very exciting or compelling. (I didn't know how to recognize the feeling of dissociation until I tried THC, though, so I will give it credit for teaching me what that feels like.)
This is your neural net on drugs! https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa024/6032852?l...
Obviously no one can vouch for this topic, but consider the vulnerability associated with intense psychedelic use. If someone wanted to make you die in real life, black mail you, etc, this would be very good leverage. I've been told that the government likes leverage like this for maintaining control/order of the people who work for it. But who really knows, could all be conspiratorial mumbo jumbo. What is known is that the government invested a lot of time into studying psychedelics for purposes of mind control, IE, something that is not in the interest of the practitioner whatsoever.
Me personally... If I had to choose between being a psychedelic user on my own with my own tribe, or durring a government evaluation of my character, I think it's probably safer to choose the former not the latter.
Also, not super interested in barbed wire lunches, being used for psychological experiments, armed guards behind me while I write if statements, etc. Not my thing, but I know some people are fine with the trade.
https://www.instagram.com/inner.reflection/
So far the closest visualization I have seen in terms of visuals that happen under effects of LSD/Shrooms
It’s clear to me that the brain, the brain on psychedelics, computers, etc are all just systems that are attuned to specific things. These tests do not show a system that is purportedly better than a sober mind using technologies to achieve the same effect - they provide some insight into how the mind, in particular the visual system, works.
It’s totally learnable (if you don’t have aphantasia afaict), although the internet is full of clickbait scammers. I can recommend learning sources if anyone wants.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nL5ulsWMYc
or selective attention:
(1) such as:
- Night mode
- Fireworks mode
- "Live photo -> Long exposure"
- Countless other modes that do an equivalent frame layering function
"Informed Consent" to capture user tracking data will have an interesting interplay with "Dark Patterns".
"I'll take Microsoft Marketing for $200"
"IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE DRUNK! YOU CANNOT DRIVE!"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogenic_drugs_and_the_arch...
How can one stand decades of stagnation without the desire to escape?
Agree... I'm nearly unable to fantasize properly (dream or daydream what I want), and it's difficult to describe how it makes me feel, but I would probably use something like "fantasy withdrawal".
I've gotten pretty upset in the past over it and keep wishing I could find some drug to help me experience the things that I can't normally. LSD was the first thing I tried, ketamine will probably be next.
Curse my stupid brain for being stuck in reality. Makes one wonder what the purpose of dreams really is. It could be to try to prevent something like this from arising, but mine don't properly address that need.
It's not aphantasia, not even close. My coping mechanism for most of my life has been roleplay and story writing, which I have no trouble imagining (in fact I can seemingly do it better than most people). It's just that I can't properly dream it, can't experience it using the slots reserved for the normal senses.
I've never gotten a straight answer to whether this is normal or not, but I have heard that similar things can be caused by being autistic (which I am). Some autistics are known to be very literal and aware of reality and only reality. I just don't want to be that because it's painful.
I haven't tried it though, that sounds interesting. I would probably want to use headphones for it though, as otherwise, the volume required to actually bother me would probably fill the entire apartment complex ;D
Maybe its just your default mode of consciousness that's boring.
Yesterday I had a dream where Elon Musk was making blow-up spaceships like balloons and I met Natalie Portman in a crowd of people and told her I hated Trainspotting, also there were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at some point but I don't remember why.
One time I had a dream that changed my entire view of reality where I experienced passing into the afterlife as if I were diving into a pool of water and the transition was like touching the surface of the water.
Even during the day time, my brain just produces stuff like this but it's 'behind my eyes', that's where my imagination goes. Sometimes I'll just decide I want the colors to melt, or objects to explode like glass, and I can just do that.
There is so many interesting things to do (let alone watch) to last multiple lifetimes.
> How can one stand decades of stagnation without the desire to escape?
I guess by not being totally unimaginative and boring ? There is no nice way to say it.
I am pretty happy so there is no need to escape.
I admit I am -curious- to try psychedelics but in no hurry. Plenty of things to entertain me in this life.
If you ever do decide to try them, it should still be an interesting experience. Personally, I loved to watch what happened to my computer screen during my first LSD trip, and I spent a lot of time obsessing over how pretty it was. It's definitely a different type of experience than learning a skill or solving a puzzle.
By the clinical definition, I don't have depression, because it doesn't impact my enjoyment of or participation in hobbies, and I also don't seem to have any persistent or recurring mood problems.
I'm not sure anyone would call this depression? I certainly wouldn't.
I think I generally mean anhedonia when I talk about depression.
Well, that's the point.
> I think I generally mean anhedonia when I talk about depression.
As far as I know, anhedonia isn't supposed to be very common. Though it can be pretty amazing to look at the outside world if you happen to be one of the unlucky ones who do have it.
I used to do this when I couldn't finish any projects because of ADHD. How did people dedicate all their free time to one thing for so long, and actually finish it to completion? I just didn't understand how it was possible because it just didn't work that way for me.
? My understanding is that it's like, a pretty primary symptom of depression?
> clinical depression, is ... characterized by ... pervasive low mood, low self-esteem, and loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_depressive_disorder)
At any rate, yeah, it's the primary symptom of depression I experience.
Shrooms, meditation, therapy, and exercise all do help manage it (in roughly that order).
Plenty of stress or frustration to be had from hobbies too
I do feel lucky that the thing I don't hate and are reasonably good at allows me to get decent job and money
So before you can actually start reading the text, you have to actually see the surface, which will in some sense appear as the widening of the lines across the curved flow axis. So the lines start turning into flowing stripes which reveal the surface beneath (full of text and aliens), you then have to try and hold that state.
It is like that spinning balerina.
EDIT: One more thing. The lines flicker, right? Since the "surface" underneath is interchangeably black & white, you must notice that the black stripes have straight borders. This will also make it easier.
...
The white lines turn into "stripes revealing the surface underneath" even though when ignoring this, you only observe a white line. For me, if that shift of perspective is possible, then as an observer I can't vouch on the true width of the white lines, because if I switch my perspective, even as slightly as the lines widen, I cannot as a single observer give a definite statement on their width. Video analysis would only empirically confirm it if I stay correct.