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Comment by s4mw1se | Hacker News Reader

LSD was expected to be the holy grail of mental health treatment in the 40s and 50s before it was made illegal by the U.S. and the rest old the world following in the united states foot steps.

I’m very grateful that we are starting to see research really pick up steam and public companies like MindMed pushing for FDA approval with MM120.

It’s bittersweet though because it also is proof of how much progress we lost over those decades.

Not to discredit PTSD and Mental Health research, but just to expand on how much we don’t know about our mind and what these chemicals really are…

DMTx had its first round of clinical trials, where participants have extended experiences in DMT hyperspace and all share common hallucinations (i.e talking to other lifeforms).

What’s interesting is that these experiments are showing us how our brain models the world. Unlike freebase N,N-DMT which is a short lived rocky experince. These patient reported and the data showed that after the first few minutes on DMTx things started to normalize (the brain started modeling their world better)

One of Strassmans patients years ago said on DMT that these entities could share more with us if we learn to make extended contact.

Albert Hoffman the inventor of LSD also said he had contact with external entities on a trip (eyeball with wings) and said that it told him that they chose him to discover LSD for the sake of humanity.

The DMTx participants all reported that these entities knew about their life and their traumas and helped them process these all in different ways. They all reported that these were beings of a higher intelligence and felt that they were external.

Psychedelics are 100% challenging the gold standard. Whatever the that is lol.

View on HN

And people experiencing DTs from alcohol withdrawal say nonexistent entities are present too. The brain is merely capable of processing its inputs based on the laws of physics, and considering the complexity of a functioning mind, we shouldn't be too surprised when abnormal inputs cause abnormal outputs, nor should we necessarily hold much stock in the matter. Certainly, though, the tales are interesting if nothing else.

We don’t have any way of determining whether these experiences are purely generated by the brain, and it’s not smart to claim it’s one way or the other without further evidence.

> it’s not smart to claim it’s one way or the other without further evidence

It's perfectly smart to claim Hoffman did not make "contact with external entities on a trip (eyeball with wings)" with zero evidence because the status quo is not having conversations with eyeballs with wings. Herego, the burden of proof is on the eyballs-with-wings guy.

Anyone who makes a claim has a burden of proof.

If I'm on The Truman Show, could someone please spill the beans?

Yet we still work on the assumption that consciousness arises within space-time...

Disappointing the burden of proof is not deemed necessary in this case!

For what it's worth, I don't have evidence that you are conscious (and I never can; your qualia of the concept of the color red and your other internal world-state representations are solely yours, assuming you are not a P-zombie). For the record, I also do not make magic claims of free will nor assume there are laws outside known physics. If you wish to call in dark matter as a potential agent of causal change, then you can propose your theories backed by evidence and we'll continue as the evidence leads. But as far as my own existence, well, cogito ergo sum and all

> Yet we still work on the assumption that consciousness arises within space-time...

What role is the "yet" playing here, to indicate contradiction to my comment?

And without it, I'm not sure what the point of the comment would be.

This whole comment section is so confusing.

Actually, the people who are making the claim that the hallucinations are external entities are asserting a position. And with a quick application of Hitchens' Razor, that which is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

They do have evidence - their own experiences! It’s not very convincing evidence, to be sure, but as the replication crisis shows, even “objective” evidence can fail to be convincing or demonstrative for various reasons.

... The replication crisis does not - I repeat, does not - lower the standard for acceptable evidence in the sciences.

First, the replication crisis, or at least its recognition, should if anything raise the standard for acceptable evidence.

More pertinently, I am talking here on a purely social and practical level. You seem to have taken it as a moral statement.

And what evidence do you actually have for your position? Your position is tailored to make subjects better taxpayers, rather than understanding how the brain/mind actually works. That's ok, than just assert this, that it is just a position amongst an infinity of other positions, rather than claiming that your position is the ultimate truth.

So someone is experiencing the self-transforming machine elves. Please provide the exact description of neuronal circuitry (numbers of neurons, network architectures, interconnectivity patterns, amounts of neurotransmitters used, spike patterns and the resulting EEGs etc) which generates this exact experience. Ask a distinguished professor of neuroscience. Use integrated information theory, emergent properties, quantum collapse in microtubules, whatever currently established paradigm - and provide the exact, 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state that presumably generates this exact experience, also allowing to differentiate from all other experiences like just "machine elves", "non-self-transforming machine elves" or elves with any other properties. Or just begin with the 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state/circuitry generating the taste of vanilla, which would be distinctly differentiable from the state/circuitry generating a taste of chocolate or garlic.

We communicate with other people and entities in dreams as well, and they seem completely convincing during the experience. While its not impossible for the self-replicating machine elves from the 5th dimension to actually exist, I think its more likely they're reflections of our psyche or something like that

Of course it’s more likely, I’m just arguing we shouldn’t dismiss the possibility just because it sounds silly before we’ve studied it thoroughly.

> before we’ve studied it thoroughly.

I don't know about you, but I have studied reality pretty extensively over the years. I have yet to come across evidence that I would submit to a court of law regarding the existence of winged eyeballs, or other products of a hallucination. Having said that, several lawyers seem to be submitting such hallucinations in court thanks to AI, so maybe that technology can help us investigate this possibility of extracorporeal entities.

People don't see self-replicating machine elves if they have no idea who Terence McKenna is.

Ultimately, these are easily programmed experiences by people good at creating mythology. The more pseudoscientific one makes the mythology the better too of course or at least some loose connection to pseudoscience.

If we just say elves then it is obviously ridiculous. Self-replicating machines sounds STEM enough.

That was McKenna's brilliant con-artistry. Painting a STEM varnish on centuries old bullshit that no one would have bothered reading about otherwise.

People totally blind from birth taking hallucinogens don't see entities which strongly suggests they're not real.

I agree the entities probably aren't real, but an equally supported hypothesis would be that you need to see the entities to "see" the entities.

Except some people who lost their vision late in life can experience them.

Because they still have a developed (if atrophying) visual cortex to generate the visual hallucinations.

That is easy to check if you measure the amount of light reaching the eyes of the patient while the experience is happening. Without even checking, I am already quite confident that no extra light will be reaching their eyes because they took some drug, but it's easy to measure.

This makes no sense.

You are constantly being bombarded with sensory phenomena that your nerves detect but your brain ignores. For example, you smell almost nothing, nearly all the time, despite being able to smell those scents occasionally, such as when you move to a different environment. Changing your brain somehow to notice those phenomena would not change the physical phenomena.

The claim was that some external entity was communicating with the people taking DMT. However, others in the room did not detect that entity, so it can't be made up of normal matter, or at least not at normal sizes. It is possible that the entity detected the person taking DMT somehow and started contacting them from far away, but then an instrument could detect the change after the DMT is consumed.

The alternative is that the entity is communicating in some way that is neither electromagnetic nor gravitational nor the weak or strong interactions, which would require new physics, and it would also require some explanation of why our brains would have evolved to capture this fifth force of nature that somehow doesn't have any measurable effects outside of DMT.

Not a parsimonious explanation - more likely, the visual cortex needs to be trained in order to see anything, even in the mind’s eye.

>>People totally blind from birth taking hallucinogens don't see entities

So these people do not trip at all on hallucinogens? Sounds like rather improbable. ~70% of what you call "visual experience" is driven by non-visual cortices, like anterior cingulate, for example. And even before the visual cortex, even on the thalamus level, the thalamus receives up to ~60% of top-down connections from non-visual cortices. You do not need to literally see anything in order to get the information about it. Get your potato, monkey.

Of course we do, what do you mean? We can obviously check if there is anyone else in the room, with various instruments, and if there isn't, we obviously know for certain that the experience was purely generated by the brain. What else could it even be?

Is it scientific consensus that an absence of evidence is proof of absence?

And even if so: is it necessarily true?

PS: did you notice you're using the same methodology "believers" use: it's obvious?

Give the extreme level at which we understand the basic functioning of the physical world (the Standard Model), yes, absence of evidence for a phenomenon that would contradict this model constitutes evidence of absence of such a phenomenon.

That is, since the only possible known interactions that the brain could pick up are electrical in nature, and given that no external electrical field changes are observed, that constitutes evidence that no external signal is being received by the person. The weak and strong forces don't work at such distances, so they are out of the question, and gravitational waves or neutrinos are far too weak to be detected by our brains, and impossible to make so targeted that only a single individual would receive the signal.

Now, is it conceivable that a different fundamental interaction that mammalian brains can detect but that none of our experiments have ever found could exist? Yes, but it is so extraordinarily unlikely that it can be dismissed out of hand, absent any proof. And the memories of people experiencing hallucinations are certainly not proof.

I'll add to it that there's a wide range of documented cases of humans experiencing all sorts of weird phenomena when their brains are being physically poked at. A drug chemically circuit-bending your brain therefore seems much more likely explanation than opening it to perceive an extra dimension of reality.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circuit_bending

> ... constitutes evidence of absence of such a phenomenon.

Mostly everyone prefers that easy version of the question, but that isn't the one I asked.

The one I asked is:

Is it scientific consensus that an absence of evidence is proof of absence? ("proof" vs "evidence")

(Note also my question was about scientific consensus, but you are welcome to choose either version.)

> That is, since the only possible known interactions that the brain could pick up are electrical in nature

This seems "off" to me..."the only know to be possible" seems perfectly logical, whereas your wording almost sounds like you determine how Mother Nature runs the show. Granted, that's how it intuitively seems, but still. Regardless, for clarity: are you asserting that the final answered has been reached here, in fact?

Still outstanding (for bonus points):

>> And even if so: is it necessarily true?

>> PS: did you notice you're using the same methodology "believers" use: it's obvious?

For your troubles, an extra bonus question:

Did atoms exist before they were discovered to exist?

Nothing can really be perfectly proven, so go away if that's the only standard you will allow discussion of.

> Did atoms exist before they were discovered to exist?

We were certainly able to detect atoms before we figured out the exact details.

> Nothing can really be perfectly proven...

Many here seem to disagree with you, at least if one interprets their words literally. It's hard to know what they mean they since getting anyone to answer a question directly is typically not possible.

> ...so go away if that's the only standard you will allow discussion of.

What does "if that's the only standard you will allow discussion of" refer to?

>> Did atoms exist before they were discovered to exist?

> We were certainly able to detect atoms before we figured out the exact details.

Did atoms exist before they were discovered to exist?

No obligation to answer the question that is asked, just thought it would be fun to see if you have the ability.

> What does "if that's the only standard you will allow discussion of" refer to?

The way you blocked out everything else in the post to reiterate your question, which they had already answered fine unless you are doing the thing I accused you of, in which case I reiterate: go away

> Did atoms exist before they were discovered to exist?

Hmm, I think you misunderstood my previous answer. I'll try again.

We knew about the existence of atomic matter since humans have been a species, with overwhelming amounts of evidence. There is no "before" in that sense.

(If you mean "before humans and the concept of science existed" then the answer is yes but it has no relevance to a question of whether science is missing anything.)

> The way you blocked out everything else in the post to reiterate your question...

"Blocked out"? I didn't block out anything, I quoted specific text. Quoting specific text in no way disallows discussion of other things, which is what you accused me of.

> ...which they had already answered fine...

No, they answered a question more to their liking - they didn't answer mine at all. They, like many others, seem to have an aversion to discussing certain aspects of reality, so they chose to opt out of the conversation, a right which you too have.

> in which case I reiterate: go away

Why? Are there certain aspects of reality that you have an aversion to being pointed out? Well, simply click the X in your browser window and all this harshness can disappear.

> Hmm, I think you misunderstood my previous answer.

I understood it perfectly well, it is a highly predictable response to that class of prompt, one of three or so responses.

> We knew about the existence of atomic matter since humans have been a species, with overwhelming amounts of evidence. There is no "before" in that sense.

Humans knew about the existence of atomic matter since they've been a species?

The earliest reference I could find is this:

https://www.britannica.com/science/atom/Development-of-atomi...

>>> The concept of the atom that Western scientists accepted in broad outline from the 1600s until about 1900 originated with Greek philosophers in the 5th century BCE. Their speculation [1] about a hard, indivisible fundamental particle of nature was replaced slowly by a scientific theory supported by experiment and mathematical deduction.

Could you possibly share even one piece of evidence of this (you don't even need to link to it, quoting it from memory is fine, provided you include some detail)?

[1] which is not knowledge, by the way

It sounds like I broke your prediction if you're this confused.

Atomic matter is right there and everywhere. We didn't know about the structural details of atoms, but we knew about the bulk effects.

When the topic of discussion is signals that no current equipment can measure, there are some pretty direct analogues that might be convincing in some ways, but when it comes to something as fundamental as atoms, we were only ever lacking nuance in our knowledge. Signals like that would be a lot bigger than nuance, and our physics experiments leave a lot less room for it.

> It sounds like I broke your prediction if you're this confused.

This is a thing of beauty.

I humbly concede victory to you good sir - may we meet again.

Proof and strong evidence are the same thing in my view of the world, for everything outside of pure mathematics. Of course, this means that even a previously "proven" fact can turn out to be wrong later on. But the alternative is that "proof" simply doesn't exist, as nothing about the physical world can be "proven" to the extent that 2+2=4 can be.

And yes, atoms have of course always existed. As the other poster points out, even before we could even understand the concept, we could detect them. Cats can detect them.

The thing about this posited entity that makes me so certain it is not an external phenomenon (or, if you prefer being mathematically pedantic, that gives me such a high degree of confidence that the probability of that is very very low) is that it is not detectable at all in many other experiments you can run. None of our finest instruments would pick up any increase or decrease in the physical quantities they can measure in the room with the person on psychedelics, if we were to waste money looking for this signal. And then, if they don't, then how could the brain of this person pick up such a weak signal? Why would it even have evolved to be able to detect this fifth fundamental force if it's so weak it can't even be detected by devices that are affected by a single atom passing them by?

> But the alternative is...

"The" alternative is an interesting way to "think".

Psychedelics are a hell of a drug. So too is culture, and the conditioning of consciousness that comes with it. It starts the day you were born, and it never stops. This indoctrination is like the background noise of a city....you've never experienced it not being there, so you don't even notice it.

We need to account for the odd similarity of experience across users, which leads to two most probable explanations. First, the brain generates the experience, and the patterns are a consequence of structural similarities across human brains. Second, these entities actually exist somehow and we can’t yet observe them with our modern instruments. I certainly think that the first is more likely, but I think we need to do more work to reduce the probability of the second, likely by recording the brain activity similarities we would expect to see if it were a generated experience or by finding a number of individuals who don’t have the same experiences. We can also have people undergo extended trips, as is being tested currently, and see if the characteristics of the entities or the world indicate a generated experience. My only point was that, since this is a matter that depends entirely upon subjective conscious experience, a phenomenon we lack tools to measure and understand somewhat poorly, and since this substance is majorly understudied, it isn’t smart to simply assume that the first explanation is the correct one.

The second "explanation" requires a fundamental upending of basic physics research that is confirmed to higher degrees of accuracy than any direct experience we have ever had. The first explanation, while slightly handwavy, perfectly fits all established models of physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and psychology.

I think even mentioning the second explanation is entirely splitting hairs. It's like reminding everyone that physics can't rule out that God could have created the world with its apparent 8 billion year history 2 hours ago.

Actually yeah I think you’re right.

This is called Bayesian reasoning, BTW, and you subconsciously do it all the time. Your entire life would be almost completely incomprehensible otherwise.

This is an absurdly credulous take. If we took this face value, then we'd have assume that Carl Sagan really did keep an invisible flying dragon his garage.[0] This position is the exact opposite of rational thought.

Say it with me, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

Even famed psychonaut, and inventor of the self-transforming machine elves meme, Terance McKenna said the only way to prove that it wasn't all in your head was to ask the elves a question that was easily and objectively verifiable, but you didn't know the answer.

He couldn't do that. He said so. He still publicly said that he believed they were real transdimensional intelligences, but he made no qualms about the fact that he had no proof, they're just a hallucination was very real possibility. (They are.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World#Dragon...

The extraordinary nature of a claim or its proof is by nature a subjective one.

>>Say it with me, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof."

Let's be honest with it. So someone is experiencing the self-transforming machine elves. Please provide the exact description of neuronal circuitry (numbers of neurons, network architectures, interconnectivity patterns, amounts of neurotransmitters used, spike patterns and the resulting EEGs etc) which generates this exact experience. Ask a distinguished professor of neuroscience. Use integrated information theory, emergent properties, quantum collapse in microtubules, whatever currently established paradigm - and provide the exact, 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state that presumably generates this exact experience, also allowing to differentiate from all other experiences like just "machine elves", "non-self-transforming machine elves" or elves with any other properties. Or just begin with the 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state/circuitry generating the taste of vanilla, which would be distinctly differentiable from the state/circuitry generating a taste of chocolate or garlic.

I think the preponderance of evidence points strongly to these phenomena being purely mental - in particular the vast majority of conscious behaving entities which we encounter on a regular basis are physical objects with certain properties (having a brain is the big one) and what we know about physics, biology, computation, and neuroscience makes a pretty compelling case that the physical object in question (the brain) is intimately, probably one to one, connected with the phenomenon we identify as the entity. It would be very strange if we found evidence of non-material entities given this context. And in the case of the self-transforming machine elves we very clearly have a compatible alternate hypothesis: they are generated by the brain which we are mucking around in with chemicals which are known to disrupt its behavior.

I think you may have touched on the actual lesson of psychedelics:

"I think the preponderance of evidence points strongly to these phenomena being purely mental"

Agreed. Along with all phenomena anyone experiences in general.

We all create reality strictly in our heads which corresponds, with varying degrees of accuracy, to external phenomena.

We like to think this is not the case and we are in possession of "objective fact", or maybe we are not at this moment, but objective reality certainly is out there and we are on track to get it.

But maybe it's really just mental abstractions all the way down. All the way down into the earliest evolutionary days of perceiving distinction between light and dark.

We cannot see certain wavelengths of light for example. But butterflies can. So when I look at a flower with UV markings and a butterfly looks at the same flower, who is right? How much more "information" is available about (for instance) this flower if we could only perceive it? How much magnesium is in it? How about if we couldn't see things that were not static for more then a day just like we can't see sub-millisecond motion with our eyes and have to measure it with instruments? Would the flower even exist for us in casual every day life at that point?

We have monkey eyes for the most part. We see what a highly evolved monkey would need to see, no less, no more. This in my opinion is what is so startling (and potentially therapeutic) about psychedelics. It awakens us to the fact that perception, which we firmly believed to be unassailable reality, is just perception and there exists the possibility to think about things in new ways, to create a new reality in a manner of speaking.

There is a huge difference between believing "perception is possession of objective fact" and "its mental abstractions all the way down," but I think a reasonable appraisal of the world makes both almost certainly equally wrong. My assertion that the machine elves are mental phenomena should not be taken to mean that I think everything is, which I think is a pretty silly idea.

When we perceive something, anything, it comes to us strictly as a mental (or emotional or sensational if you like) projection.

In other words, our perception is inevitably subjective and personalized.

Now most of us can agree on many things, but this is because we have the same frames of reference (as modern humans etc). Under normal circumstances we have similar mental models and similar perceptive facilities which given similar phenomena produce agreement.

But this agreement doesn't doesn't necessarily tell us what a phenomena actually "is" in objective fact, nor give us all available information about the phenomena. It only means we agree on a picture of objective reality (which is important for our species) and that our mental models more or less work to guide us around. But that in no way implies we are, nor are necessarily capable of being, in full possession of actual objective reality.

If we were an gnat 1/2 mm in length with a 3 day lifespan and many less neurons we would probably perceive things very differently. Or (as a thought experiment) if we were Lord God of the universe, immortal creator of time and space.

Point being, all reality we experience goes through our minds, our experiences, our filters and the picture at the end corresponds roughly with something we call "objective reality".

This isn't to bash on objective science nor promote superstition or argue for the objective physical existence of machine elves either. Some models and perceptional frameworks work better then others when you are trying to survive as a species and rational measurable science is pretty powerful tool. But sometimes, maybe especially with therapy issues it could be useful to back up and remember we have a frame of reference. It can be changed to some extent.

When someone sees a "machine elf" yes they are hallucinating, we can agree on that and we sober people don't see the elf nor can we measure it with instruments so it's reasonable to say it's simply a mirage or a mental trick.

But is there perhaps some underlying "reality" to machine elves that is translated as a "machine elf" because what the hell else could you call it? Maybe not an external sentient being, but part of a collective unconscious we share as humans? Or maybe (less probably imo) there is more sentience in the universe then we currently understand? I don't really know, but that so many people have similar experiences is interesting and perhaps worth exploring to better understand what we as humans are underneath this superficial top floor of consciousness.

I'm not saying that machine elves definitely don't exist and I'm certainly not saying that my collection of things I think are true are objectively true. I'm simply saying that from my point of view its very unlikely that machine elves being real is the explanation for people reporting interactions with machine elves.

I believe its important to explore these experiences and I think people should do so, both under the aegis of science and less formal self exploration. But in the end we cannot just accept mere perception as naively correlated with reality. The process of connecting perception to reality is one of the great works of human beings and, from where I am sitting, that great work seems pretty definitively negative on machine elves.

Very interesting thoughts you've got there. Nice

>>And in the case of the self-transforming machine elves we very clearly have a compatible alternate hypothesis: they are generated by the brain

And what is the actual evidence for this alternate hypothesis? Please provide the exact description of neuronal circuitry (numbers of neurons, network architectures, interconnectivity patterns, amounts of neurotransmitters used, spike patterns and the resulting EEGs etc) which generates this exact experience. Ask a distinguished professor of neuroscience. Use integrated information theory, emergent properties, quantum collapse in microtubules, whatever currently established paradigm - and provide the exact, 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state that presumably generates this exact experience, also allowing to differentiate from all other experiences like just "machine elves", "non-self-transforming machine elves" or elves with any other properties. Or just begin with the 100% comprehensive and full description of the brain state/circuitry generating the taste of vanilla, which would be distinctly differentiable from the state/circuitry generating a taste of chocolate or garlic.

You don't need a perfect account to have a reasonable account. You've set up an absurd standard which essentially no knowledge could reasonably meet. I'm not a distinguished neuroscientist, but I've published papers in neuroscience and while we certainly can't provide a full account of the precise details of these brain states, the balance of the physical sciences, including neuroscience, leads me to strongly favor the "machine elves aren't real" hypothesis.

[flagged]

So, I think that is too dismissive, while I think the psychedelic proponents are too exuberant

Basically, I don't think the categorization matters. Like are these entities things always here and perceived if we access a certain plane, or are these mere configurations and figments of our brain that can be repeated. To me, thats not important. Its important if the reconfiguration of the brain is useful, therapeutic, repeatable, what side effects are there, whats going on with people predisposed to schizophrenia that psychedelics seem to exacerbate permanently. What’s going on with floaters/HPPD.

Can LSD be refined for the parts that are useful for us, or do we simply slap fine print about potential side effects for those with a family history of schizophrenia on it like …. every other FDA approved drug.

I think fawning over something in the 1950s is juvenile, when there probably are advances possible since then to that substance.

But I would like it to at least reach parity with Big Pharma’s designer drugs with clinical trials and listed side effects, instead of just anecdotes percolating rave communities.

Rave communities? This is from research and patient panel interview that was hosted after the publication. Minus the hoffman stuff.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37897244/

https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI?si=qnJ8UhOztRjshEkf

I was replying to r2 about the path they had taken the discussion, which was no longer about the article

but you knew that. consider reading it again with that interpretation if you didn’t know that.

> we shouldn't be too surprised when abnormal inputs cause abnormal outputs, nor should we necessarily hold much stock in the matter.

While my scientific mind wants to agree with you, that same scientific mind can't help but wonder...why similar experiences are being triggered on totally unrelated people.[0]

[0]- https://health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/drugs-alcohol/dmt-...

Here's a simpler explanation that fits the facts. Humans are practically genetically identical, are raised in roughly similar cultures with similar expectations of reality, and are being dosed with drugs generally assumed to be chemically similar (in this case) paired with the experiences that are reported. So while it's imperative to keep an open mind, it's also important to keep it closed enough that your brains don't leak out.

Mass media tends to follow a lot of common themes and often they are proxies for other general societal attitudes? Many of us grew up reading at least some books in common?

Interplanetary aliens always being more developed than us (and usually hostile) is a direct proxy for xenophobia to people from other countries.

Ever wonder why there's so much hand-waving about immigrants stealin' our jerbs?

Totally unrelated is relative (ha ha). We are all the same species after all. Why wouldn't we respond similarly to similar inputs? Especally with something very different to our everyday experiences.

Just curious if you've tried psychedelics?

Not OC, and I've never tried psychedelics, but even a strong fever will make you hallucinate, and I've had a couple of those. You mind closes up into itself, and the world it creates, while extremely simplistic, feels very real.

SWIM may or may not have confided to me experiences with a variety of compounds purported to induce a wide range of subjective internal experiences upon their various methods of consumption. At any rate, I've certainly read (and donated to) Erowid.

Did any of your subjective internal experiences create objective results?

I will say prior to experiencing this myself I felt 100% certain that what you said is the truth. It just makes sense.

Now that I've had these experiences, I'm more like 90% certain that what you said is true. These experiences add a certain humility to the way I experience the world.

So in all likelihood, molecules like dmt will bind to certain serotonin receptors in the brain that cause strong and repeatable distortions in the visual field (even with eyes closed).

The human mind is great at picking out patterns and assigning meaning to them based on our experiences. So that shifting pattern in my visual space kinda looks like a face, I'm going to assign trickster machine elf to that visual pattern.

More likely than not that's what's going on. But there is probably some value in experiencing that.

Having said all that, the subjective experience of living that is very different. This feels incredibly real. As crazy as it sounds, it genuinely feels like blasting into a hyper-dimensional space and encountering a population of sentient entities.

That feeling is so real, that it leaves just the tiniest gap of "hmm, maybe I don't know everything after all. Maybe there's more to this story than I could've previously comprehended".

All to say is that while you're most likely right, I think it could be healthy to acknowledge that you're not definitely right. And leaving some room for uncertainty and exploration could prove beneficial, even for the skeptics among us.

I've done DMT a handful of times, and experienced the "entities" in several of them. After the trips ended I did not have any particular feeling that these entities were real, though the experiences were strange in a way that was quite wonderful.

One trip lacked any of these entities, but the time dilation is something that I still contemplate today, a decade or so later. It literally felt like hundreds or thousands of years had passed, with clear memory of all sorts of mundane days, etc., along with more memorable ones, particularly in the days following the trip. It had a pretty profound impact on my worldview, particularly in the few months following it, though those memories faded faster than real memories would. Feeling like I had lived for so long did make a lot of my day-to-day worries seem far less significant.

Also not anything I ascribe to any sort of mystical or extra-planar root-cause, but the ability for the brain to invent such a huge quantity of information over a ~15 minute trip is crazy to me, in the "man brains are weird" sense.

It's quite common, though poorly understood, for the brain to have surprisingly consistent hallucinations in response to a particular substance. Just like seeing the same sort of entities on DMT, people in accute alcohol withdrawal almost all report hallucinations of small-ish vermin (e.g. rats, snakes, mice, cockroaches). It seems pretty clear that these substances each produce their own particular kind of input to the brain that then gets interpreted by the very similar neural circuitry we all have to the same kind of memory/experience.

I wonder if this type of thing will actually end up helping neuroscience research as well, seeing as how some of these substances seem to push higher level concepts than what is typically easily induced in an fMRI. If they turn out to be safe for human use, they should be usable in this setting as well.

And yes, of course an entity your brain is hallucinating "knows" about your memories. It's you talking to yourself.

it seems like you're a bit too comfortable with thinking that just because the hallucinations are hallucinations they must be useless. alcoholics see snakes and rats and vermin, and that's not very much help to anybody. but all these psychedelic folks are hallucinating higher orders of intelligence that understand their trauma and can help them? hallucination or not, seems like a useful thing to have access to. far more than shadows of snakes, for sure

They didn't imply the hallucinations were useless. Rather the opposite in fact.

As the other commenter pointed out, I'm not at all claiming they are useless. I actually think it's more likely than not that the hallucination itself is what is having the therapeutic effect, that it's not a side effect at all. And even if that's not true, I think it's still very wise for the one experiencing it to engage with the hallucination.

All I'm saying is that none of this makes it even slightly remotely possible that it is anything other than a hallucination.

And note: they are not hallucinating a higher level of intelligence, they are hallucinating a way to accept their own trauma in the form of an entity that appears more intelligent. Just like when writers create a super-intelligent alien in a movie, they don't actually create something more intelligent than humans.

Now, if they were seeing an entity that explained new ways of solving partial differential equations to them, then I would say that the external entity hypothesis merits some investigation.

I'm deeply appreciative of the voice of reason in these discussions. My parents raised me in a demon haunted world, and having access to the intellectual tools which brought me out of that world fills me with gratitude toward those who helped make them widely available and continue to do so.

I have had dreams where I listen to songs and marvel at the incredible skill of the songwriter, and sadly accept that I could never have 1/10th of that skill. It was a surprise for me to reflect back on the dream and realise that of course because it was my dream I was in fact the song writer too, somehow also able to listen to it with no idea what would come next. The mind is a fascinating thing.

Was the song actually that good, or did your brain simply tickle the 'appreciation for incredible beauty' neurons while playing back some Nickelback memories?

I'm pretty sure I've experienced both, actually. Occasionally bits of it, melody or words, will survive in my memory that I think are actually good, if only I could reconstruct the rest of it. Other times I'm pretty sure there was nothing actually there.

The bit you remember might be great. The part you don't remember might never have existed. I've often "solved" problems in semi-lucid sleep, by brainstorming an idea and pursuing it, but when I push, the idea doesn't makes sense, or is meaningless, not just wrong.

Could be. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

Almost certainly the latter. But how would I know...?

The trick is that you're not just generating the song; you're generating the experience of listening to the song. Much more efficient :)

For clarity: is this to say that it is a fact that these are simpy hallucinations, nothing more?

It is a fact that they are experiences in your brain and not communication with an entity of any kind outside your brain.

The word "hallucination" sometimes has some negative connotations that suggest they are deceitful or useless experiences that you should ignore and forget. I'm not trying to say that at all. I do think it's quite possible that any therapeutic effect is entirely due to these experiences, and, if so, they should be encouraged, not ignored.

To you, what is the meaning of "fact" and "is a fact"?

What, specifically, separates a "fact" from a "non fact" in this specific context?

What possible answer do you think there could be to this question? Facts are true statements. Questioning what your interlocuter thinks a "fact" is isn't going to move the debate forward in any useful way.

> What possible answer do you think there could be to this question?

There are a few different classes/categories you'll see, but not many.

> Facts are true statements.

Do (non-specialized, as in scientific facts) facts require a proof, or not? And if not....

> Questioning what your interlocuter thinks a "fact" is isn't going to move the debate forward in any useful way.

Perhaps (is that future you see the real thing?), it may provide value though.

A fact is something which generally agrees with the accepted body of scientific knowledge, even if it challenges specific assumptions. A non fact is something that blatantly contradicts this body of knowledge without any credible new evidence.

> A fact is something which generally agrees with the accepted body of scientific knowledge, even if it challenges specific assumptions.

Is there a difference between a fact and a scientific fact (from a Philosophy of Science perspective)?

> A non fact is something that blatantly contradicts this body of knowledge without any credible new evidence.

Can you cite anything authoritative that supports this claim?

And....are "fact" and "non fact" the only two options?

Mathematical facts could be said to be different, though I think they are still compatible with my definition, so they could be considered a subset. So no, I don't believe there are other kinds of facts that don't match the criteria, though of course you can subdivide the ones that do into all sorts of categories.

And while any positive statement is either a fact or a "non fact", there are plenty of things we don't know the truth of (P=NP? Gravity is quantum?), and something that today seems a fact can be a non-fact tomorrow, though this rarely happens in physics (often, some preconditions just need to be added to make the older "fact" still correct).

I'm not sure what you want me to cite. Why I believe in this definition of "fact"?

Actually, it turns out It's been me who's been wrong this whole time....I googled "fact" and came up with:

------------

fact

/fak(t)/

noun

1. a thing that is known or proved to be true.

2. information used as evidence or as part of a report or news article

------------

I was under the impression that a distinguishing factor of "fact" was Truth, now that I know that mere information is a fact, it explains a whole bunch of what confused me about this world.

Even more interesting:

------------

truth

/tro͞oTH/

noun

1. the quality or state of being true.

2. that which is true or(!) in accordance with fact (see above) or reality

3. a fact or belief that is accepted as true

------------

I feel like I should feel silly.

> all reported that these were beings of a higher intelligence and felt that they were external

"Jaynes asserts that consciousness did not arise far back in human evolution but is a learned process based on metaphorical language. Prior to the development of consciousness, Jaynes argues humans operated under a previous mentality he called the bicameral (‘two-chambered’) mind. In the place of an internal dialogue, bicameral people experienced auditory hallucinations directing their actions, similar to the command hallucinations experienced by many people who hear voices today. These hallucinations were interpreted as the voices of chiefs, rulers, or the gods" [1].

Basically, the hypothesis that humans as late as the ancient Greeks were sort of schizophrenic [2]. (To be clear, it's a hypothesis, not science.) But it's neat to think of drugs like DMT reverting (converting?) us to that bicameral state.

[1] https://www.julianjaynes.org/about/about-jaynes-theory/overv...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

Sorry to see you're being downvoted. Origin of Consciousness is a masterpiece, even if it's wrong.

> Origin of Consciousness is a masterpiece, even if it's wrong

I read it after it had been debunked, and so parsed it as an alternate history, in a genre akin to Ted Chiang's "Omphalos" [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos_(story)

>Albert Hoffman the inventor of LSD also said he had contact with external entities on a trip (eyeball with wings) and said that it told him that they chose him to discover LSD for the sake of humanity

When will these entities share something truly useful, like the design for a working cold fusion reactor, or a cure for Alzheimer's?

Also, people really need to know that while a psychadelic trip can be healing and mystical, it can also go like this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DMT/comments/gb9ar0/dark_dmt_trip_r...

This person did an insanely high dosage of DMT. Most people can hit "breakthrough" levels at 20-30mg, and I rarely hear of even experienced DMT users taking more than 50mg. 100mg for someone on their first real trip isn't something anyone should do - and from their general attitude towards tripping solo when knowing they aren't in a great mental place, it doesn't seem like they're particularly experienced with shrooms or lsd, either.

I wouldn't cautious people against social drinking to the point of getting a buzz just because getting blackout drunk is often an unpleasant experience.

Why is saving the entire world your only idea of usefulness?

Yes hallucinating higher powers making contact with plans for the subject to make the world better is… a consistent but rarely encountered feature of the human brain. Go read the descriptions of angels in the Bible and it reads just like somebody tripping.

One of the reasons hallucinogens are dangerous is that there’s a risk that users will believe in their hallucinations and try to start cults.

Timothy Leary was one of these drug-induced zealots and he among others were the reasons LSD et al got banned in the first place. They wanted to overthrow society and implement a quasi-religion based on the drugs.

Society has already been overthrown with a quasi-religion based on drugs. They're trying to make experimental gene therapy MANDATORY right now. Even though 3 million people mysteriously died after receiving the previous "vaccine".

There is psychological approach called internal family system, it explains personality as collection of entities that cooperate unaware of each other. Perhaps some drugs disturb this to such extend that it feels like there are multiple people in consciousness.

If those external entities were real, we wouldn't need to wait for science, some shaman would just go to the spirit realm and get told about bacteria.

And also the argument that people have demons in them: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-others-with....

I read some of the guy's book. It's a trip.

If those external entities were real, we wouldn't need to wait for science, some shaman would just go to the spirit realm and get told about bacteria.

A great point.

People with DID and schizophrenia feel this way.

Are you saying that speaking to external beings while tripping is potentially a treatment for mental health?

I mean yeah, that's what it feels like when you really trip and sometimes it can be really exciting, sometimes it's interesting and feels informative, and sometimes it's completely terrible.

The best feeling in the world is when you remember that you took drugs and the people telling you that you are stuck on a foreign planet in cold and darkness away from everyone you know for eternity aren't real, that the sun is in fact coming up and you are just on earth in your friends backyard.

I have a really hard time thinking anyone that proposes tripping as a viable solution to true mental health problems is a serious person.

There's basically two camps of people in that arena, and it's people that haven't done many drugs, and people that did too many drugs.

> Are you saying that speaking to external beings while tripping is potentially a treatment for mental health?

"External" but really just products of your brain, and yes, I could see how this would be helpful. Taking such drugs seem like giving a whack to the brain to the point you enter a kind of "debug mode"; perhaps some issues that you can't normally untangle are accessible directly in that mode. At the very least, you get to poke at your internal state from angles normally not available to you, so some of your mental blocks could shake loose and fall back into place.

(I wouldn't know, I never took anything like it or had any similar experiences, but that's what I gather from reading countless stories and reports of those who did.)

"Debug mode" is also my favorite way of putting it, and yes it does seem to give me greater access to retrieve memories and discover, re-evaluate, and re-program heuristics I thought were just background constants.

I've also read that some who are quite experienced in lucid dreaming can have conversations with their subconscious by embodiment into a character in their dream. I bet there is a lot of potential utility to be discovered there.

if we were to dramatically oversimplify it, we could say that these drugs grant someone a perspective that they were unable or unwilling to achieve through their typical thought processes

it's not hard to imagine why sometimes that can be helpful, and we can try to optimize towards "usually helpful" — but sure they could also be harmful or plain useless

The vast majority of people report their experiences with the DMT "Machine Elves" as being positive. Very few report the experience as being negative, and I have very very very rarely heard of a bad trip in the same vein that you see occur a significant amount of the time with shrooms and LSD.

Not all of my DMT trips involved these other entities, but when they did, they frequently had something to show me or say to me. These things weren't "new" knowledge - how could it be? I don't believe these are actually external entities - but instead things that on some level I knew to be true, but had trouble internalizing and operating on. These experiences helped integrate that knowledge from something I understood on a conceptual basis to something I could actually put in practice. One of my first serious long-term relationships ended when I was cheated on, and it resulted in me having some serious trust issues in relationships after that. I "knew" that this is a risk in relationships, but that people CAN be faithful, and that allowing these trust issues to fester would almost certainly directly result in relationships failing because of them. That didn't stop me from doing the things that I knew I shouldn't. A DMT trip with some experiences related to this didn't teach me anything new, but after I found it significantly easier to move past those trust issues and become a much better partner in relationships.

If I had to guess, something about being exposed to this information in such an altered state of conscious can allow for you internalize it when you otherwise struggle in your normal state of being.

> I have a really hard time thinking anyone that proposes tripping as a viable solution to true mental health problems is a serious person.

This seems likely to be a personal bias. There is a lot of real-deal research from serious people showing promising results.

As someone who did a far amount of psychedelics decades ago I can state for certain that not all "tripping" is the same, depending on a variety of factors. LSD is completely different than psilocybin which is completely different than peyote. All of these trips are completely different based on your mental state, your surroundings and the size of your dose (among other things). Given the wide array of mental health problems people suffer, I find it absurd to assert that there it is impossible that psychedelics offer no potential treatment for some of these problems. That isn't to say they are a cure-all, are suitable for treating all patients, or all conditions, but it is to say that there has been very promising research done to suggest that some psychedelics do improve some mental health problems. There has been convincing research done on the treatment of PTSD and alcoholism, and research in this field has really only begun to get off the ground.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9577917/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9710723/

> One of Strassmans patients years ago said on DMT that these entities could share more with us if we learn to make extended contact.

If you want to hear some really wild stories read Ayahuasca In My Blood: 25 Years of Medicine Dreaming. Such as ayahuasca curing a man who received a bushmaster bite or entities revealing an herbal cure for a woman's liver failure.

> The DMTx participants all reported... that these were beings of a higher intelligence and felt that they were external.

This is not true. I know multiple DMTx participants and many report that the beings are conjurations of their own subconscious, i.e. very much "internal."

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