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.
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.
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.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37897244/
https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI?si=qnJ8UhOztRjshEkf
but you knew that. consider reading it again with that interpretation if you didn’t know that.
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-...
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?
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.
If I'm on The Truman Show, could someone please spill the beans?
Disappointing the burden of proof is not deemed necessary in this case!
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
More pertinently, I am talking here on a purely social and practical level. You seem to have taken it as a moral statement.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
And even if so: is it necessarily true?
PS: did you notice you're using the same methodology "believers" use: it's obvious?
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.
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?
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?
"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.
> Did atoms exist before they were discovered to exist?
We were certainly able to detect atoms before we figured out the exact details.
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.
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.)
"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
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.
This is a thing of beauty.
I humbly concede victory to you good sir - may we meet again.
--
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.
"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.
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 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.