Out of Your Head
nautil.us
nautil.us
It was never a visual manifestation of a recognisable shape, it was just a sense that there was another consciousness in the room with me. I never saw machine elves or anything, I just felt strongly that there was a benevolent female presence in the corner of the room. Why I felt it was female I can't say but in the moment I was absolutely certain.
I am almost pathologically sceptical and I have absolutely zero belief in anything metaphysical. I believe that capability is simply not within me. I can see how other people would believe that there is something beyond though.
When probing into what this might actually mean, there's never really any substance there. And from what I can tell most of the experiments in actually living these different lives in the 60s and 70s failed because when it comes down to it, communal living requires idealism, commitment and hard graft. Those last two are often missing and the first fades.
I've had my "I am one with the fabric of the universe" moments. I've seen things of great beauty on psychedelics, I've had thoughts twist and turn in impossible ways... but in the end it would take extraordinary evidence to persuade me it's anything other then the subjective experience brought on by a drug twisting my brain. From the article -
> If people say they’ve talked with angels or dead ancestors, should we dismiss them as raving, drug-addled trippers?
No, because that's prejudicial and dismissive, but we probably should think of those experiences in terms of an internal psychedelic journey conjured up by the brain on drugs, rather than some sort of extrinsic interaction with the universe. At least until someone comes up with something other than speculation as evidence.
I ended up trying DMT a few times, and decided (at least for awhile), that the brain was a "chemical radio," able to be tuned to the different frequencies of reality with these substances. It was a very wispy way of explaining how the brain processes input in an altered state, but worked really well for me at the time.
I've had trips like that but then I also had trips where I saw things like Pikachu, bees, jesters, machine elves (people-like things). But then the more I did it they got more defined and were just hallucinations of people (some were fictional characters). There was also progression from "feels like you're getting a message" -> "hearing something that's unintelligible" -> "hearing full sentences in English". I'm skeptical of the metaphysical or meaningful interpretations just because the more I did it the more nonsensical it seemed.
Sounds similar to dreams where you tell an amazing joke or story and people are laughing uncontrollably and you feel like the funniest person in the world, then if you can recall the joke on waking it is total nonsense. Maybe it is more about transferring emotion/feeling than language.
A month ago, I got a dream where I saw my wife and she passed me a note saying "I love you." I woke up and I realized that even my subconscious mind believed that she loved me. A lovely thing to realize.
To be fair, most dreams don't mean anything to me.
To put this more succinctly:
If your brain tells you that #2 pencils are sacred universal objects, you will be 100% convinced that it is true. The conscious subject will do an analyses and be as sure as the sky is blue that #2 pencils are sacred.
Crazy might be an apt term to describe them, but they weren't dangerous or harmful people. Quiet the opposite actually. However talking to them an listening to them talk to each other, it was clear that they had lost contact with the ground, but they were convinced they were more in touch with it than anyone else. To the point they could feel that they were more in touch than anyone else.
Take a fan and point it at someone's back and they will feel the breeze there. Now cross wires in the brain that replicates the same feeling, even in the absence of the fan. They will be just as convinced that the breeze is there. Now do the same thing but for something that cannot be as simply empirically verified as the presence of a fan. And then short out the wires that would allow one to "step back" and see rethink. Maybe that is crazy, I don't know.
We don't really know how brains work, or how reality works, so I think it's premature to be confident about either subject.
There may indeed be things which we can't detect, even with our best instruments, that we don't have a suitable explanation for.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_Cluster#Significance_to...
Then you also have to accept that you're not talking about objective reality in any way but isolated to human experience and limited by our cognitive and experimental abilities.
It's pretty clear that we as ugly giant bags of mostly water don't perceive much of what's going on and tack a lot of made up shit on top to make it more functional. Like colours which aren't really a thing, objectively speaking (ask a colour blind person or check what the JWST sees in outer space).
And yet we know that we don't see these things, because we can detect them indirectly. And we've been finding methods of better indirect detection of literally anything for millennia and mapping it all into the areas we can detect. If there was a configuration of carbon in our heads that mixed with drugs detects something, we'd have built a artificial sensor out of it by now (alas it is but random noise that does not correlate with anything, not even itself). So while there's probably still particles and fields that we can't detect yet and some we even know we don't know about (ahem dark matter/energy ahem), it wouldn't be too much hubris to say we've got most of it covered by now.
Now sure, a person during the roman times or the middle ages could be caught saying the same thing and couldn't be more wrong. And sure it's entirely possible that we'll figure something out that will revolutionize our knowledge of the universe entirely... but every time general relativity predicts yet another observation to an annoying level of perfection that chance becomes smaller and smaller.
I'll again say that I think it's extremely hubristic to think that human civilization has somehow figured out "most" scientific knowledge in the last couple of centuries. This human-centered attitude is not unique, though, which is kind of my point: it's not a new thing at all to think that the current level of knowledge has nowhere to go. It's just the typical human hubris that has been with us forever.
We're certainly still wrong about exotic types of matter, gravity, fundamental particles, the ways completely arbitrary things function, like genes in a cell, etc... but we know that cells exist, what they're composed of, and we're definitely not wrong about that, and that is frankly infinitely more knowledge than we've ever had before. What's left to find are mostly increasingly more nitpicky details that are nonetheless very important, but they don't change our understanding anywhere nearly as drastically.
To wrap back around to my original point, in comparison to everything else the amount of knowledge we've gained on paranormal things since tribal shaman times is about zero. It's still all hearsay and speculation and it's not for the lack of trying.
Just to put loud in perspective: seems like cavitation produces ultrasound in the ~30db range at the highest[1], which is roughly the level of a whisper. I haven't knowingly captured trees in my ultrasound field recording, but it seems fun to try. That should be loud enough to pick up something with an ultrasonic recorder close by, I'd think, which is pretty cool -- I assumed you'd need to do something like David Dunn and embed microphones into the trees.
[1] https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-...
:)
In such a case, the existence of a higher metaphysical plane is purely aesthetic. In terms of predictions, both models are equally correct, being identical. The correctness of the internal representation is beyond epistemological limits, and arguably a meaningless or ill-formed proposition. For a significant difference, the models must make different predictions. But the conventional understanding (say the standard model) is carefully constructed and deviations by laypeople are invariably simplifications or are due to impaired reality testing.
This situation is the same as religion, because it is one. Either the religion doesn't make predictions about reality, in which case it's difference is purely aesthetic (as a model of reality), or it does and in practice is either trivially falsifiable or copying what is already known (note that the old well known religions have long since had their predictions tested).
Psychedelic experiences could, in theory, produce interesting hypotheses about reality; just like Scientology and the "Twin flame" people could. But in practice it almost always seems to produce crackpot stuff like "you can make a perceptual motion machine with time crystals and fractals; also Einstein, Aristotle, and Tupac already knew this but no one was paying attention; luckily drug-induced divine revelation has bequeathed this information via direct transmission; if only everyone else experienced ego death, then maybe they could be as great as I".
This is the hubris I perceive in the idea that scientists, philosophers, etc. that have dedicated their life to the study of particular tiny pieces of reality and honed a disciplined sense of intellectual rigor are going to be outdone by random people tripping. It is uniquely offensive and arrogant.
That said, in so far as 'reality' is 'my model of reality', individuals may gain psychological insight by partaking in 'spiritual' activity, including psychedelics, and it follows that they may gain a 'special understanding of (their) reality' in that way. The problems are the magical thinking implicated in universalizing personal insight, the pitfall of assuming independence of realities beyond subjective experience, the belief subjective perception is unlimited by physical reality, and in some a tendency to insist that such insight cannot be gained in other (more mundane) ways.
Whether one believes in one thing or another is a personal value system and neither side should dominate.
But... why is it dangerous to try and theorize that there is something out there bigger than our brain?
"a theory is a well-substantiated explanation of the natural world that is based on the scientific method and uses facts, hypotheses, and laws"
Because it's not theorizing, it's wishful thinking. And for some reason it almost always leads to people telling other people how to live their lives based on the "thing that's bigger than our brain" (e.g. god, because that's what you're all trying to imply). That's why it's dangerous.
Thus your position should be approximately: There exists non-zero probability that agency in the physical universe is embedded but since its small and "external" to our agency, one has no reason (ability?) to believe in other than by stating this as their best model.
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Englightement is to know that death means merely the state after which what happens cannot be predicted because you are dead.
But what is relationship between intelligence & immortality?
When a company forms it is useful, if not entirely accurate, to describe it as an intelligent agent. This entity does not physically exist, the soul of Disney is not in it's avatar micky mouse, or it's CEO, it's in the (collection of) minds of everyone that sees Disney as an entity. Santa Clause does not exist outside your imagination, yet parents act as the egregore's hands giving out presents. To a real extent, Santa Clause is the cause of acts of good will, and even though Santa doesn't physically exist, physical actions are taken in Santa's name. Same with any accolades of any religion. Or employee's of a company.
Its truth value is orthogonal to it's predictive value, and it is very predictive. See, there are two kinds of general groups within the egregore, the hands (creators, generators, those occupied with the 'mission' of the egregore) and the mouth (those occupied with feeding and sustaining an egregore, sales/marketing). The hands start off in charge and everything works, but eventually the mouth gets control and eats the hands, starving the egregore.
An egregore eats it's own hands and starves to death. This is exactly what happened with Boeing.
It could be modeled from an individual's mind, but some concepts take a village to execute, and some(times) things emerge when you put a bunch of smaller things together. A wave isn't the matter in which it materializes, it's something emergent from when you move some material in a certain way.
But yeah, Atheist here, this is about as esoteric as I get :)
> Its truth value is orthogonal to its predictive value
This seems to imply that the integrity of a company's information/communication functions (truth value) is unrelated to its ability to make accurate predictions about future events ... Why is this significant, or have I misunderstood?
To clarify the possible misunderstanding: 'its' is referring to the toy model of the egregore (not any particular company/egregor), My point is useful things are useful regardless of them being strictly true.
We are just a clump of matter floating through space with some crude detection devices equipped so we can tell when electromagnetic waves hit us. If the brain is just forcing all this input into some kind of reality, with illusions like the flow of time to attempt to predict the constant change/entropy going on around it, then couldn't drugs expand that capacity?
In other words, if time is just perception of changing states in the universe, and there is no past/present/future, just states, then we aren't really experiencing a "present", but an illusion created by using patterns from past state changes. In that case if drugs expanded that pattern detection then you could start altering your "present" much more powerfully, e.g. vividly replaying past states, or perceiving state changes that you would normally filter out, like a conversation someone is having across the street.
Sorry also I can't really express this correctly and it also may be total nonsense!
But as someone else said, the next day you don't care anymore and you don't actually think you unlocked a new dimension. The experience of what drugs feel like doesn't seem like a valid way to get at the true nature of anything.
Our perception of the universe is part of the universe.
We exist in the world and are a part of the world.
Learning to think in new ways can be a powerful force.
Is Nautil.us worth the subscription.
I'm trying to find a modern magazine that is like the old "OMNI" from the 70's and 80's. Wondering if this is it?
I can't find it, and I remember that it was just the author's educated guess. Nonetheless it stuck with me.
This doesn't make any sense... morphine is not a hallucinogen or a psychedelic. You don't "trip" on it. I have a feeling the journalist mixed something up here.
Anyone who has been a caregiver to someone with prescription opioids can confirm.
Something that feels like a few minutes but lasts 13 hours certainly sounds like induced sleep.