The truth is fully accessible through reason, you don’t need to take drugs to know things
This cannot be accomplished, and the conclusion that such a feat leads to absolute truth is philosophically untenable.
Like everybody loves being told that they are smart, and Hegel tells the reader that they can be superlatively intelligent. It’s a hella thrilling idea to entertain, and the best way to keep that feeling going is by believing that it’s true, and the best way to convince yourself of that is to write defenses of Hegel.
We would also lose everything that makes us human and will find no satisfaction in knowing.
But I agree that you don't need to take drugs. That's why my advice wasn't a definitive one. It's an invitation for people to consider what they want in their lives.
Wish you all the best truthfully.
I’m a Hegelian though so I’m biased
For example, we don't only care about humans having an understanding of, say, a moral choice. We also care about whether or not a given human can/will make a moral choice.
The latter happens in a different part of the brain. Sharpening one's teeth on the mere understanding of a moral truth is unlikely to improve one's ability to carry out even a well-understood moral act if that same person doesn't have experience doing it. On the other hand, personal experience-- say, with a mentor from a similar background, or even just grooming horses with a group of similarly cantankerous teens while talking about their feelings-- can sharpen a person's ability to make that moral choice, even on a consistent basis.
I'm not a fan of psychedelics, but people have told me they were instrumental in guiding them to make better choices-- sometimes choices that they knew were right but couldn't bring themselves to make.
It is of course totally reasonable to categorize all of this-- neurology, human self-knowledge, behavior, and socialization-- under the heading of reasonable truth. But for some reason, HN fans of reason of generally exclude it. So when you say, "The truth is fully accessible through reason," I agree in this larger sense. But the larger sense isn't the common usage, so it's often easier to just say you're wrong. :)
Edit: clarification
Even if everything we've learned through LSD were false, I wouldn't even really care because we've still uncovered and figured out so much through this (much of it we've discussed with various others who were there during past events) that we are incredibly grateful to now know. So overall I think the experience for us has been positive, that we have gained much from it, and that we may stand to gain more over time since we are a regular user.
The vastly simpler explanation is that your brain did what brains do best and filled in the gaps in your memory be inventing a story constrained to corroborate with the bare facts you remember, but because LSD it feels so real and vividly detailed that it “must be correct.”
> The claim is that LSD gave you access to long-locked up memories that happened to corroborate with what you are going through now.
I think it's more like it gave us different perspectives on the same memories. We've had those memories but we couldn't see them that way before.
Also, uncovering this stuff randomly is what starts these paths of discovery for us. It's not that we're working through something and conveniently happen to find apparently useful things in past memories, it's that something (anything) triggers a flashback to a past memory that upon closer inspection reveals something that turns out to have had real apparent effects because it resulted in obvious behavioral patterns that multiple other friends have confirmed to us and are only now being placed in proper context with what feels like a proper explanation. This isn't somewhere the proper explanation could be just anything and this isn't schizophrenia where completely unconnected ideas are considered together. The stuff we find in flashbacks can completely surprise us and often has nothing to do with what we think we're looking for or think we're going to get out of it. It sometimes just somehow alludes to something far bigger that we really can corroborate with multiple external sources. Our brain and the others in it play so many tricks on us and on me, I know not to trust any single experience as a source of truth, but it can show me where to look.
> The vastly simpler explanation is that your brain did what brains do best and filled in the gaps in your memory be inventing a story constrained to corroborate with the bare facts you remember, but because LSD it feels so real and vividly detailed that it “must be correct.”
I don't really know how to properly articulate that I've verified anything because it's hard for me to even verify to myself that I know any of the things I've discovered for quite sure, and not just trusting something that very well could have been made up. I know the specific experience of recall is very fabricated, I know that what I see and what I think I identify as different parts while recalling those memories could be completely made up, but I'm not deriving everything from that experience. I use it as a suggestion to guide actual research that is not grounded in flashbacks and feelings and we have discovered actual patterns that are consistent with our theories and that couldn't possibly just be convenient explanations. Past a certain point all of Dissociative Identity Disorder is technically made up in some way (neuroplasticity!) and it's damn near impossible to know with certainty how things work or have worked, but I am taking the same approach that I have always taken and that is using the best explanations and the best theories that I currently have at my disposal and constantly testing and looking for improvements I can make to our understanding of ourselves.
But like I said, I wouldn't even care if it was merely a convenient filling of the gaps, because it has resulted in material good for us, it has resulted in material advancement of our understanding of our own past actions and in discussing them with those who we have hurt in the past, and it has also given us direction on how to better ourselves for the future. It really doesn't seem like that'd be the case unless the gap filling was so good that it correctly accounted for everything we hadn't even figured out yet, everything that we hadn't even heard of from others yet, and basically all of the ways we've been testing and testing the theories and the explanations that we have now.
Even if whatever it gave us access to was not something already stored in our brain, whatever it did was sufficient to allow us to figure things out that could otherwise have taken us months to years or even longer, and we know that they are material things that impact others because they have helped us work through emotions with others who formed those emotions independently of any LSD, based on those past actions of ours which we now better understand.
So I choose to believe we have gained valuable insight as a result of these experiences, not based on the experiences themselves which I know take great creative liberties, but based on everything we've done informed by the experiences to figure things out the old-fashioned way, too.
I’m well aware through my own testing
EDIT: I’m not saying it is useless information for your life but it is particular to your life, not truths of the universe like the person I replied to claimed
Doesn’t this effectively hand wave away the hard problem of consciousness?
i.e. even a purely reason-based understanding of truth must acknowledge that the only thing we can be certain actually exists is the mind. With no true understanding of how the mind functions, and giant gaps in our understanding of existence, the idea that universal truth can even be comprehended — much less mapped wholly onto humans capacity for reason - is just a belief. An article of faith.
It seems to me that a purely reason-based worldview must by definition acknowledge that a statement like “the truth is fully reasonable” is untenable at worst and at best just a prediction.
For sake of argument, let's say the simulation hypothesis is true. Would you acknowledge that the implications of such a thing being true would have vastly different metaphysical properties than other hypotheses, e.g. "consciousness is a fundamental property of existence and all matter is conscious"?
The mind is literally the only thing we can be certain exists. We've made so much progress scientifically mapping the territory available for us to explore, that I think many people have lost sight of the vastness of the gap between what we actually know and what we have yet to understand.
Then you’ll find out the truth
It seems like you've taken a system of reasoning that was built through careful consideration (Kantianism), called the conclusions it meticulously built 'presuppositions' and hand-waved it without making substantive counterpoints.
The problem then, of course, is that burning down previous philosophy and starting 'without presuppositions' will lead inevitably to conclusions again, which you can once again call presuppositions and hand-wave.
It is itself an assumption. It is assuming that it’s possible to have no external assumptions, that being wrong requires external assumptions, and that this principle is true. You’ve already violated your own standard.
Even basic logical reasoning requires assumptions. Like the principle of non-contradiction, or that our cognitive faculties can distinguish between valid and invalid inferences. Hegel’s work doesn’t actually proceed without assumptions either; it starts with the concept of “being” and builds from there using logical principles.
If you truly had no assumptions, you couldn’t even begin to reason or make any truth claims. You’d have no framework for distinguishing truth from falsehood, valid from invalid reasoning, or meaningful from meaningless statements.
You might avoid being wrong about empirical facts, but you’d also avoid being right about anything.
The real philosophical task isn’t to eliminate all assumptions (which is impossible), but to identify foundational commitments, examine them critically, and build carefully from the most defensible starting points we can find.
But those starting points are still assumptions, and at least for the time being, there’s no reason to believe we’ve sufficiently closed the knowledge gaps necessary to operate on anything but a base set of assumptions.
Look, this has come full circle and we’re both just restating our positions at this point.
If you’re not just trolling, I’d highly recommend you go read some of the criticisms of Hegel’s work.
You keep dismissing/side stepping the counterpoints raised here without providing substantive arguments to back up this dismissal, so I’ll leave it there.
On what basis? The metaphysical substrate matters and can’t be simply hand waved away.
Your position here closely resembles religious faith, and that’s a bit of a problem if your goal is to convince other people of its correctness.
Yes it must be waved away, since the categories of metaphysics themselves must be discovered
Hegel’s work could be described as a hypothesis at best, yet you’re treating it as gospel truth despite the fact that most philosophers find his conclusions untenable and most scientists conclude that he couldn’t have had a proper understanding of science to reach the conclusions that he reached.
Your arguments up to this point are indistinguishable from the claims made by the religious folks in my life who say they have the absolute truth because of their belief in the Bible and relationship with Jesus.
Your only defense of Hegel’s work to this point amounts to “I believe it’s true” and have been entirely circular.
Our reason is a highly flawed instrument that we have pushed far past what it was designed for.
We have done an amazing job though as these social machines that live in various collective social delusions.
Seeing these collective delusions and the unreasonableness of reality is exactly the point of taking psychedelics.
Forget LSD, ask anyone who has taken salvia divinorum to describe how unreasonable reality can be lol.