Whenever I hear these stories about multiple cultures having the same hallucination, I think that we have to give some weight to the possibility that the little people are real and the mushrooms just let us see them.
Maybe having the same chemical stimulants going through the same basic processing hardware causes the same outputs. But that's just like my opinion man.
> It doesn't matter which side of the road you drive on. It matters that everyone else is also driving on that side.
I bet if all our brains were wired to constantly see little people, we would adapt and eventually pick up on subtle cues related to the environment or our emotions.
Some student taking an intro to cultural anthropology course would be shocked to find out that some culture has a very different relationship to their little people as she does to her little people. Strangers making small talk on the subway would ask each other what their little people have been up to today. Someone on Hackernews would be reading an article about an herb that can make the little people completely invisible for days.
1. There are invisible tiny people that only a specific mushroom that hits your brain in a very specific way can let you see
2. There aren't invisible tiny people but a specific mushroom that hits your brain in a very specific way makes you hallucinate a specific thing
0. There are tiny people who are not invisible but there is something that makes it so humans ignore them. That specific mushroom interfered with whatever that is so that we can see them.
An argument for #0 and in favor of #2 is the #2 requires the mushroom to cause an hallucination that includes a lot of generated detail to be realistic and consistent with how an actual tiny person would behave and affect the world.
#0 on the other hand is just turning something off.
An argument for #0 over #1 is that #0 does not require actual invisibility. If there were actually invisible tiny people we still probably would have discovered by now the physical mechanism that can make things invisible, which w e have not. Unless we are going to consider magic or psychic powers or some other such thing completely beyond known physics we can almost certainly rule out actual invisibility.
If they aren't invisible, my cat would have caught and killed dozens of them, and then I'd be smelling their rotting corpses around my house and slipping on their bodies.
Also presumably they'd end up in many pictures, which even if we somehow ignored them still in all photographs AI would still see, as would car lidar systems, etc.
(I guess the likelier theory is that a mushroom that causes hallucination is causing hallucination)
Also of course the tiny people do not seem to causally interact with their physical environment in any measurable way (at least to observers of the test subject) so that already strongly points towards hallucinations but that kind of thinking isn't how you get a grant.
What if we all see the exact same thing
That also describes data centers ;)
How can chemical compounds contain an entire script of what the little people can and cannot do?
There are some hallucinogens that only produce auditory hallucinations. We don't really have a reason to think those are real sounds.
There are others that will not make you visually hallucinate in the regular sense, but will mess with how your brain interprets what you see - scrambling your internal visual object classifiers, so to speak - so that distinct things sort of melt together in your mind.
Hallucinogens are wild. But I think they are the same as any other drug that has predictable effects, like alcohol or pot.
Maybe it throws us for a loop because subjective experience of hallucinogens are so bizarre and varied and often intense. They truly do weird things to us.
How could an index finger contain an entire movie? presses play
I understand what you’re trying to say, but this sentence could be an argument against DNA. It’s also chemical compounds that contain an entire script of what our species can and cannot do - and much more.
Did you not read the article?
Please stop attempting to flame/throw petty shade because you don't like that I disagreed with you.
Your posting from a rando pseudonym account on HN, as far as I can tell. It’s not even possible for passing readers (including me) to determine who is actually behind it…
So who would I be “flaming”?
Plus given the nonsensical claim, it wouldn’t even make sense for me to do anything other than point that out.