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Comment by darius42 | Hacker News Reader

When I did 2 hits of acid, I had the exact opposite experience of seeing God. The fact that such a tiny amount of a mere chemical could effect my "soul" so profoundly was proof positive that the soul is completely material.

I already believed this intellectually, but this experience solidified this knowledge into my very being. So personally, I would recommended experimenting with a psychedelic or two for those who wish to study Philosophy.

In my experience, LSD dosing is exponential, so I can't fathom what taking a dose thousands of times a typically heavy dose would do to you. People I know who occasionally did like 10 hit doses, never fully returned to reality, if you ask me. I might have an inkling of what it would be like from a few experiences with nitrous, but this lasts for a couple of minutes, not for hours and hours, which would end up making a huge qualitative difference.

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"When I did 2 hits of acid, I had the exact opposite experience of seeing God. The fact that such a tiny amount of a mere chemical could effect my "soul" so profoundly was proof positive that the soul is completely material."

Your so-called "soul" may in fact be "completely material", but I don't think what you describe above proves it.

There was a famous mystic who once said something like, "when you put a lit match to cotton, it is not the fire that burns the cotton, but God."

Relating it back to your account, how can you know if it was in fact the chemical that changed your consciousness and not the grace of God (or gods, or the devil, some alient, or the program/programmer running your virtual reality, etc).

There could be some cause that caused you to both take the chemical and to have the experience. Or they could be caused by two independent things, with the experiences just happening to succeed one another in time (see Hume's critique of causality).

Finally, I'm not a physicist, but from what I've read, even physicists now have a lot of trouble defining "matter" as such. I don't think they even use the term much at all anymore. And, whatever reality happens to be, it might be infinitely divisible, and ultimately not completely understandable or knowable as far as science is concerned. At the very least, science now does not have a full understanding of it, and to say that science will one day have such a full understanding is merely an expression of faith.

> Your so-called "soul" may in fact be "completely material", but I don't think what you describe above proves it.

Re Hume, not to mention Leibnitz, I didn't mean proof to a logical certainty. I meant proof beyond all reasonable doubt. But if you want to believe that God hides super-soul-cleanser inside simple chemicals, then more power to ya!

To tell you the truth, I actually believe in epiphenomenalism, which is a kind of materialist dualism, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.

> Finally, I'm not a physicist, but from what I've read, even physicists now have a lot of trouble defining "matter" as such.

As someone with physics training I do not see physicists having this trouble.

> I don't think they even use the term much at all anymore.

Most the physicists I know use it often.

Please be a little more careful when spreading information you are not sure about. The best way in my opinion is to be specific, give concrete examples, and/or give specific resources that you drew your conclusion from; preferably resources with concise explanations, more people will look into them that way and get back to you with their analysis of the source, it's like getting a free tutor.

You say this and you don't give him a serious response.

>As someone with physics training I do not see physicists having this trouble

What is definitively known about mass besides E = mc^2 and the limited information we now about the Higgs Boson?

>Most the physicists I know use it often I'm glad the physicists you know use it often. Why is it used so often? If it was known what matter and mass was there would be no need to discuss it.

We know quite a lot about matter, actually. We can describe huge swaths of its properties: we can categorize it into different particles, we know how it acts in various fields, we can tear it apart and build it back up. All in all, quite a lot of knowledge.

Also, the Higgs boson is more interesting for its evidence in spontaneous electroweak symmetry breaking than for its ramifications on matter. Despite what popular science tells you, it actually doesn't give most of what you think of as "matter" its mass, that's quantum chromodynamic interactions.

"I can't fathom what taking a dose thousands of times a typically heavy dose would do to you."

Pretty sure there are limits to the subjective experience somewhere, and above them there won't be much difference.

Of course somewhere up there is the LD50 as well, but that's pretty huge for ergoloids AFAICT.

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