I really object to this idea that hallucinogens unlock some kind of higher plane of existence that can’t be experienced by people who don’t do these drugs.
If it were true that people who did hallucinogens did gain some kind of additional knowledge why is it they aren’t achieving things at some obviously higher rate?
If you want to use recreational or therapeutic drugs be my guest, just don’t come back telling me you’ve uncovered the secrets to the universe…
Plot twist: you’re already hallucinating, your brain just calls it reality 😂
I really didn’t like the personality changes I saw in others after taking LSD, that’s why I have no interest in psychedelics.
Admittedly I haven’t done a lot of deep diving on it, but what kinds of personality changes did you observe? I haven’t heard a lot of testimony like this around psychedelics. Mostly just people praising them.
Weeks after taking them they were still gushing how beautiful this and that treeline was. I don’t remember more, sorry ^^
Oh, they just…saw more beauty and wonder in things most folks consider ordinary? That doesn’t sound so bad, actually. XD
I don’t remember more, sorry ^^
Haha all good. Thanks for replying. :)
Me neither. This is not about psychedelics.
It’s more “I want to continue to hallucinate in the super useful way that all humans normally do, and not fuck up my brain so that useful hallucination of reality gets knocked out of whack.”
A series of still images, if the frame rate is fast enough, appears to us as smooth motion. Our eye can only focus on a tiny spot at any given time, but our brain fills in the rest of the visual field as if it’s high res based on the last time we glanced somewhere, some extrapolation and interpolation, etc. We’re somehow able to pull the sound of someone’s voice out of a crowd of noises and ignore all the irrelevant sounds to hear what someone’s saying. And then these sounds get somehow directly translated to words and concepts in our head. And if you’re looking at someone in the face as they’re talking, you can read emotions there, instead of just seeing a wrinkly slab of meat with some wet spheres near the top and some disgusting wet holes below. That’s all “hallucination” in some way. But, it’s all incredibly useful.
I know that 99% of the time if someone takes hallucinogens they come back to reality just fine. Sometimes the trip even makes them feel better. But, is it really worth messing with your brain’s delicate and super useful hallucination of the world around you?
Duuude, totally
Right, and a single marijuana cigarette will drive you to a murderous rape rampage of white women (or whatever else American bullshit propaganda you want to peddle today)…
I know that 99% of the time if someone takes hallucinogens they come back to reality just fine.
“I know that 99% of the time someone masturbates they don’t go blind” - that’s the level of nonsense you’re spouting…
Just turn on your brain for a second. Psychedelics have been legal/decriminalised in some countries for years or decades. You’re saying 1 in a 100 trips leaves you insane. Try to make sense of those two statements and support it with literally any shred of data from the last couple of decades.
All of the traditional psychedelics are significantly healthier for your brain than having a few drinks. One can literally regrow neurons, the other kills them.
Sometimes the trip even makes them feel better. But, is it really worth messing with your brain’s delicate and super useful hallucination of the world around you?
And sometimes it can cure serious psychological conditions, autoimmune disease, allergies, and a host of other issues.
There’s a very good reason an increasing number of places are legalising them for therapeutic use.
not really 99%, more 99.9%
the only time when you as a person should never take psychadelics is when you have a pychoaffective disorder (or a history of it in your family) as it can trigger psychosis
other dangers come from heavy abuse of the substances, nothing you can do accidentally (psychadelics are non-addictive chemically speaking, but we humans can abuse anything so there’s been cases of it) or taking the substances when you’re depressed or anxious (can turn into a bad trip, cure you of those in a day, or just be a normal trip, it’s a gamble)
99.9% of the time people who take psychadelics come back to normal after the effects wear off. even bad trips can be beneficial. the normal becomes broader, and many lessons are learnt, the useful hallucinations gain more meaning. i often compare psychadelic trips to having a mirror put in front of yourself and being forced to look at it for hours, now - do you like what you see?
I thought such disorders were much more frequent in the human population than 0.1%
This is why when I want to cross a busy road I just pretend reality isn’t real, close my eyes, and cross the road. Can’t get hit by cars if I don’t accept that they are there.
This is just a misinterpretation. Things are there anyway but we filter it out in a way our brain can handle.
Think of it as a very, veeeeery strong Instagram filter.
Human Pov
Other Pov
Higher dimensions Pov
All this brain hallucinating reality stuff pisses me off because people use it as a springboard to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I’m just not aware of can’t REALLY kill me. There is a uniform and self-consistent reality which we all have only limited perceptual awareness of. The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality, not to fabricate wishy-washy arguments for how that reality doesn’t exist
or doesn’t have meaning(see comment below for clarification here)One thing I took away from learning more about philosophy was to be unsure of pretty much anything except my own existence.
The idea that there is an objective mind independent reality is a nice idea and neatly fits my worldview but there are compelling arguments for this not to be the case.
I’d only ask what makes you so certain of this “uniform and self-consistent reality” because if you’re relying on your senses to gather information for this fact I regret to inform you that human senses are awfully unreliable.
I also have read quite a bit of philosophy! So this should be fun to discuss.
First, I agree that 100% certainty is virtually impossible. However, there comes a point when we say we’re “certain”, depending on the severity of the outcome and the probability of it.
For instance, if I offered for you to play a game where we spin a big spinner, and 99.9999999999999% of the wheel is red, which means you pay me ten thousand dollars, and the rest of it means I pay you ten thousand dollars…you’d probably not say “I might win ten thousand dollars!” You’d probably say “this forces me to give you ten thousand dollars”. And if I said “whaaaat, no, we can’t be certain of that!”, you’d probably think I was being nonsensical.
So let’s acknowledge that while Descartes’ arguments for solipsism are indeed basically undefeated on a first order logic basis, we really should be evaluating the claim on a probabilistic or statistical basis instead, since the argument is fundamentally about our degree of sureness in something.
You’re correct that ultimately my senses alone are my only exposure to the world. However, there are some interesting things I can notice. If I lock 1000 people in a room with an undetectable poison gas, then they all will die - even though none of them had any sensory awareness of the gas! If it was just one person in the room, maybe we could argue that reality isn’t consistent, but the fact that all 1000 people due suggests that the gas affects everyone the same consistent way. Similarly, a blood clot in my leg can kill me even if I’m not aware of it.
Acknowledging now that things can certainly affect things regardless of their sensory awareness of each other, the only way to preserve our radical doubt of our senses is to suspect that perhaps the 1000 people in my room are actually not really people, but instead something me and my senses have imagined. If we suppose (against all other evidence, mind you, and purely on the basis of being able to achieve an impossible100% certainty to the contrary), that my senses really do deceive me at every turn, then we have other situations that will puzzle us:
For example, I’m studying math as a 7 year old and coke across a fancy integral equation, which I absolutely cannot make sense of, and I don’t even know what the symbols mean. Later in life, in my 20s, I have learned enough math to understand the equation, and remarkably, I see that it made sense all along. The equation was always right, even before I had the mental capacity to understand it. How could this be, if my perception of the world was not mapping to some consistent reality? These are things that we must come up with strange explanations for, like claiming that my consciousness actually fully understands all workings and states of the universe, and I’m only playing a game with myself where I pretend to forget about it, or something like that.
And if we were to make such a fantastical interpretation for the world as that, what would be our evidence for that interpretation as opposed to the “default” one that the world is self consistent and maps consistently to the our sensory interpretation? Our evidence could only be “we can’t prove with 100% certainty that this isn’t the case”! But if that’s a good reason to believe things, I could just as well say that we can’t prove with 100% certainty that my default interpretation isn’t the case either, and now our claims (and any claim) are on equal footing - since nothing can be 100% certain. All that this really does is show to us that this justification is completely useless, as it makes all claims equally viable and negates itself.
I agree with you but in defense of the image in front of us, they still show atoms in the rest of the photo. I take that as the representation of “reality” and the commentary as being more about perception and not some alternate reality.
Yes that’s true, and I did think about this, but really this just makes the image even dumber, because we can see atoms nowadays too, and even if we couldn’t, all our knowledge of them would still come from what this comic implies is our hallucination 🤔 kinda crazy to say that if you just zoom in on a hallucination it suddenly becomes real
As a great scientist once said:
“There’s no scientific consensus that life is important” - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Welcome to materialism lol
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm
Careful, you’ll trigger the libs
the constant snide remarks at liberals are the same as the constant snide remarks at millennials, it’s a circlejerk that accomplishes nothing but make yourself feel superior
The data of reality is consistent. How that data is interpreted by the brain may not be. Like the color red might not look the same to you as it does to me despite it being the same wavelength for both of us. We’ll never know since it’s impossible to describe a color and we can’t see the world with the other’s brain.
Given that color theory works the same for anyone that isn’t some variety of colorblind, I’d argue we probably see colors the same way or very very close to the same.
Everyone sees colors slightly differently, this is perfectly illustrated by the old blue black/white gold dress. Depending on how your brain has learned to perceive color determines what colors you see.
Your phone screen only uses three colors to represent all colors.
If you printed out the photo of the dress the “illusion” wouldn’t work.
The 3 colors used to make the blue dress in warm “gold” light is what allows your brain to interpret it as yellow.
If anything it helps prove that people basically see in the same way. Just if your brain adjusts for the backlight tone. You either saw blue or yellow. No one was saying purple or orange.
If you took mushrooms and saw purple you’d be hallucinating. Your brain is giving you false information.
Seeing it as yellow isn’t false information but a different interpretation of the given material
Yeah, I’m in agreement with you, my point is that we have proof that people perceive reality slightly differently, in general it’s pretty standardized, but there are slight variations. That’s all my point was.
Kinda true but kinda not. Language alone can affect our perception. Some don’t have a word for green or blue, and orange is indistinguishable from light brown given context.
Even when we are almost definitely seeing the same things, there’s a lot that can differ.
Your language doesn’t change your perception of color.
The primary colors being Red, Yellow, Blue. Is made up. There’s no reason those should be the three primary colors.
Magenta, Yellow, and Cyan could be the primary colors if you were taught that.
In that color wheel orange is an intermediate color. The intermediate color between green and yellow can be called chartreuse.
Did you know chartreuse as a color or did you just know it as yellow-green?
Do you not preceve the color chartreuse the same as someone that just knows that name?
You can perceve all the difference colors on this wheel without needing an official word.
As you can see “Brown” is just a darker orange.
colour theory works the same to everyone because it works entirely with how colours relate to each other
if you saw colours rotated on a colour wheel 180° - so that your green is my purple - we wouldn’t know
the only difference would be in the hue (difference between green and purple), which isn’t all that important. there are plenty of videos on youtube with artists drawing using random hues but with correct values (difference between black and white) and once they switch their work to colour it all just looks, good, a bit abstract for sure but still good
besides, colour theory picks colours that go together well based on their relative position on the colour wheel. teal works well with orange because they’re complimentary, opposites on the spectrum. neutral colours are neutral because they’re desaturated regardless of hue, neon colours are very saturated regardless of hue
maybe in objective reality we all like the same exact hue of colour, but in our brains we all call it a different word, we’ll never know
the logic might be the same, the perception may not
The logic is based on perception, though. Colors either clash or go together because of how we percieve them and which colors go with which is pretty consistent between cultures and time periods.
But perception is for a large part embedded in memory, which differs individually. For me steel foundries smell amazing because I used to play on the beach near a steel foundry, to the point I need to put effort into understanding that it’s actually kind of acrid. So am I still “having the same perception” as someone who doesn’t have the lived experience?
This can happen at a society-wide level too. Liminal beige and seafoam green were not intended to create a feeling of disquiet, but of calm neutrality. Modern audiences perceive them as disquieting because they have been systematically used in our society to impose a sense of calm on un-calm situations, such as operating rooms or hallways in sketchy buildings.
I honestly don’t know how much of the commonality of associations across cultures comes from instinct and how much comes from the fact that all children learn to live on the same planet with the same physical laws. I would bet that for 99.9% of children, their first experience with a strong sulphur smell is going to be from rotten eggs (or similar rotten goods) that others act disgusted by. So the fact that sulphur smells disgusting to the vast majority of adults is not evidence for instinct over memory. The same goes for green plants, red blood, blue skies, etc.
But not everyone agrees on which colors go together and which clash
Yeah, that wasn’t a good example since taste is weird. A better example would be that most people would agree that the pink background on this sprite sheet is almost painful to look at while other, more luminous, elements are fine. If our perception significantly varies, then simple mid-luminance color blocks shouldn’t have consistent effects from person to person. Parts of that yellow gradient on the right should cause more strain to someone you know than the magic pink field if perception is strongly variable.
The relative perception of things may be similar while the absolute perception of something differs wildly for everyone
Perception is pretty much always different, but that doesn’t mean the underlying thing being experienced is itself different.
If you cut a pickle in half, and give each half to a different person, and one liked it and one didn’t, you wouldn’t say the pickle tasted different, just that both people perceived the taste differently.
Yes but for all we know one person perceives the pickles in a way i would consider tart or sour while the other may perceive them as sweet. but relative to everyone’s individual perception this fits along the broader categories that people may experience. the relatuvity may be the same while the absolute nature is not
We have proof that people don’t see colors the same way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
That was horseshit with multiple different pictures being used with different levels, confusing people to death about what others had reported seeing. It’s easy to white balance the blue back to white which with the yellow orange lighting reflections on the black, saturated up the yellow lighting to look more gold. Nobody with normal vision both looking at the same original picture claims the blue part is white.
Wow. You are just proving my point. It looks white and gold to me.
What color is the wiki page around it then? Ultra white? Or even in dark mode the blown out lighting on the right side is white as well. It’s surely not the same as the dress. Just go get a crayon from the box to compare.
They did researchers with fMRI that showed that the same colors activated brains of viewers the same way, giving as much weight as possible to the idea that people perceive colors the same way.
that’s not really a good study for the issue in question since getting a control group of people who never formed associations between colours and ideas would be rather difficult
even a day old baby would begin forming their first associations - yellow is warm because the sun is warm
has the study included totally colour blind people? (like literally blind to colour, full monochromacy) and if so how were their results interpreted?
If they’re fully color blind, how could they be shown colors? That would be a bad control group.
Instead, when doing fMRI stuff, they usually create a “baseline” by showing their subjects random stuff to see how the brain fires up. For example, they could show greyscale images of grass, sun, blood, etc., then see how it differs from seeing contextless colors (ie: a uniform green screen)
if you show people colours you can be sure they already have associations with them - sun is yellow, sun is warm, yellow is warm - of course everyone will fire up the “this is warm” parts of their brain, but will it be the same thing i call yellow?
there are bound to be associations that transcend cultures and therefore fire up the same brain parts
monochromatic colour blind people will see the wavelength of yellow, but their eyes don’t have the receptors to distinguish it from light grey. objectively they still “see” the yellow, their eye-brain system just doesn’t interpret it in the way other people do
probably, this is what i know but it might not be true. if there is no way to get a control group of people who never learnt to associate colours with other things (pretty much everyone, aside from monochromatic colour blindess, and actual blindness since birth) then there is no way to test if we all indeed see the same yellow
Isn’t the problem with your example that a completely color blind person cannot differentiate the wavelength, but they can differentiate the intensity of light. I’m also mostly assuming here, that our light cones are sensitive to certain ranges of frequency and that is how we can differentiate different wavelengths.
The scientific and philosophical question is if we can prove that each person perceive those combination of signals the same way. The subjective experience.
Unless of course the color blindness is a “software” issue rather than a “hardware” issue.
Very on-topic SMBC today: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/mary
There are multiple types of color blindness, most of the time they affect the production of a specific cone inthe eye. Deuteranomaly is the red-detection cone being affected, and causes issues distinguishing red/green colors, but also blue/purple. It’s a “hardware” issue caused by less or lack of detection.
I’ve heard of “software” version of colorblindness, but it doesn’t seem to be as documented as others. I have a younger sibling that seemed to have “copied” my deuteranomaly despite being able to pass the “hardware” tests…
The exact neurons in the eye and the brain being triggeres are the same for detection of color, but where the “qualia” differs is to which external interpretation they are linked to. If we were able to isolate the souvenirs/associations that come from specific colors, I’m sure in general people would see the same colors.
Just like touching something hot triggers the same neurons as touching capsaicin, it creates a signal to the brain. What happens inside the brain depends on the life experience of each, but the initial signal is the same, and it can be proven with fMRI.
Off course, if we want to define a “qualia” as “the thing that can’t be proven by science”, then off course it won’t be provable using science. What is it, though?
Yes I agree, sorry if that wasn’t clear
Okay. I'm going to fuck with your head. Don't click this unless you're sure.
The color red is not even the same for you between each eye. Go look.
Given that it’s the same brain interpreting information from two different eyeballs, I’d suspect this is down to minute differences either between them (such as adjusting for darkness while testing as Kratzkopf suggested), or in their relative position.
It’s interesting, but I don’t think it really gets at the question of differing perceptions between people.
I’m wearing red socks, they look the same through each eye
Looks the same to me
Looks the same to me, do you have some kind of source or paper to back up your claim?
Nah, just folk who look closely are typically able to notice they perceive shades of colors slightly differently. Everyone I’ve tested it with has been able to do it.
How do you test this though? The eye is highly adaptive. If you close one eye, look at something red, then close the other one, your formerly closed eye will already have adapted to the darkness of your eye lid. Depending on how long you do the looking, I can imagine this leading to quite a difference in color perception already.
There is a uniform and self-consistent reality
Quantum says otherwise, doesn’t mean hallucinations are reflective of really at all, but reality is a lot more bizarre than classical scientists could have ever imagined.
Exactly. This post actually reinforces why I don’t want to alter my reality. That little window of interpretation is absolutely remarkable, it’s all we have to anchor us to the outside world and I will never give that up. Not that I’m dead against occasional hallucinogenics, but our perception is an amazing thing and I feel bad for people who don’t appreciate it.
IMO the term “hallucinogenic” undersells what psychedelics do in some ways. There is an interpretative layer of abstraction that naturally builds up between you and what you are perceiving. This is useful because it lets you make assumptions about and mostly ignore objects that you know are not necessary to pay attention to, and not be overwhelmed by the experience of being actively aware of all their details, but it also prevents us from considering and experiencing what is behind that layer of preconception.
Obviously there’s also a lot of other things our brains do that is interpretive or corrective, but it’s really remarkable to be able to see the world without that one in particular, which is one of the more striking effects of those drugs, and it happens on doses lower than the ones that produce especially vivid hallucinations.
there is some evidence in our pre-history that we used to experience the world without the layer of abstraction
cave paintings at one point became… different. at first they represented reality - various animals - in absolutely amazing detail, down to depicting which muscles tensed as an animal ran, then they stopped. just around the same time as we began depicting ourselves in more detail. when we noticed ourselves it seems like first layers of abstract interpretation of reality began forming
here’s a cool video on the subject (the title is rather click-baity but it is a good video, trust)
Brother, have you never been depressed? That shit can do as much to me as mushrooms sometimes. Or shit if I get a really good runners high, feels very similar to a low dose of mushrooms.
Brother, I don’t ever want to know what a low dose of mushrooms feels like…or 2cB or DMT or LSD or 4aco DMT or
Oh, well it’s not very different from how you normally feel. Our perception of reality changes all the time to a greater or lesser degree. Like when you’re depressed, you don’t see things as they actually are but through the warped reality of depression. Food won’t taste good anymore, or you can’t see the beauty of nature, or you can’t remember what being happy feels like.
I’d argue that we almost never experience reality as it is. Things are filtered through our feelings and judgement and assumptions without our conscious input. The reason psychedelics can be useful for people with PTSD or depression is because it forces a shift in our perception.
to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I’m just not aware of can’t REALLY kill me.
It’s not that reality isn’t subjective it’s that acting as if it is subjective isn’t useful for our everyday experience. So we act as if it is objective. But acting as if reality is objective so you can live your life does not mean reality is objective, and personally, I think being absolutely certain that it is objective leads to shit like “Jesus loves you and died for your sins” - not to great science.
There is a uniform and self-consistent reality
The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality
I’m really not trying to be shitty or anything about this, but science is increasingly showing us something considerably more complicated than that. Science absolutely gives us greater understanding of classical reality which is useful to us because airplanes fly. However, like it or not, science also is telling us that reality is a strange miasma of superpositions and that we actively participate in the creation of reality by simply existing/observing. At the very least, your outlook that it “is… uniform and self-consistent” does not appear to represent what is truly happening, it just represents what you think is happening, which is, ultimately, the point of the OPs meme. Everything you think you know is being filtered through your experience of it and whether this represents some objective reality or not, it represents it enough for you to live your life and feel like it is objective and consistent. But that isn’t necessarily so. As wild as it sounds, there may be an infinite number of branching realities and you are walking down only one, and considering it as “objective reality.”
For anyone interested in this stuff, there’s a great video from Sean Carrol about that outlines the uncomfortable unanswered questions in quantum physics and their implications about reality here.
Edit to add: on somewhat of a tangent, there’s a fascinating book regarding your brain and reality I really love called Free Will
I was wondering who would bring up quantum physics 🥲
I don’t subscriber to any interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so to me any insights that this field may offer still don’t support that reality is subjective. Reality could be only locally real but still objective and consistent. And it sure seems that it is, in at least 99.999…% of all situations, especially situations that actually matter to us. Just my understanding, not a quantum physicist lol
There are no interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so maybe you should look a little closer at what it actually does say? You can pick and choose the science you want to subscribe to of course, but it’s been making verifiable predictions for a hundred years now. If you ignore it because it disagrees with your preconceptions… well, that’s called religion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There certainly are pseudoscientific interpretations of it like that, which many laypeople subscribe to.
Woah there, where are you getting this idea that any of this has meaning from? Reality being coherent doesn’t imply any kind of meaning. I can’t even think of a theoretical way to determine if we’re here for a reason (other than cause and effect) or if we’re just here.
Yeah sorry, horrible choice of words. I am a nihilist in fact. I was using meaning in the very dull sense, like how a red light has the “meaning” to bring your car to a halt. And similarly a blood clot in my leg means that I am at increased risk of death, the rising of the sun means that the air will heat up (even if I’m blind), cooking garlic means the air will be filled with scent molecules (even if I can’t smell), etc.
I am so accustomed to only talking with IRLs who know what I mean by meaning that I forget what a loaded word it is.
Putting this as a separate comment because its unrelated. I think theoretically the problem is that the notion of “purpose” or “reason” is extremely fraught with psychological quirks. We say that flowers are colorful for the “purpose” of attracting pollinators, but it might be more accurate to say they just coincidentally ended up that way. But a more ironclad claim of purpose would be something like “I made this fruit salad for myself for the purpose of eating something healthy and sweet”. Here we are hard pressed to deny that the salad has a real purpose. In fact, anything that has real purpose seems to have been designed by a conscious entity. Only a conscious entity can imbue its creations with purpose, when we look at how we actually use the term in that sense. This also handily shows that purpose is not a physical quality, but purely a genealogical quality. A purposeful object doesn’t need to bear any physical markers that show that it came from a conscious entity - it is purposeful either way. Since “purpose” aka “reason for being” is now a matter of nothing more than being created by a conscious entity with some purpose in the mind of the conscious entity, it seems like the theoretical way to determine if humans have a reason for being, or if the universe has a reason for being, could ONLY be to determine if these things were created by a conscious entity.
Obviously religion comes to mind, but outside of that unfalsifiable realm, theoretically we could learn for instance that humans were actually designed by aliens to be fun little pets to watch, like Tamagotchi. If we found that out then our purpose would factually be “to be entertaining”.
So I actually think the theoretical path of establishing the existence of a reason or purpose is quite clear! Its just that the path clearly leads to the conclusion that there isn’t one.
I don’t think I’d be able to agree with that last sentence. Like if our universe is contained within another one and there’s no way for us to “escape” the constraints of this universe to test that, it wouldn’t be less true, it’s just not knowable through any real means. Best we can do in that regard is either choose to believe it or not or leave our mind open to the possibility that it may or may not be the case.
It’s kinda like your other point except applied to things well beyond our senses and any additional ways to measure things via science. Whatever is going on outside of this is still going on whether we know about it or not.
Though in all the thinking about it, entertainment is one of the top reasons I can think of for why we might exist. It’s the only non-circular one that has occurred to me (ie, the others tend to beg the question “if this is for something else, then what is that something else for?”, and we circle back to where we started, just with a bigger picture of what’s up). Though circularity doesn’t imply it is wrong or incorrect, it’s also possible we are in an arbitrarily deep set of nested simulations, each trying to reveal information about the sim one layer up to the simulants in that layer while those one layer above them watch to see what they figure out.
And this isn’t an anti-science stance, I just think that there’s a bunch of things that are unknowable (to us with our current limitations, at least, as another part of my pet idea is that we created this to entertain ourselves). And, no, despite my name, I don’t think spirituality can give any answers, though it can make a lack of answers more comfortable, and philosophy does have much wisdom to offer (which is more why I chose this name because enlightenment is real, though it doesn’t turn you into some all-knowing guru and has many forms).
Are you still alive? How’s that blood clot doing?
Well I stopped observing it so it should now be 50/50 on whether I die or not. Shit wait gotta stop observing it in my mind’s eye
It’d be like saying reality is a series of pixels in frames because that’s how computers “comprehend” reality.
Oh I’m not arguing that reality is different from how we perceive it. Just arguing with the sneaky little trick where people say “reality isn’t what we perceive… Therefore reality is subjective”
I agree with you. The “It” in my sentence isn’t clear so I’ll explain.
“Reality” in the sentence “reality is a shared hallucination” (or similar) means "reality as it exists in their brain.
People instead interpret “Reality” as "[Physical] reality is a shared halucination which is very different. I was pointing out a more real/visual example with digital cameras.
It’s just more efficient for my brain to only render what I’m looking at.
Dismissing: lacks object permanence.
Embracing: optimizes render load.
Have we considered I don’t have ADHD, just triple A blockbuster brain engine??
god learned from steam frame
I think this has actually been a standard method of optimization for about as long as there’s been 3d games.
Its called optical oclussion, pretty cool stuff.
The one time I tried shrooms I died, then I saw everything I needed for what I was going through and woke up the next day after all the nightmares feeling at peace with life and had a new perspective. Kind of like a speed run midlife crisis. I wouldn’t do it again but I’m glad I did
I’ve never done any drugs (trauma from witnessing alcohol use as a child), but once I had a dream where I just suddenly died for a short moment without any connection to the dream I was having. Like, literally died, there was nothing, I just disappeared for a blink. Absolutely gone. I strongly believe had I not come back I would have just died in my sleep. I’ve never had that experience before or since, and it’s really hard to describe since you can’t really feel death, but that reminded me of it
Im a big fan of doing small amounts, but sometimes it definitely gets you feeling like
Same thing with me and LSD. It is insanely powerful when used therapeutically, however that is also why I don’t talk about it irl at-all. The short explanation is that I don’t believe many people can handle these things and come out with similar clarity.\
If anyone is interested, please do as much research if you can. I would recommend James Fadiman’s Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide.
I assume you mean ego death and not literal death
fun(?) fact! ego death feels like death :D
you know that thing people say about how everyone’s last thought is of their mother or their home?
when i first took LSD i experienced an ego death, and just before fully letting go i thought to myself “how will i tell my mum i died?”
it was, to put it blunt, quite fucking terrifying. thankfully i had enough logic in me to calm myself down and fully let go to experience it, after the you dies the world becomes so– fresh. i felt like an alien experiencing the Earth for the first time, there was no barrier between me and the world, because for a few hours there was no “me”
Damn that must be scary in the moment, but also what an interesting experience, was that feeling of seeing the world with a new perspective temporary or do you feel it left any lasting impact?
it was temporary but unforgettable
it’d be impossible to live like that, but for a while it felt like being born again
and it definitely left a lasting impact on me, everything was so easily beautiful. usually you have to look to notice the beauty, but then it was all apparent and awe-inspiring, i was thinking about the concepts of hospitality and langauge, as well as look at the setting sunlight dancing in the window
i could write a book attempting to describe that evening, and even then it wouldn’t be a perfect description, it’s something you have to experience
You have to type louder for them to get your message in the spirit world.
I ASSUME YOU MEAN EGO DEATH AND NOT LITERAL DEATH
Nope, literal death.
bad trips can be really really enlightening. i got the cliché “i am so tiny and the universe is so big” and it changed the way i think about things on a fundamental level.
Last time I did shrooms I saw geometric cats on everything.
Can’t wait for next season.
Bitch don’t do this to me
but please do do this to me
What an apt comic. The first time I tried mushrooms I came to the conclusion we are essentially peeking through the keyhole of a door trying to understand an environment we can’t even be sure is limited to the ‘other side’.
Hm, that’s odd. I just laughed a lot. 🤷
why not both?
amanita muscaria will give you the shits for hours. There are better psychedelics.
its also a deleriants, so it wont give you pleasant hallucinations. people try to do this with diphenhydramine too, but you would have to tak a ton of it.
There’s a valuable lesson here, and it’s to avoid using comic strips to identify the mushrooms you should eat to trip.
Instead, rely on the comments
He’s got the mushroom in his hand as well as a pipe and a tab, I think they’re just referring to psychs in general, but you’re right, maybe they should’ve put more of a brown mushroom
Amanita muscaria is NOT psychedelic though, it’s a deliriant. It can cause hallucinations, but it is not serotonin based, and psychedelics work on serotonin receptors.
Bullshit!
Says who? I have done it both wet and dry many many times and never experienced that, and I’ve talked to people online about it a lot and nobody has mentioned that. So where are you getting this claim? I say that knowing that there are groups trying to make it illegal that have been spreading lies including that ibotenic acid causes brain bleeds based on a single discredited study repeated ad nauseam.
You are on some Reefer Madness bullshit aren’t you? Admit it!
Maybe you are less susceptible to it, or are ingesting a variety more unique to your region, but nausea and diarrhea are extremely common side effects.
Throwing up not long after ingesting the tea is normal, yet you have no idea what you are talking about here.
You are cooperating in a puritanical campaign to make this mushroom illegal, maybe you don’t realize that’s what you are doing, but that is going out right now. Stop it.
You also have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.
Dude, relax and go mushrooming. All I said is it gives you the shits and there are better substances.
I mean it doesn’t give me the shits lol, sorry your bowels can’t handle it
I want a source for that. Because I called bullshit.
They really jumping down your throat, huh? Iv never done the red ones with the white dots, but Iv done a few different types. Also Iv read about mushrooms, what may look the same aint always the same. And then the same shroom (or same looking shroom) from another region can be vastly different.
And then yes we as people will react different than another person might react to the same shroom.
Anywhoots.
So you clean out your pipes while you clean out your pipes?
What’s the downside here?
I want a source for that disparaging comment which is incorrect. Also it’s not a psychedelic and the fact that you described it as such destroys your credibility. You have no idea what you were talking about and are repeating puritanical propaganda.
For shame. Maybe you should go talk about the reefers online.
Firstly, the comic above uses the word psychedelic while showing an Amanita Muscaria. I never called it that but honestly, I’m not an expert and don’t know the technical definitions of that type of thing, I’m just a guy that likes mushrooms.
Outside of my personal experience of having about 30 minutes of fun followed by 6 hours of not fun, here is the first result I got when searching for ‘amanita muscaria side effects’
Emerging Risks of Amanita Muscaria: Case Reports on Increasing Consumption and Health Risks
People can have all sorts of different reactions to mushrooms, like I’ve never died from eating raw false morels, but others have.
Do you have a souce that says Amanita Muscaria doesn’t give most people nausea and diarrhea?
I have heard however that the juice produced from dehydration has a lot less unwanted side effects, but I didn’t bother to test that myself.
There are several thousand years of case history that do not mention anything about these reports you mentioned with a government website. Reports that do not match my own experience. This mushroom has the longest recorded use of any drug plant or fungi in the northern hemisphere, and here you are spreading bullshit to help make it illegal. Now maybe you do not know that’s what you’re doing but that’s what you’re doing. The government is not a fucking reliable source.
Somehow I knew you wouldn’t trust or read any source I could provide.
The only source you provide comes from an organization that reports to donald trump. . .
Can’t find the word diarrhea in there
On the contrary I will read it, later, when I’m in the mood for some dark fiction I repeat, the government is not a reliable source on this issue.
You should know that
The podcast “You Made It Weird,” with Pete Holmes is great. He has a lot of smart and funny people on, and the pattern is usually to start with “What’s going on with you? What are you working on? What makes you laugh?” for the first two thirds of a given episode, and then the last third is stuff like “Do you believe there is a purpose to life? Have you ever seen a ghost? Have you ever tried psychedelics?” Pete is clearly on his own spiritual journey and has a lot of heavy stuff to talk about and share, and he makes for a great conversation.
Two highlights were when Reggie Watts talked about going on a trip in a bathroom where he traveled to a parallel universe and met with a sentient planet, and when Judd Apatow talked about how ayahuasca brought him into a meeting with the embodiment of his childhood self.
I don’t necessarily want to get into psychedelics, but it’s a very interesting topic of conversation, if the person is smart enough to ask and answer intelligent questions.
Makes me think of Outer Wilds!
i always saw the last sequence as an interpretation of what happened by our limited consciousnesses, and definitely inspired by psychadelics, no way in hell it wasn’t
If everything we experience is a hallucination, then we should use psychology to engineer a just and useful hallucination. For example, we should hallucinate trans people as closer to their preferred gender presentation.
We also need to consider the fact that rich people have spent so much money on controlling the media, they’ve definitely discovered how to use this power for evil. Our perceptual reality has already been manipulated by billionaires.
discovered how to use this power for evil
They already have. Is called “propaganda”, or “the narrative”.
One proposed solution is to put control of consensus reality in people we trust, like scientists. However, I think it’s pointless to leave such a dangerous force lying around where anyone could theoretically get ahold of it.
Instead, we should dismantle the very idea of objective reality, and teach everyone the skills to control their subjective world, so that we can democratise perception and create a subjective multiverse with room for everyone.
