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)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.” Nevermind that “reality” is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes - there is no way to determine that what you think you experience as “reality” is anything more than the qualia of a brain in a jar. This is Descartes 101.
Anyway, 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.
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.
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).
As a great scientist once said:
“There’s no scientific consensus that life is important” - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
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.
I believe you’re speaking about General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics refers to “quantum” aka discrete, non-smooth things like the energy levels of electrons.
General Relativity indicates that the temporal ordering of events may appear different to different observers, although there is a way to objectively switch between perspectives.
In all cases, the theories point to a uniform, self consistant reality, as that is in fact their very purpose. If they didn’t work as expected, your GPS wouldn’t be a thing.
No i was speaking about quantum mechanics thank you
Quantum says otherwise
It doesn’t.
I meant that GR better fits the vague description you gave.
Thanks for the conversation.
I know what you meant and you’re wrong. Unless, you know how to resolve the interpretation of QM, then by all means go ahead and take that nobel prize, you deserve it!
I know what you meant
I’m not trying to toy with you, please reciprocate. Because you didn’t say what about quantum mechanics causes reality to appear non self consistent I tried to connect the dots in my head: what I know about relativity fits the bill a hell of a lot better than QM.
QM does predict some weird probability distributions where the interpretation of causality is unclear. Just like mfed1122’s argument of understanding calculus, just because you or I don’t know what it means doesn’t indicate that it’s meaningless. Regardless of how confusing it is, QM describes everything objectively and so it doesn’t say the universe is inconsistent. Like with my example about GPS, quantum computers wouldn’t be possible if QM didn’t describe a uniform, self-consistent reality.
Unless, you know how to resolve the interpretation of QM, then by all means go ahead and take that nobel prize
This is unrelated to both your point and the original commenter’s discussion, per mfed1122’s argument.
If you want to continue this discussion in a meaningful way could you outline the elements of quantum mechanics that indicate a non self-consistent reality?
I tried to connect the dots in my head: what I know about relativity fits the bill a hell of a lot better than QM
That’s fascinating your brain works like
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
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.
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
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.
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
Im a big fan of doing small amounts, but sometimes it definitely gets you feeling like
I assume you mean ego death and not literal death
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
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
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.
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.
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Bitch don’t do this to me
but please do do this to me
amanita muscaria will give you the shits for hours. There are better psychedelics.
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
What you want is penis… envy. Specifically the albino kind
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 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.
I mean it doesn’t give me the shits lol, sorry your bowels can’t handle it
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.
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.
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 only source you provide comes from an organization that reports to donald trump. . .
Can’t find the word diarrhea in there
So you clean out your pipes while you clean out your pipes?
What’s the downside here?
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.
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?
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%
i also narrowed down my guesstimation to only include those interested in taking psychadelics
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.
Over time, psychedelics tend to clean off the lenses, so to speak, making the “useful hallucination” more accurate and reliable.
Duuude, totally
I dunno if I’d call this hallucination, although I get what you’re saying and I agree with you! But wouldn’t “interpretation” be a more apt description?
If someone is seeing a message out of this very text, rather than the strict “material reality” of each individual letter just being an arbitrary glyhph, or each pixel, or each little diode or electron forming those pixels…
…to call this miraculous level of ascribing meaning “hallucinating” seems a disservice right?
Your comment just brought me a lot of wonder and awe, because you’re right, our brains’ wiring to tell stories and weave concepts and interpret the world around us in a way that’s useful, and beautiful, is a wonderful part of being alive and setting us apart from mere machines, rather than simply a feed of raw unfiltered data input from the world around us “as it is.”
Truly marvelous. :D
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?
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…
What in the world…
They literally are tho. lol. What a wild take
“You see, I think drugs have done some good things for us. I really do. And if you don’t believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight. Take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. 'Cause you know what, the musicians that made all that great music that’s enhanced your lives throughout the years were rrreal fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few tunes.”
Bill Hicks
I think you may be a little biased, Mr Psychodelic.
I mean I can honestly say for me that shrooms cured my depression. Not helped, not band aid fixed but cured (this was eight years ago). Not pushing any agenda here, just sharing my experience
there is real science of therapeutic effect to some people.
but like, you will harm a happy person if you give them an SSRI, with these things is hard to say how it will go.
I have no doubt there are therapeutic applications for hallucinogens and psychedelics just as much as there are recreational uses for those drugs as well.
My contention is really directed at those who think these are some kind of out of body spiritual hack to “unlock” knowledge.
It smacks of Joe Rogan nonsense.
It’s wild how conservative and square the community is here.
Thanks for posting the comic! It’s neat
It doesn’t surprise me that much honestly, even on Lemmy there are a lot of right-wing people.
Get off my lawn, you goddamn hippies!
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.
I really didn’t like the personality changes I saw in others after taking LSD, that’s why I have no interest in psychedelics.
Me neither. This is not about 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. :)
Lol “people loved the world and saw beauty in things I couldn’t and it PISSED ME OFF”. Real big brain take, fuck man let people enjoy things
ITT: people who have never taken psychs talking shit and people who have being like chill. Who do you think knows more? The folks swallowing D.A.R.E. propaganda like water, or the open minded people who actually experienced it??
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
