I agree with Sacks. While taking large doses of LSD or DMT I had experiences with what felt like otherworldly entities, or a sense that some cosmic revelation was imminent, but once I'd come down I didn't think something had been revealed to me or that I had been in contact with some supernatural plane, I just thought "wow I was really fucking high".
It was never a visual manifestation of a recognisable shape, it was just a sense that there was another consciousness in the room with me. I never saw machine elves or anything, I just felt strongly that there was a benevolent female presence in the corner of the room. Why I felt it was female I can't say but in the moment I was absolutely certain.
I am almost pathologically sceptical and I have absolutely zero belief in anything metaphysical. I believe that capability is simply not within me. I can see how other people would believe that there is something beyond though.
My experience was similar; no direct contact with entities, but the certainty that something was in the room with me and had no ill intent toward me.
I ended up trying DMT a few times, and decided (at least for awhile), that the brain was a "chemical radio," able to be tuned to the different frequencies of reality with these substances. It was a very wispy way of explaining how the brain processes input in an altered state, but worked really well for me at the time.
Is there really any difference between the entities people encounter during a trip and the entities that populate our dreams? Most people don't entertain the idea that their dreams are real experiences. And often in a dream I will be thinking about some idea that seems very profound and important but on waking if I can remember what that idea was it is always absolute nonsense. I suspect it is the same with psychedelic trips.
I've had dreams that were significant. One time I had a nightmare and it became "sentient" and the nightmare started to talk to me and hurt me. I started to meditate and the nightmare couldn't hurt me anymore. I felt pain as it was scarring me all over, but I didn't feel suffering. I woke up realizing that meditation is my safe space.
A month ago, I got a dream where I saw my wife and she passed me a note saying "I love you." I woke up and I realized that even my subconscious mind believed that she loved me. A lovely thing to realize.
To be fair, most dreams don't mean anything to me.
I am skeptical because I had a brush with schizophrenia where I felt _exactly_ like I was always having epiphanies, and it was mental illness. I've never done psychoactives but I know feelings are sometimes just feelings.
I feel this about a lot of the apparent revelations that come out of LSD and other psychedelic use, particularly the revolutionary nature of psychedelics which (if only enough people would take them) would change the world, people would realise we don't need police, armies, governments wielding power over us, we can all get along in peace and harmony and create a new world of love, charity and understanding.
When probing into what this might actually mean, there's never really any substance there. And from what I can tell most of the experiments in actually living these different lives in the 60s and 70s failed because when it comes down to it, communal living requires idealism, commitment and hard graft. Those last two are often missing and the first fades.
I've had my "I am one with the fabric of the universe" moments. I've seen things of great beauty on psychedelics, I've had thoughts twist and turn in impossible ways... but in the end it would take extraordinary evidence to persuade me it's anything other then the subjective experience brought on by a drug twisting my brain. From the article -
> If people say they’ve talked with angels or dead ancestors, should we dismiss them as raving, drug-addled trippers?
No, because that's prejudicial and dismissive, but we probably should think of those experiences in terms of an internal psychedelic journey conjured up by the brain on drugs, rather than some sort of extrinsic interaction with the universe. At least until someone comes up with something other than speculation as evidence.
I believe that theory of pure bliss and self-regulating society was finally disproven at the Altamont Free Concert[1]. Its long ago, so its weird that the message never really landed somewhere...
> It was never a visual manifestation of a recognisable shape, it was just a sense that there was another consciousness in the room with me. I never saw machine elves or anything, I just felt strongly that there was a benevolent female presence in the corner of the room. Why I felt it was female I can't say but in the moment I was absolutely certain.
I've had trips like that but then I also had trips where I saw things like Pikachu, bees, jesters, machine elves (people-like things). But then the more I did it they got more defined and were just hallucinations of people (some were fictional characters). There was also progression from "feels like you're getting a message" -> "hearing something that's unintelligible" -> "hearing full sentences in English". I'm skeptical of the metaphysical or meaningful interpretations just because the more I did it the more nonsensical it seemed.
Sounds similar to dreams where you tell an amazing joke or story and people are laughing uncontrollably and you feel like the funniest person in the world, then if you can recall the joke on waking it is total nonsense. Maybe it is more about transferring emotion/feeling than language.
I think people don't know that their entire experience is their brain. Being human you just intrinsically feel that you are this conscious subject who is experiencing/analyzing what this organ called "the brain" presents to you. What's lost is that the conscious subject and the brain are the same thing. The drugs doing funny stuff to the brain is the same as the drug doing funny stuff to the conscious subject.
To put this more succinctly:
If your brain tells you that #2 pencils are sacred universal objects, you will be 100% convinced that it is true. The conscious subject will do an analyses and be as sure as the sky is blue that #2 pencils are sacred.
If you live your entire life worshipping pencils, treat other humans benevolently due to the laws the pencils have passed down, and die clutching a fistful of them with a smile on your face, is that crazy?
I have met people before who were devoted to mystical insights gained through the use of psychedelics. Quasi-religious groups of people who stopped taking psychedelics for fun and started taking them for meaning.
Crazy might be an apt term to describe them, but they weren't dangerous or harmful people. Quiet the opposite actually. However talking to them an listening to them talk to each other, it was clear that they had lost contact with the ground, but they were convinced they were more in touch with it than anyone else. To the point they could feel that they were more in touch than anyone else.
Take a fan and point it at someone's back and they will feel the breeze there. Now cross wires in the brain that replicates the same feeling, even in the absence of the fan. They will be just as convinced that the breeze is there. Now do the same thing but for something that cannot be as simply empirically verified as the presence of a fan. And then short out the wires that would allow one to "step back" and see rethink. Maybe that is crazy, I don't know.
I had lucid dreams in the past, I can understand why people would call this astral projection, but to me it's pretty obviously brain produced experience. I doubt that anyone would believe in this stuff if they had Sack's experience of patients with brain injuries.
I don't believe in anything metaphysical, I believe all these things can be explained by what is "real".
If I draw a circle and put two dots in it and a curve below the two dots, your brain will immediately recognize these shapes as a human face (smiley face). That means somewhere in your brain there is a mechanism to recognize faces. I believe in everybody's brain there exists such knowledge and reflexes that may become more prominent under the effect of some drugs - there is nothing unusual about that.
I do believe this is very mysterious and interesting, and that it must be researched so we can learn more about it. But I find it wrong and dangerous to try to theorize that there is "something out there bigger than our brain". Like no, it is all in our brain - but that does not make this issue any less interesting. Brain is capable of great many things and great number of things can be revealed to an individual when their brain is functioning differently under some drugs. I just don't think this hints towards some metaphysical world of wonders that is otherwise hidden from our normal state of mind.
I agree that maybe this doesn’t prove the existence of a higher metaphysical plane, but don’t you find it a bit hubristic to assume that the contemporary human perception and way of categorizing things just happens to be the way everything actually is?
Here are two fun facts: Wifi antennas are just lightbulbs that shine really red light that we can't see. Trees are loud, like really loud, but we can't hear it at all since it's all ultrasound.
It's pretty clear that we as ugly giant bags of mostly water don't perceive much of what's going on and tack a lot of made up shit on top to make it more functional. Like colours which aren't really a thing, objectively speaking (ask a colour blind person or check what the JWST sees in outer space).
And yet we know that we don't see these things, because we can detect them indirectly. And we've been finding methods of better indirect detection of literally anything for millennia and mapping it all into the areas we can detect. If there was a configuration of carbon in our heads that mixed with drugs detects something, we'd have built a artificial sensor out of it by now (alas it is but random noise that does not correlate with anything, not even itself). So while there's probably still particles and fields that we can't detect yet and some we even know we don't know about (ahem dark matter/energy ahem), it wouldn't be too much hubris to say we've got most of it covered by now.
Just because we've found a lot of previously undetectable things in no way indicates that we've found "most" of it by now. All it indicates is that we've found more things than we knew before; for all we know, we may have merely gone from knowing 0.01% to 0.02%.
Well to some degree we actually can know how much we know and don't know, with statistics [0] and our observations so far. So much of modern science was easy pickings in the 19th and 20th centuries, while these days we keep investing ludicrous amounts of effort into ultra specific experiments to figure out some small new thing that often just confirms what we already thought, learning relatively little in comparison to the ye olde polymaths making three new branches of science by themselves. The fact that we're so far into diminishing returns is an indicator by itself. Most new tech these days isn't even new, it's just figuring out how to make the already known practical enough to be cost effective.
Now sure, a person during the roman times or the middle ages could be caught saying the same thing and couldn't be more wrong. And sure it's entirely possible that we'll figure something out that will revolutionize our knowledge of the universe entirely... but every time general relativity predicts yet another observation to an annoying level of perfection that chance becomes smaller and smaller.
The history of human knowledge is pretty much a succession of people saying "we know everything, this topic is done" being proved wrong by a new development.
I'll again say that I think it's extremely hubristic to think that human civilization has somehow figured out "most" scientific knowledge in the last couple of centuries. This human-centered attitude is not unique, though, which is kind of my point: it's not a new thing at all to think that the current level of knowledge has nowhere to go. It's just the typical human hubris that has been with us forever.
With the “God of the gaps” things…it’s always hand waved away. Things seem mystical until science comes along a codifies it so to speak. And yet the gap remains, it’s just further out. It’s a gap we didn’t even know was there. It just gives me pause when I try to think about the totality of things. How can I say for sure how it came to be when I’m not even close to sure what it is.
Well sure, but at least in comparison with the entire history of life on this planet, we've known close to nothing until the last ~400 years and have since figured out most that practically matters to us on a daily basis. We don't know how to cure cancer, but we know exactly what it is.
We're certainly still wrong about exotic types of matter, gravity, fundamental particles, the ways completely arbitrary things function, like genes in a cell, etc... but we know that cells exist, what they're composed of, and we're definitely not wrong about that, and that is frankly infinitely more knowledge than we've ever had before. What's left to find are mostly increasingly more nitpicky details that are nonetheless very important, but they don't change our understanding anywhere nearly as drastically.
To wrap back around to my original point, in comparison to everything else the amount of knowledge we've gained on paranormal things since tribal shaman times is about zero. It's still all hearsay and speculation and it's not for the lack of trying.
> Trees are loud, like really loud, but we can't hear it at all since it's all ultrasound.
Just to put loud in perspective: seems like cavitation produces ultrasound in the ~30db range at the highest[1], which is roughly the level of a whisper. I haven't knowingly captured trees in my ultrasound field recording, but it seems fun to try. That should be loud enough to pick up something with an ultrasonic recorder close by, I'd think, which is pretty cool -- I assumed you'd need to do something like David Dunn and embed microphones into the trees.
Is there any evidence for this ultrasound being a communication medium of any kind (I'm thinking less IPv6 or US English, and more insect or bird calls)? Any hint that they listen to sounds as well as make them, or that there's any information content in it? Or it's more like heartbeats and engine/fan noise, just a byproduct of processes doing what they do?
Suppose a model of reality M (which makes predictions) and doesn't admit a higher metaphysical plane as part of the model. Now assume Mp does admit a higher metaphysical plane and makes the same predictions as M for all observable phenomena (or for all reality in the sense of 'this reality').
In such a case, the existence of a higher metaphysical plane is purely aesthetic. In terms of predictions, both models are equally correct, being identical. The correctness of the internal representation is beyond epistemological limits, and arguably a meaningless or ill-formed proposition. For a significant difference, the models must make different predictions. But the conventional understanding (say the standard model) is carefully constructed and deviations by laypeople are invariably simplifications or are due to impaired reality testing.
This situation is the same as religion, because it is one. Either the religion doesn't make predictions about reality, in which case it's difference is purely aesthetic (as a model of reality), or it does and in practice is either trivially falsifiable or copying what is already known (note that the old well known religions have long since had their predictions tested).
Psychedelic experiences could, in theory, produce interesting hypotheses about reality; just like Scientology and the "Twin flame" people could. But in practice it almost always seems to produce crackpot stuff like "you can make a perceptual motion machine with time crystals and fractals; also Einstein, Aristotle, and Tupac already knew this but no one was paying attention; luckily drug-induced divine revelation has bequeathed this information via direct transmission; if only everyone else experienced ego death, then maybe they could be as great as I".
This is the hubris I perceive in the idea that scientists, philosophers, etc. that have dedicated their life to the study of particular tiny pieces of reality and honed a disciplined sense of intellectual rigor are going to be outdone by random people tripping. It is uniquely offensive and arrogant.
That said, in so far as 'reality' is 'my model of reality', individuals may gain psychological insight by partaking in 'spiritual' activity, including psychedelics, and it follows that they may gain a 'special understanding of (their) reality' in that way. The problems are the magical thinking implicated in universalizing personal insight, the pitfall of assuming independence of realities beyond subjective experience, the belief subjective perception is unlimited by physical reality, and in some a tendency to insist that such insight cannot be gained in other (more mundane) ways.
I think you're kind of "talking past me" here, in that you're replying to a different point than the one I'm making. I'm not saying that psychedelics or crackpot theories are offering some kind of insight that scientists are missing. Rather, that describing reality with contemporary human concepts is just going to be inherently limited and restricted, because of its foundation in human perception. Saying that nothing bigger than our brain exists just seems very limited and human-centric to me.
I think it's pretty likely that there are sources of information we don't normally perceive. I mean at some point the theory of evolution says we didn't sense light, and then some mutation let us see what was, at the time, a metaphysical world of wonders that was otherwise hidden from our normal state of mind!
We don't really know how brains work, or how reality works, so I think it's premature to be confident about either subject.
I've heard a hypothesis that suggests the evolution of eyes set off the Cambrian Explosion. Rather than a "a metaphysical world of wonders", it was a physical world of things to eat and be eaten by.
We have countless mechanical sensors and detectors that can sense just about everything there is in this universe, even neutrinos. Even if we magically manage to detect half of that it wouldn't show us anything we don't already know. Although it would be trippy to see the full EM spectrum.
"just about everything" includes detecting perturbations in the intensity and frequency of light that Occam's Razor suggests is due to unaccounted mass and energy. Moreover, that the unaccounted-for amount would exceed the light and mass we can detect (75:25, roughly? Maybe less, depending on the model). Our best explanations all sound dubious -- dark matter & dark energy? Hardly an explanation. Extra torsion of the space in each galaxy due to the effect on space from black holes? That's a pretty big rounding error. WIMPs that we've left out of the Standard Model? Recent experiments have left little room for that possibility.
There may indeed be things which we can't detect, even with our best instruments, that we don't have a suitable explanation for.
I would go as far as to say it's a certainty there are things we can't detect yet... but probably not that many of them. Dark matter is funny because it's actually something that we can detect [0], at least indirectly but can't explain yet. But just like there are the EM and Higgs fields there could be countless other fields that don't affect our day to day reality in any way, but in that sense they might as well not exist.
> But just like there are the EM and Higgs fields there could be countless other fields that don't affect our day to day reality in any way, but in that sense they might as well not exist.
Then you also have to accept that you're not talking about objective reality in any way but isolated to human experience and limited by our cognitive and experimental abilities.
"a theory is a well-substantiated explanation of the natural world that is based on the scientific method and uses facts, hypotheses, and laws"
Because it's not theorizing, it's wishful thinking. And for some reason it almost always leads to people telling other people how to live their lives based on the "thing that's bigger than our brain" (e.g. god, because that's what you're all trying to imply). That's why it's dangerous.
Because you express no uncertainty, your belief equals the statement: There exists 0% probability that agency in the physical universe is embedded. This is stupid, because embedded agency does exist, EG we have programs that simulate consciousness & life that are embedded. You have evidence that we could with some non-zero probability embed a worm or baby ape into a simulation that will approximately work like it would in real life with only the physics being less accurate (IE cannot model quantum states perfectly). You should now combine this with the fact that by default embedded agents have no "real" models of the external world, IE a smart monkey in a small simulationmight deduce external world has computational complexity limits BUT they probably cannot say "Eiffel Tower exists in Paris" or "The Universe expands at speed of light."
Thus your position should be approximately: There exists non-zero probability that agency in the physical universe is embedded but since its small and "external" to our agency, one has no reason (ability?) to believe in other than by stating this as their best model.
---
Englightement is to know that death means merely the state after which what happens cannot be predicted because you are dead.
But what is relationship between intelligence & immortality?
Oh! I get to talk about my favorite subject: the egregore.
When a company forms it is useful, if not entirely accurate, to describe it as an intelligent agent. This entity does not physically exist, the soul of Disney is not in it's avatar micky mouse, or it's CEO, it's in the (collection of) minds of everyone that sees Disney as an entity. Santa Clause does not exist outside your imagination, yet parents act as the egregore's hands giving out presents. To a real extent, Santa Clause is the cause of acts of good will, and even though Santa doesn't physically exist, physical actions are taken in Santa's name. Same with any accolades of any religion. Or employee's of a company.
Its truth value is orthogonal to it's predictive value, and it is very predictive. See, there are two kinds of general groups within the egregore, the hands (creators, generators, those occupied with the 'mission' of the egregore) and the mouth (those occupied with feeding and sustaining an egregore, sales/marketing). The hands start off in charge and everything works, but eventually the mouth gets control and eats the hands, starving the egregore.
An egregore eats it's own hands and starves to death. This is exactly what happened with Boeing.
It could be modeled from an individual's mind, but some concepts take a village to execute, and some(times) things emerge when you put a bunch of smaller things together. A wave isn't the matter in which it materializes, it's something emergent from when you move some material in a certain way.
But yeah, Atheist here, this is about as esoteric as I get :)
Interesting. Sounds like this could turn into a long form essay or book.
> Its truth value is orthogonal to its predictive value
This seems to imply that the integrity of a company's information/communication functions (truth value) is unrelated to its ability to make accurate predictions about future events ... Why is this significant, or have I misunderstood?
I mean to say, modeling a company hyper accurately - down to personal psychology of the high level employees - has diminishing returns for predictive value, and also diminishing returns for generalizability. And a surprisingly useful toy model (the egregore and it's hand eating lifecycle), describe better(or at least, good enough) what will happen with any particular company given it's current state according to the terms of that model.
To clarify the possible misunderstanding: 'its' is referring to the toy model of the egregore (not any particular company/egregor), My point is useful things are useful regardless of them being strictly true.
It really isn’t “wrong and dangerous” - hippies talking about greater consciousnesses have been a thing for a looooong time, and surely you could accept in SOME manner the argument that mankind is a kind of organism as well. That’s basically what sociology is studying!
The really interesting philosophical question is what causes the aggregation of consciousness. It isn't related to distance or connection, rather it seems to be the result of physical "coupling" through shared history. It's almost like consciousness represents the shared state of a given part of the universe.
An even more true statement when made in the context of pre Scientific Revolution. We don’t know everything but we know a heck of a lot more than when this was written.
We are just a clump of matter floating through space with some crude detection devices equipped so we can tell when electromagnetic waves hit us.
If the brain is just forcing all this input into some kind of reality, with illusions like the flow of time to attempt to predict the constant change/entropy going on around it, then couldn't drugs expand that capacity?
In other words, if time is just perception of changing states in the universe, and there is no past/present/future, just states, then we aren't really experiencing a "present", but an illusion created by using patterns from past state changes. In that case if drugs expanded that pattern detection then you could start altering your "present" much more powerfully, e.g. vividly replaying past states, or perceiving state changes that you would normally filter out, like a conversation someone is having across the street.
Sorry also I can't really express this correctly and it also may be total nonsense!
I think there's something in how a good shrooms high makes you feel that 'you' are less real, and that something like nature is more cohesive and real than you are used to thinking about it.
But as someone else said, the next day you don't care anymore and you don't actually think you unlocked a new dimension. The experience of what drugs feel like doesn't seem like a valid way to get at the true nature of anything.
All we experience is in our mind alone - psychedelics reveal nothing about the universe but they do reveal everything about our perception of it. It wont make you see colors that you are incapable of normally seeing, or hear things you are incapable of normally hearing, but it will re-arrange your senses to seem that way. IMO, we should not be fooled by these cheap sensory tricks and im disappointed Sacks has been.
The main thing you get out of LSD and even THC is new pattern associations. Due to the way the brain works, and its constant desire to reduce resource usage, when our life consists of the same patterns, the brain will slowly tune them out. These drugs, by the simple virtue of making you feel "different", will force your brain to reassess all patterns. This is why creative types love these drugs, because they make you see regular things differently.
There was this post from Scott Alexander which I can't find. The gist of it is that some drugs like caffeine and LSD made the brain overvalue patterns and connections, so that epiphanies that honestly aren't.
I can't find it, and I remember that it was just the author's educated guess. Nonetheless it stuck with me.
> Once, after injecting himself with a large dose of morphine, he found himself hovering over an enormous battlefield, watching the armies of England and France drawn up for battle, and then realized he was witnessing the 1415 Battle of Agincourt... The vision seemed to last only a few minutes, but later, he discovered he’d been tripping for 13 hours.
This doesn't make any sense... morphine is not a hallucinogen or a psychedelic. You don't "trip" on it. I have a feeling the journalist mixed something up here.
It's not quite the same as a traditional hallucinogen but there are some vivid dreams. In fact, that's where the term "pipe dream" comes from, from the dreams that opium smokers would have while high. I have taken a lot of heroin in my life and although I never experienced something to the extent that Sacks is describing I did have some strange and very vivid daydreams while high.
They mess a lot with your sleep in general, altering your lucid state, to the point that what might otherwise have just be a dream becomes something closer to a trip.
I have a very similar reaction to codeine. Based on genetic testing, my body processes it much faster than normal, which is similar to increasing the dosage much higher.
It was never a visual manifestation of a recognisable shape, it was just a sense that there was another consciousness in the room with me. I never saw machine elves or anything, I just felt strongly that there was a benevolent female presence in the corner of the room. Why I felt it was female I can't say but in the moment I was absolutely certain.
I am almost pathologically sceptical and I have absolutely zero belief in anything metaphysical. I believe that capability is simply not within me. I can see how other people would believe that there is something beyond though.