> I'm still it's sure hard to even come 1% of grasping it if you've never experienced though.
I'm not sure about that. I've done my fair share of LSD some years ago, but to me (to lift a simile from somebody else), it's a bit like a program's coredump. All the information is there, sure, less pre-categorized / pre-filtered, but it's not exactly guiding, so to speak. You're left on your own in a forest. Not always, and doesn't have to be like that, but I've seen diminishing returns after a while (meaning, it definitely does give you something the first time; and perhaps several more - when you can focus on thoughts and the world in a calmer way). The latter may not even be the case for some people, maybe, but I definitely think there is an overall "floor" in regards to the "depth" you can reach. Let me compare and contrast.
This may sound cheesy, but the quoted text above reminds me very much of Kant and the approach he had laid out in his Critique of Pure Reason, which I very much recommend and had the pleasure to (to a most definitely quite limited degree) grok, partly. (I think it's quite possible to just take it and read it - some guidance would definitely help - but in itself, it's very organized and (when he's not contradicting himself, which (under some interpretations) does happen) almost pedagogical at times. Familiarity with (especially) Hume and (perhaps) Leibniz, et al. would help, but I think there's value to be extraced by reading it just like that.)
In epistemology ("how do we come to know things, and what kinds of things can we know?"), Kant was all about the "Kantian filter/net" - the "raw experience" / sense data we get is not actually raw; not only is it filtered just by virtue of us having specific perceptual sense, but there appears to be structure in the very experience we get (for him, this was (first and foremost) spatial, temporal and causal structure; in addition to this, we have an arsenal of Kantian categories, which are something that all objects we get to experience have, our perception applying the former to the latter involuntarily and preemptively; Kantian categories are (so to speak) "conditions of the possibility of objects in the first place"). Kant goes into detail about this, attempting to deduce them and the associated "judgments" (we judge whenever we understand things, for him), and so on. His whole project does a reversal of the "how can we know laws of the world?" inductive approach done by Hume et al.; it's not observed temporal sequences -> causal relations between events -> aha! - general causal principle. Kant instead reverses the "direction" and shows how you inevitably have to have a general causal principle if you are to have any experience whatsoever (this is explain in part in his Second Analogy, for anyone interested). Thus it is that even though we cannot know how things in the world are "in themselves", we know things about our experience - their conditions. Consider a fish: a "normal" thinking fish would just think that all its world is water. But a Kantian fish would deduce that even though it does not know what the world "out there" truly is, whether it's water, not-water-deceiving-as-water, or a mixture - it can know something - namely: whatever it comes to experience, the experience itself is aquatic so to speak, having to come "through water". Kant applies this general approach to a number of things, going in detail about the "filters" and about what they tell us about the world, and how this can be used to revive metaphysics (which aims to know what things exist in the world a priori (known not empirically); no, we cannot know this, in a sense; but we can pin down the conditions of human experience, at the very least; these conditions will be a priori).
This kind of stuff was (in a way) quite more powerful than the "knowledge" from LSD. LSD is good for other things, and it can "bootstrap" your drive for knowledge (maybe), and give you initial insights. But for me, I prefer a debugger-symbols-loaded REPL vs. investigation of a binary coredump ;) (that said, I'll want to have a trip again some day just to compare).
I'm not sure about that. I've done my fair share of LSD some years ago, but to me (to lift a simile from somebody else), it's a bit like a program's coredump. All the information is there, sure, less pre-categorized / pre-filtered, but it's not exactly guiding, so to speak. You're left on your own in a forest. Not always, and doesn't have to be like that, but I've seen diminishing returns after a while (meaning, it definitely does give you something the first time; and perhaps several more - when you can focus on thoughts and the world in a calmer way). The latter may not even be the case for some people, maybe, but I definitely think there is an overall "floor" in regards to the "depth" you can reach. Let me compare and contrast.
This may sound cheesy, but the quoted text above reminds me very much of Kant and the approach he had laid out in his Critique of Pure Reason, which I very much recommend and had the pleasure to (to a most definitely quite limited degree) grok, partly. (I think it's quite possible to just take it and read it - some guidance would definitely help - but in itself, it's very organized and (when he's not contradicting himself, which (under some interpretations) does happen) almost pedagogical at times. Familiarity with (especially) Hume and (perhaps) Leibniz, et al. would help, but I think there's value to be extraced by reading it just like that.)
In epistemology ("how do we come to know things, and what kinds of things can we know?"), Kant was all about the "Kantian filter/net" - the "raw experience" / sense data we get is not actually raw; not only is it filtered just by virtue of us having specific perceptual sense, but there appears to be structure in the very experience we get (for him, this was (first and foremost) spatial, temporal and causal structure; in addition to this, we have an arsenal of Kantian categories, which are something that all objects we get to experience have, our perception applying the former to the latter involuntarily and preemptively; Kantian categories are (so to speak) "conditions of the possibility of objects in the first place"). Kant goes into detail about this, attempting to deduce them and the associated "judgments" (we judge whenever we understand things, for him), and so on. His whole project does a reversal of the "how can we know laws of the world?" inductive approach done by Hume et al.; it's not observed temporal sequences -> causal relations between events -> aha! - general causal principle. Kant instead reverses the "direction" and shows how you inevitably have to have a general causal principle if you are to have any experience whatsoever (this is explain in part in his Second Analogy, for anyone interested). Thus it is that even though we cannot know how things in the world are "in themselves", we know things about our experience - their conditions. Consider a fish: a "normal" thinking fish would just think that all its world is water. But a Kantian fish would deduce that even though it does not know what the world "out there" truly is, whether it's water, not-water-deceiving-as-water, or a mixture - it can know something - namely: whatever it comes to experience, the experience itself is aquatic so to speak, having to come "through water". Kant applies this general approach to a number of things, going in detail about the "filters" and about what they tell us about the world, and how this can be used to revive metaphysics (which aims to know what things exist in the world a priori (known not empirically); no, we cannot know this, in a sense; but we can pin down the conditions of human experience, at the very least; these conditions will be a priori).
This kind of stuff was (in a way) quite more powerful than the "knowledge" from LSD. LSD is good for other things, and it can "bootstrap" your drive for knowledge (maybe), and give you initial insights. But for me, I prefer a debugger-symbols-loaded REPL vs. investigation of a binary coredump ;) (that said, I'll want to have a trip again some day just to compare).