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Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics

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Re: Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics

#171
post #13

Im a stable, sane, not depressed or anything person. I once took LSD (mixed with other things aswell...) and had a trip during which I spoke to God, Satan and various other imaginary beings. It was not a fun experience - I'm a man of science, but the feeling/perception was so real, my entire world view was shattered. It stuck with me for months after. I've gone from someone who 100% believed in evolution and a materi…

These are the stories we tell ourselves. Be they scientific or otherwise. The science is nice, it helps us get around in the world. But when stories become overwhelming, maybe it’s time for a change (of mind). “Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palac…

Odd, I just read that a few hours ago in Alan Watts' Wisdom of Insecurity.

Re: Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics

#172
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never, ever met a psychonaut that doesn't advocate "set and setting".

The main point was that bad reactions and bad trips should not be underestimated and down played as silly ego problems or rare personal weakness. Set and setting is important. Do not try psychedelics to solve problems. But set and setting is not everyting. A bad trip might happen anyway. Who knows about its genetic, biological and psychological constitution and reaction before the trip ? That is why a medical expert…

I understand where you are coming from and agree with 75+% of what you state. Most people who say they have a "bad trip" actually say it was better defined as "difficult" and had long-term benefits. Here is a key statistic from this study:

"Despite these difficulties, it is notable that 84% of respondents reported having benefited from the experience, with 76% reporting increased well-being or life satisfaction attributed to the experience."

Study: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5551678/

Re: Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics

#173
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your definition. Hand out sheets of paper and ask people to write down all the gods they believe exist. What's your term for people who hand in empty sheets? For many of us, that's non-theist, aka atheist. Also note that it's not only theological propositions that are impossible to prove: The omphalos hypothesis could be true and the whole universe could have started existing a microsecond ago. I could be…

Yes, you should be. You should claim uncertainty about anything you cannot prove in any way, shape or form. It's fine to say you believe something is the case, but at that point you're talking about faith and you don't get to say what a "wrong" position is - it's faith after all. In any case, we're drifting way off-topic here. It's fine if you don't agree with what I think atheism is, although I would be interested t…

You should claim uncertainty about anything you cannot prove in any way, shape or form.

All ontological claims are unprovable, resting on axioms that have to be accepted on faith. I can't prove I just wrote you this message, I just believe I did. Philosophically speaking, there is no certainty.

I would be interested to see what kind of definition you base it on

Binary classifications are useful. There are people who affirm the existence of gods. Let's call them 'theists'. There are people who are not members of that group. Let's call them 'a-theists'. Done.

Now, you might be interested why people do not affirm the existence of gods. For example, they might think it unlikely due to empirical evidence that contradicts most traditional religious claims. Or they might think there's not enough evidence to come to a conclusion either way. Let's call the latter agnostics and make our binary classification into a tripartite one. But wait, what about ignostics, believing that the question itself is ill-posed? Should we include them as well as their own category? What about all the other ways not to be a theist? You have to draw the line somewhere if you want to avoid an explosion in complexity.

None of the possible ways to draw the lines is inherently more correct as long as you take care to define your terminology, it's just that you might upset different groups of people because they feel underrepresented or resent being grouped together with 'those guys'.

Re: Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, it’s a clinical study. They need to control the conditions or it’s not science.

It wouldn't be science but at the same time those conditions are horrible in order to study the effects of psychedelics. The conditions are almost a sure fire way to make someone have a troubling experience if they were given the doses knowen to be taken in those times and did not have prior experience dealing with the reality altering effects of those substances.

Apparently not that horrible, with 25mg of psilocybin: Treatment with psilocybin produced rapid and sustained antidepressant effects. Decreased depressive symptoms were observed in all 19 patients at 1-week post-treatment and 47% met criteria for response at 5 weeks. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-13282-7

Re: Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics

#176
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Post-solopsism? Fck me dude, I mean say want you will about nihilism, at least it doesn't attempt to invalidate the experience of qualia.

I can't help feeling we're begging the question a bit with qualia. Yes, I have experiences. Yes, there's "something it feels like" for me to see red, or stub my toe, or whatever. But there's no reason to believe that that feeling is in any way portable to anywhere outside my own head. I don't see why "I perceive a thing and I perceive myself perceiving the thing" is so universally accepted to be something special or…

> I can't help feeling we're begging the question a bit with qualia

Exactly, it's kind of like how the debate about "free will" is being handled, either you use a definition of free will that makes it trivially true, but useless, or you use a definition of free will that requires you to literally believe in magic

Re: Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics

#177
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just materialism taken to its logical conclusion. We're just a bunch of atoms bumping into each other in a way that fools ourselves into believing that we're a cohesive entity. Ever been tired and run on autopilot? Our experience of ourselves vary in strength all the time. If I'm really really honest with myself, I don't actually have the experience of qualia all the time

>>"If I'm really really honest with myself, I don't actually have the experience of qualia all the time" That's is what you say, but how can we know that you are not a conscious being imitating a p-zombie? ;-)

We can't :)

So I'm going for the one that requires the least magic

Re: Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics

#178
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this very interesting because I had precisely the opposite reaction once when I tried psylocibin. Despite being pretty solidly materialist and agnostic, I'd always held a bit of a soft spot for Cartesian duelism and a bit of a "but it'd be cool if..." What I didn't expect was that the effects wouldn't just "feel real" or "be convincing", they were real. Subjectively, it wasn't inside my head, it was the actual…

Yep, the arbitrariness and oddity of the experiences cemented materialism for me. Something an acquaintance in the old Atari users group I was a part of in the 80s/90s said to me (when I was a teenager, saying "acid could be neat to try") stuck with me. "You know how if you drop some screws or something on video circuitry of the PCB of your computer and the display gets all scrambled? That's analogous to what LSD is…

This is a great analogy and something I found quite comforting (I'm OP), thankyou.

Re: Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics

#179
post #24
post #13

Im a stable, sane, not depressed or anything person. I once took LSD (mixed with other things aswell...) and had a trip during which I spoke to God, Satan and various other imaginary beings. It was not a fun experience - I'm a man of science, but the feeling/perception was so real, my entire world view was shattered. It stuck with me for months after. I've gone from someone who 100% believed in evolution and a materi…

I highly suggest reading 'Why god won't go away' by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D'Aquili, and Vince Rause. IIRC, the posterior superior parietal lobe essentially orients your body within your consciousness. When people have religious experiences this part of the brain has extra activity. If that activity was blocking that part of the brain from properly orienting your body, wouldn't a feeling of 'oneness' make a lot of se…

Your comment took me quite a while to parse, but it's actually incredible. I had never considered that somewhere deep down I have a sensation of "being" inside my body, which I guess some part of the brain is responsible for. Our senses can be fooled as we all know - if this sense became confused, it seems plausible that one could experience the sensation of "being" - in the sense of, their phyisical geometric location in space - somewhere else, other than between their ears.

If this could happen then the experience could possibly manifest itself in a few ways. In the larger discussion thread, many are talking about having an experience where somebody feels they are at one with the universe, so their sense of being is that they feel like they are everywhere.

Another possibility that occured to me is, consider that we percieve the world from the position of inside our head - which also happens to be the default calibration for our sense of geometrical "being". We also experience vision from this perspective, so it seems completely normal to assume that our brains process raw eye-signals. However, consider the possibility that our experience which we call vision is actually not the raw data feed, but actually is calculated/derived from both the raw data feed and our internal sense of geometrical viewpoint. If this were the case, then someone who had their sense of geometrical viewpoint displaced (but was still taking in raw data from their eyes, which do have a fixed real-world location) would experience a sense of vision, from the viewpoint inside the world wherever their sense of geometrical viewpoint has been displaced to.

This seems a plausible explanation for how people (who are often experiencing medical trauma) could have a legitimate out of body experience - their sense of geometrical location was displaced, but their brain continued to process vision, so it projected a viewpoint from location X using the data it was receiving from positiom Y and what it already knew of the world.

Re: Michael Pollan reluctantly embraces the 'new science' of psychedelics

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you see it as a indication of the opposite of what we typically call God? That instead of there being an external entity outside our universe interacting with you, you talked to something God-like inside yourself. This might be what you share with every person in history that ever have received divine inspiration. That same experience motivated them. Just like we can share experience with other people when we a…

And that inner God likely lives in the right side of your brain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)

If by likely you mean according to a discredited theory proposed by one person and based on some really bad historical understanding.
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