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Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

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Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#41

Post by jklinger410 »

toomanydoubts wrote: post #26
cipheredStones wrote: post #11

Despite having had the relevant experience, I've always found it hard to understand why this happens. You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are. Maybe it's that psyched…

I believe it's because it shows you that reality is not actually real. It's just a product of your senses. During a psychedelic trip, one might wonder "if I had been like this all my life, I would consider this to be reality, not what I'm used too". It fundamentally shows you that what you consider reality might be very, very, very wrong. So how can I trust my own senses and perceptions if they can be so powerfully m…

You've got it backwards. Reality does not change due to hallucination, only my perception of it.

I've tripped many times and none of what I saw was real, and everything I saw when I wasn't tripping was real. It's good as therapy, and reveals a lot about perception and thoughts, but nothing else.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#43

Post by toomanydoubts »

sethaurus wrote: post #38
toomanydoubts wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the same experience. Can't shake the idea that `consciousness == god` and we are all tiny manifestations of this "essence", after some psychedelic trips. My rational mind always goes back to atheism when sober, but the idea is always there in the back of my mind.

Perhaps this is self-delusion on my part, but I've had no trouble integrating materialism/atheism with what you're describing — that kind of psychedelic panpsychism. They don't feel like competing claims.

I don't mean the usual anthropomorphic god. It's just that once you accept that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe, it's not a big leap to think that it's god(not in the sense of "god, the creator", but in the sense of "god, the consciousness that is and that experiences the universe").

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#44

Post by bobthechef »

badtuple wrote: post #40
bobthechef wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the self-defeating skepticism lost on you? What reality? What molecules? The only explanation that doesn't lead to absurdity is that drugs corrupt your perception. They interfere with and frustrate the healthy and proper operation of the brain and in doing so distort perception.

I guess one question I'd have is why you think your brain is "operating properly". It's definitely perceiving and constructing a narrative out of those perceptions, but that happens differently for every brain and it really doesn't seem like there's a perfect version of it that's "correct". If you're willing to accept that you can't really rank or judge modes of mental experience quantitatively on some kind of non-re…

You're still not seeing the contradiction between making truth claims and having beliefs and the skeptical position you're entertaining. By your own standards, I could ask how you know there's something called a brain, that it has something to do with perception, etc. Maybe you hallucinated the brain? Maybe it's just some weird belief you have? Maybe hallucinations aren't a thing? How do you know what other brains do or don't do differently? And why can't some of them be wrong?

Attaching doubt to things "just because" isn't rational and cannot be resolved rationally precisely because such doubts are not rationally motivated. If I say to you "I doubt that you are here", for no reason other than some arbitrary skepticism about my perceptual faculties, then there is no way that that doubt can rationally be resolved. The very idea of hallucination presumes a normative perception. That we can know that we can misperceive or be subject to illusions itself presumes that we can tell the difference. Otherwise, we are just positing idle and detached possibilities while tacitly, and paradoxically, drawing on various convictions about the real.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#45

Post by willhinsa »

whalesalad wrote: post #42

Psilocybin has been a profound catalyst for change in my life. Macro + micro dosing both offer distinct benefits. Can’t imagine life without it now. I feel enlightened and awakened. Alive for the first time in a long time.

How has microdosing helped? Or I should say, what benefits does microdosing confer that macrodosing doesn't?

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#47

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

kaycebasques wrote: post #10
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #2

I used to be a pretty frequent psychedelic user. These results sound right to me. I would've considered panpsychism to be totally absurd before I discovered LSD, for instance. Now it's my daily driver.

Can you elaborate on panpsychism being your daily driver? Wikipedia article suggests it has something to do with minds being present throughout the universe. Are we talking animals? Rocks? Everything? Computers?

Sure.

I once wrote a paper for epistemology class (https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/Righting/blob/master...). In it I argue that there is a category of propositions that are knowably unknowable. These are things that we know that we will never be able to know. One example of such a proposition is:

> We're living in a simulation that's too complete for us to escape

You can believe it, or you can disbelieve it, and neither stance is more rational than the other. Beliefs in such a space can't be motivated by evidence, so they have to be motivated by something else--like whether they cause you to live the kind of life that you want to be living, or maybe you just think it's fun. My beliefs re: panpsychism are like this. I don't anticipate ever being able to prove them, nor do I expect to run into evidence that disproves them. They go something like this:

I like to imagine that there is more than one temporal dimension. When we humans have cause to believe that a certain part of the universe has a mind, it's because that part of the universe is doing something that creates an arrow of time that is parallel to our own. Its future is also our future. This lets us communicate with it (maybe).

By contrast, when we encounter a rock or a lightning bolt or something that you'd generally call dead. Well, whatever machinations that part of the universe is having towards supporting its experience--they create an arrow of time that is orthogonal to ours, so we can't communicate with them. It's not so much that each rock is alive, or each lightning bolt, but that the whole universe is alive. The part of the universe that I get go call myself has come up with names for the other parts, but those names are just part of the story that I tell myself. Other perspectives might group things into entities worth naming in other ways. Maybe what I call "my" behavior is functioning like a neuron in something... else.

I like to mess with people who are having arguments about abortion: I believe that life begins not at conception, not at birth, but at the big bang. There are very few ways that this belief affects my life, but it does occasionally motivate me to meditate. If I can get my own thoughts to settle down for a while I feel like I can tap into a bigger awareness. It's not having any thoughts that I can decipher, but it feels nice anyhow.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#48

Post by klodolph »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #22
User23 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That materialism is much less popular than I expected. I wonder how much is due to selection bias The overwhelming majority of human beings both now and historically are dualists, so this isn't surprising to me at all. Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. Usual…

There is no "mechanism for how [ ... ] emergence occurs". Emergence is the mechanism. This is even more true of qualia, which are definitionally subjective, and thus do not exist as phenomena in the world. We could talk a bit about the mechanism behind the process where aggregating sufficient water molecules creates a liquid. But we can't talk at all about how that same process could ever be responsible for the exper…

Maybe you experience qualia, but I’m just a configuration of matter. I can’t know what it’s like to experience qualia, because I don’t experience them. Instead, my configurations change according to input and internal processes. I am purely phenomenological.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#49

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

klodolph wrote: post #48
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "mechanism for how [ ... ] emergence occurs". Emergence is the mechanism. This is even more true of qualia, which are definitionally subjective, and thus do not exist as phenomena in the world. We could talk a bit about the mechanism behind the process where aggregating sufficient water molecules creates a liquid. But we can't talk at all about how that same process could ever be responsible for the exper…

Maybe you experience qualia, but I’m just a configuration of matter. I can’t know what it’s like to experience qualia, because I don’t experience them. Instead, my configurations change according to input and internal processes. I am purely phenomenological.

No worries. You're not part of the discussion, then.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#50

Post by e40 »

jklinger410 wrote: post #41
toomanydoubts wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's because it shows you that reality is not actually real. It's just a product of your senses. During a psychedelic trip, one might wonder "if I had been like this all my life, I would consider this to be reality, not what I'm used too". It fundamentally shows you that what you consider reality might be very, very, very wrong. So how can I trust my own senses and perceptions if they can be so powerfully m…

You've got it backwards. Reality does not change due to hallucination, only my perception of it. I've tripped many times and none of what I saw was real, and everything I saw when I wasn't tripping was real. It's good as therapy, and reveals a lot about perception and thoughts, but nothing else.

I don't think that's what the GP meant. I think they meant your perception of reality can take more than one form. Often people fall into the trap of thinking their current perception of reality must be The One, but clearly what many people believe is very much not reality. It's just their current feeling about what their senses are telling them. In fact, in many cases, said perception is created from very little data. The older I get the more I see this in operation.

Changing perspective, which can be instantaneous, is just shifting your view of reality.

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