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Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

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Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#71

Post by jklinger410 »

sedivy94 wrote: post #69
jklinger410 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, that's not what they mean. My carpet is not changing color, my mother's face isn't melting. That's not happening on a physical level. My sober perception is repeatable and verifiable. It exists no matter my state of mind. It's novel to make yourself see things that are unreal. It's novel to have your emotions fluctuate wildly. But it's just novel, and unreal, and nothing more.

Psychedelic perception is also repeatable. And sober perception is not reliable.

Same drug, same effects. Cameras can't see your wall melting, but they exactly match what we see in reality

Huh, weird.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#72

Post by TimTheTinker »

guythedudebro wrote: post #20
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…

Not only that, but the fact that consuming a chemical can make your consciousness feel so different always felt to me like pretty good evidence that consciousness is material. I do think there are rational realizations that rational people can come to under the influence of psychedelics, that they might not otherwise, though.

Why can't consciousness be from both the material and the immaterial?

If a chemical alters perception, that just shows that consciousness is strongly affected by the material, but other non-contradictory hypotheses aren't thus disproven.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#73

Post by toomanydoubts »

jklinger410 wrote: post #71
sedivy94 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Psychedelic perception is also repeatable. And sober perception is not reliable.

Same drug, same effects. Cameras can't see your wall melting, but they exactly match what we see in reality Huh, weird.

Cameras were designed to work just like our own eyes. Design a camera to work like flies eyes, and suddenly you will get an image that does not match your perception. That's the whole point, we don't know reality. We only know a model of reality that we can perceive with the senses we have.

Show a picture to a fly and it will tell you: "you're tripping, this is not what reality looks like".

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#74

Post by sedivy94 »

whalesalad wrote: post #58
willhinsa wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I was surprised by this - but microdosing has had a more profound effect on my daily life than macrodosing. After a very long and arduous journey with therapist(s), psychiatrist(s), counseling, etc… I finally decided to trust myself and take my own well-being into my own hands: cultivating my own medicine at home. During the entire process I was convinced macrodosing would be the most helpful and microdosing would ju…

Astute observations… I’ve heard similar from someone who microdoses and pole dances for hours on end. She’s an interesting gal to say the least but incredibly tapped into the fungal experience and that trajectory of personal growth.

Really appreciate this comment, thank you.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#75

Post by dwaltrip »

jklinger410 wrote: post #68
Elof wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that your sober perception exists only in your state of mind. My sober perception of the 'same' experiences you have is almost definitely not going to be the same as yours. So an altered state potentially gives you the realization that your personal experience isn't universal reality. In other words a personal perception of reality is not reality itself. This is why we have philosophy in general.…

This is such a silly conversation. We have cameras and all sorts of equipment that tracks a constant reality. Who gives a shit if people perceive it with varying levels of accuracy? What does it matter that introducing substances to the brain can reduce your ability to perceive it? There is evidence of reality, and childish mind games and semantic debates that it might not. I drop you off in the Gobi desert with no w…

For many things, you are right (or close enough for most purposes). For many, many other things, including the some of the things we care about most, the "true reality" is not so easy to discern.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#76

Post by throwaway34241 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #53
monktastic1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument breaks down for me here: > because the experience of wet is wholly subjective. I can't distinguish this from "wetness is a quale." In which case the analogy water : wetness :: brain : qualia reduces to water : qualia :: brain : qualia. Also: > the experience of having experiences The fact that we sometimes slip up and use recursive language like this is a suggestive sign to me. We intuit that experience…

> the experience of having experiences this is not recursive, really. It is not written to imply that experience is universal, in fact quite the opposite. Most of us generally posit that rocks do not have experiences. Most of us posit that humans do, and likewise (famously) so do bats. But what the experiences that a bat has? It's not unreasonable to assume that they are quite different from the ones a human has. Erg…

I agree that people have experiences, but I don't understand why they must be magical or non-existent in the physical world. Why can't the word "experience" simply be referring to the physical processes that happen when our mind/body is in some particular environment?

Certainly physically ingesting a small amount of certain psychedelic chemicals can have profound effects on subjective experience, so it can't be too disconnected from physical processes.

The whole issue of qualia / experiences seems like it is an extension of the dualist/materialist perspectives rather than something that sheds light on it one way or another - dualists will view qualia as something non-material and so something that materialism can't explain, and materialists will view qualia as something material along with consciousness itself.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#77

Post by User23 »

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…

I say this in all sincerity: thank you for providing a much better example of the kind of hand-waving flim-flam I was referring to than I was able to.

I imagine that you are making some kind of point here, but this is just exactly what loses me every time. Is that some kind of mental deficiency on my part? I suppose it could be, but if it is then I don't think it's one I want to correct.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#78

Post by User23 »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #52
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…

> Materialists always lose me when they start trying to explain things like how exactly inanimate matter started thinking. Define "thinking." Is an ecoli deciding to move towards or away from a chemical signal "thinking?" > I've never seen any recourse other than handwaving of the highest order. How much have you read from people researching consciousness, vs reading half-baked layman ideas about materialism on web f…

> Define "thinking." Is an ecoli deciding to move towards or away from a chemical signal "thinking?"

Define "defining". Is a definition the thing that is being defined?

> How much have you read from people researching consciousness, vs reading half-baked layman ideas about materialism on web forums?

Will I not learn anything from dialog with you because it's on a web forum?

> Do you find "souls" to require less handwaving than materialism?

Do you find "materialism" to require less handwaving than dualism?

> Do you find "souls" to require less handwaving than materialism? Because if not, I have a lot of questions about souls that I'd love you to answer. Here are a few.

Did I somehow give you the impression that I'm an apologist? I'm here to talk about how conscious intelligence could arise from dumb matter, not about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and other such nonsense.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#79

Post by mostertoaster »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #65

At the risk of being "that guy", it has to be said that this kind of study is unreliable. Posting a bunch of messages to r/drugs and r/psychedelics to come take their survey is going to suffer from all sorts of statistical biases. It is still better than the lowest for the study, the sample size of one: "Well this is what I experienced". Yet here I go. I have always been a materialist, and I've also never done drugs…

You should try going to an Orthodox Church and see how weird it is. It definitely makes you think of the spiritual meaning of things.

THC alone makes me all spiritual feeling, and often in a good way. I think psychedelics would just take me to a scary spiritual place, not a euphoric one.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#80

Post by toomanydoubts »

monktastic1 wrote: post #64
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.

Per your description below ("god, the consciousness that is and that experiences the universe") I would have pegged you as an idealist (god is and dreams the universe), not a panpsychist.

To be honest, I'm don't know much about philosophy of the mind. From the very little I've read right know, probably my current view is closer to cosmopsychism, maybe?

This is what I just read: "but the difference is that for the analytic idealist the universal mind is a reality which underlies the physical world, whereas for the cosmopsychist the universal mind is the physical universe."

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