Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs • Hacker News Board

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#91

Post by guythedudebro » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 6:30 AM UTC

monktastic1 wrote: post #24

guythedudebro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure I see why. Dreams tend to be unstable, but if a dream were particularly stable, and a certain behavior in the dream reliably triggered a certain insight (say, a dream sign that triggered lucidity), would that be evidence that consciousness was produced by the "material" in the dream? In the same way, if this is a dream of sorts, the fact that certain dream behaviors can trigger certain changes in experie…

If you can develop a robust system of testable explanations for the material reality of your dream world that hold consistently true where/when this is all happening then maybe your question would be useful.

There is complex physiology going on producing a consciousness (so it seems to me) that can be altered when that physiology is altered. We can see at least some of this physiology. Suggesting all that physiology in our world is actually happening in the dream world of some other being doesn't seem very interesting as it still leaves us here in the same material (as we can measure it) reality that science is... still pretty damn good at describing. So why even bring it up? If there's evidence that points us that way, cool, otherwise, Occam's razor seems better.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#92

Post by mostertoaster » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 6:42 AM UTC

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 think it’s because it opens up the narrative part of our brains.

Why are stories powerful?

The material world is the facts. It could be intoxicated man driving his car dies crashing into telephone pole. If the other facts could be he had just finished robbing someone and being abusive to a woman and then got in his car, your mind tells a story about “justice”.

Maybe the facts were he was a gay man who just came out to his conservative parents and they disowned him and he got drunk and drove into the pole out of sorrow. The story becomes “injustice”, “tragedy”.

But justice, tragedy, injustice aren’t material things. Psychedelics tend to set your mind on these things, and give meaning to what we’re just material facts. The meaning of them may or may not be true, but pondering on them and thinking about their meaning is sure to change your worldview (ie the root of meaning or how you “perceive” the world.)

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#93

Post by mostertoaster » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 6:43 AM UTC

jklinger410 wrote: post #54

e40 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dat…

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.

[flagged]

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#94

Post by r00fus » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 6:48 AM UTC

mostertoaster wrote: post #79

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.

Imagine how powerful it would be to be able to alter the setting so bad trips depict hell and good trips depict heaven.

Almost like they could be utilized in a way to provide a religious fervor for your adherents.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#95

Post by latestbulletins » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 6:49 AM UTC

Welcome to the https://latestbulletins.com/"> latestbulletins !! We provide you all the latest news, entertainment, music, fashion, and video straight from the entertainment industry. Stay tuned with Latest Bulletin for more exciting videos, entertainment, & the latest break.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#96

Post by __del__ » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 6:54 AM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #83

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…

I can't help but keep rereading this. The statement "I've never done drugs" juxtaposed with "20 and 30 experiments" is kinda funny to me.

"I have been advised to let you know that I have never..."

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#97

Post by samhain » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 7:01 AM UTC

User23 wrote: post #77

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…

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.

This sounds like you might be able to gain something from the “Do chairs exist?” video by vsauce.[1] Basically, he goes through the different philosophical reasonings of the past and then explores where each one of those fall apart. He goes explicitly into how small things can create something larger but why philosophers have struggled to make the leaps to change definition. He ends on the latest philosophical reasoning, which I think thoroughly explains your conundrum.

I’ll try to explain even if it seems less profound here than in the video. Basically, all concepts are emergent behavior of “stuff.” There really isn’t a chair, but “stuff” arranged chair-wise. And humans decide what that boundary is for both chairs and consciousness as they are concepts we apply to stuff that is “chairing” or “being conscious.” A collection of neurons may or may not be conscious by defining how they behave. And the details on where we draw the line for consciousness is no different than where we draw the line for how many atoms we can scrape away from a chair and it still be a chair.

[1] https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#98

Post by akomtu » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

jklinger410 wrote: post #54

e40 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dat…

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.

Your carpet will change colors are if you wear colored glasses. If everyone had colored eye lenses, we wouldn't be able to agree what color the carpet really is. We would still agree that it's a 500nm wavelength that gets reflected from the carpet, because that number is objective, while our senses aren't. It just so happens that we perceive the numbers in a more or less the sane way. I guess that mushrooms change your perceptual "reference frame", you notice that the two reference frames have equal standing and thus neither is true.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#99

Post by LNSY » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

Slightly off topic, but: Jesus turning water into wine makes a lot more sense when he has access to some kind of potent hallucinogen. It also might explain everything else that went on back in Palestine 2000 years ago.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#100

Post by fsh » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 7:17 AM UTC

malermeister wrote: post #87

jklinger410 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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've tripped many times and none of what I saw was real, and everything I saw when I wasn't tripping was real. How would you possibly verify this claim? What is reality if not your perception of it? Does objective reality exist? How do you know anything is objectively real and not a product of some brain process? All of those are long-standing philosophical questions. Here's [1] a quick intro on the problem space I…

Ancient Greek philosophers could not measure anything, so this idea was at least somewhat plausible. Modern philosophers have no such excuse. We can simply measure the temperature of the water buckets and accept that our hands are very poor thermometers. Leaving aside the very difficult issue of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, the last 200 or so years of science have clearly demonstrated that objective reality exists.