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Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

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Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#131

Post by GoblinSlayer »

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…

Brain doesn't have resources to simulate reality all the way down.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#132

Post by microjim »

emptyfile wrote: post #121
eurasiantiger wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”Doing drugs” evokes images of injecting hard drugs with all the unclean nastiness. ”Experimenting with psychedelics” is really, really far from that reality.

What nonsense, is it so much different really? How much experience do you people really have with drugs in america to be making such sweeping statements? "Unclean nastiness"? And wriggling around on the floor on a big dose of LSD for 12 hours is casual clean fun? Getting psychosis from shrooms is not a big of a deal as getting hooked on heroin? Romanticizing psychedelics is a good starting point for abuse.

Some subset of people do some subset of drugs in order to have an exciting/fun/heightened experience (e.g. cocaine on a night out to feel more confident and energised)

Some subset of people do some subset of drugs in order to settle addictive pressure (e.g. popping one’s codeine pills for the day)

Some subset of people do some subset of drugs in order to gain psychological or insight or have spiritual experience (e.g. taking psilocybin with an appropriate setting)

While the lines can be blurry, these are distinct use cases each with their own risks and considerations so they’re worth separating out.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#133

Post by GoblinSlayer »

toomanydoubts wrote: post #66
bobthechef wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's no truth claims. The point is that under the influence of psychedelics, you realize you can't know the truth. I understand you're looking at it from a scientific point of view, but the discussion is not scientific. Consciousness is probably the hardest body of knowledge to integrate with science. Nobody knows where consciousness comes from. Nobody knows how to measure it. I can tell you: "I'm conscious and aw…

>I can tell you: "I'm conscious and aware", but there's no way I can prove to you I'm not a philosophical zombie(someone that acts like it's conscious, but isn't).

You can't prove that to yourself either, because a zombie has the same thoughts as you. You can't differentiate even subjectively whether you're a zombie or not.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#134

Post by archibaldJ »

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…

I really enjoy practicing breathing and going for hikes to connect with the plants and landscape (and in many ways with my cells too which are finally in their natural habitats) when I'm on lsd.

I feel like a key distinguishing factor between microdosing and macrodosing appears to be the crossing into a certain boundary of uncontrolablity (both physiologically and in terms of the mental anatomy of the processes) in the spectrum of conscious control (from a cybernetic perspective?)

I’m caffeine-sensitive so microdosing is definitely a better alternative to cope with city life. I'm still practicing not to lose my narrative and get carried away by noises, bright lights, odor and unintended emotions.

Macrodosing-wise, I find being mathematically minded, etc, to be immensely useful. I've been in a quest to formalise the effect of thc (eg as performing a natural transformation to the attention mechanism in the brain) though I feel like this is only touching the surface as lsd/psilocybin/etc would always demonstrate how the world of qualia is much stranger than one can imagine.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#135

Post by alexanderthe- »

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…

At the risk of being "that other guy", psychedelic experiences come in many different categories of experience: ranging from mere distortions of our normal, subjective state of perceiving reality, to emotional processing, ego death, out of body and spiritual experiences. There is no formula for a spiritual experience, but there have been enough accounts of mystical experiences throughout human history that point to them being quite literally "spiritual" - ephemeral, outside of or interacting with this three dimensional space we inhabit in ways difficult to comprehend, a true mystery to this physical instrument through which we filter the universe.

I think it's a mistake to think we have it all figured out just because we've had an experience that either reinforces or contradicts our per-conceived notions of what constitutes reality.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#136

Post by leadingthenet »

tayo42 wrote: post #63
inter_netuser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how does it reinforce/solidity materialism for you?

During my first lsd trip, I was sitting on a rock in the park, and I'm not sure what happened or why, but suddenly my entire reality fell apart, disintegrated into a bright light and small pieces, and I became intensely aware of how we are seemingly are just built up from particles that came together. I think those pieces were the atoms and molecules that came together to create my experience of the world. Less about…

I think my psychedelic experiences mirror yours quite well, and it has led to me reaching much the same conclusion, though you've put it into words much better than I've ever been able to.

Have you ever experienced your sense of time becoming immaterial? I've had one such trip where I genuinely believed that time stopped, and I was present in some eternal plane, though my ego no longer was present. I can definitely see how such an experience could lead someone down a path of panpsychism.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#137

Post by leadingthenet »

r00fus wrote: post #94
mostertoaster wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't there some evidence to suggest earlier, pre-Christian European religions did sometimes make use of psychedelic substances in group rituals?

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#138

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #119
dwaltrip wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's just FUD. If reality was difficult to discern, we would long be extinct.

Reality is difficult to discern and we are not extinct. Cognitive bias has a long history of existing. For example, attributing personal flaws to harmless mistakes and attributing the flaws of others to malice or incompetence. This is clearly a distortion of reality, because we cannot assume we know the intention or capacity of all other people who aren’t perfect.

(A huge number of other evidences that sober people don’t have a full grasp of reality also exist: people misremember things all the time. People mishear things all the time. Check out that internet debate about the black-and-blue or gold-and-white dress!)

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#139

Post by emerged »

monktastic1 wrote: post #6
bluSCALE4 wrote: post #3

My experience has been that just as fast as the walls come down, the mind builds them back up.

Reminds me of this section from a fantastic trip report: "My hardcore materialist atheism was beginning to be challenged. But my identity was so solidly based on my materialist atheism that I soon attributed the entire experience to merely a "drug trip" with no meaning for my life! Perhaps the greatest lesson here is that. No matter what you experience, your identity can write it off as unreal if it conflicts with wh…

Isn’t it Bayesian? If you experience a few trips here and there, the sum amount of time spent in that version of reality is dwarfed by that of sober experience. So while those experiences do contribute to your understanding of reality, it’s unlikely to be dominated by it.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#140

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #131
malermeister wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Brain doesn't have resources to simulate reality all the way down.

The brain does have the resources to do so, actually. This is variously called dreaming, psychosis, or similar.
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