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Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

nature.com

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Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#181

Post by myfavoritedog »

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…

It looks like you mistakenly thought that having a drug-induced spiritual experience would somehow make spirituality more "real".

No matter how much you felt like you were in the presence of the Light, it didn't change the fact that the Light doesn't exist. It was just a trigger in a part of your brain that can bring on neurological changes in many people.

I'm not an atheist because I want to be or because I haven't had spiritual experiences. I'm an atheist because facts and logic have led me to the unfortunate conclusion that this life is all I'll ever have and that when it ends, I have no belief that something else will continue for me.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#182

Post by klyrs »

microjim wrote: post #132
emptyfile wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The distinction you're making isn't the drug, it's the purpose, and you left one out: people also take drugs for medical reasons, with or without a prescription (aspirin is a drug).

For example, weed can be used for all five of those purposes. But what's the value you see in separating them?

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#183

Post by scubakid »

namlem wrote: post #178
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 think being familiar with the basics of the standard model of physics (very basic, I don't claim to know much at all) influences one's perception of the experience induced by psychedelics. I would say that I am still more or less a materialist, though with greater appreciation for the idea of panpsychism, but really what I believe is that these ideas are not in conflict. The ephemeral, empty nature of all things is…

For me, panpsychism has never landed at all, though it is a fun idea to think about. I tend to see animals/humans as exceedingly complex (and most likely deterministic) systems, of which what we call "consciousness" is an emergent property. From that viewpoint, applying consciousness down the chain to the lower-level building blocks doesn't make a lot of sense.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#184

Post by filoeleven »

klyrs wrote: post #176
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.

Sorry, no. Drinking alcohol is "doing drugs." The imagery you're evoking is propaganda. Don't validate it.

So is drinking coffee. “Drugs” as an umbrella term is either too broad or too politicized to have much meaning without referring to specific substances. Even classing them by category can be tricky: caffeine and cocaine are both stimulants, for example.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#185

Post by tinalumfoil »

Sosh101 wrote: post #159
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 one thing it can do is allow you to view things with fewer of the biases, assumptions and other mental stuff you've accumulated over the years. Having a fresh (childlike?) view of things can give you a newfound appreciation for many things (e.g. the environment). > You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? Isn't t…

> Isn't that a little bit like saying that you shouldn't change your views after reading a book, if you are aware that the book commonly changes views?

No, it's closer to changing your belief from "chocolate is bad for you" to "chocolate is good for you" after having a particularly good-tasting piece of chocolate. Unlike reading a book on the health benefits of chocolate, your change in belief does not logically follow from your experiences, at least not in an obvious way. Since drugs aren't going to alter your priors, it seems as though the change in belief is purely emotionally driven. Which is odd.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#186

Post by agumonkey »

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…

Your brain is all chemistry but your experience is still variable. You can choose to live on matter or orient your brain on other directions.

It's said that some of these drugs can make one more social, more emotional, which imo is a better existence than other paradigms.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#187

Post by GoblinSlayer »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #140
GoblinSlayer wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Dreaming is a limited simulation, not on the level of reality.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#188

Post by pmichaud »

jklinger410 wrote: post #158
malermeister wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you only see the recordings from those cameras with the same eyes you're trying to verify, so this isn't actually giving you anything useful. You only have one input and no way of testing how reliable it is.

X ray vision, heat vision, electron microscopes all exist and translate things outside of our visual ranges into something we can perceive. None of those validate LSD induced hallucinations. If you have some ideas that those technologies are wrong, go enter the field and prove it! Until then this conjecture is intellectually lazy.

Suppose for a moment that you and the people talking to you in this thread are talking past each other. What do you imagine the other people are trying to communicate to you, in their own terms?

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#189

Post by malermeister »

jklinger410 wrote: post #158
malermeister wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you only see the recordings from those cameras with the same eyes you're trying to verify, so this isn't actually giving you anything useful. You only have one input and no way of testing how reliable it is.

X ray vision, heat vision, electron microscopes all exist and translate things outside of our visual ranges into something we can perceive. None of those validate LSD induced hallucinations. If you have some ideas that those technologies are wrong, go enter the field and prove it! Until then this conjecture is intellectually lazy.

All of those readings enter your mind through your senses.

All the x-ray, heat, whatever readings all have to pass through your audiovisual senses before you know about them. If your eyes and ears deceive you, all the fancy technology outside your eyes and ears can't help you.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#190

Post by fsh »

Der_Einzige wrote: post #179
fsh wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Oh really? So you mean things like the no-cloning theorem, no-copying theorem, the whole idea of quantum indeterminacy, and the fact that actual randomness exists gives you evidence for objective reality? Actually, it's exactly the opposite. A =/= A. Even if there was objective reality, it's not available to us. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_indeterminacy h…

The measurement problem is indeed profoundly weird and nobody has a good explanation for it. However, I doubt that you are going to be able to resolve quantum effects when discussing the temperature of two buckets of water.
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