Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs • Hacker News Board

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#231

Post by aunty_helen » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

jamal-kumar wrote: post #228

aunty_helen wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aya isn't super long lasting. A tab of acid might take you on a journey for 8 hours. Aya might be 3-4 depending on the brew. The actual chemical is different and the way you take it (orally, by nealing in front of a shaman and drinking about a shot glass of it) has an affect on the duration and intensity (like a lot of drugs). You can smoke dmt purified or a yagi mix and have different more intense experiences but th…

I live in Latin America and I am strongly disinterested in that tourist side of things, it gives off smelly fake vibes Have yet to have anyone indigenous try and sell me on this

I live in Latin America and I feel the same. It's important to pick your facilitator and shaman carefully. There are the yoga instructor turned shaman types that it's best to avoid.

There are also the "passing through want to try it" attendees.

However, given the power of this substance to have a positive effect on someone's life, I'm not going to build walls around it. Also, it's a very challenging experience and anyone that goes through it deserves a bit of respect.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#232

Post by TheCoelacanth » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #119

dwaltrip wrote: post #75

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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.

I don't think that's at all accurate.

We have evolved to perceive some aspects of reality (the ones where perceiving them improves survival/reproduction) and to not perceive many other aspects of reality because those aspects of reality do not affect survival/reproduction success enough to make up for the cost of having the more accurate perception.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#233

Post by User23 » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

TchoBeer wrote: post #147

User23 wrote: post #78

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> 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 handw…

>Do you find "materialism" to require less handwaving than dualism? The upside to materialism is that the gap in our knowledge, namely why networks of neurons cause consciousness, is something we can acknowledge we don't know and try to understand. Resorting to an explaination relying on objects we can't observse seems... inelegant.

> Resorting to an explaination relying on objects we can't observse seems... inelegant.

Does your objection hold for dark matter and dark energy too?

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#234

Post by dr_dshiv » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 11:23 PM UTC

scubakid wrote: post #224

dr_dshiv wrote: post #210

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You don’t have to go down the chain, you can go up, too. E.g., groups, organizations, ecosystems, etc. It’s not that individual electrons need to be conscious. Instead, for instance, free energy minimizing systems might be conscious— and those are pervasive in the universe at large and small scale.

I feel like even that requires a pretty broad definition of consciousness that starts to diverge from what the term usually connotes. This strikes me as similar to the classic question of whether an ant hill could be considered conscious. In the end I guess a lot comes down to semantics/definitions.

Consciousness is qualia, feeing, experience. So, for instance, if the feeling of dissonance and harmony has some universal characteristic of the alignment of differences into a unified flow, then one can postulate that this characteristic may have a qualitative experience that is similarly universal in those systems where it occurs.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#235

Post by Elof » Wed, Dec 08, 2021, 11:56 PM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #193

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #138

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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 d…

Cognitive bias doesn't exist in perception, it's interpretation, and attributions are even thoretization. Difficulty of classification is not a problem of perception, it's a problem of classification. If we can't name the color, it doesn't mean we don't see the color as it is.

Interpretation informs perception and perception isn't some constant in the human experience. A difficulty of classification can absolutely be a problem of perception because none of these things exist in a vacuum. Literally every human interpretation of reality is at best an approximate summary of what we experience of reality because it's impossible to remove bias and, believe it or not, we still don't know everything.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#236

Post by microjim » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 12:26 AM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #182

microjim wrote: post #132

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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?

Yep, exactly. Sure, I've left out medical reasons but principally it's not what most people have in mind when they talk about 'doing drugs' - even replacing aspirin with something psychoactive (e.g. SSRIs or anti-psychotics).

My point was in response to the parent's 'is it so much different really' question - when you insist that all varieties of reasons that people might be ingesting psychoactive substances stay under the same banner it's a fair bit harder to have a useful conversation about it.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#237

Post by pmichaud » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 12:52 AM UTC

jklinger410 wrote: post #209

pmichaud wrote: post #188

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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?

They are positing a that all reality is unknowable because our senses can be fooled, and our brain is an unreliable narrator (if you will). No matter what evidence I bring to the table, they will simply say "but what if you are being fooled?"

Yeah I'm not them, but I think that's close.

What I would say is that our sensory data + mental models of that data are abstractions over whatever reality actually is, which I am guessing you agree with. On top of that I think something else that I am guessing you don't agree with: I think those abstractions are pretty arbitrary and hide important "implementation details" of reality that could turn out to have a big impact on what anything is or what we might do with it.

I am guessing the crux here is about how much those abstract models are constrained by the underlying reality. It seems like you believe that because sensory information/models converge in a repeatable and consistent way, that it must be close to accurate and complete, where by complete I don't mean we, eg, can "see" the whole EM spectrum, but that there being such a thing as an EM spectrum that we can only see part of gives us a reliable way to infer that our senses aren't missing any substantial chunks of conception space.

What I remain open to is that the abstractions are sort of self referential in that we're in a self constrained region of "potential sensory space," that we can sense and verify the things we can sense and verify, but that raw reality is deceptively huge and complex and a radically different sensory+model configuration might give us a qualitatively different picture of raw reality, even if it overlaps quite a bit with our current sensory bubble.

My main reason for being open to this is that it seems like QFT is an existence proof of our subjective awareness of reality being fundamentally askew from how raw reality actually works, and in fact we ended up narrowly optimized to experience things as we do and act as we do because of replication/evolution not because of correctness or how well our sensory abstraction carve reality at the actual joints.

I am guessing our disagreement is how much extra/unknown space there is, or how useful fundamentally different abstractions could be in interacting with raw reality stuff.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#238

Post by namlem » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 1:07 AM UTC

scubakid wrote: post #183

namlem wrote: post #178

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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.

If you break consciousness down to its most basic element, qualia, I think it's plausible that even very simple systems might be conscious. Not conscious in the way humans or animals are conscious though. Perhaps consciousness is just something that is inherent to information states. The simplest form of consciousness might exist in a switch with an on/off position. If consciousness is indeed innate to information states, then it feels like something to be on or off. There is nothing the switch can do with this information, it's incapable of doing anything. All it can be is on or off. The switch isn't sentient, it just has a subjective experience of on or off.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#239

Post by filoeleven » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 1:32 AM UTC

klyrs wrote: post #204

filoeleven wrote: post #184

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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.

Classifying drugs is, itself, a problem. For example, fentanyl is used in medical settings. The US has pushed an international categorizations of "no medical use" which paradoxically has prevented research into drugs that would find medical uses (research with a hypothesis that "drugs are bad," however, was allowed). We're finally seeing research into positive effects of what were once seen as recreational drugs. And…

Yes, exactly. According to both contemporary accounts and traditional usage, cocaine at low doses via brewed or chewed coca leaves is a an all-round better stimulant (meaning it has fewer negative side effects) than caffeine at similar dosage levels via coffee. I’d be interested in trying it. But the specter of being refined into a hard drug prevents coca leaves from being imported or even studied more thoroughly—and cocaine is schedule II with recognized medical use.

Re: Psychedelics alter metaphysical beliefs

#240

Post by potatoman22 » Thu, Dec 09, 2021, 3:17 AM UTC

emerged wrote: post #139

monktastic1 wrote: post #6

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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.

I think experiences should be weighted by their perceived importance -- and a large number of psychedelic users have reported a trip as being one of the most important events of their lives. However, I can't find the citation for this right now.