Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

qri.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 302 posts

Re: Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

#101

Post by LoganDark »

jabbany wrote: post #98
LoganDark wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people did not go through an eternity of perception, processing, and thought; they had the label on their memories altered. No, psychedelics really can speed up thought. It's not uncommon to experience a lot more in a much shorter amount of time than normal. For example, I've experienced this first-hand where I could not even finish a single sentence before I was so far ahead in thought that I completely forg…

The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered". To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic ca…

> The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered".

It's not the only evidence I have, but one of the main problems with trying to describe psychedelics is that the experience is... well, indescribable. As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't even properly decode most of the memories I made with it.

> To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic cases given the same amount of "real time".

LSD probably doesn't make it faster for me to process things. It just makes me jump between things more quickly so I have more distinct experiences at any given time. I know that while in voice chat with people, I would have moments where I would have a bunch of thoughts, completely forget what just happened, and only a couple seconds of real-world time had passed. In that scenario the other person is my time reference but I've also checked actual clocks and observed that effect.

I don't think LSD makes me better at computation at all (in fact, it probably makes me a bit worse at computation).

Re: Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

#102

Post by carlmr »

brutusborn wrote: post #58
codeflo wrote: post #51

All the people in this thread who decoded it used long exposure or faster playback. Using the latter, for me, it starts to become readable at 2.5x and is essentially a clear static image at 4x. (I had to download the video and play it back using VLC.) Which for me, makes this claim a bit absurd: > At a theoretical level, this confirmation is significant because it is the first clear demonstration of a real perceptual…

You are probably right that having a slower processing speed isn’t an advantage overall, but being able to perceive patterns like this may be advantageous in some situations. Maybe the slower processing speed is the cost of better processing power? Kinda like the tradeoff between high torque and high speed for gearboxes. Some tribes use psychedelics for hunting, and others that use psychedelics for introspection: may…

>Some tribes use psychedelics for hunting

OP saying slow doesn't mean that it's actually slower. If you process more information time _appears_ more slowly, but you're processing more, i.e. faster.

In hunting it might be good to have improved pattern matching abilities at the cost of a higher false-positive rate.

Re: Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

#104

Post by kfrzcode »

arunix wrote: post #59
kfrzcode wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arguable. Entheogenic drugs are likely a significant driver behind human cognitive evolution. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogenic_drugs_and_the_arch...

Are you referring to the Stoned Ape hypothesis? I couldn't find any mention of evolution in the linked article.

Yes, in part, and generally there's a close relationship between humans and many interesting psychedelic sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_entheogenic_drugs

Re: Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

#105

Post by jabbany »

LoganDark wrote: post #101
jabbany wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered". To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic ca…

> The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered". It's not the only evidence I have, but one of the main problems with trying to describe psychedelics is that the experience is... well, indescribable. As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't e…

> more distinct experiences

If well formulated I suppose this could be scientifically tested too. Given the right kind of task and measurement. My earlier point is only to tie to the parent about differentiating actually having "more distinct experiences" with just _feeling like_ you had them. This is something that, as the subject and knowing the intervention, you cannot determine by yourself. You'd need an experimenter doing a double-blind experiment to really test this out.

As an anecdote there's nothing wrong --- subjective experiences aren't any less "real" to the experiencer --- just that claims about the mechanism and effect are probably not generalizable.

> As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't even properly decode most of the memories I made with it.

There's also lots of metaphysical questions about whether indescribable experiences are "real" or not that are probably too long to get into on HN :)

Re: Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

#106

Post by carlmr »

causi wrote: post #87
sneak wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a subjective interpretation, and I say that even as someone who believes in objective reality. There's no telling what time perception is "correct" or "real". It is actually within the realm of possibility that they did experience an eternity-scale (but sub-infinite, natch) amount of experiences.

That's a subjective interpretation, and I say that even as someone who believes in objective reality. Nonsense. Where's the thousand years of creative output? If my mind existed for a thousand years I'd be immediately filing patents and writing papers based off all the things I came up with during my eternity of thought . Further, if there was a simple chemical way to accelerate actual brain processing thousands of t…

>Further, if there was a simple chemical way to accelerate actual brain processing thousands of times, you don't think evolution would've built it into our brains?

Not OP, but I'd counter that evolution is doing an imperfect multivariate optimization over a pretty big state-space. Even if it might be easy to change one simple chemical and thus speed up processing, the question is whether the speed-up has other costs.

E.g. the brain is already using a lot of energy, increasing processing speed which probably increases energy usage might not be optimal.

We still don't understand sleep well, it could be that if you process faster more consistently you might need more sleep to organize your thoughts and memories, which is counterproductive if you don't want to be eaten. It's hard enough with our sleep requirements to keep up with nature.

A third point is that evolution only needs to find good enough. We're already the apex predator due to our ability to think. Anything above what we currently have might just not be necessary so has no evolutionary pressure.

Re: Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

#107

Post by LoganDark »

jabbany wrote: post #105
LoganDark wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered". It's not the only evidence I have, but one of the main problems with trying to describe psychedelics is that the experience is... well, indescribable. As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't e…

> more distinct experiences If well formulated I suppose this could be scientifically tested too. Given the right kind of task and measurement. My earlier point is only to tie to the parent about differentiating actually having "more distinct experiences" with just _feeling like_ you had them. This is something that, as the subject and knowing the intervention, you cannot determine by yourself. You'd need an experime…

> My earlier point is only to tie to the parent about differentiating actually having "more distinct experiences" with just _feeling like_ you had them. This is something that, as the subject and knowing the intervention, you cannot determine by yourself. You'd need an experimenter doing a double-blind experiment to really test this out.

This can honestly be applied to basically anything about thought. I sort of get it though, because claiming a difference implies "citation needed". I would just feel weird if I wasn't really having all the thoughts that I thought I had.

It's not exactly possible to communicate exactly what validation I've done over those memories, especially since my brain could have fixed stuff after the fact (as brains do). I just can't find anything that would suggest it was modified after the fact, since even my behavior at the time would support the theory.

Worth noting that I have a lot of experience with things that my brain simply makes me think are happening, because I have Dissociative Identity Disorder and that happens with all sorts of things all the time. (That's not to say I can completely rule it out, rather that I know it happens and roughly how un-rule-out-able it can be.)

My brain will simulate something happening and then also create the memory of it happening, which becomes almost indistinguishable from it actually having happened. I would say I can usually tell those memories apart if I really study them, but whether I am correct or not, it is objectively impossible to know or say for sure, because if I missed something it would simply be missing from my knowledge (to the point where I wouldn't know something was missed).

Re: Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

#108

Post by Nihilartikel »

personjerry wrote: post #54

One time I took way too much weed butter and watched Interstellar, and I swear I could tell exactly where the green screen and photoshopping points were.

Similarly, when enjoying an edible of a strongish dose, I become hyper-sensitized to digital compression artifacts. Low bit-rate media is really obtrusively ugly to me in that state.. the swishing of the drums and cymbals in music, and the smudging of B-frames in the mpeg are just so front-and-center that it's hard to pay attention to the narrative (more so than usual, at least ;) ).

Re: Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

#109

Post by batty_alex »

carlmr wrote: post #102
brutusborn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are probably right that having a slower processing speed isn’t an advantage overall, but being able to perceive patterns like this may be advantageous in some situations. Maybe the slower processing speed is the cost of better processing power? Kinda like the tradeoff between high torque and high speed for gearboxes. Some tribes use psychedelics for hunting, and others that use psychedelics for introspection: may…

>Some tribes use psychedelics for hunting OP saying slow doesn't mean that it's actually slower. If you process more information time _appears_ more slowly, but you're processing more, i.e. faster. In hunting it might be good to have improved pattern matching abilities at the cost of a higher false-positive rate.

Yeah, it's very hard to describe. Almost like you perceive the present moment and the past couple seconds at the same time. Time seems to pass by you very quickly but, then you look at the clock, and it's only been 5 minutes

That being said, I can't imagine having to hunt while on a lot of psychedelics

Re: Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

#110

Post by ilyt »

codeflo wrote: post #51

All the people in this thread who decoded it used long exposure or faster playback. Using the latter, for me, it starts to become readable at 2.5x and is essentially a clear static image at 4x. (I had to download the video and play it back using VLC.) Which for me, makes this claim a bit absurd: > At a theoretical level, this confirmation is significant because it is the first clear demonstration of a real perceptual…

.
Post reply on HN