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Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

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

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like time goes by “slower” for me ever since I did a heroic dose a few years ago. Used to be stressed the f out all the time. Now I feel like I can enjoy every full second. Crazy how much time we have in life when we just stop paying attention to the negative energies like stress and instead channel them into storage for something positive later. I’ve always been efficient and quick at learning new things and…

The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change. That change in personal outlook may have been coming your direction anyway, or you may have experienced it sooner if you hadn't been doing LSD at all.

> The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change.

No, there's no problem. It doesn't change the fact that the dose is when it happened.

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

#243
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Sounds identical to me on a bad ADHD day.

My thoughts would expand like a fractal and it would take active effort to make it all the way back out. I probably can't really communicate it to someone who hasn't experienced psychedelics before, but it makes me feel like I am conscious of every bit of mental effort I am spending. Pulling myself out of deep thought feels like a long, manual process, even if it's actually instant. An analogy I liked to use is havin…

This happened to uh a friend the first time they got really high on weed.

It's just a trick your brain is playing on you man. I was playing Rainbow Six Siege with friends, and during the 30 second setup phase I played for what was surely several minutes doing all the things you do with the drone and looking everywhere and planning all sorts of things, and then I looked at the timer and only 5 seconds had passed.

Your brain's interpretation of time passing is a completely made up fiction for it's own benefit. Police officers report seeing shootings going down in slow motion, watching individual shell casings drop to the floor and reading the numbers stamped on the bottom.

When this kind of time dilation was scientifically investigated, we found that what actually changed was your MEMORY of that time, not your cognition during the dilation itself. You aren't actually experiencing things quicker, your brain is just timestamping stuff poorly. Your brain's time tracking system just gets out of whack, and that screws with your consciousness because it relies heavily on timestamping of things.

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

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all the time Humans do all the time. A person does very seldomly.

yes, but mostly without psychedelics.

I mean, if one of ten happened while on psychedelics, and the person spent 0.0001% of their life under the influence of psychedelics, that's a pretty significant contribution.

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

#245
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…

>To scientifically test this... I swear, you people turn science into a religious ritual. First-hand observation (which we have here) is the gold standard for knowledge-derivation. Science is just a method for ensuring that our models hew close to that. What you assert here is mere convention.

Actually no. The plural of anecdote is not data. This is a single anecdote, not a set of data from a properly blinded or designed study.

Humans are TERRIBLE at knowing reality. That's like the whole point of the scientific process. People's self reports are literally the worst evidence ever used in science, and you have to actively work against your subjects and their brains to tease any actual signal out of that noise.

Consider for example, many airplane accidents have people reporting the plane was hit by a missile, even though we can have independent evidence that they weren't even looking in the direction until after the event.

We KNOW the brain lies to you as a matter of course, and makes up pretty much everything it can for the purpose of being lazy. Your entire consciousness is a fiction, vulnerable to all the normal human biases. We KNOW it is incredibly easy to mangle, twist, modify, and combine memories, and that pretty much everyone has memories that don't match reality.

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

#246
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…

I feel like time goes by “slower” for me ever since I did a heroic dose a few years ago. Used to be stressed the f out all the time. Now I feel like I can enjoy every full second. Crazy how much time we have in life when we just stop paying attention to the negative energies like stress and instead channel them into storage for something positive later. I’ve always been efficient and quick at learning new things and…

Hrm.. does time going slower mean you overclocked your cpu? Are you able to accomplish more in a given amount of time? Say typing faster? Or is it just the perception of time passing that changed and maybe your ticks are further apart so that it seems like time has slowed but has actually remained constant?

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

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That is OK, right?" The way you are doing it, could maybe be improved. "The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change" You clearly judged here based on little information. How do you know, that he cannot know? (Unless you argue about philosophical limits of "knowing") When till time X there was behavior Y and at time X there was a strong trip - and afterwards differences,then it…

Hey thanks, I'll work on that. You try and work on staying on topic and not making meta comments.

Sorry, but that is quite similar. You asked a question and I decided to answer it. No meta comments initiated from my side, as far as I am aware.

(I did not take part in the conversation before).

So you are not really in a position to tell me, what to do, yet you did. And I am not in a position to tell you, what to do. I merly answered your open question on what I think you could improve.

But if you would like a meta comment from me: I think you might benefit from not considering every online discussion as something you have to win.

(I have been there as well)

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah let me drop acid in my morning cereal right before the daily scrum. This day's gonna be a fun if unproductive one finding patterns across Confluence pages.

Don't do that, I already put it in the team water jug.

Oh yeah, talk about _real_ team building. Offsite and all over the place without leaving the building.

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

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty high dose if you aren't a regular user. Most of my friends who are very casual with it usually go for 10mg max. Altered visuals on cannabis are very rare, its almost entirely a psychological effect in my experience. As far as altered thoughts - did you think something was physically wrong with you? That paranoia 100% counts

> That's a pretty high dose if you aren't a regular user. Exactly. The goal was to take a really high dose, to see if it would do anything—I was getting impatient tapering up with 2.5mg (or so) edibles, so I bought some tincture, did some calculations, and took 50 milligrams' worth. (Just drank it directly from a dropper.) Now that I've tried such a high dose and not detected any desirable effects, I can basically ru…

It took me several attempts with weed before it would affect me. I smoked like gram of flower one of my first times and had no effect, while my friends were zonked off of a few puffs. This isn't bragging about my tolerance, as nowadays a single puff can get me high, it's as if I had to "sensitize" myself to it.

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

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that is a pretty sweeping claim given the limitation of science when it comes to understanding the psychoactive effects of entheogens. Especially for something like spirituality, which is almost by definition something experienced within.

That's true! But, don't you think that our inner state can be correctly described in terms of electrochemical activities inside the brain, including spirituality?

I believe the electrostuff in the brain is determinstic, but we exist in a parallel dimension which is able to bias the movement of any of those interactions. Picture the brain as a pinball game, and we're able to "tilt" the table to influence it to some extent to go in a direction we want, but only in a very limited way :)
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