71–80 of 170 posts
This was a great read. Thanks for sharing it. It's a shame the responses are overwhelmingly arrogant and myopic/naive. You don't know what you don't know, especially when it comes to the individual perception of others.
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All spiritual experiences sound like gobbledygook to those who have never had a spiritual experience. That they are beyond rational explanation is a feature, not a bug.
They aren't beyond rational explanation. We may not have models that can predict and explain this qualitative phenomena, but I end this sentence with a resounding "yet".
I note that "It's like tripping your balls off on LSD" is missing from the list. But, funny thing: It's the most accurate. Instead you get a bunch of gobbledygook about death, eternity, and direct messages from god. The fact that you might just be having an episode of impaired cognition does not actually enter your brain. Let's not make this more complicated than it is.
Anything with the phrase (paraphrasing) "but I must warn you, you must be surrounded by evolved people" sounds so incredibly condescending and pretentious it really shows how these people see themselves as superior to others, like your friend who travels a lot and brings it up all the time. Except his stories are rational and meaningful, while stories about tripping balls are so subjective, they're meaningless. Yes,…
If you read about the history of the 60's counterculture, you'll see that there was a massive political, physical, economic, and social backlash against it from the dominant culture.
Kind of hard to keep participating in the countculture when the whole rest of society is hell-bent on eliminating "those dirty hippies", putting you in jail, and making illegal the drugs that aided consciousness expansion and questioning the status quo.
Not to mention the huge incentives for conforming and working on Wall St or in Silicon Valley vs giving up your posessions, dropping out, living in a commune, and refusing to participate in the dominant culture.
Also, it takes quite a lot of dedication, patience, and perseverence to stay part of the counterculture for extended periods of time.
There are consequences to all of this and prices to pay quite apart from whether you achieve wisdom from psychedelic trips (which, sadly, most aren't even interested in).
I wonder if there is some plausible medical research which could justify 20-50mg LSD doses.
In 1962 a scientist gave an elephant LSD. Unfortunately they got the dosing very wrong and gave the animal a massive overdose. The elephant died. ( http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2007/05/30/science-va... )
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When I did 2 hits of acid, I had the exact opposite experience of seeing God. The fact that such a tiny amount of a mere chemical could effect my "soul" so profoundly was proof positive that the soul is completely material. I already believed this intellectually, but this experience solidified this knowledge into my very being. So personally, I would recommended experimenting with a psychedelic or two for those who w…
"When I did 2 hits of acid, I had the exact opposite experience of seeing God. The fact that such a tiny amount of a mere chemical could effect my "soul" so profoundly was proof positive that the soul is completely material." Your so-called "soul" may in fact be "completely material", but I don't think what you describe above proves it. There was a famous mystic who once said something like, "when you put a lit match…
Re Hume, not to mention Leibnitz, I didn't mean proof to a logical certainty. I meant proof beyond all reasonable doubt. But if you want to believe that God hides super-soul-cleanser inside simple chemicals, then more power to ya!
To tell you the truth, I actually believe in epiphenomenalism, which is a kind of materialist dualism, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
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Anything with the phrase (paraphrasing) "but I must warn you, you must be surrounded by evolved people" sounds so incredibly condescending and pretentious it really shows how these people see themselves as superior to others, like your friend who travels a lot and brings it up all the time. Except his stories are rational and meaningful, while stories about tripping balls are so subjective, they're meaningless. Yes,…
What do you expect from shroomery.org's phpbb installation? It's optimistic, I think, to assume that you can even "put the hours in" to become an interesting and clever person. It seems more likely that, like many things in humans, being an intelligent (which is what I think you were proxying through "interesting and clever," so I'll cut to the chase -- correct me if I'm wrong) person is something that has a biologic…
Absolutely hit the nail on the head - drugs can show you things with _perspective_, not so much a mystical power given by god - and I see them as potential positives for this reason.
Psychedelic drugs are a shortcut to inducing an intense, temporary paradigm shift in your thought process and perspective, and those experiences can shape your conscious thought in either a positive or negative way afterwards. I am of the opinion that the nature of this influence is very much dependent on your mindset, reasons for and environment of the drug use.
I note that "It's like tripping your balls off on LSD" is missing from the list. But, funny thing: It's the most accurate. Instead you get a bunch of gobbledygook about death, eternity, and direct messages from god. The fact that you might just be having an episode of impaired cognition does not actually enter your brain. Let's not make this more complicated than it is.
Anything with the phrase (paraphrasing) "but I must warn you, you must be surrounded by evolved people" sounds so incredibly condescending and pretentious it really shows how these people see themselves as superior to others, like your friend who travels a lot and brings it up all the time. Except his stories are rational and meaningful, while stories about tripping balls are so subjective, they're meaningless. Yes,…
Again, I think my comment might give you some insights as to the claims about wisdom and maturity. There are also a vast amount of very smart people who have gotten a lot from LSD. I'd highly recommend this read: http://www.themorningnews.org/article/the-heretic
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The canonical thought experiment from philosophy is called "The Knowledge Argument". In it, you are asked to imagine a super-intelligent but color-blind since birth scientist named Mary who knows everything there is to know about human perception from a scientific point of view. (Btw, she's completely color-blind; she only sees in black & white.) Since she knows everything there is to know, surely she knows what it's…
"Mary who knows everything there is to know about human perception from a scientific point of view. ... Since she knows everything there is to know" The second assertion does not necessarily follow from the first. There may well be more to understanding something than what science can know about it. Also, there's something that analytic philosophers like to call "qualia", which is what it's like to experience somethi…
I'm pretty sure I mentioned that. But who knows? Maybe I just did too much acid back in the hippy days.
The amount of literature on The Knowledge Argument is staggering, and there are many ways out of the apparent paradox. Frank Jackson who came up with the Knowledge Argument was using it to argue that mental states do not supervene on physical ones. I.e., one's mental states are not uniquely determined in the space of all possible worlds by one's physical state. (He later changed his mind about this, however, and is no longer a dualist.)
One way out of dualism is, as you hinted at, is to maintain that even if dualism is false, there are things that you can't know without having a certain concept in your head, and the only way to get the concept in your head is to have a certain experience which puts your mind into a state that you could not get to via pondering alone.
Another way out of dualism is to deny that Mary acquired any new knowledge when she sees the ripe tomato.
Etc, etc. And the philosophers will probably be arguing about Mary for the next thousand years.
I would instead recommend reading Albert Hofmann's original accounts of how he came to discover and to sample LSD for the first time; his was a very measured (though his very first experience was unexpected and therefore somewhat peculiar), delicate and elegant approach to discovering the molecule's effects; a scientist with an open mind - that read stirred quite a few things in me! A good read / book by any measure.
http://www.maps.org/books/mpc/chapter1.html
edit - wanted to add that the book in question also includes early accounts of other researchers, psychiatrists, etc. - for a quick read, see e.g. this account in particular: http://www.maps.org/books/mpc/chapter4.html