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LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

biorxiv.org

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Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You need to consider your informational sphere, considering you are on HN its probably vastly different than 95% of the US. Most of the US still views drug use as a criminal issue, including psychedelics. Psychedelics are still central to large pieces of the counter culture.

I live and operate well outside of the typical sphere of Hacker News. Cannabis has been normalized across my country for decades. It's well known for it.

I'm talking about things like LSD and MDMA, cannabis is not exactly a psychedelic.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you just described makes about as much sense as Seado - a word that I just came up with - e.g. no sense at all.

You're starting to get it. Paradoxes, contradictions, and nonsense is how these traditions attempt to get the practitioner to overcome dualism. The problem is that you think you can use either-or logic to understand it when the practice is designed to destroy it.

Get what? Understand what? Destroy what?

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're starting to get it. Paradoxes, contradictions, and nonsense is how these traditions attempt to get the practitioner to overcome dualism. The problem is that you think you can use either-or logic to understand it when the practice is designed to destroy it.

Get what? Understand what? Destroy what?

Dualistic thinking.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get what? Understand what? Destroy what?

Dualistic thinking.

As I explained above, what you call "dualistic thinking" is just refusal to follow common definitions for relatively simple concepts. For example, Wikipedia's entry for abovementioned personhood is clear enough to say, that I and you are two distinct persons. The two of us may be called a person, but it has nothing to do with the "way of thinking", and only has to do with the definition of a person. If a definition of a person had a clause, that would prevent congregates of persons to be a person, no amount of "dualistic thinking" would make two of us, or the entire humanity a person.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of accidental patterns in purely random stuff. So the thing that the pattern corresponds to, according to your brain, isn't really there - but the pattern itself can very well be. You know how trees sometimes look like they have faces, for example? They objectively do, according to our pattern recognition algorithm for faces, in a sense that people will find the same tree more or less anthropomorphic.…

Trees are not accidental. They very much have a pattern. Namely they are in the shape of a tree. TV static is pure randomness. Looking at any pixel has no correlation with looking at any other pixel. Any pattern you see in static must therefore be an artifact of the way your brain encodes patterns rather than something that is actually there.

Trees with faces are accidental. Trees don't have faces. They do have various unrelated features, which sometimes combine to form something that objectively looks like a face to humans.

For a more abstract example, if you generate a random black-and-white static image, it will have a bunch of (short) vertical and horizontal lines in it, simply because random pixel values will sometimes cluster into sequences that produce lines. Such a line is "actually there" - different people will see it, and you can even write code that finds all such lines. The fact that its pixels were formed randomly, without correlation between each other, doesn't change this - it just means that the line has no meaning; it's data, not information. But even so, your ability to detect such lines in a static image can vary.

In a similar vein, there's a well-known issue with RNG in games, where a straightforward approach can sometimes result in e.g. repeating the same value in a row many times, which the players immediately notice (and perceive as unfair). Which is why in many games, the RNG is specifically tweaked to keep track of recent outputs and actively avoid producing more output that would form an easily recognizable pattern.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dualistic thinking.

As I explained above, what you call "dualistic thinking" is just refusal to follow common definitions for relatively simple concepts. For example, Wikipedia's entry for abovementioned personhood is clear enough to say, that I and you are two distinct persons. The two of us may be called a person, but it has nothing to do with the "way of thinking", and only has to do with the definition of a person. If a definition o…

Sadly, this discussion appears to be at an end. Nondualistic thought processes are not based on definitions. They are based on direct experience of the ineffable, beyond words themselves. You keep trying to impose Aristotelian logic on to paradoxes, contradictions, and nonsensical attempts to break one out of dualistic perceptions. There are numerous ways this works, from dreaming, to creativity, to peak and flow experiences of all kinds, all of which aim to break the mind out of what is perceived as separate and to give it a new holistic POV. Just as you cannot have music without the notes that define it, you also cannot have the notes without the empty spaces between them. You can pretend that the notes represent the music, but it is also equally composed by its absence in the form of silence. They are one and the same.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terence McKenna would often say all sorts of crazy-sounding things but he never struck me as someone who took himself too seriously. Here's a short clip [0] which I believe perfectly captures his essence; at the end you can hear him laugh at himself and his story. Edit: I've enjoyed listening to many hours of Terence McKenna speaking, but I wouldn't recommend swallowing all of his pills. [0] https://www.youtube.com/w…

I really enjoy his address to the Jung Society because he is a little more formal without the amusing speculative half-serious statements. He really broke through to me in this one ("the dime dropped"), whereas I didn't take him as seriously before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvBP2sm5kJM

Do you have a time stamp to the interesting bit? That video is 3 hours long.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live and operate well outside of the typical sphere of Hacker News. Cannabis has been normalized across my country for decades. It's well known for it.

I'm talking about things like LSD and MDMA, cannabis is not exactly a psychedelic.

MDMA and LSD are marginalized? Everyone I've ever known has either tried them or knows someone who has. Psilocybin even more so. That was practically a rite of passage growing up in rural Canada.

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I explained above, what you call "dualistic thinking" is just refusal to follow common definitions for relatively simple concepts. For example, Wikipedia's entry for abovementioned personhood is clear enough to say, that I and you are two distinct persons. The two of us may be called a person, but it has nothing to do with the "way of thinking", and only has to do with the definition of a person. If a definition o…

Sadly, this discussion appears to be at an end. Nondualistic thought processes are not based on definitions. They are based on direct experience of the ineffable, beyond words themselves. You keep trying to impose Aristotelian logic on to paradoxes, contradictions, and nonsensical attempts to break one out of dualistic perceptions. There are numerous ways this works, from dreaming, to creativity, to peak and flow exp…

There's nothing ineffable in anything you are referring to. Anyone can generate tons of bullshit by combining letters and words. You are clearly much worse at Seado than I am at non-dualism. Your thought process needs to grow much before you can realize significance of Seado. Then you will learn some truth (and still it will not be universal).

Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about things like LSD and MDMA, cannabis is not exactly a psychedelic.

MDMA and LSD are marginalized? Everyone I've ever known has either tried them or knows someone who has. Psilocybin even more so. That was practically a rite of passage growing up in rural Canada.

Your social circle is not the same as everyone else's. That was my entire point above.
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