Anecdata: I once took LSD and went on a bad trip. I "discovered" that everything in the universe is fractal: space, time and causality. Every microsecond of existence contains within itself the whole existence of the universe and at the same time each one of those 'temporal universes' contains other temporal universes, every micrometer contains the whole space, and every moment there are millions of decisions that ta…
LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
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Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is lots of potential benefits that far outweigh any downsides,so it's worth investigating. They were made illegal for political reasons rather than for scientific or evidence based reasons
Sources for benefits (plural) vs. downsides? Source for politically-motivated criminalization?
The Yale Manual for Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy of Depression (using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as a Therapeutic Frame) https://psyarxiv.com/u6v9y
“Trial of Psilocybin versus Escitalopram for Depression“, https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2032994
Effects of Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy on Major Depressive Disorder. A Randomized Clinical Trial, Alan K. Davis et al., 2020 doi : 10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.3285
Can Psychedelic Drugs Attenuate Age-Related Changes in Cognition and Affect? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41465-019-00151-6
LSD is one of the safest drugs there are. You may get a bad trip but it ends. Of course people in danger of psychosis should not take it.
People don't get addicted to LSD or psychedelics in general. It's not something you want to take frequently (excluding some who microdose at the levels where you don't feel the psychedelics effects).
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#33Anecdata: I once took LSD and went on a bad trip. I "discovered" that everything in the universe is fractal: space, time and causality. Every microsecond of existence contains within itself the whole existence of the universe and at the same time each one of those 'temporal universes' contains other temporal universes, every micrometer contains the whole space, and every moment there are millions of decisions that ta…
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#34Well, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a signal. "Shannon entropy" is noise. "Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#35Here is interesting study lecture and article, maybe somewhat related. The Geometry and objects of things you see in typical to DMT experiences are hyperbolic. Lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes https://qualiacomputing.com/2016/12/12/the-hyperbolic-geomet...
Why on Earth is this being downvoted?
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#36Well, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a signal. "Shannon entropy" is noise. "Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
I thought Shannon entropy described the amount of information content in a message; its uncertainty or surprise. Why would it be noise?
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#37Anecdata: I once took LSD and went on a bad trip. I "discovered" that everything in the universe is fractal: space, time and causality. Every microsecond of existence contains within itself the whole existence of the universe and at the same time each one of those 'temporal universes' contains other temporal universes, every micrometer contains the whole space, and every moment there are millions of decisions that ta…
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds like a profound experience, would you say these insights had any lasting impact on your life? And, if may ask, in what way was it a bad trip? I once took LSD and was hoping for that level of experience, but only got nice visual sfx and some bad emotions later on.
I would say it has opened a door to different way of seeing reality, and I can open that door whenever I want, but I don't think it has changed any of the practical decisions I've made. It was a bad trip because the fractal nature of time implies that your life repeats itself infinitely many times (probably with the exact same details). You can never rest, it's all an infinite loop, and that idea made me extremely di…
This echoes Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, which he thought would in fact be terrifying to the ordinary man, but the overman could live their life in such a way that the infinite repetition would be fully and unreservedly welcome.
Re: LSD and psilocybin increase the fractal dimension of brain activity
#39Well, yes, adding noise increases the fractal dimension of a signal. "Shannon entropy" is noise. "Lempel-Ziv complexity" is "how long is the zip file".
Given your brain takes sensory signal input and coheres it, impairing that ability is going to create signals-based feedback that is described in information theory and signal processing, which if there is any periodic sampling going on on the coherance layer, you're going to get shape artifacts that are a function of that period. It's essentially 1/f noise and the experience of "more" information in a hallucinatory state is really just noisy information, like feedback on a TV. (It implies your brain has a clock cycle, and probably something like an NTP service.)
Imagine your TV had worked perfectly for your entire life and the first time you experienced its signal was bad, but you didn't realize there was a world in which that signal could not exist, so it would be totally mind blowing and you might experience it as a rift in reality. It would demand the question, if the people on TV aren't the substrate of our shared reality, and they are only representations transmitted by signals our minds are cohering, what else isn't necessarily real?
You'd tell other people that you had an experience where there is something else, a true substrate of reality where the televisions weren't coherent and real, which seems impossible, but if you've experienced it, you know. Suddenly, the televisions and they things they say are fallible, but there is still a you without them, and one that is not bound to the identity you see reflected in what they broadcast and tell you, because when the TV signal fed back on itself or echoed with delay, now you know there is something behind it all. It seems profound, but it's really just the first time your TV didn't work because something had impaired the signal. This is what I think hallucinogens are: noise on your sensory channels that reminds you the signals you use to cohere your experience exist in a substrate, which is just a mundane fact and necessarily physically true, and "you" are more than what your manage to cohere into a narrative from your sensory input. Some people believe a substrate or perception of something "else" is inconcievable because they have never experienced jitter in their coherence cycles, and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really, it's not, and most of us just go back to chopping wood and carrying water.