Having recently recovered from Legionnaires where I was in a medically induced coma for nearly 2 months where I received CPR twice for flat-lining here is my experience... I didn't know what happened but I did get to meet deities, aliens and participate in a bunch of sci-fi oriented excursions. In short I learned about where the mind goes under a lot of drugs and I appreciate the experience. It was easier to remember and clearer than dreams. As to the bright light -- I thought it was nuclear war :) It a long "bad trip" but recovering well, thanks to a great community of concerned friends and healers.
I had open heart surgery once, and was given a lot of drugs. It was extremely intense and strange, and I felt like I was at the edge of discovering something immensely important. In retrospect I believe I learned nothing.
I think I posted it on here before but I recall a story of someone who said they would speak to God on LSD and that everything was profound.
So one time they decided to ask "God" what the meaning of life was and they would write it down to study the next day. The next day all that was written down was "Walls". It felt profound but meant nothing.
That is unless walls is the answer and it is just too blunt for us to understand but that is a question for another day. ;)
Truly, the meaning of life is walls. Without cell walls, where would we be? Without delineation or separation, how could we make sense of the world? This article is about piercing the veil, a wall between life and, well, that would be telling. Gradients are necessary for life, but walls are necessary for meaning.
I dunno, I'm not high but I can see some plausible depth here. I'm not arguing that your friend talked to god, of course, but as an answer to the meaning of life, "walls“ is pretty excellent.
I used to do this a lot as a kid. Ascribing high meaning to tiny things like words or patterns. Some of it was just plain magical thinking. Later I learned it's called the "Hindsight Bias" usually mixed in with a little grandiosity and juvenile narcissism. I never understood why no-one could see my genius! Being a teenager is so cringey in retrospect...
Although, as a buddhist I like to think of the meaning of life as tearing down walls that never existed anywhere but our own minds. Of realizing interconnectedness. But at the same time I'm always aware that I'm not THAT far from the cringey know-it-all teenager!
Yeah, I was just having fun with it. I was reared in a spiritualistic environment, so I kinda know the lingo. So help me if I actually believed those words I wrote :)
Assume this was a valid scientific experiment, then there has to be some combination of a reasonable number of written words that would prove they had communicated with the divine.
People have been writing texts for thousands of years and it's obvious to me that no such word combos exist. If they did, they'd have been discovered and well-known.
So, all that was shown with the walls experiment was that experimental design was flawed. Nothing about whether the person could or could not speak to God on LSD.
Due to the nature of higher powers and quantum randomness, I don't believe there's an algorithmic way to distinguish acts of God from acts of an Alien from happenings of extremely improbable (out-of-distribution) quantum randomness.
I'm very happy for your recovery, wishing you many more good years.
"It was extremely intense and strange, and I felt like I was at the edge of discovering something immensely important. In retrospect I believe I learned nothing."
I love that the "it" in this sentence could be lots of things, heart surgery, marriage, school, and even life as a whole itself.
I'm sorry, I had to. Re-reading your response though, there's something unclear to me. What part was intense and strange? Wouldn't it just be like going under and then waking up? Was there a sensation of going in and out as they performed surgery?
I remember nothing of surgery itself, but for weeks after that I was on Vicodin and half-crazy. I remember a dream that felt like I had spent a hundred years on a submarine, with almost no input but the ping of a radar. I remember being mostly unable to participate in a Skype conversation my visiting parents had had with some friends from fifteen years ago, putting my head down, and seeing that everyone was in fact a tiny ship on a great expanding sea, getting farther and farther from each other, ala the big bang. I remember identifying with a pinball in a two-dimensional pinballish world -- somehow my sense of self was inside that world but my perception of it was from outside in the z-direction looking at it -- and the certainty that that pinball had to eventually get flushed down a certain exit pipe, and yet it never seemed to. Everything felt pregnant with metaphor for everything else -- the bed was school, a book was traffic, speech was rain.
It all sounds trippy and enjoyable to me as I write it now, but really, it sucked.
This sounds very familiar to when I was a young man and I was given a lot of painkillers and had a very high fever due to an infection. I had a very intense waking dream where I felt like I was hurtling into an infinite void. I had a few flashbacks in the next week while totally sober. Overall it was an intensely unpleasant experience.
When I was about 11 I had a bad flu with fever for a number of days. I was eventually hospitalized for dehydration as I could not drink or eat without vomiting. I don't remember a lot of detail but there were several periods of vertigo and a blurring of dreaming and being awake.
Definitely not like you but last year I had COVID and while everything else was fine as doctor said I had high fever for 5 days straight with little dip and I hallucinated like anything had known before.
Then after some time I had dengue. Well, that made COVID fever experience a walk in a well maintained park. I would not wish dengue on anyone!
The difference of these hallucinations was that it seemed so real. I got to remember what happened and a lot I can remember even now - after months. Characters, people, my connection with them, whys, whats, names, clear faces, places, signs and marks around me from those episodes. While in case regular dreams by the end of an hour so it disintegrates so fast I can barely remember I had a dream and can’t recall much of it.
This sounds quite similar to many DMT experiences you see on YouTube and hear about on podcasts. I wonder if there's been any studies monitoring DMT levels in realtime as people pass away to measure if there's a significant spike around the time of death. I recall hearing that measuring DMT levels is difficult because we process it so quickly.
If there's one hill I'm determined to die on (given the information that I have anyway) is that any scientific finding extrapolating information from "brain waves" or "region activation" is little more than modern day phrenology. Of course this is not an original thought, though I find it alarming that it's the minority opinion seeing as EEG/fMRI augury suffers from blatant methodological and even statistical flaws.
There are too many sources to list but I think [0] has a good and varied collection of what I consider to be statistically informed thoughts on "cognition" research, see e.g. [1] [2] for a gentle introduction.
(I should like to point out that I recognize the usefulness of brain measurements in medical contexts; I'm just saying that using them to say anything about non-pathological perception or metaphysics has so far been fantastically unsuccessful.)
As someone who works in EEG, you may be surprised that I somewhat agree with you.
Let's start with where I am in agreement.
EEG or fMRI data only tells us about electrical activity in the brain, specifically the firing of neurons in different patterns and areas of the brain. We are yet to make the absolute connection of how that electrical activity translates into thought.
What I do find interesting is that in the age when we were learning about the movement of fluid and pumps, everything was taken from the understanding of how blood moved through the body and how we "worked" as a result of this fluid moving through our pipes.
As we learned more about electrical activity, we suddenly thought "oh! The pumps are moving necessary biological matter, but it's really the electrical impulses that are the important part. Even when we look at how the heart or any other muscle works, it's all about the electrical now.
So what is the next phase? As we understand more about quantum mechanics, will that be the next state of science that we attach to our understanding of how we work? Will it be something else?
However, the way I see this differently from you is that knowing how the pumps work, or knowing how the electrical systems work does are still valuable to us.
This isn't like the old days where we got sick from "humours".
So don't through the baby out with the bathwater. Understanding the electrical function of the brain is likely important in reaching our next level of understanding.
Now a somewhat unrelated, but tied to your thinking. I think this is what most people miss when they are talking about Nuralink and other implantable BCI. When people talk about "connecting our brains to the internet", we have to realize that we don't really have the ability to directly put information in. We can try to map electrical activity to requests, but I don't believe we have that in a high resolution method.
This doesn't mean BCI isn't valuable. If you have Parkinson's or other medical issue that can be treated with stimulation, it is absolutely valuable. But getting a monkey to play a game is still a long way from getting information in. Plus, a joystick is still easier, cheaper, and probably more fun than just staring at a screen without moving your body....assuming you have a body to move.
> EEG or fMRI data only tells us about electrical activity in the brain, specifically the firing of neurons in different patterns and areas of the brain. We are yet to make the absolute connection of how that electrical activity translates into thought.
To do that, I think we’d need much higher resolution imaging, both in space and in time.
It also says temporal resolution can be about a second. Whether that is sufficient isn’t clear to me. I think we know too little of the human brain to make a judgment on that. On the one hand, https://aiimpacts.org/rate-of-neuron-firing/ says a brain neuron, on average, fires less than 2 times a second. On the other hand https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fncel.2016.0023... talks of fast-spiking neurons that fire hundreds of times a second.
The current data is like trying to figure out how a CPU works from recordings that don’t show individual bits, but only show what parts get active when doing floating point calculations, when doing I/O, etc.
The 1970's BBC series, "The Body In Question" [0] explained the functioning of the body as understood through medical history and I found it very interesting that the latest technology was always used as a metaphor (and sometimes more) to expand understanding.
What you are experiencing is being present for the development of a major leap in technology. You'll see a lot of trial and error and near misses until someone cracks the big breakthrough of how we non-invasively read information in bulk from a mind.
Have a look at all the historical cynicism that surrounded things like voice tracks in motion pictures or consumer automobiles.
I don't deny that neuroscientists will discover something big in the future; I'm just saying that people should stop expecting that the next breakthrough will come from crude tools such as EEGs and fMRI, at least in conjunction with present-day computational power and statistical sophistication. These tools are useful enough without assigning an aura of metaphysical power to them; as things stand, billions of dollars are being wasted on adding noise, and what's worse is that the field has a track record of nefarious applications[0]. You could argue that the latter are not the scientists' fault, but if we keep promoting grandstanding pseudoscience for no clear reason, it's only a matter of time before somebody with both power and ill will is going to use it to harm people, all the while purporting to act in the name of "science."
I'm not sure I follow; by the same argument, measuring bumps on people's skulls can't be ruled out as not crucial to future science since it hasn't yielded a breakthrough yet.
The merits of a scientific methodology cannot possibly depend on the small chance that some hitherto unsuccessful approach might result in an unexpected breakthrough. Aside from the fact that anything might hold the key to the next big thing, such an approach would inevitably end up following whims and fashions more so than robust and sound scientific reasoning. All else being the same, priority should be given to research which is grounded in solid experiment design and a firm grasp on statistic.
> All else being the same, priority should be given to research which is grounded in solid experiment design and a firm grasp on statistic.
Agencies like DARPA exist primarily to counter this line of thinking. We built the atomic bomb by building a bunch of facilities out in the middle of nowhere and letting scientists just kind of make it up as they went along.
I hope you genuinely understand the difference between measuring bumps on ones head and well established scientific instruments that allow you to take measurements inside the body. MRIs are not some sort of witchcraft that should be distrusted.
> We built the atomic bomb by building a bunch of facilities out in the middle of nowhere and letting scientists just kind of make it up as they went along.
Physics in the years leading up to WWII had reached levels of accuracy and predictive power never before seen, so I think this example supports my argument if anything. Also the team there did not "just kind of make it up;" sure, they followed a relatively unconstrained creative process, but the foundations they were building upon were astoundingly firm.
> I hope you genuinely understand the difference between measuring bumps on ones head and well established scientific instruments that allow you to take measurements inside the body. MRIs are not some sort of witchcraft that should be distrusted.
I understand the difference, I was using skull bumps to prove my point by way of contradiction. I also understand the usefulness of MRIs. I'm just saying that they are useful within a certain domain, and cognitive science falls outside of that domain to a large extent (certainly to a much larger extent than sensationalistic pop-sci publications would have you believe).
It does seem reasonable that EEG can be used for a very, very crude type of mind reading. I believe it can show that you are in REM sleep or not in REM sleep, for example.
> The sensation of moving down a tunnel towards a bright light, reliving past memories and hearing or seeing deceased relatives have all been reported by people from many cultures who have had a brush with death. Sceptics, however, say these experiences could be caused by people hallucinating as they recover in hospital.
The way that the default is presented here is interesting. Interpreting the experiences as hallucinations makes you a "sceptic" - presumably a sceptic of them being evidence for some kind of afterlife. Whether or not brain activity records of dying people are available, treating these subjective experiences as anything other than naturalistic in origin seems bizarre to me.
Unfortunately many things in western culture that get close to mysticism are disregarded as hallucinations or random neurological firings.
Same goes with dreams and such. It’s the ‘religion of science’ defaulting to the ‘god’ of deconstructionism. Just hallucinations, nothing more.
I understand why, there’s certainly many things which were once said to be mystic, but ended up less so.
However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings.
However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings.
Why would that be the case? If anything, it seems to me, taking psychedelics will teach you that tiny amounts of chemicals can drastically alter how your brain works, especially how it perceives the world.
If tiny chemicals can do that to you, because you ingested them, what about all of the other things you ingest, including sound, which cause chemicals in your brain to make reactions?
I am not sure what you mean, but sensory inputs can obviously affect you. Hearing a bear roar right behind you will probably change you state of mind pretty quickly.
Can confirm. Sleeping in a tent on the Serengeti whilst hyenas and lions prowl around the perimeter of the campground has a noticeable effect on one's sleep pattern and heart rate.
Sounds do have a strong effect on people's emotions, but they don't tend to affect the way in which you think (maybe emotionally) in the same way that psychedelics can do.
Words, transmitted by sound _absolutely_, without a single doubt, can affect the thoughts of an individual. And, of course, horns and loud sounds and noises will also affect the thoughts.
Those affect your thoughts, but don't really change the manner in which you think to the same degree that psychedelics do.
I'd grant some exceptions such as a zen student receiving a lesson/koan that drastically changes their thought processes, but I'd argue that the change was already within them and the sound was just the catalyst - the same lesson/koan is unlikely to have similar effects on other people, and certainly not without the recipient having spent time studying that religion/philosophy.
Can confirm that the 'urgent'-sounding music and shouting on most cable news channels definitely affects my thoughts for the worse. I also have tinnitus and having the noise on constantly without any discernible source, even after all these years, is not conducive to peace.
I would think there's a difference between regular stimuli (through touch, sound, sight, taste, smell) causing your brain to react -- possibly drastically, and deliberately changing your brain chemistry in an "unnatural" way by taking drugs.
One chemical change is caused by the brain working as designed, while the other is a deliberate attempt to change the brain directly.
Well, the answer is literally that everything you ingest affects you. It affects your body and the body affects the mind. From the food you eat to the words you hear, your body and mind is affected.
That obviously is true, but you are completely ignoring the argument of the person you are answering to. He told that the brain might be learned using effect of some substance by the same principle when Neurophysiologists observe people with damaged brain and realize what the damaged surface is doing. And you are telling that people without brain damages can be observed by Neurophysiologists as well which is just a truism.
I am addressing the original argument. The original premise was mere amusement that such a chemical could exist which could alter the mind. What I’m saying is that there is more than just chemicals which can change your mind.
If you say it is obvious that everything you ingest affects you, then what about time? Both of us are clearly ingesting time, it is simply another one of our inputs. And, of course, it is obvious that time affects our mind and body.
Both of us are clearly ingesting time, it is simply another one of our inputs.
We are not ingesting time, we are in a certain sense creating it. We constantly observe the world and it changes over time but just observing the world alone is not enough to perceive time. You have to memorize the current state of the world as you just perceived it and later compare your new perceptions with the memory in order to determine that the world has changed in between.
Observation is inherently a process with time. Without time, observation cannot be done. I’m not sure how observation without time could even be done, with the goal of observation being the measure from one state to another.
Sure, an observation itself takes place in time and over a period of time, but a single observation itself does not capture time. Imagine you would see the world through your eyes and immediately forget about it. The process of seeing itself takes some time as chemistry and biology do their thing, but you yourself would not be aware of time. You would see the world in one state and shortly after in another state but you would be unaware that it changed as you already forgot the previous observation. For all you could tell, the world could be a static timeless place.
I agree with what you say, but do not think it is true for humans. I think this may be true for thinking machines like ChatGPT which do not think, do not observe, unless we give it something to think about. E.g. the thinking machine is just a program which runs its program with our input. In the future, seeing machines will not see unless we give it something to look at.
Perhaps you are right, it is we who create time to observe.
Humans obviously have the capability to remember so it is hard to imagine what it would be like if we could not. For artificial neural networks it depends on their architecture and use, to be able to get a sense of things changing over time you need the ability to process information from different times at the same time. Therefore the network itself needs some memory that feeds back internally or some outputs of the network must be fed back into the inputs externally or the inputs itself must be from different times.
It's hard to imagine what it would be like to actually live as something that doesn't remember, but we do have some experience observing people who have lost the ability to remember through illness or brain trauma or otherwise.
In general it seems like attempting to live in human society without memory is a pretty traumatic experience. Or it would be, if you could remember experiencing it.
Sure, everything you ingest affects you. But I think most people wouldn't expect drinking some clean water to cause them to hallucinate. Ingesting a chemical like LSD that is known to affect the brain in certain ways is different.
Put another way: all things are not equal when you ingest them.
I’ve done plenty of psychedelics. I have no idea why you would imply dreams and near death experiences are in the same boat, and much further than that, why you’d combine them with the concept of an afterlife. The pineal gland isn’t a third eye.
Dreams are blatantly not random neurological firings, but have no inherent relation to death or the concept of life after death at all.
Near death experiences are similar. The fact that humans have similar experiences when dying is probably not so different from how our behaviors and experiences line up in a multitude of ways, across cultures.
You’re the one dismissing hallucinations as simple or unimportant. Understanding them is crucial to understanding human perception and interpretation at large.
Pretty much all of what psychedelics taught me is that the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and make sense from anything. Close your eyes hard enough and put some white noise in your ears and see god now.
> the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and make sense from anything.
Fully agree. I've never done psychedelics, but years ago when overworked and by lack of sleep my mind went into a severe state of hyperassociativity. Though a serious health danger (feeling as if your brain gets cooked) it was a magnificent experience. Everything I saw with my eyes triggered an explosion of associations. I felt as if I could pierce the mysteries of the universe, perceive the future as it unfolded before me, and was sure that a higher entity existed. Until.. it became too much and I needed treatment and medication to bring me back to earth. The brain is a powerful machine.
very interesting, do you know the name of this phenomenon? i have experienced something similar, when the brain is munched from overworking and undersleeping, you kind of start "daydreaming", although it might be slightly different than what you have described.
I don't know a medical term, other than that it is in the area of Mania [0]. For me it was luckily a one time adventure induced by the circumstances. In hindsight I consider it positively, as an enriching experience. When reading the wikipedia page, I avoided some of the more severe afflictions. There are risk factors to avoid. Good sleep most important among them. After such episode the brain is completely drained and needs time to 'recharge'. Having multiple episodes in a row usually leads to a bipolar disorder with true depression following the manic episodes, I was told.
> Having multiple episodes in a row usually leads to a bipolar disorder with true depression following the manic episodes, I was told.
Yes. I am not sure about the odds, but you might have been lucky. It’s a good way to end up properly insane.
I’ve never been anywhere near that state but even milder cases can be frightening. I’ve had 2 periods were everything worked, I was so clever and solved everything, and that was wonderful. Except that after that I could not get out of bed for days, had severe burnouts (no true depression though, thank goodness). And it turned out that what I did was so “clever” and complicated as to be almost re-done from scratch, and also contained mistakes hard to spot amongst the cleverness. It turns out that it does not make you a super-human, but mostly feel like one. I wonder if I had been a painter or a musician instead, if those mistakes would not have been seen as strokes of genius. Since then I’ve noticed that I get mentally tired much more quickly, and I need much more sleep.
Anyway, I’m happy for you that you came out of it in one piece and enlightened.
Hyperassociativity is not necessarily apophenia. Apophenia is finding meaningful patterns in random noise, but it is not clear that the patterns being discovered were in random noise, or if the person merely saw the present patterns more clearly. That can happen too, and is not apophenia. It's something more like hypercognition
The original context of the discussion was altering consciousness under the influence of psychedelics. The phenomenon of apophenia is well known in that context and has some unfortunate side effects that overlap with other communities, such as the conspirituality subculture, all of which make use of an almost institutionalized form of apophenia that is accepted as valid by their adherents. More interestingly, this kind of imagery is often used as a social glue to keep the community in sync. The most simple and basic example is the use of imagery such as tie-dye by people in the psychedelic community. The colors and patterns themselves are highly reminiscent of a drug-induced hallucination. The images of colorful, random bits of noise produced by tie-dye designs promote a kind of basic apophenia at the most sensory level which allow the members of the subgroup to engage in apophenic flights of fancy at will by using their eyes. This can evolve into more elaborate forms that go beyond the sensory system, like the kind of all encompassing, conceptual conspiracy theories that are common to more religious and spiritual subsets of related communities. These intellectual flights of fancy are similar to tie-dye designs that facilitate apophenia. Fundamentalist Christians and QAnon adherents, as only two examples, also make great use of this, in their search for signs and symbols that emerge out of the random chaos of everyday experience. This kind of patternicity-seeking is common to these communities, and many of their shared values and beliefs come out of their use of apophenia to create and augment their experience of new or altered realities that align with the values of the group. In a very real way, this is a form of alternate reality role playing, the only problem being that for many of them, they see it as real. This is where the disconnect emerges post-experience. In an attempt to recapture the magic of the altered state, many of them will forget about the mundane nature of noise and how patterns will emerge from random chaos just about anywhere, and attribute real, concrete information where none in fact exists. This is the problem.
You said up above that you’ve never done psychedelics, so it makes sense that you’ve never experienced it. This is not a simple example of hyperassociation, it’s a classical case of psychedelic apophenia. If you spend just a few minutes browsing r/psychonaut, you’ll see if for yourself. I’ve also found that one can replicate it by drinking too much coffee. The connection between apophenia and psychedelics is well known.
> the human brain is soooo fucking primed to see patterns and make sense from anything
I really wish more people would recognize this. I hear so much irrational thinking because people seem to think that random noise is somehow meaningful. Or because people choose to ignore all the information that doesn't match the "pattern", because they've decided what does match is important to them in some way.
One more thing psychedelics has pointed me towards is the feeling that reality may be recursive in some possibly incomprehensible way. So yeah!! Maybe!
The universe is a cosmic horror, life emerges and with it untold suffering.
The very notion of perfection is also emergent (not to mention self relative), outside of the conceptual framework of the observer's mind perfection does not even exist.
The universe is beautiful, life emerges and with it all understanding, love and joy.
Two sides of the same emergent coin, the nature of all experience was forged by what it took for our ancestors to survive to the next generation.
Sigh, now you've got me sitting here having an existential crisis over my long held belief in the perfection of the universe.
The belief was primarily based on a deterministic view of it, with the notion that everything comes from something, and becomes something else.
Every moment has two perfectly balanced sides, with perfect knowledge of the laws of the universe giving you a perfect understanding of all the transformations that took place from one moment into the next.
There is of course the debate over whether it is not deterministic, if the Everettian view is false then possibly not, but more to the heart of the matter, this idea that because a greater and greater understanding of the laws of the universe unravels all its dynamics, all its reasons for being and acting the way that it is. This idea that the fact that there is a reason for everything, an order to everything, is what makes it perfect.
The thing is I have a hunch that an inquiry all the way to the bottom will eventually leave us with a bunch of arbitrary laws and constants, which have no further explanation for their being just so, other than the anthropic principle.
It seems hard to me to ascribe such a scenario the quality of generic "perfection" even solely from the perspective of my biased human mind.
I agree with you that perfection is a notion alien to the objective reality, which simply is, without any judgements or qualifications.
So to go back to my original comment, I think it would be more accurate to simply say that I've seen no reason to believe that anything we experience cannot be explained by physical processes.
Maybe consciousness itself will be the most relevant concept left inexplicable? Not the process of sustaining it, but the actual subjective experience of it. Why not have a universe of automatons processing their worlds and inner minds in all the same ways, but without anyone home? Why are we home, and how are we assigned to our homes?
I don't know that these questions are enough to make me believe in the "supermaterial" or supernatural, my hunch is just that our current awe and inability to begin to approach the subject may simply be due to a lack of understanding of the processes at work, but that's admittedly based on faith.
If you want to intensify your existential crisis then you might enjoy this interesting half astrophysics half philosophy article from the NY Times today (should be a gift link):
If we take Plato’s cave to be the mind, and the projections upon the wall to be reality’s impressions upon our mind transformed into interpreted stimuli, then I don’t believe anyone could have ever left that cave anymore than anyone could have ever stepped their consciousness outside of their own brain to verify how well reality correlates to their mind’s interpretation of it.
Regardless, all this this conjecture is invariably happening within the boundaries of our minds, which seems to be composed entirely of physical phenomena.
Without a definition of what’s material in this context, this discussion makes very little sense.
We can’t see objective reality since all we see and sense have to go through our brains. What we can do is to interpret what we see and try to arrive at something that represents a consensus among our different perceptions.
Hard to draw a line without a good definition of awareness. An entire adult brain loaded with a life of experiences? Certainly yes. A 10-week fetus? Almost certainly no.
I don't agree there's more to it than random firings, but only in the sense they aren't quite random at all. For the rest I do still think there's nothing more to it than that. The biochemistry behind psychedelics is fairly well-researched and can be explained, so while there is a random component to it just like there are variations in, say, how people perceive color, I do still belive that's really all there is to it, just hallucinations (both sensory and mentally). No matter how in touch one might feel with whatever mystic stuff out there, no matter how profound it might feel, I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever of that somehow proving there effectively is something out there. Doesn't matter those feelings are very real, but it's just.. feelings.
The science of keeping humans healthy is fairly well researched and can also be explained, but that same science cannot convey the experience of being healthy.
A lot of people either seem to not understand that science is focused on testable models of phenomenon and not the actual phenomenon itself, or they refuse to believe any such meaningful distinction exists.
> the study of health and the being of health are separate topics entirely
I would rather say that your statements in this particular topic and wise statements per se are separate things entirely and what you have just claimed is not at all.
I'm not sure what you mean exactly by this, but I think I understand a little. The reason why the study of health is separate than the being of health is that the being requires time and experience. I cannot convey how I feel when I eat clean, lift well, read a lot, and socialize often, but I can say that I feel "happy" or "good" and give you a list of steps to achieve that state.
This essence of "lossy transmission" is simply our reality.
> No matter how in touch one might feel with whatever mystic stuff out there, no matter how profound it might feel, I've yet to see any evidence whatsoever of that somehow proving there effectively is something out there. Doesn't matter those feelings are very real, but it's just.. feelings.
Do you have a pretty diverse range of experiences on psychedelics backing this up?
'back up' is a bit hard because of the anecdotal nature, but for me this is just the most logical explanation and as said: I have yet to see even the slightest piece of scientific evidence pointing to something else. Whereas there's enough of science supporting the way I think. I remain skeptical of course, though it's more of a 'I want to belive' type of thing.
> 'back up' is a bit hard because of the anecdotal nature, but for me this is just the most logical explanation
"The most 'logical' explanation" is very often a function of psychedelic usage (and various other experiences one may have had, or not).
> and as said: I have yet to see even the slightest piece of scientific evidence pointing to something else. Whereas there's enough of science supporting the way I think.
In actual science, an abscence of evidence is not proof of abscence though.
> I remain skeptical of course, though it's more of a 'I want to belive' type of thing.
> Just hallucinations, nothing more. [..] “random” neurological firings.
With 'just' and 'random' you are in a similar way derogatory to the 'religion of science' in favor of mysticism. If in a healthy and awake state it is our brains that model the full brunt of reality we perceive (an assumption, may be 'mysticism' involved here), then these hallucinations may be just as real seeming to a person, though not based on usual sensory input. Maybe based on past experience, memories. Maybe unconsciously collected until 're-lived' in the hallucination.
The overall phenomenon is not random. Our brain is structured, so processes that are not meaningful can produce results that seem meaningful to our brains. Like wind blowing through wind chimes.
I think there are three fundamental aspects to the nature of the death of near death experience.
Struggle, acceptance and (what I'm going to call) decay.
The first two I believe to be evolved mechanisms, the third whatever fits incidentally within the constraints imposed by the former two.
The struggle is obvious, we fight to survive or we do not replicate.
I think the acceptance is an aspect that emerges from the constraints applied to social organisms.
There is no evolutionary impetus for something that cannot survive to continue with the struggle, but there is the impetus not to harm its relatives in the process.
What remains is hallucinatory nonsense born of a failing mind, understanding is lost piece by piece - your conceptual framework perceiving what remains even as it falls apart.
Well 'modern science' aka 'scientific materialism'.
Tons of the greatest scientists were religious and therefore not materialists.
It's pretty easy to just brush it all aside, but I don't think we should.
Also - I suggest you don't need to take acid, but rather just look into your child's eyes to start to fathom something more. I mean, the notion that we are merely blobs of particles randomly bouncing around completely disintegrates pretty much everything we would otherwise believe, I mean, literally the notion of 'intelligence' itself, as such a thing cannot exist out of randomness.
Imagine if scientific materialists had to preface every time they said 'life' or 'intelligence' or 'love' or 'creativity' or 'communication' or 'knowledge' with 'supposed life' or 'supposed intelligence' etc. because after all, 'we know none of that exists, neither does consciousness, and we are not having a discussion, we just appear to be having it'.
What's funny is a '5th force' that we might crudely refer to as 'Spirit' or whatever that seems to somehow influence matter/energy in some way, is literally and logically a better and more intuitive explanation that 'we are randomness'. And that position would be in many ways much less hypocritical than those walking around professing that they are 'nothing but noise' and yet living every aspect of their lives as though they were not.
Random particles cannot have 'rights' folks, so pick a side!
> However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings.
On what is this reasoning based? Do you have any idea of what “random neurological firings” can actually do? Particularly considering that you are not in a situation to understand what is happening when your own brain does its thing, so how can you get any certainty out of this?
It sounds a lot like the “complex behaviour cannot emerge from an assembly of simple systems” we see regularly, an updated version of the watchmaker fallacy. The truth is, you have no clue. More than that, you cannot have a clue because you are trying to observe something through itself, and the thing in question is behaving in such a peculiar way.
That’s why we have things like double blind studies and the scientific method: to try to tease some objective observations out of a complex mess. We don’t understand everything in the brain, far from it. But it’s not magical either. We do understand neurotransmitters, we can look in real time how some patterns change when we eat various substances or do various things.
> Given that nobody has found concrete evidence of any phenomena being supernatural ever,
I'm going to take issue with this. Anytime we sufficiently understand something it stops becoming supernatural and becomes natural. For a long time lightening, and disease were considered supernatural.
To assume there cannot exist things or beings we do not yet understand about the universe simply because we cannot explain it is the height of huburis.
> However, anyone who has done respectable doses of psychedelics probably agrees with me that there’s a bit more to dreams, NDE and afterlife than “random” neurological firings.
Maybe anyone except of me. I am really comfortable when hallucinations are called as hallucinations despite of does they have any esoteric sense or not. All esoteric understanding of hallucination are really better to keep distance from science before some study will give a ground to consider more.
You must distinguish known things from unknown things unless you are comfortable to be a not wise person.
I don’t understand the why anymore. More than 2000 years ago, we understood that we must be a sum of parts and that kind of idea yielded the atom. We applied the atom to many kinds of structures to discern their nature. Now, atom means some scientific particle.
We simply have more things to name, but still constantly run into things we cannot name yet. We think this will end but it will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it?
> still constantly run into things we cannot name yet.
Humanity has the opposite problem - we invent names for things that don't exist. We have no idea what dark matter is, but we have a name handy just in case. Same with gods, elves, dragons, aliens, etc.
I can't find one example of people not being able to name something that exist. Worst case just name it "phenomenon X" where X is the first unused integer.
I can find lots of examples of people naming things that don't exist. See phlogiston and ether for example, if you don't like fantasy and religion.
Yes.
The older I get the more open minded I try to be about these things.
I find some of my friends who are the most dogmatically anti-religion or anti-spirtuality, really just replace it with some other tribal thing like politics.
There are questions we won't ever have an answer for, and we've been asking the same questions since as long as philosophers could record their writings.
There shouldn't be anything wrong with having an open mind about such phenomena. While it's very likely that they are of biological origin, to immediately dismiss any other possibilities is closed minded dogmatism.
It's reasonable to dismiss hypotheses that are untestable, provide no predictive power and have questionable evidence to support them. That's not so much about being close-minded, but just a practical methodology. If you accept non-testable hypotheses, then how can you tell whether it was the result of a specific deity or an invisible pink unicorn?
I don't by default accept the existence of such phenomena, instead I don't want to summarily, without investigation, dismiss the existence of it.
There might still be a way we can test these hypotheses at some point in the future. It's just that we can't do it now.
But not being able to test it now, is no reason to dismiss it, because then we will never go down the path that might eventually result in it being testable.
It's very similar to being untestable. If a hypothesis provides a prediction, but can alter the interpretation after the event to fit the facts, then it's providing no predictive power. e.g. If someone predicts that <insert deity> rewards/punishes people when they die (which alters their near death experience), but then amends their interpretation of good/bad to fit the data, then it can't be used to predict anything.
> If a hypothesis provides a prediction, but can alter the interpretation after the event to fit the facts, then it's providing no predictive power. e.g.
Is this an accurate and comprehensive description of the situation we have before us though?
> If someone predicts that <insert deity> rewards/punishes people when they die (which alters their near death experience), but then amends their interpretation of good/bad to fit the data, then it can't be used to predict anything.
That you can identify one attribute of this nature is no guarantee that all attributes (which is not known) are of this kind.
> presumably a sceptic of them being evidence for some kind of afterlife.
That would never have occurred to me—my reading of the passage is that these are skeptics of near-death experiences actually occurring near death, rather than later during recovery and becoming connected to the earlier experience.
[EDIT] Struck a word that made the tone very slightly confrontational for no reason.
You can only experience the external world through your consciousness. Certain contents of consciousness we assume to have an external correlate, others not, but there is no way to bypass our minds and check directly. Any given civilization has its own picture of reality, and draws its own line separating objective from subjective. We have a fairly conservative model of what is real, due to the influence of the scientific method, but the choice is ultimately arbitrary.
The filter theory* of consciousness holds that consciousness is an element independent of the human brain. Every brain acts as a unique filter for this elemental consciousness, structuring reality in the most optimal way for that creature to survive.
This filtered consciousness forms the "default mode network", which is the construction of ego or separate self. Near death experiences (and psychedelics and Buddhist jhanas) disintegrate the default mode network, allowing us to perceive the consciousness element beyond the brain's filtering mechanism.
*vs commonly held production theory which assumes the brain produces consciousness.
I consider that the best argument against any kind of afterlife is the sheer banality of any claimed conversations with ghosts/deceased. I'd imagine that someone that has taken the final(?) journey would have incredible insights to pass on, yet they always just mumble on about something mundane.
Well, that'd be an argument against ghost encounters, not necessarily against "any kind of afterlife". There's plenty of afterlife beliefs that don't involve ghosts at all.
Moreover it's assuming that being a ghost would actually impart some incredible insights, or that the behaviour or experience of being a ghost would necessarily reflect that. Most of what I know about ghosts comes from the movie Casper (1995), and in that ghosts are depicted as beings who can't move on from some trauma from their life. Maybe the incredible insights come later, after moving on; maybe the nature of being a ghost necessitates fixation on the "mundane".
I'm also not sure (nor am I not not sure) that most accounts of interaction with ghosts would even be described as "mumbling on about something mundane". A Christmas Carol (fictional) depicts ghosts as providing life-changing spiritual guidance, for instance.
The best - and only - argument we have against belief in any kind of afterlife is that we have no actual evidence for one. The very idea lies outside of our capacity to know.
Well, you don't know what you've got 'till it's gone, right? Maybe the first thing we start missing is small talk. (Of course, I'm more of a Lisp guy myself)
Of course there are also stories of people who claim to have left their body and seen the operating theatre from above and to have noticed some unexpected object on top of a cupboard or in some other location visible only from on high ... and later, when someone checks, the object really is there ... [spooky music] ...
18 hospitals planted such objects so that only beings floating close to the ceiling can see them. Wonder if those objects are still there and how the rest of the research went.
There are a few stories in it that left me raising my eyebrows and going "well, that seems improbable."
I've not found any I couldn't construct a reductionist dismissal for (usually of the form "confirmation bias - someone had to eventually have the hallucination that corresponded with reality and we don't hear about the failures" or "the witnesses memories are incorrect"), but that doesn't mean I find the dismissals entirely plausible or fully convincing.
I don’t know if there’s an afterlife or not, but if there’s such a thing as a soul I wouldn’t think it’d operate on a technicality.
That is: our medical definition of death wouldn’t be what determines freeing a soul from the body. I can’t imagine an “oops, looks like they got your heart beating again - guess it’s time to stuff that pesky soul back in the carcass. See you in a few years” scenario.
I like this kind of experiment, but it would have to be tightly controlled to avoid anyone viewing the object and possibly communicating it to the patient. Maybe some kind of duplicated 2FA device that shows a time-changing code and the twin device records its output over time - that would be tricky to cheat.
The digression into mysticism in this thread is weird. Finding a physical correlate of NDEs reinforces the materialist view, which is basically the null hypothesis for "sceptics". Everyone who didn't already believe in an immaterial soul can calm down.
What is "materiality"? Electrons guided by magnetic field that form one universal wave function? In that case even the hardcore materialists are fundamentally in agreement with mysticism.
No they aren't, despite the superficial similarity, and I think you know it. At best you haven't actually thought about the difference between a measurable field defined by math and a mystical "field" ultimately defined by feelings.
"Mysticism" is a belief that everything and everyone are different manifestations of the one (law, origin, something that's beyond words and imagination). Science is a belief that there is one universal law of nature and that everything is its different manifestations.
Sounds funny but... I had a near-death experience and this is exactly how it feels - data recollection before departure. The weird thing is that you understand that it's not a totally new feeling - it seems that you are already got familiarized with it some time in the past but just forgot it while you was living your current instance of life.
I can’t speak to near death experiences but I have been in a couple… for lack of a better term… “pre-death” experiences where for a split moment it’s like you’re experiencing all possible paths and none of them at the same time. Very Schrödinger’s cat / multiversey.
I read the same hypothesis, but it does not really square with the observation that soldiers, sailors etc. in life-threatening situations report similar experiences even if they end up physically unhurt.
Imagine a film of still and moving images depicting all situations that you ever experienced in your whole life. When you have a near death experience, that imaginary film appears in your consciousness and you immediately recall all those situations down to the greatest details, in parallel. You recall and relive even those moments that you thought were irreversibly lost in your memory. That process of recalling takes a split second, but once it comes to completion you get quite amazed that your brain (or something) was able to perform such a big and costly computational undertaking.
However, in my case, that shocking astonishment was not joyful. For me, it was bitter because once I was able to see every moment of my life with all my deeds and intentions packed in a highly-concentrated billboard of information, I realized how miserable my life actually was. I was driven by fear, illusions, money, greed, and selfishness. I was not giving, I was taking. I was not caring, instead I was mostly ignorant. I knew nothing about life and now it's ending and I spent it awfully.
A few moments later, I understood that a natural cycle of life and death was going to repeat itself one more time, so I made a hard promise to do it better next time, if at all.
However, the cycle did not repeat itself, as I received adequate medical help in time. I was able to make a recovery. But that experience changed me forever.
There is an old saying: spirit lives by giving, matter lives by taking. One interpretation: by sharing knowledge, your "possession" doesn't diminish, but grows as it lives in more minds; however when you share food, you have less food. This explains how the spirit's innate drive to grow becomes greed when it expresses itself thru matter. Only when it stops identifying with matter, it becomes free.
In the cases of natural deaths, I think it's something you decide, or rather you give up, and shortly after the whole body turns off. I was with my mother with a strong cancer, she didn't want to go to hospital but her situation got really bad so we ended up carrying her to hospital, she died shortly after entering in the hospital despite all their systems (transfusions) set up
One of the things that struck me when I took LSD for the first time is that pop culture gets a surprising amount right about going insane. There were aspects of the experience that felt familiar from TV shows and movies. In hindsight, it makes sense: the people who create those depictions are doing their best to capture the real thing, and not just making up stories that sound cool.
Similarly, I think a lot of skeptics will be surprised when they're dying and realize that the pop culture tropes are fairly accurate. Memories being replayed in vivid detail, a light at the end of a tunnel, etc. Where do you think these ideas are coming from if not first-hand experience?
Between having surreal dreams occasionally after merely a late-night dark chocolate snack, and some bizarre errors I've seen from computers with failing power supplies...zero "near-death experience" reports actually seem credible to me. ("Credible" in the supernatural / theological sense. However real an occasional dream of levitating myself feels...after waking up, that pesky "gravity" stuff is again ON, with the cool "off" option grayed out.)
> Sam Parnia at NYU Langone Health says the gamma wave surge might happen as people die because falling oxygen levels disable some natural “braking systems” on brain activity.
Woah, they should study this in context of the practice of meditating and fire breathing (hyperventilating?). A popular one is Wim Hoff who has this method where you increase O2 in the blood by breathing techniques and then hold your breath for as long as possible.
When my mother died she had been completely unconscious for a whole week, but just 30 minutes before she died she opened her eyes and looked around the room. I was later told by a nurse that this is quite common when people are about to die. It seems to fit with the notion of one last burst of brain activity.
People also inexplicably get better for a few days/weeks before they die. This happened with my grandfather who died of cancer and my great-grandmother who died of sepsis.
We've just discovered that most of the world is made of "dark" matter of unknown origin. Clearly, what we know is just a thin layer of reality. And even about this thin layer we know very little.
Some children can remember exact & verifiable details of their prior life they never could have come to know in this their current child life. These details can be objectively and independently confirmed. Remarkably & quite biologically enigmatic: Some of them have birth marks and birth defects at very same locations as the lethal injury causing their often abrupt and violent past life death. Eg. Born with 5 missing fingers after a prior life accident where they were cut off... Birthmarks at the exact location where they got gunshot wounds in their prior life, which could be confirmed from the autopsy report of their deceased individuality. Furthermore: Some can speak a language they never have learnt in this life (xenoglossy) corresponding to their past life language & nationality.
They can in some cases remember names of siblings and other family members in their past life family who they never have met in this life...
This seems to be arbitrary and completely open to interpretation unless you can predict which child is going to result from a "previous life". e.g. if you see a birthmark, then you can just make up what injury could have "caused" it and go looking for a suitable previous life to link to and thus "explain" it.
Also, I don't believe there's been any incidents of xenoglossy that have withstood any detailed examination.
If reincarnation is real, I guess the afterlife faces a crisis due to the impending demographic crash here. The lines of souls awaiting reincarnation are about to get real long, as lots of people die of old age without people having children to ensure a fast return.
Who says you have to get reincarnated in the future? Maybe next up you'll be a 17th century peasant. Hell everyone that has ever and will ever live could all just be the same person.
As a dwarf shrimp breeder, we must be doing the bulk of the work. We buy vividly colored dwarf shrimp, go crazy when they carry 40 eggs and gift them when when there are more than way more than the recommended 10 per liter. We also strive to maintain a ton of other tiny crustaceans, snails and worms.
I don't believe in reincarnation but had a phase of religious study. It's generally not a 1-to-1 mapping of you die and come back as a human. Depending on the religious school of thought "you" can spend some finite time in some afterlife (good or bad) then come back as some organism, not necessarily human. Also accounting for continued biological evolution may not be homo sapien if your "soul" comes back 1000 years later. Can't say I believe in reincarnation at all.
There is actually a hierarchy of reincarnation with enlightenment being at the top.
You can think of it like a mouse is lower form of life and if he works on his karma he can reincarnate as a racoon and then then if the racoon works on himself he can reincarnate as a monkey all the way up until enlightenment.
The animal right before reincarnation as an enlightened being is of course man.
But do you know what being is right before man?
Woman.
True story. Not even joking here. If a woman works on her karma, she supposedly can reincarnate as a man.
