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.
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.