It’s more “I want to continue to hallucinate in the super useful way that all humans normally do, and not fuck up my brain so that useful hallucination of reality gets knocked out of whack.”
A series of still images, if the frame rate is fast enough, appears to us as smooth motion. Our eye can only focus on a tiny spot at any given time, but our brain fills in the rest of the visual field as if it’s high res based on the last time we glanced somewhere, some extrapolation and interpolation, etc. We’re somehow able to pull the sound of someone’s voice out of a crowd of noises and ignore all the irrelevant sounds to hear what someone’s saying. And then these sounds get somehow directly translated to words and concepts in our head. And if you’re looking at someone in the face as they’re talking, you can read emotions there, instead of just seeing a wrinkly slab of meat with some wet spheres near the top and some disgusting wet holes below. That’s all “hallucination” in some way. But, it’s all incredibly useful.
I know that 99% of the time if someone takes hallucinogens they come back to reality just fine. Sometimes the trip even makes them feel better. But, is it really worth messing with your brain’s delicate and super useful hallucination of the world around you?
This is why when I want to cross a busy road I just pretend reality isn’t real, close my eyes, and cross the road. Can’t get hit by cars if I don’t accept that they are there.
All this brain hallucinating reality stuff pisses me off because people use it as a springboard to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I’m just not aware of can’t REALLY kill me. There is a uniform and self-consistent reality which we all have only limited perceptual awareness of. The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality, not to fabricate wishy-washy arguments for how that reality doesn’t exist
or doesn’t have meaning(see comment below for clarification here)As a great scientist once said:
“There’s no scientific consensus that life is important” - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Welcome to materialism lol
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm
There is a uniform and self-consistent reality
Quantum says otherwise, doesn’t mean hallucinations are reflective of really at all, but reality is a lot more bizarre than classical scientists could have ever imagined.
The data of reality is consistent. How that data is interpreted by the brain may not be. Like the color red might not look the same to you as it does to me despite it being the same wavelength for both of us. We’ll never know since it’s impossible to describe a color and we can’t see the world with the other’s brain.
Given that color theory works the same for anyone that isn’t some variety of colorblind, I’d argue we probably see colors the same way or very very close to the same.
We have proof that people don’t see colors the same way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
the logic might be the same, the perception may not
Perception is pretty much always different, but that doesn’t mean the underlying thing being experienced is itself different.
If you cut a pickle in half, and give each half to a different person, and one liked it and one didn’t, you wouldn’t say the pickle tasted different, just that both people perceived the taste differently.
The logic is based on perception, though. Colors either clash or go together because of how we percieve them and which colors go with which is pretty consistent between cultures and time periods.
But not everyone agrees on which colors go together and which clash
Yeah, that wasn’t a good example since taste is weird. A better example would be that most people would agree that the pink background on this sprite sheet is almost painful to look at while other, more luminous, elements are fine. If our perception significantly varies, then simple mid-luminance color blocks shouldn’t have consistent effects from person to person. Parts of that yellow gradient on the right should cause more strain to someone you know than the magic pink field if perception is strongly variable.
They did researchers with fMRI that showed that the same colors activated brains of viewers the same way, giving as much weight as possible to the idea that people perceive colors the same way.
Okay. I'm going to fuck with your head. Don't click this unless you're sure.
The color red is not even the same for you between each eye. Go look.
I’m wearing red socks, they look the same through each eye
Looks the same to me, do you have some kind of source or paper to back up your claim?
Nah, just folk who look closely are typically able to notice they perceive shades of colors slightly differently. Everyone I’ve tested it with has been able to do it.
How do you test this though? The eye is highly adaptive. If you close one eye, look at something red, then close the other one, your formerly closed eye will already have adapted to the darkness of your eye lid. Depending on how long you do the looking, I can imagine this leading to quite a difference in color perception already.
Looks the same to me
Yes I agree, sorry if that wasn’t clear
Exactly. This post actually reinforces why I don’t want to alter my reality. That little window of interpretation is absolutely remarkable, it’s all we have to anchor us to the outside world and I will never give that up. Not that I’m dead against occasional hallucinogenics, but our perception is an amazing thing and I feel bad for people who don’t appreciate it.
IMO the term “hallucinogenic” undersells what psychedelics do in some ways. There is an interpretative layer of abstraction that naturally builds up between you and what you are perceiving. This is useful because it lets you make assumptions about and mostly ignore objects that you know are not necessary to pay attention to, and not be overwhelmed by the experience of being actively aware of all their details, but it also prevents us from considering and experiencing what is behind that layer of preconception.
Obviously there’s also a lot of other things our brains do that is interpretive or corrective, but it’s really remarkable to be able to see the world without that one in particular, which is one of the more striking effects of those drugs, and it happens on doses lower than the ones that produce especially vivid hallucinations.
Brother, have you never been depressed? That shit can do as much to me as mushrooms sometimes. Or shit if I get a really good runners high, feels very similar to a low dose of mushrooms.
Brother, I don’t ever want to know what a low dose of mushrooms feels like…or 2cB or DMT or LSD or 4aco DMT or
to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I’m just not aware of can’t REALLY kill me.
It’s not that reality isn’t subjective it’s that acting as if it is subjective isn’t useful for our everyday experience. So we act as if it is objective. But acting as if reality is objective so you can live your life does not mean reality is objective, and personally, I think being absolutely certain that it is objective leads to shit like “Jesus loves you and died for your sins” - not to great science.
There is a uniform and self-consistent reality
The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality
I’m really not trying to be shitty or anything about this, but science is increasingly showing us something considerably more complicated than that. Science absolutely gives us greater understanding of classical reality which is useful to us because airplanes fly. However, like it or not, science also is telling us that reality is a strange miasma of superpositions and that we actively participate in the creation of reality by simply existing/observing. At the very least, your outlook that it “is… uniform and self-consistent” does not appear to represent what is truly happening, it just represents what you think is happening, which is, ultimately, the point of the OPs meme. Everything you think you know is being filtered through your experience of it and whether this represents some objective reality or not, it represents it enough for you to live your life and feel like it is objective and consistent. But that isn’t necessarily so. As wild as it sounds, there may be an infinite number of branching realities and you are walking down only one, and considering it as “objective reality.”
For anyone interested in this stuff, there’s a great video from Sean Carrol about that outlines the uncomfortable unanswered questions in quantum physics and their implications about reality here.
Edit to add: on somewhat of a tangent, there’s a fascinating book regarding your brain and reality I really love called Free Will
I was wondering who would bring up quantum physics 🥲
I don’t subscriber to any interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so to me any insights that this field may offer still don’t support that reality is subjective. Reality could be only locally real but still objective and consistent. And it sure seems that it is, in at least 99.999…% of all situations, especially situations that actually matter to us. Just my understanding, not a quantum physicist lol
There are no interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so maybe you should look a little closer at what it actually does say? You can pick and choose the science you want to subscribe to of course, but it’s been making verifiable predictions for a hundred years now. If you ignore it because it disagrees with your preconceptions… well, that’s called religion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Woah there, where are you getting this idea that any of this has meaning from? Reality being coherent doesn’t imply any kind of meaning. I can’t even think of a theoretical way to determine if we’re here for a reason (other than cause and effect) or if we’re just here.
Yeah sorry, horrible choice of words. I am a nihilist in fact. I was using meaning in the very dull sense, like how a red light has the “meaning” to bring your car to a halt. And similarly a blood clot in my leg means that I am at increased risk of death, the rising of the sun means that the air will heat up (even if I’m blind), cooking garlic means the air will be filled with scent molecules (even if I can’t smell), etc.
I am so accustomed to only talking with IRLs who know what I mean by meaning that I forget what a loaded word it is.
Putting this as a separate comment because its unrelated. I think theoretically the problem is that the notion of “purpose” or “reason” is extremely fraught with psychological quirks. We say that flowers are colorful for the “purpose” of attracting pollinators, but it might be more accurate to say they just coincidentally ended up that way. But a more ironclad claim of purpose would be something like “I made this fruit salad for myself for the purpose of eating something healthy and sweet”. Here we are hard pressed to deny that the salad has a real purpose. In fact, anything that has real purpose seems to have been designed by a conscious entity. Only a conscious entity can imbue its creations with purpose, when we look at how we actually use the term in that sense. This also handily shows that purpose is not a physical quality, but purely a genealogical quality. A purposeful object doesn’t need to bear any physical markers that show that it came from a conscious entity - it is purposeful either way. Since “purpose” aka “reason for being” is now a matter of nothing more than being created by a conscious entity with some purpose in the mind of the conscious entity, it seems like the theoretical way to determine if humans have a reason for being, or if the universe has a reason for being, could ONLY be to determine if these things were created by a conscious entity.
Obviously religion comes to mind, but outside of that unfalsifiable realm, theoretically we could learn for instance that humans were actually designed by aliens to be fun little pets to watch, like Tamagotchi. If we found that out then our purpose would factually be “to be entertaining”.
So I actually think the theoretical path of establishing the existence of a reason or purpose is quite clear! Its just that the path clearly leads to the conclusion that there isn’t one.
I don’t think I’d be able to agree with that last sentence. Like if our universe is contained within another one and there’s no way for us to “escape” the constraints of this universe to test that, it wouldn’t be less true, it’s just not knowable through any real means. Best we can do in that regard is either choose to believe it or not or leave our mind open to the possibility that it may or may not be the case.
It’s kinda like your other point except applied to things well beyond our senses and any additional ways to measure things via science. Whatever is going on outside of this is still going on whether we know about it or not.
Though in all the thinking about it, entertainment is one of the top reasons I can think of for why we might exist. It’s the only non-circular one that has occurred to me (ie, the others tend to beg the question “if this is for something else, then what is that something else for?”, and we circle back to where we started, just with a bigger picture of what’s up). Though circularity doesn’t imply it is wrong or incorrect, it’s also possible we are in an arbitrarily deep set of nested simulations, each trying to reveal information about the sim one layer up to the simulants in that layer while those one layer above them watch to see what they figure out.
And this isn’t an anti-science stance, I just think that there’s a bunch of things that are unknowable (to us with our current limitations, at least, as another part of my pet idea is that we created this to entertain ourselves). And, no, despite my name, I don’t think spirituality can give any answers, though it can make a lack of answers more comfortable, and philosophy does have much wisdom to offer (which is more why I chose this name because enlightenment is real, though it doesn’t turn you into some all-knowing guru and has many forms).
It’d be like saying reality is a series of pixels in frames because that’s how computers “comprehend” reality.
Oh I’m not arguing that reality is different from how we perceive it. Just arguing with the sneaky little trick where people say “reality isn’t what we perceive… Therefore reality is subjective”
I agree with you. The “It” in my sentence isn’t clear so I’ll explain.
“Reality” in the sentence “reality is a shared hallucination” (or similar) means "reality as it exists in their brain.
People instead interpret “Reality” as "[Physical] reality is a shared halucination which is very different. I was pointing out a more real/visual example with digital cameras.
Are you still alive? How’s that blood clot doing?
Well I stopped observing it so it should now be 50/50 on whether I die or not. Shit wait gotta stop observing it in my mind’s eye
It’s just more efficient for my brain to only render what I’m looking at.
Dismissing: lacks object permanence.
Embracing: optimizes render load.
Have we considered I don’t have ADHD, just triple A blockbuster brain engine??
god learned from steam frame
I think this has actually been a standard method of optimization for about as long as there’s been 3d games.
Its called optical oclussion, pretty cool stuff.
The one time I tried shrooms I died, then I saw everything I needed for what I was going through and woke up the next day after all the nightmares feeling at peace with life and had a new perspective. Kind of like a speed run midlife crisis. I wouldn’t do it again but I’m glad I did
I’ve never done any drugs (trauma from witnessing alcohol use as a child), but once I had a dream where I just suddenly died for a short moment without any connection to the dream I was having. Like, literally died, there was nothing, I just disappeared for a blink. Absolutely gone. I strongly believe had I not come back I would have just died in my sleep. I’ve never had that experience before or since, and it’s really hard to describe since you can’t really feel death, but that reminded me of it
Same thing with me and LSD. It is insanely powerful when used therapeutically, however that is also why I don’t talk about it irl at-all. The short explanation is that I don’t believe many people can handle these things and come out with similar clarity.\
If anyone is interested, please do as much research if you can. I would recommend James Fadiman’s Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide.
Im a big fan of doing small amounts, but sometimes it definitely gets you feeling like
bad trips can be really really enlightening. i got the cliché “i am so tiny and the universe is so big” and it changed the way i think about things on a fundamental level.
I assume you mean ego death and not literal death
You have to type louder for them to get your message in the spirit world.
I ASSUME YOU MEAN EGO DEATH AND NOT LITERAL DEATH
Nope, literal death.
Last time I did shrooms I saw geometric cats on everything.
Can’t wait for next season.
What an apt comic. The first time I tried mushrooms I came to the conclusion we are essentially peeking through the keyhole of a door trying to understand an environment we can’t even be sure is limited to the ‘other side’.
Hm, that’s odd. I just laughed a lot. 🤷
Bitch don’t do this to me
but please do do this to me
Makes me think of Outer Wilds!
amanita muscaria will give you the shits for hours. There are better psychedelics.
its also a deleriants, so it wont give you pleasant hallucinations. people try to do this with diphenhydramine too, but you would have to tak a ton of it.
There’s a valuable lesson here, and it’s to avoid using comic strips to identify the mushrooms you should eat to trip.
Instead, rely on the comments
He’s got the mushroom in his hand as well as a pipe and a tab, I think they’re just referring to psychs in general, but you’re right, maybe they should’ve put more of a brown mushroom
Amanita muscaria is NOT psychedelic though, it’s a deliriant. It can cause hallucinations, but it is not serotonin based, and psychedelics work on serotonin receptors.
Bullshit!
Says who? I have done it both wet and dry many many times and never experienced that, and I’ve talked to people online about it a lot and nobody has mentioned that. So where are you getting this claim? I say that knowing that there are groups trying to make it illegal that have been spreading lies including that ibotenic acid causes brain bleeds based on a single discredited study repeated ad nauseam.
You are on some Reefer Madness bullshit aren’t you? Admit it!
Maybe you are less susceptible to it, or are ingesting a variety more unique to your region, but nausea and diarrhea are extremely common side effects.
Throwing up not long after ingesting the tea is normal, yet you have no idea what you are talking about here.
You are cooperating in a puritanical campaign to make this mushroom illegal, maybe you don’t realize that’s what you are doing, but that is going out right now. Stop it.
You also have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.
Dude, relax and go mushrooming. All I said is it gives you the shits and there are better substances.
I mean it doesn’t give me the shits lol, sorry your bowels can’t handle it
I want a source for that. Because I called bullshit.
They really jumping down your throat, huh? Iv never done the red ones with the white dots, but Iv done a few different types. Also Iv read about mushrooms, what may look the same aint always the same. And then the same shroom (or same looking shroom) from another region can be vastly different.
And then yes we as people will react different than another person might react to the same shroom.
Anywhoots.
So you clean out your pipes while you clean out your pipes?
What’s the downside here?
I want a source for that disparaging comment which is incorrect. Also it’s not a psychedelic and the fact that you described it as such destroys your credibility. You have no idea what you were talking about and are repeating puritanical propaganda.
For shame. Maybe you should go talk about the reefers online.
Firstly, the comic above uses the word psychedelic while showing an Amanita Muscaria. I never called it that but honestly, I’m not an expert and don’t know the technical definitions of that type of thing, I’m just a guy that likes mushrooms.
Outside of my personal experience of having about 30 minutes of fun followed by 6 hours of not fun, here is the first result I got when searching for ‘amanita muscaria side effects’
Emerging Risks of Amanita Muscaria: Case Reports on Increasing Consumption and Health Risks
People can have all sorts of different reactions to mushrooms, like I’ve never died from eating raw false morels, but others have.
Do you have a souce that says Amanita Muscaria doesn’t give most people nausea and diarrhea?
I have heard however that the juice produced from dehydration has a lot less unwanted side effects, but I didn’t bother to test that myself.
There are several thousand years of case history that do not mention anything about these reports you mentioned with a government website. Reports that do not match my own experience. This mushroom has the longest recorded use of any drug plant or fungi in the northern hemisphere, and here you are spreading bullshit to help make it illegal. Now maybe you do not know that’s what you’re doing but that’s what you’re doing. The government is not a fucking reliable source.
Somehow I knew you wouldn’t trust or read any source I could provide.
The only source you provide comes from an organization that reports to donald trump. . .
Can’t find the word diarrhea in there
On the contrary I will read it, later, when I’m in the mood for some dark fiction I repeat, the government is not a reliable source on this issue.
You should know that
The podcast “You Made It Weird,” with Pete Holmes is great. He has a lot of smart and funny people on, and the pattern is usually to start with “What’s going on with you? What are you working on? What makes you laugh?” for the first two thirds of a given episode, and then the last third is stuff like “Do you believe there is a purpose to life? Have you ever seen a ghost? Have you ever tried psychedelics?” Pete is clearly on his own spiritual journey and has a lot of heavy stuff to talk about and share, and he makes for a great conversation.
Two highlights were when Reggie Watts talked about going on a trip in a bathroom where he traveled to a parallel universe and met with a sentient planet, and when Judd Apatow talked about how ayahuasca brought him into a meeting with the embodiment of his childhood self.
I don’t necessarily want to get into psychedelics, but it’s a very interesting topic of conversation, if the person is smart enough to ask and answer intelligent questions.
If everything we experience is a hallucination, then we should use psychology to engineer a just and useful hallucination. For example, we should hallucinate trans people as closer to their preferred gender presentation.
We also need to consider the fact that rich people have spent so much money on controlling the media, they’ve definitely discovered how to use this power for evil. Our perceptual reality has already been manipulated by billionaires.
discovered how to use this power for evil
They already have. Is called “propaganda”, or “the narrative”.
One proposed solution is to put control of consensus reality in people we trust, like scientists. However, I think it’s pointless to leave such a dangerous force lying around where anyone could theoretically get ahold of it.
Instead, we should dismantle the very idea of objective reality, and teach everyone the skills to control their subjective world, so that we can democratise perception and create a subjective multiverse with room for everyone.
The image really does illustrate a fascinating thesis
If offered in good faith the answer should always be yes.
