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
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.
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
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.
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.
the logic might be the same, the perception may not
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.
colour theory works the same to everyone because it works entirely with how colours relate to each other
if you saw colours rotated on a colour wheel 180° - so that your green is my purple - we wouldn’t know
the only difference would be in the hue (difference between green and purple), which isn’t all that important. there are plenty of videos on youtube with artists drawing using random hues but with correct values (difference between black and white) and once they switch their work to colour it all just looks, good, a bit abstract for sure but still good
besides, colour theory picks colours that go together well based on their relative position on the colour wheel. teal works well with orange because they’re complimentary, opposites on the spectrum. neutral colours are neutral because they’re desaturated regardless of hue, neon colours are very saturated regardless of hue
maybe in objective reality we all like the same exact hue of colour, but in our brains we all call it a different word, we’ll never know
We have proof that people don’t see colors the same way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
That was horseshit with multiple different pictures being used with different levels, confusing people to death about what others had reported seeing. It’s easy to white balance the blue back to white which with the yellow orange lighting reflections on the black, saturated up the yellow lighting to look more gold. Nobody with normal vision both looking at the same original picture claims the blue part is white.
Yes I agree, sorry if that wasn’t clear
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.
Looks the same to me
Given that it’s the same brain interpreting information from two different eyeballs, I’d suspect this is down to minute differences either between them (such as adjusting for darkness while testing as Kratzkopf suggested), or in their relative position.
It’s interesting, but I don’t think it really gets at the question of differing perceptions between people.
As a great scientist once said:
“There’s no scientific consensus that life is important” - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
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.
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 is 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 is 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 quantum physics 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)_/¯
There certainly are pseudoscientific interpretations of it like that, which many laypeople subscribe to.
Can we please, for the love of god, stop pretending it is just “laypeople” who push quantum mysticism? “Consciousness causes collapse” literally originated from academia. I know you hold physicists up on a pedestal so they can do no wrong and it’s only the dumb laypeople, but the majority of times their crackpot quantum mystical claims are traceable directly back to a physicist holding a PhD. Quantum mysticism is rampant in academia as well, and people need to stop denying this fact.
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.
It doesn’t tell us that at all. This is just bizarre metaphysics invented out of someone’s ass one day and became popular among academics, despite it having no empirical basis for it and not even being logically consistent if you take it seriously for more than five seconds.
Quantum mechanics is just a statistical theory. You literally superimpose states in classical statistical mechanics as well. The only difference is quantum mechanics has an extra degree of freedom in the state description of the system that includes phases, and those phases evolve deterministically and influence the stochastic dynamics of the system. This gives a kind of “memory” effect whereby the same operator can have different behavior if the history is different, such as, a photon having 50%/50% chance of being reflected/transmitted by a beam splitter, unless its immediate previous interaction was of a beam splitter as well, then it is 100%/0% because the state of the phases are different.
No, Sean Carroll is just wrong and he presents nothing to justify his position. The cat doesn’t stop existing when you’re not looking, nor is there is a multiverse, nor do things spread out as infinite-dimensional vectors in configuration space when you aren’t looking. You just do not know its state because it is statistical as quantum mechanics is a statistical theory. Multiverse believers love to put their idea side-by-side another idea which is even more absurd in order to make it look more viable, but they never bother to defend their ideas on their own merit, without a comparison. Any time you ever encounter a multiverse believer, they will constantly bring up Copenhagen even if you never mention it.
Carroll responds to a variant of Copenhagen that believes in a “spreading out” axiom that things diverge into a multiverse of every possibility represented by a vector in configuration space when you aren’t looking, but then suddenly “collapses” back down into a definite configuration in state space when you look. He then attacks the “collapse” as silly, and therefore we should believe things spread out as a multiverse forever. But nowhere does he ever give any convincing justification for the “spreading out” axiom to begin with. That axiom is not grounded in any empirical evidence or in the mathematics at all, and so multiverse believers can only make their position look coherent by putting it beside another silly belief which also presupposes that axiom, and thus they make it appear reasonable that they never justify it.
Just look at the awful slide 24:35. Someone can make this same argument in a perfectly classical universe. If we could not track the definite states of particles because they behaved randomly, but in a classical sense which did not violate Bell inequalities, we would also only be able to track the states of systems as vectors evolved by matrices. Someone could also come along and claim that particles do not have real states when you are not looking at them because they are not there in the mathematics, and that they are being the “reasonable” one for believing that the universe just evolves as a big deterministic vector.
We would all look at them as if they are silly. Yet, somehow, this is stated unironically among multiverse believers as if it is somehow made less silly by quantum mechanics, when absolutely nothing in the theory makes this a less silly position.
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”
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
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.
No. There is an obsession many people have, from laymen to academics alike, with quantum woo and trying desperately to extrapolate bizarre metaphysics from the linear algebra, but nothing in the mathematics of the theory necessitates their crackpot ideas. Objective reality exists.
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 assume you mean ego death and not literal death
You have to type louder for them to get your message in the spirit world.
Nope, literal death.
fun(?) fact! ego death feels like death :D
you know that thing people say about how everyone’s last thought is of their mother or their home?
when i first took LSD i experienced an ego death, and just before fully letting go i thought to myself “how will i tell my mum i died?”
it was, to put it blunt, quite fucking terrifying. thankfully i had enough logic in me to calm myself down and fully let go to experience it, after the you dies the world becomes so– fresh. i felt like an alien experiencing the Earth for the first time, there was no barrier between me and the world, because for a few hours there was no “me”
Damn that must be scary in the moment, but also what an interesting experience, was that feeling of seeing the world with a new perspective temporary or do you feel it left any lasting impact?
it was temporary but unforgettable
it’d be impossible to live like that, but for a while it felt like being born again
and it definitely left a lasting impact on me, everything was so easily beautiful. usually you have to look to notice the beauty, but then it was all apparent and awe-inspiring, i was thinking about the concepts of hospitality and langauge, as well as look at the setting sunlight dancing in the window
i could write a book attempting to describe that evening, and even then it wouldn’t be a perfect description, it’s something you have to experience
Im a big fan of doing small amounts, but sometimes it definitely gets you feeling like
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.
Bitch don’t do this to me
amanita muscaria will give you the shits for hours. There are better psychedelics.
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
There’s a valuable lesson here, and it’s to avoid using comic strips to identify the mushrooms you should eat to trip.
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!
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.
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.
I really object to this idea that hallucinogens unlock some kind of higher plane of existence that can’t be experienced by people who don’t do these drugs.
If it were true that people who did hallucinogens did gain some kind of additional knowledge why is it they aren’t achieving things at some obviously higher rate?
If you want to use recreational or therapeutic drugs be my guest, just don’t come back telling me you’ve uncovered the secrets to the universe…
What in the world…
They literally are tho. lol. What a wild take
“You see, I think drugs have done some good things for us. I really do. And if you don’t believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight. Take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. 'Cause you know what, the musicians that made all that great music that’s enhanced your lives throughout the years were rrreal fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few tunes.”
Bill Hicks
I think you may be a little biased, Mr Psychodelic.
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 hot by cars if I don’t accept that they are there.
This is just a misinterpretation. Things are there anyway but we filter it out in a way our brain can handle.
Think of it as a very, veeeeery strong Instagram filter.
Human Pov
Other Pov
Higher dimensions Pov
ITT: people who have never taken psychs talking shit and people who have being like chill. Who do you think knows more? The folks swallowing D.A.R.E. propaganda like water, or the open minded people who actually experienced it??
It’s wild how conservative and square the community is here.
Thanks for posting the comic! It’s neat
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. 🤷
Plot twist: you’re already hallucinating, your brain just calls it reality 😂
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.
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?
not really 99%, more 99.9%
the only time when you as a person should never take psychadelics is when you have a pychoaffective disorder (or a history of it in your family) as it can trigger psychosis
other dangers come from heavy abuse of the substances, nothing you can do accidentally (psychadelics are non-addictive chemically speaking, but we humans can abuse anything so there’s been cases of it) or taking the substances when you’re depressed or anxious (can turn into a bad trip, cure you of those in a day, or just be a normal trip, it’s a gamble)
99.9% of the time people who take psychadelics come back to normal after the effects wear off. even bad trips can be beneficial. the normal becomes broader, and many lessons are learnt, the useful hallucinations gain more meaning. i often compare psychadelic trips to having a mirror put in front of yourself and being forced to look at it for hours, now - do you like what you see?
I thought such disorders were much more frequent in the human population than 0.1%
i also narrowed down my guesstimation to only include those interested in taking psychadelics
Over time, psychedelics tend to clean off the lenses, so to speak, making the “useful hallucination” more accurate and reliable.
People will go great lengths to mentally justify to themselves they’re not addicts somehow.
And sure, many will be functional addicts, DrHousing around life without apparent crazyness, but many won’t, but still try them because people like this swear it’s the panacea.
Sure, in some cases they can do good and be therapeutic, but in so many other not.
Is like marijuana, for years people swore up and down that it was harmless and not addictive, but now science shows that can cause addiction, and that it can cause long term cognitive damage.
What I will agree tough, is that marijuana and some psychodelic drugs are, even if harmful, way less so than things like alcohol and cigarettes, so then is the question to be asked if those are legal, why these aren’t, and that’s a good argument to say they shouldn’t be illegal.
I still won’t take any of them tough.
and still is quite BS the comic’s copium as many have pointed out.
