All the people in this thread who decoded it used long exposure or faster playback. Using the latter, for me, it starts to become readable at 2.5x and is essentially a clear static image at 4x. (I had to download the video and play it back using VLC.)
Which for me, makes this claim a bit absurd:
> At a theoretical level, this confirmation is significant because it is the first clear demonstration of a real perceptual computational advantage of psychedelic states of consciousness.
LSD fans might hate this conclusion, but there's no "computational advantage" to having a 2.5x to 4x slower processing speed, which his the only thing actually being shown here.
I feel like time goes by “slower” for me ever since I did a heroic dose a few years ago. Used to be stressed the f out all the time. Now I feel like I can enjoy every full second. Crazy how much time we have in life when we just stop paying attention to the negative energies like stress and instead channel them into storage for something positive later.
I’ve always been efficient and quick at learning new things and doing work. So it’s like being given a superpower to “slow” time.
(Obviously time hasn’t slowed down only for me. It’s just how I personally perceive it now.)
Hrm.. does time going slower mean you overclocked your cpu? Are you able to accomplish more in a given amount of time? Say typing faster? Or is it just the perception of time passing that changed and maybe your ticks are further apart so that it seems like time has slowed but has actually remained constant?
The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change. That change in personal outlook may have been coming your direction anyway, or you may have experienced it sooner if you hadn't been doing LSD at all.
What you seem to be after is scientific evidence. The problem is that these substances by nature cannot be double-blind trialed because blinding is impossible. So as individuals we all need to make a decision whether we would like to try them or not for ourselves and the best evidence we can ever hope to get is subjective and anecdotal. If you want to deny yourself the potential of these life changing experiences without scientific evidence then that’s your choice. In my opinion it’s your great loss too.
> these substances by nature cannot be double-blind trialed because blinding is impossible
That's a bold claim. You can try multiple different substances, the test subjects know they ingest a psychedelic, but don't know which, which allows you to have a control group.
Clinical trials would face other issues, but not this one.
i think it would be super interesting to do a study where we compared the effects of moderate/high-dose psychedelics to some other substance that had comparable subjective effects. but (a) i don't think such a control substance actually exists
and (b) i strongly suspect that you'd see the same benefits to both groups - and then what conclusion do you draw from that?
People have life changing epiphanies without psychedelics all the time though, and people (me) take psychedelics without having them. So yeah, GP could have been due for one.
I mean, if one of ten happened while on psychedelics, and the person spent 0.0001% of their life under the influence of psychedelics, that's a pretty significant contribution.
It is little-known but clearly established knowledge that psychedelics are very potent at curbing inflammation, including inflammation in the central nervous system. Inflammation in the CNS and feeling bad are highly correlated.
For more information, see this paper for instance – Psychedelics and Immunomodulation by Dr. Attila Szabo of the University of Norway, published in 2015: https://doi.org/10.3389%2Ffimmu.2015.00358
I think this is an overly cynical take. I've had pretty deep rooted anxiety most of my life and it got worse after military service, to the point that I was probably a part time agoraphobe. My mushroom and LSD use coalesces with when that stopped.
It's okay to recognize that people consistently claim an effect, and to affirm that it is indeed a possible effect without knowing why.
No I’m talking about this one’s person’s experience. They are putting out their notion of cause and effect on a public forum and I am questioning it. That is OK, right?
Sorry, but that is quite similar. You asked a question and I decided to answer it. No meta comments initiated from my side, as far as I am aware.
(I did not take part in the conversation before).
So you are not really in a position to tell me, what to do, yet you did. And I am not in a position to tell you, what to do. I merly answered your open question on what I think you could improve.
But if you would like a meta comment from me: I think you might benefit from not considering every online discussion as something you have to win.
Maybe it isn't. What I mean is, it doesn't seem to be a problem for them. A peer reviewed study of their own life experience isn't necessary for them to be a lot happier post-trip than pre-trip. Correlated with many other peoples' experiences, there is at least strong correlation evidence between certain drug use and epiphanies.
Sure, "person ready to take drugs to have epiphany" might mean they were on the cusp of one anyway, but it doesn't really matter.
Well I guess I was not very clear with my words then. I didn't say it was a problem for them, and they seem to be perfectly happy at the idea of their big epiphany coming from LSD. But I wasn't taking issue with that, I believe they believe that. I simply meant the "problem" with ascribing the epiphany to LSD is there is no way to know in an individual case if LSD had anything to do at all with it, because we know very little on that subject at the current time.
> Our position contrasts the idea that subjective effects of psychedelics may be irrelevant to their therapeutic effects.
> The meaning and significance attributed to psychedelic experiences has been well established in laboratory settings. Psilocybin administration studies have repeatedly shown that participants frequently rate their psychedelic experiences as among the most meaningful of their entire lives (5,6,8,16−19) and they are sometimes compared to the birth of a first-born child or death of a parent. Due to their salience, such experiences may serve as narrative “inflection points” in one’s life that could provide an impetus for changing one’s identification with certain patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
We know very little about a lot. Including things society believes we know a lot or all about. Scientific evidence isn’t infallible or the be all end all.
It really isn't. They certainly have more insight into their subjective mental state than you, so basically you're just saying 'coincidence?!' about an unmeasurable phenomenon where the observer has qualia and you do not.
It'd be like if you said 'I had an idea yesterday...' and I responded with 'Did you though? Maybe you just overheard it and thought it was yours! Maybe you just thought of it now and incorrectly associated it with something you did yesterday!' It doesn't add any extra information while dismissing your own conscious experience completely.
I think the more scary issue - what else changed in their brain. Maybe they've changed in such a way that they perceive something as a power when it is a drain.
This is consistent with the idea that the geometric patterns of hallucinogenic drugs are just feedback artifacts in an analog system of your senses, and by imparing its 'clock' signal chemically, you get periodic noise whose geometry is proportional to the signalling frequency and its failures. No higher dimensions, just maybe a lower, impaired, fractal dimension.
There are still theraputic uses for this impairment, and definitely a lot of recreational ones that allow you to discover things about yourself like any other testing or resistance, but hallucinogens are at best biohacking via chemical glitching, not spiritual gateways.
You admit that there is plenty of recreational and therapeutical use for them and then that leads you to the conclusion that they’re not spiritual gateways. I find this surprising as those are one in the same to me.
Spiritual experiences have been about recreation, understanding others, the self, personal growth, coming of age, etc…
I feel like your post in general is full of acknowledgment of these drugs capabilities followed by attempts to downplay it with pejoratives like “chemical glitching” or “lower dimension”. It’s quiet confusing that you seem to think positively of the drugs but then dunk on them in the same breath.
I don’t think being able to explain, categorize and describe phenomena needs to make them less significant or impact. The mechanism of action being non mystical doesn’t need to change the significance of the experience.
This reminds me of a quote from Margaret Boden about her work on understanding creativity in a academic context.
> A scientific understanding of creativity does not destroy our wonder at it, nor does it make creative ideas predictable. Demystification does not imply dehumanization.
> (...) leads you to the conclusion that they’re not spiritual gateways. I find this surprising as those are one in the same to me.
How does that surprise you? I mean do spiritual gateways exist at all? Is there even a concrete definition and concept? Or are they just a conjecture without any basis whatsoever?
It seems you start from baseless beliefs and blindly assume they are require no validation and afterwards feel surprised others don't share your wild assumptions.
I don’t think “lower dimension” is a pejorative, just, contrasting with the “higher dimension” claim.
Like, just literally a lower dimensionality (on account of the fractal dimension, where the metric dimension is less than the (integer) topological dimension)
It is that when you realize that they are conveniently created with your own mind, they disappear immediately, you become tolerant because you have learned not to lose track of reality. I do not recommend it at all, meditation is preferable in all its aspects.
This is a very interesting way to look at this. Do you have many more resources for this "interpretation" of a psychedelic experience.
I believe, the slowing down of the "clock" can be said for meditation as well in some sense. Because even in a deep meditation you lose a sense of "time" and that's when it gets slightly "psychedelic", for a lack of a better word.
One thing that is different with meditation is that the senses are somewhat rendered inactive. So that means, the feedback artifacts are generated on our internal networks, i.e. consciousness and not from external stimuli ?
The full mathematics are quite challenging, but the gist of the result (iirc) is basically: many common hallucinatory experiences, including the geometric patterns reported from both psychedelics and migraines, can be explained by the inherent connectivity patterns in the visual cortex.
Consistent with this idea, there's other strains of research (sorry, too lazy to look up more citations) that show that psychedelics tend to decrease input from the primary sense organs, so that during a trip we really are literally turning inward. (if you want to look it up, iirc the effect is called "thalamic gating" or something? the senses all come up the spinal nerves into the thalamus which helps gate our attention, but during psychedelic experiences all thalamic input is turned down.)
So what happens when you turn down the dimmer on external senses, is that you "see" only from the "higher" cortical areas: suddenly the neurons that are several synapses removed from primary sense activity are the 'loudest' in our experience. This is why "set and setting" are so important in a trip, because you're going to literally experience your mood and emotional state more strongly than usual, since it won't be mediated as much by external sensory events. That's not to say there's no external senses- most people report experiencing a sort of psychedelic remix of ordinary reality. But back to the geometric patterns -- sometimes what you see really does seem to be based on the fundamental connectivity matrix. it's like in absence of strong input, the visual cortex just has activity rippling across it along its own wiring.
anyways hopefully this rambling with a few sources cited helped a little.
What originally got me thinking about it was a variation of these Analog Fractals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv26QAOcb6Q which show how you can generate fractals with feedback from analog signals, and how feedback in general has some fractal qualities. We know our senses use electrical impulses, so it wasn't a leap to imagine that we could cause feedback in them. That it's chemically induced is just ridiculously cool.
I don't entirely discount the spiritual aspect or disrespect it either, in spite of my original comment. While I've never used DMT, the experiences of friends who have used ayahuasca could not just be feedback and distortion artifacts of impairment, they are a complete break, where the needle on the player of self just lifts off the record entirely. But for milder recreational stuff like lsd and mushrooms, it's nice to just have the self shut up for a little bit by impairing it.
That's true! But, don't you think that our inner state can be correctly described in terms of electrochemical activities inside the brain, including spirituality?
In the same way that the current state of a computer can be described by the position of electrons within its components or a party can be described by the relative position and density of various types of atoms in the room, sure.
I believe the electrostuff in the brain is determinstic, but we exist in a parallel dimension which is able to bias the movement of any of those interactions. Picture the brain as a pinball game, and we're able to "tilt" the table to influence it to some extent to go in a direction we want, but only in a very limited way :)
We would expect other effects though! Probably that's where the hallucinations come from (There are cool articles suggesting that the spiral patterns many see are due to other artifacts being altered by a polar -> rectangular transform), but there are also cognitive aspects as well. You'd have to target a drug pretty precisely to only affect perception- one would assume that the sensory effects are downstream of some more fundamental variable. Global sensitivity for instance, how strongly incoming data is weighed
Being able to see that which our perception actively suppresses because it is hyper-focused on a certain cadence is indeed a gift.
If you believe that our perceptive filters, evolved over millennia of survival requirements, is the only or even best way to perceive our reality, I would invite you to consider that hummingbirds will never enjoy Mozart, and you will never be as relaxed as a sloth.
Isn't the parent's point that, you don't necessarily need to use psychedelics but can use other technology to simulate the perception of different cadence or scale...? (E.g. A similar experiment https://xkcd.com/941/)
> and you will never be as relaxed as a sloth.
Also FWIW, does the sloth also consider itself to be relaxed or rather just "normal" ;-)
Isn't the perception of being relaxed itself exactly reflective of how artificial* the experience actually is.
*: With the context that I have no intention of prescribing whether it is positive or enjoyable.
I’d note that the technological filter only works on captured stuff. Filtering reality like this isn’t technically feasible with external devices alone. Whether that’s useful or not seems fairly subjective, though. People find utility in all sorts of things I don’t.
I'm assuming this discussion is all within the context of the original article "Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics" --- in which case understanding these specific messages actually don't require psychedelics.
Not implying psychedelics have no utility, just that whatever utility they have probably doesn't lie in interpreting these "slowed down scan" animations.
You know, according to people who have done buckets of psychedelics, there's an awful lot more to the psychedelic experience than 2.5-4x slower processing speed. I recall reading of numerous people who found they could collectively slow down a wall clock to the point were it didn't move any longer, and people who have experienced what they refer to as "eternity", "multiple life times", "thousands of years", etc.
Also what is being done here isn't simply slower processing speed. It's more like the information from old states persists into new ones. My understanding is that this would be considered low dose territory.
There's more to the story here, and I don't think this test, is even scratching the surface. It is neat though.
people who have experienced what they refer to as "eternity", "multiple life times", "thousands of years", etc.
They didn't "experience an eternity". They experienced an emotional feeling they likened to an eternity. This is the difference between your computer running a program for a thousand years and you changing the date settings. These people did not go through an eternity of perception, processing, and thought; they had the label on their memories altered.
> These people did not go through an eternity of perception, processing, and thought; they had the label on their memories altered.
No, psychedelics really can speed up thought. It's not uncommon to experience a lot more in a much shorter amount of time than normal. For example, I've experienced this first-hand where I could not even finish a single sentence before I was so far ahead in thought that I completely forgot what I was originally trying to say.
I used to call it "an entire universe happening between each instant" which, while inaccurate, is an apt enough description of how it feels, but also how it actually is, because the volume of thought is still much higher than normal.
The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered".
To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic cases given the same amount of "real time".
IIRC earlier papers (that I am too lazy to find) shared on HN that have done this seem to show the opposite, that there is no measurable difference on the task yet the participants reported a difference in their label of the experience. (I think the paper then was related to some form of creativity and showed that there was no post-hoc measured difference despite a significant reported experiential difference).
> The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered".
It's not the only evidence I have, but one of the main problems with trying to describe psychedelics is that the experience is... well, indescribable. As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't even properly decode most of the memories I made with it.
> To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic cases given the same amount of "real time".
LSD probably doesn't make it faster for me to process things. It just makes me jump between things more quickly so I have more distinct experiences at any given time. I know that while in voice chat with people, I would have moments where I would have a bunch of thoughts, completely forget what just happened, and only a couple seconds of real-world time had passed. In that scenario the other person is my time reference but I've also checked actual clocks and observed that effect.
I don't think LSD makes me better at computation at all (in fact, it probably makes me a bit worse at computation).
If well formulated I suppose this could be scientifically tested too.
Given the right kind of task and measurement.
My earlier point is only to tie to the parent about differentiating actually having "more distinct experiences" with just _feeling like_ you had them.
This is something that, as the subject and knowing the intervention, you cannot determine by yourself. You'd need an experimenter doing a double-blind experiment to really test this out.
As an anecdote there's nothing wrong --- subjective experiences aren't any less "real" to the experiencer --- just that claims about the mechanism and effect are probably not generalizable.
> As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't even properly decode most of the memories I made with it.
There's also lots of metaphysical questions about whether indescribable experiences are "real" or not that are probably too long to get into on HN :)
> My earlier point is only to tie to the parent about differentiating actually having "more distinct experiences" with just _feeling like_ you had them. This is something that, as the subject and knowing the intervention, you cannot determine by yourself. You'd need an experimenter doing a double-blind experiment to really test this out.
This can honestly be applied to basically anything about thought. I sort of get it though, because claiming a difference implies "citation needed". I would just feel weird if I wasn't really having all the thoughts that I thought I had.
It's not exactly possible to communicate exactly what validation I've done over those memories, especially since my brain could have fixed stuff after the fact (as brains do). I just can't find anything that would suggest it was modified after the fact, since even my behavior at the time would support the theory.
Worth noting that I have a lot of experience with things that my brain simply makes me think are happening, because I have Dissociative Identity Disorder and that happens with all sorts of things all the time. (That's not to say I can completely rule it out, rather that I know it happens and roughly how un-rule-out-able it can be.)
My brain will simulate something happening and then also create the memory of it happening, which becomes almost indistinguishable from it actually having happened. I would say I can usually tell those memories apart if I really study them, but whether I am correct or not, it is objectively impossible to know or say for sure, because if I missed something it would simply be missing from my knowledge (to the point where I wouldn't know something was missed).
I know that while in voice chat with people, I would have moments where I would have a bunch of thoughts, completely forget what just happened, and only a couple seconds of real-world time had passed.
My thoughts would expand like a fractal and it would take active effort to make it all the way back out. I probably can't really communicate it to someone who hasn't experienced psychedelics before, but it makes me feel like I am conscious of every bit of mental effort I am spending. Pulling myself out of deep thought feels like a long, manual process, even if it's actually instant. An analogy I liked to use is having to arrange all the neurons manually or something.
After every instance of that, it felt like I had spent so much time in that fractal that it was difficult to recall what had happened previously. It's not like ADHD where I get distracted and lose something from my short-term memory—it's that I had so many other thoughts that it was difficult to backtrack past them all.
This happened to uh a friend the first time they got really high on weed.
It's just a trick your brain is playing on you man. I was playing Rainbow Six Siege with friends, and during the 30 second setup phase I played for what was surely several minutes doing all the things you do with the drone and looking everywhere and planning all sorts of things, and then I looked at the timer and only 5 seconds had passed.
Your brain's interpretation of time passing is a completely made up fiction for it's own benefit. Police officers report seeing shootings going down in slow motion, watching individual shell casings drop to the floor and reading the numbers stamped on the bottom.
When this kind of time dilation was scientifically investigated, we found that what actually changed was your MEMORY of that time, not your cognition during the dilation itself. You aren't actually experiencing things quicker, your brain is just timestamping stuff poorly. Your brain's time tracking system just gets out of whack, and that screws with your consciousness because it relies heavily on timestamping of things.
I swear, you people turn science into a religious ritual.
First-hand observation (which we have here) is the gold standard for knowledge-derivation. Science is just a method for ensuring that our models hew close to that.
Actually no. The plural of anecdote is not data. This is a single anecdote, not a set of data from a properly blinded or designed study.
Humans are TERRIBLE at knowing reality. That's like the whole point of the scientific process. People's self reports are literally the worst evidence ever used in science, and you have to actively work against your subjects and their brains to tease any actual signal out of that noise.
Consider for example, many airplane accidents have people reporting the plane was hit by a missile, even though we can have independent evidence that they weren't even looking in the direction until after the event.
We KNOW the brain lies to you as a matter of course, and makes up pretty much everything it can for the purpose of being lazy. Your entire consciousness is a fiction, vulnerable to all the normal human biases. We KNOW it is incredibly easy to mangle, twist, modify, and combine memories, and that pretty much everyone has memories that don't match reality.
To be fair, I understand why they're skeptical. A brain's perception of itself is imperfect, and sometimes completely made-up. (Actually, one could make the argument that all perception is completely made-up, but I digress.)
Since we're talking about things that happened inside my own head, how can I know whether I actually experienced a certain period of time, or only created a memory of having experienced that time? My own recollection of it may be flawed, so it logically follows that in order to know for sure, I have to find some way to objectively quantify it. I don't know how I'd objectively quantify the number of thoughts I'm having, though, lol.
No...? Science is just a tool to resolve disagreements in conclusions about observations. It is a pretty effective tool if your personal philosophy believes reality is objective (externally defined) and shared.
It's not the only tool available though. You could also use other tools like coercion, intimidation, violence, negotiation, etc. to also arrive at a single conclusion. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
The problem with drug users is that they don't seem to be alarmed that others can't confirm the "profoundness" of their experiences from outside. They tend to discard the obvious explanation of their fascination: their own stupidity induced by drugs makes trivial things seem profound. E.g. the fact that the interpretation is broken.
Almost definitely. Though in all cases where I noticed that I forgot something, it was because I had some other train of thought that happened so quickly that it created a bunch of distance from the thing I forgot, even if very little real-time passed.
Sometimes I could recall the thing after spending a lot of time backtracking, but sometimes not.
That's a subjective interpretation, and I say that even as someone who believes in objective reality.
There's no telling what time perception is "correct" or "real". It is actually within the realm of possibility that they did experience an eternity-scale (but sub-infinite, natch) amount of experiences.
> There's no telling what time perception is "correct" or "real".
Perception is always, always false, the same way that our internal reality is imperfect. The only way to trust perception is to go through repeatable experiment and see that results conforms to prediction, eg. science.
Science is the only and sole way to determine our shared reality, anything else is literally lucky heuristics, including the behavior of scientists. The worst deceit from those heuristics being our conviction that there is any kind of truth in what we think, preventing the whole thing to fall appart.
I feel like the statement only holds true if you are trying to learn about shared reality.
Perception Isn't false, it's subjective. It's real in its own domain, but that domain may not generalize or overlap with a shared physical reality or perceptions made by other people.
The perception as two sides: the signal, and how it's processed. The signal is real and true just by it's existence. Note that this also applies with self-generated signal such as phantom limbs.
For the processing, the subjective part of the perception, lot of things falls appart, attaching any notion of reality and trustiness looks like a choice to enable some lines of reflection. A choice heavily oriented by our own experience of existence, nobody wants to see themselves as a bag of more or less working heuristics with conscience as meta processing and data acquisition for self-correction mechanism.
But if you have a solid source or line of thought that manages to explain one's sense of reality being more than «it's how I feel it for me, so that must be true of others, otherwise it's quite scary», I'm really (really) interested.
I think the point I was making is different. It was that perception and experiences are real, just not necessarily reflective of a shared reality. The state of consciousness is much more than just the processing of external signals.
> if you have a solid source or line of thought that manages to explain one's sense of reality being more than «it's how I feel it for me, so that must be true of others, otherwise it's quite scary», I'm really (really) interested.
The best example I can think of is a dream. Dreams are real experiences despite not being shared with any other human. It would be absurd to say that you can't have dreams because they aren't perceived by or true for other people. The same holds true for thoughts and feelings.
People don't get sent into an existential crisis because they feel happy while someone somewhere is unhappy. Having a feeling is a real experience, despite being personal and subjective.
Foreword: I don't wan't to be contrarian or combative, but I see unjustified universal truths laid out in your comment, 2 specifically:
> The state of consciousness is much more than just the processing of external signals.
Complex life evolution is 100% based on best survival interpretation of surrounding environment. I understand how we can try to figure out what is more in the human way of doing it, but I really think that has to hold on something before getting past it.
> It would be absurd to say that you can't have dreams because they aren't perceived by or true for other people.
It is, and yet, if you do the exercise of imagine that dreaming is a social construct that you are the only one to really experience it, discarding that idea is solely based on belief. A belief I share, based on trust in others, and what seems the most probable. If it's absurd, it's only because we can rule it out as highly improbable.
I'm not sure I understand your statements or how it relates to the things that I said, but I'll try my best to respond
>Complex life evolution is 100% based on best survival interpretation of surrounding environment. I understand how we can try to figure out what is more in the human way of doing it, but I really think that has to hold on something before getting past it.
I agree that evolution is driven by Fitness, and a large part of Fitness is understanding the world around you. That doesn't mean 100% of behavior, or especially experience, serves a purpose of advancing Fitness. Evolution is messy. It has mistakes, byproducts, artifacts, and maladaptive traits. Not everything done is done with a purpose.
>It is, and yet, if you do the exercise of imagine that dreaming is a social construct that you are the only one to really experience it, discarding that idea is solely based on belief. A belief I share, based on trust in others, and what seems the most probable. If it's absurd, it's only because we can rule it out as highly improbable.
Really struggle to grasp your meaning on this one. It seems that the existence of belief itself, independent of social truth, and contrary to trust in others, is evidence to the contrary. Are you saying that humans wouldn't have feelings, thoughts, or dreams, unless they have a social expectation to do so?
As Sam Harris has discussed several times, if you run the thought experiment of what is definitely real and not to its conclusion, subjective experience is the only thing that cannot be faked as it does not make any claim beyond the experience itself. Even if there is no real world out there, you're just sitting on a hard drive in a super computer being simulated, your subjective experience was proven to be true the moment you experienced it.
There is a distance between your experience and the shared reality (a bunch of signals, perception and processing) that we use science to try to overcome
I don't think it's self referential, the whole idea holds on that if you manage to do predictions that are confirmed, you still have to assume that your perceptions are consistent across time. As an individual you can check you perceptions across time, with several people you remove yourself as a variable.
I've been extreme in the formulations, but no, you don't need other methods,
repeatable experiment with accurate predictions is enough. The heuristics are quite reliable. It's just that we tend to forget/ignore that everything that what we think of being true is just a large compound of beliefs, and that the only way to validate those beliefs is to use them to make prediction, and validate it through experiments.
It involves perception, and you believe it despite not having gone through what you claim is necessary to acquire the knowledge.
> the whole idea holds on that if you manage to do predictions that are confirmed, you still have to assume that your perceptions are consistent across time.
YOu may have to do this, but I certainly don't - in fact, I believe essentially the opposite of this!
> As an individual you can check you perceptions across time, with several people you remove yourself as a variable.
That could depend on the nature of your relationship with the people - it's possible, but not guaranteed (and knowing which situation you're in isn't easy).
> I've been extreme in the formulations, but no, you don't need other methods, repeatable experiment with accurate predictions is enough.
This is only true if it is actually true though - how do you confirm that it is true?
> The heuristics are quite reliable.
...the heuristic process suggests.
> It's just that we tend to forget/ignore that everything that what we think of being true is just a large compound of beliefs, and that the only way to validate those beliefs is to use them to make prediction, and validate it through experiments.
It is true that there is value in science, but there is also risk.
I would advise others methods to convince the loved one the reality of your love. As for yourself, well, this is some aspect where the brain decides on your behalf, consciousness can be damned.
That's a subjective interpretation, and I say that even as someone who believes in objective reality.
Nonsense. Where's the thousand years of creative output? If my mind existed for a thousand years I'd be immediately filing patents and writing papers based off all the things I came up with during my eternity of thought. Further, if there was a simple chemical way to accelerate actual brain processing thousands of times, you don't think evolution would've built it into our brains? There is no difference between this and hypnotizing someone to believe they've lived an eternity.
>Further, if there was a simple chemical way to accelerate actual brain processing thousands of times, you don't think evolution would've built it into our brains?
Not OP, but I'd counter that evolution is doing an imperfect multivariate optimization over a pretty big state-space. Even if it might be easy to change one simple chemical and thus speed up processing, the question is whether the speed-up has other costs.
E.g. the brain is already using a lot of energy, increasing processing speed which probably increases energy usage might not be optimal.
We still don't understand sleep well, it could be that if you process faster more consistently you might need more sleep to organize your thoughts and memories, which is counterproductive if you don't want to be eaten. It's hard enough with our sleep requirements to keep up with nature.
A third point is that evolution only needs to find good enough. We're already the apex predator due to our ability to think. Anything above what we currently have might just not be necessary so has no evolutionary pressure.
I think the relevant questions are how are the brain measures time and of what the brain is processing.
What if the only thing it's capable of doing is perceiving the passage of time? If the biological clock is the only measure of perceived time, then it feels like more time is elapsing. If the brain measures and feels time as sand slowly falling into a bucket, what happens when you dump a truckload of sand into the bucket? That doesn't mean that you're necessarily capable of doing more work in that time, but maybe you still feel the additional passage of time.
I highly recommend trying mushrooms or acid for someone in a good place mentally who wants to improve themselves. Obviously one should do their own research for responsible consumption, and find a good set and setting.
I went from drinking a consistent 1-2 alcoholic drinks a day (very rarely getting drunk tho, just loved homebrewing and craft beer), being nearly obese, with little cardiovascular/muscular fitness to being in a much better place. I now exercise regularly, have a resting heart rate of 54 bpm, lost 30 pounds, meditate every day, eat much more healthfully, rarely consume alcohol, and I am more patient and listen to my partner better.
The increased neuroplasticity caused by physcadelics when combined with a desire to improve habits is a very powerful combination.
There is also a legal, mushroom based therapy for anxiety and depression that has shown great results, available in Oregon.
I really do believe society is much too welcoming of alcohol consumption, and much too resistant to physcadelics. We got this one so wrong.
I sense judgement from you towards anyone who has found utility or enlightenment through mind-altering drugs.
Just because I'm smart doesn't mean I stop reading. Just because I am fit doesn't mean I stop running. Just because I'm happy doesn't mean I can't dabble with new mental models.
And finally, to clarify the OP's statement: "Mind in the right place" doesn't mean being perfectly happy or without stressors/depression. To me it suggests someone doesn't have mental illness or suicidal tendencies.
I'm not saying psychedelics can't make you perceive things an unaltered brain cannot. I'm just saying they can't fit tens of thousands of times as much thought into the same amount of time, just that they can make you believe you did, and that experiencing a sense of deep time is not the same thing as experiencing deep time itself. I can dream or be drugged or hypnotized or otherwise fooled into believing I had sex with a supermodel. That doesn't mean I know what it's actually like. The experience I've had and the experience I believe I've had are not the same thing.
Offer any real reason why a person cannot experience extreme time dilation? Proof by contradiction? Anything other than a hunch... Because a lot of people across a lot of cultures with various substances have experienced and independently reported this. To say "no because I don't think so" is akin to gas lighting people who dropped a ball and observed it always fell, or found certain ores were attracted to certain metals. There's a lot of evidence for these experiences, and it's quite reproducible.
I haven't done any psychedelics but I spent a lot of time meditating a few years back, and I experienced something like this on a smaller scale. It wasn't quite as profound as "thousands of years" or anything, more like, subjective hours over the course of 5 minutes.
Well I can stop a fast spinning (to the point of blurry) tire with my mind into a still image of the thread, all I need to do is to be tired enough to have micro-conciousness lapses... doesn't make that into some new perception state
What about people who did psychedelics and got severe anxiety, depresion, panic attacks? Why the dark side of using drugs is always forgoten. It feels like cartels invested in PR - upside only.
What about the poor people who jumped out of windows or in front of traffic while on psychedelics? Oh yeah, that doesn't happen, because the govt has had a decades long monopoly on fear mongering BS when it comes to psychedelics.
As someone who now occasionally suffers panic attacks due to psychedelic use, I agree: people downplay the risks because it suits their personal narrative and experience. Perhaps as a pushback against years of over-exaggeration re: risks, per another poster, but nevertheless a definite under emphasis on the dangers these drugs pose.
That's the problem; in general, in popular culture, psychedelics are marketed as the end of your anxiety and the reset button for your brain and that type of thing.
For some people that may be true; but for many of us, these drugs only make our brain reel faster and faster until it just goes full blown into fight or flight mode.
I'm with the other posters. I believe people should be able to put whatever they want into their bodies (as long as they fully understand what they're doing), but also should absolutely know that panic attacks, and ongoing anxiety disorders could be a side effect.
Source: My anxiety disorder that exists now after recreational hallucinogen use for about a decade.
Yeah, a reasonable discussion includes both benefits (your experience) and risks (mine). The former has recently been getting all the air time.
This isn’t a “both sides” argument wherein some highly unlikely hypothetical is trotted out to debate the consensus. Plenty of people have had bad experiences with long term ill effects.
What do you mean by "processing speed"? I think you are interpreting this experiment as if our brains worked like digital computers doing signal processing in some buffer in the visual cortex :p
This example is basically adding a low pass signal filter on a signal, not processing speed.
Every electronic device you use requires low pass signal processing to function and transfer information.
It isn't just about speed. A clear image on your TV is a clear advantage over static.
Similarly, there is a clear "computational advantage" to processing data at the right rate it is being transmitted. You can process a binary signal at faster rate than transmission, but 100% of your data will be lost.
You are probably right that having a slower processing speed isn’t an advantage overall, but being able to perceive patterns like this may be advantageous in some situations.
Maybe the slower processing speed is the cost of better processing power? Kinda like the tradeoff between high torque and high speed for gearboxes.
Some tribes use psychedelics for hunting, and others that use psychedelics for introspection: maybe they are perceiving something that we ignore during normal processing modes.
OP saying slow doesn't mean that it's actually slower. If you process more information time _appears_ more slowly, but you're processing more, i.e. faster.
In hunting it might be good to have improved pattern matching abilities at the cost of a higher false-positive rate.
Yeah, it's very hard to describe. Almost like you perceive the present moment and the past couple seconds at the same time. Time seems to pass by you very quickly but, then you look at the clock, and it's only been 5 minutes
That being said, I can't imagine having to hunt while on a lot of psychedelics
Do you think people have CPUs in their brains? There isn't a clock rate knob that LSD goes and turns all the way down. As another commenter said, this is about being able to correlate events across time, and distinguish patterns in a way that you would not normally be able to.
Also, I think if you'd ever used LSD, you would never think it was "slowing your thoughts down".
I downloaded and played back at higher speeds as well after your suggestion. Using the same technique to view the 3D image in those "posters from the 90s", I could make out the messages too.
Persistence of vision type of tricks/effects have always been a favorite of mine. Even without LSD, I still enjoy finding ways to "trip" the mind. I have a ceiling fan with dark tone blades hanging from a white ceiling. When laying down in bed, I can stare at the ceiling fan for a couple of seconds, and then when I close my eyes, I still "see" the ceiling fan but in a negative view where the ceiling is now dark and the blades are light color. Cheap LEDs and fluorescent lights with cheap ballasts also cause me to see weird flickering when using averted vision or by turning my head back and forth in a rapid manner.
Maybe it's because of the training my brain has undergone from using psychedelics, but I've tried to get other people that have never used psychedelics to see the same things without success.
I agree that “computational advantage” is probably too strong a conclusion. However, it is intriguing to think about how this general effect (increasing the time span over which data are integrated) could extend to more abstract reasoning. Subjectively it certainly feels like when on these substances I am aware of more at once but perhaps with the loss of some focus.
There's a book called "Thinking fast and slow".
It is a bestseller and that very clearly tells how thinking in different speeds helps particular tasks. Will you disagree with that?
We need to use the second command, as frame averaging in ffmpeg lowers luminosity. There's probably a way to cleverly get around this, but I'm no ffmpeg expert. The secrets are: "WE LOVE YOU," some alien heads, "UNIVERSE IS THE GATE," and "MIND IS THE LOCK (?—the last word is a bit hard to read)." Pretty neat, fun puzzle, though there's probably ways to make it tougher to solve in the context of something like a hacker tournament (as the negative space is a dead giveaway).
I think GP meant: how do you go from watching the obfuscated video to going, "To see the message I need to use mix=frames=36 with the following weights..."
Oh, well the weight was going to be 1 since I needed the frames need to be fully overlayed, and I randomly ended up at 36, since I just kept upping the frames until I got a good-enough image via trial & error. Then I had to fix the gamma, because it ended up being "smeared," which is exactly what I wanted, but extremely dark and hard to see.
> Psychedelics give all perceptions including mental concepts "long exposure" as well, causing them to overlap in ways which rarely happen sober.
> This allows for forming wholly new connections and insights otherwise out of reach for the sober mind.
For me, LSD seemed to reveal some brand new type of thought or concept that could be recognized by the sound or impression that it made. My speech center would spit out complete gibberish when fed these types of thoughts. Actual quotes I typed while on LSD:
"can have a haves and take a three sixteenth quarters"
"can have an um somethings or others .... mmm much of somethings or others.... can havings a taken umpteenth very good time ...."
Normal thoughts for me are based on words and images, but these ones were based on some sort of "proximity". I could somehow sense the strength of certain patterns, recognize them, and manipulate them, even if they had no actual meaning. It felt like I got to re-learn very basic fundamental concepts in the form of this brand new type of thought. Some of them just felt pleasant to think about even if I didn't know what they meant, so I'd commonly find them looping in the background. I still find this extremely fascinating and it's probably one of the biggest reasons why I hope to have more psychedelic trips in the future.
I learned plenty of patterns and have plenty of memories of them, but seemingly can't decode those memories when sober, probably because those mental patterns simply aren't visible to me right now. I can remember certain types of artifacts generated by them though, like the gibberish words, some sounds, etc., at least the ones I committed to memory.
Caffeine can cause pupil dilation - might be useful for low light conditions, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have plenty of other effects and uses. Same for any other drug
most "recreational/party drugs” change the hardware, like pupils dilate, heart rate, pores open or close
psychedelics, specifically LSD and psilocybin, are like a software change, enough is like a firmware change. When it comes to sight, its more like some side image decoder in the image processing pipeline is modified, as opposed to your eye hardware or brain/storage itself. some people experience a latent side effect called HPPD (Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder) where they get these visual distortions for days to years after every other affect has gone away. this is an area that needs research but is quite obscure and getting there is too vilified right now.
This is a very cool post. It’s a bit funny to see the HN crowd polarized with how best to view the messages but doesn’t seem anyone has viewed yet under psychedelics
Yeah let me drop acid in my morning cereal right before the daily scrum. This day's gonna be a fun if unproductive one finding patterns across Confluence pages.
>first clear demonstration of a real perceptual computational advantage of psychedelic states of consciousness.
I feel like this is technically true but also misleading towards the belief that there is an overall perceptual computation advantage of psychedelic states. You can maybe get a higher score on certain tests, but it comes at a loss on other tests. I'm willing to bet basic tests like an eye exam will score worse when all the letters are dripping. The reality is psychedelics effect a particular band of brainwave frequencies, and so is not like the blunt general stimulation or inebriation of other drugs. It may be better for your brain to be in a psychedelic state on certain tasks, but if it was better in the general case evolution would have already made it so. Remember, I can rig a system with absolute perfect perception just so long as you don't mind a rate of 100% false positives.
Still congrats to QRI on this research. Very impressive result. Seems like they had some of the same method ideas I've had, or thought my ideas were worth taking last I spoke with them.
> It may be better for your brain to be in a psychedelic state on certain tasks, but if it was better in the general case evolution would have already made it so.
Would the same not be true of delusion, psychopathy, and various other human shortcomings?
In the general case, having delusions and other psychotic issues are not selected for traits with positive outcomes for the individuals having them. Your life is hard if you have them and conventional success is rare.
They persist in the general population to an extent for the same reason other hereditary illness persists. "I would die for two brothers or 8 cousins". A gene that is to your detriment in 1/3 cases but carries an advantage in the other 2/3 is still selected for. We have lots of examples of this in other heritable disease types, though admittedly no one is quite sure what advantage there might be to you if your brother or cousin is schizophrenic (for example).
> In the general case, having delusions and other psychotic issues are not selected for traits with positive outcomes for the individuals having them. Your life is hard if you have them and conventional success is rare.
It varies per delusion - for example, most successful people suffer from the delusion that they have ~omniscient level knowledge of what's going on - if it were not for this misplaced confidence within human consciousness, I suspect it would be much more difficult to get things done (though, a lot of the dumb stuff that's done would get avoided as well, so it's a tough call what's net best).
Here's a lecture by Robert Sapolsky where he goes into some theories involving schizotypal individuals (and other mental disorders) and culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI
Long story short, the theory goes that being schizotypal (but not full-blown schizophrenic) could be an advantageous trait in human society, usually by filling some spiritual, ritual, or religious role in the group. These people are high status in their societies, and have many chances for passing on their genes.
Yep, that's exactly the lecture I had in mind for my original comment. I decided to shorten down to "no one is sure what the advantage is" rather than try to both explain Sapolsky's conjecture and not mislead people into thinking its an established scientific fact.
> We have lots of examples of this in other heritable disease types
You're saying that diseases persist in humans because they're selected for, because they're beneficial to others? That's interesting, do you have some examples?
I would phrase it as the genes are selected for, not that the diseases are selected for, but yeah you understand correctly. Others have already filled in examples like you asked for.
>The book opens at the eponymous congress. A riot breaks out, and the hero, Ijon Tichy, is hit by various psychoactive drugs that were put into the drinking water supply lines by the government to pacify the riots. Ijon and a few others escape to the safety of a sewer beneath the Hilton where the congress was being held, and in the sewer he goes through a series of hallucinations and false awakenings, which cause him to be confused about whether or not what's happening around him is real. Finally, he believes that he falls asleep and wakes up many years later. The main part of the book follows Ijon's adventures in the future world — a world where everyone takes hallucinogenic drugs, and hallucinations have replaced reality.
In the same way that the epic movie Blade Runner was based on Philip K Dick's classic book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, both movies are deeply inspired by but quite different than the books, so they both have unique important things to say and are worth reading and seeing.
Both pairs of movies and books are among my top favorites!
Many of Lem's books and stories are also excellent mind bending gems -- especially The Cyberiad!
>[...] The Cyberiad (Cyberiada) provide a commentary on humanity in the form of a series of grotesque, humorous, fairytale-like short stories about a mechanical universe inhabited by robots (who have occasional contact with biological "slimies" and human "palefaces").[11][35] Lem also underlines the uncertainties of evolution, including that it might not progress upwards in intelligence.[36]
What are the messages hidden in each video. Unless I'm mistaken, the text below doesn't say what the hidden message is?
In addition, does anyone have a version of the video with the messages visible, as outlined in the first description:
Entire message can be seen clearly by using video editing software and applying a tracer/echo effect and having 60 images in a trail that each are 0.033 seconds after the previous. This process can also be repeated with code.
The first video shows diagonal rows of.. creatures, reminiscent maybe of crabs, or maybe flowers. They are pretty clearly visible once you repeat the video several times, and watch the black empty spaces between color lines, instead of the lines themselves (much like Castaneda describes it).
The second one contains some intricate pattern or maybe letters, but still more like flowers. I was unable to make out any definite shapes.
The third one contains letters in the vertical columns. I could not make out enough to read a complete message, but certain letters, like R, S, or E in the left columns are pretty clearly visible after several repetitions. The largest fragment I could detect with enough certainty is ...ERS IS THE... in the leftmost column.
Disclaimer: absolutely clean, no psychedelic or other mind-altering substances.
> The third one contains letters in the vertical columns.
(The text is stationary; if it were moving, that would make the following fiddly and annoying, but not genuinely difficult. So it would provide the illusion of security, but no actual security. For this (kind of) reason, "psycrypto" strikes me as a rather bad idea.)
then opened it in GIMP and copy-pasted various frames to a new image as layers with additive blending (Layers window > "Mode:" > "Addition") until legibility (somewhat) ensued.
The text says "UNIVERSE IS THE GATE" in a obnoxious ultra-stencil font.
Ahh yes, you're right! The expanding circles show the text, it's just disappearing too quickly after. I imagine that, if you're on acid, the afterimage is strong enough to read the message clearly.
In all parts. The center is has the biggest text. If it helps think of it this way: you're looking through a black fence at something colorful on the other side.
Edit: You're right, the text is only in the middle and next largest "fold." The rest is, spoiler, alien face glyphs.
Confirmed! The letters are easy to read once you know where to look.
Indeed the regular pattern can be seen as alien faces. But they are so close by that to me the slanted "eyes" and the cup-like "chins" more readily form plant shapes, with pairs of "leaves" and "flowers" above them instead.
I can see the first one fairly clearly in my default state of consciousness, which I suppose confirms my theory that I have higher-than-average vision persistence. (I have never used psychedelics, and do not plan to)
Tips to make it stand out more: HDR monitor at max brightness, increase playback speed to 2x
Try not to follow the movement, but keep your eyes on a fixed location (e.g. a speck of dust on your screen)
First time heard about this. Do you think that you have more "buffer space" for past visual input than average, or do the older and newer visual input "merge together" in the same "buffer space"? What I'm trying to get at is that does this come at cost of blurring vision or reaction speed, or do you have no problems related to those?
Cool stuff but there are some omissions that leave me wondering how correct this is.
1. What's the proper way to experience this?
No information is given on how the judges experienced this content. Did they watch it in 1080p or 360p? Did they watch it over YouTube or on a local player? Did they watch it on a loop or did they have to manually play it every loop? Did they watch it in a dark room or with the lights on? Did they watch it on a phone or a monitor or a TV?
2. What is the transmission speed?
How much time did someone tripping take to see the message? These methods could be ineffective if it takes someone sober the same amount of time to read the message.
3. What is the transmission method?
I specifically avoided the descriptions before watching the videos so I wouldn't bias myself by knowing the answer. I was still able to read the messages when I sat myself down in a dark room, put the videos on loop, and "spaced out" for a few minutes. I suspect these messages rely on the tendancy of someone tripping to stare off into space so the afterimage effect can come into play. I understand that the authors are coming from a non-scientific background and cannot pin down the specific traits of tripping on LSD that causes these methods to be effective. I strongly suspect these messages work by watching the content in a specific manner instead of the result of an altered function or altered reception of visual stimuli.
> I suspect these messages rely on the tendancy of someone tripping to stare off into space so the afterimage effect can come into play.
Not necessarily. I've taken LSD before and it legitimately seems to increase persistence of vision (otherwise known as tracers). If I wave my paw in a circle on LSD, I can see a short trail behind it, and it seems to slightly lag behind its actual real-world position (by around a quarter of a second?).
Haha yeah it's harder for me to see now also. Two of the leaves of the lotus are darker those are his eyes, the white flower & female buddha are his tongue. The white skin of people are his hairs. When sober it feels farfetched, but it's all much clearer on a substance :)
It is easier to spot when the details become blurred. So either zoom out of the image or look at your screen from afar. Because I am shortsighted, I am also able to see it easily when I remove my glasses and move back somewhat from the screen. I get the best result when I am just a bit outside the range were the image is sharp. Then I still have something like a 3-D effect from the potest. -- So no substance needed to see it.
Ahhh I kind of see what you mean! Very interesting, I wonder if this was on purpose or if the mind is just great at seeing things in shapes when on drugs.
And the Tibetans have a strong culture of visions in dreams and real life.
For instance they often meditate long times without food & water, and they speak about how to protect against "demons" persuading you to jump of cliffs.
Although most or much more positives, projections of buddha forms appearing next to teachers etc.
There are also some shamanistic leftovers from the Bon Tradtion before buddhism took over. And some claim substances where used in certain traditions.
So I wouldn't be surprised if certain painters could see things like this, since it was so vivid while on truffles I think someone knew what they were doing, but who knows.
People throughout time and culture have described the experience of seeing auras, and I believe that's a result of peeling back inhibitory responses to really "see" what the eye and mind see without too much heavy filtering.
Like today there are people who experience things like psychedelic flashbacks or HPPD, many report being able to trigger those experiences willingly, and sometimes uncontrollably.
I think you can train yourself to see this way, and meditation is a great way of peeling back your brains' pattern matching and assumption making to do it. It's similar to learning to "see" as an artist, or the artist's eye. When you first start out, you have to learn to look past the generalizations your mind fills in for what you think you're looking at to actually "see" what needs to be seen to capture what you want in art. It's a different type of perception.
For that reason, I don't think drugs need to be involved at all to make art like this, just a different way of perceiving things.
Hmm. “Right state of consciousness” makes it sound exotic in a click baity way
It is more like
“Experiencing a visual trip compatible with the image whilst also still lucid enough to communicate and remember”
Tripping comes in all varieties of strengths and effects. Often the effects are barely visual. Also you can be so out of it that you cannot speak and perhaps also cannot remember the test image when you’ve come down.
> At a theoretical level, this confirmation is significant because it is the first clear demonstration of a real perceptual computational advantage of psychedelic states of consciousness.
This is a pretty strong claim, considering that while psychedelic states of consciousness do allow you to see these messages, they also have a lot of other side effects.
I'm pretty sure you can do the reverse too, create a message which can only be seen in a normal state of consciousness - for example you use the same tracer phenomenon to obscure instead of to reveal the message.
So a psychedelic state is not strictly superior to normal state, it's just different.
It should because there is a net advantage coming from this difference.
If some problem seems unsolvable in your normal state, try thinking that out in high state. So, at the end, creative tasks become easier as we can easily get two different perspectives for the same problem. Sometimes, it will help, sometimes not much. But the net is always positive because you visit both the states to solve the problem thinking out different possible angles.
One time I took way too much weed butter and watched Interstellar, and I swear I could tell exactly where the green screen and photoshopping points were.
Cannabis is indeed a psychedelic substance. Many users don't experience it as such, but in the proper dose, and especially ones first usage of it, can be intensely psychedelic. The challenge with the cannabis experience is, it is often deeply clouded in fear and paranoia.
I bet someone could read the messages in these videos quite easily under the influence of cannabis, but I doubt most would be comfortable at that level of intoxication to enjoy the experience while it occurred.
> Many users don't experience it as such, but in the proper dose, and especially ones first usage of it, can be intensely psychedelic.
ime/imo the main reason why it's so uncommon is because you have to go _comically_ far over your tolerance to hit the truly-psychedelic effects, and, as you said, it can be deeply uncomfortable. I've only ever managed to hit truly-psychedelic effects by ex. eating 600mg of RSO with a low tolerance, or doing a dab after a t break and way overestimating my tolerance.
> ime/imo the main reason why it's so uncommon is because you have to go _comically_ far over your tolerance to hit the truly-psychedelic effects, and, as you said, it can be deeply uncomfortable.
I tried taking something like 50mg THC once and it just made me feel like my head was imploding for around five hours. No visuals or altered thoughts or anything. Made me conclude that my brain probably just isn't receptive to weed or something.
A shot in the dark, here, but it does have an effect on blood pressure, so it's probably a bit of that, and the increase in general sensitivity you experienced. Pretty normal. Some strains are even known for their "headband" effects (at maybe more pleasant intensities)
It could be blood pressure, yeah. I've only really also tried LSD recreationally, but it creates a similar head feeling (though much less dysphoric). It's probably caused by blood flow to the brain, specifically, due to the drugs being psychoactive.
That's a pretty high dose if you aren't a regular user. Most of my friends who are very casual with it usually go for 10mg max. Altered visuals on cannabis are very rare, its almost entirely a psychological effect in my experience. As far as altered thoughts - did you think something was physically wrong with you? That paranoia 100% counts
> That's a pretty high dose if you aren't a regular user.
Exactly. The goal was to take a really high dose, to see if it would do anything—I was getting impatient tapering up with 2.5mg (or so) edibles, so I bought some tincture, did some calculations, and took 50 milligrams' worth. (Just drank it directly from a dropper.)
Now that I've tried such a high dose and not detected any desirable effects, I can basically rule out THC completely as a recreational drug. And it didn't require being uncomfortable more than a single time; pretty efficient if you ask me.
> Altered visuals on cannabis are very rare, its almost entirely a psychological effect in my experience.
"Visuals" includes imagination / mind's eye, but I also got no effect there whatsoever. I mentioned it because I know someone who claims that THC edibles added more "depth" to their imagination, almost like they could see it more clearly when they closed their eyes. I had no such effect. (The effects of THC seem to differ for every brain, depending on the location of the cannabinoid receptors or something?)
> As far as altered thoughts - did you think something was physically wrong with you? That paranoia 100% counts
Not really. I have dysphoria normally though, so I probably wouldn't be able to tell if it was coming from the THC.
I did experience very strong dissociation, since THC is a dissociative, but I already have a dissociative disorder, so that's not very exciting or compelling. (I didn't know how to recognize the feeling of dissociation until I tried THC, though, so I will give it credit for teaching me what that feels like.)
It took me several attempts with weed before it would affect me. I smoked like gram of flower one of my first times and had no effect, while my friends were zonked off of a few puffs. This isn't bragging about my tolerance, as nowadays a single puff can get me high, it's as if I had to "sensitize" myself to it.
Similarly, when enjoying an edible of a strongish dose, I become hyper-sensitized to digital compression artifacts. Low bit-rate media is really obtrusively ugly to me in that state.. the swishing of the drums and cymbals in music, and the smudging of B-frames in the mpeg are just so front-and-center that it's hard to pay attention to the narrative (more so than usual, at least ;) ).
Is there a way to make some psychedelic LLM middleware to translate any new breaking API changes down into an acceptable format? High-level abstractions...
This gave me a good chuckle. I remember at school once there was a shadowy entity that I came to understand was NSA recruiters (think big engineering school, big Military budget, not atypical for students to have high clearance). If you signed away a couple years they gave you some cash, I remember that, but what made me laugh was the thought of those bland recruiters surreptitiously whispering, “Now look, the LSD is supposed to HELP you see the code, go on try some!”.
Ive heard a lot of folklore surrounding these topics. I'd just be weary personally. At one point if you admitted you had used psychedelics some number of times you were considered insane and there's no way you could pass a polygraph.
Obviously no one can vouch for this topic, but consider the vulnerability associated with intense psychedelic use. If someone wanted to make you die in real life, black mail you, etc, this would be very good leverage. I've been told that the government likes leverage like this for maintaining control/order of the people who work for it. But who really knows, could all be conspiratorial mumbo jumbo. What is known is that the government invested a lot of time into studying psychedelics for purposes of mind control, IE, something that is not in the interest of the practitioner whatsoever.
Me personally... If I had to choose between being a psychedelic user on my own with my own tribe, or durring a government evaluation of my character, I think it's probably safer to choose the former not the latter.
I have nothing against the agency. I know people who used to work for them, and they are alright once you see their soul and not how they operate. But, I also know that you have to offer something more than loyalty to be trusted in groups such as those. Drug traffickers will ask for the names of your kids, the NSA already has that and requires more(is my understanding anyways). me personally, I've given enough in my life, if my word isn't enough, then I have no interest in the asymmetric business relationship. IE if you need my life, then keep your secrets, I'll keep mine, and off we go in our separate directions.
Also, not super interested in barbed wire lunches, being used for psychological experiments, armed guards behind me while I write if statements, etc. Not my thing, but I know some people are fine with the trade.
Can we please stop putting things on a 1-dimensional “better/worse” scale? Even more, can we stop assuming that there is a high correlation between “processing power” and this reductive grading system?
It’s clear to me that the brain, the brain on psychedelics, computers, etc are all just systems that are attuned to specific things. These tests do not show a system that is purportedly better than a sober mind using technologies to achieve the same effect - they provide some insight into how the mind, in particular the visual system, works.
Surprised there's not more skepticism about the "Qualia Research Institute" behind this study. It's funded by the founder of Polychain Capital, which might raise some eyebrows. I also find it amusing that people in tech have a tendency to reject traditional Western religious forms, but readily adopt Eastern ones or modern New Age spinoffs, which are arguably just as bad if not worse in terms of being anti-intellectual, anti-rational, mystical, etc.
I tried a new one yesterday using cuprous benzene.
I had a long standing ML problem to solve. It did get solved yesterday!
Now, finally, I can launch that product!
This is like a mutation in a dungeon crawl game, that affects most of your stats negatively but gives you the ability to discover the effect of scrolls.
For anyone in pursuit of surreal experiences and reality-perspective shifts without using LSD, lucid dreaming works just great. I didn’t use LSD but from what I read, I can tell the experience is very similar. Source: I am a lucid dreamer.
It’s totally learnable (if you don’t have aphantasia afaict), although the internet is full of clickbait scammers. I can recommend learning sources if anyone wants.
thelucidguide.com and The Lucid Portal YouTube channel. The channel is more of a podcast, but the website contains learning resources and the forum there may help as well.
Seems a bit inflated to describe that it can only be understood when taking psychedelics. It takes nothing more than a long exposure mode(1) on your camera to see the image live.
(1) such as:
- Night mode
- Fireworks mode
- "Live photo -> Long exposure"
- Countless other modes that do an equivalent frame layering function
This is awesome. As someone who occasionally used LSD for a couple months, I have a ton of appreciation for psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. This is super fascinating to me and I hope to experience it for myself one day.
> Do you not suffer from how painfully boring reality and the default mode of consciousness are?
Agree... I'm nearly unable to fantasize properly (dream or daydream what I want), and it's difficult to describe how it makes me feel, but I would probably use something like "fantasy withdrawal".
I've gotten pretty upset in the past over it and keep wishing I could find some drug to help me experience the things that I can't normally. LSD was the first thing I tried, ketamine will probably be next.
Curse my stupid brain for being stuck in reality. Makes one wonder what the purpose of dreams really is. It could be to try to prevent something like this from arising, but mine don't properly address that need.
It's not aphantasia, not even close. My coping mechanism for most of my life has been roleplay and story writing, which I have no trouble imagining (in fact I can seemingly do it better than most people). It's just that I can't properly dream it, can't experience it using the slots reserved for the normal senses.
I've never gotten a straight answer to whether this is normal or not, but I have heard that similar things can be caused by being autistic (which I am). Some autistics are known to be very literal and aware of reality and only reality. I just don't want to be that because it's painful.
Have you tried watching and listening to harsh noise? Idk if it'd overstimulate you, but it might help you learn to break out of reality. It's also harder to do if you're stressed.
AFAIUI, being autistic can completely remove the ability for the brain to filter out certain types of stimuli. (Autism is a spectrum, but defective filtering of certain stimuli is a known autistic trait.) It might not necessarily be possible to train/practice dissociation like that.
I haven't tried it though, that sounds interesting. I would probably want to use headphones for it though, as otherwise, the volume required to actually bother me would probably fill the entire apartment complex ;D
>Do you not suffer from how painfully boring reality and the default mode of consciousness are?
Maybe its just your default mode of consciousness that's boring.
Yesterday I had a dream where Elon Musk was making blow-up spaceships like balloons and I met Natalie Portman in a crowd of people and told her I hated Trainspotting, also there were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at some point but I don't remember why.
One time I had a dream that changed my entire view of reality where I experienced passing into the afterlife as if I were diving into a pool of water and the transition was like touching the surface of the water.
Even during the day time, my brain just produces stuff like this but it's 'behind my eyes', that's where my imagination goes. Sometimes I'll just decide I want the colors to melt, or objects to explode like glass, and I can just do that.
> I admit I am -curious- to try psychedelics but in no hurry. Plenty of things to entertain me in this life.
If you ever do decide to try them, it should still be an interesting experience. Personally, I loved to watch what happened to my computer screen during my first LSD trip, and I spent a lot of time obsessing over how pretty it was. It's definitely a different type of experience than learning a skill or solving a puzzle.
Seriously, my current motivation to work is basically to afford a place where I can indulge in more of my hobbies and skills. I can't imagine "running out of things to do" (aside from "I am so tired after work I can't be arsed" I guess) anytime soon
It depends on your definition of depression. For example I could be either depressed (there are some facts about my life that I've always been unhappy with, even if they don't necessarily distress me every day) or not depressed (I'm pretty happy and can't remember any real recent gripes) depending on how you define depression.
By the clinical definition, I don't have depression, because it doesn't impact my enjoyment of or participation in hobbies, and I also don't seem to have any persistent or recurring mood problems.
> I'm not sure anyone would call this depression? I certainly wouldn't.
Well, that's the point.
> I think I generally mean anhedonia when I talk about depression.
As far as I know, anhedonia isn't supposed to be very common. Though it can be pretty amazing to look at the outside world if you happen to be one of the unlucky ones who do have it.
I used to do this when I couldn't finish any projects because of ADHD. How did people dedicate all their free time to one thing for so long, and actually finish it to completion? I just didn't understand how it was possible because it just didn't work that way for me.
> As far as I know, anhedonia isn't supposed to be very common.
? My understanding is that it's like, a pretty primary symptom of depression?
> clinical depression, is ... characterized by ... pervasive low mood, low self-esteem, and loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities.
Oh, no, you can have plenty of hobbies but still be too depressed to touch any of that, lived thru that too, and still didn't drop the weight I gained because of that...
Plenty of stress or frustration to be had from hobbies too
I do feel lucky that the thing I don't hate and are reasonably good at allows me to get decent job and money
Shift your perspective, instead of imagining that the lines are flowing over the black (along the paths with coloured borders), imagine that black stripes are flowing and covering the surface which has something inscribed on it.
So before you can actually start reading the text, you have to actually see the surface, which will in some sense appear as the widening of the lines across the curved flow axis. So the lines start turning into flowing stripes which reveal the surface beneath (full of text and aliens), you then have to try and hold that state.
It is like that spinning balerina.
EDIT: One more thing. The lines flicker, right? Since the "surface" underneath is interchangeably black & white, you must notice that the black stripes have straight borders. This will also make it easier.
...
The white lines turn into "stripes revealing the surface underneath" even though when ignoring this, you only observe a white line. For me, if that shift of perspective is possible, then as an observer I can't vouch on the true width of the white lines, because if I switch my perspective, even as slightly as the lines widen, I cannot as a single observer give a definite statement on their width. Video analysis would only empirically confirm it if I stay correct.
All the people in this thread who decoded it used long exposure or faster playback. Using the latter, for me, it starts to become readable at 2.5x and is essentially a clear static image at 4x. (I had to download the video and play it back using VLC.)
Which for me, makes this claim a bit absurd:
> At a theoretical level, this confirmation is significant because it is the first clear demonstration of a real perceptual computational advantage of psychedelic states of consciousness.
LSD fans might hate this conclusion, but there's no "computational advantage" to having a 2.5x to 4x slower processing speed, which his the only thing actually being shown here.
I feel like time goes by “slower” for me ever since I did a heroic dose a few years ago. Used to be stressed the f out all the time. Now I feel like I can enjoy every full second. Crazy how much time we have in life when we just stop paying attention to the negative energies like stress and instead channel them into storage for something positive later.
I’ve always been efficient and quick at learning new things and doing work. So it’s like being given a superpower to “slow” time.
(Obviously time hasn’t slowed down only for me. It’s just how I personally perceive it now.)
Hrm.. does time going slower mean you overclocked your cpu? Are you able to accomplish more in a given amount of time? Say typing faster? Or is it just the perception of time passing that changed and maybe your ticks are further apart so that it seems like time has slowed but has actually remained constant?
The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change. That change in personal outlook may have been coming your direction anyway, or you may have experienced it sooner if you hadn't been doing LSD at all.
What you seem to be after is scientific evidence. The problem is that these substances by nature cannot be double-blind trialed because blinding is impossible. So as individuals we all need to make a decision whether we would like to try them or not for ourselves and the best evidence we can ever hope to get is subjective and anecdotal. If you want to deny yourself the potential of these life changing experiences without scientific evidence then that’s your choice. In my opinion it’s your great loss too.
> these substances by nature cannot be double-blind trialed because blinding is impossible
That's a bold claim. You can try multiple different substances, the test subjects know they ingest a psychedelic, but don't know which, which allows you to have a control group.
Clinical trials would face other issues, but not this one.
i think it would be super interesting to do a study where we compared the effects of moderate/high-dose psychedelics to some other substance that had comparable subjective effects. but (a) i don't think such a control substance actually exists and (b) i strongly suspect that you'd see the same benefits to both groups - and then what conclusion do you draw from that?
You run into another problem here: those other psychedelics may also cause the same changes.
It still might be worth trying though, if it can be done ethically. It's not a perfect test, but it's halfway decent?
"You don't know if you were gonna have a life changing epiphany next week or not!!!"
The radical changes in mentality from psychedelics is well documented. Not understood but documented.
People have life changing epiphanies without psychedelics all the time though, and people (me) take psychedelics without having them. So yeah, GP could have been due for one.
> all the time
Humans do all the time. A person does very seldomly.
yes, but mostly without psychedelics.
I mean, if one of ten happened while on psychedelics, and the person spent 0.0001% of their life under the influence of psychedelics, that's a pretty significant contribution.
I wasn’t making a point I was countering yours.
And I was countering your counter?
Was that not self-evident?
Also, countering a point is itself a point in a conversation.
It is little-known but clearly established knowledge that psychedelics are very potent at curbing inflammation, including inflammation in the central nervous system. Inflammation in the CNS and feeling bad are highly correlated.
For more information, see this paper for instance – Psychedelics and Immunomodulation by Dr. Attila Szabo of the University of Norway, published in 2015: https://doi.org/10.3389%2Ffimmu.2015.00358
I think this is an overly cynical take. I've had pretty deep rooted anxiety most of my life and it got worse after military service, to the point that I was probably a part time agoraphobe. My mushroom and LSD use coalesces with when that stopped.
It's okay to recognize that people consistently claim an effect, and to affirm that it is indeed a possible effect without knowing why.
> The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change
What problem exactly? This seems like a dismissive take on someone's positive experience.
Are your referring to the scientific problem of studying cause & effect of the psychedelic experience? Science is figuring that out.
No I’m talking about this one’s person’s experience. They are putting out their notion of cause and effect on a public forum and I am questioning it. That is OK, right?
"That is OK, right?"
The way you are doing it, could maybe be improved.
"The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change"
You clearly judged here based on little information. How do you know, that he cannot know?
(Unless you argue about philosophical limits of "knowing")
When till time X there was behavior Y and at time X there was a strong trip - and afterwards differences,then it seems pretty linked to me.
Hey thanks, I'll work on that. You try and work on staying on topic and not making meta comments.
Sorry, but that is quite similar. You asked a question and I decided to answer it. No meta comments initiated from my side, as far as I am aware.
(I did not take part in the conversation before).
So you are not really in a position to tell me, what to do, yet you did. And I am not in a position to tell you, what to do. I merly answered your open question on what I think you could improve.
But if you would like a meta comment from me: I think you might benefit from not considering every online discussion as something you have to win.
(I have been there as well)
Maybe it isn't. What I mean is, it doesn't seem to be a problem for them. A peer reviewed study of their own life experience isn't necessary for them to be a lot happier post-trip than pre-trip. Correlated with many other peoples' experiences, there is at least strong correlation evidence between certain drug use and epiphanies.
Sure, "person ready to take drugs to have epiphany" might mean they were on the cusp of one anyway, but it doesn't really matter.
Well I guess I was not very clear with my words then. I didn't say it was a problem for them, and they seem to be perfectly happy at the idea of their big epiphany coming from LSD. But I wasn't taking issue with that, I believe they believe that. I simply meant the "problem" with ascribing the epiphany to LSD is there is no way to know in an individual case if LSD had anything to do at all with it, because we know very little on that subject at the current time.
That's one of the signatures of a psychedelic experience. There's plenty of research on the subject, this study came up on a quick Google search.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00194
> Our position contrasts the idea that subjective effects of psychedelics may be irrelevant to their therapeutic effects.
> The meaning and significance attributed to psychedelic experiences has been well established in laboratory settings. Psilocybin administration studies have repeatedly shown that participants frequently rate their psychedelic experiences as among the most meaningful of their entire lives (5,6,8,16−19) and they are sometimes compared to the birth of a first-born child or death of a parent. Due to their salience, such experiences may serve as narrative “inflection points” in one’s life that could provide an impetus for changing one’s identification with certain patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
We know very little about a lot. Including things society believes we know a lot or all about. Scientific evidence isn’t infallible or the be all end all.
It really isn't. They certainly have more insight into their subjective mental state than you, so basically you're just saying 'coincidence?!' about an unmeasurable phenomenon where the observer has qualia and you do not.
It'd be like if you said 'I had an idea yesterday...' and I responded with 'Did you though? Maybe you just overheard it and thought it was yours! Maybe you just thought of it now and incorrectly associated it with something you did yesterday!' It doesn't add any extra information while dismissing your own conscious experience completely.
Sure, but it's your problem, not OP's.
I think the more scary issue - what else changed in their brain. Maybe they've changed in such a way that they perceive something as a power when it is a drain.
> The problem is, of course, you have no idea if that dose is what caused the change.
No, there's no problem. It doesn't change the fact that the dose is when it happened.
And if you had wheels, you could be a bus.
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This is consistent with the idea that the geometric patterns of hallucinogenic drugs are just feedback artifacts in an analog system of your senses, and by imparing its 'clock' signal chemically, you get periodic noise whose geometry is proportional to the signalling frequency and its failures. No higher dimensions, just maybe a lower, impaired, fractal dimension.
There are still theraputic uses for this impairment, and definitely a lot of recreational ones that allow you to discover things about yourself like any other testing or resistance, but hallucinogens are at best biohacking via chemical glitching, not spiritual gateways.
You admit that there is plenty of recreational and therapeutical use for them and then that leads you to the conclusion that they’re not spiritual gateways. I find this surprising as those are one in the same to me.
Spiritual experiences have been about recreation, understanding others, the self, personal growth, coming of age, etc…
I feel like your post in general is full of acknowledgment of these drugs capabilities followed by attempts to downplay it with pejoratives like “chemical glitching” or “lower dimension”. It’s quiet confusing that you seem to think positively of the drugs but then dunk on them in the same breath.
I don’t think being able to explain, categorize and describe phenomena needs to make them less significant or impact. The mechanism of action being non mystical doesn’t need to change the significance of the experience.
This reminds me of a quote from Margaret Boden about her work on understanding creativity in a academic context.
> A scientific understanding of creativity does not destroy our wonder at it, nor does it make creative ideas predictable. Demystification does not imply dehumanization.
> (...) leads you to the conclusion that they’re not spiritual gateways. I find this surprising as those are one in the same to me.
How does that surprise you? I mean do spiritual gateways exist at all? Is there even a concrete definition and concept? Or are they just a conjecture without any basis whatsoever?
It seems you start from baseless beliefs and blindly assume they are require no validation and afterwards feel surprised others don't share your wild assumptions.
My definition would be that spiritual gateways are tools that help you have spiritual experience.
Plenty of people have had that shared effect from psychedelics.
I’m sure what baseless belief you see.
I don’t think “lower dimension” is a pejorative, just, contrasting with the “higher dimension” claim. Like, just literally a lower dimensionality (on account of the fractal dimension, where the metric dimension is less than the (integer) topological dimension)
LSD also seems to lead to extradimensional bypass
Is this a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy reference / joke ? About how they destroy the earth in order to make a travel route?
If not, what do you mean?
Would you describe the biochemical mechanisms behind aspirin as 'spiritual'? Why or why not?
It is that when you realize that they are conveniently created with your own mind, they disappear immediately, you become tolerant because you have learned not to lose track of reality. I do not recommend it at all, meditation is preferable in all its aspects.
This is a very interesting way to look at this. Do you have many more resources for this "interpretation" of a psychedelic experience.
I believe, the slowing down of the "clock" can be said for meditation as well in some sense. Because even in a deep meditation you lose a sense of "time" and that's when it gets slightly "psychedelic", for a lack of a better word.
One thing that is different with meditation is that the senses are somewhat rendered inactive. So that means, the feedback artifacts are generated on our internal networks, i.e. consciousness and not from external stimuli ?
check section 3 of this review: https://www.asc.ohio-state.edu/golubitsky.4/reprintweb-0.5/o...
or for a narrower slice this paper is reference [6]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11500666_What_Geome...
The full mathematics are quite challenging, but the gist of the result (iirc) is basically: many common hallucinatory experiences, including the geometric patterns reported from both psychedelics and migraines, can be explained by the inherent connectivity patterns in the visual cortex. Consistent with this idea, there's other strains of research (sorry, too lazy to look up more citations) that show that psychedelics tend to decrease input from the primary sense organs, so that during a trip we really are literally turning inward. (if you want to look it up, iirc the effect is called "thalamic gating" or something? the senses all come up the spinal nerves into the thalamus which helps gate our attention, but during psychedelic experiences all thalamic input is turned down.)
So what happens when you turn down the dimmer on external senses, is that you "see" only from the "higher" cortical areas: suddenly the neurons that are several synapses removed from primary sense activity are the 'loudest' in our experience. This is why "set and setting" are so important in a trip, because you're going to literally experience your mood and emotional state more strongly than usual, since it won't be mediated as much by external sensory events. That's not to say there's no external senses- most people report experiencing a sort of psychedelic remix of ordinary reality. But back to the geometric patterns -- sometimes what you see really does seem to be based on the fundamental connectivity matrix. it's like in absence of strong input, the visual cortex just has activity rippling across it along its own wiring.
anyways hopefully this rambling with a few sources cited helped a little.
What originally got me thinking about it was a variation of these Analog Fractals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pv26QAOcb6Q which show how you can generate fractals with feedback from analog signals, and how feedback in general has some fractal qualities. We know our senses use electrical impulses, so it wasn't a leap to imagine that we could cause feedback in them. That it's chemically induced is just ridiculously cool.
I don't entirely discount the spiritual aspect or disrespect it either, in spite of my original comment. While I've never used DMT, the experiences of friends who have used ayahuasca could not just be feedback and distortion artifacts of impairment, they are a complete break, where the needle on the player of self just lifts off the record entirely. But for milder recreational stuff like lsd and mushrooms, it's nice to just have the self shut up for a little bit by impairing it.
that is a pretty sweeping claim given the limitation of science when it comes to understanding the psychoactive effects of entheogens.
Especially for something like spirituality, which is almost by definition something experienced within.
That's true! But, don't you think that our inner state can be correctly described in terms of electrochemical activities inside the brain, including spirituality?
In the same way that the current state of a computer can be described by the position of electrons within its components or a party can be described by the relative position and density of various types of atoms in the room, sure.
I believe the electrostuff in the brain is determinstic, but we exist in a parallel dimension which is able to bias the movement of any of those interactions. Picture the brain as a pinball game, and we're able to "tilt" the table to influence it to some extent to go in a direction we want, but only in a very limited way :)
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We would expect other effects though! Probably that's where the hallucinations come from (There are cool articles suggesting that the spiral patterns many see are due to other artifacts being altered by a polar -> rectangular transform), but there are also cognitive aspects as well. You'd have to target a drug pretty precisely to only affect perception- one would assume that the sensory effects are downstream of some more fundamental variable. Global sensitivity for instance, how strongly incoming data is weighed
I am not at all qualified to say this, but that sure does feel like an answer that makes sense.
I hadn’t heard this theory before but it makes sense at first glance.
Being able to see that which our perception actively suppresses because it is hyper-focused on a certain cadence is indeed a gift.
If you believe that our perceptive filters, evolved over millennia of survival requirements, is the only or even best way to perceive our reality, I would invite you to consider that hummingbirds will never enjoy Mozart, and you will never be as relaxed as a sloth.
Isn't the parent's point that, you don't necessarily need to use psychedelics but can use other technology to simulate the perception of different cadence or scale...? (E.g. A similar experiment https://xkcd.com/941/)
> and you will never be as relaxed as a sloth.
Also FWIW, does the sloth also consider itself to be relaxed or rather just "normal" ;-)
Isn't the perception of being relaxed itself exactly reflective of how artificial* the experience actually is.
*: With the context that I have no intention of prescribing whether it is positive or enjoyable.
I’d note that the technological filter only works on captured stuff. Filtering reality like this isn’t technically feasible with external devices alone. Whether that’s useful or not seems fairly subjective, though. People find utility in all sorts of things I don’t.
Of course.
I'm assuming this discussion is all within the context of the original article "Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics" --- in which case understanding these specific messages actually don't require psychedelics.
Not implying psychedelics have no utility, just that whatever utility they have probably doesn't lie in interpreting these "slowed down scan" animations.
Sure - unless the fnords can only be seen in slowed down scan time.
You know, according to people who have done buckets of psychedelics, there's an awful lot more to the psychedelic experience than 2.5-4x slower processing speed. I recall reading of numerous people who found they could collectively slow down a wall clock to the point were it didn't move any longer, and people who have experienced what they refer to as "eternity", "multiple life times", "thousands of years", etc.
Also what is being done here isn't simply slower processing speed. It's more like the information from old states persists into new ones. My understanding is that this would be considered low dose territory.
There's more to the story here, and I don't think this test, is even scratching the surface. It is neat though.
people who have experienced what they refer to as "eternity", "multiple life times", "thousands of years", etc.
They didn't "experience an eternity". They experienced an emotional feeling they likened to an eternity. This is the difference between your computer running a program for a thousand years and you changing the date settings. These people did not go through an eternity of perception, processing, and thought; they had the label on their memories altered.
> These people did not go through an eternity of perception, processing, and thought; they had the label on their memories altered.
No, psychedelics really can speed up thought. It's not uncommon to experience a lot more in a much shorter amount of time than normal. For example, I've experienced this first-hand where I could not even finish a single sentence before I was so far ahead in thought that I completely forgot what I was originally trying to say.
I used to call it "an entire universe happening between each instant" which, while inaccurate, is an apt enough description of how it feels, but also how it actually is, because the volume of thought is still much higher than normal.
The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered".
To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic cases given the same amount of "real time".
IIRC earlier papers (that I am too lazy to find) shared on HN that have done this seem to show the opposite, that there is no measurable difference on the task yet the participants reported a difference in their label of the experience. (I think the paper then was related to some form of creativity and showed that there was no post-hoc measured difference despite a significant reported experiential difference).
> The experience you described is no indicator of whether "volume of thought is still much higher than normal" though? You'd have the exact same experience if the actual mechanism is that "had the label on [your] memories altered".
It's not the only evidence I have, but one of the main problems with trying to describe psychedelics is that the experience is... well, indescribable. As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't even properly decode most of the memories I made with it.
> To scientifically test this, you'd need some normalized "benchmark task" of thought, and then compare the difference in progress on such a thought task between the control and psychedelic cases given the same amount of "real time".
LSD probably doesn't make it faster for me to process things. It just makes me jump between things more quickly so I have more distinct experiences at any given time. I know that while in voice chat with people, I would have moments where I would have a bunch of thoughts, completely forget what just happened, and only a couple seconds of real-world time had passed. In that scenario the other person is my time reference but I've also checked actual clocks and observed that effect.
I don't think LSD makes me better at computation at all (in fact, it probably makes me a bit worse at computation).
> more distinct experiences
If well formulated I suppose this could be scientifically tested too. Given the right kind of task and measurement. My earlier point is only to tie to the parent about differentiating actually having "more distinct experiences" with just _feeling like_ you had them. This is something that, as the subject and knowing the intervention, you cannot determine by yourself. You'd need an experimenter doing a double-blind experiment to really test this out.
As an anecdote there's nothing wrong --- subjective experiences aren't any less "real" to the experiencer --- just that claims about the mechanism and effect are probably not generalizable.
> As in, when I'm not on LSD, I can't even properly decode most of the memories I made with it.
There's also lots of metaphysical questions about whether indescribable experiences are "real" or not that are probably too long to get into on HN :)
> My earlier point is only to tie to the parent about differentiating actually having "more distinct experiences" with just _feeling like_ you had them. This is something that, as the subject and knowing the intervention, you cannot determine by yourself. You'd need an experimenter doing a double-blind experiment to really test this out.
This can honestly be applied to basically anything about thought. I sort of get it though, because claiming a difference implies "citation needed". I would just feel weird if I wasn't really having all the thoughts that I thought I had.
It's not exactly possible to communicate exactly what validation I've done over those memories, especially since my brain could have fixed stuff after the fact (as brains do). I just can't find anything that would suggest it was modified after the fact, since even my behavior at the time would support the theory.
Worth noting that I have a lot of experience with things that my brain simply makes me think are happening, because I have Dissociative Identity Disorder and that happens with all sorts of things all the time. (That's not to say I can completely rule it out, rather that I know it happens and roughly how un-rule-out-able it can be.)
My brain will simulate something happening and then also create the memory of it happening, which becomes almost indistinguishable from it actually having happened. I would say I can usually tell those memories apart if I really study them, but whether I am correct or not, it is objectively impossible to know or say for sure, because if I missed something it would simply be missing from my knowledge (to the point where I wouldn't know something was missed).
I know that while in voice chat with people, I would have moments where I would have a bunch of thoughts, completely forget what just happened, and only a couple seconds of real-world time had passed.
Sounds identical to me on a bad ADHD day.
My thoughts would expand like a fractal and it would take active effort to make it all the way back out. I probably can't really communicate it to someone who hasn't experienced psychedelics before, but it makes me feel like I am conscious of every bit of mental effort I am spending. Pulling myself out of deep thought feels like a long, manual process, even if it's actually instant. An analogy I liked to use is having to arrange all the neurons manually or something.
After every instance of that, it felt like I had spent so much time in that fractal that it was difficult to recall what had happened previously. It's not like ADHD where I get distracted and lose something from my short-term memory—it's that I had so many other thoughts that it was difficult to backtrack past them all.
This happened to uh a friend the first time they got really high on weed.
It's just a trick your brain is playing on you man. I was playing Rainbow Six Siege with friends, and during the 30 second setup phase I played for what was surely several minutes doing all the things you do with the drone and looking everywhere and planning all sorts of things, and then I looked at the timer and only 5 seconds had passed.
Your brain's interpretation of time passing is a completely made up fiction for it's own benefit. Police officers report seeing shootings going down in slow motion, watching individual shell casings drop to the floor and reading the numbers stamped on the bottom.
When this kind of time dilation was scientifically investigated, we found that what actually changed was your MEMORY of that time, not your cognition during the dilation itself. You aren't actually experiencing things quicker, your brain is just timestamping stuff poorly. Your brain's time tracking system just gets out of whack, and that screws with your consciousness because it relies heavily on timestamping of things.
>To scientifically test this...
I swear, you people turn science into a religious ritual.
First-hand observation (which we have here) is the gold standard for knowledge-derivation. Science is just a method for ensuring that our models hew close to that.
What you assert here is mere convention.
Actually no. The plural of anecdote is not data. This is a single anecdote, not a set of data from a properly blinded or designed study.
Humans are TERRIBLE at knowing reality. That's like the whole point of the scientific process. People's self reports are literally the worst evidence ever used in science, and you have to actively work against your subjects and their brains to tease any actual signal out of that noise.
Consider for example, many airplane accidents have people reporting the plane was hit by a missile, even though we can have independent evidence that they weren't even looking in the direction until after the event.
We KNOW the brain lies to you as a matter of course, and makes up pretty much everything it can for the purpose of being lazy. Your entire consciousness is a fiction, vulnerable to all the normal human biases. We KNOW it is incredibly easy to mangle, twist, modify, and combine memories, and that pretty much everyone has memories that don't match reality.
You offer that we cannot trust our observations - except that we can trust our observations in the case of a method for validating our observations.
You see how that is rather inconsistent.
How about this instead.
We can offer, in addition to our observation, the method by which we arrived at the observation. The method of our "experiment".
We might also compare our observation with that of our "peers".
(And we might also cultivate ourselves, to make better observations. If you think such a thing is possible)
But however you slice it, the validity of the observation stands upon the authority of the observer. There's no getting around that.
To be fair, I understand why they're skeptical. A brain's perception of itself is imperfect, and sometimes completely made-up. (Actually, one could make the argument that all perception is completely made-up, but I digress.)
Since we're talking about things that happened inside my own head, how can I know whether I actually experienced a certain period of time, or only created a memory of having experienced that time? My own recollection of it may be flawed, so it logically follows that in order to know for sure, I have to find some way to objectively quantify it. I don't know how I'd objectively quantify the number of thoughts I'm having, though, lol.
They're skeptical because it stands against convention. The rest is mere justification. Not very serious.
It's funny. You distrust your eyes but trust your thoughts.
No...? Science is just a tool to resolve disagreements in conclusions about observations. It is a pretty effective tool if your personal philosophy believes reality is objective (externally defined) and shared.
It's not the only tool available though. You could also use other tools like coercion, intimidation, violence, negotiation, etc. to also arrive at a single conclusion. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯
> First-hand observation
Well no, it is not. If you spot an UFO, chances are your "first-hand observation" is lying to you.
Or you might say that your seeing is good but your interpretation is bad. Or vice versa even. It ain't so clearly cut.
The problem with drug users is that they don't seem to be alarmed that others can't confirm the "profoundness" of their experiences from outside. They tend to discard the obvious explanation of their fascination: their own stupidity induced by drugs makes trivial things seem profound. E.g. the fact that the interpretation is broken.
Sounds like your short term memory was impacted by the drug.
Almost definitely. Though in all cases where I noticed that I forgot something, it was because I had some other train of thought that happened so quickly that it created a bunch of distance from the thing I forgot, even if very little real-time passed.
Sometimes I could recall the thing after spending a lot of time backtracking, but sometimes not.
It only generates false memories, reality is creative ideas that get into the memory system
Do you have a basis for your speculation, or are you just sharing from personal experience?
Yes, it clearly needs more science. Can we get some test-tubes and white lab-coats in here?
Because first-hand observation just isn't good enough.
Actually, my guess was that parent poster had neither science nor experience to back him up and was just making shit up.
Not sure exactly what point you are trying to make.
It's called humor. A confusing human vanity.
That's a subjective interpretation, and I say that even as someone who believes in objective reality.
There's no telling what time perception is "correct" or "real". It is actually within the realm of possibility that they did experience an eternity-scale (but sub-infinite, natch) amount of experiences.
> There's no telling what time perception is "correct" or "real".
Perception is always, always false, the same way that our internal reality is imperfect. The only way to trust perception is to go through repeatable experiment and see that results conforms to prediction, eg. science.
Science is the only and sole way to determine our shared reality, anything else is literally lucky heuristics, including the behavior of scientists. The worst deceit from those heuristics being our conviction that there is any kind of truth in what we think, preventing the whole thing to fall appart.
I feel like the statement only holds true if you are trying to learn about shared reality.
Perception Isn't false, it's subjective. It's real in its own domain, but that domain may not generalize or overlap with a shared physical reality or perceptions made by other people.
The perception as two sides: the signal, and how it's processed. The signal is real and true just by it's existence. Note that this also applies with self-generated signal such as phantom limbs.
For the processing, the subjective part of the perception, lot of things falls appart, attaching any notion of reality and trustiness looks like a choice to enable some lines of reflection. A choice heavily oriented by our own experience of existence, nobody wants to see themselves as a bag of more or less working heuristics with conscience as meta processing and data acquisition for self-correction mechanism.
But if you have a solid source or line of thought that manages to explain one's sense of reality being more than «it's how I feel it for me, so that must be true of others, otherwise it's quite scary», I'm really (really) interested.
I think the point I was making is different. It was that perception and experiences are real, just not necessarily reflective of a shared reality. The state of consciousness is much more than just the processing of external signals.
> if you have a solid source or line of thought that manages to explain one's sense of reality being more than «it's how I feel it for me, so that must be true of others, otherwise it's quite scary», I'm really (really) interested.
The best example I can think of is a dream. Dreams are real experiences despite not being shared with any other human. It would be absurd to say that you can't have dreams because they aren't perceived by or true for other people. The same holds true for thoughts and feelings.
People don't get sent into an existential crisis because they feel happy while someone somewhere is unhappy. Having a feeling is a real experience, despite being personal and subjective.
Foreword: I don't wan't to be contrarian or combative, but I see unjustified universal truths laid out in your comment, 2 specifically:
> The state of consciousness is much more than just the processing of external signals.
Complex life evolution is 100% based on best survival interpretation of surrounding environment. I understand how we can try to figure out what is more in the human way of doing it, but I really think that has to hold on something before getting past it.
> It would be absurd to say that you can't have dreams because they aren't perceived by or true for other people.
It is, and yet, if you do the exercise of imagine that dreaming is a social construct that you are the only one to really experience it, discarding that idea is solely based on belief. A belief I share, based on trust in others, and what seems the most probable. If it's absurd, it's only because we can rule it out as highly improbable.
I'm not sure I understand your statements or how it relates to the things that I said, but I'll try my best to respond
>Complex life evolution is 100% based on best survival interpretation of surrounding environment. I understand how we can try to figure out what is more in the human way of doing it, but I really think that has to hold on something before getting past it.
I agree that evolution is driven by Fitness, and a large part of Fitness is understanding the world around you. That doesn't mean 100% of behavior, or especially experience, serves a purpose of advancing Fitness. Evolution is messy. It has mistakes, byproducts, artifacts, and maladaptive traits. Not everything done is done with a purpose.
>It is, and yet, if you do the exercise of imagine that dreaming is a social construct that you are the only one to really experience it, discarding that idea is solely based on belief. A belief I share, based on trust in others, and what seems the most probable. If it's absurd, it's only because we can rule it out as highly improbable.
Really struggle to grasp your meaning on this one. It seems that the existence of belief itself, independent of social truth, and contrary to trust in others, is evidence to the contrary. Are you saying that humans wouldn't have feelings, thoughts, or dreams, unless they have a social expectation to do so?
As Sam Harris has discussed several times, if you run the thought experiment of what is definitely real and not to its conclusion, subjective experience is the only thing that cannot be faked as it does not make any claim beyond the experience itself. Even if there is no real world out there, you're just sitting on a hard drive in a super computer being simulated, your subjective experience was proven to be true the moment you experienced it.
There is a distance between your experience and the shared reality (a bunch of signals, perception and processing) that we use science to try to overcome
Thanks, this is another way of explaining what I was trying to convey.
> The only way to trust perception is to go through repeatable experiment and see that results conforms to prediction, eg. science.
Is this claim not self-referential? Did you apply its ~~recommended~~ necessary methodology to itself?
> Science is the only and sole way to determine our shared reality, anything else is literally lucky heuristics, including the behavior of scientists.
This too...plus, who will be performing these experiments if scientists are not trustworthy?
Maybe this is brand new territory and we need new theories (&/or revisit old ones) and techniques.
I don't think it's self referential, the whole idea holds on that if you manage to do predictions that are confirmed, you still have to assume that your perceptions are consistent across time. As an individual you can check you perceptions across time, with several people you remove yourself as a variable.
I've been extreme in the formulations, but no, you don't need other methods, repeatable experiment with accurate predictions is enough. The heuristics are quite reliable. It's just that we tend to forget/ignore that everything that what we think of being true is just a large compound of beliefs, and that the only way to validate those beliefs is to use them to make prediction, and validate it through experiments.
> I don't think it's self referential
It involves perception, and you believe it despite not having gone through what you claim is necessary to acquire the knowledge.
> the whole idea holds on that if you manage to do predictions that are confirmed, you still have to assume that your perceptions are consistent across time.
YOu may have to do this, but I certainly don't - in fact, I believe essentially the opposite of this!
> As an individual you can check you perceptions across time, with several people you remove yourself as a variable.
That could depend on the nature of your relationship with the people - it's possible, but not guaranteed (and knowing which situation you're in isn't easy).
> I've been extreme in the formulations, but no, you don't need other methods, repeatable experiment with accurate predictions is enough.
This is only true if it is actually true though - how do you confirm that it is true?
> The heuristics are quite reliable.
...the heuristic process suggests.
> It's just that we tend to forget/ignore that everything that what we think of being true is just a large compound of beliefs, and that the only way to validate those beliefs is to use them to make prediction, and validate it through experiments.
It is true that there is value in science, but there is also risk.
How would you design an experiment to tell whether a perception of love is to be trusted or not?
I would advise others methods to convince the loved one the reality of your love. As for yourself, well, this is some aspect where the brain decides on your behalf, consciousness can be damned.
That's a subjective interpretation, and I say that even as someone who believes in objective reality.
Nonsense. Where's the thousand years of creative output? If my mind existed for a thousand years I'd be immediately filing patents and writing papers based off all the things I came up with during my eternity of thought. Further, if there was a simple chemical way to accelerate actual brain processing thousands of times, you don't think evolution would've built it into our brains? There is no difference between this and hypnotizing someone to believe they've lived an eternity.
>Further, if there was a simple chemical way to accelerate actual brain processing thousands of times, you don't think evolution would've built it into our brains?
Not OP, but I'd counter that evolution is doing an imperfect multivariate optimization over a pretty big state-space. Even if it might be easy to change one simple chemical and thus speed up processing, the question is whether the speed-up has other costs.
E.g. the brain is already using a lot of energy, increasing processing speed which probably increases energy usage might not be optimal.
We still don't understand sleep well, it could be that if you process faster more consistently you might need more sleep to organize your thoughts and memories, which is counterproductive if you don't want to be eaten. It's hard enough with our sleep requirements to keep up with nature.
A third point is that evolution only needs to find good enough. We're already the apex predator due to our ability to think. Anything above what we currently have might just not be necessary so has no evolutionary pressure.
I think the relevant questions are how are the brain measures time and of what the brain is processing.
What if the only thing it's capable of doing is perceiving the passage of time? If the biological clock is the only measure of perceived time, then it feels like more time is elapsing. If the brain measures and feels time as sand slowly falling into a bucket, what happens when you dump a truckload of sand into the bucket? That doesn't mean that you're necessarily capable of doing more work in that time, but maybe you still feel the additional passage of time.
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> if you have a clean bill of health, your mind is in the right place, no family history of severe mental illness, and have a trusted sober friend
And if you have all that you don't need to be doing mind altering drugs anymore.
I highly recommend trying mushrooms or acid for someone in a good place mentally who wants to improve themselves. Obviously one should do their own research for responsible consumption, and find a good set and setting.
I went from drinking a consistent 1-2 alcoholic drinks a day (very rarely getting drunk tho, just loved homebrewing and craft beer), being nearly obese, with little cardiovascular/muscular fitness to being in a much better place. I now exercise regularly, have a resting heart rate of 54 bpm, lost 30 pounds, meditate every day, eat much more healthfully, rarely consume alcohol, and I am more patient and listen to my partner better.
The increased neuroplasticity caused by physcadelics when combined with a desire to improve habits is a very powerful combination.
There is also a legal, mushroom based therapy for anxiety and depression that has shown great results, available in Oregon.
I really do believe society is much too welcoming of alcohol consumption, and much too resistant to physcadelics. We got this one so wrong.
I sense judgement from you towards anyone who has found utility or enlightenment through mind-altering drugs.
Just because I'm smart doesn't mean I stop reading. Just because I am fit doesn't mean I stop running. Just because I'm happy doesn't mean I can't dabble with new mental models.
And finally, to clarify the OP's statement: "Mind in the right place" doesn't mean being perfectly happy or without stressors/depression. To me it suggests someone doesn't have mental illness or suicidal tendencies.
You do if you want to "see for yourself". Which was GPs entire point.
I'm not saying psychedelics can't make you perceive things an unaltered brain cannot. I'm just saying they can't fit tens of thousands of times as much thought into the same amount of time, just that they can make you believe you did, and that experiencing a sense of deep time is not the same thing as experiencing deep time itself. I can dream or be drugged or hypnotized or otherwise fooled into believing I had sex with a supermodel. That doesn't mean I know what it's actually like. The experience I've had and the experience I believe I've had are not the same thing.
Offer any real reason why a person cannot experience extreme time dilation? Proof by contradiction? Anything other than a hunch... Because a lot of people across a lot of cultures with various substances have experienced and independently reported this. To say "no because I don't think so" is akin to gas lighting people who dropped a ball and observed it always fell, or found certain ores were attracted to certain metals. There's a lot of evidence for these experiences, and it's quite reproducible.
I haven't done any psychedelics but I spent a lot of time meditating a few years back, and I experienced something like this on a smaller scale. It wasn't quite as profound as "thousands of years" or anything, more like, subjective hours over the course of 5 minutes.
Well I can stop a fast spinning (to the point of blurry) tire with my mind into a still image of the thread, all I need to do is to be tired enough to have micro-conciousness lapses... doesn't make that into some new perception state
What about people who did psychedelics and got severe anxiety, depresion, panic attacks? Why the dark side of using drugs is always forgoten. It feels like cartels invested in PR - upside only.
What about the poor people who jumped out of windows or in front of traffic while on psychedelics? Oh yeah, that doesn't happen, because the govt has had a decades long monopoly on fear mongering BS when it comes to psychedelics.
One of my friends literally jumped off a balcony on psychedelics and is no longer here. Be careful…
As someone who now occasionally suffers panic attacks due to psychedelic use, I agree: people downplay the risks because it suits their personal narrative and experience. Perhaps as a pushback against years of over-exaggeration re: risks, per another poster, but nevertheless a definite under emphasis on the dangers these drugs pose.
Psychedelics are not for everyone. Specially people, who thinks too much, must avoid it.
That's the problem; in general, in popular culture, psychedelics are marketed as the end of your anxiety and the reset button for your brain and that type of thing.
For some people that may be true; but for many of us, these drugs only make our brain reel faster and faster until it just goes full blown into fight or flight mode.
I'm with the other posters. I believe people should be able to put whatever they want into their bodies (as long as they fully understand what they're doing), but also should absolutely know that panic attacks, and ongoing anxiety disorders could be a side effect.
Source: My anxiety disorder that exists now after recreational hallucinogen use for about a decade.
My panic attacks went away because of psychedelics. Sorry yours was the opposite.
Yeah, a reasonable discussion includes both benefits (your experience) and risks (mine). The former has recently been getting all the air time.
This isn’t a “both sides” argument wherein some highly unlikely hypothetical is trotted out to debate the consensus. Plenty of people have had bad experiences with long term ill effects.
It's opening up a perceptual time domain that is not available in a sober state. That's not 'slower processing speed'.
I quickly looked up research and, yeah, while LSD does impair many cognitive functions, reaction time seems to be unaffected.
It’s presumably extending persistence of vision not slowing reaction time. Seems easy enough to test with revolving wheel/stroboscopic discs.
Which if true, sounds like an artifact from less processing power to me.
What do you mean by "processing speed"? I think you are interpreting this experiment as if our brains worked like digital computers doing signal processing in some buffer in the visual cortex :p
This example is basically adding a low pass signal filter on a signal, not processing speed.
Every electronic device you use requires low pass signal processing to function and transfer information.
It isn't just about speed. A clear image on your TV is a clear advantage over static.
Similarly, there is a clear "computational advantage" to processing data at the right rate it is being transmitted. You can process a binary signal at faster rate than transmission, but 100% of your data will be lost.
You are probably right that having a slower processing speed isn’t an advantage overall, but being able to perceive patterns like this may be advantageous in some situations.
Maybe the slower processing speed is the cost of better processing power? Kinda like the tradeoff between high torque and high speed for gearboxes.
Some tribes use psychedelics for hunting, and others that use psychedelics for introspection: maybe they are perceiving something that we ignore during normal processing modes.
>Some tribes use psychedelics for hunting
OP saying slow doesn't mean that it's actually slower. If you process more information time _appears_ more slowly, but you're processing more, i.e. faster.
In hunting it might be good to have improved pattern matching abilities at the cost of a higher false-positive rate.
Yeah, it's very hard to describe. Almost like you perceive the present moment and the past couple seconds at the same time. Time seems to pass by you very quickly but, then you look at the clock, and it's only been 5 minutes
That being said, I can't imagine having to hunt while on a lot of psychedelics
Do you think people have CPUs in their brains? There isn't a clock rate knob that LSD goes and turns all the way down. As another commenter said, this is about being able to correlate events across time, and distinguish patterns in a way that you would not normally be able to.
Also, I think if you'd ever used LSD, you would never think it was "slowing your thoughts down".
Some subtle things can only be perceived as you slow down.
Under mushroom, food tastes amazing, because you can suddenly perceived a lot more details.
Andres posted a reply on Twitter: https://twitter.com/algekalipso/status/1666091889500758016
I downloaded and played back at higher speeds as well after your suggestion. Using the same technique to view the 3D image in those "posters from the 90s", I could make out the messages too.
Persistence of vision type of tricks/effects have always been a favorite of mine. Even without LSD, I still enjoy finding ways to "trip" the mind. I have a ceiling fan with dark tone blades hanging from a white ceiling. When laying down in bed, I can stare at the ceiling fan for a couple of seconds, and then when I close my eyes, I still "see" the ceiling fan but in a negative view where the ceiling is now dark and the blades are light color. Cheap LEDs and fluorescent lights with cheap ballasts also cause me to see weird flickering when using averted vision or by turning my head back and forth in a rapid manner.
Maybe it's because of the training my brain has undergone from using psychedelics, but I've tried to get other people that have never used psychedelics to see the same things without success.
I agree that “computational advantage” is probably too strong a conclusion. However, it is intriguing to think about how this general effect (increasing the time span over which data are integrated) could extend to more abstract reasoning. Subjectively it certainly feels like when on these substances I am aware of more at once but perhaps with the loss of some focus.
There's a book called "Thinking fast and slow". It is a bestseller and that very clearly tells how thinking in different speeds helps particular tasks. Will you disagree with that?
> it starts to become readable at 2.5x and is essentially a clear static image at 4x
> having a 2.5x to 4x slower processing speed
I'm confused. Wouldn't this imply a 2.5x to 4x faster processing speed?
No. The world is moving 2.5x to 4x faster relative to your perception.
Is life just about "computation advantage" ?
To a lot of people on this site, yes.
there's some seriously Joe Rogan-esque horseshit on that page.
.
I think you need to accelerate it more / aren't high enough. If you persist the white dots, you'll see letters.
Shameful such a short-sighted conclusion sits at the top of HN.
For those that are curious, these are the messages: https://imgur.com/a/y0mXbAk
Decoded using:
We need to use the second command, as frame averaging in ffmpeg lowers luminosity. There's probably a way to cleverly get around this, but I'm no ffmpeg expert. The secrets are: "WE LOVE YOU," some alien heads, "UNIVERSE IS THE GATE," and "MIND IS THE LOCK (?—the last word is a bit hard to read)." Pretty neat, fun puzzle, though there's probably ways to make it tougher to solve in the context of something like a hacker tournament (as the negative space is a dead giveaway).A couple of quick optimizations:
- If weights are repeated, you only need to specify the last unique one
- You can chain filters using a comma
- You can drop that last point in the curve
> You can chain filters using a comma
Haha, I knew there was some way of doing this, but I couldn't remember how (tried semicolons which didn't work), thanks :)
Mad respect for your solution, but how do you get to this point where you can look at a thing and say “oh yeah, it’s XYZ”?
> how do you get to this point where you can look at a thing and say “oh yeah, it’s XYZ”?
What do you mean exactly?
I think GP meant: how do you go from watching the obfuscated video to going, "To see the message I need to use mix=frames=36 with the following weights..."
Oh, well the weight was going to be 1 since I needed the frames need to be fully overlayed, and I randomly ended up at 36, since I just kept upping the frames until I got a good-enough image via trial & error. Then I had to fix the gamma, because it ended up being "smeared," which is exactly what I wanted, but extremely dark and hard to see.
I've learned that a lot of what we think of as art or mastery is just the end result of trying shit and then remembering what works.
Hah that's cool, reminds me a little bit to those LED message fans
thank you! I was very frustrated by this whole thing
Like, you want us to take 150ug just to see your puzzle? Well that could be fun in the right context, not on HN though
You can see the messages if you take a long exposure shot (2s) from your phone
Here are the photos from my phone
https://imgur.com/a/WOqbQVo
So, psychedelics can give you a longer exposure vision.
It might be useful for looking at stars and galaxies. Not so much for everything else.
It's not just vision!
Psychedelics give all perceptions including mental concepts "long exposure" as well, causing them to overlap in ways which rarely happen sober.
This allows for forming wholly new connections and insights otherwise out of reach for the sober mind.
> Psychedelics give all perceptions including mental concepts "long exposure" as well, causing them to overlap in ways which rarely happen sober.
> This allows for forming wholly new connections and insights otherwise out of reach for the sober mind.
For me, LSD seemed to reveal some brand new type of thought or concept that could be recognized by the sound or impression that it made. My speech center would spit out complete gibberish when fed these types of thoughts. Actual quotes I typed while on LSD:
"can have a haves and take a three sixteenth quarters"
"can have an um somethings or others .... mmm much of somethings or others.... can havings a taken umpteenth very good time ...."
Normal thoughts for me are based on words and images, but these ones were based on some sort of "proximity". I could somehow sense the strength of certain patterns, recognize them, and manipulate them, even if they had no actual meaning. It felt like I got to re-learn very basic fundamental concepts in the form of this brand new type of thought. Some of them just felt pleasant to think about even if I didn't know what they meant, so I'd commonly find them looping in the background. I still find this extremely fascinating and it's probably one of the biggest reasons why I hope to have more psychedelic trips in the future.
I learned plenty of patterns and have plenty of memories of them, but seemingly can't decode those memories when sober, probably because those mental patterns simply aren't visible to me right now. I can remember certain types of artifacts generated by them though, like the gibberish words, some sounds, etc., at least the ones I committed to memory.
Citation? I have done a few and didn't really experience anything like that. Most things to me seemed somewhat shallow just like this visual trick.
It was fun though!
Caffeine can cause pupil dilation - might be useful for low light conditions, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have plenty of other effects and uses. Same for any other drug
most "recreational/party drugs” change the hardware, like pupils dilate, heart rate, pores open or close
psychedelics, specifically LSD and psilocybin, are like a software change, enough is like a firmware change. When it comes to sight, its more like some side image decoder in the image processing pipeline is modified, as opposed to your eye hardware or brain/storage itself. some people experience a latent side effect called HPPD (Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder) where they get these visual distortions for days to years after every other affect has gone away. this is an area that needs research but is quite obscure and getting there is too vilified right now.
You have to try it to have any idea. The effects are beyond any words or concepts that can be expressed vocally or through internet text.
This is a very cool post. It’s a bit funny to see the HN crowd polarized with how best to view the messages but doesn’t seem anyone has viewed yet under psychedelics
Yeah let me drop acid in my morning cereal right before the daily scrum. This day's gonna be a fun if unproductive one finding patterns across Confluence pages.
Don't do that, I already put it in the team water jug.
Oh yeah, talk about _real_ team building. Offsite and all over the place without leaving the building.
:D
> It’s a bit funny to see the HN crowd polarized with how best to view the messages but doesn’t seem anyone has viewed yet under psychedelics
Honestly, I probably would if I wasn't all out of LSD, hehe. It sounds like a fun experiment and I still hope to try it one day.
also wondered about that. nobody here from the valley who'd up the micro dose today and confirm the claim?
>first clear demonstration of a real perceptual computational advantage of psychedelic states of consciousness.
I feel like this is technically true but also misleading towards the belief that there is an overall perceptual computation advantage of psychedelic states. You can maybe get a higher score on certain tests, but it comes at a loss on other tests. I'm willing to bet basic tests like an eye exam will score worse when all the letters are dripping. The reality is psychedelics effect a particular band of brainwave frequencies, and so is not like the blunt general stimulation or inebriation of other drugs. It may be better for your brain to be in a psychedelic state on certain tasks, but if it was better in the general case evolution would have already made it so. Remember, I can rig a system with absolute perfect perception just so long as you don't mind a rate of 100% false positives.
Still congrats to QRI on this research. Very impressive result. Seems like they had some of the same method ideas I've had, or thought my ideas were worth taking last I spoke with them.
> It may be better for your brain to be in a psychedelic state on certain tasks, but if it was better in the general case evolution would have already made it so.
Would the same not be true of delusion, psychopathy, and various other human shortcomings?
In the general case, having delusions and other psychotic issues are not selected for traits with positive outcomes for the individuals having them. Your life is hard if you have them and conventional success is rare.
They persist in the general population to an extent for the same reason other hereditary illness persists. "I would die for two brothers or 8 cousins". A gene that is to your detriment in 1/3 cases but carries an advantage in the other 2/3 is still selected for. We have lots of examples of this in other heritable disease types, though admittedly no one is quite sure what advantage there might be to you if your brother or cousin is schizophrenic (for example).
> In the general case, having delusions and other psychotic issues are not selected for traits with positive outcomes for the individuals having them. Your life is hard if you have them and conventional success is rare.
It varies per delusion - for example, most successful people suffer from the delusion that they have ~omniscient level knowledge of what's going on - if it were not for this misplaced confidence within human consciousness, I suspect it would be much more difficult to get things done (though, a lot of the dumb stuff that's done would get avoided as well, so it's a tough call what's net best).
Here's a lecture by Robert Sapolsky where he goes into some theories involving schizotypal individuals (and other mental disorders) and culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwAQqWUkpI
Long story short, the theory goes that being schizotypal (but not full-blown schizophrenic) could be an advantageous trait in human society, usually by filling some spiritual, ritual, or religious role in the group. These people are high status in their societies, and have many chances for passing on their genes.
Yep, that's exactly the lecture I had in mind for my original comment. I decided to shorten down to "no one is sure what the advantage is" rather than try to both explain Sapolsky's conjecture and not mislead people into thinking its an established scientific fact.
> We have lots of examples of this in other heritable disease types
You're saying that diseases persist in humans because they're selected for, because they're beneficial to others? That's interesting, do you have some examples?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235230421...
I would phrase it as the genes are selected for, not that the diseases are selected for, but yeah you understand correctly. Others have already filled in examples like you asked for.
sickle cell anemia is the classic example; one copy of the gene gives you malaria resistance, two copies gives you the disease
People who haven't used psychedelics don't tend to get or appreciate The Congress as much as those who have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPGhw4nACfk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPAl5GwvdY8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pqzaZcivh4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMMI8HWhqEc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHBl43lMJY0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)
I've recommended the film previously on HN [0]. It's a movie that only gets more relevant with time.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30628290
This is absolutely amazing to me -how would one go about finding more gems like that?
It's well worth reading the book by Stanislaw Lem that it's based on, The Futurological Congress!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress
>The book opens at the eponymous congress. A riot breaks out, and the hero, Ijon Tichy, is hit by various psychoactive drugs that were put into the drinking water supply lines by the government to pacify the riots. Ijon and a few others escape to the safety of a sewer beneath the Hilton where the congress was being held, and in the sewer he goes through a series of hallucinations and false awakenings, which cause him to be confused about whether or not what's happening around him is real. Finally, he believes that he falls asleep and wakes up many years later. The main part of the book follows Ijon's adventures in the future world — a world where everyone takes hallucinogenic drugs, and hallucinations have replaced reality.
In the same way that the epic movie Blade Runner was based on Philip K Dick's classic book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, both movies are deeply inspired by but quite different than the books, so they both have unique important things to say and are worth reading and seeing.
Both pairs of movies and books are among my top favorites!
Many of Lem's books and stories are also excellent mind bending gems -- especially The Cyberiad!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cyberiad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Lem
>[...] The Cyberiad (Cyberiada) provide a commentary on humanity in the form of a series of grotesque, humorous, fairytale-like short stories about a mechanical universe inhabited by robots (who have occasional contact with biological "slimies" and human "palefaces").[11][35] Lem also underlines the uncertainties of evolution, including that it might not progress upwards in intelligence.[36]
What are the messages hidden in each video. Unless I'm mistaken, the text below doesn't say what the hidden message is?
In addition, does anyone have a version of the video with the messages visible, as outlined in the first description:
The first video shows diagonal rows of.. creatures, reminiscent maybe of crabs, or maybe flowers. They are pretty clearly visible once you repeat the video several times, and watch the black empty spaces between color lines, instead of the lines themselves (much like Castaneda describes it).
The second one contains some intricate pattern or maybe letters, but still more like flowers. I was unable to make out any definite shapes.
The third one contains letters in the vertical columns. I could not make out enough to read a complete message, but certain letters, like R, S, or E in the left columns are pretty clearly visible after several repetitions. The largest fragment I could detect with enough certainty is ...ERS IS THE... in the leftmost column.
Disclaimer: absolutely clean, no psychedelic or other mind-altering substances.
> The third one contains letters in the vertical columns.
(The text is stationary; if it were moving, that would make the following fiddly and annoying, but not genuinely difficult. So it would provide the illusion of security, but no actual security. For this (kind of) reason, "psycrypto" strikes me as a rather bad idea.)
I transcoded the video to gif with:
then opened it in GIMP and copy-pasted various frames to a new image as layers with additive blending (Layers window > "Mode:" > "Addition") until legibility (somewhat) ensued.The text says "UNIVERSE IS THE GATE" in a obnoxious ultra-stencil font.
I've not been able to figure much in the first and second video, but in the third I think it's written "XXXXXX IS THE GATE"
edit: the first word could be like INVERSE. Not 100% sure
I see the words "WE LOVE YOU" in the negative space in the first video.
Ahh yes, you're right! The expanding circles show the text, it's just disappearing too quickly after. I imagine that, if you're on acid, the afterimage is strong enough to read the message clearly.
In what part of the video? The top?
The bottom is definitely covered with repeating non-letter shapes.
In all parts. The center is has the biggest text. If it helps think of it this way: you're looking through a black fence at something colorful on the other side.
Edit: You're right, the text is only in the middle and next largest "fold." The rest is, spoiler, alien face glyphs.
Confirmed! The letters are easy to read once you know where to look.
Indeed the regular pattern can be seen as alien faces. But they are so close by that to me the slanted "eyes" and the cup-like "chins" more readily form plant shapes, with pairs of "leaves" and "flowers" above them instead.
Ding ding ding. Loving you
The repeated pattern in the first one is the classic "alien head", like the emoji: (which I pasted here but I assume HN will strip it out...)
Edit: The emoji was indeed stripped. This one https://emojipedia.org/alien/
I can see the first one fairly clearly in my default state of consciousness, which I suppose confirms my theory that I have higher-than-average vision persistence. (I have never used psychedelics, and do not plan to)
Tips to make it stand out more: HDR monitor at max brightness, increase playback speed to 2x
Try not to follow the movement, but keep your eyes on a fixed location (e.g. a speck of dust on your screen)
> I have higher-than-average vision persistence
First time heard about this. Do you think that you have more "buffer space" for past visual input than average, or do the older and newer visual input "merge together" in the same "buffer space"? What I'm trying to get at is that does this come at cost of blurring vision or reaction speed, or do you have no problems related to those?
The latter. This is the first time it's ever been remotely "useful", the rest of the time it's annoying.
Thanks for answering! TIL
Putting at 2x speed made it easy to read for me too, only the 3rd one was hard to read and I feel like that's because the lettering there is strange.
Yeah I can too but I have done psychedelics in the past, despite not having any HPPD symptoms.
I believe it is WE LOVE YOU with some aliens.
Do you see all of your life with extreme motion blur? Can you see anything clearly while walking or driving?
> increase playback speed to 2x
But that's cheating -make it fast enough any anyone can see it I suppose.
Do you normally have the ability to see things at half-speed?
I can see it without, I just noticed that 2x made it easier.
It seems like that’s one of the reasons the first piece won - because it’s quite accessible compared to the others.
Cool stuff but there are some omissions that leave me wondering how correct this is.
1. What's the proper way to experience this?
No information is given on how the judges experienced this content. Did they watch it in 1080p or 360p? Did they watch it over YouTube or on a local player? Did they watch it on a loop or did they have to manually play it every loop? Did they watch it in a dark room or with the lights on? Did they watch it on a phone or a monitor or a TV?
2. What is the transmission speed?
How much time did someone tripping take to see the message? These methods could be ineffective if it takes someone sober the same amount of time to read the message.
3. What is the transmission method?
I specifically avoided the descriptions before watching the videos so I wouldn't bias myself by knowing the answer. I was still able to read the messages when I sat myself down in a dark room, put the videos on loop, and "spaced out" for a few minutes. I suspect these messages rely on the tendancy of someone tripping to stare off into space so the afterimage effect can come into play. I understand that the authors are coming from a non-scientific background and cannot pin down the specific traits of tripping on LSD that causes these methods to be effective. I strongly suspect these messages work by watching the content in a specific manner instead of the result of an altered function or altered reception of visual stimuli.
> I suspect these messages rely on the tendancy of someone tripping to stare off into space so the afterimage effect can come into play.
Not necessarily. I've taken LSD before and it legitimately seems to increase persistence of vision (otherwise known as tracers). If I wave my paw in a circle on LSD, I can see a short trail behind it, and it seems to slightly lag behind its actual real-world position (by around a quarter of a second?).
It looks a lot like this: https://youtu.be/ggFKLxAQBbc?t=26
I have a replica of an old painting of the Buddha, Tibetan.
Once on truffles I shouted out there is a snow lion in the painting.
Very vividly the pattern of the composition turns into a snowlion in 3d on truffles.
Sober I can now see the patterns in there, but not the strong visual representation.
They defintely put it in there on purpose. Not sure what tools they use to alter their vision.
Can you post a photo?
This one: https://i.etsystatic.com/25915090/r/il/ed3d36/4628746212/il_....
Not sure the rest saw it, not everyone recognizes Tibetan symbols.
Thank you for sharing your story. I have had similar experiences.
I have reverse image searched to provide a higher resolution image https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Shakyamu...
Interesting, thanks! I can't make out anything resembling a lion, but I imagine I need to be higher for that.
Haha yeah it's harder for me to see now also. Two of the leaves of the lotus are darker those are his eyes, the white flower & female buddha are his tongue. The white skin of people are his hairs. When sober it feels farfetched, but it's all much clearer on a substance :)
Any chance you can draw on top of the image? I don't really know where to begin to look from your description.
It is easier to spot when the details become blurred. So either zoom out of the image or look at your screen from afar. Because I am shortsighted, I am also able to see it easily when I remove my glasses and move back somewhat from the screen. I get the best result when I am just a bit outside the range were the image is sharp. Then I still have something like a 3-D effect from the potest. -- So no substance needed to see it.
Yeah that's how I try to see the image again now. But it's not as vivid.
I see it better when my head is really close to the screen.
Ahhh I kind of see what you mean! Very interesting, I wonder if this was on purpose or if the mind is just great at seeing things in shapes when on drugs.
Thangka's are always filled with symbols.
And the Tibetans have a strong culture of visions in dreams and real life.
For instance they often meditate long times without food & water, and they speak about how to protect against "demons" persuading you to jump of cliffs.
Although most or much more positives, projections of buddha forms appearing next to teachers etc.
There are also some shamanistic leftovers from the Bon Tradtion before buddhism took over. And some claim substances where used in certain traditions.
So I wouldn't be surprised if certain painters could see things like this, since it was so vivid while on truffles I think someone knew what they were doing, but who knows.
People throughout time and culture have described the experience of seeing auras, and I believe that's a result of peeling back inhibitory responses to really "see" what the eye and mind see without too much heavy filtering.
Like today there are people who experience things like psychedelic flashbacks or HPPD, many report being able to trigger those experiences willingly, and sometimes uncontrollably.
I think you can train yourself to see this way, and meditation is a great way of peeling back your brains' pattern matching and assumption making to do it. It's similar to learning to "see" as an artist, or the artist's eye. When you first start out, you have to learn to look past the generalizations your mind fills in for what you think you're looking at to actually "see" what needs to be seen to capture what you want in art. It's a different type of perception.
For that reason, I don't think drugs need to be involved at all to make art like this, just a different way of perceiving things.
Hmm. “Right state of consciousness” makes it sound exotic in a click baity way
It is more like “Experiencing a visual trip compatible with the image whilst also still lucid enough to communicate and remember”
Tripping comes in all varieties of strengths and effects. Often the effects are barely visual. Also you can be so out of it that you cannot speak and perhaps also cannot remember the test image when you’ve come down.
> At a theoretical level, this confirmation is significant because it is the first clear demonstration of a real perceptual computational advantage of psychedelic states of consciousness.
This is a pretty strong claim, considering that while psychedelic states of consciousness do allow you to see these messages, they also have a lot of other side effects.
I'm pretty sure you can do the reverse too, create a message which can only be seen in a normal state of consciousness - for example you use the same tracer phenomenon to obscure instead of to reveal the message.
So a psychedelic state is not strictly superior to normal state, it's just different.
It's not claiming that there's a net advantage.
It should because there is a net advantage coming from this difference. If some problem seems unsolvable in your normal state, try thinking that out in high state. So, at the end, creative tasks become easier as we can easily get two different perspectives for the same problem. Sometimes, it will help, sometimes not much. But the net is always positive because you visit both the states to solve the problem thinking out different possible angles.
One time I took way too much weed butter and watched Interstellar, and I swear I could tell exactly where the green screen and photoshopping points were.
Cannabis is indeed a psychedelic substance. Many users don't experience it as such, but in the proper dose, and especially ones first usage of it, can be intensely psychedelic. The challenge with the cannabis experience is, it is often deeply clouded in fear and paranoia.
I bet someone could read the messages in these videos quite easily under the influence of cannabis, but I doubt most would be comfortable at that level of intoxication to enjoy the experience while it occurred.
> Many users don't experience it as such, but in the proper dose, and especially ones first usage of it, can be intensely psychedelic.
ime/imo the main reason why it's so uncommon is because you have to go _comically_ far over your tolerance to hit the truly-psychedelic effects, and, as you said, it can be deeply uncomfortable. I've only ever managed to hit truly-psychedelic effects by ex. eating 600mg of RSO with a low tolerance, or doing a dab after a t break and way overestimating my tolerance.
> ime/imo the main reason why it's so uncommon is because you have to go _comically_ far over your tolerance to hit the truly-psychedelic effects, and, as you said, it can be deeply uncomfortable.
I tried taking something like 50mg THC once and it just made me feel like my head was imploding for around five hours. No visuals or altered thoughts or anything. Made me conclude that my brain probably just isn't receptive to weed or something.
A shot in the dark, here, but it does have an effect on blood pressure, so it's probably a bit of that, and the increase in general sensitivity you experienced. Pretty normal. Some strains are even known for their "headband" effects (at maybe more pleasant intensities)
It could be blood pressure, yeah. I've only really also tried LSD recreationally, but it creates a similar head feeling (though much less dysphoric). It's probably caused by blood flow to the brain, specifically, due to the drugs being psychoactive.
That's a pretty high dose if you aren't a regular user. Most of my friends who are very casual with it usually go for 10mg max. Altered visuals on cannabis are very rare, its almost entirely a psychological effect in my experience. As far as altered thoughts - did you think something was physically wrong with you? That paranoia 100% counts
> That's a pretty high dose if you aren't a regular user.
Exactly. The goal was to take a really high dose, to see if it would do anything—I was getting impatient tapering up with 2.5mg (or so) edibles, so I bought some tincture, did some calculations, and took 50 milligrams' worth. (Just drank it directly from a dropper.)
Now that I've tried such a high dose and not detected any desirable effects, I can basically rule out THC completely as a recreational drug. And it didn't require being uncomfortable more than a single time; pretty efficient if you ask me.
> Altered visuals on cannabis are very rare, its almost entirely a psychological effect in my experience.
"Visuals" includes imagination / mind's eye, but I also got no effect there whatsoever. I mentioned it because I know someone who claims that THC edibles added more "depth" to their imagination, almost like they could see it more clearly when they closed their eyes. I had no such effect. (The effects of THC seem to differ for every brain, depending on the location of the cannabinoid receptors or something?)
> As far as altered thoughts - did you think something was physically wrong with you? That paranoia 100% counts
Not really. I have dysphoria normally though, so I probably wouldn't be able to tell if it was coming from the THC.
I did experience very strong dissociation, since THC is a dissociative, but I already have a dissociative disorder, so that's not very exciting or compelling. (I didn't know how to recognize the feeling of dissociation until I tried THC, though, so I will give it credit for teaching me what that feels like.)
It took me several attempts with weed before it would affect me. I smoked like gram of flower one of my first times and had no effect, while my friends were zonked off of a few puffs. This isn't bragging about my tolerance, as nowadays a single puff can get me high, it's as if I had to "sensitize" myself to it.
This has happened to me nearing the end of LSD trips watching movies or TV a couple times. Glad to finally hear someone else has experienced it too.
Similarly, when enjoying an edible of a strongish dose, I become hyper-sensitized to digital compression artifacts. Low bit-rate media is really obtrusively ugly to me in that state.. the swishing of the drums and cymbals in music, and the smudging of B-frames in the mpeg are just so front-and-center that it's hard to pay attention to the narrative (more so than usual, at least ;) ).
Is there a way to make some psychedelic LLM middleware to translate any new breaking API changes down into an acceptable format? High-level abstractions...
I mean, the LLMs are already hallucinating, so it shouldn't be that much of a stretch...
The phrase “psychedelic LLM” reminded me of this paper.
This is your neural net on drugs! https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2020/1/niaa024/6032852?l...
Amount of acid consumed today amongst HN readers must be higher today.
Regardless of the claims made, its a really neat idea. Confirms that tracers are a genuine artifact in your vision at least.
Have we all misunderstood the function of drug screening job applicants by the NSA?
This gave me a good chuckle. I remember at school once there was a shadowy entity that I came to understand was NSA recruiters (think big engineering school, big Military budget, not atypical for students to have high clearance). If you signed away a couple years they gave you some cash, I remember that, but what made me laugh was the thought of those bland recruiters surreptitiously whispering, “Now look, the LSD is supposed to HELP you see the code, go on try some!”.
Ive heard a lot of folklore surrounding these topics. I'd just be weary personally. At one point if you admitted you had used psychedelics some number of times you were considered insane and there's no way you could pass a polygraph.
Obviously no one can vouch for this topic, but consider the vulnerability associated with intense psychedelic use. If someone wanted to make you die in real life, black mail you, etc, this would be very good leverage. I've been told that the government likes leverage like this for maintaining control/order of the people who work for it. But who really knows, could all be conspiratorial mumbo jumbo. What is known is that the government invested a lot of time into studying psychedelics for purposes of mind control, IE, something that is not in the interest of the practitioner whatsoever.
Me personally... If I had to choose between being a psychedelic user on my own with my own tribe, or durring a government evaluation of my character, I think it's probably safer to choose the former not the latter.
Oh god mate, I would never hahaha. Not to mention I would never work for the soul-less NSA.
I have nothing against the agency. I know people who used to work for them, and they are alright once you see their soul and not how they operate. But, I also know that you have to offer something more than loyalty to be trusted in groups such as those. Drug traffickers will ask for the names of your kids, the NSA already has that and requires more(is my understanding anyways). me personally, I've given enough in my life, if my word isn't enough, then I have no interest in the asymmetric business relationship. IE if you need my life, then keep your secrets, I'll keep mine, and off we go in our separate directions.
Also, not super interested in barbed wire lunches, being used for psychological experiments, armed guards behind me while I write if statements, etc. Not my thing, but I know some people are fine with the trade.
I personally have tons against the agency. The most morally confused people on the face of the earth. To each their own.
Main insta
https://www.instagram.com/inner.reflection/
So far the closest visualization I have seen in terms of visuals that happen under effects of LSD/Shrooms
Have you seen /r/replications?
Can we please stop putting things on a 1-dimensional “better/worse” scale? Even more, can we stop assuming that there is a high correlation between “processing power” and this reductive grading system?
It’s clear to me that the brain, the brain on psychedelics, computers, etc are all just systems that are attuned to specific things. These tests do not show a system that is purportedly better than a sober mind using technologies to achieve the same effect - they provide some insight into how the mind, in particular the visual system, works.
Surprised there's not more skepticism about the "Qualia Research Institute" behind this study. It's funded by the founder of Polychain Capital, which might raise some eyebrows. I also find it amusing that people in tech have a tendency to reject traditional Western religious forms, but readily adopt Eastern ones or modern New Age spinoffs, which are arguably just as bad if not worse in terms of being anti-intellectual, anti-rational, mystical, etc.
Light painting [1] without a camera.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_painting
I tried a new one yesterday using cuprous benzene. I had a long standing ML problem to solve. It did get solved yesterday! Now, finally, I can launch that product!
This is like a mutation in a dungeon crawl game, that affects most of your stats negatively but gives you the ability to discover the effect of scrolls.
For anyone in pursuit of surreal experiences and reality-perspective shifts without using LSD, lucid dreaming works just great. I didn’t use LSD but from what I read, I can tell the experience is very similar. Source: I am a lucid dreamer.
It’s totally learnable (if you don’t have aphantasia afaict), although the internet is full of clickbait scammers. I can recommend learning sources if anyone wants.
Recommend already :)
thelucidguide.com and The Lucid Portal YouTube channel. The channel is more of a podcast, but the website contains learning resources and the forum there may help as well.
How do psychadelics affect the experience of "gradual change" illusions like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nL5ulsWMYc
or selective attention:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bnnmWYI0lM
I feel like with enough training you could decode these in normal states of conciousness under low light conditions
Anyone brave enough to leaf through the Voynich manuscript on their next acid trip? Maybe that's the key?
Seems a bit inflated to describe that it can only be understood when taking psychedelics. It takes nothing more than a long exposure mode(1) on your camera to see the image live.
(1) such as:
- Night mode
- Fireworks mode
- "Live photo -> Long exposure"
- Countless other modes that do an equivalent frame layering function
This is awesome. As someone who occasionally used LSD for a couple months, I have a ton of appreciation for psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. This is super fascinating to me and I hope to experience it for myself one day.
Wow this is way cooler than the ski goggles announcement! :D
Imagine subtly encrypting a message on all the users of ski goggles such that only people using psychedelics could see it.
Click on the period at the end of this dot.
"Informed Consent" to capture user tracking data will have an interesting interplay with "Dark Patterns".
Ironically these clips would probably be great to view with said ski goggles
If this becomes widespread, I predict that police will start walking around with a cellphone app at festivals that can decode all the images.
>> Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics
"I'll take Microsoft Marketing for $200"
Please, record this message and make an animation for a car dashboard.
"IF YOU CAN READ THIS YOU ARE DRUNK! YOU CANNOT DRIVE!"
Vision is a wrong envirenment for the messages which can only be understood under the influence, try sound.
I want this in a They Live remake
There's always a head start when you overclock, but we all know the rest.
I can’t see it, but I trust others when trhey tell me it’s there. :)
https://youtu.be/ila-hAUXR5U
In an article that can only be read under the influence of js...
None of this is real. Don’t fuck with your brain, pal, it ain’t worth it.
Just in case you don't get it, I think this is a quote from the movie 'Total recall'
Your two sentences contradict each other.
Arguable. Entheogenic drugs are likely a significant driver behind human cognitive evolution.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entheogenic_drugs_and_the_arch...
Are you referring to the Stoned Ape hypothesis? I couldn't find any mention of evolution in the linked article.
Yes, in part, and generally there's a close relationship between humans and many interesting psychedelic sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_entheogenic_drugs
Do you not suffer from how painfully boring reality and the default mode of consciousness are?
How can one stand decades of stagnation without the desire to escape?
> Do you not suffer from how painfully boring reality and the default mode of consciousness are?
Agree... I'm nearly unable to fantasize properly (dream or daydream what I want), and it's difficult to describe how it makes me feel, but I would probably use something like "fantasy withdrawal".
I've gotten pretty upset in the past over it and keep wishing I could find some drug to help me experience the things that I can't normally. LSD was the first thing I tried, ketamine will probably be next.
Curse my stupid brain for being stuck in reality. Makes one wonder what the purpose of dreams really is. It could be to try to prevent something like this from arising, but mine don't properly address that need.
It's not aphantasia, not even close. My coping mechanism for most of my life has been roleplay and story writing, which I have no trouble imagining (in fact I can seemingly do it better than most people). It's just that I can't properly dream it, can't experience it using the slots reserved for the normal senses.
I've never gotten a straight answer to whether this is normal or not, but I have heard that similar things can be caused by being autistic (which I am). Some autistics are known to be very literal and aware of reality and only reality. I just don't want to be that because it's painful.
Have you tried watching and listening to harsh noise? Idk if it'd overstimulate you, but it might help you learn to break out of reality. It's also harder to do if you're stressed.
AFAIUI, being autistic can completely remove the ability for the brain to filter out certain types of stimuli. (Autism is a spectrum, but defective filtering of certain stimuli is a known autistic trait.) It might not necessarily be possible to train/practice dissociation like that.
I haven't tried it though, that sounds interesting. I would probably want to use headphones for it though, as otherwise, the volume required to actually bother me would probably fill the entire apartment complex ;D
>Do you not suffer from how painfully boring reality and the default mode of consciousness are?
Maybe its just your default mode of consciousness that's boring.
Yesterday I had a dream where Elon Musk was making blow-up spaceships like balloons and I met Natalie Portman in a crowd of people and told her I hated Trainspotting, also there were Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at some point but I don't remember why.
One time I had a dream that changed my entire view of reality where I experienced passing into the afterlife as if I were diving into a pool of water and the transition was like touching the surface of the water.
Even during the day time, my brain just produces stuff like this but it's 'behind my eyes', that's where my imagination goes. Sometimes I'll just decide I want the colors to melt, or objects to explode like glass, and I can just do that.
If I won lottery today I'd have enough hobbies and interests to fill a lifetime.
There is so many interesting things to do (let alone watch) to last multiple lifetimes.
> How can one stand decades of stagnation without the desire to escape?
I guess by not being totally unimaginative and boring ? There is no nice way to say it.
To stimulate my brain I just learn new skills and solve puzzles constantly.
I am pretty happy so there is no need to escape.
I admit I am -curious- to try psychedelics but in no hurry. Plenty of things to entertain me in this life.
> I admit I am -curious- to try psychedelics but in no hurry. Plenty of things to entertain me in this life.
If you ever do decide to try them, it should still be an interesting experience. Personally, I loved to watch what happened to my computer screen during my first LSD trip, and I spent a lot of time obsessing over how pretty it was. It's definitely a different type of experience than learning a skill or solving a puzzle.
Seriously, my current motivation to work is basically to afford a place where I can indulge in more of my hobbies and skills. I can't imagine "running out of things to do" (aside from "I am so tired after work I can't be arsed" I guess) anytime soon
Kinda crazy to realize/appreciate how not-depressed some people are.
It depends on your definition of depression. For example I could be either depressed (there are some facts about my life that I've always been unhappy with, even if they don't necessarily distress me every day) or not depressed (I'm pretty happy and can't remember any real recent gripes) depending on how you define depression.
By the clinical definition, I don't have depression, because it doesn't impact my enjoyment of or participation in hobbies, and I also don't seem to have any persistent or recurring mood problems.
> there are some facts about my life that I've always been unhappy with, even if they don't necessarily distress me every day
I'm not sure anyone would call this depression? I certainly wouldn't.
I think I generally mean anhedonia when I talk about depression.
> I'm not sure anyone would call this depression? I certainly wouldn't.
Well, that's the point.
> I think I generally mean anhedonia when I talk about depression.
As far as I know, anhedonia isn't supposed to be very common. Though it can be pretty amazing to look at the outside world if you happen to be one of the unlucky ones who do have it.
I used to do this when I couldn't finish any projects because of ADHD. How did people dedicate all their free time to one thing for so long, and actually finish it to completion? I just didn't understand how it was possible because it just didn't work that way for me.
> As far as I know, anhedonia isn't supposed to be very common.
? My understanding is that it's like, a pretty primary symptom of depression?
> clinical depression, is ... characterized by ... pervasive low mood, low self-esteem, and loss of interest or pleasure in normally enjoyable activities.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_depressive_disorder)
At any rate, yeah, it's the primary symptom of depression I experience.
Shrooms, meditation, therapy, and exercise all do help manage it (in roughly that order).
Oh, no, you can have plenty of hobbies but still be too depressed to touch any of that, lived thru that too, and still didn't drop the weight I gained because of that...
Plenty of stress or frustration to be had from hobbies too
I do feel lucky that the thing I don't hate and are reasonably good at allows me to get decent job and money
Shift your perspective, instead of imagining that the lines are flowing over the black (along the paths with coloured borders), imagine that black stripes are flowing and covering the surface which has something inscribed on it.
So before you can actually start reading the text, you have to actually see the surface, which will in some sense appear as the widening of the lines across the curved flow axis. So the lines start turning into flowing stripes which reveal the surface beneath (full of text and aliens), you then have to try and hold that state.
It is like that spinning balerina.
EDIT: One more thing. The lines flicker, right? Since the "surface" underneath is interchangeably black & white, you must notice that the black stripes have straight borders. This will also make it easier.
...
The white lines turn into "stripes revealing the surface underneath" even though when ignoring this, you only observe a white line. For me, if that shift of perspective is possible, then as an observer I can't vouch on the true width of the white lines, because if I switch my perspective, even as slightly as the lines widen, I cannot as a single observer give a definite statement on their width. Video analysis would only empirically confirm it if I stay correct.
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It's nothing you can't chime in mentally sober.