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Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

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637 points robinhouston | 1 comments | 05 Jun 23 07:27 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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codeflo ◴[06 Jun 23 10:39 UTC] No.36210706[source]▶
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.

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thumbuddy ◴[06 Jun 23 11:18 UTC] No.36210999[source]▶
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.

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causi ◴[06 Jun 23 11:28 UTC] No.36211075[source]▶
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.

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sneak ◴[06 Jun 23 11:39 UTC] No.36211174[source]▶
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.

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causi ◴[06 Jun 23 11:47 UTC] No.36211237[source]▶
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.

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1. carlmr ◴[06 Jun 23 12:48 UTC] No.36211815[source]▶
>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.