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Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

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637 points robinhouston | 5 comments | 05 Jun 23 07:27 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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tuyiown ◴[06 Jun 23 12:02 UTC] No.36211364[source]▶
> 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.

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s1artibartfast ◴[06 Jun 23 13:22 UTC] No.36212272[source]▶
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.

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tuyiown ◴[06 Jun 23 15:23 UTC] No.36214259[source]▶
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.

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1. s1artibartfast ◴[06 Jun 23 16:00 UTC] No.36214801{3}[source]▶
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.

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2. tuyiown ◴[06 Jun 23 21:20 UTC] No.36219261[source]▶
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.

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3. s1artibartfast ◴[07 Jun 23 00:12 UTC] No.36220955[source]▶
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?

4. areeh ◴[07 Jun 23 12:03 UTC] No.36225748[source]▶
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

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5. s1artibartfast ◴[07 Jun 23 16:38 UTC] No.36229320[source]▶
Thanks, this is another way of explaining what I was trying to convey.