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Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

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637 points robinhouston | 2 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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motohagiography ◴[06 Jun 23 13:15 UTC] No.36212182[source]▶
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.

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pulkitsh1234 ◴[06 Jun 23 15:43 UTC] No.36214584[source]▶
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 ?

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1. q845712 ◴[06 Jun 23 17:33 UTC] No.36216285[source]▶
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.

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2. motohagiography ◴[07 Jun 23 01:39 UTC] No.36221693[source]▶
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.