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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: 0.448s | 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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thumbuddy[dead post] ◴[06 Jun 23 15:21 UTC] No.36214227[source]▶
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1. causi ◴[06 Jun 23 17:40 UTC] No.36216387[source]▶
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.
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2. thumbuddy ◴[07 Jun 23 10:43 UTC] No.36225168[source]▶
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.