Messages that can only be understood under the influence of psychedelics

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.