I don't disagree with the title of the article but I also don't think you can prove anything about consciousness with language. How consciousness can arise from matter is still a very much a mystery.
That's not a great argument for having an llm in an apocalyptic scenario.
People tend to think they are the thriving hero but most won't survive the first year.
I'd much rather have a USB stick of prepper disk. It works on any shitty machine I find, and it's not going to take days for an answer on how to make potash or fix a solar panel.
It means being grounded in something firm, whether that's inner strength or a reliance on an external deity.
Religion is not required for psychedelics, but a strong grounding in something is, in my opinion.
People have bad trips because there's something inside them that they haven't identified or dealt with properly. Anxiety and/or depression will ALWAYS flare up during your trip. It's best to deal with those properly (meaning change things in your life, not just medication) beforehand.
There are finders and seekers. I’m always impressed with people who ardently believe they know the truth, they can act without doubt, an interesting skill.
I'm also impressed, but not in a good way. I consider certainty to be the biggest tell of falsehood, and I wish to deny the vote to people with certainty.
Certainty of opinion on a complex topic reveals a belief that organic brains can, in practice, judge the correctness of their own reasoning - a conceit that borders on the psychotic, and at minimum a complete failure of self-awareness. These people don't need agency, they need thorazine.
yea it's like when someone is a really good liar - some skills you shouldn't want to have. Being insanely sure of the history of the universe when you have incredibly scant information, is surely not a good thing, unless you need to use it to survive through an illogical and chaotic world
I'm with you. It's not for me but it's absolutely fascinating. There's something nice about letting go and just knowing that it's part of someone's plan. Again, not for me but I understand that appeal.
My experience is that psychedelics will not get rid of anything on their own. They provide you with a different perspective on what you may or may not already know is going on.
This perspective can help you process those issues, absolutely. But they will not solve anything. I was always interested in finding a psychiatrist or therapist that would help me process during a shroom trip, but never found one.
And resetting your brain is just a nice way of saying, confront every single demon you have all at once. Some people are strong enough, mentally, to process things like that. Most are not. Most will take the bad trip as a sign that they shouldn't ever do psychedelics.
I'm firmly in the camp of not using them to explore my problems. I know what they are already, and I know how to fix them. I used to love psychedelics when I was younger (and had less stress and obligations). Now they just panic me and aren't fun.
I guess I was talking more about depression and anxiety than anything else. That's awesome for you. Any way to keep that going, or did you see diminishing returns?
No, it isn't. What's important is "set", and "setting".
Set is your mental mindset. Setting is where you're tripping. If you're mentally in a good place, and you're comfortable in your surroundings, you will probably have a good trip.
If you're dealing with some shit mentally and you're not comfortable where you're tripping you'll probably have a really bad trip.
The article mentions that the "pranksterish" groups who took psychedelics weathered it just fine. They didn't have an expectation to disappoint. Irreverence seems to be just as good
It does sound like the opposite a bit, it sounds like attempting to create a spiritual practice, or assign spiritual significance at all was what did him in
I really don’t think the word spiritual precludes atheists, you could even read it as “the human spirit”. The point is just that you need some framework to ground yourself. Plenty of people have “spiritual” beliefs based purely around the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics or even simulation theory.
I'm an absolute atheist and philosophical nihilist and I have done psychedelics and I've never had a problem with them. Typically find the experiences positive. So we have at least one counter-example.
Belief in spirits is just as absurd as belief in deities, which are just a specialized category of spirit as far as these things are usually classified anyway.
spirituality doesn’t have to mean you believe in spirits in the sense of ghosts etc. I believe that if that’s where the definition of exploring one’s own inner world ends, then that person has missed the point.
If you don't mean to suggest you believe in some strange metaphysics without any grounding in reality, why do you call it spirituality? What "inner world" are you "exploring"? Can that be done in plain language without any mysticism? Why or why not?
we are monkeys following logic that was determined by other monkeys. our experience of reality is equivalent to that of a brain in a jar. blind belief is blind belief whether placed in science or religion. breaching the gap of blindness necessarily involves a leap to test ideas with personal faith. such a notion is not necessarily compatible with an atheistic perspective insisting reality is solely that which may be verbally quantified by monkeys. a dog knows to sit on command but has no idea about the concept of sitting, does that make the concept of sitting unreal?
It doesn't have to be. Searching out the unknown is seeking out new knowledge, seeking to diminish ignorance. You don't need to believe in higher powers or anything like that to search for new knowledge. Spirituality is a shortcut to a unverifiable, unfalsifiable knowledge that some explanation for phenomena exists, but not at all the kind of thing anyone actually interested in truth or expanding their own knowledge would use to explain anything.
I agree that "metaphysical" and "unverifiable" are traits of spirituality, as i understand the word. I consider theorem and animism to be categories of spirituality, but not the totality of it.
I describe myself as a humanist, and to me that approximately means a spiritual existentialist with no belief in spirits. From existentialism you can, of course, reach nihilism, a philosophy that is not so much wrong as unhelpful. But existentialism doesn't teach that there is no meaning; it teaches us that meaning is whatever we want, and it's important because we say it is important. From there you can end up back in any school of philosophy you want, but with a grounding that's compatible with living on a ball of rock hurtling through space.
I don't believe in any "God". I believe that only the universe is any "supreme being". Is that woo? Maybe. But it helps me be kinder than any religion seems to teach others.
The big religions of the world all explicitly teach kindness - personal and concrete kindness practiced by you, the follower.
Is that what they effectively teach? Or is it just window dressing on top of underlying hegemonisation?
A/B testing is likely impossible and i can't see how you would measure kindness. Nonetheless, my conjecture is that religion likely shifts people in the direction of kindness. I suspect that believers who are cruel would typically also be cruel without the religion.
I assert that there are more direct and effective waits of developing compassion, but that they require a base level of self-awareness higher than the median found in neoliberal nations. Perhaps religion is close to optimal for those who need extrinsic motivation to develop any self-government.
Furthermore, it looks to me like neoliberalism leaves a philosophical vacuum which demands filling with something, and that something is all too eagerly supplied by charlatans. We should evaluate religion relative to whatever philosophy would take its place. Tribalism, fascism, supremacy: these are perennially seductive. Religion is not incompatible with these, but it might crowd them out.
Not in the slightest. Telling yourself “this is a drug that is altering my perceptions and it will end” is enough for me. That’s all the grounding LSD and mushrooms require and I’ve never had a bad trip, but I have plenty of drug experience so perhaps I’m just used to being in an altered state.
Psychedelics don’t reveal anything profound, they just alter your thinking and perception temporarily.
Good crutch for the weak. I've tripped plenty of times; I'm an atheist; it was great. Next time you trip, you should reflect on your need for "spirituality" and what it says about whatever is going on or not going on between your ears. One of the most amazing things about humans is their imagination and ability to convince themselves of almost anything. In my opinion, one of the points of doing psychedelics is to recapture your own imagination and flush out all the BS that other people have put in there to capture your mind. And here you are telling people to pour more programming back in there in the form of "spirituality."
I’m also an atheist, but just looking at the huge amount of anthropological information we have, from hunter gatherer bands to large scale civilizations, I am quite sure that a perception of god-like and spirit-like entities is built into the hardware layer in humans. That doesn’t make them “real”, of course, but it doesn’t seem to matter much whether or not they are real, and deleting them from life because they aren’t literally real is an ongoing experiment.
Yes, perception of entities during psychedelic experience is unhinged paredolia: psychedelic substances obliterate the squelch for our pattern recognition systems, of which paredolia is one. Deepdream slugdogs are sort of a synthetic analogue to this.
Also an atheist. Used psychedelic recreationally/recklessly in my youth but that was a long time ago.
Recently returned to psychedelic use to treat depression and the best takeaway I have for the experience is "swimming with God". By God I mean "the Universe as an entity" for lack of better words. Pro tip: ketamine wins out over psilocybin for treating depression.
I did try DMT once a long time ago and saw the machine elves (prior to ever hearing about them) but it felt more like "ROM artifacts" rather than alien consciousness trying to connect.
Ketamine treats symptoms and is more like a bandaid from what I see, and comes with its own problems (addiction). Psilocybin and ayahuasca when used properly can help you to process and resolve many types of problems (traumas, past drug/alcohol use, sins). But you have to be willing to work (if you can't bear it alone, this is where the curandero or therapist comes in. If that idea doesn't work for you then probably stick to ketamine)
Everybody's different. I am approaching the problem from multiple angles (pharma, non-pharma); CBT is on the table and I'm open to other non-chemical routes.
Your comment conflates depression with "being sad/hurt". There's biological aspects that no amount of trauma processing (whether talk therapy or spiritual (psilocybin)). Sometimes the machine itself is broken, not the programming.
I've experience significant trauma in my life and, while it shapes my being, is not the basis for my "depression".
Bandaids are valuable tools. I know there are plenty of non-chemical remedies, exercise being a foundational one, that a proper treatment plan includes.
So for everyone, YMMV, but clinical ketamine use has been borderline magical in readily perceptible improvements, with the caveat that it does seem to be temporary. This is a pity, because it's easy to grow mushrooms and DIY in that regard but getting K requires going through expensive gatekeeping.
And to address the addictive concerns of K, for me, the treatments have had their own elements of joy but I see no recreational value for me personally. I've delt with addictive issues in the past and I have no problems facing those particular demons.
I've been pretty blessed with my path- I've spent the greater part of the last 6 years steeped in traditional ayahuasca (Shipibo) work and it has convinced me that there is very likely something at the root that is not biological/genetic/structural in nearly all cases (the exceptions being schizophrenia/bipolar). The issue is that nearly no one is so blessed to be able to take off for the months/years it requires to actually get there. It's a huge commitment, and to support the lifestyle needed to live free of deep depression can require more changes than most are willing to make. In any case I did not mean to denigrate your own journey with my comment and apologize for it- I am glad you've found something to get your head above water and live.
I know that there was no ill intent but it certainly seemed to be conflating things.
I know that I am neurospicy and seen extreme evidence of same in family members. I have my grief, and the ongoing worry of wasting my life and all that fun stuff. That part feels like various forms of therapy would help, but there's other aspects that are just flat out biochemical failures. It's an adventure in how to deal with all the above the best one can within the given constraints.
What would be extra helpful is to not do it alone, but alas, one can't always get what one wants, or needs.
The bastardization of the term “spiritual”/“spirituality” has done deep damage to the collective psyche. The view that spirituality is following dogma rather than an exploration of the ineffable from your own subjective experience is a widespread failure of communication.
> one of the points of doing psychedelics is to recapture your own imagination
this also is my takeaway as to the primary utility. its so easy to accumulate ideas about how things _must_ be represented over time. every so often (maybe 5-10 years?) its probably good to have a way to shave them off and re-expose the surface.
We used to call them trip sitters and it was a friend who helped keep you grounded. Rich people will always find a way to buy their way into a subculture.
It's quite the opposite. When a drug trip conflicts with one's "spiritual practice" is exactly when you have a problem. That seems to be McKenna's problem in this case: he tried to assigning meaning to an experience he had while compromising his brain function with chemicals.
All you really need is to understand that there's no magic involved here. If you deliberately compromise your brain function, you're going to have strange experiences. It doesn't "mean" anything except that you compromised your brain function.
This whole article is a categorical error. Whether something is good or not entirely depends on the frame of reference and the context. You can argue endlessly by shifting the topic that 98% is used on. I guess that's what people are doing here.
This is still very much a thing, but the degree of adherence varies depending on the family. I know people that don't follow it, but I also know people who pay part of their income to their elders & some voluntarily invite their otherwise healthy parents to live with them.
I personally think it's a good thing to take care of your parents within reasonable boundaries. However, I don't think the current social structure provides a good framework for this. We don't live in the same village compound in modern times, afterall.
