Interesting post Rod.
While some psychoactive drugs do affect serotonin levels, their other effects on the brain are not at all well understood. That a drug that just targets the serotonin levels does not induce mystical experiences shows that there are other substantial effects of those drugs.
I had a life-changing experience similar to your friend Rod. However, for me, it was not taking hallucinogenic drugs. My freshman year in college I was an agnostic/atheist, but a short schizophrenic episode made me experience a lot of what your friend experienced, “having to do with a new awareness of the unity of all things, and the power of a life force he identified as God filling all matter,” along with a couple of other perceptions. The experience completely changed my worldview, and I rejoined the Catholic church that year. I strongly believe that this experience was real and was in fact a gift from God. The gifts of the Spirit are recognized by their fruits, and in every way I emerged better from the experience.

Why is it improbable that God might want us to eat the mushrooms and smoke the herb so that we might find ourselves more inclined to grow closer to Him?

There are several Native American strains of religion that traditionally incorporate peyote in some of their ceremonies (and it’s legal for them to do so.) It’s sort of a both/and answer to your question about the difference between working at mysticism and taking a “shortcut.”
I don’t know how you could tell the difference between a mystical experience and a hallucination. I like John E’s take on the question though. Makes me smile.

I like John E’s take on the question though. Makes me smile.
Thanks, AB. I must admit that on those occasions when I indulge in marijuana, LSD, and psilocybin, I’m more inclined to believe in the existence of a Transcendent Deity than I am in my more typical state of awareness.

Rod, do you think the man in this previous post of yours is thinking of taking LSD to experience God’s love?

This is where I come to the conclusion that I’m too straight laced and rational.

I’m put in mind of line from the old Joan Osborne song, “What if God Was One of Us”:
“If God had a face, what would it look like
And would you want to see
If seeing meant that you would have to believe
In things like Heven and in Jesus and the saints
And all the prophets.”
If somone, Morpheus-like, offered you the red pill or the blue pill, where the red one let you know once and for all, beyond all doubt, if God exists or not, and the blue pill puts you back to normal life, not knowing, which would you take? Of course, many theists might fear to do so in case it turned out that God didn’t exist after all; but I’m inclined to think that many non-believers might also hesitate or even go for the blue pill, instead.

Rod – have you considered your questions in reverse?
That LSD does not open the mind to the “mystical” but rather using a drug like that mimics a state of mind when people think they experience the mystical under other circumstances, thus suggesting that mystical experiences are not supernatural or involve something unseen beyond material reality but in fact are simply the result of changes in brain?

I like Grant’s question, but mostly for the implication that there may be (personal POV: is) a middle ground.
The “which is it” question is one which, while important on an individual level, remains of little value. It can be answered, at least partially, in hindsight: Whichever one it was, did it have any practical value during the experience, and did it provide any value after the experience?
Whether hallucination or valid perception, I prefer to judge it by the outcomes.

GrantL, you make an interesting point, but it doesn’t prove or disprove anything. One can stimulate the brain to cause old memories to arise, or to see, hear, or smell things, for example; but the fact that these phenomena can be caused artificially doesn’t mean that memory or the senses don’t exist or are “simply the result of changes in the brain”. We assume that external reality is there, even if the brain can be fooled. Thus, if LSD or other psychedelic drugs produce mystical experiences, that in and of itself neither proves nor disproves the existence of anything beyond material reality.
One could argue that the ability of the brain to have such experiences implies their reality, in fact: after all, we have eyes and a visual cortex because there really are things out there to see, regardless of whether drugs can fool said cortex. Perhaps our brain’s hardwiring for the mystic is because there is a mystic out there to percieve. But this would probably be pressing the argument too far.

Turmarion, being rather pragmatic I’d go for the red pill. The reason is that a non-existent God can’t hurt you. But an existing God who you don’t believe in could be a major long term problem.

I’m with GrantL. I’ve tripped on acid and shrooms many, many times, and a few times fairly intensely. I felt all the feelings of unity-with-nature, atemporality, personality-dissolving, etc. All the things that mystics and saints often report during their periods of ecstasy.
As an atheist though, I was always clearly aware that I had taken a drug, and that what I was experiencing had a biochemical cause. I definitely had feelings and experiences that a more religious, or even agnostic, person might describe as “finding God”. (Like Kurt Cobain’s lyric “in a daze cause I found God”).
I gained tremendous insights into art and music via hallucinogens. I came to have a deeper respect for mystical traditions and “religious” visions that I’d earlier dismissed as poppycock.
But….the fact that one could have these experiences induced by drugs – experiences which seem subjectively indistinguishable from mystic/religious visions – was to me prima facie evidence against the supernatural.
Tumarion – Occam’s razor would indicate that supernatural explanation of phenomena are not called for given that a natural (repeatable, observable, verifiable) explanation is available.

A-Bax: “As an atheist though, I was always clearly aware that I had taken a drug, and that what I was experiencing had a biochemical cause.”
What perception doesn’t have a “biochemical cause?”

Frog Leg asks “what perception doesn’t have a biochemical cause”
Just so. And the take-away lesson is that visions/experiences of mystics and religious all have biochemical (as opposed to supernatural) causes.
Hence the believer who thinks their mystical vision is “evidence” of God is mistaken, as that vision can be explained biochemically.

“Occam’s razor would indicate that supernatural explanation of phenomena are not called for given that a natural (repeatable, observable, verifiable) explanation is available.”
As soon as I see that natural explanation made for the experiences I’ve had using psychedelics I’ll quit believing in a supernatural one. I don’t see why the fact that your experience was from a drug was relevant to the experience itself. Surely the members of the mushroom cults of Mexico, or the Native American Church which uses peyote, or the Amazon tribes that use ayahuasca are aware that their experiences originate in the drug. They don’t make the distinction that because it’s a drug, that invalidates the nature of the experience. Nor do I.

A-Bax, you misunderstand my question. I am not just talking about mystical experiences here. I am talking about _any_ perception. The way I perceive an apple falling has a biochemical cause. The way I perceive friction slowing down a sliding block has a biochemical cause. Yet you trust these more than others. Why?

“Hence the believer who thinks their mystical vision is ‘evidence’ of God is mistaken, as that vision can be explained biochemically.”
Maybe, but my interactions with the tree outside, through my eyes, nose, and hands can also be explained biochemically, but that doesn’t mean the tree doesn’t exist.

Turmarion of course it does not disprove some kind of supernatural world. But I am sure I don’t need to remind you that proving a negative is a logical facility.
The point being that we know what the drugs do the brain, what kind of changes they create in the brain resulting in an altered mental state. Those are facts. Yes the brain can be fooled. It happens any time you look at those “optical illusion” pictures where you can see either a duck or a woman but not both at the same time. Neil DeGrasse Tyson says those drawings should be called “brain failures.” lol.
In any case, we know for a fact that altering the chemistry in the brain causes altered mental states, which appear to be the same as “mystical experiences.” From an evidentiary point of view, this very strongly suggests that mystical experiences are related directly to brain function. (combine with studies which show meditation, and to a lesser extent prayer, causes changes in the brain.)
This does not “disprove” supernatural stuff. But then, NOTHING and disprove the mystical anymore than you can disprove Thor or Zeus or Shiva. What these studies do suggest however is that what we have long taken to be “mystical” is changes in brain activity. This should perhaps cause us to reassess what we decide to call “mystical” and also what benefits there are to these kinds of experiences, because the experiences are real – in that something is going on in the brain. (Sam Harris is often on about this stuff)
I mean, these kinds of results must at the very least open up the real possibility to believers that when they experience the supernatural it could very likely be just the result of brain activity.

Turmarion,
Your question about the pills is interesting. I’m not at all sure I would choose the red pill, myself. I’m put in mind of what Camus said, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
If I knew for a fact that God did not exist, then it would be much, much harder (not to say impossible) to answer ‘Yes’ to that question.
Of course, the very idea of a pill that could give you perfect knowledge presupposes that perfect knowledge exists, and some would say that in turn presupposes a Perfect Knower. So it’s quite possible that the idea of a pill that could prove the nonexistence of God is in itself logically contradictory (Anselm would say that existence itself presupposes a Supremely Existent Being, which seems convincing to me.) Which is certainly comforting….:)

Jacobus, that is true. however, we can verify the tree’s existence beyond private revelation. Notice that god or gods never speak to say, everyone at Time Square on New Years Eve. It always private, always unseen, always unverifiable. We can verify a tree.

Gus’s faith that external, material reality actually exists outside his head is just a different kind of religious leap from biochemical phenomena to metaphysical ideals.

Frog Leg: Fair enough. The long answer to your question is that I take Van Fraassen’s “Constructive Empiricist” view towards these questions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_empiricism
(And Yes, I know that VF is himself Catholic.)
Peace.

Sorry, that should be *GrantL’s* faith, not Gus’s — though, actually, come to think of it, the mix-up could be serendipity, since GrantL’s faith is no less faith than Gus’s faith.

GrantL
What you say marks the true divide. Skeptic assume that anything that found by one person to be true can be objectively verified by others. I think this dramatically oversimplifies human existence.

Groby, assuming that something exists outside of you is pretty low on the scale of metaphysical leaps of faith. Stay in bed for a while and hunger will eventually force you to get up.
Hector, there is only one philosophical question “How does this turn into food?”

A-Bax: Occam’s razor would indicate that supernatural explanation of phenomena are not called for given that a natural (repeatable, observable, verifiable) explanation is available.
That’s a valid point. However, as I’ve explained in much greater detail on other threads (MH, you were there–you remember), I’m persuaded that mathematical truth has real and objective, but non-physical, existence. That human minds can perceive this truth indicates, to me, that they are at least in part non-physical themselves. Once the door to non-physical existence is opened, then it cannot be dismissed on the grounds that there’s no “natural” (that is, in this context, “material”) explantion.
I realize that this intepretation of math is, to say the least, controversial, and we’ve hashed out a lot of details elsewhere. Suffice it to say that my training in math and the opionions of much greater mathematicians than I are persuasive to me as against the so-called “embodied math” school of thought.
GrantL, I agree that you can’t disprove, or prove, the supernatuarl, or Thor or Shiva, etc. My point was more subtle. If one asserts that only material phenomena are real (metaphysical materialism) then of course any supernatural realm is ruled out. To assert that the supernatural doens’t exist because there are no non-material realities is to beg the question. For reasons I’ve briefly outlined, and others too complex to go into, I think that metaphysical materialism is in fact incorrect. Materialists would, of course, disagree, but merely asserting metaphysical materialism (as opposed to methodological materialism, necessary for science, but a different thing) doesn’t prove it.
Jacobus, that is true. however, we can verify the tree’s existence beyond private revelation…. We can verify a tree.
Well, Kant would have said we can’t. He argued that our senses and brain structure shape our perecption and that we thus know only our perceptions, never the Ding am sich (“thing in itself”). To put it in modern terms, we’re locked into the Matrix and can never know if it’s real or not. We can’t get “outside” our own perceptions. This is the point that Frog Leg, Jacobus, and I have been making–if you want to argue that mystic experience is “only” a biochemical reaction in the brain, then you can’t consistently say that everything might not also be “only” biochemical reactions in the brain. We might all be the proverbial brains in a vat!
Of course, MH, I imagine you’d take issue with Kant, since he’s not telling you how to make a sandwich! But we’ve been over that before….

GrantL: Rod – have you considered your questions in reverse? That LSD does not open the mind to the “mystical” but rather using a drug like that mimics a state of mind when people think they experience the mystical under other circumstances, thus suggesting that mystical experiences are not supernatural or involve something unseen beyond material reality but in fact are simply the result of changes in brain?
Oh yes, you’re exactly right that this is a definite possibility. Indeed, it’s the answer you would expect materialists to give, because it’s the only one that makes sense in their world. I do think that it’s interesting, if unconventional, to ponder whether or not chemicals can, to use Aldous Huxley’s famous phrase, open the doors of perception, in the same way that using a telescope or a microscope to amplify our vision reveals things that we cannot perceive in a normal state.

Gus, I do not possess anything that can be called “faith” in a religious sense as you present it. I don’t have faith in anything.
I am well aware of questions of epistemology and questions about what we can truly know outside out own internal experience. These are fascinating philosophical questions that will still puzzle over.
However, from a practical point of view, science and evidence are our single best means to explore and understand the universe. I mean, one can say, well I have “faith” in gravity, which is no more or less correct than someone who does not. Well to that I just say, feel free to leap from a building and see if you float. We should always keep questions about the nature of knowledge in mind, but even within that context, there is an undeniable difference between what can be demonstrated through evidence (LSD causing altered states of mind) and faith based assertions (altered states of mind are the result of supernatural somethings). Accepting the results of evidence and experiment is not “faith.”

Turmarion wrote: “Well, Kant would have said we can’t. He argued that our senses and brain structure shape our perecption and that we thus know only our perceptions, never the Ding am sich (“thing in itself”). To put it in modern terms, we’re locked into the Matrix and can never know if it’s real or not. We can’t get “outside” our own perceptions. This is the point that Frog Leg, Jacobus, and I have been making–if you want to argue that mystic experience is “only” a biochemical reaction in the brain, then you can’t consistently say that everything might not also be “only” biochemical reactions in the brain. We might all be the proverbial brains in a vat!”
well yes of course. On the other hand, you still have to account for the fact that you cannot make the sky anything other than blue, or the internal angles of a triangle cannot add up to anything but 180 degrees. There is little question that there are external phenomenon that are bringing forth these things as much as our perception is the result of electrical signals being interpreted by the brain.
I do not dispute that there are very big questions about what is knowledge, what is reality, how can we be sure that we know what we know and so on. At the same time, even within that context, we have the scientific method, and evidence and experiment which gives us a look at what reality is and we accept that evidence, albeit always provisionally.
What I take issue with is when someone invokes Kant or Hume, or hell even Socrates I suppose, and says that both science and religion are “faith based” activities. They are DRASTICALLY different.

Turmarion, yes I remember that thread. I think in that thread I also pointed out that math can be predict new physical phenomena as well as describe known phenomena. The predictive nature of math strongly implies to me that math is objectively real. But I’m unsure of what that reality is. Math is physical in that you can make piles of stones and perform concrete enumeration.
My issue with Kant is that making the sandwich isn’t the hard part. It’s obtaining the ingredients! Our senses evolved to help us find food and their biological utility means that the better they model reality, the better they are at locating ingredients. So our sense data being wildly in conflict with reality would seem unlikely given our physical needs.

“you still have to account for the fact that you cannot make the sky anything other than blue, or the internal angles of a triangle cannot add up to anything but 180 degrees.”
…except if you are moving at a relativistic speed, the sky would appear a different color. And the angles of that triangle will change, depending on the acceleration of the observer (since acceleration adds a fiducial amount to the stress energy tensor, and therefore influences perceived curvature). In fact, there is not really any physical observable (other than counting of objects) which does not depend on the observer. And this doesn’t even bring in the interaction between the observer and the observed from quantum mechanics.

French anthropologist Jean Clottes explored this idea in his 1998 book, translated as The Shamans of Prehistory: Trance and Magic in the Painted Caves. He thinks that cave art (and Paleolithic art and culture in general) were animated by shamanistic trance-like experiences (which can be similar to psychedelics.) It’s possible that shamanic, or even psychedelic hallucinations (with native mushrooms like psilocybin and amanita muscaria) might be some of the oldest religious experience on the face of the planet.

MH: “Our senses evolved to help us find food and their biological utility means that the better they model reality….”
But man has also evolved to a state where most are religious. Can it also be said that this is also getting to a place where our perceptions “better model reality?”

Frog Leg, but the counting of objects is the basis of math. With that you can derive how to correct errors in your perception based upon your motion. So it is still possible to agree with another observer about that nature of reality.
As an agnostic I’m not saying that the supernatural doesn’t exist, but I am saying that I don’t know anything about it and I get conflicting information from other people. This is in contrast to the nature of food which people tend to agree on.
As I said before I’d prefer to have Turmarion’s red pill because supernatural reality could have big long term implications, but only if you are sure of its nature.

Re: Math is physical in that you can make piles of stones and perform concrete enumeration.
Well, one problem with that is the existence of, for example, complex numbers. We can’t visualize them or make them correspond to physical numbers of objects, but we know they exist because if we assume they exist then we can explain aspects of the world that we couldn’t explain if they didn’t exist.
I’d say the situation with the supernatural is somewhat similar.

I don’t want to give the impression that I have 100% faith that my experiences are valid. That’s another artifact of the experience, actually. I don’t believe that science explains everything, but that’s just a belief. I’m well aware, that psychedelic experience might be a meaningless light show. It’s possible that I wouldn’t feel the way I do if I hadn’t grown up in a (since discarded) faith tradition. I certainly don’t feel like I have a lot of insight into the nature of what I call for lack of a better term god (though a lot more than I got from 20 years of Catholic instruction). I agree that science is different than religion, but you do have to accept that what you’re seeing and experiencing is ultimate reality to accept that science will give you all the answers. GrantL, if you grant that “there are very big questions about what is knowledge, what is reality, how can we be sure that we know what we know and so on”, then you can see how I can question the scientific method as providing ultimate truth in all cases. I wouldn’t say I’m religious about it it. I don’t belong to a religion, so I don’t really have any vested interest in making anyone believe what I believe, and in any event I don’t believe it strongly enough to care to persuade anyone.

Hector, complex number have physical analogs in things like AC power which has both quantity and phase angle. Indeed until this relationship was discovered complex numbers were thought useless. After this complex numbers started showing up everywhere in math that modeled natural phenomena. So this is a case of the predictive nature of math.

In response to Frog Leg’s “But man has also evolved to a state where most are religious. Can it also be said that this is also getting to a place where our perceptions “better model reality?”
I cannot recommend more highly cognitive anthropologist Pascal Boyer’s take on this idea:
http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Explained-Instincts-Fashion-Ancestors/dp/0099282763/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1271190896&sr=8-1
Snippet from a review:
“Some authors have argued from an evolutionary perspective that we have concepts for supernatural agents and perform behaviors relevant to those agents because of adaptive pressures specifically to perceive and act on “religious” forces of some sort.
Boyer turns this argument on its head and says that the kind of inference systems we evolved make certain concepts more salient than others, and make certain concepts more likely to be remembered and passed on, not necessarily because those concepts represent veridical things we adapted to, but because of the way our inference systems work. The common patterns in concepts reflect a common set of biases we all share because we share the same inference systems.”

MH,
What you say about complex numbers is true, but I don’t see how it contradicts what Hector said. Indeed, the same can be said for irrational numbers. Properly speaking, no one has ever observed an irrational number. Every instrument of measurement has a finite number of bits with which to quantify a measurement, and its output is therefore a rational number. There’s very little in the space of mathematics that is directly measurable (no pun intended).
“As an agnostic I’m not saying that the supernatural doesn’t exist, but I am saying that I don’t know anything about it and I get conflicting information from other people. This is in contrast to the nature of food which people tend to agree on…
…supernatural reality could have big long term implications, but only if you are sure of its nature.”
We have to make decisions in the face of uncertainty all the time. It can’t be helped. Trust in yourself more! And it seems that the older I get, that “information from other people” seems to be conflicting more in semantics than reality.

A-Bax, I’ve heard the same idea when it comes to man’s interest in science. It just seems to me that religion (and consciousness for that matter) is a much more radical shift in the “inference systems” we possess than can be explained by materialistic pressures. Just IMHO (and what isn’t!)

Here’s the problem…yes, the doors of perception can be opened with drug. BUT, if you’re not ready for it it can do serious damage to the psyche. Also, once you’ve seen such things, and once you’ve experienced the ego less state, you come back with no ambition whatsoever. What’s the point, after all?
Drugs are not a good idea for most people.
There are no shortcuts to enlightenment.

MH,
No question, I’m not denying that complex numbers can be used to explain and understand things in the real world. In fact, their utility was recognized before we knew about AC current. Complex numbers are used in solving cubic equations and in describing heavily damped harmonic motion, for example.
What I was saying is that their utility and predictive power comes in spite of the fact that they aren’t directly countable or observable.
I would argue that postulating the supernatural allows us to understand and explain things that we wouldn’t be able to otherwise (like for example the visions of Joan of Arc, or the apparitions to the three children at Fatima), and also helps explain the extremes of good and evil which we see demonstrated in human history, better than a purely naturalistic framework.

Frog Leg writes: “A-Bax, I’ve heard the same idea when it comes to man’s interest in science”
Perhaps, but the key difference is: science makes successful predictions. Without successful predictions, science would not have the prestige it does, nor would it be the threat to religion/supernaturalism that it is.
Were it not for successful predictions – and the technology that is its fruit – a scientific worldview would be just one among many, with no more claim to seriousness than astrology, voodoo, or biblical mythology.
From where I’m sitting (and yes, I know I’m making pre-empirical commitments here), if a system of ideas does not lead to successful predictions, that system is an interesting fable a best, and a destructive lie at worst.
Basically: organized religion = structured superstition.

“Also, once you’ve seen such things, and once you’ve experienced the ego less state, you come back with no ambition whatsoever.”
Huh? I’d like to see some evidence of that, and I’d also like to know what you mean by ambition. I will grant you that I don’t value raw material success as much as I used to, but I would argue that’s a good thing. Experiencing an ego-less state didn’t prevent me from living a pretty ordinary middle-class existence complete with graduate degree and career. I would argue that I may have a different perspective than some of my colleagues who value that career above everything else. Again, a good think in my mind. All depends on your perspective.

It just seems to me that religion (and consciousness for that matter) is a much more radical shift in the “inference systems” we possess than can be explained by materialistic pressures.
For people who observe a wide range of animals closely, and enough human infants closely as they develop in their first years, that view of radical differences in consciousness between closely related species becomes less and less plausible. A continuum of many small increments is a much better fit.
As for culture, here’s Dorothy’s funeral:
http://www.ida-africa.org/index.php?page_id=12&newsletter_id=55
And as concerns religion, one of the chimp subjects of the Washoe project was taken to church by her adoptive human family. Eventually she asked to be baptized, and the local clergyperson agreed. I can’t find a link for this, or the exact details, but apparently it was documented by a researcher by the name of Fouts.
Sounds like an excellent research area for the Templeton Foundation, come to think of it. And all the more reason to see a bright future for religion in Africa….

Also, once you’ve seen such things, and once you’ve experienced the ego less state, you come back with no ambition whatsoever.
And that is bad because … why … exactly?

Jillian – thanks for that link -

GrantL: What I take issue with is when someone invokes Kant or Hume, or hell even Socrates I suppose, and says that both science and religion are “faith based” activities. They are DRASTICALLY different.
Agreed. My point was that metaphysical materialism is an assumption that can not be proved or disproved. Materialists would consider it a correct one, obviously, but there are arguments to be made against it (which also can’t be definitively proved or disproved).
MH: So our sense data being wildly in conflict with reality would seem unlikely given our physical needs.
Not necessarily–blind cave fish evolved to meed their physical needs, which don’t include sight. This doesn’t mean light doesn’t exist, any more than our inability to see ultraviolet, infrared, or radio waves renders those phenomena nonexistent.
The reason I suggested the red pill-blue pill experiment is that I get a whiff from some of the non-believers on threads like this sometimes of a famous quotation from Thomas Nagel, which you can find here, among other places (boldface in the original):
“In speaking of the fear of religion, I don’t mean to refer to the entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence. Nor am I referring to the association of many religious beliefs with superstition and the acceptance of evident empirical falsehoods. I am talking about something much deeper–namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.” The Last Word, Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 130-131.
I can get someone who is agnostic or atheist because he doesn’t think the evidence indicates that God (or Transcendent Meaning, or whatever) exists; or who shows “entirely reasonable hostility toward certain established religions and religious institutions, in virtue of their objectionable moral doctrines, social policies, and political influence”; or who objects to certain views of God (such as the Jonathan Edwards I’m-holding-you-like-a-loathsome-bug-over-the-pits-of-Hell God); but I don’t get the attitude of Nagel here.
I have to compliment MH here–he doesn’t come off this way at all. Moreover, in his willingness to take the red pill, he has more guts than I’d do. I’d probably vacillate with fear and then take it before I could change my mind. Since meaning is so important to me, I’d fear my ability to deal with the loss of it; and if God were proved, I’m not sure I’m quite spiritually ready yet for such a revelation, particularly in light of my deep flaws and imperfections.
Maybe what we all need to do is drop some acid and then continue this thread. We might not even need computers….

Drugs don’t let one see other dimensions; this is just subconscious imagination, like dreams. If there are other dimensions, then our hope to view them is with science and good instrumentation like the Large Hadron Collider. The brain alone has no sensory apparatus, just what comes in through the five senses. And that’s how I think God wants it.

The reason I suggested the red pill-blue pill experiment is that I get a whiff from some of the non-believers on threads like this sometimes of a famous quotation from Thomas Nagel, which you can find here, among other places (boldface in the original):
Just to clarify my own position, Tumarion, I’d take the red pill in a heartbeat.
Heck, I think it would be great if there were an omnipotent being that cared about me, and the life after death thing would be good too – I just don’t see any particular reason to believe that to be the case, except of course that I might feel better about life in general from believing that to be true.

MH,
It takes a huge leap of faith to assume that the hunger that gets you out of bed is any more “real” than someone else’s equally “real” intimation that there is a God. What makes hunger any less of a mere biochemical phenomenon than spiritual intimation is purported to be by adherents to your own atheistic religious worldview? To paraphrase David Bentley Hart, you may not believe in God, but you do believe in something. You believe in *nothing* — nothing that is other than a brute material world whose existence requires as much faith to affirm as faith is required to believe in God or to believe in *the* nothing that functions in atheist cosmologies in the just same way that God functions in theistic ones. Your worldview is open to all the same objections that any theist’s worldview. Your belief in the nothing is as like to be wishful thinking as any theist’s belief in a God. You *want* there to be nothing. You *hope* that there’s nothing. But maybe there’s not …

Groby: You *want* there to be nothing. You *hope* that there’s nothing.
I would come to MH’s defense on this one. We may hold different views on many things, but I’ve never had the impression from him that he “wants” or “hopes” that there is nothing. He merely holds this to be likely. Not to speak for him, but I doubt he sees “wanting” or “hoping” as relevant in this case, and would be open to sufficiently strong (in his view) evidence that might go against his current beliefs.

Your name:
“How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?”

Turmarion,
Your quotation from Nagel puts me in mind of another quotation, from the scientist and theologian Blaise Pascal: “All men fear God; believers fear that they may lose him, and unbelievers fear that they may find him.” (I found this quoted in Fr. Alexandre Kalomiros’ sermon ‘The River of Fire’, which you also should read.)
I don’t quite get Nagel’s point of view there, but it’s worth pointing out that despite his atheism, Nagel is a very smart man, and one intellectually honest and perceptive enough to recognize the limits of a materialist worldview. His essay ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’ is brilliant, and one that makes a good case that some kinds of personal experience are ineffable and can’t really ever be explained, or explained away. In his own way, some of Nagel’s work is serving truth, and thereby serving the God who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
I would certainly fear the red pill if I thought such a thing was possible- but like I said above, I think (as did Anselm) that existence itself presupposes some kind of Supremely Existent Being, so I’m not especially worried about anyone ‘proving’ the nonexistence of God- if Anselm was right then such a proof would be by definition impossible.

Jillian,
You misunderstand my point. I am not trying to say that there is no continuum in consciousness for different animals. I am saying the development of consciousness in _any_ animals is such a radical evolution in “inference systems” that cannot be explained by materialist pressures. It can IMHO only explained by supernatural teleology.

Frog Leg, the reality of irrational numbers is an interesting question. My point of view is if space and time are quantized at the plank any scale, then irrational numbers do not exist. If they are continuous, then they exist but we are unable to measure them. We are certainly unable to really conceive of them because their infinite string of digits would require an infinite amount of time to full appreciate.
Hector, to me the physical reality of things which are described by complex numbers means they are manifestations of complex numbers. Since you can measure current and phase that seems the same as a concrete enumeration of five pebbles.
Turmarion, thanks for the compliment. I can take the red pill because I have less to lose than a theist or an atheist. I just want an answer and would probably prefer if there is a God.
You are correct that our senses are not a complete description of reality. But I would argue that they are accurate in what they do describe. For example the blind cave fish probable has great hearing and smell. I don’t like “The Cave” style arguments because confusing shadows with reality would be unlikely to persist in our world.

Groby, I’m not sure how to respond to your argument. Partly because it puts words in my mouth and partly because it strikes me as pointless solipsism. After all if true then one of us is talking with to himself, so why do this? Also, I can feel hunger and can’t will it away, so that seems like strong evidence it depends on something outside of me.
Turmarion, thanks again and you accurately represented my views.
Rod, two versions of my previous post were held. I eventually got it through by deleting adjectives that while harmless seemed to trigger the filter.

Turmarion, isn’t it possible that even the coldest and most scientific point of view still has too much anthropromorphism and emotion mediating it, and reality is even colder and more distant?

meh, Nietzsche said exactly what you said–something to the effect that reality is so awful that truth may not be an actual value, deception may be necessary for humans to survive, and only strong souls can take very much truth at all. A rather bleak and nasty possibility, but a possiblity nonetheless.

meh and Turmarion, have either of you ever read any of the Disc World Novels? The Death character is bleak, cold and distant. He reminds me of Nietzsche, only a lot more funny.

Turmarion, isn’t it possible that even the coldest and most scientific point of view still has too much anthropromorphism and emotion mediating it, and reality is even colder and more distant?
Sounds sort of Lovecraftian…

Nah, I’m not thinking awful or Lovecraftian. That’s getting back to too emotional. I’m thinking more …abstract. Scientific, but even more so. Double distilled scientific. Distant, and hard to grasp.

MH, I never read the Disc World novels. The last science fiction I enjoyed reading was Jack Vance’s novels Emphyrio and the Durdane trilogy(The Faceless Man , The Brave Free Men, and The Asutra). That was several years ago. Sigaliris might enjoy the satire of religion in Emphyrio and The Faceless Man (aka The Anome).
I did enjoy Adam Carolla’s vocal performance as the character of Death on early episodes of Family Guy.

Lottery ticket and hard work metaphor presumes that these two things, spirituality and psychedelics take you to the same place… that’s just not comparable. Psychedelics DO NOT take you to the same place, nor one you could ever conceive of without trying them yourself. Get off the armchair and get an experience before you think that you know what you’re talking about. I’ve tried both spirituality (religion) and psychedelics… and what is considered a sacrament according to conventional religions is a parlor game compared to the experience of ingesting a psychedelic.

MH, I’m familiar with the Discworld series–it’s on my (unfortunately enormous) “to read” list.
meh: Nah, I’m not thinking awful or Lovecraftian. That’s getting back to too emotional. I’m thinking more …abstract. Scientific, but even more so. Double distilled scientific. Distant, and hard to grasp.
Well, taken to the extent you speak of, I’d say impossible to grasp. Even in that most austere and abstract of all fields, mathematics, the greatest practitioners thereof speak of the “beauty” of mathematical truth. If you got the emotion and value-judgment completely out, you’d have something either totally incomprehensible to humans; or something indeed awful, since humans tend to fear or hate things that are alien to their understanding. Another way of putting it would be to say a truly, emotion-free, value-free, totally abstract view of the world would be essentially the worldview of an autistic.
In any case, even if a non-autistic could view things this way, what would be the point?

In any case, even if a non-autistic could view things this way, what would be the point?
Well, there’s something to be said for grokking another perspective that is outside your usual mindset.
Hey, this is interesting – both ‘grok’ and ‘grokking’ are in Firefox’s list of correctly spelled words. That is to say, grok doesn’t trigger an misspelling warning, but groke does. Groked also shows as misspelled, but when I right-click on it, Firefox suggests the spelling of grokked.
May y’all never thirst…

Going off on a tangent. I’ve read writings by a Reconstructionist Rabbi (I forget the name) where he discussed the different names of God used in the Hebrew scriptures. The Reconstructionist have a radically different theology from other Jews. But from my point of view they are trying to come to terms with the way reality seems to conflict with the traditional views. So they are worth listening to.
The highly distilled point is that each name represents a different facet of God. Several of these facets are completely impersonal, abstract, and indifferent to humans. Other facets are similar to a personal God, but only exist because humans exist. He sort of viewed humans as partners in creation. Basically because we exist, our values are just as real as the abstract impersonal reality which underlies us.

Turmarion wrote: “Well, Kant would have said we can’t. He argued that our senses and brain structure shape our perecption and that we thus know only our perceptions, never the Ding am sich (“thing in itself”). To put it in modern terms, we’re locked into the Matrix and can never know if it’s real or not. We can’t get “outside” our own perceptions. This is the point that Frog Leg, Jacobus, and I have been making–if you want to argue that mystic experience is “only” a biochemical reaction in the brain, then you can’t consistently say that everything might not also be “only” biochemical reactions in the brain. We might all be the proverbial brains in a vat!”
well yes of course. On the other hand, you still have to account for the fact that you cannot make the sky anything other than blue, or the internal angles of a triangle cannot add up to anything but 180 degrees. There is little question that there are external phenomenon that are bringing forth these things as much as our perception is the result of electrical signals being interpreted by the brain.
I do not dispute that there are very big questions about what is knowledge, what is reality, how can we be sure that we know what we know and so on. At the same time, even within that context, we have the scientific method, and evidence and experiment which gives us a look at what reality is and we accept that evidence, albeit always provisionally.
What I take issue with is when someone invokes Kant or Hume, or hell even Socrates I suppose, and says that both science and religion are “faith based” activities. They are DRASTICALLY different.

Stupid thing reposted my last post…GRRR
anyway:
Look, we are seeing here what happens when you dive into questions about epistemology carelessly. Facts become meaningless. The Dopler Effect is used to suggest that science cannot demonstrate something (when the dopler effect is posited by science in the first place! so by the same reasoning you need to doubt that too!) Again, accepting there are questions about how knowledge and reality that we continue to puzzle over, one has to accept in practical terms some things.
If you fall off a cliff you will accelerate at very specific and fixed rate until you suffer serious deceleration trauma. lol. On can try to say how gravitational acceleration cannot be verified because on cannot know if all reality is there because of a trick by an evil genius (al la Kant)and we cannot deny that. But you will still hit the ground and go splat. You’re perception isn’t going to change the rate at which you fall or what happens when you hit the ground.
Either anti-botics work or they don’t. Either we put a space station in orbit or we didn’t. Either a plane can fly or it cannot. And so on. Science works because we can repeat it and verify it. Feel free to say its all in my head, or its an evil genius at work or whatever. All interesting questions. But in practical terms would you not take those anti-botics because you are unsure that we can accurately reflect reality through our senses and brains? Why not just jump off that cliff and see if you float if everything is 100 per cent dependent on the observer?
You see the point. We must ALWAYS keep in mind two things. One – we have unresolved (and maybe unresolvable) deep questions about epistemology. Two – that we always accept facts about the world as provisionally because, as the history of science shows us, things are never exactly as we think they are at the moment. Knowledge changes constantly and we then change with it.
Within that context, we can actually verify a tree. or a stone falling. Or the chemical effects of a powerful drug on the brain. We know that LSD causes certain changes to the brain and that causes specific changes in perception. Now, do our unresolved questions about epistemology then make EVERY possible idea about those changes in perception valid? Is it just as valid to say that the drug altered the brain as it is to say the drug “opened a door” to a mystical, supernatural reality? No it is not. This is the problem when people jump down the rabbit hole when talking about epistemology. They go so far, as some people in this thread has, to say that well nothing can be verified and therefore implying that all ideas about physical phenomenon are equally valid because we cannot know anyway. To which I again say, jump off that cliff and see what happens.
the drug study does touch on that questions of what is real, what is knowledge and so on. How can we trust our brain to process information accurately if it can be unbalanced so easily? But practically what is REALLY interesting is that is forces us to look at those experiences believed to “mystical” or “supernatural” and ask – are those powerful impactful states of brain, or actually something supernatural? Does a brain on LSD look like the brain of someone who thinks they are talking in tongues or seeing a great spirit?
I agree with Sam Harris on this count. These types of experiences are “real” in that the people involved experienced something. But are they the result of a change in the state of the brain.The answer is actually knowable with scientific study and can be ask knowable as anything else we can pin down with science. Saying we have questions about epistemology does not change that result or allow us to responsibly slip the supernatural in scientific work.

GrantL: Now, do our unresolved questions about epistemology then make EVERY possible idea about those changes in perception valid?
Of course, the answer is “no”.
They go so far, as some people in this thread has, to say that well nothing can be verified and therefore implying that all ideas about physical phenomenon are equally valid because we cannot know anyway. To which I again say, jump off that cliff and see what happens.
Just for clarity, I have never said this. In fact, in arguing against post-modernist types that want to have all reality as being socially constructed, I’ve said this same thing almost word-for-word.
Having said which, as I’ve pointed out, certain aspects of the mind (the ability to understand math and to grasp universals) indicate to me that it is, in part, non-material, since mathematical truth is non-physical and no actual universals exist. Now, one might disagree with the Platonist view of math; and one might, in a nominalist sort of way, deny universals, or give a different account of how we can understand them; but these are not intrinsically unreasonable or indefensible in themselves unless one is a priori committed to metaphysical materialism.
In short, I’m not saying that material causes don’t explain most things; I’m saying that there are some things that it seems to me they can’t and never will be able to explain (although of course I could be mistaken) and that therefore it is probable (in my opinion) that some immaterial realities exist. To categorically deny this possibilty tout court is possible only if one insists that metaphysical materialism is true in all cases; and I’d say, at the present time, that the jury is out on that. That doesn’t mean I think material causes don’t explain the vast majority of things–just that I don’t think they explain everything.
It’s also ironic that you quote Sam Harris, who in places such as here has made statements such as this:
“The question of what happens after death (if anything) is a question about the relationship between consciousness and the physical world. It is true that many atheists are convinced that we know what this relationship is, and that it is one of absolute dependence of the one upon the other. Those who have read the last chapters of The End of Faith know that I am not convinced of this. While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us.” (emphasis added)
Coming from an atheist and neuroscientist, to boot, this is extraordinary; and though Harris has been a hero to some atheists, he has been sharply criticized by others for just this, that he refuses reduce mind to matter or rule out the possibility of the immaterial (or that, as he puts us, that the contrary categories mislead us). Interesting, isn’t it?

ah you are putting words in Harris’ mouth just a little bit. Harris is not saying there a supernatural causation at work here or that part of the mind is, as you say, immaterial. He is saying we don’t understand consciousness and how it relates to the relates to the brain and that, in fact, we might not even be asking the right questions yet.
Harris in both the End of Faith and his recent, brilliant I think, talk at the TED lectures and other talks is saying that there is this big question mark about the nature of consciousness. We don’t understand it. It does seem, and he has said as much, that consciousness is a product of the brain, but why or how that happens is really an unknown thing. I mean, the next time someone says the problem has been solved, ask them what area of the brain houses consciousness….:-)
Harris, like any good scientist, is not closing the door and saying “Well I know the answer here.” We don’t. I mean, Harris is exactly correct. We don’t understand the relationship between the brain and consciousness and anyone who pretends we do is a being a idiot.
It’s like people who think they know what happened before the Big Bang or why it happened. People who say it was “nothing” or “god” are, to put it bluntly, full of crap. The only honest answer is “we don’t know.” There is nothing wrong with admitting that we don’t know when we don’t. (I take it by your commentary you agree with that) Same with consciousness. I talked to an atheist friend of mine recently who said the mind-brain duality issue has been completed settled. Well, I’m an atheist too, but no it hasn’t. The most we can say is that it seems linked to the brain but we cannot say more than that, which is to say we cannot say much at all just yet.
The reason I really like Harris is that he knows when to say we don’t know, which is what is saying here. He is not pretending to give an answer to something to that we cannot possibly, at the moment, give an answer to.
I quite agree with you that we cannot say, as a axiom, that it is IMPOSSIBLE that something non-material exists. I take the view of Bertrand Russell here. We cannot totally deny there is a tea pot in close orbit of the sun either. But, and here is where the whole notion of immaterial stuff hits a brick wall, while we to stay technically agnostic about it, how would you ever demonstrate it? How would you show it is at work in the brain or on the brain? If “mind” is separate from “brain” why can’t a brain damaged person operate normally? And so on.
And if we could show that the non-material exists, would Thomas Hobbes then not be correct and the non-material is actually material? One of the questions Harris raises here is really what do we mean when we say “material”?
I think at the end of the day all of us could learn a simple thing from Harris or Russell. When we don’t know, just say so!

GrantL: We don’t understand the relationship between the brain and consciousness and anyone who pretends we do is a being a idiot…. I talked to an atheist friend of mine recently who said the mind-brain duality issue has been completed settled. Well, I’m an atheist too, but no it hasn’t.
Well said. As you know, an awful lot of atheists (Daniel Dennett springs to mind) think they know exactly how consciousness works, but as you say, and I agree, we don’t in fact understand this.
Harris is not saying there a supernatural causation at work here or that part of the mind is, as you say, immaterial.
I didn’t say Harris said anything about “supernatural causation”; I said, “he refuses reduce mind to matter or rule out the possibility of the immaterial”. Now that was infelicitously phrased. However, he does say, “I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established.” Well, if consciousness is not totally reducible to matter, what’s left? The immaterial, it seems, though Harris didn’t say that as such and might deny that interpretation of what he said.
In any case, when he says “t may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us,” he seems to indicate that both the reductionist-materialist and the Cartesian dualist views of mind are limited and insufficient to explain consciousness. I don’t think it unreasonable to read his comments as allowing for the possibility of the immaterial. In any case, it’s certainly true that many atheists have criticized Harris for not being, in effect, “materialist enough”.
But, and here is where the whole notion of immaterial stuff hits a brick wall, while we to stay technically agnostic about it, how would you ever demonstrate it?
Well, as I’ve said, I think math demonstrates it. My experience of math is that at its deeper levels it does not appear to be something constructed by humans but something “found”–that is, something that has real existence, objectively and independently of our (or any one else’s) brains, outside the material cosmos. This is a controversial view, but it seems to me the one that best fits the evidence. It is also of interest that many mathematical concepts (such as imaginary numbers or the Fibonacci sequence) that at the time they were discovered were thought to be mere curiosities have turned out to have applications that were never dreamed of. To me, this is further proof of math’s objective reality.
Once more, this is controversial, but many prominent mathematicians, philosophers, and physicists have held this view; so though you may disagree with it, it’s not necessarily “crazy” or without merit. I might point out that MH (who is also a more or less a materialist and agnostic) has admitted at least some merit in this position; and disbelief in God, as I’ve pointed out before, isn’t quite the same as dismissal of an immaterial realm (Buddhism, e.g. is non-theistic but certainly believes in the immaterial).
Does this prove the immaterial? No. Does it give a reasonable ground for asserting the possibility, or even probability of it? In my judgment, yes.
And if we could show that the non-material exists, would Thomas Hobbes then not be correct and the non-material is actually material? One of the questions Harris raises here is really what do we mean when we say “material”?
Well, I think Hobbes is rather fatuous here in his definitions. Raising the question, “what does material even mean, really” is much sounder. Richard Feynman, probably the greatest physicist of the last century after Einstein himself, said that when you get right down to it, we don’t really know what matter and energy (which of course are different aspects of the same thing) even are ultimately.
I think at the end of the day all of us could learn a simple thing from Harris or Russell. When we don’t know, just say so!
Agreed. Where we differ is this: While we both say, “I don’t know about the mind or the immaterial,” you say, “But the evidence we do have is strongly against it,” whereas I say, “The evidence shows a strong probability for it. We just disagree on which evidence we accept and our evaluation of said evidence.

I had a couple of very profound experiences tripping on mushrooms, and then at a later age I had a very strong mystical experience while meditating. I would say that the two mind-states were absolutely related. It was a feeling that permeated my entire being, an awareness of being connected to every living thing, of deep love, and of union with God. These experiences absolutely changed my life, as I used to be an atheist who had a very secular upbringing.

Very interesting post. As I have said before, in the psychedelic era, Catholicism was quite popular with the underground (you might recall my noting the Electric Prunes’ “Mass in F Minor”) so the conversion of someone experimenting with LSD should envision relatively little shock.
That there might be an evolutionary advantage in spirituality is very easy for me to see – at least in the context of environments that are not resource-free like Europe, East Asia and New Zealand become as a result of industrialisation.

Turmarion: ” My experience of math is that at its deeper levels it does not appear to be something constructed by humans but something “found”–that is, something that has real existence, objectively and independently of our (or any one else’s) brains, outside the material cosmos.”
Why outside the material cosmos? Why not that math has real existence inside the material cosmos?

meh: Why outside the material cosmos? Why not that math has real existence inside the material cosmos?
You could google “philosophy of mathematics” or “mathematical platonism vs embodied math” (there are some good articles on Wikipedia, too) for far, far more detail.
Briefly, many important discoveries in math (e.g. imaginary numbers, irrational numbers, the Fibonacci sequence, pi, e, etc.) were discovered long, long before they had any physical application at all. It was only later that what was originally found without reference to the material cosmos and thought just to be an interesting result of mathematical playing around turned out to have actual applications. Pi was developed for a physical purpose (the circumference of a circle) but turned out oddly to have applications far beyond that area.
To appreciate how weird this is (and this weirdness had been remarked on many times, not necessarily by religious people, either), it’s as if on a lark I made up an imaginary animal and made up a word for it (and some argue that mathematics is just such a linguistic game), only to find the animal summoned into existence by the fact of my actions.
Also, anyone who has a background in math (not necessarily a math genius, either–I’m certainly not) has experienced the way proofs seem to flow one from another and to be “found” or “seen”, not made up or derived from the world. It’s extremely difficult to explain to one that hasn’t had the experience, but even in high school doing geometric proofs I experienced snatches of it.
It’s somewhat like a sighted person trying to describe “red” to a skeptical blind person. I’m not saying that math people are like the sighted to everyone else, the blind (I’m not that arrogant a *&@$!–if anything, we’re probably defective compared to others in many ways); just that one shouldn’t dismiss mathematical Platonism without having some experience of math. Now, some who do have such experience do not, in fact, accept mathematical Platonism; but most of the true greats in math up until the latter part of the last century did, and many still do.
You might not agree with all this, but I think it’s at least a not-unreasonable possibility, or even probability. Materialists tend to try to dismiss such a view as prima facie absurd, but it’s not. It may not be true; but it’s not intrinsically absurd.
It’s also interesting, as I pointed out above, that even an atheist and neuroscientist such as Sam Harris won’t rule out the possibility that mind is not reducible to matter, or that it survives death, or that the very concept of “matter” or “material cosmos” may be something we don’t properly understand or that may not ultimately represent reality accurately.
I might also point out that he practices Buddhist meditation, and he has argued that there are phenomena encountered in such states that we don’t really understand and that we mustn’t be too quick to try to reduce to physiological phenomena or mere brain chemistry. Thus, it’s not just believers who have experiences that lead them at least to suspend judgment on the accuracy of the purely materialist account of mind and the world.
Once again, I don’t expect you to agree; but you can’t argue that it’s just believers trying to smuggle God in through the backdoor or philosophical or scientific hacks who don’t know what they’re talking about. Agree or disagree, but at least give the other side the respect of taking them seriously.

meh, GrantL, and Turmarion when I try to wrap my mind around the “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” I play a mental game called “The Cosmic Sims.”
First some theory. A Turing machine can compute the computable functions and simulate the function of another Turing machine. A cellular automata (CA) is grid with rules about how the cells change their state. Now a CA and Turing machine can be thought of as the same thing, because you can build a CA that implements a Turing machine within it (ex John Conway’s game of life).
Now what about the reality in which we live? It is at least a multi-dimension grid of cells with rules (physics) that govern cell state transition. It might be more than that, but reality is at least a CA and can emulate a Turing machine. This shouldn’t be news as we can build computers out of the stuff of reality. Also DNA and a ribosome looks like a Turing machine too. But even structures like Galaxies on the macro scale might be computing as well.
To me this explains why math is so meshed with reality. Reality and math are the same thing! But it still leaves open a question “what machine that is running the cosmic CA in which we live?” Is reality complete or does it depend on something else?
Now here’s the Cosmic Sim. Imagine the Sims became sapient and begin investigating their reality using the scientific method. They might be to infer that their reality wasn’t closed. Their simulation required an external machine to run on? As the simulators we could inject information into their reality that showed them our reality and explained the nature of their reality to them!
This post is strangely appropriate for a thread on psychedelic medicine. Perhaps its good I never did any of this stuff or it might really send me round the bend.

Turmarion, what difference does it make if you’re counting the rocks on the ground or the ‘rocks’ in your head? It’s all inside the material cosmos.

i suppose i’ll throw my take on this matter out here…
psychedelics are like everything else in this world. they are subject to interpretation. each individual’s experience under the influence is as unique as the person taking the drug. i have personally experienced “ego-less” states under the influence, and these experiences have been incredibly important to my sense of spirituality. my experiences weren’t so much about understanding god, as they were about understanding love, the nature of time, and my place in reality. whether those things have anything to do with god, i have no idea. that being said, i think it’s important to make clear: our interactions with the world are experiences. We experience a tree, we experience love, we experience pain, the list continues. what i find to be the most valuable aspect of taking psychedelics is that the experience has the possibility to take the mind away from dualistic thinking. Instead of thinking “this is a green tree. that is a black dog.”, pyschedelics can allow the user to think “this is a green tree, that is a black dog, but even better, it is all life.” I suppose it’s not even the thinking capabilities that are so valuable from the psychedelic experience- it’s the feeling. The senses percieve their surroundings in a unique manner- instead of sensing reality, they become a part of reality.
now, it is always up to the individual to take what they want from ANY experience. as in life (without psychedlics), i try incredibly hard to see the bright side of every situation. perhaps a pessimistic person would take a different experience away from the “drug.”
regardless, what’s really amazing about the article is that it provoked so many people to discuss!
furthermore, it’s exciting to think that scientists are interested in discovering more about the effects of psycedlics. i think it’s always a good thing to obtain knowledge.

What many people don’t realize is that the human brain is made of drugs. Something odd about these incredibly powerful psychedelics is that they can produce THE MOST intense experiences possible with very little harm to the physical brain and body. Psilocybin and LSD are very similar to compounds already found in the brain, which is why their molecules fit so neatly into our receptors.
DMT is the strongest of all psychedelics and it IS produced in the brain. This is a very interesting compound referred to as the “spirit molecule”. It’s found in every ecosystem on earth, in plants and animals. The pineal gland (the third eye) produces large amounts of it when we are in deep sleep and right before we die. Contact with non human entities in reported by the majority of people who “break through” to the other side.
As far as comparing psychedelics to winning the lottery… well a burst of the “mystical experience” can dramatically change one’s life, and set one on a spiritual course. But it’s not as though anyone would want to stay in the psychedelic state for a long period of time. Anyone who’s done deep psychedelic work knows how paradoxical, complex, information packed, alien, bizarre and unimaginable those hallucinations can be. Psychedelics will never replace everyday spiritual practices, just like spiritual practices can’t replace psychedelics.

I find 4FMP to be a really great chemical at recreational doses, and it hasn’t really produced much of a hangover in me. I appreciate its long duration, empathogenic properties, great body high, and sociability, as well as the relatively sober mindstate you remain in (unlike MDMA, for example). It also doesn’t feel toxic in the way that MDMA does.