https://reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1ll9k7o/flight/
https://reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1jkajcq/that_mome...
https://reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1hruv4t/just_visi...
Overdose or a "bad trip" is possible with any of these three substances, so one must be extremely careful when experimenting.
I can only speak about LSD, but its visual effects are based on constant and surprising visual transformations. People's faces transform into the faces of other people or animals (which can be even frightening). Non-animate objects can transform into other objects or resemble unexpected living forms.
However, these initially unique visual experiences quickly become boring for people with clear objectives in their life. I don't think it's contact with a spiritual universe or anything like that. It might help (or not) if you try it once or twice.
Cool story, though.
I have to say it's a bit underwhelming. It's interesting how the closest analog I can think lf is early generative image AI hallucinatory stuff.
And I am not advocating for trying them. Im not one of these evangelists. But replication images are a very weak simulacrum of what the experience is actually like.
Shifts in perspective, including ones embedded in beliefs, trauma patterns, habitual mental models.
Thinking, perceiving, remembering out of the box… the box one does not know they are in.
Here on HN we tend to be habituated in perceiving the thinking mind as correct, rational, in our control. What if it’s none of these things?
Well, yeah. It’s like watching a video of a rollercoaster on your phone, vs riding in one.
I would say to me these videos work wonders in confirming a little bit that I'm not really missing out. There's a lot of FOMO and myth-making around drugs, I think experience reports and replications are a pretty good way to make everyone's decisions more informed whether it's "for them".
This could totally be some form of confirmation bias at work, but it works for me ...
My first LSD trip is probably the most important experience of my life, and sure I saw some fractals in the clouds, but that’s close to zero percent of what was important during it.
"To him who has had the experience no explanation is necessary, to him who has not, none is possible."
My best trips were at psytrance parties as peak experiences in terms of fun.
I have tripped many times alone in a dark room and basically gained nothing from the experience besides falling into an existential void.
Personally, from so much experiences, reading thousands of trip reports, most the psychedelic literature up to about 2005, I think the psychedelic experience is like a blank white canvas. Some people end up with a Monet painting experience and some people end up with a Dali painting experience. Some run into a Hieronymus Bosch the first time and never try it again. You can't really make overall statements about what the blank canvas is going to be before someone starts to paint.
For me, my best psychedelic experiences were better versions of my most fun nights drunk. Anything I have learned that is all that deep though I have learned from reading books.
Never having a psychedelic experience I think is like never being drunk. It is really missing out on an interesting life experience but at the same time it is not this profound loss.
Working out all these life problems like some kind of pyschotherapy session is for sure something that never happened to me. That just lead me to the existential void when attempted.
Experience has taught me to be wary of identity-conferring stuff that's easy and not hard to do. Taking drugs is not difficult.
> MDMA has limited approved medical uses in a small number of countries,[32] but is illegal in most jurisdictions.[33] MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is a promising and generally safe treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder when administered in controlled therapeutic settings.[34][35] In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given MDMA breakthrough therapy status (though there no current clinical indications in the US).[36] Canada has allowed limited distribution of MDMA upon application to and approval by Health Canada.[37] In Australia, it may be prescribed in the treatment of PTSD by specifically authorised psychiatrists.[38]
They will never be a solution for every problem like some people evangelize but where they work, they give people with these conditions another avenue to try when other "legal" drugs have failed.
You'd have to agree, the types of people who choose to research psychedelics professionally, are the types of people who want to see, and demonstrate, positive results. These aren't unbiased research outcomes.
LSD is illegal, and in most countries considered one of the most dangerous drugs despite being completely harmless from a physical perspective.
We were having a debate among friends when a couple of people said they took MDMA once, and some of the most obviously alcoholics (drunk twice a week) went to their yugular calling them junkies and "irresponsible" because drugs fry your brain.
Classic dental study: 89% of ecstasy users reported clenching or grinding; 60% had tooth wear into dentine vs 11% of non-users. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10403088/
ChatGPT: “One pill, one year of grinding” – biologically plausible as a trigger, but not a universal rule.
"I think that MDMA, unlike other drugs, is potentially much more neurotoxic and dangerous than any drug that has comparable effects, like hallucinogens for example, for which we haven't shown long-term alterations. MDMA is therefore a special case. It's difficult to give recommendations for use. It's better not to take it regularly, and if someone asks me, in my opinion, I would say it's better to keep your distance from this drug so as not to run any risks."
Source: Franz X. Vollenweider in 2005, Director Neurophenomenology of Consciousness, Zürich University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnptUdyDUKI&t=1810
There is a big difference between 'generally not harmful in very small singular doses' and 'all harm is fabricated'.
I’ve known old LSD abusers with fried brains but never seen a LSD abuser go from non-fried to fried brains. Correlation is not causation, but it could be.
> LSD can also trigger legitimate lifelong psychotic states in some people.
These statements should be accompanied by the necessary caveat that just about anything can trigger psychotic states in people prone to psychosis.
Hallucinogens act on deeper mechanisms that control from visual perception all the way to the sense of self. It can fundamentally change during the experience the way you see yourself and the world. It's not uncommon for users of LSD or DMT and psilocybin to describe the experience as getting in touch with the interconnectedness of all things. Also bad trips can be very terrifying because of how much you are exposed to the experience. Like dying or feeling the fleeting nature of existence very present in your skin.
All this to say that videos don't do any of this justice. It's just a fun way to represent the image distortions.
I recently read "A Brief History of Intelligence" by Bennet which spends quite a bit of time dwelling on "generative" simulation mechanisms in brain function and their role in cognition from prediction to mentalizing, and I think I can get a rough sense of how this would all click together.
It makes sense why creative/artistic people may be drawn to this and could consider it a heightened form or a letting loose of their normal processes, etc.
But to me it's still not that attractive. I can never shake the idea that it's a bit like driving a system past specifications and assigning meaning to malfunctions, and essentially lying to yourself. I get it's not black and white, and obviously philosophy is rife with arguments and takes on what is true experience and cognition, but given the risks and downsides I'd rather not.
I'm very fine with other people occupying different points on the spectrum.
>brain circuitry that goes and re-imagines the input consciously going haywire and growing and extrapolating into overdriven, bizarre directions.
>assigning meaning to malfunctions, and essentially lying to yourself
The problem is that your description fully applies to "normal", non-chemically-altered cognition. Miscognitions propagate. The spec only goes as far as anatomically modern, i.e. cavefolk, where the error correction mechanism there is "get eaten by wild animals, having failed to reproduce".
We don't have sabertooth tigers any more, we have a planetary-scale material culture developed over millenia. It provides for our safety; it records and propagates imprints of what we think, say, and do; it makes meaningful actions out of human utterances and movements, by providing them with interpretations (shared collective cognitions).
It's a safe and rich environment, one where people get to live safe lives in the grasp of utter, insane delusion, we just can't agree on which ones exactly are the deluded ones. We consider that one is responsible primarily for one's own actions, so let's start with the self, shall we.
What is one to do, if one wants to say the words "I am not lying to myself" in the sense of an actual falsifiable statement, and not just as a form of "I'm significant... said the dust speck"?
I mean, how do you even know? Couldn't you just lie to yourself about that one, too, and carry on none the wiser?
You know how you can look at your eye with your eye, by means of routing photons through space in a clever way, with some help from that best friend of the psychonaut - the bathroom mirror?
Turns out you can also look at your mind with your mind, by routing concept-patterns though time in a clever way, by means of chemicals which alter the activation thresholds and signal propagation times throughout your body.
And what this gives you is a basis for comparison. Otherwise, you simply don't know. You're taking your introspection on faith, and that's massively irresponsible towards everyone else. Ask me how I know.
I mean, yeah, you're looking at an image on your computer screen.
Seeing a video of Niagara Falls or a photo of a person at the Grand Canyon similarly capture the difference to the real thing.
For example: https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Geometry#8B_-_Perceived_expo...
https://plus.maths.org/content/uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-ha...
https://bressloff.github.io/index.html
Some other links - not only how the cortex got its stripes but how the leopard got its spots. You see alot of this math in psychedelic visuals now (Reaction-diffusion networks etc)
(Normally, I "tune out" my visual field when I close my eyes. And for reference, my mind's eye is weak, but I do not think I have complete aphantasia.)
The effort is purely descriptive and does not seem to correlate the various effects with their cause (nothing wrong with that, still interesting).
This article provides a good overview of various theories:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-math-theory-for-why-people-...
Once a week for 10 years? Everyday for almost 2?
In their case they were taking lower doses than are traditionally associated with the one-off stories you hear about people traveling for ceremonies. There is also a tolerance build up that lessens the overt effects.
However, it still resulted in some major mental health issues over time. He was outwardly happy and cheerful, but the longer you talked to him the more you realized he had developed impossible ideas about reality, distorted (and easily debunked with photos and other records) memories of past events, and a lot of mystical ideas about the world.
He had mostly learned to hide them from people who weren’t in his group. When you got a couple of them ayahuasca people together and they started talking about mysticism, telepathy, and dismissing “western science” it started to reveal how far he was down the rabbit hole.
He has since gone MIA, though we get signs that he’s still alive and active from time to time via social media. The way it changed him was scary, though.
I never thought about the machinescapes visual and that is very spot on. That was over 20 years ago on Salvi. I was in a basement and visualized a train driving through the wall. The thing that stood out the most is the detail of the train. It looked like an old steam train and nothing like I had ever seen before in person. Was really cool and fun experience and really short lived. All done in like 15 minutes. Never really noticed the level of detail that was present until just now looking back on it.
Another great experience I had that was captured well in this was on LSD at a competitive paintball event. I could visualize the paintball streams coming at me as solid lines. I knew exactly where people were shooting at. It stood out very prominently. But also, I could “feel” an opponent moving on the other side of the field. We were ~20 meters/yards apart behind opposite bunkers but I knew exactly where and when he was moving. I could feel his moves through the ground. Like we were both remotely connected like the mycelium of a mushroom. His left movements pulled me to the right. We were connected together.
I’m really grateful to have experienced these things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogen_persisting_percep...
If you’ve never tried hallucinogens, you wouldn’t really qualify as having HPPD. There are other terms for visual issues that people can experience that look similar, but HPPD is specifically a hallucinogen-triggered condition.
I do agree, though: If you’re already having visual issues it would be very wise to avoid hallucinogens.
Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder - 5CAST with Andrew Callaghan (#4) feat. Dr. Wesley Ryan
It's not fun in the way party drugs or low dose mushrooms are, it's more of a type-2 fun, not necessarily fun in the moment but sure as hell gives you a unique experience to reflect on when you're sober 10 minutes later.
This is a funny and accurate way of looking at it.
After trying it a few times I felt like I had seen everything salvia had to show me. A dissociative kaleidoscope that leaves you coughing and sweaty loses its novelty pretty quick.
IMHO not worth it — salvia is terrifying much more often than mushrooms / acid. Definitely not something for a "first time psychonaut," and certainly shouldn't be legal.
Among my most terrifying dissassociative moments (you will not know who you, nor anything else, is).
The list goes on, but it's interesting how different yet the same they all kinda feel... guess that tracks given what are actually limited variables.
You mean like Salvia? I didn't know 2cb had this effect as well
Hallucinogens change my perspective of that river. Stuff I didn't notice I start noticing. My careful sample of the river, cultivated over a lifetime, gets jiggled and smeared all over and much that was invisible becomes visible.
That said, I prefer shikantaza meditation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DMT/comments/gb9ar0/dark_dmt_trip_r...
Neither cases prove that either ecosystems are net-negative compared to the overall benefits.