5 ms·
This is an important description, as when you think of a chemical creating impairment, it is essentially adding noise to signals in your brain, and a lot of the
by motohagiography 5y ago
This is an important description, as when you think of a chemical creating impairment, it is essentially adding noise to signals in your brain, and a lot of the geometric and fractal artifacts we see resemble noise artifacts you would get from interfering with other analogue signals.
Given your brain takes sensory signal input and coheres it, impairing that ability is going to create signals-based feedback that is described in information theory and signal processing, which if there is any periodic sampling going on on the coherance layer, you're going to get shape artifacts that are a function of that period. It's essentially 1/f noise and the experience of "more" information in a hallucinatory state is really just noisy information, like feedback on a TV. (It implies your brain has a clock cycle, and probably something like an NTP service.)
Imagine your TV had worked perfectly for your entire life and the first time you experienced its signal was bad, but you didn't realize there was a world in which that signal could not exist, so it would be totally mind blowing and you might experience it as a rift in reality. It would demand the question, if the people on TV aren't the substrate of our shared reality, and they are only representations transmitted by signals our minds are cohering, what else isn't necessarily real?
You'd tell other people that you had an experience where there is something else, a true substrate of reality where the televisions weren't coherent and real, which seems impossible, but if you've experienced it, you know. Suddenly, the televisions and they things they say are fallible, but there is still a you without them, and one that is not bound to the identity you see reflected in what they broadcast and tell you, because when the TV signal fed back on itself or echoed with delay, now you know there is something behind it all. It seems profound, but it's really just the first time your TV didn't work because something had impaired the signal. This is what I think hallucinogens are: noise on your sensory channels that reminds you the signals you use to cohere your experience exist in a substrate, which is just a mundane fact and necessarily physically true, and "you" are more than what your manage to cohere into a narrative from your sensory input. Some people believe a substrate or perception of something "else" is inconcievable because they have never experienced jitter in their coherence cycles, and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really, it's not, and most of us just go back to chopping wood and carrying water.
- saiya-jin 5y agoFor me the (rather strong) trips from mushrooms showed me how some part of the brain (not sure which one though) is very good at interpolating bits and pieces of reality when there is no longer strong coming in via our senses. Its a blurry picture of reality, but the blur isn't the loss of detail but rather its fractalization (which in the end is the opposite of it). The harder the trip the less real-world signal and more brains's interpolation. We all have highly unique brains so although the principles are the same (fractals in visual and in mind, strange colors, mixing senses etc.) we all have such a unique take on it. And since the same brain is just guessing and smoothing input, and the one processing the guesses, its guesses are so 'self-compatible' that it can literally make its own feedback loops (I had it multiple times, when tripping with closed eyes I began wandering further and further away on a very consistent interconnected trip). Its so strange. I can remember those trips so well, but the 'enhanced' version of it is simply too vast for my normal brain to grok. Just partial projections like 3d into 2d that don't give full picture or don't make much sense.
- SamoyedFurFluff 5y agoThe nature of brains is largely a prediciting machine. Most of our sight is actually predicted, not interpreted, especially anywhere we deem familiar.
- LocalH 5y agoIndeed. Not only that, but our brain lies to us with regards to temporal placement of objects. Hence the old thing where when you first look at a ticking clock, the first second feels like it takes longer to lapse, because your brain filled in part of your vision with where it thought the second hand was, because when you shifted your focus towards the second hand, your eyes performed a microsaccade and thus in that precise moment, you were technically blind. This is why I think the effects of psychedelics have such a strong temporal factor.
- randomopining 5y agoIt def feels like a raw vs jpeg. The straight sensor data vs a compressed and corrected view. Problem is, you can get caught on certain intricacies of the raw input instead of just taking it all in at once. Taking it all in at once you can see how it's different than what you preconceived, and that your preconception is just one of infinite perceptions of the single moment.