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Despite having had the relevant experience, I've always found it hard to understand why this happens. You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feeli

Despite having had the relevant experience, I've always found it hard to understand why this happens. You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? All kinds of things can change the way you feel temporarily, but most of them don't leave you thinking that you got insight into the way things really are. Maybe it's that psychedelics also induce feelings of having discovered something important, and a lot of people don't try to double-check whether they actually did.

aunty_helen 5y ago
If astronauts can have their worldview changed by going to space why can't a psychedelic experience do the same. Both are just a new perspective.
- Elof 5y ago
  100%. To abstract it even further, I have some defining moments from my teens that are monumental to me and uneventful at best to everyone else. Gaining perspective is largely an individual experience, it's just that some things seem to have more influence in sparking a change in perspective than others
westoncb 5y ago
There is some interesting research[1] accounting for this via analogy to annealing: essentially that while using psychedelics (or a variety of other situations), a kind of disordering occurs that opens up an alternate phase of neural behavior where it's more possible to change course; then, after the trip (or whatever caused you to enter this more disordered state where free energy is higher), there is a "cooling" phase and some new order is arrived at. [1] https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/neural-annealing https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/neural-annealin...
swayvil 5y ago
We don't qualify experiences by consistency with convention so much as intensity. Call it unreasonable but there you go. So if you have a strange and intense experience then your ideas about stuff are appropriately modified. Even if the experience and ideas don't align with convention/consensus/etc.
guythedudebro 5y ago
Not only that, but the fact that consuming a chemical can make your consciousness feel so different always felt to me like pretty good evidence that consciousness is material. I do think there are rational realizations that rational people can come to under the influence of psychedelics, that they might not otherwise, though.
- kritiko 5y ago
  Why do you believe in rational people?
  - guythedudebro 5y ago
    I thought it was a useful label to describe a set of people who would make an effort not to settle for supernatural explanations
    - weq 5y ago
      We only use a minute amount of our brain. Supernatural is a state of dystopia set out by the Religious zealots to rationalise their inability to understand anything not fed to them by their sacred books.
- monktastic1 5y ago
  I'm not sure I see why. Dreams tend to be unstable, but if a dream were particularly stable, and a certain behavior in the dream reliably triggered a certain insight (say, a dream sign that triggered lucidity), would that be evidence that consciousness was produced by the "material" in the dream? In the same way, if this is a dream of sorts, the fact that certain dream behaviors can trigger certain changes in experience is also internally consistent. Of course, this "dream" has much greater stability to it, but the basic idea holds.
  - guythedudebro 5y ago
    If you can develop a robust system of testable explanations for the material reality of your dream world that hold consistently true where/when this is all happening then maybe your question would be useful. There is complex physiology going on producing a consciousness (so it seems to me) that can be altered when that physiology is altered. We can see at least some of this physiology. Suggesting all that physiology in our world is actually happening in the dream world of some other being doesn't seem very interesting as it still leaves us here in the same material (as we can measure it) reality that science is... still pretty damn good at describing. So why even bring it up? If there's evidence that points us that way, cool, otherwise, Occam's razor seems better.
moj 5y ago
Try getting there without the drugs, it's not difficult. It might require a weekend workshop or two, but it's quite doable. Of course, this will also open up new horizons for doubt, too. Ymmv.
toomanydoubts 5y ago
I believe it's because it shows you that reality is not actually real. It's just a product of your senses. During a psychedelic trip, one might wonder "if I had been like this all my life, I would consider this to be reality, not what I'm used too". It fundamentally shows you that what you consider reality might be very, very, very wrong. So how can I trust my own senses and perceptions if they can be so powerfully modified by such a simple molecule? What if the actual reality is what you experience during a trip, and what we consider reality is some kind of trip due to the lack of a molecule that allows you to fully experience reality(in the same way that the lack of nutrients and water can lead to mental confusion/delirium)? It opens up a world of possibilities.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  How is the self-defeating skepticism lost on you? What reality? What molecules? The only explanation that doesn't lead to absurdity is that drugs corrupt your perception. They interfere with and frustrate the healthy and proper operation of the brain and in doing so distort perception.
  - badtuple 5y ago
    I guess one question I'd have is why you think your brain is "operating properly". It's definitely perceiving and constructing a narrative out of those perceptions, but that happens differently for every brain and it really doesn't seem like there's a perfect version of it that's "correct". If you're willing to accept that you can't really rank or judge modes of mental experience quantitatively on some kind of non-relative scale (which would require access to a "reality" outside yourself), then it shouldn't be too much of a leap to say messing with how it functions within tolerable bounds could be more of an optimization (or equal but just different) to your experience.
    - bobthechef 5y ago
      You're still not seeing the contradiction between making truth claims and having beliefs and the skeptical position you're entertaining. By your own standards, I could ask how you know there's something called a brain, that it has something to do with perception, etc. Maybe you hallucinated the brain? Maybe it's just some weird belief you have? Maybe hallucinations aren't a thing? How do you know what other brains do or don't do differently? And why can't some of them be wrong? Attaching doubt to things "just because" isn't rational and cannot be resolved rationally precisely because such doubts are not rationally motivated. If I say to you "I doubt that you are here", for no reason other than some arbitrary skepticism about my perceptual faculties, then there is no way that that doubt can rationally be resolved. The very idea of hallucination presumes a normative perception. That we can know that we can misperceive or be subject to illusions itself presumes that we can tell the difference. Otherwise, we are just positing idle and detached possibilities while tacitly, and paradoxically, drawing on various convictions about the real.
bobthechef 5y ago
Or it produces such severe distortions that it leads people to bizarre conclusions.
mostertoaster 5y ago
I think it’s because it opens up the narrative part of our brains. Why are stories powerful? The material world is the facts. It could be intoxicated man driving his car dies crashing into telephone pole. If the other facts could be he had just finished robbing someone and being abusive to a woman and then got in his car, your mind tells a story about “justice”. Maybe the facts were he was a gay man who just came out to his conservative parents and they disowned him and he got drunk and drove into the pole out of sorrow. The story becomes “injustice”, “tragedy”. But justice, tragedy, injustice aren’t material things. Psychedelics tend to set your mind on these things, and give meaning to what we’re just material facts. The meaning of them may or may not be true, but pondering on them and thinking about their meaning is sure to change your worldview (ie the root of meaning or how you “perceive” the world.)
GoblinSlayer 5y ago
Many people are naive realists. For them a trip is truth, not a chemically induced hallucination. And they always describe trips as truth.
tsol 5y ago
Is it a surprise that drugs induce chemical changes that affect perception, sometimes permanently? I've always wondered what is it isn't that it shows you something that makes people almost universally come to the same conclusions about reality.. what if it just flips a switch? The similarity in thought I see among different users of psychedelics is just so big. Why should it be a surprise that it's chemical? Opiates can flip a switch in your brain that makes you way more habituated than a natural stimulus with the same level of pleasure(ie heroin users will say they don't like it any more they like spending time with their kids, but still will neglect their kids to do heroin because they can't say no). Marijuana can trigger latent psychological issues in those who are at risk. Maybe psychedelics pushes some switch that makes people think differently, even if they're aware of it and trying to convince themselves otherwise?
bondarchuk 5y ago
Psychedelics don't just give you certain insights/thoughts/ideas, they do so while causing a very intense euphoric experience. I think that's what actually makes it stick. Not that different from religious prayer/meditation, which is strongly euphoric as well.
musingsole 5y ago
Intense dreams have toppled empires. Knowing the experience was triggered by a known substance doesn't mean you should throw out the entirety as some sort of manufactured sensation separated from reality.
slibhb 5y ago
I had the same view until I tried dmt. With dmt, you can easily find a "break through" dose. This is the point where your consciousness stops being a disinterested spectator and gets sucked into the experience. The moment your consciousness gets pulled in is extremely disconcerting, I'd never felt anything like it (including other psychedelics). The resulting experiences are basically religious visions (I'm an atheist). Often, an entity appears and reveals a vision. > Maybe it's that psychedelics also induce feelings of having discovered something important, and a lot of people don't try to double-check whether they actually did. I think psychedelics solidify or clarify feelings or ideas that you previously had. Lots of people take them as evidence of their superstitious feelings. For me, not being superstitious, they did not have that effect but they did clarify my worldview.
- vicda 5y ago
  I can only imagine how deeply connected your spiritual upbringing would be to the trip experience. So many shamanistic traditions have guides that are there to teach you the lore to prime you so you understand/have the right experience.
Sosh101 5y ago
I think one thing it can do is allow you to view things with fewer of the biases, assumptions and other mental stuff you've accumulated over the years. Having a fresh (childlike?) view of things can give you a newfound appreciation for many things (e.g. the environment). > You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? Isn't that a little bit like saying that you shouldn't change your views after reading a book, if you are aware that the book commonly changes views?
- tinalumfoil 5y ago
  > Isn't that a little bit like saying that you shouldn't change your views after reading a book, if you are aware that the book commonly changes views? No, it's closer to changing your belief from "chocolate is bad for you" to "chocolate is good for you" after having a particularly good-tasting piece of chocolate. Unlike reading a book on the health benefits of chocolate, your change in belief does not logically follow from your experiences, at least not in an obvious way. Since drugs aren't going to alter your priors, it seems as though the change in belief is purely emotionally driven. Which is odd.
  - rpearl 5y ago
    experiences and emotions are relevant evidence which can change your beliefs
whatroot8 5y ago
You seem to think a persons worldview is under their control The important discovery people make is lucid awareness a chemical did this to them Unlike booze where you black out Whether the brain gives rise to us it’s a medium that exists and it can’t be discounted it has a lot to do with our awareness That we can be just chemistry is the shift in metaphysical belief I came away with The oceanic connectedness being we’re all just a few micrograms of this or that from being the same. That perception of uniqueness is not uniqueness

aunty_helen 5y ago

If astronauts can have their worldview changed by going to space why can't a psychedelic experience do the same. Both are just a new perspective.

Elof 5y ago
100%. To abstract it even further, I have some defining moments from my teens that are monumental to me and uneventful at best to everyone else. Gaining perspective is largely an individual experience, it's just that some things seem to have more influence in sparking a change in perspective than others

westoncb 5y ago

There is some interesting research[1] accounting for this via analogy to annealing: essentially that while using psychedelics (or a variety of other situations), a kind of disordering occurs that opens up an alternate phase of neural behavior where it's more possible to change course; then, after the trip (or whatever caused you to enter this more disordered state where free energy is higher), there is a "cooling" phase and some new order is arrived at. [1] https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/neural-annealing https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/neural-annealin...

swayvil 5y ago

We don't qualify experiences by consistency with convention so much as intensity. Call it unreasonable but there you go. So if you have a strange and intense experience then your ideas about stuff are appropriately modified. Even if the experience and ideas don't align with convention/consensus/etc.

guythedudebro 5y ago

Not only that, but the fact that consuming a chemical can make your consciousness feel so different always felt to me like pretty good evidence that consciousness is material. I do think there are rational realizations that rational people can come to under the influence of psychedelics, that they might not otherwise, though.

kritiko 5y ago
Why do you believe in rational people?
- guythedudebro 5y ago
  I thought it was a useful label to describe a set of people who would make an effort not to settle for supernatural explanations
  - weq 5y ago
    We only use a minute amount of our brain. Supernatural is a state of dystopia set out by the Religious zealots to rationalise their inability to understand anything not fed to them by their sacred books.
monktastic1 5y ago
I'm not sure I see why. Dreams tend to be unstable, but if a dream were particularly stable, and a certain behavior in the dream reliably triggered a certain insight (say, a dream sign that triggered lucidity), would that be evidence that consciousness was produced by the "material" in the dream? In the same way, if this is a dream of sorts, the fact that certain dream behaviors can trigger certain changes in experience is also internally consistent. Of course, this "dream" has much greater stability to it, but the basic idea holds.
- guythedudebro 5y ago
  If you can develop a robust system of testable explanations for the material reality of your dream world that hold consistently true where/when this is all happening then maybe your question would be useful. There is complex physiology going on producing a consciousness (so it seems to me) that can be altered when that physiology is altered. We can see at least some of this physiology. Suggesting all that physiology in our world is actually happening in the dream world of some other being doesn't seem very interesting as it still leaves us here in the same material (as we can measure it) reality that science is... still pretty damn good at describing. So why even bring it up? If there's evidence that points us that way, cool, otherwise, Occam's razor seems better.

moj 5y ago

Try getting there without the drugs, it's not difficult. It might require a weekend workshop or two, but it's quite doable. Of course, this will also open up new horizons for doubt, too. Ymmv.

toomanydoubts 5y ago

I believe it's because it shows you that reality is not actually real. It's just a product of your senses. During a psychedelic trip, one might wonder "if I had been like this all my life, I would consider this to be reality, not what I'm used too". It fundamentally shows you that what you consider reality might be very, very, very wrong. So how can I trust my own senses and perceptions if they can be so powerfully modified by such a simple molecule? What if the actual reality is what you experience during a trip, and what we consider reality is some kind of trip due to the lack of a molecule that allows you to fully experience reality(in the same way that the lack of nutrients and water can lead to mental confusion/delirium)? It opens up a world of possibilities.

bobthechef 5y ago
How is the self-defeating skepticism lost on you? What reality? What molecules? The only explanation that doesn't lead to absurdity is that drugs corrupt your perception. They interfere with and frustrate the healthy and proper operation of the brain and in doing so distort perception.
- badtuple 5y ago
  I guess one question I'd have is why you think your brain is "operating properly". It's definitely perceiving and constructing a narrative out of those perceptions, but that happens differently for every brain and it really doesn't seem like there's a perfect version of it that's "correct". If you're willing to accept that you can't really rank or judge modes of mental experience quantitatively on some kind of non-relative scale (which would require access to a "reality" outside yourself), then it shouldn't be too much of a leap to say messing with how it functions within tolerable bounds could be more of an optimization (or equal but just different) to your experience.
  - bobthechef 5y ago
    You're still not seeing the contradiction between making truth claims and having beliefs and the skeptical position you're entertaining. By your own standards, I could ask how you know there's something called a brain, that it has something to do with perception, etc. Maybe you hallucinated the brain? Maybe it's just some weird belief you have? Maybe hallucinations aren't a thing? How do you know what other brains do or don't do differently? And why can't some of them be wrong? Attaching doubt to things "just because" isn't rational and cannot be resolved rationally precisely because such doubts are not rationally motivated. If I say to you "I doubt that you are here", for no reason other than some arbitrary skepticism about my perceptual faculties, then there is no way that that doubt can rationally be resolved. The very idea of hallucination presumes a normative perception. That we can know that we can misperceive or be subject to illusions itself presumes that we can tell the difference. Otherwise, we are just positing idle and detached possibilities while tacitly, and paradoxically, drawing on various convictions about the real.

bobthechef 5y ago

Or it produces such severe distortions that it leads people to bizarre conclusions.

mostertoaster 5y ago

I think it’s because it opens up the narrative part of our brains. Why are stories powerful? The material world is the facts. It could be intoxicated man driving his car dies crashing into telephone pole. If the other facts could be he had just finished robbing someone and being abusive to a woman and then got in his car, your mind tells a story about “justice”. Maybe the facts were he was a gay man who just came out to his conservative parents and they disowned him and he got drunk and drove into the pole out of sorrow. The story becomes “injustice”, “tragedy”. But justice, tragedy, injustice aren’t material things. Psychedelics tend to set your mind on these things, and give meaning to what we’re just material facts. The meaning of them may or may not be true, but pondering on them and thinking about their meaning is sure to change your worldview (ie the root of meaning or how you “perceive” the world.)

GoblinSlayer 5y ago

Many people are naive realists. For them a trip is truth, not a chemically induced hallucination. And they always describe trips as truth.

tsol 5y ago

Is it a surprise that drugs induce chemical changes that affect perception, sometimes permanently? I've always wondered what is it isn't that it shows you something that makes people almost universally come to the same conclusions about reality.. what if it just flips a switch? The similarity in thought I see among different users of psychedelics is just so big. Why should it be a surprise that it's chemical? Opiates can flip a switch in your brain that makes you way more habituated than a natural stimulus with the same level of pleasure(ie heroin users will say they don't like it any more they like spending time with their kids, but still will neglect their kids to do heroin because they can't say no). Marijuana can trigger latent psychological issues in those who are at risk. Maybe psychedelics pushes some switch that makes people think differently, even if they're aware of it and trying to convince themselves otherwise?

bondarchuk 5y ago

Psychedelics don't just give you certain insights/thoughts/ideas, they do so while causing a very intense euphoric experience. I think that's what actually makes it stick. Not that different from religious prayer/meditation, which is strongly euphoric as well.

musingsole 5y ago

Intense dreams have toppled empires. Knowing the experience was triggered by a known substance doesn't mean you should throw out the entirety as some sort of manufactured sensation separated from reality.

slibhb 5y ago

I had the same view until I tried dmt. With dmt, you can easily find a "break through" dose. This is the point where your consciousness stops being a disinterested spectator and gets sucked into the experience. The moment your consciousness gets pulled in is extremely disconcerting, I'd never felt anything like it (including other psychedelics). The resulting experiences are basically religious visions (I'm an atheist). Often, an entity appears and reveals a vision. > Maybe it's that psychedelics also induce feelings of having discovered something important, and a lot of people don't try to double-check whether they actually did. I think psychedelics solidify or clarify feelings or ideas that you previously had. Lots of people take them as evidence of their superstitious feelings. For me, not being superstitious, they did not have that effect but they did clarify my worldview.

vicda 5y ago
I can only imagine how deeply connected your spiritual upbringing would be to the trip experience. So many shamanistic traditions have guides that are there to teach you the lore to prime you so you understand/have the right experience.

Sosh101 5y ago

I think one thing it can do is allow you to view things with fewer of the biases, assumptions and other mental stuff you've accumulated over the years. Having a fresh (childlike?) view of things can give you a newfound appreciation for many things (e.g. the environment). > You know you're taking a drug that reliably induces feelings of "oceanic connectedness". Why should you change your worldview as a result? Isn't that a little bit like saying that you shouldn't change your views after reading a book, if you are aware that the book commonly changes views?

tinalumfoil 5y ago
> Isn't that a little bit like saying that you shouldn't change your views after reading a book, if you are aware that the book commonly changes views? No, it's closer to changing your belief from "chocolate is bad for you" to "chocolate is good for you" after having a particularly good-tasting piece of chocolate. Unlike reading a book on the health benefits of chocolate, your change in belief does not logically follow from your experiences, at least not in an obvious way. Since drugs aren't going to alter your priors, it seems as though the change in belief is purely emotionally driven. Which is odd.
- rpearl 5y ago
  experiences and emotions are relevant evidence which can change your beliefs

whatroot8 5y ago

You seem to think a persons worldview is under their control The important discovery people make is lucid awareness a chemical did this to them Unlike booze where you black out Whether the brain gives rise to us it’s a medium that exists and it can’t be discounted it has a lot to do with our awareness That we can be just chemistry is the shift in metaphysical belief I came away with The oceanic connectedness being we’re all just a few micrograms of this or that from being the same. That perception of uniqueness is not uniqueness