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You've got it backwards. Reality does not change due to hallucination, only my perception of it. I've tripped many times and none of what I saw was real, and e

You've got it backwards. Reality does not change due to hallucination, only my perception of it. I've tripped many times and none of what I saw was real, and everything I saw when I wasn't tripping was real. It's good as therapy, and reveals a lot about perception and thoughts, but nothing else.

e40 5y ago
I don't think that's what the GP meant. I think they meant your perception of reality can take more than one form. Often people fall into the trap of thinking their current perception of reality must be The One, but clearly what many people believe is very much not reality. It's just their current feeling about what their senses are telling them. In fact, in many cases, said perception is created from very little data. The older I get the more I see this in operation. Changing perspective, which can be instantaneous, is just shifting your view of reality.
- jklinger410 5y ago
  Sorry, that's not what they mean. My carpet is not changing color, my mother's face isn't melting. That's not happening on a physical level. My sober perception is repeatable and verifiable. It exists no matter my state of mind. It's novel to make yourself see things that are unreal. It's novel to have your emotions fluctuate wildly. But it's just novel, and unreal, and nothing more.
  - mostertoaster 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 5y ago
      Personal attacks, flamebait, snark, and ideological battle—which I think this manages to be all 4 of!—are not allowed on HN. If you'd please review the rules and not post like that, we'd appreciate it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - mostertoaster 5y ago
        I apologize. I will try not to let myself get carried away next time.
  - Elof 5y ago
    I think the point is that your sober perception exists only in your state of mind. My sober perception of the 'same' experiences you have is almost definitely not going to be the same as yours. So an altered state potentially gives you the realization that your personal experience isn't universal reality. In other words a personal perception of reality is not reality itself. This is why we have philosophy in general. Novel in this instance isn't relevant IMO Updated for spelling
    - jklinger410 5y ago
      This is such a silly conversation. We have cameras and all sorts of equipment that tracks a constant reality. Who gives a shit if people perceive it with varying levels of accuracy? What does it matter that introducing substances to the brain can reduce your ability to perceive it? There is evidence of reality, and childish mind games and semantic debates that it might not. I drop you off in the Gobi desert with no water (or acid) and let's test the boundaries of reality. Let's see if you can perceive yourself some water.
      - toomanydoubts 5y ago
        Old cameras recorded in black and white. Did people in the 20s live in B&W? Or maybe the camera is a device that attempts to record a picture of reality at some point in space-time, with lossy compression, to match the perceptions of reality of its creators? The thing is, you can have a consistent model of reality when you're only looking at it from the inside. This tells you nothing about the outside. Eg: if you're living in a simulated universe, everything is consistent, your cameras and the dry desert. Still, outside the thing you perceive as reality, there could be anything.
      - dwaltrip 5y ago
        For many things, you are right (or close enough for most purposes). For many, many other things, including the some of the things we care about most, the "true reality" is not so easy to discern.
        5y ago
  - sedivy94 5y ago
    Psychedelic perception is also repeatable. And sober perception is not reliable.
    - jklinger410 5y ago
      Same drug, same effects. Cameras can't see your wall melting, but they exactly match what we see in reality Huh, weird.
      - toomanydoubts 5y ago
        Cameras were designed to work just like our own eyes. Design a camera to work like flies eyes, and suddenly you will get an image that does not match your perception. That's the whole point, we don't know reality. We only know a model of reality that we can perceive with the senses we have. Show a picture to a fly and it will tell you: "you're tripping, this is not what reality looks like".
        jklinger410 5y ago
        The physical reality seen by a fly and myself are the same consistent reality. Regardless of our differences in perspective. You are correct, we only know a model of reality that we can piece together. And we piece that reality together, bit by bit, with instruments and math and studying. Regardless of how much you dream that there is an oasis in the desert, it is simply not there. No one else can see it, no instruments can detect it, you can't drink its water, it is unreal. You can "what if" and "woah dude" until you are blue in the face, but you will never be able to drink that water. So what is more real? The sun and the sand and your dehydration? Or an oasis that exists only in your mind? Many don't like the answer, but it is clear as day.
      - malermeister 5y ago
        But you only see the recordings from those cameras with the same eyes you're trying to verify, so this isn't actually giving you anything useful. You only have one input and no way of testing how reliable it is.
  - akomtu 5y ago
    Your carpet will change colors are if you wear colored glasses. If everyone had colored eye lenses, we wouldn't be able to agree what color the carpet really is. We would still agree that it's a 500nm wavelength that gets reflected from the carpet, because that number is objective, while our senses aren't. It just so happens that we perceive the numbers in a more or less the sane way. I guess that mushrooms change your perceptual "reference frame", you notice that the two reference frames have equal standing and thus neither is true.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
malermeister 5y ago
> I've tripped many times and none of what I saw was real, and everything I saw when I wasn't tripping was real. How would you possibly verify this claim? What is reality if not your perception of it? Does objective reality exist? How do you know anything is objectively real and not a product of some brain process? All of those are long-standing philosophical questions. Here's [1] a quick intro on the problem space I found. [1] https://iep.utm.edu/objectiv/#SH2a https://iep.utm.edu/objectiv/#SH2a
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  >How do you know anything is objectively real and not a product of some brain process? If that's true, then I know that brain processes are real.
- fsh 5y ago
  Ancient Greek philosophers could not measure anything, so this idea was at least somewhat plausible. Modern philosophers have no such excuse. We can simply measure the temperature of the water buckets and accept that our hands are very poor thermometers. Leaving aside the very difficult issue of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, the last 200 or so years of science have clearly demonstrated that objective reality exists.
  - staticman2 5y ago
    Ancient greek's could surely measure some things, how else did they build those buildings? You've declared we can measure everything important so reality is objective, but quantum physics suggests the things we can't measure may be astronomically large. The physicists who subscribe to the many world's theory believe there's a near infinite assortment of humans we cannot percieve or effectively measure, for example, and our own experience of self is inaccurate as we don't percieve ourselves to be branching in time. I don't think measurements solve the problem of the uncertainty of reality.
  - TremendousJudge 5y ago
    >We can simply measure That "simply" is doing a lot of work there. Measurement is never simple, or correct. Yes, it's much, much more precise than it was in the past, but it's never exact. Until May 2019, the magnitude of many of the units composing the SI system of measurement, including most of those used in the measurement of electricity and light, were highly dependent upon the stability of a 142-year-old, golf-ball-sized cylinder of metal stored in a vault in France. The mass of this cylinder drifts when compared to copies, and nobody knows why. Yeah, the effect is super tiny, but the measurements are demonstrably _not precise_

e40 5y ago

I don't think that's what the GP meant. I think they meant your perception of reality can take more than one form. Often people fall into the trap of thinking their current perception of reality must be The One, but clearly what many people believe is very much not reality. It's just their current feeling about what their senses are telling them. In fact, in many cases, said perception is created from very little data. The older I get the more I see this in operation. Changing perspective, which can be instantaneous, is just shifting your view of reality.

jklinger410 5y ago
Sorry, that's not what they mean. My carpet is not changing color, my mother's face isn't melting. That's not happening on a physical level. My sober perception is repeatable and verifiable. It exists no matter my state of mind. It's novel to make yourself see things that are unreal. It's novel to have your emotions fluctuate wildly. But it's just novel, and unreal, and nothing more.
- mostertoaster 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 5y ago
    Personal attacks, flamebait, snark, and ideological battle—which I think this manages to be all 4 of!—are not allowed on HN. If you'd please review the rules and not post like that, we'd appreciate it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - mostertoaster 5y ago
      I apologize. I will try not to let myself get carried away next time.
- Elof 5y ago
  I think the point is that your sober perception exists only in your state of mind. My sober perception of the 'same' experiences you have is almost definitely not going to be the same as yours. So an altered state potentially gives you the realization that your personal experience isn't universal reality. In other words a personal perception of reality is not reality itself. This is why we have philosophy in general. Novel in this instance isn't relevant IMO Updated for spelling
  - jklinger410 5y ago
    This is such a silly conversation. We have cameras and all sorts of equipment that tracks a constant reality. Who gives a shit if people perceive it with varying levels of accuracy? What does it matter that introducing substances to the brain can reduce your ability to perceive it? There is evidence of reality, and childish mind games and semantic debates that it might not. I drop you off in the Gobi desert with no water (or acid) and let's test the boundaries of reality. Let's see if you can perceive yourself some water.
    - toomanydoubts 5y ago
      Old cameras recorded in black and white. Did people in the 20s live in B&W? Or maybe the camera is a device that attempts to record a picture of reality at some point in space-time, with lossy compression, to match the perceptions of reality of its creators? The thing is, you can have a consistent model of reality when you're only looking at it from the inside. This tells you nothing about the outside. Eg: if you're living in a simulated universe, everything is consistent, your cameras and the dry desert. Still, outside the thing you perceive as reality, there could be anything.
    - dwaltrip 5y ago
      For many things, you are right (or close enough for most purposes). For many, many other things, including the some of the things we care about most, the "true reality" is not so easy to discern.
      - 5y ago
- sedivy94 5y ago
  Psychedelic perception is also repeatable. And sober perception is not reliable.
  - jklinger410 5y ago
    Same drug, same effects. Cameras can't see your wall melting, but they exactly match what we see in reality Huh, weird.
    - toomanydoubts 5y ago
      Cameras were designed to work just like our own eyes. Design a camera to work like flies eyes, and suddenly you will get an image that does not match your perception. That's the whole point, we don't know reality. We only know a model of reality that we can perceive with the senses we have. Show a picture to a fly and it will tell you: "you're tripping, this is not what reality looks like".
      - jklinger410 5y ago
        The physical reality seen by a fly and myself are the same consistent reality. Regardless of our differences in perspective. You are correct, we only know a model of reality that we can piece together. And we piece that reality together, bit by bit, with instruments and math and studying. Regardless of how much you dream that there is an oasis in the desert, it is simply not there. No one else can see it, no instruments can detect it, you can't drink its water, it is unreal. You can "what if" and "woah dude" until you are blue in the face, but you will never be able to drink that water. So what is more real? The sun and the sand and your dehydration? Or an oasis that exists only in your mind? Many don't like the answer, but it is clear as day.
    - malermeister 5y ago
      But you only see the recordings from those cameras with the same eyes you're trying to verify, so this isn't actually giving you anything useful. You only have one input and no way of testing how reliable it is.
- akomtu 5y ago
  Your carpet will change colors are if you wear colored glasses. If everyone had colored eye lenses, we wouldn't be able to agree what color the carpet really is. We would still agree that it's a 500nm wavelength that gets reflected from the carpet, because that number is objective, while our senses aren't. It just so happens that we perceive the numbers in a more or less the sane way. I guess that mushrooms change your perceptual "reference frame", you notice that the two reference frames have equal standing and thus neither is true.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

malermeister 5y ago

> I've tripped many times and none of what I saw was real, and everything I saw when I wasn't tripping was real. How would you possibly verify this claim? What is reality if not your perception of it? Does objective reality exist? How do you know anything is objectively real and not a product of some brain process? All of those are long-standing philosophical questions. Here's [1] a quick intro on the problem space I found. [1] https://iep.utm.edu/objectiv/#SH2a https://iep.utm.edu/objectiv/#SH2a

TchoBeer 5y ago
>How do you know anything is objectively real and not a product of some brain process? If that's true, then I know that brain processes are real.
fsh 5y ago
Ancient Greek philosophers could not measure anything, so this idea was at least somewhat plausible. Modern philosophers have no such excuse. We can simply measure the temperature of the water buckets and accept that our hands are very poor thermometers. Leaving aside the very difficult issue of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, the last 200 or so years of science have clearly demonstrated that objective reality exists.
- staticman2 5y ago
  Ancient greek's could surely measure some things, how else did they build those buildings? You've declared we can measure everything important so reality is objective, but quantum physics suggests the things we can't measure may be astronomically large. The physicists who subscribe to the many world's theory believe there's a near infinite assortment of humans we cannot percieve or effectively measure, for example, and our own experience of self is inaccurate as we don't percieve ourselves to be branching in time. I don't think measurements solve the problem of the uncertainty of reality.
- TremendousJudge 5y ago
  >We can simply measure That "simply" is doing a lot of work there. Measurement is never simple, or correct. Yes, it's much, much more precise than it was in the past, but it's never exact. Until May 2019, the magnitude of many of the units composing the SI system of measurement, including most of those used in the measurement of electricity and light, were highly dependent upon the stability of a 142-year-old, golf-ball-sized cylinder of metal stored in a vault in France. The mass of this cylinder drifts when compared to copies, and nobody knows why. Yeah, the effect is super tiny, but the measurements are demonstrably _not precise_