5 ms·

Psychedelic perception is also repeatable. And sober perception is not reliable.

by sedivy94 5y ago

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.
  - jklinger410 5y ago
    X ray vision, heat vision, electron microscopes all exist and translate things outside of our visual ranges into something we can perceive. None of those validate LSD induced hallucinations. If you have some ideas that those technologies are wrong, go enter the field and prove it! Until then this conjecture is intellectually lazy.
    - pmichaud 5y ago
      Suppose for a moment that you and the people talking to you in this thread are talking past each other. What do you imagine the other people are trying to communicate to you, in their own terms?
      - jklinger410 5y ago
        They are positing a that all reality is unknowable because our senses can be fooled, and our brain is an unreliable narrator (if you will). No matter what evidence I bring to the table, they will simply say "but what if you are being fooled?"
        malermeister 5y ago
        I just wanted to give you props for actually understanding the point being made. You don't need to agree with it, but at least you can see where I'm coming from! I understand your frustration with there not really being an objective argument that would be able to deal with this thought experiment - I myself argued your case for a long time! For all practical uses, the distinction is mostly pointless anyways, but it does make for some fun philosophical thought experiments! :-)
        pmichaud 5y ago
        Yeah I'm not them, but I think that's close. What I would say is that our sensory data + mental models of that data are abstractions over whatever reality actually is, which I am guessing you agree with. On top of that I think something else that I am guessing you don't agree with: I think those abstractions are pretty arbitrary and hide important "implementation details" of reality that could turn out to have a big impact on what anything is or what we might do with it. I am guessing the crux here is about how much those abstract models are constrained by the underlying reality. It seems like you believe that because sensory information/models converge in a repeatable and consistent way, that it must be close to accurate and complete, where by complete I don't mean we, eg, can "see" the whole EM spectrum, but that there being such a thing as an EM spectrum that we can only see part of gives us a reliable way to infer that our senses aren't missing any substantial chunks of conception space. What I remain open to is that the abstractions are sort of self referential in that we're in a self constrained region of "potential sensory space," that we can sense and verify the things we can sense and verify, but that raw reality is deceptively huge and complex and a radically different sensory+model configuration might give us a qualitatively different picture of raw reality, even if it overlaps quite a bit with our current sensory bubble. My main reason for being open to this is that it seems like QFT is an existence proof of our subjective awareness of reality being fundamentally askew from how raw reality actually works, and in fact we ended up narrowly optimized to experience things as we do and act as we do because of replication/evolution not because of correctness or how well our sensory abstraction carve reality at the actual joints. I am guessing our disagreement is how much extra/unknown space there is, or how useful fundamentally different abstractions could be in interacting with raw reality stuff.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  We’re at the allegory of the cave level here. You gotta pass that point to understand this. But you also don’t have to understand this. It’s okay to not understand it.
  - jklinger410 5y ago
    What if like, we're just in a raindrop in some cloud in another universe? Woah. It's like the allegory of the cave man. Have fun with that!
- circlemaker 5y ago
  Cameras don't see colors, a wall or a texture on that wall. Cameras merely capture a grid of values. All color perception, object recognition and figure segmentation happens in the brain.

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.
- jklinger410 5y ago
  X ray vision, heat vision, electron microscopes all exist and translate things outside of our visual ranges into something we can perceive. None of those validate LSD induced hallucinations. If you have some ideas that those technologies are wrong, go enter the field and prove it! Until then this conjecture is intellectually lazy.
  - pmichaud 5y ago
    Suppose for a moment that you and the people talking to you in this thread are talking past each other. What do you imagine the other people are trying to communicate to you, in their own terms?
    - jklinger410 5y ago
      They are positing a that all reality is unknowable because our senses can be fooled, and our brain is an unreliable narrator (if you will). No matter what evidence I bring to the table, they will simply say "but what if you are being fooled?"
      - malermeister 5y ago
        I just wanted to give you props for actually understanding the point being made. You don't need to agree with it, but at least you can see where I'm coming from! I understand your frustration with there not really being an objective argument that would be able to deal with this thought experiment - I myself argued your case for a long time! For all practical uses, the distinction is mostly pointless anyways, but it does make for some fun philosophical thought experiments! :-)
      - pmichaud 5y ago
        Yeah I'm not them, but I think that's close. What I would say is that our sensory data + mental models of that data are abstractions over whatever reality actually is, which I am guessing you agree with. On top of that I think something else that I am guessing you don't agree with: I think those abstractions are pretty arbitrary and hide important "implementation details" of reality that could turn out to have a big impact on what anything is or what we might do with it. I am guessing the crux here is about how much those abstract models are constrained by the underlying reality. It seems like you believe that because sensory information/models converge in a repeatable and consistent way, that it must be close to accurate and complete, where by complete I don't mean we, eg, can "see" the whole EM spectrum, but that there being such a thing as an EM spectrum that we can only see part of gives us a reliable way to infer that our senses aren't missing any substantial chunks of conception space. What I remain open to is that the abstractions are sort of self referential in that we're in a self constrained region of "potential sensory space," that we can sense and verify the things we can sense and verify, but that raw reality is deceptively huge and complex and a radically different sensory+model configuration might give us a qualitatively different picture of raw reality, even if it overlaps quite a bit with our current sensory bubble. My main reason for being open to this is that it seems like QFT is an existence proof of our subjective awareness of reality being fundamentally askew from how raw reality actually works, and in fact we ended up narrowly optimized to experience things as we do and act as we do because of replication/evolution not because of correctness or how well our sensory abstraction carve reality at the actual joints. I am guessing our disagreement is how much extra/unknown space there is, or how useful fundamentally different abstractions could be in interacting with raw reality stuff.
renewiltord 5y ago
We’re at the allegory of the cave level here. You gotta pass that point to understand this. But you also don’t have to understand this. It’s okay to not understand it.
- jklinger410 5y ago
  What if like, we're just in a raindrop in some cloud in another universe? Woah. It's like the allegory of the cave man. Have fun with that!
circlemaker 5y ago
Cameras don't see colors, a wall or a texture on that wall. Cameras merely capture a grid of values. All color perception, object recognition and figure segmentation happens in the brain.