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

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 [...]? At first glance this might sound like a reasonable thought but I have never been convinced by this idea. The mistake is to think about you in isolation. You alone might be unable to tell whether reality is like your normal perception or like your perception under the influence of psychedelics, but you are not alone, you can compare what different people perceive. You will probably find that normal perception mostly agrees while perception under the influence of psychedelics varies. Why would that be if psychedelics allow you to perceive true reality? And you do not have to stop there, maybe all humans have the same kind of distortions in their perception of reality anchored deeply in our DNA. But we do not have to rely on human perception, we have invented devices to measure and quantify about everything we know of. You can just point a camera at a wall and figure out if it solid white or if it is covered in moving color-changing fractal patterns. Sure, it might be possible that our perception is warpend in such a strange way that even devices we build would be unable to make this difference noticeable, but that seems really unlikely to me. So for all the agreement we have between our perception and what our measuring devices report, I would say our perception of reality is pretty accurate, at least within the limits of the capabilities of our senses.