4 ms·

I don't know about "religiously" but did you have a better idea? Am I supposed to believe suppositions as though they are fact, for literally no reason?

lend000 2y ago
You could instead say something like "I don't know." Unfortunately, a lot of people (especially engineers) default to attempting to discredit people's strange experiences and instead regurgitate some hand-wavy materialistic explanation that is incorrect or at least so incomplete and hand-wavy as to just derail the conversation instead of improving it. I was this guy when I was younger, but I prefer being open-minded nowadays. Specifically with regard to people's experiences, I tend to treat them with a strong curiosity. You can never really tell on the internet, but in person, I think people are generally quite honest and don't really lie about things that don't benefit them in some way. If you approach things with an open mind, people tend to be more open with their experiences, and it seems like at least 10% of people I know well and possibly many more have had some inexplicable experiences of the variety described by the parent poster (albeit usually over a much shorter period).
- deciplex 2y ago
  To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism. I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - lend000 2y ago
    You actually gave a pretty good example of what I mean here: > She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact. (Human) memory is extremely unreliable. This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much while it's also rather insulting to the author of the original comment. The way I see it, the problem is not that you are skeptical, but that you seek to explain away one piece so that you can dismiss the whole thing. I see it as starting with what you already believe (that the parent's experiences are invalid) and working backwards from there, instead of starting with what you're given (that the parent claims to have experienced some incredible things) and then trying to build the best explanation. We will likely have a compelling explanation for experiences like the parent's someday, perhaps centuries in the future, but such knowledge will only be discovered people who do not immediately dismiss evidence that sits wholly outside existing scientific understanding (even if it ends up being a purely mechanistic brain circuitry phenomenon).
    - kranke155 2y ago
      Thank you. The way I see it is, electricity was there before we knew what it was. If you explained what electricity is to someone in the 1300s, they would call you insane and maybe burn you at the stake. Yet now we know what electricity is. We know what lightning is. The scientific mindset has so impregnated our society we have a tendency to say “if it hasn’t been mapped it doesn’t exist”. Yet maps (science) are only a map of something that existed far before we understood it. Mountains were there before plate tectonics. Lightning was there before Ben Franklin. I think the psychedelic world is something we will understand far far into the future, and the explanation will likely be as weird as it would be to explain electricity to someone in an ancient Egypt.
      - deciplex 2y ago
        The compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. It's perhaps not as comprehensive and well-understood as Maxwell's equations, but they are well-studied. What happened to you, while fascinating on a personal level, is not a scientific mystery. You accuse me of dismissing your experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

lend000 2y ago

You could instead say something like "I don't know." Unfortunately, a lot of people (especially engineers) default to attempting to discredit people's strange experiences and instead regurgitate some hand-wavy materialistic explanation that is incorrect or at least so incomplete and hand-wavy as to just derail the conversation instead of improving it. I was this guy when I was younger, but I prefer being open-minded nowadays. Specifically with regard to people's experiences, I tend to treat them with a strong curiosity. You can never really tell on the internet, but in person, I think people are generally quite honest and don't really lie about things that don't benefit them in some way. If you approach things with an open mind, people tend to be more open with their experiences, and it seems like at least 10% of people I know well and possibly many more have had some inexplicable experiences of the variety described by the parent poster (albeit usually over a much shorter period).

deciplex 2y ago
To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism. I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lend000 2y ago
  You actually gave a pretty good example of what I mean here: > She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact. (Human) memory is extremely unreliable. This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much while it's also rather insulting to the author of the original comment. The way I see it, the problem is not that you are skeptical, but that you seek to explain away one piece so that you can dismiss the whole thing. I see it as starting with what you already believe (that the parent's experiences are invalid) and working backwards from there, instead of starting with what you're given (that the parent claims to have experienced some incredible things) and then trying to build the best explanation. We will likely have a compelling explanation for experiences like the parent's someday, perhaps centuries in the future, but such knowledge will only be discovered people who do not immediately dismiss evidence that sits wholly outside existing scientific understanding (even if it ends up being a purely mechanistic brain circuitry phenomenon).
  - kranke155 2y ago
    Thank you. The way I see it is, electricity was there before we knew what it was. If you explained what electricity is to someone in the 1300s, they would call you insane and maybe burn you at the stake. Yet now we know what electricity is. We know what lightning is. The scientific mindset has so impregnated our society we have a tendency to say “if it hasn’t been mapped it doesn’t exist”. Yet maps (science) are only a map of something that existed far before we understood it. Mountains were there before plate tectonics. Lightning was there before Ben Franklin. I think the psychedelic world is something we will understand far far into the future, and the explanation will likely be as weird as it would be to explain electricity to someone in an ancient Egypt.
    - deciplex 2y ago
      The compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. It's perhaps not as comprehensive and well-understood as Maxwell's equations, but they are well-studied. What happened to you, while fascinating on a personal level, is not a scientific mystery. You accuse me of dismissing your experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.