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The truth is fully accessible through reason, you don’t need to take drugs to know things
by bowsamic 1y ago
The truth is fully accessible through reason, you don’t need to take drugs to know things
- LoganDark 1y agoNo, but LSD helped me see things that couldn't be learned from outside. For some reason, it helps me recall childhood memories better. Sure maybe there's some guided therapy session that could have done that, but LSD gives it to me for free, along with a whole lot of other stuff.
- bowsamic 1y agoAll knowledge that can be gained through LSD is contingent and experiential, not universal and certain I’m well aware through my own testing EDIT: I’m not saying it is useless information for your life but it is particular to your life, not truths of the universe like the person I replied to claimed
- LoganDark 1y agoOh, of course, nothing about LSD can give me access to things that my brain just doesn't have access to. It can help with the things that already are in my brain though.
- bowsamic 1y agoYour brain does have access to all rational truth
- LoganDark 1y agoMy brain has the ability to claim anything it wants as truth. I prefer for my truth to either be consistent with an objective or empirical truth, or be measurably opposed to truths I disagree with (and to a known degree). I don't always achieve this and I'm not always the best at being open-minded but it is the goal, I would think.
- bowsamic 1y agoEmpirical truth is a lesser form of truth, look for necessary truth, purely rational
- adastra22 1y agoWha? Empirical truth is a lesser form of truth? What are you getting at there?
- bowsamic 1y agoEmpirical observation is contingent, so cannot be the basis of certain knowledge.
- adastra22 1y agoEverything is contingent on empirical observation. Our rational brains are the product of pattern matching algorithms trained on empirical reality. There is no basis for rational thought that is not downstream of empiricism.
- adastra22 1y agoDid it let you recall childhood memories, or invent new ones? How would you know the difference?
- sethammons 1y agoHistoric events can be corroborated.
- LoganDark 1y agoThis. There are certain events that we already know happened. We have approximate dates, and we have talked about the events with others, who have given us their impressions of how we acted at the time. But sometimes we don't remember what our internal thought processes were at the time, or we simply held some certain belief about what had occurred (e.g. "I just decided I didn't want to go to school some day", or "I wanted to go to school but ADHD wouldn't let me!"). Sure LSD can give us some creative visualizations, but sometimes it also gives us ideas that just make more sense than what we had before. Instead of some spooky brain disorder just randomly Stopping me from going to school that day, randomly, maybe it was actually a fight between alters (yay for dissociative identity disorder!). And the more I thought about it (especially being - apparently !! but clearly - able to see what was me and what was the other during those fights), the more true it seemed, especially given all the more instances of this I've discovered over time, and that it's part of a longstanding pattern, but I digress. More and more has come out over the months and years that builds a progressively clearer picture of why we act the way we do and why we've done certain things we've done; why I feel certain things I do, why I remember certain things I do and why I don't remember certain things I don't. I'm not seeing any universal truth; I am discovering our own truth, and we are discovering our own truths, and this has done a lot of good for us, especially where we gain a better understanding of our past behavior in friendships (and elsewhere), and where we can still improve, etc. Even if everything we've learned through LSD were false, I wouldn't even really care because we've still uncovered and figured out so much through this (much of it we've discussed with various others who were there during past events) that we are incredibly grateful to now know. So overall I think the experience for us has been positive, that we have gained much from it, and that we may stand to gain more over time since we are a regular user.
- krzat 1y agoReason is overrated. Knowing that smoking is unhealthy is not sufficient to stop oneself from smoking.
- bowsamic 1y agoIt’s not overrated if you want to know the universal truths of reality, which is what the person I replied to spoke of. The truth is fully reasonable
- haswell 1y ago> The truth is fully reasonable Doesn’t this effectively hand wave away the hard problem of consciousness? i.e. even a purely reason-based understanding of truth must acknowledge that the only thing we can be certain actually exists is the mind. With no true understanding of how the mind functions, and giant gaps in our understanding of existence, the idea that universal truth can even be comprehended — much less mapped wholly onto humans capacity for reason - is just a belief. An article of faith. It seems to me that a purely reason-based worldview must by definition acknowledge that a statement like “the truth is fully reasonable” is untenable at worst and at best just a prediction.
- bowsamic 1y agoWe don’t need to understand how the mind works to derive the necessary metaphysical categories. That’s something Kant got wrong
- haswell 1y agoI'm not sure upon what basis you think such a claim can be definitively made. Nor does declaring "Kant got this wrong" help the argument. For sake of argument, let's say the simulation hypothesis is true. Would you acknowledge that the implications of such a thing being true would have vastly different metaphysical properties than other hypotheses, e.g. "consciousness is a fundamental property of existence and all matter is conscious"? The mind is literally the only thing we can be certain exists. We've made so much progress scientifically mapping the territory available for us to explore, that I think many people have lost sight of the vastness of the gap between what we actually know and what we have yet to understand.
- bevan 1y agoYou don’t need to take drugs to know things, but reason only covers a portion of what can be known. Reason doesn’t really help one understand the nature of experience itself. That’s a whole different kind of meta-factual knowing, an infinite subject that some people approach through meditation (and psychedelics too).
- bowsamic 1y agoReason can know the entirety of all necessary truth. There are experiential contingent things such as what I ate for breakfast that it of course cannot know. But it can know all universal truth, such as all metaphysical and philosophical truth I’m a Hegelian though so I’m biased
- jrflowers 1y agoI like this because it immediately accounts for truth not arrived at though reason and then just slaps on the word “universal” as the descriptor for the subset of truth reachable through reason. It is convincing because universal is a big word
- bowsamic 1y agoWell the reasonable truth is not universal as in exhaustive but as in it always holds. I mean universal as in necessary, not contingent. Psychedelic and personal experience is merely contingent
- jancsika 1y agoAt least for human affairs, there's more to it than that. For example, we don't only care about humans having an understanding of, say, a moral choice. We also care about whether or not a given human can/will make a moral choice. The latter happens in a different part of the brain. Sharpening one's teeth on the mere understanding of a moral truth is unlikely to improve one's ability to carry out even a well-understood moral act if that same person doesn't have experience doing it. On the other hand, personal experience-- say, with a mentor from a similar background, or even just grooming horses with a group of similarly cantankerous teens while talking about their feelings-- can sharpen a person's ability to make that moral choice, even on a consistent basis. I'm not a fan of psychedelics, but people have told me they were instrumental in guiding them to make better choices-- sometimes choices that they knew were right but couldn't bring themselves to make. It is of course totally reasonable to categorize all of this-- neurology, human self-knowledge, behavior, and socialization-- under the heading of reasonable truth. But for some reason, HN fans of reason of generally exclude it. So when you say, "The truth is fully accessible through reason," I agree in this larger sense. But the larger sense isn't the common usage, so it's often easier to just say you're wrong. :) Edit: clarification
- golergka 1y agoQualia. Black and white room.
- jrflowers 1y agoThis makes sense because experience doesn’t affect how a person reasons. This is why all truth is agreed upon
- bowsamic 1y agoI know you’re being sarcastic but indeed if we reasoned properly we would all agree
- sethammons 1y agoA common fallacy is that if you and I are smart then we will agree. Conflicts of interest and personal value systems and world views provide easy inlets for various counter points.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- gchamonlive 1y agoI've seen your post below about your bad trip. I fully respect your position, but that is not my experience. I realised I can't access things I find important through my reason. I'm just too dependent on my body for my mind to function, so I just followed what my body was telling me. But I agree that you don't need to take drugs. That's why my advice wasn't a definitive one. It's an invitation for people to consider what they want in their lives. Wish you all the best truthfully.