CosmicExplorer

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Posts posted by CosmicExplorer

  3. Posted · Edited by CosmicExplorer

    What is insane to me is that alcohol is not criminalised while less harmful drugs are. Either criminalise alcohol or decriminalise less harmful drugs like: amphetamine, psyhedelics, weed, oxy, codeine, benzos, ketamine, MDMA...

    Alcohol is very addictive and harmful drug. If you would fully comprehend how much suffering, addiction, homelessness, violence was and is caused by alcohol in the world, your head would explode. It just doesn't make sense that it's legal while drugs I mentioned aren't, where is rationality in that? 

  4. Posted

    @Leo Gura The key, which is not much talked about about mindfullness or Satipatthana is that it is not a continuous thing, you're not supossed to try to continiously focus on an object, it's always a punctuated event. Continuous half-assed effort is not the same as punctuated, commited effort. Each punctuated event of contacting an object at extreame level of detail and clarity may only last 200 to 1000 ms. It's more like doing reps in the gym. I highly recommend you listen to deconstructing yourself podcast, eposide "Am I mindful right now" with Michael Taft and Kenneth Folk in which they discuss exactly this misunderstanding of what mindfullness is.

  5. Posted

    Hardcore definition of enlightenment: someone who eliminated all suffering and/or Duhkha*

    * Definition of suffering - "Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, may be an experience of unpleasantness or aversion, possibly associated with the perception of harm or threat of harm in an individual"
    What Duḥkha means according to Wiki:
    "Duḥkha is a term found in the Upanishads and Buddhist texts, meaning anything that is "uneasy, uncomfortable, unpleasant, difficult, causing pain or sadness"

    That person can endure professional torture for an indefinite time with no suffering, aversion. He/she can easily sit for 16 or more hours meditating without back support, dullness, or distraction.

    Whether there's anybody like that in the world or has ever been is questionable, whether one can stay alive for a prolonged period in that state is also questionable.

    Soft definition of enlightenment:

    like you said "A person who's ordinary experience is without the separateness of I and external world." so someone who doesn't have the felt "center to the experience" that is the self, typically felt in the head

     

     

     

  7. Posted

    1 hour ago, LordFall said:

    but there are cars driving around me now so like there must be individual humans with a different conscious experience than me currently driving them right? 

    If people are driving cars in a dream, does that mean there must be individual humans with different conscious experiences, or you're just dreaming them up/imagining them?

     

    1 hour ago, LordFall said:

    How would you explain this? I do feel like when I'm on psychedelics or even sober sometimes I have nondual experiences where basically the world seem to react/unfold in synchronicity to my thoughts but that's not all the time and that also doesn't explain where TVs come from. I swear I've never built a single TV in my life. 

    You haven't gotten deep enough on psychedelics

  9. Posted

    Typical "normie" interactions with humans are not interesting to me at all, so if I have to be social it drains me and feels like a job. Just being myself doesn't work well, probably because i'm somewhat neurodivergent. As for the need for human interaction, I suspect I'm on a very end of normal distribution, I can not have any social interaction for months and it doesn't bother me at all.

  10. Posted · Edited by CosmicExplorer

    On 22.07.2024 at 9:40 PM, Paradoxed said:

    Leo has also said things like "You can't throw up when you haven't eaten anything for 4 hours in advance" seemingly trying to convince people not to worry about doing 5meo alone. But others here have claimed that they didn't eat in advance, and still ended up throwing up. This is concerning to suggest people are generally safe to do this drug alone without a facilitator if they don't eat in advance.

    I also have to strongly disagree here with Leo. I'm very prone to nausea in general, even sober. And I can easly vomit on drugs when not eating anything for 12 hours previously, even. That's also part of the reason why I don't want to do higher doses of any tryptamines, I always get very strong nausea no matter if I've just eaten something or been fasting for 12+h, and it destroys my trips and feels like shit. Nothing helps for that kind of nausea too, ginger extract does absolutley nothing

  11. Posted · Edited by CosmicExplorer

    Weed has always gave me anxiety, I don't like it. 

    11 hours ago, Holymoly said:

    its numbs away the pain

    Neither it numbs away my pains, it has never helped me with pain. Weird how different drugs work for different people.

    In terms of hedonic/painkilling/feel good effect for me:

    Opioids>mephedrone>benzos>MDMA>GHB>alcohol>amphetamine>DXM>caffeine>LSD(low dose)>weed>nicotine>DPH

    But it also depends on my current mood to some degree, it's not as straightfoward

     

  13. Posted

    @DianaFr By brain activity I mean brain metabolism, measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), or magnetoencephalography (MEG), in healthy humans (or rats), compared to placebo.

    5 hours ago, DianaFr said:

    brain activity is such a wide concept, it literally means nothing if you say it's decreased/increased. Brain activity measured by what and under what experimental conditions, compared to what, induced, blocked, modulated by what, what organism, mouse, rat, human, cell culture or multiple, in what condition, healthy/diseased, wild type/knockout, etc. And ultimately what's your point?? If you present such a wide statement and don't relate it to anything, then it's a little difficult to have a productive discussion

    You're missing a point, those details don't matter in the context of what I was saying: "Anesthetic drugs increase brain activity. Metabolically the brain under anesthesia is further away from a state in which the dead brain is than in a normal sober waking state, and the brain in a normal sober waking state is further away from the dead brain than the brain under LSD, psilocybin or DMT"

    What matters for my claim is whether or not the overall brain metabolism is increased, decreased, or stays the same under psychedelics (and anesthesia) vs placebo. In a dead brain, metabolism ceases.

    5 hours ago, DianaFr said:

    brain activity is such a wide concept, it literally means nothing if you say it's decreased/increased

    No. It means a lot for the sake of discussing metaphysics. According to materialism, consciousness is brain activity (a totally inactive brain is, after all, a dead and unconscious brain under materialism)

    5 hours ago, DianaFr said:

    Can you point to a specific piece of data that is in line with your statement? 

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1119598109

    pnas.1119598109fig04.jpeg

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15179026/ (in rats)

    "Human EEG studies with serotonergic psychedelics consistently report a broadband spectral power decrease (delta to gamma) most pronounced within the alpha band (8–12 Hz) and a decrease in functional connectivity and integrity of networks [21,22,23,24,25,26]. On the other hand, increases in higher frequencies (gamma oscillations, 30 Hz and above) have been also described [27,28,29]; however, the effects are hard to interpret due to typical contamination related to increased tension of the facial muscles. MEG, in contrast to EEG, is devoid of this contamination [30], and on the contrary shows a decrease in oscillations within the gamma range [31]."

    https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1518377113

    F5.large.jpg

    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15179026/

    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-51974-4

     

    Anesthesia:

    https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(24)00446-X?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS089662732400446X%3Fshowall%3Dtrue

     

     

  14. Posted

    7 hours ago, DianaFr said:

    I suggest you base your point on peer-reviewed publications from respectable journals

    If you post study directly and say psychedelics decrease brain activity, it's the same reaction

    7 hours ago, DianaFr said:

    For scientific people, whenever you present a blog post as an evidence, especially on a controversial topic, it's an automatic downvote. It could help if you presented data with a better validity

     

    6 hours ago, DianaFr said:

    Another question - what do you mean by brain activity? What in particular is being decreased by psychedelics and is that supposed to be beneficial or detrimental or it depends? I'm not an expert on the subject by any means - just curious. I quickly checked the literature and found an article in eLife* which looks at LSD and brain connectivity. It's a neuroimaging study that suggests that some brain regions present increased connectivity (increased interaction) in some regions and decreased connectivity in others compared to placebo

    This is precisely the reason why this time I thought it would be better to post the link to his blog post which explains it in more detail. The brain connectivity in psychedelic studies is notoriously misinterpreted as the brain activity/metabolism of the brain increasing. You can have more brain activity and less connectivity and vice versa. "what the paper shows is that, although brain activity, as measured with MEG, has decreased, the activity that remains is more synchronized across brain regions"

     

  15. Posted · Edited by CosmicExplorer

    Every time I comment anything about psychedelics decreasing brain activity/metabolism, I get downvoted into oblivion. They either don't even read the studies or misinterpret them. There's never a valid critique, either straight up denial or ad hominem type of argument.

    Screenshot 2024-07-20 at 17-38-00 Researchers have discovered how general anesthetic drugs induces unconsciousness in adult rhesus macaque monkeys by causing brain activity to become unstable Findings could lead to better anest[...].png

    https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1e70w9g/comment/ldx3a2p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

    If you mention to them for example that the hypothesis "other people exist beyond my mind" is unfalsifiable, they'll immediately label you as crazy. It's shocking that people who pride themselves on being scientific, logical, and rational, are cherry-picking when and how much they want to be scientific, and are in full denial about it. I mean I guess water is wet and what did I even expect, but still I naively thought they were not as dogmatic. I considered making a post on askscience or some similar subreddit explaining my frustration but realized that there's no point. There's no discussion with them. If it potentially threatens their preconceived notions, they'll deny, downvote you, and call you unscientific (oh irony).

     

  16. Posted · Edited by CosmicExplorer

    I've seen my friend (pretty shy/insecure personality, not enlightened at all, never meditated) taking 7g of potent dried shrooms and almost nothing happened. He was unsure if he was feeling anything from it or it was a placebo. Psychedelics don't work on some people and it means nothing. Also, you never know how much actual LSD was in 2.5 tabs he took.

    Frank claims he eradicated all aversion but still suffers from pain which doesn't make sense. You need an ego to have a conversation so that's already contradictory to me.

    Oh and btw psychedelics certainly work on Daniel Ingram and Culadasa so...

  17. Posted

    11 hours ago, bambi said:

    I guess if I could sum it up: they are claiming that the negative emotional states of conciousness are gone, the contractions associated with that are gone, the pain associated with it are gone, the escapisms/compulsions associated with it are gone, the sense of identity creaitng the personal linear self is gone, and along with the default mode of time has changed to non-linear etc etc

    OK, but suffering associated with that is maybe like max 35% of total human suffering. There's still a shit load of human/animal mental/physical suffering that only perhaps fentanyl/heroin can put a big dent in and it doesn't work long-term due to tolerance/withdrawal.

  18. Posted

    "The Far Out Initiative is a Public Benefit Biotechnology Company focused on developing technological solutions to the problem of involuntary suffering in human and non-human animals"

    "In 2019, scientists discovered a woman with a new form of congenital pain insensitivity that left her virtually immune not only to physical pain but to psychological pain as well.

    Unlike other forms of congenital pain insensitivity, her condition left her blissfully unaffected by fear, sadness, anger, anxiety, and grief"

    "On May 24th, 2023, University College London released its landmark paper investigating the molecular basis of this strange new pain insensitivity syndrome titled "Molecular Basis of FAAH-Out Associated Pain Insensitivity," in which it was revealed that this "Feel Good Syndrome" was caused by two simple genetic mutations affecting the FAAH"

    "This "Feel Good Syndrome" could be replicated using gene editing technologies like CRISPR in humans and livestock animals"

    That would be insane if they can do that. If we genetically engineer cows, chickens... With 10x the anandamide levels, I think it's very moral thing to do. The amount of suffering in the world that can potentialy be prevented by that mutation is insane.

    https://faroutinitiative.com/

  19. Posted

    Almost all reasons for emotional pain and emotions are arbitrary. The stronger the mental illness, the more it applies, but it also applies to completely average and normal people. Let me explain what I mean by that

    What I mean by that is let's say you feel irritated by something, feel guilt about something, or angry about something, or feel lonely, or anxious about something. Or even positive states like you somehow feel hopeful, energetic, and are in a generally good mood, problems seem very manageable, having a "good day". And in the moment it really feels like you feel guilt because of situation X, but actually, you're just in a guilty mood/lens, and in a guilty mood/lens that you're having right now, tends to skew everything towards feeling guilty about it. If you would be in a different mood, the exact same thoughts would not cause you to feel like that.

    Reckful talks about the same phenomena here:

    When he's depressed, it seems like he is depressed because he's thinking that everything has no purpose, but it turns out that it's not the reason because when his lens/mood switches to normal or mania, he doesn't mind thinking that everything has no purpose, he still feels happy even when thinking like that.

    I've discovered exactly the same thing by doing many experiments on myself. I would be feeling intense anxiety/guilt/anger because seemingly Y reason at the moment, I'd be like "ok let's see, maybe it's truly a reason why I feel like that" and I would set an alarm in 8 days on my phone to check how I would be feeling about that exact Y reason. And 8 days later my phone notification appears, so I check and try to bring exactly the same thoughts that seemingly caused me that feeling, and pretty much every single time it no longer felt like that at all, the same set of information I'm bringing to mind and yet completely different feeling about it results from it.

    If Reckful would feel depressed because of the thought "everything has no purpose" or I because of thought XYZ, then bringing that thought to mind would result in feeling depressed, no matter how we currently feel, but it's not. The easiest way to demonstrate that to somebody would be to give them bipolar disorder and make them do the experiments I mentioned.

    But It also applies to people without mental illness, in fact, the line between mental illness and not mental illness is arbitrary (I'm absolutely not saying that depression isn't real or smth, just that mood fluctuates in cycles, in normal people too, just to a much much lesser degree) "normal" people also have something like bipolar just only a tiny micro version of it, and most probably don't even notice that their mood cyclicly change.

    It's really surprising to me that even many therapists and psychiatrists believe that thoughts create mood. When actually it's a reverse causality - mood have a tendency to cause certain thoughts. I don't know how common that realization is, I mean I don't think I would've ever discovered that if not for mental illness. I understand how it can be hard to realize it requires a certain mindfulness and doing experiments on yourself actually trying to make your mood bad when having a good mood (which is a weird thing to do lol) and vice versa

  23. Posted

    @Schizophonia Only in extremely high doses for ketamine. No evidence of DXM causing Olney’s lesions even at lethal doses

    https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6264286_Oral_administration_of_dextromethorphan_does_not_produce_neuronal_vacuolation_in_the_rat_brain

    Quote

    To determine whether dextromethorphan produces these characteristic lesions, dextromethorphan was administered orally either as a single dose of 120mg/kg to female rats, or daily for 30 days at doses of 5-400 mg/(kg day) to male rats and 5-120mg/(kg day) to female rats. Brains were examined microscopically for evidence of neuronal vacuolation (4-6h postdose) and neurodegeneration ( approximately 24 or 48h postdose). Administration of dextromethorphan at 120mg/(kg day) in females, and at > or =150mg/(kg day) in males produced marked behavioral changes, indicative of neurologic effects. Mortality occurred at the highest doses administered. There were no detectable neuropathologic changes following single or repeated oral administration of dextromethorphan at any dose.

     

     

  24. Posted · Edited by CosmicExplorer

    DXM is a very interesting substance. In a lot of countries, you can buy it (even the pure version with the only ingredient being DXM) in the form of cough syrup or gel pills OTC. It's a dissociative, with somewhat similar effects to ketamine. I've tried it a few times and the biggest problem for me is very strong nausea and vomiting, and the only solution is to take it together with Diphenhydramine (DPH) but it makes the effects worse and DPH is generally a very unhealthy deliriant drug which use is associated with dementia. Many people don't experience nausea/vomiting from DXM or only mild.

    Chronic DXM use is associated with a reduced risk of dementia: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15333175221124952

    Quote

    Dextromethorphan (DXM) has been reported to reduce neuronal damage and neurodegeneration in animal and human models
    We used a Cox regression hazard model to identify risk factors of dementia during 16 years of follow-up, and the results indicate that a significantly lower percentage of subjects with DXM use (P < .001) developed dementia compared with those without DXM use (11.38%, 4541/39 895 vs 18.66%, 29 785/159 580). After adjustment for age and other variables [adjusted hazard ratio: .567 (95% confidence interval: .413-.678, P < .001)], this study also demonstrated that DXM use appeared to reduce the risk of developing dementia. DXM use may potentially provide a protective effect against dementia.

    Furthermore, there is a dose dependent pattern, where higher dosage of DXM relates with a lower risk of dementia.

    Hazard ratio for no DXM use 1 (reference)

    Hazard ratio for 1-30mg a day 0.754

    Hazard ratio for 31-90mg a day 0.563

    Hazard ratio for ≥91mg a day 0.442

    DXM use is associated with a reduced risk of hearing loss: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32878128/

    Quote

    In human study, we used a Cox regression hazard model to indicate that a significantly lower percentage individuals developed SNHL compared with and without DXM use (0.44%, 175/39,895 vs. 1.05%, 1675/159,580, p < 0.001). After adjustment for age and other variables [adjusted hazard ratio: 0.725 (95% confidence interval: 0.624-0.803, p < 0.001)], this study also demonstrated that DXM use appeared to reduce the risk of developing SNHL. This animal study demonstrated that DXM significantly attenuated noise-induced hearing loss. In human study, DXM use may have a protective effect against SNHL.

    It has profound anti-inflammatory, anti-arthritic, and Immunomodulatory effects:

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5595833/

  25. Posted · Edited by CosmicExplorer

    9 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

    There are different kinds of tinnitus. One kind comes from sound damage to the ears, other kind is brain related. Medications can also damage the ears or the brain.

    From what I've heard there's always at least some minimal hearing loss with tinnitus. Some people have huge hearing loss and no tinnitus tho

    https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/18agdm3/individuals_who_report_tinnitus_which_present_as/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button