Scholar

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Everything posted by Scholar

  1. Of course the topic is not to blame, it's the level of consciousness of the people on here. And consciousness of course can be degenerated. It just depends on what you mean by consciousness.
  2. I think this topic actively degenerates the consciousness of anyone on this forum who is engaging in it. There is no maturity to be found here. It's laughable how you guys interact with each other and analyse this conflict.
  3. I'm pretty sure it is related to the brain tingles I get when taking them. It just feels like it targets motivational centers, and the complete annihilation of libido that happens during the trip just continues on. It definitely feels purely like a chemical process happening in the upper part of my brain.
  4. https://www.reddit.com/r/LSD/comments/5ad8f5/no_empathy_feel_less_human_after_bad_trip/ Did some research and I found quite a few of these and similar accounts. There is this delusional idea going around as if LSD and psychedelics could not possibly be harmful to users, and that any negative effect is all psychological. People have different brains, and chemicals can have different effects on them. Not everything is some sort of psychological or spiritual phenomena. Sometimes it's just brain chemistry.
  5. Wasn't that a misunderstanding? I think they "slow down" older phones because the updates can cause a lot more battery consumption for those phones, and I think they also might slow down phones once the batteries have lost a certain percentage of capacity. The court case they lost I am pretty sure is because they have not made this clear to consumers, which really is a technicality. It's not like they slow down the phones so they can sell new phones. I am pretty sure other phones have to do this or suffer the consequences of degradation. The apple hate is a little exaggerated to me. Apple definitely has it's advantages and disadvantages.
  6. I didn't get any awakening, it's basically a microdose. And it's definitely something to do with brain chemistry, because it kills my libido as well, completely.
  7. 5g of magic truffels actually caused me the same symptoms. Felt almost identical to a small dose of LSD. Pretty annoying, it seems like serotogenic psychedelics are just causing my brain to get out of balance in some way that takes longer to recover from.
  8. How has self-help degraded so much, lol.
  9. I am not a dualistc, there is no fundamental distinction between experience and neurons because it is all simply existence, in different forms. The relationship between what we interpret as structures in motion and other types forms of existence, like redness, is fundamentally mysterious. It is one of the infinite ways reality can relate to itself, there is no mechanism beyond the relationship itself. The correlation is the relation, there is nothing more to it. Using the structures in motion (as described by a mathematical, physical system) as causation is more useful than other frameworks, because we have no physical way of interacting with something like vision. We cannot alter the structure of the brain by altering the experience. But we do have ways to interact with the physical structures of the brain, and we can alter the experience that way. Causality is fundamentally a construct. All is caused by Infinity, all relationships emerge fundamentally mysteriously. In the end, what is rational and scientific is not about what is real, but about what leads to functional understanding. Because the picture is not information, the picture is what is hallucinated by the brain to turn the information into functional understanding. The picture you see is informed fundamentally by the information from sensory organs, transformed into a different type of informational landscape using a different substance of existance (visuality). This informational landscaped then is processed via interpretation and pattern recognition. You assume I am a naive realistic or a physicalist. My framework is beyond idealism, materialism and physicalism. When I use terms that remind you of these frameworks, it is so that I can have a conversation with you. There is no causing anything, there simply is a relation. It's not a correlation. What I mean by already existing information is information already present in the brain. I could have an out of body hyperreal dream-experience that my brain can fabricate based on information that only exist within it. In fact, I have had hyperreal dreams that looked more real than reality. If I wasn't lucidly dreaming, I would have believed it was an out of body experience. My brain was capable of reconstructing the entire town I live in, in full detail. OOBE most likely are just such dreams, similar to experiences one can have during psychedelic tripping. It's not a correlation, it's a relation. If I hit you on the head, there will be a difference in your experience. That is not merely a correlation, we know there is a direct relationship. A correlation is when there is an apparent relation, but no evidence for an actual relation. But with the brain and experience, we know there is actually a direct relation. It's not a persistent correlate, it is a persistent relation. You have given no evidence for experience that fall outside of this relationship, or cannot be plausibly explained by this relationship. Therefore, positing new relationships is simply unnecessary and would require evidence to support. I had a hyperreal dream where I saw myself in the mirror of my bathroom. There is no reason to think your experience is not merely a dream. I don't have to provide evidence because I am not making claims about new relationships between experience and the world. So far all evidence suggests that the only relationship experience has to the world is the structure of the brain, and this understanding is in unity with our understanding of the physical nature of the universe, biology and so forth. We have not observed phenomena that necessarily fall outside of this understanding. You can of course make any claims about reality you want, but there is no reason to accept them given basic principles of rationality. Eventually we will develop technology that will be capable of visualizing brain activity, converting your dreams into visual information processed by a computer. When that happens, a lot of the spiritual mumbo jumbo will be put to an end, because we will see the out of body experiences. Everyone will have a gadget at home that will be able to record their visual processing, be it stimulated visual processing, imagination, hallcuination or dreams. Neural networks are capable of processing information and dynamically recreating such information using mathematically stochastic dynamics. Meaning we have an expanation for how imagination is possible (how you can see an apple in your mind, and how your mind can create a new apple that it has not see in that exact form before), as well as hyperreal dreams. You also get similar artifacts in dreams as you get in generative AI, something you can observe if you dream lucidly and pay attention to the visual experience. If you want evidence of this you can take a high dose of LSD. Other than that, there is no metaphysical or physical law that prohibits a brain from being structured in such a way that it would translate stimuli received from the eyes into sounds or other types of substances or information landscapes. Google Synesthesia. Animals have far more senses than five senses, so do humans. In the end, the amount of senses we will develop is determined by how many different types of information can be gathered from the environment. Light is prevalent in the environment, and it provides information that is useful for evolution. So do molecules for smell, energy states for temperature and so forth. If there was some sort of aspect to reality that would provide useful information for an evolutionary organism given the presence of sensory organ, it would most likely have evolved. I doubt plants have individuated consciousness, real time information processing does not provide any benefit to them. Because we have no evidence of animals behaving in ways that would suggest they have gathered information outside of the senses we know they have. Even for bird navigation we have found that they have an organ that can perceive the axis of the magnetic field of the earth. So, we did have behavior that was difficult to explain before we had found those organs, but now we no longer observe such phenomena. It is unlikely that we would miss entire spectrums of behaviors in animals that escape the current notions of sensory information processing, given that we have detected behaviors that have eluded us before we have found by what means animals could have gathered such information. Given the potential usefulness of astral projection, we should see behaviors that indicate such information processing far more frequently in nature. Even if this is not definitive evidence, it is one of the dozens of things we understand about nature that makes your hypothesis more and more unlikely. This is why you have to provide extraordinary evidence to actually show us that these phenomena are real, if you want anyone to take you seriously. Yes, what I rely on are the basic tenants of the scientific method and it's institutions. Basically hyperreal dreams. When I speak of information in this context, we are talking about sensory information. The brain can generate new information given already present information in the brain. When you astral projection, your claim is you have astral sensory organs that gather astral sensory information (you claim you see yourself outside of your own body). No, I am not gathering novel sensory information about the world as we speak, outside of my physical sensory organs.
  10. I just have no motivation to engage in autistic debates in this moment of time. I will continue to provide my assertions and people can make up their own minds. Maybe I will respond to this at some other point but honestly, we are talking past each other.
  11. Weed is way overhyped. Most people are too immature to benefit from it, aside from people with specific medical conditions.
  12. I don't know man, might be good to see a doctor. Never know what these chemicals do to your brain.
  13. It's the same with predator catching videos. It just encourages self-righteousness and witch-hunt mentalities. It degrades society.
  14. Jesus Christ these people are lost, lol.
  15. It makes you less emotionally intelligent and lowers your consciousness in general.
  16. It makes you dumber.
  17. I want to try exercise and maybe cold showers to put me in a nice frame of mind. What other kinds of tricks have you found that improves the trip experience?
  18. Because evolution exploits everything it can, that is how it works. And we are talking about something that seems to be accessible without much modification of the brain even. I would imagine there would be all types of brains and organs that would evolve that are just astral projecting and acquiring information that way.
  19. There is no need to be lucid in the dream. There is no need to escape nightmares. It's okay to be afraid when the tiger is trying to kill you. Lucidity is optional.
  20. There is no need to be conscious of God, God is always conscious of God, and only God exists.
  21. That's bs, everything always is God. Experiencing the inevitable, is a choice you can make, not a biggie.
  22. You implied more brain activity might lead to higher intensity of any given substance of existence (like for example pain). This assumes that a brain with more neurological complexity would experience more pain because there are more neurons within the "pain-structure". But neurological structures might interface with consciousness in a different way, meaning if there is an experience of total pain, it would be achieved with a neurological simplicity of one. This would mean pain would be an off and on switch, stimulating that neurological structure would just lead to total pain. Higher neurological structure would be exploited by nature to make more distinction between total pain and non-pain. A neurological complexity of two could mean that you would have 3 states: No stimulation = no pain, stimulating 1 neuron = half of pain, stimulating 2 neurons (all neurons of that structure) = total pain. As you increase neural complexity, you could have finer and finer steps between total pain and no pain states. You basically divide the pain-substance into different degrees of intensity by having dividing the total neurological structure that is responsible for the given substance. When talking about what the brain does, I am referring to how exactly it relates to consciosuness. In general, we know many things about the brain, how it relates to our senses and so forth. We have no evidence that the brain has any access to information that fall outside of information gathered through senses. By changes in the simulated reality of the brain I mean that the structure and activity of the brain is responsible for how the given bubble of realit (consciousness) is structured. Every single sense or impression you have of reality is a careful orchestration, hallucination. This means, your sense of time, your sense of space, your sense of location within your sense of space and so forth. I believe OBE's are likely just a change of those within the brain, similar to when you are dreaming, using already existing information, but presenting it in a new way. To clarify, I am making a distinction between the brain and consciousness for clarities sake, I am not making metaphysical declarations or implying a dualism of fundamental substance. I am invoking the brain because experience in general is tied to our brain, and I have seen no evidence that there is any other mechanism that would influence or alter our state of mind. We already know the brain is related to consciousness, and it is the only thing that we know of that relates to it. OBEs are dream-like experiences, and dreams are caused due to changes in brain states. There is no evidence that we acquire information outside of what the brain processes when dreaming. You are making the extraordinary claim here, not me. I am simply stating something we already know. If I hit you on the head real hard, it will change your state of consciousness. There is not a singular thing in the world we know of that will alter your experience other than a change in brain-activity. Millions of people have been wrong in the past, they can be wrong now. This should be exceptionally easy to prove if it was true. Until you gather actual evidence, I see no reason to believe it is the case. It is causative. Machine Neural networks cause dream-like information-processing. Your entire sense of reality is hallucinated. The world doesnt look the the way your brain hallucinates it. If I hit you on the head real hard, your sense of reality will permanently change completely. Colors might become sound, sounds might become vision. The world is not dimensional, you only hallucinate it to be that way. We have no evidence whatsoever for what you are positing. You can make up fables all day long, you still cannot explain why evolution is not exploiting any of these mechanisms if they are this significant, if you don't even need sensory apparatuses to perceive the world. Why do all animals in the history of evolution evolve sensory organs if the world could be perceived without them? Even plants have them, and their information is clearly limited to the information their sensory organs transmit to them. This theory is so absurd, to goes contrary to everything we know, so you need to have some really good explanation for how everything we know about evolution is false. I don't believe this to be the case. If such astral-perception was possible, most animals would have evolved this. I don't take such claims seriously anymore. People are fundamentally delusional, including scientists and researchers. Physicalism is just a framework to understand the world, people who take it as metaphysical grounding are lost. I highly doubt these experiences are what you think they are. The question is not whether or not you can engage in OBE, but whether or not OBE actually are what you claim they are, an actual stepping outside of your body and acquiring information that you didn't gain through sensory input. And I in general don't take individuals seriously in regards to this.
  23. Intention is probably the most important. If you can turn it into a ritual and feel the significance of what you achieve, that will be what will guide your trip. I intuit the best way to do it is to have an issue you work on, and you keep working on it until you get somehow stuck. Once you get stuck, and you have the will to resolve it, with that intention, you can trip and your brain handles the rest. So, it might be good to take some time off the internet, a day or so of just focusing on the issue, and then create a kind of climax using the substance to come to a resolution. Frame of mind is important, and it will be potentiated if you are strongly in a certain mind-frame. Quickly meditating an hour before your trip on what you want to do and intend is good, but it is far, far more helpful to do like a week of constantly contemplating, maybe obsessing over the particular issue, and then set your mind clearly once you go on the trip. You will gain a feel for what a mind-frame is, different types of intensities of mind-frames and so forth, as you gain experience.
  24. Jesus christ why do you have to do the snippet thing! I don't think increase in brain activity necessarily means increase in intensity of brain states. For example, you could have a neural structure of two, which taps into the substance of pain, and have it be infinite pain vs no pain, two states. Adding neurons might not lead to higher pain experiences, but simply to more distinctions between these states, so you can half it, quarter it and so forth. But we simply do not understand how the brain works, so we can't say anything about how these relationships in the end work. Sure, but the brain doesn't work like a computer. It's not "more activity = more intense activity", the entire mystery is that certain structures give rise to substances, like color and so forth. We don't know what even truly constitutes brain-consciousness activity, we are just making wild guesses. Obviously this is more sophisticated than more = more. I'm not a physicalist so I don't subscribe to these notions. We aren't discussing intensity of experience or intelligence, but whether or not information can be gathered as if you had a second body that was floating through space. What do you think happens, that somehow the universe makes a copy of your physicality, lets it float in space, photons reach your astral projection and you can see through your eyes like you can when you are in your body? It just makes no sense on so many levels. And again, we have no reason to assume this is the case, given that such experiences do not lead to information that could not have been acquired otherwise, and further problems like why evolution did not explout these mechanisms if they are so easily accessed. But we have a model of the brain that is explanatory of such dreams, we have hecking machine neural networks that can basically simulate dreams now. it's nothing fancy. It doesn't make sense that you could see the world as if you had a body if it is not your body. Why would you see the world in vision, if you have no "astral" eyes that can interact with photons? And if they do interact with photons, we should be able to test this. If you go beyond your goggled sensory experience, you should be able to acquire information that you otherwise could not, and evolution should have found a mechanism to exploit such states. This isn't good evidence. I have premonition type of experiences all the time, and they are incredibly strange. I am not a physicalist so I can fathom the possibility that they are mysterious, but I am not epistemically founded to make conclusions about OBE, especially if I have not recorded such an incident and clearly established that I couldn't have known. Even if premonition is possible somehow, it does not mean OBE is possible in the way we describe it, nor are we epistemically justified to affirm it, especially in scientific context. Sure, but you have no clue what this world is. Again, in the end what is going to be rational to conclude might not even fit reality, but given that you have no better alternative, that is what you are left with. It's not conclusive evidence, but there is more evidence than for the opposing few. You have to do some real trickery to explain away why this phenomena is not far more common and involved in the natural process. Because we cannot observe such phenomena in nature, or rather phenomena that could not otherwise be explained. Nor is the human mind capable of doing this at will.