Carl-Richard

How is the "you" separate from something else absolute now? 🤨

Psychedelics weren't created with any particular human purpose in mind (they were created by nature). Still, I think they can definitely be used to control people's minds, in principle. Psychedelics deconstruct your mind, but after deconstruction, there is a reconstruction, and that is when you're particularly vulnerable to control. However, control by some malicious actor is not generally what you should worry about. Rather, it's being suggestible to new perspectives that prey on your lower impulses or fears, and you'll be controlled by them, just like the people who promote it (e.g. vaccine paranoia, conspiracy theories, negative supernatural energies/entities). I'm not saying this has to happen when you take psychedelics, but it can happen and I've seen it happen (it has also happened to me). It's also true like Leo said that you become less susceptible to some forms of control, but again, when you deconstruct something, there is a potential for something to go wrong during the reconstruction.

A sense of belonging is felt when you fit to your environment. It's easy to forget that even though you might be different, you share a lot with your fellow humans, and therefore you belong with them. I didn't have it as a deep psychedelic insight, but more conceptual, but I'll still share it here:

It's a cycle more precise than the movement of the celestial bodies.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is a theory that presents three factors that create optimal motivation in an organism. SDT in a nutshell: These three factors reflect deep biological truths and can be applied to all organisms, but here I will apply them to humans. I will also claim that "motivation" in this sense is synonymous with "health" and "well-being". In other words, SDT describes the factors that create optimal health and well-being. For a more in-depth explanation of SDT, I recommend this thread. So, how does SDT relate to Western values (or so-called "Western" values)? What is so special about the West? Why are Western values considered so precious? And more controversially: is it true that Western values are "objectively" good? I will claim that if SDT can be treated as an objective measurement of health and well-being, which you could argue is the case when you consider how it reflects deep biological truths, then you can possibly make the case that Western values are "objectively" good. (I put "objectively" in quotation marks because I acknowledge that I've chosen an arbitrary standard for objectivity. However, like I said, the standard can be argued on biological lines and applies to all organisms. So if it's not objectively good, it's at least based on something that applies to all organisms, and it has to do with health and well-being). Individualism The West champions the right to be the maker of your own destiny, that you can pursue whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt others (which is relativistic, but we won't go there), and generally that you're free to be who you want to be. This coincides nicely with "autonomy" and "competence" (you're free to be who you truly are and who you want to be), but also "belonging" in the sense that the surrounding culture promotes and supports your right to be yourself, and that you belong there. It's also a two-way street in the sense that you need to factor in other people and their autonomy (you can't hurt them), creating the space of belonging for them. Freedom of speech You should be able to say what you want, to make your case, to have your voice heard, again, as long as it doesn't hurt others. In a sense, it's individualism in the realm of verbal and intellectual self-expression, and it has practically the same relation to SDT as above. Democracy You should be able to have a say in how your society is governed. This ensures "belonging" in the sense that your competencies and need for self-expression is reflected in your environment, i.e. that you belong to that environment. The state also protects you from other people taking away your autonomy by being the monopoly of violence, again creating the space for belonging. So in summary, it seems like SDT coincides nicely with the Western values of individualism, freedom of speech and democracy. Does that mean the West is perfect? Does that mean authoritarianism doesn't have a point? Not necessarily. With respect to the West not being perfect, the West often goes too far with individualism, in a way that erodes the need for belonging, for example by the tiny size of families ("the nuclear family"), ideas like having to move out from your parents, buying your own house or living on your own, overdoing sayings like "going it on your own" with respect to career, intellectual pursuits or "spirituality" (the fallacy of autodidactism). With respect to authoritarianism having a point, if you wanted to pull in a model like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, authoritarianism could be good if the need for safety is threatened by anarchy and violence (people who do not respect your autonomy), effectively creating a relative space of belonging. But once your safety is secured, once you live in a society where other people relatively respect your autonomy, what else do you need as an organism? Or rather, what "is" an organism? How does an organism function on a fundamental level? What makes an organism healthy? That, is what SDT tries to describe.

How does it prove your point? No human form of government has existed for 3.5 billion years.

The need for an organism to express their abilities in line with their drive for survival ("competence") and to feel like they're able to do so freely ("autonomy") and that their environment resonates with these needs ("belonging") precedes any human system of government by 3.5 billion years. And generally, these needs favor values like individualism, freedom of speech and democracy. https://actionforhappiness.org/happiness-and-democracy

The gist, or my intention, was to link the three "Western" values to the three factors in SDT. Calling it "Western" was merely pragmatic (and edgy) on my part, but you're right to call it out the way you did, because it could come off like I'm some alt-right nazi if the context I'm currently giving does not exist in the person's mind reading this. Maybe I'll think twice about being lax in my language and making clickbait titles in the future. Melodramatic, more like late night ramble mood 😝 I've now added some quotation marks around "Western" to clarify

Welp. That might be true, but as I said above in my most recent edit, even then it's still just a partial perspective (which is of course obvious, but sometimes it needs to be said, which in itself echoes the very point I'm referencing). We haven't unravelled the whole jarn yet; we cannot. There is always something you can pick at ("that's inaccurate!", "that's overly simplified!"). Maybe my use of "the West" was a bit too pragmatic for most people's taste, but if you really want to turn the skepticism microscope to full use, no utterance is safe. And again, that's ok.

I just referred to it that way because that is how it's usually talked about (and maybe a little because I wanted a spicy title). I could've just dropped calling it "the West" and just have presented the three specific values. But I didn't. I could also have flipped it on its head and made the topic about "is authoritarianism objectively good?" and given the pros and cons there from the perspective of SDT, and the answer would essentially be the same as I alluded to just now: at the end of the day, you have to be nuanced. It's not either freedom or tyranny: it's wisdom. Still, this is what popped up in my mind, and I share it for what it's worth. Any time you utter something, you're giving a partial perspective. If you generally have a wider perspective, essentially all we're doing when we're talking with each other is to play a game of refreshing our memories about earlier things we've learned that is a part of the puzzle but not the whole puzzle. And that's ok. We can't really do anything else.

The Western values get you sick when you approach them in an unbalanced, inflexible and naive way, which I gave a few examples of. That's when understanding deeper mechanisms like competence, autonomy and belonging comes in (and the hundreds of other frameworks that try to encapsulate health, wisdom, well-being), and of course just life experience. The deeper problem is essentially a lack of wisdom. Latching on to a limited set of values alone is really not sufficient, but still, from a certain "wise" perspective, these values have a place.

I watch documentaries of tigers sometimes even though they murder animals regularly. I watch documentaries of dolphins even though they sexually assault their females. I just like their ambiance. Just listen to some Varg Vikernes and shut up 😛

It's a problem of naive pop science, but also it's a larger epistemological problem of naive realism. You're not born questioning your assumptions. You first have to acquire them and test them out. It's a stage we all must go through, and in many cases, it's the norm, especially when trying to appeal to the younger parts of the population, which pop science does. Those factors would be called "auxiliary hypotheses" in the literature. When testing a hypothesis, often there is a myriad of smaller underlying hypotheses that need to be granted to confirm the main hypothesis, and these are of course not themselves tested (only sometimes indirectly by comparing a large amount of studies), which is a problem. Examples would be the type of measurements used (e.g. self-report questionnaire vs. physiological measures), the general study design, etc. One approach to solve that problem is to simply reduce the amount of auxiliary hypotheses you need to confirm the main hypothesis (and more generally the theory the hypothesis is derived from; "theory-testing research"). That also means you get closer to the Popperian "scientific ideal" of making your hypotheses falsifiable, which they generally and practically speaking aren't in the human-related sciences, because you can always blame the auxiliary hypotheses when your hypothesis goes wrong ("ah, it's probably the differences in sample size, the different type of questionnaires used, the variability in the sample", etc.). That's really how most science goes in these fields: "The hypothesis didn't pan out? Well, it's probably not the hypothesis or the theory that is at fault. Let's generate a slightly different hypothesis and try again! When we find a positive result, we'll publish that so we can get more funding and continue being scientists." ("discovery-oriented research"). By the way, negative results are generally not published outside file drawer initiatives (because it's not interesting), which feeds into this problem. Yes. Other than the "religiosity problem" I pointed to earlier, with fields like physics, the problems become more theoretical than empirical, and it's generally a problem of complexity: what does your theory actually tell us about reality? In physics, you might be able to predict quite accurately how two objects move relative to each other, but what about 5, 10, 20 objects? Similarly, in biology (which is of course related to humans, but it's nevertheless a fun example of the problem of complexity), we've sequenced the entire human genome, meaning we know all the genes that goes into a human, and these genes code for proteins that make up the human. But how exactly do the proteins go about making up the human? The genetic code is one thing, the morphological code is another. So complexity is not just a problem in human-related sciences, but in the human-related sciences, it additionally manifests much more in the empirical realm. It's essentially because in physics, you're more able to ignore the complexity by choosing to study and test hypotheses for simpler things (2 objects vs. 20), while in say psychology, you're always stuck with studying humans, which are of course complex. It's their job, and their default position is to be optimistic. And again, there are promising initiatives for increasing replication rates and more generally improving the state of human-related science. However, the real "black pill" here is not replication but generalization. Even if your studies are 100% replicable (meaning somebody repeats the study with the exactly same setup and gets the same result every time), does that mean your results will hold when you slightly tweak some of the factors? Not at all. Like I said earlier, some people actually argue that generalizability is an unsolvable problem that invalidates all human-related science. But you could counter that and ask "surely, some studies generalize pretty well?". Even though the exact results of the study don't generalize, maybe they partially generalize (there is "some" effect). But how can we know that? Well, you can't know for sure, but doing a large amount of "conceptual replications" (replications where you tweak some factor relative to the original study) could give an indication. It will never be 100% proof (because that requires virtually simulating the entire universe), but I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that you're at least getting closer to an answer than not.

So my class had a lecture about stress, and it mentioned in passing that extremely stressful experiences might cause time to slow down or even cause out of body experiences (OBEs). So after that lecture, one of my classmates said that he had experienced time slowing down but not OBEs, and he asked if any of us (a group of three classmates) had experienced any OBEs. That day, I was so sleep deprived that I didn't even catch half of the lecture because I was slipping in and out of consciousness (speaking about OBEs; I even joked about that 🥴😝), so I guess my inhibitions were slightly diminished, but I immediately thought about one of my meditation experiences where I opened my eyes and I saw myself from like 5-10 inches above my head. I was about to say it out loud, but then I hesitated and instead said something which is even more suspicious: "not in a stressful situation" 😂. Again, I didn't have the mental agility in that moment to maybe save the awkwardness somehow, and we just ended up moving on from the topic. Who knows what they thought I was referring to? Sex? Drugs? A psychotic break? (they're psychologists after all). Who knows? So that was awkward 😆 Anyways, I was thinking about that moment a bit after, and I thought: "what would happen if I actually said what I wanted to say"? More generally, why am I hesitant about talking about these experiences to people? Two main options (which are somewhat interrelated) popped into my mind: they could have an existential crisis and get scared or really skeptical, or they could just think I'm mentally unstable or delusional. Besides, these are my classmates and potential future colleagues. So there could be both social and occupational consequences in the worst case. In the best case, they're openminded psychologists who have heard about these things before or simply know how to reconcile it with their worldview in an accommodating way. But could the same be said if I had started talking about my other mystical or even psychic experiences? Would it be a bit like talking about having taken drugs? (I generally avoid that as well, unless of course it's obvious that someone is onboard). Anyways, I've concluded that I need to open myself up more to people in order to be myself more authentically, because I believe being your authentic self is synonymous with being confident and competent, and I would like to be that in most social situations. It's just that when you're authentically rather outside the norm, that could have some undesirable consequences if you care about "getting along" somewhere within that norm. I know that it's always a balance, but I just think I could maybe push myself a little bit more in the direction of authenticity (and hence my question).

@zurew Yeah this is a mess 😆 Impressive that you went through the entire thing.

😂 Got it. Cool. Want to elaborate? Like bro cmon, this is like Leo's main catchphrase we're talking about. I've followed him for like almost a decade, just as long ago as I started taking psychedelics (if that's like your qualifying metric). This is basic shit, you cannot be serious. 😂

Duh, that's what science is. "Functional understanding". But that too is also just functional understanding. In reality, there aren't even any relations. "Relation" is something your mind is cooking up to make sense of reality, to make predictions, to help you interact with reality. Kastrup, like me, thinks causality is only a conceptual tool, not ultimate reality. So again, big miss. You should again maybe read more about what you're talking about (?) I actually smelled this one coming from a mile away. At the end of the day, it was always just a flex of "the map is not the territory", "maps are limited, "reality is limitless", "science is only a tool", which is apparently the only thing people think is worth talking about on here. It's hilarious how convoluted some people make it though. I actually appreciate people like @UnbornTao more now: at least he gets straight to the point. It's of course an incredibly juvenile point that you should've known I've accepted ages ago, yet you make it the focal point of this now disaster of a discussion. I do actually remember thinking this thought as a faint glimpse, but I guess I was just in denial that this was actually what was happening. Well well.

Yup. That's what a causal relationship is: one thing happening before the other, and a mechanism that connects the two. If you don't have a mechanism, you only have two things happening in temporal order. Physicalists think brains happen before experience and that there is ostensibly a mechanism there, but they admit that at our current level of scientific knowledge, such a mechanism is either unknown or mysterious, or they woo themselves into a false sense of security by alluding to some vague notions like "emergence" or "function". I agree. I don't think what the physicalists are aiming at is possible. I've just given the criteria that would need to be filled for it to be possible: providing a mechanism that makes sense and isn't mysterious, and ways to explain away the various empirical problems. And of course, so far, those criteria have not been filled, and I don't think they ever will be filled. In other words, it's mysterious for a reason, a reason they won't accept. Your two sentences don't connect.

I'm sorry, but what? 🙈 I've never said that. You've lost the plot.

You can think it's deluded, but the problem is that you don't have a solid understanding of it, so it doesn't mean much. You can't actually engage with the concepts. It's essentially the pre-trans problem. A pre-rational religious dogmatist critiquing science is very different from a post-rational person critiquing it. And you can't argue someone out of a pre-position, hence there is no point in continuing.

Ok, let's bring the real context to what's happening here: You make it seem like this about me not understanding you. But in reality, nobody gives a shit about you. You're talking about brains, and brains are studied in academia, nowhere else. If you're unable to engage with the language of academia; if you're stuck inside your contracted use of language and other people have to essentially rescue you out of it to have a conversation with you; then it's not me not understanding you: it's you frankly not knowing what you're talking about. It makes no sense to pretend to have any deep knowledge about academic topics while being unable to work with the language of academia, spinning your wheels in the dirt when basic terms like correlation vs. causality are brought up. It's like pretending to have deep knowledge about Western politics while constantly getting bogged down discussing the definitions of political parties or democracy. I talk with this one guy in academia about these things on a regular basis (the Hard problem, physicalism, brains, experience, etc.), and we have virtually no problems understanding each other. For "some reason", that is not happening here.

I think the reason I got into music with weird time signatures so much is that my dad used to play this song in the car a lot when I was 6-7. It's not really until later that I realized how brilliant it is.

These are arguments less against science and more against people who hold science as a religion. As for my arguments, it depends on what sciences you're talking about. Sciences that study humans quantitatively (e.g. sociology, anthropology, psychology, medicine, political science) infamously have problems with replicability (can you repeat the study and get the same results?) and generalizability (do the results apply more generally to the world and not just inside the particular study?). Many (ex-)scientists have made strong criticisms about these problems, some even claiming that they're practically unsolvable and that this kind of quantitative science is a lost cause, while others are more optimistic and constructive, while some are in denial and keep doing what they've always done. There are many sub-problems that feed into the two main problems, and some of them are summed up by the concept of "questionable research practices", while others relate to for example limitations with methodologies like null hypothesis testing. There has been a great effort to address these problems though, through initiatives like open science, file drawer journals, preregistrations, etc. Qualitative sciences (e.g. interviewing people about their feelings and experiences) bypass many of these kinds of problems, but they're less able to make precise predictions, so you lose something there. "Hard sciences", particularly those that are largely independent of humans (e.g. physics, chemistry), have less of these problems. For them, the problems go back to again holding science as a religion (basically physicalism), which bleeds into the culture through the idolization of pop science communicators ("the scientific priesthood") and is upheld by modern society's disconnect with wisdom and spirituality.

Then that is your deficiency Some people are so relaxed that dopamine would probably be their only way to become more social. You should see the med student who conducts our brain dissection lab sessions. He is a walking brick wall 😆 (not in an autistic way). On a slightly (un)related topic, I've been thinking a bit about the relationship between neuroticism (in the strictly emotional lability sense) and creativity which we talked about one time. I consider myself way above average in creativity, and I've always been highly neurotic. I'm high in openness too, yes, but the combination with neuroticism and openness I think creates a creative beast. My dad is like that (BP1 diagnosis, arguably the definition of openness + neuroticism). My friend from class is high in openness but comparably low in neuroticism (by my estimation), and he doesn't seem as creative in the strictest sense but certainly intellectually gifted. Same with the aforementioned med student. Another slightly tangential thought to that, I had a wild idea that maybe sprinters or explosive athletes are more neurotic on average. It sort of makes sense that one's personality would be associated with some deeper biological traits like that. In other words, being able to quickly change your physiological state in terms of muscle fiber recruitment could be mirrored in being able to quickly change your psycho-emotional state (emotional lability). Maybe there could be some co-selection of genes going on there to create the optimal "fast" phenotype. Again, this is of course just wild half-baked speculation. I haven't looked into any potential data on that yet Also, back to creativity, I say "in a strictly emotional lability sense" because I believe that even though I have severely reduced my more "Freudian" neuroticism (internal conflict, repetitive and irrelevant mental chatter), I still have a mind that changes quickly while zeroing in on a task. In other words, my mind finds more relevant information and faster. So in a sense, it's possible to distinguish between a more generally dysfunctional neuroticism and a more generally functional neuroticism: emotional lability with or without task-irrelevant mind-wandering. Then again, I'm not saying task-irrelevant mind-wandering is by definition dysfunctional; I'm just saying generally (most people in the modern would could certainly benefit to have less of it). I hope I'm not derailing the thread 😳 (I got carried away, I'm sorry 😣; just ignore everything but the first paragraph if you're not Nilsi. This is what happens when I take breaks from the forum and post at night 🤭).

@Scholar When you equate physicality to logic and when you call Kastrup a physicalist, that sums up the level of semantic disconnect that we're having, and I don't think we'll solve that in 10 years. As someone who aspires to be semantically connected to the larger scientific and philosophical community (academia), as someone who studies neuroscience in academia, I believe you're semantically disconnected from that community. That is not to say your understanding of reality is invalid. It's just that the language you use and the language I use (and ostensibly my peers) is very different. I see no reason for this conversation to continue. It was interesting, I guess. And just so you don't think I'm making stuff up, I'll recap some of the terms you use that seem unfamiliar to me, either in the way you use them or just full-stop unfamiliar: Direct vs. indirect causality Causative vs. causal influence vs. causal relationship Relation (actual relation vs. apparent relation) Metaphysical relationship "Neuronal structure of two" Functional understanding If there is one thing we can maybe agree on, it's that concepts like causality are at the end of the day just concepts we use to make sense of our experience as apes on planet Earth. They don't reflect reality in the ultimate sense. Reality in the ultimate sense is far beyond that. But it's still useful to talk about that if you care about making sense of our experience.