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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2165 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 29, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Which psychedelic did your friend do?

It happens to rhyme with Salman Rushdie.

Interesting. That's the one of the big 3 that I haven't tried yet, mainly for concern about how long primary effects can last. 8-12 hours? Ain't nobody got time for that.

4 hours for the ascent, trip, and descent on mushrooms? That's a nice Sunday midday event.

For what it's worth, a moderate dose of a benzodiazepine reduces the intensity of an LSD trip immediately. I don't know how functional you'd feel afterwards, but it's an option.

I had nothing important planned for the day, and I managed to mostly pull off the few errands that lurked waiting for me in the evening. But it's not a use and forget drug, and I agree shrooms are more sensible for the psychonaut on a time-crunch. What do you mean by the Big 3? I can infer that's LSD and shrooms, but the third one?

Mescaline. I consider those the big 3 of traditional (non-dissociative) hallucinogens. I consider the others, like DMT, the dissociatives, or Datura, to be the "hell no" zone.

Incidentally, I found mescaline to not be worth the hassle. I might've been under-dosed.

I haven't given mescaline much thought, it's probably far harder to acquire outside the Americas. I share your concerns about DMT, and datura is definitely something described in my forensic medicine textbooks for a reason. Nor is dissociation something I enjoy, it happened to me as a very idiosyncratic reaction to a prescribed drug, and it was quite unpleasant to experience.

You know, I’m not actually sure how to pronounce that.

Sal like the sul in sullied. Rush-D.

Ah, so you mean the wonder drug, PCP.

Correct. No notes. A Primary Care Physician is the solution for most cases of depression, or at least they can send you to a better shrink than I am.

The only psychedelic worth doing is DMT and its analogues, which don't rhyme with Rushdie. I am disappointed in your friend...

Are you trying to kill me or drive me insane?

I mean, you probably are, but you're usually more subtle about it. DMT is very low on the list of substances to try; I don't speak Machine Elvish, not even the LOTR kind. If they start talking shit about "universal love", I'm going to pull out a baseball bat.

Edit: I know it's unlikely to literally kill me. It's just not what I'm looking for, I don't want to lose contact with reality or risk truly mind altering or gnostic experience.

He doesn't know about the secret esoteric knowledge linear time factorisation method which breaks almost all modern cryptography...

I'll have to check in with Scott Aaronson, but I strongly suspect he hasn't tried that stuff either.

Eh, I wouldn't tell people not to try DMT if they're interested, but it's the polar opposite of what I desire.

Eh? Can you explain the acronyms please.

Sigh. It's probably not worth talking about. Any insights gleaned are personal and the kind of stuff I could have told you a week in advance if I was drunk.

I mean, sample size of one and all, but I actually delurked and started posting for a conversation like this one, FWTW.

Well, if one of Odin's ravens thinks so:

The long and short of it was that it went way harder and deeper than I accounted for. I genuinely felt the edges of my mind fraying. I was fighting ego death and struggling to retain the integrity of my consciousness. I might have described myself as "tripping balls" when I enrolled for a psilocybin trial, but it had nothing on what I experienced. Back then, and in this instance, my greatest fear was succumbing to woo or catching religion. I felt the pressure, that sense of cosmic significance. I genuinely told it to fuck itself. At that point, I was envisioning it as some kind of extradimensional tendril cracking open my skull and wrapping itself around my consciousness, while "I" was quite literally shearing it away it with a set of scissors.

Another very literal visual metaphor was trying to keep the "knot" of patterns that constituted myself from being unraveled under the tension.

Words can hardly describe it. I feel like the protagonist of Scott's short story, Samsara, except I actually faced the pressure of imminent enlightenment and chose to walk away. I don't need enlightenment, I need to be less depressed. Jury's out on that one.

That is quite similar to what I experienced after full anesthetic. Like for 24 hours different parts of my mind (and body) were disjointed and talking to each other. Like the self that was holding them together was missing. And fucking clock ticking in your mind all the time. It started 12 hours after the surgery when I got sleepy.

Miserable experience.

Huh. That's an interesting outcome, some anesthetics are known to have dissociative properties, but I don't think that's quite what I experienced. Which one was it, if I may ask (or if you happen to know, it's not usually disclosed specifically because most patients don't care)?

I wasn't fighting parts of my self, or my body, per se. Most of the time, the voice in my head was gone, or the volume was dialed down significantly. This has happened to me before on or after psychedelics, and is something I carefully noted during the experience. I always have an inner monologue, at least when I check for it. It might be damped down or absent when I'm extremely focused, but how would I know?

At the very peak, I don't think I was thinking in words, just visual metaphors. I used words to write (because I was able to do so live, albeit not with great grammar), and that stream of text was my stream of thought at a certain point. Very hard to explain unless you've been there. I was literally typing at the speed I was thinking (the latter definitely slower than usual) and exactly as I thought. Not quite the same as what I do when sober, where I'm usually at least planning ahead and have a general thesis in mind.

My body usually felt heavy and leaden. Then it got lighter as the peak came down slowly. No sense that parts of it were alien or in conflict with me, which you'd see with dissociation/depersonalization.

It’s funny to me that you went into this looking for an answer to your depression, had the answer shoved directly in your face, then still chose to “shear it away with a set of scissors” to protect your ego.

Uh.. I have multiple answers to depression. I know psilocybin worked the previous time. I could have gone for IV ketamine or ECT. I know for a fact that I do not need religion to be happy, and that becoming religious has a very real risk of making me unhappy as well as, in a very real sense, delusional and insane.

My ego exists for a reason. I am fond of being mostly myself. The parts of me I wish to keep are present when both when I'm happy and when I'm sad, and that's a fact that's clearly documented in my notes. If the only way to live is to trick myself into religious belief? You better hope to ask when I've got a literal gun to my head. I am not read to compromise my epistemics for happiness except for a very large value of the latter and a small amount of the former.

We had a kid from a Muslim family pledge our frat a year or two before I joined. He dropped acid with his pledge class, met Allah, dropped out of pledging, and every so often he'd show up at our parties with a big smile holding a can of Lacroix.

There but for the grace of God the Flying Spaghetti Monster go I. I've seen other people lose it with after using psychedelics, or outright go insane. And more who have become "soft" spiritual and woo-ish. I'm not saying I'd rather die than end up like that, but it's very, very low on the list.

Returning to an organized religion is definitely the best outcome out of that possibility set. Oh, you mean I can just download a helpful and prosocial memeplex into my brain and all I have to do is accept Jesus Christ into my heart? Give me the pill - hell, give me two!

Perhaps. It's still more likely to just become a bit wooly, touchy feely and "spiritual but not religious". I would not identify with a version of me that sincerely believes in a deity for anything but incredibly strong empirical evidence. I'd think the old me was, in an important sense, partly dead. Not fully dead. That option beats true psychosis and definitely beats real death.

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Been there myself, though I chose... differently. I hope you understand when I say from the bottom of my heart that I believe you made the right choice.

It was mumblety decades ago, and I was several orders of magnitude deeper than I'd ever been before. When my own personal variety of cosmic significance came knocking on the door of my consciousness, I was all out of fucks to give. I was extremely cognizant that I was crossing a line by opening up my brain for an interior conversation with a hallucination, but I did it anyway, and as a result I had the classic experience of going mad from the revelation. Although I ultimately made it out the other side with some semblance of my Self still intact, it was a damn close run thing and it definitely Changed me. Were I my brother, I'm sure I would have had the good sense to pull a Brave Sir Robin and Nope right up outta there, but I wasn't, and I'm not, and here we all are.

I'm sorry man. I genuinely am. Even during the experience (or very very shortly after the peak), I was grappling with multiple existential crises:

  • Was the very vivid and literal visual metaphor real? Was it actually a "choice" to reject endless meaning and hedonium, or just my mind play-acting a decision I'd made well in advance while coming up with an entertaining visualization of it? I genuinely do not know. The opposite felt like a very real possibility. It terrified me.
  • I understood the impermanence of qualia, the meaning of the self being a series of continuous snapshots. I vividly remember (and have live notes) of a version of me that was terrified of dying and being replaced by another me. He was practically screaming and begging to stay alive, or at least to be remembered. Then, a little later, a version of me that was more pragmatic but also meta to a degree that annoys even sober me: he had the self-awareness to find this all amusing while hoping he'd be gone soon. He got his wish.
  • I understood why the brain's sober state is conserved the way it is. It's the only way to be functional, even if there's some wiggle room. Breaking something and being stuck like that? I'd call depression a broken brain too, but I'm not willing to go that far.

I don't know if you ever had a choice in the matter. I don't know if I did either. But I am so lucky to have made the choice of going the route I would have committed myself to going well in advance. Screwing with my brain's chemistry is pragmatically useful for therapeutic purposes and also... fun. But it's not a solution to metaphysics. If I claimed to have come up with one after the trip, my notes tell myself that I should consider the original me gone, maybe for good.

I hope you're doing okay. I wanted to be changed too, but I'm clearly the annoying kind of person who is just as analytical and self-scrutinizing when sober as they are zooted. I'm happy/sad about that. Uh, now that I think about it, I do understand the limits of language as a communication tool/expression of qualia better. That perhaps does constitute a change. Words genuinely cannot express the conflict within at the time. Good luck to you, if there is some residual damage, we will likely be able to cure you, speaking from a medical perspective. That is a promise I am mostly confident science can cash.

I'm sorry, too, sir, and thank you. It's not the funnest club to be a member of, though we sure can have some interesting and esoteric conversations amongst ourselves! Regardless, my story is also similar to yours in the sense that it took some serious depression for me to try acid for the first time. But when I did, I had clearly found my drug of choice, and for a period of about four months, I did it often enough to learn about the brain's ability to quickly build a short term tolerance to the stuff, and adjusted my consumption accordingly. Things dried up for several months after that, after which I had two deep trips maybe six week apart from each other, one weak one, and then the final time (which is the one I was specifically talking about) wherein I'd estimate the peak lasted 12-16 hours or so. All of which is to say that I've been around the block, so to speak, before I get into the fun stuff.

  • Taking your last point first, I have to completely agree with you when you say that the brain's sober state is the only way to be functional. One of my persistent impressions from my experiences is that my brain's built-in filters were significantly removed, hence the depth and intensity of sensory inputs and experiences. For instance, at some point I realized that the breathing wallpaper experience that could mesmerize me so had its roots in my own heartbeat. Likewise, on a purely causal level, I had the experience of having a realization, then having a censor kick in, saying in essence, "you are not ready to receive this truth," and then fighting to override that censor and get back to the original realization. It was amazing stuff, but it also meant that I could spend an hour looking for the car keys that were in my pocket the entire time, despite my pockets being the first place I checked!
  • I also agree with your thinking about the self being a continuous series of snapshots, and for me, the ability to perceive this as such is actually one of the true dangers of diving deeply into psychedelics. With sobriety gone and the ego much more malleable, the qualia of the psychedelic experience can create a persistent change in the perception of the Self. In your example, you could have chosen to be the more pragmatic, meta version of you that you encountered for a short time. While you didn't do that, it does sound like you not only recognize that, but experienced that to an extent for yourself. If you'll forgive the wordplay, self_made_human is no more, and you're now self_remade_human. As the lyric goes, what I used to think was me was just a fading memory, I looked him right in the eye and said goodbye.
  • The question of whether or not the vivid and literal visual metaphor you experienced was real is a haunting one. We know that as humans, the brain tends to make its decision subconsciously, then a framework of rationality is constructed around the decision that ultimately connects consciously and appears to be the process of the decision itself. Given my own belief that psychedelics get us closer to the "bare metal" of our consciousness, so to speak, this would necessarily mean that an actual awareness of the various possibilities of our choices could indeed be quite terrifying. I personally found the experience of being free of my own morality and empathy to be a hideous one.

I don't know if you ever had a choice in the matter. I don't know if I did either. But I am so lucky to have made the choice of going the route I would have committed myself to going well in advance.

Haha, probably true in my case, am I really going to turn down an offer of knowledge? Dangle something shiny in front of me and of course I want it for my nest! Moreover, I actually did try to snap myself out of it quite a few times, all without success. At one point the (un)reality was so bloody pervasive that as I was trying to rationalize my experience, I registered amusement on the other side of the conversation just as a couple of kids I'd been tripping with exclaimed from the other room, "whoa, [Muninn's manifestation of cosmic significance] is in the TV!" That's just a coincidence! I thought. More amusement. "There he is again!" Point, made.

Anyway, It sounds like you've been shaken but are coming out the other side shaken and changed, but not broken, and I'm glad for that. I'm also glad that you took the time to share some of your experience with me--like I said, I find these sorts of conversations to be fascinating, and there aren't many of us that have gone down this particular road. And I likewise appreciate your own well wishes for me. My own experience was a long time ago, and I've thankfully been able to deal with the fallout/residual damage as it has come to me. While my own path has steadily lead me away from mind and mood altering drugs and substances, caffeine notwithstanding, I appreciate the potential in psychotropic medications and work with some folks in your profession that can artistically prescribe a medication regimen for all that ails the psyche. For all of that, however, I am still mulishly stubborn and insist on thinking my way through everything, as is my wont.

I recognize a fell traveler, albeit one with the kind of scars I really don't want to acquire. Yup, that is precisely the kind of stuff that I was and am terrified of, but hey, you're here. You're talking. You know there's a problem. You give me the impression of having a functional life. I find that reassuring!

If you'll forgive the wordplay, self_made_human is no more, and you're now self_remade_human

In an unfortunate sense, it is impossible to say for sure if I'm the same person I was before and after psychedelics. But I genuinely don't think I've broken anything I'll miss. I feel like roughly the same person, a little happier, maybe, a little less emotionally reactive in a way that doesn't amount to apathy. If I start acting really weird, or even subtly off, I suppose enough people know me well enough to mention it. That is true both online and off, I hope.

In a very real sense, we're all Ships of Theseus, and always undergoing routine and unexpected maintenance. I don't feel anxious about going to bed or getting anesthesia, because I don't seem to change very much. I don't feel too bad about aging, except for all the physical health stuff that will inevitably pop up unless we find a cure. I think the version of me that was 2 years old has only a little in common with the man I am today, but I'm glad he grew up anyway. Similarly, I'm willing to do a lot of growing up (in the transhumanist sense), and I am not afraid of it as long as I get to call the shots and, preferably, make some backups along the way. I think a much smarter and wiser version of me that preserves the same values and desires is... me. A better me.

If it interests you, I just posted a full writeup of the experience on the front page. I doubt the phenomenological aspects are new to you, but I do go into more detail about my experiences and my takeaways from them.

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I've never done it myself (and would be terrified to) but it's quite interesting to read these anecdotes about psychedelics and then connect it to some of the research that's been coming out. Psilocybin AFAIK disrupts functional connectivity in the brain quite aggressively and basically causes different brain networks to become less segregated and bleed together, and it does so most severely in the default mode network, which is the piece of mental circuitry responsible for your sense of time, space and self. So you get ego death.

It also helps to suspend depressive symptoms by disrupting the connections between networks, specifically the hippocampus and default mode system, which are associated with that. Your thought patterns are quite literally spilling into each other on the fly in a way that can temporarily disassemble your entire perceptual and affective world, and it offers the possibility of your mental circuitry settling into a subtly changed baseline for better or for worse. It's basically very imprecise, very ghetto biohacking.

I honestly don't think it's all bad and has some possible transhumanisty applications, but as it currently stands the drug is like a sledgehammer where the effects aren't fully understood or controllable. If not I would be all in to be honest.

I agree with you. That's my understanding of my the mechanics, though note that there's also a general increase in neuroplasticity as well as evidence of some neurogenesis.

In predictive processing terms: psychedelics relax your priors, which helps unstick the stuck ones (like depression).

For what it's worth, I was always fascinated by psychedelics even as a teen, and wanted to try them recreationally. But I avoided them for a decade, because I was too afraid of the risk. Then my depression got really bad, and I felt the clinical trial was a good shout before I resorted to IV ketamine and ECT (very annoying to get in my parts of Scotland). It worked wonders, and gave me more confidence that I could push things.

Uh.. Turns out there's a limit to how far I wanted to push things. I might try LSD again, but never at this dose. I've had my fun. I like my sanity. If you do specifically want a treatment for depression, the evidence for psilocybin is much more robust. You've probably read my blog post, but if you haven't, it's in my posts.

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Is SWIY's trip over yet?

He fucking hopes so. But yes, it's over. Lasted way longer and took far longer to finish than he'd like.

SWIM = Somebody Who Isn't Me (wink wink nudge nudge)

SWIG = Somebody Who Isn't... God?!

Thank you.

Accurate on both counts, though the latter could be one of many potential extraplanar entities. Almost certainly just the outcome of the brain being reminded why certain mushrooms are not meant for consumption (though this one wasn't from a mushroom).

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