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Notes -
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.
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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.
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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
Godthe 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.
I mean, TLP would diagnose this sense of change-as-death to be narcissism (to be fair, he diagnoses everything as narcissism). Personally, I'd love to be able to believe in Christianity - I find a lot of religion fairly silly and completely unfounded, but I also find modern scientistic materialism fairly silly and almost completely unfounded - but if the faith ain't there it ain't there.
I mean, that's the issue with TLP: everything is narcissism. Or he only cares to write about narcissism. He's insightful, but one note.
I'm genuinely unsure how you could be equally agnostic with regards to both organized religion and empiricism, but hey, better than committing to what I believe is the wrong team here.
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FWIW as a former atheist transhumanist and having had it happen to me, that's really not how it feels. I used to believe some stuff, now I'm more doubtful about that stuff and prepared to believe some other stuff. I'm sure you've changed your mind on other things before, it doesn't feel any different from that.
Identifying with a very particular memeset* about the nature of the universe and your place in it so strongly that you cannot conceive of a version of you who believes something different and is still you is a little unhealthy, I think. It can produce a rather clenched-up and self-protecting attitude towards the world (not in a Freudian sense!), and a set attitude of rejection towards trying things that could turn out to be growth or at worst short-lived and mildly-embarrassing fads.
In short there are worse things in the world than letting yourself try a little woo, especially since IMO transhumanism as it actually exists in the world already contains plenty of woo that is made more dangerous by the appearance of being cold and rational.
Disclaimer: none of this is an attempt to convert you to my religion, or any religion. That's not my place, for many reasons. In any case, please forgive me if I have overstepped.
*I refer to transhumanism and more specifically to the very particular pride that comes with thinking, "I am smart enough to see the world like it really is and brave enough to take it head-on without the lies other people tell themselves, and one day we'll fix all the stuff that's rubbish about it."
That's the thing. I don't expect it to be a drastic change, necessarily. Many changes that we/I won't endorse on reflection are gradual and subtle. Becoming religious or spiritual is far from the worst thing that can happen to someone. You seem pretty sane, for what it's worth. I'm not going to call you crazy in a literal or strong sense!
I see high dose or regular usage of psychedelics as carrying an unavoidable risk of both causing a sudden snap and also a risk of "opening" your mind to a degree that I'd rather prefer not to open, mostly due to the risk of my brain falling out. I believe most of the things I believe for very good reason, at least if we're talking about empirical topics and not just ideals or preferences. Think of it like Gandhi in that thought experiment, where he can get a pill that makes him 1% Murder Gandhi in exchange for a million dollars. That 1% MG is more likely to accept the next pill, and so on till he has $100m and a kill count of comparable magnitude.
I see myself as being, in a sense, almost the 0% Gandhi. Each psychedelic I do has a small chance of shifting that, but it's a more probabilistic risk here. I don't think I've drifted so far, but even if you're, say, only 10% as religious/spiritual as a theoretical maximum, that is very far from where I want to be. I think not being depressed is worth, say, $1 million, or a 1% chance of religion, but I'd rather not take the risk if I can help it, which I usually can.
I don't want to relitigate the usual atheism-religion debates, but if you want to explain what made you change your mind, I'm genuinely curious and want to hear it out. FWIW, I have an essay almost ready to post, so if you what to hold off then that's fine too.
No argument there. I toyed with the idea of taking psychedelics but didn't because I've been blessed with a fairly good brain and it's about the only advantage I've got, plus looking at most shroom-takers gives the impression that most psychedelics seem to produce the experience of profundity without the real thing. I’d never risk the kind of mind-melting trip you’re talking about. That said, I don't get the impression that woo in general is a one-way slippery slide to madness for most people, more "Pacifist gets in a couple of fights and learns they aren't much fun but there are worse things and gets a bit of confidence".
My thoughts on religion will disappoint you, I suspect. Broadly, I was working in a prestigious research job & field in my mid-twenties and a few crises of faith came to a head simultaneously:
In short, all of the old gods I had worshiped were broadly dismantled in front of my eyes. I want to be clear here: I am not saying that meeting top Rationalists and finding they were nutters proves that all Rationalists are, or that there is nothing good in Rationality. Nor am I now unable to believe anything published in a scientific paper, or any such nonsense.
But.
I was no longer able to treat the things I had believed as being obviously true. Looking at them from the outside, as instantiated in people I didn't much like, tracing them through the historical record, seeing why people came to believe them, it was much easier to see that (in my opinion) they were largely self-coherent belief structures that had become accepted for often-contingent reasons and sometimes had fairly clearly delineated bounds. For example, empirical science is definitionally limited to the material world, and more practically its effectiveness seems to be limited to broadly the 'hard' sciences where observations made about the system don't affect the system (excluding things like social sciences) and you can design valid small experiments without excluding the vast majority of relevant factors (so big chunks of stuff like nutrition, behaviour, politics, economics etc. are also out).
I read some theoretical physics, I read some CS Lewis, I talked to various people and eventually I decided that if there was no one belief system that was obviously correct, then ultimately it came down to my choice. And if it was my choice, I decided to choose a belief system that produced the kind of people and things I liked as opposed to ones who gave me the creeps, might get me a girlfriend with the same kind of preferences, and gave me hope instead of existentialist depression.
In the end I never did 'find God', I just chose to hope that the churchy people were right. In one sense there's nothing rational about it, in another sense looking at my options and choosing the best I could see feels like the most rational thing I could have done. I certainly don't regret it.
It seems to me like a pretty good shot that there's something very broadly God-ish out there - the world came from somewhere and all of the theoretical physics doesn't give any more plausible answer AFAIK - but there's nothing to say that He/She/It is still around or has anything to do with Christianity. I hope that one day God Himself will stop by and give me the good news in person, but otherwise I'm just choosing to have hope and live this way. My experience has been that the Catholics are right and that turning up to Mass every Sunday does a lot more for one's faith than sitting in one's bedroom and fretting. It's just group psychology, yes, but what could be more rational than using psychology to hack your way into a happier and more pro-social mindset, when the alternative is IMO worse and doesn't even manage to be rational?
Like I said, you'll probably find this disappointing. There's not really an argument there, let alone hard apologetics. (Most but not all apologetics is pretty terrible and written to make believers feel smug and clever. I'm going to classes for Confirmation now and they're awful.) But that's what happened, as well as I can write it.
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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:
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.
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!
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.
Brilliant, read it and AAQC'd it. And FTR, music could be a whole different world to me when I was tripping, too, and was a major factor in those last experiences that I had as well. I'll leave it at that, at least for now.
Thank you, that means a lot to me. The first time I had LSD, I was rather disappointed that the music didn't sound nearly as good as it did on MDMA or psilocybin. Turns out that an unfortunately high dose, with or without THC, makes all the difference. Still didn't lose myself in it in the way I think you mean, but it was very, very good and affected my thoughts greatly.
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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.
The interesting thing about psychedelics is that you can titrate this somewhat, in ways that change it qualitatively as well as quantitatively. LSD/Psilocybin is a sledgehammer. Ketamine (in recreational doses, administered nasally, I have no idea about IV and no interest in trying) is more like pushing the clutch out on a manual car. "You" are still there, and can still contemplate things rationally, but you're separated from the world in a way that lets you be, for want of a better phrase, creatively objective.
The unfortunate side effect, for me, is that I spend a good deal of time on most ketamine trips thinking about how Nick Land was right about everything.
I am interested in trying ketamine, preferably I since it's more effective for depression.
Perhaps it's unfortunate that I often think Nick Land is right when sober. To be precise, more directionally correct than any other contemporary philosopher or writer. I hate the man and his ideology, I don't want the future he imagines and dreams of to come to fruition. I want something human to survive into the far future.
Alas, I must still concede that it's a very real possibility that the techno-capital singularity consumes us whole. It won't surprise you to learn that I spent a good while on the trip worrying about the Singularity. I do that while sober too.
I'm much more optimistic, in that I believe that much of the aspects of ourselves we consider to be distinctly human are actually necessary qualities of intelligence, and there will be many ways that even a superintelligence is human or hyper-human. And I would also rather see humanity gone and replaced by an able and energetic intelligence than eternally humiliated in something like a WALL-E future.
On the actual point of the conversation, SWIM would recommend to SWIY to be sure to source high-quality ketamine and start with small doses. If SWIY cuts out a line that looks like what you see in the movies he's going straight into the Interstellar black hole, that's what usually ruins ketamine for people. Put a nature documentary, some youtube drone footage of Iceland/Cape Town/Japan, or a cyberpunk anime on TV.
I've been surprised by how difficult it is to find ketamine in Scotland, it's far easier to come by down south. I think that I'm most likely to go through the hassle of an IV infusion on medical grounds, the subjective effects don't appeal to me nearly as much as the benefits for depression. But good to know, I'm open to it!
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