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Comment by taneq | Hacker News Reader

I find this very interesting because I had precisely the opposite reaction once when I tried psylocibin. Despite being pretty solidly materialist and agnostic, I'd always held a bit of a soft spot for Cartesian duelism and a bit of a "but it'd be cool if..."

What I didn't expect was that the effects wouldn't just "feel real" or "be convincing", they were real. Subjectively, it wasn't inside my head, it was the actual world that changed. The fact that a small amount of psychoactive substance could fundamentally alter my perceived reality put the final nail in the coffin for any possibility that my mind was generated by something outside my own skull.

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Yep, the arbitrariness and oddity of the experiences cemented materialism for me.

Something an acquaintance in the old Atari users group I was a part of in the 80s/90s said to me (when I was a teenager, saying "acid could be neat to try") stuck with me.

"You know how if you drop some screws or something on video circuitry of the PCB of your computer and the display gets all scrambled? That's analogous to what LSD is doing to your brain."

The patterns displayed across the TV after doing that might be really cool. But it's a profound mistake to assume meaning in them. In fact it'd be very difficult to work backwards from what's on the screen to how the video circuitry works.

This is a great analogy and something I found quite comforting (I'm OP), thankyou.

LSD made me go from your run of the mill nihilist to being convinced that even consciousness is a complete illusion and all philosophy is built on this ridiculous lie.

It's like solipsism taken one step further, no I'm not the only thing that exists because -I- don't really exist in any meaningful way either.

We're all just P-zombies.

Qualia is nonsense

If you thought relating to normal people as a nihilist was hard.....

Post-solopsism? Fck me dude, I mean say want you will about nihilism, at least it doesn't attempt to invalidate the experience of qualia.

It's just materialism taken to its logical conclusion. We're just a bunch of atoms bumping into each other in a way that fools ourselves into believing that we're a cohesive entity.

Ever been tired and run on autopilot? Our experience of ourselves vary in strength all the time. If I'm really really honest with myself, I don't actually have the experience of qualia all the time

>>"If I'm really really honest with myself, I don't actually have the experience of qualia all the time"

That's is what you say, but how can we know that you are not a conscious being imitating a p-zombie? ;-)

We can't :)

So I'm going for the one that requires the least magic

What's your solution to finding medium term (5-10 years) motivation?

The more I read on cognitive science (Strange Loop was the first and then you understand what was behind GEB) the more I concur with your view. It is depressing though.

For short term daily tasks, one can depend on routines.

For longer planning the implications are horrifying if there is no qualia in the sense that we think of it.

It's just like with nihilism, it might be "true" but it is not very productive.

At best it leads to Vito Corleone type of ethics, ie tribalism, I'll take care of my family/village, but woe to the outside world.

At worst it leads to Michael Corleone actions, ie screw everyone besides yourself.

Where do you get joy in life if Dennett turns out to be right?

I can only speak for myself, but I find joy in living vicariously through others who don't contemplate existential issues. Sometimes I can spend a day just hanging out with my cat watching him do random things with sincerity. Sometimes I envy him.

As far as medium term motivation, guilt, fear and debt seems to work for most people regardless of philosophical disposition.

I can't help feeling we're begging the question a bit with qualia. Yes, I have experiences. Yes, there's "something it feels like" for me to see red, or stub my toe, or whatever. But there's no reason to believe that that feeling is in any way portable to anywhere outside my own head. I don't see why "I perceive a thing and I perceive myself perceiving the thing" is so universally accepted to be something special or surprising.

As best I understand it, our "consciousness" that "feels" things is basically an overblown condition monitoring system bolted onto the top of a highly effective correlation/prediction engine attached to a whole lot of sensory nerves. Sure, a signal goes from the senses into the middle bit and the result feeds into the consciousness bit which cross-checks everything including its own responses, but that's a control system, not a 'soul'. Or conversely, you could say the spectrum of "error term is saturated negative" through to "error term is saturated positive" is a range of qualia "felt" by a PID loop.

> I can't help feeling we're begging the question a bit with qualia

Exactly, it's kind of like how the debate about "free will" is being handled, either you use a definition of free will that makes it trivially true, but useless, or you use a definition of free will that requires you to literally believe in magic

As you've profoundly experienced all things change... ;)

Just curious if you have looked into Mahayana Buddhist formulations of emptiness? They sound very similar to what you're describing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhyamaka

Having a hard time understanding the concept of solipsism, can you give an example of it? Thanks.

Someone who is a solipsist believes that the external reality doesn’t exist, e.g. other people are just a figment of your own imagination. Think ”The Matrix”, except you aren’t connected to other real human beings. You never wake up either.

Yup, when I consumed some `golden teacher` and started perceiving the people around me in `The Simpsons Cartoon Style` rendered in realtime with perfect realism replacing my reality, I was sold on that being a very real possibility as well.

And music... It takes a whole other dimension. Calling it `high def` doesn't do it any justice. Experiencing music aside, it feels as though you live the music you are hearing. It is hard to explain. It also becomes your reality.

"The fact that a small amount of psychoactive substance could fundamentally alter my perceived reality put the final nail in the coffin for any possibility that my mind was generated by something outside my own skull."

Wow awesome insight! Thanks for sharing your experience, this blows my mind. I might be able to try it now without fear of other worldly entity bad trip encounters.

While experiencing a trip, are you able to recall that you took a substance and that this is your altered reality? Can you close your eyes and see darkness? Can you take a benzo to abort trip like shrooms?

It went the other way for me. My experience was that anything I believed could become true, including the idea that its all generated by the mind. It sounds like you still leave a part of your reality outside the scope of that. I'd suggest looking into the idea of reality tunnels as expressed by Robert Anton Wilson.

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