Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaway894345 | Hacker News Reader

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throwaway894345

> Take it to the extreme of an LSD trip, you can get something out of it that you can't get any other way. You take a day to mentally dig into your psyche and cut through so many of your mental ruts, while having some crazy hallucinations.

Maybe. I'm unconvinced that this is the only way to achieve any kind of insight. In particular I'd be surprised if it outperforms a cup of coffee or a rhapsodical conversation for any type of insight.

> your framing of "escaping or distorting reality" is founded on a trust that your senses and current mental processes are objective reality and that reality is desirable.

How can a high be "more real" than what you perceive through your senses? That seems almost incorrect by definition, so I guess I plead guilty to the charge of believing that sober experiences are more real.

With respect to "I'm assuming that reality is desirable"--yeah, if you think reality isn't desirable, then you're escaping, so I think you're [agreeing violently][0] with me here. I am guilty of the charge that I think escapism is bad and confronting reality is good.

[0]: http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2020/02/recognizing-violent-...

> How can a high be "more real" than what you perceive through your senses?

"Perceive" is the key word here. To draw an analogy, if your mind is a computer, your senses are raw data inputs, which your unconscious mind parses, filters, and transforms before the data is eventually passed to your conscious mind. Some hallucinogens give you a peek into this process - you get to see what's going on under the hood, so to speak.

Like a young child, you might find yourself enamored by the beauty of the simple greenness of a leaf.

These substances can teach you that there are many valid ways to "perceive" an event. It's not so much that what you perceive while intoxicated is "more real", but that it's an equally valid (and sometimes drastically different!) interpretation.

They're simple lessons that can mostly be learned without any drugs at all (meditation helps), but a proper trip can hammer a lesson home in such an immediate, visceral, enduring way that I'm not sure there's a sober equivalent.

>In particular I'd be surprised if it outperforms a cup of coffee or a rhapsodical conversation for any type of insight.

Ego death is a hell of a thing to experience. We can talk about it and how some people can reach it through years of meditation, but LSD is a sure ticket to it and the value of it is in the qualia of the experience, not the knowledge of what it is.

Imagine your psyche is a factory you've built over your life and you're standing high above it supervising. Regular introspection is walking through the lines and tuning the machine. Ego death is a tidal wave knocking down everything you've built, adjusting to your new reality, and the rest of the day is watching as it all comes back together. There's a level of forced commitment and intensity of the experience that you can't simulate. I'm not claiming you'll reach enlightenment, but something more akin to the learning from tearing down and rebuilding an engine, except it's ~~you~~.

There are real gains to going through it if you're of sound mind.

Sometimes escaping can give you a little distance and a perspective from which you can see reality more clearly. Sometimes confronting reality is just (mis)applying ingrained cognitive patterns to a bunch of details.

Also, sometimes things are just really shitty and there's nothing that can realistically fix them and escapism actually is a reasonable choice.

> Also, sometimes things are just really shitty and there's nothing that can realistically fix them and escapism actually is a reasonable choice.

I don’t buy this. Even when you can’t fix things (and I’ve been there) you can still process through your emotions and accept and make sense of your new normal. You don’t have to do it all at once, but that’s the only path to recovery—drugs and alcohol won’t get you there.

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