I used to be a pretty frequent psychedelic user. These results sound right to me.
I would've considered panpsychism to be totally absurd before I discovered LSD, for instance. Now it's my daily driver.
I would've considered panpsychism to be totally absurd before I discovered LSD, for instance. Now it's my daily driver.
My rational mind always goes back to atheism when sober, but the idea is always there in the back of my mind.
I'd recommend reading his books, The Way of Zen was excellent.
This is what I just read: "but the difference is that for the analytic idealist the universal mind is a reality which underlies the physical world, whereas for the cosmopsychist the universal mind is the physical universe."
In my personal experience psychedelic use seemed to almost solidify materialism for me. The idea that reality, your self and soul is nothing but an illusion is uncomfortable but I think tripping can reinforce that idea.
Less about the psychedelic experience itself. I also think that the existence of these drugs show that someone's reality is constructed from chemicals and cells doing what they do. Psychedelics are like throwing a wrench in a machine. The chemicals and mechanics are working differently now and the conscious experience changes with it. Depending on the drug introduced the perception changes, or consider some drugs like anesthetics where you can be awake and responsive but not have any personal awareness of whats going on.
On DMT trips I felt abstract thought fall apart along with the idea of my self(Ego death maybe?). I couldn't form ideas, and there was no longer an idea of self. "I" didn't exist. But this happens because a chemical is introduced into a system that is generating a conscious experience and it changes because of it. A typical brain creates these abstract ideas, your self identity, interprets senses in a certain way. That's the illusion created.
Since drugs being introduced into the system can turn off that sense of self, I, your soul(anesthesia, ego death) I don't think dualism is really applicable, the mind seems to be generated by the brain/body and its chemicals.
Hope i explained my self alright, not a topic I get to talk or think about much
Have you ever experienced your sense of time becoming immaterial? I've had one such trip where I genuinely believed that time stopped, and I was present in some eternal plane, though my ego no longer was present. I can definitely see how such an experience could lead someone down a path of panpsychism.
a different, fresh point of view, a heightened sense of empathy?
I once wrote a paper for epistemology class (https://github.com/MatrixManAtYrService/Righting/blob/master...). In it I argue that there is a category of propositions that are knowably unknowable. These are things that we know that we will never be able to know. One example of such a proposition is:
> We're living in a simulation that's too complete for us to escape
You can believe it, or you can disbelieve it, and neither stance is more rational than the other. Beliefs in such a space can't be motivated by evidence, so they have to be motivated by something else--like whether they cause you to live the kind of life that you want to be living, or maybe you just think it's fun. My beliefs re: panpsychism are like this. I don't anticipate ever being able to prove them, nor do I expect to run into evidence that disproves them. They go something like this:
I like to imagine that there is more than one temporal dimension. When we humans have cause to believe that a certain part of the universe has a mind, it's because that part of the universe is doing something that creates an arrow of time that is parallel to our own. Its future is also our future. This lets us communicate with it (maybe).
By contrast, when we encounter a rock or a lightning bolt or something that you'd generally call dead. Well, whatever machinations that part of the universe is having towards supporting its experience--they create an arrow of time that is orthogonal to ours, so we can't communicate with them. It's not so much that each rock is alive, or each lightning bolt, but that the whole universe is alive. The part of the universe that I get go call myself has come up with names for the other parts, but those names are just part of the story that I tell myself. Other perspectives might group things into entities worth naming in other ways. Maybe what I call "my" behavior is functioning like a neuron in something... else.
I like to mess with people who are having arguments about abortion: I believe that life begins not at conception, not at birth, but at the big bang. There are very few ways that this belief affects my life, but it does occasionally motivate me to meditate. If I can get my own thoughts to settle down for a while I feel like I can tap into a bigger awareness. It's not having any thoughts that I can decipher, but it feels nice anyhow.