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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

This is such a silly conversation. We have cameras and all sorts of equipment that tracks a constant reality. Who gives a shit if people perceive it with varying levels of accuracy?

What does it matter that introducing substances to the brain can reduce your ability to perceive it?

There is evidence of reality, and childish mind games and semantic debates that it might not.

I drop you off in the Gobi desert with no water (or acid) and let's test the boundaries of reality. Let's see if you can perceive yourself some water.

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Old cameras recorded in black and white. Did people in the 20s live in B&W? Or maybe the camera is a device that attempts to record a picture of reality at some point in space-time, with lossy compression, to match the perceptions of reality of its creators?

The thing is, you can have a consistent model of reality when you're only looking at it from the inside. This tells you nothing about the outside.

Eg: if you're living in a simulated universe, everything is consistent, your cameras and the dry desert. Still, outside the thing you perceive as reality, there could be anything.

I think it's not a silly conversation at all. It hints to something that is so fundamental about existence.

You seem stuck in circular reasoning. The point is that when in an altered state, your conventional, "sober" model of reality breaks down and no longer applies. I think people "break through" when they realize their model of reality was constructed according to what they perceived through their available sense doors, but it's still just a construction, a model, a simulation, not reality itself. Even though it might be consistent when sober, it's self-referential consistency.

> The point is that when in an altered state, your conventional, "sober" model of reality breaks down and no longer applies.

Your sober model of reality 100% still applies. You are simply mis-perceiving what is happening in reality.

The reality your mind is attempting to model is the only one that exists. Inducing chemicals that hinder your ability to perceive it does not indicate that it is a simulation.

It is not a self-referential consistency because it is being tracked by many people, many forms of study, many computers and machines, and is repeatable. Chemically induced states of hallucination are none of the above.

I will leave the undoing of reality to string theorists and super-computers.

Sometimes I wonder if the people that claim they don't have an 'internal dialogue' in their head just haven't noticed it because they don't know where to look for it

There are many parts of conscious experience, that might not be noticed, but become extremely obvious in a Psychedelic state. It is like one of those hidden-image patterns. You would never know theres an image there, but once you see it, you can't unsee it - and you are struck by how blind you were to it before.

There are many correct ways to experience reality, operating off of the same source-of-truth data. Someone born with one eye can go their entire lives not knowing what it's like to _experience_ depth perception. You can give them all the cameras in the world, and they can fully understand the spacial relationships of all objects in the room, but they still wont be able to _experience_ depth, in their mental model of the world, like everyone else. They can't even begin to imagine it.

So, the carpet might not actually be swirling with fractal patterns. But It can be insightful to experience love as a fractal. You might notice parts of it that seemed one dimensional to you before.

woh man, that tree is beautiful.

For many things, you are right (or close enough for most purposes). For many, many other things, including the some of the things we care about most, the "true reality" is not so easy to discern.

That's just FUD. If reality was difficult to discern, we would long be extinct.

Reality is difficult to discern and we are not extinct. Cognitive bias has a long history of existing. For example, attributing personal flaws to harmless mistakes and attributing the flaws of others to malice or incompetence. This is clearly a distortion of reality, because we cannot assume we know the intention or capacity of all other people who aren’t perfect.

(A huge number of other evidences that sober people don’t have a full grasp of reality also exist: people misremember things all the time. People mishear things all the time. Check out that internet debate about the black-and-blue or gold-and-white dress!)

Cognitive bias doesn't exist in perception, it's interpretation, and attributions are even thoretization. Difficulty of classification is not a problem of perception, it's a problem of classification. If we can't name the color, it doesn't mean we don't see the color as it is.

Interpretation informs perception and perception isn't some constant in the human experience. A difficulty of classification can absolutely be a problem of perception because none of these things exist in a vacuum. Literally every human interpretation of reality is at best an approximate summary of what we experience of reality because it's impossible to remove bias and, believe it or not, we still don't know everything.

We don't know everything, but we discern reality just fine. Those are two different claims.

Sure, we discern reality, but that doesn't mean our perception isn't biased or correct.

Seemingly you talk about interpretation and theoretization, not perception. We have problem with building far reaching theories based on perception, but an error in a theory is not a bias in perception, see the color example above.

I don't think that's at all accurate.

We have evolved to perceive some aspects of reality (the ones where perceiving them improves survival/reproduction) and to not perceive many other aspects of reality because those aspects of reality do not affect survival/reproduction success enough to make up for the cost of having the more accurate perception.

The aspects that improve survival are pretty big and their perception is accurate and that's how we study nature - by augmenting our perception with tools.

You would do well to steel man this line of thought.

"Reality" can mean the physical patterns of atoms and electromagnetic radiation, which nobody suggests psychedelics change (although it's worth noting that you cannot completely eliminate subjectivity from your measurements even here, thanks to quantum physics). However we don't perceive atoms and radiation directly - we filter our senses through countless layers of filtering, interpretation, and abstraction. "Reality" for us encompasses a lot of concepts that are not so clear cut as "this pixel is that color". The clarity with which you perceive the world when sober is illusory, as evidenced by the widespread perception of paranormal phenomena by sober people - or even simple optical illusions.

Let me source OP to clarify where my statements are coming from.

> What if the actual reality is what you experience during a trip, and what we consider reality is some kind of trip due to the lack of a molecule that allows you to fully experience reality?

So, keeping our conversation on-topic, sober reality is a place of scientific validation. The leaves on a tree are not breathing, they are simply blowing in the wind. We know this because photosynthesis does not require movement.

The edges of your door may be fuzzy on a molecular level, but they are not expanding and contracting every few seconds, we know this because wooden doors do not have those transitive properties.

Acid, and therefore a hallucination, is altering your ability to perceive reality. It is not "unlocking" any form of reality that you cannot normally perceive. It might be fun to think about a ton of "what-ifs" but it is not as metaphysical as it is made out to be.

The one profound aspect of tripping is to identify that your perception can be altered. This has a litany of positive mental affects that should be studied and prescribed.

> The leaves on a tree are not breathing,

Actually, leaves are the primary method that trees use to breathe.

> Acid, and therefore a hallucination, is altering your ability to perceive reality. It is not "unlocking" any form of reality that you cannot normally perceive.

Every new type way of seeing the world unlocks a new form of reality. I would disagree with the "fully experience reality", but it can definitly provide new experiences with time, space, perception, identity and causality. Those are the very topics covered by metaphysics and this it seems entirely likely that same/many people change their metaphysical views as a result.

Interestingly vision science has shown there is some sort of transfer function that takes the same data we get from cameras to build perception. This is why there are some optical illusions that only humans can see, esp. in regards to colors of a given type being surrounded by different colors and appearing different even in reality they computer doesn’t experience the color change.

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