Pharmacology of Hallucinations
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Confabulation is a great word for it, and has a similar quality.
But I suspect we'll end up having grown past the issue long before we'd see the term switch given the entrenched usage by now.
Maybe the current usage of hallucination can be viewed as metonymy or perhaps synecdoche - the untrained observer sees absurd outputs, the description of the phenomenon does not include the reason.
Does anyone seriously considers LLMs as modeling the human brain?
I don’t like hallucination because it implies that it is different from how it normally works. Theories of confabulation suggest that this normal brain behavior. Still not the best word.
I’m always surprised when the kappa-opioid pathway (salvinorin A) is overlooked. It produces very distinctive hallucinations. I lack the personal experience to judge, but I think it’s phenomenalogically distinct from other dissociate experiences. It should be easier to research given that Salvia diviniorum and its constituents are not controlled federally nor in many states.
A number of my friends had terrible feelings and were freaked out for about a week afterwards. Similar stories are found on erowid.
> hallucinations may also be triggered by at least three different kinds of drugs: psychostimulants (i.e., cocaine or amphetamine), the so-called “dissociative anesthetics” (i.e., phencyclidine (PCP) or ketamine), and psychedelics, (i.e., lysergic diethylamid (LSD) and psilocybin).
It's my understanding that Psilocybin and LSD do not produce hallucinations (e.g. seeing something which does not exist. I'm aware of the difficulty of qualifying the previous sentence) versus changing your perception of phenomena.
The exceptions to this are that these compounds can trigger an individual to enter a psychotic state in which this then becomes possible. Or that in _extremely_ high doses such as the 'white light' territory of LSD. However the vast majority of those who use these substances do not tend to report, for example, conversations with people whom a sober sitter would state were not in the room (like the effects of dissociatives such as Datura).
The article seems to agree with my understanding of this nuance. I have found this distinction to be relatively uncommon in reporting otherwise.
Initially it was thought that LSD was psychotomimetic (mimicing the symptoms of those with pre-existing psychotic illnesses) and there were hopes that they could be used for study into these conditions. I understand that this is no longer working scientific thinking. A good documentary on these topics is the BBC's LSD The Beyond Within from 1987 [0].
Personally I have reached a personal belief that entheogens allow you traverse the realms of existence [1] within your lifetime. For example, descending into the hell realm or ascending into the deva realm.
I have the more prosaic belief that using a rickety chair allows you to sit on the floor.
Now, obviously, there are various levels of schmess. Many might say, "but look at the complexity of thought of these cultural artifacts surrounding psychedelics!" to which I'd say that, much like St. Anselm's ontological argument (which is poor reasoning, absurd on its face, and yet still more coherent than most psychedelic-induced metaphysical rants), the complexity of thought involved means nothing if it can not be grounded in the everyday experience of a shared, external, objective space.
Let's not reinvent religion and cults with psychedelics; let's look at this pivotal moment in time as a chance for us enthusiasts to encourage society to move beyond such poor modes of reasoning.
Also: I see shit on LSD, but I know it's not real. I'm hallucinating but not delusional, whereas e.g. datura produces both hallucinations and delusion.
It’s really annoying. The truth is, there’s nothing profound about tripping, it’s just a drug that changes your perception. There’s nothing intrinsically magical or spiritual about it. I enjoy tripping once or twice a year because it makes things look amazing and music sound cool, and your thoughts seem super profound (but they aren’t).
Thankfully, enterprising botanical entrepreneurs are doing their best to remediate the impact of acacia confusa on the environment, by gathering loose pieces of the root bark, powdering it, and selling the powder online. It makes a quite beautiful red/purple dye. Other interesting material properties include its use as a natural soap, and there appears to be some evidence for its utility as a wound healing agent.
Unfortunately, hooligans on the internet seem to be acquiring this incredible dye for the purpose of drug manufacture. Please do not be like these hooligans. Leave the root bark powder of acacia confusa, commonly abbreviated to ACRB, to those of us using it as a dye.
Even more upsetting is the ritual (ab)use of ACRB or other DMT-containing plants in combination with one of my other favorite dyes: refined harmaline, which is a beautiful yellow under normal light and flouresces brilliantly when exposed to black light. There are some positively in-the-paint ne'er-do-wells that will consume two of these dyes, ACRB (or similar pigment) and refined harmalines, within very quick succession. Usually they will then vomit, which serves them right!
Your understanding matches my anecdotal experience over a couple dozen LSD and psilocybin experiences. Largest doses for me are 10 ‘tabs’ and 7g shrooms.
The visual effects make colors more vivid, textures will shimmer, objects will morph and warp, some things will have a ‘halo’ around them, things of that nature.
I’ve never seen something that isn’t actually a real object while tripping, just perceptual changes on real objects, and I’ve never forgot that I’m tripping while tripping.
> Personally I have reached a personal belief that entheogens allow you traverse the realms of existence
This I don’t agree with, there’s nothing profound or magical about tripping. It’s just a way to perceive things differently, none of the stuff you think of during a trip is actually profound, it just seems that way. If you don’t believe me, try journaling or recording your thoughts on video while tripping and watch it while sober.
It’s simply a chemical that changes the way you perceive things, that’s all. Nothing spiritual or mystical.
FWIW I’ve done pretty much every common drug aside from MDMA (excluding research chemicals).
A. you actually had those types of hallucinations if it was LSD
B. you actually tested your tab
This is because that kind of subjective effect is just not what LSD does. Full stop. It is possible that you have some underlying schizophrenic tendencies that were triggered by LSD though.
Personally I have reached a personal belief that entheogens allow you traverse the realms of existence [1] within your lifetime. For example, descending into the hell realm or ascending into the deva realm
I now "know" that I cannot know anything about the spiritual realm. Spiritual "knowledge" gained by religion, meditation and hallucinogen it's all fake, what we can perceive as spiritual is a distorted projection of the inner working of the mind that gets rationalized as spirituality. That agnosticism is the only rational position.
I don't claim that hallucinogen religion and meditation cannot have positive benefits but don't seek spirutal enlightenment to hard or you will eventually into an hole or join a cult.
> That agnosticism is the only rational position.
Please tell us more about the insights you have gained leading to this conclusion
I started an intense spirutal quest after a meditation session¹, that unexpectedly left me disoriented, depressed and generally dysfunctional. My first few trips after that event made me hopeful again but left me curious as I felt that there was a deeper truth to be found.
1-in a college course on meditation (I had the choice between soccer, golf and meditation... in retrospective I should have chosen Golf)
At that time most of the more obscure hallucinogen described in Tikal and Phikal were legal and easy to obtain from Sigma-Aldrich at reasonable price and I knew people who could obtain quality LSD. So I tried almost everything that Shuglin described as +++.
But it's repeated combination of dextromethorphan (a surprisingly complex drug that is mostly a dissociative) and things in Thikal (LSD, 4-AcO-DMT, 5-meo-mipt...) that pulled on the curtain. 350mg of DXM made me prone to recursive toughts without blocking my ability to remember and the tryptamine brought the spiritual aspect. After thinking about thinking that I am thinking for what felt like a thousand years I came to experience the holodeck effect where you can will any scene into "existence", it's my repeated interactions with my "holodeck" that pulled that metaphorical curtain to reveal that the Wizard was nothing more than a physical process inside me.
After that I lost my access to the holodeck, hallucinogens became physically unpleasant and mentally uninteresting. My quest ended as I felt that I had learned what could be learned about spirituality and stopped worrying about a deeper hidden meaning in life. Things happen because they happen and there is no answer to why something instead of nothing (a complete nothingnes, not the nothingnes of a perfect vaccuum) and it doesn't matter!
By the time I got round to PiKHAL and TiKHAL everything was scheduled.
Personally, I disagree with the notion that "it doesn't matter" when reflecting on life. However, I understand the tremendous importance of being able to let go of things and the freedom that comes with that.
edit: And to learn what you need to change I never experienced something as effective and as harsh as 2CE, personal problems were magnified front and center and you feel like if you doesn't make a plan to adress those issues and execute that plan you will painfully burst into flame.
Also I don't opposed nor judge the work you do, spiritual beliefs or lack of are deeply personal, that why I put quote around "know" in my post.
If you sit in a completely dark room on LSD, you will see something other than a completely dark room. Do those things that you see exist? Maybe there's some technical definition of hallucination that isn't being met, but turning a complete lack of visual stimulus into something sounds like a hallucination to me.
I was always aware at some level that what I was experiencing was due to the drugs I took, so maybe that has something to do with whether it was a hallucination or not?
https://plus.maths.org/content/uncoiling-spiral-maths-and-ha...
To put it another way, there could also be cases where what is deemed an hallucination isn't, but it might lead to psychosis if the subject doesn't know how to interpret the new signal.
To reason by analogy, that would be akin to everyone being blind and a couple people developping sight.
Whole point is that unless we can understand what the brain is doing, we simply observe a phenomenon but we don't know what the phenomenon actually is.
(not talking about drug induced hallucinations, just to be clear)
It blew my mind when I learned these exist, and especially when I learned there has been apparently little research into them. Maybe more informed minds than I have determined there’s nothing to learn from them, but it seems like there would be insights to gain about how we see.