72 replies to this topic

[Psylo]

^^ Go ahead Psylo, smite me!

Consider yourself smited. Or smitten.

^it's called psychedelics and psychedelic experiences, where do you think religion came from?

What is the basis of your allegations ? Rather than psychedelics, we may need to further examine the nauture of religions being formed due to undiagnosed heath issues.

It has been suggested that Muhammad suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy. Part of the syndrome of TLE seizure & sydromes include hallucinations. The Prophet claimed not only to have been visited by the Angel Gabriel, but often many Jinns (supernatural Genies). Revelations (known as Ayah) that were to become crucial formations of the Quran were presented by the mysterious ringing of a bell from the skies. He suffered from anxiety, he sweated in the coldest of winters, and he often fainted.

While we often associate visual & auditory hallucinations with imbibement of psychedelic substances, in the case of Islam I do not believe it to be the case. Modern neuroscience has found that electrical lobe stimulation triggers instances that may be deemed 'paranormal activity', which explains the Prophet's genie encounters.

What may be deemed as hallucinations are als experienced in advanced stated of Yogic meditation. Is there any evidence of Hindu philosophy being formulated as a result of 'using psychedelics' ?

These heightened states already exists within us, but merely require a key to unock the potential. Whether it be TLE, meditation/prayer, schizophrenia, drugs or other tools, each & every aspect of ancient & modern humanity can be attributed to the potential for hallucination.

[chnt]

^good point

[applesnail]

Bury a black hen egg and blow yr load in it and see if you can get a miniature humanoid!

"cited by Dr. David Christianus at the University of Giessen during 18th century, was to take an egg laid by a black hen, poke a tiny hole through the shell, replace a bean-sized portion of the white with human semen, seal the opening with virgin parchment, and bury the egg in dung on the first day of the March lunar cycle. A miniature humanoid would emerge from the egg after thirty days, which would help and protect its creator in return for a steady diet of lavender seeds and earthworms."
http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Homunculus

Edited by applesnail, 08 July 2012 - 07:54 PM.

[Psylo]

Ah yes, that reminds me. Three is also the traditional "Century Egg", a Chinese delicacy where a duck's egg is preserved in salt, lime, wood ash, green tea & barley husks.

It's eventually removed, and the resulting eggs looks like this. Breakfast, anyone ?

[SallyD]

They buried Jesus for three days and he came out with more power than ever.

There's a bit of confusion as to whether he lived or not depending on which "chapter" of the book you read, but burying him seems to be the best thing that ever happened to him.

[Distracted]

I think if you put 'energy' into a ritual you can influence your trip.

If you had to fast for 20 nights then on the final day repeat a mantra or prayer 50 times before lighting a fire and imbibing you'd have a rather different trip than if you went to some guy's house and paid $20 and imbibed.

Simple rituals effect the way things turn out, you could argue that it has to do with spirits... or you could argue that the entire ritual is just you preparing for your trip. The more premeditation involved the more different the end result will be.
I'm not sure how to explain it any easier... it seems like common sense to me.


edit: in conclusion, i 100% believe that performing a burial rite for a psychedelic will potentiate it's effects.

Edited by Distracted, 10 July 2012 - 08:15 AM.

[whitewind]

Magic is like the Higgs Boson - we theorise that it exists because we see the effects of it's presence, but we can't actually see the object scientifically - yet. Some of the effects of meditation and diet could be monitored scientifically; they become understood by science, and accepted. Set and Setting - this is proven to be important through experience, though quantifying the effects scientifically do prove more difficult - especially as each person reacts differently to each stimulus.

It is interesting to me, to see just how much money is being poured in to "seeing" the Higgs Boson. If the magical energy is as difficult to manipulate and determine scientifically as this, one day we may get some genius coming along who thinks they know where to look and persuades governments to hand over trillions to see if they can discover it! But to do that, it would seem that we would need more proof that it actually exists.

Which is why it is important to take notes and write down your experiences with potentiating magical energy. Just chucking it in the ground and hoping that it will do the trick is just not good enough. Tell me your rituals! How did you focus your mind? How did you channel the energy? What time of day was it, which cycle of the moon, did you bury a dead animal with your brew? The more information we have, the better, and if we can consistently replicate the effects, we have something scientific to play with!

[CβL]

Here's a pictorial Vennish diagram. The larger square is "everything".


--How we described what we knew in the year 1600--
________________________________________________
|.....................|.........................................................................|
|.....................|.........................................................................|
|.....Science...|..........................Magic......................................|
|.....................|.........................................................................|
|.....................|.........................................................................|
|.....................|.........................................................................|
|.....................|.........................................................................|
|.....................|.........................................................................|
|.....................|.........................................................................|
|.....................|.........................................................................|
|.....................|.........................................................................|
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

--How we describe what we know in the year 2012--
________________________________________________
|...................................................................|...........................|
|...................................................................|...........................|
|....................Science..................................|.......Magic...........|
|...................................................................|...........................|
|...................................................................|...........................|
|...................................................................|...........................|
|...................................................................|...........................|
|...................................................................|...........................|
|...................................................................|...........................|
|...................................................................|...........................|
|...................................................................|...........................|
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

^^

Basically, there's:

The person who believes that what is currently in the science box is all there is, and denies anything else.
This person is about as likely to be correct, as I am likely to turn into a dragon the second I click 'Post' (I'll let you know if I am a dragon afterwards).
It should be obvious that the science box keeps growing, and will continue to grow for a very long time. There's no evidence of it stopping. For this reason, this viewpoint I don't think is useful.

The person who believes that what is in the magic box is all there is, and denies anything else.
This person is again, basically wrong, as it's not hard to show them things from the science box (such as bacteria, galvanism, static electricity - all traditionally attributed to magic).

The person who believes what's in the magic box can fit entirely into the science box
That's me (for now). If the things called "magic" exist, then science can bend to fit them, and then they will be "science" too. Things that in the past were described with magic (such as rainbows), have been found to have more simple ( = less things to believe in that cannot be seen or measured in order to explain) explanations from science.

The person who believes what's in the science box can fit entirely into the magic box
I can't deny the possibility that everything might be magic, but see no non-ambiguous evidence for it (i.e. if science can explain it without invoking nothing "unseen", then that evidence is ambiguous). This same caveat applies to the science explanation. This ultimately reduces the choice to "which is more useful?" for the ambiguous cases.

The person who believes that nothing exists (denies the existence of anything)
Well... good luck to this person - they're gonna need it.

The person who believes that what's in the boxes at the moment is correct [both science and magic exist]
I can only point to the "graphs" showing that the magic box almost certainly become a lot smaller, and will continue to do so, as science describes more things more accurately.




This is a work in progress. Please help if you can see anything missing. I'm sure I've left things out. Such as including a category of "Not sure". But I think most of the points stand. And here's to hoping I can finally become a dragon and flamethrower those banker cowards...

Edit: I did not become a dragon, for those who were wondering.

Edited by βluntmuffin, 15 July 2012 - 10:39 PM.

[∂an]

^^ nice post betaluntmuffin


How do we define the science box?

Scientists answer: Phenomena that can be explained as occurring through processes that we have experimentally proven to exist.
Magicians answer: Phenomena that do not require the interaction of matter and consciousness to occur.

How do we define the magic box?

Scientists answer: Phenomena that cannot be explained as occurring through processes that we have experimentally proven to exist.
Magicians answer: Phenomena that require the interaction of matter and consciousness to occur.

Not sure what my point is really.

[Distracted]

Science is a theory that can be replicated, discovered by using the scientific method.

[mud]

Even though i've done my majik mostly through the chaos paradigm,
everything old and earthy has spoken, and makes sense too. Sometimes, the most basic common sense.
Like bury your nuts and they wont spoil. lol
Ground your energy, and it lasts longer... yeah?
But when you think of glass, or crystal as an obvious magnifier..
and realise its a lot of what, a lot of ground is made from..a person can start to see more and more opportunities to legitimize the postulate.
That burying something could potentiate it.
But when you play with other correspondences too.. colour, number, planet, chemical..neuroligical, physiological..
whether or not you've done something that works or not,
doesnt matter as much as the connections you've made by thinking about this.
Now, i'd never even thought of asking the gnomes for help..i've been working rock like trees or machinery, and never stopped the think of those little smiths and how they could help. Specifically..

I've thought of burying potions. The prepared herb from a place..
near the places point of power.. (the intersection of river, or peak of hill, or outcrop convergence etc)
for a certain period of time..
and add a few sparkles and ribbons that might be relevant to the whole thing,
then invest enough belief and energy

and presto!
Stinging nettle, moon powered, number 7 acorn pesto sauce! I'll ask the gnomes to season it!!
Then i'll dig it up and eat it before a ritual, or some shiz.
Yay, thanks for the idea : )

Edited by mud, 16 August 2012 - 08:26 PM.

[r2pi]

how the hell science can understand the basis of consciousness, let alone its alteration, when we can't even understand what the hell consciousness is... I can't see a resolution to that any time soon. There will always be mystery. Even if consciousness is logically explicable, all systems of logic rest on axioms, the source of which are surely arbitrary or at least completely mysterious to anyone subject to them.

As for burying stuff... one of my favourite sections from one of my favourite books, Bill Mollison's Permaculture Book of Ferment and Human Nutrition...

There are, of course, yeast inside and on the bodies of grasshoppers from grain fields, and grasshoppers are the base of the wheat-cakes cooked as cous-cous,. or at least are such a base in the countries of origin (in North Africa). Cooked wheat is cracked and pounded with uncooked grasshoppers and a little salt. It is moistened and packed into buried jar as a 'nauseous ferment' (probably a normal ferment).

After 6-8 days, the mass is formed into cake 1-1.5 cm thick and sundried. Cous-cous is quickly cooked in water, in stews aor alone to be eaten with sauces or hot meals.

One would expect somewhere in grasshoppers, caterpillars, etc., are all the necessary yeasts and enzymes to digest plant leaf and grain. For cous-cous, some of the grasshoppers used are Locusta bruchos, Attacus ophimacus and like species. This recipe can be used for a variety of insects and grain crops.

[CβL]

Even if consciousness is logically explicable, all systems of logic rest on axioms, the source of which are surely arbitrary or at least completely mysterious to anyone subject to them.

You've said science is like this:
axioms >--[experiment]--> explanations.

Science (when it works properly) is like this:
axioms >--[experiment]---> explanations
....../\__________________________\/

Axioms such as "Mass is always conserved" were derived from experiments, and any experiment which can prove otherwise is welcome to modify the axiom. In fact that very much happened with the genesis of atomic physics, where it was found that particular axiom was incorrect, and was reformulated as "Mass and Energy, through their equivalence, are always conserved."
It could (and going by the scientific record) probably will - get changed.

Secondly, most of the pieces of the puzzle of consciousness are there. They just haven't been made into the painting quite yet.
Things like strange loops, memory predictive framework, "mirror neurons" (I get the feeling they have found something significant, but have just jumped to a wrong conclusion),
and what I believe is yet to be described adequately- self-proliferating neuron excitation patterns (I'll call them SPNEPs).
I'm very sure that the brain waves are largely the output of these patterns. The brainwaves themselves are largely meaningless (for example, if you measure the temperature of your CPU once a minute, do you know how your CPU works? (no) ), but the patterns that generate the brainwaves are significant (but the brainwaves do not give much more than a tiny clue to the real patterns). Brainwaves are 4d patterns compacted into 2d patterns; losing a lot of critical detail.

The next advance was when they used 3d brain scanning to find increased blood flow or higher electrical current (via their induced magnetic fields) in certain sections of the brain. These methods can track which neuron areas have been assigned to which tasks (approximately). But again, this isn't that useful, as the location of the neurons doesn't matter. It matters what those neuron structures are doing, and what they are actually representing when they do it. That's much harder to answer. But I'm certain they'll find that the brain has many SPNEPs, of different frequencies (but they do not use an exact frequency, the frequencies drift slightly in a chaotic fashion over time). They are almost like "wake-up/update" signals that spread out and remain somewhat (but not entirely), localized. The subsections in your brain consume up to 90% (e.g. visual cortex) of their signals from elsewhere in the brain, I'm pretty sure that some of that 90% is always circulating. That particular pattern, is one of the reasons you're alive.

It goes without saying this is just my hypothesis at this stage. I'm sure there's been more thorough thinking/research on this particular topic, and I'll check. But I will more to write (non-amiguous evidence), and whatnot. Then maybe I can devise some scientific tests, and maybe we'll get a bit closer to understanding it. ^^

[r2pi]

CBL - sure, some of that stuff goes towards explaining neuron systems as computational systems giving rise to response to stimulus. But even when we work that out (which is a long way off, as your temperature analogy attests)-- that's still a million light years away from understanding consciousness. Where on Earth does an "I" fit into that? What the hell is "I"??

[CβL]

What makes you so sure there's actually an 'I', rather than it being a clever illusion?

Edit: I never actually compared the brain to a computation system, and it's not in the sense of the word 'compute'. Evidence suggests the brain's main action in that respect is through memory-based predictions. It predicts what the sensory input is about to be, and sends that information downwards. The lower parts of the brain checks if the prediction is correct - if it is, then it doesn't make a big fuss. If it's completely incorrect, the new information bubbles to the top (being turned into more and more abstract representations as it goes, from edges, to contours, to shapes, to objects, to meanings - something like that). The top "layer" then adjusts itself (either short-term by activating other abstract circuits (such as if you open the door and then you see someone you recognize, activating your 'grandparents', or your 'Bill Clinton' circuits) (or long term, such as creating/enlarging a neuron connection path) to suit the new data. That's emerging as the new interpretation of intelligence. There's still some tricks that remain unknown though.

Consciousness is related to this high-level layer that maintains an abstract representation of yourself. But due to information constraints, there are many shortcuts that your brain takes to represent itself with itself. Most of these shortcuts we don't even realize. The brain does a marvellous job of tricking ourselves. For example, you have no ability whatsoever to sense your saccades (certain drugs can allow you to sense them, but you normally feel very sick and nauseous from the experience). They are 100% there, 5 times a second your eye makes tiny involuntary darting movements when you think you're staring at one spot, not moving. Your eyes have a blind spot, where blood vessels congregate on your retina - your brain filters it out so you don't have a clue.

There's a lot that we can learn from outside, and a lot we can learn from inside, and it will take both to understand consciousness. As I have hopefully made clear, you cannot "believe 100%" what your brain provides to you. I recommend you read some of the clever experiments that have been thought up to find out these tricks the brain uses, as it's very surprising to read about what is totally hidden to you.

Lastly, there's no reason to suspect that learning about something diminishes the wonder it causes in any way whatsoever. Previously most people thought the night sky was some little lights glued onto a black screen (omg bro, that's just buzzy.... -_-). But now that we know we're staring millions and billions (and trillions?) of years into the past, via light from distances we can't even grasp. That there just orders of magnitudes more stars than grains of sand on Earth. That there actually could be other people also looking into the same night sky and thinking the very same thoughts we're thinking...

Trying to understand these things just makes them more mysterious, as we just unlock bigger questions.

Edited by CβL, 16 August 2012 - 11:50 PM.

[r2pi]

What makes you so sure there's actually an 'I', rather than it being a clever illusion?

Who is witnessing this illusion? (Agree with everything you say in that post btw.)

[CβL]

Wouldn't have a clue mate.

As far as I know, there's very little evidence, and it dwindles all the time - to suggest that we have the free-will we feel we do. All I know is that I'm happy to pretend I have free-will. ^^

[eatingsand]

reading all the talk of magic, illusion, freewill etc. on this thread got me thinking about this doco with sir Martin Rees called "Are we real" and I went to re-watch it again at http://topdocumentar...till-dont-know/ and before i hit play I seen an ad for Open Universities Australia offering a bachelor of arts (security, terrorism and counter-terrorism)............Whatthefuck!!!! I dont want to live in this country/planet anymore....going to bury myself in the backyard and see what potentiates

[chilli]

Excellent stuff CBL, very interesting, but what are these SPNEPs you speak of? I can't find anything googling.

eatingsand.. I don't get why counterterrorism would make you feel like that?

[eatingsand]

I thought arts degrees were all about helping to encourage our next generation of free-thinkers...not fascist-fuck security guards, maybe i'm just ignorant to what an arts degree is. Sorry I dont want to derail this thread as it interests me greatly. My wife has a pretty massive esoteric library and I thought we would find heaps on potentiating things by burying them but not much chop so far. My little old grandpa in scotland used to bury scotch in the backyard and joke about it being for the pixies but dad reckons it was because it came off the back of a lorry

[r2pi]

As far as I know, there's very little evidence, and it dwindles all the time - to suggest that we have the free-will we feel we do. All I know is that I'm happy to pretend I have free-will. ^^

To me, this may be a blind spot in the current scientific world view.

The scientific approach is acutely reductionist - try to explain everything with an absolutely minimally complicate set of premises. One premise that has been adopted is that everything in the universe is a epiphenomenon of matter and its interactions (energy).

This works great, mostly. Spectacularly well. So well that people have come to believe in it -- which is a fundamentally unscientific thing to do.

As you point out, our materialist understanding seems to say that free will, consciousness and agency are all impossible.

And yet, of all the observations we have made about the universe, in order to inform our understanding, which of them is more immediate and more undeniable than the existence of individual personalities with agency? This is the most obvious and fundamental observation of all all other observations in fact are made through the lens of the subject, the conscious agent who makes the observation. The failure of our theories to predict it does not disprove its existence. It tells us the theories are incomplete.

This suggests to me that the universe consists of something else in addition to matter, and that whatever that is, is the seat of consciousness. Consciousness shares the same primacy of existence as matter and energy. All three obviously exist. And of none of them can we meaningfully ask or answer the question, "What is matter?", "what is energy?" or "what is consciousness?". This is because they are all part of the fundamental structure of the universe.

I'm not really convinced of what I've written above. But is a thought that I keep coming back to.

[CβL]

Well, that's mostly part of it r2pi, there's a new approach in science, called holism.
Holism is related to gestalt psychology (many people here will be more familiar with this term), which is the idea that while it's important to know how the parts work, the whole cannot be understood as just the linear combination of parts. There's the strong emergence argument, which is that by studying everything from cells and downwards you can never discover consciousness. There's the weak emergence argument, in that by studying everything from cells and downwards could lead to everything above, but it will require a gigantic amount of resources to do so. A brain has something like 50-100 billion neurons (I can't remember the real number sorry), and a model of a neuron, and a neuron connection will take up /way/ more than 1 transistor - you would need a gigantic number, all connected in a useful way to get an idea of how the brain works at only one instant. The next instant, when neurons have died or been created. or a new connection is made, or the blood brings a non-native neurotransmitter into the synapse (= LSD has entered), will take another order of specific changes again. Again, theoretically you could do it, but it's just orders of magnitude more difficult to do so than to calculate how a planet orbits. Lastly, there's also the information of the electrical and chemical momentum of the reactions within neurons and in the synapses that have to be taken into account. I think the brain is able to "re-start" it's SPNEPs if there's enough neuron firings in the brain. Kind of like how a wildfire can start to burn where you've put it out. But either way, it would be necessary to simulate the brain with these electrical and chemical momenta, either from capturing them, or allowing "the fire to rekindle the recurrent cyclical patterns [the SPNEPs]".
This new type of science is really cool, but so far it's actually a lot harder to practice, as there's no established specific method to apply it.

I favour the weak emergence argument, and I can probably justify why, but I haven't got a coherent clear explanation for it. My brain has weighed the implications, and the possibilities that either allow somewhat, and it says that the weak argument is best. This strong/weak emergence argument also ties in with the idea of nature's 'hidden variable', something that Einstein and peers debated for years. I can't remember which side Einstein was on, but as I understand it, this 'hidden variable' theory has been disproven for all matter down to the sub-atomic level (but not quarks, and the still-theoretical strings). I can't remember it well enough to explain it.

I don't feel that consciousness is something primal, and ultimately special, as I think there are way higher levels of consciousness that can happen, and they will in the future. Read Star Maker to get an idea of these.
The idea is that the inhabitants of entire planets communicate in such a way so as to ensure a truly global superconsciousness. On Earth - where you have large groups of people saying "No, Book A is the right one, you are entirely incorrect and evil and everything you say is designed to trick me to the evil side!", and another group saying "No, Book B is the right one, you are entirely incorrect and evil and everything you say is designed to trick me to the evil side!" without ever so much as trying to agree on the differences (Jesus and Mohammed could totally be good mates considering all of their similarities) - I can pretty much safely say there is no global consciousness of this nature on Earth. We cannot have it without them either, as a truly conscious supergroup would be conscious of and feel empathy for those confused people, and be unable to ascend higher without everyone coming up also. Without everyone even being able to communicate constructively, we cannot even begin to comprehend the ascent to the next level of consciousness.

And chilli, I have made-up (or coined, as it sounds more professional) the term 'self-proliferating neural excitation patterns'. There probably exists a term for them, but I haven't found it described yet (admittedly I haven't specifically looked for it). They definitely exist - for example there must be a cyclical excitation pattern that regulates the heartbeat. I'm just proclaiming with some indirect evidence that these cyclical excitation patterns are way more important than most people imagine, and are necessary (but not sufficient) conditions [these are math words with a specific meaning]) for consciousness.


Edit: for something fun I remembered, here's some more evidence that there is something staring you in the face and your brain filters it out. The background of the thread is white (I will also assume that your computer screen is LCD). Pick a white bit, and just think to yourself "it looks pretty much white, sure it's made of little red, green and blue squares, but it looks almost like the white paint on my wall - good enough". Well, there's a pattern called Haidinger's brush, that is right there and I would say 98-99% of people have no idea about. http://en.wikipedia....idinger's_brush
I highly recommend learning how to see it. Once you get good enough, you can even see it in a blue sky from light from the sun.

Edited by CβL, 18 August 2012 - 03:25 PM.

[r2pi]

Rhythmic nerve excitations government heartbeat, were, I thought, initiated by the sinoatrial node and to a lesser degree all cardiac muscle tissue. The nerves are neurons but the cells exciting them are not -- they are a type of muscle cell.

Breathing would fit your description, but this is susceptible to conscious control, unlike heartbeat (largely).

[CβL]

The heartbeat is just evidence of a cyclical pattern, but as you point out, it's not subservient to the brain. I'm sure there are more, but I cannot prove that there are (yet.... can I, have a look in your brain bro?).

As an aside, walking is very similar to a rolling circle. There's not really a deep connection that this makes, but it's somewhat interesting I think.

[incognito]

That's the one psyllo. Watched a doco on it in year 5 or something. Being a strict catholic private school, it came across as rather witchy and spooky and fascinating.