Anodyne
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Posts posted by Anodyne
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42 minutes ago, DiscoStu said:It's ironic and funny that "science" has been saying for centuries theres no god but now simulation theory posits the existence of a creator all of a sudden god is real again. But of course nobody elses gods are real but the science god is real. Where have we heard that before?
Even if we assumed for a minute that "science" was some kind of homogeneous institution (which it isn't), rather than a way to question the world around us in a meaningful way (which it should be)... I don't think that "science" has ever said anything of the kind. Individual people might believe it but, kinda by definition, beliefs which are not supported by evidence, are not science.
There is a big difference between saying that there is no evidence for something, and saying that it is wrong. It's an even bigger leap to say that because there's no evidence for something, that it must be wrong AND this alternate theory (which also has no evidence, but we won't worry about that) must be right instead. I mean, if we want to treat "science" as an entity for a little longer, I would say that it is agnostic rather than atheist. (unless there's been some amazing new evidence discovered about how life or the universe began that I've missed)
That's why I like the scientific method - you are not encouraged to take anything on faith. Part of the process of real science (as opposed to stoned "the universe looks like it's made of pixels" kind of bullshit philosophising) is sharing how you came to those conclusions, so that others can pick it apart & question it & replicate it themselves if they want to. I think the problem that most people really have with all this is that it's a lot of hard work. Who has time to read, much less think about what you read? Much easier to just pick a news channel with some sexy reporters and believe what they tell you instead.
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I take issue with every usage of the word "evidence" in that article.
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13 hours ago, MeanGreen said:The graft on that last pic seems to be growing a sort of translucent green spine under each areole, that's very cool I've never seen that!
Apparently they are vestigial leaves! (source)
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On 10/5/2017 at 5:37 PM, El Presidente Hillbillios said:i was thinking i might have to make a t shirt or somthing so people who dont know me can recognise who i am
You reckon we should grab a bunch of nametag stickers?
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On 11/12/2017 at 6:28 PM, DiscoStu said:the cynic in me says he's having an existential crisis because he killed his girlfriend.
I wasn't following any of that, so I could be wrong about the timeline, but I feel like he's been on this path for a long time - you can see the beginnings of it in some of the weird acceptance/public speeches he's been giving for years now. And even if that was the event that tipped him into crisis (as you kind of hope it would do, to anyone), it seems like he's gone through that and out the other side. It kinda seems like his personal philosophy is still developing, and that might make him look flaky as fuck in interviews, but to be fair I think most of us would, if asked to articulate our deepest beliefs. And regardless of what I think of his ideas, I give credit to him that he is at least trying to learn & evolve.
I do get pissed off when people (especially public figures) renounce some old belief, espouse a new one, and then try to convert you. Fuck off teetotalers, we don't all have to stop drinking just because you had an epiphany about your own destructive alcoholism. But I don't get that vibe from Jim Carrey. He's trying to convince people that their reality is an illusion, and that they should look within to find their own meaning & divinity... er, wow, what a jerk?
People with money & fame who use that status to try to convert others to their cults & pronounce themselves saviours of humanity (ala Tom Cruise) - yeah, that shit offends me. But what is Jim Carrey doing with his fame & status? - acknowledging that it's transient & illusory & that instead of attaching meaning to it, we should look for meaning within ourselves.
I always thought that nihilistic evangelism was kinda oxymoronic, but fuck, if he can make it work, more power to the man. Though no doubt he will renounce it along with all his other worldly attachments.
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On 11/26/2017 at 10:50 AM, Sallubrious said:When I was kid I suffered from Alice in wonderland syndrome...It's hard to explain properly but I would feel like the walls of my room were miles away but paradoxically my head seemed much bigger than the room. It scared the fuck out me the first few times but I came to enjoy it after a while.It happened mostly when I was an adolescent but it still occurs from time time.
I never even tried to explain this one to my parents - it was only a few years ago that I learned that it happened to other people and actually had a name. Aside from the weird depth-perception shifts (if you've never experienced AIWS, look at dolly zooms in film - they capture a little of the experience), the most bizarre effect I get is that my proprioception gets all fucked up and my body feels like one of those sensory homunculus guys:
I feel like both of these effects stem from a similar process. With the depth perception thing - it might be an inverse of a common effect: the way the moon looks much smaller in photos than it does when we look at the sky, because we mentally magnify it when we pay attention to it. Or when we're looking at someone we're speaking to across the room, we are focusing so much on facial minutiae that their face stands out from the background to us. With AIWS, the opposite happens to me - not only does their face not stand out, but if I try to focus on it, it starts drawing away (like the push-pull focus), eventually seeming further away than the walls of the room, as Sally said.
So I wonder if both these effects are instances of our sensory "scaling" systems malfunctioning. Normally we downplay the fact that we're getting more sensory data from our fingers than we are from the entire rest of our arms, and our proprioceptive apparatus tells us that they are smaller. But if that system didn't work, and you had to deal with the reality of those signals in their actual proportions, you might feel like the little homunculus.
Similarly with our attention-focus telling us that faces & moons are bigger than they really are, or telling us how far away familiar things are even though we don't have enough visual information to make that call - our sensory processing system fills in the blanks from our memories. Normally, that is. But so much of what we experience from our own senses is filtered or illusory or in some cases completely made up - that when you take away some of those filters, or disrupt those processes, things can become really weird.
It's even more weird to think about how my sensory homunculus body image is probably just as valid a mental model as the visually-proportioned one, at least from my point of view. That's what really does my head in sometimes - not the idea that I'm freaking out & hallucinating when AIWS & other strangeness happen - but the idea that we are all hallucinating all the time, and that these weird moments are just tiny glimpses of what it might all look like without our brains in the way & misinterpreting everything.
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21 hours ago, ThunderIdeal said:My youthful meditations (on a handful of occasions) were by far the strangest and most jarring experiences i can recall,... whereas drugs have produced some of the most pleasant and sensory experiences.
I wonder if this is one of the reasons people gravitate towards drugs & exercise more than meditation? I mean, obviously the mental discipline required puts a lot of folks off as well. But I wonder if people prefer drugs not just because it's easier to reach those altered states, but also because you often get a nice whack of euphoria in the bargain, which helps to soften the blow of having the foundations of reality dissolve before your eyes...
And exercise too, as Glaukus mentions - where you get a nice endorphin/adrenaline rush accompanying your meditation. This must help to put a positive spin on any altered state, right? one that you might not get just by sitting still & thinking?
20 hours ago, mysubtleascention said:Have you read any ayurvedic literature regarding cumulative effects of various food intake and the immediate effect on the body and mind ?
No, never. I've been coming at it more from the angle of elimination-diets, food-intolerance/ immune-responses, and recent research into links between gut health & mental health. I do like my theories to have some scientific basis. But I am open to learning about traditional systems of medicine/healthcare, since so many of them have been supported by science when people finally got around to looking. Can you recommend a good read?
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...and crystal meth!
When I mention to someone that I take psychoactive drugs and hear “I’m high on life”, my brain usually translates it as one of these:
I’m high on life (psychoactive drugs scare me)
I’m high on life (I watch porn &/or play video games 6 hours a day - I don’t have time in my busy schedule for another potentially-addictive hobby)
I’m high on life (I train 6 hours a day - I don’t have time in my busy schedule for another potentially-addictive hobby)
I’m high on life (that OD really scared me)
I’m high on life (workaholic)
I’m high on life (Ritalin doesn’t count)
I’m high on life (still breastfeeding, ask me again next year)
So I find that people often just use it as a euphemism for explaining why they don’t take drugs, as opposed to actually expressing an interest in “natural highs” (excepting perhaps the exercise junkies). But I’m curious whether many of you out there are interested in altered states in general as I am, i.e. not exclusively the drug-induced kind. I’ve been interested ever since I was a little kid and first grokked that other people experience the world differently: some people don’t like this taste! My parents can’t hear that high-pitched noise! That blew my tiny mind. When I learned a decade or so later that you could evoke perceptual changes using drugs, that was a great thing to discover as well, but I never lost interest in the other kinds. They all represent manifestations of different parts of our body/brain/consciousness. And since that is how we experience the world, anything that gives us a deeper understanding of that apparatus & how it works - even if only by showing what happens it all goes wrong - is fascinating to me.
So what are these natural altered states, and how to find them? Here are just some of the ones I have noticed:
Migraines (with mild aura) are one that I get occasionally - it used to be I was too busy whimpering with my eyes closed to notice much else, but ever since my doc gave me some of those nice triptan meds I can experience some of the non-headache parts of migraines, and they are quite interesting. I don’t get strong visuals, but all of my senses are turned WAY up. I remember walking home as one was hitting - it was a warm day & I could feel every individual drop of sweat on my skin like hundreds of tiny cold pinpricks. There was a forgotten pack of peppermint gum in my backpack & at one point I had to stop and dig it out & throw it away because the smell was so overwhelming it was getting difficult to focus on things like crossing the road. The similarity to the sensory effects of psychedelics was striking - the feeling that I wasn’t really hallucinating, just experiencing reality in a less filtered way than usual.Another example is the AIWS and other kinds of sensory-processing weirdness that I sometimes experience. It’s been a long-standing theory of mine that the idea of HPPD(“flashbacks”) can be traced to stuff like this. People experience sensory weirdness all the time - for some of us that’s rare, for others not so much - and sometimes we don’t even notice, because our brains are so good at integrating sensory input. And if we do notice something weird happening, how do you even describe it? But people who have taken psychedelics have a point of reference - a similar experience that they can point to and say: “this sensory disturbance that I’m experiencing now reminds me of that time I took LSD”, and worry that they have broken their brains with drugs. Whereas people who haven’t taken psychedelics just say “well, this is a bit weird”, and then forget about it. But there are no stray drug molecules lurking in our brains, and no permanent drug-induced neurological damage. These things happen whether you have taken psychoactive drugs before or not. Interestingly, people doing deep meditation practice sometimes report similar sensory/proprioceptive distortions. I’ve never gone deep enough with meditation to the point of getting any drastic changes in sensory perception, but even the little CBT work I’ve done has been life-changing - just learning that you can *decide* how to react to things.
More recently I was changing my diet and observing the changes from that. I’ve never been good with fasting but I’ve discovered that a ketogenic diet gives me most of the benefits of fasting, without the low-blood-sugar, feeling-like-rubbish part. Of special interest for the altered states discussion was reintroducing non-keto foods and observing the effects they have, which can be pretty drastic. I used to think the phrase “sugar addiction” was stupid & sensationalist, but altering my carb intake and paying close attention to my body’s responses has forced me to re-evaluate that, and decide that it’s actually a pretty apt description. I’ve also learned that much of my daily aches & fatigue are caused by my diet (which, by the way, is one that would be considered quite healthy by normal standards), and that some simple changes give me more energy & better mood. So if the CBT work helped me to see how much mind influences body, the diet experiments showed me that the reverse is true as well, and our physical state influences our mindset more than we usually realise. It’s a two-way street and there is no clear divide between mind & body - you can’t take care of one without the other.Drugs generally work by mimicking/boosting/blocking our natural neurotransmitters. But there can be other ways to achieve the same end. After all, we’ve evolved each of those intertwining systems for a reason - to stay alert when we’re in danger, to remember useful information & forget useless stuff, to reward survival/reproductive behaviours like eating & fucking, and so on. And because so many of these processes are geared to respond to basic stimuli (food/water/sleep, emotional/immune reactions), we can manipulate them to a degree, simply by consciously controlling those inputs. The whole “set & setting” idea applies just as much to everyday life as it does to tripping.
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this is our wildest mount- a headless horse
but though it runs unbridled off its course,
and all our blandishments would seem defied,
we have ideas yet that we haven't tried- Robert Frost
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I reckon you need to be careful when getting in to this whole duality concept, and especially to applying it broadly to a range of different ideas. It sets up opposition (literally, of one thing being opposite to another) where this may not always be a helpful way to think about those things - it equates things which may not be equivalent on all levels, and can also support antagonist, us-against-them kinds of ideas. That is more of a conceptual criticism of duality. Maybe a more practical one is simply: not everything has an opposite. Many of the concepts that people present as being dualistic are not a thing and its opposite, but rather a thing and its absence. Which is a more interesting idea in my book. All the labels are arbitrary stuff that we've assigned, all their "opposites" are equally arbitrary, our entire existence is subjective. There might be stuff that exists outside of our own heads, but since we are beings of matter, who have forms & consciousness, that is the way we interact with that stuff. So I dunno if it's even possible to understand nothingness. I think this is another one of these dualisms that ignores the third option. We think in terms of "being" & "non-being" because our being is our lens through which we perceive everything. It is so central to how we think about things that our whole idea of "nothingness" basically just becomes an existence without us in it!
I find it really interesting how most religions have a creation myth that begins from nothingness, with realms & beings coalescing or being formed/summoned from this. It seems an idea that we find very comforting - that some kind of god-creator-being banished that nasty Void that was giving us nightmares. Because so few of them have us returning to that void when we die, and becoming nothing again. We are so attached to being that we don't want to give it up, even in death.
But how else to think about nothingness? The buddhist idea of non-attachment is one way to approach it, but in practice this seems to often get mixed in with some unhealthy self-denial. And while it still represents that dualistic problem I was talking about earlier (that non-attachment-to-being & attachment-to-being are two sides of a coin, and not the same as non-being), it does attempt a worldview where our own being is not central, which is at least a step on the path to accepting the idea of it not existing at all.
DiscoStu, I figure you're already on top of all this, I'm just riffin. If you're listening to special plans for this world then you already know that most don't go far enough, and that you must go beyond tongue and teeth, and hunger and flesh, beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away.
That poem has some of the best descriptions of nihilism. Here is another one you might like.Happily, I don't believe that you need to understand nothingness to accept it.
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I know a guy who was raised in an atheist household, and it was one of their family traditions to sit down together once a year and listen to this song, just to remind themselves what's really important:
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Someone just posted this in the random thread:
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I can't copy the pic from my phone for some reason, but here is a link to show you what happens when you put white oil on cactus
... learn from my mistakes! white oil burns -
Nooooo! White oil will strip the cuticle off the poor cactus, leaving it open to rot, sunburn, and other unpleasantness. Mildly soapy water on a soft brush (eg. old toothbrush) will remove the scale without hurting the plant. Also IME scale tend to target plants which are a bit sickly, &/or in damp sites without good air flow. So if it's possible to move them to a sunnier, airier spot after brushing them clean, maybe try that as well?
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This is a great idea guys! I was so stoked when I saw this workshop on the program. Teaching people to fish & all that... love yas
Or maybe Terry Pratchett's variation on the fishing proverb fits better here:
"Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life."
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Might be borderline as far as being considered "ethnobotanical", but bees seem to love tulsi species, which produce flowers for many months. Places with large Greek communities often have them planted as hedges on streets & in public areas. Plants are perennial, heat & drought tolerant, respond well to heavy pruning; the leaves dry well & make great pesto. Even thought I only have a few plants, they apparently attract enough bees (mostly those nifty blue-banded native ones around here) to support populations of predators as well - a couple of solitary wasps, and plenty of praying mantises. I like them because they're a useful plant, but even if they weren't edible I would grow them just for the mantis population - they are such fascinating little beasties.
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Some folks growing lichens also add a bit of soluble plant food and agar/gelatine to their milk/buttermilk, for extra nutrients & extra-stickiness, respectively. I've never tried it, but they sounded like useful additions?
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Holy shit yes, Special Plan! If you're not familiar, and ever feel your will to live rising too high, try saving up a week or two of sleep deprivation then locking yourself in a dark room with Current 93...
...that should sort it right out.
"Imagine", he said, "all the flesh that is eaten. The teeth tearing into it, the tongue tasting its savour and the hunger for that taste. Now take away that flesh", he said, "take away the teeth and the tongue the taste and the hunger. Take away everything as it is. That was my plan, my own special plan for this world."
I listened to these words and yet I did not wonder that this creature whom I had thought sleeping or dead would ever approach his vision, even in his deepest dreams or his most lasting death. Because I had heard of such plans, such visions, and I knew they did not see far enough. That what was demanded in the way of a plan needed to go beyond tongue and teeth, and hunger and flesh, beyond the bones and the very dust of bones and the wind that would come to blow the dust away. And so I began to envision a darkness that was long before the dark of night, and the strangely shining light that owed nothing to the light of day.-
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^^
I thought that buttermilk tek was for lichen?
I have a few mates who do bonsai and they get the best moss beds by crumbling up a chunk of moss with sand and sprinkling over the surface. Slower, but works much better than trying to transplant a big chunk in the long run. But this is just breaking it apart with your fingers, not grinding it to powder. Not sure that mosses would survive being ground that fine. That said, the one in the photos looks like it might be a selaginella(?), which are pretty tough and can even take over your garden if you let them.
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The last few days I'd been hearing this tinkly hi-speed tune every time there was a lull in the background city noise - sort of like a manic carillon - which I eventually decided must be the ringtone of a phone left behind by one of the builders who are working on the flat next door. After two days of that jangling I was cursing the thin walls and wondering why the damn thing hadn't run out of battery yet.
That should've been my first clue. Then at work today, in a different suburb, there were some rare quiet spells where I could still hear it.
So: don't cha hate it when that annoying song you've been hearing turns out to be some bizarre new kind of tinnitus coming from inside your own brain? I can't hear it without imagining some meth'd-up monk shouting "Allegro, allegro!" as he whips the carillonneurs....in the jingle-jangle morning I'll come following you, you bastard.
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3 hours ago, ThunderIdeal said:I bet its a great book.
It's actually not. It's something like 800 pages of stilted philosophy and excessive dialogue mashed in with some interesting alternate history kinda stuff. But still, somehow, when I finished it I looked up and realised that in the last few hours I'd become homesick for a fictional world. And the brains-as-quantum-processors idea has lodged so firmly I have trouble entertaining other models of consciousness now. I only know a few other weirdoes who liked it, and Yeti's one of them.
As for the topic of self-aware galaxies, I'm just gonna repeat what I said about it last time:
On 1/20/2014 at 8:05 PM, Anodyne said:Just because conscious neural networks are fractal, does not mean that all fractals represent consciousness. Stupid pattern-seeking human brains and their converse errors... I wonder if self-aware galaxy-spanning darkmatter-beings suffer from the same kind of logical fallacies that we do?
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Here's the bit that I'm guessing 3 out of 4 trippers are not grasping when they read that article:
QuoteIt is important to understand these structures do not exist in more than three dimensions in space. Only the mathematics used to describe them uses more than three dimensions.
So they're not saying that the brain has facets outside of regular time & space and encompasses parallel dimensions or whatever. Their use of the word "dimensions", in this context, just means that the brain has a structure with lots of levels of connections, and so is really complex. But I guess "really complex" just doesn't have the same buzzwordy pizzazz that "multi-dimensional" does.
By chance, I've just been reading a book about the other kind of multi-dimensional thinking, which suggests that brains may be quantum-processors, linked to all the infinite copies of themselves that exist within the polycosm. If you like your sci-fi slow & pedantic, I recommend checking it out: Anathem, by Neal Stephenson.
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4 hours ago, GypsyLee said:Does anyone remember Chemical Shaman or is he even still here?
Not forgotten, I re-read selections from his rants every few years when I need cheering up... usually when I'm a bit deranged already, so they make more sense...
Anyways, on a happier note, welcome o zef one!
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Zedo - SJW has complicated pharmacology, chiefly serotonergic activity, but also effects on dopamine & other types of neurotransmitter systems, plus a bunch of enzyme-inducing stuff... short story, it has lots and lots of drug interactions, some of them dangerous. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head if combining with caapi would be one of the risky ones, but personally I wouldn't chance it. At least not without doing some detailed research into both their pharmacologies first. At a glance though, I can tell you that SJW has been shown to downregulate 5HT2A receptors, which are thought to be important to psychedelic activity, so even if it isn't dangerous to combine with vine, it may dull some of the effects.
Also, many of the actives in SJW aren't heat-stable, so smoking may not be a good ROA.
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Is god a computer programmer?
in Chill Space
Posted
Wait, who the hell are these "people" who claim that science is without bias? Huge chunks of the process (peer review, as Crop already mentioned, and also statistical analysis - which basically exists to help keep our own over-active pattern-finding in check) are built entirely around the understanding that everyone IS biased. So these checks are put in place to attempt to minimise that (or at least balance it against some opposing biases
). And of course those attempts are also subject to bias, and so on down the rabbithole we go. To steal a line from Heinlein: it's a poor system, the best thing that can be said about it is that it's about eight times as good as any other method we've tried.
I do understand the issues & criticisms you bring up with putting these ideas into practice. I rail all the time against the poorly-designed studies, unsupported conclusions, biases & corporate corruption that plague every field of science. In fact I abandoned a career in pharmacology to work shitkicker jobs just because the corruption in that industry upset me so much that I couldn't bear to face it every day. But you're taking the worst perversions of scientific ideals as the foundation for your judgement?
Okay, I think I see the problem here. You're using the words "atheist" & "science" interchangeably, as if all scientists are atheists and all atheists are scientists. And both hashslingr & myself have already pointed out the flaw there. If you just replaced the word "science" with the word "atheists" in your first post, then I would agree completely.
And while this might seem like a petty point, and I'm sure that you (DiscoStu) understand the distinction between reified & non-reified "science", I doubt that everyone who agrees with you can make the same claim. So I know that "defining our terms" is such a pedantic stereotypical scientist thing to do, but it's important because those words express how we see things. And how a lot of people right now seem to see "science" is as a untrustworthy villain. They are throwing out the rational-thinking-baby with the pharmaceutical-scandal-bathwater, and so we end up with creationism in public schools and climate-change-deniers setting energy policies. Or people dismissing the entire field of biotech just because Monsanto are cunts. You can be critical of how scientific ideas are applied, without abandoning the good bits (like rational thinking, peer review & testing your theories) entirely and rejecting the whole enterprise. Just as I can respect the "be excellent to each other" portions of religion, rather than judging them all on the basis of a few crazy chapters & pedo priests. I just hope that people who see Science as a villain consider the alternative: that it has become a victim of capitalism, like so many other ideals.