ITT: people who have never taken psychs talking shit and people who have being like chill. Who do you think knows more? The folks swallowing D.A.R.E. propaganda like water, or the open minded people who actually experienced it??
People will go great lengths to mentally justify to themselves they’re not addicts somehow.
And sure, many will be functional addicts, DrHousing around life without apparent crazyness, but many won’t, but still try them because people like this swear it’s the panacea.
Sure, in some cases they can do good and be therapeutic, but in so many other not.
Is like marijuana, for years people swore up and down that it was harmless and not addictive, but now science shows that can cause addiction, and that it can cause long term cognitive damage.
What I will agree tough, is that marijuana and some psychodelic drugs are, even if harmful, way less so than things like alcohol and cigarettes, so then is the question to be asked if those are legal, why these aren’t, and that’s a good argument to say they shouldn’t be illegal.
I still won’t take any of them tough.
and still is quite BS the comic’s copium as many have pointed out.
Ive never met, read, or heard of an addict of psychedelics. Even an addict of THC is a stretch to be honest.
I tend to rank addiction to withdrawal effects, weed withdrawal is probably somewhere between caffeine and nicotine for most people.
IDC what y’all say. I like this comic. I liked doing psychedelics in college. I may do more eventually…
YAY DRUGS!
It’s wild how conservative and square the community is here.
Thanks for posting the comic! It’s neat
Get off my lawn, you goddamn hippies!
Plot twist: you’re already hallucinating, your brain just calls it reality 😂
I really object to this idea that hallucinogens unlock some kind of higher plane of existence that can’t be experienced by people who don’t do these drugs.
If it were true that people who did hallucinogens did gain some kind of additional knowledge why is it they aren’t achieving things at some obviously higher rate?
If you want to use recreational or therapeutic drugs be my guest, just don’t come back telling me you’ve uncovered the secrets to the universe…
What in the world…
They literally are tho. lol. What a wild take
“You see, I think drugs have done some good things for us. I really do. And if you don’t believe drugs have done good things for us, do me a favor. Go home tonight. Take all your albums, all your tapes and all your CDs and burn them. 'Cause you know what, the musicians that made all that great music that’s enhanced your lives throughout the years were rrreal fucking high on drugs. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few tunes.”
Bill Hicks
I think you may be a little biased, Mr Psychodelic.
I mean I can honestly say for me that shrooms cured my depression. Not helped, not band aid fixed but cured (this was eight years ago). Not pushing any agenda here, just sharing my experience
I have no doubt there are therapeutic applications for hallucinogens and psychedelics just as much as there are recreational uses for those drugs as well.
My contention is really directed at those who think these are some kind of out of body spiritual hack to “unlock” knowledge.
It’s smacks of Joe Rogan nonsense.
there is real science of therapeutic effect to some people.
but like, you will harm a happy person if you give them an SSRI, with these things is hard to say how it will go.
I really didn’t like the personality changes I saw in others after taking LSD, that’s why I have no interest in psychedelics.
Admittedly I haven’t done a lot of deep diving on it, but what kinds of personality changes did you observe? I haven’t heard a lot of testimony like this around psychedelics. Mostly just people praising them.
Weeks after taking them they were still gushing how beautiful this and that treeline was. I don’t remember more, sorry ^^
Oh, they just…saw more beauty and wonder in things most folks consider ordinary? That doesn’t sound so bad, actually. XD
I don’t remember more, sorry ^^
Haha all good. Thanks for replying. :)
Lol “people loved the world and saw beauty in things I couldn’t and it PISSED ME OFF”. Real big brain take, fuck man let people enjoy things
Me neither. This is not about psychedelics.
It’s more “I want to continue to hallucinate in the super useful way that all humans normally do, and not fuck up my brain so that useful hallucination of reality gets knocked out of whack.”
A series of still images, if the frame rate is fast enough, appears to us as smooth motion. Our eye can only focus on a tiny spot at any given time, but our brain fills in the rest of the visual field as if it’s high res based on the last time we glanced somewhere, some extrapolation and interpolation, etc. We’re somehow able to pull the sound of someone’s voice out of a crowd of noises and ignore all the irrelevant sounds to hear what someone’s saying. And then these sounds get somehow directly translated to words and concepts in our head. And if you’re looking at someone in the face as they’re talking, you can read emotions there, instead of just seeing a wrinkly slab of meat with some wet spheres near the top and some disgusting wet holes below. That’s all “hallucination” in some way. But, it’s all incredibly useful.
I know that 99% of the time if someone takes hallucinogens they come back to reality just fine. Sometimes the trip even makes them feel better. But, is it really worth messing with your brain’s delicate and super useful hallucination of the world around you?
Over time, psychedelics tend to clean off the lenses, so to speak, making the “useful hallucination” more accurate and reliable.
I dunno if I’d call this hallucination, although I get what you’re saying and I agree with you! But wouldn’t “interpretation” be a more apt description?
If someone is seeing a message out of this very text, rather than the strict “material reality” of each individual letter just being an arbitrary glyhph, or each pixel, or each little diode or electron forming those pixels…
…to call this miraculous level of ascribing meaning “hallucinating” seems a disservice right?
Your comment just brought me a lot of wonder and awe, because you’re right, our brains’ wiring to tell stories and weave concepts and interpret the world around us in a way that’s useful, and beautiful, is a wonderful part of being alive and setting us apart from mere machines, rather than simply a feed of raw unfiltered data input from the world around us “as it is.”
Truly marvelous. :D
Duuude, totally
Right, and a single marijuana cigarette will drive you to a murderous rape rampage of white women (or whatever else American bullshit propaganda you want to peddle today)…
I know that 99% of the time if someone takes hallucinogens they come back to reality just fine.
“I know that 99% of the time someone masturbates they don’t go blind” - that’s the level of nonsense you’re spouting…
Just turn on your brain for a second. Psychedelics have been legal/decriminalised in some countries for years or decades. You’re saying 1 in a 100 trips leaves you insane. Try to make sense of those two statements and support it with literally any shred of data from the last couple of decades.
All of the traditional psychedelics are significantly healthier for your brain than having a few drinks. One can literally regrow neurons, the other kills them.
Sometimes the trip even makes them feel better. But, is it really worth messing with your brain’s delicate and super useful hallucination of the world around you?
And sometimes it can cure serious psychological conditions, autoimmune disease, allergies, and a host of other issues.
There’s a very good reason an increasing number of places are legalising them for therapeutic use.
not really 99%, more 99.9%
the only time when you as a person should never take psychadelics is when you have a pychoaffective disorder (or a history of it in your family) as it can trigger psychosis
other dangers come from heavy abuse of the substances, nothing you can do accidentally (psychadelics are non-addictive chemically speaking, but we humans can abuse anything so there’s been cases of it) or taking the substances when you’re depressed or anxious (can turn into a bad trip, cure you of those in a day, or just be a normal trip, it’s a gamble)
99.9% of the time people who take psychadelics come back to normal after the effects wear off. even bad trips can be beneficial. the normal becomes broader, and many lessons are learnt, the useful hallucinations gain more meaning. i often compare psychadelic trips to having a mirror put in front of yourself and being forced to look at it for hours, now - do you like what you see?
I thought such disorders were much more frequent in the human population than 0.1%
This is why when I want to cross a busy road I just pretend reality isn’t real, close my eyes, and cross the road. Can’t get hit by cars if I don’t accept that they are there.
This is just a misinterpretation. Things are there anyway but we filter it out in a way our brain can handle.
Think of it as a very, veeeeery strong Instagram filter.
Human Pov
Other Pov
Higher dimensions Pov
Makes me think of Outer Wilds!
The image really does illustrate a fascinating thesis
What an apt comic. The first time I tried mushrooms I came to the conclusion we are essentially peeking through the keyhole of a door trying to understand an environment we can’t even be sure is limited to the ‘other side’.
Hm, that’s odd. I just laughed a lot. 🤷
why not both?
All this brain hallucinating reality stuff pisses me off because people use it as a springboard to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I’m just not aware of can’t REALLY kill me. There is a uniform and self-consistent reality which we all have only limited perceptual awareness of. The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality, not to fabricate wishy-washy arguments for how that reality doesn’t exist or doesn’t have meaning
One thing I took away from learning more about philosophy was to be unsure of pretty much anything except my own existence.
The idea that there is an objective mind independent reality is a nice idea and neatly fits my worldview but there are compelling arguments for this not to be the case.
I’d only ask what makes you so certain of this “uniform and self-consistent reality” because if you’re relying on your senses to gather information for this fact I regret to inform you that human senses are awfully unreliable.
I also have read quite a bit of philosophy! So this should be fun to discuss.
First, I agree that 100% certainty is virtually impossible. However, there comes a point when we say we’re “certain”, depending on the severity of the outcome and the probability of it.
For instance, if I offered for you to play a game where we spin a big spinner, and 99.9999999999999% of the wheel is red, which means you pay me ten thousand dollars, and the rest of it means I pay you ten thousand dollars…you’d probably not say “I might win ten thousand dollars!” You’d probably say “this forces me to give you ten thousand dollars”. And if I said “whaaaat, no, we can’t be certain of that!”, you’d probably think I was being nonsensical.
So let’s acknowledge that while Descartes’ arguments for solipsism are indeed basically undefeated on a first order logic basis, we really should be evaluating the claim on a probabilistic or statistical basis instead, since the argument is fundamentally about our degree of sureness in something.
You’re correct that ultimately my senses alone are my only exposure to the world. However, there are some interesting things I can notice. If I lock 1000 people in a room with an undetectable poison gas, then they all will die - even though none of them had any sensory awareness of the gas! If it was just one person in the room, maybe we could argue that reality isn’t consistent, but the fact that all 1000 people due suggests that the gas affects everyone the same consistent way. Similarly, a blood clot in my leg can kill me even if I’m not aware of it.
Acknowledging now that things can certainly affect things regardless of their sensory awareness of each other, the only way to preserve our radical doubt of our senses is to suspect that perhaps the 1000 people in my room are actually not really people, but instead something me and my senses have imagined. If we suppose (against all other evidence, mind you, and purely on the basis of being able to achieve an impossible100% certainty to the contrary), that my senses really do deceive me at every turn, then we have other situations that will puzzle us:
For example, I’m studying math as a 7 year old and coke across a fancy integral equation, which I absolutely cannot make sense of, and I don’t even know what the symbols mean. Later in life, in my 20s, I have learned enough math to understand the equation, and remarkably, I see that it made sense all along. The equation was always right, even before I had the mental capacity to understand it. How could this be, if my perception of the world was not mapping to some consistent reality? These are things that we must come up with strange explanations for, like claiming that my consciousness actually fully understands all workings and states of the universe, and I’m only playing a game with myself where I pretend to forget about it, or something like that.
And if we were to make such a fantastical interpretation for the world as that, what would be our evidence for that interpretation as opposed to the “default” one that the world is self consistent and maps consistently to the our sensory interpretation? Our evidence could only be “we can’t prove with 100% certainty that this isn’t the case”! But if that’s a good reason to believe things, I could just as well say that we can’t prove with 100% certainty that my default interpretation isn’t the case either, and now our claims (and any claim) are on equal footing - since nothing can be 100% certain. All that this really does is show to us that this justification is completely useless, as it makes all claims equally viable and negates itself.
I agree with you but in defense of the image in front of us, they still show atoms in the rest of the photo. I take that as the representation of “reality” and the commentary as being more about perception and not some alternate reality.
As a great scientist once said:
“There’s no scientific consensus that life is important” - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Welcome to materialism lol
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm
Careful, you’ll trigger the libs
There is a uniform and self-consistent reality
Quantum says otherwise, doesn’t mean hallucinations are reflective of really at all, but reality is a lot more bizarre than classical scientists could have ever imagined.
It’d be like saying reality is a series of pixels in frames because that’s how computers “comprehend” reality.
Oh I’m not arguing that reality is different from how we perceive it. Just arguing with the sneaky little trick where people say “reality isn’t what we perceive… Therefore reality is subjective”
I agree with you. The “It” in my sentence isn’t clear so I’ll explain.
“Reality” in the sentence “reality is a shared hallucination” (or similar) means "reality as it exists in their brain.
People instead interpret “Reality” as "[Physical] reality is a shared halucination which is very different. I was pointing out a more real/visual example with digital cameras.
Exactly. This post actually reinforces why I don’t want to alter my reality. That little window of interpretation is absolutely remarkable, it’s all we have to anchor us to the outside world and I will never give that up. Not that I’m dead against occasional hallucinogenics, but our perception is an amazing thing and I feel bad for people who don’t appreciate it.
Brother, have you never been depressed? That shit can do as much to me as mushrooms sometimes. Or shit if I get a really good runners high, feels very similar to a low dose of mushrooms.
Brother, I don’t ever want to know what a low dose of mushrooms feels like…or 2cB or DMT or LSD or 4aco DMT or
Oh, well it’s not very different from how you normally feel. Our perception of reality changes all the time to a greater or lesser degree. Like when you’re depressed, you don’t see things as they actually are but through the warped reality of depression. Food won’t taste good anymore, or you can’t see the beauty of nature, or you can’t remember what being happy feels like.
I’d argue that we almost never experience reality as it is. Things are filtered through our feelings and judgement and assumptions without our conscious input. The reason psychedelics can be useful for people with PTSD or depression is because it forces a shift in our perception.
IMO the term “hallucinogenic” undersells what psychedelics do in some ways. There is an interpretative layer of abstraction that naturally builds up between you and what you are perceiving. This is useful because it lets you make assumptions about and mostly ignore objects that you know are not necessary to pay attention to, and not be overwhelmed by the experience of being actively aware of all their details, but it also prevents us from considering and experiencing what is behind that layer of preconception.
Obviously there’s also a lot of other things our brains do that is interpretive or corrective, but it’s really remarkable to be able to see the world without that one in particular, which is one of the more striking effects of those drugs, and it happens on doses lower than the ones that produce especially vivid hallucinations.
there is some evidence in our pre-history that we used to experience the world without the layer of abstraction
cave paintings at one point became… different. at first they represented reality - various animals - in absolutely amazing detail, down to depicting which muscles tensed as an animal ran, then they stopped. just around the same time as we began depicting ourselves in more detail. when we noticed ourselves it seems like first layers of abstract interpretation of reality began forming
here’s a cool video on the subject (the title is rather click-baity but it is a good video, trust)
The data of reality is consistent. How that data is interpreted by the brain may not be. Like the color red might not look the same to you as it does to me despite it being the same wavelength for both of us. We’ll never know since it’s impossible to describe a color and we can’t see the world with the other’s brain.
Okay. I'm going to fuck with your head. Don't click this unless you're sure.
The color red is not even the same for you between each eye. Go look.
Given that it’s the same brain interpreting information from two different eyeballs, I’d suspect this is down to minute differences either between them (such as adjusting for darkness while testing as Kratzkopf suggested), or in their relative position.
It’s interesting, but I don’t think it really gets at the question of differing perceptions between people.
I’m wearing red socks, they look the same through each eye
Looks the same to me, do you have some kind of source or paper to back up your claim?
Nah, just folk who look closely are typically able to notice they perceive shades of colors slightly differently. Everyone I’ve tested it with has been able to do it.
How do you test this though? The eye is highly adaptive. If you close one eye, look at something red, then close the other one, your formerly closed eye will already have adapted to the darkness of your eye lid. Depending on how long you do the looking, I can imagine this leading to quite a difference in color perception already.
Looks the same to me
They did researchers with fMRI that showed that the same colors activated brains of viewers the same way, giving as much weight as possible to the idea that people perceive colors the same way.
that’s not really a good study for the issue in question since getting a control group of people who never formed associations between colours and ideas would be rather difficult
even a day old baby would begin forming their first associations - yellow is warm because the sun is warm
has the study included totally colour blind people? (like literally blind to colour, full monochromacy) and if so how were their results interpreted?
If they’re fully color blind, how could they be shown colors? That would be a bad control group.
Instead, when doing fMRI stuff, they usually create a “baseline” by showing their subjects random stuff to see how the brain fires up. For example, they could show greyscale images of grass, sun, blood, etc., then see how it differs from seeing contextless colors (ie: a uniform green screen)
if you show people colours you can be sure they already have associations with them - sun is yellow, sun is warm, yellow is warm - of course everyone will fire up the “this is warm” parts of their brain, but will it be the same thing i call yellow?
there are bound to be associations that transcend cultures and therefore fire up the same brain parts
monochromatic colour blind people will see the wavelength of yellow, but their eyes don’t have the receptors to distinguish it from light grey. objectively they still “see” the yellow, their eye-brain system just doesn’t interpret it in the way other people do
probably, this is what i know but it might not be true. if there is no way to get a control group of people who never learnt to associate colours with other things (pretty much everyone, aside from monochromatic colour blindess, and actual blindness since birth) then there is no way to test if we all indeed see the same yellow
Isn’t the problem with your example that a completely color blind person cannot differentiate the wavelength, but they can differentiate the intensity of light. I’m also mostly assuming here, that our light cones are sensitive to certain ranges of frequency and that is how we can differentiate different wavelengths.
The scientific and philosophical question is if we can prove that each person perceive those combination of signals the same way. The subjective experience.
Unless of course the color blindness is a “software” issue rather than a “hardware” issue.
Given that color theory works the same for anyone that isn’t some variety of colorblind, I’d argue we probably see colors the same way or very very close to the same.
Everyone sees colors slightly differently, this is perfectly illustrated by the old blue black/white gold dress. Depending on how your brain has learned to perceive color determines what colors you see.
Your phone screen only uses three colors to represent all colors.
If you printed out the photo of the dress the “illusion” wouldn’t work.
The 3 colors used to make the blue dress in warm “gold” light is what allows your brain to interpret it as yellow.
If anything it helps prove that people basically see in the same way. Just if your brain adjusts for the backlight tone. You either saw blue or yellow. No one was saying purple or orange.
If you took mushrooms and saw purple you’d be hallucinating. Your brain is giving you false information.
Seeing it as yellow isn’t false information but a different interpretation of the given material
Yeah, I’m in agreement with you, my point is that we have proof that people perceive reality slightly differently, in general it’s pretty standardized, but there are slight variations. That’s all my point was.
Kinda true but kinda not. Language alone can affect our perception. Some don’t have a word for green or blue, and orange is indistinguishable from light brown given context.
Even when we are almost definitely seeing the same things, there’s a lot that can differ.
Your language doesn’t change your perception of color.
The primary colors being Red, Yellow, Blue. Is made up. There’s no reason those should be the three primary colors.
Magenta, Yellow, and Cyan could be the primary colors if you were taught that.
In that color wheel orange is an intermediate color. The intermediate color between green and yellow can be called chartreuse.
Did you know chartreuse as a color or did you just know it as yellow-green?
Do you not preceve the color chartreuse the same as someone that just knows that name?
You can perceve all the difference colors on this wheel without needing an official word.
As you can see “Brown” is just a darker orange.
colour theory works the same to everyone because it works entirely with how colours relate to each other
if you saw colours rotated on a colour wheel 180° - so that your green is my purple - we wouldn’t know
the only difference would be in the hue (difference between green and purple), which isn’t all that important. there are plenty of videos on youtube with artists drawing using random hues but with correct values (difference between black and white) and once they switch their work to colour it all just looks, good, a bit abstract for sure but still good
besides, colour theory picks colours that go together well based on their relative position on the colour wheel. teal works well with orange because they’re complimentary, opposites on the spectrum. neutral colours are neutral because they’re desaturated regardless of hue, neon colours are very saturated regardless of hue
maybe in objective reality we all like the same exact hue of colour, but in our brains we all call it a different word, we’ll never know
We have proof that people don’t see colors the same way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress
That was horseshit with multiple different pictures being used with different levels, confusing people to death about what others had reported seeing. It’s easy to white balance the blue back to white which with the yellow orange lighting reflections on the black, saturated up the yellow lighting to look more gold. Nobody with normal vision both looking at the same original picture claims the blue part is white.
Wow. You are just proving my point. It looks white and gold to me.
What color is the wiki page around it then? Ultra white? Or even in dark mode the blown out lighting on the right side is white as well. It’s surely not the same as the dress. Just go get a crayon from the box to compare.
the logic might be the same, the perception may not
Perception is pretty much always different, but that doesn’t mean the underlying thing being experienced is itself different.
If you cut a pickle in half, and give each half to a different person, and one liked it and one didn’t, you wouldn’t say the pickle tasted different, just that both people perceived the taste differently.
The logic is based on perception, though. Colors either clash or go together because of how we percieve them and which colors go with which is pretty consistent between cultures and time periods.
But perception is for a large part embedded in memory, which differs individually. For me steel foundries smell amazing because I used to play on the beach near a steel foundry, to the point I need to put effort into understanding that it’s actually kind of acrid. So am I still “having the same perception” as someone who doesn’t have the lived experience?
This can happen at a society-wide level too. Liminal beige and seafoam green were not intended to create a feeling of disquiet, but of calm neutrality. Modern audiences perceive them as disquieting because they have been systematically used in our society to impose a sense of calm on un-calm situations, such as operating rooms or hallways in sketchy buildings.
I honestly don’t know how much of the commonality of associations across cultures comes from instinct and how much comes from the fact that all children learn to live on the same planet with the same physical laws. I would bet that for 99.9% of children, their first experience with a strong sulphur smell is going to be from rotten eggs (or similar rotten goods) that others act disgusted by. So the fact that sulphur smells disgusting to the vast majority of adults is not evidence for instinct over memory. The same goes for green plants, red blood, blue skies, etc.
But not everyone agrees on which colors go together and which clash
Yeah, that wasn’t a good example since taste is weird. A better example would be that most people would agree that the pink background on this sprite sheet is almost painful to look at while other, more luminous, elements are fine. If our perception significantly varies, then simple mid-luminance color blocks shouldn’t have consistent effects from person to person. Parts of that yellow gradient on the right should cause more strain to someone you know than the magic pink field if perception is strongly variable.
Yes I agree, sorry if that wasn’t clear
to say that reality is subjective or something, as if a blood clot in my leg that I’m just not aware of can’t REALLY kill me.
It’s not that reality isn’t subjective it’s that acting as if it isn’t subjective isn’t useful for our everyday experience. So we act as if it is objective. But acting as if reality is objective so you can live your life does not mean reality is objective, and personally, I think being absolutely certain that it is objective leads to shit like “Jesus loves you and died for your sins” - not to great science.
There is a uniform and self-consistent reality
The great value of science is to give us greater access to that reality
I’m really not trying to be shitty or anything about this, but science is increasingly showing us something considerably more complicated than that. Science absolutely gives us greater understanding of classical reality which is useful to us because airplanes fly. However, like it or not, science also is telling us that reality is a strange miasma of superpositions and that we actively participate in the creation of reality by simply existing/observing. At the very least, your outlook that it “is… uniform and self-consistent” does not appear to represent what is truly happening, it just represents what you think is happening, which is, ultimately, the point of the OPs meme. Everything you think you know is being filtered through your experience of it and whether is represents some objective reality or not, it represents it enough for you to live your life and feel like it is objective and consistent. But that isn’t necessarily so. As wild as it sounds, there may be an infinite number of branching realities and you are walking down only one, and considering it as “objective reality.”
For anyone interested in this stuff, there’s a great video from Sean Carrol about quantum physics that outlines the uncomfortable unanswered questions in quantum physics and their implications about reality here.
Edit to add: on somewhat of a tangent, there’s a fascinating book regarding personal reality I really love called Free Will
I was wondering who would bring up quantum physics 🥲
I don’t subscriber to any interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so to me any insights that this field may offer still don’t support that reality is subjective. Reality could be only locally real but still objective and consistent. And it sure seems that it is, in at least 99.999…% of all situations, especially situations that actually matter to us. Just my understanding, not a quantum physicist lol
There are no interpretations of quantum physics that require consciousness for observation, so maybe you should look a little closer at what it actually does say? You can pick and choose the science you want to subscribe to of course, but it’s been making verifiable predictions for a hundred years now. If you ignore it because it disagrees with your preconceptions… well, that’s called religion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There certainly are pseudoscientific interpretations of it like that, which many laypeople subscribe to.
Are you still alive? How’s that blood clot doing?
Well I stopped observing it so it should now be 50/50 on whether I die or not. Shit wait gotta stop observing it in my mind’s eye
Woah there, where are you getting this idea that any of this has meaning from? Reality being coherent doesn’t imply any kind of meaning. I can’t even think of a theoretical way to determine if we’re here for a reason (other than cause and effect) or if we’re just here.
Putting this as a separate comment because its unrelated. I think theoretically the problem is that the notion of “purpose” or “reason” is extremely fraught with psychological quirks. We say that flowers are colorful for the “purpose” of attracting pollinators, but it might be more accurate to say they just coincidentally ended up that way. But a more ironclad claim of purpose would be something like “I made this fruit salad for myself for the purpose of eating something healthy and sweet”. Here we are hard pressed to deny that the salad has a real purpose. In fact, anything that has real purpose seems to have been designed by a conscious entity. Only a conscious entity can imbue its creations with purpose, when we look at how we actually use the term in that sense. This also handily shows that purpose is not a physical quality, but purely a genealogical quality. A purposeful object doesn’t need to bear any physical markers that show that it came from a conscious entity - it is purposeful either way. Since “purpose” aka “reason for being” is now a matter of nothing more than being created by a conscious entity with some purpose in the mind of the conscious entity, it seems like the theoretical way to determine if humans have a reason for being, or if the universe has a reason for being, could ONLY be to determine if these things were created by a conscious entity.
Obviously religion comes to mind, but outside of that unfalsifiable realm, theoretically we could learn for instance that humans were actually designed by aliens to be fun little pets to watch, like Tamagotchi. If we found that out then our purpose would factually be “to be entertaining”.
So I actually think the theoretical path of establishing the existence of a reason or purpose is quite clear! Its just that the path clearly leads to the conclusion that there isn’t one.
I don’t think I’d be able to agree with that last sentence. Like if our universe is contained within another one and there’s no way for us to “escape” the constraints of this universe to test that, it wouldn’t be less true, it’s just not knowable through any real means. Best we can do in that regard is either choose to believe it or not or leave our mind open to the possibility that it may or may not be the case.
It’s kinda like your other point except applied to things well beyond our senses and any additional ways to measure things via science. Whatever is going on outside of this is still going on whether we know about it or not.
Though in all the thinking about it, entertainment is one of the top reasons I can think of for why we might exist. It’s the only non-circular one that has occurred to me (ie, the others tend to beg the question “if this is for something else, then what is that something else for?”, and we circle back to where we started, just with a bigger picture of what’s up). Though circularity doesn’t imply it is wrong or incorrect, it’s also possible we are in an arbitrarily deep set of nested simulations, each trying to reveal information about the sim one layer up to the simulants in that layer while those one layer above them watch to see what they figure out.
And this isn’t an anti-science stance, I just think that there’s a bunch of things that are unknowable (to us with our current limitations, at least, as another part of my pet idea is that we created this to entertain ourselves). And, no, despite my name, I don’t think spirituality can give any answers, though it can make a lack of answers more comfortable, and philosophy does have much wisdom to offer (which is more why I chose this name because enlightenment is real, though it doesn’t turn you into some all-knowing guru and has many forms).
Yeah sorry, horrible choice of words. I am a nihilist in fact. I was using meaning in the very dull sense, like how a red light has the “meaning” to bring your car to a halt. And similarly a blood clot in my leg means that I am at increased risk of death, the rising of the sun means that the air will heat up (even if I’m blind), cooking garlic means the air will be filled with scent molecules (even if I can’t smell), etc.
I am so accustomed to only talking with IRLs who know what I mean by meaning that I forget what a loaded word it is.
If everything we experience is a hallucination, then we should use psychology to engineer a just and useful hallucination. For example, we should hallucinate trans people as closer to their preferred gender presentation.
We also need to consider the fact that rich people have spent so much money on controlling the media, they’ve definitely discovered how to use this power for evil. Our perceptual reality has already been manipulated by billionaires.
discovered how to use this power for evil
They already have. Is called “propaganda”, or “the narrative”.
One proposed solution is to put control of consensus reality in people we trust, like scientists. However, I think it’s pointless to leave such a dangerous force lying around where anyone could theoretically get ahold of it.
Instead, we should dismantle the very idea of objective reality, and teach everyone the skills to control their subjective world, so that we can democratise perception and create a subjective multiverse with room for everyone.
