If you’re interested in accurate examples of visual effects of hallucinogens, check out /r/Replications. Some of them are shockingly accurate. Here are some good examples:
The article states that "It is most commonly induced under the influence of mild dosages of psychedelic compounds, such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline."
Overdose or a "bad trip" is possible with any of these three substances, so one must be extremely careful when experimenting.
I can only speak about LSD, but its visual effects are based on constant and surprising visual transformations. People's faces transform into the faces of other people or animals (which can be even frightening). Non-animate objects can transform into other objects or resemble unexpected living forms.
However, these initially unique visual experiences quickly become boring for people with clear objectives in their life. I don't think it's contact with a spiritual universe or anything like that. It might help (or not) if you try it once or twice.
The visual experience is last on the list of things psychedelics are proven through clinical study to help with. Also, unless one of those objectives is to avoid the help psychedelics can provide, having clear objectives in life isn't a predictor of how helpful it will be. Finally, "contact with the spiritual universe it whatever" isn't even on the list things that actually help subjects in these studies.
It's not that it didn't occur to me. Sure I understand I'm missing the immediacy and the visceral effect here, and I presume the parallel impact on other senses. But then again if I was the sort of person that mattered to, my outlook would probably be different. I'm fine with others having different preferences.
I would say to me these videos work wonders in confirming a little bit that I'm not really missing out. There's a lot of FOMO and myth-making around drugs, I think experience reports and replications are a pretty good way to make everyone's decisions more informed whether it's "for them".
This could totally be some form of confirmation bias at work, but it works for me ...
The visuals are like a fraction of the experience. Personally, I get very little in terms of visuals. It’s insight, wisdom, love, and the releasing of emotional holding patterns that is the most prominent thing for me. You can read about ego death all you want, but until you actually experience that sort of thing it’s just nice words on a page. It’s why Buddha would say don’t take my word for it, do the practice and have the experience yourself.
My first LSD trip is probably the most important experience of my life, and sure I saw some fractals in the clouds, but that’s close to zero percent of what was important during it.
This exchange reminds me a bit of the experience of becoming a parent. The permanent reconfiguration of priorities from the intense oxytocin high is also quite impossible to explain to non-parents.
It is interesting to me as my first acid trip was 30 years ago but I have never gained anything profound from the experience.
My best trips were at psytrance parties as peak experiences in terms of fun.
I have tripped many times alone in a dark room and basically gained nothing from the experience besides falling into an existential void.
Personally, from so much experiences, reading thousands of trip reports, most the psychedelic literature up to about 2005, I think the psychedelic experience is like a blank white canvas. Some people end up with a Monet painting experience and some people end up with a Dali painting experience. Some run into a Hieronymus Bosch the first time and never try it again. You can't really make overall statements about what the blank canvas is going to be before someone starts to paint.
For me, my best psychedelic experiences were better versions of my most fun nights drunk. Anything I have learned that is all that deep though I have learned from reading books.
Never having a psychedelic experience I think is like never being drunk. It is really missing out on an interesting life experience but at the same time it is not this profound loss.
Working out all these life problems like some kind of pyschotherapy session is for sure something that never happened to me. That just lead me to the existential void when attempted.
Yeah, you're right in that it is highly dependent on the person and the set and setting. For me, I went into that first experience seeking a catalyst for insight into the things that were holding me back in my life, and got it. Intention setting is super important, which is why in formal meditation practice and in yoga they teach you to set a samkalpa for your practice session [1].
I've certainly taken LSD and gone to a rave with 6k people before, but I usually end up wanting to go home to meditate after a while. Insight into that existential void (sunyata) is exactly what I'm seeking out. But there's of course nothing wrong with wanting to stay at the party and dance all night! They're both manifestations of the same thing if you can see it.
The type of person who is arrogant enough to read some trip reports on the internet and look at a couple gifs and thinks "yeah I totally get this" is exactly the type of person a trip will benefit the most.
The problem with the whole "tripping has made me wiser and more kind and loving" type stuff is that it's self-serving and doesn't really stand up to Occam's Razor. It's a bit like that xkcd post on homeopathy: If it actually worked at scale, health insurers would be doing it.
Experience has taught me to be wary of identity-conferring stuff that's easy and not hard to do. Taking drugs is not difficult.
> MDMA has limited approved medical uses in a small number of countries,[32] but is illegal in most jurisdictions.[33] MDMA-assisted psychotherapy is a promising and generally safe treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder when administered in controlled therapeutic settings.[34][35] In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has given MDMA breakthrough therapy status (though there no current clinical indications in the US).[36] Canada has allowed limited distribution of MDMA upon application to and approval by Health Canada.[37] In Australia, it may be prescribed in the treatment of PTSD by specifically authorised psychiatrists.[38]
If you don't think an acid trip can be a difficult experience you really don't know what you're taking about. I guess you would think therapy isn't difficult either because you're just sitting on a couch.
That could be down to the fact that homeopathic treatments have largely been legal. The studies have been done and showed that a lot of it doesn't work so it isn't offered in traditional medicine. There were a lot of promising studies into the effects of LSD and Psilocybin before they were made illegal. Now with the loosening of restrictions we are able to get more research into the potential uses of psychedelics and there have been a lot of positive results. The research into MDMA for PTSD is really exciting, as well as Ketamine, LSD, and Psilocybin for different forms of depression for example.
They will never be a solution for every problem like some people evangelize but where they work, they give people with these conditions another avenue to try when other "legal" drugs have failed.
> more research into the potential uses of psychedelics and there have been a lot of positive results
You'd have to agree, the types of people who choose to research psychedelics professionally, are the types of people who want to see, and demonstrate, positive results. These aren't unbiased research outcomes.
I don't use drugs, but the LSD situation is crazy: is well down in any rank of harm (both to user and to others). The alleged harm has been proved fabricated (people getting blind for staring at the sun) or incredibly overstated (suicides while tripping). Is way less dangerous than tobacco or alcohol, and has next to zero addiction. Their users praise the experience, and some studies show potential medical use. Yet is furiously prohibited, deviled and prosecuted.
We were having a debate among friends when a couple of people said they took MDMA once, and some of the most obviously alcoholics (drunk twice a week) went to their yugular calling them junkies and "irresponsible" because drugs fry your brain.
MDMA fries your teeth. Gave in to 1/5th of a dose with people I was partying with, received one year of tooth-grinding. Never again.
Classic dental study: 89% of ecstasy users reported clenching or grinding; 60% had tooth wear into dentine vs 11% of non-users. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10403088/
ChatGPT: “One pill, one year of grinding” – biologically plausible as a trigger, but not a universal rule.
"I think that MDMA, unlike other drugs, is potentially much more neurotoxic and dangerous than any drug that has comparable effects, like hallucinogens for example, for which we haven't shown long-term alterations. MDMA is therefore a special case. It's difficult to give recommendations for use. It's better not to take it regularly, and if someone asks me, in my opinion, I would say it's better to keep your distance from this drug so as not to run any risks."
Are you telling me you've never met an old LSD abuser whose brain was fried like an egg? LSD can also trigger legitimate lifelong psychotic states in some people.
There is a big difference between 'generally not harmful in very small singular doses' and 'all harm is fabricated'.
Ive seen people with fried brains from copious amounts of drug abuse taking everything under the sun that will also sometimes take LSD. Ive never seen someone who only takes psychodelics like LSD and mushrooms, even heroic amounts, have any cognitive problems from it.
> Are you telling me you've never met an old LSD abuser whose brain was fried like an egg?
I’ve known old LSD abusers with fried brains but never seen a LSD abuser go from non-fried to fried brains. Correlation is not causation, but it could be.
> LSD can also trigger legitimate lifelong psychotic states in some people.
These statements should be accompanied by the necessary caveat that just about anything can trigger psychotic states in people prone to psychosis.
Nah, you may be missing or may be not, but there no way ay to explain psychedelic feelings. Just not possible. Sometimes world changes to wonder full or curiosity, and you think why, or why I cannot live like that always. Extent of this is not possible to experience without psychedelics or other strong mind altering practises.
The visuals are like 10% of the experience. The last thing you could describe psychedelics as is underwhelming. It is not possible for you to understand what the experience is like without trying it for yourself.
And I am not advocating for trying them. Im not one of these evangelists. But replication images are a very weak simulacrum of what the experience is actually like.
I was using stable diffusion 1.5 when it came out and had my first LSD trip shortly after that, prolly like a few months. Anyways, what struck me was how similar the closed eyes visuals were on LSD compared to the generated images from stable diffusion when i was using it on low CFG and also some of my poorly trained textual inversions at the time. Watching the "training process" of the textual inversion in the early epochs made a lot of such images before the TI finally completed. Makes me think if the processes are somehow related, like if in human brains the reason we don't have experience seeing these "hallucinations" is because we have many robust subsystems that filter out the noise and make the mental model cohere on a stable world view.
Our culture is very image-centric. You have to understand that the drug induced image distortions are just a very specific side-effect that is part of a larger whole.
Hallucinogens act on deeper mechanisms that control from visual perception all the way to the sense of self. It can fundamentally change during the experience the way you see yourself and the world. It's not uncommon for users of LSD or DMT and psilocybin to describe the experience as getting in touch with the interconnectedness of all things. Also bad trips can be very terrifying because of how much you are exposed to the experience. Like dying or feeling the fleeting nature of existence very present in your skin.
All this to say that videos don't do any of this justice. It's just a fun way to represent the image distortions.
I get that, and I guess I try to extrapolate from the image-based examples to other senses and congnition in general. The image replications give me the idea that there is some generative extrapolation based on actual sensory input a seed going on, like the brain circuitry that goes and re-imagines the input consciously going haywire and growing and extrapolating into overdriven, bizarre directions.
I recently read "A Brief History of Intelligence" by Bennet which spends quite a bit of time dwelling on "generative" simulation mechanisms in brain function and their role in cognition from prediction to mentalizing, and I think I can get a rough sense of how this would all click together.
It makes sense why creative/artistic people may be drawn to this and could consider it a heightened form or a letting loose of their normal processes, etc.
But to me it's still not that attractive. I can never shake the idea that it's a bit like driving a system past specifications and assigning meaning to malfunctions, and essentially lying to yourself. I get it's not black and white, and obviously philosophy is rife with arguments and takes on what is true experience and cognition, but given the risks and downsides I'd rather not.
I'm very fine with other people occupying different points on the spectrum.
>generative extrapolation based on actual sensory input a seed going on
>brain circuitry that goes and re-imagines the input consciously going haywire and growing and extrapolating into overdriven, bizarre directions.
>assigning meaning to malfunctions, and essentially lying to yourself
The problem is that your description fully applies to "normal", non-chemically-altered cognition. Miscognitions propagate. The spec only goes as far as anatomically modern, i.e. cavefolk, where the error correction mechanism there is "get eaten by wild animals, having failed to reproduce".
We don't have sabertooth tigers any more, we have a planetary-scale material culture developed over millenia. It provides for our safety; it records and propagates imprints of what we think, say, and do; it makes meaningful actions out of human utterances and movements, by providing them with interpretations (shared collective cognitions).
It's a safe and rich environment, one where people get to live safe lives in the grasp of utter, insane delusion, we just can't agree on which ones exactly are the deluded ones. We consider that one is responsible primarily for one's own actions, so let's start with the self, shall we.
What is one to do, if one wants to say the words "I am not lying to myself" in the sense of an actual falsifiable statement, and not just as a form of "I'm significant... said the dust speck"?
I mean, how do you even know? Couldn't you just lie to yourself about that one, too, and carry on none the wiser?
You know how you can look at your eye with your eye, by means of routing photons through space in a clever way, with some help from that best friend of the psychonaut - the bathroom mirror?
Turns out you can also look at your mind with your mind, by routing concept-patterns though time in a clever way, by means of chemicals which alter the activation thresholds and signal propagation times throughout your body.
And what this gives you is a basis for comparison. Otherwise, you simply don't know. You're taking your introspection on faith, and that's massively irresponsible towards everyone else. Ask me how I know.
It’s kinda like if the feeling you see in the videos were replicated across all of your senses. Your senses kinda blur together in an indescribable way, and it’s extremely intense, kinda all consuming.
They're not the same thing, although visual migraines can appear at the start of a "real" migraine. It's a distortion of vision with glitchy geometric patterns that pulsate and move a bit. Here are some attempts to recreate them: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=visual+migraine+&ia=images&...
https://reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1ll9k7o/flight/
https://reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1jkajcq/that_mome...
https://reddit.com/r/replications/comments/1hruv4t/just_visi...