one thing that frustrates me: people sometimes have weird brain experiences and then become convinced of crazy metaphysical beliefs. like you have some strange spiritual experience and become convinced god exists.
human brains are really fucking weird and complicated! it’s true that the default hypothesis of conscious experience (the idea that unless you’ve gone completely crazy, you basically just perceive reality as it is, and act on it as a rationalish agent) is not exactly true. the correct update is that while most of the time this is accurate, there is a lot of weird shit that goes on inside your brain, and your perception is the result of a whole lot of computation over the streams of raw data, and there are all sorts of weird modes you can push your brain into that feel really fucking weird from the inside, especially through drugs/meditation/etc, but even sometimes without. it’s actually completely possible to just hallucinate very complicated things, or suddenly feel some emotion very strongly for no obvious reason, or your brain can even mess with your memories too.
my diagnosis is that a lot of people have a belief that perceiving weird bullshit is not compatible with the standard rational view of the world (“science can’t explain why i heard the voice of god booming from the sky”), the one that says ghosts don’t exist and whatever, so if you perceive weird bullshit the standard rational view must be wrong and therefore we must consider ghosts and spirits and god and such to be in the space of hypotheses again. this is understandable but totally wrong. if anything, experiencing weird brain shit should make you more cautious about epistemology.
then again, although i’ve run into lots of weird quirks of my brain that violate the basic rational model, i’ve never had any kind of strange spiritual experience. maybe i’d change my mind if i have such an experience, though hopefully not. i’d like to think if i heard the voice of god booming down from the sky i would be like “aha yes my brain is fucking with me”.
I have a friend who, as a committed Christian, took LSD, and felt a deep spiritual connection to the Holy Spirit for his entire trip. It was a much stronger than he was ever able to feel in a church service. Puzzled, he took LSD a second time, and got the same feeling. He almost immediately became an atheist, reasoning that if LSD could replicate the feeling of the Holy Spirit then there was obviously nothing supernatural going on.
That doesn’t make sense to me, either emotionally or logically (it seems like there are lots of reasons that could have happened that would be totally consistent with God being real and people sometimes being able to really feel the presence of God?)
I strongly believe in the Christian God because of the feeling of the Holy Spirit that I get in church (and not much else, the world looks pretty secular)
This feeling is similar to, but weaker than, the feeling of taking LSD
If God is real, then He probably would not create a random mushroom derivative chemical which provides a stronger connection to him than an actual church does
Therefore this feeling is probably not the Christian God connecting to me
The brain can be accurately described as a hallucination engine. Its perceptual and cognitive processes are generative. The generated representations stay coupled to reality by sensory input during most normal waking experience, but the vividness of dreams, imagination, and hypothesis formation are pretty clear indicators of the strongly generative algorithm. The fact that anyone will reliably hallucinate from lack of sleep as well as hallucinogens adds evidence.
The non-cofnitive hallucinations in belief space are what make people think they’ve directly experienced the reality of spiritual truths. The feeling of presence of another mind or another space is just another hallucination, but people take that felt certainty as evidence of their reality.
maybe i’d change my mind if i have such an experience, though hopefully not.
Not sure if I’m just being stupid in context, but doesn’t “your brain can sometimes do really weird shit” combined with “your mind is instantiated primarily via your brain” create a plausible physicalist causal path to “you’d change your mind”? That is, if the focus event is that your brain does something weird, and experiences and beliefs are both mediated by the brain, why can’t the same underlying phenomenon directly cause both the experience and the change in beliefs? Like a kernel memory management glitch in a computer could simultaneously cause display distortion and corrupt some file buffers on their way to persistent storage.
i think it’s worth developing a systematic science of all the sorts of weird bullshit human minds pull in general, so we can understand better how to navigate being a human. doing so requires not knee-jerk ignoring interesting phenomena. but it also requires not throwing away our epistemics.
i’ve run into lots of weird quirks of my brain that violate the basic rational model
Can you give examples?
i’d like to think if i heard the voice of god booming down from the sky i would be like “aha yes my brain is fucking with me”.
I resonate with this but I also feel—though not super strongly (I’m not sure how to think about this) -- that there should be something (some evidence or argument or a large collection of those) that would be in principle capable of convincing you that you’re speaking to God via some legitimate epistemics.
Like, I’m pretty sure God (at least in the standard ~religious sense of the word) doesn’t exist. In my [metaphysics + broad understanding of the world] there’s no room for God, so it’s not even a hypothesis to be considered. But it seems to me that there are possible, internally consistent worlds where this [metaphysics + broad understanding of the world] is incorrect and I “should” be in principle open to evidence that I am in such a world.
Well if something spoke to me in my head and told me things I didn’t and couldn’t know but could verify later, I’d be convinced they were real and not just a hallucination.
Of course you’d need to be really careful about the strength of the evidence. Basically p-hacking on coincidences is how people become convinced of both woo metaphysics and conspiracy theories.
Well if something spoke to me in my head and told me things I didn’t and couldn’t know but could verify later, I’d be convinced they were real and not just a hallucination.
Surely they would be “real”, but then the simulation hypothesis still trumps the God hypothesis as an explanation of the phenomenon, given my metaphysics.
I’m asking: What legitimate reasoning, given what sort of ~evidence would be able to convince me that God, e.g., in the Abrahamic sense, is real, or that Kami are real (plausibly partly through subverting my metaphysics)?
I haven’t had much psychedelic experience, but from what I can tell, a lot of what seems to outsiders like bad epistemics is actually the person using words VERY differently than they are normally used. Which is itself a bad communication strategy, but not bad epistemology.
An advanced meditator might de a better job explaining specific examples than me, but meditators might say, like, the universe dissolved frame by frame until they were visited by an angel in the place outside time. This is literally false. The universe did not dissolve and does not have a framerate like a video game. Angels do not exist. There is no place outside time. But I would guess they are using most of those words in very different ways, grasping at some way to describe novel qualia that really have no words, or for which the only words are ancient religious terminology.
If you suddenly had a sixth sense analogous to vision, but not vision, and you had to describe it to someone else, I could see the temptation to start using nonsense language. In fact, a normal person describing color to a blind person will sound to the blind person like they’re using nonsense language. What do you mean, bananas have a “yellowness” just like the sun, and you can sense them both, sense the whole universe, at the same time? That sounds like magic. It’s only not magic if you understand how vision works, but we don’t have equivalent knowledge for most of the strange qualia of the psychedelic world. If your model of psychedelics is that it’s mostly hallucinations, that is, different contents of the regular senses that represent unreal objects, that’s way off from reality. The nature of the senses and mind itself shift, and new qualia of many types are experienced.
Plenty of meditators, plenty of people, have bad epistemic hygiene, but I think you can still have good epistemics and talk this way. Though you probably shouldn’t.
i think it’s fine to use such metaphors as ling as you make it clear you don’t think there is actually literally an angel outside time you are talking to, for the nornal understanding of those words.
1) drugs/meditation are “weird” and very firsthand-experience dependent and subjective
2) the people likely to get into these mindstates are probably more likely to be unsatisfied with their normal lives, so already deviant mentality
3) the ‘normal state’ of people is not considered weird or improvable (even though normal state of life can lead to spirals, depression, even suspected lead/plastic poisoning and such modify you)
4) many people operate with less ‘basic rational’ stories already and have gone into what seem to be delusion spirals even without mindstate changes, and it’s then frustrating to read people who seem to have no curiosity or skepticism about it (personally I feel like I try to test stuff in dreams, if you see ‘visions’ or feel ‘deja vu’ of the future you should log them, etc.)
5) some of those mindstates feel objectively significantly better than normal, which attracts the thought “I should tell others about this!” and it feels like you need to establish yourself as ‘sane’ beforehand. Plus doing too many of these, outsiders may more easily get a skewed view of who you are.
Also in a similar way sometimes people say “religion wasn’t true but it filled so many important roles”, there is a benefit to the person to have untrue but more productive beliefs, in your ‘god booming down from the sky’ example, that person may just use it as a highly confident whispering earring and legitimately improve their life, blurring the pros/cons and ideal of truth-seeking.
6) everyone also knows they can permanently change you, making it easy for an outsider to say “you are still under the influence of the drug/etc.” and write you off
I’m not sure I can properly articulate this but this seems to underestimate quite how difficult the position is for the person having the weird experience. There is an issue of reflexivity: once you start taking seriously the possibility that “your brain is fucking with you” you are doubting the very mechanism which you are trying to use. If the rational world view is to trust your experience and reasoning over faith and dogma, then when your experience calls into doubt your rational world view it seems like you have a choice between ‘rationally’ doubting your rationalism or ‘irrationally’ maintaining faith in it.
I’d argue that it is actually more rational to question one’s experience of the world specificallybecause brains are unreliable.
There are times in altered states in which I am very much aware that I am experiencing the world in a way that is quite outside the normal bounds of my everyday lived experience. I’ve made the mistake of having one too many cannabis edibles a couple of times; the first time the sensations were so intense that I thought I was literally going to die. We’re talking that heart-squeezed-in-the-chest-cold-sweats-can’t-move level of high. The second time I felt the exact same way, except now I was armed with both the trigger and prior experience to lean on such that I knew I was just along for the ride until the high wore off.
In knowing that I was altered, I could reliably doubt my experiences without doubting the ability of instrument to examine itself, especially in post-experience reflections.
Self-examination is a checking loop, and the outcomes don’t have to be binary. The important thing is that you can’t grade the instrument from the inside, you have to have external anchors (and preferably those anchors are different in kind, like checking if a voice you heard could have come from something nearby and also asking anyone else around if they heard that voice). You might find that you reliably experience the world differently than other people, and that’s incredibly important for grounding rational thinking. If your brain is unreliable, it’s counterproductive to try to reason yourself into a believing that it is.
Refusing to update/examine your priors (eg. refusing to entertain that your instrument might be miscalibrated) is itself a form of dogma.
I think drugs make this a lot easier because they give a clear context for the altered experience. Like you said you can easily dismiss the effects as temporary, and even if you do take them seriously at the time you can easily dismiss them retrospectively once sober. Even without drugs if the altered experience happens in the context of a specific ritual or practice such as meditation that creates an inside/outside distinction relative to which you really can seek external anchors.
The important thing is that you can’t grade the instrument from the inside, you have to have external anchors
I think the challenge is if you don’t have clear context markers surrounding the experience then this becomes difficult or impossible to do. Ultimately grading your own instruments ‘from the inside’ seems pretty fundamental to the human experience, there is nowhere else to grade them from.
You might find that you reliably experience the world differently than other people, and that’s incredibly important for grounding rational thinking. If your brain is unreliable, it’s counterproductive to try to reason yourself into a believing that it is.
But if your experience is reliably different from others then deferring to them (besides being a huge loss of agency) requires you not only to trust them more than you trust yourself, but also to trust your experience of them more than you trust whatever experience is contradicting them.
one thing that frustrates me: people sometimes have weird brain experiences and then become convinced of crazy metaphysical beliefs. like you have some strange spiritual experience and become convinced god exists.
human brains are really fucking weird and complicated! it’s true that the default hypothesis of conscious experience (the idea that unless you’ve gone completely crazy, you basically just perceive reality as it is, and act on it as a rationalish agent) is not exactly true. the correct update is that while most of the time this is accurate, there is a lot of weird shit that goes on inside your brain, and your perception is the result of a whole lot of computation over the streams of raw data, and there are all sorts of weird modes you can push your brain into that feel really fucking weird from the inside, especially through drugs/meditation/etc, but even sometimes without. it’s actually completely possible to just hallucinate very complicated things, or suddenly feel some emotion very strongly for no obvious reason, or your brain can even mess with your memories too.
my diagnosis is that a lot of people have a belief that perceiving weird bullshit is not compatible with the standard rational view of the world (“science can’t explain why i heard the voice of god booming from the sky”), the one that says ghosts don’t exist and whatever, so if you perceive weird bullshit the standard rational view must be wrong and therefore we must consider ghosts and spirits and god and such to be in the space of hypotheses again. this is understandable but totally wrong. if anything, experiencing weird brain shit should make you more cautious about epistemology.
then again, although i’ve run into lots of weird quirks of my brain that violate the basic rational model, i’ve never had any kind of strange spiritual experience. maybe i’d change my mind if i have such an experience, though hopefully not. i’d like to think if i heard the voice of god booming down from the sky i would be like “aha yes my brain is fucking with me”.
I have a friend who, as a committed Christian, took LSD, and felt a deep spiritual connection to the Holy Spirit for his entire trip. It was a much stronger than he was ever able to feel in a church service. Puzzled, he took LSD a second time, and got the same feeling. He almost immediately became an atheist, reasoning that if LSD could replicate the feeling of the Holy Spirit then there was obviously nothing supernatural going on.
extremely based
That doesn’t make sense to me, either emotionally or logically (it seems like there are lots of reasons that could have happened that would be totally consistent with God being real and people sometimes being able to really feel the presence of God?)
His logic was something like:
I strongly believe in the Christian God because of the feeling of the Holy Spirit that I get in church (and not much else, the world looks pretty secular)
This feeling is similar to, but weaker than, the feeling of taking LSD
If God is real, then He probably would not create a random mushroom derivative chemical which provides a stronger connection to him than an actual church does
Therefore this feeling is probably not the Christian God connecting to me
Therefore I have no evidence for God
Therefore God likely does not exist
?? for a day back there, God’s, like, main thing was that He created a mushroom that provides a strong connection to Him
The brain can be accurately described as a hallucination engine. Its perceptual and cognitive processes are generative. The generated representations stay coupled to reality by sensory input during most normal waking experience, but the vividness of dreams, imagination, and hypothesis formation are pretty clear indicators of the strongly generative algorithm. The fact that anyone will reliably hallucinate from lack of sleep as well as hallucinogens adds evidence.
The non-cofnitive hallucinations in belief space are what make people think they’ve directly experienced the reality of spiritual truths. The feeling of presence of another mind or another space is just another hallucination, but people take that felt certainty as evidence of their reality.
Not sure if I’m just being stupid in context, but doesn’t “your brain can sometimes do really weird shit” combined with “your mind is instantiated primarily via your brain” create a plausible physicalist causal path to “you’d change your mind”? That is, if the focus event is that your brain does something weird, and experiences and beliefs are both mediated by the brain, why can’t the same underlying phenomenon directly cause both the experience and the change in beliefs? Like a kernel memory management glitch in a computer could simultaneously cause display distortion and corrupt some file buffers on their way to persistent storage.
i think it’s worth developing a systematic science of all the sorts of weird bullshit human minds pull in general, so we can understand better how to navigate being a human. doing so requires not knee-jerk ignoring interesting phenomena. but it also requires not throwing away our epistemics.
Can you give examples?
I resonate with this but I also feel—though not super strongly (I’m not sure how to think about this) -- that there should be something (some evidence or argument or a large collection of those) that would be in principle capable of convincing you that you’re speaking to God via some legitimate epistemics.
Like, I’m pretty sure God (at least in the standard ~religious sense of the word) doesn’t exist. In my [metaphysics + broad understanding of the world] there’s no room for God, so it’s not even a hypothesis to be considered. But it seems to me that there are possible, internally consistent worlds where this [metaphysics + broad understanding of the world] is incorrect and I “should” be in principle open to evidence that I am in such a world.
Well if something spoke to me in my head and told me things I didn’t and couldn’t know but could verify later, I’d be convinced they were real and not just a hallucination.
Of course you’d need to be really careful about the strength of the evidence. Basically p-hacking on coincidences is how people become convinced of both woo metaphysics and conspiracy theories.
Surely they would be “real”, but then the simulation hypothesis still trumps the God hypothesis as an explanation of the phenomenon, given my metaphysics.
I’m asking: What legitimate reasoning, given what sort of ~evidence would be able to convince me that God, e.g., in the Abrahamic sense, is real, or that Kami are real (plausibly partly through subverting my metaphysics)?
I haven’t had much psychedelic experience, but from what I can tell, a lot of what seems to outsiders like bad epistemics is actually the person using words VERY differently than they are normally used. Which is itself a bad communication strategy, but not bad epistemology.
An advanced meditator might de a better job explaining specific examples than me, but meditators might say, like, the universe dissolved frame by frame until they were visited by an angel in the place outside time. This is literally false. The universe did not dissolve and does not have a framerate like a video game. Angels do not exist. There is no place outside time. But I would guess they are using most of those words in very different ways, grasping at some way to describe novel qualia that really have no words, or for which the only words are ancient religious terminology.
If you suddenly had a sixth sense analogous to vision, but not vision, and you had to describe it to someone else, I could see the temptation to start using nonsense language. In fact, a normal person describing color to a blind person will sound to the blind person like they’re using nonsense language. What do you mean, bananas have a “yellowness” just like the sun, and you can sense them both, sense the whole universe, at the same time? That sounds like magic. It’s only not magic if you understand how vision works, but we don’t have equivalent knowledge for most of the strange qualia of the psychedelic world. If your model of psychedelics is that it’s mostly hallucinations, that is, different contents of the regular senses that represent unreal objects, that’s way off from reality. The nature of the senses and mind itself shift, and new qualia of many types are experienced.
Plenty of meditators, plenty of people, have bad epistemic hygiene, but I think you can still have good epistemics and talk this way. Though you probably shouldn’t.
i think it’s fine to use such metaphors as ling as you make it clear you don’t think there is actually literally an angel outside time you are talking to, for the nornal understanding of those words.
1) drugs/meditation are “weird” and very firsthand-experience dependent and subjective
2) the people likely to get into these mindstates are probably more likely to be unsatisfied with their normal lives, so already deviant mentality
3) the ‘normal state’ of people is not considered weird or improvable (even though normal state of life can lead to spirals, depression, even suspected lead/plastic poisoning and such modify you)
4) many people operate with less ‘basic rational’ stories already and have gone into what seem to be delusion spirals even without mindstate changes, and it’s then frustrating to read people who seem to have no curiosity or skepticism about it (personally I feel like I try to test stuff in dreams, if you see ‘visions’ or feel ‘deja vu’ of the future you should log them, etc.)
5) some of those mindstates feel objectively significantly better than normal, which attracts the thought “I should tell others about this!” and it feels like you need to establish yourself as ‘sane’ beforehand. Plus doing too many of these, outsiders may more easily get a skewed view of who you are.
Also in a similar way sometimes people say “religion wasn’t true but it filled so many important roles”, there is a benefit to the person to have untrue but more productive beliefs, in your ‘god booming down from the sky’ example, that person may just use it as a highly confident whispering earring and legitimately improve their life, blurring the pros/cons and ideal of truth-seeking.
6) everyone also knows they can permanently change you, making it easy for an outsider to say “you are still under the influence of the drug/etc.” and write you off
I’m not sure I can properly articulate this but this seems to underestimate quite how difficult the position is for the person having the weird experience. There is an issue of reflexivity: once you start taking seriously the possibility that “your brain is fucking with you” you are doubting the very mechanism which you are trying to use. If the rational world view is to trust your experience and reasoning over faith and dogma, then when your experience calls into doubt your rational world view it seems like you have a choice between ‘rationally’ doubting your rationalism or ‘irrationally’ maintaining faith in it.
I’d argue that it is actually more rational to question one’s experience of the world specifically because brains are unreliable.
There are times in altered states in which I am very much aware that I am experiencing the world in a way that is quite outside the normal bounds of my everyday lived experience. I’ve made the mistake of having one too many cannabis edibles a couple of times; the first time the sensations were so intense that I thought I was literally going to die. We’re talking that heart-squeezed-in-the-chest-cold-sweats-can’t-move level of high. The second time I felt the exact same way, except now I was armed with both the trigger and prior experience to lean on such that I knew I was just along for the ride until the high wore off.
In knowing that I was altered, I could reliably doubt my experiences without doubting the ability of instrument to examine itself, especially in post-experience reflections.
Self-examination is a checking loop, and the outcomes don’t have to be binary. The important thing is that you can’t grade the instrument from the inside, you have to have external anchors (and preferably those anchors are different in kind, like checking if a voice you heard could have come from something nearby and also asking anyone else around if they heard that voice). You might find that you reliably experience the world differently than other people, and that’s incredibly important for grounding rational thinking. If your brain is unreliable, it’s counterproductive to try to reason yourself into a believing that it is.
Refusing to update/examine your priors (eg. refusing to entertain that your instrument might be miscalibrated) is itself a form of dogma.
I think drugs make this a lot easier because they give a clear context for the altered experience. Like you said you can easily dismiss the effects as temporary, and even if you do take them seriously at the time you can easily dismiss them retrospectively once sober. Even without drugs if the altered experience happens in the context of a specific ritual or practice such as meditation that creates an inside/outside distinction relative to which you really can seek external anchors.
I think the challenge is if you don’t have clear context markers surrounding the experience then this becomes difficult or impossible to do. Ultimately grading your own instruments ‘from the inside’ seems pretty fundamental to the human experience, there is nowhere else to grade them from.
But if your experience is reliably different from others then deferring to them (besides being a huge loss of agency) requires you not only to trust them more than you trust yourself, but also to trust your experience of them more than you trust whatever experience is contradicting them.