Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. With your mind in a suggestible state, it's much easier to convince yourself that you're seeing in 4D than is to actually see in 4D.
It's pretty easy to work out what they actually saw from the words used to describe them. A hypercube rotation is a 4d object projected into 3 dimensions. Nothing extraordinary at all about that.
Yes, it was a visual hallucination, and so constrained to two dimensions plus perspective. But I clearly recall the sense that I was seeing a 2D projection of a higher-dimensional image.
Yeah, visualizing 2D/3D shapes is not extraordinary. "The sense" of an extra dimension is meaningless woo, unless someone with sufficient mathematical experience is able to observe consistent properties of a shape's higher-dimensional structure.
Obviously anything experiential can be dismissed as "meaningless woo", but as someone who's done a fair amount of LSD and is a lifelong skeptic, it's an unmistakable experience that the hallucinations are taking place in a higher ordered space.
The process of hallucinating on LSD feels like you're sliding a window through a higher dimensional structure projected onto a 2D plane. LSD hallucinations aren't "3D" in the same way that mushroom hallucinations are. LSD feels like infinite 2D planes stacked on top of each other, rather than a 3D, if that makes any sense.
If you pause to meditate and quiet your mind, you can get the hallucinations to briefly stall or at least retain their current character. If you focus on one area and let your mind explore the hallucinating you're looking at and just sort of "let it happen", or perhaps change music/environments/stimulus, you can push the hallucinations in a new direction.
The 2D nature of the hallucinations and the lens-like focusing mechanic does give the impression that you're viewing a projection of a higher dimensional space.
I understand it sounds like woo, but the experience is remarkably similar to the feeling of playing with something like http://4dtoys.com/ and I can very much understand what mirimir is describing.
I don't have any science-based understanding of how the brain works, but maybe I've added enough color that you can understand what the experience feels like.
I hope some day to encounter a situation where a non-psychedelic-experienced person lecturing the experienced about how silly they are agrees to "put their money where their mouth is" so to speak and actually try it out for themselves, and then return to the previous argument and reflect upon it with the new insight they've gained.
Of course they wouldn't suddenly "get it" entirely like in the movies, but I think it would have to be somewhat interesting to see their reaction to going from absolute confidence in their perceptions and knowledge, to.....well, whatever you call the state one is in after having had such experiences. I know for me, even being fairly experienced, returning to a psychedelic state is rather shocking....it seems like it is literally impossible to store even remotely proper memories of it in one's mind, at least mine. Ineffable doesn't seem like the right word for it.
I have a lot of meditation experience, and deep trance states are also extremely hard to hold on to. Meditating on the phenomena has revealed that it's a combination of unfamiliarity with the subject matter along with the sheer complexity of the experience that leads to inability to remember all the details.
People also tend to forget that ordinary life is crazy complicated in its own right. We don't have trouble remembering it because our brains have tuned itself to compress and operate on those kinds of experiences symbolically.
But since we don't have appropriate symbolic representation for 'deep experience' it gets shoved out of mind before we can form memories.
I'm not a fan of the "you have to experience it to understand it" mantra.
I understand experiencing something yourself can be a very easy/efficient way for humans to learn. But the ability to transfer knowledge and understanding in other ways even for complicated thoughts is one of the things that sets us apart from lesser beings on this planet.
Don't get me wrong, I understand there are effects. If alcohol weakens myelin and thus boosts unusual interactions between neurons (my layman understanding based on little education on the topic) it might be a good tool to boost creativity, within reason and with a bunch of asterisks attached. Meditation helping you to understand and control your mental state sounds very useful.
But yeah, for psychedelic I've not yet encountered a convincing elevator pitch of it providing lasting benefits beyond being an interesting experience. At least benefits in areas I consider myself lacking. At the same time I've read enough about the AI control problem that messing around with your thinking should only be done with a lot of caution. And an online personality I follow had a shroom trip, including a limited existential crisis and following panic attacks. Just that seems like a high price to pay, considering I don't see it having made him a better person.
So yeah, I'll hold off on such an experience until I get a plausible lecture from some psychedelic advocate or at least encounter statistical evidence of it being beneficial.
That's a great wiki. I'm talking about 8A/8B. And it's hard to describe, because you forget most of it so fast. What I remember most vividly is close to the image "Abstract by Matt W. Moore", but not so hard edged. More like "Untitled by Luke Brown". Like a bunch of strings of 3D characters, rotating and writhing through higher dimensions. And they moved and changed so quickly that I could never make out what they meant. Plus the fact that I had virtually no memory left.
I really did have the sense that I was somehow seeing my thought process. As the wiki says:
> At the lower end of level 8B geometry, the experience manifests itself as being able to perceive the supposed organization and structure behind one's current conscious thought stream. This is typically presented in the form of a complex, multisensory, and fast-moving network that contains innately understood and relevant geometric representations of specific and abstract concepts. The experience of these innately understandable geometric representations consistently triggers one to visualize and physically feel the concept through highly detailed conceptual thinking.
> At the higher end of level 8B geometry, the effect retains its lower levels but expands itself to include the experience of subjectively perceiving, through innately understandable geometric representations, the architecture of subconscious neurological processes which are usually outside of one's normal daily perception or understanding. These processes are often interpreted to include concepts such as the structure of one's neurology, memories, perspectives, emotions, and general cognitive functions.
It would have to be higher dimensional properties observed by someone who doesn't have mathematical experience relayed to and confirmed by someone who does.