[motohagiography]

This is an important description, as when you think of a chemical creating impairment, it is essentially adding noise to signals in your brain, and a lot of the geometric and fractal artifacts we see resemble noise artifacts you would get from interfering with other analogue signals.

Given your brain takes sensory signal input and coheres it, impairing that ability is going to create signals-based feedback that is described in information theory and signal processing, which if there is any periodic sampling going on on the coherance layer, you're going to get shape artifacts that are a function of that period. It's essentially 1/f noise and the experience of "more" information in a hallucinatory state is really just noisy information, like feedback on a TV. (It implies your brain has a clock cycle, and probably something like an NTP service.)

Imagine your TV had worked perfectly for your entire life and the first time you experienced its signal was bad, but you didn't realize there was a world in which that signal could not exist, so it would be totally mind blowing and you might experience it as a rift in reality. It would demand the question, if the people on TV aren't the substrate of our shared reality, and they are only representations transmitted by signals our minds are cohering, what else isn't necessarily real?

You'd tell other people that you had an experience where there is something else, a true substrate of reality where the televisions weren't coherent and real, which seems impossible, but if you've experienced it, you know. Suddenly, the televisions and they things they say are fallible, but there is still a you without them, and one that is not bound to the identity you see reflected in what they broadcast and tell you, because when the TV signal fed back on itself or echoed with delay, now you know there is something behind it all. It seems profound, but it's really just the first time your TV didn't work because something had impaired the signal. This is what I think hallucinogens are: noise on your sensory channels that reminds you the signals you use to cohere your experience exist in a substrate, which is just a mundane fact and necessarily physically true, and "you" are more than what your manage to cohere into a narrative from your sensory input. Some people believe a substrate or perception of something "else" is inconcievable because they have never experienced jitter in their coherence cycles, and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really, it's not, and most of us just go back to chopping wood and carrying water.

[int_19h]

I'm very skeptical of this interpretation, if only because LSD doesn't just (or even mostly) cause "noise" hallucinations. It makes you actually notice the tiny details and patterns in everyday things. Not a different reality so much so as a deeper awareness and appreciation of the reality normally perceived.

[babyshake]

People who don't have first-hand experience with psychedelics tend to have this misconception, thinking of the experience as some type of delirium. The wonder of being on psychedelics is understanding that everything in typical day to day to life is hilariously unimportant, and also understanding that the impaired perception of the world is the one we normally have.

[GuB-42]

I don't think it is incompatible.

To keep with the TV analogy, let's say you are watching a movie, enjoying the story, the setting, etc... Then, noised is added to the signal and you start seeing all sorts of glitches.

For example, let's imagine that the boot of a character flickers a bit. That boot has its importance, the director wanted to give the movie a certain aesthetic and that boot is part of it, but it is not important in the story and you are not supposed to notice it, in fact it is especially designed not to be out of place.

But because of the glitch, you now have all your attention focused on the boot, which is interesting, but you lost the big picture, too hard to understand now because of the noise. Maybe the next glitch will highlight the pavement or a lamp post.

[int_19h]

But that's not how it works, at all. There's nothing "flickering" to draw your attention to one particular bit etc; you still perceive the whole image at once.

The closest I can come to describing this is a higher resolution - like viewing the same photo, but you go from 640x480 to 4K, and from 256 to 32-bit color. Indeed, when consuming any sort of digital visual input, resolution differences (and compression artifacts etc) become much more noticeable, so perhaps this isn't merely an analogy. But the same also extends to sounds and even taste - it's not that things taste different, for example, but you can more readily identify and appreciate all the overtones that combine to create a particular taste, without subtracting from the experience of the whole.

This, by the way, is why watching fractal animations [1] can be so fascinating in that state - you still perceive the fractal as a whole, but you also simultaneously see the tiny details, and can observe that they faithfully correspond to the larger image, without having to individually focus on each.

[1] E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cgp2WNNKmQ (best viewed at 4K)

[IIAOPSW]

I'm very nodding-along with this interpretation, but only because when I closed my eyes I realized that what I saw looked like the normal after image of staring at a lightbulb but shoved through some form of Fourier space filter. I came to this revelation that the entire experience, the sense of time, the visual distortions, the losing trains of thought, all of it could be explained if brain waves are representations of repeating patterns at that same time scale. The acid simply damps or phase shifts the larger time scales. Visual signals become time series in a manner similar to analogue TV.

The opposite of tiny detail happens. I looked at a brick wall and all the bricks were identical. Like lazy copy paste game texture identical. I knew that the bricks weren't actually like that. You see patterns in things because the frequency resolution needed to encode the difference is cut off. The result is like a JPEG artifact but instead of localized square pixelation you get globalized crystal pixelization. Everything looks like it fits a crystal pattern. Especially random noise. Here is some noise that worked particularly well one time. https://ibb.co/D1rd6bN

You can't tell me you are seeing patters that are really there in literal randomness.

[int_19h]

There's plenty of accidental patterns in purely random stuff. So the thing that the pattern corresponds to, according to your brain, isn't really there - but the pattern itself can very well be.

You know how trees sometimes look like they have faces, for example? They objectively do, according to our pattern recognition algorithm for faces, in a sense that people will find the same tree more or less anthropomorphic. But it doesn't mean that they actually have faces, of course! If you have a still photo of the forest, and stare at it long enough, you might notice more such than you would if you just glanced at it briefly. Same thing here.

[IIAOPSW]

Trees are not accidental. They very much have a pattern. Namely they are in the shape of a tree.

TV static is pure randomness. Looking at any pixel has no correlation with looking at any other pixel. Any pattern you see in static must therefore be an artifact of the way your brain encodes patterns rather than something that is actually there.

[int_19h]

Trees with faces are accidental. Trees don't have faces. They do have various unrelated features, which sometimes combine to form something that objectively looks like a face to humans.

For a more abstract example, if you generate a random black-and-white static image, it will have a bunch of (short) vertical and horizontal lines in it, simply because random pixel values will sometimes cluster into sequences that produce lines. Such a line is "actually there" - different people will see it, and you can even write code that finds all such lines. The fact that its pixels were formed randomly, without correlation between each other, doesn't change this - it just means that the line has no meaning; it's data, not information. But even so, your ability to detect such lines in a static image can vary.

In a similar vein, there's a well-known issue with RNG in games, where a straightforward approach can sometimes result in e.g. repeating the same value in a row many times, which the players immediately notice (and perceive as unfair). Which is why in many games, the RNG is specifically tweaked to keep track of recent outputs and actively avoid producing more output that would form an easily recognizable pattern.

[atatatat]

It's both.

Sensory exploration & new neural connections are both well documented.

[saiya-jin]

For me the (rather strong) trips from mushrooms showed me how some part of the brain (not sure which one though) is very good at interpolating bits and pieces of reality when there is no longer strong coming in via our senses. Its a blurry picture of reality, but the blur isn't the loss of detail but rather its fractalization (which in the end is the opposite of it).

The harder the trip the less real-world signal and more brains's interpolation. We all have highly unique brains so although the principles are the same (fractals in visual and in mind, strange colors, mixing senses etc.) we all have such a unique take on it.

And since the same brain is just guessing and smoothing input, and the one processing the guesses, its guesses are so 'self-compatible' that it can literally make its own feedback loops (I had it multiple times, when tripping with closed eyes I began wandering further and further away on a very consistent interconnected trip).

Its so strange. I can remember those trips so well, but the 'enhanced' version of it is simply too vast for my normal brain to grok. Just partial projections like 3d into 2d that don't give full picture or don't make much sense.

[SamoyedFurFluff]

The nature of brains is largely a prediciting machine. Most of our sight is actually predicted, not interpreted, especially anywhere we deem familiar.

[LocalH]

Indeed. Not only that, but our brain lies to us with regards to temporal placement of objects. Hence the old thing where when you first look at a ticking clock, the first second feels like it takes longer to lapse, because your brain filled in part of your vision with where it thought the second hand was, because when you shifted your focus towards the second hand, your eyes performed a microsaccade and thus in that precise moment, you were technically blind. This is why I think the effects of psychedelics have such a strong temporal factor.

[randomopining]

It def feels like a raw vs jpeg. The straight sensor data vs a compressed and corrected view.

Problem is, you can get caught on certain intricacies of the raw input instead of just taking it all in at once. Taking it all in at once you can see how it's different than what you preconceived, and that your preconception is just one of infinite perceptions of the single moment.

[patcon]

This is a really wonderful comment and i find it very thought-provoking.

I haven't had much in the way of trips, but it resonates a ton with my own emerging understanding of base-reality, if i can call it that

[bts327]

Just an amazing comment. As someone who has experienced profound states of psychedelia, and having consumed vast amounts of data pertaining to such experiences, yours may be the most unique and original commentary regarding the topic that I’ve seen yet. Bravo, and I’ll certainly be returning to this comment at a later time and date.

[atatatat]

I fully concur.

[singingfish]

Creating noise in the brain that the nervous system then makes sense of. Interesting theory.

Now if I put my mystical hippie hat on I'm going to ask you what you think noise is? Personally I think it's some fundamental property of the universe.

[gryn]

noise is whatever you're not interested in studying/analyzing at the moment.

it's more a property of a thinking agent than it is of the universe.

if you see it everywhere it's because we are the same type of observers, maybe other kinds of hypothetical agents can segments the universe in different ways.

[singingfish]

Your retina does quite a lot of noise filtering at the beginning of visual processing.

Background radiation is also a noise property of the universe, as is the background microwave radiation from the start of the universe. Is this just noise because it's an artefact of the measurement aparatus?

[edgyquant]

I think it’s just the normal noise/lighting/etc that is always there. You just have no reason to actually notice it (it provides no benefit to e.g. a hunter gatherer) so the brain normally disregards it. It’s a fundamental property of the universe but then again so is everything else.

[singingfish]

I was thinking of noise - or randomness. It crops up in many places. When I was studying visual perception a long time ago (back during the second wave of neural networks) it amazed me what a hostile mechanism light is for actually getting a coherent signal that looks well put together (like what our brain does)

[golergka]

It's all the more interesting because consciousness itself is often described as a consequence of a sensory loop on the brain. The book "I am a strange a loop" goes into detail about this theory.

[cmrdporcupine]

I remember being 15 or 16 and an older adult friend in my computer club describing LSD to me: "You know when you turn on your computer and the cartridge isn't in right or you have some fault on the PCB bridging some lines on the data or address bus to the video chip? Something like that... LSD is like opening the case of your Commodore 64 and dropping in some loose metal screws..."

I feel like the analogy holds, at least for simple computers like that where the machine still runs, but with weird alterations. You can look at the patterns that the chip is generating and ... see something [for me never particularly visual, more philosophical]. But it's really just throwing things... off. There's something to learn there, I guess, but I never thought it was terribly metaphysical.

More just evidence that our experience is always mediated, and a sensory change [internal senses as well], a change in texture of mood and thought, and not a very functional one.

[andrekandre]

  and once you do it seems like a really big deal, but really, it's not

do you mean to say "its not a big deal" or "its ends up not being a big deal to most people" ?

it was a little ambiguius to me what was being implied...

[motohagiography]

It's that the discovery that our personal coherence and experience is very narrow, is very jarring when we haven't experienced it before and haven't developed cognitive tools to manage that. It's like discovering that from some other perspective that exists in the substrate, it's likely that your entire experience of the world is as bounded and low-entropy as a drawing or a song. If the sudden apprehension that we may be this absurd isn't belly laugh funny, I am confident that someone else especially finds this fact of us not finding it funny even funnier. There's nothing we can do about it, so you just appreciate it for what it is, relieve suffering where you can, and be excited about what else you couldn't have known.

[patcon]

> it's likely that your entire experience of the world is as bounded and low-entropy as a drawing or a song

YES. I've been following some threads related to the Leiden Theory of Language, which basically proposes that human minds differ from other creatures' right now mostly because we're an advanced semiotic organism that has carved out and evolved an ecological niche inside of an specific area of a biological host organism: the human mind. Basically, the mundane world we live every day is not so dissimilar from the one we imagine as an otherworldly future where we might become cyborgs of tech and biology... but we're ALREADY an organic cyborg of language/semiotics and biology. As in, shit is already weird, we just can't recognize the weirdness so well. Perhaps our fellow travellers (other animals) see us best for what we are.

Anyhow, re: drawings/songs. Through this distorted lens, I've been trying to see the way that our stories and narratives are in some ways like our children. I'm trying to see humans as being more like songs or drawings than we care to admit. Or rather, I'm noticing that we find these other things more "disposable" and we feel less kinship with them when they're persisting in various non-human substrates. We don't mourn their loss as fiercely as the loss of a semiotic-biological cyborg that is wrapped inside another human. But that's just our own bias. Maybe some of these lost narratives and semiotic systems deserve to be mourned just as much. Maybe we should be just as sad for the loss of groups of meaning and narrative (other cultures), but we're just not hard-coded to sense it as well...

And really vibing with your use of the word "substrate" btw.