[NovaDudely]

I think I posted it on here before but I recall a story of someone who said they would speak to God on LSD and that everything was profound.

So one time they decided to ask "God" what the meaning of life was and they would write it down to study the next day. The next day all that was written down was "Walls". It felt profound but meant nothing.

That is unless walls is the answer and it is just too blunt for us to understand but that is a question for another day. ;)

[klyrs]

Truly, the meaning of life is walls. Without cell walls, where would we be? Without delineation or separation, how could we make sense of the world? This article is about piercing the veil, a wall between life and, well, that would be telling. Gradients are necessary for life, but walls are necessary for meaning.

I dunno, I'm not high but I can see some plausible depth here. I'm not arguing that your friend talked to god, of course, but as an answer to the meaning of life, "walls“ is pretty excellent.

[foxyv]

I used to do this a lot as a kid. Ascribing high meaning to tiny things like words or patterns. Some of it was just plain magical thinking. Later I learned it's called the "Hindsight Bias" usually mixed in with a little grandiosity and juvenile narcissism. I never understood why no-one could see my genius! Being a teenager is so cringey in retrospect...

Although, as a buddhist I like to think of the meaning of life as tearing down walls that never existed anywhere but our own minds. Of realizing interconnectedness. But at the same time I'm always aware that I'm not THAT far from the cringey know-it-all teenager!

[klyrs]

Yeah, I was just having fun with it. I was reared in a spiritualistic environment, so I kinda know the lingo. So help me if I actually believed those words I wrote :)

[foxyv]

I was tempted to ask you to do "Balls" next! I love those kinds of games.

[klyrs]

ew

[foxyv]

Not THAT kind of game!

[lovemenot]

Assume this was a valid scientific experiment, then there has to be some combination of a reasonable number of written words that would prove they had communicated with the divine.

People have been writing texts for thousands of years and it's obvious to me that no such word combos exist. If they did, they'd have been discovered and well-known.

So, all that was shown with the walls experiment was that experimental design was flawed. Nothing about whether the person could or could not speak to God on LSD.

[goldenkey]

Due to the nature of higher powers and quantum randomness, I don't believe there's an algorithmic way to distinguish acts of God from acts of an Alien from happenings of extremely improbable (out-of-distribution) quantum randomness.

[oigursh]

Universal Love said the Cactus Person https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...

[niknoble]

Trump vindicated