[keiferski]

I agree that maybe this doesn’t prove the existence of a higher metaphysical plane, but don’t you find it a bit hubristic to assume that the contemporary human perception and way of categorizing things just happens to be the way everything actually is?

[moffkalast]

Here are two fun facts: Wifi antennas are just lightbulbs that shine really red light that we can't see. Trees are loud, like really loud, but we can't hear it at all since it's all ultrasound.

It's pretty clear that we as ugly giant bags of mostly water don't perceive much of what's going on and tack a lot of made up shit on top to make it more functional. Like colours which aren't really a thing, objectively speaking (ask a colour blind person or check what the JWST sees in outer space).

And yet we know that we don't see these things, because we can detect them indirectly. And we've been finding methods of better indirect detection of literally anything for millennia and mapping it all into the areas we can detect. If there was a configuration of carbon in our heads that mixed with drugs detects something, we'd have built a artificial sensor out of it by now (alas it is but random noise that does not correlate with anything, not even itself). So while there's probably still particles and fields that we can't detect yet and some we even know we don't know about (ahem dark matter/energy ahem), it wouldn't be too much hubris to say we've got most of it covered by now.

[keiferski]

Just because we've found a lot of previously undetectable things in no way indicates that we've found "most" of it by now. All it indicates is that we've found more things than we knew before; for all we know, we may have merely gone from knowing 0.01% to 0.02%.

[moffkalast]

Well to some degree we actually can know how much we know and don't know, with statistics [0] and our observations so far. So much of modern science was easy pickings in the 19th and 20th centuries, while these days we keep investing ludicrous amounts of effort into ultra specific experiments to figure out some small new thing that often just confirms what we already thought, learning relatively little in comparison to the ye olde polymaths making three new branches of science by themselves. The fact that we're so far into diminishing returns is an indicator by itself. Most new tech these days isn't even new, it's just figuring out how to make the already known practical enough to be cost effective.

Now sure, a person during the roman times or the middle ages could be caught saying the same thing and couldn't be more wrong. And sure it's entirely possible that we'll figure something out that will revolutionize our knowledge of the universe entirely... but every time general relativity predicts yet another observation to an annoying level of perfection that chance becomes smaller and smaller.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_tank_problem

[keiferski]

The history of human knowledge is pretty much a succession of people saying "we know everything, this topic is done" being proved wrong by a new development.

I'll again say that I think it's extremely hubristic to think that human civilization has somehow figured out "most" scientific knowledge in the last couple of centuries. This human-centered attitude is not unique, though, which is kind of my point: it's not a new thing at all to think that the current level of knowledge has nowhere to go. It's just the typical human hubris that has been with us forever.

[genghisjahn]

With the “God of the gaps” things…it’s always hand waved away. Things seem mystical until science comes along a codifies it so to speak. And yet the gap remains, it’s just further out. It’s a gap we didn’t even know was there. It just gives me pause when I try to think about the totality of things. How can I say for sure how it came to be when I’m not even close to sure what it is.

[moffkalast]

Well sure, but at least in comparison with the entire history of life on this planet, we've known close to nothing until the last ~400 years and have since figured out most that practically matters to us on a daily basis. We don't know how to cure cancer, but we know exactly what it is.

We're certainly still wrong about exotic types of matter, gravity, fundamental particles, the ways completely arbitrary things function, like genes in a cell, etc... but we know that cells exist, what they're composed of, and we're definitely not wrong about that, and that is frankly infinitely more knowledge than we've ever had before. What's left to find are mostly increasingly more nitpicky details that are nonetheless very important, but they don't change our understanding anywhere nearly as drastically.

To wrap back around to my original point, in comparison to everything else the amount of knowledge we've gained on paranormal things since tribal shaman times is about zero. It's still all hearsay and speculation and it's not for the lack of trying.

[hecanjog]

> Trees are loud, like really loud, but we can't hear it at all since it's all ultrasound.

Just to put loud in perspective: seems like cavitation produces ultrasound in the ~30db range at the highest[1], which is roughly the level of a whisper. I haven't knowingly captured trees in my ultrasound field recording, but it seems fun to try. That should be loud enough to pick up something with an ultrasonic recorder close by, I'd think, which is pretty cool -- I assumed you'd need to do something like David Dunn and embed microphones into the trees.

[1] https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-...

[daniel_reetz]

Same in my experiments. "Loud" is not the right word here at all.

[Earw0rm]

Is there any evidence for this ultrasound being a communication medium of any kind (I'm thinking less IPv6 or US English, and more insect or bird calls)? Any hint that they listen to sounds as well as make them, or that there's any information content in it? Or it's more like heartbeats and engine/fan noise, just a byproduct of processes doing what they do?

[moffkalast]

They use exclusively IPv3 (IP version tree)

:)

[bbwbsb]

Suppose a model of reality M (which makes predictions) and doesn't admit a higher metaphysical plane as part of the model. Now assume Mp does admit a higher metaphysical plane and makes the same predictions as M for all observable phenomena (or for all reality in the sense of 'this reality').

In such a case, the existence of a higher metaphysical plane is purely aesthetic. In terms of predictions, both models are equally correct, being identical. The correctness of the internal representation is beyond epistemological limits, and arguably a meaningless or ill-formed proposition. For a significant difference, the models must make different predictions. But the conventional understanding (say the standard model) is carefully constructed and deviations by laypeople are invariably simplifications or are due to impaired reality testing.

This situation is the same as religion, because it is one. Either the religion doesn't make predictions about reality, in which case it's difference is purely aesthetic (as a model of reality), or it does and in practice is either trivially falsifiable or copying what is already known (note that the old well known religions have long since had their predictions tested).

Psychedelic experiences could, in theory, produce interesting hypotheses about reality; just like Scientology and the "Twin flame" people could. But in practice it almost always seems to produce crackpot stuff like "you can make a perceptual motion machine with time crystals and fractals; also Einstein, Aristotle, and Tupac already knew this but no one was paying attention; luckily drug-induced divine revelation has bequeathed this information via direct transmission; if only everyone else experienced ego death, then maybe they could be as great as I".

This is the hubris I perceive in the idea that scientists, philosophers, etc. that have dedicated their life to the study of particular tiny pieces of reality and honed a disciplined sense of intellectual rigor are going to be outdone by random people tripping. It is uniquely offensive and arrogant.

That said, in so far as 'reality' is 'my model of reality', individuals may gain psychological insight by partaking in 'spiritual' activity, including psychedelics, and it follows that they may gain a 'special understanding of (their) reality' in that way. The problems are the magical thinking implicated in universalizing personal insight, the pitfall of assuming independence of realities beyond subjective experience, the belief subjective perception is unlimited by physical reality, and in some a tendency to insist that such insight cannot be gained in other (more mundane) ways.

[keiferski]

I think you're kind of "talking past me" here, in that you're replying to a different point than the one I'm making. I'm not saying that psychedelics or crackpot theories are offering some kind of insight that scientists are missing. Rather, that describing reality with contemporary human concepts is just going to be inherently limited and restricted, because of its foundation in human perception. Saying that nothing bigger than our brain exists just seems very limited and human-centric to me.