[lend000]

You could instead say something like "I don't know."

Unfortunately, a lot of people (especially engineers) default to attempting to discredit people's strange experiences and instead regurgitate some hand-wavy materialistic explanation that is incorrect or at least so incomplete and hand-wavy as to just derail the conversation instead of improving it. I was this guy when I was younger, but I prefer being open-minded nowadays.

Specifically with regard to people's experiences, I tend to treat them with a strong curiosity. You can never really tell on the internet, but in person, I think people are generally quite honest and don't really lie about things that don't benefit them in some way. If you approach things with an open mind, people tend to be more open with their experiences, and it seems like at least 10% of people I know well and possibly many more have had some inexplicable experiences of the variety described by the parent poster (albeit usually over a much shorter period).

[deciplex]

To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.

I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.

[lend000]

You actually gave a pretty good example of what I mean here:

> She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.

  (Human) memory is extremely unreliable.

This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much while it's also rather insulting to the author of the original comment.

The way I see it, the problem is not that you are skeptical, but that you seek to explain away one piece so that you can dismiss the whole thing. I see it as starting with what you already believe (that the parent's experiences are invalid) and working backwards from there, instead of starting with what you're given (that the parent claims to have experienced some incredible things) and then trying to build the best explanation. We will likely have a compelling explanation for experiences like the parent's someday, perhaps centuries in the future, but such knowledge will only be discovered people who do not immediately dismiss evidence that sits wholly outside existing scientific understanding (even if it ends up being a purely mechanistic brain circuitry phenomenon).

[kranke155]

Thank you.

The way I see it is, electricity was there before we knew what it was. If you explained what electricity is to someone in the 1300s, they would call you insane and maybe burn you at the stake. Yet now we know what electricity is. We know what lightning is.

The scientific mindset has so impregnated our society we have a tendency to say “if it hasn’t been mapped it doesn’t exist”. Yet maps (science) are only a map of something that existed far before we understood it. Mountains were there before plate tectonics. Lightning was there before Ben Franklin. I think the psychedelic world is something we will understand far far into the future, and the explanation will likely be as weird as it would be to explain electricity to someone in an ancient Egypt.

[Dylan16807]

Several people could look at the same lightning bolt and independently write down what they saw, then a third person could verify. That's an important thing that's missing in the story of "the voice sounded the same to me".

You're focused on unknown mechanisms for easily verifiable observations, while my focus is on the (lack of) proof that the song lady actually observed anything at all. For all I know she just listened to what you said and went along with it.

[kranke155]

You’re absolutely right and I can’t convince of anything and I won’t try. All I can say is have some psychedelic trips and see how you feel.

To me it felt as real as anything that’s ever happened to me, and since I’ve spoken to other people who’ve had similar experiences (psychedelic experiences are remarkable in their similarities, I think) I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.

The way I see it it’s odd that someone like me with bipolar can have a natural psychedelic experience and see pretty much similar things as someone on LSD. This suggests that the chemical change in the brain has consistency between people, even if the origin of the chemical change is natural or artificial. So I find it odd to just explain it as hallucinations. Dreams are hallucinations, people have wildly different dreams.

But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.

[deciplex]

> I find it hard to just say “none of this means anything, it’s just a hallucination”.

I don't think that's the claim being made. FWIW I've done psychedelics as well, and I've had "natural" hallucinations (sleep paralysis). I don't think that those experiences were "meaningless" (well, maybe the sleep paralysis mostly was) but neither do I think they allowed me to tap into some new physics or something.

To me, the fact that having these experiences requires me to change my brain, first and only then can I have them, with the experience not persisting after I leave the psychedelic state, suggests that the experience is a function of what's going on in my brain rather than some enhanced perception of reality. I say this, because it seems unlikely that there are physical properties of the universe that are only measurable by a human brain and only in a very specific state. Put another way: if some eldritch knowledge were revealed to me in a psychedelic state, I would expect it to be verifiable outside of a psychedelic state, even if by some other means.

The same goes for certain mental illnesses, by the way. If a brain is operating differently, then it seems reasonable that it will have a different perception of reality. But, importantly, if that perception of reality can only affect them or be affected by them then even if I accept it as "real" I can't tap into it - they may as well be living a parallel universe with different physical laws. But if you ask me which is more likely: that some people just exist partially in a parallel universe with different physical laws, or that some people just think that (wrongly) because of some quirk of perception and cognitive function, then even if I don't have a full picture of all the facts I'm going with the latter.

And that seems reasonable: you and another poster seem to think I'm wrong for assigning probabilities without a full picture of the facts. But I can do that with a partial picture of the facts as well: humans do this all the time and it works quite well for us.

> But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.

I think a lot of people have a mistaken notion that the human brain starts out as a completely blank slate. On the contrary much of our behavior is hard-coded, like any other animal. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that there would be realms of human experience that cut across cultural boundaries. If anything, the opposite would be more surprising.

[deciplex]

The compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. It's perhaps not as comprehensive and well-understood as Maxwell's equations, but they are well-studied. What happened to you, while fascinating on a personal level, is not a scientific mystery.

You accuse me of dismissing your experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

[deciplex]

Human memory is extremely unreliable.

> This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much

Sorry but I am not going to copy/paste hundreds of paragraphs of literature from neural science journals in order to give a comprehensive analysis of what OP experienced. Especially since, based on their other comments in this thread, they aren't terribly interested in that sort of explanation anyway.

At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. You just don't like it because it's not mystical enough for you. You accuse me of dismissing people's experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

[kranke155]

I have no idea why you'd think I'm not interested in scientific explanations. Seems like an assumption to me.

[lend000]

This is what I'm talking about: shallow dismissals without even a footnote to avoid admitting that you don't understand the parent's experience. Your reaction to the parent, immediately trying to shut it down with weak explanations, suggests a complete lack of curiosity in the mechanics of how things work, which I don't think is true.

> At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have.

No, we don't. I'll even refer you to an expository article that describes some studies about what you are probably alluding to, and you can let me know how you think it adequately accounts for the parent's story [0].

Spoiler: it requires someone taking the effort to implant the memories (a pretty significant caveat worth mentioning, I would think), and I've certainly never seen it applied to some ongoing thing like a disembodied voice with apparent agency.

But even where memory implantation is relatively accepted ala coercive police interrogations, the mechanism in the brain is unknown. Was a new memory implanted or was a subject simply gaslit into remembering the conversation with the interrogator? Where in the brain is that belief encoded? How can it be simulated? Did the parent never experience a voice then? They just have a continuously updating memory being implanted by some researcher? You clearly haven't thought this through, so don't be so quick to shut it down.

The reality is that none of us here have a good explanation for the parent's experience -- brains are barely understood at all. Your skepticism to the parent's interpretation is fine, but your attempt to discredit with a blanket cop out statement that lacks any mechanism or reproducibility on the scale of the parent's story only serves to let you keep pretending like you know everything.

[0] https://www.bxscience.edu/ourpages/auto/2013/10/5/59413507/F...

[deciplex]

I will refer you to my earlier post:

  To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.

  I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.

I don't know where you're getting this idea that I'm shutting down their experience in the way you describe. But like, do you think this story of theirs is that unique? Have you really never heard anything like this before? Because it kind of seems like it. So it's not that I'm dismissing their story out of hand, but rather stories like this are not that uncommon and generally in my experience you don't need to resort to the supernatural to explain them. So that's where I'm coming from and, again, I'm not even telling them they're wrong as you suggest, but I am reverting to the "null hypotheses" as you say. But, as I already explained, to me that's more of a "you haven't given me any reason to believe this" than it is a "you're wrong, didn't happen." Unfortunately you seem committed to taking equal offense to both, as though they are equal, and we are at an impasse.

At any rate, you're being oddly hostile toward me about all of this and it's getting on my nerves so I'll be ignoring your posts in this thread going forward. Thanks.

[lend000]

I do want to apologize for being unnecessarily confrontational, although I stand by my general points. It was your reply to the parent about misremembering their experience that threw me on a tangent. I will just say I think there's a better way to approach these conversations, even if you think it's nonsense.