qwe
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2004
- Messages
- 16,269
1) science and spirituality and psychedelics, imo, are reconcilable. psychedelics is pharmacology that influences whatever portion of our physical brain produces consciousness itself, or at least, transmits information to whatever portion produces consciousness itself. aka qualia aka redness bitterness etc.
it may not be a predictable science, but it produces an expanded awareness and increases one's knowledge of what is "under the surface" of one's mind, and lets the user think "outside the box". in this sense, i would say it's more of a technological tool for bettering oneself, than a scientific tool of discovery. though of course, psychedelics are often intimately involved with scientific discoveries
it may not be a predictable science, but it produces an expanded awareness and increases one's knowledge of what is "under the surface" of one's mind, and lets the user think "outside the box". in this sense, i would say it's more of a technological tool for bettering oneself, than a scientific tool of discovery. though of course, psychedelics are often intimately involved with scientific discoveries
2) what passes for scientific thought on this particular board amazes me. i haven't been here in a while and this is what i'm met with when i stumble back into PD. it's barely even challenged cept for a "lol"this is the forum that brought me to BL!The Smoking Man said:Well, one of my biggest problems with psychology (and closely related fields) is all the chicken-or-egg mixups and similar issues. One could be quick to say that x is [necessarily] an effect of y, when it could actually be that x is the cause of y, or even both are true as a "vicious cycle" so to speak.RGB said:I agree that psychedelia and science are difficult to reconcile, but I don't think it's because they're inherently different. Both science and psychedelic experiences rely on observation of reality, and an underlying assumption that we as human beings witness things in roughly the same way. If you could find some common ground between people's psychedelic experiences and repeatedly produce the same phenomena, I imagine that you could build a science out of it.
The problem in my opinion is that psychedelia is rife with confounding factors. Everything about a person and their environment contributes to the experience, making the result extremely chaotic. You may be able to pull out common threads, but you simply can't approach the rigor of examining a single subject (e.g. reality) and controlling your variables in the way that you can with more traditional sciences. Psychology's a great example of a field with similar difficulties and also a similarly negative popular opinion.Well, it's more deterministic than predictable, so long as chaos theory holds. Oh, and that example is a little unfair as calories and celsius are relative to water.greenmeanies said:true science offers predictive capability-- i can predict with 99% confidence that 1kg of water requires 1kcal of energy to raise in temperature by 1C. this can be repeated at any time in any lab, regardless of the history of the water before you perform the experiment.