Y does the psychedlic experience exist? is there an evolutionary basis? implications?

[LucidSDreamr]

I have been thinking a lot lately about why the psychedlic experience exists within the brain. I have heard shulgin speak on the topic, where he's talking about how its an ability of the brain totally contained within the brain and how drugs are only a facilitator. He speaks on how the psychedlic experience is not evolutionarily advantageous due to the fact that most animals/primitive humans would get killed if they were distracted by anything other than the immediate environment.

But yet, its there, buried deep within the mind. Why do you think its there if it serves no evolutionary purpose? If we follow the model of evolution, there seems to be no reason whatsoever for it to be there, thus it leads me to suspect that there must be something more, like god or something put it there and drugs are a gift from god. I'm a pretty staunch athiest and with a scientific background and tend to dismiss things like god usually. I holed on 3meo pcp yesterday and have been reconsidering things since. I have holed on mxe many times but it was years ago and I guess these thoughts fade after those experiences.

Why do you think the mind is able to do that?

 

[szuko000]

I think its because all of perception has to do with the homeostatic environment of the brain so the only way to make perception unchanging is to retain a similar chemical state in the brain. Fluctuations are felt by an individual things like activation of nerves can make one feel sick (serotonin activation can do this) and a variations in levels of dopamine can cause feelings of content or joy.

Because this is such a complex communication any disruption in speed or method of communication can directly impact and individuals sensory experience and thus their entire perception. Since the world we see around us, how we think logically and emotionally is directly tied to our neuroactivity it makes sense that similar type compounds can activate sites that would effect our reality.

Its basically the idea that there needs to be a specific chemical communication between cells to get your reality, if you mess with that you mess with your reality. To me the existence of drugs only highlights how fragile and interlaced all of existence really is. The byproduct of one things metabolism can directly impact the homeostasis of another's body, it is how we are all connected in some manner.

 

[pupnik]

why is not a good question for evolution, although evolutionary advantage is inherent in the ability to shift our state of consciousness when necessary.
An ability has existed in animals for hundreds of millions of years supporting flight or fight (or stand and stare if you are a deer) and shifting into these "states of mind" are clearly of survival basis.
andrenergic or sympathomimetic drugs produce similar effects as certain emotions would and shift the body into these states - but psychedelic is slightly different, though it has the dilating of pupils, the need to go pee, and vasoconstriction with euphoria and or speedy impetus.

Psychedelic experiencing also can be triggered by emotions joy or sadness, even fear can set up a psychedelic state of mind, and while emerging from deep sleep we also attain dreams which are very psychedelic as well. (anything which preserves frames of experience or makes them fade more slowly and overlap is going to be psychedelic)

the adaptive value for dreaming is to juxtapose mentally things what were not connected before, and in that way work out notions with our ability to picture things and immerse our selves into the experience.

Similarly with psychedelics, the ability to merge ideas and sensations from different time frames or across a span of time has a blatant creative advantage and subtle advantages in coming up with previously unknown solutions to new problems (for the self and the tribe) . you really can think things through in an organic way that is all new, but you have to practice bringing back some souvenir of your insights. Hence the whole myth of Prometheus who stole fire from the gods. this is the set of abilities that have adaptive advantage, but there is no specific reason for why we can steal from gods just that it is an aspect of our species, like the big ears of the Ferengi.

 

[Cream Gravy?]

Spoiler: The implication...

 

[cj187]

You're overthinking things. The psychedelic experience exists because you take a drug and get high. You assume that your brain is meant to have a psychedelic experience, but tripping is what happens when you brain ISN'T doing what its meant to do. If you want to understand the psychedelic experience better, you should study neuroscience. Tripping is just a chemical modulating the brains normal processes, like recognizing patterns and feeling emotions. There's no way that ordinary consciousness could exist without the possibility for tripping.

 

[pupnik]

I just like an obvious link between what I think but I might be looking at a different part of the thing

 

[LucidSDreamr]

^ my background is outside of the biological sciences, but I've always found neuroscience fascinating, just don't know enough about it to make sense of things.

I guess that what you're saying is that you brain has a big collection of memories and thoughts and taking the drug uses that information to cause the psychedlic or hole state. I still get confused as to why the experience has the nature that it does, the rapturous cosmic nature about it as opposed to any other experience that could be happening. Its impossible to know why it is the way that it is I guess but I enjoy hearing everyones thoughts about it.

"why" questions can be quite frustrating to dwell on

 

[cj187]

I think the reason it feels like such a grand cosmic experience is because psychedelics basically work by changing the way your brain makes connections. They make your though patterns less rigid and organized, causing you to feel like many different things are connected, which creates a feeling of strong significance. There was a study not too long ago where people under the influence of LSD had their brains scanned, and the brain was less compartmentalized than it normally is. Heres an article I found about it: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/apr/11/lsd-impact-brain-revealed-groundbreaking-images

 

[TheAppleCore]

You're overthinking things. The psychedelic experience exists because you take a drug and get high. You assume that your brain is meant to have a psychedelic experience, but tripping is what happens when you brain ISN'T doing what its meant to do. If you want to understand the psychedelic experience better, you should study neuroscience. Tripping is just a chemical modulating the brains normal processes, like recognizing patterns and feeling emotions. There's no way that ordinary consciousness could exist without the possibility for tripping.

This is basically what I was going to post. Evolution is the organism's genome adapting to its environment. As far as we know, that environment didn't contain a whole lot of psychedelic drugs for the majority of our evolutionary history, so I don't think it would be fair to suggest that there is an evolutionary purpose for tripping.

But who knows? Maybe our ancestors were munching on psilocybin mushrooms for a few thousand generations at one point.

 

[Volsam]

I believe we are not looking at the big picture of evolution here. As I see it, the point of evolution is in ultimate calculation of reality, ultimate transcendence, self-transcendence and total understanding. Kind of like a point of information saturation on the global level.

I also theorize that all living beings are striving for this self-transcendence in order to send some kind of signal (somewhere?)...

In Buddhism there is a belief that even thoughts of a single individual affect all others, because all life, conscious and unconscious is connected and pretty much develops as a single organism.

The other thing is "fractalism" of our Universe. Psychedelics inevitably show that reality, and possibly our brains (as a part of reality) are fractal-like, that is the same pattern infinitely infolded in itself. It's empty but even a slightest sound would produce an echo that would last infinitely long, being replicated over and over again. There is a possibility to gain insights on such concepts as time, physical substance, infinity, when using psychedelics.

Aldous Huxley theorized that psychedelics are at the core of understanding an "empty" structure of our mind and development of the system of preciousness (including valuing precious metals and sparkly stones and analogy in language and meaning transposing).

 

[pupnik]

and what is the evolutionary significance of CLOWNS
whose blurry features are running all over their faces.

the ridiculous comic nature about it is closely related to "the rapturous cosmic nature about it "

 

[The Hypnotist]

Probably anything that the brain does, it is meant to do it. Psychedelic experience can happen in lots of different ways, even spontaneously. We assume our normal state of conciousness is the only one valid in the way it perceives reality, that's called cognicentrism. Neuroscience is just a part of the truth, so the scientific method is. It brings valuable information to the equation but no definite truth. Things are too complicated and understanding is limited by our capability. It just seems to be impossible to look at the whole picture.
To reduce the psychedlic experience to some changes in neurotransmitors in our brain might be oversimplifing and trying to see too objectively things that are inmensely subjective.

I don't have any answers, but can be that sometimes we confuse cause and effect. But I don't know and I tend to be untrustful of anybody who thinks they know. No matter how many ''objective'' data they are showing...off. They just know a very limited part of what reality is...just humans.
In any case I think science should go on and see where it can get. It taught us important things in the past and will in the future surely. Just hope we find alternative ways to increase understanding.

For me the psychedelic experience is just a reminder of what a mistery life is. And I am afraid it will go on being like that to the infinite...but of course that's just an opinion without any evidence. In any case it helped me to believe in things I cannot prove but that make my life more meaningful.

 

[pupnik]

well it sure exposes gaps that we normally gloss over.

 

[Solipsis]

The fact that there are people trying to achieve things like these just with yogic practices and meditation bypasses your question about the drugs.

I am far from any such guru or yogi bear, but having been on retreats with like a week of meditation and how very LSD like it was tells me that you are focussing on the wrong part: that only drugs would be able to do this. Well you do also wonder about why our brains / minds are able to do this in the first place...

IMO the answer is that the way our intelligent minds have developed involve structures of subroutines nested in subroutines etc etc, extremely branched metaprograms interacting, some interacting with completely different parts of different branches of programs. The conscious mind is an emergent phenomenon, something that emerges as more than the sum of these parts, involving coherence between parts.

Disruption of these programs by either tuning some of the more restless activity way down (e.g. meditation) or by scrambling the shit out of it (with psychedelics) lay bare these algorithms themselves. I think this pops up out of these complex routines and brings us to far more basic higher routines and coherence (like another modus you can probably detect as changed brainwaves). This has a lot of profound implications for giving meaning and sensing our spirituality, to transcend the pedestrian business of the mind and experience the mind cleared up more.

I think mystical experiences come from well succeeded transitions of these kinds but that the psychedelic trips and lessons we learn come from incomplete transitions and the way the mind tries to always form a coherent stream of consciousness as long as it can. If you are partially cleared up but also still also have mental content processed I guess you can get these kinds of experiences.
I believe more religious or abstract experiences - though not mystical necessarily - come from particular brain areas that deal with sensing presences or life forms (big evolutionary advantages to having those) but also trying to find causality, reasons and patterns everywhere possible.

With those in the mix, meeting god the almighty reason for everything with its unfathomable patterns, etc seems explainable as a synthesis of critical and ancient brain functions/regions that are what's left if the personal and daily life stuff is transcended. What is last to be transcended should be very powerful clusters like an amalgam of what we deem good and what we deem bad. Confined to that you are likely to get heaven and hell type trips.

In other words: I do not think there is an evolutionary basis to it but the result of temporarily switching off all those routines that WERE developed via evolution. No this does not suggest regression, because what we can integrate from that perspective can further enrich us and allows us to change and adapt a bit more consciously.

Still I think this is an accidental advantage, or it is the very extreme version of taking a step back from our active thought patterns to contemplate which does have evolutionary basis.

But many other questions that pertain to why some of these things exist I strongly feel that not everything has a 'why' behind it. We are addicted to asking questions like that, which is normally excellent but it becomes a problem if that convinces you that there must be a why behind everything, just because it works for so many things. This is an illusion: it works for many things of the same basic 'type' or level. It's ridiculous to suppose that "why are bananas bent?" is in the same category of question as "why does this universe exist?".

Evolution is amazing but it is also just chaos and mistakes that basically try every new thing they can. What survives is what was able to because it accidentally adapted step by step. So the answer to that why is simply: 'because it works'.
It's like a hacker cracking every code in history, an incredible feat but done with brute force attacks and a lot of time.. (Get a life, evolution!!) (haha get it)

I bet the best answer to "why does this universe / multiverse exists?" is similarly: because it can.

 

[Img_9999]

You're overthinking things. The psychedelic experience exists because you take a drug and get high. You assume that your brain is meant to have a psychedelic experience, but tripping is what happens when you brain ISN'T doing what its meant to do. If you want to understand the psychedelic experience better, you should study neuroscience. Tripping is just a chemical modulating the brains normal processes, like recognizing patterns and feeling emotions. There's no way that ordinary consciousness could exist without the possibility for tripping.

This.If there is consciousness, there is a way to alter it. It's kind of like asking "What's the evolutionary implication of illness?". The psychedelic experience is not a a physiological state.

On the other hand, in the same way pathogens have evolved to recognize and attack their hosts and we can more or less understand how and when they have evolved to do what they do, it would be interesting to ask ourselves what are the evolutionary implications of alkaloids in plant. In which ways do plants and fungi benefit form having psychoactive compounds? How did their biochemistry evolve to produce molecules that fit receptors inside the mammalian brain? Pure coincidence ? If not, in which ways did they come to contact, or which environment made it adaptative for plants to evolve such chemical content?.

 

[donvliet]

You're overthinking things. The psychedelic experience exists because you take a drug and get high. You assume that your brain is meant to have a psychedelic experience, but tripping is what happens when you brain ISN'T doing what its meant to do. If you want to understand the psychedelic experience better, you should study neuroscience. Tripping is just a chemical modulating the brains normal processes, like recognizing patterns and feeling emotions. There's no way that ordinary consciousness could exist without the possibility for tripping.

This

 

[szuko000]

On the other hand, in the same way pathogens have evolved to recognize and attack their hosts and we can more or less understand how and when they have evolved to do what they do, it would be interesting to ask ourselves what are the evolutionary implications of alkaloids in plant.

This is not the same as the pathogens are at least semi living and not secondary metabolites. The plants would have to test compounds to find one that works just as those organisms change protein coats over generations to better adapt. Plants have slower generations it wouldnt be likely in my opinion. I think it makes sense that things work like this as we are very sensitive to the chemical composition of our brains. Plants can in a sense synthesize something by "mistake" through metabolic pathways they require for other reasons by accidental introduction of a different compound. Kind of like how if you drink methanol you make formic acid in your liver and destroy your optic nerve, that was not your bodies intention but the introduction of that medium made it possible through its normal metabolism. Not everything is intentional and not everything has a purpose.

So it could all be random chance and environmental reasons. Then you mix in the fact that its all based on charges and size and its not surprising there is some cross over. Just an idea i have no backing for.

 

[LucidSDreamr]

Some interesting things to think about you have all posted.


My original question is really based more on holes and DMT like experiences, not just acid tripping and altering the real world perception although its just a smaller step towards hyperspace.


Anyways, I find it very strange that we see things like elves, or lego land, or very extravagantly put together scenes or ordeals that go beyond just fractalizing visuals. Like someone posted in trip reports about a slavia trip where a giant announcement came on saying that he was the 1,000,000 th contestant and his name was spelled out in legos in the sky, hardly just a random/repeating patterning you would expect with a "disording" or brain processes.

why elves, why is it like a kids cartoon? Why isn't it just a bunch of random nasty static or memories playing out? I wonder if these occurrences are some kind of product of collective human culture as it exists these days on earth and our notions of it. What if you gave a hole or dmt to a caveman from 20,000 years ago, who has no memories/ideals which all relate to modern life. Does he see the same elves? Or is his experience quite different due to his life and memories being totally different? What if you gave psychedelics to a person who had been locked in a dark room since they were born and never spoken to even looked at anything? What would their hole or DMT trip be like? Their are reports on blind peoples experiences that had been blind since birth but not very many or very descriptive.

I understand that these are mostly impossible questions to answer, but I like hearing peoples ideas and also being directed to research or anecdotes which relate to these questions.

 

[Xorkoth]

Not everyone sees DMT "elves" on DMT. I think the elves thing boils down to Terence McKenna making that idea (his idea) popular, and our brains pull from associations we have made. I do find it curious though that people tend to see "something" that seems like agents of the underlying mechanisms of the universe (this seems to happen on salvia as well). There's also the widespread similarities in peak experiences with psychedelics, of awakening into oneness, seeing the universe explode into infinity on the macro- and microscopic level, etc. My first trip I was expecting dancing bears and shit, something like the Magical Mystery Tour. Instead I woke up and realized I was the universe and so are you and so is everything else, we're all the same thing, life is an illusion, and I saw my perspective in the universe go out, and out, and out, until the universe became a particle in an infinitely larger universe, and then smaller, smaller, smaller until a particle was revealed as a universe itself. This experience was so profound that it shaped my entire perception of reality from then on, and I later came to see that many others have come to the same conclusions from psychedelics.

I think perhaps people tend to have similar peak experiences despite not having had prior exposure to the idea because when you disrupt the ego process enough, it shows you something deeper that is actually a real thing.

 

[white55]

I never see eyes everywhere despite people saying it's common on psychedelics. In fact I've never seen eyes where there weren't any. Or faces.