Any experience of psychedelics from completely non-spiritual people?

[Ismene2]

The trouble is language is limited so it's hard distuingishing experiences - religious people sometimes use the same language but it's a whole different philosophy. I follow the path of the psychedelic - it's my personal thing nothing to do with any bullshit spirituality.

 

[pupnik]

i kept 1/2 of one tab for the future which may never come.

 

[Chris Timothy]

I'm not religious in the slightest and wouldn't have considered myself spiritual, but these last few years I hit the strong stuff pretty frequently and have wavered quite a bit on my acceptance of the ineffable. The sensation to me is more akin to tapping into quantum realms / states / streams of information that aren't quite yet explained or proven, and are a combination of *perhaps* external factors but also the operation of the largely unexplained human brain, an organ which could already loosely be decribed as an organic multidimensional quantum computer.

Problems for the non-religious and non-'spiritual' skeptic in me began to occur when inscrutable, difficult to explain experiences began piling up. Instead of saying I'm now spiritual, however, I'm content to believe that, as indicated above, these experiences are largely a function of aspects of the human brain both known and unknown, with perhaps a dose of external phenomena also unknown to science but copacetic more or less with various paths of theoretical quantum physics.

Some observations from the deeper dives: the brain creates one's reality to a higher degree than I would have ever expected. It's all fabricated in the mind, from the interpretation of the senses into the experience we accept as seen / heard / smelled / touched reality to the way our brain creates the narrative of our lives and assembles the narrative threads around us. This doesn't mean that the perceived reality of the sober brain isn't more or less there and isn't essentially what we experience: that the table is there, someone's knocking at the door, this piece of fruit is rotten, that this person with the blonde hair and red sweater is being socially rude, that the landlord is conspiring to evict you; what it does mean is that our experience of these things is entirely built in the mind, like an ultra-complex video-game render with a virtual novelist rapidly interpreting then transcribing the story.

Once drugs have shown one this potential of the mind it's difficult not to crash the metaphysical into science.

I'm academically interested in a variety of spiritual practices now, but I understand that none of them are strictly true, my interest is instead in finding the overlap between beliefs and squicking out the universal truths of the human experience. In these overlaps one can interpret a sort of hidden service manual for the human experience, like one might for a washing machine or television.

edit: to be clear, these weren't insights that happened during trips in the form of intellectual or spiritual epiphanies, but post trip reactions to drugs and drug combinations completely altering my experience of reality, clear as day, as well as drug-induced psychotic breaks that led my brain to fabricate my perception of narrative reality in ways that persisted far after the drugs wore off but were clearly 'false' in hindsight.

Quantum-computational ability is certainly needed for intelligence. It introduces the capability for self-referential statements to escape the paradoxes which arise with strict logic. I doubt however whether quantum abilities are enough, even loosely, to define brain function. It has to interconnect with the surrounding universe as well. And for that it needs chemistry. Also if we consider the speed of thoughts, and assume that a thought arising out of a feeling corresponds to a quantum wave collapse, we are not looking at elements the size of qubits, but at something the size of molecules.

Because the material world this thread has now gone on about doesn't exist as such either. Equally important to "what" something is, is "where" it is (see ecology), and also "when" it is. An electron, as commonly measured, only exists as particle for a couple of attoseconds. Things you see under a normal microscope only materialize in terms of weeks. Nothing inherently material about any of it. If you insist on modeling a purely mechanical, 19th century universe, containing only passively modeling minds, then you very much need a spiritual world to complement it. Otherwise you either haven't been very perceptive, or are rather easily pleased, heh.

Back to my point, simulating dynamic carbon in static silicon is like squeezing an oyster into a vending machine. That could be a fundamental barrier that's not acknowledged in AI research, that the whole idea is flawed for trying to neatly organize a system which fundamentally runs on chaos. Note that there's plenty of silicon around on Earth, yet no life has organized itself around it. Instead you'd have to select for interesting self-assembling, chemical processes. But I've argued that any lab situation would suffer the disconnect from the astronomical engine which slowly booted up life. In other words, no chemical process will adapt to the geological (geophysiological, rather) sphere it's not in.