Oh, and that example is a little unfair as calories and celsius are relative to water.
Is there any way we can 'reform' psychedelic thought to be more accepted by others?
greenmeanies said:i have experienced certain feelings (entity contact, telepathy, time travel etc) during intense trips that i swore were more real than reality. however these things cannot be brought back OUT of the rabbit hole, and offer zero predictive capability in the land of the living.
In general I tend to be almost embarrased that psychedelics are associated with the "new age Gaian" types.
Personally I will do almost anything but psychedelics and their users are starting to get a bit over the top, when I go into PD they put fucked up ideas/thoughts in my head which arent real but feel so real while tripping. I used to love acid and psych's but I cant handle them anymore.
Call me a hippy or whatever but isn't love and respecting your fellow man something that was around before altered states?
This just in: PD users force fucked up ideas into the heads of innocents! In a process akin to rape, several regulars of the forum forcibly insert nonstandard thoughts into the minds of passersby who preferred to remain unexposed to aberrant theories! Are our children next!? Someone stop these freaks from spreading their faggotry PLUR shit, preferably with a meth-fueled crowbar through the eye!
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.
This is why fieldwork anthropology can be good. (Has some practically inherent problems with it that make it imperfect, though. An anthropologist living among a group of people for study just isn't encultured the same way the people he's studying are, which makes for a not totally ideal perspective, and this also compounds with the group seeing you as an outsider, again affecting perspective.)At the moment I think one of the best ways to study psychedelics, or rather the subjective experiences they induce, is in psychology. Particularly psychology of religion, and within that field, the study of mystical experience. Mystical experience has been difficult to study because these experiences are very difficult to induce in a laboratory setting.
Those of us who choose psychedelics for their mind expanding nature are open to the experiences they bring, be they good or bad, and the new ideas that they present; whereas, say, a meth head or a heroin junky is simply chasing that one feeling that they enjoy and probably doesn't care to better understand the universe around them. The fact of the matter is, if a person isn't open to new ideas, they won't accept them from anyone, the fact that the idea came from another drug user won't make a difference.
No, science and mind manifesting drugs can not even be used in the same sentence. There is nothing provable about insight. One man's insight is another man's crazy thought.
Psychedelics seem to be the antidote to science. Science is limited though when it comes to consciousness. Like I was stating in the other thread about what makes a drug psychedelic there really is no answer. Yet some very intelligent and even scientific users will tell you the insights provided are valuable. But none (or almost none)of the insightful thoughts can be put into real scientific terms. Maybe if science evolves to include the terms mysticism and consciousness.
Maybe if science evolves to include the terms mysticism and consciousness. But at this point science makes us think (and maybe so) that consciousness forms out of matter. Yet on a psychedelic, as we have seen in many users, it's almost as if consciousness creates the matter or at the very least matter needs consciousness to exist.