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  • EADD Moderators: Pissed_and_messed | Shinji Ikari

Sleep paralysis

Yet the features of consciousness are things like the experience of colour and sound, the redness of the colour red is not describable in terms of the synaptic networks which supposedly give rise to it.
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You are absolutely right, there are all kinds of interesting problems related to this (the ineffable experiential phenomena you are referring to are known as qualia), if you're interested, a paper which I found fascinating is "What is it like to be a bat?" by Thomas Nagel, and the thought experiment about "Mary the colour scientist" is also directly related to what you're talking about. I admit, it's a leap of faith, and it's not an unproblematic one.

The thing is, belief is difficult, and you're probably never going to have a completely coherent worldview, there's always questions and cognitive dissonance and the like. What do we make of qualia, if we are to reject epiphenomenalism? Do we posit the existence of another kind of stuff (I already do this, actually, I think there is a Platonic realm of idealised numbers that actually exists, I think that "7" is literally real), of which consciousness is made? I understand your concerns, I studied them extensively, but if we look at the history of our view of the limits of science to explain things, it's pretty one-way (well, apart from that Kuhn fucker). It seems a bit like the god of the gaps.

To me, it's poor form to shy from admitting the limits of our science just because we're scared of leaving a void that might get filled with nonsense. We should be able to live with the void. We are able to live with the void!
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Allow me to be clear; what I was stating was my philosophy, not uncontroversial scientific fact. I think that the best inference to make in order for me, personally, to make sense of self-supporting web of knowledge and belief that makes up my understanding of the world is naturalism. Science is limited, yes, and the things I believe go above and beyond any kind of scientific evidence. Yes, that's faith, and in a sense, that is the same thing as religious devotees do. I think, though, that we can use our empirical knowledge and reason to examine our faiths, and decide which are the best ones to hold. By the way, there is a sense in which all science is like this, there's a theory called underdetermination, we always interpret data, ultimately, in a way that infers a best explanation for it. Particle/wave duality, or electron orbitals, or electromagnetism don't spontaneously self-organise into theories on a spreadsheet of data and burst out, we create them. The mind actively organises reality, and as a conscious being, there is no way to disentangle one's consciousness from "the world as it really is". Quantum theory suggests that even observing a thing completely changes its behaviour and nature, for fuck's sake!

You are totally right, though, in that I mentioned all sorts of things that I didn't need to in my rejection of bogeymen, and presented a needlessly weak argument. Of course, one can disagree with almost everything I said, and still convincingly dispute that. This was, as you say, poor form, and I apologise.

Let's not turn this thread into a dry discussion of metaphysics
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Mission aborted/
 
I've had a few bouts of sleep paralysis, I made a thread on here about it.

It was definitely made worse, maybe even caused by MDMA. I saw a demon creature, that looked a bit like the pale man from Pans Labyrinth, standing over my bed. I also had another episode of it where I felt an evil, malevolent presence drag me out of bed and across the room, I could feel it's heavy breathing on my back.

This was after five weeks of taking MDMA every weekend, up to a gram a night, of pretty pure stuff. I also did a fair amount of mephedrone in the week.
 
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this is an extensive subject. ive experienced it, researched it - and am not convinced the conventional catch-all explanation caters for every aspect of the phenomena. the hatman experience, for example, is far too specific, widespread and uniform to be a hallucination as explained by sleep paralysis. i actually had a paranormal book printed in the 70s with an account in itself from some british person recalling childhood encounters in the 1950s with 'an all black figure of shadow in a homburg hat and cape' that would appear at the end of the bed and cast malevolence at the kid - this is an early example of an archetypal encounter with the 'hat man' which occurs all over the world and has, apparently, for a long long time. ive looked at hundreds of these encounters, from people thousands of miles and even centuries apart, and dont believe that hypnopompic/hypnogogic hallucinations in of themselves are a viable explanation.. yet it has been lumped in under the lazy catch-all of sleep paralysis, which affords mainstream science with its veneer of certainty - but does nothing to get to the actual truth of the matter
 
A lot of people mention MDMA as a big factor, but for me: opiates and alcohol (especially in combination), skyrocket my propensity to experience both SP and EHS.
 
I started getting this after abusing mamadee, to say I was creeped out the first time is an understatement, honestly I thought I was going to die.

The weird thing is the first time it happened (iirc 16) there was a African gentleman laughing at me sat at the bottom of my bed, as I tried my bloody hardest to move/ breath. Then things took a strange turn when I shit you not at least once a month a f+×king 6ft cartoon chicken IN A FUCKING CAGE! in the corner of my room would mock me, I'm sure it was off looney tunes or summit else that was on tv at the weekend.

Anyway it died down when I reduced the pill intake., its definitely drug related with me especially mdma. The last time I had it was say 4month ago after a heavy android session. But thank fuck there was no bastard chicken. :)
 
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