Psychedelics_r_best said:
It would be very difficult to create a profile of the subjective effects of psychedelics. First, we can't know for sure how similar the effects are for each person. Second, we can't know how accurately we are describing these effects. Language is a very diverse template, and what one may describe one way, another may describe another way. In terms of what you feel or what you see, people may explain two different things very similarly, and two similar things very differently. The experience of each person is markedly unique in its interpretations and auras.
I agree the world as we experience it is much more complex than our language stretches, and that goes double for tripping, but language gets us somewhere nonetheless. You can debate for an eternity about if any person views things like colors and sounds the same as another. In a certain way because every life full of experience is different, any single thing must have a special meaning to every person. But that doesn't keep us from trying to understand one another and empathize... We are all people with common factors, if you explain a situation to someone we can almost feel what it must be like.
I don't really care and kinda like that everyone's unique in his sensations, emotions and personality - if you ask someone details about a trip or read trip reports a lot you often encounter resemblances. Just get a basic idea of the concepts of things like dissociation, fractal patterns and what not and you've got yourself enough markers to get a feel for the character of a substance.
Now, it's absolutely impossible to know exactly what it will be like if you haven't tried it yourself, but to me it would be a matter of extrapolation and compensating descriptions of drug reactions for myself. Basically the same as I guess everyone does when they read a trip report: "Ah I recognize that typical and unmistakable effect from other drugs but I believe I would react somewhat different due to me being more or less like this and that..."
If we just take the trip reports that are now pretty much only memories and define a set of parameters, we combine them into these surveys. These parameters should be designed to be impersonal, to not relate to experiences and personalities but to things we tend to agree on. I think we can all agree on the definition of vomiting, seeing things melt, synaesthesia... there are a lot of phenomenon that bear a term and there are a lot of psychedelic aspects generally understood. If you like to question definitions set by language and philosophize on semantics what reason do you have to believe or sympathize with any trip report be it written or told? Or any other human experience for that matter?
If you would even set a criterium that is somewhat vague, interpreted subjectively... this criterium would either appeal to people or not, and if enough people participated it woud definitely tell us something about the outcome. Maybe your interpretation colors it because it becomes more personal but I still believe common factors will be distilled. This has a limit but if you keep the parameters in check I strongly anticipate the results will sure have meaning.
IMO the limit to interpreting these results does not lay in the blended median of subjectivity but in the experience of the reviewer! You need to have enough reference points to understand the meaning. Sometimes it seems tripping can give you an endless number of possibilities, though there are some categories to be found. You will have to know these categories before any of the results will ring a bell.
Please everyone, let's keep these opinions coming.
