Sorry, I wasn't referring to you as a fat, naive realist. I was merely making the point that I cannot shake the reality of the DMT experience no matter how I try to explain it away. And this has completely changed my view on reality - this is why I'm trying to get my head around it....



Well you've described the 4 dimensions that we're aware of... if there are other places that we aren't aware of, outside this universe, then they would have their own dimensions, so I think you know exactly what I mean.... nobody is saying that aliens transmit radio DMT, just that when you burst into a space crawling with entities of a nature so bizarre you can't explain them and a strange intelligent world that's undeniably THERE, then it's hard to go back to your original, safe ideas of what reality means.... I get the feeling you've never been to this place..... (I could be mistaken of course)...



OK, this is where the problem lies. It sounds like your friends have failed to hit the potential of the DMT experience.... "they" need to try again... of course, "they" might just be one of the small proportion that don't respond to it - it's weird, but on here, it's almost always the individuals that have failed to breakthrough into the DMT world that cannot accept that there might be something more to it than hallucination. This is entirely understandable and it's not really possible to communicate the utterly REAL otherness of the DMT world to someone who hasn't been there... and, similarly, if an individual hasn't been there then, in the words of Wittgenstein, 'whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent'....

No, really Im not at all sure what you mean. When you speak of 'other places outside of the universe' you seem to be at odds with the common sense view that 'places' are the kinds of thing that exist inside universes.

But maybe Im wrong? Would you care to clarify what kind of 'other dimensional place' you mean? If it is a multi-verse theory, which one?



Again you argue that the truth of this is just something you see. And that directly contradicts your earlier claim that perception is allied with fitness rather than truth. Don't you understand that you can not have it both ways? You can't base your theory on the view that things are not real just because they seem to be; and then make appeals to how real things seem?

Whats more the entities are not intelligent are they? In the history of DMT the entities have never once managed to communicate a single intelligent thought less still a new fact to a psychonaut. You have to ask why that is... People take it often enough, and when taking it there is the feeling that you are returning to some place you have been before, and yet in all these 'journeys', all these returns, no new facts are imparted by the entities. Why?



How can I go to somewhere that doesn't exist???



Ah. now what you've done there is to maneuver yourself into a position where you can not be wrong and you told me before that you thought that kind of move would be fatal. Your argument is that people's opinions are relevant in direct proportion to the extent that they agree with you.



And what Wittgenstein meant was that you should shut up about ideas which can not be coherently communicated. In other words, those experiences McKenna describes 'language transcendant' ... the DMT flash for example .... Wittgenstein says those should play no role in one's account of reality.

You seem awfully certain of this...

Surely you have not surveyed everyone who has used DMT in the history of DMT

Additionally, I assume you define "intelligent thought" or "fact" according to a very narrow definition (e.g. revelations about the rain in Spain revealed to an American, receiving the answer to some complex mathematical equation, etc.).

Personally, I would disagree strongly with your assertion that the entities "have never once managed to communicate a single intelligent thought." There are myriads of trip reports that show this could not be farther from the truth. How many people have received personally-relevant/meaningful information from entities? Do those communications not pass the bar for "intelligent thought"? Perhaps not to someone who is dead-set on some sort of high-level mathematical "truth" as proof...but the problem there seems to lie more with the narrow definition than the actual phenomena being reported.

Obviously the logical retort will be, "that was just in their heads, pieces of themselves revealing things about other pieces of themselves," but for those who have actually experienced it, that does not always appear to be the case, even if it clearly is that way sometimes. Such a dismissal tosses out the baby with the bathwater in a quest for self-assurance, imo.

Additionally, we have the phenomenon of encountering the "impossible." Obviously it's not impossible, as it's encountered...but until those encounters it seemed impossible. How can things move like that, relate like that, interact like that, do what they do? Is that not its own kind of knowledge/truth/fact?

If I kept you in a cave from birth, then carted you into a forest, blindfolded, at thirty years old and removed the blindfold for five minutes, would you not be experiencing numerous "facts" about existence and how it appears to be? Even if I never uttered a coherent word to you during the experience, slapped the blindfold back on you after five minutes, and marched you back to the cave, you would have undoubtedly experienced phenomena that the rest of the world considers to be "true" or "real," even if you were entirely unable to make any coherent sense out of them. What could you possibly convey to any other people who had also spent their entire lives in the cave? And yet, this lack of ability to understand or articulate what you had just been shown would have zero bearing on the "truth" or validity of the experience, nor would it invalidate the reality/truth of what had been observed to exist outside of the cave.

Apologies to Plato as I did not intend to crib and modify his allegory, but looking back, it appears that's what I've done...ah well...the point still stands. This is not to say that these things are "objectively real" or not...I don't know. That's my entire point, we don't know. The people I trust the least are those who are absolutely certain it is one way or another and insistent on "proving" that.

Do you mind if I ask what your experience with DMT (and other psychedelics) has been?

That's the problem I have - I don't know where it is or how it fits into our current version of reality. It's confounding...




I think that perception in this reality is indeed allied with fitness. However, DMT seems to allow one to transcend this into a type of perception that is not. There is no contradiction here. In terms of whether the DMT reality is "real", this is really based on the unshakeable knowledge that it is. This is hard to explain unless you've seen it and it kind of circumvents my rationality....



They are extremely intelligent. 'New facts'? What does that mean? Just because it's very difficult to bring back Englishable data, doesn't mean the data isn't new or valid.



I believe it does.




I understand that you disagree with me, but as I've said before, the sense that this place is real is unshakeable and many many other users feel the same way. We all might be wrong, of course. There is no way to convince you of this and we're always going to disagree with each other on this. Unless, either I realise that I'm fooling myself or you manage to break through with a good 3 lungfuls of DMT and realise that I was right all along (that's if I am right). I don't hold out for either... so really it's a waste of time to discuss it, for the simple fact that I'm trying to convince you of the reality of a place you've neither been to nor believe exists.... it's a dead end....

I like this analogy...



I'd also like to know as I'm a little confused - according to the intro essay, Mistletoe Minx was spiked with DMT in a pipe/bong many years ago, thinking it was weed, but isn't 100% sure it was DMT. And he/she was on acid at the time. And, he/she saw entities... but not intelligent ones?

You also state,



But, now you seem to deny such experiences happen, although I’m not sure whether you’re talking about yourself or your friends…



So, please correct me if I’m wrong, but you appear to have had a single questionable experience of DMT many years ago and, despite seeing entities, are now using this experience upon which to base your categorical dismissal of the reality of the DMT worlds. I’m confused….

Hi Snozzleberry



yeah, thats what I mean. Francis Crick claims to have imagined the structure of DNA while high on LSD. Why are such discoveries not imparted to anyone by the entities in a DMT flash?



well, i think its fairly rare that an entity directly imparts even that kind of information, but maybe Im reading the wrong trip reports. Most usually, I read that the experience as a whole contains personally relevant information when one tries to interpret and integrate. Thats subtly but imo significantly different because when you interpret and integrate it is hopefully obvious that a load of that info is coming from you. It isn't that personal info isn't intelligent thought, its that it isn't evidentially conclusive.

Were an entity to provide the solution to some mathematical or scientific conundrum that would be conclusive. In the 'God Geometrizes' thread in the philosophy section Global comes closest to arguing that there is this kind of information. The hyper-cubal architecture he describes which he has never witnessed before but then sees on you-tube geometry animations. That is genuinely troublesome for a skeptic like me. McKenna's self-dribbling basket balls and bouncing Faberge eggs are not.



Not everybody who has had a breakthrough experience concludes that they are witnessing actual events in what laughingcat calls 'another dimension', whatever that is supposed to mean. Im sure you know that Nick Sands for example dismisses the idea. He does so in favor of what to me seems to be both a more naturalistic but also a more spiritual interpretation.

http://psychedelicfronti...red-world-dmt-nick-sand/

His assessment of how the content of a DMT flash arises is based on many years of experience and hundreds perhaps thousands of break through experiences. In his opinion content arises more or less directly from set and setting. His discussion of how alien visions may have arisen within Dr. Strassman's experimental setting are very interesting and very convincing I think. Nick Sands descriptions of his own experiences and how they arose resonate very deeply with me.

I suppose we could canvas everyone's opinion about where the content comes from and we might find most people believe in other dimensions or that most people dont. We could weight the responses based on how valid laughingcat regards a reporter's experience level. But, I think that such a pole of purely subjective opinion should have no place in what laughingcat presents as an objectively supported and scientific theory. Nor should it have a place in the discussion of that theory.

I wanted to discuss the objective evidence laughingcat presents in his papers, but I feel increasingly drawn into a kind of macho chest beating contest of psychedelic one-up-manship with him. Its a shame, I think. But whilst it will be easy for him to dismiss my experience, and he is extremely keen to, I think it is much harder to dismiss Sand's.



I think your cave analogy bears greater resemblance to Frank Jackson's "black and white room" than it does to Plato's cave:

http://en.wikipedia.org/...ument#Thought_experiment

and its a good argument, and I don't disagree with you that much. I mean I agree that the inability to articulate what you had been shown to others would have no bearing on the validity you ascribed to your own subjective experience. In a way, that is why laughingcat's current dismissal of my experience is so thoroughly short sighted (and hypocritical). But there are two problems for laughingcat, I think:

1) Laughingcat's argument already incorporates the idea that real seeming subjective experiences should not be trusted. The idea that subjective experiences are not related to truth is a cornerstone of his argument. In the terms of your analogy, he tries to be both the person whose forest experiences are valid and the person in the cave who dismisses forest experiences.

2) I think that the inability to articulate the experience to others renders the report of that experience unacceptable fodder for a scientific paper. The argument "I can't really describe it but it really really looked real to me" doesn't make it into either of laughingcat's published papers and I very much doubt laughingcat tells his academic peers to 'shut up and take 3 lung-fulls of dmt' when they criticize his work.



With regards to my own experience, you can read about it in the welcome area. If you're interested Please do. If not, here in brief, are the main points with which you can tear me down:

1) I have lots of experience with LSD, MDMA and Mushrooms.

2) Ive never knowingly taken DMT

3) Once I think I took something that led to an experience that was off the charts relative to LSD, Mushrooms etc.

4) Many years of looking later I see art depicting DMT experiences and read trip reports of break through experiences, and whilst nothing else had ever come close to describing the experience I had, this art and these reports were almost a perfect fit.

best regards

Yes it is. But you have to understand how what you say reads at my end... the first comments you made were basically a "correction" of my flawed and incorrect position regarding the nature of perception. Instead of saying, "The way I see it is..." or "Have you thought about it lke this...?" or "What do you think of this?", you instead write:



Before stating a highly debatable direct realist position as if it was the most uncontroversial and obvious thing in the world and that nobody should ever disagree with it and thus completely dismissing my position... it was downhill from there I'm afraid....




You are misrepresenting me again here. I did not say that subjective experiences should not be trusted, but questioned how one might decide which subjective experiences to trust and which not to trust - these are very different arguments. The realist position would be that normal waking perceptions are to be trusted, but all other perceptions are false perceptions that cannot be trusted. I would say that this isn't necessarily that case and that other models of reality might be just as valid. I'm not particularly definitive on this issue and merely ask the question as to whether we should automatically assume that "consensus reality" holds some sort of ultimate primacy over all other models of reality that the brain is capable of modelling/perceiving.

You seem to have latched onto a minor section of my most recent article, where I make the point that we can't necessarily equate perception with truth - this really is not the "cornerstone" of my argument at all. I am very reluctant to state what I think "true reality" means because I don't know. My main point in this paper was simply that the brain is capable of modelling/constructing (whatever term you want to use) a whole range of worlds, some very similar to this one, some that bear no relationship to it (i.e. some DMT worlds). I then pose the question as to whether we can learn anything from these alternate worlds, whatever their ontology (which I don't claim to know), or whether we should dismiss them as hallucinations with no intrinsic value. Open question, up to you what you think.

My other main argument, articulated in my 2013 Building Alien Worlds paper, is that the brain appears to have "learned" to construct the consensus world and, in fact, most of the information used to model the world is from intrinsic acitivity (what Edelman called the remembered present). I then suggest that, given that the brain has only learned to build one world, there seems no reason for its ability to construct exquisitely complex worlds with strange entities that are completely alien to this one and yet it does under DMT - I think this is remarkable and worthy of discussion. I then propose a possible explanation for this.

This "truth" issue that you seem to think I hold some intransigent position on is one I barely touch on at all in either of the papers you've read, because I don't have a firm position on it - I'm as confused as anyone else... Yes, the DMT experience 'feels' more real than real and this is something I find fascinating and confounding and I'm trying to make sense of it.... but I'm not there yet...



This is partly correct. I focus on the content of the experiences and the commonalities between them, as dealing with the emotional response is more difficult. However, it is something we are looking at in our ongoing study, so we will have something to say about it. I do mention it in the Building Alien Worlds paper, however, albeit only briefly...




You'd be surprised....



I'm not convinced by them. I have an enormous amount of respect for Sands, but I found his Sacred World of DMT and subsequent paper to be unnecessarily vitriolic towards Strassman.

However, you'll be pleased to hear that I am currently working (with a psychologist friend/collegaue) on a more formal, quantitative phenomenological analysis of the DMT experience, looking at the experience of "invisible worlds" and entities from a number of data sources, including the earliest studies in humans dating back to the 1950s right up to the present day. I am truly interested in whether the Strassman data can be explained by setting alone and whether DMT experience content is truly unique to DMT or just, as Sand thinks, purely from setting - it's about time we settled the issue and a proper study is overdue. Watch this space...

For me it really comes down to a single question - when I read that "DMT produces intense closed-eye visual hallucinations", I've always asked myself whether this is enough. Is that an acceptable, sufficient explanatinon? My answer has always been a firm no; there's more to it, much much more to it, but I'm not sure what. I'm sure that a large proportion of people on this site and elsewhere would agree with this - are we all misguided? Whether we need to start thinking about alternate realities/dimensions/branes or are faced with a remarkable new psychological phenomenon, I'm not yet sure. But I'm not ruling out the former and I don't feel I ought to be rebuked for this. It's very easy to sit and offer criticism and little else; it's not so easy spending hundreds of unpaid hours doing research, reading papers, writing papers, trying to get them published, dealing with referees, presenting at conferences and symposia, trying to offer something of interest and, hopefully, value to the community of people fascinated by DMT. I'm not looking for applause, but you should expect me to defend myself when faced with a barrage of criticism, especially when delivered with a dismissive tone...

I'm as confused and confounded as anyone else about this substance and I'm doing my best to present a few ideas as to what might be going on - some of them useful, some of them falling short. I don't claim to have a handle on the truth, but I'm willing to try and fumble around in an attempt to get closer to a deeper understanding of DMT, if it's possible. If you have advice, please offer it. If you have questions, please ask them.

peace out

@laughingcat



Funnily enough, in a previous edit, I had a long paragraph describing how controversial direct realism is and that it is almost universally rejected. That perception has been regarded as indirect for hundreds of years at least. That pretty much every major and minor player in philosophy and science since the enlightenment had rejected the view I was about to defend. That I was almost certainly a fool for trying. But then I looked at the paragraph and thought, 'Christ, laughingcat will know all that, don't patronize him, just say what you think'. So I cut that stuff out. lol.

Anyway, what I wrote wasn't half as categorical as you say. I didn't just announce my view as the one and only correct view. Looking at the snippet you cut and pasted in context it scans more reasonably:



I wouldn't have thought it necessary to explain that the scope of those "i think"s and "i dont think"s stretched beyond the sentences they were in. The idea that I was just expressing my opinion was supposed to infuse the whole post, indeed the whole catalog of posts I write. But I suppose it is necessary to do that. Its going to make debating seriously dull.

Like Ive said from the outset and have repeated since, I think your papers are fascinating and thought provoking. But lets leave the debate there. The trouble is I don't think we will be able to correspond without me offending you.

mea culpa.

all the best.