Cosmin_Visan

You also just said stuff, so you also are not in the right place.

Yeah, ok.

Can you give an example of a philosophical idea that is mental masturbation ? It sounds to me that you don't actually know what philosophy is.

@RedLine It's even more than this. Qualia themselves are ideas. For example, colors themselves are ideas. For an in-depth take on the issue, check-out my paper "Is Qualia Meaning or Understanding?": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan

@73809 Consciousness is meaning. And as meaning, its qualities are determined by contexts. Have a look at my paper "Is Qualia Meaning or Understanding?": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan And then to find out even more about the interplay between meanings and contexts, check-out "Telepathy: A Real-World Experiment".

@Nahm I know you think you are profound, but you are just shallow.

I repeat: I'm waiting for you to deduce physics from consciousness. Is kinda boring to hear you all repeating the same mantra that "consciousness is all there is" all day long.

One of the experiences that people mention on psychedelics is the feeling of all-knowing. And they really believe that they become all-knowing. I will offer here a different explanation for that feeling. I believe that psychedelics' true effect, let's say like ayahuasca, is dissociation. And we can see this in the ayahuasca images that can be found on the internet. People might tend to interpret those beautiful images as an expansion of consciousness. But I see a totally different thing there. I see consciousness dissociation. Consciousness loses the ability to unify qualia in coherent ways, so it will randomly unify them, putting eyes in the middle of the hands instead of the face, etc. So if this is the real effect of ayahuasca, then the "all-knowing" part of the experience is to be expected to be produced by the same effect. And here is how: consciousness getting dissociated, it will be left only with the eternal Self, which among its properties is also the eternal faculty of Understanding. So you are left with Understanding on its own, with no network of concepts associated to it based on which to make rational evaluations of the truth or falsehood of a certain sentence. Understanding being left on its own, it will only have itself to understand, so it will do that, it will understand itself. Being all there is left to be understood, of course that by understanding itself, Understanding will feel as if it understood everything, because after all, it really is everything that is left. So of course it will feel as if it is all-knowing. But is just a trivial effect of consciousness dissociation. And this can be proved even further. Ask any "all-knowing" guy to tell you what he knows now. He will not be able to tell you anything. He will only be able to give a flower-power answer: "Brooo... I simply knew everything!". Well... yeah... except that "everything" is contextual. When you know nothing, it feels as if you know everything. No big deal. If it's relevant, I mention that I never took psychedelics. But if you think this is relevant to the discussion, I invite you to also argue why it is relevant, don't just dismiss me with the empty reply "you cannot understand if you don't take them". I expect arguments instead.

@JosephKnecht And what is the connection between your post and the subject of this topic ? I'm kinda bored by "consciousness is all there is" posts that are 99% around here. I already know that. Do you have something more profound to say ?

So based on your post, animals are more evolved than philosophers, since they don't use words.

Then I'm waiting for you to show us how you deduce physics from consciousness. Until then, I will ignore your flower-power post.

I didn't say that. I said that normal consciousness is enough. And as I also asked the previous user, I will also ask you: Can you give some examples of content that psychedelics offer uniquely that their structure cannot be deduced also from normal consciousness ?

Of course. Can you give some examples of content that psychedelics offer uniquely that their structure cannot be deduced also from normal consciousness ?

What is the mystique ?

If you create things but nobody is seeing your creation, then what's the point of creation in the first place ? If you encourage him to create but you discourage him to enjoy the creations of others, you are basically telling him that nobody will enjoy his creations either. Computer games nowadays are a form of art. Therefore, playing them is one of the highest life purpose one can have.

@Origins Funny post. :)) But if you mentioned all those effects of your potion, I think is appropriate to bring my own understanding of these issues, in order to further show that reason alone is enough to get you to those conclusions. I will talk about the first effect. I also believe that I am God. And the reason is as follow: even though 2 consciousnesses might experience a different shade of red, both of them experience the same "I am". And this is true for all the consciousnesses in the world. Even an animal experiences the same "I am". Therefore, all the consciousnesses in the world are manifestations of the same "I am", which can be taken to be God. Therefore, I really am God. Of course, to not confuse here the Self with the ego. The Self is "I am", the ego is "I am John", so the ego is merely just another experience that the Self has. Next, one further property of the Self is that it is eternal. And this again can be understood by reason alone. And the reason is simple: the sentence "I exist"/"I am" is always true. If you don't believe me, try make it false if you can. So by reason we also conclude that the Self is eternal. I talk about this in details in my paper "I Exist" and even more profoundly in "The Self-Referential Aspect of Consciousness". Given the fact that these conclusions can be reached by reason, then I think that the fact that another way reveals them as well (by taking psychedelics), this might be an indication that psychedelics are not merely creating a hallucination that I am God, but there must be more to them than that. So if we reject the hallucination hypothesis, then how else can we explain the fact that psychedelics reveal that I am God ? I think even the alternative explanation to hallucination is trivial. As I said in a previous post, what I believe psychedelics to do is to dissociate consciousness. And when you strip consciousness of its various higher level qualia, you will eventually be left with the primordial "I am". This one you cannot strip it any further because it is eternal. So getting to the pure "I am", it will probably feel godly or something. And by its very way of feeling it will communicate its properties, like eternity, love, lack of time etc. So, as we can see, psychedelics experience can be explained rationally. Again, no bid deal. And if you ask why feel like love, this is again explainable rationally: if you get rid of all the higher level qualia, then what else are you gonna feel but love ? You have no worries left, not even time (time itself being just a quale), so you're not worring about what future might bring, etc. So with all this baggage gone, what will be left will be love. Explanation given again by reason alone. If any of the psychedelics users don't agree with me, I invite them once again to point to me exactly what I am being wrong about. Nevertheless, even if I will take psychedelics in 5 years time, I will remember to come back to these topics and to confess my mistakes in case my current interpretations were wrong. But until then, I'm waiting for you to tell me if I am wrong or not, and precisely where I am wrong.

@Origins Yes, I clearly agree with your points. And to add myself some points. I'm pretty much sure that if I were to take psychedelics, and one day I will, I will be able to express those experiences in words and connect them with my current understanding of consciousness. The reason why I believe people that take psychedelics are unable to express their experiences is because they have no prior philosophical interest in consciousness. It might even be the case that 99% of users have no such philosophical interests. They just have the experiences and are baffled by what they experience and they forever remain baffled. But for someone with a deep philosophical interest in the problem, I'm having for example almost a decade of thinking and writing professionally about these issues, the experiences that I will have on psychedelics will naturally fall in their place in my overall prior understanding of consciousness. For example, through reason alone (together with normal life qualia, of course), one can get to the conclusion that at the base of consciousness is an entity that I call self-reference with contradictory properties like being both form and formless and neither form nor formless, or being no-thing and every-thing both at the same time. (I talk about this in depth, for example in "On the Phenomenon of Unification": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan ). So reason is able to discover these paradoxical aspects of reality. You don't need psychedelics for this. So when I will use psychedelics, I am pretty sure that all those talks about infinity, will just fit perfectly with my understanding of self-reference. No big deal. But for the 99% of people who take them but are not further interested in making sense of them rationally, of course they will say that they are beyond words. No, they are not. Is just them that don't pursue the issues deeper to find ways to express them rationally.

@Swarnim Because from a single quale you can deduce the entire structure of consciousness and you can understand what is possible. Even a blind person if he looks at his auditory qualia he can deduce the structure of visual qualia even if he cannot experience them. Yes, content can only be known through direct experience. But the structure on which content is created can be deduced from any qualia domain one has access to. Thus, even though you need psychedelics in order to experience content, you can still understand their structure from a normal human consciousness. To see in depth these issues, check-out my paper "The Emergent Structure of Consciousness": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan

What makes you think I don't have enough experiential knowledge ? I can extract from the quale of red alone more knowledge than other people can extract from their entire life. So since my knowledge from the quale of red alone is deeper than the knowledge that someone acquires from psychedelics, I wonder how can those people tell me what is true. What gives them that authority ? If psychedelics would make them that all-knowing as they pretend, then at least they should be able to tell me what is wrong with my argument. But they cannot do that. One more proof that "all-knowing" is just an illusion. But their ego is so big that they don't want to admit that. That will take the superiority out of them.

I will ignore your answer until you bring arguments.

I see lots of people declaring how they pursue spirituality and talk about elevated stuff, how everything is love, etc., but in practice they are the same mean people as everybody else. So does people pursue spirituality only to feed their ego and to feel good about themselves ?

For example I knew a guy who's been to an ayahuasca retreat, took also 5-meo, and told me all those things about infinite love, etc., and at the end: "Hey, dude, I bought some ayahuasca pills from the retreat. Want to buy at double the price ?"

Well... Understanding is everything. I cannot give you a definition, but I can point to you some things that might shed some lights on Understanding. Each moment of our lives is a glimpse of understanding. Qualia themselves are forms of Understanding. And for this, I would recommend you my paper "Is Qualia Meaning or Understanding?": https://philpeople.org/profiles/cosmin-visan I like to give an example to illustrate how qualia are understanding. Let's take first a rational example of understanding. Let's say you want to understand how to build something, like a car or a computer program, or debugging a computer program. If you don't understand what you are doing, you will just randomly tap on the keyboard and you will wonder why is not working. You keep pushing all keys, making all sorts of combinations, and is still not working, and you don't know why. Then let's say you understand what the problem was, you have an "aha" moment. Then after that, everything runs smoothly. Now let's take an example from visual qualia domain. Let's say that you want to find an object in your room in the dark. You will just randomly touch the floor, touch the walls and you will wonder why you don't find it. Then you turn on the light and you immediately see the object, and everything runs smoothly. In vocabulary we say that we "saw" the object. But what is actually happening is that we "understood" the object. We have an "aha" moment. So visual qualia, and by extension all qualia, are actually forms of understanding. We don't "see", "hear", "touch", etc., but we "understand".

This is also an important point, the misinterpretation of the experience. For example the "all-knowing" part of the experience. I would interpret this in a different manner. I believe that psychedelics' true effect, let's say like ayahuasca, is dissociation. And we can see this in the ayahuasca images that can be found on the internet. People might tend to interpret those beautiful images as an expansion of consciousness. But I see a totally different thing there. I see consciousness dissociation. Consciousness loses the ability to unify qualia in coherent ways, so it will randomly unify them, putting eyes in the middle of the hands instead of the face, etc. So if this is the real effect of ayahuasca, then the "all-knowing" part of the experience is to be expected to be produced by the same effect. And here is how: consciousness getting dissociated, it will be left only with the eternal Self, which among its properties is also the eternal faculty of Understanding. So you are left with Understanding on its own, with no network of concepts associated to it based on which to make rational evaluations of the truth or falsehood of a certain sentence. Understanding being left on its own, it will only have itself to understand, so it will do that, it will understand itself. Being all there is left to be understood, of course that by understanding itself, Understanding will feel as if it understood everything, because after all, it really is everything that is left. So of course it will feel as if it is all-knowing. But is just a trivial effect of consciousness dissociation. And this can be proved even further. Ask any "all-knowing" guy to tell you what he knows now. He will not be able to tell you anything. He will only be able to give a flower-power answer: "Brooo... I simply knew everything!". Well... yeah... except that "everything" is contextual. When you know nothing, it feels as if you know everything. No big deal. So, as you (plural) can see, there can be lots of alternative ways of interpreting the psychedelics experiences, and they are not even remotely flower-power.

Yes, I'm not denying those ideas. I believe they are true. I'm only pointing the fact that people stop there as if they are the complete truth. Like for example, yes, we are all the same Self, but from this to just reject the individuality of our current consciousnesses is an inadequate step. It doesn't work to say "individuality is just an illusion". Yeah, ok, but you still need to explain that illusion. And even the word "illusion" is unfit, since from each individual consciousness point of view, she is an independent entity, she's real, so is not even an illusion. These things need to be explained. Again, "the world is just a dream" is just a metaphor that an idealist would use towards a materialist in order to make him realize the existence of consciousness. This is the only utility of this sentence. But once you realize that consciousness is all there is, it becomes an empty statement, because you still need to explain the structure of the dream. And if you've done some intellectual work on the problem, you realize that is not at all "just a dream", but is more like Donald Hoffman says, an evolutive world created by interactions between consciousnesses. You have consciousnesses that compete and each of them bring into existence new qualia that can give them an advantage over other consciousnesses. And this "arms race" of qualia is what ultimately built the world. And this war of subjectivities is what gives objectivity to the world. Is what maintains the Moon on the sky even where you are not looking, is what gives materiality to the world. As you (plural) can see, things can be quite different than the flower power ideas of "oh, is just a dream". Nope. Is more complicated than that.