Is Leo's explanation of death is too ideal?

[John Doe]

@Carl-Richard We don't know for sure about humans, but it has definitely been verified scientifically with rodents, that DMT indeed gets released in the brains of rodents when they're about to die. And we do know that DMT is produced in human brains, albeit in very low quantities. That is crazy enough for me. 

[Carl-Richard]

4 hours ago, John Doe said:

@Carl-Richard We don't know for sure about humans, but it has definitely been verified scientifically with rodents, that DMT indeed gets released in the brains of rodents when they're about to die. And we do know that DMT is produced in human brains, albeit in very low quantities. That is crazy enough for me. 

Is there even any proof that endogenous DMT or 5-MeO for that matter is involved in endogenous mystical experiences?

The idea that these things must necessarily boil down to the docking of a specific neurotransmitter is a reductive bottom-up approach and is for the most part pure speculation. It's largely a result of the widespread belief of pharmacological determinism (the idea that one type of molecule is exclusively tied to one type of response) which has both cultural and medicinal implications.

When perception is described in neuroscience, there is also something called top-down mechanisms: the idea that perceptions are constructed with the help of higher-order cortical functions instead of merely being a result of a straightforward 1-to-1 mapping of raw sensory information (bottom-up). 

In other words, mystical experiences could also be explained by looking at the brain as a whole rather than simply looking at one type of ligand-receptor activity. An example of this approach is the research done on the Default Mode Network.

Edited February 18, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[Shmurda]

@Eren Eeager @Carl-Richard Anyone who tries to tell you what happens after death, especially if they explain it in material terms, is speculating and imo you should not trust what they say.

Conor Murphy seems to have gained spiritual cred here because he has a plastered his views on spirituality all over youtube. This is a bit like when you're in Science class and the loud kid always shouts out the answer, so most people assume he's one of the smart kids. If you believe him, you are falling into the trap of appealing to authority in place of developing your own understanding.

Stop listening to Leo's, Conor's or anyone else's opinions about the unknown. Just sit every day for hours and hours and hours and eventually you will get it.

[Carl-Richard]

27 minutes ago, Shmurda said:

@Eren Eeager @Carl-Richard Anyone who tries to tell you what happens after death

I wasn't asking about that. I was asking about what happens during death in the brain.

[Vibroverse]

Nothing happens after death. Asking what happens after death is like asking what will happen ten days later. It depends on what your state of being is in the frickin moment. 

[Adamq8]

1 hour ago, Shmurda said:

@Eren Eeager @Carl-Richard Anyone who tries to tell you what happens after death, especially if they explain it in material terms, is speculating and imo you should not trust what they say.

Conor Murphy seems to have gained spiritual cred here because he has a plastered his views on spirituality all over youtube. This is a bit like when you're in Science class and the loud kid always shouts out the answer, so most people assume he's one of the smart kids. If you believe him, you are falling into the trap of appealing to authority in place of developing your own understanding.

Stop listening to Leo's, Conor's or anyone else's opinions about the unknown. Just sit every day for hours and hours and hours and eventually you will get it.

Whatever happens you will be aware of it ?

Edited February 18, 2021 by Adamq8

[John Doe]

@Carl-Richard I couldn't find any. Although I did find this literature survey: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6088236/. I didn't read it, I'm not an expert in this topic and most of it goes over my head. I think even researching such a causal link would be a difficult endeavor, no? I mean, is it even possible to examine the chemical breakup of a human brain without invasive methods, let alone, that of a human in states of mystical experience? I personally have zero idea on this topic. Maybe you might understand it better.

On 2/17/2021 at 11:59 PM, Carl-Richard said:

When perception is described in neuroscience, there is also something called top-down mechanisms: the idea that perceptions are constructed with the help of higher-order cortical functions instead of merely being a result of a straightforward 1-to-1 mapping of raw sensory information (bottom-up). 

In other words, mystical experiences could also be explained by looking at the brain as a whole rather than simply looking at one type of ligand-receptor activity. An example of this approach is the research done on the Default Mode Network.

I remember reading in another article that the little amount of DMT found in the human brain was located at the surface, or the cortex (?) of the brain itself. I suppose this would strengthen this idea that higher-order cortical functions have a strong influence on perception? Once again, no idea what I'm talking about really.

[John Doe]

@Carl-Richard @Leo Gura It feels almost as if God has created this large massive chain of causal-links, too large to unravel in one lifetime, and at the source of the chain, it's all bullshit. The greatest Troll in human history. Maybe it will be a universal rick-roll at the other end, who knows.

 

[Carl-Richard]

16 hours ago, John Doe said:

I think even researching such a causal link would be a difficult endeavor, no? 

Firstly, causality is an iffy term in neuroscience. The term "neural correlates" is preferred. Even then, sure, it's not very straightforward. Regardless, the methodological issues around neuroscience and how it relates to more general epistemological problems (hard problem of consciousness, mind-matter causality, physical/non-physical interactions, qualia vs. brain states) is a separate issue. I was talking from within that framework, not from some meta-perspective.

 

16 hours ago, John Doe said:

I remember reading in another article that the little amount of DMT found in the human brain was located at the surface, or the cortex (?) of the brain itself. I suppose this would strengthen this idea that higher-order cortical functions have a strong influence on perception? Once again, no idea what I'm talking about really.

I think you misunderstand what I mean by top-down vs. bottom up. Let's take visual perception: light hits photosensitive pigments in the retina, they break and form a neurotransmitter that binds to a receptor. This creates an action potential that travels along afferent neurons that end up in the visual cortex which creates the experience of vision (very simplified).

This explanation is reductionistic and "bottom-up" (from one type of receptor and to the brain). Your starting point is one unit and your end point is more complex. Notice how this single transmitter-receptor-nerve complex is similar to the "mystical experience =  endogenous DMT" idea. After all, what is DMT but a neurotransmitter that binds to a receptor?

Now, the top-down explanation explains the visual perception as not exclusively being a result of activity coming from the lower levels ("bottom"; transmitter-receptor-nerve) but that the information from the lower levels is somehow modified which then produce the finished product. In other words, you can't say that just this receptor or this nerve brought about the perception (one unit), but rather that it's a result of a large network of neural connections working together (many units), hence Default Mode Network.

The top-down/bottom-up distinction is used in psychology to explain things like the impact of memory and individual experience on perception: context-dependent recognition of objects, monocular cues in depth perception etc.. You can also look at different cultures and predict perceptual differences: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Müller-Lyer_illusion

Quote

In their definitive paper of 1966, they investigated seventeen cultures and showed that people in different cultures differ substantially on how they experience the Müller-Lyer stimuli. They wrote that "European and American city dwellers have a much higher percentage of rectangularity in their environments than non-Europeans and so are more susceptible to that illusion."[7]

These effects are again explained using the top-down model. It's not like the amount of stimuli from the retina is somehow different across different cultures (which would instead warrant a bottom-up description). The differences are not found on the level of transmitter-receptor-nerve.

My critique of the bottom-up model is primarily on the grounds of it being reductionistic and that it alone will most likely not lead to a comprehensive view of the phenomena. You'll either way gain more on taking a larger perspective. In other words, saying that mysticism = endogenous DMT is not necessarily a good model.

Edited February 20, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[John Doe]

On 2/19/2021 at 11:44 AM, Carl-Richard said:

I think you misunderstand what I mean by top-down vs. bottom up. Let's take visual perception: light hits photosensitive pigments in the retina, they break and form a neurotransmitter that binds to a receptor. This creates an action potential that travels along afferent neurons that end up in the visual cortex which creates the experience of vision (very simplified).

This explanation is reductionistic and "bottom-up" (from one type of receptor and to the brain). Your starting point is one unit and your end point is more complex. Notice how this single transmitter-receptor-nerve complex is similar to the "mystical experience =  endogenous DMT" idea. After all, what is DMT but a neurotransmitter that binds to a receptor?

Now, the top-down explanation explains the visual perception as not exclusively being a result of activity coming from the lower levels ("bottom"; transmitter-receptor-nerve) but that the information from the lower levels is somehow modified which then produce the finished product. In other words, you can't say that just this receptor or this nerve brought about the perception (one unit), but rather that it's a result of a large network of neural connections working together (many units), hence Default Mode Network.

Thanks, that was a good explanation, although I had a little trouble understanding what the "top" and the "bottom" of the model was. I think the "bottom" of the model is the receptor, and the "top" is a particular region in the brain? And in top-down, instead of 'one neurotransmitter --> cortex', it's basically 'multiple neurotransmitters + some other shit happenning in between --> cortex', so why did they even name the latter model as top-down? Everything ends in the cortex after all. 

On 2/19/2021 at 11:44 AM, Carl-Richard said:

My critique of the bottom-up model is primarily on the grounds of it being reductionistic and that it alone will most likely not lead to a comprehensive view of the phenomena. You'll either way gain more on taking a larger perspective. In other words, saying that mysticism = endogenous DMT is not necessarily a good model.

I understood this, in bottom-up it's one neurotransmitter --> cortex. So any shit happens in Cortex (our experience), it must be from that particular neurotransmitter. But you're arguing for top-down which implies such experiences may have a myriad of sources, which throws out the DMT = mystical experience, because DMT is that one neurotransmitter.

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, John Doe said:

I think the "bottom" of the model is the receptor, and the "top" is a particular region in the brain? And in top-down, instead of 'one neurotransmitter --> cortex', it's basically 'multiple neurotransmitters + some other shit happenning in between --> cortex', so why did they even name the latter model as top-down?

Look at the example I gave about people from different cultures perceiving different things. How come that given the same picture, the same type of light hitting the retina, which triggers the same amount of receptors of the same type, leading to the same neural signals being sent to the brain; how come that there still happens to be a perceptual difference in different people?

The top-down answer is that the people from the same culture draw upon the same types of stored information in the long-term memory because of similar experiences, and that this information which comes from the "upper levels" (cortex) somehow modulates the raw sensory information coming from the "lower levels" (sensory apparatus). There is no bottom-up answer that can explain the perceptual difference. That would be just one concrete example. My point is that this distinction applies more generally aswell.

In general, the bottom-up approach looks at the start of just one kind of signalling cascade and says "Look here! It all started here with the receptor binding a transmitter substance!" while the top-down approach says "well hold on, there is a lot more going on here!". One perspective is analytic and reductionistic, and the other is holistic and systemic.

Some of your confusion may stem from the fact that there is some overlap, because "bottom" is connected to "down" and "top" is connected to "up". That is not a problem. The problem is that bottom-up alone is inherently an exclusionary approach because of its tendency towards reductionism. You ideally want a synthesis of the two. I have no problem if you want to say "it's DMT and...".

Top-down recognizes that there isn't just one type of one type of transmitter or one type of receptor at play. There are infact many, and they all interact with eachother in complex ways. That is also just one level of analysis (transmitter-receptor level; ligand-binding). There is a myriad of different phenomenas going on: networks, pathways, homeostasis, adaptation, feedback loops, emergence etc..

Research done on The Default Mode Network is just one example of a top-down, relatively holistic approach. I say relatively, because realize that all of this is still constrained within a fundamentally broken materialist paradigm that is reductionistic in its own twisted ways, but again that is a separate discussion.

Edited February 21, 2021 by Carl-Richard

[John Doe]

On 2/21/2021 at 0:21 PM, Carl-Richard said:

In general, the bottom-up approach looks at the start of just one kind of signalling cascade and says "Look here! It all started here with the receptor binding a transmitter substance!" while the top-down approach says "well hold on, there is a lot more going on here!". One perspective is analytic and reductionistic, and the other is holistic and systemic.

Some of your confusion may stem from the fact that there is some overlap, because "bottom" is connected to "down" and "top" is connected to "up". That is not a problem. The problem is that bottom-up alone is inherently an exclusionary approach because of its tendency towards reductionism. You ideally want a synthesis of the two. I have no problem if you want to say "it's DMT and...".

I got it. Bottom-up is reductionist for the reasons you stated. Top-down is more holistic. Thank you that was well-worded and increased my grasp of the topic. I still don't understand why the 'holistic' explanation is called 'top-down'. Wouldn't it be better to say '1 to 1' (bottom-up) model vs a 'many to 1' (top-down) model? 

[Carl-Richard]

On 23.2.2021 at 0:27 AM, John Doe said:

I got it. Bottom-up is reductionist for the reasons you stated. Top-down is more holistic. Thank you that was well-worded and increased my grasp of the topic. I still don't understand why the 'holistic' explanation is called 'top-down'. Wouldn't it be better to say '1 to 1' (bottom-up) model vs a 'many to 1' (top-down) model? 

Sure, that could also work, particularily when we're dealing with activity within the brain. I was just borrowing terms from perceptual systems where the different "leveledness" is more apparent. After all, the majority of the body's external sensory receptors are situated at a lower elevation compared to the brain. Part-whole/receptor-brain/one-many are also valid descriptions.

[John Doe]

@Carl-Richard Got it. Thanks.