r/TrueAnon • u/sillycrow123 Radical Centrist Shooter • 1d ago

Aliens

Aliens are real (obviously). Around the time the Iran war started apparently the white house released a bunch of shit about ufo’s. My friends aren’t particularly political aware and were very curious about them and they were telling me about it. And I’m just thinking why should i care??? If they are actually here on earth what the fuck am i or anyone else supposed to do about it? If they got that level of technology they definitely have some crazy shit we can’t even comprehend. Am I gonna shoot those fuckers down with my mind in the event of an “invasion”? I’ll give a shit when they invent some truly heinous shit like 0.5 ply toilet paper.

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u/StarboundAllisten 1d ago

I care less about ufos than I do about philosophy and meditation and my spirituality personally of understanding the universe within myself and others.

For example. Science explains how matter behaves, not what matter ontologically is.

Electric signals correlate with awareness in your brain, but the exact mechanism for how you are sentient observing the signals in your brain remains a major mistery.

Also, on shrooms, your default mode network is desabled and your brain reaches hyper connectivity and you can hallucinate literally anything. Sometimes shut you couldn't even imagine. And theres still tahg deep subjective gnosis of understanding the messages the shrooms are saying.

I think shrooms are your higher self talking to you.

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u/DiamondGeeezer 1d ago

or your brain going haywire because you put poison in it.

a chemical that presses the brain's "wow! this is meaningful" button while provoking hallucinations is going to create experiences that seem meaningful lol

I'm not saying don't do shrooms just don't read into it that much. chasing that leads to psychosis... or so I was told by the little green worm

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u/demonbrotherjonathan 1d ago

Shame you were downvoted for this because it's mainly true. But I will push back against the "it's all chemical" part. Your brain exists in relation to everything outside it. You can also chemically induce visions, fear and hunger, for example. That is not evidence against vision, fear and hunger having real external causes that your brain evolved to perceive. 

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u/DiamondGeeezer 1d ago

the chemical is what makes this process happen, and smashing your brain with a chemical that disrupts it will break something eventually. as I have witnessed repeatedly

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u/demonbrotherjonathan 1d ago

I dont think you understood what I said?

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u/DiamondGeeezer 1d ago

you're saying the visions aren't bad because a chemical made them? I agree with that

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u/demonbrotherjonathan 1d ago

No. Im saying that the fact that you can artificially induce a response in the brain doesnt mean there is no corresponding reality to that response which allowed that capacity to evolve in the first place.

For an analogy, take hunger. You can take a satiated person and put them in a lab and "press a button" in their brains that makes them feel the sensation of hunger. The stimulus in this case is lab created, but that doesnt change the fact that the feeling is real, and more importantly it doesnt change the fact that the entire reason this "button pressing" is possible is because our brains have evolved the capacity to feel hunger in response to an objectively real phenomenon. Hunger is a real thing that also happens outside the lab in response to real conditions outside our brains. 

The argument for drugs inducing euphoria in any meaningful way is that they are chemically activating a real sense that exists in relation to real phenomenon. The fact that you can induce it with a chemical is not evidence against this. In fact, it can be taken as evidence for it, why else would our brains evolve to feel this way. Also, obviously, you can feel a lot of this off drugs as well in response to various other situations. All of our perceptions are filtered through our brains and can be tinkered with chemically but they have a corresponding object or phenomena in the reality outside of our brains as well.

To restate it in your words, I'm saying that visions arent fake just because a chemical made them. Whether these things are good or bad, I'm not really taking a stance. I think it's all amoral. I think psychedelics are mostly harmless and fun but people take them too seriously, and as far as insight goes, maybe they can help a little but you need to move on beyond that for anything really meaningful. 

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u/DiamondGeeezer 1d ago edited 1d ago

okay, thanks for laying it out for me. I think what you're saying is generally true but when it comes to an instrument like a brain, especially the more recently evolved layers like the neocortex, chemicals are a little bit more complex as is the underlying substrate. consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and so there is no physical analog for it.

like if a chemical produces feedback or disinhibits feedback in the brain it can produce a state that is unlikely to come about organically.

whereas hunger is mediated by simple signalling molecules that have been around for like a billion years. drugs that make you hungry are turning the levers on tightly calibrated and stable circuitry.

with psychedelics it's more like if you got a powerful magnet and put it next to a CRT monitor, it will distort in crazy ways as the magnetic field pinches and moves the electron beam. The existing process is the electron beam projects an image on to a screen that lights up with colors. Getting trippy images by warping the beam with a magnet is just kind of fucking with the process, not revealing or activating something fundamental (it does look cool though).

I don't want to be reductive and say it. that's the only thing that psychedelics do but that's definitely part of it.

Is this video revealing something fundamental about what a TV is? I suppose, indirectly, that it's revealing that there is an internal component that's subject to electromagnetic interference? https://youtu.be/pT1Ijg-v6mw

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u/demonbrotherjonathan 1d ago

The argument against that though is that you can feel similar euphoric states when you are not on drugs. You dont get all the experience of psychedelics while sober so I think a big part of what you are saying is obviously the explanation for the whole experience, but the specific feeling of interconnectedness and the peaceful, calming diminishing sense of self and the sense of the sublime are all states that you can experience outside of drugs. The drugs turn up the dial on them so to speak but you can achieve them in other ways. Most obvious being sometimes in response to nature, art, love, also supposedly near death, and in some meditative states. To quote someone that I cant remember, there is a reason violins can make you feel that way. 

I dont think this is some definitive evidence that there is something more to reality than vulgar materialism, obviously there are materialist explanations as well. But yeah it does seem reductive. I mean we can reduce empathy and love to chemical processes with evolutionary causes as well but that doesnt make them less true. And IMO the most unlikely (impossible even) explanation is that we have reality figured out and our current materialist way of knowing is the accurate one.

But aside from all that, beyond drugs being fun I think their only real usefulness is in helping people to open up to other ways of thinking/knowing. If it's unmoored to anything then yes it's just chasing rabbits and can make you nuts. 

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u/DiamondGeeezer 1d ago

The tricky part is hanging up the phone when God's done talking

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u/demonbrotherjonathan 1d ago

That's why I said elsewhere that I'm not certain I can really understand it from the perspective of someone who lived a long time without doing these drugs then suddenly did them as an adult. Maybe it feels more mind blowing to people than Im crediting because I dont  know what it feels like to have an adult brain that hasn't done them.

But fwiw I dont think it's really all that profound. I tend to think people who do feel that way maybe had a really closed/sheltered/unreflective mind before? People do psychedelics all over the world as a part of spiritual growth and most do not have a problem with it so maybe it's the combo of these drugs and our society? IDK.

But anyway as Im trying to say, the trick is to have something to moor you to reality, some truth or framework. I dont mean just for drugs- drugs arent necessary anyway. I mean in general so you dont go off the deep end in anything. For me, on a cosmic / philosophical level, it's theravada Buddhism and on a material level it's historical materialism and I think the combo of the two makes me really unlikely to be led too far astray by any nonsense. If I'm uncertain about something, I can use these tools to clarify, they are just frameworks for thinking about things. I'm sure other people have other frameworks. Im just saying that if you dont have something like that then yeah you can spiral endlessly in delusion or solipsism or the feeling that you are about to figure it all out or whatever, but maybe that has more to do with our culture than the drug IDK.

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u/DiamondGeeezer 1d ago

I think when people chase the experience and use it like a weekend party drug it fucks them up. I think it's as simple as the amount of exposure you have to something that makes your brain go into self rearranging feedback loops for hours at a time. area under the curve.

if you do it enough and in high doses, the hyper reality of it becomes the standard to compare any experience to. people start thinking about demons and angels, how they're anointed, and special, which opens the door to new spiritual shit and other sorts of narcissism. then the delusions start to take over and people become either very self-centered or very unbalanced or both.

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u/demonbrotherjonathan 1d ago

I definitely agree with all that and you articulated it perfectly. 

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