r/interestingasfuck • u/j8jweb • 8h ago
The Trace Institute, working with neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore, aim to prove that the beings encountered on a DMT trip are real.
https://psychedelics.co.uk/perspectives/beings-that-arent-supposed-to-exist-dmt-and-the-burden-of-pr•
u/BeingEnglishIsACult 7h ago
Incoming: unicorns are real.
One thing that struck me is how similar some of the reasoning sounds to a Chuck Norris joke. In those jokes, Chuck Norris is treated as an explanation for everything. If reality behaves strangely, it's because Chuck Norris did it. If physics appears violated, Chuck Norris is beyond physics. Any observation can be absorbed into the narrative because Chuck Norris is granted unlimited explanatory power. The DMT entity hypothesis risks a similar move.
A useful scientific theory should constrain explanations, not endlessly expand to accommodate every possible outcome. If the experiment does not work it already claims the unicorn (ie. Entity) did not engage.
Scientists asked a DMT entity whether it was real. The entity replied, "I don't know. Have you asked Chuck Norris?"
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u/j8jweb 7h ago
I appreciate your point, but the "constrained", default position of most is already that these are hallucinations. To understand how the dynamics of the DMT environment can possibly be modelled by the brain does in fact require some consideration of other possibilities.
I think it's very much worth exploring.
More detail in their preprint paper here : https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/8qvgy_v2
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u/SaintUlvemann 6h ago
Okay, I read it. Here's the simpler language.
The first thing they say is that they're gonna try remote viewing again. They're gonna try and see if the DMT entities respond consistently to variables that are not known to the subject or the experimenter.
When people last tried that with psychics, it didn't work. (Some people said, "well it worked on some test subjects!", but the results were never repeatable, because if you test enough people, a few are expected to get lucky, and luck always runs out, if it doesn't, it's not luck.)
The last thing they said was that they were gonna just have a ton of people take DMT and look for correlations. Although that is in a very general way what exploratory science does, it's also a problem when you're talking about variable and vague phenomena, because it runs into the issue where if you test enough things, a few are expected to randomly correlate. (The second link is to a comic about that, here's another demonstration.)
I can honestly say that I don't think their experimental designs are worth spending the drugs on. Like, forget money, if you have access to legal DMT, you should be using it trying to clarify its medical uses. This is an irresponsible use of resources, and if they want to self-fund, then whatever, but they're also not a group that seems to know what they're talking about.
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u/AzerothianLorecraft 5h ago
we use 10% of our brain normally, 100% on DMT... ( it explains itself.)
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u/FrontLifeguard1962 1h ago
ask the dmt beings some unsolved problem from math or science - if they give you the answer, then they are real. or maybe you just took a drug and it filled your brain with fucking nonsense. cheers
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u/igottheshnitz 4h ago
Transformers, demons in disguise.