It seems to me two things are happening. [1] The brain is really good at filling in gaps in its perception of the world and [2] there seems to be some kind of strange loopy recursion in the way the brain analyzes and observes things including itself.
I think on DMT and similar, you are actually seeing less of the world, and the recursive/fractal aspect is coming from the brain filling in gaps with observations including its own analyzing patterns.
The world at our scale has a lot of data and is really complex. These "hypbolic geometries" seem like simplifications. One strand of a flower that happens to follow something roughly like the golden ration becomes a fibonacci spiral repeated at every degree; the sense of self gets muddled with the modeling of this pattern, allowing the pattern to permeate the entire observation, and now you too are the spiral. You notice the observation and how muddled it is with the pattern and the self, creating a loop which also gets modeled, and down the recursive rabbit hole you go.
Pure speculation, but I have to wonder if our fundamental conception of sensation as a blank canvas slowly filled with positive contents is wrong, and rather that perception involves the apprehension of difference against some "basic" recursive pattern.
I tend to notice this more aurally, in the sonic experience within a highly focused state, including spending time on social media (not silent! quite noisy, but I am not actively aware of it in most cases), and also the intense experience of hitting the stop button mid-song; the silence hits very hard.
Seems Fristonian, in that if the brain is a prediction machine across time, then the underlying predictive pattern would be fractal, or at least highly self-similar to immediate past experience. The intensity of the hard stop (and similarly the annoyance of transient sounds like car horns) is in the predictive failure, which draws your attention. If this is desirable, we call it "interesting".
And if you consider the oscillatory nature of the brain, it is awfully easy for a massive set of weakly coupled oscillators to produce highly patterned nonlinear effects. We usually hold these things in control by virtue of our familiarity with them. But when they shift into some different oscillatory modes, the novel patterns become apprehensible.
For instance:
Atasoy, S., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M., Kringelbach, M. L., Deco, G., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2017). Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD. Scientific reports, 7(1), 1-18.
Ah, Carhart-Harris! His paper with Karl Friston, "REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics" (2019) really stuck with me. Very interested in harmonic interpretation, thank you for sharing.
You’ve beautifully articulated a feeling I’ve had for most of my life. In the Alvin Maker (historical fantasy) series, Orson Scott Card describes a phenomenon he calls the _greensong_. It’s a sort of pervading communion the first peoples have with nature, and white settlers not only can’t connect with it, but exist as a palpable disturbance to those who can. I’ve often felt like nearly _everything_ is signal, and my day-to-day experience is actually noise. That sense has been heightened on the occasions I’ve used hallucinogenics.
If everything has a price, the potential to receive that price without much risk encourages your selfishness. Owning stock while being able to make policies that can immediately affect that stock incentivizes selfishness.
Politicians are not suppose to be in the game of maximizing their personal profits.
Flat rates in law are useless and often don't affect the rich. It should be proportional to the profit they made, just like minimum wage should be a percentage base on living wage in your area and age-cap in politics should be output of a function of longevity and lifespan.
I hate the way we do government. It does not scale.
Seems like a career academic with no experience in the real world playing around like this is some kind of game. I'm sure they meant no harm, because they don't consider anyone "participating" to be anything more than a potential subject in their agenda to get a good review on their paper.
That letter and their social media posts are nothing more than a facade to maximize return with no consideration of impact.
Mayer has a JD and is licensed in CA (I don't know about NJ), has worked for at least one US Senate office, and has been so involved in actual practical privacy work that ad companies pressured the president of Stanford to expel him for his legitimate work on DNT.
The person who designed and ran this study is not Mayer. Mayer runs the lab, but this is a subordinate's baby.
From the study's website: "Please contact the lead researcher for this study, Ross Teixeira (rapt@princeton.edu), if you have any questions, believe you received an email in error, or would like to opt out of any future communication related to the study. The additional members of the study team are Professor Jonathan Mayer at the Princeton University Center for Information Technology Policy, who is the Principal Investigator, and Professor Gunes Acar at the Radboud University Digital Security Group."
There's a slippery slope us STEM people fall into sometimes, where we step-out a level of abstraction and say that all instances of that abstraction were actually just the abstraction itself.
I can step-out of any diet or behavior change and just say that if CaloriesIn < CaloriesOut, you win.
But there are context-specific benefits to different implementations.
I'm not saying you're wrong; you're right; but you don't want to end up stuck in a loop of depression thinking: Everything is The Same and Nothing Matters because everything possible can just be represented by Objects (or No Objects) with Relations (or No Relations) creating a graph on which everything else is generated (graphs concatenated with graphs).
Hah, your depression is my manic.:) This objects and morphisms analogy (the ur-analogy, really) is just a fast path for analysis, but artifacts in-and-of analysis are definitely a thing, sample bias in methods, etc. Depression thinking to me is described by Sapolsky's "aggression turned inward," whereas if you wanted to change your own behaviour (like eating) into something goal oriented like weight loss, having a magic feather isn't a bad thing. Magic feather militancy is its own problem, but I think it's generally true that we're wired to believe whatever preserves the idea of self, and whether our beliefs are real or not has no bearing on our attachment to them.
That said, thinking about how to manage eating is alien to my personality, so the OMAD habit is a way to eat for pleasure while cultivating one less comorbidity.
You have more freedom now, but that doesn't mean you are free. And the lack of freedom does not mean you should go back in time to when you were less free.
The truth is that your choices are determined by your options; in the past those options were determined by your feudal lord, and now they're determined by which corporate datastreams you choose to ingest.
We are freer now to create a pool of many more options, and the competitiveness of some markets forces corporations to give better options than the monopolies of the past.
But you still will be left with little choice if you passively ingest the data you receive, especially as corporations invest in AI to both identify options you will like as well as funnel you into self-feeding culture bubbles in order to make you more predictable... for their profit.
I think you have to make actions which collect as many options as possible, analyzing what you receive from corporations, and choosing to also consider which non-corporate options are available to you with your surplus of money and freedom that those in the past didn't have.
I agree. Your choices are determined by your options, and all our options are determined by corporations. There is no free will in this system.
You have to detach from the passive ingestion of the datastream and instead figure out a way to create as many options as possible in order to have any real choice.
What options can we create that weren't determined by corporations?
Human communication is only 10% the words we use. But the internet for most of its lifetime has been words-only (disregarding recent trends like TikTok). We have lost 90% of what makes our communication human.
There are biological factors as well, not just things like body language. You put off pheromones which I absorb and my brain analyzes for me when I am near you. You don't get the biological aspects unless you're in person.
I think the "No True Scottsman" fallacy is confusing here. It's actually really sly.
The "No True Scottsman" statement must be used as the argument. It has to say that they're wrong BECAUSE they are not a true Scottsman.
What OP did was say there is The Left and there is "The Left".
The Left is against rentiers.
"The Left" supports rentiers.
He's dividing the two, but he's not saying one is wrong because they're not true leftists, he's saying one is wrong because they support rentiers.
But then he additionally says they're not true leftists, which is to say that a leftists shouldn't support them because they don't align, which is where the smell comes from.
The main argument is not a Scottsman fallacy. But there's definitely some implied Scottsmanism in the additional use of Left and "Left", which if read by the right person who is already weak to Scottsmanism will materialize as the Scottsman fallacy.
EDIT: I thought you were wrong, but under more analysis, I realized you were right, it was just complicated.
I think on DMT and similar, you are actually seeing less of the world, and the recursive/fractal aspect is coming from the brain filling in gaps with observations including its own analyzing patterns.
The world at our scale has a lot of data and is really complex. These "hypbolic geometries" seem like simplifications. One strand of a flower that happens to follow something roughly like the golden ration becomes a fibonacci spiral repeated at every degree; the sense of self gets muddled with the modeling of this pattern, allowing the pattern to permeate the entire observation, and now you too are the spiral. You notice the observation and how muddled it is with the pattern and the self, creating a loop which also gets modeled, and down the recursive rabbit hole you go.