It's more "I want to continue to hallucinate in the super useful way that all humans normally do, and not fuck up my brain so that useful hallucination of reality gets knocked out of whack."

A series of still images, if the frame rate is fast enough, appears to us as smooth motion. Our eye can only focus on a tiny spot at any given time, but our brain fills in the rest of the visual field as if it's high res based on the last time we glanced somewhere, some extrapolation and interpolation, etc. We're somehow able to pull the sound of someone's voice out of a crowd of noises and ignore all the irrelevant sounds to hear what someone's saying. And then these sounds get somehow directly translated to words and concepts in our head. And if you're looking at someone in the face as they're talking, you can read emotions there, instead of just seeing a wrinkly slab of meat with some wet spheres near the top and some disgusting wet holes below. That's all "hallucination" in some way. But, it's all incredibly useful.

I know that 99% of the time if someone takes hallucinogens they come back to reality just fine. Sometimes the trip even makes them feel better. But, is it really worth messing with your brain's delicate and super useful hallucination of the world around you?

[–] jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago

Over time, psychedelics tend to clean off the lenses, so to speak, making the "useful hallucination" more accurate and reliable.

[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago (1 children)

not really 99%, more 99.9%

the only time when you as a person should never take psychadelics is when you have a pychoaffective disorder (or a history of it in your family) as it can trigger psychosis

other dangers come from heavy abuse of the substances, nothing you can do accidentally (psychadelics are non-addictive chemically speaking, but we humans can abuse anything so there's been cases of it) or taking the substances when you're depressed or anxious (can turn into a bad trip, cure you of those in a day, or just be a normal trip, it's a gamble)

99.9% of the time people who take psychadelics come back to normal after the effects wear off. even bad trips can be beneficial. the normal becomes broader, and many lessons are learnt, the useful hallucinations gain more meaning. i often compare psychadelic trips to having a mirror put in front of yourself and being forced to look at it for hours, now - do you like what you see?

[–] yistdaj@pawb.social 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I thought such disorders were much more frequent in the human population than 0.1%

[–] shneancy@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago

i also narrowed down my guesstimation to only include those interested in taking psychadelics

[–] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 2 points 1 day ago

I dunno if I'd call this hallucination, although I get what you're saying and I agree with you! But wouldn't "interpretation" be a more apt description?

If someone is seeing a message out of this very text, rather than the strict "material reality" of each individual letter just being an arbitrary glyhph, or each pixel, or each little diode or electron forming those pixels...

...to call this miraculous level of ascribing meaning "hallucinating" seems a disservice right?

Your comment just brought me a lot of wonder and awe, because you're right, our brains' wiring to tell stories and weave concepts and interpret the world around us in a way that's useful, and beautiful, is a wonderful part of being alive and setting us apart from mere machines, rather than simply a feed of raw unfiltered data input from the world around us "as it is."

Truly marvelous. :D

[–] gnufuu@infosec.pub 2 points 1 day ago

Duuude, totally