Whenever I hear these stories about multiple cultures having the same hallucination, I think that we have to give some weight to the possibility that the little people are real and the mushrooms just let us see them.
I believe that it is because we all have the same basic brain structure. The part of the brain that controls speech is in the same location in each person. So is motor control, vision, etc.
Maybe having the same chemical stimulants going through the same basic processing hardware causes the same outputs. But that's just like my opinion man.
Some would say all of our consciousness is a hallucination.
> It doesn't matter which side of the road you drive on. It matters that everyone else is also driving on that side.
I bet if all our brains were wired to constantly see little people, we would adapt and eventually pick up on subtle cues related to the environment or our emotions.
Some student taking an intro to cultural anthropology course would be shocked to find out that some culture has a very different relationship to their little people as she does to her little people. Strangers making small talk on the subway would ask each other what their little people have been up to today. Someone on Hackernews would be reading an article about an herb that can make the little people completely invisible for days.
0. There are tiny people who are not invisible but there is something that makes it so humans ignore them. That specific mushroom interfered with whatever that is so that we can see them.
An argument for #0 and in favor of #2 is the #2 requires the mushroom to cause an hallucination that includes a lot of generated detail to be realistic and consistent with how an actual tiny person would behave and affect the world.
#0 on the other hand is just turning something off.
An argument for #0 over #1 is that #0 does not require actual invisibility. If there were actually invisible tiny people we still probably would have discovered by now the physical mechanism that can make things invisible, which w e have not. Unless we are going to consider magic or psychic powers or some other such thing completely beyond known physics we can almost certainly rule out actual invisibility.
Hear me out: There are tiny people who are invisible, and independently, there is a mushroom which makes humans hallucinate tiny people. The hallucinations are different than the ones which actually exist.
If they aren't invisible, my cat would have caught and killed dozens of them, and then I'd be smelling their rotting corpses around my house and slipping on their bodies.
Also presumably they'd end up in many pictures, which even if we somehow ignored them still in all photographs AI would still see, as would car lidar systems, etc.
(I guess the likelier theory is that a mushroom that causes hallucination is causing hallucination)
The empirical solution would be to administer the mushroom to people who are not equipped to correctly predict how an actual tiny person would physically interact with certain situations (idk maybe something involving surface tension and liquids of different viscuousities) and instruct them to report their observations. This would then either demonstrate that the tiny people do not obey the laws of physics or that they follow the subject's imagined laws of physics and are therefore hallucinations.
Also of course the tiny people do not seem to causally interact with their physical environment in any measurable way (at least to observers of the test subject) so that already strongly points towards hallucinations but that kind of thinking isn't how you get a grant.
Depends on your definition of what "real" means. Does it mean that people really have the experience of seeing little people? If so, then in that sense it's real. Or does it mean that these little people exist in some other way, outside of the mind and potentially accessible to other physical means of intervention? Probably not.
>They believed their thoughts and bodily sensations were controlled by a machine that defied their technical comprehension and secretly influenced them from a distance, often claiming that it was operated by a group of people who were persecuting them.
think of it like a placeholder for a great argument/explanation that doesn't necessarily exist, but would be funny if it did and would aledge whatever follows (in this case mechanical elfs) as being highly relevant to the topic at hand.
Hallucinogenic experiences can be really specific to particular hallucinogens.
There are some hallucinogens that only produce auditory hallucinations. We don't really have a reason to think those are real sounds.
There are others that will not make you visually hallucinate in the regular sense, but will mess with how your brain interprets what you see - scrambling your internal visual object classifiers, so to speak - so that distinct things sort of melt together in your mind.
Hallucinogens are wild. But I think they are the same as any other drug that has predictable effects, like alcohol or pot.
Maybe it throws us for a loop because subjective experience of hallucinogens are so bizarre and varied and often intense. They truly do weird things to us.
> How can chemical compounds contain an entire script of what the little people can and cannot do?
I understand what you’re trying to say, but this sentence could be an argument against DNA. It’s also chemical compounds that contain an entire script of what our species can and cannot do - and much more.
DNA operates on a much lower level than large scale macro behavior such as 3cm to 30cm tall beings visually phasing through walls, or not… unless you think DNA does somehow directly affect it?
Your posting from a rando pseudonym account on HN, as far as I can tell. It’s not even possible for passing readers (including me) to determine who is actually behind it…
So who would I be “flaming”?
Plus given the nonsensical claim, it wouldn’t even make sense for me to do anything other than point that out.
