Boy, this is really turning into a fun thread!
Some good counterpoints have been made from the "hyperspace atheism" camp. Now let me follow up with some hopefully even more gooder counter-counterpoints. Not that I'm hoping to convert any of you hard-core determinists out there... atheism is just another religion after all, and its followers defend it as vehemently as any conservative fundamentalist, even though there's no more evidence in support of it than against it. In fact the very fact that anything exists at all seems to be pretty good evidence that there's SOMETHING going on that is beyond our understanding... but I digress. Point is that at best I may hope to influence those who are open minded regarding this topic, the "hyperspatial agnostics" if you will, and at worst I am at least thoroughly enjoying this discussion. So here goes:
First off you can argue that mantises are merely rorsharc phenomenae, though that seems a stretch to Swim that out of all the rorsharcian things that could be produced, that it would be mantids. Anyway you could make a point that in Swim's case yeah it was contamination from reading the Strass Man's reports or whatever. But Swim's point is that he has turned on several people who had NOT read the spirit molecule, nor did they know anything about DMT prior to him giving it to them, nor did he mention mantids to them, nor were they in anything like a doctors office. And yet not only did they see mantids, in every case THE MANTIDS WERE OPERATING ON THEM SOMEHOW. As was pointed out above, Swim also never had much thought regarding chakras and whatnot until these mantids started operating on his. The changes that take place in one's energy field after such an operation are often lasting ones, even after the effects of the "drug" wear off. Swim feels that permanent changes have been made to him during some key sessions.
As for why you've never seen entities, that neither proves nor disproves their autonomy. That's like saying you don't believe in south america because you've never been there. As for why you're not seeing entities, let me take a venture... are you using those nice, fluffy, pretty n,n crystals you get from naptha? Swim never got entities from that stuff either. It wasn't until he started pulling with toluene first, and then limonene, that he started seeing elves, mantids, and various other entities. And no, these were not "the impression of entities," at least not always. In several cases there was a VERY CLEAR perception of actual definite entities. On one special occasion he even saw elves manifest with his eyes wide open. Everything else stayed the same, but there were elves. Also as was pointed out earlier, the use of some type of harmaloid in conjunction with the DMT seems to be a factor as well. As does set and setting.
To say that "To believe some novel information source which has an independent existence is accessed is unfounded and goes against all of neuroscience and logic" is an unfounded and illogical statement. How do you know? To be scientific means not to rule out ANY hypothesis until it has been disproven. Have you disproven the existence of an independent information source?
The brain is a vast information processing system. It recieves information from numerous sources, some of which are known, some of which are unknown; some of which are internal, some of which are external. Actually in all cases there's probably a little of both. For instance everything you percieve from the outside world is filtered thru your own personal associatory pathways... when two people look at an object they don't see the same object, in a sense. For instance when a gay dude and a straight dude look at a hot chick, in a way they aren't seeing the same chick. Then there's the reverse side of the coin, for example if I'm dreaming and my alarm clock goes off and I hear a phone ringing in my dream, and I answer it but it just keeps ringing... in this case my internal subjective experience is still being affected by external factors.
So you can't just say that something is "all in your head," as even dreams can be influenced by objective reality.
Now, let's look at this as scientifically as possible for a minute and see what possible scientific outlooks we can come up with that to my knowledge have yet to be dosproven...
Let's take information theory, for instance. What the brain does is recieve and process information. Depending on how information is processed determines the "picture" that you get. Back in the days it used to be popular to write books where you could take the first letter of each word, for example, or take every fifth letter, etc., and get a different story. So you could read the book one way, taking every single letter, and get one story... or you could take every fifth letter or whatever and get a completely different story. The same thing may be going on here.
To say that only the known sense organs are capable of recieving information is also somewhat of a fallacy. For instance the pineal gland is known to percieve parts of the EM spectrum that the eyes do not. Birds use their pineal glands to sense the earth's magnetic current, which helps them migrate north and south. This has been empirically demonstrated. The human pineal gland has also been shown to be responsive to EM fields.
Let's imagine a world where everyone was blind. The eyes would then be considered vestigial organs, much as the pineal gland was thought to be vestigial not too long ago. Now imagine someone in this world started seeing with their eyes. They would be considered crazy. People would say "he's not percieving information through any of the known sense organs... it must be all in his head." They may even go so far as to hook him up to some kind of fMRI or PET scanning device, and notice "unusual hyperactivity" in the visual cortex, and assume that this "random neuronal firing" was responsible for his "hallucinations." They may try to give him drugs to suppress this anomalous neuronal activity, to keep him from acting weird, since he would no doubt be diagnosed as schizophrenic. Much the same as we now medicate "schizophrenics" with dopamine antagonists to medicate the "unusual hyperactivity" in the prefrontal cortex associated with schizophrenia in our world. They would probably ignore the fact that this person was actually able to percieve actual information, or chalk it up to him putting together information gathered from the other four senses in an unusual way, much like the "intelligence enhancement" arguement put forth by burnt.
Consider if you will the fact that every particle in the universe is connected to every other particle. If we were to alter the placement of a single atom, every other atom in the universe would also be in a different place. This ties in to the whole "quantum entanglement" phenomenon. Can we say for sure that the brain does not have the ability to tap in to this phenomenon and percieve information in this way? No, we can't. In fact there's a very good chance that the brain HAS developed this ability, but that we normally tune it out because it's not as essential to our survival as the standard methods of perception. This ties in to McKenna's "localization of consciousness" theory. We don't normally need to percieve what's going on on the other side of the galaxy because it's not essential to our survival, so most of the time it's just "background noise" that gets filtered out by the thalamus and thus never makes it to consciousness.
Let's consider what we know about the effects of 5ht agonists on the brain to see if they could in fact produce such an effect. We know that the thalamus functions as a "switchboard" or a "filter" for information coming into the brain. We know that a vast majority of sensory input get blocked off here and never makes it to consciousness. For instance you're probably not aware of every single hair on your head, or the clothes that you're wearing, etc., or at least you weren't until I mentioned them. The same thing also applies to "unconscious" internal processes that don't normally make it up to consciousness (by that I mean the cortex... it seems that information that makes it to the cortex is what we are consciously aware of).
The molecule mainly responsible for this is 5ht, serotonin. 5ht is an antagonistic neurotransmitter in the thalamus. It tells neurons not to fire, effectively blocking signals. Serotonin is basically the reason why we are only aware of about 2% of what's going on in our brains. This is also why they perscribe SSRIs to people who are depressed or anxious, to increase the amount of 5ht and block off more signals, so you just don't think about whatever it is that's making you depressed or anxious. It just gets "swept under the rug," so to speak.
Now DMT happens to fit into the same receptor site as serotonin but instead of being antagonistic and turning the neuron off, it turns neurons ON and sends those signals on through. This essentially opens the floodgates and gives one a glimpse of "pure, unfiltered reality," in a sense.
Now, that would presumable apply to both external and internal content. So obviously some of what comes up during a DMT or other 5ht agonist experience is internal... but there seems to be a good indication that at least some of it may be external as well. Certainly we cannot rule this out.
James Kent's "recursive loop" theory gives a good explanation for why we percieve fractals and whatnot. But it does nothing to explain entities, or special knowledge, etc.
Now dreams are a great example of subjective reality. Yet I have in many cases had dreams that foretold the future. Some of these could have been mere "intelligence enhancement," others I don't see how I could have possibly known about. But as I indicated earlier even dreams may be influenced by external information.
As for objective reality existing independently of us, the viewers, that's another "tree falling in a forest with no one around to hear it" question. The fact is that we cannot prove that objective reality exists independently of the experiencer, nor can we prove that we do not create reality somehow.
There's an interesting alternate paradigm that fits just as well as the standard "objectivity" paradigm, and actually explains certain phenomenae better. As a mind experiment, let's assume that we actually do create reality... a better term for "objective" reality would then be "concensus reality." So it's not so much that I persoanlly create all of reality, but that everyone together creates it. Another way of looking at this would be that some sort of collective "overmind" (call it God if you wanna put a name to it) creates reality, and that we are all a part of this overmind.
Here's an interesting thing to consider:
Once upon a time in Swim's yacht in international waters, himself and five other people were kickin' it. One person had never smoked dmt before, so they decided to turn him on. He smoked it, and when he looked at everyone else, their heads turned into dicks. He then went out in the back yard and puked (Swim's got a really nice yacht, complete with back yard), after which he was fine and everything returned to normal.
Now obviously our heads didn't really turn into dicks. This was the guy's subjective reality, not concensus reality.
But what if two people both smoked DMT and both saw the remaining four people's heads turn into dicks? Then it's not so clearly subjective any more... we now have a discrepency in concensus.
Let's take this even further... what if everyone but Swim had smoked dmt, and they all saw Swim's head turn into a dick? Swim would then be the only person who didn't think he was a dickhead. Now where's concensus reality?
What if a hundred people smoked, and swim was the only one who thought he wasn't a dickhead? Then swim would be the crazy one!
I've got a lot more to say on this matter but I'm tired of typing for now and you're probably getting tired of reading this, so I'll turn it over to the atheist camp again for awhile.
Thanks again to everyone for participating in this discussion, I am thoroughly enjoying this!
