Reddit reviews The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self

> Religion isn't an attempt to literally explain metaphysical truth, metaphysical truth cannot be literally explained. It's an attempt to conceptualize it.

Well how do you know that it even exists to have the need to explain it?

Physicists actually can explain the 4th dimension, or at least they can do it as well as they can, but the point is that there's actual evidence that it exists. Unlike any evidence for there being a metaphysical reality of God.

> Religion, to that painting, would be an attempt to understand that 3rd dimension given it's limited perspective.

Where's the evidence for that? That it even exists.

> There is absolutely a metaphysical reality that is not conceptual. It's absolutely there, however it can only be experienced subjectively.

Well, I, subjectively don't experience it and thus it doesn't exist. (?)

> But regardless, to me you do have an essential nature, there is an essence that is the you-est you. But in the physical world, you manifest your potential to be "all" of you in limited ways.

There's a conceptual idea of the best you could be, Plato's forms, but that's just an idea, an ideal, it doesn't exist unless you get there. No more than the nuclear end of the world that I just imagined as I'm typing this.

> I didn't want to go into this place because it's clear you find this sort of conceptualization to be poppycock. But the experiences I've had seem somewhat universal. They align with people hwo've taken psilocybin. I don't advocate that method of reaching those states, for me it's meditation that works.

I'm trying to mediate at least once a day buy man my scheduling needs work and so a lot of the times it falls off.

As for psychedelics - what makes you think that what you saw / felt whatever was more real than reality?

Have you ever heard of Cotard's delusion? There's this facinating book about a few psychological disorders called "The Man Who Wasn't There. Recommend if you are into psychology.

Well anyway, this delusion basically makes people think that they are brain dead. That somehow even though they know that if your brain is dead then you are dead but they are talking to the doctor about this, like their reality is absolutely out of whack because of this mental thing they are going through.

Well, the point is that you can have physical things happen that affect your brain that will make you perceive reality differently even though reality didn't change.

So who is to say that specific psychedelics don't simply act in specific ways to create specific ideas in the brain? It's all simply a physical mechanism.

Harris for example is a "master" mediator, well, compared to most people, and he has had experiences with meditations but he isn't any less atheistic just because of it. So I don't necessarily buy that just because you got to a certain point in meditation that you will experience something transcended, metaphysical (not YOU you, general you).

> then things become clear to you that you cannot really express because of the limitation of going back to DOing.

Well, some people have expressed it and see it differently from you.