RE: Fusion of realities - LSD and its medical potential
2 things that come to mind here:
"Behind the veil of maya, the brick is still ultimately a brick"
How we perceive the world does not modify what the world itself is - it modifies how we perceive it.
We can change around the categories, but ultimately the physical world is still there and our perceptions are actually just categorisations more than illusions.
The second thing that comes to mind is that LSD does more than just shuffle the categories - it's known to actually create entirely false sensory input.
In a normally functioning brain, sensory input passes through a series of categorisation and filtering steps until it arrives at the cognitive layer of the brain. This is a process that for visual perception is very well understood in terms of HTM (Hierarchical Temporal Memory - look it up, it's awesome).
Ultimately, our brains solve the "binding problem" by having the concepts in our minds ultimately tie back to maps in the lower layers of this big pile of neural networks and ultimately back down to the original sensory input - which ties directly to physical "stuff" out there in the world.
The problem with hallucinogenics is they hijack this process - at some point they inject false input built from randomised activation into one layer of the chain and make the whole thing no longer correlate to actual real "stuff" in the outside world.
The idea that drugs such as LSD are useful for "expanding" consciousness is thus terribly flawed - they're more like the equivalent to a fault injection framework used in testing software and can often cause serious psychological problems.
Of course the opposite is also true - a little bit of fantasy after all is good for us (why else would fiction exist?) and immersing ourselves in fantasy worlds, even if generated entirely by randomised stimulation of serotonin receptors, can in a lot of cases enhance our mental wellbeing.
For me, i'll stick to movies, books and video games though - at least I can keep firmly in control with those.
That's a pretty big assumption - a common one, of course, that many of us make. Most of us operate under the assumption that there is something like objective, persistent reality, but none of us really know for sure. It's a rule in the game we're playing.
If we take LSD and start to smell a painting, or smell "Stairway to Heaven", how is it any less a valid interpretation of the sensory input? Especially with the senses of smell and taste, which appear to be especially arbitrary - if you start to see a visual representation of the smell of spearmint, how is it any less valid? How is it any less valid than say, a spectrogram of a song?
Is it possible to get a different perspective on something, and not expand your consciousness? If you have one way of looking at the world, take 300 ug of LSD, and come back with a second perspective, which you can access at any moment after that event, willfully choosing between the two, or even combining them, would it be incorrect to say that your consciousness has been expanded?
I think the information you have about the risks has probably been greatly exaggerated. Psychedelic drugs tend to have some of the lowest risks.
There's nothing wrong with not having an interest in psychedelic drugs, but a famous phrase comes to mind - "People who say it cannot be done, should not interrupt those who are doing it."
Have a good one