matthew baird said:
Hehehe I must say that my experiences with the magic mush definitely open your mind to other alternatives. I seemed to focus on my thoughts much more than what I was seeing (although what I was seeing was incredible). I also think the effects of mush on me are different than other who experienced them with me. Everyone else just sits around being lazy and or stuck to the couch claiming they cannot move...lol..meanwhile I can act as nothing is different or wrong. If it weren't for my pupils being overly dialated no one can tell I'm not sober. From my personal experiences, mush really helped me to see things from other perspectives, and really fed me more passion to learn about this world (especially when I had experiences that were isolated out in nature, for me any man made things around at this time seem to ruin it somewhat)
I like to lie, sit or otherwise be nice and comfy and still, like on my bed. I also like being by myself, so I don't have to worry about what other people will be thinking.
I remember my first trip, which was with Salvia Divinorum. I'd seen the walls of the room I was in as 2D surfaces, like they would be in a level designer for a computer game or CAD package. For a little while after I always looked at walls and thought, perhaps this is just a skin and I was kind of tempted to press my hand against them every now and again just to think about it some more. And to an extent you can argue that the thing you're seeing and experiencing as a wall isn't actually there, it's just what your senses are telling you the energy & mass is like; arguably, there is no brick and it's not beige, it's just a brick like pocket of energy & mass that happens to be emitting those wavelengths. That's what my main positive view is on hallucinogens, that it makes you think about things like that. Constantly thinking "all walls are hollow" is the crazy route, but thinking "perhaps it's not precisely what it looks like to me" is where I think they have some use. And it's much more tactile and substantial than just reading into things like quantum mechanics, because you've literally seen and felt it.
Danger said:
It's spelled 'Geordi'.

We're probably closer to something like that than most people think. Remember that his VISOR (it
[snip]
I thought I could sneak that one by without complicating the discussion with it, but I see I've met someone who likes trek too. Some would say I like it too much, but I haven't bought any trek outfit to wear... yet. Maybe when, one day, I get married I'll start buying them just to scare my future wife.
I was just watching the first series and the special features bit in which Geordi (I thought it was that but for some reason went with J) talks about the idea of the visor (which, indeedy, is an acronym for some stupid long sentence. I hate acronyms), the idea and how he wanted to see it.
Even connecting that visor directly to his cortex, I still think he'd probably see the normal range of colours humans do, maybe even less if it wasn't a perfect connection. I would strongly suspect that 99% of the neurons relating to things like colours are preset in our genes as opposed to developing depending on the data they're fed from our optical nerves. I think new bandwidths would be more likely to show up in the normal colour range but as strange effects within them, like hues around things maybe.
I think the only way you'd start seeing new colours is if you were to start messing around with the genes belonging right in the occipital cortex that control that particular area of development. Maybe you could implement something manually on a tissue level but I doubt many people would volunteer for that. But then, to test the gene idea you'd have to raise someone who the subject of a test, since you'll probably at least need them to be able to describe things to you.
I'm majorly into neural interfaces and have heard about these kinds of ideas. One was to place an electrode array on the person's tongue with 64, or something like that, contact on it that were hooked up to a CCD. The person could just about make out movement and things like that but the level of resolution was terrible, enough that they'd still qualify as blind even with it. I think they were trying to make the point that the people could visualise what was happening to some extent, not just feel it... but that's loose ground.
Here's an article about a blinded guy with an outline like view provided by a replacement eye...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/606938.stm
There's a big conference thing in the US based around neural interfacing that I hope to attend this year. But it means flying all the way over from the UK, which is pretty extreme consider it's not my job and I'm not actually a student.
With the insect retina and UV, the reason they don't get UV burns will just be different absorbers as the light harvesting complexes and / or pigments in the tissue it's self, just the same way that black people don't burn as easily as white people. I'm sure if we had super strength absorbers we could see gamma rays (I'm getting pictures of someone looking at the sun through binoculars and light shining out the back of their head

).
I dream in colour. Dreams are highly focused for me, I expect they are for a lot of people. That the things we remember are only really the points that we were directly paying attention to.
I've experimented with lucid dreaming a little. The best way I've found to have lucid dreams is just to stay in bed for 12 hours plus. After about 9 or 10 you'll start waking up every 30 to 60 minutes and this process of constantly drifting into and out of sleep seems like the easiest way to catch a dream in your memory. I remember one very clear dream in which I did notice something happening away from the focus of the dream and it was two or three people standing beside me, on the edge of my view. Parts of the people were a.) missing b.) not fully formed c.) constantly reforming and 'defining' themselves d.) flickering a little or blurred somehow, distorted. As an example, I could see someone's head but their face didn't really have a photographic quality to it, it was just roughly right and changed a bit as time went by. This I attribute to my not having actually seen these people in reality, or if I did, not paying much attention to them. As a result, my brain is lacking the information to spontaneously draw an exact copy of them (I doubt it can do this even with people we know very well), so I was seeing a rough representation of what a person should look like.
I feel kind of lucky to have seen that happening. I think I've seen it in other dreams as well. It's almost like my mind's view of things while I'm up and about, that it's approximately what things look like and only collecting information about the interesting parts of my sensory experience. Even though pieces of these people seemed wrong or missing, while other bits seemed more correct, I could still identify them as people.
I've also had at least one dream in which I very specifically got the feeling that I was dreaming. I was standing in a shopping center and it started to rain, and it seemed wrong. Although, that could just be like an April shower, when it's sunny and then starts to rain for no particular reason (a speciality of the UK), usually producing a similar feeling. I woke up about 5 - 10s later (in dream time).
Danger said:
It just seems to me that due to the nature of such things, you wouldn't be able to excercise the kind of control over signal processing that you mention.
I would agree that'd be nice if it occurred in a more controllable manner, that we could just mess around with specific fragments of our consciousness to see what happened. But there isn't much out there that will allow that due to the very fact that our brain uses only a handful of neurotransmitters for everything it does.
I'm not trying to say that tripping is a great idea for kids to try out or that it's the correct way to conduct scientific experiments, but just that the different view it gives you of the world can help you understand or learn a bit more about yourself (that sounds very hippyesque). For example, whilst tripping, an otherwise boring and none descript object will have some property of it changed, and it suddenly becomes something you take notice of. The flipside of this, when not tripping, is that bright advertisements grab our attention more than dull ones. It's just like the other side of the coin, I can take something totally unworthy of my attention and it instantly becomes interesting because some change in it's normal attributes has made it unique to my memory (It's as if my memory recognises the object, loads my memory of it, compares it to what I'm experiencing and grants it a level of wothyness for further investigation based on the amount of difference between the two). For me, something like that rams home the point (real hard) that our brains have huge amounts of compression and multiplexing on their input before they ever reach our conscious level. It's the kind of structure that any well designed system that has to operate in a dynamic environment utilises. We don't need to be paying attention to most of what we experience to get by in normal life.
Hallucinogens are in a totally different domain to other drugs. I would go as far as to say they're almost not comparable. They produce artificial changes in your body, but that's about where the similarities stop for me (and most other trippers). I'm happy to eat magic mushrooms but would never bother with things like extacy or any of the equally horrible junk you get in clubs.