New research : "LSD flattens the brain's energy landscape"

[MaartenV]

There is a new study, not yet peer reviewed, about LSD and the brain.

The title: "LSD flattens the brain’s energy landscape: evidence from receptor-informed network control theory"

The second part of the title is an interpretation from their network theory. Which is an unproven theory. It's the materialistic hypothesis
of the researchers who do not know what's going on in the brain: a flattening of the energy landscape in the whole brain???

The filter theory of consciousness could explain it much better.

Read everything about it here:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101 ... IZszgEVIdA

[Jim Cross]

Actually the REBUS theory that is the topic of paper is closely related to the filter theory.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/202 ... perception

“Normally, our thoughts and incoming information are filtered by our prior experience,” said Parker Singleton, a PhD candidate at Cornell University in New York. “But if you take that filtering and suppression away, you are looking at the world with new eyes. You get a totally new perspective.”

Singleton and his colleagues set out to test the so-called Rebus model of psychedelics. Standing for “relaxed beliefs under psychedelics”, it frames the brain as a prediction engine. Under the model, the brain takes thoughts and information from the senses and shapes them according to its understanding of the world. This makes the brain highly efficient: armed with prior beliefs, the noise and uncertainty of perception and thought are swiftly hammered into coherent reality.

But the brain works differently on psychedelics. According to Rebus, substances such as LSD weaken the influence of prior beliefs that the brain uses to make sense of the world. In one sense, the drugs rewind the brain’s clock to a time before it learned that walls tend not to move and furniture is rarely threatening.

[MaartenV]

this REBUS theory is far from the filter theory as meant by Aldous Huxley and others. It's about filtering out cosmic consciousness by a brain to be able to survive. I don't think REBUS theory is trying to say that.

[Jim Cross]

this REBUS theory is far from the filter theory as meant by Aldous Huxley and others. It's about filtering out cosmic consciousness by a brain to be able to survive. I don't think REBUS theory is trying to say that.

Pretty much the same in my view. REBUS also aligns with Friston's free energy theories, also discussed in paper, and with the Markov blankets that BK talks about when discussing his diagram showing the alter and external world.

The boundary of an alter is thus akin to a Markov Blanket [Pearl,
1988]. For this reason, and inspired by Friston’s model [Friston, 2013], I shall represent the
interaction of an alter with its surrounding mental environment

http://ispcjournal.org/journals/2017-19/Kastrup_19.pdf

[MaartenV]

I would like you to explain in a bit more detail why you think the REBUS theory is pretty much the same as the filter theory. That intruiges me.
As far as I understand it, the REBUS model says that psychedelics open the path to new information because we relax the constrains of our beliefs and ideas about the world. But does it say that psychedelics open the doors of perception to a cosmic truth? A higher truth then what we experience daily? A realm where we go to when we die? That's what I think that the filter theory says.

[Jim Cross]

I would like you to explain in a bit more detail why you think the REBUS theory is pretty much the same as the filter theory. That intruiges me.
As far as I understand it, the REBUS model says that psychedelics open the path to new information because we relax the constrains of our beliefs and ideas about the world. But does it say that psychedelics open the doors of perception to a cosmic truth? A higher truth then what we experience daily? A realm where we go to when we die? That's what I think that the filter theory says.

You're hopeless. Even when science suggests some of your ideas might have some basis in reality, you reject it because materialism.

You might as well not even bother to cite anything of a scientific nature if you expect it to prove some "cosmic truth", whatever that is.

REBUS as you state says "that psychedelics open the path to new information because we relax the constrains of our beliefs and ideas about the world". Our belief and ideas about the world are the reducing valve, the filtration mechanism, that blocks information. Psychedelics loosen the valve. They loosen the dissociative boundary in Bernardo's terms.

If you think psychedelics provide some sort of cosmic truth, I don't think even Huxley would agree with you. The best they might do is provide a glimpse of something but the something is more likely in your imagination and mindset than reality.

[MaartenV]

REBUS as you state says "that psychedelics open the path to new information because we relax the constrains of our beliefs and ideas about the world". Our belief and ideas about the world are the reducing valve, the filtration mechanism, that blocks information. Psychedelics loosen the valve. They loosen the dissociative boundary in Bernardo's terms.

In my opinon, you have to give some more arguments to proof that 'loosing the constrains of our beliefs and ideas about the world" is equal to "loosen the dissociative bounderary in Bernardo's terms. Is it really the same? And does it state that after we die we will keep experiencing this 'Mind at Large'?

If the two theories were almost the same, then Bernardo Kastrup would mention that in his writings, that the REBUS theory is confirming philosophical idealism; He doesn't do that.