“They’re really amazing, spine-tingling ideas,” says Robin Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College, London. “But, you know, arguably they’re bullshit.”

"Carhart-Harris hopes to show that an encounter with an entity may show a similar pattern of brain activity to an encounter with a person."

It seems that anyone these days can get a Dr title....

I hope the doctor himself will be dosing as well. Lol

Robin does good work, the ridicule in this thread seems misplaced.



This seems as good a place to start as any when your tools consist of brain-monitoring instruments. Even if they show that the encounter has a similar pattern of activity, it still only gives so much information. If you can identify the parts of a radio that conduct the audio signal to the speaker, you still haven't learned anything about the source of transmission. And yet, if that's the best your tools can perform at the moment, what more can you do? Does that not still provide some interesting data?

indeed.

There once was a rabbi who said "god cannot contradict science".
Aum_shanti basically said the same thing in another thread, when he mentioned the fact that ANY spiritual belief will have to contain the material world as a subset.
And that is ofcourse true, regardless of how deep your belief is.

Anyway, machine elves can't realy expect to do any better than god, in this regard.

And as snozz said, none of this shows that they don't realy exist.

A biased Dr is not a good Dr... especially NOT when you conducting these kind of experiments with real people...Simple as that!

Bias:
“They’re really amazing, spine-tingling ideas,” says Robin Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College, London. “But, you know, arguably they’re bullshit.”

He should!! haha

I would submit that the seemingly dismissive attitude can be attributed to the writer rather than the scientists. It seems unnecessary, and a bit puzzling.

So if the fMRI imaging of encounters with "machine elves" turns out to be similar to encounters with humans, wouldn't the reasonable conclusion be that both is a reaction to encountering a physical separate entity?

That's a good question. But it's probably not going to be exactly the same kind of brain activity. If you visualise doing something, then there will also be an overlap between the brain-activity of the visualised act, and the actual act.
The differences in brain activity are probably as interesting to these researchers, as the overlap.

not really.

in this particular case a accusations of bias are elementary schoolboy accusations. the point being schoolboy's context that limits his perception of the world is just that, very limiting indeed. it's not at all that his context is so vast that there is any substance worth careful consideration behind such accusations. not at all.

Eaglepath makes a valid point. More importantly, there is absolutely no way an FMRI will show machine elves. I wonder how much tax money will be wasted "proving the bullsh!t" (my quote) when it is impossible with the current methods.

I don't think these people are looking for machine-elves or pictures of machine-elves.

One thing they could be looking for, is for instance activity in the 'error-detection module' of the brain. If activity in this area of the brain is low, you could expect hallucinations to feel more 'real', for instance.

Maybe the effects of DMT on the error detection module, is greater in people who believe that machine-elves are real. I think such a discovery would be interesting.

It still wouldn't prove ofcourse, that machine-elves don't exist. But then again, i don't think that has ever been the point.

Judging from the article, the hypothesis of the research team is that "visiting spirit realms" inhabited by "entities" is "pseudoscientific".

IMO they have no way of telling from fMRI.

Also that's quite frankly not the field of psychology, but physics. So the first step would be for a theoretical physicists to figure out how psychedelic experience could relate to things like quantum mechanics, quantum computing, higher dimensional physics, fractal and sacred geometry, electro-magnetic fields and how all of this could relate to consciousness and neuronal networks.
Then, based on the theory find experimental ways to test emerging hypothesis.
But because professional science has a hardcore materialistic bias, we will probably have to wait for a pretty long time for this to happen.

I guess the research team just feels the pressure of this materialistic bias and forces it into their research to not loose face with their academic peers.

So the scientists doing the pioneering research on psychedelics that we desperately need are skeptical of the belief that dmt is a tool that allows for "trans-dimensional travel", and somehow that's crazy or shows that these scientists are biased?
I guess a non-biased scientist would just accept the idea on faith


Robin and his colleagues are doing amazing research, and the fact that they are staying away from exotic and unsupported claims like the ones Strassman made in his work (which, claims aside, is still incredibly valuable) is actually a good thing and will only increase the likelihood that psychedelic research will be taken seriously.

The thing is, arguably, they ARE bullshit ideas. So I don't really get what you're on about. You seem to be insinuating by not signing on to these ideas and allowing for the possibility that as exciting as they are, they could be completely wrong, that somehow presents unacceptable experimental bias.

The fact that you see that as "bias" is silly, imo. When it comes to unpacking the experiential phenomenology of DMT (and other psychedelics) there's such a massive quantity of unknowns and anecdotal assertions based in "woo" that making assertions of "spine-tingling ideas" without acknowledging the likelihood that at least a portion of them are utter garbage would be less rational than the statement you seem to take offense with.

With regards to claims of bias, I'll just point out that you're talking about the "head of psychedelic research" at the Imperial College. In addition to presenting fascinating (if arguably reductionist) insights and dicoveries in recent years, the IC team has also been quite supportive of the CRP efforts here.

First wired magazine, next the journal of nature. Regardless of result this is good stuff

Calling a theory, any theory, bullsh!t prior to completing a thorough study of that theory is absolutely a sign of bias. I'm sure the scientist in question has done great work but he clearly is demonstrating bias to conform with the prevailing OPINION.

I'm not aware that Strassman actually made any quantitative or qualitative claims regarding anything but physiological responses. As I understand it, that is why he quit the study. It was not designed for any data sets other than physiological parameters.

(please correct me if I am wrong, I'm not an accredited scientist in any field)

Ok, so there are a few things going on here.

1) You are misreading the quote and ultimately creating a strawman. Nowhere did Robin say that these ideas ARE bullshit. He said they are ARGUABLY bullshit. He's not stating it as an absolute, but as an allowable reality. In fact, if you read through the article closely, it doesn't appear that he makes ANY concrete assertions about the "truth" of the matter. Throughout the piece his statements are qualified with allowances of possibilities, potential flaws in hypotheses/approach, etc.

So, we are not so much seeing Robin's biases as much as those of the readers screaming "BIAS," imo.

2) The "theories" you claim he is calling bullshit are literally "intuitive theories that the entities were evidence of alien life, or that DMT facilitated trans-dimensional travel." Neither of these "theories" are scientific theories. They are simply Mckenna's personal theories based on psychedelic experiences. There is a categorical difference between a scientific theory and this type of assertion, so when you claim "Calling a theory, any theory, bullsh!t prior to completing a thorough study of that theory," this is ultimately nonsense, as no scientific evidence has been provided to support any of Mckenna's "theories" and they're only really theories in the colloquial sense.

Ultimately, it's a category error to say that Robin can't dismiss Mckenna's theories without rigorous scientific effort as there was no rigorous scientific effort that went into forming them!

3) No one is objective. That's the nature of existence. Robin and his team have their own pet theories, just as much as other researchers have theirs. Having an opinion does not mean your research is biased. Again, he acknowledges that his approach is not perfect:



You can disbelieve THEORY A and design an unbiased scientific experiment to test the validity of THEORY A. If your experiment shows that THEORY A is correct (or incorrect) your personal beliefs don't matter, as the experiment's bias is what matters, not your personal opinions. This is part of the beauty of the scientific method.

So until they've actually carried out their methodology, you're really hard-pressed to cite bias. And as I've already stated, this seems more about the beliefs of the readers than anything Robin's said or done...

Lol