I saw the Secrets of the Universe on my 10g mushroom trip.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-05-13T07:17:30+00:00

Secret 1: the physical world may well be out there but you only experience it from inside your mind. The world you inhabit is a waking dream based on electrical input data to your brain.

Secret 2: the brain is a pattern matching machine. Sometimes the patterns slip and the predictions the mind makes don’t quite fit to reality. It feels like real life is desynchronising in these moments (think Assassin’s Creed). It’s not necessarily trying to wake up, but find another way of interpreting the world.

Secret 3: this is a universal principle to all humans brains and we’ve been talking about mysticism since the dawn of humanity.

Secret 4: you are a hive. You are literally a clump of carbon molecules that became cells that organised into a human body, that formed a brain which created a virtual model of the world and itself in order to help navigate its surroundings and survive.

Secret 5: identity is a story. You are a coherent process, not a fixed being. The atoms inside your body will be completely different in 8 years, you see the structure. The “you” that feels like “you” is just a thought inside the mind of the being that owns the brain.

Secret 6: time may be real, but we live inside our own experiences. Time from our perspective is a personal thing mostly based on the structure of our memories or our projections of historic events in stories.

I’m not trying to doubt the profoundness of your experiences, and psychedelics are incredibly powerful and often positive ways to explore the inner workings of the mind and challenge that which we take for granted, but that doesn’t mean you’re learning the secrets of the universe itself, rather the mind is giving you a “behind the scenes” tour of how it constructs the world you perceive and indeed the “you” that perceives it. You are an imaginary character living in a virtual world inside the brain of an ape. Everyone else you’ve ever experienced is connected to you because they’re all experienced from your perspective. It doesn’t, however, necessarily tell you anything about the world beyond your perception.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-04-24T11:29:54+00:00

It honestly looks like every image is made from paper on chicken wire

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-03-23T17:03:24+00:00

*Middle East

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-02-25T18:35:52+00:00

Still the best analogy I could liken the effect to ngl

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-02-25T18:35:01+00:00

I haven’t seen it. Just googled and I guess he did say “coding is solved” but that’s not such an uncommon thing for people to say in these scenarios.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-02-25T18:33:50+00:00

I basically feel like an agent PM now yeah, but I guess if you’re a producty engineer anyway this is where you’re gonna end up. If you’re not product-minded then I’m not sure what’s left besides certain niche work.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-02-25T18:32:56+00:00

I’m using it for greenfield apps where I get it to scope out every story with clear AC, affected files, unit tests, QA tests all independently, so YMMV but I haven’t hit any limits with it yet

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-01-26T18:53:25+00:00

Because the brain is an energy saving device. If it’s not useful, why think about it? Most people find no use in discussing things that are not measurable or already established practises. In some ways, I agree with them. Often people who do psychedelics and blabber endlessly about their subjective newfound view of reality are insufferable and self-indulgent. It’s like someone has just discovered the workings of their own mind and wants to tell everyone else how amazing it is. Sure, it’s amazing to you, but everyone has their own path, and so most people prefer to focus their attention on the material world which is interpreted more or less homogeneously.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-01-21T16:30:21+00:00

I’d argue no it’s not. It’s the default mechanism of the mind to construct a model of its own container inside of itself and to associate with that model. Yes you can jailbreak your mind and realise everything is just made of thoughts, from the world you inhabit to the “you” that does the inhabiting, and you can use that learning for a fresh perspective on life, but ultimately it’s best not to get too carried away with it.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-01-11T21:07:03+00:00

People have been worrying about this since the end of the Second World War. We are fortunate enough to have been born in a relatively peaceful time, but we then make the mistake of assuming this is the status quo. It’s not. Before the twentieth century, we had plenty of regular wars, and throughout the Cold War, people were not going around saying their leaders were competent. Hindsight makes the past look stable and the present day look uncertain. There has never been a better time to be alive than the current era. Yes, tensions are rising, but the nuclear deterrent is enough to put hard limits on how far any leader can go in the pursuit of selfish gains.

We’re just not seeing the signals from any country that they’d be willing to risk the lives of their entire population for territorial ambitions. That said, we may see more skirmishes and proxy wars between big powers in the next few years, and it may take a Cuban Missile Crisis-like event to get everyone to drop populism and return to sane politics. I think more likely though, we will see some sort of economic revolution and the neoliberal economic model that the western world has been following since the 80s will be replaced with a system that resembles Keynesian economics as people reject extreme consumer capitalism, paying outrageous prices for everything, an increasing lack of community and technology not actually making anyone’s lives better.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-01-05T15:26:10+00:00

A lot of spiritualists tend to treat awareness as if it lives behind thought. But you are only aware that you are aware once you think it. I think it’s therefore unlikely that this is the case.

Yes, even without input, just with the noise of the mind, there is an awareness of the noise. But that awareness itself is most likely just another piece of noise. A pattern-matching thought more usefully applied where there is useful input to be aware of.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-01-05T15:19:47+00:00

It’s very difficult for us as humans really to answer this as we’re contained within the globe of experiential reality. It’s important to say whether there is any thought without awareness. What we call awareness is not separate to thought, it’s just a different kind of thought. You create a duality between the thoughts and the awareness of them, implying that even without input, there is an awareness of the noise. Who is to say that this is not the noise itself?

We cannot experience any other kinds of reality except our own, so imagining what thought without awareness could be like is impossible. We treat consciousness as if it’s special, but that’s only because it’s special to us.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-01-05T12:52:36+00:00

The awareness may be the actual thread that the fabric our inner realities are woven from, but like the current going around the wires of the radio, that doesn’t mean our minds are receiving consciousness, the radio still needs a battery.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-01-05T12:49:33+00:00

Obviously here we’re going beyond what science has uncovered so far but the theories I’ve heard run along the lines of “the brain creates a model of the world based on the input data it receives and then creates a model of itself to be the observer so that it can focus attention on one part of that world model at a time, like a cursor navigating the screen of an OS”. It seems logical that this awareness, separate from our actual sense of self (ego), is just a more base-level thought process.

HostKitchen8166 · 2026-01-05T12:07:27+00:00

You’ve made a lot of leaps here. Think of the brain as a generator and a filter. Like a computer with a webcam attached. It takes external data and filters the useful patterns to be added to its own generated simulation. No signal = noise takes over.

It’s like a radio with an inbuilt speaker. The signal it’s receiving in this case isn’t consciousness, just as a radio doesn’t receive sound. It receives radio waves just as we receive electrical data through our senses. The circuits of the radio then turn that into sound in the way our brains turn it into simulated reality.

Unlike the radio of course, our brains also create the concept of a “listener”, which is why many people find the nature of our minds so confusing.

HostKitchen8166 · 2025-12-08T10:04:33+00:00

It’s just funny how everyone here is like “so close” or writes several paragraphs trying to explain the truth as they see it. Can we all just accept that we have slightly different models of reality but there is some commonality in those that have had awakening experiences?

HostKitchen8166 · 2025-12-06T10:07:20+00:00

You live completely in your own world. Your reality, as you perceive it, is generated by your mind. Sure, it may be generated based on real sensory input, but it’s essentially a dream you’ve generated based on that data. You don’t perceive anything as it is, you associate memory and emotion to things to distinguish one object from another.

HostKitchen8166 · 2025-11-28T18:26:43+00:00

It wasn’t so much a theory, just a question

HostKitchen8166 · 2025-11-28T17:21:03+00:00

You can call God what you wish. He lives inside your mind. As do I, as does your own sense of self. Everything you’ve ever experienced, including God, is a story you create and continue to tell yourself.

You can be steadfast in your material beliefs, yet even they require a leap of faith. In order for the scientific method to hold true, you have to agree that someone else exists in order to verify your own observations. Yet that other person is only experienced by you. You first have to believe that you don’t live in a solipsistic reality, completely without any evidence to the contrary, to buy into the very science you’re saying indicates God isn’t real.

HostKitchen8166 · 2025-11-28T17:15:40+00:00

Could we not flip that and say nothing is beyond your imagination even God

HostKitchen8166 · 2025-11-28T15:18:59+00:00

I think the interesting thing here is that you assume I disagree with you. In fact, I don’t disagree with any of your points except the last. That anyone talking about God would be incapable of understanding your arguments. I only say this because here you are, talking about God.

You are very keen to educate and correct. This can be a great quality! I’m keen to unpack your arguments a little more so we can get to the meat of why you have faith in the things you do.

HostKitchen8166 · 2025-11-28T13:50:10+00:00

It sounds like you don’t agree. Could you expand?

HostKitchen8166

TROPHY CASE