I agree that the difference between being happy and merely thinking you’re happy is trifling/absurd, but the OP mentioned schizophrenics, not sad people.
The difference, OTOH, between having a good, rational grasp of external reality and merely thinking you have a good, rational grasp of external reality is potentially vast and significant.
This might be because ‘potheads’ are a self-selecting group. There are a number of people for whom smoking definitely causes hallucinations, paranoia, and other (potentially) ‘uncomfortable’ effects. These people generally don’t do it again. They may be a majority. It could also be a function of strength, quantity, ingestion etc - Amsterdam ‘spacecakes’ sometimes take even seasoned smokers a lot further from home than they expected.
As regards the schizophrenia angle, what I’ve seen matches more or less with Ichbin Dubist’s comments - I’ve seen a few diagnosed schizophrenics become very ‘symptomatic’ when they smoke - acting wild, talking to trees etc - and yet they continued to smoke, so presumably they found that condition subjectively more desirable than their functioning medicated state. Another interpretation might be to see the choice to smoke at a given time as symptomatic of a crisis coming on, rather than causal, or even simply an irrational decision. Boredom, desire for control etc may also be factors, as opposed to ‘pleasure’. Also agree that alcohol and some other drugs can produce similar results.
I have hallucinated a couple of times on weed. A particularly notable time was when I drank a quarter ounce of oily buds mashed up in yogurt.
never had ANY cool hallucinations when smoking weed. the only thing i expereinced was a lot of laughing (everything seemed funny), and tremendous apaetite (I once devoured a can of cold dinty moore beef stew-that stuff resmbles dog food)!
Can you describe the faculty by which one can accurately mark the distinction?
It’s been many years since I did any research, and there have been other studies released recently that purportedly show that pot is a lot stronger now than it was during my research 30 years ago.
I never hallucinated. Except for that one time when I’m sure it was laced with PCP. Seriously, anything with a sharp edge started melting. I remember clearly saying “hey guys, I’m gonna go outside and chill for a while.” Being the kind of caring humans they were, they did come out to check to see if I was going to eat the Chicken Supreme from Burger King, and were quite overjoyed when I gave up my rights to the chow.
I did 'shrooms a couple of times. Really enjoyed it. Nice colors, giggly, lots of fun, low key, but not hallucinations.
I suppose the distinction is drawn by the comparison to, and correlation with, actual reality - and of course, I realise that is only accessible through perception, which makes the proposal somewhat problematic, however without some kind of baseline, we can’t even define things like ‘hallucination’ and ‘delusion’.
And which is a matter of functionality. But how does that interfere with the (im)possibility of “knowing actual reality”?
See…this brings me back to the “what’s a hallucination?” question. I hear “nice colors”, I think “hallucination”. (My experience with shrooms was that it was very much like good weed, minus the lethargy. I felt just so awake and happy and high, whereas pot inevitably makes me sleepy.)
I hear *auditory *hallucinations on weed all the time - either that or the faeries really are singing and no one else can hear it. But they’re faint and go away when I try to concentrate on them. And peoples’ faces tend to morph into other people - playing “name that actor” when I’m high is useless, because I can make the actor’s face change into anyone I think of. If I’m only pleasantly high, I can turn that feature off, but if I’m really baked, I can’t. But I don’t see or feel anything out of nothing.
I did have some THC extract - thick goopy sticky stuff that had been extracted via acetone in a lab. That made me see things strangely - not melting trees or dragons, but things looked sort of pixellated, and when I closed my eyes, I still saw some pretty cool 16-bit graphics that moved and morphed on the back of my eyelids. But I think that was a function of the dose - I’ve never been able to ingest that much THC at once through smoking or eating magic brownies before simply throwing up and going to sleep.
I’ve gotten a little paranoid at times, but it’s never anything I’d call psychotic. It was all very internal and quiet, and as I have a diagnosed anxiety disorder, it’s probably muddying the waters to automatically attribute any paranoid feelings to pot. It happens more often when I’m *not *smoking.
You’ve completely lost me now. My original point was that, if you want to know whether someone - who has been diagnosed as suffering an illness characterised by delusion - is experiencing heightened or diminished levels of delusion, their opinion on the matter cannot possibly be treated as reliable.
Let’s just say I didn’t get it off the streets and leave it at that.
None. That’s my point.
Dude, if you hear colors, that’s pretty much a hallucination 
My point was, and is, that in order to accurately diagnose someone as delusional, one has to accurately perceive “actual reality”. Claiming that a schizophrenic’s judgments are delusional, begs the question of one’s own self.
Sure, from a purely philosophical standpoint, yes, but I don’t think you’ll be able to dismantle or restructure the whole system of mental health on that basis. It simply doesn’t work if you try to apply it to more than one case. That the vast majority of us perceive a largely agreed reality must count for something.
“Hey, what if we’re delusional and the schizophrenics are really right” is a stoner discussion in itself.
You funny guy!
But, for the record, I meant that when I “hear” (or “read”, to be utterly pedantic) China Guy report “nice colors”, I assume he’s talking about mild hallucinations. Yet lots of people are expecting dragons and melting trees and shit, and so don’t think that the extra sparkly lights shooting off beams of color are hallucinations. I think they might be, but I admit they’re questionable, and not nearly as fun and satisfying as I imagine a “real” hallucination of a sphinx riding a whale, or even better, a shoehorn butterhorse, must be. I’ve never achieved that level of hallucination, under pot, LSD (only done once), 'shrooms, E, alcohol or meditation. Ketamine was closer, but I didn’t take that on purpose, and was mostly terrified and trying to make it stop, so I didn’t get a chance to explore and enjoy the ride.
So my questioning what’s a hallucination isn’t suggesting that the schizophrenics are seeing reality and we’re all delusional. It’s simply questioning whether low level effects like making colors seem more vibrant or lights more sparkly are hallucinations (in which case I think a lot of people “hallucinate” with weed) or if they’re something else terribly mundane - like dry eyes affecting vision. It’s not philosphy, it’s asking for a clearer definition of terms as used in these studies.
Although it’s true to say that no-one will objectively perceive ‘actual reality’, to be pragmatic we can still compare a schizophrenic’s perception of reality to the consensus of the normal majority and consider it deluded. Strictly speaking you would be right to say that all of our perceptions of the world are to a greater or lesser degree delusional, but that would make the concept of ‘delusion’ a redundant one.
(on edit I realise that Mangetout’s post makes mine redundant…)
Hmmm. Then color me confused by your statement:
As I see it, you don’t know that, and can’t say it, since this large agreement is also perceived within your mind.
That’s only because certain psychoactive drugs are the most easily accessible instruments for mind-alteration. And it’s mind-alteration that removes the arrogance of self-perceived naive realism.
But let me point out what’s particularly troublesome about this study. As per naive realism, the stimuli of visual perception enjoy shared access i.e. the brown table physically exists ‘out there’ and hence if 100 people report seeing a brown table and 2 people report a green chair in its place, then we call those 2 delusional. However, as per the same conventional realism, emotions i.e. affect are privileged to its subject (and hence certain visual and auditory signatures have to be treated as proxies i.e. blushing, shouting…etc). The (lead) author of this study, on which I’m trying to find concrete details, is asserting on matters of the subjects’ affect. That is more troublesome, even within the confines of naive realism.
OK, go ahead and suggest a practical alternative.
Except, what if you’re writing in a different language that I only happen to perceive as English, and in fact all of the above post isn’t really picking apart the nature of reality and perception, but is in fact just a recipe for tripe and onions?
My stance is functionalist, as I outlined in a recent GD thread on the ‘problem of induction’.
However, you seem to miss the point going by your reply. Again, you are bringing up a functional objection (“practical alternative” i.e. something that ‘works’) and yet the current stance is to deign to define “actual/objective reality”, Ironically, in the second study, some subjects’ testimony of what they report as working for them is deemed delusional. Can I be sure that my “practical alternative” won’t be delusionally judged by you as impractical? :dubious: