Hey everyone, I’m looking for books that are psychedelic in the sense of being mind-expanding, perception-altering, or challenging the reader’s sense of reality, rather than involving drug use.I’m fascinated by stories that explore:Alternate realities or shifting timelinesSurreal, dreamlike narrativesCosmic or existential themesEspecially stories about characters questioning the nature of reality or identitySome authors/books I already love in this style:Philip K. Dick (Ubik, VALIS, Eye in the Sky)The Book of the New Sun by Gene WolfeThe Master and Margarita by BulgakovI’d love recommendations for other novels, short stories, or series that provide a similar “psychedelic” experience without involving drugs. Thanks in advance!
>>24929478>he who has not mastered the Kantian philosophy, whatever else he may have studied, is, as it were, in a state of innocence; that is to say, he remains in the grasp of that natural and childish realism in which we are all born, and which fits us for everything possible, with the single exception of philosophy. Such a man then stands to the man who knows the Kantian philosophy as a minor to a man of full age.
>>24929478VALIS and Ubik are pretty much peak psych writing imo. Also Burroughs (though often involving actual drugs too) for goofy psych and Ballard (Crash is super weird and psychedelic in exploring the topic where you wouldn't expect it). Dune God Emperor is psychedelic as hell too, and it turns out Herbert was hobbyist mycologist, aka shroomer, so he sporulated that stuff into all the Dune novels at least a bit.It may sound strange but Sebald is psychedelic in a weird way, the way he connects stories and memory and history and how he drifts from topic to topic, it's really like your mind wandering during a trip.Neuromancer is psychedelic too, it does have some drugs, but psychedelia is mostly from tech and Gibson's prose style.Babylon 17 I remember was also psychedelic but the weirdness comes from exploring an alien language (also shot like zero g wrestling matches in antigravity cages in futuristic dive bars and funny shit like that).If you want more grounded in reality, Pynchon is also very psychedelic - the weirdness, threads connecting out of nowhere, very strange flows...
Dion fortune is an actual occultist who wrote a number of fiction books. "The Sea Priestess" is a kabbalistic novel with descriptions of genuine outer body experiences
>>24929531She's great. Oh also I forgot Yeats. Red Hanrahan stories are so trippy it's insane.
This book covers all your list I think. It has passages in it which almost perfectly describe experiences I've had on LSD while not actually being about or featuring drugs at all.
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>>24929478The Hike
>>24929504Literally just elaborating Plato's Divided Line and Shadows.The only reason he was revolutionary was because moderns didn't read the Neoplatonists, post-kantian/German idealism can easily just as well be called neo-neoplatonism.
The word you're looking for is "profound" you're searching for a profound book.Psychedelic is an entire different description of distorted sensory perception that puts ordinary experiences into a new light.You don't want ordinary experiences in new light. You want profound insight into things you never considered.>known knownsComfort reading, slop etc>known unknownsResearch, history books on topics you find interesting etc>unknown knowsThis is the psychedelic experience, seeing things you're familiar with in a new light.>unknown unknownsThese are the profound experiences you're looking for and some of the best experiences you can have as a human. Some people are addicted to the profound and crave that feeling of finding out something new that completely changes how they view the world and everything within it. Sadly these become less common with age. My last profound experience was reading Claude Shannon's paper on prediction being equivalent to understanding written in the 1960s, because he wrote that if we ever made a computer that could predict the next word in a sentence we would create a machine that could truly think. Which of course has an insane implication now that we have those systems (LLMs) with a lot of people saying "they can't think they just predict the next word" even though it was proven in the 1960s that mathematically there is no difference between prediction and understanding. It changed how I viewed the world and the future of the universe.
>>24929478robert anton Wilson's Schrodinger's cat trilogy
>>24931652AI OverviewClaude Shannon explored the relationship between prediction and the underlying statistical structure of language in his 1951 paper, "Prediction and Entropy of Printed English". He did not claim that prediction is mathematically equivalent to understanding, but rather used human prediction experiments as a method to estimate the entropy and redundancy of a language. Shannon's Core IdeaIn his work on information theory, particularly the 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", Shannon deliberately excluded the "semantic aspects of communication" (meaning) from his mathematical framework, focusing purely on the statistical and engineering problems of transmitting signals reliably. He defined information in terms of uncertainty or surprise: a highly predictable message contains less information (lower entropy) than an unpredictable one. The Role of PredictionIn the 1951 paper, Shannon used human subjects to predict the next letter in a sequence of English text. The goal was to exploit the implicit "knowledge of the language statistics possessed by those who speak the language" to estimate English's true entropy rate. Prediction reveals redundancy: The better a person could predict the next letter, the more redundant the language was in that context. Redundancy is the amount of constraint or predictable pattern in a message.Entropy as a measure of unpredictability: The amount of actual information transmitted (entropy) is the measure of the remaining uncertainty after all predictable elements have been accounted for. Understanding vs. PredictionShannon's work highlights a sophisticated form of statistical prediction, which is central to modern AI and language models. However, the theory itself does not equate this predictive ability with human-level understanding of the content's meaning. Key distinctions:Information vs. Meaning: Shannon's theory measures the amount of information in a statistical sense (bits), not its subjective meaning or value to a human receiver.Statistical Patterns: A successful prediction model demonstrates a mastery of the statistical structure of a language (e.g., "Q is always followed by U") but doesn't necessarily "understand" the real-world concepts the language refers to. In summary, Shannon showed that a strong ability to predict language demonstrates a grasp of its statistical constraints (redundancy), allowing for efficient data compression. He did not, however, make a mathematical equivalence between this predictive capability and the human concept of "understanding."
>>24929478>I’d love recommendations for other novels, short stories, or series that provide a similar “psychedelic” experience without involving drugs. Thanks in advance!The novels of John Hawkes feel psychedelic but entirely removed from the world of drugs; I can't recommend them highly enough, especially his earlier works- a novel like The Cannibal, The Beetle Leg, The Lime Twig, or Second Skin might really do it for you. Hawkes was a very strange writer- radically anti-realist and experimental but in subtle ways that are hard to compare to anything else. The books I listed all kinda feel like nightmares, and easily satisfy>Alternate realities or shifting timelines&>Surreal, dreamlike narrativesbut not so much your next two criteria. For those check out Beckett's "How It Is", or his famous Trilogy if that interests you more. You also would like Under The Volcano. But for the feelings you describe, you might be better off reading philosophy, or even folklore.Or you could take the mathpill...
>>24931640read more
>>24929478She has a cool haircut
>>24931652>unknown knowsunironically Freud & Marx for that
>>24929478You'll never be the same after PKD
>>24932765no
>>24929478I guess Douglas Hofstadter's I Am Strange Loop qualifies
>>24932869He is so based
>>24929478
>>24931652Mind sharing more of these "profound" works you've experienced? Really enjoyed this >>24932132 one.
>>24931652>Psychedelic is an entire different description of distorted sensory perception that puts ordinary experiences into a new light.how do you know thats not what OP is looking for? Unless youre autistic, books can absolutely induce such an experience
the hill of dreams
>>24929478All the people giving you philosophy recs are blowing smoke out of their ass. Read Dostoyevsky. Really any book that embraces romanticism and has existential themes is good, but Dosto is the peak of this genre.
>>24933998malapropism aside, my point still stands
>>24929478Would
>>24931640Greeks never produced a transcendental deduction of categories so no
>>24929478That pic is giving me a philosophical awakening (realization) that anime girl is just a cat with human hair. Look at the resembalnce, the eyes, the head shape, the composition
>>24929478The Passion According to G.H.
>>24935756No anime girls simply exhibit similar features such as big eyes and childlike jaws as well as other underdeveloped/immature features. Some animals exhibit this too, mostly baby mammals. This is a well researched fact.
>>24929504This book gets defeated by this gif alone. Kant is a pure retard>t. PhD in physics
>>24929478>non-drugYou zoomers are such pussies. There is no revelation without risk.
>>24929478The Dalkey Archive, peak comfy weird Irish shit from the mid 60's
>>24937215what am i looking at?
>>24938229drug narratives normally force some gay fall or moralfagged epiphany, maybe i havent read enough, but it feels that way. oh wow, a descent into the uncontrollable? losing touch with reality? wow.
>>24929478Heidegger's Being and Time Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of NatureShantideva's Way of the BoddhisatvaSpinoza's Ethics Stirner's The Unique and Its PropertyLaozi's Tao Te Ching>>24938539Brownian motion Not sure how that is supposed to refute Kant though I also have a PhD in physics
>>24938581>>24938539I'm the anon I'll try to simply explain why I posted this, maybe I'm completely wrong. First the most important part of the book is the discussion about >Synthetic a prioriI just want to expose my understanding of the definitions that kant uses because I might be wrong already:By defining >Synthetic / AnalyticDoes a logic statement create new information (yes/no) Example :>SyntheticAll houses in the area are blueCreates new information by combining the colour and the houses in the area. You can contradict this without creating a paradox>AnalyticEvery house takes spaceDoesn't create new information. You can't contradict this without creating a paradox >posteriori / prioryDoes the logical statement need to be verified by experience or is universal and necessary>posterioriThe house next door is blue has to be verified at posteriori, I can't deduce it>prioryThe house next door takes space no need to check it I can deduce it, it has to be true >RSNow there are 3 possible categories of logical statements that we can deduce from this (actually more but they are useless, like analytic a posteriori) : >Analytic A Priori.It's definitions. >Synthetic A PosterioriCreates new knowledge but no certainty>Synthetic A Priori. Create guaranteed true knowledge through pure reflection. The whole idea of the book is to prove that the last category is not empty (because Kant was full of spite). Now here's my problem with the book : The examples he uses to prove his category is not empty aren't valid..>Example 11 + 2 = 3He argued that X + Y did not hide the concept of Z (Synthetic) and you didn't need to test it because it's always true by definition (a priory). This is just false and has been proved that 3 is actually hidden in the definition of 1 (Russell)>Example 2 (my Brownian motion meme)"Every event has a cause"He argued that this is a synthetic truth because the cause can't be deduced from the event (something can move from many reasons, observation of the movement can't give you the reason) and he argued that it's a priory because this is always true otherwise "what would a world look like if this rule were false" (he was a huge newton fan). >RSNow the problem I have is that it's been proved that fundamentally the universe events do not have a cause, like fundamental quantum noise, or the decay of radioactive particles, they just happen completely randomly, they don't need a cause, they are. Hence my Brownian motion meme, pseuds tend to have the argument of >everything is computable you just need a big enough computer because everything has a cause.But the 2022 Nobel actually proves this is wrong. So yeah, you can think about causality being the rule and you can convince yourself that what looks like pure noise can be causal (like Brownian noise), but it's false..He has 2 more examples that are also completely wrong and makes me think he's a +++pseud :>Conservation of mass>Space is Euclidean
>>24938973I took 1H to write this post I feel like I'll be dunked on by someone smarter in the minute
>>24931640You have never read Kant.
>>24938569I was proposing actual drugs, not drug narratives.
