Uh, sure they can: he saw an opportunity where he could make a difference and bring a program to light where the NSA was otherwise blatantly lying to Congress and the American people, and he took it.

There is nothing he can or could do to stop the invasion of Ukraine.

Which is to say, he didn't merely oppose US crimes. He brought them to light. Everyone already knows about Ukraine.

Of course, it's different these days. These days they'd just kill Snowden. And Mark Klein, for that matter.

And it's quickly becoming the status quo.

They really don't ever let a disaster go to waste, do they?

I think a common error is that people forget the "most" in this sentence. It is a very important word. It's not even that only profitable investments will get funded: even profitable projects might get left on the cutting room floor if they are competing for resources with projects that will generate, or are believed to generate, higher ROI.

And this maybe isn't a problem if higher ROI == better than. But to believe that, you have to also believe that enshittification is a thing that happens in spite of being less profitable (or unprofitable), which for me at least is a hard sell.

I don't think that's the claim being made. FWIW I've done psychedelics as well, and I've had "natural" hallucinations (sleep paralysis). I don't think that those experiences were "meaningless" (well, maybe the sleep paralysis mostly was) but neither do I think they allowed me to tap into some new physics or something.

To me, the fact that having these experiences requires me to change my brain, first and only then can I have them, with the experience not persisting after I leave the psychedelic state, suggests that the experience is a function of what's going on in my brain rather than some enhanced perception of reality. I say this, because it seems unlikely that there are physical properties of the universe that are only measurable by a human brain and only in a very specific state. Put another way: if some eldritch knowledge were revealed to me in a psychedelic state, I would expect it to be verifiable outside of a psychedelic state, even if by some other means.

The same goes for certain mental illnesses, by the way. If a brain is operating differently, then it seems reasonable that it will have a different perception of reality. But, importantly, if that perception of reality can only affect them or be affected by them then even if I accept it as "real" I can't tap into it - they may as well be living a parallel universe with different physical laws. But if you ask me which is more likely: that some people just exist partially in a parallel universe with different physical laws, or that some people just think that (wrongly) because of some quirk of perception and cognitive function, then even if I don't have a full picture of all the facts I'm going with the latter.

And that seems reasonable: you and another poster seem to think I'm wrong for assigning probabilities without a full picture of the facts. But I can do that with a partial picture of the facts as well: humans do this all the time and it works quite well for us.

> But you change certain chemicals in the brain, and people start seeing roughly the same things? That doesn’t sound like a hallucination to me. I don’t understand how hallucinations between different people, caused by different origins, have roughly similar effects, across populations.

I think a lot of people have a mistaken notion that the human brain starts out as a completely blank slate. On the contrary much of our behavior is hard-coded, like any other animal. It doesn't seem far-fetched to me that there would be realms of human experience that cut across cultural boundaries. If anything, the opposite would be more surprising.

  To me "I don't know" is pretty close to "didn't happen" anyway. I mean we will even say "hmm, I don't know about that" to indicate skepticism.

  I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.

At any rate, you're being oddly hostile toward me about all of this and it's getting on my nerves so I'll be ignoring your posts in this thread going forward. Thanks.

> This is obviously an inadequate explanation for the parent's complex ongoing saga so it doesn't add much

Sorry but I am not going to copy/paste hundreds of paragraphs of literature from neural science journals in order to give a comprehensive analysis of what OP experienced. Especially since, based on their other comments in this thread, they aren't terribly interested in that sort of explanation anyway.

At any rate, the compelling explanation you think we won't have for centuries in the future, we literally already have. You just don't like it because it's not mystical enough for you. You accuse me of dismissing people's experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

You accuse me of dismissing your experience while dismissing the experiences of hundreds of researchers who have documented and studied this sort of thing for years.

I suppose you are picturing someone who is obstinately refusing to believe or even investigate a claim, but when I hear "null hypothesis" it's really just "you haven't given me any reason to believe this." And that's not quite the same as "I don't know" but it's not that far off either, is it? Maybe it's just me.

It is not remotely a stretch to attribute "I recognized this woman's voice as someone else's voice" as just a run-of-the-mill fault of perception and memory. Especially when the alternative at hand is apparently something supernatural (or, at least, new physics).

Can you elaborate? I tried to keep a neutral tone.

She didn't actually do it, or at least she didn't do it to the degree that you think she did. Instead, you had an intense enough experience that your memories of the tone, cadence, and choice of words of your voice, were altered after the fact.

(Human) memory is extremely unreliable.