Consensual validation

Change in communications with others — incongruities or altered patterns, consensual validation or lack of it... 

A recognition of the unreality of the detached observer in the psychological sciences is becoming widespread, under the topics of experimenter bias 55 and demand characteristics 45. A similar recognition long ago occurred in physics when it was realized that he observed was altered by the process of observation at subatomic levels, when we deal with d-ASCs where the observer is the experiencer of the d-ASC, this factor is of paramount importance. Not knowing the characteristics of the observer can also confound the process of consensual validation. 

The physicaliStic accretion to this rule of consensual validation is that, physical data being the only "real" data, internal phenomena must be reduced to physiological or behavioral data to become reliable or they will be ignored entirely. I believe most physical observations... 

Thus consensual validation may be restricted by the fact that only observers in the same d-ASC are able to communicate adequately to each other. Someone in a different d-SoC, say normal consciousness, might find their communication incomprehensible.f51... 

Another approach is to realize that this problem is not unique to d-ASCs. One can have illusions and misperceptions in the ordinary d-SoC. Before the rise of modern physical science, all sorts of things were imagined about the nature of the physical world that could not be directly refuted. The same techniques that eliminated these illusions in the physical sciences can also eliminate them in state-specific sciences dealing with nonphysical data. All observations must be subjected to consensual validation and all their theoretical consequences must be examined. Those that do not show consistent patterns and cannot be replicated can be distinguished from those phenomena that do show general lawfulness across individuals. 

The effects of this enhanced vividness of imagination in some d-ASCs will be complicated further by two other problems experimenter bias 45, 55 and the fact that one person s illusion in a given d-ASC can sometimes be communicated to another person in the same d-ASC so that a false consensual validation results. Again, the only long-term solution is the requirements that predictions based on concepts arising from various experiences be verified experientially. 

The content of the experience has an emotional richness that is profoundly deep, yet so positive that one must laugh aloud. Inevitably, the subjective richness, and the apparent self-coherence of the content of the tryptamine trance, leads those who experience it to wonder after its implications for modem humans. The idea of the simultaneous coexistence of an alien dimension all around us is as strange an idea in the context of modem society as it must have been to the first shamans, whose experiments with psychoactive plants would have soon brought them to the same tryptamine doorway. What is the nature of the invisible landscape beyond that doorway The answer to the question is linked to the question of the nature of mind. If the world beyond the doorway can be given consensual validation of the sort extended to the electron and the black hole—in other words, if the world beyond the doorway is found to be a necessary part of scientifically mature thinking about the world—then our own circumscribed historical stmggle will be subject to whole new worlds of possibility. 

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