I've been thinking about serotonin.

Serotonin is one of the monoamine neurotransmitters that are what keeps our brains functioning. This chemical is magic if anything is. Tiny tweaks in serotonin levels or any mechanism connected to it (the production of it, the re-uptake of it, etc.) are the difference between being in this universe and being in a completely different one. Suicidal depression or a blending of all senses and a loss of individual self while melting into nature and moving in more than four dimensions can be caused by changes too subtle to see without a very powerful microscope.

The state of someone's mind due to chemical influences is almost always thought of as less than. Less valid, less real, less sane, or simply completely meaningless. You might not like what you thought was delicious when stoned, you might not ever say what you would yell when drunk. There's "insanity", a state with myriad forms which could be popularly defined as "stuff in your head that's definitely not real", all of which are caused by fluctuations of a handful of neurotransmitters.

But "sanity" is caused by chemicals. Those very same chemicals, in fact, because they are consciousness. Deciding that the messages we receive from outside our head while the chemicals are in a certain balance are concrete and real and that the universe created when there's a slightly different balance is pure illusion is just a comforting assumption (except for those who get to be told their mind is gone). If one is, there's no reason the other isn't. All of our perceptions could be illusions, or all of them could be solidly real. Perhaps there is an objective source of our perceptions which we do not have the capacity to receive in an undistorted state, like the many dimensions which we cannot perceive, thus making everything perceived just as much an incomplete, hallucinatory illusion as any drug trip. Or the changes in brain chemistry are a tuning dial which allows us to move through non-spatial dimensions from point a (sanity) to point b (insanity), all the while perceiving things that are just as real, but a different universe in the same place.

An analogy I have been considering because of this speculation is our minds as radios which pick up consciousness. Consciousness can be thought of as a dimension, something through which we can travel and which we normally experience a tiny little atom of. It is all that can be perceived, God. Brains have been evolving and changing on Earth for a long time, where the improvement of a brain is measured by how much consciousness it can take in (or hold, or create, or something. It's difficult to describe what I'm talking about because there are often simply not words with the non-duality that's necessary if I'm to continue clearly discussing philosophy without making religious-like assumptions and leaps of logic). A tiny bundle of nerves which can work with a few bits of information is enough for a flatworm, and that could be pictured as the tiniest trickle of consciousness necessary to create an organism of that kind. No greater access is required for the flatworm to survive, and because those things which do not survive are not around anymore (they don't survive), something which does survive stays around, and doesn't need to be any smarter. Then there's the other animals on Earth besides humans, who can be listed from least mentally developed to most by clear additions to or expansions on the workings of their mind. Rudimentary sight, enough to know there's something moving, goes to clearly distinguishing shapes in black and white, to seeing in a full range of colors (including wavelengths that we can't see), to being able to recognize oneself in a mirror. More and more bits of information, more and more consciousness being let through, more and more neurotransmitters.

So a radio is a machine designed to be electrically stimulated by radio waves that are out of the realm of human perception and translate them into a complex set of sound waves which are perceivable by us humans. It's possible that brains work in a sort of similar fashion (keep in mind I am not just being ignorant or science denying, it is still not understood how brains "create" consciousness), like machines that are specially designed to receive consciousness, and take that information and translate it into complex sets of nerve-stimulating output, i.e. our perceptions, our entire universe.

You can rest assured you're more intelligent than a flatworm, but the amount of consciousness we are rationed is still unimaginably tiny when compared to all that could possibly be perceived (and that's just the stuff that we know is out there to be perceived. Add extra dimensions and parallel universes and, well, you go from unknowably big to unknowably huge. Either way, really). A few dimensions are funneled into a few tiny boxes, and that makes up the range of sane reality. Infrared and ultraviolet are the borders for our eyes, a scent too faint or far away escapes our nose completely, something too fine or small will have no effect on the nerves in our fingertips so we won't feel them, some things simply don't stimulate any taste buds and if there's only a molecule or two of something we won't taste it, and of course if the wavelengths of a sound wave are not within a certain size range, we won't hear it.

When someone's brain chemistry is changed enough for them to perceive things that an average person at baseline sitting right next to them wouldn't, it's just a battle of "nu-uh/uh-huh!" as to what is real. The vast majority of existence is invisible in every way to us, so why are hallucinations considered less real because not everyone can perceive them? Our limitations are what keep us alive. If our brains were always just soaking in serotonin, pain would be ignored, fear would not caution us, our body's needs would suddenly seem optional, and we'd feel no need to get anywhere, change anything, or do anything besides just play around. All of our senses would be more finely attuned than years of training could produce, and perception would flow into us through the transmission medium of neurotransmitters, which opens wider and wider simply with the addition of more of the mysterious elixir. We would die, even without serotonin poisoning. We would die so much ecstatically happier and more fulfilled than most people get in a lifetime, but still, the organism and then the species would die. The steady little flow of experience that we can access keeps us suffering, following our instincts, feeling separate from other things and beings, basically it is just enough, and on just the right channel, for our bodies to work with and use to survive.

Is this reason to believe that our tiny set of filtered and diluted perceptions are transcendental law? I don't think so, in fact I think it's a good reason to consider just the opposite, but this assumption that our perceptions are the solid measure of existence is something else our species has needed in order to be so darned fired up about following their perceptions to survival. The effects of entheogens (psychedelic drugs which induce spiritual experiences) can be seen from a very dry pharmacological perspective in which certain chemicals have effects with other chemicals and the circuitry's just changed around for a while, in such a way which often produces the delusion of a mystical, transcendental experience by stimulating the areas in the brain responsible for those feelings. This is of course a brilliantly complex school of thought, not some arrogant assumption, but there are too many things we don't know for me to think it is law, especially having had entheogenic experiences myself. Entheogens could also work by hacking our minds to pick up signals from a realm just as real, because either way we are getting a super-limited, super-censored view, and with the realm of perceivable things being very possibly infinite, whatever we perceive could be considered completely real, just a tiny fraction of reality.

The radio analogy can go a long way.

Adjust the antennae, turn the tuning knob, increase the volume, you're still tapping into the exact same invisible sea of radio waves where all possible things your radio could produce exists, even though what comes out on one frequency can be completely different from another, and there's static in between, it's all real, it's all equal, and everything you get from your radio is limited. Say you hacked your radio and made it translate every single frequency in its range into sound simultaneously. Obviously it would just produce an impossible cacophony that you couldn't pick a single word out of. All the sounds would blend together and become one, and all of the sound frequencies within the range of the speakers would probably be produced at once, and though emphasis on certain frequencies would shift around it would be obvious that there were no separations, just an all-encompassing flux. No practical purpose could be achieved, such as listening to a song or checking a storm update. You'd have to narrow down significantly the amount of information you allowed into the radio before such specific things could be achieved. However, in a truly heroic stretching of this analogy, hearing only your favorite station would be the source of your suffering, it means that you'll enjoy some songs and hate others. "Sanity" would simply be always staying on that one specific station, a wildly popular one, but only one station nonetheless. Someone that only ever tunes to the country station could call someone else tuned to the rap station "insane" if that person were to talk about how he very clearly heard T-Pain while driving to work, while the cowboy, who had been listening to his own radio at the same time, knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was Hank Williams who had been singing. When the entire range is displayed at once, though, this preconception of a fundamental separation between the different points which one could narrow down to will be broken apart when those individual waves are finally seen as the one ocean they are.

This could be pretty literally close to the mechanism on which our brains really work, and where consciousness comes from. Consciousness could be something like those invisible radio waves, but in a way we can't imagine because it's in a form which does not show up on any of our radars. Neurotransmitters could be a physical conduit which connects things which we can perceive, such as ourselves, to the ethereal energy which is the stuff of sentience. Of course it looks like there's nothing there outside our brains, and consciousness could very well be created purely by our minds in a mechanical fashion, but because you cannot see the strings does not mean the puppet is standing up on its own.

The mechanisms of most medicines which effect the human body are understood down to astonishing detail, but the industry of psychiatric medication is far more gray, despite it's massive growth in the past few decades. If you've happened to listen to some commercials for these things, you might have noticed this. "Pristiq is thought to work by effecting two neurotransmitters in the brain: serotonin and norepinephrine". It might work by doing something to the stuff that makes you happy. This shit is not understood. There's years of education worth of knowledge about what happens in the brain, but as to why, well, we're still left to philosophical rumination.

Consciousness is, what, the perception of things? Where does an entity come into that? Obviously machines can perceive, and a piece of cloth lying in the sun receives the light, is stimulated by the light, etc. What's the key difference between an occurence and the perception of an occurence? An occurence has effects, complex effects built up from a universal handful of simple quantum interactions, and perception is another product of an occurence, with the same handful of quantum interactions building up to something complex (for example, occurence = light shines. Effects = light hits cloth, light hits eyes, light interacts on quantum level with the fundamental particles of both, producing the exact same kinds of stimulation, but the stimulation flips a magnificently detailed switch in our eyes--that is, just sets off a further chain of the same simple processes--and dissipates into entropy on the cloth. Cloth never knows, we do, we are conscious, ta-dah).

This is a work in progress, and I am done for now.