The Doors of Perception

In 1954, Aldous Huxley wrote an essay, in which he elaborated on his psychadelic experience under the influence of mescaline. Now, the work has gathered strong reactions for its evaluation of psychadelic drugs as facilitators of mystical insight with great potential benefits for science and philosophy.

For a general summary, Wisecrack has a great short take on the work:

We won't stress over any of that here. Rather, I want to take a closer look at the analogy itself, perception as a kind of door - what kind of door and where does it lead to? Why a door in the first place? What's up with the wall?

Russell's Teapot

This post provides a short explanation of Russell's teapot and is basically a transcription of a video that I made a couple of months ago (feel free to check it out):

Imagine I make the following claim:

1.  There is a teapot - which is too small to be seen by telescopes - and it orbits the sun somewhere around mars.

Let's say I don't offer any proof or evidence for my claim. Would you take my claim to be true?

This analogy was put forth by Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), who wanted to demonstrate that even though no one can disprove the existence of such a teapot (since we said that it's too small to be observed anyways), he would expect no one to believe in its existence either.