Perhaps I am improperly estimating the harm of psychedelics by lumping them in with other illegal drugs. But from the first sentence of [1] “When administered under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously-occurring mystical experiences that, at 14-month follow-up, were considered by volunteers to be among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives.” My read of this is that it made them less rational. Plus, it would fill me with horror if a drug so hijacked my brain that it became what my brain perceived as its most significant experience ever. Yes, please wirehead me when I’m feeble and in a nursing home, but not before.
Look, all experiences take place in the mind, in a very real way that’s not just a clever conversational trick.
So whatever your most meaningful and spiritually significant moment, it’s going to be “in your head.”
But on a set of very reasonable priors, we would expect your most meaningful and spiritually significant head-moment to be correlated with and causally linked to some kind of unusual thing happening outside your head. An activity, an interaction with other people, a novel observation.
Sometimes, a therapist says a few words, and a person has an internal cascade of thoughts and emotions and everything changes, and we wouldn’t blink too hard at the person saying that moment was their most meaningful and spiritually significant.
It’s not that the category of “just sitting there quietly thinking thoughts” is suspect.
And indeed, with the shakeup stimulus of a psychedelic, it’s reasonable to imagine that people would successfully produce just such a cascade, some of the time.
But like …
“Come on”?
The preconditions for the just-sitting-there-with-the-therapist moment to be so impactful are pretty substantial. Someone has to have been all twisted up inside, and confused, and working on intractable problems that were causing them substantial distress.
If just sitting there and just taking a drug is itself enough to produce “holy crap, most important moment ever,” then it seems to me, given my current model resolution, that one must additionally posit either
a) a supermajority of people have the precursors for the just-sitting-there-with-the-therapist moment, or something substantively similar, such that taking the drug allows them to reshuffle all the pieces and make an actual breakthrough
or
b) the drug is producing a “fake” sense of meaningfulness that’s unrelated to the person’s actual goals or experiences, and they’re just not critically reviewing it with anything like rational/skeptical introspection.
One of these additional premises feels much more likely to me, especially given having read accounts of e.g. strict atheists reporting that they saw their minds being willing to believe in god while tripping.
It seems to me that if [rational] then [would be skeptical of the spiritual magnitude of just taking a drug and thinking for a bit], and that if not [skeptical, etc.] then, reasonably, an update against [rational].
But on a set of very reasonable priors, we would expect your most meaningful and spiritually significant head-moment to be correlated with and causally linked to some kind of unusual thing happening outside your head. An activity, an interaction with other people, a novel observation.
This doesn’t feel plausible at all to me. (This is one of two key places where I disagree with your framing)
Like, this is a huge category: “experiences that don’t involve anything unusual happening around you.” It includes virtually all of the thinking we do—especially the kind of thinking that demands concentration. For most (all?) of us, it includes moments of immense terror and immense joy. Fiction writers commonly spend many hours in this state, “just sitting there” and having ideas and figuring out how they fit together, before they ever commit a single word of those ideas to (digital) paper. The same goes for artists of many other kinds. This is where theorems are proven, where we confront our hidden shames and overcome them, (often) where we first realize that we love someone, or that we don’t love someone, or . . .
The other place where I disagree with your framing: it seems like you are modeling human minds at a kind of coarse resolution, where people have mostly-coherent beliefs, with a single global “map” or world model that all the beliefs refer to, and the beliefs have already been (at least approximately) “updated” to reflect all the person’s actual experiences, etc.
That coarse-grained model is often helpful, but in this case, I think things make more sense if you “zoom in” and model human minds as very complicated bundles of heuristics, trying to solve a computationally expensive problem in real time, with lots of different topic-specific maps that sometimes conflict, and a lot of reliance on simplifying assumptions that we don’t always realize we’re making.
And indeed, this is much of why (just) thinking can be so interesting and meaningful: it gives us the ability to process information slower than realtime, digesting it with less aggressive reliance on cheap heuristics. We “turn things over in our heads,” disabling/re-enabling different heuristics, flipping through our different maps, etc.
I think a part of what psychedelics do is to produce a more intense version of “turning things over in one’s head,” disabling some of the more-ingrained heuristics that you usually forget about, getting you to apply a style of thinking X to a topic Y when you’d always normally think of Y in style Z, changing which things you mentally bin together vs. split apart. This can yield real insights that are outside of your normal “search space,” but even if not, it exposes you to a lot of potential ways of looking at things that you can use later if you deem them valuable.
(I have used psychedelics a number of times, and I have the impression that some of this use led to personal growth, although it might have been growth that would have occurred soon anyway. I did find these experiences “meaningful,” mostly in a way unrelated to “having breakthroughs” or “learning/realizing things” during the experience—more to do with the cognitive/emotional presentation-of-new-possibilities I described in the previous paragraph. And for the “art-like” aspect of the experience, the way I’d call a moving work of fiction or music “meaningful to me.”)
I just can’t get past what reads to me as tremendous typical mind fallacy in this comment?
Like, I think I would just straightforwardly agree with you, if you had caveatted that you were talking about LWers exclusively, or something similar.
But the whole thing above seems to think it’s not about, I dunno, a normal curve of people centered on IQ 125 or something.
So much of what you’re arguing falls apart once you look at the set of humans instead of the set of [fiction writers + artists + theorem provers + introspecters + people who do any kind of deliberate or active thinking at all on the regular].
As for the second bit: I’m not modeling human minds as having mostly-coherent beliefs or a single global map.
a) a supermajority of people have the precursors for the just-sitting-there-with-the-therapist moment, or something substantively similar, such that taking the drug allows them to reshuffle all the pieces and make an actual breakthrough
I think that there are structures in the human mind that tend to generate various massive blind spots by default (some of them varying between people, some of them as close to universal as anything in human minds ever is), so I would consider the “a supermajority of people have the precursors for the just-sitting-there-with-the-therapist moment, or something substantively similar” hypothesis completely plausible even if nobody had ever done any drugs and we didn’t have any evidence suggesting that drugs might trigger any particular insights.
A weak datapoint would be that out of the about ~twelve people I’ve facilitated something-like-IFS to, at least five have reported it being a significantly meaningful experience based on just a few sessions (in some cases just one), even if not the most meaningful in their life. And I’m not even among the most experienced or trained IFS facilitators in the world.
Also some of people’s trip reports do sound like the kind of thing that you might get from deep enough experiential therapy (IFS and the like; thinking of personal psychological insights more than the ‘contact with God’ stuff).
Upvoted, but I would posit that there’s an enormous filter in place before Kaj encounters these twelve people and they ask him to facilitate them in something-like-IFS.
I find the supermajority hypothesis weakly plausible. I don’t think it’s true, but would not be really surprised to find out that it is.
I would posit that there’s an enormous filter in place before Kaj encounters these twelve people and they ask him to facilitate them in something-like-IFS.
(a) seems implied by Thoreau’s opinion, which a lot of people reported finding plausible well before psychedelics, so it’s not an ad hoc hypothesis:
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.
A lot of recent philosophers report that people are basically miserable, and psychiatry reports that a lot of people have diagnosable anxiety or depression disorders. This seems consistent with (a).
This is also consistent with my impression, and with the long run improvements in depression—it seems like for a lot of people psychedelics allow them to become conscious of ways they were hurting themselves and living in fear / conflict.
In my personal and anecdotal experience, for the people who have a positive experience with psychedelics it really is more your ‘a’ option.
Psychedelics are less about ‘thinking random thoughts that seem meaningful’ and more about what you describe there—reflecting on their actual life and perspectives with a fresh/clear/different perspective.
I have heard a number of mothers and father say that having kids was the best thing that ever happened to them. The survey showed this was a very strong pattern, especially among women. In particular, a lot of the reports deal with the very moment in which they held their first baby in their arms for the first time. Some quotes to illustrate this pattern:
The best experience of my life was when my first child was born. I was unsure how I would feel or what to expect, but the moment I first heard her cry I fell in love with her instantly. I felt like suddenly there was another person in this world that I cared about and loved more than myself. I felt a sudden urge to protect her from all the bad in the world. When I first saw her face it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. It is almost an indescribable feeling. I felt like I understood the purpose and meaning of life at that moment. I didn’t know it was possible to feel the way I felt when I saw her. I was the happiest I have ever been in my entire life. That moment is something that I will cherish forever. The only other time I have ever felt that way was with the subsequent births of my other two children. It was almost a euphoric feeling. It was an intense calm and contentment. ————— I was young and had a difficult pregnancy with my first born. I was scared because they had to do an emergency c-section because her health and mine were at risk. I had anticipated and thought about how the moment would be when I finally got to hold my first child and realize that I was a mother. It was unbelievably emotional and I don’t think anything in the world could top the amount of pleasure and joy I had when I got to see and hold her for the first time. ————— I was 29 when my son was born. It was amazing. I never thought I would be a father. Watching him come into the world was easily the best day of my life. I did not realize that I could love someone or something so much. It was at about 3am in the morning so I was really tired. But it was wonderful nonetheless. ————— I absolutely loved when my child was born. It was a wave of emotions that I haven’t felt by anything before. It was exciting and scary and beautiful all in one.
No luck for anti-natalists… the super-strong drug-like effects of having children will presumably continue to motivate most humans to reproduce no matter how strong the ethical case against doing so may be. Coming soon: a drug that makes you feel like “you just had 10,000 children”.
Yes or “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” and brains of many adults without kids generate the “your life is meaningless” feeling.
Yes or “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” and brains of many adults without kids generate the “your life is meaningless” feeling.
Only to the extend that they don’t have something else that gives their lifes meaning. One person I know recently became mother and said that it was less impactful for her then for other women because she already had meaning beforehand.
“warping” means shifting away from the intended shape so since evolution “programed” us to have kids the effect of having kids on the brain should not be considered “mind warping”.
I guess it depends whether you care about evolution’s goals or your own. If the way that evolution did it was to massively change what you care about/what’s meaningful after you have children, then it seems it did it in a way that’s mind warping.
Perhaps I am improperly estimating the harm of psychedelics by lumping them in with other illegal drugs. But from the first sentence of [1] “When administered under supportive conditions, psilocybin occasioned experiences similar to spontaneously-occurring mystical experiences that, at 14-month follow-up, were considered by volunteers to be among the most personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives.” My read of this is that it made them less rational. Plus, it would fill me with horror if a drug so hijacked my brain that it became what my brain perceived as its most significant experience ever. Yes, please wirehead me when I’m feeble and in a nursing home, but not before.
How does someone thinking that they had a meaningful experience make them less rational?
Look, all experiences take place in the mind, in a very real way that’s not just a clever conversational trick.
So whatever your most meaningful and spiritually significant moment, it’s going to be “in your head.”
But on a set of very reasonable priors, we would expect your most meaningful and spiritually significant head-moment to be correlated with and causally linked to some kind of unusual thing happening outside your head. An activity, an interaction with other people, a novel observation.
Sometimes, a therapist says a few words, and a person has an internal cascade of thoughts and emotions and everything changes, and we wouldn’t blink too hard at the person saying that moment was their most meaningful and spiritually significant.
It’s not that the category of “just sitting there quietly thinking thoughts” is suspect.
And indeed, with the shakeup stimulus of a psychedelic, it’s reasonable to imagine that people would successfully produce just such a cascade, some of the time.
But like …
“Come on”?
The preconditions for the just-sitting-there-with-the-therapist moment to be so impactful are pretty substantial. Someone has to have been all twisted up inside, and confused, and working on intractable problems that were causing them substantial distress.
If just sitting there and just taking a drug is itself enough to produce “holy crap, most important moment ever,” then it seems to me, given my current model resolution, that one must additionally posit either
a) a supermajority of people have the precursors for the just-sitting-there-with-the-therapist moment, or something substantively similar, such that taking the drug allows them to reshuffle all the pieces and make an actual breakthrough
or
b) the drug is producing a “fake” sense of meaningfulness that’s unrelated to the person’s actual goals or experiences, and they’re just not critically reviewing it with anything like rational/skeptical introspection.
One of these additional premises feels much more likely to me, especially given having read accounts of e.g. strict atheists reporting that they saw their minds being willing to believe in god while tripping.
It seems to me that if [rational] then [would be skeptical of the spiritual magnitude of just taking a drug and thinking for a bit], and that if not [skeptical, etc.] then, reasonably, an update against [rational].
This doesn’t feel plausible at all to me. (This is one of two key places where I disagree with your framing)
Like, this is a huge category: “experiences that don’t involve anything unusual happening around you.” It includes virtually all of the thinking we do—especially the kind of thinking that demands concentration. For most (all?) of us, it includes moments of immense terror and immense joy. Fiction writers commonly spend many hours in this state, “just sitting there” and having ideas and figuring out how they fit together, before they ever commit a single word of those ideas to (digital) paper. The same goes for artists of many other kinds. This is where theorems are proven, where we confront our hidden shames and overcome them, (often) where we first realize that we love someone, or that we don’t love someone, or . . .
The other place where I disagree with your framing: it seems like you are modeling human minds at a kind of coarse resolution, where people have mostly-coherent beliefs, with a single global “map” or world model that all the beliefs refer to, and the beliefs have already been (at least approximately) “updated” to reflect all the person’s actual experiences, etc.
That coarse-grained model is often helpful, but in this case, I think things make more sense if you “zoom in” and model human minds as very complicated bundles of heuristics, trying to solve a computationally expensive problem in real time, with lots of different topic-specific maps that sometimes conflict, and a lot of reliance on simplifying assumptions that we don’t always realize we’re making.
And indeed, this is much of why (just) thinking can be so interesting and meaningful: it gives us the ability to process information slower than realtime, digesting it with less aggressive reliance on cheap heuristics. We “turn things over in our heads,” disabling/re-enabling different heuristics, flipping through our different maps, etc.
I think a part of what psychedelics do is to produce a more intense version of “turning things over in one’s head,” disabling some of the more-ingrained heuristics that you usually forget about, getting you to apply a style of thinking X to a topic Y when you’d always normally think of Y in style Z, changing which things you mentally bin together vs. split apart. This can yield real insights that are outside of your normal “search space,” but even if not, it exposes you to a lot of potential ways of looking at things that you can use later if you deem them valuable.
(I have used psychedelics a number of times, and I have the impression that some of this use led to personal growth, although it might have been growth that would have occurred soon anyway. I did find these experiences “meaningful,” mostly in a way unrelated to “having breakthroughs” or “learning/realizing things” during the experience—more to do with the cognitive/emotional presentation-of-new-possibilities I described in the previous paragraph. And for the “art-like” aspect of the experience, the way I’d call a moving work of fiction or music “meaningful to me.”)
I just can’t get past what reads to me as tremendous typical mind fallacy in this comment?
Like, I think I would just straightforwardly agree with you, if you had caveatted that you were talking about LWers exclusively, or something similar.
But the whole thing above seems to think it’s not about, I dunno, a normal curve of people centered on IQ 125 or something.
So much of what you’re arguing falls apart once you look at the set of humans instead of the set of [fiction writers + artists + theorem provers + introspecters + people who do any kind of deliberate or active thinking at all on the regular].
As for the second bit: I’m not modeling human minds as having mostly-coherent beliefs or a single global map.
I think that there are structures in the human mind that tend to generate various massive blind spots by default (some of them varying between people, some of them as close to universal as anything in human minds ever is), so I would consider the “a supermajority of people have the precursors for the just-sitting-there-with-the-therapist moment, or something substantively similar” hypothesis completely plausible even if nobody had ever done any drugs and we didn’t have any evidence suggesting that drugs might trigger any particular insights.
A weak datapoint would be that out of the about ~twelve people I’ve facilitated something-like-IFS to, at least five have reported it being a significantly meaningful experience based on just a few sessions (in some cases just one), even if not the most meaningful in their life. And I’m not even among the most experienced or trained IFS facilitators in the world.
Also some of people’s trip reports do sound like the kind of thing that you might get from deep enough experiential therapy (IFS and the like; thinking of personal psychological insights more than the ‘contact with God’ stuff).
Upvoted, but I would posit that there’s an enormous filter in place before Kaj encounters these twelve people and they ask him to facilitate them in something-like-IFS.
I find the supermajority hypothesis weakly plausible. I don’t think it’s true, but would not be really surprised to find out that it is.
That’s certainly true.
(a) seems implied by Thoreau’s opinion, which a lot of people reported finding plausible well before psychedelics, so it’s not an ad hoc hypothesis:
A lot of recent philosophers report that people are basically miserable, and psychiatry reports that a lot of people have diagnosable anxiety or depression disorders. This seems consistent with (a).
This is also consistent with my impression, and with the long run improvements in depression—it seems like for a lot of people psychedelics allow them to become conscious of ways they were hurting themselves and living in fear / conflict.
In my personal and anecdotal experience, for the people who have a positive experience with psychedelics it really is more your ‘a’ option.
Psychedelics are less about ‘thinking random thoughts that seem meaningful’ and more about what you describe there—reflecting on their actual life and perspectives with a fresh/clear/different perspective.
Being spiritual and mystical seems antithetical to rationality.
I would agree with you there.
I wouldn’t agree that describing an experience as ‘meaningful’ is antithetical to rationality, though.
Finding meaning in life felt extremely important to me, until I had a kid and then I stopped thinking about it.
I suppose one hypothesis here is that having a kid is dangerously mind warping on the same level as psychedelics.
This is substantiated by data in “Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain” (quote):
Birth of children
I have heard a number of mothers and father say that having kids was the best thing that ever happened to them. The survey showed this was a very strong pattern, especially among women. In particular, a lot of the reports deal with the very moment in which they held their first baby in their arms for the first time. Some quotes to illustrate this pattern:
No luck for anti-natalists… the super-strong drug-like effects of having children will presumably continue to motivate most humans to reproduce no matter how strong the ethical case against doing so may be. Coming soon: a drug that makes you feel like “you just had 10,000 children”.
Yes or “Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution” and brains of many adults without kids generate the “your life is meaningless” feeling.
Only to the extend that they don’t have something else that gives their lifes meaning. One person I know recently became mother and said that it was less impactful for her then for other women because she already had meaning beforehand.
It seems like both of these are the same hypothesis.
“warping” means shifting away from the intended shape so since evolution “programed” us to have kids the effect of having kids on the brain should not be considered “mind warping”.
I guess it depends whether you care about evolution’s goals or your own. If the way that evolution did it was to massively change what you care about/what’s meaningful after you have children, then it seems it did it in a way that’s mind warping.