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.
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.