fwiw as a data point here, I spent some time inwardly pursuing “enlightenment” with heavy and frequent doses of psychedelics for a period of 10 months and consider this to be one of the best things I’ve ever done. I believe it raised my resting set point happiness, among other good things, and I am still deeply altered (7 years later).
I do not think this is a good idea for everyone and lots of people who try would end up worse off. But I strongly object to this being seen as virtuous as obsessive masturbation. Sure, it might not be your thing, but this frame seriously misses a huge amount of really important changes in my experience. And I get you might think I’m… brainwashed or something? by drugs? So I don’t know what I could say that would convince you otherwise.
But I did have concrete things, like solving a pretty big section of childhood trauma (like; I had a burning feeling of rage in my chest before, and the burning feeling was gone afterwards), I had multiple other people comment on how different I was now (usually in regards to laughing easier and seeming more relaxed), I lost my anxiety around dying, my relationship to pain altered in such a way that I am significantly more mentally able to endure it than I was before, I also had a radically altered relationship to the physical environment (my living space looked very different before and after), and I produced a lot of art that I hadn’t been producing before. Maybe this one is less concrete, but some part of me feels really deeply at peace, always, like it knows everything is going to be ok and I didn’t have that before.
There’s a way in which I consider what I did wireheading, like really successful wireheading, but I think people often… fail to imagine wireheading properly? And the husk of wireheading, where you’re sort of less of a person, is really terrifying. I agree that the husk-of-wireheading view makes psychedelics seem more sinister.
In my culture, it’s easy to look at “what happens at the ends of the bell curves” and “where’s the middle of the bell curve” and “how tight vs. spread out is the bell curve (i.e. how different are the ends from the middle)” and “are there multiple peaks in the bell curves” and all of that, separately.
Like, +1 for the above, and I join the above in giving a reminder that rounding things off to “thing bad” or “thing good” is not just not required, it’s actively unhelpful.
Policies often have to have a clear answer, such as the “blanket ban” policy that Eliezer is considering proposing. But the black-or-white threshold of a policy should not be confused with the complicated thing underneath being evaluated.
And I get you might think I’m… brainwashed or something? by drugs?
I’m not sure what you find implausible about that. Drugs do not literally propagandize the user, but they can hijack the reward system, in the case of many drugs, and in the case of psychedelics they seem to alter beliefs in reliable ways. Psychedelics are also taken in a memetic context with many crystalized notions about what the psychedelic experience is, what enlightenment is, that enlightenment itself is a mysterious but worthy pursuit.
The classic joke about psychedelics is they provide the feelings associated with profound insights without the actual profound insights. To the extent this is true, I feel this is pretty dangerous territory for a rationalist to tread.
In your own case unless I am misremembering, I believe on your blog you discuss LSD permanently lowering yourmathematical abilities degrading your memory. This seems really, really bad to me…
Maybe this one is less concrete, but some part of me feels really deeply at peace, always, like it knows everything is going to be ok and I didn’t have that before.
I’m glad your anxiety is gone, but I don’t think everything is going to be alright by default. I would not like to modify myself to think that. It seems clearly untrue.
Perhaps the masturbation line was going too far. But the gloss of virtue that “seeking enlightenment” has strikes me as undeserved.
Also fwiw, I took psychedelics in a relatively memetic-free environment. I’d been homeschooled and not exposed to hippie/drug culture, and especially not significant discussion around enlightenment. I consider this to be one of the reasons my experience was so successful; I didn’t have it in relationship to those memes, and did not view myself as pursuing enlightenment (I know I said I was inwardly pursuing enlightenment in my above comment, but I was mostly riffing off your phrasing; in some sense I think it was true but it wasn’t a conscious thing.)
LSD did not permanently lower my mathematical abilities, and if I suggested that I probably misspoke? I suspect it damaged my memory, though; my memory is worse now than before I took LSD.
And sorry; by ‘everything being ok’ I didn’t mean that I literally think that situation will end up being the ones I want; I mean that I know I will be okay with whatever happens. Very related to my endurance of pain going up by quite a lot, and my anxiety of death disappearing.
Separately, I do think that a lot of the memes around psychedelics are… incomplete? It’s hard to find a good word. Naive? Something around the difference between the aesthetic of a thing and the thing itself? And in that I might agree with you somewhere that “seeking enlightenment” isn’t… virtuous or whatever.
LSD did not permanently lower my mathematical abilities, and if I suggested that I probably misspoke? I suspect it damaged my memory, though; my memory is worse now than before I took LSD.
7 years seem to be a long time and most people get worse memory as they age. Was it also significantly worse directly aften the 10 months of you being on that quest then before those 10 months.?
LSD did not permanently lower my mathematical abilities, and if I suggested that I probably misspoke? I suspect it damaged my memory, though; my memory is worse now than before I took LSD.
Thanks. Corrected; I probably conflated the two. But my feeling towards that change are the same so the line otherwise remains unchanged. I should probably organize my opinons/feelings on this topic and write an effortpost or something rather than hash it out in the comments.
This is an interesting class of opinions; I wonder if believing the following:
I’m glad your anxiety is gone, but I don’t think everything is going to be alright by default. I would not like to modify myself to think that. It seems clearly untrue.
is at all correlated with also having this belief:
The classic joke about psychedelics is they provide the feelings associated with profound insights without the actual profound insights. To the extent this is true, I feel this is pretty dangerous territory for a rationalist to tread.
“Everything is not going to be alright by default” is sort of a vague belief to have, so is it worth having? I don’t think this is necessarily either an anomalous belief nor a common-place belief. Admittedly, I have a hard time figuring out how I would modify myself to have this belief. I guess I am not that way by nature, but others can be. It would be interesting to find out what accounts for that difference. Ultimately, if it’s more of an axiomatic belief, it would require a lot of argument about what kinds of other beliefs it leads to that are more beneficial for one to use over their lifetimes.
About the profound insights, the way to check to see if they are actually profound is:
Can it be articulated?
Can you explain it in further detail from subsequent experiences?
Does it remain with you even once the psychedelics or the “elevated” experience has worn off?
From personal experience, there are insights you can have which satisfy all three. I think lessened anxiety (which will be accompanied with reasons, though too long for this comment) is one of them.
fwiw as a data point here, I spent some time inwardly pursuing “enlightenment” with heavy and frequent doses of psychedelics for a period of 10 months and consider this to be one of the best things I’ve ever done. I believe it raised my resting set point happiness, among other good things, and I am still deeply altered (7 years later).
I do not think this is a good idea for everyone and lots of people who try would end up worse off. But I strongly object to this being seen as virtuous as obsessive masturbation. Sure, it might not be your thing, but this frame seriously misses a huge amount of really important changes in my experience. And I get you might think I’m… brainwashed or something? by drugs? So I don’t know what I could say that would convince you otherwise.
But I did have concrete things, like solving a pretty big section of childhood trauma (like; I had a burning feeling of rage in my chest before, and the burning feeling was gone afterwards), I had multiple other people comment on how different I was now (usually in regards to laughing easier and seeming more relaxed), I lost my anxiety around dying, my relationship to pain altered in such a way that I am significantly more mentally able to endure it than I was before, I also had a radically altered relationship to the physical environment (my living space looked very different before and after), and I produced a lot of art that I hadn’t been producing before. Maybe this one is less concrete, but some part of me feels really deeply at peace, always, like it knows everything is going to be ok and I didn’t have that before.
There’s a way in which I consider what I did wireheading, like really successful wireheading, but I think people often… fail to imagine wireheading properly? And the husk of wireheading, where you’re sort of less of a person, is really terrifying. I agree that the husk-of-wireheading view makes psychedelics seem more sinister.
In my culture, it’s easy to look at “what happens at the ends of the bell curves” and “where’s the middle of the bell curve” and “how tight vs. spread out is the bell curve (i.e. how different are the ends from the middle)” and “are there multiple peaks in the bell curves” and all of that, separately.
Like, +1 for the above, and I join the above in giving a reminder that rounding things off to “thing bad” or “thing good” is not just not required, it’s actively unhelpful.
Policies often have to have a clear answer, such as the “blanket ban” policy that Eliezer is considering proposing. But the black-or-white threshold of a policy should not be confused with the complicated thing underneath being evaluated.
I’m not sure what you find implausible about that. Drugs do not literally propagandize the user, but they can hijack the reward system, in the case of many drugs, and in the case of psychedelics they seem to alter beliefs in reliable ways. Psychedelics are also taken in a memetic context with many crystalized notions about what the psychedelic experience is, what enlightenment is, that enlightenment itself is a mysterious but worthy pursuit.
The classic joke about psychedelics is they provide the feelings associated with profound insights without the actual profound insights. To the extent this is true, I feel this is pretty dangerous territory for a rationalist to tread.
In your own case unless I am misremembering, I believe on your blog you discuss LSD permanently
lowering yourmathematical abilitiesdegrading your memory. This seems really, really bad to me…I’m glad your anxiety is gone, but I don’t think everything is going to be alright by default. I would not like to modify myself to think that. It seems clearly untrue.
Perhaps the masturbation line was going too far. But the gloss of virtue that “seeking enlightenment” has strikes me as undeserved.
Also fwiw, I took psychedelics in a relatively memetic-free environment. I’d been homeschooled and not exposed to hippie/drug culture, and especially not significant discussion around enlightenment. I consider this to be one of the reasons my experience was so successful; I didn’t have it in relationship to those memes, and did not view myself as pursuing enlightenment (I know I said I was inwardly pursuing enlightenment in my above comment, but I was mostly riffing off your phrasing; in some sense I think it was true but it wasn’t a conscious thing.)
LSD did not permanently lower my mathematical abilities, and if I suggested that I probably misspoke? I suspect it damaged my memory, though; my memory is worse now than before I took LSD.
And sorry; by ‘everything being ok’ I didn’t mean that I literally think that situation will end up being the ones I want; I mean that I know I will be okay with whatever happens. Very related to my endurance of pain going up by quite a lot, and my anxiety of death disappearing.
Separately, I do think that a lot of the memes around psychedelics are… incomplete? It’s hard to find a good word. Naive? Something around the difference between the aesthetic of a thing and the thing itself? And in that I might agree with you somewhere that “seeking enlightenment” isn’t… virtuous or whatever.
7 years seem to be a long time and most people get worse memory as they age. Was it also significantly worse directly aften the 10 months of you being on that quest then before those 10 months.?
Thanks. Corrected; I probably conflated the two. But my feeling towards that change are the same so the line otherwise remains unchanged. I should probably organize my opinons/feelings on this topic and write an effortpost or something rather than hash it out in the comments.
This is an interesting class of opinions; I wonder if believing the following:
is at all correlated with also having this belief:
“Everything is not going to be alright by default” is sort of a vague belief to have, so is it worth having? I don’t think this is necessarily either an anomalous belief nor a common-place belief. Admittedly, I have a hard time figuring out how I would modify myself to have this belief. I guess I am not that way by nature, but others can be. It would be interesting to find out what accounts for that difference. Ultimately, if it’s more of an axiomatic belief, it would require a lot of argument about what kinds of other beliefs it leads to that are more beneficial for one to use over their lifetimes.
About the profound insights, the way to check to see if they are actually profound is:
Can it be articulated?
Can you explain it in further detail from subsequent experiences?
Does it remain with you even once the psychedelics or the “elevated” experience has worn off?
From personal experience, there are insights you can have which satisfy all three. I think lessened anxiety (which will be accompanied with reasons, though too long for this comment) is one of them.