Novel is easy. If you’re not constrained by what’s coherent and sensible, worlds of possibility open up before you. They’re just not worlds you’re going to be taking anything useful back from. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around alone in the woods with an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic (he was my field ecology lab partner,) and by ordinary standards he certainly seemed like a constant fountain of novel ideas, but that was because he was sharing with me a perception of reality that was skewed in a maladaptive way relative to everyone else’s. All of his novel ideas were crazy.
The fact that nearly everyone in computer graphics in California at the time was using psychedelic drugs seems possibly significant, but I’m inclined to discount self assessments of whether they’re actually useful for the creative process more or less entirely. People have a pronounced tendency to say that psychedelics help them be creative, but I haven’t seen any evidence yet that leads me to believe that they’re actually having more worthwhile ideas than they are when off of drugs.
When you’re constantly being struck by profound-seeming ideas, it’s easy to conclude that you’re in a particularly creative state of mind, but you could just be in a state where stupid ideas seem profound. It seems a priori much more probable to me that introducing foreign chemicals into your brain would interfere with your faculty for recognizing profundity than that it would improve your faculty for generating it. The example given by the interviewee of his own work influenced by psychedelics
About the time that chaos theory was
discovered by the scientific community,
and the chaos revolution began in 1978, I
apprenticed myself to a neurophysiologist
and tried to construct brain models made
out of the basic objects of chaos theory. I
built a vibrating fluid machine to visualize
vibrations in transparent media, because I
felt on the basis of direct experience that
the Hindu metaphor of vibrations was
important and valuable. I felt that we
could learn more about consciousness,
communication, resonance, and the
emergence of form and pattern in the
physical, biological, social and intellectual
worlds, through actually watching
vibrations in transparent media ordinarily
invisible, and making them visible.
Is definitely not something I would regard as a good idea on the face of things. It’s an idea, and I can imagine that they made a lot of progress in computer graphics at the time by working on the programs to do this, but believing that visualizing vibrations in transparent fluid would give some valuable insight into human consciousness on the basis of Hindu religious metaphor strikes me as a case of really bad scientific intuition.
When you’re constantly being struck by profound-seeming ideas, it’s easy to conclude that you’re in a particularly creative state of mind, but you could just be in a state where stupid ideas seem profound.
Dude … that’s, like, so deep …
But seriously, this agrees closely with my experience. Another way I’ve thought of it is in terms of a bullshit filter. If your bullshit filter is too high — if you’re dismissing patterns that actually exist, because they don’t fit your preconceptions — then dropping your bullshit filter across the board may lead to you recognizing more truths. But it’s at the expense of believing more falsehoods, too.
When you’re constantly being struck by profound-seeming ideas, it’s easy to conclude that you’re in a particularly creative state of mind, but you could just be in a state where stupid ideas seem profound.
This was Feynman’s conclusion. I can’t seem to find the quote, but he said something along the lines of, “I thought my hallucinations were profound, and then I realized I was just hallucinating that they were profound, which I should have expected.”
“novel” might be setting the bar too high, given “There’s nothing new under the Sun”.
Regardless, here is an interesting article regarding psychedelics and the history of Mathematics and computer graphics in the late 20th century.
Novel is easy. If you’re not constrained by what’s coherent and sensible, worlds of possibility open up before you. They’re just not worlds you’re going to be taking anything useful back from. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around alone in the woods with an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic (he was my field ecology lab partner,) and by ordinary standards he certainly seemed like a constant fountain of novel ideas, but that was because he was sharing with me a perception of reality that was skewed in a maladaptive way relative to everyone else’s. All of his novel ideas were crazy.
The fact that nearly everyone in computer graphics in California at the time was using psychedelic drugs seems possibly significant, but I’m inclined to discount self assessments of whether they’re actually useful for the creative process more or less entirely. People have a pronounced tendency to say that psychedelics help them be creative, but I haven’t seen any evidence yet that leads me to believe that they’re actually having more worthwhile ideas than they are when off of drugs.
When you’re constantly being struck by profound-seeming ideas, it’s easy to conclude that you’re in a particularly creative state of mind, but you could just be in a state where stupid ideas seem profound. It seems a priori much more probable to me that introducing foreign chemicals into your brain would interfere with your faculty for recognizing profundity than that it would improve your faculty for generating it. The example given by the interviewee of his own work influenced by psychedelics
Is definitely not something I would regard as a good idea on the face of things. It’s an idea, and I can imagine that they made a lot of progress in computer graphics at the time by working on the programs to do this, but believing that visualizing vibrations in transparent fluid would give some valuable insight into human consciousness on the basis of Hindu religious metaphor strikes me as a case of really bad scientific intuition.
Dude … that’s, like, so deep …
But seriously, this agrees closely with my experience. Another way I’ve thought of it is in terms of a bullshit filter. If your bullshit filter is too high — if you’re dismissing patterns that actually exist, because they don’t fit your preconceptions — then dropping your bullshit filter across the board may lead to you recognizing more truths. But it’s at the expense of believing more falsehoods, too.
This was Feynman’s conclusion. I can’t seem to find the quote, but he said something along the lines of, “I thought my hallucinations were profound, and then I realized I was just hallucinating that they were profound, which I should have expected.”