I definitely do not oppose psychedelics, but if you think that doing more of them or meditating more is going to significantly improve your ‘understanding of the human mind’, you are likely deluding yourself (if you are just doing it for fun, then that is another thing).
The low-hanging fruit has been picked, and probably the most productive thing you can do is to read textbooks on the topic.
I don’t think that you get far by reading a textbook of meditation. Understanding mental states that you have never experienced yourself is very hard.
The low-hanging fruit has been picked
I don’t think there’s a good reason to believe that’s true. Things like heat production during certain states of hypnosis aren”t topics that are well researched.
I don’t think that you get far by reading a textbook of meditation.
Textbooks on the human mind, not on meditation (as I am talking about what helps to understand the human mind)..
I don’t think there’s a good reason to believe that’s true. Things like heat production during certain states of hypnosis aren”t topics that are well researched.
My statement was aimed at the idea that if you’ve already done a lot of mushrooms and meditation, doing another psychedelic (like LSD) or changing your meditation techniquie is going to have diminishing returns (e.g. compared to the much bigger insight or low-hanging fruit that your first trip provides).
As somebody who’s also done a lot of mushrooms, the first trip provides comparatively little insight. You’re so busy observing all the novelty that you don’t have much time to think about it. When you’re more familiar with the common effects there’s time for introspection without missing anything interesting.
If you want to really study how a state works, than you need control to go in and out of the state.
If you want to research how a certain mental state leads the body to produce additional warmth than it’s highly useful to be able to have control to go in and out of the state by conscious decision.
Researching the mind isn’t easy. You don’t see very well what the human mind does through putting people into an fMRI. Having awareness of what happens in your own mind is a good way to understand minds better.
Of course you can also learn something through experiments but it’s often hard to know from reading a scientific paper in which state the participants have been during the experiment. A lot of psychology experiments are also not well replicated so you don’t really know which effects are stable and which aren’t.
People who are not aware of what happens in their own mind also frequently project their own issues into other people. That makes it hard to understand why other people do what they do. Meditation helps you to become aware of the stuff that happens inside your own mind.
If you have not, then hard downvote for stupendous arrogance.
The most “productive” thing to do is both use psychedelics AND read textbooks, which I assume Fink already does.
(Side note: parent is currently at the the top, and is inanely academic. I’m now further understanding the necessity of “post-rationalism” a la Will Newsome.)
Citations are needed for what you said. A description of significant experience with a variaty of psychedelics and an explanation of how that led you to think that marginal returns on “understanding the human mind” are so steep might be satisfactory.
The human mind is not close to being “solved” by any sane definition of “solved”. Systemetized research on the psychedelic experience has been repressed for decades, and current best efforts on doing so (see, e.g., psychonautwiki.org and DMT-nexus) haven’t gotten very far.
Not ignoring the virtue of things like psychonautics is an advantage that “post-rationalism” has on standard-fare LW rationalism.
I definitely do not oppose psychedelics, but if you think that doing more of them or meditating more is going to significantly improve your ‘understanding of the human mind’, you are likely deluding yourself (if you are just doing it for fun, then that is another thing).
The low-hanging fruit has been picked, and probably the most productive thing you can do is to read textbooks on the topic.
Note that understanding the human mind isn’t the same as understanding your mind.
I don’t think that you get far by reading a textbook of meditation. Understanding mental states that you have never experienced yourself is very hard.
I don’t think there’s a good reason to believe that’s true. Things like heat production during certain states of hypnosis aren”t topics that are well researched.
Textbooks on the human mind, not on meditation (as I am talking about what helps to understand the human mind)..
My statement was aimed at the idea that if you’ve already done a lot of mushrooms and meditation, doing another psychedelic (like LSD) or changing your meditation techniquie is going to have diminishing returns (e.g. compared to the much bigger insight or low-hanging fruit that your first trip provides).
As somebody who’s also done a lot of mushrooms, the first trip provides comparatively little insight. You’re so busy observing all the novelty that you don’t have much time to think about it. When you’re more familiar with the common effects there’s time for introspection without missing anything interesting.
If you want to really study how a state works, than you need control to go in and out of the state.
If you want to research how a certain mental state leads the body to produce additional warmth than it’s highly useful to be able to have control to go in and out of the state by conscious decision.
Researching the mind isn’t easy. You don’t see very well what the human mind does through putting people into an fMRI. Having awareness of what happens in your own mind is a good way to understand minds better.
Of course you can also learn something through experiments but it’s often hard to know from reading a scientific paper in which state the participants have been during the experiment. A lot of psychology experiments are also not well replicated so you don’t really know which effects are stable and which aren’t.
People who are not aware of what happens in their own mind also frequently project their own issues into other people. That makes it hard to understand why other people do what they do. Meditation helps you to become aware of the stuff that happens inside your own mind.
If you have done LSD, please explain.
If you have not, then hard downvote for stupendous arrogance.
The most “productive” thing to do is both use psychedelics AND read textbooks, which I assume Fink already does.
(Side note: parent is currently at the the top, and is inanely academic. I’m now further understanding the necessity of “post-rationalism” a la Will Newsome.)
That shouldn’t matter at all in parsing the validity of my argument, but yes, I have..
Citations are needed for what you said. A description of significant experience with a variaty of psychedelics and an explanation of how that led you to think that marginal returns on “understanding the human mind” are so steep might be satisfactory.
The human mind is not close to being “solved” by any sane definition of “solved”. Systemetized research on the psychedelic experience has been repressed for decades, and current best efforts on doing so (see, e.g., psychonautwiki.org and DMT-nexus) haven’t gotten very far.
Not ignoring the virtue of things like psychonautics is an advantage that “post-rationalism” has on standard-fare LW rationalism.