Ah, I’m really glad you asked. I tried to define it implicitly in the post but I was maybe too subtle.
There’s this specific engine of addiction. It’s the thing that distracts without addressing the cause, and becomes your habitual go-to for dealing with the Bad Thing. That creates a feedback loop.
Sobriety is with respect to an addiction. It means dropping the distraction and facing & addressing the thing you’d been previously distracting yourself from, until the temptation to distract yourself extinguishes.
Alcohol being a seed example (hence “sobriety”). The engine of alcoholism is complex, but ultimately there’s an underlying thing (sometimes biochemical, but very often emotional) that’s a sensation the alcoholic’s mind/body system has identified as “intolerable — to be avoided”. Alcohol is a great numbing agent and can create a lot of unrelated sensations (like dizziness), but it doesn’t address (say) feelings of inadequacy.
So getting sober isn’t just a matter of “don’t drink alcohol”, but of facing the things that drive the impulse to reach for the bottle. When you extinguish the cause, the effect evaporates on its own — modulo habits.
I’ve witnessed this kind of addiction engine at play for a lot of rationalists. I don’t have statistics here, or a sense of how widespread it is, but it’s common enough that it’s an invitation woven into the culture. Kind of like alcohol is woven into mainstream culture. The addiction in this case is to a particular genre of intense thought — which, like alcohol, acts like a kind of numbing agent.
So in the same way, by “get sober” I’m pointing at facing the SNS energy driving the intense thought, and getting that to settle down and digest, instead of just believing the thoughts point-blank. To get to a point where you don’t need the thoughts to be distracting. And then the mind can be useful to think about stuff that can freak you out.
But not so much before.
…kind of like, an alcohol-laden mind can’t think things through very well, and an alcoholic’s mind isn’t well-suited to deciding whether to have another drink even when they aren’t currently drunk.
So, no, I don’t mean anything about drifting back toward mainstream consensus reality. I’m talking about a very specific mechanism. Getting off a specific drug long enough to stop craving it.
Ah, I’m really glad you asked. I tried to define it implicitly in the post but I was maybe too subtle.
There’s this specific engine of addiction. It’s the thing that distracts without addressing the cause, and becomes your habitual go-to for dealing with the Bad Thing. That creates a feedback loop.
Sobriety is with respect to an addiction. It means dropping the distraction and facing & addressing the thing you’d been previously distracting yourself from, until the temptation to distract yourself extinguishes.
Alcohol being a seed example (hence “sobriety”). The engine of alcoholism is complex, but ultimately there’s an underlying thing (sometimes biochemical, but very often emotional) that’s a sensation the alcoholic’s mind/body system has identified as “intolerable — to be avoided”. Alcohol is a great numbing agent and can create a lot of unrelated sensations (like dizziness), but it doesn’t address (say) feelings of inadequacy.
So getting sober isn’t just a matter of “don’t drink alcohol”, but of facing the things that drive the impulse to reach for the bottle. When you extinguish the cause, the effect evaporates on its own — modulo habits.
I’ve witnessed this kind of addiction engine at play for a lot of rationalists. I don’t have statistics here, or a sense of how widespread it is, but it’s common enough that it’s an invitation woven into the culture. Kind of like alcohol is woven into mainstream culture. The addiction in this case is to a particular genre of intense thought — which, like alcohol, acts like a kind of numbing agent.
So in the same way, by “get sober” I’m pointing at facing the SNS energy driving the intense thought, and getting that to settle down and digest, instead of just believing the thoughts point-blank. To get to a point where you don’t need the thoughts to be distracting. And then the mind can be useful to think about stuff that can freak you out.
But not so much before.
…kind of like, an alcohol-laden mind can’t think things through very well, and an alcoholic’s mind isn’t well-suited to deciding whether to have another drink even when they aren’t currently drunk.
So, no, I don’t mean anything about drifting back toward mainstream consensus reality. I’m talking about a very specific mechanism. Getting off a specific drug long enough to stop craving it.
Now that you’ve explained this seems obviously the right sense of sobriety given the addiction analogy. Thank you!
Quite welcome.