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Desrtopa comments on The benefits of madness: A positive account of arationality - Less Wrong
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Comments (121)
Can you post references to new mathematical (or philosophical) proofs that you have solved so we can check the assertion that such altered states are beneficial? Have the results been peer reviewed or published (not that them not being peer-reviewed or published makes them any less valid but this gives a baseline of that others have checked your work)?
Also, what was your reasoning for doubting that you exist? How was Descartes proof insufficient?
It's essentially circular. It assumes an "I" from the start. If you get rid of that assumption, you have to start with "something is thinking."
That's been acknowledged in philosophical circles for some time now, but I don't think many philosophers regard it as an important problem anymore. It's about as safe an assumption as you can possibly make.
Seconding your main request, I've heard more people than I care to recall claim inspiration from altered states of consciousness, but it would be a first to have anyone present one that's novel and demonstrably true.
If anyone wants to google this, keywords are "nonduality" and "Advaita". It probably deserves a memetic hazard warning, though.
Kary Mullis invented PCR while on LSD
According to his wikipedia page, he claims that he found the use of LSD mind opening, that he believes it helped him come up with the idea for PCR, and that he doubts he would have come up with it if he never used LSD, but it doesn't say that he came up with it while on LSD, and I would take it as implied that he did not. This does shift my prior in favor of LSD having been useful to him in developing PCR, but not a whole lot, because there's such an abundance of evidence for people having poor self assessment regarding the propensity of drugs to aid their thinking. Even a non-blinded experiment which compared some measure of intellectual productivity of an experiment group on drugs to a control group that wasn't would do a lot more to change my assessment (and it is awfully hard to adequately blind subjects to whether or not they're taking real hallucinogens.)
Do you have a source for that? I remember reading in his book that the idea came to him in a flash while he was driving on the freeway. It could be my memory of what he wrote is mistaken, or he's just that kind of crazy guy, but driving on the freeway implies not tripping on LSD.
Oh, would that it were so.
Well, I've written a few poems and passages of longer prose that came out reasonably well and have joined the collection of "things I'm working on to submit to publishers" while on various drugs. That might just about count.
Also, is fun itself not enough to justify something being a Good Thing?
Provided there's nothing else to counterbalance it, but if what drugs provide is only fun, then arguing for them on any grounds other than fun is disingenuous.
Yes, that's very true.
I have found, in my personal and not at all even a little bit scientific personal experience, that altered states can be very good indeed for what people who write (I don't paint or practice higher mathematics or any of the other relevant things, so I shan't presume to comment on them) call the creative process. But then, maybe this isn't the right place for talking about The Creative Process, which I suppose is a nebulous and rather wanky sort of a term even if it is something very dear to my heart.
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 16
The message here doesn't seem truly novel, but 'You will survive through sex reassignment surgery' must at least count as unusual.
The story also illustrates how the word "I" can conceal any number of unsafe assumptions. Clearly part of the author knew more than she thought she did. (And the part about her childhood memories seems credible though not strictly proven.)
I thought the standard answer to this problem was that "think" confers "me-ness" - if you could observe "someone thinks" the way that Descartes observed it (introspection on the thought process) then you are that someone.
The flipside is that you can't know that others are thinking, because you have no ability to introspect on their thoughts.
It might be more appropriate to say "something appears to be thinking." Perhaps in the chaotic mass of whatever-exists-ness, a random collision of entities has produced something that feels from the inside like thoughts and memories of a past, but has no continuity.
I suppose you could say that the entity is still "I," even if it's divorced from your conception of yourself, but I think a better solution is to not entertain the notion at all.
Try "thinking is happening" and "observing is happening". No entity required.
Yeah, this clarifies what I thought on the matter - although it touches on anthropic reasoning, so I guess it isn't a standard answer.
For the record, it would look something like:
Putting this in formal logic, it only works if "being observed" is defined from the two-place predicate "x is observing y". We could also use a one-place predicate, "x is observed". So it's still not totally free of assumptions, so to speak.
The point is, Decart was supposedly doubting everything; so this particular argument, while decent, is not so unusually decent as to justify being held up as the one undoubted thing.
I feel like the existence of an observer is a necessary condition for "x is observed" to be true - but that is again anthropics, and so fully fleshing out this argument might take more than a comment,