[FRIAM] A longer response to Dave's question

Fri Feb 28 10:46:33 EST 2020

Yes, following Nick's comments and my prior email, there are multiple
issues, and I don't think I'm playing fast and loos with them, though maybe
we need some additional terms to differentiate things.

1) There is a legitimate question about how *reliably* certain experiences
can be produced under various circumstances. For example, how does one
reliably get the sense of floating through a connected world when on
certain drugs, chanting in certain circumstances with a group of believers,
running continuously for a certain length of time, meditating steadily on
the meaning of certain "koans", etc.

2) When one is in those "altered states" how *reliable* are the full
variety of experiences they encounter? If, during one of these experiences,
I see you melt into a puddle on the ground, can I gain nourishment by
drinking you through a straw? When I experience benzene as snakes, and I
throw the benzene a mouse, does it eat the mouse? Is the benzene happier
when on a heat rock?

3) When the "altered state" is over, how *reliable* are the insights people
am left with. We readily accept (now) that benzene is a ring, but none of
of think it is made up of snakes.... but both of those certainly were
experienced (see point 2), but the experiencer-in-question only considered
the ring part insightful, and that seems worth noting. "Insights" that
sustain after the altered states are over sometimes seem to be serious
advances, but other times seems to produce problems, ranging from mundane
dumb ideas ("Hey man, we should, like, quit our jobs and start a band, that
only plays bowling alleys") to small tragedies (such as an aquantance who
killed himself after an acid trip in which he thought he saw God and God
didn't like him) to large tragedies (wars fought and lost due to visions of
various types). How do we get a sense of which post-altered-state insights
will pan out, and which wont?

William James would be all about 1 and 2. Peirce all about 3. Though they
would both have at least some interest in all three.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Department of Justice - Personnel Psychologist
American University - Adjunct Instructor
<echarles at american.edu>

On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 2:58 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, Glen,
>
>
>
> I don't think Eric is talking about the reliability of what happens when
> one get's drunk;  I think he is talking about the applicability of lessons
> one might learn while being drunk to life when one is NOT drunk.  I suppose
> one might ask why am I privileging sobriety?  Isn't it also the case that
> the lessons I learn while NOT drunk have limited applicability to life
> while drunk? Why not focus on that?
>
>
>
> I like the plainness of what Glen writes below:
>
>
>
> Even if you're as frightened as Nick by such, you can still consider
> donations. E.g. https://maps.org/
>
>
>
> Indeed, I am frightened by these drugs.  Frightened for myself, frightened
> more for my grand children, etc.  Yes I think it goes back to that Hegelian
> thing, Apollonians and Dionysians.  Dionysians see life as a bunch of
> opportunities; Apollonians see life itself as the opportunity, and anything
> that threatens it as a hazard.  The Dionysian nightmare is confinement; the
> Apollonian nightmare is of being lost and never getting back.  Does this
> explain why so many of the Dionysians I know had strict religious
> backgrounds?  They were members of a congregation, once.   For me, FRIAM is
> my first.
>
>
>
> Nick
>
>
>
> Nicholas Thompson
>
> Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
> Clark University
>
> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com
>
> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ?
> Sent: Monday, February 24, 2020 12:30 PM
> To: FriAM <friam at redfish.com>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] A longer response to Dave's question
>
>
>
>
>
>
> https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/results?cond=&term=psilocybin&cntry=&state=&city=&dist=
>
>
>
> Eric is relying on ambiguity in the term "reliable" and the phrase "what
> is experienced under altered states" when he appeals to common sense with
> "Come on guys ...". If what one experiences after drinking alcohol were
> unreliable, it wouldn't be addictive. The experiences under alcohol,
> opiates, and recreational use of *some* hallucinogens are reliable almost
> by definition. But if you take a super-specific meaning of the term
> "reliable", then you can wiggle your way into Eric's not-so-common sense.
> Similarly, "what is experienced" comes in so many forms and layers, it's
> not only a common sense fallacy, it's also an over-generalization. Sure,
> even if you get in a bar fight 90% of the time you get drunk, with high
> reliability, the triggers for that fight probably exhibit high variation.
> So, really, some experiences are reliable and some are not. The task is to
> figure out which ones are and which one's are not.
>
>
>
> Our whole discussion seems rife with such errors, probably because we're
> insisting on talking about things in general, with few particulars. I'd
> argue the above listed clinical trials are doing a good job of developing a
> method/discipline for altered states. And I'd encourage anyone hunting for
> such a method/discipline to participate in the effort. Even if you're as
> frightened as Nick by such, you can still consider donations. E.g.
> https://maps.org/
>
>
>
> On 2/24/20 7:56 AM, Prof David West wrote:
>
> > I would argue that it is possible to "direct" or "contextualize" a
> hallucinogen induced altered state such that the experience is more
> reliable than typically acknowledged.
>
> >
>
> > It is my belief, but as yet this is just a belief, that it is possible
> to develop a "discipline" a "method" by which we might "make sense" of the
> altered state experience(s) in a more or less direct manner. Not, just as
> insights or metaphors to be exploited in the realm of the "normal."
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Mon, Feb 24, 2020, at 4:32 PM, Eric Charles wrote:
>
> >> Come on guys....
>
> >>
>
> >> We all consider most of what is experienced under altered states
>
> >> unreliable,  EVEN  when we associate great insight with those same
> experience.  Yes,  the apocryphal dream lead to the (now confirmed) belief
> that benzene is a ring,  but NOT to the belief that benzene was made up of
> snakes.
>
> >>
>
> >> So we have a condition that generates insights that would not
>
> >> otherwise have been gotten (or, which would have taken much longer to
> get), but it also generates a lot of things that aren't insights.  After
> all that generation has happened,  we sort through the experiences by
> various methods and decide what to keep and what not to.
>
> >>
>
> >> "Are there conditions that more reliably generate insights?" is a
>
> >> straightforward question for experimental investigation.  William James
> was super interested in that type of question,  but the field didn't like
> his inquiries in that direction,  so we still don't know much in the way of
> answers.
>
> >>
>
> >> "How do we,  in practice,  determine which experiences were insights?
>
> >> is an anthropological / sociological / qualitative-psychology question.
> The answer,  in most domains,  is that people decide what to believe mostly
> using heuristic judgments,  often with maintenance of social congruence
> weighing heavily.  I have no answers to offer specific to this context.
> "Abduction" should be discussed much more in this context,  but hardly
> anyone has any idea what that is.
>
> >>
>
> >> "How SHOULD we determine which experiences were insightful?" is a
>
> >> philosophical question,  of great interest to Peirce who, I think, is
> cool with any initial source of such beliefs.
>
> >>
>
> >> Peirce does have occasional mystic/transcendent leanings, especially
> later in life, but I have trouble deciphering those writings,  so can't
> really help with illuminating them. He definitely thinks those leanings are
> compatible with everything else here is saying, but I can't see it.
>
>
>
> --
>
> ☣ uǝlƃ
>
>
>
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