Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

[Prof David West]

But Nick,

I don't understand your unwillingness to acknowledge my experience(s).

When I return from Amsterdam and provide you with a detailed trip report detailing all things bicycle (rules of the road, rider attitudes, bicycle culture, multi-level bicycle garages, exotic bikes, electro-bikes, utility bikes, bikes with bins on the front for small children and groceries, "deep inner peace" from riding many kilometers, feelings of being one with Nature in a way impossible inside a car, enhanced perception of body language nuances [essential for safety reasons] ... ) will you discount those stories the same way you discount a "Trip" report?

Or, suppose I attend my next FriAM while under the influence; do you believe I will be less cogent and more stupid than I normally appear?

How about an experiment where I play a poker tournament while under the influence of mescaline and another "sober." Want to bet in which one I will do better? If mescaline increases sensitivity and reduces the 'importance" of time, then its influence would increase my ability to detect "tells" and eliminate the, sometimes, crushing boredom I normally experience.

When I post all kinds of notes (glen asked for some) and reports of findings from the ICPR conference showing both "no harm" and "measurable benefits" from hallucinogen use — will that be "evidence" or still, in some fashion, "faith?"

Two caveats:

1) individual experience may vary. My brother, for instance, cannot stand, cannot deal with, any sense of lacking "control" whether that is induced by alcohol, or the one time he tried drugs;

and, 2) it is quite possible that some drugs, like large doses of DMT, are pretty much sledgehammers. The experience is so pronounced — very much like being in a different Reality andnot  just an altered state of consciousness — that it may very well be a case of scrambled circuits. I am certain that "glue sniffing," for example, and similar means of "getting high" are exactly what you fear — John Henry size sledgehammers.  There is all kinds of physiological evidence of the harm.

Time is something we all experience. Mescaline-Time-Experience is very different than Straight-Time-Experience. Is there value in comparing/contrasting/discussing those differences in order to enhance our common understanding of Time? I don't think it possible to truly understand Time if the only experience we allow into the discussion is either Straight-Time-Experience or Mescaline-Time-Experience.

Mayhap your fear is "irrational" and my "faith" is rational?

davew

On Sun, Mar 8, 2020, at 5:41 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

But Dave, I don’t understand your faith that drugs are a Tao-ist butcher, rather than a sledgehammer.   Do you stipulate that feelings of well-being, wisdom, insight, etc. can be neurologically divorced from the facts thereof?  So, the presence of such feelings does not constitute sufficient evidence of the facts, right?  Now remember, I have stipulated to the value of the sledgehammer, and admitted that the position I am taking in this argument arises from in part an from a fear of having my brain sledged.  So “potential benefits of sledgehammering” are irrelevant to our PRESENT argument, unless, of course we want this whole vast, tortured, philosophical argument to boil down to the fact that you like being sledge-hammered and I don’t.  Apart from the fact that you LIKE taking drugs, what is the EVIDENCE that it constitutes a method of gathering knowledge less chaotic than electro-shock therapy.  How does sledging your clock with drugs systematically reveal something about time?   Or are you ready to try ECT? 

 

I apologize for all the typos in my previous messages.  My macular pucker makes it hard sometimes to see the words as they are, but Bill Gates does not have macular pucker, so there is really no excuse.

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Sunday, March 8, 2020 3:10 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

 

Ignore the software thing — an example of cross-talk between two unrelated conversations that happens because so much of my neural network is still twisted-pair copper instead of LSD-Fiber.

 

I clearly missed your sledgehammer metaphor. I think, however, it might reveal a fundamental difference in perspective. You seem to see the taking of a drug (and drugs are not the only or even the most important means available) as destructive of an orderly experience processor (an experience-randomizer); and I see such taking as "oiling the machinery to make it run more efficiently."

 

But the key metaphor — one you admit is different in kind — from the others, is the Taoist butcher and you are correct that I am suggesting drugs (other means available) augment perception/awareness in very roughly a manner akin to the way that telescopes and microscopes augment our perception/awareness capabilities.

 

The self-referential feedback loop you allude to is very real. But it takes us, not to Castenada-land, but to Buddha-land or to Wheeler(et.al. combining information and quantum theories)-land where the Universe is Experiencing Itself as experiencing itself (faith); or the Universe Computing Itself computing (supposedly, science).

 

What you see as paradox, I see as confirmation. A metaphor that provides a perspective that facilitates bringing together fibers from multiple sources and finding the consistencies among them, so as to create threads, from which my tapestry.

 

davew

 

 

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 6:35 PM, [hidden email] wrote:

Ok, so we need to get our metaphor’s straight, here.

 

The sledge hammer is meant to be an experience-randomizer.  To the extent that sledge hammers do predictable things to clocks, it fails for me as a metaphor.  Once my Sledge Hammer has struck my clock, there should be no relation between the positions of the pieces of the clock before the blow and after.  But even granting its limitations, I don’t think my Sledge Hammer is an appropriate metaphor for your complaint about ordinary software.  I think you are talking about a bull-dozer.  Like a Sledge Hammer, a Bulldozer does not care for the structure of whatever it encounters; but unlike my Sledge Hammer, it imposes a highly predictable order of its own. Neither the Sledge Hammer nor the Bulldozer are like the Taoist Butcher, who clearly cares for .the structure of what he cuts. 

 

So, what we are arguing about can be construed as an argument about which metaphor is most aptly applied to taking drugs.  I am arguing for the Sledge Hammer.  Sledge Hammers have their uses.  I have always imagined that electroshock therapy is a kind of sledge hammer, although perhaps it is more like a bulldozer, returning the brain to factory settings. Bulldozers are very useful in that they create a structure on which other things can easily be built.  You might be arguing that drug-taking is a bull dozer.  Or you might be arguing that drug-taking is more like the Taoist butcher, in that it reveals the structure of what is already there.  It is like a microscopist’s stain.  But to make that metaphor work, you have to grant to the drug, or to the person who administers it, the wisdom and experience of the butcher who has become so familiar with meat that he can, without thinking about it, see where the meat isn’t.   Now you are in Castenada territory, the territory of faith. 

 

Thanks, as always, Dave, for your generosity of spirit.  By the way, some keen-eyed observer may detect something seriously awry in my metaphorical proceeding above.  Presumably we both agree that the brain is a device that tells us something about something else, not about itself.  Dubious as I am that a sledge hammer can tell us anything about the structure of clocks, I am even MORE dubious that it can tell us anything about the structure of time. The Taoist Butcher metaphor seems to work in a different way.  To make it consistent, we would have to have the Taoist Butcher dissect HIMSELF in order to discover the structure of meat. 

 

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

 

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Saturday, March 7, 2020 3:37 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

 

Oooh fun ...

 

I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks.

 

Let me twist this example a bit to make what I think might be a valid way to assert a "benefit" of drug-epistemology over sledge-hammer.

 

I must start a bit afield with a quote from Plato and a Taoist koan:

 

[First,] perceiving and bringing together under one Idea the scattered particulars, so that one makes clear the thing which he wishes to do... [Second,] the separation of the Idea into classes, by dividing it where the natural joints are, and not trying to break any part, after the manner of as a bad carver... I love these processes of division and bringing together, and if I think any other man is able to see things that can naturally be collected into one and divided into many, him I will follow as if he were as a god.

- Plato

 

"A Taoist butcher used but one knife his entire career without the need to sharpen it. At his retirement party the Emperor asked him about this extraordinary feat, The butcher stated, "Oh, I simply cut where the meat wasn't."

 

Now this leads to a problem of decomposition - breaking up a large and complex problem into tractable sub-problems. Software engineering uses a sledgehammer epistemology of data structures and algorithms to accomplish this decomposition with results that are horrific. In contrast, a "vision" induced, daydreaming about biological cells and cellular organisms led to the insight that cells are differentiated from each other by what they do, not what they are. So software modularity might be based on behavior. Far superior results in myriad ways.

 

If we take C.D.Broad and Huxley seriously, mescaline reveals "more of reality" than typically available to our conscious minds. I would assert and be willing to defend that at least that sort of drug-epistemology could enhance our ability to actually see "where the meat wasn't" and therefore enhance our ability to decompose large complicated systems (maybe even complex systems) in tractable sub-problems.

 

* * * * * * *

 

My vision was not based on a stain, nor was it of cells dividing - it was an inter-cellular dissolving and recombining of inter-cellular elements, proteins etc., into other inter-cellular elements such that when the cell did eventually divide its internals were radically different. What I "saw" would more likely inform a genetic engineer than someone investigating cell division stuff.

 

* * * * * *

 

Sorry for making you ill, but it is your interpretation that is at fault.

 

You might remember the early days of Cinerama movies. They would start the movie showing a scene, like flying through the Grand canyon, then suddenly expand the displayed rectangle, the size of a traditional movie screen, into the full height and width of the Cinerama screen.

 

It was still just a movie, but the experience of the movie was enhanced? with sensations of vertigo, movement, detail, etc.

 

What Broad and Huxley suggest is that experience is "filtered" by the organism and that filtering reduces experience to the dimensions of a pre-Cinerama movie. Huxley then asserts that mescaline turns experience into Experience.

 

We are all experience monists here, but some of us are making the claim that there can be, at minimum, quantitative differences among experiences (something akin to the increase in pixel density and 8 versus 64 bit representation of the color of each pixel) and, at least the possibility of qualitative differences, e.g. the vertigo of Cinerama.

 

And, those differences are attainable via various means. Not just drugs.

 

So my assertion of "Apollonian-er than thou" is a claim that I experience "life" in "Cinerama" and you in "cinema multiplex standard screen."

 

davew

 

On Sat, Mar 7, 2020, at 5:53 AM, [hidden email] wrote:

See Larding below.

 

By the way:  my mail interface is taken to tucking some of my mail into a folder called "important" where, of course, I cannot see it.  So, if I appear to go missing, don't hesitate to write me an unimportant message telling me that there are important ones awaiting me. 

 

Of course I have  n o   I d e a  what distinguishes an important message from an unimportant one. 

 

As I said, see below:  Oh, and dave, what I wrote below is TESTY.  I don’t realty feel testy,  I don’t really feel qualified to be testy.  I think the rhetoric just got away with me.  It has happened before and you have promised it doesn’t’ bother you, so I am counting on your grace-under-fire again. 

 

Your friend ,

Nick

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

[hidden email]

https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

 

-----Original Message-----

From: Friam <[hidden email]> On Behalf Of Prof David West

Sent: Friday, March 6, 2020 2:00 AM

To: [hidden email]

Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Acid epistemology - restarting a previous conversation

 

thanks Glen,

 

I totally agree with you about dead white guys. [Except I have had face-to-face conversations with a couple of them :) ] I reference them not as a source of answers but in an attempt to find some kind of conceptual bridge for a conversation. But that might be totally counterproductive as it tends to introduce a propensity for forking the conversation.

 

Engaging with contemporary scientists is hard when it comes to drug-induced data sets / experiences. I hope to make some connections with contemporary researchers at the ICPR conference I mentioned but the focus there seems to be psycho-medical and related to the oxytocin article you posted, and my direct interests tend to diverge from that.

 

Perhaps something more direct might be useful. Two things, the second is mostly to tease Nick.

 

 

1) I am fascinated by the field of scientific visualization, using imagery to present complex data sets. Recently I "observed" the precise moment of sperm-egg fertilization. A whole lot was going on inside the egg cell boundary immediately upon contact (not penetration) with the sperm. The visualization was of thousands (millions?) of discrete inter-cellular elements breaking free from existing structures, like DNA strands, proteins, molecules and moving about independently. I could see several "fields" that were a kind of "probability field." These fields constrained both the movement of the various elements and, most importantly, what structures would emerge from their recombination.  "Watching" the DNA strand 'dissolve" and "reform" was particularly interesting because it was totally unlike the "unzip into two strands, the zip-up a strand-half from each donor" visualization I have seen presented in animations explaining the process.  Instead I saw all kinds of "clumps" form and merge into larger/longer "clumps" then engage in an interesting hula/belly/undulation dance to rearrange the structure into a final form.  All of this "guided" by the very visible "probability fields;" more than one and color coded.

 

Now, if I were a cellular biologist could I make use of this vision?

[NST===>] I love this example.  Every stain produces a new image and some stains are more revealing than others, in that the models they facilitate are more robust and enduring in their predictions.  I stipulate that.  I also stipulate that hitting an alarm clock with a sledge hammer MIGHT reveal robust and enduring information about alarm clocks.  I just don’t think it’s likely.  And there is the possibility that the clock wont be very accurate thereafter.  That is the whole of my argument against drug -epistemology.  So if you are NOT arguing that drug-epistemology is somehow superior to sledge-hammer epistemology, then we agree and we don’t have to argue any more. 

 

Since I am not a cellular biologist and have no understanding of inter-cellular structures/dynamics/chemistry, nor any DNA knowledge, where did the imagery come from and why did it hang together so well?

 

Was this experience just an amusing bit of entertainment" Or, is there an insight of some sort lurking there?

[NST===>] I like the metaphor with stains.  But just remember, if my memory serves me correctly, you don’t see jack shit when cells divide without the right stain.  All such observations are of the Peircean type/; “If I do this, then I will get that.” 

 

2) En garde Nick.

[NST===>] je me garde

 

Quoting Huxley, paraphrasing C.D. Broad — "The function of the brain,  nervous system, and sense organs is, in the main, eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. This is Mind-At-Large.

[NST===>] Dave, even without my characteristic ill ease with dispositions (like gravity, for instance), this last sentence gives me the heebs.  And the Heaves.  It is either a definition of memory (=all that I experience as past at a moment) or it is non-sense.  Or some kind of balmy article of faith. 

 

But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive.

[NST===>] No.  No animal has ever survived.  No animal has ever tried to survive. No species has ever tried to survive.  This is all foolishness pressed on us by Spencer.  Even Darwin was leery of it.  (and no I cannot cite text)

To make biological survival possible, Mind-At-Large,  has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet."

[NST===>] I suppose one can make sense of this sort of talk by postulating a world outside of experience, but unless you postulate that this world beyond experience can in principle never affect experience, you end up with a contradiction because anything that effects experience in any way, however indirect,  is, by definition, experienced. 

 

Two personal experiences: 1) I tend to not notice when my glasses get cloudy from accumulation of dust and moisture until it is quite bad. I clean my glasses, put them on, and am amazed at how clear and detailed my perceptions are post-cleaning. A very dramatic difference.

[NST===>] Well of course.  Cleaning glasses is a method that increases the predictive potential of your current visual experiences.  If your argument is only that there are experiences I have not had which will surprise me if I have them, I agree, so we don’t have to argue about that any more, right?

And, 2) the proper dose of a hallucinogen (and/or the right kind of meditation) and my perceptions of the world around me, using all my senses, are amazingly clear and detailed in the same way as my visual perception was changed by cleaning grime from my glasses.

[NST===>] The innate school marm gives us little jolts of pleasure from time to time, usually in response to activities that please her.  One of those jolts is a “sense of clarity.”  If you break into her storeroom and steal her clarity candies, you will get the clarity-pleasure even while seeing muddily. 

 

Now I grant you it’s possible you will see something more clearly.  See above the sledgehammered clock argument.

 

I would contend that the drug (meditation) removed the muddying filter of my brain/nervous system/ sense organs just as the isopropyl alcohol removed the muddying filter of moisture-dust on my glasses.

 

I see the world as it "really" is.[NST===>]Well, that remains to be seen, right.  It might be that the dust filters the light in such a way as to reveal structures that you cannot see through the cleaned glass.  The proof is in the pudding … i.e., the proving out.   

 

Now the tease: I would contend that I am more Apollonian than thou because I value Life, and more of Life, more directly, than you do. It is not varied experience I seek, but a direct, clear, complete, apprehension and appreciation of Life Itself.

[NST===>] Similarly, let it be the case that I had a dozen clocks and you told me you had hit them all with a sledge hammer;  now, if you told me you had lied, and gave me back the 12^th clock in perfect working order, I would value it a lot more for having thought I had lost it. 

 

davew

 

 

On Thu, Mar 5, 2020, at 4:58 PM, uǝlƃ ☣ wrote:

> It's not pesky for me in the slightest. I'm *very* interested. I

> haven't contributed because it's not clear I have anything to

> contribute.

> 

> Maybe I can start with a criticism, though. It's unclear to me why you

> (or anyone) would delicately flip through crumbling pages of

> philosophy when there are fresh and juicy results from

> (interventionist) methods right in front of us? The oxytocin post

> really *was* inspired by this thread. But because you guys are talking

> about dead white men like Peirce and James, it's unclear how the science relates.

> 

> My skepticism goes even deeper (beyond dead white men) to why one

> would think *anyone* (alive, dead, white or brown) might be able to

> *think* up an explanation for how knowledge grows. I would like to,

> but cannot, avoid the inference that this belief anyone (or any

> "school" of people) can think up explanations stems from a bias toward

> *individualism*. My snarky poke at "super intelligent god-people" in a

> post awhile back was

> (misguidedly) intended to express this same skepticism. I worry that

> poking around in old philosophy is simply an artifact of the mythology

> surrounding the "mind" and Great Men

> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_man_theory>.

> 

> It seems to me like science works in *spite* of our biases to

> individualism. So, if I want to understand knowledge, I have to stop

> identifying ways of knowing through dead individuals and focus on the

> flowing *field* of the collective scientists.

> 

> Of course, that doesn't mean we ignore the writings of the dead people.

> But it means liberally slashing away anything that even smells obsolete.

> 

> Regardless of what you do post, don't interpret *my* lack of response

> as disinterest or irritation, because it's not.

> 

> On 3/5/20 6:14 AM, Prof David West wrote:

> > And the key to my being a pest — is anyone else curious about these things?

> 

> 

> --

> ☣ uǝlƃ

> 

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