Morality and different kinds of psychoactives

[Ripheus27]

I suppose this could go in the Ethics subforum, but I'll be drawing on a fairly high-level philosophical stance in this thread so...

Oftentimes users of certain drugs, i.e. psychedelics, claim that they achieve vast mystical insight into the nature of reality while under the influence. For example, Terence McKenna claims that DMT use proved to him that materialism (of some kind) is false, that his visions of "hyperspace" showed him a world that cannot be explained, much less defined, in terms of ordinary matter. I've browsed dozens and dozens of reports on Erowid.org in which people on mushrooms or LSD or w/e allege perceiving celestial unity and power and love while in extreme psychedelic states, allegations accompanied by a high degree of certainty.

Now I will admit to having done my fair share of drugs over the years, and I often feel as if this has led me not necessarily to special insights, but at least to those insights that I would already have attained otherwise if only more slowly. But from a purely philosophical point of view, I think "drugs led me to enlightenment" is pretty much dead wrong, and here's my argument.

The difference between a priori and empirical knowledge turns on the difference between the mind's active vs. passive roles in the acquisition of knowledge. Since apriority is the sphere of transcendental knowledge, enlightenment can and must be given to us a priori. But a drug is something that "happens to us," if you will--it's something external to our mind that gets attached to it. So even if DMT (for instance) gave us "experience" of another realm, this experience, as something that we passively were subjected to, would not be a priori and therefore by definition could not be of transcendental truth. Whereas my mind is eternally disposed to "2 + 2 = 4"--since this fact is hovering before my mind all the time, everywhere I go--I know it to be a fact for all time and all space--psychedelic states are finite in duration and dependent on finitely-located substances (chemicals that degrade pretty quickly in the blood).

Again, perhaps DMT among others is like a ReadyBoost USB drive for the computer of our minds: something that flash-overdrives our thoughts into an enlightened arena. But since this capacity for enlightenment is given inherently within us, in the end, drugs are maybe like Wittgenstein's Tractatian ladder, to be thrown away once we've ascended to their apex.

 

[quatona]

I don´t disagree with you - however, I don´t think their claims that they´ve "gained insight" were meant to imply that their "insight" was "a priori enlightenment" nor that they are disputing the difference between "a priori enlightenment" and "empirical knowledge".
I don´t see much reason to interprete their statement as anything more than describing those drugs as tools that helped them to "gain insight". "Gaining insight", as I understand them, doesn´t exclude the possibility that it was a process of "getting aware of what had been your a priori knowledge, anyway".

As, generally, "enlightenment" or "insight" do not neglect the idea that the knowledge was there, a priori. If, as you postulate, "enlightenment is given to us a priori", "enlightenment" as a process or result or "heureka moment" is excluded as a possibility, by your definition. That strikes me as weird, since I have always understood claims of "enlightenment" to describe exactly a process of getting aware of something (no matter whether this knowledge had been there a priori or not).

 

[GrowingSmaller]

I heard that in some jail pot smoking might be overlooked as users are often too peaced out to do anything wrong.

 

[Ripheus27]

I think something I meant to say was that it seems as if some people, many even, claim that drug use was a portal to a world that we can't conceive of our own accord, which smacks of traditional autonomy-undermining hamartiology. That is, they act intellectually dependent on the drug, as if it were impossible for us (not just themselves) to achieve real transcendental understanding by our own efforts. Okay, so maybe it is impossible even for us, but then a fortiori would it be impossible for drugs to as if by magic jump us outside the cause-and-effect universe. The very notion seems contradictory: an obviously physical object, like a psilocybin mushroom or a chemist-synthesized DMT crystal, is causing a state of mind for someone, which state of mind is yet somehow beyond spacetime. That is, these objects in space, when we do something in space with them (e.g. eat them), mystically teleport us--using energy flowing from them in space into our embodied neural architecture!--to a place that is not a place. That is, a point in space is made to connect to a non-point (no points exist on the empty plane), and then by a line conjoined to a non-line, we move from the point to the non-point (half the line must be made up of non-points, perhaps, for this to even *start* making sense). I daresay this is absolutely false.

 

[variant]

I would say that the experience itself probably simply lead them to question some of their rational assumptions.

However, why would your experience in modifying your brain chemically, show you anything other than the fact that you can radically alter your perspective by altering it's chemical basis?

Rationally you can't use an altered brain to say that materialism is wrong, it is pretty strong evidence in the other direction. Being open to possibilities because of a interesting experience is great and all, but were not talking about a rational A -> B connection here, quite the opposite, it is an embrace of irrationality in light of experiences outside the norm for humans.

 

[bhsmte]

I would say that the experience itself probably simply lead them to question some of their rational assumptions.

However, why would your experience in modifying your brain chemically, show you anything other than the fact that you can radically alter your perspective by altering it's chemical basis?

Rationally you can't use an altered brain to say that materialism is wrong, it is pretty strong evidence in the other direction. Being open to possibilities because of a interesting experience is great and all, but were not talking about a rational A -> B connection here, quite the opposite, it is an embrace of irrationality in light of experiences outside the norm for humans.

The brain is capable of convincing you of anything, if its normal chemistry is altered etc.. Also, deep psychological needs can also work to convince one that there perceptions (no matter how irrational) are indeed true.

 

[variant]

deep psychological needs can also work to convince one that there perceptions (no matter how irrational) are indeed true.

If religion teaches us anything, it is this.

 

[bhsmte]

If religion teaches us anything, it is this.

I love psychology and the topic of; psychology of belief, is very interesting to dive into. They have learned a lot about this topic in the last 10-20 years.

 

[Ecclectic79]

Having had many psychedelic experiences in my early and mid 20's I'd phrase it like this.

Hallucinogens/psychedelics, I'd agree, help you separate yourself from inherited thought structures and to distinguish them from what you know to be true in the moment. For instance there are many thought structures we may still have dangling from our worldview by 20 or 21 that we probably wouldn't agree with given current knowledge (particularly those who seek to understand things that they previously didn't and who were raised by parents and/or culture who typically ignore what they don't understand). From that perspective, if you've excelled the people around you - an issue completely outside of the drugs - you get to shake out a lot of the false assumptions just because you get to both a) take a vacation from being in your normal rubric or box of consciousness and b) you get to see both your life and your core essence from an emotionally external and, if your lucky, even lovingly impartial perspective.

In so many ways, IMHO, it's identical to taking a week-long trip to Hawaii or Paris and reflecting on the tedium of your daily life while you're a few thousand miles away from the standard reinforcement queues that you have while in the trenches so to speak. The other thing it does is takes all the things you've been thinking about for the last several months under the radar, things you had to push down just because there was nothing practical you could do with them (ie. broader existential needs, trepidations over looming problems that were still sort of muddy or peripheral) and while on a hallucinogen it's a bit like having all of this in a 3D display that you can rotate and analyse in front of you while in a state of having an extraordinary level of mental energy to ponder these things in a way that has less tacking to your standard tautologies.

As for Terrence McKenna's experiences - I don't get the impression that he really knows what he's playing with and if he did he'd realize that there's nothing more that his kind of experiences will offer than dead-end eye candy. He and a lot of other people ooh and ahh about these entities that they meet on DMT. I think they'd be incredibly let down if they did research to find out what elemental spirits are. Essentially that's really all they're seeing, there's nothing mystical these things are teaching them and they'll gain about as much enlightenment from talking to these beings as they would hanging out and playing with ducks at the local pond. Actually in the last speech I listened to from him on Youtube one of the audience members asked him straight out if he was familiar with elemental spirits and whether he might have just been talking to elves, gnomes, of whatever division of earth elemental these things were - like a Whitehouse PR spinmaster he completely dodged the question.

Now, Graham Hancock has a video from the 'Ted x' event where he talks extensively on ayahuasca and about 'Mother Ayahuasca'. Essentially from what I can tell, Isis is making her rounds in the therapeutic hallucinogen world. For all the people meeting her these days who have nothing to do with that and to add that to the pool of her travels is something I really want to get to the bottom of understanding. I'm still trying to figure out if she's who Solomon was addressing in Proverbs 8 or something completely and totally different.

 

[Paradoxum]

I don't know if they give insights, but I can imagine they are worthwhile experiences to have.

 

[MewtwoX]

Since most drugs simply lead to temporary imbalances in dopamine and serotonin levels and subsequent receptor activation and downstream cascade response, I can safely say the drugs do not offer any sort of "enlightenment". At best they would allow people to conceive (mostly illogical) new ideas and thoughts.

One need only look to people who have these kinds of neurochemical imbalances on a more permanent basis, such as schizophrenics, and realize that their recorded mental faculties show degredation rather than improvement. Drugs simply impair the normal rational faculties that work in normal thought processing and thought content development. Drugs cannot provide any sort of philosphical boon or insight, due to their inherent destabilizing effect on peoples' cognitive faculties.