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Lion
Decadent Flower Magnate


Registered: 09/20/05
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Human coordination and entheogens
#28349270 - 06/06/23 07:47 AM (7 months, 19 days ago) |
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I wanted to share a comment I came across on a blog post reviewing Sasha Shulgin's Pihkal (or Tihkal, I can't remember which), and in doing so cross-pollinate ideas from different corners of the web. I just thought it was a really thought-provoking post:
Quote:
All your selected passages about what Shulgin was “working toward” with his drug development seem to form a consistent narrative to me—though that might just be your curation doing that.
It is, I think, the same thing the descendant group of people in the Bay Area care about today: not letting Moloch destroy the world, not creating unfriendly AI, not becoming entrapped by our own (signalling) words forcing us into acts like wars, etc.
Basically, Shulgin wanted to create drugs that would make people fully aware of their preferences (as minds, and as human adaptation-executers), and of how our world is a pretty close match—in a Fun-Theoretic sense—to an ideal world for serving as an environment to pursue satisfaction of those preferences within. He wanted us to be able to experience the absolute utility of our present context, rather than only paying attention (as we do) to the pursuit of marginal utility gains or losses.
Because, you see, being fully aware of your preferences lets you accurately optimize the world for those preferences. Most people, most of the time, are “heads down” optimizing the world for preferences they think they have (because that’s what their in-group’s explicitly-signalled collective preferences are, Abilene paradox be damned), or preferences they got the impression are good from some abstract intellectual reflection after reading a book, or even just preferences others (parents, society) seem to want them to have. People don’t take much time to give mindfulness toward exactly how much utility (not just disutility) they have in the world we’ve got right now; and they certainly don’t stop to imagine their own daily life in the world they’re pursuing the creation of, to compare-and-contrast the absolute utilities of those experiences.
I imagine that, if Shulgin were around today in the Bay Area, and immersed in current Discourse, he’d be making an argument to the effect of “of course you can create friendly AI! You just need a drug to allow your consciousness to expand enough to encompass your entire extrapolated volition! Then you can write it down, and everyone else can write theirs down, and we can (with our still-inflated minds) figure out the best-feeling merger of all those preferences… and there, done. One explicitly-programmed friendly AI preference-function, good as baked.”
Or, assuming he doesn’t care about that, he’d at least be saying something about how—if we could get all our politicians to politic while on The Best Drug—they would obviously immediately outlaw all carbon emissions and deforestation to “make nature happy”, fix public-schooling to “make children happy”, reduce the size of the military to “make people in other countries happy” (but not too much, because ally countries might get attacked and be sad!), create a huge public-works program paying poor people to take care of other poor people “to make the downtrodden happy”, and so forth. Policy by omni-empathetic global human-estimated-CEV-utility calculation, rather than by self-interested tribal game-theory negotiation.
Or, if he was cynical enough to see that politicians as a group had enough power to prevent this change from coming to their class… maybe he would just picture Effective Altruism—a grassroots movement of actively-charitable utilitarians—and figure that it requires drugs, not something as cold and heartless as economic statistics, to see what truly was the most Effective and Altruistic thing to do. (After all, we don’t know our preferences well-enough to pay for things that actually satisfy them, most of the time. We know our pains enough to pay to get rid of them, but we don’t know our pleasures well enough to—once we’ve exhausted marginal pain-removals—pick gains in those pleasures over e.g. zero-sum competitions for Veblen goods. The Market can’t be trusted to keep track of our private pleasures; it won’t notice if we optimize them away! It certainly didn’t notice when e.g. fruit and vegetables stopped tasting good. Trusting GDP as a measure of utility will get us Hansonian ems in a race to the bottom, not humans having awesome fun.)
Boiling away some of the jargon, the essence is that human coordination is the most obvious intractable problem underlying all of our many intractable problems, and that this coordination is severely restricted by deficits of information - both between individuals and groups, and more interestingly, between humans' perceptions of their own preferences and what they might prefer with more robust insight.
I think much of the psychedelic movement of the 1960s and 1970s reflected a belief that entheogens could address the problems of communication, information sharing (via psychic or at least higher-information interpersonal experience, greater awareness of self-nature and thus of more authentic preference actuation, and greater psychological openness and attunement), and coordination on large issues (like not incinerating one another in a nuclear armageddon).
It seems like there's a renewed optimism in some corners, spurred by psychological research with entheogens, that these chemicals may in the future be in some sense politically and culturally transformative, in a direction described in the above comment (i.e., reducing the hold of tribalism and game-theoretic, zero sum logics in the arena of resolving disputes and crafting human societies).
I somehow doubt such an outcome. We know psychedelics have had an indescribably profound impact on global culture, and most if does not really seem to have been for the better: it has mostly just taken various forms of amoral marketing, psychological manipulation, and nihilistic entertainment.
Of course, the potential for new chemical compounds (and new applications of existing ones) remains, and I'm sure there are many amateur Shulgins out there looking for those very qualities in new research chemicals etc. But I think there are probably some as yet undiscovered biological hard limits to desirable improvements any substance can make on individual psychology and group dynamics, with minimal or nonexistent tradeoffs. Your thoughts?
-------------------- “Strengthened by contemplation and study, I will not fear my passions like a coward. My body I will give to pleasures, to diversions that I’ve dreamed of, to the most daring erotic desires, to the lustful impulses of my blood, without any fear at all, for whenever I will— and I will have the will, strengthened as I’ll be with contemplation and study— at the crucial moments I’ll recover my spirit as was before: ascetic.”
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redgreenvines
irregular verb


Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 37,530
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Re: Human coordination and entheogens [Re: Lion]
#28349401 - 06/06/23 10:19 AM (7 months, 19 days ago) |
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but does it really help with greater awareness of self nature? with everybody?
for me it does - but I was going that way anyway, and via psychedelic I have gone that way more than I would have otherwise.
several of us are going that way anyway...
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FishOilTheKid
Ascended



Registered: 11/14/10
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Re: Human coordination and entheogens [Re: redgreenvines]
#28349529 - 06/06/23 12:38 PM (7 months, 19 days ago) |
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I would like to try Ketamine...
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Rahz
Alive Again



Registered: 11/10/05
Posts: 9,229
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Re: Human coordination and entheogens [Re: FishOilTheKid]
#28349875 - 06/06/23 05:12 PM (7 months, 18 days ago) |
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I don't discourage that research, but I also wonder if it's messianic.
-------------------- rahz comfort pleasure power love truth awareness peace "You’re not looking close enough if you can only see yourself in people who look like you." —Ayishat Akanbi
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redgreenvines
irregular verb


Registered: 04/08/04
Posts: 37,530
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Re: Human coordination and entheogens [Re: Rahz]
#28349897 - 06/06/23 05:32 PM (7 months, 18 days ago) |
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some messianism runs in the family
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Rahz
Alive Again



Registered: 11/10/05
Posts: 9,229
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Re: Human coordination and entheogens [Re: redgreenvines]
#28349924 - 06/06/23 05:49 PM (7 months, 18 days ago) |
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Please slave me master!
-------------------- rahz comfort pleasure power love truth awareness peace "You’re not looking close enough if you can only see yourself in people who look like you." —Ayishat Akanbi
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nooneman


Registered: 04/24/09
Posts: 14,555
Loc: Utah
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Re: Human coordination and entheogens [Re: Lion]
#28350002 - 06/06/23 07:08 PM (7 months, 18 days ago) |
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Don't put words in Shulgin's mouth. He never said that those things were his goals. That's just someone projecting their own ideas and feelings onto him, which is wrong. The man is dead, have some respect for the deceased.
He was a chemist. He specialized in the development of new drugs. The focus of his research was psychedelics. Don't try to bend his life to fit into your beliefs.
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The Blind Ass
Bodhi


Registered: 08/16/16
Posts: 26,657
Loc: The Primordial Mind
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Re: Human coordination and entheogens [Re: redgreenvines]
#28350033 - 06/06/23 07:38 PM (7 months, 18 days ago) |
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Quote:
redgreenvines said: some messianism runs in the family

-------------------- Give me Liberty caps -or- give me Death caps
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Lion
Decadent Flower Magnate


Registered: 09/20/05
Posts: 8,775
Last seen: 3 days, 5 hours
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Re: Human coordination and entheogens [Re: nooneman]
#28350322 - 06/07/23 12:42 AM (7 months, 18 days ago) |
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Quote:
nooneman said: Don't put words in Shulgin's mouth. He never said that those things were his goals. That's just someone projecting their own ideas and feelings onto him, which is wrong. The man is dead, have some respect for the deceased.
He was a chemist. He specialized in the development of new drugs. The focus of his research was psychedelics. Don't try to bend his life to fit into your beliefs.
I see where your concern comes from. I have a lot of respect for Shulgin, just having read about his work a lot over the years (though never reading his books). I didn't mean to say that those were his beliefs.
I mentioned him just trying to give some context for the quoted comment, because I found the comment an interesting subject for discussion in and of itself, whether or not it has anything to do with Shulgin's books or life's work.
-------------------- “Strengthened by contemplation and study, I will not fear my passions like a coward. My body I will give to pleasures, to diversions that I’ve dreamed of, to the most daring erotic desires, to the lustful impulses of my blood, without any fear at all, for whenever I will— and I will have the will, strengthened as I’ll be with contemplation and study— at the crucial moments I’ll recover my spirit as was before: ascetic.”
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Lion
Decadent Flower Magnate


Registered: 09/20/05
Posts: 8,775
Last seen: 3 days, 5 hours
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Re: Human coordination and entheogens [Re: Rahz]
#28350324 - 06/07/23 12:45 AM (7 months, 18 days ago) |
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Quote:
Rahz said: I don't discourage that research, but I also wonder if it's messianic.
I think it's likely that a lot of the interest around psychedelics in the modern research world - not to mention the world of venture capital etc. - is coming from a messianic or at least a self-aggrandizing frame; and there will be claims made about psychedelics that don't match the limited but awesome reality of what they are.
It's also no coincidence that psychedelics as a solution to problems of modern humans are popular among the same crowds who are extremely eager to see AI transform the global economy and human potentialities.
-------------------- “Strengthened by contemplation and study, I will not fear my passions like a coward. My body I will give to pleasures, to diversions that I’ve dreamed of, to the most daring erotic desires, to the lustful impulses of my blood, without any fear at all, for whenever I will— and I will have the will, strengthened as I’ll be with contemplation and study— at the crucial moments I’ll recover my spirit as was before: ascetic.”
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