Mind and drugs

[Leonid]

Suppose we are sitting and drinking coffee and I tell you: I put tasteless, colorless but very powerful hallucinogen into your glass. Whatever you perceive or think now doesn’t actually exist. You may say: Leonid, you are talking rubbish. I haven’t noticed any difference. Every thing is as it was before. My response is: You don’t know that. What you now perceive has nothing to do with reality, it is result of chemical interaction of hallucinogen with your brain. Besides, the drug eliminated all your real memories, so you don’t know how it was before. What you think you remember are false memories, induced by the drug. Even I talking to you am hallucination. Remember, no matter what you think or do, no matter which choices you make-it’s not you, it’s the drug. You are now determined being. You may response: But how I can live when all my decisions and actions are not pertained to reality? And the answer is: you cannot. And this is the essence of my thought experiment. To survive one must use his mind. One can do that only if one’s mind is free, undetermined, able to make free choices, has volition. This is applicable to any biological process which doesn’t depend on antecedent event but self-initiated .Any deterministic intervention in self-initiated biological response means disease. The function of the mind-brain unit is self-initiated response on conceptual level and this is the basis of volition. Any thing like drugs, injury, disease which may impair or cancel this response will necessary eliminates volition and therefore conceptual faculty. Without it how one can rationally assess the drug-induced experience or any effect which this drug inflicted on him? He even wouldn’t be able to know if he still doped or not. The reality for such a person will cease to exist. That why I refuse such an experience. Not because I’m closed-minded by because in principle I wouldn’t be able to learn anything from it.

[BaalChatzaf]

Suppose we are sitting and drinking coffee and I tell you: I put tasteless, colorless but very powerful hallucinogen into your glass. Whatever you perceive or think now doesn't actually exist. You may say: Leonid, you are talking rubbish. I haven't noticed any difference. Every thing is as it was before. My response is: You don't know that. What you now perceive has nothing to do with reality, it is result of chemical interaction of hallucinogen with your brain. Besides, the drug eliminated all your real memories, so you don't know how it was before. What you think you remember are false memories, induced by the drug. Even I talking to you am hallucination. Remember, no matter what you think or do, no matter which choices you make-it's not you, it's the drug. You are now determined being. You may response: But how I can live when all my decisions and actions are not pertained to reality? And the answer is: you cannot. And this is the essence of my thought experiment. To survive one must use his mind. One can do that only if one's mind is free, undetermined, able to make free choices, has volition. This is applicable to any biological process which doesn't depend on antecedent event but self-initiated .Any deterministic intervention in self-initiated biological response means disease. The function of the mind-brain unit is self-initiated response on conceptual level and this is the basis of volition. Any thing like drugs, injury, disease which may impair or cancel this response will necessary eliminates volition and therefore conceptual faculty. Without it how one can rationally assess the drug-induced experience or any effect which this drug inflicted on him? He even wouldn't be able to know if he still doped or not. The reality for such a person will cease to exist. That why I refuse such an experience. Not because I'm closed-minded by because in principle I wouldn't be able to learn anything from it.

There is no such drug. All drugs have limited efficacy because they decompose in the process of doing what they do.

And you are aware that our body produces endorphins in its normal operation, yes?

So how do you know when your "mind is free, undetermined, able to make free choices, has volition" ?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Christopher]

If you are helpless, you are helpless.

If you have the capability to consider and validate the truth of you being under the drug's effect, you are not helpless.

People are able to recognize their own psychosis, their own schizophrenia, so the ability of free-will to penetrate one's perceptions seems almost infinite in humans.

[jriggenbach]

Suppose we are sitting and drinking coffee and I tell you: I put tasteless, colorless but very powerful hallucinogen into your glass. Whatever you perceive or think now doesn’t actually exist. You may say: Leonid, you are talking rubbish. I haven’t noticed any difference. Every thing is as it was before. My response is: You don’t know that. What you now perceive has nothing to do with reality, it is result of chemical interaction of hallucinogen with your brain. Besides, the drug eliminated all your real memories, so you don’t know how it was before. What you think you remember are false memories, induced by the drug. Even I talking to you am hallucination. Remember, no matter what you think or do, no matter which choices you make-it’s not you, it’s the drug. You are now determined being. You may response: But how I can live when all my decisions and actions are not pertained to reality? And the answer is: you cannot. And this is the essence of my thought experiment. To survive one must use his mind. One can do that only if one’s mind is free, undetermined, able to make free choices, has volition. This is applicable to any biological process which doesn’t depend on antecedent event but self-initiated .Any deterministic intervention in self-initiated biological response means disease. The function of the mind-brain unit is self-initiated response on conceptual level and this is the basis of volition. Any thing like drugs, injury, disease which may impair or cancel this response will necessary eliminates volition and therefore conceptual faculty. Without it how one can rationally assess the drug-induced experience or any effect which this drug inflicted on him? He even wouldn’t be able to know if he still doped or not. The reality for such a person will cease to exist. That why I refuse such an experience. Not because I’m closed-minded by because in principle I wouldn’t be able to learn anything from it.

I agree that you probably wouldn't be able to learn anything from experimenting with drugs, but not because they do anything even remotely like what you conjecture in your "thought experiment." As Baal Chatzaf points out, there is no drug that does anything like what the drug in your "thought experiment" does. Your inability to learn anything from taking LSD (for example) would thus be entirely a function of your closed-mindedness and your apparent devotion to somewhat overwrought fantasies.

JR

[Leonid]

Baal Chatzaf" There is no such drug. All drugs have limited efficacy because they decompose in the process of doing what they do."

This is thought experiment, an allegory a parable which I brought in order to illuminate the idea that proper action of mind is incompatible with determinism, that it-any antecedent force. But if you want to take it literally, think about very advanced virtual reality game, undistinguished from reality.

[tjohnson]

Determinism is the view that every event, including human cognition, behavior, decision, and action, is causally determined by an unbroken chain of prior occurrences

This is impossible, even in physics, let alone human behaviour.

[Rich Engle]

Have any of that stuff left?

[BaalChatzaf]

Baal Chatzaf" There is no such drug. All drugs have limited efficacy because they decompose in the process of doing what they do."

This is thought experiment, an allegory a parable which I brought in order to illuminate the idea that proper action of mind is incompatible with determinism, that it-any antecedent force. But if you want to take it literally, think about very advanced virtual reality game, undistinguished from reality.

A thought experiment is not a real experiment. It has no necessary connection to the real world. Some thought experiments are rather useful (as proof of concept). For example, the gedankens of Einstein. The one about the drug the is the moral equivalent of the brain in the vat is not useful.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Leonid]

Baal Chatzaf "The one about the drug the is the moral equivalent of the brain in the vat is not useful."

Not useful for what? It depends on how one wants to use it. For example I think that your referral to endorphins is not useful, it's simply irrelevant. Endorphins aren't antecedent to the body and aren't hallucinogens. They are natural pain killers. Your brain is also produces dopamine, serotonin, acetyl-cholin, gamma-amino-butyric acid and many others neurotransmitters which under abnormal circumstances could act as hallucinogens. But that would be a disease. Under normal healthy conditions they are not. So if you implicate that brain is constantly dopes itself, you are wrong.

Edited March 29, 2010 by Leonid

[Rich Engle]

So if you implicate that brain is constantly dopes itself, you are wrong.

Depends what you're up to, I guess.

But on to more important matters. Seriously, got any of that left? I'm stuck on this one chapter and I'm thinking if it's anywhere close to what you say it is, it might get the job done. Help a brother out!

rde

Getting Desperate And Starting To Rifle Through

All The Cleaning Products Underneath The Sink.

Edited March 29, 2010 by Rich Engle

[Peter]

Rich Engle wrote:

Getting Desperate And Starting To Rifle Through All The Cleaning Products Underneath The Sink.

End quote

As important as finding new drugs might be, I would prefer we discover cures for the drugs humans are now addicted to, starting with tobacco.

It seems that every year a new “natural” or “artificial” substance is discovered that is psychoactive. Then the “State” bans it, as Maryland just did with a formerly legal, marijuana substitute. In the mean time, several teenage and adult deaths will be attributed to it.

I have no doubt some people can handle *IT* no matter what it is, but I think psychoactive drugs are counter productive. Like any new substance created for legitimate medical use, I would prefer that others be the guinea pigs who first take the illegal drug, though I will undoubtedly decline a puff or a pill anyway.

I watched a special on India last year. One day a year marijuana is legal, and they have been using it for thousands of years for this one religious festival. The country has not fallen apart but a sociologist could argue that neither individuals nor their civilization has profited from any recreational psychoactive drugs, though one day a year could not be devastating.

In America we have been giving amphetamines to military jet pilots and drinking a lot of coffee in civilian life and generally I would say the affects have been positive. And I would be in agreement with Nathaniel Branden’s assessment of alcohol: drink but expect consequences.

Methadone clinics seem awful sleazy to me. Along with a cure for addiction, legal dispersion and measured doses of drugs is the best way to go, using personal devices. Perhaps a “timed” machine could be created to get no more than the best dose into an unrepentant addicts body.

Semper cogitans fidele,

Peter Taylor