5 ms·

In Heroin's White Thrall (2013)

19 points by Hooke 11y ago

SCAQTony 11y ago
William Gibson said it best: "All any drug amounts to is tweaking the incoming data. You have to be incredibly self-centered or pathetic to be satisfied with simply tweaking the incoming data." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson
- jMyles 11y ago
  This stands in contrast to the scholarship of, for example, Terence McKenna, who suggested that certain plants and mushrooms actually delivered novel content via the presence of (and ratios between) various psychoactive compounds. Like most of McKenna's ostensible empiricism, he didn't try to convince anyone that this was true in some objective sense, but rather that it was useful as a mindset to withstand the psychedelic experience. I find this view more effective at helping to explain how my neurochemistry interfaces with reality.
  - coldtea 11y ago
    >This stands in contrast to the scholarship of, for example, Terence McKenna, who suggested that certain plants and mushrooms actually delivered novel content via the presence of (and ratios between) various psychoactive compounds. It's not really in constrast though. Gibson means: better tweak what you produce or how you act, instead of merely tweaking how your isolated self experiences reality. That's the same whether it's a "slight tweak of incoming data" or something that can be seen as novel content (a full tweak).
    - derefr 11y ago
      This comes down to whether self-improvement is useful. You could "tweak" your brain into working better: giving you more raw data, filtering for more relevant data, making connections more quickly, etc. such that you can get better knowledge from the same data, and therefore act toward your goals more effectively. This especially applies to situations where the brain starts off "tweaked" into some messy suboptimal configuration (depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc.) where it's making very bad use of incoming data. (I always thought Gibson's real argument was just that your goals shouldn't be considered in terms of sensory inputs, unless you want to end up like AIXI, converting your own mass into paperclips because you don't realize that that will kill you.)
- coldtea 11y ago
  And yet, many more philosophers, thinkers, politicians, religious people, and even activists have said that "change first comes within". I'm for the combination of both: tweaking the incoming data affects how you act and change the external world (obviously you need to have an idea before acting), and at the same time, being active the external world tweaks and improves your interpretation of the incoming data (experience). So you need both. And since drugs helps with the first, that's cool. Part of the revolution of the sixties was fulled by drug experimentation (not the "hippy-lifestyle" thing people today mock -- the whole shift in attitudes towards politics, sex, fun, religion, arts, science etc, which people have inherited and respect today).
jMyles 11y ago
> In the case of, say, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” you sort of want Hunter S. Thompson to just keep doing drugs, if only so he’ll see more giant lizards. In the very first paragraph, the author makes abundantly clear that he experienced a major whoosh while reading one of the greatest American novels and drug sagas of all time. The "Fear and Loathing" books were only about giant lizards, Richard Nixon, or LSD on the thinnest of surfaces - the author needs to re-read. > What most drug books don’t do is make the reader, upon closing the book, feel as though he or she really ought to think more seriously about experimenting with drugs. Really? The Invisible Landscape? Food of the Gods? The Human Encounter With Death? The Doors of Perception? The Spirit Molecule? PIKAL: A Love Story? What exactly is the author reading? Of all the classic "drug books," the only one I can think of that matches the author's description is Be Here Now, which the author does not mention. --- I'm not sure, after reading this review, whether I'm more or less inclined to read Clune's book - probably less. In this review, such as it is, Lewis-Kraus makes the (sadly still common) mistake of assuming that the reader has an identical understanding of what a "drug" is, and that the category of "drugs" is well-defined and discrete. Are LSD and heroin in the same category of thing? Is sugar in this same category? It seems useless in this context to compare a book about the highs of heroin with other books that happen to feature "drugs" in completely different contexts or as metaphorical devices. Reading this, I learned nothing except that pharmacological contrivances still have a grip on the editorial 'we.'
- hugh4 11y ago
  >Lewis-Kraus makes the (sadly still common) mistake of assuming that the reader has an identical understanding of what a "drug" is, and that the category of "drugs" is well-defined and discrete. Are LSD and heroin in the same category of thing? Is sugar in this same category? That sounds like a reasonable assumption about the reader; that they understand how words are used in contemporary English. The answers to your questions are "yes" and "no". The reader can also be assumed to know that, for instance, vancomycin and doxorubicin are also drugs, but that in this context the word "drug" is being used in a context which excludes them, just as the word "animal" is sometimes used in a context which includes humans and sometimes in one which excludes them.

19 points by Hooke 11y ago

William Gibson said it best: "All any drug amounts to is tweaking the incoming data. You have to be incredibly self-centered or pathetic to be satisfied with simply tweaking the incoming data." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Gibson

jMyles 11y ago
This stands in contrast to the scholarship of, for example, Terence McKenna, who suggested that certain plants and mushrooms actually delivered novel content via the presence of (and ratios between) various psychoactive compounds. Like most of McKenna's ostensible empiricism, he didn't try to convince anyone that this was true in some objective sense, but rather that it was useful as a mindset to withstand the psychedelic experience. I find this view more effective at helping to explain how my neurochemistry interfaces with reality.
- coldtea 11y ago
  >This stands in contrast to the scholarship of, for example, Terence McKenna, who suggested that certain plants and mushrooms actually delivered novel content via the presence of (and ratios between) various psychoactive compounds. It's not really in constrast though. Gibson means: better tweak what you produce or how you act, instead of merely tweaking how your isolated self experiences reality. That's the same whether it's a "slight tweak of incoming data" or something that can be seen as novel content (a full tweak).
  - derefr 11y ago
    This comes down to whether self-improvement is useful. You could "tweak" your brain into working better: giving you more raw data, filtering for more relevant data, making connections more quickly, etc. such that you can get better knowledge from the same data, and therefore act toward your goals more effectively. This especially applies to situations where the brain starts off "tweaked" into some messy suboptimal configuration (depression, ADHD, anxiety, etc.) where it's making very bad use of incoming data. (I always thought Gibson's real argument was just that your goals shouldn't be considered in terms of sensory inputs, unless you want to end up like AIXI, converting your own mass into paperclips because you don't realize that that will kill you.)
coldtea 11y ago
And yet, many more philosophers, thinkers, politicians, religious people, and even activists have said that "change first comes within". I'm for the combination of both: tweaking the incoming data affects how you act and change the external world (obviously you need to have an idea before acting), and at the same time, being active the external world tweaks and improves your interpretation of the incoming data (experience). So you need both. And since drugs helps with the first, that's cool. Part of the revolution of the sixties was fulled by drug experimentation (not the "hippy-lifestyle" thing people today mock -- the whole shift in attitudes towards politics, sex, fun, religion, arts, science etc, which people have inherited and respect today).

jMyles 11y ago

> In the case of, say, “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” you sort of want Hunter S. Thompson to just keep doing drugs, if only so he’ll see more giant lizards. In the very first paragraph, the author makes abundantly clear that he experienced a major whoosh while reading one of the greatest American novels and drug sagas of all time. The "Fear and Loathing" books were only about giant lizards, Richard Nixon, or LSD on the thinnest of surfaces - the author needs to re-read. > What most drug books don’t do is make the reader, upon closing the book, feel as though he or she really ought to think more seriously about experimenting with drugs. Really? The Invisible Landscape? Food of the Gods? The Human Encounter With Death? The Doors of Perception? The Spirit Molecule? PIKAL: A Love Story? What exactly is the author reading? Of all the classic "drug books," the only one I can think of that matches the author's description is Be Here Now, which the author does not mention. --- I'm not sure, after reading this review, whether I'm more or less inclined to read Clune's book - probably less. In this review, such as it is, Lewis-Kraus makes the (sadly still common) mistake of assuming that the reader has an identical understanding of what a "drug" is, and that the category of "drugs" is well-defined and discrete. Are LSD and heroin in the same category of thing? Is sugar in this same category? It seems useless in this context to compare a book about the highs of heroin with other books that happen to feature "drugs" in completely different contexts or as metaphorical devices. Reading this, I learned nothing except that pharmacological contrivances still have a grip on the editorial 'we.'

hugh4 11y ago
>Lewis-Kraus makes the (sadly still common) mistake of assuming that the reader has an identical understanding of what a "drug" is, and that the category of "drugs" is well-defined and discrete. Are LSD and heroin in the same category of thing? Is sugar in this same category? That sounds like a reasonable assumption about the reader; that they understand how words are used in contemporary English. The answers to your questions are "yes" and "no". The reader can also be assumed to know that, for instance, vancomycin and doxorubicin are also drugs, but that in this context the word "drug" is being used in a context which excludes them, just as the word "animal" is sometimes used in a context which includes humans and sometimes in one which excludes them.