5 ms·

"Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like lone

by _yosefk 13y ago

"Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness. We form friendships so that we can feel certain emotions, like love, and avoid others, like loneliness. We eat specific foods to enjoy their fleeting presence on our tongues." We study and work for the purpose of altering the bits representing our bank account balances. Is that equivalent to hacking the bank and altering the bits directly? We make friendships "to feel emotions like love". To what degree is it sane to misrepresent yourself and otherwise deceive people to make them your "friends"? There's a contest for the shortest program printing itself to the screen. Is opening the file with the source code and copying the code to the screen really as good an entry as any other? Any sane person and even most varieties of the insane person realize that the signal you're receiving is a means to infer that something is happening out there, not an end in itself. This is not to say that there should or should not be a War on Drugs (which, since I'm not an American citizen, is really none of my business.)

md224 13y ago
You seem to be making the case that taking drugs is in some sense "cheating" your way to a psychological experience, and therefore somewhat immoral or superficial. That's a valid perspective, but consider this: do you consider drinking coffee to be cheating? Do you consider the ingestion of caffeine to reduce fatigue and aid in cognitive performance as a bad thing? There's certainly a difference between being more alert and having a psychedelic experience, but they're both a manipulation of the mind via psychoactive substances.
- wslh 13y ago
  Indeed the debate doesn't end there. Is doing meditation cheating? sports?
ignostic 13y ago
Your comparisons are all extremely unfair in the same way: they involve unjust disregard for the well-being of others. There are victims in each of your analogies. There are no victims if I safely use a mind-altering drug like LSD. Responsible drug use has more in common with using a neat programming trick to accomplish a personal goal than it does with hacking. Still, I come across this comparison often: like people think it's "cheating" to use drugs. Nonsense. If there's a tool I can use to safely accomplish a worthwhile goal, why not use it? It might be "unnatural" or "cheating" to use a sharp stick to fight off a predator, but I doubt you have qualms with such physical tools. Is it cheating to put a roof over your head to avoid the elements? You live in unnatural conditions surrounded by synthetic solutions to accomplish your goals. You're using some sort of electronic device now. I fail to see the distinction between synthetic physical tools and synthetic chemical tools, but I do see your argument is full of holes.
- chrischen 13y ago
  His analogies are apt. His point is that in all those cases the signal itself is meaningless and inconsequential to the end. The victim, in his examples, is the achievement of the end goal, which becomes a casualty of focusing only on the signal. It probably applies to stimulant drugs more than it does to drugs like LSD. But like the original essay suggests, there's probably an evolutionary reason why we don't constantly experience life like we do on LSD, because we'd be excited and fascinated by everything. If the goal of life is to increase our experiences... then the only way to maximize that in the long term is to survive. If you tweak the algorithm to give experience/pleasure without any work (drugs), then you'll no longer have an incentive to work to increase survivability. If you tweak it to give no increase in experience and happiness, and focus only on survivability, you'll have no incentive to survive (no reason to live, because we've defined the goal of life to increase experience and happiness). So the most optimal solution, as nature has converged at, is somewhere in the middle, where we get experience and pleasure but only when we work for it by prolonging survivability. Introducing drugs into this method will shifts the balance to the less optimal side of the reward-effort continuum. The potential victim is yourself and your progeny, and you're actually shooting yourself in the foot in terms of maximizing experiences/happiness as a species by introducing drugs.
  - vehementi 13y ago
    Evolutionary reasons keep us surviving at any cost - in this discussion the cost is the sacrifice of appreciation of the beauty of everything, etc. Indeed you might die to predators more if you were distracted by how pretty that tree trunk is, but that reasoning no longer applies since we are not part of the food chain. You seem to be using what evolution "settled on" as support for your argument - that is a very wrong thing to do.
    - chrischen 13y ago
      No, not at any cost. I talked about that in my original post. >> If you tweak it to give no increase in experience and happiness, and focus only on survivability, you'll have no incentive to survive (no reason to live, because we've defined the goal of life to increase experience and happiness). I explain that "surviving at any cost" is not an optimal solution either, because we as humans would no longer have an incentive to survive. The fact is our happiness and willingness to keep going is as much a factor of evolution as our physical survivability... so it's NOT wrong to base it on what evolution "settled on." Perhaps we may not die from predators, but there are other things. Here's a thought experiment: Consider an impending asteroid heading for Earth. Which nations or peoples do you think will have the highest chance of surviving? The technologically backwards but harmonious communists, the technologically advanced capitalists, the crack addicts, or the non-crack addicts? You'll probably conclude that technology matters, not spending every waking moment appreciating the beauty in trees matter, and not feeling high all the time for no reason also matters. We need proper reward-response pathways in order to maximize our survival. Introducing artificially stimulating drugs disrupts it. It sends a false signal, which, according to Paul Graham, can be one of the most crippling things if we don't think it's bad. http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html "The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work." Getting the dopamine reward from a stimulant drug is like doing fake work, because you're being rewarded like if you actually did the work. Keep in mind, I'm talking about simulants, so LSD doesn't apply here, but there is probably a reason we weren't born fascinated with trees and every little thing.
lcedp 13y ago
> Any sane person and even most varieties of the insane person realize that the signal you're receiving is a means to infer that something is happening out there, not an end in itself. You don't actually know what is happening out there cause you can't experience out there directly, only through you senses which are always deceiving to some degree. People love watching movies/reading books/having a drink just to receive a signal not to infer what is happening there. Otherwise they will watch just news, but no fiction would exist.

by _yosefk 13y ago

md224 13y ago

You seem to be making the case that taking drugs is in some sense "cheating" your way to a psychological experience, and therefore somewhat immoral or superficial. That's a valid perspective, but consider this: do you consider drinking coffee to be cheating? Do you consider the ingestion of caffeine to reduce fatigue and aid in cognitive performance as a bad thing? There's certainly a difference between being more alert and having a psychedelic experience, but they're both a manipulation of the mind via psychoactive substances.

wslh 13y ago
Indeed the debate doesn't end there. Is doing meditation cheating? sports?

ignostic 13y ago

Your comparisons are all extremely unfair in the same way: they involve unjust disregard for the well-being of others. There are victims in each of your analogies. There are no victims if I safely use a mind-altering drug like LSD. Responsible drug use has more in common with using a neat programming trick to accomplish a personal goal than it does with hacking. Still, I come across this comparison often: like people think it's "cheating" to use drugs. Nonsense. If there's a tool I can use to safely accomplish a worthwhile goal, why not use it? It might be "unnatural" or "cheating" to use a sharp stick to fight off a predator, but I doubt you have qualms with such physical tools. Is it cheating to put a roof over your head to avoid the elements? You live in unnatural conditions surrounded by synthetic solutions to accomplish your goals. You're using some sort of electronic device now. I fail to see the distinction between synthetic physical tools and synthetic chemical tools, but I do see your argument is full of holes.

chrischen 13y ago
His analogies are apt. His point is that in all those cases the signal itself is meaningless and inconsequential to the end. The victim, in his examples, is the achievement of the end goal, which becomes a casualty of focusing only on the signal. It probably applies to stimulant drugs more than it does to drugs like LSD. But like the original essay suggests, there's probably an evolutionary reason why we don't constantly experience life like we do on LSD, because we'd be excited and fascinated by everything. If the goal of life is to increase our experiences... then the only way to maximize that in the long term is to survive. If you tweak the algorithm to give experience/pleasure without any work (drugs), then you'll no longer have an incentive to work to increase survivability. If you tweak it to give no increase in experience and happiness, and focus only on survivability, you'll have no incentive to survive (no reason to live, because we've defined the goal of life to increase experience and happiness). So the most optimal solution, as nature has converged at, is somewhere in the middle, where we get experience and pleasure but only when we work for it by prolonging survivability. Introducing drugs into this method will shifts the balance to the less optimal side of the reward-effort continuum. The potential victim is yourself and your progeny, and you're actually shooting yourself in the foot in terms of maximizing experiences/happiness as a species by introducing drugs.
- vehementi 13y ago
  Evolutionary reasons keep us surviving at any cost - in this discussion the cost is the sacrifice of appreciation of the beauty of everything, etc. Indeed you might die to predators more if you were distracted by how pretty that tree trunk is, but that reasoning no longer applies since we are not part of the food chain. You seem to be using what evolution "settled on" as support for your argument - that is a very wrong thing to do.
  - chrischen 13y ago
    No, not at any cost. I talked about that in my original post. >> If you tweak it to give no increase in experience and happiness, and focus only on survivability, you'll have no incentive to survive (no reason to live, because we've defined the goal of life to increase experience and happiness). I explain that "surviving at any cost" is not an optimal solution either, because we as humans would no longer have an incentive to survive. The fact is our happiness and willingness to keep going is as much a factor of evolution as our physical survivability... so it's NOT wrong to base it on what evolution "settled on." Perhaps we may not die from predators, but there are other things. Here's a thought experiment: Consider an impending asteroid heading for Earth. Which nations or peoples do you think will have the highest chance of surviving? The technologically backwards but harmonious communists, the technologically advanced capitalists, the crack addicts, or the non-crack addicts? You'll probably conclude that technology matters, not spending every waking moment appreciating the beauty in trees matter, and not feeling high all the time for no reason also matters. We need proper reward-response pathways in order to maximize our survival. Introducing artificially stimulating drugs disrupts it. It sends a false signal, which, according to Paul Graham, can be one of the most crippling things if we don't think it's bad. http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html http://www.paulgraham.com/selfindulgence.html "The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work." Getting the dopamine reward from a stimulant drug is like doing fake work, because you're being rewarded like if you actually did the work. Keep in mind, I'm talking about simulants, so LSD doesn't apply here, but there is probably a reason we weren't born fascinated with trees and every little thing.

lcedp 13y ago

> Any sane person and even most varieties of the insane person realize that the signal you're receiving is a means to infer that something is happening out there, not an end in itself. You don't actually know what is happening out there cause you can't experience out there directly, only through you senses which are always deceiving to some degree. People love watching movies/reading books/having a drink just to receive a signal not to infer what is happening there. Otherwise they will watch just news, but no fiction would exist.