On Fri, 2009-03-20 at 17:02 +1100, Kim Jones wrote:
> Why would people dismiss the subjective experience of hallucinogens as
> chaos?
This is simply the observation that the action of hallucinogens on
consciousness is often dismissed as an abberration and the potential
scientific benefits from their objective study are therefore lost.
Witness the popularity of the term "psychotomimetic" until fairly
recently to automatically classify these effects as something akin to
temporary mental illness, or the determination in the medico-legal
context that all use is "abuse".
What is ignored is that any theory of consciousness, or other theories
that rely on the concept of consciousness as part of a chain of
reasoning, must also be able to explain not only "typical" consciousness
but also the quantitative and qualitative nature of altered states of
consciousness. These altered states may be arrived at in a variety of
ways (meditation, religious practices, psychoactive substances), but the
use of drugs to achieve them appears to be the way most amenable to
controlled, scientific study. Yet there is very little of this
happening, and what studies are in progress are aimed at establishing
their potential health benefits (MDMA for PTSD sufferers, for example.)
This is not a bad goal in and of itself, but here we are trying to
understand this enormous mystery of consciousness, and focusing on a
narrow subset of conscious experience as the data to reason from.
> Humans, properly fed, clothed, looked after,
> educated will ALWAYS seek to alter their consciousness somehow by
> using substances.
Yes, history bears this out.
> Millions of people drink coffee which has a powerful chemical impact
> but nobody ever shows concern for their 1-pov experiences. Why the
> special pleading for drugs? It's all just substance of one kind or
> another.
Well, my earlier post in particular was singling out a specific class of
substances--hallucinogens potent enough to not just alter or distort
existing qualia, but to replace the user's entire sensorium with novel
qualia, and by some reports, qualia in novel sensory modalities. People
report experiencing being in completely different locations, witnessing
and participating in complex, detailed events, with a subjective sense
that they are as real or even more real than what they experience in the
absence of the effects of the drug.
Some hallucinogens go even further than this, and introduce an element
of amnesia for semantic and episodic memories, such that users report
the experience of "forgetting that I had taken a drug, that I was human,
or even what being human meant." Five to twenty minutes later they
return to baseline and report feeling completely "normal" again.
Frankly, what astonishes me, is that these altered states even exist at
all. It would be reasonable to think that "disrupting" the physical
processes which give rise to consciousness would merely cause it to
fail; i.e., cause a loss of consciousness. Instead, in some cases, we
have these fully immersive experiences with recurring, consistent
themes, well structured, with content of unknown origin, and a lack of
any relationship to sensory data streaming into the brain from the
"outside."
Yeah, I think their might be something worth investigating here.
Johnathan Corgan
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Received on Sat Mar 21 2009 - 14:56:28 PDT