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Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

samharris.org

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Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#141

Post by sanoli »

mreid wrote: post #133
yarou wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you could extend your argument to state that one of the most important things in Van Gogh's life was to sever his own ear and hand it to a prostitute. Therefore, those who wish to become good painters ought to sever their ear. The fallacy in your argument is simply: "person x has done y, which led them to achievement z. therefore, if you do y, you will also achieve z, because person x had done so." I don't thin…

Is there evidence to support the claim that Van Gogh believed cutting his ear off was important to his life and work? If not, then this is a very different example to that of Jobs' claim and is an equally poor way of refuting a position.

There's no evidence to that. From my personal experience (yes, anecdotal etc) with dozens of LSD taking friends over the course of many many years, they all end up attributing huge importance to their acid trips, and all the insights gained from them. The problem is this is the same with the brilliant friend, and with the do nothing, sit on my couch all day friend. For example: one of my friends, after taking acid, was so euphoric because, as he told me, he now understood so much. 'Like what?", I asked, and the only things he could tell me he understood was stuff like "i know why this lamppost is here", and "I know why there's a sign over that bakery", and other crap like that. And no, there wasn't anything deeper than that. I prodded.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#142

Post by arg01 »

Xcelerate wrote: post #73

I find it odd that the author of the article assumes his daughter is going to try drugs one day. Personally, I never have, and never plan to (23 years old). In fact, there's plenty of people I know who don't even drink -- not because of any moral or legal reason, but simply because they aren't interested in it. To clarify, I don't care what things other people try (I encourage everyone to make their own decisions), b…

I don't find it odd. I'd assume it's the same attitude plenty of parents have towards sex/parties. Assuming their child will be doing that even though it's not a given doesn't seem outrageous to me and seems like a fair analogy.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#143

Post by corr0 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #15

I recommend David Nutt's Drugs Without the Hot Air [1] on the subject. Nutt, a British psychiatrist and neuropsychopharmacologist, headed up the U.K.'s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (a British DEA/FDA hybrid). He was canned when he suggested that alcohol may be more damaging than many controlled substances. Amongst the goodies from the book are this chart [2], which plots dependence risk against toxicologis…

> "found a correlation of 0.04 – which means that there was effectively no relationship at all."

This is scary:

Independence => 0 correlation

but

~(0 correlation => independence)

Please get your basic statistic straight.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#144

Post by sanoli »

Nursie wrote: post #97
sublimit wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a dumb argument. People say "drug" isn't a meaningful classification because it mixes different categories of substances, and in the next sentence they're equating coffee with LSD, apparently to defend the use of the latter.

Who's equating or defending anything? I just think that saying "I've never done drugs" while at the same time admitting drinking alcohol is kinda silly.

It may be silly, but I bet 99% will understand that he meant the illegal stuff.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#145

Post by Nursie »

sanoli wrote: post #141
mreid wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there evidence to support the claim that Van Gogh believed cutting his ear off was important to his life and work? If not, then this is a very different example to that of Jobs' claim and is an equally poor way of refuting a position.

There's no evidence to that. From my personal experience (yes, anecdotal etc) with dozens of LSD taking friends over the course of many many years, they all end up attributing huge importance to their acid trips, and all the insights gained from them. The problem is this is the same with the brilliant friend, and with the do nothing, sit on my couch all day friend. For example: one of my friends, after taking acid, w…

As someone with direct experience of the stuff a number of times (all a long time ago now) let me just say.... spot on.

I think the psychedelic experience at most produces an unwarranted sense of the profound. You may feel like revelations have occurred, but really they were nothing. Like those dreams when you figure it all out but when you wake up it's gone, or it was something about wearing your trousers backwards to solve the problem of disharmony in the middle east.

That's not to say I don't think there are a whole load of positives in there, but deeper understanding of the universe and yourself? Meh, I say, meh.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#146

Post by pessimizer »

shantanubala wrote: post #135
pessimizer wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you think you know about psychedelic drugs is not true. If you judge what drug proponents say against what you think that you know, of course you'll find what they say dishonest. What many of them say is on a far firmer scientific footing than what you're saying. LSD does not cause people to be schizophrenic; schizophrenia shows itself during the most likely years for people to be experimenting with drugs. edit:…

> LSD does not cause people to be schizophrenic; schizophrenia shows itself during the most likely years for people to be experimenting with drugs. This is very misleading at best. LSD use causes direct symptoms of psychosis, including symptoms of schizophrenia, schizoaffective, and schizophreniform disorders. The effects of LSD resemble schizophrenia so closely, in fact, that it has led to studies on rats using LSD…

I think it's simply misleading to quote studies comparing the effects of acute LSD intoxication to the symptoms that can be seen in psychotic people as evidence that LSD in some way causes schizophrenia.

Drunken people share symptoms with schizophrenics too, as well as people who have gone without sleep.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#147

Post by Nursie »

sanoli wrote: post #144
Nursie wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's equating or defending anything? I just think that saying "I've never done drugs" while at the same time admitting drinking alcohol is kinda silly.

It may be silly, but I bet 99% will understand that he meant the illegal stuff.

>> I find it odd that the author of the article assumes his daughter is going to try drugs one day. Personally, I never have...

Some of the 'drugs' the guy talks about in the section about his daughter are caffeinated drinks and alcohol.

I also happen to think that these false distinctions (marijuana is a drug, alcohol isn't, oxycodone is different because it's a doctor-drug) do the debate a lot of harm.

I'm not saying you're wrong, mind.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#148

Post by conroe64 »

7Figures2Commas wrote: post #98
StandardFuture wrote: post #58

I don't think people are fully reading this article looking at the top comment... >There is nothing that one can experience on a drug that is not, at some level, an expression of the brain’s potential. Hence, whatever one has experienced after ingesting a drug like LSD is likely to have been experienced, by someone, somewhere, without it. >I cannot account for why my adventures with psychedelics were uniformly pleasa…

> Wine and beer in moderation is actually perfectly healthy. The idea that moderate consumption of alcohol is "perfectly healthy" is actually quite debatable. Taking red wine as a an example because of the popular belief that it has notable health benefits when consumed in moderation, a few points: 1. Many of the studies on the supposed health benefits of red wine are inconclusive. For instance, we still can't explai…

Regarding point 4, most of the calories that come from red wine is alcohol. Alcohol isn't metabolized the same way as other foods, so comparing calories from alcohol to other foods is misleading.

http://www2.potsdam.edu/hansondj/AlcoholCaloriesAndWeight.ht...

The rest of what you write doesn't really validate your conclusion. Actually, there has been a study indicating the reverse. People who drink live longer.

http://www.mnn.com/food/beverages/stories/study-abstaining-f...

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#149

Post by shantanubala »

pessimizer wrote: post #146
shantanubala wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LSD does not cause people to be schizophrenic; schizophrenia shows itself during the most likely years for people to be experimenting with drugs. This is very misleading at best. LSD use causes direct symptoms of psychosis, including symptoms of schizophrenia, schizoaffective, and schizophreniform disorders. The effects of LSD resemble schizophrenia so closely, in fact, that it has led to studies on rats using LSD…

I think it's simply misleading to quote studies comparing the effects of acute LSD intoxication to the symptoms that can be seen in psychotic people as evidence that LSD in some way causes schizophrenia. Drunken people share symptoms with schizophrenics too, as well as people who have gone without sleep.

This is not just a matter of resembling psychosis.

Haloperidol and olanzapine, two common prescriptions for schizophrenia, have been demonstrated to reduce the effects of LSD.

There is a connection between the psychoactive properties of LSD and the neurological etiology of schizophrenia, though the connection needs to be studied further.

Yes, research should not be taken as gospel, but it is foolish to think that there is no reason at all for alarm.

Another more recent source: Marona-Lewicka, D., Nichols, C. D., & Nichols, D. E. (2011). An animal model of schizophrenia based on chronic {LSD} administration: Old idea, new results. Neuropharmacology, 61(3), 503 – 512. doi:10.1016/j.neuropharm.2011.02.006

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#150

Post by jessriedel »

Nursie wrote: post #99
jessriedel wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you follow Alex3917's link, you'll see he argues that Nutt is intellectually dishonest. That's of course different than being regular dishonest (i.e. fraudulent).

I think if that was really the case then IC would still want to know, I wasn't kidding about them being one of the most prestigious institutions in the UK.

Indeed, having been offered an academic job at Imperial, I'm partial to thinking of it as a place of high prestige.

The thing about intellectual dishonesty is that it's not provable, and in fact usually isn't even noticed by people who agree with the conclusion. If you read the link, you'll see that these allegations are hardly the kind that would lead a university to remove a professor.

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