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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)

#51

Post by icebraining »

cristianpascu wrote: post #7
beachstartup wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

worst analogy ever, especially for a post that so thinly veils your misguided feelings of superiority. ferraris were meant to be tweaked, what do you think the entire field of motorsport exists for? from F1 all the way down to the local DE event at the local track, cars are tweaked endlessly, with passion. you won't find any shortage of tweaked exotics at your local autocross, either. if nobody "twaeked" cars, you wo…

Do we have like sectarian wars on HN now? Who's worthy of being on HN and who's not?

Haven't we always? When one gets a lot of downvotes, the software often responds with an (hell)ban. How is that not the community deciding that some people are not worthy of being on HN?

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#52

Post by pstuart »

mistercow wrote: post #23
ajackrabbit wrote: post #5

Every human generates DMT, every night.

As far as I know, that's purely hypothetical.

Even if it's true it really doesn't mean anything.

DMT was the most intense psychedelic experience I've ever had, but came away with zero insights or spiritual change (unlike as from the usual suspects).

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#53

Post by ignostic »

_yosefk wrote: post #35

"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 friend…

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.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#54

Post by randomracker »

[deleted] wrote: post #25
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…

[deleted]

This statement implies that you know better than Crick and Watson what contributed to their discovery. That's absurd.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#55

Post by lcedp »

_yosefk wrote: post #35

"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 friend…

> 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.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#56

Post by simonster »

lolcraft wrote: post #36
cristianpascu wrote: post #11

"Everything we do is for the purpose of altering consciousness." I very much respect Sam Harris for taking the consciousness problem seriously. It poses a real problem to (his) atheism, and he, obviously, rejects the substance dualism, which would logically lead to a religious view on us. However, without a conscious soul, meaning itself loses meaning. What's the ontological support for meaning to rise on? One thing…

Look, if you think rejecting dualism is "not taking the consciousness problem seriously", you should read more. And well, one thing that Christianism seems to be still struggling to learn is that, beyond reproductible and well defined experiments, and falsifiable hypotheses, nothing can really be more than logical inference from some axioms. Maybe some dudes up in the Vatican implicitly defined some axioms about what…

If you Google "taking consciousness seriously," the first link is to an excerpt from David Chalmers' book. That book as a whole is essentially a long argument that understanding consciousness requires a dualist position (although not a substance or interactionist form). I don't agree with it, but it's compelling. If you believe the position that "rejecting dualism is 'not taking the consciousness problem seriously'" is an ignorant one, you should read it.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#57

Post by casual_slacker »

LSD makes very smart people get hung up on trying to pull logic out of strange old metaphors. I always felt it was a stimulant for the mechanism in our brain that makes new connections. Metaphors represent connections that are kept around because our culture gives value to vague non-conclusions.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#58

Post by StandardFuture »

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 pleasant until they weren’t—but when the doors to hell finally opened, they appear to have been left permanently ajar.

It is quite obvious this guy is someone who has well experimented with psychedelics and is actually urging people to avoid them if their approach is based on falsifiable reasoning e.g. 'opening their eyes to true reality/life' or some unscientific bullshit like that.

And WTF is all this commenting about how alcohol should be considered SO bad for a healthy society. Wine and beer in moderation is actually perfectly healthy. It is the lack of control for moderate consumption that creates a weakened human/society. However, this lack of self-control can appear in numerous other areas (food, internet, TV, work, etc.).

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#59

Post by mordae »

mistercow wrote: post #23
ajackrabbit wrote: post #5

Every human generates DMT, every night.

As far as I know, that's purely hypothetical.

In any case, there is a big difference between the amount you get in the sleep and the 60mg trip... People would definitely notice the effects when being woken up in the middle of the night.

Re: Drugs and the Meaning of Life (2011)

#60

Post by Nursie »

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…

Alcohol has a greater potential for harm than a variety of other recreational substances, legal or otherwise. That's basically it AFAICT.

It has significant addiction potential, people do abuse, and there are long term harms associated with that abuse.

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