The Disputation of Vancouver

As this is being written, Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris were supposed to have a discussion of religion at a theater in Vancouver the nights of June 23rd and 24th. This post is going up the following day.

The Disputation of Barcelona took place about 750 years ago. My guess is that it’s been quite a while since we’ve had a disputation. The Peterson-Harris battle is so highly anticipated that tickets cost a fortune. And it may have been sold out!

I find this very encouraging. I would much rather see people going for this than reading newspaper columns and twitter feeds.

Although Harris is not a fan of what he sees as the baggage of religion, he is a fan of psychedelics and altered states of consciousness. Peterson is a fan of Jungian views of a sort of universal unconscious.

My own view is that the value of insights that we might get from altered states of consciousness is low and getting lower.

Let me start with a metaphor in which we have a physical layer, an operating system, and an application layer. So when you eat, your digestive system is the physical layer. Your cravings and your inclination to enjoy sugar and fat come from the operating system, which is your brain as shaped by evolution and your particular genetic inheritance. But at the application layer–how you find food, how your food is prepared, what you choose to eat, and so on–that is all cultural. You copy others, you learn from others, you experiment within the context of the people and technology around you.

I am not saying that this is a scientifically useful metaphor. But I use it to point out that most of what we are is cultural. We come into the world knowing nothing at all about pizza or french fries or sushi. Over many generations, humans have built up this vast storehouse of cultural paraphernalia–buildings, equipment, social norms, organizations, books, electronic devices, art, music, dance, sports, science. We put tremendous effort into communicating with one another, teaching with one another, and exchanging with one another in order to share access to the contents of this vast cultural supermarket.

Is there stuff sitting in altered states of consciousness that we can’t find in the rest of our cultural supermarket? Is that stuff really so important that we should devote a lot of our lives to exploring it through Biblical stories or Buddhist meditation or psychedelics? I am not dismissing that such exploration is worthless, just questioning whether it is of great value to more than a few people.

I understand that people want there to be meaning in their lives. But you don’t necessarily need altered states of consciousness to find meaning. You can find meaning from caring–about family, friends, art, science, sports, philosophy, religion, politics, nature, you name it. My guess is that the more you care about what you are close to, like your family, and the less you try to derive meaning from caring about distant phenomena, like celebrities or politics, the better off all of us are.

10 thoughts on “The Disputation of Vancouver

  1. You should have included whether you have tried psychedelics. As it seems like the answer to that is no. When people see long lasting neurological changes after one dose, who gather meaning after an afternoon when they can’t after a lifetime of religion, I feel there is something quite substantial there.

  2. Meditation is the only of the “altered states” I have much familiarity with. Is it necessary? No, but it is useful. With your food analogy, I would say it occupies a place similar to learning to cook. (Not just in terms of following a recipe, but learning enough culinary skill that you can improvise your own meals.) Our modern cultural layer gives you all the options for food you could want, but there is still benefit from being able to produce for yourself precisely what you desire. It also helps you learn why you like what you like, so getting good at the lower layer makes your actions in the upper layer more efficient.

    To use your computer analogy, I would say meditation is like learning a command line interface. Does the software layer of a GUI give you whatever you may need? More or less. But I have found meditation puts me closer to the machine in a similar way that a CLI does. I no longer need to interact with myself/my computer in a way that I have been conditioned to via society/software designers. I am closer to bare metal with meditation than without. To extend the metaphor, I see a good therapist (or good practical philosopher or chaplain/confessor/rabbi/etc.) as taking you under the hood of the API you’ve been using, and showing you the low-level code that you’ve been running so that you may debug it effectively.

    • To continue your analogy: is it the wisest thing to randomly type away at a CLI who’s syntax and semantics are wholly unknown to you while possibly operating at root level access without any hope of backup and restore?

  3. “My guess is that the more you care about what you are close to, like your family, and the less you try to derive meaning from caring about distant phenomena, like celebrities or politics, the better off all of us are.”

    This sounds like wisdom to me. Perhaps a corollary of the principle of subsidiarity. Perhaps a reformulation of the opening of Niebuhr’s serenity prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”

  4. My understanding is that certain substances impose similar chemical states in the brain to theta-waves, which happen just before sleep. The actual brainwaves are different, as far as I could find in research.

    The point being that like with almost-asleep scenario, the brain can make particularly “long-distance” neural connections, perhaps due to improved pattern-matching. This is the common ground between creative artists abusing almost-asleep state and the memefied ability of marijuana to expose the user to funny insights.

    This particular property scales off what/how much information does one possess in the first place.

    • Same goes for meditation. I find the “open-focus” type of meditation to be particularly useful in this regard.

      Bonus points for combining the methods.

      On a side note, I find that a number of public people motivated by psylocybes could use more research before jumping to conclusions. Which is a danger that we all have to face.

  5. 1. Judging from Harris’s events page, I think I’m starting to understand “The IDW” as what appears to be a successful semi-bootstrapped self-promotion / marketing campaign. Over and over with Harris, Peterson, Murray, Nawaz, and/or both Weinsteins in the top Anglosphere cities. Merely OK seats without special frills in London are selling for around $300 each! Not a bad way to make a living. Addressed to that tiny, niche, under-served market of … half the population.

    2. As far as ‘altered states’ and insights, I don’t think it’s a good or reliable path for most people – even talented intellectuals – to arrive at good intellectual insights or to inspire creativity or productivity. That’s not saying that atypical mental states (to include fatigue, athletic stimulation, or mild inebriation) aren’t important for these kinds of psychological modes: it really is stunning how often reads that some insight or innovation was achieved in a dream-like state, or in an accountable flash, or of being ‘in the zone’ and in a fit of hyperproductive mania of unknown origin where one can achieve more in a night than in a month. (I can testify personally to this last one, and boy do I wish there were some way to summon it on the regular.) Or to hear people say they are most likely to have ideas simulating conversations with themselves “in the shower” or even “on the toilet”.

    I’d like, however, to focus less on ‘insights’, so much as the psychological experience of coming to a revised belief either about the world or about oneself, which, yes, sometimes does involve a feeling of ‘epiphany’ (which people sometimes say they have after a positive session with a therapist, and indeed, which many therapists are trying preciesly to evoke.) And these experiences apparently do have the potential for some durable – and one hopes beneficial – impact on one’s life.

    How does ‘persuasion’ actually work? This is related to your “opening and closing the minds of friends and opponents” framework, and is an extremely important question on the nature of influence.

    Most of the time, for better or worse, it’s not primarily based on ideas or arguments, but on the social circumstances of the exchange, especially when done in person or with those with whom one has continuing relationships. We will become plastic and flexible and be willing to reverse ourselves and accept things from high-status people we like and respect, and we later rationalize what happened can call it “being convinced.” Likewise, we put up shields and become stubborn and intransigent when the wrong social circumstances are present.

    Now, the thing is, most of the time, people get locked into their beliefs, opinions, and outlooks, and tend to interact with a social group that reinforces these positions. They also get locked into bad lifestyle habits and ruts of bad behavior and poor decision-making.

    How does one break out of all that? (A huge and urgently pressing problem!) Well, one needs to have something like the psychological experience of being ‘persuaded’ by the inflential, high-status authority figure on ‘your side’. For therapy, I’m guessing the same kind of socially-responsive psychology is at work, and when the patient /client is in the state brought out by that circumstance and status-diferential, it allows one to ‘melt’ one’s psychological rigidities.

    What’s all that got to do with meditation and psychedelics and altered states and whatnot? This is pretty wild speculation, but my hunch is that something similar and related is going on, of a kind of trick one can play on oneself to bring about the psychological state of increased maleability.

    The trouble is, maleability isn’t good or useful for its own sake, and I think most people experiencing altered states make genuinely feel epiphany, but without a guided experience, their minds just become so open their brains fall out.

  6. While I am not an altered states type, this post would have been more interesting if it addressed Pollan’s latest.

  7. Interesting discussion. At one time I used psychedelics. The objective was to get high, as opposed to a spiritual experience. I had plenty of insights. Though I cant say they were very helpful to me.

    Fast forward a few decades.

    I do yoga. We joke that people come for the work out and stay for the “yoga.” For me the practice has led me to a different state. Much more subtle than Mr. Wonderful (a popular “blotter” back in the day.) But different enough that people who have known me can tell somethings up.

    Not sure where this is going except my observation that gaining insights while high is probably not really whats happening.

  8. I had to think abut altered states in a world of cultural sign posts.
    Consider a kid growing up to two years with uncorrected nearsightedness. This kid keeps amore complex map pof those cultural sign posts.

    Consider a kid grew up in the desert, hot dry weather doesn’t bother this kid. He goes into an altered state, a homeostasis he can control mentally, it is a physical adaption in the brain. This kid ran the shade, growing up, he knew the limits, how long one could walk the open sun. It was an exercise, growing up, and marginally, like any muscle memory, there was physical change in the neurology and biochemistry.

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