In my opening post, after rattling off a list of intellectual topics I might cover here, I revealed that this blog would also be about mind-altering drugs. Was this just something lurid to throw out there to get your attention or are we actually going to go there? Why would a Taxonomist, who claims he’s intent on making sense of the world, spend time talking about chemicals that arguably make the world make less sense?
There’s obviously the hedonic angle – as people who take them will surely tell you, most of the drugs I’ll be talking about apparently feel really good. And since the ultimate goal of making sense of the world is figuring out how we should live in it, pleasure surely has a place in the calculation. But if “drugs feel good” was all there was to say, I would hardly be the best place to look for that message.
So how can we connect these drugs, and the experiences one might have on them, to the Taxonomist’s main themes? Luckily for you, I have an answer and a list.
But first, let’s elaborate a bit on the kinds of drugs I’m talking about. The drugs I’m interested in discussing are certain psychotropic drugs: dissociatives, hallucinogens, empathogens, and entheogens. The kind that send you on trips rather than (just) get you high. We won’t spend much time on stimulants (other than amphetamines, which many of us rely on for ADHD treatment) or depressants (despite the popularity of benzodiazepines and opioids) or socially-sanctioned drugs (like caffeine, alcohol, nicotine and, increasingly, THC). The drugs I’m interested in are the ones that can change your model of the world.
To get specific, we are talking pyslocybin, LSD, MDMA, ketamine, DMT and the like.
Some of my readers are nodding along, familiar with these drugs and their effects, and eager to hear what I might have to say about them. Others are probably shocked or horrified, tossing them into the category of “hard drugs” that only degenerates would use or think about. I, too, was steeped in the DARE messaging of the 80’s and find it difficult to discuss them openly, rationally, even with the rising evidence that at least three of them (psilocybin, MDMA and ketamine) are safe, effective treatments for depression and PTSD. The Overton Window is shifting on some of these things, but they are still not quite fit for polite company.
Luckily, the Taxonomist has a friend, who we will refer to as The Intentional Degenerate on this blog, who has some amount of personal familiarity with these drugs. He writes up detailed reports of his experiences and his reflections on what they might be telling us. If we are lucky, he will let us post some of them so that we can share in his insights.
There will be time to discuss the specific drugs and their specific effects in future posts, but for now let’s return to our question. How might these kind of drugs help us make sense of the world? What can we learn from them that we can use in our daily lives, even if we choose not to partake? How can they help us understand perception, cognition or consciousness?
The short answer is by messing with the hardware we run on, changing the way we perceive the world, and how we build and use models of it.
The long answer involves a list and going into more detail about the ways they can do those things. Here are a few of the ways that I believe they can:
By making us open to new ways of being in the world
By weakening our priors and helping us “unstick” them
By tearing down our models and showing us how they work
By changing our conception of our self and our place in the world
I’ll tackle the first two in this post and save the rest for a later date.
Openness to New Ways
Most of the time, in our daily lives, we follow routines, we stay on track, we do our jobs, we abide by social norms, we live up to expectations, we do what we think we’re supposed to do. The path we tread is so well-worn that venturing off-trail can often seem unthinkable. But most of us inherited this path from our parents or absorbed it from the culture around us, and there is little reason to believe it’s the best path for us.
In many games, and in many environments, the optimal strategy is to balance exploitation and exploration. When we have something that works, we should exploit it and do more of the same. But winning strategies also make time for exploration, forgoing familiar moves every once in a while to strike out into the unknown and potentially discover an even better strategy.
But as creatures of habit, fear of the unknown, social pressure to conform or even sheer complacency can keep us closed off to new moves. They seem strange, unconventional, not what the rest of the herd is doing, and we can find it difficult to explore them even if we’d like to. A voice inside us tells us to just do it the way it’s always been done, to associate with the same kinds of people we always have, to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The voice can exaggerate the risks of trying something new, or the costs of sacrificing a turn of exploitation for a small chance of a better strategy. Our imagination can fail us when it comes to visualizing how things could be better.
What drugs can do – particularly the hallucinogens and empathogens – is turn up our dial of openness to new things, allowing us to explore the space of ways of being in the world. Now, you might think this is the same as just decreasing our inhibitions, something that alcohol is perfectly capable of doing. But even beyond the fact that alcohol, more broadly, tends to throw judgment out the window along with inhibitions, there is fundamentally something different between being open to new ideas and simply being disinhibited. It is rigidity that is banished by some of these drugs, not necessarily judgment. And being flexible can help us get to new places.
Weakened Priors
Increasing openness is just one example (an important one!) of the ways that drugs can weaken our priors. While we may not be perfectly rational Bayesians, we all build up priors as we go through life. Expectations, distributions over probable outcomes, estimates of how likely explanations are, predictions of what will happen next. Many of these are obviously useful – we need them to operate in the world. And evolution has given us effective ways to update them as new information comes in.
But it’s also clear that our priors can get stuck. We can learn a lesson too well, requiring unreasonable amounts of evidence to unlearn it. This can happen most easily in childhood, when our not-fully-mature brains have to cope with pain or trauma that overshadows anything else we’ve experienced. From a dog bite in the neighborhood, we learn that dogs are vicious and dangerous. From a narcissistic parent, we learn that when someone is upset it is probably our fault. From an overcritical one, we learn that we have to be perfect all the time.
And unfortunately, many of these these things we’ve learned too well can be self-fulfilling or self-reinforcing and get stuck. Our fear response when we see a dog solidifies our conviction that they are dangerous and we don’t like them. The positive reaction we get when we take the blame and change for others reinforces the belief that their unhappiness was our fault to begin with. Our success in being perfect most of the time ensures we never learn to take criticism and feel like we are always in the crosshairs.
Our priors stay strong and we filter out evidence that doesn’t support them because we judge it insufficient to overrule what we’ve learned. And our mental health suffers and we see the world less clearly than we could.
Hallucinogenic drugs seem to weaken our priors, causing us to see the evidence in front of us in a new light. When the priors are the fact that wallpaper doesn’t move and sofas don’t melt, the random play of light and shadow gives you “visuals” (and a reminder that not all priors should be weaker all the time.) When the priors are that new things are scary and exploration is risky, we get openness to new ideas. And I believe that some of the recent success in using hallucinogens to treat PTSD and treatment-resistant depression show that they can help us, in the right setting, unstick even complex, multi-faceted priors as well.
I’ll save my thoughts on the remaining reasons for another day, but hopefully I’ve started the conversation and begun to make my case as to why these drugs might be worth talking about. And hopefully, also made some progress towards convincing the Degenerate that he should share his experiences with us here in the future.