Errancer

Stanisław Lem is an example I suppose?

I generally agree with you, but I would like to comment on the expression you used: "As a scientist, I can't really object to rationality on its own, but it may be worth considering non-rational, transcendent experience as a fundamental psychological need.". I think you would agree that if evaluations such as life-meaningfulness are secondary-properties or qualia like you said then arranging it as a debate between rationality vs irrationality is out of the picture. It is customary to consider various forms of mysticisms as opposed to rationality but it doesn't have to be the case as long as we properly define what is entailed by such experience.

I suppose that the reason people might object to such idea is that they are implicitly committed to a form of positivism and they sense that if people can experience evaluations then the fact/value distinction is undermined. Therefore I think that while it is understandable what you mean when you use the term "rationality" as equated with positivism it would be good for the long term debate to separate those two, since I take it that people like us would like to have it both: science and a form of atheistic mysticism [0].

Ultimately the grand-father of rationality, Plato, was anything but a positivist.

[0] I use the term mysticism mostly because I lack any better term. Evaluative intuitionism is probably the most correct technical term but it has historical roots which I dislike because it was constructed around the single intuition of what is Good, and I believe that we need a wider range of evaluative terms to adequately describe our experiences.

I feel like this comment hits at the general discussion of "Why should I learn something which I won't be the best at?" and it applies just as well to maths, science and arts: you should learn it since if you really enjoy it then you can contribute by maintaining a healthy community around it; and this can mean really working on the community or just being a person who can understand the value of discoveries of others. Having a good audience is the dream of every artist and I think this applies quite universally.

I agree with your description that this is a throat-clearing but I don't see why it hurts the clarity of writing. Dense texts packed with information can often benefit from such breaks. In general I find text which uses artefacts from spoken language more readable. There are limits to this of course but if we remove all redundancy we end up with dry text which sometimes is expected but I am unsure if it is the most readable or clear way to write. One side note is that it might be culture dependent. English speaking countries and Poland, where I am from, expect and teach much different writing style than France or Germany.

I agree, often I write first sentence in technical language to introduce the reader to the existing discussion and then say "In other words" to paraphrase the technical language into more familiar but less precise vocabulary.

Yea, the point about the same people changing their opinions was quite interesting so I mostly pointed out the lack of citation since I though that the article might misrepresent the paper and I wanted to verify it. And now that I am reading it, I find it is nicely nuanced and really well written. I was wondering why exactly I was suspicious about the original article and now I see that my problem is the tone. The article starts with "Helplessness Is Not Learned" and claims that it has been "debunked" where the paper keeps the phrase "learned helplessness" as a well documented fact and adjusts the mechanism behind the phenomena, which is much more reasonable.

Fair enough, this was a stupid oversight. Thanks for pointing this out!

I don't think I understand how your comment relate to what I wrote.

Well I wrote one of the negative comments and I think you give the article an apologetic interpretation (which is great). I can agree that if this is the point then it is a good advice, but how is it different from setting yourself SMART goals and the general wisdom from personal management in psychology or theory of action in philosophy? You seem to argue that learned helplessness is alike weakness of will and while they might be on continuum there is something different between those cases since under normal circumstances you don't fail to run away from pain. And while the way "out" might be similar if we we fail to understand the difference then we will fail to understand the mental state of people who are in genuine cases of learned helplessness such as many-year homeless people. So, like, maybe a careful criticism is not that the article is wrong but it simplifies things to the point where on the one hand we are blinded to the most important things about learned helplessness and on the other hand besides the point that you bring up the article includes many rhetorical devices which obscure the main point.

This one is funny since I deliberately checked how to write it correctly and I found the form 'ad nauseam' annnnd somehow left it in the incorrect form. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

huh, I thought this was a correct use. Thanks!

This article seems to relay on the idea that by default we can take no action and therefore we don't acquire helplessness as it is the default. But it doesn't seem to make sense? The norm is that we make actions all the time and agency is expected. When one loses their agency then we are talking about learned helplessness. If we want to say "Oh, in fact those people did not learn helplessness since there is nothing like this to learn, it is more accurate to say that they find their circumstances so dire that all actions seem to them unreasonable effort as it won't allow them to change those circumstances." then I guess that true but it seems trivial. It is like saying that if you are so depressed that you don't eat then it is not depression but a default state since you need a reason to eat and you just fail to have that reason. Which is like, the point? We expect healthy people to take care of themselves and if they feel like there is no reason for them to do so then they are not back to some natural state which is fine. So I feel like there is no big discovery here. It is just terminological adjustment so that we can avoid possible misinterpretations plus some new fact from the neuroscience which doesn't change anything about our psychological understanding.

So yea, the big fanfare about "debunking" and how the science progresses are out of place. This is a one paragraph news without citation.

I always felt like Wittgenstein deeply hated philosophy and all his work was aimed at showing its meaninglessness. That is why I felt that despite the theoretical opposition between his early and late work they are continuous. The proofs has changed but the claim remained the same. But his hatred was sourced in the fact that he couldn't stop himself from engaging into it and found this desire deeply stupid and despicable so again and again he had to show himself that this is futile but as it is with philosophy every time you think you made a point a new angle revels itself and you need to adjust the argument ad nausea. So in this sense I find his preference for stupid movies understandable. The ability to just stop thinking about what you consider irresolvable, meaningless problems is a blessing and dumb pop fiction is a safe space with no traps that would cause you to think anew some problems. Now, none of what I said is backed by any research really. I haven't read his biography and I might be projecting my own experience, but I feel like there are some experiences a prolonged engagement in philosophy causes and they are quite difficult to explain to people who have not went through them. Like, you can pick up St. Augustine or Kierkegaard and I feel that they want to scream their lungs out the exact same insight. Kierkegaard had similar relation to the theatre as far as I remember. Anyway, there is no clear point to my comment. I guess I am interested what others are thinking.

what? i feel like it is completely opposite; per the "A Mathematician’s Lament" essay

This would be incompatible only if we require realistic interpretation of our taxonomies and theory of evolution can be true regardless of our (anti)realistic commitments.

The point as I understand is that interfaces in the OOP sense try to mimic what modules do. Therefore OCaml not having them is not a serious accusation since everything you try to accomplish with interfaces / design patters you can and should be able to do with modules. Here is the article explaining the concept: https://www.pathsensitive.com/2023/03/modules-matter-most-fo... but I have to note that I never worked in OCaml so this is just my theoretical understanding.

If we are looking for tests whenever we are tripping or not then sure, what you described is definitely the way to go. The categories I am drawing are not important for that. I make them to on the one hand tell people that they probably won't lose their consciousness and on the other that there will happen something more than simple "eye-filter". This middle step I find the most interesting, possibly dangerous and missing from wide-culture discussion so I want to pin it down. Especially that it is interesting feature of the mind independently of psychedelics. An experiment with tastes could be interesting but lately I simply avoid eating while tripping since I feel my stomach too vividly. Once I had to eat plain rice for some time after the trip since everything else was too overwhelming.

Okay, maybe my wording was off but I do in fact agree with you. I argue that hallucination is one property and personality-change is another. The article above says that they are working on hallucination-free lsd. Therefore the lsd they produce will still be personality-changing possibly. Therefore we are both worried that there might be something which makes lsd possibly dangerous and therefore unsuitable for wide medical use.

I happen to be well suited for psychedelic experience but I do have close one who went thought few months of LSD-induced anxiety and they won't ever take it again because of it.

Nevertheless I am in fact in favour of trying out the possibilities of lsd and I think that the policy of harm-reduction with specialised control system can outweigh the possible risks. The two most important takeaways which are repeated endlessly in this context is that one should treat LSD with high degree of respect and use allergic method at the beginning to find the ways in which one is affected by the drug. You start with half dose or even quarter dose. You take a break and observe yourself. Then you can take slightly larger dose. You observe yourself again. Etc. Second there should be someone more experienced who oversees you during the trip and after it so that if there are any troublesome effect which you yourself might omit then there will be someone to catch it and stop your from taking more. Currently both of those points are difficult because of criminalisation and I think that until this is changed we will be floating in myths (both positive and negative ones). And as long as we are floating in myths we won't be able to resolve even the simplest empirical / verifiable questions about the consequences of LSD usage.

So if this is what we would consider "hallucinations" then sure I experienced all this and more. One of the more interesting experiences for me is when I try to cook food on acid. On day to day basis I am quite good cook and I can reliably judge how well done something is but on LSD all those abilities simply disappear. I can't tell if the meat on the pan is done or not without thermometer. But I think reducing hallucinations to distortions doesn't fully capture what is going on. LSD affects the mechanism of active perception as well as the passive perception. I think when we talk of hallucination then this is the area people have in mind and what is important hallucination is one of the least interesting ways acid affect active perception. What I mean by active perception as contrasted with passive one is that all things you mentioned are passive perceptions. But our mind does not only recognises objects in the world but it is also participating in constructing new categories which establish new objects. For further reference the key-word is "The myth of the given" but what I want to point here is that this ability of the mind to put sense data under categories is affected with LSD in a incredibly interesting way. This is why hallucinations as perception of things which completely don't exist are so difficult to have and you either need to have a "special type of soul" or take such a large dose that you no longer operate on external sense data since they are so distorted.

I am not denying that for some people hallucinations are possible and dangerous. I think my main point is twofold. First in the general debate hallucinations take too much space in comparison to other psychedelic experiences. Second I think that for medical use hallucinations are not the main obstacle. For example what you describe I wouldn't consider hallucinations. LSD can definitely induce certain ideas and motivations into you and this is the area of experience which I would like people were more aware of.

Partially but as far as other people commented I rather think that each person experiences it differently. I took few heroic doses and the closes experience I had was a running conviction that floor was trying to eat me because I binge-watched attack on titan the week before. Still, it was not a hallucination per say.

I'm quite sure that the research itself is quite interesting but I hate how the "hallucinations" overtake all discussion on psychedelics. I never experienced any hallucinations, understood as believing that I perceive something which turned out to not be the case, on acid. The only text I know which describes the experience accurately is "The doors of perception" by Huxley and he as well notices how you really don't start seeing things out of nowhere. At best what happens is that you start to notice patters that look like something but you are aware that this is pattern recognition and not real thing. Maybe there are people who experience, and are truly overwhelmed, by the hallucinatory part but I doubt that this is the most important issue with psychedelic.

But Latour is precisely doing what you demand in the first paragraph. The fact that he is claimed to be anti-scientific is extremely ironic. His counter-intuitive conclusions come from the attempt of defending science because the traditional accounts failed. You use "fact", "reality", "science", "beliefs", "knowledge" without any degree of irony but do you know how hard it is to defend them on the philosophical grounds? Most people are naive positivists and even positivists from Vienna circle quickly gave up on such positions because they were so hard to maintain. Latour was not a stupid opportunist and you can find this in his biography. If you think he was wrong then first make sure you understand what he was even trying to argue for. Without this understanding how can you square your claims about knowledge and your actions? Do you believe that your opinions have no metaphysical assumptions whatsoever? Or do you think that your opinions are true so you can a priori deny any contrary opinions as false?

Genuine question but how is space travel self-evidently useful?

I skimmed through and the article looks a lot like what I think as well. One bonus point I didn't see is that the more people take the intentional-based approach the easier it is to befriend each other. My best friendship was formed and is sustained through intentional effort we share to keep it this way.

Eh, this article touches on something important but 1. the material aspect of determinism is the most boring one, if everything is materially determined then so is our feeling of freedom therefore it doesn't really change anything. Strawson has a nice article about this called "Freedom and resentment" which shows that the thesis of determinism doesn't really change anything about our ethics. 2. the programming lingo seems to me to make the issue more obscure rather than clear but the problem he is mentioning is discussed under the name "second-order desires" and is quite important since it leads to much more interesting problem of determinism - the psychological determinism. Usually we believe we have certain freedom in choosing our beliefs through weighing and choosing our interpretations of what is happening. The issue of psychological determinism is threefold. First proposition is that our beliefs change due to some causes, they don't simply pop into our head. Second proposition is that our given beliefs will dictate what interpretations will make sense to us. Therefore every cause will make us believe what our current beliefs allow. Third proposition is that our actions are driven by combination of beliefs and desires. So ultimately we can't chose our actions since we can't choose our beliefs and the hope for "freedom" is lost. What is left is the will which is not free but driven by beliefs and desires that are outside "our" control.

Now I don't know if I believe in this formulation of the problem but among all formulations of determinism throughout history this one is in my opinion the only one worth arguing about. I learned about it by reading two texts by Bernard Williams and I would say that he should be named the author of this formulation even though he never used such name. The first text is his book "Ethics and the limits of philosophy" and the second is the essay "How free does the will need to be?". If someone is interested in this issue then I would recommend following the citation trail of the essay.

I really dislike this type of thinking insisting that everything we do has some importance to it. I used to think like this in moral terms, my every action has consequences and I should be mindful of those consequences. And if anyone watched "The Good Place" then they know it is not a good way to live. I am paraphrasing but microoptimalisation is the root of all evil. I find it much better to just get a good understanding of what I wish to be and set a long time goals around it (Like a decade or lifetime long). Then every now and then I can asses if it is working or not. Since life is not a race and I am not competing with anyone I can settle for slow progression towards the good. I am the judge, the executioner and the audience of my life and therefore every aspect can be adjusted independently.

I actually had a reverse experience. I expected it to be butchered and unwatchable but it turned out really nice. Much different from the comic but this made be think that Sandman is not an usual piece of text but a kind of mythology and it suites it to be retold differently. So yea, it was "Netflix'd" but I think its a feature and not a bug. Each storyteller tells the story in their way and this is very in-line with the core idea of Sandman. Besides I am genuinely happy to see people watching it after so many years of being a fan.

I heard that it used to be true but the chemicals in soap changed and now its safe to use, but I don't know enough to verify this.

I used "Eat This Much" for a while and if i remember correctly it has those features in the premium version.