Does using a substance to temporarily make us feel various types of intoxication get us closer to answering "why am I here"?
Wouldn't a sober study of the universe and history be more effective?
Wouldn't a sober study of the universe and history be more effective?
It's probably the most effective, since we're biased towards being capable of analyzing data from those wavelengths, and the atmosphere is transparent to them.
But why would that imply that we can't use tools that let us view how the universe looks with different wavelengths of light to effectively discover new things we otherwise wouldn't?
If not, why would doing a drug make us transformationally better at finding the answer to why we're here?
AFAICS, the only new thing we can learn about the universe by doing drugs is how our brain reacts to drugs.
Each individual human doesn't know everything that happens, consciousness + culture just makes it look like they do, as demonstrated in numerous comments in this thread, and all other threads, on TV, in conversation, etc. Reality itself is composed of various mirages.
Your brain is the most powerful filter we've discovered in the universe. You can take immense amount of noise and separate information from it. The issue with these filters is most of the time you don't realize you have them. How you were raised, the people you're around, the culture you're in can all present bias filters that are impossible to see around since you don't even realize they exist.
It may not be 'figuring it all out', but sometimes just having a filter lowered for a bit letting you realize there is another part of the world exists behind it can be a breakthrough.
But on second thought, we certainly are experiencing some kind of phenomenon of consciousness, even if it's purely an emergent phenomenon of the physical world. And tweaking the experiencing of that consciousness will tend to expose the boundaries of it, even if just at the level of running a fuzzer on a C program or blowing up a balloon too far.
I'm reminded of a quote from the TV series "Weeds". A bit on the nose, I know, but when discussing peyote in the show, one character said, "It's like 30 years of psychotherapy in one night".
In the real world, the scientific community's recent renaissance around the use of psychoactive drugs like psilocybin or MDMA in therapeutic settings is further proof that "substances" can be good.
I guess your point is that psychoactive drugs can speed up thinking about these questions. I guess I could see that. It sounds a bit like how Adderall can speed up people's programming ability.
Our experience of consciousness is entirely our own. If we don’t vary it against a constant background, how do we know what sobriety even is?
Put another way: is the “sober” view of a person with schizophrenic hallucinations truer than that after they’ve taken an antipsychotic?
But I'm not sure that's useful for answering the question of why we exist, why the universe exists.
I’m not advocating for or against the use of mind-altering substances. But a scientist with two microscopes is going to have an edge over one who dogmatically subscribes to their one and only favourite. Even something as simple as observing the sky turns on knowledge of the failure of our neuro-optical pathways qua optical illusions.
If you are looking for an answer that makes sense in relation to your specific context, your life, your consciousness, then drugs might be useful.
Once upon a time, people painted with oil paints as closely as they could to still life reality. But something was missing. Cue impressionism. After impressionism, an increasingly vanishingly small proportion of the art world tried to paint still life as an arts career and be taken seriously.
The state of the art, quite simply, had moved on.
And as it is with consciousness.
FTFY
With study vs drugs, the goal is still the same: find out why we're here. Since there isn't a goal change, it's not clear there should be a strategy change.
(No offense to photographers.)
Not all of life is about being more effective and efficient all the time. Sometimes it's worthwhile to see things in a different way, and to open up new ideas.
What does “effective” mean in this context?
But do psychedelic drugs help? If I want to write code, would a psychedelic drug help there? If not, why would a psychedelic drug help in finding why I exist?