figgs and bebop:
both you guys are hung up on this idea that the authority of those who put the time in studying this stuff is illegitimate, and anyone should be able to contribute whatever they want with equal authority. but that's just asinine. if some kid in his trig class in high school decided to tell a real mathematician "move over and let ME show you how to really solve this differential equation!" i'm hoping you would agree that's absurd. it's the same as if some 150 pound guy bouncing the bar off his chest on bench and keeping his arms bent and using his back to curl came up to a 250 pound bodybuilder and said "i'll show you how this shit is done!" or if a guy with a textbook on human physiology decided that his opinion was better than an m.d.'s. i'm assuming you guys are with me in thinking that those people simply would not be qualified to address the issues no matter what they thought of themselves. moreover, it's no surprise that they might think such things considering they don't even know enough to understand what they don't understand! it simply takes a certain amount of study to even get the concepts being discussed.
well, why would anyone think that the most difficult questions of all time, namely "what is the nature of the world," would be any different? why would that kind of question, seemingly much more difficult, be thought to be the kind of thing that anyone could answer? it isn't. in the same way that you have to study any subject to some degree just to get to the point where you understand just how much you don't understand you have to study a lot of philosophy to understand the ideas being discussed in philosophy. you can't just walk in off the street and start throwing around terms because you won't even know what those terms mean. you simply haven't put in the time to get what the questions even are.
let me ground this for you guys in some real examples. in figgs' post where he listed a bunch of people whose ideas he said dovetailed with his, he named some guys who thought that psychedelics would "open up your mind" or "expand your consciousness." well, what does that even mean, and why would anyone think such a thing? how would it work? if your mind is just your brain, then it's no surprise that changing the chemical makeup of your brain would change your perception of things. but then there is no reason to think that you're getting to anything good or "expanding" anything. that's because, if we're just talking about your brain and nothing beyond it, it looks like your brain is the kind of thing that evolved for a specific purpose, that likely being cashed out as something like allowing us to navigate the world successfully. but then we wouldn't think we were getting something better when we radically changed the makeup of our brain. we would be much more likely to think we were screwing it up. it's just like you can make a car work differently by dumping metal shards in the oil. certainly the behavior of the car would change, but we have no reason to think that's "better" or "expanded." in the same way, if our mind is just our brain, and our brain is the result of evolutionary pressures whereby those individuals who navigated the world more successfully were the ones who stuck around to produce fertile offspring, then we probably don't want to screw that up by altering it dramatically as it seems very fine-tuned to its job, and we are clearly making it work differently by taking psychedelic drugs.
however, you might think that your mind is more than just the crap in your head, that it's more than your mere brain. but then you have to ask yourself how it is that altering your brain alters your mind. what is it that is being changed if not your brain? and if the non-physical part of the mind is affected by the psychedelic drugs, how is that working? do the drugs have magical powers? what is the causal relationship between the magic powers of the chemical substance and the effects they produce? more, why would we think that the "trip" one takes is any better, is "expanded" in some positive sense?
it doesn't look like the guys talking about psychedelics really address those kinds of issues, and those are the most basic in terms of studying mind. i mean, that's the absolute bottom level. you can't go anywhere before you get a handle on those kinds of issues, and they don't even address them. they just say a bunch of words that make up sentences that, while syntactically correct, are meaningless. what the hell is the energy of your mind or consciousness? i mean, i know what energy is in physics, but that's not what is being discussed, because energy doesn't have will, direction, or purpose. energy is just a scalar physical quantity. but that's not the kind of thing people mean when they talk about the mind's "energy." there it takes on some spooky properties. but then there's this constant equivocation in the meanings where people attempt to take "energy" in the spooky sense and use the theoretical language of physics to get out stuff that is empty of any genuine content. you can't use the law of conservation of energy to talk about spooky stuff. you're equivocating on the meaning of "energy," and when you do that you aren't say anything at all.
