The idea of having a multi-person brainstorming team composed of one person on psychoactive drugs and one person off them is not an obviously bad one, but you should at least try it out and certainly clean up your ideas before making a top-level post about it.
So far, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single novel and demonstrably true idea conceived under the influence of drugs. There was one case of a person on Less Wrong who claimed it helped him with original math, but another member who looked over an example of his work found that it contained a mistake. My impression is that various drugs may make one feel more creative, but largely in the same way that alcohol can make one feel more intelligent, since it lowers one’s standards for what constitute good ideas.
The man, whose name was Captain H.R. Robinson, would tell anyone who would listen that he had discovered the secret of the universe. It was all contained in a single sentence but he could never remember it after his opium trances were over. During a long crazy night of dreaming about this secret, he managed to write down the pearl of wisdom, but when he looked at in the morning, all it said was, ‘The banana is great, but the skin is greater.’”
William James describes a man who got the experience from laughing-gas; whenever he was under its influence, he knew the secret of the universe, but when he came to, he had forgotten it. At last, with immense effort, he wrote down the secret before the vision had faded. When completely recovered, he rushed to see what he had written. It was: “A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.”
-- Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy
I wonder if both stories are real, or one is a memetic mutation of the other.
If it turned out that there actually were two different people who had the two different reported experiences, but that one of those people had been inspired by reading the story of the other, how would you classify that?
I’d say both are real. But if the “secret” written down and read in the morning was also similar (and this was because the second person remembered the other story and this influenced his visions) then I’d say it was a case of memetic mutation, in addition to being real.
Novel is easy. If you’re not constrained by what’s coherent and sensible, worlds of possibility open up before you. They’re just not worlds you’re going to be taking anything useful back from. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around alone in the woods with an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic (he was my field ecology lab partner,) and by ordinary standards he certainly seemed like a constant fountain of novel ideas, but that was because he was sharing with me a perception of reality that was skewed in a maladaptive way relative to everyone else’s. All of his novel ideas were crazy.
The fact that nearly everyone in computer graphics in California at the time was using psychedelic drugs seems possibly significant, but I’m inclined to discount self assessments of whether they’re actually useful for the creative process more or less entirely. People have a pronounced tendency to say that psychedelics help them be creative, but I haven’t seen any evidence yet that leads me to believe that they’re actually having more worthwhile ideas than they are when off of drugs.
When you’re constantly being struck by profound-seeming ideas, it’s easy to conclude that you’re in a particularly creative state of mind, but you could just be in a state where stupid ideas seem profound. It seems a priori much more probable to me that introducing foreign chemicals into your brain would interfere with your faculty for recognizing profundity than that it would improve your faculty for generating it. The example given by the interviewee of his own work influenced by psychedelics
About the time that chaos theory was
discovered by the scientific community,
and the chaos revolution began in 1978, I
apprenticed myself to a neurophysiologist
and tried to construct brain models made
out of the basic objects of chaos theory. I
built a vibrating fluid machine to visualize
vibrations in transparent media, because I
felt on the basis of direct experience that
the Hindu metaphor of vibrations was
important and valuable. I felt that we
could learn more about consciousness,
communication, resonance, and the
emergence of form and pattern in the
physical, biological, social and intellectual
worlds, through actually watching
vibrations in transparent media ordinarily
invisible, and making them visible.
Is definitely not something I would regard as a good idea on the face of things. It’s an idea, and I can imagine that they made a lot of progress in computer graphics at the time by working on the programs to do this, but believing that visualizing vibrations in transparent fluid would give some valuable insight into human consciousness on the basis of Hindu religious metaphor strikes me as a case of really bad scientific intuition.
When you’re constantly being struck by profound-seeming ideas, it’s easy to conclude that you’re in a particularly creative state of mind, but you could just be in a state where stupid ideas seem profound.
Dude … that’s, like, so deep …
But seriously, this agrees closely with my experience. Another way I’ve thought of it is in terms of a bullshit filter. If your bullshit filter is too high — if you’re dismissing patterns that actually exist, because they don’t fit your preconceptions — then dropping your bullshit filter across the board may lead to you recognizing more truths. But it’s at the expense of believing more falsehoods, too.
When you’re constantly being struck by profound-seeming ideas, it’s easy to conclude that you’re in a particularly creative state of mind, but you could just be in a state where stupid ideas seem profound.
This was Feynman’s conclusion. I can’t seem to find the quote, but he said something along the lines of, “I thought my hallucinations were profound, and then I realized I was just hallucinating that they were profound, which I should have expected.”
I’m confused. I thought his preliminary data was the link at top, of the “robots” he found? It seems plausible… I mean, I would have read that comment thread and not see anything. Using his perspective, the comment thread seems to make more sense. It’s just a bunch of fake accounts shilling for Foxconn.
The idea of having a multi-person brainstorming team composed of one person on psychoactive drugs and one person off them is not an obviously bad one, but you should at least try it out and certainly clean up your ideas before making a top-level post about it.
Kids, don’t smoke and LW post!
So far, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single novel and demonstrably true idea conceived under the influence of drugs. There was one case of a person on Less Wrong who claimed it helped him with original math, but another member who looked over an example of his work found that it contained a mistake. My impression is that various drugs may make one feel more creative, but largely in the same way that alcohol can make one feel more intelligent, since it lowers one’s standards for what constitute good ideas.
Also:
I wonder if both stories are real, or one is a memetic mutation of the other.
If it turned out that there actually were two different people who had the two different reported experiences, but that one of those people had been inspired by reading the story of the other, how would you classify that?
I’d say both are real. But if the “secret” written down and read in the morning was also similar (and this was because the second person remembered the other story and this influenced his visions) then I’d say it was a case of memetic mutation, in addition to being real.
“novel” might be setting the bar too high, given “There’s nothing new under the Sun”.
Regardless, here is an interesting article regarding psychedelics and the history of Mathematics and computer graphics in the late 20th century.
Novel is easy. If you’re not constrained by what’s coherent and sensible, worlds of possibility open up before you. They’re just not worlds you’re going to be taking anything useful back from. I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around alone in the woods with an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic (he was my field ecology lab partner,) and by ordinary standards he certainly seemed like a constant fountain of novel ideas, but that was because he was sharing with me a perception of reality that was skewed in a maladaptive way relative to everyone else’s. All of his novel ideas were crazy.
The fact that nearly everyone in computer graphics in California at the time was using psychedelic drugs seems possibly significant, but I’m inclined to discount self assessments of whether they’re actually useful for the creative process more or less entirely. People have a pronounced tendency to say that psychedelics help them be creative, but I haven’t seen any evidence yet that leads me to believe that they’re actually having more worthwhile ideas than they are when off of drugs.
When you’re constantly being struck by profound-seeming ideas, it’s easy to conclude that you’re in a particularly creative state of mind, but you could just be in a state where stupid ideas seem profound. It seems a priori much more probable to me that introducing foreign chemicals into your brain would interfere with your faculty for recognizing profundity than that it would improve your faculty for generating it. The example given by the interviewee of his own work influenced by psychedelics
Is definitely not something I would regard as a good idea on the face of things. It’s an idea, and I can imagine that they made a lot of progress in computer graphics at the time by working on the programs to do this, but believing that visualizing vibrations in transparent fluid would give some valuable insight into human consciousness on the basis of Hindu religious metaphor strikes me as a case of really bad scientific intuition.
Dude … that’s, like, so deep …
But seriously, this agrees closely with my experience. Another way I’ve thought of it is in terms of a bullshit filter. If your bullshit filter is too high — if you’re dismissing patterns that actually exist, because they don’t fit your preconceptions — then dropping your bullshit filter across the board may lead to you recognizing more truths. But it’s at the expense of believing more falsehoods, too.
This was Feynman’s conclusion. I can’t seem to find the quote, but he said something along the lines of, “I thought my hallucinations were profound, and then I realized I was just hallucinating that they were profound, which I should have expected.”
I’m confused. I thought his preliminary data was the link at top, of the “robots” he found? It seems plausible… I mean, I would have read that comment thread and not see anything. Using his perspective, the comment thread seems to make more sense. It’s just a bunch of fake accounts shilling for Foxconn.
What does this have to do with marijuana?
Reading from the context, I’m assuming he was high when he made that discovery. And that “New Foe” is the same person as “Winged Foe.”