I'm going to talk about psychedelics now. My qualifications: I am me, I have taken mushrooms and acid on a number of occasions. I have read quite a bit by Leary and McKenna. I have never had a bad trip. I don't recommend them to anyone.

The argument for them is that they open up vistas of phenomenological experience that you are unlikely to have experienced before, along with a sort of default assumption that having new experiences is usually good for you

Moreover, advocates of psychedelic use say that those experiences are usually fun, meaningful, and perhaps even transformative. Many people who use psychedelic drugs feel that they have had profound insights, that they have seen behind the curtain w/r/t the true nature of reality

A lot of us here are interested in outsider forms of epistemology, in personal growth, and in "spiritual" experiences. Let's break these down one by one.

First, outsider epistemology. We mostly recognize by now that scientific epistemology in practice is captive to the demands and vices of political and ideological power.

When bureacrats decide that something is true, scientists have to get in line. Those that don't are quietly not funded, not tenured, not published. It's very difficult to make a living as a scientist if your research reaches heterodox conclusions

As a result of this, many of us are rightly distrustful of institutional science, but we are often guilty of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

In absence of Christianity, most regress to an imbecilic religiosity that would embarrass even 70IQ preliterate animists. Similarly, in absence of a properly proportioned positivism, most regress to an imbecilic theory of knowledge that aligns with 70IQ preliterate animists

Enter psychedelics. Most of the early scientists who experimented with them turned into raving lunatics spouting non sequitur theories about how the universe is made of polychromatic gumdrop marshmallow light lattices. By their fruits shall ye know them https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/28/why-were-early-psychedelicists-so-weird/

There are many domains of life where science is and should remain absolutely silent, because there are facets of our experience that resist quantification and measurement, and because something in our spirits becomes inaccessible when viewed through a rational lens

So being aware of the limits of scientific thought, which is a pursuit best left to men of genuine genius, we do well to refer to tradition, to intuition, and to personal experience in domains where science does not belong. I know you understand this https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1086444935144861696

And I understand that there are traditions that involve getting stoned delirious in the woods (observed by bush people who have barely figured out how to count past two), but this is a place where positivism is good akshually

Believing that psychedelic drugs will unlock secret or useful knowledge is like believing that microwaving your phone will improve your cell reception

Routine psychedelic use is the wellspring of the second worst epistemological theory in the world. The first is hashtag believewomen. But what about personal growth? Surely psychedelics are an interesting avenue for personal growth? In fact, they can be, however...

Personal growth means many things to many people. It could mean getting stronger, or smarter, or if you're absolutely depraved, getting more compassionate. The latter isn't really possible, and as we have already explored, psychedelics aren't going to make you smarter

Regardless of its character, personal growth is exclusively hormetic: it comes about in response to trauma. Aside: the way you nurture someone is to hurt them in small ways while protecting them, keeping them in the hormetic zone

Psychedelics can be a route to personal growth in the sense that they can be highly traumatic. A low dose or a lucky one can provoke a mild trauma, and this can indeed make you stronger in some ways. But I don't think this is the growth most psychonauts are talking about

As for me, I experienced more spiritual and emotional development in three months with a barbell than from three years of recreational drug use. The gym is also way less likely to break your brain. If you want mental trauma, just listen to any millennial woman's podcast

But the really insidious thing about psychedelics, though, is how they give you the ILLUSION of turbocharged insight, of personal growth, and of spiritual enlightenment. Probably you have visited an eye doctor at some point in your life...

When you have an eye exam, the doctor may put some yellow dye in your eye before shining a blue light on it. This makes the surface of your eye more visible. Under the influence of this yellow dye, the world looks like it has a flux filter on it. Everything seems a bit yellow

And you would be absolutely insane, I mean just claudicant in the head, if after taking that "drug" you went around telling all your friends that holy shit the doctor gave me this shit and you won't believe it: I now realize how yellow everything is. But then you take some acid

And what acid and its ilk are really doing, more than anything, more than showing you wavy dots and lines, is they're putting a filter on your thoughts where whatever else you think, you always think it's profound. Every though is accompanied by a pervasive emotion of revelation

If you think about the sky, the sky seems profound. If you think about your toilet, your toilet will seem like a rich vein of radiant insight. And perhaps it is. But the really fucked up thing is when, instead of all that, you make the mistake of thinking about morality

I don't even recommend thinking about morality even when you're totally sober, but under the influence of psychedelic "yellow dye", the most inane moral excretions of your mind feel divinely inspired. And if you're unlucky, it sticks after the trip is over https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1195752789437120512

Which brings us to the third thing people want to get out of psychedelics, which is spirituality. I think by now you can triangulate what I will say. When your every stray thought seems profound, this is indistinguishable from a spiritual experience

And what I take away from that is that spiritual experiences are pretty cheap; you can get the same buzz from singing hymns as a part of a big crowd, and it's about as likely to cause a stack overflow and let the preacher insert new instructions into your mind as dropping acid

The main difference is that when you have a spiritual experience in church, the preacher is hopefully going to put instructions there that have stood the test of time and that come a relatively symbiotic memeplex such as your culture's evolved ancient wisdom

In contrast to that, when you have a psychedelic experience, the person with superuser access to your mental map is you, but not a stable version of you, oh no, a you who is overcome with childish wonder at any random thing that strays into his field of view

This is why many psychedelic users do something they call "packing for the trip" wherein they read/watch things that they think will be comforting or enlightening before they take the drugs

And no matter what plans you make, what usually happens is you end up replaying whatever aspirational pablum you have on your internal tape loop and you come down feeling like whatever you already thought was important is now more important than ever

Sometimes this manifests in the form of "self-realizations" where you a mundane thing that you already knew about yourself takes on a sense of urgency: "I should be nicer to people" or my personal favorite, "I should lay off the drugs." But we've all seen how that usually goes