I am part of an online community centered on practicing rationality to better know the truth and achieve one’s goals. Psychedelics are increasingly a social activity in the rationalist community and a prescription for what ails ye, so I wrote this post on facebook earlier this year expressing my reservations about using psychedelics with the intent or pretense of learning truth. I’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about what I think about mindfulness and insight, so I’m sprucing it up a bit and sharing it here.
Psychedelics are not part of rationality practice. Mindfulness is not a rationality practice. Perhaps psychedelics and meditation can be part of one individual's trajectory to be better at apprehending the truth, but they are not themselves in contact with the truth.
The main thing psychedelics offer is cool sensory, emotional, and mental imagery experiences. They can have psychological benefits, like a form of emotional catharsis and a different perspective outside of your normal lens and self-image. While, again, I think psychedelics could be a tool for becoming better at truth-seeking— in certain therapies or to give someone better conditions for, e.g., getting past emotional barriers to accepting reality— in general you should not have illusions about doing psychedelics for anything other than fun or curiosity. (And there’s no guarantee it will be fun— you should also be aware of how terrifying and dysphoric the experience can be.)
As a comparison, I have a lot of anxiety. Sometimes, drinking some alcohol or taking a little CBD can improve my thinking because it reduces my anxiety. I was prescribed Ativan in the past for exactly this reason. The psychiatrist said, essentially, "no, Ativan is not good for cognition, but you are so anxious that I believe it will improve how you're able to perform." But no one would be tempted to say alcohol, CBD, or benzos are drugs to enhance rationality.1
Mindfulness has a stronger case for improving rational thinking. To the extent that unconscious emotions and thoughts are guiding your decision making, becoming more mindful can give you greater clarity and therefore greater ability to distinguish what beliefs follow from evidence and which ones flow from your wishes and biases. But it's a hygiene practice at best. It doesn’t give you very much data about the world outside of what it’s like to meditate. Many if not most practitioners of Western mindfulness are hoping to have direct insight of truth from meditation. I have had the experience of a profound understanding dawning on me during meditation practice. It's extremely pleasant, the sensation I crave the most. And there is a kind of truth that comes with it, but it's a personal, internal truth. It's a truth about what YOU really think or feel. But the content of the “insight” can be totally spurious. I've experienced that, too. The feeling of insight is just a feeling, and it's a sensation I sought like a recreational drug while sincerely believing that I was putting myself through grueling practice to improve myself and know the truth. I don’t want other people to get stuck in that loop because the rationality community seems to endorse the use of psychedelics or meditation as a legit part of truth-seeking.
What is rational and truth-seeking?
Form hypotheses about the world,
Learn the ways that evidence relates to your different hypotheses, either empirically or through known logic relationships and natural laws,
Take in evidence from the world that can confirm or disconfirm your hypotheses,
Refine your hypotheses, and
Repeat.
In other words, you learn external truths by querying the external world, not your navel.
Psychedelics and meditation are not conditioning you to be the sort of person who “gets it” and they do not give you a direct line to greater truth. I think on balance psychedelics are anti-epistemic, because when you take them you're putting yourself in this vulnerable state where everything sort of comes together and feels profound. Ideas that you catch during this time can get way more stock in your mind than they merit. Being part of burning man-type tripping cultures can expose you to lots of woo precisely when you are vulnerable. Not to mention such communities and their accompanying value of an open/uncritical mind can be a huge distraction from real, rigorous truth-seeking.
I think psychedelics and meditation are both much riskier and much less rewarding than popularly believed, but that doesn't mean I'm against them. For the right person, they can be fun or get one into a desired mental shape. Just as exercise has many benefits but isn't a way to learn the truth, so are psychedelics and meditation possibly-in-the-right-circumstances fun and possibly-in-the-right-circumstances enriching activities. I just want the narrative about them that they are somehow more than fun or ~possibly~ personally beneficial recreational activities to change, and I don't want smart people to keep propagating or indulging the reputation of psychedelics and meditation as your own personal oracle.
This is not a general statement about drugs. It may be fair to say that drugs like nootropics are drugs to enhance rationality.
Psychedelics and meditation don't show you the truth
I read the book "Right Concentration". It's a meditation book (which definitely seems like it's done the rounds in the broader rationalist-adjacent subculture) which covers the 8 jhanas, a progressive series of meditation experiences that are supposed to sharpen your mind for insight practice. (They sound fake but I'll vouch that at least the first two exist as described.)
I was struck by the following description of the sixth jhana, where you experience a sense that your consciousness expands infinitely outward:
"'There's this infinite consciousness and it's me; I must now have achieved union with atman, right?' Wrong, it's just an experience. You have put your brain/nervous system into an altered state, such that what you are experiencing is perceived by you as having an infinite consciousness -- that's all."
He's willing to take this very pragmatic and cynical perspective when critiquing Hindu views on meditation. But then the rest of the book seemingly accepts at face value that Buddhist insight/emptiness experiences are just 100% real.
I really enjoy your insights into these sorts of squishy non-rational things from a rationalist lens.
Mind-altering substances and meditation have such a profound emotional effect that they can jog us out of emotional patterns that get in the way of clear thinking. E.g., I've had real, meaningful moments of insight as a result of meditation, which enabled me to break maladaptive thought patterns. I was able to think, "oh my god, I've been so entrenched in thinking of X situation in terms of my anxiety and fear reactions that I've been preventing myself from seeing it in any other way. This is dumb and I should explore that other way of framing the situation."
But the emotional effect of meditation and substances can be super distracting; I 100% agree with you there. While there's not a highly defined line between emotion and thought, it seems to me like mind-altering practices or substances make that line even fuzzier.