Buying Ecstasy Kant

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Buying Ecstasy Kant

Ben Casnocha tweaks Kant's moral maxim:. In Kant's Categorical Imperative he includes this moral maxim of universality: 'Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law without contradiction. The implications of Kant to non-voters would be, 'If everyone chose not to vote, the democracy wouldn't function. So vote! That seems like a fine aspirational ethic -- a principled stance applied to things like democracy and drug buying -- but the more realistic approach would to weigh the probability of universal adoption of the action. If it's insanely low -- like in the case of non-voting or drug-buying -- then ignore it. If, on the other hand, there were only five total drug buyers in the world, and if you stopped buying drugs that would drastically shrink demand and perhaps result in less drug violence, you would be right to incorporate societal implications more seriously in your decision as they much greater. Casnocha doesn't object to drug use but to drug purchases funding other criminal activities. Drug use, in moderation, doesn't violate Kant's moral maxim; a world where everyone smokes a joint once in awhile wouldn't be much different than the world we live in. And drug violence could largely be resolved either by drug users quitting en masse or by legalization. Casnocha's maxim falls further apart when applied to other moral dilemmas. Take this post by McArdle on pedophilia and child pornography from earlier in the week:. Dan Savage a couple of weeks ago had a letter from a pedophile who has never done anything about it: never used child porn, never touched a child, doesn't even let himself look at children in public places. In some sense, people like this--the pedophiles who never do anything, and do their damnedest to keep from even thinking about it--are exercising a virtue that borders on the saintly. They're struggling mightily with a powerful desire that they exert rigid control over. Society should gather round to help them, tell them what a great job they're doing, give them other ways to channel the energy they aren't pouring into molesting kids, and substitutes for the emotional succor that most of us hope to get from our partners. No one would argue that this pedophile should 'weigh the probability of universal adoption' before making the decision not use child pornography. Kant's maxim only works well when debating the direct effects of an action. If one buys marijuana it is possible that they funding other criminal activities. If one consumes child pornography they are directly supporting a heinous act. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest Newsletters. Search The Atlantic. Quick Links. Sign In Subscribe. About the Author.

This Is a Philosopher on Drugs

Buying Ecstasy Kant

There is something strange in the disinterest philosophers show for experimentation with mind-altering drugs—or at least for talking about their experimentation publicly. Even further out we have philosophy-curious writers like Thomas de Quincey also a biographer of Immanuel Kant recounting his own experience of opium addiction. And then we have probabilities and speculation. This shows, I think, just how conservative philosophy remains, in some respects, as an academic discipline. At a cultural moment when psychedelics are getting a second wind, and even someone as upstanding as Michael Pollan has moved from counseling us to eat our roughage to praising the benefits of microdosing, philosophers are conducting themselves as though it were still , when we wore skinny ties to colloquia, got funding from the RAND Corporation to work on decision trees and other such narrow and straitlaced endeavors, and all knew that it is the unaltered and wakeful mind that has exclusive access to the forms and qualities of the external world. But wait a minute. Even in the midth century, perhaps especially in the midth century, years before the postwar generation was turning on, tuning in, and dropping out en masse, perfectly sober grown-up philosophers understood full well that the reports our senses give us of the physical world hardly settle the matter of what reality in itself is like. The problem is ancient but was sharpened in the early work of Bertrand Russell and G. As Russell would put the point in the s, when we are looking at a table as we walk away from it, what we see shrinks continually; but the table does not shrink; therefore, what we see simply cannot be the table itself. What we see, rather, is only what is given to sense, and the full account will have to involve the physics of light and the physiology of the brain and of the organs of sense as much as it involves the properties, to the extent that these can be known, of any external object. But if we have to take account of what the perceiver brings to the instance of perception in order to make any sense at all of what perception is, then it would seem to follow that perception should also be of interest to philosophers when there is no external object at all—or at most a hallucination of one. But they are generally interested in it only as a challenge, as an obstacle standing between them and what they would ultimately like to establish: that, namely, there is a real and all-important difference between the perception that is anchored in how the external world actually is and the perception that would seem to come from inside of us. There is a difference between waking and dreaming, in other words, and waking for them is incontestably the superior state to dwell in and the only one that is worthy of a philosopher. For philosophers seek the truth, which is something that can be furnished only to a mind not currently subject to the chimeras of psychosis, of dreaming, or of drugs. But again, the problem is ancient, which is a pretty reliable sign that it is also intractable. For all our efforts, we still are not one step closer to apprehending the things in themselves. Given what appears to be this logically necessary stalemate between us and the world, it seems inevitable that alternative accounts of the fundamental nature of reality—alternative ontologies, as we say—should keep returning and drawing off at least some philosophers who get fed up with an external world that demands our loyalty yet refuses to show itself. In at least some of these alternative ontologies, the visions that come to us unbidden, in the liminal states of insobriety, hypnagogia, or theurgic ecstasy, are not to be dismissed out of hand as obstacles to our apprehension of truth, but may in fact be vehicles of truth themselves. If you think you are in an emotional state to handle it, and in a legal jurisdiction that permits it, and you think you might benefit from being jolted out of your long-held ontological commitments, then I would recommend that you try some psychotropic drugs as well. I will not exaggerate the benefits. But I am significantly less cocky now, my cluelessness is more evident to me, a constant that accompanies me in each moment of the day. He is living with the Hurons and trying to convince them of the urgency of converting to Christianity. It dawns on him that his new hosts see things in more or less the opposite way. The missionary begins to wonder whether he really knows any better how to live than the oneiromancers he has ostensibly come to enlighten. But he has little time to indulge this question, as he fears the old leader may wake up at any moment and pass a death sentence on him. He writes a letter to his Father Superior in France, begging for a transfer out of there and back among the people who know, or think they know, the difference between appearance and reality. Philosophers today, at least in the English-speaking world, almost all take for granted that the core Cartesian doctrines are theoretical nonstarters. Yet we all remain the children of Descartes, to the extent that we take for granted that the day is more disconcealing of truth than the night. So it is with them that I throw in my lot. I am not a Freudian, nor a hippie, yet I believe, now more than ever, in part thanks to age and what I like to think of as an accrual of wisdom, in part thanks to psilocybin and muscimol, that our liminal states of consciousness may well be consciousness at its most veracious. Things were different when my father died in With his disappearance, all of a sudden the basic conditions of my own existence hit me like a revelation. He had had note that pluperfect a good long life, but now it seemed so absurdly brief to me, as if this being had just popped into existence, instantly began babbling a few favorite stories over and over again like a talking doll, a few beloved half-truths and misremembered factoids, only to pop right back out again, leaving me agape and wondering: Holy shit, who was that? What was that? They are me, just not in every respect at the present moment. I am them, but on a slight delay, and I find myself concerned with not spending the rest of this brief flash clinging to half-truths of my own. I want to know what this is all about, or at least, if knowledge is not to be had, I want to arrive at some equanimity of soul, where this condition of ours should no longer appear so absurd, so unacceptable, and where the veil that occludes my access to the world at least is no longer covered over by an additional veil of tears. The sense of loss intensified with the beginning of the pandemic and the forced isolation it brought down on the world. I was drinking heavily at the time, as I had been for many years. By the time I finally stopped using alcohol for good, just over two years ago, there was no joy at all left in it, no celebration, as there was in my younger life of at least some imperfect stab at bon-vivantism. It was simply an addiction, and one that darkened the veil through which I am constrained to make sense of the world. So I quit it, at long last. But rather than feeling liberated and good about my healthy new start, it was only then that I fell into the deepest depression I have ever known, deeper than I ever could have imagined possible. I was suddenly cut off from the only means I had of comforting myself, and of charging up the world with at least a sort of counterfeit magic. Nothing I had valued in my earlier life, my idiotic careerism, my foolish vainglory whenever I got something published, had even the faintest trace of significance now. I could still conjure, from somewhere, a semblance of caring about my career and so on, but I truly did not care. I no longer even understood how it could be possible to care about such nothings as fill up a human life. When the lockdowns ended, I summoned my forces as best I could, crawled out of my hole, and began to make the trip as often as I was able from France to California in order to visit my mother. I had been vaguely aware of the recent legislative developments in certain US states surrounding the consumption and sale of cannabis, but it was only on a whim, in the middle of one of these visits, that I turned to Google to find the location of the dispensary nearest me. I had tried marijuana a few times in my earlier life, but it had had little effect on me, and in any case I considered it trashy and beneath me in all its cultural significations. But because, now, I no longer cared about any of the judgments I had made in my earlier life, positive or negative, I found that I really could not care less what the cultural position of cannabis was, and I was perfectly happy to show my ID and stand in line with all the chewed-up old army veterans, all the underemployed marginals, all the discarded Americans, my brothers and sisters, at a dispensary on the very seediest side of Sacramento, in a place no zoning law had ever touched. While I had never smoked a joint correctly in my younger days, I found that the new abundance of tinctures and oils and other alchemical refinements of the THC molecule were just what I needed to start to see the world, again, as some sort of meaningful whole. Early in my new life as a late-blooming pothead, one thing that struck me was just what a crummy deal we in the West had been given, whereby all mind-altering substances had been prohibited and stigmatized, except for the one that has such negative medical and social consequences in its overuse as to be described in terms of disease, and that only ever alters consciousness downward, from the more to the less vivid. That wine is a central sacrament of Christianity, moreover, which in its early centuries seems to have had some interest in stamping out vestiges of pagan rituals relying on other, more intense varieties of mind alteration, seemed to me suddenly to be a rather serious argument against Christianity. It turned us into drunks, I reflected, and made us forgetful of the myriad other ways to make use of the fertile bounty of nature, particularly in its vegetal and fungal expressions, in order to see the world differently. Just a few edibles in, and I was already gravitating toward some kind of neopaganism. Experiences vary, of course, but in my case it does several things at once. It induces a sort of bodily ecstasy; it presents a vivid spectacle of patterns and figures before the eyes especially when they are closed ; and most interestingly, I think, it dissolves what I ordinarily experience as the metaphysical unity of the self, with all its memories and its steady persistence through time, and makes it temporarily difficult to comprehend how I ordinarily go about my life as if the self I present myself as being were a real thing, or at least anything suitable for presentation. In the depths of depression I came close to something resembling this condition, and it was terrifying. Stoned, by contrast, I have approached a state that is at least a cousin of depersonalization, yet I have found that it is mostly neither enjoyable nor terrifying, but simply revealing. We are, after all, quite likely not unified metaphysical subjects but rather complex assemblages of cells that facilitate an illusion of unity for as long as the assemblage endures. I will not affirm here any dogma, not even the naturalistic account of biological death to which I have just alluded, but will only say that there are several plausible accounts of what a self is on which we are indeed mistaken to suppose that it exists any more than, say, an image of a flamingo briefly manifested on a screen by colored pixels. But goodness, here I am, still philosophizing like a stoned undergrad in a black-lighted dorm room. So let me get to the heart of the matter. Beginning around I began writing essays, blog posts, polemics, and at least a few quasi-scholarly articles against the usurpation of classical models of the human being by metaphors drawn from the algorithmic technologies that surround us in the contemporary world. My criticisms were in part grounded in my perspective as a specialist in the history of early modern natural philosophy. If you know anything about 17th-century science, you will know that people at the time were particularly impressed with the most cutting-edge technologies of the day, most notably clockworks. And this is a pattern we see again and again in the history of science: The latest shiny gadget, whatever it may be, becomes such a centerpiece of human attention that we find ourselves unable to resist seeing it as a sort of epitome of reality as a whole. But what a coincidence it would be, really, if the entire world turned out to share in the same nature as a technology that only came into existence within our own lifetimes! A rigorously historicizing perspective on the simulation argument, in other words, quickly reveals it to be little more than a reflection of presentist myopia. I certainly have no qualms about the idea, defended by Chalmers, that the world is likely not at all as it appears to us. In the end, what displeased me most about it were not its arguments but its tone and authorial voice. It is, to be blunt, a bit dorky, with its narrow range of cultural references to TV shows and pop songs about which I could not care less, and its obvious rootedness in online cultures of gaming and coding and geeking out that I have always shunned. But philosophers are supposed to see past such superficial differences. If I can admire a 10th-century Islamic theologian for his ingenious use of arguments drawn from Aristotle, I ought to be able to appreciate Dave Chalmers, who is, after all, my contemporary and my guildmate too. Under the influence of drugs, the world really does seem to me more like a computer simulation than like a clock, or a loom, or a chariot wheel, or anything else we have come up with so far. Let me walk that back a bit. The glitches are not exactly as the simulationists, at their most indulgent, like to imagine them. I see no cascades of glowing green 0s and 1s, nor clean Tron -like geometric lines extending off into the horizon, not to mention cats that seem to flicker like an old UHF channel as they walk by. The glitches are not something seen at all, but rather something that characterizes the mode of consciousness in which the totality of the world, and of memory and experience, is apprehended. There are two such principal glitches. The first has to do with the experience of time. Under the influence of mushrooms, I have found, temporal duration can sometimes go the same way as I have described the self going under the influence of THC. Psilocybin is far more difficult to obtain through legal channels, unfortunately. Meanwhile, muscimol, the active ingredient in the Amanita muscaria , or fly agaric fungus, so well attested in traditional religious practices throughout Eurasia, is legal in 49 states, and common, alongside cannabis, in the dispensaries of New York. While I have had some interesting experiences with psilocybin recently, it is muscimol, purchased in a rather louche head shop on the Lower East Side, surrounded by tricolored insignia of pan-African pride, images of neon aliens, the inescapable Bob Marley, that has best succeeded in bringing me out of my ordinary experience of the fixity of my personal identity, and of the temporal boundedness of my existence. What does this have to do with simulationism? Consider, first, that in an artificial system that rises to the level of consciousness, such as future iterations of GPT or LaMDA might become, this consciousness could not be the result of any slow evolutionary process with antecedent stages of mere sensory perception. The consciousness of such a system would simply pop into existence at the moment the programmer behind it all hits Start. It would not be a hard-won consciousness, moving up through photoreception, olfaction, and other such physiological capacities that now serve in part to constitute our consciousness as biological entities if that is what we are but did not first emerge for the sake of consciousness. When we first started smelling the world around us, evolutionary theory tells us, there was as yet no plan for us to someday start cognizing that world. It all just worked out that way. In an artificial system, by contrast, such as the AIs we are currently seeking to train up, it is cognition that comes first, and likely last. While the very idea that our AIs are approaching consciousness is controversial, of course and I will not take sides on it here , we may at least agree that it is easier to make our machines cognize the world than to make them smell the world. That is, we are training the machines up to know things, and among the things they know it might turn out that they will be able to know that they know things. But the idea that there would be any accompanying bodily phenomenology to this knowledge is plainly nonsensical. But this experience of the world is typically conceived in terms of navigation in space, which can already be observed among the canine-shaped patrol robots ominously advertised by Boston Dynamics. It seems to me we would likely have to suppose, at the very least, that for an AI there could be no experience of temporal duration as we ourselves know it. It is not, or not only, my limitations as a writer that compel me to admit the impossibility of fully conveying what this is like. Shortly before I began experimenting with drugs, I found myself spontaneously, and quite surprisingly, attuned to a much more densely populated world of other minds, or of fellow beings in the full and proper sense, than we are ordinarily expected to recognize. Long ago my grandfather built a wooden deck in front of our little vacation house on Lake Almanor in the northeast of California. There was a baby pine shooting up underneath it, and he could not bring himself to cut the sapling off from its source of light and life. So he constructed the deck with a square opening through which it could continue to grow. On my first visit there after the lockdowns ended, I saw that proud tree reaching up into the sky, now about as wide in diameter as a basketball. The tree was in its forties now, almost as old as I was, and it suddenly struck me that I had passed most of my life with this tree, yet I had neglected to think about it, to hold it in my heart and thoughts, at nearly every moment of all those years. Research on fetal mice has shown fairly conclusively that the development in the mammalian brain of a capacity to navigate obstacle-filled space develops quite separately from any cognition of social reality. Mice get ready to move through the world by dreaming about that world before they are even born. Descartes, curiously, neglected to reestablish other minds after he had razed all of his beliefs through the method of radical doubt in his Meditations of Being with a tree is an experience that is harder to come by. But one thing psychedelics can help illuminate is the extent to which the limits of Mitsein are not so much a reflection of the intrinsic properties of various external entities as they are, simply, of our attunement. When we change our tuning, even the brick wall can seem to have been dismissed too hastily. On mushrooms, there is a strong perception of the mutual constitution of mind-like beings by one another, so that my understanding of what I am becomes inseparable from all sorts of entities I am usually able to bracket as distinct from me—trees, clouds, mice, and so on—and these entities all, in turn, appear to be constitutive of one another. There is a very succinct naturalistic account of why the world comes to appear to us like this under certain circumstances: It appears this way because this is how it in fact is. I would be nothing without all the clouds and trees and so on; and my eventual death, in this light, might best be understood as the end of a long campaign of stubborn resistance to this obvious fact—not the loss of anything with any real independent existence but only an anomaly within an order of existence that strives ever to even things back out. In other words, one way of thinking about a virtual world is as a world entirely constituted by other minds. And this is indeed how the world comes across to us, at moments, when we are thinking about it with chemically enhanced perception. But are any of these lucubrations to be taken at all seriously? Readers of a certain age will at this point picture an egg in a frying pan. That is, there is always a neurochemical correlate to any of your conscious perceptions whatsoever. You might be tempted to say that supplementing gets in the way of correct perception, and that the only reliable way of apprehending the world as it is must depend only on the default setting of the mind, with no extras. But again, even this setting delivers us delirious hallucinations for about eight hours out of each Moreover, it is hard to conceive of any valid argument against supplementation. The substances are out there in the world, just like the food we eat is out there—and if we did not eat it, very soon we would start to hallucinate, and eventually we would cease to have any conscious perceptions at all. The fact that we have to eat some sort of nutritious organic matter or other, while consuming psychedelic plants or fungi is strictly optional, is certainly relevant to the moral regulation of drug consumption, but it is hard to see how it is relevant to any epistemological determinations we might make about the ability of a mind to deliver knowledge of the world as it is. The undrugged mind may be more reliable in certain respects, since it is less likely to lead you to try to fly off your high-rise balcony, and it is better able to help you stay focused on present dangers and tasks necessary for survival. But this in no way means that the representations it gives you of the world are truer. My undrugged mind, to borrow a witticism from J. It presents to me trees that are brothers and clouds that are old friends and cracks in the walls that spell out warm messages from solicitous invisible beings and infinite swarms of lives, all swirling and pulsating around me. Which is correct? This is, broadly, the philosophical view of my greatest intellectual hero, the 17th-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who was, among other things, a pioneer of computer science. Leibniz was not, to say the least, a deviant weirdo. As for me, it is only at the moment I decided to take the risk of falling in with the deviant weirdos, of moving with the wrong crowd and losing my place in the guild of philosophers, that I came to believe he is probably right about things. A true genius, he seems to have got there unaided. But we all do the best we can, each according to our capacities. I am likely fortunate to live, most of the time, in a jurisdiction where none of the relevant substances are permitted by law, and so to be able to indulge my curiosity only punctually. There are many experiences I have not yet had—of DMT, for example, which I am told is the most potent of all in showing us the variety of species of beings that ordinarily remain hidden. If you are a clinical researcher in such matters and would like a volunteer for your experiments, hit me up. In any case, I suspect I have already found what I was looking for: some new knowledge, and at least a bit of equanimity. While I remain as uncertain as ever about the ultimate structure of the world, I also have new inclinations, and new sympathies, toward accounts of it that had previously struck me as altogether off the table. That widening is itself a sort of newfound knowledge, even if it contains no new certainties. As to equanimity, there really is nothing like a sharp experience of the illusoriness of time to make a person less anguished by the brevity and apparent senselessness of what we experience as our temporal sojourn. And there really is no more comforting feeling than to arrive at an awareness of the pervasive and dense presence of other beings like oneself—or at least to arrive in a state that seems to attest to the existence of such beings. Even if any positive determinations about how it actually is would automatically become new varieties of mere seeming, it is good and edifying to explore the alternatives to our standard account. This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now. Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail wired. Interview: Marissa Mayer is not a feminist. This AI tool helped arrest people. Then someone took a closer look. How a ounce layer of foam changed the NFL. Save this story Save. Most Popular. By Boone Ashworth. 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Buying Ecstasy Kant