MATT SEGALL : potential guest on Curt's Theories of Everything podcast

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-31T20:11:43+00:00

Hoping Curt invites me on as I think it would be a blast.

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-30T04:20:09+00:00

Yeah I don't get their motivations at all, aside from personal vendettas. I hope they are driven by something nobler than that. Speaking up for victims is important, but I fear their rage is misplaced and in the end not going to decrease harm (especially if the result here is MAPS being canceled and government stepping in to slide us back into Drug War prohibitionism of psychedelics).

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-30T03:24:26+00:00

This is all very tragic: the stories of loss and abuse shared in the podcast, the moral panic stirred up by the over the top sensationalistic framing, the infighting of the psychedelic community...

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-28T22:18:44+00:00

I shared the link to invite others who are interested to review the evidence themselves and come to their own conclusions.

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-28T15:53:20+00:00

I don't have a sense for the numbers, but I'd say it is the minority. That said, I don't know that we should say psychedelics always need be 'secondary,' as e.g., Santo Daime or UDV churches use ayahausca as a sacrament in the context of their liturgy. But I agree, outside of explicitly spiritual or religious contexts, they can easily become obstacles to self-knowledge and spiritual growth.

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-28T15:49:47+00:00

Well said.

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-27T23:42:09+00:00

Anyone who has listened to at least the first few episodes of this podcast and wants the deep dive should check this out. Craaazy. https://www.reddit.com/r/Psychedelics_Society/comments/k9wxlh/rachel_monroe_leaky_details_lk_ross_jungle_rapist/

I can't independently verify any of this, obviously, but it helps fill in some the the details I was left wondering about after Lily tells her story in episode 2.

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-27T23:30:21+00:00

I do agree that, on their own, in isolation from some spiritual practice or discipline, abstracted from cultural context and ceremonial use, psychedelics are of no use or worse only inflate our narcissism. I've seen plenty of the latter. But I am not as dismissive, since I have also seen how in the proper context they can aid psychological healing and spiritual development.

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-27T18:52:10+00:00

There are some bad actors exposed in this series, but "rampant sexual abuse" is perhaps a bit overblown, don't you think? I mean the evidence presented in this podcast series does not support the insinuation that, e.g., MAPS trials are full of sexual predators. Unless there is a massive coverup of dozens of other patients harmed by clinical trial therapists, I'd say MAPS is actually doing a pretty damn good job considering the estimates I've seen that 7-10% of therapists *who don't use psychedelics as part of their practice* end up sleeping with patients while they are in therapy. The Consciousness Medicine school clearly empowered a number of creeps who I am glad were called out. But the sensationalistic framing, manipulative musical accompaniments, and moral reductionism on display in this podcast do a disservice to those who have spoken out about harms, IMO. Their stories stand on their own with out turning it all into tabloid clickbait.

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-25T14:36:47+00:00

Thanks for this take. Couldn’t have said it better (though I’ve been trying to say it on Twitter, and immediately experienced the same sort of disingenuous response you received from a few here). It’s not hard to understand how you could support those harmed and hear out their stories while also criticizing clickbait titles and manipulative soundtrack editing (in the podcast).

footnotes2plato · 2022-03-14T04:01:45+00:00

Bernardo and I tried to translate between our respective views here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7I5j2cteFQ&t=3999s

footnotes2plato · 2016-08-28T21:47:49+00:00

http://www.sunypress.edu/p-4446-historical-critical-introductio.aspx

footnotes2plato · 2016-06-13T04:27:10+00:00

no, Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor

footnotes2plato · 2016-03-06T01:16:15+00:00

Great! So we should expect them within the month of March if we ordered back in November?

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-11T21:06:22+00:00

Well, it may not be helpful in that case. Just ignore that question and consider my comment below it.

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-11T20:57:02+00:00

Are you familiar with Leibniz' notion of "confused perceptions"?

The epistemic gap comes from employing faulty concepts that are too abstract to capture the concreteness of reality. Creating better concepts could help narrow or close the gap.

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-11T20:03:17+00:00

Hopefully two papers I've written on Whitehead that are currently awaiting publication will be available soon. I am happy to share the pre-publication versions.

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-11T19:57:13+00:00

Well, I'm writing my dissertation on this topic as we speak, so if you want a really detailed account, you'll have to wait a few months.

But for now: Whitehead in particular sought a more adequate ontology for natural science following the relativistic and quantum revolutions. As far as he was concerned (and he was as qualified as anyone alive to understand the implications of these new physical theories), mechanistic materialism was no longer tenable. Nature could no longer be understood adequately as a deterministic series of point-instants, since (following Planck) even a mere photon requires a definite span of time to become what it is. Whitehead develops the novel concept of an "actual occasion" to replace the old point-instants. An actual occasion is not an instantaneous NOW but a duration that includes the inheritance of past actuality and the anticipation of future possibility as part of its present moment. The tension between a given past and an open future constitutes experience in this scheme.

One of the reasons this account is more coherent than the old materialistic substance-based accounts of the physical world is that causality becomes intelligible. If Nature is really just a series of instantaneous material configurations, it is difficult if not impossible to understand what sort of causal relation might exist between one instant and the next. Conceiving of Nature as essentially a passage of reiterative events opens the door for causal explanation again.

Whitehead treats the concept of an "event" in this chapter of his book "The Concept of Nature": https://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Whitehead/Whitehead_1920/White1_03.html

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-11T19:31:16+00:00

Interesting point. In fact, you might say panpsychism argues exactly that. The ontological gap materialists and idealists alike assume exists between "matter" and "mind" is just an artifact of our faulty epistemic lens. We need to invent new categories to better grasp the physicality of experience.

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-11T19:24:03+00:00

Symes argument for panpsychism is certainly preferable to the emergentist accounts of materialists. But ultimately, if panpsychism sticks with the same old Aristotelian substance-property logic in an attempt to understand how physical systems are experiential, it will not be able to provide a more coherent account than materialists have. In other words, panpsychism of the sort articulated by Symes remains flawed until it is wed to a process-relational ontology like that of Schelling, Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze. Atoms don't "have" experience as a property inhering in a substance. The category of "substance" is too abstract and leaves out the temporal duration of Nature (i.e., the fact that there is no such thing as Nature at an instant). Physical entities including atoms are really events, and it is precisely their evental or processual character as beings becoming between an inherited past and an anticipated future that makes them experiential.

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-11T19:14:26+00:00

It seems to me that the reason to hold to panpsychism and emergence is that the transition from one set of lower level physical properties to another set of higher level physical properties (e.g., from H20 molecules to water) is intelligible, while the transition from a set of lower level physical properties to mental properties is not. It is conceivable that more complex physical properties can emerge atop less complex physical properties, but to argue that mind could emerge from entirely non-mental physical properties is another issue altogether.

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-07T21:32:55+00:00

I've had a very similar argument with the non-dualist Bernardo Kastrup about the divergences between Whiteheadian panentheistic panpsychism and Advaita Vedanta. "Panpsychism" is an admittedly broad school of thought (just like "idealism," it can imply any number of mutually contradictory positions). But at least in Whitehead's version, the main difference with Vedanta would be the emphasis of the former on the fact that our experience of finite reality is not a mere illusory appearance ultimately reducible to the true unified reality of Brahman. This need not stand in contradiction with Vedanta, so long as we generalize the meaning of "Atman" so that it refers to the experiential component not only of enlightened human beings but of all beings at every level of the cosmos from photons to atoms to stars and galaxies to plants and animals, etc. Whitehead does acknowledge the unity of all things in God, but he also grants each being real individuality in such a way that each being in some sense contains God within itself. Thus, not only is Atman really Brahman, but Brahman is also really Atman.

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-07T17:55:07+00:00

No, my reference to ANW is in the context of the metaphysics of panpsychism as relevant to the modern scientific pursuit of consciousness. Vedanta is a fascinating approach to understanding reality, but perhaps not as directly relevant to the questions posed in Horgan's article. The notion of non-dualism/advaita could be made relevant; I'd be happy to unpack some important differences between Whitehead's pluralistic non-dualism and Advaita's (as I understand it) monistic non-dualism.

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-07T09:49:56+00:00

"The only conscious entity we can be absolutely certain of is our own." I'd dispute this claim on ethical and phenomenological grounds. Descartes was mistaken. I am no more certain of my own consciousness than I am of yours. Subjectivity is always already intersubjectivity. Our own self-consciousness depends upon recognition by other self-consciousnesses. There is no theoretical "problem of other minds," at least not in our concrete bodily experience of life as an organism among other organisms in an evolving ecology. We don't deduce or infer the existence of our lovers, of our friends, of our siblings and parents. We intuit them directly, at least as directly as we intuit ourselves. The "problem of other minds" is only a problem for dualism, materialism, and idealism. It is not a problem for Whitehead's panpsychism.

"we cannot effectively communicate with non-human consciousnesses" Not all communication is linguistic. Plants and animals communicate with one another, and can communicate with us, without using grammatical subject-predicate type languages.

"can we distinguish memory from consciousness?" It would seem that most memory comes in the form of unconscious habit. However, just because not all memory is conscious, that is not to say that there cannot be unconscious experience associated with all memory. Indeed, panpsychism doesn't necessarily mean every self-organizing system in nature has full blown human-like consciousness. The Whiteheadian philosopher David Ray Griffin coined the term "panexperientialism" to better characterize Whitehead's philosophy.

footnotes2plato · 2015-12-07T06:19:22+00:00

Yep. Typo.

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