Hi evolve and glenn, and all:
I find glenn's depiction of the "philosopher's high" interesting:
> solving the world's greatest philosophical dilemmas is common while under the influence of
> drugs. But you can also work yourself up to have these same feelings, though less intense,
> by ingesting soft drinks and pretzels during all-night college bull sessions with your
> buddies. Either way, when you wake up sometime the next day, the insights you had the night
> before seem trite or they have simply evaporated from memory. All you can really remember is
> that you had a great time. I call this the philosopher's high.
I do agree that your "great" drug-influenced insights seem trite or vanish the next day. But a
good question is why?
Glenn's view seems to be that these insights weren't that great to begin with, and drugs
simply distorted your perception to take something absurd or trivial as deep philosophical
problem-solving. I'm not sure that is the case, or at least, that this is the only reasonable
interpretation of what's going on.
My point is that there could be another reason causing the "down" of the philosopher's high.
In my opinion, the "truth" discovered under drug influence, just like any other truth, has a
linguistic expression as well as a semantic interpretation. None can be sacrificed without
losing the "truth" completely. The semantic interpretation is the "meaning" you attach to
words, and that is strongly determined by your view of the world, i.e., the intellectual
static patterns that comprise your personal metaphysical system. Thus if david is right about
drugs suppressing your static patterns (be it in favor of patternless Dynamic Quality
experience or, which seems more likely to me, in favor of different static patterns) during
the "philosophical high" you phrase a truth which is a truth but whose semantic interpretation
is influenced by this effect of drugs. When you wake up the next day in your ordinary system
of intellectual static patterns, all you're left with from the night before is the linguistic
expression of the newly conceived "truth", and that is meaningless without the corresponding
system of patterns (i.e., it has *another* meaning, which on the average will be nothing so
extraordinary as the meaning you saw under drug influence).
There is a counter to drugs, too, of course: since your meaning-attaching-system is altered
when using drugs, you aren't in general able to rephrase the ideas you conceive in such a way
as to make them understandable (i.e., to convey their exact meaning) to someone in a more
ordinary state of mind. Thus drug-influenced insights resemble dreams - like a memory of a
dream, the memory of a philosophical high always seems to have missing or misplaced pieces.
I think the more brilliant evidence of the potentials of drugs are provided by the work of
Freud, who is well-known to have used cocaine. If you think of it, Freud's system was a
radical departure from previous thought on psychological issues, and exhibits a deepness that
one can never be sure to have fully probed. Nevertheless, Freud managed to bridge
drug-influenced visions to ordinary language. The hard part of philosopher's high, the part
that requires an uncommon individual to be done, is that of returning from drug world while
retaining meaning, thus being able to rephrase it within a more ordinary and shareable
context.
Andrea
>
> Another common trap is to think that certain kinds of drugs, like the
> so-called psychadelics, are special in that they tap into dynamic
> quality, while other kinds of drugs, like amphetamines and depressants,
> do not. Let me make a case for plain old boring alcohol. Suppose you
> drink a six pack or however much it takes to start the room spinning.
> There you are, lying perfectly still on the living room carpet, and the
> ceiling and walls are whizzing around, and you actually feel dizzy,
> just as you would if you stood up and spun around haphazardly. Now
> I'm going to claim that that alcohol has given me "new eyes" into
> perceiving reality. I believe I'm having this spinning sensation because
> I'm experiencing raw reality, with all the normal static filters of our
> normal lives lifted away. My great breakthrough in understanding is
> explaining why I feel a spinning sensation. What I come up with is that
> in raw reality you *should* feel dizzy, because the earth is spinning on
> its axis, which is simultaneously spinning around the sun, which is
> spinning through the Milky Way, which is expanding outward into the universe.
> What's really lacking, in an SOM world-view, is an explanation for why
> we don't always feel dizzy! Brilliant, aye?
>
> I think Pirsig has not thought through his idea of dynamic quality fully
> enough. It seems pretty clear to me that all his examples of experiencing
> DQ are confusions with physiological responses, of which I include psychic
> and subjective experiences. He would claim that peyote brings it out, but
> how is it that a drug - substance-stuff - could pull that off if DQ is
> primary? It seems we need static quality (the drug) to get dynamic
> quality, but this is the reverse of what the MOQ claims.
>
> Glenn
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