Journalists on Drugs

I've recently taken on a few journalism jobs. I dont know if this is philosophy or not, but it should be. Most recently, Ive been selected as new 'Science/Nature/Technology' journalist for the Cape Town Globalist. The theme of the next edition is 'Drugs', which is quite nice.

Interesting things, drugs. I may have reported earlier that when I had imbibed far too much bhang lassi in Gokarna and was confined to my bed for the better part of the evening and night (that is, when I wasnt exorcising demons in the squatter toilet out back... though no hangover thankfully!), what was most on my mind was the whole notion that reality can be distorted so ridiculously by pouring a small amount of toxin into the flowing river of sense-data. The brain is an amazing thing and these sorts of situations ask serious questions surrounding 'what is reality?' If reality is the sum total of our sensory experiences, then the fact that we can use various stimulants to change that reality seem to lend a certain amount of credibility to a more idealist notion of reality: 'to be is to be perceived', as Berkeley put it. If I take a drug cocktail that puts me in the shoes of the protagonist in 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas', reality has suddenly changed from rational to completely distorted. It seems fairly obvious that my reality will no longer correlate with anyone else's reality, including that of my buddy who has also taken said drug cocktail.

So maybe solipsism isnt so far-fetched after all...

(Oh, and for anyone interested, the plan for my article is that it be one entitled 'Gifts from the Gods' or 'The Opiate of the Masses' (Im not sure which approach to take yet) and it will be all about the drug properties of Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh... There are recent articles about frankincense stimulating various ion pathways in the brain that are not well-understood, and there have been studies about myrrh having various drug-like effects as well... and gold... well we all know the drug-like euphoria, giddiness, hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia that come with having various amounts of gold around.... i.e.

"[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. It has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head." -- Warren Buffett)

I Want a New Drug

One that won't make me sick
One that won't make me crash my car
Or make me feel three feet thick

What is philosophy about? Well, I suppose it depends on what you value and how you connect with the world. Simply discovering the sometimes ridiculously strange interpretations of reality arising in philosophy made me turn around and wonder what I really knew or thought I knew. Thus I suppose it depends on the one hand whether you can 'see past' a 'normal' idea of reality, and on the other hand whether you risk taking such a drastic step.

George Berkeley's conception of 'idealism' in the form of the idea that 'to be is to be perceived' made me feel like I was on drugs (or. perhaps, that he was) when I first saw it. How is it possible that absolutely EVERYTHING exists because it is perceived? So the earth I walk on wouldn't be there if my eyes didn't look at and my feet didn't walk on it? Then where does that put me as a human being? Something akin to a holodeck in Star Trek? That we are being fed into some interface that springs up as the world around us? A wisp in a vast astral ocean?

So can I define philosophy as a drug? The BEST drug? Maybe a drug, but maybe not the best. Nietzsche is a fine example of what can happen if you throw your mind into an abyss of thought with no day-to-day life to sober you up: "If you stare long enough into the abyss, the abyss also stares into you."

In Gokarna when I had a bit too much bhang lassi, and I was laying in bed in agony trying my utmost to prevent my sanity from escaping into oblivion, I tried to make sense of the reality of the situation: my nervous system somehow changes external phenomena into some internal pattern that is made sense of. So suppose you are a river of perception interpreting patterns constantly floating by, what happens when you tip a small amount of some other substance that upsets the balance? Sometimes (if your lucky or unlucky depending again on what you value), chaos. And this implies that you have some control over what's going on around you. Or, at least, that you can disturb it. Upsetting the balance of how chemicals and synapses transfer information is enough to distort reality. Why? Because suddenly you look at things differently. Since it becomes the case that you cannot properly predict what's going on around you, you must compensate for this by shutting things out, which makes many look within. And introversion leads to dangerous questions: 'what the hell am I doing?' and 'can reality really be so fleeting that a gentle push from a foreign substance flings you into a temporary abyss?' It's about how you think and how you interpret what goes on around you.

And how you perceive and react to the Absurd.

Or maybe that's just me.

So, what is philosophy about?

It's about how you think and how you interpret what goes on around you.