Psychedelics, Nonlinear Thinking, and Reality ($)

People who live in glass houses and want to get out of them should throw stones.

“The art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems.”
— Georg Cantor, mathematician

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Michael Winkelman’s 2017 article titled, “The Mechanisms of Psychedelic Visionary Experiences: Hypotheses from Evolutionary Psychology,” reports:

“Psychedelics reliably elicit experiences that are virtually indistinguishable from mystical experiences induced through prolonged austerities and disciplined contemplative practice.”

This indicates that the changes wrought by psychedelics are not exogenous. More strongly, we can argue that these changes are not chemical, but psychological. That is, the changes are changes of the brain’s mind, not changes of the brain’s chemistry. He goes on to say,

“The similarity of psychedelic and non-psychedelic mystical experiences suggests that the explanation of psychedelic experiences is not through mechanisms unique to psychedelics, but rather through shared mechanisms affected by non-drug procedures.“

This distinction is unclear to many. It’s not understood by psychologists, neurologists, and pharmacologists. We’re still seeing attempts to recreate the results of the use of psychedelics using chemicals that are modified to have no mind-altering effect.

Consensus opinion in science is that the brain is a biochemical machine. Machines are narrowly understood to operate deterministically; they can have no free will. But this definition must fail because determinism is now seen as relative to scale and causes. At some scales, and as the result of some causes, the world is not deterministic.

We presume nothing intelligent comes from randomness, and there is nothing mechanical in free will. Yet we describe the world statistically at scales from the geological to the astronomical and from the microscopic to the subatomic. In the middle range, on the human scale, we conceive ourselves as authors of intelligent designs.

Our notion of free will applies only to us, and only subjectively. This dichotomy of free will versus determinism is something we’ve created for the purpose of describing ourselves. That is to say, it is an invention that only applies to us.

The generally understood alternatives are determinism, free will, and randomness. These three lie at opposite extremes, and the world seems to alternate between them.

If you view the world as being in one of these three states—mechanical and unchanging, chaotic and decaying, or intelligently evolving—then there is no path between them. Any alternation between the three must be abrupt.

There are plausible intermediates. In a changing system, that is a system through which energy flows, deterministic structures collapse and new structures emerge from the debris. The key is having enough energy to build unlikely structures. Once such unlikely structures are built, they sustain themselves by tapping into the energy.

Intelligence itself, as is required for any design, appears to emerge simply through the occurrence of unlikely structures that feed off the available energy. The appearance of intelligence, which means little more than new, complex, and unlikely structures, appears and disappears as an explanation for how organized constructions seem to come from and then disappear back to nowhere. Intelligence itself appears to be part of the structure-building process.

What Nonlinear Means

Linear means “in a line,” and when applied to structures it means “more of the same.” Linear progressions can change, but only in quantity, not in quality. Linear systems can get larger and smaller, as they rarely stay the same, but the changes add nothing new.

Linear thinking is a bit of a contradiction, since thinking has so many effects and is so unstable as not to be linear. Moving on its own power, healthy thinking never repeats itself. It only repeats itself when constrained to a pattern.

Before the written word, oral history evolved and there was a limit to the amount of information that could be learned and accurately repeated. After the written word, there was no limit. Thoughts of any length could be permanently recorded.

With the ability to record thoughts, humans could now create structures independent of memory, and progress could be redefined, made resilient, or stopped altogether. The written word made it much easier to break out of old patterns, and to create patterns that moved in new directions.

Nonlinear equations are still predictable, so when we talk about nonlinear thinking, we’re referring to something that’s more than mathematical. Nonlinearity thinking is the breakthrough into realms of possibility that starts with the addition of something unpredictable. There are endless realms of complexity, and adding a little novelty may not get you much. It’s the idea of it; the idea of no longer being constrained to the pattern of what’s come before.

Interactions and chaos

The promise of nonlinear thinking is not in what’s unusual, it lies more in what’s unpredictable. And of this I see two important areas: interaction and chaos. By interaction, I mean ideas, systems, and models that affect each other. Adding together simple ideas does not ensure novelty, but combining complexity and interaction generally gives you something that’s unpredictable. At least it looks unpredictable.

Chaos is the paradigm of unpredictability, and adding a little chaos to any simple pattern is guaranteed to generate something new. Nevertheless, chaos is not too interesting in and of itself, it’s more a question of the kind of novelty you get when you add it.

These abstract ideas give us a foundation, a way to look for opportunities. Interactions and chaos play big roles in unpredictability because they apply to thinking, culture, and human events. In addition to our penchant for pattern following, which is our linear inclination, we are curious, opportunistic, and interactive. I find it helpful to notice the branching of these three paths: more of the same, combinations of the familiar, and taking new risks. Namely, the linear, interactive, and chaotic paths.

Most of the people who come to me with problems are either encountering the unpredictable, or  feel they’re losing control. In terms of controlling one’s life, how are you managing these three paths forward?