From: Ben Goertzel (ben@goertzel.org)
Date: Mon Aug 26 2002 - 19:01:13 MDT
> Whether hallucinogens actually makes their users more creative, or only
> gives them the illusion of being so, is open to debate; I tend to come
> down on the latter side with filmmaker Stanley Kubrick (who often had
> to deal with questions about 2001's imagery being LSD-inspired):
Hallucinogens don't MAKE anyone creative, but they have definitely, in some
cases, helped people to break through psychological barriers and manifest
more of the creativity they already had inside them.
Stanislaw Grof's work on psychedelic psychotherapy, though full of some
theoretical BS I don't agree with, is pretty powerfully informative in this
regard...
Personally, I found that taking hallucinogens in my late teens and early
20's unlocked a musical creativity I didn't know was there inside me. On
the other hand, it started to mess with my analytical mind after a little
while (making it harder for me to focus on sustained precise trains of
thought), an effect which thankfully faded completely after some time
passed...
My experience is that creative works produced while on psychedelic drugs are
usually not the greatest. The best results are obtained if one can
integrate the psychedelic insights and experiences into one's everyday life
and ordinary states of consciousness (hence making one's ordinary state of
consciousness less ordinary!). But this is a hard task, much harder than
taking a drug and having a temporary insightful experience...
> If we build a human-level AI, could we design some set of inputs such
> that the AI would "trip"?
I don't think that would be very hard, actually. It wouldn't be a set of
inputs, just an aberrant set of parameter values...
Ben G
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