The Ethics Of Using Drugs To Fall In & Out Of Love - Brian D. Earp | Modern Wisdom Podcast 268

Brian D. Earp is a Research Fellow at Oxford, philosopher and writer. Love is a feeling many of us yearn to feel, but the medical developments of the 21st century is moving love out of the personal and into the medical realm. Expect to learn if we can make ourselves fall in or out of love with drugs, whether we can turn a straight person gay with, how love anti-love drugs can help reduce domestic violence, the ethics of changing your attractiveness with drugs and much more... Sponsors: Get 83% discount & 3 months free from Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Follow Brian on Twitter - https://twitter.com/briandavidearp Buy Love Is The Drug - https://amzn.to/3bf6uas Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #lovedrugs #ssri #relationships - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Supposing that these clinics arise in the next 10 years or so, where people will be able to have psychedelic enhanced couples therapy. Let's see what happens if we can just go into this place together, put our shared values on the table, talk with the therapist about what we want to accomplish, learn about the effects of this drug, recognize that it will put us into a different state of mind for a while. The effects of the drug won't be permanent, but while we're in that altered state of mind, maybe we'll be able to kind of recapture, rekindle, or explore some things together that just because of the pattern that we're in, we aren't able to really do by our own volition. And see what happens. Some of the people who have been in these trials recently say, I look at my partner like when we first met again. And for some people, having the direct influence of a drug to kind of wipe out some of their patterned ways of thinking and allow them to see what's right in front of them with new eyes, does allow them to kind of remember and re-experience

• 0:45Speaker 00

  why it is that they valued the relationship in the first place. And to me, that doesn't seem inauthentic. That just seems like we can get ourselves into inauthentic patterns by falling into habits that aren't good for us.

• 0:59Speaker 00

  What is love?

• 1:04Speaker 00

  That's a good question. I've spent a lot of time thinking about it and obviously so have a lot of other people in a lot of different disciplines and using different lenses. Most of us, I think, probably start to think about love outside of our own experiences through art and literature and maybe philosophy. More recently, scientists have taken an interest in love and they're starting to figure out what's going on in our brains when we at least report subjectively that we feel that we're in love. And they start to try to triangulate in and see neurochemically what's happening. So I end up adopting a view that tries to integrate all of these different perspectives. So I think of love as kind of a bio-psychosocial phenomenon. It's something that feels a certain way. So there are subjective components to it. And if you report that you're in love and I report that I'm in love, we're kind of comparing notes and trying to see is what you're feeling the same thing as what I'm feeling?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  And to do that, we'll often refer to tropes and scripts and concepts in the culture. So you might say, well, it feels like that thing that's represented in that movie. Or when I read this poem by so and so, it really makes me feel like that's what I'm feeling. And that's one of the ways in which we compare notes is through cultural artifacts. And then there's also stuff going on in our brains, as I suggested. So at the, at the very least, you know, love is scaffolded on top of things that are related to our, our nature as a sexually reproducing species. So the reason why we're drawn toward at least some people in this passionate way and we want to meld with them has got to be related to the fact that we reproduce sexually. And so we're going to have to have mating partners and love is wrapped up in that. There's some theorists that suggest love has kind of different phases or stages.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  So there's a set of brain systems that are oriented around lust or libido, which is just to drive us toward a potentially a range of mating partners. There's attraction, which narrows our focus in on a smaller number of people, maybe one in particular, and then attachment, which is this long lasting kind of pair bond that exists in a lot of different mammal species and in ours. And that's more toward child rearing, potentially your long term relationships. So how that plays out in a given cultural or historical context? Well, that depends on, you know, accidents of history and, you know, prevailing concepts and ideas. So love just sits at the interface of these kind of biological, subjective, experiential, psychological aspects and the wider social historical context. And that's the best I can say of what love is.

• 3:18Chris Williamson?

  I've been fascinated this year thinking about the difference between the reductionist standpoint of how our emotions are created, whatever the particular combination of chemicals or neurotransmitters that have to fire to make it happen, and the phenomenological experience of what it feels like to be in love. Because it doesn't just feel like a combination of chemicals. It feels like some sort of blessing or curse bestowed on you by a higher power. Right? And I think it justifies a lot, spending time thinking about evolutionary psychology this year, justifies a lot of why religion came about. This sort of narrative personified of what it is that is happening. It doesn't just feel like a combination of chemicals. It feels so powerful.

• 4:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so because we have to mate to reproduce, it makes sense that just like our hunger drive is very strong, so is our drive to be close to certain other people. And then, as you say, though, it isn't just down to some sort of reproductive drive. It has, it's imbued with meaning. And so, you know, you talk about the way you can reduce complex feelings like, like love down to biology. But, you know, the other thing is, is the values that are woven into love. So for example, somebody might feel obsessively drawn towards someone, but in a really unhealthy or reckless way, where in the grand scheme of their life, they realize that actually, you know, maybe this is an abusive relationship, a really toxic connection, but they might justify it by saying, well, I'm in love with the person. So that's all the explanation you need. And then you can start to have, imagine an interlocutor saying something like, well,

• 4:45Speaker 00

  is it really love that you're feeling, or is it more some sort of obsession or unhealthy desire to possess the other person? And now you start to realize that, well, I don't know, what I was feeling subjectively was this all-consuming thing that was almost self-justifying and felt like a sufficient explanation for why I was tangled up with this person. But now somebody's giving me these value judgments. They're saying like, maybe love should only, maybe we should only count those subjective feelings as love if they're the sorts of things that drive us toward flourishing with other people. And so then you start to realize that we have some wiggle room about what kinds of experiences we as a society want to christen as counting as love. Because, you know, we might want to draw a distinction between somebody who's recklessly drawn towards somebody in a totally unhealthy way, and somebody who has a sort of long-term companion and stable relationship with somebody that brings out the best in both of them.

• 5:30Speaker 00

  We might want to distinguish between those things conceptually, maybe they don't deserve equally the label love.

• 5:36Chris Williamson?

  Why do we love the people that we do? Is it a function of closeness multiplied by time or something like that?

• 5:44Speaker 00

  Well, one of the main prerequisites is proximity. I mean, there's this, these cliches like opposites attract and, you know, absence makes the heart grow fonder and stuff like that. But I remember when I was an undergraduate, I took this psychology course with this leading researcher who works on emotions, including love, named Peter Salovey. He's now the president of Yale. And he said, basically, these things just aren't true. Like, it's not absence that makes the heart grow fonder. If somebody is far away, it's harder to love them. I mean, maybe you can make that last for a while, and some people can make a long-distance relationship work for a time, but for the most part, that's not what stimulates the most enduring feelings towards someone. Similarly, you know, people should be pretty compatible. If you have people who are totally opposite in terms of their values at least, it's very

• 6:29Speaker 00

  rare that you can get a relationship to work over the long run. You might have, again, you know, passionate attraction toward the person or something like that, but that only will last for so long and it's not going to be enough to sustain a healthy relationship. So. Yeah, proximity is part of it, but in terms of what draws you to a particular person, nobody really knows. There's all these theorists that say it maybe has something to do with pheromones and it has to do with, you know, some particular thing that's like unconsciously drawing you toward the person because of your olfactory system recognizing genetic compatibility through these pheromonal cues, but nobody has a very good theory of it. As far as we know, it's like we can paint in broad brushes. We can say things like if the person has shared values, if the person is generally seen as attractive, you'll probably also see them as attractive. But what makes a particular person seem the most attractive to you, such that you really want to be with them,

• 7:13Speaker 00

  nobody has any idea what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for bringing that about.

• 7:18Chris Williamson?

  It's a difficult and messy world. Where do drugs fit into this?

• 7:23Speaker 00

  Well, so, you know, before I was saying, I had this idea of love as a biopsychosocial phenomenon. The bio part of that is the part that can be manipulated with drugs. So, you know, insofar as people have begun to map out what is going on in our brains when we feel drawn toward people in terms of lust. So, I mean, testosterone is well known to have a substantial role in libido. And that's a system that's been manipulated in different ways for a long time. So, as a kind of unpleasant example, people who are in prison for sexual offenses, sometimes in some jurisdictions as a condition of parole, they can agree to take androgen blocking drugs, which will radically

• 8:04Speaker 00

  depress their libido. So you know that you can interfere with libido. And again, testosterone's complicated. It's not just like a dial where it's like more testosterone equals more libido and less equals less. It acts in lots of different systems. But roughly speaking, an increase in testosterone can, on balance, increase the sex drive. In terms of, you know, attraction, that sort of, you know, early stage obsessive feeling that you might have towards someone, there's some evidence that that overlaps a lot with the phenomenology and the symptoms of obsessive compulsive disorder, which is treated through serotonin affecting drugs. So, the most common treatment for OCD, besides cognitive behavioral therapy, is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,

• 8:46Speaker 00

  which are also commonly prescribed for depression. So there's a couple of studies out of Italy where the researchers have shown that People who are in the early stages of romantic love, where they're constantly thinking about the other person and they can't get them out of their mind and they're just obsessively checking their phone to see if the other person's messaged them. They have depleted levels of the serotonin transporter going on. And when they recover from that phase, their serotonin levels return to normal. So they think that that's something that could potentially be manipulated with a common drug that we already prescribe. And then in terms of long-term attachment, the main chemicals people talk about are oxytocin and vasopressin. Oxytocin is involved in all sorts of processes. So it's involved in childbirth.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  It's part of what causes contractions to happen. It's released through breastfeeding. So it's heavily a part of the maternal-infant bond and what causes a mother and the infant to have a very strong connection. The father-infant bond is similarly mediated through oxytocin, which is why they say, should I put the baby on the father's chest so that they can start to release this chemical together and have that same sort of a bond? And oxytocin is now something that you can create in a laboratory. And there are some studies that will spray this up people's noses and directly into the brain and see what kind of downstream effects it has. A lot of those results don't seem very robust. It's not clear how long-lasting they are. And so I'm not totally on the oxytocin train. We'll see over the long run whether those results are replicable.

• 10:16Speaker 00

  But the drugs I've been focusing on most recently sort of sidestep a lot of this stuff and act on the brain in a very different way. And those are the psychedelic drugs and MDMA, which is the drug in ecstasy. And those don't so much directly cause a feeling of love or attraction or attachment, but they will often put people into a state of mind whereby they're more open to the signals they're getting from another person and their defenses are depressed a little bit. And so some people are thinking about whether we should use these drugs in the context of couples counseling as a way to help people who maybe have been together for a long time. They have these grudges or these patterns that they get into where they're just acting in a very defensive way. And the thought is that if you're in a safe environment with a therapist

• 11:00Speaker 00

  and you have a drug like MDMA, which directly suppresses that hair-trigger fear response over the course of the therapy session, maybe you'll be able to... You know, bring up some of the things that are hard to talk about in a relationship and deal with them in a more loving, productive way. And then when the drug wears off, you still have your memories of what you talked about and you can kind of try to bring those lessons into the relationship going forward. So that's a different kind of approach to all of this. It's not about directly intervening in these subsystems, but rather having more of a global effect on your subjective experience that might incline you toward having a more productive therapy session. But what you're doing is enhancing the traditional effects of couples counseling rather than trying to allow the drug itself to just directly somehow cause you to love your partner more or something like that.

• 11:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a bio-psychosocial. It's a biological input, but it's actually working mostly on the psychological and on the social area.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  That's exactly right. A colleague of mine named David Yaden just published a paper today called "The Subjective Effects of Psychedelics Are Necessary for Their Treatment Effects." So what's happening is that normally when you do a clinical trial and you're giving people some drugs for something, you want to give them a placebo where they don't know whether they're taking the drug and then you measure the subtle outcomes and whether it has some sort of effect on their symptomology. But the problem is psychedelic drugs and MDMA don't work that way. You know if you're taking the drug because you're having a rather radically changed subjective experience. And so you have some scientists who want to kind of squeeze this into the old model where they're like, "Wow, we've got to control for all that subjective nonsense. Let's try to just get the effect of the drug." And, you know, people have been working with these drugs for decades and especially those

• 12:36Speaker 00

  who, I guess, think of it in more of a spiritual sense or something like that, they're like, "You're missing the point." I mean, the subjective experience is part of the healing process. It's what you, it's the meaning that you derive from what you feel that you see in this altered state of consciousness. It's the lessons that you draw out of what it's like to feel more vulnerable to another person that you've known for a long time. And to try to, you know, recapture that feeling and extend those lessons into your normal waking consciousness, it's the subjective experience that's part of the healing process. And so they summoned all sorts of data to suggest that even in these clinical trials that have been being conducted recently at places like Johns Hopkins and King's College, London. You know, they're doing it all in the rigorous scientific way, but those researchers

• 13:19Speaker 00

  are have a sophisticated view of these drugs and realize it's not just like it's it's totally different from mostly what's used in psychiatry, which is where they try to control for the subjective effects and they just want to have some sort of targeted outcome. Here it has a global effect on how you're feeling. And then it's what you make of that. It is as just as you say, it's the psychological experience and then how you deal with that socially that is going to, you know, be most predictive to whether it has a healing effect for you.

• 13:44Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't surprise me that it's causing a few problems. It seems like a big, a big paradigm shift for stuff like that. So there's two broad sections that you give us drugs for love and drugs for anti-love. What are some of the situations where someone might want to use an anti-love drug?

• 14:02Speaker 00

  The first case that we wrote about some years ago was the case of somebody who's in an objectively bad relationship and we just wanted to pick the worst example we could have, somebody who's in an abusive relationship with somebody who they ought not to be with. And unfortunately, what happens in many such cases is that partly as a way of maybe rationalizing the abuse, people will form an even stronger attachment to the person. So subjectively, they might be thinking to themselves something like, you know, the person only hits me because they love me, that kind of cliche. But then part of what's going on in terms of their attachment system is they actually grow ever more drawn toward the person. They can't imagine leaving the person, which just creates an even more dangerous situation. But sometimes you have a case where someone has the awareness of their circumstance and

• 14:44Speaker 00

  knows that they ought not to be in the relationship, but they find that they're just, their emotions are drawing them and clutching them onto the person in a way that they know is really dangerous for them. And so we tried to come up with this almost, I guess, a little stylized example where we said, imagine there's somebody who knows that they need to get out of the relationship, they desire to get out of the relationship, and they find that their first order feelings are so powerful and so strong that they can't motivate themselves to do the things that they know they need to do to actually extricate themselves from the relationship. And so if they could take a drug that would just suppress those first order feelings and allow them then to behave in a way that's consistent with their higher order goals, we thought that might be a kind of a best case scenario because we were very reluctant to think of anybody, you know, forcing these drugs on someone. We wanted to be voluntary, helping people meet their higher order goals.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  And a sort of obvious critique is, well, if somebody's in an abusive relationship, you know, adding drugs to the picture isn't what you should be doing. You should be, I don't know, calling the police. It's like, you know, if somebody, especially if somebody's engaged in criminal behavior, it's like the law and social support systems are the things that should be brought to bear. So I think that's right. And also, you know, some people can't leave an abusive relationship, not because of their first order attachment, but because they're afraid for their kid's welfare, or they're afraid that, you know, they'll be putting themselves in danger. And so, again, the really wrong way to interpret this is as a kind of victim blaming, where it's like, if you're in a bad relationship, you need to somehow take some medication to fix your circumstance. Whoever's doing the abusing

• 16:08Speaker 00

  is the person who needs to change. Nevertheless, you do find that sometimes people are attached to someone that they wish they weren't attached to, and it's reasonable for them to feel that way. And so, even in this case, where you've brought in social support services or tried all the other methodologies, you might still have a person who says, I just, you know, every night I wake up thinking about wishing I was back with so and so, even though I know that they're really bad for me. And if that persists and persists and persists, and you've tried all the other things, we just have kind of a limit case where we say, you know, if you could take a drug, like a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, which may very well suppress some of these kind of possessive feelings, that might be a legitimate use for such a drug in certain circumstances, when you've

• 16:52Speaker 00

  exhausted all the other kind of non-drug treatment modalities. Another case that's maybe even more straightforward is somebody who's overwhelmingly and exclusively sexually attracted to small children. So there is a group of people that are sometimes called self-hating pedophiles, where basically they are sometimes drawn to suicide, because they feel like, I can't, you know, they know that they ought not to express their sexual desire. They don't want to harm children, but they don't have any sexual desire otherwise. And they don't know what to do with themselves, and they don't want to put themselves at risk of potentially hurting someone. And so because they're the most stigmatized group of society, or at least one of them, it's also hard for many of these people to get treatment because I think a lot in the popular consciousness, there's a conflation between pedophilia, which is the name we give

• 17:34Speaker 00

  to the desire to have sexual interactions with prepubescent children, and sexual abuse, which is the actual abusing of children. And those things don't always go together. Some people who don't have pedophilia abuse children for other reasons, and some people who do have pedophilia don't abuse children, but are afraid to get treatment because they know it's going to be very stigmatized. And so here, there are some people who have already tried to undergo some of these androgen blocking treatments where they're just globally trying to suppress their libido. And, you know, it comes with side effects. Testosterone, as I said before, is involved in all sorts of processes. If you have lower testosterone levels, it can make your bones more brittle, so that you're at a higher risk of osteoporosis. It can lead to depression and so forth. So none of these interventions right now are

• 18:16Speaker 00

  clean. They're all messy interventions. But the point is that, you know, as we learn more and more about what's going on in terms of our lust and attraction and attachment systems, and the more that we can fine tune these kinds of interventions going forward, we're just going to have to face the question of what do we want to do with these technologies in society? If we have the power to intervene in the neurochemical underpinnings of romantic love and lust and so forth, we have to decide one way or another what we want to do. Do we want to ban all such technologies so that we can never intervene in our neurochemical systems? Do we want to try to identify some cases where we think it might be particularly useful and then, you know, actually lean into some of those opportunities? And then, you know, the final point is just that we're taking drugs already that have effects on

• 18:58Speaker 00

  our romantic neurochemistry. We just don't tend to think of them that way. So, once again, I've mentioned selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. That's the most commonly prescribed drug for depression. And, you know, when you run a clinical trial on the effects of this drug, you normally are recording things like, what are your symptoms of depression? Or did you experience nausea? Or how's your, you know, maybe you'll, you'll read about a depression in libido, which sometimes comes along with these drugs. But very rarely will they say, and how are your relationships going? You know, do you still love your partner? And yet, these interpersonal effects, we have lots of anecdotes of people feeling radically different toward their partners when they take some of these drugs. But it's just not part of what we study scientifically. And we think that's a mistake. We should study not just the personal effects of drugs, but the interpersonal effects of drugs that we're already using.

• 19:43Chris Williamson?

  There's women who are taking birth control, there's married couples who've been together for a decade or more, and then they take SSRIs and they fall out of love with their partner.

• 19:53Speaker 00

  That

• 19:56Chris Williamson?

  We're fed a narrative about love being able to conquer all because phenomenologically it's so powerful. And also the place, the ritualistic place that it's given atop pretty much every piece of entertainment, you know, like even in the most basic Christmas film, there's still a love, a love story going on. And I think that the love conquers all narrative when it comes face to face with stuff like this, there's a lot of difficulty. The people, even me, upon reading your book, like, there's a lot of responses that I have to question myself. I notice rising like visceral responses to things. I'm very big into personal agency and sovereignty and people being the commander of their own

• 20:39Chris Williamson?

  soul and also people learning from experiences that are both good and bad. And trying to kind of swallow that, it's such a messy, messy area, love, relationships, attachment, lust. And yeah, it really doesn't surprise me that it's chaotic to try and work through.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that that brings us to that kind of social and even social historical dimension of love, which is that how love is situated and celebrated or not within a culture is something that changes over time. So, you know, romantic love for long portions of history and in many, in many social contexts was seen as a threat to the social order precisely because it's so powerful. So romantic love. Is something that might drive you to want to form a relationship with somebody who's not in the right social class, or somebody who's of the wrong race, let's say, or the wrong sex. I mean, so when you have conservative, traditional societies that think that marriage is primarily an economic arrangement, and it's something that holds families together

• 21:35Speaker 00

  within their, you know, their proper kind of social hierarchy, love just blows social hierarchies over the waters, you know, out of the water. And so when you have, you know, a society like ours that's more about individual agency and autonomy and celebrating people for, you know, their own will rather than situating them within some particular social hierarchy, we tend to like love because love is something that, well, I guess, as you say, it's a bit of a tension because love can undermine our agency in some ways in that it makes us feel like it's driving us to do things that we're not sure we rationally want to do. But at the same time, love kind of draws us towards people in such a way that can compel us to cross over traditional lines that constrain relationships, like

• 22:17Speaker 00

  lines of race and class and social hierarchy and caste and so forth. So we have this paradoxical relationship with love, where on the one hand, we celebrate it as this thing that could be worth dying for. And on the other hand, when we have this very individualistic, agential kind of ethos in the society, love can sometimes feel like it's a power outside of ourselves. It's driving us to do things that we're not sure we reflectively want to do. And in that way, it seems to undermine our agency. So I think it's kind of both of those things.

• 22:43Chris Williamson?

  What about pro-love drugs? How do they work?

• 22:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, so one point to say is just that one and the same drug can be a pro-love drug or an anti-love drug, depending on the context and which couple is using it toward what end. So I'll stick with the example of SSRIs, just because they're so commonly used and they have a multiplicity of effects on different people. So just imagine that you're in that subset of people for whom SSRIs are an effective treatment of depression. And let's just say that you were so depressed that you couldn't get out of bed, and you certainly weren't engaging in your relationships in any kind of productive, healthy way. So, you know, your partner's always tending to you and starting to build resentment because you're just not really engaging what's going on. The relationship's heading in a bad place. And then you've tried all the different treatments, you know, you've had done talk therapy

• 23:30Speaker 00

  and this and that and the other thing, and you've tried all the things you're supposed to do, and then you say, well, I guess I'm gonna, as a last ditch effort, try to take some medication and see what happens. Now suppose that you're one of the people for whom that's an effective treatment, and all of a sudden you're able to get out of bed and, you know, have a conversation with your partner over dinner and go out on a date again and so forth. So you can see how for some people, this drug, depending on how it plays out for them, could be something that could enhance a relationship, all things considered. On the other hand, you mentioned the case of the long married couple where one of them goes on an SSRI and they just don't feel romantic love toward their partner anymore. And that's something that does happen as well. So in addition to blocking, for some people, libido, it can also have a general blunting effect on their emotions. And part of that is if you're in such despair that just having overall dulled emotions

• 24:14Speaker 00

  is better than being massively depressed, some people would count that as a treatment effect. They'd say, well, that's maybe the point of some of these SSRIs. But on the other hand, you know, some of the phenomenology of love requires a sense of passion, a sense of being drawn towards someone that you're really into. And if all of your feelings are sort of blunted and dulled and blocked, then you're gonna lose some of that as well. And so you do find some cases of people who say, I just, I had to stop taking the SSRIs because I didn't love my partner anymore and I've been with him for 20 years and that wasn't acceptable to me. And if I have to deal with depression now and then, I'll deal with it. So, you know, the, the effect is really, you know, slightly orthogonal to the, the actual drug. It's more like the drug times the situation, times the couple's values, times what they're dealing with, and then you start to get a map of what kind of intervention will likely

• 24:58Speaker 00

  be helpful for them, rather than something that will hinder their relationship.

• 25:01Chris Williamson?

  Is Viagra a love drug?

• 25:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so Viagra has sort of low level effects on the body in that it increases blood flow to the penis, and so it can help people with penises have erections. And so insofar as that's an important component of the sexual repertoire of a given couple, then you can see how it can have knock on effects that would be advantageous in a kind of higher level love sense. So, you know, sex and orgasm are really oxytocin, which we've been talking about, and oxytocin is something that, you know, undergirds the attachment bond. So, you know, there's lots of ways to be close to a person that doesn't involve penetrative sex, but nevertheless, if that's something that you value, if that's something that you and your partner, you know, take some particular joy in, then if you have

• 25:45Speaker 00

  a drug that enables you to facilitate that kind of activity, and that brings you closer together, and that causes you to be releasing oxytocin together in a particularly potent circumstance, then you can see how that would have ramifications for the relationship. Yeah.

• 25:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Can drugs make straight people turn gay? Are we going to have straight conversion therapy happening soon?

• 26:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's very interesting. So, you know, people have been trying to use drugs for a long time to convert gay people into straight people, and largely ineffectively. And, you know, there's a whole social campaign and government programs and laws that are being passed to try to discourage this because it's seen rightly, I think, as an unjust pressure that's placed on sexual orientation minorities to try to squeeze them into the majority mold, rather than just saying, listen, let's just let people have the sexual orientations that they want to have. There are some cases that we talk about in the book of super religious communities, like ultra-orthodox Jewish communities, where same-sex activity and attraction is totally forbidden, masturbation is forbidden, anything that's not procreative sex within the context of marriage is looked down upon and highly stigmatized.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  And what will happen is that some of these young yeshiva students will go to their counselors or the rabbis, and they'll say, you know, I have these same-sex desires, and I know I can't act on them because of the values of the community and perhaps their own reflective values. And they say, that makes me really depressed. And as a consequence of this, the rabbis and the psychiatrists will get together and say, well, if you prescribe a high dose of a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, there's a sort of on-label purpose for doing that, which is it should treat the depression. But the idea is that it will also hopefully have the side effect of depressing the libido. And so it's not a conversion drug in that it doesn't cause the person to suddenly have opposite-sex sexual desire, but it does just kind of kill their sexual desire altogether.

• 27:32Speaker 00

  So it's a sort of quasi-conversion drug in that it's at least meant to dampen or interfere with the naturally occurring same-sex attractions that this person has. And you know, that raises all sorts of problems. I mean, in the book, we suggest that certainly anybody who's, you know, any minor shouldn't have any such drug thrust upon them as a way of converting their sexuality. But this is something where kind of progressive politics comes at a conflict with itself, because we tend to think that there should be freedom of choice, you know, just let people make decisions in line with their own values. But there's some corners of progressive politics that only like people to have progressive values. So you can imagine, you know, let's say you're a thirty, thirty year old, you know, conservative Jewish person, or Christian, or Muslim, and you say, you know, my relationship

• 28:13Speaker 00

  with God, which I take to require that I ought not to be involved in same-sex relationships, will be improved if I didn't have these desires. Now, I, as a secular progressive person, would be like, oh, we need to have a conversation. Like, you shouldn't be thinking that, and maybe there's some better way of reading the Torah than the one that you're reading. But on the other hand, you know, the liberal progressive value says that you can try to persuade people, but you shouldn't coerce them. And so if the person says, I don't want to be gay, what we say, we say is, wow, you have internalized homophobia, and we need to treat you and take care of you. But now we're starting to kind of trip over ourselves, because it sounds like we're telling the person that they can't think what they think. And so this is a very touchy area. It's hard to know what to say about this. And then you raise the point of, well, what if some straight people wanted to be gay? I mean, maybe that's better, you know, these opposite sex relationships are so complicated and have all these issues.

• 28:58Chris Williamson?

  Gay people dress better, they've got cooler hair.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:01Chris Williamson?

  Better skin.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  Exactly. Men and women don't really understand each other, and you know, so we talk about that in the book. We say, just to raise a real-life example of this, back, I think, in the 1980s, there was this group of these radical feminists out of Leeds who called themselves the Revolutionary Feminists. And their argument was that, you know, the main political goal is to fight the patriarchy. And according to their vision of this, men are sort of the enemy in the patriarchy, and women have to band together, and you shouldn't have to rely on men to have romantic relationships. And so they saw lesbianism as a political virtue. Now, so they characterize themselves as political lesbians. And the issue is, it's not that they were viscerally attracted to other women, they didn't necessarily feel that way. So either they could go through the motions, or consign themselves to a life

• 29:47Speaker 00

  of celibacy, or you can imagine if they had some ability to actually intervene and tinker with their neurochemistry and... Costs to feel attracted to help them support their goals. And then you think, well, that's the sort of thing maybe we should support. You know, so some colleagues of mine have, you know, we raised this example and we knew it was going to be controversial. And I still don't know exactly what to think about it, but I am a little bit persuaded by the arguments of some critics of ours. Who said, you know, in an ideal world, if there wasn't homophobia, sure, people should be able to tinker around with their sexual orientation. And, you know, all in the project of self creation and looking at me, people should be able to be attracted to whoever they want to be. That should be the sort of thing that you could exercise some agency over. But we don't live in an ideal world.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  We live in a non ideal world where we have a lot of people who are asymmetrically pressured to change their sexual orientation. And so it would be better, all things considered, if we just didn't have this technology. We just shouldn't even develop it. And so I, you know, I I'm persuaded to some extent by their views that maybe it's better for us to just, you know, learn how to, you know, once we can all get to a place in society where we're not, you know, being bigoted and prejudiced toward people because of their sexual orientations, maybe we shouldn't be tinkering with our sexual orientation so much as fixing the wider political problem. But if we get to some utopia where people aren't, you know, hating on each other because of who they want to have sex with.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  And people want to engage in a, in a process of self creation that involves experimenting with their own sexual orientation. I think there's some trends in society that are actually supportive of that. I mean, I think in the really the youngest generation now, I think there's an emerging view about sexuality that why, why shouldn't it be something that's a little bit more fluid, you know, a lot of people are thinking of gender and gender identity as the sort of thing that you should be able to play with, rather than something that's this inherent essentialist thing within you. And I think there's that's, that's starting to affect some people's views about sexuality too. They're like, well, why should I think of sexuality as this, you know, inborn, immovable thing that isn't subject to any kind of modification by my own desires or values. And so, you know, this, this conversation is never going to go away, but it's certainly a messy conversation.

• 31:50Speaker 00

  And that's, that's about the state of it right now.

• 31:53Chris Williamson?

  Is there a limit to how much we should step into the programming of the human body? How far can we alter our desires and motivations before we're no longer ourselves?

• 32:06Speaker 00

  One general risk in intervening in biological systems is that biological systems came about through a tinkering process of natural selection, not through, well, I guess it depends on your views. If you're a creationist, you might think God just sat there with his blueprint and created humans according to some particular plan, but you'd probably be opposed to tinkering with God's plan for theological reasons. But if you're a secular, science-minded person, you think that our bodies and brains came about through the, you know, millions of years of tinkering through evolution. That means that it's not easy to reverse-engineer the blueprint. We don't know exactly how all this stuff works in there. And so it's easy to mess up a complex system, and it's often much easier to mess it up than it is to improve it. And so the general risk when

• 32:49Speaker 00

  you're putting drugs and technologies in to try to re-engineer, you know, something about human nature, is that you may think that you're improving the system along one dimension, but you don't understand the system enough to realize all the off-target effects that you're having. And so that's always a risk. Now, somebody who wanted to disagree with what I just said would say, "Of course, that's true, but, you know, nevertheless, in psychiatry, we try to do our best. We have some drugs that we prescribe for certain purposes. We don't always know exactly how they're going to work, at which dose, but some people are in a bad enough situation that having access to drugs, even if they might not have a perfect tailored effect, will all things considered improve their situation, even if there's also some side effects that they don't want. And we

• 33:30Speaker 00

  should continue to try. Unless we think that what we have now is ideal, we have some reason to try to at least keep looking into the question of whether we can improve ourselves, whether we can improve... I mean, just take an example of human beings as political creatures. You know, we have political turmoil all over the world. We have genocides. We have polarization. We have people electing authoritarian leaders and so forth. It seems like something about us humans is not ideal. We could do better than this. And if something about our tribal psychology that we've inherited from, you know, the ancient plains of Africa is something that we could improve, if we could, through some means or another, whether it's biologically or otherwise, you know, change our tribalistic tendencies, some people would say, "That's...

• 34:14Speaker 00

  We live in a world where tribalism isn't good for us anymore. Maybe it was 10,000 years ago, but it's not good for us anymore. We've constructed a world for ourselves that's in some ways out of tune with the psychological disposition that we've inherited from our ancestors. And so if we want to make the most of our lives together in this complicated... Multicultural, globally connected world, we may actually need to intervene at the level of our own psychology and biology to try to enhance ourselves to meet the challenges of the time. So people who have kind of more of a transhumanist bent tend to be more open to these kinds of strategies. And other people who are more concerned about messing up a complex biological system will be more reluctant. But somewhere between those two extremes is probably, you know, a path forward.

• 34:56Chris Williamson?

  Is there not something as well that probably is a hangover from our time in a religious society where people feel there is this essence within us, this sort of soul, something ethereal that shouldn't be tampered with to do with our form. And that, I think, is clashing up against a world in which we have vaccinations. Like, the advantage and the reason that most people, most sane people, don't disagree with vaccines is because the binary, is this better, is a world better with vaccines than without, is fairly obvious. But then if you roll that clock forward, and you just decide to pick this particular

• 35:38Chris Williamson?

  drug which has this effect, but the price is that you need to pay this particular side effect with it as well. And it becomes a value judgment. The suffering of somebody who decides to go to Germany or Switzerland or wherever it is to go and be euthanized, like, what's that? You know, we've got a world where you can elect, it's a very difficult process and in some places illegal, but where you can elect to be killed because the suffering of your life is not worth continuing it, and it would literally be better to be dead. In a world where you've got that, it opens the door for an awful lot of other people to put their hand in the air. And so actually, I've got this pain in my leg, and I'd really quite like that fixing. And actually, my sexual orientation is against my religious

• 36:21Chris Williamson?

  belief, or actually, like, girls are totally awful, and I just can't, I don't really understand them. So I just want to like, have sex with my mates and play Xbox or whatever it might be. You know, we have this kind of full gamut now. And I think that we're seeing the paradox of choice play out a little bit here, and the bizarreness of a conservative, religiously based society constrained choice in a way that actually made life a lot simpler and a lot easier. And we're now having to ask much harder questions because we're in a meritocracy where you can do whatever you want.

• 37:01Speaker 00

  There's so many interesting points that are raised by what you said.

• 37:04Chris Williamson?

  Thank you. Thank you, Brian. That's a wonderful compliment from an esteemed philosopher like yourself.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Well, so one thing I'm thinking about is people have a concern that technology will be used to override or interfere with human nature conceived of some way. And the way that debate often plays out is you have the bioconservatives who say we just shouldn't be tampering with what we've got. It would be much better for us to try to create a better environment for ourselves to live in, to, you know, work on our values. But we shouldn't keep trying to interfere with our biological essence in some kind of a way. And then you have the bioliberals who say, you know, unless you

• 37:40Chris Williamson?

  Bioliberals is such a good

• 37:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, this, you know, the, the, these political disputes play out in so many different areas. And, and in debates about human enhancement is certainly one of them. You know, the bioliberals would say, um, kind of what I was saying before, there's no reason to think that our current blueprint is ideal and certainly it's not ideal given our environment. And there's only so much changing of our environment we could do. So at least one of the options that should be on the table is tinkering with our own brains and biology. And then another point that they'll make is sort of a level two move in the debate is to say, well, let's think about human nature for a second. What is it that makes us different from all the other animals? Well, one thing is that we're inventors. We, we, we do change our environment. We don't just live in harmony with the trees in some idyllic place that we imagined from the distant past.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  But we transform our environment, we create technology, we change ourselves. Part of human nature is to be self intervening in certain kinds of ways. Now you still have some people who have this view that that's all misguided. We should go back to living in harmony with the trees. What are we doing? And I think you start to see now people who are really concerned about the pace of technological change, who are concerned about the fact that we're on our computers all the time, who are concerned about the fact that we're addicted to our devices and so forth. And I think they have a fair point when they say, maybe that idea of actually simplifying life and living on a farm and living in harmony with nature is not so bad. I mean, why do we think we're going to technologically solve our way out of our own problems? You know, the, the planet's dying and we're devastating whole ecologies and so forth.

• 39:09Speaker 00

  Maybe we should, maybe this idea that we can just, if we're smart enough, we can, with a technical fix, you know, solve the problems that we've created for ourselves. Maybe that's just a doomed general approach. And we should get off the technology and stop taking drugs for every different thing and just eat healthier and exercise more and stuff like that. So I mean, with all these things, I feel like there's usually a good insight in anybody's view. I think it's right that there's probably a lot we could do that doesn't involve high-tech interventions into our bodies, but rather just living better and, you know, paying attention to what we eat and getting good exercise and not being on the internet all the time. Those are things that we should do. On the other hand, I think there are people who go too far in that direction. So when, you know, anesthesia for pain control was first discovered, you know,

• 39:53Speaker 00

  first of all, laughing gas was being tested at Humphrey Davies, I think, and then eventually that got used with ether that they were using for pain control. A lot of people said, "Well, this is really unnatural." You know, if you're giving birth, for example, it should be painful. That's just part of what it is to be human. It's been that way for millions of years. What, all of a sudden we're just gonna take out the pain out of giving birth or the pain of surgery? I mean, surgeries too. There's some descriptions of this time where, you know, if you had, say, a breast cancer and you had to have a surgery to have that removed, then there was no pain control. Maybe you have some-

• 40:26Chris Williamson?

  Bite down on this bit of wood, yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's just excruciating. And so there's this one account that I was reading in a book recently of this woman who recorded her story in great detail about what it was like to be conscious and have her breast removed because of a surgery before pain control was available. And, you know, some people sort of gave a sense of meaning to this, where they said, "Well, this is just part of what it is to be us flawed and fragile humans, is that we're supposed to have certain kinds of suffering." Now, other people would look at this case and say, "The thought of undergoing a surgery without anesthesia is that's the height of cruelty." And you have all sorts of like, human rights declarations that say, "People have a right to pain control." So, you know, again, we have all sorts of conflicted values about what we think we should be doing here, and I don't think there's any one-size-fits-all answer. I think you can be ideological and dogmatic in any direction.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  You can be the person who says, "I won't even use vaccines because they're unnatural." And it's like, "Okay, but all things considered, it's probably worth taking." And then you can have the people who say, you know- We shouldn't even listen to what's natural because, you know, that's just a fallacy. But it's like, yeah, that's true. It's true that what's natural isn't necessarily what's good, you know, pestilence is natural and it's not good. Cancer is natural and it's not good. But it's also true that natural systems, you know, evolved to solve certain kinds of problems over millennia. And so when we come along with our high-tech mindset on, we may think that we've solved that problem or we can outsmart nature. And sometimes we can. But other times what happens is we locally solve a problem and we create much worse problems, you know, in terms of the side effects. And then we're constantly trying to catch up with our own interventions. So, you know, I guess it's good that there are

• 41:56Speaker 00

  bioliberals and bioconservatives duking it out with each other in the literature, because I think that somewhere between that dialectic is going to be where the answer lies, is we're going to keep doing science and technology and learning about how the natural world works. And sometimes we're going to find that it's all things considered best to try to intervene in it as far as we can predict what we think the downstream consequences are going to be. And I think it's right that we need to be much better about learning how to, you know, develop social systems that allow us to make peace with each other and live in harmony with the world without always, you know, looking for a technological quick fix. And so, you know, both of these, both of these views have some wisdom in them, I think.

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  The problem that I see with regards to implementing the more progressive biological enhancement approach for relationships is the order of magnitude complexity that you come up against. You've not just got the first, second, third order effects for yourself, and it's a multiplicative relationship between you and the other person. And then it will become self-referential, too. So you will do a thing, it will affect you in one, two, three, four ways down the line. That person will be affected, one, two, three, four, and then those effects will begin to interact with each other also. I think-

• 43:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, but of course, that's, that's true even setting aside biotechnology. So just take, let's say that I go on a meditation retreat for a month and I feel that I've discovered some deep insights into the nature of consciousness or something. And then I come back to my partner who's, you know, really anxious and going to work and has all these different values. We, we might have something going on between us that we have to deal with just because of a change that I underwent through non-bio technologically mediated means. So there's a risk, I think, there's, there's ways that we can have changes to ourselves, self-discovery and, you know, just changes in our values.

• 43:44Chris Williamson?

  Watching the wrong YouTube video.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  And then going down, you know, some, some rabbit hole or having a religious conversion some people may have. So, I mean, also giving birth to a child is a transformative experience. It totally restructures your value system and what your priorities are and so forth. And so a lot of couples, when the child comes along, find that, whoa, our relationship to each other is very different now. And so we have to just remember that like, something being biologically based doesn't necessarily mean that it's more radical in the effects that it brings about than things that are non-biologically based. You know, you can, you can have lots of big changes and relationships have to learn how to adapt and adjust and be elastic if, if a couple wants to stay together through the sorts of changes that life throws at us anyway. And so what you want to do when you're thinking about adding

• 44:28Speaker 00

  biotechnology to the mix is, can you identify that, that subset of cases where you'll be able to bring about a change that you have reasonably good reason to predict will help the relationship improve rather than deteriorate. And so you take the example of if I have PTSD and I see there's this trial for MDMA assisted psychotherapy and I see that 70% of the people in the trials previous to me have shown radical treatment effects where they no longer have nightmares at night and they're not on 49 different pills to treat symptoms. You have pretty good reason to think that it's rational for you to undertake this drug mediated experience if you have, if you think it's going to improve your PTSD situation and you have pretty good reason to think that not having PTSD is going to be good for your relationship. So, you

• 45:09Speaker 00

  know, you're never going to be perfect in your predictions, but biotechnology and non-biotechnology can both have radical effects on our lives. And it's really just how we integrate those effects into our ongoing narrative with the other person and our ongoing sense of ourselves.

• 45:22Chris Williamson?

  I don't know what it is. It might be something to do with this sacred inner ethereal being. Feeling feelings is hard, right? Like I get, I get that, you know, going through a breakup is painful, but nerfing that, cutting off all of the sharp edges of life by deciding to tranquilize yourself away from bad feelings, to me seems first like a cop out, secondly, it's massively against the, the philosophy of a meritocracy, which I'm massively in favor for. And thirdly, there's learnings to be made. There's lessons to learn from falling in and out of love. Are we risking losing them?

• 46:00Speaker 00

  I'll, I'll go back to our familiar example of SSRIs just because it's a familiar example. And then I'll try to talk about psychedelic drugs, which tend to work differently. You have two general types of experiences that people will tell you about when they take an SSRI for depression. One type that they'll say is, you know, I was depressed because I was in a bad situation. My emotions were telling me something real about the world, like my job sucks and I'm in a bad relationship and I need to get out of the relationship. And once I took this drug, it just kind of papered over all that, all that emotion, which is not actually helpful because although it allows me to sort of function in my current situation, it disincentivizes me from changing my situation, which is the thing I really

• 46:42Speaker 00

  ought to do because those initial emotions of despair and sadness and distress were giving me some real signal amidst all the noise. That was some really important information I should have paid attention to. So those kinds of situations, you know, it, it depends. Sometimes just functioning is the best a person can hope for, but other times you'd say, you shouldn't really be on that drug, man. You should pay attention to the depression, get out of the relationship and change your circumstance. That's what you need. Other people will say, you know, I was going through my life and maybe certain, certain things were good and certain things were bad, but this feeling of depression was so out of proportion to what was actually happening that it was disabling me from being able to participate in life. And when I took this SSRI, what it did was it felt like it lifted the blanket of depression

• 47:24Speaker 00

  off of me and allowed my true self or whatever to, to actually begin to engage with the world. I can remember being a joyful person when I was a kid. And, and from whatever happened where whatever's going on with me, I was feeling depressed all the time. This drug allowed me to remove that barrier to flourishing and then kind of have my, my true self come out. So I think you're right that if the effect of a drug was just uniformly to block people's ability to access genuine information from their emotional and intuitive lives, that would be bad. But some drugs seem to be able to, depending on how they're used and the person who's using them, remove barriers between people and their emotional lives. So just to take the PTSD MDMA example.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  When people come back from the war and they've just seen bloodshed and slaughter and horror and they have just nightmares and deep traumas that they've just had to cover over so they can keep on fighting and then they come home and now, you know, the slightest sound outside makes them freak out and they're having aggression toward their partner and all this kind of crazy stuff. They go to talk therapy and they say, listen, I've got all these symptoms of PTSD, what can I do? And the therapist says, well, we're gonna have to talk about your time in the war. And the person just shuts down. They're like, I wanna talk about that stuff. So in this case, what happens under these MDMA-assisted psychotherapy sessions, for at least the people who so far have gone through these trials, is that when the person says, tell me about, you know, the last time you were in Baghdad, instead of flipping

• 48:53Speaker 00

  out, the person feels warm and soft and safe enough to just kind of go there. And they can bring up that memory without having a freak out. And then they can talk about it with the therapist. And then they can actually work through some of these underlying issues. And then what's, what seems to be happening is that after two or three such sessions, again, about 70% of the people in these early trials just don't have PTSD anymore. They don't meet the diagnostic criteria and they aren't taking all these other pills that they had been taking before. So

• 49:21Chris Williamson?

  Was it, sorry, wasn't it that you, you found some guy that went from an 80 out of 100 down to an 8 or something?

• 49:28Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So one of the people that we talk about in the book was an early enrollee in one of these trials who was, you know, maxing out the scale and had tried everything. I mean, he was suicidal, he'd been on every kind of drug, he was living out in the back woods in North Carolina, as I recall, just drinking himself to death, basically. And then he heard from a friend about this study that was going on with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy and he figured he had nothing else to lose. So he went into the trial and, and again, because he wasn't just trying to, you know, alcohol is another drug that many people use to avoid dealing with their feelings. I mean, let's just use alcohol, for example. Alcohol can have both of these effects too, right? In some cases, you feel like shit and then you just drink yourself into a stupor so that you don't have to deal with it.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  But of course, many people have also had the situation of being there with your close friend and it's probably because you're a little bit tipsy that you're willing to kind of bring up some stuff that maybe you otherwise wouldn't have wanted to bring up because your inhibition's been lowered. And so, yeah, it's just, you know, any of these different drugs can have a multiplicity of effects, including alcohol, including SSRIs. But certainly, in the case of the psychedelic drugs, when they're used in a therapeutic context and MDMA, it seems to have

• 50:37Speaker 00

  An effect for many people that they describe as as greater authenticity. They feel that all of a sudden they're in touch with their emotions in a way that they haven't been for many years. They feel like all the defense mechanisms they've built up to just get through the social world and to deal with their demons. Those those start to break down and they actually have to confront, you know, really in a frank way, some of the basic facts of their inner life. And if they're in a safe environment, they can work through that stuff. For many of them, it can be a very positive experience. Some people have bad trips. Some people face the demons and it's not good. And so that's why it's so important to, you know, really be careful about the circumstances under which these kinds of drug assisted experiences are are had. But um, yeah, I I think that kind of gets at the heart of your question.

• 51:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's something about it that makes me feel uncomfortable. And I think part of it comes from a fear and an understanding that most people don't like facing their feelings. That

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:34Chris Williamson?

  there is a opiate crisis in America. Ridic- the only place in the world where you can essentially recreationally get your hands on things that stop you from feeling feelings. And given that choice, I don't think that most people's will powers are the the average general public willpower is sufficiently strong to not just take an increasingly complex series of cocktails in order to well, I want to find a partner, but actually I'm a little bit obsessive. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a drug that's going to dampen down my excessiveness. Like if I fall in love with a girl who is augmenting her biology with drugs. Have has she conned me? Like who am I who am I in love with? Like, and if she continues taking that for the rest of time

• 52:18Chris Williamson?

  and I don't know, does it matter? You know, I know that we're getting into some tighter and tighter circles here ethically and morally. But this is the interesting shit. So this is this is where I want to go.

• 52:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's questions of like, who is your authentic self? And there's different theories about that. One sort of general type of theory is that when you're having an emotional response to something and you, upon reflection, would sort of endorse that way that you're behaving, then people think, well, that's an authentic response. The classic example in philosophy is the willing or the unwilling addict. So if you have somebody who's deeply addicted to something, but then when they stand outside of their behavior and they look at it, they're just judging themselves, they're like, this is not what I want to do. You know, I don't want to keep going back to the harrowman or whatever it is. Then some people say that addiction is not an authentic expression of a person's self because it's something that they're in tension with and they want to get rid of. Whereas if you have somebody who has integrated their drug use into their very sense of self

• 53:13Speaker 00

  and it's, you know, their whole way of understanding themselves in the world is based around the fact that their friends do drugs with them and they do it in a certain way and they love that way that it feels. There's some views that, you know, drug use could be part of a person's authentic self, at least as far as they understand it.

• 53:27Speaker 00

  Another way of thinking about it is sort of, we have, you know, we have memories, we have our dispositions, we have our emotions, we have all sorts of stuff going on in our mental life. And some of those things are easier to dislodge than others. So take the example of the religious person who has same-sex attraction. Josh Knob, experimental philosopher and his colleagues did some really interesting work on this, where this person, you know, has two kinds of commitments here. One is their relationship to God as they see it, and the other is their same-sex attraction. And if you ask liberals and conservatives, what is their true self? You find that the conservatives are like, obviously, the Christianity is the true self and the same-sex attraction is just this annoying, like, biological thing that's getting in the way of the person's ability to live according to their true values.

• 54:12Speaker 00

  And then the progressives are all like, obviously, that Christianity nonsense needs to just get out of the way. And obviously, the same-sex attraction, you know, this is a gay person who just needs to accept the fact that they're gay. And so you start to see that we have, we have value judgments that affect what bits of our inner life do we want to kind of stake a flag in and then build the rest of it around. And some of that can be down to ideological commitments. Sometimes it can be down to just what we find we can't change about ourselves. So that's, that's a good example. If you have a, you know, a gay person in a small town where everybody's super religious and there's a lot of anti-gay sentiment, and they find that... Nevertheless, you know, they can't help these kinds of feelings and that they feel the most safe and truly themselves and in touch with their inner life when they allow

• 54:55Speaker 00

  themselves to act on their feelings, then you find many of them taking the very difficult decision to leave their communities. And they, but it's not a clean break, you know, it's like, imagine you're somebody who really, all your friends and your family and, you know, every Sunday you go to the church and that's where you're used to, you know, experiencing really deep emotions. It's not an easy thing to leave all that behind. But for some people, their feeling of same-sex attraction is so central to their sense of self and it's so immovable and it's so tied up with the rest of the way that they view themselves in the world, that that's the trade-off that they have to make. And it's conceivable, you can imagine somebody making a different trade-off if they're feeling their relationship to God was.

• 55:33Chris Williamson?

  Precisely, yeah. That's, that's what I was thinking, that because we get back to what we brought up at the very beginning about the phenomenological complexities that we're coming up against here, there is no if this, then that objective metric that we can look at to say, well, actually, you're, you're seven gay, but you're only six and a half Jewish, therefore, like, gay wins, like, go team gay, let's sort of see you at Pride. Like, we don't have a way to gauge that. And increasingly this year, upon reading and learning about self-deception and just how tiny the sliver of our own motivations that we're privy to, we get, we get to know absolutely nothing. We're like a rider on

• 56:15Chris Williamson?

  the back of an elephant who's also got blinkers on, going through some of those Kanye West glasses that kind of block out almost half of your vision. You get to see nothing. You don't know why your motivations are the way that they are. So then presuming that you know what's best for you or that anybody else does is almost impossible.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Well, I mean, so I'm thinking of John Sturt Mill's concept of experiments in living. I mean, that's not his concept, maybe other people have said that too, but. You you kind of just have to try. You just have to go out there and live your life. Like, you know, suppose you're living in a small town and all you know is Jesus loves you and God doesn't want you to be gay, or that's what you think you know. But then you get on the internet and you find out that there's some Christian communities that are accepting of gay people. And all of a sudden you're like, oh, I don't know, maybe there is a world for me where I could both have my relationship to God and, you know, live out my my sexual attractions in a way that are important to me. And so maybe you, you know, chat with those people online and then you you feel loved by them and you feel like, actually, this feels like a community. I feel understood. I feel like the whole me gets to exist with these people. And, you know, if you didn't have the internet and you didn't have that experience,

• 57:15Speaker 00

  you might not have known phenomenologically what it was like to feel fully embraced by a group of people who both accept you as a religious person and as a gay person, let's say.

• 57:24Speaker 00

  So, you know, or or if you've just never had an experience with somebody of the same sex and then you do and you find that you finally feel complete for the first time in your life or something like that. That's information. And, you know, it's true that we might really think we're on to something and we think we've harmonized all the different aspects of ourself and then some little stimulus comes in and all of a sudden we're confused again. I mean, oh, maybe I don't actually care about that. But man, that's just living. Like, you know, sometimes we're gonna find a pretty stable arrangement for ourselves where our inner life, our set of values, our community, our beliefs, all kind of hang together in a way that feels like it's got some stability to it. And that's that's kind of the goal, I think. And, you know, one way you can find out what that stable arrangement is for your

• 58:05Speaker 00

  dispositions, your drives, your beliefs, your values and your community is is by living in the world and by trying out different kinds of things and going with your hunch and seeing what happens and trying to change. And but that that just is the process of being a person, is trying these things out and seeing where do I find that I'm the most you know, at peace with myself? Where do I find that I'm able to engage with others in a way that feels healthy and not toxic? When do I feel like I'm getting lots of good sleep at night? When is my health good? And when you find that arrangement of things, and you know, different cultures have different wisdom traditions that are going to try to nudge you in certain directions. It's not like it's totally random. Some things for most people are not good things to do.

• 58:49Speaker 00

  Some things for most people are good things to do. Approaching relationships in a way that's not built around anxiety and mistrust, but around honesty and trust, generally speaking, that's going to be good for most people, with maybe some exceptions. So that's, yeah, I think the experiments in living is the only way to approach that. You're right, there isn't one obvious answer. We just sign your name onto some life plan and go with that. And you only know by bumping into stuff and seeing how it feels.

• 59:16Chris Williamson?

  What are the other common criticisms that you're coming up against, or that people are coming up against, when they propose augmenting relationships with drugs?

• 59:26Speaker 00

  I think the main thing that people are worried about is that the feelings will be inauthentic. I think this very thing that we're talking about, they think, well, isn't whatever I'm feeling without the intervention of a drug, my true feelings? And then whatever I have when I have a drug is some sort of drug-induced sensation. And I really think that this has to do with a misunderstanding about what is going on with some of these drugs. So let's take the case of psilocybin from magic mushrooms. There's different theories now about what exactly is going on when you take this drug. But one thing that it does is it binds to the serotonin receptors in the places serotonin.

• 1:00:04Speaker 00

  And it causes what it seems like is a dampening down of the kind of global network of neurochemical processes and brain areas that uphold the ego. It's sometimes called the default mode network, but it's basically your sense of self that's just hanging out with you all the time. That kind of quiets down. And so this is why some people are thinking of, or will share, that they feel at one with the universe, or they feel like the boundaries between themselves and others are breaking down. It's because, you know, the model of yourself that you have is just a fiction that your brain is... Running most of the time to kind of make sense of the world. You have to have kind of an inner self that maps onto things and is the subject of the experiences that you're having. And, you know, when people have psychotic experiences or schizophrenia and so forth,

• 1:00:48Speaker 00

  those are other ways in which the self can break down, and that's not a very safe experience to have. But if it's under controlled kind of circumstances, suddenly feeling like, wow, it's not all about me, and I see that other people are also here and their experiences are meaningful to them. You know, that's at the heart of many kinds of wisdom traditions and religions and so forth, is this idea of getting out of your own ego and, you know, giving proper weight to the other conscious beings around you. Another thing it seems to do is to kind of flush out some of your, your kind of belief structures that have become rigid. So I'll just illustrate this with an example. Let's say that you're a little kid and you're walking down the street and you see a leaf

• 1:01:32Speaker 00

  on the sidewalk and you just are fascinated by it. You're like, this is so amazing. You're just really in tune with your environment because it's new information and you don't yet know what's important and what's not important. And then as we grow up and we get socialized and our parent says, you know, come along, we need to get to school, we learn what's important and what's not important according to the dicta of society. So, you know, well, leaves aren't important and getting to school is important. But of course, it's not wrong that leaves are amazing. Leaves are amazing. It's just that we've learned to stop paying attention to them. And similarly, you know, when we get into our relationships, we can often get into a rut with people where we stop seeing our partner with fresh eyes and we just get into these stupid habits where they say something and we get irritated and we act offensively and then they respond offensively and then we have an argument and it's the thousandth time that this happened in the last 10 years.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  Well, what, by just temporarily washing out that kind of stimulus-response loop that we can get into, it allows us to see the world with fresh eyes. And so again, the kind of, when you, when people see somebody who's having a drug experience and they make fun of them because they're looking at the wall and they seem to think the wall is so fascinating, I think there's a sense in which that person is not wrong. Why isn't the wall fascinating? Why isn't this flower next to me fascinating? Why isn't the partner that I've been living with for 10 years not miraculous to perceive? They are. It's just that we've stopped seeing them that way because we've got into a pattern. And so some, some of what this drug does is it just kind of wipes out some of those patterns for a little bit so that we can see things with fresh eyes and then we decide what we want to do with that. The effect of the drug wears off and there are some long-lasting kind of heightened

• 1:02:55Speaker 00

  sense of resilience for many people where they feel, for some months, they feel a little bit changed by the experience. But you know, they have their memories, they have their values, you don't completely become a new person, and then you decide what you want to learn from that experience. And again, there are lots of ways that we can do this to ourselves. We can go climb a mountain and behold the beauty of nature. We can meditate, we can see a really good film that just totally challenges our preconceptions about, you know, what people are like. And so, you know, some of these drug-mediated experiences are just other ways of putting ourselves into an altered state of consciousness whereby we don't lose everything that was ever authentic to us, but we certainly have an experience which throws up new information and puts us into an altered state of mind whereby we're able to engage with that information with

• 1:03:40Speaker 00

  a kind of new perspective. And, you know, there's lots of ways we can do that, the potent way to do it that's more reliable than some of those other ways.

• 1:03:47Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I don't know. The naturalistic fallacy and trying to avoid it is something that I found myself coming up against constantly whilst reading your book. I'm like, yeah, okay, like, just because it's what's always happened, like, it doesn't necessarily need to be that way. Then there's another level to it that the listeners may be feeling, which is some sort of sacredness to do with a relationship, that it's something that perhaps shouldn't be beholden to this new world. You know, there's few islands of purity that are left that haven't been kind of molested. And I suppose you could argue, well, we're living in a world with Tinder and OnlyFans and booty pictures, like how has relationships not

• 1:04:30Chris Williamson?

  been molested by the modern world, but at least perhaps not by performance-enhancing drugs outside of Viagra. And I'm aware that it's just gradations all the way down, right? It's just what is your particular tolerance level for manipulation or for new stuff, new shit? And I still remain sort of unconvinced on what my own position is here. I don't know.

• 1:04:57Chris Williamson?

  And I'd be fascinated to know what the listeners think as well. Just leave it as a comment or like, let me know. But I'm unsure. What's your, what's your sort of personal stance on this? Would you take drugs to enhance your relationship?

• 1:05:11Speaker 00

  So for most of my life, I've been, just because of my upbringing, I was raised in a very conservative religious household. So when I'm talking about all these religious examples, I'm drawing from my own experience where, you know, that was my sense of the world was, you know, there's right and wrong and drugs are bad and God is good. And, and that was kind of my, my simplistic worldview for a long time. Since I spent all these years researching these drugs, I've had to change my view a little bit because I've seen so many accounts of people who seem to have had transformatively good experiences on account of them. And so my, my mind's been opened a little bit, but I think I still retain a sense of caution or skepticism or concern. So I share your view. I'm not kind of an enthusiast for biotechnological enhancement. I'm really not. I think that, you know, I like reading history. I like reading philosophy. I

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  think the Stoic philosophers from, you know, thousands of years ago had a lot of good ideas about how we can live a good life. And they weren't talking about doing a whole bunch of drugs. They were talking about doing meditation. And, you know, so they were interested in altering your consciousness. And they thought, you know, the judgments that you had about the world and the sort of responses you had to the impressions that came in was what being a virtuous person was all about. And it was, it was about how to respond to the world in a, in a responsible way. And so they were big into something like meditation. So yeah, I'm not, I'm not thinking that everybody should rush out and try these drugs. And for, for myself, I think of it as something that I would want to try having, having deeply invested in laying the right

• 1:06:36Speaker 00

  groundwork for making changes that are within my non-drug mediated control. So a conservative way to approach these things would be to say, if you're in a relationship with someone that you, you value the relationship. Let's say you have shared values, you have goals together, you have a good reason, all things considered, to try to maintain the relationship. And let's just say you've tried all the other things. You've gone on romantic vacations, you've, I don't know, got sexy underwear, whatever it is that they say in the magazines, you know, you've gone to couples counselling, you've done all the different things to try to bring a feeling of excitement back into the relationship. Um, and it just, it doesn't seem to be working. Now, one thing you might say is, well, I guess the relationship's over. I don't know. We tried all the stuff and it didn't work. And so, you know,

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  that's the signal that we need to break up. Um, and that's one thing you could do. Sure. No hard feelings to anybody who does that. But you can imagine somebody who says, you know, um, what if we, you know, supposing that these clinics arise in the next 10 years or so, which looks pretty likely, where people will be able to have psychedelic enhanced couples' therapy? Um, let's give it a try. Let's see what happens if we can just go into this place together, put our shared values on the table, talk with the therapist about what we want to accomplish, learn about the effects of this drug, recognize that it will put us into a different state of mind for a while. The effects of the drug won't be permanent. They'll wear off. Um, but, but while we're in that altered state of mind, maybe we'll be able to kind of recapture, rekindle,

• 1:08:01Speaker 00

  or, um, explore some things together that just because of the pattern that we're in, we aren't able to really do by our own volition, and, and see what happens. And then if it turns out that, as some of the people who have been in these trials recently say, you know, I, I look at my partner like when we first met again, you know, all of a sudden I can see, it's not that they aren't there, it's that I stopped seeing them. And for some people, having the, the direct influence of a drug to kind of wipe out some of their patterned ways of thinking and allow them to see what's right in front of them with new eyes, does allow them to kind of, um, remember and re-experience why it is that they valued the relationship in the first place. And to me, that doesn't seem inauthentic. That just seems like we can get ourselves into inauthentic

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  patterns by, uh, falling into habits that aren't, uh, good for us. And there's different ways we try to break our habits through trying new activities, uh, going to talk therapy and so on. And the controlled use of these drugs under certain kinds of situations is another way in which we can break our habits. And then we can decide what new habits we want to lay down.

• 1:09:05Chris Williamson?

  I certainly think the first area that I'm like, prepare, I will be prepared, prepared to secede ground on is going to be single time experiences that force a reflective period afterward. I think I have a particular issue with, I'm not just saying just man up, like your heartbreak is, is easy. Like, no, it sucks. But jumping on a course of SSRIs to essentially nerf all of the edges of your experience. And I was thinking of while I was reading the book, remember that surrogates film with Bruce Willis? Did you ever watch that? I didn't see it, no. Okay, so it's kind of like, um, future world and all of the humans now just exist

• 1:09:46Chris Williamson?

  in these lush apartments in, in pods and they have surrogates like androids that run around on their behalf. And they never get cold, they never get hungry, and they never get whatever. And they're just filled with tubes and they're essentially just asleep the whole time. And I was like, think about what most personal development strategies are doing at the moment. They're actually reconnecting us with kind of a much more ancestral paleolithic experience. Why are people doing cold showers and breathwork and high intensity interval training? Like, what are all of the reasons for these things? It's because it puts you into a state of discomfort in a world which is constantly trying to make you more and more comfortable. You can Amazon Prime a TV on which to watch Netflix, the best films on the planet for less than like the price of a cocktail per month, while you deliver

• 1:10:31Chris Williamson?

  a five star Michelin chef steak to your door without even having to leave your house. You're like, these are the antidotes to the ailments of modern society. Earlier on, you mentioned about an analogy to basically like the minimalist movement. You know, like if you were to think about the cynics like Diogenes from ancient times going back to, you know, like Greece and think about what they were doing. Even that was, look, I will strip away all of the extraneous bullshit that I don't need. I don't even need this pot. When Alexander the Great comes, I'll just tell him that you stood in my sunlight. Like, all of these sort of stories, right? Like, what are we doing with that? Again, my concern is that by increasing the ability for people to take advantage of

• 1:11:11Chris Williamson?

  a very, very convenient world, I wonder where we lose our humanity along the way. Where do we actually kind of drop that off? And the examples you've given that have been like awkwardly robust at sort of dealing with the criticisms I had, of those, I find the most compelling, definitely. Go do something, because I would say to nobody, don't go and do a 10 day meditation retreat. But 10 day meditation retreat and a single time mild MDMA dose are probably not going to have much too dissimilar experiences. You're going to break down a ton of different thinking habits. You're going to come out an entirely new person. You're not going to think in the same sort of patterns anymore.

• 1:11:55Chris Williamson?

  But for one, I would be like, yes, get yourself away, like go and enjoy the northwest of England or whatever at this retreat. And then the other one, for some reason, I'm a bit like, oh, yeah, but what about the sacred soul and the ethereal, you know, like the untouched relationship?

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  Well, you know, so those things are in some ways, I think artificially separated because, you know, the use of psychoactive substances for religious and spiritual development is something that goes back thousands of years within our species. I mean, there's even some scholarship now coming out suggesting that some of the early founding of religious movements were probably partly set off by people who were having drugs.

• 1:12:35Chris Williamson?

  I've got the book. I've got the, what's it called? The Immortality Key. The Immortality Key literally, literally got delivered today. So I've got him, I've got him coming on in January. I'm excited. I can't pronounce his surname. I'm sorry, man. Your surname is going to take me a couple of months to prepare to say.

• 1:12:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think there, these kind of, these movements have been trying to strive for kind of authenticity where we aren't so bogged down by the patterns of the world, you know, are, are. You know, imagined hierarchies and our in-group, out-group distinctions and all this kind of stuff, you know, there's lots of religious and wisdom and spiritual movements that try to get people to break down some of that stuff and they do it through different techniques. Meditation is one such technique. Exercise for some people is a way of just, you know, getting their mind in a certain kind of different space. And also the use of, you know, like ayahuasca in the Amazon basin has been going on for thousands of years, peyote in the Native American church. You know, LSD has only been around so long because it was synthesized in a lab, but it's the same kind of an idea.

• 1:13:36Speaker 00

  It's just using a substance that prompts your mind to enter into a space whereby many people feel that they are able to clear away the dross and the confusion and the clutter and the socialization and the distinctions and the stereotypes and get down to the basic fact of the matter and kind of rebuild their perception from there. And so, you know, this is, if you think of it as one of a number of tools that human societies over millennia have developed, including contemplative practices and so forth, to try to get down to the bare bones, then, then you see it as really part of that same tradition that you're keyed into rather than as something that's competing with it.

• 1:14:15Chris Williamson?

  I think you're right, man. I think you're right. Look, "Love is the Drug" will be linked in the show notes below the chemical future of our relationships. If you bite through that link, you will be supporting the show at no extra cost to yourself, of course. Brian, if people want to check out more of your work or any other stuff, where should they go?

• 1:14:31Speaker 00

  All my writing, academic writing is on academia.edu/ my name, Brian D. Earp, I think it is. I'm on Twitter, I'm on ResearchGate, and you can reach out to me in any of those places.

• 1:14:43Chris Williamson?

  Sick. Thank you, man.

• 1:14:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, thanks for this conversation. This was great.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  ...