Presents the author’s view of the best current positions on certain core philosophical and psychological problems. These positions together suggest a skeptical or nihilist perspective modified by evolutionary psychology and contemporary philosophy that embraces our desire to live as best we can and the relative and psychological reality of values, free will and other phenomena while recognizing limitations on their foundations and our understanding. Readers may want to start with the first entry. - Marc Krellenstein (personal info here)
Nozick (1974) says why we might not choose to hook ourselves up to ‘experience machines’ that could deliver any kind of reality we chose (e.g., the experience of writing a great novel) because we value our experience being real in addition to the experiences themselves. Something like this is probably part of some people’s uneasiness about certain forms of psychopharmacology. Psychotherapy seems preferable for many because they think it effects its improvements by ‘really’ transforming us — our beliefs, behaviors and emotions — rather than by giving us a drug-induced experience. But it’s not clear from the evidence that psychotherapy always works this way, or that some drugs may not be as transformational (Kramer, 1993; some people report that the prescribed drugs allowed them to be their ‘real selves’). There remain knotty problems here, though, in the end, drugs are not all that different from psychotherapy or any other form of personality manipulation (including religious conversion), all of which, if successful, ultimately result in changes in the brain that produce the desired effects with greater or less difficulty, with fewer or more undesirable side-effects and with varying degrees of permanence and related changes (and the ability to deliberately reverse them).
(Medication or therapy might also produce effects that we didn’t explicitly want but with which we are happy, or at least newly tolerant. These might include effects that we not only didn’t choose but would have avoided if we knew they would occur. Kramer reports that few patients he’s aware of discontinue SSRI-type anti-depressants despite experiencing the not so uncommon sexual side-effect of delayed, or the inability to attain, orgasm, suggesting it’s because patients so value the benefits of the medication. Reduced libido has also been reported with such drugs. However, it may be that some patients do not simply tolerate these unwanted side-effects but no longer experience them as undesirable in the same way. This fits with Kramer’s idea that the drugs effect a broader transformation than simply addressing symptoms.)