I am still alive

What's been going on in the journalism of consciousness realm.

I haven’t written on this thing since March, and that was a bit of a doozy. I’ve been pleasantly busy. But perhaps you joined this newsletter to keep some vague sense of what I’m up to, or what I’m writing. If these are among your curiosities, here is an update.

I’m writing lots of stuff for Future Perfect, my squadron at Vox, where my contractual obligation is to write about the frontiers of political economy and consciousness science. Imagine that! A jaunt through some highlights:

Science of consciousness

• The past decade has seen a progressive expansion of the kinds of things that Western culture is willing to consider might be conscious. We’re moving from a human-centrism to now including animals, and perhaps event plants and insects. But what about computers?
  
  More broadly, what about things that are not made of carbon, or biological material, but silicon, or metal? Many philosophers of mind are now making the assumption that non-biological systems, like AI, can become conscious so long as they can perform the right kinds of computation. I’m skeptical of this, but what do I know. So I spoke to philosophers of mind and computer scientists and cognitive scientists to sketch the landscape of this debate down to its core question: do you need biology to have a mind? Or, if you’ve read Terry Bisson’s excellent short story: Must minds be made of meat?

• The richer a state of consciousness, the more ineffable, or impossible to describe with words, it gets. This is both strange and frustrating — intense experiences are often those we might want to communicate most. Mystics, meditators, and people who take lots of drugs have been grating against this for millennia.
  
  Now, as consciousness science leans into its “structural turn,” where math is taking a swing where language hasn’t dispelled the mind’s mysteries, I wrote about new work in mathematizing the old problem of ineffability. The upshot is that while ineffability means information loss, it also enables generalization, which makes it easier for those ineffable experiences to yield insights that help us navigate chaotic and unpredictable environments.

  

• Neuroscience has gone from staining neurons black in the late 1800s to quantifying the complexity of brain activity. It’s tough to glean much about well-being from single neurons. But if you look at the brain’s overall electrical activity, turns out that you can maybe tell quite a bit, like how rich a moment of experience is. Maybe richness can help break open stale ideas like “happiness,” adding some diversity and nuance to what makes for a “good” state of consciousness — I wrote a little about this saga.

Psychedelics and Meditation

• Last year, I wrote about the science of meditation’s ongoing transition from studying basic mindfulness to more advanced and interesting stuff.

• A few months ago, I finally got around to publishing my piece on the jhanas, or the series of advanced meditative states that are actually quite accessible to beginners, intensely strange and blissful, and may help bring all sorts of attention to the many as-of-yet under-explored ways that minds can learn to feel. And if you’re looking for a very straightforward manual, Nadia’s writing on the jhanas has been a delight to read.

  

• People consistently rate psychedelic experiences as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. This is a curious fact, and it replicates. Given all the interest humans have shown in having meaningful experiences (as opposed to what, mere existing?), I spoke to a bunch of scientists to figure out what psychedelics might tell us about the neural mechanics of meaning, and the role of society and culture.

Economics

• In his famous 1948 textbook, economist Paul Samuelson writes: “Ours is a world of scarcity…All your life — from cradle to grave and beyond — you will run up against the brutal truths of economics.”
  
  I find this a pernicious way of thinking, and thankfully, its hold on the social and economic imagination is beginning to slip (though if I’m being charitable, I see what he means). I wrote about the history, present, and future of a modest interpretation of “post-scarcity,” where basic needs are unconditionally met, and scarcity’s hold on the mind gives way to something more interesting.

• Some people see guaranteed income as a “capitalist road to communism,” or a world free of work. Others see it as everything from a means of unleashing the population’s creative potential to a policy that would undermine human agency and erode “psychological capital.” Some see it as a way to shore up the welfare state. Others, a way to bulldoze it.
  
  But when you look at the actual proposals, studies of their impacts, and pilot experiments, the truth seems less drastic. A world with basic income is one of less poverty and higher taxes, not utopia or collapse. (And if you’re interested in an overview of the research on basic income, take a gander at our report over at the Library of Economic Possibility.)

  

• The US has designed unemployment insurance to mostly cover people who get laid off. If you quit, you don’t get unemployment benefits, largely because helping people quit their jobs has not really been seen as a policy objective. I wrote about how extending unemployment benefits to people who quit, by making it easier to leave shitty jobs, could actually salvage the logic of markets that has been deployed to justify capitalism in everyone from Adam Smith through to Friedrich Hayek and Albert Hirschman.
  
  The freedom to quit shitty jobs turns out to be an important and overlooked aspect of making capitalism work as its supposed to.

• If shorter workweeks are really going to become a thing in the US, it will be because workers get more bargaining power, not because advocates manage to convince companies that it’s good for productivity. Strong German labor unions managed to bargain for codetermination in the early 20th century, which was later codified by federal law. This is a good template to think about achieving shorter working weeks in the US, so I chronicled the fight for codetermination in Germany, looking at how it could inform efforts for shorter weeks in the US today.

• “Phase-ins” are a long-standing practice through which American economists and politicians have prevented the poorest Americans from receiving government benefits, grounded in the belief that doing so would do more harm (support laziness) than good (relieve poverty).
  
  I don’t think this practice has ever really held up to scrutiny, but in the past few years, the case for phase-ins has absolutely crumbled. And yet they remain in place on programs like the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit. “That’s something that a lot of research organizations are engaging with now,” policy researcher Halah Ahmad told me, “this question of how much further we can get with evidence, when we know that narrative eats evidence for lunch.”
  
  In this piece, I covered the history and present of arguments for and against phase-ins, hopefully contributing to the erosion of their future. Because child poverty is a choice that we keep making:

  

Psychedelic rituals

I’m working on a piece that looks at the role of ritual in psychedelic experiences, with an eye towards the landscape of rituals (that already exist, that are emerging, that may yet be developed) in the West.

I’m curious to explore just how deep the influence of ritual goes, and modes of thinking about (and ritualizing) the sacred in the context of Western secularism. If you have ideas, thoughts, or resources, please feel free to reach out. I’d love to chat about this.

And that brings you mostly up to speed on what I’ve been writing. With updates out of the way, the next dispatches will turn back to the good stuff, this newsletter’s usual fare (a few entry-points for those of you who’ve just recently joined): keeping tabs on the contours of the ‘general theory of spirituality’ emerging from the confluence of cognitive science and contemplative practice, scouting out bridges between things like poverty and the neuroscience of very strange meditative states, and how ideas like “resonance” bring sociology and neuroscience into the same conversation about what it means to live well.

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