Hi everyone, Shabbat Shalom! I haven’t been thinking about a lot this week, so I figure I’ll go back to the “digest” format, giving you stuff from elsewhere that you might find interesting. I’m falling behind again, I had to get something out, don’t blame me. The upshot is this one should be a bit easier reading than last week’s…
REBUS and SSRIs
Now that my Charles Taylor book club is over, I found it fitting to join another reading group. The topic? “Neuroscience of Consciousness” (DM me if you want to join! Open to all). Last week we read Carhartt-Harris and Friston’s paper “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics”, which lays out a theory of the function of serotonin in the brain.
I read this paper back when it came out, around 2019, and I had some thoughts then, which boil down to “what is ethics, but neuroscience?” I had another pet theory in the time since then, and I figure this would be a good week to share it, given the reading group’s paper for the week. The idea was an attempt to answer that burning question, “how do SSRIs work?”
Please note: I AM NOT A PSYCHIATRIST, PSYCHOLOGIST, OR DOCTOR OF ANY SORT. THIS IS NOT MEDICAL ADVICE. I DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT, I’M JUST CONNECTING SOME LOW HANGING FRUIT. Anyway, with that out of the way, let’s move on.
For a little background on the paper, check out the SSC post about REBUS. I’ll quote Scott to give you a little summary:
Priors are unconscious assumptions about reality that the brain uses to construct models. They can range all the way from basic truths like “solid objects don’t randomly disappear”, to useful rules-of-thumb like “most get-rich-quick schemes are scams”, to emotional hangups like “I am a failure”, to unfair stereotypes like “Italians are lazy”. Without any priors, the world would fail to make sense at all, turning into an endless succession of special cases without any common lessons. But if priors become too strong, a person can become closed-minded and stubborn, refusing to admit evidence that contradicts their views.
F&CH argue that psychedelics “relax” priors, giving them less power to shape experience. Part of their argument is neuropharmacologic: most psychedelics are known to work through the 5-HT2A receptor. These receptors are most common in the cortex, the default mode network, and other areas at the “top” of a brain hierarchy going from low-level sensations to high-level cognitions. The 5-HT2A receptors seem to strengthen or activate these high-level areas in some way. So:
Consistent with hierarchical predictive processing, we maintain that the highest level of the brain’s functional architecture ordinarily exerts an important constraining and compressing influence on perception, cognition, and emotion, so that perceptual anomalies and ambiguities—as well as dissonance and incongruence—are easily and effortlessly explained away via the invocation of broad, domain-general compressive narratives. In this work, we suggest that psychedelics impair this compressive function, resulting in a decompression of the mind-at-large—and that this is their most definitive mind-manifesting action.
But their argument also hinges on the observation that psychedelics cause all the problems we would expect from weakened priors. For example, without strong priors about object permanence to constrain visual perception toward stability, we would expect the noise of the visual sensorium to make objects pulse, undulate, flicker, or dissolve. These are some of the most typical psychedelic hallucinations:
consider the example of hallucinated motion, e.g., perceiving motion in scenes that are actually static, such as seeing walls breathing, a classic experience with moderate doses of psychedelics. This phenomenon can be fairly viewed as relatively low level, i.e., as an anomaly of visual perception. However, we propose that its basis in the brain is not necessarily entirely low-level but may also arise due to an inability of high-level cortex to effectively constrain the relevant lower levels of the (visual) system. These levels include cortical regions that send information to V5, the motion-sensitive module of the visual system. Ordinarily, the assumption “walls don’t breathe” is so heavily weighted that it is rendered implicit (and therefore effectively silent) by a confident (highly-weighted) summarizing prior or compressive model. However, under a psychedelic, V5 may be forced to interpret increased signaling arising from lower-level units because of a functional negligence, not just within V5 itself, but also higher up in the hierarchy. Findings of impaired high- but not low-level motion perception with psilocybin could be interpreted as broadly consistent with this model, namely, pinning the main source of disruption high up in the brain’s functional hierarchy.
This (kind of) explains how psychedelics work: they relax high level priors, some of which may be disrupted permanently, and this permits new, ideally better/more adaptive high level priors to form. This takes time: in my anecdotal experience, one might spend about a month processing the “trip” (or longer!). That’s the time it takes to form new high level priors once old ones are disrupted.
What about SSRIs? They seem to act on the same serotonin receptor, 5-HT2A. Wikipedia sez:
SSRIs inhibit the reuptake of serotonin. As a result, the serotonin stays in the synaptic gap longer than it normally would, and may repeatedly stimulate the receptors of the recipient cell. In the short run, this leads to an increase in signaling across synapses in which serotonin serves as the primary neurotransmitter. On chronic dosing, the increased occupancy of post-synaptic serotonin receptors signals the pre-synaptic neuron to synthesize and release less serotonin. Serotonin levels within the synapse drop, then rise again, ultimately leading to downregulation of post-synaptic serotonin receptors.
Put simply, your “serotonin levels”, (in this case, 5-HT2A) go up, and then your body adjusts homeostatically, like with any sort of drug tolerance, and the levels go down again, perhaps lower than they were before. This takes a few weeks to happen.
Let’s connect this up with REBUS. More serotonin signaling means your high level priors become destabilized. SSRIs seem to function far more weakly than psychedelics, so they may not cause a “a decompression of the mind-at-large” as psychedelics do. Rather, they create a little more noise, a little more instability, and thus open up potential for “deconstructing” your priors, but in a far less intense manner than, say, LSD.
We can hypothesize that it takes a month or three for the entire process to play out (hence “it takes a month to work”). SSRIs gently disrupt your priors, and then you form new ones, which could be better or worse overall (depending on your needs), but will be more related to your present environment vs historical environments (i.e. traumas). Since it doesn’t happen “all at once”, there’s more opportunity to control its direction, and to remain “functional” throughout the period of use.
After this, once you hit “chronic” use, those priors then get “locked in place” a little more firmly, as your serotonin levels drop via tolerance. In my own anecdotal experience, this tolerance feels like “zombification”: your highs and lows feel “less high” and “less low”.
Thus there’s a critical period of a few months max where SSRIs have the potential for transformative change. Ideally this would be paired with more traditional psychotherapy, i.e. a helpful environment to orient you toward change, so that you end up with a better rather than worse set of priors. Then, after the few month window, you should go off SSRIs.
Unfortunately, since the popular conception of serotonin is as “the happiness chemical”, and since doctors want to get paid, people assume “more serotonin = better” and want to stay on SSRIs forever. The withdrawals can also be pretty bad, so I assume it makes sense to keep patients on them if they’re already past that initial adjustment window, in order to avoid “brain zaps” or what have you.
Speaking psychoanalytically, the serotonin system offers the key to both why compulsive repetition occurs (static or fixed high level priors), and how change occurs as a result of therapeutic methods (rewriting high level priors). This relates deeply to the Freudian life and death drives I wrote about last week.
This leads us into the next topic I wanted to discuss, more in digest form: the superego.
Self-Transformation and the Superego
A friend sent me the following tweet, and asked me to explain it:
But he's overly simplifying things. Or I should say — he's talking about only the discourse and doesn't comment on whether this intervention works (pro tip: it doesn't). What [“just chill bro stop overthinking”] tends to do [for those with “overactive superegos”] is produce ambivalence, or worse (rage). The actual way to deal with overactive superego is find out a way to give it what it wants.
Lacan says the superego demands enjoyment, so lots of people are able to smartly satisfy this by giving the appearance of enjoying, like taking a lot of Instagram photos of them on vacation. But it's not "real" enjoyment, because it's just a superego-satisfaction. This leads to a lot of confusion.
It's more like, people take Instagram photos because they have a duty to be perceived by themselves/others as enjoying, rather than necessarily a duty to enjoy. Uploading the photo is felt as a relief, rather than as an attainment of something specifically desired. Another angle is that the superego is like an agent who can read your thoughts and wants you to think/do the right things. so as long as you're satisfying it somehow, it's happy.
The "secret" from the Freudian angle is in his original diagram:
The superego has a direct line into the id that bypasses the ego. In other words, it’s acting autonomously or separately from your conscious thoughts.
My friend asked: “So what the fuck do you do if you have to satisfy the superego and the superego's desire is to kill you.”
Self-transformation. It doesn't want you to kill yourself materially, but you could say that its desire is to kill off a certain piece of yourself, or to “end” “you” in some form.
This is very specifically the core of the Oedipus complex. Freud interestingly sees the superego as man's cultural heritage, as obtained from the father (quote from The Ego and the Id):
..now that we have embarked upon the analysis of the ego we can give an answer to all those whose moral sense has been shocked and who have complained that there must surely be a higher nature in man: 'Very true,' we can say, 'and here we have that higher nature, in this ego ideal or super-ego, the representative of our relation to our parents. When we were little children we knew these higher natures, we admired them and feared them; and later we took them into ourselves.' ... It is easy to show that the ego ideal [or super-ego] answers to everything that is expected of the higher nature of man. As a substitute for a longing for the father, it contains the germ from which all religions have evolved. The self-judgement which declares that the ego falls short of its ideal produces the religious sense of humility to which the believer appeals in his longing. As a child grows up, the role of father is carried on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship. The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt. Social feelings rest on identifications with other people, on the basis of having the same ego ideal. Religion, morality, and a social sense--the chief elements in the higher side of man--were originally one and the same thing.
I then attempted to “translate” the story of the superego into a different, more behaviorist or typical psychological type of language:
We must assume that people understand others by way of internalization. I have a model of you, and you of me, etc.
Children also perform internalization of others in their life.
The relationship of the parents to their children is different than most other relationships, because the parents both have more time with the child than basically anyone else, and also have power of life or death over them alongside the ability to satisfy the child's needs. So the child's model of the parents is much more intense and direct than most other people, because that model contains (a) the potential to destroy them, as well as (b) the potential to satisfy their needs.
Our models of others rarely fully fade, but rather become complicated as they intermingle with other models we obtain, and new ways we understand ourselves. So the parent-model persists in a specific and weird way, even as we self-develop.
The key I mentioned above is transforming one's relationship with this model, which emerges at certain times/in certain situations that returns one to the feeling of being a child who fears/needs the parents.
One of Lacan's insights, building on this, was that we enter into language, the symbolic realm, constructing a symbolic self, as a way of figuring out how to better obtain the satisfaction of our needs vis a vis the parent. This happens prior to the development of the superego/ego ideal. this makes sense because parents obviously like it when their kid speaks, and reward them for it.
In other words, he would be onboard with “All Communication is Manipulation” as a developmental view — but might diverge from it, when thinking about the idea of "babbling", the child making noise because they enjoy it, and also with the potential for self-manipulation thru communication, by way of projecting parts of oneself onto others and then addressing them (like how transference / love works).
Of course, this self-transformation is mediated by the serotonin system. Psychedelics are a great way to induce the kind of change involved, breaking down old patterns and finding new ways to better satisfy superego demands.
This idea too, that language is oriented toward attaining satisfaction through making demands on others, is a deeper way of justifying this tweet I made earlier this week:
If you can formulate your desire positively, you can make specific demands of “little others” (specific others, “do you want to do this for/with me?”), rather than orienting your demand negatively, toward the “big Other” (“I’m lacking, someone, anyone please help me!”).
Rejection feels different in these two cases, though. In the former case, the specific other stands in a metonymic relationship with the big Other, i.e. the single person acts as the part representing the whole. So a direct rejection from a specific other person can feel like a direct rejection from everyone, whereas a demand oriented toward everyone in the abstract is unlikely to be rejected directly, only indirectly (pls respond…).
This metonymic relationship helps explain the following tweet:
Specifically, the “spiritual power over men” that women hold (qua “the Other sex”) is precisely that each individual woman, to the man, stands in a metonymic relationship to “all women”.
This is obviously a stressful position for any woman to be in, and is also, importantly, not what man is for women. It doesn’t go both ways, at least not all the time. Re “what is man to woman?” (in the purely grammatical or formal sense), Lacan writes, in Seminar XX:
You know how much fun analysts have had with Don Juan, whom they have described in every possible way, including as a homosexual, which really takes the cake. But center him on what I just illustrated for you… Don’t you see that what is essential in the feminine myth of Don Juan is that he has them one by one?
That is what the other sex, the masculine sex, is for women. In that sense, the image of Don Juan is of capital importance.
From the moment there are names, one can make a list of women and count them. If there are mille e tre of them, it’s clear that one can take them one by one — that is what is essential. That is entirely different from the One of universal fusion [the metonymic operation I described above].
This is as far as I can take you today with Lacan’s theory of sexuation, but I recommend Zizek’s paper on the topic, “Otto Weininger, or, ‘Woman Doesn’t Exist’”, from his book The Metastases of Enjoyment for a deeper dive that doesn’t require unraveling Lacan’s obscure aphorisms.
Tinder Again (and Again and Again)
This idea of the metonymic function reminds me of the sort of desire that Tinder et al attempts to cultivate in its user base. The fantasy is that you “can have them all”, and the app developers cultivate this by literally hiring slot machine designers to keep the desire active, but just at arm’s length. This is, of course, because it’s good for business:
On a more fundamental level than just the dominance of appearance on dating apps, vis a vis male gaze, the “trick” is that you feel you can match with everyone at once. The “stack” of profiles to match with is tailored precisely for this. Not getting matches in a while? Tinder will throw 3 in a row at you. Now you’re excited, thinking of all the options, etc. Back in the game. Not working? Tinder has corporate propaganda to help.
Now with extra righteousness! The superego gets what it demands.
I believe there is a part within us that resists this primal desire, a pragmatic part adjusted to the reality of our lives, that of course, none of us can have them all, that the archetypal figure of Chad is the fantasy, the exception to the rule. Most of us will end up in long-term monogamous relationships, and this is actually something we want on some level, perhaps because it appeals to a… superegoic principle? I haven’t thought too deeply about it.
What I want to point to isn’t that Tinder’s orienting you toward a “fake” desire, but rather that this sort of “I can have them all” is a real desire, yet also unattainable, that we each must negotiate throughout their lives, in various ways, and also that it coexists with other real desires, such as to have a stable domestic situation, to raise children, etc. I tried to get at this here:
Working off a similar framing, what makes Twitter interesting as a dating app is that, if used properly, individual users actually have a chance at differentiating themselves from others, at being seen in the form of “one by one” rather than “everyone all at once”. And the deep parts that differentiate us from each other come from our little accidents, our slips, where we reveal something beyond our mere “ideal images”.
Similarly, the bluecheck is not only a controlled entity, but a relatively homogenous entity. All bluechecks are alike, in terms of who they are and what they want: they want engagement metrics and conversation rates. They’re mostly undifferentiated in terms of desire. This adds another layer to my follow-up tweet:
The bluecheck is everyone, but also nobody. They are a pure manifestation of capitalism or modernity, in the guise of the objet petit a, as I discussed last week: the promise of something or other that will finally make me happy (although most of us are cynical enough now to know this isn’t true). Whereas individual people, with their slips and mistakes, don’t promise perfection but rather present the opportunity to really know someone, a situation made a little difficult on apps like Tinder, where your date fills in your name on a spreadsheet and ranks you along various categories. Why do you think so many successful dating app stories start with something like “she’d only been on the app for a few days, and I was the first one she went on a date with?”
Miscellania
I think I’ll leave it at that. I’ve gone on and on again, even though I said I hadn’t been thinking about anything.
Have a cute story about that time I expressed myself directly at vibe camp, and was rewarded for it (now imagine trying this in a bureaucratic environment):
> It doesn't want you to kill yourself materially, but you could say that its desire is to kill off a certain piece of yourself, or to “end” “you” in some form.
Or in simpler terms, "stop being cringe" and its own form of cringe discourse.
Also, thanks for the Lacanian breakdown, if only it can get graphical with the ideas on discourse. "Chill", "Cringe", "Woke/Based", "Fake" could all be rephrased in the Lacanian.
> It doesn't want you to kill yourself materially, but you could say that its desire is to kill off a certain piece of yourself, or to “end” “you” in some form.
Or in simpler terms, "stop being cringe" and its own form of cringe discourse.
Also, thanks for the Lacanian breakdown, if only it can get graphical with the ideas on discourse. "Chill", "Cringe", "Woke/Based", "Fake" could all be rephrased in the Lacanian.
https://www.lacanticles.com/2011/10/26/the-perverse-discourses/
https://www.lacanticles.com/2020/12/20/the-libidinal-economy-of-discourses-and-the-challenges-of-maladaptation/