Your Brain on AI

Drugs, prayer, and the point of writing.

“This discovery, oh king,” said the god, “will make the Egyptians wiser and improve their memories: it’s a magic supplement for memory and wisdom.”

—Plato, Phaedrus

The other day I found myself sitting across from a man at dinner while he advertised to me the therapeutic benefits of ketamine. Small doses, he explained, can help create a little distance between your feelings and your thoughts, leaving you free to consider your emotions more coolly and react to them less impulsively. Since the drug induces a heightened state of “neuroplasticity,” in which the brain becomes more supple and new behaviors settle quickly into new habits, your better choices last longer.

I’ve heard this pitch before. It sounds, I said, a little like a booster shot for CBT or “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy”—the practice that trains you to reason with yourself about feelings of anxiety or anger. If I were being more flip I’d have said, you’re telling me you’ve invented a Stoicism pill. “Let the decision-making part of you be master of your mind, unruffled by the weak and wild stirrings of the flesh,” wrote the Stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius. “Fence it off, and keep those feelings in their place.” That’s what micro-dosing ketamine and other dissociative hallucinogens is supposed to help you do.

I’m not completely closed to this idea as a one-time way of dislodging the brain from a truly pathological rut. But I still had to ask the question I always ask: “isn’t it the case that we already know how to achieve exactly the state of mind these drugs induce, but naturally—through fasting and prayer?”

I have reason to believe this is true, and if it is, it seems to me like it makes a pretty freaking huge difference. My new friend, a genuinely decent and open-minded fellow, started discussing with me an experience he had once at a seven-day silent retreat. It seemed like he had arrived, on day four or so of quiet meditation, at a state of serenity and detachment similar to the one the drugs created immediately on day one. Which raises the question: if drugs and prayer can land you in the same place, does it matter how you get there? Or only where you end up?

I can see one way in which the route you take might matter enormously. Aristotle makes a nice distinction between will (boulēsis) and choice (prohairesis). Our will points us toward certain goals, and our choices help us reach those goals. “Will is of ends,” writes Aristotle, “but choices are of means toward ends.” If I offer you chocolate or vanilla ice cream, you have to have a goal already in mind—deliciousness, let’s say—to make your choice. By the time we get around to choosing, we already want what we want.

Which means before you reach the point of decision, you better hope you’ve spent some good time in advance honing your will, pointing it in the right direction. Let’s say for the sake of argument that both prayer and ketamine can set you free from slavery to the emotions of the moment and unlock your power to choose. Once you get into that open field, which way will you turn?

Surely it matters very much whether you hiked up to that mountaintop by a slow and steady effort of self-discipline, or got air-dropped there all of a sudden by a magic pill. The process itself of setting your will free can either make your will ready for freedom, or not.

My instinct is that teleporting ten steps down a spiritual road that other people travel day by day will leave you ill-equipped to know where to go once you get there. When I was a kid I used to put in cheat codes that skipped me to the final boss of a video game. But even with all the relevant upgrades, I wasn’t good enough at the game itself to play it very well at that level. I hadn’t put in the hours yet. I hadn’t beaten the other bosses along the way.

I raise all this not simply to be a buzzkill, but because it seems to me the logic of ketamine therapy is also very much at work in the way people are thinking about using AI in education. Plato tells this wonderful story about the invention of writing, in which he imagines the Egyptian god Thoth advertising the new technology as a pharmakon, a magic drug or supplement, to improve “wisdom and memory.” This mathēma—this discovery, or “key learning,” if you will—can boost abilities which previously took years to train.

The people who tell me there’s no point in teaching students to write essays or memorize facts anymore sound a lot like the people who tell me drugs can heal your soul. It’s not that medications don’t have their uses—obviously they do. So does writing, and so does ChatGPT. That’s not Plato’s point. His point is that you can’t use a machine or a drug to fast forward a process that’s supposed to form the soul. It just doesn’t work like that. The product might be the same at the end. But you won’t. So what good will the product be?

“Those who rely on writing exterior to themselves,” says the wise king Thamus to the god Thoth, “won’t develop their own powers of memory within themselves.” The same could be said of those students who, cheered on by disastrously well-meaning and fantastically ditzy adults, replace the inner effort of writing and thinking with the exterior computation done by a bot. The muscles of their mind will atrophy, and their “education” will turn out to have drained them of the skills they desperately need to survive.

Neurological evidence of this is already mounting, but we don’t really need it. We can see and feel the difference when we think for ourselves. For the soul does not admit of shortcuts, and drugs are not equivalent to prayer. The materialism of our addled age may have trained us to think otherwise. But that doesn’t make it so.