States of Consciousness
Charles T. Tart
15. State-Specific Communication
"According the general opinion of the uninitiated,"
mused Nasrudin, as he walked along the road, "dervishes are
mad. According to the sages, however, they are the true masters
of the world. I would like to test one, and myself, to make sure."
Then he saw a tall figure, robed like a Akldan dervish—reputed
to be exceptionally enlightened men—coming towards him.
"Friend," said the Mulla, "I want to perform an
experiment, to test your powers of psychic penetration, and also
my sanity."
"Proceed," said the Akldan.
Nasrudin made a sudden sweeping motion with his arm, then clenched
his fist. "What have I in my hand?"
"A horse, chariot, and driver," said the Akldan immediately.
"That's no real test,—Nasrudin was petulant—"because
you saw me pick them up." {57, p. 79}
In d-ASCs people often claim to have exceptional and important
insights about themselves or about the nature of the world that
they are unable to communicate to the rest of us owing to the
ineffability of the experience, the inadequacy of language, or
the "lowness" of the ordinary d-SoC that makes us incapable
of understanding "higher" things. The general scientific
opinion, however, is that communicative ability deteriorates in
various d-ASCs, such as drug-induced or mystical states. This
opinion is usually based on the observation that the experimenter/observer
has difficulty understanding what the person in the d-ASC is talking
about; his comments make no sense by ordinary consensus reality
standards.
I suspect that sometimes this judgment is based on fear, on the
semiconscious recognition that what a person in a d-ASC is saying
may be all too true, but somehow unacceptable. I recall the time
when a friend of mine was having a psychotic breakdown: it struck
me that half the things he said were clearly crazy, in the sense
of being unrelated to the social situation around him and reflecting
only his own internal processes, but the other half of the things
he said were such penetrating, often unflattering, observations
about what other people were really feeling and doing that they
were threatening to most of us. Bennett {5} makes the same observation,
noting that after his wife had a cerebral hemorrhage she seemed
to lose all the usual social inhibitions and said directly what
she felt. This was extremely threatening to most people and was
regarded as senile dementia or insanity; yet to a few who were
not personally threatened by her observation, her comments were
extremely penetrating. If you label someone as crazy, you need
not listen to him.
How can we decide in an objective fashion whether someone in a
d-ASC is able to communicate more or less clearly? Perhaps this
is the wrong question. I propose that, for at least some d-ASCs,
there are significant alterations in the manner in which a person
communicates. Changes in various subsystems, especially the Evaluation
and Decision-Making subsystem, produce a new logic, so that the
grammar of communication, including the nonverbal aspects of expression,
constitutes a different kind of language, one that may be just
as effective in communicating with someone else in the same
d-ASC as ordinary communication is in the ordinary d-Soc.
We must consider this possibility in an objective manner, but
be careful not implicitly to equate "objectivity' with the
standards of only one d-SoC.
For a given d-ASC, then, how can we determine whether there is
deterioration, improvement, or simply alteration in communication
ability, or a complex combination of all three? More specifically,
we must ask this question with respect to communication across
d-SoCs—about communication between two persons in different d-SoCs
as well as about communication between two persons in the same
d-SoC. In regard to the last two situations, only theorizing is
possible, for all published research deals only with the restricted
situation of an experimental subject in a d-ASC and the experimenter/observer
in his ordinary d-SoC.
If the grammar of communication is altered in a d-ASC, then clearly
a judge in an ordinary d-SoC cannot distinguish between the hypotheses
of deterioration and of alteration in the communicative style
of a person in a d-ASC. The specialized argot of a subcultural
group may sound, to an outside observer, like the talk of schizophrenics.
A person familiar with that subculture, on the other hand, finds
the communications exchanged among the group perfectly meaningful,
perhaps extraordinarily rich. In this example, contextual clues
may make the outsider suspect this is a subcultural argot, but
if the group is in an institutional setting and is labeled "schizophrenic,"
he may readily conclude that its speech has indeed deteriorated,
without bothering to study the matter further.
To judge adequately whether communicative patterns have altered
(and possibly improved) rather than deteriorated, the judge must
function in the same d-ASC as the communicator. Experienced marijuana
smokers, for example, claim they can subtly communicate all sorts
of things—especially humor—to each other while intoxicated {105}.
The degree to which an observer in a different d-SoC—for example,
his ordinary d-SoC—can understand the same communication is interesting,
but not a valid measure of the adequacy of the communication within
the d-ASC. And, as explained in earlier chapters, identification
of a person as being in a particular d-ASC must be based not just
on the fact that he has undergone an induction procedure (for
example, taken a drug) but on actual mapping of his location in
experiential space.
Suppose the judge is in the same d-ASC as the subjects in the
study, and reports that their communication is rich and meaningful,
not at all deteriorated. How do we know that the judge's mental
processes themselves are not deteriorated and that he is not just
enjoying the illusion of understanding, rather than prosaically
judging the subjects' communication? The question leads to general
problems of measuring the accuracy and adequacy of communication,
an area I know little about. All the work in this area has been
done with respect to ordinary d-SoC communication, but I believe
the techniques can be applied to this question of adequacy of
communication in d-ASCs. I shall try to show this by describing
one technique for rating ordinary d-SoC communication with which
I am familiar that could be readily applied to judging d-ASC communication.
It is the Cloze technique {140}. It measures, simultaneously,
how well a written or verbal communication is both phrased (encoded)
and how well it is understood by a receiver or judge. From a written
message or a transcript of a spoken message, every fifth word
is deleted. Judges then guess what the deleted words are, and
the total number of words correct is a measure of the accuracy
and meaningfulness of the communication. If a judge understands
the communicator well, he can fill in a high proportion of the
words correctly; if he does not understand him well he gets very
few correct. This technique works because ordinary language is
fairly redundant, so the overall context of the message allows
excellent guesses about missing words. This technique can be applied
to communications between subjects as judged both by a judge in
the same d-ASC, thus testing adequacy of communication within
the d-ASC, and by a judge in a different d-SoC, thus measuring
transfer across states. We think of the different d-SoC, thus
measuring transfer across states. We think of the different d-SoC
as being the ordinary state, but other d-SoCs are possible, and
we can eventually use this technique for a cross-comparison across
all d-SoCs we know of and produce important information about
both communication and the nature of various d-SoCs.
Two problems arise in applying the Cloze technique in investigating
communications in d-ASCs. One is that a particular d-ASC may be
associated with a switch to more nonverbal components of communication.
This difficulty could probably be remedied by making videotapes
of the procedure, and systematically deleting every fifth second,
and letting the judges fill in the gap. The second problem is
that communication in a d-ASC may be as adequate, but less redundant,
a circumstance that would artificially lower the scores on the
Cloze test without adequately testing the communication. I leave
this problem as a challenge to others.
Another important methodological factor is the degree of adaptation
to functioning in a particular d-ASC. I am sure techniques of
the Cloze type would show deterioration in communication within
d-ASCs for subjects who are relatively naive in functioning in
those d-ASCs. Subjects have to adapt to the novelty of a d-ASC;
they may even need specific practice in learning to communicate
within it. The potential for an altered style of communication,
state-specific communication, may be present and need to be developed,
rather than being available immediately upon entering the d-ASC.
I do not imply simply that people learn to compensate for the
deterioration associated with a d-ASC, but rather that they learn
the altered style of communication inherent in or more natural
to that particular d-ASC.
In Chapter 16, in which I propose the creation of state-specific
sciences, I assume that communication within some d-ASCs is adequate:
this is a necessary foundation for the creation of state-specific
sciences. In making this assumption, I depend primarily on experiential
observations by people in d-ASCs. Objective verification with
the Cloze technique or similar techniques is a necessary underpinning
for this. As state-specific sciences are developed, on the other
hand, technique for evaluating the adequacy of communication may
be developed within particular states that can be agreed upon
as "scientific" techniques within that state, even though
they do not necessarily make sense in the ordinary d-SoC.
Another interesting question concerns transfer of communicative
ability after the termination of a d-ASC to the ordinary (or any
other) d-SoC. Experienced marijuana smokers, for example, claim
that they can understand a subject intoxication on marijuana even
when they are not intoxication themselves because of partial transfer
of state-specific knowledge to the ordinary d-SoC. We need to
study the validity of this phenomenon.
In earlier chapters I avoid talking about "higher" states
of consciousness, as the first job of science is description,
not evaluation. Here, however, I want to speculate on what one
relatively objective definition of the adjective higher, applied
to a d-SoC, could mean with respect to communication. If we consider
that understanding many communications from other people is more
valuable than understanding few of their communications, then
a higher d-SoC is one in which communications form a variety of
d-ASCs are adequately understood; a lower d-SoC is one in which
understanding is limited, perhaps to the particular lower d-SoC
itself.