In the light of darkness: A case for an alcohol state
Take away love, take away peace, take away sanity, take away joy, take away life, take away hope, all i beg of you is to give me truth. This is my final assertion, the ultimate resolve of a questionable hypothesis, the prevailing thought of a revered principle, the central thesis of an illusive question. Of all the intrinsic values that define
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1) The argument assumes that to be civilized in this society, one must lie to one's self or, to use the language of the first post, to be divorced from truth.
and
2) To be in an alcohol state (either literally or metaphorically) one is thus removed from civilization or society.
and
3) Truth cannot exist in society.
The first is saying that in order to be in society, humans must forgo any social constructs that make them do something they wouldn't normally do. But by "normally" do, are we talking about following through with base instincts or desires? If so, does that make us more human? or more animal?
The second, I agree, that when one is in an altered state, they are removed from the normality of civilization. However, they have become part of their own civilization. Watch people that are drunk in a bar, which sure the original poster has plenty of occasion to do. There is a camaraderie there based solely on the grounds that they are all inebriated. Random people will strike up a conversation at the bar or dance on the floor. Most people don't like to drink alone - they like to do it in groups. It is a social activity for a lot of people (clearly not all), and therefore has its own rules (see: the 'party foul,' toasts, buying rounds, drinking games, and of course, 'well, I was drunk' exceptions for behavior).
Just because one has removed one's self from what is considered the day-to-day civilization of a social contract between adults, doesn't mean they have no harnessed themselves to another set of rules.
Thirdly, I posit that truth is subjective. What is true for me cannot be known to be true for anyone else. This is true (well, to me, at least haha) philosophically as well as scientifically. Consider quantum physics where the act of observation literally changes reality.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/02/980227055013.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-slit_experiment
If truth is subjective then whatever truth you find for yourself is the truth for you. No one can change it or accept it as their own.
Even if truth is absolute, and there is some greater Truth out there that we're not living up to in society, it is not through an altered state that we will find it. It is in the realization that all existence is as it is, and there is no morality attached to that state, except for whatever morality we attach to it, ourselves.
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Truth is a word and words are reductive symbols which trigger associations of other words and concepts which we share. They are, in effect, a microcosm of Truth, in that each person's understandings and associations can be modeled as a continuum ranging from the most ephemeral and intimately idiosyncratic to the most enduring and collectively validated as "objective".
To conceive of an actual TRUTH, beyond all human subjectivity presupposes that such a thing can be made available to human beings which seems absurd to me. Our existence, limited as it is by physical and chronological scope, biological, zoological, anthropological, sociological, psychological and semantic conditions can only provide us with a filtered representation, a simulacra which our superficial ego-intellect complex can identify.
At the very least, I would expect the direction to go in to get a simulacra with a richer TRUTHlike content is away from linguistic intolerance of ambiguity and toward intuitive, imaginative experience which are closer to the source of our own raw human awareness. In this regard, the altered state of consciousness can be of great assistance, primarily in allowing the empirical focus of the interior executive processes to relax enough to allow perception which falls outside the mind's preconceptions. Try looking at these words without reading them. With practice you might be able to glimpse them as unreadable characters or meaningless pixels on a screen but an altered state or brain injury that decouples your pattern recognition from your visual system will be orders of magnitude more effective at revealing to you the 'true' nature of what you are looking at.
In this way, our entire world is a semiotic text which is being read to us and decoded for us by various levels of processing and refinement beyond our conscious awareness. While subjectivity ultimately is the end result of that process of communication, and what we think of as Truth is an intersubjective communication of those ongoing processes, I would say that it is a mistake to presume that morality is entirely subjective in the sense of being personally constructed and under the voluntary control of the executive ego.
More accurate, I think, to say that morality is simply another layer of text - a sense as powerful and 'real' as anything vestibular or olfactory. The moral weight of a moral transgression is, to the acculturated psyche, as potent and solid as a traffic light and no less objective than a strong lingering odor.
We don't attach the morality, but rather the ethical gravity is manifested as a bending of intellectual 'truth' matrices - literally - resulting from the accumulated resonance of human experience as it presents itself to us through our neurology, family, anthropology, our primate and mammalian prehistory - trillions of impressions, trials and errors that leave their traces to inform our human traffic patterns and circumscribe our customs and behaviors.
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