Consciousness and psychedelics | Peter Sjostedt-H | TEDxTruro

[Music] understanding consciousness through psychedelics consciousness is that medium through which we perceive both the world that surrounds us and the world that lies within us the blue of the sea and the pain in your knee are both aspects of your conscious mind but though consciousness is that which is most familiar to each of us it is also that which is most mysterious despite thousands of years of thought we still cannot agree upon the relation between matter and mind between the solid physical world and our seemingly intangible consciousness today there's a renewed interest in this whole problem known in modern science and philosophy as the hard problem of consciousness concurrently there's a renewed interest in psychedelics in fact we are in the midst of the so named psychedelic Renaissance there are currently far more advanced research projects on psychedelic States than there ever was in the 1960s and with more knowledge we're moving away from the fearful propaganda against the use which in retrospect seems more political and scientific however most psychedelic research today is concerned with the therapeutic medicinal properties of these chemicals of course this is a great value but psychedelics can also be of great value to the healthy as well as to the unhealthy and to the Philosopher's as well as the physician psychedelics are much more than medicine psychedelic modes of consciousness can provide states that are awe-inspiring sublime ethereal and infernal visions of the most beautiful and intricate of objects can be seen but also the darkest terror one can lose one sense of oneself as one self it can shatter into a hailstorm of subjectivities one sense of space is often distorted time fluctuates or even disappears one can attain completely novel feelings emotions and sense data can tangle to the extent that one may smell the colour of time as a philosopher of mind one who studies mind matter logic the varieties of consciousness and as a metaphysician one who seeks the fundamental depths of reality it seems obvious that to enhance our understanding of the mind requires the investigation of such psychedelically induced states of mind that is psychedelics may be means to advance the metaphysics of mind yes there's little modern literature in the flows on the philosophy of psychedelic consciousness there is however a hidden psychedelic history of philosophy that can be revealed showing us how psychedelics have influenced great thinkers understanding of consciousness so let me take you on a trip the great British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead is famous for saying that the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato the ancient Greek philosopher Plato has no doubt had a profound effect upon Western thought in culture so it is interesting to see that it's likely they derived his mind matter theory from psychedelic intake in the annual Eleusinian mysteries a religious event near Athens Plato fasted and drank a potion of a specific dose that gave him heavenly visions in the fee dress he gives this ancient trip report we saw the Blessed site envisioned and were initiated into that which is rightly called the most blessed of mysteries we looked upon perfect apparitions which we saw in the pure light being ourselves pure not entombed in this which we carry about with us and call the body in which we are imprisoned like an oyster in its shell dr. albert hofmann who discovered LSD argued that the potion that Plato another ancient Greeks drank contained her got from which LSD is derived for Plato these visions fostered the mind matter relation that is dualism that the mind is separate from the matter of the body and thus that the mind can escape the prison of the body to a higher realm there's a contrary to materialism that the but that all that exists is the body in the physical world but there's Plato's dualism that I had an effect upon Christianity and upon the notion that the soul survives the death of the body and upon much of later philosophy so we see the power that psychedelics can have not only upon an individual but upon philosophies cultures and eras as we are currently gathered here in the capital of komal we should note that the first thinker to scientifically study the effects of psychedelic substances was the great Cornishmen and self-proclaimed chemical philosopher Sir Humphry Davy whose statue crowns our hometown his hometown of Penzance in 1799 Davy researched nitrous oxide to discover whether was toxic or not he soon discovered that it was not in fact quite the contrary or rather pleasant unlike the carbon monoxide he also tried which he didn't find pleasant at all for half the year 1799 Davy was inhaling 15 pints of nitrous oxide five times a day every day but this was not enough for him on Boxing Day baby steps inside an airtight box and takes 160 pints of the gas as he steps out he takes another 40 points for good measure this is his report my visible impressions were dazzling and apparently magnified I heard distinctly every sound in the room I lost all connection with external things I existed in the world of newly connected newly modified ideas with the most intense belief in prophetic manner I exclaimed nothing exists but thoughts the universe is composed of impressions ideas pleasures and pains nothing exists but thoughts as we can see from its notebooks Davy was alluding to the mind matter philosophy that is idealism the view that the material world around us is but a mental projection matter is mind in David's final book written in 1829 he talks about the spectacular visions that he brought throughout his life in one vision where he gazes upon some amazing alien City which sprouts giant blue glass columns he gives an analogy which we can still use today to explain the psychedelic experience he writes you are now in a state in which a fly would be whose microscopic I was changed to one similar to that of man and you are wholly unable to associate what you now see with your former knowledge that is what it is like to be a fly being a man is akin to what it is like to be a man tripping psychedelic so Davy was brought to this incredible world of supreme visions and ideas through psychedelics to the philosophy of idealism this philosophy devised by thinkers such as Kant and Hegel was more popular in Germany than the english-speaking world but there was one notable English speaker who was also flung to the position and likewise fashion that was a great psychologist and philosopher William James who wrote that only under the influence of nitrous oxide could he fully understand Hegel's complex philosophy of course I don't mention this to my students another great thinker of the time who also self experimented with psychoactive drugs was the great Friedrich Nietzsche famous for his claim that God is dead as a doctor Nietzsche was able to prescribe any concoction of drugs whatsoever his friends however noted it was odd that the pharmacist never asked to check whether his doctorate was in medicine or not it wasn't it was in philology but nonetheless he got what he wanted although Nietzsche was severely critical of the god of Christianity he often featured the god of intoxication in his work Dionysus even claimed that it was his inspiration many thinkers who have tried psychedelics claim how inspirational too novel thought the chemicals can be in 1935 the French existentialist philosopher jean-paul Sartre needed to escape the drudgery of his situation so he decided to take a large injection of the cactus drug mescaline for Sartre this led to his led to the essay on imagination and also to the novel that made him famous nausea but for sarch the mescaline experience had its price for months thereafter he noticed that he was being followed by giant lobsters of course he knew they were not real but this brought him little comfort as it thought it made him think he was going permanently insane as we enter the 20th century psychedelics become more prevalent and we see more intellectuals experimenting with them in the 1950s there was a planned out site project which sought to bring together the world's leading cognoscenti to each try mescaline invitees included Graham Greene AJ heir Carl Jung Albert Einstein this was the greatest thing that never happened in psychedelia unfortunately the funding was pulled in the last minute but decade later then the surge in the popular use of the drugs becomes incredible and unfortunately that leads to their criminalization a prohibition which has in my view impeded the progress of both medicine and metaphysics but now as the prohibitions are beginning to pass we can explore the potentials that these psyche these drugs can have on not only on our understanding what consciousness consciousness is but also on our understanding of what consciousness can be firstly we realize how very limited a common concept of consciousness is there are far more states of sentience than we normally experience even dreams can appear hopelessly mundane compared to certain psychedelic states and with such a realization more radical theories of consciousness become more plausible such as pants psychism the view that all organisms including plants have released basic forms of sentience secondly with the distortions of space show temporality commonly induced to our psychedelics we see we gain a direct experience of the relativity of space and time Einstein was fond of the idealist philosopher Kant and it's fascinating to see how psychedelics can yield insights into the thoughts of these two thinkers thirdly our self-consciousness undergoes radical transformations as seen the sense that you are one single consciousness can shatter the division between the self and the world can be lost the distinction between everything you know your everyday assumed beliefs can be exposed as in many ways completely arbitrary and stifling lastly not only can psychedelics seemingly increase one's intelligence and efficiency through micro dosing taking my new dose of a psychedelic but they can generally lead to a heightened awareness of the subtleties around and within us that is psychedelics can enhance our consciousness pushing us up the evolutionary ladder Nietzsche replaced God with his notion of the enhanced human or the Superman the first British writer a Nietzsche was a our Raj who claimed that new modes of consciousness will be needed as the Mystics have always declared the differencing element of man and Superman will be the possession of these could psychedelics facilitate the so called transhumanism the transformation of mankind into a greater being and moreover could psychedelics not only aid ourselves but the world in which we live through psychedelics one frequently gains a match heightened appreciation of the worth of nature and the beauty and value of her creatures even one such experience can make a person more conscious and concerned with the ecology of our planet so I say psychedelics should once more be taken seriously as intellectual and aesthetic instruments that can help us understand not only what consciousness is but what we humans really are and what we can become in our relation to the Wonder that is nature thank you [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 231,904

Rating: 4.9237108 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Social Science, Consciousness, Philosophy, Psychology

Id: tV8PSevhd_M

Length: 14min 49sec (889 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/RandomStanlet]

Loved the video. I'll check out more of Peter.