Deep Dive Into The Philosophy of Psychedelics

foreign [Music] and today I am visiting the International Conference on psychedelic research psychedelic research is booming worldwide there are a dozens of large clinical trials to research helps psychedelic therapy can be applied to treat for instance anxiety depression PTSD fear of death amongst patients of cancer or hdhd now the icpr conference brought together an international science community of over a thousand scientists and it's my distinct pleasure to welcome all of you to Harlem for this fifth edition of icpr I think this is going to be the biggest psychologist scientific conference dedicated to psychedelics globally and I'm nuancing it by saying that it's a scientific conference so we are strictly focused on on uh on science but it's a I think it's a it's a big conference these are 1100 people who came from all over the world because they're interested in in psychedelic research and therapy just to know what we're talking about always good to start with a definition like this definition is the actual scientific definition that was in Goodman and Gilman's pharmacological basis of Therapeutics in the seventh and 8th Edition these are drugs that produce changes in thought and mood that normally you only experience if you're dreaming or if you're having a religious exaltation a religious experience so they're very unique set of compounds no other drugs have this particular kind of effect now in this video I'd like to focus on that last characterization the fact that psychedelics can induce mystical type or metaphysical experiences and they do that so powerfully that people coming out of psychedelic trips report a change in beliefs a change in World Views now there's more evidence and it's pretty decent evidence I think that there can be some shifts in metaphysical beliefs so this is by Chris Timmerman at all and what they show is uh beliefs like this there are two examples of items relating to non-naturalism that these beliefs actually do seem to shift in the direction of a kind of non-naturalism a shift towards non-naturalism put a bit more bluntly an atheist after having a high-dose psychedelic trip with a strong mystical type experience might come to the conclusion that God exists after all Zeus who Greek god or ra or Ganesh no not those ones that real one in the Bible Yahweh just God sorry I couldn't help to just squeeze this funny dialogue in from the show afterlife um and YouTube let's filmmakers do this if it's under fair use policy so if it's relevant to what you're discussing and it is relevant because we're seeing here a funny metaphysical dialogue between an atheist and someone who clearly believes in God the thing is when it comes to psychedelics is that metaphysics and beliefs are now in a way entering Psychiatry if a patient comes out of a trip um and talks to a psychiatrist for instance a week later saying I feel this huge Improvement in my mental health due to this mystical experience of Oneness I feel felt at home in the universe or I met God if a therapist would respond in and slightly condescending way saying that oh that's nice that that hallucination did that for you it could potentially harm the therapy because many people attribute their Improvement in mental health after psychedelic trips with mystical type experiences exactly to the fact that what they have experienced felt real or sometimes even more real than real and this is why the world Psychiatric association now has set up guidelines when it comes to metaphysics but the world Psychiatric association does encourage uh exploration of these beliefs if they come up uh from the patient or participant or client side so it's important I think to address these beliefs if they're brought up however there's also a statement which I very much agree with that psychiatrists should not use their professional position to proselytize either for non-naturalistic religious spiritual beliefs or against them so that's the view of the WPA okay so psychiatrists psychologists guiding psychedelic trips should be metaphysically agnostic but they cannot be agnostic in an ignorant kind of way because if you want to really guide people who've had a profound experience you should be able to say more than I don't know what you saw and I don't know what it means philosopher Peter schustett use proposed setting up a metaphysical menu if you um if someone's had a metaphysical experience then they are I would imagine more uh likely to dismiss it if they haven't been given certain options like a menu of metaphysics as it were in in which to sort of frame what they've perceived they might think wow I just thought time wasn't real or something how stupid you know like and then and thus it perhaps won't be as significant to that person but if you tell them that actually the metaphysics of time is very complex and uh timelessness uh has got things going for it um you might be might take that experience uh more profoundly it's a conjecture so there's no proof for it but perhaps a trial could be made speculation so what psychedelic therapy needs is a metaphysical menu giving you different modes to interpret the Psychedelic experience and this is also the moment to make an ethical statement in this video um at the Essentia Foundation we share science relevant to metaphysical idealism or analytical idealism and we hope to view that that's the most plausible metaphysics but that does not mean that we fully agree with the world Psychiatric association namely that therapists guiding the Psychedelic experience should be metaphysically agnostic of course it's impossible to not hold any personal beliefs but in guiding people who ask questions a therapist a good therapist should just offer different metaphysical modes of interpreting um their trip but I guess what our role is as the Essentia Foundation is to just cook you a good idealist dish on the metaphysical menu of interpreting um psychedelic experiences now this is also the moment to warn you a little bit because if you really want something easy digestible I suggest you first search YouTube for trip report higher Dimensions meeting God stuff like that it will give you great videos this is something else in metaphysics and the interpretation of the psychedelic trip as discussed on the icpr conference is a more like a UT Cuisine it's a bit more difficult but I will try and make it fun I will get the uh absolutely brilliant choice and for you ma'am yeah I'm going to do the vigerty Louis verminique but can you hold the group still hurting you hold the girl books absolutely and for you sir ah sorry I'm actually just struggling with the menu a little bit oh yeah same like I don't know if I should descriptions of the Psychedelic experience that makes sense to one person can sound like jabberish to another [Music] you know I really think this is a funny thing but if if all the people that took acid you know when the people that I know that have taken acid we can look out at the other people that haven't and they can they can tell us we're crazy and we can say well you haven't seen anything yet because there are things that are more beautiful at a discourse this young so I cannot use is I think it's exemplary for the 60s and 70s when the use of psychedelic substances became highly politicized Timothy Leary saying tuning drop out the result was a strong political backlash against psychedelics and against psychedelic research I began the meeting by making this statement which I think needs to be made to the nation America's Public Enemy Number One in the United States is drug abuse all funding for research programs stopped the War on Drugs started and nowadays in what is called the Psychedelic Renaissance you can still sense um in a way a trauma of what happened 50 years ago in a sense that we really should be careful in how we now talk about psychedelics and especially if we want to integrate them clinically but that does not mean that it isn't relevant from an historical perspective to take into account everything that was written about psychedelics even though we now regard stuff written as a political esoteric you name it and it is of value now it feels safe to say that almost all of the early Pioneers in the field of psychedelics so the thinkers the scientists in the 50s and 60s from Alice Huxley to Timothy Leary Richard Alpert later known as ramdas Terence McKenna and later someone like James fatiman all implicitly or explicitly lean towards a non-physicalist interpretation of the Psychedelic experience I thereby mean that they all seem to agree that the experience you have is not merely produced by your brain but somehow you connect to a Consciousness larger than your own ego Consciousness all of these thinkers had different words for that but metaphysically you could sort of group them together in this non-physicalists or even idealists interpretation of the Psychedelic experience Huxley on masculine the suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive um according to such a theory each one of us is potentially mined at large with the doors of perception Huxley popularized the reduction valve hypothesis the idea that our brains reduce a larger Consciousness Mine At Large to our ego Consciousness that idea I think has some philosophical problems of its own but it surely is not physicalist in a strict sense absolute classic not uncontested in the Psychedelic Community because these early Pioneers Timothy Larry and Richard Albert definitely went esoteric and political but nonetheless widely read The Vedic sages knew the secrets the ellucinian initiates knew it the tantrics knew it in all their esoteric writings they whispered the message it is possible to cut Beyond ego Consciousness to tune in on neurological processes which flash by at the speed of light and to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in your body modern psychedelic chemicals provide a key to this forgotten realm of awareness more or less a modern classic the Psychedelic explorers Garber James fatiman now famous for his micro dosing protocols who writes in a chapter called the qualities of transcendent experience um basically therefore there is simply nothing to worry about because you yourself are the Eternal energy of the universe playing hide and seek off and on with itself at root you are the godhead with a capital G for God is all there is from an idealist metaphysics many of these classic interpretations of the Psychedelic experience make a lot of sense because they seem to suggest that on the Psychedelic substances you somehow can tap into or experience for a brief moment a Consciousness larger than your own that has a antic status that is real it's not fabricated by your own mind or brain and it's really out there and you can tap into it but saying something like that it's out there and you can tap into it is unscientific language and I can also see the problems with it it's highly esoteric um and the question is if we really progress psychedelic therapy if we use words like this um so in the debate I followed at the icpr conference there was this pushback from people saying we need to demystify psychedelic science for instance there's this thing called the me EQ the mystical experience questionnaire that asks questions like on a scale from one to five did you experience the Oneness of everything and with questions like these some scientists say we are framing the experience in a mystical way and you get results um that suggests that many people had mystical type experiences but did they really have those experiences or that we just ask questions that frame their experience in that way many of these studies use measures like the meq which was mentioned or other common measures of mystical experience what are they really measuring do they really reliably capture some uniquely relevant features of the cycle experience which we would appropriately call Mystical mystical experience and finally which others will also probably touch upon quite a bit bit is if we do these studies and we include these missions of mystical experience I'll be encouraging people to put their experiences whether their patients or just Volunteers in a mystical framework and if we are is that a good thing I'll leave that to others too to consider so what to do then I think we should demystify our Concepts what we need to do is we need to explicate the experiences we are trying to describe we should be very explicit we should be very specific and we should be really teasing them apart and figuring out what is going on importantly we need to separate experiences from beliefs I talked about this already I think it's extremely important then we need terminology that everybody understands in the same way no more Ultimate Reality no more and importantly and I mean I really hope that everyone already is doing this personally but we need to do it more explicitly as well we need to disassociate psychedelics from supernaturalism and Divinity and vagueness and Crystal healing this speaker referred to a Forbes cover story about psychedelics which had an image of Crystal healing accompanying the story and he didn't really I think imply that anyone in the Psychedelic Community Associates the psyched experience with Crystal healing but the plea here is to demystify the Psychedelic experience to not talk about fundamental reality-minded large Oneness Etc everything that you can read in the more classical interpretations that I shared earlier in this video so demystifying it but in doing so I think the metaphysical debate in the Psychedelic Community uses confusing terms instead of opposing the more idealist interpretation of the experience to a physicalist one materialist one they use the term naturalism if for instance you read this book the philosophy of psychedelics by Tim latherby a book widely respected in the research community and mentioned a lot at the conference we can read how naturalism boils down to physicalism all mental phenomena are to be accommodated within the framework of nature as it is understood by the Natural Sciences what leatherby does in this book is exactly to go against sort of all the classical books I just quoted from when he says this these experiences render many you undergo them incredulous that Consciousness could be mere quote unquote neural information processing but undermining this inference is one of the central burdens of this book and it calls that naturalizing the antheogenic conception so the aim here is to bring um the Psychedelic experience within a physicalist framework using the word naturalism instead of physicalism but as I mentioned earlier I don't see it as my task to serve you the dish of the on a metaphysical menu of the physicalist interpretation of the Psychedelic experience to sort of dive into how we could explain that it's all comes down to neurochemistry and it's produced fabricated within your brain I think that that view is highly problematic and in understanding the Psychedelic experience it's much more fruitful to build upon the classical literature out there but to just add more analytical rigor to it and at the conference the icpr conference I met a philosopher who does exactly that and also critiques the notion of naturalism as proposed by physicalists basically in interpreting the um psychedelic experience and his name was yusi yilka I would like to I would like to walk when I talk so naturalism a mysticism in psychedelic science it's a large maybe too large topic but I try to cover a central aspect so we have seen a tension between what we could could be called mysticism and naturalism in psychedelic science that mystical type experiences are metaphysical hallucinations or elephant in the living room of psychedelic science on the other hand we have uh Scholars who argue that these are potentially vertical insights about the nature of reality or this is reflected in the endogenic conception of psychedelics to reveal the God within so here I would like to focus on the comforting delusions objection by Chris ledepi which holds that this metaphysical aspects or insights of mystical experience they are false because they contradict with naturalism the comforting delusion objection is something first mentioned by Michael Pollan in this book called how to change your mind which is becoming a modern classic when it comes to psychedelic and absolutely great investigation Poland writes for instance we bump into one of the Richer paradoxes of the psilocybin trials while it succeeds in no small part because it has the sanction and authority of science its Effectiveness seems to depend on a mystical experience that leaves people convinced there is more to this world than science can explain science is being used to validate and experience validate an experience that would appear to undermine the scientific perspective this comforting delusion objection is a difficult one um so you're saying people are experiencing something science supposedly says is not real Mine At Large Oneness God so science says supposedly it's not real and but science does prove that experiencing it really helps to cure people and then the ethical question Michael pollen raises is should you then facilitate that should you do that because you're instilling so to speak um a false belief in people's minds any stock at the icpr use critiques this comforting delusion objection by sort of unraveling the argument so to answer to know whether this is so or not we need to know what is naturalism and what are the mystical insights so uh really briefly I take it that the metaphysical core of mystical type experiences some kinds of mystical experiences is that there is a fundamental unitary nature of reality that is beyond the sensory world and that can be known directly for example this can be conceptualized as some kind of white light Universal love or Cosmic Consciousness or God as the underlying reality that underlies this sensory reality so if people come out of a trip really believing what they saw God the Oneness the white light is real should we do it because from a physicalist perspective it's delusional Marco polan is a journalist and not a philosopher so in his book he doesn't really answer this question he doesn't really solve this dilemma and this book by Tim latherby the philosophy of psychedelics is all about solving that comforting delusion objection but before diving into how that argument is exactly built up let's first go into the whole term naturalism and then now what is naturalism it's quite common to think that naturalism consists of two main Theses and epistemological and ontological component the epistemological is that our ways of knowing reality or nature should be compatible with science and the ontological component is that all is physical so this is important figure we need to clearly distinguish between scientistic naturalism and real naturalism scientism means to these is that scientific knowledge is all knowledge we cannot have any other type of knowledge except for scientific knowledge if you say that the only knowledge we can gain about nature is through the scientific method than the contents of the Psychedelic experience do not count as knowledge because the mystical type experiences are not verifiable they cannot be modeled and replicated in how we usually do science so then they must be a hallucination but Yuka proposes a much broader definition of naturalism in which there is a form of knowledge that is not scientific knowledge but then again real naturalism this comes from Gayle is frozen it holds that all knowledge like knowledge is a wider class than just scientific knowledge in reality it's highly likely that we have knowledge that is true knowledge but not scientific knowledge so the class of knowledge is wider than scientific knowledge for example I know what it's like to be here and it's not Scientific Technology I just know it I know what this coffee tastes like I just taste it and I say it tastes like this and it's basically ineffable kind of knowledge I have previously called this unitary knowledge there is an article in this philosophy and psychedelics book on that it's the same kind of knowledge that is emphasized in this Zen meditative experiences where there is no you there is no like dichotomy between subject and object there is just a Consciousness being present without the subject even knowing like being aware that they are conscious they just exist in some very like some primordial sense of being conscious because if I say that speaking at the table discussing with you I didn't think in that way like a moment ago this was just a conceptualization of my experience it was already a model a picture of the experience so this results in the question of how can I know existence Consciousness here without modeling it like without calling this a discussion or philosophizing and so on and the answer is that it's it's all the time present like Consciousness in itself the fundamental nature of my own individual Consciousness at least it's present every single moment this is it like all the time but we fail to know like pay attention to it because we are so accustomed you could like say that we have this like priors in the predictive code in Neuroscience that which enable us to feel that everything's familiar I have like schemas of conduct and like how we behave in this situation I don't start like dancing on the table or any like that but it it's somehow like uh wheels or like heights the essence of conscience in itself because we just think oh we are discussing but what is this discussion really like this this thinking process here this I think is a really important point we are conscious beings that is undeniable and as conscious beings we're also rational beings who make models of the world and those models in a certain sense limit our understanding of reality our brains are predicting instruments they compare incoming sensory data to previous experiences we have and in that process um we live you could say inside our models for most of the time and to me personally it's interesting to look at brains that are less evolved so look at the baby brain oh yeah the the phenomenon of object permanence that a baby sort of somehow learns that when Daddy or I noticed with my own child it's funny process right when he first started smiling when I I hide behind the door and then he gets it he is still there and so that's object permanence but we have to learn that sir but maybe his and those are just a hypothesis I have maybe his form of Consciousness when I do not see my that he is not there is maybe the more pure form of Consciousness in the fact that it is all an idea in a sense yeah I I basically agree and Alison gopnick is a psychologist who says that children are babies are essentially in a psychedelic State all the time because they don't have the high level Concepts and like priors which shape narrow down their experience of the world essentially what you see in most of the Psychedelic investigators have argued for the same thing essentially you see that what the effect of psychedelics is to return the brain to this childhood state of plasticity and openness so this is a slide showing that under the influence of something like psilocybin you have many more local connections and fewer of these pruned long-distance connections so this is just the opposite of what you would see in the course of uh of development so in a sense the Psychedelic state is maybe the baby States in which we had a pure conscious experience of the world around us but no models to model it capture it remember it so we forgot why do we have this Concepts why have we evolved into this kind of animal with these kinds of Concepts because well being in a pure conscious state is not very adaptive like for a long term we need to seek food and sexual partners and so on so Evolution has shaped us into this form and all animals have Concepts in this like basic sense that they have models of reality even bacteria have matters of reality at least according to predictive coding framework it's the tragedy of human existence that we are limited beings and we need to model beings which are not identical with us so we are limited into this like a bit like platonic Cave of Shadows due to our being finite beings with borders so when I'm not existing like before my birth there is no use there is just this soup of reality and then you see emerges and that means that the border of your sea emerges like there emerges this entity which has borders with other parts of reality and it's like this entity here and then at this at that moment when reality becomes a single organism it becomes somehow like in this paradoxical situation of being still part of the reality like a wave in the sea it's just a form of energy a form of matter however you say about it and um it's still part of that same ocean but then it's also separate and it's like left in this Like It ultimately it can lead to this Cartesian like alienation from the world where we started like wondering does the external world exist and like we can uh these skeptical scenarios and that's the tragedy because only we we only have the models and then we can like start like doubting is there anything beyond the mouse is there like reality at large at all that's the treachery and then when we die we dissolve into this soup again we become one with that but it's false to say because then is there is no longer I that would be one with the larger but it's somehow like We Are One and then we become separate and then we become one again now I just finished a documentary on bacteria which will come out I think next year and that really helped me to understand that what Yuka is saying is actually quite hard from like a really physicalist biological perspective and bacteria the first organisms on our planet formed a boundary between themselves and the outside world um called the cell wall right and within the cell wall chemical processes take place and entropy is being fought and that's the whole story of life we are a bunch of cells and collectively those cells make up the human body and the human body relies on model making it relies on navigating that old bunch of cells in this world to fight off entropy and to [Music] um find food to reproduce and then we die and the boundaries are dissolved the entropy goes up and in a sense you return to the Oneness right um and this is The Human Condition we're trapped in models models that we need to navigate this bunch of cells in this world um now in psychedelic research and in the thinking and philosophy of psychedelics it's interesting that very early on um now someone was all about saying that these substances were about boundary dissolution so in a sense that they opened up to a higher entropy they broke down our mental models and the person who sort of really was all about this passage was Terence McKenna if you look at thousands of these experiences is they dissolve boundaries they dissolve boundaries between you and your past you and the part of your unconscious you don't want to look at between you and your partner between you and The Feminine if you're masculine and vice versa between you and the world all the boundaries that we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved um at Imperial College in London people on psychedelic substances would put in a brain scanner and the regions in the human brain associated with model making with memory with self-reference so you thinking about who you are sort of making up your story off the world and not sort of having this purely conscious experience after world but sort of being in these models that region in the brain the activity is uh significantly reduced on almost all psychedelic substances Robin Carhart Harris and his colleagues have shown that those prefrontal control systems that we think are so great and are really great if you actually have to go out into the world and do things actually become deactivated under the influence of uh of psychedelics so if you think about childhood childhood it looks as if what the psychedelics are doing is putting your brain back into a neurological State and I think also an experiential State a phenomenological state which is like that state of advanced plasticity um and exploration that you see in childhood and I think any of you have hung out with babies or three-year-olds this will kind of make sense um there's a lot you could sort of summarize baby Consciousness by saying it's a lot of oh wow right there's a lot of oh wow for babies and the really big and cool question I think is that can you in that psychedelic state with less models going on with let's say a more pure Consciousness gain knowledge that is theoretical that can tell us something meaningful about nature or in other words is this oh wow experience that babies have of the world without any model models a form of knowledge about the world and what if that knowledge isn't only knowledge about shiny objects like keys or or maybe they're dummy or their own fingers but about entities I think what what most of the Psychedelic Community can agree upon is is I mean one way to label this is your default mode Network right that goes down and somehow you other parts of the brain uh get sort of a free area to play or we could say these models are shut down and I can can sort of see something for the first time again but then comes the question when I encounter entities or I have a strong sense that God or whatever you call call it is talking to me and then I think a lot of psychedelic researchers are sort of uh they highly defer and how they would label that right would you give those claims uh theoretical status status I mean that does it relate to some form of Truth or will you just say okay that's where the noise in the brain or it's just an illusion your mind on drugs giving you these sort of signals I mean how to what are your thoughts here that's an important question some people refer to this as spiritual bypassing like uh Carhart Harris and Kristen in the rebels model paper I think that kind of notion is a bit like pejorative and also let there be argues that these kinds of God encounter experiences would be metaphysical metaphysical hallucinations he explicitly thinks that uh God is always Supernatural that's still like assumption but if we start from the Assumption of naturalism which is basically a monistic assumption that all is one which is like a really basic uh common approach in Western metaphysics physicalism is a kind of monism and idealism is kind of monism neutral monism is a kind of monism so physicalists are also modest in this metaphysical sense but now the problem of of this Guardian counter experience if you consider God as something Supernatural then of course if you conceptualize step God encountering these terms then it's not compatible with naturalism and in that framework it would be classified as delusional in this whole sort of debate or something I just cannot get my head around but I'm trying to do this here on camera to just understand sort of this um physicalist or or let's say within the target Community naturalist way of saying it's a delusion um okay let's let's go a couple of stacks steps back we uh in our normal Consciousness within Consciousness if we're doing science we're making models we predict nature and we agree on it because we have the same experience of nature but our starting point is experience it's Consciousness and in psychedelic trips we have this weird experience that when we come back we cannot directly share but the the ground position that it takes place within Consciousness is exactly the same as any other experience experience on which you base science so wouldn't it be more accurate to just say it's a form of uh experience knowledge if you like that I just cannot model and that's it and stop there and just say nothing about if it's true or not because that philosophically feels sloppy in a sense to me and I'm not a philosopher this is really my intuition about all of this what helps I think is a matter for Yuka uses based on the thinking of Aldous Huxley again the prism metaphor so uh this aims to illustrate this idea this is from Hawk's list the prism metaphor that uh like the fundamental nature of reality is some kind of white light that is like uh as in a prism uh it's transformed into colors of our human consciousness so this colored sphere is human consciousness and our models of reality are just one small part of that Consciousness and then all of this is part of nature okay let's for a moment stay in this prison metaphor say in a psychedelic experience you experience white light you've never experienced white light because you normally really only experience colors and when you get back you do not have a model you have nothing to frame that white light to to to to to to model it in terms of the the rest of the world you know in terms of those colors the only thing you could maybe say is it is as if I saw all the colors at once and people will start laughing and because it doesn't make sense to them but the irony here is that um in a sense you're saying something super accurate about nature on a different level um you just cannot communicate it back in the color world back in the world of models and when it comes um to discussing metaphysics in practicalics I think using words with like mystical or sort of religious Frameworks um it's confusing because there's this funny thing even people who are religious when they get out of trips they do not report a sort of confirmation of their religious models this one other really interesting study where they gave I think it's ongoing it's not published yet but they gave psilocybin to clergy remember the priests and so I remember one Protestant priest reporting that like as a member of the clergy he thought that he like is uh talking like about what God is like and then after the sales had been experienced he became more humble that no one can know God that it's like shatters our even religious concepts of God and I think religion is best conceived as like an image of God like a metaphorical and uh trying to capture some aspects and it would be like a huge mistake to think that the Bible is literally true or any other sacred texts they are just like methods of trying to somehow convey this original experience and if you forget the original experience then you are left with nothing but see it is like a conceptual construct it's just floating in space now I think from a physicalist standpoint it can feel reassuring in a sense that people who are very religious go into a psychedelic trip and come out of it sort of doubting their religion in a sense Maybe but if you're accurate they are not saying their religion isn't true they are just saying my religion is a model and in no way captures that which it refers to what is modeled by the religion and if you look at it like that there is a painful mirror for science because science is also a model of the world the hard problem of Consciousness really comes from this uh confounding between the model and the model like our words and objects because the physical is quite often fails to understand that they don't really know reality in itself they think this is just like a philosophical sophistry talking of like things in themselves but this is actually like brought into the face of the like neuroscientists and other physicalists by the predictive coding Neuroscience framework this Danish philosopher zahavi he argues in a paper this quite obvious point but he puts it really well that the predictive holding Neuroscience basically implies that we don't have access to the hidden causes of our observations so the idea in predictable Neuroscience is that our brain is like this predictive machine that tries to predict observation sensory data through building these generative models based on for example variation interfere inference and our Consciousness is basically this huge generative model of the surrounding reality based on sensory data but the model is in the mind or the model is your mind and the mind is probably in the brain and it doesn't have direct access to the surroundings so the hidden cores of the observations remains unknown and the neuroscientists like keep saying this like it was somehow not problematic at all but they don't acknowledge that this applies also to their own observations and models like the scientist thinking of the brain well the brain is just a thought in the scientist's mind and the predictive quoting framework itself is also just a model in your mind like all these empirical science is our like it's human constructs and I don't mean that they wouldn't be true of course they probably reflect to some extent the nature of reality because otherwise it would be a miracle that the theories work so well like uh where planes fly and so on talking to you see this deep irony dance on me we know from neuropredictive coding that we build models and that we do not have access to reality as it really is but we live in in these models right but the physicalist then holds on to one of these models namely the the brain that it observes in Consciousness and says about that model the the brain that presents itself as physical this one's fundamental this model is reality also it's independent of observation but yes this leads to Infinity regress basically when we try to grasp the nature of reality outside our congeness we now I just said it the nature of reality outside my Consciousness and when I said that I try to refer to the nature in itself but how can I refer it to it because my term nature in itself here is just a word again so it's like a tarskian regress this polish logician who showed that showed that truth cannot be defined within language you always have to postulate The Meta language to Define truth is it like logical analysis really like high rigor analytical philosophy but the same applies to our conscious models of reality we just kind of like get to the reality in itself except for our own case like this is it in our own case that we know it through being so the conclusion conclusion is that leatherby is mistake and that the mystical type metaphysical insights can be compatible with natural so when Naturals is not conflated with scientism however uh an important point is uh that we shouldn't like become dogmatists about our models of reality our conceptions of reality because they are just conceptions the word is not the object we only have there's fictions sort of and if we cling to our afflictions we become like idiola like we start to do idolatry like we worship the images instead of reality in itself so thank you this is it in this this is it analysis of the Psychedelic experience Yuka comes very close I think to a pure form of analytical idealism in the sense that it grants the Psychedelic experience status as an experience as something within Consciousness that you experience so it's also in a sense a relaxed open attitude to the Psychedelic experience in a sense that you could take it as a form of inspiration to do science from like agnostically I just don't know it could be maybe that I spoke to God or I connected to mind at Large um you just have to be careful to bring that back as a sort of truth that you can model but then back to this book by leatherby the philosophy of psychedelics which is really a carefully carefully written book to try to solve this comfort and delusion objection right the fact that we maybe shouldn't give people these metaphysical hallucinations that make them feel better because we are instilling beliefs that are false according to physicalism the thing with this book is that towards the end of the book um a turn is made towards different wording and towards the philosophy of phenomenology so the book starts out with physicalism and how to naturalize the Psychedelic experience but um near the end of the book um it turns towards philosophyology but the remainder of this difficult slightly schizophrenic notion when leatherby Ends by saying psychedelic therapy is neither a pure low-level pharmacotherapy nor a matter of changing explicit metaphysical convictions right so it's not about changing your metaphysical convictions but rather it's a process of deconstructing and rewriting maladaptive largely unconscious abstract beliefs about self and world that structure our experience so how then is this deconstructing abstracts beliefs about world that structure experience not changing metaphysical convictions because these are beliefs about what the world really is Right a metaphysical conviction and this book starts out with a metaphysical conviction that physicalism is true that brain States produce Consciousness so in line with Yuka I would just suggest why not apply the Psychedelic model collapse that can happen the rewriting of metaphysical beliefs to your own metaphysical belief you start with namely physicalism and of course you could say exactly the same about an ilea's standpoint but from a sermon of ilism the problem is less acute because if you say Consciousness is primary and fundamental um what the psychedelic experience shows you is exactly that Consciousness remains you just have to let go of any models you have about that so from a standpoint of idealism there isn't really a big problem so to end this video I think if we look at the metaphysical menu about the interpretations of the mystical type experiences psychedelics can give us there's plenty of choice for a good idealist dish but still not that much that much Choice when it comes to a more physicalist or naturalist interpretation and um maybe that should be worked on and if we really want to have therapy where people from all walks of life with all sort of metaphysical beliefs can be serviced to sort of um integrate these profound experiences then you should offer Different World Views but I just think as of now a more physicalist naturalists however you want to call it um interpretation is really not that coherent but I really hope to just contribute to the debate with this video I'm not a philosopher I'm not a neuroscientist I'm a filmmaker that really is interested in this because I think it has such profound um it can offer such a profound effect on the health of people and research is showing that well we can know Nature by being part of nature but what role do these psychedelics play there one could argue that when the model collapse happens we somehow at least what is absolutely clear is that our models of Consciousness and our models of Nature and matter they start to shift we start to question like and it should also happen in new reciting theories like what is the rebels model or what is the brain people should these are like priors these are models of reality people should start to question in cyclic experience like especially emphasize there that uh like these are just models but what is beyond the models that's the question that psychedelics really bring on the surface through model collapse I think that's very nice way to put it model collapse yeah yeah and then what happens when all the model models collapse this would be a topic for some predictive Neuroscience guy and some Zen meditator because like uh of course the predictive Neuroscience is just a model of reality like all else but we could use it as a conceptual framework like uh Consciousness is that generative model in in the brain that operates on the priors but suppose it would be possible for all the priors to collapse that's really problematic premise because the priors are also in the retina like uh this this Bayesian like modeling process happens on the really low level like low level already so but suppose that all priors collapse what would be left it would probably be like really high entropy like informational entropy because then the surprise would be absolute but when is the surprise like absolute maximum when you are here and now maybe that's a hypothesis like future research needed [Laughter] thanks so much you see you've been a great great conversation really enjoyed this thank you yeah we discussed for an hour great mono collapse I think it's a good thing for Humanity whether you're religious an atheist a scientist an idealist a physicalist back to the direct experience this is it if you've made it so far thanks really for watching this video essay I really love making stuff like this but what I love even more if it really helps you understanding stuff like this better so if there's anything you think I can improve or stuff that is left out in this video that you'd really like to hear more about let me know in the comments um at essencia Foundation we will be starting something new which is um sort of Roundtable discussions I will be having with the director of our foundation Bernardo castrup um not unknown to many of you and I know there are questions um as you already in the comments on YouTube directed directly to Bernardo so keep posting those and I will try to bring them to the table in upcoming videos with Bernardo and for now thanks for watching and I appreciate it very much if you subscribe to our Channel and help us grow this movement thanks thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Essentia Foundation

Views: 12,427

Keywords: Psychedelics, entheogenics, psychedelic state, metaphysics, idealism, physicalism, naturalism, metaphysical implications of the psychedelic experience, psychedelic trance, psychedelic experience, physicalism and psychedelics

Id: eQmFGTko7yI

Length: 55min 46sec (3346 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023