Consciousness Live! with Chris Letheby (S3 E25)

0:00 great all right we are live so joining me today an extra extra special guest uh chris lethebe so chris for those who don't know you i wonder if you could say a little bit about who you are and what you do sure thanks richard and thanks very much for the invitation to come on so um i'm a lecturer in philosophy at the university of western australia it's in perth and i'm half time there i'm also half time as a post-doc at the university of adelaide and by training i'm a philosopher of

0:33 mind and cognitive science so i did my studies at the university of adelaide did a p masters and a phd there in philosophy of cognitive science and my main area of interest the topic of my phd thesis and most of my subsequent work is the use of classic or serotonergic psychedelic drugs like lsd and psilocybin in neuroscience and psychiatry so that's looking at recent trials that use psychedelics as therapeutic interventions for treatments like anxiety depression and addiction and also sort of basic research that's highly philosophically relevant that aims to use psychedelics as research tools to

1:06 understand the neural bases and mechanisms of consciousness and self-awareness and this kind of thing so that's me that's what i do that's awesome yeah it's really cool because one thinks that this is like something that should have been looked at previously given the the uh the relevance to lots of claims of philosophy of mind and cognitive science and yet it's only relatively recently that this has kind of gained um respectability and that people are looking into this um and i wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what your impressions are why that may

1:40 might be the case sure yeah so i mean psychedelics like a lot of psychedelics occur naturally and dmt masculine and psilocybin occur in various plants and animals and have histories of medicinal and religious use going back at least centuries quite probably millennia in various cultures but they really only came to the attention of the western world and also of modern science in sort of well to an extent in the late 19th early 20th centuries there was some interest in masculine but really it was after albert hoffman discovered lsd in the 1940s that scientists became seriously interested

2:13 in these drugs and so there was a wave of research for about 15 or 20 years i guess from the um oh yeah from around 1950 to around 1970 when psychedelics were a hot topic and an extremely respectable topic of research in neuroscience psychiatry and various other disciplines philosophers never really caught on to a great extent which is interesting there were a few people there was um jr smithy's the philosopher and neuroscientist back then who was involved in some of the studies with masculine and published a paper in um bjps the british journal for

2:46 the philosophy of science but and there were a couple of others i mean merlot ponte um took masculine and wrote about it but yeah for some reason not many philosophers um caught on and then of course for various reasons psychedelics ended up becoming sociopolitically highly controversial for a combination of you know somewhat good and also overwhelmingly bad reasons um ended up being prohibited and then the research basically was was more or less shut down at least in humans for a couple of decades and because they became so sociopolitically controversial and because their reputation was so

3:18 poor the new wave of research that's been starting up again since the early 90s has had to proceed very slowly and very carefully in the face of a lot of obstacles and so it's really only been in the last 10 years or so that that's been kind of coming to fruition in a major way and the sort of results of that research have been reaching a wider public so so when they i mean maybe this is something that's outside your area of expertise but i'm just a little bit curious about the early history of this so when lsd was first discovered i mean i i had heard that it had been

3:52 sort of pioneered as a truth drug or something like that and for interrogation purposes but and it doesn't seem like it was really being looked at as a way for for therapeutic uh oh it was exactly right oh it was okay yeah yeah it was studied for just about anything you can imagine back in the 50s and 60s so yeah the cia infamously had the mk ultra program in which they wanted to see if it could be used as a truth serum or a brainwashing agent but there were all sorts of other research programs so you know the main one was the sort of psychotomatic paradigm the

4:25 idea that these drugs induce experiences that are similar to naturally occurring psychosis if not identical and so by studying their mechanisms of action we can learn something about the biochemical basis of mental illness and the very fact that a drug like lsd could have such dramatic effects on consciousness in such minute doses was really crucial in confirming that there is such a thing as the biochemical basis of mental illness you know it played a role in kind of confirming that serotonin is involved in regulating mood and cognition and so on um but so that was sort of the initial thought is that these drugs are

4:57 psychotic mimetics but then um as they continue to conduct the research and administer them to people into various conditions under various circumstances they notice that you didn't always get these stereotypically psychotic reactions right sometimes you would get people having transcendent mystical or religious experiences so that led to the sort of mystico memetic paradigm the thought that well studying these drugs can teach us something about the nature of mystical or religious experience even about the historical genesis of religion but then they also noticed that some people kind of who had these

5:29 mystical experiences reported really transformative effects right they reported kind of changes lasting positive changes in personality and behavior and well-being and so yeah so there was a really robust program of research using them as psychotherapeutic aids and a lot of that early research was methodologically a bit substandard but there are some really good trials for alcoholism there was a recent meta-analysis of studies from the 1950s and 60s that found solid evidence for the efficacy of high-dose lsd and the treatment of alcoholism and it was also used i don't know there were many if any rigorous trials but

6:04 it was certainly used for the treatment of anxiety depression and existential distress in terminally ill patients that was one and that's now become the sort of best studied indication in the recent wave of research as well and that actually continued all the way into the 70s into the late 70s they were still despite the fact that no new projects were being funded or approved um psychedelics like dpt dipropyl tryptamine was still being given to um dying patients well into the mid to late 70s interesting yeah so i wonder what what so i know it was classified a lot of

6:36 these drugs were classified as um having no therapeutic use uh sometimes i guess in the late 70s or i'm not sure exactly when this happened but uh so what's been the recent change why are people rediscovering this yeah well i think some people who were involved in that early research never sort of let go never never kind of let the the flame go out so one guy in particular is bill richards who's at johns hopkins who was involved in in fact he was um with on the team that i was just talking about i think it's spring grove hospital who were

7:08 still administering psychedelics to dying patients into the 70s and so people like that have sort of maintained their belief that there's a lot of value in these substances that they use carefully and then there have been people like rick doblin and maps the multi-disciplinary association for psychedelic studies and they have been sort of campaigning for the therapeutic potential and the safety and zone of psychedelics to be revisited since the mid 80s so you know even though in these drugs kind of went off the radar in the mainstream there have always been people and obviously in some cases these are people who have

7:39 had their own experiences in various you know illegal contacts and have become convinced personally that there's something really valuable here but yeah basically it's been a lot of really hard work from um a lot of people who are convinced that there was something valuable here that needed to be revisited and then the circumstances needed to be right the stars needed to align in terms of you know the culture changing a bit and people you know the authorities being ready to give this another go right and it seems like that's happening because i mean i was just talking with someone uh on thursday heather berlin who was telling me that they're opening up a

8:13 psychedelic therapy center at mount sinai in new york so this is sort of entering the mainstream at this point i guess i mean or it's vert is poised to be entering the mainstream and i guess that's really because we have some good evidence that this actually works um in many contexts and so i know you in your book which is really excellent by the way before we get too involved is this book coming out um is it out already or is it gonna be out soon it's not out yet it's gonna be out probably in march at the moment they're saying march okay so it and it's called the

8:46 philosophy of psychedelics yeah yeah it's an excellent book it's really well written it's very thorough and i really hope that people read it that are interested in these uh therapists psychiatrists psychologists but also philosophers there's a i mean it's a tremendously rich source for philosophy as well anyway so we'll get back to that but i know you have a whole chapter in the book where you kind of go through all the evidence detailing the safety and efficacy of these sorts of things and of course we should mention you said it at the beginning but we should mention that you restrict your attention to a certain class so psychedelics is a broad term but

9:19 you want to narrowly focus on the ones you mentioned at the beginning uh but anyway so i wanted to say a little bit about your your focus and uh some of the evidence that this is successfully administered yeah sure so yeah as you say i'm looking specifically at um serotonin 2a receptor agonists so yeah the most famous examples are lsd masculine psilocybin and dmt and there are some probably some like relatively minor some people would say slightly larger pharmacological and phenomenological differences but these drugs all form a unified class and the

9:51 evidence is pretty strong that their psychoactive effects are mediated primarily by this serotonin 2a receptor against action even if there are other receptors playing a role and so yeah that's the class for which the term psychedelic is increasingly being reserved that's kind of becoming the standard nomenclature um they're also known as classic psychedelics serotonergic psychedelics serotonin hallucinogens but yeah as you say there are other drugs that have been called psychedelic on phenomenological grounds because even though they have quite different pharmacological mechanisms the effects on experience overlap to a

10:24 significant degree and these are things like salvia divinorum dissociative anaesthetics like ketamine things like cannabis mdma and so yeah i'm not talking about any of them i'm just restricting my attention to the classic psychedelics for no other reason than that early in my phd i realized i needed to narrow my focus i mean i also like a lot of people i am especially interested in the classic psychedelics i do think there's something about them um but yeah it was also just a very pragmatic decision so yeah when we restrict ourselves to those and the evidence base is mounting i mean it's certainly not

10:58 sufficient yet i don't think to warrant to kind of justify clinical use i mean it's not really my area anyway but basically there's a bunch of studies um i think yeah i guess they've all really taken place over the last 20 years so there were some studies in the 1990s with dmt so rick strassman at new mexico was doing studies with dmt and healthy volunteers and then franz fall inviter and his group in zurich doing studies with psilocybin but that was all basic science neuroimaging not therapeutic trials so but that of course contributed to the

11:30 evidence for safety and that's the major hurdle that needs to be crossed after the reputation psychedelics have acquired over the years is safety and so that's where the evidence now is really clear cut right so in this new wave of research over the last 30 years i have trouble finding exact figures but many many hundreds of volunteers some healthy without a psychiatric diagnosis some have a diagnosis of anxiety depression addiction and i saw in one paper the figure was that 2 000 plus doses of psilocybin have been administered that doesn't mean two

12:04 thousand plus volunteers some respect multiple doses but two thousand plus doses of psilocybin in carefully controlled conditions without a single lasting adverse effect so sometimes during the experience people have some kind of intense fear or anxiety but that can be managed and it doesn't seem to leave any sort of trauma or mental scars or anything like that right so that's the safety issue is that people sometimes thought that this would be induced like a permanent psychotic break or something like that right and there's no evidence that that's the cases or even if there are bad trips or whatever

12:36 this is something that can be recovered from that's what the evidence is well there's no evidence that that happens when and there's good evidence that that doesn't happen when strict safety guidelines are followed and that includes among other things exclusion criteria right so no one with a personal history or an immediate family history of any psychotic mental illness is admitted into these trials because the going theory is that that's when you have the risk of a lasting psychotic break is when there's some genetic predisposition and the drug experience can kind of trigger or catalyze it and you know i mean it's hard to draw firm conclusions but what so far what this

13:09 state of studies has shown is that by following these strict guidelines which don't just you know go they go beyond those exclusion criteria it's also about kind of making sure people are well prepared they're well informed about the things they might experience they've got people on hand to give them reassurance if need be and especially in the therapeutic trials there's a very specific protocol that tends to be followed with you know a playlist music and earphones an eye mask two therapists present but yeah basically what's been shown is that under controlled conditions when all these guidelines are followed the safety profile is really really good and

13:43 physiologically as well in terms of addiction liability these drugs are definitely safer than a lot of other drugs that are used routinely for medicinal purposes yeah i mean it's important to emphasize that no one's saying you know go take some magic mushrooms out in the woods and it's going to be therapeutically beneficial i mean these are very controlled circumstances in fact in your book you say they're actually you know coached beforehand a little bit right they they have uh they work through like what the possible effects will be and what they experience and that to adopt this kind of attitude of openness

14:14 and kind of flowing with it yeah yeah trust let go and be open is the mantra yeah yeah yeah and the clinical wisdom from the 50s and 60s suggests that that's that's what tends to promote a beneficial experience whereas when you resist what's happening um that's when you can end up in a freak out right exactly so it's like you know the the hippies of the old would go some of them believed in dosing you know going around and dosing people who are not expecting it that's extremely dangerous because that's when you're most liable to resist it it seems um terrible hugely a hugely unethical idea yeah

14:47 exactly yeah well not only that but i mean it's all i guess because you know people have had these really profound experiences think there's something beneficial obviously but also something essentially important that's revealed and so there was an attitude i guess amongst certain persons you know timothy leary being kind of a leader in this area that everyone should be required to have these experiences and the people who were square or resisted it should be sort of forced into doing it and that's that's that's incredibly dangerous if you're not prepared for it then this is that's not a good idea that's not what anyone's recommending but there is a lot

15:20 of evidence that you that you talk about in your book that there's actually uh for addiction for depression for anxiety that this actually works um and the question is why does it work i mean is that the is that the right way of framing the debate i mean that is a huge question yeah as yet not answered definitively yeah but um so you get some clues from what you see across these studies and it's worth emphasizing that at the moment a lot of these are kind of open label uncontrolled trials so i think when you think about addiction i think all that's really been published so far as there's one study of

15:53 psilocybin for alcoholism one study of psilocybin for tobacco addiction then if you think about depression there's oh there's also observational studies of people taking part in ayahuasca retreats for the the treatment of addiction um depression there's one again open label study of psilocybin for treatment resistant depression and i think there's one randomized controlled trial with ayahuasca the biggest evidence space is for the treatment of existential distress anxiety and depression in end of life in people with the terminal diagnosis so there again you've got a couple of small open label i think one

16:27 of them is controlled and one of them is with lsd as well one of the very few kind of studies to be done with lst but then there's a couple of bigger double-blind randomized controlled trials and what is so interesting across all of these studies is with some variation but generally you get a very consistent picture and it's that after one to three sessions with the drug you get reductions in the symptoms of whatever the pathology is for weeks months even sometimes years um and a specific type of experience seems to predict um

16:59 these lasting changes in symptoms and that's the so-called mystical type experience and so that fact the fact that you sort of get that kind of finding across all the studies is one of the things that gives me confidence that this is kind of not just a placebo effect it's not just an artifact even though you know there are big phase three studies underway now in which it's really going to be put to the test rigorously and this is i think mostly for depression sort of testing psilocybin for depression across multiple different sites but the fact that you have this kind of consistent finding and that extends to studies with healthy volunteers as well

17:31 so you have healthy volunteers who have some interest in spirituality or have spiritual practice or whatever and they get given the drug and again not everyone satisfies the psychometric criteria for the mystical type experience and it's the people who do that tend to show lasting um personality changes and increases in self-reported well-being and quality of life and that kind of thing so it seems that yeah across different psychiatric conditions and even in people who don't have one you get these lasting increases in well-being when a specific type of experience occurs on the drug

18:04 and so what what's the i mean i know you go through it but can you tell us what the definition of a meta a mystical experience is that's sure unifying yeah yeah so it comes it's drawn from the work of uh walter stace the philosopher who in turn was drawing on aldous duxley's work on the perennial philosophy and so the idea is and i should mention that this is a contested idea but the claim is that when you look at the mystical literature of the world's religions across times places and cultures and so on it's not to say this is the only type of experience you find but the claim is that there is

18:35 a distinctive type of experience that crops up again and again that is reported notably by religious practitioners people who engage in some spiritual discipline but also sometimes by people who don't who just have the experience spontaneously and the thought is that while these experiences are kind of interpreted and just you know discussed in the language of whatever the culture and time and place is there is some common core as it's called there's a common phenomenological core that is culturally invariant and so the exact list of criteria has varied a bit oh of course i should mention william james as well so in the

19:08 western philosophy and psychology he really blazed this trail i think he had four criteria but i think in the instruments that are most commonly used there are seven right so to be a um like talk about mystical type experience um as an experience that sort of ticks these psychometric boxes and we can talk about the distinction between mystical and mystical type experience but the criteria are supposed to be a sense of unity oneness or interconnectedness right so this feeling that everything is one and the individual sense of self dissolves um let me see if i can get them all like

19:40 i always seem to miss one or two so there's the sense of unity or oneness uh the noetic quality very important the feeling that this is more real than real that i'm gaining some kind of direct unmediated knowledge or metaphysical insight into how things really are um paradoxicality so people tend to talk in languages it sounds contradictory they talk about an empty unity that was at the same time full and complete things like that ineffability they insist the experience can't adequately be described in words before going on to this is a cliche this is not my point

20:14 but or going on to talk about it endlessly [Laughter] deeply felt positive mood um oh transcendence of time and space yeah the feeling that the experience is one outside the confines of ordinary spatial awareness and it's an experience of eternity or a temporality um god i'm missing one that one did the ego dissolution no that's sort of subsumed under unity okay yeah yeah six is good six is good it's enough to be getting yeah

20:48 so and so the idea is that p so you have a questionnaire afterwards and people who rate themselves as having these kinds of experiences that correlates with the people who have positive benefits yeah that's right and so you don't need all seven of them or do you uh to counter yeah mystical experience so i should say the the one the particular instrument that i'm thinking of that has these seven criteria is the meq the mystical experience questionnaire there are other instruments that get used there's the 5d asc five dimensions of altered states of consciousness and that has a

21:22 one of the five dimensions is oceanic boundlessness which is not described in precisely the same way but it's pretty clearly a proxy for something like a mystical type experience but when um this meq is being used the definition of uh what they call a complete mystical type experience is 60 or more on each of those seven criteria basically so you're asked you know how true was this of your experience and it's a scale of you know no more than everyday experience up to you know more than ever before in my life and if you score 60 or more on all of the criteria that's

21:54 considered a complete mystical type experience okay and so this kind of gives rise to the what you call the comforting delusion uh objection which is that you know there's kind of an ethical question here because a lot of a lot of people might think well um the thing that's doing the beneficial that's giving you the beneficial results are these kind of delusional beliefs about the nature of reality which probably aren't true or something like that and so maybe we should wonder if we should get people to have these delusional beliefs um and you you want to address this head on but can

22:26 you say a little bit about what um am i getting it right and also what your strategy towards it is yeah so that's right and so it kind of becomes a problem if you're sympathetic to philosophical views like naturalism physicalism materialism if you think that the natural world is all there is that the mind is purely physical it's in some sense the activity of the biological brain or body and so you think there is in reality no such thing as a cosmic consciousness or a divine transcendent level of reality or something like that because it looks on the face of it like as you say

22:58 what is going on here especially when you look at its use in end of life care where people are anxious about their impending mortality you give them the drugs and some of them have this transcendent mystical experience and their fear of death seems to decrease dramatically it reconciles them to their impending death and so if you're sympathetic to naturalism or materialism or whatever the obvious sort of thing you think is well it's a comforting delusion these experiences they're having this intense hallucinatory experience owen flanagan calls it a metaphysical hallucination which i think is a great phrase so it looks like yeah the drugs are

23:30 inducing not just physical hallucinations that the wall is breathing and there's geometric patterns on everything but at high doses they induce metaphysical hallucinations that you know we are one with the divine ground of being with the cosmic consciousness which underlies the universe and then people come back and they have this belief that you know who i this body that i you know is going to die that's not who i really am who or what i really am is this eternal infinite kind of timeless divine reality and obviously in the face of death that would be a very comforting belief especially if it were backed by this

24:03 noetic quality if it was something that had the kind of overwhelming authority of kind of direct immediate experience feels like waking up from the dream of everyday life into you know what has always been real and will always be real and so yeah i mean as a naturalist this looks worrying to me because i think the arguments are pretty good that consciousness is just created by the brain there is no cosmic consciousness and so yeah as you say there's this worry um that it looks like we're treating psychiatric disorder by inducing comforting but implausible metaphysical beliefs yeah i

24:36 mean some people actually do endorse the i guess verticality of these beliefs i mean i know some people who are idealists i mean they're kind of vocal on twitter but one of the main reasons they're idealist is because of psychedelic experience that's not the only reason to endorse idealism i guess i'll say having talked with some serious idealists but at least there's a tradition of people saying you know that we should take these um these things seriously and you're suspicious of that move right uh i am yeah although you know i i i come and go on this i'm on the fence sometimes i mean i was an idealist in my misspent youth um and you know i i have

25:12 a colleague here at uwa mirial buhari who's currently engaged in the project of trying to formulate and defend what she calls the perennial idealist metaphysic which very much is the type of metaphysic that people come away from these experiences talking about for mary herself it's got no psychedelic basis whatsoever it's based in aldous huxley the perennial philosophy and all this stuff but yeah so there definitely are people and there's a lot of them in the psychedelic sphere who say um take it at face value it's real it's not a metaphysical hallucination it's a metaphysical revelation um yeah absolutely but yeah i'm suspicious of that i do think on balance

25:46 um physicalism is is probably um a more plausible view i think that partly because i presume we'll get into this at some point partly because i think i've got a really good error theory for the cosmic consciousness experience i think i've got a really good and it's not really my original idea but the more and more i think about it the more it makes sense a story about why and how these experiences might come about even if the corresponding metaphysical view were not true even if physicalism were true but that's the worry so the worry is that um you know naturalism is true and psychedelics work by they bring about

26:20 their therapeutic and transformative effects by inducing non-naturalistic metaphysical beliefs and this is something we should care about we should care about the epistemic status of therapies so this looks like a problem for psychedelic therapy and so there is different ways you can respond you can either say well naturalism is false you can go the cosmic consciousness idealist route or you can say well who really cares it's not you know the epistemic status is not that important as long as it kind of really benefits people and that's you know that's a crude kind of rendition but that's sort of the owen flanagan george graham view they talk about

26:52 these experiences and say look you know the benefits are so great that really um you know the kind of epistemic qualms pale in comparison um so you can go one of those two ways or you can accept the conclusion and what i'm trying to do is yeah offer an alternative a different way of responding that sort of hangs on to the idea that naturalism is true and hangs on to the idea that we should care about the epistemic status of therapies but still it ends up giving basically an okay verdict for psychedelic therapy right and the general part of the general strategy is to

27:25 argue for what lisa bortololi calls the epistemic innocence of these kinds of things and i think that's a really cool strategy um so uh first of all can you tell us what that what she means by that and how uh how it's going to play into your defense sure yeah so it was really serendipitous that lisa started doing this work on epistemic innocence right when i was starting my phd on psychedelics and i came across it and i went this is it this is perfect this is what i want to say and so she has defined this term she's coined this new concept to basically

27:58 think about the complex epistemic status of cognitive states cognitive processes that clearly are irrational in some sense or epistemically sub-optimal they have some epistemic risks or deficits or flaws but they also have these significant epidemic benefits that you can't get any other way and so one of her examples is um so-called motivated delusions or defensive delusions so things like um anosognosia the denial of illness or you know various other conditions where people hold delusions that seem to play or you know they have been argued to

28:31 play a psychologically protective role to sort of protect the person from facing the terrible truth and undergoing total despair or sort of psychological collapse and lisa just points out that look you know if these states really are playing this role this defensive or protective psychological role well obviously they've got epistemic costs right their delusions their faults are implausible beliefs but they therefore have psychological benefits they're helping the person retain their sort of psychological and social functionality and her point is that that in turn is going to have flow on epistemic benefits because

29:02 a lot of the ways in which we gain knowledge about the world have to do with exercising our psychosocial functionality right exploring the world taking an interest in it talking to other people exposing our beliefs to scrutiny and so on so she's pointing out that you know there is a real and significant epidemic benefit that you get through having this imperfect cognitive state that you couldn't at that time get any other way that you couldn't get via any less epistemically costly alternative right and so that's going to turn out to be part of your defense of of these kinds of experiences which i think is really

29:35 cool and we're going to get to that but before we do i want to talk a little bit about the things that you say kind of leading up to that because so we've sort of dealt with the let's take the metaphysical stuff seriously so you think there's a good case for naturalism i tend to agree um and also though you think that you have a debunking explanation which is going to be part of the part of the defense here um but there's a couple so first of all i think that it's part it's importantly part of your defense that you argue that well these the metaphysical part of the experiences isn't really a great

30:09 candidate for what's doing the therapeutic work so so what what's your reasons for thinking that and so what is doing the therapeutic work yeah so basically um there's a lot of really great great qualitative evidence where people have you know researchers have interviewed the participants in these studies the patients who have had these experiences and what you find is really interesting you find and these are people who've been successfully treated who have had good outcomes and therefore by inference they must have had this mystical type experience or something like it

30:40 they've satisfied the psychometric criteria and yet when the researchers interview them they're not talking about i became one with the universe and you know i realized that i am identical to the birthless deathless timeless absolute and that gave me great kind of fortitude in the face of my impending demise i mean some of them say something a little bit like that and some of them are talking about you know an encounter with god or a union with god or a vision of a deity but you get these other things that come up much more consistently which are things like a sense of connectedness right so obviously that's kind of related to the

31:12 sense of unity and the mystical type experience but it needn't be unity with any kind of divine reality or cosmic consciousness in a lot of cases it's just a sense of feeling profoundly connected to other people to all of life to everything on earth to the cosmos the natural world as such people are talking about psychological insights or experiences of autobiographical reframing kind of coming to understand things in their own life aspects of their own personality and psychology people are talking about emotional catharsis intense emotional experiences

31:44 and coming to accept and feel their full range of emotions all the way from kind of um fear and terror to sadness and despair and you know things that they previously would avoid or shut out so people are talking about all these sorts of things and you don't really get this clear signal coming through that what is doing the work is having a newly acquired or strengthened belief in the existence of some transcendent metaphysical reality and so my reasoning is really simple it's just that when people do have that classic sort of mystical experience where they do kind of

32:16 experience oneness with the the timeless absolute the cosmic consciousness they talk about it right they really rave on and on about yeah and so my thought was if these people were having that kind of experience they would be talking about it and since they're not we can conclude they might be having something that shares some elements with that but my thought is that basically these psychometric constructs of mystical type experience and oceanic boundlessness from the fact that those sort of psychometric boxes have been ticked you can't infer that someone has actually had a classic mystical

32:49 experience in the sense of union with some divine reality that was felt to be kind of undeniably or unquestionably real instead it could be some other experience that caused them to tick these boxes to a certain extent and this comes through really clearly when you read um michael pollan's book on this because you know he was a naturalist before his psychedelic experiences and he remained one after but he had this experience on psilocybin mushrooms that when he filled out the questionnaire it satisfied the criteria it was a as he put it according to the scientists i had had a mystical experience

33:22 but he talks about it and he had this experience of ego dissolution the loss of the sense of self and he felt his kind of sense of individuality merge into this cello suite that he was listening to and he kind of experienced this had this experience of looking at life and death from the vantage point of a a consciousness or a kind of way of looking at the world that is not identified that doesn't have this sense that i am this bounded individual persistent entity right so there was some kind of metaphysics in there but it's a

33:54 metaphysics that i would say is perfectly consistent with naturalism and he basically said that you know this helped him to understand how you get this phenomenon of people kind of ticking the boxes for a mystical type experience but still staying atheists it's because what is relevant and what is therapeutic and what is transformative about these experiences isn't necessarily the belief in another metaphysical reality right didn't he also say about that though that that he thought maybe this suggested that this was a bad way of uh determining what mystical experiences

34:29 are since he said he had one according to the criteria but he didn't really feel like it was one no he said that of one of his other experiences he also had this yeah he had this really intense experience on five meow dmt which is a very potent naturally occurring psychedelic that often people smoke and it's kind of zero to oblivion in 10 seconds and people often talk on this drug about having these real sort of unity of pure consciousness type experiences and basically michael pollan had a really bad experience it was kind of terrifying ego dissolution on 5 meo dmt

35:02 but he still found it just sort of scraped over the line for the meq questionnaire and that's when he said well look yeah that instrument is not a good good net for capturing the 5mo dmt experience but he seemed pretty happy with it with respect to his psilocybin experience okay yeah okay i got those two confused like because that was the one who was talking about his like sense of self was blown away like a house on bikini atoll or something like that that's yeah yeah experience okay yeah i want to go to emt yeah i want to come back to that because there's an interesting philosophical point about whether you can have selfless consciousness so i want to make

35:34 sure that we get the chance to talk to that um but going back to this this issue right here so um i i wonder if there's any uh background correlation to your previous beliefs so michael pollan was a naturalist beforehand uh he continues to be one so i wonder if some of these people have these i mean not everyone obviously some people are like pretty staunch you know ordinary persons and they have these experiences and say oh you know idealism is true there's a consciousness but i wonder if like these really union with god types of experiences uh can they be predicted by by your past

36:07 religiosity so to speak yeah good question i would love to know i mean i know there was one study in healthy volunteers by roland griffiths and ko johns hopkins where they specifically recruited people who had some kind of interest in religious or spiritual practice and i think from memory maybe there was a higher rate of mystical type experience in that than in other comparable studies but as far as i know there's just not a lot of um it hasn't really been studied rigorously empirically yet i wouldn't be surprised i mean as you say it's important to realize that it's not going to be a perfect correlation there are these really

36:39 striking stories where people are staunch atheists materialist naturalists and they become you know have have one psychedelic experience and become an idealist or whatever but yeah i would i would not be surprised if there was some correlation yeah i mean people people are making the same point about there's a couple of recent studies showing increases in things like nature relatedness um you know the sense of relation being related to nature or connected to nature after a psychedelic experience and others showing decreases in authoritarian political leanings and this is the response that a lot of people have is you know

37:11 is this just bringing out tendencies that were already there especially given the likely personality profile of people who are going to volunteer for these studies and i think that probably accounts for some of it whether it accounts for all of it i don't know but yeah yeah because i mean you might think something i mean so i had a similar kind of thought about the beneficialness of these therapies it's like maybe there's a selection uh bias going on here the people who volunteer for the study might be already people who could benefit from it so um what i don't is there i mean is there a kind of study that's just true

37:46 double-blind random selection i mean that would be hard to to really get there's always going to be a volunteer kind of thing going on exactly yeah there are kind of there are problems you just can't ever ethically get around here because people always have to consent they always have to volunteer i mean i think we're going to see more information as more studies and bigger studies are conducted as these phase 3 studies of psilocybin because just by the numbers if you have to recruit hundreds upon hundreds of volunteers across multiple study sites you're just of necessity going to get a bit more psychological and ideological diversity

38:19 but yeah there's still always going to be that fundamental limitation that you can only study the effects of psilocybin on people who want you to study the effects of psilocybin right but is there have there ever been any studies that um that uh double-blind the choice of hallucinogens so you you're getting one but you don't know if it's psilocybin or lsd or uh have they have yeah those kind of studies yeah there have been some um i don't know about so i think there were one or two back in the 60s and 70s where they blinded the choice of classic psychedelics or psilocybin lsd and so on

38:51 um i tried to track one of them down i remember reading one like that ages ago and i tried to track it down the other day but couldn't in the modern era i'm not aware of any like that but there have been ones where they've double blind and compared classics and contrast classic psychedelics with other drugs there are some where they um so there's a recent one where they did lsd mdma and some kind of straight amphetamine methamphetamine or something there was another one i think back in the 90s where they did something similar with psilocybin um amphetamine and it wasn't mdma but it was another entactogen another very

39:25 similar drug to mdma so yeah but none in the recent research that double blind compare one serotonergic psychedelic to another that i'm aware of yeah interesting because we might think that the um phenomenology is is different between the cases and we might get different effects especially with related to nature-ness and stuff like that but uh yeah so that's interesting um but so i i think there's an interesting case so i think what we were talking about previously to get her back on that track was that there's an interesting case to be made i think i was convinced by it actually by reading your book that the

39:57 the metaphysical the comforting delusion part it's not really clear that those things are doing the therapeutic work um but then there's the the flip side of that which is that you might think that the phenomenology itself doesn't play any role in doing that it may be some kind of molecular you know uh thing the phenomenology comes along for free but it's not really the the sort of vehicle for driving the change and that is a kind of response that you find in the literature right yeah yeah absolutely and your argument against that sort of approach is

40:31 um yeah is is basically just the robust correlation between this specific type of experience and the lasting benefits i mean it might seem a bit naive or simplistic but i just don't really see how you can account for that um on the kind of pure the view that it's all due to just like molecular level processes of neuroplasticity because if that were the case i would have thought that the effect you should get should be strictly dose dependent it shouldn't kind of depend on what particular profile of subjective effects you happen to get on any given administration which as we know does vary quite a lot but there is this

41:03 strong correlation to when you get this experience where the sense of self dissolves and you have some kind of insight and feeling of connectedness why would that be why would that correlation exist if it were all going on at some kind of sub-experiential level and i think there's more you can say i mean i focus specifically on that in the book but i mentioned in passing the fact that's really consistent with other things we know right so for instance we know that intense um experiences intense conscious experiences can have lasting and dramatic psychological effects can reconfigure personality and the obvious

41:36 proof of concept is ptsd so some people call psychedelic therapy a kind of inverse ptsd it's a kind of incredibly overwhelmingly intense emotional experience but the valence is positive and so similarly it's so intense it's so memorable you keep going back you keep revisiting it and that profoundly restructures your psychology but in this case for the better and so given that the experience that's induced is described you know people very often rate these experiences among the five most personally meaningful and spiritually significant events of their lives and they

42:07 say this was as important to me as being with my parent when they died or the the birth of my first child or something like that so it almost beggars belief that you could think an experience like that wouldn't have some profound lasting psychological effect i mean that's not to say there isn't some part of the effect that's being caused outside consciousness as well but you you would just expect sort of our priori as it were that if you induce an experience like that that's going to have psychological effects and then you've also got the fact that you know naturally occurring spontaneously occurring

42:41 non-drug induced mystical experiences near-death experiences are all i mean it's anecdotal you can't study it in a controlled way really but are all widely reputed to have these transformative effects there are so many stories of people kind of just completely turning their lives around after having one of these experiences spontaneously so i wonder you don't talk about this specifically that i remember in the book but i wonder about the if there's any work done on the so-called micro dosing um which you know was i guess semi-popular among certain people for a little while like enhancing creativity

43:13 you take just a little bit you don't feel like the experience or anything like that but uh so the the because one what made me think of that was that the evidence that you talk about that this is kind of dose independent so some people who take a moderate dose they have this transcendent experience they have benefits some people take a large dose they have this some people take a large dose they don't have that experience so then they don't see the the benefits so it seems to be relevant there is the experience independent of the amount of dosage that you have but i wonder if you could have you know

43:46 if you micro dose you don't notice any effects at all and you have some benefit then that might be an argument against the phenomenology working so i wonder if there's anyone that's ever looked at that or something along those lines yeah so i mean um double-blind rcts of micro dosing are only just starting to come out i think there's maybe two that have been published now i've sort of looked at them in passing but i haven't really um paid that much attention to micro dosing yet i think because until recently i just re was very agnostic as to whether it was just a placebo effect or not right um now what the new studies seem to show is that it's not they do seem to be real

44:20 effects from these like really low doses like 10 micrograms of lsd i can't remember offhand exactly what they were i think there was some kind of profile of mix you know some like increasing creativity but also a slight increase in anxiety or something like that but yeah i mean um if you certainly if you got comparable therapeutic effects from um a micro dose and from a mystical type experience um that would be remarkable that would be mind-blowing but then if you didn't that wouldn't really tell you anything because obviously the dose is so different right the person the non-experientialist

44:53 if you will the person who thinks the therapeutic effects are not experientially mediated is not going to be impressed by that that would predict that um right yeah so to really test this then it seems like really kind of difficult because what you have to do is somehow induce the cellular molecular changes without the experience um right so it seems like almost like not if not impossible extremely difficult right so what i'm really interested in is there was a study um published a couple of years ago in which it was showing that

45:25 all these classic psychedelics have these kind of immediate pro-neuroplasticity effects in cultured mammalian neurons they kind of promote the growth of dendritic arbors and all these things and um there's this drug that has been a sort of puzzle for a while because it's a selective serotonin to a agonist like the classic psychedelics but it's not psychedelic it you know seems to have barely any psychoactive effects and my understanding of the current thinking on that is that they recruit different intracellular signaling pathways so they kind of bind to the same receptor in different ways and cause a different pattern of

45:57 responses inside the neuron and that's what then leads to changes in neuronal behavior that cause a trip and those that don't um but as far as i can tell i don't know if this is right or not but as far as i can tell this other drug glyceride hasn't been studied to see if it has these pro-neuroplastic effects if it did that would be great because that would then make that um a relevant control you know and if you could get if it had those same pro neuroplastic effect at the cellular molecular level then you could do a double-blind trial comparing and contrasting that with psilocybin or lsd and if it was just as therapeutic that would be a strong kind of blow for the

46:31 non-experiential hypothesis right yeah that's yeah that would be interesting because it's it'd be i mean it'd be nice if there was something like that because i was thinking in the case of like cannabis we have the thc and then also the uh the cbd so we can separate those two out and say oh well the psychoactive effects of uh of cannabis can be separated from these beneficial effects that you get from just the cbd oil um and it would be nice if there was something like that for the classic hallucinogens and it's so maybe this might be a possible route towards that indeed yeah yeah i mean if that turns

47:04 out not to be the case then i don't know what you do yeah it is you know it's an issue i'd like to do more work on actually from a philosophy of science standpoint like looking at issues to do with um inter-level mechanisms and interlevel causal relations and so on because it's just it's such a naughty issue to think about it's so hard to figure out what would be a kind of killer experiment what would be a decisive test yeah okay but so let's let's because i i find myself relatively convinced by the fact that it's the that the phenomenology is doing some work i think as you say it's it would be almost like

47:37 a shock to uh common sense if you had those kinds of experiences they didn't have some psychological effect it just seems completely out of line with our ordinary notion of experience so if that's the case and if it's not the really you know oneness with god in the universe part that's doing the work then there's got to be some other aspect of it that's doing the work you emphasize connectedness and so forth but i think central to the kind of idea you have is that it has to do with the self kind of reorganizing or reconceptualizing of of the self itself um yeah so can you tell us a little bit about

48:10 how how you think this works sure yeah so basically um what ties in with the models there's a model of psychedelic action that's recently been proposed by robin carhart harris and kyle fristen and they call it the rebus model in it so it's formulated in the context of this hierarchical predictive coding or predictive processing theory and you know a lot of the details are not really that that essential but it's basically the idea that the brain the mind maintains this hierarchically structured model of the world and lower levels kind of model more immediate concrete um

48:42 features and then the higher up you get the more sort of abstract it is in the larger the spatial spatiotemporal scales are and their model basically is that um most of the kind of distinctive and important effects of psychedelics come from decreasing the brain's confidence in the highest levels the most abstract levels of this model so it's most fundamental domain general beliefs about self and world and so these are going to be things like you know i exist as an entity distinct from other things objects exist in space and time objects interact causally and all these really fundamental categories of

49:14 experience and right off the bat you can see why that would be a really attractive explanation of the mystical type experience because the kind of criteria for that sort of map really neatly on to what we would think of as you know the most fundamental or abstract parts of our reality models um but yeah i mean stands for relaxed belief under psychedelics so the idea is that you loosen these priors and then you have these sorts of you can come to these beliefs i guess i mean that was part of my question that i was going to ask is

49:46 why the focus on belief as opposed to experience but maybe you're going to talk about that but the idea is that you have these you're able to believe these things which the model wouldn't allow you to believe previously that's right and you can let in kind of new sources of evidence that previously the model would have just dismissed and so it's all got to do with this kind of bayesian idea that you know in fixing the content of experience there is this balance between top top-down prior expectations and bottom-up input or error signals and so you know the case that people often love to talk about which is really

50:18 great is the holo mask illusion right so you view a mask of a human face in the i can never for some reason convex and concave i always get them mixed up um pointing out yeah whatever yeah that's that's that's the way to do it i'm just gonna do that from now on so you view a mask of a human face in the pointing in orientation it's got to be concave doesn't it because it's like a cave um yeah there you go you view a mask of a human face in the concave orientation but it pops out and you see it as convex

50:52 and the explanation is that your brain is so confident has such a heavily weighted prior belief that human faces are convex that it just ignores the sensory evidence to the contrary right so there's always this balance between how confident am i in the prior belief and how confident am i in the driving input signal the error signal the source so it's kind of the brain is constantly sort of meta representing the reliability of all of its own sources of information whether they be top-down prior expectations or bottom-up kind of signals from the world and so the thought is that um this sort

51:25 of dynamic can explain you know it's not proposed as kind of a unifying theory or whatever but this kind of can account for a lot of what goes on in a lot of psychiatric pathologies so if someone is addicted then you know the further and further they go into this particular sense of who they are the less and less they become able to um really attend to or take seriously information that conflicts with that and they might you know so hannah pickard has just published a paper on this on addiction himself phil garan's my colleague talks about this a lot as well that you

51:57 know often an addict is really unable to simulate vividly for themselves and really kind of connect with it this sense of a possible future that doesn't involve addiction to this substance or this behavior or whatever and of course the phenomenon is very familiar from things like depression anxiety these conditions are characterized by these core beliefs about the self that i am unworthy that life is hopeless or meaningless or that you know i'm constantly under threat um and these beliefs because they're kind of heavily weighted beliefs about the self the brain ascends a higher

52:30 degree of confidence to them and therefore it just goes around kind of ignoring or dismissing or reinterpreting contrary evidence and once this gets entrenched it becomes this totally circular self-fulfilling prophecy whereby you know evidence that would break through and kind of um uh you know undermine this belief is just so it's like as i say in the book it's like hume's kind of argument that we can't take miracles seriously we can't believe reports of miracles because our evidence for the inviolability of natural law is so strong that we can just ignore any

53:02 testimony to the contrary and thought is that this is what the addicted the anxious the depressed brain is doing all the time it's saying basically i know i'm so sure that i'm um unworthy or that i'm under threat or whatever that i can just refuse to take seriously any evidence that i might be worthy or that i might be safe or loved or whatever and so yeah then the story is that the psychedelics break that open they go in there and kind of undermine the brain's confidence in its fundamental hypotheses including hypotheses about who and what and how i am and that then um allows room for all these sorts of things that people

53:35 describe in qualitative studies kind of reconnecting with their old sort of long forgotten values and you know reconnecting with a sense of themselves as worthy and lovable reconnecting with kind of um hobbies and pursuits and friends and parts of their personality that they'd forgotten having this new sense of who they are letting go of the old me as an addict or the old me as a smoker and having a new me as a non-smoker all these kind of changes to people's fundamental self-conception right so there was a interesting you quote this guy in the book who says

54:08 you know i felt like i died as a smoker and i was re i came back as a nonsmoker and that's kind of like encapsulates the basic the thing you're saying which is that they can they re-visualize themselves in a way that they couldn't previously because of these priors right and it's interesting how many people describe the psychedelic experience in those terms as a death and rebirth experience there's one that i'll never forget from the the 60s this book by masters in houston the varieties of psychedelic experience and was this guy who was just suicidally depressed and he was basically he was going to do it he had made his plans to

54:41 take his own life before so it's a while since i read it now but somehow or other he um you know ended up having this lsd session and as he described it it was a total death and rebirth of that old person who wanted to die did die and he said afterwards that in some sense that needed to happen one way or the other um that person who he was before was going to die and then once that had happened then he could be somebody else wow that's that's yeah that's powerful um okay i wonder if i could ask a question about the hollow face illusion since you brought that up um because there is some there's evidence that shows that uh

55:14 so people consciously perceive the the nose that's coming towards them as as uh convex but if you ask them to reach out and touch the nose they reach into the mask and touch the back they don't touch where the nose appears so so they're getting the visual information um sensing the place of where the actual nose is but because the priors are so high about the ordinary shape of faces that kind of is overridden and they sort of experience it as pointing towards them um so now i wonder so if this so if taken that

55:47 and the idea that uh hallucinogens relax these fundamental priors should one predict that you would experience the lose the illusion under hallucinogenics and does that happen it seems like you do the data have not been published yet but um as i understand there are unpublished data showing that people on psilocybin are less susceptible to the holo mask illusion yeah interesting okay so then that would that would be pretty good evidence that some of these fundamental priors are being relaxed yeah it's one of the most i'm actually in a reading group here in australas

56:19 we've got a few people interested in psychedelic science and we're meeting every fortnight to read various papers and we were looking just this morning at this this paper the carhartt harrison's wrist and rebus paper and looking at all the evidence and that is one of the findings even though yeah i mean it hasn't been published yet but i find that really compelling right and binocular rivalry as well um you know the fact that people on psychedelics i think some of the results are a little bit mixed it's not totally consistent across all the studies but in general the pattern seems to be you get longer periods of mixed percepts so again it seems like you've got less kind of dominance of

56:52 of top-down assumptions that you can't have two objects in the same place at the same time right yeah that's interesting um do any of these ideas do you feel like they put pressure on the predictive coding model um so if if the pr if what's well i don't know anyway can you so before i ask this question can you tell us about predictive processing in general and what it what about it where is the experience supposed to be generated from in terms of predictive processing

57:25 yeah so that's a hell of a question so i should say just to start out um i i'm not okay with the technicalities at all i don't understand the maths my grasp of the theory is what we might politely call conceptual um but yeah my understanding is very close to what i said before that you've got this kind of hierarchical model of the world different layers are trying to model what's going on at different levels of abstraction each layer is trying to generate top-down predictions of what's going to happen in the layer below and so together they kind of conspire to

57:58 generate this prediction of the the next moment of sensory input um and yeah the thought is that you know for efficiency's sake from an evolutionary standpoint um processing is driven only by error signals so any incoming signal that is successfully predicted is just cancelled out it doesn't go any further up the hierarchy it's only the differences that are sent up and so then yeah i take it this is where you're about to go this kind of leads to this question of what actually is that the basis of phenomenal experience and people have these different stories i take the two basic options on offer are um the content of experience is fixed by

58:33 the content of the models and the content of experiences is just the error is that those are pretty much the options that people talk about right right yeah so uh so what so and often you hear well what is the model i guess would be one question because why would it be why wouldn't it be the prediction of these kinds of theories that you get and experience at every level so i'm curious about what would drive you to identify it with the highest level besides like you know pre-theoretical concerns doesn't seem to be anything in the theory which suggests

59:05 that's the right to identify what was the highest level i'm sorry oh sorry you did sorry just cut out sorry about that oh good oh yeah good sorry um yeah sorry you were just saying uh the pressure to identify it with the highest level to identify what to say that you only get experience from the highest level of yeah who says that well so where so what's where in the model is uh the experience the content of the experience generated i mean i i've tended to assume it's at all levels

59:38 oh it is at all levels i could be wrong is there a standard story about this i i assume that it's at all levels as i say i know there are kind of divergent opinions um i do who who says that it's just at the top level uh yeah like i m i mean i thought um people like jacob howie i'm probably miss attributing this to him now that i'm thinking about it but uh yeah so that surprises me yeah you might be right i mean so

1:00:12 definitely now that i think about it there are parts of carhartt harrison fristen that read that way because they sort of say that you know there's this whole line that in in predictive processing higher levels tell lower levels to shut up um you know they kind of they're trying to quash the the driving signal and in places carhartt harris and fristen do seem to be talking about that as though yeah the higher levels one way they put it is they compress the lower levels um trying to remember the exact language they use but now that you say that yeah there is there's definitely things they say and there's language they use that could be taken to be suggestive of that

1:00:44 and i mean i guess that would explain the whole idea because they talk about you know how you get this expanded emotional experience under psychedelics and they sort of say well this comes from the relaxation of high level priors i mean i guess that would make sense on a story according to which normally you're sort of suppressing the the limbic activity by predicting it successfully and so then it doesn't come into awareness and then it's um when you can't predict it successfully anymore it comes into awareness so yeah okay i mean maybe maybe that is the position that's there in rebus um yeah i hadn't thought about it too much

1:01:17 i just had always assumed that the default options were either it's the content of the model and then i thought of that as at all levels which of course doesn't mean every part of the model at all levels i assume there's still going to be some consciousness making property that demarcates the conscious from the unconscious bits of the model but yeah i would kind of had thought of the the standard assumptions is either it's just the models at all levels um or it's the error signal because that's another view that i've heard some people propound is that you only consciously experience the error yeah because yeah all right so like i have to admit that predictive

1:01:54 processing as a theory of consciousness is something that i struggle to really come to understand um but also my understanding it's not a theory of consciousness which i think is is an important point which um i see it being referred to as such quite often but on my understanding it's not it's a theory of cognitive architecture of cognitive processing but it doesn't in itself have anything to say about what makes uh mental models or mental representations phenomenally conscious oh i see okay because i i think some people want to read it as giving you an account of that uh although i understand that it's primary

1:02:28 it was primarily introduced as a theory of cognitive functioning uh or even not just a theory of the brain itself um but i do think that people like jakob and maybe andy andy clark um take it to give an account of conscious experience that kind of falls out uh of this well okay so yeah i mean i definitely think it gives you an account of the contents of consciousness um but i don't think it's a theory of consciousness in the sense in which global workspace theory or iit or whatever is i i don't take it to be i know jacob is doing some work at the moment i don't

1:02:59 know anything about the content of it but i know he's doing some work on specifically on predictive processing and consciousness um so maybe this is the goal to create a predictive processing theory of what makes mental states phenomenally conscious or what demarcates phenomenally conscious from phenomenally unconscious ones but yeah i am yeah i guess i i didn't think people really thought that it kind of gave you an answer to that question i don't think okay so so you take it that it gives you an answer to what the contents of uh conscious experience might be but then you need an account of why certain contents are conscious yeah yeah

1:03:33 something like that yeah okay yeah okay good but even even on that understanding i guess i still have a version of my question which is why you would expect the contents to be modified in the way that they are so why is it the high level priors that become relaxed why not low level prior so why isn't there something about the sensory processing that has changed as opposed to these you know the the fundamental assumptions about reality yeah yeah so okay so you're getting at a lot of interesting and unresolved issues here because one apparent problem for

1:04:06 the rebus model is on low-dose psychedelic experiences you just sort of get um geometric or visual hallucinations and you don't tend to get these more intense effects on self foot and emotion and so on um but those hallucinations i mean there's a lot of work at the moment that explains hallucination in terms of overly strong priors so phil call it and people like this have all this experimental and theoretical work suggesting and it's very intuitive of course like it seems to be this hallmark of the psychedelic state that you get this kind of paradolia all over the place sort of perceiving patterns of random data and that seems

1:04:38 like strengthened rather than weakened priors um so there is a puzzle here and there's you know carhartt harris and fristen say something about this in the reaper's paper but i don't know if there's sort of a fully satisfactory resolution i mean part of the answer that they give and i have to defer to them on this is that basically this is where the serotonin 2a receptors are densely expressed so in a number of papers guard harris has said you get these so i know that these are most densely extra expressed on the apical dendrites of layer 5 pyramidal cells

1:05:10 but in terms of the specific regions in a number of papers carhartt harris says well they're most densely concentrated in these kind of higher level multimodal association areas and so that would explain why you're having effects on the high level rather than the low level priors then on the other hand you know my understanding is they're also pretty densely expressed in visual areas which sort of would explain why you get these visual effects but not why as you say the visual effects seems to be ones so i mean here's one answer you can give to the question right and i don't think it works um i think this is part of what

1:05:42 they say in the paper is well you've got this processing hierarchy and you know in the book i liken it to a quinyan web of belief the sort of higher most abstract layers are kind of really densely connected and so if you mess with the higher levels that's going to have kind of far-reaching and unpredictable effects throughout the whole hierarchy and that seems basically right and so i think in the paper they say something like well if you weaken the higher level priors that's then going to stop them having their usual constraining influence on the lower levels and so then you could get kind of lower level priors becoming stronger than they

1:06:15 should be because they're not being regulated by the high level hyper price the priors on priors and as far as it goes that seems right but that still doesn't account for this phenomenon as far as i can see where you have the low dose trip with mostly visual or perceptual effects and it's there's no obvious kind of phenomenological signs of weakening high level priors um right i mean you know maybe you could just say they're being weakened very subtly only enough to kind of relax their effect on on visual priors but not enough to really dissolve the sense of self and you don't ever i mean maybe

1:06:50 sometimes you do but do is there evidence that you get a kind of cross modal effects um under high doses of hallucinogenic so that you may be i mean people talk about you know hearing colors or sometimes you know anecdotally but does that is that's reliably reproduced oh yeah this is a very common psychedelic effect yeah my understanding is it doesn't meet the criteria for synesthesia proper but yeah these cross-modal interactions are almost like kind of one of the the main hallmarks of the psychedelic state and the main one is um uh auditory visuals so when people are tripping and they're listening to this

1:07:22 music they have this inc the incredible visions that sort of move in time with the music and the content and the tone of the visions is strongly affected by by the music um yeah that's the most common one i think you get others as well but and so is this something that you think you can explain in terms of the rebus like the relaxed belief yeah i mean again in a very like abstract hand wavy level it seems kind of intuitive that if you've got these uh higher levels that kind of function as the uh conductor of the orchestra they kind of uh

1:07:53 uh you know regulating the behavior of all the other systems throughout the brain and then you start weakening them and you know one important part of my story of course is that beliefs about the self so this self model um are importantly beliefs about what you care about so their beliefs about what matters to you your hierarchy of goals and things like that and so that's why there's this intimate connection between self modeling and salience and attention so the self model of the different layers of the self model play this role in determining what you pay attention to and that then regulates the way that is implemented is by

1:08:24 regulating the patterns of functional connectivity between all these different neural networks and to me it seems really intuitive that yeah if that starts crashing down um then you're just going to have all these kind of chaotic um you know you know unconstrained cognition is the term they use you're gonna have all these unconstrained kind of um chaotic effects ramifying throughout the rest of the system you're gonna get these effects that people observe of kind of new patterns of functional connectivity networks talking to networks they don't normally talk to and then it seems like yeah again very intuitive and straightforward you would

1:08:56 have information flow and so there have been studies that have shown really interesting things like you know increased information flow from medial temporal regions like the hippocampus to the visual cortex correlating with kind of um autobiographical visions and memory recalls i don't know if it's precisely that but really suggestive things where you know there's a correlation between increased crosstalk between certain systems and something on the phenomenal level that just is exactly what you would expect from um that change so yeah interesting and so this is i mean kind of jumping around a little bit but

1:09:28 though this is a finding that you that you get from psychedelics in like fmri scanners is that sort of naively you would expect that the brain was like just extremely hyperactive under these visual experiences but we find it kind of decreased activity um overall is that right or is you're looking like that you're skeptical about that yeah i i wanna i don't know what to say about this because yeah this has been sort of controversial point for a while and um some studies have been done to attempt to resolve it but frankly i don't fully understand what's going on in these studies and so i can't really i'm i'm not honestly sure if that issue

1:10:02 has been resolved to anyone's satisfaction because okay yeah there were all these pet studies in the 1990s that um franz vollenbada and co were doing with psilocybin and they seem to show this increased metabolic activity increases in glucose metabolism particularly in all these frontal regions then carhartt harrison co started doing the fmri studies and they seemed to show decreases in all these regions including default network regions under psilocybin um i think there have been some other studies that have shown decreases some other studies that have shown increases i remember one so one one um finding that seems to be pretty consistent is

1:10:37 this desynchronization so this weakening of the power of synchronous neuronal oscillations especially in the alpha rhythm sort of 8 to 13 hertz frequency band but i think in lower frequency bands in general and that seems to be something that is pretty robust and so one proposed reconciliation that i saw a few years ago was that maybe you're getting increased activity but decreased synchrony and so it's actually the synchrony not the um level of overall activity that the bold signal blood oxygen level dependence signal is measuring and i they cited some other

1:11:09 studies that seem to suggest that either that's what the bold signal is really tracking or at least that you can get this kind of decoupling of metabolic activity from synchrony but yeah i'm i'm pretty unsure what the state of play is in terms of do psychedelics increase or decrease overall brain activity okay interesting but the finding about the synchrony is it's or the these uh various brain patterns is itself pretty interesting um given that we think the various roles that they play like you know alpha waves are sometimes implicated in very psychological functions like attention or something totally yeah yeah

1:11:42 and i think some people have suggested i think harris and fristen definitely say this their idea is that the alpha rhythm encodes priors that's you know and that's why you get this alpha d synchronization these higher levels and that is what corresponds to the weakening of the priors oh interesting okay yeah i wasn't aware of that um okay so you mentioned the default mode network and you also talk a lot about the salience network so i wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about these networks and what why you think they're important for your specific uh way that you want to address the

1:12:13 comforting delusion objection sure yes so i mean basically i so the the whole um kind of response to the comforting delusion objection is just to say look you know even if naturalism is true and even if the epistemic status of psychedelic therapy is important it's still not that bad and the reason is that basically given naturalism the epistemic status of psychedelic therapy is really pretty good it's not as bad as it first appears and then there are two strands to that one is the epistemic risks aren't as bad as they look so it doesn't really

1:12:45 work by inducing these um non-naturalistic metaphysical beliefs and the other side is the epistemic benefits are greater than they might appear and kind of giving a positive story about how it actually works um it bridges those two right so early in the book i give the argument that it's not metaphysical belief changes that do the work but it is some part of the experience there's something about the phenomenology and then to really i could just leave that there but then to make good on that i kind of really need a positive story of my own well how is it working if it's not a low level non-experiential changes to neuroplasticity or b

1:13:18 changes to metaphysical beliefs what actually is the story and so then i'm giving a story there also is the springboard for the second part kind of talking about the epidemic benefits so yeah and my story is it's all about changes to the sense of self self representation or self modeling and so um then i kind of think we have to connect this well first of all my my story that it's all to do with changes in the sense of self is justified by three distinct lines of evidence yeah one of those has to do with the default mode and salience networks so basically you've got a few studies where so there are all these studies

1:13:53 where some kind of construct of mystical type experience or oceanic boundlessness predicts the positive results kind of um symptom reduction increases in well-being but there are a few studies just a few where um a stronger predictor is actually some kind of experience of psychological insight so having some kind of autobiographical insight into one's problems or seeing oneself differently getting a new perspective on one's own life so that's kind of my first um line of evidence that it's all about changes to the sense of self you combine that with the fact that this

1:14:24 sense of unity dissolution of the sense itself is a hallmark of the mystical experience anyway and that sort of seems to be a strong candidate um second you've got all these studies showing increases in uh these mindfulness capacities capacities for kind of taking a detached or at least a sort of non-reactive open curious stance on one's inner experience one's own thoughts and feelings and also studies showing increases in the construct of psychological flexibility which seems to me to be very similar to mindfulness capacities again the kind of you know feeling of willingness to have

1:14:58 different experiences and to not identify strongly with one's experiences or being distressed by one's mental contents and that to me clearly involves changes in the sense of self so it's kind of changing you're disidentifying with mental contents and seeing them as more of a spectator or an observer so there's those two and then the third line of evidence is yeah as you say um the fact that all these studies that look at neural correlates um of lasting therapeutic and transformative effects they all find changes to one of these two neural systems the default mode network and the salience network

1:15:29 and both of those are linked to self-representation linked to self-modeling by a whole bunch of independent evidence in neuroscience psychiatry and so the simple story is so there's this kind of distinction that people use between um you know the narrative self and the minimal or embodied self and so the narrative self is you know my sense of being this specific individual persisting over time with a given personality and autobiography and so on and then the minimal self i mean this obviously all gets a lot more complicated but at a first pass the minimal self is just the sense of being an experiencing

1:16:02 subject here and now at this moment in time um someone who is undergoing experience and um yeah the default mode network seems to be um implicated in this narrative autobiographical sense of self it's involved in all these functions like theory of mind so attribution of mental states um mind wandering in the task free resting state autobiographical reasoning reasoning about one's own personality all the sorts of things that seem like they would contribute to a kind of high level narrative or autobiographical conception of who one is and there's evidence from lesion studies

1:16:34 and so on that supports this as well showing that people with allegiance to components of this network have problems with autobiographical reasoning um and then the salience network is sort of that's kind of less straightforward or less intuitive but its function is supposed to be to detect kind of salient or relevant information across multiple modalities and play a role in kind of allocating processing resources activating the right systems do we need to be paying attention inside or outside um and part of the thought there is that it needs to represent itself in the

1:17:07 process because it needs to kind of interpret these dangers in the body changes in the physiological milieu need to be modeled as kind of signals of the relevance of events to someone if this network is going to kind of look for relevant or important events and then kind of activate other systems kind of coordinate other systems accordingly then it needs to have a model of someone to whom events could be relevant to whom they could matter and so that's where you're supposed to get this yeah kind of minimal sort of emotional or embodied sense of self and so and the evidence suggests that um

1:17:41 that modifications of activity in these networks correlates with the loss of self the ego dissolution and those sorts of things yeah that's right so if you just look at all the studies kind of looking at you know neural corals of the psychedelic state in general it's very messy it's very heterogeneous and really in some ways you should expect that because you've got different substances different doses different populations different imaging methods and we know that even when you hold all these factors fixed the effects of these drugs on consciousness are highly variable so that's really what you should predict but yeah all the studies and i mean i

1:18:15 should say one kind of caveat is that in a lot of these studies they've specifically looked for this right so they have kind of regions of interest but some of them they haven't and in any case um every study that i know of that has looked at yeah either neural correlates of um acute experience of ego dissolution during the drug effects neural correlates of the experience of insightfulness during the drug effects and neural correlates of lasting therapeutic and transformative benefits every one of them has found some kind of change to the default mode or the salience network or both yeah yeah and so the precise change is

1:18:49 difficult yeah what say that again oh sorry i just said the precise changes differ there's no incredibly kind of neat story but yeah right but generally speaking there's differences in these areas these areas correlate with are or at least are implicated in these kind of the narrative self um and so part of your defense then is that what's going on in these uh cases that where the beneficial effects are found is this um ego dissolution we have reasons to think that it's the

1:19:22 the narrative self which is involved there and so then this kind of like triangulation of this is the important area which explains why that's happening i should say not ego dissolution specifically right so changes to the sense of self but i think these can happen even when you don't have an experience that people naturally describe as the dissolution of the ego so someone might have a high dose experience and describe having kind of a new perspective on their life or an autobiographical insight or a sense of connectedness and they won't necessarily say i felt my sense of self dissolving or i was

1:19:54 merging with the environment which i think is i mean part of the problem is ego dissolution is not a well-defined term and people use it to mean different things but if it means this experience of feeling the boundaries between yourself and the world dissolve in some kind of metaphysical sense i think it's clear that that is not um not needed and so i'm definitely not saying that that's even when that experience is happening i don't think it's that experience per se i think it's you know more as you say the narrative autobiographical um stuff the ability to um see oneself differently to have a new

1:20:26 perspective on one's personality in one's life and so on yeah but but it is fair to say though that even in those cases the self is crucially involved because you're seeing yourself differently you're having insights in oneself etc yeah yeah so it's totally about sort of taking the self model apart and putting it back together it's just that that doesn't always induce a phenomenology that people would naturally describe as ego dissolution and even when it does that bit is not necessarily the most important part i see right so this is related to your self-unbinding account right that what's happening is so can you tell so first of all the notion of the self

1:20:59 that's at play here um yeah is the self-binding account and then the self-unbinding yeah yeah so it's all in the context of hierarchical predictive processing again and so i developed this um account in collaboration with philip guerins and really i've got to say he understands the technicalities a lot better than i do but yeah phil um i sort of worked with him a bit when i was at adelaide eating and he's done all this great work on you know basically the neuro philosophy and the cognitive neuroscience of delusions and all of these different psychiatric conditions um and so we kind of created this

1:21:35 account according to which and it's partly based on the fact that there was this discrepancy in the neuroimaging findings some studies had found ego dissolution under psychedelics correlating with disintegration of the default mode network so either reduction in activity of default mode network nodes or decreases in the connectivity within this network but then other studies have shown changes to the salience network and so our proposed resolution was that in the same way that um according to predictive processing the brain maintains a hierarchical model of the world in general we said the model of the self is also hierarchical and that basically it's

1:22:08 kind of tracking um information that relates to the self and tracking this self non self distinction at all sort of levels of abstraction spatiotemporal scales so at the most basic embodied level it's keeping track of the bodily boundaries i'm in here the world is out here but then it's slightly higher levels of abstraction you've got these kind of correspondences between changes in here and changes out there right so the fact that you know the heart rate does something when i encounter someone who has a particular significance to me or when i kind of you know basically when i encounter some situation outside of myself that has some significance for me there are these

1:22:41 consistent correlations between what's going on out there and what's going on in here and so we said well at that level as well the brain needs to kind of keep track of what's going on and so it builds this model that says there's this entity that has particular goals and interests and it predicts and explains the changes in the internal milieu in terms of the hypothesis that events well but inside and outside but events are relevant to the goals and interests of this entity and then at higher levels still it needs to kind of keep track of the really abstract patterns in this um over the course of time in order to plan to enable social coordination and

1:23:15 communication and that's where you get this kind of narrative or autobiographical sense of self and um the reason we talked about binding is because um well partly because there's all this work by sweet and humphries these psychologists basically showing that um you know there's this binding effect sort of increased representational integration for information relating to the self and it seems to be this robust effect across different sort of topics and different modalities and so on that information that is perceived as self-relevant is integrated or bound more efficiently and then it becomes

1:23:47 harder to unbind afterwards and um jakob hovi has this really nice story because of course the binding problem is you know still unsolved there's no agreed upon theory of how does the brain integrate representational parts into representational holes but jakob in his book has this great story about how it works on predictive processing which is that basically because processing is inverted because it's all driven from the top down the binding problem sort of dissolves because the brain just assumes the existence of objects with properties assumes bound attributes and then kind of issues predictions on that basis and

1:24:20 so to the extent that the sensory evidence confirms what you would expect so you know you kind of got the red ball bouncing and the model says there's a single object it's the bowl and it's both spherical and red and so to the extent of those properties of redness and sphericality actually do co-occur that reinforces the model and so um the idea there is that yeah this is a fundamental strategy whereby the brain kind of tracks the world and you know efficiently reduces prediction error and keeps track of what's going on is it populates the world with objects it kind of creates this substance property relation ontology and

1:24:53 we thought that was a really kind of compelling way to think about what's going on with self-representation and what therefore changes in psychedelic experience the idea that if this binding this integration of all this information across different time scales and modalities into a representation of the self actually happens by this top-down postulation of this substantial object that kind of persists through time then that would explain both a lot of kind of philosophical intuitions that you get in relation to thought experiments and also the phenomenology that people describe because i mean why are they talking

1:25:25 about having my sense of self dissolve or feeling like i'm no longer a bounded entity distinct from the rest of the world unless they felt like they were one the rest of the time right yeah i mean on a minor note that's not really related to your main proposal but i do wonder about this claim about the binding problem because maybe there's no universally accepted solution but i sort of thought that like activity in the gamma range you know 40 hertz or higher high frequency oscillations at least were widely thought to have at the potential to solve the binary problem so that

1:25:57 you know coming from the work of wolf singer and people like him the idea which i thought was kind of gaining popularity but maybe i'm wrong about this but i thought the idea was to be that different features that are firing in synchrony um get bound together um but so it sounds like part of what you're saying is that this isn't um or at least not as good an account of binding that you get from predictive processing are they compatible good question i don't really know what i think i mean i'm familiar with some of those early studies like from the late 90s i don't really know this more more recent work my understanding was

1:26:29 there was really good evidence for that in like visual feature binding the the 40 hertz thing is there is there evidence for it that goes beyond sort of perceptual processing uh yeah that i don't think they're that we that i'm aware of that there's great evidence for that but at least in the in the in the visual perceptual case i thought that this there was good evidence for that uh yeah yeah as far as i know that's correct yeah so i mean the response is is two things it's first of all you know that's a neural correlate you still need to describe what the cognitive process is that's being implemented by that so i don't see them as necessarily

1:27:02 inconsistent um right you could say that you know this this kind of top-down postulation of particulars is just what is being implemented when you have this 40 hertz synchrony um and the other thing is um yeah i mean i'm talking obviously much more about kind of higher levels of like multimodal um object binding and things like that so right it's possible there are different mechanisms operating yeah so and then more specifically about the predictive processing account of binding i guess i was a little bit confused about that it comes for free uh line um because so i get the idea that the

1:27:37 higher levels are making these predictions the predictions are in terms of objects having properties um that can be interpreted in that way but i i guess i still and so what the idea is that they sort of force well i'm still not sure how they get bound or why we'd expect that they would make these kinds of predictions as opposed to the other ones which just sort of seems like the binding problem in another guys so to speak um so maybe this this doesn't isn't really i mean you can still tell the story you want to tell even if you don't care about this question but i am guess i'm just a little bit

1:28:09 generally confused about how the solution really is supposed to like nuts and bolts work sure so i mean he is part of it so tell me if this makes sense right so the way i understand it is that on the sort of older feed forward view what might happen is you have some information comes in through the retina and then kind of you get some activity going on in visual cortex and you have like over here a representation of some luminance and over here representation of an edge and at some point you've got in kind of these relatively low perceptual areas

1:28:41 separate anatomically separate representations of distinct perceptual features and then some system further up from that needs to kind of figure out well does this one belong with this one or does it belong with this one there's some kind of problem i mean so i can't remember who it is but it's been pointed out that you know the term binding problem is ambiguous there's the binding problem that theorists need to solve the question how does the brain do this and then there's the binding problem that the brain needs to solve the brain needs to kind of integrate these representations correctly and obviously i'm using it now in the latter sense so the brain has this kind of question to answer which features go

1:29:13 with which other features um whereas i take the advantage of doing it in the top-down way and obviously this only works once you've had a period of learning once you've got some pretty robust kind of high-level priors that can strain the sorts of models you're going to have and then immediately when you get certain sorts of inputs you're going to vary rapidly you know you have the flood of prediction error and then very rapidly recruit kind of the best fit models but the thought is that if the process is being driven from the top down then my brain doesn't have to kind of look at the look at the redness and the sphericality and

1:29:46 decide what does the redness go with the sphericality or does the redness go with the shape of the chair it's already got a sort of model at higher levels saying you know because that's being selected that's the one that kind of is and maybe this is where you think that it's kind of cheating because you've still got the flood of prediction error that needs to recruit so is that the worry that you still have to at some point recruit them the right model right so yeah okay interesting yeah i'm not really sure why how how you i mean you can build it in but it seems like it's the the coming for free part is being

1:30:20 paid for at the earlier level uh at an earlier stage in the process which kind of at this point i'm not exactly sure why you would get that model as opposed to a different one um and uh but anyway so this is not really central to your main project so maybe it's it's not really relevant but um i hope not because i don't have anything very profound to say about it okay yeah so let's leave that aside because it was just kind of a passing thought but um so let's get back to the idea that then so what happens on your view is that so you have this

1:30:52 the self binding which is you take by analogy what's happening in the perceptual case you say okay so you have a model of the self has these priors built into it um and so that when those priors get relaxed then you can come to view the self and have beliefs about the self which you couldn't previously have um and so that's the unbinding part that different aspects of these will come apart and i should say you mentioned beliefs earlier you said well my beliefs why not experiences and i should say that i when i talk about beliefs here i'm interpreting that in a very broad sense and i think this is a really interesting

1:31:25 issue because this comes up later in the book in the epistemology chapter right so like it's just a familiar phenomenon that we're capable of believing something in one sense while not believing it in another sense right this kind of dissociation and so the common example is um mortality right you know we all know that we're going to die we all readily ascend to that proposition but um i know not everyone uh agrees with this but you know a lot of us think there's some sense in which most of us most of the time don't really believe that that's going to happen to us right and it's only after we have a real scare a brush with illness or

1:31:59 something like that that we finally get it we really get that oh this is and you know in in some strands of buddhism in traditional buddhism there are practices that are designed precisely to close this gap between mere intellectual belief and really feeling it in your bones and i think that's the thing is blocking it exactly yeah and i think this is one of the things that psychedelics can do this is part of the epistemic benefit but i just have no idea what to say about this from a cognitive perspective from the perspective of cognitive architecture it just obviously is the case that there is more than one sense there is more than one

1:32:32 kind of mental state that we refer to as belief there is more than one sense in which we believe things and obviously when i'm talking about beliefs about the self that structure your experience sometimes they might have a counterpart in your sort of explicit reflective beliefs but most of the time i'm talking about stuff that is structuring models that are structuring your experience that are you know representations about the self but might be kind of at odds with the the explicit things that you would sort of intellectually ascend to right um so yeah there's i i noticed we're i'm keeping you here for an extended

1:33:07 period of time so i hope you don't mind i don't know if you have another 15 minutes or so to keep talking oh definitely i mean time has flown i know i said i'd be able to do an hour hour and a half but i it's partly just because i have to have dinner it's 20 today yeah and i actually had a um i had a snack before i jumped on and i've also got a um bowl of cashews here in case we're making real philosophical progress and things get desperate i could do another 20 minutes i could go to eight my time if you want okay yeah perfect i don't want to impinge on your dinner time and uh i have to teach my morning classes as well so i have a

1:33:39 um i haven't had breakfast either but anyway so i i there's a lot that we haven't got i haven't got to ask you about but um i want to make sure that we can touch some bases on this so so one of the things that i was going to ask was well i know your view on it but i want to kind of press you on it was that whether or not these psychedelic experiences um are evidence for limitism about the self and you take a kind of qualitati a qual a qualified view of this in the book and say well even if not full on elimination then at least like

1:34:11 radical revision about our ordinary conception of the self but but i suspect that you think there's more there that you could say about this um like towards the full unlimited case so i wonder what your view about the self like what evidence evidential standards status does the psychedelics have here do you think yeah i mean i've actually become profoundly agnostic about this i'm sorry to disappoint you okay used to be i used to be a staunch no self theorist until i read that great paper by tom mcclellan that i cite in the book

1:34:43 that just really made me rethink the whole thing because i had like so many people been relying on this straightforward mismatch argument for eliminativism about the self we represent the self as a certain type of entity no real entity matches the description therefore the self is not real and my jaw hit the floor when mcclellan pointed out the straightforwardly obvious fact that that argument is invalid i just it never never occurred to me before but it's so obvious once it's pointed out that you can radically misrepresent something that nonetheless exists um and so then it becomes really tricky

1:35:16 because then you know obviously in some cases in the history of science we have a vast mismatch and the eliminative conclusion seems like the right one to draw flodgestone caloric luminiferous aether and obviously in other cases uh there's a great mismatch and we don't go eliminated we go revisionary and so um you know i wonder now whether i'd be really interested in any thoughts you have about this but i wonder whether there are any principal criteria that tell us when we should go revisionary and when we should go eliminative but i also increasingly suspect that it's a

1:35:49 pragmatic question at most that it's kind of a verbal um dispute i mean it's you know convenient to decide that a dispute is verbal once you start losing it but um if you know if mcclelland and i both agree that uh i don't know to what extent he does agree but if we both agree that we represent the self as being an entity with all these properties boundedness persistence free will and so on and that nothing in reality has um the those properties well i mean you know one of the things he does is he appeals to id is about

1:36:21 reference and ideas about disa representation and jacob hovey and john michael did something similar so at the same time they kind of published a paper a chapter on predictive processing in the self at the same time as phil guerins and i published our paper and the accounts were very similar i mean they differed in detail and emphasis but very similar hierarchical predictive processing story about the self philip and i said there is no self um jacob and john said the self model itself is the self and one of the reasons was it kind of plays some of the roles that the self is supposed to play

1:36:53 and another reason at least as i read them i it seemed like they were appealing maybe to the causal theory of reference like this self model that causes our behavior and so on that is kind of the thing that causes us to use this term i or me so that's what the term is referring to and so you need to you know it looks like if there is a principled way to do it you need to get into issues in the theory of reference um issues about to say representation but i don't even i mean you know i don't want to be too controversial but i don't even know if i believe in reference um as some you know as some real fact i don't know if there is some kind of real

1:37:27 fact in the world to be discovered about whether our self models really refer to the organism or the brain or themselves or fail to refer um yeah so yeah i mean in in that chapter in the book it kind of seems a bit like i'm dodging the question and i think that's sort of what i thought i was doing at the time making a pragmatic decision to shelve it and say that's not the most important thing here but the more and more i think about it the more and more i think maybe the question just dissolves i see um so i mean again because i think i mean for someone like me i'm

1:38:00 sort of attracted to like causal theories of reference um causal historical maybe teleo semantics stuff like that so if you have a view like that then there is going to be a kind of fact of the matter about what what we're picking out when we uh think about the self but if you have like a quinny and descriptivist view um or something like that then or then it's a lot less clear uh when you're um describing the thing when the thing satisfies the description enough there's nothing to satisfy the description then straightforwardly i guess it

1:38:32 can be really indeterminate whereas if there's a causal relation that really matters here then you can radically misdescribe the thing and still count us thinking about it so i think the mccullen kind of objection depends on a certain theory of reference um and so if you're agnostic about the theories of reference in general then i think the argument doesn't really work or it's good you have to defend one so but what do you think though as someone who i understand has been very sympathetic to eliminativism about the stealth and is also sympathetic to the type of theory of reference on which the mclelland argument depends

1:39:05 yeah if you don't mind my asking no i don't mind it um so for me um i because i am sympathetic to elimination or yeah neural nihilism as uh evan called it's uh um but it's with respect to a certain kind of thing so i i for me one of the things that is the definitional of the self is an entity that stays the same through time and accounts for personal identity um and that's not necessarily the notion of self that you're interested in or that we're talking about in this discussion about psychedelic therapy

1:39:37 it's not really um it does you don't need to have an a kind of metaphysically enduring or pur during or whatever you want whatever your theory of you know existing through time is you don't need one of those things to get the benefits that we're talking about you can do it with psychological continuity and those other sides of things so so mostly i'm a limitivist about the thing which exists through time um and uh the reason i'm unlimited is about that is because i well for metaphysical reasons but also i think that when we think about the self we're picking something out and the

1:40:09 thing that causes our thoughts about it isn't the kind of thing that we attribute those properties to so that's how i see the two kind of going together is that you can that there is something that we're thinking about that thing can be called the self in a deflationary sense um but it's not not the sense which there's nothing which stays the same over time i mean so that's why i can say well there is a deflationary notion of the self but not in the way that we think about it um the thing that we think we're thinking about doesn't exist but we are picking something up a self model so to speak so i'm happy

1:40:42 saying that the self model is just that's what there is that's that's that's all there is and the other thing isn't there and for you the self model is the reference of eye and it is the reference of our eye thoughts and things like yeah right and in fact i think something even kind of stronger than a lot of cases we're thinking thoughts that have like the mental analog of the word i um the self is implicit there and we're not really picking anything out unless someone forces us to so if you think you know i think this then um

1:41:15 normally no one comes up to you and says wait who's this eye you're talking about who is it that you're thinking about but if someone did sort of do that then we would say you know this thing me and so i think that the very the minimal notion is just the biological organism um and then there's you can get past that but really if someone challenge you like who is it that's having these thoughts i know this happens in cases of like thought insertion and so forth but in the normal case that doesn't ever come up no one ever you know wonders who is it that's really having these thoughts um and it's kind of just left implicit that there's a there's a self so i would

1:41:48 say that it's um i i like your idea that it's the center of um narrative gravity i thought that was kind of an interesting idea so i think i pretty much find myself attracted that kind of view as well well representation of gravity because dennis right dennis sorry that's right yeah yeah sorry freudian slip yeah i was thinking about dinner but it's a representational gravity so i like imagining this yeah exactly that it's the center of representational gravity i think that's a really cool idea and i think yeah that sits well with what i was thinking

1:42:21 but why did you think there was a kind of tension there or something is that why you were asking me that oh yeah i guess because um yeah i took you to be saying that you thought mcclellan's case against eliminativism um depended on the causal theory of reference and you you were sympathetic to that so i wondered if that you know maybe put pressure on your elimination but yeah um yeah so i take it yeah part of your position is that you do have a a conception of because this is another part of mcclellan's argument i'm sorry i don't want to kind of totally derail and

1:42:55 turn this into a conversation about the self if you've got other things you want to thrill me on but um yeah part of his his um argument as well is to say well you could try and do it by establishing necessary conditions on being a self but good luck doing that in a non question begging way basically yeah no and i agree with that um but that's why i think that the notion that we're eliminating is a specific one defined in a specific way and the other thing this is largely why i also agree with you what you're saying that's largely a terminological point at that point um so it depends on what you mean by the

1:43:27 self and you know when you talk to people like evan and he's he says well this you know this uh their self is real and well what do you mean by that actually just means like sort of what we mean by it but he wants to call that thing the self and so i think that a lot of that at that point it just boils down to well what do you want to call the self and that's a definitional terminological debate yeah yeah yeah so getting back to your view because i did want to ask so if you're not a limited evidence about the self which i guess i i did sense you were dodging the question there but now i see why

1:44:00 um but one thing that you don't want to dodge the question on is whether there can be experiences that fully lack a self yeah so whether the self is required to have experiences at all and in the book you're a little bit even dodgy on this question but i know you have a paper on this where you like are not dodging you don't dodge it at all and you straightforwardly argue that you know certain kinds of psychedelic experiences um [Music] i think you think falsify the claim that uh the self is involved in every phenomenally conscious experience i do but the reason i keep dodging

1:44:33 questions in the book is because i keep publishing papers and then people keep raising great objections and i just couldn't couldn't figure out how to answer the objections before i had to finish the book okay well that's that makes sense but what so what's can hit us a little bit about the argument there and what the great objection is yeah yeah so i mean it's very straightforward so there is this claim that um you know it's impossible to have phenomenally conscious mental states without any sense of self and it's got a long history and philosophy um according to those who have done

1:45:05 their homework better than i have it goes back to aristotle it's certainly in lock and husserl and some of these people in certain guises um and so there's now this debate about well are there empirical counter examples to this and a lot of the debates have focused on various pathological conditions thought insertion depersonalization and um the analysis of those uh cases is always very controversial but my argument is simple when i kind of take off from this chapter by and beyond krieger alexander bion and uriah krieger in which they look at various cases and what they seem to say they don't quite say it outright

1:45:40 so they're they're proponents of this subjectivity principle the idea that it's impossible to have phenomenally conscious mental states without any sense of self and what they seem to say about some of these mental states in depersonalization is look the evidence for these lacking all forms of the sense of self is really strong and there's no way of explaining it away so the only thing we can say is that actually these mental states are not phenomenally conscious as i say they don't put it that bluntly but they have various other things they think you can say about states like thought insertion and they seem to think that none of these are really very promising for these

1:46:12 depersonalization states you can't kind of you know the people are very emphatic that it's not some extra new sense of alienation being added to their experience it's something missing it's being taken away they're very emphatic that they have lost all forms of self-awareness and so the only way you can then um preserve the principle and not have this be a counter example is to say well those mental states are not phenomenally conscious and so my argument is if you look at certain reports of psychedelic experiences they are at least equal to those depersonalization states in terms of the evidence for lacking all sense of

1:46:45 self the evidence is every bit as strong if not more so and yet there's no grounds whatsoever for a denial these states are phenomenally conscious and i'm pretty skeptical about that denial even in the depersonalization case but there are some sort of things they can point to there where people talk about you know i feel unconscious or i feel like a zombie or whatever and i think when you look at these cases like michael pollan's experience on 5meodmt i've got another experience by a research subject who has injected dmt and dimethyltryptamine and they seem to be very emphatic that they are having

1:47:18 vivid memorable conscious experiences in which there was absolutely no sense of self whatsoever so the argument yeah that's the argument is really simple yeah right uh it gets a little complicated though once you sort of starts distinguishing i know you do in your paper so there's the you know the mindness the sense of ownership there's me ness which is maybe the narrative self and then there's the four meanest bit um and so i you know as someone who defends higher order theories i'm not a convinced person you know i'm pretty open but i have spent a lot of my time defending

1:47:51 you know the possibility of higher approaches to consciousness um and i know that they are camped and put in this group i know uriah is a you know self-representational guy but he's in it's largely the same similar um to higher order theories uh so the idea that this puts pressure on those kinds of theories i guess is what i would kind of want to resist um i think there's some of them that they do like broccolinaro he explicitly invokes like parietal cortices in this areas that are involved in self-representation of the self has to be important for the higher areas

1:48:24 um but i don't know if they really put pressure on like what dan sahabi calls the kind of inner awareness views right that there's a kind of awareness of because even in thought insertion there's a they they say that these thoughts are inserted into their mind like one guy says it's like a screen that the thing is shown on so there's even there's a sense in which the thoughts are for them um even if they're not experienced as being their thought they're in their mind oh yeah totally yeah so but you have some interesting things to say about this this for meanness and these distinctions so what's the argument against this kind of

1:48:57 um you have a dilemma here i guess which is what i'm pressing you to talk about yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely so my my dilemma is this right is this four meanest of which you speak um a genuinely phenomenological feature or not um and if it is there should be some conceivable report however weird sounding that somebody would give that should lead us to conclude that it was absent um and to my mind if there is any such thing it's these reports that the psychedelic subjects give they're so emphatic

1:49:28 when we go into the details of why but they talk about the very kind of subject object structure of experience being altered and i think michael pollan's report in particular is really um interesting in this regard but yeah it's on the one hand it's an experiential feature on which case you should regard these reports as describing its absence otherwise what possible report would you regard as describing its absence and then on the other hand it's not a genuinely experiential feature it's just some kind of relation of epistemic access between the self and its mental states right i can

1:50:01 access this state in a way that you can't well that to me is not in itself a phenomenal feature um the claim seems to be that that epistemic relation is invariably accompanied by a phenomenal feature but i'm trying to give counter examples to precisely that generalization so the move i think that people like zahavi make a lot in this sort of context is to equivocate between the deflationary and the non-deflationary interpretation of four meanest and say look because this epistemic asymmetry is there because i can access this experience in a way that you can't therefore this phenomenal feature is there and

1:50:33 um yeah my claim is that's question begging in the context where precisely what's at issue is whether the phenomenal feature invariably accompanies the epistemic relation and so yeah the dilemma is either it's a really gen either you're talking about a real phenomenal feature in which case what could be a clearer description of its absence in this or you're not talking about a phenomenal feature in which case you're not talking about what i'm talking about so it doesn't matter yeah so i think that's interesting i mean one thing here is the difference between like the absence of the self and the expansion of the self which i know you talk about so

1:51:05 there's a question about whether you want to describe these experiences as the self dissipating or whether it's expanding to encompass everything altogether um and i think that's compatible with what these people are saying uh because of it when you have these kind of experiences really the ineffability part kicks in uh they're really difficult to put into words and so people kind of grope for a way to express the experience verbally and so they may use this kind of language and it may not be

1:51:39 i mean i don't want to discount the experiences and say they're you know they're not phenomenal content i think that's bizarre but they may be misdescribing them in certain ways because of how bizarre the experiences are yeah but do you think that this the difference between expansion and dissolution matters i know you have a footnote about this but i wasn't clear about whether you really thought that this was a way of answering the objection or not yeah no so that's that's kind of the awesome objection that i don't really know how to answer okay yeah yeah i mean i should say so i you know i on balance i still think my

1:52:12 thesis in that paper is correct i still think these are genuine counter examples but i've kind of you know so that paper was published in a special issue of this new journal philosophy and the mind sciences edited by um jenny vince and sasha finkenko and um there was another paper in that same special issue by uh miguel sebastian really putting pressure on the idea that psychedelic states uh demonstrate the possibility of totally selfless consciousness and he was the one who kind of made this objection about ego dissolution versus ego expansion um and he made a couple of other really good

1:52:45 arguments as well and that's a great philosopher agree yeah i was not familiar with his work prior to this but um yeah i actually refereed that paper and thought it was fantastic um yeah so yeah it's really like the mcclellan paper it's kind of um got me questioning myself a bit at least it's it's you know it's not changed my view but it's made me less overwhelmingly confident in it but i think you know as i say i think the killer point about michael pollan's report in particular um is well okay so first of all

1:53:19 the dmt subject who i'd quote in the book had this experience of white light pure being pure ecstasy no space no time no self well yeah i mean it is hard to conclude definitively um you know to discriminate definitively between ego dissolution versus ego expansion but principle of charity if you want to kind of interpret it at all let's just take it at face value and what he says is not i became everything but no self he specifically says no yourself nothing except the white light um i mean you know this is probably going to depend on how high a prior

1:53:51 one has for the possibility of selfless consciousness right so if one thinks there's really really overwhelming anti-seize and evidence against it then one is going to interpret these reports in accordance with that i can see that but um yeah the michael pollan report in particular seems to me really telling because he says whatever this was it was not a hallucination something that a lot of people say of their psychedelic experiences a hallucination requires a reality a point of reference and an entity to have it none of those things remained and so i interpret that through the lens of some ideas of thomas metzingers about

1:54:25 the self model and what he calls the phenomenal model of the intentionality relation the sense that we always have this um feeling of standing in kind of epistemic and representational relations fallible epistemic and representational relations to a world external to ourselves and it's that that creates the sense that there is a possibility of error and so to my mind the best way to explain what pollen is saying there this couldn't possibly be a hallucination because there was no entity no point of reference is that structure precisely what i take sahabi and ko to

1:54:57 be getting at when they talk about full meanest that structure of there being someone to whom the experience is given um i take that structure to be part of experience right and i don't think it's part of every experience but i think it's part of 99.999 of experiences and that's why we have this kind of um totally bedrock feeling that there is someone to whom the experience is given to me pollen sounds a hell of a lot like he's describing an experience in which that almost invariable feature was gone and that's why

1:55:28 he just can't kind of um wrap his head around the idea that there was someone hallucinating because there was no one who could hallucinate there was no one having an experience right there was just a total void i mean i think a lot turns on whether this thing we're talking about is part of the phenomenology or now i know people like uriah they they do think it's there and i guess i tend to think it's there as well but like so one one response that i was thinking about when i was reading this was um the pollen case i mean it does sound like a hallucination or could sound like a hallucination

1:56:01 of the lack of a self um so one way of interpreting these kinds of weird experiences is that you're i mean we're not going to be able sadly by the way i'm going to have to have you back someday because i still want to talk about all the epistemic stuff the naturalized spirituality stuff there's so much interesting stuff in your work um if you if you have the opportunity to come back i would like to invite you but um because i'm noticing now i'm pushing the limits on your dinner and my morning classes um well it's it's up to you i mean so yeah it's i'm in no tearing hurry so it's really up to you

1:56:33 okay all right so um but so what my what my thought was how do we tell so obviously these people are on drugs um so that there's you say we should interpret them at face value and i guess i tend to agree um there's no pressing reason to to deny what they're experiencing but i guess there might be a pressing reason to deny that they're experiencing something that's vertical so i wonder when someone i mean because all of the asap a sub a sit uh sit why can't i say that word symmetric asymmetric there you

1:57:07 go um all the asymmetricity that the hobby talks about are still there um but you take that to be the non-experiential aspect right so that's yeah yeah it's interesting but that's the right absolutely because i can't access pollen's experience and there's still a sense in which he experienced it not maybe as part of for his self but that's something that he could talk to you about in a way that you couldn't talk to him about um totally so those things are there uh and i think there's a hobby point to kind of be well given those things are

1:57:40 there we expect the other thing is there and why couldn't we then say yeah maybe it was but he misidentified it or was under the impression that it was absent when it really wasn't so i wonder how you might respond to that sort of kind of claim yeah yeah and i mean i have no issue with the claim about epistemic asymmetry and so just to be really clear i absolutely believe that that experience that phenomenal state occurred entirely within the biological brain of the the organism that we point out and say michael pollan i have no doubt whatsoever about that um and yeah i mean you could certainly

1:58:13 say that because the epistemic asymmetry was there the phenomenal feature must have been too i guess my point is just what are the grounds for saying that um i mean yeah especially when the question at the issue is whether the one invariably accompanies the other and i think you know i think it is true that like in my paper i probably overstate how unambiguous and unequivocal these reports are like i think they're pretty strikingly clear but the thing that miguel points out in his paper is that you know what you really want is subjects who are you know

1:58:47 philosophers who know about term foreignness and meanness and mindless who you know can demonstrate that they're okay with all these distinctions and come back and say no it was that one that was absolutely yeah all of them were absent not even that one was there and so he had some interesting comments at the end of the paper about um you know how we could actually try and test this empirically in future and so i guess you know i i don't think there's you know so i start my paper by saying there's an impasse you know with the de-personalization cases a rational person could go either way i guess maybe i think that too even in

1:59:20 light of my psychedelic cases i can see how a really um committed kind of forminus person could still hold on to that in light of these cases but i think what would be important is to kind of say what would count as evidence against this generalization that that phenomenal feature invariably accompanies that epistemic relation so what what would count as a um a successful counter example right yeah no i think that's a good challenge for this uh kind of thing here um so i i wonder though how you so like for someone like me

1:59:54 uh so i think like what i was saying is that you have certain higher order theorists who this counts as good evidence against i think people like rocco gennaro come to mind they specifically say the kind of higher order awareness is a an awareness that involves the self um but then you have theorists like david rosenthal who's obviously hired a there is a higher thought there is kind of originates with him um but he doesn't think that it's part of the phenomenology as far as i understand it it's just that there is this kind of higher awareness that renders the state's conscious

2:00:26 um but you don't ever experience that uh except in the rare cases of introspection which you know the kind of bracketing of the who ceremony notion which are relatively rare but i don't think you have an argument against that kind of view here do you no i don't really take a yeah only only views that really do entail this phenomenological claim that all phenomenal consciousness comes along with some form of self-consciousness that's the only target and i kind of i remain you know i i do my usual move and dodge the question i remain fairly neutral in the paper on

2:00:57 which of these theories of consciousness are actually committed to that i don't say well any of them that are this is going to be bad news for them but yeah any that are not um varieties of higher order theories that don't um that aren't committed to that phenomenological claim fine yeah there's nothing for them to worry about here i don't think right okay so yeah because i so i wasn't sure if you thought that maybe this these uh psychedelic cases counted as a general argument against there being any sort of inner awareness as opposed to just uh no it's a counter example to the phenomenological claim

2:01:30 that uh some some kind of forminus is present in phenomenology of every experience besides now it's clear that you're saying the latter not the former i am saying the latter i mean i guess i think it's sort of it raises a a challenge maybe for such views i don't know if i'd even say it as put it as strongly as a challenge but it raises the possibility that those views are somehow ultimately derived from a mistake in intuition right because i talk about this access assumption the idea that consciousness consists in the accessing of mental states by

2:02:02 a subject and i owe that terminology to my supervisors jared o'brien and john opie and i sort of agree with them they say that you know this is the you know the worst bad idea most tenacious bad idea bedevilling uh the study of consciousness that's sort of paraphrasing a line from dennett i don't think i'd go that far but i do think you know i think it's an intuition that is based on this kind of ubiquitous structure of phenomenal experience but i mean you know i don't want to kind of commit a genetic fallacy like obviously like the questions about these theories need to be decided on the arguments and

2:02:35 evidence but to the extent that the appeal of theories like that derives from this intuition about an access assumption i think the kind of debunking story about the access assumption undermines them um yeah i mean i guess like for the rosenthals of the world the appeal of the theory stems from what he claims like a folk psychological platitude that if you're in a mental state but not in any way aware of yourself as being in the mental state then it's just not there it's not conscious well right now that's not that's the opposite kind of

2:03:07 phenomenological claim so it's not that in every conscious case i can tell there's the forminess there it's rather that when it's lacking we don't call the state conscious um right coming from the opposite direction but it is still that same intuition operative that consciousness is what happens when a subject stands in some relation of awareness or access to their mental states so yeah i guess i would want to say that you know i think this kind of psychedelic altered state debunking argument

2:03:39 puts pressure on those kinds of arguments arguments for those theories that appeal to those sorts of intuitive or folk psychological considerations yeah yeah i think that's interesting um okay so we're really getting on in time here and uh i i do have to wrap this up um but i know that so let's bring this all the way full circle back to your account of the how we're gonna get around the comforting um delusion objection so uh regardless of how you feel about because you even say

2:04:13 this in the book you're like look whether they're totally selfless experience is not really relevant because i think that there's very strong claim that you can you could excuse me you can make here that our ordinary conception of the self is radically revised or changed under these kinds of experiences and that's what's doing the therapeutic work here so these other questions are interesting they're raised by these sorts of experiences but they don't question the main thesis of your book right that's right absolutely yeah that's almost just you know if the book is about philosophy and psychedelics and i'm talking about the self well i probably need to say

2:04:46 something about this but yeah it's kind of secondary to the main point absolutely which is that you know yeah psychedelic therapy is not about coming to believe in cosmic consciousness it's about changing your sense of self irrespective of whether there is any metaphysically real self or not it's about changing your self sense of who you are and kind of bringing you to not only change but also to appreciate its kind of contingency and its constructive nature um and that you know from a naturalistic standpoint that is a process has considerable epidemic benefits or at least presents epistemic opportunities

2:05:18 and one of the interesting things you say about the pauline case too is all right maybe it wasn't paul and i forget who it was that you were quoting when you say this but you said they you thought they had a kind of actual experience of the ego dissolving uh or no that's not the way that they had a veritable experience of what the that the self is constructed um and that they that you're that part of the thera part of the therapeutic beneficiary uh benefits here involve recognizing that these things aren't um objective in a sense but they are the product of our own assumptions experiences etc which then

2:05:52 makes you able to change them because you realize they're not out there so to speak right and that's one of the points where kind of therapeutic mechanisms and epistemic benefits made it's kind of this phenomenal opacity moving the self model along the continuum from transparency to opacity in other words going from experiencing it as just reality in itself to experiencing it as a constructed mental model and my thought is that that's how you know you've got this sort of general effect of psychedelics of creating kind of cognitive plasticity psychological plasticity and that's how that manifests at the phenomenological level is this

2:06:26 kind of realization that my sense of self is constructed as a model is something that i can change and then in the kind of um epistemological idiom i talk about that as knowledge by acquaintance with the the modal fact that the sense of self is um constructed and contingent yeah right so one one does wonders kind of though here why you don't get the opposite kind of cases um i mean why why some of these things are strengthened uh maybe maybe this is what happens in the bad cases and you're not really

2:06:58 examining those cases but i do wonder what your thoughts about that are yeah so there's kind of um it's anecdotally fairly well attested that psychedelic experiences you know as well as sort of being ego dissolving and sometimes leading to humility and so on can exacerbate narcissism and grandiosity and this kind of thing so this is maybe the kind of thing you're getting at um yeah it doesn't seem to happen in the recent research as far as i can tell and that's probably unless there are cases that are sort of being under described or not mentioned but

2:07:29 certainly if it is happening it doesn't seem to be happening very much and that's presumably got a lot to do with the therapeutic setting and the way the whole process operates um yeah i mean there was one paper just published recently a big survey study of people having their own psychedelic experiences out in the world in uncontrolled conditions and it did find that there was evidence of decreased narcissistic tendencies and interestingly um correlating not with ego dissolution but with or so or during the experience is what what predicted to decrease narcissism um yeah but yes certainly um anecdotally

2:08:03 things like that do happen um and i mean you know i guess some of these cases as well where people are saying um i rediscovered my previous values or i kind of um becoming who i was earlier or getting back in touch with my earlier self in some sense that's kind of strengthening what's already there um right i guess yeah i guess you could just view it as you know the whole thing comes unbound and then there are many possibilities for how it could be put back together and especially if how it has been put together lately has not been great then some of the other or older possibilities are going to be more attractive are

2:08:35 going to capture attention yeah i guess i was also thinking like you don't really find cases of like the smoker who has their identity as a smoker like firmly entrenched as a result of the yeah they're like i see now there's no escape you know because you hear sometimes people ex saying things like that you know like i felt like i was going crazy and there was no way of getting out of this experience and um but you don't but it doesn't so i wonder if there's this possibility of therapeutic backfire where the habits are more firmly entrenched or

2:09:06 their identity as an addict is more firmly like they really come to see themselves as worthless or uh that these things can't escape but but we haven't seen anything like that so i was just curious about why that might be um yeah yeah yeah i mean i would say yeah our priority there's no reason to think that sort of thing can't happen it almost certainly does sometimes um i would say kind of yeah the certain setting that seems to facilitate if not a full-blown classic mystical experience at least this mystical type experience of positively valence kind of

2:09:37 disintegration of the sense of self with prior therapeutic intent is probably very important in accounting for that right i mean everyone who's yeah everyone who's going into the trials for tobacco addiction is going in with the intent of quitting and they have you know some kind of therapeutic protocol i can't remember what it was for the tobacco one i know in a study of alcoholism they use motivational enhancement therapy but you know before they even have the psilocybin there's a lot of preparation there's kind of intense this is what's going to happen and then kind of creating the circumstances under which the sense of self can be you know kind of

2:10:10 diminished disintegrated you can have this expansive sort of open feeling with the positive valence going along with it and a feeling of safety and security i mean it's a bit hand-wavy you want more mechanistic detail but i think that's gotta account for a lot of why you see see the one and not the other right okay and i also just wonder kind of finally about um whether or not this is cheating in a sense because you can get some of the same um effects in meditative practices you know people describe you you talk about the

2:10:42 similarities between um you know certain meditative practices and the kind of experiences that you have under psychedelics and so one wonders if you should do the hard work and you know focus on changing the self through these non uh hallucinatory experiences um and you suggest no that you know that this is a perfectly good way of doing it so i wonder if we could just say a little bit about that before we're finished yeah yeah so um i mean the the label that's being given i can't remember i think it was jared klerman but the name someone gave

2:11:14 to that kind of viewers pharmacological calvinism right yeah there is this it's very apt there is this kind of virtue in you know hard work and that one ought only to to use drugs as an absolute last resort to which i say why why on earth i mean we just have this yeah totally weird um way of thinking about drugs in our culture and you know the fact that psychoactive substances have been used kind of responsibly medicinally sacramentally as integral parts of many many cultures um since time immemorial doesn't show that it's good

2:11:47 obviously um i don't want to make that kind of appeal to tradition but it kind of serves as a kind of instructive contrast to our sort of deep-seated reflexive pharmacological calvinism or just you know our kind of mistrust and i you know i mean there's some good reason for it obviously drugs like other things have dangers and it's possible to use them poorly and irresponsibly and harmfully and from a completely practical standpoint right it depends what you're looking for and so if you look at the the compare and contrast between psychedelics and meditation specifically

2:12:21 taking psychedelics is not going to get get you everything that meditating can get you so there's just a straightforward practical sense in which if you have certain objectives in terms of changing your personality your patterns of attention spiritual growth and so on um there are just certain things that meditation can get you that psychedelics can't and vice versa too um so especially if you know in kind of um psychiatric cases where you're really in the grip of sort of um you know profound suffering depression anxiety whatever especially if you've got a terminal diagnosis and you don't have much time i

2:12:54 mean notoriously meditation practice takes a long time to bear fruit um right so yeah yeah i know it's i find this a really a lot in my students when we're talking about this they they have this really strong reaction like there's there's something yeah i like the pharmacological calvinism line because yeah that's a kind of it's a real sort of this is a shortcut and you're sort of a bad person for taking it instead of doing the hard work and i think that yeah hopefully that is a product of our culture um and we should reshape the way we think about drugs i think that's an

2:13:27 important message which is coming out of the kind of work that you're doing um is there a worry here uh sort of on the same note about cultural appropriation though uh some of these like sacred things that we're taking and using for these other purposes but divorced of all the spiritual and you know cultural aspects like especially with ayahuasca and stuff like that i wonder yeah is that i mean i mean i think there's definitely a worry about that with ayahuasca given what's going on with the whole kind of ayahuasca tourism scene a lot of that is getting very messy i mean i must confess i haven't looked into these issues or thought about them in

2:13:59 much detail um i find it interesting on this front that lsd was sort of discovered in a kind of western scientific pharmacological setting and was used sort of quite independently it's sort of like that almost came on the scene first in terms of mainstream science in the 1940s and then it was later in the 50s after gordon watson went to mexico and had psilocybin mushrooms in a traditional ceremony that people realized we're dealing with a unified class of drugs so i think there might be some worries about that but i think you know it's also clear that a lot of suffering is

2:14:33 being alleviated and a lot of that is happening because we've learned some important lessons about how to use these sorts of substances responsibly both from cultures that have been using them for a long time and from kind of trial and error in the 50s and 60s and so yeah specific issues about ayahuasca aside i don't see that there's a fundamental problem with the way these drugs are being used in kind of therapeutic context at the moment and you know i mean it is it's it's you know there's a ritual structure to it which a lot of people have pointed out it's not i mean when you're getting kind of

2:15:04 experienced trippers in fmris and injecting them with lsd and psilocybin and scanning their brain it's all very kind of clinical and scientific but in the studies that are looking at therapeutic and transformative effects it's obviously very different but there's a certain very abstract uh ritual dimension to it which clearly has been yeah partly a product of trial and error and partly a product of um inspiration from um traditional modes of use but yeah and that's part of your your line too about the knowledge how right that part of what they're doing here is like learning how to

2:15:36 to take this trip or how to use the drugs uh in it's an important in a sense i mean that's more what benny chanon says and he's talking specifically about ayahuasca but i sort of take that idea and i probably haven't been clear enough on this because he says yeah through taking ayahuasca repeatedly people become skilled in the art of drinking ayahuasca they learn how to do this gracefully and responsibly and i've sort of said well what does that actually amount to and then it probably sounds like i'm saying it amounts to this one thing and only this which isn't what i mean to say there's more to it than that that involves the

2:16:08 traditional ceremonial context but my claim is that an important part of that skill the skill of kind of drinking ayahuasca well or taking psychedelics well is um basically these mindfulness skills of kind of yeah attending openly curiously and non-reactively to one's own mental contents and okay that's what so but that's the idea of the ritual or the the kind of preparatory stuff yeah yeah so i think kind of the profession of psychiatry has learned how to administer psychedelics reliably um and responsibly from trial and error and from other cultures that use psychedelics but

2:16:42 yeah when i'm talking in the book about knowledge how i'm talking about individuals having the experience and then getting a taste of what it's like to relate to one's mental contents in that way and then coming out you know and people are talking about things like i know how to relate to my emotions now i know how to deal with my feelings i know how to let them run through even if they're difficult and painful so that's more what i'm what i'm getting out there i see okay yeah and then so the whole naturalizing spiritual spirituality thing at the end of the book um i guess that's uh a topic for another day but just really really quickly the

2:17:16 idea there is that a lot of these things are spiritual but not necessarily religious and metaphysical and that's a good thing we should cultivate it yeah so it's just kind of plugging into this interest that philosophers have had in recent years in the question of whether spirituality is compatible with naturalism because there is this idiom of spiritual but not religious right so a lot of people say i'm spiritual but not religious and what it seems to connote is something like a direct practical experiential approach to issues of personal transformation and

2:17:48 finding meaning in life and that kind of thing um and so that raises the question right if it's this kind of practical experiential non-dogmatic thing there's kind of this intuitive assumption that spirituality is kind of hitched to traditional religious metaphysics that to be spiritual you have to believe in spirits or something like that right but yeah this seems to get used in this way that refers to this phenomenon that is all about transformative practices and experiences that have traditionally been packaged with kind of religious metaphysics but

2:18:20 need it's not obvious that they necessarily need be and so the whole naturalizing spirituality project and you've got people like robert solomon owen flanagan ursula good enough all kind of looking at uh the other name for the what seems to be basically the same movement as religious naturalism but yeah basically the question of can we pursue the dimensions of life and the sorts of practices and the sorts of experiences that are traditionally the province of religious or spiritual people is pursuing those sorts of practices and experiences compatible with the naturalistic outlook and yeah to my mind

2:18:53 psychedelic science provides a good opportunity to look at that question from an empirical standpoint because people seem to like calling these experiences spiritual whether or not they've had any prior interest in spirituality so to me it suggests these are paradigmatically spiritual experiences they kind of that seems to be the best word for them to a wide variety of people with a wide variety of prior world views so the thought is by looking closely at what's going on in these experiences we might get some evidence about whether paradigmatically spiritual experiences and transformative practices

2:19:27 really are compatible with naturalism and of course that's where it plugs into the rest of the book where i'm saying look a lot of the time you have these mystical type experiences and you're getting connectedness you're getting aspiration you're getting these reflection on these big questions and philosophical mysteries but it's not always going hand in hand with these non-naturalistic metaphysical ideations about a divinity or cosmic consciousness or whatever and so the implication would be that sort of even persons without disorders uh might eventually find use for psychedelics if they want to be spiritual but not religious or

2:20:00 something right absolutely yeah and obviously these studies have been done so the studies um you know notably at uh roland griffiths lab johns hopkins lots of studies there with um healthy volunteers you know in some cases they've specifically recruited people who have some kind of spiritual or religious practice there was another study in which kind of i think those people also had a prior interest but there was kind of a variety of different conditions different schedules of psilocybin doses and also different degrees of support to engage in spiritual practices like meditation to see how they would interact and then

2:20:32 recently there was this really interesting study in switzerland from france fallen writers group where they gave psilocybin or placebo to experienced meditators on the fourth day of a five-day silent group zen retreat um coolest single study ever conducted with psychedelics in my opinion um and you know i don't know uh obviously the metaphysical beliefs of all those participants but it's certainly possible i mean zen of all the the forms of buddhism is notoriously kind of anti-dogmatic and anti-doctrinaire and it's certainly possible to be a dedicated zen

2:21:04 practitioner without believing in much of anything so that seems relevant too yeah yeah okay very cool all right so i i i could keep going on and on forever but we got to let you go uh it's past dinner time so let me just say thank you very much for joining me this has been a wonderful conversation i've learned a lot from reading your stuff and thinking through these issues and i i really hope the book gets white's success it deserves it thanks very much yeah my pleasure thanks for having me on yeah no problem so just hang out for one second i'll say bye off here but uh let's go ahead and finish this up all right so uh uh-oh hold on um

2:21:42 yeah okay so we are off the air