Psychedelic experiences do not contain universal messages but instead release and amplify latent cultural discourses, revealing that our ordinary perception is already a form of hallucination and that consciousness operates through symbolic structures that transcend ordinary waking experience.
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Is There Meaning Inside Psychedelic Experience? | Justin Smith-RuiuAdded:
One thing people seldom ask because we're kind of all the children of Daycart. One one thing we seldom think to ask today is what's wrong with dreaming? I'm not going to sit here and argue for the existence of fairies. Not today. In mid- 20th century anthropology, uh the anthropologists knew how to say, "Okay, I'm listening. Yeah, tell me more about the witchcraft organ." And and we've forgotten how to do that. Again, I have a theory that in the 21st century, in spite of the, you know, the political rights griping about postmodernism, in fact, in the 21st century, we've all become hyper realists about everything.
The repetition of the forms of paleolithic parietal art, the cave bear like tripled. It's not because there are three bears represented there, but because there was a way of holding fire in front of it to make the the the repetition of the three images look like a single bear in motion. Right? These were kind of >> images that were brought alive in ritual context through dance and motion and fire and presumably there were drugs involved. There is a for me moral dilemma about popping a balloon of belief that is required for everybody to participate in that that actually then delivers it. It's almost like the value of money only has value if we all believe in it. Well, the value of this portal that we're opening up to the infinite that we need uh depends on us all kind of believing the same thing.
So, nobody look behind the curtain.
Again, there's possible dangers in that, but I but I think that's there, you know, there there's something that the young angry atheist needs to learn about that.
>> Um, and that maybe all of us do at some point in in our in our age and in our growth dilemma podcast. Jay Shapiro here. And this one is a real doozy of a conversation, a real big one. Um it's with Justin Smith who is a fantastic author and analytic philosopher um who has written a book called On Drugs which is really really good really fantastic.
I I tell him before we start recording I don't think I've underlined passages in a book uh more than this one. The book is is a bit of a play on words. The title on drugs is kind of a reference to the the habit in the western tradition of naming things like on freedom or on nations or on wealth or on justice or something like that as sort of an exploration of a of a concept and he and he does that. He takes drugs and we're really talking very much about the category of drugs known as psychedelics in this one as something to contemplate, something to understand the history of and and how they've been used and what they mean etc. But also the sort of you know colloquial usage of saying like I am on drugs right now. Meaning very much writing about the experience itself.
Writing from within the experience itself and taking the question really in some ways of you know can we do good or maybe better philosophy because of these substances and the experiences we have on them. Are they showing us anything real? Or are they just scrambling the dials in such a way that could be psychologically helpful which we discussed? Or is there something much more to talk about the psychedelic experience that philosophy and very much western, you know, angopile philosophy has frowned upon in in just recent centuries that they they've they've run away from this idea that you can do serious good thinking uh while either on or after or before an intentional psychedelic experience. caveats up front. Of course, we are speaking about psychedelic usage which uh has you know various forms of of moral attitudes or legal attitudes toward towards it. Uh neither Justin or I are outright endorsing these things. We are just trying to be honest that we have both I think found them helpful and want to talk about them. Um and I mean helpful potentially psychologically but helpful philosophically. Let me also just say a few things of what I was maybe hoping to accomplish in this conversation and in this production which of course is is a deep dive and overview into Justin's fantastic book. But I hope in some ways I don't know where this is finding you as the viewer u with your relationship to the psychedelic experience as potentially something that you might want to watch or uh spend time with before you embark on a experience of your own or maybe after. Um, I think for those who maybe are more experienced with it, the idea of set and setting and intention is always really important.
And perhaps some of these philosophical contemplations about things like external reality or the nature of mind or even questions of God and superconsciousness stuff that we'll get into. Hopefully, some of our conversation might be able to um put some little signposts along along the the way of your journey. So let me set some of the sort of general groundwork here from the philosophical point of view. We have throughout the history of thought this probably most confounding question of reality which is we have this mind this thing called mind consciousness you might be able to call it but this thing called mind which feels non-material just sort of transparent in every possible sense of that philosophical word that takes in a world or maybe looks upon a world or experiences a world hallucinates an entire world that feels like it's out there somewhere. So, we have this world and we have mind as two potentially distinct entities. At least they feel that way. And what is the relationship between the two of them? Is mind a representation of the world which is false or maybe evolved in such a way as to navigate it even though it's not sort of veritically true to it or is it just taking in the world altogether in some direct real pipeline is this desk in front of me what it appears to be in every way or is the appearance of the desk and the physical desk that's out there somewhere in the world how are they related these are the kinds of things that philosophers ers of mind and philosophers of reality and existentialists spend a lot of time thinking about and when you are under the influence of something that very much seems to be playing with the mind and changing the nature or relationship between the object of the world and mind itself. I think what it does is it shatters this notion that there is a direct pipeline between reality as it is and reality as it's experienced in the mind and then you get to question reality altogether.
That can be a destabilizing position for people which is always why in these caveats as Justin says many times results may vary and people just don't want to mess around with this stuff at all. And I totally get that. But in the certain kind of contemplation, in the certain kind of maybe therapeutic intervention, it can be an incredibly useful tool. But also potentially, and this is the question he asks a lot, is it true? Like what what are you seeing or learning when you shatter that normal kind of grooved reality that feels very stable? And we live in kind of 99.9% of the time, although not entirely true because we're dreaming in our sleep.
much of the time where that relationship is altered. So what do what is really happening here and has western philosophy really handicapped itself by throwing all this away casting it away making it sort of a taboo silly subject for you know silly indigenous tribes to mess around with this stuff and just be in their dream time all the time while we're over here doing real analytic philosophy and real science. Um, those are the kind of questions that Justin's interested in. Um, stick around to the end because where he comes out of this, uh, we sort of save it for the end might be a bit surprising to you and might make it a bit surprising that I loved the book so much because he and I actually have quite a different landing point, uh, in our existential philosophical orientation and maybe potentially moral orientation. So, I'll I'll I'll let the conversation jump into itself here and and hopefully you uh you get a lot out of it. Couple of little quick updates on what I'm doing with the channel. Uh you may have noticed I've started putting out clips, which I'm definitely going to do for this one because it's very long. There's certain people just won't click on an hour long or two-hour long video, but hopefully they find the 15 to 20 minute range and uh which I totally get. This is a lot to ask. It has this border if you see the thumbnails pop up, but that's just me helping uh people find the channel. It's in its own playlist. I think that's the way to organize it on YouTube without overwhelming your feed or whatever. So, look out for those. Couple fantastic guests as usual lined up on the channel.
I'm talking to Steven Capos next week.
He is a Holocaust survivor who's been protesting uh just about all the the Palestine Israel protests in the UK. I have round two scheduled with Rabbi Yakov Shapiro, which we've already been chirping a little in in the comments.
So, I think I know a few of the things we're going to talk about, but that one should be really good. We're going to get deeper into sort of the moral, philosophy, and theological grounds of Judaism and how he sees it. I have Serene Kadder lined up who wrote a book called faux feminism. It's a subject I've been wanting to take on for a long time about the very strange state of feminism in the world, trades and only fans and what is empowerment and we're going to get into all of that. So very excited to talk to her and just scheduling probably the end of the month or early next month uh the incredible Trida Parsey who I've lots of my viewers have been asking us to converse and I can't wait to get him on the channel and really find out sort of how he approaches the deepest questions of life and of course Iran which he's been an incredible commentator on and helping people think through as clearly as they can over the last uh you know couple months if not years. Don't forget to like and subscribe to keep an eye on what I'm doing. I really appreciate it.
Or comment below. I do hang out in the comments and read just about every single one. So, you can find me down down down there, especially on this one.
Please do like it and share it or post it and share it with friends who might be interested in the psychedelic experience or just bookmark it for your next time that you might be embarking on one of these uh these strange trips. And now, without further ado, the incredible Justin Smith. Uh, and enjoy. Like most good philosophy books and I think this is really one of them.
>> It is not trying to uh in my estimation uh tackle a specific answer or put a thesis out in the world.
>> It's dealing with a problem or a question. So what was the problem or question that you think launches this >> really really amazing book in my opinion this thought process?
>> Yeah that's a really good place to start. I think um I'm interested in the problem of the limits of language which are ordinarily taken to be the limits of philosophy as such that is uh there's a longstanding uh rule sometimes implicit sometimes explicit uh expressed across the centuries by different canonical figures uh in the history of western philos philosophy to the effect that uh if it can't be rendered in propositional form uh then it is uh beyond the bounds of our discipline. Um and uh Aristotle respects this uh practically to the letter. It becomes a kind of prime directive so to speak of the history of western philosophy. And then of course you have exceptions here and there. um uh figures like Plutinus, for example, uh in antiquity who kind of cross over the line begin engaging in a kind of practice that many would be more inclined to label mysticism. And you know, the facicious definition of the mystic is someone who has experienced something ineffable and won't shut up about it, right? Um um and um uh uh so one doesn't want to be that person uh but at the same time um one also doesn't want to leave the more kind of extreme experiences of uh subjectivity or of um consciousness.
uh to people who have no sense at all of the importance of ex uh respecting this prime directive, right? Um and so I I think I say in the book that, you know, when I was younger and I was around kids doing LSD, um and they would just kind of sit, you know, play with their uh neon yo-yos and say, "Weird, man. Weird." Um, you know, that's obviously an expression of the total failure of language, right?
Because lots of things are weird. Lots of things are weird in a pretty uninteresting way. Um, but, uh, being on LSD is not like these more mundane cases of weirdness. It's really weird. Um, uh, that doesn't that doesn't capture it. So my thought, one of my thoughts behind the book is, okay, I'm a professional philosopher. Um, I've proven that uh I have some ability to articulate difficult concepts and indeed difficult uh uh uh liinal uh extreme states of consciousness uh uh in writing in propositional form that can be shared with others. Can I do this with that most uh resistant sort of experience that is the psychedelic experience? Um uh so it's kind of like the black diamond challenge. Can I engage this without slipping into um a mode of expression that will be uh perceived by others, especially by professional peers as going over the deep end um uh into into the mystical and so on. And I think if you know spoiler I I think um uh after attempting uh this this great challenge um my conclusion is no I can't um I cannot I can >> they think you've gone over the deep end. I cannot capture in language um quite uh uh the thing I was trying to uh to capture. And the result is uh a book that is um rather essaistic um in the literal Montanaian sense. You know, I'm going to take a stab at this um and it's okay if I fail because I'm calling it an essay. Uh and essays fail sometimes. Uh but it's also um in the content of the essay is um uh kind of avowedly imagistic, reliant on metaphors um and um uh uh uh ultimately uh prepared to concede that um that there are some uh conscious experiences and subjective states that uh are indeed uh more appropriately treated by poetry and music and um and and metaphor. Um and I think psychedelic experience is one of them.
>> Yeah, that that's that's fantastic.
Well, then this will lead into because chapter one is called what it's like, which we should get into.
>> Um but that was so good. I'm going to be tempted. I don't know if you know the work of like Graham Harmon.
>> Oh, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Object-oriented onology. Yeah.
>> Yeah. for for for the non initiated in the crowd, it's object-oriented art ontology and and uh I think you you didn't reference it directly, but you have a very similar idea that I think we'll get to later on, >> but to to preview it a little bit, it's I love it so much because it it really sticks its neck out in philosophy saying, "No, we've gotten as philosophers way too allergic to sounding like crazy poets and >> mystics, and we we need to embrace that because >> reality is an analogy for itself as we experience it. So, I I'll give you that might sound a little weird earlier on in the conversation, but I'm sure you could tease it out. Not to you. Not to you.
>> Um, but I'll give you what what they're like for me and then I want to ask you what they're like for you. And I'm talking mostly about psilocybin here.
The challenge you just laid out is because I would say and I don't think you use this one directly. The way I always describe it is the the phenomenon of senesthesia >> which is you know people who who hear colors or whatever and you know can taste sounds and this kind of thing. We think they're really weird or really interesting, but we act we all have a kind of sinthesia, right? Everything is a a phenomenal representation in the qualia in my interpretation >> of something, you know, just that is quirks or ones and zeros or where its bits or whatever you think it is. It's, you know, the taste of vanilla is just a bunch of molecules, but I don't experience molecules. I it somehow is translated just as this conscious experience when I ingest it and taste it. Well, that is a kind of human evolved sesthesia that would be familiar to you and all of our listeners and all of all of the viewers. But when you're on but but it's a very just like arbitrarily fine-tuned type of human sesthesia that we have that we walk around with every day that we just kind of call reality.
>> And then you ingest these >> drugs which we'll get to this term >> and it spins those dials quite a bit.
>> Yeah. And it and if anything else, it shakes you out of this stubbornness that that is reality. Suddenly that that very human sesthesia radio tuned dial becomes an arbitrary one. But when you're out of when you're out of the experience, it collapses back to the dial and then you're forced to write a book using all of that language and then and then it's inadequate. So, but to get to actually ask you a question, your first chapter is what it's like. So is is that what it's like for you and how did you >> I think that's a pretty compelling way of accounting for it. I mean I I don't think I used the word synthesia once in the book but uh there is I mean you know before we had the notion of senesthesia the truth is I don't know how long we've been talking about this but there's an older notion of um common sense in the Latin philosophical tradition not like the British empiricist sense but like sensus communis uh you know the the um the sense behind the senses that integrates them and that enables us to um uh to be assured that the ra the sphere that we're touching and the sphere that we're seeing are the same sphere for example problems like that um and um I would say that that psychedelic experience um uh shatters common sense in both senses in both the medieval Latin sense and the later um uh the later empiricist sense in that it uh breaks apart heart, your ordinary sense of the uh integration of um the world surrounding you in any number of ways. And you know, as I always say, results may vary. Um but one of the one of the points that I take into making around this is that you know, and one of the ways our language often fails uh because we're just not trying hard enough. can actually do better than we usually do in accounting for psychedelic experience. One of the ways our language fails is that we insist on accounting for typical psychedelic experience in terms of hallucination.
Um, and I mean it's it's it's very funny because you know these days I'm thinking a lot about LLMs and I think it's a big mistake to talk about hallucination there too. Um, and perhaps in analogous ways, it's a mistake to talk about hallucination when we're talking about what it's like to be on uh psilocybin uh or uh uh or acid or a number of other psychedelics in that um you know, when we represent it to the non drugged, let's just say, we tend to represent it as like a a lava lamp for uh as the spectacle being played out uh on the you know the ceiling of the the planetarium. This is when I was a kid like you go to the San Francisco planetarium for the laser light show dark side of the wall night. you know about this. Um, and you know they shoot lasers at the at the at the at the ceiling and it or the you know dome and it looks cool and it's impressive and it has something to do with what drugs are like but only something really kind of superficial only like the kind of the the first impression so to speak. Um the deeper experience I think is this disintegration in the sense of losing uh the inte the sense of an integrated reality around you which in a way is the opposite of hallucination. you stop hallucinating. Um, and in fact, you realize that your default mode of cognition of the world relies itself on a great deal of hallucination. Um, so so it's kind of the opposite of the way we ordinarily account for it, which is very strange when you think about it.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And much of your book you you pit two philosophers against each other which is always a good way to do it. And I think maybe the first one that I'm thinking of here that I wrote down was because all right so we're talking sort of about the super superficiality of all right it shatters your senses in a way which is like it's kind of the first step and if anybody of our listeners has done it or hasn't done it there's always these >> familiar processes oh I'm at this part of the experience that is kind of the entryway into the door so make makes sense to start at this but it doesn't stay there and if anybody thinks that's all it is they would be like why would anybody you know I could just spin around and you know get really dizzy in the park I I don't what's all this stuff about? But there is this other layer >> and it brings me to so your first pitting against uh Haidiger and and Plato in the Platonic sense and the Hideigarian sense >> of a mood versus potential other worlds.
I don't know if you want to walk through that. I found that >> uh very compelling although oddly although I just thought so much of your book was exactly how I would have put it. I'm more attracted to the Platonic description and you're more attracted to that Haidagarian. So I don't know if you want to lay that lay that out of the moon versus worlds.
>> Well, yeah. I mean, I definitely became kind of uh uh phenomenological existentialist malmo, you know, it was was not my intention. Um it just seemed that um the notion of or mood as an analytic category just seemed to make the most sense. Uh and I don't, you know, don't don't jump on me listeners.
I'm not a H highiger scholar. Uh it's not it's not my it's it's not my world.
Uh but uh on my understanding um the the the key idea is that uh a mood can be onlogically revoly. It can be uh disclosing of the condition of daine and so on. And um that's something that I use kind of to think about uh a whole host of experiences.
um not just the psychedelic experience but psychedelic experience is something that kind of exemplifies this I think paradigmatically but let's start with maybe an easier case um when you're listening to a song that touches you deeply um it somehow seems to be coming to you from a different reality from not a place but from from a let's say I mean it's hard to find the right language for the sphere dimension layer or something like that. I mean, I'm not I'm not onlogically committ about all of this.
I'm just trying to find language for it.
Um, >> it worked on the page really well with like the capital M music.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
>> So, like it comes from music itself, some >> platonic ideal. Yeah. I mean, that worked for me in reading.
>> Yeah. But, you know, then um when you uh ordinarily if it's kind of low inensity background Spotify, then you're just like, "Oh, whatever. This must be my neurons and my hormones." And you know, uh uh it's just it's just like that's the effect that this has for kind of evolutionary reasons. I can make sense of this. Music is not really anything uh beyond uh the known world. Um but then uh I think one of the responses to psychedelics can be like my goodness what a prejudice I allow myself to sustain in my ordinary mode of existence that enables me to dismiss that perception about music so quickly actually that music is coming from another world and that world is the most real thing there is. Um and um again it can often look as if one is simply hiding from that fact in one's default mode of consciousness. So I would I mean just to get back to something you said I don't think I mean I didn't mean to pit Plato against Haidiger. I I or to take sides in a constructed opposition between the two of them. It was more just like well you can account for it this way. You can also account for it this way. Um I think um the certainly if you are a robustly platonizing type then you're going to have more kind of onlogical commitment to an entity uh uh or an abstract idea that really exists outside of you that is causing uh the experience. uh you can also again account for it in uh in in terms of of mood which is itself ontologically revoly even if it doesn't uh you know imply ontological commitment to an external entity and that seems I don't want to say safer but it seems more in line with my sensibility which is that and this this is you know something that I discuss in connection with um well with Smithy's um and Aldis Huxley and the debate between Aldis Huxley and RC Ser accuses Huxley of um being too committal uh in uh uh in his experience of going so far as to believe of himself that he has had a beatotific vision under the influence of measculine. And then you have what I would think of as more reckless people in the decades to come like Terrence McKenna who speak in terms of little green elves and so on. Uh and what I want to do is find a kind of ontologically neutral approach where you can like not dismiss as an aberration or again as hallucination or as uh some kind of deeply errorprone cognitive state. um your encounter with little green elves or you know 12-dimensional demons or whatever. Um you don't dismiss it as an aberration.
Uh oh my mistake. Sorry. I was under the influence of stupif as we say in French.
I was I had been stupified. I had been rendered stupid by this substance. Um, but you also don't say, "Oh, as it turns out, I took DMT and little green elves exist, right? You don't want to do either of these things." Um, and I think I think trying to kind of give an account of what that uh what that terium quidd is that that that kind of stance towards the experience under the influence of psychedelics that's neither ontologically committal nor uh uh uh dismissive is a is a really hard one.
Um, and I don't even know if I've I've done it adequately, but I I think that was my um my my one of my main purposes.
>> Yeah. Well, I I think for me, and it gets into your uh next chapter, uh, huser and phenomenology does do it, which you end up calling yourself a what was it? Autoexperimental phenomenologist.
>> Yeah. Something like that.
>> Auto experiment uh autoexperimental analytic phenomenology. Yeah. an analytic analytic which is good in there. Uh but phenomenology as far as far as I understand it uh is this um commitment that the starting point for any quest or any question of truth or reality or whatever um starts with the subjective experience maybe call it qualia if you like that in the consciousness studies but that's this undeniable truth which there which then seeks an explanation we could talk about verit veritical and all these types of things but >> um I I think to go back to this initial kind of um scrambling of the dials that that the drugs promise to do up front and then hopefully there's much more and you think there's much more and I think there's much more. We're going to get to it and that's the mystery of them.
>> Um but the the scrambling is a really, you know, we'll do the trick to to to give you deliver you although it doesn't feel like it's being delivered from anywhere. It's just happening new phenomena >> that are that are uh in in the moment.
And then if you can remember to do it when you're out of the moment, when you're no longer under the drug, you cannot verify the the veracity of it by any sort of experimental logical test, right?
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
>> Which which really casts into doubt like you you've already done this notion of hallucination of like wait, was I hallucinating before? Was I dreaming then or am I dreaming now? Was I awake then or am I awake now? And there's really nothing you could do but just be a slave to well I I can't prove it. I just know that I am which you do get into to cart. But then but then yeah I don't know if you want to go like this the only thing I had written down before we jumped into Huscoel and maybe even Skinner and behaviorism um was I think it's important in your first chapter this idea of analogy >> versus tr versus truth which is you've probably already planted the seeds here in what you've said but I don't know if you want to tease that out a little more. it seemed pretty central to your thesis that >> well I think that really the payoff for the the question of analogy comes at the the end uh when I when I talk about religious experience so maybe we can we can hold that uh a little bit uh to um to talk about uh autoexperimentation and phenomenology um I think that I think I mean the book does three things really it's it's kind of a >> it's a first person memoiristic um exploratory piece of writing um and a kind of coming out of the closet as you know a bit of a a bit of a screw ball relative to the the norms and standards of my of my guild. Um so that's one thing. Another thing is, you know, maybe one-third uh rigorous or, you know, uh the best I can do at rigorous philosophical argumentation, right? Like trying to trying to corner opponents uh using um using sound reasoning. Um and uh then the third is intellectual history and history of science. Um, you know, I I'm a philos my my PhD is in philosophy, but I I've been working for many years in history and philosophy of science, which is a distinct uh uh discipline with its own norms and conventions and and so on. I think from the point of view of scholarship in the history of science, there's a really interesting story to be told um about about the history of autoexperimentation as a non non-scolar uh but still doing a very good job. Um we have the the author Mike Jay who wrote this book Psychonauts uh on uh Sigman Freud and and William James all the cocaine and uh nitrous oxide they ingested. Um, and what's interesting in their case is that they're operating in a mode as men of science, um, that is continuous, kind of like with, you know, Benjamin Franklin rushing out to fly a kite during a lightning storm in order to shock himself, right? He wants to know what what lightning is like, right? Here's an opportunity. Uh, and you know, it's reckless. It's dangerous. You could get yourself killed. Same with drugs, right?
Um but that's what that's what men of science used to do right um and that's how uh Freud and James were uh were thinking about uh this auto experimentation um then in the 20th century um standards change for one thing auto experimentation is uh inadequate obviously because it's a sample of one uh and that doesn't give meaningful results we tend to think But even more problematically, it's about uh what it's like. Whereas with the long reign of behaviorism through most of the 20th century, um the what it's like question was taboo. It was uh something you were not supposed to consider. Um and of course there are always exceptions and there are undercurrents and there are countermovements and so on. But the prevailing attitude was uh that it doesn't matter what it's like because uh uh the science of the human psyche is a science of um inputs and and and outputs of observable effects. Um and so what happens then is that um firsterson drug writing so to speak migrates uh from this quasi legitimate um I don't want to exaggerate this quai legitimate kind of lone inquirer sort of vibe um to the more kind of literary and bohemian uh fringe with you know uh uh the our you can cite your favorite cases, Vtobamine and so on. It starts even earlier with um uh Tom Quincy and then all the kind of philosophical drug writing in the 20th century is coming from uh kind of the the the let's say the the the critical edge people like Fuko whereas in my uh you know his famous uh uh LSD in Death Valley in 1975 um whereas my people because I was I was trained up in the analytic tradition my people as far as I could tell between 1925 and 1975. So like you know the discovery of measculine uh to uh let's say a few years into Nixon's war on drugs. Um I found one analytic philosopher who openly wrote about his psychedelic experience and he's a bit of an outlier. I'm talking about Smithy's. He's a bit of an outlier because he's also a psychiatrist and a neuroscientist.
Um, and you know, it's hard to say in which capacity he um he tried measculine, but for the most part, you know, I I know I know some of these people must have been doing it. They just didn't consider it part of their job description, right? Uh, and there's also legal questions to to think about and so on. They maybe they were just being cautious. But I think that there's a very beyond the r beyond the reign of behaviorism even more deeply in the history of philosophy since the 17th century um there has been such a premium on sobriety that is to say on uh being a kind of requirement or a prerequisite for philosophical activity that in order to be philosophizing you must be in the default cognitive state and everything else gets in the way, right? Um, and yes, analytic philosophers go to a pub after their after their seminars, but that's downtime. You know, once once the alcohol enters the system, it's downtime. And I think this is a particular contingent history. It didn't have to be this way. And I think we can we can give a pretty clear step-by-step account of how it came to be this way.
And I don't mean to take Decart as kind of a straw man or you know everyone likes to likes to likes to pile on Decart but if you if you think about Decart's kind of almost um phobia of um the prospect that he might be dreaming.
Um, one thing people seldom ask because we're kind of all the children of Daycart, um, one one thing we seldom think to ask today is what's wrong with dreaming? I mean, some some human societies actually think that dreams are more of a guide to reality than ordinary waking consciousness. So that's a his that's a again a very very particular historical trajectory that we got set on uh in the history of modern philosophy.
And you know again one of the deeper kind of philosophical reasons for uh for for getting interested in this topic is you know uh like inviting discussion of the question uh should we stay on that trajectory? I mean, is it is it is it um is it the only way to conceive what uh philosophical um inquiry uh might actually be?
>> Yeah. Well, well, that that plows right into the next thing I wanted to talk about, which was the excluded middle, which is which is very like triple Oish because um yeah, I mean I I'll put the resounding like no, we should get off that trajectory obviously. I mean, I was convinced of that before I read your book, I'm sure, but then reading your book, you know, pushed me further down that >> that that road because um I I don't know. I was going to ask you about the other cultures there actually because you know as as we've both done a few times here now this this sort of I was going to read actually maybe I'll just read one of your passages that I think did it really well from the second chapter >> um where you said something like uh we might say that one of the most powerful effects of psychedelic drugs >> is to invert the value hierarchy I have identified in the culture of English-speaking book reading early 21st century people and to cause us at least for the duration of the psychedelic experience to see our mental representations as the most real thing there is. Even if our commitment to this reality does not, for reasons we have already considered, translate into a commitment to ver veriticality. The psychedelic experience in short has the power to profoundly profoundly to disrupt the most basic onlogical commitments by making us powerless to resist the inversion of a hierarchy to which we or at least our surrounding culture is ordinarily committed. It's I mean you have a lot of passages like this that I think that are really beautiful. Um and and you also seem to suggest uh because we'll get to this idea of cultural contamination uh soon too, but that this was this isn't always the case and it wasn't always the case.
And it is a very sort of English western sort of u demand that you know don't worry about your dreams. They're just weird things that happen when you're asleep. They're just a malfunctioning robot. This is where you stay. I mean h how much it's sort of two questions. I'm curious since you are you do so much history of philosophy stuff. Why did that happen in your estimation? There does seem to be >> a story you brought up Nixon. There does seem to be a story just about political control and the danger of a whole bunch of you know >> workers having psychedelic experiences and then maybe not, >> you know, being so into being capitalist tools anymore. Um a and then and then you mentioned a few of them but what other cultures do you have in mind where this wasn't so much the case where the dream world was more or equal to there was no hierarchy of reality in such a western conception. Well, we I mean we don't want to we don't want to exaggerate obviously and and I mean there's a lot of there's a lot of um interesting literature and debate on um the question of say practical rationality in non-western uh indigenous traditional societies. Um but I think what we can say for certain is that um uh there is the history of western philosophy has uh has been one way of thinking of it is that it's a a gradual suppression of oniromancy.
Um and uh you see already in Aristotle uh uh uh kind of the the suggestion that what we experience as a prophetic dream uh is probably just uh an incipient fever or something like that. Um, and in the early modern period, it's like a d kind of doubling down on some of these tendencies that are already in the mix in the legacy of um philosophy from from Greek Greek antiquity. Um, but I I'm blanking on on the name, but there is a French Jesuit uh with whom Decart had been in occasional correspondence who spent a good amount of time uh in New France. that is to say in among the um the Irakqua um um in the early 17th century and um you know he's writing back to his superior in Ruan or whatever um you got to get me out of here. The chief keeps having dreams uh and uh he last night he had a dream that said accept Jesus Christ as your savior but he might have another dream tonight that says kill this guy and I want to be out of here before that happens. Uh, and these people structure their world in a way that for me as a French Jesuit in the early 1600s is totally unacceptable.
They listen to their dreams. Um, and so it's uh he the the the French guy is experiencing this as uh just kind of this you know arbitrary unpredictable uh somewhat tyrannical way of living where you never know from day to day what the what the next decision of the group is going to be. Um but you know the fact is there are human societies that function that way and they function evidently pretty well because if they didn't they wouldn't be around. Um, and so it's much like, you know, traditional societies that conceptualize hunting as a beseching of the animal to give itself, right? That's a that's a very common um theme. It comes back again and again uh in uh the ethnographic record. Um, obviously these people are good hunters. They know how to get the job done. They know how to sharpen their darts or whatever, you know. um uh uh they also are accompanied by a representation of what is happening that is completely at odds uh with um with what uh a European visitor would say about what they're doing. So you know you can have radically different conceptions of let's say where the source of our knowledge comes from and what kind of entities are delivering it and still have more or less equal practical rationality. Why did we get off on this uh this course where we only trust the the waking sober lucid mind and we value sanity and we consider um you know the revelations of mad men or dreams uh or mystical uh uh visions or indeed what happens to you under the influence of flyagarchic. Why did we uh uh uh push all this off to the side? Why did we try to shut this out? I mean, that's a long story. I don't think I can adequately uh account for it, you know, no matter how much time I have, but I would say that it's it's it's very it is very much connected to the rise of modern science. Um, and even though I just said, you know, um, uh, uh, societies that rely on oniromancy, uh, typically have pretty good practical rationality, the way I would account for the path we've taken over the past few centuries is that there was there was indeed a sudden boost to our practical rationality that enabled us to do some pretty impressive stuff, right? like build some pretty impressive machines and resolve some pretty impressive uh math problems and stuff like that. Um uh there was a boost to our practical rationality that came with this radical program of austerity so to speak where we uh evacuated the natural world. For example, of um the swarming spirits and and so on that basically all people everywhere throughout the history of humanity have assumed. uh to be present. Um some even went as far as Decart went and evacuated the external world even of um uh uh anything but extension. You know, bodies for Decart don't essentially have impenetrability.
They only have extension. So, forget about them having um a certain kind of animate janice to them, right? So it was this radically austere minimalist program that facilitated tremendous leaps and bounds uh in um mathematical physics uh uh and again uh enabled us to do some really cool things. Um, the question is whether being able to do some new really cool things like like build rockets and so on actually came historically together with getting the final correct ontology of the external world, right?
Um, and you know, I mean, I'm not going to sit here and argue for the existence of fairies. Not today. Um but I I I would say that um that just in strictly ethnographic terms um we kind of nonfairy societies are greatly outnumbered and and that should I think for um a philosopher maybe not for a for a natural scientist but for a philosopher that should be a relative uh sorry a relevant point to get to bear in mind when we're when we're thinking about what there is. Um so many people in so many places and times have been convinced that um that gemstones um uh uh can you know uh communicate with us things or you know can exercise powers over our lives. Uh just for example I'm just just just using an example. I think the history the history of min minology is really revoly in this regard. Um so many people have been convinced of things like this um that it's almost like just amputating a huge huge portion of the body of human experience to just say ah yeah that's because they're stupid and ignorant.
Yeah, that's because they didn't know any better, right? Um and and so you know there here as well in this broader sense I you I I mean I to some extent I feel like I'm just trying to hold on to principles that that 20th century anthropology as a discipline figured out how to uphold but that we've forgotten in the 21st century. To some extent that's all I'm doing. I I I look at my own description of my own psychedelic experience is something like an autoeththnography and in the autoeththnography I have the same disposition to the entities that reveal themselves to me say uh that you know someone like uh you know EES Pritchard the the British social anthropologist mid 20th century he's studying the um the idea among the azande of South Sudan that uh certain people are born with a witchcraft organ.
Do you know about this? Um and and you know uh people claim to have seen the witchcraft organ. Which one is which organ is it exactly? Obviously it can't be uh identified empirically. But you know in mid- 20th century anthropology uh the anthropologists knew how to say okay I'm listening. Yeah. Tell me more about the witchcraft organ. And and we've forgotten how to do that. And I sound like some some crazed uh you know some crazed enthusiast in the old term in the Sweden Swedenborgian term just for trying to kind of take this whole uh this whole range of human human experience and human representations seriously because I again I have a theory that in the 21st century in spite of the you know the political rights um uh griping about postmodernism In fact, in the 21st century, we've all become hyper realists about everything like like, you know, I believe X, you know, uh, full stop, >> right? Rather than rather than being interested in representations, but yeah, sorry, I that's a bit of a tangent.
>> No, that was great. And I I think you gave some, uh, previews of the analogy thing, but, uh, I I'll just I'll I'll just pull a little thread on it. And in case you do sound crazy to anyone, I'll try I'll try to uh I'll try to reflect some of that what you said because because there there's something in there that's so good. Um this this will get into the cultural contamination or the uh the kind of contents that make up our psychedelic experiences. For you it was a lot of Looney Tunes, which which was great for me to imagine.
>> For me, it's different things. Um, but you know, you start the story u with this this very funny well-written experience of like going to like a head shop type thing to buy these things from the this guy who was a little offended by by your terminology.
>> Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
>> But it comes to this this uh description where he's where he's you're like, I haven't done this in a really long time.
And he's like, don't worry, it's going to be like returning home to something you, you know, remember. And that that idea which you come back to a lot in the book this rediscovery of these truths that you always kind of knew or that this place if we're being platonic this place this thing that you always knew was there or if it's Haidagarian this mood that you always knew was true whatever works for people there that sense is um what I want to stay on now because it's everything you just said about you know witches in Sudan or whatever happen to have done a lot of traveling in Africa I should do a whole episode witchcraft in Africa. It's crazy. It's interesting.
>> Nice.
>> But to preview your idea of analogy, you know, I I am one of these hardcore realist atheist philosophy nerds, but I love religious mythology because I can understand it as analogy and I'm really interested in religious stories and rituals about death and everything else.
And and then so to the psychedelic experience, this idea of rediscovery of something that we knew was always there or we think is kind of eternal in a way. Um, you know, I can imagine when somebody is Iaska is a good example because it still is used in all these ceremonies, but even something like psilocybin and you know, you're you're you're think you're distilling this kind of chemical experience to get a subjective qualia which in some ways must be something like what humans have always been doing because this molecule has always existed. So people have been doing this forever. But to your example, we'll use the music one. Um, I could be listening to a song full of synthesizers that is sending me to that place of, oh, music is this eternal beautiful thing that's always existed >> and I could be imagining synthesizers.
Well, you know, some caveman eating that same mushroom >> isn't going to be thinking of synthesizers or having synthesizers or whatever. But still it seems it's like the cultural artifacts of our day are opening some gateway into some eternal place that feels more true. And I think that is what you are criticizing rightfully that philosophy of science has closed that gate and said don't go there. It's all [ __ ] It's all it's all Looney Tunes to borrow your analogy.
You know this is all just silly like cartoon stuff. There's nothing to discover there. Um but you you think no that we are tapping into something there that is quite real. And then the only other thing before I respond because your answer was started with a um contemplation on technological progress being so dazzling and kind of a proof of why we adopted this like wow that spaceship is pretty cool. Doing ones and zeros in math or whatever that it can be very captivating. But even that in the midst of the grips of a psychedelic experience, yours are probably the same, feels just as amazing as a pebble on the beach or or just as mundane >> as as a leaf in the same respect. And and so it has that same effect for me of also pulling out the rug from under the the dazzlingness of technological progress.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> As an object in itself, if that makes sense. And then Yeah, you can respond to that. Well, I guess yeah, I mean uh that's one uh kind of imperative uh in consideration of questions of social control. Uh you know, in order to keep people dazzled by our spaceships and so on, you got to keep them sober or you know, at least, you know, maybe drunk, too. Um >> don't don't let them know that you could go explore the universe without the spaceship. You just have to lay on your >> Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's that's one way to think of it.
Yeah, that was just a bad joke mostly.
But yeah.
>> No, no, that No, no, I think that's right. It works. Yeah. Um, but you know, as for the kind of cultural filter, >> um, I, you know, at some point, just to make it clear, at some point in the book, um, >> yeah, I explained that, uh, I have on more than one occasion been, uh, kind of shown, so to speak, motifs and play before the the mind's eye. I should say of images plainly coming from Looney Tunes cartoons.
>> Yeah. You've got Sam just running around your head.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Shooting the guns and Yeah.
Yeah. The pistols, you know, shooting the pistols towards the ground so that he levitates off the off the ground.
Things like that. I mean that comes to me with such force or it has come to me with such force under the influence of psilocybin that it seems like if you tell me at that moment that that these are just cultural artifacts that have only been around less than a hundred years and they're in no way kind of written into the order of the cosmos. I would say in that moment, get out of here. This is the most real thing there is. Um, and then you know, uh, you wake up the next day and you think, man, that Looney Tunes stuff seemed really real and yet it's just a cultural artifact.
Um and in a way it's kind of it's kind of paradoxical because um uh uh at the same time um I think uh psilocybin experience and at least a bit of reading on kind of the cultural use of drugs going back to the paleolithic.
Um I think uh it even though it makes these weird recent cultural artifacts, these purely contingent artifacts seem so real. At the same time, it it somehow attunes you to the fact that you're having experiences that really are fundamentally the same as what one could have had in uh the Paleolithic. Yuse Sam is just an avatar for a deeper truth about whatever that that trip is trying to show you, right? Where whereas a paleolithic >> tripper in that regard might be, you know, thinking of some cave painting or a deer that he saw or whatever that is serving the same function. There's almost a Yungian kind of thing happening there. I don't know.
>> Yeah.
>> Of of archetypes that are maybe >> human and eternal. Maybe. Is that too much?
>> Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I mean, I I I'm I'm non-committal about about the Yungian archetype theory. Um, and the honest truth is I don't know what the Looney Tunes stuff is trying to show me. Um the the if I could just interrupt the the thought process there because the the quote that I keep looking at over here that I wrote down I could just read it but it's the one that I'm trying to drive to and maybe just unsuccessfully but it's about latent discourse which I thought was such a great one. I think you were actually quoting someone else.
Levi Strauss.
>> Why don't you actually >> Yeah, read it to me. Yeah. Yeah.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Let me just read it for for the audience too. So it was you quoting Levi Strauss. It was nothing permits one to exclude a priori. Uh Levi Strauss writes the possibility that in societies which differed as much as the corac and the Viking the same drug was sought in order to produce opposite psychic effects. Hallucin this is you now hallucinogens he reflex oh no it was still him hallucinagens he reflex do not harbor a natural message rather they release and amplify a latent discourse >> which each culture holds in reserve and the elaboration of which is made possible or easier by the drugs. So I was trying to do some yuseite Sam or wy coyote being the language of whatever latent discourse is happening that struck me as >> so good and so true and and related to this idea of rediscovery >> and and yeah if that works that's what I was trying to get to I don't know if it worked or not >> that oh that's so interesting yeah in fact I would say that that the that the levies line actually somewhat uh opposes is a Yian archetypal reading of these of these experiences. Um because you know uh the the intensity of the experience of the Looney Tunes experience of mine is fundamentally the same as the intensity of the Paleolithic experience.
You know this recent uh little tangent, recent uh uh researchers have argued that the repetition of the forms of paleolithic parietal art, you know, where you've got the the cave bear like tripled, it's not because there are three bears represented there, but because it uh like there was a way of holding uh holding fire in front of it to make the the the repetition of The three images look like a single bear in motion.
>> Oh, interesting. Right. So, like a little like hologram kind of thing.
Interesting.
>> It's a Well, it's like a little It's a little old-fashioned movie, a flicker movie. Yeah. Yeah.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Which strongly um strongly uh favors the interpretation because we still don't know what paleolithic art means. uh uh but it strongly favors the interpretation that these were kind of images that were brought alive in uh ritual context through dance and motion and fire and and and stuff like that and presumably there were drugs involved right um I I mean we can I don't we can't take it for granted but um but those were human beings and um and this is what what human beings have always done. Um so uh uh that was just a bit of a tangent. So I now the the Levy Stroian line about latent discourse would say that you know the the experiences might be similarly intense and there might be um uh an underlying uh uh neurochemical uh explanation that's the same in in various cases. But the example he's talking about, so this is maybe if I can go back a little bit, Levy Strose is is reviewing this peculiar book uh by the largely forgotten and very peculiar uh American ethnobbotonist named R. Gordon Wson uh who with his Russian wife Valentina I think around 1959 wrote a wonderful book about the cultural role of mushrooms and they divide European societies into the micopilic and the microphobic.
Um but the ultimate microphobes are the English. Uh they're constantly worried about whether they've accidentally eaten toad stools. Like, oh no, we picked the wrong kind. The Slavs, at least in their account, they're just like, "Whatever, we'll eat the toad stools, too." You know, it's all good. Um of And they don't make a conceptual distinction.
They know that mushrooms are a dangerous game. Uh and that's why it's enjoyable, right, to go mushroom hunting. Um but the W was argue further that um that the reason uh uh Western Europeans are so microphobic is because this is a trace, this is a reaction to a relatively recent suppression of a pagan mushroom cult that had to be stamped out. So, you know, the the microphobes are uh are are in a kind of Freudian repressive phase. Anyhow, so weird argument. I I I'm I'm not going to defend it or refute it, but Levy Stro this, you know, this this captured the imagination of this great French structural anthropologist and he wrote a review of it and he adds a number of very interesting reflections and one is um taking ethnographic evidence from two cases. On the one hand, the use of fly agaric in many North Asian cultures. He cites the corac. That's kind of an antiquated term these days, but you see it across, you know, lots of indigenous tungus um and uh uh uh neighboring uh societies in North Asia on the one hand and on the other hand what we know about um about the Vikings with their use of flyagaric which um typically was used um before uh an ultraviolent raid of some poor Norman village. Um they would they would ingest this this this psychotropic drug that they would put their their bear hides on and and they would feel themselves transformed into bears and then they'd go off and rape and village and murder, right? Um, and so it's the same, but whereas the North Asians would typically take it uh in a meditative um uh uh capacity, go passive um and let the world or let the secrets of the cosmos um uh rain down upon them, reveal themselves to them. And so um what does this drug do in itself? Well, uh, you can't really say, and I mean, you know, you could take this further and say, well, you know, just like we always like educators always insist that alcohol is a depressant. Uh, and adolescence are like, what are you talking about, man?
Let's get some some some some alcohol and party because it's fun. It's like you know what we the idea that there's an easy translation of the kind of molecular structure into a particular phenomenology and into a particular suite of culturally uh embedded behaviors is actually it's actually a lot more complicated than that. um and can easily make you think that to some extent anyway drugs are just kind of the the pretext for a suite of culturally coded behavior.
>> Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, then maybe I was Yeah, because Yeah, you did write that in conjunction with um which I actually didn't even know. Well, the the Nazis and and their use of methamphetamines. I I knew a little bit.
I know the author of the the book Tricked here here in Berlin actually.
>> Oh, yeah. That's an amazing book. Yeah.
Norman. Uh, and then yeah, you wrote about the Norse and and then I was looking up like Cythian burial mounds which are like loaded with uh all kinds of drugs that we find in them. The Aztecs peyote I guess the Hamas uh the Hamas warriors were what was the drug capagen or something that they have in their >> capagon.
that they have in their and then then with with that maybe I was reading too much into this idea of latent discourses because I wanted it to mean something like and maybe maybe there's another place that you could take this because I wanted it to mean something like um there it's not a surprise that many people in modern society are seeking these drugs and seeking these experiences >> and then reporting >> similar kind of you know Not just not just images. I think those are culturally contaminated, but truths or deeper truths as some sort of reaction to the hollowess of modern realism or something like that. I don't I don't I don't know if that exactly holds up. Um but but it does lead to this other maybe my most favorite quote in your entire book, so I want to make sure I get it right. Um I could I could paraphrase it, but I have so many. Oh, here it is.
As humans, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of needing the unnecessary. And I'll stop it there. It goes on. It's beautiful. I'll put it on the screen for people who want to read the rest of the passage. But I just loved that, the needing the unnecessary.
>> But for me, that was and the spice of life that you go into. But um it kind of sums up the entire thing. And for anybody and for anybody who's watching who is curious about these things, has never tried them or wants to try them, I'm actually hoping and I'll do it in the intro that this >> uh your book or this conversation could serve as somebody who's just curious about it or or even just who's done it a lot and it's like a pre-trip kind of like reminder of what this is about.
>> I've had several trips that I've that I've I've taken this mindset into them of let me do really hard work on this trip to like figure out the nature of consciousness. I was I was writing a 10- part series with Anukica Harris about fundamental consciousness at one time.
>> I think I had two or three experiences over the course of the year of writing it where I was like, "All right, I really I really want to spend the entire trip doing this." And I think it's possible to do set in settings to a degree with everything you just said actually about >> the sort of let's take the drug to do something, whether that's go rape and pillillage or sit around under a tree and figure out the cosmos. I think to a degree, it's always a cliche, trust the drug, follow the experience, and you should to a degree, but you can you can steer them even with fairly heavy doses, I find, but but this thing of needing the unnecessary um >> is so good because there must be people who are like, why should I do this? I don't need it. And it's like you're like, well, that's the point, actually.
Well, I I mean, you know, I that yeah, that that line comes up and it kind of sends out tendrils into different different subarguments of the book. But if I can just address one that we haven't addressed at all yet. Um that is kind of a thesis uh that uh that is in the first inst instance a historical thesis. Um, and I'm I'm thinking about the wonderful work of um of uh the historian uh Sydney Mintz um called the sweetness of power um on the the rise of the global sugar trade. This is somewhat continued in the work of I I can re recommend a a real great uh proper drug historian uh Benjamin Breen um uh whose work the age of intoxication is about the same period that Mintz was writing on um but you know in effect it's it's an account of the rise of the modern world um out of uh this crazy need need in scare quotes to go out and get sugar, tobacco, coffee, chocolate, and tea, right? Um which um Europe did just fine without um for a very long time. And um that's a surprising fact. That should be really troubling to us that um the shape the modern world took and all of the all of the the kind of the the new rising power of Europe, all of the exploitation of um of the rest of the world. All of that was for mild stimulants essentially, right? um we did it because we wanted to get a little buzz. Um and um so that's um uh the context in which the concept the modern concept of drug uh emerges. Uh, I wouldn't describe uh uh Paleolithic people using fly agaric for a a ritual with a cave bear painted on the wall. I wouldn't describe that as a drug experience. Um uh uh I think that the category of drug uh emerges in the context of the rise of global trade in the early modern period designating interchangeable units of dry that's the etmology of it of of dry uh substance of some sort resources that are traded in uh standardized units um and therefore also necessarily decontextualized, taken away from the place they grow and used uh with varying degrees of awareness of their cultural significance around the world. So that's the sense in which um the history of the modern world is um kind of summed up by a kind of the the rush for new necessities that we don't need, right? And in a way that's embarrassing and silly. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
Um but on the other hand, it's just like yeah, that's what we human beings do. We uh we've we've been doing that all along. I mean, we have incredible information now about long-distance trade routes in prehistory, you know, where people would wear gemstones and brooches and so on that uh that came from very very far away. And why did they do that? to mark themselves out um and you know to say you know here I am as this particular kind of individual human and and you know that's kind of been the human story all along um and when it comes to uh the kind of the perception of the excess of drugs they do kind of illustrate this feature of us human beings very clearly and this is both you know illuminating but also as as I think I've explained embarrassing right there are two possible reactions and both kind of make sense one is we should be ashamed of ourselves the other is um is yeah that's that's that's us humans >> right um so that's that's kind of the the the sense uh the sense in which I understood that but maybe this brings me to a a you know a final dimension of the book that I that I haven't even touched on yet which is um uh and one of the reasons why I'm not a psychedelic activist um or a policyminded person um because it seems to me pretty clear that normalization uh almost necessarily means um kind of skimming off of this excess um that I think is uh intrinsic to the drug experience.
That is to say, um, you know, there was a an astounding article in the Atlantic in 2023 that I cite in the book to the effect arguing something to the effect that uh the hallucination. Now, I know I've criticized hallucination earlier, but let's just say the the mindaltering quality of a psychedelic experience, the author of the piece wanted to argue, could be an undesirable side effect of taking uh say LSD, right? Um, so that was making the case for legal therapeutic micro doing where you would never have a distorted perception of the nature of external reality or of your place in the world or of the na of the nature of your own being or anything like that. You would just function better. And to my mind, implicit in that is you would be uh a more reliable employee, uh a more reliable economic agent. You would get back in line, right? In all the ways that uh one might on the contrary argue psychedelics are supposed to knock you out of, right?
Psychedelics aren't supposed to get you back in line. On the contrary, yeah. Um, that's probably just, you know, the inevitable rhetorical tone that, uh, activists for legalization have to take.
Um, this will help PTSD victims. Uh, and so on. Um, but, uh, that's just not my beat.
>> Yeah, we should drive it towards towards your punchline soon. I'm in I'm in chapter six or seven over here. Uh >> yeah, let's let's get towards the punch >> part. Yeah, because I feel like we sort of covered that one. But yeah, so I'm I'm in more than a feeling was chapter five, which I you know, I I really really loved. I feel like we've kind of covered it, but I I have to unless there's there's something you really want to pull out from it or else I'll just skip over to sort of like the galaxy brain. I I I want to I do want to clarify that I intentionally uh uh went and chose like the corniest song imaginable to Boston's More Than a Feeling.
>> That song is terrible.
>> And and and just read reading the chapter title gives you the earworm, which is enough to just >> Yeah. No, that that was that was well well chosen. Um I I I will say there was a great passage in there which we've kind of I'll just read it because I liked it so much that you wrote the experience is closer to a sudden realization that such a list is worthless. This is you were talking about um armchairs, real estate, whatever else basically the world. Yeah.
>> U the experience is closer to a sudden realization that such a list is worthless and deserves to be crumpled up and thrown into the trash. What are quirks and furniture and so on next to the reality of this feeling inside of me? Yeah. From an outsers's point of view, the reason for keeping the feeling off the list will be precisely the opposite of that entertained by the lover. That is just a feeling. But from the lover's own point of view, that feeling becomes the world. And we we've kind of already gone over this point of, you know, the feeling is more important than any rocket ship or quark or furniture or anything. Um, this word just can be played in both directions, right? It's almost like I always go to the Carl Sean quote of like >> you can read it's just the emphasis you can say oh we're just star stuff >> and downplay it of like oh we're just machines that are bumping around here with this illusion called consciousness or you could say we're just star stuff with this emphasis of like isn't it so magical and insane that that's what we are and we're the entire cosmos and it's all a matter of the shift and the psychedelic experience and we'll get to this punchline because as we get to the end of this conversation you make a pretty strong case and I agree with it.
You don't necessarily need to be on psychedelics to have psychedelic experiences. You could you could be you could be at a planetarium without the psychedelic experiences and have a psychedelic experience of just that one if we're just star stuff kind of an aruck experience. And so I wanted to share one because so much of psychedelic experiences are always characterized as spacey and you know you're in rocket ships. I've had several of them that have this kind of quality >> and it reminded me of Edgar Mitchell uh on he was a a Apollo 14 astronaut. I don't know if you know this quote >> when he was on the moon and he had this quote where this is a guy who I'm almost sure had never touched a jug in his life to be a NASA NASA Apollo astron a astronaut at that time and he said you you develop an he's looking at earth from the moon when he says this and he says you develop an instant global consciousness a people orientation an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it from out there on the moon international politics looks so petty you want to grab grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him up a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."
And that was Edgar Mitchell. I do know this.
>> Yeah. And it's so good and it feels >> again psychedelic. You could get on a rocket ship and go to the actual moon to have that realization. And good for him for he did that he did it. Um but but this is something that feels profoundly what the the best of psychedelic trips can deliver you. It probably goes to galaxy brain because galaxy brain is where you bring in kubric and this notion of superconsciousness this feeling that sort of >> um underneath all of us are we all one soul is it one giant consciousness that's dipping in uh you know >> consciousness feels infinite but we're stuck in a finite timeline. Time has this finite quality but on psychedelics it takes this time timelessness infinite warpingness. Yeah. Well, I guess I mean one of one of the qualities of my own experience that um I find quite surprising and that I hadn't seen described in other first person accounts um was the strange kind of indeterminacy between ego death yeah which is commonly reported you know oh it turns out I'm nothing um on the one hand and on the other hand the absolute opposite of that which is that I am the lord of the universe or something like that. Um and uh uh the same the same experience um seems at moments under the influence to be uh describable either way. Um, which is unsettling.
Uh, because you know the the the people describe the ego death as kind of edifying or particularly important in the therapeutic context for terminally ill patients who are given psilocybin for example. you know, uh it makes uh it makes death a lot easier to adapt to when you are shown that in any case you were mistaken to believe that you were a discrete entity in the first place, right? Um that that seems to me to be roughly what's going on when when psilocybin has these proven positive clinical effects of that sort. the same experience can also uh be a pretty major ego boost. Uh you can kind of feel magnified somehow. Uh uh or and maybe one way of understanding this is that you know these are both the same thing under different descriptions, right? And then that kind of you know gets me to I I mention like I I am kind of deep in my heart um a liitian a follower of the philosophy of Godfred Wilhelm Linets uh and I I do mention him at least once in the book to point out that um uh you know he managed he's another one of these people like Edgar Mitchell he almost certainly never touched um any significantly mindaltering substance. Kepler probably did incidentally. Um but Linets was uh uh ppeacious enough to draw some of these lessons that I had to that I had to rely on on chemical supplements to get um with the with the theory of monads and with the um the um the deep uh I think um insight that we are primarily differentiated the ones from the others by having a particular point of view on the shared order of coexistence. Um and also the deep insight that um that it really doesn't make any sense to talk about objects at all. Everything that exists exists in so far as it has something as Linets puts it analogous to the muah right to the south. Um and so so I I'm a Linitzian in that regard. Like I you know most liet scholars are not actual Linetsians. They just work on him. But I I find myself fairly convinced. Um but another feature of livenets that's um that's very attractive to me is this consiliatory spirit. Yeah, ultimately the idea that, you know, if two people seem to seem to be giving incompatible accounts of what's going on, uh, say in the transubstantiation of the host or something like that, uh, uh, it's probably just because they're, you know, they're they're they're articulating, uh, their convictions in different ways.
And the more you press them to um clarify their their expression, the more they're going to converge on one and the same account. And I think about this a lot because you know a lot of people who um well yeah maybe we can kind of uh give the spoiler now. I talk at the end of the book about my recon conversion to Catholicism um uh in the wake of the psychedelic experience and I have actually had more than one more than two a good number in fact of conversations since then of the sort uh really Catholicism why not Buddhism and this always kind of kind of blows me away because you So the the presumption I think this is a very very western uh presumption but the presumption that upon being given a revelation of the deep truth about the nature of our existence you got to go to the other guy's religion. It's not going to be the one you happen to be born into. It's going to be the other one. Right? And that's a weird presumption. Um if there's any particular uh amenable feature of Buddhism for I mean Buddhism is a wildly diverse uh uh tradition with or you know uh uh let's say uh uh uh kind of um multiple traditions woven together and spinning off from one another. But if there's kind of a philosophical core there, you could say perhaps that much Buddhism, many strains in many centuries have emphasized the no self doctrine, the the anatman doctrine uh where you can kind of um uh uh uh uh overcome the perception of the existence of a real abiding metaphysical subject. And indeed the ego deathath of psy of of many psychedelic experiences does seem to uh uh point one in that direction. I thought I was a self. I took a bunch of mushrooms and that self dissolved.
Therefore, I guess it's Buddhism for me.
Um um but you know because I'm a live Nitsian and I think in the end everyone's everyone's trying to say the same thing the the one singular true thing and we all just say it in different ways. Um I kind of feel like for me the psychedelic experience was more like hm I could interpret this as a demonstration of the truth of the anat doctrine. I could also interpret this as a demonstration of the immortality of my soul. Right. Right. And and um and and I don't want to say it's a it's a it's a free choice uh because I you know I I I do believe in the immortality of my soul. Uh but um I do want to say that um that that this is again just a part of the the a confirmation of the difficulty of putting into language the nature of the experience. Am I experiencing ego death or am I experiencing the ultimate proof that I am uh an eternally abiding metaphysical subject? I'm not sure. I could go either way.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> You know what I mean?
>> Yeah. Yeah. That's I mean I mean I I would be remiss without pressing on it or at least having you expound on the idea of icon versus idol which I think is >> shouldn't be left off the table for anyone hearing your sort of uh pitch for any religion in this case because I think >> you know reading that part I guess I wasn't super shocked by by the twist. It was cool. Um, but but it was uh and I don't know if you did you're a really skilled writer, so I don't know if it was a nar narrative trick or not, but I was picturing you and remembering your walk to the store as a young boy for the first time alone and feeling the sense of >> freedom. I think that actually was in the more than a feeling chapter or you referenced it a few times. um for the readers or for the viewers who haven't read the book, I won't tell that whole story there, but the reason I'm bringing it up is that there is a um a nostalgia to like you said, the religion of your youth and experiences in your youth and there's there's a truth to them that when you're in them feels like the only truth in the world.
um that you can analogize like you you say like when you're in Cincinnati, you can you can see a sense of freedom in some little corner grocery store that some boy must be walking to >> for the first time. And I love that and I think it it it echoes again um this kind of we use the language and the I this is me answering for you but you do I want you to do it yourself. We we use the icons of the culture around us. the language that we have gathered as philosophers or writers or poets or painters or whatever it is >> to maybe be trying to say the same damn thing. Yeah. And so if you if you happen to be born as I don't know, you know, a Muslim in of the Sufi sect or whatever, perhaps that's what you would have returned to >> out of out of the same sense of of >> an icon that you're using to access the infinite rather than like the literal belief. But maybe I'm wrong, the literal belief in the resurrection or whatnot.
These are I don't know. Well, well, I mean I, yeah, this would this would take another two hours and kind of get us into um kind of some deep questions in the philosophy of religion, but my considered view is that the whole question of literal truth only comes up in the modern period um when uh uh the faithful when believers make the tragic mistake of agreeing to play on the home field of uh empirical science, right? Um it's like uh for the most part prior to the modern period uh you know it just wouldn't have made any sense to ask a Christian now are you are you telling me this actually happened in six days or is that just allegorical for eons or some something like that like people didn't didn't um demand of their kind of fundamental orienting belief beliefs that they check out so to speak. And in fact, what in my view what makes um religious systems work um is precisely that they are internally contradictory.
>> Um another way of putting that is that they is that is that faith involves mystery, right? Um um is uh is God loving or wrathful? Um is God one person or three? Um you know uh uh these are uh uh claims. Say the trinity for example is a claim um that is precisely meant to leave you thinking what what how is that possible? Um, so if some some smart alec comes along and says three persons, one person contradiction, right? You know, there's just like they're missing they're missing um the the the nature of the faith experience.
And I think this uh misunderstanding um is relatively young. It's it's only a few centuries old. Um, so I just kind of I refuse to answer the question. You don't have to in the sense that in the sense that I don't think I don't think I need to uh justify a faith commitment by, you know, uh uh showing how it's compatible with Darwinian evolution or something like that. I I'm an evolutionist. I I I don't even think about like uhoh should I should I not be believing this when I'm reading about some Cretaceian Cretace fossil from the Cretaceous or or something like that you know I just don't think about that. Um so uh uh uh so that's a a little bit of kind of philosophy of religion reflection. Um uh uh but I I should say that I'm one of these Christians who like let's say a convert though I re a revert maybe hard to say for whom um it's actually given me tremendous sympathy for um uh every belief community. Um, maybe not. Well, >> no, even like even the even the wacky ones, like, you know, even the cult-like ones. Uh but but um um uh in particular, you know, across across the lines of the different Abrahamic faiths, you know, to me uh uh a a de a a devout Muslim, for example, is just so much closer in sensibility in the kind of state of the of the condition of the spirit uh than um uh uh than let's say a prideful ful haughty uh uh materialist. Um um so that's the kind of the kind of convert I turned out to be.
>> Um and I think oh yeah and I think this is somewhat connected with the question of analogy and with the question of um of of icons versus idols. I was thinking there um about um the I I think I had in mind this wonderful book by uh by the the scholar of orthodox religion and like say Slavic history Alan Bessons uh who wrote a lovely book called the forbidden image um and you know uh this widespread perception that uh that uh or art in the Orthodox world lagged behind Western European art that discovered perspective and you know just shot for you know had a got a got a major boost in the Renaissance and gave us this wonderful representational uh painting that that trumps the eye as they say.
Um, and the argument is that orthodox icons didn't do this because they were in any case not trying to capture a this world worldly reality to begin with.
They were trying to uh propel you to uh kind of contact with um with the um the the entities um uh the beings um how should the principles. It's hard to say what what word is correct there. Uh that they were iconically represented >> the stuff you see when you're on psychedelics is as it were.
>> Yeah. Um and this is this is this is just a completely different objective.
Um, and it seems to me that um that I mean obviously you know what counts as an icon and what counts as an idol uh will um depend which side you're on. You know, miss missionaries in in India typically describe Ganesha, for example, as an idol and they think it's uh heathenish and superstitious to to do reverential things in front of it. Um I'm not sure from a comparative religion point of view you can really say that's all that different from kissing an icon of Mary, right? Um it's uh it's a matter of like the the internal experience of it.
Nonetheless, um um um I think you know clearly what we see across religions uh across many religions is a pretty developed way of kind of um uh using this worldly representations as a launchpad so to speak. I mean, that's kind of a flat-footed metaphor, but as a way of launching oneself into um uh into an experience of what what what comes across as the eternal and that is also I think a lot of what's going on when you know when under the influence of psychedelics we are uh kind of confronted with images from Looney Tunes and so on but it no longer seems to just that, right?
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's that's good. I I um I'm not a hottie materialist, so I wasn't offended by it, but I I you know, I I sense I guess I have to represent some of the worries or danger of, you know, uh the the overreach of religious literalism and and whatever. But that's what I think you're trying to do there with icon icon versus idol.
>> Yeah.
um wi-i which is which is well done. But maybe you know I'm 43 now and I you know I'm not I'm not a finger wagging atheist telling people about evolution. You know at some point in your life you do become a little bit more nuanced >> um and appreciative of it. And I think one of the most important things, and this might be the last um thing we can riff on, was uh was ritual as its as its own sake, ritual for itself, which is what you wrote about a little earlier, which is also what I what I tended to and maybe this is me just reading it hoping you're someone I want you to be in that conversion of like what religious um practice for you or for others might be about. Um, you bring up dance as likely like maybe the first ritual, the the earliest ritual of just movement >> and um, and I think there's something to that and I have to and even the the practice, you've now mentioned this a couple times, the practice, the habit, the ritual of psychedelic experiences is is part of a performance placebo as it were in the most positive sense of that word placebo as in it actually is delivering an experience to where I don't know if people have done the studies. I'm sure they have. Maybe you looked at some of these where they've given them false positives and there's double negatives of people getting placeos versus real drugs but getting the entire Iawaska shaman ceremony. I wonder how many people report to be having visions when they've only been given, you know, >> whatever water or mud. Um, but but there there's something there's something to the um and I'm going to I'm going to finish it on that line with your the paradoxical nature of of humans needing the unnecessary of collective ritual practice that is beautiful and psychedelic. Um, praying alone is interesting. praying around the Cabba looks insanely psychedelic and delivers something very real to the revelers.
>> And there is a for me um moral dilemma about popping a balloon of belief that is required for everybody to participate in that that actually then delivers it.
It's almost like the value of money only has value if we all believe in it. the value of this portal that we're opening up to the infinite that we need uh depends on us all kind of believing the same thing. So nobody look behind the curtain. Again, there's possible dangers in that, >> but I but I think that's there, you know, there there's something that the young angry atheist needs to learn about that.
>> Um and that maybe all of us do at some point in in our in our age and in our growth. And it and as just and then I'll let you respond and finish it up there.
But then as the last sort of because I am a you know card carrying atheist is that it's why I'm so angry by the misuse of religious >> uh politics and whatever and you know haggith with a tattoo of infidel like this kind of tre trudging on all of the things that you just said and making it so ugly and awful and Christ is king people saying it for the worst reasons.
um ma makes makes this finish of a conversation with you about a book that I absolutely loved just always a little sticky to land.
>> But but I >> but I get it. Hopefully hopefully you heard that I get it and I think it's beautiful and in some ways I'm envious of it. I grew up with something that I would never go back to of sort of a Zionism and an empty form of Judaism that that has no that has no nostalgia and only ugliness and was actually completely >> perverted by a political project to to a point that I have like no no interest in it if I ever decided to join a religion.
I would have to actually learn what the [ __ ] Judaism is to even start there.
>> Um and and and that's a real crime that I feel like was actually done to me if that if that makes sense. So interesting.
>> Yeah. So I I'll let you finish it on on that riff.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> I mean, yeah, it it's it's really hard.
I mean, particularly in France and particularly in the French university system, um you know, people typically don't say Catholic, they say Kato and which is already somewhat derogatory and it's often followed by fashure.
So like Catholic fascist and and like that's like like that's so obviously not the group I'm intending to to declare my uh affiliation to. Maybe I better work out a kind of uh rough and ready response to that kind of that kind of concern. And I would just say I mean the you know obviously the the the church is um a human institution and and it is at exactly as rotten as every other human institution. I'm I'm perfectly comfortable saying that and I think you know that's kind of the the I I I I don't think Pope Leo would disagree either. I'm not sure. Um but yeah, it's like it's like it it's uh it's just, you know, one one scandal after another for millennia. Um and and there there's no getting around that, but my thought has been kind of like, well, um um you know, model be you know, model try to model everything that's good in it or try to try to live up to everything that's good in it. In any case, that's what we also do, you know, say as as as citizens, right? We, you know, we um we, you know, we have that that same disposition to our kind of the our our um uh what's the word I'm looking for to our to the polity that we are we're we're parts of. So, why not extend that to religion as well? Um, but yeah, maybe I can leave all of that aside and just say, you know, I I um it's weird to be coming back to Haidiger here, but um I I I think um you know, I I I really appreciate the notion of onto theology and the idea that it has been a mistake to um uh pursue theology as if it were a matter of finding the the knockdown proof for the exist existence of God. Um uh as if the existence of God were, you know, a question akin to the existence of um any given hypothetical entity in the history of science like like Flegiston or or or or Bzons or you know things like this. Um um there uh there is in the history of um of of theology uh a a wide number of alternative ways of thinking about um about uh what commitment what belief commitment actually involves. God is love for example. Okay, if you believe God is love, if you take that seriously, if you think that's central to uh to to Christian doctrine, then you have the proof simply in so far as you experience the reality of love, right? Um and then you know uh kind of uh onto theologians might come and say, "Wait, wait, that's not an entity, that's an experience."
And then you can go back and say, well, yeah, but you know, that's that's one of the ways God is explicitly defined in the tradition, right? It's not claiming God is an entity. Um, and so, you know, I I I think there there's so much more I could say about about what belief commitment involves and and how I think um um we can uh we can like we can all kind of there there's a lot we can all agree on uh uh uh uh talking across the the the divide between theists and atheists. Um but uh let me just um kind of come back around to um one way I I have experienced um uh uh uh religious faith uh is precisely as you mentioned through ritual.
>> Yeah. and ritual. Um, I'm very interested in the work of a a Dutch philosopher who was at Berkeley for most of his career. He mostly worked on vitinstein but he also was very interested in uh he was a also an indologist and worked quite a bit on vidic ritual and he has a lovely book called um ritual without sorry rules without meaning right >> um and um and the argument is that um religious ritual Um, I is a sort of choreography that is onlogically and perhaps even chronologically in in kind of pale the history of uh uh uh human evolution.
Um, prior to language, um, um, you get together with your fellow tribes people and you do a series of steps in synchrony with one another.
And in that synchronization, you are effectively locking into a kind of order that duplicates or channels the order of the cosmos in an eternal way, right? Um, and so for me in the kind of stand, kneel, sit, stand, kneel, sit choreography of a Catholic mass, um, it's extremely simple choreography.
Anyone can do it. Um there is this kind of like uh kind of cosmic locking so to speak uh uh of um a group of people together at the same time. um that that propels one to um to believe.
But the belief doesn't feel like a kind of ascent to a proposition in the way that philosophers understand belief.
It feels like, as I think I I I say this in the book, I I I wrote it somewhere. I forget where. um it can easily feel like it's my knees that believe. It's the knees that are doing the believing because they're kneeling, right? And um and so any any So that's the level at which the belief experience seems to play out. And I I I don't want to say much more about this except um except that I I have some sense and I I I made some Catholic friends who were helping me on my path towards recon conversion. Very upset with this piece I wrote for Compact Magazine called Psychedelics Made Me Christian. But what what can what can I say? I mean, I have to I have to be honest about my own experience. I do have some sense that um that it's really psilocybin that in the months and few years before the conversion it's really psilocybin that made me understand not understand made me grasp how it's possible uh to believe with your knees, so to speak, you know, and then and then the actual kind of going and socially participating in the ritual is something I was loosened up for by that um that profoundly destabilizing psychedelic experience. Um um could it could have happened anyway, but um but but that's in any case the order of events in my own particular uh experience. Yeah.
Well, will we leave it there? And you also, just to be clear, you you write you don't I don't think you think psychedelics will make everybody Christian.
>> No. In fact, >> that's that's that's what's so peculiar about it. Again, you results may vary.
You know, you could they can send you off in any number of directions. And I think again this the the most common result is um is some either Buddhism or naturalism or some synratistic combination of the two.
>> No, I think that's great. I mean in some ways to circle it all the way back and put a bow on it. The point of the book and and it is a tricky book that you took on um was to question whether psychedelics help you think about anything more clearly as a philosopher.
>> Uh because they certainly make you feel things, but do do they help you can they help you think about those feelings in some new deeper way? Does it give you feelings about the thoughts perhaps in this reverse way? Um and I and I think that that that's a resounding yes in your case and in most cases yes but you don't think it's necessary for for a lot of people it's an aid um for me I find the same thing which is why I mean credit to you for writing the book that I liked so much where I I am not a linen fan and I am certainly not a Catholic and I absolutely loved everything you wrote. So that's a so I think it helps you you you uh it helped you think very clearly. So well I I'll yeah I'll leave it there. I can't wait for your your next book, whatever whatever it happens to be because this is two two bangers in a row for me that really really helped uh you know I got a lot out of.
>> Um yeah, and we'll we'll we'll send it send it off there. Hopefully people get a lot out of this one. It's a long one.
It's I'll cut it up into into pieces, but um >> yeah.
>> Yeah, Justin, this was really really fun. Yeah.
>> Yeah. Thanks so much, Jay. That was fun.
Yeah.
>> So hopefully you enjoyed that. I loved it. As usual, I'll let the record that I chose for this uh conversation with Justin to fall into focus now and I will see you next time. Thanks.
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