This is like claiming that dripping drops of water on a circuit board, and observing that the electronics misbehave, somehow links it to the emergence of circuit design.
If you are a circuit board, getting some water on yourself would be one way to (potentially destructively) learn about what your design actually is.
Or fault injection or fuzzing, same idea. By making errors happen, you find out about possible errors that even can happen, and that tells you something about the overall design. Maybe the design cannot be fully determined this way, but a portion can be learned, maybe a portion unreachable by any other means (MRI, neural probes, etc) so research into the mind and consciousness by use of psychedelics does make sense.
It surely is in some ways. But in other ways, it sure seems like they have some sort of a special "relationship" (for utter lack of a better term) with consciousness.
I'm not convinced, from a system perspective, that disturbing a system by poking its most intimate internal parts, and in an unusual way, means that the disturbance was directly required or a part of the emergence of the system.
I will admit that this perspective is mostly logically pedantic and, perhaps naive, disregards the universal usage of psychedelics throughout human history.
I suppose the question would be, what's the evolutionary advantage to temporarily modifying your brains behavior? Any raw structural changes from the use wouldn't be passed to your offspring, leaving mostly social advantages. One could argue that sensitivity to these compounds could promote these advantages, leading to a natural selection of those with more sensitive, and perhaps necessarily more complicated, brains.
What's that social, or perhaps functional, advantage? Maybe epigenetics could have played a role, along with the occasional tribe saving, trip induced, insight?
I would very much enjoy any facts or ramblings on this topic, it's very interesting.
> This is like claiming that dripping drops of water on a circuit board, and observing that the electronics misbehave, somehow links it to the emergence of circuit design.
Almost like claiming that smashing subatomic particles together might give insight into the relationships between and properties of said particles?
In my experience LSD is far different from Psilocybin, in that it "feels" more artificial, definitely does not give the same feeling of belonging to a greater organic whole that you may get with mushrooms.
> Any raw structural changes from the use wouldn't be passed to your offspring, leaving mostly social advantages.
Not necessarily structural changes as a direct result of usage (but maybe), but I can easily see social changes resulting in structural changes via greater evolutionary success being passed down, as you note in your next sentence. This stuff is extremely complicated, we only have a rough idea of how it all works, and much of what we "know" is actually just theory.
> What's that social, or perhaps functional, advantage?
I would put my money on the notion that they promote things such as greater "wisdom" and behavioral strategies (via thoughtful meditation while normal neurological filters are reduced) resulting in more peaceful and successful coexistence between people.
