1) There is so much cultural baggage around psychedelics at this point. We're still talking about the Marsh Chapel experiment? We're still writing articles that MUST include a Leary reference? There is a HUGE wave of psychedelic research coming to fruition now and in the coming 2 - 3 years that will hopefully help change the conversation from hippies, the 1960s, and even religious/spiritual metaphor.
2) Without a more concrete understanding of consciousness (and the 'hard problem' of it), our understanding of psychedelics is built on shaky foundations. Sure, psychedelic research may help us discover new insights that help solve the consciousness crisis... but that seems like a very speculative hope.
3) I'm curious why N,N-DMT isn't being studied as much as psilocybin in this current wave of research. Much of the challenge with contemporary psychedelic therapy has to do with logistics - trips take too long to fit a clinical setting. DMT is over in 20 minutes, and while (I've heard) extremely intense, people seem to anecdotally benefit in similar ways to longer-acting psychedelics.
Personally I think a big reason psychedelics are helpful to people is because of the process of an experience taking a full day, forcing you to integrate what youve experienced in a way that just wont ever be possible in a brief 20 minute experience. The trip is about the individual journey and not about some magical effect on the brain. This is just my opinion but I really think as we do more research we will find this to be the case
Throwaway account for obvious reasons. I've done DMT once and magic mushrooms a few times. DMT is by far the crazier trip that will take me a year to properly integrate. Since I have to practice a few things, the DMT being that I met gave me homework, ha! I'm going for a "check up" in 8 months.
Everyone has different experiences but when you subjectively feel your mind is at least 10 to 100 times faster (that even has some residu effect after the trip) then that's enough "time" to learn anything. Others may not have that experience.
What I learned:
- Feel free to feel free. No need to be so uptight.
- If anything, _if anything_, it's about love. A good place to start is [1].
- Seeking for the truth is amazing. However, when you speak, be warm and loving while speaking the truth. A human is not an object. A human isn't only nourished by truth. Just like a well-balanced diet. It's nourished by more things.
- You're blind to how many people love you. Also, they don't dare to say it given the culture you're in.
- It doesn't matter whether the DMT being is real or not. It felt real at the time, but I knew it is probably an illusion going in. The DMT being laughed and told me it doesn't matter. What matters is the lessons that I get from this trip. Given that I'm an atheist, I can also apply this to religion. I don't need to believe in (a) god to understand religious vocabulary (concepts I can use) or to get inspiration from it. Obviously this applies to many more things. Gods and demons exist in the conceptual/symbolic realm (as more or less anything conceivable in a thought does). They're not real. But anything in our imagination has the capability of influencing us for real (self-fulfilling prophecies, etc.).
My DMT trip lasted 30 seconds according to my trip sitter (who was sober). In those 30 seconds, I saw my life flashing by.
Mushrooms on the other hand almost always gave me bad trips. They were insightful though. However, DMT was far more therapeutical for me.
Everything you learned from dmt you would get from 5 minutes a day mindfulness meditation. And arguably more given all the other various benefits. I'm not against psychedelics, I quite enjoy them. But in my quest I have found that you don't always need them and the regular practice of meditation to be much more rewarding.
(Smoking) DMT is a huge wildcard. I've had a couple of good experiences but the vast majority left me very off-base and ungrounded, weirded out. I really don't think it has the therapeutic potential of ayahuasca.
The “war on drugs” ends, the counterculture of the 60s will loom large over discussion of psychedelics.
Society’s attitude towards drugs forces people who in some way identify with something linked to the Psychedelic experience to define themselves against society to some extent. Rather than build on society’s current paradigm and fetishes they must tear them down to an extent. Much like Freud and psychology’s discourse only changing after much science, society’s discourse surrounding psychedelics will be free of Leary once the mysteries are revealed.
I completely disagree that an enthusiasm or experience with psychedelics must lead to a definition-against, to some inherent tension with society.
Are there bad laws in place currently? Yes. Laws that contribute to the state of modern-day slavery (our "justice" system) and limit our essential freedoms to our bodies are unjust, but it is those laws that are against our society.
I do not think of myself as against society; rather, I think of myself as a progressive, working to remove the ill-conceived laws that should never have been instituted in a freedom-loving, rational society.
The difference in this framing is that I understand bad laws happen. Bad laws do not make societies bad, though they can. I am not against my society, as an American citizen, because I recognize that America has processes and procedures for the remediation of bad laws. I believe it is the responsibility of citizens seeking change to take advantage of these processes, where possible, to dismantle the systems of power that have been constructed around these bad laws. Once the systems of power have been dismantled, and the populace sufficiently convinced of their wrongheadedness, the laws will evaporate and the healing can begin.
But to accomplish this is a massive undertaking that requires disparate effort from unrelated parties, and most importantly a belief that it can happen.
I think it has to do with normalization. And this takes time. My parents would both probably connect people taking psychedelics with the Hippies, partly because they don't know better, partly because this is the picture they got in their rural alpine village describing psychedelics. Weed is slowly getting more normal, so that jokes they used to make died out a while ago. When we watched my brothers run the Amsterdam marathon they would even push us to try some with them. Meanwhile 20 years ago my father would have unironically put weed on the same level as heroin. He did not know better.
Things like LSD are probably just further down the road for them, so it is a mixture of general acceptance within society, education about the substance and the commercialization of it.
Clock time DMT is quick but in perceived time it is millennia. Whatever other effects you get are after you grapple with that The Jaunt shit on the way out.
> In 2021, Yaden and Griffiths proposed an experiment, the only definitive study that could disprove the importance of subjective effects: the administration of psychedelics to individuals rendered fully unconscious via deep anesthesia, and who subsequently reported no memory of the psychedelic experience. If full and lasting therapeutic efficacy remains under these conditions, the subjective effects — importantly, not limited to the mystical experience — would be proven irrelevant. The RECAP study, currently underway at the University of Wisconsin, is investigating a variant of this: whether the coadministration of midazolam, an amnesiac sedative, can effectively wipe participant’s memories of the subjective effects. Results are still forthcoming.
Wonder when they’re going to get published. It’s been over 2 years by now.
I find this to be pretty odd reasoning, it definitely seems far from "definitive" for me unless you make a lot of assumptions about how the mind works.
> Today’s new wave of psychedelic trials, most notably of psilocybin, have shown profound potential to address a wide range of mental health issues. An incomplete list includes end-of-life anxiety [..]
It sounds quite distopic to hint that a treatment for being afraid of death is enough drugs to make you believe in an afterlife.
I see how you find it dystopian to think that people could be given drugs just to keep them placated by inspiring false belief in an afterlife. But I don't think the afterlife belief is actually the main attitude that is driving psychedelic patients to have decreased fear of death.
Check out the 2022 study "Comparison of psychedelic and near-death or other non-ordinary experiences in changing attitudes about death and dying"
Specifically Table 7, which shows changes in attitudes of psychedelic vs non-drug (who had non-drug near-death or other non-ordinary experiences) participants.
It shows changes of certain attitudes towards death between these two groups. There is a large positive change in curiosity about death. The increase in the attitude you mention, the Approach acceptance ("I look forward to life after death") was actually increased more in the non-drug participants who underwent NDE or similar, as compared with psychedelic participants. But a far larger effect in the decrease of avoidance attitudes ("I avoid death thoughts at all costs"), and an even larger effect in simply having a reduced fear of death.
From this, and from personal psychedelic experience, I do not think increased belief in an afterlife is the primary driver of a reduced fear of death following psychedelic experience. I think the attitude change has much more to do with gaining universal acceptance of death as a natural consequence of life.
Psychedelic therapy, naive reckless pursuers of cosmic insight, more likely. Terence McKenna apparently had such an experience. Only if you pay attention to actually what he said. It comes across as so much incoherent pseudo profound glossolalia word salad. There's a distinct feeling of déjà vu about this :)
I like magic mushrooms. They help me try to figure out the existence of God (or, really, some kind of higher entity or observer). I believe. I came to the hypothesis that nothing doesn't exist, that nothing = infinity. Time, 3D shape, plane, line, point... then infinity.
Higher dimensions would be the most probable reason for the existence of our universe. And even that humans making our own computer simulated universe, with little AI generated automatons, would further prove the existence of a higher entity.
One problem with the experiment mentioned at the beginning of the article is that the participants still knew that a drug was being administered, which by itself would be enough to precipitate a reaction. Another aspect that I'd be curious about is who these religious people were... What denomination. No Christians I know would agree to doing this - Drugs? No. Partly out of a sense of morals, but more so because they wouldn't want their experience with God tainted by chemicals. There probably are other experiments out there where religious ppl were administered drugs but did not know it... Those results would be interesting to read about, including subsequent beliefs or positions about one's standing with God.
>Another aspect that I'd be curious about is who these religious people were... What denomination. No Christians I know would agree to doing this .
The study participants were all Christian seminary and theology students, of mainline protestant denominations. The study was run by an ordained minister (and doctor!) who was pursuing his PhD. Permission was granted to use marsh chapel by howard thurman, who (i hope) needs no introduction.
A statistically unlikely high percentage of study participants were subsequently ordained, and described the experiment as a spiritually significant / formative experience. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment#Doblin... and linked citations )
The experiment in question happened over 60 years ago. This was before the War on Drugs, before the hippies, and before most people had any familiarity with these drugs.
Public attitudes were very different. And the attitudes of Christians today are largely shaped by political battles that had not yet happened. Thus your current experience is not a good predictor of how easy it was to find Christians back then who would have been willing.
In fact I used to know some very conservative people who were exposed to LSD back in that early era. (They were old back when I knew them, and are dead now.) And based on what they told me, I would predict no resistance to such an experiment in 1962.
Currently Christianity is associated with conservatism, hence more anti-drug behavior. And this isn't exactly incorrect these days either. As the population of self identifying Christians in the US shrinks, those that remain are apt to be those with a very strong ideological base.
That is true. But in the early 60s, before the rise of the Religious Right, no such association existed. For example https://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/journey_4/p_2.html shows the strong Christian support for the Civil Rights Movement.
Also it wouldn't have mattered back then. In the early 60s, drugs were associated with neither conservativism or liberalism.
Anecdote time. My ex's grandfather was a very conservative, very Christian lawyer. He happened to also be a lawyer for some people who were involved with LSD in the early days, and hence actually tried LSD in the time frame of the research article in question. He used to laugh about how he was someone that nobody would think had taken LSD.
In my (American) experience, there is a world of difference between the parishioner and the theologian. I don't know any theologian who could resist an offer of an experience that might give them insight into the mind of their creator.
Also, this took place in the 1960s. Post-"War on Drugs" indoctrination wasn't in effect, and consciousness expansion - the understanding that reality is greater than our limited and incomplete human senses can perceive, but that they can be enhanced - was popular. If you're interested in the range (and similarity) of entheogen experiences, there are many accounts from people across the world recorded on the web going back decades. It makes for very interesting history.
There's a very modern fear at play here, but it's fear of the state, not of gods. Substance use as a ritual aid aligns with both religious-historic accounts and evidence found in early Abrahamic temples. For example: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/cannabis-found-alt...
I'm a strict materialist in terms of like 'where consciousness comes from', but a strictly "bottom up" model, I think, is the wrong way to think about mind, because while yes, mental states are caused by physical changes in the brain, but you can very well reverse it and show that mental states cause physical change in the brain in return. When you learn how to add 2+2, that surely corresponds to physical changes in the brain, but it would be very weird to think about that as the physical changes causing the learning of 2+2, rather than the other way around.
In computer terms, while yes, everything that happens in a computer is a result of the physical activity of its components, if you try to understand the activity of the computer while completely ignoring _the code_, you are going to have a very incomplete model of what the computer is doing and what it's going to do in response to changes.
The idea of trying to reduce "what psychedelics do" to strictly the action of chemicals causing physical changes in neurons and the pursuit of psychedelics that don't cause a subjective experience seems to very much misunderstand what the mind is. Surely you can cause physical changes in the brain with a chemical change, but it's the subjective experience itself and the mind that drives a _particular beneficial change_.
It's like trying to teach someone math without cracking a textbook or something. The fundamental thing the mind does is _learn_, and I don't think that you can learn anything beneficial from the psychedelic experience without the actual, you know, psychedelic experience.
For me, the big thing I took away from psychedelics was a new understanding about the nature of how I perceive things and the nature of reality and my place in it. It was like a conscious learning process based on experience. If you take away the experience, what are you learning?
As physicalists there is no bottom up or top down. The mental process of learning 2+2=4 doesn’t cause the physical process or vice versa. They are different ways of talking about the exact same thing. Mental processes don’t ’have Physical effects’, they just flat out are physical processes.
So of course ideas and thoughts can ‘cause changes in our bodies’, they are changes in our bodies.
Similarly when you talk about computers and software, bear in mind that software is a physical phenomenon. It exists in the computer as a physical pattern of electrical charges in memory circuits. It has physical effects in the system because it is physical.
But this is a bit silly surely? If they are different ways of talking about the same thing then one might as well label oneself a 'mentalist' and say "physical processes don't 'have mental effects', they just flat out are mental processes."
I think what you're going for is a species of monism maybe? The idea that Thought and Extension are attributes of one Substance?
We’re talking specifically about mental processes.
I think we agree that all weather is a physical process, but not all physical processes are weather. Similarly all mental processes are physical, but not all physical processes are mental.
Nevertheless it’s not that the physical atmospheric processes create weather as aside effect or product, they are the weather. Similarly mental processes are a class of physical processes.
Idealists take the opposite view. They think there are only mental processes and the physical is a class of, or product of mental processes.
That hypothesis is exactly what they are testing though, no? What happens when you take away that experience. So the best way to think about it is to wait and see.
I think I generally agree with your prediction, but I think it's because (less than 100% of) the physical changes simply don't taking place when put into a coma... I.E. the conscious process cascades more physical changes.
Poincaré in his 1902 book Science and Hypothesis breaks down our sensory experience of reality into visual, tactile (which includes auditory) and motor (muscular) representations of that reality. We use these sensations to construct a map of reality (or of the simulation, if you like). Here's what motor space means, according to Poincaré:
> "The corresponding framework constitutes what may be called motor space. Each muscle gives rise to a special sensation which may be increased or diminished so that the aggregate of our muscular sensations will depend upon as many variables as we have muscles. From this point of view motor space would have as many dimen-
sions as we have muscles."
While Poincaré uses this as a launch point into non-Euclidean and higher-dimension geometry, this visual-tactile-motor representation of reality is what psychedelics mess with, and at a biomolecular level it seems to involve nerve cell receptors that manage sensory input within the brain, such that memory can leak over into the sensory channels. Thus looking at clouds in the sky under a large dose of psychedelics results in hallucinations of whatever is on your mind at the time, while a sober person may creatively struggle to see images in clouds.
People with religious backgrounds who think about religion all the time will therefore tend to see religious iconography, which brings us to the so-called 'Captain Trips' character of Al Hubbard, who promoted this kind of thing in the late 1950s/early 1960s:
> "Whereas many LSD practitioners were content to strap their patients onto a 3' x 6' cot and have them attempt to perform a battery of mathematical formulae with a head full of LSD, Hubbard believed in a comfortable couch and throw pillows. He also employed icons and symbols to send the experience into a variety of different directions: someone uptight may be asked to look at a photo of a glacier, which would soon melt into blissful relaxation; a person seeking the spiritual would be directed to a picture of Jesus, and enter into a one-on-one relationship with the Savior."
The libertarian view is that 'if people want to ingest psychedelics, as responsible adults, they should be allowed to without suffering state persecution', and it really doesn't matter if their motivation is to improve their 3D visualization capabilities for the enjoyment of higher abstract mathematics, or if they're only interested in spiritual experiences and therapeutic potentials, or microdosing so they can write more code per day (YMMV).
Unfortunately, people indoctrinated with the consumer mentality of 'more is better' often have disastrous outcomes when they ingest psychedelics, which is why the warning labels are necessary - and saying "less is more" is almost a heresy in a consumerist society.
That's super interesting, will be taking a look at Poincaré soon. I work at an ayahuasca retreat and have drank about 300 times; IMO it seems to put you in an extreme state of synesthesia, a mixing of all the senses, including thoughts/intuitions/memories.
1) There is so much cultural baggage around psychedelics at this point. We're still talking about the Marsh Chapel experiment? We're still writing articles that MUST include a Leary reference? There is a HUGE wave of psychedelic research coming to fruition now and in the coming 2 - 3 years that will hopefully help change the conversation from hippies, the 1960s, and even religious/spiritual metaphor.
2) Without a more concrete understanding of consciousness (and the 'hard problem' of it), our understanding of psychedelics is built on shaky foundations. Sure, psychedelic research may help us discover new insights that help solve the consciousness crisis... but that seems like a very speculative hope.
3) I'm curious why N,N-DMT isn't being studied as much as psilocybin in this current wave of research. Much of the challenge with contemporary psychedelic therapy has to do with logistics - trips take too long to fit a clinical setting. DMT is over in 20 minutes, and while (I've heard) extremely intense, people seem to anecdotally benefit in similar ways to longer-acting psychedelics.