- [Steve] Hey, it's Steve Paulson. And this is Luminous, a podcast series about psychedelics from "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." There's a huge question swirling around the really big psychedelic experiences. I have to say I'm surprised that hardly anyone wants to talk about it, at least not the scientists who study these experiences. It's about those mind blowing trips where you feel like you've merged with the cosmos, or you've encountered the mind of another intelligent being, maybe the mushroom itself, or you've been transported into some other dimension of consciousness outside your own brain, outside anything we'd call consensus reality. So here's the question. Are these just hallucinations? The brain shot full of chemicals playing tricks on you? Or do these experiences crack open some transpersonal dimension of consciousness? Of course, psychonauts have been obsessed with the numinous for decades. But the scholars who tend to study psychedelics, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychopharmacologists, they don't go anywhere near this question, which seems really strange because it's so central to how you interpret these experiences. I mean, if you're in psychedelic assisted therapy trying to get through serious depression, you wanna know if this glimpse of the divine was real or just some figment of your imagination. The philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes believes we need a metaphysics of psychedelics because these are questions about the nature of consciousness. And there are different philosophical traditions that might offer the best explanation for what's really happening during profound psychedelic experiences like panpsychism, idealism, pantheism, not to mention materialism. And a lot of big names in philosophy, including Spinoza, William James, Alfred North Whitehead, have wrestled with these ideas. Peter's a philosopher at the University of Exeter who's written widely on psychedelics. So I wanted to talk to him about how a philosopher might dig into these questions that seem to go beyond science. And I also wanted to get his take on the mystical experience questionnaire that's used in so many psychedelic studies. Hope you enjoy the conversation. So let us get into it. How did you get so interested in psychedelics?
- [Peter] Well, I was teaching philosophy in a college in London. And the college wrote me into teaching philosophy of religion. And part of that included William James' classic term of 1902, "the verity of religious experience." The last two lectures in that book were on mysticism. And William James, as you probably know, was one of the first to bring together mysticism and drugs, really. So he talked about nitrous oxide, ether, alcohol even. So I was teaching this stuff. And although I was interested in consciousness and the mind, I had no mystical experience or even many drug-induced experiences. And then one day, I was walking with my brother in this field in Cornwall, in southwest of Brisbane where I live. And my brother said, "I think those are magic mushrooms, Peter." So I picked about, I dunno, a hundred of them or so and dried them and checked they weren't poisonous. And that's how it all began. And then when I took them in London a week later or so, the experience was so extremely profound and so different from anything I've ever experienced that I thought, I've gotta read up on this. You know, I've gotta read all the philosophy about it. And then sort of disappointed that there wasn't much. And so I sort of gave it a stab. Even though my colleagues said, "Don't do that. It's kind of career killer," you know?
- [Steve] Well, and that's interesting. So where do you go or where do you wanna go with that as a scholar then who is interested in consciousness and mysticism and all of that? I mean, having this big experience.
- [Peter] Yeah, that was a question really. So I suppose I started off looking at how one could interpret certain psychedelic experiences through the lens of philosophies, you know? So I looked at the experience in relation to Schopenhauer, Bergson, Kant, Nietzsche even. I discovered Nietzche was a heavy drug taker.
- [Steve] Oh, I did not know that. Interesting.
- [Peter] Yeah, yeah. And then more lately, Spinoza. Looking at his meta, general Pantheistic metaphysics in relation to it.
- [Steve] So as a philosopher of mind, and I know you're not just a philosopher of mind, but, you know, coming out of that discipline, what makes psychedelics so fascinating?
- [Peter] Well, what is the data of philosophy of mind? It is one's conscious states. What psychedelics taught me really was that there's so much more to mind than I ever imagined, because, of course, psychedelic experiences are beyond imagination. I mean, a high dose psilocybin experience will offer you states of mind that are so beyond anything you could have dreamt, literally dreamt or imagined, that it suddenly gives you all this new material to work with. And also, interestingly, it sort of resonates with a number of metaphysical viewpoints put forward through the ages. The question is, what's going on? You know, what are all these psychedelic experiences about? Are they just hallucinations generated by the brain or is there some truth to them? And to answer that, you know, it's helpful, I think, to go into metaphysics and think about the relation between, you know, the brain and the mind. Do we really understand that relation? The hard problem of consciousness. Not really. Or at least people don't agree on it. And therefore, I think that certain psychedelic experiences can't be ruled out as hallucinatory immediately without first looking at this essential question.
- [Steve] Well, and it seems to me that is the huge question about psychedelics. I mean, whether they open up some other dimension of reality. I mean, not just an altered state of consciousness. I mean clearly, they do that. But a different realm of reality. Or are they just hallucinations activated by particular neural circuits? You know, essentially the mind playing tricks on us. And how do you investigate that question?
- [Peter] Well, I'll tell you how I got where I am now. With this psychedelic colloquium that we have at Exeter, we invited a number of neuroscientists, therapists to come along. And I noticed that they often conflated spiritual experience with paranormal experience, with religious experience, with mystical experience, with metaphysical experience. And I thought, wait a minute. Metaphysics is something in a way distinct from the... You can't conflate them. I mean, metaphysics is quite a strict, you know, discipline in philosophy at least. And I thought, okay, so these scientists, they generally see the world in this dichotomous way in which they think the options are either physicalism or materialism, that everything, the substance of the world is essentially physical, or they think you're a dualist. So, you know, the mind and matter are distinct. But in metaphysics, there are a number of other options as well, you know. Idealism, neutral monism, transcendentalism, and so on. So I thought, okay, well, at least I should present these options, this metaphysical menu to people. And then I realized that actually, maybe this metaphysical menu could help psychedelic-assisted therapy itself. And that's kind of what I'm working on now. This is since my paper of last year.
- [Steve] You've argued that we need a metaphysics of psychedelics.
- Yeah, essentially. And the reason is, really, not to impose any views, but to open up possibilities of interpretation because we have no agreement on this hard problem of consciousness. In other words, how mind and matter relate. Well, some people think it's not a problem. Other people think they've found the solution. But generally, you won't find a general agreement in science, philosophy, or psychology or anywhere else.
- [Steve] Although if you talk to most neuroscientists, they think, well, of course, the brain is what is generating consciousness. We don't exactly know how. But, you know, it's some emergent phenomenon that comes out of brain activity.
- [Peter] Yeah, they do generally think that. But that's because they're assuming a metaphysics of which they are unaware, quite often. But the problem is, although it's the basis of neuroscientific hypothesis, it's not a scientific view, right? Because we can see correlations between mind and matter, between mind and brain. But we cannot empirically see, perceive the generation of the mind from the brain. We only see the brain. Yeah, like I say, we see correlates. But that is not itself proof.
- [Steve] In other words, even if you totally mapped every neural activity within the brain, and you laid that on top of conscious experience, let's say psychedelic experiences, it still doesn't explain causation.
- [Peter] No, it doesn't explain it. And so we still have to be open-minded with how we interpret those experiences. For example, like if you take the Spinoza's view, as Einstein did, which is essentially that mind and matter are the same thing, but not only brain matter. So everything has a certain element of mind. But it's not that matter is more fundamental than mind. They're both as fundamental as each other because they're both expressions of something deeper still. Substance or nature that Spinoza speaks of. If you take that view, then you would expect neural correlates of consciousness in exactly the same way as you would expect them from an emergentist, physicalist point of view, right? So different metaphysical hypotheses would still predict the same correlations as you get anyway, right? So therefore, the correlates alone cannot prove the hypothesis. So it's an open question. So when you have a psychedelic experience of, let's say, your mind fuses with a universal mind, a cosmic consciousness or something like that, we can't necessarily say that it's a hallucination because that would be based on another metaphysics, which says that the brain is the necessary and sufficient condition for consciousness, which is not a scientific proposition.
- [Steve] So the claim that's often made about psychedelics is that they are a gateway into a transpersonal experience of consciousness. Some sort of collective consciousness that goes beyond what a single brain can do. And some people talk about receiving information or knowledge beyond their own life experience. And there are, you know, all these stories of, you know, receiving wisdom from the plants themselves. You know, the mushrooms told me this or the ayahuasca experience revealed that truth. I mean, the claim is that this is not just happening in some hidden part of our unconscious. But this wisdom is coming from someplace outside of ourselves, outside of our brains. What do you do with that? Those stories are countless or legion.
- [Peter] Yeah, I remember reading Monica Galliano's book, "Thus Spoke the Plant."
- [Steve] Yeah, I have interviewed her about that. Yeah.
- [Peter] Oh, yeah. Right. okay. Yeah, well, she, as you know then, she starts the book by saying she received this wisdom, seemingly from the plant. And that led her to her experiments. Well, I'm generally skeptical, neutral person. So I'm not saying that this is not hallucination. But I'll say this. In philosophy at the moment, last 15 years or so, panpsychism has been making the rounds, which is the view that mind exists in all things, in plants as well as animals, and beyond that even, in molecules, atoms and so on. There's a lot of good thinkers who have put this forward through the ages. Like Spinoza, Leibniz. More recently, Gayland Strawson, for example. And also in the Indigenous Americas, in fact, in Indigenous communities around the world, like Sacagawea region, you get this belief in animism. You know, that the trees have spirits and whatnot, which is somewhat similar to panpsychism. I think there's good reasons for believing in panpsychism. I suppose I sort of stand out from a lot of philosophers in that way as well. I did my PhD on it, in fact. Now, if you believe that plants have forms of consciousness, like at least desire for water, you know, some basic desire, then you can begin to sort of make sense of nature connectedness, you know, which is related to mental health. You know, that you feel the intrinsic value of a plant, or even more so, you sort of become one with it to a certain extent, as Huxley wrote about. So I do think such experiences could, you know, have some element of truth in them, some kind of verticality, as we say. They're not necessarily hallucinations. They would be hallucination, of course, if you believe that plants are completely without mind, without sentience. And most people do believe that in the West. I mean, you can trace why people believe that. And it's got quite shaky foundations. I mean, the ancient Greeks generally, even Plato and Aristotle, gave basic forms of consciousness to plants, right? But in the 17th century in Europe, it was suddenly rejected because the external world was sort of seen as a kind of dead geometric world. So anyway, so I can understand that there could be some kind of intrinsic valuation seeping through into us when our minds are adjusted according to psychedelics. Whether they, more than that, deliver information, knowledge, I wouldn't like to judge upon that. I've never experienced it myself. So I can't really say.
- [Steve] Well, so let me phrase the question somewhat differently. I'm gonna sort of phrase it to from each perspective. What do you find the most compelling arguments that these other dimensions of reality actually do exist as revealed, for instance, through psychedelics?
- [Peter] I mean, there are many varieties of it. I'd say this. That, you know, the world we generally see, we generally perceive, we know, I mean, everyone will agree with this. Really, that it's just a fraction of what is out there, you know? So we only see a fraction of infrared light. We don't see infrared, ultraviolet, and whatever. And we only hear, you know, a fraction of airwaves of sounds, and, you know, many things. We completely miss most things out there. So we know that the world we perceive is an abstraction. In other words, it's not false. But it's only part of the general truth. So the next question becomes, well, what is it that is out there? Well, we can talk about electromagnetism because we can sense it with certain instruments. You know, radios and whatnot. But how about mind? Because that's what essentially we're talking about. If we're gonna receive wisdom or information from outside, or even, you know, from other people or other beings, elves, or, you have to open up to the possibility that mind transcends the personal. Again, it's about the brain, isn't it? It's sort of transcending neuro-essentialism, as it's called. The belief that the brain is necessary and sufficient for consciousness. It's a possibility. I'm not saying an absolute necessity. But it's a possibility that mind exists beyond our own person. As a result, it is possible that we can receive mentality from external sources directly, rather than hearing it or inferring or reading it or something like this. But to prove this is really, really difficult. And this is a key point, right? I try to convey it. One of the differences between consciousness and matter that a lot of people put forward is that matter is public. So we can all perceive this pencil, for example. Whereas my consciousness, like my toothache, for example, is quite personal, private. You know, only I have access to my toothache. You can guess I've got a toothache if I'm sort of, you know, by my behavior. But generally, you can't feel the pain, you know. You can't have the pain, as it were. You can just guess it. So if mind does exist externally to brains, then that would not be something you could prove empirically by the very fact that minds or consciousness are not empirically verifiable. This, by the way, is why there is this hard problem of consciousness. We can't really test it, right? We can just see correlations and make hypotheses about the relation. But this is why really, you know, I think questions of consciousness have to go beyond the scientific method that we currently have. Maybe in the future we'll sort of catch up somehow. But at this stage, we sort of can just make hypotheses. You know, it's more theoretical. Make hypotheses. You know, inference to the best explanation to understand what mind is and how it could exist. Whether it needs a brain. This again relates to AI. You know, whether robots can be conscious as well.
- [Steve] Yeah. So let me pose the question from the other perspective. What's the strongest argument against this transpersonal view of consciousness as revealed by psychedelics? That, you know, these are just hallucinations.
- [Peter] Most people would agree that certain phenomena induced by psychedelics are certainly hallucinations. If I see a yellow elephant stride across my living room after I've taken LSD, I think most people would accept that there's little truth to that, verticality to that. So, because psychedelics can seemingly, in some cases, induce hallucinations, why is it not possible that they can in all cases? That would be one argument. It's not particularly strong because, of course, we hallucinate in real life as well. And we don't think that our general vision is therefore all hallucinatory, right? I suppose another argument would be that, well, we do see quite profound changes, sort of neurological changes when taking a psychedelic. As a physical thing, it changes the physical organ, right? So therefore, why not attribute all effects to this one cause? Another argument would be that, well, all of this stuff about transcendent mentality, whether it be cosmic consciousness or other beings or whatever, it's not verifiable. So it's as good as any other theory like fairies, elves, whatever it may be. So best just to ignore it. But I would say that, well, that applies to every single theory, even the brain-mind theory. That's also not verifiable. So it's all on an equal level, it seems.
- [Steve] So let me get a little more personal for you here. I mean, you've said you've had your mushroom experiences. Maybe you've had others as well.
- [Peter] Sure. Yep.
- [Steve] I'm guessing you have, if you take off your scholarly hat, you probably have an intuitive feeling of what you believe here. I mean, whether you think there is some other dimension of reality that's revealed.
- [Peter] Well, I'll qualify what I'm about to say by the fact that I am kind of in an abyss. You know, I've studied many of these positions through the years. And I'm cognizant of all of the criticisms of every single one. So no solution that I can see-
- [Steve] Caveat taken here. Yes.
- [Peter] Okay. Okay, so I do have preferences at the moment. And that is towards some kind of a neutral monism. It's a view from Spinoza. You see it kind of partly in Alfred North Whitehead as well. And it's the view that mind and matter are two ways of seeing the same reality. And they're both abstractions. But important word, abstraction. It means part of the truth. Doesn't mean something else. I mean, it's a fragment. Again, a fraction of the reality. So one way of seeing the world is through our consciousness. Another way is through seeing it as the physical world in space and time. But the real stuff of reality is something more than both of those. So Spinoza says that, "One cause substance." He calls it Nature. He also calls it God, which makes him pantheist. Also got him into a lot of trouble. Yeah, humans are privy to two ways of seeing that, of expressing that one ultimate substance. And that's mind and matter or thought and extension. But there are an infinity of other ways of understanding reality as well. But humans, we are very restricted in our understanding of reality. But fundamentally then, mind and matter are the same thing. So the more complex the matter, like a human being, the more complex the mind. The less complex the matter, let's say a flower, the less complex the mind. But nonetheless, there's this continuity throughout nature. And that's a very parsimonious view, you know. Otherwise, you're gonna have to say that the universe is generally dead and there's no consciousness. And then at one point in the universe, there's this sudden huge kind of big pang, as it were, of consciousness, where a little tiny bit of consciousness enters. A perspective on the universe suddenly enters. This is possible, I suppose, theoretically. But I think it's more parsimonious to say there wasn't this sudden jump in evolution. There was this continuous, that's William James, right? You know, it's continuous evolution of mind and matter, which are essentially the same thing evolving into more complex forms as we go along in time.
- [Steve] So in that view then, does that open up the possibility of some sort of transpersonal consciousness, that it goes beyond an individual person?
- [Peter] Yeah, I think so.
- [Steve] There's been something called the comforting delusion objection. And the philosopher Chris Letheby has written about this at some length. And this is the idea that this universal consciousness feels real. And this feeling can have great therapeutic value. I mean, you feel better. I mean, people are really depressed when they have this sense of some sort of cosmic consciousness. Then they see the world is wonderful. But from Chris Letheby's perspective, there is no deeper dimension of reality. It's all just an illusion. It's the mind playing tricks on us. But it helps us. I mean, it may helps us feel better. And the question is, I mean, what do you do with that? This whole idea of the comforting delusion objection.
- [Peter] Yeah. Well, I remember I read it in Chris's book. I remember he said, "Well, there's still truths to be derived from psychedelics, even if you think that's a delusion." In other words, there are insights about oneself that are true that one can gain regardless. But Michael Pollan coined the comforting delusion objection before Letheby though. And so the options are, well, it doesn't matter if it's true or not. If it heals people, then that question about objectivity is irrelevant. And some people say that. That's how some people answer it. Most people perhaps. Others though, they think, well, you're lying to people, you know. You're healing people by lying to them, you know.
- [Steve] I mean, this is basically the same objection a lot of people have about religion. Maybe God doesn't exist. But people believe in God. And that is a source of great comfort and meaning.
- [Peter] Exactly. And then, of course, another answer to it is that, well, then they're not all hallucinations. That would be my answer. So the whole comforting delusion objection is based upon certain metaphysics, which just assumes without argument that they are hallucinations. So the first question is, well, how do we know they are hallucination? So you can only know if something's a hallucination if you know what reality is. And by reality, I mean the relation between mind and matter, at the fundamental level at least. Before we can answer that question, you cannot say something that is a hallucination. It might be. But it might not be.
- [Steve] Does this all come down to someone's belief system? I mean, if you were a physicalist, you know, it means that basically, you think all these experiences are generated by neural circuits in the brain or you think the mind is more than that. You know, maybe it's, you know, Aldous Huxley's mind at large. Does that kind of determine, I mean, that belief system, how you interpret these things?
- [Peter] Well, yeah, no, it does. But then the question becomes, well, what's the base of the belief system? And can psychedelics influence the belief system? Like Chris Timmerman and others did a study in 2021 on how psychedelics can alter your belief system. And there was a general shift from physicalism to panpsychism, I believe, and to dualism. So it's about belief systems. But it's... I don't think a belief system is just a matter of opinion or how one is raised. I think you can change your belief system. I have. Many times. And those belief systems, what determines them? Well, it's, of course, yeah. It's partly one's culture, language, family, schooling, and so on, and one's psychological needs. You know, certainly some people need religion. You know, others don't. But also, this is kind of old fashioned opinion perhaps. But I think that reasons can change people's beliefs, you know. If you show how a belief doesn't really make sense or how it contradicts itself, that can actually have a profound effect on people, you know.
- [Steve] This is why we need philosophers, right?
- [Peter] Well, I'm trying... So I'm just trying to promote my job here. Yeah, exactly.
- [Steve] Well, it's interesting that you say that because I mean, philosophy, metaphysics is really a system of reason, right? You're reasoning out, you know, the different possibilities. And yet, what is, it seems to me so challenging about applying this to psychedelics is this is, it's fundamentally not an experience of reason. It's something very different. You know, it's obviously a subjective experience and an emotional experience. Sort of an intuitive experience. And so, you know, how far can you take philosophy to try to explain something that is so internal and private?
- [Peter] I guess so. But you could say the same about general experience, you know. If you think about with psychedelics, so, you know, yeah, classically, they're known to be non-intellectual. Bertrand Russell writes that about mystical experiences. They're supposed to be based on intuition and so on. I would still say this. That metaphysics can be split into two general types. So there's intellectual metaphysics, which I teach at university, and then there's experiential metaphysics, which is like a mystical experience, but more than that.
- [Steve] Yeah, can you explain more what you mean by experiential metaphysics?
- [Peter] William James writes about this. He says, "The nitrous oxide provides metaphysical revelation." So let's say I am making the argument for or against panpsychism, which I mentioned, you know, plants have consciousness and so on. I can argue the case. And I can talk about the different varieties of panpsychism, whether it's dualistic or identity ones, or... It's all very intellectual or very theoretical. But then at the same time, it seems, when we read the reports, and I've had these experiences myself, like, you actually somehow perceive the sentient of another. Like a plant, for example. That would be an example of where you can have the intellectual metaphysics making sense of it all. But, you know, it's a bit like you could understand music whilst being a deaf person, right? You could understand the mathematics behind it, the harmonies, scales. But then you hear it. You know, it's a different experience. But they would map on nicely, of course. You know, that's why we have musical notation, musical theory. Same with psychedelics. You know, you can have the experience. But there are systems of thought that render it, to a certain extent, explicable. I mean, another example is Deleuze, the French philosopher wrote about, he says, "You can understand Spinoza by spending years studying his geometric order of thought, or you can have this, what Manon Roland called this 'Flash of Spinozism.'" Just get it all at once. Boom, like that. God is nature. Mind is matter. You know, it's all there.
- [Steve] A revelation and epiphany, yes.
- [Peter] Exactly, right? The oceanic filling. That actually relates to Spinoza. Originally from Roland and Freud. So that's how they map on. So there's, in other words, there's two ways of getting to the same point, you know. Via psychedelics or breath work, dieting, fasting, or whatever, and through thinking. I would say they compliment each other. They're not the same thing. But they can be complimentary. You might get a truth from a psychedelic experience. But without philosophy and science, you won't be able to make heads or tails of it. You see? So you need both for a better comprehension. Not just one. Philosophy without the psychedelics is kind of deaf, as I say. And psychedelics without philosophy is blind, you might say, you know? So, yeah. I see them as working in symbiosis really.
- [Steve] My guest is Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, a philosopher at the University of Exeter and co-editor of the book "Philosophy and Psychedelics." I'm Steve Paulson. And you're listening to Luminous, our podcast about the science and philosophy of psychedelics. Let's drill down a little bit into the whole question of what mystical experience is because it seems pretty clear that the greatest therapeutic benefits from psychedelics comes out of what people report as mystical experiences. You know, this feeling of oneness with the universe. That kind of thing. In a lot of clinical settings, people take what's called the mystical experience questionnaire, the MEQ. And there's a, you know, very particular rubric. There are like four different elements of that mystical experience, generally. There is also a lot of debate about the MEQ and whether, you know, what is mystical experience. Are these the same across cultures, as Aldous Huxley believed, William James believed, but other people say "No, they're culturally determined." What do you make of sort of how mystical experience has been talked about among people who study psychedelics?
- [Peter] I mean, that's a huge question, really, because there's a huge history. So the MEQ is based on Walter Stace's book, "Philosophy and Mysticism." That in itself is based on William James, to a certain extent. Also, as you sort of mentioned, the perennial philosophy legacy. And then there's a contextualist debate from Katz and everyone, as you mentioned, which is actually that, well, there's no common core experience transcendent of cultures. Every culture determines the experience. Not the interpretation. The experience itself. How to make sense of all this? The word mysticism derives from the... So it's pretty Christian, interestingly, right? 'Cause a lot of people say it's Christian way of thinking. It's not. It's pagan originally. Pagan customs bled into Christianity. We have, first of all, the Neoplatonist. So Plotinus is also very important. He was a philosopher who lived in the third century AD. He spoke about the one. So the unitive experience is there already. Interestingly, his student, Porphyry, he mentioned in his biography of his teacher that there was influence from India with his thoughts, you know. Hinduism or the Danta. So if true, I mean, it's quite interesting that our Western way of understanding mysticism already has Eastern influences almost from the beginning. Almost 2,000 years ago.
- [Steve] So bring this up to the present then. And the MEQ, the mystical experience questionnaire, that's given to so many people after they've had a psychedelic experience in a clinical trial.
- [Peter] Yeah, so this understanding generally, from William James probably, that psychedelics induced mystical experiences. 'Cause they don't necessarily, you know. They can just elicit laughter, or in the Indigenous countries, they make you a better hunter or whatever, you know. There's many different functions of it. It doesn't have to be mysticism. But this idea took hold. And this connection between certain psychiatric drugs and mysticism took hold. And thus, you know, when people go through a psychedelic experience, they have the MEQ. I mean, there are other questionnaires. But there's a very common one to understand the experience. In my view though, that questionnaire is kind of very limited. For example, one thing it excludes is idealism, which is one of core, well, core metaphysical position that, for example, Humphrey Davy had on nitrous oxide and William James had on nitrous oxide as well. You know, there's a few that the mind, mentality consciousness is the fundamental stuff of the universe, and matter, or physical, especially temporal physical world, is a projection of the mind. Well, anyway, idealistic experiences that everything's mind is quite common, I think, through reports. It's not on the MEQ at all really. You know, it's not because idealism is not part of mysticism. But it is part of metaphysics. And that's where I think metaphysics, we've developed at Exeter with my colleague, Rene Joseph, and Celia Morgan, what we call MMQ, which is a metaphysical matrix questionnaire, which is supposed to include idealism and other experiences that one can have beyond the mystical options, as it were. But then, you know, in relation to all of this, as you said at the beginning, there's this contextualist opposition, which is that, well, that's just a very Western way of thinking, you know?
- [Steve] And one of the criticisms like, that you hear, especially from certain Indigenous people, is that it's a very private experience. You know, you put on your blindfolds. You listen to music. And you go inside yourself, rather than it being maybe a more communal experience.
- [Peter] It's interesting. And I think there's, one of the reasons for that is the Protestant Reformation in the Europe, you know, which brought it to the individual level, brought a person directly to God without the intermediary of the priest and the church and the ritual. Hard to prove that. But I imagine it's one of many factors. Yeah, in clinical trials, it's not communal. I remember David Nut telling me. David Nut has done a number of trials. He's quite well known character here. He says, "You know, we started with individual patients. But maybe we should have started with groups from the start." And they never did tests with this, you know.
- [Steve] And I know Roland Griffis has said something similar. That, you know, even though he's the one who kind of, you know, pioneered the whole blindfolds, you sit by yourself, listen to music in the headphones. And I know near the end of his life, he kind of thought, you know, maybe we should have done this outside in small groups.
- [Peter] Well, I mean, maybe that's the future of it. Hard to say. I mean, it costs more money, probably. Or maybe less money. More variables to take into account. And I know how careful clinicians are with these things, you know. Like maybe it's a good idea, but might not have been, or maybe the funds wouldn't come if there were these sort of variables.
- [Steve] And one of the other criticisms of the MEQ is that it primes people to interpret these experiences in a particular way. It's not so much open-ended. Is that a valid criticism?
- [Peter] Well, if the MEQ is known about in the preparatory stage of the therapy, then yes, it would be priming. Usually though, it happens after the experience or during it. But, yeah, during would be priming. Also, I mean generally, there is this notion in our culture that psychedelics do induce mysticism. So we are already primed by reading Alan Watts and Terence McKenna and William James and all of these. You know, you can't, it is very hard to avoid priming because that is the ideology in which we live, you know. The language in which we think about things, right?
- [Steve] Well, and also isn't that really the whole assumption of set and setting? I mean, that is priming. I mean, you are setting yourself to have a certain kind of experience, right?
- Yeah, absolutely. It's an interesting ethical question related to this, which is, and there's some evidence showing already that certain psychedelic experiences relating to the unity are more beneficial mentally. I mean, they promote greater mental health than other experiences. Let's assume that to be the case. Let's say that that unit of experience is related to a certain metaphysical position, let's say monism. To induce the greatest benefit to a person, wouldn't it be more ethical to prime a person into this belief before they had the drug and then emphasize it later on in the integrative stage, you know? I'm not saying this should be done. I'm saying it's an option. It depends on your moral theory. So for certain utilitarians, you know, they would say, "Well, you know, this would bring about the greatest good. Someone's really deeply suffering from depression or whatever. Then let's go full throttle." Other ethicists from a different position would say, "That's completely unethical. You're brainwashing them. You know, inculcating them." How do you decide upon those two options? Well, that depends on your, like I say, moral theory, which in turn is generally based on your metaphysics. So, again, it comes back to metaphysics.
- [Steve] Yeah. So one thing that I have heard over and over from a lot of serious psychonauts is that when you take some of these high dose psychedelics, you kind of have a choice. You either walk through the door or you don't. I mean, you either open yourself up to the idea that, you know, there is this different dimension of reality, and, you know, anything is possible. Other dimensions of reality. You know, your imagination can run wild. Or you can kind of hold back. Hang onto your skeptical hat. See what happens. Chances are you're not gonna have as big an experience. What do you do with that in terms of sort of this, coming back to this question of whether it's real or not.
- [Peter] I suppose I generally advise a person to be completely open-minded and not be skeptical. I say this to myself as well as I go through it. Just to open up the potential experiences one may have and not restrict oneself in any way. There is a danger though that one could easily create a sort of psychedelic religion and whatever if you just accept anything, you know? And so I do think that skepticism, cynicism should come in and not just regard, with regard to the metaphysics of it, but also with regard to the corporatization of it, to some extent, right? Motives and medicalization and so on. But I think, yeah, initially, open-minded. And after the event, that's where the skepticism should come in. But easy to say that. When the time comes, you can't change people's ways of thinking though. A million things would be going through their minds, you know?
- [Steve] Yeah, well, I mean, and coming back to this whole question of, you know, what is a mystical experience? You know, one of the criteria that's in the modern MEQ, the mystical experience questionnaire, is what is called the noetic experience. That it feels realer than real. That you are tapping into some deeper truth than what we can access in everyday reality. And that, frankly, that is why so many people are drawn to psychedelics. I mean, those who say this is one of the most important experiences in their lives. And, again, like the powerful claim is I've tapped into something realer than I have otherwise. And how do we evaluate that truth claim?
- Hmm. Well, so William James, that was one of his four marks of the mystical, wasn't it? Noetic quality. You have the feeling that everything's realer than real. How do we assess it? Stephen Katz, who was a contextualist, who didn't believe in the perennial philosophy of the common core experience, he argued that ineffability and also noetic quality is not actually a mark of an experience, is it? Because multiple experiences, which might be contrary to one another, can be deemed noetic. So from that fact alone, you can say that the noetic quality itself cannot validate the actual experience. At least after the event. During the event, you've got different standards. But at the same time, it could be the case that, you know, some experiences are more noetic. Like, for example, noticing more details in a plant, you know, in a leaf or something like this. It's not wrong. It's an common experience when looking at a plant. Certainly that reveals deeper layers of truth about the natural world. You know, that one often just ignores or doesn't notice. More colors appear to one. Time can change in terms of its rate, time flow, you know, the speed of time. The present moment can, you know, extend or contract. These are not wrong because there's no objective like, now. You know, there's no objective range of colors. You know, there's no objective rhythm of duration and speed of time. You can experience them in different ways. So you could certainly say that this is noetic in the sense that it's, you're getting new experiences, which are just different expressions of reality. They're not sort of wrong, therefore. But on the general understanding, of course, that our general view of reality is very human. All too human, as it were, right? We've evolved to perceive the world in a certain way. We can't assume that all other animals perceive the world that way. And we know they don't in many cases with bats and whatnot. So I think there's something to be said about the noetic qualities induced by psychedelics. I think they do reveal new layers of truth. Not always though. And the question is, how do you draw the line? And that's where metaphysics comes back.
- [Steve] Are these questions that we've been talking about, you know, what is the ultimate reality of, you know, based on the experiences that we have under psychedelics, are these just theoretical questions or do these have practical implications? Like, for instance, people going through psychedelic therapy.
- [Peter] Well, my argument is that they do have practical implications, ramifications. If a person, you know, who's suffering depression, especially perhaps PTSD or something, has this particular experience, maybe units of experience, and then during the integrative session, they are made aware of, there's an integrative session, not the preparatory session so you're not priming them, they're made aware that this experience, which has had a positive impact on them, that there's a larger reality out there. They needn't worry about their little personal problems 'cause they're relatively trivial in this grander scheme of the cosmos. If they're told that, you know, maybe there's some truth to this, you know. If they're made somewhat aware of it. I mean, I'm not talking about a university course in it. But I'm talking about sort of just, you know, giving it a name. Saying that a number of people have discussed it for centuries, if not millennia. I think it could potentially give that experience more significance to the person in their life. And they'd be less inclined to dismiss it weeks or months later, as, you know, useful at the time, but obviously rubbish, you know. Obviously can't be true, right? Because a person will return to their own culture, which has got its implicit metaphysical ideology. I mean, it works by being implicit. If it's explicit, it's questioned. And we have, you know, we have our ideology in the West for sure. So I think making a person somewhat aware of what they experienced, or at least rendering it onto some kind of metaphysical position, I think potentially, that could have positive benefits on them. And that, if that is the case, and it's conjecture that can be tested, then there is a positive practical application of philosophy. People always complain that philosophers are in their ivory towers, you know. Talking about nonsense and trivial matters. But here's an example of where, at least, you know, maybe we, there can be some kind of practical outcome.
- [Steve] In other words, you're making the argument for you need philosophers in these psychedelic clinics, these psychedelic centers, you know, because there tends to be a very psychological model, I think. I mean, that's how, you know, these experienced typically are interpreted. Sort of through a therapeutic lens. But, yeah, maybe more of a philosophical lens.
- [Peter] I think that should be at least a part of it, you know, because these experiences are philosophical. You're having quite often deep metaphysical experiences. Why not bring in metaphysics to deal with it, you know? It sort of makes sense. Now, I'm not saying we should bring in philosophers into the clinic. But I'd rather, I think probably more expedient if we give some training to therapists in, you know, some basic forms of philosophy. So I'm writing a book now called the "Metaphysics Manual" just on that for practitioners and participants. But also, we will, you know, create a course eventually on it. And yeah, not to replace therapy, but just to, as an additional tool, you know. I think it could be helpful for some people. Other people, they won't have these experiences. It'd be irrelevant. But do remember that most clinicians haven't had any training in philosophy, let alone metaphysics. There are exceptions. Existential psychologists who do do some philosophy. I notice on the continent, compared to England, people know a little bit more about philosophy 'cause they often do it in schools. We don't do it here. But generally, there's a gap missing. So it's just understanding the experience more, you know. That's what it's about. Not fully, but more.
- [Steve] This has been so much fun. Thank you for talking about all of this.
- [Peter] Well, thanks for your interesting questions, Steve. Really appreciated it.
- [Steve] That's Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, a philosopher at the University of Exeter and co-editor of the book "Philosophy and Psychedelics." You're listening to Luminous, our series about psychedelics from "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." You'll find more interviews on the science and philosophy of psychedelics on our website at ttbook.org/luminous. And I hope you're subscribing to the podcast feed, where you'll meet some fascinating people, including a religion professor who had 73 high dose LSD journeys, and historian of 19th century drug culture, and a psychotherapist who talked with a number of women elders in the psychedelic underground. "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" is produced in Madison, Wisconsin. Joe Hartke is our technical director. Sarah Hopeful did the sound design for this episode. And Angelo Batista is our digital producer. I'm Steve Paulson. Thanks for listening.
