Month: November 2018

https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/article/3d9kv5/psychedelic-drugs-really-do-lead-to-a-higher-state-of-consciousness?utm_source=vicefbuk

The attached article is a perfect example of why I have mixed feelings about all the excitement around the scientific approach to integrating psychedelic experience into our civilization.  Let’s begin with the title: “Psychedelic Drugs Really Do Lead to a Higher State of Consciousness.” Yes, it is satisfying to see that fact affirmed. However, did we really need the experiment reported in the article to tell us that? Not if we have experienced psychedelics for ourselves. But experiencing something directly yourself is not “scientific” according to the modern, science-worshipping view of what science is. It is mere anecdotal evidence.

The scientific method grew out of a period when thinkers began to follow the empirical principle: try it and find out for yourself, instead of accepting whatever The Philosopher (Aristotle) said about it. Our modern version of quoting The Philosopher is citing what “the science” says and being dazzled by numbers and jargon. Replacing “Try it and find out for yourself,” the new principle is “It is real only if it can be measured.” From the attached article: “The scans looked for tiny magnetic fields produced in subjects’ brains to measure neural signal diversity, or the complexity of brain activity.” We go immediately from something apparently value-neutral and relatively uninterpreted (“tiny magnetic fields”) to something implying interpretation (“neural signal diversity”). A signal is something that is meant to convey some meaning to somebody. But these scientists strain to appear to be doing nothing more than measuring something without saying whether that something is a good thing or not.

Fancy titles and institutional affiliation help lend an aura of authority, too. Well, who am I to talk? After all, I am Janitor and President of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychedelic Christianity. Anil Seth, co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Essex is quoted in the write up as saying, “Since this measure has already shown its value as a measure of ‘conscious level,’ we can say that the psychedelic state appears as a higher ‘level’ of consciousness than normal—but only with respect to this specific mathematical measure.” If we already have what really are signals, and not just “signals”, whatever those might be, we already have a mind doing the signaling. Do any of us consciously send signals to the scientists to show how stoned or unstoned we are by producing tiny magnetic fields in our brains? Are we to say it is our subconscious minds doing it? I feel sure the working assumption here is that the mind is nothing more than the brain, and it is that assumption that I believe to be false, since what it is like to be the subject of an experience is not an object or process that can be described from an impersonal, third-person point of view. If we consider the field of consciousness and the brain of a particular person, to claim that the field of consciousness is nothing more than the processes going on in his or her brain is to claim that the field of consciousness is nothing more than a part of itself. A person’s brain, whether one’s own or someone else’s, to the extent that it is an object of consciousness at all, is always a circumscribed portion of one’s own field of consciousness.

There is always something going on in the brain of a living human being, and it is not surprising that there will be correlations to be discovered between observable brain processes and reports of experiences by the person whose brain it is. The question is whether discovering these correlations help us understand more about what we care about. Robin Cahart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at Imperial College London, is quoted as saying, “People often say they experience insight under these drugs—and when this occurs in a therapeutic context, it can predict positive outcomes. The present findings may help us understand how this can happen.” I have several questions and comments:

1) Why the qualifying clause, “when this occurs in a therapeutic context”? Is an insight that occurs outside a therapeutic context automatically suspect or less valuable? And what counts as a therapeutic context? Does putting a subject into an MRI machine or using some other apparatus to detect the magnetic fields inside his or her brain enhance a therapeutic context, or does it detract from it?

2) If someone says they have experienced an insight, then unless they are lying or mistaken, this is a positive outcome. It is not just a predictor of a positive outcome.

3) The suggestion that “the present findings may help us to understand how this can happen,” i.e., how someone can have an insight as a result of psychedelic experience, is just another one of those promises we hear about the wonders neuroscience is likely to bring in the future. The present findings themselves are nothing more than a stamp of “scientific” approval on what we already know.

I think this scientific approach to psychedelics is intended to make it more respectable to take psychedelics. And it may do that. I am no expert on how to make things respectable. But if it does, and if it comes at the price of hiding the fundamentally religious nature of psychedelic experience, it isn’t worth it. Studying religion, philosophy, art, music, or literature in the light of one’s own psychedelic experience are more likely to lead towards wisdom than is studying someone else’s psychedelic experience by aping the methods of the physical sciences. This is not to say that science itself is not worth pursuing. I will be happy if neuroscience discovers some cures for neurological diseases. But neuroscientists shouldn’t think they know any more about consciousness itself than anybody else.

 

Under what circumstances and to what degree is it wise to rely on scientific and religious authorities?

(This is an excerpt from Psychedelic Christianity.)

Psychedelic Christianity is based on the empirical principle: try it and find out for yourself. It is a distortion of empiricism to think of it as belief in only what can be confirmed by what appears to the senses, or else we must expand our concept of “the senses.” If I feel joy, for example, is that something I know through sense experience? Out of all the people I know about, I know which one I am. Is that something I know through sense experience? Whose sense experience? Empiricists prefer belief in what is experienced by oneself directly over belief based on someone else’s claim to authority. Ironically, all too often people who think of themselves as believers in science betray empiricism by accepting unquestioningly the pronouncements of authority figures who claim to speak for science. If we are to accept a claim as based on scientific research, we must understand the claim and at least something about the research. Of course, we don’t always have the time or desire to look into it for ourselves, and so we accept the word of someone whom we regard as an honest expert. But we at least have to do a little thinking about whether there are other credible experts who disagree and about criteria for deciding who is more likely to be reliable. Otherwise, our acceptance of a supposed authority’s claim is worthless.

Similar considerations apply to supposed religious authorities. Psychedelic Christianity is not an appeal to the Bible as “the inerrant word of God.” The appeal is always and only to what rings true in the light of one’s own experience. This doesn’t mean that we should never rely on authorities or that we shouldn’t regard the Bible as authoritative. It just means that there is no escaping the fact that one has a choice as to whether or not to believe a particular source is a reliable authority; that when one does rely on an authority, one can only really do that by understanding what the authority says as it applies to one’s own experience; and that accepting that a person is an authority doesn’t necessarily imply that everything he or she says is correct.