https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=syWfyTMzSSw
Please join me in welcoming our first speaker of the day, John Burbaki. Thank you everyone and it’s always a great pleasure to be here. This is such a fun conference. It’s this interesting mixture. It’s really academically interesting, but I find it the most playful conference I get to attend. There’s a lot more engagement and interest and exploration. So it’s just a lot of fun. And I need more fun, so it’s good to be here. Alright, so I want to also give credit where credit is due. I’m going to be talking about work. A lot of ideas and a lot of those ideas were done in work that I did with Leo Ferraro, also with Richard Wu and Anderson Todd, who of course is here today. So what do I want to talk about? I want to try and first start by exploring the idea of why do altered states of consciousness often have so much significance and affect associated with them? Why do we pursue them? Why do we induce them? What’s going on there? And I think in some sense we find altered states of consciousness rewarding. And then typically when things are rewarding for us, kind of universally rewarding, then they’re natural to us in some way and they’re functional in some way. They have some adaptive function. And I want to try and get into the functionality of altered states of consciousness. We tend to talk a lot about the phenomenology and I’ll talk a bit about that, but I want to get more into the functionality of them. And in order to do that, I think we have to start talking about the functionality of consciousness, which is like, oh my god, because this is one of the hard problems. They’re like one of the hardest problems in cognitive science. I mean, it’s amazing to you, what would you give up for your consciousness if I told you? You can have like a billion dollars and all the sexual experiences you want and wealth and power, you just don’t get to be conscious of it. Would you take that deal? But if I ask you, what does your consciousness do? What does it do? Because most of your behavior, most of your behavior is being run unconsciously. So what does your consciousness do? I mean, it looks like it’s just hanging around waiting for work. Well, what I want to try and do is talk a little bit about that. And I’m going to try and talk about the function of consciousness and not that much about the nature of consciousness, which is called the hard problem, because it’s called the hard problem because it’s hard. And I don’t think we have time to tackle it. And I want to concentrate on some of the current most important theories of the function of consciousness, neuroscientific and cognitive scientific and psychological theories of the function of consciousness. Not because I think they’re comprehensively right, but I’m intrigued by the fact that they seem to be converging on a consensus as to at least one of the central functions of consciousness. So the first of those theories of consciousness is called the global workspace theory. It’s advocated by people like Bars or Shanahan and Bars. And the main idea is that your consciousness functions like the desktop on your computer. Most of the files aren’t on your desktop and that corresponds to most of your processing is going on unconsciously. And what happens in consciousness is those files are accessed like they’re accessed by your desktop and you can access files and hold them together and manipulate them and do interesting things with them. And this seems to have some overlap with some psychological work and Bars has admitted this. It’s done in psychology on working memory. Working memory is that aspect of your memory where you can activate information, hold it in mind and manipulate it, etc. Now what’s interesting is what functionality Bars attributes to this. And in an article with Shanahan and then a later article in the Handbook on Consciousness, Bars and Shanahan and Bars argue that the main function of consciousness, why it’s structured this way, is to solve the frame problem. Or as Shanahan rightly argues, because he is considered to be an authority on the frame problem, the relevance problem. The issue of how we zero in on relevant information. And many of you know this is an ongoing obsession of mine. What is it? How do we do this? How do we zero in on relevant information? Of all the information available to us in the environment, all the information available to us in our minds, how do we rapidly and effectively zero in on the relevant information we need, make connections in that information that we find relevant, and then act appropriately on the basis of that information? Very, very central process and I’ll come back to that repeatedly. And the main idea is what happens is all of these processes that are going on consciously, they all compete for access to the workspace and that’s how relevance realization occurs. I have a lot of criticisms of that and I’m not going to go into that, but what I find intriguing is this idea that the core function of consciousness is relevance realization. Now, there is a theory that is more about the nature of consciousness. This is the integrated information theory of Tononi and others. And the basic idea here is a system is conscious the more its information is integrated. And what that means is how pieces of information, how tightly they co-vary with each other. It gets very complex and mathematical. But interestingly, when Tononi has proposed a test for how you see if a system is conscious, what he proposes is whether or not the systems can make judgments of relevancy and appropriateness. He proposes that, for example, what you do if you’re testing a system for consciousness is you show it a picture of a potted plant in front of a computer or a bicycle in the sky. And if the computer can figure out that the pieces of information have not been put together in an irrelevant or appropriate manner, and those are the terms he uses, by the way, then that’s how you judge that it’s not conscious. And in a more recent publication with Koch, he’s even argued that consciousness seems to be functioning to do this relevance realization function. So once again, this sort of insight, this idea that that’s what consciousness is for. There’s a developmental theory of consciousness by Clearman’s called the radical plasticity hypothesis. It has a very intriguing idea behind it that we actually have to learn to be conscious. And many philosophers would be sort of irked by that, I suppose. But again, not to go into the details, what Clearman’s makes clear, sorry for that pun, is that this learning process involves parts of the brain learning to care about the information they’re processing. And he puts a lot of those, that’s the term he uses. It’s the ability of a system to care about the information that is processing that seems to be central to consciousness. And in this he echoes the neuroscientist Montague, who has also argued that what distinguishes us from computers is that we care about the information that we’re processing. We find certain information important, relevant, salient to us, and our processing is governed by those judgments of relevance and salience. So once again, consciousness is functioning in terms of relevance realization. Finally, the frontal parietal theory of people like Bohr and Seth that say that consciousness has to do a lot with the functioning of the frontal cortex, again, has to do with, and they talk about, judgments of zeroing in on relevant information, chunking it, managing it. And they again point to consciousness having to do with this ability to realize relevance. So the idea here is, and this is often how it’s put in many of these authors, so there’s a lot of convergence on this, is that this ability of relevance realization is central to consciousness because consciousness evolved in order to deal with complexity in the environment, novelty, ill-defined situations. Because in those situations, it becomes paramount that we zero in on relevant information, we connect it appropriately, we size up the situation so that we can act appropriately within it. And I’m not going to argue this before because I argued it at a previous Mind Matters conference, the Utism conference, publications, I talk about it in my sleep, right? Relevance realization is central to your cognitive agency. You need to be able to do relevance realization, to do problem solving, to categorize, to communicate, to engage in basic actions. That’s Dennett’s famous example of the robot. And in that sense, relevance realization is central to your intelligence. It’s just central to your intelligence. And philosophers like Christopher Cherniak have argued this when he talks about the finitary predicament. We have very finite resources, very finite time, and yet we have to deal with an overwhelming amount of information, and he emphasizes relevance realization. The psychologist, Kiestanowicz, has argued similarly, he does some of the most important recent work on intelligence and its relationship to rationality. And he has argued that the core of intelligence is to do what he calls our ability to deal with computational limitations. Our brains are computationally limited. They have to deal with overwhelming amounts of information, and intelligence is that ability to zero in on relevant information. Work that I did with Leo, Leo Ferraro in 2013, we argued that you can see a lot of psychometric tests for intelligence, categorization tests, and pattern completion, et cetera, et cetera, as tests of relevance realization. Finally, there are important connections between intelligence, measures of intelligence, and working memory. And I’ve already pointed out to you, alabars, that there’s a lot of connection between working memory and consciousness. There’s a lot of connections between measures of intelligence and measures of working memory. And some of you know that Lynn Hasher, for example, has done quite a bit of work arguing that working memory isn’t just a container, but is a higher order relevance filter. So we’re seeing connections between intelligence, consciousness, and relevance realization. As many of you know, I think there’s important connections between relevance realization and insight. Insight is that phenomena when you have framed a problem in a particular way. You’ve made judgments as to what is salient or relevant, and then that affects how you try to solve the problem. My perennially favorite example is the nine dot problem. You knew I would talk about it. Okay. In which you have to join all nine dots with four straight lines. The problem is people try to make a square or a box, and then that prevents them from solving the problem. And you have to break outside of the box. You have to break that framing. You have to alter. You have to significantly restructure your judgments as to what you find relevant and salient in order to solve the problem. And that tells us that the relevance realization is recursive. It is self-organizing. It is self-corrected. It is self-interested. It is interested in itself, if I can put it that way. What’s also important about insight, right, is if we use this language, and it’s telling, right, we talk about a flash of insight. Because in insight, in that restructuring, in that re-realizing of relevance, there’s a phenomenological alteration in consciousness, right? People experience it, something like a flash. They’re super salient. The salient landscape is changed. People talk about it, right, as a significant alteration of consciousness. And so much so, by the way, that if you give people insight problems and come in and turn a lamp on around them and create a flash of light, that will actually improve their ability to solve insight problems. Alterations of states of consciousness and insight are deeply linked together. And I’m going to return to that. So relevance realization, right? In insight, we can see it. We can see intelligence intersecting, sorry, intelligence intersecting with an altered state of consciousness. That’s what’s going on in insight. We can see the intelligence aspects of relevance realization and consciousness intersecting in that flash of insight. So the fact that relevance realization is recursive, it’s self-organizing, it’s layered, it can go through spontaneous restructuring that has an impact on consciousness, this helps tell us something about what consciousness is doing. And I’m borrowing a term here now from Ramachandran that links this phenomenology and the functionality together. What consciousness is doing for us is projecting a salient landscape, right? What’s happening is certain things are standing out for you now as more salient. I hope I am, right? And other things are, right, have much less of a salient profile for you, like perhaps the walls and the seat until I mention them, of course. Your left toe, left big toe is probably not very salient to you nowadays, of course, right? And so your salient landscape is constantly being projected and it’s constantly shifting and flowing. And what’s really intriguing is the relationship within consciousness between your salient landscape and attention, because your salient landscape draws your attention. You’re drawn to what’s salient to you. Your attention goes there. But on the other hand, you can direct your attention, like I just did with your left big toe, and that alters its salience. So what’s happening in consciousness is the salient landscape and attention are in this self-organizing relationship, where the salient landscape is shaping attention and attention is shaping the salient landscape. And as I’ve argued, that affords both intelligence and insight. I think it affords something else that’s really important. It affords perspectival knowing, another kind of knowing. We’re very familiar with propositional knowing. Propositional knowing is that we’ve, you know, we’re all the children of Descartes, right? And we come to think that that’s the epitome of knowing. Propositional knowing is knowing that something is the case, knowing that Australia is both a country and a continent. That’s propositional knowing. There’s also procedural knowing. Procedural knowing is knowing how to do something, knowing how to catch a baseball. And that’s different from knowing the facts about a baseball, that baseball’s round and white. Knowing how to catch it is different. But in addition to that, there’s perspectival knowing. This is knowing what it is like to be someone, what it is like to take a particular role. It’s knowing how to do the following. Immerse yourself in a particular landscape, to project that salience landscape and immerse yourself in it. Right now, I know what it’s like to be a speaker at a conference. Right? And notice how you can do this. You can do all three. I can ask you, tell me some facts about a baseball. Do you know how to catch a baseball? But you can do this third thing. Imagine what it’s like to be a baseball, to take the salience landscape of a, you know, of a baseball arching after it’s been hit and come off the bat. You can do that. And that perspectival knowing is really important. You know, propositional knowledge gives us rule following. And procedural knowledge gives us routines that we follow. But perspectival knowledge gives us role following. It gives us our fundamental roles and how we interact with the world and how we carve out some of our basic cognitive identity and agency. So what I’m suggesting to you, and I do not mean this to be exhaustive. I do not mean this to be exhaustive. But consciousness is an active affordance. And that and so I’m going to abbreviate that with the metaphorical term field. Consciousness is an active affordance, a field of intelligent insight and perspective taking. And in which that intelligence machinery, the insight machinery and the perspectival machinery are all mutually supporting and mutually developing together. So given that rather rapid dash through the functionality of consciousness, which is like, you know, I’m going to explain God to you in five minutes or something like that. Right. Well, I want to talk about altered states of consciousness, the ones that David alluded to. Right. And their functionality. So think about first, let’s go back to the flash of insight and that there is something happening there. Let’s let’s think about something that’s related to that and can be extended. Right. And this is the flow experience talked about by Chick-Satmahai. So think about the flow experience, a typical situation that engenders at rock climbing. You’re trying to climb up a rock. Right. And you impasse. You don’t know how to go forward. And you really have to restructure your sanites landscape. Right. And it’s perspectival knowing. And then you shift and you get to another situation. You impasse. And then you get another insight and you break out. And then what starts to happen is those insights start to cascade. So instead of impasses, potential impasses are just experiences as challenges you’re constantly overcoming. And your skills and your challenges are ratcheting each other like this. And you get into the zone. Right. And you feel this paradoxical state in which you’re simultaneously exerting a lot of effort. And it seems effortless. You seem at one with the environment. There’s a significant distortion of time. You lose that nattering nanny egocentric narrative consciousness. You know that thing in your head that’s how do I look? How am I doing? How do I look? How am I doing? That goes away. That goes away. Right. And you feel like you feel resonant with your environment. And there’s this super salience. Everything is glowing and vibrant. And it’s deeply meaningful. It’s deeply meaningful such that people tend to evaluate the goodness of their life in terms of how often they flow within it. But so this is definitely an altered state of consciousness. It has a lot of features that we find in altered states of consciousness. And it’s natural and it’s universal. That’s one of the points that Chick-Sanat Mahay has made in his work. And what I’ve tried to argue, and this is some of the current work that’s in publication with Leo, is that flow is a highly adaptive process. There’s a reason why evolution makes it so rewarding to us. It’s optimal. I mean, it is such a rewarding experience. How else do you explain rock climbing? It’s absurd behavior. Right? What am I going to do? I’m going to climb up this rock. Oh, it’s exerting and horrible. And I’m going to hurt myself. And when I get to the top, I’m going to come back down. It sounds like a Greek torment. Right? You, roll up the rock. You, rock climb. Right? It’s because it induces flow. And flow is optimal. It’s not only that we enjoy it so much. And it’s not the same thing as pleasure, by the way. That’s very clear in the research. We enjoy it so much because it’s so rewarded. It’s optimal in the second sense. It is highly functioning. Training that insight cascade in connection with the causal interaction with the environment is deeply adaptive. That’s going to really improve your cognitive agency. So I now want to, I’ve stretched insight into a very natural and spontaneous and significant altered state of consciousness, the flow state. And I want to try and build on that analogy. I want to suggest this to you. That altered states of consciousness are analogous to insight, but they’re about at a higher order. And what do I mean by that? Insight is a restructuring within the field of consciousness. I’m going to suggest to you that altered states of consciousness are a restructuring of the field of consciousness. Insight is a transformation in our performance. How we’re trying to do a particular thing, solve a particular problem. Altered states of consciousness are transformation in our competence, not just what we’re doing, but what we’re capable of doing. It’s a much more fundamental transformation. A qualitative change, a developmental change is available to us. Okay, let’s try and gather this back together. The main functional role of consciousness, right, I’m trying to argue, is a higher order, dynamically recursive relevance realization that is for dealing with complexity, novelty, ill-definedness. What I’m suggesting to you is that consciousness makes a salience landscape that flows over the contours of a changing environment. And if you’ll allow me a metaphor, you know, you should occasionally. In altered states of consciousness, this fluidity is altered. The viscosity of consciousness changes. That’s what I’m trying to get at with the change in the competence. It’s not that consciousness is flowing slightly differently, it’s capacity for flowing is significantly altered. And like I’ve been trying to suggest to you, this affords a change in competence. It affords the possibility of a higher order self-correction. Insight is a moment of self-correction. The very machinery that helps you solve a problem is what has to be corrected. It’s the very thing that is biasing you or misleading you so you can’t solve. You have to break outside of the box in the 9-dot problem. But what I’m proposing to you is that altered states of consciousness have the capacity to give us a much higher order of self-correction. And of course, we fundamentally need self-correction because, again, the relevance realization processes that are so adaptive, so central to our adaptivity, are the very ones that also box us in in the 9-dot problem. That biases in the wrong way. And that’s why we have to tap into the fact that relevance realization is inherently self-correcting. Now, if we’re talking about self-correction at this more fundamental level, I think I’ve tried to give, and that has the potential to overcome a more fundamental kind of self-deception, I think I’ve given you a way of appropriating or understanding the term self-transcendence. In self-transcendence, we’re getting a much more fundamental, competence level self-correction in our fundamental processing of relevance realization, how we frame problems, how we create our cognitive agency. In an altered state of consciousness, you’re not reframing a problem. You’re transframing, that’s a neologism on my part, trying to integrate notions of reframing and transcendence. You’re transframing your problem-solving ability. It’s not a restructuring of this or that problem, but a fundamental restructuring of the competence of our cognitive agency. We’re modifying, not a problem or trying to achieve a particular goal, we’re modifying the machinery of our intelligence, our insight, and our perspective generation. That is a tremendous power, and we’ve got increasing evidence about this kind of fundamental level change. So there’s a lot of work coming out of the Griffiths lab right now that is really important about this. The obtaining work, for example, that if you induce a powerful altered state of consciousness, usually with psychotropic drugs, that you can get effective treatment and alleviation for treatment-resistant depression and treatment-resistant addiction. One of the most interesting set of experiments coming out of the Griffiths lab has to do with inducing mystical experiences, these kinds of experiences, and with self-transcendence as a fundamental feature of the altered state of consciousness. What you do is you give people psilocybin, you’ve tutored them ahead of time about what a mystical experience is, and you find the subpopulation that has a mystical experience. And two things have come out of this. People, even five years after the experiment, rate those mystical experiences as some of the most significant that they’ve ever had. They subjectively experience it as a fundamental change. Of course, our subjectivity can be misleading. Is there anything objective that correlates with this? And the answer is yes. What they have evidence for is a long-standing, potentially permanent increase in the psychological factor of openness, one of the big five. That’s a fundamental change at your cognitive agency. And of course, openness, Jordan was more of an expert than I am on this, but openness is really well correlated with your insight abilities, creativity, things like that. So this represents a fundamental change, not just in personality, but in your cognitive agency. That’s what I’m trying to suggest to you. This is what altered states of consciousness can do for us. This is the power they have for us. Now I want to talk a little bit more about this powerful self-transcendence, what’s going on in it. And here I want to turn to the work of John Wright and the work he’s done based on the really seminal work of Iris Murdoch, especially in her, a little gem of a book. It’s one of these little books, right? As I’m getting older, I guess death is approaching or something, I’m getting more and more impressed by little books. It used to be, you know, you read Hegel and oh my god, right? Now it’s these little thin books that are like these swords that go through, right? I highly recommend The Sovereignty of the Good to you. Your life will be more valuable to you if you’ve read it. That was a joke. Okay, now Murdoch does a lot in there and she talks a lot about a particular situation. And let me go to the situation, then Wright does a lot of work on it. So Murdoch talks about this situation in which you have a mother-in-law and she has a daughter-in-law. And she thinks of the daughter-in-law sort of like coarse and crude and loud. It’s like, bleh, my son married beneath himself, right? But then one day, in a spontaneous fashion, she has this insight that, you know, her daughter really isn’t coarse. She’s really sort of grounded and she isn’t crude, right? She’s really direct and sincere and she isn’t loud. She’s boisterous and vivacious. So it’s this restructuring. Now if it was just that, we would call it an insight. But Murdoch takes it farther. She says, well, what happens is the mother doesn’t just realize something different about the daughter-in-law. The insight, if I can put it this way, is bidirectional. It’s not only an insight into the daughter-in-law, right? The mother-in-law has an insight into her very competence. The mother-in-law realizes that the way she frames all situations needs to be transformed, needs to be called into question. See, what’s going on all the time in perspectival knowing is this bidirectionality, a process of co-identification. And the Stoics talked a lot about this. And I imagine you could find stuff in the Buddhists that talk a lot about this. We’d have to ask Sean, because Sean is the person that will correct any mistakes I make about Buddhist philosophy or psychology. But this idea is when you’re in the salient’s landscape and you’re projecting it and also immersing yourself in it, and it’s this binding and projecting process, you’re always assigning and assuming identities. That’s what it is to take a role. I’m assigning identities to you, and I’m assuming an identity. I’m doing it with objects, right? This is a tool that I’m using, and I have a particular identity. We’re always assigning and assuming identities within this perspectival knowing. And there’s a possibility of insights that, because they go to the core, the fundamental machinery of this perspectival knowing, that they have the capacity to generate this bidirectional insight. It’s not just that we’re changing a particular frame, we’re changing fundamentally our framing. We’re changing our existential mode. We’re changing how we project and interject, how we assign and assume identities. And that whole process, that fundamental change in how we identify and take up our cognitive agency, it’s called by John, sensibility transcendence. It’s a sensibility transcendence. You’re overcoming egocentrism. You’re getting more objective, not in the epistemic sense, of a better abstract theory, but what’s happening is what the mother-in-law is getting is a more virtuous interaction with the daughter-in-law, a more just giving of attention, a more appropriate responsiveness. A more responsible responsiveness to her daughter-in-law. So that sensibility transcendence already, and this is the point made in the Sovereignty of Good by Murdoch, it has a normative aspect to us. It starts to teach us how better to direct our attention, how better to assign and assume identities, how better to act appropriately in our environment. So that’s a significant developmental change. Right? It’s a significant developmental change. So we know from the work of Carol Dweck and others that how you appropriate, how you identify with your cognitive machinery has a significant impact on your cognitive performance, your cognitive abilities. If I get you to believe that your intelligence is a fixed trait, that’s a fixed thing, you will tend to avoid challenging problems. You will tend to go into image management. You will tend to avoid error because if intelligence is a fixed trait, error means that there’s a part of you, a fixed part of you that is defective. And I can do that. I can do that. I can prime that in you. And this is what Dweck’s work shows just by how I praise you. If I tell you, you’re really smart, it tends to make you identify with your intelligence in a fixed manner, and then your cognitive performance radically change, radically changes. But if I convince you that your intelligence is a malleable trait, then you will do the opposite. You will pursue learning experiences. Error doesn’t mean you’re defective. Error just means you have to change your strategies. You have to acquire more skills. You will pursue harder problems rather than seeking out easier problems because you don’t identify with success as the main marker of your cognitive agency, the main marker of your intelligence. You identify learning as the main marker of your cognitive agency, the main marker of your intelligence. So this identification process is fundamental and profound. So ACCs, altered states of consciousness, I should say, have this capacity to radically transform that. They have the ability. They can function to accelerate and to optimize the development of our intelligence, our insight, and transform our perspective taking into sensibility transcendence. They have that capacity. Enhancing insight, enhancing intelligence, transforming perspective taking into sensibility transcendence. Put those all together. They’re mutually being integrated together in one functional state of consciousness. That’s in short to say that altered states of consciousness have the capacity to promote the development of wisdom. Like wisdom isn’t the same thing as knowledge in the sense of I know this or that. It’s not the possession of a theory. It’s having perspectival knowing that it’s capable of self-transcendence, capable of that radical self-correction that enhances our insight, enhances our intelligence. We get better at zeroing in on what really matters and acting really appropriately towards it. That’s the key of wisdom. But of course, and this is the way reality is organized, right? Because altered states of consciousness have such promise, they bring with them tremendous peril. Because as I’ve argued, the very processes that make you so adaptive are the very same ones that make you subjected to self-deception. It’s the relevant realization machinery that makes you so intelligent that also box you in in the nine dot problem. And altered states of consciousness bring a greater risk with them because of that. I mean, in altered states of consciousness, at times you’re uncoupling that salient landscape from the rational pursuit of the truth. I’ll come back to what I mean by that in a couple of minutes. But what I want to zero in on is a very important phenomena that has been discussed. Now, famously so by Harry Frankfurt. I’m sorry, I have to use this word. The essay was entitled On Bullshit. And I think this is one of the most important philosophical works in the last 20 years. It’s again, by the way, a little book. So, Frankfurt is really interested in figuring out what bullshit is because we seem to be accruing more and more of it. And what he does is he distinguishes between bullshit and bullshitting and lying. Now, I think bullshitting and lying are on a continuum. And he presents them as a little bit more dichotomous than they are. But talking about the polls is a good way of understanding a continuum. So I won’t get into a critique of him there. I’ll just follow up. And what Frankfurt argues is that the bullshit artist, interesting term, eh? Bullshit artist. Why isn’t a bullshit carpenter? Anyways, okay. So, right, it’s different from the liar. Because the liar is trying to manipulate your behavior by relying on your commitment to the truth. That the fact that the truth can change your behavior. The liar tries to get you to believe something is true, and that is how your behavior will change. Because one of the things that changes your behavior is your belief that something is true. Truth is a cognitive norm for people. In contrast, the bullshit artist doesn’t do that. The bullshit artist relies on something else that’s cognitively important for your behavior. Something I’ve been mentioning throughout this talk. How salient you find information to be. Which is different from how true it is. Right? What the bullshit artist does is uncouple the salience machinery from the truth commitment machinery. So, my favorite example of this, and I’ve used it before, is from an episode of The Simpsons. Back when I watched it, I don’t, does anybody still, I mean it’s on TV, but nobody claims to watch it anymore. It’s a very mysterious cultural phenomenon. But back, there was a, there was a, there was a, and this has become somewhat famous as an example of bullshit. Is, there’s an alien giving a speech, Kang, and he’s running for political office in the United States. And, right, and he gives the following speech. He says, my fellow Americans, when I was young, I dreamt of being a baseball. But now we must move forward, not backwards. Upwards, not forward. Twirling, twirling towards freedom. And, like, you get this sort of rush. You go, huh, and all this salient stuff. And you get this, like, it’s a cascade, right? It’s like, it’s a pseudo-insight cascade. You get one moment of salience priming the next, and you go, huh, and nothing has been said. Right? Nothing has been said. We have the tremendous capacity to do that. Because, like, salience is directly affected by your attention, and you have control over your attention. You can alter salience by how you direct attention. You don’t have the same direct control over your beliefs. You don’t. Pick a belief you’d like to have, that everybody loves you. Believe it. Do it now. You can imagine it, but belief doesn’t work that way. But because salience is wrapped up with attention, what you can do is you can direct your attention and change your salience, which then calls your attention more that way, which directs you, and that can become a self-reinforcing process. Now, why is this so important? Why am I going on about this? Because, I think, and this isn’t something Frankfurt said, this is something I think was implied, but he didn’t pick up on, right? Self-deception. We try to understand, we use metaphors of lying to yourself to explain self-deception. He’s lying to himself. She’s lying. You can’t lie to yourself. It doesn’t make any sense. Like, you know, I’m going to tell John something he doesn’t believe. But, and that’s because belief is not a direct action. But you can bullshit yourself. At the heart, what I’m arguing is what’s at the heart of self-deception is your capacity for bullshitting yourself. The way in which attention and salience are in that self-organizing process, the very thing that makes them so adaptive, makes you susceptible to that salience rush that we find in bullshitting, that self-fulfilling prophecy that can take on a life of its own and suck life from you. Damage your cognitive agency. Undermine it in powerful ways. In bullshitting, we’re not tapping into our commitment to the truth. We’re acquiescing in a salience rush. That means altered states of consciousness are particularly dangerous because of their super salience, because of the salience rush found within them. And this sounds like a contradiction, but I tried to make an argument all the way through. The very features that make altered states of consciousness, the affordance of wisdom, make them also potentially the engine of folly, self-destructive, self-deceptive patterns of behavior. The two sides of the same coin. The adaptive, dynamical self-organization of the salience landscape is also what makes us susceptible to self-deceptive, self-destructive patterns of behavior. So, altered states of consciousness carry with them both great promise and great peril in an inseparable fashion. And where there is great promise and great peril, we should take great care. What I’m suggesting to you is that altered states of consciousness should be pursued in a way that increases the reward and minimizes the risk factors. They should be pursued in a way that justifies the risk factors. They should be pursued in a way that justifies the risk of altering our state of consciousness. And that gives us the cognitive ability to cut through bullshit. And what I want to suggest to you is, of course, wisdom gives us all three of those. Wisdom is about trying to alter your behavior so that you increase reward and reduce risk. And what better justifies risk than wisdom? What better justifies risk than wisdom? What else most contributes to how meaningful your life is than wisdom? Who doesn’t want to reduce foolishness? And finally, of course, the best antidote to bullshit, and one way of defining what wisdom is, is wisdom. Wisdom is the ability to cut through bullshit. It is the ability to overcome self-deception. Wisdom isn’t like knowledge. Knowledge is about overcoming ignorance. Wisdom is about overcoming foolishness. And that’s a different thing, right? That’s a different thing. So we should bring good judgment to bear on the altered states of consciousness we pursue. I want to say something right now, and it’s a digression, so if I could, I’d stand to the side. Okay? Because this is something I might, you might think I’m implying and I’m not. I do not think that government should be prohibiting substances. We have overwhelming research that that does nothing. Billions of dollars are wasted, and it just shovels money into organized crime. I am not talking about that. But that doesn’t mean that we should not deeply and philosophically discuss the normative structures in which we are pursuing altered states of consciousness. The fact that it shouldn’t be part of the legal domain does not remove it. In fact, it makes it more paramount that we pursue a better understanding of the law. And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to do it in a way that’s not just a legal domain, but we should not remove it. In fact, it makes it more paramount that we put it back into the ethical domain. So we should judge altered states of consciousness in terms of their ethical, epistemic, and existential fruits. We should bring them under the canon of rationality, and rationality is ultimately about reliability. What is a reliable technique for achieving the goal you want? Rationality isn’t just logic. If I have this goal, what is the most reliable method for achieving it? That’s what rationality is. We should be judging our altered states. Is an altered state of consciousness reliable for helping to deal with the fact that I can have perspectival narrowness? I can be egocentric. Does an altered state of consciousness do what Murdoch argued? Does it help me break out of that egocentrism? Does it help afford the inculcation of sensibility transcendence? Does an altered state of consciousness help existentially? What’s the problem with perspectival knowing in an existential sense? The problem with our perspectival knowing is perspective. Jordan and I talked about this in a recent Mind Matters Masters, right? Our perspectival knowing, our perspectives can clash with each other. They can be incoherent. I mean, sometimes you can step back and think about the cosmic perspective, and it makes your perspective of your own life seem insignificant or absurd. But there are altered states of consciousness that can alleviate that absurdity. Spinoza talks about it. He talks about skantia intuitiva, an altered state of consciousness produced, by the way, through intense rational reasoning. In skantia intuitiva, you see the whole in each part, and you see the part in each whole. And that alleviates the absurdity generated by the perspectival clash. You should be judging altered states of consciousness in terms of their epistemic reliability. Do they reliably alleviate or help to ameliorate the way in which our perspectival knowing can be self-destructive, self-defeating? Do they help us to overcome self-deception? And are the altered states of consciousness bringing those about in a mutually supporting fashion? Are the ethical, epistemic, and existential fruits mutually supporting each other? This is what we should be asking. So, I mean, and Dennis is going to talk a lot more about this, I imagine, but I’ve been reading people like Winkleman and Louis Williams and Matt Rossano. I got to meet Matt Rossano at the Utism last 2015 or 2014 on the Cognitive Science of Religion. And they’re basically making very similar arguments that a crucial point in cognitive evolution was afforded by the appropriation of induced altered states of consciousness. So Matt Rossano argues for this, and so does Louis Williams, and I forget Winkleman’s first name, I’m sorry. And what’s this period we’re talking about? We’re talking about the Upper Paleolithic Transition around 40,000 BCE, where you see you get this sort of significant increase in human cognitive agency and functionality. And it doesn’t seem to be driven by a biological change because we’ve been sort of anatomically stable for 150,000 years. And what’s going on in the Upper Paleolithic Transition, you get explosion in different tool types that are being made and different material. Bone is being used instead of stone, and you get the first significant projectile weapons and the use of atlatles and things like that. You get the first calendars being made. You have musical instruments being made. You have the first representational art. There’s some earlier stuff that’s non-representational, but you have representational art. You have sculpture. You have the famous cave paintings. And all of this is going on, and what Louis Williams and Winkleman and Rossano argue is what was driving that was shamanic practices, the ability to induce an altered state of consciousness that affords a terrific advancement in human cognitive evolution. Winkleman argues that when you’re in the shamanic, and he’s done a lot of work in existing shamanic, he’s an anthropologist, right? He sort of wrote the book on shamanism in some sense. And what he argues happens is when you alter that state of consciousness, what happens is you get what he calls cross-modular integration. Parts of the brain that previously didn’t talk to each other can talk to each other. It’s like go back to bars. You alter your desktop, and files that normally don’t talk or integrate can talk and integrate to each other. And what does that give you? That gives you an explosion in how metaphorical you can think, how analogously you can think. And that affords a tremendous increase in your problem-solving capacity. Now Rossano argues that the shamanic trance, he argues that it’s an early form of mindfulness practice. He’s got this really nice article entitled Did Meditating Make Us Human? And I recommend his book. It’s a thin book called Supernatural Selection, right? And the argument is there that these kinds of practices, the kinds of stuff that’s going on in shamanism, seems to, we seem to have some that can alter working memory capacity, that relevance realization machinery. Nelson, in a book called The Spiritual Doorway in the Brain, don’t read that title the wrong way. He’s pretty much a hard neuroscientist, right? But he argues that in the shamanic state, you get a co-activation of two networks, the task-focused network, the default network. You get something very analogous to lucid dreaming. And we have evidence that if you lucid dream more, you will be a better insight problem-solver. So the idea is that, right, there was a sapiential alignment of an altered state of consciousness in shamanic practices. They were basically being appropriated precisely because of the huge increase in our cognitive agency that was being afforded. And that’s what was helping to drive, there’s other things driving it, but that’s what was helping to drive the cognitive evolution we see happening in the upper Paleolithic transition. So early on, you see that context that I’m advocating for, and how fundamental it was, not even for individual development, but for our development as a species. So what is that, what am I sort of recommending? What am I trying to put together? I’m trying to say we need to shift attention from the phenomenological weirdness of altered states of consciousness, which has tended to be what we’re focusing on. I think we need to shift attention to the functionality of altered states of consciousness and the attendant normativity that goes with functionality, because whenever you talk about function, you’re invoking a norm. We need to shift from the salience of those states to their sapience. We have to give up, I think, on romantic projects of trying to construct alternative metaphysics. I think that is a mis-framing of the wisdom available in altered states of consciousness as a kind of pseudo-knowledge, which I think is a mistake. It’s a category mistake. I don’t believe in the shamanic metaphysics that came out of the upper Paleolithic transition. I don’t believe in the three-tiered world, an underworld, a middle world, an overworld. And we have some representations going back about 15,000 years. That’s a really old world. I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think it’s scientifically true. But the wisdom that was afforded in the shamanic practice is apparent from the cognitive evolution that occurred. Now, what does that mean when we’re talking about this normative structure, this sapiential alignment? What does that mean? Well, I think it puts us into a horrible problem. Sorry. What I’m saying is we need committed communities to safeguard that we’re getting the good, ethical, existential, and epistemic fruits. Now, typically, that’s been done by religion. That’s been done by religion. The problem for most of us is that we are post-religious. I would identify myself in post-religious. Although I have a strong interaction with Buddhism, I would identify myself as post-religious. The problem is, right, we’ve tried secular alternatives. And I talked about this in the mind master’s discussion I had with Dan. We’ve tried secular alternatives to religion. The 20th century is drenched in the blood of those secular alternatives. But, of course, without committed communities, we tend to pursue alternative states of consciousness in a fragmented, fruitless, and frivolous fashion, in which the risks outweigh the rewards, and wisdom is not being cultivated. See, this is a hard problem. I mean, this is what Nietzsche was on about with the madman running into the marketplace. He wasn’t arguing with religious believers. He was arguing with atheists when he talked about the death of God. He said, you don’t understand the deep functionality of religion. You don’t understand how to replace it. That’s what the death of God means. It doesn’t mean that Richard Dawkins is correct. It means that Richard Dawkins hasn’t got it. He doesn’t get the problem. This problem that I’m putting my finger on, this is what I talk about, and this is the meaning crisis of modernity. And we shouldn’t be using altered states of consciousness as an escape from that meaning crisis. We should be resolutely confronting the meaning crisis so that we can come up with normative frameworks, committed communities that allow us to reclaim the functionality of altered states of consciousness, to redeem their power, their capacity for bringing wisdom and meaning into our lives. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you.