https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=eCHRi9BMixw
Welcome everyone to another course with Raveki. I’m really, really pleased today to be with Aidan Lyon. Aidan reached out to me because he’d seen some of my work and he’s currently working on a book called Psychedelic Experience. I was very privileged. He sent me, I think it’s an ultimate draft and we’ve been having some discussion around this. I invited him to voice with Raveki because I think the material he’s working on will be important and relevant and very interesting to many of you because it overlaps with many of the concerns that this community is directed towards. So welcome Aidan. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about what you’re trying to do with the book and then we can get in specifically to what you mean by psychedelic experience. Yeah, sure. So yeah, first of all, thanks for having me on. As you mentioned, I saw some of your work with, actually I saw your podcast with Jordan Peterson and you were describing some of the stuff you were working on and I almost fell off my seat when that happened because there was such striking similarities between your work and mine and then over the last week or two, I’ve been looking at a lot more of your work. Yeah, it’s pretty amazing how similar we’re thinking, but also we’re coming at it from different perspectives. Yeah. So anyway, I’m a philosopher by training. I have a background in mathematics as well, but really my kind of bread and butter as an academic is being a philosopher. I’m also halftime academic and halftime an entrepreneur. So I kind of live in two worlds simultaneously. So the company that I co-founded with some other philosophers is called Delphi Club. And that might be something you want to talk about later on, because I know you have an affinity for Delphi and know theirself and all things related to that. So the company helps. So really, my academic work before I got into psychedelics and meditation was on probability, uncertainty, collective wisdom, decision making, that sort of stuff. And we created this company to apply a lot of that research in the form of software and consulting to help large organizations to make better decisions and better forecasts and what the future is going to be like. So, for example, one of our clients was the Australian government. This is one of the clients I could talk about. And they were interested in getting better probabilistic forecasts of emerging infectious diseases. And so we would help. We would apply techniques from psychology and philosophy in the form of software to help them to get better at that sort of task. So that kind of dominated my work for a really long time. And then about eight years ago, I got interested in the topic of psychedelics, and that quickly got me kind of re-interested in the topic of meditation. And so since then, I’ve been working on that topic as a philosopher. And little did I know what these two… I thought these were going to be two independent streams of my work, but it turns out they’re completely related. And one way of putting it is my kind of more kind of corporate work is about helping people be wise. Right. And then my academic work is on psychedelics and meditation. And I think the kind of main gist of my work is these things are really important tools for helping us become wise, better decision makers, more creative. Yeah, already the convergence is quite significant. So perhaps a good place to start, because there’s both a lot of controversy and confusion and equivocation, I should have said. There’s a lot of confusion and equivocation around the notion of what is meant by psychedelic experience. And you spend quite a bit of time, especially in the introduction book, trying to get very clear about how you are specifically understanding psychedelic experience, what you mean by that phrase. Just unpack that for us right now, because I think that’s a very good place to… I like Scott Atten’s idea that one of the functions of science is to sort of challenge common sense, get us initially away from the familiar so that we can return to explain it in a new way. So how would you go about defining, explaining, describing what you mean by psychedelic experience? Yeah. So as I mentioned about eight years ago, I got into this topic by having these experiences myself and like a lot of people that were having a profound impact on me and all sorts of ways that I could spend forever talking about. And eventually I realized that I knew these experiences were having a really positive effect on me, but I didn’t know what they were. And I was talking to other people using this term psychedelic experience. And eventually I realized I didn’t really know what I was talking about when I was saying that. I was kind of referring to these experiences that I was having with these substances, but I didn’t know what I was, I didn’t know what content I was conveying when I was when I was using that term. And I noticed when other people were talking, there was sort of I could see there’s a lot of cross talk and miscommunication when they’re using this term. I said this is what we philosophers do. Philosophers are great at asking like pick a concept and ask, what is it? Like, what is wisdom? What is love? This is what we do. And at one point I had this insight. This is a philosophical question. What is psychedelic experience? Exactly. What is this thing that’s going on? Yeah. And so I was reading around about this stuff and I think at some point I must have come across the kind of original definition of the term psychedelic. It comes from these Greek words psyche and Delos, meaning, well, there’s multiple interpretations, but one is mind and reveal or make clear some mind revealing. Another interpretation is soul or spirit for psyche and manifest for Delos. And I think that’s an important alternative interpretation that we come back to in a moment. But mind revelation is, I think, probably the easiest meaning to get started with. And at one point I had it inside, I think by myself, I really don’t know what the origin was. When I was thinking about what are these experiences and I realized, oh, this is your mind being revealed. This is the kind of forces that are usually shaping my conscious experience and my decisions of behavior. That’s sort of coming to the surface. And that’s the kind of key or core feature of these experiences. And of course, other people have had that idea. And go ahead. So does that like one of the things you start to make clear is that that’s a much more generic reference than people normally realize. So you don’t have what you say is not excluding, but you also say you don’t have to be taking these substance to have a psychedelic experience. For example, if somebody was doing the inactive imagination and all kinds of stuff of the unconscious is coming up, that would fall under your definition if I understand. Yeah, absolutely. So when you look at the definition of the word psychedelic experience as mind revelation, that doesn’t have anything to do with substances. Yeah. It’s just a hidden part or aspect of something like that. About the mind being revealed. And that could happen in all sorts of all sorts of ways. Right. And then when you look at pretty much any discussion on meditation, for example, that’s like an important thread of what they’re talking about. And when you’re meditating, it’s not all that there is to meditation, but this is definitely something that happens in meditation. And of course, there’s just millions of techniques like this yoga, fasting, breathwork, right. Contemplation. There’s so many different methods that could create these or lead you to have these experiences. And psychedelics is just just one particular way, way of doing it. And something I talk about in the book is that these different methods for having these experiences create these experiences of different kinds. So I think there’s different kinds of psychedelic experiences. And by understanding those different kinds, we can get a better understanding of how these different methods interact with each other. Right. Right. So one of the one of the areas I want to see is you explicitly, I think it’s a chapter on attention and we work towards it. But you know, you pursue a sort of an integrated, unified theory of mindfulness and psychedelic experience, having sort of a complementary relationship with each other. So maybe that’s a that’s a good thing to start. So let’s move into and I think you talked about these two pieces. So it’s relatively clear. You actually are proposing a philosophy of psychedelic experience and attempt to understand it, bring a conceptual framework. And as you said, integrate various various kinds within a unified. So let’s start to get into that. And the parts that I think may be sort of really foundational is exactly that unified theory of mindfulness and psychedelic experience in terms of attention, selection, salience, prioritization, etc. Is that fair enough? Is a question for you? Yeah, sounds good. OK. Yeah. So there’s a there’s a so as you know, the there’s a there’s a lot of issues in defining what mindfulness. Yes. Yeah, it’s not easy. And there’s a lot of confusion there. So I. Let me say so, I think. So one kind of good, good approximation to mindfulness that I think is kind of a really useful one to work with, not necessarily like an like the kind of all encompassing definition of mindfulness, but something that kind of gives more meat on the bone than the usual definition of mindfulness can be expressed in this terms, in terms of psychedelic experience, or really its its opposite, which I call psychic cryptic experience. So if if a psychedelic experience is a mind revealing experience, then the opposite of a mind revealing experience is a mind concealing experience, mind being hidden. And I think, you know, following tradition, if you go back and plug in the last point in the cell, that would be a psychic psychic cryptic cryptic coming from cryptos to conceal a psychic cryptic experience. Right. So the same same idea that we have in cryptography, for example, you you’re concealing a message. And so if you can have a psychedelic experience now, that must mean that there’s something about your mind right now that’s psychic cryptic. Right. There must be something that’s concealed. Yes. Right. OK. And so here’s one first approximation to defining mindfulness. The more mindful you are, the less psychic cryptic your current state is. Right. The less is concealed. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that these things that would normally be concealed in your awareness, but they can be easily drawn into awareness if you if you wanted to. Yes. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. And so that’s that’s the kind of as a short version of a short way of defining mindfulness, the other ways in terms of this framework that I have called psychedelic space. Right. Do you want to I can do it? It takes a little bit of work to get into this, but do you want me to? It’ll be valuable. OK, sure. So this starts with the idea that so we often talk about experiences being psychedelic or not as a kind of binary matter. But really, they come in degrees. Some experiences are more psychedelic than others. Right. And that must mean that some experiences are more revelatory of the mind, more revealing of the mind. Yes. Right. And so. What? So this is another thing that philosophers do once we got our concept and we’ve asked our question, we try to analyze it, we try to break it down into components. So what are the ways? How can some experience be more psychedelic than another? How can something be more revealing of the mind? And the way I purchase is thinking about what what does it mean to reveal anything? And what does it mean to be more revealing of something? Right. So you could take this like the painting behind me so I can at the moment, it’s like I don’t know, about 50 percent revealed. Right. And I can reveal more of it by by coming back like this. Right. Now, suppose that my like the internet connection was really bad and it was very pixelated. Right. So then I could even though I did this, you may not be able to see what the the painting is. OK, so these these two is these are kind of two dimensions of revelation. One is kind of scope, how much of the object is being revealed. And then the other one is clarity, the kind of resolution that it’s being revealed. So I could by increasing these dimensions, I can make I can be have create a kind of more of a revelation of the of the object. And then similarly, I suppose it was a there was something completely covering it behind me, and I just kind of flashed open the painting and enclosed it really quickly. You get a very brief glimpse of it. There’s a sense which have revealed the full thing to you in full clarity, but in such a short duration that you didn’t really get a chance to to look at it. So that’s the third dimension is the duration of the experience that you’re having. And then the fourth dimension is the novelty. So suppose I have this painting covered, I reveal it and then I conceal it again. And then now I reveal it again. There’s a sense of which that is not as revealing as the first experience when you first got to see see the painting. So I call this novelty. So these four dimensions create a kind of conceptual space, which I call psychedelic space that define the different ways and experience could be more or less revealing. I’m wondering about that, because I mean, in a positive sense, because that aligns with a growing consensus of the functionality of consciousness. The consciousness is precisely for, you know, ill defined, complex novel situations. And then what you need to do is hold it in mind or the process of those exactly the four dimensions you just laid out the psychedelic experience. So there’d be there’d be a deep connection between winning something in the consciousness and opening up the psychedelic space if I’m understanding it correctly. Yeah, exactly. So you can you can apply this framework to any kind of psychedelic experience, mind revealing experience. And so I should say something I think we covered was that you can have these experiences during normal everyday life. Yes. Yes. You don’t have to be meditating. You don’t have to be doing anything weird. Just for example, whenever you have a creative insight on some some problem that you’re working on, that doesn’t necessarily. But I think it can count as a psychedelic experience. Or when you remember a long lost memory from your childhood that suddenly pops into your awareness, that can count as a psychedelic experience. Yeah. And I agree. And let’s do the thing of insight. What I was trying to point to with the deep connection between this and consciousness is, you know, the prototypical phenomenology of the insight, it’s a flash of insight. There’s sort of super salience. People talk about psychedelic experiences somehow in an expansion or enrichment of consciousness. So I’m just trying to point out that there’s this dimension. There’s a phenomenological dimension that comes with the psychedelic space. Yeah, exactly. So you might if it’s a let’s keep going with the insight idea, the creative idea. So you might get like a fragment of an idea for a film that you want to create. Right. You just get a David Lynch. Talks like this. He gets like a few ideas like red lips and green lawn and a song. It’s just these fragments. And then he’s got to figure out how they like how they connect to each other. Right. So that that’s a psychedelic experience. It’s some idea that’s being revealed. But you could have the full film revealed to you in one experience. People have experiences like this, right, like an entire novel or poem. Just it’s just there in your mind right away. And so this would be this. It could be the same idea revealed in fragments or revealed in its entirety. This would be a difference in scope. So no disrespect intended by this comment. But, you know, Muhammad’s experience of being sort of thrown to the gap by Gabriel or having to recite the Koran would be a very powerful psychedelic experience under your definition. Yeah, I’m not familiar with that, to be honest, but if it’s the key thing, so the key thing is that it’s got to be it’s got to be there in your mind already. So this is I think this is important things. I think psychedelics are not necessarily always revealing the mind. I think they might be having other effects. So something could be created on the fly. And that wouldn’t necessarily be a psychedelic experience. I understand that. But so I come from the 40 cognitive science and where I think of the mind, not inside you, but between you and the world. And so what I’m saying is the if and that’s how I follow up on it. That’s why I think of consciousness. So anything mind revealing by bringing in consciousness is also in some sense might be world revealing for you. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so this is so another one. This is I kind of touch on this in two chapters on the chapter on attention, the chapter on hallucination, right? So there are all sorts of unconscious perceptions that we’re having right now of the world. We’re not aware of them because they’re unconscious. Yes. And in these psychedelic states or in these kind of more mindful states as well, these perceptions that would normally be kind of outside of our awareness can kind of can be in awareness. So there’s a sense of what you’re having mind revelation. These perceptions are being revealed, but in virtue of that, the world is being revealed. You’re seeing more of the world. So there’s a visit. Oh, sorry. I just want to there’s a possibility then for kind of like a reciprocal opening, right? You can see people. The world is being disclosed more than mine because people often talk that way, too, about a kind of resonance with the world when they’re in these kinds of experiences. Yeah, absolutely. And so it’s easy to fall into the I don’t want to say trap, but like the habit of talking about these experiences, kind of like isolated moments. Yeah. So a typical psychedelic trip, let’s say on psilocybin is about five hours. So we normally think of that’s the thing. But really, that experience will have some effect on long term behavior. And the person will start changing their environment, right? And then they’ll have another trip later on. And this new environment is going to affect the trip. And you can get this you get a transformation in one single experience. But you also get this series of experiences and interaction with the environment that can completely change your life. So let’s get a little bit more than into the theory. So my if you talk about mindfulness, about the control of attention and the psychedelic experience, psychedelic space opening up, you know, providing more resources, you know, attentional resources for allocation. If I. So maybe, you know, we can talk about when I share very similar views, I think they’re sort of emerging consensus views around the nature of attention and then maybe use that to talk about this complementary relationship. Because I think it’s a really great idea between mindfulness, mindfulness relationship to attention, psychedelic relationship to attention and therefore why they kind of need each other, at least for afford each other. Yeah, so this was this is one of these I just I stumbled into this idea as I was working on the book, I didn’t kind of set out with this intention. That’s just as I was kind of connecting the dots. I got this literally a triangle that connects dots. So one point is meditation. One point is psychedelics and one point is awareness. So we have this idea that psychedelics expand awareness, expand a consciousness. And we have the idea that meditation does as well. Right. Yes. And there’s an idea that psychedelics and meditation having similar effects, but they’re clearly also different. So there’s some relationship between them. Yes. And then in the middle of the triangle is attention, because we know attention has like extraordinarily crucial effect on awareness. Attention is roughly speaking, deciding what appears in awareness, but it’s also affecting the character of your awareness. Yes. OK, so we know that meditation is having this effect on awareness. We also know that meditation is having this effect on attention. And we know attention has an effect on awareness, so that that bit of the kind of triangle makes sense. And we know psychedelics are having this effect on awareness. And we know psychedelics are doing something similar to meditation. What is what is the how is it having how are they having the effect on on awareness? And the hypothesis that I float in the book is that they’re having it via some effect on attention. Yeah. And so attention is kind of like you could think of as a unifying ingredient for understanding how these kind of interventions are affecting awareness. Right. Right. And so the puzzle then is, OK, so it seems quite plausible that at least on this kind of symmetry and a lot of the other things we know, the psychedelics are having an effect on awareness via some effect on attention. The question then, of course, is what does that affect on attention? Because it’s clearly not the same effect as meditation is having on attention. This is a very, very good argument. Now, so I’m not settled on any particular view because I think the neurological evidence is still coming in, like there’s still a lot of work to do to kind of to know for sure, but I think a plausible view is that what let me try to figure out which way that this is the best way to purchase psychedelics. OK, here’s I’ll just say the view and then I can backtrack a little bit. I think a plausible view is that psychedelics are disrupting the usual kind of habits of the of kind of allocating attentional resource. Yeah, very much. And a frame. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So with meditation, there’s different practices of meditation. But two in particular that I talk a lot about in the book is focused attention meditation and open monitoring meditation. And in terms of the instructions, they’re both clearly about attention. One is about focusing attention on some objects such as your breath. And the other is I guess it’s less transparently about attention. It’s more about kind of observing your thoughts and sensations and and not reacting to them. But the effect that it has is it distributes your attention. And we know from the science, the scientific investigation of these meditative techniques that they they have observable effects on attention and downstream observable effects on awareness. So one way of kind of summarizing those results is that meditation is having an improvement in the kind of efficiency and control over how we allocate attentional resources. I think what psychedelics are doing is it’s not improving the control over attention. There’s not much work on this, but the evidence that we do have is that psychedelics disrupt our ability to disrupt our performance and attentional tasks. But I think what they’re doing is they’re breaking up our usual habits of attention so that we have a kind of a surplus of attention that can then can flow onto anything and in a somewhat random chaotic way, depending on the kind of psyche of the individual and the environment that they’re in. So one way of kind of fleshing this out, it’s not the only way, is that as we go about our daily lives, a lot of our attention is consumed by like kind of egocentric kind of stuff. So like the fight that we had in the past or our anxiety about finances or what have you. There’s a lot of kind of mental chatter that’s consuming our attentional resources. And the thought is that this is not the only way it can happen, but the thought is that it can knock that stuff out. Yeah. And when it does, you have this surplus of attention that you wouldn’t normally would normally be spending on that stuff that can now be spent on something else. But this is like, you know, our Harris’s idea, you sort of, you know, knocking out the automatic prioritization with the default mode network as all that self-centered kind of cognitive framing of the world. And then that opens up, right? As you said, it opens up potential resources to raise the salience of things that are normally not salient. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it doesn’t have to be so so closely tied to the ego or these sorts of more kind of personal worries, because we like our habits for looking at the world that can get disrupted. And so we have more kind of free flowing attentional resource in our visual field, which is why the vision seems expanded and things seem more colorful and more detailed. And so in that sense, it starts to overlap also with things like the flow experience where people feel as if there’s this connection, sort of insight, cascade, the super salience, and they start to also get a diminishment of that sort of self-conscious reflection. Yeah. And then, of course, farther along, I would argue a continuum, there’s full blown mystical experience where the sense of self is radically diminished. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, a mystical experience as a whole. We could talk about that one forever. That’s I think one kind of like, let’s just say, like a very rough way of characterizing it is like they’re kind of extreme psychedelic experiences. Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah. And so actually, so this is important. So on this on that kind of conceptual space, the psychedelic space framework that I was talking about, whereas you’ve got scope, clarity, duration and novelty, you’re getting kind of a maximization of both dimensions simultaneously. And the more you get a higher score on those dimensions, the more you’re having a mystical experience. I think that’s I think that’s that’s a really good conceptual framework for trying to advocate the dimensionality of that kind of continuum. But please continue. So it sounds like, therefore, there is kind of a compliment, like you can have control. But if you don’t have a lot of extra resources, you can’t do much with it. You have extra resources and you can’t control them. Like, you’re also not going to do much with it. But if you can integrate the two together, that’s presumably going to have a synergistic improvement of that. Yeah, exactly. So one analogy I like is attention is like money. And if you’re not good at managing your money and you suddenly get a lot of it, it might be fun for a bit, but it’s not going to solve your problems long term. So attention is kind of helping us better manage our attention and psychedelics kind of break it up and we get a lot more of it very, very quickly. And I think this explains why we see these interesting synergies between meditation and psychedelics. Yes, I think that’s right. So I will also you didn’t talk about this as much in the book, but this is what I think converges with what you’re saying. I also pose that one of the benefits of that improved control is an improved capacity for self-correction, so there’s evidence that mindfulness reduces, enhances insight and the same machinery that enhances insight also enhances the capacity to deal with self-deception. And therefore, one of the more longitudinal benefits of an extended mindfulness practice or I would argue the quality of practices is it can reduce the way psychedelics can open you up to bullshit in yourself in very powerful ways. And so that control can also have an aspect of self-correction, self-protection against because disruptive strategies are byvalent. They can go in bad directions. And so you think that sits well with what your theory is. Good. Yeah, absolutely. So I think the kind of the stereotypical psychedelic trip is one that might kind of reveal a lot of a lot of novel content that’s large in character, but very low in clarity. Yes. So the kind of the kind of scene that you get in like Theorem Loving in Las Vegas. Yeah, it’s just a hallucinatory mess. And there’s probably real content underlying that. But it’s such a mess that you’re not understanding any of it. And maybe even worse than that are these cases of confabulation. Yes. So some content is revealed. It’s like truly there, but you misinterpret it in some way because there’s still a lot of like habitual thinking in response to that. So it could be. I don’t know, like suppose you’re talking about content that comes up that’s associated with trauma of some kind. Yeah, exactly. People confabulated as they do in the face of trauma in order to try and deal with that. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So something may come up that’s real, but it gets interpreted through a distorted lens. Yeah. And then that can end up having a negative effect on someone’s life. Yes. Right. Because they might take action on that insight. And then, yeah, obviously, it’s not going to align with reality. So I think there’s different ways of kind of mitigating that risk. So it’s obviously not this is definitely going to be the case. I think probably on average, the tendency is more towards enough clarity to get an insight that’s actionable in a positive way. But there’s still that risk. And I think there’s some measures we can take to mitigate it. One is practicing mindfulness, getting better at understanding how your mind is working and kind of controlling and having that kind of psychological flexibility. Another is your book. You should also bring philosophical reflection to bear on the phenomena as well. Well, to be honest, that’s why I wrote the book. So I wrote the book primarily for my former self because I was having these experiences and I knew that some of them were clearly very valuable. They were like leading to dramatic improvements in my life. But I was not the insights were less obviously beneficial, let’s say. And I realized that it’s not you can’t just have these because they come through with such certainty, that’s the thing, the kind of extra misleading. Yes, you get an insight, but it’s with such a high level of confidence, way higher than your normal levels of insight. And so these need to be embedded in some kind of analytical framework so they can be kept in check and kind of triangulated with everything else going on in your life. Excellent. Yeah. I sometimes put it is we’ve got to find a way to sail between the skill and purpose of deifying or demonizing these experiences. Right. And I think a proper job of philosophical reflection is to do just that. So this I think we’re now right on the cusp of the next thing that I want to talk to you about, which is we then go from a philosophy of psychedelic experience into psychedelic philosophy, which is like not what this philosophy you have to say about psychedelics, but what can psychedelics do to help the practice of philosophy, which specifically understood as a combination of wisdom. And I really enjoyed that. I thought that that maps up with so much of the work. You know, you see, you know, here goes the understanding of ancient philosophy, the geoprotonic story conditions, the cultivation of wisdom. I’m saying too much. You go. You. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So the book came out of this kind of double insight at the same time. One was that the first half was that, hey, this is a philosophical project asking what is psychedelic experience? But at the same at the very same moment and like the same kind of insight, I had the I saw that the thing that was attracting me to these experiences was the same thing that was attracting me to philosophy. I’ve had a similar experience. Yeah. Wow. OK, I kind of want to hear that. But let me finish this and I want to come back to that. So, yeah, so I had this this insight that there’s something kind of intrinsically philosophical about the experience. And I was having these experiences and they were affecting my philosophy. And in a way that seemed to be doing better, like I was writing I was writing journal articles that were, I think, objectively better. So my peers were telling me that similar experiences. Ah, OK. Yeah, it’s OK. Can you tell me a little bit more about? Well, just a little I’ll just give you a quick thing, an example of this. So I said so a version of the meeting prices high school and I went into university and I took an introductory philosophy class and I read The Republic and I met Socrates and the Potonic framework. I was like, this is what I’m looking for. This I come out of fundamentalist Christian sort of framework and like the taste for transcendence was still in my mouth, but I had rejected that framework. And then I found, wait, here’s a way of doing this that doesn’t require me to sacrifice my rationality and has genuine aspirational value and power. And I got really attracted to this and then I went on an academic philosophy and the topic of wisdom dropped off the table. This discipline that has wisdom in its very and the love of wisdom in its name drops off the table. Now, I found an independent value for our philosophy. One we’re exemplifying right now, reflection, conceptual clarification, theoretical integration. These are all and they helped me help me become a good public scientist. So I don’t regret it, but I was hungry for the cultivation of wisdom. So I went to a place down the road that taught Tai Chi and meditation. And I said, and meditation and especially initially the Tai Chi was. And what was happening, I was having powerful flow experiences and eat because I was doing this very religiously three or four hours a day in total, and going to the center multiple times a week. So I was aware of all these sort of phenomenological changes within the practice, you know, you’re in Tai Chi. You get there’s days where you’re burning like you’re in a furnace and other days where you’re cold, like you’re an ice and all that sort of stuff. And thankfully, I had some traditional literature to point, say, don’t freak out about the emphasis, keep going. Right. But then I was in graduate school at the time, and my friends came to me and they said, what’s up with you? You know, when you’re in graduate school, you feel you’re an imposter the whole time, right? That’s right. Right. Oh, no. I said, what do you mean? And they said, well, you’re way different now. You’re much more balanced and flexible in your thinking, resonate with people and I realized, oh, the Tai Chi is somehow permeating my life and percolating through my psyche in ways that I’m not aware of. And so it was satisfying that E for the cultivation of wisdom. I was like, I got along far enough and like cognitive science started to shift and philosophy shifted towards the four E cognitive science stuff, these topics of mindfulness and wisdom and insight and mystical experience became scientifically legitimate. And the thing that we came back together. Yeah, nice. It’s so similar to the experiences I’ve had. I’ve had people come up to me who I hadn’t seen for years and they I’ve had I’ve had people say that I’m just happier and more relaxed and kinder. Yeah. And one person, one in front of mine said, it’s like I’ve been upgraded. Exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, like it’s and I’ve had yes, so it’s interesting you mentioned Tai Chi because one of the kind of really big insights that I had for myself personally was how important having a movement practice is. Thank you for saying that. I could not. Yeah. And not just for health, like it’s often associated with health and well-being for philosophy. Yes, exactly. For the cultivation of wisdom. Exactly. That’s an excellent discussion with Ray Kelly around this. And I gave a talk at the body of embodiment or was it the mindful movement symposium? Yeah, exactly. So let’s get into this then. So how let’s be more specific, more zero. How can psychedelic experience? Contribute to the cultivation of wisdom. Yeah, so there’s different ways of approaching this. One way is to think about what philosophers have said about have said what wisdom is. Yeah. And then we could think about how psychedelics may contribute to those specific ideas about wisdom. I’m just going to say it’s not only philosophers these days, cognitive scientists, the psychology, very, very big, very, very, very popular. Yeah, yeah, that’s a good point. And also, at a more kind of coarse grained level, you could think about it as at a very high level, what is wisdom? And it’s got something to do about living well. Yes, yes. Right. And there’s a lot to unpack there. But at a very high level, it’s about living well. And so we could look at the empirical literature. Are people who are having these psychedelic experiences in the right context, of course? Do they tend to live well afterwards? Is there an improvement in their well-being afterwards? The answer is yes. The evidence seems pretty clear that there is this improvement. So there’s that. And so the question is then, what’s causing that? There’s that correlation. But then what’s the underlying mechanism or process? So there’s so one conception of wisdom that I really like, it’s not the only one, but the one that’s probably my favorite is the Socratic one, which can be kind of I think it’s more nuanced and subtle than how it’s usually characterized. But very briefly, it’s being aware of your ignorance. Yes. Or in a way, not being ignorant, because there’s a way of understanding ignorance. It’s not just knowing stuff, but it’s also kind of deliberately avoiding what you don’t know. And I think so there’s a kind of one way to think of that is we go around our lives with a kind of hidden uncertainty, we think we know things when we actually don’t. Yes. And there’s all sorts of processes that are causing that. But we kind of confident in some kind of belief that we have. But deep down, we’re actually uncertain about it. And one thing that meditation and psychedelics can do is they can bring that kind of uncertainty up to the surface. Very much. And you can realize, actually, I’ve been in extreme cases and you see this a lot in the literature and the reports, people say, I don’t know anything, let alone a specific item. And this kind of go ahead. You know, I think you know, you can see from some of my work, the Socratic tradition is just deeply important to me. And so, you know, one of my favorite phrases is wisdom begins in wonder. Where wonder is curiosity, it’s more than what you’re talking about here. And Fuller talks about that difference. Curiosity is, you know, the wonder is this much more comprehensive. I don’t know. But but but but but but ultimately experienced a positive framing rather than some sort of anxiety or crippling or traumatic fashion. Yeah, more like fascination. Yeah, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. So one thing that’s worth mentioning is that this is one point where I was completely surprised by this, it dovetails with my previous area of research on probability decision making. Right. So one of the I think probably the kind of most dominant and destructive cognitive bias we have is that of overconfidence. Yeah. And a lot of my work is on trying to figure out how to people how to help people be less overconfident in their forecasts and decisions. You see that in confirmation bias and things like that. That’s what you’re talking about. Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different biases and mechanisms that feed into this kind of overall bias of overconfidence. And I think meditation psychedelics kind of differentially target those depending on their on the individual. That’s very interesting. That’s very interesting. But keep going on the central topic right now. Yeah, sure. OK, so so there’s I’m just sure I’m going to say this is a Socratic one, which is you kind of have hidden uncertainty or lack of knowledge and that’s brought to the surface. There’s the Aristotelian notion of phrenesis, which is often translated as practical wisdom. It’s it’s pretty good, but not perfect. Interestingly, there’s some people have argued for a translation. It’s mindfulness. Yes. And I’m more happy with that because it comes closer. Yeah, that I think that practicality, especially in our culture, it has a connotation that’s very opposite what Aristotle’s trying to point to. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it’s pretty close to mindfulness, but I think one component of phrenesis that’s missing from mindfulness is being experienced in life. Yes. So Aristotle is pretty clear about this, that you don’t expect kind of young people to have phrenesis. It’s something that comes with age and not just merely with age, but also kind of being actively engaged in life and kind of experiencing all these different circumstances and learning in an optimal way. It’s so it’s the research point. It’s more correlated with what’s called psychological richness than just age. Right. Yeah, yeah, exactly. People are pursuing a life that’s psychologically enriching is the degree to which they will cultivate from this. Yes. Yeah, exactly. So with that with that qualification in place, I think it’s very, very close to mindfulness. Yeah. And we kind of I mentioned this earlier, there’s a lot to say about mindfulness. I think one aspect of it is definitely being able to pay attention to the present moment and kind of see truly what’s going on. And that’s clearly an important part of phrenesis. You need to be able to see what the situation is in order to know what about your experience you’re going to bring to the situation. I would say that in addition to that, enhanced awareness, the thesis has an enhancement of another capacity. I talk a lot about which is relevant to realization. It’s Aristotle continually talks about being able to do what’s appropriate in the situation, being able to fit your cognition and your behavior appropriately the situation as the defining feature of it’s that ability to sort of evolve your salient landscaping and your behavior to fit the situation really well. But I think it is where it goes beyond just sort of mindfulness. Yeah, exactly. What somewhat puzzling kind of aspect about phrenesis and the surrounding literature is that on the one hand, it’s clearly kind of a perceptual faculty, but on the other hand, it’s very clearly tied to deliberation as well. Right. And it’s those two. I think it’s those two things that are kind of at the same time. You have this perceptual faculty, but you also have enhanced deliberation, which I think comes through. So coming at this from the mindfulness angle, that comes through like an enhanced working memory capacity. So you’re able to hold more of the situation in mind and more about different possible previous life lessons in mind. Integrate these things in a deliberative fashion, but also in a way that allows insight to kind of shine through and and better on the situation. I think that’s good. I mean, Aristotle also has Sophia and there’s a relationship. Oh, yeah. But the system Sophia in the cultivation of it. But in between, there’s Plato because I think Plato, right? Plato has an idea of wisdom as an aggagic, right? The asset, the center of the turn. And for me, that’s an also another important notion, because we mentioned that earlier, this capacity to get reciprocal opening going. And I’ve talked with Mark Lewis, who’s got a theory of addiction as the opposite reciprocal narrowing, right? It’s like a like, what did you call it? Psycho cryptic, right? And yeah, right. The world is losing complexity and novelty. So eventually you get to the place where you can’t be any other than you are. And the world can’t be any other than that is. And so your behavior is completely compelled. That’s addiction. And then you get to give an aggagic as reciprocal opening. And for Plato, that’s a I think that’s a model of also another model of wisdom that I think is important. And it’s a dimension that the and it was to say, don’t pick up on. And I think it would converge well with a lot of the stuff we’ve been talking about. Yeah, absolutely. Addiction is one form of psychokryptic experience, I think, or psychokryptic state. And the opposite of that obviously must be a psychedelic one. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And it’s not the only form of that happening. I think one aspect of your work that I really liked was the kind of the kind of on the stuff on bullshit. Yes. And this is the kind of part of the meeting crisis. Right. So there’s people who bullshit us, but we’ll also also bullshit ourselves. You can understand that as this kind of attentional cycle that’s spinning you into a psychokryptic state, losing yourself. Yeah. So that’s not addicted to it. I mean, it’s probably an addiction in some sense, but certainly not to any kind of substance in these bullshit cycles. So if you want to continue with you, we can get canvassing some wisdom frameworks. We sort of talked about three product, the product, the salient and setting up a framework and how psychedelic experience could contribute to the cultivation of wisdom. Yeah. So there was one we didn’t quite touch on. We can’t touch on it was Sophia. Yes, it was kind of knowledge, which you could kind of understand as knowledge of kind of higher truths and really kind of important grand truths that it’s such a first principles kind of idea. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So then there’s not the only ways to think about wisdom, but I think that kind of we’ve got three or four kind of pretty, pretty dominant ways of thinking about wisdom. So then what I think about is, OK, so what are the ways that psychedelic experiences might contribute to these? Yes. Right. So we saw this socratic one. You can have this revelation of ignorance. You can realize that you thought you knew something that actually you don’t know. You don’t know. You know, Jackall. Yeah. With so with this Aristotelian notion of Phenis, this this form of wisdom, I’m kind of moving very quickly here, but given it’s striking similarity to mindfulness, you’ve now got a connection to psychedelic experience. And it’s kind of two connections there. One is that psychedelic trips. The evidence is pretty clear about this. Under the right circumstances, they tend to lead to long term increases in mindfulness. And then something I argue for in the book is that psychedelic experiences are also kind of approximate approximations of temporary increases in mindfulness. Yes, I think that’s not the way. That’s a beautiful thesis. Oh, thanks. Yeah. So it’s not they’re not quite so mindfulness would be the best thing. But short failing that you can get different approximations. And I think that explains why psychedelic experiences have these profound impacts on well-being and wisdom. Sorry, I want to interrupt just because I want to say something that really reinforces the point. So going back to this, and I won’t say exactly when, but when I was really starting to achieve very powerfully, I did mushrooms, so I’ve been because I wanted to get a taste. I wanted to get a taste like a touchstone taste. And I was just going to say I did Tai Chi well, I was like, well, I was during the second part, during the psychedelic experience. And and what it did is when I came out of it, I got I got this sort of phenomenological touchstone that I could then use to improve my Tai Chi. Yeah, it get better and better. And then, of course, and as I’ve already mentioned, that wasn’t just within the practice that was percolating out through my psychedelic, through my psyche permeating through my life. And so exactly that that when I read that as a yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. Properly frame that temporary expansion can give you a an aspirational foretaste that you can then, right, can serve as a guide, as a guide for you. Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny you mentioned Tai Chi because, so I said already I had the insight about the movement practice. But one way this came out was that during one of these experiences, I caught myself in the mirror doing, I don’t know, it was Tai Chi or Kigong or something like this. And I never did anything like this in my life. I can believe it. And I realized I was kind of thinking about some philosophical problem. I forget what it was. But I realized I was using those movements to think. Yeah, very much, very much. And so that’s something I really draw upon all the time now. Instead of just being hunched over my computer, kind of furiously reading or typing, I often use a movement practice to help me think about some issue. Wow. I’m sorry, I’m trying to stay focused on you, but the resonance between our experience and our work is really impressive. So you’re building a very good argument very carefully about how psychedelic experience can contribute to these dimensions of wisdom. Please continue. Yeah. So I guess I was that. So mindfulness with phrenesis. So there’s you’ve got these long term increases in mindfulness and these temporary increases in mindfulness where you can kind of snap something up and record and keep it for later on. One example. So an example from my own life is the insight that I have to let myself not know. Yeah. It was a big insight that kind of came through my body. And so I’m not in that state right now, but it’s something I can hold on to and contemplate. And I know I get better at recognizing the kinds of circumstances where I need to kind of bring that to the foreground and kind of contemplate it and use it to guide whatever that I’m doing. So you’ve got so these are I think there’s particular ways of contributing to phrenesis, a kind of practical wisdom. And then another one is Sophia. And I think probably so there’s a kind of this is where things can potentially go off the rails or go kind of more more spiritual mystical than a lot of my kind of my philosophy colleagues would like. So there’s a kind of there’s a kind of safe version of this. And then a more kind of a riskier version. So I’ll do the safe version first, which is just that a lot of philosophical problems or even scientific problems require insight. So the breakthroughs usually come by insight, not by this step by step analytical. Exactly, exactly. So if we’re really interested in Sophia, so this could be that mathematical knowledge or knowledge about physics or philosophy, ethics, whatever it is, however you want to understand that, these kind of bigger topics advancing the knowledge with respect to these things often involves insight and psychedelics and meditation. Like this is the evidence is pretty clear that they promote the promote insight. Yeah. So that’s the safe version. The similar arguments and similar based on similar sort of curation of the empirical evidence and the best theoretical arguments. So there’s I think the evidence for these improving your capacity for systematic insight. So you’re getting maybe something like more systemic insight within finding processes, you’re getting capacity for more systematic insight, not just this problem, but what the insight machine doesn’t just solve problems, there’s problem solving, there’s problem finding insight machine. It also says here’s a bunch of disconnected problems. And look, they’re all one problem. And if you both problem find and then solve that problem with insight, that’s a systematic insight. And that’s often the kind of insights that you’re referring to. And it’s clear, I think, that in fact, the more powerful versions of these psychedelic experiences contribute greatly to people’s capacity for systematic insight. Yeah, definitely. I think there’s kind of small insights. So certainly I’ve had insights where it’s about I need to make a presentation to a company and I need to find some kind of cool way of presenting the material and given the time constraints and what I know about the audience. So that sort of stuff happens. But then you can also have these huge insights that are kind of not even propositional and form. They’re more like a kind of a revelation of a perspective, a different way of looking at the world. I think it’s just reminding me that it’s important to think again about the mechanisms behind these, because without those, it can kind of sound somewhat fanciful. I think what’s going on behind the scenes of all this is just these disruptions to attention. Right. So I don’t think you can just take psychedelics and have some profound insight on, say, quantum mechanics or something like that. You need to learn the thing that you’re thinking about, the problem. You need to really like good, high quality knowledge needs to go in. But then in that process of doing that, you form these attentional habits, certain ways you call them frames, these ways of framing problems. Right. And meditation, I feel like, like make it easier to kind of break those frames or to switch frames and to see the problem from a different angle. Yeah. I wanted to ask you very briefly. I don’t want to divert you for too long. And so some of the work I published, I made a distinction between meditation and contemplation, where meditation tends to be a very frame breaking kind of behavior, and as you say, control, whereas contemplation is much more of a frame making behavior. I have to compare it to meditation is looking at your glasses and seeing if you need to clean them. And then contemplation is seeing if you can see anything new once you clean them. And you need both. Each one tells you that the other one is going well. Right. So if I’m doing all this contemplation and I take off my glasses and everything really smudged and dirty, I go, oh, my contemplative practices are going wonky, right? Right. I think I clean my glasses and I put them on and I can’t see anything new. I don’t get the new vision. Then maybe my meditation is just sort of playing around and kind of mental observation. Right. So I see there. That’s why I think one of the and this is part of it. And I know you’re aware of this, you know, the criticism about the West’s appropriation or misappropriation of mindfulness is the reduction. Right. If you look at most mindfulness traditions, there’s a rich ecology of practices, there’s meditative practices, there’s movement practices, contemplative practices, there’s social interaction, ethical practices and all of it. It’s all constellated together. And so I just wanted to expand what you meant by the machinery. The machinery is like it’s very, very rich and dynamically self-organizing. I just wanted to just expand that for just a little bit. I think it’s an important point. Yeah, there’s a lot there. And two things I want to throw in because I want to make sure we come back to this. I think there’s also the eightfold path. So we tend to focus on the mindfulness. Right. I think we miss a lot by not focusing on the full eightfold path. Exactly. And then there’s a question I had for you. I’m hoping we can get into it. I really like this kind of two dimensional space you’ve got of it’s transparency and opacity and features and feature. Yeah. Yeah, I really like that. And so the way you understand is meditation is kind of scaling down of attention and contemplation is scaling up. I was curious. So what about the other quadrants? Yeah. So me too. And whether or not I haven’t been able to talk to people and I played around with it, I have part of it is just I have not enough time into part of the reason. It’s not just laziness or busyness on my part. I can’t find anything. So one of the methodological strengths, I want to know the mindfulness practices that facilitate insight and flow. And those two quadrants, there’s lots of literature in the inside literature. The back onto those. I can’t find anything in the inside literature to the other two. I looked and I haven’t. Some people have suggested that might be a pathological dimension. I don’t know. But so I mean, part of it was busyness and part of it was I was very concerned that the relationship between mindfulness and insight and mindfulness flow and I won’t go into it, but I think of flow as an insight cascade. Right. That was constantly being said both within the traditions and within the scientific literature, but nobody was trying to. Why? And you didn’t use it. But the traditional Kabat-Zinn definition provides no theoretical machinery to explain that whatsoever. So I was like, so I admit that I became very focused on those dimensions of mindfulness that could help me explain insight and flow and therefore possibly, as you’re doing here, contribute to how can mindfulness belong to the cultivation of wisdom? And again, that’s not the traditional. That’s the wrong word. It’s sort of commonplace, even within psychology, the Kabat-Zinn. Yeah. Why should this contribute to wisdom at all? Right. Yeah. Yeah. In fairness, the Kabat-Zinn, I think his focus was on I mean, he was sort of a trailblazer, right? He was bringing mindfulness in. It’s a good technique for teaching it, I think. Yeah. And I make that very clear. I mean, I don’t know if I said it, but I think you did. The thing I made a distinction between the language of training and the language of explaining. Yeah. What he’s doing is training. So my criticism is of him per se. My criticism is his definition was taken up into academic psychology. Yeah. Yeah. I completely agree. And so I had similar problems with both psychedelic experience and mindfulness. So if I looked at the standard definitions, they didn’t give me anything to work with. Yeah. Because there’s an analytic philosophy. I need to break things down and then plug them into each other. And that’s how you make progress. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the other quadrants, I think you can’t get into those spaces and they are connected to the things that we think about. So certainly I’ve used meditation to kind of take the step back to move to a more opaque mode to facilitate a gestalt shift. Yes. You can bounce around like that, too. And I want to admit that right up front. One of the problems is always a problem when you’re writing an article, right? You can come up with a static schema and remember, it’s not a graph, it’s a schema. I try to convey that right. And yeah, the dynamic aspects of it are I only focused on one dynamic relationship, which is the opponent processing. But there. I’m not claiming that that’s the only dynamic going on. Sure. Yeah. I think you have a really nice point about these understanding mystical experiences as these two different kinds. So one was the pure consciousness and the other one was the kind of more unity. Yeah. The maximal scaling down will give you something like a pure consciousness event. The maximal scaling up will give you sort of resonant and one minute. And then there is a third state that’s specifically talked about, literature like Pozna, in which you’re doing this. And these are just gestural metaphors at best. But I strongly believe with good reason that I’ve experienced that. Yeah, non-duality, I think, is exactly. It’s the deepest and the farthest out. It’s the grain of sand in the world. It’s all of that. Yes, very much. Yeah, me too. I think so. You must be familiar with Stace’s work. He calls this the kind of vacuum and plenum understandings of mystical experience and the kind of the full thing is actually both at the same time. Very much. Very much. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for saying that. That was. Yeah, I have to say, I really enjoyed it. I’ve read a few of your papers now and I’ve been watching a bunch of your lecture series and yeah, it’s really awesome. Well, I’m having the same experience now with your work. So I just want to reciprocate. I want to know as soon as your book’s out. But obviously, I’m recommending it very strongly by this video. I want to recommend it to everybody. I think. I’ll be a little bit bolder. I think this is the book that people should read about psychedelic experience. There’s a lot of other books out there, but I think this book is. I think your book is getting I’ll use one of my terms for model positive. I think it’s getting an optimal grip on the phenomenon. Wow. Well, thank you very much. It’s yeah, I wrote it for as I said, I wrote it kind of for my former self. The book I wish had existed when I first had started having these experiences. There were lots of other books out there, but they didn’t. It’s not to say that they were wrong or anything, but they just didn’t speak the language that I spoke back then. It’s why you also didn’t do the work that you’re doing like this. This this double move of the philosophy of psychedelics and then the second and then a psychedelic philosophy that is that is, as far as I can tell, unique and original to you, and it’s valuable, it’s important. So I just did return us back. You had gone on the non risky Sophia cultivation aspect of psychedelia and then we get into the more the more the more risky. But we’re already touching on it, the mystical. Right. Yeah. A risky version of how psychedelic experiences can contribute to the cultivation of Sophia. So what is that more risky version? Why is it more risky? But why is it potentially also more valuable? Or at least, yeah, or has a kind of independent value from the previous one? Yeah, that’s a great question about the value of these experiences. Yeah, so one. So there’s a few controversial points in the book, but I think probably the the one that kind of like kind of rubs people the wrong way, put it that way, or scientists in particular, is that I think, let me see how to phrase it, that. OK, I’ll do the weak version of it first, that there’s in order to. A very valuable way of understanding what mystical experiences are is in terms of their ineffability. Yes. We need to take their ineffability like seriously as the kind of primary feature of these experiences. And one reason why I think this is for people like us academics working in the West, we’re hyper analytic. Yeah, and we’re yeah, and we’re kind of so theory driven, evidence driven. Right. And it’s our only way of understanding something is to be able to kind of write it out in propositional form and have an argument and evidence and kind of articulate in a way that so that anyone can understand it and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s obviously been a like a incredibly powerful thing we’re doing right now. Yeah. But I think mystical experiences are I should be careful how to articulate this. I think there’s a valuable way of understanding mystical experiences such that there’s singularities for that kind of understanding enterprise and one kind of a like method for understanding these experiences or kind of getting the understanding that they afford us is by contemplating what that ineffability amounts to. And so this is the what I call in the book, then the no theory theory of mystical experience. So everyone wants to have a theory of mystical experience. So people say that it’s an experience of unity, of oneness. Some people say that it’s an experience of the illusion of the self. Some say it’s pure consciousness, that there’s different theories and we have these psychometric scores like we can measure like how much oceanic boundlessness you experience. And I think there’s values there. I’m not saying that don’t do that at all, but it can only take us so far. Yeah, and so, yeah, I can I don’t know which. So there’s a lot to watch into that. I want to respond to that. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. I think there’s a profound thing in here. This is something this is a more. I wouldn’t call this a cognitive scientific. There’s more of a philosophical point, but I think it has bearing on what I’ve seen happening in quantum science. So there was one of the differences sort of before you look at and I say this happens suddenly, but if you sort of look before the scientific revolution and then after there is what happens is a kind of fundamental change. I’ve been talking to this recently with Greg Enriquez, psychologist, Zachary Stein, also a psychologist. Here’s the fundamental chain. So. The neoplatonic Christian tradition, I’ll just use the West, but I point to analogous things and other traditions. There’s an idea that there are certain clues, there are certain dimensions in our ontology. There’s a kind of ontological depth perception that is only available to us after we undergo significant transformation, that there are there that are truths that will only be disclosed in transformation, and this isn’t a really bizarre idea because we acknowledge this in terms of our development. There’s truths that you can’t get when you’re a five year old. You have to transform the machinery. It’s not about getting different beliefs. You have to transform the functionality of the machinery in order for you to be able to see and realize. I’m using a sort of Piagetian model here, by the way, that Piagetian stage change is used by people talking about wisdom as the child is to the adult, the adult is to the sage. And so what mystical experiences point to is that there I think that there are truths that are only accessible and not only more, but kinds of truths, more importantly, that are only accessible to us after transformation. Now, this goes against kind of like, you know, the Cartesian and the blockade proposal. No, no, you you don’t you don’t have to be personally involved. You just have to get the right method and get the right training and the right method, and that method is universal and therefore it will give you access to everything you need and you don’t have to you don’t need any of this spirituality in order to get to the depths of reality. And I think what mystical experience does is it it reminds us, no, no, our development isn’t done and there is a lot of reality that is we’re blind to because we have not gone through the requisite transformation. And then if you look at, you know, even though it’s like hardline chumpskin literature, transformations are not representations. They don’t have representational content because they are not representations, they are transformations. And so that’s what I wanted to say about. So while they don’t have content in themselves, I think there is a developmental. I don’t know, it’s a developmental progress and I hate to use the word progress, but there’s a developmental progression that has ontological significance. That’s what I wanted to say. I don’t know how that lands for you, but that’s pretty much an argument I’ve been making. Yeah, I completely agree. And it touches on one of the reasons why I like the ineffability idea, because I don’t know what transformation you need to go through. Yeah, right. I could make some guesses, but there’s a good chance I’m going to lead you astray if I say mystical experiences about seeing the unity of everything. That may not be the thing that you need to hear. Exactly. It’s too much stuff. Not enough for me, sis. Exactly. Yeah. Well, so there’s some I try not to get irritated about this stuff, but the people going around saying like there’s no self and saying that you have to realize there’s no self as a kind of metaphysical statement. I think that can be a useful pedagogical tool for a lot of people. Yeah. But I think for all people, it can do more harm than good. Maybe what they need to hear is say that the upman is Brahman message. Yeah, instead. Right. I agree. And I think there’s also I mean, I have a whole series out there, The Illusive Eye with Greg Enriquez and Christopher Nesbitt. They’re actually trying to get the best philosophical reflection, cognitive science, developmental psychology. And one of the things I would say, just like attention and psychedelic experience, when people talk about the no self, they think they’re saying something very specific and but it is massively equivocal. Are they talking about phenomenological aspects of narrative ego? Are they talking about a unified functionality of agency? Those aren’t the same meaning for the word self, which are you talking about? It just conflating them together is like, I hope you don’t mean that no self means I lose my agency. It’s clearly not what the Buddha was talking about. He talks about freedom. The opposite. Yeah, exactly. The enhancement of agency. So what do you mean? So, yeah, I agree. I think I mean, yeah, I really like that argument made about I don’t know if you’re familiar with John Wright’s notion of sensibility transeptics, where he talks about the fact he uses an example from Iris Murdoch about a mother in law who doesn’t like her daughter in law. She sees her daughter alive, sort of coarse and impetuous. And then she realizes she doesn’t have just an insight into her daughter in law. She has an insight into how she’s been framing her daughter in law. Right. She gets more of a systematic insight and she realizes, no, no, she’s been to television and the daughter in law is also is actually, you know, she’s she’s really creative and she’s grounded and she’s you know, she’s wonderfully present. And Wright talks about that as sensibility transcendence, where you realize that you’ve had these categorical meanings of these terms and you need to break them so that you can fit the sort of suchness of that particular person better. And I think that you bring in that in addition to whatever sort of what I don’t know what to call it, ontological view from above, they go kind of transcendence. People also need sensibility transcendence in the cultivation of wisdom. Yeah, yeah. And the only way to really I mean, you can get some kind of outside guidance on that. But really, the only way to do it is to go within or to have that internal transformation. Well, it’s very much like therapy. Right. And I think it’s therapeutic. I want to be clear about that. But I think it’s very much like therapy. You have these general techniques like this or like like the law, you have these general techniques, but you have to have a human being in there like to the particular right, the particular developmental transformation of course, that the person thought. I think that’s an excellent. And I put together the value of ineffability as keeping an unanalyzable space for that idiosyncratic specificity of transcendence. I think that’s a beautiful point. I think. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Yeah. The flip side of it is also epistemic humility. Yes, of course. Just so this comes back to the Socratic thing, like realizing what you don’t know. So I’m not in a like I’ve had these amazing experiences and interpret them in a particular way, but I don’t know what it is for you. I don’t know what the best thing I could say to you to get you there. Unless I’ve spent a lot of time with you and I’m highly empathetic and we’re kind of in alignment. And this is what you see, I think, with Zen teachers and the students. You have that work being done with the masters, understanding the student and learning what is blocking their progress. And then you can often don’t make a propositional statement. Right. They presented with a con or something like this. Right. Yeah. This reminds me what Aristotle said about wisdom. He picks up on, you know, like, you know, the way the virtues are not, you know, the virtues can’t be reduced to rules. Doesn’t mean you don’t use rules to cultivate virtue, but, you know, be kind. That’s a good rule. But that doesn’t mean I what does it mean to be kind to my daughter? What does it mean to be kind to my lover? What does it mean to be kind to a stranger? Those aren’t the same things. Right. And then but also going backwards, what it means for John to be kind is different for what it means for you to be kind, which is just like what it means for Peter to be strong is different from what it means for Tom to be strong. Yeah. All of that, all of that, all of that fittedness. I think that’s really important. Yeah, I think that that’s exactly right. Putting the two together, the way the sensibility transcends outward and the epistemic humility inward. I think that’s really good. And I like the idea. I really like the idea of ineffability as being like, you know, don’t tread on me kind of this is a space that you need to keep open. So we’ll constantly be recognizing the need for sensibility, transcendence and epistemic humility. I think that’s really good. Thanks. This is what I want to add. There’s a kind of technical problem that arose out of this thinking that I’m still very much puzzled by, which is the connection between ineffability and uncertainty and complexity. Yeah. And then also, how would we how is this going to like what is this going to look like in a kind of scientific worldview? Right. So suppose we genuinely take this this ineffability of the experience to be completely serious. Then there’s a question like, how is it how does that line up with the scientific analysis of these experiences, because we can still scan people’s brains while they’re having these experiences, we can measure everything. We can talk about it. We can talk about it. And you said we should not. You’re not saying don’t talk about the phenomenology, you’re not saying don’t talk about the functionality. You’re not saying that you explicitly say that. And yes, so. So I mean, so I take it the difficulty doesn’t lie in that we can do the scientific or at least the philosophical reflection on the phenomenology, we can do the scientific investigation of the functionality, etc., because we do want to understand how these experiences contribute in general to wisdom, right? So there is some functionality we’re trying to get at. And I take it you don’t think that those are not available to scientific theorization. Am I understanding it correctly? Yeah, I think so. I’m still kind of thinking this way, actually. So, yeah, so I think so. Remember, I said there was a psychedelic space and the deeper you go into it, the more you approach it, a mystical experience. Yes. And I think a lot of the experiences that we say are mystical, not to denigrate them anyway, but they’re not like that absolute maximum point. There’s a lot of ego, dissolution, sense of timelessness. All that sort of stuff can happen kind of along the way. And I think we can talk a lot about all of that stuff. Like I could talk about ego, dissolution, dissolving of subject object distinction, and I can also look at potential neuro correlates of that, right? So maybe this orthogonality between the default mode network and the task positive networks, that’s been a candidate. So we see that dissolve and that seems to line up with the dissolving of the distinction. Not saying that’s true, but it’s completely plausible that we would find things like that. By plausible, you mean it seems like we’re making we’re doing the kind of science that we do elsewhere. We’re gathering good empirical argumentation. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And then there’s also the possibility that you can then say, I’m doing this, might improve these other functions because of that happening. Yeah. Exactly. So open to all of that. But then maybe this is not like ever realized in actuality, but there is an ideal limit, like the maximum of clarity, scope, duration and novelty, the full blown mystical experience. And suppose for the moment that point is actual, like some people actually have it. It’s not just approximation. So that actually happens. And it’s intrinsically ineffable. So we can’t say what it is. We can’t even say that we can’t say what it is. There’s this paradoxicality of ineffability. OK, so we have these mental states like that. Right. How do we study them? So we need in terms of from a scientific perspective, so we could have the kind of brain scans as neurological evidence and some bridge principles that we connect to. Right. So with the correlates between the default mode network and the task positive networks and ego dissolution, there’s a there’s a we’re studying something at the neurological level and we have a bridge principle that connects that to the to the mental level. Suppose we had the bridge principle and we had as as much neuroscientific evidence as we could possibly want. I wouldn’t really get it. You can also study the developmentally, you can study people, what’s their functionality like on various measures, cognitive, affect, existential, before and after. And you can see the difference. You need intervention study, which is, well, how does it like does it reliably transform? And if you get science on that and say, look, there’s this reliable transformative thing that happens across this state developmentally. I think you can also do that. I don’t see why you couldn’t do that scientifically as well. Yeah, nice. Completely agree. So suppose we have all of that. We have a puzzle there. So if the mental state is genuinely ineffable, what is one more frame is, what is the neural correlate of ineffability? Right. And so there’s a there’s a kind of kind of a skeptical response to this question, which is that you can imagine like somehow like the kind of the kind of like, let’s say, like language centers of the brain are knocked out. So people just can’t speak anymore or whatever. So that’s why that’s why these experiences are seen as ineffable. But another kind of kind of non skeptical sort of way of understanding what the correlate might be, might be that it’s also ineffable at the scientific level as well. So what would be what would that amount to? Right. Because that seems like quite a strange thing is that like the the the I use the term singularity. So you could think like, are we going to see like black holes in the brain? That’s unlikely. Or some weird quantum effect. I wouldn’t want to like hang my theory on those ideas. But I think maybe like and this is I’m not committed to this at all, but it’s something an idea of being playing around with. Ineffability at the physical level is like it’s indescribability and descriptions in science and philosophy is compression. Right. You have some observations and you’re compressing the data. Right. And so indescribability would be incompressibility. And so what would incompressibility look like? It would be a kind of explosion in complexity. And no discernible patterns in these states. So this is something I’m not committed to, but it’s something I’m curious to see if we end up seeing something like this happen. We already are seeing this kind of complexification of the brain state in psychedelic states. I was going to say that the kind of developmental evidence and the neurological is we’re getting flexification, especially developmental. And then there’s a conformity theory like the platonic, there was the teal platonic theory that there’s a kind of knowing that isn’t about having description, it’s about conforming so that I get a complexity in my in my brain. It’s actually my brain in between the brain in the world that couples to. That’s why you have a lot of sexual medicals, I would say, for this, right, that couples to the complexity of the world. But if that’s the case, there’s a sense in which and I’m not trying to press on what you just said, but there’s a sense in which, you know, it does fit into the developmental trajectory. There’s one way of understanding development is to flexifying your brain so that it couples to the complexity of the world to get better and better at staying in continuity of contact with reality, if you’ll allow me that way. And so I think the idea that we’re getting a kind of explosion. See, I. I’m glad you said complexity, because when I first was thinking about I thought you were saying sort of noise, and I don’t think that’s right, because that’s inscrutable. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It’s because it also, you know, there’s enough of the phenomenology that people are there’s something there’s something that’s supra intelligible, not sub intelligible going on that seems to be as far as I can go, very universal. This idea of a complexity that somehow couples to but that you can’t compress into any kind of knowledge format. I don’t think that that’s it. I mean, I think that’s I don’t think it’s an implausible idea. I think more argument needs to go into to make it a plausible idea. But I’ll put it this way, and I mean this as a compliment. I think it has a facial plausibility. Yeah, I think so, too. At least as a so I mean, I like puzzles. And this was a puzzle that I got led I was led to. And this is an intriguing way of solving that of solving the puzzle. But I kind of say is I’ve come to something very similar about, you know, to get to this complexification that that can’t that can’t compress itself. But it’s something you are. It’s not something you have or can speak. And this is again kind of a report, right? It’s that you get a complexity, right? That couples to the world. And you have analogs. And I mean this weekly, but you have your Arrows work that one of the points of narrative isn’t its content, it’s that narrative puts our cognition into a kind of a form of dynamical complexity that tracks dynamical systems in the world. So when you start to think narratively, you turn your brain processing into more of a dynamical system, right? Across time and across think of a plot and character like you do it. And what you’re doing is setting yourself for tracking. It’s very good for tracking people. Is there a basic argument? Regardless of the content of the narrative, the narrative itself helps you conform to the dynamical complexity of persons. So I’m not saying that’s the same thing, but I’m saying you can see that kind of thing. A lot of times you can see this, that it’s just the narrative itself that is somehow valuable. That’s me trying to say, I think it’s very similar and convergent, but I’m also hesitant like you. So I was also talking to myself when I said it as sort of a pre-efficient. Yeah, I mean, it’s a little bit of an out there idea. So that’s why I’m a little bit cautious about it. But I think you see this like when you look at the reports of mystical experiences, they often bifurcate. You see people saying the exact opposite thing. I’ve pointed that out multiple times. I pointed that out in some of the work I’ve done. Where people come out, like there’s in Taylor’s book, I can’t remember the title. I remember I was reading these two reports side by side. One person goes in and they come out and said, now I know there’s a God. Another person comes in and says, now I know there’s no God. And they’re both joyful. You’re both happy. You’re both becoming wiser. And I said, yeah, that’s really, really. I thought that was really, really important. Yeah. And you see this with the dominant theories as well, with the kind of perennialism and contextualism. Yeah, exactly. So a lot of people have the idea that there’s a common core to all these experiences. People say, no, they’re highly contextual and kind of constructed from your context, your beliefs and whatever. And so I think as we get more precise at measuring, especially using these micro phenomenological techniques, you’re getting more precise measurements at the phenomenological level and we get better at measuring it at the brain level. I think what we might find is that there’s just so much complexity. There’s no beyond saying there’s a complexification and talking around the experience, like approximations to it. There’s no there’s nothing that we can say scientifically that would speak to the kind of what the experience is. And this is only meant as an analogy. It might be that it’s like the weather and we can have meteorology, but we can’t get a meteorology that gives us the kind of predictive success we have in other sciences. I think that’s highly probable. Yeah. But we’re getting to the end of our time. We covered everything I wanted to talk about pretty much. I hope you feel that you got to present your ideas. It’s absolutely good. So I know you need some links for this video so that I can promote your work, especially thanks to the experience I want to. I think it’s important work. I want people to engage with you. I would like to set up a meeting between you and one of my favorite dialogical partners, the secret of unity, who does some of the best work on mysticism and the I’ve had a great series of dialogues about this cognitive science and mysticism and the great of you two talk about some. I’d like to give my guests any final summative or cumulative thing you want to say about our discussion today. Yeah, I mean, we could talk about this forever. So I think we did. We had a pretty good this composition is a pretty good optimal grip on the on the topic. If people want to. So the book is not out yet. It’s still going through the publication process. So if people want to find out about the book, they can just go to my website. It’s Aidan Lion dot com. This is my full name. And then there’s a place where you can sign up for the email newsletter and find out when it comes out. Great. Well, I hope we talk again and I want to. Yeah, me too. It’s wonderful. Yeah, maybe maybe now that we’ve got more of an explanation and explanation of your work, we can talk about how that discussion about points of convergence and maybe points of diverge if we were working. Yeah, I find that. Yeah, I would. Yeah, given that we agree on so much. And I think we really came up this topic independently, like from different perspectives, obviously touching points on some of the same literature, but really came to a lot of the same ideas in an independent way. And yeah, so I really want to find out where we disagree. That’s where we’re going to learn. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, we’ll set up another we’ll set up another discussion. This is good disclosure of disagreement. We’ll call it. Very cool. Thank you, Karen. Thanks.