https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=v_K5ykNOd1s
I think that one thing that psychedelics do teach us is how little we know. It’s a useful reminder of how little we know about the universe, about reality, about the way things are. You know? And in that sense, it can be very useful, because science, especially, and scientists particularly, tend to be arrogant. You know, there’s a tendency for science to say, we pretty much have this thing figured out. You know? And psychedelics are a reminder that, no, actually, we have only a very tiny slice of it figured out, and even that is subject to question, because that’s the nature of science, right? You never prove a theory. All you can do is not disprove it. You know? So we understand in great detail a very small piece of reality, but there’s an infinitude of reality beyond that that we know basically nothing. So we need science. Science and scientists should be humble. They should always keep that in mind, how little we know. That said, though, so with that preamble, I do have to say, you know, reductionism or skepticism or what they sometimes call Occam’s razor approach, the principle of parsimony, is a useful tool in science, because it is a statement that the … What explains the data, the simplest model that explains the data, let’s start there, you know? And then its shortcomings, its limitations, its deficiencies will come to light as we begin to investigate phenomena, and eventually we’re going to … But science starts with hypotheses about the way things are, what my granddad used to call how the boar ate the cabbage, you know? It begins with theories about the way a certain aspect of reality is. You create a hypothesis, you test it against the observed data, and if something comes up that the data, you know, that your model can’t explain, then you say, okay, the model is deficient. We either have to modify the model, maybe we have to blow up the model, maybe it’s completely invalid. Usually, that’s not the way it works. I mean, you tweak it, you change a thing here, a thing there, and you make it fit better with what we presume that we know, right? When it comes to entities, here’s the thing. I know that people say, oh, no, this is real, this is more real than reality itself. But you know, people are not epistemologists. People are not qualified to say what is more real than reality itself. You know, I mean, people may think it’s more real, it may seem more real than reality itself. You know, we’ve all had vivid dreams, right? And we wake up and we think, oh, my God, that was so real. But you know it was a dream, right? Because you woke up and it’s not there. And so I think that the judgments made by people who encounter these entities, you know, the fact that they have this impression that these things are real and more real than real itself does not necessarily make it so. OK, so let me ask you this. So obviously, when we dream, as you pointed out, we can encounter entities of our imagination. Those are other dream characters. I had a client once who was a lucid dreamer and a very good one. And she could actually ask her dream characters what they represented symbolically, and they would tell her. And so, OK, so let me modify the question that I posed to you before and tell me what you think of this. We know that the psychedelics produce an increment in trait openness. And we know with the psilocybin in particular that if people have a mystical experience with psilocybin, once or a couple of times, that their level of trait openness, which is the creativity dimension, increases by one standard deviation, and that appears more or less permanent. So we could say that one of the things the psychedelics do by loosening the strictures on the more fundamental realms of conception is place people into a state that’s analogous to the state of creativity. And so if you’re creative, you can shift conceptions. And the downside of that is you shift them when it’s not necessary, and the upside is now and then you shift them in a direction that’s extremely productive. And so that shifting becomes more possible under the influence of psychedelics. And then we could say that, well, it’s possible that one of the sources of creativity might be the capacity of the human imagination to generate fictional personalities. We do that in dreams. Obviously, your brain is, we would say, your brain is producing these fictional characters that have many of the attributes of real characters. When you dream, you can see them, you can hear them, you can interact with them. You don’t have immediate access to their contents of consciousness. They seem like autonomous beings. And so we could say maybe what happens when you’re experimenting with psychedelics is that you enter a dreamscape that’s populated by creatures of the imagination that have a certain degree of autonomy. And the influx of information that’s also characteristic of the psychedelic experience produces that sense of hyperreality that’s then attributed to the characters themselves. Does that seem plausible? I know it’s just a hypothesis, obviously, but it is… The auto… Well, it does. I mean, obviously, all we’re doing is trying to construct hypotheses that fit the data, that fit what we know so far, always with the caveat that we don’t know much and the picture is incomplete and so on. But here’s the thing. I think, I mean, the question perpetually that comes up with these entities is you encounter these entities in the psychedelic state, and then the question is, are they real? But I think you have to step back from that, and first of all, you have to say, well, what do you mean by real? Well, yeah, that’s a problem, man. That’s a big problem. I mean, my sort of default position is anything that you experience is real. It’s real because it can be experienced, but does it originate within? Does it come from the collective unconscious? Does it come from out there in some other dimension? And do these terms even make sense? I mean, you just get into an epistemological mess, because how can you even posit there is an outside? I mean, one thing that psychedelics do is they teach you it’s all one. There’s no separation between the self and the cosmos at large and all that. So it’s like it’s a nonstarter. It’s a zero-sum game to … Maybe it’s more useful to say, rather than to say, are they real? You know, because they’re real enough that they’re experienced. So in that sense, they’re real, whether they’re inside or outside, originate from the self or some other dimension. Maybe the question we should ask is, is the information that they transmit useful? Can we learn from it? Can it teach us something that we could not otherwise know? You know, and that seems to be potentially a more useful question.