Freedom of psychedelic consciousness.

I am advocating freedom of psychedelic consciousness.

And the value of informed, coherent and evidence-based perspectives on it. I advocate psychedelic science beyond disciplinary boundaries, psychedelic philosophy, and evolutionary humanism.

Now, what on earth (or elsewhere) might that kind of freedom encompass?

I am advocating the freedom to choose your own state of mind.

I believe it to be of utmost importance to guarantee this freedom to independently and autonomously influence your own way of being in the world, and being with the world too, in agreement with values such as respect, honesty, and dignity. This includes acknowledging yours and others direct experience of an "inner world", "in the privacy of your own heart", as Ram Dass succinctly phrased it - all the possible experiences that you might embody in your lifetime! And it entails that everyone may decide what means they use (or don't use) to reach a certain state of mind on their own, for themselves.

Why am I advocating freedom of psychedelic consciousness?

A core value I believe we should uphold is that of mental autonomy. Acknowledging another sentient being as an autonomous agent (even if only to some degree) must entail granting them an ethical consideration and respect for their option to make decisions for themselves independently, insofar as they do not harm oneself or others.

I hold the aim to increase our autonomy, especially pertaining to consciousness, and one's states of mind as central - the very possibility of it an endeavour that transcends us as individuals, subjects, and persons. I do note, following a laden word, that I consider myself a fan of naturalist approaches (for psychedelics Letheby 2017, for social ontology Kincaid 2024). I too resonate with the approach of evolutionary humanism, as formulated by Schmidt-Salomon (2006) and aim to explore what this might entail for our views on substances and respectively induced experience.

One might say choosing one's own state of mind is to "design experience"; and it is, much in the same way that coming together with friends - and doing whatever you (and your friends) want to do - can be understood as "designing experience". It is the aim for certain qualities of experience.

What even is psychedelic consciousness?

It is a quality of experience, that quality that we might say is an insight into your own mind, as well as some neurological stuff (Carhart-Harris et al. 2014; Shen et al. 2013) that's involved. I might not be able to answer this question in a meaningful way to you, sorry. We might refer to Humphry Osmond's original phrasing "to fathom hell or soar angelic, take a pinch of psychedelic" (Bisbee et al. 2018). We might remember that "psyche" & "deloun" translate to "mind-manifesting" (instead of brain manifesting; Sjösted-Hughes 2023). Yet we have not even begun to help elucidate what this might mean. Especially to psychedelic-naive persons, it is surely not of much help to define the term "psychedelic consciousness".

Humphry's original phrasing already invokes a certain sense of an entheogenic dimension of the word, meaning "generating the divine within" (en-theo) - as is Huxley's "Heaven and Hell" - which might make any secular person skeptical, and rightly so; after all there must not be any presumptions, any specific beliefs required, to be welcome in an open society and to be invited to being mutually civil (and civilised). For the time being, mind-manifesting may denote the process of recognizing or the awareness of certain mental content as mental content, as being of mental origin, as is the case in recognizing an emotion as well as generally experience induced by psychedelic substances. This may involve a quite liberating element (as we are capable of regulating our emotions), it may also be extremely overwhelming, difficult and viscerally challenging. As noted above, we should acknowledge the phenomenological (mind-manifesting) notion or dimension of this term.

Even those nonpharmacological endeavours that might be conducive to psychedelic experiences, like certain meditation practices or what is subsumed under the term "breathwork" can carry risks - any altered states of mind really, but especially those radical departures from the everyday, that characterise the psychedelic. As Albert Hofmann already pointed out, coining the term of the psychonaut, much like the astronaut, they must come back down to earth (the sober state, "regular waking consciousness" or whatever you want to call it).

Druuuuuugs.

Every single time you drink an alcoholic drink, coffee or another caffeinated liquid, or ayahuasca - whether you smoke a cigarette, a joint, THC or DMT; munch on magic mushrooms or some cacti, there is an external-to-your-brain molecule that causes some effect in the brain and thereby may affect perception, experience or behaviour. What you are doing, what is common in these examples is ingesting a psychoactive compound. And chances are when you do ingest some, you intentionally aim to influence your own perception or quality of experience, want to concentrate or relax, or trip.

In highly varying degrees we might even call them psychonaut endeavours (ayahuasca usually more so than beer). Yet the primary aim is probably not explicitly the manipulation of the neurological substrate, or the intention fixiated primarily on neurons, or even takes into account neurons at all. Usually we rather aim to fulfil some qualities of experience and to reach them do not weigh our "neurological options", but merely our "options", what we perceive as possible turns of events, experientially.

Rather, our intentions might be: "I want to have fun", "I want to feel good", "I want to explore myself", or even I want to "live a meaningful life", "find purpose" or "find my purpose" - in contrast to "I want to stimulate dopamine", even if we might refer to e.g. social media as "stimulating dopamine", with a slight cynical undertone. Even the doomscrolling and stimulation seeking behaviour is, in an experiential sense, not primarily the dopamine molecule, even though it obviously plays a role as the main molecule of our reward functions. Depression is in a reductive notion but some (dysfunctional) brain chemistry, that has developed out of balance; so too happiness merely denoted a good balance of serotonin and the other "hapiness molecules". Evidence points to the serotonin hypothesis being invalid (Moncrieff et al. 2023). And I remain sceptic of subsuming subjectivity itself under the terms of neurosciences, as some believe we might achieve, as though it were merely a question of technological advancement. It undoubtedly is one of philosophy too.

Undoubtedly the neurological substrate is ever-present in some sense. So is the heartbeat, but what does that tell us? Undoubtedly too, psychoactive molecules do qualify as a direct neurological influence, yet even here we are unwise to entirely discount the sensations and qualities of experience one might witness.

The risk of neuroscience?

I think neuroscience has disturbed our ideas on the possibility of finding answers to the aforementioned endeavours of a good and fulfilled life, "meaning" and purpose. At the very least it seems to have made the quest for meaning more difficult; to some it might even seem presumptious and a search for a God that died long ago and will supposedly remain dead. A keyword is Neuroexistentialism.

Sometimes explicit, sometimes tacit - some claim we might ultimately reduce everything and all of our experience to merely the brain. The radical anticipation of such (yet hypothetical) "deeper" or all-encompassing neurological knowledge calls into question the very meaning of meaning, because we can find "meaning" too as merely some event in the brain (Preller et al. 2017). Meaning, be it in a syntactical or experiential sense undoubtedly does have neural correlates. And we might convincingly deny some universal or inherent objepurpose to existence, the universe or consciousness, and yet the conception of such all-encompassing knowledge on all these domains in the jargon of brain sciences does not seem cogent. The specifics of qualities of experience, and their interrelatedness with previous experience, would be banished to remain the subcategory of an ever-present ambiguity. The universal scope of the claim is not substantiated by the insight that there is some neural correlate to be found.

This newly found knowledge of neural correlates seems to call into question the very possibility of autonomy, freedom of choice or free will (a will free of/to what, anyway?). It seems to me a popular reception of neuroscientific findings is to understand "the brain" as the denial of the very possibility of any kind of epistemic value in the subjective experience, and subsequently any justified meaning in the sense of personal significance and relevance, something like purpose, and ultimately a good or meaningful life. Metzinger (at INSIGHT 2023) said "events do not have meaning", as it is to be seen as a property of words exclusively (in contrast to "meaningful experience", meaning in life or maybe assertions of an inherent meaning). I wonder what else but "meaning" we could attribute to meaningful experience. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy distinguishes between the "meaning of life" and the "meaning in life", and I believe it might be wise not to conflate them, and indeed we would be wise to distinguish meaning in life, or meaningful experience too from conclusions about the natural world, physics or even metaphysics. At the very least any position that one sense of "meaning" were superior to or encompassing of the other required some reasoning and arguing.

Any sensation could be an error, subjectivity is limited - this is obvious. However, are there no limits to the limitations of subjectivity? Is personal experience entirely unscientific by definition? Should we anticipate that our subjective, "direct experiences" can be erronous, or assume that they are by default? I believe, the need to tacke such question outlines the risks of neuroscientific research, which I aim to process and deal with.

Liske (2004: 25) anyhow argues that the categories of our everyday ontologies in the tool of language have some kind of merit to them, when it comes to being in touch with reality. "This is because they reflect the experiences of countless generations in an understanding interaction with the reality that surrounds us. [Think of mere survival, growing crops or maybe even understanding behaviours of animals or ecosystems.] They have therefore at least in certain respects proved their worth". How else could we have manipulated the world around us in such successful ways? Surely this account is limited however, and remains quite ambigious. As Liske points out too, even the distinction of subject and predicate is not found in all languages alike! He explores descriptive versus revisionary metaphysics and highlights subjectivity as a kind of "access point" of prototheoretical endeavours. Could the neurosciences evolve past subjectivity, by finding its neural correlates and incorporating subjectivity into objective knowledge - effectively dissolving the radically private notion subjectivity is defined by? The grand hypothesis that it might remains yet to be proven.

To tinker with neurons

I want to elucidate, how near even the more "hands on" risks of neuroscientific findings might be. Metzinger (2009) envisions a kind of technology that aims at an intentional manipulation of qualities of experience by way of neurological influence, he calls it Phänotechnologie (phenotechnology). He thinks it will probably be possible to directly influence qualities of experience by way of influencing neurons and thereby manipulate content of experience. I believe the risks here outshine mere individual safety by a long shot. Already now we see how algorithmic optimization shapes neurons indirectly, the digital currency is attention. It is to be extracted via the correct feed and content suggestion (some kind of "dopamine feedback loop"). Leonard Bilmes wrote a review on Bernard Stiegler's book on Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism, which succinctly outlines the risks.

We need safety measures and education, and immediate, thorough reflection how we might (not) use such (pheno-) technology. We need regulatory bodies to address anyone who wants to tinker with neurons in such ways. Be it in a direct neurological way using phenotechnological devices, or a more indirect pharmacological way, triggering receptors or pathways and the like, e.g. through means of psychoactive molecules - every stakeholder must soberly (!) acknowledge and reflect them, they must be crucially and critically assessed. Psychedelics for recreational use should be decriminalised, and available to informed and educated subjects. It is available already anyway, under heightened risks of a black market and the stigma of criminalization.

Is it all just the brain? The million dollar question is rather: What conclusions might reasonably be drawn from our insights into the various neurological substrates of experience? The brain by itself is already extremely complex, the notion of subjective experience seems to add another seemingly infinite set of possible variables to the query. Husserl phrased it well: every physical property is capable of "dragging us into infinities of experience" (Husserl/Held 1985: 102); a certain inadequacy were to remain despite all gains. To disallow such an addition of complexity seems to be mere ignorance, and stretch beyond the use of reductionism as a "rational heuristic", which by itself is a reasonable scientific operation. Any adequate and serious theory of consciousness must grapple with "the problem of experience", the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers 1995): "How might we explain why there is something it is like to [be]", whether it is entertaining an idea, a mental image, an emotion? I am certain that we will not find adequate answers if we were to look exlusively in the brain.

If ultimately all experience and possibly the entirety of our existence were reducable to events in the brain (as per Persinger 2001), then uploading "a mind" in its entirety should be possible, as it is ultimately quantifiable, even at some point quantified exhaustively. Of this too, I am thus highly sceptical. The primary assumption of the Qualia Research Institute (QRI) seems less harsh, as (to my understanding) it merely hypothesizes a mathematical isomorphic structure.

I disagree with such a universalist scope of knowledge and favour a nonreductionist approach, with a focus on emergence, beyond an artificial division of mind and matter that might just be a category error (Ryle 1949). The definition of Aristotle for emergence entails that "the whole be more than the sum of its parts". And language (syllables, signs) are a great example.

I aim to develop and inspire a rational and cogent perspective, a transdisciplinary approach as well as inform the interested reader. If reductionism were the highest goal of it all, then the reductionism of my arguing against neuroexistentialist reductionism (and for taking into account subjectivity and taking seriously the philosophical exploration of self) would read:

You matter.

(However, you matter too completely independent of reading this)

Welcome to my blog, portfolio, outlet, project... website!

Here, I reflect on psychedelics, psychedelic science, offer my ideas in questions of philosophy of mind, society, the phenomenon of substance use and psychedelic culture, as well as spirituality and poems.

Thank you for reading!

- affenkopf