Psychedelics: philosophy, science and religion – 04/19/2023 – Psychedelic turn

Today, April 19th, is Bicycle Day celebrated by psychonauts around the world. The first intentional lysergic journey is celebrated on this date, carried out by the Swiss Albert Hofmann in 1943 with the LSD he had created five years earlier.

That a bicycle is the vehicle of celebration, and not a motorcycle, cart or car, has a fortuitous reason: after ingesting 250 micrograms of acid and experiencing an intense mental transformation, the chemist left the laboratory at the Sandoz pharmaceutical company and pedaled home.

The two-wheel image comes in handy for today’s subject. The ways of explaining the subjective psychedelic experience usually revolve around two axes, science and mystique, but Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, proposes that the understanding of trips will be safer and more beneficial if supported by a third wheel – metaphysics.

For the naturalism at the base of psychedelic research, which resurfaces after five decades of prohibitionism, any change in cognition and consciousness caused by compounds such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin (from mushrooms) and dimethyltryptamine (DMT, from ayahuasca) would be explained by biochemical processes that such substances trigger in the brain.

From this point of view, reality is only what we perceive through the senses. Visions of other worlds and entities, mediated or not by psychedelics, would be simple productions of the traveler’s nervous system, nothing more.

Depending on the dose of psychedelic taken, psychonauts see things and beings with an intense sensation of concreteness, which has been named as the “noetic quality” of the lived experience, often described as mystical. The drug would give access to other realms of existence, more true, if not divine (there are those who call psychedelics entheogens, not just “manifesters of the mind”, but of the “inner divinity”).

Without detracting from this mystical-religious framework, it seems unnecessary for those who do not carry such a predisposition, such as atheists and agnostics. Or, on a more benevolent hypothesis, it would at least be incomplete, as argued by Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes (PSH, for short) in the article “On the Necessity of Metaphysics in Psychedelic Therapy and Research”, published March 31 in Frontiers in Psychology .

The philosopher went beyond the observation that some psychedelic experiences do not, subjectively, have a mystical quality; even the oceanic sensation of belonging to a unity greater than the individual and his ego can impose itself as an aesthetic pleasure, transcendent without being mystical, spiritual without sounding religious.

PSH considers that, in psychedelic-supported therapy (TAP) now reactivated in clinical trials, the integration phase after dosing sessions would be more productive if the patient could make sense of what they experienced also using the tools of philosophy. There is, after all, a long history of organized reflection on beliefs and models about what the human mind intuit exists beyond the usual senses.

For this, he formulated a questionnaire with 40 statements on which the person must position himself on a seven-point scale, between disagreement and agreement. These are phrases such as “God is the universe” (pantheism), “The universe as a whole has its own mental activity” (cosmopsychism), “The physical and the mental are two aspects of the same fundamental substance” (neutral monism), or “Mental activity is not the same as brain activity, but emerges from it” (emergentism).

Above is a sample of the form, called the Metaphysical Matrix Questionnaire (MMQ), with some responses in bold. I can testify that it seemed far more interesting to answer than the Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ), a 30-question scale used in clinical trials to grade the mystical intensity of travel, which a celebrated 2006 study at Johns Hopkins University correlated with psilocybin benefits. .

In view of the 40 responses submitted, PSH commented via email: “It is particularly interesting that you seem to have an emergentist belief, but with some sympathy for neutral monism.” And he launched the seed for reflection: “I wonder if you believe that the brain is necessary for mental life [mentality]or one could accept basic forms of mental life in, say, bacteria”.

I replied that I would not go so far as to admit mental life in bacteria. Maybe some form of sentience, though? It is the term I would use to qualify the evolutionary continuum of the ability to feel in different organisms, in order to circumvent the fallacious categorical separation between rational, conscious humans and the rest of living nature, when very intuitive, without self-perception – and look there.

The ideas and proposals of the philosopher from Exeter, the city that hosts the psychedelic conference Breaking Convention from Thursday to Saturday (20th to 22nd), made us think that the MMQ could also be useful outside of therapeutic integration. For example, as a means of gauging changes in beliefs that psychedelics are supposed to induce, atheist travelers who become believers, and so on. The philosopher admits this use, but with reservations.

“The MMQ in the Frontiers article was proposed for the final phase of integration. However, it could be employed before and possibly during the dosing session [trip session]. I’m a little ambivalent about using it before, because there could be accusations that it was instilling [priming] beliefs in the participant, if this were done.”

And he added: “In any case, it would be possible to assess a change in metaphysical belief if [o MMQ] applied – and could also show the potency, in the travel session, of the ‘noetic quality’ he speaks of [William] James”.

The intense sense of reality that accompanies psychedelic experiences is, in fact, their most disturbing element. It may not be enough to convert atheists, but it leaves them with fleas behind their ears. Where do those never seen things come from, which seem to appease the mind without actually explaining anything, just providing ineffable glimpses, impossible to articulate in words?

Certain images, emotions and encounters of the psychedelic journey certainly spring from the memory, the unconscious and the traumas experienced by the psychonaut. Others remain mysterious, and there are those who propose that they emanate from the collective unconscious of Carl Jung, or perhaps by telepathy from alien beings. But there is also an exotic theoretical proposal to explain these disconcerting contents: the field of consciousness.

The model appears in a review article on ayahuasca co-authored by respected psychedelic neuroscientist, Ben Sessa. With Edward James, Joachim Keppler and Thomas Robertshaw he claims, in the journal Human Psychopharmacology, to rely on the zero-point field hypothesis (ZPF, in English; zero condition to explain here, without pun or competence) to propose an alternative explanation of the psychedelic phenomenology.

In light of the zero-point field hypothesis, they suggest that DMT and ayahuasca modify the receptive characteristics of the brain, allowing the receptive unit to resonate with a broader set of ZPF modes and access a broader spectrum of the phenomenological palette. offered by ZPF. In other words, an important effect of psychedelics would be to open the ZPF filter, making the subject come into contact with a kind of diffuse mentality in the cosmos, the field of consciousness.

From this perspective, they write, it would be conceivable that the ZPF, “respecting all the laws of physics”, could be explored as a direct communication channel between conscious beings, provided that such beings are endowed with a highly sensitive receptor unit, which allows them to read information states of other entities. Such conditions would be satisfied under the influence of DMT or ayahuasca, which would open up pathways usually inaccessible during normal brain operation.

“Such a general description is consistent with interpretations of these experiences in Eastern contemplative traditions, which suggest a unified source of matter and consciousness and that consciousness pervades the universe,” they state. That is, the authors of the review dive deep into the metaphysical field that Sjöstedt Hughes’ MMQ would point to as cosmopsychism and monism, while claiming that this is not incompatible with physics.

Who knows. Being compatible does not mean that it is probable, testable or, still less, falsifiable. But Ben Sessa & co seem to believe that neuroscience will get there:

“Although conceptually intriguing and comparatively coherent, these models have not yet been verified in controlled and well-designed studies, as neuroscientific studies so far have only produced superficial observations regarding connections with receptors and changes in brain function”, they concede.

“The phenomenology of the DMT and ayahuasca experience leads to questions about the nature of consciousness, consensus material reality, and mechanisms in medicine [terapêutica]”, they point out. “Until a general consensus is reached in the scientific community supported by a solid base of empirical tests of models, the fundamental nature of the mechanism of action of DMT and ayahuasca will remain unexplained.”

In short, the mystical pedaling that pushes psychedelic science to the neighborhood of religion is precarious and risks abandoning those who don’t have faith on the side of the road. It is safer and more objective to navigate the consecrated matrix of metaphysics.

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NOTICE TO NAVIGATORS – Psychedelics are still experimental therapies and certainly do not constitute a panacea for all psychic disorders, nor should they be the object of self-medication. Speak with your therapist or doctor before venturing into the area.

To learn more about the history and new developments of science in this area, including in Brazil, look for my book “Psiconautas – Viagens com a Ciência Psychedelica Brasileira”.

On the tendency to legalize the therapeutic and adult use of psychedelics in the US, see the article “Cogumelos Livres” in the December 2022 issue of Piauí magazine.

Be sure to also see the articles in the series “A Ressurreição da Jurema” in Folha: