The Mind, Brain, and Psychedelics
By: Brenden Weber
Tags: Education, Psychology, Psychedelics, Science, Philosophy

So typically people think of our search for aliens in the physical space of the cosmos, the universe, or even here on Earth.

But have you ever considered, why do we only search for aliens with our eyes wide open? We have this conscious experience, why must we assume that this experience is purely a physical manifestation?

Sure, the physical might create a certain type of conscious experience, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that consciousness cannot exist separate from our physical magic meat suits.

A separate form of consciousness would be different—the key being simply different—meaning it’s still attached to our waking conscious experience.

We seem to have no problem acknowledging other animals have a conscious experience different from ours! But what if consciousness is more fundamental to this magical land we call home?

We seem to only look for answers in the eyes open-world…the world Immanuel Kant calls, the phenomena.

For those concerned with this thought process at this point…I’m aware much of this is mere speculation. But established truths we take for granted now started as an idea in a human mind. An idea that started from this point of speculation.

So let’s have some reason based speculation around this idea!

Philosophy and Psychedelics

It’s time for another quick clarifier, those psychedelic experiences I mentioned earlier, I’m highly aware of the common occurrence that comes with people having a psychedelic experience—that they’ve experienced something more real than their default reality.

Many come away convinced they talked with aliens or a God. Often, this “more real” experience is interpreted as something profound that matches that person's culture they happened to have grown up in or be part of. I’m aware of this.

But it’s still interesting to consider the possibility of it being something real in a sense, beyond our default waking life; something beyond our default consciousness; or a way to connect with our own consciousness on a deeper level.

So let’s do some philosophy around the common idea of the brain producing the mind and how that has influenced our way of thinking.

Logical Positivist

Allow me to introduce the logical positivist who essentially asserted that only logical proofs that could be verified through direct observation are meaningful or helpful.

What does that mean?

It’s essentially a version of empiricism that focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s issues with language, as in the imprecise nature of it. So they would say a priori statements—which are justifications prior to experience—are wrong.

Why does this matter?

Well, what I just mentioned takes direct issue with the mystical experience or psychedelic experience mentioned earlier. Those experiences that seem to go beyond our default existence—maybe even somewhere else—to the logical positivists is useless. It has no usefulness around our understanding of truth!

However, those logical positivists—made famous in the 1920s—ran into the philosophical problem of other minds. And this is where we get into the importance of bringing up the logical positivists!

Now, the psychedelic experience is very subjective, absolutely. But the subjective experience of an individual is important to understand, and I think it’s important to contemplate.

So let’s consider the problem of other minds.

How can I know you, the person reading this right now, how can I verify your experience? How can I observe your conscious experience?

I might figure out the neuron connections of the brain, put a chip in your brain to see what you're seeing, but I can’t know your emotional experience, the essence of you! That’s where the true cognitive impact of you reading my words is placed. How do we experience someone else having a mind? We don’t.

According to the logical positivists, many personal human descriptions of their personal experience—stuff we would like to verify—would become meaningless.

If you say ‘you think the words I’m spewing are complete bullshit’ maybe you’re right, but how can I verify that with my senses? I can hear you say it, but I can’t know the inner workings of your mind. I don’t even know you have a mind under this worldview! Something is missing is my point! It’s an imprecise understanding of the world!

The Behaviorist

So you then had some logical positivist team up with a similar school of thought, the behaviorist. Who essential focus on observable behavior as a means to study the human psyche. Where it related to positivism and empiricism. These both came up around the same time, but the behaviorist really influenced the thinking in psychology.

It shifted us from focussing on those inner workings of the mind into focussing on observable behaviors. They thought the observable behaviors could explain those inner workings an individual performed.

Psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung—who were psychoanalysts—criticized this method, as they saw the subconscious, and for Jung, the subjective inner experience as vital for understanding human behavior.

They saw this subconscious experience as vital for understanding humans!

The behaviorist wanted to boil us down to robotic meat suits with an illusion of a subjective—conscious—experience. And many, not all, in the fields of science loved it.

Consciousness was and still is the enigma that perplexes many in the field of science, it’s easily one of our greatest mysteries—and I think it might be the greatest mystery. Our self-awareness, or at the very least perception of that self-awareness, is confusing to comprehend through the lens of the purely physical universe.

This had led neuroscientists to not really pay mind to understanding consciousness through the lens of an individual's subjective inner workings! They had been influenced by the positivist and behaviorist, which then ended up influencing the public's perception of what it is to be conscious. The trickle-down of our understanding of truth.

I’m not telling you to take my word for it, I’m telling you to question the words you take from others—that you once viewed as obvious and established truths.

What else is being trickled down to us as this accepted understanding? Someone else that has become so convinced within their own mind of their own truth that they persuade others to believe the same. And in doing so believe in the same flaws of their position and defending the flaws of their argument to no end.

The Influence on Consciousness

But the logical positivist and the behaviorist worked in harmony with a rising worldview, materialism. Which is a type of philosophical monism, where matter is THE essential substance in nature.

It’s the idea that every phenomenon, including consciousness, are by products of this purely material process. Maybe that is true. I don’t know.

I think materialism overly conflates correlation with causality. Relying purely on the observed and measurable, over the experienced.

But measurable in what way?

Based on an assumption that we can only rely on the observable physical.

Which might be true!

That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know.

It might not even be within human capacity to understand much more about this grand cosmos. Our minds and brains might not have the processing power.

But my point is, does that subjective, conscious, and mysterious human experience within our own minds say more about the cosmos than we might think?

Should we consider the possibility that stuff we simply perceive is all there is? What lies within the unseen?

When people come away from the psychedelic experience thinking they have been shot to some other dimension are they merely delusional? Just a purely fun shift in your brain chemistry that produces a different experience within the mind.

That’s all a big part of this consciousness equation. What if the brain is receiving some sort of signal? A signal of consciousness—that the brain then interprets and produces you!

This point is meant to provide some thoughts to consider, raising the possibility that tapping into a more profound understanding of our conscious experience is vital to transforming our understanding around the workings of the universe, our arguments in philosophy, and maybe our understanding of life itself. Probably a bit of all of those!

I’ll leave you with this today if you come to accept or embrace the possibility that our current default waking experience is a hallucination created by the mind — as in an inaccurate representation of the objective physical world — what does that mean for the psychedelic experience?

And maybe one more thought about beliefs: we allow ourselves to accept beliefs that go against established truth are built on delusion—a temptation by the devil, so to speak.

Consider this quote from the show “Attack on Titan” but consider it through the lens of this post: