mandi astola YT transcript

[00:00:11] Speaker A: Mandy Estola is a philosopher specializing in epistemology, ethics, and ethics of technology. She is assistant professor at Delft University of Technologies for Philosophy section. In particular, Mandy's work focuses on character and what features of character make someone a good person or a good thinker. She is also part of a project involving multiple universities that investigates the contribution that various disciplines in the arts can make to ethical reflections on new technologies. And lately, she has become interested in Terence McKenna and has some reflections on his philosophies and perspectives. And that's primarily what we're going to talk about today. So, Mandy, welcome to the brainforest Cafe. [00:01:14] Speaker B: Yes, thank you. [00:01:15] Speaker A: Here you are. Very good to see you. Thank you for making the time to come on our little podcast here. I understand you maybe you've been interested in Terence for a while, but I understand you attended a conference in Prague not too long ago in which he was featured, among other things, that was organized by Jeff Frame. Right. So what led you to go to that conference? And. And how was it? Did you learn anything? Did you learn anything about Terrence? [00:01:53] Speaker B: No. Yes, definitely. Yeah. I've been to some wonderful conferences recently. There was that one in Prague where we talked a lot about Terence's thought. And also just a few days ago, I've been to a conference on the epistemology of altered states of consciousness where I've actually taken some of my interpretations of Terence's thought and sort of presented that to a more academic, philosophical audience. So, yeah, no, I've had a great time. And to be honest, I've, I think, only very recently become interested in Terence McKenna's thought. I think the first time I ever heard of him, I actually kind of scoffed at him. I thought, well, I am a professional philosopher, and here is one of these people that thinks he knows everything because he took some mushrooms. Well, this. It tramples on my ego, you know, here I am spending, like, years and years studying philosophy and getting a PhD and all of that, and who does this guy think he is? You know, so that. That was my initial reaction. [00:02:57] Speaker A: I see. Well, you chose the wrong one, because not only has he taken mushrooms, he's also read lots of philosophy and alchemy and everything else. You know, he's not. He was an intellectual. So he is not just a crazy hippie taking mushrooms. He actually brought intellectual focus to us. To it. For those of us who are laymen, who are not really professional philosophers, what is your definition of epistemology? Just to kind of set the groundwork for this. [00:03:36] Speaker B: Yeah, right. That's a really good question. Epistemology is the study of knowledge. And not just knowledge, but other things that we associate with knowledge. So, for example, understanding, insight, capability, know how things that we. Yeah, in philosophy we call epistemic goods. But when you start to ask what is really the epistemic and what is the non epistemic, then the boundary starts to get very blurry because most of our activities and actions involve some kind of knowledge component. So I think that's the best definition I can give. [00:04:13] Speaker A: So epistemology is the study of knowledge and the study of ways of knowing and how we know and so on. So that is obviously a central question not only to philosophy, but to our being in the world. You know, our existence as human, human beings is kind of predicated on this assumption that we know things and you know, that there is an approach to knowing, to knowledge. One of the lessons people often ask, what have I learned from taking psychedelics? This is. This comes up very often in conversations on this topic. And after years of taking psychedelics, what do you know? And I have to respond to people, what I have learned is how little I know. And that's what psychedelics remind us of. How little we know, sort of how limited the boundaries of our knowledge are and how much there is beyond those boundaries. That is neither scientific nor any, but it is a realm to be known, not necessarily approachable through rationalism or science, Intuition, religion, all of these things take precedent, have an influence on this. So that's what psychedelics teach us, is that we don't know anything. And that's a good lesson. That's a good lesson to interiorize, don't you think? [00:05:56] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think so. Right now, if I think about what I've heard at this conference that I've just been to and what I've read broadly in philosophical work on the epistemology of psychedelics, there's lots of really interesting things going on in this field. So there's a lot of debate about. So for instance, there's a couple of authors that are writing about false insights under psychedelics. So I mean, I think we all have these experiences where we think, well, that was a really good trip. There is some genuine epistemic benefit to what I learned from that trip. But then as a kind of counterpart to that, we might also recognize some bad examples. So there are people that take psychedelics and come out of a trip with this kind of like sort of a messiah complex of like, I've seen the truth and I've. I know everything there is to know, and now you must join my cult. And you know, I've seen, I've seen the light, that kind of thing. [00:06:59] Speaker A: Right. [00:07:00] Speaker B: And you know, those is dangerous, skeptical. [00:07:03] Speaker A: This is dangerous territory with psychedelics. You have to keep your critical antennas deployed because you could easily lead to delusional places. And as you point out, even messianic places where you come out and you think, yes, I've seen the light. Not only have I seen the light, but I'm going to propagate it to the world. So it contributes to megalomania and ego inflation and that sort of thing. Do you think Terence was, was he subject to this or did he avoid this? [00:07:45] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think that actually Terence is a really interesting figure for the epistemology of psychedelics. So recently I've been reading lots of, and listening to lots of his raps and I've been trying to figure out what is the sort of original philosophical contribution that Terence has made that would be interesting to professional philosophers right now. So I've been kind of trying to translate Terence's work to a philosophical audience. And I think that the most interesting part of what he's done is really, this is actually the sort of philosophy of shamanism, as I, as I kind of like to call it. So the fact that, you know, what is, what is the right way to bring these insights out of a trip? And, you know, Terence sometimes used this example of a trip being like a fishing trip. So if you have like the shamanic ocean, then when you take, when you take some mushrooms, you can get into the boat and you can take a trip on this ocean. And, and you know, the idea is to catch fish, and if you catch sort of tiny little fish, then those are lovely for you, but they're not going to feed your community. If you want to feed your community, you should catch kind of, you know, medium sized fish that you can actually bring back in your boat. If you try to, you know, bring a fish that is three times the size of your boat, then that's not going to work. That's not going to. You're not going to pull it to the shore. And I think this is a really lovely metaphor that Terence uses because it captures exactly the kind of messianic, I've seen the light, I've seen everything, and it's all connected. But I can't explain it to you because you have to kind of join my cult and have a similar sort of, kind of noetic feeling before you can believe me. And that's exactly the kind of fish that I think Terence would say, you shouldn't be dragging out of the ocean. You should take the fish that you can actually bring to other people. Yeah, so. Yeah, [00:09:57] Speaker A: that's right. Well, if the fish that you're dragging out of the ocean are ideas, I mean, I think effectively they're ideas and notions. But you have to commit. I mean, the temptation is to have these revelations, these psychedelic insights of really Terence's. And my whole life story with La Cherrera and all that was that we went to La Cherreira and we had. We got into a place where we were downloading information from the mushroom or from some intelligent entity that we associated with the mushroom, and it was just laying it down. This is the way it is. What we failed to do was bring a critical perspective to that after that episode. In fact, we piled on even more so for years. And it took many years even for me. And I was always the skeptic of the two, even for me to kind of step back and say, wait a minute, a lot of this doesn't even make any sense. And Terence was taken, I think, with the appeal of the ideas, and he was reluctant to abandon some of these notions, even though at a certain point it became clear that they did not make any sense or they didn't stand up to really critical, objective analysis. I often get emails and things like that from young people who have taken psychedelics and they've had amazing, transcendent transformational trips. And they say, I figured it all out. They have this messianic complex. I figured out Terrence was right, all of that. And I usually respond and I say, okay, you know, write to me 48 hours after the trip is over, after you've had a chance to reflect on it, and tell me if you really think that way, because you need to, you know, you need to ground these ideas to actual reality, you know, to day. To day experience, because that's where we are most of the time, you know, And Terence, his ideas, you've read enough of his and listened to enough of his talks, you realize that if you look very closely at them and you sort of dissect them with the analytical, shall we call it, the epistemological tools that you have as a professional philosopher. You look at this and you say, wait a minute, a lot of this is just bunk. It's. It's just not true and it can't be defended. But he was such a. So articulate, so eloquent in terms of what he expressed, that even people who would normally be very skeptical and would Challenge him? Didn't he invited you to sit back and just take it all in and sort of be awed by it? Rarely did anyone ever challenge him. He didn't used to welcome when I would go to his events and his seminars and so on, because I was usually the only one in the audience who would stand up and say, wait a minute, what you said didn't make any sense. And it directly contradicts what you said 20 minutes ago, which also didn't make any sense. And so what's going on? And he would just say, well, consistency is this hobgoblin of small minds. And then just steam. Right on. I think. So. He was very good at presenting these ideas, you know, that. Like the ideas around the time wave, for example, that time has a texture and you could use the I Ching to map the texture and the structure of time and all that. On the surface, it looks probable, it looks possible. I mean, it's an intriguing idea. When you get down to the nitty gritty, when you get to the nuts and bolts of it, it really does not hold up. It doesn't hold up. You cannot. I mean, my criticism of Terence's time Wave, I was always skeptic on it, but my main criticism of it was, you have not stated what will disprove this. [00:15:05] Speaker B: Yeah, Right. [00:15:06] Speaker A: So you're positing it as a theory, but if you want it to be. If you want it to genuinely be a theory in the way that scientists understand a theory or a hypothesis, you must define what will disprove it. And then you work hard to disprove it, because in that exercise, you're identifying the gaps in the conceptual edifice. Where's the missing data? What does this not account for? And he didn't spend much time with that. And I think the time wave, other people who look more deeply into it eventually kind of realized there's no provability here. It's not really a hypothesis. [00:15:55] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. This is really incredibly interesting to hear this from your perspective and from your experience as well. So I think that these negative and positive example of what people attain from a trip. Like, for example, Terrence, who documented his trips very carefully and also was very articulate about what he learned in his trips. I think those are really good for analyzing the sort of epistemology of psychedelics. And so I. Yeah, and this is. Yeah, it's interesting to hear that you also think that maybe the time wave could be a kind of like an instructive example of how this kind of thinking can maybe in an epistemic sense go a little bit too far. I would like to bring up a really good example of a fish that Terence brought back from the ocean. Also. I'm really curious to hear what you think about this. Of course, with your. Yeah. With all your experience and your knowledge and your contributions also to his thoughts. Um, so just. Just last week, I was. I was at this. Just this week, actually, I was at this conference, and I was telling this audience of philosophers about Terence McKenna. And I took this. I took an excerpt from one of his raps where he talks about, you know, taking a hit of dmt, going through the chrysanthemum, and then, you know, entering the dome and noticing that the dome is inhabited by beings and, you know, know, encountering these machine elves. And then the machine elves, they are speaking in a language that is visual. And, you know, so Terence is experiencing synesthesia at this moment. He is hearing sounds and seeing them as physical shapes that form objects, and then they tell him to do it as well. So then he starts to speak in tongues. Right. And he starts to create objects with sound. And now this experience, which is mediated by these, you know, this narrative with these elves and everything. Right? That's the experience. But what Terence takes from this is. Wait a minute. By experiencing synesthesia, I am able to sort of, without having, you know, any prior concepts, link a visual reference to a mouth noise. So there's this linking of a visual reference, a visual object to a mouth noise. What if this is how humans evolved language? Right. And then you get the Stoned Ape theory. And I think that this is a really interesting example of a kind of insight from a trip that in the end became a scientific hypothesis and was actually taken seriously by some evolutionary psychologist and was subjected to scrutiny and turned out to be really interesting and really instructive. And I would say that in this example, it's not that Terence's Stoned Ape theory idea was only inspired by a trip. It's not only inspired, it seems to be informed by the trip, because he had this experience of synesthetically linking a mouse noise with a visual reference. Right. So I think this is a pretty good example of how you can take something out of a trip that is actually useful to the community. I'm curious how you reflect on this idea. [00:19:36] Speaker A: Well, if you think about. I mean, I'm down with the link between visual imaging and small mouth noises or sound. I mean, I think language is an act of synesthesia in ordinary states of consciousness. I mean, it wouldn't exist. Language is Usually audio. I mean, there's other forms of language, but language is usually an association of a meaningless sound with a meaningful image. And that's just something that the brain does in the way that we construct our epistemological universe in a certain way. I've talked about how we live in what the neuroscientists call the default mode, network our ordinary state of consciousness day to day, focus on what is happening in the world and what is going on internally. I prefer to call that the reality hallucination. We construct a hallucination. We take the information from our sensory neural portals, interfaces, whatever comes in from the environment. We associate that with associations and memories and all sorts of internal processing that goes on. And we kind of then extrude or create, maybe enrobe ourselves in this model of reality that is the reality hallucination. It's not reality. We don't even know what reality is. Reality is unknowable. But we create this model which we assume is a reflection of actual reality. And it is, it has to be to a certain extent, because it obviously has survival value. So the construction, the fact that we live in this reality, hallucination, otherwise known as day to day ordinary consciousness. And then psychedelics come along and they can disrupt this process. They let you step out of that reference frame temporarily and then you see that, oh, there's so much more to this. I mean, the brain. As a philosopher, I'm sure you've studied a lot of what the brain does in order to construct this model of reality is filter things out. It lets in much less than it blocks because it has to block it so that we can construct a reality experience that is not completely overwhelming. If everything got through, it would just be blooming buzzing, confusion. We couldn't make sense of anything. So we have to. Huxley called this the reducing valve neuroscientists call neural gating. Neural gating is related to what is blocked out, what doesn't get through. Just enough information gets through in order to construct this coherent model of reality which is usually pertinent to our immediate survival, you know, our day to day survival. So I. So it seems to me that language is very much about synesthesia. And the idea, I think behind the stone nape theory is that psychedelics, particularly psilocybin, easily stimulate synesthesia. They're very facile at doing that. So that back in the day when we were evolving hominids in northern Africa, clearly the environmental conditions were right for it, and that may have been where the roots of language took place. And this may have been the seed of this ability to construct this model of reality that we could call the reality hallucination. [00:23:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, right. And, you know, the way that we structure our reality happens according to certain habits. And some of these habits are sort of neural, and they're not things that we can really do that much about. Others are also character related. So, for example, some people are, you know, people's epistemic capacities can vary hugely. And some people have a very high need for kind of closure, so they will draw conclusions very quickly. Whereas others are more comfortable with a sense of openness, a sense of not knowing, for example. And like some character traits in virtue epistemology, we say that we call them epistemic virtues. So character traits that help us to process information and. Yeah. Have kind of cognitive access to truth. And, you know, something like. I think it's also interesting what you said in the beginning about psychedelics kind of forcing us to let go of our usual habits of information processing. And because we get forced to let go of these habits, it also allows us to develop new habits. So, for example, something like intellectual humility. So what you said in the beginning, knowing that you actually know very little, this is one of these traits that is very important in making somebody a good thinker. So intellectual humility is very, very beneficial for people. If you want to have any kind of access to truth or knowledge or understanding, it's very important to be intellectually humble because otherwise you won't draw conclusions too quickly, overestimate yourself. And [00:25:39] Speaker A: intellectual humility preserves openness, and the lack of it invites you to get to a place where you say, well, we have it all figured out. We don't have to think about this anymore. This is one of my criticisms of religion or religious dogma. They hand you a set of ideas and they say, this is the answer to everything. All you have to do is accept this. You can stop thinking now and just substitute faith for thought. And it's the opposite of intellectual curiosity. Science properly practiced, and it's often not properly practiced, but in the pure sense, science is very powerful because it's a tool for understanding the world, for constructing suppositions about the way that the world is. Theories, hypotheses, based on the data of what you think you know. But the beauty of science and the power of science is always that you leave the question. You never prove anything in science, right? You never say, we have it nailed down. If you're honest, you say, based on what we know, we think this is how it is. But there may be new data that comes in next week or next year or 50 years from now completely overturns the suppositions that you have. So science has to remain open to that. Science is a structured way and a formal way of cultivating that openness, you know, and it's that openness, that openness to the idea that there's a lot we don't know, and we accept that. But the openness of science is a formal way of acknowledging that and then directing our attention toward, okay, we recognize there are boundaries to what we know. How do we expand those, and how do we do it in a systematic way that's consistent with what we know and acknowledging that there's much that we still don't know. So all scientific models are incomplete, as every epistemological model is incomplete. I don't think you'd argue with that. [00:28:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, right. It's nice that you bring up science. So one of the ways that I've always read Terence's work is that he's an epistemological anarchist. So I think, yeah, while he liked science very much, I think that he also made this point of like, well, science is very good at studying sort of very predictable phenomena that happen over and over again. But then we have these other ways of knowing these other knowledge practices that are very good at studying the individual experience. You know, things that you might see once but will never seen again by anyone. And those experience can also be very valuable for the community that you are in. And I think, yeah, so, yeah, he liked to kind of contrast sort of culture, categories, boundaries, science with the shamanic ocean and direct experience on the other side. And, yeah, I think it's also really interesting to see them as kind of counterbalances to each other. Like, yes, we've got science, and science is wonderful. Science is great. But we do need a kind of more shamanic practice to counterbalance scientific knowledge. [00:29:29] Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, we do. And science may or may not be able to approach that kind of scientific knowledge, you know, or that kind of more holistic knowledge, what you might call shamanic knowledge. It's a different way of knowing. I think it is not incompatible with science. It's not antithetical to science. It's just a different perspective. For example, indigenous people immersed in nature who are not yet literate, who haven't made that commitment to literacy. They experience nature in a much more holistic manner, and they apprehend processes in nature that we're programmed to filter out. We don't see those things until somebody points them out. And this is something else I've often said about psychedelics. They bring the background forward. They temporarily disappear, enable these neural gating mechanisms, and they open up the sensorium and the apprehension sphere to a wider sphere of experience. And so they bring processes that are always going on in nature, but we're programmed to notice them. We put them in the background because we think they're not important. Well, they may not be important to our immediate survival, but they're important to understanding processes in nature. And so in some way, I've argued often that psychedelics can be viewed as a scientific instrument in a way, a kind of lens where you could look at processes in nature in a way that you never have before and understand things going on in a way that you never looked at it that way, quite that way before. And this is reflected in scientific discoveries that have been attributed to psychedelics, like Cary Bullas, you know, the molecular biologist who discovered the PCR reaction. He said, if I hadn't taken lsd, I would never have had these insights. He said LSD enabled me to get down with the molecules and see what was going on. And actually, even Francis Crick, on his deathbed, finally admitted that psychedelics were important, providing the insight into his understanding of the double helix and all this. So psychedelics can, in the right circumstances, be viewed as lenses through which we can apprehend nature in a way that we don't normally. It's a different kind of filter, right? I mean, there are always filters, but this is a different way. It's like you change the filter from green to blue or something. You have a different way of looking at it. Sorry, I'm doing the talking. [00:32:51] Speaker B: No, no, it's wonderful. No, it's really nice to hear. But would you say then that maybe we could say that psychedelics are kind of an unstructured debiasser? They'll just take away our biases. But they do it in a very unpredictable way, which is in itself also a debiasing mechanism. [00:33:14] Speaker A: Indeed. That's what they do. Yeah. They are dynamite to assumptions in a certain way. They are. They bring right in front of you, they say, well, again, the message is, remember how little you know and everything that you assume that you know is subject to question. A lot of what you assume that you know, that's just. That's just given. You're probably wrong, you know, about a lot of it. And it's that openness that I think. I think that's what drives science. And I think that psychedelics are you know, it's curiosity and it's a desire to expand our awareness of this reality construct that we're creating that we call, you know, our current understanding of reality. I think that psychedelics can be very valuable tools for that. And there will always be unanswered questions. And there's an infinite number. The field of what we don't know is always going to be infinitely larger than this expanding field of what we think we know, which is this expanding bubble which we can pop in an instant. I mean, new information may come up and say, oh, that doesn't work. Newtonian physics, that's out the window. It's now all about quantum physics and relativity and so forth. You have to be open to the power of paradigm change, you know. [00:34:59] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think if you look specifically at what do the psychedelics. What does the psychedelic experience do that is so confusing and so boundary dissolving? I think it's interesting because I think the two aspects of kind of psychedelic experiences which are seen by epistemologists as being problematic are at the same time kind of also the epistemic strengths. So, for example, one thing that's seen as very problematic is this noetic quality of knowing and psychedelic experiences. So noetic just means that you have a very strong sense of. I know that this is the case. You don't really have any evidence, but you just. You feel that something is the case and you kind of almost know it in your body. And so this is seen as very problematic because you are basically sort of drawing a conclusion without any reasons. And especially if we know that you're under the influence of a very powerful drug, then from an epistemic standpoint, you could say this is very problematic. But. And then there's also this tendency to sort of convergent thinking, so seeing connections between things and seeing, ah, I've got this idea. Well, here's a thing that confirms it. Here's another thing that confirms it. And this is the same style of reasoning that we see in conspiracy theorists, Right. You could say, like, these are two very epistemologically problematic features of the psychedelic experience. But when we see it as a debiasing mechanism, we could say, like, well, actually, these things are, in the greater scheme of things, really good for you as an epistemic agent. Because once you've had those noetic experiences, you realize actually how fickle the brain is and how easily we are. How easily we can get that feeling of being absolutely sure of something. [00:36:51] Speaker A: Right. And that's the danger of psychedelic, sedentary and many other systems of thought is the temptation to uncritically accept these insights and just say, well, it's obvious. No, it isn't obvious. You have to keep your. What I call your. Maybe I call it epistemic, I call them your critical faculties, your antennas for critical thinking have to be fully deployed at all times. And especially, I mean, in the psychedelic experience, you're kind of accepting that you're going to disable that for a while. But then when you're past that, in that 24, 48 hours after the experience, you need to reactivate that and think about, okay, I had all these insights, all these understandings. Well, now that I'm not stone, how much of that actually holds up? You know, and some of it will hold up. You know, I had this insight perhaps on a molecular or chemical process. And you go back and you look and say, yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. But a lot of it doesn't. And, you know, there is a temptation. People want answers. You know, we get the same thing very much in religious systems where, you know, the dogma, they say, well, this is a system of thought, and, you know, this is a set of understandings about spirituality and God and our place in the world and all that, and just accept these and stop asking all these pesky questions. These are the answers. What are the questions? Well, questions are not welcome. And I think this is something that leads many people who may be religious in their childhood when they grow up, but when they reach a certain point of being able to think critically about some of these things, they look and they say, well, does this really make sense? And they end up rejecting the tenets of their religion because they don't make sense in a lot of ways. And I don't know, is there a religion that is really compatible with logic and scientific understandings and all that? I mean, religion is based on dogma, and dogma does not like to be questioned. Religion postulates that you should accept the tenets of the faith, that you should accept it on faith. Asking someone to accept that on faith is also saying, turn off your critical faculties. Stop asking these pesky questions. But that's what science is supposed to do, and that's what any critical thinking is supposed to do. We should not abandon that. I mean, this is one of the main strengths of human consciousness, is that we have. We have critical faculties and we don't have to accept things on the surface. We can actually ask questions. And I think that's very powerful. [00:40:27] Speaker B: Yeah, right. So, I mean, I'm assuming that you grew up in a religious household, right? [00:40:34] Speaker A: Yes, well, we were Catholics, as you read all of parents stuff. Yeah, we were pretty strong Catholics until we weren't. Right. I mean, we each reached this point where we thought, this doesn't make any sense, you know, that the whole resurrection and all that, it didn't happen, you know, so it's an. So, yeah, we were influenced by it. And yet at the same time, I mean, we, we rejected religion in that sense, we rejected Catholicism. But in another way, the. I mean, in some ways Terence was preoccupied with the end times and this idea of the eschatology. That's what the time wave is all about. And that's right out of Christian, particularly Catholic metaphysics, is that there will be an end to time, there will be an end to history. And he was, he was very interested and talked very much about end of what happens when history ends and the transition to the post historical state, whatever that is. And that's what the time wave is all about, was an attempt to nail down this actual moment when the continuum collapsed, when history ended. And that was his obsession. And this was basically. This came out of not any scientific background, which he didn't really have, that came out of his religious background. [00:42:20] Speaker B: Yeah, right, yeah. So it's interesting, I myself, I have a very different origin story. So my parents are both scientists. My mother is a mathematician and my father. My father's an engineer. So I was brought up in a very sort of naturalistic household. Like science was kind of my religion. And actually as I've gotten older, I've become very interested in faith. So I have kind of an opposite sort of development, I guess, because in the end, science is wonderful, but science is about studying the world descriptively, so describing the phenomena that happens. And science cannot tell you what to do. So normative judgments are not something that science in the strict sense is allowed to make. Right. Like, so what is the right thing to do? How should we live our lives? What is the good life? So these are the things that we need to do either politically or philosophically or based on faith. And I've actually really come to appreciate the sort of philosophical traditions that lots of religious traditions have. So obviously, you know, religious traditions are all about telling people how to live their lives. So there's lots of like, very interesting back and forth argumentation on this. And also, you know, the entire narrative of a religion, you know, even if you are a secular person, you can read that narrative in a more secular way as well. And you can attain a lot of really Great insights from it. So yeah, I've had kind of an opposite sort of development on that front. [00:44:12] Speaker A: Right. And you make a very good point. There are certain things like ethics, like the right way to live, these sorts of things religion can address, but they can be informed by science. You know, your knowledge in science can inform the way that you reach these ethical places about what is the right way to live, what is right behavior, what is right in terms of our relationships to other people and to the earth and so on. That can have a scientific, not necessarily a foundation, but science can shed light on the construction of these ethical frameworks. And if the ethical frameworks are constructed in the absence of that, then they can be very dangerous, they can be quite harmful if there's no scientific grounding. You can build an ethical framework around the idea, for example, that, that all non white people are inferior and not really human. And then that leads to all sorts of horrors like genocide and racism and that sort of thing, which I think most ethical people would agree. These are not good things. They're harmful to the individual and they're harmful to our collectivity. Science can provide a more rational perspective that you can bring to this to avoid those sorts of pitfalls, I think. And at the same time we should not assume, I mean, scientism is also a risk. This idea that if it's not scientific, it's not valid, that's also an error, that's a mistake. There are many, many ways of knowing. And what I think in terms of trying to become ethical people and knowledgeable people is we have to achieve this balance between the scientific worldview, the rational worldview, and the more intuitive worldview that springs from another place. [00:46:44] Speaker B: Yeah, right. I think that's totally right. And also, you know, given that the other way around, not just science can influence ideology, but also ideology influences science. [00:46:56] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. [00:46:57] Speaker B: And that's another reason why scientism can be very dangerous. Because sometimes if you look at the history of science, we see that very often, you know, scientific paradigms have been influenced by the science, social conditions in which they are formed. For example, if every single person doing biology is an upper class male or identifies as a man, then there are certain things that might introduce into the field of biology and historians of science have commented on this kind of thing. So I think, yeah, science and ideology, or sort of ethics, I guess, in influence each other. [00:47:36] Speaker A: Right. And I think one sort of lesson you can draw from this is the fact that who is doing this stuff, you know, I mean, whether we're doing science or Ethics. We're human beings, right? We're all human beings, and we're inherently limited because of that, you know, and we make mistakes and we. And we're at risk for delusions. It's very easy to give in to delusions. And you see this. You see this as a psychedelic experience where you can get totally invested in a delusion and come back and say, I'm the Messiah and I'm going to propagate this message to the world, because this. This insight. But you see the same thing in conspiracy theories and all sorts of political discourse. Unfortunately. Now delusions can propagate globally to millions of people at the speed of light. We've created these technologies that can propagate bullshit as quickly and as efficiently as you could propagate truth. And it's often hard to tell the difference. You know, this is a problem. This is one of the big issues. And I'm sure you've thought about this with social media. [00:49:07] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I've actually worked on bullshit specifically as well. So I like the topic you have, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, is that. Yeah, yeah. There's a very small group of philosophers that is really obsessed with the idea of. And how do we distinguish bullshit from, you know. Yeah, has a lot to do. Yeah. It's often connected indeed to like, fake news and sort of like post truth politics and that kind of thing. But I think what you're saying. I think that's why the fishing metaphor for a trip is so lovely and so instructive, because implicit in it is also this idea of, like, take your fish, you know, to take them to your friends and let your friends check whether the fish are okay. Yes, like, take the fish and assume, well, this is the best fish ever. Just like, let somebody have a look at it first, make sure it's not a poisonous fish. You know, like, what do you have, like these puffer fish with a poisonous liver or something like that? You don't want to be feeding that to your family, right? [00:50:14] Speaker A: Well, yes. This is exactly what one should do with these psychedelic insights is, you know, put them out there and don't get invested in them. Keep open the possibility that they're all, you know, that they're completely bogus. You know, And Terence, you know, he. In some ways, he wasn't dogmatic. You know, he was interested in putting out these crazy ideas. He wasn't that invested in them. In fact, he expected people to challenge them, you know, but he was so good at articulating them that a lot of People didn't really have the epistemological tools or the interlocutory tools to really step up and say, well, wait a minute, Terrence, this is bullshit. This needs identified and called out as bullshit. You know, And I mean, people, people didn't do that, or they, they haven't. There's been a little more of that since. But, but that's a really valuable thing, you know, to be able to challenge, challenge these assumptions. You know, I'm recently I been looking at, I mean, this is a little bit off, off this topic immediately, but I've been reading a scientific paper about the development of some of these compounds to treat anxiety and depression and PTSD that are non psychedelic psychedelics. You've probably heard of this. The psychedelic experience is defined as an adverse side effect and these compounds just change the receptors. And there's no actual psychedelic experience associated with the treatment. There's no perceivable effect. To my mind, this is completely anathema. This is the. So by definition of non psychedelic psychedelics is a meaningless term. These are drugs that do things to receptor systems that, that are by definition not psychedelics. And I think you really. I mean, I'm an old timer, I'm biased. I think you cannot divorce the psychedelic experience component from the therapeutic component. That is the point. And I think these drugs, as they get into clinical trials, if they're compared to a real psychedelic like psilocybin, they're not going to stand up, they're not going to bring about the changes that people expect. That's just my bias. Call it my working hypothesis. I'm a scientist, I'm willing to be proven wrong. But I don't think I will be in this case. I don't think you can separate the psychedelic experience from the psychedelic from the therapeutic effect. [00:53:29] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. I mean, it's almost like. Imagine that you could have a drug that you can take that would alter your brain in such a way, would alter your brain in the same way that years of good parental care would. So then you could have a terrible childhood and you could take a drug that would make your brain as though you always had caring parents or something like that. [00:53:49] Speaker A: It was crazy. Wake up the next morning and nothing particularly has happened. But you're not traumatized, you're not depressed. It's not going to happen. I am really seriously biased against that. I just think that. And there's a larger issue here that maybe is worth mentioning, which is that scientists are so keen to develop these kinds of compounds, these non psychedelic psychedelics. This is an extension of what medicine has been trying to do for 150 years, which is to exorcise spirit out of medicine. They've almost succeeded, but then along comes psychedelics in the latter part of the 20th century. And all of a sudden we have a bunch of a set of medicines, the psychedelics that are basically medicines for the spirit, medicines for the soul. And so we have to acknowledge that the spirit exists, there is a soul that these things treat. And so it's put the spirit right back in the center of the debate around what is real therapy. And you have the reductionist group that says, well, we're basically just complex machines. You tweak this receptor, you change that receptor, you muck with the wiring of the brain and you're fixed because you're basically a machine. Just like you take your car to the mechanic and they fix it. I don't think people are that simple. I don't think it's quite that easy. And I'll be very surprised if any of these non psychedelic psychedelics are proved to be as effective as psychedelic, because taking the psychedelic, that is the point is you get the psychedelic experience. [00:55:52] Speaker B: Yeah, right. [00:55:52] Speaker A: And I think insights that come from that help you make the long term changes, help you integrate the understandings and actually, and that that is reflected long term in changes in neural architecture and connectivity and all these things that can be measured, you know, so. [00:56:11] Speaker B: Yeah, right. And I, I think like nowadays, you know, lots of people, also philosophers that write about psychedelics are talking about it in terms of therapeutic benefits. And there's kind of a lot of focus on the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. But what I find so interesting about, like Terence's vision on psychedelics is that it's distinctly, I think, an epistemic tool for Terrence. So he treats it as a way of learning about the world. It's not about, like, it's not, you know, he doesn't treat it as a therapeutic thing. He treats it as a way of knowing. And that I think is. Yeah, that, that's, yeah, that's one of these things that I think one of the reasons that I think that work is relevant. [00:56:56] Speaker A: I totally agree. And that I agree with his approach. Absolutely. And I think this is why the biomedical establishment, to a certain extent, the philosophical establishment, has rejected Terrence because he's not talking about the therapeutic effects. He's not. The people who bring psychedelics as forward as therapeutics, well, many of them are physicians and they're sincerely interested in finding treatments for mental disorders like depression and ptsd but then there's always a subtext there about, oh, psychedelics are a new form of therapy, the next generation after SSRIs or other classes of psychedelics. And by the way, there are billions to be made from. From this. You know, there's always that sort of subtext about, you know, the therapeutic application. I think Terry was more honest about it by rejecting that he wasn't really interested in therapy. I mean, he may have needed therapy, as we all do, but he wasn't interested in psychedelics as a tool for self understanding, you know, or self improvement. And he may have benefited from them had he looked at them in that way. In fact, you know, if you read his biography, there was a point in his life. Have you read Graham's biography of Terence or some of it? [00:58:34] Speaker B: Graham St. John's yes, yes, yeah, I've read it. [00:58:39] Speaker A: It's a wonderful book. But he talks about this experience in the late 80s when he had this very difficult trip, you know, that caused him to have an existential crisis and he stopped taking psychedelics, you know, for years. I mean, it was so unsettling to him. And I have often thought and sometimes said that what the reason that experience was so unsettling to him was because before it was all about, the focus was on the outside. The focus was on the metaphysics and as you say, an epistemic tool for understanding nature. When the mirror was turned around and focused on him, that was extremely uncomfortable for him. That was something he did not want to acknowledge or experience. It was very frightening because he really, effectively, I think he was afraid of having personal insight. You know, as long as it was directed outside, that was fine. He didn't have to think about that. But he did reject the notion of psychedelic therapy. And obviously psychedelics can be therapeutic, but again, we have to be very careful about how we employ them that way. Not least because of the way the therapies are carried out. And even some of the most highly structured clinical studies with psilocybin and so forth have been called out by other people as what you guys were doing was you were basically running a cult here. You know, that the criticisms of the Johns Hopkins studies and all that, which I don't really agree with, but that criticism has been made. And I do think that if you're going to use psychedelics in therapeutic situations, you have to be open to new forms of therapy. The old paradigms don't apply anymore, you know. [01:00:55] Speaker B: Yeah, right. It's really interesting what you say also about Terence and about the existential Crisis. Right. And the turning inward. And I think that's also actually really instructive. I noticed that in some of the raps I've listened to from Terence that he also said that he prefers to trip alone. So not to trip with other people but. Because, yeah, I mean, I think he said sometimes that he felt very responsible if there was another person there. And I can completely understand that. But I think that there is also. So a lot of people are specifically interested in psychedelics because of the interpersonal insights. Some people have almost this kind of feeling that they can communicate with someone telepathically through psychedelics and that just shows how sort of hyper attuned people are to each other's body language and each other's, you know, sort of non verbal communication sometimes on psychedelics. And of course if you are tripping alone, then that's not the thing that you're focusing on. Right. So I think also the choice to trip alone also means that you're. You're focusing on a different aspect of the psychedelic experience. [01:02:11] Speaker A: Right. Yes. He didn't really use them for interpersonal relations or personal insights and that sort of thing. It was very much directed toward this epistemic worldview and this idea of effectively the dimension of the elf machines and that sort of thing. And it is interesting that there does appear to be especially things like dmt. They can access a place where these processes seem to be going on and it's really not clear what is going on. I don't know if you've read any of Andrew Gallimore's work. [01:02:57] Speaker B: No, I haven't. [01:02:58] Speaker A: He's a neuroscientist and he has written many books on the DMT phenomenon. That's sort of extra dimensional realms that it seems to open up. His latest book is called Death by Astonishment and it's related to something Terrence said once in one of his seminars. Someone said, well, can you die from taking dmt? And he said only if you could die from astonishment. [01:03:29] Speaker B: Yeah, that's lovely. [01:03:31] Speaker A: Which I thought was pretty apt. [01:03:34] Speaker B: No, that's lovely. [01:03:36] Speaker A: We did a podcast with Andrew. I'll link you to the podcast. And his book is absolutely fascinating because there's something going on there that we don't understand, we can't and we can't get into in this podcast. But, but take a look. There does seem to be something anomalous about dmt, particularly. Especially dmt. [01:03:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:04:00] Speaker A: In this respect. So. Yeah. Well, my gosh, what a great conversation. We're over the top of the hour, but we could Go on all afternoon. But you probably don't have all afternoon and neither do I. But it's been a lovely conversation. [01:04:19] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. That's really lovely speaking with you and also hearing your reflections on Terence's thought. It's like super valuable also for my research. Yeah. So thank you for that. [01:04:29] Speaker A: Well, we'll have to invite you back when you get a little further along. Are you writing something about Terence? Are you working on something? [01:04:38] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So I've actually just finished writing one paper which engages with Terrence McKenna's ethics. So together with my co author, so Marluz Messenbacher, who is a comic artist, she's written a comic on Terence McKenna's life. And she's very interested. Yeah, she's very interested in the trickster archetype. And she has kind of studied the trickster archetype through her work with comics as well. And so I come from character ethics and epistemology. And in character ethics, we say that it is a good thing to have role models. And typically heroes, saints and sages are kind of the role models that a person should have. But what about the trickster? Is it okay to admire tricksters? And we've basically written a paper together on why it's okay to admire the trickster or trickster like individuals. And we're actually using Terence McKenna's work as a support, or as we're using him as an example of somebody who places a trickster like figure as a kind of exemplar for the good life. And that is, of course, the shaman, because the shaman is somebody who is a trickster. [01:05:59] Speaker A: Too often they are tricksters. Yeah. Well, that's fascinating. That's a whole area that we'll need to unpack when you guys get a little further along. I would point out also that the character sometimes of psychedelics can be tricksters too. [01:06:19] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. [01:06:21] Speaker A: This is why you have to be careful about all these insights and so on that you supposedly get. Particularly, I think mushrooms are particularly prone to that. They can just lay it down and you can come back utterly convinced. I mean, as we did at La Cherera, we were utterly convinced of these ideas which basically were by and large not true. And that, you know, the delusion continued for decades. And there's definitely elements of the trickster in shamanism and. Well, it's. Yeah, it's part of the dynamics, for sure. Not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, tricksters have their place. [01:07:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:07:17] Speaker A: But, you know, they could also be very dangerous. So in that sense, you know, psychedelics are like any technology potentially can be misused or can be used for. For good or bad. That, you know, the moral. Moral quality. And I say this all the time about. Any technology could be used for benefit or for harm, but it's not inherently either one. It's the choices we make about how to deploy it. And this is just kind of obvious, but people lose sight of this. They attribute moral qualities to the technology. It's not. It's neutral. And this comes up again and again. And also, particularly now we're talking about these issues with respect back to AI. And AI is another one. A very potentially beneficial and potentially dangerous kind of technology. And the question is, are we wise enough to use this technology? And that's always, you know, we're very clever species. We're not a very wise species. This is the problem. [01:08:36] Speaker B: That's a nice way to put it. Yeah, yeah. [01:08:40] Speaker A: So we could go on, but I guess we'll wrap it up here. Unless there's something we haven't said that must be said. What do you think? [01:08:50] Speaker B: Yeah, no, maybe I would like to also. So in addition to the paper on the Trickster, which hopefully will be published at some point, Pipeline, currently I've also started working on a. And this is very much work in progress, but a kind of a philosopher's guide to Terence McKenna's epistemology of psychedelics. [01:09:14] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [01:09:16] Speaker B: And this. This would be, I think, just like a short article or something. I'm thinking of making it into a journal article. So this is something I'm currently working on as well. And the reason is really that I think that philosophers have never really seriously engaged with Terence McKenna's work. And the reason for that, like, there's many reasons for that. One of them is the fact that I think sometimes Terrence McKenna engaged with these ideas, such as the DMT entities being a part of the collective unconscious, the collective unconscious being somehow real, and maybe there being sort of extraterrestrial entities involved. And this doesn't sit very comfortably with a lot of scientists. Sort of naturalistic worldview. Right. So this is like one reason why it hasn't been engaged with, but another is that I think Terence was taking lots of ideas from various different philosophers. So it's kind of like his sort of philosophy was very piecemeal. And I think lots of philosophers prefer to just read the original source. So then I've been looking. Okay, so what is the sort of. Really the novel part? And I think the novel part is really how these things connect with the psychedelic experience. And really the idea of Terence McKenna as a. Not just as a philosopher of shamanism, but also as like a shaman himself, also really as a practitioner of what he preached. And, you know, whether it's the stoned ape theory or whether it's the time wave. Right. All of these examples of his own shamanic practice are really instructive, I think. And, you know, so in philosophy of science, there are these wonderful examples, like Einstein, for example, who was a philosopher of science. He had a lot to say about how one should do science, but at the same time, he was also a scientist and he kind of. You see him in practice practicing what he preaches. So this is why philosophers of science love this guy. And I think that we should have a philosophy of shamanism as well. And I think that Terence McKenna could be the kind of figure that, you know, would be very instructive as a philosopher of shamanism and as a shaman. So that's a little bit how I'm, you know, sort of. These are the ideas that are marinating in my mind right now to write about. And I'm hoping to bring. Bring this thought to the philosophical community as well. See how that goes. [01:11:37] Speaker A: That's all great. That's wonderful that you're working on it. We'll invite you back in a few months after you've, you know, put your ideas down on paper and kind of develop them. I'd love to continue that conversation. That's another really rich area that we can discuss. So we'll table that discussion until next time. And I thank you very much for making time to have this conversation today. It was really good. It was far better than I expected. I don't know what I expected. [01:12:14] Speaker B: That's great. [01:12:15] Speaker A: We broke all the records, whatever. So it's great to have this conversation. Nice to get to know you. Next time you come on. Maybe we'll get Graham to join the conversation and we could really kick out the jabs. We'll do a two hour session with you and Graham. [01:12:36] Speaker B: Yeah, wonderful. Yeah, I would be totally down. [01:12:40] Speaker A: Okay, well, let's do that. All right. Thank you so much. [01:12:45] Speaker B: Okay, wonderful. Thank you. [01:12:47] Speaker A: I'll say goodbye now. Okay. All the best. Have a great day. [01:12:53] Speaker B: All right, Goodbye. Ciao. [01:12:55] Speaker A: Ciao.