Tag: Psychedelics

A reader writes:

This is why rationality is ultimately irreconcilable with faith. Scientists can now pinpoint the exact spots in your brain that light up during spiritual moments and you have found a mushroom that reproduces the effect. But instead of acknowledging this as an interesting yet completely natural sensation, you instead conclude that it’s a mushroom-shaped window into the divine. Your mind is playing tricks on you, much in the same way that your eyes play tricks on you when items move into your blind spot. (However, the effect sounds interesting; I might have to try it.)

Another elaborates on that view:

I find it fascinating how someone of faith (you) and someone who has no faith (me) can look at the exact same study and come to diametrically opposed conclusions.

Your ingestion of magic mushrooms led to a deep spiritual connection and a reaffirmation and deepening of your faith. Therefore, mushrooms are part of our connection to the divine and should not be regulated away from us. To some of us non-believers it suggests the opposite, namely that your brain is lying to you. A similar experiment showed that subjects would “feel the presence of the divine” when an electrode stimulated a specific portion of the brain. Meditation seems to trigger similar functionality by causing neurons to fire in a specific set of patterns, which have electrochemical affects on the same portions of the brain.

I don’t think you’d argue that direct electrical stimulation or a chemical message delivered to a similar spot is some sort of magic God retrieval switch. “Press here to summon God.” It seems that such a useful switch was rather oddly placed.

The brain, as an organ, likes certain types of stimulation and patterns, for the same reason that a song that you hate gets stuck in your head; “you” may not like it, but your brain certainly does. Certain kinds of messages or neuron firing patterns are highly enjoyable to the brain’s neurons – they make them feel good, at peace, interconnected. Your neurons are happy and that filters up into your consciousness to make “you” happy and connected.

If you can’t tell the difference between the presence of God and the presence of psilocybin, maybe there is no difference. No God required.

P.S.  The best counter-argument I can think of is that these various techniques somehow suppress “reality’s” overwhelming input and allow you to detect the undercurrent of divinity in the Universe. The best counter-counter-argument to that is Douglas Adam’s Babel Fish: God cannot exist without faith; the Babel Fish is so obviously God’s handiwork that you don’t require faith; therefore God doesn’t exist. Q.E.D. Why create a series of unrelated obtuse methods of hooking into the divine? Why not just make it as natural as breathing?

Ask God. That’s beyond my pay grade. But more seriously, by definition, any divine manifestation in the mortal world will have some physical manifestation. Psilocybin may be a kind of trick that triggers an awareness of God – something that can only be stably achieved by years of meditation, prayer and love. Of course that can be observed scientifically by studying our brains under both shrooms or meditation. But the ultimate source of that feeling of universal beneficence that seems calculated to make humans the happiest and kindest they can be remains a mystery. Perhaps it’s all neurons and chemicals – but if they are part of God too, that argument fails.

But why a mushroom? Beats me. A random part of the physical universe that acts like a key to a specifically human spiritual lock: it does seem bizarre. But humans discovered it aeons ago; and the notion of sacramental faith makes space for it, from a Catholic perspective. We eat and drink the divine – as so many faith traditions have for millennia. As long as we don’t mistake the thing for the Godhead, we are merely offered a chance to glimpse what godliness and mindfulness can be. And it remains with us months and years later – actually helping us to attain the calm and peace that true faith generates. Which makes it less a trick than a sacrament – as, by the way, peyote long has been on this continent.

I believe we are indeed all neurons and chemicals. But when all these fall away, God is still with us; and God is us. It is the falling away, the lifting of the veil, that is hard.

(Photo of Psilocybe Cubensis by Flickr user afgooey74)

A reader writes:

That is an irrational conclusion, in fact. If I begin to imagine that the voices coming out of my cell phone originate in the cell phone, and dismiss the idea that there are other people in some distant unseen part of the universe talking to me through my cell phone as madness, it is I who am becoming mad. And scientific materialists who imagine that all God-experiences merely originate in the brain because they can be  associated with brain phenomena, are similarly mad, and missing the point.

They have no idea who they even are as conscious beings, but are confusing the player of the game with the machine the game is played on.

That is where the illogic in these matters begins, with that divide between the conscious experiencer and the brain-medium of our experiences. Faith is not illogical if one doesn’t fall for this fallacy, but instead fixes oneself in the primary position of the conscious experiencer. That’s the position from which we can love, and know God and reality directly.

Science takes an abstracted definition of the self, founded in an objective experience that is presumed to be the true subject. But no subject is ever identical to his objects, or even to the media of perception by which we observe those objects. As Jesus said, the Kingdom of Heaven is within, in the subjective dimension of our conscious being, not in the objective dimension of the “game”. We play the game of life in order to learn this lesson in the midst of the most challenging circumstances. Some get that lesson, and we loosely call them “saints”. Most take a very long time, requiring many lifetimes, many different brains and bodies, as we play the game over and over again until we get it right.

Scientists are only grasping one small part of the game, and misinterpreting what it means. They will cite a lack of “evidence” for my position, but they have no evidence for their own interpretation either. The evidence I will point to is the happiness and love that comes from living from the point of view of conscious being, rather than the materialist viewpoint. But they are of course free to make as many mistakes as they like. It’s a long game, after all. One often learns only by making mistakes. But our happiness is the criteria by which we ought to judge ourselves, not dissociated logic. Logic is not a thing in itself, it is a tool to increase our love for reality.

Beautifully, powerfully put.

Andrew Sabl adds his voice to these dissents:

Give mushrooms to a bunch of hippies and they’ll gain a new appreciation for yoga; give them to a heterodox Catholic and he’ll ponder the Incarnation. Give them to me and I might start to (wrongly) believe that I can understand complex mathematical proofs or conceive (wrongly) that I remember my once-adequate ancient Greek—which once gave me the very fulfilling experience of being able to read easy bits of Plato without a dictionary. But in none of these cases is there any reason to think that the drug-takers have come to know anything that’s actually true. And I would have thought that this would be relevant.

Drum introduces romance into the debate. I'm working on a follow-up post.

Materialists return fire. One writes:

The from inside the brain with a voice emanating from a cell phone is completely flawed. Of course a reasonable person would not believe that the voice originates from the cell phone, because a person using a cell phone knows that he or she is talking to another person. We know this by common sense and because we have used cell phones before.

Consider for a moment that we dropped a cell phone down to a tribe of people who have not had contact with the outside world for hundreds of years. One of them picks it up, not knowing what it is, and when it begins ringing, fumbles around with it until he accepts the call. It is possible, if not likely, that this person would think the voice on the phone was indeed originating from the phone. It would be perhaps equally likely that the people of this tribe would believe the voice of the phone was god’s. God is always what we attribute to the unknown.

We might not know how or why psilocybin has the effect on the brain that it does, but that in itself does not mean that something spiritual or supernatural is at work. It only means that we do not yet understand what is happening, just as that tribesman does not understand what a cell phone is.

Another further breaks down the analogy:

It is a universal experience of people who speak on the phone to have also conducted conversations with people in person, where we have heard, seen, touched and smelled them. Very often in fact, we conduct conversations over the phone with the very same people we have spoken to in real life. If any doubt were to ever arise in ones mind as to the true origin of the voice in the phone, a quick real life conversation with the supposed source of that voice would be all that was needed to set ones mind at ease.

We know how cell phones work. Cut down your nearest cell phone tower, or put your phone in a Faraday cage and the voices coming from the phone disappear. Use a radio scanner to see the radio frequencies it receives and emits with the corresponding conversation. Blast enough radiation across the band and the voice drops away.

You will notice that none of these experiments will work with god. You can only ever to talk to god on the phone as it were, no double checking by having a real life conversation with him (and of course, even talking to him on the “phone” is not by any means universal. I have never had the pleasure myself, but even amongst people who have, there seems to be quite a debate about what his telephone number is and what he likes to talk about). There are no prayer waves, and thus no prayer Faraday cages or cutting down the prayer cell tower. If you cut down the cell phone tower, no amount of faith or belief will make your, or anyone else’s phone work.

Another steps back:

This is ridiculous.  Look, scientific theories are abstract models of the universe.  Models explain data.  We can compare two different models by evaluating how well they explain the data – our observations about the universe.  There are models that include a god or gods that have omniscient powers and are undetectable in the physical world.  The problem is that none of these models explain the data any better than models that do not include gods.  That’s Occam’s razor.

The materialist view does not require us to dismiss any model, including one that includes undetectable gods.  We dismiss it because it has unnecessary complications.  But if we suddenly have some observation such that that model becomes the best fit to ALL the data, then we bring it back into play.  That observation might be, say, somebody rising from the dead (in such a way that there is no other possible explanation that fits with any other model).  There is nothing “mad” about this.  It is in fact completely logical.  Most of us happen to think that something that would bring that model back into play is extremely unlikely, so there is no point in working with it until something like that does happen, and whatever that is is indisputably support for that model (rather than being explainable by people lying or some trickery).

Another:

This thread has clarified for me the essence of the materialist/spiritual divide. Spiritual folk believe that faith that makes them happy is self-validating. It MUST be true. How could it feel so right and powerful if it were untrue?  This seductive thought is absolutely refuted by the complete lack of reproducibilty across individuals, religions, cultures, and time. It is clearly a highly error-prone way to think, if not error-guaranteed.

Another:

There’s a distinct problem with your reader’s comparison of the religious or sacred sense to other perceptions: it presumes that the sacred sense is a perception, and not a reaction. For instance, say I enjoy the taste of Chinese food (and oh, I do). Do we then say that the Chinese food objectively contains my enjoyment, and that my enjoyment reaction in my brain is merely a perception of that objective enjoyment? No. Enjoyment is merely my subjective response to a stimulus. Someone who hates Chinese food would not derive that same enjoyment from the same stimuli. It’s certainly clear that not everyone receives the same dose of sacred sense from the same stimuli – I get much more of it from nature, while a friend finds it in a loud, raucous, speaking-in-tongues Born Again church that I frankly find intimidating and alien.

Finally, your reader presumes that a materialist viewpoint is inherently inferior – that it does not lead to the same happiness and love that “living from the point of view of conscious being” does. My partner and I have shared love for nine years, and I am extremely happy. Materialism is why I am happy. Everything that I am will die out when I stop breathing – this knowledge makes each moment precious, because I have no hope of eternity to remove the importance from the moment. It forces me to consider each moment deeply, to derive what I can from it. It makes me treasure everything I have, because I am aware that it is fleeting and unique – that this moment will never repeat again, because I do not have infinity to wait for it to recur. If I had infinity, then wasting my life would mean nothing, because it is only an imperceptibly tiny fraction of the time I am allotted.

The discussion thread thus far – in chronological order – here, here, here and here. Fear not. I will return to this debate soon.

(Photo of Psilocybe Cubensis by Flickr user afgooey74)

It’s an old debate, but this reader makes the point for me:

At the risk of oversimplifying, what things like Psilocybin may bring home experientially, and therefore powerfully, for those that partake is that qualitative states matter.  That the world as we know it is shot through and through by our qualitative experience of it; see Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” for a deeply rational account of what may come to be realized experientially for those who use psychotropics.

As Kant rightly showed us, there will always be a gulf between the noumena and us, and when someone is tripping balls they can easily experience that chasm, commonly resulting in a radically spiritual effect.  Psychotropics allow for this because they allow one to experience how deeply brain states shape reality, that we will never have complete, direct, or as Kant would put it, “pure” access to “things in themselves.”

Another way to speak of spirituality is to speak of the qualitative frameworks we all have. It’s not something we can step out of. That said, any experience that brings to the foreground our qualitative framework, its contingent nature, and its immense implications for our lives and our reality, will inherently be a deeply spiritual affair.

The disenchantment of the world via scientism, is merely another approach to the world via a qualitative framework, it’s a spirituality as well, with all the moral, emotional, and psychological implications that come with it. I would encourage everyone, especially atheists and science-minded members of the audience to try and have more experiences that allow them to better understand the radical contingency of their own qualitative framework, drug-induced or otherwise.  All of a sudden, science, poetry, narrative, life, and yes, maybe even God-talk may become far more interesting.

Indeed they do. Another echoes:

In regard to brain states and experiences of what Hitch calls “The Numinous”, the scientific materialists miss an important point.

All human experiences are mediated by the brain. It’s thus legitimate to point out that if transpersonal experience can be reductively explained as a brain state only, while disregarding the aesthetic, moral, and transformative aspects of such experiences, the same critique could be applied to anything. Enjoy reading Richard Dawkins? That’s the brain. Gazing at the night sky? Brain again. Good sex? “That’s the brain, honey.” Such a person would rightfully get a slap from his/her lover!

Dawkins et al. might claim they only use this criticism to attack empirical or epistemic and supernatural claims of divinity, but people like Rebecca Goldstein even use “it’s all the brain” to debunk mystics who are clearly speaking metaphorically and poetically.

I’m still working on my own response to the fascinating thread. Busy week. Still only one hand.

(Photo: by Cactu/Wiki here)

Bill Hicks – an atheist – recounts his experience of “unconditional love”. It gets great about 51 seconds in: