Psychedelic-Type Thinking & Academic Research

The Case for the rational, scientific co-exploration of psychedelic states

Thinking can be breathtaking at higher orders of complexity. Let's call this psychedelic-type thinking. This is the subject of our exploration today. 

Tripping in the Name of Science

"Who knows what hundreds if not thousands of rational psychonauts doing this kind of work could work out if they put their minds to the task of developing a language to talk about those states." ¹

Trust me, I've made my way around the various spiritual (but not religious) communities. Bouncing from community to community, I experienced a head-banging frustration at the circular logic and limited spiritual memes that pervade the talk-space of psychedelic integration. It seems that most spiritual communities are stuck, deeply stuck. The academics of the college seem distant to the new age psychedelic voyagers. Imagine the revolution that would follow the integration of leading-edge postmodern/metamodern thought with psychonaut-level consciousness exploration!

As scientific research on psychedelics begins to pick up, so should the academic rigor of these subjective states. So what would it look like to infuse spiritual circles with the same scientific rigor as the lab?

Last year I spoke with Katrina Michelle on her Ph.D. thesis regarding resistance to spiritual emergence. Our conversation centered around the core insight that our culture doesn't have the framing necessary for people to integrate their psychedelic experiences. If anything, our culture is resistant to the types of thinking that psychedelic experiences afford. We called for a renaissance of cultural understanding that doesn't judge and resist these novel types of thinking and perceiving. My attempt to elucidate the conditions required for this cultural renaissance follows. 

A Cultural Scientific & Spiritual Co-Revolution

What I'm calling for here is the rigorous, academic, rational study of psychedelic experiences and a new language of psychedelic terrain. The goal: Higher state experiences can relate healthily to all vMemes in our culture. 

Doing this entails inviting people with more disparate backgrounds and experiences to come and trip together. Let's call in expert neuroscientists, AI researchers, cognitive scientists, psychologists, philosophers, economists, and linguists (just to name a few)! Afterward, we can create a sharing circle that honors every perspective and seeks to co-construct new meta-narratives and psycho-linguistic innovations. 

The circles will entail: 

1. Dialogue that seeks to bring forth sharing around the question, "From your lens and personal history, how did you understand what you experienced?" 

2. Focusing intently on the overlap & differences so that we can architect a language that points more closely to this state than our culture currently can.

Critical Feedback of Exotic States of Consciousness

"Our descendants may someday be able to seamlessly switch between radically alien modes of cognition to tackle conceptual problems we haven't even conceived of. In fact, that we currently can't even conceive of, lacking the semantic primitives needed to do so."

Rather than letting the logical fallacies run amuck, we can hold those who trip to a higher standard of cognitive development, providing critical feedback and rigorous communities (versed in shared co-created frameworks) to help integrate one's experiences.

Critical feedback is one of the missing pieces I see currently among spiritual communities of practice. This vision is the antidote. 

Specifics Substances Support Specific Fields

I love how Qualia Research Institute approaches the intersection of psychedelics and academia. They've written about how we can use psychedelics as a way to explore creative patterns of thought.

This article has beckoned me to wonder. 

• What scientific fields can be more adequately explored using psychedelics? 

• What can we put tripping to use in service of? 

• What honorable pursuits can be enhanced and experience innovations as a result of infusing psychedelic experiences into their process? 

• Which psychedelics afford discovery in which fields? 

I want to leave you with some thoughts from the Qualia Computing Team around the potential benefit of using various psychedelics for enhanced academic explorations. 

Exploring Infinity w/ LSD

"Based on countless trip reports, it seems that LSD and related compounds allow you to "think about infinity" in a way that sober thought simply lacks."

"We have to realize that infinity as a term is very different than infinity as a concept: when you say infinity while on a high dose of LSD, you are referring to an aspect of your experience rather than a formally defined mathematical or common-sense conception of infinity."

"Consider how the sophistication of one's thinking evolves over time; compare how a third grader thinks relative to a graduate student. There is no reason to expect this mastery over our sober medium of thought will translate into competence over exotic patterns of thought! When you take LSD for the first time and experience "LSD-like thinking patterns," you are like a newborn, faced with a completely new and exotic mode of self-reflective expression."

Exploring Geometry w/ DMT

"Another property of the psychedelic medium of thought is that DMT-like cognition may be very well suited to reason about and indeed experience non-Euclidean high-dimensional geometry."

Exploring Philosophical Questions w/ Bufo Alvarius

"the medium of thought triggered by 5-MeO-DMT is well suited to contemplate the question of "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

Closing Thoughts

I invite you to sit with:

How we might upgrade the quality of dialogue and sense-making surrounding psychedelic integration.

How we may use psychedelic insights in service of the development of science & rationality as opposed to rejecting these pursuits altogether.

1. All quotes in this article are from the Qualia Computing Team.