Psychedelic experiences famously produce revelations, insight moments that feel intensely truthful and important. However, writes Henry Straughan, we should treat these insights with scepticism: the sense of certainty they bring is not a guarantee of truth. Instead of making new dogmatic claims about reality, the value of psychedelic experiences lies in sceptical openness to different ways of thinking and in understanding the limitations of our own minds.
Psychedelic trips abound in apparent insights. Drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline enable the fluid thinking required for solutions to intractable mathematical or technical problems. They produce flashes of creativity that spark musical genius and lead to therapeutic breakthroughs into personal history and present psyche. Of particular philosophical interest, however, is the way psychedelics purport to produce ethical and metaphysical insights into the nature of reality and even religious experiences of the divine itself. These “insight moments” are marked by a peculiarly intense phenomenology: one has the sense of something profound being revealed, of at last understanding the ways things are. Put simply, it is a feeling of truth.
These insights might be temporary, fleeting glimpses or lead to revolutions in belief systems. Many emerge from psychedelics with transformed worldviews. Some arrive at, or return to, particular religious traditions. Others come out with a conviction that beneath everyday reality lies a deeper, transcendent reality, and many carry with them a strong sense of the oneness of all beings. The increasing interest in and ingestion of psychedelic drugs raises the question: what is the worth of these insights? I suggest the value of psychedelic insights lies less in revealing other realities and more in the sceptical openness that arises from the way psychedelics challenge both the authority of everyday experience and call into question the truth of the extraordinary experiences they generate.
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While the “psychedelic renaissance” has done much to rehabilitate psychedelics, it is natural to be suspicious of ‘truths’ gained under the influence. A recent paper urges caution about psychedelic insights on the grounds that the feeling of insight is not an infallible indicator of truth. Experiments have shown that although the “eureka moment” is reliably correlated with truth, it does not guarantee truth since false insights can elicit the same feeling. In one experiment, participants read a series of words with closely related meanings (e.g., Grass, Plants, Farmer, Soil). They were asked to solve an anagram that was visually similar to a word related to the list, but was in fact an anagram of an unrelated word. RGNDENEA, for instance, tended to be solved incorrectly as GARDENER rather than ENDANGER. The researchers found that “solving” the anagram produced a feeling of insight, even with incorrect answers.
Indeed, a little reflection shows that at least some psychedelic insights must be wrong. Psychedelics can cause psychosis-like phases in which beliefs about the immediate environment are radically mistaken. Others have insights that are at odds with our best theories of the natural world, and, of course, psychedelic insights often contradict one another, not just between different people but for the same person over different trips (and even during a single trip).
But merely pointing out that insight moments can mislead us fails to do justice to the philosophical significance of the feeling of truth. René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy is the most (in)famous case of a philosopher arguing that the feeling of truth is the only ultimate guarantee of truth. Descartes encapsulated this in his “truth-rule”: “whatever I perceive clearly and distinctly is true”. He thought that if we cannot trust our “clear and distinct perceptions”, then we cannot trust anything, trapping us in a “deep whirlpool” of uncertainty. Admittedly, for Descartes, clear and distinct perceptions have to be indubitable: one is psychologically unable to doubt them while having them. Hence, the kind of experimental results described above do not undermine Descartes’ position. There is a difference between the simple “aha” feeling of solving a puzzle and an experience being so intensely luminous that one could not possibly doubt it. This, however, makes Descartes’ views all the more relevant to the current question, since people often describe trips as feeling more real than everyday life. During the session, they had no doubt they were encountering something real.
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Though few today would accept the system that Descartes built on his clear and distinct perceptions, many philosophers argue that contemporary analytic philosophy is pervasively structured around intuitions. In academic philosophy, “intuition” refers to a proposition seeming true to someone. Although we can use the tools of logic and mathematics, as well as the theoretical virtues, to evaluate and compare theories, ultimately, so the argument goes, our philosophical views must rest on what seems to us to be true or false, right or wrong.
We cannot escape our reliance on the feeling of truth, yet we have reasons to doubt that it is infallible. Where does this leave the value of psychedelic insights? It is worth considering why people are so inclined to take psychedelics seriously. Part of what makes psychedelic experiences seem so real is the way they overwhelm the individual’s cognitive capacities. The way the experience outstrips one’s conceptual and linguistic abilities is taken to validate the experience: if one cannot make sense of it, then one cannot have invented it. The terror and exhilaration accompanying this breakdown of reason add to the sense of reality.
Descartes’ Meditations again illustrates this phenomenon. In the Third and Fifth Meditations, Descartes offers arguments for God’s existence based on an experience of a being that appears to be so much greater, more immense, and more perfect than oneself that one could not have invented it. Such an overwhelming experience, which one is tempted to call an experience of the infinite, could not have come from the finite self.
There is the appearance of a paradox here. I have been talking about insights learnt from psychedelics yet also of psychedelic experience surpassing our sense-making capacities - how can we learn anything from psychedelics if we cannot make sense of psychedelic experience? Psychedelic insights are not verbally transmitted and psychedelics often produce the feeling of one’s linguistic capacities failing in the face of what is encountered, leaving individuals reaching for the paradoxical description “ineffable”. Instead, the work of articulating and interpreting comes later: after the shattering of self, there is its reconstitution, reconstruction, and narrativization. The verbalization of insights, the aspect which can be systematized and communicated, requires interpretative activity.
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I suggest that the value of psychedelic insights does not lie in the transmission of propositional truths. Rather, there are two distinct lessons. First, psychedelics drive us to imagine alternative ways of speaking, to push back against the impression of ineffability, of speechlessness, by generating new perspectives from which we can make sense of the experience. Yet, second, as an experience of our linguistic and conceptual capacities being outstripped, psychedelic experience shows that reality surpasses cognition. Descartes was at least correct to think that there is, if not God, a reality greater than our understanding. The response, then, should not be to fall into immutable worldviews but to find new ways to articulate, whether in words, music or images, the recognition that there will always be more than can be said.
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The extraordinary world of psychedelics can claim no more epistemic authority than ordinary, sober reality.
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Professor Chris Bache’s experience is illustrative. Over 20 years, Bache underwent 73 high-dose LSD experiences in carefully planned sessions. Bache describes these sessions in LSD and the Mind of the Universe, a valuable archive for the study of psychedelic insights. After his 50th session, he makes the following discovery:
“Like many of us, I had always operated under the assumption that there was a final endpoint to this journey, an absolute destination that we could eventually reach … But at the very moment of reaching this pinnacle, this session showed me that there are dimensions of existence beyond even this … The goal of this work, I have learned, is not to achieve some final condition or reach the end of this infinity.”
Bache’s book presents a series of insights, each of which is transcended by later insights. Although later insights do not necessarily negate earlier ones, they do demand revision and recontextualization. The inductive lesson of this perpetual transcendence is that each insight is provisional and fragile: we should neither accept insights as final truths nor reject them as illusions, but rather move forward with an openness to their potential value and eventual failure.
The psychedelic renaissance launched a new dogmatism, with devotees convinced that psychedelic exploration can disclose the true nature of reality. These extraordinary experiences are useful in counterbalancing instinctive deference to convention - the dogmatism of the everyday - but they risk becoming their own ossified worldviews. The extraordinary world of psychedelics can claim no more epistemic authority than ordinary, sober reality. Perhaps, however, the lesson of psychedelics is a more sceptical one. The experience of certainty undone vividly reminds us of our essential finitude. Every insight, every apparently firm foundation may be reinterpreted, revised, and transcended. The sublime way in which one’s worldview is surpassed by the abundance of experience can produce a sceptical openness, which recognizes each insight as provisional, perspectival, and fallible.
