Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes: What is Exogenous Mind Theory? Metaphysics, Psychedelics, & Mind At Large

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
If you're interesting consciousness, if you're
interesting flossing minds, why not explore that whole amazing
cosmos of different forms of experience, forms of experience
which you know you can't really explain?
If certain psychedelic induced mystical experiences are
ineffable, if you can't put theminto words and you can't report
them, then you can't get a neural correlate to them either.

(00:20):
Let's say that you did further tests to determine whether
certain psychedelics decreased brain activity.
Whilst the report was of intenserich experience ordered to
experience. That would be a fascinating
finding, wouldn't it? That would actually be a way of
empirically getting into metaphysics, and it's
psychedelics that would allow for such tests because it
temporarily changes functioning of normal prosaic brain

(00:42):
functioning. So yeah, there's a lot of
interesting things yet to discover.
Peter, if you had to give me a philosophical history of the
mind body problem, what would you tell me?
What story would you craft and which historical figures come to
mind when you think of the story?

(01:03):
Well, I suppose a traditional story that shopping hotels is
from Descartes. I mean, Descartes seems to think
that, you know, with him the whole problem about essentially
upward causation, downward causation begins when their
interaction. But of course, you know, in the
West we see, we see notions of the mind, of course, in the

(01:25):
classic philosophers, Plato, Aristotle, of course, you know,
with regard to, you know, the soul, the forms, teleology, what
not, What story would I tell? I still like to tell the
Cartesian story, to be honest, because I think that because I
quite, I take quite radical views of the mind.

(01:46):
I would maybe less radical thesedays, but I like to always go
into the the sort of modern history as to why people think
that's radical, why they think it's strange and whatever.
So I like to go, yeah, take thatCartesian root of the classic
Cartesian dualism. But then I also like the history
of idealism, you know, which is kind of lost, I think to certain

(02:08):
extent, especially British idealism or absolute idealism.
I was just reading a text on it the other day and it said that
for many reasons, but partly because of the war, the Great
War, there was a big antagonism towards against Germany and
against nationalism. And as a result that kind of

(02:28):
German based idealism which became heavily prominent in
Britain was kind of was kind of left alone.
So you get this history of philosophy from Mil to Russell
and you skip like 50 years in the late sort of 19, thirty 20th
century. So I always like to go through
that. British idealism basically came

(02:50):
out of Hegel mostly, you know, starting with with Green, ending
with FH Bradley. And then, you know, from FH
Bradley's appearance in reality 1893 as a kind of advance of
that, I, you get Whitehead's philosophy for North Whitehead's
philosophy. I mean, he called his main book
Process in reality because it came out of, you know, based on

(03:13):
Bradley's appearance in reality.It was seen as a sort of realist
advance on that idealism, although Bradley himself didn't
know whether he was a realist oridealist.
But anyway, so to understand Whitehead, it's good to look at,
you know, to understand Bradley really.
And to understand Bradley, you know, you go through the British
idealist, absolute idealists, and then you realize, well, you
really got to know Hegel a bit. And then if you, to understand

(03:34):
Hegel can't, can't live in its wolf and so on, then you go back
to where it all began, essentially with the ancient
Greeks. So, yeah, but my own particular
interests, I would say at the moment at least lie around that
kind of lost history of absoluteidealism, which kind of

(03:55):
predominant philosophy in the English speaking world for 50
years. I'm glad you brought up idealism
because when I read your work and when I explore it, a big
part of me thought about why you're not an idealist instead
of a pan psychist. So do you want to touch on that?
Sure. Funnily enough, I'm I'm

(04:15):
currently writing a review of Bernardo Kastrup's Analytic
Idealism, his latest book. Can I say we can get into that
if you want later. But why?
First of all, I wouldn't say, I would say that panpsychism and
idealism are not mutually exclusive.
You say you get, for example, inlive Nets, both I would say, you
know, and perhaps in Whitehead he's, you know, it depends how

(04:37):
you define idealism. And I should say that I was, I
did count myself amongst the idealists years ago.
So first of all, getting introduced to Kant, to manual
Kant first Critique University and sort of blew my mind.
And, and you know, because there's something quite
rational, quite reasonable. It's still influential today.

(04:58):
Of course, even the modern theories of predictive
processing, whatever, you can sort of press that back to count
to some extent. But but then shock now took hold
of me because it's sort of an advance upon count in a way that
will was actually something thatwas, it was the thing in itself
that you could know within yourself at least that seemed an

(05:20):
advance. And and a Nietzsche coming out.
Schopenhauer kind of changed my ethical views quite radically.
Yeah. But but then I also studied
books on at Warwick University with Keith Ansell Pearson.
I did Hegel with Stephen Holgate.

(05:40):
So I got into all of that. I had a good mix really.
And Barth University, you know, I especially went into Alfred N
Whitehead's thought, as I said, because it seems like the kind
of culmination of a lot of this idealism.
I mean, I could go into it. I mean, the the great thing
about Whitehead is, you know, that can't tell copernical
Copernicus revolution was due topartly due to Hume on causation

(06:02):
saying we can never directly perceive causation.
Whiteheads, Whitehead argued that actually you can directly
perceive causation and that's the same thing as perception
prehension for him and same thing as memory.
And he put it all together in this very parsimonious way.
But as a result it made can't, can't critical philosophy
superfluous, you know, because it was it was sort of reaction

(06:24):
to something that Hume got wrong.
Anyway, you know, 1 keeps reading and I'm sure my views
will change as time goes on. Well.
I guess I might have jumped the gun a bit.
Let's let's let's start off by defining consciousness before.
So before we continue into your actual views and how it differs
from your typical pancycis of your idealist view, how would
you define consciousness? Well, I I was a precious

(06:49):
question in a tripartite fashion.
You can see I've been asked thisbefore.
I teach philosophy mind today. So I, I, my, my general answer
is the approach to take which I find the most useful is to
divide it into three parts. The first part is to ask what
the contents of consciousness are.

(07:09):
So that would include, you know,colours, sound sense, emotions,
feelings, will time rates, time flows, stuff like that.
Qualia, controversial words, butI think as a generic term it's
fine. So that's the first thing, you
know, it's sort of, one can talkabout these different types of

(07:29):
consciousness. Absolutely.
Second part of the answer is to talk about the differentiators
of consciousness from non consciousness generally matter,
but that's what is matters just as difficult, right.
So that would be things like butthese are all like, you know,
like more purported differentiators.
So like privacy, for example, ornon spatiality with Descartes or

(07:56):
non inferentiality or or you know, and so on and so forth.
All these sort of, you know, like purported things that make
mind teleology, you know, thingsthat make mind different from
matter. But all of those are
questionable, right? So in answering the question,
what is consciousness? You, you, you have to put
forward all these questionable theories, right?
Some of them probably right, some probably wrong.

(08:17):
And then the third part of the answer to the question what is
consciousness is the relations of consciousness to non
consciousness. So then you get into the isms,
you know, so then, you know, dualism, different times of
physicalism, emergentism, epiphenomenalism, idealism,

(08:38):
absolute monism, you know, the transcendent even and so on and
so forth, all of which, as you know, in fact the purpose of
this podcast highly debatable. So, you know, yeah, so I think
basically to answer the questionwas consciousness, you just have
to go through a whole array of questionable theories to even

(09:00):
begin. So I don't think there's any
sort of absolute answer to that.I was speaking to Stuart
Hameroff about this, about I think it was a week ago, and he
was talking about how in 1994 when David Chalmers mentioned
the hard problem that their intention was to spend the
entire weekend, the first day was to define consciousness, but
they spent the entire week and then stuck on the definition.

(09:20):
So it seems like this is really a problematic aspect of trying
to discuss consciousness. What are your thoughts?
Well, I mean, you know, it's, I think plus we mind really is
concerned with that question andthe third part of the answer,
you know, the different, different sort of relationships.
Although of course, it's been focused really on physicalism
and dualism in the 20th century.I think that's changing a bit

(09:42):
now. But yeah, no, it's no easy
option. And if you're an idealist, of
course, or a certain type of idealist, Hey Gillian, maybe
then consciousness is the same thing as reality anyway.
So you know, and to us what is reality?
It's, you know, deepest, most fundamental of all questions.
So I don't know the answer to this.
You've. Got a nice grasp of the history

(10:05):
of philosophy of mind. I noticed when you talk about
it, when you write about it, you, you really have studied
this very well and you articulate your answers very
well as well and it's enjoyable to listen to it.
What do you think is the reason for this current shift from most
materialist, physicalist theories of consciousness slowly
transitioning into this pen psychist or idealist framework?

(10:26):
Why do you think this is happening?
I mean, it's I, I think multifaceted reasonings as
always, you know, there's no. There is no, there is no yes or
no questions here. It's just.
Yeah. Well, yes.
Well, I think, I think, you know, on the surface level,
David Chalmers and yeah, talkingabout, you know, renaming an old

(10:46):
problem, mind, body, body problem, hard problem,
consciousness just brought to light the fact that nothing was
really satisfactory. None of this sort of general
answers are satisfactory of the 20th century at least.
So because of that, you know, sort of cul-de-sac with a hard
problem, people went back to thedrawing board as well and looked
to the past for possible ways ofapproaching this question.

(11:10):
And that's I think why, for example, panpsychism came back
into onto the book table because, you know, this has got
a great pedigree. RG Collingwood, you know, in The
idea of Nature, he writes that, you know, the ancient Greeks
thought that the whole of naturewas alive.
That was their metaphor for reality, you know, an Organism.

(11:35):
And then we sort of moved into the metaphor of the machine.
And then he said we're now moving into the metaphor of
history with evolution and so on.
But, but I think that. Yeah, no.
So. So we've got, there's a great
pedigree in panpsychism with theGreeks, with Renaissance
thinkers. I mean, it was Patricia, the
Renaissance thinker who coined the panpsychism.

(11:55):
Interestingly, if you read that,though, it means what we today
probably define more as pantheism.
So the meanings changed and you know, as a as a kind of semi
Whiteheadian, we prefer the wordpan experientialism, but I just
see that as a type of panpsychism really.

(12:16):
Yeah. So that's so so, yeah.
And then there's great thinkers who are panpsychists, you know,
like I mentioned a few already, Leibniz, Spinoza, Russell,
arguably Whitehead then, and many others in contemporary
world, Galen Strawson, you know,and so on.
Yeah, go on. No, no, no.
So that's one reason. I mean, so, so yeah, like, you

(12:37):
know, we've come to cul-de-sac this great pedigree of pan
psychist thinkers. So people are approaching pan
psychism again, that's on the sort of logical surface level.
I think there are deeper, not deeper, but other socio
economic, political factors as well.
So, you know, relating to the church and the, you know, the

(13:01):
sort of battle between the sort of the middle classes, the
bourgeois and the clergy and so on and sort of, yeah, this and
that. I mean, yeah, multifaceted.
And it's it's pretty impossible to prove anything, you know?
Yeah, it's so multifactorial. It's very hard to pin down
certain reasons because I do believe if if Nixon hadn't with

(13:24):
Timothy Leary, if all of that hadn't happened, I believe that
pan psychosole idealists would be, I think it would be more of
a thriving philosophy at this point.
Well, yeah. Well, it's interesting.
In factorial so I do know that it's not a single entity.
No, no, absolutely. Yeah.
I I mean, I think if the war didn't happen, things would be

(13:45):
extremely different for sure. Timothy Leary and the hell sort
of psychedelic 60s outburst. I mean, you know, like the pit.
The the great pity about that was that there were
intellectuals looking at psychedelic consciousness, you
know, like Humphrey Osmond did coined psychedelic and
hallucinogen and Aldous Haxley. And you know, they, they they
organized this this great gathering in the 50s, in the

(14:07):
1950s called Outsight where theywere they invited Einstein and
Jung and AJ and you know, and soon.
Was that AJ Anyway some great thinkers together to take
mescaline and then write about it.
You know, that was 1950s. They almost got it all together.
All the fun, you know, promised funding from the Ford
Foundation. But in the end Ford Foundation

(14:27):
pulled the plug and didn't go ahead.
You know, some 10 years later then Timothy Leary messes it all
up. So yeah, I think, you know,
psychedelic research would have steamed ahead had there not been
for that. I don't just blame Leary, of
course. I mean, it was the IT was the
political situation that also suppressed it.
I mean again, interesting histories there, but.

(14:50):
This. Goes back, I should say just
quickly, it also relates to the,you know, colonization of the
Americas when the sort of Iberians prohibited psychedelic
drugs, you know, when they came across them in South America,
middle America, and also relatedto the American temperance
movement against alcohol, you know, so that interrelates to

(15:12):
the church especially, you know,it's, you know, that
fascinating. Before we get into the
philosophy of psychedelics, I think to touch on the
consciousness aspect here. You mentioned you're going to
write a piece on Bernardo Kastrup's analytic idealism.
What is this going to be about? And and if you could, how would
you really define your view of consciousness?

(15:33):
Or do you consider yourself a panpsychosist?
Because I know you wrote your your PhD on panpsychism, but
what is your actual view if you don't mind me asking?
Yeah, good question. I think it's a fusion.
I mean, first of all, I, I, I always say that I don't believe
really anything. I entertain ideas, right?
So I'm not absolutely dogmatic about my view because I know

(15:55):
problems, you know, when you really get into something, you
know the problem is better than anyone.
So it's hard. I'm not.
But at the moment my preference is for a fusion really between
Spinoza and Whitehead. And so it's a kind of, it is a
pan psychism. So I do believe that
consciousness or sentience or mentality runs throughout the

(16:19):
whole of nature. Absolutely.
I believe. I mean, I'm honest, I think that
might and matter are essentiallythe same thing.
So this is a spinootism, you know, like that it might have
might have been different attributes or expressions of the
same substance. But unlike Spinoza with
Whitehead, I'm a process philosopher as well.

(16:41):
So I believe that, you know that.
So for Spinoza, you know, the laws of nature were constant
because of, because essentially nature was God and it had to be
perfect, right? So, and that didn't allow for
freedom, mental causation, you know, effective mental
causation. Whereas with Whitehead, you've
got this creative universe, thiscreative impulse.
And so I, I sort of, I always say, you know, Spinoza plus

(17:08):
Darwin equals Whitehead. So that's the kind.
So I'm going, so I would, I would, I would classify myself
as a Whiteheadian, but with certain caveats.
You know, some of the details inWhitehead I don't think are
necessary, for example, But you know, like one thing that I
especially think is important and Whitehead you can also get
on Bergson and Bradley to some extent, is this amazing concept

(17:29):
of prehension, which is means that it's it's in a way the the
opposite of representation. It's a form of perception, but
it's not representation. It's the kind of absorption of
the outside to the object into the inside as well into the
subjects. So part of the object becomes
part of the subject. So the relationship between

(17:52):
appearance and reality is reallythe relationship between part
and the whole. That's a very, you know, so
that's sort of some symbiosis ofbugs and a Whitehead.
They admire each other's work. I think that's extremely
important. So there's a type of realism as
against idealism. You know, that you actually do
perceive the outside world. Now you of course you color it

(18:13):
to a certain extent due to evolution or whatever, but
there's a certain influx of reality into our perception.
In fact, part of the outside becomes part of the inside.
And that's the kind of, I think that concept is especially
important, something I like to pursue.
So it's a kind of that's part and it's process relational
philosophy really. And it's related to the, you

(18:34):
know, 4E cognition and whatever extended mind, but it's kind of
more original form of it, more extreme form, really.
So what would you address in Bernardo Kastrop's idealism in
this piece? What would be the most important
aspects of it? Where would you differentiate
yourself from his work? And which part is part of his
work do you admire, if any, because I'm this is a this is

(18:56):
going to be a critique or a. We'll see.
I've got a, I've got a funny relationship with Castro
because, you know, over the years I've criticized him a bit
on shopping, understanding shopping and Nietzsche and so
on. But we did have a conversation
recorded actually about a month ago.
And I think we were really affable, polite and whatever.

(19:19):
And I did enjoy his book. You know, I do like the way that
he sort of ruffles up feathers, especially in the psychedelic
world. He presents an alternative, at
least makes people think, even if you don't agree with it
fully. So anyway, reading his latest
book, Analytic Idealism in a Nutshell, is a summary book,
really small book. Yeah.
You know, had some good points, but it's pretty much cantonism.

(19:42):
So there's but not quite actually it's a mixture between
Kant and Hegel, but neither of them.
So it's the view that, you know,we represent the world in a
particular way. And but the way we represent the
world is very different from howthe world actually is.
So there's a strong difference between appearance and reality.

(20:02):
So that phenomena, Numena, that's the Cantian aspect of it.
And he uses the metaphor of the dashboard, you know.
So you know, we see the dial in an airplane.
We see. You know, let's say the outside
temperature on a dial, of coursethat represents the actual world
is that is not the actual world.The dial is not the actual world
itself. Eddington made the same metaphor
interestingly 100 years ago, butso the outside world is kind of

(20:28):
unknowable to in itself. But then he makes this argument,
which is a bit loose as part of my review, that it actually
commits a fallacy of the undistributed middle, I think
fundamentally, But it's the viewthat, well, the outside, we
don't know what the outside world is, but we know it's non
physical. And what do I know?

(20:50):
What, what do I know? What, what do I know is non
physical. And then he says the mental.
So then he makes this move that therefore the outside world is
mental. I so simplify it.
But it's it's that's his idealism.
So it's that in that sense is like Hegel, you know, so the

(21:11):
whole reality is mental and we are part of that, but it
differs. So that's how it's Hegelian
sense, but it differs from Hegelin the sense that for Hegel, you
know, this outside reality is the sort of logical unfurling of
Geist, you know, it's a very rational mind as it were, right?
Essentially got the absolute, but for Castro, this outside

(21:35):
mentality, and he uses Huxley's term mind at large
interestingly, but it doesn't not in the same way that Huxley
does really following bugs on. So for Castro, the outside world
is a mind, but it's a very primitive mind because it hasn't
gone through the sort of adaptability that evolution
forces upon organisms. So it's kind of like a goldfish

(21:56):
mind. It's kind of toddler God, as it
were. So not quite pantheism.
Yeah, so I, my main difference is that I believe the
dashboards, the appearance and reality as I've intimated is
porous. So imagine a dashboard where
it's got some sort of colored glass portholes maybe and some

(22:16):
advents coming in, right. So yes, we do see the world
through glass darkly, but there's it's not a complete
difference, the degrees of difference between appearance
and reality. And that's how that's the
realism. And the interesting thing,
right, is historically, this is the history, this is the history
of, of idealism that was lost in, in, in the West.

(22:40):
One of the reasons that idealismwas put down is because of the
war and the church and the bourgeois and the industry and
scientism and whatnot. But another reason is logical.
You know, it actually developed into realism.
Like I said, Bradley's appearance in reality was a
pivotal moment. And and that's what I prefer,

(23:02):
you know, this kind of, because I think otherwise you're really
alienated from nature. You know, you're sort of in the
solipsist world, but with this prehension, with this sort of
absorption of the outside to theend, then you avoid that.
And you don't need to assume solipsism.
And yeah, it just, it just makesmore sense to me.
Realism over representationalism.

(23:24):
So because someone Bernardo loves working with Don Hoffman
and they, they often talk about each other's work and when he
does the math and physics, they seem to come to the conclusion
that we don't see reality as what it is at all.
So there's there's no sort of porous dashboard.
It's actually just non existent and and we've made-up certain
ways to do this. Do you think that sort of naive

(23:45):
realism taking to its absolute extreme is what if it's true
though? What if it is something?
What if we really are not seeingthis for what it is?
I mean, I get what you're talking about.
You want this to be some sort ofa real feeling.
But what what if it's not? How would we go about trying to

(24:06):
disprove that? I'm not just by the way, I will.
I'll prove it. So I'm not just like you.
I have not At this point with this podcast, I have no idea
where I stand. It's it's getting hotter and
harder every day so but become more and more fascinated by each
theory at this point that I findproving and disproving many of

(24:27):
them is becoming more and more difficult.
Yeah, but with naive realism, solike you see reality as it
actually is, I'm I'm not advocating that.
And that's not the realism really.
That came maybe with more, but it's not really the realism.
I prefer the organic realism as it's so-called whiteheads and so
on. But I think with naive realism,
it's somewhat easy to disprove because you just consider the

(24:50):
fact that, you know, different perspectives of the same object
will change the color of it. And might, you know, without
different light sources, there'sdifferent colors.
So it's hard to say that the sort of, for example, the color
exists out there to a certain extent.
And of course, we can understandthat different species will have
evolved different sense modalities, you know, and to the

(25:15):
extent that, you know, we can't even know what they are really,
that was, you know, part of Nagles famous was allowed to be
a bat essay. And and the fact that even
within your own self, you see things differently at different
times, especially if you're taking drugs, right.
So it's hard to say. Well, there are normal
conditions. This was actually attempted by a

(25:35):
few people. There are normal conditions,
normal conditions, then this is the reality.
But I don't think there's such athing as normal conditions to to
lose, right. So, and also, you know, like
what works on calls, rhythm of duration or time rates, you
know, the speed at which you seethings move.
There's no, there's no objectiveform of that.
You know, there can't be an objective form of that.
So you understand, there must be, you know, I'm sort of

(25:58):
arguing against myself and that's some extent, but there
must, there must be, I always take a hybrid view there.
There must be certain elements that we project into reality.
It's very interesting as well when you look at the space and
different dimensions of space, you know, like WK Clifford, who
was in a Cambridge apostle, he, he spoke about a worm, A2

(26:21):
dimensional worm and how it would perceive reality would
perceive Ben's as force, for example, right.
And you can understand when you read this, That's right.
You know, so we, we experienced sort of three-dimensional space,
as it were, and forces. But in theory, if you increase
the dimensionality of your perception, you might perceive a

(26:43):
force as not dimension, right? So, so there's you, you can sort
of conceptually understand how the way we perceive the world is
not a necessity at all. Doesn't have to be that way.
So that's my idealist angle. And also my idealist angle is
that consciousness is ubiquitousthroughout the cosmos.

(27:07):
But at the same time, it's like Bradley makes his point that it
is an assumption to think that the feelings let's say you have
are confined within yourself. Because if you think about pure
experience, you don't make that distinction between me and the

(27:28):
outside world, right? That's a later inference.
So to think that we only know our own minds is a really later
derivative position as intellectual position.
It's not a pure phenomenologicalposition.
So take, you know, like Bradley then argues that, you know, we

(27:49):
can share emotions, you know, sowhen you, let's say, come into a
room and and you suddenly you sort of lighten up.
Let's say it's party whatever you see, and you think, well,
why did I lighten up? OK, because people are smiling
and laughing and saying, hey Peter welcoming.
And then you think, Oh yeah, that's good, I appreciate it.
Or this is going to be a fun night or whatever, or our

(28:11):
emotions somehow part and this is comes back to the pan
psychism. Now our emotions as Whitehead
believed it, part of what we call matter or physicality, like
forces. So not extra to not something
extraneous to forces, but part of forces.
So we see like electromagnetism,we think of electromagnetism in
this particular way. But for Whitehead, there's an

(28:33):
abstraction. Otherwise any part of the truth,
you know, the real, the full truth would be that there's an
emotion within light, for example, you know, explains
aesthetic appreciation to an extent.
And so likewise, you know, like we, you know, seeing others.
It's not just a perceptual kind of television representation.

(28:53):
It's rather than absorption of and so on to a certain extent,
but it's on this primitive level, Liz, that is
subconscious. So for, for Whitehead at least.
So we, we're not sort of consciously aware of it, but
nonetheless it influences us as does sunlight and so on.
Like, you know, sunbathing. Why not?
Well, Speaking of light, and most people are going to see the

(29:15):
frequencies of our shirts as very much the same, but we just
want to clarify that they're notthey're they're probably
slightly different. It's It's a bit of a naive
fairly different. But not similar.
Yeah, yeah. And numerically those distinct.
Yeah, definitely. Different frequencies here and
there. Tell me, Peter, if you had to,
if you had Huxley, James, Whitehead, Nietzsche, Spinoza

(29:39):
and Schopenhauer all hanging on a Cliff, One of them's about to.
Well, all of them are falling, but you can only save one.
Who would you save and why? That's harsh.
That's. Harsh.
That's an intense question. It's probably the darkest
question I've asked on this show.

(29:59):
Well, not shopping now because he probably, you know, like
would want to go. I I look God.
I guess Nietzsche might also want to go.
Possibly, no. I think Nietzsche was an
optimist. Ultimately.
I think it's got a bad Rep that.But I think I'll bring back

(30:20):
Whitehead, probably because I'vegot a few questions for him, you
know? What would those questions be?
What he meant, but you know, certain.
I mean, it gets so complex sometimes in some of his works
that you there's multiple interpretations of it.
Actually, no, I wouldn't. I'll tell you what.
I'll bring back Spinoza because a chief question about whether
the attribute is a famous thing as Spinoza.

(30:41):
Spinoza studies about whether the attributes are subjective or
objective. So I'd ask him about that,
probably, yeah. Did when you started in this
field, did you have any preconceived ideas when you
first entered the philosophy arena?
Let's say, for example, coming in as a materialist where you
have an emergentist and then slowly transition into the span

(31:01):
Sankers view. What what what has been your
view at the time and. How's it?
Well, I yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you sort of it's related
to obvious you can't avoid inculcation, right?
You can't avoid being brainwashed by your culture at a
certain extent, to a full extentmaybe.
So I came in from, I'm half Swedish, half British, but I've

(31:23):
lived most of my life in Britain, in Cornwall, came in as
a kind of strict materialist really, but I've never really
studied it. So I didn't know whether I was
like an identity theorist or a an emergentist or an epic
phenomenalist or whatever livingto this.
But obviously there was just matter and mind came out of
brains, certain activity in the brain we which we are yet to

(31:45):
discover. That was my general view.
And and but then when I started to actually study, that was my
default view, right. And it's kind of what I was
taught. It was kind of subconsciously
taught in schools. You know, it was never
explicitly told, you know, this is the reality.
It's just one of those unwrittenassumptions that really

(32:11):
influence people because the unquestioned and you, you don't
bring it to consciousness. But when I looked into it, I saw
that there were different types of materialism.
So then which one do you believe, Right.
And then I, when you look into the history, you realize why
people why I actually believe that.
And then I look for alternatives.

(32:33):
I think it was well that studying bugs on and can't
especially open my mind up because in Britain, you know,
you're not taught philosophy at all.
So yeah, not at school. So when I started reading at
university it was just an eye opener because I'd always
considered anything non materialistic to be like
religious new age nonsense. That's exactly the same thing

(32:58):
that happened to me. Yeah, yeah, but but now I think
materialism is an ideology as well and and it's in the same
ballpark as as a lot of the other theories.
So yeah, no, I think well, one thing that influenced me
actually with regards to my pan psychist sort of veering was

(33:20):
Nietzsche because he spoke about, you know, the will to
power villas matched coming fromShabana certain extent and he
said this is a pathos, the will to power is a pathos, right.
It's a feeling. This is fundamental.
I mean, this is more in his notebooks and his published
work, but some in his public work.
If you're on Good and Evil Section 36, I seem to remember
that there's this kind of fundamental Dr. It's

(33:42):
subconscious as a drive to development, you know, and that
kind of got me thinking. And then I read Schopenhauer.
It was much more sort of philosophically developed, but
his more of a will to survive really knows.
You get the Kinnatus somewhat similar as well.
So that got me thinking, you know, there's this kind of
underlying Dr. and we represent it as matter and force and
whatever, but it's not the essential aspect of reality.

(34:04):
And that inner aspect of realityyou can feel within yourself,
your drives and your emotions are sort of secondary to those.
And reading bugs on Keith HanserPearson, like I said, I was
never really that fond of bugs on special kind of dualism, but
it was interesting. It's things you can take out of
bugs instead. And yeah.

(34:27):
And then I, and then I probably read Whiteheads and, and that
seemed to quell a lot of my issues.
I mean, you're reading well, this.
And then you go back to the people we spoke with a few years
ago and they're just still, they're still stuck in that.
Yeah, what you're talking about,you know, obviously like, you
know, and then you think, no, it's not that.
It's not that simple. There are problems.

(34:48):
And yeah. And I still, I'm still not
saying that I know what the, what the truth is.
You know, as I say, I've just got preferences, but I hope to
develop them as time goes by. But of course, when you develop
you, you, you discover more problems as well, right?
So. Exactly.
Yeah, the more you know, the more you question.
Yeah. The answer becomes less obvious,

(35:09):
but I mean to quote you quoting someone else.
Let's take a trip at this point.Psychedelics, the philosophy of
psychedelics. Firstly, how does one come in,
get into this field and and makea career out of it for and
secondly, what is the philosophyof psychedelics?

(35:30):
Well, perhaps maybe start. Maybe start with the second
question, then go to the 1st. What is the philosophy of
psychedelics? Well, here's our book on it,
Philosophy and Psychedelics. So you can get a start that the
introduction, especially the philosophy of psychedelics is, I
would say a relatively new phenomenon.

(35:52):
Even though, as I say people, William James, as you mentioned,
was sort of speaking about it in19 O2.
And actually before that in in 1892, I think he wrote on some
Hegelisms and the footnote is all about how he understood
Hegel have to take nitrous oxiderace.
It kind of starts with James to certain extent the founder of
modern psychology as well. And it's a, it's a way of, I

(36:20):
mean, it's, it's, it's all it's very encompasses a lot.
So you've got the phenomenology and then you can apply
phenomenology, classic asylum phenomenology to it and so on.
It's completely new data for phenomenology.
And in fact, something has developed in the plus
psychedelics called micro phenomenology to really sort of

(36:41):
pin down what's going on from myown my own preferences to apply
knowledge of metaphysics to psychedelic experience.
So for example, in that book I've written a an essay on
framing the experience of five Meo DMT, which is a very

(37:05):
powerful psychedelic in spinosisterms in relation to the
so-called intellectual love of God or nature.
I've also written about, yeah, I've just written about Bogson's
influence on Huxley and those perception.
And it's interesting how you canframe in different ways
psychedelic experience accordingto old metaphysics.

(37:26):
In fact, my, the book I'm writing now for Bloomsbury,
another one is called the Psychedelics Metaphysics Manual
and it's about offering to people without a philosophical
background different metaphysical options in which
they might interpret their psychedelic experience and make

(37:48):
it significant. It's based on necessary mind on
the need for metaphysics and psychedelic therapy and
research. So that's, that's my preference.
But there's a lot of stuff like a lot of stuff on epistemology,
obviously. How do we know, you know, how do
we, how do we know that what we're experience is vertical or
delusory? There's a lot of ethical issues,
like, for example, the comforting delusion objection,

(38:11):
which Michael Pollan and and others have spoken of.
So like, is it not unethical to make people better by fostering
a delusion upon them via psychedelics?
You know, So there's a lot of different answers to that
question. Chris Leatherby's written a good

(38:32):
book addressing that in part. And then, yeah, so, so I mean,
the three, I mean, 3 columns of philosophy, traditionally,
metaphysics, epistemology and ethics are all part all part of
the philosophy of psychedelics. And interestingly, as this whole
psychedelic renaissance unfolds,more and more ethical questions

(38:54):
come into view, you know, with relation to like the law and
appropriation of indigenous use and, you know, safety issues and
all sorts of things, you know, and, and really what I, although
I, you know, yeah, I'm in the philosophy of psychedelics in
Exeter University. I'm really in the more broader
scope of psychedelic research generally because it is, by its

(39:16):
nature interdisciplinary. You know, so you need the
neuroscientist there, of course,Leo Roseman from Imperial, You
need the anthropologist going out, you know, and discovering,
talking about how psychedelic use differs from current views.
You need historians. I mean, if you look at like, for
example, psychedelic therapy in the 50s, it was the psychiatrist

(39:38):
who was taking the psychedelic rather than patient that was
turned around, right? You know, criminologists,
sociologists with relation to the law, you know,
psychologists, obviously psychiatrists, pharmacologists,
you need all of those specialisms to get a full,
concrete, satisfactory view of what's going on.

(39:59):
And of course, the reason for itall is that contrary to the sort
of propaganda of the last few decades, it's now realized that
psychedelics can be quite therapeutic rather than harmful
to people. So and that's why a lot of money
is being put into it. In next to university, we've
studied the first master's in psychedelics online, PG Cert.

(40:21):
We've got a master's in person starting in late 2025 and yeah,
so. What's going on?
And it's not just extra, of course, UCL, Imperial Harvard
just got a huge grant for psychedelic research,
$16,000,000 I think last year. So it's a it's a mushrooming

(40:42):
field. I like that when, when I think
about it and as a, as a doctor, when I used to work in, as a
psychiatry medical officer in, in the public sector in the
state facilities here in South Africa.
And you see the effect that certain psychedelics have had on
patients and causing psychosis, delusions, etcetera.

(41:02):
But then you go to the, the private sector and you see a
completely different type of patient.
You see the people who have beenusing it or therapy for sort of
trauma, etcetera. And, and you see such an abrupt
difference. You can tell that the type of
usage, the way it's used, the way it's controlled or, or even
uncontrolled can provide positive or negative effects.

(41:23):
I tried my best to not make thisa medical podcast.
So just I've always got a disclaimer, this is not medical
advice ever. This is a philosophy podcast.
But what have you seen since thenew rise in psychedelic use in
research, both anecdotally and empirically?
Evidence wise, what has been theshift that's occurring
currently? If we say the psychedelic

(41:48):
renaissance started about 12 years ago or so, the first sort
of phase of that was to really forcefully trying to move
people's perceptions away from like the negative aspects of
psychedelics that they make you jump out windows or they lead to
psychosis or neurosis or that they're addictive and so on.

(42:10):
The hippie kind of connotations,all of that.
So you had in psychedelic conferences a lot of, you know,
like a white shirted doctors coming in and talking about
brain regions. That was the first phase.
And then a lot more research. I mean, when I, when I started,
I should say, you know, like when I started, people said to

(42:32):
me, don't get into this like career, be a career killer.
You know, don't mess with your brain, your mind #1 Secondly,
you know, don't write about thisbecause it's not seen as
serious. But you know, like it's just too
interesting intrinsically when you, when you've had the sex,
that experience, it's just so radically different.
It's just so rich. Now it can be in a way that you

(42:52):
just have to like look into it again.
So I just pursued it. But I didn't, as you said, you
know, my PhD thesis was not on psychedelics, it was on
panpsychism, you know, and that's radical enough.
But I. Was just about to say you chose
both the the the fields of his consciousness and psychedelics.
You you went all in. I know, I know.
I live it. Living on the edge, Yeah, almost

(43:14):
falling off. Who knows, I might be one day.
But yeah, no, no, it can't return to your question.
So. So there was that phase.
Another interesting thing reallywas that, you know, like in the
early 20th century, there was some trials on DMT, especially
just looking at neural correlates of DMT, and it wasn't

(43:35):
for therapeutic purposes. And in the 60s, you know, as
well, like it wasn't there was therapy involved.
And there's like psycholytic therapy in Europe and
psychedelic therapy in America, which different European one was
very Freudian based, psychoanalytic based.
But but you know, like the general, you know, feeling about

(43:56):
psychedelics was that they were political tools.
You know, like you get in my Kuja, you know, like his essay
on liberation 1960 was that psychedelics are a way of for
seeing the world differently, you know, seeing like how we're
being, you know, like engaged within certain political systems
and so on. You know, but in the 21st
century, they're seen as therapeutic tools.

(44:18):
People have been very careful now doing very careful analysis
because they everyone is scared that this potential form of
medicine or therapy won't get approved, you know, and that
would be quite disastrous for a lot of people.
So, so it's a very step by step,small, cautious, unlike unlike,

(44:40):
you know, like a few decades ago.
But but the interesting thing isyou know, when you look at the
before that, before the 60s, when you look at like Osmond,
like I mentioned Humphrey Osmond, who's a British
psychiatrist, we worked with Huxley and the philosopher John
Smithy. He's a very interesting
philosopher and you're a philosopher.

(45:00):
It was intellectual, you know, and like Osmond himself, as a
psychiatrist said, you know, the, the, the important thing
about psychedelics in his in hisessay of the 1957 where he coins
it is, is it's, you know, religious, sociological and
philosophical implications that has been lost, you know, and
that was that was forgotten about really, which is a great

(45:21):
busy. And and so with the philosophy
of psychedelics, that is we're returning to that certain
extent, you know, I think so it's, it's, you know, still it's
growing and it's kind of it's got loose form.
You can't really strictly defineit like consciousness, you know,
but it's really fascinating. I mean, especially if you're a
philosophy, if you're interestedin consciousness, if you're

(45:42):
interested in philosophy, mind, you know, why not explore that
whole amazing cosmos of different forms of experience?
I mean, forms of experience which don't even have, you know,
you can't really explain. I mean, I mean, I've experienced
things on psilocybin which are you could just about call them

(46:02):
experiences, but they're not, they can't be categorized as,
let's say, a sensation or a conception or a feeling, but
nonetheless, very power, very powerful type of experience, you
know, So, so just trying to sortof get a grip on what, what was
going on there, you know, and, and also it just makes you
realize the power of the mind, you know, that the mind can

(46:24):
create these most amazing visual, I don't like spaceships
and cosmic journeys and aliens and of these things, but also
just kind of what would probablybe defined as mystical states,
which are not visual at all in many cases, you know, but just
these intense states of existence.

(46:46):
I remember when I made the introfor this podcast, at some point,
I remember saying any atypical state of mind is an absolutely
valuable asset to the study of mind.
And I mean, these states of mindare very, very fascinating.
Anyone who studies the mind who,who neglects this portion of the
field, it's, it's such a massivecomponent.
This is something that if you donot study, you're making the
most ignorant decision you can make when you concluding

(47:08):
anything about the mind. I think it's like if you studied
music but you only listen to 21st century music, it would be
like that. You know what, you don't want to
listen to all the everything that's before, you know, all the
whole other world of, of music. You have to fight against
prejudice, you know, with with regard to psychedelics.
So a lot of people still don't take it seriously.

(47:29):
Hard to get kind of state approved funding for it.
Although in balance that you do get a lot of philanthropists who
are interested, rich philanthropists, you know, who
are interested in it instead. But no, I'm happy in this world.
And also it's kind of like there's a nice community.
I'm also directed at Breaking Convention, which is Europe's
largest psychedelic conference. You know, we've got 818 hundred

(47:50):
people coming to Exeter in Aprilnow and it's just a lovely kind
of communal feel to it. Having said that though, it has
become a little bit self-conscious in the last few
years, a bit self critical as towhere it's going and some bad
apples and stuff like that. So generally, it's a nice place
to be. But I would say in any field to

(48:10):
you, there's always a bunch of bad apples.
Yeah. It's not like it's something you
can escape in any in any way. There was a term you used once.
I can't remember where I saw this or or read it, but you were
describing these experiences that are not what we call qualia
site. You, you named it something.
When you have this, it's something this ethereal

(48:32):
experience that's not describable.
Do you remember what that was? Well, maybe you mean the term
ineffable, which is from Williamactually Humphrey David
mentioned before. Yeah, you can't put it into
words. I use the word Cy X for
psychedelic experience. I think that was AI think that
was a. Yeah, but it's interesting thing
about if certain psychedelic induced mystical experiences are

(48:56):
ineffable, if you can't put theminto words and you can't report
them, then you can't get a neural correlate to them either,
right? And, and I think that that is a
kind of, I mean, that's another thing that psychedelic research
does. It brings up these interesting
theoretical questions as to well, how, you know, what are
really the limits of neuroscience and understanding

(49:17):
of the mind if there are things that you can't report, you know,
just like animal brains, minds, right, You can't really fully
correlate things because you don't get one side of the
correlate, you don't get the report, right.
Same with psychedelic drugs for human beings.
Arguably, you know, some people say no, it is.
I mean William James said they're ineffable men writes 200
pages about it later, right? So it's it's all debatable.

(49:38):
Interestingly, Castro wasn't a massive spat.
His his take is that psychedelics were shown to
decrease brain activity. All, all brain activity, right,
which kind of falsified for him physicalism or emergentism that,
you know, with greater relevant brain activity, you'd get

(49:59):
greater phenomenology and thus opens the door for idealism.
But, but that I think is an openquestion.
You know, I don't like. So I, I spoke to someone on the
study who said, no, it didn't show that at all.
And and so it's an open question.
But you know, it's very fascinating.
Like this is a very interesting question.
Let's say that you did further tests to determine whether

(50:20):
certain psychedelics decrease brain activity.
Whilst the report was of intenserich experience, ordered
experience. That would be a fascinating
finding, wouldn't it? If it, if it was, you know,
verified and and checked and youknow, tested many times, that
would tell us that would actually be like a way of
empirically getting into metaphysics to a certain extent,

(50:41):
right. And it's psychedelics that would
allow for such tests because it sort of temporarily changes
functioning of normal prosaic brain functioning.
So, so so yeah, there's a lot ofinteresting things yet to
discover, I think. And yet there are some
scientific theories that possibly could explain this if

(51:03):
you get someone like John Joe Mcfadden's semi field theory.
Perhaps because merely looking at these neural correlates might
not be the answer. Someone like Stuart Hameroff
might be right. Penrose might be right.
Because maybe when you do look at this from a from a quantum
perspective, something might be going on.
They describe it as Occam's race.
If you can solve this with quantum mechanics and it solves

(51:25):
multiple things in one go, because people often say, OK, we
don't know consciousness, we don't know quantum mechanics
and, and now we're trying to make a theory that can explain
both. But I mean, Occam's razor does
say you should be able to if youcould.
Ideally, but I don't know enoughabout quantum theory to to to to
judge that. You know, I don't like to, I'd
never like to talk about quantumtheory because when I speak to
quantum theorists, they will disagree with each other anyway,

(51:47):
so. I guess, I guess combining
consciousness, psychedelics and quantum theories, that's a bit
too much at that point we are taking a little too far.
Well, I've personally, I have taken psilocybin in the past.
I think it was maybe about 6-7 years ago.
It's been a long time, maybe, perhaps I'm overdue, but I

(52:09):
remember having one horrible experience, but it's my partly
my sister's fault. She, she, she ruined the, it's
just that she killed it for, forall of us.
And, and then what we did was I think of two days later, because
it was kind of quite a traumaticexperience.
And then two days later her husband, myself.
I don't even know if I should besharing this.

(52:30):
But anyway, it's a bit too late.He can always cut it out, can't
he? Yeah, but I might keep it in.
We, we redid it just to just to we tell her, look, you can't you
cannot join us for this one. We just we kept it out.
We, we, we put it, put it to thecorner, just the naughty corner
for a bit. And the best experience.
All of us just had the most wonderful time, life changing.

(52:51):
Some of us stopped. I mean, one person stopped
smoking one. I mean, it was it was quite a
therapeutic environment. We set it up in a way where we
all had these goals this New Year's resolution.
It was pretty cool. So these these effects I felt
first person phenomenological experiences and I do get what
you're talking about. But I'm curious to know, how do

(53:12):
you define psychedelics? Because I often think when we
try and define this, it's also quite difficult because anything
could be psychoactive in a sense.
If you take caffeine, if you eata really intense meal that's got
a high dose of sugar, at what point do we differentiate
between normal psychoactive substances and an absolutely

(53:32):
psychoactive substance like psilocybin or DMT, etcetera?
Well, again, there's no sharp edges here.
There's a big debate about it actually.
So the sort of easy answer wouldbe to limit the term psychedelic
to those drugs that act on the what are they 52HA receptors,

(53:55):
the serotonin receptors. So that would be LSD.
So Sabin, you know the classics well, generally known as classic
psychedelics. So that would be like relatively
clear cut way of defining them. However, that would exclude
salva divinorum for example, which is has very similar
effects to LSD, some GABA receptors.

(54:18):
I think I said also when you read the you know, this 1957
paper by Osmond where he actually coins it.
Before that, he was in correspondence with Huxley about
what to call these new agents. He sort of includes nitrous
oxide because of William James'swork and he defines it mostly

(54:41):
phenomenologically rather than physiologically, and I prefer
this generally speaking. So you would include nitrous
oxide and thus you would also include ketamine.
In fact, only work in our Exeterdid I realize that ketamine at
high doses can be very visual and sort of sites as I've been
like. But do you include, you know,

(55:03):
MDMA, for example, ecstasy? Do you include cannabis?
I yeah, that's where the edges get blurred.
But I'm, I personally generally am quite open in my definition.
And then you get like psychedelic as an adjective, you
know, like so you can say maybe breath work induces psychedelic
experiences, right. So breath work itself of course

(55:24):
is endogenous, but the effects, the phenomenology is somewhat
similar. So, so yeah.
So my only, my only definition is I would not restrict it to
serotonin receptors, but drugs that act on directly on
serotonin receptors, I would keep it more open than that and
base it more on phenomenology. So what phenomenology?

(55:46):
Well, altered states of consciousness, but there are
many such states, I'm thinking LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, they
induce like these beautiful can induce quite often in beautiful
visions. But if you take 5 and meo DMT,
which I mentioned, that is just not beautiful visions at all.
It's just, you know, well, whitelight generally Speaking of

(56:08):
white light, and then the loss of everything, you know, loss of
sight, hearing, memory, thought,sense of times or loss.
But there's a profound experience or state of being
that that remains, you know, andthat's known as a psychedelic.
I mean, it coincides with the word mystical.
If you, if you try to define that, there's so many different

(56:28):
definitions of that. In the early 20th and mid 20th
century, William James, you know, to find it in certain
ways, height, you know, passive,ineffable, noetic and transient.
But then other people define it in different ways.
I mean, what in in trials today,a number of questionnaires are

(56:50):
used to determine the experiences people had on
psychedelics. And a lot of those
questionnaires, especially the MEQ Mystical Experience
questionnaires, based on a philosophy book by Walter Stace
from 1960 on mysticism and philosophy.
And he defines mysticism in a certain way there, but it
differs from others. You know, it's Yeah.

(57:12):
No, I don't think you can definethese things that well.
Generally. I think, you know, what's
important ultimately is you know, how we use those
definitions. There's also another interesting
aspect to this, which is that because of the kind of Christian

(57:34):
heritage and also platonic or Neoplatonic heritage we have in
the West, there was a way of interpreting psychedelic
experiences as particularly mystical or theological in a
way. Whereas when you look at
psychedelic use and let's say Peru, very different, you know,
like it's not about becoming onewith the universe or connecting

(57:56):
or losing the sense of space, you know, never mentioned these
things. And and so you have to sort of
wonder whether people are being primed into expecting these
experiences because of the history of the field or whether
they're having those experiencesbecause of their general Western
cultural context or whether they're having many experiences,

(58:19):
but they're only being asked to report on certain experiences.
A paper came out, a preprint last month that I co-authored
our secondary author, not the main author, but a suggestion to
rename psychedelics into psychosomedelics, including the
body, because there's a lot of like bodily feelings that are
very often ignored in these in these trials and whatever,

(58:42):
right? So there's so much cultural
baggage that comes into the science.
It's quite it's, it's quite alarming actually.
The IT, it can't escape the psychology and philosophy, I
found both of them equally fascinating in different ways,
but not equally, but both fascinating in different ways.
But the ontological aspect of this, the metaphysics behind it,
it's, it's, it's such a fascinating feel.

(59:02):
It's so difficult to not get absorbed and and high on this
feeling of discussing. I always say that, yeah,
psychedelic surrogate way drug to metaphysics, ultimately,
that's that's what's going on inthat way, yeah.
It's, it's impossible to not discuss, discuss it, but
something I find fascinating is,I mean, what one could say that
OK, you get you, let's say you use psilocybin.

(59:22):
You start to notice that the Earth is sort of breathing.
You start to see the Earth as anOrganism and then you sort of
realise that this entire planet is alive.
Is that because that is the essence?
I mean, we, you, you briefly touched on the, the comforting
delusion, but I mean, that couldbe the one aspect, but the other
could be the plant has just developed this gene that allows

(59:44):
it to trick us to, to enjoy these wonderful occasions and
thereafter and nurture itself bybecause we'll obviously plant
this and keep it going. So they might just, it might
just have nothing to do with it,but.
I mean, there are obviously delusions going on.
You know, if you see a pink elephant walk across the table,
you know it's probably not an issue.

(01:00:04):
Spread little truths value to that.
Yeah, that's the question. I mean, that's the interesting
question, which metaphysical andepistemic and you know, do these
drugs allow you to see some formof reality?
You know, and you can't, I mean with a comforting delusion
objection. I mean, there's a there's a
metaphysical assumption that materialism there, right.

(01:00:25):
Well, we know what reality is. And therefore, if you experience
like an idealism, which is quitecommon, for example, a pantheism
or some kind of monism or whatever, you know, units of
experience and that obviously isfalse.
So therefore 1 shouldn't treat people with it.
Well, OK, yeah, if you're if you've established that, that
you are that materialism is true.
But that's the question, right. And what are, you know, some

(01:00:49):
studies from Imperial from ChrisTimmerman, people like that.
Well, Chris Timmerman study a few years ago showed that
generally when people take psychedelics, they do shift
their metaphysical positions generally away from physicalism
to kind of pan psychism. But the problems with those
studies, like it didn't include idealism, for example, pantheism
within it. And the way they define

(01:01:09):
panpsychism is kind of loose andbut nonetheless, there are
metaphysical shifts. I mean, the funny, the classic
cases in philosophy is AJ Ayers experience.
You know, I don't know if you ever read about that, but he.
Yeah, he choked on salmon and had a psychedelic experience
and, and wrote an article sayingthat he now believes that

(01:01:30):
consciousness might survive death after all, but there's
still no God. Yeah.
Like you say, these these experiences can be life
changing, but are they true? How do you determine truth?
This is, yeah, the classic question.
I think that what the hard problem of consciousness does is

(01:01:50):
that it leaves options open. And when you really understand
that, you realize you can't easily just dismiss idealism or
absolute monism or or whatever. And they are, I think, open
questions. There's a lot of logic behind
all of them, a lot of criticism,criticisms behind all of them.
But anyway, the point is that they are open questions and and

(01:02:14):
when you have a psychedelic experience, it is thus possible
that you are having in certain cases, vertical experiences.
You know, on the sort of deeper cases where you where you have
those kind of like classic mystical experiences.
I think there's mystical experiences.
Some evidence shows that they are actually conducive to
therapy as well. And then, yeah, so.

(01:02:38):
So I don't think though, that the experience itself can prove
any metaphysical experience, right.
For that, you still need philosophy and science and, you
know, to sort of you need both of them there, right?
Yeah. I don't think you just dismiss
them out of hand because, you know, delusion is, you know,
like completely dependent on what you understand reality to

(01:02:59):
be. So maybe there are there's some
kind of truths, like for example, I was mentioning
Whitehead's theory of prehension, which is like the
absorption of feeling from the outside into the inside, you
know, using spatial metaphors. So often with psychedelics, you
know, you look at a plant and you sort of feel it.
You know, you think you feel it.And this could be one of the

(01:03:19):
reasons why people do kind of get more sympathetic to
panpsychism to some extent. And under sort of Whiteheadian
framework, you can kind of beginto understand it a little bit
more. You know, you are becoming a
little bit more conscious of that prehensive activity that
generally happens or you're a bit more open to it or your mind
kind of fixates on it to certainextent.

(01:03:40):
That doesn't prove it's true of course, but it doesn't make more
sense of it. So, so I'm open.
Like I say, I'm, I'm quite open minded to these things being
possibly vertical, but at the same time I do realise that some
of them are mutually exclusive, you know, So like you may have
an absolute idealist experience one day and the next day you

(01:04:01):
have dualist experience, you know.
But it seems to me that these the psychedelic drugs seem to
move towards more of a non dual experience for the most part.
It does feel like you become more one with everything else.
And what Peter, from your side, what's been from your first

(01:04:23):
person experience in your research, what has been the most
intense experience and what was the substance?
Well, there's only one contenderfor that, which is the five meo
DMT that I tried once in a legalsetting I should say.
And just five meo DMT is not DMT, not normal DMT, which

(01:04:44):
people speak about. It's radically different in its
effects. You can get it from the
secretions of the Sonoran Deserttoad and also in some vines and
synthetic versions of it. What happened to me was quite
extreme. I, there's a guy I know who does

(01:05:05):
it every single Sunday for the last sort of four or five years,
right? Every that fail, which I can't
really understand, I tried it once and I actually don't dare
to take it again at the moment. Anyway, that was about two years
ago. What happens?
Well, what happened to me is I, I tried a small bit with a
vaporizer and didn't work. And I, I thought I measured that

(01:05:28):
out properly. I had this friend of mine sort
of, you know, supervising very importantly and said, OK, let's,
let's, let's increase the dose. Nothing happened that time.
Nothing happened. I said, OK, I'm one of these
like small percentage of people just doesn't get an effect from
that. So just give me the rest of
them. I'll just try that.
That was a mistake. So I don't know how much it

(01:05:50):
took, but it was it was what happened then is you breathe in
and you held it and then suddenly what happened to me at
least was suddenly everything goes white.
So you sort of become blind. A few hexagons maybe feel like
your shirt kind of appear on my shirt, just very mildly.
But mostly it's white light, white out, It's called, you see,

(01:06:12):
quite common. Although a friend of mine
actually said he had a black black out, not a black out,
black vision as a word. And then very quickly you lose
your sensibility. So you lose your hearing, you
know, your smell, your sight, asI say.

(01:06:32):
And at this point, personally, Ithought, oh shit, I've, I'm
dying. You know, I've taken too much.
This is very bad. I've never had this experience
before in the space of a few seconds and then suddenly my
thought, you know, again within the space of a few seconds.
And my thought pressure is like,Oh no, is this death?
I don't even know. That's a horrible way to die,
isn't it? When you're not even sure.

(01:06:55):
And then room, everything's gone.
You know, sense of time disappears, your memory
disappears, your sense of self disappears.
But what what remained and it lasts about 10 minutes in earth
time. What remained is like this
extreme, extreme sense of profundity.

(01:07:15):
It was like it was an sort of a state.
It was so extreme I can't I can hardly call it consciousness or
experience. I call it a state of existence
almost. But it was just a sense of
extreme importance or extreme profundity.
But without an object doesn't know about what you know,
because and, and interesting actually, you know, in terms of
philosophy in mind that you can have these, OK, let's call it

(01:07:37):
experience. You can have experience without
an object, right? Against Brentano's famous
intentionality claim that, you know, consciousness has to have
an object, right? Or it has to be about something.
This didn't seem to be about anything at all, right?
So that means you can have. So that can't be a sort of
essential demarcation of consciousness.

(01:07:58):
That's another way in which psychedelics can sort of
facilitate philosophy. Mind.
I should write one day. And I say about that I haven't
yet anyway. So yeah, that was.
And then, and then, you know, slowly, about 10 minutes later,
I kind of opened my eyes slowly came out of it.
And luckily my friend was there saying everything's fine,
everything, which was a lifesaver.
If he did that, if he did that alone, you'd have a panic

(01:08:20):
attack. It's like a war zone, you know,
it's like extreme trauma in manyways.
I don't recommend it to anyone really.
I just did it for purely academic reasons, because I,
because it's known as a God molecule, you know, it's, it's
known as that which induces the unit of statement more than
anything else. I have wanted to experience this
myself. And I wrote, I did write about
it, you know, in that book. But yeah, no, that's, that's,

(01:08:43):
that's, that's, that's my most extreme state.
I do, I must, I do prefer those psilocybin generally because of
the beautiful aesthetics and feelings that you can get from
that. Although as you say, it can be,
it's the, both the beautiful andthe sublime, the terror sublime
that Burke talks about, you know, and that's actually

(01:09:05):
another aspect you of philosophyyou can bring into like
psychedelics, right? This the whole, you know, the
aesthetics, aesthetics theory. In fact, I've got a, I've got
hopefully if she gets funding her PhD students starting soon,
who's going to look at DMT aesthetics in relation to the
sublime. Yeah, so.
There's so many different branches this could take, but

(01:09:28):
you mentioned that the the self criticism within the field is
starting to go to starting to grow.
Why do you think this is? Is it just purely because some
people are taking it too far as with any field but or or is
there some sort of plateau happening?
Do you feel like this renaissance might reach a
plateau or or will it continue to thrive in mushroom as you

(01:09:50):
said? Yeah, I hope it continues in
some form and it's not outlawed and but the reason for the
kickback as well, the imminent not implosion, but self critique
is for a number of reasons. One is some a lot of people
didn't like the medicalization psychedelics.

(01:10:12):
So, you know, like the people who were talking about
psychedelics in the 90s and the early 21st century were, you
know, like former hippies or artists, you know, and, and, and
so on. And, and, and they didn't take
it for healing, for therapy. They took it because it was
interesting, you know, artistically or intellectually
interesting. And they had their little
communities. And then it seems like there was
a takeover by the medical community and pharmaceutical

(01:10:35):
companies, you know, and then obviously you see there's a lot
of then a lot of kind of in a Californian startup companies
came in and a lot of retreat centers opened and it just came
kind of very commercialized as well.
And and then so that was that was one reason for a lot of
criticism. My colleague Christine Haskell,

(01:10:58):
as she talks about medicalization in critical
theory terms, you know, anti capitalist.
Another reason was that it didn't, there were promises
made. There was like over hype to
start with. Like I said, you had to get away

(01:11:18):
from the kind of negative connotations that had, but it
kind of pushed it too far in theother direction.
And then a lot of those promisesnever really happened.
You know, like would be using MBMA in 2018 to treat PTSD or
whatever and just didn't emerge.It's, you know, in other
countries, Australian, but there's kind of a little bit of

(01:11:39):
disappointment. Like I said, a few bad apples.
The Me Too movement got a few people down, but it's kind of
inevitable. I think, you know, with any new
sort of like flourishing new movement, you know, it's sort of

(01:11:59):
lots of people join in and then a lot of them become
disappointed and then, you know,the criticism comes in.
And then there's also the whole thing about cultural
appropriation, of course, which is an interesting one because,
you know, not all psychedelics are from indigenous communities.
LSD was synthesized in Switzerland, for example,
nitrous oxide here, MDMA, you know, So again, complex ethical

(01:12:25):
issues and so on so forth. But yeah, no, well, one
navigates through, you know, it's, it's, it's it's like, you
know, you can't expect not to have any problems whatsoever.
The biggest problem, of course, is the legal problem, still
illegal, the lot of these, most of these drugs.
So to get funding for it and even, you know, funding for
trials, very expensive and lot of hurdles to go through, but

(01:12:49):
that kind of makes it more fun, you know, more of a challenge.
I fully agree with the overhyping because because those
who love it do tend to hype thisup quite a bit to a point where
it, it, it becomes too promisingto.
But then when you look at the data, you can see, I mean, this
is very promising stuff in some of the fields.

(01:13:10):
I know I read a few papers in psilocybin and the impacts
they've had on depression rates,anxiety, etcetera.
There's still a lot of work to be done, of course, but the more
work you see coming out, the more you can see the potential
at least, which should allow forsome sort of curiosity.
And whether it's philosophical, ontological, there's definitely

(01:13:30):
some sort of a practical significance that needs to be
explored here. And yeah, to just completely
shut it down would be pretty disappointing.
No, yeah. And also I should just say, you
know, we're going through the medical therapeutic stage now.
But I see, you know, you know, in the future it's there's a
Centre for Minds with Bruce Stammer, you know, the NASA
scientists that's just emerged and they're funding their kind

(01:13:52):
of foundation to help, funding to help fund psychedelic
research into creativity and innovation.
So see that as the next step now, you know, it's moving away
a little bit from therapy, keeping that.
But you know, it's not just for the sake, it's for everyone
really. It's, I mean, it's just
inherently fascinating, as I say.
Yeah, it has become quite cold because, because I think in the
one study, I read it as a psych psychiatrist, psychologist,

(01:14:16):
patients laying on a bed and puts on a blindfold and then has
the trip. I mean, that's not the most
comfortable place. It's it's not the calming
environment, as much as we'd love to believe it is.
As a doctor, I know what I know what their intention is, but
really isn't the best place. That's what I mean by like
taking incremental careful steps.
That's what's been happening about at the same time, you
know, the old 60s motto was set and setting is so important.

(01:14:38):
I mean, again, it's another consciousness question about how
your environment affects your, your, your mind and, and, and
your, your general moods and whatnot.
In fact, that's another very interesting aspect of
psychedelic research. This old, what was one, say, a
debate within theology or mysticism studies between

(01:14:59):
perennialism and contextualism. You know that.
So some people argue the perennialists like Huxley and
and maybe James and argue that, you know, although every
cultured interprets the peak mystical experience differently,
the actual experience is the same, you know, qualitatively
identical, maybe numerically identical.

(01:15:19):
Whereas the contextualist was Stephen Katz in 17 said, no,
actually your culture completelydetermines the consciousness
that you have, you know, totally.
And and then there's a third way, of course, about this is
psychedelic research has broughtback this interesting debate
and, you know, it's fundamental consciousness question really,
you know, like to what extent your surroundings and your

(01:15:40):
mindset actually influence your consciousness relating to again
next, you know, 4E cognition andwhatnot.
So, yeah, when you're having people in a little clinical room
with a, with an eye mask on and two people over, you've watched
them, it's a, it's a very particular setting, you know,
that might have. On the right side, they've
they've taken off the white coats, so it's the least they

(01:16:04):
could do. Tell me, Peter, at this point in
your life and your career, what part about all this work excites
you the most? And what let's say in the next
10 years, what do you look most looking forward to within the
philosophy of mind and psychedelics?

(01:16:25):
I mean, I, I think what at at the moment.
So this year I spent the last few years looking downwards, as
it were, into panpsychism. You know, how far down can
consciousness go? But I'm beginning to look
upwards now. So I am interested, I'm going
back to Hegel and the idealist, the absolute idealist, Bradley,

(01:16:47):
as I keep mentioning, and I'm interested in this absolute, you
know, this related psychedelics.As you were saying, there's a
tendency towards this kind of absolute monism, you know, and
Spinoza relation to that. So I'm beginning to and and
classic notions of pantheism or modern term cosmos psychism that
that interests me, like basically top down approaches to
consciousness. I'm developing what I call

(01:17:10):
exogenous mind theory. So that's like that we are
partake of consciousness. So to a certain extent, seeing
just basically having that hypothesis and seeing where it
leads me. So both theoretically, but also
interestingly empirically. So I think, you know, certain
empirical tests can be made madefor this.

(01:17:32):
You know, like I said, you know,like testing brain activity in
relation to certain certain of these psychedelic experiences
would be very revealing. So that's where I'm heading at
the moment. Have you called us exogenous
mind theory? Have you formalized this as this
what you're calling it? Yes, I've hereby formalize it.

(01:17:52):
Great. I love that.
I love that. Yeah.
No, it's just. Why don't you go for that name?
I was when I was explaining Bergson in the, in the Masters
or the PG Sir and the PG Sir we teach here.
So I was, I was talking about how Huxley was drawing upon
Bergsen's theory of mind at large.

(01:18:14):
And actually that's Huxley's term mind at large and reducing
value from Bergsen. And I just wanted to sort of get
across this idea that generally today we have endogenous
theories of mind. So the brain and body maybe sort
of generate consciousness somehow.
I think that's a default view pretty much.
But that's a bottom up approach,of course, right.
Emergentism says it all, but Bergson has a top down approach.

(01:18:40):
So we we we receive rather than generate consciousness.
So the function of the brain is to restrict and channel outside
data. So I thought, well, if you're
going to call it in, you know, like the general theories of
self induced consciousness, endogenous so from within, and

(01:19:03):
that includes pan psychic, much like micro constitutive pan
psychicism, that is also endogenous, you know, coming
from within up, as it were, whatwould you call the opposite?
You know, so it's going to be exogenous.
Now, having said that, I'm not taking a Bergsonian view.
So, so like I said, I do like, Ithink some of the, I think
Matter of Memory from Bergson isone of the greatest books of
philosophy ever written, but it's, I think there's a

(01:19:25):
fundamental logical flaw in his dualism.
I think a monism is just more pessimonious.
So an exogenous mind theory, which is kind of monism, but
it's related to absolute idealism and organic realism.
Coming back to where I started now.
Yeah. So that's that's what I want to
develop. Would your would your

(01:19:47):
development of this theory be more empirical based or
phenomenologically based? I think actually more
theoretically based. So at this point I just want to
modernize a number of the lost philosophers of the absolute
idealists and realists, new realists, and sort of integrate
a bit from other philosophers, you know, both some especially

(01:20:07):
maybe James, but I, you know, atuniversity I do, I'm in the
psychology department, you know,and not the philosophy
department now. And I'm there.
There are many neuroscientists and psychologists I would love
to work with, you know, with regards to this.
And there's a lot of, you know, people who are very interested
in funding this kind of stuff aswell.

(01:20:29):
So I want to develop this theory, but I don't want it to
be purely philosophical. I want it to be, you know,
amenable to testing. If if it's possible to be
amenable to testing, that would make a very interesting essay in
itself, you know, because generally, as you know, you
know, the problem with empirically testing theories of
mind is the alleged privacy of the mind, right?

(01:20:51):
If mind is private, then it's not empirical, right?
By that, by that definition, if you accept that differentiator
of consciousness, which might not.
So how can we get around that ifwe need to?
So these kind of. Yeah.
So systematizing all these theoretical questions and then
fundamentally changing the way people think, you know,

(01:21:12):
normalizing what considered strange theories of
consciousness. I think this is my goal.
And actually another thing I'm involved with this this mind at
large project with some Americans like Matthew Siegel,
Andrew Davis, Andrew Schwartz and others, Alex Gomez Marin.
And we're we're creating this three-year project where we're

(01:21:33):
having conferences around the world, maybe starting an Exeter
in winter. And, and we're going to look at
the history of consciousness, like why, why people, why we are
where we are. And then we're going to
introduce, you know, sort of therationale, the logic of these
other purportedly radical theories.
And sort of, I'm bringing a number of people from many

(01:21:55):
disciplines and sort of. Yeah.
So that's not a big project I'm working on at the moment.
If if you set a date on that please let me know.
Well, I think the first one willbe December 2025 and it's
probably going to be at University of Exeter.
We're just finalizing actually dates and times, but I'll let
you know. Yeah, in fact.
Send me an e-mail, I'd love to come.

(01:22:15):
I'll. Be also, we're also looking for
documentary film makers. We've got a number of mind.
So it'll be like not just conferences, you know, everyone
says there are conferences all the time in those kind of goods.
There'll be conferences, workshops, it'll be open to the
public and private, and then we'll also have proceedings but
also documentary hopefully. That sounds a.
Bit I'm looking through your project now.

(01:22:36):
Literally just having a similar conversation with Stuart about
his Science of Consciousness conference.
One SEC like if you just invite me I'll be there.
Mind, body, solution, cover all of it.
There was something specific I wanted to touch on before.
What were you talking about prior to this?
Drugs Parties. Well, Oh yes, what's happening

(01:23:00):
next? You said the exogenous theory
and then I wanted to ask you, Peter, what what are your views
on free will? That, that old one, yeah.
So, so, so actually mental causation is something I'm
particularly interested in. And I see free will as a subset
of that because you of course you get psychological
determinism, which is mental causation, but it's not free

(01:23:24):
shopping house for you, for example, Right.
So my, my general take on, on free will is that I, I think it
exists to an extent, right? So I think much of much what we
do, most of what we do is probably determined, you know,
like most of you, you know, whenyou walk, of course, you don't
consciously make that decision to move your left foot and so

(01:23:45):
on, right, unless you're learning.
So, and obviously you know, yourlanguage and your family
upbringing and your schooling and your evolution, you know,
everything helps determine your DNA.
It all helps determine how you act and whatnot.
But why do we believe? Why do people not believe in

(01:24:06):
free will? Well, because it's not a known
force of physics, right? It's not electromagnetism,
gravity, or strong, weak nuclearforce.
So the first thing I always say about that is, well, you know,
we know they're not absolutely deterministic.
Now with quantum theory, of course, and they're

(01:24:29):
probabilistic #1 number 2 with Whitehead and Hume, David Hume,
you know, for we know the laws of nature might fluctuate, you
know, the speed of light might change over a million years, you
know, so we can't really talk about these hard termined laws.
We haven't got the right to talkabout it because we cannot
observe the future to test it. Hume's problem of induction yet
#1 So I don't think the laws of nature are that strict or that

(01:24:51):
fixed. And so that opens up the
possibility of free will, right?But another on the other side.
Now I I love this argument from people like William James and
Whitehead to a certain extent, but even Karl Popper that what
would be the purpose of consciousness if it had no

(01:25:14):
power, if it had no causal efficacy?
Like what? What would be its function like
in So in other words, why would it have evolved not only in
human beings, but presumably amongst many organisms, right.
Mentality, unless you're you think only mentality, it adheres
to human beings like so. So the immediate retort to that

(01:25:35):
is, well, it could be a spandrel, you know, like, like
the chin, for example, you know,evolve, but it doesn't play a
purpose, this kind of side effect.
Yeah, but but of course, you know, spandrels really pertain
to one species, you know so. But with Constance, you, you
expect, you know, you presume it's many species and it's not

(01:25:56):
vestigial, you know, hasn't it'smaintained, Not only has it
evolved, it's maintained itself.So and of course, most people,
when you talk about like, well, why, why did consciousness
evolve? They'll say, Oh yeah, so we
could sort of, you know, differentiate berries from the
the leaves or something like that.
Or we, you know, like when we'rethirsty, it's our body's way of
telling us to drink. And our intelligence has caused
us to create civilization and technology and whatever, right?

(01:26:18):
You'd, most people, most scientists would accept this,
you know, that consciousness, there is mental causation that
plays a role. So there's evolutionary good
evolutionary reasons for, for, for mental causation.
So I'm, I'm generally in favour of it.
But, but I mean, but another aspect of it, of course, is, you

(01:26:45):
know, if you have you ever read,I mean, one of the greatest
philosophers I think of the lastfew years is Jake Won Kim.
You know, he presents the exclusion problem really well,
the problem with merchantism in relation to mental causation.
When I say mental causation, though, I really mean as a
panpsychist, I mean physical. I mean, psychophysical to

(01:27:12):
psychophysical causation, because if you're a monist or a
panpsychist, it's essentially the same thing.
I think then there's not like a mental to mental and mental to
physical causation, right. If if these the mental and the
physical, if we're not dualists,we're monists, then there's only
that lateral causation and that and that.
That makes the most sense to me.Yeah.

(01:27:34):
So essentially, I do believe in a limited free will.
OK, do you have a? Has anyone have asked you if you
have a solution to the combination problem?
How do you address it? Yeah, so the combination problem
really is a problem for a pan psychism that has emerged in the

(01:27:55):
last few decades with Galen Strauss and Philip Goth and
people like that. But the But if you take a pan
experientialist and psychism, you realize that combination is
at the very heart of reality, right?

(01:28:15):
The fundamental. So the fundamental entities for
Whitehead are actual entities, also known as actual occasions
or events. And they are, they are
prehensive like I mentioned. So in other words, the immediate
past flows into and becomes the immediate present.
So there are drops of experience, but they are

(01:28:37):
constituted by the outside. This is a kind of extended mind
theory, right? Not only the immediate past, but
the immediate surroundings as well.
So at the very fundamental base,as it were, of reality, you get
combination, right? That's what prehension is, it's
combination. And and so the combination
problem doesn't arise because that is the sort of axiomatic

(01:29:00):
basis of that metaphysics. The reason for it is partly for
logical reasons, so that you can't really, if you didn't
presume that then you would as it will break up reality into
units which kind of succeed eachother.

(01:29:20):
This what it calls the fallacy of simple location.
And so he says, you know, like when we think of an entity like
an atom, we think of it, we conceptualize it as a single
entity, but really it's completely related to its
outside environment genes. Likewise, in fact, that that
hypothesis led to the development of epigenetics for

(01:29:41):
Waddington. You know that the gene
expression of genes is related to its surroundings.
And the same applies to instanceand time.
You know, an instant of time is an abstraction, is a conception
really. And you know, like you know,
flow and the past as it were, flows into and constitutes
present. So in other words, it's a kind

(01:30:01):
of logical way of understanding time and causation and
perception as prehension, which therefore means that fundamental
reality is relational. That's why it's called process
relational philosophy. And another word for relational
was combat, combatorial. You know that combinations are
the very essence of things because without if you weren't,

(01:30:22):
if you didn't believe that, you think everything's isolated in
nature, and somehow there's somekind of third relations that
relate everything together. So instead of sort of into
interweaving processes, you get this kind of, yeah, kind of
discrete atomic universe. So is it the deep meant?

(01:30:42):
If you think about, you know, reality on this deep
metaphysical level, then that gets rid of the combination
problem. If you're a Whiteheadian pan
psychist, also known as pan experientialist, he didn't come
up with that term, by the way. Griffin did.
But, you know, it works well. He's defined as pan psychist as
well. And at this point, Cosmo
psychist, well, it's what you slowly trying to.

(01:31:03):
I'm going up there. Yeah, I'm beginning.
Getting higher and higher. Yeah, exactly.
How high can you go? Let's just go all the way.
No, I'm, I'm not saying I believe it.
Like I say, entertain ideas rather than believe them.
But I think it's very interesting idea that there's,
you know, at the moment with panpsychism, there's just the
external world is conscious, butit's like units, as it were, of

(01:31:25):
consciousness that do combine. But how about if there's some
more unified consciousness out there?
You know, that's an interesting question, and it's not
completely implausible. I think the only danger is you
go into, you know, religion, youknow, you call it God, but, you
know, you call it cosmopsychism.That sounds quite formal and you
know. Most idealist theories
eventually go down to that route.

(01:31:46):
Yeah. At some point it tends to hit
that, that sweet spot. I some people call it love, some
people call it the one, some people call it God, but it tends
to to get to that point. I I realise I derail this a bit,
but you, you, you mentioned exogenous mind theory and then
you also mentioned mind at largethis conference which hopefully

(01:32:07):
I'll I'll attend but. Yeah.
You're most welcome. Yeah.
Yeah. The what?
In conclusion, this conversationhas been absolutely wonderful.
Thank you so much. The so much work that you're
doing, so much overlap between philosophy of mind, philosophy
of psychedelics. What else in terms of the next
few years are you looking forward to, except for those two

(01:32:28):
aspects we just discussed? Any concluded points, anything
you wish that you you'd like to say as a concluding remark?
Take as much time as you want actually.
I mean, you mean academically orgenerally?
Academically. Academically, I mean, I'm, I'm,
I'm always interested in historyas well.

(01:32:50):
And I, I always think that history can inform philosophy.
You know, this is actually, the British idealists were really
into history. To fully understand something,
you have to really contextualizeit.
So I do. I always am aiming to increase
my historical knowledge. That's one thing I'm pursuing.
I'm looking at plasma physics now.

(01:33:11):
Seems quite interesting. Something else I'm slowly
getting into. I'm all.
Oh yeah, no, actually another very important new direction I'm
going is the relationship between math, physics and
politics. I think it's very fascinating.
It's related to why we believe what we believe now, but just

(01:33:33):
the way, for example, Marx turned away from Hegel's
dialectical idealism, saying that it was bourgeois thing, you
know, and the way that the way that you know, like we moved
away from idealism because of the war partly.
There's this great book I read on actually by by John, John

(01:33:56):
Meerhead. I think it's pronounced John
philosophy in relation to the war from 19 18.
You know, first of all, Wolf, just just quite fascinating.
So I'm looking at that relationship getting a bit more
political. You know, you have to be
dangerous again, politics and religion now.
Like you shouldn't speak about that really, but but but that's,
but that's my trajectory. I think you're just a

(01:34:17):
trailblazer. You go against the status quo.
I love it. I think it's it's it's one of
the best ways without people like you doing that, nobody's
going to do it. And the work will not get done.
Right. Yeah.
Somebody's got to do it. Exactly.
Yeah, it's my my hard life. No, no, like I said, I can't
complain. It's, you know, I, I always aim

(01:34:39):
to be get a job, be getting paidto do philosophy in psychedelics
and that happens. So I'm happy.
Well, my first, my first aim actually was to be a rock star.
Didn't work out. It's Plan B Look and.
It's no time at the conference. You can always show them your
skills. I don't have any skills.

(01:34:59):
That was the problem you see. I see you guys.
So that's a bit problematic. Listen, Peter, this has been
such a wonderful conversation. I appreciate all the work you're
doing and this was really cool man Thanks.
I really thanks for your questions.
Great time. Thank you.
Yeah, and I hope we can have some chats regarding your
exogenous theory of mind at somepoint and let's see where this

(01:35:20):
goes and dissect it further in the future.
Yeah, thanks. Yeah, No, I, I have got a draft
Word file where I'm sort of justjust just, yeah, when people ask
me like you, you know, what do you really believe?
Then I thought, OK, I'll just need to formalise it a bit.
So yeah, that'll be my book after this.
Metaphysics Psychedelics 1, I think.
Yeah. I'm looking forward to it very
much. Thank you once again.
Any final words, Peter? Anything you feel like you want

(01:35:42):
to clarify or you should have said, didn't say, said and want
to correct? I feel like I haven't spoken
about Spinoza enough because I'ma I do admire his work almost
more than anyone else, but. I was about to ask you who's
your who would you put on the top of that list instead of
saving them from falling on thatfrom that Cliff?
Who is your favorite? But.

(01:36:04):
Well, Spinoza, well, I, I, I think I focus on pupilos
Spinoza. Why?
I had Nietzsche, Nietzsche more in the past.
Now Schopenhauer, I'm getting him more and more into Bradley.
FH Bradley, a lost philosopher. Fantastic.
I mean, his chapter against solipsism in appearance and
reality is I gave it to Christophe Koch in Philadelphia

(01:36:25):
a few months ago because he said, you know, solipsism is
just something that you have to assume, you know, you can't, you
can't question it, but you can move on.
You know, it's actually, no, youcan't question it.
It's like it's not at all a logical necessity, right?
And and Bradley's the best critic of that.
So getting back into his work, Bugson intrigues me as well.

(01:36:45):
So although I don't, I'm not a duelist, maybe he's not a
duelist. There's just so much you can you
can take from bugs and just really fascinating insights.
And it's a completely different way of thinking.
You know, that's what bugs and as was and.
Let's get back to Spinoza. What about him has changed your
life and the way you perceive this entire field?
I think just, I just love the way he writes, you know, this

(01:37:09):
geometric method, axioms, propositions, you know,
corollaries and stuff like that.Number one, number two,
essentially what Spinoza offers is a very simple thing, you
know, a simple monism that there's one substance as opposed
to Descartes 2. But mind the matter.
Descartes 2 are just expressionsor attributes of that one
substance that creates then panpsychism, that one substance

(01:37:33):
he calls nature at the same timehe calls it God.
So that's the pantheism and justbeautifully parsimonious.
You know, like I said, the only thing I don't like about it is
it's not transitory, it's not developmental.
And that was Hegel's critique ofit.
So in a way, like Hegel took Spinoza, Spinoza's philosophy

(01:37:53):
and sort of just got it rolling.You know, Nietzsche said without
Hegel there would be no Darwin, you know, But I think that Hegel
went a bit straight. I'm also, I should say,
rereading Hegel, I had the most amazing teacher of Hegel in in
Warwick University, Stephen Holgate.
He's like what leading scholar, you know, just such an

(01:38:14):
inspiration. We called him Hegel by accident
quite often. Holgate because he was sick.
He was. So he still is.
I mean, just so adamant about the correctness of Hegel and and
so inspiring. And so I'm going back to Hegel
now. But partly that is only to
understand where we are now. Hegel's very difficult to get

(01:38:36):
into, but I think quite rewarding for, you know,
ultimately I'm also looking at the other, you know, idealists
like Fish Stone, Schilling. I did my I'm going back to the
beginning. I did my master's dissertation
on intellectual intuition and counts first critique and
shillings system of transcendental idealism, some
sort of and it's like 20 years ago, so some sort of spinning
back on that. Somehow.

(01:38:57):
I still think there's like a lotof insights there that just lost
and there's just so much you cantake the treasure trip.
There's like that that part of German history, you know, like
in the early, late 1700s, early 1800s, just quite amazing really
when you look back. Yeah, So, but also, yeah, I'm,
I'm really, it's really fun speaking to like psychedelic

(01:39:20):
neuroscientists and and scientists because they're very
open minded to metaphysics. You know, that's a surprising
thing. They're not hardcore
materialists as as you might expect.
You know, they're Chris Timmerman, for example, who
have, I'm going to London to speak with him on mysticism
publicly at UCL in a couple of weeks.
He he, he told me to read the Blind Spot, you know, by Evan

(01:39:42):
Thompson and two others, right. He's an, an activist, I believe,
you know, he was the last time Ispoke to him.
So. Yeah, right.
So anyway, like the interest, the great thing really is that
it's just the fact of the matteris scientists, of course, they
can't haven't got time to read philosophy.
They don't know about it. And just like, I don't know
about quantum theory. So.

(01:40:03):
So it's just nice to sort of have these conversations and.
And that people are very open toit, generally speaking, you
know? Yeah, I've, I've noticed that
even with this podcast, it's, it's really cool to see the
diversity of thought around these topics and the openness to
now learn more about the different fields.
Because it seems like everybody is starting to take this a

(01:40:23):
little bit more seriously in terms of a philosophical framing
of all these problems. And, and there seems to be a
misery resurgence of not only just psychedelic research, but
philosophy in general is becoming a bit more appreciated
over time. And that's why it's a philosophy
podcast, yes. Yeah, and metaphysics as well.
You know, we're going through the metaphysical term.
I think people are just being, you know, like returning to it.
It's like, oh shit, we've got this whole history.

(01:40:44):
We don't have to down to the East or whatever, although the
East is quite fascinating in itself.
But yeah, no, you're and you're doing a good job.
I mean, I'm a big fan of this podcast, as I said to you a year
after responding to e-mail, so. Yeah, it's a.
It's really interesting, you know, when I drive to Exeter, I,
I generally listen to this podcast.
Oh, man, that's that's that's soheart warming and it means a lot

(01:41:05):
to me. Thank you so much.
No problem. Yeah.
And now it's a pleasure for me to host you.
And at least this time you can maybe wonder you listen to your
own episode, but of Pete deception.
Peter, thank you. This is this has been awesome.
And I look forward to watching your journey and hopefully you
continue to enjoy the podcast inyour drives to Exeter.

(01:41:25):
I'm sure I will, and I look forward to seeing you next to
them. Yeah, I'm in I've never been
I've never been to the UK so oh really my time been everywhere
else I think except maybe South America and the UK.
So I. Think I've not got the country
right? OK.
If you're ever in Cape Town, South Africa, come, you can come
visit me. Yeah, actually I've got a good
friend from Cape Town, so I do mean to go there one day.

(01:41:47):
When you do, I'm knock on the door.
I'll. Try and host a consciousness
conference in Cape Town. Cool.
Cheers Peter. Thanks so much.

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