 Hello my friends and welcome to the 99th episode of Patterson in Pursuit, Gazarin for Treat. This is part two of my discussion with Dr. Bernardo Kastrup. Last week we talked about the philosophy of idealism and this week we talked about some of the most fundamental ideas I can conceive of which is kind of rationality itself and specifically rationality in relation to psychedelic drugs so there's a lot of people in my investigations that I've come across who claim that you can experience something beyond rationality, something beyond logic and it's not necessarily internally contradictory it's just not a logical or non-logical and I've never had that experience so it's very hard for me to try to wrap my head around it and understand what's being spoken about and usually when talking to these people I must say I'm not persuaded I find that there's always a some kind of a logical rational context in which you can make sense of their experiences on drugs but Dr. Kastrup is obviously of such a clear rationalist disposition and has very sophisticated arguments that you can't just dismiss when somebody like Dr. Kastrup comes along and says hey maybe there's this other type of existing or being which is beyond mind and a logical and you can't put it into words and so naturally we had a conversation about it and it was spectacular really the both part one and part two are some of my favorite conversations I've had with anybody on the show and it's interesting I feel like I'm talking to somebody who's experienced something that I kind of accept that I can't grasp because I haven't had the experience I see I'm I'm not going to be able to get it maybe until I try my hand at psychedelics eventually but nonetheless it's still a fascinating conversation and if any of you have been following my work or you read my short book on logic it's called square one the foundations of knowledge I place logic on the highest pedestal I think it's literally metaphysically inescapable the laws of identity and non-contradiction and I even claim that I'm certain about it it must be that logic and existence are inseparable that is the thesis of my book that's the fundamentals of my worldview and everything I'm the worldview I'm building is built on the assumption and here comes Bernardo I don't know if challenging the assumption is correct but maybe saying that that assumption is incomplete and maybe there's something more than that our conversation kind of mimics a multi-millennial long conversation that's been happening in philosophy about the role of theory versus the role of experience in trying to get at the real nature of the world isn't the case that theory has the final say or is it the case that experience has the final say I think historically speaking experience has trumped theory and I think that's because people's theories are way way way too dogmatic and as we talk about at the beginning of this interview what consistently happens throughout history is that there's a orthodox theory that's ossified and people believe it's definitely true in the way the world works then there's some experiences that are outside of the theory everybody says those experiences are impossible or somebody comes along with a new theory like Newton's theories of physics they say this is magic this is nonsense and superstition this is impossible because we know the truth because of our theories and then given enough time people realize oh these ideas or experiences that we thought were magic and superstition turned out to be pretty good and maybe better than the existing paradigm so 99% of cases I side with experience but I admit there's three theoretical assumptions that I just can't shake it's just the laws of identity and non-contradiction and this relationship between logic and existence I can't conceive that those are incorrect and so that's why this conversation is so valuable for me and I'm sure it will be for listeners of the show you can find my guest's work at BernardoCastrup.com I will have a link to his dissertation and some of his books and his website at the show notes page this week which is steve-patterson.com slash 99 I still am of the the rationalistic mentality where I don't see I don't see logic having to be revised I should say definitely not the law of identity and non-contradiction the excluded middle can get into like the philosophy of language and what does it mean to say the present king of France is bald that's that ontological import so I agree and there's some interesting history here with the philosophy of mathematics as I know you know but I don't think there's any reason that these things can't be like perfectly understood in the context of our own reason I just think people are really really really really bad at reasoning and they're not they're not being honest with themselves I have to start methodologically with what I know and I have to that means I mean I have to start with my experience and my consciousness I think that's the most rational thing to do I was a lot to comment here let me just make a it's not where I want to get but I just want to say quickly one thing magic was never a taboo in science or physicalism science has embraced magic since its inception when newton proposed the law of gravitation that two bodies would attract each other at a distance without any contact or or any necessarily mediuming between between that was magic and actually the French stuck to the opinion that this was magic and ridiculous for decades after newton proposed it so it's not magic anymore once we review our unexamined assumptions so to say you want we review them and you get habituated to something our sense of usability changes and then it's not magic anymore it's just a postulate about something that is inherent and fundamental in nature right but that postulate keeps changing I mean there was a time we thought that that the stick would attract shaft when it's electrostatically charged that attraction would be because an invisible medium an elastic medium would connect the shaft to the thing that attracts it's like a comb and that elastic medium would pull the shaft and that was accepted theory for a long time in the Middle Ages it was very reasonable it was accepted for all the same reasons that we accept multiverse cosmologists today Kuhn wrote about it in the the structure of scientific revolutions in 1969 I believe he explained oh this magic was never a taboo in science what is taboo in science is mini the moment you say there is a meaning to say oh no no now you're out of the club you just signed you know you just signed your excommunication certificates you are out of here mini is not acceptable that is the unexamined major prejudice in science it is this this prejudice against mini I mean I'm not saying that there should be mini I don't know right I have no fucking clue whether there is meaning I suspect there is I think there is but I don't know that there is but I'm open to it I find it entirely plausible that there could be meaning to life such a complex universe that seems to have generated us with so much labor and so much difficulty I find it eminently plausible that there might be a meaning behind it all right but that is a no-go area in science yeah not magic it's meaning so I just want to piggyback on this I thought experiment right so put you know we're in the mindset of of modern scientists and the only thing we're describing is the operation of the physical phenomena physical machinery and then somebody comes along for the first time and posits consciousness is it like yeah there that is the most absurd that literally is a cat it's like two category mistakes what are you that doesn't literally does not make sense within a concept of physicalism that's like okay that might be true but it's a given that this is that's actually the world in which we live yeah so continue we are trying to reduce consciousness to an abstraction of consciousness yeah we are chasing our tails at light speed hoping we will catch it at some point never would never reduce consciousness to a conceptual conceptual abstraction of consciousness in other words matter but anyway back to logic I I live in the world of rationalism it's what I do every day is finding rational you know well constructed tight logical arguments for the positions I put forward I do it because that's the ethos of our civilization today that's what counts today nothing else counts nothing else will make a social or cultural difference which is our social and cultural prejudice today while in science the prejudice is against meaning at the cultural level the prejudice is against anything that is irrational not necessarily irrational not necessarily contradicting logic but something that transcends logic logic as we as was defined by Aristotle in classical Greece because there are many types of logic there is intuitionistic logic there are many types and very good reasons to choose some other ones sometimes but anyway that's our prejudice today so these are the constraints I chose to operate in because I agree with you when you said one of our key problems today is that we we we are using bad reasoning so even if you grant that logic is fundamentally correct and it's the foundation of reality it precedes the laws of physics themselves we we can accept when science makes an advantage that's oh you know what there there is no magical gravitational attraction at the distance between two bodies it's just some kind of fold in spacetime you know some distortion in the fabric of spacetime well then the magic becomes spacetime and how it can be distorted but never mind we accept that but we don't accept the a logical so I accept that constraint otherwise I will not be heard man I will not sell a single book and and I agree with you that we can do a lot better within that constraint I think even granted that constraint we are arriving at all the wrong conclusions within logic it's all their own conclusions I agree I agree methodologically right because people are starting with the theory rather than starting with the experience which is a fundamental methodological mistake yeah yeah so given the constraints of logic I think we can do a much better job so my personal attitude is I'm fighting this battle how much better we can do within logic I'm not going to fight the battle of uh but should we really stick the logic I think we shouldn't and I wrote one little book about it it's called meaning and absurdity which is I think my poorest selling book it's I don't know maybe it crossed a couple thousand now but it's been out for years so I'm fighting only this battle how to do logic correctly and arrive at the proper conclusions within logic but I'm not married to logic at all I think we are as human beings we are born with many other mental faculties feeling intuition some forms of insight that do not require linear linear steps of reasoning so let me ask you a question then on the definition of logic because because what I think I use a somewhat non-standard definition and that I don't necessarily mean kind of the bridges between claims in arguments in so much as I mean this is almost a metaphysical principle that things are the way that they are the law of identity the law of non-contradiction are metaphysical in nature like there are no there cannot be contradictions real contradictions in reality do you agree with that yes because it's by definition so I define contradiction as that which cannot be the case well so if you say well it cannot be the case that there are contradictions and say sure and that's how it's been defined well but but there are some people who would disagree with that they they actually had a conversation once on the on my show with an academic teaching at columbia who was trying to give examples of metaphysical contradictions and he said yeah but those are linguistic examples usually oh well it it was yes he was talking about the pope he says the pope married while he's married and not married at the same time I was thinking oh jeez that's not the best contradiction I've ever heard but I don't necessarily mean we're so I would say this as a principle whatever is is exactly the way that it is and it's not the way that it is not sure by definition yeah well but but by definition makes it sound like a linguistic thing I'm saying by like metaphysical necessity that there cannot be something that is some way that it is not physically it's complicated because what you're appealing to is definiteness and quantum mechanics has thrown definiteness out of the window for a hundred years so it gets complex if you know what I mean if you really want to go to what is out there and you say well the state of the world is definite whatever it is it is what it is and it's not what it's not yeah quantum mechanics doesn't seem to agree with this well well but that's not quite true so there are many different interpretations of quantum mechanics of course as you know some of them are more definite than others but I I think that even if one wants to say things are in a superposition of being this way and that I think the idea is that this is not a logical contradiction actually I think there's a metaphysical there are definitely some interpretation interpretations of the Copenhagen interpretation in which I think you get logical contradictions but I think that's a mistake I don't think yeah I would say if there's any metaphysics that is definitely wrong it would be one that is internally contradictory especially because there are other alternative theories which aren't contradictory this is a very rich territory or a very deep quagmire depending on how you want to look at I mean there have been papers about is logic empirical or not there was a discussion I think with there is even a book about it there were two papers famous papers on this subject in which people I think it was Quine that was looking into quantum mechanics and trying to figure out well is logic empirical if it is we have to get rid of the the the theorem of excluded excluded middle and so forth so it's it's a rich area I don't think we will I agree make sense of it here but what I would say is this usually when people say that a contradiction exists usually what they mean is there is a sense in which something is a and another sense in which something is the negation of a not a they don't mean that it's a and not a if there is a sense in which it's a and there is a sense in which it's not a particularly psychologists this is what they do when psychologists say well you know there are contradictions this is what they mean there is one sense it's one thing there is another sense it's another thing and usually we we cannot define these senses very well it's sort of a bit fuzzy in our heads and then and then we pronounce a contradiction but it's not a true contradiction and linguistically you can create true contradictions this statement is false well if it's true it's false but if it's false it cannot be true that this statement is false is a true contradiction it's both true and false but maybe that's one interpretation that that would be the dilithious interpretation that it is actually true and false at the same time but there are other attempts I think successful attempts at resolving the liars paradox and saying there's there's linguistic errors at play where it it's not true and false but even if this is a problem suppose these linguistic paradoxes were a problem well I actually think I tend to think they are a problem but it sort of emerges from a semantic schema that we created ourselves I think it this translates or can get projected onto the world at large in so far as the world at large is a story we tell ourselves in language because when we talk about the world at large we're not talking about sense pixels bundles of sense data as Kant put it we overlay a narrative on it we split it into objects into certain relationships between objects you know we apply syntactic syntactics and semantics to it and and then we replace sense data with a narrative that's how human cognition works psychologists have known this already for a few decades now we don't see the world as it is it you know we overlay a narrative on it and then if linguistic contradictions truly exist then we are overlaying those contradictions into the onto the world in so far as the world is that narrative we create right you see what I'm going with this right but in terms of like the under in terms of the mind the the universal experience in every way that it is it is only in the way that it is and there is it is no way in which it isn't right so there's not there's it couldn't be some way that it definitely isn't because if it were some other way it would be that way and not another way right in terms of definitions you're obviously correct but I'm still resisting I mean the moving beyond I mean yeah I know what you're I know what you're saying so you think that there could be an experience of a type that is not how it is I think there is a lot more going on here than we suppose within the constraints of our rationality yeah and a lot of it is filtered out as a natural cognitive mechanism because it cannot be accommodated within our internal narrative so it's not that it could be this way and that way like a plurality of ways is that literally in the sense that it is some way it is not that way by insisting on on on framing the problem as you are framing which I can completely relate to yeah but by by you're very insisting on this framing of the problem you are already acquiescing to human rationality that is do you understand do you see what I mean yes I guess I have a hard time grasping anything else because I feel like to say to put the only constraints on the universe being like it is the way that it is is still pretty generous I mean you can have all kinds of remarkable things all kinds of experiences even if we take the idealist approach all kinds of textured and nuanced experiences but I really have no way of understanding what it would even mean to say that something could be the way that it is and not the way that it is at the same time it can't if you frame the problem as you are framing well how's the other way to do it what are you yeah this framing of a problem is is is a dynamics in your rationality you see I can completely relate relate to the difficulty of making because now we are asking minds to abstract away from its own boundaries and then it's very difficult to do that you can only do that if you have a experiential reference beyond those boundaries um and that experiential reference is not something that you can come to through steps of reasoning ah okay it's it you either have had it or you haven't had it if you know what I mean and only with this this Archimedean point outside reason can you can you understand what I mean when I say that you are very framing of the problem already incursing the very thing who's validated to you with your questioning well and this is why I find the within the rationality paradigm so compelling is because I think it's inescapable it's a thing like as soon as anything is said you're within this paradigm yeah and I haven't had the experience of anything outside of it I've had a remarkable experience of falling in love with my wife was the most amazing experience I ever had totally logical though yeah uh look I think this is a very sophisticated problem we are discussing now I think the moment we get as a culture as a society to the point where this becomes the problem that needs to be discussed that will mean that we will have already solved so many problems that are still ahead of us that I will be so happy the moment the discussion we are having now would become the key discussion to have at a cultural level I think we are way behind it I think there's a lot of a lot more basic stuff that needs to be sorted a lot more things that needs to be seen for the foolishness they are within the boundaries of logic and rationality completely agree so the moment the moment we sort our house of reason and put it in good order and we eliminated the insanities that that still reign supreme in our culture today then we can have this discussion I don't think it's going to happen in my lifetime but you and I are sensing something here and I think there are more people who are sensing it it's not part of our collective consciousness it's not part of the cultural debate it's something that we didn't create language yet to capture in a way that does justice to it we don't have the conceptual arsenal to corral it in statements if you know what I mean well so so you have this experience and I've had lots of conversations with people who have this type of experience but I haven't so I totally grant that there are experiences like this that people happen that happen to people and they report them but I kind of view it as you've seen a color that I haven't and it's I'm very curious about this it's like you're an astronaut and you've been to a planet that I haven't I can't even I don't even know where it is I've never even seen it on the map but I do want to ask you just a couple of questions on this I know I appreciate you being so generous with your time this is really enjoyable though now I'm having fun too okay so so on that though when you so you've had this experience that you say let's say it's outside of the general parameters of logic as we normally conceive of them so now looking in on the logical paradigm you see that as being flawed or limited no yeah limited incomplete yeah so so within the system though it still is correct it's just that it's not an it's not an entire metaphysics maybe there's a correct existence outside of it yes it's an internally coherent system that is very useful and correct for everything that is amenable to it but not everything is amenable to being framed according to that system what isn't it though I mean I know you and our language is not gonna I get that but you have to understand my curiosity here it's like well I have a friend because you see I made a conscious choice to fight the fight of reason yeah and not any other fight right but there is a there is a side of my life that is not governed by reason it's becoming increasingly a smaller smaller part of my life as you know all the balls in the air that I'm trying to keep now sort of grab my my skills and channel them all into reasoning but there is another side to my life and then this friend of mine relates to me only in so far as that other side of my life goes he can't relate to all the reasoning side of my life and he I think I can name and Rupert Spira he is a non-duality teacher and he watched my phd defense and he didn't say quite like that but I'm sure that by watching that it's on YouTube probably his thought was how torturous and difficult these guys make what is obvious what is immediately obvious to you unprejudiced experience and contemplation so that gives you a sense of you know if I'm talking to him it's a completely different discussion then we start from a different set of references mutually acknowledged starting points so to say so let me ask you so this is a particular a lot about the law of identity is it the case that what you're describing is some type of existence or or experience in which the law of identity doesn't apply to anything because there aren't things so it's like yeah a would still be a but there isn't any a yeah I'm tempted to follow you down this road but the moment I do that I acknowledge the framing of the situation in a way that I cannot acknowledge because it would defeat the very point in contention it's something you knew when you were a kid and before you knew how to speak it was the reality you knew it was all you had it was what was given to you before you replaced the world with a logical narrative but I don't have a memory of it because when I think back of no no you do have that memory you cannot ordinarily access it okay but if one day you do you know I always knew this I've always known this I've never forgotten it was there at a subliminal level that I couldn't access by just indexing and saying okay now I'm going to retrieve those contents of no no no that's not how it goes but it was always there obfuscated by your ordinary life but it was always there it never went just right under your nose it's closer to you than you can imagine it's so so close to you that you can't see it how do you see it is this I mean obviously psychedelics are one way to do it is there another way that people can see the thing well I spiritual paths never worked for me not that I really tried seriously because I was I never had the I don't know the disposition the character it can happen spontaneously it has happened to me spontaneously a couple of times actually maybe more than a couple of times but it it's very elusive it's like trying to remember dream just after you wake up and it escapes through your fingers you just remember that you did remember the dream but you no longer remember the dream know what I mean you remember that you remembered it when you woke up but five seconds later that's how you remember that you did remember but you no longer do so it's slippery and elusive it's somebody put it in a way this is not from me and I don't I can't attribute it correctly so I regret it but I will say it anyway I don't know who's oh so it's my friend Deepak Chopra who said that he said it's what in between two thoughts it's the gap between two thoughts that's what it is and I think he pinned it down I mean people criticize him a lot for for what they claim is words salads no incomprehensible jumbos of things you know there is a difference between something that it's truly incomprehensible because it makes no sense and something that simply you don't comprehend and I think his critics tend to mix these two things the fact that they can't comprehend it that they can't relate to it doesn't mean that it's a word salad but that this is the bone that I'm in because I think okay between two thoughts is this in the space between two thoughts you will find it but I do that and I go okay it's just experience no but you see if you say now I'm gonna do it it's gone the moment you do that it's gone you can catch it do you take naps in the afternoon yeah when I can so you can catch it when you are about to fall asleep in an afternoon nap or just after you wake up from an afternoon nap in that space when you're not asleep but you're not quite awake you can catch it there isn't it just consciousness though it just seems like a state of consciousness everything is a state of consciousness there is nothing that is not a logical state of consciousness just seems to be another moment if you apply your reasoning to it you will miss it by definition um and now I may sound like I'm talking to complete nonsense here which of course it is it is nonsense because it is not sense that's the that's the very point and and it's not my mission you know it's not what I propose myself to do I'm not the guy who is going to teach you to meditate and you know find these subliminal states of mind and you know try to wrap your hands around something that is so elusive that you know if you try to grab it the slips between if I'm not the guy who is going to go down that path I'm the guy who is going to argue on the base of parsimony logic and empirical adequacy that physicalism is bullshit and that we need a better ontology to guide our culture um but I will not deny that that these other things also part of my life I wrote one book about it that was ignored that's solemnly ignored I'm definitely gonna have to get a copy of that book because this is so interesting because I wrote a little book as well on I suppose on the topic from the opposite direction where or the kind of the thesis the book is that logic and existence are inseparable and and it has to be that way and it literally couldn't be any other way so the and and I claim certainty about it too so this is this is uh this puzzle that I what I found is in in talking with people about these types of experiences pretty much without exception it can all be still within the parameters of the law of identity experience is however it was and it wasn't how it wasn't but maybe that's a framing mistake so my curiosity is peaked if I go now this down this path with the with you of thinking about it I'll completely concur with you it's inevitable to concur with you if I think about it if I reason about it I will concur with you uh and it's a matter I mean that book I wrote is already a compromise because I try to undermine the system from within so I still frame the problem according to reason and I try to undermine reason from within like Godo undermined mathematical logic from within by using you know theorems and all that formulation so that's what I tried to do in the book so it's already a compromise from the get go because something that is not a compromise can't be written it can only be caught in the act and it's very elusive you can't induce it you can only train yourself to pay attention when it happens and trust me it happens every day but we have very selective memories we usually only remember what we tell ourselves about what we are experiencing not the experience itself if you don't tell yourself what's going on you don't remember it memory is so attached to this metacognitive capacity to this narrative making reflective capacity so what you don't remember you might as well have never experienced because you never caught it in the fishing net of experience because it's a highly filtered fishing net it only catches the big fish but the minnows just go through and you think the minnows are never there they are there so you can only train yourself to pay attention or for some people it works it did work with me years ago take high dose psychedelics and it's right there it's on your face and when you it scares me though this because because I'm I'm so much of the rationalist disposition and I know you can identify with this when I look at it from the outside I go I don't want to go crazy like it sounds like well no don't worry about it no no no need to worry about it two days after your trip you will dismiss it well two days after your trip you say oh that was a bunch of nonsense and then you you talk to somebody else and who will ask you what about psychedelics and you say yeah it's a nice trip but it's bullshit you will dismiss it you will forget it and it will no longer be part of your life two 48 hours it's 40 years though it for a long time it was not part of my life despite mind boggling psychedelic experiences what I'm telling you is what happened to me and how did I get out from this I began to it was a time of my life I was tripping more or less frequently not for the sake of tripping but I I saw it as a as a an investigation it was a research project and I was very serious about it before I started I did all kinds of health checks to make sure that my heart my liver were okay and I studied all the literature and I'm very methodical about it and I would have mind boggling trips and I would dismiss two days later and then three months on I would do it again and I would think oh what an idiot I was having dismissed it previous time I missed something I forgot something but now I know that there is this this ineffable thing that I can't talk about it's there and then 48 hours later oh no no it's not really there you know because you know the more time passes the more perspective I get so it's more reliable what I think now than what I thought 12 hours after the trip because now I have perspective I have hindsight so let's forget about that and this cycle would repeat and it got me to a point where I was writing everything down I was still tripping I was already writing down you know I still couldn't see the screen well things were shifting out of focus and I was writing everything now trying to to capture that that elusive fish those minnows that go through through your net but very very important minnows and after two years it has stayed it now it stays with me and not only that I I can catch it now on the match completely sober if I take a nap in the afternoon it doesn't work at night it doesn't work when you wake up in the morning because at night you're tired and when you wake up in the morning you're fresh and you need to go to work or your activities so it doesn't work but an afternoon nap on a Sunday when the weather is fine you're in a good state of mind nothing's pressing on you you don't have immediate concerns you don't have anxieties everything seems to be okay and you take that afternoon nap I can't catch it now because I sort of I smooth the path if you know what I mean I sort of I explored the space frequently enough that I can recognize it no and that gives you a reinforcement so I no longer fall for the story of a well only now what I know now is what's as reliable because after that no I was drugged I was on drugs how can I believe how can I rely on what I thought then I was on drugs I don't have that problem anymore I know I'm on drugs right now it's called serotonin drugs mediate our our thought processes psychedelics are not and by the way there is then DMT and the most powerful psychedelic known it's it's in the human body it's naturally it occurs naturally in the human body it's probably I think there is a very recent result it is manufactured by the human body doesn't come only from from diet so our physiology manufactures it so these are neurotransmitter replacements effectively they are neurotransmitters and thought is mediated by neurotransmitters right now if there weren't drugs in my brain right now I wouldn't be thinking so I'm talking around it because there is no other way to talk about it if you know what I mean I can only talk around it and but the conclusion is I am at a point now where I no longer dismiss it through insistence and skepticism about my own conclusion so it was skeptical of my conclusion of saying well I can only rely on or I think now not what I thought then because I was on drugs I started questioning that too so if you start questioning everything it becomes a recursive process first you think well I'll go nuts because there's nothing I can trust but eventually it sort of settles down not because of an exercise of logic it's like something within you matures there is a foundation that underlines your your rational processes and that organizes your impetus so do you I'm sure that you've seen though people who are psychedelic enthusiasts that really do seem to lose it that seems to be a phenomenon that happens yeah yeah and by the way I don't think psychedelics are a penacea I think one has to be very skeptical of what people call psychedelic noses because people come back from trips thinking oh the world will end in 2053 and you know aliens from the playities have talked to me and have told me the truth I think one has to be very skeptical and careful about that the content of the psychedelic trip is not reliable I have this theory that the prime directive of mind is to deceive itself it is what mind does you know it is it is the foundational activity of mind is to tirelessly attempt to deceive itself it's what it does no it's it's the metaphysical property of mind it's inherent innate so in a psychedelic trip that's what mind is doing it's trying to find every possible way to deceive itself because that's what creates reality self-deception is the engine of reality if there were none this would all disappear don't ask me to logically explain this I'm not going to go there I'm just sharing with you the things that I think but can't defend can't argue so so my only experience with mind altering drugs is marijuana and I have because I also have a skeptical disposition I had this long thing this back and forth can I trust myself on marijuana and then I would think well I mean I seem like I'm pretty trustworthy and I'd go well you only feel that way because you're on drugs and I'd be like yeah yeah you're getting to this dialogue exactly and I actually had some interesting insights in this these just basic altered states where I would test myself and I'm go okay well if I could if I could find something that I believed to be true in the altered state that I knew to be false in the unaltered state that I could conclude you can't trust yourself in the altered state and what I chose was logic can there be a square circle and I remember this pattern of reasoning because it was so unique I was thinking okay can there be a square circle and my usual state of mind was no absolutely not these two completely different things and I remember hesitating when I was on marijuana and I then I started worrying I was like oh crap I went crazy like but what happened was I thought okay well they are not identical things but they're similar in 99% of ways they're they're but like I drew out on a piece of paper I was like okay well it's a pencil drawing on the paper that has a particular shape that I wrote with a particular intention that are generally the same size and yeah I guess the shape is a little bit different but really they're more similar than they are different and I thought and then I remember coming out of the state and thinking oh that's actually a pretty good insight that's correct so yeah I had several phases yeah so I get scared of thinking well what if I conclude the actual logical contradiction then I get out of the state and I go okay well I thought there were logical contradictions therefore you can't trust yourself in that state now the our normal frame of mind reasserts itself rather quickly at 48 hours is the number I usually come up with so don't you worry unless you have a latent psychosis which you may have so one has to be careful because the ones who do have latent psychosis do not know that they do and then a psychedelic trip can can turn the latent into a factual reality how can you prevent do you know any way any markers of that start with very low doses okay increase slowly make sure that you're like it doesn't go away after 48 hours type thing no no no if you have a predisposition or a latent psychosis a small dose is we have a spectacular effect and then you know because you know what the references are an adult with 85 kilos like I am and six foot one 85 kilos four or five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms would be a fairly high dose one gram dried psilocybin mushrooms should hardly have an effect so if you start with 0.75 gram and you have a major trip now you know you know you have to be extra careful now now okay so I don't know much about the details of this and I'm sure actually my audience will appreciate this because I know there are a lot of psychedelic explorers that listen so is the predisposition towards psychosis is that just purely a sensitivity towards the drug so like you could get the same effects with a smaller amount and if that's the case does that mean that the worry is people with psychosis will have brain damage because it's as if they took oh a bucket of psychedelics well I don't know I am I'm not I'm not a psychologist I'm not a psychiatrist so the clean answer is I don't know my my philosophical view of what the psychosis means it's just it's not necessarily a a our minds are set up by certain cultural conventions to start from certain assumptions and think according to certain patterns and somebody who is psychotics so called psychotic is somebody who does not start from those assumptions and who does not think according to those culturally accepted patterns in other words it's just a different person I don't necessarily see that as a bad thing unless it becomes dysfunctional and and not conducive to life which unfortunately often is the case and then it should be treated as a condition that requires help somebody who requires help so you don't think they're actually going crazy it's just something like their their beliefs have fundamentally changed at such a level that they're going to be seen by people in normal culture as as crazy despite yeah how interesting yeah and in other cultures they would become shamans or healers in our culture we lock them up interesting but I'm so I'm not really a spokesperson for psychedelics because I'm very cautious about that as I just try to illustrate at the same time I will not deny what they've done for me I hardly used them thing last time I used them was years ago but they've helped me a lot open up to spaces of thought spaces of insight is a better word that I I didn't even suspect existed before and what I wanted to get back to to on that point of psychedelic trips being psychedelic noses being so unreliable is the following I think the message of a psychedelic trip is totally unreliable whatever the psychedelic told you is going on or has happened in history you should take that with that whole bag of salt with the ocean of salt it is most likely not true because mind is always trying to deceive itself that's my my pet theory but in the process in the process of paying attention to how mind is trying to deceive itself in other words if you can split itself and observe all the ways especially during a trip because then it's amplified and it's happening in normal life as well but it's not amplified so we miss it but in a psychedelic trip it's amplified if you observe all the ways in which you're trying to deceive yourself all the subtle techniques and there are many there are many there is a technique of skepticism I call it it's when you're skeptical about point A so the trip told you A is true and you go like bullshit I don't believe that and then you fall on to B and actually the trip is trying to convince you about B and A is how to say there is a military term it's a ruse it's a it's a deflection maneuver it's to take your eye off the ball if you know what I mean and then you apply all of your skepticism toward towards A and you open up to B and you fall back on B because I am skeptical so B and B but B is the deception know what I mean so well B is the deception or B is what the B is the way mind is trying to deceive itself and A is a distraction maneuver to take your eye off the ball you're not you'll not be critical of B you'll be critical of A there's a name for that I'm missing well so so go ahead so what I'm trying to say is the following if you pay attention to all these maneuvers you can do that right now it's much more difficult but you can do that right now if you pay attention to all these self-deceiving maneuvers at some point you start realizing how logic is one of these maneuvers this is what I've been trying to convey to you for the past half hour and so difficult took that long so the value of a psychedelic trip for me is not in the noses is not in the A or B or C I don't trust any of them what it what it gives me is it amplifies this process of self-deception and speeds it up in a way like when you speed up the image of a flower opening up if you look at the flower in real time you see nothing but if you speed it up you see so a psychedelic trip amplifies and speeds it up so you see you can catch it in the act you can catch how your mind is deceiving itself in the act and once you get used to it it has unfathomable reach it it starts making a question the narrative you tell yourself right now and eventually it gives you this this Archimedean point outside logic because you've seen how your trusting logic evolves you see that mechanism you see it working your commitments to logic where does that come from you see the steps know what I mean they get blown up and amplified and sped up so you see them moving and you go ah gosh that's how I am buying into logic it doesn't mean that it's untrue that's not what I'm saying what I'm saying is you see the mechanism behind it and once you see that mechanism that's the Archimedean point that allows you to understand that when you frame the problem in a logical way you are already buying into that mechanism oh so your the deception already caught you you're saying like mind itself is this is a deception I'm saying that so like there's there's there's the experience and the the thinking thing that is experience is a deception yes I wrote a book about that not meaning absurdity well there's a sense in which I can I can more than allegory I like it is that it is a mental process which it seems to be like a progression of mental states but mind creates experience by deceiving itself I cannot argue this according to the analytic school of philosophy I can argue this according to the continental school which I tried to do in more than allegory it's a book overtly about religious myths but it's actually about life the universe and everything and in that book I try to make the more or less the case I try to make to you now which is reality is created by an extraordinarily subtle process of self-deception and when you catch it at work which is easier with psychedelics but you can catch it at work when you wake up from a nap in an afternoon you you see it but you can't frame it because to frame it I'm already buying into it now but isn't there a sense in which there's got to be some type of a meta understanding at play here like even if you see the the machinery involved and you go ah okay this is the this is the thinking thing that the mind that that consciousness does but you still understand that so it's like even in the psychedelic state or coming out of the psychedelic state you think okay I can't trust these experiences in a literal way but doesn't that still imply there's still a kind of a meta evaluation taking place yes but it's not a meta evaluation it's a meta observation or a meta insight the moment you try to tell yourself what that is you already put words in it you already dressed it in logic boom you already got caught and in the scheme you already got caught in the deception so is there a meta process yes there is a meta process but it's not a reasoning process it's a process of observation you see it you just see it you cannot tell yourself what it is that you are seeing so this is this is so awesome I this kind of I I I sense that there's something here both just through the practice of philosophy I try to make a very rigorous philosophy and in doing so it's kind of destroyed a bunch of normal concepts that people have and I see there's a lot of truth to be found here but also in meditation this whole phenomena of observing the mind acting is does weird things to you and it's it's it definitely gets down to the questions of what reality is so I'm trying to understand I don't I don't quite have the insight that you have so I'm trying to understand it but is it something like like what the mind fundamentally is you could say it's just a progression of experiences and there are a types of experiences which are thinking experiences and we label them in particular ways and when you see the the thinking as just a progression of experiences you you don't view them as I don't know you view the more of it more of it as like a game like a linguistic game rather than the underlying process which is just the the experience is under unfolding no that's right think think of it this way imagine that experience starts from a sort of a little seed and what will give substance to the experience is this process of self-deception it's the narratives you you construct around that little seed so you go from a little seed to boom a whole world the substantiality of the world arises from that self-deceptive process that's what creates the substantiality the palpability at the birth point of all that is a little seed that is infinitesimally small it has no extension it is so elusive has to be nothing but that nothing is what gives rise to the everything it's the starting point of that recursive process of self-deception that creates all the substantiality creates space-time extension creates the qualities as we seem to to experience but it all arises from imagine it as a golf ball that shrinks shrinks shrinks shrinks to a mustard seed and it never stops shrinking but it's not nothing because it's what gives rise to everything but if you remove the layers of self-deception it's infinitesimally small so everything arises from nothing oh it's not large crazy well so soak is there a state then that you can be in in which you you you aren't doing the self-deceiving thing i hear that there is i tend to believe there is i have never been in that state the state that have been in enough times to to take that state as part of my life learnings is observing that process happen in which an infinitesimally little seed is blown up into the whole world through a recursive process of self-deception so i have observed that process happen but i've never been in a state in which that process was not happening if you know what i mean i think the buddhists call it the great void that the state in which the process ceases i've never been in that state but i have i have had the the privilege the grace as christians would call it the grace of seeing the process happen and catching it catching that the lucid thing happening yeah that i i have had both in a trip and on the natch it's very lucid it's like a fraction of a second when you think oh i got one gone well that's a wonderful note to end on i mean this has been an awesome conversation i think i'm going to break this into two interviews i think we'll do one on the dissertation and then we talked for a while on the rationality and psychedelics i think i'm just going to make two uh two episodes because that's that was just so good i'm so curious about the these things too it's like the only thing i can relate to in this is i had a love experience that that really changed my life and i realized though this is this is essentially the meaning of life or the highest i would say the highest state of human existence is the loving state and i had this experience and i talk about it and i try to put it in context of rational philosophy i don't think there's anything irrational about it but i'm talking to people who haven't had this experience it's like there is no way to understand what i'm talking about unless you've had the experience and i remember this i this sticks in my crumb because when i was growing up i grew up christian evangelical and i used to have arguments with pastors and i really didn't like a lot of the things they were saying and i was doing the philosophy thing and they would say steve someday you're just going to get it you're going to understand and you're just going to get it and i thought at the time that's a cop out and it's like forgive me as i'm not persuaded by saying you know i've had some experience that you haven't had therefore i can't make arguments and like you just have to believe me or something it just wasn't persuaded by that but sure enough they got the last laugh in the sense that i had the love experience and it resulted in some kind of a like building a theology and i think it greatly expanded my worldview so though i haven't had your things you're talking about i still i have enough experience now to believe that in fact the experience can really challenge some of those real fundamental metaphysical assumptions about reality you see i see today you're talking to a philosopher that identifies as an analytic philosopher trying to breach the gap with continental philosophy but i identify as analytic who leaves out of reasoning based nearly all my points on reasoning but i see between between you and me and all of your thousands of listeners i see reasoning as a straight jacket that i voluntarily put on because i think we can do a lot more with the straight jacket on than we are doing today and once we do the best we can with the straight jacket on then we can start talking about removing the straight jacket but i think we are a couple of centuries away from from that this is how i see i don't see myself as better i i think that a lot of people see it as i see but it's not a cultural meme it it didn't acquire that that collective momentum that many other bad narratives and stories have acquired so it this doesn't make me unique i think it's a shared experience but it's not shared at the cultural level because it's very hard to put words on it and to communicate at the cultural level we need words we need memes things that are easy to grasp and this is not this is the most elusive thing there is so i think we are maybe two centuries away from even starting to have the question posed if you know what i mean but it is my daily life well i appreciate you being so open to and talking about it because i know even when i had this less profound experience it still can be awkward you know it's seen as as uh non-rational or something to talk about how your experiences of love nonetheless you know changed your philosophy much less talking about the experience of maybe non-logic i mean that's a whole another level of like bold proposition as somebody is a rationalist to take so thank you you're welcome so it's a lot of fun again likewise