- [Steve] Hey, it's Steve, and this is "Luminous," a podcast about the science and culture of psychedelics. There's certain people I love talking to, like philosophers who have a really nuanced take on what the mind is capable of doing, and when it comes to psychedelics, philosophers willing to go into the weirdness, even when they're skeptical of its ultimate truth value. That's one reason the German philosopher, Thomas Metzinger, is so fascinating. He's been a leading philosopher of mine for decades, someone who's steeped in cognitive science. He's not some wild-eyed psychonaut, he also has a strong ethical streak. He believes there's an imperative to create what he calls a culture of consciousness to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks of mind-altering substances, and not just for people suffering from depression or trauma, but for everyone, and he has a concrete proposal for how to do this.
- [Thomas] Come on, if these people want the ability to do this two times a year in the meditation center, in the mountains, or in the desert, and if it's true that this is not poisonous and not addictive, and if they're even financially coming up for all the risks, me, the taxpayer, will never have to pay for it. If they crack up or something, let them have it.
- [Steve] Metzinger says, "Altered states of consciousness can give us profound insights into the nature of the mind." As he told me, there are things you wouldn't think are possible without having had psychedelic experiences, but he doesn't romanticize them. He says psychedelics have led him into existential despair, even thoughts of suicide, which, listener beware, we talk about in this conversation. And there's one thing he said that I can relate to from my own experience. You can feel like you're going absolutely crazy while you're tripping, and then when it's done, or a few days later, you wanna do it again, so what's that all about? I first met Thomas at a psychedelic conference in Berlin, and then a couple of years later, we connected at a symposium in Madison, where we found time during the lunch break to sit down for this conversation. So let me take you back a little bit, and I know that your interest in psychedelics is just one little piece of the many things that you work on, but how did you first get interested in psychedelics? Why are these experiences of interest to you?
- [Thomas] Well, first of all, I cannot understand why so many of my colleagues in cognitive science, and especially in analytical philosophy of mind, feign ignorance and pretend to have no interest in this. I could never understand this, because altered states of consciousness are also very interesting for many reasons from a theoretical perspective. So one question is, do they have epistemic potential? Can something be known? Are there genuine insights or are there maybe not?
- [Steve] So the question there is, is there real knowledge to be gained from these experiences? Or is it basically just a hallucination?
- [Thomas] Yeah, and of course, there are millions of people on this planet who claim they've had deep and highly relevant insights, but the question is, what are the criteria for somebody making a knowledge claim if it's not, say, a theory that can be empirically tested? It's a big problem for a sub-discipline in philosophy and epistemology. I always had the feeling that from the fact that so many people do excellent philosophy of mind on the planet, really smart people, and do not care to enter altered states of consciousness, shows actually that their actual interest in epistemic gain and a growth of knowledge is not as high as they pretend to.
- [Steve] You're saying, I mean, you're saying, if they're serious about trying to understand what knowledge can be gained in the mind, I mean, if you're a a philosopher of mind, you should be taking psychoactive substances?
- [Thomas] I'm not saying you should in terms of an obligation.
- Of course.
- It's people should have the right to just say, "I don't want to do this, I'm scared." Often when people say, "I'm not ready for this," or "I'm not ready for this dosage," or something like this, there's a part of them that knows why they're not ready, and one should also respect that. We're all human beings.
- [Steve] And these are powerful experiences, and can be very difficult experiences, too. You don't wanna force anyone to do that, but you are saying, if you are serious about investigating the mind, okay, I'm gonna take the word, should, but people in this area of inquiry could learn a lot from having these experiences.
- Yes, and at the very least, I mean, it would give theoreticians in this field so many new ideas and such a new perspective on their own theoretical work, but if you do cognitive science philosophy of mind and things like that, and to actually not be interested, I won't go as far as saying there's something wrong, but I never understood this.
- [Steve] What are they missing if they don't have these experiences, if they don't have this sense, this awareness, of what can happen in this very altered state of consciousness?
- [Thomas] One of the first things I think you can realize in a psychedelic experience is you lose naive realism, this idea that you are directly and immediately in touch with your environment. Many people can explain this very well on a theoretical level, and write books about it, and do excellent mathematics, but to really experience this, that this, including your own body, including your very own sense of self, is actually a model that's really helpful, I think, for theoreticians. And so in this metaphor of transparency and opacity, it's like, you can look out into the garden through a window pane, but you can also look at the pane, at the glass itself, and see that you're seeing this through a window, and as all of us know, there's also a way, sometimes you can do both things at the same time. You look at the flowers and the trees in the garden, and you see the window pane in front of you, and I think psychedelics are very good to make that manifest, that this is a model, and not just a theoretical construct people use.
- [Steve] Yeah, can we get more personal here? I don't know how much you're willing to talk personally. I know you've had your own psychedelic experiences. What can you tell me about that?
- [Thomas] Well, generally, I've just turned down a major interview in Germany on this topic. I think my personal experiences in meditation and on substances are something so deep and valuable that I don't really want to drag it out in the public or into the media, but I maybe can say more generals, things-
- [Steve] Yeah, if you could. I'm not looking for you to describe particular experiences. You know, of course, I'd be very interested if you were, but-
- Or particular crimes.
- [Steve] I will say that, you know, I mean, this is a subject that if, you know, doing a podcast series about psychedelics, this comes up over and over again, is, you know, the people who are interested in this, who study this, are they willing to talk about their own experiences? Some do and some don't.
- Yeah.
- So caveat, but what can you tell me about your own personal interest, and whatever you can say about your experiences?
- [Thomas] Well, I mean, one thing is that you can really understand what it actually means that something is ineffable. I think you can, or I have had deeply relevant and extremely intense experiences where, even while there were happening, I knew I would not be ever able to explain this to anybody or describe it. I mean, there's also all this loose talk about, yeah, yeah, ineffability, and even color qualia in normal life are ineffable, but there's a depth to realizing what you can experience in what subtlety and what nuances that you will never, ever be able to communicate or even remember accurately in your own life afterwards. You may just know the immensity and the profundity of it, and that you knew at the time that you wouldn't even be able to fully remember it silently to yourself. That's one thing. Another concept that has got a much deeper meaning for me is inconceivability, that there are just things out there which are absolutely inconceivable, things you would have never thought that they are possible. And that, I think it's one of the big profits many people have had to just understand what is possible.
- [Steve] Can you give me an example of that, just to make it more concrete?
- [Thomas] Well, there are people who have learned on MDMA how much they can love, and they didn't know that they could love so much. And there are people, to take something simple, who have learned on MDMA that they are actually capable to forgive things that happened to them in their life through parents, or relationships, or things that they actually thought were unforgivable forever, things they have experienced in this difficult life. To just discover your own capacity for empathy, or for actually forgiving something that was unforgivable, you know, but then of course, in the classical hallucinogens, you see many more things, even if you read books about it before and you heard them, and that is why you sought after these experiences. You never thought that something like this in this human life could happen.
- Hmm.
- You could have all kinds of adventures and travels, and deep insights, but that something like that was really possible. And also, the beauty and the depth that it can give, but it also has other sides, like you can experience that even absurd things, you know, like in the olden days, we discovered this on DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, that you can get into a state of eternity, and you have the absolute certainty that this will never end. In a positive or in a negative sense.
- Right.
- You can really be absolutely convinced that this will never end, and it does. Or you can be completely, like, I have been more than one time completely convinced that you are completely psychotic now, and you will never get well again. You will never get healthy again. This was the day where it happened, it actually happened, and now, you're gone, and five hours later, you're in a supermarket, shopping and thinking, "What was that? How am I able to function five hours later?" So it goes in both directions. There's also, maybe I should expand this a little bit, it cuts both ways. Of course, there's this big romanticism in the psychedelic scene, and people like to project a lot of stuff on their experiences as they please, but people have also encountered deep despair or an anxiety they never thought was possible before, or, you know, everybody likes to talk about mystical experiences, and da-da-da-da-da, and ego dissolution.
- [Steve] Are you less interested in that, the mystical experience and sort of-
- [Thomas] No, no, no, that was the only thing why I started as a young man.
- Okay, uh-huh, hmm.
- [Thomas] But I got to understand other things that are not so popular. For instance, how generations of men, millions of men, my father's generation and so on, returned from war, having seen things they could never talk about with anybody, their wives or their children.
- [Steve] You're talking about the experiences during World War II, I mean, what the Nazis did?
- [Thomas] Yeah, but there's also, like, a negative mystical experience. There are people who have become convinced that life is meaningless, and that God doesn't exist through ordinary life. It happens rarely, but it can happen on psychedelics, too. That German philosopher, Nietzsche, says that if you stare too deep into an abyss, it might gaze back at you, you know? That has happened to people on-
- [Steve] Has that happened to you?
- [Thomas] Oh yeah, I have seen deep into existential despair and stuff like this, and told people, "I'm going to commit suicide, I'm just not able to do it right now," and you know.
- [Steve] You told that during the experience itself or after?
- During the experience.
- [Steve] So only during, and then when you come out of it, it's okay then?
- [Thomas] Yeah, well, I have these nice trip sitters who says, "Do it, do it, do it." "Boy, you are not laying" "this one on me, go ahead." You know, it's good to have good friends. Let's go kill yourself. So I mean, it goes both directions, and the sense of what possibility there is. Also, what possibility to really panic, like, you would never panic in the ordinary waking state or something like this.
- [Steve] When you've had those experiences, I mean, when you've come out of them, but you had this feeling of total panic, or maybe this, you know, you would enter into some kind of psychotic mind state. Does that give you pause, then? Do you think, "I don't wanna do that again"? Or do you just sort of realize, "Oh, that was just a very difficult trip, but I don't know, I got something out of that."
- [Thomas] It depends, it depends how you process it, but some of your listeners will know this, there is this... I've recently learned this word in English, I think you say, come-up anxiety. There is this, for instance, the deeply felt sense of regret of having had the courage to do this again. You know, the thing, "I never wanted to go there again. Why do I do that?" Before you enter, of course. And I think that's part of the experience, that there will be a part of you that says, "No, no, no, no, no, never, never, ever," and another part that kind of tricks you to go into that space again.
- [Steve] Does it trick you? Or is this, I mean, there must be something very compelling-
- Yeah.
- To go into that space, even though it is so difficult.
- [Thomas] A genuine interest, of course, the feeling that there's something to be had there, and I mean, that leads of course, I mean, there are these deep, philosophical issues that also drove my interest. So the question is, if there are, technically speaking, epistemically self-validating states, where you have the feeling, "I'm having a valid insight now," like many psychonauts believe, that cannot be shaken or challenged by any scientific or theoretical argument. Later, I just see this, and of course, whoever has touched this possibility of this space, that there is something that just self-validates by you living through it.
- [Steve] Does it feel more real than ordinary waking reality when you have one of those really deep, profound experiences?
- [Thomas] More real? I don't know.
- Is that worth... You know, I realize
- You know-
- I'm speaking to a philosopher.
- I think you're only more real, I mean, I don't know how to put this, I mean-
- [Steve] There there are no sort of lesser real or more real states? Or they're all equally real?
- No, no, no, no, no. More real implies that it could only be 10 times more real. That's what I mean. So that's another interesting and scientifically interesting thing. If you look at the phenomenology of human consciousness, there is a sense of realness in ordinary waking state, and we know that it can be decreased in certain psychiatric syndromes, like depersonalization syndrome and derealization syndrome. It also, you know, there are many situations where everything in a normal life briefly becomes unreal. So a friend rings on your door and says, "Peter is dead," and the first thing you say, "This is not true. I just talked to him." I've had that after a car crash, for instance, when carefully climbing out of a car, that for a certain time, everything has a dreamlike and unreal quality while you're not trying to make a mistake in that situation. So there is something, not only colors and shapes, and thoughts and insight, there is a general realness parameter. We also know, I'm not talking about psychedelics now, not yet, that this can be turned up, like it can be turned up like a volume, for instance, in certain kinds of epileptic seizures. There are people done experiment, and you can create the experience of hyperrealness also with electrodes in the brain. There's literature on that. So if, before start doing surgery, you have to test something in epileptics who have these hyperreal, they're called ecstatic seizures, and you poke around in the brain to chart this before you do surgery, you may actually be able to cause this with a very mild current of 40 millivolts, so hyperrealism is not limited to psychedelics.
- Right.
- But of course, very often there is hyperrealism, and for almost every normal human being, this wasn't something they never thought about, that there could be something like a volume control, or that something could be more real than ordinary waking life. It's another thing to talk about this and read scientific literature, and follow it up, and have clever theories how this might work in the brain, but to just experience it yourself, that it can get much more real than it is now, it destroys theoretical intuitions, as we say. We have certain deeply-ingrained intuitions, even scientists and philosophers, about the structure of reality, and they prevent us from making discoveries or trying to reject the possible assumption of something, and here, you have something that really reliably destroys theoretical intuitions about reality. You have absolute reality.
- [Steve] Yeah, I wanna come back to this question of whether actual knowledge can be gained in a psychedelic state, and there are some people, for instance, those who've taken ayahuasca, who talk about the plant, has talked to them in whatever way, you know, and they talk about the plant as teacher, the plant as telling them something. What do you make of those accounts?
- [Thomas] I deeply understand it, deeply understand it, mostly in the context of mushrooms. I mean, a teacher, I have found that mushrooms will slap you, so to speak, if you lose respect, if you think, "I know this," and now, I'm not coming to this with a genuine project, with a genuine question. It's not part of a serious practice today. We can do this for fun together in the garden. And this may be okay for two or three times, to do it just for fun, but this reliably, in my own experience, backfires completely. And that is something like the substance or the process teaching you that you have to have a certain kind of respect or sense of seriousness in going about this, because any, you know, kind of a more recreational attitude will sooner or later backfire.
- [Steve] When you say backfire, what do you mean?
- [Thomas] Produce a very negative experience, make you deeply regret that you have approached it in such a silly and superficial way. I've met people who said, I never forget, I once was in a workshop north of the polar circle on a rainbow gathering in the Arctic Sea. And the teacher in the workshop said, "There is a religious and a sacred quality that you can never completely eliminate from the psychedelic experience, from the LSD experience," and there was a wild guy in the last row, and he started yelling, "I did it, I did it!" And he said he had taken, claimed, acid more than 500 times, and he had managed to get the religious element out of it, and the sacredness, and contradicted the workshop leader, and that was a very, very funny situation, you know, so I think it's often a little self-congratulatory obscurantism if you begin to talk about the planned spirit and all that, and personalize it, and try to, you know, have your little romantic narrative around it, but I can deeply understand how this is an absolutely natural response of respect, and of the fact, you know, that this has been a learning experience. You got taught something, and often, something you never wanted to know, but there was no physical teacher, that you think the intelligence must have been somewhere in the molecule, in the stimulus. Scientifically, philosophically, I think it's absolutely untenable. It's your own hidden wisdom. We are just beginning to wonder what these large language models can do right now, but most people haven't understood how deep the knowledge encoded in their unconscious brains is, and what can emerge from there.
- [Steve] I'm talking with Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher of mind and the author of many books, including "The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self." He's also been a member of the European Commission's high-level expert group on artificial intelligence. You're listening to "Luminous," a podcast about the science and philosophy of psychedelics. I'm Steve Paulson. Let me shift the discussion a little bit, which relates to what we've been talking about, but it's somewhat different. I mean, you have posed this question, what is a good state of consciousness? Why is that question worth asking?
- [Thomas] Often, many different reasons, because for creating what I call a Bewusstseinskultur, a culture of consciousness. Many people have said similar things for decades, we lack a cultural context for dealing with mind-altering technologies. I'm this guy who likes to have a very sober perspective, and I would like to say that there are some technologies which are simply molecular-level technologies, like psychoactive substances, or many medications we have, and they pose exactly the same problems for applied ethics than many other technologies which have no psychoactive properties, and I'd like to put it very soberly. We have to maximize the benefit for society as a whole and minimize the risks. So there's a risk-benefit ratio for everything, for artificial intelligence, for self-driving cars, for introduction of something into society, and for every classical 5-HT2A receptor agonist, classical psychedelic. And here, we have failed, we have dramatically failed in installing a proper process of optimizing the risk-benefit ratio.
- [Steve] What do you mean we failed? Isn't that the thing that, you know, when you hear people running clinical trials, for instance, on psilocybin, I mean, isn't that what they're trying to figure out, is when they're beneficial or not?
- [Thomas] Yeah, for people with treatment-resistant depression.
- Right.
- But for me, as a philosopher, that's good, that will alleviate human suffering, and this is making good progress. It is making it much too late. We knew all this decades ago, but the big problem, of course, is why do I have to have a depression to be able to do this?
- [Steve] You're saying this should be much more widely available, psychoactive substances?
- [Thomas] That's another long story. So I always say I'm strictly against legalization, because it is something much too primitive. We need something much more intelligent and sophisticated. Also, laws and regulations will not work, or will only gradually work, because human beings are used to, you know, circumventing them, as we do now for decades in this thing. What we are lacking is a cultural context that, is so to speak, omnipresent, something that is a form of wisdom of dealing with this.
- [Steve] sSo you've talked about we need a culture of consciousness, and you're saying we're lacking that now?
- Yeah.
- Put on your, I don't know, your idealistic hat for a moment, and what would be some elements of if we were more sophisticated in this culture of consciousness, what would that look like?
- [Thomas] Well, I think in a free society with free citizens, everybody must be able to enter these spaces of consciousness. There's no question at all. This should be actually something that's enshrined in the Constitution. It has to do with something we haven't really coded in Western culture, is a right to mental self-determination. Of course, the general public has a right that you don't damage the common good, that you don't, you know, do something that damages the taxpayers, or your relatives, or your family, that's obvious. To make this freedom really something that is worth it, it has to be restricted in intelligent ways, so I'm always saying I'm strictly against legalization, because for these powerful tools, the general population just lacks the maturity, like I did, and we have to find clever ways, protected spaces, like meditation centers. What we do with this, the problem is we have looked the other direction as societies for reasons about which you can say a lot, like the incentive structures for politicians, and the number of voters they can get, by finally finding a solution after decades of this problem are very low. So any politician who really takes this on, you know, is very open to his or her opponents, you know, making a big show about it in the media, and so we are in a gridlock, in a historical gridlock, at least, judging from the European situation, and so many clever people have said so many clever things. And there is this knowledge, this underground knowledge is in existence, and we just don't manage, you know? You should see the ridiculous procedure of trying to legalize cannabis with the European Union and Germany, and we can't even do that. I've made a concrete proposal, actually, in a book chapter.
- Oh.
- [Thomas] So I think we need a solution, because we have to face facts.
- [Steve] What is your proposal?
- So the proposal is, okay, I'll just say the concrete proposal, select one molecule only, psilocybin, simplify the situation, allow, maximally, two doses per year, have mandatory psychiatric prescreening, so before you can get access to that, you have to check as good as we can for existing vulnerabilities, hereditary diseases you have in your family, and stuff like that. And then a decisive thing, I say, because the general society is so indifferent, the mass of the people, you should pay out of your own pocket for a 10-year test phase that will be scientifically evaluated, a new kind of insurance that has to be created, like, for professional disability, that you cannot earn your own money anymore, and for a prolonged psychiatric reaction so you're absolutely safe. I think this should not be the case in a free society. If some citizens want to do this, we should not need such a ridiculous transition period, but we have this gridlock situation.
- [Steve] Right, 'cause right, I mean, legally, you can pretty much only, well, I'll speak from the American context, you know, only prescribe these, like, in a clinical trial if there's some sort of mental disorder, but just for general human flourishing, you can't do that.
- It's strict. There's so many arguments by this is not tenable. You know, for instance, there's freedom of religion or something. You know, it's so obvious that for some people, this might, and for many people, it is part of their religious or spiritual practice. You cannot make this unavailable in a free, modern society, but I think, given that historical gridlock we have now, and the total lack of incentive for the pharmaceutical industry, because the profits are so low, and for politicians, we need to develop a proposal that is so simple and clear cut that everybody can see any rejection of this is just motivated by uninformed, pure ideological resistance. Come on. If these people want the ability to do this two times a year in the meditation center, in the mountains, or in the desert, and if it's true that this is not poisonous and not addictive, and if they're even financially coming up for all the risks, me, the taxpayer will never have to pay for it, if they crack up or something, let them have it, that every normal person that is not ideologically blinded by some ideas will say, "Yeah, but what is wrong with this two times a year or so in a safe space after risk prescreening and all that, and only this one molecule, not 15 different things at the same time." And this thing where they say it has been around for thousands of years, you know, and Indians have used it all over the world and in Africa. And so that any person who is open-minded can just say, "Yeah, this cannot be prohibited," and it's obviously just a very small number of people who are interested in this. The most important thing is to get into a process, again, after decades of a stalled process that something moves, and the idea would be that one says, "Okay, we also want scientific funding for it," and people cannot just do this, they have to fill out forms, and they will have blood samples taken, or whatever. And after five years, there will be an interim report, and after a decade, there will be a full scientific report, and it's open-ended. If we find out, no, this was not as benign as we thought, we have much more psychiatric emergencies than we thought in this situation, we can also stop this. This is genuinely open-ended. Now, say we've done this for 10 years, and we've learned, and we have a positive result, then one could say, "Okay, let's have five more of the classical molecules," or something new. Maybe we want to have mescaline in the portfolio, and expand this, but that this is a cultural learning process which is formal for healthy people, and not for people with serious issues, yeah.
- [Steve] Suppose we had a healthy psychedelic culture, doing some of the kinds of things you've just been talking about, with these kind of safeguards, but genuinely interested in, you know, moving forward, and making these substances more available to people who are healthy. Do you think the culture would change because of that? Would our politics change? Our politics which seem so dysfunctional right now? Could that help us? Or is that just kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking?
- That's, of course, the dream millions of people have had, I mean, I think you can predict some things. As thousands of hippies had psychedelic experiences here first, and then went to India, got interested in spiritual practice, and something that is more sustainable, that would happen on a larger scale, because people would think, "Okay, I have seen this. Now, how do I stabilize this in everyday life and pick up a practice?" I think that will be happening. The sense of connection to nature is enhanced, so people would probably resist the destruction of nature, but the question is, and this is where I differ from most of the, you know, starry-eyed optimists, how large a part of the population would at all be interested? Say we had in Germany, 15 fantastically attractive meditation centers in natural surroundings where you could just sign up, and have your pre-screening, and go through it. How many people would really do this? So one data point is, for instance, there's interesting research showing that about 35% of the population are what is called existentially indifferent. These are people who are not interested in the meaning of life, God, or anything like that, and they have no problem with it. They're just not interested in these things. So one third would be out, then you would probably have another quarter or so for whom this is out of the question because they're children, because they suffer from old age dementia, because they maybe have a heart condition that you cannot have strong excitement or so. And then the question, if it was really natural and open, how many people would do it? Unfortunately, you guys in the US are much more optimistic. I'm your European doom and gloom guy. So I think many more people just want to self-medicate with alcohol, and crystal meth, and fentanyl, because they are already under such pressure in their lives which have become so difficult that they just want to numb themselves or self-medicate for depression. They just don't have the power anymore or the courage now to do a self-exploration thing, and to look deeply into things, because so many difficult things have already happened in their lives. And I think we also have to have some compassion, genuine compassion with people who say, "Yes, I'm interested in this, but my father has just died half a year ago, and I know it's all going to come," or "Yeah, but I've had a divorce, and I know I will have to work through this probably after everything you tell me, and I just don't wanna work through this right now. My life is difficult enough." So how many people would do it?
- [Steve] We could talk much longer, I have many more questions, but we're out of time. We should end it there.
- Okay, good.
- [Steve] Thank you so much. This was such a pleasure.
- Yeah.
- [Steve] That's Thomas Metzinger, a philosopher who taught for many years at the University of Mainz in Germany. You'll find more interviews on the science and philosophy of psychedelics on our website at ttbook.org/luminous. And I hope you're subscribing to the podcast feed, where you'll meet a lot of amazing people, including Gul Dolan, the neuroscientist who's given MDMA to octopuses, Erik Davis, talking about the history of LSD and the psychedelic underground, and Spring Washam, who's both a Buddhist teacher and a healer who works with plant medicines. "Luminous" is produced in Madison, Wisconsin. Sarah Hopeful is our engineer and sound designer, Angelo Batista is our digital producer, and I'm Steve Paulson. Be well and join us again next time.
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