> Rather than concluding that these small molecules have simply interfered with our brain's ability to model reality and their drug-induced experience was an illusion, they instead think their mind lives in a larger reality and communicates with their earth-bound physical brain, and that a lot gets lost in the translation.
Oh boy, have I been there.
Psychedelic experiences really test the foundations of your world view. I am definitely not a dualist, but I can still vividly remember experiencing existence outside of time. When the dust settled I arrives at a panpsychic explanation, in that I expect consciousness to be a property of the computation that occurs in the universe, whereas brains are a particularly sophisticated nested computer. It just doesn't seem right any more that consciousness would occur in the brain, but not outside of it. It's all space dust anyway - to believe that brain space dust is somehow special for some reason seems as unreasonable as the beliefs of a dualist. Not sure how crazy I am to be thinking this (doesn't everyone think their own worldview is the sane one?), but I can very easily imagine people coming up with all sorts of even crazier interpretations of their experience.
Oh boy, have I been there.
Psychedelic experiences really test the foundations of your world view. I am definitely not a dualist, but I can still vividly remember experiencing existence outside of time. When the dust settled I arrives at a panpsychic explanation, in that I expect consciousness to be a property of the computation that occurs in the universe, whereas brains are a particularly sophisticated nested computer. It just doesn't seem right any more that consciousness would occur in the brain, but not outside of it. It's all space dust anyway - to believe that brain space dust is somehow special for some reason seems as unreasonable as the beliefs of a dualist. Not sure how crazy I am to be thinking this (doesn't everyone think their own worldview is the sane one?), but I can very easily imagine people coming up with all sorts of even crazier interpretations of their experience.