Selfhood and Psychedelic Phenomenology with Jason K. Day

Right now, psychedelics have been getting very, very popular, both in culture, but also now with the more acceptance of their medical use.

But all of this renewed interest has been with a very specific and narrow scope, which is very much influenced by neuroscience with a whole The Rebus model, predictive processing, all these types of frameworks are very, very brain focused, almost to the point where it's almost the only thing that seems acceptable to talk about within the realm of psychedelics.

So philosophy of psychedelics, like we were talking about before, just a podcast is a very niche thing.

Very few people are working on it.

In your own personal take, why do you think that a brain approach is misguided? Why do

we need phenomenology? Well, sometimes when I get asked questions like this, and when I've tried to think about this sort of thing about what the best approach to understanding these experiences might be, I've always found it helpful, at least for myself, to think of things sort of in terms of levels of description.

So I think that if one wants to ask the question, what is the nature of the subjective experiences induced by psychedelics, then you have to operate at the appropriate level of description, which is that of subjectivity.

Although, of course, knowledge about how psychedelics affect the brain is very important.

If you're asking the question about what the experience is actually like, then you have to be operating at the phenomenological level.

It's sort of like, I think it was Benny Shannon who used this metaphor that I quite liked.

If you can't describe a piece of piano music by describing the sort of the wood that the piano is made of and the strings and the keys, those are all necessary for the piece of piano music to be played, of course, but you need to describe at the level of music.

And yeah, at least I've been trying my best to do a lot of this groundwork that has been largely missing this phenomenological level.

Just trying to put aside all the current and previous theories about, okay, we can just explain this in terms of this happening in the brain and just really ask, let's first like just try and describe even what's happening at the level of subjective experience.

Otherwise we don't even know what we're correlating changes in the brain too

anyway, you know? When you say that there's this kind of like different levels of experience, but do you just are viewing it as this kind of like multiplicity where let's just put everything on the table? Or do you think that some levels have a higher priority in terms of like their importance in order to understand what's going on?

What do you mean by what's going on exactly? That will determine the level of description, right?

Yeah, I'm not even sure where to answer that because it gets quite tricky.

But let's just say the phenomenon has a hole.

That's the easiest way to go about it.

Otherwise, it gets a bit complicated.

Yeah, well, if you want to know what a psychedelic experience is, I think you would be misguided in attempting to explain that subjective experience in terms of brain activity.

Not that it's not a proper subject of study to study what psychedelics do to the brain, but it's just not the right level of description.

And at least, well, more specifically than just philosophy, I was deeply inspired by all the Husserl and Potocka and Govich that I read when I've been a student was really just taking experience seriously.

It's like, because experience is all that we have fundamentally.

That's what we have to work from for psychedelic experiences or ordinary experience of any kind.