How Radical is Ego-Dissolution?
I’ve been talking a lot recently about a recent experience I had, in very controlled circumstances, using a powerful psychedelic known as 5-MeO DMT. One thing I’ve been discussing is whether it’s rational to trust the experience, i.e. to believe that things really are as they they seem to be in the experience. But actually, I’m also struggling just to pin down the content of the experience. Perhaps the most salient feature is how radically different it is from ordinary conscious experience. Almost none of our normal categories apply.
However, I’ve come to think that a lot can be learnt about the content of the experience just from this negative feature. The experience lacks the subject-predicate structure of ordinary thought and perception. Our ordinary experience presents us with objects that have properties: the ball that is red and round, the table that is brown and square. Even when we attend to experience itself, there seems to be a subject-predicate structure: there are the experiences but also the thing that has the experiences — the “I” that sees colour and feels pain.
Thus, in both cases, we find a subject-predicate structure:
In perceptual experience of the world around, we find a distinction between objects (balls, tables) and their properties (colours, shapes).
When we attend to our conscious experience, we find a distinction between a particular individual (the “I” that has experiences) and its properties (its feelings and experiences).
In the 5-MeO experience, in contrast, there is no subject-predicate distinction. There is no “I” that has the experience. There is just experience. Many interpret this as showing that the self doesn’t really exist, and that the 5-MeO experience is breaking through the illusion of there seeming to be a self. For what it’s worth, it seemed to me more like something real — i.e. me —was being destroyed (fortunately only temporarily).
Thus far, there is nothing in the content of the experience that implies radical metaphysics. Many physicalists hold a “bundle theory” of the conscious mind, on which the conscious mind is nothing more than a bundle of experiences bound together in some way. Just because there’s no separate thing that has the experience, it doesn’t follow that the experience couldn’t be a localised brain process in a particular individual.
But we can dig deeper. There is a more subtle form of subject-predicate structure in ordinary thought and perception: the division between what something is and that it is. If someone asks you to tell them about Santa Claus, you could describe the outfit, the job description, the jovial personality. Once you’ve given a complete description of what Santa Claus is, a crucial question remains: Does this thing exist? (In case you don’t know the answer, I won’t give any spoilers).
Things are a bit trickier when it comes to conscious experience because, as Descartes observed, one has something close to certainty that one’s own feelings and experiences exist. But I’m not talking here about what we know, but about the content of our thought. In terms of the content of my thought about my own consciousness — we’re digging deep here! — there is a subtle distinction between what my pain is (how it feels) and that my pain is (that the pain is instantiated right here and now).
Note that this is not the same as the distinction between the pain and the “I” that has the pain. Even if there is no entity separate from the pain that feels the pain, there is still a distinction between the question of what pain is and the question of whether pain is (just as there’s a distinction between what Santa Claus is and whether Santa Claus is).
In the 5-MeO experience, there is not even this more subtle kind of subject-predicate distinction. There is no distinction between what the experience is and that the experience is. Strange as it sounds, this distinction does not apply to this experience. It just makes no sense.
We are now in the land of radical metaphysics. Without the distinction between what something is and that something is, we are no longer talking about a contingent entity, about something that might or might not have existed. This connects to a familiar theme of mystics throughout history, that what is known in the mystical experience is somehow beyond being and non-being.
Of course, there is still the option of saying the experience is a hallucination. I said something about his in the public lecture I recently gave at Liverpool University, and which you can view on my YouTube channel Philip Goff Philosophy (“Is it Rational to Trust Psychedelic Experiences.”). Last week I gave a similar talk at a consciousness conference in Lugano, but which explored more theories of rational justification. This will go up on my channel soon, so subscribe if you don’t miss it!
One thing I can say for certain is that this experience is making me think. Indeed, I can’t really think of anything else at the moment. Any help making sense of this would be much appreciated!
My book “Why? The Purpose of the Universe” is now out in paperback: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Purpose-Universe-Philip-Goff/dp/0198883765
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Does this map thoroughly onto the content-container metaphor? Or perhaps the mirror metaphor? Or the "no self in self" stance that Gary Snyder draws from Chinese philosophy? Or the claims for a "self-model" in consciousness? Picture consciousness as a sphere, perhaps without a clear boundary only a fading out from the center. Picture contained within the sphere a the smaller sphere of a self model, mirroring in its way the larger sphere. Now you're drugged in a way which makes that self model eclipsed from your view for a time. Consciousness must always be aware of itself beyond the self model, else the self model could never be formed by and in it. Drugged, you've got the primal, preliminary awareness of consiousness, but without the self-model reflection available -- a reflection which, due to its generally usable and useful enough accuracy, you commonly come to mistake for consciousness itself.
I know this is supposed to be about the psychedelic experience but honestly I'm more interested in the so-called "ordinary" experience -- because I still just don't get it.
> "Our ordinary experience presents us with objects that have properties: the ball that is red and round, the table that is brown and square."
does it really? I mean, for me, it's more like, "This red blur... it's a ball. it's round, it must be a ball. and that's where I left my ball, so ... that is in fact what it is." But I could imagine not being able to identify it or not caring enough about it to try to identify it. Not all red blurs are identifiable as distinct objects.
> "Even when we attend to experience itself, there seems to be a subject-predicate structure: there are the experiences but also the thing that has the experiences — the “I” that sees colour and feels pain."
I don't understand this either. I mean, I may say that I feel pain, but who else could I speak for with regards to feeling anything? If you are aware of the experience, then, logically, the experience is occurring to you, not to someone else. But this isn't a feeling, it's a logical entailment. The "I" doesn't feel like anything, at least not to me. I don't understand at all by what people mean by "subject-predicate" structure.