Drug Science
An enlightening and thought-provoking discussion as we explore the fascinating topic of psychedelics and consciousness. Our esteemed speakers are Dr Chris Timmermann, Carl Hayden Smith, and Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes, all experts in their respective fields. This panel is hosted by Ben Clayden, co-chair of the Drug Science Student Society Network.
Find out more about our Student Society Network and how to join here: https://www.drugscience.org.uk/students/
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36:00 – reminds me of the issue I get listening to Donald Hoffman. Love his and Chetan Prakash's theory, it's seemed like the tidiest way to do Darwinian evolution in the context of functionalism with multiple realizability between conscious agents but for the whole system to be recursively top-down and bottom-up to where you can't tell from here which spawned which or if anything of the sort actually happened. You go from his metaphor of simulated reality, eg. Grand Theft Auto, but then he talks about death being 'taking off the VR glasses' – that dualism is a hard injection and, looking at most of the NDE's that are available on Youtube, it seems like its almost required because no one's talking about peaceful psychedelic dissolution into their constituent atoms but rather popping out of their bodies, still very much them, and talking to spirits or angels. I was actually excited when I heard about Forrest Landry's Immanent Metaphysics because he does something with this immanent, omniscient, and transcendent where the transcendent seems like it's the thing that has a perpendicular join to the other two but where the immanent both mediates between transcendent and omniscient (omniscient about quantitative and qualitative thing related to an object for example) and – this is the part I have a hard time intuitively following – the idea that the immanent is actually more primary than the transcendent or omniscient (or roughly the interaction between subject and object is more primary than subject or object). It'll be really cool if we ever do find ways to test ideas as far out as that.
This is a great conversation, very special to have these three voices in the same (virtual) room!