Why it seems that psychedelics have messed the epistemic rationality (healthy cynicism and critical thinking) of intelligent, reasonable people such as most of the eminent scientists who synthesized, consumed and studied them?

“Science is piecemeal revelation.”
(Oliver Wendell Holmes)

Drug-naïve scientific rationalists tend to be unimpressed by the significance of psychedelics. Real science is hard work. Whether conducting well-controlled clinical trials of potentially life-saving new medicines, gaining a mathematical apprenticeship in theoretical physics, or building particle accelerators to test the Standard Model (etc), good science takes dogged perseverance, critical insight, and a capacity for collaborative problem-solving. Taking drugs and achieving enlightenment would be more impressive if the upshot were profound discoveries to share with the world, or even great drug literature. All too often, heavy psychedelic use makes people crazy – and not fitfully brilliant and insightfully crazy, just nuts.

I think this sceptical analysis is warranted and intellectually catastrophic. Here’s an analogy. As a thought-experiment, imagine a tribe of blind, drug-naïve scientific rationalists. A few members of the tribe stumble upon an agent that induces extraordinarily weird, intense experiences – what we would call visual consciousness, though the congenitally blind tribespeople have no words for visual experience. The discoverers are shocked. They experiment further. The raw intensity of these drug-induced states makes their new visual consciousness feel “more real” than former everyday life. Tripping on the mind-altering drug doesn’t confer any enhanced sensory capacities via peripheral sense-transducers; users don’t grow eyes. In consequence, the drug-induced visions deliver no easily digestible payoff to be shared with the tribe’s blind cognitive elite. The experimentalists are convinced that their drug-induced experiences are intellectually important. The experimentalists are of course right – as we outsiders with mature visual intelligence can tell. However, the tribal drug users can’t even agree on why the experiences are so significant, which doesn’t inspire confidence in the drug-naïve. Some users babble unintelligibly. The discovery of such an alien state-space of consciousness transcends their conceptual framework. Psychonauts have no shared language to express their mystical visual experience (“It’s inconceivable!”). Increasingly, users stop participating in the tribe’s shared cultural, intellectual and economic activities. Habitual users “drop out”, lost in phantasmagorical worlds of visual experience. Naturally, the scientific elders of the tribe take a dim view of such escapism from consensus reality. Yes, taking drugs can induce weird, indescribable experiences. So what? Drug use doesn’t promote greater understanding of the real world. Taking psychotomimetic drugs scrambles brains, ruins lives and promotes antisocial behaviour. Non-medical drug use is best discouraged.

I fear that as sighted rationalists our cognitive predicament may be analogous to the blind tribesfolk. Rather than put our mental health at risk, we settle for an impoverished evidential base. The mathematical formalism of modern physics, quantum field theory (QFT), describes the structural-relational properties of the world. Yet the nature and significance of the solutions to the equations eludes us. Psychedelics reveal the existence of outlandish state-spaces of consciousness that have never been co-opted by natural selection for any functional purpose. Tools of navigation are virtually non-existent. Human language is a pre-eminently social phenomenon (cf. the Private Language Argument). Therefore, unlike congenitally blind people who are surgically granted the gift of sight, psychonauts don’t enjoy access to an off-the-shelf conceptual scheme and the linguistic resources to organize their new-found realm of experience. What’s more, genome-editing and transhuman designer-drugs promise to expand the accessible state-spaces of consciousness by many orders of magnitude. Maybe DMT, LSD and ketamine users today are just tiptoeing in the paddling-pool end of psychedelia. Heaven knows what future psychonauts will discover, let alone full-spectrum superintelligence.

Right now, sadly, these are empty words. A post-Galilean science of mind is still a pipedream. Most of today’s scientists and philosophers will die ignorant, trapped in the invisible prison of ordinary waking consciousness. Forswearing the experimental method, and responsibly encouraging the younger generation to do likewise (“Just say no!”), we sleepwalk though life, stumbling our way to oblivion.

Here’s another worry. Paradoxically, staying drug-naïve may cripple understanding of our own normal state of consciousness. Drug-naïve rationalists are ignorant of how the state-specific properties of the medium of our thought-episodes are shaping their nominal content. Compare dream consciousness. Just as the nature of dreaming is best grasped when awake, perhaps posthumans will understand Darwinian consciousness as a waking psychosis that our minds were impotent to grasp from the inside.

If this analysis is apt, then the intellectual significance of mind-altering drugs is hard to exaggerate. Darwinian minds are typically overwhelmed by taking psychedelics. Our primitive brains evolved under pressure of natural selection in an unforgiving environment. So we are intellectually and emotionally unequal to challenge of exploration. That said, not every psychonaut succumbs to flakiness, mysticism or psychosis. Recall the late Sasha Shulgin. Sasha devised a systematic discovery-process for the synthesis of new psychedelic agents. He created a rigorous methodology of first-person experimentation. He wrote lucid and illuminating texts documenting their use. Alas, most of us are not so psychologically robust.

I say a bit more here: After an irreversible transition to a blissful existence, what would you do?