A materialist can say straightforwardly, as example, that if we administer an anesthetic to a person he or she will slip into unconsciousness. The person will not normally remember anything from the period anesthetized and the person is largely unresponsive to others externally while under the effects of drug. We can measure their brain activity while the person is anesthetized and find patterns quite different from the variable, mixed, and faster rates found during wakefulness. Clearly consciousness is caused by the brain which is physical because when we alter the brain with chemicals, we also alter consciousness.
The hard-core idealist has a difficult position to defend when it comes to the brain and consciousness. The idealist, in this example, must believe that the brain itself, the wave patterns it produces, and even the anesthetic that was administered are just mind. None of those things are physical despite what most of us would think. Everything works out the same as if the brain, its patterns, and the anesthetic were physical except they really aren’t. Clearly, it is all just mind because …
An interesting wrinkle on the idealist argument comes from Bernardo Kastrup, although I think it has been picked up by several others. The argument is based mainly on some interpretations about the effects of psychedelics discovered from fMRI studies that surprised many of the experimenters. What I will be referencing here are Chapters 11 and 12 in The Idea of the World. These chapters are largely reprints of two published papers, but they reflect also Kastrup’s views in other blog posts and articles.
The gist of the argument is summed up well in the title to Chapter 11: Self-transcendence correlates with brain function impairment. I’m not kidding. To phrase the argument a different way: we become more conscious the less we use the physical circuits of the brain. Consciousness and brain activity are anti-correlated at least at the point where the brain enters a self-transcendent state.
Kastrup gloms together a variety of experiential phenomena that purport to produce self-transcendence and finds a commonality: the brain is in some way impaired. The phenomena include hypoxic states during fainting and hyperventilation, near death experiences (NDEs), induction of an OBE using electromagnetism, trances, physical brain damage, and, of course, psychedelics. Self-transcendence is essentially the reporting of a mystical, mind-expanding, or otherwise unusual experience. Psychedelics are what are most key to the argument and chapter 12 is devoted to the discussion of fMRI studies with psychedelics. What is left out of this list are things like drumming, dancing, meditation, chanting, and prayer which would be unlikely to produce a self-transcendent state, according to this argument, since the brain is likely not impaired.
Of course, the phenomena in Kastrup’s list are all over the place as far as the effect they have on the brain. They are also wildly inconsistent in producing a self-transcendent state. Most people experiencing near death do not report any experience whatsoever if they live. We can’t be sure about the ones who die except we have found through both rat and human experimentation the brain undergoes a huge burst of activity shortly before it completely shuts down. OBEs can be induced by stimulating certain brain circuits with probes or electromagnetism, a finding not unexpected for a materialist believing in a physical brain, but whether a individual would find the experience self-transcendent or simply unusual would be largely up to the individual.
Psychedelics are at the core of the argument. When they burst into Western culture in the 1950’s and 60’s, they were tagged by their proponents as a form of instant enlightenment. The bright colors and distorted or hallucinated forms, the time dilation, the sense of deep meaning extending to everything, and, in higher doses, ego dissolution seemed to point to mystical experience for many early experimenters.
It came as a surprise when researchers hooked up people using psychedelics to fMRIs and found the brain had reduced activity during these mystical experiences. They had expected to find intense brain activity correlating to the psychedelic experience. For the idealist the result matches their intuition that the physical brain doesn’t correlate with mental activity; hence, the experience must be caused by something other than the physical brain.
There are never a good reason, however, to expect increased brain activity with psychedelics. Let’s go back and look at a very brief history of psychedelics to understand how the expectation got set up.
Usage of psychedelics in indigenous societies is widespread around the world and found in many different cultures. For the most part, this usage is tied to some form of shamanism. The shaman is primarily a healer, and the psychedelic is incorporated into the healing ritual. In some cases, the sick person takes it. In others, the shaman takes it. In other still, the shaman and sick person both take it. In many cases, the psychedelic itself will cause vomiting which can be healing by itself apart from the powerful placebo effect of the ritual. The potential healing aspect has been preserved in modern times with various forms of psychedelic therapy. The psychedelic may also be used as a tool by the shaman for communicating with the spirit world to find the cause of illness, locate lost items, and intercede on behave of a person or tribe for good harvests and hunting.
In the early Neolithic, psychedelics may have been employed in community rituals involving possibly communication with the dead. Forms of this continued to the various oracles and mystery religions that incorporated a visit to the underworld followed by a rebirth.
In none of these cases, however, were psychedelics regarded as tools for enlightenment. They were not regarded as potential consciousness expanders. They were tools for interacting with a spirit world. The idea for psychedelics as tools for enlightenment came in modern times out of the collaboration of Aldous Huxley and Humphry Osmond. I dealt with this extensively in another post but let me sum it up here. Huxley had already become interested in Eastern philosophies and had his own guru. Osmond thought psychedelics could be used to unleash the untapped psychic powers of the mind. Huxley reasoning from some ideas of Bergson came to believe that the brain acted like a filter to hide reality and that psychedelics could remove the filters. Once the filters were removed, an unchecked reality could flow into the mind and cosmic consciousness – enlightenment – could result. This is exactly the view of the idealist and became conventional wisdom among many psychedelic experimenters.
Nothing in Eastern philosophy really suggested the conclusion that Huxley reached. In fact, many gurus, including Huxley’s own, came forward and said taking a psychedelic wasn’t the same as achieving enlightenment. The closest parallel in Eastern culture to a psychedelic may have been the mysterious soma lauded in the Rig Veda. Nobody yet has figured out exactly what soma was, but some have suggested the purpose of yoga and other Eastern spiritual practices was to provide techniques for achieving enlightenment without the drug. In any case, references to it appear in early Indian writings and then vanish. It could have been nothing more than a strong alcoholic beverage such as mead. Huxley resurrects the name as a recreational drug consumed in Brave New World.
The expectation had been created that psychedelics could expand consciousness; hence they would logically correlate with increased brain activity. The results of the fMRI studies showed otherwise, so there seemed to be a problem. But was there?
Looking at the effects of psychedelics without the preconception of mind expansion, aspects of the psychedelic experience suggest reduced rather than increased brain activity. Among these experiential elements are the sense of time slowing or timelessness, simplification of reality in distorted objects, cartoon characters like elves, and at higher dosages ego dissolution and unconsciousness. Even many of the detailed visual images of vast cities and landscapes sometimes reported usually consist of simple visual structures multiplied many times to fill up a scene.
What I am suggesting is that psychedelics like LSD, DMT, mescaline, and psilocybin, act in part like weak anesthetics. At sufficiently high doses the subject effectively becomes unconscious. Ketamine, which is sometimes included in these studies as psychedelic in low doses, is already known and used as an anesthetic at high doses. This may not explain all the effects. There are certainly variations in effects across the agents which might eventually tell us something useful with additional research. But this explains the reduced brain activity.
What about self-transcendence? The term, of course, is vague but there seems little doubt that people can undergo a variety of experiences, such as those in Kastrup’s list, and come away significantly changed. There is a straightforward explanation for it: neural plasticity. When habitual brain circuits are disrupted, the brain loses its world model. It must scramble to create a new one. Some of the same studies showing reduced brain activity also showed increased communication across wide areas of the brain. Plasticity already begins to work while the experience is still happening and can continue long after the effects are worn off. Brain function impairment doesn’t produce self-transcendence. It is the breaking and modifying habitual circuits and the brain forming new ones in response to brain function impairment that produces self-transcendence. It’s the brain after all.
Broad Speculations 