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Pat Hudson never leaves her house without a syringe of Naloxone. She will not be needing it for herself, but she wants to be ready for any emergency on the street. Naloxone is injected into the muscle and blocks the effect of opioids: If somebody has taken an overdose of heroin, it can save their life. Hudson, 72, and her husband, Tony Lane, 83, are both academics and live near the town of Carmarthen in the west of Wales in the United Kingdom. She is a professor emeritus of economic history and still teaches classes at Cardiff University. For a long time, she did not know much about heroin. It was only when Kevin was in his mids that the drug started to play a big role in her life. She found Kevin in an orphanage in Liverpool in He was 16 months old and he was not doing well. The signs of neglect and abuse were obvious. But a few weeks after being adopted, Kevin began to smile. But school was a struggle in Wales, where the family had moved. Kevin suffered from ADHD as well as dyslexia. First, it was cannabis, which he started using in his early teens. Smoking a joint calmed him down; Kevin found comfort and an escape from a society he did not feel he fully belonged to. From time to time, he was caught smoking it and ended up with a criminal record. There was a time when drug use in the UK was not considered a matter for the police and judges, but for the doctor. Until the late s, the British authorities pursued a progressive drug policy that stood in stark contrast to the militarised, punitive approach across the Atlantic. The United States authorities had long considered drugs a moral vice, an evil that had to be eradicated with brute force. In the early 20th century they embarked on a moral crusade against drugs — starting with the Opium and Coca Leaves Trade Restriction Act in , and intensifying ever since. Washington used its diplomatic weight to try to force the rest of the world to follow suit. But, at first, Britain declined. Heroin addiction in particular was treated with a decidedly liberal approach in the UK. The users led mostly healthy lives, they did not need to resort to criminality, and their number remained vanishingly small: In there were only heroin addicts known of in the UK, whereas in the US, it was hundreds of thousands. But, under constant pressure from Washington, the British system began to buckle. In the s, successive laws were introduced to criminalise possession of various drugs, among them LSD and amphetamines, and the prescription of heroin for treatment was restricted. Kevin spent some time in young offender institutions in his teens and, finally, in an adult prison in Cardiff during his 20s. Kevin was somebody who was struggling with life, and that sometimes expressed itself in antisocial behaviour. She believes Kevin began using heroin in prison. To begin with, he seemed to have his drug habit under control. He trained as a tree surgeon and got a job he enjoyed and was good at. But then a new contract came up to cut down trees along a power line. It was a dangerous task that required regular drug tests for the workers, so Kevin had to own up to his problem and lost the job. Soon after that, he decided to seek professional help at a drugs treatment centre. But the availability of treatment centres was faltering. In addition, the authorities increasingly opted for an abstinence model of treatment. Under this approach, drug users are encouraged to wean themselves off their habit. Indeed, Kevin had taken a relatively small amount of heroin when he suffered a heart attack on December 12, , at in the morning. He had locked himself in the toilet of the department store, Marks and Spencer, in the town centre of Carmarthen. For a long time, nobody noticed him. When he arrived at the hospital, he was already in a coma. The machine that kept him alive was turned off the next day. Kevin was one of 3, people in England and Wales who died from the effects of drugs in For many years, this death toll has been steadily increasing. The most recent figures are for when 4, drug-related deaths were recorded — a new record. Scotland, where 1, deaths were recorded in , has the highest per-capita death rate in Europe. Apart from Sweden, there is no country in Europe where so many people die as a consequence of drug use. Why so many? There were many moments when his life could have taken a different turn. If he had not been abused as a toddler. If his school had known how to support children to learn practical, rather than academic, skills. If the treatment centres had had more resources for mental health support. But, for Hudson, there is one decisive fact: Kevin was doing something illegal. There are so many cases of heroin users dying behind closed doors. A combination of drug prohibition and the stigma that accompanies it is killing our young people. Hudson supports decriminalisation of possession of all drugs for personal use, and the establishment of Drug Consumption Rooms DCRs. In these facilities, users can consume in a safe, controlled and clean environment. She also advocates the legal regulation of the supply of drugs through prescriptions, licensed premises where users can consume drugs safely and pharmacies that are licensed to distribute them, so that people know exactly what they are taking. One of the most active undercover cops in the drug squad, he landed hundreds of drug dealers and gangsters in prison. Following 20 years of criminalisation, selling drugs had become the most lucrative source of income for organised crime and the gangs resorted to increasingly violent methods to keep the money flowing. Woods used to hang out with drug users in parks and on street corners, making friends and getting to know the dealers. Step by step, over weeks and months, he tried to get in touch with the higher-up people in the gangs: The criminals organising the drug supply. It was a dangerous job. One time, a dealer held a Samurai sword to his throat and threatened to kill him if he turned out to be a police officer. Another time a gang member chased him in his car. Time and time again, he managed to put entire organised crime groups behind bars. For example, the Burger Bar Boys, based in Birmingham, who controlled a large part of the drugs and weapons trade in the West Midlands — and whose quaint name stands in sharp contrast to the brutality of their methods. Two innocent teenagers were killed. Woods spent more than half a year collecting evidence against the leading members in Northampton, one of the towns into which the gang had expanded. When the bust came in , 96 people were arrested. Six people involved with the heroin and crack cocaine trade in this town went to court in and, in the end, three of them went to prison for nine years, while the other three got 10 years. But, Woods believes it was all for nothing. He retired from the police in Huge resources were put into the operation, and six of the leading gang members were arrested. That is how long it took for other criminal organisations to step into the gap and take control of the drugs market in Northampton. This was no exception: It is how the system works, says Woods. They never manage to interrupt the drug supply — never. Because there are always people eager to take the opportunity and make massive amounts of money. When he started as an undercover policeman, Woods believed he was doing good. Criminals were arrested, drugs confiscated. But the longer he was on the job, the more he realised his dangerous work did not achieve anything at all. In the papers, we see pictures of drug busts — arrested dealers, piles of seized drugs. And we have learned to see this as a success. The only thing the police ever achieve is to make drug criminality even more brutal. Organised crime adapts all the time — gangsters become harder and more ruthless because most ruthless are the ones that rise to the top. This is a reaction to the success of the police. The victims of the war on drugs are everywhere. The addicts who waste their money and their health; the small-time dealers from poor backgrounds who are lured with the prospect of quick money; bereaved parents like Pat Hudson — and policemen like Woods. In his undercover years, he says, he made friends with users selling drugs on the side to finance their drug habit: People in desperate situations, who nonetheless ended up being arrested. I used my talents to get to know people and emotionally manipulate them. I have caused harm to some of the most vulnerable members of our society, to no benefit at all. I never made society safer, and I never reduced crime. Like Hudson, Woods sees a change in the law as the only way out of this mess. He is a member of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership LEAP , a campaign made up of current and former members of the police as well as figures from the army and the intelligence services. Their aim is to reform drug policy in order to take control away from organised crime. Each drug is different and has different regulatory requirements. Back in the s, there were still remnants of this system in the UK. In Merseyside, where the economic policies of the Thatcher years had a devastating effect, the heroin crisis was deeper than in most parts of the country. In Warrington, the psychiatrist, John Marks, legally prescribed heroin. His success was stark. His patients did not have to get their supply on the black market — where drugs are often of dubious quality — but received clean heroin under hygienic conditions. They often had jobs and families. The Liverpool model found imitators around the world, for example in Switzerland. But the British authorities themselves ignored the work of Marks. For Woods, there is no doubt the high number of drug deaths in the UK is a direct consequence of prohibition. In the UK, by contrast, the number of drug deaths has doubled in that time, even though the total number of users has remained largely stable. Academics and health experts have long considered the punitive approach a failure. The present drug death crisis is exacerbated by a number of other factors, says Laura Garius, Policy Lead at the drug reform charity, Release. There is also a lack of investment in harm reduction and treatment, including a lack of accessible opioid substitution therapy, which would inevitably save lives. Over the past 10 years, government funding for drug treatment has shrunk dramatically. Of the residential rehabilitation centres registered with the Care Quality Commission a watchdog in England in , more than 50 had shut down by The alarming rise in drug deaths has led to calls for a fundamentally new approach. The UK government rejected its recommendations. Nevertheless, Hudson and Woods are by no means disheartened. In the past few years, they have seen attitudes in the country change. Last year, he spoke at both the Labour and the Conservative Party annual conference. Drug policy reform has firmly arrived in the mainstream. This can also be seen in concrete new initiatives. In Middlesbrough, a Heroin Assisted Treatment clinic opened its doors in — the first such scheme in decades. It is licensed by the Home Office, which has the power to do this under current legislation and is partly funded by the local Police authority. One year after the programme started, participants said they were much healthier and had a higher quality of life. According to the clinic, there was also a significant reduction in their reoffending rates. The contrast to other cities is stark, however. Take Glasgow, for example. The Scottish metropolis has been hit particularly hard by the ongoing drugs crisis. Since many needles are handed from one user to the next, one-tenth of users are HIV positive — as many as back in the s at the height of the AIDS crisis. Until last year, Peter Krykant worked for a charity that provides fast HIV tests for homeless drug users. He saw the crisis getting worse and worse, and he was shocked to see how little had changed since he himself was an addict living on the streets of Glasgow in the late s. He decided to do something to help — something which is technically illegal. Through crowdfunding and with money from his own pocket, he bought a small van last summer. He went about turning it into a mobile Drug Consumption Room DCR , equipping it with clean seats, fresh needles and disinfectant. All we offer is clean material and a sterile room so that people can consume the drugs that they bring themselves. Because otherwise, they would do it in alleyways or empty buildings. The demand for his service has been overwhelming. Many live on the street or in temporary accommodation. There is one customer who is confined to a wheelchair because of his drug habit and could not even get into the van. Initially, his chair only had three wheels, so Krykant raised money to buy him a new one. She injects heroin into her groin and lives in a tent. Up until the week before, she always came accompanied by a friend, an alcoholic. Krykant gave him a syringe with Naxolone and showed him how to use it if his friend should take an overdose. But last week she came alone. Sometimes users are only offered one half-hour session every week or even every two weeks. Krykant knows there is only so much he can do to help the estimated drug addicts — most of them crack or heroin users — in central Glasgow. He sees his project as a way to raise awareness and push for political change. Last year, Krykant faced a charge under the Misuse of Drugs Act because he was allegedly obstructing police trying to search drug users within his van. While Krykant welcomed the decision, he wants the authorities to go further and give the police clear instruction not to intervene in the running of his service. The response Krykant has received for his efforts is huge. Dozens of interviews with Scottish, English and international press have propelled him into the spotlight. Politicians have started paying attention. Across the political spectrum, people have pledged their support and, in January, he even met Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland. Krykant is an inspiration for drug reformers across the whole country, among them Hudson in Wales. Published On 22 Mar 22 Mar Sponsored Content.

This Is a Philosopher on Drugs

Buying MDMA pills Kant

There is something strange in the disinterest philosophers show for experimentation with mind-altering drugs—or at least for talking about their experimentation publicly. Even further out we have philosophy-curious writers like Thomas de Quincey also a biographer of Immanuel Kant recounting his own experience of opium addiction. And then we have probabilities and speculation. This shows, I think, just how conservative philosophy remains, in some respects, as an academic discipline. At a cultural moment when psychedelics are getting a second wind, and even someone as upstanding as Michael Pollan has moved from counseling us to eat our roughage to praising the benefits of microdosing, philosophers are conducting themselves as though it were still , when we wore skinny ties to colloquia, got funding from the RAND Corporation to work on decision trees and other such narrow and straitlaced endeavors, and all knew that it is the unaltered and wakeful mind that has exclusive access to the forms and qualities of the external world. But wait a minute. Even in the midth century, perhaps especially in the midth century, years before the postwar generation was turning on, tuning in, and dropping out en masse, perfectly sober grown-up philosophers understood full well that the reports our senses give us of the physical world hardly settle the matter of what reality in itself is like. The problem is ancient but was sharpened in the early work of Bertrand Russell and G. As Russell would put the point in the s, when we are looking at a table as we walk away from it, what we see shrinks continually; but the table does not shrink; therefore, what we see simply cannot be the table itself. What we see, rather, is only what is given to sense, and the full account will have to involve the physics of light and the physiology of the brain and of the organs of sense as much as it involves the properties, to the extent that these can be known, of any external object. But if we have to take account of what the perceiver brings to the instance of perception in order to make any sense at all of what perception is, then it would seem to follow that perception should also be of interest to philosophers when there is no external object at all—or at most a hallucination of one. But they are generally interested in it only as a challenge, as an obstacle standing between them and what they would ultimately like to establish: that, namely, there is a real and all-important difference between the perception that is anchored in how the external world actually is and the perception that would seem to come from inside of us. There is a difference between waking and dreaming, in other words, and waking for them is incontestably the superior state to dwell in and the only one that is worthy of a philosopher. For philosophers seek the truth, which is something that can be furnished only to a mind not currently subject to the chimeras of psychosis, of dreaming, or of drugs. But again, the problem is ancient, which is a pretty reliable sign that it is also intractable. For all our efforts, we still are not one step closer to apprehending the things in themselves. Given what appears to be this logically necessary stalemate between us and the world, it seems inevitable that alternative accounts of the fundamental nature of reality—alternative ontologies, as we say—should keep returning and drawing off at least some philosophers who get fed up with an external world that demands our loyalty yet refuses to show itself. In at least some of these alternative ontologies, the visions that come to us unbidden, in the liminal states of insobriety, hypnagogia, or theurgic ecstasy, are not to be dismissed out of hand as obstacles to our apprehension of truth, but may in fact be vehicles of truth themselves. If you think you are in an emotional state to handle it, and in a legal jurisdiction that permits it, and you think you might benefit from being jolted out of your long-held ontological commitments, then I would recommend that you try some psychotropic drugs as well. I will not exaggerate the benefits. But I am significantly less cocky now, my cluelessness is more evident to me, a constant that accompanies me in each moment of the day. He is living with the Hurons and trying to convince them of the urgency of converting to Christianity. It dawns on him that his new hosts see things in more or less the opposite way. The missionary begins to wonder whether he really knows any better how to live than the oneiromancers he has ostensibly come to enlighten. But he has little time to indulge this question, as he fears the old leader may wake up at any moment and pass a death sentence on him. He writes a letter to his Father Superior in France, begging for a transfer out of there and back among the people who know, or think they know, the difference between appearance and reality. Philosophers today, at least in the English-speaking world, almost all take for granted that the core Cartesian doctrines are theoretical nonstarters. Yet we all remain the children of Descartes, to the extent that we take for granted that the day is more disconcealing of truth than the night. So it is with them that I throw in my lot. I am not a Freudian, nor a hippie, yet I believe, now more than ever, in part thanks to age and what I like to think of as an accrual of wisdom, in part thanks to psilocybin and muscimol, that our liminal states of consciousness may well be consciousness at its most veracious. Things were different when my father died in With his disappearance, all of a sudden the basic conditions of my own existence hit me like a revelation. He had had note that pluperfect a good long life, but now it seemed so absurdly brief to me, as if this being had just popped into existence, instantly began babbling a few favorite stories over and over again like a talking doll, a few beloved half-truths and misremembered factoids, only to pop right back out again, leaving me agape and wondering: Holy shit, who was that? What was that? They are me, just not in every respect at the present moment. I am them, but on a slight delay, and I find myself concerned with not spending the rest of this brief flash clinging to half-truths of my own. I want to know what this is all about, or at least, if knowledge is not to be had, I want to arrive at some equanimity of soul, where this condition of ours should no longer appear so absurd, so unacceptable, and where the veil that occludes my access to the world at least is no longer covered over by an additional veil of tears. The sense of loss intensified with the beginning of the pandemic and the forced isolation it brought down on the world. I was drinking heavily at the time, as I had been for many years. By the time I finally stopped using alcohol for good, just over two years ago, there was no joy at all left in it, no celebration, as there was in my younger life of at least some imperfect stab at bon-vivantism. It was simply an addiction, and one that darkened the veil through which I am constrained to make sense of the world. So I quit it, at long last. But rather than feeling liberated and good about my healthy new start, it was only then that I fell into the deepest depression I have ever known, deeper than I ever could have imagined possible. I was suddenly cut off from the only means I had of comforting myself, and of charging up the world with at least a sort of counterfeit magic. Nothing I had valued in my earlier life, my idiotic careerism, my foolish vainglory whenever I got something published, had even the faintest trace of significance now. I could still conjure, from somewhere, a semblance of caring about my career and so on, but I truly did not care. I no longer even understood how it could be possible to care about such nothings as fill up a human life. When the lockdowns ended, I summoned my forces as best I could, crawled out of my hole, and began to make the trip as often as I was able from France to California in order to visit my mother. I had been vaguely aware of the recent legislative developments in certain US states surrounding the consumption and sale of cannabis, but it was only on a whim, in the middle of one of these visits, that I turned to Google to find the location of the dispensary nearest me. I had tried marijuana a few times in my earlier life, but it had had little effect on me, and in any case I considered it trashy and beneath me in all its cultural significations. But because, now, I no longer cared about any of the judgments I had made in my earlier life, positive or negative, I found that I really could not care less what the cultural position of cannabis was, and I was perfectly happy to show my ID and stand in line with all the chewed-up old army veterans, all the underemployed marginals, all the discarded Americans, my brothers and sisters, at a dispensary on the very seediest side of Sacramento, in a place no zoning law had ever touched. While I had never smoked a joint correctly in my younger days, I found that the new abundance of tinctures and oils and other alchemical refinements of the THC molecule were just what I needed to start to see the world, again, as some sort of meaningful whole. Early in my new life as a late-blooming pothead, one thing that struck me was just what a crummy deal we in the West had been given, whereby all mind-altering substances had been prohibited and stigmatized, except for the one that has such negative medical and social consequences in its overuse as to be described in terms of disease, and that only ever alters consciousness downward, from the more to the less vivid. That wine is a central sacrament of Christianity, moreover, which in its early centuries seems to have had some interest in stamping out vestiges of pagan rituals relying on other, more intense varieties of mind alteration, seemed to me suddenly to be a rather serious argument against Christianity. It turned us into drunks, I reflected, and made us forgetful of the myriad other ways to make use of the fertile bounty of nature, particularly in its vegetal and fungal expressions, in order to see the world differently. Just a few edibles in, and I was already gravitating toward some kind of neopaganism. Experiences vary, of course, but in my case it does several things at once. It induces a sort of bodily ecstasy; it presents a vivid spectacle of patterns and figures before the eyes especially when they are closed ; and most interestingly, I think, it dissolves what I ordinarily experience as the metaphysical unity of the self, with all its memories and its steady persistence through time, and makes it temporarily difficult to comprehend how I ordinarily go about my life as if the self I present myself as being were a real thing, or at least anything suitable for presentation. In the depths of depression I came close to something resembling this condition, and it was terrifying. Stoned, by contrast, I have approached a state that is at least a cousin of depersonalization, yet I have found that it is mostly neither enjoyable nor terrifying, but simply revealing. We are, after all, quite likely not unified metaphysical subjects but rather complex assemblages of cells that facilitate an illusion of unity for as long as the assemblage endures. I will not affirm here any dogma, not even the naturalistic account of biological death to which I have just alluded, but will only say that there are several plausible accounts of what a self is on which we are indeed mistaken to suppose that it exists any more than, say, an image of a flamingo briefly manifested on a screen by colored pixels. But goodness, here I am, still philosophizing like a stoned undergrad in a black-lighted dorm room. So let me get to the heart of the matter. Beginning around I began writing essays, blog posts, polemics, and at least a few quasi-scholarly articles against the usurpation of classical models of the human being by metaphors drawn from the algorithmic technologies that surround us in the contemporary world. My criticisms were in part grounded in my perspective as a specialist in the history of early modern natural philosophy. If you know anything about 17th-century science, you will know that people at the time were particularly impressed with the most cutting-edge technologies of the day, most notably clockworks. And this is a pattern we see again and again in the history of science: The latest shiny gadget, whatever it may be, becomes such a centerpiece of human attention that we find ourselves unable to resist seeing it as a sort of epitome of reality as a whole. But what a coincidence it would be, really, if the entire world turned out to share in the same nature as a technology that only came into existence within our own lifetimes! A rigorously historicizing perspective on the simulation argument, in other words, quickly reveals it to be little more than a reflection of presentist myopia. I certainly have no qualms about the idea, defended by Chalmers, that the world is likely not at all as it appears to us. In the end, what displeased me most about it were not its arguments but its tone and authorial voice. It is, to be blunt, a bit dorky, with its narrow range of cultural references to TV shows and pop songs about which I could not care less, and its obvious rootedness in online cultures of gaming and coding and geeking out that I have always shunned. But philosophers are supposed to see past such superficial differences. If I can admire a 10th-century Islamic theologian for his ingenious use of arguments drawn from Aristotle, I ought to be able to appreciate Dave Chalmers, who is, after all, my contemporary and my guildmate too. Under the influence of drugs, the world really does seem to me more like a computer simulation than like a clock, or a loom, or a chariot wheel, or anything else we have come up with so far. Let me walk that back a bit. The glitches are not exactly as the simulationists, at their most indulgent, like to imagine them. I see no cascades of glowing green 0s and 1s, nor clean Tron -like geometric lines extending off into the horizon, not to mention cats that seem to flicker like an old UHF channel as they walk by. The glitches are not something seen at all, but rather something that characterizes the mode of consciousness in which the totality of the world, and of memory and experience, is apprehended. There are two such principal glitches. The first has to do with the experience of time. Under the influence of mushrooms, I have found, temporal duration can sometimes go the same way as I have described the self going under the influence of THC. Psilocybin is far more difficult to obtain through legal channels, unfortunately. Meanwhile, muscimol, the active ingredient in the Amanita muscaria , or fly agaric fungus, so well attested in traditional religious practices throughout Eurasia, is legal in 49 states, and common, alongside cannabis, in the dispensaries of New York. While I have had some interesting experiences with psilocybin recently, it is muscimol, purchased in a rather louche head shop on the Lower East Side, surrounded by tricolored insignia of pan-African pride, images of neon aliens, the inescapable Bob Marley, that has best succeeded in bringing me out of my ordinary experience of the fixity of my personal identity, and of the temporal boundedness of my existence. What does this have to do with simulationism? Consider, first, that in an artificial system that rises to the level of consciousness, such as future iterations of GPT or LaMDA might become, this consciousness could not be the result of any slow evolutionary process with antecedent stages of mere sensory perception. The consciousness of such a system would simply pop into existence at the moment the programmer behind it all hits Start. It would not be a hard-won consciousness, moving up through photoreception, olfaction, and other such physiological capacities that now serve in part to constitute our consciousness as biological entities if that is what we are but did not first emerge for the sake of consciousness. When we first started smelling the world around us, evolutionary theory tells us, there was as yet no plan for us to someday start cognizing that world. It all just worked out that way. In an artificial system, by contrast, such as the AIs we are currently seeking to train up, it is cognition that comes first, and likely last. While the very idea that our AIs are approaching consciousness is controversial, of course and I will not take sides on it here , we may at least agree that it is easier to make our machines cognize the world than to make them smell the world. That is, we are training the machines up to know things, and among the things they know it might turn out that they will be able to know that they know things. But the idea that there would be any accompanying bodily phenomenology to this knowledge is plainly nonsensical. But this experience of the world is typically conceived in terms of navigation in space, which can already be observed among the canine-shaped patrol robots ominously advertised by Boston Dynamics. It seems to me we would likely have to suppose, at the very least, that for an AI there could be no experience of temporal duration as we ourselves know it. It is not, or not only, my limitations as a writer that compel me to admit the impossibility of fully conveying what this is like. Shortly before I began experimenting with drugs, I found myself spontaneously, and quite surprisingly, attuned to a much more densely populated world of other minds, or of fellow beings in the full and proper sense, than we are ordinarily expected to recognize. Long ago my grandfather built a wooden deck in front of our little vacation house on Lake Almanor in the northeast of California. There was a baby pine shooting up underneath it, and he could not bring himself to cut the sapling off from its source of light and life. So he constructed the deck with a square opening through which it could continue to grow. On my first visit there after the lockdowns ended, I saw that proud tree reaching up into the sky, now about as wide in diameter as a basketball. The tree was in its forties now, almost as old as I was, and it suddenly struck me that I had passed most of my life with this tree, yet I had neglected to think about it, to hold it in my heart and thoughts, at nearly every moment of all those years. Research on fetal mice has shown fairly conclusively that the development in the mammalian brain of a capacity to navigate obstacle-filled space develops quite separately from any cognition of social reality. Mice get ready to move through the world by dreaming about that world before they are even born. Descartes, curiously, neglected to reestablish other minds after he had razed all of his beliefs through the method of radical doubt in his Meditations of Being with a tree is an experience that is harder to come by. But one thing psychedelics can help illuminate is the extent to which the limits of Mitsein are not so much a reflection of the intrinsic properties of various external entities as they are, simply, of our attunement. When we change our tuning, even the brick wall can seem to have been dismissed too hastily. On mushrooms, there is a strong perception of the mutual constitution of mind-like beings by one another, so that my understanding of what I am becomes inseparable from all sorts of entities I am usually able to bracket as distinct from me—trees, clouds, mice, and so on—and these entities all, in turn, appear to be constitutive of one another. There is a very succinct naturalistic account of why the world comes to appear to us like this under certain circumstances: It appears this way because this is how it in fact is. I would be nothing without all the clouds and trees and so on; and my eventual death, in this light, might best be understood as the end of a long campaign of stubborn resistance to this obvious fact—not the loss of anything with any real independent existence but only an anomaly within an order of existence that strives ever to even things back out. In other words, one way of thinking about a virtual world is as a world entirely constituted by other minds. And this is indeed how the world comes across to us, at moments, when we are thinking about it with chemically enhanced perception. But are any of these lucubrations to be taken at all seriously? Readers of a certain age will at this point picture an egg in a frying pan. That is, there is always a neurochemical correlate to any of your conscious perceptions whatsoever. You might be tempted to say that supplementing gets in the way of correct perception, and that the only reliable way of apprehending the world as it is must depend only on the default setting of the mind, with no extras. But again, even this setting delivers us delirious hallucinations for about eight hours out of each Moreover, it is hard to conceive of any valid argument against supplementation. The substances are out there in the world, just like the food we eat is out there—and if we did not eat it, very soon we would start to hallucinate, and eventually we would cease to have any conscious perceptions at all. The fact that we have to eat some sort of nutritious organic matter or other, while consuming psychedelic plants or fungi is strictly optional, is certainly relevant to the moral regulation of drug consumption, but it is hard to see how it is relevant to any epistemological determinations we might make about the ability of a mind to deliver knowledge of the world as it is. The undrugged mind may be more reliable in certain respects, since it is less likely to lead you to try to fly off your high-rise balcony, and it is better able to help you stay focused on present dangers and tasks necessary for survival. But this in no way means that the representations it gives you of the world are truer. My undrugged mind, to borrow a witticism from J. It presents to me trees that are brothers and clouds that are old friends and cracks in the walls that spell out warm messages from solicitous invisible beings and infinite swarms of lives, all swirling and pulsating around me. Which is correct? This is, broadly, the philosophical view of my greatest intellectual hero, the 17th-century philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz who was, among other things, a pioneer of computer science. Leibniz was not, to say the least, a deviant weirdo. As for me, it is only at the moment I decided to take the risk of falling in with the deviant weirdos, of moving with the wrong crowd and losing my place in the guild of philosophers, that I came to believe he is probably right about things. A true genius, he seems to have got there unaided. But we all do the best we can, each according to our capacities. I am likely fortunate to live, most of the time, in a jurisdiction where none of the relevant substances are permitted by law, and so to be able to indulge my curiosity only punctually. There are many experiences I have not yet had—of DMT, for example, which I am told is the most potent of all in showing us the variety of species of beings that ordinarily remain hidden. If you are a clinical researcher in such matters and would like a volunteer for your experiments, hit me up. In any case, I suspect I have already found what I was looking for: some new knowledge, and at least a bit of equanimity. While I remain as uncertain as ever about the ultimate structure of the world, I also have new inclinations, and new sympathies, toward accounts of it that had previously struck me as altogether off the table. That widening is itself a sort of newfound knowledge, even if it contains no new certainties. As to equanimity, there really is nothing like a sharp experience of the illusoriness of time to make a person less anguished by the brevity and apparent senselessness of what we experience as our temporal sojourn. And there really is no more comforting feeling than to arrive at an awareness of the pervasive and dense presence of other beings like oneself—or at least to arrive in a state that seems to attest to the existence of such beings. Even if any positive determinations about how it actually is would automatically become new varieties of mere seeming, it is good and edifying to explore the alternatives to our standard account. This article appears in the April issue. Subscribe now. Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail wired. Interview: Marissa Mayer is not a feminist. This AI tool helped arrest people. Then someone took a closer look. How a ounce layer of foam changed the NFL. Save this story Save. Most Popular. By Boone Ashworth. 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