(I parenthetically mention that one of my deflationary hypotheses for why people say they get new thoughts when they’re on drugs, is just that some drugs, like psychedelics, disrupt patterned chains of thought. Normally whenever we think thought X, we then go on to think thoughts Y and Z in a familiar pattern. But taking psychedelics is one way to disrupt those patterns and think new thoughts instead. The deflationary hypothesis is that any kind of mental disruption would do it, that the results are not specific to the drug; you’d need to demonstrate some tighter correlation to get past the deflationary hypothesis for that drug.)
This seems like at least a partial explanation of why psychedelics lead to novel thoughts, but psychedelics throw you into sufficiently novel mental situations that it’s genuinely hard to replicate the effect while sober. While peaking on acid, you exist in a world of pure music, archetypes, and geometry, all derived by zooming in on and amplifying a narratively salient subset of your current set and setting. You just can’t easily access that level of novelty sober.
This seems like at least a partial explanation of why psychedelics lead to novel thoughts, but psychedelics throw you into sufficiently novel mental situations that it’s genuinely hard to replicate the effect while sober. While peaking on acid, you exist in a world of pure music, archetypes, and geometry, all derived by zooming in on and amplifying a narratively salient subset of your current set and setting. You just can’t easily access that level of novelty sober.