I think the psychedelics have a second important effect: they often create vivid internal worlds. If you can have that, it also implies that physical reality isn’t particularly more real than your mind.
What people don’t appreciate is that brains need to be hallucination machines just to reason about counterfactuals and make inferences. Those hallucinations are usually either tightly coupled to the sense, or more vague and fleeting and less vivid. Hallucinogens stabilize those imaginations while disrupting the bottom-up sensory information so it seems less vivid.
Great analysis, interesting data, and I agree!
I think the psychedelics have a second important effect: they often create vivid internal worlds. If you can have that, it also implies that physical reality isn’t particularly more real than your mind.
What people don’t appreciate is that brains need to be hallucination machines just to reason about counterfactuals and make inferences. Those hallucinations are usually either tightly coupled to the sense, or more vague and fleeting and less vivid. Hallucinogens stabilize those imaginations while disrupting the bottom-up sensory information so it seems less vivid.