I think drugs make this a lot easier because they give a clear context for the altered experience. Like you said you can easily dismiss the effects as temporary, and even if you do take them seriously at the time you can easily dismiss them retrospectively once sober. Even without drugs if the altered experience happens in the context of a specific ritual or practice such as meditation that creates an inside/outside distinction relative to which you really can seek external anchors.
The important thing is that you can’t grade the instrument from the inside, you have to have external anchors
I think the challenge is if you don’t have clear context markers surrounding the experience then this becomes difficult or impossible to do. Ultimately grading your own instruments ‘from the inside’ seems pretty fundamental to the human experience, there is nowhere else to grade them from.
You might find that you reliably experience the world differently than other people, and that’s incredibly important for grounding rational thinking. If your brain is unreliable, it’s counterproductive to try to reason yourself into a believing that it is.
But if your experience is reliably different from others then deferring to them (besides being a huge loss of agency) requires you not only to trust them more than you trust yourself, but also to trust your experience of them more than you trust whatever experience is contradicting them.
I think drugs make this a lot easier because they give a clear context for the altered experience. Like you said you can easily dismiss the effects as temporary, and even if you do take them seriously at the time you can easily dismiss them retrospectively once sober. Even without drugs if the altered experience happens in the context of a specific ritual or practice such as meditation that creates an inside/outside distinction relative to which you really can seek external anchors.
I think the challenge is if you don’t have clear context markers surrounding the experience then this becomes difficult or impossible to do. Ultimately grading your own instruments ‘from the inside’ seems pretty fundamental to the human experience, there is nowhere else to grade them from.
But if your experience is reliably different from others then deferring to them (besides being a huge loss of agency) requires you not only to trust them more than you trust yourself, but also to trust your experience of them more than you trust whatever experience is contradicting them.