I am still astounded by the number of philosophers who seem allergic to the discoveries of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, etc. while they formulate hypotheses (opinions) about the nature of mankind with little or no data. Sometimes I wonder if it's because the science is too difficult for them to absorb. It's where I think science and philosophy have diverged so much and now despise each other, and people like Patricia give me hope that there's still room for the two to work together to arrive at a common understanding.
It's a sad societal human history misunderstanding of the concept of the soul. The soul is a Santa Claus-ism word. It's caused untold organized soul treatment activities. Vested Santa Claus-isms die hard.
I doubt that science is too hard for philosophers. However, sciences try to make philosophical questions their own and answer them in their own regard. Philosophers don't like that for a variety of reasons. The first reason being, science will not ask them what they have found out. Second, if science tries to answer questions which philosophers regard as philosophical, they fear that it could boil down to some sort of physical reductionism (while most of philosophy is metaphysical or ontological). Lastly, maybe it should be doubted whether neuroscience has actually arrived at a sufficient and complete model of high-level concepts such as consciousness or morality (let's say, something on par with Kant).
Sorry to hear you think that way. But I as a philosopher of science will tell you that the science isn't "too hard" for us too understand. Most of the time it is usually too hard for some scientists to follow rigorous philosophical arguments. Science and philosophy aren't diverged, despite what many popularizers of science will have you believe, and yes that includes Stephen Hawkins. And your point about hypothesizing without data, well, what else is a hypothesis? Scientists do the same thing and then go get the data to prove or disprove their hypothesis. Second, we are the ones who question the scientists methods and assumptions to make sure that it is still scientific and tracks minimum values of the scientists. *steps of the pulpit.
"All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values." (Nietzsche)
I'm so glad that I got a chance to come across this video and let's not forget the fact that I'm grateful for having fast internet! Can we say that the way we think about ourselves is a result of the environment that we grew up in?
The brain is a physical memory of knowledge. You can't be conscious of anything until it's In memory. Consciousness is the awareness of memory. Awareness is knowledge and understanding.
Consciousness, perception and thinking. A theory of mind according to platonic physics. You will not find an explanation as understandable as this in the current Stanford Leibniz site, which is incomplete as it makes no mention of Mind. 1. Plato's Mind (the One, the Self) is the cause agent, the singular cybernetic control point, of all perception, thinking and doing in the universe, where control is top down from Mind. 2. Plato's Mind is timeless and spaceless, and being the only Reality, time and space are not ultimately real, but are artificial constructions. 3. Since Mind is mental, not physical, all control and causation is mental, not physical, and top down, since Mind is the singular (cybernetic) control point at the top. 4. Thus Mind plays the brain like a violin, not the reverse. 5. Man's mind (small m) is a passive mental subset, or monad, of Mind and under its control. 6. This monad (our mind) is the mental correspondent of the brain and controls it. Our mind plays our brain like a violin. 7. Thinking is the intentional action of Mind (and thus mind) on mental entities such as ideas, manipulating and transforming them intentionally (through will). 8. Qualia are simply sensory experiences, the conversion by Mind of sensory nerve signals into mental sensory experiences in a fashion similar to the conversion of physical sensory nerve signals into mental images. 9.. As Dennett has explained, In materialist thinking, there is no end to homunculi viewing the universe through a chain of homunculi. Leibniz terminates this infinite regress by making the last viewer the Self , which is at a higher level and suitably equipped. 10. Perception occurs as Mind converts physical sensory signals in the brain into mental experiences in one's mind. 11. These experiences can be made conscious (are made aware) by reperceiving or thinking them. This is called apperception by Leibniz. Thus consciousness is apperception. 12. The universe, according to Leibniz, is viewed directly by the One (the Self, the ONLY true perceiver), which views these scenes discretely and in sequence (analogous to snapshots) at discrete points as a whole indirectly through the totality of individual monads, and from their own perspectives. 13. This totality of sets of individual perceptions is then distributed in the proper order and perspective to each of the monads in the universe. 14. These individual sets are called "perceptions", and must be distributied in this indirect fashion by Mind because each monad, in order to remain an individual, has no "windows", to use Leibniz's term. 15. The perceptions are made up of what the monad would see of its nearby neighbors if it were allowed to do so. This is purely mental, but allows us to speak in terms of spacial distances and directions, through these snapshots, between physical bodies, which Mind, being spaceless, cannot actually directly. 16. Mind is also timeless, so that time is physically "created" as an artifact through the actual motions of physical bodies in physical spacetime. 1 17. Intelligence is the nonphysical ability to freely make autonomous choices. It is a faculty of nonphysical Mind, the Nothing out of which the physical universe exploded in the Big Bang. 18. Another name for this nonphysical intelligence is "life." Leibniz maintained that the entire universe is alive. 19. Each monad is perpetual, created at the beginning of the universe and only annihilated by Mind. 20. Since monads can contain other monads, they can. as plants do through seeds, and humans do through sexual reproducxtion, produce subsequent generations. 21. A robot or computer has no Mind or Self which has the wide bandwidth, intelligence and intentionality to actually perceive , think, or do things, such as Mind does. So, being without Mind, computers can have no actual intelligence or life. 22. The current theory of mind is materialist. In contrast to the above, it uses the usual decapitated, mindless, or where mind is at best an abstract entity, not a living presence as in the above. The materialist model of perception, thinking and doing, being Mindless, is dead. DSG Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (retired, 2000). See my Leibniz site: rclough@verizon.academia.edu/RogerClough For personal messages use rclough@verizon.net
...There are a "few" philosophers that amaze me in their imprecision of other philosophers and their theories and their dogmatic realistic positivism statements. First, to Aristóteles the soul was not physical such as 'matter' (even though mortal and dependent of the body, but the pure Noús, the pure intellect, was speculated by him to be immortal in "Anima"), 'matter' was not 'phenomena', for the 'form' or the 'formal structure of understanding' was only understood by itself and not by 'perceptions' - by the understanding of the form of the syntax of phrases (propositions), through his modal dialectics syllogism and "pure" syllogism - and the 'perception', to him, was not even the phenomena, but was understood lately by the "Latins" as 'stimuli'. When we translate "matter", "body", "mind" and "energy" into English, we commit to ourselves to believe - in one word, 'suppose'; suppose that we are certain in doing so - that these words manifest the same meanings or concepts that were understood in the syntaxis of the Hellenic attic dialect that he used. And we truly deceive ourselves, then, to conclude that languages of other cultures have the same structure as ours, the same development "mind-set". That they can perfectly be translated without corrupting meaning, and then conclude these ridiculous fallacy that: 'If the structure of language is universal, then there is a same universal physical structural form that every man has in heir brain, that witch is called "mind".' I would like to hear from this great "Emeritus" if she can prove to me that a multi-dimension hyper-cube has such a physical onthological level of existence as much as my typing hand; then she will have to prove me that when I think of my hand, and a geometrical "entity", I think the same type of existence... And of course, if these entities are different in nature of their existence, than there are levels of physical existence, or there are thoughts that do never achieve physical existence, and if so, there are "entities", or non-physical entities, or "less" physical entities, or less "real" than some... Come on, this can't be serious, she even has argued one time in the video, but only speculated about no evidence at all to answering questions about "meaning", "value of truth", "validity", "logical conclusion", "existence", the "existence of the self", etc... She can speculate, but no empirical evidence of what she talks is argued to prove those concepts above, then, to me, as Aristóteles speaks about Pláton, she is speaking to the air... And of course, there is no intersection here between "Neuroscience" and "Philosophy", tis just babbling about interpretations of biological phenomena...
how about to say : " brain produce thoughts which is not on purpose to produce. it doesn't necessarily saying they are two things. they are one thing because one purpose is to continue living. and suicidal simply same as the "purpose" end."
That roboethics and robot action theory are Leibnizian hence unknown to neuroscience While Kant and Hume assumed that actions and morality are primarly based on feeling states, so that morality or immorality are emotions-based, Leibniz is entirely rationally based. Hence for robots, the fields of action and morality are Leibnizian (as in his Theodicy). -- see my website independent.academia.edu/RogerClough ----- Without governance the stars will fall. ------Without a single governor they will collide.
With due respect madam, soul - science is a fairy tale today, in the same manner as the Earth being round was a fairy tale a few centuries back. May be we still don't have the technology for a soul science, as we did not have for neuroscience a couple of centuries back. So, as you have rightly mentioned we have to be open-minded. And with due respect to Plato and Aristotle and all Western philosophers, the East has always been very curious about the understanding of how the mind works (in the software sense). So in my opinion a little reference to the "discoveries" of the East on the subject might not be as disappointing as they seem to be. On the contrary I think they might be quite helpful. Some of which are the treaties on mind by Patanjali, the Sankhya Philosophy of Kapila and of course the "discoveries" of Buddha.
They should attempt to figure out what Socrates found, long ago the nature of self was discovered, there are no new discoveries that are true today. It's so regretful to see people so lost looked upon as if they are making progress. Know thyself and know all of nature.
+Julian Walker +Julian Walker well it doesn't refute neuroscience; it is an area of neuroscience itself. But it makes you realise that approaches to understanding consciousness via "philosophy" and other means we monkeys have conjured up really hold no water. Take a high dose of a strong psychedelic such as dimethyltryptamine and we shall come back and discuss further.
+Chowzoo i have taken strong doses of: LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, ayahuasca, san pedro cactus, pharmaceutical mescaline, peyote cactus , but not DMT. i am not sure that psychedelic experiences give any insight into consciousness per se as they do into the rich possibilities of the brain in altered states induced by powerful chemicals which affect how we experience our senses, memories, thought process, bodies, emotions, imagination etc.. personally, in my 20's i thought psychedelics were not only the way to understand psychology, and potentially wake up the world, but were the doorway into a higher dimension of synchronicity, seeing through the illusion of time and accessing the truth about our eternal, transcendent nature... while a i value all of those intense experiences and what i have learned from them, i no longer interpret them in this naive highly impressionable way any longer!
+Julian Walker Terence Mckenna once said he held DMT in reserve as the "ultimate convincer," so maybe you should give 70mg smoked freebase a burl before closing the door. Nevertheless, I don't think much tangible information can be extracted from these experiences besides an overwhelming conviction that life is utterly mysterious and beyond comprehension. Else I would buy into a neuroscientist saying that the mystery of consciousness can be deciphered in much the same way the mystery of genes as a propagater of life's genetic code was solved. I think the two are categorically different.
+Chowzoo over the years i have shifted to seeing all altered states as evidence that the brain is incredibly complex and that neurochemistry is (as hard as it is to grasp experientially) all powerful in terms of everything about our subjective experience: mood, focus, imagination, thought process, love, pleasure, compulsion, body awareness, ecstatic reverie, hallucination, fantasy, sense of self -indeed consciousness itself, all driven by neurochemistry, all radically impacted by affecting neurochemistry. somehow, because the altered states and their various phenomena are so impressive subjectively that it is easy to get swept up into thinking that the neurochemical, internal, brain processing changes are indicative of having access to something about reality itself that is now equally different. but think about it, we have a weakness in this area.... right? one of the characteristics of psychiatric disturbance is that we cannot be talked out of the conviction that all of the delusional perceptions we have about the world outside of our heads is actually just the product of the illness. so for me the thought process evolved along those lines. from thinking that LSD (and i took it many times) had shown me something beyond the veil of every day reality, hidden truths of the universe, and the reality of mystical experience with regard to transcendent consciousness and pantheism, to instead seeing these experiences in relation to both religious convictions and psychiatric conditions..... in all 3 cases we become convinced that intense shifts in our interior experience and it's neurochemistry indicate something radical about reality outside of our heads. in all 3 cases there are of course insights, moments of healing, and perceptions outside of our everyday mode, that are beneficial, valid and intuitively accurate, alongside many, many ideas, beliefs and convictions that are just wrong, but FEEl so right! to me that has been the area of fascination as i have sought to integrate my psychedelic experiences over the last 20 years..... i am pretty sure sam harris has followed a similar trajectory. i relate to him as well because we are both long time meditators and students of inner work who draw the same line in the sand with regard to extending the common place but untenable metaphysical claims into the outer world without evidence.
I am still astounded by the number of philosophers who seem allergic to the discoveries of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, etc. while they formulate hypotheses (opinions) about the nature of mankind with little or no data. Sometimes I wonder if it's because the science is too difficult for them to absorb.
It's where I think science and philosophy have diverged so much and now despise each other, and people like Patricia give me hope that there's still room for the two to work together to arrive at a common understanding.
It's a sad societal human history misunderstanding of the concept of the soul. The soul is a Santa Claus-ism word. It's caused untold organized soul treatment activities. Vested Santa Claus-isms die hard.
Can you please name such philosophers :)
😂
I doubt that science is too hard for philosophers. However, sciences try to make philosophical questions their own and answer them in their own regard. Philosophers don't like that for a variety of reasons. The first reason being, science will not ask them what they have found out. Second, if science tries to answer questions which philosophers regard as philosophical, they fear that it could boil down to some sort of physical reductionism (while most of philosophy is metaphysical or ontological).
Lastly, maybe it should be doubted whether neuroscience has actually arrived at a sufficient and complete model of high-level concepts such as consciousness or morality (let's say, something on par with Kant).
Sorry to hear you think that way. But I as a philosopher of science will tell you that the science isn't "too hard" for us too understand. Most of the time it is usually too hard for some scientists to follow rigorous philosophical arguments. Science and philosophy aren't diverged, despite what many popularizers of science will have you believe, and yes that includes Stephen Hawkins. And your point about hypothesizing without data, well, what else is a hypothesis? Scientists do the same thing and then go get the data to prove or disprove their hypothesis. Second, we are the ones who question the scientists methods and assumptions to make sure that it is still scientific and tracks minimum values of the scientists. *steps of the pulpit.
"All sciences are now under the obligation to prepare the ground for the future task of the philosopher, which is to solve the problem of value, to determine the true hierarchy of values." (Nietzsche)
Excellent Interview. Patricia Churchland is a pleasure to listen to.
I'm so glad that I got a chance to come across this video and let's not forget the fact that I'm grateful for having fast internet! Can we say that the way we think about ourselves is a result of the environment that we grew up in?
The brain is a physical memory of knowledge. You can't be conscious of anything until it's In memory. Consciousness is the awareness of memory. Awareness is knowledge and understanding.
Wonderful interview. An Eye-opener sort of.
Thanks Patricia
May I suggest you the first neurobiological philosopher ;Spinoza and his Ethics.
Consciousness, perception and thinking. A theory of mind according to platonic physics.
You will not find an explanation as understandable as this in the current Stanford Leibniz site,
which is incomplete as it makes no mention of Mind.
1. Plato's Mind (the One, the Self) is the cause agent, the singular cybernetic control point, of all perception, thinking and doing in the universe, where control is top down from Mind.
2. Plato's Mind is timeless and spaceless, and being the only Reality, time and space
are not ultimately real, but are artificial constructions.
3. Since Mind is mental, not physical, all control and causation is mental, not physical,
and top down, since Mind is the singular (cybernetic) control point at the top.
4. Thus Mind plays the brain like a violin, not the reverse.
5. Man's mind (small m) is a passive mental subset, or monad, of Mind and under its control.
6. This monad (our mind) is the mental correspondent of the brain and controls it. Our mind
plays our brain like a violin.
7. Thinking is the intentional action of Mind (and thus mind) on mental entities such as ideas,
manipulating and transforming them intentionally (through will).
8. Qualia are simply sensory experiences, the conversion by Mind of sensory nerve signals into
mental sensory experiences in a fashion similar to the conversion of physical sensory nerve signals
into mental images.
9.. As Dennett has explained, In materialist thinking, there is no end to homunculi viewing the universe through a chain of homunculi. Leibniz terminates this infinite regress by making the last viewer the Self , which is at a higher level and suitably equipped.
10. Perception occurs as Mind converts physical sensory signals in the brain into mental experiences in one's mind.
11. These experiences can be made conscious (are made aware) by reperceiving or thinking them.
This is called apperception by Leibniz. Thus consciousness is apperception.
12. The universe, according to Leibniz, is viewed directly by the One (the Self, the ONLY true perceiver), which views these scenes discretely and in sequence (analogous to snapshots) at discrete points as a whole indirectly through the totality of individual monads, and from their own perspectives.
13. This totality of sets of individual perceptions is then distributed in the proper order and perspective to each of the monads in the universe.
14. These individual sets are called "perceptions", and must be distributied in this indirect fashion
by Mind because each monad, in order to remain an individual, has no "windows", to use Leibniz's term.
15. The perceptions are made up of what the monad would see of its nearby neighbors
if it were allowed to do so. This is purely mental, but allows us to speak in terms of
spacial distances and directions, through these snapshots, between physical bodies,
which Mind, being spaceless, cannot actually directly.
16. Mind is also timeless, so that time is physically "created" as an artifact through
the actual motions of physical bodies in physical spacetime.
1
17. Intelligence is the nonphysical ability to freely make autonomous choices. It is a faculty of
nonphysical Mind, the Nothing out of which the physical universe exploded in the Big Bang.
18. Another name for this nonphysical intelligence is "life." Leibniz maintained that the entire
universe is alive.
19. Each monad is perpetual, created at the beginning of the universe and only annihilated by Mind.
20. Since monads can contain other monads, they can. as plants do through seeds, and humans do through sexual reproducxtion, produce subsequent generations.
21. A robot or computer has no Mind or Self which has the wide bandwidth, intelligence
and intentionality to actually perceive , think, or do things, such as Mind does. So, being without Mind, computers can have no actual intelligence or life.
22. The current theory of mind is materialist. In contrast to the above, it uses the usual decapitated,
mindless, or where mind is at best an abstract entity, not a living presence as in the above.
The materialist model of perception, thinking and doing, being Mindless, is dead.
DSG
Dr. Roger B Clough NIST (retired, 2000).
See my Leibniz site: rclough@verizon.academia.edu/RogerClough
For personal messages use rclough@verizon.net
...There are a "few" philosophers that amaze me in their imprecision of other philosophers and their theories and their dogmatic realistic positivism statements. First, to Aristóteles the soul was not physical such as 'matter' (even though mortal and dependent of the body, but the pure Noús, the pure intellect, was speculated by him to be immortal in "Anima"), 'matter' was not 'phenomena', for the 'form' or the 'formal structure of understanding' was only understood by itself and not by 'perceptions' - by the understanding of the form of the syntax of phrases (propositions), through his modal dialectics syllogism and "pure" syllogism - and the 'perception', to him, was not even the phenomena, but was understood lately by the "Latins" as 'stimuli'. When we translate "matter", "body", "mind" and "energy" into English, we commit to ourselves to believe - in one word, 'suppose'; suppose that we are certain in doing so - that these words manifest the same meanings or concepts that were understood in the syntaxis of the Hellenic attic dialect that he used. And we truly deceive ourselves, then, to conclude that languages of other cultures have the same structure as ours, the same development "mind-set". That they can perfectly be translated without corrupting meaning, and then conclude these ridiculous fallacy that: 'If the structure of language is universal, then there is a same universal physical structural form that every man has in heir brain, that witch is called "mind".' I would like to hear from this great "Emeritus" if she can prove to me that a multi-dimension hyper-cube has such a physical onthological level of existence as much as my typing hand; then she will have to prove me that when I think of my hand, and a geometrical "entity", I think the same type of existence... And of course, if these entities are different in nature of their existence, than there are levels of physical existence, or there are thoughts that do never achieve physical existence, and if so, there are "entities", or non-physical entities, or "less" physical entities, or less "real" than some... Come on, this can't be serious, she even has argued one time in the video, but only speculated about no evidence at all to answering questions about "meaning", "value of truth", "validity", "logical conclusion", "existence", the "existence of the self", etc... She can speculate, but no empirical evidence of what she talks is argued to prove those concepts above, then, to me, as Aristóteles speaks about Pláton, she is speaking to the air... And of course, there is no intersection here between "Neuroscience" and "Philosophy", tis just babbling about interpretations of biological phenomena...
***** ...Go there and add me, or have you done already that? Well, I will search you...
it is indeed scary about the knowledge being acquired in this field and others . there are always those who will use it for nefarious means.
It's simply shocking to see philosophers in denial of the relevance of neuroscience...
Thank you
how about to say : " brain produce thoughts which is not on purpose to produce. it doesn't necessarily saying they are two things. they are one thing because one purpose is to continue living. and suicidal simply same as the "purpose" end."
When are me?
i loved every word :)
Patty can touch my nerve any day!
❤❤❤
she kind of dodged the question about meanings of life being reduced to circuits...
Damnnnn ty
That roboethics and robot action theory are Leibnizian hence unknown to neuroscience
While Kant and Hume assumed that actions and morality are primarly based on feeling states, so that morality or immorality are emotions-based, Leibniz is entirely rationally based. Hence for robots, the fields of action and morality are Leibnizian (as in his Theodicy).
--
see my website independent.academia.edu/RogerClough
----- Without governance the stars will fall.
------Without a single governor they will collide.
With due respect madam, soul - science is a fairy tale today, in the same manner as the Earth being round was a fairy tale a few centuries back. May be we still don't have the technology for a soul science, as we did not have for neuroscience a couple of centuries back. So, as you have rightly mentioned we have to be open-minded.
And with due respect to Plato and Aristotle and all Western philosophers, the East has always been very curious about the understanding of how the mind works (in the software sense). So in my opinion a little reference to the "discoveries" of the East on the subject might not be as disappointing as they seem to be. On the contrary I think they might be quite helpful. Some of which are the treaties on mind by Patanjali, the Sankhya Philosophy of Kapila and of course the "discoveries" of Buddha.
They should attempt to figure out what Socrates found, long ago the nature of self was discovered, there are no new discoveries that are true today. It's so regretful to see people so lost looked upon as if they are making progress. Know thyself and know all of nature.
my brain made me do it.
This presentation is all a bit 'folkie'- should I be thinking about eliminating it?
Kro
got to admit, this honestly said nothing. I have to blame the interviewer for such poor quality questions and inquiries.
shite
Take a high dose of a psychedelic and you find that this is all malarkey.
Right.... Because ingesting a chemical that is massively impactful on the brain and produces fascinating states of mind totally refutes neuroscience?
+Julian Walker +Julian Walker well it doesn't refute neuroscience; it is an area of neuroscience itself. But it makes you realise that approaches to understanding consciousness via "philosophy" and other means we monkeys have conjured up really hold no water. Take a high dose of a strong psychedelic such as dimethyltryptamine and we shall come back and discuss further.
+Chowzoo i have taken strong doses of: LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, ayahuasca, san pedro cactus, pharmaceutical mescaline, peyote cactus , but not DMT.
i am not sure that psychedelic experiences give any insight into consciousness per se as they do into the rich possibilities of the brain in altered states induced by powerful chemicals which affect how we experience our senses, memories, thought process, bodies, emotions, imagination etc..
personally, in my 20's i thought psychedelics were not only the way to understand psychology, and potentially wake up the world, but were the doorway into a higher dimension of synchronicity, seeing through the illusion of time and accessing the truth about our eternal, transcendent nature...
while a i value all of those intense experiences and what i have learned from them, i no longer interpret them in this naive highly impressionable way any longer!
+Julian Walker Terence Mckenna once said he held DMT in reserve as the "ultimate convincer," so maybe you should give 70mg smoked freebase a burl before closing the door. Nevertheless, I don't think much tangible information can be extracted from these experiences besides an overwhelming conviction that life is utterly mysterious and beyond comprehension. Else I would buy into a neuroscientist saying that the mystery of consciousness can be deciphered in much the same way the mystery of genes as a propagater of life's genetic code was solved. I think the two are categorically different.
+Chowzoo over the years i have shifted to seeing all altered states as evidence that the brain is incredibly complex and that neurochemistry is (as hard as it is to grasp experientially) all powerful in terms of everything about our subjective experience: mood, focus, imagination, thought process, love, pleasure, compulsion, body awareness, ecstatic reverie, hallucination, fantasy, sense of self -indeed consciousness itself, all driven by neurochemistry, all radically impacted by affecting neurochemistry.
somehow, because the altered states and their various phenomena are so impressive subjectively that it is easy to get swept up into thinking that the neurochemical, internal, brain processing changes are indicative of having access to something about reality itself that is now equally different.
but think about it, we have a weakness in this area.... right?
one of the characteristics of psychiatric disturbance is that we cannot be talked out of the conviction that all of the delusional perceptions we have about the world outside of our heads is actually just the product of the illness.
so for me the thought process evolved along those lines. from thinking that LSD (and i took it many times) had shown me something beyond the veil of every day reality, hidden truths of the universe, and the reality of mystical experience with regard to transcendent consciousness and pantheism, to instead seeing these experiences in relation to both religious convictions and psychiatric conditions..... in all 3 cases we become convinced that intense shifts in our interior experience and it's neurochemistry indicate something radical about reality outside of our heads.
in all 3 cases there are of course insights, moments of healing, and perceptions outside of our everyday mode, that are beneficial, valid and intuitively accurate, alongside many, many ideas, beliefs and convictions that are just wrong, but FEEl so right!
to me that has been the area of fascination as i have sought to integrate my psychedelic experiences over the last 20 years..... i am pretty sure sam harris has followed a similar trajectory.
i relate to him as well because we are both long time meditators and students of inner work who draw the same line in the sand with regard to extending the common place but untenable metaphysical claims into the outer world without evidence.