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Just a little bit disappointing that the good doctor balked at 'the hard question' James posed: Is there evidence that psychedelics actually make you smarter (paraphrased). The subtitle of his book begins with the phrase "How Entheogens Are Enhancing Cognition". It's too bad he didn't support that statement more directly in the interview... but then I haven't read the book. Then again, there isn't much research to fall back on due to our societies response to the perceived and real dangers of these substances over the past 4 decades or so. The only thing that pops up in my mind is the research on the personality trait of openness with psilocybin (long term increase, but arguably not an enhancement of cognition) and the canadian study (in 2002 I think) that had a very big sample size and found that moderate cannabis use increased IQ by an average of 4 or 5 points (can't recall which). Other side of that coin was that heavy use was correlated with a decrease of 4 or 5 points (can't recall which was which). I think the other thing they found is that if use began past adolescence, the decrements vanished. If I wasn't working I'd have time to check my facts more carefully. So, are there other studies out there that should be mentioned?

well I already had my bad trip on klimax I started throwing up and having seizures and I went to cardiac arrest and I was in a coma for about 3 weeks and now I stutter and am kinda not all there anymore and It really messed me up but because I can't afford to fail a drug test and yes it is very potent there's some people I know that can't smoke it because they get very sick and it is very addictive I have been smoking is for two years now I can't stop but my advice is if you can't hang don't do it

When I found out the Spirit Molecule movie was going to be narrated by Joe Rogan I knew it was going to be a letdown. It's sad that the one movie on psychedelic science on Netflix is one that I have to tell people to steer clear of...

At one point in your discussion you guys wondered whether the psychedelic experience could be considered an "authentic " spiritual experience. What is an "authentic" spiritual experience? and in your paradigm James, is their such a thing given your statement that all human experience can be reduced to wires and circuitry? Your model does not seem to include anything like soul or spirit. Would you agree, or do you have an alternate definition for spirit or spiritual?

Greetings all,
Continuing the ongoing discussion on what Davey called the "hard problem" of consciousness, I'd like to point out the internal significance of these experiences. I just finished reading Hobson's Dream Drug Store, and while his neurobiology was implacable and well articulated, I found his discussion of the inner subjective realm rather shallow and actually quite useless in real life. To lump dreams, psychosis, psychedelics, and the mystical sate as a mere aberration of neuro-chemicals (true enough) and therefore the same, seems quite ignorant. As a psychotherpist I have worked with lots of psychosis, and in no way does their disintegrated mind resemble the psychedelic experience my friends and I have on the weekends, and those don't resemble the mediation master's samadhi. Yes, all these states are non-ordinary, but as Stan Groff painstakingly demonstrates in his seventy years of research, many of these states have healing, transformative, and identy-shifting potentials. Consciousness has depth, it has layers, and reveals aspects of reality that are inaccessible from the "outside." Whether DMT elves are objectively real seems like a pointless question; they have an inner vadility that can be quite constructive if one learns how to work with them; like in dreams. And as all content from the subconscious is symbolic, one must work with the symbols as they resonate with the individual. The inner universe is a participatory and a co-created realm, and therefore has as much significance and meaning as the individual is willing to give it.

Hi James, very interesting podcast, from my personal experiences with psychedelics like DMT I fully agreed with what you said about the DMT experience.

However you didn't talk about the subject of endogenous biosynthesis of DMT in humans and other organisms that much. Lately people say to me that the "DMT: The Spirit molecule"-thesis is true because of new studies etc. Here is a recent study that someone sent me in a discussion:
[link]

I remain skeptical but optimistic, just as psychedelic frontier states it. And after reading PIT and doing own research as well as keeping myself updated with MAPS, I'm really starting to un-subscribe to Risk Strassmans theories more and more. Note that the DMT, Pineal gland, Sleep & Meditation correlations was part of my initial interest in psychedelics. It feels like they are only looking for their own speculations as their anwser.

I really want to hear your thoughts of this study and on this subject.

Thanks!

This podcast really opened up my mind on DMT. Through personal experimentation I came to the conclusion that the dmt experience is the most bizarre 5 min you can ever have and that's it really. Keep an open mind while doing it and you'll be fine.
The only thing I'm sure is that I feel refreshed and clear headed for weeks after a trip.

I've found a simple and fundamental mechanism at work in my own consciousness. Nothing new: the relationship of ying and Yang, affirming and denying, body and mind, indica and sativa even;), or in my preferred terms, the imaginal and somato-sensory faculties. It is the relationship of these, their real contact and comingleing into something like a dialectical synthesis, that is the real motivator behind maybe everything in my life, (maybe not). Its the holy grail and it opens up an experience of real life, although i mostly seek it in mediated form.
So... from your explanation of dmt, I got the sense that it turns both these faculties up to 11, (the imaginal and somatic). This would likely force just such a synthesis. Perhaps this is the reason this substance has such a unique and earthshattering experiential profile for those who use it (I would not be included in that group). Mostly I find that my organism shifts between imaginal and somatic modes. It is only when random experience or intention brings them into a higher level of self modeling (in the nervous system) that I find myself in touch with a living reality inseparable from myself. Maybe dmt creates a crisis in which this shunting from one mode to another is swamped and overwhelmed by the simultaneous intensification of both.
Your thoughts anyone?
I have experienced lucid dreams (briefly) that seem to have this quality of a kind of asymptotic positive feedback occurring in the contact of these two faculties. Also, new study on dying rats published this week finds a remarkable and apparently general increase of neural activity for a brief time at time of death. Maybe this substance does give a felicitous simulation of the last big hurraw of the dying organism.
Happy dreams,
Davey

Hi guys,
I've been catching up on archived podcast episodes since I discovered you this summer. Over the course of my listening, I've had any number of thoughts and potential inputs. Let me first ask: If I comment on past shows, do you receive notice of comments to older 'shows' or just the most recent ones? Further, do you want to bother with comments on older shows? I'd like to know about these things before I make further input...

But while I have you, let me just suggest a few show ideas for the future, (as per James invitations), in no particular order...
* search: Todd Murphy EEG. That should get you to info on an interesting guy who works under Micheal Persinger, the guy at Laurentian University who has invented the "God Helmet". This guy straddles the reductive and 'grokking' approaches that you two so well personify.

* This one's more for Jake: There's no example of the western gnostic tradition more interesting to me than what is called "The Gurdjieff Work". I wish I could tell you who to talk to there. I was involved for a few years and know a bunch of people, but I'd guess many would balk at involvement with a pro-psychedelic show. A guy I've never met named Ravi Ravindra has a reputation for being open to people from divergent backgrounds... My best contact is a no nonsense lady I respect who lives in Seattle.

* I think James does the psychonauts who tune in a real service by slicing mercilessly with Occam's Razor at every opportunity in asserting the lack of a compelling reason to posit or believe in a separate and internally coherent, self supporting and separate spiritual reality. But I feel a deeper issue has been left unaddressed in all this. It's what the philosopher of consciousness David Chalmers calls "The hard problem", or more endearingly, "The zombie question". That is: many of the features of the qualia of experience are explicable or at least approachable through mechanistic models, however, the bare fact of our presence to these phenomena can not be reductively explained. There's a show in there somewhere.

* Again for Jake: The most interesting writing I've encountered in the christian tradition (by far) is that of Bernadette Roberts. Although again, I'd be very surprised if she was interested in an interview. She was a Carmelite Nun. In any case, please read her if you haven't already. I predict you will be glad you did. Another interesting perspective on christianity that I am personally convinced is true is presented in "The Jesus Mysteries" by Freke and Gandy. Freke is out to make a buck as a guru type and author, so he'd be more likely to want to talk to you about their theory that Jesus never existed but was more of the nature of an instructive character ala Krishna.

Finally, the most interesting ideas I've encountered relating consciousness and quantum mechanics were left out of your show on that subject. I'd steer you to look into Stewart Hoffman and Henry Stapp. They don't agree with eachother, but both have theories that tie quantum effects to neuroscience in a way that doesn't invoke much of the handwaving and conflation that James was at lengths to dismiss.

There's much more I could run on about but...

I've overextended your attention already for a first message...
Make the most of your day! And thanks for all you are doing.
I'm going to be reading PIT after I finish something else I'm working on now. Really looking forward to that.
Davey

Hey Predrag, great comments. I agree with everything you say. Our mathematical models of reality are crude but accurate. This is a limitation of mathematics, which strives to describe phenomena with the most efficient set of symbols for the general case. Undoubtedly the stuff of reality is far more complex and mysterious than the math can model, but the math is still an accurate representation of reality. Even though our models may become more precise, reality will always stay the same, which means...

No matter how refined our math models become, no matter how deep we dive into micro-tubules or whatever, consciousness will still remain physical, will conform to the known laws of physics, and organic nonlocal consciousness will still not exist. For instance, just because Einstein refined Newton's physical model of Gravity, Gravity remained exactly the same. No matter how far we reduce the physical nature of consciousness through neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and so on, consciousness will always remain exactly the same in form and function. No matter how far our understanding progresses, we cannot magically will "nonlocal consciousness" into a real thing, it breaks all those laws of physics, and new laws refine old laws, they do not reverse them.

Feynman diagrams of particle interactions are numerous. One series of diagrams includes many, many possible interactions when studying a single phenomenon. It is as if the more possibilities you depict and calculate, the more accurate the scheme is. Perhaps someday we won't use this method/truth. For example, an algorithm that calculates the decimals of number PI made of infinitely many small additions to a particular sum that equals pi, represents an infinitely slow way to calculate PI. There are methods that shoot out millions of decimals right away.

Some possible interactions in Feynman diagrams are backwards in time. The particles that go backward turned out to be antiparticles of common particles in the forward-moving time frame. Has the evidence for time-reverse been evaded then? No. Its different.

There are interactions - lets call them reactions, because they are like chemical reactions at the small scale - reactions that involve several particles. These can be reversed. For example, a+b -> c+d AND BACKWARDS too, which means that nature does not care about the arrow of time at the small scale. Physicists did not discover that the time arrow exists: the answer is not in those diagrams, but maybe its in the world of complexity at large scales where the time arrow seems to exist .

The last issue in this small text window, is the quantum consciousness. I do not know anything special about this topic and can only refer to Stuart Hameroff's website with the same name. This is a legitimate research in the area of biology, with emphasis on any interesting properties of biomolecules that might be discovered or have been discovered. Also, it covers a bit of philosophy of mind, which I haven't read.

There is a continuous stream of discoveries about biological cells. That is good to keep in mind as it may stop the resentment that people feel over old conflicting topics. For example, even water has unknown properties, so recently new findings have been added to how water molecules sort themselves in space under the influence of light.

At DoseNation, you perhaps heard about protein receptors and their agonists and how molecules fit into molecules.

The research in physics is much worse than this. The physics of materials studies everything through the mathematics of quantum mechanics, which has awful outlook frequently. There is a strong necessity to choose only some properties, study them and present them in a beautiful way.

Hameroff mentions microtubules, tubes made of tubulin proteins that form the skeleton of cells. They are interesting tiny conductors that assemble and disassemble themselves and participate in many basic processes in the cell. There have been attempts to count the events that are taking place during the neuronal signal conduction for example, and (give-or-take) find the exact solution to the consciousness.

One or more neurons in my brain represent my mother in my memory. Its activity is perhaps just an event (flip of a bit) or just an electric signal that exists in the context of many more surrounding neurons. The quantum events depend from what is inside the neuron and listing the interactions on the small scale. I wouldn't be afraid to go inside: the reasonable thing is to assume that the radius of the given quantum law is rather small in scale. Some might sense with their radar that one cannot expand these notions to macroscale everyday events, but the composition of matter is peculiar and it may show interesting macroscale patterns because of that composition.

That about frames it.

benzyme

You obviously never listened to Kid A/to a lesser extent Ok Computer

why do you think we watch all of these cop shows? the cops breaking the law to enforce the law because the guy is always guilty. I.E. it's ok to break into his home he's guilty,we saw him commit the crime in prime time. so it's ok that the cop ignores the Constitution. That's been on your screen for years.

Electron (1) is one of the most important particles. Electrons are responsible for electricity, chemical reactions/bonds, molecules, and biology. The electromagnetic interaction - the exchange of photons (2) - mediates their mutual interaction. The two ingredients (1, 2) seem to explain the largest variety of natural phenomena that we deal with in everyday life. Of course, there are conglomerates called atoms and their different sizes which compose different molecules and materials. Some phenomena are about the atomic nucleus (see nuclear physics). If you understand this, you graduated classical physics, chemistry and perhaps biology all at once!

Electron is both a particle and a wave. Some experiments demonstrate one property more than another. The double slit experiment does not take sides.

If we bombard two tight, microscopic slits (holes) with single, sparse electrons, flying at random times, the accumulated pattern of dots on a film behind the slit, will show that the beam of electrons is similar to a ray of light in that it is a wave. The wave-like property is peculiar, because it stretches across the dimensions of time and space (or perhaps, across the dimensions of comprehension).

Each single electron participates in the creation of the cumulative pattern on film over time. We explain the pattern by using a model of interaction of two simultaneous, coincidental, neighboring waves emitted from the two slits on the other side of the obstacle, in the direction of the film. Its like a ray of light that splits in half, and then on the other side, two rays interact with each other. The explanation of interaction is geometric - it is the interference of waves.

So, the sparse electrons who do not know of one another, who do not travel like two parallel waves, possess statistical nature over time and space - their properties portray a simple, or understandable bigger picture that is mathematical, statistical, even familiar, yet beyond belief.

We are filling in the gaps as we speak by assuming the existence of waves, interactions, the whole geometry of the phenomenon. These mathematical inventions are counter intuitive and the brain is saying that they do not fit into the conventional view on the world, but there is evidence for the understanding that is beyond belief.

These electrons belong to a "statistical picture". The meaning of difficulty here is that a typical scientist will say that this picture is undocumented, unproven, despite the strange accuracy of quantum electrodynamics and other evidence. In other words, people feel that too much had to be constructed in our minds against the stream of everyday logic, even though there is evidence that the construct (theory) works (it makes amazing predictions). So far so good, you graduated again, but wait patiently until some other time - there is stuff that this theory did not predict or for which it hasn't been used yet to our benefit.

New findings in the world of complexity are beyond the computational power of old mathematical model formulated for the world of elementary particles.

Let us return to the topic. Other experiments show the "bigger picture" further. For example, a particle could go through a barrier even though it does not possess enough energy for such penetration. Such particle is a part of a statistical spectrum of a set of bombarding particles. The spectrum of energies exists - the nature itself implies it. We observe the evidence, but we do not allow ourselves to acknowledge that we formed this picture of nature in an unconventional way. Again, it feels as though the elements are part of a whole, but the whole is not a conventional object we can understand.

When we form the picture in our minds about the nature, we include all different possible interactions (events) at the same time. Even events that move backward and forward in time. This math accomplished success in physics.

Excuse my contradictions here - I do believe that you understand me and this whole ordeal in physics. I am merely wondering, do you feel the wonder?

Experiments must be the food of gods, because they feel so right. They are thrilling, but it is difficult to obtain solid articles on this topic, because the researchers and journalists are frequently losing their wit even when they are writing for peer-reviewed journals.

People who are not writing for peer-reviewed journals may accomplish something better when they try to write about these things.

A layperson might transform himself or herself along the way and lose the awareness of what he or she is talking about at all and start printing out the content of one's own philosophical, artistic or hallucinating mind and reveal its peculiarities. It is is as if the writing creates sufficient high and generates patterns on its own. The lack of distinction brings entertaining synesthesia of diagrams of different kinds.

Men of reason are worried about both issues. (I may leave both unnamed, because they don't have their distinct elementary particles, it seems. :-)

Lets us return only to the first issue. People worry that when somebody reports on the "entanglement" for instance, the whole news is contained entirely in the interpretation or in the sensationalism, that there isn't any real connection between distant particles that were correlated in some important way in some point of time.

We are also challenged to think about these things in new, creative ways, to show purpose of thought in science, or to try to win the audience. One should try to win the audience, because we need to guide each other across the barrier of conventional intelligence.

Liberal discussion looks like the only consolation in the world of peer-reviewed science, popular science and mysticism.

Can i drink non alcoholic beer while on the scram?

This episode makes me want to listen to the other random episodes that where totally uninteresting

Neural spikes are what someone from the outside would objectively see, but in no way are those spikes the same thing as the adventure you had last night in your dreams, or in the DMTverse that explodes in front off you with a single puff. There is direct correlation, yes, but one you explore with monitors, the other with your own inner awareness. All I am saying is that you cannot reduce one realm to the other. The subjective can be explored in its own terms (mysticism, shamanism, psychotherapy), just as the objective must be explored in its own terms (empirical science). To say its all consciousness (Idealism) is to collapse the universe into the purely subjective side, the same way that to say its all material is to collapse the universe into purely material surfaces without inner depth (Wilber calls it flatland). I personally take the nondual stance: there is an objective, empirical universe, but there is also an interior realm of Consciousness that is self-evident with some basic introspection. And those two sides are part of the One Universal coin.

Interesting point James, however, computer language IS composed of 0 and 1; rhythm exists as a function of sound/silence; there is existence and there is non-existence, open /close, yin/yang; and there is a mind full of thoughts and there is quiet mind (Samadhi). But you are right, philosophy is nothing more then thoughts chasing themselves into endless rationalizations. What I am interested is in that deepest of states beyond thoughts and ideas. A state that seems to correlate with Zero-point, beyond space-time-ego. It could be a delusion of my own thinking mind, but that does not matter when I TRANSCEND my thinking mind. And all that is left when I transcend my limited thoughts is the quiet Void, still, motionless, and self-radiant. It has no need for proof, justification, rationalization, or theory. It simply IS, in the depths of what I call my consciousness.

Hi James, thanks for engaging in this most interesting discussion. My statements about Consciousness have nothing to do with Gurus or old-time mystics; they are based on direct, personal exploration of my own Consciousness. I am my own Guru.The old Gurus have left interesting maps of Consciousness, garbed of course in cultural baggage, but maps of deep Consciousness nonetheless. I have no interest in theory, philosophy, or belief systems; my interest lies in exploring that which is Aware in me. And as I dive deep within through various techniques, I notice that Consciousness has depth, it has layers and levels, and that it ultimately slips into something that appears to be beyond my little me. I don't have a lab to splice brains open, but I do keep up with the latest finding in neuroscience, and trust the empirical evidence derived therein. But the inner sense of Being contains secretes and revelations about how my reality is constructed that goes way beyond what my brain surgeon can describe. And as a psychotherapist I am in constant communication with various neuroscientist in order to coordinate services for individuals. Neuroscience studies the brain; mysticism studies consciousness. To say that it doesn't exist is to deny your own existence and your felt presence in that existence. Theories and beliefs will always be limited; I am interested in the Witness behind whatever theory or belief is being entertained. You are right, we can ramp up the brain and its thoughts (stimulants), slow it down and shut it off (alcohol/opiates) or fully distort its input/output (psychedelics), but my interest is in Who is watching? What is that Awareness in which in/out, up/down occurs? When I rest in this Awareness, as in Samadhi, the inner "I" seems to transcend my individuality and merge into what seems like a timeless Void. There I experience freedom and bliss. Is this a distortion of my brain? Is it an illusion produced by my temporal lobe for some unknown reason? Maybe, and I am open to this possibility, but the evidence from my own inner studies seem to suggest a much deeper story.

And no, my model does not "explain" where the universe came from, but it is not meant to, and I submit that any assumption about where the universe came from are inherently incomplete and wrong, so it is worthless debate. My model explains where *consciousness* came from, which is the question at hand. This model allows near-perfect understanding of consciousness within the boundaries of this universe.