Hoffman’s overall project is to explicitly systematise the psychedelic insights, to build a general framework (or paradigm, model etc) which explains why psychedelic drugs have the effect they have and what the metaphysical significance is of that effect. You can view all trip reports through the lense of Hoffman’s cybernetics/determinism/dissociation/metaphor framework, so for example you can translate the core psychedelic insights from your article into the language of that framework:
MichaelVipperman a dit:
“it tweaks our reality engine, making it clear that reality is pliable”
the psychedelic effect loosens the binding intensity of cognitive associations, this reveals the representational nature of mental (including perceptual) contents, the most obvious way this happens, is via the effect that tripping has on visual perception
this is all explained in the ‘bubble of simulation’ article
MichaelVipperman a dit:
“putting us in contact with the machinery by which we construct reality”
psychedelic tripping reveals the *metaperceptive* point of view (transcendental mental dynamics) in which perception steps back/up a level so that it can see the cognitive machinery which underlies ordinary perceptual processes. In the ordinary state of consciousness, this machinery is invisible (it is in the background, merely implicit, taken for granted)
MichaelVipperman a dit:
“I’m wont to argue that, given suitable reflection, any change in perspective, once compared to any other perspective, can provide meaningful insight if we examine the ways in which the two are different: a “psychic triangulation” of sorts, to fitting with the cartographic metaphor for psychedelic use. In other words, seeing how you experience yourself and the world on any substance and comparing that to when you’re sober can deepen your understanding.”
This is a centrally important point, - the psychedelic state and the ordinary state shine torches of perspective onto each other, the enlightened person’s mental world-model (i.e. their personal system of metaphysical assumptions, the ‘nomos’) is the model which fully incorporates the data from both states of consciousness.
so how exactly do you experience yourself in the psychedelic state? And what exactly is the ‘deepening of understanding’ that you get from tripping on drugs and then thinking about the trip afterwards? – A good analogy for tripping is to say that it is like waking up from a dream (Jungianism and Buddhism both employ this analogy in different ways). When you are dreaming, you mistakenly take it for granted that the situation you are in is real, then when you wake up, looking back at the dream you realise that the situation in fact wasn’t real, because you were asleep dreaming, it was merely a dream and therefore not real. So when you are dreaming, you make the naïve mistake of taking the dream to be actual reality, and when you wake up, you realise your mistake and adjust your beliefs accordingly. This comparison between dreaming and waking up can be mapped directly onto the comparison between the ordinary state of consciousness and the intense psychedelic altered state. In the ordinary state of consciousness, the unenlightened mind takes surface appearances to be literally real (in the sense of ‘external to oneself’), then the psychedelic state of consciousness reveals that perceptual content (the mosaic patchwork of surface appearances that are presented to consciousness) are merely mental projections, and therefore unreal (not separate from the subject himself), it does this by making the physical world look blatantly unreal, cartoonlike, wavy, flowing etc.
