"Moreover, they're presented with the aim of melting the minds of his philosophical peers and the rest of us by suggesting that psychedelics dissolve our selves and make us part of cosmic consciousness, thereby rendering us free in the way the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined it (paraphrased by Smith-Ruiu as an agreeable acquiescence in the way one's own body is moving in the necessary order of things)."
"The lump may change its form, smell, length, breadth, and yet, Descartes supposed, we still claim to know that it is the same piece of wax. The knower can be wrong about all their perceptions involving this wax but not, Descartes argued, that they are thinking: this is the basis of his famous I think therefore I am by means of which the French thinker made us the rational, sciencevenerating beings we have been ever since."
A US-born professor of history and philosophy of science at Université Paris Cité has ingested psychedelics, antidepressants, anxiolytics, antipsychotics, caffeine, and alcohol. Listed substances include psilocybin, LSD, cannabis, quetiapine, Xanax, venlafaxine, Prozac, Lexapro, tricyclics, and daily caffeine since 13 September 1990. The experiences reflect analytic philosophical training in AJ Ayer and Aldous Huxley. Psychedelics are argued to dissolve individual selves into a shared cosmic consciousness, producing a freedom likened to Spinoza's agreeable acquiescence to the necessary order of one's bodily motions. The melting metaphor evokes Descartes' wax thought experiment and imagines flipping it: instead of melting wax, Descartes melts the mind with hallucinogens, challenging Cartesian self-certainty.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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