When the Going Gets Weird, the Weird Turn Pro: Psychedelic Experiences and Radical Empiricism

A Public Lecture by Michael David Silberstein, Professor of Philosophy, Elizabethtown College and UWA Institute of Advanced Studies Visiting Fellow.

We are all aware that psychedelics are back in a big way in popular culture, clinical psychology, and the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness, just to name three. Such experiences and personal transformations raise a variety of both epistemological and metaphysical questions. For example, do such experiences provide us with unique knowledge about the nature of reality and our relationship to it? Given current trends in cognitive science and neuroscience the apparent consensus is that such “mystical” experiences and whatever positive clinical benefit they may have, are fully explicable in terms of their effects on the brain. But this consensus is only justifiable if we assume physicalism or reductive materialism are true. There is an entirely different way to think about reality and our relationship to it, one which puts experience first. The radical empiricism of William James and company is a powerful expression of this tradition in the West and there are much earlier expressions of this view in Asian philosophy and religion. I’ll argue that we ought to take radical empiricism on board and that doing so allows us to, indeed demands that we take psychedelic experiences seriously.

Michael David Silberstein is a Full Professor of Philosophy at Elizabethtown College, a founding member of the Cognitive Science program and permanent Adjunct in the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he is also a faculty member in the Foundations of Physics Program and a Fellow on the Committee for Philosophy and the Sciences. His primary research interests are foundations of physics, foundations of cognitive science and foundations of complexity theory respectively. He is especially interested in how these branches of philosophy and science bear on more general questions of reduction, emergence and explanation. He also loves film and writing about film whenever possible. In short, as a scholar he is an eclectic freak and dangerously unfocused for today’s Academy. Professor Silberstein is equally eclectic as a teacher. His regular course offerings include: philosophy of science, foundations of physics, introduction to cognitive science, philosophy of mind, philosophy and film, and science and values.