Thanks to Jason Silva (@JasonSilva) for bringing this to my attention. This entire piece is worth reading, but here are a few paragraphs that really jumped out at me:
How does this story explain the therapeutic effects of psychedelics? As we’ve seen, the self-model is an integrated bundle of predictions – and lots of these predictions, built up over a lifetime of experience, can make us deeply stressed and unhappy. A person with social anxiety expects and experiences the world to be hostile and uncontrollable because she feels vulnerable and unable to cope. The self-model that produces these feelings magnifies the adversity of her social world. Similarly, people with depression anticipate and recollect failure and unhappiness, and attribute it to their own inadequacy. Their self-model makes it hard to access positive experiences, and often feeds on itself in a negative downward spiral. Because our brains are endlessly trying to predict what’s next and reduce the likelihood of error, it’s no wonder that our expectations of ourselves tend to be self-fulfilling.
Theoretically we should be able to re-engineer the mechanisms of our self-model, and so change the way we organise and interpret our experience. The problem is that the self-model functions in a way that’s quite similar to the lenses of our eyes. We see with them and through them, but it’s almost impossible to see the lenses themselves, to really appreciate how they affect the signals that reach us, let alone take them off if they are unhelpful. In general, the mind presents us with the finished product in the form of images, not the modelling processes themselves. So too with the self: for better or worse, we feel like unified entities, not complicated and precarious hierarchical models that track and predict our organismic responses to what’s happening.
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The second effect is more subtle. It concerns the way that psychedelics can enlighten us about the processes behind our own subjectivity. When the self falls apart and is subsequently rebuilt, the role of the self-model seems to become visible to its possessor. Yes, this offers a psychological reprieve – but more importantly, it draws attention to the difference between a world seen with and without the self. For an anxious or depressed person, psychedelics make it possible to appreciate the intermediate, representational role of the self-model. Ego dissolution offers vivid experiential proof, not only that things can be different, but that the self that conditions experience is just a heuristic, not an unchangeable, persisting thing.
