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The metaphysics of the psychedelic experience: Anil Seth, Christof Koch, and Bernardo Kastrup debate
The OPEN Foundation and the Essentia Foundation together hosted a panel debate on metaphysics at the latest Interdisciplinary Conference on Psychedelic Research (ICPR26), Europe’s leading scientific conference dedicated to psychedelic science, therapy, ethics, and policy. During this discussion, Anil Seth, Bernardo Kastrup and Christof Koch discuss the latest insights from psychedelic research, as well as their different viewpoints on the epistemic value of psychedelic experiences and what metaphysics these experiences point to.
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The question of reality has proceeded uninterrupted with a search “out there,” outside ourselves, but must progress to a search inward towards awareness, argues Adedire. All honest and rigorous inquiries into the nature of reality will ultimately come to the realization that fundamental Nature is conjoined with the phenomenon of consciousness, he concludes in this short and powerful essay. Yet, here, at the inflection point of a new age of contemplation, we find ourselves burdened by the walking-dead ontology of physicalism.
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Today we are releasing something that has been cooking in the background for a while: our AI-powered Essentia App!
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Swami Sarvapriyananda is one of the world’s leading teachers of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual philosophical tradition rooted in Hinduism, which places rational inquiry and self-investigation at its core. As head of the Vedanta Society of New York, he is renowned for his clear and rigorous presentations of Advaita Vedanta, and for showing how its insights resonate with modern developments in analytic philosophy, neuroscience, and physics. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Swami Sarvapriyananda explores the metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta, the meaning of the great saying “That Thou Art” (Tat Tvam Asi), how Advaita differs from other schools of Hinduism and Buddhism, and why it offers a unique perspective on the problem of suffering.
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A clinical neuropsychologist tells us how her own ego-dissolution experience led her to a new perspective on science, the ‘soul,’ and life itself. Psychology and spirituality are not opposing paths, she realized, but complementary languages describing the same reality: consciousness.
Do we really live in a fundamentally physical universe? Are we essentially material beings? Essentia Foundation is a new force in the cultural dialogue about the nature of reality. Find out more about us.
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A clinical neuropsychologist tells us how her own ego-dissolution experience led her to a new perspective on science, the ‘soul,’ and life itself. Psychology and spirituality are not opposing paths, she realized, but complementary languages describing the same reality: consciousness.
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The search for authenticity fails because we conduct it in the wrong place: thought itself. The epistemic gap—the inability of concepts to capture experiential reality—produces the persistent sense that something fundamental about existence is amiss, a tension that underlies much existential questioning. When representations are mistaken for reality, three pervasive forms of suffering follow: fear of death, violence, and pride. Each dissolves when the error is recognized. But recognition alone fades; only sustained disengagement from conceptual identification makes the insight a lived experience, argues Steven Pashko.
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Dr. Currie argues that framing the effectiveness of shamanic medicine in terms of placebo effects alone does not do justice to the sophistication of shamanic practice. The latter, she maintains, is based on a complex, multi-tiered metaphysics whereby cause and effect relations beyond the visible material world are deliberately exploited by the shaman.
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In this rigorous and absolutely clear essay, which might as well have been published in an academic journal, Haswell shows that Eliminativism—the notion that the qualities of experience don’t really exist—contradicts not only the most obvious pre-theoretical facts of nature, it also contradicts itself in a manner that cannot be remedied.
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Swami Sarvapriyananda is one of the world’s leading teachers of Advaita Vedanta, the non-dual philosophical tradition rooted in Hinduism, which places rational inquiry and self-investigation at its core. As head of the Vedanta Society of New York, he is renowned for his clear and rigorous presentations of Advaita Vedanta, and for showing how its insights resonate with modern developments in analytic philosophy, neuroscience, and physics. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Swami Sarvapriyananda explores the metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta, the meaning of the great saying “That Thou Art” (Tat Tvam Asi), how Advaita differs from other schools of Hinduism and Buddhism, and why it offers a unique perspective on the problem of suffering.
Seeing
Videos
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Nora Bateson is a filmmaker, author and director of the Bateson Institute. In this conversation, Hans Busstra talks to Nora about her work and that of her father Gregory Bateson, who was one of the founding fathers of cybernetics. Bateson’s notion of ‘double bind,’ for instance, helps to see how solutions we design on one level of a system (say, the use of pesticides to solve food shortage) directly form an existential threat on a different level (destruction of soil microbiome).
Expanding on her father’s work, Nora Bateson introduced the concept of ‘warm data’: information about the interrelationships within a complex system, which are contextual, relational, and multi-perspectival. And she argues that to avoid double binds we need to work with warm data, which is about meaning, instead of trusting solutions that come out of the syntactic reasoning of AIs.
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Dr. Kelvin McQueen, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Chapman University, examines the leading quantum-consciousness theories and the unresolved questions that still hinder them all: what exactly is collapse, and what counts as a measurement? Building on his work with David Chalmers, McQueen argues that the neuroscience of Integrated Information Theory (IIT), with it’s definition of consciousness as intrinsic causal integration (quantified by Φ), offers a novel way forward.
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What if you are a pixel in a higher-level consciousness navigating through extra dimensions of time? Meet the ‘Nested Observer Window Model’ of Jonathan Schooler, PhD, who is Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara, Director of UCSB’s Center for Mindfulness and Human Potential, and Acting Director of the Sage Center for the Study of the Mind. In this video, Hans Busstra interviewed Schooler on his Nested Observer Window Model and how we need to extend physics to account for consciousness.
From the archives
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This essay proposes association as a fundamental principle uniting physics, biology, and mind. Rather than treating causation as either upward (from parts to wholes) or downward (from wholes to parts), Jarosek suggests that coherence emerges through the relational act of association itself. From Carlo Rovelli’s relational quantum mechanics, where particles acquire properties only in interaction, to Michael Levin’s discoveries of cellular intelligence, to Charles Sanders Peirce’s triadic semiotics, evidence converges on association as irreducible. It can be seen as the connective tissue of reality: the principle by which potential becomes form, and form becomes meaning.
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David Lloyd discusses the intriguing correspondences and isomorphisms between physical laws—such as electromagnetism and gravity—and the phenomenal flow of mentation. He sees in them more than mere poetic analogy, but a hint pointing to the mental nature and structure of reality.
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In 2018, Professor Etzel Cardeña, PhD, published a landmark review paper surveying thousands of psi studies in “American Psychologist,” one of psychology’s most respected journals. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Cardeña explains his main findings and why a dismissal of psi without looking at the data is “as unscientific as you can get.” Cardeña’s conclusion is that the cumulative evidence for psi phenomena is so strong that outright dismissal is no longer scientifically justified.
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