An Interdisciplinary Study of the Sense of Reality in Hallucinogenic Experiences

My doctoral research deals with what philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists call the sense of reality. How does one’s mind identify what is real and what is not real? More specifically, how is it possible that, during hallucinatory episodes, some subjects come to have the sense that what they are experiencing is real? In order to investigate these questions and similar ones, I have decided to focus on a very specific kind of hallucinatory experiences, namely on psychedelicsinduced experiences. Theoretically speaking, these hallucinogenic experiences are quite challenging: on the one hand, subjects report that under the effects of psychedelics, meta-awareness, lucidity or insight is still preserved – in this sense, subjects know that what they are experiencing is not reality but something induced by a chemical substance; yet, on the other hand, subjects insist that the “other world” they can readily distinguish from the “ordinary world”, is still in some sense real – and, some of them go as far as saying that it is even more real than ordinary reality. How is it possible that psychonauts have such an ambivalent sense of reality? Solving such a knotty question requires one to resort to distinct disciplines. This is why, in my work, I draw upon pharmaco-chemical, neurobiological, psychological and anthropological data. I am especially interested in studying how culture (i.e., cultural models, symbolism, rituals, low-level conditioning, etc.) informs hallucinogenic experiences. My general claim is that this empirically-grounded approach of the sense of reality can decisively adjudicate classical philosophical questions related to the nature of hallucination.