Abstract

The common intuition of epistemic benefit of psychedelic experiences is one of the most philosophically interesting effects of these substances. In recent years, academic philosophers have begun to debate the questions it raises: Do psychedelic experiences really have significant epistemic benefits? If so, what kinds of benefits are they, and how can they best be understood?

In this paper, I propose that the relatively new scholarly discussion about learning from psychedelic experience can benefit from interaction with an older scholarly discussion about learning from literary experience. There are significant parallels between the two domains, and people who read great imaginative fiction and people who have transformative psychedelic experiences both report gaining new knowledge of some kind that typically (a) is consistent with naturalism and (b) seems irreducible to new factual or propositional knowledge. 

To illustrate this idea, I apply some ideas about the transformative epistemic potential of literature to the epistemic analysis of psychedelic experience with emphasis on an important commonality: both psychedelic experience and great imaginative literature can facilitate a shift from ‘head’ knowledge to ‘heart’ knowledge. I then explore two common and interrelated mechanisms that may underlie this shift: (i) altered patterns of attention and (ii) the deployment of new or under-used representational styles.

The paper is both an articulation of a specific set of proposals and a call for pursuit of a research agenda. Poetics and aesthetics are already significantly influencing our understanding of psychedelics and are present, if often unnoticed, in psychedelic research. The paper forms part, then, of a broader argument that poetics are crucial for understanding and mapping the phenomenology and epistemology of psychedelic experiences.

About the speaker

Mette Leonard Høeg is a Carlsberg Foundation postdoctoral researcher at the Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, and Academic Visitor at the Oxford Uehiro Centre, University of Oxford. With a background in literature and narrative studies, her work currently focuses on neuroscience, neurophilosophy and psychedelics. Her publications include “The Value of Literature for Consciousness Research and Ethics” in Journal of Consciousness Studies (2023) and Uncertainty and Undecidability in Twentieth Century Literature and Literary Theory (Routledge, 2022). She is co-editor of the Neuroethics special issue Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Consciousness (2024). She has also published extensively on neurophilosophical and -existential issues in various cultural public media and magazines.

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