Psychedelic substances can produce powerful, strange conscious experiences that often change people's metaphysical beliefs about reality, including beliefs that seem bizarre from a naturalistic perspective. This paper argues that such altered states can be rationally integrated into a person's epistemic life, meaning that updating metaphysical beliefs based on these experiences does not necessarily involve epistemic irrationality.
Perceptual experiences often feel as though they directly reveal reality, a quality called phenomenal force. Some philosophers claim this force lets perceptions justify beliefs without inference. This article offers an alternative inferentialist view, drawing on Bayesian cognitive science to argue that the sense of reality in conscious vision can be epistemically evaluated based on its rational origins.
Our conscious experience typically includes a subjective sense that time is passing, but some philosophers deny that such a feeling exists. This paper argues that altered temporal experiences during deep meditation and psychedelic states serve as contrast cases that reveal the ordinary experience of time's passage. By examining these acute disturbances of normal temporal experience, the author contends that the elusive feeling of temporal flow can be identified and studied. The argument uses phenomenal contrast to establish that passage phenomenology is a genuine feature of conscious experience, making it a viable subject for philosophical theorizing.