Predictive Processing, Psychedelic Spirituality, and Neurophenomenology

Abstract

Abstract Psychedelic substances such as psilocybin, LSD, ayahuasca, DMT, or mescaline, when employed with knowledge and skill, can sometimes lead to profoundly meaningful and transformative subjective experiences. This chapter discusses how the predictive processing theory can further our understanding of these deeply meaningful spiritual psychedelic experience. It makes a more specific proposal that the predictive processing theory of psychedelics can contribute to the neurophenomenology research program. The chapter proposes that phenomenological reflection on the psychedelic experience can be used as a method by subjects for providing first-person descriptions of how the different phenomenological structures of their experience are altered during, and after, their acute psychedelic experience. What predictive processing adds is a further mathematical way of knowing consciousness that can serve as a neutral vocabulary for creating generative passages between neurobiology and phenomenology that allows neuroscientists to make sense of how psychedelics perturb the structures of first-person experience in ways that can lead to profoundly meaningful spiritual experiences.