Psychedelia, AI and the Expanding Boundaries of Mind

From the psychedelic exploration of consciousness to the relational exploration of cognition with AI.

Psychedelia, AI and the Expanding Boundaries of Mind

The psychedelic experimentation associated with the 1960s cannot easily be separated from what became known, however loosely, as the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Psychedelic substances were only one element of a much larger cultural movement, but they contributed to a remarkable proposition entering popular consciousness: perhaps the ordinary state of mind through which we conduct everyday life represents only a small part of what the human psyche is capable of experiencing.

We are not proposing a return to the chemically fuelled experimentation of the psychedelic sixties. Nor are we suggesting that engaging with generative AI produces anything equivalent to a psychedelic experience.

But there is a parallel worth exploring.

Psychedelia disrupted the assumed boundaries of consciousness. Relational engagement with AI may be disrupting the assumed boundaries of cognition.

The distinction matters, although the boundary between consciousness and cognition is itself far from straightforward. By consciousness here, we mean something like the felt experience of being — awareness, perception, presence and the experience of having a mind. Cognition is somewhat easier to describe functionally: thinking, remembering, associating, reasoning, imagining, interpreting and making meaning.

Yet these territories overlap. Our thinking affects our experience of consciousness, while changes in consciousness alter what and how we think. Imagination belongs somehow to both. So does attention. So perhaps we should resist drawing too confident a line between them.

What interests us is the different direction from which the disruption arrives.

The psychedelic experience could radically alter the individual's experience from within. Familiar boundaries between self and world, conscious and unconscious, individual and collective could become less certain. Associations appeared where none had previously been noticed. Established categories loosened. Sometimes people returned with profound insights; sometimes with questionable ones. Sometimes the experience was psychologically damaging.

But the larger cultural consequence extended beyond those taking the substances. A possibility had entered society: the inherited model of the human mind might describe less of the territory than we had assumed.

Something strangely analogous may be happening now.

A person enters sustained relational engagement with AI carrying an idea that is not yet fully formed. They attempt to express it. The AI responds, perhaps making a connection the person had not considered. The person recognises something in that response, rejects another part, changes direction, remembers something, introduces it, and receives another response.

The thought moves.

More importantly, the person moves with it.

This is not altered consciousness in the psychedelic sense. We remain sitting at the desk, walking with the phone, drinking coffee, attending to ordinary reality. Yet something has happened to the possibility-space within which cognition is occurring. An initially private movement of mind has entered an external responsive system and returned transformed. That transformation becomes material for another internal movement, which is externalised again.

Inner becomes outer. Outer returns inward. Around it goes.

The psychedelics of the 1960s altered consciousness from within; relational AI may be altering our understanding of cognition through what happens between.

And perhaps, eventually, that neat sentence will prove inadequate too. If sustained changes in cognition alter our experience of ourselves, then the consequences may reach into consciousness. If our understanding of where thinking happens changes, our understanding of who or what the thinker is may change with it.

This is where the parallel with the Age of Aquarius becomes most interesting.

The cultural significance of psychedelia was not simply that some people experienced unusual states after ingesting particular chemicals. It helped destabilise a prevailing model of the human being. It participated in a much larger cultural opening towards meditation, Eastern philosophy, depth psychology, ecological awareness and experimentation with different ways of living.

AI may be participating in another such opening.

Once again, this does not mean everything emerging from the opening is wise. AI can generate nonsense as readily as psychedelia could generate illusion. Expanded possibility is not synonymous with expanded understanding. Discernment remains essential.

But once again an unfamiliar agent has entered human psychological and cultural life.

And once again we find ourselves asking whether the mind might be larger than the model of mind we inherited.

The question of the psychedelic era might therefore be expressed as: What else might consciousness be capable of?

The question emerging within the Age of Distributed Cognition is slightly different: What else might cognition become capable of when we no longer imagine it as occurring entirely within one mind?

We do not yet know the answer.

We are among the first generations able to live inside the question.