any question reality poses, whether it’s about how to soothe a child or
mollify a spouse, repair a sentence, accept a compliment, answer the next
question, or make sense of whatever’s happening in the world. With
experience and time, it gets easier to cut to the chase and leap to
conclusions—clichés that imply a kind of agility but that in fact may
signify precisely the opposite: a petrifaction of thought. Think of it as
predictive coding on the scale of life; the priors—and by now I’ve got
millions of them—usually have my back, can be relied on to give me a
decent enough answer, even if it isn’t a particularly fresh or imaginative
one. A flattering term for this regime of good enough predictions is
“wisdom.”
Reading Robin’s paper helped me better understand what I was
looking for when I decided to explore psychedelics: to give my own snow
globe a vigorous shaking, see if I could renovate my everyday mental life
by introducing a greater measure of entropy, and uncertainty, into it.
Getting older might render the world more predictable (in every sense),
yet it also lightens the burden of responsibility, creating a new space for
experiment. Mine had been to see if it wasn’t too late to skip out of some
of the deeper grooves of habit that the been-theres and done-thats of long
experience had inscribed on my mind.
• • •
IN BOTH PHYSICS and information theory, entropy is often associated with
expansion—as in the expansion of a gas when it is heated or freed from
the constraints of a container. As the gas’s molecules diffuse in space, it
becomes harder to predict the location of any given one; the uncertainty
of the system thus increases. In a throwaway line at the end of his entropy
paper, Carhart-Harris reminds us that in the 1960s the psychedelic
experience was usually described as “consciousness-expansion”;
knowingly or not, Timothy Leary and his colleagues had hit on exactly the
right metaphor for the entropic brain. This expansion metaphor also
chimes with Huxley’s reducing valve, implying as it does that
consciousness exists in a state of opening or contraction.
As a matter of experience, a quality as abstract as entropy is almost
impossible for us to perceive, but expansion, perhaps, is not. Judson