The map is not the territory. The modelled brain is not consciousness. ‘This’ – the ineffable quality of subjective experience – is consciousness. No scientific description can ever reach it. The psychedelic experience allows us to get behind our models, and provides us with a special, unitary knowledge of consciousness; shedding new light on the infamous hard problem, writes Jussi Jylkkä.

This, my experience right now, is what it feels like to be alive. But this cannot be inferred from science alone. David Chalmers calls this the “hard problem” of consciousness. Psychedelic experience can shed light on the problem, as it demonstrates how I know my consciousness in a non-conceptual and non-reflective way through being it. I call such knowledge “unitary”, as it is not about anything. It is simply the brute happening of a process: this. In contrast to unitary knowledge, scientific models and observations only give relational knowledge that is about something distinct. Thus, psychedelic experience shows that consciousness is part of the concrete reality that science merely models. This is what science models as “physical”.

The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of why it is that any physical processes feel like anything ‘from the inside’. A closely related problem is the epistemic gap, or why it is impossible to infer from science what experiences feel like, or that subjective consciousness exists at all. Psychedelics can shed light on these problems through demonstrating a categorical difference between how I know my own consciousness, and what type of knowledge science gives.

Psychedelic experience shows that consciousness is part of the concrete reality that science merely models.