Pseudodelica
Pseudodelica
On the demarcation problem, being wooed by the woo and lying on the cusp of revolution
How should we distinguish science from pseudoscience?
While seemingly easy to answer, the question has flummoxed western philosophers of science dating back all the way to Aristotle, although the first documented use of 'pseudoscience' was made only in the late 18th century to refer to alchemy1. Aptly known as the demarcation problem, Karl Popper described it as the “key to most of the fundamental problems in the philosophy of science”2. The difficulty of the problem has been thought to lie not in what fields constitute pseudoscience (think astrology and homeopathy), but in what criteria to use to make such a distinction, a telling clue that there is likely still much to be worked out.
Unlike your average philosophical quandary whose esotericism confines its real-world implications to the armchair and the lecture hall, the demarcation problem has some weighty high stake implications for individuals and broader society. This has never been clearer in the past year under the throes of the pandemic — from the contested origins of the virus and the brouhaha over the utility of masks to the endorsement of outlandish cures and a burgeoning anti-vax movement — the lines between science and pseudoscience have come under increasing scrutiny and strain, only made worse by the proliferation of runaway echo chambers and filter bubbles that the algorithmic cyberspace we increasingly dwell in is designed to spawn.
Underlying the problem is the fundamental question of “how to determine which beliefs are epistemically warranted”3. Science purports to offer a compelling answer by allowing its practitioners to separate the wheat from the chaff and tell fact from fiction. It has, with little doubt, been tremendously successful at doing so. Yet, while several accounts of science's epistemic framework have been offered, such as Popper's notion of 'falsifiability', no comprehensive definition of what it really is exists. This is because science is heterogenous and constantly evolving and changing, which makes a timeless definition next to impossible. Thus, the boundaries between science and pseudoscience remain embroiled in mist.
No field encapsulates the treacherous nature of the demarcation problem better than the realm of psychedelics. Folk beliefs that run counter to what is considered scientific fact — chakras, telepathy, synchronicity — have a rich history of being associated with psychedelics, exemplified by the intertwined nature of many New Age style beliefs with psychedelic counterculture. This infamous predilection for 'wooey' beliefs amongst psychedelic users prompted Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston to devote an entire section - 'What to do about the woo?' - in their highly influential paper 'REBUS and the Anarchic Brain'. They posit that the 'ontological shock' caused by psychedelics — where the influx of new information and emotion causes one to question everything one once knew — can often lead to an escapist defense that masquerades as awakening and led to bizarre beliefs or poorly understood platitudes in order to explain away uncertainty.
Even more interesting, however, is the entangling of the scientific community investigating psychedelics with ideas and concepts that many would consider defy or subvert the traditional norms of science. Since the 1960's, the phrase 'mystical experience'4, has been common parlance among scientists to refer to the profound peak experience that many people have on high psychedelic doses. 'Psilocybin can occasion mystical-type experiences having substantial and sustained personal meaning and spiritual significance' was the title of the seminal 2006 paper by Hopkins researchers that has been cited over a thousand times and arguably launched the psychedelic renaissance. This paper, and many others that followed it, use the 'Mystical Experience Questionnaire' — a well validated psychometric tool that operationalises the concept of a mystical experience by measuring the participant’s felt sense of unity, timelessness, sacredness, paradoxicality and ineffability.
While the MEQ has proven to possess predictive utility for ascertaining therapeutic outcomes, its usage has been criticised as creating a 'black box' mentality that casts certain aspects of experience as out of bounds for scientific inquiry. In a recent opinion piece for ACS Pharmacology titled 'Moving past mysticism in psychedelic science', Sanders & Zijlmans argue that the "terminology and conceptualisation scientists use in their research should not imply that a psychedelic experience holds a special status of inaccessibility beyond other kinds of experience. To assume this special status a priori is unscientifically pessimistic" [emphasis mine].
A similar argument of 'psychedelic exceptionalism' was made in a different opinion piece by Matthew Johnson, who observed there was an "inclination to believe that the nature of the experiences people have on psychedelics are so sacred or important that the normal rules do not apply, be they the rules governing clinical boundaries, the practice of clinical psychology or medicine, sound philosophy of science, or ethics."
Does the central role of the mystical experience in psychedelic science threaten to bleed into the pseudoscientific? This cuts to the heart of the demarcation problem in psychedelics and reveals the inherent tensions of investigating phenomenal consciousness within the current metaphysical framework of western science. The tension boils down to essentially this - How do we objectively evaluate from the outside what is inherently subjective on the inside?
Of course, investigations into consciousness have long preceded modern psychedelic science and have occupied philosophers across the world for millennia, with Indian and Buddhist philosophers particularly notable for their devising of systematic and extensive methodologies to probe the inner realm of mind. But the study of consciousness was essentially ignored in the West, primarily to protect science from the Church, as famously articulated by Descartes who described the domain of science to explicitly be only about the material world (res extensa), while mental phenomena (res cogitans) was deemed to be under the purview of religion. Thus, the very conceptualisation of western science (which is now global science) made the so-called 'hard problem of consciousness' inevitable.
Recently however, consciousness has emerged back into mainstream cognitive science. One prominent approach to tackle the 'hardness' of consciousness has been neurophenomenology, made concrete in the 1990’s by the prolific cognitive scientist Francisco Varela. Neurophenomenology emphasises the importance of the irreducible nature of conscious experience and suggests complementing extensive third person 'neuro' centric methods with robust first person phenomenological approaches (such as those pioneered by Buddhist meditators). While such an approach is proving to be fruitful in laying out a path forward, the psychedelic experience still poses various challenges. For instance, how does one investigate the phenomenal nature of an experience if it is by nature ineffable?
This article began with a seemingly simple yet unanswered question 'How do we distinguish science from pseudoscience?' and in lieu of any answer, we seem to have been left with even more questions. Yet, rather than cause for despair, the seemingly intractable nature of the demarcation problem, in psychedelics and in general, may potentially be cause for optimism. Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher and author of the influential 1962 work 'The Structure of Scientific Revolution', proposed that it was only in 'normal science', which took place between moments of scientific revolution, that we find the characteristics by which science can be distinguished from other activities5. The misty and mystical terrain of the psychedelic landscape might be an important sign that we are on the cusp of a major scientific revolution.
"To say that there is more to reality than physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it is an acknowledgement that we are nowhere near a theory of everything, and that science will have to expand to accommodate facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain" - Thomas Nagel
Used by the historian James Petitt Andrew in 1796
(Popper 1962, 42) from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/
(Fuller 1985, 331) from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pseudo-science/
A structure of the proto-typical mystical experience was offered by Walter Stace in his 1960 book Mysticism and Philosophy
(Kuhn 1974, 801) https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/thomas-kuhn/