Marginalium

A note in the margins

April 18, 2025

Marginalium

My commentary on something from elsewhere on the web.

Psychedelics demolish assumptions:

With their uncanny ability to disrupt our ordinary modes of perception and thinking, psychedelics have long been associated with feelings of insight … One of the most powerful cumulative effects of these disruptions is what I call ‘epistemic loosening’. Epistemic loosening is, in its essence, a quasi-Socratic, temporary destabilisation of deeply held beliefs and assumptions

I talk about the ‘language problem’ all the time. So here is a new way of talking about this kind of intuitive insight, and as a bonus, how psychedelics interact with it. And here are some old articles of mine that talk about the same thing from other angles.


filed under:

Join over 2000 of us. Get the newsletter.