Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

“New word of the week: slopper. Someone who uses ChatGPT to do everything for them.”
– Warren Ellis

‘[E]verything less than the Universe is an abstraction…’

– F. H. #Bradley

(AR, 521)

BBC Radio 4 - Understand, The Trip, 7. Fascination and taboo Psychedelic drugs have a chequered history. How did wonder turn to fear?

I’ll be on BBC Radio 4 on 12th August from 13:45 UK time, on a new series about psychedelics called ‘The Trip’.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

With physicist Prof. em. Bernard Carr discussing consciousness in relation to n-dimensional spacetime. Carr knew John Smythies, whom I recently wrote about in my Outsight article, and who also had a seminal n-dimensional theory influencing Huxley’s Mind-at-Large. www.feedyourhead.blog/p/outsight

This is where Panpsychism went wrong:
– 1967: Paul Edwards: 'A. N. Whitehead, probably the most distinguished champion of panpsychism in the twentieth century'.
– 2016: David Chalmers: 'Perhaps the most important form of panpsychism is constitutive Russellian panpsychism'.

Leibniz: ‘natural machines, that is living bodies, are still machines in their least parts, to infinity. That is the difference between nature and [technology].’

– Monadology, 1714
Pic: Rozalski

Leibniz: ‘our happiness will never consist … in complete joy, in which nothing is left to desire, and which would dull our mind, but must consist in a perpetual progress to new pleasures and new perfections’.
(1714: PoN&GBoR)

Latest reading list

Jacobi: ‘The thing brings just so much to the awareness of consciousness, as consciousness does to the awareness of the thing. I experience that I am, and that something is outside of me, in the same indivisible instant … . No representation, no conclusion mediates this double revelation.’ 1787

Very proud of our Exeter PgCert Psychedelics students who have now graduated 🌟

OUTSIGHT The Greatest Thing that Never Happened in Psychedelia

Outsight:
www.feedyourhead.blog/p/outsight

OUTSIGHT was a bold plan to bring together and give mescaline and/or LSD to fifty to a hundred of the world’s pre-eminent minds, including Einstein, Jung, A. J. Ayer, and Graham Greene. The intention was that “of changing the intellectual climate,” as Osmond put it to Huxley. – link below:

Isaiah Berlin on Aldous Huxley:
‘Perhaps no one since Spinoza has believed so passionately or coherently …in the principle that knowledge alone liberates, not merely knowledge of physics or history or physiology, or psychology, but an altogether wider panorama of possible knowledge…open and occult’

OUTSIGHT The Greatest Thing that Never Happened in Psychedelia

OUTSIGHT: The Greatest Thing that Never Happened in Psychedelia.
My new article:
www.feedyourhead.blog/p/outsight

'[To] be refuted in every century after you have written is the acme of triumph.'

– A. N. Whitehead

Very pleased to welcome and work with neuroscientist Anjali Bhat and psychiatrist, ayahuasca researcher Simon Ruffell as new University of Exeter lecturers, joining our Exeter Psychedelic Centre and Psychology department, teaching on our courses and advancing psychedelic research.

The word ‘epistemic’ is now overused and its use is hereby prohibited.

‘I have sometimes asked myself what would have happened if modern science, instead of … converging on the study of matter, had begun by the consideration of mind—if Kepler, Galileo and Newton, for example, had been psychologists.’
– Bergson, 1913

The Superintelligence Conference (SiC 2025) at the University of Exeter invites researchers, academics, and industry professionals to submit original papers on all aspects of superintelligence. 
sites.google.com/exeter.ac.uk...

‘If you want to know what you think about a topic, write about it. Writing has a way of ruthlessly exposing unclear thoughts and imprecision. This is part of what is lost by ChatGPT, the mistaken belief that the spat out string of words in a reasonable order is the only goal…’

Latest reading list

Esalen Institute, California.
Invited to their Center for Theory and Research week on ‘scientists & mystics’ by Jeff Kripal and co., where I spoke on Bergson and Huxley. Aldous Huxley was an inspiration to, and visitor of, this dream-like place, as was Alan Watts, Maslow, McKenna, and all. Paradise.

Come and study an MSc in 'Psychǝdǝlics: Mind, Medicine, and Culture' at Exeter – now on-campus too. Here's a lovely new video of one of our students, Nina, speaking on her experience:

Pic: ‘Goethe am Fenster’, Tischbein 1786/7

Goethe: “Spinoza does not have to prove the existence of God; existence is God.”
PANTHEISM: One & All –
doi.org/10.1080/0951...

It was recorded – it should appear on the Exeter Egenis YouTube channel soon I believe.

‘Why isn’t there a philosophy of neurology?’ –
Thanks to UCL neuropsychologist Prof. Vaughan Bell @vaughanbell.bsky.social for his fascinating and well-delivered talk (part of the new Egenis Lectures here at Exeter).

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A clinician talking to a patient

Latest papers: Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes seeks to remedy the deficit in understanding of the meaning of Pantheism in clinical and therapeutic spheres in this open access paper doi.org/10.1080/0951...