Ontological Failure
Happy New Year! This article by computer scientist Simon Odense first appeared in Psychedelic Press XXXI (still a handful of ltd. edition print copies left here). Also, please consider a paid subscription to our Substack for access to all our posts, the ability to comment, and to help support psychedelic writing:
‘Across this big room, the wall started to crinkle into an accordion-like design or almost like a book closing its pages. The people kept chatting, and at the same time, somehow, closing the wall into an accordion rainbow dimension. Suddenly I was turned into the cover of the accordion book as it slowly closed, lowering to the ground. I continued unfolding forward as my face made contact with the ground.’ - bleedin cedar[i]
Such statements are not unusual in reports of breakthrough experience; they are practically cliché in salvia trip reports. Yet to those uninitiated in intense psychedelic experiences, they remain utterly baffling. Such an obviously illogical belief seems incomprehensible. How could anyone think that they are an inanimate object?
Upon hearing reports of these phenomena, the response from people who have not themselves experienced them is usually a mixture of amazement and vague disbelief. Relating similar experiences, such as believing that you are dead[ii], results in the same incredulity. There is something particularly jarring about these kinds of mental states that makes them fascinating. These experiences are unlike the delusions brought on by deliriants, which, although significantly impacting your perception of the world, are still relatable enough to everyday thinking as to be understandable by those who have not personally experienced them. Common experiences found in deliriant trip reports involve things such as smoking phantom cigarettes or speaking to people who aren’t there. While these experiences are strange, hallucinations remain well in the reach of sober imagination. Your senses are merely giving you incorrect information and the current time and place you occupy are often forgotten. A change in one’s understanding of the nature of their own identity, on the other hand, represents a more fundamental shift in the cognitive framework that poses difficult questions about the perceptual construction of reality itself.
The key to understanding how one can believe that they have become an object—while somehow missing the obvious contradiction they should therefore be incapable of belief—is to understand that it is not merely this specific belief that has changed, but the entire cognitive process used to make sense of concepts, such as thinking vs. non-thinking and alive vs. dead. Although this might seem obvious to the experienced psychonaut, the imprecision of our language often forces us to reduce an ineffable experience to a simple (and perhaps not entirely accurate) statement. In this case, however, after reflecting on the nature of several intense dissociative experiences as well as other psychedelic experiences, I have come to the conclusion that this and related phenomena may be understood as a shifting of our categorical understanding of the world rather than a singular aberration in our mental calculus. What I mean by this, is that, more so than our perception of ourselves or any one object, it is the very notions of agency and animation that are affected. By digging into the minutiae of how we form mental categories for things I hope to provide a plausible account of how mental frameworks can be altered in such a way as to facilitate experiences of being dead, and of inanimate objects being alive.
Perceptual/Conceptual Category of Agency
In order to examine how animate and inanimate objects can be confused in extreme psychedelic states, we will have to develop a working ontological conception of agency. Roughly speaking, agency is the capacity for intentional action. In our everyday perception of the world, a dog running to fetch a ball is an intentional act resulting from the dog’s mental state, whereas a rock rolling down a hill is an event solely determined by outside forces. Animate objects are those capable of agency, while inanimate objects are those that are not. The notion of agency is often associated with mental representations. Generally, people view agency as a property of things capable of forming mental representations. The reason a rock does not have agency, we assume, is because it has no internal mental experience. The rock is incapable of representing the world around it with any sort of mental model and thus is incapable of acting with intention. The correlation between mental representation and agency are so closely linked that the perception of agency often acts as a proxy for the existence of mental representations. The distinction between the two concepts is made clear by simple organisms, such as bacteria, which appear to act intentionally according to a set of goals despite, as most people believe, having no conscious experience. It is possible to view objects as if they possess agency in a given context even when, deep down, we believe that their actions can be explained by a complex interaction of natural forces.
Whether or not mental representation is a necessary (or, for that matter, sufficient) condition for true agency is a deep metaphysical question that is beyond the scope of this discussion. Luckily, we are not interested in the fundamental nature of agency, but rather the perception of agency. As adults, agency is one of the key factors we use to categorize objects. Indeed, our ability to distinguish an agent from a non-agent is so second-nature to us that it is tempting to think of agency as a fundamental ontological category of objects. The categorization of things based on what are perceived as fundamental properties has a long history in metaphysics going back to Aristotle.[iii] The existence of an objective scheme by which things can be categorized is doubtful; rather, the construction of ontological categories is better understood as a conceptual grouping of things that is perceived to be fundamental according to the thought, experience, and language of the one defining the categories.[iv]
In order to make these notions more precise, we will sketch the notion of a model, a kind, and an attribute. According to Bunge, 1977, the world is made up of things.[v] Things can be atomic, or made up of other things through various kinds of association. Things have properties. These properties may be fundamental in the sense that they apply to every constituent part of a thing or emergent if they do not. We do not directly observe things and their properties, but experience them through a model which identifies things according to their attributes relative to a certain frame of reference. In this formulation, attributes differ from properties in that properties are fundamental, whereas attributes are assigned to things by a given model. A kind, relative to a model, is a collection of things that all share a certain set of common attributes. Some attributes may always be correlated, for example, biological organisms always have DNA. A categorization scheme is merely a choice of attributes that group kinds in ways that are seen as somehow fundamental.
With these concepts sorted out, we can think of agency as an attribute of a kind in a specific mental model. Certain kinds of objects have the attribute of agency and certain kinds of objects do not. We no longer have to concern ourselves with the exact nature of agency or whether or not it is correct for a person to attribute agency to any specific object in their personal mental inventory of things. Instead we can examine the flexibility of agency as a conceptual category. The most immediate question is whether or not agency is an innate conceptual category or one that is learned. There is evidence in psychology and cognitive science that the concept of agency is innate for humans and even other primates.[vi] Agency is identified as one of the four concepts of ‘core cognition’. Susan Carey argues that core cognition is a separate conceptual structure from perceptual and conceptual representations.[vii],[viii]
Here it is again worth bringing up the distinction between consciousness and agency. Although the two concepts are essentially equivalent in our minds, infants are thought to lack self-awareness, as evidenced by their failure to pass the mirror test,[ix] and thus are incapable of having a theory of mind until later in their development. Agency in the absence of understanding consciousness reduces mostly to goal-directed action, and it is through this lens that infants likely view the distinction between agents and non-agents. Primates might have an innate capacity to distinguish agents from non-agents, but how does this translate to categorization? Does early childhood development amount to filling in a set of predetermined ontological categories with things that we encounter during our lives? Evidence suggests that this is not the case, but that our system of ontological categorization changes as we gain experience with the outside world. For example, when presented with toys that transgress typical ontological categories, such as cows with wheels or vehicles with legs, infants under 14 months of age generally categorize objects based on wheels and legs[x] instead of living and non-living, a system that has clearly shifted by the time we reach adulthood. In this experiment, it would appear that perceptual information is being used to categorize things rather than conceptual attributes such as agency.
Although categorization schemes have sometimes been understood as a single cognitive process, it has been argued that there is a distinction between conceptual and perceptual categorization.[xi] The existence of distinct mental processes that interpret the same phenomenon can possibly explain states of cognitive dissonance. As we will discuss in the next section, it is possible to feel that something is a certain way even while your conscious thoughts tell you otherwise. This has been observed in the ability of children aged 3–4 to correctly reason about theory of mind tasks. While they have difficulty with explicit theory of mind tasks that involve verbal reasoning, they are able to correctly interpret implicit theory of mind tasks. Recent evidence has identified distinct brain regions responsible for perception based on implicit theory of mind and verbal explicit theory of mind.[xii]
Together this suggests that infants have the capacity to assign agency to things, but rely primarily on perceptual information to categorize objects. It may be that infants can recognize instances of agency based on contextual information, but do not associate the attribute of agency with any particular kind. By the time we are toddlers, however, the notion of agency—and the kinds of objects that possess this attribute—has become an important facet in our mental experience. Toddlers are also known to understand agency as having a causal role in many external events that most adults in our society would attribute to natural phenomena.[xiii] The fact that the set of agents contains a great number of things when we are children, but shrinks to include many fewer things when we are adults strongly suggests that our division of the world into agents and non-agents is not static, but dynamic.
Assuming that the partition of the natural world according to agency is not fixed, it should not be surprising that there is cross-cultural variability in the boundaries between agents and non-agents. Western tradition fixes agency as an attribute only appropriate to describe biological entities. In the most extreme view, humans alone are capable of intentional action.[xiv] In contrast, other traditions that have been broadly labelled as animist do not have such a restrictive notion of agency. Although traditionally conceived as a family of belief systems in which objects such as rocks, trees, or even natural phenomena, possess a spirit or life force and, consequently, agency, further scholarship has developed a more nuanced view that describes animist belief systems as those in which personhood is understood in a way distinct from Western tradition with the locus of personhood often existing in a relational context.[xv]
Taken as a whole, it is clear that agency is a fundamental attribute used in our mental models to build ontological categories of the things inhabiting our world. Our everyday experience of reality is, at least in part, built on our subconscious ontological categorization. It is also clear that this categorization is not fixed from birth but formed through experience and culture. What is not clear is exactly how the fundamental mechanisms for identifying agency and learned ontological categorizations shape phenomenology. Can an inhibition of core conceptual processing modules occur while the learned ontological categories remain intact, or vice versa? What effect on consciousness would this have? While the relationship between these mechanisms and lived experience is muddy, a link between a shift or even a total failure of the cognitive subsystem that encodes our categorization scheme and fundamental misidentification (according to our everyday framework) of kinds seems plausible. With this possibility established, it is not a great mental leap to suppose that ontological failure of this kind can be caused by certain drugs and that this might be the underlying mechanism behind many bizarre mental experiences associated with extreme altered states.
Dissolution of Ontological Categories
Now that we have a framework in which to understand the perception of agency, we can reframe the confusion of animate and inanimate objects as the dissolution of certain ontological categories. Drawing from my personal experience, this view seems to more accurately capture what it is like to believe you are dead or that your lamp is a living being. Perhaps the best point of reference for me are my experiences with Ambien. Ambien is a strange drug. It targets the same receptor as traditional benzodiazepines, but is capable of producing dream-like delirium. Even the closely related zopiclone is only capable of sedation without any meaningful change in cognitive apparatus.[xvi] Although the details of an Ambien trip are obscured in memory the same way dreams are, there are a few memorable aspects of the experience that are directly relevant to our discussion. Namely, the attribution of agency to inanimate objects. In its weakest form, this effect takes shape as a vague sense of not being alone. This is not a frightening or unnerving experience, nor is it one that is easily noticed if you are not paying attention. You simply feel as if there are other living beings in the room with you. This feeling is experienced in the same way as having a friend sleeping on the couch while you are cooking dinner. It is a fact stored somewhere in your subconscious rather than existing at the centre of your thoughts. Under the influence of Ambien, while idly wasting time on my computer or wandering around my apartment (doing god knows what), I would have to periodically remind myself that I was, in fact, alone in the room. Although I could understand this logically, it was something I had to concentrate on, despite all evidence pointing to the fact that the room was unoccupied save for me.
As the dosage increases, this phenomenon takes shape as a complete ontological failure. No longer do I just feel not alone, but I feel as if the objects around me are living beings. The room was occupied after all, I just wasn’t looking in the right places! Curiously, the same logical rationalization process is possible while in this state as well. Occasionally snapping to my senses, I will realize that the lamp is not actually living and that I am, indeed, alone. The key point I want to stress here is that at no point did I think ‘The lamp is an animate being’. I didn’t think about the lamp at all. It simply felt as though the lamp, and all the objects on my table, were living.[xvii] Agency was no longer a dimension in my mental categorization scheme of objects. It wasn’t any specific fact about the lamp or the table that changed in my mind, but the whole organizational framework. While the set of abstract facts about the kinds of things that possessed agency and were capable of mental representations remained intact, the subconscious organization of my surroundings had changed in such a way as to remove one of the main attributes differentiating me from the table, the lamp, and the chair. We all now belonged to the same category.
There are striking parallels to the animation of objects and my experiences of believing that I had died while under the influence of dissociatives. On one particular occasion I felt as though I had died—something not entirely uncommon for higher doses—yet, as with Ambien, I was still able to collect my thoughts enough to occasionally remember why this could not be true. When I paused to think about it, I realized I wasn’t actually dead. I was still able to resolve the obvious logical chain that disproved my non-existence. ‘Dead things do not think’, ‘I am thinking’, therefore ‘I am not dead’. Although Descartes’ cogito ergo sum along with the law of contraposition remained in my grasp, they were only understood at an abstract level. It didn’t feel right, it really felt not only as though I was dead, but that thinking itself should not disqualify me from being dead. Instances of ego death have had moments of similar revelation. I realize, in an instant, that the person occupying this body and the person flashing through my memories was me, that this person existed, and that the concept of existing means something. I realized, too, that I had never really forgotten these facts, but just didn’t think about them. It seems clear to me that many of the substantial shifts in consciousness that can occur under the influence of drugs take place at a subconscious, perceptual level which may be in conflict with our conscious cognition.
Finally, we return to salvia and the identification of oneself with a specific object. This might seem like a synthesis of the above two kinds of experiences, but in reality is more similar to the latter than the former. In fact, it is so similar to the latter that the only thing to comment on is the slightly morbid question of why this involves objects in some cases and corpses in others.
The framework of categorical dissolution has implications for the psychedelic experience as well. One of the most common motifs in trip reports of mushrooms, LSD, and other serotonergic psychedelics is a sense of oneness with the universe. This is often an effect of ego-dissolution in which conscious experience is less anchored to the individual. Instead, experience may be felt as a property of the universe itself leading to a sense that the internal individual and external objects are merely the components of a much larger thing.[xviii] Examining this from the perspective of our framework of categorical dissolution leads to some intriguing possibilities. Our sense of identity, the ego, is perhaps constructed from an array of categorical distinctions which separate us from the outside world. Perhaps things are judged to be ‘not us’ based on a collection of attributes that separate us from the various other things inhabiting the universe? For instance, the notion of agency alone puts us in a category separate from most things in the world.
Cognitive processes dealing with theory of mind may further separate agents into subcategories based on an inferred internal state. Our own conscious experience, then, may be a special case of this categorization, which attributes our experience of reality to a unique thing, namely ourselves. This can be expressed as the logical judgement that I am the thing which has the attribute of experiencing this particular internal experience. Ego dissolution could then be explained as a cumulative effect of the dissolution of various ontological categories. Each categorical axis that is erased removes one more attribute separating you from the rest of the world, crumbling one more pillar of your constructed identity. In many trip reports involving ego death we find that believing you are dead, as described in the preceding paragraphs, is often a steppingstone to full-blown ego death. This would support the notion of ego death being a result of categorical dissolution, since believing that you are dead, as I have argued, requires the erasure of certain ontological categories that separate the living from the non-living. It would make sense, then, that the journey to ego death involves intermediate stages in which some, but not all, of the categories constructing identity have dissolved.
To be clear, this is quite speculative, perhaps more so than the other arguments I have made so far, and I suspect there is a lot more to say about identity and the ego. The psychedelic experience is rich and nuanced enough that it seems unlikely that it can be reduced to a single kind of cognitive shift. However, the notion of categorical dissolution could play a critical role in understanding various aspects of the psychedelic experience, and so I mention it here as something to ponder.
I have now described in detail three kinds of common drug experiences which, on the surface, seem vastly different. I make the case that all can be understood as instances of the same general phenomenon. The salvia experience of becoming an inanimate object, the Ambien experience of viewing inanimate objects as animate, and the dissociative experience of believing you are dead. All three first require a failure in our cognitive mechanisms that categorize objects according to their agency and/or their capacity for mental representations. The obliteration of these ontological categories facilitates the transgression between boundaries that no longer exist—living and non-living. Why different substances manifest this effect across different kinds is a mystery and further research in cognitive science may reveal alternative frameworks that can better explain these experiences. But viewing their effects as ontological failure, rather than a collection of mistaken facts in a body of conceptual knowledge, seems to me to make sense of mental phenomena that are otherwise incomprehensible.
To summarize, there is evidence that our experience is partially determined by various subconscious categorization mechanisms which sort things according to various attributes. Agency is one such attribute that has a significant impact on how we see the world. Many intense psychedelic experiences involve a blurring of these boundaries. This tends to happen at a perceptual level, which can lead to states of cognitive dissonance in which it does not feel as though there is a substantial difference between living and non-living things, but we remember which attribute we assign to various things in our everyday account of the world. Although these states may seem baffling from the outside, they begin to make more sense when we view them as a shift in the underlying mental processes that build our experience based on the categorization of things. At the very least, each of these experiences gives insight into our construction of reality and for that reason alone, they are valuable.
[i] cedar b (2013). ‘Im a Poolside Accordion Smothered Face Down!: An Experience with Salvia Divinorum & Cannabis (exp68855)’, Erowid, 6 January. https://www.erowid.org/experiences/exp.php?ID=68855
[ii] The experience of feeling as though you are dead should be distinguished from traditional ego death. In the former there is still an identification of the self; it is only the nature of the self that has been transformed, whereas in full ego death any conception of a ‘self’ ceases to be meaningful. Belief that you are dead is known as Cotard’s delusion or Cotard’s syndrome in psychiatry - viii However, there seems to be some fundamental differences between the experience of patients with Cotard’s delusion and the belief you are dead while under the influence of psychedelics or dissociatives. Perhaps somewhere there is someone who has had both experiences and can confirm their similarity or difference?
[iii] Thomasson A (2018). ‘Categories’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/categories/
[iv] Carr B (1987). Metaphysics: An Introduction. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK.
[v] Bunge M (1977). Treatise on Basic Philosophy: Ontology I: The Furniture of the World. Springer Netherlands.
[vi] Carey S (2009). The Origin of Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[vii] Debruyne H, Portzky M, Peremans K, & Audenaert K (2011). 'Cotard's syndrome', Mind & Brain, The Journal of Psychiatry. 2: 67–72.
[viii] While perceptual representations are considered an innate function of our perceptual systems, conceptual representations are the product of learning through our physical and cultural environment. The identification of external objects as possessing agency is mediated through perceptual and conceptual knowledge, meaning that while the axes of core cognition are innate in primates, the identification of objects according to these axes is not fixed.
[ix] Amsterdam B (1972). ‘Mirror self-image reactions before age two’, Developmental Psychobiology, 5(4):297–305.
[x] Rakison D & Oakes LM (2003). Early Category and Concept Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[xi] Mandler JM (2000). ‘Perceptual and Conceptual Processes in Infancy’, Journal of Cognition and Development, 1(1):3–36.
[xii] Grosse Wiesmann C, Friederici AD, Singer T, & Steinbeis N (2020). ‘Two systems for thinking about others’ thoughts in the developing brain’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(12):6928–6935.
[xiii] Berk L (2006). Child Development. Boston, MA: Pearson/Allyn and Bacon.
[xiv] It is worth noting that when I discuss the attribution of agency in this context, I do not mean the intellectual understanding of agency, but rather the collection of things that are perceived to have agency in everyday life. On a fundamental level, many do not believe anything to possess free will and that agency solely exists as a perceived attribute rather than a fundamental property of the universe.
[xv] Bird‐David N (1999). ‘“Animism” Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology’, Current Anthropology, 40(S1):S67–S91.
[xvi] Of the common z-drugs, zolpidem and zaleplon are capable of inducing dream-like states whereas zopiclone and pagoclone merely act as sedatives similar to benzodiazepines. The Amanita mushroom is another substance known for its dreamy delirium that might at least partially be explained by activity at GABA-A of its active components. However, NMDA antagonism as well as other pharmacological activity also plays a role in the Amanita experience, making the importance of GABA-A activity unclear in this context. American Society of Health Pharmacists. (2019). Zolpidem Tartrate. https://www.drugs.com/monograph/zolpidem-tartrate.html
[xvii] Perhaps this cognitive dissonance can be explained as a retention of my conceptual knowledge of agency as an abstract property, while agency as an item of core cognition simply dissolved, leaving me aware of agency as an idea and to which things I normally attribute it, but also unable to connect with the concept as a meaningful attribute of things inhabiting the world around me.
[xviii] Recall the ontological framework discussed in Section 2; the universe is filled with things, and associations of things form new things. The sense of oneness experienced with psychedelics can be understood as a shifting of the identification of oneself from the individual person to the larger, or even universal thing of which the individual is a single component.