Before I became a doctor, I had certain experiences that hinted at our mind’s true potential.

In this video Tom and I discuss my early experiences with psychedelics and whether they’re applicable to all who might choose a career in medicine. I talk about how this led me to a fascination with consciousness, more sustainable meditation practices, and a feeling that medicine might have “hit the wall” when it comes to reductionist approaches to disease complexes such as mental illness.

Full Transcript:

Interviewer: Have you ever done drugs?

ZDoggMD: Have I ever done drugs?

Interviewer: [LAUGHTER]

ZDoggMD: I went to Berkeley, dude. This is the thing. In high school, I never did anything. I was super straight arrow, because literally I grew up in the era of Nancy Reagan saying, “Don’t do shit.” I forget. What was her catchphrase? “Just say no.” Just say no and I grew up in the central valley of California, super conservative place. My parents are both doctors. They’re from India. There’s no drugs. There’s no drugs that they would ADMIT to.

Interviewer: When was the first time you did drugs?

ZDoggMD: The first time I’m in a dorm room in Berkeley, Putnam Hall. I’m on the fifth floor and this kid was the only weird libertarian, conservative kid in all of Berkeley. He was like, “Hey, man. ZDogg, have you ever smoked weed, man? Because they’re outlawing it and that’s bullshit because LIBERTY.” I’m like, “No, because Nancy Reagan says that shit is dangerous.” The next thing I know I’ve got my mouth around a bong and I was like…and I’ve never smoked a cigarette…I’m coughing.

I remember this so vividly because this was the first altered consciousness of my whole life. I look down and I look up, and I’d entered—the best I could describe it was it was a dream state. I’m living in a dream, walking in a dream. I could sense this weird distortion of space and time where I was walking around like that asshole that you see in the dorms like, “Man, I see the fourth dimension, bro. I SEE it.” There were people in that dorm who, to this day, they went through med school with me, and they still will call me on it. “Remember that time you saw the fourth dimension?” I was like, “I was 18.” But the thing is, as an experience, immediately I remember after I sobered up I was like, “Oh, I get what the 60s were about.” I didn’t understand these hippies and now I’m like, “Oh, this experience was so different than anything.” It opened my mind to things that the mind could do, which then they always say weed is a “gateway drug.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s some more Nancy Reagan shit.”

It’s true! Because what it does is it says, “I didn’t die. I didn’t go crazy and I had a really interesting experience that, on some level, was quite enjoyable.” The next thing I know I tried LSD, and this was with one of my roommates who was a real psychonaut, even in those days, poli-sci major. He’s like, “I got this from some guy on Telegraph Avenue.” What could possibly go wrong? I ended up doing a tab of acid and sitting there. Thirty minutes go by, nothing happens. We’re in our little rental place and I’m playing my guitar, and it’s this Joe Satriani-looking multi-colored guitar that I had until just recently when I broke it and gave it to the Salvation Army.

I’m playing and the neck starts to bend and I’m like, “That doesn’t happen in real life,” and I had enough meta-awareness that I was like, “No, this is…” The next thing you know I’m on a ride that, to describe it, is the sense of mind expansion. The whole universe seemed to connect. It was really a borderline mystical experience. You get all the weird hallucinatory stuff and the strange visual stuff, but that was just a side effect.

What I felt? I looked up at the moon that night. I remember in our back yard and I was like, “Oh, my God. I’m one with everything that ever was, ever is. I’m eternal. I will never die.” That felt more true than anything in waking life.

Really, that was it. I kind of dabbled in a little mushrooms, a little acid when I was in college, but that experience told me that the human mind is just a veil on something underneath and that’s why I got interested in meditation because I said, “I bet you could access this without the drug.” It really changed the direction of my life because I would have just kind of fallen into maybe bench research or reductionism. Instead, I went into medicine because I found something deeply mysterious about the human consciousness that I thought medicine could help me understand better. Actually, it didn’t. It only helped me to the extent that I got to know people better and I got to know that interaction better, but the science can’t quite get at it yet because I think we’re still just moving icons on a desktop. We need to get into the source code of it.

Interviewer: What would you say to the people who are like, “Hey, ZDogg? You’re a doctor. You need to stop doing drugs.”

ZDoggMD: You know, that’s a great question. It’s taken me many years to be able to even admit that I dabbled in psychedelics in college and that I would consider doing it again now in my elderly years (I’m 46). It’s because there’s so much stigma from everything in the 60s. But the truth is…you want to know what I really think? What I really think is if you haven’t tried a psychedelic sometime in your life or had some sort of experience that’s similar, whether it’s a meditation or retreat or something, you shouldn’t touch patients. I honestly believe that and a lot of people are going to get pissed at me. But the thing is the one thing that happens when you do that, you have that psychedelic experience or mystical experience, is you come back and you go, “I have missed something so central to the nature of what our minds are, what we are, our place in everything that I couldn’t imagine not having had this experience and still being effective in the world.” Now I may be deluded, but that’s what it feels like and I’m going to stick with it.

Interviewer: Take it far back. Honestly, that’s what doctors used to be when they were medicine men. It’s like, “I’m going to do these drugs. Then you’re going to do these drugs. I’m going to be your trip sitter and walk you through what it feels like to be on these drugs.”

ZDoggMD: I think the future of medicine — I’m going to take a lot of shit for this — is more shamanic than it is giving medications and pushing this stuff. That will always be a part of it.

Interviewer: You’re going to take so much shit for that. You need to clarify it.

ZDoggMD: People are going to give me shit. When I say shamanic, I mean our role is almost as a guide. We are a shepherd. You’re bringing your own healing with you. We’re going to help you with these tools we have from the armamentarium that we have, whether it’s Lipitor or Lasix or Olanzapine or Zoloft, but part of that trip may be a guided psychedelic experience with a guide who is medically trained. Maybe a part of that is sitting and being present with you in a way that two conscious agents interact and the healing comes from what we used to call the placebo effect or the mind-body effect, but really is a transcending mind-body continuum. This is not to endorse kooky alternative medicine stuff. It’s to transcend and include the best of what we have with this higher understanding of what humans really are.

I’m doubling down on that. I will take a lot of shit from people like Gorsky and these other guys who will be like, “ZDogg is an iconoclast who’s spouting garbage. You might as well be Dr. Oz.” Now, Dr. Oz sells bullshit on TV. I’m just telling you this is what I think the truth is about the universe from my own subjective experiences, and perhaps you should explore your experience as well.

Interviewer: You were also a pretty hardcore reductionist for a number of years. I mean you burned out. Did you feel like you reached the end of the road with the reductionism?

ZDoggMD: Reductionism, materialism, this idea that we are only these chemical reactions was how we’re conditioned in Western science, Western medicine, and even when I had had that acid trip in Berkeley, I’m a molecular biology major. I’m studying genetics in a Drosophila lab. My whole world is material science, is reductionism. Every experience, human experience, the taste of chocolate, whatever it is, love, can be reduced to a chemical reaction and that’s how I was trained. Even while having this experience on LSD, I was trying to shoehorn what my mind was doing. In other words, oh, my gosh. I’ve never had these connections, this feeling of openness and connectedness. It must be serotonin levels are rising or it’s opening up different receptors.

It took me years to realize that that reductionism wasn’t the answer. It’s simply a correlation. Those receptors change, but what arises is conscious experience, which I don’t think is reducible and identical to a serotonin flux or a dopamine flux. I think they’re correlated, but they’re not the same. There’s something else going on, and again, I’ve done interviews with people that I think have the right idea, but it’s taken me years to kind of come to this. It’s not something that I’m just making up. I’m not trying to sell you anything. This is just my experience.

Interviewer: It’s interesting because I think about my mother. They wanted me to put her on an involuntary psych hold. It’s such a reductionist approach to medicine, which is you need to have the police kidnap this woman, put her in restraints, and force these chemicals into her because we believe there’s a chemical imbalance in her. I didn’t do that. She went back to being normal after two days, like what her baseline is. Fine. If I had done it, I would have made it worse for months. It would have lingered because it’s trauma.

ZDoggMD: This is the thing. We do the best we can with the tools we have. We speak the language of reductionism, so we move those tools around our desktop, and that’s what they’re trying to do with your mom.

Interviewer: You’ll have to unfold my mom stuff because it’s just too long. The thing I’m trying to get at, maybe I can make it about something better, do you even believe there are chemical imbalances? Do you believe that’s accurate?

ZDoggMD: I believe when we see chemicals imbalanced in a mind — and I think that happens — you can see correlation between conscious experience and fMRI data. Things are correlated. Absolutely. The question is where’s the causality?

Well, it turns out if you mess with the interface and you move serotonin here and you do this with dopamine, you have a different conscious experience because they’re so tightly correlated. It doesn’t mean that that’s causative. It might mean that you can actually get a similar effect from some other intervention on a conscious experience, whether that’s serious psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, being present with someone. In cases of severe mental illness like your mother, it’s probably so disjointed that you have to have all these approaches because we only have limited tools.

They’re going to look back on modern psychiatry and say it’s barbarism, but we look back on all of medicine that way. We have to hold a little compassion for what we’re trying to do in Western medicine, but at the same time understand that we’re missing a big part of this. What they tried to do with your mother when they said put her on an involuntary hold, take her out of her life, put her in this. That’s the best that they know how to do because what are the other options? You happened to get really lucky. She was very lucky because she has a son who’s there, who’s with her, who’s keeping her safe, keeping her from going out and hurting herself. Not everybody has that so they have to do the best they can. It’s really a struggle. But if we’re asking the wrong questions, if this is all reduced to chemicals, we’re already hitting a wall.

Interviewer: Haven’t we been asking the wrong questions for far too long? Wouldn’t you think of something like an SSRI is just a super mild lobotomy?

ZDoggMD: Is an SSRI a super mild lobotomy? I don’t think so.

Interviewer: But it’s just an overall dulling. It doesn’t cause permanent damage. It’s a reversible lobotomy.

ZDoggMD: Many people describe psychiatric drugs as a kind of a dulling experience for them, and they don’t want to take them.

Interviewer: Because they’re blunt tools.

ZDoggMD: They’re blunt tools. It’s like you only have certain symbols to work with. They’re dumbed down. You don’t see the underlying reality, so you move those symbols around and one of those symbols is the serotonin molecule. You move it around. You change its concentration. You change its receptor upregulation and something changes in conscious experience, but something else changes that isn’t desirable, so we’re still very blunt. Could it be that we could design better drugs to do that? Yes, but to do that you have to release the reductionist approach and understand what those drugs actually represent, and that will be, I think, the next phase of science, true science.

Interviewer: Do me and you share the same reality?

ZDoggMD: Do me and you share the same reality? I think we interact with the same matrix of consciousness that everybody does, but we interpret it differently. We construct it differently, and it affects our own awareness differently, but the same enough that we share an intersubjective truth. You and I share certain understandings. English, certain norms, like if we’re in an airport we don’t run around yelling, “Bomb!” Well, maybe some of us do. That comes from our shared conditioning within that matrix, but yes, we each construct our own experience of reality 1000%. That’s without doubt.

Interviewer: But how do I know that the color blue that I see is the same color blue that you see?

ZDoggMD: You don’t. You don’t and you can’t, but I will say this. I think humans evolved our interface with reality in a mostly similar way. The exception is the mutations that happen that cause synesthesia where you may smell colors or see sounds. Those are people that prove the rule that our interface is constantly evolving and it may be that in the future it might be beneficial to us to survive to see a sound, to see a sound of a siren as the color red. We share that red. Actually, that experience of red probably as a quality or an experience is the same because it has been selected for through natural selection whatever that is in reality in the reality.

Interviewer: Do the mentally ill see less of reality or more of reality?

ZDoggMD: I think some of the mentally ill see more of the underlying source code and it makes it unstable. Because remember the proposition that Hoffman and others have said is that seeing the underlying source code of reality, the complexity of it, is untenable in terms of survival. It’s too much information and it doesn’t help you survive. When I look at a glass of water, it may represent, it may point to the deepest, most complex conscious agent having experiences, but our mind reduces it to a glass of water because we don’t need to see that in order to survive.

Someone who’s mentally ill might actually see something in that glass of water that is vastly different than you and I have access to, but it’s maladaptive to live in a society of humans. It’s just not good. We call that “crazy,” right? I actually think when we understand mental illness at its root, it’s going to be something along those lines. It’s not going to be there’s a serotonin flux that’s out of jiggering.

Interviewer: What do you think we could do if it turns out to be true that consciousness is at the underpinning of everything? What could we do with that in terms of medical structures?

ZDoggMD: If it turns out that Hoffman’s theory that everything is consciousness interacting with itself in mathematically predictable ways, the way that helps medicine is you create a science that’s based on the underlying source code instead of on the icons. In other words, right now all of science, if this is true, is the science of our “desktop.” I move the trashcan here. It does this. I move this document here. It does that. But it doesn’t tell us, if we actually want to transform things, how do we get into the underlying program?

In the old days, the idealists, it’s a school of philosophy that said we can’t really know reality because it’s unknowable. It’s just God or whatever. That’s not very helpful. It’s not very scientifically precise and it doesn’t help us actually do things in the world. But a theory where you have mathematically predictable models of conscious agents interacting with themselves can actually predict what happens in our interface. That means you can start to manipulate it at the source code level with the right technology. What’s a psychedelic? A manipulation of our interface. It’s a gross, crude manipulation of our interface.

Interviewer: It’s a plant consciousness.

ZDoggMD: Maybe it’s a plant consciousness. Maybe you’re seeing fungal consciousness. Who knows? People who’ve done it feel this is true. They’ll tell you, “That’s what it felt like.”

Interviewer: When was the first moment that you questioned reality? How early? How far back?

ZDoggMD: I think I started questioning reality when I went through the bar mitzvah equivalent in Zoroastrianism, which is two priests come to your house, and you’re 11, and you have to learn these prayers, and you go through the ceremony. I started going, “So there’s a God, of course. It’s a mythic, magic God that you have to pray to because it can punish you, and this and that.” I started going, “That doesn’t really jibe with any of this, that I’m having this experience in this world. How does that have anything…?” The facade of reality started to crack then. Then I had a psychedelic experience in college and I said, “Oh, no. Reality is much deeper, more complex than we’re able to perceive.” It’s not just that we’re not perceiving all of reality. It’s that we’ve taken reality and we’ve turned it into symbols that have nothing to do with reality. They’re simply ways for us to survive. Reality itself is far more beautiful, complex, and terrifying than we have access to or should have access to, maybe. That’s a valid question. If we want to survive in society, should we have access to that? These are valid questions.

This idea that most of modern science has been so successful because it works. If we move this icon, this happens. This atom does this. Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories of all times, predicts reality. It makes no sense that things would need conscious observers to settle down, but it works. It’s absolutely predictable. We have fallen into what Hoffman calls a “rookie mistake” of going, “This interface must be reality because we can manipulate it and make things happen.”

It’s true, up to a point, and science has been really good at getting to that point. Everything in our current model was true until it starts to push up against where it’s not, where we’re failing. We’re now getting to the point where we’re in the 21st century. We haven’t figured out cancer yet. We haven’t figured out mental illness. We haven’t figured out why people are conscious at all. It’s because the reduction to materialism is going to fail. It really is.

Now, some people say we’re just not smart enough. We don’t have a powerful enough computer. I don’t think so. I think it’s because the next layer of science is understanding the source code, which is that it isn’t atoms really emerging consciousness. It’s consciousness that emerges an icon of atoms. It’s predictable. We can have scientific formulas that are mathematically based. As Hoffman said, “Math is the bones of consciousness. It’s the flesh and bones of consciousness.”

That’s science in its purest form. Science isn’t a dogma. It’s an approach. The next layer of science is going to be that. I am convinced of this, dude. It gives you a feeling both intellectually and emotionally that that is absolutely correct. That’s why I talk about this stuff at great risk to my own personal reputation because I think it’s true and I think a lot of people that don’t want to admit this publicly also think it’s true. I’m excited. The future is going to be insane, absolutely amazing, but we have to transcend this reductionism.

Interviewer: One last question. Would you agree with the statement that all significant advances in science are conscious, perceptual shifts?

ZDoggMD: All significant advances in science are conscious, perceptual shifts. I will say this. I wouldn’t reduce it just to science. I would say all significant advances in humanity collectively are due to conscious, perceptual shifts.

Interviewer: This leads into why a better computer, a faster computer isn’t going to solve it. We have to change ourselves.

ZDoggMD: The whole model of our minds have to change. The whole model of society has to change. That’s why I hate this idea that only Democrats are progressives, only conservatives are trying to pull you back. No, we all need to transcend and include what has come before. But transcend to that next level, use this all as building. It’s all true, but partial. What’s the next emergent? We’re there because we’re running up on the failures of the current paradigm, and it used to be the current paradigm couldn’t be beat. We went to the moon. We harnessed the atom to power electricity. We cured infectious diseases. Oh, my God it gives you goosebumps when you think about it.

What have we done lately? The reason is that now we’re at the end of that paradigm. What’s next? So don’t resist it. We need to start to go, “This is what’s been successful. Let’s build on it, and this is what’s failed. Let’s transcend it.” That next rung on the ladder is this realization. It is a huge perceptual shift and the New Age people talk about, “Everybody’s going to get woke.” That’s not what it is. It’s a slow fits and starts wave, and then the wave recedes, but it’s got to happen, and that’s why we have conversations like this. If five people in the audience get this and they send me a message, I know that we’re on the right track because it’s going to have to start at the fringes and then open up.

Interviewer: Have you ever done drugs?

ZDoggMD: Have I ever done drugs?

Interviewer: [LAUGHTER]

ZDoggMD: I went to Berkeley, dude. This is the thing. In high school, I never did anything. I was super straight arrow, because literally I grew up in the era of Nancy Reagan saying, “Don’t do shit.” I forget. What was her catchphrase? Just say no. Just say no and I grew up in the central valley of California, super conservative place. My parents are both doctors. They’re from India. There’s no drugs. There’s no drugs that they would admit to.

Interviewer: When was the first time you did drugs?

ZDoggMD: The first time I’m in a dorm room in Berkeley, Putnam Hall. I’m on the fifth floor and this kid was the only weird libertarian, conservative kid at all of Berkeley. He was like, “Hey, man. ZDogg, have you ever smoked weed, man? Because they’re outlawing it and that’s bullshit because liberty.” I’m like, “No, because Nancy Reagan says that shit is dangerous.” The next thing I know I’ve got my mouth around a bong and I was like, and I’ve never smoked a cigarette. I’m coughing.

I remember this so vividly because this was the first altered consciousness of my whole life. I look down and I look up, and I’d entered -the best I could describe it was it was a dream state. I’m living in a dream, walking in a dream. I could sense this weird distortion of space and time where I was walking around like that asshole that you see in the dorms like, “Man, I see the fourth dimension, bro. I see it.” There were people in that dorm who, to this day, they went through med school with me, and they still will call me on it. “Remember that time you saw the fourth dimension?” I was like, “I was 18.” But the thing is, as an experience, immediately I remember after I sobered up I was like, “Oh, I get what the 60s even were about.” I didn’t understand these hippies and now I’m like, “Oh, this experience was so different than anything.” It opened my mind to things that the mind could do, which then they always say weed is a gateway drug. I’m like, “Oh, that’s some more Nancy Reagan shit.”

It’s true because what it does is it says, “I didn’t die. I didn’t go crazy and I had a really interesting experience that, on some level, was quite enjoyable.” The next thing I know I tried LSD, and this was with one of my roommates who was a real psychonaut, even in those days, poli-sci major. He’s like, “I got this from some guy on Telegraph Avenue.” What could possibly go wrong? I ended up doing a tab of acid and sitting there. Thirty minutes go by, nothing happens. We’re in our little rental place and I’m playing my guitar, and it’s this Joe Satriani-looking multi-colored guitar that I had until recently when I broke it and gave it to the Salvation Army.

I’m playing and the neck starts to bend and I’m like, “That doesn’t happen in real life,” and I had enough meta-awareness that I was like, “No, this is…” The next thing you know I’m on a ride that, to describe it, is the sense of mind expansion. The whole universe seemed to connect. It was really a borderline mystical experience. You get all the weird hallucinatory stuff and the strange visual stuff, but that was just a side effect.

What I felt? I looked up at the moon that night. I remember in our back yard and I was like, “Oh, my God. I’m one with everything that ever was, ever is. I’m eternal. I will never die.” That felt more true than anything in waking life.

Really, that was it. I kind of dabbled in a little mushrooms, a little acid when I was in college, but that experience told me that the human mind is just a veil on something underneath and that’s why I got interested in meditation because I said, “I bet you could access this without the medication.” It really changed the direction of my life because I would have just kind of fallen into maybe research or reductionism. Instead, I went into medicine because I found something deeply mysterious about the human consciousness that I thought medicine could help me understand better. Actually, it didn’t. It only helped me to the extent that I got to know people better and I got to know that interaction better, but the science can’t quite get at it yet because I think we’re still just moving icons on a desktop. We need to get into the source code of it.

Interviewer: What would you say to the people who are like, “Hey, ZDogg? You’re a doctor. You need to stop doing drugs.”

ZDoggMD: You know, that’s a great question. It’s taken me many years to be able to even admit that I dabbled in psychedelics in college and that I would consider doing it again now in my elderly years. It’s because there’s so much stigma from everything in the 60s. But the truth is you want to know what I really think? What I really think is if you haven’t tried a psychedelic sometime in your life or had some sort of experience that’s similar, whether it’s a meditation or retreat or something, you shouldn’t touch patients. I honestly believe that and a lot of people are going to get pissed at me. But the thing is the one thing that happens when you do that, you have that psychedelic experience or mystical experience, is you come back and you go, “I have missed something so central to the nature of what our minds are, what we are, our place in everything that I couldn’t imagine not having had this experience and still being effective in the world.” Now I may be deluded, but that’s what it feels like and I’m going to stick with it.

Interviewer: Take it far back. Honestly, that’s what doctors used to be when they were medicine men. It’s like, “I’m going to do these drugs. Then you’re going to do these drugs. I’m going to be your trip sitter and walk you through what it feels like to be on these drugs.”

ZDoggMD: I think the future of medicine — I’m going to take a lot of shit for this — is more shamanic than it is giving medications and pushing this stuff. That will always be a part of it.

Interviewer: You’re going to take so much shit for that. You need to clarify it.

ZDoggMD: People are going to give me shit. When I say shamanic, I mean our role is almost as a guide. We are a shepherd. You’re bringing your own healing with you. We’re going to help you with these tools we have from the armamentarium that we have, whether it’s Lipitor or Lasix or Olanzapine or Zoloft, but part of that trip may be a guided psychedelic experience with a guide who is medically trained. Maybe a part of that is sitting and being present with you in a way that two conscious agents interact and the healing comes from what we used to call the placebo effect or the mind-body effect, but really is a transcending mind-body continuum. This is not to endorse kooky alternative medicine stuff. It’s to transcend and include the best of what we have with this higher understanding of what humans really are.

I’m doubling down on that. I will take a lot of shit from people like Gorsky and these other guys who will be like, “ZDogg is an iconoclast who’s spouting garbage. You might as well be Dr. Oz.” Now, Dr. Oz sells bullshit on TV. I’m just telling you this is what I think the truth is about the universe.

Interviewer: You were also a pretty hardcore reductionist for a number of years. I mean you burned that out. Did you feel like you reached the end of the road with the reductionist?

ZDoggMD: Reductionism, materialism, this idea that we are only these chemical reactions was how we’re conditioned in Western science, Western medicine, and even when I had had that acid trip in Berkeley, I’m a molecular biology major. I’m studying genetics in a Drosophila lab. My whole world is material science, is reductionism. Every experience, human experience, the taste of chocolate, whatever it is, love, can be reduced to a chemical reaction and that’s how I was trained. Even while having this experience on LSD, I was trying to shoehorn what my mind was doing. In other words, oh, my gosh. I’ve never had these connections, this feeling of openness and connectedness. It must be serotonin levels are rising or it’s opening up different receptors.

It took me years to realize that that reductionism wasn’t the answer. It’s simply a correlation. Those receptors change, but what arises is conscious experience, which I don’t think is reducible and identical to a serotonin flux or a dopamine flux. I think they’re correlated, but they’re not the same. There’s something else going on, and again, I’ve done interviews with people that I think have the right idea, but it’s taken me years to kind of come to this. It’s not something that I’m just making up. I’m not trying to sell you anything. This is just my experience.

Interviewer: It’s interesting because I think about my mother. They wanted me to put her on a Legal 2000. It’s such a reductionist approach to medicine, which is you need to have the police kidnap this woman, put her in restraints, and force these chemicals into her because we believe there’s a chemical imbalance in her. I didn’t do that. She went back to being normal after two days, like what her baseline is. Fine. If I had done it, I would have made it worse for months. It would have lingered because it’s trauma.

ZDoggMD: This is the thing. We do the best we can with the tools we have. We speak the language of reductionism, so we move those tools around our desktop, and that’s what they’re trying to do with your mom.

Interviewer: You’ll have to unfold my mom stuff because it’s just too long. The thing I’m trying to get at, maybe I can make it about something better, do you even believe there are chemical imbalances? Do you believe that’s accurate?

ZDoggMD: I believe when we see chemicals imbalanced in a mind — and I think that happens — you can see correlation between conscious experience and fMRI data. Things are correlated. Absolutely. The question is where’s the causality?

Well, it turns out if you mess with the interface and you move serotonin here and you do this with dopamine, you have a different conscious experience because they’re so tightly correlated. It doesn’t mean that that’s causative. It might mean that you can actually get a similar effect from some other intervention on a conscious experience, whether that’s serious psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, being present with someone. In cases of severe mental illness like your mother, it’s probably so disjointed that you have to have all these approaches because we only have limited tools.

They’re going to look back on modern psychiatry and say it’s barbarism, but we look back on all of medicine that way. We have to be a little hold and compassion what we’re trying to do in Western medicine, but at the same time understand that we’re missing a big part of this. What they tried to do with your mother when they said put her on an involuntary hold, take her out of her life, put her in this. That’s the best that they know how to do because what are the other options? You happened to get really lucky. She was very lucky because she has a son who’s there, who’s with her, who’s keeping her safe, keeping her from going out and hurting herself. Not everybody has that so they have to do the best they can. It’s really a struggle. But if we’re asking the wrong questions, if this is all reduced to chemicals, we’re already hitting a wall.

Interviewer: Haven’t we been asking the wrong questions for far too long? Wouldn’t you think of something like an SSRI is just a super mild lobotomy?

ZDoggMD: Is an SSRI a super mild lobotomy? I don’t think so.

Interviewer: But it’s just an overall dulling. It doesn’t cause permanent damage. It’s a reversible lobotomy.

ZDoggMD: Many people describe psychiatric drugs as a kind of a dulling experience for them, and they don’t want to take them.

Interviewer: Because they’re blunt tools.

ZDoggMD: They’re blunt tools. It’s like you only have certain symbols to work with. They’re dumbed down. You don’t see the underlying reality, so you move those symbols around and one of those symbols is the serotonin molecule. You move it around. You change its concentration. You change its receptor upregulation and something changes in conscious experience, but something else changes that isn’t desirable, so we’re still very blunt. Could it be that we could design better drugs to do that? Yes, but to do that you have to release the reductionist approach and understand what those drugs actually represent, and that will be, I think, the next phase of science, true science.

Interviewer: Do me and you share the same reality?

ZDoggMD: Do me and you share the same reality? I think we interact with the same matrix of consciousness that everybody does, but we interpret it differently. We construct it differently, and it affects our own awareness differently, but the same enough that we share an intersubjective truth. You and I share certain understandings. English, certain norms, like if we’re in an airport we don’t run around yelling, “Bomb!” Well, maybe some of us do. That comes from our shared conditioning within that matrix, but yes, we each construct our own experience of reality 1000%. That’s without doubt.

Interviewer: But how do I know that the color blue that I see is the same color blue that you see?

ZDoggMD: You don’t. You don’t and you can’t, but I will say this. I think humans evolved our interface with reality in a mostly similar way. The exception is the mutations that happen that cause synesthesia where you may smell colors or see sounds. Those are people that prove the rule that our interface is constantly evolving and it may be that in the future it might be beneficial to us to survive to see a sound, to see a sound of a siren as the color red. We share that red. Actually, that experience of red probably as a quality or an experience is the same because it has been selected for through natural selection whatever that is in reality in the reality.

Interviewer: Do the mentally ill see less of reality or more of reality?

ZDoggMD: I think some of the mentally ill see more of the underlying source code and it makes it unstable. Because remember the proposition that Hoffman and others have said is that seeing the underlying source code of reality, the complexity of it, is untenable in terms of survival. It’s too much information and it doesn’t help you survive. When I look at a glass of water, it may represent, it may point to the deepest, most complex conscious agent having experiences, but our mind reduces it to a glass of water because we don’t need to see that in order to survive.

Someone who’s mentally ill might actually see something in that glass of water that is vastly different than you and I have access to, but it’s maladaptive to live in a society of humans. It’s just not good. We call that “crazy,” right? I actually think when we understand mental illness at its root, it’s going to be something along those lines. It’s not going to be there’s a serotonin flux that’s out of jiggering.

Interviewer: What do you think we could do if it turns out to be true that consciousness is at the underpinning of everything? What could we do with that in terms of medical structures?

ZDoggMD: If it turns out that Hoffman’s theory that everything is consciousness interacting with itself in mathematically predictable ways, the way that helps medicine is you create a science that’s based on the underlying source code instead of on the icons. In other words, right now all of science, if this is true, is the science of our desktop. I move the trashcan here. It does this. I move this document here. It does that. But it doesn’t tell us, if we actually want to transform things, how do we get into the underlying program?

In the old days, the idealists, it’s a school of philosophy that said we can’t really know reality because it’s unknowable. It’s just God or whatever. That’s not very helpful. It’s not very scientifically precise and it doesn’t help us actually do things in the world. But a theory where you have mathematically predictable models of conscious agents interacting with themselves can actually predict what happens in our interface. That means you can start to manipulate it at the source code level with the right technology. What’s a psychedelic? A manipulation of our interface. It’s a gross, crude manipulation of our interface.

Interviewer: It’s a plant consciousness.

ZDoggMD: Maybe it’s a plant consciousness. Maybe you’re seeing fungal consciousness. Who knows? People who’ve done it feel this is true. They’ll tell you, “That’s what it felt like.”

Interviewer: When was the first moment that you questioned reality? How early? How far back?

ZDoggMD: I think I started questioning reality when I went through the bar mitzvah equivalent in Zoroastrianism, which is two priests come to your house, and you’re 11, and you have to learn these prayers, and you go through the ceremony. I started going, “So there’s a God, of course. It’s a mythic, magic God that you have to pray to because it can punish you, and this and that.” I started going, “That doesn’t really jibe with any of this, that I’m having this experience in this world. How does that have anything…?” The facade of reality started to crack then. Then I had a psychedelic experience in college and I said, “Oh, no. Reality is much deeper, more complex than we’re able to perceive.” It’s not just that we’re not perceiving all of reality. It’s that we’ve taken reality and we’ve turned it into symbols that have nothing to do with reality. They’re simply ways for us to survive. Reality itself is far more beautiful, complex, and terrifying than we have access to or should have access to, maybe. That’s a valid question. If we want to survive in society, should we have access to that? These are valid questions.

Interviewer: There’s something here about how the data allows people to do terrible things. You know what I mean? Because it’s reductionism on top of reductionism, so it’s not the world is true. It’s this way. It’s hard. I can knock on things. There’s the desk. Then we have measures for things. These are our measures and we’re going to improve things this way. Look, here’s the data that backs the data, so it’s all endogenous. The same thing with reductionism. This is the thing that does the thing. This is the icon. Those are connected and I can’t figure out how to…

ZDoggMD: This idea that most of modern science has been so successful because it works. If we move this icon, this happens. This atom does this. Quantum mechanics, one of the most successful theories of all times, predicts reality. It makes no sense that things would need conscious observers to settle down, but it works. It’s absolutely predictable. We have fallen into what Kaufman calls a rookie mistake of going, “This interface must be reality because we can manipulate it and make things happen.”

It’s true, up to a point, and science has been really good at getting to that point. Everything in our current model was true until it starts to push up against where it’s not, where we’re failing. We’re now getting to the point where we’re in the 21st century. We haven’t figured out cancer yet. We haven’t figured out mental illness. We haven’t figured out why people are conscious at all. It’s because the reduction as a materialism is going to fail. It really is.

Now, some people say we’re just not smart enough. We don’t have a powerful enough computer. I don’t think so. I think it’s because the next layer of science is understanding the source code, which is that it isn’t atoms really emerging consciousness. It’s consciousness that emerges an icon of atoms. It’s predictable. We can have scientific formulas that are mathematically based. As Hofmann said, “Math is the bones of consciousness. It’s the flesh and bones of consciousness.”

That’s science in its purest form. Science isn’t a dogma. It’s an approach. The next layer of science is going to be that. I am convinced of this, dude. It gives you a feeling both intellectually and emotionally that that is absolutely correct. That’s why I talk about this stuff at great risk to my own personal reputation because I think it’s true and I think a lot of people that don’t want to admit this publicly think it’s true. I’m excited. The future is going to be insane, absolutely amazing, but we have to transcend this reductionism.

Interviewer: One last question. Would you agree with the statement that all significant advances in science are conscious, perceptual shifts?

ZDoggMD: All significant advances in science are conscious, perceptual shifts. I will say this. I wouldn’t reduce it just to science. I would say all significant advances in humanity collectively are due to conscious, perceptual shifts.

Interviewer: This leads into why a better computer, a faster computer isn’t going to solve it. We have to change ourselves.

ZDoggMD: The whole model of our minds have to change. The whole model of society has to change. That’s why I hate this idea that only Democrats are progressives, only conservatives are trying to pull you back. No, we all need to transcend and include what has come before. But transcend to that next level, use this all as building. It’s all true, but partial. What’s the next emergent? We’re there because we’re running up on the failures of the current paradigm, and it used to be the current paradigm couldn’t be beat. We went to the moon. We harnessed the atom to power electricity. We cured infectious diseases. Oh, my God it gives you goosebumps when you think about it.

What have we done lately? The reason is that now we’re at the end of that paradigm. What’s next? So don’t resist it. We need to start to go, “This is what’s been successful. Let’s build on it, and this is what’s failed. Let’s transcend it.” That next rung on the ladder is this realization. It is a huge perceptual shift and the New Age people talk about, “Everybody’s going to get woke.” That’s not what it is. It’s a slow fits and starts wave, and then the wave recedes, but it’s got to happen, and that’s why we have conversations like this. If five people in the audience get this and they send me a message, I know that we’re on the right track because it’s going to have to start at the fringes and then open up. So the punchline is, “Hey hey hey hey, smoke weed everyday.”

 

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