Jake Orthwein on Psychedelics, Consciousness, Buddhism, Jung | Seeing Clearly Episode 6

ELI5/TLDR

Your brain is not a window onto the world — it’s a guessing machine that mostly hallucinates what it expects to see and then nudges those guesses against the trickle of data coming through your senses. Psychedelics turn the guess-confidence way down, which is why everything suddenly feels enormous, sacred, and terrifying. Meditation, on the same plumbing, is a slower way to notice that the things you treat as solid — the table, your pain, your self — are not actually sitting “out there” with their properties stuck to them; they’re emerging in the dance between you and whatever the world actually is. Jake Orthwein, a filmmaker hired by Sam Harris to make a movie on this, walks Christian through how predictive processing, Buddhist emptiness, and Jung’s god-image are all pointing at the same thing from different sides.

The Full Story

The brain as a reducing valve

Start with the strange fact that there are more nerve fibres in the brain travelling top-down than bottom-up. If perception were just “light hits eye, signal travels up, picture appears,” you’d expect the opposite. Instead, the brain is mostly busy predicting what it’s about to see, and using the actual sensory data to correct those predictions at the edges. This is called predictive processing.

Stack it: low-level predictions (“there’s an edge here”) feed mid-level ones (“that’s a cup”), which feed high-level ones (“I am at a table about to drink coffee”). Reality gets compressed, anticipated, contained. Aldous Huxley called this the “reducing valve.” Without it, you’d drown in the world.

There’s a related idea called the free energy principle from Karl Friston. The math says: any system that manages to stay a coherent thing in a universe trending toward dissipation must behave as if it’s modelling its environment and minimising surprise. Brains are one instance of this. Cells are another. The math from “how do brains perceive” and the math from “what must any bounded thing do to stay bounded” turn out to be the same math. Which is suspicious in a good way.

“All of the sense making we’re doing, including this sort of high level abstract cognition, has at its root the situation of being a bounded finite thing in relationship to a world whose entropy you could never assimilate totally.”

Psychedelics turn the valve loose

If your ordinary experience is the valve doing its job — predictions tight, priors confident, world tame — then psychedelics relax the precision on those priors. The top-down clamp loosens. Sensory data and possibility flood back in. People report dissolving into the room, losing the boundary between body and world, no longer remembering who they are.

This is also why they often report something that looks like a religious experience. The thing the priors were quietly holding at bay was what Rudolf Otto called the mysterium tremendum — the overwhelming, sacred, slightly threatening sense of an infinite world pressing against your finite mind. The valve was its bouncer. Loosen the valve, the bouncer steps aside.

Robin Carhart-Harris has a measurement for this: the entropic brain hypothesis. Measure the unpredictability of neural signals. The more entropic the signal, the richer and stranger the conscious experience people report. He thinks ordinary waking consciousness is slightly subcritical — a bit more rigid than is optimal — and that psychedelics push the brain closer to criticality, the sweet spot where a system is sensitive enough to its environment to learn from it but stable enough not to dissolve into it.

Imagine dropping single grains of sand on a pile. For a long time nothing happens. Then a grain triggers an avalanche, the pile rearranges, and it’s still a pile. That’s criticality. Living things tend to live near it.

Why the dissolved-self thing is not what the Buddhists actually mean

Here’s a confusion people import from psychedelics into Buddhism. On a strong trip you might lose your sense of body boundary, lose your name, sit very still because you can’t move. People assume that is what the Buddha was pointing at — empty out the concepts, become a vegetable, congratulations, enlightenment.

Orthwein is firm: that can’t be right. The Buddha walked around, gave talks, remembered his name. The “no-self” claim is much narrower and weirder.

The technical word is avidya, usually translated as ignorance. Ignorant of what? Of the fact that phenomena lack inherent existence. We do this move where we attribute solid, stand-alone, “from its own side” existence to things — to the cup, to the pain in the knee, to the self that’s experiencing the pain. The Buddhist claim is that this attribution is the source of the push-pull dynamics — craving, aversion — that constitute suffering.

Concrete version: you’re sitting, an unpleasant sensation arises in your knee. The default sense is that you are a separate subject, over here, and the pain is over there, happening to you. From inside that frame, you can be in a push-pull with it — wanting it gone, resenting it, bracing against it. Pull the pin on the assumed separateness and the basis for the push-pull dissolves. The pain may still be there. The suffering on top of it loosens.

“It has to do with this seeming but not actually real sense that you’re other than what you’re experiencing.”

Emptiness goes all the way down

Take the colour of a bottle. Feels like the green is in the bottle. Do the physics — green is some interaction between wavelengths of light, your visual system, your neural wiring. There’s no neat one-to-one between “the wavelength out there” and “the green you see.” Green is happening in the meeting between you and whatever is.

Now: every property you’d want to ascribe to anything has a bit of that character. The way the table feels under your hand depends on what kind of hand you have. The way a cup is “graspable” depends on whether you’re a thing with hands or, say, a fish. To a burglar in your house, the cup might be a weapon, not a cup. Its cup-ness is not a property of the cup from its own side. It’s a property of the meeting between cup and creature.

The radical move is to say: this goes all the way down. Not just the high-level concepts. Colours, shapes, edges, atoms — the same logic applies. Nothing has svabhāva, “own-being.” This is the emptiness claim.

It’s not the same as “everything is subjective and you can decide what’s real” — try deciding that the floor isn’t there. It’s the subtler claim that meaning, perception, even what counts as an object, lives in the interactive space between subject and world, not as a property of either side alone. David Chapman’s phrase: meaning is neither subjective nor objective but interactive.

Where this collides with Sam Harris

Sam Harris, in The Moral Landscape, makes a clean argument: the world divides into objective things (physics) and subjective things (conscious states). Conscious states can be intrinsically better or worse. Therefore the moral project is to navigate toward better states. Orthwein finds this attractive — he calls himself “basically a closet hardcore utilitarian” — but he thinks the emptiness claim quietly unpicks it.

The trouble is the clean two-bucket ontology. If even physics-talk depends on a particular vantage point and a particular kind of measuring creature, then “objective physics on one side, subjective qualia on the other” is itself a modernist arrangement, not a found feature of reality. The hard problem of consciousness, in his read, is partly an artefact of having drawn that line so sharply.

This leaves him in a bind he openly admits he hasn’t solved. He shares Christian’s intuition that valence — the goodness or badness inherent in an experience — is the bedrock of normativity. But the same emptiness analysis you’d apply to colour or cups also applies to valence. The pain you were sure was intrinsically bad turns out, on inspection, to shift depending on how you look at it. Which is exactly what meditative practice exploits.

Robert Bea’s book Seeing That Frees is full of this: try looking at a sensation this way, then this way, then this way. Over time you notice that no stable characteristic survives across all the ways of looking. That’s the meta-insight. Phenomena are empty.

The structure that survives the frame shift

Christian keeps pushing back: even if you can shift frames, within any frame there’s a structure — a fact of the matter. You don’t get to claim the bottle is yellow when everyone else sees green. Relativity didn’t kill physics; it just made physics depend on the observer’s frame while preserving correct measurements within each frame.

Orthwein agrees, mostly. There’s something our claims are accountable to — Brian Cantwell Smith’s phrase: “something in deference to which our objectifications exist.” When word and world part company, trust the world. But the moment you try to specify what that something is, you’ve already objectified it from within some frame. So the most honest move is to leave it deliberately vague — which, he notes, lands you suspiciously close to “the Dao that can be named is not the Dao.”

Jung’s god-image and why religion is a defence against God

The Jungian piece, via Edward Edinger’s Ego and Archetype. The ego — your individuated finite self — develops in relationship to something Jung called the Self (capital-S, confusing name): a kind of regulative totality that contains the ego, the shadow, the opposites, everything. The “god-image” in any culture is what makes it possible for the ego to interface with the Self.

The infant starts in unconscious identification with the Self — not believing it’s God, just not yet having distinguished itself from totality. Then the mother fails to instantly meet every need, and that “necessary failure” is the first crack: oh, I am not the totality, I have limits, my desires can be thwarted. This is the Eden myth, basically. The fall is the discovery of finitude.

A healthy psyche, on this picture, maintains an ego-Self axis — a working connection between the finite individual and the transcendent totality. Lose that, and you oscillate between two failure modes: inflation (identifying with the divine: I am God, I am immortal) and alienation (cut off from anything transcendent at all).

Now Orthwein quotes a line that stops the conversation:

“All religion is a defence against an encounter with God.”

You’d think the religious structure exists to give you the encounter. Jung’s claim is the opposite. The dogma, the ritual, the narrative — they keep the archetypal energies present to consciousness in a contained form, so you can participate in them safely. Without that scaffolding, the bare encounter with the mysterium tremendum — the same thing the predictive-processing brain is organised to keep at bay — would be unbearable. Religion is titrated exposure to the infinite.

This is the same shape as the predictive-processing story. Cognition is structured to manage anomaly. Religion is structured to manage the encounter with what exceeds your model. Same job, different scale.

The hero, order and chaos, and why Jordan Peterson keeps showing up

Peterson’s mythological grammar — great mother (chaos, the unknown, nature), great father (order, culture, the known), divine son (the individual mediator between them) — turns out to graft cleanly onto predictive processing. Top-down priors are the great father: the culture in your head, the ordered model. Bottom-up sensory data is the great mother: the unfiltered chaos that would overwhelm you if it came in raw. You can’t have either alone. Pure data dissolves you. Pure prior shuts the world out.

Peterson’s ethic — embody the hero who voluntarily descends into chaos and re-emerges with renewed order — is his answer to the structural problem of being a finite predictor in an infinite world. You will never arrive at a final understanding that won’t eventually break against new anomaly. So the only stable posture is the willingness to keep dying and being reborn at finer resolutions of order.

Orthwein draws an unexpected parallel: the Buddhist injunction to get off the wheel of death and rebirth (samsara) is reaching for something similar, but going through the back door. If non-dual awareness is recognised as never having taken on inherent finite existence in the first place, it was never bound to the wheel at all. The voluntary self-sacrifice of the hero and the recognition of no-self are pointing at the same dissolution from different angles.

Scale-free hierarchies and why cultures swallow their prophets

One last loop. Brains near the critical point exhibit scale-free hierarchies — the same organisational pattern repeating at multiple scales, like a fractal. This is good for information processing: low-level perturbations get resolved at low levels when possible, but can propagate up the chain when needed. You don’t want every twitch shaking your deepest model. You also don’t want a model so rigid that nothing ever reaches it.

The same structure shows up in Plato — the soul and the city mirror each other. It shows up in psychedelic neuroscience — Carhart-Harris’s other paper, “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain,” argues psychedelics flatten these hierarchies temporarily. Walls down, everything connected to everything, lots of communication, not much functional structure. Which is exactly what happens to a culture when psychedelics arrive at scale — the 1960s being the obvious example.

And there’s a darker corollary in Peterson’s diagram. The hero who descends into chaos and brings back the boon — the renewed insight, the new way of seeing — is contaminated by the encounter. The culture often does not receive him well. The culture itself may have to pass through chaos before it can assimilate what he brought back. The Christ story has this shape. Timothy Leary, less heroically, has this shape. The carrier of new order arrives looking like a destabilising force, and sometimes that’s exactly what they are, on the way to becoming something else.

Key Takeaways

Predictive processing: the brain mostly predicts what it expects to perceive and corrects predictions against sensory data, rather than building perception bottom-up. More top-down nerve fibres than bottom-up.
Free energy principle (Friston): any system that maintains itself against thermodynamic dissipation must behave as if it’s modelling its environment and minimising surprise. The math from this and the math from predictive processing are the same math.
Reducing valve (Huxley): ordinary perception is reality compressed and contained. Without the compression, you can’t function.
Entropic brain hypothesis (Carhart-Harris): neural signal entropy correlates with the richness of conscious content. Psychedelics increase both.
Criticality: living systems hover at the edge between rigid order and dissolution into noise. Optimal for information processing. Carhart-Harris thinks ordinary waking consciousness is slightly subcritical; psychedelics push toward criticality.
Avidya / inherent existence: the central Buddhist confusion is treating phenomena as having properties “from their own side” rather than emerging in the meeting between perceiver and world. This is what generates suffering, not the experiences themselves.
Emptiness goes all the way down: not just high-level concepts but colours, shapes, the cup’s “cupness” — every property is interactive, not intrinsic.
The Western “no-self” misreading: Buddhists negate a narrow technical sense of self (the assumed separate experiencer). They are not negating personality, memory, identity, or the ability to function.
Meaning is neither subjective nor objective but interactive (Chapman): the third category that modernist ontology lacks a clean slot for.
Brian Cantwell Smith on intentionality: even bare truth-claims require a normative commitment to “something in deference to which our objectifications exist.” You can’t get reference and truth without smuggling in normativity.
Jung’s ego-Self axis: a healthy psyche maintains a working connection between the finite individual and the transcendent totality. Failures: inflation (ego thinks it’s God) or alienation (ego cut off entirely).
“All religion is a defence against an encounter with God”: dogma and ritual keep archetypal energies present in a contained form, protecting you from the bare overwhelming encounter — same job the predictive-processing brain does at the cognitive level.
Peterson’s order-chaos-hero grammar maps cleanly onto top-down priors, bottom-up data, and the system that mediates between them.
Death and rebirth as ethic: no final model survives all anomaly, so the stable posture is repeated voluntary dissolution and reformation at finer resolutions of order.
Scale-free hierarchies: low-level perturbations resolve locally when possible but can propagate up when necessary. Brains near criticality exhibit this. So do healthy cultures.
Heuristics-and-biases is upside down (Chapman): formal rationality is a specialised application of everyday reasonableness, not the other way around. Treating the everyday as a defective approximation of the formal is the rationalist’s mistake.
Meta-rationality (Keegan stage 5 / Chapman): the skill of handling multiple formalisms reflectively, knowing which to apply when, and never mistaking any of them for the view from nowhere.

Claude’s Take

This is one of the better long conversations in the genre — two people who’ve actually read the source material, willing to follow each other into the weeds without performing certainty. Orthwein in particular has the rare habit of openly flagging when he hasn’t worked something out, which is a much more reliable signal of careful thinking than a polished thesis.

The strongest thread is the structural parallel between predictive processing, Buddhist emptiness, and Jung’s ego-Self axis. Each is, at a different level of description, an account of how a finite system manages its relationship to something it can’t fully contain. The cognitive version (priors managing anomaly), the contemplative version (the meditator noticing that phenomena have no fixed character across ways of looking), and the religious version (ritual mediating the encounter with the mysterium tremendum) really do seem to be the same shape at different scales. That’s not a small claim, but the convergence is genuine and not forced.

The honest weakness — and Orthwein admits it twice — is the unresolved tension between his utilitarian intuitions and his emptiness commitments. If valence is empty in the same sense colour is empty, then “we should maximise good conscious states” loses its foundation in exactly the way moral foundationalism is supposed to. He gestures at Brian Cantwell Smith’s structural-realist move (normativity as accountability to something we can’t specify) but doesn’t close the loop. Fair enough — nobody has — but it’s the soft spot in the worldview. The conversation would have been even better if Christian had pressed harder there.

The Jung material is the freshest part for a viewer who’s already done the predictive-processing rounds. The reading of religion as a defence against the encounter with God, rather than its delivery mechanism, is the kind of inversion that earns its surprise. It also explains a lot about why fundamentalism — religion treated as propositional science about an inert deity — feels so much more dead than the older participatory forms. The container is intact; the contents have leaked out.

Score 8/10. Loses a point for the unresolved valence-realism / emptiness tension being more punted than wrestled with, and for the conversation occasionally drifting into “and then this guy said this” name-dropping when a clean example would have done more work. Gains points back for being unusually honest about the limits of its own claims and for braiding three traditions together in a way that doesn’t violate any of them.