“Open Questions § Anti-Psychedelics”, Gwern2018-10-17

Some anomalies/questions which are not necessarily important, but do puzzle me or where I find existing explanations to be unsatisfying.

Psychedelics famously dissolve personal identity and make you ‘one with everything’. If there are so many drugs which can do that, where are the drugs which do the opposite, strengthening identity and making you one with nothing?

There are a few candidates like MDMA or ketamine/DXM which may do something like that, but not many and not convincingly.

This may show that psychedelics’ effect on identity is less interesting than it looks: it is easier to destroy than to create, and this may be why so many psychedelics can have such similar effects in dissolving but never strengthening identity.