Naturalizing the inner healer – Anssi Pitkänen

Anssi Pitkänen's lecture "Naturalizing the inner healer: reconceptualizing psychedelics as autopoiesis-enhancing agents" from the Psykedeelit 2023 conference held in Turku, Finland on November 23–24, 2023.

More information about the event and speakers: https://psyty.fi/psykedeelit2023/
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"Could the philosophy of self-organizing systems help to understand how psychedelic experiences can be therapeutically legitimate? My proposal is based on the work of Evan Thompson, who argues that biological systems are qualitatively different to mechanical ones. Biological systems are self-organizing, or to use a more technical term, autopoietic.

The purpose of this talk is to juxtapose autopoiesis with the concept of the 'inner healer' that has been proposed to work through psychedelic therapy. I consider the concept of an inner healer to be vague and unscientific compared to the recent advances of our understanding of those mechanisms that underpin the effects of psychedelics and their therapeutic effectiveness. In my talk I will argue in favor of the following proposition (1), and I will consider some of its most important implications.

(1.) What has been called 'the inner healer' in psychedelic literature can be naturalized to mean the autopoietic capacities belonging to all biological organisms. Autopoiesis-enhancing agents like psychedelics simply broaden the possibilities of what can be reorganized, by for example, adding entropy to the system, and affording communication between brain networks that in normal conditions do not 'talk' to each other."

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