#1116 Adam Safron: Consciousness, AI, Psychedelics, and The Self

Hello everyone, welcome to a new episode of The Decenter. I'm your host, as always, Ricardo Lopes, and today I'm joined by Dr. Adam Seffran. He is research fellow at the Allen Discovery Institute at Tufts University and he is also leading an interdisciplinary research program at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies. And today we're going to talk about consciousness, intelligence, psychedelics, the self.

and some other related topics. So Adam, welcome to the show. It's a huge pleasure to everyone. So happy to be talking with you. So before we get into specific topics, let me just ask you, because it seems to me that the research you do is very multidisciplinary and you have many different kinds of approaches.

For some topics you have, for example, developmental and evolutionary approaches, then you also apply neurophenomenology or neuroscience plus phenomenology and then you also have embodied cognition so um what is the sort of framework that you adopt in your work when it comes to studying the mind exactly I guess some of my um uh biggest influences would be um uh it's like people like uh uh Nietzsche, um uh uh George Lakoff, um many others, but basically um you might call it um uh heterarchical perspectivism. And it's like, you know, um all models are wrong, some models are useful, and all analogies are wrong, some analogies are useful. And basically, um

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