Minerva

Are you living your best life, given the circumstances? According to Amy Berg, there's probably room for improvement. She thinks that, for most of us, the good life is a well-rounded life – one full of diverse pursuits, projects, goals, hobbies and interests. This episode explores why, and how, to live that way.

Psychedelic therapy is remarkable, and tempting. More and more studies indicate that substances like LSD or psilocybin can play a helpful role in the treatment of anxiety, depression, or alcoholism — even when more conventional substances come up short.

Many of the patients in these studies report having had a mystical experience as their ordinary sense of time, space, and self fell away. They feel, moreover, that they’ve learned something during their trip, leaving the lab with new or altered beliefs and the sense that they now have a better grasp on the world.

These studies draw a correlation between such mystical experiences and psychological benefits. People who felt that they caught a glimpse of reality as it really is ended up being less anxious, less depressed.

So the beliefs stemming from psychedelic experiences seem to be helpful, but are they true or meaningful? Is there any reason to believe that stimulating our serotonin 2A receptors leads us to a worldview that’s closer to reality? And what if the answer is no? What if psychedelics do not just produce visual hallucinations, but also metaphysical ones, and give us an unwarranted sense of confidence in a misrepresentation of the world? And what would that say about the ethical status of psychedelic therapy, given that most of us don’t want to be deceived?

In this episode, I talk to Chris Letheby. He teaches philosophy at The University of Western Australia and has written a book about the philosophy of psychedelics.

Not long after his daughter died, Freud wrote a letter to a friend: “Although we know that after such a loss the acute state of mourning will subside, we also know we shall remain inconsolable and will never find a substitute. No matter what may fill the gap, even if it be filled completely, it nevertheless remains something else. And actually this is how it should be. It is the only way of perpetuating that love which we do not want to relinquish.”

This conversation touches on so much of this. Oded Na'aman argues that emotions about the past, like grief or regret, are appropriate. That it can even be right to feel them. Medicating them out of existence would get in the way of truly appreciating what happened. At the same time, these backward-looking emotions aren't easy to make sense of: they change and diminish over time, even though the reasons for them persist. The past, after all, cannot change.

Oded Na'aman teaches philosophy at the Hebrew University and writes about ethics, moral psychology, political philosophy, and literature. He also writes long-form essays and fiction. I recorded this conversation back in 2018.

Most of us like to think of ourselves as unprejudiced, but psychologists tell us otherwise. Even if we don't have any conscious biases, stereotypes might still influence our judgements and our actions implicitly. In this episode of the Minerva podcast, Robin Zheng talks about how we can hold ourselves and others accountable for these biases – and whether they make us blameworthy.

My most powerful aesthetic experience didn’t happen in an art gallery — it happened in a forest at dusk. I couldn’t quite make sense of it until I came across Dr. Emily Brady's work.

In this episode, she explores what it means to engage with nature on its own terms, why interpretation doesn't require an artist, and how aesthetic virtues relate to environmental care.