Ideas

Ego Dissolution

EE-goh dis-uh-LOO-shun
The measurable, dose-dependent unraveling of self-boundaries under psychedelics, meditation, or brain injury, and the REBUS model built to explain it.
Documented

REBUS and the entropy brain

Carhart-Harris and Friston's REBUS model (2019), relaxed beliefs under psychedelics, holds that 5-HT2A agonism relaxes the precision of high-level priors, letting bottom-up signal flood the hierarchy; the self-model, being the heaviest prior, relaxes most dramatically. Documented correlates: DMN disintegration tracks ego dissolution scores (Carhart-Harris 2016), cortical entropy rises and predicts later increases in openness (Lebedev 2016), and therapeutic outcomes correlate with dissolution intensity. The Ego Dissolution Inventory quantifies it.

Assessment: Documented, quantified, and still correlative: the model explains the phenomenology's shape, not consciousness itself, and its authors say so.
Stories

The mystic's lab coat

The folk reading: the psychedelic renaissance validated the perennial philosophy, Griffiths's mystical-experience scores predicting depression remission reads like the desert fathers with statistics. The counter-folk reading, from clinicians, warns that dissolution without integration is just depersonalization with better marketing.

Assessment: Both positions are documented in the literature itself. The mystical-type experience is now a validated psychometric category; what it contacts remains outside the instrument.
Interesting claims

The filter, loosened on schedule

The claim: ego dissolution is the temporary lifting of the reducing valve, which is why the state schedules the wrenches. The trap literature adds the warning label: an open valve inside a prison is still inside the prison.

Assessment: The pharmacology is documented, the valve is a metaphor, and the scheduling argument is political history run backward through metaphysics. Filed as the archive's most literally testable esoteric claim.
Sources and further reading
  1. Carhart-Harris and Friston, REBUS, 2019
  2. The Ego Dissolution Inventory, Nour et al., 2016
  3. Lebedev et al., 2016, entropy and openness
  4. Griffiths et al., mystical experience and depression trials
Worth asking

When the self can be dialed down pharmacologically, is the mystical experience explained, or finally measurable?

Open in the interactive archive
GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+