How psychedelics can increase cognitive liberty

Are you really thinking for yourself? Psychedelics like psilocybin can help you become aware of how cultural conditioning has influenced your thought life.

Image by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

I learnt about the concept of “cognitive liberty” while interviewing a doctor for a story I was writing for DoubleBlind magazine. In a nutshell, having cognitive liberty means being free to control your own consciousness and mental processes. The degree to which we are cognitively liberated is the degree to which we can think for ourselves. According to Chat GPT, the term, coined in the late 1990s by neuroethicist Wrye Sententia and legal theorist Richard Glen Boire of the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (CCLE), refers to “the right to freedom of thought, mental autonomy, and the control over one’s own consciousness, including the right to alter or protect one’s mental state through means such as psychoactive substances or neurotechnology.” The fact that, in the previous sentence, I have repeated, verbatim, an AI-generated description of cognitive liberty is in itself a violation of our cognitive liberty because what I have done is adopted, through agreement, a technologically-generation description, which originated as a theoretical construct by Sententia and Glen Boire, which came into my consciousness via the promptings of a doctor, which was then transmitted to your awareness as you read these words…