Designing Consciousness: Psychedelics as Ontological Design Tools for Decolonizing Consciousness

Abstract

Ontological and decolonial designers have called for a reorientation of the fundamental relations between humans, things, and the world away from their entrenchment in modernist and colonial thought. Both ontological and decolonial design therefore share the vision of transcending design’s modern philosophical inheritances to allow for the flourishing of new ontologies of interrelatedness. Whereas some radical design theorists have mobilized border thinking, subjugated knowledges, and alternative ways of being as means of challenging modernist epistemologies and ontologies, this article instead examines the role that alternate states of consciousness may play in the formation of new ontological designs. In drawing on radical design and decolonial theory, I argue that psychedelic experiences and states of consciousness can potentially serve as decolonial tools for designing consciousness, and thereby assist in reorienting human social and environmental relations toward ontologies of relatedness and interconnectedness.

Keywords:

• consciousness
• decoloniality
• design
• language
• psychedelics
• relational ontology

Introduction

This essay seeks to incorporate the subject of human consciousness into design practice and theory by taking the alternate states of consciousness and experiences provoked by classic psychedelic substances as a case in point. While acknowledging that a number of decolonial and radical design theorists have shown how human design projects are entrenched in modernist languages and philosophical precepts that work to the detriment of other ways of knowing, being, and relating in the world, I instead suggest that our normalized modes of consciousness have themselves been designed according to a particular matrix of colonial power. In drawing on contemporary scientific research on classic psychedelic substances, I argue that the alternate states of consciousness and experiences occasioned by classic psychedelics can potentially help to usher in new ontological designs by way of expanding individualistic senses of subjectivity. By understanding human consciousness as a multiplicity which can confer a wide variety of attributes, senses, and abilities depending on what states of consciousness are experienced, design theory and praxis can begin to consider how the design of our consciousness itself constitutes a domain worthy of further exploration in cultivating ontologies and social relations based on interconnectedness and interrelatedness.

The Nature of Design

From early on, design theorists such as Herbert Simon (1969, 114) have suggested that what design broadly refers to is the capacity for making things other than they are; that is, making things “how they ought to be.” The attempt to make things how they ought to be, or to make things other than they are, however, not only involves certain assumptions about how one understands the object, phenomena, or event that one intends to design; it also involves value judgments that are made before and throughout the design process. The practice of design, therefore, already embraces certain philosophical precepts, including, at the very least, ontological assumptions as well as a political and ethical stance. As preconceived notions are inherently at work in any design practice, it becomes clear that while design involves both “making sense of things” and “problem-solving” (Manzini 2015, 35), it does so in accordance with a particular philosophical configuration. The philosophical underpinnings according to which one makes sense of things, and approaches so-called problems, is contingent upon a panoply of factors including one’s culture, language, agential potentials, and even one’s state of consciousness.

While design theorists have suggested that the origins of design are anthropocentric, dating back 2.5 million years to our tool-making ancestors Homo habilis (Friedman and Stolerman in Manzini 2015, xi), it should be recognized that designing, or the intentional act of developing certain problem-solving strategies to problematic circumstances, is rife throughout the more-than-human world. All living creatures design their environments in ways that are appropriate to their modes of being, and “all organisms make ecological living places, altering earth, air, and water […] In the process, each organism changes everyone’s world” (Tsing 2015, 22). In this communal world, each nature struggles to maintain its characteristic shape as it engages “with the necessities of exterior limitations” (Kratochvíl 2016, 75). By taking on certain styles of being in relation to the world, each entity prioritizes “particular relations” according to the unique struggles they encounter (Kratochvíl 2016, 76). In design terms, insofar as each organism is incessantly faced with problems that it must find solutions to, and therefore must make sense of things in order to do so, each entity contributes to the weaving of an interconnected web of “intergenerational living spaces,” wherein each entity engages with their environment through a process of “redesign” (Tsing 2015, 161). In echoing the notion that design is not an activity exclusive to anthropos, designer Tony Fry (2014, 21) has suggested that the genesis of design not only precedes human existence but also remains “lodged in our origin.” On Fry’s (2014, 21) account, design is a preeminent, “prefigurative force”; it is an “ontological driver that powers the endless (to date) transformative cycling of things, beings, and Being.”

Notwithstanding the idea that design refers to a natural propensity that is enacted through all entities in their “worlding[s]” of the world (Fry 2014, 14), it can be maintained that design takes on a qualitatively different dimension for human beings given the complexity of human language and abstract thought. And while further acknowledging that complex forms of language exist across all lifeforms – from prokaryotes which engage in signaling processes to the idea that all living entities are involved in a “semiosis of life” (Skyrms 2010; Kohn 2013, 55) – there still remains nuances between the influence that human language has on our ontological designs when compared with those of nonhumans. Holding debates over the human–nonhuman divide aside, most human languages today have proceeded in a way that is markedly different from that of other creatures, including even from human oral traditions, given how extensively they have tended to isolate things from their relations and, thus, develop abstract ideas that are context independent. While the ability to abstract in such a way undoubtedly confers certain advantages to human design projects, it nevertheless runs the risk of imposing rigid structures over what is otherwise an everchanging, fluid, and interrelated world. The styles of reification mediated by human language reflect certain philosophical precepts which in turn affect one’s conceptualization of the world. As there are particular philosophical commitments embedded in contemporary languages and designs, our styles of reification inherently contain certain value judgments about the phenomena being categorized and, as such, warrant a brief investigation into how language lends itself to multivalent design practices.

Human Language and Design

Across the spectrum of design practices that exist, it is clear that language plays an indispensable role in the human design projects found across contemporary societies. Granted that communication is “an essential feature of life” (Mansuco 2017, 43), without which living beings could not learn from or adapt to the challenges they encounter throughout their lives, it appears that human world-making processes are markedly distinct from those of nonhumans in that they tend to abstract and isolate things from their relations, and phenomena from their multivalent contexts. In considering the formal language used in contemporary design projects, there is an implicit incorporation of modernist philosophical precepts which construe entities, phenomena, and experiences in particular ways. It is in this sense that modern human language influences “our perception of things itself [and] does violence to the very nature of ‘things in being’- which is the relational character of all things as ‘world’” (Heidegger 2002, 7). The processes at work in modern human language systems have been referred to by some as “the denaturing of physis,” a phrase used to denote matter which has been denatured through a process of reification (Kratochvíl 2016, 17). The philosopher Zdeněk Kratochvíl (2016, 28) has suggested that what reified natures denote are natures described from one perspective; an entity reified in this manner is thus rendered devoid of their temporal and informal associations and interrelations. Notwithstanding the fact that reification through language is a pragmatic function which contributes to human survival and aids in the acquisition of certain kinds of specialized knowledges, there are degrees to which natures can be abstracted or denatured; thus, there are different styles of reification that emphasize certain relations over others.

This relationship between the philosophical foundations and ontological designs of our world-making practices and the manner in which phenomena and entities are reified through language is an area of inquiry that has garnered significant attention from philosophers and social scientists alike. Misia Landau, for instance, has argued that “reality is not simply ‘experienced’ or ‘reflected’ in language, but instead is actually produced by language itself” (Landau in McKenna 1992, 7). Landau’s assertions echo what Whorf and Carroll (1956, 212) recognized decades earlier in claiming that language is not only central to the formation of mental categories and activity but that it also plays an integral role in our impressions, ideas, and analyses of the world. For Whorf and Carroll (1956, 252), because our thoughts themselves are in language, it follows that our analyses into the nature of things will tend to emphasize certain phenomena and relations over others, based on our culture, our reasoning abilities, and the formation of our consciousness. Taking this line of thought a step further, Whorf maintained that the most foundational aspects of our thought – including intuitions, common sense, and our modern notions of time, space, matter, nature, and reality – are thus bound “by the structuralizations which our languages impose upon the flux of experience” (Spier, Hallowell, and Newmann 1941, 197). Said another way, Gilles Deleuze’s (1990) philosophical reflections on language further suggest that, while abstract categories of meaning are inscribed onto “contextually specific phenomena” to help make sense of reality, our linguistic categorizations nevertheless come at a cost to the entity that is thereby “serialized” (Grove 2018, 235).

Matters become more complex when one realizes that not only does language denature entities and phenomena in particular ways depending on one’s culture and philosophical precepts, but that there are different modes of relating to things in the world, and thereby different styles of reification, depending on one’s state of consciousness as well. Following Kratochvíl (2016, 30–1), the manner in which natures are grasped also “depends on our state of consciousness […] We construct a thing from phenomena and from the intentions of consciousness, and we construct it in the world, a specific world.” The constitution of a thing therefore “already presume[s] a certain character of world, certain types of relations into which the thing will fit. The type of world offers a statement about how our consciousness relates itself to being” (Kratochvíl 2016, 31). Becuase our styles of reification, and therefore our design practices, are ultimately mediated by both our states of consciousness and our forms of language, they do not only reflect particular philosophical configurations, they also highlight the intimate relationship between consciousness, language, ontology, praxis, and design. If certain states of consciousness tend to produce certain styles of reification, and these modes of categorization reflect a certain relation with the world and its entities, then not only must the denaturing grasps mediated by language take center stage in design thought, but so must the study of consciousness itself. What this theoretical trajectory leads us to, however, is questioning just how it is that modern philosophies, languages, and forms of consciousness have influenced the conditions we collectively observe and experience in the world today. Given that modern ways of knowing and being have ultimately shaped our modes of consciousness, styles of reification, and our naturalized philosophical commitments – and, further, that it is through these modes of thought and consciousness that reality has been construed, including the relations between beings and things – I suggest that decolonial thought can help shed light on how modern ways of knowing and being continue to have adverse effects today.

The Coloniality of Power and Design

By investigating the conceptual indebtedness that most contemporary languages, concepts, and design practices have to modernity, we inevitably arrive at the view that modernity cannot be approached solely as an historical event. Although the inception of modernity is inexorably tied to the European conquests across the Global South, modernity also constitutes a form of “epistemological imperialism” which persists to the present day (Tuathail 1996, 76). When viewed from a decolonial perspective, the continued presence of modernity’s colonial socioeconomic relations and philosophical commitments can be subsumed under the concept of coloniality, a term used to denote the patterns of domination that emerged during early colonialism but which have continued to define knowledge production, culture, intersubjective relations, and labor relations (Maldonado-Torres 2007, 243; Schulz 2017, 129). Coloniality also implies a collection of hegemonic knowledge systems, known as “the coloniality of power,” according to which aesthetic, moral, and epistemic resources have been distributed to both reproduce and reflect imperial logic (Quijano 1998; Dussel 1998; Mignolo 2000, 2009; Santos 2000; Alcoff 2008, 83; Mignolo and Escobar 2013). The coloniality of power has been described by decolonial thinkers as a “cognitive empire”; one which promulgates the idea of a rational subject “that is epistemic rather than concrete or empirical” at the center of its capitalistic, patriarchal, and colonial system of power (De Sousa Santos 2018, 87). On this view, modernity signifies a set of colonial self-serving “macronarratives” which persist to this day and are hence constitutive of coloniality; decoloniality is a response to the ongoing suppression of other ways of knowing and being and aims to end coloniality through the dismantling of modernity’s principles, philosophical assumptions, and its imposed social relations (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 109).

While the concepts of coloniality and the coloniality of power are understood by some decolonial thinkers as shorthand for the more expansive notion of the “colonial matrix of power” (Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 114), the theoretical developments of coloniality and the coloniality of power remain among the foremost contestations to the unquestioned philosophical precepts that have accompanied and justified colonialism and its continued interventions. In terms of design, Arturo Escobar (2018, 83) has argued that the coloniality of power constitutes a “modern onto-epistemic order.” According to Escobar, this has direct implications for design insofar as the hegemonic knowledge systems of modernity are rooted in patriarchy and the rationalistic tradition and have led to several destructive conceptual outgrowths which have been naturalized across the Global North. These include: a) the belief in the individual, devoid of its relational embeddedness; b) the Cartesian rendering of a real, objective, and “single world,” or what John Law (2015) has referred to as the One-World World (OWW); c) the reinforcement of a “single world” through the hierarchization of scientific knowledge along with the invisibility and dismissal of “other knowledges and ways of being”; and d) the integration of a capitalist economic model with its market dynamics that constitute “the default setting of much of socionatural life in late modernity” (Escobar 2018, 86–90).

What Escobar essentially argues here is that modernity, colonialism, patriarchy, rationalism, and the coloniality of power all coalesce into a metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological design system which has annulled the possibility of other worlds through its extensive domination. Within this contemporary one-world world ontology, or the modern onto-epistemic order, there are processes of translation wherein people, things, and the world are deciphered according to the teleological and philosophical commitments of modernity, including rationalism, the idea of progress, and utilitarianism. These ways of knowing which constitute the coloniality of power, also referred to as the epistemologies of the North (De Sousa Santos 2018), are further entrenched in the global capitalist enterprise which has been described as a system of translation wherein there is “the drawing of one-world-making project into another” (Tsing 2015, 62). This drawing of other bodies, natures, and worlds into one filtered through the coloniality of power has led to particular patterns of reification which reinforce the subjugation of particular social groups as well as the nonhuman sphere.

Following Escobar, the coloniality of power can be understood as a design project and process which continues to affect design theory and practice today. As an ontological design, the coloniality of power entails a particular formula for sensing the world, and solving relevant problems, while ordering things in the way that they “ought” to be. At its core, the coloniality of power proceeds through both an occularcentric “scopic regime that equates seeing with knowledge” (Rose 2016, 3) and a logocentric framework which works to transcendentally justify these “naturally” derived observations (Tuathail 1996). For decolonial designers such as Madina Tlostanova (2017, 52), modernity/coloniality constitutes nothing less than a “total design” process that has imposed itself on “the fundamental relations between people, the world and things.” To further complicate matters, this perspective cultivates the foundations “for a worldview to be built on a rigid essentialist modern/colonial model that hides its locality and represents itself as universal or natural” (Tlostanova 2017, 52). The logic of coloniality, in this view, has resulted in a “coloniality of design” that controls and disciplines “our perception and interpretation of the world, of other human and nonhuman beings and things according to certain legitimized principles” (Tlostanova 2017, 53). The coloniality of design reflects a “set of specific ontological, epistemic, and axiological notions imposed forcefully onto the whole world,” subjugating other forms of knowledge and ways of being in the process (Tlostanova 2017, 53). The modernist ontology emanating from the coloniality of power therefore tells a story of the world from a “disembodied vantage point that eliminates other possible ways to produce, transmit and represent knowledge” (Tlostanova 2017, 52).

At the root of the matter, however, is the fact that this modern onto-epistemic design which permeates everyday life and infrastructures has been constructed, in part, through language. Although our perceptions of the world, and our relations in it, can significantly be influenced by our states of consciousness as well, it is through “discursive enframings” (Slater 2004, 109), “reified grasps” (Kratochvíl 2016), and the “serializations” (Grove 2018) and “structuralizations” (Whorf and Carroll 1956) of modern language that that the one-world ontology has established its predominance. To reorient human social relations with human and nonhuman others alike, design itself must be liberated from the coloniality of power. This, in turn, “requires problematizing the affective and conceptual operations that form the basis of our relations with the world” (Tlostanova 2017, 52) and entails “imagining new articulations between living systems and infrastructural assemblages, metabolically and ontologically steered” so that the “redesign of life” can be oriented toward the flourishing of all planetary beings (Escobar 2019, 139).

Political Ontology and Decolonizing Design

Across the multiple dimensions through which decolonial thought has reproached the coloniality of power, design has recently become a rallying point for some theorists insofar as it is perceived as having the potential to usher in in new ways of being, doing, and relating in the world. While many decolonial and radical design thinkers recognize that “design […] is equally not neutral: it either future or defutures, sustains or destroys” (Fry 2018, 174), it is understood that design, once freed from the philosophical constraints of the coloniality of power, can be remade into a “powerful ontological tool capable of transforming” sociocultural realities (Tlostanova 2017, 51). Following this line of thought, ontological designing has the capacity to either future or defuture, work toward flourishing or destructiveness, by the manner in which it is articulated. Insofar as ontological design provides conceptual models that help to arrange the “relations between the world, things and human beings” in particular ways, it follows that ontological design can also be manipulated in manifold ways (Fry 2017).

In drawing extensively on Fry’s notion of ontological design, Escobar (2018, 2019) has further developed the political implications of this concept by putting it into conversation with the Epistemologies of the South (ES) framework developed by Boaventura De Sousa Santos (2000, 2018). The result has led Escobar to political ontology – a concept coined by anthropologist Mario Blaser (2009) and further developed by Marisol De La Cadena (2010) – which represents a perspective that views globalization as the “ontological occupation” of subaltern worlds “at the expense of relational and nondualist worlds worldwide” (Escobar 2018, 69). Escobar views the potential of design optimistically, claiming that we should strive to “reorient design practice from its traditional meanings,” which are directed at the creation of objects, individuals, technological advances, and the market, to a more situated, collaborative, and user-centered design that focuses “on the production of human experience and life itself” (Escobar 2018, 48). As the world we currently inhabit bears the mark of coloniality with its subordination, suppression, devaluation, and ultimate “destruction of forms of knowledge and being that do not conform to the dominant form of modernity,” Escobar (2018, 95) reasons that an “ontological-political field” is emerging that can reorient social and cultural practices “in ways that clearly foster the intersecting goals of ecological sustainability, social justice, and pluriversality.”

Decolonial thinkers often draw inspiration from the “positive ontologies” and “decolonial designing strategies” which emanate from the Global South (Tlostanova 2017, 55), with the Zapatista social movement of Mexico being a prime exemplar (Zibechi 2012; Fitzwater 2019). For many decolonial theorists, the Global South stands as a living testament to the fact that other ways of being, knowing, relating, and, ultimately, designing are possible (Botero, Del Gaudio, and Gutiérrez Borrero 2018). The struggle against modernity’s one-world world ontology that the Global South presents has therefore served as a wellspring for the decolonial and pluriversal imperative to make “a world in which many worlds fit” (Escobar 2018, xvi). Although some have remained less hopeful than Escobar about the transformative potential of ontological design given the “predominance of negative ontological designing” in the contemporary world, there is nevertheless an acknowledgment that decolonial design projects can potentially cultivate a sense of increased “maturity and responsibility” that is necessary for creating a more positive future (Tlostanova 2017, 60). Ontological design, political ontology, and the call for decolonizing design therefore stand as contemporary approaches to our current predicament that signal the need for a change in our ontological commitments. As such, they promulgate a delinking from modern design principles and instead draw inspiration from those ontological designs, largely from subaltern groups, which are based on principles of reciprocity and relationality.

To reorient design, it has been suggested, will require a “profound ontological transformation” insofar as there is “significant ontological work” that needs to be done to begin ridding ourselves of the defuturing and denaturing effects of the coloniality of power and design (Escobar 2018, 92). Following Escobar, this calls for a “political activation of relationality” which maintains a dualist ontology in reference to practices affecting nature, yet transcends this dualism through practices of relationality (Escobar 2018, 103). Given that Escobar understands the ecological crisis of our time as being linked to the coloniality of power and to the “crises of modern systems of thought” (Escobar 2008, 8), what he ultimately promulgates is a “new ecological episteme” that is rooted in intracultural dialogue, purposive living, and multispecies flourishing (Escobar 2018, 124). While developing new ontological designs which prioritize relationality, autonomy, and reciprocity are necessary to combat the coloniality of power and the “ecological crisis of reason” (Escobar 2018, 95), the emergence of these relational ontologies cannot be imposed by an authoritarian regime. Instead, new ontological designs must emerge organically through the cultivation of “shifts in consciousness through various means” (Escobar 2018, 217).

Designing Consciousness and Psychedelics

To rehash the argument I have put forth thus far, human design practices are first and foremost mediated through the ways in which our languages reify, and our states of consciousness relate to, entities and phenomena. The forms of language that are regularly employed in advanced capitalist societies today can be understood as being entrenched in modern philosophical precepts which influence our language, perception, and even our ethical values, given that they reify entities and phenomena according to a particular ontological design. Decolonial thinkers have described the coloniality of power as a hegemonic knowledge and design configuration that has delimited labor relations, aesthetic values, ontological possibilities, epistemological alternatives, and ultimately other world-making design projects given its commitment to dominant forms of scientific rationalism, patriarchy, and Enlightenment ideals such as progress, humanism, and capitalist market logic. As a response to this state of affairs, radical and decolonial design theorists argue that design theory and practice can themselves be redesigned to allow new modes of being and relating to emerge that are based on principles of relationality and reciprocity. In taking quite literally Escobar’s suggestion that these pluriversal ontologies must emerge organically through shifts in consciousness, I argue in this section that experimenting with alternative states of consciousness can potentially help cultivate ontological designs which are better attuned to immanence, relationality, and embodiment, as well as an enhanced awareness of our embeddedness and responsibility to the wellbeing of human and nonhuman others (Braidotti 2019). Moreover, the implications for design are that alternative states of consciousness can potentially offer other modes of reification and relating which are not rooted in the coloniality of power and may therefore help to stultify the denaturing effects of its reifying grasps.

One domain in which our modernist-influenced reifying grasps can be observed, according to Escobar (2018, 84), is in our conception of the self. While the self in Euro-American epistemologies is characteristically associated with “the individual” which is purportedly defined by certain properties that can be objectively distinguished, Escobar instead draws on Ingold to assert that the self can be better understood as a nexus “within a continuously unfolding field of relations” (Ingold 2011, xii). The idea of this relationally embedded self, however, stands at odds with the coloniality of power, which embraces a rationalistic, Cartesian, and objectivist worldview that is mechanistic, reductionistic, positivistic, logocentric, and computational (Escobar 2018, 80). The effects of this modern onto-epistemic order have also influenced design theory and practice insofar as they have led to the standardization of a one-world world that exists separate from us – the reinforcement of the idea of “the individual” that is isolated from its preexisting interrelational embeddedness – and ultimately disempowers and prevents “us from partnering with nature” and one another (Escobar 2018, 85). Practices which can transform and expand one’s view of the self, and therefore lead to relational modes of being, “might foster design thinking and prototyping that embody the new that is emerging or wants to emerge” (Escobar 2018, 125). By seeing our modes of consciousness themselves as constituting an area worthy of exploration for design and decolonial thought, Escobar opens the door to the idea of changing subjectivity and praxis through the production of new modes of consciousness.

On these grounds, if there are indeed certain practices that can shift our states of consciousness away from modes which reflect individualistic and egocentric habits toward more relational and compassionate actions – Escobar (2018, 84) mentions Buddhist mindfulness meditation practices in particular – then this points us to the idea that our modes of consciousness themselves are also tied to the colonial matrix of power. Although the languages which are characteristic of the Global North are constrained by the coloniality of power through our modern philosophical inheritances, I argue that our normalized modes of consciousness, and thereby our perceptions, languages, and social relations, have themselves been designed according to the colonial matrix of power. Upon further examination of this line of inquiry, one finds that the modes of consciousness that have been promoted and naturalized in European and Western societies throughout the Middle Ages and into the early colonial expeditions continue to hold pride of place throughout the Global North; think of the standardized psychological reference to “normal waking consciousness” as our optimal functioning state (Edwards 2016, 70), or the seamless cultural integration of certain drugs, such as sugar, alcohol, and caffeine, and even psychotropic pharmaceuticals (Mintz 1986; De Sutter 2018). The cultural promotion of these normalized states of consciousness has gone hand-in-hand with the demonization of those substances and practices that have not been historically permitted across the Global North, such as mystical experiences, traditional healing, and spiritual practices that provoke altered states of consciousness through the use of visionary plants, fungi, and substances (McKenna 1992).

Taking the psychoactive substances referred to in contemporary pharmacological literature as the “classic psychedelics” as a case in point, we find that they are categorized under the strictest drug scheduling in the United States as well as in many countries around the globe. The classic psychedelics – which include dimethyltryptamine (DMT), lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline, and psilocybin (Carhart-Harris 2019) – are drugs which endogenously occur in plants and fungi and have each been historically linked to traditional practices often associated with healing and spirituality (Schultes and Hofmann 1998; Guerra-Doce 2015; Samorini 2019). According to the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), however, classic psychedelic drugs are classified as Schedule 1 substances which have no known medicinal value and a high potential for abuse. Not only have all classic psychedelic drugs been illegalized through executive orders in the United States since 1970, if not earlier in some cases, psychedelics have also carried with them pejorative connotations which render those who consume them as drug addicts, morally degenerate, and even potential threats to national security (Szasz 1974; Lovering 2015). Although psychedelic substances initially gained recognition for their therapeutic and quasi-religious value soon after they became objects of knowledge in Euro-American societies throughout the early to mid-twentieth century (Pollan 2018), they have since been outlawed, making those who consume or cultivate these substances run the risk of persecution.

Within roughly the past two decades, however, the negative depiction of psychedelic substances has started to erode as new scientific studies have begun to legitimize the therapeutic potential of classic psychedelic drugs (Carhart-Harris and Goodwin 2017; Johnson et al. 2019; Kuypers 2019). Although studies are now showing that classic psychedelics exhibit remarkable efficacy in treating mental health disorders such as depression, anxiety, and substance addiction, it has now been established that psychedelics can reliably provoke “mystical experiences” which study participants rank among the most meaningful of their lives (McCorvy, Olsen, and Roth 2016; Johnson, Garcia-Romeu, and Griffiths 2017; Noorani et al. 2018; Carhart-Harris et al. 2016, 2017). Recent trials on psilocybin – a classic psychedelic compound which occurs in certain species of fungi – have further found that the mystical-type experiences induced by the substance can contribute lasting positive effects which may include an enhanced capacity for empathy, more altruistic actions, and even changes in the personality trait of openness, which has been linked to increased creativity and changes in visual perception (Griffiths et al. 2006, 2008, 2011; MacLean, Johnson and Griffiths 2011; Antinori, Carter, and Smillie 2017; Pokorny et al. 2017). Further evidence suggests that the use of classic psychedelics predicts increased nature relatedness and pro-environmental behaviors (Forstmann and Sagioglou 2017; Lyons and Carhart-Harris 2018). It is reasoned that, since one of the physiological effects of classic psychedelics is that they tend to suppress the Default Mode Network (DMN) – a top-down neural network that researchers have correlated with the ego and one’s sense of self – they thereby often lead to experiences wherein there is an expansion or dissolution of oneself and a merging with others or the environment (Carhart-Harris et al. 2014, 12). As such, researchers have noted that psychedelics therefore produce increased connectedness that can be observed neurologically and experienced phenomenologically, leading individuals to feel more interconnected with themselves, with others, and the world at large (Watts et al. 2017; Carhart-Harris et al. 2018).

If psychedelics can indeed “reboot” or “inactivate” our “behavioral subroutines” (Nichols in Miller 2017, 25) and bring about “desemanticized states” (Baker 1994, 65–72), then psychedelic states of consciousness can potentially be used as tools to loosen the modernist philosophical legacies we have inherited from the coloniality of power while helping to generate new philosophical and ethical commitments based on interconnectedness (Falcon 2017). Bringing attention to human psychology and consciousness when contemplating issues of social and environmental justice is nothing new; however, as the interdisciplinary field of ecopsychology has long recognized, human psychology itself needs to be looked at more closely when problematizing anthropogenic environmental destruction (Roszak 1992). Taking this line of thought a step further, the late psychologist Ralph Metzner (1999, 4) has developed his own version of ecopsychology known as “green psychology,” which posits that the ecological crises of our time require a “fundamental reorientation of human attitudes” toward the entirety of the nonhuman realm. One method which can assist in this fundamental reorientation of human social relations with the nonhuman, according to Metzner (1999, 4), is the “use of hallucinogenic visionary plants,” which can ultimately help to “cultivate a more direct psychic, conscious connection with the natural world.” For Metzner (1994, 1), psychedelic plants and fungi can also potentially help “individuals, tribes, and nations” to “free themselves from the residues of the ideological oppression practiced by what they see as Eurocentric culture.” Metzner’s assertions here are reminiscent of what anthropologist Charles Laughlin (2013, 287) has suggested: not only may alternative states of consciousness play a formative role in the development of a culture’s relations with nature but these experiences can also, when cycled through a particular people’s fabric of meaning, reinforce either a holistic and interdependent sense of self that extends to the commons or a “fragmented and analytic sense of self,” which may lead to a desacralization of place.

All things considered, though, psychedelic experiences do produce drastically diverse effects on different people as they are influenced by a range of dynamically interacting factors, including one’s life history, mood, intentions, expectations, physiology, the substance(s), and the environments in which they are consumed, to name a few (Hartogsohn 2017). Furthermore, the medicalization of psychedelics presents issues of its own, such as decontextualizing traditionally used plants and fungi to the detriment of indigenous peoples who brought knowledge of their properties to the Global North, in addition to drawing psychedelics into capitalistic assemblages (Noorani 2019). Moreover, contemporary research on psychedelics largely adheres to the epistemologies that are characteristic of the coloniality of power, including rationalism and a belief in the individual; both of which map neatly onto allopathic models of medicine. Notwithstanding these criticisms, it must still be recognized that “once integrated in the ecologies of knowledges, modern science can be a useful tool in the struggles against oppression” (De Sousa Santos 2018, 45). The contemporary resurgence of research on the classic psychedelics can therefore be understood as helping to validate the “multistate paradigm” put forth by psychologist Thomas Roberts (2015, 2019), which maintains that multiple “mindbody” states are potentially available to humans, each of which can alter our physiology and perception in ways that may enhance or atrophy particular senses and abilities. In reflecting on the mindbody states regularly provoked by the classic psychedelics, Roberts (2013, 37) maintains that they allow people to “see their responsibilities, actions, and inactions in a wider context” and help to shift values “from those that are self-centered to those that center more on a group, society, humanity, and even the cosmos.” Multistate theory has significant implications for design theory and praxis insofar as our modes of consciousness can no longer be ignored as a domain that intimately influences our language, perception, and philosophical commitments. By mobilizing the contemporary scientific research on classic psychedelics – which itself validates certain aspects of decades of marginalized and suppressed knowledge – we can begin to consider the idea of designing our own consciousness by way of experimenting with alternate modes as potential tools to assist in delinking our thoughts, languages, relations, ways of being, and ultimately our design practices from the ongoing legacy of coloniality.

Conclusions

If we accept Escobar's (2018, 212) proposition - borrowed from biologist Kristi Sharma (2015) - that our ontologies and epistemologies are what sustain our philosophical commitments to reductionistic materialism, unchecked rationalism, patriarchy, essentialism, and the Cartesian substance metaphysics that splits mind from matter and humans from nature, then our efforts as critical design theorists must be aimed toward “redesigning design from within and from without” (Escobar 2018, 205). Because the reifications we have inherited from the coloniality of power proceed by way of denaturing entities and phenomena through conceptually isolating them from their relational embeddedness, then we must open ourselves up to the possibility that experiencing other states of consciousness may help us to tap into and develop certain “latent potentials, which lie outside the cultural norm, by entering an altered state of consciousness, by temporarily restructuring consciousness” (Tart 1983, 4). Given that ontological design, political ontology, and decolonizing design projects all call for a revolution in our hearts and minds as a way of redesigning our modern onto-epistemic order, then we must understand that

To construct a new worldview not bound by the coloniality of power, then, we must develop a new language and therefore a new ontological reality. But the recognition that language is a tool for ‘constructing cosmovision’ is only part of the process. (Rappaport 2005, 178)

Beyond language, then, we must recognize that there can be “no social justice without cognitive justice” (De Sousa Santos 2018), and that even our states of consciousness have been delimited by the legacy of coloniality. Constructing a new cosmovision based on the “expression of the radical relationality of life” (Escobar 2018, 225) is therefore contingent upon recognizing that “many of us [I include myself] continue to think and act in ways that are dyed in the colors of colonial power” (Gregory 2004, xv). If psychedelic substances can reliably confer experiences wherein the metaphysical commitment to, and phenomenological experience of, separateness can transform into newfound ontologies grounded in interrelatedness, then this can help to bring about new ethical values that are more altruistic and take our interconnectedness with human and nonhuman others into account. What psychedelic experiences as ontological design tools for decolonizing consciousness bring to the fore, then, is one of the many possibilities for ushering in new ontological designs that are rooted in our inextricable relationality with ourselves, with others, and the world.

Acknowledgements

With thanks to Kevin Grove who introduced me to design theory and helped me to develop many of the ideas presented here. I am also greatly indebted to two anonymous reviewers whose extensive feedback helped to clarify the overall argument of this paper in addition to enhancing its implications for design.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Joshua Falcon

Joshua Falcon is a PHD candidate of Anthropology in the Department of Global and Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. His research primarily focuses on the theme of human-nature relations and, in particular, how alternate states of consciousness influence one’s perception of, and relations toward, nonhuman plants, animals, and the environment. He is currently investigating issues surrounding the legal and ethical implications of drug use, as well as examining how psychedelic substances produce changes in subjectivity, perception, and values. [email protected]