I agree with pretty much all of that but remark that “deep sleep < awake < psychedelic” is not at all clearly more correct than “deep sleep < psychedelic < awake”. You may feel more aware/conscious/awake/whatever when under the effects of psychedelic drugs, but feeling something doesn’t necessarily make it so.
The ordering is based on measures of neuro-correlates of the level of consciousness like neural entropy or perturbational complexity, not on how groovy it subjectively feels.
It would seems a bit optimistic to call anything a “neuro-correlate of the level of consciousness” simply on the basis that it’s higher for ordinary waking brains than for ordinary sleeping brains. Is there more evidence than that for considering neural entropy or perturbational complexity to be measures of “the level of consciousness”?
(My understanding is that in some sense they’re measuring the amount of information, in some Shannonesque sense, in the state of the brain. Imagine doing something like that with a computer. The figure will—at least, for some plausible ways of doing it—be larger when the computer is actively running some software than when it’s idle, and you might want to say “aha, we’ve found a measure of how much the computer is doing useful work”. But it’s even larger if you arrange to fill its memory with random bits and overwrite them with new random bits once a second, even though that doesn’t mean doing any more useful work. I worry that psychedelics might be doing something more analogous to that than to making your computer actually do more.)
I agree with pretty much all of that but remark that “deep sleep < awake < psychedelic” is not at all clearly more correct than “deep sleep < psychedelic < awake”. You may feel more aware/conscious/awake/whatever when under the effects of psychedelic drugs, but feeling something doesn’t necessarily make it so.
The ordering is based on measures of neuro-correlates of the level of consciousness like neural entropy or perturbational complexity, not on how groovy it subjectively feels.
It would seems a bit optimistic to call anything a “neuro-correlate of the level of consciousness” simply on the basis that it’s higher for ordinary waking brains than for ordinary sleeping brains. Is there more evidence than that for considering neural entropy or perturbational complexity to be measures of “the level of consciousness”?
(My understanding is that in some sense they’re measuring the amount of information, in some Shannonesque sense, in the state of the brain. Imagine doing something like that with a computer. The figure will—at least, for some plausible ways of doing it—be larger when the computer is actively running some software than when it’s idle, and you might want to say “aha, we’ve found a measure of how much the computer is doing useful work”. But it’s even larger if you arrange to fill its memory with random bits and overwrite them with new random bits once a second, even though that doesn’t mean doing any more useful work. I worry that psychedelics might be doing something more analogous to that than to making your computer actually do more.)