I side with the idea that the psychedelic experience is not built into the brain, but is an emergent property of having a homeostatic environment as our seat of consciousness. Disrupting it leads to perceived changes in our experience of reality.
I don't think there is really a point or benefit to the psychedelic state as such, but certainly they can be beneficial to a smallish number of people. Many people who take a psychedelic dislike the experience, many people find it uncomfortable, confusing and frightening with little desire to repeat it. This actually makes sense considering that psychedelic compounds in some plants are thought to be evolved defense mechanisms, though I'm not entirely convinced this goes across the whole gamut of psychedelics.
I believe we are not looking at the big picture of evolution here. As I see it, the point of evolution is in ultimate calculation of reality, ultimate transcendence, self-transcendence and total understanding. Kind of like a point of information saturation on the global level
I'm curious about this. What makes you think that is the "point" to evolution? Given what we know of the principles that evolution operates on, which are random mutations that an indivdual passes on to its offspring, it is a very odd system to create if there is an end-point. Evolution does not have awareness of the past or future, it responds only in the eternal present. In this sense, it cannot have an aim or point, the future does not exist in this realm. No adapatation ever has ocurred because it will be of benefit in the future; a mutation arises that does not kill the organism, and if it is lucky, it will pass that mutation along to its offspring, regardless of whether the mutation is actually beneficial or not. We did not evolve bipedalism so that we could climb mountains 2 million years later, we evolved it due to the pressures influencing the organism at the present moment. Evolution has all the hallmarks of a blind and neutral process.
Probably anything that the brain does, it is meant to do it. Psychedelic experience can happen in lots of different ways, even spontaneously. We assume our normal state of conciousness is the only one valid in the way it perceives reality, that's called cognicentrism. Neuroscience is just a part of the truth, so the scientific method is. It brings valuable information to the equation but no definite truth. Things are too complicated and understanding is limited by our capability. It just seems to be impossible to look at the whole picture.
To reduce the psychedlic experience to some changes in neurotransmitors in our brain might be oversimplifing and trying to see too objectively things that are inmensely subjective.
So is it simply a coincidence that changes in neurotransmitters occur during a psychedelic experience?
Defining everyday, drug-free consciousness as normal should be seen as a neutral statement. We have a baseline state of perceiving the world, we alter it via a chemical and the perception changes. Our bodies actively metabolise and excrete the chemicals and we return to baseline. This doesn't mean that the psychedelic experience isn't real or important, just that it is both dependant on chemical changes in the body and evidence for a normal/typical/average/median experience of consiousness which we call 'sobriety' or 'boredom'
Of course, it could be a coincidence but it seems odd that everytime you ingest a psychedelic chemical, you will experience a psychedelic trip. They are merely enablers.
