Consciousness Researchers Are Tripping

Here’s an idea for a game show. It’s called “Materialists on Mushrooms.” A bunch of hardheaded scientists gather in a room to discuss the fundamental nature of consciousness. Each contestant is then given a progressively larger quantity of psilocybin to consume. To stay in the game, the scientists must continue to deny that their increasingly vivid and bizarre experiences are anything more than the product of purely physical reactions in the brain. The final materialist still to hold out wins, rewarded with the collected works of Proust and a stomach pump.