Richard Dawkins & Jordan Peterson Discuss Psychedelics, Consciousness, and Artificial Intelligence

We weren't ready for any of that, and we certainly weren't ready for LSD. These are unbelievably powerful pharmacologically. LSD, I think, is the most psychoactive chemical ever found by an order of magnitude. It just takes a few million molecules to produce an intense psychedelic experience.

I have taken extremely high doses of psilocybin. Four doses is enough, basically, to knock you out of your body. I wouldn't recommend it casually. I took 7 grams three times, and I had this shamanic experience. It was unbelievable ... I have no idea how to make sense of it.

Psychedelics seem to expand that capacity, so that consciousness can move up and down layers of apprehension that aren't available to consciousness under its normal conditions.

[Jacques] Lacan is a fraud as far as I'm concerned. I've tried to read Lacan, and I cannot make heads or tails of him—and it may be because I'm stupid ... Of all the French intellectuals that I've read, I think Lacan is the most fraudulent.

The conservatives, especially in Canada, they're absolutely terrified that if they make any conservative pronouncements, that they'll be singled out and mobbed, and it's unbelievably unpleasant.

Anxiety signifies the emergence of entropy. That's what it does. So, you can map anxiety right down to... the level of entropy.

When you look at the world, mostly what you see is memory.

Many people have suggested that at least one of the mechanisms that drove our rapid cortical evolution was stringent sexual selection, primarily applied by females to males.