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# “You haven't taken psychedelics, so you can't understand.”
- URL: https://www.ardmt.com/you-havent-taken-psychedelics-so-you-cant-understand/
- Published: 2026-08-21T05:28:08.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-21T05:28:08.000Z
- Author: Stephen Page

There's something obviously true about that. Someone who has taken DMT knows something about the experience that someone who hasn't simply doesn't.

But how far does that authority extend?

I've been reading Sarah Shortall's *Psychedelic Drugs and the Problem of Experience* (2014), and this was the idea that stuck with me most.

Shortall traces how LSD could move from model psychosis, to therapeutic tool, to mystical sacrament, to social liberator, to dangerous drug — sometimes with the same features of the experience being used to justify opposite conclusions.

Her deeper target is **experience itself as evidence**.

If I take DMT and encounter an apparently autonomous intelligence, I'm probably the best authority on what that encounter *felt like*.

But:

**“I experienced an autonomous being”**

and

**“therefore an autonomous being exists independently of my mind”**

aren't the same claim.

There's an inference between them.

But the same scrutiny has to work in the opposite direction. A neuroscientist demonstrating the brain mechanisms accompanying that encounter hasn't thereby demonstrated:

**“therefore the being was unreal.”**

That's an inference too.

So perhaps the useful question isn't simply **who gets to explain a psychedelic experience?**

It's:

**What does each kind of evidence actually entitle us to claim?**

The experiencer, neuroscientist, psychologist, anthropologist and Indigenous practitioner may each know something the others don't. None automatically gets the final word on what ultimately happened.

That's the thought I'm taking from this one.

*Reading: Sarah Shortall (2014), “Psychedelic Drugs and the Problem of Experience”, Past & Present.*

**ARDMT Reading Notes — MSc #001**

#Psychedelics #DMT #Consciousness #PsychedelicResearch #Philosophy