The Reducing Valve and the Entropic Brain

“Huxley: 'The function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.' [...] Carhart-Harris: 'Psychedelics reduce activity in the default mode network, the brain's self-referential processing hub, and increase entropy in neural states, temporarily dissolving the predictive models that ordinarily organize experience.' [...] Metzinger: 'The self is a phenomenal self-model, not a metaphysical substance. Ego dissolution is the temporary destabilization of this model, and what it reveals is that ordinary consciousness was always a representation, not direct contact with reality.' — Huxley, The Doors of Perception (1954); Carhart-Harris et al., 'The Entropic Brain' (2014); Metzinger, The Ego Tunnel (2009)”