Translated from our German original by AI. The German text was researched, written, and edited by the Psychedelia Foundation team and remains the authoritative version.
Could psychedelic experiences have contributed, over the course of human evolution, to producing the idea of objective moral truths? Emanuel Jas pursues this question in a paper published in 2026 in the Journal of Conscious Evolution. The work draws together findings and theories from evolutionary anthropology, neuroscience, and moral philosophy.
At its center is the question of how humans developed the capacity to form abstract concepts such as absolute truth or objective morality in the first place. Jas argues that psychedelic experiences, with their frequently described intensity, self-transcendence, and sense of a reality existing independently of one’s own self, could have created a possible experiential space for this. Psilocybin in particular is discussed as an example.
On the author’s hypothesis, such experiences could have supported the ability to move from concrete norms embedded in the body and in social life toward more abstract and transcendent moral principles. Psychedelic experiences might thus have helped develop the notion that moral truths exist independently of individual or societal beliefs.
Jas explicitly stresses that he is not setting out to prove moral realism philosophically. His thesis concerns the emergence of the concept itself. That humans can develop the idea of objective moral facts independent of the human mind does not, on this account, mean that such facts actually exist.
The broader assumption that psychedelic use during human evolution could have been involved in the development of these cognitive capacities remains speculative, however. The paper provides no empirical evidence for such an evolutionary causal link. Jas himself points out that other factors, such as the development of language, the use of fire, and the cooking of food, could also have contributed to human cognitive evolution.
Above all, then, the work formulates an unusual hypothesis in the philosophy of evolution and consciousness: psychedelic experiences could have influenced not only religious or spiritual ideas, but possibly also the human capacity to think of moral norms as abstract and universal truths. Whether psychedelics actually played such a role in human evolution remains an open question.
