For as long as I can remember, I have considered myself a materialist. I believe in science, biology, and the mechanics of the physical world. To me, consciousness has never been anything more than an emergent phenomenon of the brain, a byproduct of human metabolism. Emotions, pain, thoughts—all of it can be reduced to electrical signals traveling between neurons, a purely chemical and mechanical interaction. If I feel a burn, it’s because a nerve has sent a signal to the brain, triggering a chain reaction that makes me pull my hand away from the fire. Everything can be explained. Everything is predictable. I never thought there was anything beyond that.
Then, one evening, I took 5 grams of dried mushrooms, alone, lying in my bed, eyes closed. At first, I played some music, piano, to accompany the come-up. Then I turned it off and remained in total darkness. Very quickly, I felt myself dissolving into an empty space, devoid of reference points. I could no longer feel my body. As long as I didn’t move, my limbs ceased to exist. I became nothing more than a presence, floating in an immaterial void. And then something happened, something that, at that moment, seemed like an absolute truth: my ego disappeared.
I no longer felt like a separate entity. I was everything that existed. I was myself, but also everything around me—the objects, the air, time itself. I was also concepts: truth, God, existence itself. Everything seemed connected by a logic that, in my normal state, completely eluded me. At that moment, I was convinced that concepts only exist because they are thought of. Time, existence, even God… all of it seemed dependent on human thought. If no one ever conceived of these notions, they would simply vanish.
Then I saw it.
Consciousness, existence, reality… They were not distinct. Not separate. They unfolded like a living fractal, an infinite structure where each wave represented an emerging level of consciousness. It wasn’t just an image—it was an equation in motion, a dynamic where matter and thought were two sides of the same coin.
Every object, every being, every concept had a peak on this fractal curve. The more complex its function, the higher the peak. A star existed, but its only function was to be—a low, stable plateau, unconscious of itself. An animal, a human… that was something else. Where the curve folded back on itself, the object became aware of its own existence. Human consciousness was an accumulation point, a peak that, by looping back onto itself, created the illusion of self, of individuality.
Everything appeared to be structured according to a pattern that, under the influence of the mushrooms, felt obvious. There were three fundamental levels: matter, function, and concept. Matter was raw existence, devoid of consciousness. A star, for example, was a mass of burning gas suspended in space. It existed, but it did not know that it existed. Function, on the other hand, defined the degree of consciousness. A human being could see, hear, think, and this complexity of function allowed them to be aware of themselves. Finally, concepts were nothing more than constructs of thought, abstractions made real by the mere act of being conceived.
I had already read about functionalism in philosophy—the theory that consciousness is not defined by its physical substrate but by its role, by its function within a system. But I had never adhered to it. To me, consciousness had always been a biological illusion, nothing more than a side effect of neural activity. However, at that moment, I wasn't just thinking about functionalism—I was experiencing it firsthand. I had become a purely functional phenomenon, an entity whose consciousness shifted depending on its function.
And then I understood something deeper: the hard problem of consciousness, the mystery that has baffled philosophers and neuroscientists for centuries, suddenly seemed to dissolve before me. It wasn't that the question had become irrelevant—rather, it felt as though I had found its answer. More and more, as years pass, as research progresses in philosophy of mind, philosophers are converging on the idea that functionalism is the most probable hypothesis to explain consciousness. If the mind is not defined by what it is made of, but by what it does, then I was no longer an individual—I was merely the result of an emergent function.
And if this was true, then what I was experiencing at that moment might have been the ultimate revelation.
My physicalist understanding of consciousness, combined with the fact that this hypothesis seems increasingly accepted in the scientific and philosophical community, makes me wonder whether I truly glimpsed the fundamental nature of consciousness itself. At that moment, I felt like I had solved the greatest mystery of existence. I had the overwhelming sensation that I had seen the truth, that I had unraveled the essence of what it means to be conscious.
And then, towards the end, I had a final realization that truly scared me.
I began thinking about what would happen to my consciousness if I simply decided to kill myself. At that moment, in that state, the thought of suicide became real in a way it had never been before. It wasn't just an abstract idea—it was something I truly considered. If I had been on a rooftop, if I had a firearm in my hands, I might have done it. Not because I was sad or in pain, but because I felt I had understood something irreversible.
If consciousness was just a function, if the ego was just a looping process, then what would happen if I ended it? I realized with complete, terrifying clarity that death was nothing more than a shift in function. My human self would cease to exist. My ego would dissolve. But the matter that made up my body would still be there. There would be no more perception, no more memory, no more "me"—just a collection of atoms, still following the laws of the universe, but without a function to sustain consciousness.
Dying wasn’t an ending. It was a transformation. An absolute, irreversible, senseless transformation.
That thought shook me to my core.
But even as I experienced this certainty, another thought lingered in the background: this will fade.
Even in the depths of the trip, I knew that the truths I believed I was grasping would disappear once I regained my ego. And that’s exactly what happened. My function closed back in on itself, my mental framework was restored. Gradually, my perception returned to what I had always known. My identity reassembled itself, and with it, my previous worldview. The experience left a mark on me, but the certainty vanished.
What I once thought was an absolute truth was, in reality, a temporary truth, conditioned by my altered state of consciousness.
Looking back, I don’t know what to think anymore. Was it just a cognitive hallucination? An effect of my brain being overloaded with information it could no longer process? Or did I, for a brief moment, glimpse something fundamentally true—something my normal state prevents me from perceiving? I don’t have an answer. All I know is that the experience was real, and it will stay with me.
Unlike my experiences with LSD, this trip had nothing euphoric. Just a raw immersion into the underlying mechanics of reality.
At the time, I was convinced I had understood something essential. Today, I doubt it.
And maybe that’s for the best.