Daniel Sherman

Embodied Insights: Interoception in Psychedelic Epistemology The University of Western Australia Psychedelic epistemology is currently deadlocked on several fronts. Claims that metaphysical reality is revealed by psychedelic experience produce mutually irreconcilable conclusions. Work on psychological insights under psychedelics has connected those experiences to therapeutic benefits (Kugel et al. 2025), but methods of epistemic verification remain unclear. Meanwhile, some epistemologists have questioned whether psychedelic experience itself can lead to the acquisition of knowledge, or perhaps just increase understanding (Fink 2022). Psychedelic insights involving bodily states, addiction, and health may provide ideal test cases because such claims can be triangulated across multiple forms of evidence, such as physiological measures, validated self-report instruments, and behavioural outcomes. This presentation proposes that interoception—the brain’s sensing and interpretation of the organism’s internal states and homeostatic needs—is an underexamined epistemic source with major implications for psychedelic epistemology. I argue that interoceptive epistemic performance cannot be reduced to the veridical detection of bodily signals (Garfinkel et al. 2015). Sensory systems track properties relative to organismic interests, while embodied appraisals represent what bodily changes mean for an organism’s concerns and well-being (Prinz 2004). Such appraisals can succeed or fail. Danger may be detected or overlooked, benign arousal misrepresented as threat, and damaging states assigned insufficient salience. Interoception therefore operates at an epistemically significant interface between bodily sensation and cognitive appraisal, where physiological information contributes to representations with conditions of correctness. On this account, interoception enables and constrains knowledge not only through detection, but through appraisal and salience (Seth 2013). Epistemic improvement occurs when altered appraisal more accurately represents the significance of bodily states for the organism’s health, needs, and goals. 164 Although psychedelic experiences are highly variable, insights related to substance use, diet, and exercise show recurring tendencies toward health-promoting orientations and behavioural changes across clinical and naturalistic contexts (Teixeira et al. 2022). These convergent patterns call for epistemic explanation. I argue that psychedelic alterations to the salience and appraisal of bodily feelings, as well as to mental representations of the body, are a neglected source of these insights and of what many subjects later describe as psychological revelations. Psychedelic epistemic gains may therefore be grounded not in metaphysical revelation, but in altered access to bodily information and changes in what that information means to the embodied subject. Interoceptive claims are unusually tractable within psychedelic epistemology because they can be evaluated across multiple perspectives, including objective physiological measures, selfreport instruments of interoceptive sensibility and awareness, and behavioural outcomes such as long-term abstinence from harmful substances. Interoceptive psychedelic insights therefore provide a plausible case of epistemic gain within an empirically evaluable domain. By locating psychedelic insight within an embodied system that integrates bodily detection, appraisal, and salience, this account offers a route beyond current stalemates over metaphysics, ineffability, and unverifiable psychological insight.