I get that. I just felt the need to defend lilly a bit because I’ve been reading his books since I was a teenager. It’s like when you read something inaccurate about a topic you know. Just wanting to correct the record somewhat.

Lilly wasn’t a nut job. His dolphin experiments ultimately failed, but it takes courage to try radical scientific experiments. Consider the common attitude towards science in academia these days where so many people fudge their results because they’re afraid of being considered failures. Failure is a part of science because you can learn from it. One of the cool things about Lilly’s experiments is that he didn’t feel the need to commercialise his experiments. They were mostly based on pure scientific inquiry.

Adding to this because I feel a bit annoyed at how John C Lilly gets so badly represented sometimes. He wasn’t a nut job. He was a weird guy with a very unique personality. He had an intense passion for knowledge and scientific inquiry. He also had a massive ego. But he was a reasonably self reflective person. Read his books and watch interviews with him. He wasn’t just a hedonist who got addicted to K. He always had a very non typical experience of reality. He had hallucinations of angels as a child, partly due to a heavily religious upbringing. It’s totally understandable that he was primed for strange trips when he got into psychedelics. But he was able to function as a professional. He had multiple government funded research projects during his career, medical credentials, and owned electrical engineering patents. His characterisation as a kook is very similar to the crap that people say about Tim Leary, who had a successful academic career before being kicked out of Harvard and was actually a very rational person.

This statement from the article is a bit misleading. Lilly had this hallucination during a ketamine trip after injecting 150mg. The article makes it sound like a persistent delusion arising from daily use. Lilly abused ketamine for sure, but he didn’t lose his mind. He was a guy who seemed to have strange ideas his whole life. https://www.intuition.org/txt/lilly.htm