Month: January 2019

Triple S Genetic Counseling: Predicting Hedonic-Set Point with Commercial-Grade DNA Testing as an Effective Altruist Project

Posted on by algekalipso

The term “Transhumanism” has many senses. It is a social movement, a philosophy, a set of technologies, and a conceptual rallying flag. David Pearce pins down the core sentiment behind the term like this:

If we get things right, the future of life in the universe can be wonderful beyond the bounds of human imagination: a “triple S” civilisation of superlongevity, superintelligence and superhappiness.

– David Pearce, in The 3 Supers

The concept of a “triple S” civilization is very widely applicable. For example, one can imagine future smart homes designed with it in mind. Such smart homes would have features to increase your longevity (HEPA filters, humidity control, mold detectors, etc.), increase your intelligence (adaptive noise-canceling, optimal lighting, smart foods), and happiness (mood-congruent lighting, music, aromas, etc.). Since there are trade-offs between these dimensions, one could specify how much one values each of them in advance, and the smart home would be tasked with maximizing a utility function based on a weighted average between the three S’s.

Likewise, one could apply the “triple S” concept to medical care, lifestyle choices, career development, governance, education, etc. In particular, one could argue that a key driver for the realization of a triple S civilization would be what I’d like to call “triple S genetic counseling.” In brief, this is counseling for prospective parents in order to minimize the risks of harming one’s children by being oblivious to the possible genetic risk for having a reduced longevity, intelligence, or happiness. Likewise, in the more forward-looking transhumanist side of the equation, triple S genetic counseling would allow parents to load the genetic dice in their kid’s favor in order to make them as happy, long-lived, and smart as possible.

Genetic counseling, as an industry, is indeed about to explode (cf. Nature’s recent article: Prospective parents should be prepared for a surge in genetic data). Predictably, there will be a significant fraction of society that will question the ethics of e.g. preimplantation genetic diagnosis for psychological traits. In practice, parents who are able to afford it will power ahead, for few prospective parents truly don’t care about the (probabilistic) well-being of their future offspring. My personal worry is not so much that this won’t happen, but that the emphasis will be narrow and misguided. In particular, both predicting health and intelligence based on sequenced genomes are very active areas of research. I worry that happiness will be (relatively) neglected. Hence the importance of emphasizing all three S’s.

In truth, I think that predicting the hedonic set-point of one’s potential future kids (i.e. the average level of genetically-determined happiness) is a relatively more important project than predicting IQ (cf. A genome-wide association study for extremely high intelligence; BGI). In addition, I anticipate that genetic-based models that predict a person’s hedonic set-point will be much more accurate than those that predict IQ. As it turns out, IQ is extremely polygenetic, with predictors diffused across the entire genome, and it is a very evolutionary recent axis of variance across the population. Predictors of hedonic-set point (such as the “pain-knob gene” SCN9A and it’s variants), on the other hand, are ancient and evolutionarily preserved across the phylogenetic tree. This makes baseline happiness a likely candidate for having a straight-forward universal physiological implementation throughout the human population. Hence my prediction that polygenetic scores of hedonic-set point will be much more precise than those for IQ (or even longevity).

Given all of the above, I would posit that a great place to start would be to develop a model that predicts hedonic set-point using all of the relevant SNPs offered by 23andMe*.  Not only would this be “low-hanging fruit” in the field of genetic counseling, it may also be a project that is way up there, close to the top of the “to do” list in Effective Altruism (cf. Cause X; Google Hedonics).

I thought about this because I saw that 23andMe reports on health predispositions based on single SNPs. From a utilitarian point of view, of particular interest are SNPs related to the SCN9A gene. For example, I found that 23andMe has the rs6746030 SNP, which some studies show can account for a percentage of the variance associated with pain in Parkinson’s and other degenerative diseases. The allele combination A/A is bad, making you more prone to experience pain intensely. This is just one SNP, though, and there ought to be a lot of other relevant SNPs, not only of the SCN9A gene but elsewhere too (e.g. involved in MAO enzymes, neuroplasticity, and pleasure centers innervation).

Concretely, the task would involve making two models and then combining them:

The first model uses people’s responses to 23andMe surveys to come up with a good estimate of a person’s hedonic set-point. Looking at some of the questions they ask, I would argue that there are more than enough dimensions to model how people vary in their hedonic set-point. They ask about things such as perception of pain, perception of spiciness, difficulty sleeping, stress levels, whether exercise is pleasant, etc. From a data science point of view, the challenge here is that number of responses provided by each participant is very variable; some power users respond to every question (and there are hundreds and hundreds), while most people respond to a few questions only, and a substantial minority respond to no questions at all. Most likely, the distribution of responses per participant follows a power law. So the model to build here has to be resilient against absent data. This is not an insurmountable problem, though, considering the existence of Bayesian Networks, PGMs, and statistical paradigms like Item Response Theory. For this reason, the model would need to both predict the most likely hedonic set-point of each participant, and provide confidence intervals specific to the participant based on the quality and relevance of the questions answered.

The second model would involve clustering and dimensionality reduction applied to the SNPs that are likely to be relevant for hedonic set-point. For example, one dimension would likely be a cluster of SNPs that are associated with “maximum intensity of pain”, another might be “how quickly pain subsides once it’s stimulated”, another “how much does pleasure counter-balance pain”, and so on. Each of these dimensions is likely to be determined by different neural circuits, and interact in non-linear ways, so they deserve their own separate dimension.

And finally, one would make a third model that combines the two models above, which predicts the hedonic set-point of a person derived from the first model using the genetic dimensions found by the second model. If you are an up-and-coming geneticist, I would like to nudge you in the direction of looking into this. As a side effect, you might as well get filthy rich in the process, as the genetic counseling field explodes in the next decade.

Bonus Content: What About Us?

Admittedly, many people will note that predicting a fraction of the variance of people’s hedonic set point with commercial DNA testing products will only really alleviate suffering in the medium to long term. The people who will benefit from this technology haven’t been born yet. In the meantime, what do we do about the people who currently have low hedonic set-points? Here is a creative, politically incorrect, and enticing idea:

Let’s predict which recreational drugs have the best cost-benefit profile for individuals based on their genetic makeup.

It is no secret that people react differently to drugs. 23andMe, among others, is currently doing research to predict your particular reaction to a drug based on your genetic makeup (cf. 23andMe can now tell you how you’ll react to 50+ common drugs). Unfortunately for people with anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and other hedonic tone illnesses, most psychiatric drugs are rather subtle and relatively ineffective. No wonder, compared to heroin, an SSRI is not likely to make you feel particularly great. As David Pearce argued in his essay Future Opioids, there is substantial evidence that many people who become addicts are driven to take recreational substances due to the fact that their endogenous opioid system is dysfunctional (e.g. they may have bad variants of opioid receptors, too many endorphin-degrading enzymes, etc.). The problem with giving people hard drugs is not that they don’t work in the short term; it is that they tend to backfire in the long-term and have cumulative negative health effects. As an aside, from the pharmaceutical angle, my main interest is the development of Anti-tolerance Drugs, which would allow hard drugs to work as mood-enhancers indefinitely.

This is not to say that there aren’t lucky people for whom the cost-benefit ratio of taking hard drugs is, in fact, rather beneficial. In what admittedly must have been a tongue-in-cheek marketing move, in the year 2010 the genetic interpretation company Knome (now part of Tute Genomics) studied Ozzy Osbourne‘s entire genome in order to determine how on earth he has been able to stay alive despite the gobs and gobs of drugs he’s taken throughout his life. Ozzy himself:

“I was curious, [g]iven the swimming pools of booze I’ve guzzled over the years—not to mention all of the cocaine, morphine, sleeping pills, cough syrup, LSD, Rohypnol…you name it—there’s really no plausible medical reason why I should still be alive. Maybe my DNA could say why.”

– Ozzy Osbourne’s Genome (Scientific American, 2010)

Tentatively, Knome scientists said, Ozzy’s capacity to drink entire bottles of Whisky and Gin combined with bowlfuls of cocaine and multiple packs of cigarettes over the course of… breakfast… without ending up in the hospital may be due to novel mutations in his alcohol dehydrogenase gene (ADH4), as well as, potentially, the gene that codes for CLTCL1, a protein responsible for the intake of extra-cellular material into the cell’s inside. These are wild speculations, to be clear, but the general idea is brilliant.

Indeed, not everyone reacts in the same way to recreational drugs. A recent massive study on the health effects of alcohol funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (cf. No amount of alcohol is good for your overall health) suggests that alcohol is bad for one’s health at every dosage. This goes against the common wisdom backed up with numerous studies that light-drinkers (~1 alcohol unit a day) live longer and healthier lives than teetotalers. The new study suggests that this is not a causal effect of alcohol. Rather, it so happens that a large fraction of teetotalers are precisely the kind of people who react very badly to alcohol as a matter of poor metabolism. Hence, teetotalers are not unhealthy because they avoid alcohol; they avoid alcohol because they are unhealthy, which explains their shorter life expectancy on average. That said, the study did show that 1 alcohol unit a day is, although damaging, very minimally so:

Anyhow, the world’s cultural fascination with alcohol is bizarre to me, considering the existence of drugs that have a much better hedonic and cost-benefit profile (cf. State-Space of Drug Effects). Perhaps finding out with genetic testing that you are likely to be an above-average alcohol metabolizer might be good to lessen your worry about having a couple of drinks now and then. But the much bigger opportunity here would be to allow you to find drugs that you are particularly compatible with. For example, a genetic test might determine based on a polygenetic score that you might benefit a whole lot from taking small amounts of e.g. Khat  (or some such obscure and relatively benign euphoriant). That is, that your genetic make-up is such that Khat will be motivation enhancing, empathy-increasing, good for your heart and lungs, reduce the rate of dopamine neuron death, etc. while at the same time producing little to no hangovers, no irritability, no sleep issues, or social dysfunction. Even though you may have thought that you are “not an uppers person”, perhaps that’s because, genetically, every other upper you have ever tried is objectively terrible for your health. But Khat wouldn’t be. Wouldn’t this information be useful? Indeed, I would posit, this might be a great step in the right direction in order to achieve the goal of  Wireheading Done Right.

*23andMe is here used as a shorthand for services in general like this (including Ancestry, Counsyl, Natera, etc.)

Featured image credit: source.

Dream Music

Posted on by algekalipso

I, too, once thought the radio played
Let’s act like children while we sleep paralyzed

– “Scissor Lock” by Dredg (from the album “El Cielo”)

El Cielo is an album about lucid dreaming, dreamless sleep, and sleep paralysis. I love the fact that a rock band takes dreaming states of consciousness seriously enough to record an entire album dedicated to them. The line “I, too, once thought the radio played” reminded me of the times I’ve thought music was playing while I was experiencing a sleep paralysis.

Convincing auditory hallucinations do seem to be commonplace during such states, and ample anecdotal evidence supports this fact. The music experienced can either be (1) generated on the fly, (2) a faithful reproduction of a song one knows, (3) an altered version of a song one has heard and remembers, or even (4) a reproduction of a song one has heard but isn’t aware of at the time.

Examples of (1) and (2) are alluded to by this experience report found on the website DreamViews:

I love listening to music in sleep paralysis. The other day it was “I Love it Loud” by Kiss. The song that forms up is usually something fresh in my mind, maybe something listened to earlier. It’s like having headphones in, the sound quality is that good. What songs do you get?

– User J.D. in DreamViews (source)

And here is FlacidSteel from Reddit relating their experience:

That happens to me when I am in the right mindset to have a lucid dream. It normally comes as the sound of the radio next to my bed, or sometimes the TV. When I finally realize I didn’t leave the radio/TV on is when I realize I’m dreaming and gain control of my dream, almost like a reality check. One time I could have sworn the garbage men were outside and I woke up and it was hours before they came. Sleep paralysis hallucinations can be the most convincing and terrifying experienced.

– From the r/LucidDreaming post “Sleep Paralysis Involving Music” (source)

I’ve experienced (3) but I haven’t seen an explicit account online. There is at least one account for (4): the music might have been stored in auditory memory but not semantically.

Sleep paralysis for me comes about once a month, and lucid dreams about every two months. Like many, I’ve heard Bach Cello Suite No.1. and other classics. I once heard the Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone movie soundtrack playing perfectly for what seemed like many tracks. I think that learning about japanoise changed what my mind thought of as acceptable mood-setting melodies. So when I first started contemplating the emotional character of arbitrary sounds and I fell into a sleep paralysis my mind played a concert that combined noise music and Bach. That time I had the ability to modulate the ratio of noise music to Bach music and see how the various proportions changed the mood I experienced. Noise blunted the quality and emotional depth of Bach. On the other hand, noise did not make me commit to any particular pattern.

Our minds can create pleasant music on the fly featuring synthesizer sounds, flutes, pianos, duck quacks, elephant trumpets, and so on. Sleep paralysis allows you to experience a broad range of deeply emotional sounds of uncharted varieties. If you are in search of a bang rather than a slow burn, I would point you to the very start of the hypnagogic state. Once a sleep paralysis has gotten going it will creep for a good 5 to 15 minutes depending on your ability to reconfigure it to a better state. Some people use their extremities to bootstrap a wave of wakefulness by energizing little pulsed ripples in one’s toes and fingers until you have yourself wiggling out of the state. The methods to deal with the aftermath of entering a sleep paralysis are myriad. But let’s talk about the point before getting into it. There isn’t a better place to arrest a sleep paralysis than at its very beginning. It’s like a loud sound in the distance is trying to set the mood and seduces you so that you agree to abide by its emotional parameters. When you fully let go for a moment, that’s the real onset of a hypnagogic state. One can hear bangs right there – one can experience sounds with climaxes! Kitchen pots colliding, balloons exploding, water splashing, 80s drums. If you want to interrupt a sleep paralysis you have to contend with the mood-setting forces of the initial hypnagogic bang. Be brave; apply the mental move of either “internalism of meaning” or semantic nihilism and prevent the loud sound from convincing the rest of your experiential world to settle in on this “new world”. If you are quick to detect the hypnagogic sleight of hand and you act decisively, a sleep paralysis can be cut right at the nub.

During sleep paralysis, hearing any kind of sound is possible, really. The generality of it is remarkable. But perhaps more relevant still is the fact that dream music is often experienced as being emotionally compelling. “Like music is supposed to be heard”- I once thought as a kid waking up from a dream with a soundtrack. It is almost like the music is a manifestation of the mood one is in. Deep down, one’s own felt-sense of aliveness provides the constraints for the type of music that will resonate with you on a given night. In turn, having slept well through the night helps you internalize a certain mood, to imagine worlds within certain affective constraints. Some people remark that dream phenomenology is emotion-driven rather than emotion-responsive. What one sees is a projection of one’s mood, the semantic congruence being imposed in often symbolic and round-about ways. It’s like when you’ve had a conversation with someone a thousand times, so you come at it with a certain attitude. “Whatever you say, no, because I’ve seen it all and I’ve always said no. Try me.” And so the dream generates images and scenes and it is somehow always implied that what happens is part of the plot. Contradictions are quickly incorporated rather than a source of questioning. Sleep paralysis has this quality, but it also has the wakeful emotion-responsive quality too. So you are in the weird position of experiencing this strange feedback effect that has a certain mood, and is trying to express its excess energy in whatever way is possible, and you have your ego who is more critical and expects certain behaviors from the world. In a way you can think of this situation as having two metallic blades spinning very fast right next to each other, and they are tied together with a complicated arrangement of pulleys and levers. If you do it right and manage to keep the balance right, no harm done. But if you mess up you can experience super strange dissonant couplings and bizarre vibrations, few of which are strictly pleasant, and most of which are sharp and rather uncomfortable.

It’s no wonder some people get traumatized from experiencing sleep paralysis. I assume very few families have a parent-child vocabulary so well developed as to be able to carefully explain sleep paralysis phenomenology in a way that will work at pointing to the thing when it finally happens for the first time. Indeed, what is so stunning about the state is perhaps precisely that which people have the hardest time verbalizing. Namely, the fact that the phenomenal character of this state is almost entirely having to do with its ambiance rather than the intentional objects present. People come out of the state saying “there was a man on top of me” or “I felt like my arms were tied to the bed” which although true, completely misses the essential character of the state, the fact that it had this peculiar dreamy subtlety that embedded a mood into everything it touched. The often Halloweenesque scenic mist that comes with a sleep paralysis is rather paranormal-themed. On a bad night, the ambiance of a sleep paralysis can feel quite inviting to zombies, demons, and vultures as thought-forms. Likewise, the thought-forms can take the shape of angry sounds and dissonant percussions. It is incredible just how powerful of a filter hedonic tone exerts on reality. For that exact same reason, it does happen to be the case that some sleep paralyses are filled with extraordinary beauty and delight. The negative hedonic tone is not intrinsic to the state, although it may seem so at the time. For whatever reason, most humans’ experience with sleep paralysis is of the negative variety, but for most sufferers every once in a while the experience comes with pleasant qualities. Indeed, there is no reason to think that devoid of evolutionary selection pressures, exotic states of alertness should come with a pre-defined hedonic tone. On the contrary, I would expect them to be fully programmable.

Anyhow, some people, myself included, have experienced sleep paralysis in which the sounds heard were of extraordinary beauty. Most people will be skeptical that the music our brains can compose on the fly in a good mood sleep paralysis is genuinely good. I’ve gone through several stages on this matter. At first I treated it as self-evidently true that the music was beautiful. Then I questioned my memory and convinced myself that my brain was fabricating the music after the fact and that I was under the illusion that it was beautiful to begin with. Then I finally memorized a little melody I heard and it was nice but too small to say much about when I woke up, so I suspected again that my brain could compose great music if I just let it do it on that state. But finally I realized that the melody is in fact quite irrelevant. What matters is the mood, and the state itself, the good mood sleep paralysis itself is in a way expressing its positive valence via sounds, but if you were to listen to them in a normal state, they wouldn’t resonate in the same way. They wouldn’t produce the same peculiar echoing along one’s subjective arrow of time (cf. The Pseudo-Time Arrow).

Naïvely one may think: let us put musicians in good mood sleep paralysis and produce great music very easily. The problem is not that you will not get melodies and rhythms out. It’s that they will not create the same emotional impression they did in the person in the state in which they were generated.

Rather, what we ought to do is figure out in what ways good mood sleep paralysis states enable a wider range of emotional contrast for phenomenal music. That’s the real question. How can we import the (good) emotional depth of sleep paralysis into the wakeful state? Deep down I suspect this comes down to disabling the boredom mechanism. It is not so much that good mood sleep paralysis is great at composing music, and more that it can create a dreamy “enjoyment body” for the music. The thought-forms there can be entranced with harmonic patterns much more easily than those present while awake.

In the general case I suspect that the music produced is entirely new… it’s the emotional character that convinces you that it is so profound, not its resemblance to a previously heard soundtrack. To reword: the precise melody of the music one experiences on dream states is almost irrelevant to understanding that world of experience. It’s the resonant echoey quality of the state that gives such a remarkable emotional depth to those imagined/experienced sounds.

Perhaps the fact that dream music can be profoundly emotionally compelling is a special case of the more general feature of such states: that the brain is in some ways more resonant than usual. Music might be just one manifestation of this general effect, others being unlocking rarely-felt emotions, body vibrations, or even things like feeling that you are being electrocuted. If resonance is the key, we could predict that a sufficiently trained lucid dreamer will be able to generate musical experiences that are surprisingly simple in their complexity and yet stunningly deep in their emotional character. What is the CDNS of a dream state? This story doesn’t end here.

Free-Wheeling Hallucinations

Posted on by algekalipso

[at 12:40] Q: Is the content of our experience epistemological?

A: If you take the right combination of psychedelic substances* you can get yourself in a state which is a full free-wheeling hallucination, which looks every bit as real as this world, and yet you know it’s not real because of the crazy things that happen in that world. You can have direct conscious control of those objects. You can say “give me a table” and a table will appear right in front of you as real as a solid table. Now, the first time you have this experience you think “Oh My God! What is this? What’s going on?” And the most profoundly shocking thing about the experience is the complete and total absence of your own body at the center of the experience. So here you have a space, somewhat like this space you see in this room… but there’s nobody in it! And yet the space is crammed full of images that morph rapidly from one to another through all kinds of crazy contortions. And your sense of your own self is forced to migrate away from the body that’s no longer there and takes up residence in the space itself, and you become aware of the fact that there is this spherical theater of the mind in which images are generated by your mind, full three-dimensional solid-looking real images with color, and lightning, and shadow, and mirror image effects, and reflections, and refractions. Everything we see in the normal world, and yet obviously they are not images of the world, they are images that are generated inside the mind. And that there shows that the space of our experience is a representational space that’s capable of maintaining images, but that the images have no real external reality- unless they happened to be coupled to external events. And this is the distinction that many seers and thinkers have made between the imaging mechanism that’s capable of generating images, and the images that it generates.

* Which drug combinations produce free-wheeling hallucinations? We find a more in-depth description of the phenomenon in Lehar’s book The Grand Illusion. The type of drug combo reported to lead to free-wheeling hallucinations in this book involves mixing a dissociative (DXM, PCP, Ketamine) and a psychedelic or psychedelic-like substance (LSD, Mescaline, even THC). For example DXM + THC (marijuana) is the first combination reported to produce this effect. Later on Ketamine + LSD + THC is proposed as the most effective method to achieve this state.

Here is an excerpt from the book that discusses the phenomenon in detail (pgs. 63-70 and 109):

Around the time I was experimenting with ecstasy and LSD, I discovered a whole new class of drugs, the dissociative drugs. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my experiments with Nitrous Oxide had been my first foray into the dissociative realm. Perusing on the internet brought my attention to Dextromethorphan, or DXM, known in the drug world as “Robo”, because it is the active ingredient in Robitussin DM, the cough medicine. Following my education on the internet, I took my first Robo experience by slugging down a whole bottle of the sickly sweet Robitussin syrup, which I could only hold down for a while before it all came back up again. The result was a state of profound mental befuddlement. I really had no clue at all. I became very uncoordinated, and could only move slowly like a sloth, for fear of losing my balance and falling over. And my thoughts shrank down to a tiny trickle of one intense but simple thought at a time. It was only by accident that I discovered the unique power of Robo. I was lying on my bed, probably wondering why I was doing this to myself, when I noticed a peculiar phenomenon. When I closed my eyes, the world around me failed to disappear! There it was, bold as brass, right there before me in all its color and glory, while my eyelids were firmly closed! I blinked open, then closed again. No difference! My eyelids had become transparent! I could see right through them! What was actually happening was that my mind had made an image of the world before me, partly as a visual after-image, and partly by visual memory and perceptual filling-in, and it was presenting that image to me with eyes closed as if my eyes were still open! It was absolutely extraordinary! It was only on a later occasion, several years later, that I discovered that these hallucinations need not be boring copies of consensual reality, as had occurred in this case, but if you just ask for them to present something more interesting, they will happily oblige! In other words, Robo gives you the power to produce full free-wheeling hallucinations on demand! You can experience virtually anything you want, if you can just imagine it! Those of you who are familiar with the phenomenon of lucid dreaming, the ability to have startlingly real and vibrant dreams which can also be brought under voluntary control, already know of this wondrous capacity of the human mind, to build complete synthetic hallucinated worlds of visual experience every bit as vivid and apparently real as the waking world. If nothing else, this should clearly clinch the case for the World In Your Head.

On the internet I later read about robo parties where people would assemble in one room, consume Robo simultaneously, then they lie back and close their eyes and share a collective hallucination. For example they might agree in advance to take a trip to the moons of Mars. Then they all lie down and close their eyes, and their collective trip would begin. One will say “fasten your seat belts”, another will hit the launch button, a third might remark on the rumble of the rocket and the view of the sky out the viewport, and everything that they describe is hallucinated by everyone else simultaneously, although each in their own personal way, so they are literally sharing a single consensual experience, except this time totally de-coupled from objective external reality. The very existence or possibility of this capacity is very instructive of the principles behind human perception.

In my own solitary explorations of the dissociated state I put this imaging power to the test, with a combination of Robo and Marijuana. This time I had read about a chemical procedure by which one can separate the Robo from the Robitussin DM with an acid / base reduction process. I carefully followed the directions in my kitchen, and what emerged after a couple of hours of mixing and boiling, was a glob of clear goo at the bottom of my beaker. I tasted it, and it tasted like hell fire! It was inconsumable! So I stirred it up with some orange juice and slugged it all down. I immediately felt very very sick, and after no more than about a minute, it all came back up again, to my great relief. But the chemical had done its thing, and I was plunged into a state of the deepest mental confusion. I retreated to my tripping room and reclined on my recliner, took a few notes in my notebook, and recorded the time. The image of the clock, and everything else in the room, was double. Even with an effort of will, I could not fuse my binocular vision, so it became more easy and comfortable to just close my eyes. What followed was some number of hours of the wildest mental confusion, with senseless whirling images tumbling through my mind, one following the next in completely senseless procession. I just let it go and went for the ride, having lost all sense of who or even what I was, or where I was located. All that existed for me was those chaotic tumbling patterns.

[…]

In any case, I “awoke” the next morning in a very gray and colorless foggy space with little in the way of mental images, just a gray sense of being trapped within the vast cavern of my mind. I opened my eyes to a double-image world, and found the pipe thoughtfully pre-loaded with marijuana that I had left for myself, along with the clock and notepad, before launching into the experience the day before. And sure enough, consistent with my new theory, after smoking the pipe, I closed my eyes and found that the internal world was now splashed with color and light and all kinds of interesting shapes and patterns. I had arrived in the state I had been targeting all along.

Once I realized that I was in the free-wheeling hallucination stage, I took a look at the experience. Where was my body? I was in a space somewhat like the last room I remembered being in, but I had no body! Or did I? When I looked down at my hands, (with eyes actually closed) there they were, floating in space, disconnected from anything else. And the rest of my body was just gone! Or was it? When I asked myself about it, there it was! Or I could make it disappear again at will! My choice! I was like God who can think any thought, and it becomes reality. So I thought to myself “let there be a table”, and there was a table! Right there in front of me! A rectangular top, four legs, aspect ratio about 1:2, just your typical canonical table. And I could rotate it in my mind’s eye to see it from any angle I chose, and I could translate, rotate, and zoom my viewpoint by just wishing it. I could even turn my viewpoint upside-down. I tried it! And when I zoomed in to examine the table closer I discovered a strange thing. If I did not bother to imagine a body for myself, then I had a disembodied experience, like the view from an eyeball floating in empty space. I could see a view from a point, but there was no body or self at that point. And in this disembodied state there was no longer an objective sense of scale. When I zoomed in to take a closer look at the table there was no distinction between my looking from closer, and the table simply zooming to larger size. Zooming in on the table was at the same time shrinking down to the size of an ant. This gave direct meaning to Empedocles’s dictum that man is the measure of all things.

But there were limits to what I was able to image. For example I tried to fulfill one of my long time fantasies, and fly a Spitfire in aerial combat in the Battle of Britain. “Let there be a spitfire cockpit around me”, I commanded, and there it was, with a view of the English countryside from 20,000 feet. But the picture was not very good. I could only see one instrument at a time on the panel, and even that only with an effort, and the view of the world around me was very sketchy and simplistic, so I gave it up after a while. I guess there are limits to the power of imagination in the dissociated state. It is extraordinarily difficult to keep one’s head in such a dissociated state. The free-wheeling hallucination stage follows only after a period of such profound confusion and dissociation that no coherent pictures can form, there is just a wild roller-coaster ride of one fantastical vision after another in such a nonsensical sequence as to make your head spin. When things settle down a bit, and your experience settles into a more stable, coherent state, it is hard to remember that this journey was taken for a purpose, and that the scientific psychonaut should remember to observe and remember as much as he can. The experience is generally a chaotic blur, with little flashes of imagery that are later recalled piecemeal. For example I remember seeing a head, in 3-D right before me, but it was flickering and flashing at a truly blinding rate between millions of variations, a black face, a white face, a man, a woman, an ape, an android, but flashing so fast between these countless alternatives like fanning rapidly through a picture book with your thumb. I found it extraordinary that my mind was capable of such rapid switching of imagery, especially considering the fact that the mind is slowed considerably by the effects of dissociative drugs, and that was probably the only reason that I could distinguish the fleeting individual heads at all. Under more normal consciousness the many heads blur into one general head of indefinite features, the general concept of head that applies to all heads, and thus to none individually. In retrospect, after much contemplation of this and other similar experiences, I came to hypothesize that I was seeing the method by which the brain expresses the general concept, which it does apparently in a very literal way, as a kind of probabilistic superposition of mutually inconsistent alternatives through which it cycles at a blinding speed. This is what your visual system does in a flash when a new face appears, before settling on the one face recreated from memory that best fits the sensory evidence before us. This was a profoundly moving discovery.

The dissociative state does more than just dissociate your experience from the external world, creating a solipsistic inner experience, but it also dissociates one brain area from another, causing a mental fragmentation in which one no longer feels like a single individual, but as a kind of fragmented collective consciousness almost like a multiple-personality syndrome, or a cacophony of asynchronous “group thought”. The most direct and obvious manifestation of this strong dissociation was seen in vision turning double, as also happens when one is profoundly drunk. It just becomes too great an effort to keep the two eyes fused, so one tends to relax and just let the world turn double, each eye ignoring the experience of the other, and thus, it is normally more relaxing and less disturbing to simply close your eyes, and in the dissociated state this does nothing to reduce the vividness or clarity of the experience. Thoughts also dissociate from each other, allowing one part of your mind to think one thing, while another part thinks something completely different. Your mind becomes a cacophony of discordant voices, you lose your sense of being a single self. This also was a fascinating experience with profound philosophical implications.

There is a strange sense of space that takes over as your world of experience becomes dissociated, as your perceived body fragments into a million pieces and dissolves seamlessly into the surrounding world of non-self, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the self expands outward to encompass the whole world of your experience. Your self is transformed from a central body-shaped object, to a larger spatial void that is just crammed full of images madly morphing from one pattern to the next. This world is your all, it is the screen that defines the maximum extent of your possible experience, just as a television screen, with its glowing colored dots, defines the full range of all possible images that can be expressed in that gamut of colors. And during the free-wheeling hallucination stage, I would experience a succession from one moving experience to the next, from Egyptian pyramids in a desert, to the mountains of Mars, to people, faces, creatures, concepts, and wild pattens in an endless state of flux. It is one thing to read about these experiences as happening to someone else, but it is quite another to “be” those endless visions, and to have them be as real to you as any experience in the real world!

I came to call this phenomenon the “egg world”, a roughly ellipsoidal volume of space stretching to often dark shadowy and indistinct limits, like the dome of the sky matched by the bowl of an inverted sky, but with a curious missing hemifield back behind what would have been behind my head, a volumetric space in which the images appear, morphing from one interpretation to the next, like a surrealistic painting by Dali. In fact, the radical transformation of one object to something completely different, was typical of the visual transformations, they tended to shift abruptly like one of those Gestalt illusions where a young lady is transformed into an old hag, and back again. In this profound state of intoxication I lost all sense of the distinction between the world itself and the experience of it in my mind. I got the sense that I was directly experiencing the cataclysmic transformation of the universe, or at least the only universe of which I was aware, and that whole universe was exploding into senseless fragments. I felt I was witnessing the cataclysmic birth or death of the entire universe, witnessed not by viewing from the outside, but by being the universe undergoing those cataclysmic events. There was nothing else beyond myself that entered into my awareness, I was isolated in a kind of “brain in a vat” solipsistic experience disconnected from external reality.

And yet at the same time I had a sense that my universe was finite and bounded, delimited by the outer shell of the egg-like space, a surface whose distance was indefinite or fuzzy, or changeable, not unlike the space you see before you with eyes closed, or in pitch darkness, and the dimensions of that space seemed to depend on what was being imaged in that space. I had a claustrophobic sensation of being trapped within the confines of this egg-shaped world, and in that thought was embodied the notion of the possible existence of something else beyond, of the great infinite blackness of non-experience beyond the limits of my experienced world.

And with that thought, there came another, which I found even more moving still. With that thought came a thought, why do I have to be trapped within my own self? Why can’t this beautiful energetic spirit that is me, escape the confines of my brain, and go out into the external world? Not as a supernatural spirit, I don’t believe in those. But as a resonance in some kind of resonator built for that purpose, that operates on the same essential principles as the resonance in our brain. Why don’t we build machines that have the same power of dynamic image generation as our brain, and thus, create consciousness beyond the biological mind? And if we can create resonators that replicate the principle of the human brain, we can then interconnect them in a global network, where the images in the various resonators would be coupled with each other so as to produce a single emergent global mind, distributed across all the resonators in the network. It is hard to express the profoundly moving nature of that thought. This was the philosophy of experience seen in a completely different light.

There was another aspect of the dissociated psychedelic experience that impressed itself on me, and that was the sound that I heard. Although I tended not to notice unless I attended to it deliberately, there was a strange and constant sound in the background during all these experiences, and that sound could be described as the thrumming of some great machine, or the drone of enormous deep organ pipes that vibrated to the core of my soul. There was a kind of “chugga chugga chugga” or “thumpa thumpa thumpa” sound, but that was only one component. On top of that were higher pitched and faster cycling sounds all the way to the highest audible tone, and these sounds were rich and deep and periodic and chaotic, all at the same time, impossible to describe. I came to believe that this was the sound that my brain makes when it is thinking. This is the sound of thought.

[…]

Ketamine marked for me the final shattering of the last vestiges of the naïve illusion that what we are seeing in experience is the world itself. After you have lived through as many free-wheeling hallucinations as I have, you realize that your mind is first and foremost, a magnificent three-dimensional holographic image projection mechanism, capable of rendering some truly awesome experienced scenes, with incredible capacities for generating texture, patterns, shapes, transparency, color, light and shadow, multiple illumination, radiance or self-illuminance, mirror reflections, and refraction as through water or glass. Our visual mind works like a modern ray-tracing algorithm that creates synthetic scenes using fractal algorithms complete with illumination and shadow, except it is capable of generating the most complex scenes in a fraction of a second, and hundreds of these images per second! Once you have seen how vivid and clear and complex a world your mind is capable of fabricating in an instant of time, you must acknowledge both a deep appreciation for the outstanding capacity of the brain to pull off that stunt, and at the same time, a deep awe at the thought of the real world itself, beyond our experience, of which the world of experience is no more than a cartoon caricature over-simplification.

It is worth complementing Lehar’s report with the findings of another lucid psychonaut, James L. Kent of Psychedelic Information Theory. He also identifies the “psychedelic + dissociative” combination as an area of special interest for studying hallucinations. That said, he also points out that if one takes this combo in conjunction with an acetylcholine promoter of some sort the experience can easily become overwhelming and uncontrollable (crossing the boundary between fun and free-wheeling to unpleasantly chaotic and out of control; cf. criticality):

The ACh promotion of dreaming and REM has been demonstrated in animal research, but only subjectively reported and presumed in humans. Subjective reports of combining both the dissociative ketamine and the psychedelic LSD with pre-doses of galantamine and choline (both acetylcholine promoters) indicates that ACh promoters facilitate emotionally intense eidetic hallucinations, sometimes uncomfortable or unpleasant in nature, emerging beyond the subject’s capacity to control. This demonstrates that the production of eidetic imagery in response to ACh modulation is a spontaneous and automatic function of memory consolidation that cannot be easily controlled by the will or intent of the subject. The spontaneous production of salient eidetic memory makes psychedelics a useful tool in psychotherapy, but the uncontrollable flood of eidetic imagery may not always be pleasant for the subject. States of intense eidetic hallucination may be associated with memory regression, imprinting, reconsolidation, and neuroplasticity.

– Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason (pg. 94)

As they say in my hometown: It’s all fun and games until someone becomes a globular cluster of arborized realities. Don’t overdo the acetylcholine.

Philip K. Dick’s LSD Trip

Posted on by algekalipso

Scene from Philip K. Dick’s novel “Maze of Death”. According to him, this is a detailed and 100% accurate description of his most intense LSD trip. During this experience he allegedly started speaking out loud religious phrases in perfect Latin even though he had never studied this language in his entire life (he also claimed that a girl was there and can confirm that it really happened, though I haven’t found any direct retelling of this event from her):

Opening The Book at random she walked toward him, and as she walked she read aloud from The Book. “ ‘Hence it can be said,’ ” she intoned, “ ‘that God-in-history shows several phases: (one) The period of purity before the Form Destroyer was awakened into activity. (two) The period of the Curse, when the power of the Deity was weakest, the power of the Form Destroyer the greatest—this because God had not perceived the Form Destroyer and so was taken by surprise. (three) The birth of God-on-Earth, sign that the period of Absolute Curse and Estrangement from God had ended. (four) The period now—’ ”
She had come almost up to him; he stood unmoving, still holding the gun. She continued to read the sacred text aloud. “ ‘The period now, in which God walks the world, redeeming the suffering now, redeeming all life later through the figure of himself as the Intercessor who—’ ”

“Go back with them,” Thugg told her. “Or I’ll kill you.”

“ ‘Who, it is sure, is still alive, but not in this circle. (five) The next and last period—’ ”

A terrific bang boomed at her eardrums; deafened, she moved a step back and then she felt great pain in her chest; she felt her lungs die from the great, painful shock of it. The scene around her became dull, the light faded and she saw only darkness. Seth Morley, she tried to say, but no sound came out. And yet she heard noise; she heard something huge and far off, chugging violently into the darkness.

She was alone.

Thud, thud, came the noise. Now she saw iridescent color, mixed into a light which traveled like a liquid; it formed buzzsaws and pinwheels and crept upward on each side of her. Directly before her the huge Thing throbbed menacingly; she heard its imperative, angry voice summoning her upward. The urgency of its activity frightened her; it demanded, rather than asked. It was telling her something; she knew what it meant by its enormous pounding. Wham, wham, wham, it went and, terrified, filled with physical pain, she called to it. “Libera me, Domine,” she said. “De morte aeterna, in die illa tremenda.”

It throbbed on and on. And she glided helplessly toward it. Now, on the periphery of her vision, she saw a fantastic spectacle; she saw a great crossbow and on it the Intercessor. The string was pulled back; the Intercessor was placed on it like an arrow; and then, soundlessly, the Intercessor was shot upward, into the smallest of the concentric rings.

“Agnus Dei,” she said, “qui tollis peccata mundi.” She had to look away from the throbbing vortex; she looked down and back . . . and saw, far below her, a vast frozen landscape of snow and boulders. A furious wind blew across it; as she watched, more snow piled up around the rocks. A new period of glaciation, she thought, and found that she had trouble thinking—let alone talking—in English “Lacrymosa dies illa,” she said, gasping with pain; her entire chest seemed to have become a block of suffering. “Qua resurget ex favilla, judicandus homo reus.” It seemed to make the pain less, this need to express herself in Latin—a language which she had never studied and knew nothing about. “Huic ergo parce, Deus!” she said. “Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem.” The throbbing continued on.

A chasm opened before her feet. She began to fall; below her the frozen landscape of the hellworld grew closer. Again she cried out, “Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna!” But still she fell; she had almost reached the hell-world, and nothing meant to lift her up.

Something with immense wings soared up, like a great, metallic dragonfly with spines jutting from its head. It passed her, and a warm wind billowed after it. “Salve me, fons pietatis,” she called to it; she recognized it and felt no surprise at seeing it. The Intercessor, fluttering up from the hellworld, back to the fire of the smaller, inner rings.

Lights, in various colors, bloomed on all sides of her; she saw a red, smoky light burning close and, confused, turned toward it. But something made her pause. The wrong color, she thought to herself. I should be looking for a clear, white light, the proper womb in which to be reborn. She drifted upward, carried by the warm wind of the Intercessor… the smoky red light fell behind and in its place, to her right, she saw a powerful, unflickering, yellow light. As best she could she propelled herself toward that.

The pain in her chest seemed to have lessened; in fact her entire body felt vague. Thank you, she thought, for easing the discomfort; I appreciate that. I have seen it, she said to herself; I have seen the Intercessor and through it I have a chance of surviving. Lead me, she thought. Take me to the proper color of light. To the right new birth.

The clear, white light appeared. She yearned toward it, and something helped propel her. Are you angry at me? she thought, meaning the enormous presence that throbbed. She could still hear the throbbing, but it was no longer meant for her; it would throb on throughout eternity because it was beyond time, outside of time, never having been in time. And—there was no space present, either; everything appeared two-dimensional and squeezed together, like robust but crude figures drawn by a child or by some primitive man. Bright colorful figures, but absolutely flat. . . and touching.

“Mors stupebit et natura,” she said aloud. “Cum resurget creatura, judicanti responsura.” Again the throbbing lessened. It has forgiven me, she said to herself. It is letting the Intercessor carry me to the right light.

Toward the clear, white light she floated, still uttering from time to time pious Latin phrases. The pain in her chest had gone now entirely and she felt no weight; her body had ceased to consume both time and space.

Wheee, she thought. This is marvelous.

Throb, throb, went the Central Presence, but no longer for her; it throbbed for others, now.

The Day of the Final Audit had come for her—had come and now had passed. She had been judged and the judgment was favorable. She experienced utter, absolute joy. And continued, like a moth among novas, to flutter upward toward the proper light.

From a 1979 interview:

I only know of one time where I really took acid. That was Sandoz acid, a giant horse capsule that I got from the University of California, and a friend and I split it. And I don’t know, there must’ve been a whole milligram of it there. It was a gigantic thing, you know, we bought it for five dollars and took it home and we looked at it for a while—looked at it, we were all gonna split it up—and took that, and it was the greatest thing, I’ll tell you.

I went straight to Hell, is what happened. I found myself, you know, the landscape froze over, and there were huge boulders, and there was a deep thrumming, and it was the Day of Wrath, and God was judging me as a sinner, and this lasted for thousands of years and didn’t get any better. It just got worse and worse, and I was in terrible pain, I felt terrible physical pain, and all I could talk was in Latin. Most embarrassing, ‘cause the girl I was with thought I was doing it to annoy her, and I kept saying Libera me domine in die illa. You know, and Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi […] and especially, Tremens factus sum ego et timeo—timeo meaning “I’m afraid”—and I said Libera me, domine! Whining like some poor dog that’s been left out in the rain all night. Finally, the girl with me said “Oh, barf” and walked out of the room in disgust.

Two more references:

Yes, friends, you, too, can suffer forever; simply take 150 mg [sic] of LSD—and enjoy! If not satisfied, simply mail in—but enough. Because after two thousand years under LSD, participating in the Day of Judgment, one probably will be rather apathetic to asking for one’s five dollars back.

(source)

And:

I perceived Him as a pulsing, furious, throbbing mass of vengeance-seeking authority, demanding an audit (like a sort of metaphysical IRS agent). Fortunately I was able to utter the right words [the “Libera me, Domine” quoted above], and hence got through it. I also saw Christ rise to heaven from the cross, and that was very interesting, too (the cross took the form of a crossbow, with Christ as the arrow; the crossbow launched him at terrific velocity—it happened very fast, once he had been placed in position).

(same as above)

Brief Analysis: Philip K. Dick extensively explored the literary theme of simulationism. This theme posits that the reality that we experience is an illusion; it is not what it originally seemed to be. The fakeness of reality includes not only one’s perception of the world, but also one’s beliefs about oneself. Indeed, it is a narrative staple of a good PKD story for the character to turn out to have been a robot, secret agent, alien, and/or a computer program all along. Oftentimes the fundamental plot twists are layered, multifaceted, recursive, and ultimately undecidable thanks to the presence of contradictory versions of events and narrative ambiguity.

More than almost any other author, PKD indeed explored to a great depth the implications of indirect realism about perception (e.g. in many of his stories the main character discovers that she/he never perceives the world in an unmediated fashion). That the world we perceive is a simulated reality is to be expected in the works of this author; whether this simulation is created by one’s brains or a large cosmic computer is the deeper question that PKD tends to posit again and again and often leaves in fully unresolved terms.

The LSD trip above recounted is interesting in this context. PKD’s trip illustrates just how insidious the reality transformation caused by psychedelics can be, to the point that they can make you doubt fundamental implicit background assumptions you’ve constructed your life around. While PKD remained skeptical of the cosmic significance of most of his life experiences, he seems to have given a very high degree of metaphysical credence to specific intensely emotional events in his life, including the above LSD trip. Perhaps PKD didn’t know at the time that LSD does not merely make you experience weird qualia, but that it also intensifies its emotional power. Psychedelics are interesting in part because they are remarkably effective means to increase the energy of one’s consciousness (via increasing the amplitude of connectome-specific harmonic waves). People describe them as experience intensifiers. Thus, positive, negative, and mixed emotions can be felt in much greater depth. According to our work, this process is related to symmetry and harmony. On psychedelics the pseudo-time arrow of experience elongates and spatial representations cohere on symmetrical shapes (such as wallpaper groups for 2D texture repetition or 3D hyperbolic manifolds on high doses of DMT). The increased level of energy leads to entropic disintegration, and ultimately to neural annealing, a process which is experienced as intensely emotional and full of meaning. Interestingly, PKD’s trip report showcases all of these features in one way or another.

For instance, the thumping/throbbing described is first experienced as intensely unpleasant and only at the end is described as blissful. The existence of this thumping can be accounted for by a process of neural annealing; its initial unpleasantness is the result of the dissonance between the core metronome (“Central Presence”) and the rest of the experience; the final bliss is the result of successful annealing and the high levels of consonance that ensue. The increased subjective time reported can be explained by changes to the pseudo-time arrow, including the eternal-seeming nature of the Central Presence. And so on.

In so far as we choose to reduce spirituality to valence (rather than the other way around) we will expect to find that intense life-altering spiritual experiences will all bear the signatures of high/low valence. That is, it is not that spirituality is emotionally intense. Rather, emotional intensity underlies spirituality. PKD’s account displays this in a very explicit way. The thumping of the Central Presence could certainly have theological significance, but it is not specifically predicted by any kind of formal theology. On the other hand, if the Symmetry Theory of Valence is correct, such thumping (and associated intense emotions) are expected to be found in typical intensely blissful/hellish states. That said, due to the Tyranny of the Intentional Object such intensely valenced states will appear to be reflections of inherently good/bad situations or entities. The emotion comes first. The illusion of grasping the “fundamentally good/bad essence of a being” comes second, as an after-the-fact ideation. Alas, thanks to implicit direct realism about perception, most people fail to attribute the intense emotional character of these experiences to things as impersonal as neural annealing, and instead interpret what happened in terms of metaphysical happenings like meeting God or experiencing telepathy.

The fact that intense emotions masquerade as insight into the fundamental nature of other beings is perhaps one of the most deceptive aspects of the world simulations created by our brains. After all, nothing is good or bad, but the encephalization of phenomenal valence via afferent neural connections from our limbic system’s hedonic hot spots makes it so. While Philip K. Dick managed to be skeptical and cautious about the way he made sense of reality, it is clear that he still somehow took at face value the representational content of intense emotions. Thus, he was still under the spell of a fundamental illusion, and hence at the mercy of gripping mystical visions. In future, however, PKD-like authors imbued with a 21st century science of consciousness shall go even deeper, and explore simulationism in light of, not only indirect realism about perception, but also of the Tyranny of the Intentional Object, egocentric bias, personal identity, and other evolutionarily adaptive shenanigans of our perception.