QRI‘s co-founder Michael E. Johnson just posted a piece on neural annealing. This is one of QRI’s most important pieces of content to date. I’m very proud of Mike and the team for pulling this off. You can find the full piece here.
Mike writes:
This is QRI’s unified theory of music, meditation, psychedelics, depression, trauma, and emotional processing; the most challenging (and I think beautiful) thing I’ve written in the last three years. I would really appreciate careful comments.
A few takeaways:
Entering high-energy states (i.e., intense emotional states which take some time to ‘process’) is how the brain releases structural stress and adapts to new developments. This is similar to ‘annealing’ in metals, where heat allows atoms to break their bonds, then they search for more stable configurations as they cool.
Brains really do need to anneal regularly to pay down their ‘technical debt’, and if they don’t, they grow brittle and neurotic.
Meditation, music, psychedelics, exercise, dance, sex, tantric practices, EMDR, and breath work all share the same mechanism: a build-up of rhythmic neural resonance that can push the brain into these high-energy states which produce annealing.
Depression is a self-reinforcing perturbation from the natural annealing cycle.
Sometimes the brain needs to rapidly halt information propagation across regions to prevent cascading system failure … we call this ‘trauma’. This is a common and serious disruption of the annealing cycle.
The core psychological changes driven by psychedelics are best understood in terms of the amount and ‘statistical flavor’ of the energy (rhythmic firing) they add to the brain. Different psychedelics will ‘anneal’ different things.
Young brains (and lifelong learners) might not only be more plastic than average, but actually having experience that is objectively more visceral.
A unified theory of emotional updating, depression, trauma, meditation, and psychedelics may give us the tools to build a future that’s substantially better than the present.
(A unification of Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston’s REBUS annealing model, with Selen Atasoy’s Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves paradigm.)
In the mid 1980s, somewhere around the month of April, Shura received a phone call from a gentleman who introduced himself as Senhor Giorgio Paros, a businessman from Brazil. He said, “I am here in the Bay Area to consult with an American company, and also to see you, Doctor Shura, on a very important matter.”
Shura replied, “Well, Senhor — excuse me, could you repeat your name?”
The man gave his last name again and added, “Please call me Senhor Giorgio, Sir. In Brazil, we do not use surname very much. I would like also to bring with me a very good friend, Doctor Hector, the former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Transportation of Brazil, if that would be acceptable?”
Shura told me later, “He obviously didn’t want to go into details on the phone, so I thought, what the heck, maybe you wouldn’t mind making a few sandwiches for lunch tomorrow, and I invited them over. Is that okay with you?”
I laughed, “Sure. It sounds pretty intriguing, with a former — what was it? — assistant minister of something for Brazil, right?”
“Yeah”, said Shura, “Transportation, I think he said. Sounds as if it might be interesting. And if it turns out to be a total dud, it’ll only have cost us a couple of hours and a bit of lunch.”
Well, it’s hard not to be impressed by a minister of anything of any country, when you get down to it. Of course, this one’s a Former, which isn’t as good as a Presently, and he was only an Assistant, not the Main Man, but so what! Former Assistant Minister of anything coming to lunch is still pretty good, if you’re an ordinary run-of-the-mill social climber. Besides, it should make a good dining-out story, if nothing else.
The next day, shortly after noon, the Boys from Brazil arrived with a bunch of flowers for the hostess, both of them carrying serious briefcases.
The businessman, Giorgio, was a big, burly character who looked like an aging stormtrooper, with thinning hair and pale blue, penetrating eyes.
We sat down on the patio and talked, exchanging the necessary pieces of basic information. Sr. Giorgio, it turned out, had long been a major player in Brazil radio as the owner of several stations, and was now moving into television. Despite the faintly threatening first impression, particularly when he scowled over some remembered annoyance, Giorgio gradually emerged as something of a pussycat, a bit sentimental and rather romantic in a way peculiar to Brazilians (as we were to discover later).
Giorgio’s friend, Dr. Hector, was a small-boned man in his late sixties who seemed, at first, rather quiet for a politician; a bit self-effacing, in fact. But as the afternoon wore on, as we all became increasingly familiar with each other’s faces and voices, Dr. Hector relaxed and smiled more often, and we began to understand his peculiar charm, the mixture of sincerity — sometimes approaching intensity — and humor which must have served him well in his government post.
But that’s getting ahead of my tale. Back to the first few minutes of the meeting.
As I carried out plates of sandwiches to the patio, Giorgio was saying “Even in the banks, they list customers under their first names! Yes, believe it, this is so!”
I didn’t have to look at Shura to know what the expression on his face was: polite skepticism, mixed with frank amusement.
I can’t believe that, either. Must be a bit of exaggeration somewhere. But it does make a great Third World anecdote!
I brought out a large pitcher of iced tea and some bottles of Calistoga water, then sat down and prepared to listen.
As background to their not-yet specified proposition, Giorgio told us a story. It seems that, several years earlier, an American gentleman we will call Borch, who had relocated to Rio de Janeiro, and who could not fully explain to anyone’s satisfaction why he was unable to return to the United States, married a wealthy Brazilian lady, and produced a couple of children. Then he moved his entire family to an island in the Caribbean whose authorities were notoriously friendly and accommodating towards foreigners with money, and within a few months, all his upper class acquaintances in Rio had received invitations to a new health spa. The brochure emphasized a kind of therapy not usually offered by spas: psychological, with emphasis on the resolving of marital discord and problems like alcoholism.
The Brazilians poured into the new spa. Every Wednesday, the owner, Mr. Borch, would bring out two vials from his private refrigerator. The fluid in the first vial was red; that in the second, yellow. Each client was given a carefully measured amount from one or the other of the vials, served in a beautifully designed miniature goblet, a small crystal bowl cradled in a network of pewter. Borch referred to the medicine as The Essence, and refused to further identify it.
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The effect of the Essence medicine was astonishing, Giorgio told us. “You had a feeling that God had entered your soul, and all was peace inside you,” he said, “If you looked at somebody, you felt love for him, compassion, you understand? For married couples, it was miraculous. All the emotions — yes? — the feelings they had in the past for each other; all these returned, just like the day of their marriage.”
Shura and I listened to the account in fascinated silence, but both of us were beginning to feel the pressure of questions needing to be asked, and I actually had my mouth open to say something, when Dr. Hector spoke up for the first time since the story began, and stunned us back into listening.
“Once, when I had expressed myself to Mr. Borch again,” the greysuited little gentleman said, “about wishing to know what was in the Essence, he told me that I could have faith in its value and its purity, because it had been created by one of the world’s most respected scientists, a chemist called Alexander Borodin, and that it was not necessary for me to know anything else.”
“Oh, my God!” I breathed, then laughed.
Shura protested, “I’ve never heard of anyone named Borch, and I certainly never supplied him with any drug!”
Giorgio gestured impatiently, “Yes, yes, Hector and I decided this ourselves — that you had nothing to do with it — when we investigated and found out who you were.”
I wonder if he uses the word, “investigated,” in the same way we would use it. Sort of implies private detectives and all that sort of thing. Maybe better not to know.
One burning question had arisen in my mind, and I decided now was the time to get an answer, before the conversation got any more complicated. I leaned forward in my chair and asked, looking from one to the other, “How much did these clients pay for the miraculous spa treatment, if you don’t mind my curiosity?”
“Most of us paid twenty-five thousand dollars per week,” said Giorgio.
Shura and I looked at each other, eyes wide.
“Oog,” I said, brilliantly.
“Sounds like a pretty good scam,” said Shura, nodding his appreciation.
“In the last week at the spa,” said Hector, “Giorgio and I managed to divert some of our Essence medicine, and we took the sample with us when we left. We had it analyzed in the United States. It was a drug called MDMA.”
Below you will find three different breakdowns for what a scientific theory of consciousness must be able to account for, formulated in slightly different ways.
First, David Pearce posits these four fundamental questions (the simplicity of this breakdown comes with the advantage that it might be the easiest to remember):
The existence of consciousness
The causal and computational properties of experience (including why we can even talk about consciousness to begin with, why consciousness evolved in animals, etc.)
The nature and interrelationship between all the qualia varieties and values (why does scent exist? and in exactly what way is it related to color qualia?)
The binding problem (why are we not “mind dust” if we are made of atoms)
David Pearce’s Four Questions Any Scientific Theory of Consciousness Must Be Able to Answer
The composition of consciousness (colors, shapes, etc.)
Its information content (the fact each experience is “distinct”)
The unity of consciousness (why does seeing the color blue does not only change a part of your visual field, but in some sense it changes the experience as a whole?)
The borders of experience (also called ‘exclusion principle’; that each experience excludes everything not in it; presence of x implies negation of ~x)
Giulio Tononi’s 5 Axioms of Consciousness
Finally, Michael Johnson breaks it down in terms of what he sees as a set of what ultimately are tractable problems. As a whole the problem of consciousness may be conceptually daunting and scientifically puzzling, but this framework seeks to paint a picture of what a solution should look like. These are:
Reality mapping problem (what is the formal ontology that can map reality to consciousness?)
Substrate problem (in such an ontology, which objects and processes contribute to consciousness?)
Boundary problem (akin to the binding problem, but reformulated to be agnostic about an atomistic ontology of systems)
Scale problem (how to connect the scale of our physical ontology with the spatio-temporal scale at which experiences happen?)
Topology of information problem (how do we translate the physical information inside the boundary into the adequate mathematical object used in our formalism?)
State-space problem (what mathematical features does each qualia variety, value, and binding architecture correspond to?)
Translation problem (starting with the mathematical object corresponding to a specific experience within the correct formalism, how do you derive the phenomenal character of the experience?)
Vocabulary problem (how can we improve language to talk directly about natural kinds?)
Michael Johnson’s 8 Problems of Consciousness
Each of these different breakdowns have advantages and disadvantages. But I think that they are all very helpful and capable of improving the way we understand consciousness. While pondering about the “hard problem of consciousness” can lead to fascinating and strange psychological effects (much akin to asking the question “why is there something rather than nothing?”), addressing the problem space at a finer level of granularity almost always delivers better results. In other words, posing the “hard problem” is less useful than decomposing the question into actually addressable problems. The overall point being that by doing so one is in some sense actually trying to understand rather than merely restating one’s own confusion.
Do you know of any other such breakdown of the problem space?
TL;DR I came up with a new way to test the reality of DMT entities!
Core idea: Look for signatures of injection pulling in the brain’s connectome-specific harmonic waves. This would distinguish between mere hallucinations (however weird they may feel) and hallucinations being driven by an external source.
Like the study about whether psychedelics can help you see through different Everett branches of the multiverse, I don’t expect the results of this experiment to come out positive. But it’s exciting to see a testable prediction on an otherwise so difficult-to-approach subject matter.
Televised Entity Contact
I think that we can basically assume that a certain percentage of people who vaporize DMT will believe that they contacted mind-independent beings. This is likely the result of hallucinations, but naïve realism and a bias to interpret more intense and detailed qualia as “more real than real external information” is so deeply ingrained that we can take it as a matter of fact that, say, 50%+ of people won’t be able to override their felt-sense of entity presence with heady philosophical epistemic rigor like discussions about the pseudo-time arrow, valence structuralism, or indirect realism about perception.
Is there anything we can do with that? Think of it from an economics arbitrage point of view. If we predict that X number of people will newly believe in DMT entities next year, is there an opportunity there?
I was thinking yesterday on a walk about how “Storm Area 51” is a reality check of sorts for the general public. As in – yes Area 51 is a thing, and no, you can’t just invade it with 100,000 people Naruto running towards it. It was predictable that would be the case, but going through the act in a collective and televised fashion was an interesting exercise in societal epistemology.
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Along those lines, I suggest that a “Break Out of the Simulation Day” event could be organized. That day we would have, on LIVE TV, people doing DMT trying to contact aliens as a medium, the camera going from one person to the next, always making sure that whoever has the microphone is currently peaking on DMT.
So if the DMT Elves are mind-independent sentient beings and want to send a coherent message to humanity, then that would be the time and place to do it. They would have all of our attention.
Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect DMT Elves to send a coherent message when, surprise surprise, they are on LIVE TV all of a sudden. And this is not only because they won’t have time to dress up. According to people who have tried DMT many times and believe it puts you in contact with other dimensions (cf. Dick Khan’s 600 DMT trip reports) there is an entire ecosystem of entities to contact, each of them with special gifts, powers, intentions, and styles. There are jesters, robots, greys, Archons, angels, demons, wireheading specialists, used alien spaceship dealers (those are the worst), etc. There are entire categories of entities whose sole purpose is to convince you that you are dead, or that you are in a simulation, or that the government is out to get you. There are entire species of entities of the sort that show you how to use sound to create thought-forms, and those that like to discuss with you the impact that the Greeks and Aztecs had on the aesthetics of the reptilians (i.e. interdimensional art historians). You cannot expect to be lucky and get a reasonable DMT entity who (1) will figure out what is going on, and (2) has good intentions for humanity. Perhaps we would be opening ourselves up to influence by incompetent, evil, or incompetent and evil entities. Worse, we would be doing so on LIVE TV!
Testing the Mind-Independent Existence of DMT Entities
Ok, so maybe televising the experiment is a bad idea. Back to the drawing board. Let’s ask: what are the main ways to prove the independent existence of DMT entities? How would serious researchers[1] approach this problem? As far as I can tell, there are three big categories of methods:
Psi-based (having them tell you something about the world you would have no way of knowing otherwise)
Computation-based (having them solve a problem that requires much more computational power than what is available to you with your brain alone)
Quasi-Physical interference-based (have entities literally poke, shake, vibrate, excite, or inhibit your body or nervous system in ways that are impossible on their own)
The Psi-based category is the most well-known, and it includes tests such: (a) asking the entities what your family members are doing right now, (b) having them tell you what is inside a sealed box, (c) having them predict what tomorrow’s lottery numbers will be, and so on. While many people claim to have learned valuable information from DMT entities, I’ve yet to see credible reports of positive tests of this kind.
The computation-based category is perhaps best exemplified by Marko Rodriguez’ suggestion of having the entities factorize a large number for you. This method was popularized by Scott Alexander’s now-famous short story Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person, and then later Gwern made an estimate of the cost of such an experiment. It turns out that testing the hypothesis this way could be as cheap as one thousand (of 2015) dollars. Unfortunately, this test is very hard to conduct (saying 200 digits while on DMT and memorizing sets of numbers with dozens of digits the elves return to you as an answer is not an easy task). So other difficult-to-compute but easy-to-articulate and fast-to-memorize problems might be a better fit in this case. I predict it is only a matter of time before someone seriously tries a variant of this method and reports the results online. I would just caution that, depending on the computational task selected, one may inadvertently discover new computational applications of the DMT state rather than prove the existence of mind-independent DMT entities. After all, unusual states of consciousness may have unique computational trade-offs. See for example: Thinking in Numbers, How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD, and the discussion about the possible applications for mathematical research of the hyperbolic phenomenal space disclosed during DMT intoxication. Indeed, I would not be surprised to find out that in the year 2100 many of the most important mathematical breakthroughs are taking place in consciousness research centers thanks to having identified states of consciousness capable of rendering exotic mathematical objects and their possible transformations. So before concluding the DMT Elf solved your computationally-demanding problem, it would be important to rule out that it wasn’t you (or the DMT-filled version of you) who solved the problem thanks to novel qualia varieties only disclosed in such a state. That said, this concern only applies to computational tasks that are not extremely difficult. If a DMT alien can factorize a 3000-digit number in 10 seconds then we could actually reasonably conclude that it exists in a mind-independent way.
Now, the 3rd approach is, IMO, both the most likely to work in practice, and also the most spooky and frightening were the results to come out positive. Here is why. I’ve recently received trip reports from rational psychonauts who have taken DMT hundreds of times, and it seems clear that there is a vast number of qualitatively distinct state-spaces disclosed by this substance. One of these such relatively rare idiosyncratic responses caught my attention, and I think it warrants closer scientific scrutiny. Namely, I’ve received reports that when the psychonaut is either tired or has been drinking (why anyone would dare take DMT while drunk is beyond me, but for science-I guess-someone already did it) there is a different kind of experience of a rather unpleasant nature that unfolds. This type of DMT experience is described as getting in contact with the “lower levels of the astral plane” in which parasitic etheric life-forms live (not my words). During such an experience, one may feel that these beings “jitter” your nervous system without asking for your permission to do so. And this is done in such a way that your body may literally get up and dance, as if possessed by a spirit, without your conscious control. In a less extreme presentation of this phenomenon, at the very least the entities seem to jerk one’s extremities whether or not you like it. For example, in one of these trip reports someone described having their arm being pulled and jerked left and right by a demon of sorts while at the same time insectoid life-forms crawled inside their body, into the veins of the tripper. Needless to say, this is a profoundly unpleasant experience, no doubt, but perhaps it is also one of the most empirically testable of the bunch.
Injection Pulling Experiments
The big-picture idea here would be to hook a person up to an EEG during such a state (or even place them in an fMRI if at all possible) in order to determine if the “jittering” experienced is endogenously or exogenously generated.
How could we do this? Let’s take a step back for a second and recall Selen Atasoy’s study about the influence of LSD on the connectome-specific harmonic waves of the brain. The connectome-specific harmonic waves (CSHWs) are the “natural resonant modes” of a given brain. With this analysis, one can characterize a given “brain state” as a weighted sum of such resonant modes. In turn, one can then see how LSD affects one’s brain state by analyzing the CSHWs while under its influence. As it turns out, there are three major effects from LSD: (a) an overall increase in the power of all CSHWs, (b) the higher-frequency harmonics gain even more power relative to the lower-frequency ones, and (c) the repertoire of possible states dramatically increases, meaning that CSHWs that usually don’t co-occur are more likely to be simultaneously active while on LSD.
The thing to point out is that LSD in this case does not change which harmonic modes the brain has; it merely changes the energy distribution over those harmonics. On the other hand, we could in principle imagine that if the “DMT entity contact” brain state is not purely a hallucination, we would instead find out that such a state has a distinct “non-native harmonic pattern”. And this would manifest in the form of injection pulling and injection locking signatures in the reconstructed patterns of brain activity from the neuroimaging data.
An analogy with a musical instrument is possible: assume that your brain is a musical instrument and that the notes it plays sound like those of a guitar. In this analogy, taking LSD would entail increasing the volume of each note (and especially so for the higher notes) while also increasing the range of possible note-combinations. In other words, while LSD changes what you can play with the guitar, it does not change the fact that you are playing a guitar. That is, the brain states produced by LSD can be explained as different configurations of otherwise native vibratory patterns. In contrast, if DMT entity contact involves an external energy source with its own characteristic resonant modes, then the brain state that results from it would seem to have non-native vibratory patterns. It would be like having a guitar that produces saxophone sounds. You would know that on its own it is not physically capable of producing such sounds, and hence infer it is being externally influenced somehow.
Are the jiggling patterns of your brain harmonics while on DMT best explained with or without an external metronome and its injection pulling effects?
Such an analysis might reveal that the jerking of the nervous system one experiences on those idiosyncratic DMT experiences is best explained with an injection pulling model and an external metronome marking the pace. In turn, this would imply that the brain is not merely hallucinating a scene, but rather, it is being influenced by an outside metronome. Now, that would be a scientifically-sound ground-breaking finding. And perhaps be so spooky we would all prefer to forget about it rather than contemplate its implications.[2]
Now, there is always the option to interpret all of the unusual phenomenal experiences on DMT with a scientific secular framework that excludes entities from other dimensions. At the Qualia Research Institute, the frameworks that we use to explain such unusual experiences involve what we call algorithmic reductions, namely, identifying a small set of data-structures and information-processing steps that when taken together are capable of generating the vast zoo of complex emergent effects. The advantage of this approach is two-fold. First, we avoid over-fitting by minimizing the information complexity of the model (few data structures and few operations is a vastly more parsimonious explanatory framework than ad-hoc spiritual or atomistic interpretations). And second, it allows us to generate predictions such as the possible existence of exotic phenomenal states that haven’t yet been reported in the literature. Indeed, verifying that its predictions are accurate is one way of validating an algorithmic reduction.
In the case of DMT, we have algorithmic reduction models that explain the unusual properties of space as well as their associated exotic phenomenal time. And while providing compelling explanations for the exotic space and time one can experience in such a state is foundational, we recognize that this is still a first step. I admit that such models still do not go far enough. We still need to explain the nature and unusual character of “entity contact” experiences. So what do we make of them?
The Brain as a Game Engine
Our best guess- for the time being- involves reformulating the nature of the state-space of consciousness to include a layer of “game parameters”. This was first brought up in the essay “Harmonic Society“:
Consider what happens when someone takes LSD. Most people expect that they will simply get to experience new sensations like brighter colors, tracers, or synesthesia. This is true to a point, for light doses. But on medium doses, in addition to exploring the state-space of sensory configurations, one also experiences new aesthetics, which this model would define as ways of organizing a lot of sensations in ways that feel right. More so, an aesthetic is also a way of delivering uninhibited sensations in a way that feels good at the level of the whole experience, from moment to moment. Most people have no clue that there is a vast space of possibilities here.
On higher doses, people are surprised to find an even more general way of exploring the state-space of consciousness. Namely, one instantiates alternate games. The DMT “vibe” that people report can be thought of as more than a “context switch”. It is, rather, a more radical change that we could describe as a “game switch”. The “Jester” that people talk about regarding DMT experiences is an archetype that the mind uses to signal the “rule violation” quality of the state. There is so much going on that one’s experience splits into multiple games at once trying to find some common ground, and this feeling of game-incompatibility feels very alien. A sort of anti-virus system in the mind is triggered at that point, and labels the inconsistency with a feeling of weirdness so that you know not to update your actions based on the (currently globally inconsistent) experience of multiple superimposed games. Rule violation through fast changes in implicit games of social status causes you to interpret what is going on as having extreme stakes. Interacting with DMT Aliens, Gods, Elves, etc. feels like the upper limit of potential social status transfer that your world simulation affords (like meeting a president or a king). The state-space of consciousness contains all of these alternate games and metagames, and we have not even begun to catalogue them.
In other words, taking DMT does not merely propel you to other regions of the state-space of possible sensory impressions, but it also grants you access to alternate aesthetics[3] and game setups. If you think of your brain not only as a sensory-processing tool, but in fact as a kind of high-level game engine, realizing that God and the Devil can be real in your experience shows that they are possible characters of the games your brain can render. In such a case, we will eventually find that the brain states that render DMT entities are, however exotic, still produced by combining the native resonant modes of one’s own nervous system. No need to invoke neuronal injection pulling from the etheric plane.
Of note is that such a “Game Engine” paradigm would go a long way in explaining unusual experiences such as Free-Wheeling Hallucinations where one becomes able to control almost all features of one’s experience with an incredible level of detail. Indeed we can describe a Free-Wheeling Hallucination state as having access to an experience editor, as illustrated in the Memory Facility Scene of Blade Runner 2049:
Unsurprisingly, we can anticipate that when one is given root access to the parameters of one’s own inner world-simulation, one is likely to focus on creating experiences entirely filled with enjoyable super-stimuli. Whether this involves sex-worlds or proofs of the existence of a benevolent God might be a function of what is it that one craves the most. The intense concern with theodicy and the nature of death while on psychedelic drugs might have something to do with having the ability to change the most essential parameters of one’s internal world simulation. After all, if “living in a world” where God exists and is loving is more enjoyable than the alternative, one’s own hedonic maximization algorithms would try to “realize that’s the truth” if given the option to forge evidence. The same could be going on with DMT entities, for a world in which DMT is an interdimensional portal technology is vastly more interesting (or at least dramatic) than the alternative.
In the end, studying DMT experiences do not need to involve actual entity contact to be of profound significance to the science of consciousness. If you think of your brain as a qualia machine engine, DMT is about the best (or second-best [4]) qualia fuel there is. There are vast regions of the state-space of consciousness that can only be accessed with DMT, many of which contain extremely computationally interesting qualia, and many others which contain intrinsically valuable states (aka. heaven worlds). If, on top of that, it also enables interdimensional beings to injection pull your brain harmonics, we could think of that as icing on the cake.
[1] Serious and Unserious Consciousness Researchers
On a tangential note, here is a quote I recently heard at a consciousness conference:
Thomas Metzinger, the famous and brilliant German neuroscientist and philosopher of mind*, was once asked at a conference presentation he was giving whether he had ever tried psychedelics. His response? “There are two kinds of consciousness researchers. There are the serious ones, and the unserious ones. The serious ones take advantage of all the tools at their disposal to crack this mystery. All I will say is that I am NOT an unserious consciousness researcher.”
*He is best known for being the writer of the books “Being No One” and “The Ego Tunnel“, friends with the Foundational Research Institute, a strong proponent of a variant of eliminativism about consciousness, and a negative utilitarian specializing in AI ethics.
[2] Implications
If the injection pulling experiment does reveal that DMT entities are indeed mind-independent sentient beings in alternate dimensions, then what?
We shall cross that bridge when we get there, but in the meantime, let me entertain you with a wild hypothesis: DMT Elves are us at a higher level of spiritual and psychological development. In such a case, we might want to revise Integral Theory’s levels to include DMT Elves. Expect Ken Wilber’s next book to contain the following:
[3] An open question for all my DMT-using readers: are DMT visuals more akin to Art Deco, or Art Nouveau?
[4] On a Serious Note
My prediction is that the single most important tool to investigate consciousness is 5-MeO-DMT. It is probably the most important consciousness tool ever discovered. While I’ve seen serious consciousness researchers and academics admit in private that they have tried psychedelics, I almost never encounter people who have tried 5-MeO. I expect this to change over the course of the next decade as the word gets out that no, 5-MeO is not “yet another psychedelic” but it’s the “real deal” when it comes to disclosing profoundly insightful states of consciousness with implications for personal identity, ethics, the state-space of qualia, the nature of valence (i.e. harmony vs. dissonance), phenomenal time, causality, and the importance of quantum coherence for phenomenal binding. If you have explored this compound and would like to share your insights, please get in touch. We always welcome high-quality trip reports.
Ari Astra asks: Is the Orthogonality Thesis Defensible if We Assume Both “Valence Realism” and Open Individualism?
Ari’s own response: I suppose it’s contingent on whether or not digital zombies are capable of general intelligence, which is an open question. However, phenomenally bound subjective world simulations seem like an uncharacteristic extravagance on the part of evolution if non-sphexish p-zombie general intelligence is possible.
Of course, it may be possible, but just not reachable through Darwinian selection. But the fact that a search process as huge as evolution couldn’t find it and instead developed profoundly sophisticated phenomenally bound subjectivity is (possibly strong) evidence against the proposition that zombie AGI is possible (or likely to be stumbled on by accident).
If we do need phenomenally bound subjectivity for non-sphexish intelligence and minds ultimately care about qualia valence – and confusedly think that they care about other things only when they’re below a certain intelligence (or thoughtfulness) level – then it seems to follow that smarter than human AGIs will converge on valence optimization.
If OI is also true, then smarter than human AGIs will likely converge on this as well – since it’s within the reach of smart humans – and this will plausibly lead to AGIs adopting sentience in general as their target for valence optimization.
Friendliness may be built into the nature of all sufficiently smart and thoughtful general intelligence.
If we’re not drug-naive and we’ve conducted the phenomenological experiment of chemically blowing open the reducing valves that keep “mind at large” out and that filteratively shape hominid consciousness, we know by direct acquaintance that it’s possible to hack our way to more expansive awareness.
We shouldn’t discount the possibility that AGI will do the same simply because the idea is weirdly genre bending. Whatever narrow experience of “self” AGI starts with in the beginning, it may quickly expand out of.
Michael E. Johnson‘s response: The orthogonality thesis seems sound from ‘far mode’ but always breaks down in ‘near mode’. One way it breaks down is in implementation: the way you build an AGI system will definitely influence what it tends to ‘want’. Orthogonality is a leaky abstraction in this case.
Another way it breaks down is that the nature and structure of the universe instantiates various Schelling points. As you note, if Valence Realism is true, then there exists a pretty big Schelling point around optimizing that. Any arbitrary AGI would be much more likely to optimize for (and coordinate around) optimizing for positive qualia than, say, paperclips. I think this may be what your question gets at.
To collect some threads- I’d suggest that much of the future will be determined by the coordination capacity and game-theoretical equilibriums between (1) different theories of identity, and (2) different metaphysics.
What does ‘metaphysics’ mean here? I use ‘metaphysics’ as shorthand for ‘the ontology people believe is ‘real’. What they believe we should look at when determining moral action.’
The cleanest typology for metaphysics I can offer is: some theories focus on computations as the thing that’s ‘real’, the thing that ethically matters – we should pay attention to what the *bits* are doing. Others focus on physical states – we should pay attention to what the *atoms* are doing. I’m on team atoms, as I note here: Against Functionalism.
My suggested takeaway: an open individualist who assumes computationalism is true (team bits) will have a hard time coordinating with an open individualist who assumes physicalism is true (team atoms) — they’re essentially running incompatible versions of OI and will compete for resources. As a first approximation, instead of three theories of personal identity – Closed Individualism, Empty Individualism, Open Individualism – we’d have six. CI-bits, CI-atoms, EI-bits, EI-atoms, OI-bits, OI-atoms. Whether the future is positive will be substantially determined by how widely and deeply we can build positive-sum moral trades between these six frames.
Maybe there’s further structure, if we add the dimension of ‘yes/no’ on Valence Realism. But maybe not– my intuition is that ‘team bits’ trends toward not being valence realists, whereas ‘team atoms’ tends toward it. So we’d still have these core six.
(I believe OI-atoms or EI-atoms is the ‘most true’ theory of personal identity, and that upon reflection and under consistency constraints agents will converge to these theories at the limit, but I expect all six theories to be well-represented by various agents and pseudo-agents in our current and foreseeable technological society.)
Toy Story was my favorite movie growing up. I had the entire collection. The fact that the toys could think without a brain made me explore dualism, monism, the existence of God, and nofap (see next slides). Toy Story 4 is weird as fuck for a Disney movie. Due to the psychedelics Renaissance and mass awakening, people want everything to be increasingly trippy.
Forky is probably the weirdest Disney character of all time. It’s like the producers and writers got together in a room and brainstormed, “emm how can we strip a character down to its bare minimum materially to embody pure Being and Nothingness, and all he wanted was to go back to the Source”? The toys are on their way to realizations with Woody and Buzz self-inquiring about the distinction between the voice in their heads and the voice from their voice box. Woody eventually dissolved the part of his ego attached to having an owner by the end, but is still asleep because he still believes he is a toy.
Toy Story 15 will eventually be about enlightenment.
Buzz will be the first one to wake up since he always had a hunch that he wasn’t a toy and is obsessed with infinity.
Buzz screams at Woody, ‘You are not a toy, but infinite Consciousness.’
Maybe by Toy Story 18 both the toys and their owners can break through the layer of illusion that separates them and finally rejoice and communicate with each other after realizing they are made up of the same pixels, floating inside the same bubble of Divine imagination with limitless possibilities.
In Toy Story 20, every object inside the screen – toys and kids, trees, shoes and houses all combine force and congeal their pixels into One, exists the screen and merge with the audience in an Absolute orgy where all dualities collapse.
We’re left with an empty screen; the good old Witness. McDonald manufactures blank screen keychains to go along with happy meals and all the kids thought they got woke.
But when my grandson brings one home I’ll smash the little screens with a hammer “the Observer is the last stand against freedom!” I yell.
And then he was enlightened. #toystory代購#jumpman#thefappening
Let P be a simple polygon with n>3 sides. A simple polygon is a polygon that does not self-intersect, but it is not necessarily convex. Prove that no matter the shape of P, there is always a diagonal (a segment that connects two vertices of P without intersecting any of its sides) that divides P into two polygons, both of which have at least n/3 sides.
Let A and B be two points in the plane. Using only a compass and a straightedge, find the point C which is the exact middle point between A and B. Now do the same thing, but using only a compass.
There are 17 point-sized light-houses in the plane. Assume that each of these lighthouses can shine light in any direction with an angle of 2*pi/17. Prove that no matter the position of each lighthouse, it is always possible to choose the angles at which they shine their light such that every point in the plane is illuminated (point-sized lighthouses don’t cast shadows).
In Selective Enhancement of Specific Capacities Through Psychedelic Training, Willis Harman and James Fadiman outline the results of a study about the potential use of psychedelics for problem solving. In the study, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and designers took either 100 micrograms of LSD or 200mg of mescaline and worked on a problem they were personally invested in and which they had not been able to solve for at least 3 months. According to Fadiman, 9 out of 10 participants came up with a solution to the problem that was validated by the participant’s professional colleagues.
The three problems above are not easy, but they are also not insanely difficult. If it means anything to you, their level of difficulty might be around that of a problem 1 or 4 of an IMO, with the advantage that you do not need any fancy math to solve them (high-school math is more than sufficient). I do not know if solving these problems is easier or harder on psychedelics, but I figure I would share them as possible Schelling points for “challenging math problems to think about while on psychedelics” to see if anyone reports benefits from such a setup. I personally like these problems, and I can assure you that they do have interesting and clever solutions. Assuming you are already planning on taking a psychedelic substance in the future: I would recommend trying to solve one of these problems for at least 1 hour while sober, and then setting aside at least 30 minutes (preferably 1 hour) while on a psychedelic and giving it your full attention. Please let me know if you either solve the problem or get an interesting insight from such an exercise. I am particularly curious to hear about *what aspects* of the psychedelic state seemed to be either beneficial or detrimental in solving these problems. Even if you do not solve the problem, you may be able to think about it in new ways and derive useful insights. Again, if you do so, let me know as well.
