DMT experiences can give you a sense for how multidimensional hive minds might be workable.
Example:
I met a yoga teacher at the Texas Eclipse festival earlier this year who explained that she has been receiving instructions for a new kind of yoga modality that helps with deep trauma from a hive mind that “lives in a 9 dimensional space”. This is sans drugs, and she demonstrated the body work movements she was taught by this “collective consciousness” to me and a few other people after my talk. I guess my candid discussions of altered states motivated her to share to see what I thought.
First of all, the movements were extremely interesting. Her body and extremities would coordinate in a way I’ve never seen before, as if her hands and feet were being used to select and tune into a fractal foliation of space and then her torso would make swimming motions in accord with those movements. But anyway. She explained her movements expressed the collective intelligence she was getting in touch with.
But this on a matter of principle sounds unlikely: can there really be a stable equilibrium of many intelligences in a 9 dimensional space that doesn’t quickly collapse into a hierarchically organized system of control? Can a 9D swarm intelligence really be a stable attractor in mind space?
The thing is that this happens all the time on high dose DMT! Past the Magic Eye level (Waiting Room and above in my classification), DMT’s character is exactly that of arriving at equilibrium points where many mind shards are simultaneously trying to survive, control the narrative, and redirect attention.
And, unbelievably, these typically fleeting but sometimes robust, equilibrium points do involve meaningful, swarm like, multidimensional contributions from a wide range of mind kinds all at once. They are in an all-to-all hypercomputation relation to each other and yet they can arrive at stable states capable of computing information. From eyes that simply like to capture attention, to many-legged angel wings, to gnomes stuck as 2D reflections in windows, to Cronenberg-like shoggoths, the scenes might have a really significant contribution from each element and yet not collapse to a state where there is a dictator and everyone else follows suit.
And I think the dimensionality actually enables this. From simulations of coupling dynamics, I’ve noticed that 2D systems of oscillators tend to be much more simple and dominated by a single dynamic compared to their higher dimensional versions.
In 3D already we have vastly diverse collective organisms, but in higher D this is even more available as an option. When the “beings” can evolve to inhabit (via fast reproduction, selection, and variation aided with attention) spaces as exotic as the surface of tubes or the points in a 4D cloud of dust, the emergent network of intelligences that achieves equilibrium can be truly multifaceted: it doesn’t cohere because there is no clear center. The degree to which different aspects of the space control each other is both very variable and lacking a central control panel. It’s a bit like one of those carefully engineered videogame landscapes where each region in the map has pros and cons, and thus you’re always safe from some attacks in but never from all of them when standing in a particular space. The ecosystem that evolved in such an environment doesn’t have a central director, but can still have a deep coherence of sorts.
The geometry of such experiences, especially at Breakthrough doses, is more akin to a CW-complex (which stitches together many spaces of different dimensionalities) than a smooth surface of a given dimensionality. It enables ecological mind niches which turn out to have very complex symbiotic relationships with one another.
On a good day, it might even feel like this is how it always works already – we’re just used to the specific high dimensional evolutionarily stable equilibrium of our hive mind in normal states. But perhaps it too lacks a clean hierarchical structure.
Cue in meme…
