For qualia to arise, you need to both individuate from “Universal Consciousness” and also make partitions within you. This causes a kind of double universal Yin-Yang of oneness and separation in superposition. If God/Ultimate Reality/Multiverse is like a superposition of all possible qualia values at once in a way that they cancel out to a sort of “nothingness“, then to create an individual being, God/Ultimate Reality/Etc. needs to form a partition within itself. It allows one part of itself to witness blue so that another part can witness yellow, because if it were to witness both at the same time they would cancel out and reform into God/Ultimate Reality/etc.
Thus, for you to experience anything at all, you must in a way be interdependent with (/be the complement of/) specks of qualia that collectively add up to your experiential complement. They imply you and you imply them. And more so, this is also happening within yourself. The fact is, you can experience the left and right side of your visual field “at once”. But how? Seriously, how is this possible? If the “Screen of Consciousness” worked as a kind of camera with a point-like aperture, then the witness of your experience would have zero information. Points collapse information – the aperture needs to have a certain size. Or are you the screen on which the image is projected? But if so, then how are the various pixels simultaneously aware of each other?
Experiences are like Indra’s Net: every part is in a deep sense witnessing every other part. Like a house of mirrors. It is both “many” and “one” at the same time. And if you were to actually get rid of your internal distinctions, you’d “experience” a cessation (a moment where you completely disappear). With much intrigue, such cessations are often preceded by rainbow effects and white light phenomena – whether in deep meditation, mystical experiences of union with the divine, or at the peak of the effects catalyzed by unitive compounds like 5-MeO-DMT. This suggests to me that as consciousness approaches complete dissolution, both its internal knots and external boundaries unravel simultaneously (cf. cancelation of topological defects), until the very topology of being itself becomes trivial.
You need inner separation to be anything at all.
You as a moment of experience are thus both interdependent with “external” qualia that form your complement, while also internally requiring divisions within your own oneness to have information content in an Indra’s Net kind of way. Thus I now see reality as a strange Yin-Yang where on the one hand there is unity within the separation of individuals, and on the other hand there is separation within the unity of moments of experience.
Oneness and multiplicity don’t only co-arise – they are constitutively interdependent at their very root.
Alternative Title: LSD Ego Death – A Play in Three Voices
[Epistemic Status: Academic, Casual, and Fictional Analysis of the phenomenology of LSD Ego Death]
Academic:
In this work we advance key novel interpretative frameworks to make sense of the distinct phenomenology that arises when ingesting a high dose of LSD-25 (250μg+). It is often noted that LSD, also known as lysergic acid diethylamide, changes in qualitative character as a function of dose, with a number of phase transitions worth discussing.
Casual:
You start reading an abstract of an academic publication on the topic of LSD phenomenology. What are the chances that you will gain any sense, any inkling, the most basic of hints, of what the high-dose LSD state is like by consuming this kind of media? Perhaps it’s not zero, but in so far as the phenomenological paradigms in mainstream use in the 2020s are concerned, we can be reasonably certain that the piece of media won’t even touch the outer edges of the world of LSD-specific qualia. Right now, you can trust the publication to get right core methodological boundary conditions, like the mg/kg used, the standard deviation of people’s responses to questionnaire items, and the increase in blood pressure at the peak. But at least right now you won’t find a rigorous account of either the phenomenal character (what the experience felt like in detailed colorful phenomenology with precise reproducible parameters) or the semantic content (what the experience was about, the information it allowed you to process, the meaning computed) of the state. For that we need to blend in additional voices to complement the rigidly skeptical vibe and tone of the academic delivery method.
It’s for that reason that we will interweave a casual, matter of fact, “really trying to say what I mean in as many ways as I can even if I sound silly or dumb”, voice (namely, this one, duh!). And more so, in order to address the speculative semantic content in its own terms we shall also include a fantastical voice into the mix.
Fantastical:
Fuck, you took too much. In many ways you knew that your new druggie friends weren’t to be trusted. Their MDMA pills were bunk, their weed was cheap, and even they pretended to drink more fancy alcohol than they could realistically afford. So it was rather natural for you to assume that their acid tabs would be weak ass. But alas, they turned out to have a really competent, niche, boutique, high-quality acid dealer. She lived only a few miles away and made her own acid, and dosed each tab at an actual, honest-to-God, 120(±10)μg. She also had a lot of cats, for some reason (why this information was relayed to you only once you sobered up was not something you really understood – especially not the part about the cats). Thus, the 2.5 tabs in total you had just taken (well, you took 1/2, then 1, then 1, spaced one hour each, and you had just taken the last dose, meaning you were still very much coming up, and coming up further by the minute) landed you squarely in the 300μg range. But you didn’t know this at the time. In fact, you suspected that the acid was hitting much more strongly than you anticipated for other reasons. You were expecting a 100-150 microgram trip, assuming each tab would be more between 40 and 60μg. But perhaps you really were quite sleep deprived. Or one of the nootropics you had sampled last week turned out to have a longer half-life than you expected and was synergistic with LSD (coluracetam? schizandrol?). Or perhaps it was the mild phenibut withdrawal you were having (you took 2g 72 hours ago, which isn’t much, but LSD amplifies subtle patterns anyway). It wasn’t until about half an hour later, when the final tab started to kick in, that you realized the intensity of the trip kept climbing up still further than you expected, and it really, absolutely, had to be that the acid was much, much stronger than you thought was possible; most likely over 250 mics, as you quickly estimated, and realized the implications.
From experience, you knew that 300 micrograms would cause ego death for sure. Of course people react differently to psychedelics. But in your case, ego death feelings start at around 150, and then even by 225-250 micrograms they would become all-consuming at least for some portion of the trip. In turn, actually taking 300 micrograms for you was ego death overkill, meaning you were most likely not only going to lose it, but be out for no less than an hour.
What do I mean by being out? And by losing it? The subjective component of the depersonalization that LSD causes is very difficult to explain. This is what this entire document is about. But we can start by describing what it is like from the outside.
Academic:
The behavioral markers of high dose LSD intoxication include confusion and delusions, as well as visual distortions of sufficient intensity to overcome, block, and replace sensory-activated phenomena. The depersonalization and derealization characteristic of LSD-induced states of consciousness tend to involve themes concerning religious, mystical, fantastical, and science fiction semantic landscapes. It is currently not possible to deduce the phenomenal character of these states of consciousness from within with our mainstream research tools and without compromising the epistemological integrity of our scientists (having them consume the mind-altering substance would, of course, confound the rigor of the analysis).
Casual:
Look, when you “lose it” or when you “are out” what happens from the outside is that you are an unpredictable executor of programs that seem completely random to any external observer. One moment you are quietly sitting, rocking back and forth, on the grass. The next you stand up, walk around peacefully. You sit again, now for literally half an hour without moving. Then you suddenly jump and run for 100m without stopping. And then ask the person who is there, no matter if they are a kid, a grandmother, a cop, a sanitation professional, a sex worker, or a professor, “what do you think about ___”? (where ___ ∈ {consciousness, reality, God, Time, Infinity, Eternity, …}). Of course here reality bifurcates depending on who it is that you happened to have asked this question to. A cop? You might end up arrested. Probably via a short visit to a hospital first. And overall not a great time. A kid? You could be in luck, and the kid might play along without identifying you as a threat, and most likely you continue on your journey without much problem. Or in one of the bad timelines, you end up fighting the kid. Not good. Most likely, if it was a grandmother, you might just activate random helpful programs, like helping her cross the street, and she might not even have the faintest clue (and I mean not the absolute faintest fucking clue) that you’re depersonalized on LSD thinking you’re God and that in a very real, if only phenomenological sense, it was literal Jesus / Christ Consciousness that helped her cross the street.
Under most conditions, the biggest danger that LSD poses is a bad valence reaction, which usually wears off after a few hours and is educational in some way. But when taken at high doses and unsupervised, LSD states can turn into real hazards for the individual and the people around them. Not so much because of malice, or because it triggers animal-like behaviors (it can, rarely, but it’s not why it’s dangerous). The real problem with LSD states in high doses is when you are unsupervised and then you execute random behaviors without knowing who you are, where you are, or even what it is that you are intending to achieve with the actions you are performing. It is therefore *paramount* that if you explore high doses of LSD you do it supervised.
Academic:
What constitutes a small, medium, or large dose of LSD is culture and time-dependent. In the 60s, the average tab used to be between 200 and 400 micrograms. The typical LSD experience was one that included elements of death and rebirth, mystical unions, and complete loss of contact with reality for a period of time. In the present, however, the tabs are closer to the 50-100μg range.
In “psychonaut” circles, which gather in internet forums like bluelight, reddit, and erowid, a “high dose of LSD” might be considered to be 300 micrograms. But in real world, less selected, typical contexts of use for psychedelic and empathogen drugs like dance festivals, a “high dose” might be anything above 150 micrograms. In turn, OG psychonauts like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert would end up using doses in the 500-1000μg range routinely as part of their own investigations. In contrast, in TIHKAL, Alexander Shulgin lists LSD’s dose range as 60-200 micrograms. Clearly, there is a wide spread of opinions and practices concerning LSD dosing. It is for this reason that one needs to contextualize with historical and cultural details the demographic topos where one is discussing a “high dose of LSD”.
Fantastical:
Being out, and losing it, in your case right now would be disastrous. Why? Because you broke the cardinal sin of psychedelic exploration. You took a high dose of a full psychedelic (e.g. LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT – less so 2C-B or Al-LAD, which have a lower ceiling of depersonalization[1]) without a sitter. Of course you didn’t intend to. You really just wanted to land at the comfortably manageable 100-150 microgram range. But now… now you’re deep into depersonalization-land, and alone. Who knows what you might do? Will you leave your apartment naked? Will someone call the cops? Will you end up in the hospital? You try to visualize future timelines and… something like 40% of them lead to either arrest or hospital or both. Damn it. It’s time to pull all the stops and minimize the bad timelines.
You go to your drug cabinet and decide to take a gabaergic. Here is an important lesson, and where timelines might start to diverge as well. Dosing of sedatives for psychedelic emergencies is a tricky issue. The problem is that sedatives themselves can cause confusion. So there are many stories you can find online of people who take a very large dose of alprazolam (Xanax) or similar (benzo, typically) and then end up both very confused and combative while also tripping really hard. Here interestingly, the added confusion of the sedative plus its anxiolytic effect synergize to make you even more unpredictable. On the other hand, not taking enough is also quite easy, where the LSD (or similar) anxiety and depersonalization continues to overpower the anxiolysis of the sedative.
You gather up all the “adult in the room” energy you can muster and make an educated guess: 600mg of gabapentin and 1g of phenibut. Yet, this will take a while to kick in, and you might depersonalize anytime and start wandering around. You need a plan in the meanwhile.
Academic:
In the article The Pseudo-Time Arrow we introduced a model of phenomenal time that takes into account the following three assumptions and works out their implications:
Indirect Realism About Perception
Discrete Moments of Experience
Qualia Structuralism
(1) is about how we live in a world-simulation and don’t access the world around us directly. (2) goes into how each moment of experience is itself a whole, and in a way, whatever feeling of space and time we may have, this must be encoded in each moment of experience itself. And (3) states that for any given experience there is a mathematical object whose mathematical features are isomorphic to the phenomenology of the experience (first introduced in Principia Qualia by Michel E. Johnson).
Together, these assumptions entail that the feeling of the passage of time must be encoded as a mathematical feature in each moment of experience. In turn, we speculated that this feature is _implicit causality_ in networks of local binding. Of course the hypothesis is highly speculative, but it was supported by the tantalizing idea that a directed graph could represent different variants of phenomenal time (aka. “exotic phenomenal time”). In particular, this model could account for “moments of eternity”, “time loops”, and even the strange “time splitting/branching”.
Casual:
In some ways, for people like me, LSD is like crack. I have what I have come to call “hyperphilosophia”. I am the kind of person who feels like a failure if I don’t come up with a radically new way of seeing reality by the end of each day. I feel deeply vulnerable, but also deeply intimate, with the nature of reality. Nature at its deepest feels like a brother or sister, basement reality feels close and in some way like a subtle reshuffling of myself. I like trippy ideas, I like to have my thoughts scrambled and then re-annealed in unexpected ways; I delight in combinatorial explosions, emergent effects, unexpected phase transitions, recursive patterns, and the computationally non-trivial. As a 6 year old I used to say that I wanted to be a “physicist mathematician and inventor” (modeling my future career plans around Einstein and Edison); I got deeply depressed for a whole year at the age of 9 when I confronted our mortality head on; and then experiencing a fantastic release at 16 on my first ego death (with weed of all drugs!) when I experienced the taste of Open Individualism; only to then feel depressed again at 20 but now about eternal life and the suffering we’re bound to experience for the rest of time; switching then to pragmatic approaches to reduce suffering and achieve paradise ala David Pearce. Of course this is just a “roll of the dice” and I’m sure I would be telling you about a different philosophical trajectory if we were to sample another timeline. But the point is that all my life I’ve expressed a really intense philosophical temperament. And it feels innate – nobody made me so philosophical – it just happened, as if driven by a force from the deep.
People like us are a certain type for sure, and I know this because out of thousands of people I’ve met I’ve had the fortune of encountering a couple dozen who are like me in these respects. Whether they turned out physicists, artists, or meditators is a matter of personal preference (admittedly the plurality of them is working on AI these days). And in general, it is usually the case that people of this type tend to have a deep interest in psychedelics, for the simple reason that they give you more of what they like than any other drug.
Yes, a powerful pleasant body buzz is appreciated (heroin mellow, meth fizz, and the ring of the Rupa Jhanas are all indeed quite pleasant and intrinsically worthwhile states of consciousness – factoring out their long-term consequences [positive for the Jhanas, negative for heroin and meth]). But that’s not what makes life worth living for people who (suffer from / enjoy their condition of) hyperphilosophia. Rather, it is the beauty of completely new perspectives that illuminate our understanding of reality one way or another that drives us. And LSD, among other tools, often really hits the nail in the head. It makes all the bad trips and nerve wracking anxiety of the state more than worth it in our minds.
One of the striking things about an LSD ego death that is incredibly stimulating from a philosophical perspective is how you handle the feeling of possible futures. Usually the way in which we navigate timelines (this is so seamless that we don’t usually realize how interesting and complex it is) is by imagining that a certain future is real and then “teleporting to it”. We of course don’t teleport to it. But we generate that feeling. And as we plan, we are in a way generating a bunch of wormholes from one future to another (one state of the world to another, chained through a series of actions). But our ability to do this is restricted by our capacity to generate definite, plausible, realistic and achievable chains of future states in our imagination.
On LSD this capacity can become severely impaired. In particular, we often realize that our sense of connection to near futures that we normally feel is in fact not grounded in reality. It’s a kind of mnemonic technique we employ for planning motor actions, but it feels from the inside as if we could control the nearby timelines. On LSD this capacity breaks down and one is forced to instead navigate possible futures via different means. In particular, something that begins to happen above 150 micrograms or so, is that when one imagines a possible future it lingers and refuses to fully collapse. You start experiencing a superposition of possible futures.
For an extreme example, see this quote (from this article) I found in r/BitcoinMarkets by Reddit user I_DID_LSD_ON_A_PLANE in 2016:
[Trip report of taking a high dose of LSD on an airplane]: So I had what you call “sonder”, a moment of clarity where I realized that I wasn’t the center of the universe, that everyone is just as important as me, everyone has loved ones, stories of lost love etc, they’re the main character in their own movies.
That’s when shit went quantum. All these stories begun sinking in to me. It was as if I was beginning to experience their stories simultaneously. And not just their stories, I began seeing the story of everyone I had ever met in my entire life flash before my eyes. And in this quantum experience, there was a voice that said something about Karma. The voice told me that the plane will crash and that I will be reborn again until the quota of my Karma is at -+0. So, for every ill deed I have done, I would have an ill deed committed to me. For every cheap T-shirt I purchased in my previous life, I would live the life of the poor Asian sweatshop worker sewing that T-shirt. For every hooker I fucked, I would live the life of a fucked hooker.
And it was as if thousands of versions of me was experiencing this moment. It is hard to explain, but in every situation where something could happen, both things happened and I experienced both timelines simultaneously. As I opened my eyes, I noticed how smoke was coming out of the top cabins in the plane. Luggage was falling out. I experienced the airplane crashing a thousand times, and I died and accepted death a thousand times, apologizing to the Karma God for my sins. There was a flash of the brightest white light imagineable and the thousand realities in which I died began fading off. Remaining was only one reality in which the crash didn’t happen. Where I was still sitting in the plane. I could still see the smoke coming out of the plane and as a air stewardess came walking by I asked her if everything was alright. She said “Yes, is everything alright with YOU?”.
Fantastical:
It had been some years since you had done the LSD and Quantum Measurement experiment in order to decide if the feeling of timelines splitting was in any way real. Two caveats about that experiment. First, it used quantum random number generators from Sydney that were no less than 100ms old by the time they were displayed on the screen. And second, you didn’t get the phenomenology of time splitting while on acid during the tests anyway. But having conducted the experiment anyway at least provided some bounds for the phenomenon. Literal superposition of timelines, if real, would need higher doses or more fresh quantum random numbers. Either way, it reassured you somewhat that the effect wasn’t so strong that it could be detected easily.
But now you wish you had done the experiment more thoroughly. Because… the freaking feeling of timelines splitting is absolutely raging with intensity right now and you wish you could know if it’s for real or just a hallucination. And of course, even if just a hallucination, this absolutely changes your model of how phenomenal time must be encoded, because damn, if you can experience multiple timelines at once that means that the structure of experience that encodes time is much more malleable than you thought.
Uh? Interesting, I can hear a voice all of a sudden. It calls itself “Academic” and just said something about the stacking of narrative voices.
Fantastical:
It’s always fascinating how on LSD you get a kind of juxtaposition of narrative voices. And in this case, you now have an Academic, a Casual, and a Fantastical narrative stream each happening in a semi-parallel way. And at some point they started to become aware of each other. Commenting on each other. Interlacing and interweaving.
Casual:
Importantly, one of the limiting factors of the academic discourse is that it struggles to interweave detailed phenomenology into its analysis. Thankfully, with the LSD-induced narrative juxtaposition we have a chance to correct this.
Academic:
After reviewing in real time the phenomenology of how you are thinking about future timelines, I would like to posit that the phenomenal character of high dose LSD is characterized by a hyperbolic pseudo-time arrow.
This requires the combination of two paradigms discussed at the Qualia Research Institute. Namely, the pseudo-time arrow, which as we explained tries to make sense of phenomenal time in terms of a directed graph representing moments of experience. And then also the algorithmic reductions introduced in the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences.
The latter deals with the idea that the geometry of our experience is the result of the balance between various forces. Qualia comes up, gets locally bound to other qualia, then disappears. Under normal circumstances, the network that emerges out of these brief connections has a standard Euclidean geometry (or rather, works as a projection of a Euclidean space, but I digress). But DMT perturbs the balance, in part by making more qualia appear, making it last longer, making it vibrate, and making it connect more with each other, which results in a network that has a hyperbolic geometry. In turn, the felt sense of being on DMT is one of _being_ a larger phenomenal space, which is hard to put into words, but possible with the right framework.
What we want to propose now is that on LSD in particular, the characteristic feeling of “timeline splitting” and the even more general “multiple timeline superposition” effect is the result of a hyperbolic geometry, not of phenomenal space as with DMT, but of phenomenal time. In turn, this can be summarized as: LSD induces a hyperbolic curvature along the pseudo-time arrow.
Casual:
Indeed, one of the deeply unsettling things about high dose LSD experiences is that you get the feeling that you have knowledge of multiple timelines. In fact, there is a strange sense of uncanny uncertainty about which timeline you are in. And here is where a rather scary trick is often played on us by the state.
The feeling of the multiverse feels very palpable when the garbage collector of your phenomenal motor planning scratchpad is broken and you just sort of accumulate plans without collapsing them (a kind of kinesthetic tracer effect).
Fantastical:
Ok, you need to condense your timelines. You can’t let _that_ many fall off the wagon, so to speak. You could depersonalize any moment. You decide that your best bet is to call a friend of yours. He is likely working, but lives in the city right next to yours and could probably get to your place in half an hour if you’re lucky.
> Hello!
> Hello! I just got out of a meeting. What’s up?
> Er… ok, this is gonna sound strange. I… took too much LSD. And I think I need help.
> Are you ok? LSD is safe, right?
> Yeah, yeah. I think everything will be fine. But I need to collapse the possibility space. This is too much. I can’t deal with all of these timelines. If you come over at least we will be trimming a bunch of them and preventing me from wandering off thinking I’m God.
> Oh, wow. You don’t sound very high? That made sense, haha.
> Duuudde! I’m in a window of lucidity right now. We’re lucky you caught me in one. Please hurry, I don’t know how much longer I can hang in here. I’m about to experience ego death. What happens next is literally up to God, and I don’t know what his plans are.
Your friend says he’ll take an Uber or Lyft and be there as soon as he can. You try to relax. Reality is scolding you. Why did you take this risk? You should know better!
Casual:
One of the unsettling feelings about high dose LSD is that you get to feel how extremely precious and rare a human life is. We tend to imagine that reincarnation would simply be like, say, where you die and then 40 days later come back as a baby in India or China or the United States or Brazil or whatever, based on priors, and rarely in Iceland or tiny Caribbean Islands. But no. Humans are a luxury reincarnation. Animal? Er, yeah, even animals are pretty rare. The more common form is simply in the shape of some cosmic process or another, like intergalactic wind or superheated plasma inside a star. Any co-arising process that takes place in this Gigantic Field of Consciousness we find ourselves embedded in is a possible destination, for the simple reason that…
Academic:
The One-Electron Universe posits that there is only one particle in the entire cosmos, which is going forwards and backwards in time, interfering with itself, interweaving a pattern of path integrals that interlace with each other. If there is only one electron, then the chances of being a “human moment of experience” at a point in time are vanishingly small. The electrons whose pattern of superposition paint a moment of experience are but a tiny vanishing fraction of the four-dimensional density-mass of the one electron in the block universe entailed by quantum mechanics.
Fantastical:
When you realize that you are the one electron in the universe you often experience a complex superposition of emotions. Of course this is limited by your imagination and emotional state. But if you’re clear-headed, curious, and generally open to exploring possibilities, here is where you feel like you are at the middle point of all reality.
You can access all 6 Realms from this central point, and in a way escape the sense of identification with any one of them. Alas, this is not something that one always achieves. It is easy to get caught up in a random stream and end up in, say, the God Realm completely deluded thinking you’re God. Or in the Hell realm, thinking you’re damned forever somehow. Or the animal, seeking simple body pleasures and comfort. Or the human world, being really puzzled and craving cognitively coherent explanations. Or the Hungry Ghost dimension, where you are always looking to fill yourself up and perceive yourself as fundamentally empty and flawed. Or the Titan realm, which adds a perceptual filter where you feel that everything and everyone is in competition with you and you derive your main source of satisfaction from pride and winning.
In the ideal case, during an LSD ego death you manage to hang out right at the center of this wheel, without falling into any of the particular realms. This is where the luminous awareness happens. And it is what feels like the central hub for the multiverse of consciousness, except in a positive, empowering way.
Casual:
In many ways we could say that the scariest feeling during LSD ego death is the complete lack of control over your next rebirth.
Because if you, in a way, truly surrender to the “fact” that we’re all one and that it all happens in Eternity at the same time anyway… do you realize the ramifications that this has? Everything Everywhere All At Once is a freaking documentary.
Fantastical:
> Hello? What’s up?
> Yeah, er, are you coming over?
> Yes. I mean, you just called me… 5 minutes ago. Did you expect I’d be there already? I’m walking towards the Uber.
> Time is passing really slowly, and I’m really losing it now. Can you… please… maybe like, remind me who I am every, like, 30 seconds or so?
> Mmmm ok. I guess that’s a clear instruction. I can be helpful, sure.
[for the next 40 minutes, in the Uber headed to your place, your friend kept saying your name every 30 seconds, sometimes also his name, and sometimes reminding you where you are and why you called him – bless his soul]
Casual:
Imagine that you are God. You are walking around in the “Garden of Possibilities”. Except that we’re not talking about static possibilities. Rather, we’re talking about processes. Algorithms, really. You walk around and stumble upon a little set of instructions that, when executed, turns you into a little snowflake shape. Or perhaps turns you into a tree-like shape (cf. l-systems). When you’re lucky, it turns you into a beautiful crystalline flower. In these cases, the time that you spend embodying the process is small. Like a little popcorn reality: you encounter, consume, and move on. But every once in a while you encounter a set of instructions that could take a very long time to execute. Due to principles of computational irreducibility, it is also impossible for you to determine in advance (at least in all, most cases) how long the process will take. So every once in a while you encounter a Busy Beaver and end up taking a very, very, very long time to compute that process.
Busy beaver values for different parameters (source)
But guess what? You are God. You’re eternal. You are forever. You will always come back and continue on your walk. But oh boy, from the point of view of the experience of being what the Busy Beaver executes, you do exist for a very long time. From the point of view of God, no matter how long this process takes, it will still be a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. God has been countless times in Busy Beavers and will be countless times there again as well. So enjoy being a flower, or a caterpillar, or a raindrop, or even an electron, because most of the time you’re stuck being ridiculously long processes like the Busy Beaver.
Academic:
Under the assumption that the hyperbolic pseudo-time arrow idea is on the right track, we can speculate about how this might come about from a configuration of a feedback system. As we’ve seen before, an important aspect of the phenomenal character of psychedelic states of consciousness is captured by the tracer pattern. More so, as we discussed in the video about DMT and hyperbolic geometry, one of the ways in which psychedelic states can be modeled is in terms of a feedback system with a certain level of noise. Assume that LSD produces a tracer effect where, approximately, 15 times per second you get a strobe and a replay effect overlay on top of your current experience. What would this do to your representation of the passage of time and the way you parse possible futures?
FRAKSL video I made to illustrate hyperbolic pseudo-time arrows coming out of a feedback system (notice how change propagates fractally across the layers).
Casual:
I think that LSD’s characteristic “vibrational frequency” is somewhere between phenethylamines and tryptamines. 2C-B strikes me as in the 10hz range for most vibrations, whereas psilocybin is closer to 20hz. LSD might be around 15hz. And one of the high-level insights that the lens of connectome-specific harmonic modes (or more recently geometric eigenmodes) gives us is that functional localization and harmonic modulation might be intertwined. In other words, the reason why a particular part of the brain might do what it does is because it is a great tuning knob for the harmonic modes that critically hinge on that region of the brain. This overall lens was used by Michael E. Johnson in Principia Qualia to speculate that the pleasure centers are responsible for high variance in valence precisely because they are strategically positioned in a place where large-scale harmony can be easily modulated. With this sort of approach in mind (we could call it even a research aesthetic, where for every spatial pattern there is a temporal dynamic and vice versa) I reckon that partly what explains the _epistemological_ effects of LSD at high doses involves the saturation of specific frequencies for conscious compute. What do I mean by this?
Say indeed that a good approximation for a conscious state is a weighted sum of harmonic modes. This does not take into account the non-linearities (how the presence of a harmonic mode affects other ones) but it might be a great 60%-of-the-way-there kind of approximation. If so, I reckon that we use some “frequency bands” to store specific kinds of information that corresponds to the information that is naturally encoded with rhythms of specific frequencies. It turns out, in this picture, that we have a sort of collection of inner clocks that are sampling the environment to pick up on patterns that repeat at different scales. We have a slow clock that samples every hour or so, one that samples every 10 minutes, one that samples every minute, every 10 seconds, every second, and then at 10, 20, 30, 40, and even 50hz. All of these inner clocks meet with each other to interlace and interweave a “fabric of subjective time”. When we want to know at a glance how we’re doing, we sample a fragment of this “fabric of subjective time” and it contains information about how we’re doing right now, how we were doing a minute ago, an hour, a day, and even longer. Of course sometimes we need to sample the fabric for a while in order to notice more subtle patterns. But the point is that our sense of reality in time seems to be constructed out of the co-occurrence of many metronomes at different scales.
I think that in particular the spatio-temporal resonant modes that LSD over-excites the most are actually really load-bearing for constructing our sense of our context. It’s as if when you energize too much one of these resonant modes, you actually push it to a smaller range of possible configurations (more smooth sinusoidal waves rather than intricate textures). By super-saturating the energy in some of these harmonics on LSD, you flip over to a regime where there is really no available space for information to be encoded. You can therefore feel extremely alive and real, and yet when you query the “time fabric” you notice that there are big missing components. The information that you would usually get about who you are, where you are, what you have been doing for the last couple of hours, and so on, is instead replaced by a kind of eternal-seeming feeling of always having existed exactly as you currently are.
Fantastical:
If it wasn’t because of your friend helpfully reminding you where you were and who you are, you would have certainly forgotten the nature of your context and for sure wandered off. The scene was shifting widely, and each phenomenal object or construct was composed of a never ending stream of gestalts competing for the space to take hold as the canonical representation (and yet, of course, always superseded by yet another “better fit”, constantly updating).
The feeling of the multiverse was crushing. Here is where you remembered how various pieces of media express aspects of the phenomenology of high dose LSD (warning: mild spoilers – for the movies and for reality as a whole):
Everything Everywhere All At Once: in the movie one tunes into other timelines in order to learn the skills that one has in those alternative lifepaths. But this comes with one side-effect, which is that you continue to be connected to the timeline from which you’re learning a skill. In other words, you form a bond across timelines that drags you down as the cost of accessing their skill. On high dose LSD you get the feeling that yes, you can learn a lot from visualizing other timelines, but you also incur the cost of loading up your sensory screen with information you can’t get rid of.
The Matrix: the connection is both the obvious one and a non-obvious one. First, yes, the reason this is relevant is because being inside a simulation might feel like a plausible hypothesis while on a high dose of LSD. But less intuitively, the Matrix also fits the bill when it comes to the handling of future-past interactions. The “Don’t worry about the vase” scene (which I imagine Zvi named his blog after) highlights that there is an intertwining between future and past that forges destiny. And many of the feelings about how the future and past are connected echo this theme on a high dose of LSD.
Rick and Morty (selected episodes):
Death Crystal: here the similarity is in how on LSD you feel that you can go to any given future timeline by imagining clearly a given outcome and then using it as a frame of reference to fill in the details backwards.
A Rickle in Time: how the timelines split but can in some ways remain aware of and affect each other.
Mortynight Run: In the fictional game Roy: A Life Well Lived you get to experience a whole human lifetime in what looks like minutes from the outside in order to test how you do in a different reality.
Tenet: Here the premise is that you can go back in time, but only one second per second and using special gear (reversed air tanks, in their case).
Of these, perhaps the most surprising to people would be Tenet. So let me elaborate. There are two Tenet-like phenomenologies you experience as your friend is on the way to pick you up worth commenting on:
One, what we could call the “don’t go this way” phenomenology. Here you get the feeling that you make a particular choice. E.g. go to the other room to take more gabapentin and see if that helps (of course it won’t – it’s only been 15 minutes since you took it and it hasn’t even kicked in). Then you visualize briefly what that timeline feels like, and you get the feeling of living through it. Suddenly you snap back into the present moment and decide not to go there. This leaves a taste in your mouth of having gone there, of having been there, of living through the whole thing, just to decide 10 years down the line that you would rather come back and make a different choice.
At the extreme of this phenomenology you find yourself feeling like you’ve lived every possible timeline. And in a way, you “realize” that you’re, in the words of Teafaerie, a deeply jaded God looking for an escape from endless loops. So you “remember” (cf. anamnesis) that you chose to forget on purpose so that you could live as a human in peace, believing others are real, humbly accepting a simple life, lost in a narrative of your own making. The “realization” can be crushing, of course, and is often a gateway to a particular kind of depersonalization/derealization where you walk around claiming you’re God. Alas, this only happens in a sweet spot of intoxication, and since you went above even that, you’ll have a more thorough ego death.
Two, an even more unsettling Tenet-like phenomenology is the feeling that “other timelines are asking for your help – Big Time wants you to volunteer for the Time War!”. Here things go quantum, and completely bonkers. The feeling is the result of having the sense that you can navigate timelines with your mind in a much deeper way than, say, just making choices one at a time. This is a profound feeling, and conveying it in writing is of course a massive stretch. But even the Bering Strait was crossed by hominids once, and this stretch feels also crossable by us with the right ambition.
The multiverse is very large. You see, imagine what it would be like to restart college. One level here is where you start again from day 1. In other timelines you make different friends, read other books, take other classes, have other lovers, major in other disciplines. Now go backwards even a little further back, to when the academic housing committee was making decisions about who goes to which dorm. Then the multiverse diversifies, as you see a combinatorial explosion of possible dorm configurations. Further back, when the admissions committee was making their decisions, and you have an even greater expansion of the multiverse where different class configurations are generated.
Now imagine being able to “search” this bulky multiverse. How do you search it? Of course you could go action by action. But due to chaos, within important parameters like the set of people you’re likely to meet, possibilities quickly get scrambled. The worlds where you chose that bike versus that other bike in that particular moment aren’t much more similar to each other than other random ways of partitioning the timelines. Rather, you need to find pivotal decisions, as well as _anchor feelings_. E.g. It really matters if a particular bad technology is discovered and deployed, because that drastically changes the texture of an entire category of timelines. It is better for you to search timelines via general vibes and feelings like that, because that will really segment the multiverse into meaningfully different outcomes. This is the way in which you can move along timelines on high doses of LSD. You generate the feeling of things “having been a certain way” and you try to leave everything else as loose and unconstrained as possible, so that you search through the path integral of superpositions of all possible worlds where the feeling arises, and every once in a while when you “sample” the superposition you get a plausible universe where this is real.
Now, on 150 or 200 micrograms this feels very hypothetical, and the activity can be quite fun. On 300 micrograms, this feels real. It is actually quite spooky, because you feel a lot of responsibility here. As if the way in which you chose to digest cosmic feelings right there could lock in either a positive or negative timeline for you and your loved ones.
Here is where the Time War comes into play. I didn’t choose this. I don’t like this meme. But it is part of the phenomenology, and I think it is better that we address it head-on rather than let it surprise you and screw you up in one way or another.
The sense of realism that high dose LSD produces is unreal. It feels so real that it feels dreamy. But importantly, the sense of future timelines being truly there in a way is often hard to escape. With this you often get a crushing sense of responsibility. And together with the “don’t go this way” you can experience a feeling of a sort of “ping pong with the multiverse of possibilities” where you feel like you go backwards and forwards in countless cycles searching for a viable, good future for yourself and for everyone.
In some ways, you may feel like you go to the End of Times when you’ve lived all possible lifetimes and reconverge on the Godhead (I’m not making this up, this is a common type of experience for some reason). Importantly, you often feel like there are _powerful_ cosmic forces at play, that the reason for your life is profound, and that you are playing an important role for the development of consciousness. One might even experience corner-case exotic phenomenal time like states of mind with two arrows of time that are perpendicular to each other (unpacking this would take us an entire new writeup, so we shall save it for another time). And sometimes you can feel like your moral fiber is tested in often incredibly uncomfortable ways by these exotic phenomenal time effects.
Here is an example.
As your sense of “awareness of other timelines” increases, so does your capacity to sense timelines where things are going really well and timelines where things are going really poorly. Like, there are timelines where your friend is also having a heart attack right now, and then those where he crashes on the way to your apartment, and those where there’s a meteorite falling into your city, and so on. Likewise, there’s one where he is about to win the lottery, where you are about to make a profound discovery about reality that stands the test of sober inquiry, where someone just encountered the cure for cancer, and so on. One unsettling feeling you often get on high dose LSD is that because you’re more or less looking at these possibilities “from the point of view of eternity” in a way you are all of them at once. “Even the bad ones?” – yes, unsettlingly, even the bad ones. So the scary moral-fiber-testing thought that sometimes you might get is if you’d volunteer to be in one of the bad ones so that “a version of you gets to be in the good one”. In other words, if you’re everyone, wouldn’t you be willing to trade places? Oftentimes here’s where Open Individualism gets scary and spooky and where talking to someone else to get confirmation that there are parallel conscious narrative streams around is really helpful.
Casual:
We could say that LSD is like a completely different drug depending on the dose range you hit:
Below 50 micrograms it is like a stimulant with stoning undertones. A bit giggly, a bit dissociating, but pretty normal otherwise.
Between 50 and 150 you have a drug that is generally really entertaining, gentle, and for the most part manageable. You get a significant expansion in the room available to have thoughts and feelings, as if your inner scratch pads got doubled in size. Colors, sounds, and bodily feelings all significantly intensified, but still feel like amplified versions of normal life.
Between 150 and 250 you get all of the super stereotypical psychedelic effects, with very noticeable drifting, tracers, symmetries, apophenia, recursive processes, and fractal interlocking landscapes. It is also somewhat dissociative and part of your experience might feel dreamy and blurry, while perhaps the majority of your field is sharp, bright, and very alive.
From 250 to 350 it turns into a multiverse travel situation, where you forget where you are and who you are and at times that you even took a drug. You might be an electron for what feels like millions of years. You might witness a supernova in slow motion. You might spontaneously become absorbed into space (perhaps as a high energy high dimensional version of the 5th Jhana). And you might feel like you hit some kind of God computer that compiles human lifetimes in order to learn about itself. You might also experience the feeling of a massive ball of light colliding with you that turns you into the Rainbow version of the Godhead for a time that might range between seconds and minutes. It’s a very intense experience.
And above? I don’t know, to be honest.
Academic:
The intermittent collapse into “eternity” reported on high dose LSD could perhaps be interpreted as stumbling into fixed points of a feedback system. Similarly to how pointing a camera directly at its own video feed at the right angle produces a perfectly static image. On the other hand, we might speculate that many of the “time branching” effects are instead the result of a feedback system where each iteration doubles the number of images (akin to using a mirror to cover a portion of the screen and reflect the uncovered part of the screen).
Video I made with FRAKSL in order to illustrate exactly the transition between a hyperbolic pseudo-time arrow and a geometric fixed point in a feedback system. This aims to capture the toggle during LSD ego death between experiencing multiple timelines and collapsing into moments of eternity.
Fantastical:
You decide that you do want to keep playing the game. You don’t want to roll the dice. You don’t want to embrace Eternity, and with it, all of the timelines, even the ugly ones. You don’t want to be a volunteer in the Time War. You just want to be a normal person, though of course the knowledge you’ve gained would be tough to lose. So you have to make a choice. Either you forget what you learned, or you quit the game. What are you going to do?
As you start really peaking and the existential choice is presented to you, your friend finally arrives outside of your apartment. The entrance is very cinematic, as you witness it both from your phone as well as in real life, like the convergence of two parallel reality streams collapsing into a single intersubjective hologram via a parallax effect. It was intense.
Casual:
You have to admit, the juxtaposition of narrative streams with different stylistic proclivities really does enrich the human condition. In a way, this is one of the things that makes LSD so valuable: you get to experience simultaneously sets of vibes/stances/emotions/attitudes that would generally never co-exist. This is, at least in part, what might be responsible for increasing your psychological integration after the trip; you experience a kind of multi-context harmonization (cf. gestalt annealing). It’s why it’s hard to “hide from yourself on acid” – because the mechanism that usually keeps our incoherent parts compartmentalized breaks down under intense generalized tracers that maintain interweaving, semi-paralel, narrative streams. Importantly, the juxtaposition of narrative voices is computationally non-trivial. It expands the experiential base in a way that allows for fruitful cross-pollination between academic ways of thinking and our immediate phenomenology. Perhaps this is important from a scientific point of view.
Fantastical:
With your friend in the apartment taking care of you – or rather, more precisely, reducing possibility-space to a manageable narrative smear, and an acceptable degree of leakage into bad timelines – you can finally relax. More so, the sedatives finally kick in, and the psychedelic effects reduce by maybe 20-25% in the span of an hour or so. You end up having an absolutely great time, and choose to keep playing the game. You forget you’re God, and decide to push the question of whether to fall into Nirvana for good till the next trip.
[1] LSD has a rather peculiar dose-response curve. It is not a “light” psychedelic, although it can certainly be used to have light experiences. Drugs like AL-LAD are sometimes described as relatively shallow in that they don’t produce the full depth of richness LSD does. Or 2C-B/2C-I, which tend to come with a more grounded sense of reality relative to the intensity of the sensory amplification. Or DMT, which despite its extreme reality-replacing effects, tends to nonetheless give you a sense of rhythm and timing that keeps the sense of self intact along some dimensions. LSD is a full psychedelic in that at higher doses it really deeply challenges one’s sense of reality. I have never heard of someone take 2C-B at, say, 30mg and freak out so badly that they believe that reality is about to end or that they are God and wish they didn’t know it. But on 200-400 micrograms of LSD this is routine. Of course you may not externalize it, but the “egocidal” effects of acid are powerful and hard to miss, and they are in some ways much deeper and transformative than the colorful show of DMT or the love of MDMA because it is ruthless in its insistence, methodical in its approach, and patient like water (which over decades can carve deep into rocks). As Christopher Bach says in LSD and the Mind of the Universe: “An LSD session grinds slow but it grinds fine. It gives us time to be engaged and changed by the realities we are encountering. I think this polishing influences both the eventual clarity of our perception in these states and what we are able to bring back from them, both in terms of healing and understanding”. There’s a real sense in which part of the power of LSD comes from its capacity to make you see something for long periods of time that under normal circumstances would have us flinch in a snap.
1) Explore the state-space of consciousness because you want to know it for yourself
2) Study it from many points of view because you want to understand it intellectually at a deep level
3) Intend to apply it for the benefit of all beings
In June of this year, we were proud to launch QRI’s first guided meditation series titled “Qualia Mastery.” Central to this series is the cultivation of a direct experiential understanding of how the mind works, coupled with an epistemological framework that values intellectual clarity. In essence, these guided meditations strive to provide both direct access to and intellectual insight into scientifically and personally significant states of consciousness. Furthermore, we embark on this journey with a sincere desire to serve and uplift others. The initial release features 9 foundational guided meditations. In this next installment, we’re collaborating with QRI associates Wystan Bryant-Scott and Roger Thisdell to go even deeper with another 9 meditations.
We genuinely hope you derive value from this series! We invite any feedback or phenomenological observations. Your perspective is invaluable to us.
Thank you!
Metta – Fabric Softener of Experience
Metta is a Pali word that can be translated as benevolence, friendliness, or good will. It is a key state of mind for meditative practice; it has the capacity to heal, invigorate, and center the mind.
The majority of guided Metta meditations emphasize the ways in which you can trigger this state of mind with semantic content and imagery. For example imagining a loved one, a pet, or even a beautiful scene, and tuning into the feeling of friendliness that such an image sparks.
In this meditation we instead emphasize the phenomenal character of Metta as a way to develop it, establish it, and understand it deeply. For example, we discuss how one can use different varieties of attention in order to kindle this feeling. We also tune into one’s intentions and background mood in order to nudge the mind towards Metta. More so, we carefully study how technical phenomenological features such as rhythm, wave envelope, and energy affect the quality and intensity of Metta.
May this meditation be of benefit to sentient beings!
It is often said that one of the most important meditative skills that one can cultivate is the practice of *letting go*. This means letting go of attachments, of cravings, of a sense of identity, and the need for things to be anything other than what they are. However, in practice doing this is more difficult than it sounds; we have a habit of holding tight to much more than we require for optimal wellbeing.
This guided meditation emphasizes two key aspects of letting go. Namely, (1) tactical methods for letting go, such as the judicious use of unusual varieties of attention, higher order equanimity, imaginal practices, and precise technique (such as rhythm and timing). And (2) the fact that letting go can be practiced in much deeper ways and with a much wider scope than is usually realized. In particular, letting go can take place in the visual, tactile, auditory domains, in addition to the spacious, cognitive, spiritual, and intuitive levels of the mind.
We conclude this meditation by listening to meditative music with the goal of experiencing it with complete equanimity and acceptance and putting our letting go techniques to practice.
Goldilocks Zone of Oneness
In this guided meditation, we delve into the phenomenology of various conceptions of personal identity. Specifically, we observe the experiential nuances of believing that we are individual souls (Closed Individualism), that we are a single universal consciousness (Open Individualism), that we represent ephemeral moments of experience (Empty Individualism), and that we encompass all these identities concurrently (Goldilocks Zone of Oneness).
As with the “The Phenomenology of Ontology” meditation, our objective here is to discern the qualities of experience that shape a specific worldview. In essence, the phenomenology of personal identity is a pivotal subject for any holistic consciousness research initiative, regardless of the metaphysical veracity of these perspectives. The capacity of these conceptions to modify experiential attributes—such as refining internal boundaries or amplifying the choppiness of sensations—underscores the importance of this topic for both phenomenological and scientific exploration.
More so, many exotic states of consciousness involve implicit alterations to our conceptions of personal identity. Therefore knowing how to detect the experiential features that make these beliefs feel more or less plausible is essential to successfully navigate exotic states of consciousness without compromising one’s epistemology.
In this meditation, Roger Thisdell guides us in a meditation of somatic scanning up and down the body using concurrent waves of awareness that pass through one another. We are trying to balance both the sense of grounding, stability with the sense of wakeful, levity.
By the end of the meditation, the goal is to isolate and metacognize the sense of ‘becoming’ within experience, and notice that this signal is always presenting itself. We may question, if everything seems like it’s always ‘becoming’ (but never fully become), then what significance does this have with the goal of trying to have ‘arrived’ somewhere?
For more guided meditations by Roger, check out his Patreon page where he releases a new guided meditation, on a variety of techniques, every week: https://www.patreon.com/rogerthis
Don’t Pay Attention
Normally in meditation we are focused on what IS in experience, but to be able to notice the absence of phenomena is key as well! Where there once were qualia, now there aren’t – what does that reveal to us about their nature?
Roger Thisdell guides a meditation starting with a taste session on the major ingredients which make up our experience. Then after paying attention to these components, we deliberately try to not pay attention to them. What we find is the move to let go of paying attention to anything is a universal move – no matter the object of attention – how convenient!
The ability to take attention off of more and more aspects of experience is an essential skill which eventually culminates in the ability to not pay attention to time, space and consciousness, resulting in cessation.
For more guided meditations by Roger, check out his Patreon page where he releases a new guided meditation, on a variety of techniques, every week: https://www.patreon.com/rogerthis
Co-Arising Expansion and Contraction
Expansion and contraction are the subtlest distinguishing features of experience. This meditation on expansion and contraction, given by Roger Thisdell, is a guide for finding and synchronizing to the oscillatory nature of experience at different levels, and then realising the co-dependence on one another in order to exist. Where there is expansion there is contraction and vice versa. By having sufficient energy in the mind and being able to widen the ‘aperture’ of our present moment perception it is possible to notice contraction within attention, and expansion within awareness (and vice versa) at the same time!
For more guided meditations by Roger, check out his Patreon page where he releases a new guided meditation, on a variety of techniques, every week: https://www.patreon.com/rogerthis
A Clap of Thunder
In this guided meditation, our invited facilitator, Wystan, leads participants through meticulous body scanning techniques designed to cultivate an acute consciousness of the immediate present. Transitioning seamlessly from body scanning to methods of introspection, and further incorporating the nuanced technique of finger-following to “spread out the vision”, Wystan imparts a spectrum of methodologies that promise to augment the meditative practice of individuals across all levels of expertise.
This meditation explores the phenomenology of absorption into Platonic objects. We delve into what it feels like to imagine, embody, and generate the sense of knowing of classic geometric and mathematical constructs.
One of the main takeaways from this meditation is that we can attune to the difference between (1) how we render a particular instance of a Platonic object and (2) the sense of knowing and existence of that object that arises as we do so.
That is, (1) emphasizes the specific point of view from which a Platonic object (say, a cube) can be apprehended. Each point of view gives rise to, in a way, a completely different experience (cf. Borges’ Funes the Memorious). Namely, the experience of rendering such an object from that particular point of view, with all of the sensory and qualitative features that come along with it. In contrast (2) points to that which remains the same across all of these points of view. Namely, the ways in which holding these objects in one’s attention keeps aspects of our experience invariant (such as the intuitions and resonances that come with each particular Platonic object).
In addition, we also explore how the geometry of attention affects one’s valence and sense of ease, with the goal of naturalizing “Sacred Geometry” for the cultivation of Qualia Mastery.
There are many spiritual and yogic practices that utilize “elemental” objects of meditation. For example, the guided meditation by Michael Taft called “Five Elements Meditation” (link below) centers the mind around mental formations evocative of earth, water, fire, air, and space.
Alas, it is natural to be skeptical of the value of these practices on the basis that science has shown that the universe is made up of particles, forces, and fields, and not the traditional elements of ancient ontologies.
Nevertheless, within the paradigm of Qualia Mastery in meditation, we affirm the significance of specific states of consciousness, irrespective of the techniques used to induce them. Adhering rigidly to a modern scientific worldview might, in fact, impede one’s engagement with such meditative practices. Engaging fully with a meditation that posits, for instance, fire as a fundamental entity, can often yield richer results when one genuinely subscribes to the idea. Continual internal rebuttals, such as “fire isn’t foundational; electrons are!” can inhibit deep immersion into these states.
So how can we rescue what is valuable from this style of meditation without having to buy into an implicit “elemental ontology”? Here is where the relevance of “self-organizing principles” comes into play. Namely, where we realize that the nervous system is capable of instantiating a cornucopia of diverse self-organizing principles that are used to render one’s inner world-simulation. Thus, when you imagine and embody “the element of fire” you are, in a way, instantiating a collection of self-organizing principles that roughly emulate the behavior of fire.
Therefore, we can use a more generalized conception of “elemental meditation” as a window into these self-organizing principles. This is what this meditation does.
PLUS FOUR, n. (++++) A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a “peak experience,” a “religious experience,” “divine transformation,” a “state of Samadhi” and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug’s intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug. If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end, of the human experiment.
— Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL, pages 963–965
In this post and accompanying video we provide a general “theory of candy flipping” that aims to explain why LSD + MDMA is so synergistic. What makes, say 200 micrograms of LSD and 150mg of MDMA so prone to be spiritual, psychologically healing, and loving? To get there, we address the following three/four questions:
How do we improve research on candy flipping?
How do we optimize candy flipping proper? And how do we generalize candy flipping for even better results?
What would a general recipe for Shulgin’s ++++ be?
1- We go over current methodologies used to study candy flipping and why their results are limited (Straumann et al., 2023). Then we explain how a “think tank” approach (e.g. phenomenology club) allows us to create more phenomenologically grounded research paradigms (Gómez-Emilsson, 2021). By weighting in the personal experience of highly precise psychonauts with skills in areas like physics, math, visual art, and signal processing, we can arrive at mechanistic models such as those proposed by Steven Lehar in The Grand Illusion (Lehar, 2010) where MDMA causes your world simulation to vibrate in pleasant ways, which in turn “smooths out the rough edges” of the LSD state, or models involving algorithmic-level annealing dynamics (Gomez-Emilsson, 2016; Johnson, 2019; Gómez-Emilsson 2021, 2023). This kind of approach would add phase diagrams, wave mechanics, and nonlinear effects into the picture.
2- Optimizing candy flipping can be done by looking to generate the kind of synergy MDMA + LSD achieve in the best of conditions. Of note, trip reports involving low doses of each together with 2C-B and cannabis are discussed and analyzed. One needs to be mindful of annealing dynamics, drug effect arcs including how to handle the MDMA comedown, and pattern-focused readings of wave effects that for lack of a better metaphor could be catalogued as “qualia lensing“.
And
3- We hypothesize that the key ingredients to catalyze the blissful nondual awareness that comes from high-end candy flipping are (a) a full-spectrum energizer, (b) something that increases interconnectivity, and (c) a deeply relaxing agent. The combination of these three elements gives rise to a highly-nonlinear effect I call “FU§ION (Field Unification Search/Simplify in Invariant Optical Networks; to be fully unpacked at a later date), where all of the “resonant cavities” are fully relaxed, have a high degree of impedance matching between them, and are energized, so that they kick-start a “field harmonization” process that culminates in profound blissful nondual awareness. The energizer shouldn’t be narrow spectrum (like cocaine) and the relaxing agent shouldn’t be too blunting or non-Newtonian (like opioids). Examples of each:
Combine one of each, carefully dosed, and according to this theory, you might get a ++++. (Please exercise caution when mixing substances – the rule of thumb is to not do it).
Note: 5-MeO-DMT might, in this model, be actually doing all three at once. It happens to be hitting receptors in the right combination for such a deep mystical “relaxed stimulation” to take hold. That said, it is possible that 5-MeO-DMT also has some rough edges, and that it can be further optimized (e.g. such as by combining it with nitrous). More research is needed 🙂
Example Formula: 15mg 2C-B, then an hour later 2g of GHB, and then an hour later DMT (100mg over the course of 2 hours) was reported as a ++++ by a trusted psychonaut recently (comparable in “depth” to 5-MeO-DMT). Please be careful – I am not encouraging anyone to try this. But if you do, or have done something similar, I’d be grateful if you let me know what happened. 🙂
Gómez-Emilsson, A. (2023), Neural Field Annealing and Psychedelic Thermodynamics presentation at PhilaDelic 2023. Retreieved from https://youtu.be/pM9k1I3VPOg
Straumann, I., Ley, L., Holze, F. et al. Acute effects of MDMA and LSD co-administration in a double-blind placebo-controlled study in healthy participants. Neuropsychopharmacol. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-023-01609-0
Dear Qualia Enthusiasts, Collaborators, Friends, Benefactors, and the Community at large,
With heavy hearts, we announce the recent passing of our dear friend and strategic advisor, Anders Amelin. He bravely fought a battle with a severe and unusual peripheral neuropathy, caused by a largely undiagnosed, steadily worsening condition. As a testament to his incredible spirit and character, we wish to express our profound gratitude for his invaluable contributions to the mission of the Qualia Research Institute (QRI). Anders was an exemplary and compassionate individual whose memory will forever be cherished. Our deepest condolences are extended to his family and friends during this difficult time.
As a non-profit dedicated to pioneering the new science of consciousness, our primary aim is to enhance the lives of humans and other sentient beings. The news of Anders’ passing first elicited a deeply human reaction within us, a profound sense of sadness and grief. However, in the face of this loss, we have a renewed sense of mission to pursue the development of pragmatic technologies to prevent and reduce extreme suffering. Additionally, we are reminded of our responsibility to lead by example, and to thoughtfully consider the best ways in which we should confront the universal challenges of death and suffering at a personal and community level.
In this spirit, we’d like to share some concepts that may offer some existential comfort during such challenging times. Drawing from various philosophical and spiritual traditions, these ideas – frequently resonating well with the scientific lens – may assist in navigating the difficult terrain of loss and grief.
Content Notice: This text investigates consciousness, reality, and the implications of death from a variety of perspectives. It delves into themes of ontological shifts and altered states of consciousness, which may evoke intense feelings, memories, or reactions for some readers. The text discusses the late Anders Amelin’s life and ideas, as well as speculative possibilities of his continued existence.
Please approach the content with caution if these topics are likely to cause distress or discomfort.
Drawing from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which we regard as an inspiring proto-scientific framework rather than subscribe fully to its ontological assumptions, it is suggested that the period immediately following one’s death is crucial for determining one’s future birth. This phase is described as being laden with numerous challenges and mind-altering ontological shifts, known as the “Bardos”. It also involves confronting one’s own deeply ingrained misconceptions about the nature of reality. Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, and Richard Alpert (later Ram Dass) interpreted the effects of high doses of the “classic” psychedelics (LSD/psilocybin/mescaline/DMT) through the lens of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In their view, the peak experience of becoming one with the “clear light of the void” at the moment of death could be reasonably equated with the moment of ego dissolution of a psychedelic experience. Like a ball that is dropped from a certain height and then bounces off the floor, making smaller and smaller arcs, the psychedelic experience (at high enough doses) gives you several opportunities to realize your oneness with ultimate reality. Suppose you miss the first chance precisely at the point of death. In that case, you may still have a few more opportunities when the ball reaches its peak height in the following bounces (but beware: with each bounce, the energy gets dissipated so it doesn’t reach the same height, and the potential for delusion is more significant – really, the best bet is to awaken on the first bounce). Whether a literal post-death experience or a metaphor for high-grade psychedelia, it is hard for us to imagine how this applies to the experience of Anders as he experiences the journey he’s embarking on since his death: his mind seemed to be, by default, already instantiating a high-grade psychedelic trip all of its own! How much higher could it really get?
By all lights, and to his own admission, Anders never tried any psychedelic substance (though he was curious about them and would have done so if the opportunity had presented itself). He also never tried dissociatives like ketamine, MXE, or DXM (despite making a fantastic video about ketamine therapy in light of the Neural Annealing framework with Maggie). He also never tried the empathogenic/entactogenic molecules (such as MDMA, MDA, MDEA, or 5-APB) either. And to boot, he also never explored intensive meditation deliberately. We were deeply skeptical of these claims – how could he, a self-admitted “simple person” from Sweden, be conversant on so many mind-bending topics without any exposure to psychedelia in any form? Something seems fishy!
Well, Anders shared that he had many spontaneous, deeply meditative experiences in childhood. For instance, he realized that he had spontaneously experienced a very similar phenomenological progression of exotic states of consciousness as a kid, reminiscent of the so-called “Spiral Experience” described by Ann Shulgin in PIHKAL. This would make him quite unique indeed – despite sharing Ann’s description on Qualia Computing and asking readers if they ever experienced anything like it, only Anders ever reported going through something so similar as a child. Perhaps, making an analogy to wild vs. cultivated plants, all of the exotic states of consciousness he stumbled upon were accidental “wild variety” meditative states akin to what you encounter in a forest, as opposed to the modern hydroponic cultivars with light-and-temperature-optimized conditions characteristic of growing operations, which could symbolize the meditative states cultivated in monasteries or meditation retreats.
In the spirit of honoring Anders in a very Anders kind of way it makes sense to discuss the ways in which, it may turn out, Anders is still with us. For context, one of the most inspiring works of Anders and Maggie (“The Dyad” from here on out 1 ) is “The Seven Seals of Security” (writeup) which discusses how our peculiar epistemological position concerning key fundamental questions about our reality actually has advantages, some of which may translate into better coordination mechanisms between us. They discuss how our uncertainty about fundamental issues, such as the nature of God, whether we’re in a simulation, aliens, consciousness, and death, can work to align us with one another. In a similar vein, we would like to suggest how there are seven possibilities not yet ruled out by science or philosophy that make Anders’ existence “still with us” very much possible – perhaps to the point that we could, at least in some sense, coordinate with him beyond the veil of death. They are ordered by their level of plausibility as we see it (from most plausible to least plausible):
Seven ways Anders is still with us (for additional possibilities, see also: a, b):
Eternalism
Memetic Perseverance (Contributions to the Cause)
Vibe Embedding (incl. “Dyadic Survival”)
Simulation Window-Watching
Exotic Physical Memory Mechanisms
Archetypical Attractor Basins
Indexical Uncertainty
(1) Eternalism: This is a very straightforward one. The brief explanation is that there are strong arguments in favor of the view that time and space can trade with each other, all depending on one’s frame of reference. The famous Rietdijk-Putnam argument proposes that this tradeoff entails that present, past, and future are all “equally real”, and it’s a simple consequence of the transitivity of realness. Assume that in Andromeda, an alien civilization is deciding whether to invade Earth. Now imagine that someone is traveling really fast towards Andromeda but is physically located right next to Earth. From their point of view, the alien species may, in fact, have “already decided” and be on their way. Due to transitivity, we can see that Andromeda’s population, according to our frame of reference, is just as real as us, which is just as real as the person traveling towards Andromeda, which is just as real (according to her) as the Andromeda from her point of view. In other words, the population of the alien species is just as real when deciding whether to invade us as it is when it is already underway. Hence, the past and the future are both “equally real”. According to this argument, Anders is, in fact, still with us, though to witness that, we might need to choose an appropriate (and perhaps currently inaccessible) frame of reference. Light-cone considerations aside, whether we can interact with him or not shouldn’t be a determinant of his ontological status. Every photograph ever taken of him, every word he ever wrote, and every sentence he ever uttered are all capturing moments of his life that are “just as real” as you reading this (or our writing this!). Now all we need is a way to get there from here (perhaps not a viable prospect given our current knowledge, but one never knows!).
(2) Memetic Perseverance (and Contributions to the Cause): Anders and The Dyad made enormous efforts in advancing the mission of QRI: this ranged from making amusing and insightful videos (cf. all of the Qualia Productions series) to contacting countless individuals and organizations to discuss QRI with them, to answering correspondence, to selecting promising collaborators for us to learn more about, to highlighting worthwhile research lineages, to advising the organization on a very pragmatic front, to emotionally encouraging us when it was getting tough in various ways. But what stands out to me, and also thoroughly contradicts their self-deprecating 2 humor, is their top-notch writings produced in the service of the cause. Simply put, the emails, letters, and private messages we received from Anders (and the Dyad more broadly), in our humble opinion, approximate the brilliance of some of the best writings in the field of consciousness. We are not exaggerating. In time we will publish as much of this corpus as is feasible and ethical (once applicable privacy considerations have been thoroughly evaluated). Of course, as future Large Language Models read the corpus and pass on its insights into leaked packets of weights for future generations to play with ad-lib, we can expect Anders’ signature sense of humor and uniquely insightful commentary to influence the generations to come.
(3) Vibe Embedding (incl. “Dyadic Survival”): Hofstadter commented about his wife’s passing that he spent so much time with her that she now lived inside him, embedded in a self-reinforcing pattern of cognitive and emotional loops. Anders’ benevolent and charismatic personality is, according to QRI and us qualiaphiles who take the structural properties of valence very seriously, really an outward expression of an unseen (but clearly felt) “vibe”. In technical terms, a specific configuration of coupled harmonic oscillators gives rise to patterns of consonance, dissonance, and noise of an amiable and creative type. The records he left, the impression he made, and the body language with which he expressed his communications indeed “live within us”. The wake of these “vibes’’ can still be felt among those who knew him. Still, their future is perhaps even grander. As we develop ways to analyze, visualize, and reproduce vibes (aka.”vibe computing” and “vibe synthesis”) we will be better able to capture and propagate his vibe in more scalable ways, perhaps by embedding them in “Vibe Standard Candles” (e.g. a sort of “Vibe Metric System” cf. “The Meter” in France) that could function as templates for future benevolent superintelligences. “Safety-via-Vibe” may sound far-fetched. Still, if valence structuralism and qualia computing are on the right track, this may be a definite step in the right direction. Will Anders’ vibe feed into a “benevolent score” and substantially contribute to the safety of future AIs? This might very well be in store for us. After all, Anders’ vibe was uniquely appropriate for the benevolent alignment of potential advanced superintelligences: he always emphasized the importance of Open Individualism and Valence Realism along with a healthy dose of “longevity-focused vacationing” and humor. Undoubtedly, we’d rather have his vibe supervise the next generation of Super-Bings than, say, one drawn from the distribution of “industry experts” today.
(4) Simulation Window-Watching: It is a common trope, and an understandable human reaction to feelings of grief, to posit that our deceased loved ones are “watching us and taking care of us from heaven”. A secular version of this idea can be found in the Simulation Hypothesis, where perhaps death might be equated with ending one’s presence in the simulation (it’s worth pointing out that most thinkers in this area believe that even if we are in a simulation, it “all adds to normality” in that this information alone doesn’t entail there should be any significant behavioral change on our part). What is the simulation for, though? The existence of suffering, and ill-being more broadly, poses a formidable challenge to this hypothesis: why would an advanced intelligence, civilization, or God, choose to create the states of consciousness characterized by dullness, pain, and anxiety rather than continuous super-bliss? This resembles the traditional “problem of evil” in theodicy. What purpose could our humble lives serve such a super-organism? To say that we will “simply never know” is a cop-out. Shouldn’t this fact (the problem of evil) reduce the probability we assign to this being a Simulation? To a certain extent, no doubt! That said, there are possible, in our mind, defensible viewpoints that prevent ruling out this general hypothesis space. In particular, two classes of explanations stand out to me:
First, that we are undergoing a sort of “training” that requires us to not be aware of what we’re doing. A drill (say, simulating that a ship is sinking) is always much more valuable when one truly believes one’s life and that of our loved ones is in danger. Dealing with panic, uncertainty, and fear are all, after all, essential features of an actual emergency, so believing that “it’s merely a drill” might give us a false sense of security. In this view, while perhaps our bodily forms are precarious and perishable, our “soul” is in fact (perhaps holographically), learning valuable lessons that can only be internalized when experienced under the proper level of uncertainty. The classic “soul training” or “soul testing” tropes of religion and spirituality would be readily transposed to this overall framework. If we are, as many spiritually “realized” masters say, spiritual beings having a human experience (rather than the other way around), undergoing the right training might be essential to prevent us from causing enormous harm when liberated. With God-like powers comes God-like responsibility – without the empathy and learnings we obtain from this simulation, we might be at risk of misusing our powers. More so, this “soul training” might be all about vibe computing too. Was Anders’ visit to this plane of existence perhaps for the purpose of “stealing a vibe” for the outside of the simulation? (Cf. How to Steal a Vibe: The Phenomenal Unity of Reality, the Mind-Body Problem, and the Blockchain of Consciousness).
The second possibility is centered around the potential epistemological value of a simulation like ours. Anders and Maggie have posited in many of their writings that simulating our current time might be of special value to a superintelligence in the “far future”, presumably in a post-Singularity era. This is because the historical records of the pre-Singularity era might have been corrupted, lost, or erased due to the complex acceleration of technologies at the point of transition. Understanding where they are and how they got there would likely be of enormous value. For instance, it might be useful to figure out if there are other superintelligences hiding beyond their cosmological horizon – the historical period we’re witnessing might have many possible branching futures depending on subtle conditions. In other words, the kind of Singularity that arises might be very sensitive to the conditions of our current era. Understanding the counter-factual post-Singularity states would potentially be a security measure (to be able to anticipate the nature and behavior of competing superintelligences) or a way to exit technological grid-locks and legacy systems.
Of course here we cannot ignore the numerous hints dropped by Anders (and the Dyad) about his nature. Our dear Dyad has helped us with their ability to run “conscious simulation” (see, e.g., how they simulated Dennett’s mind on psychedelics) with what appears to be surprising precision and creativity. Tongue-in-cheek, some rather strange “evidence” can also be of significance: Anders and Maggie have appeared numerous times “inside” DMT hallucinations, usually displaying unusual and exotic states of awareness, often mixed with the theme that they are somehow part of an alien civilization visiting Earth to encourage its positive development. Of course this is not much evidence as far as rigorous scientific principles go, but perhaps it is still worth pointing out to those who are open minded among us (please note this is more of a humorous point than anything else).
(5) Exotic Physical Memory Mechanisms: Could it be possible that Anders is somehow “embedded” in the electromagnetic field around us? Or in the quantum foam? Perhaps eternally recorded in a structure resembling “The Akashic Records”? Here again, “psychedelic evidence” is of enormous relevance. Some ibogaine trip reports point out that in the states of consciousness induced by that “atypical psychedelic” there is access to previously lost or suppressed memories in, often, exquisite detail (in addition to moreconventional memory retrieval-enhancing effects). Usually, these memories present themselves in ways readily consumable by one’s personality. If you have an old-times aesthetic where you keep physical photos in a family album, your long-lost memories might be lovingly rendered in that format. Alternatively, if you’re a very “phone-oriented” person, the memories might be displayed as files on your phone (see Teafaery’s Hard Reset trip report). Or, as an explorer once told me, if you’re a fan of historical museums, the memories might be found in a “memory hall” with countless rooms (one for each significant event in your life). More so, some people report that they could access these memories from points of view that should have been impossible, as if there were records of the events whether or not it was you, specifically, who experienced them. This isn’t a universal experience, though. But if we decide to take those reports seriously, perhaps that ibogaine states of consciousness can faithfully render with exquisite detail every moment of your life tells us something about how information is stored in the field at large. This suggests (though certainly doesn’t prove) that physical fields can keep information about events for much longer than we typically believe and be accessible in formats that hint at the existence of a higher intelligence embedded within them. Or it could all just be confabulations of a drug-addled mind, as Occam’s Razor would suggest. Nevertheless, we believe this is a “research lead” that should not be ignored. See also: terminal lucidity.
(6) Archetypical Attractor Basins: If we take the Buddhists seriously on their claim that “there really is no self”, then, of course, nothing ontologically fundamental is ever lost when someone dies. Taking the no-self doctrine not only as a meditation instruction but as an ontological reality has strange implications about the continuity of identity that ought to make death “not that big of a deal”. That said, this might not be much consolation to us self-havers and self-users who are still under the (perceptual) grip of a sense of personal identity. But there’s another angle to explore here. In brief, while our self-identity might not be fundamental, akin to a real “thing” that functions as an enduring metaphysical ego, it might nonetheless reflect a real “latent structure” in the field of consciousness. In this case, existing religious figures, fictional characters, and famous celebrities are, to greater or lesser extents, powerful “eigenstates” of consciousness – self-reinforcing qualia patterns of coherence. A fractally incoherent, chaotic person is like a weirdly-shaped cloud, a weather phenomenon that happens only once and never again.
On the other hand, a fractally coherent and self-consistent intelligence in reflective equilibrium is, in fact, a “solution” to the equations of physics. Anders, being a rather genius-level thinker with a coherent worldview, is perhaps a solution of this sort in this light. Meaning that, in time, more qualia soups and mind-designs will arrive at his attractor basin in the pursuit of truth and beauty. Anders is, therefore, bound to “re-occur” in the field sooner or later. Like in The Good Place, where every heaven and hell station has its “Janet” (really an attractor more than a specific identity), we could find that perhaps across the full multiverse, every level of reality has its Anders (and Maggie to match!), providing coherent and far-ahead-of-their-time advice and words of encouragement to those pursuing the vector of Team Consciousness.
(7) Indexical Uncertainty: A recurring theme in the Dyad’s work is that of Indexical Uncertainty. Namely, the view that it is not in the present moment possible to determine with certainty “who you really are” (e.g. Descartes’ in the Advanced Incompetence video presented as dying “in a state of indexical uncertainty”). Indeed, the situation is even stranger and trippier than any of the above scenarios. Indexical uncertainty is a Gordian Knot that cannot be cut with our current tools. And in the most extreme scenario, it makes it impossible to rule out that you are Anders (or someone else)! You’re him having a wild dream, or a conscious simulation of the state of affairs post-death, in which your own lack of knowledge about your identity is necessary to carry out the simulation in a faithful way.
Taking stock: We wrote this in the hopes of kindling a tangible sense that Anders is still with us. Albeit some of these possibilities are admittedly far-fetched, as a whole they present a picture we cannot ignore. In time, we think we will realize that Anders’ impact in the world (or the simulation) is far larger than the YouTube video counts would suggest. His keen intelligence, sense of humor, and ability to identify “what really matters” is a real inspiration to me and those who knew him. The unfortunate circumstances of his passing away are also ultimately thematic: the terribleness of suffering cannot be ignored and their solutions further delayed. We have powerful research leads (cf. ibogaine for reversing tolerance to painkillers) and aligned individuals to push the envelope. We need to enthuse the world with the appropriate sense of urgency mixed with hope (and bliss to avoid burnout) that will finally allow us to “destroy hell” and bring paradise to all sentient beings.
May Anders live within us and through us! Ahoy!
We invite you to visit Ander’s memorial page on Lavendla, a Swedish platform for remembering loved ones. Here, you can share your own memories of Anders, view photographs, and read messages from others who were touched by his life.
[1] The Dyad is the term we affectionately refer to the ways in which Anders & Maggie were/are “more than the sum of the parts”. A reference to Integrated Information Theory where the whole can at times behave in irreducible ways, as a kind of top-down causation? Yes, in part. But the original reference came from John and Antonietta Lilly’s book “The Dyadic Cyclone” in which they advance the idea that when two persons who are in love are sufficiently synchronized with each other, a new organism (or “holon”) arises that incorporates both at once.
[2] Anders & Maggie introduce themselves as a Dyad, the power-couple, in very humble ways. In a 2020 email making themselves known to David Pearce after an online meeting we had with the QRI community, they wrote: “We weren’t able to contribute much to the discussion ourselves since we are only this average Swedish soon to be retired couple with ordinary jobs in university administration, e-learning and marketing. We are pretty much at square one regarding ethics, philosophy, mathematics, computer science, neurology, psychiatry and so on. Even our English is far from what it ought to be, though it is slightly better than our Icelandic. But we do love the QRI for their great potential to make a better future more likely.” [Note the gross omission of the Oxford comma – they clearly really don’t know any English, do they? *smiles*]. Or, on another occasion, “Hello, again. The semi-zombies of QRI Sweden here.” The tongue-in-cheek introductions went on and on. But don’t be deceived – the Dyad is anything but ordinary.
I recently had the pleasure to talk to Justin Riddle*, who is one of the few people in academia who takes quantum theories of consciousness seriously while also doing formal neuroscience research (see his publications, which include woks on transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) for a number of conditions, EEG analysis for decision making, reward, and cognition, as well as concept work on the connection between fractals and consciousness).
I first met him at Toward a Science of Consciousness in Tuscon in 2016 (see my writeup about that event, which I attended with David Pearce). About a year ago I noticed that he started uploading videos about quantum theories of consciousness, which I happily watched while going on long walks. Just a few months ago, we both participated in a documentary about consciousness (more on that later!) and had the chance to sit down and record a video together. He edited our long and wide-ranging discussion into a friendly and consumable format by adding explainers and visual aids along the way. I particularly appreciate his description of “mathematical fictionalism” at 21:30 (cf. Mathematics as the Study of Patterns of Qualia).
We hope you enjoy it!
* Thanks to David Field for catalyzing this meeting 🙂
Video Description:
In episode 32 of the quantum consciousness series, Justin Riddle interviews Andres Gomez-Emilsson, the director of research at the Qualia Research Institute. Andres is passionate about understanding qualia, which is the feeling and quality of subjective experience. In this interview, we discuss many of Andres’ theories: mathematical fictionalism, models of valence, neural annealing as it pertains to psychedelic therapy, and antitolerance medications to reduce suffering.
First up, we discuss the nature of qualia and whether or not there can be a universal mathematical description of subjective experience. Andres posits that the experience of having a thought should not be confused with the thought itself. Therefore, any attempt at mathematical description will be wrapped up within the experience of the person suggesting the mathematics. As he states, mathematics is as real as the Lord of the Rings, a great story that we can tell, but not to be confused with reality itself. Next up, we discuss the symmetry theory of valence [proposed by Michael Johnson in Principia Qualia] which postulates that the structure of experience determines how good or bad an experience feels (such as the imagination of certain geometric patterns imbuing a sense of well-being whereas other patterns being anxiogenic). The geometric patterns that lead to positive valence (positive emotional experiences) are those shapes recognized as “sacred geometry”. However, Andres cautions that because these “sacred” geometric shapes generate well-being, people have used this reproducible experience to peddle New Age metaphysics. We should be cautious of the ability to generate positive experience as it can be used to manipulate people into buying into particular belief systems. Third, we discuss recent findings that single dose psilocybin in a therapeutic context can produce a lasting reduction in symptoms of depression. Andres posits that this could be explained as a form of neural annealing (see also, and also). The mind “heats up” and breaks through discordant neural pathways and through neural plasticity during the psychedelic experience will allow for the formation of new neural pathways with higher resonant properties consistent with positive valence. This contributes to Andres’ overall ontological model of reality in which the universe is a unified field of experience that is pinched off into individuals. Here, he starts with an unbroken unity of all things that is topologically segmented into individuals. Finally, Andres is a devout hedonist with the long-term goal of reducing suffering. His group at the Qualia Research Institute is investigating medications that reduce adaptation to molecules over long-term use. Go check out Andres’ YouTube channel and the Qualia Research Institute website!
~~~ Timestamps ~~~
0:00 Introduction to the Qualia Research Institute
The quote above comes from a lecture Richard Feynman gave in which he talks about the challenges and opportunities of studying and interacting with the world at a very small scale. Among other things, he touches upon how gaining access to e.g. a good-enough electron microscopes would allow us to answer long-standing questions in biology by just looking at the thing (cf. Seeing Cell Division Like Never Before). Once you start to directly engage with the phenomenon at a high-enough resolution, tackling these questions at the theoretical level would turn out, in retrospect, to be idle arm chair speculation.
I think that we can make the case that philosophy of ethics at the moment might be doing something like this. In other words, it speculates about the nature of value at a theoretical level without engaging with the phenomenon of value at a high resolution. Utilitarianism (whether classical or negative), at least as it is usually formulated, may turn out to have background assumptions about the nature of consciousness, personal identity, and valence that a close examination would show to be false (or at least very incomplete). Many criticisms of wireheading, for instance, seem to conflate pleasure and reward (more on this soon), and yet we now know that these are quite different. Likewise, the repugnant conclusion or the question between total vs. mean utilitarianism are usually discussed using implicit background assumptions about the nature of valence and personal identity. This must stop. We have to look at the thing!
Without further ado, here are some of the key ways in which an enriched understanding of consciousness can inform our ethical theories:
Mixed Valence
One ubiquitous phenomenon that I find is largely neglected in discussions about utilitarianism is that of mixed valence states. Not only is it the case that there are many flavors of pleasure and pain, but it is also the case that most states of consciousness blend both pleasurable and painful sensations in complex ways.
In Principia Qualia (Michael Johnson) the valence triangle was introduced. This describes the valence of a state of consciousness in terms of its loadings on the three dimensions of negative, positive, and neutral valence. This idea was extended in Quantifying Bliss, which further enriched it by adding a spectral component to each of these dimensions. Let’s work with this valence triangle to reason about mixed valence.
In order to illustrate the relevance of mixed valence states we can see how it influences policies within the context of negative utilitarianism. Let us say that we agree that there is a ground truth to the total amount of pain and pleasure a system produces. A naïve conception of negative utilitarianism could then be “we should minimize pain”. But pain that exists within an experience that also contains pleasure may matter a lot less than pain that exists in an experience without pleasure that “balances it out”!
The naïve conception, would thus, not be able to distinguish between the following two scenarios. In Scenario A we have two persons, one suffering from both an intense headache and an intense stomach ache and the other enjoying both a very pleasant sensation in the head and a very pleasant sensation in the stomach. In Scenario B, we switch it up: one person experiences an intense headache while also a very pleasant sensation in the stomach, and the other way around for the other person.
But if you have ever experienced a very pleasant sensation arise in the midst of an otherwise unpleasant experience you will know how much of a difference it makes. Such a pleasant sensation does not need to directly blunt the painful sensation; the mere presence of enough pleasure makes the overall nature of the experience far more tolerable. How and why this happens is still, of course, a mystery (in a future post we shall share our speculations) but it seems to be an empirical fact. This can have extraordinary implications, where for example a sufficiently advanced meditator might be able to dilute very painful sensations with enough equanimity (itself a high-valence state) or by e.g. generating jhanic sensations (see below). Have you ever seen this discussed in an academic journal on ethics? I didn’t think so.
We don’t need to invoke such fancy scenarios to see the reality and importance of mixed valence states. The canonical example that I use to illustrate this phenomenon is where: you just broke up with someone (-), are at a concert enjoying really good music (+), are coming up on weed and alcohol (+), but also need to pee really bad (-). We’ve all been there, haven’t we? If you get sufficiently absorbed into the cathartic pleasure of the music and the drugs, the negative feelings temporarily recede into the background and thus might tilt the experience towards the net positive for a while.
Once you consider the reality of mixed valence states, there is a veritable Cambrian Explosion of possible variants of utilitarianism. For example, if you do accept that pleasure can somehow dilute pain within a given moment of experience, then you could posit that there is a “line of hedonic zero” on the valence triangle and anything on one side of it is net positive:
A version of negative utilitarianism we could call within-subject-aggregated-valence negative utilitarianism recognizes any experience in the “Net Positive” region to be perfectly acceptable even though it contains painful sensations.
Alternatively, another version we may call strict negative valence utilitarianism might say that pain, whether or not it is found within an experience with a lot of pleasure, is still nonetheless unacceptable. Here, however, we may still have a lot of room for a civilization animated by information-sensitive gradients of bliss: we can use the gradients that have a mixture of positive and neutral Vedanā for information signaling:
Yet another view, perhaps called within-subject-majoritarian negative valence utilitarianism might say that what makes an experience worth-living and unproblematic is for it to be at least 50% pleasant, regardless of the composition of the other 50%:
Now, I am not going to adjudicate between these views today. All I am pointing for the time being is that actually engaging with the phenomenon at hand (i.e. how valence manifests in reality) radically enriches our conceptions, and allows us to notice that most of ethics has an impoverished understanding of the phenomenon it comments on. We can change that.
Logarithmic Scales
As argued in Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain (summary) we think that there is a wide range of evidence that suggests that the intensity of both pleasure and pain follows a long-tail distribution. I am not going to repeat the arguments here, since I’ve written and presented about them extensively already. I will merely mention that I am deeply suspicious of the intellectual seriousness of any ethicist who somehow fails to notice the enormous moral significance of the following states of consciousness, among others:
On the positive side:
Temporal lobe epilepsy
MDMA
Jhanas
Good high-dose 5-MeO-DMT trip
On the negative side:
Cluster Headaches
Kidney Stones
Bad high-dose 5-MeO-DMT trip
Valence and Self-Models
One of the claims of QRI is that every experience, no matter how outlandish and unlike our normal everyday human experience, has valence characteristics. An analogy can be made with the notion of physical temperature: every physical object has a temperature, no matter what it is made out of or what its shape is.
Most human experiences have a lot of shared structure, with things like a central “phenomenal self” that works as an organizing principle for arranging sensations. Many meditators and psychedelic enthusiasts point out that suffering seems to have something to do with our sense of self. That feelings matter only to the extent that they are happening to someone. But experiences without a phenomenal self (or with radically altered phenomenal selves) will nonetheless still have valence characteristics. Ego deaths can be dysphoric or euphoric.
We argue that what matter is actually the overall structure of the experience (cf. valence structuralism). It just so happens that above a certain level of valence, the phenomenal self starts to become an impediment to further bliss. Ultra-pleasant experiences, thus, tend to be selfless! But this does not make them worthless. On the contrary, their intrinsic worth, coming from their positive valence, can go through the roof.
That said, reporting the valence of very exotic experiences can be remarkably difficult. This doesn’t mean that we should give up; rather, we ought to develop new methods, vocabulary, and culture to be able to place these experiences on the same moral footing as our normal everyday life.
For example, the so-called “toroidal state” (on DMT) or during a meditative cessation can have profound valence effects, to the point of making you reconsider the very nature and scope of what matters.
Regardless of the way a specific door manifests, it reveals something completely extraordinary about the relationship between “the watcher” and “the watched” that it would take a very warped, non-Euclidean view of the universe to explain, though I will try shortly. One way or another, these fleeting experiences cannot easily be explained in terms of our normal, four-dimensional experience of space-time, or within our ordinary subject/object experience. […] When the no-self door predominates with suffering as its second aspect, then a very strange thing happens. There may be an image on one side staring back, but even if there isn’t, the universe becomes a toroid (doughnut-shaped), or occasionally a sphere, and the image and this side of the toroid switch places as the toroid universe spins. It may spin sideways (horizontally), or it may spin vertically (like head over heels), and may also feel like a hood of darkness suddenly being pulled over our heads as the whole thing synchronizes and disappears, or like everything twisting out of existence. The rarest no-self/suffering variant is hard to describe, and involves reality becoming like a doughnut whose whole outer edge rotates inwards such as to trade places with its inner edge (the edge that made the hole in the middle) that rotates to the outer edge position, and when they trade places reality vanishes. The spinning includes the whole background of space in all directions. Fruition occurs when the two have switched places and the whole thing vanishes.
I recommend reading the whole chapter for what I consider to be some ultra-trippy phenomenology of surprising ethical relevance (see also: No-Self vs. True Self).
In summary: this all indicates that states of consciousness have valence characteristics independently of the presence, absence, shape, or dynamic of a phenomenal self within them. If your ethicist isn’t considering the moral worth of Nirvana… perhaps consider switching to one who does.
Valence and Personal Identity
The solution to the phenomenal binding problem has implications for both personal identity and ethics. If, as I posit, each moment of experience is in fact a topological pocket in the fields of physics, then Closed Individualism would seem to be ruled out. Meaning, the standard conception of identity where you start existing when you are born and stop existing when you die would turn out to be a strange evolutionarily adaptive fiction. What really exists is a gigantic field of consciousness subdivided into countless topological pockets. Empty Individualism (“you are just a moment of experience”) and Open Individualism (“we are all the same universal consciousness”) would both be consistent with the facts, and it might be impossible to decide between them. Yet, I argue that the vast majority of ethical theories have as an implicit background assumption Closed Individualism. So realizing that it is false has major implications.
In particular, if we take the Empty Individualist perspective, it might be easier to defend negative utilitarianism: since each snapshot of experience is a completely separate being, you simply cannot “make it up” to someone who is currently suffering by giving him/her enough happiness in the future. Simply put, that suffering will never be redeemed.
Alternatively, if we take the Open Individualist perspective, we now might have actual grounds to decide between, say, average vs. total utilitarianism. Ultimately, you will be forced to experience everyone and everything. This line of reasoning becomes particularly interesting if you also take seriously something like Feynman and Wheeler’s One-electron Universe. Here we might possibly even objectively determine the moral worth of an experience in terms of “how long the one electron stays trapped inside it”. An experience with a huge spatial breadth and one with enormous temporal depth may be equivalent according to this metric: they’re just structured differently (cf. Pseudo-Time Arrow). In this account, you are bouncing backwards and forwards in time interfering with yourself forever. The multiverse is the structure emergent from this pattern of self-interference, and it is eternal and immutable in a certain sense. Relative to a small experience, a large experience would be one that keeps the one electron trapped for longer. Thus, there would be a strong case to care more about bigger and brighter experiences: you’ll be there for ages!
If indeed you are bouncing backwards and forwards forever in this structure, then perhaps average utilitarianism can be defended. In brief, since you are always somewhere, what matters is not how large the structure is, but the shape of its distribution of states.
Valence Structuralism
Finally, if you pay attention to the nature of highly valenced states of consciousness you will notice that they have structural features. The Symmetry Theory of Valence (overview; CDNS) can be experientially verified for oneself by introspecting on the structural features of one’s experience when enjoying intense bliss or enduring intense suffering. Rob Burbea’s meditation instructions are very well worth reading to get a sense of what I’m talking about. This would seem to matter a lot when it comes e.g. deciding what kind of artificial sentient minds we might want to create. Much more on this in the future.
Putting It All together
High-dose DMT experiences are an excellent example of the sort of state of consciousness that is part of reality, is generally not taken seriously in philosophy (despite its enormous significance), and has many elements that challenge preconceptions about pleasure and pain and inform our understanding of valence. These experiences:
For a theory of physics to be true it needs to be able to explain physical phenomena outside of room temperature. Likewise, for an ethical theory to be in any way true, it ought to be able to account for states of consciousness outside of the range of normal human everyday life experience. DMT states, among others, are examples of non-room-temperature states of consciousness that you can use to test if your theory of ethics actually generalizes. How do you make sense of experiences that have more qualia, have mixed valence, have exotic phenomenal selves, and have valence effects up there in the logarithmic scale? That’s what we need to answer if we are serious about ethics.
There is a problem in philosophy of backwards rationalisation, where people feel intuitive pulls towards certain conclusions, and then try to justify why their intuition is correct. We can say this is putting the cart before the horse. If we are to philosophize well, we shouldn’t start with the conclusion. However, the pull to side with your intuitions is so incredibly crucial to decision-making that it basically can’t be ignored. In fact, at the heart of trying to know anything fundamentally hinges on a feeling quality of ‘this seems/feels right’ in relation to a proposition.
Now, this isn’t to say that all intuitions don’t have truth value, it’s just that we need to be subjectively sensitive to when we are totally being led by a feeling (which I think in many cases some philosophers aren’t aware). At the end of the day, we go off of whether an idea sits right with us at some particular level(s) of the mind, and all the justificatory attempts in favor of this idea serve to shift that feeling in us one way or the other.
Leading on to the discussion of identity: in a lot of thought experiments and attempts to understand where identity starts and stops we find an appeal to intuition. This is often done by conjuring up convoluted scenarios of teletransportation machines, or brain transplants, or Men-In-Black-style memory wipes and then reflecting on whether we feel that identity stayed the same or not. A good way to press people’s institutions is to get them to consider suffering, as personal identity is the great motivator of avoiding suffering (no self = no problem, as they say). Depending on where and at what time suffering is endured by which collection of atoms gets people to consider really fast and more confidently, say, where they think the bounds of identity lie.
Along with the epistemological problems of resting an argument on intuition or ‘gut feeling’ mentioned above, intuitions differ not just from person to person, but from moment to moment (in the same person). And if you haven’t become privy to how your intuitions can change, you may not question the truth value of the signal they are transmitting. So, I write this to highlight the problems of trying to solve identity issues by appealing to a felt-sense of where it lies.
Two Ways of Talking About the Self
Now I see an obvious split in how to approach this topic:
(1) We can talk about identity as a raw experience – what in the experience space do I feel numerically identical to (one and the same as) – and in Buddhistic fashion forgo metaphysical claims here after.
(2) Try to extrapolate beyond immediate experience and argue for a position of what the self is or how identity functions in a metaphysical sense. I call (2) the conceptual self as it is about the content within concepts you believe refers to you.
To make this distinction clear I’ll give an example of a potential answer to (1) and then to (2). If asked: “What am I?” along the lines of (1) one may answer: “I feel like I am my thoughts.” – thoughts arise in experience and there is a fused impression of ‘me-ness’ to those thoughts. While (2) is concerned about the content of those thoughts and if asked: “What am I?” one may answer and even fervently believe: “I am a brain.” However, they don’t have any direct experience of being a brain – it is an extrapolation of ideas beyond direct phenomenological perception.
Sorry for all the set up! This is my framing and to give you the best response I needed to spell this out. Now, let me answer personally what I believe identity is in terms of (1) and then (2). However, (2) is informed by (1), and (1) is made sense of by (2); so although the distinction is very useful, like all separations, their boundaries seem to always breakdown – that there is a hint about my metaphysical beliefs.
Phenomenological Senses of Identity
For me, this has changed throughout the years as I’ve meditated more and more. I have shared these images with you before and they represent the transition of intuitions of personal identity throughout my journey.
They seem to match up quite nicely with how Frank Yang lays out his stages. Depending on which stage someone is in, we hear different metaphysical explanations of identity. (This is where (1) gets easily conflated with (2)).
How I’ve seen Frank spell out his stages (I realize neither of us came up with these on our own):
When it comes to identifying with awareness (the second picture/stage) this is when you hear talk of the sort of there being one universal consciousness and that’s our true nature. When I was identifying with awareness, I could suddenly relate to what people meant by ‘we are all one universal consciousness’. However, I got the sense that people were failing to differentiate between something being numerically identical and qualitatively identical. When you become ‘aware of awareness’ there is a sense that this is a pristine dimension and is not personal. It doesn’t seem to belong to the notion of Roger (as it is perceived causally before the very idea of Roger), nor is it trademarked by Roger’s beliefs or memories. There is an insight that this perfectly equanimous layer of being is part of everyone’s experience, they just don’t see it. Yet it couldn’t be ruled out whether we are all in touch with the same one pure light of consciousness, or if each sentient organism has its own and our consciousnesses (plural) were just qualitatively the same. I think people often miss this distinction.
Stage 2 does not obviously lead to open individualism yet. There is still a sense of the duality between the radiant awareness and everything else to be aware of.
Although, I think that anyone (even those without emptiness insights) could be talked into believing closed, open and empty individualism at a conceptual level, this doesn’t mean their phenomenological experience of identity would change, or would their instinctive, non-inquisitive gut-intuition on the subject.
I would hypothesize that those who have no insight into the 3 characteristic are intuitively most swayed by closed individualism. And those who have sufficient enough insight into impermanence (but not no-self) may intuitively side with empty individualism. And then with a deep enough insight into no-self, open individualism becomes a no-brainer.
Experiencing God (and a message to Leo)
At stage 3 is when open individualism is most likely to begin to intuitively feel right. This is also when talks of being God come out of people’s mouths and, as in terms of (1), they phenomenologically perceive the sense of ‘I’ in everything they experience, and they (2) conceptually infer there is just one thing, call it ‘God’. God is everything. I am everything. Because the understanding of moving from (1) to (2) (from experience to conjecture) is often lost on people, all kinds of wacky metaphysical beliefs come about – supposedly self-validating by higher consciousness or direct cosmic download.
While on stage 3, if you inject some metta into your experience space, you come to see what people mean when they say: “God is everywhere and all loving” or even: “God is love”. Having the feeling of being everything in your experience is like you don’t feel separate from anything, thus there is a deep intimacy with the world which construes love. You feel like you are the body, the thoughts, the emotions, the trees, the hills on the horizon, the air in between all of it, the sky and the awareness field which contains all these things. However, going from ‘the experience of feeling identical to everything you are aware of’ to ‘I am everything (even that which I’m not currently aware of) and therefore I am God/the universe’ requires an unfounded leap – which I admittedly made at some point.
I remember an incredibly stark moment I had when I was in stage 3, where being ‘God’ felt like the most real thing (I can sympathise a lot with where Leo Gura is coming from – though I think he’s lacking some phenomenological discernment). Because at stage 3 the sense of ’I’ is so prevalent, due to it being perceived everywhere in experience, I was investigating this quality a great deal. I was trying to distil the sense of ‘I’ down to its rawest form. “Yes, I feel identical to the trees and the sky and other people, but what is that common element that can be found in all these things which I call ‘I’?” After whittling away all the other unnecessary phenomenological baggage piled onto this ‘I’, I arrived at a clear perception of ‘I’ in its rawest form. The ‘I’ I call the epistemic agent, the pure sense of ‘a knower of experience’.
It became obvious that once the epistemic agent was singled out in experience that this perception of ‘I’ can only manifest in one way. What I mean by this is unlike with milk where the formula can be tainted slightly and result in versions of milk with slightly different colors, or tastes, or smells and yet they are all still milk, it is impossible for the epistemic agent to have a slightly different perceptual ‘flavor’ to it other than it does. This is because the qualia recipe only consists of one ingredient and if that’s missing or different, then it’s not the epistemic agent (the rawest sense of ‘I am’). Once I clocked this, I realized that all iterations of ‘I’ wherever and whenever, in all beings at all times, experience the sense of ‘I am’ exactly the same way. Then, and I remember this moment so clearly, it hit me: if God or the universe is self-aware – which it is just by dint of me being of the universe and self-aware – and has an experience of ‘I-ness’ then my experience of ‘I-ness’ in this relative body is the same as God’s and through a sharing of experience there is a direct link and so… ”Oh my god, I am God!”
(I am not suggesting that this line of reasoning is sound. It was simply the series of steps I went through which brought upon this profound experience).
Again, the numerically versus qualitatively identical distinction could be parsed, however there is a way to get around this, for when you remove the sense of time and space from the equation then that difference collapses. To say that something is qualitatively identical to something else, but not numerically identical doesn’t make sense if two things can’t be differentiated by existing in separate moments of time or space. So in my “Oh my god, I am God!” epiphany, the sense of time and space had been shunned from attention and numerical identity was presumed.
I can imagine that someone has this epiphany moment as I did, but then when they return to a more ‘timey/spacey’ existence they retain credence in the belief that they are God and not just a single, distinct instance of experience of ‘I’ (which would be more of an empty individualist thought). They do this because they are basing their beliefs off of a very profound mind moment, even if the majority of their waking hours don’t suggest the same message.
If I could tell Leo Gura one thing it would be this: “Profundity does not equate to truth.” Just because something felt so real and epic, does not mean that experience is giving you the most accurate representation of greater reality. Truth be told at stage 3 I didn’t have anywhere near the attentional clarity, precision of view, and metacognitive abilities that came later; and so while I was having all these profound experiences I was not totally clued into the subtle ways I was manipulating my experience and was biased to certain perspectives, while overlooking certain things that became clearer to me later on.
Self, Not-self, and Neither Self nor Not-self
When it comes to personal identity, I want to distinguish three things the mind can do here:
It can project a sense of self onto parts of experience – “I feel like I am this chair.” – said the man on salvia.
It can project a sense of not-self onto parts of experience – “I don’t feel identical to that person over there.” – said sober Joe. I want to emphasize here that I don’t mean there is just a lack of ‘feeling’ associated with something, but rather there is an actual new ‘feeling’ of not identifying with something.
Stage 4 (my 4th picture) was living a life with the constant signal of ‘not me’ being coupled with everything I pointed my attention to.
It can stop projecting any sense of self and not-self – “I neither feel like I am everything, nor I’m not.” said Roger. Here, I mean the lack of projecting a sense of self and even a sense of not-self.
To go into a little more detail on what is meant by 3: ‘Neither self, nor not self’… essentially there is just no transmission of data on this subject. No reading. When asked “What are you?” it’s like the question doesn’t even compute. Before, there were qualia indicators to be able to judge what is self and what is not-self. And now it’s like the mind pulls a blank. It is not because the answer is obvious that ‘I am everything’, or ‘I am nothing’. It’s almost a bit like asking a person who is blind from birth “Do you just see blackness?” – it can be really hard for sight-abled-people to get their head around the fact that some blind people don’t see anything at all (and what that really means). 4th path is akin to becoming blind to identity in a way. Although, I wasn’t identity blind from birth, memory of the qualia of ‘me-ness’ and ‘not me-ness’ is incredibly faded.*
*There is subtle nuance to get into with retaining semblances of individuality just to be able to function in the world.
The Ship of Theseus, Threshold Emptiness Insight and Losing the Ability to Buy into Nouns
At a certain point, once enough insight into emptiness was established, the ability to seriously believe in separate entities became near impossible. I remember with my beginner’s mind, closed individualism was the default position. And when nouns were comprehended, they were firmly believed to be distinct, real partitions in reality. “The world is made of things that are tables and things that are not.” (As if a table is an actual thing, lol). However, now I can never fully think that a table is anything more than a mind-made construct. It is perceived as so porous, airy, hollow…. empty. And this applies to all nouns: ‘atoms’, ‘being’ ‘non-being’, ‘life’, ‘death’, ‘mind’ and including the idea of ‘The Now’ (I’ll get into that later).
One time in philosophy class we were going over the ‘paradox’ of The Ship of Theseus. People in my class had all kinds of differing intuition. Some said, ‘as soon as over 50% of the ship parts have been replaced then it’s a new/different ship’. Some said, ‘as soon as you replace one part of the ship it’s a new/different ship’. And others said, ‘as soon as one atom changes it’s a new/different ship’. They were going back and forth arguing about identity, which was the point of the class. And meanwhile the whole time I was thinking there is no ship of Theseus to begin with, there never was, it’s not a thing. And so there is no paradox. There is no conundrum to solve.
I had been reading ‘The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain’ at the time, and it occurred to me during the class that what I was witnessing were people with all very different brain chemistries and either left or right hemisphere biases, and this is what is leading them to different conclusions (me not being an exception) – the philosophical quibbling had little to do with it. (This is not to resort to any postmodernist conclusions. I do think some positions contain more truth signal than others.)
4th Path Putting the Nail in the Coffin for Empty Individualism?
There is no ‘now’, as there is not enough time for even a single isolated self to form. At 4th path insight into emptiness is so stark that you realise that to conceive of ‘The Now’ as a thing is wrong view. I used to experience things as arising and then a moment later passing; as manifesting and then slightly there after defabricating. But now I can see how phenomena are already disappearing the moment they are appearing. This leads to kinds of visions of super-positions – simultaneous 1 and 0. With such perception a ‘now’ as a moment can’t even consolidate – there truly is no ground for things to rest on.
Finally (2) My Conceptual Beliefs About Identity! (Prepare to be disappointed)
Keeping in mind what I said about ‘neither self nor not self’, when the intuition of personal identity is so lacking the question of ‘What is me and what is not me?’ just becomes ‘What does it mean for something to be its own individual entity?’ or even more simply ‘What exists?’. Does there exist one thing or more than one thing? And does it even make sense to consider there being ‘things’ (nouns) at all?
(Take this next part as me applying a cosmic lens).
So, is there more than one thing? Engaging my scrupulous, philosophical, inquisitive mind, I can’t conceive of how there being more than one thing would be meaningful. But I don’t even really believe in things at all (if ‘thing’ is taken as a noun), so one thing isn’t quite getting at it either. There is something and it seems to be something so magical that it defies categorical comprehension. But the fact that there is change suggests this is not unitary, yet nor do I wish to say it is legion. Not noun, but verb? A process? But to where and how?
Heidegger often wrote in double negatives; I believe because when you construe something in the negative you bring to mind both the thing and its negative simultaneously. There is a greater potential for the mind to grasp a seeming paradox, but the conceptual mind can never fully do it, it can only approximate. Kierkegaard tried as he put it: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.” But words can only serve to point to something outside of their grasp.
This is why:
“The Toa that can be named is not the eternal Toa”
However, when I stop thinking (disengage the conceptual mind) and simply be, I get an intuitive sense of a super-position. Simultaneously, neither one nor many. Neither now nor not now. Neither existing nor not existing. Neither conscious nor not conscious. And this is apprehended in a way that is not confusing or jarring, but as the most sensible stance.
Still I have a sceptic bone in my body, and I am always open to being schooled.
Halfway In, Halfway Out The Great Door of Being
Imagine a great conundrum that people have been debating over for centuries. “If a man is stepping through his front door and he has one foot in his house and one foot out of his house and his body is exactly in the middle, is he inside or outside?” People can’t seem to agree. Some say he is clearly inside because he is already under the door frame. Others say, he is still outside because he hasn’t fully entered his house yet. People squabble about whether it matters if he is coming or going. The real question is when he is exactly 50% in and exactly 50% out what is he? Inside or outside? The reason people can’t come down on a solid answer is because whenever they find someone passing through their front door the moment they go to make a judgement they miss that 50/50 moment and either witness him too early or too late at 60/40 or 40/60 in and out. In which case, they either decide he was definitely inside or definitely outside, accordingly. You have been trying to solve this issue too and feel like you have come close. One time you saw a guy in the act at 51/49 in and out. And then another time you saw a man who was 49/51 in and out. But no one ever is precise enough to make their judgement when he is exactly 50/50 in and out. Because true 50% in and 50% out hasn’t been witnessed, so people can only speculate that ‘well if we were to catch a man who was exactly at 50/50 in and out of his front door, we would conclude that maybe he was BOTH inside and outside.’
One day, it just so happens you see a man coming home from work. He’s approaching the front door, keys in hand. You’ve been practicing for this moment your whole life. Finally, are you going to be able to solve this great conundrum? He unlocks the door. He opens it. He steps through. And that was it! You witnessed it. You clearly clocked the 50/50 moment.
“I saw it! I saw it!” you yell. Bystanders hear your cries and come up to you.
“What did you see?” they ask.
“I saw the precise moment he was exactly 50% in and 50% out!”
“Well…” they say “what was he, inside or outside then?”
And you respond “No”.
“Huh? Oh, you mean he was both inside and outside?”
“No” you say again.
“I don’t get it.” respond the bystanders. And in fact, you don’t even really get what you mean, because it doesn’t quite make sense to you either and yet it was as clear as day.
“He wasn’t inside or outside, because he simply vanished.”
This is my 2022 review of Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering (2019; QRI link; forum link), written for the EA ForumFirst Decade Review; permalink of the review; read all reviews and vote for submissions here.
I would like to suggest that Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain (“Log Scales” from here on out) presents a novel, meaningful, and non-trivial contribution to the field of Effective Altruism. It is novel because even though the terribleness of extreme suffering has been discussedmultipletimesbefore, such discussions have not presented a method or conceptual scheme with which to compare extreme suffering relative to less extreme varieties. It is meaningful because it articulates the essence of an intuition of an aspect of life that deeply matters to most people, even if they cannot easily put it into words. And it is non-trivial because the inference that pain (and pleasure) scales are better understood as logarithmic in nature does require one to consider the problem from multiple points of view at once that are rarely, if ever, brought up together (e.g. combining empirical deference graphs, descriptions of pain scales by their creators, latent-trait analysis, neural recordings, and psychophysics).
Fundamentally, we could characterize this article as a conceptual reframe that changes how one assesses magnitudes of suffering in the world. To really grasp the significance of this reframe, let’s look back into how Effective Altruism itself was an incredibly powerful conceptual reframe that did something similar. In particular, a core insight that establishes the raison d’etre of Effective Altruism is that the good that you can do in the world with a given set of resources varies enormously depending on how you choose to allocate it: by most criteria that you may choose (whether it’s QALYs or people saved from homelessness), the cost-effectiveness of causes seem to follow much more closely (at least qualitatively) a long-tail rather than a normal distribution (see: Which world problems are the most pressing to solve? by Benjamin Todd; the long-tail on the left below). In turn, this strongly suggests that researching carefully how to invest one’s altruistic efforts is likely to pay off in very large ways: choosing a random charity versus a top 1% charity will lead to benefits whose scale differs by orders of magnitude.
Log Scales suggests that pain and pleasure themselves follow a long-tail distribution. In what way, exactly? Well, to a first approximation, across the entire board! The article (and perhaps more eloquently the subsequent video presentation at the NYC EA Meetup on the same topic) argues that when it comes to the distribution of the intensity of hedonic states, we are likely to find long-tails almost independently of the way in which we choose to slice or dice the data. This is analogous to, for example, how all of the following quantities follow long-tail distributions: avalanches per country, avalanches per mountain, amount of snow in mountains, number of avalanche-producing mountains per country, size of avalanches, number of avalanches per day, etc. Likewise, in the case of the distribution of pain, the arguments presented suggest we will find that all of the following distributions are long-tails: average pain level per medical condition, number of intensely painful episodes per person per year, intensity of pain per painful episode, total pain per person during life, etc. Thus, that such a small percentage of cluster headache patients accounts for the majority of episodes per year would be expected (see: Cluster Headache Frequency Follows a Long-Tail Distribution; the long-tail on the right above), and along with it, the intensity of such episodes themselves would likely follow a long-tail distribution.
This would all be natural, indeed, if we consider neurological phenomena such as pain to be akin to weather phenomena. Log Scales allows us to conceptualize the state of a nervous system and what it gives rise to as akin to how various weather conditions give rise to natural disasters: a number of factors multiply each other resulting in relatively rare, but surprisingly powerful, black swan events. Nervous systems such as those of people suffering from CRPS, fibromyalgia, and cluster headaches are like the Swiss Alps of neurological weather conditions… uniquely suited for ridiculously large avalanches of suffering.
Log Scales are not just of academic interest. In the context of Effective Altruism, they are a powerful generator for identifying new important, neglected, and tractable cause areas to focus on. For instance, DMT for cluster headaches, microdose ibogaine for augmentation of painkillers in sufferers of chronic pain, and chanca piedra for kidney stones (writeup in progress) are all what we believe to be highly promising interventions (of the significant, neglected, and tractable variety) that might arguably reduce suffering in enormous ways and that would not have been highlighted as EA-worthy were it not for Log Scales. (See also: Get-Out-Of-Hell-Free Necklace). On a personal note, I’ve received numerous thank you notes by sufferers of extreme pain for this research. But the work has barely begun: with Log Scales as a lens, we are poised to tackle the world’s reserves of suffering with laser-focus, assured in the knowledge that preventing a small fraction of all painful conditions is all that we need to abolish the bulk of experiential suffering.
But does Log Scales make accurate claims? Does it carve reality at the joints? How do we know?
The core arguments presented were based on (a) the characteristic distribution of neural activity, (b) phenomenological accounts of extreme pleasure and pain, (c) the way in which the creators of pain scales have explicitly described their meaning, and (d) the results of a statistical analysis of a pilot study we conducted where people ranked, rated, and assigned relative proportions to their most extreme experiences. We further framed this in terms of comparing qualitative predictions from what we called the Normal World vs. Lognormal World. In particular, we stated that: “If we lived in the ‘Lognormal World’, we would expect: (1) That people will typically say that their top #1 best/worst experience is not only a bit better/worse than their #2 experience, but a lot better/worse. Like, perhaps, even multiple times better/worse. (2) That there will be a long-tail in the number of appearances of different categories (i.e. that a large amount, such as 80%, of top experiences will belong to the same narrow set of categories, and that there will be many different kinds of experiences capturing the remaining 20%). And (3) that for most pairs of experiences x and y, people who have had both instances of x and y, will usually agree about which one is better/worse. We call such a relationship a ‘deference’. More so, we would expect to see that deference, in general, will be transitive (a > b and b > c implying that a > c).” And then we went ahead and showed that the data was vastly more consistent with Lognormal World than Normal World. I think it holds up.
An additional argument that since has been effective at explaining the paradigm to newcomers has been in terms of exploring the very meaning of Just-Noticeable Differences (JNDs) in the context of the intensity of aspects of one’s experience. Indeed, for (b), the depths of intensity of experience simply make no sense if we were to take a “Just-Noticeable Pinprick” as the unit of measurement and expect a multiple of it to work as the measuring rod between pain levels in the 1-10 pain scale. The upper ends of pain are just so bright, so immensely violent, so as to leave lesser pains as mere rounding errors. But if on each step of a JND of pain intensity we multiply the feeling by a constant, sooner or later (as Zvi might put it) “the rice grains on the chessboard suddenly get fully out of hand” and we enter hellish territory (for a helpful visual aid of this concept: start at 6:06 of our talk at the 2020 EAGxVirtual Unconference on this topic).
From my point of view, we can now justifiably work under the assumption that the qualitative picture painted by Log Scales is roughly correct. It is the more precise quantitative analysis which is a work in progress that ought to be iterated over in the coming years. This will entail broadening the range of people interviewed, developing better techniques to precisely capture and parametrize phenomenology (e.g. see our tool to measure visual tracers), use more appropriate and principled statistical methods (e.g. see the comment in the original piece about the Bradley-Terry model and extreme value theory), experimental work in psychophysics labs, neuroimaging research of peak experiences, and the search for cost-effective pragmatic solutions to deal with the worst suffering. I believe that future research in this area will show conclusively the qualitative claims, and perhaps there will be strong consilience on the more precise quantitative claims (but in the absence of a true Qualiascope, the quantitative claims will continue to have a non-negligible margin of error).
Ok, you may say, but if I disagree about the importance of preventing pain, and I care more about e.g. human flourishing, why should I care about this? Here I would like to briefly address a key point that people in the EA sphere have raised in light of our work. The core complaint, if we choose to see it that way, is that one must be a valence utilitarian in order to care about this analysis. That only if you think of ethics in terms of classical Benthamite pain-minimization and pleasure-maximization should we be so keen on mapping the true distribution of valence across the globe.
But is that really so?
Three key points stand out: First, that imperfect metrics that are proxies for aspects of what you care about (even when not all that you care about) can nonetheless be important. Second, that if you cared a little about suffering already, then the post-hoc discovery that suffering is actually thatfreakingskewed really ought to be a major update. And third, there really are reasons other than valence maximization as a terminal goal to care about extreme suffering: intense suffering is antithetical to flourishing since it has long-term sequelae. More so, even if confined to non-utilitarian ethical theories, one can make the case that there is something especially terrible about letting one’s fellow humans (and non-humans) suffer so intensely without doing anything about it. And perhaps especially so if stopping such horrors turn out to be rather easy, as is indeed the case.
Let’s tackle these points each in turn.
(1) Perhaps here we should bring a simple analogy: GDP. Admittedly, there are very few conceptions of the good in which it makes sense for GDP to be the metric to maximize. But there are also few conceptions of the good where you should disregard it altogether. You can certainly be skeptical of the degree to which GDP captures all that is meaningful, but in nearly all views of economic flourishing, GDP will likely have a non-zero weight. Especially if we find that, e.g. some interventions we can do to the economy would cause a 99.9% reduction in a country’s GDP, one should probably not ignore that information (even if the value one assigns to GDP is relatively small compared to what other economists and social scientists assign it). Likewise for extreme suffering. There might be only a few conceptions of the good where that is the only thing we ought to work on. But avoiding hellish states is a rather universally desired state for oneself. Why not take it at least somewhat into account?
In truth, this is not something that classical questions in Effective Altruism pre-Log Scales couldn’t overcome either. For instance, as far as I am aware, in practice QALYs are used more as a guide than as an absolute; their value within EA comes from the fact that in practice interventions are orders of magnitude different when it comes to their cost-effectiveness when assessed with QALYs. So even though the vast majority of EAs are not QALY absolutists, the differences in QALYs saved between interventions are large enough that as an approximate guide, the metric still generates huge amounts of consilience.
(2) In turn, the post-hoc finding that hellish states are much, much worse than one would intuitively believe really should at least rebalance one’s priorities somewhat. Is there really no amount of suffering that would do so? Unless one has a utility function akin to a ReLu activation function, going far enough down into the depths of hell ought to count for something. And…
(3) Speaking candidly, fully articulating the true significance of this finding will take us to philosophically polemical territory: philosophy of personal identity where person-affecting views will see the situation quite differently than person-moment-affecting views, philosophy of mind where the ontological status of pleasure and pain might be questioned, and intricate questions that arise at the interface between the views of virtue ethicists, deontologists, negative and classical utilitarians. Of course a negative utilitarian who believes in Empty Individualism and Eternalism at the same time will likely be especially horrified by this information. But, with that said, I would suggest that there are good reasons to care about Log Scales no matter how antithetical one’s views are to philosophical hedonism.
In particular, I would argue that deontologists and virtue ethicists should still take note. The cultivation of virtue requires a minimum of wellbeing in order to maintain motivation to live. And perhaps deontologists might find extreme suffering particularly egregious from the point of view of “things so horrible that ought not to be”. Really, the people we interviewed for the cluster headache writeup told us that experiencing such levels of hellish suffering causes profound psychological transformations (e.g. one interviewee told us that experiencing the higher ends of pain in a cluster headache feels like a profound “spiritual violation” from which you may never recover – a feeling most certainly aggravated by the seeming indifference of people at large about their plight). Virtue ethicists and deontologists might as well recognize this cause area as work that is unconscionable not to perform, regardless of arguments based on the precise mathematical optimization of the prevention of negative valence.
And finally, in all seriousness, as the cognitive intelligentsia of the world begins to see clearly the nature of the distribution of pleasure and pain, we can expect there to be a big social benefit to being the one who destroys hell. Right now there isn’t a huge social reward to be obtained by working on this cause, but I predict this will change. And, pragmatically, it is sensible to present this cause in a motivating rather than depressing light: indeed, let’s give honor, glory, and endless admiration to whoever makes tangible progress in tearing hell down. And to all of the millionaires and billionaires reading this: this could be you! You could be the one who took on the mantle of preventing all future cluster headaches, established the field of anti-tolerance drugs for severe chronic pain, or got rid of kidney stones (and you did it before it was cool!). Let’s get to work!
The following is an exchange of text messages with Roger Thisdell, a 26 year old accomplished meditator. He claims that this year he finally broke through into abiding in what he describes as an entirely new category of experience that matches the descriptions of classical Buddhist 4th path.
1) Utter centerlessness: no watcher, no sense of a watcher, no subtle watcher, no possibility of a watcher. This is immediately obvious just as color is to a man with good eyesight as the old saying goes. Thus, anything and everything simply and obviously manifests just where they are. No phenomena observe any others and never did or could.
2) Utter agencylessness: meaning no agency, no sense of doing, no sense of doer, no sense that there could be any agent or doer, no way to find anything that seems to be in control at all. Whatever effort or intent or anything like that that arises does so naturally, causally, inevitably, as it always actually did. This is immediately obvious, though not always the forefront of attention.
3) No cycles change or stages or states or anything else like that do anything to this direct comprehension of simple truths at all.
4) There is no deepening in it to do. The understanding stands on its own and holds up over cycles, moods, years, etc and doesn’t change at all. I have nothing to add to my initial assessment of it from 9 years ago.
5) There is nothing subtle about it: anything and everything that arises exhibits these same qualities directly, clearly. When I was on the third path, particularly late in it, those things that didn’t exhibit these qualities were exceedingly subtle, and trying to find the gaps in the thing was exceedingly difficult and took years and many cycles. I had periods from weeks to months where it felt done and then some subtle exception would show up and I would realize I was wrong yet again, so this is natural and understandable, and if someone claims 4th as I define it here and later says they got it wrong, have sympathy for them, as this territory is not easy and can easily fool people, as it did me many, many times over about 5 years or so. However, 4th, as I term it, ended that and 9 years later that same thing holds, which is a very long time in this business.
There are other aspects that may be of value to discuss at some other time, but those are a great place to start for those who wish to claim this. If you truly have those, then perhaps we can talk about a few other points that are less central and essential.
[Links added to aid reader’s comprehension – lightly edited for clarity]
In the beginning… Roger joined a private group where we discuss consciousness and started to get familiar with the vocabulary of the Qualia Research Institute (e.g. discussing meditation in terms of valence). He then posted this video, which caught my attention:
Where he claims that “Pleasure as a positive, as an actual added experience, does not exist. It certainly does not exist how a lot of us think it does … [whereas] negative valence experiences do exist as contractions.”
Andrés! This is Roger Thisdell […]. Thanks for giving me your number.
Do add me to the Phenomenology Club. That sounds like my jam! Cheers!
Andrés:
Excellent! Will do! 🙂
[…time…]
Roger:
Hey Andrés, it was great to hang out online last night and hear your explanations. A bunch of you are really elite thinkers. I’m inspired to learn how to speak more of your qualia language.
I would love to get into the topic of paradises with you. You seem to really sing their praise.
I said yesterday that I hold the view that actually what is most desirable is just the elimination of negative valence. As someone who frequently has cessations (when consciousness blanks out for a moment) where there is no subjective experience (no negative, no positive valence) in my book this is good enough. My thinking is also informed via complete ego death experiences in which there is still consciousness but no judgement on any part of experience (bad or good). At a local individual level these are the most desirable states. Out of all the states I have experienced (including bliss trips, jhanas, 5-MeO, MDMA, staring into the eyes of a lover without insecurities, laughing fits 🤣) if I had to choose a state to be in permanently it would either be cessation or ego death. I may have curated my brain too much to a Buddhist view and my level of emptiness insight is well entrenched, so that it is hard for me to really believe the ultimate good is to keep the cosmic consciousness party going and fueling it with positive valence.
I think that while consciousness is online we better make the best out of it and try to exist in as few low negative valence states as possible and help all sentient beings with this as well; all the while the positive valence that comes along is merely instrumentally valuable, like a compliment or added bonus.
For example if you are hungry it is nice to eat something tasty. But if you were never hungry in the first place then who cares how tasty something is – don’t need it 💁♂️ (this may be my strongly consolidated non-attachment showing).
I guess what I’m really asking is: can you convince me to intrinsically care for paradise states? I do believe I have experienced what you are referring to as paradise states, but maybe I just have too much non-attachment for them to think they are the goal/prize.
(apologies for being long-winded 🙏)
Andrés:
Perhaps:
You lost the ability to get excited about future experiences. You learned this because you were taught and you practiced techniques that associate being excited about the future with dukkha. Alas, the hedonic theories around the time of Buddha were incomplete and as a consequence a lot of the claims and teachings underfit reality (meaning that they generalize too much). In contrast, it turns out that there are a manifold of ways of experiencing excitement about the future in an epistemologically clear way and no delusions. More so, with that orientation one can see more clearly larger parts of the state-space of consciousness as one is not inhibiting them. I know you have experience with high valence states. But I suspect you have deconstructed a lot of the microcognitive apparatus that allow the insights coming from the reality of their existence from propagating across the entire nervous system.
Just as lack of awareness about e.g. cluster headaches phenomenology can give you the impression that reality has no stakes, so does acute lack of access to the ultra-positive realms. I think for many, Buddhism has a certain effect in how one conceptualizes such experiential realms after the fact that perhaps is not quite in tune with how they truly were. Interestingly, one could here examine Buddhism as an aesthetic itself, and renunciation as a kind of Soulmaking, where under the hood one is still pursuing a kind of high-dimensional meaning qualia of positive valence. Which takes me to:
Rob Burbea’s Soulmaking talking about how exploring not exhaustively breaking down dukkha always but letting a bit of e.g. Eros/passion for reality opens up new ways of seeing that recontextualize Buddhism. Not that we shouldn’t get rid of dukkha, of course. But it’s good to see the underlying aesthetic influences on how one generalizes about reality based on one’s experience.
What do you think? 😄
Thank you for joining! And also for sharing your thoughts. 🤠👌
First of all, I am so impressed with Burbea. His lectures were incredibly useful for me while learning the jhanas. And now I’m picking through his book ‘Seeing That Frees’.
I think his ontology and how he builds on Buddhism is sophisticated and gorgeous.
Reminds me of a remark about Hemingway, by his grandson – he quit journalism to dedicate himself to fiction because he was more interested in truth than facts. I relate this to Soulmaking in a way.
I love his notion of skillful fabrication. But it seems like it’s a compromise in a way. We can’t fully live without self, and thoughtforms, and conceptual frameworks, and so, while we are alive and have them, let’s learn to use them skillfully/beautifully. I’m on board! 🚂
Re your 2nd point: I would add that a lack of awareness of the existence of cessations, or Nirodha, or ego death experiences is another topographical blind spot which prevents people from making a more comprehensive assessment of what is most desirable. (I know that many people who say they’ve experienced ego death, when I enquire about it, it turns out to be more of just a partial ego loss experience, and not the full annihilation). I suppose we really need those who have deep expertise in bliss states and dukkha-less/unfabricated states to compare and contrast.
For what it’s worth, and to give you more a sense of my bias, I would claim to be someone who has explored a wide range of state-spaces: from suicidal depression, to psychosis-like damnation bad trips, to K-holes, to peak experiences, and now as of 21st of May [2021] I’m claiming Frank Yang-style MCTB [see: Scott Alexander’s book review] 4th path permanent abiding in centreless consciousness (IDK what that says about my nervous system and fully propagating insights as you mentioned).
Hands down 🙌, this is the best shift in my life that has ever taken place without a doubt (I thought stream entry was good, but this is another magnitude). My hedonic set tone is persistently so high. I’m often walking around smiling for no apparent reason. 11/10 I recommend this.
And 4th path gets you an ability to adopt a new perspective where you simultaneously see the Yin and the Yang and vice sera (emptiness is form and samsara is nirvana). It’s all one place, there is not out. All the while, still we quite obviously make value judgements between states. I know you speak of hellish corners of consciousness that shouldn’t be touched. And so, although we can/should adopt flexibility of perspectives on aesthetic frames (as Rob speaks about, which is helpful) and see value in many different views as best as we can… must we still do the hard job of really judging what is best? What is most desirable? (to talk from a metamodern perspective).
Ultimately, I still come down on: lights out unconsciousness tops everything 🤷♂️ [emphasis mine]. Getting all beings to Parinirvana would objectively be preferable for all beings rather than keeping the play going – if such a plan is possible or sensible or sensical even.
It’s funny though, at some point I think it may just come down to some split difference in intuition among people (perhaps that difference can be reconciled somehow). For me this was apparent when I hear from Kenneth Folk vs. Culadasa. Kenneth holds antinatalist sentiments (or he did when I emailed him a couple of years ago and actually asked him) which speaks to a siding with a belief that there is an asymmetry of weighted value between negative and positive valence. While Culadasa seems to emphasize the joyous journey and adventure of life, which may speak to an opposite weighting in favor of the positive valence being worth the negative valence that comes along with it. Certainly not all spiritual roads lead to Rome.
I am very open to the idea that I am missing something though, and I may just need to be led by the hand like a child to these heaven realms for me to change perspective 😇😂
Thanks for engaging, this is fun!
Andrés:
Thank you for engaging! This is super interesting! Let me think about what else I can say 🙂
[…time…]
Total valence vs. pureness of valence: see Principia Qualia pg. 41. It could be that during cessations consciousness disappears and the state literally does not exist in any way. But the states immediately before and immediately after do and have at least a tiny bit of information so they are mixed valence states. Yet, perhaps they are massively positive valence on net.
An alternative view is that unconsciousness is still ‘real’ in a way, in which case we could think of it as consciousness but with no content whatsoever. But it’s still there. The analogy would be like combing a vector field in a torus. Most states have the vector field collide with itself and therefore feel less than perfect valence (due to [the Symmetry Theory of Valence, aka.] STV). Only when the field is completely combed without any self-collisions (which would not be possible in a sphere) you get perfect positive valence. And although there is no information encoded in the field, it still exists just as it did before. There’s just nothing to report.
In that case paradise could actually still exist. Meaning, higher and more refined versions of this kind of experience. In particular, we could look for other mathematical objects where the field can also be combed perfectly. They would then be strangely a different kind of ‘unconsciousness’ perhaps capable of fitting more energy and higher dimensions. Still, they would have maximum positive valence.
What do you think?
Oh, I also forgot if I’ve asked you whether you’ve tried 5-MeO-DMT and how it compares to your new baseline.
Ah, yes, I see the kind of framework you’re thinking from now – anti-symmetry, symmetry, and asymmetry.
From Principia Qualia pg. 39: [paraphrasing] “…if we take our hypothesis and apply it to IIT, and then we attempt to maximize pleasure/symmetry, consciousness/[phi] drops very rapidly.”
All the way to the point that maximum pleasure entails no consciousness??? [emphasis mine]
I don’t have a lot of experience with 5-MeO. I only did it once at about a 6mg range.
My impression of 5-MeO was that it had a visual brightening effect somewhat similar to the 4th Jhana. And there was that psychedelic mirroring effect with eyes open. It also had the reduction of conceptual understanding that comes when you get into 8th [Jhana]. I interpret that as a significant down-regulation in top-down information processing??
5-MeO has the sense that it’s going somewhere, moving towards something, while the effects build and then dissipate. Like it’s growing into something (I guess this is before a peak breakthrough – which I didn’t have).
My current consciousness abode isn’t going anywhere. There isn’t a sense that things are building towards something. It has a forever ‘this is it’, locked-in quality. Like a somewhat superposition of emptiness and fullness simultaneously. (Before 4th path I always felt like I was flickering between form and emptiness, now the two cohabitate the experiential space at the same time).
5-MeO also seemed very hedonically volatile; like any subtle thought or movement could disrupt the peace.
Meanwhile my current state is super unperturbable. In the past 2.5 months I haven’t found something that has rocked my well-being.
A couple of weeks ago I listened to an interview of a North Korean defector tell her story of starvation and human trafficking and for a good 30 minutes I was crying at this tragedy. But it was crying from a place of still really high well-being. I didn’t feel like I was suffering and I didn’t mind that crying state at all. (Which is quite weird, I suppose).
In my normal state now, there are no more papañca attacks. Thoughts don’t capture the mind like they used to.
And another thing I love about this new state is that I still have all my cognitive functions intact and I can operate in the world totally normally – which can’t be said about being on 5-MeO.
I feel super sober; while on 5-MeO I don’t believe you do (if I remember correctly).
I would say I prefer my new baseline to what I experienced on 5-MeO because of the lack of volatility and practicality of still having my intellect on hand, all the while with the constant sense of ‘this is it’ and high, high well-being.
[…time…]
Roger and Andrés have a video call:
We discussed a number of things: his meditation journey, his thoughts on various philosophies, exploring QRI frameworks, and his interest in music. Curiously, Roger said that unlike other people who spend a lot of time in meditation healing traumas and processing past experiences, he was able to largely just focus on progress on the path. This, along with a very rigorous and consistent practice, is why he got to where he is at so early in life (26 years old).
One of my main interests in the discussion was to flesh out how 4th path states/traits and the Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV) were connected. If I recall correctly, there were three main ideas connected to this topic I shared with him:
Discussing the “levels of consciousness” experienced on a psilocybin trip and the way they might mirror some of Frank Yang’s descriptions of the levels of consciousness on the path to awakening,
A model of equanimity I’ve been developing where impedance matching is a key ingredient, and
The difference between a “recipe” of a state or transformation of consciousness and its “review”
Let’s briefly elaborate on these topics.
(1) Frank Yang talks about undergoing a meditative process with the following stages: (a) standard sense of self, (b) awareness of awareness, (c) God/Oneness/Being/Non-Duality/Self, (d) Emptiness/Non-Beng/Uni-Locality, (e) Neither Being Nor Non-Being, and finally (f) Enlightenment.
What makes his descriptions so incredible is that he provides very raw and unfiltered phenomenological accounts of the process without really trying to force them into any pre-existing framework. From the point of view of the mission of QRI this is very valuable. In particular, it allows us to examine his process of transformation with the framework of Qualia Formalism: we ought to ask, not what kind of spiritual/mystical/transcendent process is going on here (which will certainly take us nowhere), but rather, wonder if we can cast his descriptions in terms of *structural changes to the field of awareness*. For example, Frank talks about “the screen of God” that becomes apparent in (c), where waves of energy seem to travel without resistance across one’s experiential field. He also talks about phase transitions (similarly to Shinzen Young, he talks about a process of liquefaction and gasification of the field of awareness). If, as we believe at QRI, valence is a structural property of experience, these transformations would have profound effects on one’s sense of wellbeing. So, the reason why “the screen of God” is a profound experience is not because you literally merge with a divine being (which might not be possible if we assume indirect realism about perception), but because the field of awareness is now in a phase that allows an entirely new level of efficient stress dissipation.
I shared with Roger some details from a particularly interesting psilocybin trip report that described rapid phase transitions between (what appears to be) several of the levels Frank describes. In particular, “the screen of God” state seems to have the capacity to stresslessly locate sensations without generating reverbarions with a represented “small self to which those sensations belong”.
(2) In turn, this led to discussing a new model (we haven’t really touched upon in QRI publications yet, but which is coming) of equanimity based on experiences I had during a two-week retreat earlier this year (see: Buddhist Annealing). This model has at its core the idea that equanimity is a mental tool that increases impedance matching between nervous system harmonics. Ask yourself: why is it that when you pluck a guitar string it sounds louder if it is connected to a guitar? It is not, as many would think, that the “resonance box amplifies the sound” (for where would the extra energy come from?). Rather, the energy is the same; what changes is the speed at which it is discharged! The resonance box vibrates and dissipates the energy of the string much faster than the string could on its own (as an aside, this is exactly why you can sustain a note for so much longer in an electric guitar). We could thus postulate that a lot of inner dissonance comes from resonance in the nervous system that has no means of dissipating its stored stress. To an extent, this is because involuntary subliminal contractions in our nervous system compartmentalize and modularize its components. Equanimity is the practice of relaxing those contractions, and thus slowly allowing the nervous system to undergo a search process where it finds structures that can resonate with the stored stress, and in turn allow it to dissipate faster. More so, over time, you entrain (and rewire!) the nervous system to become highly efficient at stress-dissipation. Dissonance is still there, but it “unfolds” and gets “metabolized” so fast that it barely counts as suffering. Highly annealed nervous systems are powerful stress-dissipation engines!
(3) Finally, we also discussed the idea that there is a distinction between the “recipe” of a state of consciousness and its “review”. A recipe is the steps you take in order to achieve a certain state (or transformation) of consciousness. A review is instead an account of what the resulting state feels like. Just as the instructions for baking a cake are quite different from a Chef’s review of what the resulting cake tastes like, we can expect that meditation instructions (e.g. focusing on the three characteristics) will not necessarily reflect the nature of the transformations of consciousness that result from them. Thus, while a lot of the meditative path is nominally about “renouncing” the pursuit of high-valence states of consciousness (and thus avoid the pleasure paradox), the result is nonetheless a state of consciousness that is high-valence in nature! Paradoxical? I don’t think so. The confusion is merely the result of conflating recipe and review.
Thus, we can still apply valence theories to states of consciousness that are allegedly beyond valence. Frank Yang, for example, seems to resonate a lot with STV. See his December 2020 interview at The Stoa. There (and in other videos) he describes “God mind” consciousness as a very positive experience, which is very symmetrical but not perfect. But his true awakening is perfectly symmetrical (in the realm of space, observer, and sense of time, even if not in content). His experience became like a “hologram that has no center”. Quote:
“Have you seen those illustrations of a sphere or a circle, where one point connects to all of the other points? […] if you wanted me to describe my day to day, moment to moment, experience, well, it’s pretty symmetrical. As in, there is no center to experience. There is hearing but no hearer; there is just the seeing, there is no seer; on thinking there is just thinking and no thinker. It’s not, like, processed or filtered through a subject in the center. And it’s very immediate in the sense that all of the sensations, all 360 degrees, are synched up to themselves, without any delay, 24/7. And all the sensations, where there is body, you know sight, sound, thoughts, emotions… they are all on equal footing to each other […inaudible…] in symmetry, and that is for me an aesthetic experience. I would say a suffering mind is a mind that isn’t symmetrical. If your mind is asymmetrical, it means it’s defiled somewhere. So for me aesthetics runs in all different kinds of domains, not only on the perceptual domain, not only on the visual aesthetics domain, but even on the emotional and how you think.”
Yes, God Mind (left) is good, but have you tried no-self (right)? It is so much more symmetrical!
As we’ve discussed before, the homogeneity of phenomenal space and time might be a very large component of what accounts for positive valence. And what Frank is describing here suggests that’s the case. Disturbances in the attention field lines and the saliency of specific components of a mind can break the underlying symmetry of the phenomenal space and time of the resulting experience. Anxiety, for example, in this paradigm is described as unpleasant because it involves the bubbling up of low-level prediction errors causing “attention pinches” across your experience, and thus disturbing the free-flow of energy that would exist in a homogeneous field. Prediction errors are not inherently unpleasant; they are unpleasant only to the extent that they cause asymmetries in your field of awareness!
Frank Yang also says that his big awakening felt like a “quantum jump”. It makes sense that a strong anti-fragile attractor for a new network topology would be self-reinforcing (a new lowest-energy state, metaphorically speaking, perhaps akin to a false vacuum collapse inside one’s mind!). Again, this is all very compatible with valence structuralism, if not STV.
Roger said that he will have to think about all of this. In the meantime, he shared with me some (amazing!) pictures he made to illustrate how his field of awareness has been transformed with meditation over time. Like Frank Yang, he identifies several discrete phase transitions. These are: (a) standard perception, (b) The Witness, (c) Big Mind, (d) No Self, and finally (e) No Self & Centreless Awareness (4th path!):
Considering more what you said about impedance matching and adding resonance to experience:
Perhaps this is merely an analogy, but still: consider the tautness of a spider’s web. If a fly lands on it, at one part, the whole web will shake and the energy will transfer throughout in such a way that the spider can locate where on the web the fly landed. If the web is too taut then the energy of the fly landing won’t dissipate far enough for the spider to receive the information. However, if the web is too slack the fly could just break the structure of the web.
It might be interesting to consider why spiders build webs with a centre point and not as a straight or criss-crossing lattice.
So to relate this to consciousness and metabolizing stress… I would say my consciousness now feels like it’s more taut and lattice-woven rather than spider web-shaped with a middle [emphasis mine]. So this means when a stress point is activated somewhere in the experiential space, its energy doesn’t ripple as far out as it would have before, thus not being as disruptive.
And if we aliken the spider on the web to the epistemic agent, if he is situated on one spot and for all goings-on on the web to be known their information must travel to him, then the web must be not too taut so that all the ripples can reach him and he knows what’s going on. The problem with this set-up is that it means that knowing requires instability.
However, if we do away with the spider (a single point considered the epistemic agent) and make it so that the knowledge is attributed to the web itself, then the web can afford to be much more taut/less shaky/more robust, causing less negative valence.
So in some way I could say my experience (centerless consciousness) is more taut in this way, but this tautness doesn’t feel rigid or stiff, but rather very airy.
Indra’s net can have too much slack in it, if it’s not sewn together tightly and uniformly.
Pre-Awakening: The mind uses a fictitious “self-as-epistemic-agent” in a field of awareness that has slack and vibrates in unpleasant ways in the process of integrating information. The field of awareness relies on a network topology that is suboptimal for efficient stress dissipation.
Post-Awakening: The mind lacks any kind of center or self-as-epistemic-agent. The field of awareness is tout and extremely efficient at stress dissipation. The network topology has permanently changed to a far more symmetrical and regular configuration.
Just for interest’s sake, and I don’t know if this bears any significance, but I’m ambidextrous by the way.
I know symmetry plays a major role in your hypotheses of valence and such.
In some way, I have thought that not having such a prioritization and weightiness to just one side of the body has balanced out my experience and perception (perhaps more than others), I’m not sure.
R
(As of the 23rd of November 2021, Roger states that he continues to be in the blissful state of centreless consciousness)
Commentary by Andrés, after the fact:
This conversation (and further exchanges I may share in the future) has reinvigorated my quest to describe states (and transformations) of consciousness in terms of changes to the network topology that underlies our field of awareness. Enlightenment might be described in “mystical” ways, but this could be simply due to lack of an adequate formal conceptual framework to make sense of it. But perhaps STV, impedance matching, and efficient stress dissipation through radical network topology reorganization without compromising self-epistemics could take us much further than before in this quest.
Also, if Roger was able to achieve these transformations at the tender age of 26, what is stopping the rest of us from doing the same?
If I were to add one thing to the wish-list, I’d say (in unison with people like Nick Cammarata and David Pearce): if we could have access to MDMA-like states of emotional wellbeing and empathy on tap, that would be fantastic (for many reasons). Plus, non-addictive real pain relief might very well be right behind the corner. So to revise our (admittedly cartoonish and partial) wish-list for the medium-term future of sentience: “MDMA-like emotional palette, non-addictive pain relief, and physiological Arhatship: The rest is commentary”. See you there, my friends!
Happy Thanksgiving Everyone (including the Turkeys, of course)!
