Indra’s Net via Nonlinear Optics: DMT Phenomenology as Evidence for Beamsplitter Holography and Recursive Harmonic Compression
[Epistemic Status: Speculating on a key implementation detail within the paradigm of the Brain as a Non-Linear Optical Computer (BaaNLOC) – specifically, how the optical function of beam splitting could be used to compose the contents of a conscious simulation scene with principles of cel animation and holography. In particular, this may explain both how local phenomenal binding is implemented as well as the uncanny sense of being a multitude that are common on DMT-induced states of consciousness; featured image source]
Alternative Title: One Screen, Many Contributors: Explaining the One + Many nature of Experience with Non-Linear Optical Circuits
Background Readings – and key takeaways of each:
- The Constructive Aspect of Visual Perception (by Steven Lehar): We learn that vision is a constructive process that uses bottom-up and top-down resonance as its generator. Of special note: a gestalt (when features become “more than the sum of their parts”) has spectral properties: it resonates in a specific way as a combination of frequencies and can click with, interface with, and even drag other gestalts. Waves inside gestalts collide with each other in a way that conveniently (and efficiently) abstracts its symmetries (e.g. how the “reverse grassfire algorithm” can be used to abstract the symmetries of shapes).
- The Brain as a Non-Linear Optical Computer: Reflections on a 2-Week Jhana Meditation Retreat: Where I introduce the overall picture of BaaNLOC based on phenomenological observations I gathered at a Jhana retreat. The core idea is that the world simulation is rendered using optical elements (cf. Ising Machines: Non-Von Neumann Computing with Non-linear Optics). I hypothesized that there is a trade-off between how much we can experience sensations in a localized way vs. experiencing frequency-domain information. Jhana absorption is akin to pushing all of the information to the frequency domain: you’re a vibration rather than a location. We can hypothesize that the sense of simultaneity and non-locality comes from us being a standing wave pattern trapped in Total Internal Reflection (TIR) in the brain. The quality of experience, especially pertaining to each of the Jhanas, can be described in terms of an optical circuit that modulate the consonance, dissonance, and noise signature of gestalts, each of which is an optical “soliton” within the larger TIR pocket that delimits a moment of experience. Jhana meditation involves, among other things, interacting with gestalts in such a way that you harmonize them, and eventually build up to a level of coherence that allows the entire world simulation to achieve (one of several types of) global coherence.
- The Electrostatic Brain: How a Web of Neurons Generates the World-Simulation that is You (by Fakhri, Percy, Gómez-Emilsson): “We propose that objects in your world simulation are made of patches in the neuronal lattice with distinct electrostatic parameters. The interaction of light with matter is governed by the material’s electrostatic parameters permittivity and permeability. Light propagates undisturbed through a uniform medium but reflects and refracts when these properties vary spatially, which is the principle behind how lenses manipulate light.” In other words, a theory for how “phenomenal objects” (and gestalts more broadly) acquire their solidity and individuation at the implementation level. Waves inside each gestalt behave differently than “outside” (but still within the world simulation) of them, due to literal electrical properties modulating the speed of wave propagation.
- DMT and Hyperbolic Geometry: The core ideas to import deal with how DMT hallucinations can be explained in terms of a field of experience with an energy function: the simultaneous maximization of how “recognizable” and how “symmetrical” (both being “energy sinks”) a gestalt is. DMT energizes the world simulation, and the hallucinations we experience are downstream of the system trying to get rid of this excess energy. A psychedelic trip, therefore, is explained in terms of thermodynamics and as an annealing process that may, along the way, favor hyperbolic (and non-Euclidean, broadly) geometry. The world becoming a kind of kale surface (cf. “worldsheet“) is the result of the system “stitching together” an excess number of gestalts (that fail to dissipate quickly; cf. tracer effects). The gestalts are all trying to predict each other in a process of energy minimization that may do some useful compute along the way if we figure out how to harness it properly (cf. Cub Flipper’s recent ideas on the matter).
- From Neural Activity to Field Computing: The key takeaway here is that we can modulate the topology of a field by parametrizing a network of coupled oscillators in such a way that you can “tune into” the resonant modes of the system and in turn interact with the field in a coherent way. If the field responds to the oscillators in a physical way (e.g. interpreting the oscillators as electrical in nature, and the field as the shape of the magnetic field, as one of many possible examples) attractors of the system of coupled oscillators may in turn instantiate specific and predictable topological structures in the field. The way this is relevant to the current post is that we see how e.g. electric oscillations (in gestalts) can create genuine boundaries in a field and allow entire regions to “behave as one” in turn.
- Cel Animation as a Key Metaphor to Model DMT Hallucinations: This may be the most important background read – it outlines how both Laser Chess and Cel Animations can be used as system metaphors for how a wave-like non-local experience can interface (and be part of) a system with “classical” local parts. In the case of Laser Chess, we have a game where there is a local “classical” step (moving a piece) and then a non-local “holistic” state (shining the laser and seeing what standing wave pattern emerges as a result). The brain’s “slow” neural activity might be “placing” the classical optical elements as constraints at millisecond-speed, for then a “global” and “near instantaneous” interference pattern that solves the path integral of all possible trajectories within the pocket to take over as a global ultra-parallel medium of compute. In turn, Cel Animation (the way cartoons used to be made; transparent sheets that depict what is changing and leave everything else intact) can be used as a metaphor to describe how “awareness wraps around and moves around” in a field of gestalts. Our world simulation is akin to a projector that shines on a 3D diorama populated with holograms. The experience is the emergent light-field that stabilizes when light is shined on this diorama. Typically our diorama has a clear center, but depending on the kind, alignment, vibration, and symmetries of the gestalts present, more than one, or even no, “phenomenal center” might emerge: the light does not need to converge at a point, even if it usually does.
- The Emergence of Self-Awareness: Conscious Holography as an Evolved Hardware Accelerator: Finally, this recent video explains how dimensionality reduction implemented at a physical level (with e.g. holograms a quintessential example) could be associated with moments of experience via a precise computational role of consciousness. Namely, we’re conscious because dimensionality reduction in holograms feels like something, and evolution found really good use for this physical process. That is, coordinating information in sensory fields of different dimensionalities in order to construct a coherent internal state that efficiently and accurately encodes both information types. This is reasonable because holographic compressions, at a physical implementation level, are a kind of distributed spatial knowledge that uses path integrals and superposition to encode large amounts of information. We could make the case that at the point of dimensionality reduction is when “reality can meet itself” by collapse in on itself.
Putting it all together: we have a model of moments of experience as a standing wave pattern inside a non-linear optical system. It is conceptually elegant, but still widely unspecified. We have noted how this conceptual framework would solve many philosophical problems while articulating the nature of otherwise extremely puzzling phenomenology (e.g. DMT breakthroughs). What follows is further speculation, specifically on how beam splitters could play a role in this framework. In particular, I’m going to describe and then try to explain the phenomenology of DMT’s autonomous entities as well as Indra’s Net (at the extreme) and then explain how a non-linear optical circuit with the right characteristics could give rise to these corner cases. In fact, as we will see, it makes sense to think of every experience as a kind of Indra’s Net but with significant opaque components. More on this later.
Context
I recently had the chance to talk to Michael Levin and Elan Barenholtz (thanks to Ekkolapto at University of Toronto!) on the topic of phenomenal binding and the Platonic Realm (hear also the conversation I had with Levin last year):
I recommend listening to the whole conversation, but I figured I’d share what I presented at the beginning to establish some context for further discussions. The talk was an interesting challenge for me because I was given exactly 5 minutes to present a case at the beginning of the panel. In general, I love to be challenged to deliver a specific insight or argument on a time limit. Although a fun exercise, I also realize that there is quite a bit of background needed to really get what I’m talking about. So this post will go over both the content of my presentation as well as its further implications. There will be a lot more QRI content on the topic of non-linear optical circuits in relation to consciousness coming in the future.
What Needs to be Explained
Two key phenomenological realities need to be explained. No matter how weird and absurd they may sound (they do happen, as a phenomenon), we need to take them seriously if our theory of consciousness is any good. The key idea we will circle back to is that we can explain this exotic phenomenology using non-linear optics as a substrate (at least conceptually). So, what is it that we ought to explain?
First, is the sense of autonomous entities while on DMT. While 5-MeO-DMT tends to generate a sense of global coherence that hints at Open Individualism, DMT instead tends to feel as if you’re being thrown into a deep ecosystem of rogue mindforms. More so, it is often reported that these entities not only feel like they are _not you_ but they also feel controlled by a variety of different agencies with disparate goals. It is also not the case that these agencies are in agreement about how to interact with you, as oftentimes fierce competition for attention and other cognitive or energetic resources ensues. It is for this reason we like to say DMT pushes you to a “competing clusters of coherence” attractor. More so, each of these clusters seems to have its own agenda and objective function. It often takes quite a bit of negotiating between the “parts” of the organism can “pull together” in one direction during the otherwise fragmented state of DMT intoxication.
And if that wasn’t enough of a mystery, the second is an even stranger but certainly no less real phenomenon: Indra’s Net. This is the feeling and felt sense that “everything reflects everything else”. Many people use to term to refer to an implicit quality of reality: interdependence. But when I use the term in this context, I’m pointing to a very real, very vivid, and very computationally non-trivial state of consciousness. It is _true_ that the state gives you the feeling that it has a lesson, message, implicit insight, etc. to deliver, and that it is that we’re all connected at a deep fractal level somehow, but leaving aside this impression, the immediate phenomenology of Indra’s Net is really something worth exploring and explaining in its own right.
I believe that Indra’s Net is a window into how consciousness works at a fundamental level, and in this essay you will see how we might be able to explain it in terms of non-linear optical circuits. But the deeper insight (note: don’t take a twig from the Dharma Tree, says Rob Burbea, instead go for the big flowers, the big fruits, the jewels of the path) is that perhaps “everything reflects everything else” is not a strange corner case you have to work to arrive at. But on the contrary, the sense that each part of experience has a clear identity, location, and boundary relative to every other part of experience, is itself the strange corner case – you have to twist and torque Indra’s Net just right so that its projection _looks_ like a normal everyday life type of experience. By default, consciousness is profoundly interconnected in overt and explicit ways. If so, a lot of the energy the brain is spending is on keeping the illusion that non-Indra’s Net states are the default somehow.
Another problem is that Indra’s Net sounds so outlandish and incredible that it is easy to dismiss as “recollection or confabulation after the fact”. The epistemological poverty of our predicament is further exacerbated by the fact that people tend to confuse semantic content and phenomenal character, in turn delivering fantastically confused and knotted trip reports.
So, let’s cut to the chase, what is so special about Indra’s Net and how does it actually manifest? Here is the essence of it: any gestalt on your visual/tactile field (which can be synesthetic, and typically is) can be an expression of the whole experience after a certain kind of transformation or information processing pipeline. Let me elaborate. In the classic case where Indra’s Net is expressed as a web of water droplets, then what you will see is that the content of every reflection (the light emitted by each droplet) is itself the whole scene, but transformed. Indeed, it is _what the scene looks like_ from that point of view (more or less). In turn, this is happening to every one of the elements on the scene. Each element is itself expressing what the rest of the scene looks like from its point of view. Each element is taking the whole scene, applying a transformation to it, and then expressing it back into the field for everyone else to see.
This is agnostic to the specific semantic content of the scene (though perhaps not entirely orthogonal, as content and shape are ultimately correlated). You could have an Indra’s Net experience of countless heavenly Jewels reflecting on each other in beautiful ways. Or you could have an experience of looking at hundreds of demon eyes, each one reflecting every other one. Or you could experience something much more computationally crazy, like a maze of mirrors and diffraction rays, where everything reflects everything else in highly non-trivial ways in maze paths you didn’t even know were mathematically possible. The point is that the mind seems to have this attractor state we can broadly point to with the term Indra’s Net, which corresponds to a state in which the geometric content of every gestalt reflects/and is connected to the content of every other gestalt and of the scene as a whole.
The question that naturally arises here is: why do we experience this on DMT? Seriously, why is this a common attractor state? Importantly, the feature that “the whole scene hangs together as an irreducible whole” in which “moving any part results in the whole state shifting and adjusting” is not, predicted, by current computational models of the mind (or is?). What would a theory that predicts Indra’s Net look like?
The core insight I want to share for the time being is that if we allow the whole experience to somehow “project onto itself” a transformed version of itself after underlying non-linear optical filters, then some of these features start to emerge for free.
At the limit, both DMT autonomous entities and Indra’s Net become sort of one and the same (!). In effect, it is not uncommon for the sense of the multiple entities to coalesce into a gigantic god-like hivemind that incorporates many gestalts at multiple scales and it makes it very clear that it is “one and all of them at the same time”. Indeed, one can perhaps re-interpret a lot of classic iconography (e.g. the hundreds of arms of the Hindu Gods) as perhaps a pictographic representation of the phenomenology of Indra’s Net. (See also how the improper stitching together of the holograms can result in misaligned Cronenberg-like DMT Shoggoths, too).
Both deep in a DMT experience, and also at high levels of meditative concentration (cf. hard Jhanas) Indra’s Net is really common. I want to emphasize how this is not a vague poetic metaphor. It is a concrete structure, where the phenomenological “screen” that makes up access consciousness (the part of your experience you can report on) is filled with clusters of agentic constructs (“entities”) that seem to be mutually inspecting and modifying each other. They behave like holographic cel animation layers, arranged with depth and dynamically interacting subcomponents that reflect the whole.
What we want is a conceptual framework that would make DMT autonomous entities as well as Indra’s Net a perfectly natural outcome. Indeed, perhaps even expected and obvious in retrospect. To do this, I will introduce a number of core ideas, all of them orbiting a central one: perhaps our “screen of consciousness” is being “beamed” to multiple semi-independent modules at the same time, each specialized in different aspects of information processing. In turn, these modules transform the beamed image, and then pull it together with the other post-processed images by the other modules, and projects it back onto the original screen. This is reminiscent of recurrent neural networks, non-linear optical networks, but above all, the core idea that intelligent dimensionality reduction is central to a well behaved mind. Let’s dive in!
One Screen, Many Contributors: Explaining the One + Many nature of Experience with Non-Linear Optical Circuits
Non-Linear Optical Circuitry at the core of the current iteration of BaaNLOC. The central screen beams copies of its content to semi-independent modules. Then each module applies learned non-linear optical transformations such as birefringence, diffraction, refraction, etc. The post-processed images are then pulled together, and after a final symmetry group transform (to know how to fit it onto the screen), are re-projected back onto the original screen. The experience that emerges is the steady state standing-wave pattern of Total Internal Reflection (TIR) trapped in the loop. Key idea is that the images projected from each module back to the main screen can interact with each other in a quasi-physical way there.
I start by portraying the overall geometry of a moment of experience, as illustrated by Steven Lehar:
Source: Cartoon Epistemology by Steven Lehar
Consider this “diorama-like shape” that contains phenomenal properties we can point to and discuss. It is deeply interconnected. An experience is not “just” a 2.5D screen of pixels, because something is actively integrating and interrelated all of those pixels under a shared “umbrella”: a point of view, or subject of experience. Whatever the true mathematical object is that corresponds to a moment of experience (cf. qualia formalism), it must be able to connect variables in ways that produce the specific patterns of binding we observe. The patterns of binding must somehow allow us to reconstruct the geometry of the experience as a whole. But the patterns of binding are complex. A cup is not merely a blue object – it has intricate structures like a handle and a floor and perhaps liquid content, features which are all put together into a coherent multi-level representation for us to interact with. Indeed, we have to ultimately provide a mathematical structure rich enough to model and account for all types of phenomenal binding. Worth mentioning is QRI’s long-standing idea of modeling experiences as graphs with nodes that represent qualia values and edges that represents the flow of attention. In this case, the nodes you attend to are salient due to reasons having to do with graph centrality (cf. PageRank). Why? Because e.g. PageRank tracks the probability of landing on a given node if you are doing a kind of random walk from node to node using the directed edge weights as probability of transitioning. The nodes with high PageRank are those for which “the flow of attention” leads to lakes where it pools and concentrates.
As explained already, we suspect that the psychedelic sense that “everything is connected to everything else” may not be an anomaly, but rather a feature of experience that is always present, only rarely made explicit. This kind of PageRank of attention is always ongoing. The geometry of experience seems to be a kind of stable equilibria that results from systems observing each other and creating representations with relative distances to each other. Naturally, experience is “self-reflective” for this reason (and not only due to introspection!). But Indra’s Net is a deeper kind of structure that is still way more interconnected than e.g. PageRank would suggest. We need something new:
The core idea is that the non-linear optical circuit diagram above might capture some of the more exotic and intricate aspects of phenomenology (as mentioned: autonomous entities and Indra’s Net). The sketch you see at the start of this section (“One Screen, Many Contributors: Explaining the One + Many nature of Experience with Non-Linear Optical Circuits”), aims to capture key structural insights for the generation of moments of experience, which beam splitters, birefringence, and image-teleporting TV stones (cf. “How does Television Stone Work?“; Ulexite) feeding a recursive optical loop. This loop allows many “sub-agents” to see the same field, alter it independently, and feed their changes back into the whole in real time. The equilibrium state of this process is what we experience as a moment of consciousness.
In the recorded discussion, Michael Levin offered an elegant metaphor for how self-organizing systems can “pull” you toward them, where constraints in the medium act like attractors and make parts of the problem solve themselves once enough structure is in place. One of his example was a triangle: if the fittest shape for a given problem involves a certain triangle (e.g. a triangular alga needs to have three specific angles at its corners to succeed in certain navigation task), you evolve the first angle, then the second, and the third is automatically determined by the laws of geometry (a free gift from Euclidean geometry; or the geometry of the network of relationships between the parts, more broadly, when we talk about intrinsic geometry). This kind of regularity is an example case for how complex systems can bootstrap themselves, where knowing part of the whole lock in the rest: symmetry reduces degrees of freedom, and constraint propagation allows the global pattern to self-assemble without exhaustive search. In Levin’s framework and worldview, these “free lunches” live in pattern-space or morphogenesis space (as we’ll see), so that once your system points to the right place, the rest of the pattern ingresses “into the physical”.
Indra’s Net might be one of these patterns. The state of consciousness where everything _explicitly_ reflects everything else, from this point of view, does not have to be built in its entirety from the bottom up; once parts of it crystallize, and high-level symmetries are locked in place, the rest already knows how to relax into its attractor. It’s worth mentioning Levin also pointed out that in his work with Chris Fields he extends the logic of navigation in pattern-space, to “morphogenesis space”. That is, the configuration space in which cells navigate to build and repair anatomies. Applying least action laws (perhaps the true building blocks of reality? Or the true underlying laws of reality?) not to physical three-dimensional space (which may itself be emergent) but to the implicit geometries that shape biological growth and repair, may explain how an organism navigates its possible self-organization and converges on an energy minima that is very wholistic in nature.
In the toy model I presented, a non-linear optical circuit containing beam splitters, birefringence, and image-teleporting TV stones feeds a recursive loop that allows many “sub-agents” to see the same field, alter it independently, and feed their changes back into the whole. The equilibrium of this process corresponds to a moment of consciousness: it’s the topologically closed standing-wave pattern that emerges out of the non-linear optical circuit reaching a point of stability – and then what it is like to be it perhaps corresponding to “the superposition of all points of view” within it (see Cube Flipper’s recent efforts to describe this way of “reading off” an experience out of a physical system).
The energy function locally rewards gestalts that succeed at being explanatory, meaning they can anticipate, compress, and model the behavior of other gestalts. This generates an ecosystem in which gestalts compete and cooperate by predicting one another, and some develop the capacity to swallow the entire scene and then re-express it in transformed form. The medium where these interactions occur (the phenomenal screen) is not a passive display (common misconception) but an active site of computation, where interferences between gestalts are identified and workshopped. It also plays the role of being a “metric” or “gauge” for the other various gestalts. The screen gives gestalts a kind of “radar” so that by emitting waves they can find each other “in 3D”. From this perspective, experience involves lifting the content of the field into higher dimensions (internal states of the modules), applying transformations there, and then re-projecting it back as a coherent standing wave onto 3D (or 2.5D). In fact, several semi-independent modules doing this in parallel and then responding to each other’s transformations. The result is often deeply interdependent and “enmeshed”, irreducible-seeming, as the process transforms experiences recursively mid-flight and converges on gestalts that get along well with each other, are explanatory, and can predict sensory input.
Beam Splitters
Let’s try to imagine this more concretely. First, let’s talk about beam splitters. A beam splitter is typically a piece of glass or plastic that allows a certain percentage of the light through and reflects the rest. They’re one of the pieces in the game Khet 2.0 (a variant of Laser Chess), where the laser effectively splits in two and has more chances to do damage to the other’s Kind (or Pharaoh). This multiplies the number of beams, and at least in some arrangements, can lead to combinatorial explosions. Beam splitters, I suspect, are ubiquitous in our brain’s information processing pipeline. The ability to carbon-copy a gestalt so that you can work on it in multiple streams in parallel is extremely empowering, and no doubt a core step in any serious implementation of non-linear optical computation. Think about the phenomenology of shifting around the content of a working memory module. Doesn’t it feel like you’re copy/pasting information from one part of your field to another? Beam splitters are also, I reckon, a key optical component of our world simulation that allows for parallel processing streams to get unified into the coherent experience we mistake for a single “simple” witness.
Teleprompters allow you to have “split vision” so that you can look at the camera while you read your speech. (cf. DIY Teleprompter). They’re a kind of highly functional beam/image splitters.
In an effort to making the above more relatable, let’s talk about a really cool invention: the holographic broadcasting system. It doesn’t exist yet, but it could. It should, in fact. For aesthetic, social, and computational reasons,. What is this I’m talking about? Check this out:
The Holographic Broadcasting System
Imagine this: in front of you is a special table. A table that shows an image. There are hundreds of other tables like it and they are all connected to each other. When you place something on the table, it appears as a hologram in every other table like it. You can use this to play board games with people in other countries in real time, or for strategizing, delivering presentations, and even solving a maze as a team.
Here is the twist: the object that you place on the table can itself be an object that holds a transformed image of the table. Say, the object you place on the table is an iPad that shows what the table looks like from your point of view (e.g. your glasses have cameras that beam data to the iPad). You can even do projection mapping on the table and overlay a digitally transformed version of what it looks like on top of itself.
Projection mapping: you use a model of the 3D scene so that you can “paint it” with a projector that displays a video of the very scene it’s illuminating, after processing it with digital tools.
Each person with access to (a parallel version of) the table might specialize in a different kind of transformation: some specialize in adding edge detectors that highlight the corners and sharp angles of what’s in it. Others perhaps do color enhancement. Yet another one does shape rotation, where it overlays rotated images of the table (or a region thereof) on top of itself. The result is that the table is a live hologram that gets to be edited in real time by many different groups of people, each looking for something different, and capable of emphasizing different features of this collective work of art.
But here’s what makes this system truly extraordinary: each hologram carries its own unique spectral signature (remember how you can do analogue Fourier transforms in optical circuits!). From the point of view of the system, each gestalt/hologram is a kind of molecule with distinct “vibratory modes” that interact with other nearby gestalts that share such frequencies. When an edge detector sharpens a visual element, it doesn’t just change the shape, it also “stamps” a vibratory signature, so to speak, onto the hologram metadata for the system to work with. From the point of view of the system as a whole, may at first seem like a simple object carries rich spectral (i.e. frequency/vibration in addition to position) information. Whether holograms in the table “get along with each other” is a function of how they resonate together, as a group (with other gestalts), and as a whole (how the whole state can self-harmonize, or not, with the presence of such features). Collectively, the local and global vibrations define how the system “wants” to settle, and how each region interferes and interacts with neighboring holograms.
Importantly, I think this is happening all the time. What is different about high dose DMT or hard Jhanas with prominent Indra’s Net phenomenology is the extent to which individual gestalts express information about the whole experience. Consider the spectrum that goes from a completely dark and uninteresting room, to a room that is filled with parallel mirrors, beam splitters, diffraction gratings, polarizers, etc. What the room looks like doesn’t change very much as a function of lighting and head position in the first room. But in the second room, subtle changes in lighting can change the look and feel of the whole scene, as well as subtle changes in head positioning or even direction to which the eyes are pointed. In both cases the rooms are ultimately made of the same kind of “material” (atoms, physically speaking; qualia, subjectively speaking). But the second room has implicit connections and relationships that makes it highly sensitive to things like angle of lighting. The punch line, as it were, is that both physical systems are kinds of Indra’s Net, at least in a raw physical sense: every part of the dark room does indeed reflect every other part, it’s just that the information has been scrambled and largely lost. But just because the materials are not reflective or smooth doesn’t mean that on a deep physical level we don’t find a web of interdependent physical fields giving rise to the room as a whole as a “point of stability” of the system. This requires “everything reflecting everything else”. It’s just that many of these reflections aren’t very interesting or coordinated! Yet they are always there.
Likewise, even very boring and prosaic “contents of the visual field” (say, a banana, an orange… a stim toy) without any “trippiness”, I would argue, do implicitly contain the “everything reflects everything else” quality. When you see a banana contextualized by being next to an orange, the very _meaning_ of the banana changes. It becomes, in look and feel, a “banana next to an orange” rather than a “banana plain and simple”. More so, now that this contextual relationship has been established, we see the same is the case for the orange. And once more, with recursion, we find that the banana starts to look like a “banana that’s next to an orange, which is next to a banana” and so on. In principle this sounds redundant. But it is not. On DMT trips, this “transitivity of context” may in fact break down. So, for example, you might find yourself contextualizing the banana by an orange, but the orange might feel like it’s coming from a space that _is not_ contextualized by the banana. At least not directly. It’s often as if the various gestalts on DMT could exist in semi-independent geometric spaces that only with joint attention can actually interact with one another. Thus, the Indra’s Net quality of experience is in some sense much more robust in “normal everyday life” relative to the depths of an ayahuasca journey. And that is because under normal circumstances we do in fact have that our phenomenal objects properly contextualize each other in a way that achieves closure.
On high doses of DMT, it is possible for the entirety of one’s experience to be “compressed” into a triangle and then having that triangle projected onto our experience. You see how this would be a rather unusual and special kind of mathematical object, right? We’re dealing with a situation in which materializing a projection of the whole space onto a part of it radically changes the nature of the geodesics of the space. The triangle becomes a shortcut between various points that find their shortest distance by jumping into it. Now, in really exotic states, when multiple parallel streams are re-projecting the whole experience back onto itself after doing unique transformations to it (say, one “rolls up the experience into a tube”, another one “turns it into the surface of a sphere”, and yet another one “does this weird Hopf-fibration-like foliation of the space”) you have the emergence of phenomenal spaces that are extremely interconnected and will for the most part be a once-in-a-life-time encounter, as the combinatorial explosion of these feedback processes is so large we often have no hope of reconstructing specific and weird corner case.
Harmonic Simplification
Hundreds of spectral holograms can coexist in the shared screen at once. They do not need to collide directly. They are controlled by different modules, but they do “collapse” and get pushed into the same screen, which tries to reconcile/compile them into a single “point of view”. There are two steps. First the system tries to flatten all of the holograms in the main screen. Then the system lifts all of the subsystems that didn’t find a clear fit with each other into a higher-dimensional work space where the more fined-grained information is computed (and where many more kinds of rotations are available to do so). This way, the screen, in light of the multiple commenting parallel streams that “lift it”, can dynamically transform in much more general ways than what the screen itself could afford geometrically on its own. In that space their spectra interact more directly: modes beat against modes and compatible components find strange projections (along higher dimensional transformations) that allow them to click together. The screen’s own low frequency harmonics act as a constraint (they amplify the 2D and 3D symmetries found in among the gestalts as seen presented in the screen, cf. our computational model of cessation) and work as selection pressures for patterns that fit the logic of 3D space. Anything that persists must couple to, and be consistent with, the global modes of the screen (imposing familiar geometry), as well as the constraints being carried in/imported by each of the semi-independent modules.
When a stable configuration that ties together multiple other gestalts in a clean composition is found, the circuit produces a simplified gestalt that stands in for the group. In some cases it replaces it, but more typically the “summary representation” works as a kind of leader of the gestalts it’s summarizing. Alas, all gestalts are decaying, so the visible and impactful ones are only the most recent summaries. The summary gestalt also carries spectral content that matters for downstream coupling (how to “get along with the current screen as a whole”) and drops detail that would only introduce new conflicts. That surrogate then re-enters the loop as a new gestalt with its own spectral signature. The process is recursive, which makes most of experience be a strange process where summaries compose with other summaries, and the screen converges toward a coherent standing wave that is both globally coherent and locally consistent. The “infinite reflections in the eyes of beings” inside Indra’s Net e..g. “spider eyes” (eyes reflecting eyes, etc.) move in a way that is both consistent with the local geometry of the main screen (of access consciousness) as well as with the geometry of the network of connections and reflections. When you move an eye in an Indra’s Net, you move the _whole_ Net.
On ordinary mindstates gestalts have short half-lives, so the loop clears quickly and the screen doesn’t tend to have long-range temporal self-interactions. High-energy conditions such as high dose DMT or hard Jhanas extend those half-lives (cf. Tracer Effects). More gestalts remain in the screen for longer, more summaries are formed, and more couplings between gestalts become possible. The result is a scene where parts model each other and the whole and then re-express it in transformed form that interact with one another. This is the functional core of Indra’s Net phenomenology as I currently see it. And I believe we can have it come about naturally in such an optical circuit.
The Multitude Behind the Screen
We typically think the screen of consciousness is like this: you think you are just one witness looking at it. But what if it’s actually being broadcast to hundreds of different locations at once? And every one of those locations has a specialized intelligence that knows how to identify faces/mechanisms/connections on the screen and overlay that information on top of it for everyone else to see?
Neither recurrence nor resonance can solve the phenomenal binding problem, but if consciousness is a standing wave pattern trapped in a TIR pocket, then beam splitters that allow different modules to work simultaneously into a shared space just might.
From Lehar’s Cartoon Epistemology
Each of these specialized processing locations generates its own “interpretation of the scene”. Effectively, taking the shared space and applying specialized filters (try to resonate with it in a bunch of ways and see what sticks!), in turn modifying it in real time and contributing additional gestalts to the collective mix. Face recognition modules stamp facial harmonics onto visual patterns. Motion detection systems add their characteristic rhythms. Mood modules add jitter or laminar flow to attention. Memory systems contribute resonant modes that connect current perceptions to stored patterns. Emotional processing centers overlay affective spectral information that colors the entire scene (cf. citta).
The beam splitter is multimodal. The signal gets split and is sent simultaneously to somatic processing modules, auditory systems, and other sensory domains. Each domain receives the same fundamental holistic information (the _entire_ experience!) but processes it according to its own characteristic geometry, topology, and harmonic features. There’s likely a master screen that combines these three primary modalities (incl. visual, somatic, auditory) each contributing their own spectral signatures to the unified conscious experience.
Crucially, this conceptual framework might articulate the phenomenology we observer in how tactile-visual synesthesia works through spectral principles (cf. Roger Thisdell on Pure Perception). Synesthetic states can be thought of as “solitons” of the system: self-reinforcing wave packets that maintain their coherence while propagating their spectral information to the rest of the field across modalities. These solitons resonate with one another and with the broader spectral ecosystem in the screen, integrating interactions, and in turn lock together the gestalts contributed by different modules into stable multi-modal gestalts.
The sense of “Autonomous Entities”, and even more strikingly, the feeling of being a multitude on DMT might come from this mechanism becoming more “transparent”. The screen is always broadcast to many locations, but at baseline only a few have edit rights, with a strong and smart filter gating what reaches the authoritative version. On DMT many (perhaps most?) streams gain editing privileges at once, so an ecosystem of patterns grows in the shared space and coordinates through the screen without the intermediate central organizer (ego?) filtering who talks to who. This results in complex subagents interacting through the medium that can plot for and against you. Thus framework that accounts for Indra’s Net also explains Autonomous Entities: the competing clusters of coherence on DMT form hierarchical networks that bootstrap semi-parallel agency. As Steven Lehar hypothesizes (personal communication), these entities are facets of yourself: the central screen is being beamed to separate modules, each “witnesses” the whole scene, processes it, and then comments by beaming transformed gestalts back to the screen. Under normal conditions few streams are active; with DMT’s coupling kernel you may be “opening half the streams at once” (chaotically and hierarchically), creating literally “more witnesses of your experience.” Streams come together that usually don’t co-exist, and must thus negotiate how agency will be distributed among them.
A bit like the kid behind a reporter saying “mom! I’m on tv!” – many subagents can now broadcast their existence to the whole organism and seek like-minded shards to work on (artistic? political? cosmic?) projects with. Not all the shards understand each other’s communication style, so there is a lot of cross-talk that goes unrecognized by the whole yet is happening beneath the surface.
This way, the entities we encounter can be thought of as different parts of yourself gaining editing privileges on a shared space whose control room is usually locked and safeguarded. It is a multitude in the same way that you’re always already a multitude. But you’re usually following an algorithm that prevents “multiple parts talking at once”; with DMT that system is gone.
The Tracer Effect in Light of the Hologram Collective
As briefly touched upon already, on DMT (and other psychedelics/exotic states of consciousness), sensations (and gestalts) don’t decay at the same rate as normal. Every sensation you experience tends to flicker at a high frequency and linger for a while (depending on dose, could be over several seconds). These “tracers” hang around as afterimages that flicker characteristically fast at the 10-40hz range typically as they interact with one another. When the process that effectively works as a “compression engine” (gestalts summarizing pre-existing gestalts) tries to replace a cluster of gestalts with their simplified proxy, the older ones are still present and spectrally active (meaning, their vibrations still condition the screen and one another). The screen now contains both the compressed summary AND its constituent parents, so the next compression cycle captures the recursive echoes of patterns that should have vanished under normal circumstances (cf. don’t look at cauliflowers while on DMT!). It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could lead to “fractal-like” patterns.
Overall, this creates a spectral feedback loop, where each new compression inherits more and more afterimages from previous cycles (until it reaches a dose-dependent homeostatic level). Instead of an orderly hierarchy of representations with conventional order, you get a sprawling pattern of self-referential holograms and time-loops, each quoting fragments (and partial impressions) of earlier generations, all resonating and cross-modulating each other. The compression engine, as it were, starts feeding on its own history, creating recursive patterns that reference themselves in increasingly complex ways. One of the key ingredients for the fractal quality of Indra’s Net!
Collective Harmony in Emergent Gestalts
Finally, any discussion of this process would be incomplete without at least mentioning valence. Individual holograms both float independently and they organize themselves into gestalt collectives. These collectives develop their own characteristic resonant modes, creating new spectral patterns that can influence the entire system from the top down. When you recognize a face, you are doing more than combining features such as eyes, nose, and mouth. Really, the face is a higher order gestalts: it is a collective interlocked “metagestalt” that has genuine causal power over how subsequent processing goes. The gestalts that make it up compromise a little on their own characteristic frequencies so that they can interlock as a group and genuinely form something more (and different) than the mere superposition of the parts. Importantly, each gestalt (of any order) tends to have both an intrinsic valence as well as a valence in relation to the other gestalts present. I would posit the intrinsic valence is the result of its internal consonance, dissonance, noise signature (CDNS) of the gestalt. Namely, how would this vibrate if it were the only element in the screen? Whereas valence in relation to other gestalts is the result of mutual consonance, dissonance, and noise between the gestalts.
Indra’s Net valence tends to be pretty extreme. Usually positive (or very positive), but at times negative or very negative. Yes, it is likely the case that if you want to pack as much consonance (mystical choruses, interdimensional massages, etc.) as possible in a finite volume like our screen of consciousness, probably creating a complex web of fractal connections allows you to maximize the number of pleasant relationships. Alas, be warned that fractal dissonances lurk in Indra’s Net too, and a “fractured” not quite complete Indra’s Net can be really disconcerting in some ways. It’s possible that peak positive valence resides in minimal-information-content experiences (as Michael Johnson’s Symmetry Theory of Valence posits), so high-energy high-symmetry states like 5-MeO-DMT are more likely to be leads for peak pleasure states that those catalyzed by DMT or similar. In either case, both the valence (and specifically aesthetic!) value as well as computational significance of Indra’s Net keeps it in the short list of most interesting states to study.
Discussion and Conclusions
Let’s recap. In our non-linear optical circuit, each iteration runs the same loop: the screen copies the whole scene to many modules, they transform their copies, the returns are then projected back onto the screen, and what fits with everything else stays. This iteration-by-iteration “handoff” from each of the modules and the screen as a whole gives continuity where small overlaps between iterations keep motion smooth. The system tends to a few stable objects because it keeps spectra that cooperate with each other and lets go of the rest. The screen is not (just!) a display (!), because it turns out to be where useful compute happens. Namely, where different modules can see the work of each other in real time, and negotiate together how to transform the scene in order to both fit the constraints of the screen as well as of each other.
Radical state changes affect how this loop behaves. With altered coupling dynamics, streams running at their own speed can lock to one another in the presence of strong kernel changes (e.g. when the “DMT coupling kernel” is applied indiscriminately to many systems at once). With tracers, the feedback intensifies across iterations and the negotiation becomes visible on the screen: edges, colors, textures, posture, points of view, trying to fit each with other. By default this tends towards hyperbolic geometry (as the gestalts drift into a more relaxed metric so that all of their idiosyncratic distances to one another can be embedded in some space and the gestalts get stitched together). But even more interestingly, when many modules hold the whole scene at once and write back versions that still predict it, you get Indra’s Net: each patch shows the whole through its own lens, and pulling on any part pulls on the rest too. When more streams get edit rights at the same time in tandem with the tracer effects, the modules negotiate domains of influence by both communicating through the screen and developing agent-like qualities. They all see the same broadcast, process it in their own way, and comment on it by projecting their gestalts back onto the screen. They feel alien because the usual gate that merges commentaries is relaxed, so their “signatures” stay distinct and you can watch them interact and develop new kinds of languages mid-flight.
We are in early days of BaaNLOC, but I am optimistic that it won’t take long for us to be able to code simulations of this optical circuit (and many variants) and then test whether they generate recognizably-DMT-like dynamics. From playing with toy models (to be released soon), I think we’re on track. But much remains to be done. Stay tuned 🙂
