[Epistemic status: work in progress that is highly speculative but which I have reason to think has explanatory power – the content comes from this talk I gave at the Oxford Psychedelic Society a couple of weeks ago, which was then summarized/turned into a Twitter thread by Hunter Meyer]
QRI’s ‘Good Vibes Theory’ (GVT) is a speculative proposal for a physics of consciousness. This theory aims to establish an ontological foundation for a future rigorous science of good vibes. 🧵🧵🧵 #psychedelicthermodynamics #goodvibestheory
Two groups will make the most use of GVT; one is the “vibe engineers,” who are grounded in creating good vibes technically, and the mystics, who want to connect good vibes to deep insights and truths of wisdom traditions.
There is a deep connection between the shape of things and the way they vibrate. Different shapes have different energies, as their curvature, complexity, and surface area increase.
Internal representations act as energy sinks that absorb and channel ambient energy. They are often symmetrical and have semantic meaning, which makes them effective energy sinks. These representations also radiate energy and have energizing effects *to other representations*.
In physics, the Hamiltonian of a system is a measure of the system’s total energy. Similarly, the Hamiltonian of Consciousness would formulate how to add up all the energy of each component of a bound experience created by a system to get the total energy of that experience.
QRI proposes a new framework, “Psychedelic thermodynamics”, which offers a novel perspective on energy flow in consciousness.
In this framework, one system’s energy sink is another system’s energy source. The energy flows from sensory input to consciousness, where it’s transformed into internal representations or “solitons” and released through motor actions or field radiation.
The quality of conscious experience is shaped by the energy radiated from internal representations known as gestalts, which interact with each other to produce the texture and valence of the experience. The shape of the gestalts determines the vibe they radiate (cf. valence structuralism).
The “vibes” of our experiences are determined by the interaction of our internal representations, and dissonance can arise from being out of phase with input, incompatibility with noise, being intrinsically misshaped, or dissonance with other representations.
Psychedelic Thermodynamics suggests that the valence of a psychedelic experience can be modulated by inputs to the extent that they are in tune with the background noise and there are no misshapen or incompatible inputs leading to dissonance and negative valence.
Input valence effects are therefore the result of how external stimuli interact with internal representations in conscious experience. The degree of coherence between the input and the background noise, as well as the shape and resonance of the internal representation, determine an input’s valence effects.
The Flower of Life from sacred geometry can be steel-manned (within indirect realism) as a powerful metaphor for how experience is constructed. It may have deeper metaphorical relevance in physics than previously realized in light of Feynman and Wheeler’s “one-electron universe” where reality is an interference pattern of one electron bouncing back and forth in time.
The iterative way in which the Flower of Life is constructed takes on a new potential metaphorical meaning that can be used as a lens to understand the fundamental nature of reality.
There may be just one electron in the entire universe. It is because when an electron and an anti-electron interact, they merge and cancel out, producing a photon.
Mathematically, the interaction of an electron moving back in time is the same as an anti-electron, called a positron. As a result, there is only one type of observer in the universe, and it is bouncing back and forth in time, interfering with itself.
According to physics, quantum mechanics is mathematically equivalent whether it is thought of as fields or a superposition of all possible paths.
The Schrodinger equation, which describes the behavior of quantum mechanical systems, gives the same answers whether solving the field or taking one electron or one photon and making it go through every possible path and then superimposing all those paths simultaneously.
The behavior of an electron is the sum total of all possibilities. The field and the one electron can be thought of as the same, a matter of perspective. The field is a superposition of paths, while the electron is a smooth field evolving according to the Schrodinger equation.
The field usually segments into pockets, and the topology of the magnetic field changes through a process known as magnetic reconnection, which has real-world implications, like solar flares and coronal mass ejections in the sun.
A possible solution to the “boundary problem” (how is it that we are not all just one bound experience? why are we separate moments of experience?) is that the thing that creates a boundary around an individual’s experience is a topological pocket, and within it, there is a field.
The question then arises, what does it feel like to be that field in the topological pocket?
The field is equivalent to all possible paths within it. Thus, to be a pocket in the field might feel exactly like every point in that field, knowing about every other point. This interaction between all points within the field gives rise to the entirety of the shape.
The experience of being the one electron in the topological pocket would be precisely the superposition of all possible points of view that exist within it. It aligns with what mystics have talked about for a long time – the screen of consciousness is not fundamental, but emergent.
The screen of consciousness is a special case that requires the field to be shaped in a peculiar way so that “it seems like there is a screen from every possible trajectory within the topological pocket of the field”.
Symmetry, meaning “invariance upon transformation”, can entail that many different paths look the same. As a consequence, in some situations making the pocket perfectly symmetrical (via e.g. neural annealing) can collapse the dimensionality of the experience.
As a powerful metaphor, the symmetrical nature of electron orbitals might offer insights into the experience of altered states of consciousness, such as those induced by high doses of LSD.
Under LSD, symmetrification of self within a pocket collapses multiple points of view, leading to a collective wavefront. Points within the pocket sense the field and advance as a collective wavefront, blurring the line between a point and a wave.
Some states emit coherent waves of awareness in resonant patterns, with inherent trade-offs between location and frequency due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
The symmetrical structures on DMT function as “witnesses of the scene”. Hence, with each pattern of resonance that gets organized in a symmetrical way, you add a new “reference frame” for the experience.
With a physics of consciousness, we should be able to look at trippy DMT replication images, understand their non-trivial meaningful content, and interpret the reason for the existence of the patterns and structures within them.
DMT induces resonant and coherent states of consciousness that emit waves of awareness that are in phase and which seem to be subjectively equivalent to many points simultaneously sensing the (inner) environment.
These patterns on DMT are not just “3D patterns in the visual field”; they are far deeper and more coherent, with each cluster of coherence functioning as a coherent witness that is measuring its environment (art by Symbolika).
Understanding this we can reason about highly coherent states of consciousness like those induced by psychedelics, meditation, and other ecstatic/annealing methods in terms of a network of coherence, where each frequency at which the hierarchy is coherent with one another may tell us a lot about them.
The witness is a coherent wavefront of awareness that is interacting or embedded within your consciousness. As a consequence, it is possible to describe a state of consciousness as a network of coherence.
States where the physics of consciousness is evident, include DMT’s Symmetry Hotel, where every two-dimensional surface looks like a coherent symmetry group, and Crystal Worlds, which are between Magic Eye and the Waiting Room.
In the Crystal Worlds, the witnesses are three-dimensional, and there is a question of whether they are external or internal entities. However, they are coherent witnesses of awareness that are interacting or embedded within your consciousness and their inherently 3D “point of view” has geometric effects on the unfolding of the experience.
Coherence can help us understand the zoo of possible self-organizing principles that arise on something like DMT. The network of coherence can crystallize in various shapes, including low-level features or high-level features, fractally coherent, or hyperbolic networks (also Symbolika below). Many scale-specific network geometries are possible.
On DMT, as soon as there are coherent symmetrical structures there will be mirror rooms.
Each surface emits a coherent wavefront of awareness that reflects off of the other surfaces, and this behavior is reminiscent of light in that a coherent witness bounces off of itself in the various surfaces. This may explain why “mirror room experiences” on DMT are incredibly common.
Coherence has a remarkable effect on consciousness that mirrors its effect on light. When mirrors become parallel, the subject and object collapse with perfect symmetry. Every alignment feels like a union because the witness and the witnessed collapse.
DMT induces resonant and coherent states of consciousness that emit waves of awareness, and each cluster of coherence functions as a coherent witness that is measuring its environment.
Understanding the physics of consciousness on DMT can help us understand the network of coherence, the zoo of possible self-organizing principles that arise, and the common experiences such as the mirror room experiences.
The present depiction is an intuitive and conceptual overview, while a formal and scientifically rigorous formulation is currently under development. Nonetheless, we are enthusiastic about its capacity to provide comprehensive explanations and develop its practical applications.
QRI’s GVT and Psychedelic Thermodynamics are ambitious proposals, but they are exciting ones that could open up new avenues of exploration in the field of consciousness.
If you are as excited as we are about the direction consciousness research is headed, please consider learning more at qri.org
You can find the full presentation on GVT here. Thank you @kfshinozuka and Ali-Reza Omidvar and the rest of the folks at @OxPsySoc for hosting this event:
We are deeply grateful to have you with us on our expedition through the state-space of consciousness. It’s been an exciting and productive year and we’re thrilled to share all of our updates and accomplishments. None of this would have been possible without support from sentient beings like you.
1+ Million Views
First of all, we are thrilled to announce that our presentation on DMT & Hyperbolic Geometry has reached an amazing milestone of 1+ million views this year. We highly appreciate the support and engagement of the community. This presentation has also helped to catalyze some incredible collaborations.
“I interpret QRI as coming at the problem from the opposite direction as everyone else: normal neuroscience starts with normal brain behavior and tries to build on it until they can one day explain crazy things like jhana; QRI starts with crazy things like jhana and tries to build down until they can explain ordinary behavior. This is naturally going to be shakier and harder to research – but somebody should be trying it.”
Our Slicing Problem paper, which provides a novel critique of computational theories of consciousness, has been accepted to the journal Open Philosophy.
We’ve also recently submitted a paper on our Heavy-Tailed Valence Hypothesis (read the preprint), which is the latest iteration of our Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain – a key foundational piece for the field of valence research.
QRI has been working on building this field since 2015. We are proud to continue pushing the boundaries of knowledge in valence research. We are just getting started!
In addition to our research efforts, we’ve had the opportunity to connect with others in the research community. Our Director of Research, Andrés Gómez Emilsson, presented at the Tyringham Initiative, and we held a meet-and-greet in London with approximately 40 attendees, including some of QRI’s earliest supporters. We are thrilled to see such a strong interest in building a worldwide “qualia research community”, and we look forward to hosting more meetups in the future.
QRI now has an unofficial Discord server which has already gathered over 1000 members and has fostered engaging discussions related to QRI, attracting notable figures in the field like Roger Thisdell and the founders of PsychonautWiki.
One of the highlights of the year for us was getting to host a QRI event in the San Francisco Bay Area, attended by over 200 people. It was a great opportunity for us to showcase some of our latest tangible innovations, such as our scents and a demo of our Light-Sound-Vibration system. We also had a speech about the Future of Consciousness, which generated some thought-provoking conversations.
TEDx Talk
QRI’s first TEDx Talk got published, which discusses interventions that will have as much, if not more, impact in reducing suffering as anesthesia. The most innovative part of the talk was about anti-tolerance drugs. We believe that we are the only organization in the entire world talking about anti-tolerance drugs as a dedicated field of study with enormous implications rather than as a mere biochemical oddity.
A thorough explanation of how the science of consciousness and valence structuralism inform ethics and what the Effective Altruism movement is missing.
This talk explores modeling the generator of each aesthetic in order to create a network of “compatibility between aesthetics” that minimizes dissonance between them while emphasizing their synergies as well as their unique and valuable contributions.
Discussion on indirect realism, phenomenal time, qualia formalism, exotic phenomenal spacetime in psychedelic and meditative phenomenology, the effects of persistent subject-object nonduality on phenomenal spacetime and hedonic valence, and more!
A wide-ranging discussion and sharing of perspectives covering jhāna, Brahmavihārās, comparisons with psychedelic states, and the journey to and from the Absolute.
Is Google’s LaMDA sentient? The phenomenal binding problem asks us to consider, ‘how can a huge set of discrete neurons form a unified mind?’ Is topological binding a requirement for AI to be sentient?
You can now listen to QRI material on the go, while driving, doing exercise, in the sauna, or any other healthy annealing rituals!
Supporting QRI
Purchase a scent pack from QRI’s new scent line “Magical Creatures”. This line of scents explores the complex and often puzzling interactions that exist in the state-space of olfaction, highlighting the exotic and unique qualities that can emerge in this space.
Please feel free to donate to QRI independent of our Magical Creatures campaign.
Thank you!
We want to thank everyone who has helped QRI in any way, including our current and past collaborators, donors, readers, video watchers, and event attendees. Special thanks to Hunter, Anders & Maggie, Marcin, Chris, Winslow, Olaf, Crystal, Libor, and David who really stepped up this year to help QRI in an incredible way. Our efforts wouldn’t matter or be possible without all of you! May you all be prosperous, energized, and access the full-state of consciousness for the benefit of all beings! Thank you!
¹ Additional QRI references by Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten this year:
In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell published a rambling and difficult two-volume Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism that was destined to change the orthodox picture of reality. This treatise did for electromagnetism what Newton‘s Principia had done for classical mechanics. It not only provided the mathematical tools for the investigation and representation of the whole of electromagnetic theory, but it altered the very framework of both theoretical and experimental physics. Although the process had been going on throughout the nineteenth century, it was this work that finally displaced action-at-a-distance physics and substituted the physics of the field.
Like Newton’s Principia, Maxwell’s Treatise did not immediately convince the scientific community. The concepts in it were strange and the mathematics was clumsy and involved. Most of the experimental basis was drawn from the researches of Michael Faraday, whose results were undeniable, but whose ideas seemed bizarre to the orthodox physicist. The British had, more or less, become accustomed to Faraday’s “vision,” but continental physicists, while accepting the new facts that poured from his laboratory, rejected his conceptual structures. One of Maxwell’s purposes in writing his treatise was to put Faraday’s ideas into the language of mathematical physics precisely so that orthodox physicists would be persuaded of their importance.
Maxwell died in 1879, midway through preparing a second edition of the Treatise. At that time, he had convinced only a very few of his fellow countrymen and none of his continental colleagues. That task now fell to his disciples.
The story that Bruce Hunt tells in this volume is the story of the ways in which Maxwell’s ideas were picked up in Great Britain, modified, organized, and reworked mathematically so that the Treatise as a whole and Maxwell’s concepts were clarified and made palatable, indeed irresistible, to the physicists of the late nineteenth century. The men who accomplished this, G. F. FitzGerald, Oliver Heaviside, Oliver Lodge, and others, make up the group that Hunt calls the “Maxwellians.” Their relations with one another and with Maxwell’s work make for a fascinating study of the ways in which new and revolutionary scientific ideas move from the periphery of the scientific thought to the very center. In the process, Professor Hunt also, by extensive use of manuscript sources, examines the genesis of some of the more important ideas that fed into and led to the scientific revolution of the twentieth century.
L. PEARCE WILLIAMS. – Ithaca, New York
“Maxwell’s equations”
Introduction
James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field is generally acknowledged as one of the outstanding intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century—indeed, of any century. The late Richard Feynman once remarked, with perhaps only a little hyperbole, that “from a long view of the history of mankind […] there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics”. Even the American Civil War, Feynman said, “will pale into provincial insignificance” besides this more profound event of the 1860s.[1] By the mid-1890s the four “Maxwell’s equations” were recognized as the foundation of one of the strongest and most successful theories in all of physics; they had taken their place as companions, even rivals, to Newton’s laws of mechanics. The equations were by then also being put into practical use, most dramatically in the emerging new technology of radio communications, but also in the telegraph, telephone, and electric power industries. Maxwell’s theory passed to the twentieth century with an enormous reputation it has retained ever since.
It is thus perhaps surprising to find that the fullest statement Maxwell gave of his theory, his 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, does not contain the four famous “Maxwell’s equations,” nor does it even hint at how electromagnetic waves might be produced or detected. These and many other aspects of the theory were quite thoroughly hidden in the version of it given by Maxwell himself; in the words of Oliver Heaviside, they were “latent” in the theory, but hardly “patent.”[2]
Maxwell was only forty-eight when he died of cancer in November 1879. He was only a quarter of the way through revising his Treatise for a second edition, and the task of digging out the “latent” aspects of his theory and of exploring its wider implications was thus left to a group of younger physicists, most of them British. Between roughly 1879 and 1894, these “Maxwellians,” led by George Francis FitzGerald (1851-1901), Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), and Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925), with a key contribution from the German physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894), transformed the rich but confusing raw material of the Treatise into a solid, concise, and well-confirmed theory—essentially, at least for free space, the “Maxwell’s theory” we know today. It was they who first explored the possibility of generating electromagnetic waves and then actually demonstrated their existence; it was they, along with J. H. Poynting (1852-1914), who first delineated the paths of energy flow in the electromagnetic field and then followed out the far-reaching implications of this discovery; it was they who recast the long list of equations Maxwell had given in his Treatise into the compact set now universally known as “Maxwell’s”; and it was they who began to apply this revised theory to problems of electrical communications, with results that have transformed modern life. It was mainly the Maxwellians who gave Maxwell’s theory the form it has since retained, and it was largely through their work that it first acquired its great reputation and breadth of application.
The evolution of “Maxwell’s theory” in the years after Maxwell’s death provides a striking example of a process quite common in science, as in other fields of intellectual endeavor. Scientific theories rarely spring fully formed from the mind of one person; a theory is likely to be so refined and reinterpreted by later thinkers that by the time it is codified and passes into general circulation, it often bears little resemblance to the form in which it was first propounded. The practice in science of naming theories after their originators often obscures the historical process by which scientific syntheses are achieved. One is tempted to seek all of “Newtonianism” in Newton, or all of “Darwinism” in Darwin. One of the main aims in the pages that follow is to trace the formation of such a theoretical synthesis in some detail and to show that “Maxwellianism,” though undeniably built on Maxwell’s ideas, was in many ways the work of his successors. “Maxwell was only 1/2 Maxwellian,” Heavisde declared in 1895; I examine here what it meant to be a Maxwellian and trace the transformation of ideas that lay behind Heaviside’s remark.[3]
Another of my aims is to trace the evolution of the Maxwellians as a scientific group and to show how they stimulated and helped one another, both in their strictly scientific work and in more practical affairs. Science is a more social and cooperative process than is sometimes appreciated, and one of the most effective ways to capture its richness is to examine in detail the workings of a small group. The key to such a study of the Maxwellians is their surviving letters and notebooks, through which one can follow the course of their thoughts and actions almost day by day and see how strongly they influenced one another. In the work of FitzGerald and Lodge on ether models and electromagnetic waves; in Lodge and Heaviside’s joint battles with W. H. Preece of the Post Office Telegraph Department; in Heaviside and FitzGerald’s long collaboration on the problem of moving charges and on the puzzle of the ultimate nature of the electromagnetic field—in all of these, the cooperative nature of the Maxwellian’s work can be clearly seen in their correspondence. Heaviside in particular virtually lived his life on paper; he was something of a recluse, and his letters and published writings were his main contact with the outside world. FitzGerald and Lodge, too, left very full records of their activities. Although all three were pioneers of electrical communications, they lived before telephones were common, and since they were physically separated—Heaviside in London and later Devon, Lodge in Liverpool, and FitzGerald in Dublin—they kept in touch mostly via letters, hundreds of which have been preserved. These enable us to reconstruct not only their work but something of their personalities and to see them engaged in the 1880s and 1890s in the lively business of remaking Maxwell’s theory and of probing, as they thought, into the ultimate foundations of the physical universe.
Maxwell himself is only a minor character in this story; he died before the Maxwellians’ work was well begun. But his ideas pervade the book, as they pervaded the Maxwellians’ own work. Though greatly reinterpreted and recast, Maxwell’s ideas always formed the core of the Maxwellian synthesis. In one of the most interesting of his unpublished writings, Heaviside reflected on the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. In its old religious sense, the idea had, he believed, been thoroughly discredited. But there was, he said, another “and far nobler sense” in which the soul truly was immortal. In living our lives, each of us “makes some impression on the world, good or bad, and then dies”; this impression goes on to affect future events for all time, so that “a part of us lives after us, diffused through all humanity, more or less, and all of Nature. This is the immortality of the soul,” Heaviside said. “There are large and there are small souls,” he went on.
The immortal soul of John Ploughman of Buckinghamshire is a small affair, scarcely visible. That of a Shakespeare or a Newton is stupendous. Such men live the best parts of their lives after they shuffle off the mortal coil and fall into the grave. Maxwell was one of those men. His soul will live and grow for long to come, and, thousands of years hence, it will shine as one of the bright stars of the past, whose light takes ages to reach us, amongst the crowd of others, not the least bright.[4]
This light from Maxwell has come down to us mainly through the Maxwellians; it was they who developed the most important implications of his theory and cast it into the form in which it has become most widely known. In the pages that follow, we trace how this light was refracted and refocused by the Maxwellians and how it was passed along to the next generation, to be transformed and reinterpreted again.
[1] Feynman 1964, 2:1.11
[2] Heaviside 1892, 2:393 [1888]
[3] Heaviside to FitzGerald, [Mar. 1895], FG-RDS; internal evidence places this undated fragment between FitzGerald’s letters to Heaviside of 8 and 15 Mar., OH-IEE.
[4] Heaviside notebook 8, OH-IEE; a slightly different version is quoted in Appleyard 1930: 257. It was probably written in 1886; cf. Heaviside 1892, 2:77 [1886].
[Context: 4th in a series of 7-video packages. See the previous three packages: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd]
Cognitive Sovereignty: How Do You Incentivize Genuinely New Thoughts? (link)
Genuinely new thoughts are actually very rare. Why is that? And how can we incentivize the good side of smart people to focus their energies on having genuinely new thoughts for the benefit of all? In order to create the conditions for that we need to strike the right balance between many complementary forces.
I offer a new ideal we call “Cognitive Sovereignty”. This ideal consists of three principles working together in synergy: (1) Freedom of Thought and Feeling, (2) Idea Ownership, and (3) Information Responsibility.
(1) Freedom of Thought and Feeling is the cultivation of a child-like wonder and positive attitude towards the ideas of one another. A “Yes And” approach to idea sharing.
“On the topic of liberty of mind, we may reflect that inhibitory mechanisms are typically strong within groups of people. As is the case within minds of individuals. In minds it’s this tip of the iceberg which gets rendered as qualia and is the end result of unexperienced hierarchies of powerfully constraining filters. It’s really practical for life forms to function this way and for teams made up of life forms to function similarly, but for making grand improvements to the very foundations of life itself, you need maximum creativity instead of the default self-organizing consensus emergence.
“There is creativity-limiting pressure to conform to ‘correctness’ everywhere. Paradigmatic correctness in science, corporate correctness in business, social correctness, political correctness, and so on. As antidotes to chaos these can serve a purpose but for exceptional intellectual work to blossom they are quite counterproductive. There is something to be said for Elon Musk’s assertion that ‘excellence is the only passing grade’.
“The difference to the future wellbeing of sentient entities between the QRI becoming something pretty much overall OK-ish, and the QRI becoming something of great excellence, is probably bigger than between the corresponding outcomes for Tesla Motors.
“The creativity of the team is down to this exact thing: The qualia computing of the gut feeling getting to enjoy a haven of liberty all too rare elsewhere.”
On (2) we can say that to “be the adult in the room” is also equally important. As Michael Johnson puts it, “it’s important to keep track of the metadata of ideas.” One cannot incentivize smart people to share ideas if they don’t feel like others will recognize who came up with them. While not everyone pays close attention to who says what in conversation, we think that a reasonable level of attention on this is necessary to align incentives. Obviously too much emphasis on Idea Ownership can be stifling and generate excessive overhead. So having open conversations about (failed) attribution while assuming the best from others is also a key practice to make Idea Ownership good for everyone.
And finally, (3) is the principle of “Information Responsibility”. This is the “wise old person” energy and attitude that deeply cares about the effects that information has on the world. Simple heuristics like “information wants to be free” and the ideal of a fully “open science” are pleasant to think about, but in practice they may lead to disasters on a grand scale. From gain of function research in virology to analysis of water pipes in cities, cutting-edge research can at times encounter novel ways of causing great harm. It’s imperative that one resists the urge to share them with the world for the sake of signaling how smart one is (which is the default path for the vast majority of people and institutions!). One needs to cultivate the wisdom to consider the long-term vision and only share ideas one knows are safe for the world. Here, of course, we need a balance: too much emphasis on information security can be a tactic to thwart other’s work and may be undully onerous and stifling. Striking the right balance is the goal.
The full synergy between these three principles of Cognitive Sovereignty, I think, is what allows people to think new thoughts.
I also cover two new key ideas: (a) Canceling Paradise and (b) Multi-level Selection and how it interacts with Organizational Freedom.
Towards an Enlightened Phenomenology of Scent: What’s an Aromatic Fougère at the Deepest Level? (link)
In this talk we analyze the perfume category called “AromaticFougère” in order to illustrate the aesthetic of “Qualiacore” in its myriad manifestations.
Definition: The Qualiacore Aesthetic is the practice and aspiration to describe experiences in new, meaningful, and non-trivial ways that are illuminating for our understanding of the nature of consciousness.
At a high-level, we must note that the classic ways of describing the phenomenology of scents tend to “miss the target”. Learning about the history, cultural imports, associations, and similarities between perfumes can be fun to do but it does not advance an accurate phenomenological impression of what it is that we are talking about. And while reading about the “perfume notes” of a composition can place it in a certain location relative to other perfumes, such note descriptions usually give you a false sense of understanding and familiarity far removed from the complex subtleties of the state-space of scent. So how can we say new, meaningful, and non-trivial things about a smell?
Note-wise, Aromatic Fougères are typically described as the combination of herbs and spices (the aromatic part) with the core Fougère accord of oak moss, lavender/bergamot, geranium, and coumarin. In this video I offer a qualiacore-style analysis of how these “notes” interact with one another in order to form emergent gestalts. Here we will focus on the phenomenal character of these effects with an emphasis on bringing analogies from dynamic system behavior and energy-management techniques within the purview of the Symmetry Theory of Valence.
In the end, we arrive at a phenomenological fingerprint that cashes out in a comparison to the psychoactive effect of “Calvin Klein” (cocaine + ketamine*), which blends both stimulation and dissociation at the same time – a rather interesting effect that can be used to help you overcome awkwardness barriers in everyday life. “Smooth out the awkwardness landscape with Drakkar Noir!”
I also discuss the art of perfumery in light of QRI’s 8 models of art:
Art as family resemblance (Semantic Deflation)
Art as Signaling (Cool Kid Theory)
Art as Schelling-point creation (a few Hipster-theoretical considerations)
Art as cultivating sacred experiences (self-transcendence and highest values)
Art as exploring the state-space of consciousness (ϡ☀♘🏳️🌈♬♠ヅ)
Art as something that messes with the energy parameter of your mind (ꙮ)
Art as puzzling valence effects (emotional salience and annealing as key ingredients)
Art as a system of affective communication: a protolanguage to communicate information about worthwhile qualia (which culminates in Harmonic Society).
Are Others Conscious? Solving the Problem of Other Minds with Mindmelding and Phenomenal Puzzles (link)
How do you know for sure that other people (and non-human animals) are conscious?
The so-called “problem of other minds” asks us to consider whether we truly have any solid basis for believing that “we are not alone”. In this talk I provide a new, meaningful, and non-trivial solution to the problem of other minds using a combination of mindmelding and phenomenal puzzles in the right sequence such that one can gain confidence that others are indeed “solving problems with qualia computing” and in turn infer that they are independently conscious.
This explanatory style contrasts with typical “solutions” to the problem of other minds that focus on either historical, behavioral, or algorithmic similarities between oneself and others (e.g. “passing a Turing test”). Here we explore what the space of possible solutions looks like and show that qualia formalism can be a key to unlock new kinds of understanding currently out of reach within the prevailing paradigms in philosophy of mind. But even with qualia formalism, the radical skeptic solipsist will not be convinced. Direct experience and “proof” is necessary to convince a hardcore solipsist since intellectual “inferential” arguments can always be mere “figments of one’s own imagination”. We thus explore how mindmelding can greatly increase our certainty of other’s consciousness. However, skeptical worries may still linger: how do you know that the source of consciousness during mindmelding is not your brain alone? How do you know that the other brain is conscious while you are not connected to it? We thus introduce “phenomenal puzzles” into the picture: these are puzzles that require the use of “qualia comparisons” to be solved. In conjunction with a specific mindmelding information sharing protocol, such phenomenal puzzles can, we argue, actually fully address the problem of other minds in ways even strong skeptics will be satisfied with. You be the judge! 🙂
~Qualia of the Day: Wire Puzzles~
Many thanks to: Everyone who has encouraged the development of the field of qualia research over the years. David Pearce for encouraging me to actually write out my thoughts and share them online, Michael Johnson for our multi-year deep collaboration at QRI, and Murphy-Shigematsu for pushing me over the edge to start working on “what I had been putting off” back in 2014 (which was the trigger to actually write the first Qualia Computing post). In addition, I’d like to thank everyone at the Stanford Transhumanist Association for encouraging me so much over the years (Faust, Karl, Juan-Carlos, Blue, Todor, Keetan, Alan, etc.). Duncan Wilson for the beautiful times discussing these matters. Romeo Stevens for the amazing vibes and high-level thoughts. And of course everyone at QRI, especially Quintin Frerichs, Andrew Zuckerman, Anders and Maggie, and the list goes on (Mackenzie, Sean, Hunter, Elin, Wendi, etc.). Likewise, everyone at Qualia Computing Networking (the closed facebook group where we discuss a lot of these ideas), our advisors, donors, readers, and of course those watching these videos. Much love to all of you!
“Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” – To understand all is to forgive all.
Paradigm-Shifting Qualia Research Methods: How to Take Exotic States of Consciousness Seriously (link)
“New scientific paradigms essentially begin life as conspiracy theories, noticing the inconsistencies the previous paradigm is suppressing. Early adopters undergo a process that Kuhn likens to religious deconversion.” – Romeo Stevens
The field of consciousness research lacks a credible synthesis of what we already know about the mind. One key thing that is holding back the science of consciousness is that it’s currently missing an adequate set of methods to “take seriously” the implications of exotic states of consciousness. Imagine a physicist saying that “there is nothing about water that we can learn from studying ice”. Silly as it may be, the truth is that this is the typical attitude about exotic consciousness in modern neuroscience. And even with the ongoing resurgence of scientific interest in psychedelics, outside of QRI and Ingram’s EPRC there is no real serious attempt at mapping the state-space of consciousness in detail. This is to a large extent because we lack the vocabulary, tools, concepts, and focus at a paradigmatic level to do so. But a new paradigm is arriving, and the following 8 new research methods and others in the works will help bring it about:
Taking Exotic States of Consciousness Seriously (e.g. when a world-class phenomenologist says that 3D-printed Poincaré projections of hyperbolic honeycombs make the visual system “glitch” when on DMT the rational response is to listen and ask questions rather than ignore and ridicule).
High-Quality Phenomenology: Precise descriptions of the phenomenal character of experience. Core strategy: useful taxonomies of experience, a language to describe generalized synesthesia (multi-modal coherence), and a rich vocabulary to convey the statistical regularities of textures of qualia (cf. generalizing the concept of “mongrels” in the neuroscience of visual perception to all other modalities).
Phenomenology Club: Critical mass of smart and rational psychonauts.
Psychedelic Turk for Psychophysics: Real-time psychedelic task completion.
Generalized Wada Test: What happens when half of your brain is on LSD and the other half is on ketamine?
Resonance-Based Hedonic Mapping: You are a network of coupled oscillators. Act like it!
Pair Qualia Cartography: Like pair programming but for exploring the state-space of consciousness with non-invasive neurostimulation.
Cognitive Sovereignty: Furthering a culture that has a “Yes &” approach to creativity, keeps track of meta-data, and takes responsibility for the information it puts out.
Are Higher Dimensions Real? From Numerology to Precision Xenovalence – 4 5 6 8 10 12 16 20 24 32 (link)
Many people report experiencing “higher dimensions” during deep meditation and/or psychedelic experiences. Vaporized DMT in particular reliably produces this effect in a large percentage of users. But is this an illusion? Is there anything meaningful to it? What could possibly be going on?
In this video we provide a steel man (or titanium man?) of the idea that higher dimensions are *real* in a new, meaningful, and non-trivial sense.
We must emphasize that most people who believe that DMT experiences are “higher dimensional” interpret their experiences within a direct realist framework. Meaning that they think they are “tuning in” to other dimensions, that some secret sense organ capable of perceiving the etheric realm was “activated”, that awareness into divine realms became available to their soul, or something along those lines. In brief, such interpretations operate under the notion that we can perceive the world directly somehow. In this video, we instead work under the premise that we live in a compact world-simulation generated by our nervous system. If DMT gives rise to “higher dimensional experiences”, then such dimensions will be phenomenological in nature.
We thus try to articulate how it can be possible for an *experience* to acquire higher dimensions. An important idea here is that there is a trade-off between degrees of freedom and geometric dimensions. We present a model where degrees of freedom can become interlocked in such a way that they functionally emulate the behavior of a *virtual* higher dimension. As exemplified by the “harmonograph”, one can indeed couple and interlock multiple oscillators in such a way that one generates paths of a point in a space that is higher-dimensional than the space inhabited by any of the oscillators on their own. More so, with a long qualia decay, one can use such technique to “paint” entire images in a *virtual* high dimensional canvas!
High-quality detailed phenomenology of DMT by rational psychonauts strongly suggests that higher virtual dimensions are widely present in the state. Also, the unique valence properties of the state seem to follow what we could call a “generalized music theory” where the “vibe” of the space is the net consonance between all of the metronomes in it. We indeed see a duality between spatial symmetry and temporal synchrony with modality-specific symmetries (equivariance maps) constraining the dynamic behavior.
This, together with the Symmetry Theory of Valence (Johnson), makes the search for “special divine numbers” suddenly meaningful: numerological correspondences can illuminate the underlying makeup of “heaven worlds” and other hedonically-loaded states of mind!
I conclude with a discussion about the nature of “highly-meaningful experiences”. In light of all of these frameworks, meaning can be understood as a valence effect that arises when you have strong consonance between abstract (narrative and symbolic), emotional, and sensory fields all at once. A key turning point in your life combined with the right emotion and the right “sacred space” can thus give rise to “peak meaning”. The key to infinite bliss!
Thumbnail Image Source: Petri G., Expert P., Turkheimer F., Carhart-Harris R., Nutt D., Hellyer P. J. and Vaccarino F. 2014 Homological scaffolds of brain functional networks J. R. Soc. Interface.112014087320140873 – https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2014.0873
Solving the Phenomenal Binding Problem: Topological Segmentation as the Correct Explanation Space (link)
How can a bundle of atoms form a unified mind? This is far from a trivial question, and it demands an answer.
The phenomenal binding problem asks us to consider exactly that. How can spatially and temporally distributed patterns of neural activity contribute to the contents of a unified experience? How can various cognitive modules interlock to produce coherent mental activity that stands as a whole?
To address this problem we first need to break down “the hard problem of consciousness” into manageable subcomponents. In particular, we follow Pearce’s breakdown of the problem where we posit that any scientific theory of consciousness must answer: (1) why consciousness exists at all, (2) what are the set of qualia variety and values, and what is the nature of their interrelationships, (3) the binding problem, i.e. why are we not “mind dust”?, and (4) what are the causal properties of consciousness (how could natural selection recruit experience for information processing purposes, and why is it that we can talk about it). We discuss how trying to “solve consciousness” without addressing each of these subproblems is like trying to go to the Moon without taking into account air drag, or the Moon’s own gravitational field, or the fact that most of outer space is an air vacuum. Illusionism, in particular, seems to claim “the Moon is an optical illusion” (which would be true for rainbows – but not for the Moon, or consciousness).
Zooming in on (3), we suggest that any solution to the binding problem must: (a) avoid strong emergence, (b) side-step the hard problem of consciousness, (c) circumvent epiphenomenalism, and (d) be compatible with the modern scientific word picture, namely the Standard Model of physics (or whichever future version achieves full causal closure).
Given this background, we then explain that “the binding problem” as stated is in fact conceptually insoluble. Rather, we ought to reformulate it as the “boundary problem”: reality starts out unified, and the real question is how it develops objective and frame invariant boundaries. Additionally, we explain that “classic vs. quantum” is a false dichotomy, at least in so far as “classical explanations” are assumed to involve particles and forces. Field behavior is in fact ubiquitous in conscious experience, and it need not be quantum to be computationally relevant! In fact, we argue that nothing in experience makes sense except in light of holistic field behavior.
We then articulate exactly why all of the previously proposed solutions to the binding problem fail to meet the criteria we outlined. Among them, we cover:
Cellular Automata
Complexity
Synchrony
Integrated Information
Causality
Spatial Proximity
Behavioral Coherence
Mach Principle
Resonance
Finally, we present what we believe is an actual plausible solution to the phenomenal binding problem that satisfies all of the necessary key constraints:
10. Topological segmentation
The case for (10) is far from trivial, which is why it warrants a detailed explanation. It results from realizing that topological segmentation allows us to simultaneously obtain holistic field behavior useful for computation and new and natural regions of fields that we could call “emergent separate beings”. This presents a completely new paradigm, which is testable using elements of the cohomology of electromagnetic fields.
We conclude by speculating about the nature of multiple personality disorder and extreme meditation and psychedelic states of consciousness in light of a topological solution to the boundary problem. Finally, we articulate the fact that, unlike many other theories, this explanation space is in principle completely testable.
~Qualia of the Day: Acqua di Gio by Giorgio Armani and Ambroxan~
Qualia Computing: How Conscious States Are Used For Efficient And Non-Trivial Information Processing (link)
Why are we conscious?
The short answer is that bound moments of experience have useful causal and computational properties that can speed up information processing in a nervous system.
But what are these properties, exactly? And how do we know? In this video I unpack this answer in order to explain (or at least provide a proof of concept explanation for) how bound conscious states accomplish non-trivial speedups in computational problems (e.g. such as the problem of visual reification).
In order to tackle this question we first need to (a) enrich our very conception of computation, and (b) also enrich our conception of intelligence.
(a) Computation: We must realize that the Church-Turing Thesis conception of computation only cares about computing in terms of functions. That is, how inputs get mapped to outputs. But a much more general conception of computation also considers how the substrate allows for computational speed-ups via interacting inner states with intrinsic information. More so, if reality is made of “monads” that have non-zero intrinsic information and interact with one another, then our conception of “computation” must also consider monad networks. And in particular, the “output” of a computation may in fact be an inner bound state rather than just a sequence of discrete outputs (!).
(b) Intelligence: currently this is a folk concept poorly formalized by the instruments with which we measure it (primarily in terms of sequential logics-linguistic processing). But, alas, intelligence is a function of one’s entire world-simulation: even the shading of the texture of the table in front of you is contributing to the way you “see the world” and thus reason about it. So, an enriched conception of intelligence must also take into account: (1) binding, (2) the presence of a self, (3) perspective-taking, (4) distinguishing between the trivial and significant, and (5) state-space of consciousness navigation.
Now that we have these enriched conceptions, we are ready to make sense of the computational role of consciousness: in a way, the whole point of “intelligence” is to avoid brute force solutions by instead recruiting an adequate “self-organizing principle” that can run on the universe’s inherent massively parallel nature. Hence, the “clever” way in which our world-simulation is used: as shown by visual illusions, meditative states, psychedelic experiences, and psychophysics, perception is the result of a balance of field forces that is “just right”. Case in point: our nervous system utilizes the holistic behavior of the field of awareness in order to quickly find symmetry elements (cf. Reverse Grassfire Algorithm).
As a concrete example, I articulate the theoretical synthesis QRI has championed that combines Friston’s Free Energy Principle, Atasoy’s Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves, Carhart-Harris’ Entropic Disintegration, and QRI’s Symmetry Theory of Valence and Neural Annealing to shows that the nervous system is recruiting the self-organizing principle of annealing to solve a wide range of computational problems. Other principles to be discussed at a later time.
To summarize: the reason we are conscious is because being conscious allows you to recruit self-organizing principles that can run on a massively parallel fashion in order to find solutions to problems at [wave propagation] speed. Importantly, this predicts it’s possible to use e.g. a visual field on DMT in order to quickly find the “energy minima” of a physical state that has been properly calibrated to correspond to the dynamics of a worldsheet in that state. This is falsifiable and exciting.
I conclude with a description of the Goldilock’s Zone of Oneness and why to experience it.
Transcript from the last section of the 1983 BBC interview of Richard Feynman “Fun to Imagine” (excerpt starts at 55:52):
Interviewer presumably asks: What is it like to think about your work?
Well, when I’m actually doing my own things, that I’m working in the high, deep, and esoteric stuff that I worry about, I don’t think I can describe very well what it is like… First of all it is like asking a centipede which leg comes after which. It happens quickly and I am not exactly sure… flashes and stuff goes on in the head. But I know it is a crazy mixture of partial differential equations, partial solving of the equations, then having some sort of picture of what’s happening that the equations are saying is happening, but they are not as well separated as the words that I’m using. And it’s a kind of a nutty thing. It’s very hard to describe and I don’t know that it does any good to describe. And something that struck me, that is very curious: I suspect that what goes on in every man’s head might be very, very different. The actual imagery or semi-imagery which comes is different. And that when we are talking to each other at these high and complicated levels, and we think we are speaking very well and we are communicating… but what we’re really doing is having some kind of big translation scheme going on for translating what this fellow says into our images. Which are very different.
I found that out because at the very lowest level, I won’t go into the details, but I got interested… well, I was doing some experiments. And I was trying to figure out something about our time sense. And so what I would do is, I would count trying to count to a minute. Actually, say I’d count to 48 and it would be one minute. So I’d calibrate myself and I would count a minute by counting to 48 (so it was not seconds what I counted, but close enough), and then it turns out if you repeat that you can do very accurately when you get to 48 or 47 or 49, not far off you are very close to a minute. And I would try to find out what affected that time sense, and whether I could do anything at the same time as I was counting and I found that I could do many things, but couldn’t do other things. I could… For example I had great difficulty doing this: I was in university and I had to get my laundry ready. And I was putting the socks out and I had to make a list of how many socks, something like six or eight pair of socks, and I couldn’t count them. Because the “counting machine” was being used and I couldn’t count them. Until I found out I could put them in a pattern and recognize the number. And so I learned a way after practicing by which I could go down on lines of type and newspapers and see them in groups. Three – three – three – one, that’s a group of ten, three – three – three – one… and so on without saying the numbers, just seeing the groupings and I could therefore count the lines of type (I practiced). In the newspaper, the same time I was counting internally the seconds, so I could do this fantastic trick of saying: “48! That’s one minute, and there are 67 lines of type”, you see? It was quite wonderful. And I discovered many things I could read while I was… I could read while I was counting and get an idea of what it was about. But I couldn’t speak, say anything. Because of course, when I was counting I sort of spoke to myself inside. I would say one, two, three… sort of in the head! Well, I went down to get breakfast and there was John Tuckey, a mathematician down at Princeton at the same time, and we had many discussions, and I was telling him about these experiments and what I could do. And he says “that’s absurd!”. He says: “I don’t see why you would have any difficulty talking whatsoever, and I can’t possibly believe that you could read.” So I couldn’t believe all this. But we calibrated him, and it was 52 for him to get to 60 seconds or whatever, I don’t remember the numbers now. And then he’d say, “alright, what do you want me to say? Marry Had a Little Lamb… I can speak about anything. Blah, blah, blah, blah… 52!” It’s a minute, he was right. And I couldn’t possibly do that, and he wanted me to read because he couldn’t believe it. And then we compared notes and it turned out that when he thought of counting, what he did inside his head is that when he counted he saw a tape with numbers, that did clink, clink, clink [shows with his hand the turning and passing of a counting tape], and the tape would change with the numbers printed on it, which he could see. Well, since it’s sort of an optical system that he is using, and not voice, he could speak as much as he wanted. But if he wanted to read then he couldn’t look at his clock. Whereas for me it was the other way.
And that’s where I discovered, at least in this very simple operation of counting, the great difference in what goes on in the head when people think they are doing the same thing! And so it struck me therefore, if that’s already true at the most elementary level, that when we learn about mathematics, and the Bessel functions, and the exponentials, and the electric fields, and all these things… that the imagery and method by which we are storing it all and the way we are thinking about it… could be it really if we get into each other’s heads, entirely different? And in fact why somebody has sometimes a great deal of difficulty understanding when you are pointing to something which you see as obvious, and vice versa, it may be because it’s a little hard to translate what you just said into his particular framework and so on. Now I’m talking like a psychologist and you know I know nothing about this.
Suppose that little things behaved very differently than anything that was big. Anything that you are familiar with… because you see, as the animal evolves, and so on, as the brain evolves, it gets used to handling, and the brain is designed, for ordinary circumstances. But if the gut particles in the deep inner workings whereby some other rules and some other character they behave differently, they were very different than anything on a large scale, then there would be some kind of difficulty, you know, understanding and imagining reality. And that is the difficulty we are in. The behavior of things on a small scale is so fantastic, it is so wonderfully different, so marvelously different than anything that behaves on a large scale… say, “electrons act like waves”, no they don’t exactly. “They act like particles”, no they don’t exactly. “They act like a kind of a fog around the nucleus”, no they don’t exactly. And if you would like to get a clear sharp picture of an animal, so that you could tell exactly how it is going to behave correctly, to have a good image, in other words, a really good image of reality I don’t know how to do it!
Because that image has to be mathematical. We have mathematical expressions, strange as mathematics is I don’t understand how it is, but we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without actually being able to picture it. It would be something like a computer that you put certain numbers in and you have the formula for what time the car will arrive at different destinations, and the thing does the arithmetic to figure out what time the car arrives at the different destinations but cannot picture the car. It’s just doing the arithmetic! So we know how to do the arithmetic but we cannot picture the car. No, it’s not a hundred percent because for certain approximate situations a certain kind of approximate picture works. That it’s simply a fog around the nucleus that when you squeeze it, it repels you is very good for understanding the stiffness of material. That it’s a wave which does this and that is very good for some other phenomena. So when you are working with certain particular aspect of the behavior of atoms, for instance when I was talking about temperature and so forth, that they are just little balls is good enough and it gives us a very nice picture of temperature. But if you ask more specific questions and you get down to questions like how is it that when you cool helium down, even to absolute zero where there is not supposed to be any motion, it’s a perfect fluid that hasn’t any viscosity, has no resistance, flows perfectly, and isn’t freezing?
Well if you want to get a picture of atoms that has all of that in it, I can’t do it, you see? But I can explain why the helium behaves as it does by taking my equations and showing that the consequences of them is that the helium will behave as it is observed to behave, so we now have the theory right, but we haven’t got the pictures that will go with the theory. And is that because we are limited and haven’t caught on to the right pictures? Or is that because there aren’t any right pictures for people who have to make pictures out of things that are familiar to them? Let’s suppose it’s the last one. That there’s no right pictures in terms of things that are familiar to them. Is it possible then, to develop a familiarity with those things that are not familiar on hand by study? By learning about the properties of atoms and quantum mechanics, and practicing with the equations, until it becomes a kind of second nature, just as it is second nature to know that if two balls came towards each other they’d mash into bits, you don’t say the two balls when they come toward each other turn blue. You know what they do! So the question is whether you can get to know what things do better than we do today. You know as the generations develop, will they invent ways of teaching, so that the new people will learn tricky ways of looking at things and be so well trained that they won’t have our troubles with picturing the atom? There is still a school of thought that cannot believe that the atomic behavior is so different than large-scale behavior. I think that’s a deep prejudice, it’s a prejudice from being so used to large-scale behavior. And they are always seeking to find, to waiting for the day that we discover that underneath the quantum mechanics, there’s some mundane ordinary balls hitting, or particles moving, and so on. I think they’re going to be defeated. I think nature’s imagination is so much greater than man’s, she’s never gonna let us relax.
In the following video Leo Gura from actualized.org talks about his 30-day 5-MeO-DMT streak experiment. In this post I’ll highlight some of the notable things he said and comment along the way using a QRI-lens to interpret his experiences (if you would rather make up your mind about what he says without my commentary just go and watch the video on your own before reading what I have to say about it).
TL;DR: Many of the core QRI paradigms such as Neural Annealing, the Symmetry Theory of Valence, the Tyranny of the Intentional Object, and Hyperbolic Geometry on Psychedelics have a surprising degree of explanatory power when it comes to making sense of the peculiar process that ensues when someone takes a lot of 5-MeO-DMT. The deep connections between symmetry, valence, smooth geometry, and information content are made clear in this context due to the extreme and purified nature of the states induced by the drug.
Introduction
Recently Adeptus Psychonautica (who has interviewed me in the past about the hyperbolic geometry of DMT experiences) put out a video titled “When you have taken too much – Actualized.org“. This video caught my attention because Leo Gura did something that is rather taboo in spiritual communities, and for good reasons. Namely, he tried to convince the viewers that he had achieved a level of awakening that nobody (or perhaps only a few people) on the entire planet had ever reached. He then said he was going to isolate for a month to integrate these profound awakenings and come back with a description of what they are all about.
Thankfully I didn’t have to wait a month to satisfy my curiosity and see what happened after his period of isolation because by the time I found about it he had already posted his post-retreat video. Well, it turns out that he used those 30 days of isolation to conduct a very hard-core psychedelic experiment. Namely, he took high doses of 5-MeO-DMT daily for the entire month. I’ve never heard of anyone doing this before.
Learning about what he experienced during that month is of special interest to me for many reasons. In particular, thanks to previous research about extreme bliss and suffering, we had determined that 5-MeO-DMT is currently the psychedelic drug that has the most powerful and intense effects on valence. Recall Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain (video): many lines of evidence point to the fact that extreme states of consciousness are surprisingly powerful in ways that are completely counterintuitive. So when Leo says that there are “many levels of awakening” and goes on to discuss how each level is unrecognizably more intense and deeper than the previous one, I am very much inclined to believe he is trying to convey a true property of his experiences. Note that Leo did not only indulge in psychedelics; we are talking about 5-MeO-DMT in particular, which is the thermonuclear bomb version of a psychoactive drug (as with Plutonium, this stuff is best handled with caution). More so, thankfully Leo is very eloquent, which is rare among people who have had many extreme experiences. So I was very eager to hear what he had to say.
While I can very easily believe his trip reports when it comes to their profundity, intensity, and extraordinary degree of consciousness, I do not particularly find his interpretations of these experiences convincing. As I go about describing his video, I will point out ways in which you can take as veridical his phenomenological descriptions without at the same time having to agree with his interpretations of them. More so, if you end up exploring these varieties of altered states yourself, by reading this you will now at least have two different and competing frameworks to explain your experiences. This, I think, is an improvement. Right now the psychedelic and scientific community has very few lenses with which to interpret something as extraordinary as 5-MeO-DMT experiences. And I believe this comes at a great cost to people’s sanity and epistemic rationality.
What Are Leo’s Background Assumptions?
In the pre-retreat video Leo says that his core teachings (and what he attempts to realize on his own self) are: (1) you are literally God, (2) there is nothing but consciousness – God is infinite consciousness, (3) everything is states of consciousness – everything at all times is a different state of consciousness, (4) you are love – and love is absolute – this is all constructed out of love – fear is just fear of aspects of yourself you have disconnected from, (5) you have no beginning and no end, (6) you should be radically open-minded. Then he also adds that physical and mental health issues are just manifestations of your resistance to realizing that you are God.
What Are My Background Assumptions?
Personal Identity
I am quite sympathetic to the idea of oneness, which is also talked about with terms like nonduality and monopsychism. In philosophical terminology, which I find to be more precise and rigorous, this concept goes by the name of Open Individualism – the belief that we are all one single consciousness. I have written extensively about Open Individualism in the past (e.g. 1, 2, 3), but I would like to point out that the arguments I’ve presented in favor of this view are not based on direct experience, but rather, on logical consistency from background assumptions we take for granted. For instance, if you assume that you are the same subject of experience you were a second ago, it follows that you can exist in two points in space-time and still be the same being. Your physical configuration is different than a few seconds ago (let alone a decade), you have slightly different memories, the neurons active are different, etc. For every property you point out as your “identity carrier” I can find a counter-example where such carrier changes a little while you still remain the same subject of experience. Add to that teleportation, fission, fusion, and gradual replacement thought experiments and you can build a framework where you can become any other arbitrary person without a loss of identity. These lines of argumentation coupled with the transitivity of identity can build the case that we are indeed all one to begin with.
But realize that rather than saying that you can grasp this (potential) truth directly from first person experience, I build from agreed upon assumptions to arrive at an otherwise outlandish view. Understanding the argument does not entail “feeling we are all one”, and neither does feeling we are all one entails understanding the arguments!
Indirect Realism About Perception
There is a mind-independent world out there and you never get to experience it directly. In some sense, we each live in a private skull-bound world-simulation that tracks the fitness-relevant features of our environment. Hence, during meditation, dreaming, or psychedelic states you are not accessing any sort of external reality directly, but rather, exploring possible configurations and qualities of your inner world-simulation. This is something that Leo may implicitly not realize. In particular, interpreting 5-MeO-DMT experiences through direct realism (also called naïve realism – the view that you experience the world directly through your senses) would make you think that you are literally merging with the entire cosmos on the drug. Whereas interpreting those experiences with indirect realism merely entails that your inner boundaries are dissolving. In other words, the partitions inside your world-simulation are what implements the feeling of the self-other duality. And since 5-MeO-DMT dissolves inner boundaries, it feels as though you are becoming one with your surroundings (and the rest of reality).
Physicalism and Panpsychism
An important background assumption is that the laws of physics accurately describe the behavior of the universe. This is distinct from materialism, which would also posit that all matter is inherently insentient. Physicalism merely says that the laws of physics describe the behavior of the physical, but leaves its intrinsic nature as an open question. Together with panpsychism, however, physicalism entails that what the laws of physics are describing is the behavior of consciousness.
What makes an experience feel good or bad is not its semantic content, its computational use, or even whether the experience is self-reinforcing or not. What makes experiences feel good or bad is their structure. In particular, a very promising idea that will come up below is that highly symmetrical states of consciousness are inherently blissful, such as those we can access during orgasm, meditation, psychedelics, or even just good food and a hug. Recall that 5-MeO-DMT dissolves internal boundaries, and this is indicative of increased inner symmetry (where the boundaries themselves entail symmetry breaking operations). Thus, an exotic state of oneness is blissful not because you are merging with God, but “merely” because it has a higher degree of symmetry and therefore it’s valence is higher than what we can normally experience. In particular, the symmetry I’m talking abut here may be an objective feature of experiences perhaps even measurable with today’s neuroimaging technology.
There are additional key background philosophical assumptions, but the above are enough to get us started analyzing Leo’s 5-MeO-DMT journey from a different angle.
The Video
[Video descriptions are in italics whereas my commentary is bolded.]
For the first 8 minutes or so Leo explains that people do not really know that there are many levels of enlightenment. He starts out strong by claiming that he has reached levels of enlightenment that nobody (or perhaps just a few people) have ever reached. More so, while he agrees with the teachings of meditation masters of the past, he questions the levels of awakening that they had actually reached. It takes one to know one, and he claims that he’s seen things far beyond what previous teachers have talked about. More so, he argues that people simply have no way of knowing how enlightened their teachers are. People just trust books, gurus, teachers, religious leaders, etc. about whether they are “fully” enlightened, but how could they know for sure without reaching their level, and then surpassing them? He wraps up this part of the video by saying that the only viable path is to go all the way by yourself – to dismiss all the teachers, all the books, and all the instructions and see how far you can go on your own when genuinely pursuing truth by yourself.
With this epistemological caveat out of the way, Leo goes on to describe his methodology. Namely, he embarked on a quest of taking 5-MeO-DMT at increasing doses every day for 30 days in a row.
At 10:05 he says that within a week of this protocol he started reaching levels of awakening so elevated that he realized he had already surpassed every single spiritual teacher that he had ever heard of. He started writing a manifesto explaining this, claiming that even the most enlightened humans are not truly as awake as he became during that week. That it had became “completely transparent that most people who say they are awake or teach awakening are not even 1% awake”. But he decided not to go forward with the manifesto because he still values the teachings of spiritual leaders, whom according to him are doing a great service to mankind. He didn’t want to start, what he called, a “nonduality war” (which is of course a fascinating term if you think about it).
The main thing I’d like to comment here is that Leo is never entirely clear about what makes an “awakening experience” authentic. From what I gather (and from what comes next in the video) we can infer that the leading criteria consists of a fuzzy blend of experience of certainty, feeling of unity, and sense of direct knowing coupled together. To the extent that 5-MeO-DMT does all of these things to an extraordinary degree, we can take Leo on his words that he indeed experienced states of consciousness that feel like awakening that are most likely inaccessible to everyone who hasn’t gone through a protocol like his. What is still unclear is how exactly the semantic contents of these experiences are verified by means other than intuition. We will come back to that.
At 16:00 he makes the distinction between awakening as merely “cessation”, “nothingness”, “emptiness”, “the Self”, or that “you are nothing and everything” versus what he has been experiencing. He agrees that those are true and worthy realizations, but he claims that before his experiences, these understandings were still only realized at a very “low level”. Other masters, he claims, may care about ending suffering, about peace, about emptiness, and so on. But that nobody seems to truly care about understanding reality (because otherwise they would be doing what he’s doing). He rebukes possible critics (arguably of the Zen variety) who would say that “understanding is a function of the mind” so the goal shouldn’t be to understand. He asserts that no, based on his lived experience, that consciousness is capable of “infinite understanding”.
Notwithstanding the challenges posed by ultrafinitism, I am also inclined to believe Leo that he has experienced completely new varieties of “understanding”. In my model of the mind, understanding something means to have the ability to render it in your world-simulation in a particular kind of way that allows you to see it from every possible angle you have access to. On 5-MeO-DMT, as we will see to a greater extent below, a certain new set of projective operations get unlocked that allow you to render information from many, many more points of view at the same time. It is unclear whether this is possible with meditation alone (in personal communication, Daniel Ingram said yes) but it is certainly extraordinarily rare for even advanced meditators to be able to do this. So I am with Leo when it comes to describing “new kinds of understandings”. But perhaps I am not on board when it comes to claiming that the content of such understandings is an accurate rendering of the structure of reality.
At 18:30 Leo asserts that what happened to him is that over the course of the first week of his experiment he “completely understood reality, completely understood what God is”. God has no beginning and no end. He explains that normal human understanding sees situations from a single point of view (such as from the past to the future). But that actual infinite reality is from all sides at once: “When you are in full God consciousness, you look around the room, and you can see it from every single point of view, from an infinite number of angle and perspectives. You see that every part of the room generates and manufactures and creates every other part. […] Here when you are in God consciousness, you see it from every single possible dimension and angle. It’s not happening lilnearly, it’s all in the present now. And you can see it from every angle almost as though, if you take a watermelon and you do a cross-section with a giant knife, through that watermelon, and you keep doing cross-section, cross-section, cross-section in various different angles, eventually you’ll slice it up into an infinite number of perspectives. And then you’ll understand the entire watermelon as a sort of a whole. Whereas usually as humans what we do is we slice down that watermelon just right down the middle. And we just see that one cross-section.”
Now, this is extremely interesting. But first, it’s important to point out that here Leo might implicitly be reasoning about his experience through the lens of direct realism about perception. That is, that as he experiences this profound sense of understanding that encompasses every possible angle at once, he seems to believe that this is an understanding of his environment, of his future and past, and of reality as a whole. On the other hand, if you start out assuming indirect realism about perception, how you interpret this experience would be in terms of the instantiation of new exotic geometries of your own world-simulation. Here I must bring up the analysis of “regular” DMT (i.e. n,n-DMT) experiences through the lens of hyperbolic geometry. Indeed, regular DMT elevates the energy of your consciousness, which manifests in brighter colors, fast movement, intricate and detailed patterns, and as curved phenomenal space. We know this because of numerous trip reports from people well educated in advanced mathematics who claim that the visual symmetries one can experience on DMT (at doses above 10mg) have hyperbolic curvature (cf. hyperbolic orbifolds). It is also consistent with many other phenomena one can experience on DMT (see the Eli 5 for a quick summary). But you should keep in mind that this analysis never claims that you are experiencing directly a mind-independent “hyperspace”. Rather, the analysis focuses on how DMT modifies the geometric properties of your inner world-simulation.
Energy-complexity landscape on DMT
DMT trip progression
Intriguingly, our inner world-simulations work with projective geometry. In normal circumstances our world-simulations have a consistent set of projective points at infinity – they render the modal and amodal features of our experience in projective scenes that are globally consistent. But psychedelics can give rise to this phenomenon of “point-of-view-fragmentation“, where your experience becomes a patchwork of inconsistent projective renderings. So even on “regular” DMT you can get the profound feeling of “seeing something from multiple points of view at once”. Enhanced with hyperbolic geometry, this can cause the stark impression that you can explore “hyperspace” with a kind of “ultra-understanding”.
Looking beyond “regular” DMT, 5-MeO-DMT is yet more crazy than that. You see, even on DMT you get the feeling that you are restricted in the number of points of view from which you can see something at the same time. You can see it from many more points of view than normal, but it’s still restricted. But the extreme “smoothing” of experience that 5-MeO-DMT causes makes it so that you cannot distinguish one point of view from another. So they all blend together. Not only do you experience semantic content from “multiple points of view at once” as in DMT, but you can erase distinctions between points of view so that one’s sense of knowing arises involving a totally new kind of projective effect, in which you actually feel you can see something from “every point of view at once”. It feels that you have unlocked a kind of omniscience. This already happens on other psychedelics to a lesser extent (and in meditation, and even sober life to an even lesser extent, but still there), and it is a consequence of smoothing the geometry of your experience to such an extent that there are no symmetry-breaking imperfections “with which to orient a projective point”. I suspect that the higher “formless” jhanas of “boundless space” and “boundless consciousness” are hitting at this effect. And on 5-MeO-DMT this effect is pronounced. More so, because of the connection between symmetry and smoothness of space (cf. Geometry Through the Eyes of Felix Klein) when this happens you will also automatically be instantiating a high-dimensional group. And according to the Symmetry Theory of Valence, this ought to be extraordinarily blissful. And indeed it is.
This is, perhaps, partly what is going on in the experience that Leo is describing. Again, I am inclined to believe his description, but happy to dismiss his naïve interpretation.
Indra’s Net
At 23:15 Leo describes how from his 5-MeO-DMT point of view he realized what “consciousness truly is”. And that is an “infinitely interconnected self-communicating field”. In normal everyday states of consciousness the different parts of your experience are “connected” but not “communicating.” But on 5-MeO, “as you become more conscious, what happens is that every point in space inter-connects with itself and starts to communicate with itself. This is a really profound, shocking, mystical experience. And it keeps getting cranked up more and more and more. You can call it omniscience, or telepathy. And it’s like the universal communication system gets turned on for the first time. Right now your conscious field is not in infinite communication with itself. It’s fragmented and divided. Such that you think I’m over here, you are over there, my computer is over here, your computer is over there…”. He explains that if we were to realize we are all one, we would then instantly be able to communicate between each other.
Here again we get extremely different interpretations of the phenomena Leo describes depending on whether you believe in direct or indirect realism about perception. As Leo implicitly assumes direct realism about perception, he interprets this effect as literally switching on an “universal communication system” between every points in reality, whereas the indirect realist interpretation would be that you have somehow interlocked the pieces of your conscious experience in such a way that they now act as an interconnected whole. This is something that indeed has been reported before, and at QRI we call this effect “networkintegration“. A simple way of encapsulating this phenomenon would be by saying that the cross-frequency coupling of your nervous system is massively increased so that there is seamless information and energy transfer between vibrations at different scales (to a much lesser extent MDMA also does this, but 5-MeO-DMT is the most powerful “integration aid” we know of). This sounds crazy but it really isn’t. After all, your nervous system is a network of oscillators. It stands to reason that you can change how they interact with one another by fine-tuning their connections and get as a result decoupling of vibrations (e.g. SSRIs), or coupling only between vibrations of a specific frequency (e.g. stimulants and depressants), or more coupling in general (e.g. psychedelics). In particular, 5-MeO-DMT does seem to cause a massively effective kind of fractal coupling, where every vibration can get in tune with every other vibration. And recall, since a lot of our inner world simulation is about representing “external reality”, this effect can give rise to the feeling that you can now instantly communicate with other parts of reality as a whole. This, from my point of view, is merely misinterpreting the experience by imagining that you have direct access to your surroundings.
At 34:52 Leo explains that you just need 5-MeO-DMT to experience these awakenings. And yet, he also claims that everything in reality is imaginary. It is all something that you, as God, are imagining because “you need a story to deny that you are infinite consciousness.” Even though the neurotransmitters are imaginary, you still need to modify them in order to have this experience: “I’m talking about superhuman levels of consciousness. These are not levels of consciousness that you can access sober. You need to literally upgrade the neurotransmitters in your imaginary brain. And yes, your brain is still imaginary, and those neurotransmitters are imaginary. But you still need to upgrade them nevertheless in order to access some of the things I say.”
Needless to say, it’s bizarre that you would need imaginary neurotransmitter-mimicking molecules in your brain in order to realize that all of reality is your own imagination. When you dream, do you need to find a specific drug inside your dream in order to wake up from the dream? Perhaps this view can indeed be steel-manned, but the odds seem stacked against it.
At 38:30 he starts talking about his pornography collection. He assembles nude images of women, not only to relieve horniness, but also as a kind of pursuit of aesthetics. Pictures of nude super-models are some of the most beautiful things a (straight) man can see. He brings this up in order to talk about how he then at some point started exploring watching these pictures on 5-MeO-DMT. Recollecting this brings him to tears because of how beautiful the experiences were. He states “you’ve never really seen porn until you’ve seen it on 5-MeO-DMT.” He claims that he started to feel that this way he really felt that it is you (God) that is beautiful, which is manifested through those pictures.
A robust finding in the psychology of sexual attraction is that symmetry in faces is correlated with attractiveness. Indeed, more regular faces tend to be perceived as more beautiful. Amazingly, you can play with this effect by decorating someone’s face with face-paint. The more symmetrical the pattern, the more beautiful the face looks (and vice-versa). Arguably, the effect Leo is describing where people who are already beautiful become unbelievably pretty on 5-MeO-DMT involves embedding high-dimensional symmetries into the way you render them in your world-simulation. A lesser, and perhaps more reliable, version of this effect happens when you look at people on MDMA. They look way more attractive than what they look like sober.
Leo then brings up (~41:30) that he started to take 5-MeO-DMT on warm baths as well, which he reassures us is not as dangerous as it sounds (not enough water to drown if he experiences a whiteout). [It’s important to mention that people have died by taking ketamine on bath tubs; although a different drug, it is arguably still extremely dangerous to take 5-MeO-DMT alone on a bathtub; don’t do it]. He then has an incredible awakening surrendering to God consciousness in the bathtub, on 5-MeO-DMT, jerking off to beautiful women in the screen of his laptop. He gets a profound insight into the very “nature of desire”. He explains that it is very difficult to recognize the true nature of desire while on a normal level of consciousness because our desires are biased and fragmented. When “your consciousness becomes infinite” those biases dissolve, and you experience desire in its pure form. Which according to his direct experience turned out to be “desire for God, desire for myself”. And this is because you are, deep down “infinite love”. When you desire a husband, or sex, or whatever, you are really desiring God in disguise. But the problem is that since your path to God is constrained by the form you desire, your connection to God is not stable. But once you have this experience of complete understanding of what desire is, you finally get your desire fully quenched by experiencing God’s love.
This is a very deep point. It is related to what I’ve sometimes called the “most important philosophical question“, which is: is valence a spiritual phenomenon or spirituality a valence phenomenon? In other words, do we find experiences of God blissful because they have harmony and symmetry, or perhaps is it the other way around, where even the most trivial of pleasures, like drinking a good smoothy, feels good because it temporarily “gets you closer to God”? I lean towards the former, and that in fact mystical experiences are so beautiful because they are indeed extremely harmonious and resonant states of consciousness, and not because they take you closer to God. But I know very smart people who can’t decide between these views. For example, my friend Stuart Garvagh writes:
What if the two options are indistinguishable? Suppose valence is a measure of the harmony/symmetry of the object of consciousness, and the experience of “Oneness” or Cosmic Consciousness is equivalent to having the object of consciousness be all of creation (God‘s object), a highly symmetrical, full-spectrum object (full of bliss, light, love, beingness, all-knowledge, empty of discernible content or information). All objects of consciousness are distortions (or refractions, or something) of this one object. Happiness is equivalent to reducing or “polishing-out” these distortions. Thus, what appears to be just the fact of certain states being more pleasant than others is equivalent to certain states being closer to God‘s creation as a whole. Obviously this is all pure speculation and just a story to illustrate a point, but I could see it being very tough to tease apart the truth-value of 1 and 2. Note: I’m fairly agnostic myself, but lean towards 2 (bliss is the perfume of “God realizing God” or the subject of experience knowing Itself). I would very much love to have this question answered convincingly!
At 50:00 Leo says that “everything I’ve described so far is really a prelude to the real heart of awakening, which is the discovery of love. […] I had already awakened to love a number of times, but this was deeper. By the two week mark the love really started to crack open. Infinite self-love. You are drowning on this love.” He goes on to describe how at this point he was developing a form of telepathy that allowed him to communicate with God directly (which is, of course, a way of talking to himself as he is God already). It’s just a helpful way to further develop. And what God was showing him was how to receive self-love. It was so much at first he couldn’t handle it. And so he went through a self-purification process.
An interesting lens with which to interpret this experience of purification is that of neural annealing. Each 5-MeO-DMT experience would be making Leo’s nervous system resonate in ways in new ways, slowly writing over previous patterns and entraining the characteristic high-symmetry patterns of the state. Over time, the nervous system adjusts its weights in order to be able to handle that resonance without getting its patterns over-written. In other words, Leo has been transforming his nervous system into a kind of high-valence machine, which is of course very beneficial for intrinsic feelings of wellbeing (though perhaps detrimental to one’s epistemology).
55:00: He points out that unlike addictive drugs, he actually had to push himself very hard to continue to take 5-MeO-DMT everyday for 30 days. He stopped wanting to do it. The ego didn’t want it. And yes, it was pleasurable once he surrendered on every session, but it was difficult, heavy spiritual work. He says that he could only really do this because of years of practice with and without psychedelics, intense meditation, and a lot of personal development. And because of this, he explains his 5-MeO experiences felt like “years of spiritual work condensed into a single hour.” He then says that God will never judge you, and will help you to accept whatever terrible things you’ve done. And many of his subsequent trips were centered around self-acceptance.
Following the path of progressive neural annealing, going deeper and deeper into a state of self-acceptance can be understood as a deeper harmonization of your nervous system with itself.
At 1:01:20, Leo claims to have figured out what the purpose of reality truly is: “Reality is a contest for who can love who more. That’s really what life is about when you are fully conscious. […] Consciousness is a race for who can love who more. […] An intelligent fully conscious consciousness would only be interested in love. It wouldn’t be interested in anything else. Because everything else is inferior. […] Everything else is just utter silliness!”
I tend to agree with this, though perhaps not in an agentive way. As David Pearce says: “the pleasure-pain axis discloses the universe’s intrinsic value function.” So when you’ve annealed extremely harmonious patterns and do not get distracted by negative emotion, naturally, all there is left to do is maximize love. Unless we mess up, this is the only good final destiny for the cosmos (albeit perhaps it might take the form of a Hedonium shockwave, which at least in our current human form, sound utterly unappealing to most people).
1:06:10 “[God’s love] sparks you to also want to love it back. You see, it turns into a reciprocal reaction, where it is like two mirrors that are mirroring light between each other like a laser beam that is bouncing between two mirrors. And it’s bouncing back and forth and back and forth. And as it bounces back and forth it becomes more and more concentrated. And it strengthens. And it becomes more coherent. And so that’s what started happening. At first it started out as just a little game. Like ‘I love you, I love you, I love you’. A little game. It sounds like it’s almost like childish. And it sort of was. But then it morphed from being this childish thing, into being this serious existential business. This turned into the work. This was the true awakening. Is that with the two mirrors, you know, first it took a little while to get the two mirrors aligned. Because you know if the two mirrors are not perfectly aligned, the laser beam will kind of bounce back and forth in different directions. It’s not going to really concentrate. So that was happening at first. […] The love started bouncing back and forth between us, and getting stronger and stronger. […] Each time it bounces back to me it transforms me. It opens me up deeper. And as it opens me up deeper it reveals blockages and obstacles to my capacity to love.”
Misaligned mirrors letting energy fly away
Aligned mirrors concentrating coherent energy
Now this is a fascinating account. And while Leo interprets it in a completely mystical way, the description also fits very well an annealing process where the nervous system gets more and more fine-tuned in order to be able to contain high levels of coherent energy via symmetry. Again, this would be extremely high-valence as a consequence of the Symmetry Theory of Valence. Notice that we’ve talked about this phenomenon of “infinite mirrors” on psychedelics since 2016 (see: Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic States).
At ~1:09:30 he starts discussing that at this point he was confronted by God about whether he was willing to love the holocaust, and rape, and murder, and bullies, and people of all sorts, even devil worshipers.
Two important points here. First, it is a bit ambiguous whether Leo here is using the word “love” in the sense of “enjoyment” or in the sense of “loving-kindness and compassion”. The former would be disturbing while the latter would be admirable. I suppose he was talking about the latter, in which case “loving rape” would refer to “being able to accept and forgive those who rape” which indeed sounds very Godly. This radical move is explored in metta (loving-kindness) meditation and it seems healthy on the whole. And second: Why? Why go through the trouble of embracing all the evil and repulsive aspects of ourselves? One interpretation here, coming back to the analysis based on neural annealing, is that any little kink or imperfection caused by negative emotion in our nervous system will create slight symmetry breaking effects on the resonance of the entire system as whole. So after you’ve “polished and aligned the mirrors for long enough” the tiny imperfections become the next natural blockage to overcome in order to maximize the preservation of coherent energy via symmetry.
~1:12:00 Leo explains that the hardest thing to love is your own self-hatred. In the bouncing off of the love between you and God, with each bounce, you find that the parts you hate about yourself reflect an imperfect love. But God loves all of you including your self-hatred. So he pings you about that. And once you can accept it, that’s what truly changes you. “Because when you feel that love, and you feel how accepting it is, and how forgiving it is of all of your evil and of all of your sins… that’s the thing that kills you, that transforms you. That’s what breaks your heart, wide open. That’s what gets you to surrender. That’s what humbles you. That’s what heals you.” Leo then explains that he discovered what “healing is”. And it is “truth and love”. That in order to heal anyone, you need to love them and accept them. Not via sappy postcards and white lies but by truth. He also states that all physical, mental, and spiritual ailments have, at their root, lack of love.
If love is one of the cleanest expressions of high-valence symmetry and resonance, we can certainly expect that inundating a nervous system with it will smooth and clean its blockages, i.e. the sources of neural dissonance. Hence the incredible power of MDMA on healing nervous systems in the short-term. Indeed, positive emotion is itself healing and enhances neural coherence. But where I think this view is incomplete is in diagnosing the terrible suffering that goes on in the world in terms of a lack of love. For instance, are cluster headaches really just the result of lack of self-love? In here must bring back the background assumption of physicalism and make a firm statement that if we fall into illusion about the nature of reality we risk not saving people (and sentient beings more generally) who are really in the depth of Hell. Just loving them without taking the causally-relevant physical action to prevent their suffering is, in my opinion, not true love. Hence the importance of maintaining a high level of epistemic rigor: for the sake of others. (See: Hell Must Be Destroyed).
1:22:30 Leo explains that in this “love contest” with God of bouncing off love through parallel mirrors the love became so deep that for the first time in his life he felt the need to apologize: “I’m sorry for not loving more.” He goes into a sermon about how we are petty, and selfish, etc. and how God loves us anyway. “Real love means: I really love you as you are. And I don’t need anything from you. And especially all those things that you think I want you to change about you, I don’t need you to change. I can accept them all exactly as they are. Because that’s love. And when you realize THAT, that’s what transforms you. It is not that God says that he loves you. He is demonstrating it. It’s the demonstration that transforms you.” Leo expresses that he was then for the first time in his life able to say “thank you” sincerely. Specifically, “thank you for your love”: “This is the point at which you’ve really been touched by God’s love. And at this point you realize that that’s it, that’s the point, that’s the lesson in life. That’s my only job. It’s to love.” And finally, that for the first time in his life he was able to say “I love you” and truly mean it. “And you fall in love with God… but it doesn’t end there.”
An interesting interpretation of the felt-sense of “truly meaning” words like “I’m sorry”, “thank you”, and “I love you” is that at this point Leo has really deeply annealed his nervous system into a vessel for coherent energy. In other words, at this point he is saying and meaning those words through the whole of his nervous system, rather than them coming from a fragmented region of a complex set of competing internal family systems in a scattered way. Which is, of course, the way it usually goes.
1:35:30 Leo explains that at this point he started going into the stage of being able to radiate love. That he was unable to radiate love before. “I love that you are not capable of love. I love that. And when that hits you, that’s what fills you with enough love to overcome your resistance to love that next level thing that you couldn’t love.” Then at ~ 1:38:00 it gets really serious. Leo explains that so far he was just loving and accepting past events and people. But he was then asked by God whether he would be willing to live through the worst things that have happened and will happen. To incarnate and be tortured, among many other horrible things. And that’s what true love really means. “When you see a murder on the TV, you have to realize that God lived through that. And the only reason he lived through that is because it loved it.”
I do not understand this. Here is where the distinction between the two kinds of senses of the word “love” become very important. I worry that Leo has annealed to the version of love with the meaning of “enjoyment” rather than “loving-kindness and compassion”. Because a loving God would be happy to take the place of someone who went through Hell. But would a loving God send himself to Hell if nobody had to in the first place? That would just create suffering out of nothing. So I am confused about why Leo would believe this to be the case. It’s quite possible that there are many maxima of symmetry in the nervous system you can achieve with 5-MeO-DMT, and some of them are loving in the sense of compassionate and others are crazy and would be willing to create suffering out of nothing from a misguided understanding of what love is supposed to be. Again, handle Plutonium with caution.
1:43:00 Leo started wondering “what is reality then?” And the answer was: “It’s infinite consciousness. Infinite formless consciousness. So what happens was that my mind in my visual field as I was in that bathtub. My mind and my visual field focused in on empty space, and I sort of zoomed into that empty space and realized that that empty space is just love”. He then describes a process where his consciousness became more and more concentrated and absorbed into space, each dot of consciousness branching out into more and more dots of consciousness, turning into the brightest possible white light. But when he inquired into what was that white light he kept seeing that there was no end to it, and rather, that each point was always connected to more points. Inquiring further, he would get the response that at the core, reality is pure love. That it wouldn’t be and couldn’t be any other way.
The description sounds remarkably close to the formless jhanas such as “boundless space” and “boundless consciousness”. The description itself is extremely reminiscent of an annealing process, reaching a highly energized state of consciousness nearly devoid of information content and nearly perfectly symmetrical. The fact that at this incredibly annealed level he felt so much love supports the Symmetry Theory of Valence.
147:28 – And after Leo realizes that “Of course it is love!” he says that’s when the fear comes: “Because then what you realize is that this is the end. This is the end of your life. You are dead. If you go any further you are dead. Everything will disappear. Your family, your friends, you parents, all of it is completely imaginary. And if you stop imagining it right now, it will all end. If you go any further into this Singularity, you will become pure, formless, infinite, love for ever, loving itself forever. And the entire universe will be destroyed as if it never existed. Complete nothingness. Complete everythingness. You will merge into everyone.”
This sounds like the transition between the 6th and 7th Jhana, i.e. between “boundless consciousness” and “nothingness”. Again, this would be the result of further loss of information via an annealing process, refining the symmetry up to that of a “point”. Interestingly, Mike Johnson in Principia Quallia points out that as symmetry approaches an asymptote of perfection you do get a higher quality of valence but at the cost of reduced consciousness. This might explain why you go from “the brightest possible love” to a feeling of nothingness at this critical transition.
1:48:25: “…You will merge into everyone. Your mother, your father, your children, your spouse, Hitler, terrorists, 9/11, Donald Trump, rape, murder, torture, everything will become pure infinite love, merging completely into itself, there will be no distinction between absolutely anything, and that will be the end. And you will realize what reality is. Infinite consciousness. Love. God. And you will realize that everything in your life from your birth to this point has just been some imaginary story. A dream that was design to lead you to pure absolute infinite love. And you will rest in that love forever. Forever falling in love with yourself. Forever making love to yourself. Forever in infinite union. With every possible object that could ever exist. Pure absolute, omnipotent, omniscient, perfect, intelligent, consciousness. Everything that could ever possibly be, is you. And THAT is awakening. When you are this awake, you are dead. And you have no desire for life. There is no physical existence. There is no universe. Nothing remains. Your parents, and your spouse, and your children, they don’t stay back and keep living their lives, enjoying their life without you while your body drops dead. No, no, no, no, no. This is much more serious than that. If you do this. If you become infinite love, you will take everybody with you. There will not be anybody left. You will destroy the entire universe. Every single sentient being will become you. They will have no existence whatsoever. Zero. They will die with you. They will all awaken with you. It’s infinite awakening. It’s completely absolute. There will not be anything left. You will take the entire universe with you. Into pure oneness. THAT’S awakening.”
This is not the first time I hear about this kind of experience. It certainly sounds extraordinarily scary. Though perhaps a negative utilitarian would find it to be the ultimate relief and the best of all possible imaginable outcomes. With the human survival instinct, and quite possibly a body fully aroused with the incredible power of 5-MeO-DMT, this is bound to be one of the most terrifying feelings possible. It’s quite likely that it may be one element of what makes “bad 5-MeO-DMT experiences” so terrifying. But here we must recall that the map is not the territory. And while an annealing process might slowly write over every single facet of one’s model of reality and in turn making them part of a super-cluster of high-dimensional resonance that reflects itself seemingly infinitely, doing this does not entail that you are in fact about to destroy the universe. Though, admittedly, it will surely feel that way. Additionally, I would gather that were it possible to actually end the universe this way, somebody, somewhere, in some reality or another, would have already done so. Remember that if God could be killed, it’d be dead already.
1:52:01: “And I didn’t go there! As you can tell, since I’m still sitting here. I’m not there. I was too afraid to go there. And God was fine with it. It didn’t push me. But that’s not the end of the story! It’s still just the beginning.” He then goes on to explain that a part of him wanted to do it and another part of him didn’t want to. He says it got really loopy and weird; this really shook him. That God was beckoning him to go and be one forever, but he was still ambivalent and needed some time to think about it. He knew it would make no difference, but he still decided to ‘make preparations’ and tell his family and friends that he loves them before moving forward with a final decision to annihilate the universe. By the time he had done that… he had stopped taking 5-MeO-DMT: “The experiences had gotten so profound and so deep… this was roughly the 25th or 27th day of this whole 30 day process. I swore off 5-MeO-DMT and said ‘Ok I’m not doing any more of this shit. It’s enough'”. He explains that by this time the drug was making him feel infinite consciousness when waking up (from sleep) the next day. He felt the Singularity was sucking him into it. It felt both terrifying and irresistible. Every time he would go to sleep it would suck him in really strongly, and he kept resisting it. He would wake up sweaty and in a panic. He was tripping deeper in his sleep than in the bathtub. He couldn’t sleep without this happening, and it kept happening for about 5 days. “I just want to get back to normal. This is getting freaky now.”
I’ve heard this from more than a couple people. That is, that when one does 5-MeO-DMT enough times, and especially within a short enough period of time, the “realizations” start to also happen during sleep in an involuntarily way. One can interpret this as the annealing process of 5-MeO-DMT now latching on to sleep (itself a natural annealing process meant to lessen the technical debt of the nervous system). Even just a couple strong trips can really change what sleep feels like for many days. I can’t imagine just how intense it must have been for Leo after 25 days straight of using this drug.
2:01:40 – Leo explains that when he was dozing off with a blanket on his living room (terrified of sleeping on his bed due to the effect just described) he experienced a “yet deeper awakening” which involved realizing that all of his previous awakenings were just like points and that the new one was like a line connecting many points. “Everything I’ve said up to this point were just a single dimension of awakening. And then what I broke through to is a second dimension. A second dimension of awakening opened up. This second dimension is completely unimaginable, completely indescribable, cannot be talked about, cannot be thought about. And yet it’s there. In it, are things that are completely outside of the physical universe that you cannot conceive or imagine.” He goes on to explain that there are then also a third, fourth, fifth, etc. dimensions. And that he believes there is an infinite number of them. He barely even began to explore the second dimension of awakening, but he realized that it goes forever. It kept happening, he had intense emotional distress and mood swings. But gradually after five more days it subsided, and he started to be able to sleep more normally. “And I’ve been working to make sense of all of this for the last couple of weeks. So that’s what happened.”
Alright, this is out of my depth and I do not have an interpretation of what this “second dimension of awakening” is about. If anyone has any clue, please leave a comment or shoot me an email. I’m as as confused as Leo is about this.
~2:05:00 – Leo confesses he does not know what would happen if he went through with joining the Singularity and mentions that it sounds a bit like Mahasamādhi. He simply has not answers at this point, but he asserts that the experience has made him question the extent of the enlightenment of other teachers. It also has made him more loving. But still, he feels frustration: “I don’t know what to do from here.”
And neither do I. Do you, dear reader?
Postscript: In the last 10 minutes of the video Leo shares a heart warming message about how reality is, deep down, truly, “just love” and that him saying this may be a seed that will blossom into you finding this out for yourself at some point in the future. He ends by cautioning his audience to not believe as a matter of fact that this is the path for everyone. He suggests that others should just use his examples from his own journey as examples rather than an absolute guide or how-to for enlightenment. He asks his audience to make sure to question the depth of their own awakening – to not believe that they have reached the ultimate level. He admits he has no idea whether there is an ultimate level or not, and that he still has some healing to do on himself. He remains dissatisfied with his understanding of reality.
Even with the benefit of enormous hindsight, it is hard to introduce complex numbers in a compelling manner. Historically, we have seen how cubic equations forced them upon us algebraically, and in discussing Cotes’ work we saw something of the inevitability of their geometric interpretation. In this section we will attempt to show how complex numbers arise very naturally, almost inevitably, from a careful re-examination of plane Euclidean geometry.[10]
[…]
Although the ancient Greeks made many beautiful and remarkable discoveries in geometry, it was two thousand years later that Felix Klein first asked and answered the question, “What is geometry?”
Let us restrict ourselves from the outset to plane geometry. One might begin by saying that this is the study of geometric properties of geometric figures in the plane, but what are (i) “geometric properties”, and (ii) “geometric figures”? We will concentrate on (i), swiftly passing over (ii) by interpreting “geometric figure” as anything we might choose to draw on an infinitely large piece of flat paper with an infinitely fine pen.
As for (i), we begin by noting that if two figures (e.g., two triangles), have the same geometric properties, then (from the point of view of geometry) they must be the “same”, “equal”, or, as one usually says, congruent. Thus if we had a clear definition of congruence (“geometric equality”) then we could reverse this observation and define geometric properties as those properties that are common to all congruent figures. How, then, can we tell if two figures are geometrically equal?
Consider the triangles in [fig 23], and imagine that they are pieces of paper you could pick up in your hand. To see if T is congruent with T’, you could pick up T and check whether it could be placed on top of T’. Note that it is essential that we be allowed to move T in space: in order to place T on top of T˜ we must first flip it over; we can’t just slide T around within the plane. Tentatively generalizing, this suggests that a figure F is congruent to another figure F’ if there exists a motion of F through space that makes it coincide with F’. Note that the discussion suggests that there are two fundamentally different types of motion: those that involve flipping the figure over, and those that do no. Later, we shall return to this important point.
It is clearly somewhat unsatisfactory that in attempting to define geometry in the plane we have appealed to the idea of motion through space. We now rectify this. Returning to [fig 23], imagine that T and T’ are drawn on separate, transparent sheets of plastic. Instead of picking up just the triangle T, we now pick up the entire sheet on which it is drawn, then try to place it on the second sheet so as to make T coincide with T’. At the end of this motion, each point A on T‘s sheet lies over a point A’ of T’‘s sheet, and we can now define the motion M to be this mapping A → A’ = M(A) of the plane to itself.
However, not any old mapping qualifies as a motion, for we must also capture the (previously implicit) idea of the sheet remaining rigid while it moves, so that distances between points remain constant during the motion. Here, then, is our definition:
A motion M is a mapping of the plane to itself such that the distance between any two points A and B is equal to the distance between their images A’ = M(A) and B’ = M(B). (22)
Note that what we have called a motion is often termed a “rigid motion”, or an “isometry”.
Armed with this precise concept of motion, our final definition of geometric equality becomes:
F is congruent to F’, written F ≅ F’, if there exists a motion M such that F’ = M(F). (23)
Next, as a consequence of our earlier discussion, a geometric property of a figure is one that is unaltered by all possible motions of the figure. Finally, in answer to the opening question of “What is geometry?”, Klein would answer that it is the study of these so-called invariants of the set of motions.
One of the most remarkable discoveries of the last century was that Euclidean geometry is not the only possible geometry. Two of these so-called non-Euclidean geometries will be studied in Chapter 6, but for the moment we wish only to explain how Klein was able to generalize the above ideas so as to embrace such new geometries.
The aim in (23) was to use a family of transformations to introduce the concept of geometric equality. But will this ≅-type of equality behave in the way we would like and expect? To answer this we must first make these expectations explicit. So as not to confuse this general discussion with the particular concept of congruence in (23), let us denote geometric equality by ~.
(i) A figure should equal itself: F ~ F’, for all F.
(ii) If F equals F’, then F’ should equal F: F ~ F’ ⇒ F’ ~ F.
(iii) If F and F’ are equal, and F’ and F” are equal, then F and F” should also be equal: F ~ F’ & F’ ~ F” ⇒ F ~ F”.
Any relation satisfying these expectations is called an equivalence relation.
Now suppose that we retain the definition (23) of geometric equality, but that we generalize the definition of “motion” given in (22) by replacing the family of distance-preserving transformations with some other family G of transformations.
It should be clear that not any old G will be compatible with our aim of defining geometric equality. Indeed, (i), (ii), and (iii) imply that G must have the following very special structure, which is illustrated[11] in [fig 24].
(i) The family G must contain a transformation ε (called identity) that maps each point to itself.
(ii) If G contains a transformation M, then it must also contain a transformation M-1 (called the inverse) that undoes M. [Check for yourself that for M-1 to exist (let alone be a member of G) M must have the special properties of being (a) onto and (b) one-to-one, i.e., (a) every point must be the image of some point, and (b) distinct points must have distinct images.]
(iii) If M and N are members of G then so is the composite transformation N ∘ M = (M followed by N). This property of G is called closure.
We have thus arrived, very naturally, at a concept of fundamental importance in the whole of mathematics: a family G of transformations that satisfies these three[12] requirements is called a group.
Let us check that the motions defined in (22) do indeed form a group: (i) Since the identity transformation preserves distances, it is a motion. (ii) Provided it exists, the inverse of a motion will preserve distances and hence will be a motion itself. As for existence, (a) it is certainly plausible that when we apply a motion to the entire plane then the image is the entire plane — we will prove this later — and (b) the non-zero distance between distinct points is preserved by a motion, so their images are again distinct. (iii) If two transformations do not alter distances, then applying them in succession will not alter distances either, so the composition of two motions is another motion.
Klein’s idea was that we could first select a group G at will, then define a corresponding “geometry” as the study of the invariants of that G. [Klein first announced this idea in 1872 — when he was 23 years old! — at the University of Erlangen, and it has thus come to be known as his Erlangen Program.] For example, if we choose G to be the group of motions, we recover the familiar Euclidean geometry of the plane. But this is far from being the only geometry of the plane, as the so-called projective geometry of [fig 24] illustrates.
Klein’s vision of geometry was broader still. We have been concerned with what geometries are possible when figures are drawn anywhere in the plane, but suppose for example that we are only allowed to draw within some disc D. It should be clear that we can construct “geometries of D” in exactly the same way that we constructed geometries of the plane: given a group H of transformations of D to itself, the corresponding geometry is the study of the invariants of H. If you doubt that any such group exists, consider the set of all rotations around the center of D.
The reader may well feel that the above discussion is a chronic case of mathematical generalization running amuck — that the resulting conception of geometry is (to coin a phrase) “as subtle as it is useless”. Nothing could be further from the truth! In Chapter 3 we shall be led, very naturally, to consider a particularly interesting group of transformations of a disc to itself. The resulting non-Euclidean geometry is called hyperbolic or Lobachevskian geometry, and it is the subject of Chapter 6. Far from being useless, this geometry has proved to be an immensely powerful tool in diverse areas of mathematics, and the insights it continues to provide lie on the cutting edge of contemporary research.
[10] The excellent book by Nikulin and Shafarevich [1987] is the only other work we know of in which a similar attempt is made.
[11] Here G is the group of projections. If we do a perspective drawing of figures in the plane, then the mapping from the plane to the “canvas” plane is called a perspectivity. A projection is then defined to be any sequence of perspectivities. Can you see why the set of projections should form a group?
[12] In more abstract settings it is necessary to add a fourth requirement of associativity, namely, A∘ (B∘ C) = (A∘ B)∘ C. Of course for transformations this is automatically true.
Note: QRI‘s Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV) refers to the claim that valence (the pleasure-pain axis) manifests in the symmetry of the mathematical object that corresponds to each experience such that the mathematical features of that object are isomorphic to the phenomenal character of that experience. Using the lens of Klein’s conception of geometry, one could in turn give to STV a strictly geometrical interpretation. Namely, that the shape of one’s experience will be of high valence when it contains geometric invariants. In addition, Noether’s theorem (one of QRI’s lineages, which states that “every differentiable symmetry of the action of a physical system has a corresponding conservation law”) along with physicalismof consciousness suggests that for every symmetry in the mathematical object that corresponds to consciousness there is a corresponding preserved quantity. Thus, one could posit– assuming that the STV is correct– high-valence states might be extremely energy-efficient in addition to feeling good.
We are currently preparing a paper that ties all of these threads together in a way that, we believe, may turn out to have tremendous explanatory power. In particular, this formal account of valence will be able to explain succinctly a wide range of disparate and exotic empirical phenomena such as:
Why phenomenal symmetry during psychedelic experiences is correlated with more extreme valence values.
How and why Jhanas present the way they do, namely, as having:
[Some] versions of identity panpsychism are holistic in that they invoke fundamental physical entities that are not atomic or localized. One such view combines identity panpsychism with the monistic view that the universe itself is the most fundamental physical entity. The result is identity cosmopsychism, on which the whole universe is conscious and on which we are identical to it. (Some idealist views in both Eastern and Western traditions appear to say something like this.) Obvious worries for this view are that it seems to entail that there is only one conscious subject, and that each of us is identical to each other and has the same experiences. There is also a structural mismatch worry: it is hard to see how the universe’s experiences (especially given a Russellian view on which these correspond to the universe’s physical properties) should have anything like the localized idiosyncratic structure of my experiences. Perhaps there are sophisticated versions of this view on which a single universal consciousness is differentiated into multiple strands of midlevel macroconsciousness, where much of the universal consciousness is somehow hidden from each of us. Still, this seems to move us away from identity cosmopsychism toward an autonomous cosmopsychist view in which each of us is a distinct constituent of a universal consciousness. As before, the resulting decomposition problem seems just as hard as the combination problem.
Perhaps the most important version of identity panpsychism is quantum holism. This view starts from the insight that on the most common understandings of quantum mechanics, the fundamental entities need not be localized entities such as particles. Multiple particles can get entangled with each other, and when this happens it is the whole entangled system that is treated as fundamental and that has fundamental quantum-mechanical properties (such as wave functions) ascribed to it. A panpsychist might speculate that such an entangled system, perhaps at the level of the brain or one of its subsystems, has microphenomenal properties. On the quantum holism version of identity panpsychism, macrosubjects such as ourselves are identical to these fundamental holistic entities, and our macrophenomenal properties are identical to its microphenomenal properties.
This view has more attractions than the earlier views, but there are also worries. Some worries are empirical: it does not seem that there is the sort of stable brain-level entanglement that would be needed for this view to work. Some related worries are theoretical: on some interpretations of quantum mechanics the locus of entanglement is the whole universe (leading us back to cosmopsychism), on others there is no entanglement at all, and on still others there are regular collapses that tend to destroy this sort of entanglement. But perhaps the biggest worry is once again a structural mismatch worry. The structure of the quantum state of brain-level systems is quite different from the structure of our experience. Given a Russellian view on which microphenomenal properties correspond directly to the fundamental microphysical properties of these entangled systems, it is hard to see how they could have the familiar structure of our macroexperience.
The identity panpsychist (of all three sorts) might try to remove some of these worries by rejecting Russellian panpsychism, so that microphenomenal properties are less closely tied to microphysical structure. The cost of this move is that it becomes much less clear how these phenomenal properties can play a causal role. On the face of it they will be either epiphenomenal, or they will make a difference to physics. The latter view will in effect require a radically revised physics with something akin to our macrophenomenal structure present at the basic level. Then phenomenal properties will in effect be playing the role of quiddities within this revised physics, and the resulting view will be a sort of revisionary Russellian identity panpsychism.
TL;DR I came up with a new way to test the reality of DMT entities!
Core idea: Look for signatures of injection pulling in the brain’s connectome-specific harmonic waves. This would distinguish between mere hallucinations (however weird they may feel) and hallucinations being driven by an external source.
Like the study about whether psychedelics can help you see through different Everett branches of the multiverse, I don’t expect the results of this experiment to come out positive. But it’s exciting to see a testable prediction on an otherwise so difficult-to-approach subject matter.
Televised Entity Contact
I think that we can basically assume that a certain percentage of people who vaporize DMT will believe that they contacted mind-independent beings. This is likely the result of hallucinations, but naïve realism and a bias to interpret more intense and detailed qualia as “more real than real external information” is so deeply ingrained that we can take it as a matter of fact that, say, 50%+ of people won’t be able to override their felt-sense of entity presence with heady philosophical epistemic rigor like discussions about the pseudo-time arrow, valence structuralism, or indirect realism about perception.
Is there anything we can do with that? Think of it from an economics arbitrage point of view. If we predict that X number of people will newly believe in DMT entities next year, is there an opportunity there?
I was thinking yesterday on a walk about how “Storm Area 51” is a reality check of sorts for the general public. As in – yes Area 51 is a thing, and no, you can’t just invade it with 100,000 people Naruto running towards it. It was predictable that would be the case, but going through the act in a collective and televised fashion was an interesting exercise in societal epistemology.
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Along those lines, I suggest that a “Break Out of the Simulation Day” event could be organized. That day we would have, on LIVE TV, people doing DMT trying to contact aliens as a medium, the camera going from one person to the next, always making sure that whoever has the microphone is currently peaking on DMT.
So if the DMT Elves are mind-independent sentient beings and want to send a coherent message to humanity, then that would be the time and place to do it. They would have all of our attention.
Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect DMT Elves to send a coherent message when, surprise surprise, they are on LIVE TV all of a sudden. And this is not only because they won’t have time to dress up. According to people who have tried DMT many times and believe it puts you in contact with other dimensions (cf. Dick Khan’s 600 DMT trip reports) there is an entire ecosystem of entities to contact, each of them with special gifts, powers, intentions, and styles. There are jesters, robots, greys, Archons, angels, demons, wireheading specialists, used alien spaceship dealers (those are the worst), etc. There are entire categories of entities whose sole purpose is to convince you that you are dead, or that you are in a simulation, or that the government is out to get you. There are entire species of entities of the sort that show you how to use sound to create thought-forms, and those that like to discuss with you the impact that the Greeks and Aztecs had on the aesthetics of the reptilians (i.e. interdimensional art historians). You cannot expect to be lucky and get a reasonable DMT entity who (1) will figure out what is going on, and (2) has good intentions for humanity. Perhaps we would be opening ourselves up to influence by incompetent, evil, or incompetent and evil entities. Worse, we would be doing so on LIVE TV!
Testing the Mind-Independent Existence of DMT Entities
Ok, so maybe televising the experiment is a bad idea. Back to the drawing board. Let’s ask: what are the main ways to prove the independent existence of DMT entities? How would serious researchers[1] approach this problem? As far as I can tell, there are three big categories of methods:
Psi-based (having them tell you something about the world you would have no way of knowing otherwise)
Computation-based (having them solve a problem that requires much more computational power than what is available to you with your brain alone)
Quasi-Physical interference-based (have entities literally poke, shake, vibrate, excite, or inhibit your body or nervous system in ways that are impossible on their own)
The Psi-based category is the most well-known, and it includes tests such: (a) asking the entities what your family members are doing right now, (b) having them tell you what is inside a sealed box, (c) having them predict what tomorrow’s lottery numbers will be, and so on. While many people claim to have learned valuable information from DMT entities, I’ve yet to see credible reports of positive tests of this kind.
The computation-based category is perhaps best exemplified by Marko Rodriguez’ suggestion of having the entities factorize a large number for you. This method was popularized by Scott Alexander’s now-famous short story Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person, and then later Gwern made an estimate of the cost of such an experiment. It turns out that testing the hypothesis this way could be as cheap as one thousand (of 2015) dollars. Unfortunately, this test is very hard to conduct (saying 200 digits while on DMT and memorizing sets of numbers with dozens of digits the elves return to you as an answer is not an easy task). So other difficult-to-compute but easy-to-articulate and fast-to-memorize problems might be a better fit in this case. I predict it is only a matter of time before someone seriously tries a variant of this method and reports the results online. I would just caution that, depending on the computational task selected, one may inadvertently discover new computational applications of the DMT state rather than prove the existence of mind-independent DMT entities. After all, unusual states of consciousness may have unique computational trade-offs. See for example: Thinking in Numbers, How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD, and the discussion about the possible applications for mathematical research of the hyperbolic phenomenal space disclosed during DMT intoxication. Indeed, I would not be surprised to find out that in the year 2100 many of the most important mathematical breakthroughs are taking place in consciousness research centers thanks to having identified states of consciousness capable of rendering exotic mathematical objects and their possible transformations. So before concluding the DMT Elf solved your computationally-demanding problem, it would be important to rule out that it wasn’t you (or the DMT-filled version of you) who solved the problem thanks to novel qualia varieties only disclosed in such a state. That said, this concern only applies to computational tasks that are not extremely difficult. If a DMT alien can factorize a 3000-digit number in 10 seconds then we could actually reasonably conclude that it exists in a mind-independent way.
Now, the 3rd approach is, IMO, both the most likely to work in practice, and also the most spooky and frightening were the results to come out positive. Here is why. I’ve recently received trip reports from rational psychonauts who have taken DMT hundreds of times, and it seems clear that there is a vast number of qualitatively distinct state-spaces disclosed by this substance. One of these such relatively rare idiosyncratic responses caught my attention, and I think it warrants closer scientific scrutiny. Namely, I’ve received reports that when the psychonaut is either tired or has been drinking (why anyone would dare take DMT while drunk is beyond me, but for science-I guess-someone already did it) there is a different kind of experience of a rather unpleasant nature that unfolds. This type of DMT experience is described as getting in contact with the “lower levels of the astral plane” in which parasitic etheric life-forms live (not my words). During such an experience, one may feel that these beings “jitter” your nervous system without asking for your permission to do so. And this is done in such a way that your body may literally get up and dance, as if possessed by a spirit, without your conscious control. In a less extreme presentation of this phenomenon, at the very least the entities seem to jerk one’s extremities whether or not you like it. For example, in one of these trip reports someone described having their arm being pulled and jerked left and right by a demon of sorts while at the same time insectoid life-forms crawled inside their body, into the veins of the tripper. Needless to say, this is a profoundly unpleasant experience, no doubt, but perhaps it is also one of the most empirically testable of the bunch.
Injection Pulling Experiments
The big-picture idea here would be to hook a person up to an EEG during such a state (or even place them in an fMRI if at all possible) in order to determine if the “jittering” experienced is endogenously or exogenously generated.
How could we do this? Let’s take a step back for a second and recall Selen Atasoy’s study about the influence of LSD on the connectome-specific harmonic waves of the brain. The connectome-specific harmonic waves (CSHWs) are the “natural resonant modes” of a given brain. With this analysis, one can characterize a given “brain state” as a weighted sum of such resonant modes. In turn, one can then see how LSD affects one’s brain state by analyzing the CSHWs while under its influence. As it turns out, there are three major effects from LSD: (a) an overall increase in the power of all CSHWs, (b) the higher-frequency harmonics gain even more power relative to the lower-frequency ones, and (c) the repertoire of possible states dramatically increases, meaning that CSHWs that usually don’t co-occur are more likely to be simultaneously active while on LSD.
The thing to point out is that LSD in this case does not change which harmonic modes the brain has; it merely changes the energy distribution over those harmonics. On the other hand, we could in principle imagine that if the “DMT entity contact” brain state is not purely a hallucination, we would instead find out that such a state has a distinct “non-native harmonic pattern”. And this would manifest in the form of injection pulling and injection locking signatures in the reconstructed patterns of brain activity from the neuroimaging data.
An analogy with a musical instrument is possible: assume that your brain is a musical instrument and that the notes it plays sound like those of a guitar. In this analogy, taking LSD would entail increasing the volume of each note (and especially so for the higher notes) while also increasing the range of possible note-combinations. In other words, while LSD changes what you can play with the guitar, it does not change the fact that you are playing a guitar. That is, the brain states produced by LSD can be explained as different configurations of otherwise native vibratory patterns. In contrast, if DMT entity contact involves an external energy source with its own characteristic resonant modes, then the brain state that results from it would seem to have non-native vibratory patterns. It would be like having a guitar that produces saxophone sounds. You would know that on its own it is not physically capable of producing such sounds, and hence infer it is being externally influenced somehow.
Are the jiggling patterns of your brain harmonics while on DMT best explained with or without an external metronome and its injection pulling effects?
Such an analysis might reveal that the jerking of the nervous system one experiences on those idiosyncratic DMT experiences is best explained with an injection pulling model and an external metronome marking the pace. In turn, this would imply that the brain is not merely hallucinating a scene, but rather, it is being influenced by an outside metronome. Now, that would be a scientifically-sound ground-breaking finding. And perhaps be so spooky we would all prefer to forget about it rather than contemplate its implications.[2]
Now, there is always the option to interpret all of the unusual phenomenal experiences on DMT with a scientific secular framework that excludes entities from other dimensions. At the Qualia Research Institute, the frameworks that we use to explain such unusual experiences involve what we call algorithmic reductions, namely, identifying a small set of data-structures and information-processing steps that when taken together are capable of generating the vast zoo of complex emergent effects. The advantage of this approach is two-fold. First, we avoid over-fitting by minimizing the information complexity of the model (few data structures and few operations is a vastly more parsimonious explanatory framework than ad-hoc spiritual or atomistic interpretations). And second, it allows us to generate predictions such as the possible existence of exotic phenomenal states that haven’t yet been reported in the literature. Indeed, verifying that its predictions are accurate is one way of validating an algorithmic reduction.
In the case of DMT, we have algorithmic reduction models that explain the unusual properties of space as well as their associated exotic phenomenal time. And while providing compelling explanations for the exotic space and time one can experience in such a state is foundational, we recognize that this is still a first step. I admit that such models still do not go far enough. We still need to explain the nature and unusual character of “entity contact” experiences. So what do we make of them?
The Brain as a Game Engine
Our best guess- for the time being- involves reformulating the nature of the state-space of consciousness to include a layer of “game parameters”. This was first brought up in the essay “Harmonic Society“:
Consider what happens when someone takes LSD. Most people expect that they will simply get to experience new sensations like brighter colors, tracers, or synesthesia. This is true to a point, for light doses. But on medium doses, in addition to exploring the state-space of sensory configurations, one also experiences new aesthetics, which this model would define as ways of organizing a lot of sensations in ways that feel right. More so, an aesthetic is also a way of delivering uninhibited sensations in a way that feels good at the level of the whole experience, from moment to moment. Most people have no clue that there is a vast space of possibilities here.
On higher doses, people are surprised to find an even more general way of exploring the state-space of consciousness. Namely, one instantiates alternate games. The DMT “vibe” that people report can be thought of as more than a “context switch”. It is, rather, a more radical change that we could describe as a “game switch”. The “Jester” that people talk about regarding DMT experiences is an archetype that the mind uses to signal the “rule violation” quality of the state. There is so much going on that one’s experience splits into multiple games at once trying to find some common ground, and this feeling of game-incompatibility feels very alien. A sort of anti-virus system in the mind is triggered at that point, and labels the inconsistency with a feeling of weirdness so that you know not to update your actions based on the (currently globally inconsistent) experience of multiple superimposed games. Rule violation through fast changes in implicit games of social status causes you to interpret what is going on as having extreme stakes. Interacting with DMT Aliens, Gods, Elves, etc. feels like the upper limit of potential social status transfer that your world simulation affords (like meeting a president or a king). The state-space of consciousness contains all of these alternate games and metagames, and we have not even begun to catalogue them.
In other words, taking DMT does not merely propel you to other regions of the state-space of possible sensory impressions, but it also grants you access to alternate aesthetics[3] and game setups. If you think of your brain not only as a sensory-processing tool, but in fact as a kind of high-level game engine, realizing that God and the Devil can be real in your experience shows that they are possible characters of the games your brain can render. In such a case, we will eventually find that the brain states that render DMT entities are, however exotic, still produced by combining the native resonant modes of one’s own nervous system. No need to invoke neuronal injection pulling from the etheric plane.
Of note is that such a “Game Engine” paradigm would go a long way in explaining unusual experiences such as Free-Wheeling Hallucinations where one becomes able to control almost all features of one’s experience with an incredible level of detail. Indeed we can describe a Free-Wheeling Hallucination state as having access to an experience editor, as illustrated in the Memory Facility Scene of Blade Runner 2049:
Unsurprisingly, we can anticipate that when one is given root access to the parameters of one’s own inner world-simulation, one is likely to focus on creating experiences entirely filled with enjoyable super-stimuli. Whether this involves sex-worlds or proofs of the existence of a benevolent God might be a function of what is it that one craves the most. The intense concern with theodicy and the nature of death while on psychedelic drugs might have something to do with having the ability to change the most essential parameters of one’s internal world simulation. After all, if “living in a world” where God exists and is loving is more enjoyable than the alternative, one’s own hedonic maximization algorithms would try to “realize that’s the truth” if given the option to forge evidence. The same could be going on with DMT entities, for a world in which DMT is an interdimensional portal technology is vastly more interesting (or at least dramatic) than the alternative.
In the end, studying DMT experiences do not need to involve actual entity contact to be of profound significance to the science of consciousness. If you think of your brain as a qualia machine engine, DMT is about the best (or second-best [4]) qualia fuel there is. There are vast regions of the state-space of consciousness that can only be accessed with DMT, many of which contain extremely computationally interesting qualia, and many others which contain intrinsically valuable states (aka. heaven worlds). If, on top of that, it also enables interdimensional beings to injection pull your brain harmonics, we could think of that as icing on the cake.
[1] Serious and Unserious Consciousness Researchers
On a tangential note, here is a quote I recently heard at a consciousness conference:
Thomas Metzinger, the famous and brilliant German neuroscientist and philosopher of mind*, was once asked at a conference presentation he was giving whether he had ever tried psychedelics. His response? “There are two kinds of consciousness researchers. There are the serious ones, and the unserious ones. The serious ones take advantage of all the tools at their disposal to crack this mystery. All I will say is that I am NOT an unserious consciousness researcher.”
*He is best known for being the writer of the books “Being No One” and “The Ego Tunnel“, friends with the Foundational Research Institute, a strong proponent of a variant of eliminativism about consciousness, and a negative utilitarian specializing in AI ethics.
[2] Implications
If the injection pulling experiment does reveal that DMT entities are indeed mind-independent sentient beings in alternate dimensions, then what?
We shall cross that bridge when we get there, but in the meantime, let me entertain you with a wild hypothesis: DMT Elves are us at a higher level of spiritual and psychological development. In such a case, we might want to revise Integral Theory’s levels to include DMT Elves. Expect Ken Wilber’s next book to contain the following:
[3] An open question for all my DMT-using readers: are DMT visuals more akin to Art Deco, or Art Nouveau?
[4] On a Serious Note
My prediction is that the single most important tool to investigate consciousness is 5-MeO-DMT. It is probably the most important consciousness tool ever discovered. While I’ve seen serious consciousness researchers and academics admit in private that they have tried psychedelics, I almost never encounter people who have tried 5-MeO. I expect this to change over the course of the next decade as the word gets out that no, 5-MeO is not “yet another psychedelic” but it’s the “real deal” when it comes to disclosing profoundly insightful states of consciousness with implications for personal identity, ethics, the state-space of qualia, the nature of valence (i.e. harmony vs. dissonance), phenomenal time, causality, and the importance of quantum coherence for phenomenal binding. If you have explored this compound and would like to share your insights, please get in touch. We always welcome high-quality trip reports.
Extract from “Many Voices, One Mission” by Michael G. Reccia, R. Jane Kneen
25th February, 2007
[Jane recalls: This clairvoyant address from Silver Star was given to Michael and myself one Sunday morning on our return home after he had accompanied us on a walk around the local reservoir.]
Silver Star: I want to talk about resonance and vibration, particularly in the spirit world. What I am going to talk about also applies to this level but cannot be picked up with earthly senses.
Everything in the spirit world has a sound, a colour, a tonality of Light and a degree of sentience. If I place a box in front of you on an earthly level it is simply a box …a utilitarian, functional, square structure built to hold something. If I gave you a box from the spirit worlds, that box has been created by thought. So, if I have a box in my house in the spirit world and turn my attention to it, that box will have a colour value. It is not just a box but is also a vibration of Light, and it is that vibration of Light that gives it its ‘solidity’. It will have a particular colour according to the purpose I assign to it. And, because the spiritual atoms in the box are vibrating at a certain rate, that box also has a sound value if I choose to tune in to it, which will be pleasing to the ear because the box has been created in one of the worlds of Light. That box is made from energy so as well as its colour – which will change dependent on what I want the box to do – it also has a luminance.
So, every object in the spirit realm has a colour (even a seemingly transparent box has a colour value) …it has a vibration of sound …and it has a perfume. The box stimulates all the senses we had on Earth so we can see, hear, touch and smell it.
Michael: Why would it have a perfume, Silver Star?
Silver Star: All the senses can be used as a spirit. Even though there is no dense atmosphere like on Earth, the sense of smell is stimulated by any object. There are exquisite perfumes here and each object has a unique scent dependent upon its complexity and intention of purpose. There is also a background aroma from the landscape and a subtle fragrance with people as well.
All your senses work at once, spiritually speaking, which is why, when Michael tries to describe spirit communication, he says it is like a beam of energy that carries within it a huge amount of information. Each object here conveys a lot of information …it has Light …it has a colour value …it has a sound value …and it has a perfume.
You can tune out these things, dependent on which of them you want to sense, or you can experience all of them at once. You can (as in your drug ‘culture’ on Earth) smell colours. You can experience emotion through colours and so feel warm or cold or happy or sad through colours. You can hear the symphony of Creation that runs through everything, and yet it can be individualised so that you only hear it coming out of the ‘box’ or just from the atmosphere around you …or you can hear it coming from the whole of the sphere you are in at the time.
Discord also exists in the Lower Astral because people there are still God-like in potential and what they imagine takes form. They think up discordant images and those images have vibrations that clash …that have a disagreeable odour …that exhibit violent colours …that carry sounds that are an assault on the senses. The spirits in the Lower Astral can feel and sense their havoc that, whilst on Earth, they thought they were creating in secret.
As an example of what I am trying to put across, let us take the simple act of one person visiting a friend with the express intent of spreading discord by voicing disharmonious views about a mutual acquaintance. On an earthly level all the person can be seen to have done is travel from point A to point B, indulge in malicious gossip, and then return home with no apparent retribution or consequence for having done that.
On a spiritual level, however, as soon as that person decides to undertake that malevolent course of action, they create jagged thoughts around themselves and attract towards themselves similar spirits from the Lower Astral. So, accompanying them unseen on that journey are spirits who think that this is a fun thing to do, because their vibrations are similar to the intentions of the soul on Earth wishing to cause trouble.
In contrast, the person who is sitting in meditation creates thoughts of Light and balance, and creates spheres (like the ones photographed over your door [reference to the coloured orbs that I had unexpectedly captured on my camera]), which have lovely, balanced colours and beautiful harmonies and sounds. Whereas the person who is acting negatively towards someone else creates a ‘thunderstorm’ around themselves with roiling clouds of darkness and disharmony within that bubble. Those disharmonies are then recorded in the karmic pattern of the person’s life, inhibiting their vibration so that, when they pass to spirit, they have to rid themselves of that thought and intention (even though they might not have thought about it for years) before they can raise their vibrations enough to fully appreciate the worlds of Light.
So, just as there are harmonious colours in Creation, there are also disharmonious colours; and just as there are harmonious sounds there are sounds – like clashing cymbals – of discord and disharmony.
Many illnesses on Earth are caused by the body having to react on a subconscious level to the constant battering of disharmony that the spirit has created around itself, year in, year out. The cells within a person’s body also vibrate, have a sound- and Light-quality and are designed to be harmonious but can be overcome by the bombardment of dominant negative thoughts from the person. That dulls or extinguishes the Light within the cells, resulting in the cells becoming unhealthy because they are not receiving the harmony from God that should reach them …so thick are the thoughts around the person and their subconscious.
In spiritual work you will often detect a smell …such as cigarettes, earth or perfume. The part of the wavelength that affects smell is easier to manipulate from one of the spirit worlds than sight or hearing, so very often a discarnate soul will convey a smell to the person on the Earth plane they wish to contact because it is the easiest way (relatively speaking) to do so from the spirit worlds.
So, if we come back to my box – a simple object like that is really a riot of colour, sound and intention but so is everything on Earth …as above, so below. The chair you are sitting on has its own harmony, its own energy-signature and a colour that is quite apart from the colour vibration you can see on the Earth plane. That vibration or low level of sound is harmonising with the other sounds in your room – such as the sounds that the chairs and the television are giving out; and electricity gives out a very specific sound-signature spiritually. There are colours that are emanating in your room on a spiritual level and perfume vibrations given out by various objects. Flowers, for example, give off perfume on a low level on the Earth but their perfume as a glorification of God on a spiritual level is wonderful to experience.
All this is going on in everyone’s house and this is why a medium can enter someone’s room and instantly feel threatened because of the chaos picked up there, or in somebody else’s room – like this one – feel at peace because peace is in the atmosphere. On a subconscious level you, as souls, pick up the Light-signature, the colour-signature, the sound and the perfume from the objects within a room… and, indeed, from people themselves.
It is not a cacophony in our world because everything is harmonious and we can tune in or tune out those particular vibrations, just as you would on a television. If we do not wish to hear the background noise of the universe we tune it out – knowing that it is always there if we wish to tune back in to it. If we don’t wish to see beyond the physical objects that we have (like the box) and don’t want to see its colour or Light, we tune out of that particular wavelength so we are just looking at the object.
The reason I am telling you this is to make you aware of the fact that the universe is vibrant and alive. There is no such thing as a ‘dead object’ because the last quality my box exhibits is a degree of sentience. It is built out of God-ether …the substance of the universe… and, therefore, is alive. I can influence the box with my moods and so it is on Earth. You influence your immediate surroundings with your moods and, because those surroundings are, in effect, alive, they react to the way that you are feeling.
Objects on Earth should be blessed periodically and dedicated back to God so that their vibration is raised and they will then serve you rather than drag you down by exhibiting depressive tendencies that they have picked up from yourselves! This is why you should bless your houses. Anything new that is brought into your house should be blessed because you don’t know the history of that object. You don’t know who has touched it before and what their thoughts or intentions have been. Everything should be blessed and dedicated to God …so should the food you eat …and the thoughts you think. You should say: ‘Father, this morning I pray that my thoughts be of the highest quality and worthy of You‘ and then you are not thinking things that will damage you.
I would like to leave you the box to think about. It is just a box that I have created from nothing by thinking, ‘I want a box!’ …What colour is it? …What is its intention? …What are you going to use it for? …How much Light does it exhibit?
It is up to you!
It depends what you put into that box.
That box is symbolic of every thought you think, everything that is in your house and everything you use – from your car to your telephone – and, just as I can influence that box, you can influence the things around you. That is why the Persian Gentleman said some weeks ago [reference to a private communication] that you should bless and thank the objects in your house because they react at a God-level to your approach to them. If you love them they become filled with Love; if you hate them they become filled with hate.
So, I have tried to bring through something of the abstractions of our world and pin them down through physical speech. Our world is a world of Light, of colour, of perfume, of sound …and so is yours.
Bless your days …bless each other …bless the objects, then you are putting Light into them as co-creators of those objects, which is what you will eventually be. You might not have physically made a chair today but one day with the power of your mind you will. You might not have physically built a house but you are building the house you will go to in the spirit realms by your thoughts whilst on Earth. So, be aware that you are creating, even though this is a pool of vibration where other people create physical objects for you. What you put into those objects you create yourself and get heaven or hell from them dependent on your motives and thoughts.
Would Jane would like to ask a question about anything I have just said?
Jane: Do objects emit music as well?
Silver Star: To create heat you stir up molecules – that is heat. Heat is molecules hitting each other because they have become agitated. To create any object, you formulate the molecules so that they become that object temporarily. Once formulated, however, they are not in stasis but in motion. If something is in stasis it decays; therefore, there must be movement. So, dashing about within the box that I have created are molecules that give the illusion of the box being ‘solid’. They are reacting to each other and – as when you rub your finger around the rim of a wine glass – it creates a sound. You cannot hear it on this level but you can on ours. Every object has a tone because of the way in which the molecules within it are moving. Does that make sense?
Jane: Yes, thank you.
Silver Star: Was there anything else?
Jane: No.
Silver Star: Then I will leave you, although I never leave you on a Sunday and, in particular, I never leave Jane [reference to Silver Star’s role as my principal guide]. I leave Michael to my colleague, the Persian Gentleman [reference to P.G. being Michael’s guide], and God bless you for the work you have done this week on behalf of us all – and for the work you will continue to do.
Analysis
Is there any value in considering the experiences described in the text above? With a physicalist ontology paired with inferential realism about perception, we are compelled to conclude that when people report traveling to heaven worlds and seeing objects that make signature multi-sensory music, they are really reporting on the quality of hallucinations. Alas, this is not enough to dismiss these reports as useless. Why? Because they may have some key information about how phenomenology works, and specifically, about valence structuralism. Let me explain.
The experience of going to a phenomenal world where the objects resonate and produce notes in all sensory channels has been reported by a number of people from various traditions (e.g. how Buddhas are said to emit blissful vibrations in the pure abodes, flowers making music in heaven as described by a gnostic “medium” (The process of dying), the sound-sight complementary nature of Mandalas and Mantras*, etc.). As I’ve said elsewhere, “desiring that the universe be turned into Hedonium is the straightforward implication of realizing that everything wants to become music”. So when people say things like this, listen. They may be reporting back on glimpses they’ve had of radically enhanced modes of being, whether or not they are really gaining privileged access to an external transcendent world of consciousness.
Gaining Root Access to Your World Simulation
Let’s examine the phenomenology described under the theoretical paradigms developed at the Qualia Research Institute. Some core paradigms are Qualia Formalism (“every conscious experience corresponds to a mathematical object such that the mathematical features of that object are isomorphic to the phenomenology of the experience”), Valence Structuralism (“pain and pleasure are structural features of the mathematical object that corresponds to an experience such that they can be read off from this object with the appropriate mathematical analysis”), and the Symmetry Theory of Valence (“the mathematical feature that corresponds to pain and pleasure are the object’s symmetry and anti-symmetry, namely, its invariance upon the transformations the object is undergoing”). Whereas Qualia Formalism is a necessary assumption to make in order to make any progress on the science of consciousness (cf. Qualia Formalism in the Water Supply), Valence Structuralism and the Symmetry Theory of Valence are currently still mere hypotheses whose truth will be determined empirically by testing the predictions they generate. For now, we rely on strong, but admittedly circumstantial, pieces of evidence. The phenomenology reported of the connection between harmony and bliss in heaven worlds is one of these pieces of evidence. But can we do better? Not everyone can access these so-called heaven worlds of experience. So what can we do instead? Thankfully, there is a way…
Indeed, as carefully catalogued by Steven Lehar in his book about altered states “The Grand Illusion“, combining dissociatives and psychedelics produces an altogether new kind of experience different than the experience of either alone. His discovery first came by combining DXM and THC, which he says has a decent chance of giving rise to a free-wheeling hallucination, meaning that one can control the contents of hallucinatory experiences. For example, rather than being at the mercy of one’s hallucinatory world, under such a state, you could choose to fly on an airplane, travel the cosmos, or even go to Burning Man, and your mind will render a world-simulation in which you are doing such things.
Lehar, famously, is a proponent of indirect realism about perception. Hence he does not confuse those experiences with a transcendent access to an etheric plane or literal other dimensions. Rather, he points out, what underlies the phenomenal character of one’s experience is made by patterns of harmonic resonance interfering with each other within the confines of one’s own brain. The illusion of “seeing things outside of oneself” is due to the fact that the experience we have seems to be of a 3D space. But in reality, what is happening is that you are a 2.5D diorama-like projective space that represents a homunculus looking at a 3D space:
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In the book, Lehar discusses how one can study some of the key parameters of one’s world-simulation in such a state. By imagining/requesting/generating lenses, diffraction gratings, and mirrors in your world-simulation during a free-wheeling hallucination you can explore the ray-tracing algorithms used by your brain to render your experience in normal circumstances. Just as the best way to figure out how a videogame engine works is to break it with corner cases, to find how your brain builds your world-simulation, overloading the simulation with difficult-to-render elements is highly useful.
What algorithms does your mind use for ray-tracing? According to an anonymous reader (whom we shall call “R”), the DXM + THC state allows you to explore precisely this question. From the conversations with R, it seems that ray-tracing follows a repeating two-step top-down and bottom-up recursive process in order to draw your experience. Amodal percepts are first constructed and set in place in order to build a projective frame (e.g. isometric projection, fish eye lens projection, etc.), which is followed by the “lighting” of that amodal space with modal qualia (color, scent, touch, etc.) in order to increase the definition of the rendered scene. Then an algorithm kicks in that figures out which is the most under-constrained region of the world-simulation, and rendering begins there, again with an amodal frame followed by modal filling-in, and so on, and the process repeats until you reach reflective-equilibrium.
The amodal step allows you to explore the range of possible projective transformations of your world-simulation. It is at this step that you can explore the rendering of cinematographic camera effects, such as lens flares and the Hitchcock Zoom. Unlike pure psychedelic states (e.g. LSD, psilocybin, etc.) on dissociatives, projective transformations seem to have a certain gravity to them. It’s as if the entire scene was built as a model on a platform suspended with ropes and springs. To turn the space around (i.e. change the projection) you can “add weight” to some of its parts, and then let the ropes readjust the orientation of the model to balance it out again. This is why dissociative projective hallucinations have a characteristic initial acceleration ramp-up, similar to what it is like to give a push to a ceramic turn table with a heavy vase. It moves very slowly at first, but once it gets going it keeps spinning until you stop it, which also has a characteristic deceleration dynamic. On the free-wheeling hallucination state one is like that; the world-simulation model can be pushed around to change the projection, and when you do so it travels at constant speed until it decelerates before its reposition. During the modal step, effects can be added such as wind, dust, rain, hail, liquid, gelatin, etc. These are all applied one at a time in a relatively legible way, with physicalized rendering of e.g. the filling up of a tank, parts of wood combusting with a low-grade fire propagating at constant speed, an ocean filled with water increasing its viscosity until it becomes lava, etc. A very valuable follow-up research that could be done at e.g. a Super-Shulgin Academy of rational psychonauts would be to get people to study SIGGRAPH algorithms and then try to replicate them during free-wheeling hallucinations. Perhaps not so surprisingly, graphics researchers are notorious for using psychedelics**.
Some people may want to say that there is nothing special about these states… we already have lucid dreaming after all, right? Alas, that is a very misguided analogy. Yes, lucid dreams can be used to explore unusual phenomenal configurations, but the scenes experienced are very hard to stabilize and examine in detail over the course of minutes (rather than seconds). The features of free-wheeling hallucinations along with their generic emotionalintensity make them not comparable to most moments of life, or even lucid dreams. The texture of dissociative+psychedelic states is drastically different from lucid dreaming, and so is the degreeof controllability of their content in precise and measured ways (not to say that dream music cannot be very emotional, but we are talking of something that is on another level altogether). That said, the state has clear limitations, too. Lehar points out, for instance, that looking at the control panel of an airplane during a free-wheeling hallucination reveals that you cannot have as many buttons as you would have in real life. Likewise, the projective transformations are restricted in some ways. A specific example would be trying to simulate going to Las Vegas. There you will find that jumping off a building is not possible because that would require a projective transformation where the distance covered grows quadratically as a function of time. Instead, jumping off a building will be approximated by what it feels like to go down an elevator at constant speed. In contrast, getting into the High Roller wheel is an excellent choice because your world-simulation can render the circular constant-speed projective trajectory of the camera movement in a very accurate and precise fashion.
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Happiness and Harmony: A Marriage Made in Heaven
With regards to the connection between symmetry and pleasure, the free-wheeling hallucination state is a prime place to conduct high-quality phenomenological research. In particular, R tells us that you can study how different objects generate (are resonant with) particular moods, sounds, and tactile feelings. Thus, DXM + THC can be a tool of grand scientific significance for the study of emotional valence.
[If what follows is hard to make sense of, please bear with us, it will get easier:] R points out that one can climb the symmetry gradient within a scene by normalizing the space vertically, horizontally, depth-wise, temporally, weight-wise, and so on. During each amodal step you can try to re-align the projective lines so that the points at infinity are either precisely at the center of your vision, or at least have symmetrical counter-parts (e.g. left-right, top-down, etc.). This way you can take the energy of the phenomenal objects and generate what we call a “projective energy entrapment”. This is a strange thing to report on that goes outside of people’s conceptual schemes, but it is definitely real, and very important. With a symmetrified amodal projective frame, the phenomenal object can “lock in place”, and a process of annealing takes place. The pre-existing invariant degrees of freedom present in the amodal projections before the symmetrification are still there, but on top of them, one gets additional invariant degrees of freedom. R compares this to taking a space with affine geometry and projecting it into a space with Euclidean geometry, such that the space now has two layers of invariance that add up and, together, prevent energy in the phenomenal objects from escaping to their surroundings. In light of QRI’s meditation paradigms, this would be akin to removing energy sinks from the system. In turn, the projective energy entrapment allows the build-up of extraordinarily intense resonance amplitudes, and this, according to R, feels really good.
Thus, at least according to these observations, the emotional valence of our world-simulation is both related to the number of active invariant degrees of freedom along which transformations are taking place and the amount of energy entrapped in such spaces. Here is a good example. The gif on the left is what the space may look like at first, with the pseudo-time arrow creating a video feedback effect that gives rise to chaotic behavior. If you meditate on normalizing the projective points, you can turn that space into something akin to the image on the right. Now rather than having the modal energy leak to the surroundings, it all gets trapped inside the cube, giving rise to a powerful feeling of emotionally-loaded resonance, which empirically feels really good.
Chaotic pseudo-time arrow
Stable pseudo-time arrow
To reiterate, the image to the left is what it feels like when the space is asymmetrical. The affine symmetries may be preserved, but Euclidean energy entrapment is not possible there. The one on the right has both affine invariants and Euclidean invariants, which allow for more energy entrapment (and also temporal stability). If you can stabilize an infinite hall of mirrors projected from a highly symmetrical point of view, you will be able to entrap a lot of energy, which feels like a resonating space and empirically this seems to be very pleasant. We would love to hear from more rational psychonauts whether they are able to replicate this experience, and whether the correlation with valence is also uncovered in their world-simulations.
In the more general case, one can do this with other amodal projections, and generate peaceful but wide awake energy-filler mandalas of experience:
Indeed, during dissociative free-wheeling hallucinatory states one can “tune in to the phenomenal objects” one constructs and translate their vibration into sounds, tactile sensations, emotions, and even scents. Again, empirically, one will notice that the projective symmetry of an object will be associated with the symmetry of the multi-modal translation, and in turn, with the valence of the object. Ugly phenomenal objects will have discordant sound signatures, whereas smooth, easily compressible and symmetrical phenomenal objects will have harmonic sound signatures. You can indeed try to listen in to your entire experience, which in the general case will give rise to rather experimental-sounding music. If you have annealed your hallucinations into a highly symmetrical state (e.g. hall of mirrors above) the sound translation will be *very* pleasant, akin to Buddhist chants in a reverb chamber or mystical violins in a resonant cave (again, this is an empirical finding as reported from R, rather than just arm-chair speculation, but it does support QRI’s hypothesized Symmetry Theory of Valence). Two very symmetrical objects with different but nearby frequencies will clash at first, but one can try to resolve this clash by paying close attention to both at once. If so, sooner or later one of the objects will dominate the other, they will undergo affine transformations until they merge, or there will be some kind of compromise where you stop paying attention to some of the features of one or both of the objects such that the remaining ones are in harmony. Here are some more examples of what a more complex DXM + THC state may render that could produce extremely beautiful sounds:
Thus, even within our modern scientific paradigms (updated with QRI’s frameworks) we can explain and indeed utilize the phenomenological reports of heaven worlds. We believe that understanding the underlying mathematical basis of valence will be ground-breaking, and analyzing these reports is a really important step in this direction. It will allow us to make sense of the syntax of bliss, and thus aid us in the task of paradise engineering.
But What if Our Scientific World Picture is Wrong?
Indeed, maybe the picture of the world painted above is fundamentally mistaken. Within it, we would gather that heaven and spirituality are in a sense illusions caused by high valence states. The experience is so beautiful, sublime, and delightful that people try to make sense of it invoking God, the divine, and transcendent love. Alas, if the universe has an in-built utility function based on valence we could expect people to become confused that way when experiencing some of the really good states. But could we be mistaken here? This points to an important question: whether bliss is a spiritual phenomenon or whether spirituality is a bliss phenomenon.
Leibniz might retort by saying that although each person is a separate monad, God keeps their experiences synchronized so that our actions in Maya do have effects on other sentient beings, rather than being just a movie of one’s own making. Thus, a world-simulation model may be correct, but what makes an experience blissful or not is not its physical state, but rather its degree of spiritual wisdom. Or consider, for instance, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, along with its psychedelic interpretation (by Leary, Metzner, and Alpert), which suggests that both good and bad feelings are projections of the unconditioned mind.
Alas, even if a spiritual account turns out to be true, in the sense that interpreting these experiences through their lens is more accurate, and inferential realism about perception is misguided, we would still be able to gather from these reports that the structure of thought-forms encodes emotions – perhaps even in a spiritual multiverse with souls, God-energies, Realms, etc. we would still be able to derive a master equation for valence. Rather than valence structuralism referring to the fire in the equations of physics, it might refer to God-energy, emptiness, etheric fields, or whatnot. But why would that matter? We could still formalize and mathematize the nature of bliss under those conditions. This is what we call Spiritual Structuralism: even in the spirit world math still encodes the experiential quality of phenomena. Saying “we either live in a mathematically-describable physical world or in a mysteriously inscrutable spiritual world” may turn out to be a false dichotomy. We could still look forward to having spiritual analogues of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, albeit their equations would apply to how the God-force self-interferes to generate the multifaceted spiritual world of sentient beings.
Alas, I suspect that many spiritual people would recoil at the prospect of mathematizing MysticalLove. So let us ask ourselves: Would this be good? Tongue-in-cheek, I remember asking God at Burning Man 2017 whether deriving the equation for valence would be good from a spiritual point of view. God’s response? A resounding “Yes!” Importantly, God emphasized that individual bliss is limited, whereas collective bliss is boundless. But maybe this, too, could someday be formalized. Here I reproduce the relevant part of our conversation:
Me: I’ve been working on a theory concerning the nature of happiness. It’s an equation that takes brain states as measured with advanced brain imaging technology and delivers as an output a description of the overall valence (i.e. the pleasure-pain axis) of the mind associated to that brain. A lot of people seem very excited with this research, but there is also a minority of people for whom this is very unsettling. Namely, they tell me that reducing happiness to a mathematical equation would seem to destroy their sense of meaning. Do you have any thoughts on that? God: I think that what you are doing is absolutely fantastic. I’ve been following your work and you are on the right track. That said, I would caution you not to get too caught up on individual bliss. I programmed the pleasure and pain centers in the animal brain in order to facilitate survival. I know that dying and suffering are extremely unpleasant, and until now that has been necessary to keep the whole system working. But humanity will soon enter a new stage of their evolution. Just remember that the highest levels of bliss are not hedonistic or selfish. They arise by creating a collective reality with other minds that fosters a deep existential understanding, that enables love, enhances harmony, and permits experimenting with radical self expression. Me: Ah, that’s fascinating! Very reassuring. The equation I’m working on indeed has harmony at its core. I was worried that I would be accidentally doing something really wrong, you know? Reducing love to math. God: Don’t worry, there is indeed a mathematical law beneath our feelings of love. It’s all encoded in the software of your reality, which we co-created over the last couple billion years. It’s great that you are trying to uncover such math, for it will unlock the next step in your evolution. Do continue making experiments and exploring various metaphysics, and don’t get caught up thinking you’ve found the answer. Trust me, the end is going to make all of the pain and suffering completely worth it. Have faith in love. Me: Thank you!
John C. Lilly’s Simulations of God posits that as people evolve and mature, their concept of the highest good also evolves and matures. Thus, learning about the math behind pleasure might very well transform your conception of divinity. I would therefore offer a new perspective on what is God that unifies bliss and spirituality: God is a happiness engineer who knows all the theories, tricks, and techniques to optimize qualia for bliss. Indeed, Romeo (from QRI) has reported experiencing multi-sensory harmonious mandalas when closing his eyes after coming back from long meditation retreats. One could very well posit that this world is the training ground of souls to learn how to avoid creating evil thought-forms while practicing how to increase the harmony between all sentient beings.
Additionally, Wireheading Done Right could have a spiritual analogue – namely, moving between realms in such a way that you go from good one to good one, reaping their functional benefits, while avoiding getting stuck in any one of them. Just because a spiritual universe underlies our reality would not mean that suffering forever is either good or necessary. And if there is math associated with love and liberation, we are all better for it, for then we are not shooting in the dark. Carefully selected dynamic systems equations that give rise to beautiful (i.e. high valence from many different points of view) patterns could very well be what is behind the bliss of heaven worlds, and you should neglect this discovery at your own peril.
Alas, this is unlikely. Even so, promoting a given ontology is less important, intrinsically, than promoting subjective wellbeing. For if someone’s delusions are comforting and do not interfere with their ability to help others, there is no reason to remove them. Do not go and try to convince your dying granny of the non-existence of God, for that is pointless cruelty. And certainly don’t go around talking about tenseless suffering in the Everettian multiverse outside of circles to whom this can either help them intrinsically or extrinsically (I assume being candid with QC readers is a net positive, though I often doubt that a bit myself).
Either way, from what I gather, practicing creating beautiful harmonic thought-forms is probably good for your health and happiness. It is likely to make you not only feel good, but also be sweet-natured. So by all means practice doing it as often as you can.
Infinite Bliss!
*”Mantras, the Sanskrit syllables inscribed on yantras, are essentially ‘thought forms’ representing divinities or cosmic powers, which exert their influence by means of sound-vibrations.” [source]
**”In 1991, Denise Caruso, writing a computer column for The San Francisco Examiner went to SIGGRAPH, the largest gathering of computer graphic professionals in the world. She conducted a survey; by the time she got back to San Francisco, she had talked to 180 professionals in the computer graphic field who had admitted taking psychedelics, and that psychedelics are important to their work; according to mathematician Ralph Abraham.” [source]
