By Andrés Gómez Emilsson

Digital Sentience

Creating “digital sentience” is a lot harder than it looks. Standard Qualia Research Institute arguments for why it is either difficult, intractable, or literally impossible to create complex, computationally meaningful, bound experiences out of a digital computer (more generally, a computer with a classical von Neumann architecture) include the following three core points:

Digital computation does not seem capable of solving the phenomenal binding or boundary problems.
Replicating input-output mappings can be done without replicating the internal causal structure of a system.
Even when you try to replicate the internal causal structure of a system deliberately, the behavior of reality at a deep enough level is not currently understood (aside from how it behaves in light of inputs-to-outputs).

Let’s elaborate briefly:

The Binding/Boundary Problem

A moment of experience contains many pieces of information. It also excludes a lot of information. Meaning that, a moment of experience contains a precise, non-zero, amount of information. For example, as you open your eyes, you may notice patches of blue and yellow populating your visual field. The very meaning of the blue patches is affected by the presence of the yellow patches (indeed, they are “blue patches in a visual field with yellow patches too”) and thus you need to take into account the experience as a whole to understand the meaning of all of its parts.
A very rough, intuitive, conception of the information content of an experience can be hinted at with Gregory Bateson’s (1972) “a difference that makes a difference”. If we define an empty visual field as containing zero information, it is possible to define an “information metric” from this zero state to every possible experience by counting the number of Just Noticeable Differences (JNDs) (Kingdom & Prins, 2016) needed to transform such empty visual field into an arbitrary one (note: since some JND are more difficult to specify than others, a more accurate metric should also take into account the information cost of specifying the change in addition to the size of the change that needs to be made). It is thus evident to see that one’s experience of looking at a natural landscape contains many pieces of information at once. If it didn’t, you would not be able to tell it apart from an experience of an empty visual field.
The fact that experiences contain many pieces of information at once needs to be reconciled with the mechanism that generates such experiences. How you achieve this unity of complex information starting from a given ontology with basic elements is what we call “the binding problem”. For example, if you believe that the universe is made of atoms and forces (now a disproven ontology), the binding problem will refer to how a collection of atoms comes together to form a unified moment of experience. Alternatively, if one’s ontology starts out fully unified (say, assuming the universe is made of physical fields), what we need to solve is how such a unity gets segmented out into individual experiences with precise information content, and thus we talk about the “boundary problem”.
Within the boundary problem, as Chris Percy and I argued in Don’t Forget About the Boundary Problem! (2023), the phenomenal (i.e. experiential) boundaries must satisfy stringent constraints to be viable. Namely, among other things, phenomenal boundaries must be:
1. Hard Boundaries: we must avoid “fuzzy” boundaries where information is only “partially” part of an experience. This is simply the result of contemplating the transitivity of the property of belonging to a given experience. If a (token) sensation A is part of a visual field at the same time as a sensation B, and B is present at the same time as C, then A and C are also both part of the same experience. Fuzzy boundaries would break this transitivity, and thus make the concept of boundaries incoherent. As a reductio ad absurdum, this entails phenomenal boundaries must be hard.
2. Causally significant (i.e. non-epiphenomenal): we can talk about aspects of our experience, and thus we can know they are part of a process that grants them causal power. More so, if structured states of consciousness did not have causal effects in some way isomorphic to their phenomenal structure, evolution would simply have no reason to recruit them for information processing. Albeit epiphenomenal states of consciousness are logically coherent, the situation would leave us with no reason to believe, one way or the other, that the structure of experience would vary in a way that mirrors its functional role. On the other hand, states of consciousness having causal effects directly related to their structure (the way they feel like) fits the empirical data. By what seems to be a highly overdetermined Occam’s Razor, we can infer that the structure of a state of consciousness is indeed causally significant for the organism.
3. Frame-invariant: whether a system is conscious should not depend on one’s interpretation of it or the point of view from which one is observing it (see appendix for Johnson’s (2015) detailed description of frame invariance as a theoretical constraint within the context of philosophy of mind).
4. Weakly emergent on the laws of physics: we want to avoid postulating either that there is a physics-violating “strong emergence” at some level of organization (“reality only has one level” – David Pearce) or that there is nothing peculiar happening at our scale. Bound, casually significant, experiences could be akin to superfluid helium. Namely, entailed by the laws of physics, but behaviorally distinct enough to play a useful evolutionary role.
Solving the binding/boundary problems does not seem feasible with a von Neumann architecture in our universe. The binding/boundary problem requires the “simultaneous” existence of many pieces of information at once, and this is challenging using a digital computer for many reasons:
1. Hard boundaries are hard to come by: looking at the shuffling of electrons from one place to another in a digital computer does not suggest the presence of hard boundaries. What separates a transistor’s base, collector, and emitter from its immediate surroundings? What’s the boundary between one pulse of electricity and the next? At best, we can identify functional “good enough” separations, but no true physics-based hard boundaries.
2. Digital algorithms lack frame invariance: how you interpret what a system is doing in terms of classic computations depends on your frame of reference and interpretative lens.
3. The bound experiences must themselves be causally significant. While natural selection seemingly values complex bound experiences, our digital computer designs precisely aim to denoise the system as much as possible so that the global state of the computer does not influence in any way the lower-level operations. At the algorithmic level, the causal properties of a digital computer as a whole, by design, are never more than the strict sum of their parts.

Matching Input-Output-Mapping Does Not Entail Same Causal Structure

Even if you replicate the input-output mapping of a system, that does not mean you are replicating the internal causal structure of the system. If bound experiences are dependent on specific causal structures, they will not happen automatically without considerations for the nature of their substrate (which might have unique, substrate-specific, causal decompositions). Chalmers’ (1995) “principle of organizational invariance” assumes that replicating a system’s functional organization at a fine enough grain will reproduce identical conscious experiences. However, this may be question-begging if bound experiences require holistic physical systems (e.g. quantum coherence). In such a case, the “components” of the system might be irreducible wholes, and breaking them down further would result in losing the underlying causal structure needed for bound experiences. This suggests that consciousness might emerge from physical processes that cannot be adequately captured by classical functional descriptions, regardless of their granularity.

More so, whether we realize it or not, it is always us (indeed complex bound experiences) who interpret the meaning of the input and the output of a physical system. It is not interpreted by the system itself. This is because the system has no real “points of view” from which to interpret what is going on. This is a subtle point, and will merely mention it for now, but a deep exposition of this line of argument can be found in The View From My Topological Pocket (2023).

We more so would point out that the system that is smuggling a “point of view” to interpret a digital computer’s operations is in the human who builds, maintains, and utilizes it. If we want a system to create its “own point of view” we will need to find the way for it to bind the information in a (1) “projector”/screen, (2) an actual point of view proper, or (3) the backwards lightcone that feeds into such a point of view. As argued, none of these are viable solutions.

Reality’s Deep Causal Structure is Poorly Understood

Finally, another key consideration that has been discussed extensively is that the very building blocks of reality have unclear, opaque causal structures. Arguably, if we want to replicate the internal causal structure of a conscious system, the classical input-output mapping is therefore not enough. If you want to ensure that what is happening inside the system has the same causal structure as its simulated counterpart, you would also need to replicate how the system would respond to non-standard inputs, including x-rays, magnetic fields, and specific molecules (e.g. Xenon isotopes).

These ideas have all been discussed at length in articles, podcasts, presentations, and videos. Now let’s move on to a more recent consideration we call “Costs of Embodiment”.

Costs of Embodiment

Classical “computational complexity theory” is often used as a silver bullet “analytic frame” to discount the computational power of systems. Here is a typical line of argument: under the assumption that consciousness isn’t the result of implementing a quantum algorithm per se, the argument goes, then there is “nothing that it can do that you couldn’t do with a simulation of the system”. This, however, is neglecting the complications that come from instantiating a system in the physical world with all that it entails. To see why, we must first explain the nature of this analytic style in more depth:

Introduction to Computational Complexity Theory

Computational complexity theory is a branch of computer science that focuses on classifying computational problems according to their inherent difficulty. It primarily deals with the resources required to solve problems, such as time (number of steps) and space (memory usage).

Key concepts in computational complexity theory include:

Big O notation: Used to describe the upper bound of an algorithm’s rate of growth.
Complexity classes: Categories of problems with similar resource requirements (e.g., P, NP, PSPACE).
Time complexity: Measure of how the running time increases with the size of the input.
Space complexity: Measure of how memory usage increases with the size of the input.

In brief, this style of analysis is suited for analyzing the properties of algorithms that are implementation-agnostic, abstract, and interpretable in the form of pseudo-code. Alas, the moment you start to ground these concepts in the real physical constraints to which life is subjected, the relevance and completeness of the analysis starts to fall apart. Why? Because:

Big O notation counts how the number of steps (time complexity) or number of memory slots (space complexity) grows with the size of the input (or in some cases size of the output). But not all steps are created equal:
1. Flipping the value of a bit might be vastly cheaper in the real world than moving the value of a bit to another location that is very (physically far) in the computer.
2. Likewise, some memory operations are vastly more costly than others: in the real world you need to take into account the cost of redundancy, distributed error correction, and entropic decay of structures not in use at the time.
Not all inputs and outputs are created equal. Taking in some inputs might be vastly more costly than others (e.g. highly energetic vibrations that shake the system apart mean something to a biological organism as it needs to adapt to the possible stress induced by the nature of the input, expressing certain outputs might be much more costly than others, as the organism needs to reconfigure itself to deliver the result of the computation, a cost that isn’t considered by classical computational complexity theory).
Interacting with a biological system is a far more complex activity than interacting with, say, logic gates and digital memory slots. We are talking about a highly dynamic, noisy, soup of molecules with complex emergent effects. Defining an operation in this context, let alone its “cost”, is far from trivial.
Artificial computing architectures are designed, implemented, maintained, reproduced, and interpreted by humans who, if we are to believe already have powerful computational capabilities, are giving the system an unfair advantage over biological systems (which require zero human assistance).

Why Embodiment May Lead to Underestimating Costs

Here is a list of considerations that highlight the unique costs that come with real-world embodiment for information-processing systems beyond the realm of mere abstraction:

Physical constraints: Traditional complexity theory often doesn’t account for physical limitations of real-world systems, such as heat dissipation, energy consumption, and quantum effects.
Parallel processing: Biological systems, including brains, operate with massive adaptive parallelism. This is challenging to replicate in classical computing architectures and may require different cost analyses.
Sensory integration: Embodied systems must process and integrate multiple sensory inputs simultaneously, which can be computationally expensive in ways not captured by standard complexity measures.
Real-time requirements: Embodied systems often need to respond in real-time to environmental stimuli, adding temporal constraints that may increase computational costs.
Adaptive learning: The ability to learn and adapt in real-time may incur additional computational costs not typically considered in classical complexity theory.
Robustness to noise: Physical systems must be robust to environmental noise and internal fluctuations, potentially requiring redundancy and error-correction mechanisms that increase computational costs.
Energy efficiency: Biological systems are often highly energy-efficient, which may come at the cost of increased complexity in information processing.
Non-von Neumann architectures: Biological neural networks operate on principles different from classical computers, potentially involving computational paradigms not well-described by traditional complexity theory.
Quantum effects: At the smallest scales, quantum mechanical effects may play a role in information processing, adding another layer of complexity not accounted for in classical theories.
Emergent properties: Complex systems may exhibit physical emergent properties that arise from the interactions of simpler components and as well as phase transitions, potentially leading to computational costs that are difficult to predict or quantify using standard methods.

See appendix for a concrete example of applying these considerations to an abstract and embodied object recognition system (example provided by Kristian Rönn).

Case Studies:

1. 2D Computers

It is well known in classical computing theory that a 2D computer can implement anything that an n-dimensional computer can do. Namely, because it is possible to create a 2D Turing Machine capable of simulating arbitrary computers of this class (to the extent that there is a computational complexity equivalence between an n-dimensional computer and a 2D computer), we see that (at the limit) the same runtime complexity as the original computer in 2D should be achievable.

However, living in a 2D plane comes with enormous challenges that highlight the cost of embodiment present in a given media. In particular, we will see that the *routing costs* of information will grow really fast, as the channels that connect between different parts of the computer will need to take turns in order to allow for the crossed wires to transmit information without saturating the medium of (wave/information) propagation.

A concrete example here comes from examining what happens when you divide a circle into areas. Indeed, this is a well-known math problem, where you are supposed to derive a general formula for the number of areas by which a circle gets divided when you connect n (generally placed) points in its periphery. The takeaway of this exercise is often to point out that even though at first the number of areas seem to be powers of 2 (2, 4, 8, 16…) eventually the pattern is broken (the number after 16 is, surprisingly, 31 and not 32).

For the purpose of this example we shall simply focus on the growth of edges vs. the growth of crossings between the edges as we increase the number of nodes. Since every pair of nodes has an edge, the formula for the number of edges as a function of the number of nodes n is: n choose 2. Similarly, any four points define a single unique crossing, and thus the formula for the number of crossings is: n choose 4. When n is small (6 or less), the number of crossings is smaller or equal to the number of edges. But as soon as we hit 7 nodes, the number of crossings dominates over the number of edges. Asymptotically, in fact, the growth of edges is O(n^2) using the Big O notation, whereas the number of crossings ends up being O(n^4), which is much faster. If this system is used in the implementation of an algorithm that requires every pair of nodes to interact with each other once, we may at first be under the impression that the complexity will grow as O(n^2). But if this system is embodied, messages between the nodes will start to collide with each other at the crossings. Eventually, the number of delays and traffic jams caused by the embodiment of the system in 2D will dominate the time complexity of the system.

2. Blind Systems: Bootstrapping a Map Isn’t Easy

A striking challenge that biological systems need to tackle to instantiate moments of experience with useful information arises when we consider the fact that, at conception, biological systems lack a pre-existing “ground truth map” of their own components, i.e. where they are, and where they are supposed to be. In other words, biological systems somehow bootstrap their own internal maps and coordination mechanisms from a seemingly mapless state. This feat is remarkable given the extreme entropy and chaos at the microscopic level of our universe.

Assembly Theory (AT) (2023) provides an interesting perspective on this challenge. AT conceptualizes objects not as simple point particles, but as entities defined by their formation histories. It attempts to elucidate how complex, self-organizing systems can emerge and maintain structure in an entropic universe. However, AT also highlights the intricate causal relationships and historical contingencies underlying such systems, suggesting that the task of self-mapping is far from trivial.

Consider the questions this raises: How does a cell know its location within a larger organism? How do cellular assemblies coordinate their components without a pre-existing map? How are messages created and routed without a predefined addressing system and without colliding with each other? In the context of artificial systems, how could a computer bootstrap its own understanding of its architecture and component locations without human eyes and hands to see and place the components in their right place?

These questions point to the immense challenge faced by any system attempting to develop self-models or internal mappings from scratch. The solutions found in biological systems might potentially rely on complex, evolved mechanisms that are not easily replicated in classical computational architectures. This suggests that creating truly self-understanding artificial systems capable of surviving in a hostile, natural environment, may require radically different approaches than those currently employed in standard computing paradigms.

How Does the QRI Model Overcome the Costs of Embodiment?

This core QRI article presents a perspective on consciousness and the binding problem that aligns well with our discussion of embodiment and computational costs. It proposes that moments of experience correspond to topological pockets in the fields of physics, particularly the electromagnetic field. This view offers several important insights:

Frame-invariance: The topology of vector fields is Lorentz invariant, meaning it doesn’t change under relativistic transformations. This addresses the need for a frame-invariant basis for consciousness, which we identified as a challenge for traditional computational approaches.
Causal significance: Topological features of fields have real, measurable causal effects, as exemplified by phenomena like magnetic reconnection in solar flares. This satisfies the requirement for consciousness to be causally efficacious and not epiphenomenal.
Natural boundaries: Topological pockets provide objective, causally significant boundaries that “carve nature at its joints.” This contrasts with the difficulty of defining clear system boundaries in classical computational models.
Temporal depth: The approach acknowledges that experiences have a temporal dimension, potentially lasting for tens of milliseconds. This aligns with our understanding of neural oscillations and provides a natural way to integrate time into the model of consciousness.
Embodiment costs: The topological approach inherently captures many of the “costs of embodiment” we discussed earlier. The physical constraints, parallel processing, sensory integration, and real-time requirements of embodied systems are naturally represented in the complex topological structures of the brain’s electromagnetic field.

This perspective suggests that the computational costs of consciousness may be even more significant than traditional complexity theory would indicate. It implies that creating artificial consciousness would require not just simulating neural activity, but replicating the precise topological structures of electromagnetic fields in the brain. This is a far more challenging task than conventional AI approaches.

Moreover, this view provides a potential explanation for why embodied systems like biological brains are so effective at producing consciousness. The physical structure of the brain, with its complex networks of neurons and electromagnetic fields, may be ideally suited to creating the topological pockets that correspond to conscious experiences. This suggests that embodiment is not just a constraint on consciousness, but a fundamental enabler of it.

Furthermore, there is a non-trivial connection between topological segmentation and resonant modes. The larger a topological pocket is, the lower the frequency of the resonant modes can be. This, effectively, is broadcasted to every region within the pocket (much akin how any spot on the surface of an acoustic guitar expresses the vibrations of the guitar as a whole). Thus, topological segmentation, quite conceivably, might be implicated in the generation of maps for the organism to self-organize around (cf. bioelectric morphogenesis according to Michael Levin, 2022). Steven Lehar (1999) and Michael E. Johnson (2018) in particular have developed really interesting conceptual frameworks for how harmonic resonance might be implicated in the computational character of our experience. The QRI insight that topology can mediate resonance, further complicates the role of phenomenal boundaries in the computational role of consciousness.

Conclusion and Path Forward

In conclusion, the costs of embodiment present significant challenges to creating digital sentience that traditional computational complexity theory fails to fully capture. The QRI solution to the boundary problem, with its focus on topological pockets in electromagnetic fields, offers a promising framework for understanding consciousness that inherently addresses many of these embodiment costs. Moving forward, research should focus on: (1) developing more precise methods to measure and quantify the costs of embodiment in biological systems, (2) exploring how topological features of electromagnetic fields could be replicated or simulated in artificial systems, and (3) investigating the potential for hybrid systems that leverage the natural advantages of biological embodiment while incorporating artificial components (cf. Xenobots). By pursuing these avenues, we may unlock new pathways towards creating genuine artificial consciousness while deepening our understanding of natural consciousness.

It is worth noting that the QRI mission is to “understand consciousness for the benefit of all sentient beings”. Thus, figuring out the constraints that give rise to computationally non-trivial bound experiences is one key piece of the puzzle: we don’t want to accidentally create systems that are conscious and suffering and become civilizationally load-bearing (e.g. organoids animated by pain or fear).

In other words, understanding how to produce conscious systems is not enough. We need to figure out how to (a) ensure that they are animated by information-sensitive gradients of bliss, and (b) how being empowered by the computational properties of consciousness can lean into more benevolent mind architectures. Namely, architectures that care about their wellbeing and the wellbeing of all sentient beings. This is an enormous challenge; clarifying the costs of embodiment is one key step forward, but part of an ecosystem of actions and projects needed for the robust positive impact of consciousness research for the wellbeing of all sentient beings.

Acknowledgments:

This post was written at the July 2024 Qualia Research Institute Strategy Summit in Sweden. It comes about as a response to incisive questions by Kristian Rönn on QRI’s model of digital sentience. Many thanks to Curran Janssen, Oliver Edholm, David Pearce, Alfredo Parra, Asher Soryl, Rasmus Soldberg, and Erik Karlson, for brainstorming, feedback, suggesting edits, and the facilitation of this retreat.

Appendix

Excerpt from Michael E. Johnson’s Principia Qualia (2015) on Frame Invariance (pg. 61)

What is frame invariance?

A theory is frame-invariant if it doesn’t depend on any specific physical frame of reference, or subjective interpretations to be true. Modern physics is frame-invariant in this way: the Earth’s mass objectively exerts gravitational attraction on us regardless of how we choose to interpret it. Something like economic theory, on the other hand, is not frame-invariant: we must interpret how to apply terms such as “GDP” or “international aid” to reality, and there’s always an element of subjective judgement in this interpretation, upon which observers can disagree.

Why is frame invariance important in theories of mind?

Because consciousness seems frame-invariant. Your being conscious doesn’t depend on my beliefs about consciousness, physical frame of reference, or interpretation of the situation – if you are conscious, you are conscious regardless of these things. If I do something that hurts you, it hurts you regardless of my belief of whether I’m causing pain. Likewise, an octopus either is highly conscious, or isn’t, regardless of my beliefs about it.[a] This implies that any ontology that has a chance of accurately describing consciousness must be frame-invariant, similar to how the formalisms of modern physics are frame-invariant.

In contrast, the way we map computations to physical systems seems inherently frame-dependent. To take a rather extreme example, if I shake a bag of popcorn, perhaps the motion of the popcorn’s molecules could – under a certain interpretation – be mapped to computations which parallel those of a whole-brain emulation that’s feeling pain. So am I computing anything by shaking that bag of popcorn? Who knows. Am I creating pain by shaking that bag of popcorn? Doubtful… but since there seems to be an unavoidable element of subjective judgment as to what constitutes information, and what constitutes computation, in actual physical systems, it doesn’t seem like computationalism can rule out this possibility. Given this, computationalism is frame-dependent in the sense that there doesn’t seem to be any objective fact of the matter derivable for what any given system is computing, even in principle.

[a] However, we should be a little bit careful with the notion of ‘objective existence’ here if we wish to broaden our statement to include quantum-scale phenomena where choice of observer matters.

Example of Cost of Embodiment by Kristian Rönn

Abstract Scenario (Computational Complexity):

Consider a digital computer system tasked with object recognition in a static environment. The algorithm processes an image to identify objects, classifies them, and outputs the results.

Key Points:

The computational complexity is defined by the algorithm’s time and space complexity (e.g., O(n^2) for time, O(n) for space).
Inputs (image data) and outputs (object labels) are well-defined and static.
The system operates in a controlled environment with no physical constraints like heat dissipation or energy consumption.

However, this abstract analysis is extremely optimistic, since it doesn’t take the cost of embodiment into account.

Embodied Scenario (Embodied Complexity):

Now, consider a robotic system equipped with a camera, tasked with real-time object recognition and interaction in a dynamic environment.

Key Points and Costs:

Real-Time Processing:
- The robot must process images in real-time, requiring rapid data acquisition and processing, which creates practical constraints.
- Delays in computation can lead to physical consequences, such as collisions or missed interactions.
Energy Consumption:
- The robot’s computational tasks consume power, affecting the overall energy budget.
- Energy management becomes crucial, balancing between processing power and battery life.
Heat Dissipation:
- High computational loads generate heat, necessitating cooling mechanisms, requiring additional energy. Moreover, this creates additional costs/waste in the embodied system.
- Overheating can degrade performance and damage components, requiring thermal management strategies.
Physical Constraints and Mobility:
- The robot must move and navigate through physical space, encountering obstacles and varying terrains.
- Computational tasks must be synchronized with motion planning and control systems, adding complexity.
Sensory Integration:
- The robot integrates data from multiple sensors (camera, lidar, ultrasonic sensors) to understand its environment.
- Processing multi-modal sensory data in real-time increases computational load and complexity.
Error Correction and Redundancy:
- Physical systems are prone to noise and errors. The robot needs mechanisms for error detection and correction.
- Redundant systems and fault-tolerance measures add to the computational overhead.
Adaptation and Learning:
- The robot must adapt to new environments and learn from interactions, requiring active inference (i.e. we can’t train a new model everytime the ontology of an agent needs updating).
- Continuous learning in an embodied system is resource-intensive compared to offline training in a digital system.
Physical Wear and Maintenance:
- Physical components wear out over time, requiring maintenance and replacement.
- Downtime for repairs affects the overall system performance and availability.

Pointers to Related Research

An Energy Complexity Model for Algorithms

Roy, S., Rudra, A., & Verma, A. (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2422436.2422470

Abstract

Energy consumption has emerged as a first class computing resource for both server systems and personal computing devices. The growing importance of energy has led to rethink in hardware design, hypervisors, operating systems and compilers. Algorithm design is still relatively untouched by the importance of energy and algorithmic complexity models do not capture the energy consumed by an algorithm. In this paper, we propose a new complexity model to account for the energy used by an algorithm. Based on an abstract memory model (which was inspired by the popular DDR3 memory model and is similar to the parallel disk I/O model of Vitter and Shriver), we present a simple energy model that is a (weighted) sum of the time complexity of the algorithm and the number of ‘parallel’ I/O accesses made by the algorithm. We derive this simple model from a more complicated model that better models the ground truth and present some experimental justification for our model. We believe that the simplicity (and applicability) of this energy model is the main contribution of the paper. We present some sufficient conditions on algorithm behavior that allows us to bound the energy complexity of the algorithm in terms of its time complexity (in the RAM model) and its I/O complexity (in the I/O model). As corollaries, we obtain energy optimal algorithms for sorting (and its special cases like permutation), matrix transpose and (sparse) matrix vector multiplication.

Thermodynamic Computing

Conte, T. et al. (2019). https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01968

Abstract

The hardware and software foundations laid in the first half of the 20th Century enabled the computing technologies that have transformed the world, but these foundations are now under siege. The current computing paradigm, which is the foundation of much of the current standards of living that we now enjoy, faces fundamental limitations that are evident from several perspectives. In terms of hardware, devices have become so small that we are struggling to eliminate the effects of thermodynamic fluctuations, which are unavoidable at the nanometer scale. In terms of software, our ability to imagine and program effective computational abstractions and implementations are clearly challenged in complex domains. In terms of systems, currently five percent of the power generated in the US is used to run computing systems – this astonishing figure is neither ecologically sustainable nor economically scalable. Economically, the cost of building next-generation semiconductor fabrication plants has soared past $10 billion. All of these difficulties – device scaling, software complexity, adaptability, energy consumption, and fabrication economics – indicate that the current computing paradigm has matured and that continued improvements along this path will be limited. If technological progress is to continue and corresponding social and economic benefits are to continue to accrue, computing must become much more capable, energy efficient, and affordable. We propose that progress in computing can continue under a united, physically grounded, computational paradigm centered on thermodynamics. Herein we propose a research agenda to extend these thermodynamic foundations into complex, non-equilibrium, self-organizing systems and apply them holistically to future computing systems that will harness nature’s innate computational capacity. We call this type of computing “Thermodynamic Computing” or TC.

Energy Complexity of Computation

Say, A.C.C. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38100-3_1

Abstract

Computational complexity theory is the study of the fundamental resource requirements associated with the solutions of different problems. Time, space (memory) and randomness (number of coin tosses) are some of the resource types that have been examined both independently, and in terms of tradeoffs between each other, in this context. Since it is well known that each bit of information “forgotten” by a device is linked to an unavoidable increase in entropy and an associated energy cost, one can also view energy as a computational resource. Constant-memory machines that are only allowed to access their input strings in a single left-to-right pass provide a good framework for the study of energy complexity. There exists a natural hierarchy of regular languages based on energy complexity, with the class of reversible languages forming the lowest level. When the machines are allowed to make errors with small nonzero probability, some problems can be solved with lower energy cost. Tradeoffs between energy and other complexity measures can be studied in the framework of Turing machines or two-way finite automata, which can be rewritten to work reversibly if one increases their space and time usage.

Relevant physical limitations

Landauer’s limit: The lower theoretical limit of energy consumption of computation.
Bremermann’s limit: A limit on the maximum rate of computation that can be achieved in a self-contained system in the material universe.
Bekenstein bound: An upper limit on the thermodynamic entropy S, or Shannon entropy H, that can be contained within a given finite region of space which has a finite amount of energy.
Margolus–Levitin theorem: A bound on the maximum computational speed per unit of energy.

References

Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chandler Publishing Company.

Chalmers, D. J. (1995). Absent qualia, fading qualia, dancing qualia. In T. Metzinger (Ed.), Conscious Experience. Imprint Academic. https://www.consc.net/papers/qualia.html

Gómez-Emilsson, A. (2023). The view from my topological pocket. Qualia Computing. https://qualiacomputing.com/2023/10/26/the-view-from-my-topological-pocket-an-introduction-to-field-topology-for-solving-the-boundary-problem/

Gómez-Emilsson, A., & Percy, C. (2023). Don’t forget the boundary problem! How EM field topology can address the overlooked cousin to the binding problem for consciousness. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience,17. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2023.1233119

Johnson, M. E. (2015). Principia qualia. Open Theory. https://opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf

Johnson, M. E. (2018). A future of neuroscience. Open Theory. https://opentheory.net/2018/08/a-future-for-neuroscience/

Kingdom, F.A.A., & Prins, N. (2016). Psychophysics: A practical introduction. Elsevier.

Lehar, S. (1999). Harmonic resonance theory: An alternative to the “neuron doctrine” paradigm of neurocomputation to address gestalt properties of perception. http://slehar.com/wwwRel/webstuff/hr1/hr1.html

Levin, M. (2022). Bioelectric morphogenesis, cellular motivations, and false binaries with Michael Levin. DemystifySci Podcast. https://demystifysci.com/blog/2022/10/25/kl2d17sphsiw2trldsvkjvr91odjxv

Pearce, D. (2014). Social media unsorted postings. HEDWEB. https://www.hedweb.com/social-media/pre2014.html

Sharma, A. (2023). Assembly theory explains and quantifies selection and evolution. Nature, 622, 321–328. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9

LSD Ego Death: Where Hyperbolic Pseudo-Time Arrows Meet Geometric Fixed Points

Posted on March 17, 2024 by algekalipso

Alternative Title: LSD Ego Death – A Play in Three Voices

[Epistemic Status: Academic, Casual, and Fictional Analysis of the phenomenology of LSD Ego Death]

Academic:

In this work we advance key novel interpretative frameworks to make sense of the distinct phenomenology that arises when ingesting a high dose of LSD-25 (250μg+). It is often noted that LSD, also known as lysergic acid diethylamide, changes in qualitative character as a function of dose, with a number of phase transitions worth discussing.

Casual:

You start reading an abstract of an academic publication on the topic of LSD phenomenology. What are the chances that you will gain any sense, any inkling, the most basic of hints, of what the high-dose LSD state is like by consuming this kind of media? Perhaps it’s not zero, but in so far as the phenomenological paradigms in mainstream use in the 2020s are concerned, we can be reasonably certain that the piece of media won’t even touch the outer edges of the world of LSD-specific qualia. Right now, you can trust the publication to get right core methodological boundary conditions, like the mg/kg used, the standard deviation of people’s responses to questionnaire items, and the increase in blood pressure at the peak. But at least right now you won’t find a rigorous account of either the phenomenal character (what the experience felt like in detailed colorful phenomenology with precise reproducible parameters) or the semantic content (what the experience was about, the information it allowed you to process, the meaning computed) of the state. For that we need to blend in additional voices to complement the rigidly skeptical vibe and tone of the academic delivery method.

It’s for that reason that we will interweave a casual, matter of fact, “really trying to say what I mean in as many ways as I can even if I sound silly or dumb”, voice (namely, this one, duh!). And more so, in order to address the speculative semantic content in its own terms we shall also include a fantastical voice into the mix.

Fantastical:

Fuck, you took too much. In many ways you knew that your new druggie friends weren’t to be trusted. Their MDMA pills were bunk, their weed was cheap, and even they pretended to drink more fancy alcohol than they could realistically afford. So it was rather natural for you to assume that their acid tabs would be weak ass. But alas, they turned out to have a really competent, niche, boutique, high-quality acid dealer. She lived only a few miles away and made her own acid, and dosed each tab at an actual, honest-to-God, 120(±10)μg. She also had a lot of cats, for some reason (why this information was relayed to you only once you sobered up was not something you really understood – especially not the part about the cats). Thus, the 2.5 tabs in total you had just taken (well, you took 1/2, then 1, then 1, spaced one hour each, and you had just taken the last dose, meaning you were still very much coming up, and coming up further by the minute) landed you squarely in the 300μg range. But you didn’t know this at the time. In fact, you suspected that the acid was hitting much more strongly than you anticipated for other reasons. You were expecting a 100-150 microgram trip, assuming each tab would be more between 40 and 60μg. But perhaps you really were quite sleep deprived. Or one of the nootropics you had sampled last week turned out to have a longer half-life than you expected and was synergistic with LSD (coluracetam? schizandrol?). Or perhaps it was the mild phenibut withdrawal you were having (you took 2g 72 hours ago, which isn’t much, but LSD amplifies subtle patterns anyway). It wasn’t until about half an hour later, when the final tab started to kick in, that you realized the intensity of the trip kept climbing up still further than you expected, and it really, absolutely, had to be that the acid was much, much stronger than you thought was possible; most likely over 250 mics, as you quickly estimated, and realized the implications.

From experience, you knew that 300 micrograms would cause ego death for sure. Of course people react differently to psychedelics. But in your case, ego death feelings start at around 150, and then even by 225-250 micrograms they would become all-consuming at least for some portion of the trip. In turn, actually taking 300 micrograms for you was ego death overkill, meaning you were most likely not only going to lose it, but be out for no less than an hour.

What do I mean by being out? And by losing it? The subjective component of the depersonalization that LSD causes is very difficult to explain. This is what this entire document is about. But we can start by describing what it is like from the outside.

Academic:

The behavioral markers of high dose LSD intoxication include confusion and delusions, as well as visual distortions of sufficient intensity to overcome, block, and replace sensory-activated phenomena. The depersonalization and derealization characteristic of LSD-induced states of consciousness tend to involve themes concerning religious, mystical, fantastical, and science fiction semantic landscapes. It is currently not possible to deduce the phenomenal character of these states of consciousness from within with our mainstream research tools and without compromising the epistemological integrity of our scientists (having them consume the mind-altering substance would, of course, confound the rigor of the analysis).

Casual:

Look, when you “lose it” or when you “are out” what happens from the outside is that you are an unpredictable executor of programs that seem completely random to any external observer. One moment you are quietly sitting, rocking back and forth, on the grass. The next you stand up, walk around peacefully. You sit again, now for literally half an hour without moving. Then you suddenly jump and run for 100m without stopping. And then ask the person who is there, no matter if they are a kid, a grandmother, a cop, a sanitation professional, a sex worker, or a professor, “what do you think about ___”? (where ___ ∈ {consciousness, reality, God, Time, Infinity, Eternity, …}). Of course here reality bifurcates depending on who it is that you happened to have asked this question to. A cop? You might end up arrested. Probably via a short visit to a hospital first. And overall not a great time. A kid? You could be in luck, and the kid might play along without identifying you as a threat, and most likely you continue on your journey without much problem. Or in one of the bad timelines, you end up fighting the kid. Not good. Most likely, if it was a grandmother, you might just activate random helpful programs, like helping her cross the street, and she might not even have the faintest clue (and I mean not the absolute faintest fucking clue) that you’re depersonalized on LSD thinking you’re God and that in a very real, if only phenomenological sense, it was literal Jesus / Christ Consciousness that helped her cross the street.

Under most conditions, the biggest danger that LSD poses is a bad valence reaction, which usually wears off after a few hours and is educational in some way. But when taken at high doses and unsupervised, LSD states can turn into real hazards for the individual and the people around them. Not so much because of malice, or because it triggers animal-like behaviors (it can, rarely, but it’s not why it’s dangerous). The real problem with LSD states in high doses is when you are unsupervised and then you execute random behaviors without knowing who you are, where you are, or even what it is that you are intending to achieve with the actions you are performing. It is therefore *paramount* that if you explore high doses of LSD you do it supervised.

Academic:

What constitutes a small, medium, or large dose of LSD is culture and time-dependent. In the 60s, the average tab used to be between 200 and 400 micrograms. The typical LSD experience was one that included elements of death and rebirth, mystical unions, and complete loss of contact with reality for a period of time. In the present, however, the tabs are closer to the 50-100μg range.

In “psychonaut” circles, which gather in internet forums like bluelight, reddit, and erowid, a “high dose of LSD” might be considered to be 300 micrograms. But in real world, less selected, typical contexts of use for psychedelic and empathogen drugs like dance festivals, a “high dose” might be anything above 150 micrograms. In turn, OG psychonauts like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert would end up using doses in the 500-1000μg range routinely as part of their own investigations. In contrast, in TIHKAL, Alexander Shulgin lists LSD’s dose range as 60-200 micrograms. Clearly, there is a wide spread of opinions and practices concerning LSD dosing. It is for this reason that one needs to contextualize with historical and cultural details the demographic topos where one is discussing a “high dose of LSD”.

Fantastical:

Being out, and losing it, in your case right now would be disastrous. Why? Because you broke the cardinal sin of psychedelic exploration. You took a high dose of a full psychedelic (e.g. LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT – less so 2C-B or Al-LAD, which have a lower ceiling of depersonalization[1]) without a sitter. Of course you didn’t intend to. You really just wanted to land at the comfortably manageable 100-150 microgram range. But now… now you’re deep into depersonalization-land, and alone. Who knows what you might do? Will you leave your apartment naked? Will someone call the cops? Will you end up in the hospital? You try to visualize future timelines and… something like 40% of them lead to either arrest or hospital or both. Damn it. It’s time to pull all the stops and minimize the bad timelines.

You go to your drug cabinet and decide to take a gabaergic. Here is an important lesson, and where timelines might start to diverge as well. Dosing of sedatives for psychedelic emergencies is a tricky issue. The problem is that sedatives themselves can cause confusion. So there are many stories you can find online of people who take a very large dose of alprazolam (Xanax) or similar (benzo, typically) and then end up both very confused and combative while also tripping really hard. Here interestingly, the added confusion of the sedative plus its anxiolytic effect synergize to make you even more unpredictable. On the other hand, not taking enough is also quite easy, where the LSD (or similar) anxiety and depersonalization continues to overpower the anxiolysis of the sedative.

You gather up all the “adult in the room” energy you can muster and make an educated guess: 600mg of gabapentin and 1g of phenibut. Yet, this will take a while to kick in, and you might depersonalize anytime and start wandering around. You need a plan in the meanwhile.

Academic:

In the article The Pseudo-Time Arrow we introduced a model of phenomenal time that takes into account the following three assumptions and works out their implications:

Indirect Realism About Perception
Discrete Moments of Experience
Qualia Structuralism

(1) is about how we live in a world-simulation and don’t access the world around us directly. (2) goes into how each moment of experience is itself a whole, and in a way, whatever feeling of space and time we may have, this must be encoded in each moment of experience itself. And (3) states that for any given experience there is a mathematical object whose mathematical features are isomorphic to the phenomenology of the experience (first introduced in Principia Qualia by Michel E. Johnson).

Together, these assumptions entail that the feeling of the passage of time must be encoded as a mathematical feature in each moment of experience. In turn, we speculated that this feature is _implicit causality_ in networks of local binding. Of course the hypothesis is highly speculative, but it was supported by the tantalizing idea that a directed graph could represent different variants of phenomenal time (aka. “exotic phenomenal time”). In particular, this model could account for “moments of eternity”, “time loops”, and even the strange “time splitting/branching”.

Casual:

In some ways, for people like me, LSD is like crack. I have what I have come to call “hyperphilosophia”. I am the kind of person who feels like a failure if I don’t come up with a radically new way of seeing reality by the end of each day. I feel deeply vulnerable, but also deeply intimate, with the nature of reality. Nature at its deepest feels like a brother or sister, basement reality feels close and in some way like a subtle reshuffling of myself. I like trippy ideas, I like to have my thoughts scrambled and then re-annealed in unexpected ways; I delight in combinatorial explosions, emergent effects, unexpected phase transitions, recursive patterns, and the computationally non-trivial. As a 6 year old I used to say that I wanted to be a “physicist mathematician and inventor” (modeling my future career plans around Einstein and Edison); I got deeply depressed for a whole year at the age of 9 when I confronted our mortality head on; and then experiencing a fantastic release at 16 on my first ego death (with weed of all drugs!) when I experienced the taste of Open Individualism; only to then feel depressed again at 20 but now about eternal life and the suffering we’re bound to experience for the rest of time; switching then to pragmatic approaches to reduce suffering and achieve paradise ala David Pearce. Of course this is just a “roll of the dice” and I’m sure I would be telling you about a different philosophical trajectory if we were to sample another timeline. But the point is that all my life I’ve expressed a really intense philosophical temperament. And it feels innate – nobody made me so philosophical – it just happened, as if driven by a force from the deep.

People like us are a certain type for sure, and I know this because out of thousands of people I’ve met I’ve had the fortune of encountering a couple dozen who are like me in these respects. Whether they turned out physicists, artists, or meditators is a matter of personal preference (admittedly the plurality of them is working on AI these days). And in general, it is usually the case that people of this type tend to have a deep interest in psychedelics, for the simple reason that they give you more of what they like than any other drug.

Yes, a powerful pleasant body buzz is appreciated (heroin mellow, meth fizz, and the ring of the Rupa Jhanas are all indeed quite pleasant and intrinsically worthwhile states of consciousness – factoring out their long-term consequences [positive for the Jhanas, negative for heroin and meth]). But that’s not what makes life worth living for people who (suffer from / enjoy their condition of) hyperphilosophia. Rather, it is the beauty of completely new perspectives that illuminate our understanding of reality one way or another that drives us. And LSD, among other tools, often really hits the nail in the head. It makes all the bad trips and nerve wracking anxiety of the state more than worth it in our minds.

One of the striking things about an LSD ego death that is incredibly stimulating from a philosophical perspective is how you handle the feeling of possible futures. Usually the way in which we navigate timelines (this is so seamless that we don’t usually realize how interesting and complex it is) is by imagining that a certain future is real and then “teleporting to it”. We of course don’t teleport to it. But we generate that feeling. And as we plan, we are in a way generating a bunch of wormholes from one future to another (one state of the world to another, chained through a series of actions). But our ability to do this is restricted by our capacity to generate definite, plausible, realistic and achievable chains of future states in our imagination.

On LSD this capacity can become severely impaired. In particular, we often realize that our sense of connection to near futures that we normally feel is in fact not grounded in reality. It’s a kind of mnemonic technique we employ for planning motor actions, but it feels from the inside as if we could control the nearby timelines. On LSD this capacity breaks down and one is forced to instead navigate possible futures via different means. In particular, something that begins to happen above 150 micrograms or so, is that when one imagines a possible future it lingers and refuses to fully collapse. You start experiencing a superposition of possible futures.

For an extreme example, see this quote (from this article) I found in r/BitcoinMarkets by Reddit user I_DID_LSD_ON_A_PLANE in 2016:

[Trip report of taking a high dose of LSD on an airplane]: So I had what you call “sonder”, a moment of clarity where I realized that I wasn’t the center of the universe, that everyone is just as important as me, everyone has loved ones, stories of lost love etc, they’re the main character in their own movies.

That’s when shit went quantum. All these stories begun sinking in to me. It was as if I was beginning to experience their stories simultaneously. And not just their stories, I began seeing the story of everyone I had ever met in my entire life flash before my eyes. And in this quantum experience, there was a voice that said something about Karma. The voice told me that the plane will crash and that I will be reborn again until the quota of my Karma is at -+0. So, for every ill deed I have done, I would have an ill deed committed to me. For every cheap T-shirt I purchased in my previous life, I would live the life of the poor Asian sweatshop worker sewing that T-shirt. For every hooker I fucked, I would live the life of a fucked hooker.

And it was as if thousands of versions of me was experiencing this moment. It is hard to explain, but in every situation where something could happen, both things happened and I experienced both timelines simultaneously. As I opened my eyes, I noticed how smoke was coming out of the top cabins in the plane. Luggage was falling out. I experienced the airplane crashing a thousand times, and I died and accepted death a thousand times, apologizing to the Karma God for my sins. There was a flash of the brightest white light imagineable and the thousand realities in which I died began fading off. Remaining was only one reality in which the crash didn’t happen. Where I was still sitting in the plane. I could still see the smoke coming out of the plane and as a air stewardess came walking by I asked her if everything was alright. She said “Yes, is everything alright with YOU?”.

Fantastical:

It had been some years since you had done the LSD and Quantum Measurement experiment in order to decide if the feeling of timelines splitting was in any way real. Two caveats about that experiment. First, it used quantum random number generators from Sydney that were no less than 100ms old by the time they were displayed on the screen. And second, you didn’t get the phenomenology of time splitting while on acid during the tests anyway. But having conducted the experiment anyway at least provided some bounds for the phenomenon. Literal superposition of timelines, if real, would need higher doses or more fresh quantum random numbers. Either way, it reassured you somewhat that the effect wasn’t so strong that it could be detected easily.

But now you wish you had done the experiment more thoroughly. Because… the freaking feeling of timelines splitting is absolutely raging with intensity right now and you wish you could know if it’s for real or just a hallucination. And of course, even if just a hallucination, this absolutely changes your model of how phenomenal time must be encoded, because damn, if you can experience multiple timelines at once that means that the structure of experience that encodes time is much more malleable than you thought.

Academic:

A phenomenon reported on high dose LSD is the recursive stacking of internal monologues – this also leads to higher order intentionality and the cross-pollination of narrative voices due to their sudden mutual awareness…

Casual:

Uh? Interesting, I can hear a voice all of a sudden. It calls itself “Academic” and just said something about the stacking of narrative voices.

Fantastical:

It’s always fascinating how on LSD you get a kind of juxtaposition of narrative voices. And in this case, you now have an Academic, a Casual, and a Fantastical narrative stream each happening in a semi-parallel way. And at some point they started to become aware of each other. Commenting on each other. Interlacing and interweaving.

Casual:

Importantly, one of the limiting factors of the academic discourse is that it struggles to interweave detailed phenomenology into its analysis. Thankfully, with the LSD-induced narrative juxtaposition we have a chance to correct this.

Academic:

After reviewing in real time the phenomenology of how you are thinking about future timelines, I would like to posit that the phenomenal character of high dose LSD is characterized by a hyperbolic pseudo-time arrow.

This requires the combination of two paradigms discussed at the Qualia Research Institute. Namely, the pseudo-time arrow, which as we explained tries to make sense of phenomenal time in terms of a directed graph representing moments of experience. And then also the algorithmic reductions introduced in the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences.

The latter deals with the idea that the geometry of our experience is the result of the balance between various forces. Qualia comes up, gets locally bound to other qualia, then disappears. Under normal circumstances, the network that emerges out of these brief connections has a standard Euclidean geometry (or rather, works as a projection of a Euclidean space, but I digress). But DMT perturbs the balance, in part by making more qualia appear, making it last longer, making it vibrate, and making it connect more with each other, which results in a network that has a hyperbolic geometry. In turn, the felt sense of being on DMT is one of _being_ a larger phenomenal space, which is hard to put into words, but possible with the right framework.

What we want to propose now is that on LSD in particular, the characteristic feeling of “timeline splitting” and the even more general “multiple timeline superposition” effect is the result of a hyperbolic geometry, not of phenomenal space as with DMT, but of phenomenal time. In turn, this can be summarized as: LSD induces a hyperbolic curvature along the pseudo-time arrow.

Casual:

Indeed, one of the deeply unsettling things about high dose LSD experiences is that you get the feeling that you have knowledge of multiple timelines. In fact, there is a strange sense of uncanny uncertainty about which timeline you are in. And here is where a rather scary trick is often played on us by the state.

The feeling of the multiverse feels very palpable when the garbage collector of your phenomenal motor planning scratchpad is broken and you just sort of accumulate plans without collapsing them (a kind of kinesthetic tracer effect).

Fantastical:

Ok, you need to condense your timelines. You can’t let _that_ many fall off the wagon, so to speak. You could depersonalize any moment. You decide that your best bet is to call a friend of yours. He is likely working, but lives in the city right next to yours and could probably get to your place in half an hour if you’re lucky.

> Hello!

> Hello! I just got out of a meeting. What’s up?

> Er… ok, this is gonna sound strange. I… took too much LSD. And I think I need help.

> Are you ok? LSD is safe, right?

> Yeah, yeah. I think everything will be fine. But I need to collapse the possibility space. This is too much. I can’t deal with all of these timelines. If you come over at least we will be trimming a bunch of them and preventing me from wandering off thinking I’m God.

> Oh, wow. You don’t sound very high? That made sense, haha.

> Duuudde! I’m in a window of lucidity right now. We’re lucky you caught me in one. Please hurry, I don’t know how much longer I can hang in here. I’m about to experience ego death. What happens next is literally up to God, and I don’t know what his plans are.

Your friend says he’ll take an Uber or Lyft and be there as soon as he can. You try to relax. Reality is scolding you. Why did you take this risk? You should know better!

Casual:

One of the unsettling feelings about high dose LSD is that you get to feel how extremely precious and rare a human life is. We tend to imagine that reincarnation would simply be like, say, where you die and then 40 days later come back as a baby in India or China or the United States or Brazil or whatever, based on priors, and rarely in Iceland or tiny Caribbean Islands. But no. Humans are a luxury reincarnation. Animal? Er, yeah, even animals are pretty rare. The more common form is simply in the shape of some cosmic process or another, like intergalactic wind or superheated plasma inside a star. Any co-arising process that takes place in this Gigantic Field of Consciousness we find ourselves embedded in is a possible destination, for the simple reason that…

Academic:

The One-Electron Universe posits that there is only one particle in the entire cosmos, which is going forwards and backwards in time, interfering with itself, interweaving a pattern of path integrals that interlace with each other. If there is only one electron, then the chances of being a “human moment of experience” at a point in time are vanishingly small. The electrons whose pattern of superposition paint a moment of experience are but a tiny vanishing fraction of the four-dimensional density-mass of the one electron in the block universe entailed by quantum mechanics.

Fantastical:

When you realize that you are the one electron in the universe you often experience a complex superposition of emotions. Of course this is limited by your imagination and emotional state. But if you’re clear-headed, curious, and generally open to exploring possibilities, here is where you feel like you are at the middle point of all reality.

You can access all 6 Realms from this central point, and in a way escape the sense of identification with any one of them. Alas, this is not something that one always achieves. It is easy to get caught up in a random stream and end up in, say, the God Realm completely deluded thinking you’re God. Or in the Hell realm, thinking you’re damned forever somehow. Or the animal, seeking simple body pleasures and comfort. Or the human world, being really puzzled and craving cognitively coherent explanations. Or the Hungry Ghost dimension, where you are always looking to fill yourself up and perceive yourself as fundamentally empty and flawed. Or the Titan realm, which adds a perceptual filter where you feel that everything and everyone is in competition with you and you derive your main source of satisfaction from pride and winning.

In the ideal case, during an LSD ego death you manage to hang out right at the center of this wheel, without falling into any of the particular realms. This is where the luminous awareness happens. And it is what feels like the central hub for the multiverse of consciousness, except in a positive, empowering way.

Casual:

In many ways we could say that the scariest feeling during LSD ego death is the complete lack of control over your next rebirth.

Because if you, in a way, truly surrender to the “fact” that we’re all one and that it all happens in Eternity at the same time anyway… do you realize the ramifications that this has? Everything Everywhere All At Once is a freaking documentary.

Fantastical:

> Hello? What’s up?

> Yeah, er, are you coming over?

> Yes. I mean, you just called me… 5 minutes ago. Did you expect I’d be there already? I’m walking towards the Uber.

> Time is passing really slowly, and I’m really losing it now. Can you… please… maybe like, remind me who I am every, like, 30 seconds or so?

> Mmmm ok. I guess that’s a clear instruction. I can be helpful, sure.

[for the next 40 minutes, in the Uber headed to your place, your friend kept saying your name every 30 seconds, sometimes also his name, and sometimes reminding you where you are and why you called him – bless his soul]

Casual:

Imagine that you are God. You are walking around in the “Garden of Possibilities”. Except that we’re not talking about static possibilities. Rather, we’re talking about processes. Algorithms, really. You walk around and stumble upon a little set of instructions that, when executed, turns you into a little snowflake shape. Or perhaps turns you into a tree-like shape (cf. l-systems). When you’re lucky, it turns you into a beautiful crystalline flower. In these cases, the time that you spend embodying the process is small. Like a little popcorn reality: you encounter, consume, and move on. But every once in a while you encounter a set of instructions that could take a very long time to execute. Due to principles of computational irreducibility, it is also impossible for you to determine in advance (at least in all, most cases) how long the process will take. So every once in a while you encounter a Busy Beaver and end up taking a very, very, very long time to compute that process.

Busy beaver values for different parameters (source)

But guess what? You are God. You’re eternal. You are forever. You will always come back and continue on your walk. But oh boy, from the point of view of the experience of being what the Busy Beaver executes, you do exist for a very long time. From the point of view of God, no matter how long this process takes, it will still be a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. God has been countless times in Busy Beavers and will be countless times there again as well. So enjoy being a flower, or a caterpillar, or a raindrop, or even an electron, because most of the time you’re stuck being ridiculously long processes like the Busy Beaver.

Academic:

Under the assumption that the hyperbolic pseudo-time arrow idea is on the right track, we can speculate about how this might come about from a configuration of a feedback system. As we’ve seen before, an important aspect of the phenomenal character of psychedelic states of consciousness is captured by the tracer pattern. More so, as we discussed in the video about DMT and hyperbolic geometry, one of the ways in which psychedelic states can be modeled is in terms of a feedback system with a certain level of noise. Assume that LSD produces a tracer effect where, approximately, 15 times per second you get a strobe and a replay effect overlay on top of your current experience. What would this do to your representation of the passage of time and the way you parse possible futures?

FRAKSL video I made to illustrate hyperbolic pseudo-time arrows coming out of a feedback system (notice how change propagates fractally across the layers).

Casual:

I think that LSD’s characteristic “vibrational frequency” is somewhere between phenethylamines and tryptamines. 2C-B strikes me as in the 10hz range for most vibrations, whereas psilocybin is closer to 20hz. LSD might be around 15hz. And one of the high-level insights that the lens of connectome-specific harmonic modes (or more recently geometric eigenmodes) gives us is that functional localization and harmonic modulation might be intertwined. In other words, the reason why a particular part of the brain might do what it does is because it is a great tuning knob for the harmonic modes that critically hinge on that region of the brain. This overall lens was used by Michael E. Johnson in Principia Qualia to speculate that the pleasure centers are responsible for high variance in valence precisely because they are strategically positioned in a place where large-scale harmony can be easily modulated. With this sort of approach in mind (we could call it even a research aesthetic, where for every spatial pattern there is a temporal dynamic and vice versa) I reckon that partly what explains the _epistemological_ effects of LSD at high doses involves the saturation of specific frequencies for conscious compute. What do I mean by this?

Say indeed that a good approximation for a conscious state is a weighted sum of harmonic modes. This does not take into account the non-linearities (how the presence of a harmonic mode affects other ones) but it might be a great 60%-of-the-way-there kind of approximation. If so, I reckon that we use some “frequency bands” to store specific kinds of information that corresponds to the information that is naturally encoded with rhythms of specific frequencies. It turns out, in this picture, that we have a sort of collection of inner clocks that are sampling the environment to pick up on patterns that repeat at different scales. We have a slow clock that samples every hour or so, one that samples every 10 minutes, one that samples every minute, every 10 seconds, every second, and then at 10, 20, 30, 40, and even 50hz. All of these inner clocks meet with each other to interlace and interweave a “fabric of subjective time”. When we want to know at a glance how we’re doing, we sample a fragment of this “fabric of subjective time” and it contains information about how we’re doing right now, how we were doing a minute ago, an hour, a day, and even longer. Of course sometimes we need to sample the fabric for a while in order to notice more subtle patterns. But the point is that our sense of reality in time seems to be constructed out of the co-occurrence of many metronomes at different scales.

I think that in particular the spatio-temporal resonant modes that LSD over-excites the most are actually really load-bearing for constructing our sense of our context. It’s as if when you energize too much one of these resonant modes, you actually push it to a smaller range of possible configurations (more smooth sinusoidal waves rather than intricate textures). By super-saturating the energy in some of these harmonics on LSD, you flip over to a regime where there is really no available space for information to be encoded. You can therefore feel extremely alive and real, and yet when you query the “time fabric” you notice that there are big missing components. The information that you would usually get about who you are, where you are, what you have been doing for the last couple of hours, and so on, is instead replaced by a kind of eternal-seeming feeling of always having existed exactly as you currently are.

Fantastical:

If it wasn’t because of your friend helpfully reminding you where you were and who you are, you would have certainly forgotten the nature of your context and for sure wandered off. The scene was shifting widely, and each phenomenal object or construct was composed of a never ending stream of gestalts competing for the space to take hold as the canonical representation (and yet, of course, always superseded by yet another “better fit”, constantly updating).

The feeling of the multiverse was crushing. Here is where you remembered how various pieces of media express aspects of the phenomenology of high dose LSD (warning: mild spoilers – for the movies and for reality as a whole):

Everything Everywhere All At Once: in the movie one tunes into other timelines in order to learn the skills that one has in those alternative lifepaths. But this comes with one side-effect, which is that you continue to be connected to the timeline from which you’re learning a skill. In other words, you form a bond across timelines that drags you down as the cost of accessing their skill. On high dose LSD you get the feeling that yes, you can learn a lot from visualizing other timelines, but you also incur the cost of loading up your sensory screen with information you can’t get rid of.
The Matrix: the connection is both the obvious one and a non-obvious one. First, yes, the reason this is relevant is because being inside a simulation might feel like a plausible hypothesis while on a high dose of LSD. But less intuitively, the Matrix also fits the bill when it comes to the handling of future-past interactions. The “Don’t worry about the vase” scene (which I imagine Zvi named his blog after) highlights that there is an intertwining between future and past that forges destiny. And many of the feelings about how the future and past are connected echo this theme on a high dose of LSD.
Rick and Morty (selected episodes):
- Death Crystal: here the similarity is in how on LSD you feel that you can go to any given future timeline by imagining clearly a given outcome and then using it as a frame of reference to fill in the details backwards.
- A Rickle in Time: how the timelines split but can in some ways remain aware of and affect each other.
- Mortynight Run: In the fictional game Roy: A Life Well Lived you get to experience a whole human lifetime in what looks like minutes from the outside in order to test how you do in a different reality.
Tenet: Here the premise is that you can go back in time, but only one second per second and using special gear (reversed air tanks, in their case).

Of these, perhaps the most surprising to people would be Tenet. So let me elaborate. There are two Tenet-like phenomenologies you experience as your friend is on the way to pick you up worth commenting on:

One, what we could call the “don’t go this way” phenomenology. Here you get the feeling that you make a particular choice. E.g. go to the other room to take more gabapentin and see if that helps (of course it won’t – it’s only been 15 minutes since you took it and it hasn’t even kicked in). Then you visualize briefly what that timeline feels like, and you get the feeling of living through it. Suddenly you snap back into the present moment and decide not to go there. This leaves a taste in your mouth of having gone there, of having been there, of living through the whole thing, just to decide 10 years down the line that you would rather come back and make a different choice.

At the extreme of this phenomenology you find yourself feeling like you’ve lived every possible timeline. And in a way, you “realize” that you’re, in the words of Teafaerie, a deeply jaded God looking for an escape from endless loops. So you “remember” (cf. anamnesis) that you chose to forget on purpose so that you could live as a human in peace, believing others are real, humbly accepting a simple life, lost in a narrative of your own making. The “realization” can be crushing, of course, and is often a gateway to a particular kind of depersonalization/derealization where you walk around claiming you’re God. Alas, this only happens in a sweet spot of intoxication, and since you went above even that, you’ll have a more thorough ego death.

Two, an even more unsettling Tenet-like phenomenology is the feeling that “other timelines are asking for your help – Big Time wants you to volunteer for the Time War!”. Here things go quantum, and completely bonkers. The feeling is the result of having the sense that you can navigate timelines with your mind in a much deeper way than, say, just making choices one at a time. This is a profound feeling, and conveying it in writing is of course a massive stretch. But even the Bering Strait was crossed by hominids once, and this stretch feels also crossable by us with the right ambition.

The multiverse is very large. You see, imagine what it would be like to restart college. One level here is where you start again from day 1. In other timelines you make different friends, read other books, take other classes, have other lovers, major in other disciplines. Now go backwards even a little further back, to when the academic housing committee was making decisions about who goes to which dorm. Then the multiverse diversifies, as you see a combinatorial explosion of possible dorm configurations. Further back, when the admissions committee was making their decisions, and you have an even greater expansion of the multiverse where different class configurations are generated.

Now imagine being able to “search” this bulky multiverse. How do you search it? Of course you could go action by action. But due to chaos, within important parameters like the set of people you’re likely to meet, possibilities quickly get scrambled. The worlds where you chose that bike versus that other bike in that particular moment aren’t much more similar to each other than other random ways of partitioning the timelines. Rather, you need to find pivotal decisions, as well as _anchor feelings_. E.g. It really matters if a particular bad technology is discovered and deployed, because that drastically changes the texture of an entire category of timelines. It is better for you to search timelines via general vibes and feelings like that, because that will really segment the multiverse into meaningfully different outcomes. This is the way in which you can move along timelines on high doses of LSD. You generate the feeling of things “having been a certain way” and you try to leave everything else as loose and unconstrained as possible, so that you search through the path integral of superpositions of all possible worlds where the feeling arises, and every once in a while when you “sample” the superposition you get a plausible universe where this is real.

Now, on 150 or 200 micrograms this feels very hypothetical, and the activity can be quite fun. On 300 micrograms, this feels real. It is actually quite spooky, because you feel a lot of responsibility here. As if the way in which you chose to digest cosmic feelings right there could lock in either a positive or negative timeline for you and your loved ones.

Here is where the Time War comes into play. I didn’t choose this. I don’t like this meme. But it is part of the phenomenology, and I think it is better that we address it head-on rather than let it surprise you and screw you up in one way or another.

The sense of realism that high dose LSD produces is unreal. It feels so real that it feels dreamy. But importantly, the sense of future timelines being truly there in a way is often hard to escape. With this you often get a crushing sense of responsibility. And together with the “don’t go this way” you can experience a feeling of a sort of “ping pong with the multiverse of possibilities” where you feel like you go backwards and forwards in countless cycles searching for a viable, good future for yourself and for everyone.

In some ways, you may feel like you go to the End of Times when you’ve lived all possible lifetimes and reconverge on the Godhead (I’m not making this up, this is a common type of experience for some reason). Importantly, you often feel like there are _powerful_ cosmic forces at play, that the reason for your life is profound, and that you are playing an important role for the development of consciousness. One might even experience corner-case exotic phenomenal time like states of mind with two arrows of time that are perpendicular to each other (unpacking this would take us an entire new writeup, so we shall save it for another time). And sometimes you can feel like your moral fiber is tested in often incredibly uncomfortable ways by these exotic phenomenal time effects.

Here is an example.

As your sense of “awareness of other timelines” increases, so does your capacity to sense timelines where things are going really well and timelines where things are going really poorly. Like, there are timelines where your friend is also having a heart attack right now, and then those where he crashes on the way to your apartment, and those where there’s a meteorite falling into your city, and so on. Likewise, there’s one where he is about to win the lottery, where you are about to make a profound discovery about reality that stands the test of sober inquiry, where someone just encountered the cure for cancer, and so on. One unsettling feeling you often get on high dose LSD is that because you’re more or less looking at these possibilities “from the point of view of eternity” in a way you are all of them at once. “Even the bad ones?” – yes, unsettlingly, even the bad ones. So the scary moral-fiber-testing thought that sometimes you might get is if you’d volunteer to be in one of the bad ones so that “a version of you gets to be in the good one”. In other words, if you’re everyone, wouldn’t you be willing to trade places? Oftentimes here’s where Open Individualism gets scary and spooky and where talking to someone else to get confirmation that there are parallel conscious narrative streams around is really helpful.

Casual:

We could say that LSD is like a completely different drug depending on the dose range you hit:

Below 50 micrograms it is like a stimulant with stoning undertones. A bit giggly, a bit dissociating, but pretty normal otherwise.

Between 50 and 150 you have a drug that is generally really entertaining, gentle, and for the most part manageable. You get a significant expansion in the room available to have thoughts and feelings, as if your inner scratch pads got doubled in size. Colors, sounds, and bodily feelings all significantly intensified, but still feel like amplified versions of normal life.

Between 150 and 250 you get all of the super stereotypical psychedelic effects, with very noticeable drifting, tracers, symmetries, apophenia, recursive processes, and fractal interlocking landscapes. It is also somewhat dissociative and part of your experience might feel dreamy and blurry, while perhaps the majority of your field is sharp, bright, and very alive.

From 250 to 350 it turns into a multiverse travel situation, where you forget where you are and who you are and at times that you even took a drug. You might be an electron for what feels like millions of years. You might witness a supernova in slow motion. You might spontaneously become absorbed into space (perhaps as a high energy high dimensional version of the 5th Jhana). And you might feel like you hit some kind of God computer that compiles human lifetimes in order to learn about itself. You might also experience the feeling of a massive ball of light colliding with you that turns you into the Rainbow version of the Godhead for a time that might range between seconds and minutes. It’s a very intense experience.

And above? I don’t know, to be honest.

Academic:

The intermittent collapse into “eternity” reported on high dose LSD could perhaps be interpreted as stumbling into fixed points of a feedback system. Similarly to how pointing a camera directly at its own video feed at the right angle produces a perfectly static image. On the other hand, we might speculate that many of the “time branching” effects are instead the result of a feedback system where each iteration doubles the number of images (akin to using a mirror to cover a portion of the screen and reflect the uncovered part of the screen).

Video I made with FRAKSL in order to illustrate exactly the transition between a hyperbolic pseudo-time arrow and a geometric fixed point in a feedback system. This aims to capture the toggle during LSD ego death between experiencing multiple timelines and collapsing into moments of eternity.

Fantastical:

You decide that you do want to keep playing the game. You don’t want to roll the dice. You don’t want to embrace Eternity, and with it, all of the timelines, even the ugly ones. You don’t want to be a volunteer in the Time War. You just want to be a normal person, though of course the knowledge you’ve gained would be tough to lose. So you have to make a choice. Either you forget what you learned, or you quit the game. What are you going to do?

As you start really peaking and the existential choice is presented to you, your friend finally arrives outside of your apartment. The entrance is very cinematic, as you witness it both from your phone as well as in real life, like the convergence of two parallel reality streams collapsing into a single intersubjective hologram via a parallax effect. It was intense.

Casual:

You have to admit, the juxtaposition of narrative streams with different stylistic proclivities really does enrich the human condition. In a way, this is one of the things that makes LSD so valuable: you get to experience simultaneously sets of vibes/stances/emotions/attitudes that would generally never co-exist. This is, at least in part, what might be responsible for increasing your psychological integration after the trip; you experience a kind of multi-context harmonization (cf. gestalt annealing). It’s why it’s hard to “hide from yourself on acid” – because the mechanism that usually keeps our incoherent parts compartmentalized breaks down under intense generalized tracers that maintain interweaving, semi-paralel, narrative streams. Importantly, the juxtaposition of narrative voices is computationally non-trivial. It expands the experiential base in a way that allows for fruitful cross-pollination between academic ways of thinking and our immediate phenomenology. Perhaps this is important from a scientific point of view.

Fantastical:

With your friend in the apartment taking care of you – or rather, more precisely, reducing possibility-space to a manageable narrative smear, and an acceptable degree of leakage into bad timelines – you can finally relax. More so, the sedatives finally kick in, and the psychedelic effects reduce by maybe 20-25% in the span of an hour or so. You end up having an absolutely great time, and choose to keep playing the game. You forget you’re God, and decide to push the question of whether to fall into Nirvana for good till the next trip.

[1] LSD has a rather peculiar dose-response curve. It is not a “light” psychedelic, although it can certainly be used to have light experiences. Drugs like AL-LAD are sometimes described as relatively shallow in that they don’t produce the full depth of richness LSD does. Or 2C-B/2C-I, which tend to come with a more grounded sense of reality relative to the intensity of the sensory amplification. Or DMT, which despite its extreme reality-replacing effects, tends to nonetheless give you a sense of rhythm and timing that keeps the sense of self intact along some dimensions. LSD is a full psychedelic in that at higher doses it really deeply challenges one’s sense of reality. I have never heard of someone take 2C-B at, say, 30mg and freak out so badly that they believe that reality is about to end or that they are God and wish they didn’t know it. But on 200-400 micrograms of LSD this is routine. Of course you may not externalize it, but the “egocidal” effects of acid are powerful and hard to miss, and they are in some ways much deeper and transformative than the colorful show of DMT or the love of MDMA because it is ruthless in its insistence, methodical in its approach, and patient like water (which over decades can carve deep into rocks). As Christopher Bach says in LSD and the Mind of the Universe: “An LSD session grinds slow but it grinds fine. It gives us time to be engaged and changed by the realities we are encountering. I think this polishing influences both the eventual clarity of our perception in these states and what we are able to bring back from them, both in terms of healing and understanding”. There’s a real sense in which part of the power of LSD comes from its capacity to make you see something for long periods of time that under normal circumstances would have us flinch in a snap.

The View From My Topological Pocket: An Introduction to Field Topology for Solving the Boundary Problem

Posted on October 26, 2023 by algekalipso

[Epistemic Status: informal and conversational, this piece provides an off-the-cuff discussion around the topological solution to the boundary problem. Please note that this isn’t intended to serve as a bulletproof argument; rather, it’s a guide through an intuitive explanation. While there might be errors, possibly even in reasoning, I believe they won’t fundamentally alter the overarching conceptual solution.]

This post is an informal and intuitive explanation for why we are looking into topology as a tentative solution to the phenomenal binding (or boundary) problem. In particular, this solutions identifies moments of experience with topological pockets of fields of physics. We recently published a paper where we dive deeper into this explanation space, and concretely hypothesize that the key macroscopic boundary between subjects of experience is the result of topological segmentation in the electromagnetic field (see explainer video / author’s presentation at the Active Inference Institute).

The short explanation for why this is promising is that topological boundaries are objective and frame-invariant features of “basement reality” that have causal effects and thus can be recruited by natural selection for information-processing tasks. If the fields of physics are fields of qualia, topological boundaries of the fields corresponding to phenomenal boundaries between subjects would be an elegant way for a theory of consciousness to “carve nature at its joints”. This solution is very significant if true, because it entails, among other things, that classical digital computers are incapable of creating causally significant experiences: the experiences that emerge out of them are by default something akin to mind dust, and at best, if significant binding happens, they are epiphenomenal from the “point of view” of the computation being realized.

The route to develop an intuition about this topic that this post takes is to deconstruct the idea of a “point of view” as a “natural kind” and instead advocate for topological pockets being the place where information can non-trivially aggregate. This idea, once seen, is hard to unsee; it reframes how we think about what systems are, and even the nature of information itself.

One of the beautiful things about life is that you sometimes have the opportunity to experience a reality plot twist. We might believe one narrative has always been unfolding, only to realize that the true story was different all along. As they say, the rug can be pulled from under your feet.

The QRI memeplex is full of these reality plot twists. You thought that the “plot” of the universe was a battle between good and evil? Well, it turns out it is the struggle between consciousness and replicators instead. Or that what you want is particular states of the environment? Well, it turns out you’ve been pursuing particular configurations of your world simulation all along. You thought that pleasure and pain follow a linear scale? Well, it turns out the scales are closer to logarithmic in nature, with the ends of the distribution being orders of magnitude more intense than the lower ends. I think that along these lines, grasping how “points of view” and “moments of experience” are connected requires a significant reframe of how you conceptualize reality. Let’s dig in!

One of the motivations for this post is that I recently had a wonderful chat with Nir Lahav, who last year published an article that steelmans the view that consciousness is relativistic (see one of his presentations). I will likely discuss his work in more detail in the future. Importantly, talking to him reminded me that ever since the foundation of QRI, we have taken for granted the view that consciousness is frame-invariant, and worked from there. It felt self-evident to us that if something depends on the frame of reference from which you see it, it doesn’t have inherent existence. Our experiences (in particular, each discrete moment of experience), have inherent existence, and thus cannot be frame-dependent. Every experience is self-intimating, self-disclosing, and absolute. So how could it depend on a frame of reference? Alas, I know this is a rather loaded way of putting it and risks confusing a lot of people (for one, Buddhists might retort that experience is inherently “interdependent” and has no inherent existence, to which I would replay “we are talking about different things here”). So I am motivated to present a more fleshed out, yet intuitive, explanation for why we should expect consciousness to be frame-invariant and how, in our view, our solution to the boundary problem is in fact up to this challenge.

The main idea here is to show how frames of reference cannot boostrap phenomenal binding. Indeed, “a point of view” that provides a frame of reference is more of a convenient abstraction that relies on us to bind, interpret, and coalesce pieces of information, than something with a solid ontological status that exists out there in the world. Rather, I will try to show how we are borrowing from our very own capacity for having unified information in order to put together the data that creates the construct of a “point of view”; importantly, this unity is not bootstrapped from other “points of view”, but draws from the texture of the fabric of reality itself. Namely, the field topology.

A scientific theory of consciousness must be able to explain the existence of consciousness, the nature and cause for the diverse array of qualia values and varieties (the palette problem), how consciousness is causally efficacious (avoid epiphenomenalism), and explain how the information content of each moment of experience is presented “all at once” (namely, the binding problem). I’ve talked extensively about these constraints in writings, videos, and interviews, but what I want to emphasize here is that these problems need to be addressed head on for a theory of consciousness to work at all. Keep these constraints in mind as we deconstruct the apparent solidity of frames of reference and the difficulty that arises in order to bootstrap causal and computational effects in connection to phenomenal binding out of a relativistic frame.

At a very high level, a fuzzy (but perhaps sufficient) intuition for what’s problematic when a theory of consciousness doesn’t seek frame-invariance is that you are trying to create something concrete with real and non-trivial causal effects and information content, out of fundamentally “fuzzy” parts.

In brief, ask yourself, can something fuzzy “observe” something fuzzy? How can fuzzyness be used to boostrap something non-fuzzy?

In a world of atoms and forces, “systems” or “things” or “objects” or “algorithms” or “experiences” or “computations” don’t exist intrinsically because there are no objective, frame-invariant, and causally significant ways to draw boundaries around them!

I hope to convince you that any sense of unity or coherence that you get from this picture of reality (a relativistic system with atoms and forces) is in fact a projection from your mind, that inhabits your mind, and is not out there in the world. You are looking at the system, and you are making connections between the parts, and indeed you are creating a hierarchy of interlocking gestalts to represent this entire conception of reality. But that is all in your mind! It’s a sort of map and territory confusion to believe that two fuzzy “systems” interacting with each other can somehow bootstrap a non-fuzzy ontological object (aka. a requirement for a moment of experience).

I reckon that these vague explanations are in fact sufficient for some people to understand where I’m going. But some of you are probably clueless about what the problem is, and for good reason. This is never discussed in detail, and this is largely, I think, because people who think a lot about the problem don’t usually end up with a convincing solution. And in some cases, the result is that thinkers bite the bullet that there are only fuzzy patterns in reality.

How Many Fuzzy Computations Are There in a System?

Indeed, thinking of the universe as being made of particles and forces implies that computational processes are fuzzy (leaky, porous, open to interpretation, etc.). Now imagine thinking that *you* are one of such fuzzy computations. Having this as an unexamined background assumption gives rise to countless intractable paradoxes. The notion of a point of view, or a frame of reference, does not have real meaning here as the way to aggregate information doesn’t ultimately allow you to identify objective boundaries around packets of information (at least not boundaries that are more than merely-conventional in nature).

From this point of view (about points of view!), you realize that indeed there is no principled and objective way to find real individuals. You end up in the fuzzy world of fuzzy individuals of Brian Tomasik, as helpfully illustrated by this diagram:

Source: Fuzzy, Nested Minds Problematize Utilitarian Aggregation by Brian Tomasik

Brian Tomasik indeed identifies the problem of finding real boundaries between individuals as crucial for utilitarian calculations. And then, incredibly, also admits that his ontological frameworks gives him no principled way of doing so (cf. Michael E. Johnson’s Against Functionalism for a detailed response). Indeed, according to Brian (from the same essay):

Eric Schwitzgebel argues that “If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious“. But if the USA as a whole is conscious, how about each state? Each city? Each street? Each household? Each family? When a new government department is formed, does this create a new conscious entity? Do corporate mergers reduce the number of conscious entities? These seem like silly questions—and indeed, they are! But they arise when we try to individuate the world into separate, discrete minds. Ultimately, “we are all connected”, as they say. Individuation boundaries are artificial and don’t track anything ontologically or phenomenally fundamental (except maybe at the level of fundamental physical particles and structures). The distinction between an agent and its environment is just an edge that we draw around a clump of physics when it’s convenient to do so for certain purposes.

My own view is that every subsystem of the universe can be seen as conscious to some degree and in some way (functionalist panpsychism). In this case, the question of which systems count as individuals for aggregation becomes maximally problematic, since it seems we might need to count all the subsystems in the universe.”

Are you confused now? I hope so. Otherwise I’d worry about you.

Banana For Scale

A frame of reference is like a “banana for scale” but for both time and space. If you assume that the banana isn’t morphing, you can use how long it takes for waves emitted from different points in the banana to bounce back and return in order to infer the distance and location of physical objects around it. Your technologically equipped banana can play the role of a frame of reference in all but the most extreme of conditions (it probably won’t work as you approach a black hole, for very non-trivial reasons involving severe tidal forces, but it’ll work fine otherwise).

Now the question that I want to ask is: how does the banana “know itself”? Seriously, if you are using points in the banana as your frame of reference, you are, in fact, the one who is capable of interpreting the data coming from the banana to paint a picture of your environment. But the banana isn’t doing that. It is you! The banana is merely an instrument that takes measurements. Its unity is assumed rather than demonstrated.

In fact, for the upper half of the banana to “comprehend” the shape of the other half (as well as its own), it must also rely on a presumed fixed frame of reference. However, it’s important to note that such information truly becomes meaningful only when interpreted by a human mind. In the realm of an atom-and-force-based ontology, the banana doesn’t precisely exist as a tangible entity. Your perception of it as a solid unit, providing direction and scale, is a practical assumption rather than an ontological certainty.

In fact, the moment we try to get a “frame of reference to know itself” you end up in an infinite regress, where smaller and smaller regions of the object are used as frames of reference to measure the rest. And yet, at no point does the information of these frames of reference “come together all at once”, except… of course… in your mind.

Are there ways to boostrap a *something* that aggregates and simultaneously expresses the information gathered across the banana (used as a frame of reference)? If you build a camera to take a snapshot of the, say, information displayed at each coordinate of the banana, the picture you take will have spatial extension and suffer from the same problem. If you think that the point at the aperture can itself capture all of the information at once, you will encounter two problems. If you are thinking of an idealized point-sized aperture, then we run into the problem that points don’t have parts, and therefore can’t contain multiple pieces of information at once. And if you are talking about a real, physical type of aperture, you will find that it cannot be smaller than the diffraction limit. So now you have the problem of how to integrate all of the information *across the whole area of the aperture* when it cannot shrink further without losing critical information. In either case, you still don’t have anything, anywhere, that is capable of simultaneously expressing all of the information of the frame of reference you chose. Namely, the coordinates you measure using a banana.

Let’s dig deeper. We are talking of a banana as a frame of reference. But what if we try to internalize the frame of reference. A lot of people like to think of themselves as the frame of reference that matters. But I ask you: what are your boundaries and how do the parts within those boundaries agree on what is happening?

Let’s say your brain is the frame of reference. Intuitively, one might feel like “this object is real to itself”. But here is where the magic comes. Make the effort to carefully trace how signals or measurements propagate in an object such as the brain. Is it fundamentally different than what happens with a banana? There might be more shortcuts (e.g. long axons) and the wiring could have complex geometry, but neither of these properties can ultimately express information “all at once”. The principle of uniformity says that every part of the universe follows the same universal physical laws. The brain is not an exception. In a way, the brain is itself a possible *expression* of the laws of physics. And in this way, it is no different than a banana.

Sorry, your brain is not going to be a better “ground” for your frame of reference than a banana. And that is because the same infinite recursion that happened with the banana when we tried to use it to ground our frame of reference into something concrete happens with your brain. And also, the same problem happens when we try to “take a snapshot of the state of the brain”, i.e. that the information also doesn’t aggregate in a natural way even in a high-resolution picture of the brain. It still has spatial extension and lacks objective boundaries of any causal significance.

Every single point in your brain has a different view. The universe won’t say “There is a brain here! A self-intimating self-defining object! It is a natural boundary to use to ground a frame of reference!” There is nobody to do that! Are you starting to feel the groundlessness? The bizarre feeling that, hey, there is no rational way to actually set a frame of reference without it falling apart into a gazillion different pieces, all of which have the exact same problem? I’ve been there. For years. But there is a way out. Sort of. Keep reading.

The question that should be bubbling up to the surface right now is: who, or what, is in charge of aggregating points of view? And the answer is: this does not exist and is impossible for it to exist if you start out in an ontology that has as the core building blocks relativistic particles and forces. There is no principled way to aggregate information across space and time that would result in the richness of simultaneous presentation of information that a typical human experience displays. If there is integration of information, and a sort of “all at once” presentation, the only kind of (principled) entity that this ontology would accept is the entire spacetime continuum as a gigantic object! But that’s not what we are. We are definite experiences with specific qualia and binding structures. We are not, as far as I can tell, the entire spacetime continuum all at once. (Or are we?).

If instead we focus on the fine structure of the field, we can look at mathematical features in it that would perhaps draw boundaries that are frame-invariant. Here is where a key insight becomes significant: the topology of a vector field is Lorentz invariant! Meaning, a Lorentz transformation will merely squeeze and sheer, but never change topology on its own. Ok, I admit I am not 100% sure that this holds for all of the topological features of the electromagnetic field (Creon Levit recently raised some interesting technical points that might make some EM topological features frame-dependent; I’ve yet to fully understand his argument but look forward to engaging with it). But what we are really pointing at is the explanation space. A moment ago we were desperate to find a way to ground, say, the reality of a banana in order to use it as a frame of reference. We saw that the banana conceptualized as a collection of atoms and forces does not have this capacity. But we didn’t inquire into other possible physical (though perhaps not *atomistic*) features of the banana. Perhaps, and this is sheer speculation, the potassium ions in the banana peel form a tight electromagnetic mesh that creates a protective Faraday cage for this delicious fruit. In that case, well, the boundaries of that protecting sheet would, interestingly, be frame invariant. A ground!

The 4th Dimension

There is a bit of a sleight of hand here, because I am not taking into account temporal depth, and so it is not entirely clear how large the banana, as a topological structure defined by the potassium ions protective sheer really is (again, this is totally made up! for illustration purposes only). The trick here is to realize that, at least in so far as experiences go, we also have a temporal boundary. Relativistically, there shouldn’t be a hard distinction between temporal and spatial boundaries of a topological pocket of the field. In practice, of course one will typically overwhelm the other, unless you approach the brain you are studying at close to the speed of light (not ideal laboratory conditions, I should add). In our paper, and for many years at QRI (iirc an insight by Michael Johnson in 2016 or so), we’ve talked about experiences having “temporal depth”. David Pearce posits that each fleeting macroscopic state of quantum coherence spanning the entire brain (the physical correlate of consciousness in his model) can last as little as a couple of femtoseconds. This does not seem to worry him: there is no reason why the contents of our experience would give us any explicit hint about our real temporal depth. I intuit that each moment of experience lasts much, much longer. I highly doubt that it can last longer than a hundred milliseconds, but I’m willing to entertain “pocket durations” of, say, a few dozens of milliseconds. Just long enough for 40hz gamma oscillations to bring disparate cortical micropockets into coherence, and importantly, topological union, and have this new new emergent object resonate (where waves bounce back and forth) and thus do wave computing worthwhile enough to pay the energetic cost of carefully modulating this binding operation. Now, this is the sort of “physical correlate of consciousness” I tend to entertain the most. Experiences are fleeting (but not vanishingly so) pockets of the field that come together for computational and causal purposes worthwhile enough to pay the price of making them.

An important clarification here is that now that we have this way of seeing frames of reference we can reconceptualize our previous confusion. We realize that simply labeling parts of reality with coordinates does not magically bring together the information content that can be obtained by integrating the signals read at each of those coordinates. But we suddenly have something that might be way better and more conceptually satisfying. Namely, literal topological objects with boundaries embedded in the spacetime continuum that contribute to the causal unfolding of the reality and are absolute in their existence. These are the objective and real frames of reference we’ve been looking for!

What’s So Special About Field Topology?

Two key points:

Topology is frame-invariant
Topology is causally significant

As already mentioned, the Lorentz Transform can squish and distort, but it doesn’t change topology. The topology of the field is absolute, not relativistic.

The Lorentz Transform can squish and distort, but it doesn’t change topology (image source).

And field topology is also causally significant. There are _many_ examples of this, but let me just mention a very startling one: magnetic reconnection. This happens when the magnetic field lines change how they are connected. I mention this example because when one hears about “topological changes to the fields of physics” one may get the impression that such a thing happens only in extremely carefully controlled situations and at minuscule scales. Similar to the concerns for why quantum coherence is unlikely to play a significant role in the brain, one can get the impression that “the scales are simply off”. Significant quantum coherence typically happens in extremely small distances, for very short periods of time, and involving very few particles at a time, and thus, the argument goes, quantum coherence must be largely inconsequential at scales that could plausibly matter for the brain. But the case of field topology isn’t so delicate. Magnetic reconnection, in particular, takes place at extremely large scales, involving enormous amount of matter and energy, with extremely consequential effects.

You know about solar flairs? Solar flairs are the strange phenomenon in the sun in which plasma is heated up to millions of degrees Kelvin and charged particles are accelerated to near the speed of light, leading to the emission of gigantic amounts of electromagnetic radiation, which in turn can ionize the lower levels of the Earth’s ionosphere, and thus disrupt radio communication (cf. radio blackouts). These extraordinary events are the result of the release of magnetic energy stored in the Sun’s corona via a topological change to the magnetic field! Namely, magnetic reconnection.

So here we have a real and tangible effect happening at a planetary (and stellar!) scale over the course of minutes to hours, involving enormous amounts of matter and energy, coming about from a non-trivial change to the topology of the fields of physics.

(example of magnetic reconnection; source)

Relatedly, coronal mass ejections (CMEs) also dependent on changes to the topology of the EM field. My layman understanding of CMEs is that they are caused by the build-up of magnetic stress in the sun’s atmosphere, which can be triggered by a variety of factors, including uneven spinning and plasma convection currents. When this stress becomes too great, it can cause the magnetic field to twist and trap plasma in solar filaments, which can then be released into interplanetary space through magnetic reconnection. These events are truly enormous in scope (trillions of kilograms of mass ejected) and speed (traveling at thousands of kilometers per second).

CME captured by NASA (source)

It’s worth noting that this process is quite complex/not fully understood, and new research findings continue to illuminate the details of this process. But the fact that topological effects are involved is well established. Here’s a video which I thought was… stellar. Personally, I think a program where people get familiar with the electromagnetic changes that happen in the sun by seeing them in simulations and with the sun visualized in many ways, might help us both predict better solar storms, and then also help people empathize with the sun (or the topological pockets that it harbors!).

“The model showed differential rotation causes the sun’s magnetic fields to stretch and spread at different rates. The researchers demonstrated this constant process generates enough energy to form stealth coronal mass ejections over the course of roughly two weeks. The sun’s rotation increasingly stresses magnetic field lines over time, eventually warping them into a strained coil of energy. When enough tension builds, the coil expands and pinches off into a massive bubble of twisted magnetic fields — and without warning — the stealth coronal mass ejection quietly leaves the sun.” (source)

Solar flares and CMEs are just two rather spectacular macroscopic phenomena where field topology has non-trivial causal effects. But in fact there is a whole zoo of distinct non-trivial topological effects with causal implications, such as: how the topology of the Möbius strip can constrain optical resonant modes, twisted topological defects in nematic liquid crystal make some images impossible, the topology of eddy currents can be recruited for shock absorption aka. “magnetic breaking”, Meissner–Ochsenfeld effect and flux pinning enabling magnetic levitation, Skyrmion bundles having potential applications for storing information in spinotropic devices, and so on.

(source)

In brief, topological structures in the fields of physics can pave the way for us to identify the natural units that correspond to “moments of experience”. They are frame-invariant and casually significant, and as such they “carve nature at its joints” while being useful from the point of view of natural selection.

Can a Topological Pocket “Know Itself”?

Now the most interesting question arises. How does a topological pocket “know itself”? How can it act as a frame of reference for itself? How can it represent information about its environment if it does not have direct access to it? Well, this is in fact a very interesting area of research. Namely, how do you get the inside of a system with a clear and definite boundary to model its environment despite having only information accessible at its boundary and the resources contained within its boundary? This is a problem that evolution has dealt with for over a billion years (last time I checked). And fascinatingly, is also the subject of study of Active Inference and the Free Energy Principle, whose math, I believe, can be imported to the domain of *topological* boundaries in fields (cf. Markov Boundary).

Here is where qualia computing, attention and awareness, non-linear waves, self-organizing principles, and even optics become extremely relevant. Namely, we are talking about how the *interior shape* of a field could be used in the context of life. Of course the cell walls of even primitive cells are functionally (albeit perhaps not ontologically) a kind of objective and causally significant boundary where this applies. It is enormously adaptive for the cell to use its interior, somehow, to represent its environment (or at least relevant features thereof) in order to navigate, find food, avoid danger, and reproduce.

The situation becomes significantly more intricate when considering highly complex and “evolved” animals such as humans, which encompass numerous additional layers. A single moment of experience cannot be directly equated to a cell, as it does not function as a persistent topological boundary tasked with overseeing the replication of the entire organism. Instead, a moment of experience assumes a considerably more specific role. It acts as an exceptionally specialized topological niche within a vast network of transient, interconnected topological niches—often intricately nested and interwoven. Together, they form an immense structure equipped with the capability to replicate itself. Consequently, the Darwinian evolutionary dynamics of experiences operate on multiple levels. At the most fundamental level, experiences must be selected for their ability to competitively thrive in their immediate micro-environment. Simultaneously, at the broadest level, they must contribute valuable information processing functions that ultimately enhance the inclusive fitness of the entire organism. All the while, our experiences must seamlessly align and “fit well” across all the intermediary levels.

Visual metaphor for how myriad topological pockets in the brain could briefly fuse and become a single one, and then dissolve back into a multitude.

The way this is accomplished is by, in a way, “convincing the experience that it is the organism”. I know this sounds crazy. But ask yourself. Are you a person or an experience? Or neither? Think deeply about Empty Individualism and come back to this question. I reckon that you will find that when you identify with a moment of experience, it turns out that you are an experience *shaped* in the form of the necessary survival needs and reproductive opportunities that a very long-lived organism requires. The organism is fleetingly creating *you* for computational purposes. It’s weird, isn’t it?

The situation is complicated by the fact that it seems that the computational properties of topological pockets of qualia involve topological operations, such as fusion, fission, and the use of all kinds of internal boundaries. More so, the content of a particular experience leaves an imprint in the organism which can be picked up by the next experience. So what happens here is that when you pay really close attention, and you whisper to your mind, “who am I?”, the direct experiential answer will in fact be a slightly distorted version of the truth. And that is because you (a) are always changing and (b) can only use the shape of the previous experience(s) to fill the intentional content of your current experience. Hence, you cannot, at least not under normal circumstances, *really* turn awareness to itself and *be* a topological pocket that “knows itself”. For once, there is a finite speed of information propagation across the many topological pockets that ultimately feed to the central one. So, at any given point in time, there are regions of your experience of which you are *aware* but which you are not attending to.

This brings us to the special case. Can an experience be shaped in such a way that it attends to itself fully, rather than attend to parts of itself which contain information about the state of predecessor topological pockets? I don’t know, but I have a strong hunch that the answer is yes and that this is what a meditative cessation does. Namely, it is a particular configuration of the field where attention is perfectly, homogeneously, distributed throughout in such a way that absolutely nothing breaks the symmetry and the experience “knows itself fully” but lacks any room left to pass it on to the successor pockets. It is a bittersweet situation, really. But I also think that cessations, and indeed moments of very homogeneously distributed attention, are healing for the organism, and even, shall we say, for the soul. And that is because they are moments of complete relief from the discomfort of symmetry breaking of any sort. They teach you about how our world simulation is put together. And intellectually, they are especially fascinating because they may be the one special case in which the referent of an experience is exactly, directly, itself.

To be continued…

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful and extend my thanks to Chris Percy for his remarkable contributions and steadfast dedication to this field. His exceptional work has been instrumental in advancing QRI’s ideas within the academic realm. I also want to express my sincere appreciation to Michael Johnson and David Pearce for our enriching philosophical journey together. Our countless discussions on the causal properties of phenomenal binding and the temporal depth of experience have been truly illuminating. A special shout-out to Cube Flipper, Atai Barkai, Dan Girshovic, Nir Lahav, Creon Levit, and Bijan Fakhri for their recent insightful discussions and collaborative efforts in this area. Hunter, Maggie, Anders (RIP), and Marcin, for your exceptional help. Huge gratitude to our donors. And, of course, a big thank you to the vibrant “qualia community” for your unwavering support, kindness, and encouragement in pursuing this and other crucial research endeavors. Your love and care have been a constant source of motivation. Thank you so much!!!

Open Sourcing Qualia Mastery: QRI’s First Guided Meditation Series

Posted on June 13, 2023 by algekalipso

Explore the Qualia Mastery Series Now

Qualia Mastery, in a nutshell:

1) Explore the state-space of consciousness because you want to know it for yourself

2) Study it from many points of view because you want to understand it intellectually at a deep level

3) Intend to apply it for the benefit of all beings

I really like meditation, but I have never been a fan of not understanding how it works rationally. It seems to me that doing powerful things to your state of consciousness without having a good sense of what is going on can open you up to unfounded beliefs.

As I’ve gone deeper into meditation and energetic practices, though, I’ve come to realize that one can in fact make rational sense of what is happening. This guided meditation series condenses this knowledge into 9 sets of practices that have transparent and interpretable effects.

I go over the basics of how the mind works, with principles like what you pay attention to gets energized, energizing an internal representation highlights its resonant modes, sufficiently energized representations become plastic and malleable, and certain vibratory qualities feel better than others because they spread out stress more uniformly.

And then, with the basics covered, we go on to play and construct interesting states of mind, including heavenly realms of experience and computationally non-trivial mind acrobatics.

No magic needed; just curiosity and openness of being.

I hope you enjoy and learn from it! And also please feel encouraged to share feedback or reports of how it went for you.

Thank you!

The Varieties of Attention

This is a guided meditation provided by Andrés in order to enrich one’s conception of the nature of “attention”.

Attention is typically thought of as a fuzzy “spotlight” that redirects cognitive resources to a region of one’s experience. But this is just one of many varieties of attention. In fact, many changes to one’s state of consciousness have very little to do with changes to perceptual features like color, brightness, auditory pitch, tactile sensations, or the texture of thought. At times, one can tell that one’s state of consciousness has changed dramatically and yet it is very hard to pin-point exactly what that change consists of. In many of those cases, that’s because the change is primarily attentional. Thus, learning about alternative modes of attention is an important tool to enable higher quality phenomenological reports and replications. It has the added bonus that knowing a broad range of attentional modes can radically enhance one’s meditation practice.

Join us in this guided meditation to get acquainted with a much broader set of attentional modes.

Relevant Links:

Playing with the Energy Parameter

In this guided meditation Andrés walks you through a variety of methods to modulate the “energy parameter” of experience. This is a building block for the framework of Neural Annealing in the nervous system, which explores how (suitably defined) energy impacts internal representations, facilitates solving constraint satisfaction problems, and has the potential to lead to sustainable high valence states of consciousness by reducing internal stress.

We explore energy sources such as (a) sensory input, (b) pleasure and pain, (c) attention, (d) and surprise. Additionally a wide range of techniques for how to build, manage, and skillfully deploy the energy are discussed and practiced.

Enjoy!

Relevant Links:

The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes
Peaceful Qualia: The Manhattan Project of Consciousness
Neural Annealing (Michael Johnson)
Healing Trauma with Neural Annealing (Gomez-Emilsson)
Good Vibe Theory
The Brain as a Non-Linear Optical Computer: Reflections on a 2-Week Jhana Meditation Retreat
QRI’s Tracer Tool (as an example for how to measure an aspect of the visual energy parameter)

Textures of Valence – Consonance, Dissonance, and Noise

In this guided mediation Andrés walks you through:

A factorization of experience into three main channels with their corresponding inner and outer versions: “see”, “hear”, and “feel”.
Using your energy body as an antenna capable of picking both shapes and frequencies of internal representations: the duality between form and vibration in the phenomenal world.
Symmetry & smooth geometry as the foundation for valence.
Consonance, dissonance, and noise as a way to obtain a readout of the valence of our world-simulation.
A number of pragmatic strategies for addressing phenomenal dissonance.

Relevant Links:

Michael Johnson’s Principia Qualia first introduced the Symmetry Theory of Valence, valence structuralism, and qualia formalism
The Consonance Disonance Noise Signature framework first introduced by Andrés Gómez Emilsson in Quantifying Bliss
The Symmetry Theory of Valence (@The Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London)
The Constructive Aspect of Visual Perception (Steven Lehar)
See, Hear, Feel (Shinzen Young)
Practicing the Jhanas (Rob Burbea)
Geometry Through the Eyes of Felix Klein

Local Binding and the PageRank of Attention

In this guided meditation Andrés helps you explore the way in which attention constructs local binding connections between phenomenal features and how the flow of attention and awareness can be modeled with the graph algorithm called PageRank.

Topics covered:

Review of the nature of attention: what you pay attention gets stronger, gets locally bound, and gets connected to what you were paying attention right before
Noticing local binding in See, Hear, Feel (inner & outer)
Cross-modal coupling: divide and conquer technique for preventing negative valence and a coherence technique to enhance positive valence
Oscillatory complementarity between awareness and attention
How objects of perception can play the role of witnesses and witnessed elements of a scene
Hybrid attentional modes
Chains of witnessing and Nth-order intentionality
PageRank of attention
Space witnessing space

These are all very helpful techniques and insights to practice and add to your Qualia Mastery Toolkit.

Relevant Links:

The Thermodynamics of Consciousness and the Ecosystem of Agents

In this guided meditation Andrés walks you through QRI’s recent work on:

The Thermodynamics of Consciousness: how energy flows from energy sources (sensory stimulation, valence, attention, surprise, and the background noise signature) towards the bound field of consciousness, which is then shaped via the energy sink landscape of symmetry and recognition, and then exit via motor action or “outer field radiation”.

And,

The Ecosystem of Agents: our minds work somewhat similar to a next-token prediction engine like GPT-4, where the existing constraints help resolve the ambiguity of the regions of experience which remain amorphous. In order to make accurate predictions of the world, we need to actually simulate agentive behavior (because the world of full of agents). To do this we create “subagents” that play the role of agentive forces so that we can predict them (and ultimately remain safe).

The meditation also walks through a series of strategies for dealing with subagents in order to harmonize them and experience a healthy and wholesome ecosystem of friendly subagents that help each other in beautiful ways:

Improve the training data
Practice the meditation where you guide lost subagents to a pool of love that re-absorbs them
Good vibes as base: your mood provides the evolutionary selection pressures for agentive forces, so cultivating beautiful mindsets will enable more friendly agents to arise
More Dakka on equanimity and metta
Reward clean intentions before flattery (there’s a vibe to transparent intentions)
Explore different network structures for agents that are more easily manageable

Relevant Links:

High-Valence Calisthenics – Exploring the Heaven Worlds

In this guided meditation Andrés walks you through a wide range of possible high-valence states of consciousness, aka. phenomenal “heaven worlds”.

Calisthenics are exercises that you can perform with minimal equipment and that are intended to exercise every muscle group in the body. Now what would it mean to do “meditation calisthenics”? Well, that you exercise every kind of meditative approach in order to keep all of your “meditation muscles” fit. More specifically, “high-valence calisthenics” would be the practice of engaging with every kind of positive valence state of consciousness achievable without the aid of external aids (whether chemical, sensorial, or situational).

In this guided meditation we go through the high-valence configurations of “see, hear, feel” (inner & outer), artistic states of consciousness, social mindsets, metta, “cosmic party mode”, the worlds of insight, intellectual understanding, realization, and the modes of being of refined and purified high-valence (Jhanas).

We conclude by dedicating these beautiful qualities of the mind for the benefit of all beings.

Infinite bliss!

Relevant Links:

On Dark Rooms, Jhanas, Ecstasy, and the Symmetry Theory of Valence

“Calisthenics (American English) or callisthenics (British English) (/ˌkælɪsˈθɛnɪks/) is a form of strength training consisting of a variety of movements that exercise large muscle groups (gross motor movements), such as standing, grasping, pushing, etc. These exercises are often performed rhythmically and with minimal equipment, as bodyweight exercises. They are intended to increase strength, fitness, and flexibility, through movements such as pulling, pushing, bending, jumping, or swinging, using one’s body weight for resistance in pull-ups, push-ups, squats, etc. Calisthenics can provide the benefits of muscular and aerobic conditioning, in addition to improving psychomotor skills such as balance, agility, and coordination.” (source)

Divine Qualia – Open Sourcing God

Without making any ontological, philosophical, or metaphysical assertions or assumptions, we point out that the phenomenology of the divine and in particular the concept of “God” has an important resonance for the human soul. Therefore exploring this phenomenology is essential for a complete direct understanding of consciousness.

In this guided meditation Andrés walks you through an exploration of the phenomenology of different conceptions of the divine. The key guiding question for this exploration is: what does it feel like to inhabit the phenomenal world in which God is conceived in this or that way? Rather than pursuing a specific conception, we instead engage in an open ended exploration of the divine for the sake of developing Qualia Mastery. We call this approach “Open Sourcing God”, where one is not dependent on other’s interpretations or rules to access the God of one’s own understanding.

Conceptions of the divine explored include Chaos, Ingroup, Hierarchy, Creator, The Law, Archetype, Replication, Dynamics, Life, Energy, Coincidence and Synchronicity, Love, Compassion, Witness, Consciousness, Awareness, Oneness, Axis of Annealing, and Valence.

Relevant Links:

Simulations of God: The Science of Belief (John Lilly, 1975)
The True Beauty of Your “Soul” by Shinzen Young [a secular conception of the soul worth paying attention to]
Key Ideas of a Soulmaking Dharma (Part 2 – The Eros-Psyche-Logos Dynamic) by Rob Burbea

Harmonic Meditation – Calibration Exercises

In this guided meditation Andrés walks you through a series of exercises that illustrates harmonic resonance in the energy body and then channels excess energy into high-valence tactile sensations (cf. Piti), which can be a possible foundation practice for the 1st Jhana.

The meditation focuses on the inner and outer “feel” channels for (see, hear feel) X (inner, outer) as formulated by the “factorization of experience” introduced by Shinzen Young in his Unified Mindfulness framework. When necessary feel free to use the inner and outer “see” channel for support, but try to keep “feel” primary. We explore the following kinds of oscillations:

On/off
Left/right
Top/bottom
Front/back
Expand/contract
Toroidal flow (up, down, both at once)
Checkerboard pattern
Zebra pattern
Homogenous attention in space
Space qualities: solid, liquid, magnetic, viscosity, gaseous, plasma
Pleasure, joy, peace
Laminal flow and energy management techniques

It is recommended that one first listens to the guided meditations about Energy, Attention, and Valence of this Qualia Mastery series before doing this one.

Relevant Links:

Developing Piti, Developing Focus, Developing Wellbeing (Rob Burbea)
Representational and Computational Properties of Resonance (Steven Lehar)
The Resonance and Vibration of [Phenomenal] Objects

The Phenomenology of Ontology

In this guided meditation Andrés guides you through what believing in different ontologies feels like.

Without making any claim (implicit or otherwise) about the nature of reality, one can still explore the phenomenology of ontology. Namely, explore what it is like to inhabit a phenomenal word in which the building blocks of reality are rendered as being this or that.

At a very high level, one key insight is that one can notice how different facets of one’s experience reify, solidity, and rigidify an ontology. For example, this shows up in “dualism”. In this ontology, one posits that the universe has both matter and mind. This has the tendency to trigger the feeling of being encased or trapped in your body. But pay attention! If you notice carefully, you will realize that this is implemented with somatic feelings that rigidify the sense of being caged inside your body. This sense is, ultimately, a fabrication, rather than a realization. It’s just how the mind chooses to render that particular sense of reality.

Following this insight, we notice how there is a transmutation from the ontology one believes in, into a characteristic phenomenology of existence (and back). In fact, “the pain of dualism” is a feedback loop that involves somatic sensations, and not something intrinsic to a belief system. Similarly, every other ontology tends to trigger phenomenological feedback loops for its rendering. Pay attention! 🙂

The ontologies we explore in this meditation include:

(1) Dualism: Mind and matter.
(2) Trinitarianism of matter, consciousness, and space.
(3) Atomism – we know that science confirmed the ancient view of atomism, but notice how without some kind of holism/binding, only “mind dust” can exist.
(4) Jain ontology (in which there are ~9 fundamental kinds of ontological building blocks of reality) – space, time, dynamism (movement and rest), atoms that can combine, the soul, and all kinds of “karma particles”.
(5) Monism – It’s all qualia. It’s all awareness. It’s all information. It’s all algorithms or computation. It’s all belief. It’s all a social construction (cf. Strong Tlon Hypothesis)
(6) Ontologies of infinities.
(7) Ontologies of Zero. In particular, we zoom in on David Pearce’s Zero Ontology, in which the reason why there is something rather than nothing is that “zero information” is the case (and this implies the existence of all mutually-consistent universes of bound qualia).

This last ontology is particularly powerful: when explored deeply, it can trigger the “Rainbow God” phenomenology, where all of the flavors of qualia come together and “cancel each other out”. This is highly related to the phenomenology of 5-MeO-DMT as well as that of the formless Jhanas.

May all benefit from this meditation!

Relevant Links:

Why Does Anything Exist? Zero Ontology, Physical Information, and Pure Awareness (Andrés Gómez-Emilsson discusses and expands upon David Pearce’s theory for why there is something rather than nothing)
No-Self vs. True Self (Daniel Ingram)
WHY DOES ANYTHING EXIST? (David Pearce)
Jain Ontology
Burning Man (Strong Tlon Hypothesis)

✵ Open Sourcing Qualia Mastery ✵ 🧘🌈

Gain deeper phenomenological insights into consciousness and use them to enhance meditation practice, overall wellbeing, and your capacity to report your subjective experiences accuratelyhttps://t.co/8suXnHNmmx pic.twitter.com/8ZTGiP2SVy
— Qualia Research Institute (@QualiaRI) June 13, 2023

High-Valence Meditation

Posted on December 3, 2021 by algekalipso

Excerpt from Seeing that Frees by Rob Burbea (2014), pgs. 53-59

Working with Feelings of Pleasure and with the Subtle Body

Encouraging feelings of well-being

The method just described, of focusing primarily on the sense of the whole body, involves the development of a sensitivity to what could be termed ‘the subtle body’ or the ‘energy body’.[8]

Almost from the start in this approach we deliberately but gently work at nurturing a sense of comfort, pleasure, or well-being in the body.
This can be done through the way we pay attention to the subtle body, as described above – opening out the awareness to encompass there the whole body space, and tuning into the more pleasant frequencies of feeling that are perceivable.
It is also possible to use the breath or the mettā to help elicit and support the pervasion of this sense of well-being. Simply sensitizing to, and enjoying, the way we feel the energetic resonances of the mettā or the breath throughout the whole space of the body – opening to and finding delight in their reverberations there – can gently move the experience in the direction of a more expansive well-being.
And when there is a state of agitation or anxiety, we can play with ways of breathing or practicing the mettā, and also ways of sensing the breath or mettā, that feel as if they soothe the subtle body and smooth out its energies. Delicately tuning into the felt experience of these qualities of soothing or smoothing-out will help them to gradually gain strength, and help the agitated energies to slowly subside.
The imagination, too, can be skillfully employed in order to gently encourage this sense of pleasure or well-being in the subtle body. While simultaneously pervading the whole body space with an awareness sensitive to the texture and tone of the energy of that whole field, it is possible, for example, to imagine the subtle body as a body of radiant light; then to open to and explore what that feels like. Any image formed in this way does not necessarily need to appear in precise detail, or even completely distinctly. It is, rather, the energetic sense of pleasure or well-being which it supports that is primary, since this is what primarily supports the samādhi.
Likewise, one may experiment with imagining various luminous lines of energy in the body – for example, between the perineum and the crown of the head, or from the lower belly out through the legs – and sense how any such lines of energy supports the whole body to feel upright, open, and energized. The imagination here may be visual or kinesthetic, or a combination of the two. And it need not always follow exactly the anatomical contours of the physical body or its posture. For instance, if sitting or kneeling with the legs crossed or bent, the luminous lines of energy imagined radiating from the lower belly or base of the spine need not bend with the legs, but may instead continue and extend straight out at the knees, if at that time that feels more supportive of openness, energization, and well-being.
If there is tension, or even pain, in one area of the body, rather than always conceiving of it in anatomical or physiological terms, it can sometimes be more helpful to conceive of and perceive that area in energetic terms, and to play with the perception of lines of energy in order to support a degree of comfort and ease.

There are many ways we may discover to bring about some sense of energetic openness and well-being in the subtle body. And as it is accessed more and more, this altered body feeling is one that eventually we can ‘remember’ and learn to deliberately recall – to summon by gentle intention. We can then move, usually gradually, into the focused steadiness of samādhi from that basis, by incorporating this perception of pleasure or well-being more centrally into the meditation.

Towards unification

Whether it has arisen through being deliberately recalled, or through focusing on the breath or mettā, there are again a number of possible ways of using the sense of pleasure or comfort to help guide the citta into the unification of samādhi.

Once it is easy sustaining for some minutes, we can gently begin to take that bodily feeling of well-being as the primary object of our focus. It is important not to ‘snatch at it’, but rather to ease the attention toward it gracefully, and gradually let it take up the full focus of attention. Then the attention and the citta can be encouraged to enjoy it as fully as possible.
The attention can at times probe it, burrowing into one area of the pleasure, perhaps where it feels strongest.
Or, at other times, a mode of ‘receiving’ it, really trying to open up to it, can be employed.
Either way, one attempts all the while to remain intimate with its texture, and actually to relish the pleasure as much as possible. In these ways (and in others that can be discovered) we can delicately work to gently sustain the bodily feeling of well-being, and to absorb the attention more fully into it.
Alternatively, it is possible to mix the sense of pleasure with the perception of the breath or the mettā, in order to support and deepen the quality of the samādhi.
Then it may seem, for example, as if one is breathing the pleasurable energy; or it may seem as if one is breathing into and out of that area of well-being.
In mettā practice, it may seem as if the mettā and the pleasurable energy have become fused, so that the feeling of the mettā at that time is the feeling of the well-being. And this can become the ‘flavour’ of the energy of mettā that is radiated outwards towards beings, or that wraps around and permeates one’s own body and being.
The area of pleasurable energy may also be perceived as the source of the mettā.

Steadiness of feeling is more important than strength

We should point out once more that sometimes the sense of well-being is really quite subtle. Although the feelings of pleasure might also be very strong at times, this is actually not necessary in order to use them in a helpful way. Over time, their strength will in fact vary naturally (and anyway, as the practice matures, at a certain stage they begin to mellow). What is more necessary is that they sustain relatively steadily for more than a few minutes. Then we can learn to sustain them for longer.

Within this larger steadiness, any perceived waves or movements of the energy are not at all problematic. We can try to open the space of the body to these inner currents as much as possible, allowing and fully enjoying them (and if they feel very intense, even playing with surrendering and abandoning our whole body and being to them). Doing so, their intensity will in time calm down.

Suffusing and saturating the whole body

Along with the steadiness of the feelings of well-being, and of the attention on those feelings, we are also gently aiming at eventually having the whole space of the body suffused by and saturated with the feeling of well-being or pleasure. Sometimes this happens by itself. But sometimes the sense of pleasure, when it arises or when it is recalled, only pervades one area of the body. There are a number of viable responses then.

One is to simply enjoy it in the area where it is located, in the ways that we have described, without pressuring the feeling to spread. It may then expand naturally at some point to pervade the whole body.
But even if it does not spread then, that need not be regarded as a problem. A vital aspect of the whole relationship with samādhi practice is to enjoy what well-being is there at any time, not to measure it and view it through a lens that somehow demands, even subtly, that it be ‘better’, bigger, stronger.
Having said that, it is in fact also possible at times to gently encourage the feeling of pleasure or well-being to spread – for instance by simply opening up the space of the awareness to embrace a larger area of the body. Sometimes then the pleasant feeling will automatically start to expand to fill that space.
Alternatively, the breath may be used to gently ‘massage’ the sense of well-being into other areas of the body. Although there is not space to enter into a full description of possibilities here, with practice the breath energy may be felt and perceived throughout the body, entering and flowing in all kinds of ways beyond the strictly anatomical movement of air into the wind-pipe and lungs. We can learn to sense the breath energy in and through the whole body. And as alluded to earlier, the breath energy can be mixed with the pleasure, so that the perceived movements of breath in the whole body space move and spread the perception of the pleasure.
There is also, again, no reason why one cannot just imagine the feeling of well-being permeating the body space more fully. The perception then often begins to follow the image.

These are some of the possibilities, but with repeated practice over time it will anyway become normal for the pleasurable feeling to effortlessly pervade the whole body whenever it arises.

Unblocking and smoothing out the subtle body energies

The harmonization and unification in well-being that is characteristic of samādhi can also be regarded as a harmonization, alignment, smoothing out, and opening of the flows of energies in the subtle body [emphasis mine]. All day and all night long our energy body is moving in and out of states of alignment and openness, constriction and blockage, in response to a whole range of conditions, physical, mental, and emotional. This is completely normal, and with attention and sensitivity to the experience of the body we notice these fluctuations more and more. Although they may be felt in any region, perhaps most commonly a block in energy will be felt as a constriction somewhere along the central axis of the body, anywhere from the perineum to the top of the head. As we move into a state of more samādhi there is an unblocking, untying, aligning, and harmonizing of the subtle body energies to some degree.

When the subtle energies are blocked and agitated, samādhi is to some extent blocked. And when the subtle energy is unblocked and unagitated, samādhi is not so far away. (Perhaps all that is needed then is a steadying of the attention on enjoying the pleasant feelings of the ‘unblocked’ subtle body, as described). In addition, therefore, to the ways of working to smooth out and soothe the energy body suggested earlier, it can be useful to learn means for gently unblocking the energies when there is any sense of energetic constriction, in order to open up again the potential of a degree of samādhi at that time. Again, with a light and playful attitude of experimentation, a variety of ways of working in meditation can be discovered.

For example, sensitive to the whole subtle body sense, the breath energy or mettā may be perceived and conceived in any way that feels helpful, as alluded above:

We may breath into and out of an area of blockage.
Or we may, perhaps gently, breathe the breath energy through that area.
In mettā practice, we may experiment with situating the centre or source of the energy of mettā right at that point of constriction, and explore what effects that has.
If these strategies prove difficult, it is again quite feasible to imagine the breath, the body energies, or the mettā flowing more freely through the area of blockage, or even flowing out of the body, and opening and unblocking in that way.

The Relation Between Samādhi and Insight

Insight brings samādhi

As well as those described above, there are many other practicable means to unblock the subtle body energies. In particular, most of the insight ways of looking that we shall introduce in the course of this book may also be used in the service of opening and deepening samādhi. Mindful observation will reveal that any craving or clinging is always accompanied by, and reflected in, blocks and knots in the subtle body [emphasis mine]. Now, insight, we have said, cuts that on which dukkha depends. And dukkha depends on craving. Thus, according our definition, insight is any way of looking that releases craving. As the insight and emptiness practices are developed, therefore, they can also be used at times to deliberately undo the craving that is mirrored in the knots in the energy body. This might involve using the insight practices ‘on’ the experienced subtle energy blocks themselves, as ways of looking at those perceptions and feelings. Or it might involve engaging these insight ways of looking just more generally in regard to any experience in the moment. Either way, the dissolving of craving to whatever extent will, at the same time and to a similar extent, untie the knots in the subtle body to unblock those energies and so deliver the possibility of some samādhi. Ha!

With more practice our skill grows and we find that it is in fact possible quite often to use the ‘letting go’ that insight brings to deliberately unblock the energies and the felt sense of the sublet body in this way. The pleasantness, openness, well-being, delightful and alive stillness, or joy that comes with this unblocking can be felt in the space and texture of the body sense. We can then tune into that. It is this tuning in to the frequency of the pleasant, and delicately attending to it, that ‘filters it out’ of the field of awareness, so that it begins to become more palpable and more prominent.

Then we can rest in it, allowing it to spread throughout the body space. And if, as before, we continue to tune in to and focus on the felt sense of the energy of this well-being, gently intent on allowing and opening to an enjoyment of it, and encouraging the attention to become absorbed in it, to fill up with it, this can carry us to the threshold of some samādhi.

Such a skill is useful for even the most experienced meditators. There are times in meditation when we may be trying to bring the mind to some unification, working with the intention for samādhi, and despite all our patience and adeptness in attempting different things samādhi does not come. We may need some insight to help us let go of some craving or clinging, perhaps even a craving we were unaware of, and then some samādhi becomes possible.

In addition to the opening and transformation of the energies of the subtle body just described, there is another, related aspect to what is occurring that can be pointed out. To a degree proportional to its strength, the push and pull of craving pushes and pulls the attention. It thus agitates the mind and makes it restless; or saps its energy and makes it dull [emphasis mine]. Relaxing craving through insight will therefore allow the mind to settle more naturally and easefully into stillness and a steadiness of attention. We can see then that the quality of steadiness of attention does not only come through holding the mind to one object.

Aside from being a skillful ‘trick’, however, all this suggests a number of things. One is that although usually we might conceive that ‘samādhi leads to insight’, (and clearly a certain amount of steadiness is generally needed before any insight can arise), as we explore we discover more and more that they can lead to each other.

[8] We can freely use a term like ‘subtle body’ or ‘energy body’, without needing either to assert or to deny the ‘reality’ of such a concept. It is enough for us that it is a perception, a way the body can be perceived which can be helpful. In fact, a little reflection reveals that the same could be said of concepts like ‘attention’. Is there really some ‘thing’ called ‘attention’ that can ‘go towards’ some other thing (or mental representation of an object) or ‘receive’ that thing? These are all ways of conceiving and perceiving useful on the path to freedom. Perceivable, useful, and, as we will come to see, thoroughly empty.

See Also:

Healing Trauma with Neural Annealing

Posted on May 8, 2021 by algekalipso

The folks at QRI have recently given a string of presentations. Before I jump to the main topic of this article, I will briefly mention a few of these presentations that are likely to be of interest to the reader. Quintin Frerichs recently presented about Neural Annealing at the Wellcome Center for Human Neuroimaging at UCL. I recently presented about Mapping the Heaven Realms at the SSC/ACX online meetup organized by Joshua Fox. Also, a few weeks ago I participated in the U.S. Transhumanist Party Virtual Enlightenment Salon (the live conversation was so engaging we ended up talking for four hours). And finally, as the main topic of this article, the talk I gave at the Oxford Psychedelic Society on May 6th, 2021:

Healing Trauma with Neural Annealing: Is Annealing the Key Condition for Successful Psychedelic Psychotherapy?

Abstract of the Talk:

Mystical-type experiences mediate the therapeutic benefit of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (Griffiths, 2016; Ross, 2016; Yaden, 2020). In this talk we will explore why this may be the case and how we might improve this effect. On the one hand we can interpret the effect of mystical-type experiences through the lens of belief and attitude change (Carhart-Harris and K. J. Friston, 2019). But beliefs that are not deeply felt are unlikely to have much of an effect. Why would mystical-type experiences in particular cause deeply felt belief changes? On the other hand, one can interpret the effect of these experiences to be healing at a low-level: they allow the reconfiguration of the microstructure of our experience in beneficial ways. The first lens suggests that these experiences change what we believe and think about, whereas the second lens suggests that the experiences change how we feel. In this talk we will unify these two lenses and argue that neural annealing (Johnson, 2019) underlies high-level changes in beliefs and attitudes as well as low-level microstructural healing of internal representations. This paradigm ties together the puzzling effects of mystical-type experiences by interpreting them as uniquely strong versions of neural annealing. We suggest that traumatic memories are indeed implemented with low-level microstructural dissonance in the internal representations (Gomez-Emilsson, 2017). Not only are they about something bad, they also feel bad. In turn, neural annealing targeted towards these internal representations can heal and transform them from dissonance-producing to consonance-producing. More so, neural annealing also enhances the information propagation fidelity of the nervous system, allowing the healed representations to update the state of the rest of the nervous system. This insight, along with careful study of annealing dynamics under psychedelics, can allow us to target the annealing process in order to heal these internal representations more effectively. We conclude with empirical predictions for what to look for in order to identify the signatures of successful neural annealing under psychedelics and suggest methods to piggyback on the natural well-trodden paths of beneficial annealing (e.g. meditation, yoga, music, creativity) to optimize such experiences.

Why This Is Important

There are two main reasons I think sharing this work as soon as possible with the world is very beneficial. The first is that it genuinely advances a new model for how to optimize psychedelic therapy. In particular, I think that being aware of this model can be very useful for people who intend to self-medicate with psychedelics. Although there is a vast literature for psychedelic psychotherapy, it is largely laced with metaphysical views, implicit background philosophical assumptions incompatible with science, and in my view, questionable ethics.

The second point is that this model can be used as an antidote to psychedelic brainwashing. If a friend of yours has been taking a lot of psychedelics (with or without a shaman) and now has a web of unfalsifiable beliefs that do not seem to help them, this presentation might work to help them understand what is going on in their mind. Additionally, once you understand how psychedelic annealing works, you can anticipate irrational belief changes based on the texture of the experience and proactively prevent them. Indeed, being showered with bliss consciousness by a DMT entity might be healing to your nervous system, but alas, it also anneals in you a conviction in the independent existence of such entities. With this presentation, the hope is that you can keep the healing while discarding the irrational beliefs (because you will now be able to see how they are implemented!). If we want to indeed create a truth-seeking psychonaut shanga (aka. a Super-Shulgin Academy) we *have to* have an adequate model of how exotic states of consciousness modify one’s belief networks. The penalty of not modeling this accurately leads to the loss of one’s critical faculties. I have seen it happen (see Appendix A & B), and I am not impressed. We can do better.

Without further ado, here is the video:

And here are the slides (with some light comments along the way on the topics that have not been previously discussed):

Many thanks to the Oxford Psychedelic Society for the invitation to give this talk. 🙂

Model (1) has the problem that the researchers themselves are not exposed to the exotic states of consciousness, and as such, what they write and theorize about comes from second-hand accounts. More so, the bulk of the direct phenomenological information the participants gain access to is generally discarded as it goes through the low-dimensional information filters of standardized questionnaires. There is no real buildup of phenomenological information or an effort to integrate it across participants (participants don’t generally talk to each other). The model does excel at generating copious high-quality neuroimaging data.

Model (2) suffers from the problem that the idiosyncratic beliefs of the psychonaut tend to “anneal more deeply” (see the next slide for a more through description of this) with each trip. Unless they were to focus on the phenomenal character of the experience rather than the intentional content, what tends to happen is that specific high-level beliefs become energy sinks and they dominate the exploration. Recall how DMT’s world-sheet “crystallizes” around objects and ideas you can recognize. Thus, as you take psychedelics over and over, the realms of experience one goes to will tend to follow recurring themes along the lines of what the most successful energy sinks from previous experiences have been. The explorer usually does not develop technical models of the phenomenological effects, but rather, tends to focus on the metaphysical or philosophical implications of the experiences.

Model (3) is like that of a think tank. Ever since writing articles like How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD, we have received a lot of correspondence from pretty smart people who enjoy exploring exotic states of consciousness. The multi-year dialogue between us and them and each other has resulted in a lot of generative model building for which we can then get feedback. Grounded in common background philosophical assumptions and a drive towards phenomenological accuracy, the type of output of this model tends to look much more like The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences than either a neuroscience paper (model 1) or a book about the Earth Coincidence Control Office (model 2).

Which of these information-processing architectures would you use if you were trying to figure out the truth of how psychedelics work? If they were diagrams for a neural network architecture, which one do you think would model and integrate information most effectively? Ultimately, we should think of these models as complementary. But since model 3 is novel and largely unexplored, it might be sensible to pay attention to what it outputs.

(H/T Quintin Frerichs for this slide)

This slides illustrates the sort of topics and problems that a “Good Annealing Manual” would need to cover. As an integrated “energy management” strategy, such a manual would describe how to raise energy, how to dampen it, how to translate it from one domain into another, how to stabilize a state, how to get knocked out of an unhelpful limit cycle, and so on.

(H/T Quintin Frerichs for this slide)

Note: I should have cited Michael Schartner’s work (and more generally the work coming out of Anil Seth‘s lab which applies the predictive processing paradigm and neural network feature visualization to model the effects of psychedelics). Apologies for this omission. Importantly, all of that work (in addition to REBUS and SEBUS) lives at the computational level of analysis. What QRI is bringing into the picture is how the implementation level based on principles of harmonic resonance and the Symmetry Theory of Valence underlie predictive processing. More on this below.

One of the interesting ideas of Steven Lehar is applying the duality between standing wave patterns and resonant modes of objects to the brain. A lot of psychedelic phenomenology suggests that there is a duality between the vibe of the state and the geometric layout of the multi-modal hallucinations. In other words, each phenomenal object has a corresponding way of vibrating, and this is experienced as a holistic signature of such objects. (cf. Resonance and vibration of [phenomenal] objects). (See also: Hearing the shape of a drum).

In the context of this presentation, the most important idea of this slide is that the duality between standing wave patterns and the vibe of the experience showcases how symmetry and valence are related. Blissful “heavenly realms” on DMT are constructed in ways where the resonance of the phenomenal objects with each other is consonant and their structure is symmetrical. Likewise, the screechy and painful quality of the DMT “hell realms” comes along with asymmetries, discontinuities, and missing components in the phenomenal objects that make up experiences. The overall vibe of the space is the result of the intrinsic vibratory modes of each phenomenal object in addition to each of the possible interactions between them (weighted by their phenomenal distance). An analogy readily comes to mind of an orchestra and the challenges that come with making it sound consonant.

From Mike’s Why we seek out pleasure:

A good algorithmic theory of cognition will collect, unify, and simplify a lot of things that look like odd psychological quirks, and recast them as deeply intertwined with, and naturally arising out of, how our brains process information. I’m optimistic that Symmetry Theory will be able to do just this- e.g.,
* Cognitive dissonance happens when two (or more) patterns in your head are battling for your neural real estate, and they’re incompatible– i.e., they’re collectively dissonant/asymmetrical.
* Denial is what happens when your brain attempts to isolate/quarantine such patterns, and is actively working to prevent this tug-of-war for neurons.
This model implies that your brain can evaluate the “internal consistency/harmony” of a neural pattern, and reject it if there’s a negative result- and also the “simulated relative compatibility/harmony” of two neural patterns, and try to keep them isolated if there’s a negative result. I’d suggest the best way to understand this is in terms of projective geometry, resonance, and symmetry: i.e., to evaluate a pattern’s “internal harmony” and whether it ‘runs well (is stable) on existing hardware’, the brain uses principles of resonance to apply certain geometric projections (high-dimensional-to-lower-dimensional transformations) to the pattern to see if the result is stable (unchanged, or predictably oscillating, or still strongly resonant) under these transforms. Stable patterns are allocated territory; unstable ones (=dangerous neural code) are not. The internal mechanics of this will vary across brain areas (based on the specific resonance profile of each area) and emotional states, which might contribute to how certain types of information tend to end up in certain brain regions. Likewise, this could explain how moods coordinate information processing– by changing the resonance landscape in the brain, thus preferentially selecting for certain classes of patterns over others. A core implication of this model is that different kinds of dissonance will drive different kinds of behavior (feel like different kinds of imperatives), and based on what action is needed, a mood may create (or be the creation of) a certain kind of dissonance.

Why we seek out pleasure: the Symmetry Theory of Homeostatic Regulation, Michael Johnson (2017)

Now applying annealing to the above, we hypothesize that: (1) On the one hand, at the implementation level neural annealing works as a method to reduce dissonance by escaping local minima. (2) On the other hand, at the computational level simulated annealing can be used as a method to reduce prediction errors (cf. message passing and belief propagation). We hypothesize that there is a kind of duality between these two levels of abstraction. We are very interested in cleanly formalizing it so it can be empirically tested. But the facts seem to suggest that there is something here. What this duality says is that for any transformation that you do to the resonance network there will be a corresponding effect on the belief network and vice versa. For example, in this light, you will always find that denial or cognitive dissonance will come along with the phenomenology of “resistance” in one of its many guises (such as muscle tension, feelings of viscosity, or hardness). If you can address the muscle tension directly with progressive relaxation (or yoga, massage, etc.) you will also be implicitly addressing the integration of information into your world-model. At the same time, you may use specific beliefs in order to relax specific muscles, and some aspects of meditation may involve doing this to an extent (e.g. “now is all there is” and “the self is illusory” are beliefs that would seem to result in particular patterns of mental and physical relaxation).

We might succinctly explain how a resonance network trying to minimize dissonance could implement the free energy principle. Namely, we could maximize “accuracy – complexity” in the following way: If complex models require complex networks of resonance to be implemented, then there might be an inherent dissonance cost to complexity. More symmetrical configurations lower this cost, which makes more compact and coherent models preferable. At the same time, to take care of the accuracy, prediction errors themselves might be implemented with dissonance (e.g. via out-of-phase communication between layers of the hierarchy). Together, these two effects favor both accurate and simple models.

An interesting contrast that illustrates this duality between the computational and implementational level of abstraction is that between the effects of DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Particularly, DMT seems to give rise to the chaotic generation of information and this can be seen in something as simple as the style of the tracer effects it induces (richly-colored flip-flopping between positive and negative afterimages). 5-MeO-DMT’s tracer effects are generally monochromatic and the same color as that of the input. (See: Modeling Psychedelic Tracers with QRI’s Psychophysics Toolkit: The Tracer Replication Tool).

We hypothesize that DMT’s effects at the implementation level can be understood as the result of competing clusters of coherence across the hierarchy, whereas the main attractors of 5-MeO-DMT seem to involve global coherence. Modulating the average synaptic path length in a system of coupled oscillators can give rise to this sort of effect. By randomly adding connections to a network of coupled oscillators one first sees an emergent state of many competing patches of synchrony, and then, after a threshold is crossed, one starts seeing global synchrony emerge. Despite both drugs making the brain “more interconnected”, the slight difference in just how interconnected it makes it, may be the difference between the colorful chaos of DMT and the peaceful nothingness of 5-MeO-DMT.

The competing clusters of coherence across the hierarchy can evolve to adapt to each other. The DMT realm is more of an ecosystem than it is a state per se (ex: Hyperspace Lexicon). And due to the duality between dissonance minimization and prediction error minimization, avoiding updating one’s belief in the direction of these realms being real causes intense cognitive dissonance. Some level of belief updating to fit the content of the hallucinations might be very difficult to resist. Indeed, the forced coherence across the layers of the hierarchy would be bypassing one’s normal ability to resist information coming from the lower layers.

On peak experiences such as those induced by 5-MeO-DMT, global coherence will generally have the effect of dissolving internal boundaries. In turn, due to the duality proposed, belief updating in the direction of extreme simplicity is very difficult to resist. Global annealing without sensorial chaos results in the minimization of model complexity; high accuracy is taken care of thanks to the low information content of the state. As a consequence, one experiences very high-valence, high-energy, high-symmetry states of consciousness that come along with belief updating towards ideas with close to zero information content.

The high-valence nature of the state can be very useful to heal dissonance in the network, so therapeutic benefits seem very promising (notwithstanding the somewhat forced belief updates the state induces).

Unfortunately a nearby attractor of the globally coherent states is when there are two incompatible coherent states competing with one another. This can result in extremely negative valence and belief updating in the direction of “everything being bad”.

We now see how the typical belief changes caused by these two drugs have a dual counterpart in how they feel. I am of the opinion that a commitment towards truth and careful attention to one’s state of mind can prevent (or at least substantially lessen) the epistemological failure modes of these drugs. But since this kind of model is not known by the general population, for most people these drugs do tend to act as “epistemological hand grenades”.

See Appendix A & B at the bottom of this article for examples of each of these failure modes.

Now on to the therapeutic applications: practicing loving-kindness meditation consistently for weeks before a trip seems to substantially change its phenomenal character. It feels that metta practice over time anneals a consonant metronome which can become massively amplified during a psychedelic experience. In turn, a brightly shinning metta metronome emits “healing waves of energy” within one’s world-simulation (I know how crazy this sounds!), which impact the contents of one’s subconscious in ways that reduces their internal dissonance.

Similar benefits can be obtained from other meditation practices, as long as their emphasis is on high-valence and coherent states of mind. See also: Buddhist Annealing (video).

Importantly, you can “work smart” if you manage to use the seeds of consonance as the nucleation sources for alignment cascades. This can heal at a very deep level, and it is what people are talking about when they say things like “all is love”.

A secular Good Annealing Manual would ideally have very detailed information for how to move around in the state-space of consciousness.

Apparently, equanimity is also highly beneficial during psychedelic experiences. But rather than merely repeating the mantras that everyone in the psychedelic community chants (“just let go”, “surrender”, “accept”), we can use a More Dakka approach and aim to maximize equanimity rather than merely invoking it. Taking psilocybin during a meditation retreat in which you do a lot of equanimity exercises will allow you to “let go” with much greater skill than what you could do in normal everyday life. As a result, one is able to “learn one’s lessons” with much greater ease and a lot less resistance. This, I think, is generally good. After all, the point is not to punish oneself, but to learn from one’s mistakes.

In turn, Shinzen Young says that experiencing pleasure with equanimity is very healing. By not grasping, one is letting the consonant waves propagate freely throughout one’s nervous system, which results in positive annealing. So a possible therapeutic modality might be to combine peak states together with high levels of equanimity. If we want to bump the therapeutic effect sizes of psychedelic psychotherapy, this is the sort of thing I consider to be very promising.

I conclude by providing some annealing targets that are generically good for one’s mental health. Practice them consistently before a psychedelic experience so that they can be the nucleation points of sane and hedonically beneficial psychedelic annealing. Being bathed by love is good. Being bathed by love and equanimity at the same time is even better. Being bathed by love and all Seven Factors of Awakening at the same time might be still even better. The ceiling of wholesome happiness is not currently known by science. It is probably much higher than we can imagine.

If you found this talk inspiring, generative, or clarifying for your own work, please cite it! If you want to see more work like this and help us transform the alchemy of consciousness into a chemistry of the mind, please consider donating to QRI. Every dollar takes us closer to being able to empirically test these models and use them to develop technology to alleviate suffering in bulk.

Thank you!!!

Appendix A: What Happens When You Take Too Much DMT – What Does Overfitting Look Like?

A case study of a psychiatrist case who self-medicated his depression with a regiment of 1g of DMT (along with MAOIs) and 4mg of clonazepam a day:
- “On arrival, the patient was nonverbal, combative, and required six security guards to restrain him. When less restrictive measures failed, he was given propofol 1,000 mg IV, ketamine 500 mg IM, midazolam 5 mg IV, diazepam 20 mg IV, and fentanyl 4 mg IV with minimal effect.”
- “Psychiatry was consulted after the patient’s delirium resolved and he was medically stabilized as he exhibited symptoms of mania and psychosis. He was pressured in his speech, hyperreligious, and delusional. He believed that demons were leeching into his soul and asked the medical staff for an exorcism. It was recommended that the patient be admitted to the behavioral health unit for mood stabilization.”

How can I help my friend understand that what he is seeing is a side effect of smoking DMT on a daily basis? (from Quora – note: it is impossible for me to verify the accuracy of this report). From the comment thread:
- “He has been smoking it every day and night for the past 3 months that I know of. He sees these little beings everywhere and says they are trying to destroy his house pushing it over. He also says they spray mace and fairy dust and little balls in his face and other peoples too. He doesn’t believe that nobody else sees this happening, he says we have all been compromised and can’t be trusted. I’m worried about him and also his girlfriend that has to deal with him and he’s delusional. His daughter is scared to come home, his parents want to have him committed, and he doesn’t believe it has anything to do with dmt! He absolutely believes it is real.”
- “He is always under the influence of DMT, he smokes it all day every day. He says it no longer makes him hallucinate like when he first tried it, now it just takes away pain . NOT TRUE!! it’s like now he believes that this altered state of mind is reality and he’s losing everything. He is even destroying his own house to get them out from behind the walls.the other night he stood up and started stabbing his ceiling saying he was going to get them. It’s very disturbing to see him like this.”
- “He’s doing about the same. Last time I went to see him he was showing me how the moon was following him into his back yard and then back to the front yard . He also sees a bunch of drones in the sky that I can’t see. He still doesn’t believe that we can’t see the walls and countertops moving, or feel the fairy dust being sprayed in our faces.”
The YouTube channel C.U.E. COMPREHENSIVELY UNCOVERING EVIDENCE seems to exemplify quite accurately what DMT-induced overfitting looks like (e.g. see his DMT-informed numerological musings)
Reddit user ClockJoule: see an interview with him about his daily DMT use and the beliefs that he developed as a consequence: Magic Mushroom Cloud – THE MAN WHO SMOKED DMT FOR 120 DAYS STRAIGHT.
[Report(s)] A warning to my fellow psychonauts regarding hyperspace entities (wall of text alert!) – excerpt:
- “It all culminated in one long, elaborate, and highly dramatic visionary experience in which I was essentially ‘recruited,’ initiated in some grand ceremony alongside a large group of others presumably in my same situation (which may have just been “actors” ). It was all part of some kind of vast organization, which could best be described as ‘universal consciousness transcendental cosmic hippie space religion.’ [Read Lehar’s warning against believing what the DMT entities tell you]. It all had a very attractive but vaguely cult-like Scientology kind of feel to it. They even had their own music (which was actually pretty cool; see my comments on “the director” in part 4 for more details), propaganda, regular meetings and rituals, the whole works. They even seemed to revere a deity of some sort, their version of The Source (more detail on that in part 5), but this whole experience was so full of illusion and misdirection that I have no idea what their ‘deity’ really was, nor their true relation to it.”
- “I’ve gone on way to long already and need to start wrapping things up here, but long story short, in light of their new demands of allegiance, and through a separate series of bizarre synchronicities in ‘real life’ (what that means to me now, I have no idea) that I still can’t quite explain, I began to have some serious doubts and questions that needed answers. As I reflected on all that they had taught me, I began to realize that there were some major gaps in my knowledge, and that I had unwittingly filled in a lot of the blanks with my own speculation while assuming the picture I was being given was much more complete than it actually was. To summarize, over a series of increasingly confrontational and unpleasant experiences, I became less and less satisfied with their vague and evasive answers to my direct (and I think perfectly reasonable) questions, and we had something of a falling out, to put it very mildly. They eventually dropped all pretenses and flat-out turned on me, beginning a long period of harsh punishment.”
- “The results weren’t pretty. Their facade began to crumble as I saw through more and more of what I now recognized as deceptive illusions. What truly lay behind it was hideous, repulsive, monstrously evil, relentlessly manipulative, filled with petty malicious intent, and not nearly as righteous, enlightened, or omnipotent as they pretended to be. I’m actually still pretty uncomfortable with going into detail regarding what followed, but suffice it to say that I’ve basically been to hell and back. They did everything they could to ‘punish’ me, and some of the things they came up with were uniquely and creatively traumatic. If they had put half as much effort and sophistication into ‘teaching’ me as they did into attacking and tormenting me, I probably would still be happily and obliviously under their control today, a fresh new convert of their admittedly impressive sci-fi space religion.”
- “It took all the willpower I had just to stay focused and not become a completely broken wreck through all of this. Most of the ‘abilities’ I had acquired under their guidance gradually faded away over the course of a few weeks, with the exception of a number of lucid dream skills that I had picked up along the way. As I began to approach something resembling recovery, all kinds of memories and perspective started coming back to me that I had lost along the way (which may have been intentionally withheld from me). I felt like a toxic fog had been lifted from me, and everything looked so different now. I looked back on the last couple years of my life, especially the preceding four months or so, and was shocked to find that it wasn’t what I thought it was.”
- “I had seen some mind-blowingly incredible things and progressed in so many ways in what I thought represented cognitive and spiritual development, but the consequences were now apparent. Without realizing it, my personality had changed so much, and not for the better. I had alienated myself from many of my close friends, my romantic relationship had suffered, I had been much more depressed than I wanted to admit, and I had spent way too much of my free time alone and in the dark, becoming obsessed with progressively darker and weirder esoteric knowledge. I had been able to maintain a token amount of social interaction, just enough to convince myself I was still ‘normal,’ but it frequently left me feeling drained, and bored with the mere ‘meat puppets’ in this material plane who were but a pale reflection of what existed beyond it.”

Appendix B: What Happens When You Take Too Much 5-MeO-DMT – What Does Underfitting Look Like?

Leo Gura went on a month-long daily 5-MeO-DMT retreat. Here is my analysis of his retreat report: 5-MeO-DMT Awakenings: From Naïve Realism to Symmetrical Enlightenment. And here is Adeptus Psychonautica commenting on one of his most concerning videos.
Martin Ball: Another advocate of 5-MeO-DMT who claims that the highest truth is that we are all God, and that all of the hallucinatory content of DMT is egoic distraction from this truth (see what he thinks of Terence Mckenna).
He, like many in this cluster, seems to believe that the only truth worth knowing about is oneness and that this can only be known directly, at first with 5-MeO-DMT, and then through a process of integration of the experiences into one’s everyday life. Here is an interview he did with Adeptus Psychonautica. Also, here is Leo talking to Martin (do you count one or two persons in that video?).

While I agree that oneness is really important (and indeed I have written extensively about philosophy of personal identity and I generally advocate for Open Individualism), I do not think that realizing we are God is going to solve everything. In particular, we still need ruthlessly pragmatic solutions to the problem of intense suffering.

Insofar as non-duality is used as a mood-enhancer, it seems to be unreliable. Oneness can lead to bad trips of loneliness, a fact that tends to be brushed off by its advocates. My assessment is that this effect is the result of negative valence rather than an inherent effect of the concept (or truth?) of oneness. Shaman Oak‘s Bad LSD Experience – NIRVANA SUCKS video is a rather typical version of this effect and it highlights its true underlying cause: since he took the LSD during a comedown from cocaine, his entire trip was colored by the negative valence of that state. The world “felt inherently lonely” because it had depression qualia all over it. Amplified and magnified through the kaleidoscopic funhouse of LSD’s annealing dynamics, such a feeling of loneliness can look universal and omniprevalent “no matter how you look at it”. But if you were to replace that feeling with something blissful, then the concept of oneness would be experienced as wonderful and enlightening. It is always important to remember the Tyranny of the Intentional Object: ideas and beliefs seem to us as having inherent goodness or badness, but how this is implemented under the surface relies on hedonic tone/valence “painting” those ideas. As David Pearce likes to say, “take care of happiness and the meaning of life will take care of itself”.

Counterexamples: We do know a number of people who have used these compounds extensively and who do not seem to exhibit noticeable underfitting or overfitting. In particular, we have interviewed someone who took 5-MeO-DMT in high doses everyday for six months and who does not seem to suffer from any serious epistemological issues (they contacted me because they had read my analysis of Gura’s month-long experiment and wanted to share their even more extreme experience). The same person has extensive experience (including daily use for months) with DMT, Salvia, DPT and their combinations. They can still hold a technically demanding job and sustain a family despite this. Needless to say, such a level of psychological robustness is exceedingly rare.

Appendix C: The Abstract of the Other Talks

DMTX as a 21st Century Mystery School

A talk by Carl Hayden Smith

This talk will focus on the prospects of being one of the first participants in the world to try DMTX (X=Extended) at Imperial College London (ICL). After being part of the DMT phase 1 and phase 2 trials (over the last 5 years) this research now moves into a whole new level of immersion. During this experiment the peak of the DMT state will be extended thanks to a continuous intravenous drip feeding of the entheogen. This arguably turns this ancient medicine into a new form of technology. Early findings of the research from Chris Timmerman (ICL) suggests that nnDMT produces the same brain signature as the dreaming state. During the extended state we may be better able to explore the hypothesis from Andrew Gallimore that nnDMT actually opens up an entirely novel, orthogonal reality.

The DMTX experiment potentially means that nnDMT could become the base layer of our subjective reality, being combined, exponentially, with everything in life. What are the implications of this? Is there a danger that the psychedelic state is being overly romanticised and that DMTX could be regarded as a new form of bio chemical VR? How will DMTX help with the integration problem? Maybe the problem of bringing our insight back from the liminal space isn’t that these experiences defy verbalization, but that our languages are not yet sufficient enough to describe these experiences.

Increased cortical signal diversity during psychedelic states and visually realistic neural network models of hallucinations

A talk by Michael Schartner

Global states of consciousness – such as general anaesthesia or REM sleep – can be characterised by metrics of signal diversity, showing that diverse cortical activity is a hallmark of consciousness. We found that signal diversity is elevated in classical psychedelic states, possibly explained by a larger repertoire of brain states – which would be in line with reports about openness, novel associations and levelled salience of all experiences during psychedelic states. This coarse description of the brain as a dynamical system with various degrees of diversity in activity is only one dimension to characterise such global states of consciousness. Neural network models of visual perception and its pharmacological perturbation may provide a more mechanistic model, showing how the balanced integration of prior and sensory information into conscious perception is regulated by serotonin.

Note: I am still open to e.g. the external reality of DMT beings. I find it unlikely, but evidence could convince me otherwise. We are not dogmatic about the models we present. Rather, they simply are the current “best fit” for the available evidence in conjunction with parsimony considerations (yes, we could even say that this model is what minimizes our free energy!). Cheers!

References (abstract & talk; Chicago Style):

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Atasoy, S., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M. et al. (2017). Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD. Sci Rep 7, 17661. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-17546-0

Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2018). The entropic brain -revisited. Neuropharmacology142, 167–178. doi:10.1016/j.neuropharm.2018.03.010.

Carhart-Harris, R. L., and Friston, K. J. (2019). REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics. Pharmacol. Rev.71, 316–344. doi:10.1124/pr.118.017160.

Gomez-Emilsson, A. (2017). Quantifying Bliss. https://qualiacomputing.com/2017/06/18/quantifying-bliss-talk-summary/ [Accessed April 30, 2021].

Gomez-Emilsson, A. (2020). Modeling Psychedelic Tracers with QRI’s Psychophysics Toolkit: The Tracer Replication Tool. Qualia Computing. https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/10/09/modeling-psychedelic-tracers-with-qris-psychophysics-toolkit-the-tracer-replication-tool/

Gomez-Emilsson, A. (2020). 5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 Lenses. https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/07/01/5-meo-dmt-vs-nn-dmt-the-9-lenses/ [Accessed April 30, 2021].

Griffiths, R. R., Johnson, M. W., Carducci, M. A., Umbricht, A., Richards, W. A., Richards, B. D., Cosimano, M. P., and Klinedinst, M. A. (2016). Psilocybin produces substantial and sustained decreases in depression and anxiety in patients with life-threatening cancer: A randomized double-blind trial. Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England), 30(12), 1181–1197. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881116675513

Johnson, M. E. (2016). Principia Qualia. https://opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf [Accessed April 30, 2021].

Johnson, M. E. (2017). Why we seek out pleasure: the Symmetry Theory of Homeostatic Regulation https://opentheory.net/2017/05/why-we-seek-out-pleasure-the-symmetry-theory-of-homeostatic-regulation [Accessed April 30, 2021].

Johnson, M. E. (2019). Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything. https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/ [Accessed April 30, 2021].

Lehar, S. (1999). Harmonic Resonance Theory: An Alternative to the “Neuron Doctrine” Paradigm of Neurocomputation to Address Gestalt properties of perception. http://slehar.com/wwwRel/webstuff/hr1/hr1.html [Accessed April 30, 2021].

Luppi, A. I., Vohryzek, J., Kringelbach, M. L., Mediano, P. A. M., Craig, M. M., Adapa, R., Carhart-Harris, R. L., Roseman, L., Pappas, I., Finoia, P., Williams, G. B., Allanson, J., Pickard, J. D., Menon, D. K., Atasoy, S., & Stamatakis, E. A. (2020). Connectome Harmonic Decomposition of Human Brain Dynamics Reveals a Landscape of Consciousness [Preprint]. Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.08.10.244459

Ross, S., Bossis, A., Guss, J., Agin-Liebes, G., Malone, T., Cohen, B., Mennenga, S. E., Belser, A., Kalliontzi, K., Babb, J., Su, Z., Corby, P., & Schmidt, B. L. (2016). Rapid and sustained symptom reduction following psilocybin treatment for anxiety and depression in patients with life-threatening cancer: a randomized controlled trial. Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England), 30(12), 1165–1180. https://doi.org/10.1177/0269881116675512

Safron, A. (2020). “Strengthened Beliefs Under Psychedelics (SEBUS)? A Commentary on “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics”” PsyArXiv. November 30. doi:10.31234/osf.io/zqh4b.

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Wu, L., Gomez-Emilsson, A., and Zuckerman, A. (2020). QRI Psychophysics Toolkit, Qualia Research Institute. https://psychophysics.qualiaresearchinstitute.org

Yaden, D., and Griffiths, R. R. (2020) The Subjective Effects of Psychedelics Are Necessary for Their Enduring Therapeutic Effects. CS Pharmacol. Transl. Sci. 2021, 4, 2, 568–572 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsptsci.0c00194

The Symmetry Theory of Valence: 2020 Presentation

Posted on December 17, 2020 by algekalipso

Presentation Given at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London by Andrés Gómez Emilsson (December 8th 2020)

Authorship note: The Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV) was first introduced by Mike Johnson in Principia Qualia (2015). This 2020 presentation summarizes and extends the theory as developed in subsequent research at the Qualia Research Institute since 2016.

Transcribed with otter.ai. Edited for grammar and clarity by Mackenzie Dion.

Watch the talk on our Youtube channel.

So, the Symmetry Theory of Valence. Just defining terms so that we’re all on the same page. There’s this thing called core affect which is basically what you get when you apply dimensionality reduction techniques to any one of many areas of psychology. There’s a surprisingly robust pair of dimensions that emerge in co-occurrences of words or even descriptions of behavior. These two axes, arousal and valence, seem to account for about 60% of the variance in terms of what information emotional words contain. And I mean, roughly speaking, arousal is the level of activation, how energetic you are, and valence is how good you feel. Most of what I’m going to be talking about is valence. That said, you need to also consider arousal in the picture to know what this is all about. Just a few examples: you have high arousal, high valence, so that would be kind of excitement and anticipation. But you also can have high energy, but not feeling really good, and that would be kind of anxiety or anger or irritation. Likewise, you have depression, which is low arousal, low valence, and serenity is peaceful, blissful calm, that would be low arousal, high valence.

This is just one example of one of the ways in which you can recover these dimensions of valence and arousal. This was a little study we conducted years ago. We were studying people who have experiences with all kinds of substances online. We were giving them the survey, where they were going to describe a particular substance along something like 70 different dimensions. Then I conducted factor analysis on that data set. Interestingly, we have three core dimensions of valence or valence-related axes, which give you a sense of, okay, what is the space of possible effects that you can get from some substances. There were actually six dimensions that emerged, but three of them are valence-related:

We have slow euphoria, which is equivalent to low arousal, high valence with top terms like calming and relieving. The negative predictors of it would be something like anxiety, producing difficult bodily discomfort. Fast euphoria is the sort of thing you get with stimulants, you know, energizing, sociable, the opposite of feeling spaced out and confused.

The other axis that kind of emerged was this notion of spiritual euphoria. That’s the term I used back then. I also used the term significance, or saliency nowadays. Now I would actually use the term criticality for other reasons that we can go into. There’s this other kind of axis for how you can experience intense valence with substances, which is different from slow and fast euphoria, which would roughly correspond to the psychedelic space. And that, you know, gets marked with things such as mystical, incredible, life changing. The opposite of that is trivial, self-centered, or irrelevant or something like that. This is just to complete the cube. And, you know, in a sense…

This is just a kind of change of basis, where you still get, in a sense, the valence dimension emerging out of this dimensionality reduction analysis. If you were to apply just one dimension, you know, if you ask the factor analysis to just give you one factor, it is going to be the valence factor. That’s the axis that accounts for most of the variance for the effects of drugs.

I’ve got to say that I absolutely acknowledge that emotions are far more complex and intricate than just valence and arousal. This is the result of my master’s thesis where we were analyzing this thing called mood updates, how people feel over time, day after day. I was computing the transition probabilities between emotions, and you can do cluster analysis here and finding attractors. You’ll see that there’s additional information. That said, we concluded that a big chunk of the additional information that is not valence and arousal is actually information about your trajectory in the valence arousal space. For example, we found there would be emotions that because of what they tell you about your emotional dynamics we called gateway emotions, like feeling relieved and feeling hopeful. These terms contain information that you were in a negative, kind of depressive attractor, and you’re moving towards the positive high arousal attractor. In essence, the terms we use for emotions give you not only information about where you are in the valence-arousal space but also what is your trajectory in that space. But in a sense, valence and arousal still account for a very, very big chunk of what an emotion is. Okay, so hopefully I’ve convinced you of the importance of valence, at least in this context.

Now, let’s jump into the Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV). The overall hypotheses and the first explicit argument for it appeared in this really, really awesome work by my collaborator, Michael Johnson, Principia Qualia. He has a really interesting skeleton of an argument that points to a lot of research threads that are really worth getting into. I highly recommend digging into this work.

One of the things that it lays out is the kind of conceptual framework to make sense of what type of thing valence might be. I’ll just define a couple terms, which is, first qualia formalism. If there’s one thing at QRI we are married to, you could say, it would be qualia formalism. That is, for any conscious experience, there exists a mathematical object isomorphic to it. We can make an analogy here to something like electromagnetism where we used to have lightning, and electricity, and magnets, and all of that seemed sort of somehow thinly related. But, it turns out that there’s actually just four equations of electromagnetism that tie together all of that phenomena. And you can compare it to something like élan vital, the essence of life. People used to think that maybe there is some kind of a substance that determines whether you’re alive or not. And we would say that, well, that kind of fell through, you know, in the end there is molecular complexity under more molecular complexity. There doesn’t seem to be such a thing as “life itself”. Life is not formalizable in the same way as electromagnetism is, but something that we would claim at QRI or we could even say something that we assume at QRI, because we believe it is a very generative frame, is that yes, there will be a set of deep mathematical structures to consciousness. In particular, if you expand this into other areas, we also think this is going to apply to valence: that there is going to be a deep and rich mathematical structure to valence, and that notion is called valence structuralism.

In Principia Qualia by Mike Johnson, he has this argument for it, which I definitely recommend reading, especially if you have the aesthetic of a physicist. I think you’ll really like this work, because I think it’s really, really good in that sense. What I’m going to do now is try to give you a kind of intuition for it. And then the whole empirical argument.

Importantly, there are a lot of theories of what valence is. Mike looked at the literature, did a very deep dive into it, and realized that they’re usually unsatisfactory, or at the very least, they don’t get at the true core of what an explanation for valence should be like. So basically, you have these accounts of, for example, valence sees how the brain represents value. Ultimately, that’s just a correlation. Value is a fuzzy abstraction. Some people think valence is the presence of opioids in the brain. But if you inject opioids in different parts of the brain, it doesn’t always feel good. It actually needs to be injected in a very narrow range of stripes in the pleasure centers, and otherwise, it just causes strange feelings or wanting, but it’s not the signature of valence itself. Or, for example, the pleasure centers. Just because you’re calling something “the pleasure center”, and it’s correlated with feeling good, it doesn’t mean you have an explanation. It’s not a very insightful, illuminating, account of valence.

So what could it be? I’ll focus to a large extent on what we are going to call bliss, which is just very positive valence. What is that? What is very positive valence? What is the sense of ecstasy, bliss, intense happiness? There’s a lot of intuitions. Definitely a lot of people think it’s some kind of spiritual signal, and I wouldn’t want to convince you out of that view. But the truth is that there are a lot of different spiritualities, and they sometimes say contradictory things. So it’s kind of strange to expect that there’s this underlying universal spiritual signal that whenever you’re doing something aligned with spirit, you feel good. Because sometimes you can do something very different than somebody else and still have that feeling. Also, the idea that it is “merely” chemical reactions in the brain, again, is not a super satisfactory explanation… same as with pleasure centers, health, few prediction errors, etc. Well, and in the end, I add, yes, symmetry and consciousness, which is what I will be arguing.

I also want to point out, and this is super important, that valence is not the same as healing, and it’s not the same as meaning. However, they’re correlated. I would also go as far as to say that high valence is necessary for healing and for meaning to a large extent. In a sense, you can have a lot of very high valence states that are actually very unhealthy for you. Just an example would be methamphetamine. It can feel great, but it’s unsustainable. To the extent that your nervous system is self-organizing around that high valence experience, it makes it kind of the center of your life. And, you know, it’s a dopamine releaser. It’s obviously unsustainable. You can’t actually do that long-term and expect good results. Whereas, something like meditation, or even psychedelics, because their tolerance mechanism is very, very different. You could say that, yeah, those might be high valence, highly meaningful, and also healing experiences.

So I just want to say that, you know, high valence doesn’t entail healing. And that in that sense, you might say, “Okay, why are we so interested in this?”, but I would say that high valence is a necessary condition for deep healing. And I would even go as far as to say that, for a psychedelic experience to be deeply healing, it has to involve high valence in one context or another. Of course, you may end up processing a lot of very difficult emotions. But ideally, it would be something that basically allows you to heal those difficult emotions and transform them into a state of mind that has many more of the positive qualities.

And more so, high valence, even according to the Buddha, is an important factor for awakening. Of the seven factors for awakening, I would actually say about five of them are very connected to valence. Mindfulness, joy, relaxation, concentration, equanimity; they are kind of different flavors of high valence. They’re different ways in which a very high valence experience can manifest. The Buddha says that these are important things. Even if you only care about awakening, enlightenment, you may also care about the mathematics of valence. It might point you in the right direction as well.

I’ll also mention, there’s a big difference between the recipe of a state of consciousness and what you might call the review, or the description, of that state of consciousness. I’ll make an analogy with cooking: if you have cooking instructions for how to make a cake, sometimes it’s very counterintuitive what the cake is going to taste based on those instructions. Like “add yeast” for example. A lot of things in the recipe you may not know exactly how are going to actually affect the result. So, the recipe may look very different from the review of the state. I would say that for a lot of meditation states, or even just general life advice, this idea of don’t mindlessly chasing pleasure or trying to satisfy all of your existing desires compulsively gives counter-intuitive results. Yeah, chasing pleasure compulsively is not going to result in a sustainable high valence. To some extent, a lot of meditation instructions tell you to neither approach nor withdraw from emotions to develop equanimity. Since you are not engaging with your emotions, it sounds like the result is a fully neutral experience, right? It sounds like it’s unrelated to valence, almost cutting out the valence. But I would say: that’s just the recipe. Those are the instructions for how you manage your attention in order to eventually change your brain to actually generate these very healthy, sustainable, high valence states. So I definitely want to overcome this prejudice of thinking that high valence is unrelated to spirituality. No, I think they’re actually very deeply, intimately connected.

Okay, so let’s go into the Symmetry Theory of Valence. I’ll just read these, but we will go into more depth into all of these. So, you know, we talked about qualia formalism, there is a mathematical object whose features are isomorphic to phenomenology. We believe that, yeah, harmony basically feels good because it’s symmetry over time. And basically, there’s kind of this duality between symmetry and space and synchrony in time. We will go over pleasure centers. The way we explain pleasure centers in this theory is that they are kind of tuning knobs (this was first proposed in Principia Qualia). They are there these bridges that, basically, when they get activated, they enable global large-scale synchrony in the brain. This is something that ultimately is very testable. Because if you can activate the pleasure centers, or inhibit whole brain harmony, we predict that’s going to actually negate the positive valence effects of the pleasure centers. Likewise, if we can induce large scale harmony, without activating the pleasure centers, or maybe even inhibiting the pleasure centers, we expect that to be a high valence state. So, it’s a cool, testable interpretation of what pleasure centers even are.

Boredom is kind of an anti symmetry mechanism. So that’s why even if you look at a cathedral or something like that, you’re not going to be happy forever. You’re going to be happy for a little bit. Because your brain realizes that you’re not learning anything, and adds kind of this dissonance in order to make you move on to something else. We are wired in such a way that what helps us reproduce symmetrifies our consciousness. So, it’s not that high calorie food in and of itself is symmetrical, it’s not that it in and of itself is pleasant. It’s more that the way our nervous system is programmed is such that when you eat high calorie food, it triggers high valence. And that triggered high valence is what would be symmetrical, not necessarily the chemicals that you’re eating.

Importantly, valence, we think, has these three dimensions, which is positive, neutral, and negative. And you can actually have highly mixed experiences. You can have experiences, I don’t know, an example is you’re at a concert, enjoying yourself, but also you have to go to the bathroom, and you just broke up with your boyfriend. You can have these very complex mixed valence experiences, where parts of your experience are very pleasant, parts are very distressing, parts of those are very neutral, and that’s fine. At the same time, it still kind of collapses into this ultimately, “Hey, are you having a good time or not?”.

And something that the Symmetry Theory of Valence would say, and this is a pretty interesting kind of relationship, and I’ll explain it in a couple slides. This is just to kind of put it out there in your head to bounce around as we go on, which is that we expect there to be a very, very intimate relationship between information content, and basically the range of valence that you have access to. So in brief, for very, very high valence states of consciousness, we expect those to have very close to zero information. Whereas, when you have this state that is close to pure white noise, we expect that to be basically zero valence. Hopefully, this will make more sense as we go along.

These are just some illustrations of this principle. Actually, we expect that some of the most negative experiences out there will actually be pretty close to very, very highly symmetrical. I put this disjointed lattice at the bottom. And I would claim that something like a bad 5-MeO-DMT experience is actually something that is very regular, except for some strange disjoints, or imperfections, that cause profound dissonance. Whereas, if you’re in the pure noise kind of range, it all feels blah, it all feels really close to neutral.

When we say the state of consciousness is highly symmetrical and such, you know, let’s say, 5-MeO-DMT, or jhanas, or something like that, we expect these to actually show up in many ways. If you look at the biorhythms, like heart rate and breathing, that’s going to show up, symmetry is going to show up in some ways, being a different kind of projection of the latent state. I mean, ultimately, the formalism, you know, this mathematical object corresponds to consciousness is not observable directly, at least not right now. So we have to kind of rely on these projections, these interpretations of what’s going on, these ways of getting at this unobservable, underlying state. And EEG, connectome harmonics, biorhythms, and so on, are different ways of getting at it. I’ll show you at least empirically that it’s all so far consistent with the Symmetry Theory of Valence.

Here’s kind of the big plan. All of these different projections of this underlying state. So we have basically this stimulus. These are kind of visualized also to give you an intuition. So there’s stimuli, basically more symmetrical stimuli with higher valence, then there’s the endogenous bodily state, you know, biorhythms, as well. The CNS State, the actual, okay, what’s going on in your brain, then the formalism, and then the phenomenology of valence. When you have high valence, we expect (and what we see is) that there’s symmetry all across the board, in each of these different ways of looking at the state of consciousness. In each of these projections of the latent state.

So I’ll go on and start with phenomenology. I know that phenomenology is such a tricky thing. It’s so difficult to do, right. It’s so difficult to do. You make a lot of mistakes in phenomenology, get confused, and become self-deceived. So I mean, hopefully, the observation I’ll relate to you is going to show you that at least we’re taking care of some of the failure modes of phenomenology.

So, first of all, we distinguish between intentional content and phenomenal character. So, if you smoke DMT, and you experience, you know, you say something like “I saw a dragon with my own eyes” that doesn’t mean there was actually a mind-independent dragon out there. And, you know, I take seriously your report that you saw a dragon, but I don’t know how significant that is necessarily. On the other hand, if you describe “Oh, and by the way, the dragon had scales that had a symmetry group of what’s called the glide mirror symmetry group, and it had a 17 hertz strobing effect“. Okay, yes, so we’re getting more into the phenomenal character. You’re actually describing what it felt like, not only what it was about. I would make the claim that these observations of symmetry being related to valence are about the phenomenal character. I don’t care that much about, you know, “What was the journey? What was the content of the experience?” I care more about what it felt like, what are the features of it, and what we observe is that there’s a deep connection here.

So I’ll just give you some examples. Basically, introspect. You know, the difference between massage and bodily pain. Massage is kind of this very, very pleasant, harmonious, tactile pattern throughout your body that gives you these very nice waves of pleasure, as opposed to bodily pain. Bodily pain, if you introspect on it, it’s almost kind of like there’s like pinch points and discontinuities and fragmentations and deformations in your sense of self and the continuity of your skin or your felt sense of your inner organs. Basically, I would make the claim that bodily pain always manifests in one way or another as a kind of symmetry breaking operation. Now, definitely keep this in mind if you ever have a pain again, hopefully not.

Also, let’s say anxiety versus relaxation. Anxiety, you could almost describe it as, constant prediction errors. “Oh, did my heart do something strange? Is my leg positioned properly?”. It’s a state of mind where all of these little imperfections bubble up to your awareness. I would say it’s interrupting the flow of your attention and creating these pinch points and deformations in the way you experience the world. As opposed to relaxation, where you’re almost kind of just completely melted into it. And it’s so regular, you can almost filter out most of your bodily sensations. And in that sense I would argue it has a very symmetrical quality.

There’s also this whole argument Mike brings up which is the phenomenology concerning non-adaptiveness, the non-adaptiveness principle, which is that basically, there’s a bunch of things out there that feel really good, but that weren’t in our evolutionary environment. Those are hints; we consider those hints that hey, if something wasn’t in the African savanna but feels great, it probably means that it’s kind of directly hacking into the patterns of valence somehow. We didn’t evolve to filter those out or to not get absorbed by them. And yeah, here are some examples, but I’ll go deeper into those.

Now, there’s also this exotic valence. Bodily pain, anxiety, relaxations: those would be examples of “normal valence”. It’s the valence that we’re all used to. But I would say that also in “strange valences”, like valences in weird states of consciousness, they also follow this pattern. That in some sense, symmetry explains their pleasantness. And I’ll give you some examples.

So, dream music. I’ve had the pleasure or displeasure, you could say, of having had a lot of sleep paralysis and lucid dreams, and this effect is something you can experience in either sleep paralysis or lucid dreams. If you’ve had a lucid dream, where you were making music, or you heard, you’re hallucinating that there was a radio playing, you will notice that, “Oh my gosh, the music can be beautiful, like… incredible”. And this music, maybe you have heard it before, maybe not. Maybe your brain is generating it on the fly. But it has a quality to it that is extraordinarily hedonic and pleasant. And I remember studying this on myself over many lucid dreaming experiences. At first, I thought, “Oh my gosh, my brain is just unlocking this ability to create awesome harmonies and melodies”. But then I ended up realizing that even if I just make a kind of an “om”, this meditation sound, even though that sound is extremely simple, the quality of the sound in the lucid dream is profound. I mean, it’s almost kind of a surround sound, like 360 surround sound, and stereoscopic and full of reverb and richness.

I would claim that it’s actually because, during a dream state, your brain is more resonant. You can kind of enter into these very, very resonant attractors, and it’s that quality that makes the music so compelling, not the melody. If you transcribe the melody, the melody may not be very significant. It was how it sounded that was so profound in the music in the dream.

Then you have meditation. Even these images, maybe, I don’t know if this is cheating, but representations of meditation, like high attainments, and so on, they usually come with these beautiful symmetries and whatnot. If you examine the phenomenology of jhanas, how they’re described, there seems to be kind of this projection of less and less information content in your experience. Going from having all of your attention concentrated in one point to then the experience of completely perfectly smooth, boundless space to then just pure consciousness, and then the experience of neither nothing nor something. In a sense, that’s kind of approaching the limit of zero information. And then people report these jhana experiences, they’re not pleasant in a conventional sense. It’s not like eating ice cream or something like that, but they’re still very, very high valence. They’re blissful, in an exotic way. But, I do want to point out that there’s this fascinating, strange relationship here between low information content and the blissfulness and the healing quality of the state.

And then there is exotic valence from psychedelics. I mean, again, I don’t want you to focus on the intentional content, what was the experience about. What you thought, of course, can influence your valence, but it’s more about the phenomenal character. There’s this phenomena of tracers, you move your hand around, and you see copies laying around, and in a sense, it’s giving a temporal depth to your experience. It’s almost kind of adding a new dimension of time, where qualia can pile up. And usually, if the trip is good, you’ll notice that these tracers are in a harmonic relationship with each other. That is kind of the essence of what makes them feel so good.

Likewise, there’s a psychedelic texture repetition. You stare at a piece of grass on LSD, and it starts to symmetrify. And I would totally say this is exotic valence because you ask the person, and they will say “the ground was symmetrifying, and I don’t know why, but it was awesome”. There was something really cool about it, and why would that be? Our interpretation here is that psychedelics are, in a sense, unlocking the valence capacity of your visual cortex. It’s kind of transforming your cortex into a pleasure machine, basically allowing it to exhibit these profound symmetries, and that is what actually is making them feel so compelling. People will struggle to explain “Why were the visuals cool? Why were they interesting?”. When it comes down to it, I think it is the symmetry.

Interestingly, these are called the wallpaper symmetry groups. There’s 17 possible ways of tessellating a two dimensional space. From subjective reports, we know that any of these can be experienced on a psychedelic. The ground, kind of chaotically, will arrive at one attractor of symmetry. It could be any of these 17, and they all feel great. They’re all extremely aesthetic and beautiful and blissful in one way or another. But it’s kind of a testament to just how general this effect is.

I would make the claim, and this is obviously a strong claim, but it matters for something like therapy, psychedelic therapy. We recently saw this fascinating research on psilocybin for major depression, and that a lot of these effects are mediated by whether you had a mystical experience or not. I would say that if you did have a mystical experience, and it was healing, I would bet that while you were having that experience, the sense of space and time was basically extremely, extremely symmetrical. And here is kind of why it’s so confusing. Because you come back and you say, “Well, I saw Jesus”, and you think that you got healed because of Jesus. I don’t want to dissuade you from that view, but I would basically ask you “Okay, but when you experienced Jesus, what was the feeling of space and time?”. They might say something like, “Oh, it had a beautiful light. It had this beautiful harmony and rainbows”. And I’ll claim that if you introspect on them then that it’s actually the quality of phenomenal space and time that is healing and blissful. The meaning, the religious meaning, is something that is helping your mind basically concentrate on that space, and take it seriously as a way of propagating this negentropy in your nervous system.

Now, another place where this shows up super, super clearly, phenomenologically, is on DMT. I definitely recommend this article we wrote that basically charts the DMT space. You can know a lot about where you are in the DMT space by describing what is your energy level on the one hand, and then what is the information content on the other. I would say DMT states that have close to zero information content would be kind of these geometric, perfectly repeating, symmetry groups, either 2D or 3D. Whereas, more chaotic states would be kind of in the middle. The energy level would be a matter of dose. The “height” you reach is very, very dose-dependent. But then the valence, I think it’s very, very dependent on actually where in the axis of information content you find yourself in.

Here again, there’s this diagram that the most blissful experiences you may have on DMT are going to be on these kinds of honeycombs and perfectly symmetrical patterns. The most unpleasant experiences are going to be just right next to those, they are going to be kind of dissonant honeycombs. Whereas you know, when you get to complex narratives, like machine elves and alien realms and all of that stuff, those experiences would be very mixed in their valence. There’s both dissonance, consonance, symmetry, anti-symmetry; those are very complex experiences.

Now, the information content, we think of them as basically attractors in feedback systems. You may end up in a chaotic attractor, you may end up in a limit cycle or a fixed point. And that will determine how much information content the state has.

Interestingly, this also can be used to describe the difference between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. We think DMT tends to have a lot more information content.

So you have these very rich patterns, and I would say competing synchronies. On DMT, there’s all of these slightly different frequencies that are competing for your attention and creating a narrative out of that. That is like a very mixed experience; it is both blissful and distressing at the same time.

Whereas 5-MeO-DMT, which is described as far more powerful emotionally, tends to give you this sense of pure space, like the feeling of the insight into emptiness, the feeling of infinite boundless consciousness, very little information content. Yet, it’s so emotionally impactful to such an extreme extent.

Interestingly, I would say, the reports do come out that on 5-MeO-DMT, you may have the best experience of your time, or you may have the worst experience of your life. It’s kind of bimodal. It’s either amazing or it’s extremely bad. Often, it starts out really bad and then it gets amazing. I would describe that in terms of kind of this annealing process where it basically starts with dissonance, and, over time, things synchronize, and you do end up where all of your nervous system is entrained to the same frequency, and that feels very, very blissful. Whereas DMT is always kind of in this mixed state. It is very difficult for DMT to be pure negative or pure positive. It’s always this mixed state. So I would say, yeah, this is kind of the phenomenological case for the Symmetry Theory of Valence.

I’m two thirds of the way through the presentation. I’m just gonna walk you through the empirical evidence. So we were talking about phenomenology; that’s one of the projections of this formalism and its symmetry. There’s symmetry in the formalism. It’s gonna manifest in some forms of phenomenological symmetry. Likewise, you know, if you use external stimuli in order to generate a state, like, let’s say, watching a movie, playing music, playing stroboscopic stimulation, there’s a lot of evidence that indicates that the symmetry of the stimuli is the leading factor for how pleasant or unpleasant the resulting state is. We have all of this research in vision.

These are just some examples. It’s so stunning, right? Even if you know the effect, you still get the valence response. You go to a cathedral and think “Okay, I’m not gonna get high valence, I’m not going to get high valence”. You still get the response. It’s pretty automatic. As long as it has this rich, deep symmetry, oftentimes, it’s going to be very beautiful. There’s something very compelling about this.

Just some random pictures to give you a sense of this.

Why does this feel good? It really has very little to do with our ancestral environment.

Anyway, this is such a robust effect that, with the symmetry of faces, for example, even face paint can be used to modify the valence. So, if you don’t have a perfectly symmetrical face, but you add symmetrical face paint with beautiful patterns, you’re going to be judged as more beautiful. It’s just such a strong effect, that it can actually modify your perception of how beautiful somebody is. Likewise, if you add asymmetrical patterns, you look less beautiful. Now, this, I wouldn’t say this is that strong of evidence because this actually does have an evolutionary reason. Symmetry in faces is a marker of mutational load. So I don’t put that much stock in, symmetry of faces being that relevant. But symmetry in other forms is where I think it’s so stunning.

You also see this in symmetry in audio, basically, regular rhythms. Harmony is the leading predictor for whether a sound is going to be pleasant or unpleasant.

You know, this is Helmholtz’s big idea. He was the first one to figure out why playing two notes in a piano that are one semitone apart feels unpleasant. It’s because the harmonics are basically within what’s called the critical window. They generate beat patterns and the beat patterns can be described as basically symmetry breaking operations in the waveform. Those symmetry breaking operations, in essence, cause irritation. So basically, the more beating there is in sound, and the more beating across the spectrum, the more irritating and distracting and rough the sound is going to sound like. Whereas, when you have these harmonic relationships, you play one note, one piano note, and another at an octave of difference, the harmonics line up perfectly. Actually, the sound is very compressible because you don’t have this extra information of where all the other harmonics lie. They’re just the harmonic sequence. And that is universally described as a more pleasant sound.

When you add up all the harmonics, you get these interesting curves. The height here is the amount of dissonance. When you have a relationship of one to two, basically an octave, you have zero dissonance, and that feels really good. Now, music is very complicated. We have to factor in the boredom mechanism. If you just play the same octave over and over, you get bored, and there’s an inner sense of restlessness and dissonance. But if you just hear it for the first time, then there’s a super, super strong relationship between symmetry and valence.

These are just examples of a piano chord.

Dissonant sounds. I can send you a link to all of these sounds after the presentation*, but I have some links for a SoundCloud account where you can kind of get convinced that “Oh gosh, these are actually really bad sounds”. It’s not that I’m saying they’re bad. If you ask 100 people, like 99% of people will say they’re awful.

Likewise, reverb basically symmetrifies any waveform. Reverb is almost kind of this hack that you take almost any dissonant sound and you add reverb to it and is going to sound a lot less bad, a lot less distracting, irritating, and so on. So this is comparing the sound of a baby crying, which by the way, like in our analysis, it shows that babies crying, it’s almost like their sound is optimized for dissonance. It’s almost kind of as dissonant as it gets for a sound made by a human. For good evolutionary reasons, it has to be distracting, and catch your attention, bring the desire to stop it. But you add reverb and to give you a sense, that’s like if the baby was in a huge cave, you get all these echoes averaging out the beat patterns. It sounds way better, way less distracting, probably not good from an evolutionary standpoint. But, it’s just a fascinating kind of transformation you can apply to any waveform.

And here, I just want to illustrate that valence can happen across the spectrum. So I also have this file**, and you’re welcome to listen to it after the presentation where you can have consonance anywhere in the spectrum, mixed in with dissonance anywhere in the spectrum, mixed in with noise anywhere in the spectrum. That ends up basically creating these very mixed states.

So basically, when I say “Oh, I had a mixed experience, a mixed valence experience” that underdetermines what I experienced because we don’t know if the positive part was in the high frequencies or in the low frequencies. We don’t know that. That’s why the full picture of valence would also include the spectrum for positive, negative, and neutral valence. You can have high frequency pleasure, you can have low frequency pleasure, etc. So that kind of explains why there’s a tremendous diversity of possible mixed experiences even though ultimately they’d still come down to symmetry. Deep down, they can all still be explained with symmetry.

Now, endogenously generated symmetry, this is fascinating research. That when you have this “biorhythm coherence” you feel happier. And the way of computing biorhythm coherence is very related to musical consonance. Breathing entrained with heart rate variability is reported as giving rise to a just much, much better positive mood, and is one of the things that long-term meditation achieves. Meditation entrains these biorhythms and basically makes them interlock with one another. That is reported as giving rise to positive mood which is an interesting finding and very consistent with STV.

Here are just some quotes. Cool.

And you know, the heart palpitations. I mean, it’s similar to anxiety in that if you have like this usually regular metronome, and it’s failing, is generating these imperfections, that gives rise to unpleasant states of mind. I’m sure heart disease is terrible for your valence. Likewise, meditation is a wonderful tool for heart disease because it allows you to overcome those imperfections and still feel good despite the problem.

In terms of other endogenously generated symmetry, I will mention orgasm and flow. Orgasm is a powerful generator of endogenous resonance. It’s the entrainment of motor systems to near hallucinations, to synchronizing feedback processes across multiple functional networks. With an orgasm, there’s a deep, deep level of synchrony and symmetry across the nervous system. I highly recommend introspecting on this (not to get into your sex life or anything, though). I mean, it’s something you can actually pay attention to, and it becomes very obvious once you notice it.

Likewise with flow, there’s this evidence that symmetry is deeply related to flow. Two physiological metrics for measuring flow are cortical muscular coherence and a degree of coupling between neural EEG waves and EMG oscillations of muscle activity. So, there’s also these interlocking patterns, lower information content, more symmetry. Yeah, it’s a strong predictor of flow. So like, hey, go figure flow is also symmetrical.

Okay, let’s get into the symmetry in the brain. So this is kind of the other projection you could take of the latent state. If you look at the central nervous system of high valence states, how does the valence show up? And, you know, meditation, like all over the place, basically pretty much any kind of meditation, if done for a long enough time, leads to some kind of EEG coherence. Whether it’s gamma coherence, delta coherence, or alpha coherence, depends on which kind of meditation you do. But they all generate some form of coherence, and coherence in EEG is intimately related with symmetry. I mean, basically, two signals are coherent when they’re both reflections of a shared signal through a reverb pattern, meaning that they’re encoding the same information just through a different filter, which is, again, deeply, deeply connected to symmetry.

Here’s a fascinating study from 2019 that I recommend reading which to me was really stunning. It was stunning in just how clear the connection with the Symmetry Theory of Valence was. The study is about the EEG recordings of the first and second jhanas and the interesting patterns that emerged in them. One of them is this seizure-like activity. Now, seizure-like activity is three to five hertz, and it doesn’t have harmonic structure. I mean most seizures don’t have their harmonics together with them. But the type of seizure-like activity you see on jhanas does have harmonic structure. And the picture here is basically the Fourier transform of the independent components of the EEG recordings. You can see there’s a very clean 5.6 hertz signal, together with its harmonic of 11.23 hertz. This is kind of stunning. Why would this happen? And jhanas feel really blissful. Without the Symmetry Theory of Valence, this is just super surprising and strange. With the Symmetry Theory of Valence it’s like, “Oh, yeah, you’re, feeling a really great symmetrical attractor of your brain and sustaining it”. So that’s going to feel good.

Even you know, ketamine showing high levels of a gamma coherence.

For 5-MeO-DMT, the only dataset I’m aware of, of EEG and 5-MeO-DMT, shows coherence across the spectrum, not only gamma coherence, but also beta coherence, and especially delta coherence. Again, why on earth? The Symmetry Theory of Valence would explain this. It would say, “Yes, this is expected”. Other theories might struggle a bit. Now, I’ve got to say that just because you have high coherence doesn’t mean it’s going to be high valence. We expect also very negative valence could also be high coherence. Except that when you have total coherence, then we expect that to be always positive valence. Again, it’s going to have that relationship because you could still have a high average coherence, but have half of your channels coherent in a certain frequency and half of the other channels coherent in a slightly different frequency. That might actually maximize dissonance. So just average coherence is not enough. You also need to tell whether it’s in harmonic structure or not.

Pleasure in the brain seems to be kind of this distributed effect that also from our point of view would mean it’s actually a whole brain phenomena.

This is about what I was mentioning about the pleasure centers from our point of view. I mean, there’s this research of if you tried to synchronize clocks, and you tried to synchronize neurons, and you put them in a geometric grid. If it’s large enough, you’re not going to usually get full scale synchrony. You might have emergent patches of synchrony or traveling waves of synchrony. But if you also add these random connections across the network and reduce the synaptic path length, then you can unlock the ability for the entire network to enter synchrony. So we think of the pleasure centers as kind of these bridges that are, in a sense, lowering the average synaptic path length across your brain, and therefore enabling similar synchrony across the brain. And that’s the reason why we think the pleasure centers generally feel good when you activate them.

Okay, getting to the end of the presentation. So I’ll just talk about a few near “enemies”. I put “enemies” in quotes, because we actually admire these people. They’re part of our research lineages. I think they’re a very, very key component of any good theory of consciousness. But I think when it comes to valence itself, there’s some explanations in the space that are really close to the Symmetry Theory of Valence, but they’re not exactly what we’re getting at. So there’s this whole account of computational efficiency. The brain likes computational efficiency, but in a sense, you still have to explain why the brain likes computational efficiency- what does this liking manifest as? We use this argument of “passing the bucket” which ideally your theory of valence should avoid. The theory should explain what valence itself is, not only when it gets triggered. These theories of computational efficiency, energy efficiency, we would claim, they’re telling you under what conditions positive valence gets triggered, but they don’t tell you what positive valence itself is. And that’s what the Symmetry Theory of Valence is getting at.

So yeah, these are some of the issues with those, at least as complete theories.

Finally, okay, counter examples. There’s this whole theory I recommend reading called Neural Annealing (by Mike Johnson). But even very neutral energy that neither has harmony or dissonance, can still give rise to very positive feelings because it can give rise to this annealing process. And that’s actually what we believe is going on with psychedelics. Psychedelics gives you what Mike would call semantically neutral energy. And that gives rise to basically this entropic disintegration, a term from Robin Carhart-Harris and the entropic brain hypotheses, which then gives rise to kind of this search, or self-reorganisation that basically will settle on these basins of symmetry. And it’s those that feel good, not the energy that feels good. It is the end result, the attractor that it takes you to.

And this explains, I think, why even somebody can like hot sauce. Hot sauce is kind of this unpleasant stimuli, but it can lead to euphoria. It can lead to this heightened state of energy. If you introspect on the euphoria of hot sauce, it’s not the unpleasant pain in the mouth, it’s that it raises all of your energy, your entire amount of the intensity of your consciousness. You can then notice these resonant waves, and it is those resonant waves that feel good, not the hot sauce itself. So there’s this kind of a step that basically separates one from the other.

I’ll just very quickly, briefly describe one way we’re trying to test the Symmetry Theory of Valence. It is not the only way to test it. I would even argue that, you know, the argument that I here presented is itself a potentially strong argument. But ideally, you know, we generate novel predictions. And this is one of them, which is that we basically expect that the very positive states of consciousness will have a harmonic relationship, basically a consonant relationship between the brain harmonics. Yeah, using the work of Selen Atasoy.

This algorithm of quantifying the amount of consonance in brain harmonics, which is something we were working with, and hopefully will get resolved soon.

We anticipate that, again, if this is true, the Symmetry Theory of Valence would be validated. If it’s not, it doesn’t invalidate it, because there’s many ways in which it can manifest. But when you have harmonics that are in a consonant relationship with each other, and those are the main drivers of your experience, we expect that to be pleasant.

That is, euphoric.

Whereas, when you have harmonics that are dissonant with each other, they generate these intense beating patterns. So we expect that to be described as unpleasant. Again, we don’t know, but we want to check if this is true.

Just a couple testable predictions based on this, which is that we expect psychedelics to enhance the range of valence. Basically, psychedelics enhance energy across the board. Just all of the harmonics have more energy. We expect that some of those combinations will be just very consonant and reported to be very pleasant, some of those will be very dissonant, reported to be unpleasant. Then SSRIs, there’s a lot of research on SSRIs and their blunting effects. They cut the extremes of valence. So, we expect when it comes to harmonics that the SSRIs will be more noisy, less consonant, less dissonant. MDMA, we expect it to be a stable attractor of a few resonant modes that are very consonant with each other. Stimulants would be kind of high frequency consonance. Opiates would be low frequency consonance. Again, this idea that you can be in a good state leaves underdetermined whether there are symmetries in the high frequencies or the low frequencies, and this would disentangle these types of mixed experiences.

These are the last two or three slides which is kind of a case study which is SSRI’s. Roughly speaking, we interpret them as being noise inducers which is why things like orgasm on SSRIs are less intense. Crying is hard. I mean, crying itself is a kind of a dissonant and sometimes consonant, kind of resonant state. On SSRIs you feel kind of spaced out and music enjoyment goes down. So yeah, the way we think of SSRIs is that they’re almost kind of like listening to a white noise machine along your life, so it’s gonna cut off the extremes. It’s gonna blunt both very positive and very negative valence, and it’s gonna just kind of center you in neutral valence.

Whereas psychedelics, they basically kind of purify and intensify your harmonics. And in that sense, you get to have more pleasant and more unpleasant states and both extremes.

Just to remind you: introspect. I compel you, next time you’re on a psychedelic having a mystical experience, introspect on the quality of space and time. I suggest that you will probably be experiencing these kinds of beautiful ripples that are in a harmonic relationship to each other. Please email me if this is true or not true. But that’s the experience so far. And that’s the reason why this can feel so amazing.

The future of mental health, ideally, would be that we can identify, “what are the sources of dissonance in your nervous system?” and then find the shortest path to the smallest change possible that will give rise to sustainable consonance in your nervous system. Whether this is going to be with meditation, a psychedelic session, or yoga, or biofeedback will be person-specific. There’s probably a shortest path from a highly dissonant dysfunctional state to a sustainable consonant state for each person.

And with that I just want to say thank you to other people in the team of QRI. And thank you, Robin, Shamil, and all of you guys for attending this presentation. And to the Centre for Psychedelic Research for hosting this presentation.

Thank you so much.

* BART sound, Baby Crying, Baby Crying w/ Reverb

** Consonance – Noise – Dissonance – Mixed Spectra

Special Thanks to: Mike Johnson who initiated this research direction and has been deeply involved in it for years. To Andrew Zuckerman, Quintin Frerichs, Kenneth Shinozuka, Sean McGowan, Jeremy Hadfield, and Ross Tieman for their contributions to the current work this year. To everyone in the team for their help, support, and love. To our donors for their incredible help. And to you, dear reader. Thank you!

5-MeO-DMT Awakenings: From Naïve Realism to Symmetrical Enlightenment

Posted on May 19, 2020 by algekalipso

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.

Tyranny of the Intentional Object

We tend to believe that what makes us happy is external to us, while in reality happiness is a state of consciousness triggered by external circumstances. Our minds lead us to believe otherwise for evolutionary reasons.

Valence Structuralism

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.”

mam_abudhabi_10_03-56a03a5c5f9b58eba4af6e6b

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.

Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences copy 47

Energy-complexity landscape on DMT

Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences copy 38

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 “network integration“. 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.

Communication between brain networks in people given psilocybin (right) or a non-psychedelic compound (left) (source: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/magic-mushroom-brain/)

Different-arrangements-of-the-coupling-networks

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.

Thank you for reading!

THE END

Qualia Productions Presents: When AI Equals Advanced Incompetence

Posted on December 3, 2019 by algekalipso

By Maggie and Anders Amelin

Letter I: Introduction

We are Maggie & Anders. A mostly harmless Swedish old-timer couple only now beginning to discover the advanced incompetence that is the proto-science — or “alchemy” — of consciousness research. A few centuries ago a philosopher of chemistry could have claimed with a straight face to be quite certain that a substance with negative mass had to be invoked to explain the phenomenon of combustion. Another could have been equally convinced that the chemistry of life involves a special force of nature absent from all non-living matter. A physicist of today may recognize that the study of consciousness has even less experimental foundation than alchemy did, yet be confident that at least it cannot feel like something to be a black hole. Since, obviously, black holes are simple objects and consciousness is a phenomenon which only emerges from “complexity” as high as that of a human brain.

Is there some ultimate substrate, basic to reality and which has properties intrinsic to itself? If so, is elementary sentience one of those properties? Or is it “turtles all the way down” in a long regress where all of reality can be modeled as patterns within patterns within patterns ending in Turing-style “bits”? Or parsimoniously never ending?

Will it turn out to be patterns all the way down, or sentience all the way up? Should people who believe themselves to perhaps be in an ancestor simulation take for granted that consciousness exists for biologically-based people in base-level reality? David Chalmers does. So at least that must be one assumption it is safe to make, isn’t it? And the one about no sentience existing in a black hole. And the one about phlogiston. And the four chemical elements.

This really is good material for silly comedy or artistic satire. To view a modest attempt by us in that direction, please feel encouraged to enjoy this youtube video we made with QRI in mind:

When ignorance is near complete, it is vital to think outside the proverbial box if progress is to be made. However, spontaneous creative speculation is more context-constrained than it feels like, and it rarely correlates all that beautifully with anything useful. Any science has to work via the baby steps of testable predictions. The integrated information theory (IIT) does just that, and has produced encouraging early results. IIT could turn out to be a good starting point for eventually mapping and modeling all of experiential phenomenology. For a perspective, IIT 3.0 may be comparable to how Einstein’s modeling of the photoelectric effect stands in relation to a full-blown theory of quantum gravity. There is a fair bit of ground to cover. We have not been able to find any group more likely than the QRI to speed up the process whereby humanity eventually manages to cover that ground. That is, if they get a whole lot of help in the form of outreach, fundraising and technological development. Early pioneers have big hurdles to overcome, but the difference they can make for the future is enormous.

For those who feel inspired, a nice start is to go through all that is on or linked via the QRI website. Indulge in Principia Qualia. If that leaves you confused on a higher level, you are in good company. With us. We are halfway senile and are not information theorists, neuroscientists or physicists. All we have is a nerdy sense of humor and work experience in areas like marketing and planetary geochemistry. One thing we think we can do is help bridge the gap between “experts” and “lay people”. Instead of “explain it like I am five”, we offer the even greater challenge of explaining it like we are Maggie & Anders. Manage that, and you will definitely be wiser afterwards!

– Maggie & Anders

No qualia or your money back!

Tested for consciousness – zero

Don’t be afraid – she can’t feel anything!

Letter II: State-Space of Matter and State-Space of Consciousness

A core aspect of science is the mapping out of distributions, spectra, and state-spaces of the building blocks of reality. Naturally occurring states of things can be spontaneously discovered. To gain more information about them, one can experimentally alter such states to produce novel ones, and then analyze them in a systematic way.

The full state-space of matter is multidimensional and vast. Zoom in anywhere in it and there will be a number of characteristic physics phenomena appearing there. Within a model of the state-space you can follow independent directions as you move towards regions and points. As an example, you can hold steady at one particular simple chemical configuration. Diamond, say. The stable region of diamond and its emergent properties like high hardness extends certain distances in other parameter directions such as temperature and pressure. The diamond region has neighboring regions with differently structured carbon, such as graphite. Diamond and graphite make for an interesting case since the property of hardness emerges very differently in the two regions. (In the pure carbon state-space the dimensions denoting amounts of all other elements can be said to be there but set to zero). Material properties like hardness can be modeled as static phenomena. According to IIT however, consciousness cannot. It’s still an emergent property of matter though, so just stay in the matter state-space and add a time dimension to it. Then open chains and closed loops of causation emerge as a sort of fundamental level of what matter “does”. Each elementary step of causation may be regarded to produce or intrinsically be some iota of proto-experience. In feedback loops this self-amplifies into states of feeling like something. Many or perhaps most forms of matter can “do” these basic things at various regions of various combinations of parameter settings. Closed causal loops require more delicate fine-tuning in parameter space, so the state-space of nonconscious causation structure is larger than that of conscious structure. The famous “hard problem” has to do with the fact that both an experientially very weak and a very strong state can emerge from the same matter (shown to be the case so far only within brains). A bit like the huge difference in mechanical hardness of diamond and graphite both emerging from the same pure carbon substrate (a word play on “hard” to make it sticky).

Molecular-models-showing-different-types-of-carbon-nanomaterials-categorized-by-their

By the logic of IIT it should be possible to model (in arbitrarily coarse or fine detail) the state-space of all conscious experience whose substrate is all possible physical states of pure carbon. Or at room temperature in any material. And so on. If future advanced versions of IIT turn out to be a success then we may guess there’ll be a significant overlap to allow for a certain “substrate invariance” for hardware that can support intelligence with human-recognizable consciousness. Outside of that there will be a gargantuan additional novel space to explore. It ought to contain maxima of (intrinsic) attractiveness, none of which need to reside within what a biological nervous system can host. Biological evolution has only been able to search through certain parts of the state-space of matter. One thing it has not worked with on Earth is pure carbon. Diamond tooth enamel or carbon nanotube tendons would be useful but no animal has them. What about conscious states? Has biology come close to hit upon any of the optima in those? If all of human sentience is like planet Earth, and all of Terrestrial biologically-based sentience is like the whole Solar System, that leaves an entire extrasolar galaxy out there to explore. (Boarding call: Space X Flight 42 bound for Nanedi Settlement, Mars. Sentinauts please go to the Neuralink check-in terminal).

Of course we don’t currently know how IIT is going to stand up, but thankfully it does make testable predictions. There is, therefore, a beginning of something to be hoped for with it. In a hopeful scenario IIT turns out to be like special relativity, and what QRI is reaching for is like quantum gravity. It will be a process of taking baby steps, for sure. But each step is likely to bring benefits in many ways.

Is any of this making you curious? Then you may enjoy reading “Principia Qualia” and other QRI articles.

– Maggie & Anders

Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything

Posted on November 29, 2019 by algekalipso

QRI‘s co-founder Michael E. Johnson just posted a piece on neural annealing. This is one of QRI’s most important pieces of content to date. I’m very proud of Mike and the team for pulling this off. You can find the full piece here.

Mike writes:

This is QRI’s unified theory of music, meditation, psychedelics, depression, trauma, and emotional processing; the most challenging (and I think beautiful) thing I’ve written in the last three years. I would really appreciate careful comments.

A few takeaways:

Entering high-energy states (i.e., intense emotional states which take some time to ‘process’) is how the brain releases structural stress and adapts to new developments. This is similar to ‘annealing’ in metals, where heat allows atoms to break their bonds, then they search for more stable configurations as they cool.
Brains really do need to anneal regularly to pay down their ‘technical debt’, and if they don’t, they grow brittle and neurotic.
Meditation, music, psychedelics, exercise, dance, sex, tantric practices, EMDR, and breath work all share the same mechanism: a build-up of rhythmic neural resonance that can push the brain into these high-energy states which produce annealing.
Depression is a self-reinforcing perturbation from the natural annealing cycle.
Sometimes the brain needs to rapidly halt information propagation across regions to prevent cascading system failure … we call this ‘trauma’. This is a common and serious disruption of the annealing cycle.
The core psychological changes driven by psychedelics are best understood in terms of the amount and ‘statistical flavor’ of the energy (rhythmic firing) they add to the brain. Different psychedelics will ‘anneal’ different things.
Young brains (and lifelong learners) might not only be more plastic than average, but actually having experience that is objectively more visceral.
A unified theory of emotional updating, depression, trauma, meditation, and psychedelics may give us the tools to build a future that’s substantially better than the present.

(A unification of Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston’s REBUS annealing model, with Selen Atasoy’s Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves paradigm.)