So picture yourself on a random Saturday in the Bay Area. A couple of friends of yours have been dying to try magic mushrooms and know that you are an experienced tripper. They have done weed and MDMA a couple of times, and one of them once had 2 grams of mushrooms with you years ago (probably over a decade now, though you prefer not to count). The other, his boyfriend, has never tried a psychedelic. They are both professionals in the AI world, working either on cutting-edge language models or hardware accelerators. So you decide that a fruitful endeavor would be to watch AI-generated content and see how our relatively AI-informed tripping minds interpret what we see. It’s a neat experiment, right? Anyone can do it. But chances are that explicit “watch parties” with friends would be the most effective.
It’s a remarkably simple setup, really. All you have to do is to get together with friends into AI and/or consciousness, each consume between 1 and 2 grams of mushrooms, and then spend the next 5 hours watching this video:
You will ideally also play the music that comes with the video in a good speaker system and with a great large-screen TV. Why is this a significant experiment, or activity?
Look, I want to avoid the perception that this is simply coming from a sort of “oh mushrooms are trippy, AI art is trippy, if we add them together we will get extra trippy!” heuristic. I mean, there is some logic to this, and in many circumstances it really makes sense. But, guys, we’re doing sophisticated science here! Let me explain.
We have an AI system that is trying to minimize the difference between a prompt and the images it is generating. It is trying to make every part of the image as unexpected as possible given every other part of the picture and the prompt. But on magic mushrooms you parse images differently. How these models ultimately draw inferences is still hotly debated, and it wouldn’t be absurd to find out that some clues are more perceptible in such an altered state.
We decided to simply experience the most generic and reproducible setup possible and so we stuck to watching that video, so it becomes a kind of standard candle for discussion.
I should mention that the other two participants took 2 grams. One of them all at once (soaked in lemon and with ginger juice as a chaser to avoid nausea) and the other took one gram and then about 50 minutes later the second gram. I took half a gram to test the waters (as I sometimes respond really strongly to mushrooms in particular) and had a gram (most likely about 0.8-0.9g) also 50 minutes after the first dose, when it became apparent that I was having a more typical response by then.
The other two participants were very grateful for the experience overall, but they both stated that they thought it was too intense, and they wish they had taken 1 or 1.5g instead. For me the dose was right on target, which I suppose amounted to 1.3-1.4g or so.
The Experience
The video and the music turned out to be perfect. I had a blast. I really couldn’t think of anything more interesting to do on a random Saturday afternoon. First of all, the dose was strong enough for me to have really noticeable effects worth pointing out, but not strong enough that I would get completely side-tracked by internal tangents or worries. I was really energized but euphoric and able to keep it together all of the time, having a lot of familiarity with this territory. Second, I think that the input was really useful for the experience to go well. The images continued to be entertaining and grounding, even. And the music created a vibe of “we made it! we are humanity in the future and we figured out how to solve the climate crisis, AI, and pandemics, and we’re all living a never ending party exploring consciousness”. So at least this created really excellent conditions for my experience.
But most importantly, the task of “look at these images and try to point out things about how the model works that you wouldn’t normally be able to see” was enormously engrossing. Having a deep personal interest in how the mind works and how this differs from how computers work also provided great mental software to play with during this activity.
I will start out by pointing out the most obvious difference in how the experience of watching the video is on 1.3g of mushrooms relative to normal. The biggest difference is in how sensitive one is to randomness in the animation. This is something you can point out literally at any moment of the 11 hour long video (yeah, I know, it’s a shorter loop, which we watched probably around 3.5 times altogether). The change introduced by the zoom makes the algorithm re-paint each region locally in a way that minimizes surprise (modulo the prompt) with its surroundings. And while the local change in color and low-level shape are typically well-coordinated with changes in the region, they are largely random and desynchronized relative to low-level changes elsewhere in the image. This could have been different. For instance, if the model had more non-local update rules, where each local change needs to be made in coordination with changes elsewhere (or at different scales!) then we would be seeing (and noticing in the psychedelic state!) many more correlations in how the video evolves. Instead, we get a setup that almost sort of maximizes the individual brightness of each local change precisely because it occurs in relative isolation, and thus stands out. In a way, looking at this video while on mushrooms makes the experience very “pointillistic”.
Relaxation of Beliefs vs. Expanded Repertoire of Harmonic Modes
Now, the standard explanation for why on a psychedelic we would experience these local changes as brighter than when one is sober is that the state sensitizes you to low-level sensory signals over the perceptual priors we rely on to compress our experience and highlight only what’s out of line. In other words, this is the story where top-down priors are loosened and thus allowing for bottom-up sensations to drive the state more directly than they usually would.
But I think that we can enrich this explanation with a more gear-level account. Namely, if we think, simplistically, that each state of consciousness is decently approximated by a superposition of harmonic resonant modes in each of our sensory channels as well as globally, then psilocybin’s role would be to increase the amplitude of these resonant modes and especially that of higher frequency ones. In turn, the typical landscape of harmonic coupling gets overwhelmed by the non-linearities emergent in the new regime, which give rise to a wide repertoire of possible ways for harmonics to (fleetingly) couple together. As a consequence, we have a wider (but unreliable!) set of building blocks (as resonant modes coupled together to form gestalts) with which to make sense of sensory information. In other words, it’s not (only) that the “perceptual filters” are down, as both Huxley and perhaps standard predictive processing explanations would have you believe, but there is also an enrichment of internal resonant modes that can function as more complex priors useful for perceptual processing.
What this means in practice is that you will be overfitting your sensory input a larger fraction of the time. The garden full of overgrown grass and leaves can look like a complex network of hypercubes on DMT or on a high dose of mushrooms. This is obviously not because that shape is really latent in the stimuli. Rather, that among the non-linear resonant modes that you now internally have available to sample from in order to fit together the information coming from the senses there is an entirely new class of non-Euclidean and also higher dimensional gestalt configurations. In a way, they are the possible data-structures for ordering large bundles of local binding connections into coherent structures with long-range correlations. But in this case, it is overwhelmingly likely that you are overfitting on the data: the grass and the leaves are a source of partially structured randomness that the normal visual system correctly interprets as stochastic whereas the tripping brain over-thinks it far beyond the necessary.
That said, as with psychedelic cryptography more broadly, I do very much believe that it is possible to create input that specifically looks ordered in the right way on a psychedelic but not sober. For instance, a case where indeed the movement of dots in a screen are very well approximated by certain projection of a hypercube on a hyperbolic plane, so that on a psychedelic you actually tap into one of those possible “solitons” of the mind and correctly represent it. Here one would be finding a specific visual task where its model complexity is indeed adequate for a psychedelic but not for the normal visual system. I would in particular, expect that psychedelic states of mind would work really well as kind of a “reverse fractal diffusion” system, where you can “click” into fractals hidden in the screen that were noised in some way. I.e. where the possible fractal gestalts that become available on psychedelics turn out to be a great approximation for the image in a way that generalizes.
Now, given the way in which our brain might use superposition of harmonic modes as one of its primary ways of modulating the contents of the world simulation, then we could _define_ randomness _relative_ to this system. In particular, it might be a good approximation for us to think of randomness as the degree to which the input is “incompressible with harmonic modes”. After all, JPEG is quite a good image compressor for humans. In other words, while some number theoretic properties are certainly not random (if anything, they are superdeterministic, in that they are true in all possible universes), they are random from the point of view of the human visual (tactile, etc.) system. Looking for patterns in prime numbers is so trippy because they are deterministic and yet an adversarial case for our pattern-detection system (don’t get me started on looking for patterns in Pi). So that which cannot be compressed as an interaction between harmonic resonant modes stands out as inexplicable from a subjective point of view, even if there is a real pattern underneath that is simply poorly compressible with harmonic modes.
So one story says that the relative strength of our priors to our sensory input is flipped over. The other story says that the inner repertoire of representations increases and that as a consequence you will be more prone to interpret randomness as a pattern simply due to having more categories of patterns to sample from. How are these stories connected?
Here is what I think.
The Annealing Process
First of all, I think the dynamics are key (cf. mettannealing). A whole psychedelic experience can be seen as an annealing process and we need to be aware of this to make sense of each stage of the trip (Psychedelic Information Theory, Neural Field Annealing). I think that psychedelics inherently activate some low-level cellular-automata-like reaction-diffusion-like processes that make your experience buzz all throughout and causes many of the pre-existing correlations learned by your system to break down. At first, in desynchronized ways. During this phase, the video looked like it was undergoing a process of defabrication. The elements were more disconnected from each other, sort of drifting apart into their own island realities. And the parsing of the scene was highly pointillistic.
Then, I think that as these low-level patterns begin to coordinate with each other, they start to form groups and clusters where they form networks of resonance. In this phase the experience is characterized by the evolution of signals, where different parts of your experience are trying to connect with one another, sending waves to each other and adjusting their mutual shape in order to be able to send and receive signals more efficiently. Here many parts of the video worked as makeshift transmission fields for patterns to communicate with each other.
Then you have a long period where the common themes on the “surviving” patterns of the ecosystem are dancing with each other. Once the pieces of the puzzle are set in place, then you explore their many possible configurations and interactions. But at this point you aren’t making entirely new pieces. So during this phase, the video emphasized the complex relationships between the parts. In essence, the main archetypes that you arrived at during the process of deconstruction go as far as they can in cooperating with one another to make the experience as great as possible (in this case).
And finally you have a comedown and a subtle long-tail, both characterized by the loss of access to the memory of the process (if not somehow encoded in clever ways or recorded in audio or writing) except for a recurring sort of revising of the main emotionally impactful takeaways of the experience.
So I would say that both stories are part of the picture. In that the first story explains the start of this annealing process, where you become sensitized to low-level sensory inputs. But then as the canvas of patterns gets painted and you have the start of competition for attention and connection, you actually explore a wide range of new primitives that can be used to make sense of very complex relationships (which risks overfitting, but might also be legitimately necessary for some categories of insights or realizations). In other words, there is a phase of the process where the evolutionary dynamics generate a layered ecosystem of resonant modes, and these in turn enrich the range of model complexities you can afford to use to represent sensory data.
Now, importantly, the video precisely lacks many of the long-range correlations that are more characteristic of the psychedelic state. This actually, in my estimation, made the experience somewhat more DMT-like, in that the low-level detail always attracted a lot of the attention, as opposed to being more centered on the intermediate-sized gestalts.
The state I was in during the peak of the experience would hallucinate a lot of long-range correlations that I really don’t think are present in the video as such. It was as if the lack of global coordination between the low-level patterns left my pattern-detection systems really hungry, and with the enriched repertoire of possible models, they would find really implausible but technically accurate fits. For instance, here the visual system was really trying its best to reconstruct the pattern of light in the grid as a meaningful optical effect coming from some symmetrical prisms rather than admit that it is random:
In this case, I think my visual system was really using all of the available complexity in the repertoire of resonant couplings on hand and legitimately “thought” that it was a good fit of the data. And of course if there were reasons for those new priors to be there (like that the movie was constructed with them in mind) then they would be picking up on real signals. Here, I’m pretty sure, it was a case of overfitting.
It is worth noting that the valence of the consciousmodel ultimately matters just as much, if not more, than that of the sensory input per se. I actually think that this video wasn’t particularly valence-maximizing. I think for that you would benefit from carefully curated videos with soft harmonic resonance coupling in really elegant ways. This video instead was rather sort of maximizing a certain kind of visual interestingness, in that it compellingly creates the illusion of a structured generator behind the scene even when it is smoke and mirrors, and is rich enough to grip you without being so rich that you miss out on detail.
Lensing
There’s one important exception to the absence of long-range correlations in the video. And that is when “lensing” effects take place.
When you have a pattern that repeats over a long distance, then the little “update waves” that the pattern emits do tend to have the habit of entering into coherence. When the pattern curves, then the waves can in a way become concentrated, and as such, function as a kind of “lens” (cf. Reverse Grassfire Algorithm). When this happens, the image does pulse and vibrate in coherent ways, which is especially nice while on a psychedelic. So I really cherished the moments when lensing would happen in this video.
Another way of looking at these lensing effects comes from thinking of the model as a series of non-linear activation layers for receptive fields of increasing abstraction. In this case, we can actually expect interesting lensing effects, because a coherent wavefront might make a large-enough area look similar enough in order to trigger the detection of a broader gestalt. So in a way, we could say that this model does have some degree of psychedelia inherent in it, though it is far from optimized. Lensing-aware and lensing-optimized networks should be doable.
Importantly, because lensing _is_ present in both the visual field on psychedelics and in this model, there is an especially strong effect from symmetrical alignments in this video and the state we were in, making us say “oh my god” when strong lensing would happen. That said, this non-linear amplification of waves that results in large-scale coordination of gestalts could be greatly enhanced in the model by adding correlated changes across the scene. I’d even predict that the “interaction length” variable of a model like this that has adjustable long-range correlations would be a good proxy for the “degree of trippiness” of the imagery.
A Geometric Deep Learning-Inspired Model of Psychedelic Action
This takes me to another key way in which the video isn’t exactly as psychedelic as it could be. This involves a brief discussion about geometric deep learning. One of the main insights of this field is a way to make sense of how neural networks overcome the curse of dimensionality. In other words, why is it that a model with so many parameters doesn’t automatically just massively overfit the data? And why does the model converge so fast, relative to what you’d expect given the complexity of the patterns it figures out how to detect?
Here the idea is that the way in which we construct neural networks actually has in-built assumptions that significantly reduce the state-space that they are exploring. In particular, two key assumptions are built-in: symmetries in the input, and scale-separation in the outputs.
The symmetries in the input deal with the type of space the data comes from. When you’re in 2D Euclidean spaces, then rotation, translation, and reflection might all count as the symmetries of your space (cf. Klein’s conception of geometry). And it turns out that a key principle behind choosing the right neural networks for a given task is that the in-built symmetries it assumes correspond to the symmetries of the space it is actually sampling from. Thus, convolutional neural networks are a good fit for datasets where you want to enforce translational invariance (a cat is a cat, no matter if it is on the left or the right part of the screen) but not a good fit when the specific location of a pattern actually matters for its classification. Nevertheless, we can say that one of the fascinating things about psychedelic states is that you do seem to experience new exotic geometric primitives. Indeed, a computational interpretation of, say, a hyperbolic spinning wheel on DMT, is that you are applying a _space prior_ over a region of your experience such that the symmetries of that space are enforced in that region. Thus, psychedelic symmetries are, in a deep way, geometric priors over sensory input. But this only really makes sense once you zoom out of traditional deep learning principle and take into account the insights of geometric deep learning (cf. the inventor’s paradox).
The second in-built assumption that comes from how we build neural networks is scale-separation. Here the key is to realize that many of our networks have “pooling” layers where low-level details are aggregated across a region. This way of treating the data gives rise to an implicit assumption about how the information is structured. And that is that patterns of a given size are expected to interact with patterns of roughly the same size. Importantly, too, that categories exist at a certain scale, meaning, that concepts like “a face” encapsulate lower-level features together (nose, eyes, mouth) that are spatially contained _within_. In other words, the way we make sense of visual data using these networks assumes that there is a very specific, highly local, way by which low-level features are put together to form higher level features.
An example of a dataset that would violate this scale-separation assumption would be one where faces need the high frequency elements of eyes to be a certain distance away from the rest of the features. Here the gestalt that one needs to learn to recognize incorporates low-level features into higher level features in an anomalous (highly distributed) way. Then again, this is something that future neural network architectures can play with. Namely, _relaxing_ the degree of scale-separation that is enforced.
Put together, we now have a picture of psychedelic effects in terms familiar to geometric deep learning. Namely, we are sampling geometric priors from an expanded repertoire of possible symmetries (!). In this way, psychedelics could be thought of as relaxing geometric (typically Euclidean) priors in favor of a long-tail of (hyperbolic and higher dimensional) priors. In parallel, we observe that the degree to which long-range correlations are detected and experienced on psychedelics is greatly amplified, especially if they can be compressed as harmonic waves at a different scale. Importantly, there is more coupling between scales on psychedelics, giving rise to a relaxation of the scale-separation priors our system typically works with. Thus, I reckon we can see the psychedelic state precisely as one where scale-separation constraints are relaxed (!). Meaning that, the psychedelic state has broader geometric priors and less scale-separation in its assumptions about the structure of sensory data. A more universal, albeit slower and maladaptive in our current environment, form of qualia computation.
The verdict?
In many ways, the video we saw was fascinating. The constant stream of novelty was endlessly stimulating. In many other ways, it was maximally boring: it precisely lacked the sublime long-range correlations that make psychedelics so delightful. But when they did happen (via lensing effects) they were especially glorious. It became apparent how a much more interesting video to watch will become viable when a broader set of geometric and scale-separation priors are explored in models like these. But on the whole, I thought it was a delightful experience. And my friends were, in their words, quite pleased. A wholesome Saturday evening in the Bay I’ll always remember fondly.
I am delighted to say that I will be delivering a workshop at Vibe Camp on Saturday the 17th of June:
Time: 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Location: Fire Circle
Title: Explore the State-Space of Consciousness with QRI – GET YOUR VIBE CAMP RECORDER (scent)
Description: Come to learn useful techniques to navigate the state-space of consciousness and pick up your VCR (Vibe Camp Recorder), a scent created in honor of this event, which will “record” this day forever in your memory. It is both pleasant and very distinctive, so that every time you smell it again you will vividly remember this day.
Thank you Hunter for designing this sticker. cf. Scents by QRI.
I will be arriving on the 19th of June and staying until the 26th. If you see me, don’t be shy! Please say hi.
#PS23 will be a moment in time. People will say “were you there?” It is a celebration of MAPS’ and the field’s accomplishments. #Excited
— Robin Carhart-Harris (@RCarhartHarris) June 7, 2023
We are going to host a QRI Meetup (cf. London, Valenciaga) on the 23rd or 24th, place TBD but near the conference. Please reach out if you want to volunteer. Stay tuned 🙂
PhilaDelic 2023
I will be delivering the following talk. Please come say hi!
Talk Abstract: The paradigm of Neural Annealing developed at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI) by Andrés Gómez Emilsson and Michael E. Johnson has a lot of explanatory power in the context of meditation and exotic states of consciousness such as those induced by psychedelic agents. The theory posits that there is a sense in which each state of consciousness has an associated level of energy, that there are specific energy sinks and sources in the nervous system, and that internal representations can be modified (and indeed “internal stress” released) with an appropriate heating and cooling schedule (aka. neural annealing). More recently, the theory has been enriched with “non-linear wave computing“, which might be capable of formalizing the concept of a (phenomenal) “vibe” for internal representations. Of special interest for the scientific community studying psychedelics and meditation is the recent QRI model of Neural Field Annealing, which combines Hebbian learning with Neural Annealing in order to explain why “highly annealed brains” can instantiate harmonic field behavior (such as the Jhanas). In this talk Andrés will provide an overview of the theory, share empirical findings, and discuss its testability based on its unique predictions.
The first time I discussed this approach to the boundary problem was for a presentation I was going to give at The Science of Consciousness 2020 (see: Qualia Computing at: TSC 2020, IPS 2020, unSCruz 2020, and Ephemerisle 2020). Alas, COVID happened. Now, thanks to the amazing Chris Percy, who joined QRI as a visiting scholar in 2022 and has been killing it as a collaborator, we have a thoroughly researched paper we can point to for this solution. Please send us feedback, cite it, and join the conversation. I believe this is one of the most significant contributions of QRI to philosophy of mind to date, and I hope high-quality engagement with it by physicists will only make it better. Thank you!
Abstract:
The boundary problem is related to the binding problem, part of a family of puzzles and phenomenal experiences that theories of consciousness (ToC) must either explain or eliminate. By comparison with the phenomenal binding problem, the boundary problem has received very little scholarly attention since first framed in detail by Rosengard in 1998, despite discussion by Chalmers in his widely cited 2016 work on the combination problem. However, any ToC that addresses the binding problem must also address the boundary problem. The binding problem asks how a unified first person perspective (1PP) can bind experiences across multiple physically distinct activities, whether billions of individual neurons firing or some other underlying phenomenon. To a first approximation, the boundary problem asks why we experience hard boundaries around those unified 1PPs and why the boundaries operate at their apparent spatiotemporal scale. We review recent discussion of the boundary problem, identifying several promising avenues but none that yet address all aspects of the problem. We set out five specific boundary problems to aid precision in future efforts. We also examine electromagnetic (EM) field theories in detail, given their previous success with the binding problem, and introduce a feature with the necessary characteristics to address the boundary problem at a conceptual level. Topological segmentation can, in principle, create exactly the hard boundaries desired, enclosing holistic, frame-invariant units capable of effecting downward causality. The conclusion outlines a programme for testing this concept, describing how it might also differentiate between competing EM ToCs.
QRI’s Consciousness Art Contests: Immerse, Innovate, and Inspire
Congratulations to the winners of QRI’s Art Contests! (contest announcement). Many thanks to all of the participants! You guys did really great! We will share all of the submissions for which the artists gave us permission to post in the near future; and in my opinion, there were simply too many amazing submissions that didn’t get a prize. We asked the community for awesome content, and they delivered!
In 2015 I wrote a blogpost in Qualia Computing titled "How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD" where I introduced the idea of Psychedelic Cryptography.
This is the idea of using encoding schemes to hide messages by using the unique information processing advantages of… https://t.co/ECvIBO1IdH
— Andrés Gómez Emilsson (@algekalipso) June 2, 2023
Psychedelic Epistemology: The Think Tank Approach
I want to express gratitude to the panel of judges who diligently worked to evaluate each of the submissions along key dimensions in agreement with the contest specifications. To provide a little background about the panel, I should mention that since early 2020 QRI has been periodically hosting a “Phenomenology Club” by invitation only which gathers top scientists, philosophers, artists, meditators, and psychonauts. We usually choose a particular topic to discuss (e.g. comparing specific kinds of pains or pleasures), or otherwise interview someone with extensive experience with a particular facet of consciousness. For example, we once interviewed three people all of whom have tried taking 5-MeO-DMT in high doses every day for at least a month (i.e. Leo Gura isn’t the only one who has done this!). Really, we are able to do this because QRI has functioned as a beacon to attract highly experienced rational psychonauts and people seriously interested about the nature of consciousness since ~2017. It is out of this pool of world-class phenomenologists from which the panel of judges was formed. The panel includes people who have had over 1,000 high-dose experiences with LSD, psilocybin, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, dissociatives, and a vast experience with meditative practices like the Jhanas and the process of insight. More so, in order to evaluate the PsyCrypto submission, some of the judges took psilocybin mushrooms and ayahuasca in a place where it is legal to do so. They all gathered to look at and discuss the submissions sober, then while on mushrooms, then sober again, then while on ayahuasca, and then sober again, and only then they were told about the “encryption key” the contestants submitted, and then they had yet another chance to look at them on either mushrooms or ayahuasca while knowing what it is that they were supposed to see. Most of the judges reported that the winning submissions did in fact work. So I am fairly confident that they do.
Similarly, for the Replications contest, the judges looked at the submissions before, during, and after mushrooms and ayahuasca so that they would have a very fresh impression of what these states are like in order to make accurate and technically precise judgements. Hence the detailed and object-level feedback for the top 10 submissions we were able to provide.
Importantly, at QRI we believe that this is the kind of “facing up to the empirical facts” of psychedelic states of consciousness that will actually advance the science of consciousness (aka. the “think tank approach“). This approach stands in stark contrast with, just to give an example: giving surveys to drug-naïve individuals (exclusion criteria incl. “lifetime prevalence of hallucinogens or MDMA use >20 times”) and having them blindly try either LSD or “candy flipping” [MDMA + LSD], a methodology that apparently allows you to conclude that MDMA doesn’t add anything noteworthy to the experience:
As a simple metaphor, imagine what would it take to make genuine progress in the science of electromagnetism. Would you approach the problem of figuring out how magnets work by putting people who have never seen magnets in a room to play with them for a few minutes and then asking them to fill out a questionnaire about their experience? Or… would it perhaps be more fruitful to gather a team of top mathematicians and visual artists who are very experienced magnet-users and allow them to play with them in any way they want, talk extensively with one another, and generate models, predictions, and visualizations of the phenomenon at hand? Which approach do you think would have better chances of arriving at a derivation of Maxwell’s Equations?
Well, you probably know my answer to that question, as QRI is “Psychedelic Think Tank Approach Central”, and we are damn proud of it 🙂
See: 5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 Lenses (video), which is the sort of content that could only ever be generated with a Think Tank Approach to exotic states of consciousness.
It’s amazing to me how people feel, at times, in a hurry to try to explain away anything interesting involving psychedelics with catch-all ideas like “it’s just slower processing” or “it’s just the result of messing with feedback, nothing to see here” (cf. Need For Closure Scale).
The winners of the PsyCrypto contest used the lowest hanging fruit idea for how to do PsyCrypto. It’s amazing that it works, and it does show a computational advantage that isn’t present in normal states of consciousness. And this isn’t trivial! In fact tracers in general affect how you think at a deep level, allowing for thoughts and feelings that never overlap in everyday life to actually show up together in your experiential field at once. This lingering effect increases the internal cross-pollination of information categories in one’s mind. This allows you to make completely new connections in your mind; hooking tracers with field computing is computationally non-trivial. More on this later.
But… also there is a plethora of more sophisticated approaches. I won’t say much more right now, but essentially PsyCrypto can be done in entirely different ways than using tracers. This includes things like pareidolia, color gradients, and detection of movement. And it is these novel approaches that will show the even more interesting computational advantages to the state.
We ain’t seen nothing yet. We’re at the dawn of a new era 🙂
Now, in the wake of our announcement of the PsyCrypto winners, as I very much anticipated, I got an email from Vice:
Dear Andrés,
I’m a science reporter for VICE. Great to be in touch.I’m reaching out about the results of the Qualia Research Institute’s Psychedelic Cryptography Contest, which is a story we’d love to share with our readers.
I was hoping you could answer a few questions about the contest. I wrote them out here in case it’s more convenient to respond over email, but I’m also available for a phone or Zoom call anytime before 3:30pm Eastern Daylight Time today if that works better. Thanks so much and hope to connect.
1. First, I’d love to know what inspired this contest. What are you and your colleagues at QRI hoping to learn and achieve with the Psychedelic Cryptography Contest?
2. On the page announcing the results, you note that “only three submissions seemed to have any promising psychedelic cryptography effects” and that “to decode these pieces you do require a substantial level of tracers.” Why were these three submissions so much more effective than the rest of entries to this contest? Were they the only ones to use the “first classic PsyCrypto encoding method” that is described in your recent blog post, or was there another reason they stood out from the rest?
3. You note that these PsyCrypto experiments can open up new avenues of research in the fields of neuroscience and consciousness. What are some of the open questions in these fields that you think PsyCrypto encoding could help to constrain or resolve?
4. Last, do you and your colleagues QRI have any plans to build on these findings about PsyCrypto with other future studies, contests, or related projects?
Much appreciated! Best, XXXX
Sent June 6 at 9:05 AM
And my response:
Dear XXXX,
Awesome! Science reporter? It sounds like we’re getting an upgrade 🙂 QRI, that is. Mom, I’m on Vice!
Ok, forgive that. I’m just very stoked about the warm reception that PsyCrypto has been getting in the last couple of days. We made it into the front page of Hacker News and I’ve been receiving emails from neuroscientists and artists. […]. So I’m in a good mood 🙂
[…]
I’m more than happy to answer your questions here.
1. I first came up with the idea of PsyCrypto over 10 years ago, while in grad school. I was throwing into the air some spinning glow sticks in the darkness and noticing the patterns that would arise from their trajectory in space. I realized that the lighting conditions were ideal for me to actually make sense of their movement, and wondered if it would be in fact easier to see that path while on psychedelics, given their well-known tracer effects. I immediately coded up some experiments to hide letters using that idea and gave the code to some friends, who then reported some mild but noticeable improved ability to read them while on LSD. After that, I brainstormed a number of alternative encoding methods, coined the term Psychedelic Cryptography, and a couple of years later wrote the Qualia Computing article you saw.
Now, this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Already in 2011 I was a fan of David Pearce and his philosophy of mind (see physicalism.com). In essence, his view is that consciousness evolved because it has information processing advantages. In particular, phenomenal binding, he believes, is not a classical phenomenon. It is in fact enormously computationally beneficial, as we can learn from disorders of consciousness where binding partially breaks down.
So even then I was actively in the lookout for ways to demonstrate how consciousness actually confers an information processing advantage. And psychedelics, to me, felt like very fertile territory to explore this idea. In essence, people have reported all sorts of information processing benefits from psychedelics (e.g. the classic study of Harman and Fadiman of psychedelics for problem solving). But this is still controversial, so to me PsyCrypto is a way to show the undeniable benefits (and tradeoffs!) in terms of information processing that different states of consciousness confer.
The more PsyCrypto encoding schemes are identified and developed, the more this research direction is advanced. It is the emerging field of “Qualia Computing”. Namely, the study of the ways in which consciousness is computationally non-trivial. 🙂
We believe that the contest furthers this mission, and that opening up the project to a broader audience, with prizes and recognition for winning, can drastically accelerate this research direction.
2. The top three submissions were the only ones that worked at all according to our team of expect phenomenologists. They tried really, really hard to find messages in every submission while on mushrooms and ayahuasca (at places where these substances are perfectly legal) and none of the other submissions had anything worth commenting on (sorry!). I think many people misunderstood the task, tried something random without checking if it works first, or simply crossed their fingers and hoped.that their images would look different enough on psychedelics to contain new and meaningful information. But alas, no. Only the three winners had anything resembling PsyCrypto in them. And to top it off, they were also very aesthetically pleasing. So they are, in my mind, real rockstars 🙂
I do expect a dramatic improvement in the quality of submissions next time we run this contest, though.
Very importantly, based on recent work at QRI, I am convinced that there are at least 3-4 completely new and mind-blowing ways to achieve PsyCrypto that do not use tracers at all. The tracers are, in a way, the trivial case. The new PsyCrypto encoding schemes are… Far more surprising and non-trivial. We will publish more information about them in the near future.
3. Yes, absolutely. In essence, I believe that novel PsyCrypto encoding schemes are a window into the actual information processing algorithms of the visual system. At the risk of sounding fringe, I am not impressed with the current mainstream neuroscience models of how psychedelics work or how they alter visual perception. Yes, one can see tunnels and 2D symmetrical tessellations while on psychedelics. But actually… One can *also* experience hyperbolic honeycombs, 4D projective transformations, and fast spatiotemporal Fourier transforms of non-linear resonance. I am sorry, but no current neuroscientific theory *predicts* this. So we are currently in what David Pearce calls the pre-Galilean era for theories of consciousness. Like the (apocryphal) story of the priests not wanting to look through the telescope of Galileo because “the Bible already tells you the truth about the heavens”, similarly right now most theories of how the visual system work are not taking into account the facts of what happens on, say, DMT. Don’t ever let the theory dictate the facts! Instead, let the facts dictate the theory (see: my presentation about psychedelic epistemology).
Therefore we think that by developing encryption schemes that use *phenomenological facts* such as hyperbolic geometry on DMT (https://youtu.be/loCBvaj4eSg) we will radically transform the conversation about how consciousness works and what its information processing properties are. Once you show that those geometries can be used for information processing, and that humans in the right state of consciousness display such advantages, then it becomes undeniable that they are in fact using such exotic geometry for computation. I believe this will set the trajectory of the history of consciousness in very unexpected ways. Indeed, superintelligence won’t be achieved with AI, but with consciousness engineering.
4. Yes. Now, please note that PsyCrypto and in fact psychedelic phenomenology research is only a part of what the Qualia Research Institute does. We have serious work in philosophy of mind, ethics, valence, neurotechnology, and neuroscience, to name a few. We are extremely prolific given our shoestring budget, tiny number of members, and relatively low profile in academia. But I am confident that as we keep producing world class outputs in all of these fields, QRI will become far more influential and mainstream 🙂
Ultimately, my mission is to prevent all future suffering (see my TEDx talk) and figure out how to enable all sentient beings to experience long-term sustainable blissful states at will. This mission is enormously ambitious, but hey, that’s what I want to do with this one life I have. And so is the mission of the other members of QRI. Let’s get to work! 🙂
Thank you! And please let me know if I can clarify anything.
Infinite bliss!
Sent via email June 6 at 4:30PM
And given this, I really thought that the resulting Vice post was actually really stellar. Thank you! 🙂
We titled the series Qualia Mastery – Building Your Toolkit for Navigating the State-Space of Consciousness.
Qualia Mastery, a concept I introduced in a review of a Jhana meditation retreat, is, in a nutshell, the self-organizing vector that cultivates the tools and practices needed to achieve the following three goals:
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
May this be of benefit to you and all sentient beings! And also, have fun!
The Qualia Research Institute (QRI) is excited to announce the launch of three Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness (NSCs) Art Contests: Immerse, Innovate, and Inspire with submissions accepted until 5/17/2023. Examples of non-ordinary states of consciousness are psychedelic experiences, meditative experiences like the jhanas, and near-death experiences.
Our objective is to highlight the reciprocal relationship between art and consciousness research, enabling artists to create lifelike representations of non-ordinary states of consciousness, and contribute to the development of consciousness studies and psychedelic science.
About the Qualia Research Institute
The Qualia Research Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing our understanding of consciousness. Its mission is to:
Develop a precise mathematical language for describing subjective experience
Map out the full range of possible conscious experiences
Build technologies to improve the lives of sentient beings
Replication Contest (Immerse): Entries will be judged based on transparent and interpretable qualities that accurately capture the low-level subjective effects experienced in non-ordinary states of consciousness.
Psychedelic Cryptography Contest (Innovate): Artists are invited to create encodings of sensory information that are only meaningful when experienced on psychedelics in order to show the specific information-processing advantages of those states.
For the sake of transparency and to benefit the community as a whole, QRI reserves the right to publish the winning submissions made by contestants on its website. Artists retain their intellectual property rights, allowing them control over their artwork’s use and distribution. However, QRI would appreciate permission to showcase participants’ art on our website or use it in potential research publications with proper citations and links to the artists’ work.
Disclaimer
We understand that the replication contest may not capture the full complexity and nuances of psychedelic experiences, and that there are concerns about the potential harm associated with the use of psychedelics. Participation in these contests does not require the use of psychedelics, and we encourage all participants to prioritize their safety and well-being.
We welcome feedback and suggestions for future contests at hello@qri.org. We look forward to exploring these topics responsibly and respectfully.
Replication Contest
The Replication Contest seeks to celebrate the artistic capabilities of participants in accurately depicting and interpreting the low-level subjective effects experienced in non-ordinary states of consciousness (NSCs), with a particular emphasis on (1) valence effects and (2) geometric transformations.
Valence effects focus on demonstrating how the shape of the experience can reveal whether a person is having a clean and blissful experience or a mixed affect experience. The transition between feeling normal and feeling blissful might involve changes to the shape of the visual experience. Rather than focusing on the semantic content (e.g. seeing an angel) here the point is to visualize the texture, shape, and dynamics that bring about this change (e.g. harmonizing flow by reducing turbulence).
Geometric transformations such as rotations, reflections, glides, affine transformations, and so on often feature in psychedelic experiences. Can this be rendered in a realistic way? We suggest that you consider how symmetry and geometry are two sides of the same coin in order to better appreciate this quality of psychedelic experiences. When the geometry of phenomenal space changes, so do the symmetries within it. Can this be expressed artistically in an accurate way?
To participate, artists should create a piece of art that embodies the subjective effects they have researched or encountered during NSCs, emphasizing the two highlighted areas.
Familiarize yourself with the concept of algorithmic reduction (cf. our glossary), where the complex zoo of effects is interpreted as emerging out of a few core effects interacting with each other. See also the different subjective effects cataloged at effectindex.com, and draw inspiration from the QRI videos on psychedelic epistemology and the tracer tool. Additionally, explore the r/replications subreddit to see some remarkable replications.
Example ways to explore (1) and (2)
Showcase how more smooth, symmetrical, regular, and soft visual features express pleasant qualities of the experience (cf. valence structuralism, Michael Johnson’s Symmetry Theory of Valence).
Visualize an annealing process where the video contains blinking lights driven by metronomes that can sync up with each other until the whole scene is shining in a coherent way (cf. Neural Annealing).
Show how bouba vs. kiki imagery highlight different emotional tones during a psychedelic experience (cf. CDNS in Quantifying Bliss), where spiky feelings tend to be harsh and disquieting, whereas bubbly and round features tend to be calming and welcoming (extra points if these features emerge out of some kind of annealing process, or if you find counterexamples to this general pattern).
Visualize how wallpaper symmetry groups transform textures into repeating patterns.
Show waves interacting with each other in order to construct psychedelic interference patterns (cf. non-linear wave computing)
Use hyperbolic minimal surfaces in order to exemplify how sensations aggregate on DMT.
Show how the Reverse-Grassfire Algorithm can create 3D crystals (cf. Harmonic Gestalt).
Show a 2D Euclidean grid becoming hyperbolic by adding additional nodes and edges in order to demonstrate a change of geometry (cf. world-sheet).
Model the the experience of achieving a DMT breakthrough level experience using a physical instability (such as Kelvin-Helmholtz).
These are just some suggestions and there are many other ways of connecting technical descriptions of the phenomenology of NSE and visual replications. It helps if you can ground the effects visualized on paradigms and explanations presented by QRI, but it is not necessary to win the contest. What matters is that you can create realistic yet interpretable visualizations that hint at the underlying processes that are generating these experiences. What we are after is insight. In other words, we want to be able to discover new, meaningful, and non-trivial explanations for why NSEs manifest in the way they do. Hence, being able to describe how the replication effects are achieved is highly beneficial.
Entries will be judged based on the number and precision of replicated subjective effects, with special attention given to valence effects and geometric transformations.
The Psychedelic Cryptography Contest invites artists to create unique encodings of sensory information that are only meaningful when experienced on psychedelics. The goal is to challenge participants to develop innovative methods of encoding sensory information in such a way that an encoded secret is only apparent on a NSC. The contest encourages the exploration of how sensory information can be modulated and presented in a way that reveals hidden patterns or messages when experienced under the influence of psychedelics.
Entries will be judged based on the difficulty of the encryption method used and the clarity of the message or pattern when experienced on psychedelics.
The Inspirational Piece Contest seeks to highlight the powerful connection between art and consciousness research by encouraging artists to create pieces that exemplify this relationship. The focus of this contest is on originality, creativity, inspiration, impact, quality, and execution. Artworks submitted for this contest should evoke a sense of wonder and curiosity about the nature of consciousness and the vast landscape of possible experiences.
Entries will be judged based on originality, creativity, inspiration, impact, quality, and execution, with winners determined by a public poll.
Participants can submit their entry in the form of a video or image.
The submission should be original and created specifically for the contest.
Participants can submit up to three entries per contest.
Submissions will be accepted starting on March 17th 2023 and must be submitted by May 17th 2023. Winners will be announced on June 1st 2023.
We encourage artists from the psychedelic and visionary art communities to participate and explore the connection between art and consciousness research. Good luck to all participants!
QRI’s Resources for Technical and Artistic Inspiration
Why it’s helpful: This article presents 8 models of art: 4 common ones, and 4 that connect it to consciousness studies. The overall frameworks of 8 models might help us arrive at methods to create innovative aesthetic qualia from first principles. We think that artists participating in any of the contests might benefit from the vocabulary introduced in these models to create innovative and meaningful pieces that explore the relationship between art and consciousness research. In particular, taking into account the energy parameter, efficient state-space exploration, annealing effects, and the vision of a meta-aesthetic all provide a unique lens for how psychedelics and art are so connected.
Why it’s helpful: This article discusses possible methods of communication that can be understood primarily by individuals under the influence of LSD and other tracer-inducing psychoactives. This may serve as inspiration for artists to think about novel ways to encode information or create unique experiences tailored to specific states of consciousness.
Why it’s helpful: This article provides a detailed analysis of how the visual effects of psychedelics might be understood and replicated using algorithmic processes. It can serve as a foundation for artists attempting to replicate the visual aspects of non-ordinary states of consciousness in their artwork, or as inspiration to propose alternative algorithmic reductions that capture effects that are currently unaccounted for.
Why it’s helpful: This article explores the connection between the subjective effects of DMT experiences and hyperbolic geometry, various possible algorithmic reductions to explain this connection, as well as detailing the progression of an experience through the DMT levels. Artists participating in the Replication Contest may find inspiration and insights into replicating specific visual patterns and structures often encountered in DMT experiences.
Why it’s helpful: The Psychophysics Toolkit and accompanying article are collections of resources and tools designed to help researchers and artists explore the intersection of perception, consciousness, and the physical world. It includes a variety of resources and interface tools that can aid artists in understanding the principles of psychophysics used to measure subjective experience and applying them to their work. This can be particularly useful for participants in all three contests, as it can provide insights into the ways that sensory information is processed during both ordinary and non-ordinary states of consciousness, and how this can be utilized in creating innovative and impactful art pieces.
Why it’s helpful: This video introduces new epistemological frameworks for studying and understanding non-ordinary states of consciousness induced by psychedelic substances. By incorporating these paradigms into their creative process, artists can develop a deeper understanding of the nature of these experiences and their potential implications for human knowledge. This enhanced understanding can help artists create innovative and thought-provoking pieces that capture the essence of exotic states of consciousness.
Why it’s helpful: This article provides a detailed explanation of the concept of phenomenal time and how it relates to the structure of conscious experiences. Understanding this concept could help artists in the contest to better represent the perception of time in non-ordinary states of consciousness and incorporate these insights into their artwork.
Why it’s helpful: This article explores the concept of wireheading and how it could be applied responsibly to maximize pleasure without causing psychological harm. Artists participating in the contest might find this article helpful in inspiring their work, particularly in the Inspirational Piece Contest, by envisioning a future where technology is used to enhance well-being and explore the state-space of consciousness responsibly.
Why it’s helpful: This video explores the concept of state-space neighborhoods, where specific aspects of conscious experiences are clustered together. By understanding the structure and dynamics of these neighborhoods, artists can create pieces that more accurately represent the nuances of different non-ordinary states of consciousness, leading to a more immersive and impactful experience for the audience.
Why it’s helpful: This article provides a comparative analysis of the experiences induced by 5-MeO-DMT and N,N-DMT. By understanding the unique characteristics of each substance’s effects, artists can draw inspiration for their artwork and more accurately replicate specific psychedelic experiences in the Replication Contest.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our profound gratitude to the donors of the Qualia Research Institute. Your unwavering support has been invaluable in making our work possible. Your investment in our research has not only inspired a growing number of individuals to take our approach to consciousness research seriously but has also led to an expansion in our collaborations. As a result, we have seen the integration of our insights into the work of others, building upon the foundation we have established thus far.
First and foremost, we would like to extend our appreciation to Loka Vision for inspiring the contest. Their dedication to the Psychedelic/Visionary Art community, as demonstrated through their Psychedelic Replication Masterclass, has shown us the immense potential this community holds in furthering our understanding of consciousness.
Thank you Andrés Gómez Emilsson for offering technical insights that will enable artists to create life-like replications of the low-level subjective effects experienced on NSCs and incepting the idea of psychedelic cryptography as a viable field of research.
A thank you goes to Josie Kins of effectindex.com for their open-source approach to developing psychedelic art through generative AI, as well as their support of and feedback on the Replication contest and insights into the visionary/psychedelic art community.
Additional thanks to Scry, Marcin, gydravlik.eth, PsyNFT, and Ferociously Amused for their invaluable feedback on the contest and their contributions to our understanding of the visionary/psychedelic art community and thank you Maggie and Anders Wassinge for your unwaivering support.
[Epistemic status: work in progress that is highly speculative but which I have reason to think has explanatory power – the content comes from this talk I gave at the Oxford Psychedelic Society a couple of weeks ago, which was then summarized/turned into a Twitter thread by Hunter Meyer]
QRI’s ‘Good Vibes Theory’ (GVT) is a speculative proposal for a physics of consciousness. This theory aims to establish an ontological foundation for a future rigorous science of good vibes. 🧵🧵🧵 #psychedelicthermodynamics #goodvibestheory
Two groups will make the most use of GVT; one is the “vibe engineers,” who are grounded in creating good vibes technically, and the mystics, who want to connect good vibes to deep insights and truths of wisdom traditions.
There is a deep connection between the shape of things and the way they vibrate. Different shapes have different energies, as their curvature, complexity, and surface area increase.
Internal representations act as energy sinks that absorb and channel ambient energy. They are often symmetrical and have semantic meaning, which makes them effective energy sinks. These representations also radiate energy and have energizing effects *to other representations*.
In physics, the Hamiltonian of a system is a measure of the system’s total energy. Similarly, the Hamiltonian of Consciousness would formulate how to add up all the energy of each component of a bound experience created by a system to get the total energy of that experience.
QRI proposes a new framework, “Psychedelic thermodynamics”, which offers a novel perspective on energy flow in consciousness.
In this framework, one system’s energy sink is another system’s energy source. The energy flows from sensory input to consciousness, where it’s transformed into internal representations or “solitons” and released through motor actions or field radiation.
The quality of conscious experience is shaped by the energy radiated from internal representations known as gestalts, which interact with each other to produce the texture and valence of the experience. The shape of the gestalts determines the vibe they radiate (cf. valence structuralism).
The “vibes” of our experiences are determined by the interaction of our internal representations, and dissonance can arise from being out of phase with input, incompatibility with noise, being intrinsically misshaped, or dissonance with other representations.
Psychedelic Thermodynamics suggests that the valence of a psychedelic experience can be modulated by inputs to the extent that they are in tune with the background noise and there are no misshapen or incompatible inputs leading to dissonance and negative valence.
Input valence effects are therefore the result of how external stimuli interact with internal representations in conscious experience. The degree of coherence between the input and the background noise, as well as the shape and resonance of the internal representation, determine an input’s valence effects.
The Flower of Life from sacred geometry can be steel-manned (within indirect realism) as a powerful metaphor for how experience is constructed. It may have deeper metaphorical relevance in physics than previously realized in light of Feynman and Wheeler’s “one-electron universe” where reality is an interference pattern of one electron bouncing back and forth in time.
The iterative way in which the Flower of Life is constructed takes on a new potential metaphorical meaning that can be used as a lens to understand the fundamental nature of reality.
There may be just one electron in the entire universe. It is because when an electron and an anti-electron interact, they merge and cancel out, producing a photon.
Mathematically, the interaction of an electron moving back in time is the same as an anti-electron, called a positron. As a result, there is only one type of observer in the universe, and it is bouncing back and forth in time, interfering with itself.
According to physics, quantum mechanics is mathematically equivalent whether it is thought of as fields or a superposition of all possible paths.
The Schrodinger equation, which describes the behavior of quantum mechanical systems, gives the same answers whether solving the field or taking one electron or one photon and making it go through every possible path and then superimposing all those paths simultaneously.
The behavior of an electron is the sum total of all possibilities. The field and the one electron can be thought of as the same, a matter of perspective. The field is a superposition of paths, while the electron is a smooth field evolving according to the Schrodinger equation.
The field usually segments into pockets, and the topology of the magnetic field changes through a process known as magnetic reconnection, which has real-world implications, like solar flares and coronal mass ejections in the sun.
A possible solution to the “boundary problem” (how is it that we are not all just one bound experience? why are we separate moments of experience?) is that the thing that creates a boundary around an individual’s experience is a topological pocket, and within it, there is a field.
The question then arises, what does it feel like to be that field in the topological pocket?
The field is equivalent to all possible paths within it. Thus, to be a pocket in the field might feel exactly like every point in that field, knowing about every other point. This interaction between all points within the field gives rise to the entirety of the shape.
The experience of being the one electron in the topological pocket would be precisely the superposition of all possible points of view that exist within it. It aligns with what mystics have talked about for a long time – the screen of consciousness is not fundamental, but emergent.
The screen of consciousness is a special case that requires the field to be shaped in a peculiar way so that “it seems like there is a screen from every possible trajectory within the topological pocket of the field”.
Symmetry, meaning “invariance upon transformation”, can entail that many different paths look the same. As a consequence, in some situations making the pocket perfectly symmetrical (via e.g. neural annealing) can collapse the dimensionality of the experience.
As a powerful metaphor, the symmetrical nature of electron orbitals might offer insights into the experience of altered states of consciousness, such as those induced by high doses of LSD.
Under LSD, symmetrification of self within a pocket collapses multiple points of view, leading to a collective wavefront. Points within the pocket sense the field and advance as a collective wavefront, blurring the line between a point and a wave.
Some states emit coherent waves of awareness in resonant patterns, with inherent trade-offs between location and frequency due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
The symmetrical structures on DMT function as “witnesses of the scene”. Hence, with each pattern of resonance that gets organized in a symmetrical way, you add a new “reference frame” for the experience.
With a physics of consciousness, we should be able to look at trippy DMT replication images, understand their non-trivial meaningful content, and interpret the reason for the existence of the patterns and structures within them.
DMT induces resonant and coherent states of consciousness that emit waves of awareness that are in phase and which seem to be subjectively equivalent to many points simultaneously sensing the (inner) environment.
These patterns on DMT are not just “3D patterns in the visual field”; they are far deeper and more coherent, with each cluster of coherence functioning as a coherent witness that is measuring its environment (art by Symbolika).
Understanding this we can reason about highly coherent states of consciousness like those induced by psychedelics, meditation, and other ecstatic/annealing methods in terms of a network of coherence, where each frequency at which the hierarchy is coherent with one another may tell us a lot about them.
The witness is a coherent wavefront of awareness that is interacting or embedded within your consciousness. As a consequence, it is possible to describe a state of consciousness as a network of coherence.
States where the physics of consciousness is evident, include DMT’s Symmetry Hotel, where every two-dimensional surface looks like a coherent symmetry group, and Crystal Worlds, which are between Magic Eye and the Waiting Room.
In the Crystal Worlds, the witnesses are three-dimensional, and there is a question of whether they are external or internal entities. However, they are coherent witnesses of awareness that are interacting or embedded within your consciousness and their inherently 3D “point of view” has geometric effects on the unfolding of the experience.
Coherence can help us understand the zoo of possible self-organizing principles that arise on something like DMT. The network of coherence can crystallize in various shapes, including low-level features or high-level features, fractally coherent, or hyperbolic networks (also Symbolika below). Many scale-specific network geometries are possible.
On DMT, as soon as there are coherent symmetrical structures there will be mirror rooms.
Each surface emits a coherent wavefront of awareness that reflects off of the other surfaces, and this behavior is reminiscent of light in that a coherent witness bounces off of itself in the various surfaces. This may explain why “mirror room experiences” on DMT are incredibly common.
Coherence has a remarkable effect on consciousness that mirrors its effect on light. When mirrors become parallel, the subject and object collapse with perfect symmetry. Every alignment feels like a union because the witness and the witnessed collapse.
DMT induces resonant and coherent states of consciousness that emit waves of awareness, and each cluster of coherence functions as a coherent witness that is measuring its environment.
Understanding the physics of consciousness on DMT can help us understand the network of coherence, the zoo of possible self-organizing principles that arise, and the common experiences such as the mirror room experiences.
The present depiction is an intuitive and conceptual overview, while a formal and scientifically rigorous formulation is currently under development. Nonetheless, we are enthusiastic about its capacity to provide comprehensive explanations and develop its practical applications.
QRI’s GVT and Psychedelic Thermodynamics are ambitious proposals, but they are exciting ones that could open up new avenues of exploration in the field of consciousness.
If you are as excited as we are about the direction consciousness research is headed, please consider learning more at qri.org
You can find the full presentation on GVT here. Thank you @kfshinozuka and Ali-Reza Omidvar and the rest of the folks at @OxPsySoc for hosting this event:
The casual QRI enjoyer may get the impression that this video encapsulates our current understanding of the phenomenology of DMT. The dedicated QRI reader/watcher, however, knows that we are light-years ahead in our understanding relative to where we were at the time. So I figured that this would be a good opportunity to highlight some of the DMT-specific insights that we have presented since that video came out. But before I do so, let me briefly discuss why this work is actually advancing our understanding (unlike most psychedelic phenomenology work out there) and then summarize some of the core points presented in that video so that we are all on the same page before moving on to the new models:
Introduction: What’s Useful Phenomenology?
At QRI we have put a lot of effort into characterizing what it means to describe an exotic state of consciousness in a way that is actually useful (see our guide for how to write good trip reports). Here are some key points:
Most people who try to make sense of the DMT-induced state of consciousness focus on the intentional content (the narrative) of the experience, which isn’t actually that helpful (consider how both a mescaline trip and a DMT trip can give rise to a hallucination about e.g. “meeting a dragon in another dimension”, yet the texture of such experiences will be very different!). Many others obsess over the question of whether what one experiences on DMT has a reality outside your brain or not (cf. Andrew Zuckerman has made it easy for you to test a DMT prime factorization experiment, were you to be so inclined). While interesting, I don’t think these approaches really advance our understanding very much; they in fact leave an enormous amount of low-hanging fruit uncollected.
Instead, a more fruitful approach is to focus on describing what we call the phenomenal character of the experience (yes, the dragon is important, but please also tell us how the scales on the skin of the dragon were arranged, whether they followed any wallpaper symmetry group, what their flicker frequency was, what patterns of local binding they expressed, and so on). The overwhelming majority of trip reports you can find in the literature and online don’t even try to do this. They are just quite content with a narrative account and superficial descriptions of the sensorial components of the experience (“I saw a lot of orange triangles”). But some psychonauts do try to rise to the challenge of describing the phenomenal character of the experience. Two examples are:
Junk Bond Trader‘s My DMT Year series, which does an excellent job articulating the tactile component of DMT experiences.
A step above doing this is where we find people such as Josikins (of Subjective Effect Index fame) who spend copious amounts of time trying to systematically catalogue exotic phenomenology by carefully describing and then labeling each effect with a concept handle. See also DMT-Nexus‘ systematic Hyperspace Lexicon which is perhaps a bit of a hybrid between focusing on intentional content and phenomenal character.
What’s missing here, however, is that the output ends up being a zoo of effects. Presumably, however, DMT and other psychedelics don’t have that many direct effects. Rather, they probably affect the properties of the nervous system in specific ways that in turn, downstream, give rise to a complex variety of effects. In other words, to really understand what’s going on, one should try to find a minimal set of core effects such that by combining them you get the complexity that we observe. Here is where we find people like Steven Lehar (see The Grand Illusion) and James L. Kent (see Psychedelic Information Theory). They are really experienced psychonauts who then go on to use their subject-matter expertise (cognitive science and signal processing, respectively) to explain the characteristics of the exotic states of consciousness they have experienced. They have both produced really excellent work with significant explanatory power.
At QRI we do something like that, but on a higher level. Namely, the exploration is integrated with philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and neurotechnology. What makes QRI’s psychedelic theory different than what you will see in academia is that:
We know of and take seriously a vastly larger experience base to work with (compared to e.g. some labs where you are not even allowed to discuss your own experiences with your colleagues!)
We use the framework of algorithmic reduction (and other key QRI paradigms) to try to simplify the complexity in terms of a minimal set of effects interacting with one another
We have a crisp philosophy of mind that allows us to make modular progress on specific questions rather than being crippled by the “hard problem of consciousness” (e.g. solving the boundary problem or the translation problem can be done without having to solve everything else at once)
In other words, we actually pay attention to the details of experience no matter how weird they may be (did you know that seeing a hyperbolic honeycomb while on DMT can make your visual field “glitch”? Why does that happen?). We don’t let the theory define the facts and instead let the facts define the theory. And we try to tie it all together in light of what we know about how the nervous system works.
Example of a *structural* feature of experience: the fractal dimension of phenomenal objects. Empirically, the Hausdorff dimension of DMT phenomenal objects increases with the dose. (Ps. be careful not to look at objects with a high Hausdorff dimension while on DMT, such as cauliflowers – don’t ask me why, just don’t).
The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences
The original article (slides; ELI5) upon which the video is based is over 8,000 words long and a lot of material is covered in it. Here I will merely highlight some of the key arguments, concepts, and talking points.
To a first approximation, the article does three things:
(1) provide detailed phenomenology focused on the structural and dynamic features that arise at each dose.
(2) postulate possible algorithmic reductions to explain the emergence of such structural and dynamic features.
(3) speculate on the information-processing properties of the state in question.
We point out that the reason why it is so difficult to recall the DMT experiences is that they take place in a phenomenal world with different geometry. Hence, what you do remember is whatever can exist both here and there! That said, you can modify the phenomenal objects you experienced as you come down in order to impress on them hints about what they were like up there.
Provide 17 reasons why DMT experiences are highly suggestive of hyperbolic geometry (from the presence of saddles in DMT psychedelic replications to the explicit accounts of Ralph Abraham who said his DMT experiences were distinctly non-Euclidean).
(1) Phenomenology:
Threshold (1-4mg): Crisp and high-resolution experience without obvious hallucinations. Intensified colors and sharper edges.
Chrysanthemum (4-8mg): The surfaces become fully saturated with wallpaper symmetry groups and then overflow, leading to a hyperbolization of such surfaces. At this level, the mind will still try to embed these constructs in 3D Euclidean space, so in practice you will see kale-like surfaces, saddles, helixes, corners, twists, etc. This often manifests as what looks like the blossoming of a flower or unwrapping of a present in the center of your attention.
Magic Eye (8-12mg): The Chrysanthemum becomes so curved that it can be used to render arbitrary 3D scenes of all sorts (e.g. ice cream shops, apparel, play pens, kitchen counters, etc.). We can think of this as a dynamic and animated depth map, which we call the world-sheet. If you pay attention, you will realize that the texture of the world-sheet is in fact made out of a widely contorted Chrysanthemum, with similarities to autostereograms (aka. Magic Eye visual illusions).
Waiting Room (12-25mg): The curved world-sheet fully saturates 3D space; qualia continues to build to the point the that it simply does not fit 3D Euclidean space. Thus there is a forced hyperbolization of 3D phenomenal space, which also comes along a powerful multi-modal synchronization (cf. Kinesioöptic). This, in turn, makes the hallucinated world so engrossing that you lose contact with your surroundings. Often manifests as a hyper-realistic dome or series of interconnected rooms and exotic architectural structures with countless twists and turns.
Breakthrough (25mg+): The curvature and density of qualia is so extreme that the very topology of the worldsheet can change (e.g. via bifurcations and reconnections). One experiences radically exotic geometries of experience. There may be more than one geodesic between two given points, leading to markedly bizarre pseudo-acoustic properties. Sense of entering a sort of “interdimensional highway” that stitches together widely diverse and seemingly contradictory realities at once. (Today I would add that at this dose different regions of the experience may exhibit different pseudo-time arrows, and thus may have hybrid temporal qualities, as discussed here).
Amnesia (40mg+; depends): Not much to say here.
DMT objects, DMT space expansion, and DMT entities are described in terms of the unique features of each level.
(2) Algorithmic Reductions:
Control Interruption + Symmetry detection = Change in Metric: This algorithmic reduction combines the two core psychedelic effects of tracers (here discussed in light of Kent’s control interrupt model of psychedelic action) and lowering the symmetry detection threshold. The first one can be thought of as making the decay of qualia over time slower, and so the homeostatic level of qualia in one’s world-simulation reachers a higher level than normal. In turn, the rate at which “distances are being measured” with symmetry detection also changes. These two effects combined may give rise a network of distances between phenomenal objects that has a hyperbolic metric.
Dynamic System Account: Energy Sources, Sinks and Invariants: This algorithmic reduction bears a lot of similarities with predictive processing, except that it works at the algorithmic rather than computational level of abstraction.
We define the “Hamiltonian of Consciousness” (aka. the “temperature parameter”) as the sum total of the intensity-weighted qualia in an experience. It is noted that on DMT many energy invariants get activated: intense color can morph into acceleration which can morph into curvature and so on, as if they were trading a common currency (a unified “energy of consciousness” property).
Energy Sources: attention works as an energy source and on DMT this becomes intensified (almost as if the voltage of attention increased). Thus whatever you pay attention to becomes energized (brighter, faster, more curved, etc.).
Energy Sinks: The two main energy sinks are symmetry (not unlike how a soap bubble radiates out its energy until it settles as a perfect sphere) and semantic content (i.e. recognition). Essentially, when a part of the world-sheet starts to look symmetrical, it will “snap into symmetry” because that’s an energy minima in the neighborhood of configuration-space. And when parts of it start to resemble something you have seen or thought about before, it will snap into that configuration. We call the latter kind “Bayesian energy sinks” because they implement our perceptual priors.
On DMT the homeostatic balance between energy sources and sinks favors a much higher level of energy. Since curvature contributes to the Hamiltonian, most of the highly-energized states of mind are highly curved. This model wonderfully explains two aspects of tripping: first, it accounts for why what one ends up experiencing is a bizarre hybrid of symmetrical and semantic structures (e.g. faces with extra eyes, boats with point symmetry along extra degrees of freedom, etc.). And second, it explains why there are discontinuities between levels. This is because when you overwhelm the energy sinks the configuration of the world-sheet becomes less recognizable, and in turn this further blocks the ability to shed off the energy into Bayesian sinks. As a consequence, the balance between semantic content and symmetries favors symmetries on higher doses (since we lack the capacity to “recognize” semantically meaningful shapes in highly energized world-sheets).
Hyperbolic Micro-structure of Consciousness: This algorithmic reduction focuses on the low-level microstructure of experience. It postulates that the material properties of the world-sheet at the microscopic level are such that by energizing it one experiences a sort of thermal expansion and deformation on the parts of the world-sheet one pays attention to.
We note that these three algorithmic reductions might be complementary rather than mutually exclusive.
(3) Information Processing Properties:
We point out that these exotic states of consciousness may allow us to experience from the inside mathematical shapes for which mathematicians have so far had enormous difficulty visualizing and making sense of. In particular, knot complements (i.e. the space around a knot deformed so that the knot becomes the boundary at infinity), higher dimensional objects, and irreducibly complex (“prime”) shapes native to hyperbolic geometry can be encountered and interacted with. We speculate that perhaps someday breakthroughs in higher math might in fact primarily come from consciousness research centers.
Furthermore, the video includes some extra insights not present in the original article:
We add two more levels (which live at the interface between levels already discussed):
Between Threshold and Chrysanthemum there is a thin layer we call Symmetry Hotel where you still see the “real” world around you but every surface is fully saturated with wallpaper symmetry groups. Empirically, at this level the surfaces one sees on DMT can be tessellated with any of the 17 wallpaper symmetry groups and their combinations. Essentially, if you increase the energy parameter any more, then you will start to see some hyperbolization of the 2D surfaces and unlock the Chrysanthemum.
Between Magic Eye and Waiting Room there is a thin layer we call Crystal Worlds. It’s analogous to the Symmetry Hotel but one spatial dimension higher. Namely, the space around you becomes fully saturated with Euclidean space groups. If the energy parameter is raised any higher, then you will start to see a hyperbolization of (3D) space itself and unlock Waiting Room phenomenology.
In addition to the Hamiltonian of Consciousness (i.e. the temperature parameter) there is also a really important feature of experience: information content or complexity.
These two features define a state-space we call the Energy X Complexity landscape.
In order to provide an algorithmic reduction for the complexity of experience, we suggest that it is the result of feedback dynamics. This allows us to import an ontology of attractor states, which includes fixed points, limit cycles, chaos, and noise-drive spatial structures.
Note: In the presentation I highly recommended watching Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback to get a feel for this ontology. Today I would also recommend playing with the suitably psychedelic feedback-based phone app called Fraksl.
If you want to anneal a blissful state, starting in a minimally complex state and “going up” without moving right (i.e. getting caught up in any complexity) would be ideal.
For discovering and investigating mathematically interesting and exotic phenomena, aiming towards the upper center region would be ideal. This is where the machine elves show you absolutely mind-boggling irreducibly complex synesthetic patterns of qualia for which we have no names.
For processing stored inner tension or trauma, it might be necessary to go to the middle right region in order to induce entropic disintegration of patterns and then come back via the low-complexity region to anneal a harmonious state.
We concluded the presentation by suggesting that a way forward for science to investigate DMT-like states of consciousness would be to plan legal retreats with physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, and visual artists so that the models here presented could be explored, tested, and further developed out in the open.
More Recent DMT Insights
The descriptions shown below merely scratch the surface. Think of them as pointers rather than the insights themselves. For the videos in particular, even if you don’t have the time to see them in full, I nonetheless recommend clicking on them and reading their descriptions (rather than merely the excerpts pasted below). Of course there really isn’t a good substitute for watching the entire video if you want the detailed explanation.
This essay proposes a novel way of testing the independent reality of DMT entities: one could in principle determine that the brain state is being influenced by an external force by looking for the dynamic signatures of injection pulling in neuroimaging data.
This article describes 9 key differences between the phenomenology of DMT and 5-MeO-DMT: (1) Space vs. Form: 5-MeO is more space-like than DMT. (2) Crystals vs. Quasi-Crystals: 5-MeO generates more perfectly repeating rhythms and hallucinations than DMT. (3) Non-Attachment vs. Attachment: 5-MeO seems to enable detachment from the craving of both existence and non-existence, whereas DMT enhances the craving. (4) Underfitting vs. Overfitting: 5-MeO reduces one’s model complexity whereas DMT radically increases it. (5) Fixed Points and Limit Cycles vs. Chaotic Attractors: 5-MeO’s effect on feedback leads to stable and predictable attractors while DMT’s attractors are inherently chaotic. (6) Modulation of Lateral Inhibition: 5-MeO may reduce lateral inhibition while DMT may enhance it. (7) Diffuse Attention vs. Focused Attention: 5-MeO diffuses attention uniformly over large regions of one’s experiential field, while DMT seems to focus it. (8) Big Chunks and Tiny Chunks vs. A Power Law of Chunks: 5-MeO creates a few huge phases of experience (as in phases of matter) with a few remaining specks, while DMT produces a more organic power law distribution of chunk sizes. (9) Integration vs. Fragmentation: 5-MeO seems to give rise to “neural integration” involving the entrainment of any two arbitrary subnetworks (even when they usually do not talk to each other), while DMT fragments communication between most networks but massively enhances it between some specific kinds of networks.
This is the first attempt at quantitatively and qualitatively measuring the tracer characteristics of DMT hallucinations (try it yourself!). Preliminary findings suggest that DMT is special relative to other psychedelics in the following ways. First, it has pronounced tracer effects. Second, they flicker at a much higher frequency than other drugs (~30 Hz relative to ~15-20 for LSD and ~12 for 2C-B). Third, there are both strobe and replay effects galore. Fourth, there is a color pulsing effect at a very high frequency (also around 30 Hz). Unlike 5-MeO-DMT, which gives rise to monochromatic tracers, on DMT the color of the tracers alternates between their positive and negative afterimages.
This explains why it is so hard to not take at face value the reality of the hallucinations on DMT. When we take psychedelics, we learn what “channels” of information become distorted and which ones can be trusted. It turns out that DMT can mess with many more channels relative to other psychedelics (such as LSD, mescaline, or 2C-B). In particular, DMT is exceptional in the degree of (1) cross-modal coherence that it induces, (2) heat, giving rise to a very high temperature parameter of experience, and (3) realistic tactile hallucinations. These three features combined might go a long way in explaining why DMT feels so real. Namely, that you can experience detailed tactile feelings like “crossing a veil” or “being invaded by energetic bugs” or “being operated on” that are coherent with the information you are receiving from other senses and are felt with a level of intensity much greater than the feelings one is used to in everyday life. This synergizes to create a very realistic feeling of touching parallel realities.
From the description: We suggest that a remarkably fruitful strategy for pointing at a whole family of psychedelic effects comes in the form of “field operators” that change the qualitative properties of our experiential fields. I provide a detailed description of what we call the “world-sheet” of experience and how it encodes emotional and semantic content in its very structure. The world-sheet can have tension, relaxation, different types of resonance and buzzing entrainment, twisting, curling, divergence (with vortices and anti-vortices in the attention field-lines), dissonance, consonance, noise, release, curvature, holographic properties, and dimensionality. I explain that in a psychedelic state, you explore higher up regions in the “Hamiltonian of the field”, meaning that you instantiate field configurations with higher levels of energy. There, we observer interesting trade-offs between the hyperbolicity of the field and its dimensionality. It can instantiate fractals of many sorts (in polar, cartesian, and other coordinate systems) by multi-scale entrainment. Time loops and moments of eternity result from this process iterated over all sensory modalities. The field contains meta-data implicitly encoded in its periphery which you can use for tacit information processing. Semantic content and preferences are encoded in terms of the patterns of attraction and repulsion of the attention-field lines.
This writeup does a lot of things. While the focus is on application (i.e. how to heal trauma with psychedelics), it also lays out a very significant amount of novel psychedelic theory. Excerpt: 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. […] 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. As you can see, contrary to what many people in the comments* seem to say, DMT visuals are in fact extremely important and not at all just a superficial aspect of the experience. Due to the duality between the vibe of the state and the geometric layout of the multi-modal hallucinations, it is always the case that the geometry of your experience will be a reflection of your emotional processing! Solving for harmony in your hallucinations will in turn have unexpected harmonizing effects at the emotional level as well.
This video essay expands on the article and adds three key differences: (10) Global Coherence vs. Competing Clusters of Coherence: 5-MeO-DMT gives rise to a global coherent state (the so-called “unified energy field”), whereas DMT gives rise to an ecosystem of time-loops, each trying to capture as much of your attention as possible, which in turn results in coalition-building and evolution of patterns in the direction of being very “attention grabbing” (cf. reddit.com/r/place). (11) Really Positive or Really Negative Valence vs. Highly-Mixed Valence: 5-MeO-DMT gives rise to either a globally coherent state (high-valence) or two competing coherent states (negative-valence), whereas DMT tends to generate complex consonance/dissonance relationships between the clusters of coherence. (12) How they are different according the the Free Energy Principle: On 5-MeO-DMT the entire experience has to reinforce itself, whereas each cluster of coherence needs to model the rest of the experience in order to be reinforced by it on DMT. Thus 5-MeO-DMT makes experiences that express “the whole as the whole” whereas DMT makes each part of the experience represent the whole yet remains distinct.
The key achievement of this video is to discuss the Free Energy Principle and Predictive Processing at the implementation level of analysis in light of Neural Annealing, the Symmetry Theory of Valence, and Holistic Field Behavior. Here we realize that prediction errors feel bad not because they are inherently negative, but because the nervous system is implemented in such a way that they generate dissonance. More so, there is also a dissonance cost to model complexity (complex internal representations “self-intersect” and thus generate dissonance). This balances out so that our nervous system minimizing dissonance ends up generating relatively simple models with high levels of accuracy. In other words, it avoids both underfitting and overfitting merely by trying to minimize internal dissonance! The video also articulates how Bayesian Energy Sinks might be implemented. It concludes with a derivation of the “mystical” (or psychedelic, really) state of Indra’s Net, i.e. why on substances such as DMT it often feels like “everything reflects everything else”. Indra’s Net, it turns out, can be explained as a local energy minima of a highly energized system of coupled oscillators organized hierarchically so that each “competing cluster of coherence” minimizes its energy by predicting perfectly the behavior of the surrounding ones. In other words, each “competing cluster of coherence” needs to model its environment in order to synch up with it in a reinforcing way. This leads to attractor states where everything is a reflection of everything else.
This video explains how a system of coupled oscillators can in fact instantiate virtual higher dimensions. Namely, dynamic systems that behave as if they were embedded in a higher spatial dimension. There is a trade-off between degrees of freedom and higher virtual dimensions. It argues that indeed on DMT one can experience such higher dimensions and that in light of the Symmetry Theory of Valence there is a corresponding “generalized music theory” that explains why some of them feel good and others not. Additionally, there seems to be an algebra for how “DMT objects” with specific dimensionalities can be composed with one another (the 2D symmetry slabs found in Symmetry Hotel can be composed with each other to form 3D spatial structures native to the Crystal World level).
From the video description: The reason we are conscious is because being conscious allows you to recruit self-organizing principles that can run on a massively parallel fashion in order to find solutions to problems at [wave propagation] speed. Importantly, this predicts it’s possible to use e.g. a visual field on DMT in order to quickly find the “energy minima” of a physical state that has been properly calibrated to correspond to the dynamics of a world-sheet in that state. This is falsifiable and exciting.
From the video description: High-octane mental power, when pointed in a pointless direction, is not particularly useful. Thus, we must enrich our conception of intelligence to encapsulate philosophical, meditative, and existential cognition. And, perhaps the Crown Jewel of Intelligence: the ability to explore, make sense of, navigate, and recruit exotic states of consciousness for information processing and aesthetic purposes. In particular, I make the case that intelligence is truly about identifying *self-organizing principles* of physics that are energetically cheap which can *solve the problem for you* (cf. “Repulsive Shape Optimization”).
DMT both energizes one’s state of consciousness and also provides a new medium of wave propagation. At a sufficient dose (>5mg) it takes one’s consciousness to the non-linear regime. This video discusses the very nature of vibes, how gestalts arise, and how they assemble to form realms. It also explains how a vibe acquires its valence (partly through its ADSR envelope characteristics). If you only watch one video, make it this one.
This video explains how DMT objects emerge out of exotic attention-awareness patterns. From the video description: LSD non-duality can be understood as more diffuse elements of experience becoming the non-linear oscillatory complements of the field of awareness, such as “light”, “space”, and “being”. DMT’s competing clusters of coherence and their compositional properties also emerge naturally out of a hyper-energized field of awareness that generates oscillatory complements. 5-MeO-DMT is a straight path to insight territory, as it activates a new medium of wave-propagation orthogonal to the one in which our world-simulation is typically embedded. And so on… I also re-evaluate the models introduced in the original Qualia Computing article on the geometry of DMT experiences in light of this new paradigm. In particular, I delve into the concept of exotic attention in the form of wallpaper symmetry groups and Bayesian energy sinks.
DMT-related Media Appearances
Since the Harvard presentation, I have also given many other presentations and participated in podcasts, some of which touch upon DMT. Here is a selection of some of the most relevant ones:
Note: Of course all of this still needs to be synthesized, presented, and written up in ways that can interface more smoothly with academia and the world at large. That said, I constantly get emails and messages from people in academia (typically PhD students, but often also professors and even heads of labs) telling me that QRI’s psychedelic theory is the most illuminating content they are aware of when it comes to how to make sense of exotic states of consciousness. One relatively well-known academic described our models in private as “two steps ahead of the current understanding in academia”. Sadly, I am also aware of a few peer reviewed articles and publications that present our ideas as their own- ideas which we shared with the authors in private meetings, where they told us they were insightful and new to them at the time. I would kindly request to any academic reader of QRI to please cite our articles and videos if they inspired or informed their research in any way. It’s of course a matter of intellectual integrity to do so (and contrary to common misconception, you can in fact cite blogposts and YouTube videos in your scientific articles! In fact, not doing so when you got a key insight from them goes against the very spirit of science. Please do so when appropriate). Thank you, and remember that citing us for our meaningful contributions to the field will put a smile on my face! 🙂
Special thanks to: Everyone at QRI (especially Michael Johnson, for years of fruitful collaboration on these topics). Andrew Zuckerman and Kenneth Shinozuka who were instrumental for setting up this presentation and so many other things. Quintin Frerichs who 3D-printed and brought the cool shapes shown in the video**, not to speak of his outstanding internal technical contributions. Romeo Stevens for all the incredible support (he was also there in the audience!). Anders Amelin and Maggie Wassinge for their brilliant and holistic contributions to the conversation. Marcin Kowrygo and Hunter Meyer for stepping up in times of need and being such great and dedicated helpers in so many ways. The extended QRI network and anonymous psychonauts who have participated in fruitful discussions and informed our models. David Pearce for years of friendship and collaboration in this and related areas. Our donors for bravely supporting our projects despite how crazy they may seem from the outside view. And to YOU, dear reader. Thank you all!
Infinite bliss!
* You can find my response to the most common kinds of comments on the video here: Collecting Qualia Souvenirs.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
“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.”
“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?
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):
Atasoy, S., Donnelly, I. and Pearson, J. (2016). Human brain networks function in connectome-specific harmonic waves. Nat Commun 7, 10340. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10340
Atasoy, S., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M. et al. (2017). Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD. Sci Rep7, 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.
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
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.
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
Video description: How can we bring back information from conscious states, especially from exotic and altered states of consciousness? This talk covers Qualia Research Institute’s tracer replication tool and how we can turn what until now has been qualitative descriptions and informal approximations of the psychedelic tracer phenomenon into concrete quantitative replications.
I think that Zuck does a great job at walking you through the features of the tool. If you watch the video you will understand the difference between trails, replays, and strobes. You will get an intuitive feel for what color pulsing means. It will teach you how ADSR envelopes affect tracer effects. And it will give you a sense of how we can use the Tracer Tool to quantify how high you are, how synergistic drugs are, and how valenced a given tracer pattern is. Of course this is explained in the original writeup (linked above), but Zuck’s presentation might be more appropriate if you don’t have the time to read 10,000 words. I recommend it highly.
Qualia Souvenirs
One of the concepts that Zuck introduces in his presentation is that of a qualia souvenir. Just like how it is very nice to bring back a keychain with a picture of the place of your vacation as a souvenir, perhaps we could generalize this notion to include experiences as a whole. That is, how do we create a souvenir for an experience? As Zuck points out, taking a picture while on a psychedelic simply won’t do. You need to capture the quality of your experience, rather than merely the content of the inputs at the time.
With the Tracer Tool (and tools we will be sharing in the future) you can do just that. Well, you can at least replicate a component of your experience. And little by little, as we develop the tools to replicate more and more such components, we will slowly get to the point where you can genuinely recreate a snapshot of your psychedelic experience (or at least to the extent that images and sounds can evoke its nature).
Make It Social
One of the features of the Tracer Tool that I failed to emphasize in the original writeup was that we put a lot of effort into making the submissions shareable. There are several ways you could do this, in fact. The simplest is to fiddle with the parameters until you get an accurate tracer replication and then click on “Start Recording Video” and then click “Stop Recording Video” when you have captured what you want. Then it’s as simple as clicking on “View/Download Video” and then on “Download”. You’ll get a .webm file, which is supported by most large image-sharing sites (e.g gfycat.com). And if you want or need it in a .gif format (e.g. to share it on Facebook), you can use a free online converter.
Alternatively, you can click “Share Parameters” and copy the JSON that is displayed. You can then share it with your friends, who will click on “Import Parameters” and paste the JSON you gave them. The advantage of this method versus the previous one is that you can edit others’ qualia souvenirs and work together to create specific effects. It is also a way for you to “save” your work if you are not quite done and want to continue fiddling with the parameters later on, but don’t want to lose the work you have already put into it.
This is all to say: Make it social! It’s easy! Add tracer replications to your trip reports. Share them in social media. Use them to help your doctor understand the severity of your HPPD. Share them with friends and family (well, maybe not family, lest you want Grandma to know intimate phenomenological details of your LSD trip – there’s every kind of family, you know?). And so on. Let’s normalize psychedelic tracers!
Side-By-Side
A recent improvement to the tool that Zuck mentions in the video is the fact that we now display two bouncing balls rather than just one. This is in order to mitigate the problem that when you are tripping, the simulated tracers will get in the way of the actual tracers. And while this is still a bit of a problem, having one bouncing ball without simulated tracers can be really helpful when fiddling with the parameters on psychedelics:
Side-by-side: left side with tracers, right side without tracers.
We got a trip report from someone who took 100μg LSD who used the tool once we had added the second ball. This person said that the second ball was extremely helpful and that it allowed them to confidently estimate the replay frequency (14.5Hz):
100μg LSD 4 hours after dosing
It’s satisfying to see someone being confident about the replay frequency. The 14.5Hz in this case is not too far off from the 15-20Hz range previously estimated for LSD. And the best part is that this was done during the trip and in real time. The person who submitted this datapoint specifically said that it was very clear that the effect was one of replay rather than strobe, and that they were able to accurately estimate the replay frequency by adjusting the spacing so that there would be a match between the simulated trail effects on the left with the real trail effects on the right. We expect this to be a skill very amenable to training and we hope the psychonautic community starts paying attention to it.
Tracer Tool on Psychedelic YouTube
I recently found a really interesting YouTube channel: Junk Bond Trader (JBT for short). I found it by looking for quality5-MeO-DMT trip reports and I thought that his video about it was good enough for me to look deeper into his work.
One of the things I really enjoy about his style is that he describes the quality of his altered states in a very matter-of-fact way without taking the experience at face value. He also has a chill demeanor, epistemologically optimistic and curious rather than stuck in a wall of confusion or vibing in mysterianism. This is quite rare in Psychedelic YouTube. Exaggerating a little, I find that psychedelic-adjacent personalities tend to undergo changes that end up being difficult to square with the sort of slow and humble attention to detail needed for science and serious phenomenology. Perhaps we can think of this in terms of archetypes. When someone starts to explore psychedelics they often begin by embodying the archetype of the explorer. Namely, being driven by curiosity about what’s out there in the state-space of consciousness. After a number of powerful experiences, the driving archetype often shifts. The direct exposure to high-energy high-integration states of mind tends to anneal a new self-concept. The archetype they embody tends to drift to things like the psychedelic mystic, priest, educator, messiah, warrior, evangelist, shaman, prophet, counselor, or healer. It is rare to see someone who after many such exposures remains in the explorer wavelength; undoubtedly one of the most useful archetypes for science. In addition to an explorer, JBT is also a synthesizer in that he makes detailed analyses pointing out the common features across many experiences. For instance, I loved his retrospective analysis of about 40 DMT trips (see: part 1, 2, 3, & 4).
Steven Lehar is right, psychedelic experiences are harder to dissect when one is young and impressionable. It is quite likely that the best phenomenological reports will come from people who are at least 30 years old and who have a wealth of crystallized knowledge to use in order to describe their experiences. Speaking of which, I would say that Steven is also someone who successfully maintained the archetype of explorer throughout his psychedelic explorations without lapsing into any other less helpful archetype. But more than that, Lehar is also a synthesizer, and above all a scientist. At QRI we very much value his contributions and, contra modern academia, take seriously the sort of epistemology he employed. Namely, investigating the phenomenal character of (exotic) experiences in order to probe the principles by which perception operates. More generally, the psychedelic archetypes we consider to be priceless for qualia research are those of the explorer, synthesizer, philosopher, scientist, and engineer. Let’s get more of those and less shamans, evangelists, prophets, etc.
Back to JBT, I would highly recommend his Coffee Trip Report video on the basis that… it is really funny. But perhaps most relevant for our purposes at the moment, he recorded a video while on 200μg + 36mg 2C-B (warning: for most people this would be a very strong combined dose) and at 45:40 he started talking about the nature of the tracer effects of this combo:
“These trails are no fucking joke you guys. Some of the coolest visuals I’ve ever had in my life. […] Can I see through my eyelids? I can see around me, what the fuck? Dude, that’s freaking me out. [Waves hand in front of face with eyes closed]. There it is again! Wow. How does that work? […] These visuals are awesome, you’ll have to take my word for it. […] Everything looks alive, you know? It is not so much morphy as with mushrooms, but everything is jumpy, it’s got an energy to it. It’s all pulsing at the same frequency. These trails are… they honestly last two or three seconds. It’s not even funny at this point. It’s ridiculous. I thought I knew trails… I thought I knew trails! I didn’t know fucking trails. I’m afraid to do this again. I was seeing through my eyelids earlier… I’ve gotta look back at that footage. I mean, I obviously wasn’t looking through my eyelids, I know that. But I thought I was, I thought I was, I was that convinced. It’s weird, you go in and out of confusion, and it coincides with the intensity of the hallucinations. It’s like the more confused I get, the more intense the visuals get. So just when things start going good I can’t articulate it. I’m very conscious and lucid during all of this experience, and I’ll be able to recall it all. […] These trails are so over the top. Every little movement stains the air forever. […] Really weird, really strong visuals. Everything looks alive. Which is really cool. I feel like my ceiling is wet. That popcorn ceiling looks wet. It has this weird gloss over it. It looks cool. What can I say, it looks awesome. I could sit here all night staring at my fucking ceiling.”
Given these comments about the trail effects he was experiencing I decided to reach out to him to congratulate him for the quality psychedelic content and also ask him if he would be kind enough to try to replicate the tracers he saw using the Tracer Tool. And he did! He can now share with us a qualia souvenir from his trip! Here is what the tracers looked like:
He left this comment on the submission: “Though it was 5 weeks later, I made a specific note of the tracers in a live trip report video, and committed it to memory at that point because they were so unusually vivid. I chose black because the trail was specifically dark black.” – Junk Bond Trader (see the parameters[3]).
Just a few days ago, JBT gave a shoutout to QRI, my channel, and the Tracer Tool in a video (between 2:35 and 5:20). Thank you JBT! I particularly liked that he remarks on the fact that we use Shia LaBeouf’s “Just Do It!” green screen as the default animation for our custom tracer editor.[4]
An important note is that in his shoutout JBT makes it sound like this is all just me, but in reality what is going on at QRI is a huge team effort. In the psychophysics front in particular I would like to mention that Lawrence Wu and Zuck are the main people pushing the envelope and I am immensely grateful for all the hard work they are doing for this project. This also wouldn’t be possible without the many discussions with people at QRI and the broader community of friends of the organization.
I believe that Adeptus Psychonautica, whom I also like and respect, will give the Tracer Tool a try and discuss it in his channel soon! He interviewed me over a year ago and I think that he is also very much of an explorer. A particularly nice thing about his channel is that he reviews psychedelic retreat and healing centers. This is unusual; most people find it psychologically difficult to say anything bad about the place or the people who facilitated an e.g. ayahuasca ceremony for them. The perceived sacredness of the ritual makes any review other than a glowing recommendation feel sacrilegious. Adeptus Psychonautica has been around the psychedelic retreat block enough that he can really map out all the ways in which specific psychedelic retreat centers fail to meet their full potential. This is highly appreciated. I personally would take my sweet time in selecting the right place to experience something as valenced as an ayahuasca trip, so his reviews add a lot of value on that front. Thank you Adeptus!
Akin to these two YouTubers, if you have the ability to promote the Tracer Tool to audiences that are likely to try it, please be our guest! We would love to get more data so we can share the results with the world.
From Psychedelic Renaissance to Psychedelic Enlightenment
One of the things that I love about the fact that JBT tried the tool and talked about it on his channel is that it shows that research feedback loops can be closed online and in places as distracted and unfocused as YouTube. It hints at a new possible model for decentralized scientific research of exotic states of consciousness. Even if small in percentage, a dedicated group of online rational psychonauts able and willing to try each other’s experiments and discuss them openly might very well accelerate our understanding of these states at a pace that is faster than academia or the R&D departments of relevant industries (such as pharma). How many potential Steven Lehars are out there just waiting for the right legal landscape to share their experiences and analyses with others alike? I am excited to see how the online rational psychonautic community evolves in the coming years. I anticipate substantial paradigmatic developments, and we hope that QRI contributes to this process. In the long term, it is still unclear where most of the discoveries in this field will take place. On one extreme a hyper-centralized Manhattan Project of Consciousness could leapfrog all current research, and on the other extreme we have anonymous and decentralized Psychedelic Turk scenarios where access to exotic states of mind (both from the inside and the outside) is a sort of utility at the mercy of market forces. In the middle, perhaps we have semi-decentralized conglomerates of researchers building on each other’s work. If so, I look forward to an emergent science-oriented psychedelic intelligentsia of excellent trip reporters on YouTube in the next few years.
What Data Are We Most Interested In?
The combinatorial space of possible drug cocktails is really large and poorly mapped out. Of particular note, however, is the exotic effects caused by mixing psychedelics and dissociatives. Given the reports that there is a profound synergy between psychedelics and dissociatives (and that this combination is not generally particularly unsafe), we expect there to be really interesting tracers to report and we have no submissions of the sort so far. In particular, we expect to find synergy (rather than orthogonality or suppression) between these classes of drugs, and we would love to quantify the extent of this synergy (anecdotally it is really strong). If you are the sort of person who does not get noticeable tracers on LSD, perhaps try adding a little ketamine and see if that helps. Chances are, you will be like JBT, saying something along the lines of “I thought I knew tracers… I didn’t know **** tracers!”.
It would also be really good to see tracer data for candy-flipping (and MDMA combinations more broadly). We suspect that MDMA will generally have interesting ADSR envelopes. So if you have candy-flipped in the past or you intend do to so in the future please consider donating a couple minutes of your time to submit a datapoint! Remember, you can share it with your friends as a qualia souvenir!
Finally, we would love to have more DMT and 5-MeO-DMT submissions. We are interested in checking if the differences we have found between them can be replicated. In particular, we are told that 5-MeO-DMT produces monochromatic tracers whereas DMT produces richly-colored tracers that flicker between positive and negative after-images. If this turns out to be true, it would be really significant from a scientific point of view:
5-MeO-DMT
DMT
Apropos Psychedelic YouTube
With over a quarter million views as of March of 2021, The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (@Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club) is perhaps the most viewed piece of QRI content. Thus, the comment section perhaps gives us a snapshot of how the existing (pre-Galilean!) memes surrounding the psychedelic community make sense of this work. Doing a cursory semantic clustering analysis, I would say that most of the comments tend to fit into one of the following groups:
Comments from people who admit to having tried DMT tend to say that “this is the best description of DMT phenomenology I have ever seen”.
Comments complaining about the poor audio quality.
Comments saying I should go on Joe Rogan (e.g. “Very captivating and well formulated. We need to have jamie pull this up.” is the most upvoted comment, with 1.7K upvotes).
Comments stating that the DMT entities are real and that I should take higher doses to confirm that.
Comments complaining that “visuals are not what matters about the experience” and that I’m “missing the point” for paying attention to them.
Weird miscellaneous comments like claiming that the video is a proof that there is a conspiracy from Harvard trying to convince the world that DMT is not a true spiritual molecule.
Fun one-liners (my favorite is “Massachusetts Institute of Tryptamines”).
Let me briefly comment on each of these clusters:
For (1): I am always happy to hear from psychonauts that our work at QRI is clarifying and illuminating. I get a lot of emails and messages saying this, and it honestly makes me happy and keeps me motivated to go on. An example of this would be one of the most upvoted comments:
This video combined with the article probably explained more of the dmt trip than all the trip reports I’ve read which is a lot. The levels, with the doses! Now I know I landed squarely in the Magic Eye. The symmetry hotel is a great explanation too. I find it interesting that I had an experience of divine consciousness on level three rather than level six; perhaps it was just a foretaste? Truly informative, this is what psychonauts need to hear.
YouTube user johnnysandiegoable
For (2): Yes, we know, sorry! We did what we could to stitch together the audio from my phone and the audio from the camera (which was way in the back). The wireless mic we had planned to use malfunctioned at the last minute and I wasn’t very mindful about the fact that the phone would produce the best audio. I know I should have stayed closer to the podium for most of the talk. That said, if you hear the presentation with headphones and are willing to increase the volume for the quiet parts, you can still make out every word. So, admittedly, the comments are exaggerating a bit just how unlistenable it is. ^_^
For (3): Joe, if you are reading this, I’m game! Bring it on! I think that it is entirely possible that we will have a great conversation.
For (4): I have indeed said before that we think it is unlikely that one makes true contact with mind-independent entities while tripping on DMT. Of course we welcome evidence to the contrary, and we have even suggested novelmethods by which this could be tested. But I do want to say that unlike other accounts of the DMT phenomenology, the way we argue for the likely internal (“fully in your head”) interpretation does not in any way dismiss the specific reasons why such experiences are so compelling. It is not only that the experience feels very real (indeed, what does that even mean?) but that it has a series of properties that makes the hallucinations stand out as uniquely believable relative to other psychedelics. In the Harvard presentation I mention the idea that the dimensionality of the experience is so high that in a way one does experience a sort of superintelligence while on DMT. In such states, we genuinely get to experience much more information at once and render intricate connections in ways that would make connoisseurs of complex thoughts extremely jealous. Alas, this has yet to be fine-tuned for any kind of useful computational purpose. Yet, in terms of raw information bandwidth, the state has tremendous potential. So we could say, that on DMT you do get to experience a sort of higher intelligence; it is just that it is a higher intelligence of your own making, and we lack an adequate narrative within sober states of mind to make sense of what this experience means. Hence we tend to converge on easy-to-explain and relatable metaphors. Saying that one met with an advanced alien intelligence is somehow easier to convey than describing in detail the sequence of point-of-view fragmentation operations that bootstrapped the multi-perspectival state of mind you experienced. More so, in a recent video, I explained that DMT has some additional properties that make the hallucinations it induces extremely believable. Of particular note I point out that on DMT one experiences:
Multi-modal coherence where touch, sight, and sound hallucinations are synchronized,
An extremely high temperature parameter leading to the melting of the phenomenal self, and
Tactile hallucinations, which add a layer of “reality” to the experience.
These and other features are the reason why DMT experiences feel so “real” and hard to dismiss as mere hallucinations. Rational psychonauts are advised to pay close attention to this in order to avoid developing delusions with repeated administrations.
For (5): Look, we understand. It is obviously the case that the visual effects are a tiny component of the experience, but consider just how difficult it is going to be to describe every single aspect of the experience. I am sure you have heard the expression “learn to walk before you learn to run” (or in this case, learn to walk before you learn to fly, or perhaps more appropriately, to learn to walk before you learn how to operate an alien spaceship with sixteen thousand levers interlinked in unknown ways). In brief, the path that will take us to the point where we can fully characterize a DMT trip will start with developing an extremely crisp and precise vocabulary and research methodology to describe the simplest low-level effects. It is surprising how much we can in fact say about a DMT trip by allusions to attractors in feedback systems and hyperbolic symmetry groups even if this turns out to only get at a small fraction of what makes such experiences interesting. We have to start with the basics; that is what we are doing here.
For (6): This is at least somewhat expected. Recall that DMT tends to make you overfit data. Conspiratorial thinking is a classic form of overfitting. Without a rational framework and grounding exercises, DMT users will generally develop increasingly overfit models of reality.
For (7): Well, keep them coming!
Future Developments
I want to conclude by mentioning that we have ambitious plans for QRI’s Psychophysics Toolkit (of which the Tracer Tool is but the first of many tools to come). We are in the process of developing many more experimental tools and paradigms specifically designed to rigorously quantify and characterize the information-processing features of exotic states of mind. Fancifully, imagine an “experience editor” where you can recreate arbitrary experiences from first principles. To name one possibility here, consider Distill’s Self-Organizing Textures: visual textures are hard to put into words, but easy to tell apart. Hence, odd-one-out paradigms in conjunction with generative methods (i.e. texture synthesis) can allow us to pin-point exactly how psychedelics affect our perception of mongrels. In the long run, we want to characterize the circuit motifs emergent out of the neural architecture of the human brain, and we expect this work to be extremely useful for that pursuit. Stay tuned!
[1] From their website: The Intercollegiate Psychedelics Network (IPN) is a youth-led garden organization dedicated to the development of students into the next generation of diverse and interdisciplinary leaders in the field of psychedelics. We envision a future where safe, legal, and equitable access to psychedelic healing creates a more just, peaceful and connected world. [e.g. see PennPsychedelics].
[2] From their website: PsychedelX is a student talk program featuring 20 minute talks from students around the globe with novel, impactful, and interdisciplinary ideas that will shake up the psychedelic discourse. From February 22nd – 27th [2021], watch their presentations on YouTube to expand your understanding of psychedelics and their role in our world today.
[3] If you want to see Junk Bond Trader’s tracer go to the Tracer Tool, click “Import Paramters”, and then paste: {“animation”:”unlitBallGravity”,”speed”:”1.65″,”trailOn”:true,”trailIntensity”:”70″,”trailTimeFactor”:”78″,”trailExponential”:true,”strobeOn”:true,”strobeFrequency”:”14.7″,”strobeIntensity”:”83″,”strobeTimeFactor”:”76″,”strobeExponential”:true,”strobeAdsr”:false,”replayOn”:false,”replayFrequency”:”11″,”replayIntensity”:”68″,”replayTimeFactor”:”75″,”replayExponential”:true,”replayAdsr”:false,”pulseOn”:false,”pulseFrequency”:”1.6″,”pulseAmplitude”:”50″,”pulseColor”:false,”pulseColorAmplitude”:”100″,”maxTracers”:”154″,”color”:”#000000″}
Befriending Utility Monsters: Being the Adult in the Room When Talking About the Hedonic Extremes (link)
In this episode I connect a broad variety of topics with the following common thread: “What does it mean to be the adult in the room when dealing with extremely valenced states of consciousness?” Essentially, a talk on Utility Monsters.
Concretely, what does it mean to be responsible and sensible when confronted with the fact that pain and pleasure follow a long tail distribution? When discussing ultra-painful or ultra-blissful experiences one needs to take off the glasses we use to reason about “room temperature consciousness” and put on glasses that actually take these states with the seriousness they deserve.
Topics discussed include: The partial 5HT3 antagonism of ginger juice, kidney stones from vitamin C supplementation, 2C-E nausea, phenibut withdrawal, akathisia as a remarkably common side effect of psychiatric medication (neuroleptics, benzos, and SSRIs), negative 5-MeO-DMT trips, the book “LSD and the Mind of the Universe”, turbulence and laminar flow in the “energy body”, being a “mom” at a festival, and more.
“Those taking a thousand milligrams or so of vitamin C a day may have a 1-in-300 chance of getting a kidney stone every year, instead of a 1-in-600 chance.” (source)
“This manuscript will advance the hypothesis that 5-HT7 directly mediates three specific dramatic mental effects of psychedelics: creative open-eyed Visuals, Ego-loss, and loss of contact with Reality (VER).” (Thomas S. Ray; source)
Mapping State-Spaces of Consciousness: The Neroli Neighborhood (link)
What would it be like to have a scent-based medium of thought, with grammar, generative syntax, clauses, subordinate clauses, field geometry, and intentionality? How do we go about exploring the full state-space of scents (or any other qualia variety)?
Topics Covered in this Video: The State-space of Consciousness, Mapping State-Spaces, David Pearce at Oxford, Qualia Enrichment Kits, Character Impact vs. Flavors, Linalool Variants, Clusters of Neroli Scents, Neroli in Perfumes, Neroli vs. Orange Blossom vs. Petigrain vs. Orange/Mandarin/Lemon/Lime, High-Entropy Alloys of Scent, Musks as Reverb and Brown Noise, “Neroli Reconstructions” (synthetic), Semi-synthetic Mixtures, Winner-Takes-All Dynamics in Qualia Spaces, Multi-Phasic Scents, and Non-Euclidean State-Spaces.
What is Time? Explaining Time-Loops, Moments of Eternity, Time Branching, Time Reversal, and More… (link)
What is (phenomenal) time?
The feeling of time passing is not the same as physical time.
Albert Einstein discovered that “Newtonian time” was a special case of physical time, since gravity, relativity, and the constancy of the speed of light entails that space, time, mass, and gravity are intimately connected. He, in a sense, discovered a generalization of our common-sense notion of physical time; a generalization which accounts for the effects of moving and accelerating frames of reference on the relative passage of time between observers. Physical time, it turns out, could manifest in many more (exotic) ways than was previously thought.
Likewise, we find that our everyday phenomenal time (i.e. the feeling of time passing) is a special case of a far more general set of possible time-like qualities of experience. In particular, in this video I discuss “exotic phenomenal time” experiences, which include oddities such as time-loops, moments of eternity, time branching, and time reversal. I then go on to explain these exotic phenomenal time experiences with a model we call the “pseudo-time arrow”, which involves implicit causality in the network of sensations we experience on each “moment of experience”. Thus we realize that phenomenal time is an incredibly general property! It turns out that we haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible here… it’s about time we do so.
Benzos: Why the Withdrawal is Worse than the High is Good (+ Flumazenil/NAD+ Anti-Tolerance Action) (link)
Most people have low-resolution models of how drug tolerance works. Folk theories that “what goes up must come down” and theories in the medical establishment about how you can “stabilize a patient on a dose” and expect optimal effects long term get in the way of actually looking at how tolerance works.
In this video I explain why benzo withdrawal is far worse than the high they give you is good.
Core arguments presented:
Benzos can treat anxiety, insomnia, palpitations, seizures, hallucinations, etc. If you use them to treat one of these symptoms, the rebound will nonetheless involve all of them.
Kindling – How long-term use leads to neural annealing of the “withdrawal neural patterns”.
Amnesia effects prevent you from remembering the good parts/only remembering the bad parts.
Neurotoxicity from long-term benzo use makes it harder for your brain to heal.
Arousal as a multiplier of consciousness: on benzos the “high” is low arousal and the withdrawal is high arousal (compared to stimulants where you at least will “sleep through the withdrawal”).
Tolerance still builds up even when you don’t have a “psychoactive dose” in your body – meaning that the extremely long half-life of clonazepam and diazepam and their metabolites (50h+) entails that you still develop long-term tolerance even with weekly or biweekly use!
I then go into how the (empirically false) common-sense view of drug tolerance is delaying promising research avenues, such as “anti-tolerance drugs” (see links below). In particular, NAD+ IV and Flumazenil seem to have large effect sizes for treating benzo withdrawals. I AM NOT CONFIDENT THAT THEY WORK, but I think it is silly to not look into them with our best science at this point. Clinical trials for NAD+ IV therapy for drug withdrawal are underway, and the research to date on flumazenil seems extremely promising. Please let me know if you have any experience using either of these two tools and whether you had success with them or not.
Note: These treatments may also generalize to other GABAergic drugs like gabapentin, alcohol, and phenibut (which also have horrible withdrawals, but are far shorter than benzo withdrawal).
Further readings:
Epileptic patients who have become tolerant to the anti-seizure effects of the benzodiazepine clonazepam became seizure-free for several days after treatment with 1.5 mg of flumazenil.[14] Similarly, patients who were dependent on high doses of benzodiazepines […] were able to be stabilised on a low dose of clonazepam after 7–8 days of treatment with flumazenil.[15]”
Flumazenil has been tested against placebo in benzo-dependent subjects. Results showed that typical benzodiazepine withdrawal effects were reversed with few to no symptoms.[16] Flumazenil was also shown to produce significantly fewer withdrawal symptoms than saline in a randomized, placebo-controlled study with benzodiazepine-dependent subjects. Additionally, relapse rates were much lower during subsequent follow-up.[17]
Is it possible for the “natural growth” of a pandemic to be slower than exponential no matter where it starts? What are ways in which we can leverage the graphical properties of the “contact network” of humanity in order to control contagious diseases? In this video I offer a novel way of analyzing and designing networks that may allow us to easily prevent the exponential growth of future pandemics.
Topics covered: The difference between the aesthetic of pure math vs. applied statistics when it comes to making sense of graphs. Applications of graph analysis. Identifying people with a high centrality in social networks. Klout scores. Graphlets. Kinds of graphs: geometric, small world, scale-free, empirical (galactic core + “whiskers”). Pandemics being difficult to control due to exponential growth. Using a sort of “pandemic Klout score” to prioritize who to quarantine, who to vaccinate first. The network properties that made the plague spread so slowly in the Middle Ages. Toroidal planets as having linear pandemic growth after a certain threshold number of infections. Non-integer graph dimensionality. Dimensional chokes. And… kitchen sponges.
Readings either referenced in the video or useful to learn more about this topic:
Main Empirical Findings: Our results suggest a rather detailed and somewhat counterintuitive picture of the community structure in large networks. Several qualitative properties of community structure are nearly universal:
• Up to a size scale, which empirically is roughly 100 nodes, there not only exist well-separated communities, but also the slope of the network community profile plot is generally sloping downward. (See Fig. 1(a).) This latter point suggests, and empirically we often observe, that smaller communities can be combined into meaningful larger communities.
• At size scale of 100 nodes, we often observe the global minimum of the network community profile plot. (Although these are the “best” communities in the entire graph, they are usually connected to the remainder of the network by just a single edge.)
• Above the size scale of roughly 100 nodes, the network community profile plot gradually increases, and thus there is a nearly inverse relationship between community size and community quality. This upward slope suggests, and empirically we often observe, that as a function of increasing size, the best possible communities as they grow become more and more “blended into” the remainder of the network.
We have also examined in detail the structure of our social and information networks. We have observed that an ‘jellyfish’ or ‘octopus’ model [33, 7] provides a rough first approximation to structure of many of the networks we have examined.
Ps. Forgot to explain the sponge’s relevance: the scale-specific network geometry of a sponge is roughly hyperbolic at a small scale. Then the material is cubic at medium scale. And at the scale where you look at it as flat (being a sheet with finite thickness) it is two dimensional.
Why Does DMT Feel So Real? Multi-modal Coherence, High Temperature Parameter, Tactile Hallucinations (link)
Why does DMT feel so “real”? Why does it feel like you experience genuine mind-independent realities on DMT?
In this video I explain that we all implicitly rely on a model of which signals are trustworthy and which ones are not. In particular, in order to avoid losing one’s mind during an intense exotic experience (such as those catalyzed by psychedelics, dissociatives, or meditation) one needs to (a) know that you are altered, (b) have a good model of what that alteration entails, and (c) that the alteration is not strong enough that it breaks down either (a) or (b). So drugs that make you forget you are under the influence, or that you don’t know how to model (or have a mistaken model of) can deeply disrupt your “web of trusted beliefs”.
I argue that one cannot really import the models that one learned from other psychedelics about “what psychedelics do” to DMT; DMT alters you in a far broader way. For example, most people on LSD may mistrust what they see, but they will not mistrust what they touch (touch stays a “trusted signal” on LSD). But on DMT you can experience tactile hallucinations that are coherent with one’s visions! “Crossing the veil” on DMT is not a visual experience: it’s a multi-modal experience, like entering a cave hiding behind a waterfall.
Some of the signals that DMT messes with that often convince people that what they experienced was mind-independent include:
Hyperbolic geometry and mathematical complexity; experiencing “impossible objects”.
Incredibly high-resolution multi-modal integration: hallucinations are “coherent” across senses.
Philosophical qualia enhancement: it alters not only your senses and emotions, but also “the way you organize models of reality”.
More “energized” experiences feel inherently more real, and DMT can increase the energy parameter to an extreme degree.
Highly valenced experiences also feel more real – the bliss and the horror are interpreted as “belonging to the vibe of a reality” rather than being just a property of your experience.
DMT can give you powerful hallucinations in every modality: not only visual hallucinations, but also tactile, auditory, scent, taste, and proprioception.
Novel and exotic feelings of “electromagnetism”.
Sense of “wisdom”.
Knowledge of your feelings: the entities know more about you than you yourself know about yourself.
With all of these signals being liable to chaotic alterations on DMT it makes sense that even very bright and rational people may experience a “shift” in their beliefs about reality. The trusted signals will have altered their consilience point. And since each point of consilience between trusted signals entails a worldview, people who believe in the independent reality of the realms disclosed by DMT share trust in some signals most people don’t even know exist. We can expect some pushback for this analysis by people who trust any of the signals altered by DMT listed above. Which is fine! But… if we want to create a rational Super-Shulgin Academy to really make some serious progress in mapping-out the state-space of consciousness, we will need to prevent epistemological mishaps. I.e. We have to model insanity so that we ourselves can stay sane.
[Skip to 4:20 if you don’t care about the scent of rose – the Qualia of the Day today]
“The most common descriptive labels for the entity were being, guide, spirit, alien, and helper. […] Most respondents endorsed that the entity had the attributes of being conscious, intelligent, and benevolent, existed in some real but different dimension of reality, and continued to exist after the encounter.”
We developed a new method for replicating psychedelic tracer effects in detail: the Tracer Replication Tool. This tool gives us a window into how the time-like texture of experience determines the state of consciousness we find ourselves in, which clarifies what makes both meditating and taking psychedelics such powerful state-switching activities. We discuss how the technique of using the tracer tool may find useful applications, such as allowing us to describe exotic “ineffable” experiences in clear language, standardize a scale of intensity of psychedelic drug effects (a.k.a. a “High-O-Meter”), help us quantify the synergy between different drugs, and test theories for what makes an experience feel good or bad such as the Symmetry Theory of Valence. The pilot data collected with this tool so far is suggestive of the following patterns: (1) THC and HPPD result in a smooth and faint trail effect. (2) The characteristic frequencies of the strobe and replay effects for 2C-B are slower than those of either DMT or 5-MeO-DMT. And, (3) whereas DMT comes with a strong color pulsing effect leading to very colorful visuals, 5-MeO-DMT gives rise to monochromatic tracer effects. We conclude by discussing the implications of these patterns in light of an analysis of experience that allows for a varying time-like texture. We hope to inspire the scientific community and curious psychonauts to use this tool to help us uncover more patterns.
Introduction
Rhythmic activity in the brain is a staple of neuroscience. It shows up in spiking neurons, synchronous oscillations at the level of networks, global patterns of resonance and coherence in EEG recordings, and in many other places. The book Rhythms of the Brain by György Buzsáki is a systematic review of what was known about these rhythms back in 2006.[1] One of the things György talks about in this book is how a lot of neuroscience techniques focused on finding the neural correlates of perception tend to consider the variable activation of neurons from one trial to the next as noise. In experiments that look into how neurons respond to a specific stimulus, datasets are constructed that track the neuronal activity that stays the same across trials. That which changes is discarded as noise, and György argues that such “noise” is really where the information about the internal rhythms is to be found.[2] We concur with the assessment that understanding these native rhythms is key for making sense of how the brain works. Perhaps one of the most exciting developments in this space is the method of Connectome-Specific Harmonic Wave analysis (Atasoy et al., 2016). This way of analyzing fMRI data describes a “brain state” as, at least partly, consisting of a weighted sum of its resonant modes. This paradigm has been used with success for comparing brain states across widely different categories of experience: LSD, ketamine, and anesthesia, among others (Luppi et al., 2020).
These are exciting times for exploring the native rhythms of nervous systems in neuroscience. But what about their subjective quality? One would hope that we could connect a formal third-person view of these rhythms with their experiential component. Alas, at this point in time the behavioral and physiological component of brain rhythms is far better understood than the way in which they cash out in subjective qualities.
Could there be a way to make these rhythms easily visible to ourselves as scientists? One interesting lens through which to see psychedelics is in terms of the way they excite specific rhythm-generating networks. This lens would present psychedelic states as giving you a sense of what it feels like to have many of these rhythms simultaneously activated, thus having access to a wider repertoire of brain states (Atasoy et al., 2017).
But you don’t need psychedelics to realize there’s something fishy about the solidity of our perception. Intuitively, one may get the impression that normal everyday states of consciousness do not show the signatures of being the result of ensembles of rhythmic activity. That said, some would affirm that paying attention to the artifacts of our perception may in fact be a window into these rhythms. For example, Lehar’s Harmonic Resonance Theory of the gestalt properties of perception (Lehar, 1999) attempts to explain the characteristics of well known visual illusions (such as the Kanizsa triangle) with principles derived from the superposition of rhythmic activity.
Kanizsa Triangles
Paying close attention to the act of observing an object over time has led some researchers to play with the idea that our experience of the world is best understood as music (Lloyd, 2013), for our feeling of a solid surrounding results from the interplay between finely coordinated sensations and acts of interpretation. Indeed, the fluidity of sensory impressions betrays our common-sense notion that we experience a solid and stable world. It often takes a perturbation out of our normal everyday state of consciousness to notice this. As an example here, we can point out that insight meditation practices peer into the illusion of solidity and continuity of our experience, whereas concentration meditation enhances these illusions (Ingram, 2018).
Arguably, like a fish who cannot notice water until it’s taken out of it, the stitching process by which our brain constructs reality is usually hidden from view. To be taken out of the water in this context would be to be in a state that allows you to notice the seams of one’s experience. To the extent that this normal stitching process breaks down in exotic states of consciousness, they are clearly useful for research in this domain. Thus we argue that the artifacts of perception in alien states of consciousness are not noise; they provide hints for how normal experience is constructed. In particular, we posit that “psychedelic tracers” (i.e. the cluster of persisting visual phenomena caused by hallucinogens) may be a window into how rhythmic feedback dynamics are used to control the content of our experience. For this reason, we have been interested in turning what until now has been qualitative descriptions and informal approximations of this phenomenon into concrete quantitative replications.
In what follows we will showcase the value of a psychophysics toolkit we developed at the Qualia Research Institute called the Tracer Replication Tool for modeling psychedelic tracer phenomenology. Although we will focus on psychedelic experiences, this tool can have a much broader set of applications. For example, we show how the tool can be used to visualize and quantify the severity of HPPD, which currently has a very qualitative, and imprecise at best, diagnostic criteria. Likewise, the tool has the potential to bring together the complex clinical presentation of visual disturbances such as palinopsia, photopsia, oscillopsia, visual snow, and other conditions, into a coherent framework. Perhaps, speculatively, the connection between all these visual disturbances is to be found in the dysregulation of the rhythms of the visual control systems, which is what the tracer tool sets out to quantify.
The only attempt of arriving at quantitative replications of psychedelic tracers in the scientific literature we are aware of is by (Dubois & VanRullen, 2011). They used multiple-exposure stroboscopic photography in order to depict video scenes. They then asked many people who have had LSD experiences to identify the strobe frequency that best approximated their tracers (which on average was in the 15-20 Hz range).
As we will see, our model for psychedelic tracers is more detailed: it has multiple persistence of vision effects that combine together into a complex tracer. For this reason, the kind of tracers used in Dubois & VanRullen turn out to be a special case of our tool, which we call the strobeeffect:
LSD users perceive a series of discrete positive afterimages in the wake of moving objects, a percept that has been likened to a multiple-exposure stroboscopic photograph, somewhat akin to Etienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs [5] from 1880, or to more recent digital art produced in a few clicks (Figure 1).
By using a wider set of effects, the Tracer Replication Tool might give us hints about how psychedelics disrupt native rhythms given how they affect the processing of perceptual information at a granular level.
Before we provide the full set of tracer effects along with their associated vocabulary, let us jump into the preliminary psychedelic replications we have obtained thanks to this tool.
Psychedelic Replications
Over the years since I’ve run the Qualia Computing blog, I’ve received many messages from people who, for lack of a better term, we could call rational psychonauts. This should not be too surprising, with pieces like “How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD” and “5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 Lenses”, the site has become a bit of a Schelling point for people who like to blend computational reasoning and the study of exotic states of consciousness. These rational psychonauts are people who not only are well acquainted with exotic states of consciousness, but also like to use a scientific and rational lens to make sense of such states. In particular, people in this cluster often ask me to send them experiments to try out next time they take a psychedelic substance. I certainly never encourage them to take drugs, but under the assumption they will do so anyway, I sometimes send them tasks to do. Thus, once we had a prototype for the tracer tool, I already had a set of more than willing anonymous pilot participants. I sent them the link to the tool along with some brief instructions. Namely:
Look at the ball for a few minutes in state X (where X can be any substance, meditation, etc.). Then as soon as you come down, try to fiddle with the parameters on the left until the simulated tracer looks as close as possible to how you experienced it in the state. When you are ready, simply click “submit parameters” and add info about what the state you were in was at the time. In the case of HPPD, just try your best to replicate the tracer (I know it gets confusing when we talk about the tracers of the simulated tracers, but try to ignore those and just replicate the tracer of the original input).
Without further ado, here are the resulting replications I received:
HPPD
Mild HPPD (participant said it was strongest on color red)
THC
12.5mg edible, 60 minutes post-ingestion
15mg edible, 90 minutes post-ingestion
2C-B
20mg orally ingested
12mg “gummed”
Notice how although the replication of the higher dosage is more mild in a way, they both share the presence of a strobe effect at roughly 5.5 Hz!
DMT
5mg vaped
10mg vaped
20mg vaped
The higher dose has a complex mixture of effects, including 40 Hz color pulsing (positive and negative afterimages mixed together), 22 Hz replay, and 27 Hz strobe. I’ll note that the participant included the following comment: “Aside from extremely fast tracers, the white space consisted of pixelated fractals. Color was abundant.”
5-MeO-DMT
5mg vaped
10mg vaped
As we will discuss further below, it is worth noting that at least in this sample, there are no color pulsing effects present (which is unlike “regular” DMT).
Drug Combination: Mescaline + ETH-LAD
125μg ETH-LAD + 2 teaspoons of San Pedro powder
The above is the only datapoint we have so far from the combination of psychoactive substances. The participant took 125μg of ETH-LAD, and then two and a half hours later 2 teaspoons of San Pedro powder. The replication is of the way the ball looked like 5 hours after taking the first drug.
Definitions
Let us now look into the specifics of the tracer tool:
Core Effects
Core effects are pillars of the tracer tool where a particular feedback dynamic is used. The core effects include trails, strobe, and replay.
Modifiers
A modifier effect is one that plays with a core effect and alters it in some way. We will talk along the way about the modifying effects of persistence, intensity, and frequency, and then have a separate section to talk in more detail about the modifier effects of envelope (ADSR), pulse, and color pulse.
Trails (Core Effect)
This is perhaps the most basic effect. Making an analogy with sound, trails are akin to a soft reverb with no delay:
The three settings for trails are: persistence, intensity, and exponential decay (which is binary in the current implementation and otherwise takes on the value of linear decay). Persistence determines how quickly the tracer vanishes, whereas intensity is a constant multiplier for the entire trail. Thus, by changing those parameters you can choose between e.g. a long but dim trail or a short but bright trail.
High persistence / low intensity
Low persistence / high intensity
The exponential decay parameter slightly changes how quickly the brightness goes down; when it’s on, the trails go down more smoothly (cf. gamma correction).
Without exponential decay
With exponential decay
Strobe (Core Effect)
The strobe effect takes snapshots of the input at regular intervals. It works like chronophotography, and it is perhaps what most people think about when you first talk about visual tracers. It is the effect that Dubois & VanRullen used to find that LSD produces visual tracers at ~15-20 Hz.
Strobe effect at 16.4 Hz
The strobe effect, just as the traileffect, also has intensity, persistence, and exponential decay modifiers. In addition, it also has frequency, which encodes how many snapshots per second are being taken.
5 Hz Strobe
10 Hz Strobe
20 Hz Strobe
Note: The current implementation of the trails feature is done with a very fast strobe. In this way, when you set the strobe frequency to the maximum you get something that starts to look a little like the trails effect.
Replay (Core Effect)
With an analogy to sound, replay would be akin to adding an echo or delay to a signal. Replay adds to the raw signal a copy of the output from a fraction of a second into the past. The result is a current output that contains a sequence of increasingly dimmer video replays of itself at regular time intervals into the past.
6 Hz Replay
As with strobe, replay has intensity, persistence, exponential decay, and frequency as its modifying effects.
3 Hz Replay
12 Hz Replay
Note: the replay effect is difficult to distinguish from the strobe effect with only still images
Pulse (Modifier)
This is a modifier effect that can apply to trails, strobes, and replays (right now the implementation only applies to strobe, but we may change that in the future). It takes a fraction of the input and modulates it with a sine wave at a given frequency. This way the trails, strobes, and replays can come and go (either in part or in full) at a given frequency. This adds sparkle to the experience, and it can plausibly help create a sense of reality or object-permanence for the hallucinations as they “vibrate at their own frequency”.
Compare the difference between a strobe at 4 Hz vs. a strobe at 4 Hz with a pulse at 2 Hz:
4 Hz Strobe
4 Hz Strobe + 2 Hz Pulse at 50% amplitude
As you can see, the pulsing effect makes the strobes look like they have a sort of life of their own.
Using control interrupts as the source of hallucinogenesis, we can model hallucinogenic frame distortion of multisensory perception the same way we model sound waves produced by synthesizers; by plotting the attack, decay, sustain, and release (ADSR envelope) of the hallucinogenic interrupt as it effects consciousness. (Fig. 2)3,4 For example, nitrous oxide (N20) inhalation alters consciousness in such a way that all perceptual frames arise and fall with a predictable “wah-wah-wah” time signature. The throbbing “wah-wha-wah” of the N20 experience is a stable standing wave formation that begins when the molecule hits the neural network and ends when it is metabolized, but for the duration of N20 action the “wah-wah-wah” completely penetrates all modes of sensory awareness with a strobe-like intensity. The periodic interrupt of N20 can be modeled as a perceptual wave ambiguity that toggles back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness at roughly 8 to 11 frames-per-second, or @8-11hz.5 Consciousness rises at the peak of each “wah” and diminishes in the valleys in between. On sub-anesthetic doses, N20 creates a looping effect where frame content overlaps into the following frame, causing a perceptual cascade similar to fractal regression. We can thus model the interrupt envelope of N20 as having a rounded attack, fast decay, low sustain, medium release, with an interrupt frequency of @8-11hz. Any psychoactive substance with a similar interrupt envelope will produce results that feel similar to the N20 experience. (Fig. 3) For instance, Smoked Salvia divinorum (vaporized Salvinorin A&B, or Salvia) has an interrupt envelope similar to N20, except Salvia has a harder attack, a slightly longer decay, a more intense sustain, a slightly longer release, and a slightly faster interrupt frequency (@12-15hz).6 These slight changes in the frequency and shape of interrupt envelope cause Salvia to feel more physically intense, more hallucinatory, and more disorienting than N20, even though they share a similar throbbing or tingling sensation along the same frequency range.
This actually seems to be important for showcasing what makes drugs with similar characteristic frequencies capable of feeling so different.
2 Hz Strobe
2 Hz Strobe + soft ADSR pattern
A really interesting research lead that is connected to the ADSR envelope of psychedelic tracers can be found in The Grand Illusion (Lehar, 2010), where cognitive scientist Steven Lehar narrates some of his experiences with LSD vs. LSD + MDMA. One of the things he discusses is the way that MDMA makes the experience jitter in a pleasant way that results in the LSD visuals becoming smoother (emphasis mine):
Under LSD and ecstasy I could see the flickering blur of visual generation most clearly. And I saw peculiar ornamental artifacts on all perceived objects, like a Fourier representation with the higher harmonics chopped off. LSD by itself creates sharply detailed ornamental artifacts, like a transparent overlay of an ornamental lattice or filigree pattern superimposed on the visual scene, especially in darkness. Ecstasy smooths out those sharp edges and blurs them into a creamy smooth rolling experience.
I would suspect that this distinction will become legible with the judicious use of ADSR envelopes. Below you will find a possible rendition of this effect:
As we will discuss further below, a more creamy ADSR envelope may cash out in a more pleasant experience, whereas a sharper or spikier envelope may in turn create more harsh experiences.
Color Pulse/Negative After Images (Modifier)
The color pulse effect transforms the image’s color towards its opposite in the CIELAB color space with a given frequency. It modifies strobe, replay, and trails (in principle, there can be a different color pulse for each effect, but for now it modifies all three simultaneously).
23.6 Hz Strobe
23.6 Hz Strobe + 2 Hz Color Pulse
Unlike pulse, color pulse modulates the color rather than the brightness of the input. The way we determine what color to transform into is by going to the opposite side of the CIELAB color space. This accurately approximates the negative afterimage of any phenomenal color (such as yellow being the negative afterimage of blue, and green being the negative afterimage of red). In our current implementation, color pulsing affects strobe and replay quite differently. For replay, the effect is one where there are now versions of the ball (or image, more generally) that have the opposite color that are chasing the original ball, whereas for strobe the effect is that of giving a seizure to each of the recent snapshots of experience! See for yourself:
26 Hz Replay + 13 Hz Color Pulse
26 Hz Strobe + 13 Hz Color Pulse
In a future version of the tracer tool, color pulse may become a sub-property of each main tracer layer in the same way ADSR is a sub-property of the strobe and replay layers.
Color pulsing may be an important piece of the puzzle for understanding how otherwise similar drugs can have such dramatically different effects. Tentatively, color pulsing showed up as a distinction between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT according to one of the persons who submitted parameters (as you can see above in the replication section). For that person, DMT produced color pulses while 5-MeO-DMT did not. Of course this is just a sample size of N=1. But it seems like an important research lead if true! After all, DMT trip reports do talk of highly colorful hallucinations that typically involve the combination of colors and their opposites (e.g. “The wall looked like a Persian carpet with an alternating checkerboard pattern design of neon green and magenta light” – anonymous 10mg DMT), whereas most 5-MeO-DMT trip reports don’t feature color very much. In fact, 5-MeO-DMT trips are often in black and white, pure white, pure black, or “nothingness color”. We discuss the implications of this in more detail in the last section of this piece (GettingRealms from Time-Like Textures).
Face Value vs. Dynamic Feedback Model
It is important to point out that the tracer tool works under the assumption of linearity between the effects it models. In other words, each effect modifies the input in its own way, and the corresponding modifications are added linearly at the end. This does not need to be the case. And in fact, we must expect the brain to have a lot of complex non-linearities where e.g. the pulsing effect is then used in a replay loop which entrains a strobing pattern which focuses your attention and so on. This complication aside, there is a lot of value in postulating the simple model first, and then adjusting accordingly when it fails to model the more complex phenomena. When we get there, once we have identified particular drugs, doses, and combinations that produce strange nonlinearities, we can then build tracer tools that explore how the parameters of particular dynamic systems can best explain the empirical data. Until then, let us start mapping out the space with this (relatively) simple linear model.
Useful Vocabulary
I would like to highlight the fact that using the tracer tool can be very educational. Familiarizing yourself with the effects and their modifications will allow you to be able to describe in detail psychedelic tracers even without having to use the tool again. For instance, I find myself now able to describe what kind of tracer effect appears on any given replication or trippy video. For example, now that you have read about them, can you tell us what is going on in the following gifs?:
The Explanatory Power of the Time-Like Texture of Experience
Exotic Phenomenal Time
We have previously suggested that tracers in the most general sense (i.e. including tracers for emotions, thoughts, and all sensory modalities in addition to visual experience) are very important for understanding the time distortions one experiences in exotic states of consciousness. The overall idea is that the aspect of our experience that gives rise to the feeling of time passing is the result of implicit causality in the network of local binding connections, which we call the pseudo-time arrow (see a recent presentation about it). Don’t worry about the details, though. All you need to know is that here we model phenomenal time as the direction along which causality flows within one’s experience. And because this is a statistical property of our experience, it turns out that phenomenal time ends up being very malleable; it admits of “exotic phenomenal time” variants:
This framework can articulate what is going on when you experience crazy psychedelic states such as moments of eternity, time branching, time looping, and so on. Now, even these are just some of the possible ways in which the network of local binding connections can give rise to exotic phenomenal time experiences. In reality, because the pseudo-time arrow emerges at a statistical level in the network, one can have all manners of local pseudo-time arrows nested in complex ways, as briefly discussed in the presentation:
I will end by speculating: I just walked you through seven types of exotic phenomenal time, but if indeed [the experience of time] can be explained in terms of causality in a graph, then there are many other exotic phenomenal times we can construct. This is especially so when we consider the space of possible hybrid phenomenal times. For instance, where in some regions in the network we may find time looping, some other region might be a moment of eternity, and perhaps another region is branching, and you know, if you have a very big experience, there is no reason why you wouldn’t be able to segment different regions of it for different types of phenomenal time. This is not unlike, perhaps, how we think of Feynman diagrams, where this part of it here is moving forwards in time, this part here is doing a loop, this part here is branching… I think a lot of the topologies we see here could be used to represent completely new [hybrid] exotic phenomenal times.
Given the diversity of ways in which phenomenal time can be expressed in an experience, I will start talking about the patterns encoded in the pseudo-time arrow as the time-like texture of experience. This way, rather than assuming that one’s sense of time is globally consistent in a given way (e.g. as in “I am fully inside a time-loop”), we can discuss how various patches and components of one’s experience have this or that time-like texture (e.g. “my visual field was looping, but my proprioception was strobing and my thoughts felt timeless”).
Drugs
As a generic effect, all psychedelics seem to increase the duration of qualia in one’s experiential field, leading to a buildup of energy. But the precise shape this takes matters a lot, and it is certainly different between drugs. An example pointed above is how LSD and DMT seem to produce strobe and replay patterns of markedly different frequencies. For DMT, the spatial and temporal frequency of the visual hallucinations is usually described as “very high”. Based on the replications thus far, along with personal reports from a musician I trust, DMT’s “characteristic frequency” seems to be in the 25 to 30 Hz range. In contrast, LSD’s frequency is more in the range of 15 to 20 Hz: both Dubois & VanRullen’s LSD tracer study and subjective reports I’ve gathered over the years point to the hallucinations of acid having this rough frequency. Hence, the very building blocks of reality of a high-dose DMT breakthrough experience consist of tiny time-loops and strobe effects interacting with one another, weaving together a hallucinated world with surprising levels of detail and intense freshness of experience (as all the time loops are “young” due to their short duration). Really, when you take a small dose of DMT and you see the walls tessellating into wallpaper groups, notice how each of the tiny “bricks” that make up the tessellation is itself a time loop of sorts! It is not a stretch to describe a DMT experience as a kind of complex Darwinian ecosystem of tiny coalition-based time loop clusters bidding for your attention (cf. Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences).
Taking this paradigm seriously allows us to interpret psychoactive effects at a high level in novel ways. For example, these are some of the general patterns we have identified so far:
Psychedelics tend to have strong replay and strobe effects
HPPD, cannabis, and dissociatives seem to have a much smoother trail effect
MDMA and 5-MeO-DMT have characteristically creamy ADSR envelope effects
Using the sound metaphor to restate the above, psychedelics introduce beats and recursion, dissociatives introduce reverb, and empathogens/valence drugs may affect the temporal blur of one’s experience. Thus, we arrive at a model of psychoactive substances that makes sense of their effects in the language of signal processing rather than neurotransmitters and functional localization. This sheds a lot of clarity on the mysterious and bizarre state-spaces of consciousness disclosed by psychoactive drugs and paves the way for a principled way of predicting the way drug combinations may give rise to synergistic effects (more on that below). More so, it lends credence to the patternceutical paradigm of drug effects.
Meditation: Insight and Concentration Practices
The pseudo-time arrow paradigm suggests that one of the ways in which meditative practices can switch one’s state of consciousness is by disrupting sober time-like textures and enabling exotic time-like textures not available to the sober mind (see also: The Neuroscience of Meditation: Four Models (Johnson, 2018)). My personal experience with meditative practices is limited, but I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing some strange effects so far. In particular, I would say that concentration practices seem to give rise to experiences with long and stable pseudo-time arrows – a peacefulness in which nothing is happening yet the flow of time is constant and rather uneventful. The phenomenal time of highly focused states of mind may be full of reverb, but I do not think it has crazy time loops. Moments of eternity and timelessness may be present at the limit here (e.g. moments of eternity and Jhanas may be deeply connected), though I will need more personal experience to say this with confidence.
On the other hand, insight practices such as noting meditation may have more of a replay and strobe effect. In particular, this may happen as a result of three core effects from this kind of meditation: (1) it stops you from dissipating energy across long narratives, (2) it recaptures the energy you were going to use for a longer narrative to feed the noting process instead, and (3) it entrains the rhythm of noting. This in turn (a) energizes a regular constant-frequency pattern (the frequency of noting) and (b) reduces the energy of every other rhythm, which in turn (c) canalizes sensory stimulation energy towards the brain’s noting frequency and all of its harmonics, which eventually leads to a high-frequency energized state of consciousness whose building blocks are tiny time-loops. These can synchronize and create experiences with characteristic time-like textures made up of such tiny energized loops. Hence, noting practice above some level of skill (e.g. with a noting frequency above 3 Hz) can be DMT-like to an extent (in light of thinking of DMT realms as made up of energized high-frequency mini-time-loops).
These experiences characterized by intense tracer effects are in a similar space as the strange temporal distortions that happen when you are dizzy (like when you stand up too fast or hyperventilate). The “loss of context” that results from this effect is due to the longest replay loops becoming too short to contain the necessary information to “keep you in the loop about what is going on”. Hence the confusion about who or what you are, what you are doing, and how you got here that happens when you are near passing out from standing up too quickly. That confusion takes place in an otherwise highly detailed and intense high-energy and high-frequency “rush” made of tiny time loops.
Thus, one of the gateways into altered states of consciousness via meditation with noting can be summarized as what happens when you induce a self-reinforcing pattern of strobing, replay, and pulsing that fully captures your attention. This process builds up a lot of energy, which one can only wield up to a point. When one fails to control it, the state decays into a series of tracer patterns that use the clean loop as its background reference. As this happens, one experiences a world whose building blocks are beautiful tiny jewels of attention, slowly decaying as one loses the ability to stay focused. The decay process also seems to do something good when properly orchestrated. Namely, as the decay process begins, one naturally experiences a Cambrian explosion of qualia critters eager to feed off of the negentropy generated, as thought-forms need attention to survive. This whole process, one could argue, lends phenomenological credence to the paradigm of neural annealing, where one’s brain uses a heating and cooling schedule to entrain brain-wide harmony.
In other words, with something like a noting practice, one ends up creating a world simulation whose building blocks are all embedded in a very tight time-loop, a wind-up universe of concentrated awareness. Perhaps we are going too far with this explanation. Either way, we really feel that thinking in terms of these generalized tracer dynamic patterns is an exciting new conceptual toolkit that allows us to describe the quality of exotic experiences that were hard to pinpoint before.
Three Exciting Possible Applications of the Tracer Tool: High-O-Meter, Synergy Quotient, and Harmonic World-Building
(1) High-O-Meter
How high are you? It is often difficult to put a number on this question. But once we have established the parameters for different drugs (e.g. characterized DMT as living in a region of the parameter-space that is of higher frequency than LSD, etc.) we can show a series of gifs to someone and ask them to point at the one that best shows what tracers looked like at the peak of their experience. This way we can quickly estimate how high they got (at least visually) with a very simple question.
For example, we may find that the “modal response” to 50, 100, 200, and 300 micrograms of LSD looks as follow:
Simulated tracer for 50 μg of LSD
Simulated tracer for 100 μg of LSD
Simulated tracer for 200 μg of LSD
Simulated tracer for 300 μg of LSD
If this works, we would be able to sort research participants into one of these ranges just by asking them to point at the image that best captures their experience. Similar tools for other modalities could be used to obtain a global “highness score” meaningful across people.
(2) Synergy Quotient (orthogonality vs. synergy vs. suppression vs. harmonization)
What happens when you combine psychoactive drugs together? We have previously discussed in great detail what happens when you take combos of drugs from various categories (see: Making Amazing Recreational Drug Cocktails), but admit that there are huge puzzles and unknowns in this space. Of note is that some combinations give rise to synergistic effects (e.g. psychedelics and dissociatives), others blunt each other’s action (e.g. agmatine and nootropics), while yet others seem to create competing effects due to some kind of mutually-exclusive qualities of experience (e.g. salvia and DMT, a.k.a. “drugfights”). For an illustrative example of the third category, famous psychonaut D. M. Turner reports:
I smoked 30 mg. of DMT in three tokes, followed immediately by 650 mcg. of Salvinorin that I had preloaded in a separate pipe.
The effects were felt almost immediately. The first thing I noticed was a grid of crosshatch patterns. I had perceived something similar when using 2C-B with mushrooms, which I believed to be the result of using two psychedelics that were not compatible with each other. However, in this case the patterns were defined to a much sharper degree, and it seemed apparent that these two substances affect consciousness in differing ways that are not synchronistic when used together. Both the Salvia and DMT entities seemed to have been taken entirely off guard and had not been expecting this confrontation. These entities seemingly paid no attention to me as their attention was entirely fixed on each other. It soon became apparent that the two were going to battle, vying to determine who would have control of my consciousness.
We think that the tracer tool can be useful to quantify the degree of interaction between two drugs. For instance, say that drug A produces a robust 10 Hz replay effect, whereas drug B produces a 7 Hz Strobing effect. Would drug A + drug B cause a tracer that blends these two facets, or does it produce something different? If the combination’s tracers are different than the sum of its parts, how large is this difference? And can this difference be identified with a particular recursive stacking of effects, or as the result of a nonlinear interaction between dynamic systems? We believe that this line of research may be very illuminating.
Drug A
Drug B
Drug A + Drug B (“orthogonal”)
Drug A + Drug B (“suppression”)
Drug A + Drug B (“synergy”)
Drug A + Drug B (“harmonization”)
In the above example, we show what various possibilities for the result of drug combos may be. “Orthogonal” effects mean that the resulting tracer is the sum of the tracers of each drug, “suppression” means that one drug’s effect reduces the effect of the other, “synergy” means that the resulting effects are stronger than you’d expect by just linearly adding the effects of each drug, and “harmonization” refers to the possible slight-retuning of the characteristic frequency of each drug’s effect that allows for a consonant blending. How strongly the combo is from the predicted effect based on each drug would determine the synergy quotient of the pair.
A few possible (tentative) examples: alcohol + psychedelics give rise to orthogonal effects, opiates and psychedelics result in effect suppression, dissociatives and psychedelics result in strong synergy (not unlike what you get when you stack reverb and looping in music), and MDMA and psychedelics might result in harmonized tracers (hence the creamy and harmonious visuals of candy-flipping). We would love to see research tackling this question.
(3) Harmonic World-Building
Tinnitus is usually loud and distracting, but in addition, it can also be annoying and unpleasant. At QRI, we posit that the precise pattern of tinnitus—not only its loudness—has implications for how bad it is for someone’s mental health: dissonant and chaotic tinnitus might be worse than consonant and harmonious patterns, for instance.
In a similar vein, we think that the particular tracer patterns, over and above just their intensity, of perceptual conditions like HPPD probably matter for how the condition affects you at a cognitive, perceptual, and emotional level. Concretely, we would like to study how valence is related to one’s particular tracer patterns: we think that when psychedelic tracers feel good, that such positive valence may show up in the form of (a) harmonious relationships between the components of the effects, and (b) a sort of creaminness in the way the tracers come over time (as shown in the MDMA + LSD trip report by Steven Lehar).
We take seriously the possibility that something akin to the rules of harmony in music (see: Tuning Timbre Spectrum Scale by William Sethares) will have a showing in the way resonance in any experiential field cashes out into valence. In other words, the way patterns of resonance in the brain combine might be responsible for whether the experience feels good or bad. In particular, under psychedelics and other high-energy states of consciousness, one’s visual field is capable of instantiating visions of both tremendous beauty and tremendous terror. It is as if in high-energy regimes, one’s visual field acquires the capacity for creating pleasure and pain of its own (albeit “visual” in flavor!). While sober, one can get something akin to this effect, though only mildly in comparison: you can experience beautiful patterns by staring at a smooth strobe with eyes closed, or experience unpleasant reactions when the strobe shines at irregular intervals. The quality of the self-generated light-show in energized states of consciousness (such as a psychedelic experience) will likely have an impact on one’s sense of wellbeing. Is one’s inner light show all irregular, uncoordinated, sharp, and jarring? Or is it smooth, clean, robust, and soft? Based on the Symmetry Theory of Valence, one can anticipate that one’s tracer phenomenology feels good when it expresses or approximates regular geometries and bad when the implied geometries are irregular or disjointed.
Dissonant emergent pattern
Consonant emergent pattern
The creaminess of smooth ADSR envelopes would likewise prevent sensory and emotional dissonance by virtue of softening spikes of sensations. This, of course, is ultimately an empirical question. Let’s investigate it!
Final Thoughts: Getting Realms from Time-Like Textures
The complexity and information content of one’s state of consciousness as induced by a substance may depend on what fits in the repertoire of time-like textures of the state. For example, some states might be much more prone to generate quasi-crystals as opposed to crystals, as we argued in DMT vs. 5-MeO-DMT (Gomez Emilsson, 2020).
What are these crystals? One of the characteristic spatial effects of psychedelics is that they lower the symmetry detection threshold. This gives rise to the beautiful tessellations (at times Euclidean, at times hyperbolic (Gomez Emilsson, 2016)) everyone talks about. Analogously in time, psychedelics are notorious for creating time loops (cf. Going Loopy (Alexander, 2014)). In a deeper sense these are, we might argue, two facets of the same underlying effect. Namely, the creation of, for lack of a better term, qualia crystals. We can be cautious about assigning an ontological interpretation to qualia crystals; all we are proposing here is to accept them as phenomenological artifacts that tie together a lot of these experiential qualities. These gems of qualia come in many flavors, but they all express at least one symmetry in a clean and deep way. Whereas our experience of the world is usually made of a complex distribution of (tiny) qualia crystals which form the macroscopic time-like texture of our mind, we find in exotic states of consciousness the possibility of experiencing the refined, pure version. Timothy Leary in The Psychedelic Experience describes what he believes is the key existential conundrum close to the peak of an ecstatic trip:
Is it better to be part of the sugar or to taste the sugar?
In line with the neural annealing frame (Johnson, 2019), there is a very real sense in which slightly past the peak of a psychedelic experience you will find some of the largest, purest, most refined qualia crystals (at least relative to the human norm). And what this looks like will depend a lot on what the available building blocks are! The diversity of these building blocks makes the time-like texture of experience triggered by different drugs dramatically variable.
Some of the realms of experience are made with a time-like texture of interlocking time loops of different frequencies allowing you to experience the sense of “a big other”. In some other realms, the time loops are all aligned with each other, which makes self-other distinctions hard to represent and reason about. The various flavors for the felt sense of non-duality, for example, may correspond to different ways in which strobes, replays, pulse, etc. align perfectly to dissolve the internal boundaries used as building blocks to represent duality. At the extreme of “unification”, such as the state found in the 5-MeO-DMT breakthrough, one “becomes” a metronome whose tune is reflected faithfully everywhere in one’s experience, such that there is nothing else to interface with. Hence, one becomes “invisible to oneself”. To be in a state of near total oneness may entail the feeling of nothingness for this reason (thus the highest Jhanas being “nothingness” and “neither nothing nor something”).
This overall interpretative frame of exotic states as the result of time-like textures may show up empirically, too. One of the exciting early results, as mentioned above, is the report that while DMT creates complex positive and negative after-image dynamics full of color and polarity, the tracers on 5-MeO-DMT are monochromatic, meaning that one only experiences their positive after-image.
This alone may go a long way in explaining why the visual character of these two drugs is so distinct at their upper ranges. Namely, because DMT gives rise to complex checkerboard grid-patterns of overly-saturated colors intermingling with their polar opposites, whereas on 5-MeO-DMT, one often experiences an incredibly bright white light, or even a sense of translucid empty space, but no colors! The paradigm of using tracer patterns to make sense of states of consciousness would here suggest that a “breakthrough” experience can be interpreted as what happens when one’s world is saturated with the time-like texture characteristic of the tracer pattern of either drug. The realms of experience these agents disclose are the universes that you get when the building blocks of reality are those specific time loops and attention dynamics, leaving no room for anything that does not follow those “phenomenal time constraints”. When the dose is low, this manifests as just a gloss over one’s otherwise normal experience, a mere modifier on top of one’s sober reality. But when the dose is large, these time loops and attention dynamics drive the very way one’s mind constructs our whole sense of the world.
In this light, rather than thinking of exotic states of mind as places (as the “realm” metaphor alludes to), one can imagine conceptualizing them as ways of making sense of time. When you smoke salvia, you make sense of time in a salvia kind of way, which involves looping back chaotically in a way that typically results in losing the normal plot altogether and instead exotic narratives better fitted for the salvia attentional dynamics end up dominating the world-building process of the mind. Hence you end up in “salvia land”. Which is what you remember best. But the salvia land one ends up in is only a circumstantial part of the true story. The fundamental generator that is upstream of this realm would be the overall tracer pattern, the time-like texture of the experience: the neuroacoustic effect of salvia. He who controls the time-like texture of experience, controls the world-building process of the mind. Thus the paramount importance of understanding tracer patterns.
Do you want to collaborate on this project?
For Researchers
The Tracer Replication Tool is the first of a series of research tools we are creating at QRI specifically designed with psychedelic phenomenology in mind. The spirit of this enterprise is to identify the ways in which psychedelic states of consciousness can enhance the information processing of the mind in some ways. Rather than focusing on how information processing is impaired, we develop these tools with the goal of finding the ways in which it is enhanced (cf. psychedelic cryptography (Gomez Emilsson, 2015), psychedelic problem solving (Harman, 1966)). We take very seriously high-quality trips reports from rational psychonauts, which help us ideate tasks that are likely to show large effect sizes. Thus, rather than bringing traditional psychometric tools to the psychedelic space, we think that developing the tools to assess the psychedelic state in its own terms is more likely to provide novel and significant insights. We would love to have academic researchers include some of these tasks in their own study designs. Becoming familiar with the Tracer Replication Tool takes less than 10 minutes, and based on the pilot results, operating it during a psychedelic experience is possible for a good fraction of people under the influence of these substances. It would be amazing to have tracer replications included in psychedelic studies to come. If you are involved in psychedelic research and would like to use the Tracer Replication Tool or learn more about the toolkit we are developing please reach out to us! We would love to hear from you.
For Participants and Volunteers
There are several ways you can help this project. As a beta tester participant, you can use the tracer tool to replicate tracers that you yourself have experienced. There are three categories here (which you can specify at the point of submission when using the tool):
Retroactively: If you have experienced visuals tracers in the past and think you can remember them accurately (or at least recognize them when you see them), you can play with the Tracer Replication Tool and submit the parameters that best match your memory of the tracers you experienced.
Post-Trip: If you are planning on taking a psychedelic in the near future* and want to submit a datapoint from your experience, open the tracer tool during the trip and look at the bouncing ball (and other animations). While staring at the center of the animation for about a minute, try to get a clear picture of what the tracers look like. We encourage you to play with the color, speed, and animation type while you are in the state so that you see how tracers react to different visual inputs. Then as soon as possible after the trip is over, come back to the tool and find the tracer parameters that best replicate what you saw.
Within Trip: If you are familiar with the tracer tool parameters so that you can tell in real time whether you are experiencing strobing, replays, color pulsing, etc. then you may want to try to replicate the tracers you are seeing in real time. We recognize that this has the problem that the tracer replications will have psychedelic tracers of themselves, and that they get in the way of the tracers you are trying to reproduce. That said, the early reports we have received state that it is actually easier to do a good job at replicating the tracers while in the state than after it. So we also welcome submissions of this type.
The case of HPPD and other non-drug induced tracers could be considered in this frame as well. For instance, we have been made aware that during the meditation practice of Fire Kasina, one experiences many pronounced tracers of various kinds. Thus, if you are currently experiencing meditation-induced tracers, you can submit parameters of the within trip kind. If you saw the bouncing ball (or other animations) during the meditation but have now exited your state, then you could submit a datapoint of the post-trip kind. And if you only have the recollection of tracers but did not see the ball at the time, then submit a retroactive datapoint. Likewise, HPPD and other tracer phenomena may come and go and their intensity may wax and wane, so these categories are also useful in such cases.
Please sign up to the QRI mailing list if you want to stay informed about the development of QRI’s Psychophysics Toolkit. We also want to emphasize, as we note in the Special Thanks section below, that this tool could not have been made without our amazing QRI volunteers. We are very eager to work with anyone with technical skills useful for this and related projects. If you would like to help us build these tools and advance our collective understanding of exotic states of consciousness, please get in touch. For more QRI volunteer projects see our volunteer page.
[1] A significant message of the book is that it is useful to conceptualize these rhythms as being the result of endogenous pattern-generating networks specialized to create specific frequencies, envelopes, and types of synchronization.
[2] “There are only two sources that control the firing patterns of a neuron at any time: an input from outside the brain and self-organized activity. These two sources of synchronization forces often compete with each other (Cycle 9). If cognition derives from the brain, this self-organized activity is its most likely source. Ensemble synchrony of neurons should therefore reflect the combination of some selected physical features of the world and the brain’s interpretation of those features. Even if the stimulus is invariant, the brain state is not. From this perspective, the most interesting thing we can learn about the brain is how its self-generated internal states, the potential source of cognition, are brought about. Extracting the variant, that is, brain-generated features, including the temporal relation between neural assemblies and assembly members, from the invariant features evoked by the physical world might provide clues about the brain’s perspective on its environment. Yes, this is the information we routinely throw away with stimulus-locked averaging.” (Buzsáki, 2006)
*Disclaimer: We are not encouraging anyone to ingest psychoactive substances.
Special Thanks to: Lawrence Wu for implementing the current version of the tool. To Andrew Zuckerman, Quintin Frerichs, and Mike Johnson for a lot of useful ideas, conversations, and keeping the project afloat. To Robin Goins and Alex Zhao for getting a head start in implementing an earlier version of the tool. To the QRI team for encouragement and many discussions. And to the anonymous rational psychonauts and the HPPD sufferer for contributing pilot data with visual replications of their own experiences.
Bibliography
Buzsáki, G. (2006). Rhythms of the Brain. Oxford University Press.
Atasoy, S., Donnelly, I., & Pearson, J. (2016). Human brain networks function in connectome-specific harmonic waves. Nature Communications, 7(1), 10340. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10340
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
Rudrauf, D., Lutz, A., Cosmelli, D., Lachaux, J.-P., & Le Van Quyen, M. (2003). From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: Francisco Varela’s exploration of the biophysics of being. Biological Research, 36(1). https://doi.org/10.4067/S0716-97602003000100005
Lehar S. (1999) Harmonic Resonance Theory: An Alternative to the “Neuron Doctrine” Paradigm to Address Gestalt Properties of Perception. Available at http://slehar.com/wwwRel/webstuff/hr1/hr1.html
Ingram, D. (2018). Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book. Newburyport: AEON Books. Available at: https://www.integrateddaniel.info/book
Atasoy, S., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M., Kringelbach, M. L., Deco, G., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2017). Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 17661. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-17546-0
Harman, W. Fadiman, J. (1996). Selective Enhancement of Specific Capacities Through Psychedelic Training. Psychedelic Reports. Available at: http://druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/harman.htm
(Organizational) Questions About the Qualia Research Institute
What type of organization is QRI?
QRI is a nonprofit research group studying consciousness based in San Francisco, California. We are a registered 501(c)(3) organization.
What is the relationship between QRI, Qualia Computing, and Opentheory?
Qualia Computing and Opentheory are the personal blogs of QRI co-founders Andrés Gómez Emilsson and Michael Johnson, respectively. While QRI was in its early stages, all original QRI research was initially published on these two platforms. However, from August 2020 onward, this is shifting to a unified pipeline centered on QRI’s website.
Is QRI affiliated with an academic institution or university?
Although QRI does collaborate regularly with university researchers and laboratories, we are an independent research organization. Put simply, QRI is independent because we didn’t believe we could build the organization we wanted and needed to build within the very real constraints of academia. These constraints include institutional pressure to work on conventional projects, to optimize for publication metrics, and to clear various byzantine bureaucratic hurdles. It also includes professional and social pressure to maintain continuity with old research paradigms, to do research within an academic silo, and to pretend to be personally ignorant of altered states of consciousness. It’s not that good research cannot happen under these conditions, but we believe good consciousness research happens despite the conditions in academia, not because of them, and the best use of resources is to build something better outside of them.
How does QRI align with the values of EA?
Effective Altruism (EA) is a movement that uses evidence and reason to figure out how to do the most good. QRI believes this aesthetic is necessary and important for creating a good future. We also believe that if we want to do the most good,foundational research on the nature of the good is of critical importance. Two frames we offer are Qualia Formalism and Sentientism. Qualia Formalism is the claim that experience has a precise mathematical description, that a formal account of experience should be the goal of consciousness research. Sentientism is the claim that value and disvalue are entirely expressed in the nature and quality of conscious experiences. We believe EA is enriched by both Qualia Formalism and Sentientism.
What would QRI do with $10 billion?
Currently, QRI is a geographically distributed organization with access to commercial-grade neuroimaging equipment. The first thing we’d do with $10 billion is set up a physical headquarters for QRI and buy professional-grade neuroimaging devices (fMRI, MEG, PET, etc.) and neurostimulation equipment. We’d also hire teams of full-time physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, computer scientists, neuroscientists, chemists, philosophers, and artists. We’ve accomplished a great deal on a shoestring budget, but it would be hard to overestimate how significant being able to build deep technical teams and related infrastructure around core research threads would be for us (and, we believe, for the growing field of consciousness research). Scaling is always a process and we estimate our ‘room for funding’ over the next year is roughly ~$10 million. However, if we had sufficiently deep long-term commitments, we believe we could successfully scale both our organization and research paradigm into a first-principles approach for decisively diagnosing and curing most forms of mental illness. We would continue to run studies and experiments, collect interesting data about exotic and altered states of consciousness, pioneer new technologies that help eliminate involuntary suffering, and develop novel ways to enable conscious beings to safely explore the state-space of consciousness.
Questions About Our Research Approach
What differentiates QRI from other research groups studying consciousness?
The first major difference is that QRI breaks down “solving consciousness” into discrete subtasks; we’re clear about what we’re trying to do, which ontologies are relevant for this task, and what a proper solution will look like. This may sound like a small thing, but an enormous amount of energy is wasted in philosophy by not being clear about these things. This lets us “actually get to work.”
Second, our focus on valence is rare in the field of consciousness studies. A core bottleneck in understanding consciousness is determining what its ‘natural kinds’ are: terms which carve reality at the joints. We believe emotional valence (the pleasantness/unpleasantness of an experience) is one such natural kind, and this gives us a huge amount of information about phenomenology. It also offers a clean bridge for interfacing with (and improving upon) the best neuroscience.
Third, QRI takes exotic states of consciousness extremely seriously whereas most research groups do not. An analogy we make here is that ignoring exotic states of consciousness is similar to people before the scientific enlightenment thinking that they can understand the nature of energy, matter, and the physical world just by studying it at room temperature while completely ignoring extreme states such as what’s happening in the sun, black holes, plasma, or superfluid helium. QRI considers exotic states of consciousness as extremely important datapoints for reverse-engineering the underlying formalism for consciousness.
Lastly, we have a focus on precise, empirically testable predictions, which is rare in philosophy of mind. Any good theory of consciousness should also contribute to advancements in neuroscience. Likewise, any good theory of neuroscience should contribute to novel, bold, falsifiable predictions, and blueprints for useful things, such as new forms of therapy. Having such a full-stack approach to consciousness which does each of those two things is thus an important marker that “something interesting is going on here” and is simply very useful for testing and improving theory.
What methodologies are you using? How do you actually do research?
QRI has three core areas of research: philosophy, neuroscience, and neurotechnology
Philosophy: Our philosophy research is grounded in the eight problems of consciousness. This divide-and-conquer approach lets us explore each subproblem independently, while being confident that when all piecemeal solutions are added back together, they will constitute a full solution to consciousness.
Neuroscience: We’ve done original synthesis work on combining several cutting-edge theories of neuroscience (the free energy principle, the entropic brain, and connectome-specific harmonic waves) into a unified theory of Bayesian emotional updating; we’ve also built the world’s first first-principles method for quantifying emotional valence from fMRI. More generally, we focus on collecting high valence neuroimaging datasets and developing algorithms to analyze, quantify, and visualize them. We also do extensive psychophysics research, focusing on both the fine-grained cognitive-emotional effects of altered states, and how different types of sounds, pictures, body vibrations, and forms of stimulation correspond with low and high valence states of consciousness.
Neurotechnology: We engage in both experimentation-driven exploration, tracking the phenomenological effects of various interventions, as well as theory-driven development. In particular, we’re prototyping a line of neurofeedback tools to help treat mental health disorders.
What does QRI hope to do over the next 5 years? Next 20 years?
Over the next five years, we intend to further our neurotechnology to the point that we can treat PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), especially treatment-resistant PTSD. We intend to empirically verify or falsify the symmetry theory of valence. If it is falsified, we will search for a new theory that ties together all of the empirical evidence we have discovered. We aim to create an Effective Altruist cause area regarding the reduction of intense suffering as well as the study of very high valence states of consciousness.
Over the next 20 years, we intend to become a world-class research center where we can put the discipline of “paradise engineering” (as described by philosopher David Pearce) on firm academic grounds.
Questions About Our Mission
How can understanding the science of consciousness make the world a better place?
Understanding consciousness would improve the world in a tremendous number of ways. One obvious outcome would be the ability to better predict what types of beings are conscious—from locked-in patients to animals to pre-linguistic humans—and what their experiences might be like.
We also think it’s useful to break down the benefits of understanding consciousness in three ways: reducing the amount of extreme suffering in the world, increasing the baseline well-being of conscious beings, and achieving new heights for what conscious states are possible to experience.
Without a good theory of valence, many neurological disorders will remain completely intractable. Disorders such as fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), migraines, and cluster headaches are all currently medical puzzles and yet have incredibly negative effects on people’s livelihoods. We think that a mathematical theory of valence will explain why these things feel so bad and what the shortest path for getting rid of them looks like. Besides valence-related disorders, nearly all mental health disorders, from clinical depression and PTSD to schizophrenia and anxiety disorders, will become better understood as we discover the structure of conscious experience.
We also believe that many (though not all) of the zero-sum games people play are the products of inner states of dissatisfaction and suffering. Broadly speaking, people who have a surplus of cognitive and emotional energy tend to play more positive sum games, are more interested in cooperation, and are very motivated to do so. We think that studying states such as those induced by MDMA that combine both high valence and a prosocial behavior mindset can radically alter the game theoretical landscape of the world for the better.
What is the end goal of QRI? What does QRI’s perfect world look like?
In QRI’s perfect future:
There is no involuntary suffering and all sentient beings are animated by gradients of bliss,
Research on qualia and consciousness is done at a very large scale for the purpose of mapping out the state-space of consciousness and understanding its computational and intrinsic properties (we think that we’ve barely scratched the surface of knowledge about consciousness),
We have figured out the game-theoretical subtleties in order to make that world dynamic yet stable: radically positive, without just making it fully homogeneous and stuck in a local maxima.
Questions About Getting Involved
What are the most important things to read to learn about QRI’s research?
You can start by signing up for our newsletter! This is by far our most important communication channel. We also have a Facebook page, Twitter account, and Linkedin page. Lastly, we share some exclusive tidbits of ideas and thoughts with our supporters on Patreon.
Read and engage with our research. We love critical responses to our ideas and encourage you to reach out if you have an interesting thought!
Spread the word to friends, potential donors, and people that you think would make great collaborators with QRI.
Check out our volunteer page to find more detailed ways that you can contribute to our mission, from independent research projects to QRI content creation.
Questions About Consciousness
What assumptions about consciousness does QRI have? What theory of consciousness does QRI support?
The most important assumption that QRI is committed to is Qualia Formalism, the hypothesis that the internal structure of our subjective experience can be represented precisely by mathematics. We are also Valence Realists: we believe valence (how good or bad an experience feels) is a real and well-defined property of conscious states. Besides these positions, we are fairly agnostic and everything else is an educated guess useful for pragmatic purposes.
What does QRI think of functionalism?
QRI thinks that functionalism takes many high-quality insights about how systems work and combines them in such a way that both creates confusion and denies the possibility of progress. In its raw, unvarnished form, functionalism is simply skepticism about the possibility of Qualia Formalism. It is simply a statement that “there is nothing here to be formalized; consciousness is like élan vital, confusion to be explained away.” It’s not actually a theory of consciousness; it’s an anti-theory. This is problematic in at least two ways:
1. By assuming consciousness has formal structure, we’re able to make novel predictions that functionalism cannot (see e.g. QRI’s Symmetry Theory of Valence, and Quantifying Bliss). A few hundred years ago, there were many people who doubted that electromagnetism had a unified, elegant, formal structure, and this was a reasonable position at the time. However, in the age of the iPhone, skepticism that electricity is a “real thing” that can be formalized is no longer reasonable. Likewise, everything interesting and useful QRI builds using the foundation of Qualia Formalism stretches functionalism’s credibility thinner and thinner.
2. Insofar as functionalism is skeptical about the formal existence of consciousness, it’s skeptical about the formal existence of suffering and all sentience-based morality. In other words, functionalism is a deeply amoral theory, which if taken seriously dissolves all sentience-based ethical claims. This is due to there being an infinite number of functional interpretations of a system: there’s no ground-truth fact of the matter about what algorithm a physical system is performing, about what information-processing it’s doing. And if there’s no ground-truth about which computations or functions are present, but consciousness arises from these computations or functions, then there’s no ground-truth about consciousness, or things associated with consciousness, like suffering. This is a strange and subtle point, but it’s very important. This point alone is not sufficient to reject functionalism: if the universe is amoral, we shouldn’t hold a false theory of consciousness in order to try to force reality into some ethical framework. But in debates about consciousness, functionalists should be up-front that functionalism and radical moral anti-realism is a package deal, that inherent in functionalism is the counter-intuitive claim that just as we can reinterpret which functions a physical system is instantiating, we can reinterpret what qualia it’s experiencing and whether it’s suffering.
At QRI, we hold a position that is close to dual-aspect monism or neutral monism, which states that the universe is composed of one kind of thing that is neutral, and that both the mental and physical are two features of this same substance. One of the motivating factors for holding this view is that if there is deep structure in the physical, then there should be a corresponding deep structure to phenomenal experience. And we can tie this together with physicalism in the sense that the laws of physics ultimately describe fields of qualia. While there are some minor disagreements between dual-aspect monism and panpsychism, we believe that our position mostly fits well with a panpsychist view—that phenomenal properties are a fundamental feature of the world and aren’t spontaneously created only when a certain computation is being performed.
However, even with this view, there still are very important questions, such as: what makes a unified conscious experience? Where does one experience end and another begin? Without considering these problems in the light of Qualia Formalism, it is easy to tie animism into panpsychism and believe that inanimate objects like rocks, sculptures, and pieces of wood have spirits or complex subjective experiences. At QRI, we disagree with this and think that these types of objects might have extremely small pockets of unified conscious experience, but will mostly be masses of micro-qualia that are not phenomenally bound into some larger experience.
What does QRI think of IIT (Integrated Information Theory)?
QRI is very grateful for IIT because it is the first mainstream theory of consciousness that satisfies a Qualia Formalist account of experience. IIT says (and introduced the idea!) that for every conscious experience, there is a corresponding mathematical object such that the mathematical features of that object are isomorphic to the properties of the experience. QRI believes that without this idea, we cannot solve consciousness in a meaningful way, and we consider the work of Giulio Tononi to be one of our core research lineages. That said, we are not in complete agreement with the specific mathematical and ontological choices of IIT, and we think it may be trying to ‘have its cake and eat it too’ with regard to functionalism vs physicalism. For more, see Sections III-V of Principia Qualia.
We make no claim that some future version of IIT, particularly something more directly compatible with physics, couldn’t cleanly address our objections, and see a lot of plausible directions and promise in this space.
What does QRI think of the free energy principle and predictive coding?
On our research lineages page, we list the work of Karl Friston as one of QRI’s core research lineages. We consider the free energy principle (FEP), as well as related research such as predictive coding, active inference, the Bayesian brain, and cybernetic regulation, as an incredibly elegant and predictive story of how brains work. Friston’s idea also forms a key part of the foundation for QRI’s theory of brain self-organization and emotional updating, Neural Annealing.
However, we don’t think that the free energy principle is itself a theory of consciousness, as it suffers from many of the shortcomings of functionalism: we can tell the story about how the brain minimizes free energy, but we don’t have a way of pointing at the brain and saying *there* is the free energy! The FEP is an amazing logical model, but it’s not directly connected to any physical mechanism. It is a story that “this sort of abstract thing is going on in the brain” without a clear method of mapping this abstract story to reality.
Friston has supported this functionalist interpretation of his work, noting that he sees consciousness as a process of inference, not a thing. That said, we are very interested in his work on calculating the information geometry of Markov blankets, as this could provide a tacit foundation for a formalist account of qualia under the FEP. Regardless of this, though, we believe Friston’s work will play a significant role in a future science of mind.
What does QRI think of global workspace theory?
The global workspace theory (GWT) is a cluster of empirical observations that seem to be very important for understanding what systems in the brain contribute to a reportable experience at a given point in time. The global workspace theory is a very important clue for answering questions of what philosophers call Access Consciousness, or the aspects of our experience on which we can report.
However, QRI does not consider the global workspace theory to be a full theory of consciousness. Parts of the brain that are not immediately contributing to the global workspace may be composed of micro qualia, or tiny clusters of experience. They’re obviously impossible to report on, but they are still relevant to the study of consciousness. In other words, just because a part of your brain wasn’t included in the instantaneous global workspace, doesn’t mean that it can’t suffer or it can’t experience happiness. We value global workspace research because questions of Access Consciousness are still very critical for a full theory of consciousness.
What does QRI think of higher-order theories of consciousness?
QRI is generally opposed to theories of consciousness that equate consciousness with higher order reflective thought and cognition. Some of the most intense conscious experiences are pre-reflective or unreflective such as blind panic, religious ecstasy, experiences of 5-MeO-DMT, and cluster headaches. In these examples, there is not much reflectivity nor cognition going on, yet they are intensely conscious. Therefore, we largely reject any attempt to define consciousness with a higher-order theory.
What is the relationship between evolution and consciousness?
The relationship between evolution and consciousness is very intricate and subtle. An eliminativist approach arrives at the simple idea that information processing of a certain type is evolutionarily advantageous, and perhaps we can call this consciousness. However, with a Qualia Formalist approach, it seems instead that the very properties of the mathematical object isomorphic to consciousness can play key roles (either causal or in terms of information processing) that make it advantageous for organisms to recruit consciousness.
If you don’t realize that consciousness maps onto a mathematical object with properties, you may think that you understand why consciousness was recruited by natural selection, but your understanding of the topic would be incomplete. In other words, to have a full understanding of why evolution recruited consciousness, you need to understand what advantages the mathematical object has. One very important feature of consciousness is its capacity for binding. For example, the unitary nature of experience—the fact that we can experience a lot of qualia simultaneously—may be a key feature of consciousness that accelerates the process of finding solutions to constraint satisfaction problems. In turn, evolution would hence have a reason to recruit states of consciousness for computation. So rather than thinking of consciousness as identical with the computation that is going on in the brain, we can think of it as a resource with unique computational benefits that are powerful and dynamic enough to make organisms that use it more adaptable to their environments.
Does QRI think that animals are conscious?
QRI thinks there is a very high probability that every animal with a nervous system is conscious. We are agnostic about unified consciousness in insects, but we consider it very likely. We believe research on animal consciousness has relevance when it comes to treating animals ethically. Additionally, we do think that the ethical importance of consciousness has more to do with the pleasure-pain axis (valence), rather than cognitive ability. In that sense, the suffering of non-human animals may be just as morally relevant, if not more relevant than humans. The cortex seems to play a largely inhibitory role for emotions, such that the larger the cortex is, the better we’re able to manage and suppress our emotions. Consequently, animals whose cortices are less developed than ours may experience pleasure and pain in a more intense and uncontrollable way, like a pre-linguistic toddler.
Does QRI think that plants are conscious?
We think it’s very unlikely that plants are conscious. The main reason is that they lack an evolutionary reason to recruit consciousness. Large-scale phenomenally bound experience may be very energetically expensive, and plants don’t have much energy to spare. Additionally, plants have thick cellulose walls that separate individual cells, making it very unlikely that plants can solve the binding problem and therefore create unified moments of experience.
Why do some people seek out pain?
This is a very multifaceted question. As a whole, we postulate that in the vast majority of cases, when somebody may be nominally pursuing pain or suffering, they’re actually trying to reduce internal dissonance in pursuit of consonance or they’re failing to predict how pain will actually feel. For example, when a person hears very harsh music, or enjoys extremely spicy food, this can be explained in terms of either masking other unpleasant sensations or raising the energy parameter of experience, the latter of which can lead to neural annealing: a very pleasant experience that manifests as consonance in the moment.
I sometimes like being sad. Is QRI trying to take that away from me?
Before we try to ‘fix’ something, it’s important to understand what it’s trying to do for us. Sometimes suffering leads to growth; sometimes creating valuable things involves suffering. Sometimes, ‘being sad’ feels strangely good. Insofar as suffering is doing good things for us, or for the world, QRI advocates a light touch (see Chesterton’s fence). However, we also suggest two things:
1. Most kinds of melancholic or mixed states of sadness usually are pursued for reasons that cash out as some sort of pleasure. Bittersweet experiences are far more preferable than intense agony or deep depression. If you enjoy sadness, it’s probably because there’s an aspect of your experience that is enjoyable. If it were possible to remove the sad part of your experience while maintaining the enjoyable part of it, you might be surprised to find that you prefer this modified experience more than the original one.
2. There are kinds of sadness and suffering that are just bad, that degrade us as humans, and would be better to never feel. QRI doesn’t believe in forcibly taking away voluntary suffering, or pushing bliss on people. But we would like to live in a world where people can choose to avoid such negative states, and on the margin, we believe it would be better for humanity for more people to be joyful, filled with a deep sense of well-being.
If dissonance is so negative, why is dissonance so important in music?
When you listen to very consonant music or consonant tones, you will quickly adapt to these sounds and get bored of them. This has nothing to do with consonance itself being unpleasant and everything to do with learning in the brain. Whenever you experience the same stimuli repeatedly, most brains will trigger a boredom mechanism and add dissonance of its own in order to make you enjoy the stimuli less or simply inhibit it, not allowing you to experience it at all. Semantic satiation is a classic example of this where repeating the same word over and over will make it lose its meaning. For this reason, to trigger many high valence states of consciousness consecutively, you need contrast. In particular, music works with gradients of consonance and dissonance, and in most cases, moving towards consonance is what feels good rather than the absolute value of consonance. Music tends to feel the best when you mix a high absolute value of consonance together with a very strong sense of moving towards an even higher absolute value of consonance. Playing some levels of dissonance during a song will later enhance the enjoyment of the more consonant parts such as the chorus of songs, which are reported to be the most euphoric parts of song and typically are extremely consonant.
What is QRI’s perspective on AI and AI safety research?
QRI thinks that consciousness research is critical for addressing AI safety. Without a precise way of quantifying an action’s impact on conscious experiences, we won’t be able to guarantee that an AI system has been programmed to act benevolently. Also, certain types of physical systems that perform computational tasks may be experiencing negative valence without any outside observer being aware of it. We need a theory of what produces unpleasant experiences to avoid inadvertently creating superintelligences that suffer intensely in the process of solving important problems or accidentally inflict large-scale suffering.
Additionally, we think that a very large percentage of what will make powerful AI dangerous is that the humans programming these machines and using these machines may be reasoning from states of loneliness, resentment, envy, or anger. By discovering ways to help humans transition away from these states, we can reduce the risks of AI by creating humans that are more ethical and aligned with consciousness more broadly. In short: an antidote for nihilism could lead to a substantial reduction in existential risk.
One way to think about QRI and AI safety is that the world is building AI, but doesn’t really have a clear, positive vision of what to do with AI. Lacking this, the default objective becomes “take over the world.” We think a good theory of consciousness could and will offer new visions of what kind of futures are worth building—new Schelling points that humanity (and AI researchers) could self-organize around.
Can digital computers implementing AI algorithms be conscious?
QRI is agnostic about this question. We have reasons to believe that digital computers in their current form cannot solve the phenomenal binding problem. Most of the activity in digital computers can be explained in a stepwise fashion in terms of localized processing of bits of information. Because of this, we believe that current digital computers could be creating fragments of qualia, but are unlikely to be creating strongly globally bound experiences. So, we consider the consciousness of digital computers unlikely, although given our current uncertainty over the Binding Problem (or alternatively framed, the Boundary Problem), this assumption is lightly held. In the previous question, when we write that “certain types of physical systems that perform computational tasks may be experiencing negative valence”, we assume that these hypothetical computers have some type of unified conscious experience as a result of having solved the phenomenal binding problem. For more on this topic, see: “What’s Out There?“
How much mainstream recognition has QRI’s work received, either for this line of research or others? Has it published in peer-reviewed journals, received any grants, or garnered positive reviews from other academics?
We are collaborating with researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Stanford University on several studies involving the analysis of neuroimaging data of high-valence states of consciousness. Additionally, we are currently preparing two publications for peer-reviewed journals on topics from our core research areas. Michael Johnson will be presenting at this year’s MCS seminar series, along with Karl Friston, Anil Seth, Selen Atasoy, Nao Tsuchiya, and others; Michael Johnson, Andrés Gómez Emilsson, and Quintin Frerichs have also given invited talks at various east-coast colleges (Harvard, MIT, Princeton, and Dartmouth).
Some well-known researchers and intellectuals that are familiar and think positively about our work include: Robin Carhart-Harris, Scott Alexander, David Pearce, Steven Lehar, Daniel Ingram, and more. Scott Alexander acknowledged that QRI put together the paradigms that contributed to Friston’s integrative model of how psychedelics work before his research was published. Our track record so far has been to foreshadow (by several years in advance) key discoveries later proposed and accepted in mainstream academia. Given our current research findings, we expect this trend to continue in the years to come.
Miscellaneous
How does QRI know what is best for other people/animals? What about cultural relativism?
We think that, to a large extent, people and animals work under the illusion that they are pursuing intentional objects, states of the external environment, or relationships that they may have with the external environment. However, when you examine these situations closely, you realize that what we actually pursue are states of high valence triggered by external circumstances. There may be evolutionary and cultural selection pressures that push us toward self-deception as to how we actually function. And we consider it negative to have these selection pressures makes us less self-aware because it often focuses our energy on unpleasant, destructive, or fruitless strategies. QRI hopes to support people in fostering more self-awareness, which can come through experiments with one’s own consciousness, like meditation, as well as through the deeper theoretical understanding of what it is that we actually want.
How central is David Pearce’s work to the work of the QRI?
We consider David Pearce to be one of our core lineages. We particularly value his contribution to valence realism, the insistence that states of consciousness come with an overall valence, and that this is very morally relevant. We also consider David Pearce to be very influential in philosophy of mind; Pearce, for instance, coined the phrase ‘tyranny of the intentional object’, the title of a core QRI piece of the same name. We have been inspired by Pearce’s descriptions for what any scientific theory of consciousness should be able to explain, as well as his particular emphasis on the binding problem. David’s vision of a world animated by ‘gradients of bliss’ has also been very generative as a normative thought experiment which integrates human and non-human well-being. We do not necessarily agree with all of David Pearce’s work, but we respect him as an insightful and vivid thinker who has been brave enough to actually take a swing at describing utopia and who we believe is far ahead of his time.
What does QRI think of negative utilitarianism?
There’s general agreement within QRI that intense suffering is an extreme moral priority, and we’ve done substantial work on finding simple ways of getting rid of extreme suffering (with our research inspiring at least one unaffiliated startup to date). However, we find it premature to strongly endorse any pre-packaged ethical theory, especially because none of them are based on any formalism, but rather an ungrounded concept of ‘utility’. The value of information here seems enormous, and we hope that we can get to a point where the ‘correct’ ethical theory may simply ‘pop out of the equations’ of reality. It’s also important to highlight the fact that common versions and academic formulations of utilitarianism seem to be blind to many subtleties concerning valence. For example, they do not distinguish between mixed states of consciousness where you have extreme pleasure combined with extreme suffering in such a way that you judge the experience to be neither entirely suffering nor entirely happiness and states of complete neutrality, such as extreme white noise. Because most formulations of utilitarianism do not distinguish between them, we are generally suspicious of the idea that philosophers of ethics have considered all of the relevant attributes of consciousness in order to make accurate judgments about morality.
What does QRI think of philosophy of mind departments?
We believe that the problems that philosophy of mind departments address tend to be very disconnected from what truly matters from an ethical, moral, and philosophical point of view. For example, there is little appreciation of the value of bringing mathematical formalisms into discussions about the mind, or what that might look like in practice. Likewise there is close to no interest in preventing extreme suffering nor understanding its nature. Additionally, there is usually a disregard for extreme states of positive valence, and strange or exotic experiences in general. It may be the case that there are worthwhile things happening in departments and classes creating and studying this literature, but we find them characterized by processes which are unlikely to produce progress on their nominal purpose, creating a science of mind.
In particular, in academic philosophy of mind, we’ve seen very little regard for producing empirically testable predictions. There are millions of pages written about philosophy of mind, but the number of pages that provide precise, empirically testable predictions is quite thin.
What therapies does QRI recommend for depression, anxiety, and chronic pain?
At QRI, we do not make specific recommendations to individuals, but rather point to areas of research that we consider to be extremely important, tractable, and neglected, such as anti-tolerance drugs, neural annealing techniques, frequency specific microcurrent for kidney stone pain, and N,N-DMT and other tryptamines for cluster headaches and migraines.
Why does QRI think it’s so important to focus on ending extreme suffering?
QRI thinks ending extreme suffering is important, tractable, and neglected. It’s important because of the logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain—the fact that extreme suffering is far worse by orders of magnitude than what people intuitively believe. It’s tractable because there are many types of extreme suffering that have existing solutions that are fairly trivial or at least have a viable path for being solved with moderately funded research programs. And it’s neglected mostly because people are unaware of the existence of these states, though not necessarily because of their rarity. For example, 10% of the population experiences kidney stones at some point in their life, but for reasons having to do with trauma, PTSD, and the state-dependence of memory, even people who have suffered from kidney stones do not typically end up dedicating their time or resources toward eradicating them.
It’s also likely that if we can meaningfully improve the absolute worst experiences, much of the knowledge we’ll gain in that process will translate into other contexts. In particular, we should expect to figure out how to make moderately depressed people happier, fix more mild forms of pain, improve the human hedonic baseline, and safely reach extremely great peak states. Mood research is not a zero-sum game. It’s a web of synergies.
Many thanks to Andrew Zuckerman, Mackenzie Dion, and Mike Johnson for their collaboration in putting this together. Featured image is QRI’s logo – animated by Hunter Meyer.
