Aligning DMT Entities: Shards, Shoggoths, and Waluigis

We have recently seen some incredible “rogue AI behavior” in Microsoft’s Bing.

While reading some of these outputs I was reminded of… rogue DMT entities. Indeed, sometimes people have DMT experiences and encounter beautiful angelic beings that want to help and heal you (and sometimes do so!), but other times people encounter demonic beings that want to harm and hurt you (and sometimes do so!).

Just as it is unwise to roll-out a technology like Bing that is full of potential misaligned subagents, I also reckon that it’s unwise to deliver DMT therapy to the masses *before* fixing this bug. While I think that responsible consenting adults *should* be allowed to experiment with DMT as they wish, the bar for “safety and effectiveness” should be much higher when we think of it as a possible mental health intervention.

Ok, so both Bing and DMT experiences can create insane rogue subagents. How are these two things more than merely superficially connected?

Someone I talked to recently was actually worried that DMT entities are perhaps controlling these AI technologies to infiltrate our world. I don’t think that’s a very likely explanation. Rather, I think there is a much more parsimonious explanation for this similarity. Namely that both involve having a predictive system spun up misaligned agents in order to fit narratives that appear in the training data. Let’s dig in!

When in Rome

Last year when playing with GPT and also after talking to Connor from Conjecture who introduced me to JanusSimulator Theory[1] (see also: Janus’ Simulators by Scott Alexander) it became clear that there is a similarity between DMT entities and the quasi-agentic simulated characters GPT-like systems spin up in order to predict the next token in text. If this is true, then this suggests that there might be interesting transpositions between the strategies and concerns discussed in the AI Alignment world and the findings from psychedelic phenomenology about how to have a good time with the beings that you encounter in far-out places. Let me explain.

A very large fraction of our nervous system is dedicated to minimizing surprise (cf. free energy principle, predictive processing). Now, I don’t think that this is all that the nervous system is doing, nor do I think it is a theory of consciousness. But it is a very important piece of the puzzle nonetheless.

QRI has championed a set of integrative models that tie together the free energy principle within the larger context of consciousness research in order to explain psychedelic phenomenology. Most recently we have been discussing the frame of “Psychedelic Thermodynamics”, which brings together Neural Annealing, Non-Linear Wave Computing, Johnson’s Symmetry Theory of Valence, and Topological Approaches to Binding.

The bit that is relevant from Psychedelic Thermodynamics here is that there is a process by which psychedelics intensify the background noise that, together with sensory stimuli, stimulate internal representations (via a process of stochastic resonance). Importantly, internal representations function as energy sinks from the point of view of the background noise, whereas they are energy sources from the point of view of other representations. 

The two key features that work as energy sinks of this background energy are symmetry and “recognition”. This was first discussed in The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences, but it also shows up elsewhere[2]. In particular, when you can interpret an ambiguous input as “expected given the context” then that sucks energy out of the background noise in order to energize a gestalt that binds together low-level features into a coherent high-level percept (e.g. Necker Cube). When this “clicks” it will radiate out its excess energy to the rest of the field, and also *constraint* the shape of the field such that it functions as new context that changes the probability for other ambiguous sensations to collapse into representations consistent with the new gestalt. In other words, on DMT you can go from what feels like “pure undifferentiated non dual consciousness” to “this specific carnival with harlequins doing acrobatics” by collapsing how you interpret slight imperfections in the field, which then snowball into instantiating an entire realm of experience where each shape resonates with every other shape (a “vibe lock”, as we call it).

Now, once you interpret a sufficient number of features as high-level gestalts, then they will start interacting with each other and further constraining the possible interpretations of the rest of the field. This, I believe, is somewhat similar to GPT, except on a full spatiotemporal context rather than a sequence of tokens context (cf. probabilistic graphical models).

If this model is correct, as soon as you start collapsing the energized field into interpretations, then a particular narrative structure may start dominating and “making sense” of what is happening. This can indeed snowball into getting into tricky and sometimes really unpleasant situations.

Slides from: Healing Trauma With Neural Annealing

Meet the Meeseeks

In parallel, it’s important to briefly mention the role that subagents typically have in us. Namely, what Romeo Stevens calls the “Mr. Meeseeks interpretation of subagents”. The subagents are created to achieve a goal, they don’t really like existing, but will continue to hang in there until they’re convinced the goal has been met. The subagents are spun up in order to accomplish goals that would normally require you to spend a lot of attention but that cannot be simply offloaded to muscle memory (e.g. like driving a car). Typical examples are things like the response one may have to living in an environment with very negative people (say, dark triad personalities) where you need to spin up subagents that behave like them so that you can predict their next move. In cases of PTSD, it may be that part of the problem is that one created a lot of rather negative subagents (of people, situations, dynamics, actual physical hazards, etc.) and that as a collective they reinforce each other.

Hi I’m Mr. Meeseeks! I see your grandmother is emotionally abusive. I’ll pretend to be her inside your mind so that you can predict what she will do next and thus avoid getting harmed. Let me know when she’s gone so I can go *PUFF*.

The Return to Goodness

Here loving-kindness meditation can be enormously helpful. I refer you to Anders & Maggie’s meditative exercise to heal negative internal subagents (see Letter XI: Douglas Adams). Essentially what you do is visualize a container of very positive benevolent and high-valence feelings (call it unconditional love, God, primordial goodness, Buddhamind, etc. – or whatever really resonates in your inner world simulation). You then tell the story that subagents come out of that container and once they achieve their goals they go back to it in order to “merge with love” once again. You can even explain this to the subagents, and they can feel the sense of relief that comes when they finally achieve union with this primordial love. Gently guide them towards it. And if you do this over and over, you will in fact be cleaning up a lot of subagents lingering implicit in the field, until you achieve a smooth field with high-valence and a non-dual feel.

Ok, so taking stock: our field of experience can “collapse” into familiar representations when they start predicting each other, sub-agents cease to exist once they have achieved their goal, and loving-kindness exercises can help you steer lost and lingering subagents towards their re-unification with primordial love (or, again, whatever resonates with you!). More so, these subagents are embedded in the predictive processing hierarchy and will try to do exactly what you find them most likely to do. So given these conditions, how do you align DMT entities?

Aligning DMT Entities

Here are some suggestions:

* First, the simplest and most straightforward intervention is to simply get good and prosocial training data. This is highlighted by the Waluigi Effect, in which Bing sort of turns nasty *because* character trait inversion is a *trope* in human stories, and there are plenty of such stories online. This could in principle be fixed by having an AI that classifies tropes and narrative structures and filters texts that contain any hint of Waluigi tropes or character trait switching narrative structures before feeding them as training data to GPT. Similarly, in the case of DMT entities, you can go to an environment with vetted inputs that are always really wholesome. Recall: the influence that the last couple of weeks have on what comes up in a psychedelic experience is vastly larger than what you experienced a year or a decade ago. The recent inputs matter a lot, so don’t worry about the fact that you’ve seen horror movies in the past. If you’ve been consuming really wholesome media for the last three months, that will matter enormously more.

* Second, add really highly-weighted good training data that makes it so that aligned outcomes are always the most likely. In our case, this would be indeed things like exercising the “gently guide subagents to the pool of love” move so that it’s a very likely outcome and they predict that that’s what’s going to happen. Train on visualizing the Buddha with a hand up saying “don’t fear”. Internalize that “love is always stronger than fear” (which is something I actually believe in, based on many incredible experiences). And so on.

Don’t Fear

* Third, use good vibes as the base. Essentially, negative entities feed off of negatively valanced patterns. Literally, feeling somatic sensations of pinching, pressure, twisting, etc. can become the building blocks of gestalts that end up becoming negative entities. Starting out with a very positive and smooth field reduces the fuel that negative entities have to construct themselves in resonance with patterns of dissonance. We’ve heard about good outcomes from Wim Hof and chanting metta meditation before trips (YMMV!).

* Fourth, More Dakka on equanimity. Remember the teachings of Rob Burbea (“what you resist persists”) and Shinzen Young (“suffering equals pain times resistance”). Essentially, resisting negative energies makes them stronger. This is doubly so on psychedelic states of consciousness. Instead, remember that high enough equanimity, where you don’t let positive or negative vibes “move you”, maximizes the rate of stress dissipation within your nervous system, and this accelerates the rate at which negative vibes flow through you and exit your system via some kind of radiative cooling process currently not understood by science. Practice taking cold showers without stalling or flinching, or eating relatively hot peppers without resisting or letting the pain get to you. At least for DMT realms up to Magic Eye-level the physical discomfort of the state is not stronger than a cold shower… that is, if you don’t resist it! If you do resits it, the discomfort can be drastically amplified, and you can turn some waves in a glass of water into a storm.

* Fifth, going back to the Waluigi Effect: the article explains why Reinforcement Learning via Human Feedback (RLHF) doesn’t really work for it (it encourages Waluigies to hide and pretend, rather than really getting rid of them). So instead of simply “rewarding good behavior” I suggest you reward “clean subagentic structures”. There is a “vibe” to the “intentions” of subagents. And you will soon realize that Waluigies have an “ambiguous intention” vibe. Use metta to reward sub-agents that have collapsed and clean intentions instead. Importantly, this takes priority over rewarding subagents that are really good at flattering you, for example. Because you’ve been fed enough narratives where flattery turns to betrayal that this is not a guarantee of alignment.

* Sixth, I think the principles of Shard Theory might be really useful here. In particular, really notice how not only is it that you can reward sub-agents with your attention and your top-down vibes, but once they are sufficiently “alive” they can actually start to *reward each other*. This, I believe, is how you get things like “egregore possessions” and other uncanny related phenomena. More on this below. You want to have a clean and smooth field of awareness so that subagent conspiracies can be easily spotted and addressed before they snowball.

Example Entities

Finally, let me ground this with some of the common categories of DMT entities:

Shoggoths: These are entities that seem to emerge out of the resonance of interpersonal representations of preferences at the cultural level. The things that you can “recognize the field as” in this case are “people doing what they want” where what they want may be different than what you want. If you have an adversarial relationship with a particular culture or subculture and you resist these wants, they will get reinforced by you disliking them and in some cases can start to locally bind with each other until you get what some psychonauts call “an amalgam” of cultural preferences. This is also what I think people are talking about when they say they have met an “egregore” of a culture of ideology on DMT. These are hard or perhaps impossible to align: cultures are in fact self-contradictory. So the amalgam will typically hold a lot of internal contradictions, which it will then externalize. The way to deal with a Shoggoth involves re-annealing, in addition to the suggestions above. DMT Shoggoths are sort of a symptom of failed clean annealing, in that they “coagulate” rather than “click”, and are amalgams of lots of incompatible preferences loosely held by a political coalition. This could perhaps be predicted from first principles with non-linear wave computing and Shard Theory, so the fact that it does happen to people makes it a salient case for this field of study.

Demons: these are sub-agents that come up in “hell realms” which are states of consciousness where you believe that you are a bad person and deserve some kind of punishment. The demons here are just, in my opinion, doing exactly what you expect them to do, namely, punishing you. I think that in addition to equanimity and metta, these entities also respond to boosting narratives of redemption that are wholesome in nature. For example, there is this spiritual belief that demons ultimately are all on the path towards God… they are just in a more extreme version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, and they might take thousands of years to redeem themselves. But they will do so. In this case, you sending them metta and telling them that they are actually intrinsically good, can slowly, but surely, help them unwind their dissonant configurations.

Harlequins: these are entities from what feels like some kind of “clown dimension”. They are extremely common on DMT. Because we have so many tropes of negative clowns, this can often turn ugly. I suggest you reinforce the narrative of “harlequins as tricksters who are child-like in their curiosity about consciousness”. In fact, prompted properly and softened with enough metta, harlequins can be extremely helpful for consciousness research. You can play positive sum games with them in which you give them a really good time, and in exchange they help you explore the most surprising features of the space you are inhabiting. They can become “consciousness research assistants” with a flair for the weird and wondrous.

There is of course a zoo of possible entities, and in fact many possible entities currently exist merely in potential. As we imagine new healthy and wholesome tropes in our sense-making attempts for DMT realms, I predict that we will “unlock” new and more helpful DMT beings. In particular, I think that Team Consciousness tropes can give us a really good aesthetic to use as the primary energy sink for “recognizing” entities in this space. If you ever meet Rainbow God, say hi for me. It *always* gives you a mind-blowing revelation about reality and consciousness that enriches your life for the better 😉

How does this help AI Alignment?

I will conclude by saying that studying DMT entities might actually be a way to make headway in AI alignment in two ways. First, because they genuinely can be really smart entities you can interact with, on a bounded timeframe, and who seem to share a lot of features with AI technologies. They are human-level or higher in their intelligence (because they have access to new geometries of phenomenal space and hence to novel qualia computing, and because they lack the ego defenses that make you incapable of having certain thoughts!). And second, because all of the above may actually also transpose to discussions in AI alignment. In particular, I think the above suggestions are helpful for researchers. AI alignment can expose you to a lot of mental health risks (from the belief that “we’re doomed”, to creating strong tulpas that don’t align with your own values!). The recommendations I provide above may transpose to that domain: realize that even AI alignment research makes you spin up subagents inside you! The tools I shared may be helpful to increase the mental health of anyone studying this field who is now suffering from an infestation of negative subagents. Bring them back to Love!

See also:


[1] Not to be confused with simulationism (the belief that we actually live in a computer simulation) or indirect realism about perception (the philosophical realization that all we ever have access to are the features of an internal world simulation and we don’t perceive the world “directly”)

[2] Lehar’s Harmonic Gestalt argues that this emerges naturally out of the hill-claiming towards higher harmony between internal representations. Also discussed in Healing Trauma with Neural Annealing.

QRI: A Year in Review – 2022

We are deeply grateful to have you with us on our expedition through the state-space of consciousness. It’s been an exciting and productive year and we’re thrilled to share all of our updates and accomplishments. None of this would have been possible without support from sentient beings like you.


1+ Million Views

First of all, we are thrilled to announce that our presentation on DMT & Hyperbolic Geometry has reached an amazing milestone of 1+ million views this year. We highly appreciate the support and engagement of the community. This presentation has also helped to catalyze some incredible collaborations.

Check Out QRI’s Latest DMT Research


“I interpret QRI as coming at the problem from the opposite direction as everyone else: normal neuroscience starts with normal brain behavior and tries to build on it until they can one day explain crazy things like jhana; QRI starts with crazy things like jhana and tries to build down until they can explain ordinary behavior. This is naturally going to be shakier and harder to research – but somebody should be trying it.”

– Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten¹


Peer-Reviewed Research Publication Pipeline

Our Slicing Problem paper, which provides a novel critique of computational theories of consciousness, has been accepted to the journal Open Philosophy.

We’ve also recently submitted a paper on our Heavy-Tailed Valence Hypothesis (read the preprint), which is the latest iteration of our Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain – a key foundational piece for the field of valence research.

QRI has been working on building this field since 2015. We are proud to continue pushing the boundaries of knowledge in valence research. We are just getting started!

Up next: QRI’s solution to the Boundary Problem of Consciousness and a hypothesis piece for the Symmetry Theory of Valence and how it might be tested!


Tyringham Initiative

In addition to our research efforts, we’ve had the opportunity to connect with others in the research community. Our Director of Research, Andrés Gómez Emilsson, presented at the Tyringham Initiative, and we held a meet-and-greet in London with approximately 40 attendees, including some of QRI’s earliest supporters. We are thrilled to see such a strong interest in building a worldwide “qualia research community”, and we look forward to hosting more meetups in the future.


QRI now has an unofficial Discord server which has already gathered over 1000 members and has fostered engaging discussions related to QRI, attracting notable figures in the field like Roger Thisdell and the founders of PsychonautWiki.

Join


QRI Summer Event

One of the highlights of the year for us was getting to host a QRI event in the San Francisco Bay Area, attended by over 200 people. It was a great opportunity for us to showcase some of our latest tangible innovations, such as our scents and a demo of our Light-Sound-Vibration system. We also had a speech about the Future of Consciousness, which generated some thought-provoking conversations.


TEDx Talk

QRI’s first TEDx Talk got published, which discusses interventions that will have as much, if not more, impact in reducing suffering as anesthesia. The most innovative part of the talk was about anti-tolerance drugs. We believe that we are the only organization in the entire world talking about anti-tolerance drugs as a dedicated field of study with enormous implications rather than as a mere biochemical oddity.


QRI Articles

Just Look At The Thing!

A thorough explanation of how the science of consciousness and valence structuralism inform ethics and what the Effective Altruism movement is missing.

Digital Sentience

Digital computers will remain unconscious until they recruit physical fields for holistic computing using well-defined topological boundaries.


QRI Media

The Ontological Dinner Party

w/ Daniel Ingram, Andrés Gómez Emilsson, Frank Yang, & Ryan Ferris

Reflections on a 2-Week Jhāna Meditation Retreat

A deep phenomenological reflection on Pīti and the 1st Jhāna through a QRI-theoretic lens.

Harmonic Gestalt

Steven Lehar provides an overview of the core insights of his life’s work.

Exploratory Haptic Research

Valence, Arousal, Phenomenal Complexity, and Loving-Kindness

The History of HedWeb

Andrés Gómez Emilsson interviews QRI Board of Advisor and author of the Hedonistic Imperative, David Pearce.

The Aesthetic of the Meta-Aesthetic – On the Stoa

This talk explores modeling the generator of each aesthetic in order to create a network of “compatibility between aesthetics” that minimizes dissonance between them while emphasizing their synergies as well as their unique and valuable contributions.

Andrés Gómez Emilsson & Roger Thisdell – WystanTBS

Discussion on indirect realism, phenomenal time, qualia formalism, exotic phenomenal spacetime in psychedelic and meditative phenomenology, the effects of persistent subject-object nonduality on phenomenal spacetime and hedonic valence, and more!

Stephen Snyder & Andrés Gómez Emilsson – WystanTBS

A wide-ranging discussion and sharing of perspectives covering jhāna, Brahmavihārās, comparisons with psychedelic states, and the journey to and from the Absolute.

Leigh Brasington & Andrés Gómez Emilsson – WystanTBS

AI, Sentience & the Binding Problem of Consciousness – Adam Ford’s Science, Technology & the Future

Is Google’s LaMDA sentient? The phenomenal binding problem asks us to consider, ‘how can a huge set of discrete neurons form a unified mind?’ Is topological binding a requirement for AI to be sentient?

The Future of Consciousness – Adam Ford’s Science, Technology & the Future

A positive vision of the future that is both viable given what we know, and also utterly radical in its implications.

Psychedelic Qualia – Martin W. Ball

A discussion on psychedelic qualia, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, salvia divinorum, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT, MDMA, and more!


Listen to QRI on the Go!

You can now listen to QRI material on the go, while driving, doing exercise, in the sauna, or any other healthy annealing rituals!


Supporting QRI

Purchase a scent pack from QRI’s new scent line “Magical Creatures”. This line of scents explores the complex and often puzzling interactions that exist in the state-space of olfaction, highlighting the exotic and unique qualities that can emerge in this space.

Purchase QRI’s Magical Creatures

Please feel free to donate to QRI independent of our Magical Creatures campaign.


Thank you!

We want to thank everyone who has helped QRI in any way, including our current and past collaborators, donors, readers, video watchers, and event attendees. Special thanks to Hunter, Anders & Maggie, Marcin, Chris, Winslow, Olaf, Crystal, Libor, and David who really stepped up this year to help QRI in an incredible way. Our efforts wouldn’t matter or be possible without all of you! May you all be prosperous, energized, and access the full-state of consciousness for the benefit of all beings! Thank you!


¹ Additional QRI references by Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten this year:

Copyright (C) 2022 Qualia Research Institute. All rights reserved.

On Rhythms of the Brain: Jhanas, Local Field Potentials, and Electromagnetic Theories of Consciousness

Of potential interest to readers: here’s part of an email exchange I recently had with Scott Alexander about Rhythms of the Brain by György Buzsáki, a book I recommended he read to learn more about the neuroscience of brainwaves. This is an essay he published about it; I had a chance to read a pre-publication draft to check whether he was describing the science and my positions accurately. This is part of my feedback on the draft (lightly edited for clarity and consistent formatting):


Andrés – Oct/13/2022

First of all, thank you again for writing a review of Rhythms Of The Brain. As I mentioned, I think your review is spot-on. It’s already really great as it is. But I think the following pieces of information might help you answer some of the questions you pose and enrich the mental model you have about brainwaves. I should also mention that I’m still learning a lot on the topic from a number of angles and my model still has quite a few moving parts.

Without further ado, here are 5 key points I’d like to share:

(1) I think that Susan Pockett‘s Consciousness Is a Thing, Not a Process (link to PDF) is very relevant here. She argues based on neurophysiological and behavioral evidence that conscious perception only happens when Local Field Potentials (LFPs) are generated. The timing, functional correlates, and location of events of conscious perception of sensory stimuli seem to agree with this (pgs. 4-5):

Here’s how I think about this: 

Have you wondered why brainwaves track levels of wakefulness? See, in principle you can have a great deal of neural activity without any brainwaves. Raster plots of spike neural networks could in principle look like white noise… which in turn would generate no brainwaves at all because the oscillations in the electric field would cancel each other out at the macroscopic level. Recall that perfectly compressed information is indistinguishable from noise. So, in principle, an optimal use of the state-space of neural activity would look totally like white noise and lack brainwaves.

Susan Pockett would say that the non-conscious parts of neural activity can be like this… greatly optimized in a certain sense. But they will lack consciousness. The advantage of the coherence (which comes at the cost of greatly reduced information content) is distributed representations. In turn, this may solve the binding problem.

(2) Johnjoe McFadden‘s Conscious Electromagnetic Field (CEMI) theory is worth digging into. 

The “LFPs as mediators of consciousness” story has a lot going for it. In particular, it is quite elegant in how it can help us make sense of our phenomenological relation to our brain and nervous system. Brainwaves and LFPs are be highly correlated. Coherent neural activity causes LFPs, which in turn mediate/bias activity in neurons, with a causal structure like this:

If “we are” the patchwork of interlaced LFPs the brain is generating, in some sense we could say that we “have a brain” rather than that we “are the brain” (loosely speaking). Without putting any strong metaphysical import on the concept of free will, the phenomenology of it seems to me at least to make more sense when you identify with the field rather than the neurons per se (see clues 1 and 3 in his paper). In this view, we are like the “ghost in the machine”, capable of biasing neural activity here and there. But at the same time, we need the coherent neural activity to be booted up. So we are sort of “riding the brain” while the brain is giving us our foundation. Perhaps this gives us another angle to think about the “elephant taming” metaphor for the progression of the meditative path:

(3) The work of Stephen Grossberg (Adaptive Resonant Theory, and more recently his book Conscious Mind, Resonant Brain) as well as that of his student Steven Lehar, have macroscopic resonance as a key computational step. Arguably this is something you can simulate with classical neural networks. But using the EM field would potentially produce a significant computational speedup. Talking to Lehar, he used an interesting analogy, where in which he described “neurons spiking as a kind of sand blasting of the electric field” in order to activate internal representations. Recent research seems to confirm that the information content of internal representations is better captured by the structure of the electric field than by the neurons that sustain it (“Neurons are fickle. Electric fields are more reliable for information.“).

NOTE: One of the contributions to the conversation that QRI is aiming to make (essentially by publishing in academia what’s already discussed in our website) is that while these field theories of consciousness do address the binding problem, they now have to contend with the boundary problem. Our solution is “topological segmentation”, which itself comes with empirically testable predictions. Topological pockets allow for holistic field behavior *and* for solving the boundary problem at the same time, finally rendering bound consciousness both causally efficacious and objectively bounded. [In your essay] you could point out that I claim that resonance is necessary but not sufficient to solve the phenomenal binding problem. So even if AIs were using brainwaves, that might not be enough for them to be conscious, though it would go in the right direction. More on this on our website soonish.  

(4) I think that we can use the Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV) to explain the hedonic properties of different network topologies. This would be responsible for the “intrinsic valence” of a given brain region. You write:

> Why this combination of tasks? Rhythms sort of suggests that brain areas are less about specific tasks than about specific graph-theoretic arrangements, which are convenient for specific algorithms, which are convenient for specific tasks.

Yes! This is a great way of putting it. I think that having diverse network topologies available is one of the key ingredients of a general intelligence like ours. A learning algorithm that patches together the right sections to produce the right kind of structure for internal representations with holistic properties seems like a natural way to construct a mind. More so, some of these patches will cause dysphoric waves and others euphoric waves. The dysphoric parts of the brain, if STV is in the right direction, would have a network topology that work as a sort of frustration generator. The waves generated by these parts sort of “hate themselves”: activating them causes internal dissonance and stress that is then radiated out as waves with unfriendly ADSR envelopes to the rest of the brain. In contrast, the euphoric parts would produce highly aligned waves with soft ADSR envelopes and the right level of impedance matching to harmonize with other wave generators. 

(5) Merging with God as a kind of global coherence:

> Andres suggests all of this is a good match for oscillatory coupling between brain regions.

Perhaps add something akin to “which according to him ‘dissolves internal boundaries'”

> Andres thinks this is part of what’s behind “spiritual” or “mystical” experiences, where you suddenly feel like you’ve lost the boundaries of yourself and are at one with God and Nature and Everything.

My strongest phenomenological evidence here is the difference between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT (video): competing clusters of coherence feel like “a lot of entities in an ecosystem of patterns” whereas global coherence feels like “union with God, Everything, and Everyone”. Hence the terms “spirit molecule” for DMT and “God molecule” for 5-MeO-DMT. The effect size of this difference is extremely large and reliable. I’ve yet to find someone who has experience with both substances who doesn’t immediately agree with this characterization. [This can be empirically tested] by blinding whether one takes DMT or 5-MeO-DMT and then reporting on the valence characteristics, “competing vs. global” coherence characteristics, and on whether one gets a patchwork of entities or one feels like one is merging with the universe.

With classic psychedelics, which stand somewhere between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT in their level of global coherence, you always go through an annealing process before finally “snapping” into global coherence and “becoming one with God”. That coherence is the signature of these mystical experiences becomes rather self-evident once you pay attention to annealing signatures (i.e. noticing how incompatible metronomes slowly start synchronizing and forming larger and larger structures until one megastructure swallows it all and dissolves the self-other boundary in the process of doing so).

You will not find academic publications describing this process (because their psychological scales are not detailed enough, aren’t focused on structure, and aren’t informed by actual practice). Nor will you find psychonauts talking much about this, because they tend to focus on the semantic content of the experience rather than on the phenomenal texture [see our guide]. Naturally, one is typically socially rewarded for providing an entertaining story about one’s trip… not a detailed *technical* report of phenomenal texture. Therefore, right now you’ll only find QRI content explaining all of this. But I’m fairly confident about this after talking to very experienced. So I think this will significantly shape the conversation in a couple of years once we start getting some consensus on it.

I could share much more, but I have to restrain myself (taming the elephant!). Let me know if you need anything else.

Thank you!!

Infinite bliss!


Scott – Oct/13/2022

Thanks. […] two questions:

> Susan Pockett would say that the non-conscious parts of neural activity can be like this… greatly optimized in a certain sense. But they will lack consciousness. The advantage of the coherence (which comes at the cost of greatly reduced information content) is distributed representations. In turn, this may solve the binding problem.

Not sure I understand this. Aren’t there clear examples of unconscious brain waves (eg delta waves during sleep)? Can you explain more about what you mean by distributed representations and why they’re linked to consciousness?

> If “we are” the patchwork of interlaced LFPs the brain is generating, in some sense we could say that we “have a brain” rather than that we “are the brain” (loosely speaking). Without putting any strong metaphysical import on the concept of free will, the phenomenology of it seems to me at least to make more sense when you identify with the field rather than the neurons per se (see clues 1 and 3 in his paper). In this view, we are like the “ghost in the machine”, capable of biasing neural activity here and there.

Confused by this too. My model for thinking about brain waves has been cellular automata – in this case, there would be no difference between the pattern and the machinery, and it wouldn’t make sense to say that the pattern is able to bias the activity here or there. Is this a bad model? Can you explain more what you mean by “us” (by which I’m assuming you mean consciousness) “biasing” activity (by which I assume you mean causing brain activity different from what you would expect by lower-level laws)?


Andrés Oct/15/2022

Hey Scott!

> Thanks […] two questions:

(I’ll answer your questions in a different order than how you asked them, on the basis that my answer to the first one is much more weird and less credible… In other words, I’m answering more or less in order of how weird my responses are so that you are not put off by my first answers. This way you can choose when to stop reading without missing anything useful for your essay):

> My model for thinking about brain waves has been cellular automata – in this case, there would be no difference between the pattern and the machinery, and it wouldn’t make sense to say that the pattern is able to bias the activity here or there. Is this a bad model? 

I think that “brainwaves can be explained as emergent patterns of a cellular automata” is a very good starting model, and it has a lot of explanatory power. But there are empirical and experiential facts that would go against it as a complete explanation. And perhaps, it misses the most important hint for a theory of consciousness that satisfies all of the necessary criteria I consider such a theory must satisfy. And that is, that binding has non-trivial computational effects. I.e. At some level, patterns of organization exert “weak downward causation” on the substrate that gave rise to them. This does not mean there is “strong emergence” or that we’re going against the laws of physics. On the contrary, a key guiding principle for QRI is to be strict physicalists. The laws of physics are causally closed and complete (or at least as good as it gets; the Standard Model can be taken at face value for the time being, until something better comes along). Without violating physicalism, we nonetheless still see instances of weak downward causation in the physical world.

As an intuition, consider the fact that something like TMS can change neural activity. In fact, TMS, and especially rTMS, can cause seizures. This suggests that at a sufficiently high dose, EM oscillations can exert top-down influence on neuronal firing thresholds and phase coherence, and more so when they come in repetitive waves rather than pulses. In the case of LFPs, which are far more localized and less energetic, the influence isn’t huge. But it is there. As far as I understand the neuroscience literature on LFPs (and ephatic coupling more generally), the fact that LFPs change firing thresholds is uncontroversial. The question is “by how much”. Most studies find small effects (otoh between 1% and 20% of the variance, but I can look up more precise and recent figures – e.g. see: Ephaptic coupling of cortical neurons).

The more interesting and perhaps significant effect that LFPs have is to change the degree of coherence between neurons. In other words, they may not change much their probability of firing, but do change a lot their probability of firing in phase. You can see how this would lead to interesting self-reinforcing effects. Namely, if neural coherence causes LFPs, and LFPs increase neural coherence, there might be attractors of hypercoherent neural firings coupled with strong and very orderly LFPs. I believe this explains the Jhanas.

Now, can’t you just expand your cellular automata to include LFPs and call it a day? Well, yes, in a theoretical but rather impractical sense. Building a cellular automata that simulates a simple neural network is easy. Building one that simulates water is more tricky. By the time you are constructing cellular automata to simulate EM fields you get into trouble. It’s possible, but you need all sorts of tricks, shortcuts, and handling complex edge cases (e.g. topological segmentation!). Can you construct a cellular automata that simulates physics? Quantum mechanics proper? Yes… if you are Wolfram. But recall that his explorations invoke cellular automata with unusual mathematical primitives. We are no longer in the territory of simple grid-like graphs. We are in Ruliad-space, with hypergraphs and exotic rulesets. Quantum coherent states behave in a very holistic fashion (where the “next step” is the result of solving Shrödinger’s equation in configuration space). So while it’s possible to use cellular automata to think of physics at this level, it isn’t a very natural choice. Rather, I posit that thinking of it in terms of universal principles like energy minimization, extremas, and the preservation of zero information is what takes us closer to the phenomenon at hand. These principles are, by their very nature, holistic. An electron, as Feynman would put it, can sort of “smell its surroundings” to decide where to go. It somehow explores all possibilities at once and “chooses” the one that balances the minimization of energy and maximization of entropy. A truly holistic sort of phenomenon.

Source: A Class of Models with the Potential to Represent Fundamental Physics by Stephen Wolfram

I think that if at that point one uses a cellular automata to represent this, one has actually reintroduced the very thing the cellular automata conceptual framework was trying to avoid. And that is, the computational power of holism. This is because even though the Ruliad that simulates physics is in some way a cellular automata, the ruleset itself requires a kind of God-like capacity to integrate pieces of information and “see all at once” entire regions of the (hyper)graph and decide what to do next. My claim is that at this point one has “pushed” the undesired holism to the ruleset in order to avoid seeing it directly. It’s a reductionist sleight of hand.

Now, I’m not saying consciousness is quantum mechanical. What I’m pointing out is that EM waves are sort of in the spectrum between simple cellular automatas and QM, where the waves interacting with one another have all kinds of peculiar holistic effects. Binding, if it involves EM waves, turns out to be computationally non-trivial.

In this model, the brain is physically providing a soil that can instantiate EM waves with many different kinds of properties. Some behave linearly, some non-linearly. And together, they give rise to the vast zoo of possible internal representations, many kinds of binding, topologies, and dynamics we experience (such as the strangeness of “fire meditation“).

> Can you explain more what you mean by “us” (by which I’m assuming you mean consciousness) “biasing” activity (by which I assume you mean causing brain activity different from what you would expect by lower-level laws)?

You can’t voluntarily shut down your brain with conscious control. At least not immediately. But you can direct your attention to two parts of your experience at once, and the resonances in those two regions will slowly but surely begin to synchronize. In other words, from an EE point of view, spreading your attention over a given region of your experience increases the impedance matching between the metronomes in those regions. This, I think, is the influence of LFPs (or similar) on neural activity. This may be subtle, but over enough time and neural rewiring, the process can lead to very interesting effects. Hyperconcentrated states of consciousness, starting with access concentration all the way to single-pointed attention and ultimately to the formless Jhanas are obtained through mental moves that slowly by surely “unify the mind” (i.e. brings coherence between disparate metronomes in the nervous system). This is “us” learning to influence “our brain”.

> Not sure I understand this. Aren’t there clear examples of unconscious brain waves (eg delta waves during sleep)?

Two quick things here. The first is that we think brainwaves (macroscopic oscillations in the EM field more generally) are necessary but not sufficient for consciousness. They still need to form a topological pocket, or they will remain unclosed eddies that cannot contain information nor maintain a boundary with their surroundings. The second is that the main point is that the brainwaves track the texture of degrees of wakefulness. More so, it’s not just the spectral power distribution, but also the patterns of spatiotemporal cross-frequency coherence. Thus, two states might look the same in terms of their spectrum, but carry significantly different internal textures since one of them has a high degree of, say, gamma coherence and the other doesn’t.

> Can you explain more about what you mean by distributed representations and why they’re linked to consciousness?

One of the key insights from Stevan Lehar is that using a dynamic, smooth, spatial medium of representation allows us to run spatial algorithms on our representations. One example is the incredibly general reverse grassfire & reverse shock schaffold algorithms that explain a wide range of visual illusions (discussed in The Constructive Aspect of Visual Perception / as well as in his magnum opus video Harmonic Gestalt). Based on the fact that these algorithms generalize to things like breakthrough level DMT experiences and that they apply to hyperdimensional phenomenal objects and their resonant modes, I’m fairly convinced that the local cellular automata view doesn’t explain the facts. The structures that exist in those states follow law-like energy minimization properties reminiscent of fluid dynamics in higher dimensions. To me they seem to necessitate something like Maxwell’s equations; a cellular automaton would need a lot of training and fine-tuning to be able to instantly generate those dynamics right and seamlessly. Combine this with the (not fully verified but tentative) observation that DMT states are phenomenologically similar to those induced by high-dose Fire Kasina. I believe that the mechanism is actually fairly simple: both methods energize the visual field to the point where it transitions from a linear and partially linear state into a fully nonlinear regime. The phenomenon is better seen as what happens when you energize a non-linear optical computer than, say, the effect of changing the ruleset of a cellular automaton.

I know this lacks credibility for the time being […]. I aim to identify crisp and experimentally verifiable demonstrations of this that trained physicists and neuroscientists can both agree on.

In the long-term, I expect humans to figure out ways to use high-energy states of consciousness to tap into the EM field as a computational substrate. Not only will this entail a revolution in consciousness, but also, interestingly, in how we think of computation. The Turing Paradigm will turn out to be a tiny special case of… qualia computing.

Alright, I hope that wasn’t too much, haha.

Thank you again, and happy to answer more questions.

Infinite bliss!


See also:

The Maxwellians

Excerpt from The Maxwellians by Bruce J. Hunt (1991)

Foreword by L. Pearce Williams

In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell published a rambling and difficult two-volume Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism that was destined to change the orthodox picture of reality. This treatise did for electromagnetism what Newton‘s Principia had done for classical mechanics. It not only provided the mathematical tools for the investigation and representation of the whole of electromagnetic theory, but it altered the very framework of both theoretical and experimental physics. Although the process had been going on throughout the nineteenth century, it was this work that finally displaced action-at-a-distance physics and substituted the physics of the field.

Like Newton’s Principia, Maxwell’s Treatise did not immediately convince the scientific community. The concepts in it were strange and the mathematics was clumsy and involved. Most of the experimental basis was drawn from the researches of Michael Faraday, whose results were undeniable, but whose ideas seemed bizarre to the orthodox physicist. The British had, more or less, become accustomed to Faraday’s “vision,” but continental physicists, while accepting the new facts that poured from his laboratory, rejected his conceptual structures. One of Maxwell’s purposes in writing his treatise was to put Faraday’s ideas into the language of mathematical physics precisely so that orthodox physicists would be persuaded of their importance.

Maxwell died in 1879, midway through preparing a second edition of the Treatise. At that time, he had convinced only a very few of his fellow countrymen and none of his continental colleagues. That task now fell to his disciples.

The story that Bruce Hunt tells in this volume is the story of the ways in which Maxwell’s ideas were picked up in Great Britain, modified, organized, and reworked mathematically so that the Treatise as a whole and Maxwell’s concepts were clarified and made palatable, indeed irresistible, to the physicists of the late nineteenth century. The men who accomplished this, G. F. FitzGerald, Oliver Heaviside, Oliver Lodge, and others, make up the group that Hunt calls the “Maxwellians.” Their relations with one another and with Maxwell’s work make for a fascinating study of the ways in which new and revolutionary scientific ideas move from the periphery of the scientific thought to the very center. In the process, Professor Hunt also, by extensive use of manuscript sources, examines the genesis of some of the more important ideas that fed into and led to the scientific revolution of the twentieth century.

L. PEARCE WILLIAMS. – Ithaca, New York


“Maxwell’s equations”

Introduction

James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of the electromagnetic field is generally acknowledged as one of the outstanding intellectual achievements of the nineteenth century—indeed, of any century. The late Richard Feynman once remarked, with perhaps only a little hyperbole, that “from a long view of the history of mankind […] there can be little doubt that the most significant event of the 19th century will be judged as Maxwell’s discovery of the laws of electrodynamics”. Even the American Civil War, Feynman said, “will pale into provincial insignificance” besides this more profound event of the 1860s.[1] By the mid-1890s the four “Maxwell’s equations” were recognized as the foundation of one of the strongest and most successful theories in all of physics; they had taken their place as companions, even rivals, to Newton’s laws of mechanics. The equations were by then also being put into practical use, most dramatically in the emerging new technology of radio communications, but also in the telegraph, telephone, and electric power industries. Maxwell’s theory passed to the twentieth century with an enormous reputation it has retained ever since.

It is thus perhaps surprising to find that the fullest statement Maxwell gave of his theory, his 1873 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, does not contain the four famous “Maxwell’s equations,” nor does it even hint at how electromagnetic waves might be produced or detected. These and many other aspects of the theory were quite thoroughly hidden in the version of it given by Maxwell himself; in the words of Oliver Heaviside, they were “latent” in the theory, but hardly “patent.”[2]

Maxwell was only forty-eight when he died of cancer in November 1879. He was only a quarter of the way through revising his Treatise for a second edition, and the task of digging out the “latent” aspects of his theory and of exploring its wider implications was thus left to a group of younger physicists, most of them British. Between roughly 1879 and 1894, these “Maxwellians,” led by George Francis FitzGerald (1851-1901), Oliver Lodge (1851-1940), and Oliver Heaviside (1850-1925), with a key contribution from the German physicist Heinrich Hertz (1857-1894), transformed the rich but confusing raw material of the Treatise into a solid, concise, and well-confirmed theory—essentially, at least for free space, the “Maxwell’s theory” we know today. It was they who first explored the possibility of generating electromagnetic waves and then actually demonstrated their existence; it was they, along with J. H. Poynting (1852-1914), who first delineated the paths of energy flow in the electromagnetic field and then followed out the far-reaching implications of this discovery; it was they who recast the long list of equations Maxwell had given in his Treatise into the compact set now universally known as “Maxwell’s”; and it was they who began to apply this revised theory to problems of electrical communications, with results that have transformed modern life. It was mainly the Maxwellians who gave Maxwell’s theory the form it has since retained, and it was largely through their work that it first acquired its great reputation and breadth of application.

The evolution of “Maxwell’s theory” in the years after Maxwell’s death provides a striking example of a process quite common in science, as in other fields of intellectual endeavor. Scientific theories rarely spring fully formed from the mind of one person; a theory is likely to be so refined and reinterpreted by later thinkers that by the time it is codified and passes into general circulation, it often bears little resemblance to the form in which it was first propounded. The practice in science of naming theories after their originators often obscures the historical process by which scientific syntheses are achieved. One is tempted to seek all of “Newtonianism” in Newton, or all of “Darwinism” in Darwin. One of the main aims in the pages that follow is to trace the formation of such a theoretical synthesis in some detail and to show that “Maxwellianism,” though undeniably built on Maxwell’s ideas, was in many ways the work of his successors. “Maxwell was only 1/2 Maxwellian,” Heavisde declared in 1895; I examine here what it meant to be a Maxwellian and trace the transformation of ideas that lay behind Heaviside’s remark.[3]

Another of my aims is to trace the evolution of the Maxwellians as a scientific group and to show how they stimulated and helped one another, both in their strictly scientific work and in more practical affairs. Science is a more social and cooperative process than is sometimes appreciated, and one of the most effective ways to capture its richness is to examine in detail the workings of a small group. The key to such a study of the Maxwellians is their surviving letters and notebooks, through which one can follow the course of their thoughts and actions almost day by day and see how strongly they influenced one another. In the work of FitzGerald and Lodge on ether models and electromagnetic waves; in Lodge and Heaviside’s joint battles with W. H. Preece of the Post Office Telegraph Department; in Heaviside and FitzGerald’s long collaboration on the problem of moving charges and on the puzzle of the ultimate nature of the electromagnetic field—in all of these, the cooperative nature of the Maxwellian’s work can be clearly seen in their correspondence. Heaviside in particular virtually lived his life on paper; he was something of a recluse, and his letters and published writings were his main contact with the outside world. FitzGerald and Lodge, too, left very full records of their activities. Although all three were pioneers of electrical communications, they lived before telephones were common, and since they were physically separated—Heaviside in London and later Devon, Lodge in Liverpool, and FitzGerald in Dublin—they kept in touch mostly via letters, hundreds of which have been preserved. These enable us to reconstruct not only their work but something of their personalities and to see them engaged in the 1880s and 1890s in the lively business of remaking Maxwell’s theory and of probing, as they thought, into the ultimate foundations of the physical universe.

Maxwell himself is only a minor character in this story; he died before the Maxwellians’ work was well begun. But his ideas pervade the book, as they pervaded the Maxwellians’ own work. Though greatly reinterpreted and recast, Maxwell’s ideas always formed the core of the Maxwellian synthesis. In one of the most interesting of his unpublished writings, Heaviside reflected on the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. In its old religious sense, the idea had, he believed, been thoroughly discredited. But there was, he said, another “and far nobler sense” in which the soul truly was immortal. In living our lives, each of us “makes some impression on the world, good or bad, and then dies”; this impression goes on to affect future events for all time, so that “a part of us lives after us, diffused through all humanity, more or less, and all of Nature. This is the immortality of the soul,” Heaviside said. “There are large and there are small souls,” he went on.

The immortal soul of John Ploughman of Buckinghamshire is a small affair, scarcely visible. That of a Shakespeare or a Newton is stupendous. Such men live the best parts of their lives after they shuffle off the mortal coil and fall into the grave. Maxwell was one of those men. His soul will live and grow for long to come, and, thousands of years hence, it will shine as one of the bright stars of the past, whose light takes ages to reach us, amongst the crowd of others, not the least bright.[4]

This light from Maxwell has come down to us mainly through the Maxwellians; it was they who developed the most important implications of his theory and cast it into the form in which it has become most widely known. In the pages that follow, we trace how this light was refracted and refocused by the Maxwellians and how it was passed along to the next generation, to be transformed and reinterpreted again.


[1] Feynman 1964, 2:1.11

[2] Heaviside 1892, 2:393 [1888]

[3] Heaviside to FitzGerald, [Mar. 1895], FG-RDS; internal evidence places this undated fragment between FitzGerald’s letters to Heaviside of 8 and 15 Mar., OH-IEE.

[4] Heaviside notebook 8, OH-IEE; a slightly different version is quoted in Appleyard 1930: 257. It was probably written in 1886; cf. Heaviside 1892, 2:77 [1886].


Featured Image Source: Arrayás, M., Bouwmeester, D., & Trueba, J. L. (2017). Knots in electromagnetism. Physics Reports, 667, 1–61. doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2016.11.001 [link]. (cf. QRI’s topological solution to the phenomenal binding problem).

Ecstasy and Honesty

by David Pearce (2004; reprinted with permission, link/arx)

A society based on E-like consciousness would be an honest society of honest people.

        Today, most of us lie and dissemble. We tell white lies and, on occasion, total whoppers. Most of us lie many times in the course of a day, whether to friends, family, colleagues or – as necessity or convenience dictates – to total strangers. Hiding one’s true thoughts and feelings as the occasion demands is second nature to outwardly civilised Darwinians. The few formal studies conducted into the prevalence of lying in everyday life suggest we tend to underestimate just how often (almost) all of us are guilty of outright fabrications, not to mention innumerable half-truths and evasions.

        On a wider scale, deceit is institutionalized in political life. The record of human history to date supports the powerful intuition that deception will persist indefinitely in public and private life alike. For the evolved capacity to lie and deceive in ever more sophisticated ways has been genetically adaptive. Indeed, if the controversial Machiavellian ape hypothesis is correct, then a progressively refined capacity to lie and deceive – and conversely, a fine-tuned capacity to spot lies and deceit in others – may have driven the evolution of human intelligence.

        It is sometimes said that life would be better if only we were honest with each other. More often, this value judgement is simply assumed. Life might be better, too, if we were more honest with ourselves. But given today’s corrupt genome, all such scenarios are impossibly unrealistic. Moreover, the effects of public openness about private feelings would frequently be catastrophic. This is because Darwinian humans entertain so many negative thoughts about each other that complete candour would wreck most contemporary human relationships. In a grim Darwinian world, one [E-less] person may, for instance, find another person boring and ugly. Yet there is commonly no advantage to either party in saying so. So the civilities are (sometimes) preserved.

        Not all lying is self-serving. Very often, we lie to spare the feelings of others, as well as our own.

        On MDMA/Ecstasy, however, subjects tend to become extraordinarily honest. People trust each other: MDMA indirectly triggers the release of oxytocin. Critically, MDMA-induced emotional honesty is matched by a subtle yet profound shift in perception: when “loved up” on MDMA, we all tend to seem fascinating and beautiful, both to each other and to ourselves. On MDMA, it seems natural to express these feelings spontaneously and demonstratively too.

        Alas this marvellous state of being doesn’t last for more than a few hours. Potentially, the benefits of MDMA (and MDA)-assisted therapy can be much longer-lasting. But the peak experience of soul-baring empathetic bliss soon fades. Looking to the future, however, enhancements of E-like consciousness can in principle be indefinitely prolonged. By opting via gene-therapy to hardwire a neurobiology of E-like consciousness into our offspring, we could even lock in this perceptual and behavioural shift for good. If implemented species-wide, an enhanced E-like set of perceptual filters would make heavenly love for each other as natural as breathing.

         This post-millennial vision is implausible. Right now, the notion of global E-like consciousness seems fantastical, especially if one isn’t loved up on MDMA. Yet the capacity to love everybody, and in extreme forms, to be in love with everybody, will be a technical if not sociological possibility in the age of mature biotechnology. In future, if we ever opt – pharmacologically or genetically – to implement E-like consciousness as one facet of world-wide mental health, then it may be psychologically safe to be totally honest. In the meantime, barring such enrichment of our troubled minds, it’s sometimes safer to lie through one’s teeth. Thus today the MDMA user is probably well advised to take a conscious decision, prior to dropping an E, not to disclose anything s/he would not wish to be known in the E-less state. Reticence on E can be maintained; but one can be reliably tight-lipped on E only with a fair degree of forethought.

        Yet discretion is prudent not because an E-catalysed outpouring of the heart and soul is itself pathological. Selective reticence about (some of) one’s innermost feelings is wise simply because the repercussions of honesty back in the E-less world to which the user must return can be cruel; and because the elevated sentiments felt while on E often cannot be sustained in the cold light of day.

         Of course, the prospect of worldwide E-like candour strikes the harsh Darwinian eye as grotesque – no less than the prospect of us all loving each other. More specifically, the option of becoming permanently loved-up invites the charge that E-like perception is systematically distorted. A notional society of loved-up E-heads, it may be alleged, would be in the grip of a collective psychosis. Sure, runs the cynic’s critique, loved-up Ecstatics intoxicated on MDMA may find everyone beautiful and fascinating. But so what? Even though MDMA is not a classic “hallucinogen” or psychedelic, the drug-induced perception of loveliness that MDMA creates is (often) false. For lots of people are really boring and ugly. A perpetually E-enchanted world would be a fool’s paradise populated by intellectually and aesthetically undiscerning simpletons. In an E-like world, we might indeed be open and honest; but we’d have nothing worth hiding.

        This dismissive judgement doesn’t follow. If being boring or ugly were intrinsic properties of (some of) our fellow humans, rather than our emotional responses to the vicious (mis-)representations of Darwinian minds, then the charge of false consciousness, as it were, might be easier to sustain. But there’s no evidence that this is so. Our perceptual experiences have been shaped by natural selection, not to be veridical, but to help our genes leave more copies of themselves. Sometimes this (lack of) veridicality is fitness-enhancing; and sometimes it isn’t; and sometimes – as is arguably the case in the realm of attitudes expressing pure value judgements – there’s no fact of the matter either way. In any event, under the primordial Darwinian regime of natural selection, there has been great advantage in seeing genetic rivals, and indeed seeing anyone with whom one is not genetically identical, in a (sometimes) cruelly negative light. On the other hand, if it had helped our genes leave more copies of themselves, then men would typically represent women of, say, 80 years old as more sexy and fascinating than women aged 21; and this perception would be neither more nor less “correct” than the aesthetic consensus-reality of today.

         Analogously, the enraptured mystic who can “see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower” is not deluded; such perceptions are uncommon at present merely because it has been genetically maladaptive to occupy states of sustained mystical bliss. For in the ancestral environment of adaptation, it was typically more adaptive to see grains of sand as boring and neglect them. But today’s parochial (virtual) worlds are only one small set of mind-dependent creations in a vaster state-space of possibilities, not a timeless feature of the human predicament. Tantalisingly, thanks to biotechnology a wide range of life-enriching options will soon be on offer instead.

         A tough-minded sceptic may respond: yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but not all social perception is relative. Some people really are nasty and ill-natured by (almost) any criterion at all. And seeing them as anything else would be delusive. Granted, viewing each other in an often jaundiced light may be a product of our nasty little Darwinian minds, but surely that’s the point: commonly we just aren’t very lovable. If we are to be honest, then we should admit this – not gush effusively at each other like drugged-up hippies.

         Herein lies the beauty of MDMA – and perhaps safer, sexier lovedrugs and more distant gene-therapies in the pipeline. MDMA doesn’t just make us honest. E-like consciousness makes us sweeter-natured. Even better, the idealised self activated by MDMA does not take the form of alien impostor, so to speak, but feels utterly authentic, constructed from elements of an idealised persona that we can’t live up to in drug-naïve life. If, in a hypothetical E-based society, everyone were constitutionally sweet-natured, then enriching our cognitive architecture would entail capturing this sweet-naturedness in our interpersonal perceptions. With E-like consciousness, emotional honesty and intellectual integrity can, in principle, go hand in hand. It is possible, but unproven, that ugly representations of ourselves and each other belong to a dark Darwinian world that we will shortly leave behind.

        This prospect again invites scepticism. It can be argued that genetically engineering an entire population primed for indiscriminate honesty is not an evolutionarily stable outcome. An unfailingly honest population might seem prone to genetic invasion by mutant, quasi-sociopathic “defectors”. This game-theoretic argument may continue to hold in the future, as it has done in the past. Even with advanced biotechnology, runs this line of argument, perhaps only substantially egoistic well-being is feasible in any biologically realistic model of a globally superhappy society.

        But once again, this overly quick reply neglects how ostensibly altruistic thoughts and behaviour evolved in the first instance i.e. for (genetically) selfish reasons; and how they are likely to proliferate explosively in the new reproductive era of designer babies. The proliferation of such admirable traits will accelerate not because our genes stop being any less selfish in the technical sense. For unselfish genes are impossible. Instead, an (E-like?) nobility of character may flourish in the impending era of so-called unnatural selection because when selection is no longer “blind” or [effectively] random, the [selfish] genetic payoff of promoting such “altruistic” traits can be higher. In the new reproductive era ahead, when genes/allelic combinations are chosen by (partially) rational agents in anticipation of their likely behavioural consequences, parents will plausibly exhibit a strong preference for offspring with genotypes that promote such (partially) heritable traits as honesty and “lovability”. These nicer traits may then flourish at the expense of alleles that predispose to a nastier disposition. After all, who wants to devote their life to raising nasty kids?

        Unfortunately there are no shortcuts. Any transition to a truly honest post-Darwinian society can’t happen simply though acts of individual initiative or all-night Paradise-engineering certainly won’t come about just via individual acts of drug-taking – even after safe and distributed via the Net.

        Needless to say, we don’t know whether our genetically enhanced descendants will ever have E-like perceptual filters to their consciousness. We don’t know if posterity will lie and cheat as much as we do. We don’t even know whether they will be fundamentally happy, or assuming they are indeed innately so blessed, whether their well-being will take an egocentric or empathetic guise, or express modes of flourishing unimaginably different from anything accessible to conscious mind today. So perhaps the enticing scenarios for our transhuman descendants touted here are all just wishful thinking masquerading as futurology. But whatever the future holds, by taking MDMA we can already, fleetingly, access states of consciousness richer than our brutish Darwinian mindset normally permits. A fundamentally honest society, prefigured (perhaps) in a communal MDMA love-in, is not self-evidently ethically inferior to a society founded on never-ending lies and deceit – or a society driven by competitive displays of consumer consumption. So at least as an intellectual exercise, it’s worth investigating the policy-option of locking in the biochemical substrates of E-like honesty for good.

7 Recent Videos: Cognitive Sovereignty, Phenomenology of Scent, Solution to the Problem of Other Minds, Novel Qualia Research Methods, Higher Dimensions, Solution to the Binding Problem, and Qualia Computing

[Context: 4th in a series of 7-video packages. See the previous three packages: 1st2nd, and 3rd]


Genuinely new thoughts are actually very rare. Why is that? And how can we incentivize the good side of smart people to focus their energies on having genuinely new thoughts for the benefit of all? In order to create the conditions for that we need to strike the right balance between many complementary forces.

I offer a new ideal we call “Cognitive Sovereignty”. This ideal consists of three principles working together in synergy: (1) Freedom of Thought and Feeling, (2) Idea Ownership, and (3) Information Responsibility.

(1) Freedom of Thought and Feeling is the cultivation of a child-like wonder and positive attitude towards the ideas of one another. A “Yes And” approach to idea sharing.

As QRI advisors Anders Amelin and Margareta “Maggie” Wassinge write on the topic:

“On the topic of liberty of mind, we may reflect that inhibitory mechanisms are typically strong within groups of people. As is the case within minds of individuals. In minds it’s this tip of the iceberg which gets rendered as qualia and is the end result of unexperienced hierarchies of powerfully constraining filters. It’s really practical for life forms to function this way and for teams made up of life forms to function similarly, but for making grand improvements to the very foundations of life itself, you need maximum creativity instead of the default self-organizing consensus emergence.

“There is creativity-limiting pressure to conform to ‘correctness’ everywhere. Paradigmatic correctness in science, corporate correctness in business, social correctness, political correctness, and so on. As antidotes to chaos these can serve a purpose but for exceptional intellectual work to blossom they are quite counterproductive. There is something to be said for Elon Musk’s assertion that ‘excellence is the only passing grade’.

“The difference to the future wellbeing of sentient entities between the QRI becoming something pretty much overall OK-ish, and the QRI becoming something of great excellence, is probably bigger than between the corresponding outcomes for Tesla Motors.

“The creativity of the team is down to this exact thing: The qualia computing of the gut feeling getting to enjoy a haven of liberty all too rare elsewhere.”

On (2) we can say that to “be the adult in the room” is also equally important. As Michael Johnson puts it, “it’s important to keep track of the metadata of ideas.” One cannot incentivize smart people to share ideas if they don’t feel like others will recognize who came up with them. While not everyone pays close attention to who says what in conversation, we think that a reasonable level of attention on this is necessary to align incentives. Obviously too much emphasis on Idea Ownership can be stifling and generate excessive overhead. So having open conversations about (failed) attribution while assuming the best from others is also a key practice to make Idea Ownership good for everyone.

And finally, (3) is the principle of “Information Responsibility”. This is the “wise old person” energy and attitude that deeply cares about the effects that information has on the world. Simple heuristics like “information wants to be free” and the ideal of a fully “open science” are pleasant to think about, but in practice they may lead to disasters on a grand scale. From gain of function research in virology to analysis of water pipes in cities, cutting-edge research can at times encounter novel ways of causing great harm. It’s imperative that one resists the urge to share them with the world for the sake of signaling how smart one is (which is the default path for the vast majority of people and institutions!). One needs to cultivate the wisdom to consider the long-term vision and only share ideas one knows are safe for the world. Here, of course, we need a balance: too much emphasis on information security can be a tactic to thwart other’s work and may be undully onerous and stifling. Striking the right balance is the goal.

The full synergy between these three principles of Cognitive Sovereignty, I think, is what allows people to think new thoughts.

I also cover two new key ideas: (a) Canceling Paradise and (b) Multi-level Selection and how it interacts with Organizational Freedom.

~Qualia of the Day: Long Walks on the Beach~

Relevant links:


In this talk we analyze the perfume category called “Aromatic Fougère” in order to illustrate the aesthetic of “Qualiacore” in its myriad manifestations.

Definition: The Qualiacore Aesthetic is the practice and aspiration to describe experiences in new, meaningful, and non-trivial ways that are illuminating for our understanding of the nature of consciousness.

At a high-level, we must note that the classic ways of describing the phenomenology of scents tend to “miss the target”. Learning about the history, cultural imports, associations, and similarities between perfumes can be fun to do but it does not advance an accurate phenomenological impression of what it is that we are talking about. And while reading about the “perfume notes” of a composition can place it in a certain location relative to other perfumes, such note descriptions usually give you a false sense of understanding and familiarity far removed from the complex subtleties of the state-space of scent. So how can we say new, meaningful, and non-trivial things about a smell?

Note-wise, Aromatic Fougères are typically described as the combination of herbs and spices (the aromatic part) with the core Fougère accord of oak moss, lavender/bergamot, geranium, and coumarin. In this video I offer a qualiacore-style analysis of how these “notes” interact with one another in order to form emergent gestalts. Here we will focus on the phenomenal character of these effects with an emphasis on bringing analogies from dynamic system behavior and energy-management techniques within the purview of the Symmetry Theory of Valence.

In the end, we arrive at a phenomenological fingerprint that cashes out in a comparison to the psychoactive effect of “Calvin Klein” (cocaine + ketamine*), which blends both stimulation and dissociation at the same time – a rather interesting effect that can be used to help you overcome awkwardness barriers in everyday life. “Smooth out the awkwardness landscape with Drakkar Noir!”

I also discuss the art of perfumery in light of QRI’s 8 models of art:

  1. Art as family resemblance (Semantic Deflation)
  2. Art as Signaling (Cool Kid Theory)
  3. Art as Schelling-point creation (a few Hipster-theoretical considerations)
  4. Art as cultivating sacred experiences (self-transcendence and highest values)
  5. Art as exploring the state-space of consciousness (ϡ☀♘🏳️‍🌈♬♠ヅ)
  6. Art as something that messes with the energy parameter of your mind (ꙮ)
  7. Art as puzzling valence effects (emotional salience and annealing as key ingredients)
  8. Art as a system of affective communication: a protolanguage to communicate information about worthwhile qualia (which culminates in Harmonic Society).

~Qualia of the Day: Aromatic Fougères~

* Extremely ill-advised.

Relevant links:


How do you know for sure that other people (and non-human animals) are conscious?

The so-called “problem of other minds” asks us to consider whether we truly have any solid basis for believing that “we are not alone”. In this talk I provide a new, meaningful, and non-trivial solution to the problem of other minds using a combination of mindmelding and phenomenal puzzles in the right sequence such that one can gain confidence that others are indeed “solving problems with qualia computing” and in turn infer that they are independently conscious.

This explanatory style contrasts with typical “solutions” to the problem of other minds that focus on either historical, behavioral, or algorithmic similarities between oneself and others (e.g. “passing a Turing test”). Here we explore what the space of possible solutions looks like and show that qualia formalism can be a key to unlock new kinds of understanding currently out of reach within the prevailing paradigms in philosophy of mind. But even with qualia formalism, the radical skeptic solipsist will not be convinced. Direct experience and “proof” is necessary to convince a hardcore solipsist since intellectual “inferential” arguments can always be mere “figments of one’s own imagination”. We thus explore how mindmelding can greatly increase our certainty of other’s consciousness. However, skeptical worries may still linger: how do you know that the source of consciousness during mindmelding is not your brain alone? How do you know that the other brain is conscious while you are not connected to it? We thus introduce “phenomenal puzzles” into the picture: these are puzzles that require the use of “qualia comparisons” to be solved. In conjunction with a specific mindmelding information sharing protocol, such phenomenal puzzles can, we argue, actually fully address the problem of other minds in ways even strong skeptics will be satisfied with. You be the judge! 🙂

~Qualia of the Day: Wire Puzzles~

Many thanks to: Everyone who has encouraged the development of the field of qualia research over the years. David Pearce for encouraging me to actually write out my thoughts and share them online, Michael Johnson for our multi-year deep collaboration at QRI, and Murphy-Shigematsu for pushing me over the edge to start working on “what I had been putting off” back in 2014 (which was the trigger to actually write the first Qualia Computing post). In addition, I’d like to thank everyone at the Stanford Transhumanist Association for encouraging me so much over the years (Faust, Karl, Juan-Carlos, Blue, Todor, Keetan, Alan, etc.). Duncan Wilson for the beautiful times discussing these matters. Romeo Stevens for the amazing vibes and high-level thoughts. And of course everyone at QRI, especially Quintin Frerichs, Andrew Zuckerman, Anders and Maggie, and the list goes on (Mackenzie, Sean, Hunter, Elin, Wendi, etc.). Likewise, everyone at Qualia Computing Networking (the closed facebook group where we discuss a lot of these ideas), our advisors, donors, readers, and of course those watching these videos. Much love to all of you!

Relevant links:

“Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” – To understand all is to forgive all.


New scientific paradigms essentially begin life as conspiracy theories, noticing the inconsistencies the previous paradigm is suppressing. Early adopters undergo a process that Kuhn likens to religious deconversion.” – Romeo Stevens

The field of consciousness research lacks a credible synthesis of what we already know about the mind. One key thing that is holding back the science of consciousness is that it’s currently missing an adequate set of methods to “take seriously” the implications of exotic states of consciousness. Imagine a physicist saying that “there is nothing about water that we can learn from studying ice”. Silly as it may be, the truth is that this is the typical attitude about exotic consciousness in modern neuroscience. And even with the ongoing resurgence of scientific interest in psychedelics, outside of QRI and Ingram’s EPRC there is no real serious attempt at mapping the state-space of consciousness in detail. This is to a large extent because we lack the vocabulary, tools, concepts, and focus at a paradigmatic level to do so. But a new paradigm is arriving, and the following 8 new research methods and others in the works will help bring it about:

  1. Taking Exotic States of Consciousness Seriously (e.g. when a world-class phenomenologist says that 3D-printed Poincaré projections of hyperbolic honeycombs make the visual system “glitch” when on DMT the rational response is to listen and ask questions rather than ignore and ridicule).
  2. High-Quality Phenomenology: Precise descriptions of the phenomenal character of experience. Core strategy: useful taxonomies of experience, a language to describe generalized synesthesia (multi-modal coherence), and a rich vocabulary to convey the statistical regularities of textures of qualia (cf. generalizing the concept of “mongrels” in the neuroscience of visual perception to all other modalities).
  3. Phenomenology Club: Critical mass of smart and rational psychonauts.
  4. Psychedelic Turk for Psychophysics: Real-time psychedelic task completion.
  5. Generalized Wada Test: What happens when half of your brain is on LSD and the other half is on ketamine?
  6. Resonance-Based Hedonic Mapping: You are a network of coupled oscillators. Act like it!
  7. Pair Qualia Cartography: Like pair programming but for exploring the state-space of consciousness with non-invasive neurostimulation.
  8. Cognitive Sovereignty: Furthering a culture that has a “Yes &” approach to creativity, keeps track of meta-data, and takes responsibility for the information it puts out.

~Qualia of the Day: Being Taken Seriously~

Relevant links:


Many people report experiencing “higher dimensions” during deep meditation and/or psychedelic experiences. Vaporized DMT in particular reliably produces this effect in a large percentage of users. But is this an illusion? Is there anything meaningful to it? What could possibly be going on?

In this video we provide a steel man (or titanium man?) of the idea that higher dimensions are *real* in a new, meaningful, and non-trivial sense. 

We must emphasize that most people who believe that DMT experiences are “higher dimensional” interpret their experiences within a direct realist framework. Meaning that they think they are “tuning in” to other dimensions, that some secret sense organ capable of perceiving the etheric realm was “activated”, that awareness into divine realms became available to their soul, or something along those lines. In brief, such interpretations operate under the notion that we can perceive the world directly somehow. In this video, we instead work under the premise that we live in a compact world-simulation generated by our nervous system. If DMT gives rise to “higher dimensional experiences”, then such dimensions will be phenomenological in nature.

We thus try to articulate how it can be possible for an *experience* to acquire higher dimensions. An important idea here is that there is a trade-off between degrees of freedom and geometric dimensions. We present a model where degrees of freedom can become interlocked in such a way that they functionally emulate the behavior of a *virtual* higher dimension. As exemplified by the “harmonograph”, one can indeed couple and interlock multiple oscillators in such a way that one generates paths of a point in a space that is higher-dimensional than the space inhabited by any of the oscillators on their own. More so, with a long qualia decay, one can use such technique to “paint” entire images in a *virtual* high dimensional canvas!

High-quality detailed phenomenology of DMT by rational psychonauts strongly suggests that higher virtual dimensions are widely present in the state. Also, the unique valence properties of the state seem to follow what we could call a “generalized music theory” where the “vibe” of the space is the net consonance between all of the metronomes in it. We indeed see a duality between spatial symmetry and temporal synchrony with modality-specific symmetries (equivariance maps) constraining the dynamic behavior.

This, together with the Symmetry Theory of Valence (Johnson), makes the search for “special divine numbers” suddenly meaningful: numerological correspondences can illuminate the underlying makeup of “heaven worlds” and other hedonically-loaded states of mind!

I conclude with a discussion about the nature of “highly-meaningful experiences”. In light of all of these frameworks, meaning can be understood as a valence effect that arises when you have strong consonance between abstract (narrative and symbolic), emotional, and sensory fields all at once. A key turning point in your life combined with the right emotion and the right “sacred space” can thus give rise to “peak meaning”. The key to infinite bliss!

~Qualia of the Day: Numerology~

Relevant links:

Thumbnail Image Source: Petri G., Expert P., Turkheimer F., Carhart-Harris R., Nutt D., Hellyer P. J. and Vaccarino F. 2014 Homological scaffolds of brain functional networks J. R. Soc. Interface.112014087320140873 – https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsif.2014.0873


How can a bundle of atoms form a unified mind? This is far from a trivial question, and it demands an answer.

The phenomenal binding problem asks us to consider exactly that. How can spatially and temporally distributed patterns of neural activity contribute to the contents of a unified experience? How can various cognitive modules interlock to produce coherent mental activity that stands as a whole?

To address this problem we first need to break down “the hard problem of consciousness” into manageable subcomponents. In particular, we follow Pearce’s breakdown of the problem where we posit that any scientific theory of consciousness must answer: (1) why consciousness exists at all, (2) what are the set of qualia variety and values, and what is the nature of their interrelationships, (3) the binding problem, i.e. why are we not “mind dust”?, and (4) what are the causal properties of consciousness (how could natural selection recruit experience for information processing purposes, and why is it that we can talk about it). We discuss how trying to “solve consciousness” without addressing each of these subproblems is like trying to go to the Moon without taking into account air drag, or the Moon’s own gravitational field, or the fact that most of outer space is an air vacuum. Illusionism, in particular, seems to claim “the Moon is an optical illusion” (which would be true for rainbows – but not for the Moon, or consciousness).

Zooming in on (3), we suggest that any solution to the binding problem must: (a) avoid strong emergence, (b) side-step the hard problem of consciousness, (c) circumvent epiphenomenalism, and (d) be compatible with the modern scientific word picture, namely the Standard Model of physics (or whichever future version achieves full causal closure).

Given this background, we then explain that “the binding problem” as stated is in fact conceptually insoluble. Rather, we ought to reformulate it as the “boundary problem”: reality starts out unified, and the real question is how it develops objective and frame invariant boundaries. Additionally, we explain that “classic vs. quantum” is a false dichotomy, at least in so far as “classical explanations” are assumed to involve particles and forces. Field behavior is in fact ubiquitous in conscious experience, and it need not be quantum to be computationally relevant! In fact, we argue that nothing in experience makes sense except in light of holistic field behavior.

We then articulate exactly why all of the previously proposed solutions to the binding problem fail to meet the criteria we outlined. Among them, we cover:

  1. Cellular Automata
  2. Complexity
  3. Synchrony
  4. Integrated Information
  5. Causality
  6. Spatial Proximity
  7. Behavioral Coherence
  8. Mach Principle
  9. Resonance

Finally, we present what we believe is an actual plausible solution to the phenomenal binding problem that satisfies all of the necessary key constraints:

10. Topological segmentation

The case for (10) is far from trivial, which is why it warrants a detailed explanation. It results from realizing that topological segmentation allows us to simultaneously obtain holistic field behavior useful for computation and new and natural regions of fields that we could call “emergent separate beings”. This presents a completely new paradigm, which is testable using elements of the cohomology of electromagnetic fields.

We conclude by speculating about the nature of multiple personality disorder and extreme meditation and psychedelic states of consciousness in light of a topological solution to the boundary problem. Finally, we articulate the fact that, unlike many other theories, this explanation space is in principle completely testable.

~Qualia of the Day: Acqua di Gio by Giorgio Armani and Ambroxan~

Relevant links:


Why are we conscious?

The short answer is that bound moments of experience have useful causal and computational properties that can speed up information processing in a nervous system.

But what are these properties, exactly? And how do we know? In this video I unpack this answer in order to explain (or at least provide a proof of concept explanation for) how bound conscious states accomplish non-trivial speedups in computational problems (e.g. such as the problem of visual reification).

In order to tackle this question we first need to (a) enrich our very conception of computation, and (b) also enrich our conception of intelligence.

(a) Computation: We must realize that the Church-Turing Thesis conception of computation only cares about computing in terms of functions. That is, how inputs get mapped to outputs. But a much more general conception of computation also considers how the substrate allows for computational speed-ups via interacting inner states with intrinsic information. More so, if reality is made of “monads” that have non-zero intrinsic information and interact with one another, then our conception of “computation” must also consider monad networks. And in particular, the “output” of a computation may in fact be an inner bound state rather than just a sequence of discrete outputs (!).

(b) Intelligence: currently this is a folk concept poorly formalized by the instruments with which we measure it (primarily in terms of sequential logics-linguistic processing). But, alas, intelligence is a function of one’s entire world-simulation: even the shading of the texture of the table in front of you is contributing to the way you “see the world” and thus reason about it. So, an enriched conception of intelligence must also take into account: (1) binding, (2) the presence of a self, (3) perspective-taking, (4) distinguishing between the trivial and significant, and (5) state-space of consciousness navigation.

Now that we have these enriched conceptions, we are ready to make sense of the computational role of consciousness: in a way, the whole point of “intelligence” is to avoid brute force solutions by instead recruiting an adequate “self-organizing principle” that can run on the universe’s inherent massively parallel nature. Hence, the “clever” way in which our world-simulation is used: as shown by visual illusions, meditative states, psychedelic experiences, and psychophysics, perception is the result of a balance of field forces that is “just right”. Case in point: our nervous system utilizes the holistic behavior of the field of awareness in order to quickly find symmetry elements (cf. Reverse Grassfire Algorithm).

As a concrete example, I articulate the theoretical synthesis QRI has championed that combines Friston’s Free Energy Principle, Atasoy’s Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves, Carhart-Harris’ Entropic Disintegration, and QRI’s Symmetry Theory of Valence and Neural Annealing to shows that the nervous system is recruiting the self-organizing principle of annealing to solve a wide range of computational problems. Other principles to be discussed at a later time.

To summarize: the reason we are conscious is because being conscious allows you to recruit self-organizing principles that can run on a massively parallel fashion in order to find solutions to problems at [wave propagation] speed. Importantly, this predicts it’s possible to use e.g. a visual field on DMT in order to quickly find the “energy minima” of a physical state that has been properly calibrated to correspond to the dynamics of a worldsheet in that state. This is falsifiable and exciting.

I conclude with a description of the Goldilock’s Zone of Oneness and why to experience it.

~Qualia of the Day: Dior’s Eau Sauvage (EDT)~

Relevant links:

God and Open Individualism

by Roger Thisdell (context: I messaged Roger asking him about his thoughts on Open Individualism. A few days later he sent me this response. To get the most out of it, I recommend first reading our earlier text message exchange here: The Supreme State of Unconsciousness: Classical Enlightenment from the Point of View of Valence Structuralism)


Set-Up and Squaring Intuitions

There is a problem in philosophy of backwards rationalisation, where people feel intuitive pulls towards certain conclusions, and then try to justify why their intuition is correct. We can say this is putting the cart before the horse. If we are to philosophize well, we shouldn’t start with the conclusion. However, the pull to side with your intuitions is so incredibly crucial to decision-making that it basically can’t be ignored. In fact, at the heart of trying to know anything fundamentally hinges on a feeling quality of ‘this seems/feels right’ in relation to a proposition.

Now, this isn’t to say that all intuitions don’t have truth value, it’s just that we need to be subjectively sensitive to when we are totally being led by a feeling (which I think in many cases some philosophers aren’t aware). At the end of the day, we go off of whether an idea sits right with us at some particular level(s) of the mind, and all the justificatory attempts in favor of this idea serve to shift that feeling in us one way or the other.

Leading on to the discussion of identity: in a lot of thought experiments and attempts to understand where identity starts and stops we find an appeal to intuition. This is often done by conjuring up convoluted scenarios of teletransportation machines, or brain transplants, or Men-In-Black-style memory wipes and then reflecting on whether we feel that identity stayed the same or not. A good way to press people’s institutions is to get them to consider suffering, as personal identity is the great motivator of avoiding suffering (no self = no problem, as they say). Depending on where and at what time suffering is endured by which collection of atoms gets people to consider really fast and more confidently, say, where they think the bounds of identity lie.

Along with the epistemological problems of resting an argument on intuition or ‘gut feeling’ mentioned above, intuitions differ not just from person to person, but from moment to moment (in the same person). And if you haven’t become privy to how your intuitions can change, you may not question the truth value of the signal they are transmitting. So, I write this to highlight the problems of trying to solve identity issues by appealing to a felt-sense of where it lies.

Two Ways of Talking About the Self

Now I see an obvious split in how to approach this topic: 

(1) We can talk about identity as a raw experience – what in the experience space do I feel numerically identical to (one and the same as) – and in Buddhistic fashion forgo metaphysical claims here after. 

(2) Try to extrapolate beyond immediate experience and argue for a position of what the self is or how identity functions in a metaphysical sense. I call (2) the conceptual self as it is about the content within concepts you believe refers to you. 

To make this distinction clear I’ll give an example of a potential answer to (1) and then to (2). If asked: “What am I?” along the lines of (1) one may answer: “I feel like I am my thoughts.” – thoughts arise in experience and there is a fused impression of ‘me-ness’ to those thoughts. While (2) is concerned about the content of those thoughts and if asked: “What am I?” one may answer and even fervently believe: “I am a brain.” However, they don’t have any direct experience of being a brain – it is an extrapolation of ideas beyond direct phenomenological perception.

Sorry for all the set up! This is my framing and to give you the best response I needed to spell this out. Now, let me answer personally what I believe identity is in terms of (1) and then (2). However, (2) is informed by (1), and (1) is made sense of by (2); so although the distinction is very useful, like all separations, their boundaries seem to always breakdown – that there is a hint about my metaphysical beliefs.

Phenomenological Senses of Identity

For me, this has changed throughout the years as I’ve meditated more and more. I have shared these images with you before and they represent the transition of intuitions of personal identity throughout my journey.

They seem to match up quite nicely with how Frank Yang lays out his stages. Depending on which stage someone is in, we hear different metaphysical explanations of identity. (This is where (1) gets easily conflated with (2)).

How I’ve seen Frank spell out his stages (I realize neither of us came up with these on our own):

Image

When it comes to identifying with awareness (the second picture/stage) this is when you hear talk of the sort of there being one universal consciousness and that’s our true nature. When I was identifying with awareness, I could suddenly relate to what people meant by ‘we are all one universal consciousness’. However, I got the sense that people were failing to differentiate between something being numerically identical and qualitatively identical. When you become ‘aware of awareness’ there is a sense that this is a pristine dimension and is not personal. It doesn’t seem to belong to the notion of Roger (as it is perceived causally before the very idea of Roger), nor is it trademarked by Roger’s beliefs or memories. There is an insight that this perfectly equanimous layer of being is part of everyone’s experience, they just don’t see it. Yet it couldn’t be ruled out whether we are all in touch with the same one pure light of consciousness, or if each sentient organism has its own and our consciousnesses (plural) were just qualitatively the same. I think people often miss this distinction. 

Stage 2 does not obviously lead to open individualism yet. There is still a sense of the duality between the radiant awareness and everything else to be aware of.

Although, I think that anyone (even those without emptiness insights) could be talked into believing closed, open and empty individualism at a conceptual level, this doesn’t mean their phenomenological experience of identity would change, or would their instinctive, non-inquisitive gut-intuition on the subject.

I would hypothesize that those who have no insight into the 3 characteristic are intuitively most swayed by closed individualism. And those who have sufficient enough insight into impermanence (but not no-self) may intuitively side with empty individualism. And then with a deep enough insight into no-self, open individualism becomes a no-brainer.

Experiencing God (and a message to Leo)

At stage 3 is when open individualism is most likely to begin to intuitively feel right. This is also when talks of being God come out of people’s mouths and, as in terms of (1), they phenomenologically perceive the sense of ‘I’ in everything they experience, and they (2) conceptually infer there is just one thing, call it ‘God’. God is everything. I am everything. Because the understanding of moving from (1) to (2) (from experience to conjecture) is often lost on people, all kinds of wacky metaphysical beliefs come about – supposedly self-validating by higher consciousness or direct cosmic download.

While on stage 3, if you inject some metta into your experience space, you come to see what people mean when they say: “God is everywhere and all loving” or even: “God is love”. Having the feeling of being everything in your experience is like you don’t feel separate from anything, thus there is a deep intimacy with the world which construes love. You feel like you are the body, the thoughts, the emotions, the trees, the hills on the horizon, the air in between all of it, the sky and the awareness field which contains all these things. However, going from ‘the experience of feeling identical to everything you are aware of’ to ‘I am everything (even that which I’m not currently aware of) and therefore I am God/the universe’ requires an unfounded leap – which I admittedly made at some point.

I remember an incredibly stark moment I had when I was in stage 3, where being ‘God’ felt like the most real thing (I can sympathise a lot with where Leo Gura is coming from – though I think he’s lacking some phenomenological discernment). Because at stage 3 the sense of ’I’ is so prevalent, due to it being perceived everywhere in experience, I was investigating this quality a great deal. I was trying to distil the sense of ‘I’ down to its rawest form. “Yes, I feel identical to the trees and the sky and other people, but what is that common element that can be found in all these things which I call ‘I’?” After whittling away all the other unnecessary phenomenological baggage piled onto this ‘I’, I arrived at a clear perception of ‘I’ in its rawest form. The ‘I’ I call the epistemic agent, the pure sense of ‘a knower of experience’.

It became obvious that once the epistemic agent was singled out in experience that this perception of ‘I’ can only manifest in one way. What I mean by this is unlike with milk where the formula can be tainted slightly and result in versions of milk with slightly different colors, or tastes, or smells and yet they are all still milk, it is impossible for the epistemic agent to have a slightly different perceptual ‘flavor’ to it other than it does. This is because the qualia recipe only consists of one ingredient and if that’s missing or different, then it’s not the epistemic agent (the rawest sense of ‘I am’). Once I clocked this, I realized that all iterations of ‘I’ wherever and whenever, in all beings at all times, experience the sense of ‘I am’ exactly the same way. Then, and I remember this moment so clearly, it hit me: if God or the universe is self-aware – which it is just by dint of me being of the universe and self-aware – and has an experience of ‘I-ness’ then my experience of ‘I-ness’ in this relative body is the same as God’s and through a sharing of experience there is a direct link and so… ”Oh my god, I am God!”

(I am not suggesting that this line of reasoning is sound. It was simply the series of steps I went through which brought upon this profound experience). 

Again, the numerically versus qualitatively identical distinction could be parsed, however there is a way to get around this, for when you remove the sense of time and space from the equation then that difference collapses. To say that something is qualitatively identical to something else, but not numerically identical doesn’t make sense if two things can’t be differentiated by existing in separate moments of time or space. So in my “Oh my god, I am God!” epiphany, the sense of time and space had been shunned from attention and numerical identity was presumed.

I can imagine that someone has this epiphany moment as I did, but then when they return to a more ‘timey/spacey’ existence they retain credence in the belief that they are God and not just a single, distinct instance of experience of ‘I’ (which would be more of an empty individualist thought). They do this because they are basing their beliefs off of a very profound mind moment, even if the majority of their waking hours don’t suggest the same message.

If I could tell Leo Gura one thing it would be this: “Profundity does not equate to truth.” Just because something felt so real and epic, does not mean that experience is giving you the most accurate representation of greater reality. Truth be told at stage 3 I didn’t have anywhere near the attentional clarity, precision of view, and metacognitive abilities that came later; and so while I was having all these profound experiences I was not totally clued into the subtle ways I was manipulating my experience and was biased to certain perspectives, while overlooking certain things that became clearer to me later on.

Self, Not-self, and Neither Self nor Not-self

When it comes to personal identity, I want to distinguish three things the mind can do here:

  1. It can project a sense of self onto parts of experience – “I feel like I am this chair.” – said the man on salvia.
  1. It can project a sense of not-self onto parts of experience – “I don’t feel identical to that person over there.” – said sober Joe. I want to emphasize here that I don’t mean there is just a lack of ‘feeling’ associated with something, but rather there is an actual new ‘feeling’ of not identifying with something.

Stage 4 (my 4th picture) was living a life with the constant signal of ‘not me’ being coupled with everything I pointed my attention to. 

  1. It can stop projecting any sense of self and not-self – “I neither feel like I am everything, nor I’m not.” said Roger. Here, I mean the lack of projecting a sense of self and even a sense of not-self. 

To go into a little more detail on what is meant by 3: ‘Neither self, nor not self’… essentially there is just no transmission of data on this subject. No reading. When asked “What are you?” it’s like the question doesn’t even compute. Before, there were qualia indicators to be able to judge what is self and what is not-self. And now it’s like the mind pulls a blank. It is not because the answer is obvious that ‘I am everything’, or ‘I am nothing’. It’s almost a bit like asking a person who is blind from birth “Do you just see blackness?” – it can be really hard for sight-abled-people to get their head around the fact that some blind people don’t see anything at all (and what that really means). 4th path is akin to becoming blind to identity in a way. Although, I wasn’t identity blind from birth, memory of the qualia of ‘me-ness’ and ‘not me-ness’ is incredibly faded.*

*There is subtle nuance to get into with retaining semblances of individuality just to be able to function in the world.

The Ship of Theseus, Threshold Emptiness Insight and Losing the Ability to Buy into Nouns

At a certain point, once enough insight into emptiness was established, the ability to seriously believe in separate entities became near impossible. I remember with my beginner’s mind, closed individualism was the default position. And when nouns were comprehended, they were firmly believed to be distinct, real partitions in reality. “The world is made of things that are tables and things that are not.” (As if a table is an actual thing, lol). However, now I can never fully think that a table is anything more than a mind-made construct. It is perceived as so porous, airy, hollow…. empty. And this applies to all nouns: ‘atoms’, ‘being’ ‘non-being’, ‘life’, ‘death’, ‘mind’ and including the idea of ‘The Now’ (I’ll get into that later). 

One time in philosophy class we were going over the ‘paradox’ of The Ship of Theseus. People in my class had all kinds of differing intuition. Some said, ‘as soon as over 50% of the ship parts have been replaced then it’s a new/different ship’. Some said, ‘as soon as you replace one part of the ship it’s a new/different ship’. And others said, ‘as soon as one atom changes it’s a new/different ship’. They were going back and forth arguing about identity, which was the point of the class. And meanwhile the whole time I was thinking there is no ship of Theseus to begin with, there never was, it’s not a thing. And so there is no paradox. There is no conundrum to solve.

I had been reading ‘The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain’ at the time, and it occurred to me during the class that what I was witnessing were people with all very different brain chemistries and either left or right hemisphere biases, and this is what is leading them to different conclusions (me not being an exception) – the philosophical quibbling had little to do with it. (This is not to resort to any postmodernist conclusions. I do think some positions contain more truth signal than others.)

4th Path Putting the Nail in the Coffin for Empty Individualism?

There is no ‘now’, as there is not enough time for even a single isolated self to form. At 4th path insight into emptiness is so stark that you realise that to conceive of ‘The Now’ as a thing is wrong view. I used to experience things as arising and then a moment later passing; as manifesting and then slightly there after defabricating. But now I can see how phenomena are already disappearing the moment they are appearing. This leads to kinds of visions of super-positions – simultaneous 1 and 0. With such perception a ‘now’ as a moment can’t even consolidate – there truly is no ground for things to rest on.

Finally (2) My Conceptual Beliefs About Identity! (Prepare to be disappointed)

Keeping in mind what I said about ‘neither self nor not self’, when the intuition of personal identity is so lacking the question of ‘What is me and what is not me?’ just becomes ‘What does it mean for something to be its own individual entity?’ or even more simply ‘What exists?’. Does there exist one thing or more than one thing? And does it even make sense to consider there being ‘things’ (nouns) at all? 

(Take this next part as me applying a cosmic lens).

So, is there more than one thing? Engaging my scrupulous, philosophical, inquisitive mind, I can’t conceive of how there being more than one thing would be meaningful. But I don’t even really believe in things at all (if ‘thing’ is taken as a noun), so one thing isn’t quite getting at it either. There is something and it seems to be something so magical that it defies categorical comprehension. But the fact that there is change suggests this is not unitary, yet nor do I wish to say it is legion. Not noun, but verb? A process? But to where and how?

Heidegger often wrote in double negatives; I believe because when you construe something in the negative you bring to mind both the thing and its negative simultaneously. There is a greater potential for the mind to grasp a seeming paradox, but the conceptual mind can never fully do it, it can only approximate. Kierkegaard tried as he put it: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself.” But words can only serve to point to something outside of their grasp.

This is why: 

The Toa that can be named is not the eternal Toa”

However, when I stop thinking (disengage the conceptual mind) and simply be, I get an intuitive sense of a super-position. Simultaneously, neither one nor many. Neither now nor not now. Neither existing nor not existing. Neither conscious nor not conscious. And this is apprehended in a way that is not confusing or jarring, but as the most sensible stance.

Still I have a sceptic bone in my body, and I am always open to being schooled. 

Halfway In, Halfway Out The Great Door of Being

Imagine a great conundrum that people have been debating over for centuries. “If a man is stepping through his front door and he has one foot in his house and one foot out of his house and his body is exactly in the middle, is he inside or outside?” People can’t seem to agree. Some say he is clearly inside because he is already under the door frame. Others say, he is still outside because he hasn’t fully entered his house yet. People squabble about whether it matters if he is coming or going. The real question is when he is exactly 50% in and exactly 50% out what is he? Inside or outside? The reason people can’t come down on a solid answer is because whenever they find someone passing through their front door the moment they go to make a judgement they miss that 50/50 moment and either witness him too early or too late at 60/40 or 40/60 in and out. In which case, they either decide he was definitely inside or definitely outside, accordingly. You have been trying to solve this issue too and feel like you have come close. One time you saw a guy in the act at 51/49 in and out. And then another time you saw a man who was 49/51 in and out. But no one ever is precise enough to make their judgement when he is exactly 50/50 in and out. Because true 50% in and 50% out hasn’t been witnessed, so people can only speculate that ‘well if we were to catch a man who was exactly at 50/50 in and out of his front door, we would conclude that maybe he was BOTH inside and outside.’ 

One day, it just so happens you see a man coming home from work. He’s approaching the front door, keys in hand. You’ve been practicing for this moment your whole life. Finally, are you going to be able to solve this great conundrum? He unlocks the door. He opens it. He steps through. And that was it! You witnessed it. You clearly clocked the 50/50 moment. 

“I saw it! I saw it!” you yell. Bystanders hear your cries and come up to you. 

“What did you see?” they ask. 

“I saw the precise moment he was exactly 50% in and 50% out!”

“Well…” they say “what was he, inside or outside then?”

And you respond “No”.

“Huh? Oh, you mean he was both inside and outside?”

“No” you say again.

“I don’t get it.” respond the bystanders. And in fact, you don’t even really get what you mean, because it doesn’t quite make sense to you either and yet it was as clear as day.

“He wasn’t inside or outside, because he simply vanished.”

Breaking Down the Problem of Consciousness

Below you will find three different breakdowns for what a scientific theory of consciousness must be able to account for, formulated in slightly different ways.

First, David Pearce posits these four fundamental questions (the simplicity of this breakdown comes with the advantage that it might be the easiest to remember):

  1. The existence of consciousness
  2. The causal and computational properties of experience (including why we can even talk about consciousness to begin with, why consciousness evolved in animals, etc.)
  3. The nature and interrelationship between all the qualia varieties and values (why does scent exist? and in exactly what way is it related to color qualia?)
  4. The binding problem (why are we not “mind dust” if we are made of atoms)

david_pearce_criteria_for_scientific_theory_of_consciousness

David Pearce’s Four Questions Any Scientific Theory of Consciousness Must Be Able to Answer


Second, we have Giulio Tononi‘s IIT:

  1. The existence of consciousness
  2. The composition of consciousness (colors, shapes, etc.)
  3. Its information content (the fact each experience is “distinct”)
  4. The unity of consciousness (why does seeing the color blue does not only change a part of your visual field, but in some sense it changes the experience as a whole?)
  5. The borders of experience (also called ‘exclusion principle’; that each experience excludes everything not in it; presence of x implies negation of ~x)

Axioms_and_postulates_of_integrated_information_theory

Giulio Tononi’s 5 Axioms of Consciousness


Finally, Michael Johnson breaks it down in terms of what he sees as a set of what ultimately are tractable problems. As a whole the problem of consciousness may be conceptually daunting and scientifically puzzling, but this framework seeks to paint a picture of what a solution should look like. These are:

  1. Reality mapping problem (what is the formal ontology that can map reality to consciousness?)
  2. Substrate problem (in such an ontology, which objects and processes contribute to consciousness?)
  3. Boundary problem (akin to the binding problem, but reformulated to be agnostic about an atomistic ontology of systems)
  4. Scale problem (how to connect the scale of our physical ontology with the spatio-temporal scale at which experiences happen?)
  5. Topology of information problem (how do we translate the physical information inside the boundary into the adequate mathematical object used in our formalism?)
  6. State-space problem (what mathematical features does each qualia variety, value, and binding architecture correspond to?)
  7. Translation problem (starting with the mathematical object corresponding to a specific experience within the correct formalism, how do you derive the phenomenal character of the experience?)
  8. Vocabulary problem (how can we improve language to talk directly about natural kinds?)

Eight-Problems2

Michael Johnson’s 8 Problems of Consciousness

Each of these different breakdowns have advantages and disadvantages. But I think that they are all very helpful and capable of improving the way we understand consciousness. While pondering about the “hard problem of consciousness” can lead to fascinating and strange psychological effects (much akin to asking the question “why is there something rather than nothing?”), addressing the problem space at a finer level of granularity almost always delivers better results. In other words, posing the “hard problem” is less useful than decomposing the question into actually addressable problems. The overall point being that by doing so one is in some sense actually trying to understand rather than merely restating one’s own confusion.

Do you know of any other such breakdown of the problem space?


27983216_842901315900851_2411647783839521476_o

Do you think that some psychedelic drugs, such as DMT, can help mathematicians visualize the hyperbolic geometry of space? Or could mathematicians glean other interesting insights through the experience?

[From Quora]

The answer is yes (though I am the writer of the piece that is linked, so take my answer with a grain of salt).

The number of novel mathematical objects encoded in the structure of one’s experience when under the influence of DMT is huge. Most mathematicians who try it will come out feeling that they “don’t even know where to start”.

So let’s start simple.

Consider the “Chrysanthemum” level of DMT intoxication (which is the 2nd of 6 levels). Anybody who has read “The Symmetry of Things” by John H. Conway, Heidi Burgiel, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss (or who has a deep acquaintance with symmetry groups by other means) will *readily recognize* the fact that the symmetry groups that appear on such DMT visuals are *not Euclidean*.

At that level they would see rapidly-flickering superpositions of hyperbolic symmetry groups like *2 3 11, *2 3 7, 2 4 5, 2 3 9 (the picture below), etc. Together with the fact that these visuals are completely “flat-looking” rather than curved, this is the smoking gun that what you are looking at/experiencing is a hyperbolic phenomenal space.

2 3 9 Hyperbolic Symmetry Group

And this is not even discussing the 3D hyperbolic space that becomes apparent (if you know what to look for) on higher levels of DMT. For instance, on level 3 you can experience 3D Euclidean symmetry groups tesselate your visual field, on level 4 you can experience 3D hyperbolic space and “prime” objects that belong to that geometry (which are impossible to reproduce faithfully in Euclidean space). Level 5 leads to global topological bifurcations of the phenomenal space, which gives rise to even more exotic objects with hard-to-grasp mathematics. And level 6… well, there IS a level 6, and that’s as much as I’m willing to say for the time being.

In future, I believe that mathematicians who care to *look closely* will see the signature of exotic mathematical spaces on the “DMT Realms” everywhere. This will become common knowledge in both neuroscience and mathematical circles.

As David Pearce likes to say: “Some people think we are reaching the age where fundamental knowledge has been achieved… I think the enterprise of knowledge has scarcely begun.” Studying exotic states of consciousness is not even at a pre-Galilean stage, it perhaps is even at a pre-Socratic stage. Alas, if more people pay attention and document their experiences carefully, such that a critical mass of rational brilliant psychonauts is reached, there will be a “knowledge explosion”.


For more see: The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes (cf. Explain Like I’m 5 version), and How do you conceptualize the entities many individuals describe encountering when they’ve consumed DMT?

The Pseudo-Time Arrow: Explaining Phenomenal Time With Implicit Causal Structures In Networks Of Local Binding

At this point in the trip I became something that I can not put into words… I became atemporal. I existed without time… I existed through an infinite amount of time. This concept is impossible to comprehend without having actually perceived it. Even now in retrospect it is hard to comprehend it. But I do know that I lived an eternity that night… 

 

– G.T. Currie. “Impossible to Understand Reality: An Experience with LSD

Time distortion is an effect that makes the passage of time feel difficult to keep track of and wildly distorted.

 

PsychonautWiki

Introduction

What is time? When people ask this question it is often hard to tell what they are talking about. Indeed, without making explicit one’s background philosophical assumptions this question will usually suffer from a lot of ambiguity. Is one talking about the experience of time? Or is one talking about the physical nature of time? What sort of answer would satisfy the listener? Oftentimes this implicit ambiguity is a source of tremendous confusion. Time distortion experiences deepen the mystery; the existence of exotic ways of experiencing time challenges the view that we perceive the passage of physical time directly. How to disentangle this conundrum?

Modern physics has made enormous strides in pinning down what physical time is. As we will see, one can reduce time to causality networks, and causality to patterns of conditional statistical independence. Yet in the realm of experience the issue of time remains much more elusive.

In this article we provide a simple explanatory framework that accounts for both the experience of time and its relation to physical time. We then sketch out how this framework can be used to account for exotic experiences of time. We end with some thoughts pertaining the connection between the experience of time and valence (the pleasure-pain axis), which may explain why exotic experiences of the passage of time are frequently intensely emotional in nature.

To get there, let us first lay out some key definitions and background philosophical assumptions:

Key Terminology: Physical vs. Phenomenal Time

Physical Time: This is the physical property that corresponds to what a clock measures. In philosophy of time we can distinguish between eternalism and presentism. Eternalism postulate that time is a geometric feature of the universe, best exemplified with “block universe” metaphor (i.e. where time is another dimension alongside our three spatial dimensions). Presentism, instead, postulates that only the present moment is real; the past and the future are abstractions derived from the way we experience patterns in sequences of events. The present is gone, and the future has yet to come.

Now, it used to be thought that there was a universal metronome that dictated “what time it is” in the universe. With this view one could reasonably support presentism as a viable account of time. However, ever since Einstein’s theory of relativity was empirically demonstrated we now know that there is no absolute frame of reference. Based on the fundamental unity of space and time as presented by general relativity, and the absence of an absolute frame of reference, we find novel interesting arguments in favor of eternalism and against presentism (e.g. the Rietdijk–Putnam argument). On the other hand, presentists have rightly argued that the ephemeral nature of the present is self-revealing to any subject of experience. Indeed, how can we explain the feeling of the passage of time if reality is in fact a large geometric “static” structure? While this article does not need to take sides between eternalism and presentism, we will point out that the way we explain the experience of time will in turn diminish the power of presentist arguments based on the temporal character of our experience.

Phenomenal Time: This is the way in which the passing of time feels like. Even drug naïve individuals can relate to the fact that the passage of time feels different depending on one’s state of mind. The felt sense of time depends on one’s level of arousal (deeply asleep, dreaming, tired, relaxed, alert, wide awake, etc.) and hedonic tone (depressed, anxious, joyful, relaxed, etc.). Indeed, time hangs heavy when one is in pain, and seems to run through one’s fingers when one is having a great time. More generally, when taking into account altered states of consciousness (e.g. meditation, yoga, psychedelics) we see that there is a wider range of experiential phenomena than is usually assumed. Indeed, one can see that there are strange generalizations to phenomenal time. Examples of exotic phenomenal temporalities include: tachypsychia (aka. time dilation), time reversal, short-term memory tracers, looping, “moments of eternity“, temporal branching, temporal synchronicities, timelessness, and so on. We suggest that any full account of consciousness ought to be able to explain all of these variants of phenomenal time (among other key features of consciousness).

Key Background Assumptions

We shall work under three key assumptions. First, we have indirect realism about perception. Second, we have mereological nihilism in the context of consciousness, meaning that one’s stream of consciousness is composed of discrete “moments of experience”. And third, Qualia Formalism, a view that states that each moment of experience has a mathematical structure whose features are isomorphic to the features of the experience. Let us unpack these assumptions:

1. Indirect Realism About Perception

This view also goes by the name of representationalism or simulationism (not to be confused with the simulation hypothesis). In this account, perception as a concept is shown to be muddled and confused. We do not really perceive the world per se. Rather, our brains instantiate a world-simulation that tracks fitness-relevant features of our environment. Our sensory apparatus merely selects which specific world-simulation our brain instantiates. In turn, our world-simulations causally covaries with the input our senses receive and the motor responses it elicits. Furthermore, evolutionary selection pressures, in some cases, work against accurate representations of one’s environment (so long as these are not fitness-enhancing). Hence, we could say that our perception of the world is an adaptive illusion more than an accurate depiction of our surroundings.

A great expositor of this view is Steve Lehar. We recommend his book about how psychonautical experience make clear the fact that we inhabit (and in some sense are) a world-simulation created by our brain. Below you can find some pictures from his “Cartoon Epistemology“, which narrates a dialogue between a direct and an indirect realist about perception:

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Steve Lehar also points out that the very geometry of our world-simulation is that of a diorama. We evolved to believe that we can experience the world directly, and the geometry of our world-simulation is very well crafted to keep us under the influence of a sort of spell to makes us believe we are the little person watching the diorama. This world-simulation has a geometry that is capable of representing both nearby regions and far-away objects (and even points-at-infinity), and it represents the subject of experience with a self-model at its projective center.

We think that an account of how we experience time is possible under the assumption that experiential time is a structural feature of this world-simulation. In turn, we would argue that implicit direct realism about perception irrevocably confuses physical time and phenomenal time. For if one assumes that one somehow directly perceives the physical world, doesn’t that mean that one also perceives time? But in this case, what to make of exotic time experiences? With indirect realism we realize that we inhabit an inner world-simulation that causally co-varies with features of the environment and hence resolve to find the experience of time within the confines of one’s own skull.

2. Discrete Moments of Experience

A second key assumptions is that experiences are ontologically unitary rather than merely functionally unitary. The philosophy of mind involved in this key assumption is unfortunately rather complex and easy to misunderstand, but we can at least say the following. Intuitively, as long as one is awake an alert, it feels like one’s so-called “stream of consciousness” is an uninterrupted and continuous experience. Indeed, at the limit, some philosophers have even argued that one is a different person each day; subjects of experience are, as it were, delimited by periods of unconsciousness. We instead postulate that the continuity of experience from one moment to the next is an illusion caused be the way experience is constructed. In reality, our brains generate countless “moments of experience” every second, each with its own internal representation of the passage of time and the illusion of a continuous diachronic self.

Contrast this discretized view of experience with deflationary accounts of consciousness (which insist that there is no objective boundary that delimits a given moment of experience) and functionlist accounts of consciousness (which would postulate that experience is smeared across time over the span of hundreds of milliseconds).

The precise physical underpinnings of a moment of experience have yet to be discovered, but if monistic physicalism is to survive, it is likely that the (physical) temporal extension that a single moment of experience spans is incredibly thin (possibly no more than 10^-13 seconds). In this article we make no assumptions about the actual physical temporal extension of a moment of experience. All we need to say is that it is “short” (most likely under a millisecond).

It is worth noting that the existence of discrete moments of experience supports an Empty Individualist account of personal identity. That is, a person’s brain works as an experience machine that generates many conscious events every second, each with its own distinct coordinates in physical space-time and unique identity. We would also argue that this ontology may be compatible with Open Individualism, but the argument for this shall be left to a future article.

3. Qualia Formalism

This third key assumption states that the quality of all experiences can be modeled mathematically. More precisely, for any given moment of experience, there exists a mathematical object whose mathematical features are isomorphic the the features of the experience. At the Qualia Research Institute we take this view and run with it to see where it takes us. Which mathematical object can fully account for the myriad structural relationships between experiences is currently unknown. Yet, we think that we do not need to find the One True Mathematical Object in order to make progress in formalizing the structure of subjective experience. In this article we will simply invoke the mathematical object of directed graphs in order to encode the structure of local binding of a given experience. But first, what is “local binding”? I will borrow David Pearce’s explanation of the terms involved:

The “binding problem”, also called the “combination problem”, refers to the mystery of how the micro-experiences mediated by supposedly discrete and distributed neuronal edge-detectors, motion-detectors, shape-detectors, colour-detectors, etc., can be “bound” into unitary experiential objects (“local” binding) apprehended by a unitary experiential self (“global” binding). Neuroelectrode studies using awake, verbally competent human subjects confirm that neuronal micro-experiences exist. Classical neuroscience cannot explain how they could ever be phenomenally bound. As normally posed, the binding problem assumes rather than derives the emergence of classicality.

 

Non-Materialist Physicalism by David Pearce

In other words, “local binding” refers to the way in which the features of our experience seem to be connected and interwoven into complex phenomenal objects. We do not see a chair as merely a disparate set of colors, edges, textures, etc. Rather, we see it as an integrated whole with fine compositional structure. Its colors are “bound” to its edges which are “bound” to its immediate surrounding space and so forth.

A simple toy model for the structure of an experience can be made by saying that there are “simple qualia” such as color and edges, and “complex qualia” formed by the binding of simple qualia. In turn, we can represent an experience as a graph where each node is a simple quale and each edge is a local binding connection. The resulting globally connected graph corresponds to the “globally bound” experience. Each “moment of experience” is, thus, coarsely at any rate, a network.

While this toy model is almost certainly incomplete (indeed some features of experience may require much more sophisticated mathematical objects to be represented properly), it is fair to say that the rough outline of our experience can be represented with a network-like skeleton encoding the local binding connections. More so, as we will see, this model will suffice to account for many of the surprising features of phenomenal time (and its exotic variants).

Timeless Causality

While both physical and phenomenal time pose profound philosophical conundrums, it is important to denote that science has made a lot of progress providing formal accounts of physical time. Confusingly, even Einstein’s theory of general relativity is time-symmetric, meaning that the universe would behave the same whether time was moving forwards or backwards. Hence relativity does not provide, on its own, a direction to time. What does provide a direction to time are properties like the entropy gradient (i.e. the direction along which disorder is globally increasing) and, the focus of this article, causality as encoded in the network of statistical conditional independence. This is a mouthful, let us tackle it in more detail.

In Timeless Causality Yudkowsky argues one can tell the direction of causality, (and hence of the arrow of time) by examining how conditioning on events inform us about other events. We recommend reading the linked article for details (and for a formal account read SEP’s entry on the matter).

In the image above we have a schematic representation of two measurables (1 & 2) at several times (L, M, and R). The core idea is that we can determine the flow of causality by examining the patterns of statistical conditional independence, with questions like “if I’ve observed L1 and L2, do I gain information about M1 by learning about M2?” an so on*.

Along the same lines Wolfram has done research on how time may emerge in rule-based network modifications automata:

image-xlarge

Intriguingly, these models of time and causality are tenseless and hence eternalist. The whole universe works as a unified system in which time appears as an axis rather than a metaphysical universal metronome. But if eternalism is true, how come we can feel the passage of time? If moments of experience exist, how come we seem to experience movement and action? Shouldn’t we experience just a single static “image”, like seeing a single movie frame without being aware of the previous ones? We are now finally ready tackle these questions and explain how time may be encoded in the structure of one’s experience.

Pseudo-Time Arrow

pseudo_time_arrow_illustrated_1

Physical Time vs. Phenomenal Time (video source)

In the image above we contrast physical and phenomenal time explicitly. The top layer shows the physical state of a scene in which a ball is moving along a free-falling parabolic trajectory. In turn, a number of these states are aggregated by a process of layering (second row) into a unified “moment of experience”. As seen on the third row, each moment of experience represents the “present scene” as the composition of three slices of sensory input with a time-dependent dimming factor. Namely, the scene experienced is approximated with a weighted sum of three scenes with the most recent one being weighted the highest and the oldest the least.

In other words, at the coarsest level of organization time is encoded by layering the current input scene with faint after-images of very recent input scenes. In healthy people this process is rather subtle yet always present. Indeed, after-images are an omnipresent feature of sensory modalities (beyond sight).

A simple model to describe how after-images are layered on top of each other to generate a scene with temporal depth involves what we call “time-dependent qualia decay functions”. This function determines how quickly sensory (and internal) impressions fade over time. With e.g. psychedelics making this decay function significantly fatter (long-tailed) and stimulants making it slightly shorter (i.e. higher signal-to-noise ratio at the cost of reduced complex image formation).

With this layering process going on, and the Qualia Formalist model of experience as a network of local binding, we can further find a causal structure in experience akin to that in physical time (as explained in Timeless Causality):

Again, each node of the network represents a simple quale and each edge represents a local binding relationship between the nodes it connects. Then, we can describe the time-dependent qualia decay function as the probability that a node or an edge will vanish at each (physical) time step.

sober_pseudo_time_arrow_1

The rightmost nodes and edges are the most recent qualia triggered by sensory input. Notice how the nodes and edges vanish probabilistically with each time step, making the old layers sparsely populated.

With a sufficiently large network one would be able to decode the direction of causality (and hence of time) using the same principles of statistical conditional independence used to account for physical time. What we are proposing is that this underlies what time feels like.

Now that we understand what the pseudo-time arrow is, what can we do with it?

Explanatory Power: How the Pseudo-Time Arrow Explains Exotic Phenomenal Time

Let us use this explanatory framework on exotic experiences of time. That is, let us see how the network of local binding and its associated pseudo-time arrows can explain unusual experiences of time perception.

To start we should address the fact that tachypsychia (i.e. time dilation) could either mean (a) that “one experiences time passing at the same rate but that this rate moves at a different speed relative to the way clocks tick compared to typical perception” or, more intriguingly, (b) that “time itself feels slower, stretched, elongated, etc.”.

The former (a) is very easy to explain, while the latter requires more work. Namely, time dilation of the former variety can be explained by an accelerated or slowed down sensory sampling rate in such a way that the (physical) temporal interval between each layer is either longer or shorter than usual. In this case the structure of the network does not change; what is different is how it maps to physical time. If one were on a sensory deprivation chamber and this type of time dilation was going on one would not be able to say so since the quality of phenomenal time (as encoded in the network of local binding) remains the same as before. Perhaps compare how it feels like to see a movie in slow-motion relative to seeing it at its original speed while being perfectly sober. Since one is sober either way, what changes is how quickly the world seems to move, not how one feels inside.

The latter (b) is a lot more interesting. In particular, phenomenal time is often incredibly distorted when taking psychedelics in a way that is noticeable even in sensory deprivation chambers. In other words, it is the internal experience of the passage of time that changes rather than the layering rate relative to the external world. So how can we explain that kind of phenomenal time dilation?

Psychedelics

The most straightforward effect of psychedelics one can point out with regards to the structure of one’s experience is the fact that qualia seems to last for much longer than usual. This manifests as “tracers” in all sensory modalities. Using the vocabulary introduced above, we would say that psychedelics change the time-dependent qualia decay function by making it significantly “fatter”. While in sober conditions the positive after-image of a lamp will last between 0.2 and 1 second, on psychedelics it will last anywhere between 2 and 15 seconds. This results in a much more pronounced and perceptible change in the layering process of experience. Using Lehar’s diorama model of phenomenal space, we could represent various degrees of psychedelic intoxication with the following progression:

The first image is what one experiences while sober. The second is what one experiences if one takes, e.g. 10 micrograms of LSD (i.e. microdosing), where there is a very faint additional layer but is at times indistinguishable from sober states. The third, fourth, and fifth image represent what tracers may feel like on ~50, ~150, and ~300 micrograms of LSD, respectively. The last image is perhaps most reminiscent of DMT experiences, which provide a uniquely powerful and intense high-frequency layering at the onset of the trip.

In the graphical model of time we could say that the structure of the network changes by (1) a lower probability for each node to vanish in each (physical) time step, and (2) an even lower probability for each edge to vanish after each (physical) time step. The tracers experienced on psychedelics are more than just a layering process; the density of connections also increases. That is to say, while simple qualia lasts for longer, the connections between them are even longer-lasting. The inter-connectivity of experience is enhanced.

low_dose_lsd_pseudo_time_arrow

A low dose of a psychedelic will lead to a slow decay of simple qualia (colors, edges, etc.) and an even slower decay of connections (local binding), resulting in an elongated and densified pseudo-time arrow.

This explains why time seems to move much more slowly on psychedelics. Namely, each moment of experience has significantly more temporal depth than a corresponding sober state. To illustrate this point, here is a first-person account of this effect:

A high dose of LSD seems to distort time for me the worst… maybe in part because it simply lasts so long. At the end of an LSD trip when i’m thinking back on everything that happened my memories of the trip feel ancient.

When you’re experiencing the trip it’s possible to feel time slowing down, but more commonly for me I get this feeling when I think back on things i’ve done that day. Like “woah, remember when I was doing this. That feels like it was an eternity ago” when in reality it’s been an hour.

 

Shroomery user Subconscious in the tread “How long can a trip feel like?

On low doses of psychedelics, phenomenal time may seem to acquire a sort of high definition unusual for sober states. The incredible (and accurate) visual acuity of threshold DMT experiences is a testament to this effect, and it exemplifies what a densified pseudo-time arrow feels like:

SONY DSC

Just as small doses of DMT enhance the definition of spatial structures, so is the pseudo-time arrow made more regular and detailed, leading to a strange but compelling feeling of “HD vision”.

But this is not all. Psychedelics, in higher doses, can lead to much more savage and surrealistic changes to the pseudo-time arrow. Let us tackle a few of the more exotic variants with this explanatory framework:

Time Loops

This effect feels like being stuck in a perfectly-repeating sequence of events outside of the universe in some kind of Platonic closed timelike curve. People often accidentally induce this effect by conducting repetitive tasks or listening to repetitive sounds (which ultimately entrain this pattern). For most people this is a very unsettling experience since it produces a pronounce feeling of helplessness due to making you feel powerless about ever escaping the loop.

In terms of the causal network, this experience could be accounted for with a loop in the pseudo-time arrow of experience:

high_dose_lsd_infinite

High Dose LSD can lead to annealing and perfect “standing temporal waves” often described as “time looping” or “infinite time”

Moments of Eternity

Subjectively, so-called “Moments of Eternity” are extremely bizarre experiences that have the quality of being self-sustaining and unconditioned. It is often described in mystical terms, such as “it feels like one is connected to the eternal light of consciousness with no past and no future direction”. Whereas time loops lack some of the common features of phenomenal time such as a vanishing past, moments of eternity are even more alien as they also lack a general direction for the pseudo-time arrow.

high_dose_lsd_moment_of_eternity

High Dose LSD may also generate a pseudo-time arrow with a central source and sink to that connects all nodes.

Both time loops and moments of eternity arise from the confluence of a slower time-dependent qualia decay function and structural annealing (which is typical of feedback). As covered in previous posts, as depicted in numerous psychedelic replications, and as documented in PsychonautWiki, one of the core effects of psychedelics is to lower the symmetry detection threshold. Visually, this leads to the perception of wallpaper symmetry groups covering textures (e.g. grass, walls, etc.). But this effect is much more general than mere visual repetition; it generalizes to the pseudo-time arrow! The texture repetition via mirroring, gyrations, glides, etc. works indiscriminately across (phenomenal) time and space. As an example of this, consider the psychedelic replication gifs below and how the last one nearly achieves a standing-wave structure. On a sufficient dose, this can anneal into a space-time crystal, which may have “time looping” and/or “moment of eternity” features.

oscillation_1_5_5_75_5_1_10_0.05_signal_

Sober Input

Temporal Branching

As discussed in a previous post, a number of people report temporal branching on high doses of psychedelics. The reported experience can be described as simultaneously perceiving multiple possible outcomes of a given event, and its branching causal implications. If you flip a coin, you see it both coming up heads and tails in different timelines, and both of these timelines become superimposed in your perceptual field. This experience is particularly unsettling if one interprets it through the lens of direct realism about perception. Here one imagines that the timelines are real, and that one is truly caught between branches of the multiverse. Which one is really yours? Which one will you collapse into? Eventually one finds oneself in one or another timeline with the alternatives having been pruned. An indirect realist about perception has an easier time dealing with this experience as she can interpret it as the explicit rendering of one’s predictions about the future in such a way that they interfere with one’s incoming sensory stimuli. But just in case, in the linked post we developed an empirically testable predictions from the wild possibility (i.e. where you literally experience information from adjacent branches of the multiverse) and tested it using quantum random number generators (and, thankfully for our collective sanity, obtained null results).

high_dose_lsd_branching

High Dose LSD Pseudo-Time Arrow Branching, as described in trip reports where people seem to experience “multiple branches of the multiverse at once.”

Timelessness

Finally, in some situations people report the complete loss of a perceived time arrow but not due to time loops, moments of eternity, or branching, but rather, due to scrambling. This is less common on psychedelics than the previous kinds of exotic phenomenal time, but it still happens, and is often very disorienting and unpleasant (an “LSD experience failure mode” so to speak). It is likely that this also happens on anti-psychotics and quite possibly with some anti-depressants, which seem to destroy unpleasant states by scrambling the network of local binding (rather than annealing it, as with most euphoric drugs).

pseudo_time_arrow_loss

Loss of the Pseudo-Time Arrow (bad trips? highly scrambled states caused by anti-psychotics?)

In summary, this framework can tackle some of the weirdest and most exotic experiences of time. It renders subjective time legible to formal systems. And although it relies on an unrealistically simple formalism for the mathematical structure of consciousness, the traction we are getting is strong enough to make this approach a promising starting point for future developments in philosophy of time perception.

We will now conclude with a few final thoughts…

Hyperbolic Geometry

Intriguingly, with compounds such as DMT, the layering process is so fast that on doses above the threshold level one very quickly loses track of the individual layers. In turn, one’s mind attempts to bind together the incoming layers, which leads to attempts of stitching together multiple layers in a small (phenomenal) space. This confusion between layers compounded with a high density of edges is the way we explained the unusual geometric features of DMT hallucinations, such as the spatial hyperbolic symmetry groups expressed in its characteristic visual texture repetition (cf. eli5). One’s mind tries to deal with multiple copies of e.g. the wall in front, and the simplest way to do so is to stitch them together in a woven Chrysanthemum pattern with hyperbolic wrinkles.

Implementation Level of Abstraction

It is worth noting that this account of phenomenal time lives at the algorithmic layer of Marr’s levels of abstraction, and hence is an algorithmic reduction (cf. Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic States). A full account would also have to deal with how these algorithmic properties are implemented physically. The point being that a phenomenal binding plus causal network account of phenomenal time work as an explanation space whether the network itself is implemented with connectome-specific harmonic wavesserotonergic control-interruption, or something more exotic.

Time and Valence

Of special interest to us is the fact that both moments of eternity and time loops tend to be experienced with very intense emotions. One could imagine that finding oneself in such an altered state is itself bewildering and therefore stunning. But there are many profoundly altered states of consciousness that lack a corresponding emotional depth. Rather, we think that this falls out of the very nature of valence and the way it is related to the structure of one’s experience.

In particular, the symmetry theory of valence (STV) we are developing at the Qualia Research Institute posits that the pleasure-pain axis is a function of the symmetry (and anti-symmetry) of the mathematical object whose features are isomorphic to an experience’s phenomenology. In the case of the simplified toy model of consciousness based on the network of local binding connections, this symmetry may manifest in the form of regularity within and across layers. Both in time loops and moments of eternity we see a much more pronounced level of symmetry of this sort than in the sober pseudo-time arrow structure. Likewise, symmetry along the pseudo-time arrow may explain the high levels of positive valence associated with music, yoga, orgasm, and concentration meditation. Each of these activities would seem to lead to repeating standing waves along the pseudo-time arrow, and hence, highly valence states. Future work shall aim to test this correspondence empirically.

QRIalpha (1)

The Qualia Research Institute Logo (timeless, as you can see)


* As Yudkowsky puts it:

causeright_2

Suppose that we do know L1 and L2, but we do not know R1 and R2. Will learning M1 tell us anything about M2? […]

The answer, on the assumption that causality flows to the right, and on the other assumptions previously given, is no. “On each round, the past values of 1 and 2 probabilistically generate the future value of 1, and then separately probabilistically generate the future value of 2.” So once we have L1 and L2, they generate M1 independently of how they generate M2.

But if we did know R1 or R2, then, on the assumptions, learning M1 would give us information about M2. […]

Similarly, if we didn’t know L1 or L2, then M1 should give us information about M2, because from the effect M1 we can infer the state of its causes L1 and L2, and thence the effect of L1/L2 on M2.



Thanks to: Mike Johnson, David Pearce, Romeo Stevens, Justin Shovelain, Andrés Silva Ruiz, Liam Brereton, and Enrique Bojorquez for their thoughts about phenomenal time and its possible mathematical underpinnings. And to Alfredo Valverde for pointing me to the Erlangen program, wh