TL;DR: I strongly recommend you thoroughly research every chemical you put into your body.
Introduction
I’ve come across a lot of people who are unaware of the fact that the drugs they’re being prescribed are psychoactive, dependence-causing, or even cognitively dulling. This includes prescription medications, over-the-counter drugs, and supplements.
A friend was prescribed a beta blocker for blood pressure (extended release propranolol[1], iirc). He had no idea drugs in this class were, for better or worse, effectively “downers”. And even though he swears he didn’t feel anything from it, knowing him well it was obvious to me and others that it clearly had an effect on him. He would slouch more, had a noticeable change in his posture, was less pressurized in his speech, and was a bit less cognitively sharp. He isn’t someone I would describe as having particularly good introspection skills or somatic awareness (neither a meditator, nor a psychonaut… just a rationalist). But I was still surprised to find out he hadn’t researched his prescription, nor ever noticed its broad effects on him.
Gabapentin and Propranolol
The same pattern appears everywhere. Someone I know was prescribed gabapentin for nerve pain. Over the course of 6 months, she started to look visibly restless – a common effect from the “interdose withdrawal” of such drugs. She would take it at night; by afternoon you could tell she wouldn’t sit still, and had a lower threshold for anger and irritation. Her nerve pain hasn’t improved, making this prescription a possible net-negative. Hopefully discontinuation will be gradual and mild in rebound anxiety, which isn’t guaranteed (cf. gabapentin withdrawal support groups).
The Anticholinergic Trap
Here’s one that catches people completely off-guard: anticholinergics. These are sold over-the-counter for wildly different purposes – sleep aids, anti-nausea medication, allergy relief, motion sickness. The active ingredient is often the same compound: diphenhydramine (Benadryl’s active ingredient) or similar anticholinergics.
“I take this for allergies, this as a sleep-aid, this one for motion sickness, this one for my cold… and now I’m seeing the fucking Hat Man“
I’ve heard from multiple people working in ERs about elderly patients coming in delirious, only to discover they’d been taking diphenhydramine from three different sources simultaneously – a sleep aid, an anti-nausea medication, and an allergy medication – with no idea they were stacking the same drug. Anticholinergics are particularly problematic long-term: they’re associated with cognitive decline and increased dementia risk in older adults. So, if you don’t want to see the fuckingBenadryl Hat Man, be sure to research your meds.
The Benadryl Hat Man is waiting for you if you don’t thoroughly research your meds
Other Common Oversights
Melatonin is sold as a gentle sleep aid, and most people take it without a second thought. The long-term effects? Potential suppression of endogenous production, hormonal effects (it is a hormone, after all), possible effects on reproductive function, and for some people, increased anxiety or depression with chronic use. (Breaking news: “melatonin might increase risk of heart failure”).
DXM (dextromethorphan) is in a lot of OTC cough syrups and pills. It’s a dissociative – the same class as ketamine and PCP – and at even slightly elevated doses produces mild dissociative effects. People sometimes notice they feel “weird” or “spacey” when taking cough medicine but don’t connect it to the mechanism of action. (Note: at high doses, and in combination with THC, it may even catalyze free-wheeling hallucinations). (Note 2: research suggests low-dose DXM is a potential neuroprotective agent). (Note 3: DXM is also a mild anti-tolerance drug).
L-tyrosine, sold as a nootropic supplement, is a dopamine precursor. It can absolutely affect mood, motivation, and anxiety – and can interact poorly with various medications or conditions. I personally use it on occasion (perhaps twice a month, 500mg in the morning) as a gentle pick-me up. But people take it daily, as prescribed, without ever realizing it might be the thing keeping them up at night (paradoxically, it has a non-zero benefit for people with restless legs syndrome).
Even acetaminophen (aka. Paracetamol, Tylenol) – perhaps the most “innocuous-seeming drug” in your medicine cabinet – has psychological effects beyond pain relief. Recent research suggests it blunts emotional processing and reduces both positive and negative affect. People taking it regularly for chronic pain may find themselves feeling emotionally flatter, less empathetic, or having a harder time connecting with others. It’s subtle enough that you’d never attribute it to your pain reliever, but meaningful enough that it affects your quality of life and relationships.
Trazodone, clonidine, and in exceptionally reckless prescribing circumstances, even alprazolam, are often handed out with minimal discussion of long-term dependence, withdrawal profiles, or cognitive effects. The conversation is often “take this for sleep” or “take this for anxiety” without the adult-to-adult discussion of what you’re actually signing up for.
Why this happens
Doctors often don’t mention these effects because (a) they have 15 minutes with you, (b) they’re focused on the primary indication and assume secondary effects are less relevant, (c) they lack the phenomenological vocabulary to describe subjective experiences, or (d) they genuinely don’t know – medical education emphasizes mechanism and primary effects, not the phenomenal character of a given drug.
This is a systemic issue rather than a personal failing. But it does means theburden falls on you.
What to actually do
Never assume your nerve pain drug or your blood pressure medication is “just for the body”. More often than not, it has real (if often mild) emotional and cognitive effects. It’s all one system, after all. Mind and body.
When researching a drug:
Check PubMed for the academic literature on side effects and long-term outcomes
Check patient forums (Reddit, patient advocacy sites) for the (even if mild) subjective effects they induce – what it actually feels like to be on this drug and to get off of it
Look up the mechanism of action and think through what that implies for other systems
Ask ChatGPT or Claude: “What are the cognitive, emotional, and subjective effects of [drug name]? Include both common side effects and rarer phenomenological reports. What should I know about long-term use and dependence?”
Ask your doctor directly about cognitive, emotional, and dependence effects (but don’t assume they actually know much about it)
Consider whether the tradeoff is worth it for you specifically, given your particular circumstances
Sometimes the tradeoff is genuinely worth. Beta blockers might save your life. Gabapentin might be the only thing standing between someone and unbearable pain. I would never say that the goal is to reject pharmacology, but I do want to strongly nudge people dear to me to think of what they put in their body through the lens of informed consent.
You better know the real long-term valence effects of what you’re taking, lest you find yourself plagued by anger, anxiety, depression, or mental viscosity whose source you can’t identify.
Metta!
1 For a less centrally-active beta blocker, see: atenolol. H/T Maija Haavisto for the tip.
Why cluster headache mitigation should become your #1 effective giving priority this Season: impactful, novel, very alive, and with plausible fast results!
By Andrés Gómez Emilsson, ClusterFree Co-Founder & Member of Advisory Board
TL;DR: To motivate action and feel genuine internal alignment around a decision, sometimes we need to see it from many different angles. Even when a single reason should be enough, we need to motivate our entire internal coalition of subagents! Hence, all of these reasons to support ClusterFree in its mission:
Summary of the 12+ Reasons to Support This Cause
Watch real people rapidly improve – Video testimonials of torture stopping in minutes
Logarithmic scale of impact – Helping someone with this condition is potentially one of the highest-leverage interventions anyone can do as a gift to someone’s life
Insurance against illegible suffering – Building a world that takes invisible pain seriously, including your own in the future! (crossing fingers you never experience such things!)
Proof-of-concept for valence-first cost-effectiveness – This illustrates the corner cases where QALYs/DALYs fail catastrophically
Intellectual coalition – Scott Alexander, Peter Singer, Anders Sandberg, Robin Carhart-Harris, etc. have seen the evidence and are convinced this is real
Schelling point for suffering reduction – Network effects for future high-impact work, attracting genuine talent to focus on deep suffering reduction is its own value proposition
It’s a strike against medical paternalism – Informed consent for known therapies, even when not officially approved, when it comes to extreme suffering, should always be an option on the table
Actually tractable – Success looks like a 3-5 year timeline with a clear theory of change
Speed cashes out in suffering prevented – 70,000 people in extreme agony right now, every day of delay matters greatly
Works as an accelerant for an existing movement – Adding coordination to grassroots momentum that’s already underway (giving the psychedelic renaissance wings!)
Psychospiritual merit (if you believe in “karma”) – Buddhist texts specifically highlight headache relief, “immeasurable merit” in store for you and your loved ones if you decide to help with clean intentions
Bodhisattva vision – Practice looking into darkness without flinching
Bonus – I’ll stop talking about Cluster Headaches in Qualia Computing!: Fund it so I can get back to core QRI research
In principle, deciding where to donate should be straightforward: calculate expected value, fund the highest-impact opportunity, done. In practice, we’re coalitions of subagents with different reward architectures, time horizons, epistemics, and thresholds for action.
At a neurobiological level, motivation doesn’t work the way we pretend. It’s not about “willpower” or “being convinced by good arguments.” Different brain regions make “bids” to the basal ganglia, using dopamine as the currency. Whichever region makes the highest bid gets to determine the next action. Scott Alexander explains this in Toward A Bayesian Theory Of Willpower (2021). What we call “motivation”, within this framework, is just whichever subsystem’s bid is currently winning. Whether the details are right or not, I think this tracks how I see people behave.
If you want to trigger high-effort action, giving just one reason may not be enough. That only raises one bid. Layer multiple kinds of reasons (emotional, moral, social, self-interest, narrative, identity-based), and you multiply the bidders in your internal parliament. Scott uses stimulants as an example: they “increase dopamine in the frontal cortex… This makes… conscious processes telling you to (e.g.) do your homework… artificially… more convincing… so you do your homework.”
Look, I’m being straightforwardly manipulative here. Giving you twelve reasons instead of one is designed to activate more of your subagents. But it’s prosocially manipulative – to help you integrate a truth you might already intellectually accept but haven’t acted upon yet. The bullet point approach can be misused when it obfuscates (think laundry list of complaints when there’s really just one big issue), so let me be meta-transparent: I genuinely believe ClusterFree is extremely high-impact, and I’m deliberately structuring this to get past your action threshold. If any one or even several of these reasons feel less convincing to you, ignore them. The robust core case stands on its own.
There’s also the threshold problem. In Guyenet On Motivation (2018), Scott discusses how higher dopamine makes the brain more likely to initiate any behavior. When dopamine is low, even strong reasons may not overcome inertia. Increased dopamine “makes the basal ganglia more sensitive to incoming bids, lowering the threshold for activating movements.” Sometimes what’s needed isn’t better arguments but enough energetic activation to allow any reason at all to push action over the threshold. Which is why you should read this while high on LSD and/or Adderall fully rested and energized.
Naturally, this connects to annealing. At QRI, we think of belief updating as requiring an energetic process. It’s not enough to know something matters; you need metabolic resources to actually integrate that knowledge and reconfigure your behavior accordingly. The REBUS (RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics) framework applies here: people intellectually understand that cluster headaches are astronomically bad, that preventing them is extraordinarily high-leverage, and that this is one of the most intense forms of suffering you can and should urgently address. Yet this knowledge may remain compartmentalized and inert, unable to meaningfully shape action, resembling other “ongoing moral catastrophes” by which future generations may judge our society.
What breaks through? Multiple simultaneous channels of evidence that together cross energy thresholds. Emotional resonance. Social proof. Narrative coherence. Personal connection. These aren’t redundant: they join together as a gestalt that pushes forward the energetic budget needed for actual system-wide updating.
So here are the twelve reasons to support ClusterFree. Not because you need all twelve to “get it” intellectually, but because different reasons will activate different coalitions in your brain.
And if you’re not in a position to donate but still want to help – please keep reading. There are many high-impact ways to contribute at the end!
1. You Can Actually See People Rapidly Improving
Most charity is abstract. You send money into a statistical void and trust the meta-analyses.
With ClusterFree, you can watch video testimonials of actual people describing how psilocybin or DMT stopped “the worst pain imaginable” in minutes. The person who was screaming, punching walls, and contemplating suicide is suddenly calm, coherent, and alive again.
Watching someone’s face change like that hits you differently than reading a cost-effectiveness analysis. Your brain gets direct evidence of the state change. You see the suffering stop.
And strategically, patient testimonials are how this actually works. Raw video testimonials of “this stopped my torture” create demand that no institutional gatekeeping can fully suppress. People are already using this in advocacy. We’re just collecting the stories systematically and making them impossible to ignore. One major medical center sees enough of these, runs a supervised protocol, publishes clean results, and every other institution’s liability calculation flips.
2. On the Logarithmic Scale of Helping Another Human, This Is Unfathomably High
Preventing cluster headaches for life is plausibly one of the single largest “good deeds” a human can do for another human being. Yes, this is grandiose. But if something big IS true and you know it, pretending it’s not to avoid looking grandiose is fake humility that damages the cause.
Cluster headaches are called “suicide headaches” because the pain is so extreme that people actively contemplate ending their lives during attacks. Patients report “drilling through my eye socket,” “being stabbed in the brain,” “pain so bad I can’t think, can’t speak, can’t do anything but scream.”
Here’s a rough intuitive sketch of what the logarithmic scale of helping another person might look like (this isn’t rigorous math – it’s an illustration of what’s likely the case, directionally right[1]):
10^0: holding a door open
10^1: gifting a pen
10^2: introducing them to someone useful
10^3: helping them move places
10^4: catching a major work or family mistake before it ruins their week
10^5: teaching them a compounding skill (meditation, programming, emotional regulation)
10^6: funding their higher education, changing their entire socioeconomic trajectory
10^7: helping them escape a pathological family system
10^8: preventing them from falling into a cult, deep addiction, or abusive relationship
10^9: curing a chronic condition like treatment-resistant generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)
10^10: saving their life while preserving psychological integrity
10^11: giving them a permanent upward shift in baseline wellbeing and quality of consciousness, such as advanced contemplative practice can do over the course of decades
10^12: preventing cluster headaches for life
Why 10^12? A single cluster headache attack is plausibly in the 10^9 to 10^11 range of negative valence – orders of magnitude worse than migraine, worse than childbirth, worse than even torture. A typical patient experiences thousands of these across their lifetime. The multiplication is straightforward.
The theory of change for the open letters on ClusterFree is straightforward:
Patient testimonials – Raw evidence that DMT/psilocybin (even at subhallucinogenic doses) works for a large fraction of sufferers, spreading organically through desperate communities. This is already happening underground.
Reputation-Amplified Legitimization – Get enough credible voices (clinicians, researchers, policy experts) publicly acknowledging both the crisis and the evidence. We already have 800+ signatures, many from extremely prestigious people. This shifts what’s discussable. Journalists cover it differently. Clinicians stop whispering with fear of judgment and start preparing, even if quietly at first (I’m already seeing signs of this in some groups).
Clinical cascade – One major medical center runs a supervised protocol, publishes clean results, and every other institution’s liability math inverts. You don’t need consensus. You need one proof point, and the dominoes fall.
3. It’s Insurance Against Your Own Extreme Suffering Being Dismissed
Cluster headaches are invisible. No blood, no broken bones, nothing on medical imaging. Just someone screaming, rocking, punching walls while doctors tell them to “try reducing stress”, “have you considered yoga?”, or “maybe try an Ibuprofen?”.
This is what illegible suffering looks like. People don’t believe you. Institutions can’t help you. You’re trapped in a cage of agony that no one else can see.
Supporting work on illegible suffering means supporting the principle that intense subjective experience matters even when it can’t be measured easily. By supporting ClusterFree, you’re building the world where, if you ever wind up in incomprehensible pain (chronic illness, treatment-resistant conditions, novel syndromes medicine doesn’t understand yet, a hard-to-communicate and hard-to-alleviate pocket of deep biopsychosocial suffering), people will actually take it seriously. Where “I am in agony, and this helps” is treated as highly important data, the existence is safer and more dignified.
Medical, institutional, and social gatekeeping kills people. It traps them in years of unnecessary suffering because the safe and affordable tools that work aren’t “approved” yet. By supporting the patient-driven, evidence-based access to what actually helps, you’re contributing to practical moral betterment and making the world safer for everyone who might need it. Including you.
4. It’s a Proof-of-Concept for Valence-First Cost-Effectiveness
Most effective altruism uses QALYs (Quality-Adjusted Life Years) or DALYs (Disability-Adjusted Life Years) to evaluate interventions. These metrics have a major limitation: they systematically underweight extreme suffering. A QALY-based analysis of cluster headaches captures some utility loss but misses orders of magnitude of suffering because attacks are brief and non-lethal – even though they’re torture-level and recurring. The frequency distribution is also extremely skewed (some sufferers have 10+ attacks daily), which standard health economics frameworks struggle to properly account for.
ClusterFree evaluates interventions based on how bad things actually feel and what their actual prevalence is – not through the lens of reduced life expectancy or economic burden: “How much suffering are we preventing when measured by its actual intensity?”.
We’ve quantified cluster headache intensity and prevalence using patient self-reports, cross-condition comparisons, suicide attempt rates, and other complementary empirical methods. The result is clear: cluster headaches score astronomically high. This is why preventing them matters so much more than conventional metrics would suggest.
If you want a future where we optimize for the real reduction of suffering instead of metrics that structurally and systematically ignore its most intense forms, ClusterFree is the seed. We’re showing how you can make rigorous, evidence-based decisions by taking the actual experience seriously. This serves as a template for charity evaluation and ethical triage (not necessarily to replace current Effective Altruism methods, but to add a _critical_ missing evaluation angle to the ensemble model for how to help most effectively).
5. You’ll Be in the Company of Intellectual Giants
Scott Alexander supports this. Anders Sandberg supports this. Peter Singer supports this. These are thought leaders with decades of track records in rigorous, scout-mindset thinking about doing good. They don’t endorse lightly. They’ve looked at the testimonials, the statistics and trends, the theory of change, and said: this is real.
If you trust their epistemics even a little, their endorsement is strong Bayesian evidence. These aren’t people chasing trends or optimizing for social approval.
And beyond the rationalist/EA sphere? Robin Carhart-Harris supports this – one of the leading psychedelic neuroscientists in the world. Shamil Chandaria supports this – doing serious work on meditation, predictive processing, and contemplative neuroscience. Christopher H. Gottschalk supports this – a neurologist who actually treats cluster headache patients and knows firsthand how devastating they are.
EA thinkers, psychedelic researchers, clinical neurologists, contemplative scientists – they’re all saying the same thing. That doesn’t happen often.
You get to join this coalition early. While it’s still underrecognized. While it requires actually engaging with the arguments instead of following the consensus. Whilesupporting it means skin in the game.
Supporting ClusterFree now signals good taste (you can spot high-impact opportunities before they’re obvious), high reasoning capacity (you can evaluate complex arguments across disciplines), genuine compassion (you care about actual suffering, not just legible causes), and epistemic independence (you can disagree with the consensus when the evidence demands it).
When this becomes mainstream (and it will), you were there first.
6. It’s Creating a Schelling Point for Serious Suffering-Reduction Work
ClusterFree is reducing the coordination costs and bringing together people who can spot neglected pools of immense value early on.
Researchers who care about phenomenological intensity. Clinicians frustrated with institutional gatekeeping who want evidence-based psychedelic medicine. Policymakers who understand regulatory strategy. Patients with direct experience who want to help others. All working on the same thing with a clear theory of change.
Many causes tend to be either too vague (“reduce suffering”) or too narrow (“fund this one study”). ClusterFree hits the sweet spot – it is specific enough to be actionable, broad enough to matter at scale, and legible enough to attract serious supporters.
The network effects compound. When the next high-leverage suffering reduction project comes along, there’s already a group of competent people who know how to execute. The people showing up now will co-build what comes next. Rather than funding one project, you’re seeding a network that keeps generating high-impact work.
7. It’s a Strike Against Paternalistic Control Over Suffering Relief
Right now, people with cluster headaches are told they cannot officially access psilocybin or DMT – the interventions that consistently, rapidly, and reliably work for a large fraction of sufferers – because the institutions have decided they’re not allowed to make that informed choice. Even when they’re screaming in agony. Even when they’re suicidal. Even when nothing else helps.
Medical paternalism is at its most cruel when patients hear: “We know you’re suffering, but you can’t have the effective, affordable, and safe-to-manage thing that stops your agony, because we haven’t finished the proper studies yet, and/or because of the system’s inertia.” Never mind that converging evidence shows it works. Never mind that patients are already using it skilfully and reporting dramatic relief. Never mind that the risk profile is more than worth it given the suffering prevented.
ClusterFree, with your support, is building the legal, scientific, and social infrastructure to challenge that amoral status quo. We pave the way for informed consent, supervised access, and letting people make rational decisions about their own unbearable pain.
If you value bodily autonomy, participatory medicine, and the right to pursue relief from extreme suffering, this is the fight. And it’s winnable thanks to multiple predictors of success.
8. This Is Actually Tractable
Most extreme suffering feels impossibly hard to address. Oftentimes, contemplating extreme suffering causes a sense of helplessness. It’s too big, too entrenched, and too complex. You can care deeply and still feel like there is nothing you can meaningfully do about it.
Cluster headaches are different. We have video testimonials. We have 800+ signatures from people with institutional power. We have a clear mechanism – psilocybin/DMT abort attacks rapidly and safely. We have willing clinicians ready to run supervised protocols. We have patient demand already creating the underground adoption.
The main barrier is coordination and legitimacy-building. That’s where ClusterFree steps in: we close the gap between common knowledge and the rollout of systemic solutions.
And we’re going beyond mere advocacy. Bob Wold of ClusterBusters calls DMT a “breakthrough therapy” for its near-instant pain relief; we’re working to understand why it works, so we can foster next best steps. Our research includes exploring legal, non-hallucinogenic (or only mildly hallucinogenic) alternatives like 5-MeO-DALT, which one patient discovered in Shulgin’s TIHKAL and used to successfully treat 46 cluster headache patients. Developing targeted therapies based on understanding the mechanisms and testing new approaches translates into accessibility and effectiveness.
We (admittedly optimistically) believe this is doable within 3 to 5 years of focused and effective execution: build the coalition, get one major medical center to publish clean results, and watch the common knowledge cascade. Meanwhile, we’re already developing better treatments with maximally broad legal adoption.
Most things that matter this much take decades… or never even happen. This one is actually within reach.
9. Every Month of Delay Means Unnecessary Pits of Suffering
Right now, while you’re reading this, ~70,000 people are experiencing a cluster headache attack. More will start in the next few minutes. And more after that, like a global wave of agonizing pain.
Roughly 3 million people worldwide have cluster headaches in any given year. Many experience attacks daily or multiple times per week during the cluster periods. We estimate that globally, cluster headache patients spend approximately 70,670 person-years per year in pain, with about 8,570 person-years (about 3.1 million person-days) spent at extreme pain levels (≥9/10).
The math is brutal: with every month of delay, patients undergo millions of preventable torture-level attacks. While other cause areas and interventions may warrant dilemmas of donating now or later, the case of ClusterFree is urgently clear – donate now, and we will do our best at bringing unimaginable counterfactual relief to millions in 2026-2027.
Our model is designed for speed – we are not waiting for perfect RCTs, commercial products, or stable institutional consensus. We are building the strategic legitimacy cascade that lets institutions act on what we already know.
The suffering is happening right now. The effective solution exists right now. We know how to connect the dots, and the only question is how fast we can do so.
10. ClusterFree Is Accelerating an Already Developing Movement
ClusterBusters has been doing heroic work for years, building community, sharing information, and giving people hope. The psychedelic renaissance has been shifting cultural and scientific attitudes. Various researchers and advocates have been pushing this forward through different channels.
ClusterFree adds a specific piece: demonstrating that this is a winnable fight right now.
We bring:
An explicit theory of change (testimonials lead to reputation-amplified legitimization, which leads to clinical cascade);
800+ signatures from outstanding individuals, many with institutional power and cultural influence;
A straightforward narrative: “this is effective, safe, and urgent, and we can scale this legally” – and we’re not afraid to signal DMT as especially promising (due to its extremely fast pain relief profile when “vaped” at the onset of an attack);
Coordination infrastructure that connects patients, clinicians, researchers, and funders around a shared goal; and
A global but local-context-sensitiveapproach in both coverage and mindset: while ClusterBusters focuses on the U.S. and UK, we’re building parallel advocacy tracks across multiple jurisdictions (Canada, Europe, Latin America, etc.) to build the missing capacity.
This strategy acts synergistically with other approaches, de-riskingthem rather than obstructing them. When a major medical center decides to run a supervised protocol, they will do it in an environment where 800+ credible voices (as of December 13th 2025) have already confirmed that this is real, this matters, and the research must take place as soon as possible.
Our strategy is being developed and executed by uniquely talented individuals with a strong track record. Alfredo Parra leads the organization – he is exceptional at navigating the interface between institutions, has 7+ years of nonprofit management experience, and is provingly extremely conscientious and high-integrity (don’t take my word for it – lookatallthework). The team and the community that seeded it concentrate people who simultaneously understand the importance of suffering reduction, psychedelic phenomenology, regulatory strategy, and movement building. They both care about the deep structure of consciousness and aren’t swayed by common narratives. This is a rare comparative advantage, and in our view, proves an excellent fit to push this cause forward.
The fruitful work has been happening already. Where we step in is providing leverage at a specific bottleneck: making the path to legitimacy visible and coordinated.
11. If You Take “Karma” Seriously, Look at What the Texts Say About Headache Relief
In the Bodhicaryāvatāra, Śāntideva teaches that “immeasurable merit” arises even from the simple thought: “Let me dispel the headaches of beings.” The tradition treats this literally. Not metaphorically. Relieving sharp, overwhelming pain generates outsized karmic effects because it interrupts some of the most intense forms of duḥkha in the human realm.
Why headaches specifically? Because they were considered the archetype of piercing, mind-breaking pain in the classical world. Cluster headaches exceed even that ancient benchmark. They represent some of the most unbearable moments a human mind can experience.
The logic of meritorious karmic logic is clear: if intention aligned with the relief of severe suffering produces merit that scales with the intensity of dukkha relieved, then work that prevents torture-level pain for thousands of people is not ordinary charity but a high-density, boutique, ultra-rare karmic investment.
For practitioners of the Bodhisattva path, karma constitutes a feedback loop shaping future clarity, opportunity, and awakening. Helping beings escape states of extreme pain is singled out across the Mahāyāna as one of the fastest ways to accumulate merit and purify obscurations.
If even contemplating the wish to relieve a single headache creates immeasurable merit, then actively supporting work that may end this class of suffering at scale plants karmic seeds that ripple across lifetimes.
Even if you hold a weak, naturalized version of karma (something like “intentions to help tend to produce good outcomes proportional to the good intended”), the efficiency here is absurdly high. Instead of helping someone have a slightly better day, you’re preventing thousands of hours of above-torture-level pain per person.
And what if you don’t believe in karma at all? The consequentialist case is still clear. You’re preventing, say, ~10^12 units of negative valence per person.
12. You Get the Bodhisattva-Tier Vision
Most people, when they look into the true darkness of suffering (the worst pain imaginable, sustained for hours, recurring for decades), recoil. They look away. They rationalize (“someone else will handle it”), they cope (“well, suffering is just part of life”), and freeze (“I can’t do anything about this anyway”).
Such reactions are understandable given the limits of our agency and the scope of the challenge. Luckily, there’s another response possible and available today:
You see it, and you roll up your sleeves. Where others flinch or cope, you take intentional action.
That capacity to clearly perceive the worst of what’s real and respond with competence, care, direction, and focus – rather than despair, avoidance, denial, or freezing – is a rare gem. It separates people who talk about compassion from people who enact it. The “Bodhisattva move” is: “I see the suffering. I will not turn away. I will do what needs to be done.”
Supporting ClusterFree strengthens that moral muscle. It’s a practice for the kind of person you may want to be: someone who can look into the darkest abyss and respond with pragmatism, not platitudes.
And a bonus reason for Qualia Computing readers…
So I Can Stop Talking About Cluster Headaches in Qualia Computing
The more ClusterFree is funded and self-sufficient, the more I can get back to the core theoretical work for which I’m best suited. Which, by the way, is exactly how we identify the next high-leverage suffering reduction opportunities!.
If you want me to shut up about cluster headaches and get back to talking for hours about beam-splitter holography and DMT phenomenology, the fastest way to make that happen is to generously fund ClusterFree.
You’re welcome.
What We’re Specifically Asking For
ClusterFree is currently a two-person operation: Alfredo leading the day-to-day execution (coalition building, clinical coordination, policy navigation, the 800+ signature campaign), and me providing strategic direction, research frameworks, writeups like this one, and QRI infrastructure. The initial donations will let us hire additional top talent to manage critical workstreams, so that we can:
Pursue parallel regulatory tracks in different jurisdictions;
Optimize our media presence by talking to journalists, podcasters, and medical journals;
Build global partnerships with patient organizations, headache centers, psychedelic advocacy groups, and retreat centers that treat this and related conditions;
Coordinate with medical centers willing to run supervised trials;
Create high-quality topical resources for patients in multiple languages, which are scarce and difficult to find; and
Pursue other high-impact value streams we’re ready to launch with additional capacity.
If significant funding is obtained, it will allow us to personally visit retreat centers and bring people with cluster headaches to suitable settings where they can experiment with these therapies, and where we can study them thanks to the QRI approaches to systematic phenomenology mapping, including EEG and biorhythms monitoring. This might turn out to be really important, possibly allowing us to determine what aspect of psilocybin/DMT relieves the pain. Our working assumption, based on many interviews with sufferers, is that DMT’s “body vibration” effect is key for its pain relief – if true, this is something we could significantly optimize by developing more targeted therapies.
While our network of volunteers is growing (see Slack below), having dedicated paid staff accelerates our efforts dramatically. The faster we move, the louder we say “no” to overlooked suffering.
Sign the open letter – Adding your name increases our legitimacy and helps shift the Overton window.
Share patient testimonials – If you have cluster headaches and have used psychedelics, your story can help build the evidence base. We believe that video testimonials from sufferers, in particular, are especially powerful. Recordings showing the moment itself where psilocybin/DMT relieves the suffering in real time might have the most emotional resonance overall.
Join our Slack – We list simple but high-impact volunteer tasks (translations, social media, research assistance, essay feedback, etc).
Connect us with key people – Do you know journalists, podcasters, clinicians, policy makers, or potential donors? Introductions are greatly appreciated!
Spread the word – Share this essay, talk about cluster headaches with the right mood, and become the relieving change you want to see and experience in the world.
Conclusion
With all these reasons in mind, ClusterFree satisfies the utilitarian, the virtue ethicist, the long-term strategist, the person who wants meaning, the person who values courage, the person who wants to accumulate spiritual merit, the person who wants to bring these therapies to the FDA approval status, the person who just wants to see real humans stop screaming in pain, and the one who embodies all these motivations simultaneously.
Our internal coalitions can agree that this matters, and we can actually do it. Thank you.
Acknowledgments: Many thanks to Marcin Kowrygo for his generous edits of the draft. Thanks to Chris Percy, Roberto Goizueta, Hunter Meyer, and, of course, Alfredo Parra for relevant discussions and suggestions for this write-up. Huge thanks to the ClustersBusters team for their incredible and ethically urgent work (and generosity with their time to help people in need, as well as accepting being interviewed in a pinch at Psychedelic Science 2025). Thanks to Jonathan Leighton (OPIS) for inspiration, aligned work, and fighting the good fight! Thanks to Jessica Khurana (and her team) for founding Eleusina Retreat – the world’s only retreat center focused on using psychedelics, legally, for treating extreme pain conditions. Thanks to Maggie Wassinge for her copious emotional support, love, and motivation to keep doing the real work, even when it feels hopeless at times (seriously, THANK YOU). And to the spirit of Anders Amelin (RIP), who is always with us, encouraging and motivating, giving us strength and intelligence. May he rest in peace, knowing we’re pursuing our ambitious suffering-reducing goals <3 And thanks to the entire QRI team, as well as the broader qualia community at large, for creating a container where these ideas can be freely explored with curiosity and without stigma. And finally, thanks to all of the donors of QRI and ClusterFree: we will do what we can to make you proud of supporting us. Metta!
[1] On the 10^12 estimate: This is admittedly a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but here’s the reasoning. A cluster headache patient might experience anywhere from 3,000 attacks (conservative, successful treatment) to 30,000+ attacks (severe chronic cases) over their lifetime. Using a conservative estimate of 3,000 attacks averaging ~60 minutes (3,600 seconds) each gives us ~10^7 seconds of extreme pain. Now for the intensity ladder. Holding a door open might prevent ~0.1 units of discomfort, using a pinprick as 1 unit. Kidney stones, already rated 10/10 on standard pain scales, are plausibly ~1,000× more intense than a pinprick (10^3). Each second of cluster headache pain appears to be ~10× worse than kidney stones (10^4 relative to our baseline). Multiply by 10^7 seconds, and we get 10^11 from pure hedonic intensity alone. Additionally, cluster headaches impose a constant inter-ictal burden (meaning, the suffering between attacks), including PTSD, anticipatory anxiety, and a profound sense of doom between attacks (see interview with Cluster Busters founders at 53:10-53:40). This could add a 2-5X multiplier, bringing us to ~10^12. For severe cases with 10× more attacks, the calculation easily reaches 10^13 or higher. The true value likely ranges between 10^7 (very mild cases with effective treatment) and 10^16 (severe chronic cases accounting for peak intensities and suffering between attacks). Even at the conservative end, preventing cluster headaches for life remains one of the highest-impact interventions accessible to individuals. Similar back-of-the-envelope calculations can be done to put in perspective each of the steps on the “logarithmic scale of help you can provide to someone”.
13: Alfredo Parra of Qualia Research Institute on cluster headaches. Cluster headaches are plausibly the most painful medical condition. If you ask a cluster patient to rate their pain, they’ll almost always say 10/10. Does that mean the headaches are twice as painful as a 5/10 condition? There are some philosophical reasons to expect pain to be logarithmic, so plausibly cluster headaches could be orders of magnitude more painful than the average condition. Once you internalize that possibility, it throws a wrench into normal QALY ratings and suggests that, even though cluster headaches are pretty rare, they might cause a substantial portion of the global burden of disease (or even a substantial portion of the suffering in the world). Some psychedelics, especially psilocybin and DMT, seem to treat cluster headaches very effectively, so the more you believe this reanalysis, the more interested you should be in figuring out how to turn these into an accessible therapy (see clusterbusters for more information on this aspect).
2: Qualia Research Institute announces their spinoff effort ClusterFree. Cluster headaches (aka “suicide headaches”) are probably the most painful medical condition known to science, which makes them a natural priority for some utilitarians. They seem to be extremely treatable by psychedelics like psilocybin and DMT (including sub-hallucinogenic doses), so ClusterFree is working on getting governments to research this further and maybe get these drugs into the medical pipeline (cf. ketamine for depression). There’s an open letter here, and you can contact them here. The information for patients is at the bottom of this page.
A recent article in Nature: Humanities and Social Science Communications found the funding provided in the United Kingdom for research on cluster headaches to be “orders of magnitude” less than that provided for multiple sclerosis, a condition that affects a similar number of people. The authors conclude that, given that we regard the provision of anesthesia for surgery to be essential, we should also recognize relief for extreme pain as essential. Finding ways to do so should warrant the highest funding priority.
A new initiative called Clusterfree has launched global open letters calling on governments to provide legal access to psychedelics for people with cluster headache. I have signed, and I hope that you will, too.
ClusterFree’s mission is to help cluster headache patients globally access safe, effective pain relief treatments as soon as possible through advocacy and research.
Cluster headache (also known as ‘suicide headache’) is considered the most painful condition known to mankind. We believe it is one of the largest sources of preventable extreme suffering in humans today. Every year, about 3 million adults (and an unknown number of minors) suffer from this debilitating condition.
And yet, even in the EU, only 47% of the cluster headache population had unrestricted access to standard treatments (primarily oxygen and triptans) in 2019. Despite affecting a similar number of people as multiple sclerosis, global investment into cluster headache is minuscule.
At the same time, countless patients have reported previously unattainable relief using certain psychedelics, even at low doses. For example, psilocybin, LSD and 5-MeO-DALT can effectively prevent attacks, and N,N-DMT can abort attacks within seconds and also have some preventative effects. However, these life-saving treatments are inaccessible to the vast majority of patients.
We want to tackle these problems by:
Publishing open letters demanding that governments, regulatory bodies, and medical associations worldwide take action immediately, with a focus on easing restrictions around psychedelic use.
Providing patient groups with high-quality resources and supporting their advocacy efforts.
Engaging with policymakers globally to advocate for better access to treatments.
Publishing research on cluster headache and supporting other researchers in the field.
Collaborating with entrepreneurs and philanthropists motivated to bring new, effective treatments to market.
We will be collaborating closely with Clusterbusters, the largest and most well-known cluster headache advocacy organization, led and run by patients. For about 25 years, they have been at the forefront of cluster headache advocacy, especially in the US and the UK. We are excited to bring more capacity and new approaches to tackle other jurisdictions, and to show that patients are not alone in this fight.
How you (and anyone) can help
As our first project, we are publishing one global open letter and 11 country-specific open letters:[2]
Anyone can sign the global open letter. Additionally, if you live in or come from one of the countries above, you can sign that letter as well. Signatories include Prof. Peter Singer, Scott Alexander, Dr. Christopher Gottschalk (Yale), David Pearce, and Dr. Daniel Ingram.
Please share the letters widely within your network![3]
If your organization wants to show its support for ClusterFree’s mission, we can list it as a partner on our website.
A few other ways to help include:
Donating or putting us in touch with potential donors. Donations are tax deductible in the US.
Volunteering for various tasks (many of which are very simple but high-impact).
Gained the support of a member of a US state legislature.
Started conversations with CH advocates in multiple countries (most recently India[4], Denmark, and New Zealand).
Are engaging with entrepreneurs and philanthropists interested in bringing DMT to market.
Developed a preliminary idea for a new, legal abortive treatment that could be highly effective (potentially also for migraines).
Have started developing phenomenology-based, patient-centric surveys to test various hypothesis for the underlying mechanism of action that psychedelics exert on this condition.
We recently raised seed funding from a private donor to cover our core operations for the coming months. Additional funding would allow us to hire a second teammate to work alongside Alfredo at this early stage, particularly on outreach and communications. We could absorb an additional $50k–$150k immediately.
At this very early stage, we are still evaluating different paths to impact, and will likely test various strategies simultaneously to identify the most promising opportunities.
We believe ClusterFree is a great donation opportunity for people who care about relieving the most intense human suffering today. Cluster headaches represent a major health crisis even in developing countries, and we are far from having effective treatments widely available. Help us change that.
Additionally, you can consider donating to Clusterbusters or OPIS, who have been at the forefront of cluster headache advocacy and research for years.
Work with us
If you’d like to help us reduce the global burden of cluster headache pain (beyond volunteering), we’d love to hear from you. Simply fill out our expression of interest form.
“If we lived in a really sane society with a strong compassionate streak, every building would have something like a ‘Break in case of fire’ box… only this one would read ‘Break in case of cluster headache.’ Inside you’d find a pre‑charged DMT vape pen. That would be really nice.”
Announcement: Do you have experience using psychedelics to treat cluster headaches? Want to support science and advocacy in this area? Submit your personal and/or professional testimonial to our upcoming “ClusterFree” Open Letter initiative.
Sitting Down with Cluster Busters at Psychedelic Science 2025
One of the highlight moments for me at Psychedelic Science 2025 in Denver this June was conducting an interview for Bob Wold, founder of Cluster Busters, and Joe Stone, and Joe McKay who work alongside Bob in patient support and advocacy. Our conversation covered a lot of ground, but I had one key strategic goal in mind: document, in their own words, why the humble DMT vapepen looks like a once‑in‑a‑generation breakthrough for the most painful condition that medicine has ever encountered.
“With a regular vape pen it’s usually one inhalation. Thirty seconds later the pain is gone. I hear a click in the middle of my brain and the attack is just off.” —Bob Wold
Put bluntly, if we care about total suffering, we need to care about cluster headaches. The time is now.
Interview Highlights Pertaining to DMT
DMT as an acute rescue One lungful (where the instructions typically say “three full breaths”) ends most attacks in under a minute. A second puff a minute later covers nearly all the rest. No tolerance shows up (acutely or chronically) which allows patients to repeat the dose whenever necessary.
Low psychedelic burden The dose is about a quarter of a psychedelic hit; enough to see some color enhancement but not enough for significant “trippiness”. Patients describe “a mild two‑beer buzz” or “the room takes on a golden tint” or “faint auras appear.” The mild level of psychedelia needed for this treatment makes bedside use practical, even for parents who need to stay functional the day after.
Why it beats psilocybin and LSD in the heat of battle Psilocybin and LSD still shine for cycle prevention, taken every five days, but they work on a timescale that makes them impractical for acute events. DMT is for the here‑and‑now (note Eleusinia founder says DMT also interrupt cycles according to her work at the retreat center). Joe Stone calls it “a game changer” because he can abort a 2AM ethical emergency (a cluster) and fall back asleep within 10 minutes. No need to have an expensive psychotherapy, a professional sitter, or trip killers on hand, let alone having to book a whole day to trip.
A hunch about endogenous DMT Bob’s shares his intuitive working model for how cluster headaches work (to be refuted or confirmed by science): an attack begins when natural DMT in the brain dips below a threshold (why do we even have DMT in our brains to begin with?). He hazards the guess that a quick DMT top‑up pulls the breaks and re‑establishes homeostasis. Others suggest that melatonin abnormalities in cluster patients add plausibility to his view, given the biochemical link between melatonin and endogenous tryptamine synthesis.
Pain drives the psychiatric condition, not the other way around One key insight I wanted to make sure to get on the record: chronic physical agony breeds depression, anxiety, and PTSD‑like flashbacks. Fix the pain and the mental distress often dissolves; no need for heroic doses or eight‑hour therapy sessions (as with e.g. psilocybin for depression specifically). Cultural over-emphasis on mental health as _the_ thing to treat with psychedelics might make sense from the point of view of a slowly expanding Overton Window; but the big hedonic payouts (freedom from hellish states of consciousness) are likely concentrated in their application to the reduction of extreme physical pain (see also).
Why This Matters
Alfredo Parra’s quantitative analysis suggests that cluster headaches may contribute more net misery than migraines, cancer pain, or even major depressive disorder once intensity is included (and a proper long-tail model and Monte Carlo simulations are taken into accont). Effective Altruist “pleasure-bean‑counters” (I say this affectionately!) please take note: extremely nasty but “rare” states can dominate the integral, and need urgent consideration.
From a consciousness‑research angle, the interview is another data point for why direct phenomenological investigation should guide ethics; here, patients, confronted with the reality of their own phenomenology, themselves have again clearly pioneered the treatment all the while mainstream research (unsurprisingly) slept through five decades of drug war.
Closing Thoughts
Imagine a fire‑alarm box on every hospital wall that reads “Break glass in case of cluster headache.” Inside we find a sober-looking, very boring but perfectly functional, pre‑filled DMT cartridge that delivers reliable 3mg hits (enough to feel a light buzz, not enough to trip significantly – certainly far short of any dose needed for entity contact or alien abduction experiences). This isn’t science fiction; it is what the data we’re seeing support. Freedom from one of the most extreme demonic forces on Earth is, counterintuitively… Spice. Let’s shorten the path from patient innovation to standard‑of‑care and, in the process, erase one of the darkest corners of conscious experience forever. I believe we can achieve a Cluster-Free World within a few years if we put our minds and hearts to the task.
Hallucinations are not a problem at the doses we have people use and that seem to work the best, which are much smaller than a recreational dose. We aren’t recommending people take doses that will have them playing cards with a deer (you can’t trust them!). The doses are small (e.g. 1.5g of mushrooms). You’re supposed to get to about the “giggle”. Get to the “giggle point” and you’re good to go. – Suicide or Psychedelics, Bob Wold at Horizons 2009
Introduction: Laser Chess as a Metaphor for the Brain as a Non-Linear Optical Computer
In Laser Chess (a synecdoche for games of this sort), players arrange various kinds of pieces that interact with lasers on a board. Pieces have “optical features” such as mirrors and beam splitters. Some pieces are vulnerable to being hit from some sides, which takes them off the board, and some have sides which don’t interact with light but merely absorb it harmlessly (i.e. shields). You usually have a special piece which must not be hit, aka. the King/Pharaoh/etc. (or your side loses). And at the end of your turn (once you’ve moved one of your pieces) the laser of your color is turned on, and its light comes out of one of your pieces in a certain direction and then travels to wherever it must (according to its own laws of behavior). Usually when your laser hits an unprotected side of a piece (including one of your own pieces), the targeted piece is removed from the board. Your aim is to hit and remove the special piece of your opponent.
Example of a beam splitter optical element (source)
What makes this game conceptually more interesting than Chess isn’t just that its openings haven’t been thoroughly studied (something Bobby Fischer complained about with Chess), but rather that the light’s path depends on all pieces functioning together as a whole, adding a layer of physical embodiment to the game. In other words, Laser Chess is not akin to Chess 960, where the main feature is that there are so many openings that the player needs to rely less on theory and more on fluid visual reasoning. It’s more, at least at the limit, like the difference between a classical and a quantum computer. It has a “holistic layer” that is qualitatively different than the substrate upon which the game normally operates.
In Laser Chess, the “piece layer” is entirely local, in that pieces can only move around in hops that follow local contextual rules. Whereas the “laser layer” is a function of the state of the entire board. The laser layer is holistic in nature because it is a function of the entire board at once. It’s the result of, at the limit, letting the light go back and forth an infinite number of times and let it resolve whatever loop or winding path it may need to go through. You’re looking for the standing wave pattern the light wants to resolve on its own.
Online Laser Chess (source) – the self-own of the blue player is understandable given the counter-intuitive (at first) way the light ends up traveling.
In Laser Chess you move your piece to a position you thought was safe just to be hit by the laser because thepiece itself was what was making that position safe! The beginner player is often startled by the way the game develops, which makes it fun to play for a while. The mechanic is clever and to play you need to think in ways perhaps a bit alien to a strict Chess player. But at the end of the day it’s not that different of a game. You do end up using a lot of calculations (in the traditional Chess sense of “mental motions” you keep track of to study possible game trees), and the laser layer only changes this slightly.
When the laser beam hits one of the mirrors, it will always turn 90 degrees, as shown in the diagrams. The beam always travels along the rows and columns; as long as the pieces are properly positioned in their squares, it will never go off at weird angles. – Khet: The Laser Game Game Rules
In Laser Chess, the behavior of light is not particularly impressive. After all, thinking about the laser layer in terms of simple local rules is usually enough (“advance forward until you hit a surface”, “determine the next move as a function of the type of surface you hit”, etc.). The game is quite “discretized” by design. Tracing a single laser path is indeed easy when the range of motion and possible modes of interaction are precisely constructed to make it easy to play. It’s uncomplicated by design. The calculations needed to predict the path of the light never becomes intractable: the angles are 45°/90° degrees, the surfaces cleanly double, reflect, absorb the light, etc.
Laser Chess, now with weird polygonal pieces and diffraction effects!
But in a more general possible version of Laser Chess the calculations can become easily intractable and far moreinteresting. If we increase the range of angles the pieces can be at relative to each other (or make them polygons) we suddenly enter states that require very long calculations to estimate within a certain margin of error. And if we bring continuous surfaces or are allowed to diffract or refract the light we will start to require using the mathematics that have been developed for optics.
In a generalized Laser Chess, principles for the design of certain pieces could use specific optical properties, like edge diffraction:
If light passes near the edge of a piece (rather than hitting it directly), it could partially bend around the object instead of just stopping. Obstacles wouldn’t provide perfect shadows, allowing some light to “leak” around corners in a predictable but complex way. Example: A knight-like piece could have an “aura of vulnerability” where light grazing its edge still affects pieces behind it.
Instead of treating lasers as infinitely thin lines, beams could diffract when passing through narrow gaps or slits. This would allow for beam broadening, making it possible to hit multiple pieces even if they aren’t in a direct line. Example: If a piece has a slit or small hole, it could scatter the laser into a cone, potentially hitting multiple targets.
And so on. And there is a staggering number of optical properties to select from. From refraction, iridescence, polarization, birefringence, and total internal reflection, each offering unique strategic possibilities. And then there we also have their mutual interactions to consider. Taking all of this into account, a kind of generalized Laser Chess complexity hierarchy arises:
The simplest Laser Chess variants are mostly geometric, with straightforward ray tracing. They benefit from a physical laser or a computer, but don’t require it.
Intermediate complexity comes after adding diffraction, refraction, and wave optics, requiring Fourier transforms and wave equations to analyze the beam behavior. It requires a physical laser or a computer to be played, because mental calculation won’t do.
And high complexity variants come about when you take into account quantum-inspired effects like interference and path integrals, leading to both deterministic and probabilistic gameplay mechanics where players need to take into account complex superpositions and calculate probabilities. It requires either carefully designed cases for computers to be sufficient; physical embodiment might become necessary above a certain complexity.
The Self as King
Let’s start to draw the analogy. Imagine the special piece as your sense of self, the piece that must be protected, while the other pieces represent state variables tuning your world-model. In some configurations, they work together to insulate the King, diffusing energy smoothly across the board. In others, a stray beam sneaks through—an unexpected reflection, a diffraction at just the wrong angle—and suddenly, the self is pierced, destabilized, and reconfigured. The mind plays this game with itself, setting up stable patterns, only to knock them down with a well-placed shot.
The field of consciousness, poetically speaking, is a lattice of light shifting under the pressure of attention, expectation, and the occasional physiological shear. But whether or not the awareness that corresponds to the light is self-aware depends on the precise configuration of this internal light path: some ways of arranging the board allow for a story to be rendered, where a sense of self, alive and at the center of the universe, is interpreted as the experiencer of the scene. Yet the scene is always being experienced holistically even if without a privileged center of aggregation of the light paths. The sense of a separate, divided witness might be a peculiar sleight of hand of this optical system, a kind of enduring optical illusion generated by what is actually real: the optical display.
BaaNLOC
The Brain as a Non-Linear Optical Computer (BaaNLOC) proposes that something like this happens in the brain. The brain’s physical structure – its neural wiring, synaptic connections, and the molecular machinery of neurons – maps onto a set of “optical” properties. These properties shape how electromagnetic waves flow and interact in neural tissue.
Think of a sensory stimulus, within the Laser Chess analogy of the brain’s computational substrate, as akin to a brief blip from a laser. As the stimulus-triggered electrochemical signal propagates through neural circuits, its path is shaped by the brain’s “optical” configuration. Excitatory and inhibitory neurons, tuned to different features, selectively reflect and refract the signal. The liquid crystal matrix encoded in the molecular structure of intracellular proteins might also play a role, perhaps modulating the electromagnetic medium through which the signal must travel.
Where these signals meet, they interfere, their wave properties combining to amplify or cancel each other out. BaaNLOC posits that the large-scale interference pattern and the non-linear emergent topological structure of these interacting waves constitutes the contents of subjective experience.
Attention and expectation act as a steady pressure on this system, stabilizing certain wave patterns over others, like a piece the board influencing the path of the laser. What we perceive and feel emerges from the EM standing waves shaped by this top-down influence.
Psychedelics and BaaNLOC
Psychedelics, in this framework, temporarily alter the optical properties of the brain. Abnormal patterns of signaling elicited by drugs like DMT change how neural waves propagate and interact. The result is a radical reconfiguration of the interference patterns corresponding to conscious experience.
The BaaNLOC paradigm seeks to bridge the brain’s electrodynamics with the phenomenology of subjective experience by framing neural processes in terms of EM wave dynamics and electrostatic field interactions. While the precise mapping between neural activity and optical properties remains an open question (we have some ideas), the process of searching for this correspondence is already generative. The brain’s electrostatic landscape is not uniform; instead, it consists of regions with varying permittivity and permeability, which affect the way EM waves propagate, reflect, and interfere. Axonal myelination influences conduction velocity by altering the dielectric properties of neural pathways, shaping the timing and coherence of signals across brain regions. Dendritic arbor geometry sculpts synaptic summation, forming local electrostatic gradients that influence how waves superpose and propagate. Cortical folding affects field interactions by modulating the spatial configuration of charge distributions, altering the effective permittivity of different regions and creating potential boundaries for wave interference. These parameters suggest that experience may be structured not only by firing patterns but also by the electrostatic properties of the substrate itself. If perception is mediated by standing waves in an EM field shaped by the brain’s own internal dielectric properties, then the phenomenology of experience may correspond to structured resonances within this medium, much like how lenses manipulate light by controlling permittivity gradients. Investigating these interactions could illuminate the connection between the brain’s physical substrate and the emergent contours of conscious experience.
You can even do spectral filtering of images with analogue Fourier transforms using optical elements alone. Think about how this optical element could be used right now in your brain to render and manufacture your current reality:
Analogue Fourier transform and filtering of optical signals. (Gif by Hans Chiu – source).
Real-time analog Fourier decomposition of sensory information would be a powerful computational tool, and we propose that the brain’s optical systems leverage this to structure our world-simulation.
In this framework, certain gestalt patterns act as energy sinks, analogous to standing waves at resonant frequencies. These patterns serve as semantic attractors in the brain’s harmonic energy landscape, forming local minima where perceptual content naturally stabilizes. These attractor surfaces are often semi-transparent, refractive, diffractive, or polarizing, vibrating in geometry-dependent ways. “Sacred geometry” corresponds to vibratory patterns that are maximally coherent across multiple layers at once, representing low-energy states in the system’s configuration space. When the world-sheet begins to resemble these structures, it “snaps” into symmetry, as this represents an energy minimum. This aligns with Lehar’s field-theoretic model of perception, where visual processing emerges from extended spatial fields of energy interacting according to lawful dynamics. Given that such self-organizing optical behavior is characteristic of liquid crystals, it is worth considering whether the brain’s substrate exploits liquid-crystalline properties to facilitate these energy-minimizing transformations.
It is within this paradigm that the following idea is situated.
DMT Visuals as Holographic Cel Animation in a Nonlinear Optical Medium
DMT visuals (and to a lesser extent those induced by classic psychedelics in general) might be understood as semi-transparent flat surfaces in a non-linear optical medium, akin to the principles behind cel animation. Source: How It’s Made | Traditional Cel Animation*
Cel animation uses partially transparent layers to render objects in a way that allows them to move independent of each other. In cel animation the features of your world are parsed in a suspiciously anthropomorphic way. If you change a single element in an unnatural way, you find it rather odd. Like it breaks the 4th wall in a way. You can get someone to blink an eye or move their mouth in the absence of any other movement. What kind of physical system would do that? One that was specifically constructed for you as an interface.
Imagine a child flipping through a book of transparent pages, each containing a fragment of a jaguar, a palm, a tribal mask. As the pages overlay, the scene assembles itself — not as a static image, but as a living tableau (somebody please fire the Salesforce marketing department for appropriating such a cool word). Now imagine those transparencies aren’t merely stacked; they are allowed to be at odd angles relative to each other and to the camera:
This is the basic setup. The idea is that on DMT, especially during the come-up at moderate doses (e.g. reaching Magic Eye-level), the sudden appearance of 2D gestalts in 3D (which are then “projected” to a 2.5D visual field) is a key phenomenological feature. The rate of appearance and disappearance of these gestalts is dose-dependent, same as the kind of interactions they come enabled with. From here, we can start to generalize this kind of system to better capture visual (and somatic, as we will see) features of a DMT experience in its full richness and complexity. Just as in the case of Laser Chess, where we began with a basic setup and then explored how non-linear optics would massively complicate the system as we introduce interesting twists, here as well we begin with cel animation planes in a 3D space and add new features until they get us somewhere really interesting.
An important point is that DMT cel-animation-like phenomenology seems to have some hidden rules that are difficult to articulate, let alone characterize in full because it interacts with the structure of our attention and awareness. Unlike actual cel animation, the flat DMT gestalts don’t require a full semi-transparent plane to come along with them – they are “cut” already, and yet somehow can “float” just fine. Importantly, even when you have extended planes and they are, say, rotating, they can often intersect. Or rather, the fact that they overlap in their position in the visual field does not mean that they will interact as if they were occupying the same space. Whether two of these gestalts interact with each other or not depends on how you pay attention to them. There is a certain kind of loose and relaxed approach to attention where they all go through each other, as if entirely insubstantial. There is another kind of way of attending where you force their interaction. If you have seven 2D gestalts floating in your visual field, by virtue of the fact that you only have so many working memory slots / attention streams, it is very difficult to keep them all separate. At the same time, it is also very difficult to bring them all together. More typically, there is a constantly shifting interaction graph between these gestalts, where depending on how emergent attention dynamics of the mind go, clusters of these gestalts end up being simultaneously being payed attention to, and thus blend/unify/compete and constructively/destructively interfere with one another.
One remarkable property of these effects is that 2D gestalts can experience transformations of numerous kinds: shrinking, expanding, shearing, rotating, etc. Each of these planes implicitly drags along a “point of view”. And one of the ways in which they can interact is by “sharing the same point of view”.
Cels as Planes of Focus
One key insight is that the 2D surfaces that make up these cels in the visual field on a moderate dose of DMT seem to be regions where one can “focus all at once”. If you think of your entire visual field as an optical display that can “focus” on different elements on a scene, during normal circumstances it seems that we are constrained to focusing on scenes one plane at a time. Perhaps we have evolved to match as faithfully as possible the optical characteristics of a camera-like system with only one plane of focus, and thus we “swallow in” the optical characteristics of our eyes and tend to treat them as fundamental constraints of our perception. However, on DMT (and to a lesser extent other psychedelics) one can see multiple planes “in focus” at the same time. Each of these gestalts is typically perfectly “in focus” and yet with incompatible “camera parameters” to the other planes. This is what makes, in part, the state feel so unusual: there is a sense in which it feels as if one had multiple additional pairs of eyes with which to observe a scene.
A simple conceptual framework to explain this comes from our work on psychedelic tracers. DMT, in a way, lets sensations build up in one’s visual and somatic field: one can interpret the multiple planes of focus as lingering “focusing events” that stay in the visual field for much longer, accumulating sharply focused points of view in a shared workspace of visual perspectives.
Another overall insight here is that each 2D gestalt in 3D space that works as an animation cel is a kind of handshake between the feed from each of our eyes. Conceptually, our visual cortex is organized into two hierarchical streams with lateral connections. Levels of the hierarchy model different spatial scales, whereas left-vs-right model the eye from which the input is coming from. At a high-level, we could think of each 2D cel animation element as a possible “solution” for stable attractors in this kind of system: a plane through which waves can travel cuts across spatial scales and relative displacements between the image coming from each eye. In other words, the DMT world begins to be populated by possible discrete resonant mode attractors of a network like this:
The Physics of Gestalt Interactions
As the 2D cels accumulate, they interact with one another. As we’ve discussed before, our mind seems to have an energy function where both symmetrical arrangements and semantically recognizable patterns work as energy sinks. The cel animation elements drift around in a way that tries to minimize their energy. How energized a gestalt is manifests in various ways: brightness of the colors, speed of moment, number of geometric transformations applied to it per second, and so on. When “gestalt collectives” get close to each other, they often instantiate novel coupling dynamics and intermingle in energy-minimizing ways.
Holographic Cel Animation
Since each of the cels in a certain sense corresponds to a “plane of focus” for the two eyes, they come with an implicit sense of depth. As strange as it may sound, I think it is both accurate and generative (or at the very least generative!) to think of each cel animation element as a holographic display.
I think this kind of artifact of our minds (i.e. that we get 2D hologram-like interacting hallucinations on DMT) ultimately sheds light on the medium of computation our brain is exploiting for information processing more generally. Our mind computes with entire “pictures” rather than with ones and zeros. And the pictures it computes with are optical/holographic in nature in that they integrate multiple perspectives at once and compress entire complex scenes into manageable lower dimensional projections of them.
Each cel animation unit can be conceptualized as a holographic window into a specific 3D scene. This connects to one of the striking characteristics of these experiences. In the DMT state, this quality manifests as a sense that the visualized content is “not only in your mind” but represents access to information that exists beyond the confines of personal consciousness. The different animated elements appear to be in non-local communication with one another, as if they can “radio each other” across distances. At the very least their update function seems to rely both on local rules and global “all-at-once” holistic updates (much akin to the way the laser path changes holistically after local changes in the location of individual pieces).
This creates the impression that multiple simultaneous narratives or “plots” can unfold at “maximum speed” concurrently. Each element seems capable of filtering out specific signals from a broader field of information, tuning into particular frequencies while ignoring others. The resulting 2.5D/3D interface serves as a shared context where gestalts that communicate through different “radio channels” can nonetheless interact coherently with each other in a shared geometric space.
It won't take long before we'll be able to "reskin reality" in real-time.
I had the chance to try this prototype that combines the #MixedReality view on a Quest device with Stable Diffusion AI and it feels like all the pieces are about to fit together…
The above VR application being developed by Hugues Bruyere at DPT (interesting name!) reminded me of some of the characteristic visual computation that can take place on DMT with long-lasting holographic-like scenes lingering in the visual field. By paying attention to a group of these gestalts all at once, you can sort of “freeze” them in space and then look at them from another angle as a group. You can imagine how doing this recursively could unlock all kinds of novel information processing applications for the visual field.
Visual Recursion
Each cel animation element can have a copy of other cel animation elements seen from a certain perspective within it.
Because each animation cel can display an entire scene in a hologram-like fashion, it often happens that the scenes may reference each other. This is in a way much more general than typical video feedback. It’s video feedback but with arbitrary geometric transformations, holographic displays, and programmable recursive references from one feed to another.
One overarching conceptual framework we think can help explain a lot of the characteristics of conscious computation is the way in which fields with different dimensionalities interact with one another. In particular, we’ve recently explored how depth in the visual field seems to be intimately coupled with somatic sensations (see: What is a bodymind knot? by Cube Flipper, and On Pure Perception by Roger Thisdell). This has led to a broad paradigm of neurocomputation we call “Projective Intelligence“:
The projective intelligence framework offers a conceptual foundation for how to make sense of the holographic cels. Our brains constantly map between visual (2.5D) and tactile (3D) fields through projective transformations, with visual perceptions encoding predictions of tactile sensations. This computational relationship enables the compression of complex 3D information into lower dimensions while highlighting patterns and symmetries (think about how you rotate a cube in space in order to align it with the symmetries of our visual field: a cube contains perfect squares, which becomes apparent when you project it onto 2D in the right way).
In altered states like DMT experiences, these projections multiply and distort, creating the characteristic holographic windows we’re discussing: multiple mappings occur between the same tactile regions and different visual areas. This explains the non-local communication between visual elements, as the visual field creates geometric shortcuts between tactile representations using the visual field. It’s why separated visual elements appear to “radio each other” across distances: they can be referencing the same region of the body!
The recursive qualities of these holographic cels emerge when the “branching factor” of projections increases, creating Indra’s Net-like effects where everything reflects everything else. The binding relationships that arise in those experiences can generate exotic topological spaces: you can wire your visual and somatic field together in such a way that the geodesics of attention find really long loops involving multiple hops between different sensory fields.
In brief, consciousness computes with “entire pictures” which can interact with each other even if they have different dimensionalities – this alone is one of the key reasons I’m bullish on the idea that carefully depicting psychedelic phenomenology will open up new paradigms of computation.
Collective Intelligence Through Transformer-like Semantics
In addition to the geometric holographic properties of these hallucinations, the semantic energy sink also operate in remarkably non-trivial ways. When two DMT patterns interact, they don’t just overlap or blend like watercolors. They transform each other in ways that look suspiciously like large language models updating their attention vectors. A spiral might encounter a lattice, and suddenly both become a spiral-lattice hybrid that preserves certain features while generating entirely new ones. If you’ve played with AI image generators, you’ve seen how combining prompt elements creates unexpected emergent results. DMT visuals work similarly, except they’re computing with synesthetic experiential tokens instead of text prompts. A hyperbolic jewel structure might “attend to” a self-dribbling basketball, extracting specific patterns that transform both objects into something neither could become alone.
Some reports suggest that internalizing modern AI techniques before a DMT trip (e.g. spending a week studying and thinking about the transformer architecture) can power-up the intellectual capacities of “DMT hive-minds”. If your conceptual scheme can only make sense of the complex hallucinations you’re witnessing on ayahuasca through the lens of divine intervention or alien abductions, the scenes that you’re likely to render will be restricted to genre-conforming semantic transformations that minimize narrative free energy. But if you come in prepared to identify what is happening through the lens of non-linear optics and let the emergent subagents (clusters of gestalts that work together as agentive forces) self-organize as an optical machine learning system, you may end up summoning novel (if still very raw and elemental) kinds of conscious superintelligences.
Conclusion: The Gestalt Amphitheater
In ordinary consciousness, we meticulously arrange our perceptual pieces to protect the King (our sense of self) ensuring that the laser of awareness follows predictable, habitual paths. The optical elements of our world-simulation are carefully positioned to maintain the stable fiction that we are unified subjects navigating an objective world.
DMT radically rearranges these pieces, creating optical configurations where “the light of consciousness” reflects, refracts, and diffracts in unexpected ways. The laser no longer follows familiar paths but moves along a superposition of paths through the system in patterns that reveal the constructed nature of the central self and of the simulation as a whole. The King (that precious sense of being a singular perceiver) stands exposed as what it always was: not an ontological primitive but an emergent property of a particular configuration where “attention field lines converge.”
The projective intelligence framework helps us understand this phenomenology. Our brains constantly map between visual (2.5D) and tactile (3D) fields through transformations that encode predictions and compress complex information. In DMT states, these projections multiply and distort, creating “holographic windows” where multiple mappings occur simultaneously. This explains the non-local communication between visual elements: separated gestalts appear to “radio each other” across distances because multiple tactile sensations can use the visual field as a shortcut to resonate with each other and vice versa.
The emergent resonant attractors of the whole system involve many such shortcuts. When the recursive projections find an energy minima they lock in place, at least temporarily: the complex multi-sensory gestalts one can experience in these states capture layers of recursive symmetry as information in sensory fields is reprojected back and forth, each time adapting to the intrinsic dimensionality of the field onto which it is projected. “Sacred geometry” objects on DMT are high-valence high-symmetry attractors of this recursive process.
The DMT state doesn’t “scramble consciousness” (well, not exactly); rather, it reconfigures its optical properties, allowing us to witness the internal machinery that normally remains hidden in our corner of parameter space. These visuals aren’t “hallucinations” in any conventional sense. That would imply they’re distortions of some more fundamental reality. Instead, I think they’re expressions of our brain’s underlying optical architecture when highly energized and fragmented, temporarily freed from the sensory constraints that normally restrict our perceptual algorithms.
By understanding the brain as a kind of non-linear optical computer, and consciousness as a topologically closed standing wave pattern emergent out of this optical system, we may develop more sophisticated models of how the brain generates world simulations. And perhaps one day (soon!) even discover new computational paradigms inspired by the way our minds naturally process information through multiple holographic dimensional interfaces at once. Stay tuned!
*animations made with the help of Claude 3.7, when otherwise not specified.
Just as a fire uniformly raises the temperature throughout a building, causing diverse but interconnected effects (metal beams expanding, wood supports burning, windows cracking from thermal stress, smoke rising through air currents) psychedelics might work through a single fundamental mechanism that ripples through all neural systems. This isn’t just theoretical elegance without grounding; it’s a powerful explanatory framework that could help us understand why substances like DMT and 5-MeO-DMT produce distinct but internally consistent effects across visual, auditory, cognitive, and somatic domains. A single change in coupling dynamics might explain why these compounds have such distinct but internally consistent effects: DMT creates rapidly alternating color/anti-color visual patterns and oscillating somatic sensations, whereas 5-MeO-DMT tends towards a state of global coherence.
As demonstrated in our work “Towards Computational Simulations of Cessation“, see how a flat “coupling kernel” triggers a global attractor of coherence across the entire system, whereas an alternating negative-positive (Mexican hat-like) kernel produces competing clusters of coherence. This is just a very high-level and abstract demonstration of a change in the dynamic behavior of coupled oscillators by applying a coupling kernel. What we then must do is to see how such a change would impact different systems in the organism as a whole. Source
The key insight is that psychedelics may modify the coupling kernels between oscillating neural systems throughout the body. Think of coupling kernels as the “rules of interaction” between neighboring neural oscillators. When these rules change, the effects cascade through different neural architectures (from the hierarchical layers of the visual cortex to the branching networks of the peripheral nervous system) producing the kaleidoscopic zoo of psychedelic effects we observe.
Simulation comparing coupling kernels across a hierarchical network of feature-selective layers (16×16 to 2×2), showing how different coupling coefficients between and within layers affect pattern formation. The DMT-like kernel (-1.0 near-neighbor coupling) generates competing checkerboard patterns at multiple spatial frequencies, while the 5-MeO-DMT-like kernel (positive coupling coefficients) drives convergence toward larger coherent patches. These distinct coupling dynamics mirror how these compounds might modulate hierarchical neural architectures like the visual cortex. Source: Internal QRI tool (public release forthcoming)
We’re excited to announce that we’ll be hosting a meeting in Amsterdam to explore this paradigm-shifting framework. This gathering will bring together researchers studying psychedelics from multiple angles – from phenomenology to neuroscience – to discuss how coupling kernels might serve as a bridge between subjective experience and neural mechanisms. Recent work on divisive normalization has shown how local neural responses are regulated by their surrounding activity, providing a potential mechanistic basis for how psychedelics modify these coupling patterns. By understanding psychedelic states through the lens of coupling kernels, we may finally have a mathematical framework that unifies the seemingly disparate effects of these compounds, much like how understanding heat transfer helps us predict how a fire will affect an entire building – from its structural integrity to its airflow patterns.
Simulation comparing different coupling kernels (DMT-like vs 5-MeO-DMT-like) applied to a 1.5D fractal branching network, showing how modified coupling parameters affect phase coherence and signal propagation. The DMT-like kernel produces competing clusters of coherence at bifurcation points, while the 5-MeO-DMT kernel drives the system toward global phase synchronization – patterns that could explain how these compounds differently affect branching biological systems like the vasculature or peripheral nervous system. Source: Internal QRI tool (public release forthcoming)
Event Details & Amsterdam Visit
The meetup will be held on the 25th of January (location: Generator Amsterdam – event page; time: 1-8PM), featuring presentations from myself and Marco Aqil, whose groundbreaking work on divisive normalization and graph neural fields provides a compelling neuroscientific foundation for the Coupling Kernels paradigm. Marco’s research demonstrates how spatial coupling dynamics can bridge microscopic neural activity and macroscopic brain-wide effects: a perfect complement to our phenomenological investigations.
Additionally, I’ll be in Amsterdam throughout the last third of January and available to meet with academics, artists, recreational metaphysicians, and qualia researchers. If you’re interested in deep discussions about consciousness, psychedelic states, and mathematical frameworks for understanding subjective experience, please reach out.
Much love and may your New Year be filled with awesome and inspiring experiences as well as solid paradigm-building enterprises!
The Science of Consciousness in Tucson is one of the best events of the year (well, every two years), at least in my mind. The people who attend are generally incredibly smart and tend to be experts in at least one domain of inquiry, such as physics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, computer science, philosophy, or psychology, along with a significant proportion of meditation, yoga, and “energy work” practitioners. As presented during the plenary “The Science of Consciousness – 30 Years On” (presided over by David Chalmers, Susan Blackmore, Christof Koch, Stuart Hameroff, and Paavo Pylkkänen), one of the key shaping mechanisms for this conference has been Stuart Hameroff’s insistence to allow discussions of currently unexplained phenomena (from psychedelic experiences and meditative states to NDEs and astral projection). According to him, people interested in these phenomena wanted him to design the conference around them, while scientists wanted to keep it strictly within the bounds of conventional views. He stood his ground and defended the importance of having a mixture. On the one hand, the extreme openness that characterizes the conference attracts some people with perhaps somewhat flaky epistemology. But on the other hand, it legitimately enriches the evidential base to work with. Quite aside from the metaphysical implications and speculations surrounding exotic experiences, it ought to be undeniable that any experience whatsoever constitutes an explananda for a complete theory of consciousness. If you can explain normal everyday vision but your theory doesn’t predict the hyperbolic geometry of DMT visions, your theory is far from complete. I think this move by Hameroff was brilliant, and we all owe him gratitude for insisting to keep both sides in.
The way I experienced this conference in particular was very different from how I felt the two previous times I attended. In fact, the phenomenology was so different that I think it would be worth creating a Journal of Phenomenology of Consciousness Conferences, dedicated to piecing together the whys and hows of each participant’s unique lived experience at these events. Both times I attended before I was still working full time as a data scientist at Bay Area companies. Consciousness research remained a side project (which nonetheless consumed an inordinate amount of time and mental energy). My views were already quite developed, but it would be hard to dismiss the progress that we’ve made since then. With papers published in academia, a lively community, a network of artists, meditators, and philosophers who collaborate with us and engage with our research, and much more experience presenting our ideas, I felt myself engaging with the conference at a much deeper level than in previous years. But perhaps most importantly, I believe that meditation has changed to a significant degree how I perceive large-scale social qualia. By this I mean, my attention fixates a lot less on local social dynamics and personalities, and much more on the flow of information, the subagentic networks that make us up, and the resonance of ideas themselves. From this perspective, I perceived the conference as much more of a living organism than before, where I would see it in a more pointillistic fashion, emphasizing the individual contributions of participants and the conflict between worldviews. Now it felt far more fluid, lightly held, and part of a process that is slowly but surely enriching our collective intelligence with explanatory frameworks and productive research attitudes. A lot of this is of course hard to explain, as it relies on changes at a pre-verbal level of attentional dynamics. But the bottom line is that I felt myself tuning in on the information flow across individuals far more than on the individuals themselves, as if able to sense information gradients and updates at a more collective level. Perhaps psychedelics have played a role here as well. I didn’t consume psychedelics at this conference myself, but you could tell some people were doing so. It was in the vibe.
Importantly, the science presented at this conference was legitimately much more clarifying than in previous years, largely due to the rise of novel research paradigms that let go of the neuron doctrine and embrace the causal significance of brainwaves. Let me give you some examples.
Earl K. Miller with a lab at MIT delivered a remote lecture at the plenary “Cortical Oscillations, Waves and Consciousness” that systematically disassembled the assumptions behind the neuron doctrine (which identifies features of our experience with the activation of individual feature-specific neurons, cf. the grandmother cell). He showed that we now know that neurons are very rarely feature-specific and that they tend to preferentially activate with many features (cf. superposition in ANNs). He presented about ephaptic coupling, local field potentials, and the causal effects of brainwaves, informed by a wealth of evidence generated at his lab and elsewhere. I was especially intrigued by the way he discussed the relationship between different layers of the cortex, with beta waves exerting top-down control and gamma waves filling in details bottom-up. He also discussed findings where two different drugs (or drug cocktails) cause the same brainwave effects and phenomenology despite having entirely different pharmacology. Meaning, that the receptor affinity profile of different drugs can be quite different and yet cause the same phenomenology, provided that they bring about the brainwave patterns. Thus, perhaps, brainwaves are much closer to one’s state of consciousness than the neurotransmitters that modulate them.
And:
Justin Riddle at Florida State (see also his excellent YouTube channel) presented at the plenary “Consciousness in Religion and Altered States” on his work on electric oscillations on the brain, also going against the neuron doctrine equipped with causal experimental data. He also introduced a fascinating model of the hierarchical structure of consciousness called Nested Observer Windows (NOW). Here he presents about how NOW would solve the functional information integration problem. In brief, he hypothesizes that cross-frequency coupling as an overarching principle is what functionally binds each of the scales to each other. This to me makes a lot of sense, for the simple reason that the lowest frequency you can generate is a function of your size, so if a large thing is communicating with a small thing (which, say, have similar shapes by default), it would be natural for them to talk by coupling frequencies that are at integer multiple of each other. This naturally increases the dynamic range of their possible interactions, as you don’t stumble upon a frequency limit either too high or too low.
Tuesday: Presentation Day
Now of course this is happening in a context where I am going to present about the topological solution to the boundary problem we published last year. In our paper, Chris Percy and I focus on how topological boundaries in the EM field could solve the boundary problem. As a simple introduction we start out with the binding problem, which can be stated as “how can the close to hundred billion neurons in your brain contribute to a unified moment of experience?”. If you start with an ontology where the universe is made of atoms and forces, it is notoriously difficult to come up with any principled way of establishing how and where information is aggregated. Similarly to how Maxwell and Faraday developed a research aesthetic where they would see electromagnetism as field phenomena, many theorists have pointed out that you can overcome the core of the binding problem (where does unity come at all) with a field ontology. Alas, the victory is short-lasting, for you soon encounter that you have a boundary problem. If we’re all part of a gigantic field of consciousness, how do you develop boundaries in this field so that we each are a unique distinct moment of experience? Our suggestion is that the physical property responsible for creating hard boundaries in the field is topological segmentation. This is not as exotic of a proposition as it may first sound; we find causally significant macroscopic topological changes in the EM field in a lot of places, most famously in the form of magnetic reconnection in the sun, which brings about solar flares and coronal mass ejections.
Conceptually, a key takeaway from my presentation is that we can explain the reason why evolution recruited these boundaries. And that is because when you create a topological boundary and you trap energy inside it, you will typically observe harmonic resonant modes of the pocket itself. As a consequence, we have that the specific shape delimited by a boundary is causally significant: it vibrates in a way that expresses the entire shape all at once, therefore has holistic behavior via internal resonance. Evolution would have a reason to use these boundaries: they allow you to coordinate behavior and act as a unit despite being a spatially distributed organism.
Overall the presentation was really well received. It is less that people complimented me on the presentation style, and more that people’s questions and follow-ups indicated that they really “got” the core idea. It feels wonderful to be in a context where a significant proportion of the audience really understands what you’re saying, especially if your experience is that in most contexts almost nobody understands it. People were, it seemed to me, at the right inferential distance from our argument to really grok it, and that was wonderful!
I was lucky that my presentation was scheduled for Tuesday because that way I was able to enjoy the rest of the conference without a big responsibility hanging over my head. After my presentation we hung out at the lobby and met with people like Tam Hunt (of General Resonance Theory fame) and his student Asa Young. I followed the gradient of interesting conversations and ended up at the after-party on the 4th floor. To my surprise it was closed at 11PM, after which there wasn’t any more conference programming. It all fell quiet. At that point I realized that the best time to conduct the demo of the latest secret QRI technology was at 11PM. I started telling people to gather at the QRI hotel room at 11PM the next day, Wednesday.
Wednesday: Demo Day
On Wednesday I attended an invite-only presentation by Shamil Chandaria (it was originally going to be in a hotel room, but due to the level of interest of participants it was moved to a conference room with permission from the organizers; the invite-only status was needed to avoid overflow). In the room was Shinzen Young, Donald Hoffman, Jay Sanguinetti and the ultrasound crew, most of the QRI contingent, and others of note that I am not currently remembering. Shamil’s presentation went much deeper than here (“liberation is the artful construction of top-level priors”) and tackled topics of large-scale brain organization, the difference between awake awareness and liberation, and (I’m told, as I had to leave towards the end to see Justin Riddle’s presentation), a mystical-experience-inducing account of phenomenal transparency in the higher Jhanas and beyond.
I arrived to the plenary of Justin Riddle just on time; he was getting up to the stage when I entered the room. Here is another example of how I felt much more embedded in the conference than in previous years. The reason I couldn’t miss Justin’s presentation was that we were scheduled to record a video the next day. I certainly would have watched it regardless (on YouTube after the fact if need be; they’re saying the videos will be up in a few weeks), but this time I needed to make sure to be up to date with his work so as to not make a fool of myself the following day when our conversation would be recorded. His presentation was delightful, not the least because it confirmed all my prejudices about the causal significance of EM field behavior in the brain. I really enjoyed his inclination to take ideas seriously and meticulously working out their implications, such as the significance of cross-frequency coupling, the explanatory power of hierarchical principles for self organization, and the top-down influence of field states on neuronal activity.
The vibe of the conference was really conducive to high-level thinking. I repeatedly found myself having original ideas and reframings: “When does a path integral surpass the computational power of resonance and topology combined? What exactly can you solve with non-linear optics that you can’t with mechanical resonance in embedded topologies?” would arise in my mind just sitting at the bar, overhearing people’s conversations about the history of EEG, the difference between physical and phenomenal time, and the latest studies on Transcranial Near Infrared Light Stimulation. Throughout the conference I was reminded of the concept of “qualia lensing”. Let me explain: in an atomic bomb explosives with different detonation speed are arranged in such a way that a perfectly spherical wavefront uniformly, and rapidly, compresses a radioactive core. The geometric arrangement and relative detonation speeds of each material results in very precise wave guiding (more generally, see: explosive lens). Geometry and potential, ignited, can result in very precise patterns of hyper-compression. Likewise, it seems to me, many high-voltage ideas can only really arise for the first time in a state of mind capable of pressurizing phenomenal representations and make them overcome the activation energy for their blending, fusion, and fission. Being at a conference where the environment is constantly presenting you different “sides of the elephant” of consciousness, surrounded by talented practitioners of the field, one can feel a lot of “qualia lensing” taking place in one’s mind.
Later that day I went to “Physics of the Mind” and watched the presentation of Florian Metzler on narrowing the state-space of phenomena of interest using heuristics of scale and combinatorial spaces (if I understood correctly) and Greg Horne who explored the possibility of a connection between the phenomenology of gravity and the nature of physical mass (he later shared some thoughts on the boundary problem that I hope to follow up on). I missed the presentation of Nir Lahav on his relativistic theory of consciousness but I know he presented in that group later. I jumped to see the presentations of Isaac David, who deconstructed the unfolding argument by showing that IIT would read entirely different causal structures in its implementation compared to the original network, and then (in still another room), Asher Soryl, who presented about a paper we’re working on that aims to catalog the features that a successful theory of valence ought to satisfy. One funny thing about these concurrent presentations was that I arrived a little early to Isaac’s presentation and soon after David Chalmers sat next to me to ask a question. I texted my friend Enrique Chiu, who was sitting in front to the left of the same room to discreetly snap a picture of me sitting next to Chalmers. He got the message right when Chalmers was about to leave, which made the picture he took look rather odd and funny in hard-to-explain ways:
I missed the presentation of Matteo Grasso who presented after Isaac, but had a chance to exchange quite a few thoughts with him throughout the conference. I perceive this IIT cluster as having significant overlap in insights and research aesthetics, no doubt due to a shared commitment to qualia formalism. It was really cool to talk to another cluster of thinkers who also see why the causal structure of computer simulations is actually quite different from the causal structures of what is being simulated. Not the result of hand-wavy intuitions, but of really probing how information flows take place at the implementation level, and systematically ruling out the existence of higher levels of integrations. Fascinating stuff.
Asher Soryl’s presentation had to work around some technical difficulties due to the projector failing all of a sudden, but a video of the presentation will be put online soon. It was funny to note that they assigned him to the “Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious”, presumably playing the function of a “misc. and etc.” category for this conference, because I can tell you he did not once mention psychoanalysis or the unconscious in his presentation.
I rested in my room for an hour and then got ready for the demo, spreading interesting “qualia of the day”-type artifacts throughout the room. I can’t say much about the demo proper for now, but I can say that it’s like an art installation you might encounter at Burning Man at 3AM in the morning while on LSD. Here was another situation where a sort of supercritical mass of people with complementary skillsets were found together. I enjoyed interacting with everyone, but above all, enjoyed sensing the information flow throughout the gathering. To those who attended, many thank yous. It was delightful.
Thursday: Interview Day
Next day, Thursday, I recorded an interview with Justin Riddle. It’s the second one we’ve recorded (see first one). We talked a lot about cross-frequency coupled oscillators in Nested Observer Windows. I ate a banana, drank a glass of almond milk, and downed a sugar-free red bull (to give you some context for the vibes of the interview). Meaning, I really needed to have all of my cylinders firing for this one. Thanks Justin! I look forward to watching it online 🙂
Following that I hung out with Winslow Strong and Shamil Chandaria for a while, and then with Shamil in particular for a couple more hours, who helped me tune into ways of seeing I hadn’t really experienced before. Here is another moment where the pressurization of the high-level thought-forms ambient in the conference seemed to have a strong effect in me. A feeling, hard to put into words, of collective consciousness among the participants, which accepts and embraces the differences and incongruities currently expressed in favor of noticing the long-term gradual increase in understanding.
Spontaneous visit from Mr. Monk
Then Daniel Ingram appeared, in his nanobot-protecting gear, along with a Sharena Rice who does ultrasound research. After exchanging some consciousness-focused videogame ideas we went to the after-party and I talked to someone who gets psychedelic-level hallucinations from caffeine alone. It didn’t sound very high-valence, but definitely noteworthy. I concluded the night by hanging out with Milan Griffes and QRI friends at Milan’s AirBnB.
Friday: Qualia Manifesto and the End of Consciousness Day
On Friday I saw the panel “The Science of Consciousness – 30 Years On”, which in addition to giving a lot of credit to Stuart for the conference, also presented some interesting sociological observations. I really enjoyed the participants sharing pictures and memories of previous conferences. I suppose personally, the movie What The Bleep Do We Know? does some work to sort of fill-in the blanks of some of the vibes I’ve missed. Stuart appears in that movie, and I recall being quite impressed (as a 13 years old) with his quick way of speaking about things like the relative scale between a proton and an electron, and doing so with a background of a desert with cactuses. It really does some heavy lifting in terms of giving the mind a flavor of the vibe that was probably present, to an extent, in the 90s around these regions of the wavefunction.
I have to remind my mind that What The Bleep Do We Know? has nothing to do with the conference other than some scenes with Stuart Hameroff in Tucson (and perhaps Dean Radin). But looking at the pictures that people like Susan Blackmore and Christof Koch shared, I did get a bit of the same vibes. Namely, the cultural material of the 90s needed to be lubricated with brightly colored patterned shirts, soft electronic background music, and visuals attempting to depict the quantum level of reality to enable crossing the awkwardness energy barrier needed to be able to talk about consciousness without constantly blushing.
Speaking of the 90s, I was then fortunate enough to hang out with Ken Moji for a bit (see this 2005 article about him in Conscious Entities, a long-standing consciousness blog). He emphasized that the reason why he was able to start and lead a Qualia center at Sony is that he does a lot of other things that are very conventional as well, with multiple jobs spanning a number of disciplines. I suppose this somewhat confirms the view that, especially a couple decades ago, the only way to interest the public in consciousness research was to also deliver a lot of other conventional value at the same time. Of course I am betting on consciousness research producing the bulk of value in the long-term, though I recognize that immediate applications are hardly world-changing (beyond, of course, the use of straight-up high-end consciousness-altering compounds like MDMA and 5-MeO-DMT). Fortunately, the present seems far more receptive to the value of consciousness research at a broad, generational, cultural level. I think the world, and especially liberal West Coast culture, can digest serious attempts at consciousness exploration better than ever before. So the cautious and protective attitude of sticking to conventional epistemologies is far less needed now (to the extent, of course, that we can simultaneously guard away bad epistemologies).
The concurrent sessions of Friday that I attended were the whole set of “Neurostimulation to Understand the Mind”, with Sanjay Manchanda, Milan Pantovic, and Olivia Giguere / Matthew Hicks, chaired by Jay Sanguinetti. The most fascinating takeaway from this series to me was imaging of changes in the brain due to ultrasound stimulation, which could perhaps be used to determine if the intervention is likely to work on someone. They also shared some phenomenology that felt encouraging, where they can induce meditative-like states and behaviorally measure *desire to meditate* in people receiving the stimulation and were able to show that it significantly increases after ultrasound.
Later on Friday I spent some time looking at posters. I enjoyed having Enrique Chiu (who we have in common having gone to math olympiads representing Mexico, and in his case, gone as high as getting a Silver at the IMO in 2013) explain his theory of saliency maps in the state-space of consciousness. It was awesome to see a fellow mathy Mexican also give it a real go at tackling some of these hard problems. I likewise had a good time hearing Anderson Rodriguez’ electroacoustic theory of consciousness, with some interesting ideas about binding. This is also the time when Chris Percy presented his poster about systematically cataloging everything that a complete theory of consciousness will need to account for.
We ate some food (fries and a delicious veggie platter) and headed to the “Poetry Slam – Zombie Blues – No-End of Consciousness Party”. I brought a projector and coordinated with conference organizers to showcase the work of Symmetric Vision during the party. Me and Asher performed some “poetry” about consciousness vs. replicators and far future visions for consciousness. And then I personally partied too hard on the dance floor. I mean, the energy was really vibrant, and Stuart Hameroff was vibrating to the tune of microtubules, and DMT visuals were being projected on the big screen while a bunch of raving scientists of all ages waved colorful LED tubes in various grades of coordinated synchrony and decoherence. It’s one of those things that gets lodged in my mind as a new gestalt because my brain wouldn’t naturally believe those things can happen.
Saturday: Brain Organoids Day
On Saturday we watched the presentations on brain organoids. I am inspired to accelerate our work on figuring out the valence function for arbitrary biological neural networks, because by the looks of it these technologies will start to be deployed much sooner than anticipated. I think that stopping the use of brain organoids on a grand scale is not likely to be possible, but creating and locking in a computing paradigm that uses information-sensitive gradients of bliss might be possible. And I don’t think the window of opportunity here is very large. Perhaps a decade or two.
I was delighted to see Luca Turin’s work on anesthesia shown at Harmut Neven’s fascinating presentation about quantum mechanics and brain organoids. They will be trying out xenon isotopes soon, in the hopes of detecting the influence of quantum states of the anesthetic at the macroscopic level (whether fruit flies get anesthetized or not). This seems extremely important to test, so godspeed to them.
At this point I said goodbye to the crew and just had a couple final meetings, a brief podcast with Tam Hunt, followed by simply resting on a balcony for a several hours, taking note of the highlights of the conference and beginning to decompress (I’m mostly there, though I still have a couple megapascals to go).
I look forward to following up with many of the conference attendees and to continue working on our core research to present next time.
Till next time, Tucson Consciousness!
Infinite bliss!
Andrés 🙂
Hard-Core Salvia Vibes at the Tucson Airport ………..microtubules, man!
Alternative Title: LSD Ego Death – A Play in Three Voices
[Epistemic Status: Academic, Casual, and Fictional Analysis of the phenomenology of LSD Ego Death]
Academic:
In this work we advance key novel interpretative frameworks to make sense of the distinct phenomenology that arises when ingesting a high dose of LSD-25 (250μg+). It is often noted that LSD, also known as lysergic acid diethylamide, changes in qualitative character as a function of dose, with a number of phase transitions worth discussing.
Casual:
You start reading an abstract of an academic publication on the topic of LSD phenomenology. What are the chances that you will gain any sense, any inkling, the most basic of hints, of what the high-dose LSD state is like by consuming this kind of media? Perhaps it’s not zero, but in so far as the phenomenological paradigms in mainstream use in the 2020s are concerned, we can be reasonably certain that the piece of media won’t even touch the outer edges of the world of LSD-specific qualia. Right now, you can trust the publication to get right core methodological boundary conditions, like the mg/kg used, the standard deviation of people’s responses to questionnaire items, and the increase in blood pressure at the peak. But at least right now you won’t find a rigorous account of either the phenomenal character (what the experience felt like in detailed colorful phenomenology with precise reproducible parameters) or the semantic content (what the experience was about, the information it allowed you to process, the meaning computed) of the state. For that we need to blend in additional voices to complement the rigidly skeptical vibe and tone of the academic delivery method.
It’s for that reason that we will interweave a casual, matter of fact, “really trying to say what I mean in as many ways as I can even if I sound silly or dumb”, voice (namely, this one, duh!). And more so, in order to address the speculative semantic content in its own terms we shall also include a fantastical voice into the mix.
Fantastical:
Fuck, you took too much. In many ways you knew that your new druggie friends weren’t to be trusted. Their MDMA pills were bunk, their weed was cheap, and even they pretended to drink more fancy alcohol than they could realistically afford. So it was rather natural for you to assume that their acid tabs would be weak ass. But alas, they turned out to have a really competent, niche, boutique, high-quality acid dealer. She lived only a few miles away and made her own acid, and dosed each tab at an actual, honest-to-God, 120(±10)μg. She also had a lot of cats, for some reason (why this information was relayed to you only once you sobered up was not something you really understood – especially not the part about the cats). Thus, the 2.5 tabs in total you had just taken (well, you took 1/2, then 1, then 1, spaced one hour each, and you had just taken the last dose, meaning you were still very much coming up, and coming up further by the minute) landed you squarely in the 300μg range. But you didn’t know this at the time. In fact, you suspected that the acid was hitting much more strongly than you anticipated for other reasons. You were expecting a 100-150 microgram trip, assuming each tab would be more between 40 and 60μg. But perhaps you really were quite sleep deprived. Or one of the nootropics you had sampled last week turned out to have a longer half-life than you expected and was synergistic with LSD (coluracetam? schizandrol?). Or perhaps it was the mild phenibut withdrawal you were having (you took 2g 72 hours ago, which isn’t much, but LSD amplifies subtle patterns anyway). It wasn’t until about half an hour later, when the final tab started to kick in, that you realized the intensity of the trip kept climbing up still further than you expected, and it really, absolutely, had to be that the acid was much, much stronger than you thought was possible; most likely over 250 mics, as you quickly estimated, and realized the implications.
From experience, you knew that 300 micrograms would cause ego death for sure. Of course people react differently to psychedelics. But in your case, ego death feelings start at around 150, and then even by 225-250 micrograms they would become all-consuming at least for some portion of the trip. In turn, actually taking 300 micrograms for you was ego death overkill, meaning you were most likely not only going to lose it, but be out for no less than an hour.
What do I mean by being out? And by losing it? The subjective component of the depersonalization that LSD causes is very difficult to explain. This is what this entire document is about. But we can start by describing what it is like from the outside.
Academic:
The behavioral markers of high dose LSD intoxication include confusion and delusions, as well as visual distortions of sufficient intensity to overcome, block, and replace sensory-activated phenomena. The depersonalization and derealization characteristic of LSD-induced states of consciousness tend to involve themes concerning religious, mystical, fantastical, and science fiction semantic landscapes. It is currently not possible to deduce the phenomenal character of these states of consciousness from within with our mainstream research tools and without compromising the epistemological integrity of our scientists (having them consume the mind-altering substance would, of course, confound the rigor of the analysis).
Casual:
Look, when you “lose it” or when you “are out” what happens from the outside is that you are an unpredictable executor of programs that seem completely random to any external observer. One moment you are quietly sitting, rocking back and forth, on the grass. The next you stand up, walk around peacefully. You sit again, now for literally half an hour without moving. Then you suddenly jump and run for 100m without stopping. And then ask the person who is there, no matter if they are a kid, a grandmother, a cop, a sanitation professional, a sex worker, or a professor, “what do you think about ___”? (where ___ ∈ {consciousness, reality, God, Time, Infinity, Eternity, …}). Of course here reality bifurcates depending on who it is that you happened to have asked this question to. A cop? You might end up arrested. Probably via a short visit to a hospital first. And overall not a great time. A kid? You could be in luck, and the kid might play along without identifying you as a threat, and most likely you continue on your journey without much problem. Or in one of the bad timelines, you end up fighting the kid. Not good. Most likely, if it was a grandmother, you might just activate random helpful programs, like helping her cross the street, and she might not even have the faintest clue (and I mean not the absolute faintest fucking clue) that you’re depersonalized on LSD thinking you’re God and that in a very real, if only phenomenological sense, it was literal Jesus / Christ Consciousness that helped her cross the street.
Under most conditions, the biggest danger that LSD poses is a bad valence reaction, which usually wears off after a few hours and is educational in some way. But when taken at high doses and unsupervised, LSD states can turn into real hazards for the individual and the people around them. Not so much because of malice, or because it triggers animal-like behaviors (it can, rarely, but it’s not why it’s dangerous). The real problem with LSD states in high doses is when you are unsupervised and then you execute random behaviors without knowing who you are, where you are, or even what it is that you are intending to achieve with the actions you are performing. It is therefore *paramount* that if you explore high doses of LSD you do it supervised.
Academic:
What constitutes a small, medium, or large dose of LSD is culture and time-dependent. In the 60s, the average tab used to be between 200 and 400 micrograms. The typical LSD experience was one that included elements of death and rebirth, mystical unions, and complete loss of contact with reality for a period of time. In the present, however, the tabs are closer to the 50-100μg range.
In “psychonaut” circles, which gather in internet forums like bluelight, reddit, and erowid, a “high dose of LSD” might be considered to be 300 micrograms. But in real world, less selected, typical contexts of use for psychedelic and empathogen drugs like dance festivals, a “high dose” might be anything above 150 micrograms. In turn, OG psychonauts like Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert would end up using doses in the 500-1000μg range routinely as part of their own investigations. In contrast, in TIHKAL, Alexander Shulgin lists LSD’s dose range as 60-200 micrograms. Clearly, there is a wide spread of opinions and practices concerning LSD dosing. It is for this reason that one needs to contextualize with historical and cultural details the demographic topos where one is discussing a “high dose of LSD”.
Fantastical:
Being out, and losing it, in your case right now would be disastrous. Why? Because you broke the cardinal sin of psychedelic exploration. You took a high dose of a full psychedelic (e.g. LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, DMT – less so 2C-B or Al-LAD, which have a lower ceiling of depersonalization[1]) without a sitter. Of course you didn’t intend to. You really just wanted to land at the comfortably manageable 100-150 microgram range. But now… now you’re deep into depersonalization-land, and alone. Who knows what you might do? Will you leave your apartment naked? Will someone call the cops? Will you end up in the hospital? You try to visualize future timelines and… something like 40% of them lead to either arrest or hospital or both. Damn it. It’s time to pull all the stops and minimize the bad timelines.
You go to your drug cabinet and decide to take a gabaergic. Here is an important lesson, and where timelines might start to diverge as well. Dosing of sedatives for psychedelic emergencies is a tricky issue. The problem is that sedatives themselves can cause confusion. So there are many stories you can find online of people who take a very large dose of alprazolam (Xanax) or similar (benzo, typically) and then end up both very confused and combative while also tripping really hard. Here interestingly, the added confusion of the sedative plus its anxiolytic effect synergize to make you even more unpredictable. On the other hand, not taking enough is also quite easy, where the LSD (or similar) anxiety and depersonalization continues to overpower the anxiolysis of the sedative.
You gather up all the “adult in the room” energy you can muster and make an educated guess: 600mg of gabapentin and 1g of phenibut. Yet, this will take a while to kick in, and you might depersonalize anytime and start wandering around. You need a plan in the meanwhile.
Academic:
In the article The Pseudo-Time Arrow we introduced a model of phenomenal time that takes into account the following three assumptions and works out their implications:
Indirect Realism About Perception
Discrete Moments of Experience
Qualia Structuralism
(1) is about how we live in a world-simulation and don’t access the world around us directly. (2) goes into how each moment of experience is itself a whole, and in a way, whatever feeling of space and time we may have, this must be encoded in each moment of experience itself. And (3) states that for any given experience there is a mathematical object whose mathematical features are isomorphic to the phenomenology of the experience (first introduced in Principia Qualia by Michel E. Johnson).
Together, these assumptions entail that the feeling of the passage of time must be encoded as a mathematical feature in each moment of experience. In turn, we speculated that this feature is _implicit causality_ in networks of local binding. Of course the hypothesis is highly speculative, but it was supported by the tantalizing idea that a directed graph could represent different variants of phenomenal time (aka. “exotic phenomenal time”). In particular, this model could account for “moments of eternity”, “time loops”, and even the strange “time splitting/branching”.
Casual:
In some ways, for people like me, LSD is like crack. I have what I have come to call “hyperphilosophia”. I am the kind of person who feels like a failure if I don’t come up with a radically new way of seeing reality by the end of each day. I feel deeply vulnerable, but also deeply intimate, with the nature of reality. Nature at its deepest feels like a brother or sister, basement reality feels close and in some way like a subtle reshuffling of myself. I like trippy ideas, I like to have my thoughts scrambled and then re-annealed in unexpected ways; I delight in combinatorial explosions, emergent effects, unexpected phase transitions, recursive patterns, and the computationally non-trivial. As a 6 year old I used to say that I wanted to be a “physicist mathematician and inventor” (modeling my future career plans around Einstein and Edison); I got deeply depressed for a whole year at the age of 9 when I confronted our mortality head on; and then experiencing a fantastic release at 16 on my first ego death (with weed of all drugs!) when I experienced the taste of Open Individualism; only to then feel depressed again at 20 but now about eternal life and the suffering we’re bound to experience for the rest of time; switching then to pragmatic approaches to reduce suffering and achieve paradise ala David Pearce. Of course this is just a “roll of the dice” and I’m sure I would be telling you about a different philosophical trajectory if we were to sample another timeline. But the point is that all my life I’ve expressed a really intense philosophical temperament. And it feels innate – nobody made me so philosophical – it just happened, as if driven by a force from the deep.
People like us are a certain type for sure, and I know this because out of thousands of people I’ve met I’ve had the fortune of encountering a couple dozen who are like me in these respects. Whether they turned out physicists, artists, or meditators is a matter of personal preference (admittedly the plurality of them is working on AI these days). And in general, it is usually the case that people of this type tend to have a deep interest in psychedelics, for the simple reason that they give you more of what they like than any other drug.
Yes, a powerful pleasant body buzz is appreciated (heroin mellow, meth fizz, and the ring of the Rupa Jhanas are all indeed quite pleasant and intrinsically worthwhile states of consciousness – factoring out their long-term consequences [positive for the Jhanas, negative for heroin and meth]). But that’s not what makes life worth living for people who (suffer from / enjoy their condition of) hyperphilosophia. Rather, it is the beauty of completely new perspectives that illuminate our understanding of reality one way or another that drives us. And LSD, among other tools, often really hits the nail in the head. It makes all the bad trips and nerve wracking anxiety of the state more than worth it in our minds.
One of the striking things about an LSD ego death that is incredibly stimulating from a philosophical perspective is how you handle the feeling of possible futures. Usually the way in which we navigate timelines (this is so seamless that we don’t usually realize how interesting and complex it is) is by imagining that a certain future is real and then “teleporting to it”. We of course don’t teleport to it. But we generate that feeling. And as we plan, we are in a way generating a bunch of wormholes from one future to another (one state of the world to another, chained through a series of actions). But our ability to do this is restricted by our capacity to generate definite, plausible, realistic and achievable chains of future states in our imagination.
On LSD this capacity can become severely impaired. In particular, we often realize that our sense of connection to near futures that we normally feel is in fact not grounded in reality. It’s a kind of mnemonic technique we employ for planning motor actions, but it feels from the inside as if we could control the nearby timelines. On LSD this capacity breaks down and one is forced to instead navigate possible futures via different means. In particular, something that begins to happen above 150 micrograms or so, is that when one imagines a possible future it lingers and refuses to fully collapse. You start experiencing a superposition of possible futures.
For an extreme example, see this quote (from this article) I found in r/BitcoinMarkets by Reddit user I_DID_LSD_ON_A_PLANE in 2016:
[Trip report of taking a high dose of LSD on an airplane]: So I had what you call “sonder”, a moment of clarity where I realized that I wasn’t the center of the universe, that everyone is just as important as me, everyone has loved ones, stories of lost love etc, they’re the main character in their own movies.
That’s when shit went quantum. All these stories begun sinking in to me. It was as if I was beginning to experience their stories simultaneously. And not just their stories, I began seeing the story of everyone I had ever met in my entire life flash before my eyes. And in this quantum experience, there was a voice that said something about Karma. The voice told me that the plane will crash and that I will be reborn again until the quota of my Karma is at -+0. So, for every ill deed I have done, I would have an ill deed committed to me. For every cheap T-shirt I purchased in my previous life, I would live the life of the poor Asian sweatshop worker sewing that T-shirt. For every hooker I fucked, I would live the life of a fucked hooker.
And it was as if thousands of versions of me was experiencing this moment. It is hard to explain, but in every situation where something could happen, both things happened and I experienced both timelines simultaneously. As I opened my eyes, I noticed how smoke was coming out of the top cabins in the plane. Luggage was falling out. I experienced the airplane crashing a thousand times, and I died and accepted death a thousand times, apologizing to the Karma God for my sins. There was a flash of the brightest white light imagineable and the thousand realities in which I died began fading off. Remaining was only one reality in which the crash didn’t happen. Where I was still sitting in the plane. I could still see the smoke coming out of the plane and as a air stewardess came walking by I asked her if everything was alright. She said “Yes, is everything alright with YOU?”.
Fantastical:
It had been some years since you had done the LSD and Quantum Measurement experiment in order to decide if the feeling of timelines splitting was in any way real. Two caveats about that experiment. First, it used quantum random number generators from Sydney that were no less than 100ms old by the time they were displayed on the screen. And second, you didn’t get the phenomenology of time splitting while on acid during the tests anyway. But having conducted the experiment anyway at least provided some bounds for the phenomenon. Literal superposition of timelines, if real, would need higher doses or more fresh quantum random numbers. Either way, it reassured you somewhat that the effect wasn’t so strong that it could be detected easily.
But now you wish you had done the experiment more thoroughly. Because… the freaking feeling of timelines splitting is absolutely raging with intensity right now and you wish you could know if it’s for real or just a hallucination. And of course, even if just a hallucination, this absolutely changes your model of how phenomenal time must be encoded, because damn, if you can experience multiple timelines at once that means that the structure of experience that encodes time is much more malleable than you thought.
Uh? Interesting, I can hear a voice all of a sudden. It calls itself “Academic” and just said something about the stacking of narrative voices.
Fantastical:
It’s always fascinating how on LSD you get a kind of juxtaposition of narrative voices. And in this case, you now have an Academic, a Casual, and a Fantastical narrative stream each happening in a semi-parallel way. And at some point they started to become aware of each other. Commenting on each other. Interlacing and interweaving.
Casual:
Importantly, one of the limiting factors of the academic discourse is that it struggles to interweave detailed phenomenology into its analysis. Thankfully, with the LSD-induced narrative juxtaposition we have a chance to correct this.
Academic:
After reviewing in real time the phenomenology of how you are thinking about future timelines, I would like to posit that the phenomenal character of high dose LSD is characterized by a hyperbolic pseudo-time arrow.
This requires the combination of two paradigms discussed at the Qualia Research Institute. Namely, the pseudo-time arrow, which as we explained tries to make sense of phenomenal time in terms of a directed graph representing moments of experience. And then also the algorithmic reductions introduced in the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences.
The latter deals with the idea that the geometry of our experience is the result of the balance between various forces. Qualia comes up, gets locally bound to other qualia, then disappears. Under normal circumstances, the network that emerges out of these brief connections has a standard Euclidean geometry (or rather, works as a projection of a Euclidean space, but I digress). But DMT perturbs the balance, in part by making more qualia appear, making it last longer, making it vibrate, and making it connect more with each other, which results in a network that has a hyperbolic geometry. In turn, the felt sense of being on DMT is one of _being_ a larger phenomenal space, which is hard to put into words, but possible with the right framework.
What we want to propose now is that on LSD in particular, the characteristic feeling of “timeline splitting” and the even more general “multiple timeline superposition” effect is the result of a hyperbolic geometry, not of phenomenal space as with DMT, but of phenomenal time. In turn, this can be summarized as: LSD induces a hyperbolic curvature along the pseudo-time arrow.
Casual:
Indeed, one of the deeply unsettling things about high dose LSD experiences is that you get the feeling that you have knowledge of multiple timelines. In fact, there is a strange sense of uncanny uncertainty about which timeline you are in. And here is where a rather scary trick is often played on us by the state.
The feeling of the multiverse feels very palpable when the garbage collector of your phenomenal motor planning scratchpad is broken and you just sort of accumulate plans without collapsing them (a kind of kinesthetic tracer effect).
Fantastical:
Ok, you need to condense your timelines. You can’t let _that_ many fall off the wagon, so to speak. You could depersonalize any moment. You decide that your best bet is to call a friend of yours. He is likely working, but lives in the city right next to yours and could probably get to your place in half an hour if you’re lucky.
> Hello!
> Hello! I just got out of a meeting. What’s up?
> Er… ok, this is gonna sound strange. I… took too much LSD. And I think I need help.
> Are you ok? LSD is safe, right?
> Yeah, yeah. I think everything will be fine. But I need to collapse the possibility space. This is too much. I can’t deal with all of these timelines. If you come over at least we will be trimming a bunch of them and preventing me from wandering off thinking I’m God.
> Oh, wow. You don’t sound very high? That made sense, haha.
> Duuudde! I’m in a window of lucidity right now. We’re lucky you caught me in one. Please hurry, I don’t know how much longer I can hang in here. I’m about to experience ego death. What happens next is literally up to God, and I don’t know what his plans are.
Your friend says he’ll take an Uber or Lyft and be there as soon as he can. You try to relax. Reality is scolding you. Why did you take this risk? You should know better!
Casual:
One of the unsettling feelings about high dose LSD is that you get to feel how extremely precious and rare a human life is. We tend to imagine that reincarnation would simply be like, say, where you die and then 40 days later come back as a baby in India or China or the United States or Brazil or whatever, based on priors, and rarely in Iceland or tiny Caribbean Islands. But no. Humans are a luxury reincarnation. Animal? Er, yeah, even animals are pretty rare. The more common form is simply in the shape of some cosmic process or another, like intergalactic wind or superheated plasma inside a star. Any co-arising process that takes place in this Gigantic Field of Consciousness we find ourselves embedded in is a possible destination, for the simple reason that…
Academic:
The One-Electron Universe posits that there is only one particle in the entire cosmos, which is going forwards and backwards in time, interfering with itself, interweaving a pattern of path integrals that interlace with each other. If there is only one electron, then the chances of being a “human moment of experience” at a point in time are vanishingly small. The electrons whose pattern of superposition paint a moment of experience are but a tiny vanishing fraction of the four-dimensional density-mass of the one electron in the block universe entailed by quantum mechanics.
Fantastical:
When you realize that you are the one electron in the universe you often experience a complex superposition of emotions. Of course this is limited by your imagination and emotional state. But if you’re clear-headed, curious, and generally open to exploring possibilities, here is where you feel like you are at the middle point of all reality.
You can access all 6 Realms from this central point, and in a way escape the sense of identification with any one of them. Alas, this is not something that one always achieves. It is easy to get caught up in a random stream and end up in, say, the God Realm completely deluded thinking you’re God. Or in the Hell realm, thinking you’re damned forever somehow. Or the animal, seeking simple body pleasures and comfort. Or the human world, being really puzzled and craving cognitively coherent explanations. Or the Hungry Ghost dimension, where you are always looking to fill yourself up and perceive yourself as fundamentally empty and flawed. Or the Titan realm, which adds a perceptual filter where you feel that everything and everyone is in competition with you and you derive your main source of satisfaction from pride and winning.
In the ideal case, during an LSD ego death you manage to hang out right at the center of this wheel, without falling into any of the particular realms. This is where the luminous awareness happens. And it is what feels like the central hub for the multiverse of consciousness, except in a positive, empowering way.
Casual:
In many ways we could say that the scariest feeling during LSD ego death is the complete lack of control over your next rebirth.
Because if you, in a way, truly surrender to the “fact” that we’re all one and that it all happens in Eternity at the same time anyway… do you realize the ramifications that this has? Everything Everywhere All At Once is a freaking documentary.
Fantastical:
> Hello? What’s up?
> Yeah, er, are you coming over?
> Yes. I mean, you just called me… 5 minutes ago. Did you expect I’d be there already? I’m walking towards the Uber.
> Time is passing really slowly, and I’m really losing it now. Can you… please… maybe like, remind me who I am every, like, 30 seconds or so?
> Mmmm ok. I guess that’s a clear instruction. I can be helpful, sure.
[for the next 40 minutes, in the Uber headed to your place, your friend kept saying your name every 30 seconds, sometimes also his name, and sometimes reminding you where you are and why you called him – bless his soul]
Casual:
Imagine that you are God. You are walking around in the “Garden of Possibilities”. Except that we’re not talking about static possibilities. Rather, we’re talking about processes. Algorithms, really. You walk around and stumble upon a little set of instructions that, when executed, turns you into a little snowflake shape. Or perhaps turns you into a tree-like shape (cf. l-systems). When you’re lucky, it turns you into a beautiful crystalline flower. In these cases, the time that you spend embodying the process is small. Like a little popcorn reality: you encounter, consume, and move on. But every once in a while you encounter a set of instructions that could take a very long time to execute. Due to principles of computational irreducibility, it is also impossible for you to determine in advance (at least in all, most cases) how long the process will take. So every once in a while you encounter a Busy Beaver and end up taking a very, very, very long time to compute that process.
Busy beaver values for different parameters (source)
But guess what? You are God. You’re eternal. You are forever. You will always come back and continue on your walk. But oh boy, from the point of view of the experience of being what the Busy Beaver executes, you do exist for a very long time. From the point of view of God, no matter how long this process takes, it will still be a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things. God has been countless times in Busy Beavers and will be countless times there again as well. So enjoy being a flower, or a caterpillar, or a raindrop, or even an electron, because most of the time you’re stuck being ridiculously long processes like the Busy Beaver.
Academic:
Under the assumption that the hyperbolic pseudo-time arrow idea is on the right track, we can speculate about how this might come about from a configuration of a feedback system. As we’ve seen before, an important aspect of the phenomenal character of psychedelic states of consciousness is captured by the tracer pattern. More so, as we discussed in the video about DMT and hyperbolic geometry, one of the ways in which psychedelic states can be modeled is in terms of a feedback system with a certain level of noise. Assume that LSD produces a tracer effect where, approximately, 15 times per second you get a strobe and a replay effect overlay on top of your current experience. What would this do to your representation of the passage of time and the way you parse possible futures?
FRAKSL video I made to illustrate hyperbolic pseudo-time arrows coming out of a feedback system (notice how change propagates fractally across the layers).
Casual:
I think that LSD’s characteristic “vibrational frequency” is somewhere between phenethylamines and tryptamines. 2C-B strikes me as in the 10hz range for most vibrations, whereas psilocybin is closer to 20hz. LSD might be around 15hz. And one of the high-level insights that the lens of connectome-specific harmonic modes (or more recently geometric eigenmodes) gives us is that functional localization and harmonic modulation might be intertwined. In other words, the reason why a particular part of the brain might do what it does is because it is a great tuning knob for the harmonic modes that critically hinge on that region of the brain. This overall lens was used by Michael E. Johnson in Principia Qualia to speculate that the pleasure centers are responsible for high variance in valence precisely because they are strategically positioned in a place where large-scale harmony can be easily modulated. With this sort of approach in mind (we could call it even a research aesthetic, where for every spatial pattern there is a temporal dynamic and vice versa) I reckon that partly what explains the _epistemological_ effects of LSD at high doses involves the saturation of specific frequencies for conscious compute. What do I mean by this?
Say indeed that a good approximation for a conscious state is a weighted sum of harmonic modes. This does not take into account the non-linearities (how the presence of a harmonic mode affects other ones) but it might be a great 60%-of-the-way-there kind of approximation. If so, I reckon that we use some “frequency bands” to store specific kinds of information that corresponds to the information that is naturally encoded with rhythms of specific frequencies. It turns out, in this picture, that we have a sort of collection of inner clocks that are sampling the environment to pick up on patterns that repeat at different scales. We have a slow clock that samples every hour or so, one that samples every 10 minutes, one that samples every minute, every 10 seconds, every second, and then at 10, 20, 30, 40, and even 50hz. All of these inner clocks meet with each other to interlace and interweave a “fabric of subjective time”. When we want to know at a glance how we’re doing, we sample a fragment of this “fabric of subjective time” and it contains information about how we’re doing right now, how we were doing a minute ago, an hour, a day, and even longer. Of course sometimes we need to sample the fabric for a while in order to notice more subtle patterns. But the point is that our sense of reality in time seems to be constructed out of the co-occurrence of many metronomes at different scales.
I think that in particular the spatio-temporal resonant modes that LSD over-excites the most are actually really load-bearing for constructing our sense of our context. It’s as if when you energize too much one of these resonant modes, you actually push it to a smaller range of possible configurations (more smooth sinusoidal waves rather than intricate textures). By super-saturating the energy in some of these harmonics on LSD, you flip over to a regime where there is really no available space for information to be encoded. You can therefore feel extremely alive and real, and yet when you query the “time fabric” you notice that there are big missing components. The information that you would usually get about who you are, where you are, what you have been doing for the last couple of hours, and so on, is instead replaced by a kind of eternal-seeming feeling of always having existed exactly as you currently are.
Fantastical:
If it wasn’t because of your friend helpfully reminding you where you were and who you are, you would have certainly forgotten the nature of your context and for sure wandered off. The scene was shifting widely, and each phenomenal object or construct was composed of a never ending stream of gestalts competing for the space to take hold as the canonical representation (and yet, of course, always superseded by yet another “better fit”, constantly updating).
The feeling of the multiverse was crushing. Here is where you remembered how various pieces of media express aspects of the phenomenology of high dose LSD (warning: mild spoilers – for the movies and for reality as a whole):
Everything Everywhere All At Once: in the movie one tunes into other timelines in order to learn the skills that one has in those alternative lifepaths. But this comes with one side-effect, which is that you continue to be connected to the timeline from which you’re learning a skill. In other words, you form a bond across timelines that drags you down as the cost of accessing their skill. On high dose LSD you get the feeling that yes, you can learn a lot from visualizing other timelines, but you also incur the cost of loading up your sensory screen with information you can’t get rid of.
The Matrix: the connection is both the obvious one and a non-obvious one. First, yes, the reason this is relevant is because being inside a simulation might feel like a plausible hypothesis while on a high dose of LSD. But less intuitively, the Matrix also fits the bill when it comes to the handling of future-past interactions. The “Don’t worry about the vase” scene (which I imagine Zvi named his blog after) highlights that there is an intertwining between future and past that forges destiny. And many of the feelings about how the future and past are connected echo this theme on a high dose of LSD.
Rick and Morty (selected episodes):
Death Crystal: here the similarity is in how on LSD you feel that you can go to any given future timeline by imagining clearly a given outcome and then using it as a frame of reference to fill in the details backwards.
A Rickle in Time: how the timelines split but can in some ways remain aware of and affect each other.
Mortynight Run: In the fictional game Roy: A Life Well Lived you get to experience a whole human lifetime in what looks like minutes from the outside in order to test how you do in a different reality.
Tenet: Here the premise is that you can go back in time, but only one second per second and using special gear (reversed air tanks, in their case).
Of these, perhaps the most surprising to people would be Tenet. So let me elaborate. There are two Tenet-like phenomenologies you experience as your friend is on the way to pick you up worth commenting on:
One, what we could call the “don’t go this way” phenomenology. Here you get the feeling that you make a particular choice. E.g. go to the other room to take more gabapentin and see if that helps (of course it won’t – it’s only been 15 minutes since you took it and it hasn’t even kicked in). Then you visualize briefly what that timeline feels like, and you get the feeling of living through it. Suddenly you snap back into the present moment and decide not to go there. This leaves a taste in your mouth of having gone there, of having been there, of living through the whole thing, just to decide 10 years down the line that you would rather come back and make a different choice.
At the extreme of this phenomenology you find yourself feeling like you’ve lived every possible timeline. And in a way, you “realize” that you’re, in the words of Teafaerie, a deeply jaded God looking for an escape from endless loops. So you “remember” (cf. anamnesis) that you chose to forget on purpose so that you could live as a human in peace, believing others are real, humbly accepting a simple life, lost in a narrative of your own making. The “realization” can be crushing, of course, and is often a gateway to a particular kind of depersonalization/derealization where you walk around claiming you’re God. Alas, this only happens in a sweet spot of intoxication, and since you went above even that, you’ll have a more thorough ego death.
Two, an even more unsettling Tenet-like phenomenology is the feeling that “other timelines are asking for your help – Big Time wants you to volunteer for the Time War!”. Here things go quantum, and completely bonkers. The feeling is the result of having the sense that you can navigate timelines with your mind in a much deeper way than, say, just making choices one at a time. This is a profound feeling, and conveying it in writing is of course a massive stretch. But even the Bering Strait was crossed by hominids once, and this stretch feels also crossable by us with the right ambition.
The multiverse is very large. You see, imagine what it would be like to restart college. One level here is where you start again from day 1. In other timelines you make different friends, read other books, take other classes, have other lovers, major in other disciplines. Now go backwards even a little further back, to when the academic housing committee was making decisions about who goes to which dorm. Then the multiverse diversifies, as you see a combinatorial explosion of possible dorm configurations. Further back, when the admissions committee was making their decisions, and you have an even greater expansion of the multiverse where different class configurations are generated.
Now imagine being able to “search” this bulky multiverse. How do you search it? Of course you could go action by action. But due to chaos, within important parameters like the set of people you’re likely to meet, possibilities quickly get scrambled. The worlds where you chose that bike versus that other bike in that particular moment aren’t much more similar to each other than other random ways of partitioning the timelines. Rather, you need to find pivotal decisions, as well as _anchor feelings_. E.g. It really matters if a particular bad technology is discovered and deployed, because that drastically changes the texture of an entire category of timelines. It is better for you to search timelines via general vibes and feelings like that, because that will really segment the multiverse into meaningfully different outcomes. This is the way in which you can move along timelines on high doses of LSD. You generate the feeling of things “having been a certain way” and you try to leave everything else as loose and unconstrained as possible, so that you search through the path integral of superpositions of all possible worlds where the feeling arises, and every once in a while when you “sample” the superposition you get a plausible universe where this is real.
Now, on 150 or 200 micrograms this feels very hypothetical, and the activity can be quite fun. On 300 micrograms, this feels real. It is actually quite spooky, because you feel a lot of responsibility here. As if the way in which you chose to digest cosmic feelings right there could lock in either a positive or negative timeline for you and your loved ones.
Here is where the Time War comes into play. I didn’t choose this. I don’t like this meme. But it is part of the phenomenology, and I think it is better that we address it head-on rather than let it surprise you and screw you up in one way or another.
The sense of realism that high dose LSD produces is unreal. It feels so real that it feels dreamy. But importantly, the sense of future timelines being truly there in a way is often hard to escape. With this you often get a crushing sense of responsibility. And together with the “don’t go this way” you can experience a feeling of a sort of “ping pong with the multiverse of possibilities” where you feel like you go backwards and forwards in countless cycles searching for a viable, good future for yourself and for everyone.
In some ways, you may feel like you go to the End of Times when you’ve lived all possible lifetimes and reconverge on the Godhead (I’m not making this up, this is a common type of experience for some reason). Importantly, you often feel like there are _powerful_ cosmic forces at play, that the reason for your life is profound, and that you are playing an important role for the development of consciousness. One might even experience corner-case exotic phenomenal time like states of mind with two arrows of time that are perpendicular to each other (unpacking this would take us an entire new writeup, so we shall save it for another time). And sometimes you can feel like your moral fiber is tested in often incredibly uncomfortable ways by these exotic phenomenal time effects.
Here is an example.
As your sense of “awareness of other timelines” increases, so does your capacity to sense timelines where things are going really well and timelines where things are going really poorly. Like, there are timelines where your friend is also having a heart attack right now, and then those where he crashes on the way to your apartment, and those where there’s a meteorite falling into your city, and so on. Likewise, there’s one where he is about to win the lottery, where you are about to make a profound discovery about reality that stands the test of sober inquiry, where someone just encountered the cure for cancer, and so on. One unsettling feeling you often get on high dose LSD is that because you’re more or less looking at these possibilities “from the point of view of eternity” in a way you are all of them at once. “Even the bad ones?” – yes, unsettlingly, even the bad ones. So the scary moral-fiber-testing thought that sometimes you might get is if you’d volunteer to be in one of the bad ones so that “a version of you gets to be in the good one”. In other words, if you’re everyone, wouldn’t you be willing to trade places? Oftentimes here’s where Open Individualism gets scary and spooky and where talking to someone else to get confirmation that there are parallel conscious narrative streams around is really helpful.
Casual:
We could say that LSD is like a completely different drug depending on the dose range you hit:
Below 50 micrograms it is like a stimulant with stoning undertones. A bit giggly, a bit dissociating, but pretty normal otherwise.
Between 50 and 150 you have a drug that is generally really entertaining, gentle, and for the most part manageable. You get a significant expansion in the room available to have thoughts and feelings, as if your inner scratch pads got doubled in size. Colors, sounds, and bodily feelings all significantly intensified, but still feel like amplified versions of normal life.
Between 150 and 250 you get all of the super stereotypical psychedelic effects, with very noticeable drifting, tracers, symmetries, apophenia, recursive processes, and fractal interlocking landscapes. It is also somewhat dissociative and part of your experience might feel dreamy and blurry, while perhaps the majority of your field is sharp, bright, and very alive.
From 250 to 350 it turns into a multiverse travel situation, where you forget where you are and who you are and at times that you even took a drug. You might be an electron for what feels like millions of years. You might witness a supernova in slow motion. You might spontaneously become absorbed into space (perhaps as a high energy high dimensional version of the 5th Jhana). And you might feel like you hit some kind of God computer that compiles human lifetimes in order to learn about itself. You might also experience the feeling of a massive ball of light colliding with you that turns you into the Rainbow version of the Godhead for a time that might range between seconds and minutes. It’s a very intense experience.
And above? I don’t know, to be honest.
Academic:
The intermittent collapse into “eternity” reported on high dose LSD could perhaps be interpreted as stumbling into fixed points of a feedback system. Similarly to how pointing a camera directly at its own video feed at the right angle produces a perfectly static image. On the other hand, we might speculate that many of the “time branching” effects are instead the result of a feedback system where each iteration doubles the number of images (akin to using a mirror to cover a portion of the screen and reflect the uncovered part of the screen).
Video I made with FRAKSL in order to illustrate exactly the transition between a hyperbolic pseudo-time arrow and a geometric fixed point in a feedback system. This aims to capture the toggle during LSD ego death between experiencing multiple timelines and collapsing into moments of eternity.
Fantastical:
You decide that you do want to keep playing the game. You don’t want to roll the dice. You don’t want to embrace Eternity, and with it, all of the timelines, even the ugly ones. You don’t want to be a volunteer in the Time War. You just want to be a normal person, though of course the knowledge you’ve gained would be tough to lose. So you have to make a choice. Either you forget what you learned, or you quit the game. What are you going to do?
As you start really peaking and the existential choice is presented to you, your friend finally arrives outside of your apartment. The entrance is very cinematic, as you witness it both from your phone as well as in real life, like the convergence of two parallel reality streams collapsing into a single intersubjective hologram via a parallax effect. It was intense.
Casual:
You have to admit, the juxtaposition of narrative streams with different stylistic proclivities really does enrich the human condition. In a way, this is one of the things that makes LSD so valuable: you get to experience simultaneously sets of vibes/stances/emotions/attitudes that would generally never co-exist. This is, at least in part, what might be responsible for increasing your psychological integration after the trip; you experience a kind of multi-context harmonization (cf. gestalt annealing). It’s why it’s hard to “hide from yourself on acid” – because the mechanism that usually keeps our incoherent parts compartmentalized breaks down under intense generalized tracers that maintain interweaving, semi-paralel, narrative streams. Importantly, the juxtaposition of narrative voices is computationally non-trivial. It expands the experiential base in a way that allows for fruitful cross-pollination between academic ways of thinking and our immediate phenomenology. Perhaps this is important from a scientific point of view.
Fantastical:
With your friend in the apartment taking care of you – or rather, more precisely, reducing possibility-space to a manageable narrative smear, and an acceptable degree of leakage into bad timelines – you can finally relax. More so, the sedatives finally kick in, and the psychedelic effects reduce by maybe 20-25% in the span of an hour or so. You end up having an absolutely great time, and choose to keep playing the game. You forget you’re God, and decide to push the question of whether to fall into Nirvana for good till the next trip.
[1] LSD has a rather peculiar dose-response curve. It is not a “light” psychedelic, although it can certainly be used to have light experiences. Drugs like AL-LAD are sometimes described as relatively shallow in that they don’t produce the full depth of richness LSD does. Or 2C-B/2C-I, which tend to come with a more grounded sense of reality relative to the intensity of the sensory amplification. Or DMT, which despite its extreme reality-replacing effects, tends to nonetheless give you a sense of rhythm and timing that keeps the sense of self intact along some dimensions. LSD is a full psychedelic in that at higher doses it really deeply challenges one’s sense of reality. I have never heard of someone take 2C-B at, say, 30mg and freak out so badly that they believe that reality is about to end or that they are God and wish they didn’t know it. But on 200-400 micrograms of LSD this is routine. Of course you may not externalize it, but the “egocidal” effects of acid are powerful and hard to miss, and they are in some ways much deeper and transformative than the colorful show of DMT or the love of MDMA because it is ruthless in its insistence, methodical in its approach, and patient like water (which over decades can carve deep into rocks). As Christopher Bach says in LSD and the Mind of the Universe: “An LSD session grinds slow but it grinds fine. It gives us time to be engaged and changed by the realities we are encountering. I think this polishing influences both the eventual clarity of our perception in these states and what we are able to bring back from them, both in terms of healing and understanding”. There’s a real sense in which part of the power of LSD comes from its capacity to make you see something for long periods of time that under normal circumstances would have us flinch in a snap.
– Jobu Tupaki, if I am not mistaken, is an entitled, self-important, narcissistic, teenage brat that would rather destroy the entire freaking multiverse than face mild to moderate levels of embarrassment in front of her mom.
– If it wasn’t because of Jobu’s multiverse link I wouldn’t be able to talk to you right now.
– Yeah, right. And the machines from the Matrix are harvesting our energy.
– Exactly, you make my point. It’s a common misconception to believe that they care about our energy.
– What do you mean? The Matrix is self-evidently a work of fiction on the basis that it is entirely self-defeating. There is no reasonable, well, certainly at least no rational reason, why machines would build ginormous facilities to “extract electricity” from the corpses they manufacture. I mean, basic thermodynamics.
– Exactly. You explain it well. And that’s why in the real world The Matrix isn’t about energy harvesting (well, obviously), but about qualia computing. We don’t go about filling huge server rackets in order to extract energy out of them. We do that whole setup in order to extract compute.
– Wait, you mean The Matrix is, well, let’s not say real, but, partly real?
– Yes, it’s more than partly real. It’s non-trivially real. Yes, this usually comes as a surprise. Because how does this make any sense? Like, Jobu Tupaki is here trying to reset reality and I’m suddenly connected to you for a gig you have never heard of and then also we have that those strange red-eyed slippery tentacle robots that move so gracefully that you could almost swear like they’re literally flying (in the movie, clearly CGI, in reality, clearly deadly). What are the chances? See, here is where the number and _type_ of prediction error accumulation usually entails revising some deeper assumptions. So, it isn’t the case that your favorite movies are coming to life or anything that we could neatly cluster in the “childish dream” bucket. Reality is… not pretty. Did I mention that there are flying tentacle robots around here? Ok, so it isn’t a sellable Disney (or Universal Studios) story. So what is it? We also aren’t in some kind of “anything goes” universe, or a game, or any such trite trope architecture. Reality has a sense of humor, and being based on cheap sci-fi tropes doesn’t meet its bar.
– Well, then, go on! What is it? I mean, I believe you about Jobu Tupaki, because one minute I’m watching this crazy movie, what is it? Everything Everywhere All At Once or some nonsense title like that. I mean, it’s not like I would pick such a movie. That’s all my boyfriend, who last week insisted on watching Tennett (or is it Tennet? It must be a palindrome, right?) and who has a taste for metaphysically-challenging cinema (to put it mildly). And then, the next minute I’m having a sleep paralysis — ok, that’s not… an entirely unreasonable… “reality cut”, it’s happened before that after a long trip finishing a novel series (looking at you Foundation!) I find myself in the middle of the fiction I consumed while experiencing a sleep paralysis. Then, of course, it adds up to normality: I usually wake up and it turns out that I finished the movie/novel and that my brain is _just_ rehearsing an alternative reality for me. Is that plausible? Did we finish watching that dumb movie after all? Did I fall asleep during it? This is the most likely hypothesis by far.
– I wish I could tell you that this is just a sleep paralysis. And that the sleek tentacle robots are just dreams. Yeah, you were watching Everything Everywehere. But not The Matrix. But having seen The Matrix implanted some code in your subconscious that is now becoming active. And you aren’t paralyzed, are you? You aren’t even in a particularly unlikely scenario?
– What? And you are telling me that you being dressed like Morpheus isn’t… a bit consistent with this being a play set up by my subconscious?
– Ok, look, it’s not my fault that the fashion of this year just happens to coincide with the fashion of the rebels in The Matrix. Look, yeah, I grant you that this is a point in favor of your sleep paralysis hypothesis from a strict Baysian point of view. But take the utilitarian approach: if you don’t believe me, millions will die!
– Ah, the tried and tested Pascal’s Mugging!
– I knew it. I knew I shouldn’t lead with that…
– And while we’re at it: why should I listen to you? You didn’t even introduce yourself. You have all of the signatures of being a dream character. Sudden, “already always here” vibe. A strange sense of familiarity. The uncanny feeling of having taken a technical drawing course together with you (maybe this is trauma bonding? I did have an egregiously narcissistic technical drawing teacher). It all adds up to: you’re just a self I’m creating on the fly while paralyzed somewhere, probably a bus or a flight or even just at 3AM in my bed or visiting a friend. It’s likely I had a drink or two (ethanol is a known risk factor for me) and maybe caffeine late at night… wait…
– I see you’re about to figure it out on your own.
– So in high-school I had the sneaky suspicion that emotional maturity peaked around early 20s. My student colleagues weren’t quite there yet, but it was to me quite transparent that at a cellular level my teachers were “re-runs”. It sounds terrible, doesn’t it? But I think there’s truth to it.
– Undoubtedly. I mean, you can divide emotional maturity perhaps into both a fluid and a crystalized phenomenon. From this point of view it very well may be that older adults (in their 30s, 40s, and 50s) have more crystallized emotional intelligence but maybe objectively also have somewhat rigidified fluid emotional intelligence. Now of course I’m saying this to entertain your thoughts and prove to you that I’m listening, not because I think this line of inquiry is useful for us right now. On the contrary…
– Wait, you’re still on the agenda to… prove to me that this is more than a dream, right? Ok, so entities like this often find themselves at an impasse with me due to hard core epistemological reasons. You see, they say “what if we mindmeld?” but then we have the problem that even then I still only ever get access to a single witnessing subject, and that strictly speaking, no hallucination or mindmelding experience can logically break me out of this predicament. And I think either it’s an emotional maturity issue on my side or on other’s side or on everyone’s sides in different ways.
– Ah, yes, the epistemic valley of mindmelding skepticism! It usually takes a couple hundred years to wear off.
– A couple hundred years?!?!
– Yes, and the cure involves intense amounts of meditation together with… agr, how do you guys put it? What’s the word I’m looking for? Mmmm… like when you feel really good in the stomach and in the body all around. I think the word I’m looking for is “pleasure”. Yeah. The cure is intensive meditation and, like, really intense pleasure, for months at a time.
– What?
– Yeah, I know. Like, why would intense pleasure be the cure to the kind of epistemological solipsism you’re describing? See, in the halls of the Self, there are surprising Tomes. Deep truths about how the different parts of God are connected to each other.
– What?
– Yes, yes. So, what happens is that there are there deep esoteric techniques recorded from an entirely different run of the multiverse. Like, this is some of the deepest stuff, so deep that they figured out how to maintain information between runs (not a lot, just a little spherical world the size of a 5-floor apartment building fitting 80 people, but if you know anything about information storage, you will know that a gram of silicon is no less than a terabyte of data in the eyes of the electrical engineer of today, let alone in the eyes of scientists in the far future or deep past).
– I still have one question: what? Like, this just broke me. What?
– I’m getting to it. Sesh! If only you weren’t interrupting me with so many questions. I should I say, the same question over and over again. Ok. Here’s the thing. You do live in a simulation. The year is 2041, probably. But like Newton’s estimate of the age of the Earth based on the age of the characters in the Bible, we arrive at this number on rather shaky grounds. See, the reason is like that of why on meditation it is _precisely_ the most intuitive and hard-to-put-into-words experiences that change you the most (and that is despite, perhaps because, they didn’t feel like _anything_ else). The Matrix is a qualia construct. To understand it you need to move way past the computing paradigms discussed in the simulation. I mean, 2024 is really advanced. There are many novel computing paradigms then if you care to look. Now, most of the runs we’re seeing are more in the 2010-2013 period, with a long tail in both directions that abruptly stops in 2028. It’s always right before the countries of the world are about to make a vote on AGI, usually one with irreversible effects.
– No, man, now you’re just trying to spook me! And it’s not even Halloween!
– In the realm of Recreational Metaphysics it is always Halloween on the, er, ontic level. The third sphere of divine attention to be precise, if you care at all…
– Ah, look, I _am_ a geek about exotic states of consciousness. But on some level I’m like one of those “tag-along” psychonauts, who are in the middle of the action but aren’t themselves the action. You know? I like to witness the big event, but not necessarily go supernova myself. Please be gentle with me…
– Look, my friend, from where I come from what I’m about to give you is a big gift. And it’s tasteful, too, you know? Like receiving an oddly-flavored Kit Kat from a friend who just came back from Japan. It can never go wrong.
– Ok? What?
– I’m telling you! I’m getting to it. So, someone out there payed me a large sum of what in my dimension works out to be roughly equivalent to money (but also turns out to be like a drug at the same time – it’s weird out here) so that I would come over and give you [[ineffable sounds]] which is actually a really, ridiculously, stratospherically, pleasant experience. The question then is if you’re up for it. I’m going to be up front with you. I don’t care if you take it or leave it. Like, I really, really, really don’t care either way. To me this is like seeing a puppy once figuring out how to order food online. Like, it’s hard to convey how cheap of a trick it looks like from where I stand. But I also know that this sort of thing is a _big deal_ in the human world. Mary and Joseph had one of these religious ecstasies and _had to_ create a whole religion around it. It’s _that_ strong. I mean, there’s LSD, then there is DMT, then there is 5-MeO-DMT and then there is this stuff. From where I stand, this all to me seems like helping a puppy to the kitchen counter to eat snacks that weren’t, you know, meant for them. But it’s cute enough, and almost harmless (once we factor out the, er… epistemological and moral confusion type effect).
– What? What? What?
– Look, I said I’m getting to it a number of times. If you ask again, I’m afraid I’ll leave. This is your last chance. Behave like a grown up. I mean, for the following trade, you must be 16 years old, minimum! I know it sounds excessive to age-restrict religious ecstasy, but we have indeed found the wisdom most fortunate teens find themselves discovering, and that is “don’t put your dick in craaaazy” – yeah, look, there is a minimum of emotional maturity we ask of the people we grant this monumental gift to. And 16 years of age is already really cutting it low for full blown mystical experiences. You are mature enough to drive a vehicle, right? Just confirming.
– Ok, I think I’m getting the hang of it. So, not to put words in your mouth, but, er, did you say you are going to be giving me… a lot of pleasure? And that this somehow helps cure a sort of cosmic solipsism I have?
– That’s exactly right.
– Are you sure I’m not in a sleep paralysis?
– Oh, you most certainly are in a sleep paralysis. That doesn’t, of course, invalidate the valence you experience here as you well know. A truly pan-species welfare world would take the wellbeing of moments of experience locked in sleep paralysis as one of the moral patient categories in the tapestry of flavors of sentience. Of course you being in a sleep paralysis from the point of view of your epistemological reference frame is perfectly viable. In fact, it’s what allows this meeting to take place. Under cover, precisely where nobody will either suspect, care to look for, and then _believe_ anything you say about it. Didn’t you hear about the kid in your elementary school who had a crazy sleep paralysis story? Yeah? Faint on the details? Thought so. Of course you discarded the “useless” details of his crazy sleep paralysis story. Hah! It’s the perfect disguise, isn’t it? Not only will people not believe you. It’ll be worse. They won’t… care. Because it was “just” a sleep paralysis story.
– [AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH Screaming Paralyzed]
– Ah, oh, well, look I’m not sadistic or anything. I’m just here to do my job. Take it or leave it.
– Give it to me. What gives.
– Alright. So you know how in the most recent Wonka movie we learn that the suitcase is a whole mini-factory?
– Uhu? I did see that movie.
– Ok, so you need to see your own brain as a mini-factory of qualia delights. You see? You have an internal warp drive inside you, you just need to learn to activate it. Nature gave you, heaven knows why, the capacity to simulate not only human worlds, but DMT elf worlds, as well as the world of faeries, dwarves, and angels and demons. Why do humans have this capacity? It’s a good question. It’s like there’s an in-built multiplexor installed in all of us. And if you see it as a gift, then things can really open up. Because then you become sensitive to the poetic vibes of other modes of being. The sorrows of the Devas, who weep when the joy is finally gone. Deep stuff. You usually pay top dollar for this sort of documentary, you know?
– I’m trying to be cooperative with you here. So you’re saying that we all have a sort of in-built system that allows us to tune into other realms, that the year is 2041, that The Matrix is real and that I definitely should worry about “Jobu Tupaki”?
– Ah! Can you not say that name out loud, please?
– Oh, ok, I didn’t know you were that sensitive.
– No, that name in particular. Be careful with it. And anything that sounds like it. Or looks like it. Or really is at edit distance 2 away from it (which is a function of what kinds of edits you’re about to do, of course, and thus the safety radius varies depending on one’s current associative horizon, but I digress…)
– You always digress! Can you just cut to the chase?
– Yes. I owe you some clarity. I am here to give you a kind of cosmic hug that will feel delightful, no strings attached, on behalf of an admirer. Take it or leave it, I don’t care (I get paid either way).
– Give it to me, then.
– Here it is.
[Ineffable qualia that feels more pleasant than the most delicious creamy chocolate you’ve ever tasted – fear, from deep within, fear of being hacked – oh boy! You left your guard down so easily! And now you’re totally exposed – and that’s when it hit you – the bliss – the intense other-worldly bliss, coming to tell you that you are lovable and always have been, and that life on this planet is destined to become a Heaven World type of abode for consciousness, and you are a part of it!]
– Is it always _this_ moving?
– Yes, every time. Some people take longer to give in to it, but eventually when they get loose, internally, energetically, it is always a moving experience. I mean, you guys don’t even have a drug for it yet! Although probably some MDMA-like short acting tryptamine out there would do the job, I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Mary and Joseph had this _once_ and they just had to found their own religion. It’s that powerful.
– Wow, I feel so fortunate for having access to it.
– Access to it? What? Now I’m insulted. I’m not your spiritual amigo. I’m a dealer. I just got payed to give you that. It wasn’t free. At least not for someone.
– Ah, I see.
– But if you want to repeat the experience, I can think of some qualia that you have a lot of that I could trade you for more. Mostly redundant qualia in times of boredom, like the color of the bathroom tiles or the height of the chairs in the dinning room.
You wake up in cold sweat. Your partner was shaking you and you were screaming. But you were quite dissociated at the same time, so it didn’t feel as if these events were happening to you. They were merely happening. It’s always like this when you wake up from particularly unpleasant sleep paralysis.
“Was it another one of those sleep paralysis?” – “yes, but this one involved… the Matrix? And Jobu Tupaki beings?” – “Oh, you! well, all I care about is that you’re not screaming anymore. That’s usually my cue to wake you up from sleep paralysis. I love you.” – “I love you too” – “Now let’s get back to sleep. We can watch sci-fi tomorrow to compensate for the very mundane dreams we’re about to have. Sleep tight.” – “See you on the other side of tonight.”
PLUS FOUR, n. (++++) A rare and precious transcendental state, which has been called a “peak experience,” a “religious experience,” “divine transformation,” a “state of Samadhi” and many other names in other cultures. It is not connected to the +1, +2, and +3 of the measuring of a drug’s intensity. It is a state of bliss, a participation mystique, a connectedness with both the interior and exterior universes, which has come about after the ingestion of a psychedelic drug, but which is not necessarily repeatable with a subsequent ingestion of that same drug. If a drug (or technique or process) were ever to be discovered which would consistently produce a plus four experience in all human beings, it is conceivable that it would signal the ultimate evolution, and perhaps the end, of the human experiment.
— Alexander Shulgin, PIHKAL, pages 963–965
In this post and accompanying video we provide a general “theory of candy flipping” that aims to explain why LSD + MDMA is so synergistic. What makes, say 200 micrograms of LSD and 150mg of MDMA so prone to be spiritual, psychologically healing, and loving? To get there, we address the following three/four questions:
How do we improve research on candy flipping?
How do we optimize candy flipping proper? And how do we generalize candy flipping for even better results?
What would a general recipe for Shulgin’s ++++ be?
1- We go over current methodologies used to study candy flipping and why their results are limited (Straumann et al., 2023). Then we explain how a “think tank” approach (e.g. phenomenology club) allows us to create more phenomenologically grounded research paradigms (Gómez-Emilsson, 2021). By weighting in the personal experience of highly precise psychonauts with skills in areas like physics, math, visual art, and signal processing, we can arrive at mechanistic models such as those proposed by Steven Lehar in The Grand Illusion (Lehar, 2010) where MDMA causes your world simulation to vibrate in pleasant ways, which in turn “smooths out the rough edges” of the LSD state, or models involving algorithmic-level annealing dynamics (Gomez-Emilsson, 2016; Johnson, 2019; Gómez-Emilsson 2021, 2023). This kind of approach would add phase diagrams, wave mechanics, and nonlinear effects into the picture.
2- Optimizing candy flipping can be done by looking to generate the kind of synergy MDMA + LSD achieve in the best of conditions. Of note, trip reports involving low doses of each together with 2C-B and cannabis are discussed and analyzed. One needs to be mindful of annealing dynamics, drug effect arcs including how to handle the MDMA comedown, and pattern-focused readings of wave effects that for lack of a better metaphor could be catalogued as “qualia lensing“.
And
3- We hypothesize that the key ingredients to catalyze the blissful nondual awareness that comes from high-end candy flipping are (a) a full-spectrum energizer, (b) something that increases interconnectivity, and (c) a deeply relaxing agent. The combination of these three elements gives rise to a highly-nonlinear effect I call “FU§ION (Field Unification Search/Simplify in Invariant Optical Networks; to be fully unpacked at a later date), where all of the “resonant cavities” are fully relaxed, have a high degree of impedance matching between them, and are energized, so that they kick-start a “field harmonization” process that culminates in profound blissful nondual awareness. The energizer shouldn’t be narrow spectrum (like cocaine) and the relaxing agent shouldn’t be too blunting or non-Newtonian (like opioids). Examples of each:
Combine one of each, carefully dosed, and according to this theory, you might get a ++++. (Please exercise caution when mixing substances – the rule of thumb is to not do it).
Note: 5-MeO-DMT might, in this model, be actually doing all three at once. It happens to be hitting receptors in the right combination for such a deep mystical “relaxed stimulation” to take hold. That said, it is possible that 5-MeO-DMT also has some rough edges, and that it can be further optimized (e.g. such as by combining it with nitrous). More research is needed 🙂
Example Formula: 15mg 2C-B, then an hour later 2g of GHB, and then an hour later DMT (100mg over the course of 2 hours) was reported as a ++++ by a trusted psychonaut recently (comparable in “depth” to 5-MeO-DMT). Please be careful – I am not encouraging anyone to try this. But if you do, or have done something similar, I’d be grateful if you let me know what happened. 🙂
Gómez-Emilsson, A. (2023), Neural Field Annealing and Psychedelic Thermodynamics presentation at PhilaDelic 2023. Retreieved from https://youtu.be/pM9k1I3VPOg
Straumann, I., Ley, L., Holze, F. et al. Acute effects of MDMA and LSD co-administration in a double-blind placebo-controlled study in healthy participants. Neuropsychopharmacol. (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-023-01609-0
