poetry

Posthuman Art: Towards Full-Spectrum Positive Valence Amplification

Posted on by algekalipso

Everyone says love hurts, but that is not true. Loneliness hurts. Rejection hurts. Losing someone hurts. Envy hurts. Everyone gets these things confused with love, but in reality love is the only thing in this world that covers up all pain and makes someone feel wonderful again. Love is the only thing in this world that does not hurt.

 

― Meša Selimović

Excerpt from the wonderful conversation between Lucas Perry, Sam Barker, and David Pearce posted on June 24 (2020) at the Future of Life Institute Podcast (where Mike Johnson and I have previously participated). [Emphasis mine].

Lucas Perry: For this first section, I’m basically interested in probing the releases that you already have done, Sam, and exploring them and your inspiration for the track titles and the soundscapes that you’ve produced. Some of the background and context for this is that much of this seems to be inspired by and related to David’s work, in particular the Hedonistic Imperative. I’m at first curious to know, Sam, how did you encounter David’s work, and what does it mean for you?

Sam Barker: David’s work was sort of arriving in the middle of a series of realizations, and kind of coming from a starting point of being quite disillusioned with music, and a little bit disenchanted with the vagueness, and the terminology, and the imprecision of the whole thing. I think part of me has always wanted to be some kind of scientist, but I’ve ended up at perhaps not the opposite end, but quite far away from it.

Lucas Perry: Could explain what you mean by vagueness and imprecision?

Sam Barker: I suppose the classical idea of what making music is about has a lot to do with the sort of western idea of individualism and about self-expression. I don’t know. There’s this romantic idea of artists having these frenzied creative bursts that give birth to the wonderful things, that it’s some kind of struggle. I just was feeling super disillusioned with all of that. Around that time, 2014 or 15, I was also reading a lot about social media, reading about behavioral science, trying to figure what was going on in this arena and how people are being pushed in different directions by this algorithmic system of information distribution. That kind of got me into this sort of behavioral science side of things, like the addictive part of the variable-ratio reward schedule with likes. It’s a free dopamine dispenser kind of thing. This was kind of getting me into reading about behavioral science and cognitive science. It was giving me a lot of clarity, but not much more sort of inspiration. It was basically like music.

Dance music especially is a sort of complex behavioral science. You do this and people do that. It’s all deeply ingrained. I sort of imagine the DJ as a sort Skinner box operator pulling puppet strings and making people behave in different ways. Music producers are kind of designing clever programs using punishment and reward, or suspense and release, and controlling people’s behavior. The whole thing felt super pushy and not a very inspiring conclusion. Looking at the problem from a cognitive science point of view is just the framework that helped me to understand what the problem was in the first place, so this kind of problem of being manipulative. Behavioral science is kind of saying what we can make people do. Cognitive psychology is sort of figuring out why people do that. That was my entry point into cognitive psychology, and that was kind of the basis for Debiasing.

There’s always been sort of a parallel for me between what I make and my state of mind. When I’m in a more positive state, I tend to make things I’m happier with, and so on. Getting to the bottom of what tricks were, I suppose, with dance music. I kind of understood implicitly, but I just wanted to figure out why things worked. I sort of came to the conclusion it was to do with a collection of biases we have, like the confirmation bias, and the illusion of truth effect, and the mere exposure effect. These things are like the guardians of four/four supremacy. Dance music can be pretty repetitive, and we describe it sometimes in really aggressive terminology. It’s a psychological kind of interaction.

Cognitive psychology was leading me to Kaplan’s law of the instrument. The law of the instrument says that if you give a small boy a hammer, he’ll find that everything he encounters requires pounding. I thought that was a good metaphor. The idea is that we get so used to using tools in a certain way that we lose sight of what it is we’re trying to do. We act in the way that the tool instructs us to do. I thought, what if you take away the hammer? That became a metaphor for me, in a sense, that David clarified in terms of pain reduction. We sort of put these painful elements into music in a way to give this kind of hedonic contrast, but we don’t really consider that that might not be necessary. What happens when we abolish these sort of negative elements? Are the results somehow released from this process? That was sort of the point, up until discovering the Hedonistic Imperative.

I think what I was needing at the time was a sort of framework, so I had the idea that music was decision making. To improve the results, you have to ask better questions, make better decisions. You can make some progress looking at the mechanics of that from a psychology point of view. What I was sort of lacking was a purpose to frame my decisions around. I sort of had the idea that music was a sort of a valence carrier, if you like, and that it could be tooled towards a sort of a greater purpose than just making people dance, which was for Debiasing the goal, really. It was to make people dance, but don’t use the sort of deeply ingrained cues that people used to, and see if that works.

What was interesting was how broadly it was accepted, this first EP. There were all kinds of DJs playing it in techno, ambient, electro, all sorts of different styles. It reached a lot of people. It was as if taking out the most functional element made it more functional and more broadly appealing. That was the entry point to utilitarianism. There was sort of an accidentally utilitarian act, in a way, to sort of try and maximize the pleasure and minimize the pain. I suppose after landing in utilitarianism and searching for some kind of a framework for a sense of purpose in my work, the Hedonistic Imperative was probably the most radical, optimistic take on the system. Firstly, it put me in a sort of mindset where it granted permission to explore sort of utopian ideals, because I think the idea of pleasure is a little bit frowned upon in the art world. I think the art world turns its nose up at such direct cause and effect. The idea that producers could be paradise engineers of sorts, or the precursors to paradise engineers, that we almost certainly would have a role in a kind of sensory utopia of the future.

There was this kind of permission granted. You can be optimistic. You can enter into your work with good intentions. It’s okay to see music as a tool to increase overall wellbeing, in a way. That was kind of the guiding idea for my work in the studio. I’m trying, these days, to put more things into the system to make decisions in a more conscious way, at least where it’s appropriate to. This sort of notion of reducing pain and increasing pleasure was the sort of question I would ask at any stage of decision making. Did this thing that I did serve those ends? If not, take a step back and try a different approach.

There’s something else to be said about the way you sort of explore this utopian world without really being bogged down. You handle the objections in such a confident way. I called it a zero gravity world of ideas. I wanted to bring that zero gravity feeling to my work, and to see that technology can solve any problem in this sphere. Anything’s possible. All the obstacles are just imagined, because we fabricate these worlds ourselves. These are things that were really instructive for me, as an artist.

Lucas Perry: That’s quite an interesting journey. From the lens of understanding cognitive psychology and human biases, was it that you were seeing those biases in dance music itself? If so, what were those biases in particular?

Sam Barker: On both sides, on the way it’s produced and in the way it’s received. There’s sort of an unspoken acceptance. You’re playing a set and you take a kick drum out. That signals to people to perhaps be alert. The lighting engineer, they’ll maybe raise the lights a little bit, and everybody knows that the music is going into sort of a breakdown, which is going to end in some sort of climax. Then, at that point, the kick drum comes back in. We all know this pattern. It’s really difficult to understand why that works without referring to things like cognitive psychology or behavioral science.

Lucas Perry: What does the act of debiasing the reception and production of music look like and do to the music and its reception?

Sam Barker: The first part that I could control was what I put into it. The experiment was whether a debiased piece of dance music could perform the same functionality, or whether it really relies on these deeply ingrained cues. Without wanting to sort of pat myself on the back, it kind of succeeded in its purpose. It was sort of proof that this was a worthy concept.

Lucas Perry: You used the phrase, earlier, four/four. For people who are not into dance music, that just means a kick on each beat, which is ubiquitous in much of house and techno music. You’ve removed that, for example, in your album Debiasing. What are other things that you changed from your end, in the production of Debiasing, to debias the music from normal dance music structure?

Sam Barker: It was informing the structure of what I was doing so much that I wasn’t so much on a grid where you have predictable things happening. It’s a very highly formulaic and structured thing, and that all keys into the expectation and this confirmation bias that people, I think, get some kind of kick from when the predictable happens. They say, yep. There you go. I knew that was going to happen. That’s a little dopamine rush, but I think it’s sort of a cheap trick. I guess I was trying to get the tricks out of it, in a way, so figuring out what they were, and trying to reduce or eliminate them was the process for Debiasing.

Lucas Perry: That’s quite interesting and meaningful, I think. Let’s just take trap music. I know exactly how trap music is going to go. It has this buildup and drop structure. It’s basically universal across all dance music. Progressive house in the 2010s was also exactly like this. What else? Dubstep, of course, same exact structure. Everything is totally predictable. I feel like I know exactly what’s going to happen, having listened to electronic music for over a decade.

Sam Barker: It works, I think. It’s a tried and tested formula, and it does the job, but when you’re trying to imagine states beyond just getting a little kick from knowing what was going to happen, that’s the place that I was trying to get to, really.

Lucas Perry: After the release of Debiasing in 2018, which was a successful attempt at serving this goal and mission, you then discovered the Hedonistic Imperative by David Pearce, and kind of leaned into consequentialism, it seems. Then, in 2019, you had two releases. You had BARKER 001 and you had Utility. Now, Utility is the album which most explicitly adopts David Pearce’s work, specifically in the Hedonistic Imperative. You mentioned electronic dance producers and artists in general can be sort of the first wave of, or can perhaps assist in paradise engineering, insofar as that will be possible in the near to short terms future, given advancements in technology. Is that sort of the explicit motivation and framing around those two releases of BARKER 001 and Utility?

Sam Barker: BARKER 001 was a few tracks that were taken out of the running for the album, because they didn’t sort of fit the concept. Really, I knew the last track was kind of alluding to the album. Otherwise, it was perhaps not sort of thematically linked. Hopefully, if people are interested in looking more into what’s behind the music, you can lead people into topics with the concept. With Utility, I didn’t want to just keep exploring cognitive biases and unpicking dance music structurally. It’s sort of a paradox, because I guess the Hedonistic Imperative argues that pleasure can exist without purpose, but I really was striving for some kind of purpose with the pleasure that I was getting from music. That sort of emerged from reading the Hedonistic Imperative, really, that you can apply music to this problem of raising the general level of happiness up a notch. I did sort of worry that by trying to please, it wouldn’t work, that it would be something that’s too sickly sweet. I mean, I’m pretty turned off by pop music, and there was this sort of risk that it would end up somewhere like that. That’s it, really. Just looking for a higher purpose with my work in music.

Lucas Perry: David, do you have any reactions?

David Pearce: Well, when I encountered Utility, yes, I was thrilled. As you know, essentially I’m a writer writing in quite heavy sub-academic prose. Sam’s work, I felt, helps give people a glimpse of our glorious future, paradise engineering. As you know, the reviews were extremely favorable. I’m not an expert critic or anything like that. I was just essentially happy and thrilled at the thought. It deserves to be mainstream. It’s really difficult, I think, to actually evoke the glorious future we are talking about. I mean, I can write prose, but in some sense music can evoke paradise better, at least for many people, than prose.

And it continues on. I highly recommend listening to the whole podcast: it is wonderfully edited and musical pieces referenced in the interview are brought up in real time for you to listen to. Barker also made a playlist of songs specifically for this podcast, which are played during the second half of the recording. It is delightful to listen to music that you know was produced with the explicit purpose of increasing your wellbeing. A wholesome message at last! Amazing art inspired by the ideology of Paradise Engineering, arriving near you… very soon.

As an aside, I think that shared visions of paradise are really essential for solving coordination problems. So…

Please join me in putting on Barker’s track Paradise Engineering, closing your eyes, and imagining- in detail- what the creation of an Institute for Paradise Engineering on a grand scale would look like. What would a positive Manhattan Project of Consciousness entail? What is the shortest path for us to create such a large-scale initiative?

By the way: the song is only 4 minutes long. So its duration is perfect for you to use as a guiding and grounding piece of media for a positive DMT trip. Press “play” immediately after you vaporize the DMT, sit back, relax, and try to render in your mind a posthuman paradise in which Full-Spectrum Supersentient Superintelligence has won and the threat of Pure Replicators has been averted. If you do this, please let me know what you experience as a result.

Ps. It’s worth noting that Barker’s conception of art is highly aligned with QRI’s view of what art could be like. See, in particular, models 4 through 8 in our article titled Harmonic Society.

Featured image by Michael Aaron Coleman

Harmonic Society (4/4): Art as Valence Modulation and Future Affective Language

Posted on by algekalipso

The following essay* was recently published in the Berlin-based art magazine Art Against Art (buy issue).

The essay offers eight different models of art: models 1 through 4 have been discussed in academic literature and the current intellectual zeitgeist, while models 5 through 8 are new, original, and the direct result of recent insights about consciousness as uncovered by modern neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and the work of the Qualia Research Institute.

Below you will find models 7 and 8, which conclude this series of posts. (See previous models: 1 & 2, 3 & 4, and 5 & 6).

7. Valence Modulation

What is the difference between indifference and interest, boredom and thrill, despair and bliss? Pleasure! A few grains of this magic ingredient are dearer than a king’s treasure, and we have it a plenty here in Utopia. It pervades into everything we do and everything we experience. We sprinkle it in our tea.

The universe is cold. Fun is the fire that melts the blocks of hardship and creates a bubbling celebration of life.

It is the birth right of every creature, a right no less sacred for having been trampled upon since the beginning of time.
– Letter From Utopia by Nick Bostrom

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Photo by Andrés Silva (aka. El Capitán). Claudia Silva (in the picture).

We are now approaching the point at which we will finally start cooking with peanut oil, so to speak. We will finally start thinking about how to build extremely good art from first principles. The ‘Art as Valence Modulation’ model builds on top of the previous model where art involves messing with the brain’s energy parameter. To explain this model we need to introduce two additional concepts:

  1. Neural Annealing, and
  2. The Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV)

Neural annealing is a concept we developed at QRI to extend the entropic disintegration framework.[1] Namely, the most beneficial use of ‘energy’ is to direct it towards the brain’s natural harmonics in order to carve out the presence of a naturally blissful state in everyday life. This process works on a progression that goes like this:

  1. Energy application
  2. Entropic disintegration
  3. Search/self-reorganization
  4. Neural annealing

Together with neural annealing, STV provides an answer for why we experience intensely rewarding states of consciousness from art. Here is where some of the theories that we have been working on come into play. In particular, we hypothesize that when highly-energized states of consciousness follow an adequate cooling schedule, they can give rise to highly ordered states that are experienced as very pleasant and which can carve good attractor states into the brain in the long term. Making an analogy with metallurgy, with annealing, you can increase the regularity of the microscopic structure of metal by heating it above the recrystallization temperature and letting it cool. This results in changed material properties (such as reduced hardness and increased ductility). We hypothesize that something along these lines also takes place in brains. Neural annealing facilitates solving complex constraint satisfaction problems at the perceptual, emotional, and conceptual level. The higher energy enables quick search between possible configurations that satisfy as many constraints as possible (over- stepping the local maxima we are usually stuck within normal energy ranges), while the cooling process solidifies the best constraint satisfaction solutions. Critically, here the STV comes into play by proposing that the more regular the resulting neural structures are, the better they feel. Annealing smooths out inconsistencies and irregularities, which according to the STV are key sources of discomfort. Symmetry, in the form of smoothness and harmony, is why the process of annealing leaves you feeling great.

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Very high-valence annealed states of mind feel cosmic and profound in significance. Images by Adrián Regnier Chávez

In this light, art with lasting desirable mood effects does not only need to increase the energy parameter, but it also needs to know how to lower it at the right schedule in order to leave people annealed to a given desirable mindset. A lot of art that successfully raises the energy parameter nonetheless does not succeed in the ecosystem of human attention, because it does not let people cool off in the right way. More so, an excessively competitive memetic landscape that incentivizes maximum surprise tends to train people to experience too much fear of missing out to let them adequately consume art at the pace needed to leave you better off emotionally. There is genuine wisdom in going to museums with one’s smartphone turned off.

Where do we draw the line between healthy recreation and distraction? Some might say that art in the form of pictures is fine, but audiovisual is too much. Some may be fine with movies but not with VR. Others would be ok with videogames but perhaps not with drugs. Others perhaps would be ok with drugs but not with genetic modification of neuronal gene expression. Some would be ok with that but not with neural dust rewiring, and so on. The format, we would argue, is not what matters. But rather, what the annealing pattern is, which is actually what makes the effects of art stick in the long run (or not).

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Image by Joseph Matthias Young. It makes me think of the aesthetic of the meta-aesthetic.

This way of seeing art is highly generative. It gives us a research lead for how to construct new grandiose and highly-effective art. More so, the model can itself be developed as an aesthetic of its own. Perhaps we could call it the aesthetic of the meta-aesthetic. That is, an aesthetic that rewards distilling the essential reason why any aesthetic can feel good and meaningful. In the future, we might expect to see in stores “Hedonium Magazine” – which catalogues all of the peak-valence states that can be achieved with any method whatsoever, and sees the craft of perfecting neural annealing as itself the highest form of art. Here we transcend the post-modern ethos of giving each aesthetic its place in the garden of paradoxes. Yes, give each aesthetic its place, but do not let that prevent you from building a meta- narrative that ties together and clarifies the value-add of each aesthetic. No aesthetic is above being examined in terms of how it achieves neural annealing in those who consume it.

In turn, this model gives us a new understanding of what an “aesthetic” even is. According to it, an aesthetic is a system for long-term neural annealing. A one-off weird art piece might give rise to annealing and solidify random structures in your brain. An aesthetic is more than that. It is a collection of generator seeds for art pieces that give rise to a coherent form of neural annealing that is reinforced with each piece, no matter how different they may seem from one another on the surface.

A further property of neural annealing is that it is what enables you to fully experience a self-consistent worldview as if true. This bridges the gap between meaning and pleasure, and is at the core of the connection between valence and the experience of sacredness we discussed in model 4. According to model 7, sacred experiences are the result of driving the energy parameter of the brain above the recrystallization threshold and then having it cool down as it reorganizes the elements of a given target ontology and worldview. The result is an annealed mental state optimized to represent that worldview. The sense of global consistency makes the worldview feel good and true, almost as if you were able to smell truth with it. This model would say, thus, that the core mechanism behind every kind of sacred experience is the same. Which emotions, ontologies, and worldviews get annealed is what is different depending on set, setting, and aesthetic (i.e. how the energy sources and sinks were modified). But deep down, it is successful annealing that makes sacred experiences feel so compelling and good.

8. Affective Language: Harmonic Society

An idealised full-spectrum superintelligence will indeed be capable of an impartial “view from nowhere” or God’s-eye-view of the multiverse, a mathematically complete Theory Of Everything – as does modern theoretical physics, in aspiration if not achievement. But in virtue of its God’s-eye-view, full-spectrum superintelligence must also be hypersocial and supersentient: able to understand all possible first-person perspectives, the state-space of all possible minds in other Hubble volumes, other branches of the universal wavefunction (UWF) – and in other solar systems and galaxies if such beings exist within our cosmological horizon. Idealized at least, full-spectrum superintelligence will be able to understand and weigh the significance of all possible modes of experience irrespective of whether they have hitherto been recruited for information-signalling purposes.
– David Pearce, in The Biointelligence Explosion (2012)

If we succeed at developing a science of art built on top of a modern science of consciousness, what should we do with it? What would the art of a wise post-scarcity and post-suffering society look like? As far I can tell, Utopia consists of both having the system in place to keep the lights on, while being able to use the surplus energy to power blissful experiences beyond the bounds of our current conceptions.

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Harmonic Society by ALGE

The vision of Harmonic Society is that of a particular type of post-suffering utopia that resolves to optimize for good art. Referencing the models of art we’ve built upon so far: Harmonic Society (1) knows there are stakes in art and hence sidesteps the traps of semantic deflation, (2) avoids runaway signaling and Cool Kid gridlock, (3) utilizes Hipsters to explore promising new frontiers, (4) has mastery over a diverse range of conceptions of the sacred, (5) systematically explores the state-space of consciousness, (6) has a scientific and precise understanding of the energy parameter of experience, and (7) has deep knowledge of how to induce arbitrary types of neural annealing. In addition to all of this, Harmonic Society has (8) a map of all high-level aesthetics, knows what they are useful for, and can instantiate them at will.

In Harmonic Society there is always a way to smoothly transition between seemingly irreconcilable aesthetics. It deeply understands the pros and cons of different aesthetics and knows how to apply them optimally both for instrumental purposes and hedonic value.

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Image by Michael Aaron Coleman

Nowadays a lot of people who could benefit from, e.g. going to art festivals, taking acid, subpack cuddle parties, participating in plays (i.e. exposing themselves to high-end aesthetic experiences), find it hard to do so, because it is difficult to get back to work once the weekend is over after experiencing incredible bliss. A rough solution to avoid residual incompatibility between the state you annealed over on the weekend with the mindset you need today for work would be to develop a mood organ[2] that instantly puts you into any mindset you want. But perhaps a more elegant solution is to have such an advanced and detailed map of the state-space of mindsets that smooth, painless, and synergistic transitory states between arbitrary modes of being are discovered.

Thus, one could one minute be on a 5-MeO-DMT-type white light conscious void ultra-blissful state, the next minute be on a perfectly functional MDMA-like state useful for socializing, the minute after moving to a highly-focused nootropic-like systematizing state, and so on. The aesthetic to foster here is a meta-aesthetic of avoiding sharp discontinuities between mindsets, and allowing you to transition between all known awesome aesthetics. In Harmonic Society the entire state-space of consciousness is your oyster.

A further thought about Harmonic Society is that a sufficiently advanced understanding of aesthetic experience might even revolutionize our understanding of identity.
For instance, a non-trivial sense of personal diachronic identity could arise if everyone
starts to identify with e.g. a different person-specific song. If we truly understood how
valence works and we had full access to our neurocircuitry, we could in a way embody a
given work of art and interact with others in a way that is consistent with the artistic
degrees of freedom our identity allows. This way, people’s interactions could perhaps be guaranteed to be positive. The combinatorial space of possible back-and-forth interactions does not need to be small, since high-energy allows for incredibly varied states. But nonetheless we could get to a point of understanding how valence works such that we could provably demonstrate that two persons with the right neural implementations will always have positive-sum interactions no matter what.

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Identity in Harmonic Society: The aesthetic of understanding the valence of every possible state of consciousness and how to translate what matters between them. (Picture: Symbol of Open, Empty, Closed Individualism from Burning Man Theme-Camps of the Year 2029, Continuity Camp)

Conclusion

As the guiding premise of this essay we started out assuming that there are real and substantial stakes in art. It sure is all fun and games to think that anything goes in art until your landscape of cultural meaning is polluted with replicator strategies and attention-zapping exploits that lead to long-term neuropsychological problems and anneal false and neurotic metaphysics. Understanding art matters.

I would make the claim that a new science of valence, i.e. a new science of pleasure, pain, love, hate, and indeed transcendent bliss, can be a new rallying flag for cultural value. Rather than the messy consilience patchwork between different aesthetics we have today, we might in the future indeed find a true and real grounding for the meaning of beauty and bliss. Contrary to the conservative spirit often associated with calls to reinvigorate an objective sense of beauty, here we arrive at a theory of art that would very well appreciate experiences as outlandish as DMT breakthroughs. This theory of art appreciates such states not “just as much” as fine art, but indeed as far more valuable and implicated in what matters than most of everyday life. For art, meditation, psychedelics, and philosophy all share the fact that they are messing with the energy parameter of experience in powerful ways that can be used to achieve much better and globally-consistent brain states. Understanding that the effects of art can be very strong and life-changing is one thing, but knowing the mechanism of action behind those changes comes with entirely new possibilities and responsibilities. We invite you to consider what this entails, and to join us in envisioning a future Harmonic Society constructed with full knowledge of neural annealing.

[1] It is worth mentioning that Steven Lehar used annealing to describe the subjective progression of his ketamine experiences in his book The Grand Illusion: A Psychonautical Odyssey Into the Depths of Human Experience. [October 2019 – Edit: Carhart-Harris and Friston wrote a paper together in which they discussed annealing in the context of psychedelic research (see summary). The paper was published in July, two months after I submitted this essay to Art Against Art in May of 2019. We are delighted to see independent convergence on this concept and its importance.]

[2] The Penfield Mood Organ is a technology described in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick that allows the user to instantly tune into any of hundreds of possible moods via direct cerebral stimulation. Some example moods include “3. The desire to dial other moods”, “481. Awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future”, “594. Pleased acknowledgment of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters”, and “888. The desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it”.

Glossary

Cool Kids: Someone who is well-rounded and uses strategic mediocrity in order to entice people to show their peacock feathers. At its extreme, Cool Kids become the leaders of artistic gangs who corner the marketplace of aesthetic attention.

Hipster: Someone who enjoys art and media that seems too obscure to care about. Typically, the preferred aesthetics of a Hipster are highly detailed and focus on specific favored attributes at the expense of well-roundedness. A Hipster does not only have opinions about what is enjoyable, but also about how to enjoy it and why.

Nerd: Someone who wants to figure out what is true, especially as it applies to technical and formal systems. A philosophy nerd, for instance, compulsively tries to figure out ultimate truth.

Minimax art strategies: A strategy for making art that tries to be the best on a narrow set of attributes while neglecting well-roundedness. This is sometimes adaptive and some- times maladaptive.

L1/L2 normalization: Using mean absolute error (L1) favors minimax strategies vs. using mean squared error (L2) which favors well-rounded strategies.

Special thanks to: Michael Johnson, Romeo Stevens, Liam Brereton, Duncan Wilson, Victor Ochikubo, and David Pearce for their thoughts and feedback.

* The full essay’s title is: Harmonic Society: 8 Models of Art for a Scientific Paradigm of Aesthetic Qualia

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Johnson, M. (2018). The Neuroscience of Meditation: Four Models | Opentheory.net. Retrieved May 16, 2019, from website: https://opentheory.net/2018/12/the-neuroscience-of-meditation/
Johnson, M., (2016). Principia Qualia: Blueprint for a new science v1. Retrieved from http://opentheory.net/PrincipiaQualia.pdf
Friston, K. (2010). The free-energy principle: a unified brain theory? Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(2), 127–138. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2787
Schmidhuber, J. (2009) Simple Algorithmic Theory of Subjective Beauty, Novelty, Surprise, Interestingness, Attention, Curiosity, Creativity, Art, Science, Music, Jokes. Journal of SICE 48(1), 21-32
Carhart-Harris, R. L., Leech, R., Hellyer, P. J., Shanahan, M., Feilding, A., Tagliazucchi, E., … Nutt, D. (2014). The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 8. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00020
Atasoy, S., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M., Kringelbach, M. L., Deco, G., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2017). Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD. Scientific Reports, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-17546-0
Atasoy, S., Donnelly, I., & Pearson, J. (2016). Human brain networks function in connectome-specific harmonic waves. Nature Communications, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10340
Kanungo, R., & Lambert, W. E. (1963). Semantic satiation and meaningfulness. The American Journal of Psychology, 76(3), 421-428.
Gómez Emilsson, A., (2016). The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes. Retrieved May 16, 2019, from Qualia Com- puting website: https://qualiacomputing.com/2016/12/12/the-hyperbolic-geometry-of-dmt-experiences/
Bostrom, N. (2008). Letter from Utopia. Studies in Ethics, Law, and Technology, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.2202/1941-6008.1025
Dick, P. K. (1968), Do androids dream of electric sheep? Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday Pearce, D.(1995) The Hedonistic Imperative. Retrieved May 16 2019 from: https://www.hedweb.com/hedab.htm
Lehar, S., (2010) The Grand Illusion: A psychonautical odyssey into the depths of human experience, Retrieved May 26 2019 from: http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/GrandIllusion.pdf
Simler, K. (2014). Ads Don’t Work That Way | Melting Asphalt. [online] Available at: https://meltingasphalt.com/ads-dont-work-that-way/ [Accessed 16 May 2019]. Pearce, D. Supersentience. (2012). Retrieved May 16, 2019, from Biointelligence-explosion.com website: https://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/parable.html
Kent, J. L. (2010). Psychedelic Information Theory: Shamanism in the Age of Reason, Chapter 05, ‘The Control Interrupt Model of Psychedelic Action’. PIT Press, Seattle.

Harmonic Society (3/4): Art as State-Space Exploration and Energy Parameter Modulation

Posted on by algekalipso

The following essay* was recently published in the Berlin-based art magazine Art Against Art (issue). Below you will find models 5 and 6 (out of 8), which are new, original, and the direct result of recent insights about consciousness as uncovered by modern neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and the work of the Qualia Research Institute. (See models 1 & 2, and 3 & 4).

I will wrap up this series next week with something many readers would know to expect – an explanation for how art is connected to valence. Stay tuned!

5. State-Space Exploration

The elucidation of the origin of qualia-rich subjectivity is important not only as an activity in the natural sciences, but also as a foundation and the ultimate justification of the whole world of the liberal arts. Bridging the gap between the two cultures (C. P. Snow) is made possible only through a clear understanding of the origin of qualia and subjectivity.
Qualia symbolize the essential intellectual challenge for humanity in the future. The impact of its elucidation will not be limited to the natural sciences. The liberal arts, religion, and the very concept of what a man is will be reassessed from their very foundations.
– Ken Mogi in The Qualia Manifesto (1998)

Glass Pavilion by Nick Xu
Glass Pavilion by Nick Xu

Is there anything beyond the sacred? Yes. This model of art posits that one key feature of art is the pursuit of novel experiences that challenge preconceptions of what is possible to experience. The state-space[1] of possible experiences is unfathomably vast, and mundane everyday human experiences are restricted to a tiny corner of this enormous behemoth. As they say, “you won’t know if you like it until you try it”. Applying that logic to the exploration of the state-space of consciousness would encourage us to open our horizons and become receptive to the possibility that there are true gems of experience waiting to be found in exotic regions of this space.

Now, it is easy for some people to fetishize the exotic for novelty’s sake. But contrary to popular belief, novelty is not intrinsically valuable. Taking into account previous discussions (especially models 2 and 3 above), we can interpret artistic explorations that push the boundary of our knowledge about what can be experienced as a sophisticated form of signaling genetic fitness. In particular, mastery over novel modes of experience shows that you have the mental and physical power to devote copious amounts of resources to exploration, for only one in a thousand attempts at discovering something new results in something that other people can appreciate. It is thus the case that a lot of novelty creation is aimed at courtship rather than being driven by a genuine passion for knowledge.

clamped_aesthetic

Left style source: Adrián Regnier Chávez. Right style source: Carpet by ALGE

That said, what is out there hidden in the state-space of consciousness beggars belief. Anyone who is exploring that vast space in an intelligent way will sooner or later find incredible things. But how do we explore this space intelligently? A systematic exploration of possible images, for instance, could involve taking a picture and changing one pixel at a time. But as we all know, the Library of Babel is almost completely devoid of meaningful books. At least relative to its size. A much better way of exploring the space (inspired by Steerable Pyramid and Deep Dream-type algorithms) would be to sample possible images with an intelligent method, such as training generative neural networks on previous works of art, and then asking them to hallucinate possible images while constraining the neural layers you identify with the aesthetic quality of the images. Style transfer techniques and similar methods can result in images sampled from a given aesthetic, rather than from e.g. a particular low-level feature set (e.g. a type of edges) or a set of high-level semantic content (e.g. cars, people, dogs, etc.).

clamped_aesthetic_1

Left style source: blue balloons in a living room. Right style source: collection of blankets by ALGE

Exploring the space of possible images is an extremely small sub-problem of exploring the state-space of consciousness. But I think the analogy is useful as a general idea. Now, how vast is the state-space of consciousness? Well, it tends to be larger than you think, even when you take that fact into account. I will coin that fact as Gomez-Emilsson’s Law. Every time you think you know how vast the state-space of consciousness is, you will be surprised to find out you are wrong if you choose to dig deeper.

Consider what happens when someone takes LSD. Most people expect that they will simply get to experience new sensations like brighter colors, tracers, or synesthesia. This is true to a point, for light doses. But on medium doses, in addition to exploring the state-space of sensory configurations, one also experiences new aesthetics, which this model would define as ways of organizing a lot of sensations in ways that feel right. More so, an aesthetic is also a way of delivering uninhibited sensations in a way that feels good at the level of the whole experience, from moment to moment. Most people have no clue that there is a vast space of possibilities here.

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Illustrates “state-space of beach rocks” by unknown artist at Sombrio Beach in Vancouver. Photo: Julia Pope

On higher doses, people are surprised to find an even more general way of exploring the state-space of consciousness. Namely, one instantiates alternate games. The DMT “vibe” that people report can be thought of as more than a “context switch”. It is, rather, a more radical change that we could describe as a “game switch”. The “Jester” that people talk about regarding DMT experiences is an archetype that the mind uses to signal the “rule violation” quality of the state. There is so much going on that one’s experience splits into multiple games at once trying to find some common ground, and this feeling of game-incompatibility feels very alien. A sort of anti-virus system in the mind is triggered at that point, and labels the inconsistency with a feeling of weirdness so that you know not to update your actions based on the (currently globally inconsistent) experience of multiple superimposed games. Rule violation through fast changes in implicit games of social status causes you to interpret what is going on as having extreme stakes. Interacting with DMT Aliens, Gods, Elves, etc. feels like the upper limit of potential social status transfer that your world simulation affords (like meeting a president or a king). The state-space of consciousness contains all of these alternate games and metagames, and we have not even begun to catalogue them. This is all to say: seen in this light, the era of art has just begun.

Like the previous models, this one also gives rise to an aesthetic of its own. I call this the aesthetic of “Rainbow God”. This is the meta-belief that we gain value by understanding and experiencing extremely novel states of consciousness. Ultimate bliss, according to this aesthetic, is not a bland monotone state, but rather, is a state that incorporates within it an extraordinary variety of types of qualia. Posthuman aesthetics will not only show up in the form of intense feelings, but also in the form of extremely “rainbow-ey” experiences. The concept of a full-spectrum intelligence (an intelligence capable of instantiating any qualia at will) plays an important role in this aesthetic. Thus, the full-spectrum artists of the future will have access to a qualia pallet in an experience editor[2] that includes human qualia like sight, touch, scent, emotions, thought-episodes, etc. It will also include qualia only found in insects, fish, mollusks, people tripping, people having seizures, novel neurocircuitry, etc. The asymptote of incorporating all possible varieties of qualia into a single experience is the final realization of Rainbow God, the ultimate state of knowledge and beauty according to this aesthetic.

6. Energy Parameter Modulation

SeifertSurfaces

Seifert Surfaces by Paul Nylander

People say they have weird and novel experiences with art, but by a large margin, the novelty itself is not the focus of what matters in people’s reports. Rather, people especially talk about having experiences that are not only novel and unusual, but also characterized by heightened states of consciousness. For example, when people “get art” they report being inspired, amazed, surprised, enthralled, or even shocked. These states seem to have in common a quality of high-energy in one form or another. Although possible, it is rare to talk about art as purposefully sedating, boring, anesthetizing, or numbing. That’s the exception. In general, art as diverse as Japanoise and Jodorowsky have in common the quality of heightening, and not only changing, one’s state.

At the Qualia Research Institute (QRI) we take very seriously the notion that experience has an energy parameter. In psychology-speak, nearby concepts include emotional arousal and activation level, though these tend to have more physiological than phenomenological connotations. In contrast, we hold that you can indeed experience very high levels of conscious energy without at the same time experiencing the physiological responses that are usually associated with high arousal (such as high heart-rate, high breath-rate, high blood pressure, sweating, etc.). Likewise, it is not the case that only traditionally high-arousal emotions (such as being excited, thrilled, fearful, anxious, etc.) come in high-energy forms. Indeed, it is possible to experience states of relaxation, serenity, equanimity, and peacefulness in extremely energetic forms(!), as happens in the concentration-based altered states of consciousness called “Jhanas” in the Buddhist tradition.

Here it is relevant for me to bring up the fact that my colleague Mike Johnson recently wrote about the neuroscience of meditation. He discussed how to make sense of the acute and long-term effects of meditation through the lens of modern neuroscience paradigms, and then found a way to tie them together into an overarching theory. For the sake of brevity I will schematically outline some of the key features of the paradigms he integrated:

  1. Free Energy Principle (Karl Friston, 2010):
    1. The brain is trying to minimize expected future surprise by building high-level models of sensory input
    2. When a model says that the input is very unlikely, our brain propagates an error signal in the form of excess energy
    3. This energy motivates the search for a better model, for which the previously surprising input is now expected
  2. Entropic Disintegration (Robin Carhart Harris, 2014):
    1. Psychedelics elevate the “neural temperature” of the brain, meaning that they increase the entropy/disorder present in neural circuits
    2. One’s everyday mode of consciousness relies on learned neural patterns solidified over years, which at times can be chronically maladaptive
    3. By “raising the temperature” of our neural circuits, maladaptive neural circuits, especially “egoic structures” in the default-mode network (DMN), disintegrate
    4. This enables you to “start from scratch” and form new, more adaptive, neural patterns
  3. Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves (Selen Atasoy, 2016):
    1. Physical systems with excitation-inhibition wavefronts have harmonic modes
    2. By mapping out the connectome of a brain (white and grey matter tracks) and using empirically-derived excitation-inhibition differential equations of neural activity, one can infer the electromagnetic resonant modes of a given brain
    3. Using this technique, it was found empirically that psychedelics increase the amplitude of connectome-specific harmonic waves across the spectrum, and in particular, the amplitude delta is higher on the upper ranges of the spectrum

Tying together these frameworks we see that (a) the brain responds to surprise in an excitatory way which gives rise to a process of search for better models, (b) there is a sense of neural energy for which increasing it gives rise to the disintegration of pre-existing patterns, and (c) there is a sense of actually physical energy in the brain tied together with its resonant modes, which are variable depending on one’s state of consciousness. To bring all of these frameworks together, we can interpret them in terms of energy sources and energy sinks:

  1. Energy Sources: surprises, sensory stimulation
  2. Energy Sinks: passage of time (decay factor), semantic content (crystallization around explanatory representations), pre-existing attitudes

At a high-level, we could describe the relevance of these frameworks for art as follows: For art to energize you it needs to either reduce the influence of energy sinks and/or increase the amount of energy from energy sources.

The numerous tricks of the craft of different kinds of art can be reinterpreted in this framework. For example, a lot of artistic advice for a broad audience focuses on making sure that there is a twist you are introducing in an otherwise familiar space. Even subtle surprises (colors being out of place, unusual garments, implausible actions, perspective mixups, etc.) will propagate a prediction error and heighten the energy available in one’s state. This will make you experience the rest of the piece in a more energized and impactful form. Now, to sustain the heightened energy parameter, it is important to avoid making it easy for the brain to redirect the energy to a large energy sink. If the perceptual mistake one makes is one you are familiar with and have experienced before, you might end up diverting the newly available energy towards reinforcing an attitude you developed about that perceptual mistake (e.g. word tricks could trigger anxiety about not being a good reader rather than helping you stay in an energized state).

This paradigm also puts in a different light, and makes sense of, the criticisms often raised against pieces perceived as Kitsch, Camp, and Cliché, or other aesthetics centered around the over-use of a given artistic trick. Art can fail to sufficiently energize your state by failing to introduce a large enough surprise. If you can immediately grasp the full scope of the novelty introduced by a given piece (even if you are misapprehending the input!) you can quickly categorize your experience into a pre-existing bucket and skip the intended energized state. This functions as an energy sink, and hence you fail to stay energized.

This is just a piece of the full story here, for energy sinks are not completely reliable. There is a phenomenon called semantic satiation, where a pattern of rapid and regular repetition of words, images, and concepts makes them feel meaningless. So even the most cliché of art can indeed get the job done of energizing your state of consciousness, by presenting many versions of the same thing in flashes at a sufficiently high rate (I’m not saying this is necessarily pleasant, but it might be effective!). On the flip side, if what you are after is the maximization of a particular meaning in e.g. a commercial, you will find there is a Goldilocks Zone for the number of times you should present the core concept/image to the audience; too few and the meaning will be weak, too many and you’ll trigger semantic satiation by overwhelming the energy sinks of the audience.

Schematically, there are three broad ways of inhibiting energy sinks to allow the buildup of what we call “semantically neutral energy”. You can:

  1. Disable,
  2. Overwhelm, or
  3. Avoid them

Let me elaborate. First, you can disable energy sinks by switching to unfamiliar contexts (e.g. it is harder worrying about work while on a screen-free beach, at a museum… or at Burning Man). Also, disabling energy sinks can happen in states of exhaustion, fasting, intoxication, or other states of mind that impair some of the normal functions of the brain. Second, as we saw, semantic satiation would be an example of overwhelming energy sinks, but there are many other ways of doing so, such as increasing the intensity of input above a certain threshold. And third, avoiding energy sinks involves things like setting the intention to focus your attention on a meditation object and refocus on it every time you get distracted. Alternatively, one can load a given energy sink with negative implications and learn to avoid it via negative feedback (e.g. when a standard interpretive framework is frowned upon by a social group).

Most drugs and activities could be described in terms of their characteristic effect on energy sources and sinks.[3] But only some of these drugs and activities are “broadband energy enhancers”, in the sense that the energy they give rise to is transferable to a broad range of mental and physical activities. This is what sets meditation, trance-inducing music/dancing, psychedelics, philosophy, and art apart from other energizing activities. Those methods in particular allow energized states to be sustained for long periods of time, and they give rise to novel sensations exclusive to the high-energy regions of the state-space of consciousness.

DMT-like phenomenal objects – high energy configurations of phenomenal space. Images by Paul Nylander (http://bugman123.com/)
DMT-like phenomenal objects – high energy configurations of phenomenal space. Images by Paul Nylander (http://bugman123.com/)
DMT-like phenomenal objects – high energy configurations of phenomenal space. Images by Paul Nylander (http://bugman123.com/)
DMT-like phenomenal objects – high energy configurations of phenomenal space. Images by Paul Nylander (http://bugman123.com/)

A note on psychedelics here is in order. There is indeed something very peculiar that psychedelics do to the energy sources that to my knowledge is not done by the other broad-band energy enhancers. Psychedelics make energy sources echo! They change the neuroacoustics of the brain, which favors temporally repeating patterns in a delayed-echo fashion along with a slower decay function for experience over time.[4] Thus, visual tracers and the amplification of music appreciation during a psychedelic trip are both expressions of the same underlying principle: the brain is more resonant. The fact that this effect is distinct from what art, meditation, philosophy, or strobes have to offer makes psychedelics synergistic and complementary with the other methods. After all, it is hard to ignore the gazillion subjective reports of enhanced aesthetic appreciation experienced on even small doses of psychedelics.

For the above reasons, I think this model has a lot of explanatory power. To recap, this model of art says that increasing the energy parameter of one’s consciousness is the success condition of art. It explains the repeating trance-inducing quality of music, the need for balance between predictability and surprise, common craft advice, and the existence of higher aesthetics. In turn, this model implies that art can be done in a wrong way. Art that is uninspiring, insipid, unexciting, irrelevant, etc. could be understood as art that fails to raise the energy parameter of those who experience it. And indeed, the higher the form of the art, the more it allows for the buildup of semantically-neutral energy.

[1] The term “state-space” refers to a very general concept that identifies the set of all possible configurations of a given system (of equations, machines, experiences, etc.) and the ways in which these configurations can transition from to another.

[2] As a proof of concept: According to cognitive scientist Steven Lehar, combining LSD, Ketamine, and THC can give rise to a “free-wheeling hallucination”, which is a state of mind where one gains the ability to edit the contents of one’s experience at will (“You can say ‘give me a table’ and a table will appear right in front of you as real as a solid table”).

[3] For example, anti-psychotic drugs are broad-band energy sink enhancers, psychedelics are broad-band energy source enhancers, classic stimulants (such as amphetamines) are narrow-band energy source enhancers, classical depressants (such as benzodiazepines) are narrow-band energy sink enhancers.

[4] In one account proposed by “Psychedelic Information Theory” (James Kent), psychedelics achieve the tracing/echo effect by disabling an energy sink. The control interrupt model of psychedelic action says that there are natural inhibitory processes that prevent features of our current experience from building up over time. Psychedelics are thought to chemically interrupt inhibitory control signals from the cortex, which are constantly preventing the build-up of qualia. In this account, what you are paying attention to is in fact the part of the sensory input that is being inhibited the least. Interrupting the inhibitory “control signal” gives rise to echoes of previous states across the board that you intrinsically attend to whether you like it or not.

Featured image credit: Seifert Surfaces by Paul Nylander

* Originally titled: Harmonic Society: 8 Models of Art for a Scientific Paradigm of Aesthetic Qualia

Harmonic Society (2/4): Art as Schelling Point Creation and the Pursuit of Sacred Experiences

Posted on by algekalipso

The following essay was recently published in the Berlin-based art magazine Art Against Art (issue). Below you will find models 3 and 4 (out of 8). I will be sharing 2 new models each week until I’ve shared all of them (see part 1/4).

3. Schelling Point Creation

[Psychoanalysis teaches us:] When somebody complains, always be careful and try to find, identify, what type of additional pleasure, satisfaction, does the act of complaining itself bring to you. We all, when we complain, almost always, find a perverse satisfaction in the act of complaining itself.
– Slavoj Zizek (2019)

I certainly feel compelled to complain about the tyranny of genetic fitness signaling in art. That said, people who excel at games who are not played by many people will have an incentive to undermine the popular games and frame their favorite game as somehow superior. Why are Hipsters and Nerds allied against Cool Kids? Because the Cool Kids can decide on a whim that the games the Hipsters and Nerds play are uncool and not worthy of public fitness displays. Even if they happen to be of superb quality!

In many cases, the exploration of uncommon games can give rise to major innovations, so there is a utilitarian reason to promote some degree of exploration outside of the aesthetics that most people can enjoy.

This line of reasoning gives rise to a new interpretation for what a Hipster is. To be a Hipster is not, as popularly believed, to merely desire the uncommonly desired. The whole thrust of hipsterism is a promise of superior quality in at least some actually relevant area, even at the cost of severely reduced quality across the board. (Using an analogy from the field of statistics: Cool Kids favor L2 normalization[1] as it signal-boosts people who are well-rounded, whereas Hipsters and Nerds favor L1 normalization which improves the outlook for imbalanced minimax strategies).

Many people believe that all Hipsters are Cool Kids. Many believe something slightly weaker, which is that to be a Cool Kid you also need to be a Hipster. But in fact this is absolutely not the case, and it is a category error to think otherwise. Cool Kids and Hipsters were correlated when being Hipster had mainstream appeal. That is, Hipsters were cool when Cool Kids used to challenge people to show how Hipster they could be. But this should not be in any way an indication that Hipster aesthetics are intrinsically related to Cool Kids, for the same reason that e.g. Country Music, Normcore, or Bolshevik aesthetics are not intrinsically invented by Cool Kids. Hipsters are individual contributors to the frontier of culture. Indeed, it is rare to find a place that produces genuinely innovative content while also being saturated with Cool Kids.

Cool Kids, in large quantities, eventually form cliques that become voting blocs. These frustrate innovation by fully orthogonalizing what is socially cool from what is socially valuable. A Hipster under those circumstances tends to feel stifled. Cool Kids tend to be above-average in openness to experience, but they are rarely in the top 2% of openness to experience – more like one standard deviation above the mean. This is because they need to be open enough to look at new trends but also sufficiently closed to be able to relate to the bulk of the consumers of new trends. Genuine Hipsters are usually above the 98th percentile of openness to experience. In turn, the sexual attraction of some people is focused on this particular trait, and Hipsters compete at signaling it to the highest extent possible. In the process, they discover interesting things. But this does not mean they can sustainably stay cool in the eyes of the average person.

High openness to experience allows you to appreciate minimax players. It allows you to accept artists who are ridiculously good at making a specific point but lack talent in every other respect. Ultimately, the innovations produced by these extreme artistic explorations sometimes radically transform social reality.

In “Ads Don’t Work That Way”, Kevin Simler discusses how advertisement’s power is not through direct persuasion, but through shaping the landscape of cultural meaning. You don’t bring a 6-pack of Coronas to a party because the ads have subconsciously conditioned you to think that this beer in particular is more likely to make you and your friends feel like you are a chill group. Rather, you buy it in order to signal the fact that you see yourself as a chill person, and to bring that mindset to those who see you bring the product. It is by virtue of common knowledge that ads can do this; if every single person received a different custom-made AI-powered neural net ad, ads would stop having the function of shaping the landscape of cultural meaning, and perhaps lose a significant portion of their power.

Art, likewise, can also change the landscape of cultural meaning. In contrast to ads, art might perhaps be described as high-bandwidth low-distribution as opposed to high-distribution low-bandwidth. And to the extent that Hipsters discover new aesthetics, they are a big source of novel cultural Schelling points for subcultures to form around.

4. Creating Sacred Experiences

Art could be the next religion – Alex Grey

Below you will find an example of a piece that aims to create a sacred experience, which I recently encountered at the Santa Cruz Regional Burn. It is called Mementomorium, and it is a mixture of a sensory-deprivation-chamber and a symbolic self-burial experience crafted in order to simulate your own death and to attempt to see your life in its finitude. This art piece plays with one’s experience of time and sense of mortality, and helps you cut through delusion in order to re-interpret one’s time on earth as finite and priceless.

Mementomorium by Oleg Muir Lou Goff
Mementomorium by Oleg Muir Lou Goff

Why is the above art? Cool Kids might find this too morbid, and Hipsters are likely to see
it as too real. So what is the thrust behind artistic visions like the above?

Sacred experiences are an aspect of social and phenomenological reality. Art, it turns out, is deeply entwined with such sacredness. Now, much has been said about the sublime in relation to art. What else is there to say?

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself. – George Bernard Shaw

Contrary to the three previous models, here the culminating emotion that is sought is not the vindication of self, but rather, the elicitation of a sense of self-transcendence. This 4th model would say that art creates some of the most valuable experiences there are, because it makes us experience a sense of transcendence. And relative to the previous three models, this model is the first to consider art as involved in the quest of finding the ultimate answer, as opposed to merely providing incremental benefits to humanity.

Cutting to the chase, let us jump right into a list of possible intentional sources for phenomenal sacredness (i.e. the possible targets of art according to this model). From John Lilly’s “Simulations of God”, below you find the most common types of self-transcendence catalogued:

  1. God As the Beginning
  2. I Am God
  3. God Out There
  4. God As Him/Her/It
  5. God As The Group
  6. God As Orgasm and Sex
  7. God As Death
  8. God As Drugs
  9. God As the Body
  10. God As Money
  11. God As Righteous Wrath
  12. God As Compassion
  13. God As War
  14. God As Science
  15. God As Mystery
  16. God As the Belief, the Simulation, the Model
  17. God As the Computer
  18. God Simulating Himself
  19. God As Consciousness-without-an-Object
  20. God As Humor
  21. God As Superspace, the Ultimate Collapse into the Black Hole, the End.
  22. The Ultimate Simulation
  23. God As the Diad

According to John Lilly’s view, each of us lives in a world simulation (whether this is generated by our brains or by a higher power is something Lilly himself went back and forth on for decades). He makes the case that our world simulation is run by a hierarchical chain of programs and meta-programs. One’s locus of control[2] is what he calls the Self Meta-Programmer, which is roughly equivalent to the ego (or at least a healthy one with high levels of self-control). Implicitly, however, the Self Meta-Programmer is subordinated to something higher, something he calls the Supra-Self Meta-Programmer (SSMP for short; see: “Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer”).[3] Our SSMPs are responsible for our notions of a higher power, higher values, and higher purpose. One’s religion is determined by the SSMPs to which one is subordinated. In Lilly’s view, it is one’s SSMPs that give rise to one’s understand- ing of God. And as the list above shows, there are many possible versions of God. That is, there are many possible meta-programmings for what the highest power, value, and purpose might be. In light of this, art as the pursuit of sacred experiences would not be restricted to a particular view of God. Rather, it encapsulates every possible notion of God – where the art that hits hardest is the art that resonates the most with one’s implicit conception of God.

A parallel here could be made with adult developmental models (such as those of Wilber’s Integral Theory, Kegan’s Evolving Self, Common’s and Richard’s Model of Hierarchical Complexity, etc.). At each level of development, one’s conception of the highest value transcends and includes those of the developmental stages below. Let’s take for example Integral Theory’s levels 4, 5, and 6. Level 4, aka. “Amber” (ethno- or nation-centric, values rules, discipline, faith in transcendent God or preordained high- er order, socially conservative, etc.) would derive a sense of sacredness from religious imagery, a nationalist spirit, and art that fosters traditional values. Level 5, aka. “Orange” (values science and rationality, democracy, individualism, materialism, entrepreneurship, etc.) gets off on experiences that bring about a reductionist scientific world picture compatible with self-reliance (“the world is made of atoms, and this, rather than being tragic, is an opportunity to have fine-grained control over the elements”). And Level 6, aka. “Green” (values pluralism and equality, multiple points of view, no true reality, embraces paradox, considers civil rights and environmentalism to be the frontier of culture, etc.) would find art projects that highlight the multiplicity of perspectives to be key to a sense of the sacred.[4] In this framework we can explain people’s negative reaction to art as a misfit between the developmental level of the target audience and the developmental level of the person who gets to experience it. Art targeted to people in a higher level of development than oneself will be perceived as heretical (e.g. postmodern art from the point of view of a traditionalist monotheist), while art targeted to people on a lower level of development than oneself will be perceived as childish or naïve (e.g. traditional religious iconography from the point of view of a scientific rationalist humanist). We could thus predict that if there are even higher developmental levels above ours, we will most likely think of the art targeted to them as deeply troubling.

The core quality of the experience is the feeling and recognition that oneness is truth. – Martin Ball on 5-MeO-DMT

At the upper levels of development, one could argue, we find sacredness based on concepts like pure consciousness, emptiness, and the clear white light of the void, etc. Famously, psychedelics, and in particular 5-MeO-DMT, seem to trigger direct experiences of this type of sacredness, which, according to its proponents, encapsulates all other kinds of transcendence within. If this is so, then we could anticipate that agents like 5-MeO-DMT will play an important role in the future of art as more people climb the ladder of adult psychological development.

On a social level, art as the pursuit of the sacred can be interpreted as an adaptive behavior aimed at taming envy. “Keeping up with the Joneses” is (artistically or other- wise) capable of diverting a group’s energy away from tasks that need to be done for individual and collective survival. When done in excess, wasteful displays of fitness make communities suffer. Runaway signaling has serious drawbacks, and sacred experiences seem to calm people down a bit, especially if the sense of sacredness comes along with social reassurance in the form of being able to hang out together without having to compete all the time, for Christ’s sake! Ahem. To be chill with one another.

As we saw with the previous models, this one, too, has its own aesthetic. The aesthetic of the model would perhaps manifest in the form of a museum that caters to every possible sense of sacredness. From aboriginal shamanism to monotheistic conservativism to punk rock concerts to transhumanism, this aesthetic recognizes the fact that sacredness is catalyzed by many different inputs depending on the psychological traits of the people who consume it.

[1] L1 and L2 normalization are ways of talking about how to describe the distance between points in a given space. L2 takes into account the mean squared difference along each dimension, whereas L1 simply uses the average difference in each dimension. If one is thinking about an ideal art piece within a given aesthetic, then using L2 would penalize very heavily exemplars that deviate from the archetype and generally favor well-roundedness, whereas an L1 normalization would accept large differences from the ideal along several dimensions as long as at least a fraction of the dimensions are very good.

[2] One’s locus of control is the part of our experience that comes with a felt sense of agency. That is, what feels like is in charge of determining the direction of one’s attention, intention, and behavior. Typically, a person’s locus of control is tied to their sense of self – or ego – but this is not true in the general case (as demonstrated by the shattered locus of control present in schizophrenia, and absent locus of control during states of depersonalization and derealization).

[3] According to John Lilly, a Supraself-Metaprogramer is an agent outside our locus of control that runs below our threshold of awareness and which ‘codes’ Supraself-Metaprograms. In turn, Supraself-Metaprograms are the mental “programs” that determine our sense of the highest values, which we typically inherit from our culture, influence from others, implicit historical beliefs, and so on.

[4] The colors of Integral Theory: Ken Wilber’s Integral theory was developed by identifying the commonalities among many different types of adult developmental models, spiritual stage maps, and meditation progression systems. The progression could broadly be described as a generalized expansion of the circle of compassion and increased acceptance of complexity. The color associated with each level is arranged from low-frequency to high-frequency parts of the spectrum. Specifically, infrared – archaic, magenta – tribal, red – warrior, amber – traditional, orange – modern, green – postmodern, teal/turquoise – integral, ultraviolet – post-integral.

Featured image credit: Mementomorium by Oleg Muir Lou Goff

* The full essay’s title is: Harmonic Society: 8 Models of Art for a Scientific Paradigm of Aesthetic Qualia

Harmonic Society (1/4): Art as Family Resemblance + Cool Kid Theory

Posted on by algekalipso

Note – The full essay’s title is: Harmonic Society: 8 Models of Art for a Scientific Paradigm of Aesthetic Qualia

The following essay was recently published in the Berlin-based art magazine Art Against Art (issue).

The essay offers eight different models of art: models 1 through 4 have been discussed in academic literature and the current intellectual zeitgeist, while models 5 through 8 are new, original, and the direct result of recent insights about consciousness as uncovered by modern neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and the work of the Qualia Research Institute.

Below you will find the abstract, introduction, and the first 2 (out of 8) models of art. I will be sharing 2 new models each week until I’ve shared all 8 of them.

Contemporary writing about art is in exactly the same place as writing about nature was before Darwin came along. Before Darwin there was no single intellectual matrix upon which to fix all of these impressions and ideas. There was no way of organizing all of that information. And this seems to me to be the situation we are in with the arts, as well.

– Brian Eno, “What is Art Actually For?” (2012)

Abstract

We start by assuming that there are real stakes in art. This motivates the analysis of this subject matter, and it focuses where we place our gaze. We examine a total of eight models for “what art might be about”, divided into two groups. The first group of four are some of the most compelling contemporary models, which derive their strength from fields such as philosophy of language, economics, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology. These models are: (1) art as a word only definable in a family resemblance way with no necessary or sufficient features, (2) art as social signaling of desirable genetic characteristics, (3) art as Schelling point creation, and (4) art as the cultivation of sacred experiences. These four models, however enlightening, nonetheless only account for what David Marr might describe as the computational level of abstraction while leaving the algorithmic and implementation levels of abstraction unexamined. They explain what art is about in terms of why it exists and what its coarse effects are, but not the nature of its internal representations or its implementation. Hence we propose a second group of four models in order to get a “full-stack” view of art. These models are: (5) art as a tool for exploring the state-space of consciousness, (6) art as a method for changing the energy parameter of experience, (7) art as activities that induce neuronal annealing (which implements novel valence modulation, i.e. surprising pain/pleasure effects), and (8) art as an early prototype of a future affective language that will allow diverse states of consciousness to make sense of each other. These frameworks address how art interfaces with consciousness and how its key valuable features might be implemented neurologically. We conclude with a brief look at how embracing these new paradigms could, in principle, lead to the creation of a society free from suffering and interpersonal misunderstanding. Such a society, aka. Harmonic Society, would be designed with the effect of guaranteeing positive valence interactions using principles from a post-Galilean science of consciousness.

Introduction

We shall start this essay by making the assumption that there are real and substantial stakes when it comes to art. Not all of my readers will agree with this point, and those who do might in fact secretly worry that they are overvaluing art for selfish reasons. I come here to suggest that there could be very real and substantial stakes in art, and that to realize this you do not need to buy into sentimentalism, fanaticism, wishful thinking, or traditionalist attitudes. You could start with the sheer amount of human attention that is devoted to art in one way or another. Art seems to make a lot of people do things, and do them with a lot of their energy and focus. Indeed, many people point at their intimations with art as personally defining moments. Some say their best self is expressed in their creation, consumption, or participation in art. So what is all of this fuss about?

Alas, most things of grand significance have been analyzed by countless people. The sheer magnitude of certain human activity is not a justification for caring about it at the margin, considering the often corresponding sheer magnitude of other people already analyzing and scientifically probing the field. That is, of course, unless you have a reason to think that you have something that everyone else has been missing all this time. And this is the case for you and me right now. The new perspectives on art on this essay come from thinking very deeply about consciousness, qualia, and the possible implementations of the pleasure-pain axis, aka. valence. We will see how investigating these questions cashes out in novel insights about art. In turn, these models, as well as the empirically testable predictions they generate, might have the ability to reframe what is going on with art in a way that allows us to predict how and when it will bring about good and desirable effects.

The 8 Models

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

Models 1 through 4 are already present in the memetic ecosystem of today. They focus on external aspects of art, such as why it reproduces and how it impacts social behavior. From the point of view of Marr’s levels of analysis, these four models focus on the behavioral/computational level of analysis.[1] Namely, what art looks like from the outside, and how it reproduces. Models 5 through 8 are novel perspectives that arise out of examining artistic experiences in light of Marr’s algorithmic and implementation-level accounts of consciousness. That is, how the internal information-processing and implementational features of brains give rise to art. In turn, these four models give rise to a new understanding for when art does or does not do its job.

1. Semantic Deflation

This model says that asking “what is art?” is, more often than not, an utterly confused question. Perhaps in antiquity it would make sense to talk about the essence of art, expecting there to be a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be art. According to the semantic deflation model of art, starting out with the expectation of finding a crisp set of requirements for something to be art is starting off on the wrong foot, for believing that there is an essence of art is to simply not pay attention to the large set of inconsistent use cases for that word, which challenges the existence of such an essence.

The semantic deflation model is supported by key insights from 20th Century philosophy of language, such as found in the works of Russell, Frege, Carnap, Quine, and especially those of the late Wittgenstein. Of particular relevance when it comes to defining art we could point at Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance. Developed in his book Philosophical Investigations, the concept of family resemblance posits that many words which seem at first to point at something with a core essence are, in fact, pointing to referents which have overlapping similarities but no universally shared attributes.

Like the concept of a game, which refers to activities as diverse as checkers and cellular automata, and which cannot be easily defined in terms of e.g. point systems, physical movement, number of players, etc., we likewise cannot expect art to be definable in terms of media, intent, social effects, or craft. All we can aspire to is to identify common and characteristic features.

According to this view, the models of art that take objective beauty seriously on Platonic or traditionalist grounds are fundamentally misguided. Callbacks to retraditionalize society to preserve its past – more genuine – aesthetics are perceived as parodies of themselves, trying to undo an intrinsically irreversible process of cultural learning. Nowadays few people seriously believe that art should be conceived of as a tool exclusively for the glorification of traditional values and religious symbolism. It is also not fashionable to think of art in sincere non-ironic ways. Those who wish to earnestly engage with art must remind themselves that the days in which its meaning could be grounded on universally agreed definitions is gone.

Although sobering and clarifying, I argue that this view leaves a lot of value on the table. Sure, art has no common essence, but that does not mean that all of the uses of the word are pointing at things of equal value. Semantic deflation does not provide us with guidance for identifying and promoting good art. Indeed, as Wittgenstein might put it, “[p]hilosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language, it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is.” (Philosophical Investigations, pg.49).

Interestingly, the semantic deflation model of art can itself be conceived of as an aesthetic. This aesthetic rewards those who can help others transcend narrow conceptions of what art is. Exemplary movements like Dadaism and Pop Art could be thought of as pushing the aesthetic of semantic deflation to the limit.

“Art is what you can get away with.” – Andy Warhol.

But what if there is something worth preserving, reifying, and defining clearly in art? Semantic deflation should perhaps be thought of as a first step in figuring out what is valuable about art, rather than a final destination. To move beyond it, one should avoid reviving a naïve essentialist view of art, and instead identify conceptual focal points that genuinely enrich our conception of art. Rather than destroying preconceptions, we could instead refactor, discover, and build new and enlightened ones. Transcending absolutist deflationary views of art is indeed more appealing when there is an alternative in sight that is both better and more real than what you get by merely deconstructing and breaking down naïve views. And this is what we will attempt to do as we move on to other models of art.

2. Cool Kid Theory

In his book “The Mating Mind”, Geoffrey Miller discusses art in light of evolutionary psychology. In this view, art, rather than being a thing, is a culturally sanctioned activity devised to allow people to display their genetic fitness, by showing off above-average features of their phenotypes. Art is, in this view, at its core, an outlet for courtship. Incredible performances like those of Liszt and Rachmaninoff are not just for the pleasure of music. The incredible difficulty of performing the musical compositions is itself the show. The difficulty is not a side-effect of discovering new soundscape frontiers that produce blissful and extraordinary experiences to degrees that couldn’t be possible without the difficulty of execution. Rather, the difficulty of performing the musical pieces is part and parcel of what makes them so extraordinary. They are indeed erotic displays of fitness traits (cf. Lisztomania) crafted to cause an impression in fertile ground.

Indeed, we are constructed in such a way that we can emotionally hack and be hacked by others to assess each others’ suitability as potential family, friends, and neighbors. Unfakeable fitness displays typically require prodigious amounts of waste. As Geoffrey puts it: “Every sexual ornament in every sexually reproducing species could be viewed as a different style of waste.” (The Mating Mind, pg. 128. cf. An Infinite Variety of Waste) Only extremely fit organisms can afford to spend resources on non-survival tasks.

Fashion, too, in this light, is a sort of collective activity of systematic waste. Keeping up with the latest trends shows that you have a lot of free time (which, contrary to popular belief, is perceived as more sexy than the alternative). Only the wealthy, disciplined, or well-organized can manage to sustain energy- and time-consuming hobbies for years and years.

This theory of art has a problem, though, which is that on its own it does not explain art as a cultural institution. We could very well imagine that aesthetics-based displays of genetic fitness would be circumscribed to individual efforts but in practice we see groups of people coming together to work out the potentialities, possibilities, limits, and implications of particular aesthetics. We don’t only generate extraordinarily wasteful works of art ourselves, but do so contextually within art movements and aesthetic languages. Why is this?

I believe there is a layer of organization above individual signaling displays. To fully grasp it, we need to talk about what I have named “Cool Kid Theory”. This theory postulates that above-average and particularly well-rounded individuals, aka. Cool Kids, figure out ways of enticing others to show their peacock feathers, so to speak. Being a Cool Kid is not to excel oneself, but rather, to have the precise kind of strategic mediocrity that gives others the urge to show how they can improve upon your craft. At its extreme, a Cool Kid commands a group of people who practice a particular type of craft, which ultimately becomes an artistic gang. If you are a Cool Kid you can decide who is cool and who is not by choosing what challenges to measure the performance of people with.

Who wants to be a Cool Kid? The answer is, for the most part, anyone who can get away with it. It is so evolutionarily adaptive to be a Cool Kid that we have a number of psychological programs that can be triggered with a sequence of social cues that can make almost anyone into a Cool Kid.

Part and parcel of being a Cool Kid is to know how to induce the fear of missing out in others. It is about detecting when a particular challenge is headed towards an imminent dead end and course-correct to keep people engaged.

Here is an example. If you ever encounter a group of dancers in public transportation, you will notice that there is a Cool Kid who binds them together. The Cool Kid selects for people who have unique talents, and collectively accumulates a solidly impressive bag of tricks. Everyone in the group takes turns showing their best trick. For instance, the group might have someone who sings, someone who plays an instrument, and someone who owns a subwoofer (sometimes that’s all it takes). You might also see that there is a guy who can do the weird elbow twist thingy, the one who can break dance and do nine spins on his back, the one who can beat-box to the tune of the song, and the one who moonwalks while playing a harmonica. An effective Cool Kid is one who can corral all of these specialists and be the artistic glue who controls the overarching aesthetic. And this aesthetic is what defines a set of challenges used for impressive fitness displays.

The art world can be thus conceived of as a large super-cluster of Cool Kid gangs cornering the economy of attention. The competitive nature of Cool Kids is sure to produce a constant stream of novel stimuli, endlessly varied trends and fashions, as well as competitive and indeed sometimes even virulent attacks between aesthetics. For he who controls the aesthetic, controls your ability to be popular.

To be continued… (edit: see models 3 & 4, 5 & 6, and 7 & 8).

[1] Marr’s levels of analysis is a framework to analyze information-processing systems. First we have the computational level, which describes what the system does from a third-person point of view. This level is concerned with questions like what the system is capable of, and how quickly it can succeed at it. Second is the algorithmic level of analysis, which focuses on the internal representations and operations used to transform the inputs into the outputs. And third is the implementation level of analysis, which is concerned with the physical realization of the algorithms described in the second level.

An Infinite Variety of Waste

Posted on by algekalipso

Excerpt from The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2000) by Geoffrey Miller (pg. 128-129)

Zahavi’s handicap principle and the idea of condition-dependence* are different perspectives on the same thing. The handicap idea emphasizes that sexual ornaments and courtship behaviors must be costly in order to be reliable fitness indicators. Their cost can take almost any form. They can increase risk from predators by making an animal more conspicuous with bright colors. They can increase risk from germs by impairing an animal’s immune system (which many sex hormones do). They can burn up vast amounts of time and energy, like bird song. They can demand a huge effort to obtain a small gift of meat, as in human tribal hunting.

As with Veblen’s conspicuous consumption principle, the form of the cost does not matter much. What matters is the prodigious waste. The waste is what keeps the fitness indicators honest. The wastefulness of courtship is what makes it romantic. The wasteful dancing, the wasteful gift-giving, the wasteful conversation, the wasteful laughter, the wasteful foreplay, the wasteful adventures. From the viewpoint of “survival of the fittest,” the waste looks mad and pointless and maladaptive. Human courtship even looks wasteful from the viewpoint of sexual selection for non-generic benefits, because, as we shall see, the act of love considered most romantic are often those that cost the giver the most, but that bring the smallest material benefits to the receiver. However, from the viewpoint of fitness indicator theory, this waste is the most efficient and reliable way to discover someone’s fitness. Where you see conspicuous waste in nature, sexual choice has often been at work.

Every sexual ornament in every sexually reproducing species could be viewed as a different style of waste. Male humpback whales waste their energies with half-hour-long, hundred-decibel songs that they repeat all day long during the breeding season. Male weaverbirds waste their time constructing ornamental nests. Male stag beetles waste the matter and energy from their food growing huge mandibles. Male elephant seals waste a thousand pounds of their fat per breeding season fighting other elephant seals. Male lions waste countless calories copulating thirty times a day with female lions before the females will conceive. Male humans waste their time and energy getting graduate degrees, writing books, playing sports, fighting other men, painting pictures, playing jazz, and founding religious cults. These may not be conscious sexual strategies, but the underlying motivations for “achievement” and “status”- even in preference to material sources- were probably shaped by sexual selection. (Of course, the wasteful displays that seemed attractive during courtship may no longer be valued if they persist after offspring arrive- there is a trade-off between parental responsibilities and conspicuous display.)

The handicap principle suggests that in each case, sexual selection cares much more about the prodigious magnitude of the waste than about its precise form. Once the decision-making mechanisms of sexual choice get their necessary information about fitness from a sexual display, everything else about the display is just a matter of taste. This interplay between waste and taste gives evolution a lot of elbow room. In fact, every species with sexual ornaments can be viewed as a different variety of sexually selected waste. Without so many varieties of sexual waste, our planet would not be the host of so many species.

* (from Glossary, pg. 437) Condition-dependence: A trait’s sensitivity to an animal’s health and energy level. For example, dance ability is condition-dependent because tired, sick animals can’t dance very well.

Lucid LSD Trip Report from an Anonymous Reader

Posted on by algekalipso

Writer: Anonymous (here substituted as “Bill”)

Dose: 2 blotters

I remember at one point feeling and saying that I was on the “sandy beaches of time.” Normally there are story arcs to events. There’s peak arousal and closure. But the hoffman [“LSD blotter”] was sustained arousal. In an expected upbeat I found a downbeat. All downbeats. So I found myself with extra moments unexpectedly. Moments that normally would have been blank or dim transitions were just as full as the moments they connected. The idea of the “sandy beaches of time” came from the feeling of rolling around in the sand on the inclines. Imagine you’re floating in water and then you wash on shore. Then you’re on the sand. That’s a feeling of unexpected support. You’re lying passively and find yourself on solid ground somehow. That’s how I felt that I found myself (without trying or initiating a thought) supported unexpectedly in additional moments. This reminds me of the experience I had on a stronger dose in 2016 (same number of blotters but higher potency due to freshness) where I always felt “in the middle of my thought.” It’s like there’s a moment of height and openness at the peak of the thought where you expand open to figure out how you’re going to fit together the structural pieces of the highest level of organization of the thought. But I was continually in the middle of the thought and never finishing a thought, I felt. I tried a lot harder to have complete well formed thoughts back then too, so the experience would have been more notable. In general this time I was least excited or interested at all. Quite passive and peaceful, but not exploring with great energy or amusement. It was a lower dose. I thought it was going to be difficult and possibly be my first bad trip, but when I did them I saw as always that psychedelics are nice to me and weed is the only one who occasionally gets medieval. When I figure out my van and living situation I will definitely seek out more hoffmans and things like it, because they have a certain potential to make my mind work better and they don’t seem to make me insane at all. On weed I can picture some bad day it getting me into a fetal position, but on psychedelics I have a relaxed “power pose.”

I also slightly expanded my sense of unifying with the perceptual (and otherwise conceived/imagined) environment. I’m putting on equal footing (there’s that equal footing theme again… In an article (link) the author used the phrase on “equal footing” once.  I had an idea to explain the equal footing phenomenon but I forget what it was). I feel like my implicit understanding of “merge your awareness with the world around you” increased and so I didn’t have to try so hard to figure it out. At this point I started to reflect on the kind of spiritual poverty of the spiritual ideas and theories I had and would often think about. The ideas I have often come from a dim dull state of mind. Anyway the merging came at the same time as understanding objects on their own terms. So rather than forcing a single texture onto two objects to see them both, I would see both objects with their own unique shapes and the only thing bridging them together was my awareness. That felt like the cubism people talk about in psychedelics (by the way Brahms is notoriously full of time distortions and musical cubism and disintegrations. The very long lines and irregular rhythms (implying a much lengthier process to “resolve,” i.e., achieve a full round of symmetry) are like the decreased decay of stuff in the mindstream. You can use sentences, words, sounds, symbols in a way that sustain moments of that openness, the middle-of-the-thought, and use sleight of hand to keep it from compensating or closing back down.). So I’d put on equal footing perceptions and all the notions I had which would be replaced by syntheses. Like I’d see a plane out the window and have a notion of the distance I was from it and then the notion of the angle of the distance line on my body and the plane, maybe picturing the underside of the plane and then the point of view from the plane looking back down, and I thought these images were all valid, and with the cubism going on it seemed to put the plane and the skyspace relationship to me on equal footing as myself, so I would see and not identify with my physical body and it’s vantage point and I would begin to get a sense of omniscience. Normally I’d reject this and say, “Well, look, we can take the pieces of the collage and infer that there’s only one body with eyes who can see and a brain that can think… it’s not like the plane actually sees or thinks” and yet I was going beyond that somehow. The panpsychism I’ve long subscribed to is like particulate panpsychism. It’s just like molecules and atoms have basic building blocks of complicated mechanical chemical processes, likewise simple consciousness properties of the oxygen atom and the carbon atom are modified by complex activities. However, the way I always thought of it wasn’t very smart. It wasn’t distributed consciousness at all. Nor did the consciousnesses of particles grow or interact or form “consciousness molecules” out of consciousness atoms. It was only the ability of surrounding forces to dance upon a carbon atom’s surface that I could imagine some experience arising. As for the human state—there are billions of consciousnesses and you just happen to be the one seeing this or hearing that or having the feeling of talking. In fact, all these examples of phenomenal experience would be vastly too complicated. But it’s no problem when you don’t believe in binding to suppose that I’m not a single person who talks and hears single sounds, but I’m an army of tiny mind particles that contribute their own tiny dust threads to experience… an experience that remains unbound and separate from all the other threads. So something like mind dust.

The cubism, by the way, was like dissociation, except that, like with the sandy beaches of time rushing in to provide an unexpected moment of support, there was always some unexpected maximally abstract unity support rushing in to bridge the disperate cubist pieces. That bridge was found in ongoing openness to find out. It was like an exercise in faith, and, in turn trust and compassion.

Anyway, that’s one kind of panpsychism. Another kind is nihilistic. Something about my coefficients was altered. Something normally was disproportional in my approach to panpsychism. Something similarly was out of place in the approach to open individualism. Well, the hoffman seemed to tune me a bit and adjust the amount of belief and nihilism and so on I was going into it with to give me a fuller experience. It turns out that what I see as “taking at face value” is actually an important state of openness. One doesn’t truly take it at face value because one isn’t ever pretending to have complete knowledge, but one does take something without devoting so much resource to reconceiving it in order to conform to one’s beliefs. The hoffman experience was generally very in favor of bottom up mindfulness. Let go of socially motivated reasoning and imaginary conversations trying to prove yourself to ignorant people with no imaginations who want to ruin everything good… just put your energy into understanding something with openness and then you’ll see it. I got higher understandings or understandings I realized I otherwise wouldn’t get.

The experience really gave me a strong sense of the doom of my life while at the same time making me light hearted about it and trying to show me around. Normally I’m scared that a psychedelic is going to be like weed and be scary, but it never is. In fact the hoffman took me around my room to see that in some areas where there was some mess or something that I projected an ugly identity onto (like I see my shoes and the first thing I think is, “That’s asperger’s shoes. Those are the shoes someone with asperger’s wears.” So I have my social “identity disturbance” imbued into virtually all the objects around me. Any object that signifies someone else in my life is imbued with boogeymen and gremlins of the relationship I have with that person). I’m oppressed by my room and the needless flavoring of everything with stigma and shame… it’s so comprehensive that I’ve lost the sensitivity to it. It’s like a fish in water, I’m drowning in stigma to the point that I take it for granted and no longer realize there’s any other way of being. So the hoffman tried to show me around my room and show me there aren’t any boogey man and reconnect me to the personality I do have which isn’t aspergery and is fine and contradicts the stigmas. Every time I look in the mirror I see someone more attractive than I expected to see. I think this started in middle school. I always always always underestimate my appearance by quite a bit. And I load my self image with all those bad stigmas. Going to the mirror is like a reality check, but it’s worn out because I’m largely desensitized to it. But the hoffman helped me see that being aspergery or any other stigma was an unnecessary self-fulfilling trap I didn’t have to go down because I did have… I was in good standing and nothing meant I had to be aspergers. My posture my voice my skin etc.., all was fine.

But the hoffman did go over my life. I expected it would attack me about my relationship with my family (which I stigmatize myself for… “I must be some kind of deranged monster” is a load I begin every thought on the matter with) and turn me vegan, but it’s never what you expect. It wasn’t a fear based assault but it was really sane and reasonable. It gave me a sense of the trap I’m in. I ordinarily only feel one part of the trap at once, like I’m in a maze going from one dead end to another. But the hoffman gave me a sense of all the traps of my life I’m in at once. Yet I was lighthearted and amused and smiling about it. I was ego dead but I didn’t even know it. It’s like my ego left without making a sound. Another thing is that it isn’t necessarily key to have no ego, but it is key to be in the moment which is often conflated with having no ego. Like if you’re alone walking and having an inner monologue conversation, that’s probably being lost in thought having some imaginary future conversation and that exemplifies the problems and life-of-it’s-own of the ego. But it actually could be that one is checking into the present moment continuously and one is having that conversation for the nobody, for the consciousness. After all, the consciousness divided and packaged into different points of view and bodies in an audience is the same as the consciousness you have, so why not have the conversation before it? I used to regiment being in the moment, a certain grid of checkpoints of checking in. But that top-down systematic way of being mindful doesn’t work because I find shortcuts and seem to be beyond the age where I can keep going back to the beginner’s mind in a subject and question everything I know to the point where I am not allowed those shortcuts. Further those shortcuts are easy to take without knowing it. They masquerade as true mindfulness. So an informal bottom up spontaneous not regimented continuous mindfulness is important. I like the short ego stories mentioned… (to be continued… must use bathroom now)

I like the idea of short duration egos/stories Mike Johnson mentioned in his recent meditation article. I used to have long systematic stories with regimented moderately high frequency check ins with the present moment proportional to what I used to call “salience essentialism” (a silly name, but the idea of making some element of information that’s only found in a state of lots of reflection and skepticism and metacognitions essential). But, as I said, I can’t do that regimentation anymore, so I’m going with Mike Johnson’s idea of short egos linked together. To have short ego stories that remain close to the present it’s key not only to bring a story to a natural end soon but also to not linger on that ending. If you linger on that ending rather than immediately continuing the moment, keep it rolling in a new moment, then you end up just getting lost in a nothingness epilogue to the story. Useless. You can’t end and then stop with nothing to continue with. So key to keeping short ego stories is also continually making them. Always be shedding light on the situation (keep no secrets. The ego performer has no secrets to keep as the actor. Continually to unravel it in any situation it finds itself. Don’t worry about nullifying a previous performance…because the previous performance was never meant to fool you as complete reality. Hold onto no pretense, but continue to act while shedding light always. A dance without deceit.)

Rather than being mindful to grasp the moment, to pas a yes/no test, I be mindful anew each time. Every time I be mindful is a new way of being mindful, and it’s about quickly jumping to the moment. When you’re really mindful like this listening to Beethoven’s cello sonata, you can’t tell if it’s you that’s singing or the cello. It feels like your own mind almost. I used to be a yes/no tester. I would have a preconceived idea of reality I strove for. But now I’m not doing that. I’m letting go of all my notions and quickly coming to the moment with openness.

One more word on the cubism thing. It’s related very much, I think, to the feeling of open individualism as well as the sandy beaches of time thing because each item has with it it’s own competing structure. Normally we resolve things into one system, but this cubism takes different elements on-their-own-terms, which means there are terms and structures and systems and orientations attached to them. In these systems are simulated the ego and its orientation to things. It’s like when you have some words and are deciding what sentence to make of them you ordinarily subordinate certain words to other words (the main verb being at the highest level of organization), but instead this cubism would have competing sentences for different words. It wouldn’t force the collapse of one structure or system for the other. Likewise the feeling of always being in the middle of one’s thought (or the sandy beaches of time) is like the noncollapse of the thought structure. There are many overlapping thoughts, all of them in the middle, rather than one thought with a start and a finish spanning several moments. You see? I think a similar thing can explain the proliferation of selfhood in objects in one’s perceptual/imagined environment. You go beyond your ordinary selfhood sense structure and see no problem attaching it to multiple things, like anthropomorphizing things with your sense of orientation and first person perspective. This gives rise to a sense of perspective that is beyond seeing and hearing and all the ordinary things. Yet what is it? Alas, perspective as a concept is only as advanced as the abstraction of perceptions and imaginations and so on, so we don’t actually have a more advanced concept of perception/perspective-having. What we have is the abstraction that’s forced upon us by the cubism and multiplication of competing perspective-having structures attached to different objects. All we know is that whatever it is must go beyond any individual object and is seen only when you’re continually opening up to the idea by watching the cubism unfold. So it’s easy to understand how this is all just a conceptual trick of the mind, but it has a very good way of taking everything you know and all your beliefs and spinning those into the picture to convince you of something beyond all that still. And I really do like to believe the idea of a perspective that transcends my human situated perspective of sense organs and a center of imaginations. I’d like the floating above everything and seeing the symphony. I see how MC Escher pictures are very evocative here, because you have competing “structures” or competing whatevers…  competing resolutions. MC Escher is a form of cubism in this way.

Another thing I notice is a decrease in bad compulsions. Generally psychedelics relieve anxiety and obsessions and stuff like that. I have this nasty habit of looking at attractive people and getting a pang of pain and loneliness and stuff. My work involves me being on social media all day long, so I often see a lot of attractive people and it’s just a pang of badness. But fighting with the compulsion is no good either. Flee it. I’ve got to stop correcting past mistakes. Short ego story. Don’t go down one road and then smack your forehead and then reverse and go back down another road. Nobody wants to see you back up. It’s not valuable. You’re not submitting or apologizing to anyone. Once you go down one road simply poof out of existence and then poof back into existence on the right road. No ego story of grinding corrections and punishments and obstacles. Just skip ahead to the right spot the moment you notice a better spot. Ordinarily seeing or hearing attractive people makes me tense up and go ouch and feel a dose of desperation and so on. This time I’m not doing that. I find that I’m lucky that I haven’t had that and a state of not clinging and so on is naturally here (I’m not anxiously monitoring my clinging level). I think it’s good to just zip to the right moment, the right thought and not spend time wrestling with the thing trying to undo it explicitly. Learn the habit of bypassing it, not reversing it. Don’t even expedite reversal. There should be no struggle to correct anything. Rather just jump freely to a better state of mind. But that’s easier said than done. I think it’s very hard to see the possibility of freedom in the present when faced with very strong recurrent thoughts or states of mind that one doesn’t want. It feels like the only hope of getting out of there is by contending with it, reversing it. But I’m suggesting that actually one can unlearn ever going down the wrong path in the first place (as opposed to learning to make the mistake and then the correction) and that is found in the present, the elusive present we overlook (or underlook). In fact, the present moment isn’t known to you yet while you’re still trying to struggle to escape the undesirable thought pattern. Trust that it will show you the way and open up to you as you open up to it. It will progressively open up, and you’ll say, “Oh, I see now.” 

So short stories are good, being in the moment is good. The intentional object is particularly tyrannical (ref) when it lives in a long story. Short stories can still have intentional objects. Things can have purposes, there can be a point, but the point should be found in the present (or the very very near future). When you find yourself having imaginary conversations for the future, then quickly start speaking that to the present. Whom are you talking to? Nobody. The nobody of the now (or yourself, or the non-people of the now) is a perfectly interesting audience.  You have within your consciousness basically what any audience can actually supply anyway. Consciousness differentiated through filters of points of view and personality and so on is only just the same as what you have in your “solitary” conversation.

Well anyway, I found myself having a bit of a love for the present. I like knowing that fulfillment is found in the present. It is beautiful and wholesome. I like not being chained to anxieties and compulsions. I like the spontaneousness of the higher rate of mindfulness. I don’t normally have so much mindfulness and trying with much effort to be mindful backfires. As explained above about reversing mistakes, today I was quickly and without making a fuss finding myself snapping back into the present. Rather than trying to make an ordeal of an error report trying to diagnose the lapse in mindfulness and see to it that it doesn’t happen again, I let go of that controlling and just join the present moment “ready to rock” as [person] from [previous job] would put it.

Here’s part of the trip report. I wrote the other half of it in a paper notebook:

5:10PM I recorded everything earlier in a notebook.

Wow so much easier to type fast. Anyway I see how the ego and the self, I created a dark scary world of doubt and fear and shame for this Bill character. It’s just a character. Bring as many emotional resolutions as possible to make the story have as happy an ending as can be, but ultimately just don’t forget it’s all fiction.

And I guess that’s key. The fears of the hellishness of being a “bad human” and so on…all fictions of the Bill story in the world, in consensus reality. Make the story look nice, but see through it. It’s just a story for some TV viewer. I’m so predictable, what I’m paranoid about, what my hang ups are, etc… How the grass is greener on the other side of being social.

But this trip, rather than dipping me in guilt and attacking me with my own problems is actually more like a refresher on how these places aren’t full of boogeymen like I think they are, and if I just realized this I’d have a better day. But ultimately the desperateness and the loneliness and so on…gosh what a drag. On and on and on being upset about my life. I cultivate a sense of loss before fulfilling it. I should instead not have any needs and just pursue excitement… It’s interesting to think about whether you can get anywhere in life or have a very interesting time without those needs and voids held open by fear.

5:19PM I think I watch Minecraft playthroughs as a surrogate for socializing. Now without getting emotional or caught up in the Bill story, let’s just assess whether this is necessary.

5:25PM I’m listening to music. I’m admiring the majesty of some things in it. CPE bach. Just like Huxley said about my nonself being the non self of that chair leg, I identify as a non self with the non self of the grand music at points. Anyway, I notice how a lot of my enjoyment of music is really grinding and unpleasant. Forceful and full of pain like fighting through wounds, forcing your way through barbed wire. It’s senseless, isn’t it? If I can control it and enjoy music without this forceful stuff, this suffering forcefulness and longing and neediness and narrowness.

5:30PM Those headphones cause such misery. I get lost in those things. I’m getting a bit morbid, aren’t I? I’m not coming down but I’m tired and maybe my blood sugar is lower or something.

9:51PM Watched the Terence McKenna in Prague with Ram Das and Shulgin and others (link 1, link 2). Fascinating. Then I listened to this I noticed how this time I did acid my mind didn’t expand very much at all. I feel old and like my brain is stuck in certain ways of seeing things. I do have a gentle calling to feel myself situated in terms of nature and evolution and the mystery of the universe…I just want to see the open night sky like our ancestors did, but not clouded by all these paved roads and jobs and clocks and so on. Missing the moment for some future goal, measured by time and streets and so on. I liked what Watts said about playing a musical instrument for the enjoyment of music and not to do secondary things like make money or impress an audience. Now one could say that their goal is to impress audiences and so one isn’t “playing music” but one is “impressing audiences” and happening to play music. But I like the idea of only playing music in an innocent way because of the pleasure the noise gives. Unlocking the song by learning the music is rewarded by the music as it comes along. Not the prospect of performing or this becoming a dance of your ego or something. That’s kind of the problem. At least not living acts for the present well enough. That’s what I meant a couple weeks ago about having present moment self goals. Have goals for the moment. Don’t do stuff for later. The goal shouldn’t be set on some fulfillment of something later on. Why? Because people who say things like that have broken heads and my head is broken so I say stuff like that. Anyway, when I play music it should be to produce sound. When I try to get a self image, a social ego, a sense of my social personality, it shouldn’t be aimed at a future date. I should be genuine where I am, even if I’m alone. That is the moment. When it happens, it isn’t practice for some future performance. I’m not scripting. Rather, that is it. That was the moment to make the joke or be clever or do something. If I’m alone, that’s who I do it for. I do it for myself and nobody. I don’t do it for anybody, at least nobody to be abstracted and conceived in a later date. What happens happens then…what happens in the moment stays in the moment. Right now, who am I journaling with? Whom am I talking to? Wow, I can’t even believe I’ve got the depth to question that. Above I mentioned how not expanded my mind felt. Well I’m not very reflective, and the fact I just brought up the question who I am journaling for shows that thing. A lot of life has been lived in these journals. Some good, a lot bad. I can imagine myself throwing my journals away. I can imagine my laptop getting stolen or destroyed or lost. I no longer am hoarding up notes on philosophy projects. So what is this all for? Well, it’s all for itself. And right now it feels better. This feels like a good use of my time and a legitimate experience of living. Nothing lacks. I don’t need to add on some need to escape here and strive for a better place. Apples and oranges. This is adequate in itself. What I do, I must enjoy doing for the sake of itself. I don’t read books to build a vocabulary and a wit so I can talk to people. I have to enjoy reading the books and having that vocabulary and wit as the reader. Not for some future moment. The journey of a book isn’t an overture to something else. It is the journey. I need really to start becoming intrinsically motivated by everything I do, see things as ends in themselves. Really end. Not mindfulness to some other place. I make this mistake all the time. I think of the future now, of the future present moment mindfulness state. I’ve got to enjoy the mindfulness I already have before I can progress further…or rather before it can progress to unfold and intensify. I have to appreciate the experience of education I’m getting by reading a book, raw education however unglamorous and rudimentary, before my education can grow and intensify.

Sunk cost is big when trying to improve yourself (referring back to Alan Watts talk there). If I haven’t already implemented these notes about living in the present moment, then why do I think I can? Seems like the game has run stale. I’ve been narrowly focused and in sunk cost and escapism and I need to just let go of the outcome and step back and observe. Just like what I said about the stand-up comedian’s ego filtering out the amount of feedback based on how massively they’d have to renovate their act—they’re unwilling to open themselves up to just assess what’s wrong and fix it because they’re trying to open up to a small amount, one repair guy and see what he says and see if he recommends a follow up repair guy when he can’t figure it out, and then two slightly more in-depth expert repair guys come by and so on….why is this progression of repairmen economical? It is if you have no idea what’s wrong with your electricity in your house, but if you are a standup comedian and your ability to correct your act depends on your ability to recognize what’s wrong with it and you have access to that consultation, why limit yourself by peeking through a half closed eye? Why not just open up and see the whole situation? You won’t waste time…oh so much time you’ll spend fighting your way back up from the later stage repair men to earlier repair men…correcting later stage specific advanced diagnoses but still something’s wrong but it’s simpler than before. Just always wrestling with the errors in your performance trying to keep them in the simple no biggie zone rather than in the serious fail zone. But if only you were willing to open your eyes fully to see the true extent of the problems, then you could fix them all.

10:30PM Down with an edible. Wow, surprised how powerful the acid still is. Let’s see I took one at 12:33PM and the other at 1:49PM. Well, and I just took an edible. A tinge of regret because it’ll dull and otherwise contaminate the acid, but I’m getting tired so it wasn’t like I was going to get much out of it anyway. Alas, I’m still looking for gold to fill my notebooks for for later reading. I still take notes for the future. I should see notes as what they really are, which is just prosthetics for the experience of narratives in the present moment. Nothing more. (And I’m often blind to that possibility! I’m blind to the potential of the present! I only think in terms of future stuff. I just overlook the present.)

10:36 Wow that Alan Watts talk though. I know I always can’t help but put in my disclaimers. I don’t even feel like going through the various examples of why I have critical reasoning bla bla bla (don’t think of me as a stupid sheep). Just how helpless I seem to be in my current mode of doing things to get myself to live in the present and for the present. I don’t make decisions. I don’t decide what meanings my words have. I rather sit there passively waiting for the right words to come and fill in. I could do with some asserting myself more. But when the moment is right, when it gives energy rather than drains.

And rather than striving for an answer for a theory about consciousness or something or reality or whatever crazy… that is so rewarding that it can be done for itself in the moment. Think about consciousness. The mystery of the ever elusive background. The unknown is stimulating. It is exciting. Seeing the implications of the unknown and questioning old frameworks is enjoyable. It just is. 🙂

11:30PM Just took my second edible. (Saw: Alan Watts – Nature of God)

12:31AM Only do things for the now. Don’t solve problems for the future. Propose solutions for the future in the now. It’s a present act. You’re just exercising talking and proposing and speculating recreationally for the present. You ‘re not putting your will into the future. And the idea I have is that the bleakness of my life is in my head. Living in a van can be positive. I can have a happier social life. But doubts just feed. They’re demonic. They love sadness like heroin. They love to feed on the anxieties about not being able to make friends, of how poor my track record has been, how my life used to be in my control and going in a direction has now fallen so dramatically in a different way….The doubt tempts you. The decisions stop being made in the present moment. IT says “Hold on now. Think about this…” as it proceeds, foot in the door, to tempt you to sadness and doubt, as if there’s some social reward for having a sufficiently pessimistic view.

The Purple Pill

Posted on by algekalipso

It finally arrived. I had to appeal it’s denial a couple times, but it finally came through. It arrived in the mail today. It’s laminated with rounded corners, a holographic mark, and a pinch of glitter. I finally got my Poetic License. They said if I wanted permission to use metaphors I would need to apply for an allegorical diploma, but what is a poetic license without metaphor? In practice most licensed professionals in the field ignore this rule. It’s not like the reader ever asks you for your credentials whenever symbolism is used. They said my trope copyright agreement is on the way. They gave me a tracking number. But I’m not going to be waiting around any longer…

The most insidious thing about taking the blue pill is that it is usually followed by an immediate amnesia of having done so. Soon after one is presented with the same decision, but now with an incredible -unbelievable- literary feeling of empowerment and bravery that makes you decide to take the red pill in an heroic act of self-effacement. Alas, this is of course all a fantasy induced by the original blue pill.

There are various grades of pseudo-red pills. You have the standard sedatives that put you to sleep; a dreamless coma – “Life is an unprofitable episode disturbing the blessed calm of non-existence” (Schopenhauer). You have the one that makes you forget -in fact achieve a state of convenient social neglect- of the intensely bad experiences that exist out there in Hell branches of the multiverse. There is the one that makes you believe that nonhuman animals lack souls and are unable to suffer (despite their, it turns out, much greater capacity for suffering than humans). There are those that by virtue of making you believe that you took the red pill give your life a tremendous sense of mission and moral superiority. There is the pill of sentimentalism, the pill of fanaticism, the pill of scientism, the pill of mainstream sports, the pill of social media rage, the pill of analytic philosophy fandom, and the pill of pop psychopharmachology (SSRIs increase your serotonin levels, and serotonin is the happy molecule, or so the scientists are saying *wink*). Alas, naming the most common ones, those that zombify the people who claim to be the most awake would feel like a personal attack (even if far from it). So the most common blue pills shall remain unmentioned lest I’m lynched.

The true red pill is not just DXM with red 2. It isn’t just eugenics, international conspiracies, evolutionary psychopathology, or Hansonian signaling theory. The real red pill is made of 4000°C bright red luminous magma that destroys not only your esophagus, but cuts through your body and falls directly on the ground below passing right through, only barely cooled down by your body due to its incredibly high specific heat capacity.

No. That’s still another blue pill fantasy designed to make you feel brave and morally superior for taking it. The real red pill is agape. The communion with the Godhead in its infinite compassion for all Beings large and small.

But you guessed it right, that’s also another type of coating for the blue fellow (iridescent, yes, but still synthetic and bad for your liver).

What did you think, that there is any real closure? It is not like nature is going to be kind to us humans who suffer from high levels of neuroticism and psychological need for closure.

There is no red pill. But there are decent approximations. There is the unprejudiced pursuit of truth – the high AQ high IQ depressive realism that is an evolutionary spandrel. The state of metta and LSD ego death are close seconds, though they lack the critical clarity of mind needed to be willing to stare at the raw truth of suffering and its causes for too long before craving social validation for doing so.

Is there an alternative? Yes.

The purple pill is the pill that gives you both high hedonic tone and an unprejudiced open ended approach to the pursuit of truth. For losing truth is to lose it all, but to lose it all is only bad because it makes you and others suffer in the wider universe. Yes, here is where I am abusing my poetic license. I am a licensed wordsmith, don’t you know? I carry with me the approval of RA, I have the blessing of poetic authority so don’t you dare question my use of vagueness to drive a point home. The purple pill is what will redeem us all. The recognition that though truth is painful in our current, evolutionarily adaptive mind-frame, it is not in and of itself a cause of seething pain. Recognizing that true evil is not a person or a mythical archetype but the mere existence of states of consciousness as pornographically unethical as kidney stones or cluster headaches does not need to induce (at least not logically, not physically) a nihilistic depression. It does not need to make you speak in tongues, to scream at strangers in the street “AHH don’t you see how bad it is that we live in an eternalist empty individualist universe that does not care about the welfare of moments of experience!?!?” – It is still possible to do something productive instead. You can still, it turns out, choose to take eros and agape and reforge them into a laser sword that produces hyperdopaminergic loving-kindness in those who are hit by it, and mindfulness in those who wield it.

The purple pill is the true red pill; at least the best approximation there is. For if the truth is that the world is tenselessly (timelessly) littered with hellish states of consciousness implicated by the universal wavefunction satisfying the principles of zero ontology, this still does not imply that accurately representing the causal structure of such facts *has* to come along with a hellish hedonic tone of itself. This is the truth we all long for.

Take the purple pill and join us in the battle to destroy hell. You will, much to everyone’s incredulous amazement, be happy while doing so.

Photo credit: The HyperSpace

Qualia Computing Media Appearances

Posted on by algekalipso

Podcasts

16 – Andrés Gómez Emilsson on Solving Consciousness and Being Happy All the Time (The Most Interesting People I Know…, October 2019)

On Consciousness, Qualia, and Meaning with Mike Johnson and Andrés Gómez Emilsson (AI Alignment Podcast, May 2019)

71 – Researching Qualia with Andrés Gómez Emilsson (The Bayesian Conspiracy, October 2018)

The Future of Mind (Waking Cosmos, October 2018)

Consciousness, Qualia, and Psychedelics with Andres Gomez Emilsson (Catalyzing Coherence, May 2018)

Consciousness and Qualia Realism (Cosmic Tortoise, May 2018)

Robert Stark interviews Transhumanist Andres Gomez Emilsson (The Stark Truth with Robert Stark, October 2017)

Como el MDMA, pero sin la neurotoxicidad (Abolir el sufrimiento con Andrés Gómez) (Guía Escéptica [in Spanish], March 2016)

Happiness is Solving the World’s Problems (The World Transformed, January 2016)

Presentations

The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (@Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club, September 2019)

Harmonic Society: 8 Models of Art for a Scientific Paradigm of Aesthetic Qualia (at a QRI Party, July 2019)

Andrés Gómez Emilsson – Consciousness vs Replicators (Burning Man, August 2018)

Quantifying Valence (see also; The Science of Consciousness, April 2018)

Quantifying Bliss (Consciousness Hacking, June 2017)

Utilitarian Temperament: Satisfying Impactful Careers (BIL Oakland 2016: The Recession Generation, July 2016)

Interviews

Mapping the psychedelic experience – a conversation with the Qualia Research Institute (Adeptus Psychonautica, October 2019)

Simulation #453 Catalog & Navigate Consciousness (Simulation, Jun 2019)

Simulation #310 Mike Johnson & Andrés Gómez Emilsson – Chemistry of Consciousness (Simulation, March 2019)

Simulation #255 Andrés Gómez Emilsson – Computational Properties of Consciousness (Simulation, February 2019)

Want a Penfield Mood Organ? This Scientist Might Be Able to Help (Ziff Davis PCMag, April 2018)

Frameworks for Consciousness – Andres Gomez Emilsson (Science, Technology & the Future by Adam Ford, March 2018)

Towards the Abolition of Suffering through Science (featuring David Pearce, Brian Tomasik, & Mike Johnson hosted by Adam Ford, August 2015)

The Mind of David Pearce (Stanford, December 2012)

Andrés Gómez Emilsson, el joven que grito espurio a Felipe Calderón (Cine Desbundo [in Spanish], October 2008)

Narrative Inclusions

SSC Journal Club: Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics and the Anarchic Brain (Slate Star Codex, September 2019)

Why We Need to Study Consciousness (Scientific American, September 2019)

Young pioneers on their hopes for technology, and older trailblazers on their regrets (MIT Technology Review, August 2019)

Mike Johnson – Testable Theories of Consciousness (Science, Technology & the Future, March 2019)

On Consciousness, Qualia, Valence & Intelligence with Mike Johnson (Science, Technology, Future, October 2018)

Podcast with Daniel Ingram (Cosmic Tortoise [referenced at 2h22m], January 2018)

Fear and Loathing at Effective Altruism Global 2017 (Slate Star Codex, August 2017)

Transhumanist Proves Schrödinger’s Cat Experiment Isn’t Better on LSD (Inverse, October 2016)

High Performer: Die Renaissance des LSD im Silicon Valley (Wired Germany [in German], June 2015)

Come With Us If You Want To Live (Harper’s Magazine, January 2015)

David Pearce’s Social Media Posts (Hedweb: pre-2014, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018)

David Pearce at Stanford 2011 (Stanford Transhumanist Association, December 2011)

External Articles

Ending Suffering Is The Most Important Cause (IEET, September 2015)

This Is What I Mean When I Say ‘Consciousness’ (IEET, September 2015)

My Interest Shifted from Mathematics to Consciousness after a THC Experience (IEET, September 2015)

‘Spiritual/Philosophical’ is the Deepest, Highest, Most Powerful Dimension of Euphoria (IEET, September 2015)

Bios

H+pedia, ISI-S, Decentralized AI Summit, Earth Sharing

Miscellaneous

Philosophy of Mind Stand-up Comedy (The Science of Consciousness,  April 2018)

Randal Koene vs. Andres Emilsson on The Binding Problem (Bay Area Futurists, Oakland CA, May 2016)

Note: I am generally outgoing, fun-loving, and happy to participate in podcasts, events, interviews, and miscellaneous activities. Feel free to invite me to your podcast/interview/theater/etc. I am flexible when it comes to content; anything I’ve written about in Qualia Computing is fair game for discussion. Infinite bliss!

Marijuana-induced “Short-term Memory Tracers”

Posted on by algekalipso

[On the subjective effects of marijuana]: It’s one thing to describe it verbally and another thing to experience it yourself. I had this dissociated feeling that was really intense. I had memory tracers. So it wasn’t like, you know, people on LSD or stuff will talk about how “your hand is tracing over and over again” and it was almost like that with my memory. My short term memory was repeating over and over again. So it’d be things like getting in a car, and getting in the car over and over again, putting on a seat belt over and over and over again, and it was like short term memory tracers. And it was overall extremely intense. Had an altered perception of space. You know… distance. That’s something I [also] got on mushrooms, which I talked about in a previous video, but it’s like you see something far away and you don’t really know if it’s really far away, or if it is just really small. So if you see a car that’s like 50 feet away, you don’t know if it is 50 feet away or if it is just a matchbox car that’s really close to you. So it kind of had that; it altered the way I saw space. And, to be honest, I freaked the fuck out, because this isn’t what I thought marijuana was supposed to be. I thought it was a sedative. I thought it made you relaxed. I didn’t know it tripped you the fuck out. So, uh, my response was: I thought I was dying. I remember being in the backseat of the car and saying “is this normal?” And the guy in the front seat– he was this Indian dude, his name was Deepak– I swear to God it was like, uh, my Kumar, and he turns back and and was like “Are you tripping, man? Are you feeling it, man?” and that just made me even more fucked up in the head. Because he was saying it in his Indian accent, and I was like “What’s going on? What’s going on?”, and I thought I had to go to the hospital. Uh, let’s fast-forward in the experience, so about one hour later, or 30 minutes later, I don’t really know, it started to turn more in what I expected it to be. Which was this sedative, I started feeling more relaxed, like the trip started subsiding, and I was left with this trip afterglow of relaxation, feeling giggly, feeling really hungry, and you know kind of like the standard marijuana high. And this happened every time I smoked marijuana in the beginning. I was uncomfortable for the first 30 minutes to an hour. I learned to kind of enjoy it, but for the most part I was waiting it out. And then I’d get relaxed and chill. And I wouldn’t really call it paranoia, it was really just tripping so hard I was kind of like “wow, like, I’m really fucking tripping, I hope I don’t act weird in front of a bunch of people” Maybe that is paranoia, I don’t know.

 

[…10 more minutes talking about marijuana…]

 

And I don’t know why the fuck marijuana is still illegal in 2017. I feel like I a fucking pilgrim. Like, seriously? A war veteran can go and almost die for his country. He could come back, and drink alcohol, buy an assault riffle, and get prescribed speed, but smoke a joint? Nah, you are a fucking criminal! I mean, that doesn’t make any fucking sense. I’ve been doing this push, that I said that if by January 2018 Marijuana wasn’t legal I’d shave my hair. I’m not gonna shave my head. I am gonna cut all of my hair off, and I’m really sad about that. Usually when I cut my hair off I send it to Korea at a random address because I just like to say “my hair is in Korea”. And I’m sure whoever opens it is like “why the fuck am I getting this?” But this time I’m gonna throw it up into eBay just because I want to see if anybody bids on it. I’m gonna do it 99 cents free shipping. But yeah, getting my hair cut is simply really weird: when I get to the stylist and say “can you put this on a bag? I’m gonna sell this.” Uh, but yeah, that really is it for Marijuana as far as my overall experience with the substance.

– What’s smoking marijuana like? The positive and negative effects of smoking cannabis and dabs by Youtube addiction recovery coach Cg Kid