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David Pearce on the “Schrodinger’s Neurons Conjecture”

Posted on by algekalipso

My friend +Andrés Gómez Emilsson on Qualia Computing: LSD and Quantum Measurements: Can you see Schrödinger’s cat both dead and alive on acid?

 

Most truly radical intellectual progress depends on “crazy” conjectures. Unfortunately, few folk who make crazy conjectures give serious thought to extracting novel, precise, experimentally falsifiable predictions to confound their critics. Even fewer then publish the almost inevitable negative experimental result when their crazy conjecture isn’t confirmed. So kudos to Andrés for doing both!!

 

What would the world look like if the superposition principle never breaks down, i.e. the unitary Schrödinger dynamics holds on all scales, and not just the microworld? The naïve – and IMO mistaken – answer is that without the “collapse of the wavefunction”, we’d see macroscopic superpositions of live-and-dead cats, experiments would never appear to have determinate outcomes, and the extremely well tested Born rule (i.e. the probability of a result is the squared absolute value of the inner product) would be violated. Or alternatively, assuming DeWitt’s misreading of Everett, if the superposition principle never breaks down, then when you observe a classical live cat, or a classical dead cat, your decohered (“split”) counterpart in a separate classical branch of the multiverse sees a dead cat or a live cat, respectively.

 

In my view, all these stories rest on a false background assumption. Talk of “observers” and “observations” relies on a naïve realist conception of perception whereby you (the “observer”) somehow hop outside of your transcendental skull to inspect the local mind-independent environment (“make an observation”). Such implicit perceptual direct realism simply assumes – rather than derives from quantum field theory – the existence of unified observers (“global” phenomenal binding) and phenomenally-bound classical cats and individually detected electrons striking a mind-independent classical screen cumulatively forming a non-classical interference pattern (“local” phenomenal binding). Perception as so conceived – as your capacity for some sort of out-of-body feat of levitation – isn’t physically possible. The role of the mind-independent environment beyond one’s transcendental skull is to select states of mind internal to your world-simulation; the environment can’t create, or imprint its signature on, your states of mind (“observations”) – any more than the environment can create or imprint its signature on your states of mind while you’re dreaming.

 

Here’s an alternative conjecture – a conjecture that holds regardless of whether you’re drug-naïve, stone-cold sober, having an out-of-body experience on ketamine, awake or dreaming, or tripping your head off on LSD. You’re experiencing “Schrodinger’s cat” states right nowin virtue of instantiating a classical world-simulation. Don’t ask what’s it like to perceive a live-and-dead Schrödinger’s cat; ask instead what it’s like to instantiate a coherent superposition of distributed feature-processing neurons. Only the superposition principle allows you to experience phenomenally-bound classical objects that one naively interprets as lying in the mind-independent world. In my view, the universal validity of the superposition principle allows you to experience a phenomenally bound classical cat within a seemingly classical world-simulation – or perform experiments with classical-looking apparatus that have definite outcomes, and confirm the Born rule. Only the vehicle of individual coherent superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors allows organic mind-brains to run world simulations described by an approximation of classical Newtonian physics. In the mind-independent world – i.e. not the world of your everyday experience – the post-Everett decoherence program in QM pioneered by Zeh, Zurek et al. explains the emergence of an approximation of classical “branches” for one’s everyday world-simulations to track. Yet within the CNS, only the superposition principle allows you to run a classical world-simulation tracking such gross fitness-relevant features of your local extracranial environment. A coherent quantum mind can run phenomenally-bound simulations of a classical world, but a notional classical mind couldn’t phenomenally simulate a classical world – or phenomenally simulate any other kind of world. For a supposedly “classical” mind would just be patterns of membrane-bound neuronal mind-dust: mere pixels of experience, a micro-experiential zombie.

 

Critically, molecular matter-wave interferometry can in principle independently be used to test the truth – or falsity – of this conjecture (see: https://www.physicalism.com/#6).

 

OK, that’s the claim. Why would (almost) no scientifically informed person take the conjecture seriously?

 

In a word, decoherence.

 

On a commonsense chronology of consciousness, our experience of phenomenally bound perceptual objects “arises” via patterns of distributed neuronal firings over a timescale of milliseconds – the mystery lying in how mere synchronised firing of discrete, decohered, membrane-bound neurons / micro-experiences could generate phenomenal unity, whether local or global. So if the lifetime of coherent superpositions of distributed neuronal feature-processors in the CNS were milliseconds, too, then there would be an obvious candidate for a perfect structural match between the phenomenology of our conscious minds and neurobiology / fundamental physics – just as I’m proposing above. Yet of course this isn’t the case. The approximate theoretical lifetimes of coherent neuronal superpositions in the CNS can be calculated: femtoseconds or less. Thermally-induced decoherence is insanely powerful and hard to control. It’s ridiculous – intuitively at any rate – to suppose that such fleeting coherent superpositions could be recruited to play any functional role in the living world. An epic fail!

 

Too quick.
Let’s step back.
Many intelligent people initially found it incredible that natural selection could be powerful enough to throw up complex organisms as thermodynamically improbable as Homo sapiens. We now recognise that the sceptics were mistaken: the human mind simply isn’t designed to wrap itself around evolutionary timescales of natural selection playing out over hundreds of millions of years. In the CNS, another form of selection pressure plays out – a selection pressure over one hundred of orders of magnitude (sic) more powerful than selection pressure on information-bearing self-replicators as conceived by Darwin. “Quantum Darwinism” as articulated by Zurek and his colleagues isn’t the shallow, tricksy metaphor one might naively assume; and the profound implications of such a selection mechanism must be explored for the world-simulation running inside your transcendental skull, not just for the extracranial environment. At work here is unimaginably intense selection pressure favouring comparative resistance to thermally (etc)-induced decoherence [i.e. the rapid loss of coherence of complex phase amplitudes of the components of a superposition] of functionally bound phenomenal states of mind in the CNS. In my view, we face a failure of imagination of the potential power of selection pressure analogous to the failure of imagination of critics of Darwin’s account of human evolution via natural selection. It’s not enough lazily to dismiss sub-femtosecond decoherence times of neuronal superpositions in the CNS as the reductio ad absurdum of quantum mind. Instead, we need to do the interferometry experiments definitively to settle the issue, not (just) philosophize.

 

Unfortunately, unlike Andrés, I haven’t been able to think of a DIY desktop experiment that could falsify or vindicate the conjecture. The molecular matter-wave experiment I discuss in “Schrodinger’s Neurons” is conceptually simple but (horrendously) difficult in practice. And the conjecture it tests is intuitively so insane that I’m sometimes skeptical the experiment will ever get done. If I sound like an advocate rather than a bemused truth-seeker, I don’t mean to be so; but if phenomenal binding _isn’t _quantum-theoretically or classically explicable, then dualism seems unavoidable. In that sense, David Chalmers is right.

 

How come I’m so confident that superposition principle doesn’t break down in the CNS? After all, the superposition principle has been tested only up to the level of fullerenes, and no one yet has a proper theory of quantum gravity. Well, besides the classical impossibility of the manifest phenomenal unity of consciousness, and the cogent reasons that a physicist would give you for not modifying the unitary Schrödinger dynamics, the reason is really just a philosophical prejudice on my part. Namely, the universal validity of the superstition principle of QM offers the only explanation-space that I can think of for why anything exists at all: an informationless zero ontology dictated by the quantum analogue of the library of Babel.

 

We shall see.

– David Pearce, commenting on the latest significant article published on this blog.

LSD and Quantum Measurements: Can you see Schrödinger’s cat both dead and alive on acid?

Posted on by algekalipso

[Content Warnings: Psychedelic Depersonalization, Fear of the Multiverse, Personal Identity Doubts, Discussion about Quantum Consciousness, DMT entities, Science]

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

– Emily Dickinson

Is it for real?

A sizable percentage of people who try a high dose of DMT end up convinced that the spaces they visit during the trip exist in some objective sense; they either suspect, intuit or conclude that their psychonautic experience reflects something more than simply the contents of their minds. Most scientists would argue that those experiences are just the result of exotic brain states; the worlds one travels to are bizarre (often useless) simulations made by our brain in a chaotic state. This latter explanation space forgoes alternate realities for the sake of simplicity, whereas the former envisions psychedelics as a multiverse portal technology of some sort.

Some exotic states, such as DMT breakthrough experiences, do typically create feelings of glimpsing foundational information about the depth and structure of the universe. Entity contact is frequent, and these seemingly autonomous DMT entities are often reported to have the ability to communicate with you. Achieving a verifiable contact with entities from another dimension would revolutionize our conception of the universe. Nothing would be quite as revolutionary, really. But how to do so? One could test the external reality of these entities by asking them to provide information that cannot be obtained unless they themselves held an objective existence. In this spirit, some have proposed to ask these entities complex mathematical questions that would be impossible for a human to solve within the time provided by the trip. This particular test is really cool, but it has the flaw that DMT experiences may themselves trigger computationally-useful synesthesia of the sort that Daniel Tammet experiences. Thus even if DMT entities appeared to solve extraordinary mathematical problems, it would still stand to reason that it is oneself who did it and that one is merely projecting the results into the entities. The mathematical ability would be the result of being lucky in the kind of synesthesia DMT triggered in you.

A common overarching description of the effects of psychedelics is that they “raise the frequency of one’s consciousness.” Now, this is a description we should take seriously whether or not we believe that psychedelics are inter-dimensional portals. After all, promising models of psychedelic action involve fast-paced control interruption, where each psychedelic would have its characteristic control interrupt frequency. And within a quantum paradigm, Stuart Hameroff has argued that psychedelic compounds work by bringing up the quantum resonance frequency of the water inside our neurons’ microtubules (perhaps going from megahertz to gigahertz), which he claims increases the non-locality of our consciousness.

In the context of psychedelics as inter-dimensional portals, this increase in the main frequency of one’s consciousness may be the key that allows us to interact with other realities. Users describe a sort of tuning of one’s consciousness, as if the interface between one’s self and the universe underwent some sudden re-adjustment in an upward direction. In the same vein, psychedelicists (e.g. Rick Strassman) frequently describe the brain as a two-way radio, and then go on to claim that psychedelics expand the range of channels we can be attuned to.

One could postulate that the interface between oneself and the universe that psychonauts describe has a real existence of its own. It would provide the bridge between us as (quantum) monads and the universe around us; and the particular structure of this interface would determine the selection pressures responsible for the part of the multiverse that we interact with. By modifying the spectral properties of this interface (e.g. by drastically raising the main frequency of its vibration) with, e.g. DMT, one effectively “relocates” (cf. alien travel) to other areas of reality. Assuming this interface exists and that it works by tuning into particular realities, what sorts of questions can we ask about its properties? What experiments could we conduct to verify its existence? And what applications might it have?

The Psychedelic State of Input Superposition

Once in a while I learn about a psychedelic effect that captures my attention precisely because it points to simple experiments that could distinguish between the two rough explanation spaces discussed above (i.e. “it’s all in your head” vs. “real inter-dimensional travel”). This article will discuss a very odd phenomenon whose interpretations do indeed have different empirical predictions. We are talking about the experience of sensing what appears to be a superposition of inputs from multiple adjacent realities. We will call this effect the Psychedelic State of Input Superposition (PSIS for short).

There is no known way to induce PSIS on purpose. Unlike the reliable DMT hyper-dimensional journeys to distant dimensions, PSIS is a rare closer-to-home effect and it manifests only on high doses of LSD (and maybe other psychedelics). Rather than feeling like one is tuning into another dimension in the higher frequency spectrum, it feels as if one just accidentally altered (perhaps even broke) the interface between the self and the universe in a way that multiplies the number of realities you are interacting with. After the event, the interface seems to tune into multiple similar universes at once; one sees multiple possibilities unfold simultaneously. After a while, one somehow “collapses” into only one of these realities, and while coming down, one is thankful to have settled somewhere specific rather than remaining in that weird in-between. Let’s take a look at a couple of trip reports that feature this effect:

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

 

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

 

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

 

— Reddit user I_DID_LSD_ON_A_PLANE, in r/BitcoinMarkets (why there? who knows).

Further down on the same thread, written by someone else:

[A couple hours after taking two strong hits of LSD]: Fast-forward to when I’m peaking hours later and I find myself removed from the timeline I’m in and am watching alternate timelines branch off every time someone does something specific. I see all of these parallel universes being created in real time, people’s actions or interactions marking a split where both realities exist. Dozens of timelines, at least, all happening at once. It was fucking wild to witness.

 

Then I realize that I don’t remember which timeline I originally came out of and I start to worry a bit. I start focusing, trying to remember where I stepped out of my particular universe, but I couldn’t figure it out. So, with the knowledge that I was probably wrong, I just picked one to go back into and stuck with it. It’s not like I would know what changed anyway, and I wasn’t going to just hang out here in the whatever-this-place-is outside of all of them.

 

Today I still sometimes feel like I left a life behind and jumped into a new timeline. I like it, I feel like I left a lot of baggage behind and there are a lot of regrets and insecurities I had before that trip that I don’t have anymore. It was in a different life, a different reality, so in this case the answer I found was that it’s okay to start over when you’re not happy with where you are in life.

 

— GatorAutomator

Let us summarize: Person X takes a lot of LSD. At some point during the trip (usually after feeling that “this trip is way too intense for me now”) X starts experiencing sensory input from what appear to be different branches of the multiverse. For example, imagine that person X can see a friend Y sitting on a couch in the corner. Suppose that Y is indecisive, and that as a result he makes different choices in different branches of the multiverse. If Y is deciding whether to stand up or not, X will suddenly see a shadowy figure of Y standing up while another shadowy figure of Y remains sitting. Let’s call them Y-sitting and Y-standing. If Y-standing then turns indecisive about whether to drink some water or go to the bathroom, X may see one shadowy figure of Y-standing getting water and a shadowy figure of Y-standing walking towards the bathroom, all the while Y-sitting is still on the couch. And so it goes. The number of times per second that Y splits and the duration of the perceived superposition of these splits may be a function of X’s state of consciousness, the substance and dose consumed, and the degree of indecision present in Y’s mind.

The two quotes provided are examples of this effect, and one can find a number of additional reports online with stark similarities. There are two issues at hand here. First, what is going on? And second, can we test it? We will discuss three hypotheses to explain what goes on during PSIS, propose an experiment to test the third one (the Quantum Hypothesis), and provide the results of such an experiment.

Hard-nosed scientists may want to skip to the “Experiment” section, since the following contains a fair amount of speculation (you have been warned).

Three Hypothesis for PSIS: Cognitive, Spiritual, Quantum

In order to arrive at an accurate model of the world, one needs to take into account both the prior probability of the hypothesis and the likelihoods that they predict that one would obtain the available evidence. Even if one prior of yours is extremely strong (e.g. a strong belief in materialism), it is still rational to update one’s probability estimates of alternative hypotheses when new relevant evidence is provided. The difficulty often comes from finding experiments where the various hypotheses generate very different likelihoods for one’s observations.  As we will see, the quantum hypothesis has this characteristic: it is the only one that would actually predict a positive result for the experiment.

The Cognitive Hypothesis

The first (and perhaps least surreal) hypothesis is that PSIS is “only in one’s mind”. When person X sees person Y both standing up and staying put, what may be happening is that X is receiving photons only from Y-standing and that Y-sitting is just a hallucination that X’s inner simulation of her environment failed to erase.

Psychedelics intensify one’s experience, and this is thought to be the result of control interruption. This means that inhibition of mental content by cortical feedback is attenuated. In the psychedelic state, sensory impressions, automatic reactions, feelings, thoughts and all other mental contents are more intense and longer-lived. This includes the predictions that you make about how your environment will evolve. Not only is one’s sensory input perceived as more intense, one’s imagined hypotheticals are also perceived more intensely.

Under normal circumstances, cortical inhibition makes our failed predictions quickly disappear. Psychedelic states of consciousness may be poor at inhibiting these predictions. In this account, X may be experiencing her brain’s past predictions of what Y could have done overlaid on top of the current input that she is receiving from her physical environment. In a sense, she may be experiencing all of the possible “next steps” that she simply intuited. While these simulations typically remain below the threshold of awareness (or just above it), on a psychedelic state they may reinforce themselves in unpredictable ways. X’s mind never traveled anywhere and there is nothing really weird going on. X is just experiencing the aftermath of a specific failure of information processing concerning the inhibition of past predictions.

Alternatively, very intense emotions such as those experienced on intense ego-killing psychedelic experiences may distort one’s perception so much that one begins to suspect that one is perhaps dead or in another dimension. We can posit that the belief that one is not properly connected to one’s brain (or that one is dying) can trigger even stronger emotions and unleash a cascade of further distortions. This positive feedback loop may create episodes of intense confusion and overlapping pieces of information, which later might be interpreted as “seeing splitting universes”.

The Spiritual Hypothesis

Many spiritual traditions postulate the existence of alternate dimensions, additional layers of reality, and hidden spirit pathways that connect all of reality. These traditions often provide rough maps of these realities and may claim that some people are able to travel to such far-out regions with mental training and consciousness technologies. For illustration, let’s consider Buddhist cosmology, which describes 31 planes of existence. Interestingly, one of the core ideas of this cosmology is that the major characteristic that distinguishes the planes of existence is the states of consciousness typical of their inhabitants. These states of consciousness are correlated with moral conditions such as the ethical quality of their past deeds (karma), their relationship with desire (e.g. whether it is compulsive, sustainable or indifferent) and their existential beliefs. In turn, a feature of this cosmology is that it allows inter-dimensional travel by changing one’s state of consciousness. The part of the universe one interacts with is a function of one’s karma, affinities and beliefs. So by changing these variables with meditation (or psychedelic medicine) one can also change which world we exist in.

An example of a very interesting location worth trying to travel to is the mythical city of Shambhala, the location of the Kalachakra Tantra. This city has allegedly turned into a pure land thanks to the fact that its king converted to Buddhism after meeting the Buddha. Pure lands are abodes populated by enlightened and quasi-enlightened beings whose purpose is to provide an optimal teaching environment for Buddhism. One can go to Shambhala by either reincarnating there (with good karma and the help of some pointers and directions at the time of death) or by traveling there directly during meditation. In order to do the latter, one needs to kindle one’s subtle energies so that they converge on one’s heart, while one is embracing the Bodhisattva ethic (focusing on reducing others’ suffering as a moral imperative). Shambhala may not be in a physical location accessible to humans. Rather, Buddhist accounts would seem to depict it as a collective reality built by people which manifests on another plane of existence (specifically somewhere between the 23rd and 27th layer). In order to create a place like that one needs to bring together many individuals in a state of consciousness that exhibits bliss, enlightenment and benevolence. A pure land has no reality of its own; its existence is the result of the states of consciousness of its inhabitants. Thus, the very reason why Shambhala can even exist as a place somewhere outside of us is because it is already a potential place that exists within us.

Similar accounts of a wider cosmological reality can be found elsewhere (such as Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Theosophy, etc.). These accounts may be consistent with the sort of experiences having to do with astral travel and entity contact that people have while on DMT and other psychedelics in high doses. However, it seems a lot harder to explain PSIS with an ontology of this sort. While reality is indeed portrayed as immensely vaster than what science has shown so far, we do not really encounter claims of parallel realities that are identical to ours except that your friend decided to go to the bathroom rather than drink some water just now. In other words, while many spiritual ontologies are capable of accommodating DMT hyper-dimensional travel, I am not aware of any spiritual worldview that also claims that whenever two things can happen, they both do in alternate realities (or, more specifically, that this leads to reality splitting).

The only spiritual-sounding interpretation of PSIS I can think of is the idea that these experiences are the result of high-level entities such as guardians, angels or trickster djinns who used your LSD state to teach you a lesson in an unconventional way. The first quote (the one written by Reddit user I_DID_LSD_ON_A_PLANE) seems to point in this direction, where the so-called Karma God is apparently inducing a PSIS experience and using it to illustrate the idea that we are all one (i.e. Open Individualism). Furthermore, the experience viscerally portrays the way that this knowledge should impact our feelings of self-importance (by creating a profound feeling of sonder). This way, the tripper may develop a lasting need to work towards peace, wisdom and enlightenment for the benefit of all sentient beings.

Life as a learning experience is a common trope among spiritual worldviews. It is likely that the spiritual interpretations that emerge in a state of psychedelic depersonalization and derealization will depend on one’s pre-existing ideas of what is possible. The atonement of one’s sins, becoming aware of one’s karma, feeling our past lives, realizing emptiness, hearing a dire mystical warning, etc. are all ideas that already exist in human culture. In an attempt to make sense- any sense- of the kind of qualia experienced in high doses of psychedelics, our minds may be forced to instantiate grandiose delusions drawn from one’s reservoir of far-out ideas.

On a super intense psychedelic experience in which one’s self-models fail dramatically and one experiences fear of ego dissolution, interpreting what is happening as the result of the Karma God judging you and then giving you another chance at life can viscerally seem to make a lot of sense at the time.

The Quantum Hypothesis

For the sake of transparency I must say that we currently do not have a derivation of PSIS from first principles. In other words, we have not yet found a way to use the postulates of quantum mechanics to account for PSIS (that is, assuming that the cognitive and spiritual hypothesis are not the case). That said, there are indeed some things to be said here: While a theory is missing, we can at least talk about what a quantum mechanical account of PSIS would have to look like. I.e. we can at least make sense of some of the features that the theory would need to have to predict that people on LSD would be able to see the superposition of macroscopic branches of the multiverse.

Why would being on acid allow you to receive input from macroscopic environments that have already decohered? How could taking LSD possibly prevent the so-called collapse of the wavefunction? You might think: “well, why even think about it? It’s simply impossible because the collapse of the wavefunction is an axiom of quantum mechanics and we know it is true because some of the predictions made by quantum mechanics (such as QED) are in agreement with experimental data up to the 12th decimal point.” Before jumping to this conclusion, though, let us remember that there are several formulations of quantum mechanics. Both the Born rule (which determines the probability of seeing different outcomes from a given quantum measurement) and the collapse of the wavefunction (i.e. that any quantum state other than the one that was measured disappears) are indeed axiomatic for some formulations. But other formulations actually derive these features and don’t consider them fundamental. Here is Sean Carroll explaining the usual postulates that are used to teach quantum mechanics to undergraduate audiences:

The status of the Born Rule depends greatly on one’s preferred formulation of quantum mechanics. When we teach quantum mechanics to undergraduate physics majors, we generally give them a list of postulates that goes something like this:

  1. Quantum states are represented by wave functions, which are vectors in a mathematical space called Hilbert space.
  2. Wave functions evolve in time according to the Schrödinger equation.
  3. The act of measuring a quantum system returns a number, known as the eigenvalue of the quantity being measured.
  4. The probability of getting any particular eigenvalue is equal to the square of the amplitude for that eigenvalue.
  5. After the measurement is performed, the wave function “collapses” to a new state in which the wave function is localized precisely on the observed eigenvalue (as opposed to being in a superposition of many different possibilities).

In contrast, here is what you need to specify for the Everett (Multiple Worlds) formulation of quantum mechanics:

  1. Quantum states are represented by wave functions, which are vectors in a mathematical space called Hilbert space.
  2. Wave functions evolve in time according to the Schrödinger equation.

And that’s it. As you can see this formulation does not employ any collapse of the wavefunction, and neither does it consider the Born rule as a fundamental law. Instead, the wavefunction is thought to merely seem to collapse upon measurement (which is achieved by nearly diagonalizing its components along the basis of the measurement; strictly speaking, neighboring branches never truly stop interacting, but the relevance of their interaction approaches zero very quickly). Here the Born rule is derived from first principles rather than conceived as an axiom. How exactly one can derive the Born rule is a matter of controversy, however. Currently, two very promising theoretical approaches to do so are Quantum Darwinism and the so-called Epistemic Separability Principle (ESP for short, a technical physics term not to be confused with Extra Sensory Perception). Although these approaches to deriving the Born rule are considered serious contenders for a final explanation (and they are not mutually exclusive), they have been criticized for being somewhat circular. The physics community is far from having a consensus on whether these approaches truly succeed.

Is there any alternative to either axiomatizing or deriving the apparent collapse and the Born rule? Yes, there is an alternative: we can think of them as regularities contingent upon certain conditions that are always (or almost always) met in our sphere of experience, but that are not a universal fact about quantum mechanics. Macroscopic decoherence and Born rule probability assignments work very well in our everyday lives, but they may not hold universally. In particular -and this is a natural idea to have under any view that links consciousness and quantum mechanics- one could postulate that one’s state of consciousness influences the mind-body interaction in such a way that information from one’s quantum environment seeps into one’s mind in a different way.

Don’t get me wrong; I am aware that the Born rule has been experimentally verified with extreme precision. I only ask that you bear in mind that many scientific breakthroughs share a simple form: they question the constancy of certain physical properties. For example, Einstein’s theory of special relativity worked out the implications of the fact that the speed of light is observer-independent. In turn this makes the passage of time of external systems observer-dependent. Scientists had a hard time believing Einstein when he arrived at the conclusion that accelerating our frame of reference to extremely high velocities could dilate time. What was thought to be a constant (the passage of time throughout the universe) turned out to be an artifact of the fact that we rarely travel fast enough to notice any deviation from Newton’s laws of motion. In other words, our previous understanding was flawed because it assumed that certain observations did not break down in extreme conditions. Likewise, maybe we have been accidentally ignoring a whole set of physically relevant extreme conditions: altered states of consciousness. The apparent wavefunction collapse and the Born rule may be perfectly constant in our everyday frame of reference, and yet variable across the state-space of possible conscious experiences. If this were the case, we’d finally understand why it seems so hard to derive the Born rule from first principles: it’s impossible.

Succinctly, the Quantum Hypothesis is that psychedelic experiences modify the way one’s mind interacts with its quantum environment in such a way that the world does not appear to decohere any longer from one’s point of view. Our ignorance about the non-universality of the apparent collapse of the wavefunction is just a side effect of the fact that physicists do not usually perform experiments during intense life-changing entheogenic mind journeys. But for science, today we will.

Deriving PSIS with Quantum Mechanics

Here we present a rough (incomplete) sketch of what a possible derivation of PSIS from quantum mechanics might look like. To do so we need three background assumptions: First, conscious experiences must be macroscopic quantum coherent objects (i.e. ontologically unitary subsets of the universal wavefunction, akin to super-fluid helium or Bose–Einstein condensates, except at room temperature). Second, people’s decision-making process must somehow amplify low-level quantum randomness into macroscopic history bifurcations. And third, the properties of our quantum environment* are in part the result of the quantum state of our mind, which psychedelics can help modify. This third assumption brings into play the idea that if our mind is more coherent (e.g. is in a super-symmetrical state) it will select for wavefunctions in its environment that themselves are more coherent. In turn, the apparent lifespan of superpositions may be elongated long enough so that the quantum environment of one’s mind receives records from both Y-sitting and Y-standing as they are overlapping. Now, how credible are these three assumptions?

That events of experience are macroscopic quantum coherent objects is an explanation space usually perceived as pseudo-scientific, though a sizable number of extremely bright scientists and philosophers do entertain the idea very seriously. Contrary to popular belief, there are legitimate reasons to connect quantum computing and consciousness. The reasons for making this connection include the possibility of explaining the causal efficacy of consciousness, finding an answer to the palette problem with quantum fields and solving the phenomenal binding problem with quantum coherence and panpsychism.

The second assumption claims that people around you work as quantum Random Number Generators. That human decision-making amplifies low-level quantum randomness is thought to be likely by at least some scientists, though the time-scale on which this happens is still up for debate. The brain’s decision-making is chaotic, and over the span of seconds it may amplify quantum fluctuations into macroscopic differences. Thus, people around you making decisions may result in splitting universes (e.g. “[I] am watching alternate timelines branch off every time someone does something specific.” – GatorAutomator’s quote above). Presumably, this assumption would also imply that during PSIS not only people but also physics experiments would lead to apparent macroscopic superposition.

With regards to the third assumption: widespread microscopic decoherence is not, apparently, a necessary consequence of the postulates of quantum mechanics. Rather, it is a very specific outcome of (a) our universe’s Hamiltonian and (b) the starting conditions of our universe, i.e. Pre-Inflation/Eternal Inflation/Big Bang. (A Ney & D Albert, 2013). In principle, psychedelics may influence the part of the Hamiltonian that matters for the evolution of our mind’s wavefunction and its local interactions. In turn, this may modify the decoherence patterns of our consciousness with its local environment and- perhaps- ultimately the surrounding macroscopic world. Of course we do not know if this is possible, and I would have to agree that it is extremely far-fetched.

The overall picture that would emerge from these three assumptions would take the following form: both the mental content and raw phenomenal character of our states of consciousness are the result of the quantum micro-structure of our brains. By modifying this micro-structure, one is not only altering the selection pressures that give rise to fully formed experiences (i.e. quantum darwinism applied to the compositionality of quantum fields) but also altering the selection pressures that determine which parts of the universal wave-function we are entangled with (i.e. quantum darwinism applied to the interactions between coherent objects). Thus psychedelics may not only influence how our experience is shaped within, but also how it interacts with the quantum environment that surrounds it. Some mild psychedelic states (e.g. MDMA) may influence mostly the inner degrees of freedom of one’s mind, while other more intense states (e.g. DMT) may be the result of severe changes to the entanglement selection pressures and thus result in the apparent disconnection between one’s mind and one’s local environment. Here PSIS would be the result of decreasing the rate at which our mind decoheres (possibly by increasing the degree to which our mind is in a state of quantum confinement). In turn, by boosting one’s own inner degree of quantum superposition one may also broaden the degree of superposition acceptable at the interface with one’s quantum environment. One could now readily take in packets of information that have a wider degree of superposition. In the right circumstances, this may result in one’s mind experiencing information seemingly coming from alternate branches of the multiverse. In other words, the trick to PSIS both in the Quantum and the Spiritual Hypothesis is the same (though for different reasons): travel to other dimensions by being the change that you wish to see in the world. You need to increase your own degree of quantum coherence so that you become able of interacting with a more coherent quantum environment.

If this were the case it would call for a conceptual revolution. We would stop thinking of “our universe” as the “place we inhabit” and instead think of it as “the quantum environment our consciousness can interface with”. Perhaps life as we know it exists in a quantum niche that can give rise to embodied biological beings, but the universal wavefunction also contains alien state-spaces in which the patterns of entanglement work in different ways and lead to different evolutionary histories. Our minds evolved to interact with the particular environment that leads to the sustenance of our everyday macroscopic world. Our consciousness is shaped to fit in here, and it has a symbiotic relationship with the body that hosts it.

Now, how do we go about testing the quantum hypothesis? Following previous work on psychophysics for psychedelic research, the main idea will be to show that people on psychedelics can achieve something that sober individuals can’t. In this case, the task is designed to be impossible if one is only receiving input from one world (as predicted by the cognitive hypothesis). Only if PSIS is the result of simultaneously experiencing input from the several nearby branches that correspond to different outcomes of quantum events can the task be successfully performed.

The Experiment

Setup

The task in question involves three white little squares on a black background. At each time step (~16 milliseconds) the squares move one pixel down, and some number of pixels horizontally. While the downward movement is constant, the change in the horizontal direction is chosen randomly. The horizontal movement of one of the squares is being randomized on the fly with a Quantum Random Number Generator (qRNG**). We call this the quantum square. The horizontal movement of the other two squares follows a path that was determined at the beginning of each trial by a Classical Random Number Generator (cRNG***). We will refer to these two squares as the classical squares. The task for the participant is to identify which of the squares is the “odd one out” (i.e. the quantum square). Here is an infographic that explains the experimental setup:

infografic_of_experiment.png

In order to make the horizontal movement seem very chaotic and, at times even dramatic, it is randomized by choosing a horizontal change of either -4, -1, 1 or 4 pixels. By using a jump of 4 pixels (rather than e.g. 2) the squares sometimes seem to advance very quickly in one direction. The rationale for doing this was to make the predicted effect (assuming the Quantum Hypothesis) more noticeable – we want low probability paths that are extremely different than the typical path and in turn make it easy to distinguish between single paths and the superposition of many of the possible paths at once.

Critically, the starting position of the quantum square (whether left, center or right) for each of the trials during an experiment is obtained with a cRNG at the very beginning of the experiment. Why not use a qRNG? If we randomized the position of the quantum square using a qRNG we might be sabotaging ourselves: participants might see a superposition of classical and quantum squares on each of the three positions and thus not see any square behave differently than the other two. Thus, for the experiment to work (under the assumption that PSIS is explained by the Quantum Hypothesis) the only aspect that should be randomized using a qRNG is the horizontal displacement of the quantum square.

Since the numbers coming from the qRNG need to be requested over the internet, it is also crucial that we try to obtain fresh quantum random numbers as frequently as possible without messing up the flow of the experiment. Thus, a request for new quantum random numbers is made as often as possible (usually every 1 to 2 seconds). Since internet connections, server response time and network reliability varies from moment to moment, it is inevitable that once in a while we will have to stop the downward movement of all three squares as we wait for the next batch of random numbers. In principle this should have no negative effect at all in the ability to choose the odd-one-out. This problem merely interrupts the flow of the experiment, but it should not invalidate the results. We kept track of the number of trials that were interrupted for this reason (which you will find recorded in the “Network” column of the table of results down below).

Participants were instructed to:

  1. Clone the Github code for the experiment, and to open it up in a Chrome browser.
  2. Make sure that they have a reliable high-speed internet connection.
  3. Record the pertinent facts (time of experiment, substance, dose and time of intake).
  4. Use a sensorially-minimized room for the experiment (such as a closed bathroom), turn off the lights, ask anyone who is in the house to be quiet and mind their own business, and wear earplugs.
  5. Meditate for a couple of minutes before conducting the experiment and to try to induce PSIS voluntarily.
  6. Choose the odd-one-out (i.e. the quantum square) on each trial, for a total of at least 30 trials.

Under this setup, what should the participants expect to see if the Quantum Hypothesis is correct?

Predicted Psychedelic Perception

Sober view
Psychedelic view in the null scenario
Psychedelic view as predicted by the Quantum Hypothesis

The pictures above illustrate how the experiment looks like to three different observers. On the left we see what a sober participant would see at a given time during a trial. The squares are moving downwards but since we are taking a snapshot in time they seem to be static. The image on the center shows what we would expect out of a generic psychedelic experience. In brief, the typical control interrupt action of psychedelics (i.e. tracers) effectively allows you to see more clearly the path that the squares have traced over time, but it would not allow you to notice any difference between the classic and quantum squares. The image on the right shows what we would expect to see if the Quantum Hypothesis is correct and PSIS is actually about perceiving nearby branches of the Everett multiverse. Notice how the center square is visibly different than the other two: it consists of the superposition of many alternative paths the square took in slightly different branches.

Implications of a Positive Result: Quantum Mind, Everett Rescue Missions and Psychedelic Cryptography

It is worth noting that if one can indeed reliably distinguish between the quantum and the classical squares, then this would have far-reaching implications. It would indeed confirm that our minds are macroscopic quantum coherent objects and that psychedelics influence their pattern of interactions with their surrounding quantum environment. It would also provide strong evidence in favor of the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics (in which all possibilities are realized). More so, we would not only have a new perspective on the fundamental nature of the universe and the mind, but the discovery would just as well suggest some concrete applications. Looking far ahead, a positive outcome is that this knowledge would encourage research on the possible ways to achieve inter-dimensional travel, and in turn instantiate pan-Everettian rescue missions to reduce suffering elsewhere in the multiverse. The despair of confirming that the quantum multiverse is real might be evened out by the hope of finally being able to help sentient beings trapped in Darwinian environments in other branches of the universal wavefunction. Looking much closer to home, a positive result would lead to a breakthrough in psychedelic cryptography (PsyCrypto for short), where spies high on LSD would obtain the ability to read information that is secretly encoded in public light displays. More so, this particular kind of PsyCrypto would be impervious to discovery after the fact. Even if given an arbitrary amount of time and resources to analyze a video recording of the event, it would not be possible to determine which of the squares was being guided by quantum randomness. Unlike other PsyCrypto techniques, this one cannot be decoded by applying psychedelic replication software to video recordings of the transmission.

Results

Three persons participated in the experiments: S (self), A, and B. [A and B are anonymous volunteers; for more information read the legal disclaimer at the end of this article]. Participant S (me) tried the experiment both sober and after drinking 2 beers. Participant A tried the experiment sober, on LSD, 2C-B and a combination of the two. And participant B tried the experiment both sober and on DMT. The total number of trials recorded for each of the conditions is: 90 for the sober state, 275 for 2C-B, 60 for DMT, 120 for LSD and 130 for the LSD/2C-B combo. The overall summary of the results is: chance level performance outcomes for all conditions. You can find the breakdown of results for all experiments in the table shown below, and you can download the raw csv file from the Github repository.

results_to_show
Columns from left to right: Date, State (of consciousness), Dose(s), T (time), #Trials (number of trials), Correct (number of trials in which the participant made the correct choice), Percent correct (100*Correct/Trials), Participants (S=Self, A/B=anonymous volunteers), Requests / Second (server requests per second), Network (this tracks the number of times that a trial was temporarily paused while the browser was waiting for the next batch of quantum random numbers), Notes (by default the squares left a dim trail behind them and this was removed in two trials; by default the squares were 10×10 pixels in size, but a smaller size was used in some trials).

I thought about visualizing the results in a cool graph at first, but after I received them I realized that it would be pointless. Not a single experiment reached a statistically significant deviation from chance level; who is interested in seeing a bunch of bars representing chance-level outcomes? Null results are always boring to visualize.****

In addition to the overall performance in the task, I also wanted to hear the following qualitative assessment from the participants: did they notice any difference between the three squares? Was there any feeling that one of them was behaving differently than the other two? This is what they responded when I asked them: “I could never see any difference between the squares, so it felt like I was making random choices” (from A) and “DMT made the screen look like a hyper-dimensional tunnel and I felt like strange entities were watching over me as I was doing the experiment, and even though the color of the squares would fluctuate randomly, I never noticed a single square behaving differently than the other two. All three seemed unique. I did feel that the squares were being controlled by some entity, as if with an agency of their own, but I figured that was made up by my mind.” When I asked them if they noticed anything similar to the image labeled Psychedelic view as predicted by the Quantum Hypothesis (as shown above) they both said “no”.

Discussion

It is noteworthy that neither participant reported an experience of PSIS during the experiments. Even without an explicit and noticeable input superposition, PSIS may turn out to be a continuum rather than a discrete either-or phenomenon. If so, we might still expect to see some deviations from chance. This may be analogous to how in blindsight people report not being able to see anything and yet perform better than chance in visual recognition tasks. That said, the effect size of blindsight and other psychological effects in which information is processed unbeknownst to the participant tend to be very small. Thus, in order to confirm that quantum PSIS is happening below the threshold of awareness we may require a much larger number of samples (though still a lot smaller than what we would need if we were aiming to use the experiment to conduct Psi research with or without psychedelics, again, due to the extremely small effect sizes).

Why did the experiment fail? The first possibility is that it could be that the Quantum Hypothesis is simply wrong (and possibly because it requires false assumptions to work). Second, perhaps we were simply unlucky that PSIS was not triggered during the experiments; perhaps the set, setting, and dosages used simply failed to produce the desired effect (even if the state does indeed exist out there). And third, the experiment itself may be wrong: the second-long delays between the server requests and the qRNG may be too large to produce the effect. In the current implementation (and taking into account network delays), the average delay between the moment the quantum measurement was conducted and the moment it appeared on the computer screen as horizontal movement was .9 seconds (usually in the range of .4 to 1.4 seconds, given an average of 1/2 second lag due to the number buffering and 400 milliseconds in network time). This problem would be easily sidestepped if we used an on-site qRNG obtained from hardware directly connected to the computer (as is common in psi research). To minimize the delay even further, the outcomes of the quantum measurements could be delivered directly to your brain via neuroimplants.

Conclusion

If psychedelic experiences do make you interact with other realities, I would like to know about it with a high degree of certainty. The present study was admittedly a very long shot. But to my judgement, it was totally worth it. As Bayesians, we reasoned that since the Quantum Hypothesis can lead to a positive result for the experiment but the Cognitive Hypothesis can’t, then a positive result should make us update our probabilities of the Quantum Hypothesis a great deal. A negative result should make us update our probabilities in the opposite direction. That said, the probability should still not go to zero since the negative result could still be accounted for by the fact that participants failed to experience PSIS, and/or that the delay between the quantum measurement and the moment it influences the movement of the square in the screen is too large. Future studies should try to minimize these two possible sources of failure. First, by researching methods to reliably induce PSIS. And second, by minimizing the delay between branching and sensory input.

In the meantime, we can at least tentatively conclude that something along the lines of the Cognitive Hypothesis is the most likely case. In this light, PSIS turns out to be the result of a failure to inhibit predictions. Despite losing their status as suspected inter-dimensional portal technology, psychedelics still remain a crucial tool for qualia research. They can help us map out the state-space of possible experiences, allow us to identify the computational properties of consciousness, and maybe even allow us to reverse engineer the fundamental nature of valence.

[Legal Disclaimer]: Both participants A and B contacted me some time ago, soon after the Qualia Computing article How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD made it to the front page of Hacker News and was linked by SlateStarCodex. They are both experienced users of psychedelics who take them about once a month. They expressed their interest in performing the psychophysics experiments I designed, and to do so while under the influence of psychedelic drugs. I do not know these individuals personally (nor do I know their real names, locations or even their genders). I have never encouraged these individuals to take psychedelic substances and I never gave them any compensation for their participation in the experiment. They told me that they take psychedelics regularly no matter what, and that my experiments would not be the primary reason for taking them. I never asked them to take any particular substance, either. They just said “I will take substance X on day Y, can I have some experiment for that?” I have no way of knowing (1) if the substances they claim they take are actually what they think they are, (2) whether the dosages are accurately measured, and (3) whether the data they provided is accurate and isn’t manipulated. That said, they did explain that they have tested their materials with chemical reagents, and are experienced enough to tell the difference between similar substances. Since there is no way to verify these claims without compromising their anonymity, please take the data with a grain of salt.

* In this case, the immediate environment would actually refer to the quantum degrees of freedom surrounding our consciousness within our brain, not the macroscopic exterior vicinity such as the chair we are sitting on or the friends we are hanging out with. In this picture, our interaction with that vicinity is actually mediated by many layers of indirection.

** The experiment used the Australian National University Quantum Random Numbers Server. By calling their API every 1 to 2 seconds we obtain truly random numbers that feed the x-displacement of the quantum square. This is an inexpensive and readily-available way to magnify decoherence events into macroscopic splitting histories in the comfort of your own home.

*** In this case, Javascript’s Math.random() function. Unfortunately the RGN algorithm varies from browser to browser. It may be worthwhile to go for a browser-independent implementation in the future to guarantee a uniform high quality source of classical randomness.

**** As calculated with a single tailed binomial test with null probability equal to 1/3. The threshold of statistical significance at the p < 0.05 level is found at 15/30 and for p < 0.001 we need at least 19/30 correct responses. The best score that any participant managed to obtain was 14/30.

Getting closer to digital LSD

Posted on by algekalipso

I am very pleased with the recent work on psychedelic replications by communities such as the wonderful Psychonaut Wiki and r/replications. There is a lot of great work in the area, a little too much to discuss at length in one post. Keep up the good work!

A recent source of marvelous psychedelic replication techniques has just come into the scene, and from an unlikely source. Of course, we are talking about inceptionism applied to deep belief networks.

Someone said DMT?

Someone said DMT?

First of all, who says these pictures are actually trippy? Is there evidence of that? I intend to fully operationalize the concept of trippiness for the classification of pictures; I believe the question is empirically approachable. In the meantime I will simply point out that a lot of people are talking about the peculiar trippiness of these pictures. To give an example, look at some of the comments on the Google blogpost:

Help! We’ve created AIs more powerful than us, and now we need to feed them hallucinogenic drugs to subdue them…. – Urs

Either somebody has been feeding hallucinogens to Google’s image-recognition neural networks, or computer comprehension is alien! Well, actually, I wonder how this compares to visualizations of how the human brain stores images for pattern-matching purposes. – Stephen

Computers are all on drugs. – Matt

And from the Vice article:

“Its incredible how close it looks to an LSD trip, that is normally so hard to describe.” – corners

There are ongoing discussions in a lot of forums about this right now. Somehow, it seems that these new pictures are hitting a particular component of the psychedelic experience that previous replications have missed or at least not fully captured. What is that?

For the purpose of this post I will use a particular classification of phenomenal effects caused by psychedelics. Specifically, the one proposed by Psychedelic Information Theory. In order to fully grasp the motivation for this classification I highly recommend reading the control interrupt model of psychedelic action. In summary, it seems that there are natural inhibitory processes that prevent features of our current experience to build up over time. Psychedelics are thought to chemically interrupt inhibitory control signals from the cortex, which in turn results in a non-linear interaction between the unmitigated characteristics of your conscious experience. I will explain in a bit how this model provides a good framework for explaining the way recent Google Inceptionist (GI) pictures fit into the broader world of visual psychedelic replication.

But now let’s start with the three classes of hallucinations discussed:

  1. Entropic hallucinations describe the visual effects of gently pushing one’s eyes as well as the amazing interaction between LSD and strobes
  2. Eidetic hallucinations are the result of interpreting ambiguous stimuli using high-level concepts
  3. Erratic hallucinations result from the chaotic binding and over-saturation of sensory modalities, which affect the stability of the global perceptual frame (and probably disrupts the continuity field too)

Zooming into the phenomenology of eidetic hallucinations:

The most commonly reported eidetic hallucinations seen on psychedelics are of people, faces, animals, plants, flowers, spirits, aliens, insects, and other similar archetypes. Eidetic hallucinations can sometimes take the form of entire virtual worlds, spirit dimensions, invisible landscapes, and so on. Eidetics often emerge within a pre-existing entoptic interference pattern that grows in intensity over time to produce more photographic or 3D rendered objects. Eidetics under the influence of psychedelics are most often reported with eyes closed or while sitting motionless in meditative trance. On high doses of psychedelics eidetic hallucinations may materialize with eyes open on any surface, pattern, or texture that’s gazed at for more than a few seconds.*

If you surf the internet looking for replications of psychedelic experiences, you will notice that there are great examples of a wide range of effects, but compelling software-generated images of eidetic hallucinations are rare. The challenge here is the complexity of creating actionable tools that highlight high-level features in pre-existing pictures. Amazingly, people can make successful and stunning pictures with eidetic tones, but this requires a lot of dedication and artistic experience. The mighty human artistic effort is unstoppable, though:

Thanks to this 3-fold classification of psychedelic effects we can isolate the quality of experience that both Dali and the recent GI pics specifically enhance. Of course, the phenomenology of most psychedelic experiences incorporate elements of each of these classes, and the interaction between them is certainly non-trivial. In addition, specific substances may have a larger loading of each type, and signature proportions with peculiar results.

It is also worth mentioning the existence of other classification systems, within and beyond visual phenomenology. For example the subjective effect index of Psychonaut Wiki and even the various circuits proposed by ancient Leary and Dass writings have very worthwhile observations that may come useful in one context or another. For the level of resolution here discussed giving eidetic hallucinations their own class is particularly useful.

How the Inceptionist method and psychedelic experiences work similarly

Here is the core of the explanation for how the Google trippy pictures were made:

In this case we simply feed the network an arbitrary image or photo and let the network analyze the picture. We then pick a layer and ask the network to enhance whatever it detected. Each layer of the network deals with features at a different level of abstraction, so the complexity of features we generate depends on which layer we choose to enhance. For example, lower layers tend to produce strokes or simple ornament-like patterns, because those layers are sensitive to basic features such as edges and their orientations.

In some sense this is basically the same eidetic effect we find in psychedelic experiences. For one reason or another, there are moments during a psychedelic experience in which strong eidetic effects manifest. As if a specific layer (or hierarchy level) of one’s model of reality is chosen for being enhanced and fractally iterated in a scale-free manner. Referencing back the control interrupt model of psychedelic action, we can reason that what is going on involves a reduction in the amount of inhibition that highlighted high-level features receive. Again, this resembles the Inceptionist algorithm:

If we choose higher-level layers, which identify more sophisticated features in images, complex features or even whole objects tend to emerge. Again, we just start with an existing image and give it to our neural net. We ask the network: “Whatever you see there, I want more of it!” This creates a feedback loop: if a cloud looks a little bit like a bird, the network will make it look more like a bird. This in turn will make the network recognize the bird even more strongly on the next pass and so forth, until a highly detailed bird appears, seemingly out of nowhere.

Now, this only really shows a snapshot of a psychedelic experience with a heavy eidetic bent. In actual psychedelic experiences there are other common factors that come into play that influence the experience. First, not only are specific features highlighted, but, on the whole, we could say that there is an increase in the overall amount of sensations experienced together. The overall amplitude of your experience goes up, if that makes sense. In other words, although this is hard to imagine, the overall amount of experience increases relative to baseline. That is not evoked using external stimuli, of course, since the actual change in the intensity of your experience requires direct control interruption. The overall information content globally available in the field of awareness of a person tripping increases in a dose-dependent way.

The second hallmark characteristic of psychedelic experiences, which gives them a powerful edge over current digital techniques, is that the state highlights already salient stimuli. High-level psychedelic pattern recognition seems to be based on attention-modulated saliency enhancement. Let me explain:

Our visual system automatically recognizes salient features in our experience. This is not an exclusive property of visual consciousness, by the way. Here we must notice that awareness and attention are distinct but related aspects of our mind. Awareness happens effortlessly, and its visual variety arises as soon as we open our eyes (within 200 milliseconds therefrom). Even at the level of awareness we see a fast sorting of perceived features by their overall saliency, which is a function both of their intrinsic properties and those relative to every other feature in the awareness field. Attention, which is slower and builds on top of the awareness field, enables a variety of high level cognitive activities to interplay with the features highlighted by awareness. In turn, the overall state of consciousness of a person changes as attention moves the reference point for awareness to bring forth new salient features. Iteratively, these processes allow a mind to surf through states of consciousness.

In summary, awareness creates the marketplace of salient features that compete for attention. As attention is recentered on a new cluster of features, the field of awareness is modified and the new salient features again have a chance to change the focus of attention.

With psychedelic-induced control interruption, the intensity by which saliency of features in the field of awareness is highlighted goes up significantly. In turn, the attention-modulated perception of the intensely salient features highlights specific high-level features suggested by the field of awareness. And finally, this conceptual mental state highlighted via attention, results in an even higher saliency for conceptually-related features. And hence come the eye reality, fish realty, tree reality, abstract concept reality, divine reality, fractal reality, etc. people discover on LSD.

Although a difficult challenge, I predict that a well-trained, dedicated and mentally healthy psychonaut would be able to paint psychedelic experiences of her own that highlight similar high-level features as those highlighted on specific Inceptionist works of art. Probably a long meditative practice would help in the process, since the specific saliency of various features is attention-modulated, and thus requires inhibiting unrelated salient directions (e.g. deep philosophical questions, personal issues, etc.) and focus exclusively on, say, dogs.

Who chooses what is salient?

If you already know what class of features you want to highlight, then the inceptionist method will help you. But what about choosing what to highlight to begin with? This, I believe, is the crux of what makes psychedelic experiences (and minds in general) still unbeatable by neural networks. Once you know what to look for, your cortex and inceptionist methods (and their future incarnations) might be on the same playing field. But what enables you to decide what is worth looking for?

The key unresolved problem standing for a fully-digital psychedelic experience replication algorithm is what I call the saliency-attention mapping. This is: Given a particular conscious experience that is highlighting a set of features, how does attention ultimately find what to focus on? How are the subsequent relevant features to be highlighted? In many cases we choose to ignore all of the immediately salient features in a scene precisely to see more subtle patterns. And during a psychedelic experience, directing your attention to entirely unsuspecting places has the effect of switching off previously salient features and activating a new class of them (for example, choosing to focus on the music rather than the visual scene).

Is there any way of modeling the saliency-attention mapping without taking into account all of the information present in the field of awareness at the time? Indeed, an ongoing hypothesis here in Qualia Computing is that consciousness itself is required for this step. The very computational advantage of being conscious seems to be related to the unitary nature of experiences: Your choices are not only the result of parallel processing or implicit information integration. They stem from what you choose to pay attention to considering the entirety of your field of awareness. You do this at every point in time. Thus, a sort of instantaneous and ontological unity is required to account for a significant step of the information processing pipeline of the mind. And this may lead to a saliency-attention function whose runtime complexity is impossible to match with digital computers.

The conceivability horizon

Now, this unitary field of awareness step also has large down-stream effects. In particular, subsets of the phenomenology of experiences can be reinterpreted in very novel ways. Psychedelics are likewise famous for unlocking entirely new conceptual ontologies and points of view that remain with the person long after acute effects subside. We could call this, an extension of the horizon of conceivability. This comes about from considering many of the features of the particular conscious experience at once and identifying a new private referent (such as a concept) whose meaning is derived from the unique combination of those elements.

Without a unitary conscious experience this step would be impossible, and it remains to be seen for an artificial neural network to accomplish this on its own. For completeness, it is worth mentioning that phenomenal binding also has strong implications for memory. Every time we experience a new situation a new ‘situational snapshot’ is added to the collection of — and network of relationships between — memories that can be triggered with temporal lobe stimulation. Thus, incorporating a human (or whatever implements phenomenal binding) into the loop may be unavoidable.

The future of psychedelic replications and consciousness engineering

Eidetic art is marvelous, and for a long time we didn’t have any idea about how to systematize it in software. Now we have some wonderful examples of a fully scalable approach. Inevitably, we will soon have visual editing software that incorporates neural networks.

Deep belief networks applied to replications will allow us to drastically increase the level of realism of simulated trips. This will thus draw a lot more attention to this fascinating field, and bring engineers, artists and mathematicians onboard. They will have a wonderful synergy in this sphere.

But how practical are these techniques? If you want to find fundamentally new patterns in an image, what should you use… neural networks or LSD? The answer is: why do you have to choose only one? Here is where I casually mention that if you were planning on taking a psychedelic sometime in the future, why not tell us how the trippy images of Google look like during a trippy experience? I bet a lot of people would appreciate your input.

Presumably, incorporating a human in the loop could actually empower these networks to recreate remarkably psychedelic progressions of scenes and features (and high level ideas!). To do so you need to somehow identify what the human finds salient in the picture/video being explored, and how her attention is directed as a consequence of that. Obvious candidates here are eye tracking devices and the general class of bio/neurometrics. More speculatively, endocrine measurements of the chemical markers of saliency and attention may be of tremendous value too. What would this look like? A person hooked to a series of tubes that provide fast feedback using a lab-on-a-chip, and a deep belief network with flexible Inceptionist dynamics guided by the person’s measured center of attention. In case you haven’t noticed, I think that this area of exploration is extremely promising. Go ahead and do it!

Now, if you want to figure out a hard technical problem, currently mild psychedelic experiences are more promising than deep belief networks. This, again, is because the attention-modulated saliency enhancement of psychedelics can allow you to discover, explore and reinterpret the features that matter for a particular problem. Assisted digital exploration, however, may someday surpass the effectiveness of psychedelics, or better yet: A smart combination of techniques –chemical, biological and digital– will incite in the field of consciousness research what the Galilean revolution was to physics. The hands-on collective exploration science needs in order to fully thrive is about to arrive for consciousness. Finally!

State-Space of Drug Effects: Results

Posted on by algekalipso

Credit: Chelsea Morgan. Source: http://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Tracers

Credit: Chelsea Morgan. Source: http://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Tracers

What are the relevant dimensions of drug effects?

“Does it make you stupid? Does it make you hallucinate? Gosh, I don’t know what else to ask!”

– Moms everywhere, worrying about the latest Research Chemicals

It is hard to keep up with all of the new research chemicals (RCs). When a substance comes onto the scene, it is hard to predict whether first adopters will experience fascinating, terrifying or just plain weird effects from the drug. Largely, one thing is certain: Most psychonauts agree that describing subjective effects is brutally difficult. Without a principled framework for pinning down the nature of a drug experience, we will continue to misunderstand and misjudge the states of consciousness disclosed by brains on RCs.

What should we know about the subjective effects of a drug? In what way are drugs different? And in what way do they produce similar effects? This post will present a general conceptual framework for discussing drug effects in a principled fashion. This will be done by analyzing the responses of a recent survey on drug effects. The major axes of variance are obtained using factor analysis, and the dimensions are interpreted and discussed.

The Survey

About a month ago I asked people to fill out an anonymous survey about the subjective effects of psychoactive substances. The survey was advertised in many Facebook groups (Hedonistic Imperative, Stanford Transhumanist Association, etc.), subreddits (r/LSD, r/drugs, r/opiates, etc.), online forums and via email.

The survey asked participants to either choose a substance from a list of 36 (with options including LSD, Salvia, Piracetam and even Tobacco), or to specify a drug by writing it down in the “other” section. After asking basic questions such as age and number of times the drug has been used, the survey presents 52 5-points Likert items: Participants had to rate on a scale from -2 to +2 how much a given word or brief phrase describes their experience with the drug. Examples of such words or phrases are: “subtle”, “irritating”, “intense”, etc.

An example review: Imagine that you are answering the survey and chose to review the effects of MDMA. The first Likert item has the word “energetic.” You remember that your MDMA experiences have been uplifting but not really full of energy, so to speak; you give it a 1. The second item has the phrase “anxiety producing” and right away you recall that MDMA has made you feel more at ease with yourself, rather than placing you in weird or anxious situations. Hence you give it a -2, meaning that MDMA is the opposite of “anxiety producing”. And so on.

The survey was filled out a total of 442 times. The top 10 most reviewed substances in the survey are: LSD (74), Marijuana (64), MDMA (45), Psilocybin (39), Alcohol (34), Heroin (20), DMT (17), D-Amphetamine (12), Salvia (10) and Cocaine (10).

The cleaned and anonymized dataset, as well as the analysis presented here, can be found here. Feel free to conduct your own analysis and add to the discussion in any way you want. My analysis here focuses on general features of the responses and on the interpretation of dimensions. There is a lot more that can be said about this data. If not me, I hope someone takes advantage of it sometime in the future.

6 Dimensions of Experience

Given that the total number of different drugs reviewed by survey participants (46) is smaller than the number of items (53), I decided to use each submission as an observation. I performed a varimax factor analysis on the 442 observation rows X 52 subjective properties columns.

The cumulative variance explained for one, two, etc. number of factors looks like this: 25%, 37%, 42%,  45%, 49%, 52%, 53%, 54%… The jump between 5 and 6 factors adds 3% of variance explained, and from 6 to 7 this percentage increases only by 1%. Adding extra factors after the 7th barely increases the variance explained.

I inspected the factor loadings for each dimension, and it does seem that using six factors results in semantically meaningful dimensions. Using less than 6 results in factors that have semantically mixed elements (for example, a factor that includes both cognitive impairment and arousal). Six seems to be the sweet spot. Let’s see what the factor loadings are:

Trivia: Which words have both a large loading on significance and slow euphoria?

Answer: “Love” and “Blissful”! :*

Where do the drugs live?

The six dimensions outlined above define a rudimentary (but informative) state-space of subjective drug effects. In this state-space, we can estimate the centroid region where responses about a given drug tend to fall. Below I plot the estimated location of such means. The color scheme represents the number of survey responses for each compound. For that reason you should calibrate your trust in the shown location as a function of how far up the rainbow the color of the substance is.

Three Varieties of Euphoria

Three out of the six dimensions directly involve our general sense of wellbeing. Our sense of wellbeing seems to have three components here, rather than being a single homogenous feeling. Think of this as three faces of a cube that share a corner. Let’s call this the Euphoria Cube:

Navigating through this map can be fun. As you can realize, MDMA/MDA are rock-solid-wonderful in all three euphorias. Perhaps that’s why people have such a strong trust in its effects – it has a little of everything that is good (experience-wise). Acid is wonderful, yes, but it has unreliable slow euphoria… could we improve an acid experience with phenibut? These kinds of questions pop up when you examine the state-space.

You may see now why Salvia gets such a bad rap. It is clearly mystical and spiritual in its own way. But it has no hint of either slow or fast euphoria. Salvia is a very tricky compound to handle, but may still be very worthwhile. Since spiritual bliss tends to be so much deeper and long-lived than the other two kinds of bliss, salvia can still be of significant therapeutic value.

Within the class of psychedelic compounds themselves we also see differences. For example, 2C compounds seem to generally have more fast euphoria than other psychedelics. Perhaps a better choice than shrooms for a melancholic depressive?

I suspect that there are several other ‘natural kinds’ of euphoria. (Well, natural kind sounds ontologically very strong – I’m only using this as an intuition pump). And there seems to be a definite and finite set of euphoria flavors I’m aware of. If I am pressured to guess what a good taxonomical account of euphorias would look like, I would use the following one:

The bliss of safety

The bliss of intimacy

The bliss of social coordination

The bliss of loving-kindness

The bliss of understanding

The bliss of wonder and intuition

The bliss of enlightenment

But this would sound awfully cultish. Moving right along.

The existence of three euphorias is foreshadowed by the rough legal and educational classification of ‘street’ drugs into one of three categories: Stimulants, depressants and hallucinogens. Drug education, unfortunately, fails to convey the message that hallucinogens not only affect your senses, but induce spiritual euphoria.

The location of substances in the Euphoria Cube also has a straightforward relationship with the receptor types implicated in the mechanism of action of these drugs. Slow euphoria comes with modulation of GABA and Opioid receptors (with Oxytocin also being a likely player). Fast euphoria is related to dopamine, and to a lesser extent to: norepinephrine, glutamate and the cholinergic system. The axis of significance, or spiritual euphoria (to give it a name), implicates both specific serotonin receptors (such as 5HT2A) as well as, strangely, the kapa opioid receptor.

In a limited sense, this is also a ballpark replication of the Lövheim cube of emotion. It is exciting to think that surveys like this can readily provide actual quantitative estimations of these experiential qualities. And this may be helpful for researchers and users alike.

What about the other three dimensions?

Is it worth it? Does it impair you? Will I enjoy food?

What the euphoria cube tells you is how a drug can be used for fun, spiritual growth and solace. What that cube does not tell you is whether, all things considered, taking the drug is a good idea to begin with. Perhaps a particular compound gives you a reliable buzz and a little relaxation, but don’t forget to ask whether it also make you dumb and confused! These three dimensions provide a context for the euphoria values.

We can see that nootropics seem to have their main action on the dimension of clarity. What is clarity? A good guess might be that clarity refers to the signal-to-noise ratio that a mind experiences at the time of doing mental operations. The sort of mental activity that you perform does not tell you how noisy the mind is while attempting to do it. Some drugs may somehow diminish your ability to filter and eliminate noise. Others, may enhance those processes. Stimulants for the most part activate the inhibitory control involved in thinking about implications of premises. Thus clarity is experienced: Strong and robust symbolic manipulation of implicit ontologies and concepts. This, although generally good, may incidentally make the mind be locked in a state with fixed ontologies and background assumptions. Thus, the mind can get in conceptual prisons by getting lost in the implication of ontologies. Taking a strong cholinergic nootropic in the morning may result in a whole day of a mind fixated on a given problem. Thus too much clarity can be a problem, too.

What about the dimension of cost benefit? An unfortunate red flag is that tobacco does not seem to have a particularly low value in the cost-benefit dimension. The way I interpret this is that participants understood items such as “dangerous” and “worth-it” to refer to the immediate window time around of a drug’s acute effects (which includes hang-over and after-effects, but does not include long-term negative health effects). This interpretation would explain as well why MDA and MDMA are ranked very highly for cost-benefit, given the (controversial) neurotoxic effect associated with more than casual use.

Stimulus seeking is a weird dimension. It seems to be largely dominated by marijuana-specific effects, which somehow contrast with the anorexia induced by stimulants in general. An interesting way of interpreting this factor is in terms of the source of one’s bliss. Drugs with a high stimulus seeking value make us appreciate external influences such as music and food. Drugs with low stimulus seeking create a sort of euphoria that makes people temporarily self-sufficient. Outwardly focused interests versus inwardly focused interests is a neat, though somewhat speculative, interpretation of this factor. Any other ideas?

Why physicists are not into consciousness and monks are not into spaceships

A particularly interesting cross-section of the data is the interaction between Spiritual euphoria and Clarity. Why? Because, on the one hand, Spiritual euphoria, in a way, comes when one gains a certain sort of awareness and imaginative capability that enables the conception of entirely new ontologies. Hence, one’s models of personhood, morality, wellbeing and even logic can break down and be reconstructed during a psychedelic experience. On the other hand, conceptual clarity of the sort shown here happens when pre-existing ontologies are navigated and used efficiently, effortlessly and robustly. Hence, it is not hard to see why states of consciousness in which both conceptual clarity and conceptual revolutions are happening are very uncommon. More so, no known drug induces states of consciousness with those two qualities at the same time. This is made evident by the empty upper right quadrant of this space:

SpiritualClarityRoot

Will we ever discover a substance high on Spiritual euphoria and Clarity at the same time? Perhaps if we use a Generalized Wada Test: Just inject amphetamines in one hemisphere and DMT on the other 🙂 More seriously, this may be a fundamental limitation of the mind: It can’t both see the problem with its current ontologies at the same time as using them to think by believing their implications. Maybe we just need bigger brains.

That said, the flip-side of the question is just as valid: Is there any substance that makes you dumb, both spiritually and cognitively at the same time? Wait, looks like we are lucky this time! The answer is Alcohol! Probably, though, a finer analysis may find that small amounts of alcohol have mild mind-expanding effects – unfortunately the sweet spot that accomplishes this, it seems to me, is very delicate.

The orthogonality of these two functions of the mind (thinking rationally and efficiently; having spiritual or philosophical insights) may explain why it is hard to find people who are passionate about (and good at) math at the same time as passionate (and good at) exploring different states of consciousness. This may give us hints of an explanation for why it has taken this long to develop computational models of psychedelic experiences! A drug that enhances both facets of consciousness at the same time, though, would be truly revolutionary (and part of me thinks micro-dosed LSD may already be doing this).

The full dimensional table

Here I present the full table of mean factor loadings for each substance. Use this wisely. Perhaps future introductory psychonautic programs will study state-space maps and tables like the one below, and develop navigation strategies. For example, the map can be used to infer that DMT induces extremely profound experiences, but that at the same time it lacks direct slow or fast euphoric effects. LSD, as the map shows, is more stimulating than shrooms, so it may be better suited than psilocybin for certain tasks (say, for micro-doses or productive creativity enhancement). And so on. One can even imagine a psychiatrist and patient in 2025 looking at these maps while choosing a psychedelic that satisfies the patient’s therapeutic needs. A small personal difference in proclivity to panic attacks could make one choose MDA over, say, 2C-E.

factors

Discussion

The current survey and methodology has the potential to ground a lot of high level discussion about drug effects. Similar methodologies and datasets could be used to infer many other properties that are hard to talk about anecdotally. The dimensions surfaced may be helpful for harm reduction (allowing people to minimize risks while maximizing possible benefits) and even transhumanism. Although here I found three axis related to euphoria, otherwise talked about as hedonic tone, I suspect that future iterations of this sort of analysis will reveal a finer map of conscious bliss. Hopefully we will someday soon discover the biomolecular signatures and qualia preconditions for all of the forms of bliss, so that we once and for all find a method to abolish experiences not worth having.

I predict that follow-up research will find many verifiable and useful dimensions that describe the “core” differences between states of consciousness. The words and phrases used in this survey are limited in scope, so they do not help us differentiate properly the singular characteristics of specific psychedelic compounds. Hypothetically, there could be a reliable cluster of unique phenomenologies produced by certain class of phenethylamines. This difference may not affect the response given to any of the survey items, and thus remain undiscovered.

For example, perhaps 2C-T-X compounds produce visual hallucinations that involve more diagonal drifting than what is common for all other 2C-X compounds. Given the broad focus of the current survey, we can predict it will not detect any difference of this subtle sort, unfortunately. Nevertheless, this is the first step: We currently work on the low hanging fruit that makes very different drugs different, so that we can later go on to measure the more subtle differences between similar drugs.

I am currently refining the survey so that finer phenomenological differences can be discovered. I am also incorporating some of the work on authenticity by Matthew Baggott and other scales for altered states of consciousness. Feel free to email me if you have any suggestions or would be interested in collaborating on this research project.

Thank you for reading! 🙂

Transparency about errors:

There were a few mistakes in the execution of the survey. First, I wrote “Heroine” when I should have written “Heroin”. Second, the word “constructive” is found twice on the survey (the correlation between participant’s answers to both “constructive” items is .86, showing a high consistency of responses). And third, during the first 30 submissions of the survey the “Other” option did not work properly. This was corrected immediately and the participants who submitted after that had no problem sending reviews about “Other” drugs.

How to secretly communicate with people on LSD

Posted on by algekalipso

How you see it sober
~How you see it on ~100µg of LSD

 

About 18 months ago I had a really cool idea: What if we could communicate with people who are high on LSD in such a way that sober people can’t understand?* I call this idea psychedelic cryptography (PsyCrypto for short).

The GIFs above do just that: The left one is the “original” and it shows how you perceive it while sober. The GIF on the right shows what it’s like to see the GIF on the left after taking 100 micrograms of LSD. Notice anything different?

The first thing to note is that it is easier to see what letter is hidden here (C). On a closer inspection, you can also notice another amazing fact: It turns out that there are gaps between the vertical columns! This feature pops-up with clarity and is self-evident on the right GIF, and yet one needs to carefully observe the left GIF to notice that this is happening. That piece of information is not obvious when you are sober. Hence, while a sober person may infer what the hidden letter is, only a person on a psychedelic will see right away that there are gaps between the columns. Can you think of how to use this as a communication tool?

The approach shown above is only one of a plethora of ways of communicating with people on psychedelics. Here I will mention just a couple low-hanging fruits, give a few ideas for how to extend psychophysical research to build animations in a principled way, and discuss an awesome speculative application of this research.

Hopefully this article will spark interest and motivate both the psychedelic replication and the psychophysics community to come up with more innovative communication methods.

Do psychedelics enhance performance?

Drug “education” emphasizes the functional, perceptual, cognitive and affective impairments caused by the acute and chronic use of psychedelic substances. Psychedelics impair reaction time, linear thought, verbal expression, and a large range of everyday activities. This much is clear. It is undeniable that not all tasks are suitable for psychedelic experiences: Filing taxes, giving lectures to large audiences, and passing the polygraph test may all be rather poor choices for psychedelic activities.

But impairment is not the whole story. It is obvious to anyone who has researched the matter that psychedelics have some peculiar mind-enhancing properties. Any decent scientific account of psychedelic states has to provide information about the ways in which this particular state of consciousness confers genuine advantages.

And a great scientific account will explain why these particular trade-offs exist, and how we can best use them to (1) understand the mind, (2) achieve our human potential, and (3) address mental illness in a meaningful way.

Harman & Fadiman found a very large performance enhancement in the Witkins Embedded Figures test upon the administration of 100µg of LSD or 200mg of Mescaline. That is one of the most remarkable results of their study, which of course is not to diminish the relevance of their results concerning the rate of outstanding scientific discoveries. Unfortunately, the absence of drug-free controls in that study makes it less useful for convincing skeptics. When the study is replicated, it would be ideal to make it double-blind and not only include drug-free placebo controls, but also use an active performance-enhancing placebo, such as amphetamine.

Likewise, it is now clear that the self-insight concerning difficult emotional subjects can be radically amplified during therapeutic psychedelic sessions.  How and why this happens is still a rather difficult mystery.

Finally, we are currently experiencing a memetic explosion with regards to the use of micro-doses. Although we don’t yet have formal double-blind placebo-controlled research on the benefits of micro-dosing LSD, the wealth of anecdotal evidence is too large to ignore. For LSD, a micro-dose is defined as a dose in the 10-20 microgram range. The awesome Gwern is, to my knowledge, one of the few biohackers to have run a placebo-controlled experiment on himself. Although he found no positive effects, I suspect that is largely due to the sort of activities that he cares about. A more noticeable enhancement would be observed on artists, writers and possibly mathematicians. It is genuinely exciting that there is a new wave of attention to this particular application of psychedelics: General, all-purpose life-enhancement.

A Fantastic Speculative Application

If psychedelic states of consciousness provide some sort of information-processing advantage over sober states, this advantage may be possible to exploit for secret communication. Conversely, if there is any information-delivery method that only people on psychedelics can understand, it follows that psychedelic states have distinct information-processing advantages over sober states. From a purely PR point of view, obtaining a portfolio of methods to secretly transmit information to high-people will do a lot of beneficial work in showing the potential benefits of psychedelics. This is partly what motivates my research.

Even more awesome is the idea that this technology can lead to the creation of a video-game that only people on psychedelics can understand and play. For a sober person the game would look like an incomprehensible bundle of dots, edges, colors, sounds, etc. But a person sufficiently zonked would perceive crystal-clear images and easy-to-infer objectives. Only a sufficient amount of LSD would allow you to score a single point in this game.

Low Hanging Fruit

The simplest method is to take advantage of the longer-lasting after-images experienced under the influence. This happens to be one of the most robust effects that psychedelics have, and there seems to be a very clear dose-dependent curve in the intensity of these lingering phosphenes. Neurologically, this is explained by the Control Interrupt Model of Psychedelic Action, which can be summarized as follows: Our cortex’s main role is to provide inhibitory control on thalamic activity. The serotonergic activity of psychedelics blocks this control signal, and thus prevents the swift extinction of qualia once the triggering stimuli (whether internal or external) is removed.**

Tracers

Credit: Chelsea Morgan. Source.

 

The basic idea for using tracers to communicate information is to provide, little-by-little, pieces of information that can be assembled into a coherent whole only if you use lingering after-images as building blocks.

Psychophysics for Psychedelic Research: Afterimages/Tracers

In order to find the right parameters to make awesome visualizations that can only be interpreted during psychedelic experiences, we will need to do a lot of trial-and-error, and ideally, build quality psychophysical tools. The following are some of the most important questions that we need to answer before we can go wild and build the psychedelic video-game:

  1. What is the dose-dependent decay function of tracers’ brightness?
  2. What is the additive function? Do similar colors average out? Do opposite colors cancel out?
  3. What is the range of features that remain in one’s experiential field? Is this dose-dependent?
  4. Do lingering features interact with one another? Do they achieve after-the-fact local phenomenal binding?
  5. What is the role of synesthesia in tracers?

To elaborate a little: The first question is about the rate of decay of phosphenes as a function of the dose and the time since the presentation of the stimuli. The GIF at the top of this page assumes an exponential gamma-corrected decay function.

The second question goes a little deeper, and it inquires about the way in which successive after-images of simple features (such as color and brightness) interact. If you first show a red square followed by a yellow one, do you then experience two overlapping but unblended colors? Or do you experience the average of the two (a hue of orange)? (If you know the answer from first-hand experience, please comment below!)

According to abundant anecdotal evidence (erowid, PsychonautWiki, r/psychonaut, etc.) the kind of perceptual objects that linger in one’s experiential field is dose-dependent. On small doses only colors and edges linger, while on higher doses you may experience emotions, faces, abstract concepts and even ontological qualia for many more seconds than normal. But what is the precise equation that describes this?

The fourth question is getting into more serious and difficult-to-research territory. Namely, we would want to know how different features interact with one another once they are lingering in one’s experiential field. If you first look at the blue sky and then look at a white cube, do you perceive a blue cube? More stunningly: If you think about the concept of recursion and then look at a tree, do you see recursion in the tree? (anecdotally, this definitely happens). The amazing thing about this particular question is that it may get at the very reason why consciousness was recruited by natural selection for information-processing purposes: There are some qualia that can be locally bound and some that can’t. This determines the range of constraints with which our mind implements constraint satisfaction solvers. But that’s a story for another post.

Finally, studying synesthesia during psychedelic experiences will almost certainly require the combination of neuro-imaging (such as fMRI) and quality psychophysics. I will explore this question further at a later time.

Answering the Questions

In order to answer most of the above questions, we can use the following paradigm: In order to test a theory you will want to (1) create interesting animations that produce particular effects, (2) create simulations of how these animations should look like under psychedelic vision, and (3) ask participants to rate the degree of similarity between the actual and predicted experiences.

For example, the GIFs below illustrate how an image might be seen if after-images are additive in nature. In other words, if you do experience orange when you flash red and yellow in quick succession, we can predict that the image on the left would be seen as the image on the right while on LSD. Is this so? I don’t know! Let me know if you happen to try it out.

Original gif
Predicted experience assuming additive color qualia

 

Answering these questions using this and other paradigms will be very valuable to neuroscience.***

Textures (Once Again)

In Psychophysics for Psychedelic Research: Textures we discussed how we can use psychophysical tools and computational models in order to measure deficits and enhancements in our visual pattern recognition ability while under the influence of LSD. This is done by measuring the size of the Just Noticeable Differences (JND) for each of the summary statistics our visual system can recognize in peripheral vision. I have yet to collect real data from people under the influence, but thankfully the paradigm is already fleshed out. (Dear psychophysical researcher reading this blog, please feel free to use this approach!). Presumably both textures and after-images can be used to encode information that only high people can read.

A proof of concept for how to do this would be to encode information in binary code: Take a set of summary statistics that high people are good at distinguishing (and sober people confuse). Then show pairs of textures, one on the left and one on the right, so that the texture on the right has either the same or different summary statistics as the one on the left. If the textures are different then that encodes a 0. And if they are the same, that encodes a 1. Make sure that this particular summary statistic difference is only noticeable by people on psychedelics and you will have a state-dependent visual binary encryption!

Since you can communicate anything using a binary sequence, you can use this to provide any information you may want. But will your zonked friends be able to string together 1024 1s and 0s in order to decode a verbal message? Unlikely.

Full Set (complete algorithm)
Subband Correlation removed

As the sole way of communicating information, textures are an unlikely candidate. But they may fit well as a component of a complex array of stimuli. If we can answer questions (3) and (4) we may be able to flash textures in sequence in such a way that their summary statistics are combined. While a pair of textures may not provide a lot of information, a sequence of them may overlap in such a way that high-level features begin to appear.

Hence, maybe we can build a sequence of textures that will make a person on LSD experience a particular face, or a dog. The sober person will remain clueless, though, since the consecutive textures fail to become integrated into a coherent percept.

Using Text

According to Shulgin there was a study conducted in the 60s that showed that people on psilocybin can read a text with fewer letters. What does this mean? Take a random text like a children’s story. Then remove X% of letters from it at random (substituting them by an underscore to show that a letter is missing).

Every person has a comprehension threshold: A 55-percenter would only be able to read texts that have 55% or more of their letters remaining. If that person takes psilocybin, then the comprehension threshold may drop to, say, 44%. This test should be particularly easy to replicate since it does not require any sort of image processing. Would you be interested in building an online test that determines your comprehension threshold? If you do, make sure to ask “are you on a psychedelic currently?” and collect the data!

Perhaps this generalizes to other areas of verbal comprehension. For instance, can you understand spoken words with more syllables taken out? What about sign language?

Inspired Work

These are just a few promising approaches. I am confident that by opening this idea up to the broader academic and psychedelic community a lot more ideas will blossom. If you were inspired by this article to build your own psychophysical toolkit, make sure to let me know in the comments below. And remember: I’m always looking for collaborators. 🙂

* LSD here is a shorthand for psychedelics in general.

** Control Interrupt Model of Psychedelic Action: In his awesome book called Psychedelic Information Theory, James Kent argues that the visual and cognitive components of psychedelic experiences can be explained as the effect of subtle disruptions to the inhibitory control cycle of perception. He calls this theory the Control Interrupt Model of Psychedelic Action. The basic idea is that in order for our experience of the world to be linear and stable there must be mechanisms in place that regulate the overall loop of consciousness. In other words, when we open our eyes, the image in out visual field does not become arbitrarily brighter over time. Nor is it the case that our visual field gets as bright as it can if you give it enough time. Rather, we have in place a negative feedback mechanism involving lateral inhibition and inhibitory projections from the cortex to the thalamus that regulates the brightness of our experience.

This inhibitory control mechanism occurs a discrete number of times per second. Therefore “control interruption” caused by psychedelics, in this model, is conceived as a periodical failure of inhibitory control that allows aspects of one’s experience to be sustained for longer than usual. The frequency of control interruption is specific to the psychedelic used. As the article conjures, salvia and nitrous oxide produce control interruption at a frequency of 8-11 and 12-15 Hz, respectively. On the other hand, DMT disrupts control at a much higher frequency (24-30+ Hz). This control interrupt creates “a standing hallucinogenic interference pattern in the consciousness of the subject”.

*** As argued by Julien Dubois  and Rufin VanRullen in “Visual Trails: Do the Doors of Perception Open Periodically?” tracers may be very significant when it comes to reverse-engineering the human visual system. How many frames per second do we experience? How long do the images last in the visual field? Does this effect generalize to high-level features, or is it specific to colors and edges? Thus, building psychedelic communication tools would be of great value to neuroscience.

Generalized Wada Test and the Total Order of Consciousness

Posted on by algekalipso

In a Wada test a single hemisphere is sedated with sodium amobarbital. While the sedated hemisphere is unresponsive, a cognitive examination is conducted on the other hemisphere. This test is done to determine whether performing an ablative surgery on a given hemisphere is a viable treatment for epileptic seizures. By using the Wada test, one can avoid creating irreversible damage in areas of the brain crucial for modern day life, such as language production regions.

The Generalized Wada Test

The thought of targeting an isolated brain region for drug therapy is very stimulating. But do we have to sedate it? Sodium amobarbital may have useful properties that makes it a good fit for the Wada test. But it is unlikely to be the only substance that can be used. More broadly, there seem to be a variety of compounds that can be used for intracarotid drug delivery.

In all likelihood there must be a number of psychedelic compounds that could selectively affect brain regions via intracarotid delivery. One thought is to inject 2C-B (or whichever psychedelic has the desired pharmacological properties) on one hemisphere so that a person can compare the two sides of her visual field. This way, she would be able to compare side-by-side the features and patterns highlighted by the algorithms of her visual system (which would, presumably, be different on each side). In turn, this will enable us to catalogue more precisely the specific differences in visual experience under the influence of several drugs.

Even more generally, one could also make use of additional brain interventions such as tDCS, ultrasound, optogenetcs, etc. For example, imagine using ketamine and tDCS on the right hemisphere while the left receives ultrasound stimulation. We have a combinatorial explosion. A good one. I call this the Generalized Wada Test (WGT).

Philosophical Applications of the Generalized Wada Test

This technique presents a striking possibility: approaching philosophical problems empirically. More specifically, this technique might be used to:

  1. Test the properties of phenomenal binding, and
  2.  Allow “incommensurable” experiences to “experience each other” as the halves of a unitary consciousness

Phenomenal binding can be put under a microscope by using a GWT to infer the necessary chemical properties that brain regions require in order to enable the integration of phenomenal features into unitary experiential wholes. The speed at which binding takes place between the hemispheres could also be quantified. If phenomenal binding is not possible between two given states of consciousness, that would also be very valuable information for consciousness research.

With regards to the second possibility…

Is there a Total Order of Subjective Preferences?

Take two states of consciousness A and B. Suppose we use a GWT to make A manifest in the left hemisphere, while B does so in the right. The subject as a whole is asked to decide which of the two states of consciousness is subjectively preferable. If A is preferred over B, then a directed edge from B to A is added to the graph (with a weight proportional to the certainty/degree of preference). By adding the corresponding weighted edge between every pair of states of consciousness inducible on a GWT we would map a large portion of the state-space of consciousness available to humans. Let’s call this graph the directed network of subjective preferences.

Now, once we have fully populated such graph… would it actually be a directed acyclic graph (DAG)? Could we extract a Total Order? In other words, does the directed network of subjective preferences reveal a proper order of experiences from least to most preferred?

Can we make a universal scale of subjective preferability? Is it possible to infer a scale that, as David Pearce would call it, shows us the utility function of the universe?

But what if we find cycles?

Hedonic Tone

Even though there is a very close relationship between bliss and activity in the outer shell of the nucleus accumbens (and various other nearby hedonic hot-spots), it is not yet clear whether all pleasurable, blissful or otherwise subjectively valuable states are triggered by the activation of this area. We know that classic psychedelics, for example, do not have pharmacological dopaminergic or opiodergic action, and thus don’t activate the nucleus accumbens directly. And yet, people do report ecstatic and blissful states of consciousness on LSD…

It is not yet clear whether that bliss is mediated by hedonic hot-spot activity (thankfully, we may soon find out). If psychedelic bliss is fundamentally dissociated from dopaminergic and opiodergic activity, what would that say about the nature of pleasure? Could there be higher levels of bliss that are unrelated to current neurobiological models of subjective reward? What if everyone on acid bliss says that acid bliss is better than heroine bliss, while everyone on heroine bliss says the opposite? What do we make of Dostoevsky’s epileptic bliss?

For several instants I experience a happiness that is impossible in an ordinary state, and of which other people have no conception. I feel full harmony in myself and in the whole world, and the feeling is so strong and sweet that for a few seconds of such bliss one could give up ten years of life, perhaps all of life.

I felt that heaven descended to earth and swallowed me. I really attained god and was imbued with him. All of you healthy people don’t even suspect what happiness is, that happiness that we epileptics experience for a second before an attack.

Nothing short of a Generalized Wada Test would be able to approach these questions.

Psychophysics for Psychedelic Research: Textures

Posted on by algekalipso

In this post I will provide an account of my personal research project to understand the algorithms that underly human visual pattern-recognition. This project is multidisciplinary in nature, combining paradigms from three fields: (1) the analysis and synthesis of textures, (2) psychophysics and (3) psychedelic research. I will explain in detail how these areas can synergistically help us understand the computational properties of consciousness. In the process of doing so I will describe some of the work I have done in this direction.

tl;dr: With texture synthesis algorithms we can control the statistical features present in textures. By using an odd-one-out paradigm where participants have to find the “different texture” we can identify the statistical signatures of the visual patterns people can perceive. Collecting these signatures under various states of consciousness will reveal the information processing limitations of visual experience. It may turn out that some patterns can only be seen on LSD (psilocybin, mescaline, etc.), and this information will inform a general theory of vision’s algorithms, expanding the scope we have studied so far and suggesting relevant applications of psychedelic consciousness.

Introduction to Spatial Patterns

The world is patterned. In fact, it is so patterned, that it is difficult to identify natural surfaces that have no perceptible regularities. The grass, the trunk of trees, the surface of rocky mountains, the dancing and dissolving of the clouds. All of these natural scenes are full of regularities. For hundreds of millions of years animals on this planet have existed in an environment where regularities are not inconsequential: being able to use or detect camouflage is a matter of life or death to some species. The insects who hide between the leaves pretending to be part of the scene are in an evolutionary arms race against predators and their sensory apparatus. (Here is a neat collection of insect camouflage). Arguably, there are strong evolutionary selection pressures that push predator’s visual system into adapting to recognize the differences between the scene’s visual statistics and the prey’s body appearance.

Other widespread examples for the evolutionary relevance of pattern recognition can be found: Birds may take advantage of the look of cloud formations to determine if they should fly or find refuge, herbivores may seek only plants with specific visual properties to avoid poisonous lookalikes and parasites, the health of potential mates can be assessed by the uniformity of their fur patterns. You get the idea.

Not surprisingly, you today can look at a plain rock and see a lot of visual properties pointed out by patterns you can perceive. Unfortunately, something has kept us quiet about this aspect of our perception: most of these properties are hard to verbalize. Often, you will be able to tell apart two kinds of rocks by grasping the subtle visual differences between them, but at the same time still be unable to explain what makes them different.

What exactly is going on in your mind/brain when you are recognizing characteristic features in textures? We don’t know how the information is processed, why we perceive the features we perceive, or even how the various features are put together in a unified (or semi-unified) conscious representation. The hints we do have, however, are precious.

Receptive Fields

A big hint we can build on is that many neurons in the primary visual cortex (of cats, monkeys, and probably all mammals) respond to visual stimuli in specific areas of the visual field. For a given neuron, the shape of this region is an instance of a well-studied canonical function, as shown in the images below. The area of the visual field a neuron best responds to (by becoming excited or inhibited) is called its receptive field, and the canonical function is the Gabor filter.

As far back as the early 60s, research has been conducted to map the receptive fields of neurons by inserting electrodes into the brain of animals and presenting them with visual input of lines and shapes. In 1961 D. H. Hubel and T. N. Wiesel showed for the first time that neurons in a cat’s cortex and lateral geniculate have receptive fields that look like this:

1961_receptive_field

The crosses indicate regions in which stimuli excites the neuron’s activity while the triangles represent regions in which stimuli inhibits the neuron’s activity. Due to the arrangement of these excitatory and inhibitory regions, these neurons functionally work as edge-detectors. A computer rendering of these receptive fields looks like this:

gabor

Since then a tremendous amount of research has repeatedly confirmed the existence of such neurons, and also uncovered a large number of more complex receptive fields. Some neurons even respond specifically to abstract concepts and high-level constructs. More recently, the simple receptive fields shown above have been modeled as Gabor filters in quantitative simulations. This, in turn, has been successfully used to build brain activity decoders that reconstruct the image that a person is seeing by assuming that the activity of fMRI’s voxels approximately matches the added activity of neurons with Gabor receptive fields (see: Identifying natural images from human brain activity by Kay, Naselaris, Prenger and Gallant).

Thus we can say that we know that a large number of neurons in our visual cortex have Gabor receptive fields and that the collective activity of these neurons contains enough information to at least approximately reconstruct the image a person is seeing (well enough to identify it from a pool of candidates).

We can’t jump from these findings alone to a global theory of visual processing. That is, without also considering what people actually experience. It may turn out, for example, that the activity of the visual cortex contains a lot of information that can be decoded using machine learning techniques applied to fMRI’s voxel brightness. And yet, simultaneously, it could be that people do not consciously represent all of the {decodable} information.

Likewise, a priori we cannot rule out the possibility that some of the information we consciously experience is not actually decodable using brain activity alone. (A quick remark: this may be the case even if one assumes physicalism. Why this is the case will be explained in a future article).

To illustrate this example we can consider the information available in the retina and before it. The light that reaches the outer surface of our eyes contains all of the information available to our mind/brain to instantiate our visual experience. Yet, there is a lot of information there that is ultimately irrelevant for our conscious experience. For instance, there is infrared and ultraviolet light, as well as light that does not make it to our retina, light that fails to elicit an action potential, and so on. If you can discriminate between a really hot and a cold metal using the infrared signature of the light that reaches the eye, you have certainly not shown that we perceive infrared light or that we use it to make distinctions. It merely means that such information is sufficient. We wouldn’t yet know that we actually use it or that it shapes our experience.

But how exactly do we develop an experiment to infer the statistical properties represented by our experience? Here is where the analysis and synthesis of textures becomes relevant.

Analysis and Synthesis of Textures

The idea of using oriented Gabor-like filters (also known as “steerable pyramids”) to analyze and synthesize visual textures was, as far as I know, first proposed by David J. Heeger and James R. Bergen in “Pyramid-based texture analysis/synthesis.” Texture analysis in this context means the use of algorithms to characterize the properties of textures to capture what makes them unique. In turn, texture synthesis, refers to the application of texture analysis to produce an arbitrarily large patch of a synthesized (synthetic) texture so that the synthetic and original texture are as indistinguishable as possible. Of course whether something is “indistinguishable” or not is to a certain degree subjective. Here the criteria for indistinguishability between the original and the synthetic textures is whether a person comparing them side by side could confuse them. In the following section I address how to operationalize and formalize the indistinguishability between patterns using psychophysics.

This particular texture synthesis algorithm works by forcing a white noise image (of any size) to conform to the statistics obtained in the texture analysis step. This is done iteratively, matching the histograms of the synthesized canvas to the various statistics computed from the original texture. I recommend reading the paper to gain a better grasp of what the algorithm does, and to see some stunning examples of the output of this algorithm.

The use of steerable pyramids was later refined by Portilla & Simoncelli‘s texture synthesis algorithm, which currently plays an important role in my research. This algorithm extends Heeger et al. by including additional statistics to enforce, which are (roughly) computed by measuring the autocorrelation between the various components of the steerable pyramid texture representation. Below you can see two pairs of pictures (two originals and their corresponding same-sized synthetics versions), that I recreated using Potilla & Simoncelli’s matlab code:

As you can see, the original and synthetic images are fairly similar to each other. Close inspection is sufficient to notice deadly differences. If you only use your peripheral vision it is very challenging to see major differences.

Psychophysics

Psychophysics is the study of the relationship between physical stimuli and experience (and often behavior). Thanks to psychophysics we now have:

  1. A good approximate map of the phenomenal space of color (CIELAB)
  2. A strong grasp of the nature of color metamers, which in turn underlies all of our color display technologies.
  3. The ability to predict the subjective intensity of the experience elicited by stimuli as a function of the energy of the stimulus (see Weber–Fechner law).

A very powerful idea in psychophysics is the use of just-noticeable differences (JND): Carry a bucket of water. How much water should I add to it so that you are capable of perceiving a difference in the weight of the bucket? Look at a pair of identical light sources. How much blue (in this case, the specific and pure frequency of light that elicits the blue qualia) can I add to one of the lights before you perceive them as being differently colored? Pinch your skin with two needles. How far can their pointy part be before you perceive two needles rather than one?

In these cases, though, there is a natural (and sometimes unique) dimension along which the stimuli can be varied in order to compute the JND. What about visual textures? Here the problem becomes non-trivial. In what way should we change a texture? And how should we accomplish such? There is no clear and obvious scale for describing textures. So what can we do?

Psychophysics of Textures (Take 1):

Before learning about steerable pyramid representations of textures I developed a variety of psychophysical tests to identify the JND between textures. I did this by changing the value of parameters of images with ground-truth statistical properties. If you are curious, feel free to try the first iteration of my experimental paradigm. (Note: I am not collecting data from that experiment, so you should not expect to contribute to science by finishing the task. That said, you can have fun, and a pop-up window with your raw score will appear when you finish both tasks). The average accuracy of the texture discrimination part is about 13/21 (with a chance performance of 3/21), while the performance in the numerical pattern completion task is about 3/5 (with a near 0/5 expected performance when answering randomly).

One of the statistical properties I was changing in the stimuli was the variance of a 2D Gaussian process I implemented with a python script and the magic of Gibbs sampling. Thus, a subset of the images I tested were complete noise except for the first order statistic of local autocorrelation created by the differently parametrized Gaussian process. Here are a couple of examples of such patterns:

These pictures, it turns out, are relatively easy to tell apart when the parameters are sufficiently different. There is a threshold of similarity in the variance parameter after which people cannot distinguish between them. A nice property of this particular method is that you can be sure that if people do recognize the differences, it is because they are somehow extracting features that are a direct consequence of a different value for the variance parameter.

The textures above instantiate the simplest statistical differences that can be created, after the mean and standard deviation of the pixel values. To explore more broadly a wider variety of patterns, I also created textures with fairly complex parametrizable Turing machines (TMs). This, unfortunately, does not lend itself to a clear analysis. In brief, this is because changing a single parameter of such TMs can produce profoundly different results with unclear ground-truth properties:

What information could I gain from the fact that changing x, y or z parameter in a Turing machine by a, b, or c amounts enables accurate discrimination between textures? In principle one could try to explain the performance obtained by making an a posteriori analysis of the correlation between a variety of statistics measured in the textures. But since the textures were not created to have specific statistical properties, the distribution of such properties will not be ideal to find JNDs or discriminability thresholds.

Even if you do this, you will still have more problems. The images are more different (and different in more ways) than what your texture analysis algorithm is capable of detecting. Thus the reason why people can tell these textures apart is not possible to extract from the statistical differences you measure between them. At least not without being extremely lucky and hitting the visual features that matter.

And here, I was stuck several months.

Psychophysics of Textures (Take 2):

After learning about the steerable pyramid model, the work of Eero Simoncelli and the state of the art in fMRI decoding of visual experience, I decided to shift gears and approach the problem with some of the best of the tools created so far.

It turns out that the concept of texture metamers had been developed to describe the perceptual indistinguishability between textures in peripheral vision. Taken from here, the following two images are texture metamers. The images look the same when you center your vision in either of the central red dots. Close foveal inspection of the image, however, will reveal that these are very different pictures!

A specific study caught my attention, and I decided to replicate it as a final class project. Specifically, Texture synthesis and perception: Using computational models to study texture representations in the human visual system by Benjamin J. Balas. I attempted to replicate some of the main results of that study using Mechanical Turk. A full account of the experimental procedure, results and discussion can be found in this wiki here, (written for Stanford’s Psych 221 – Applied Vision Systems). To see the actual experiment performed, try it out here: Replication (and the github repository).

The main idea goes as follows: If textural metamerism can be verified using a given texture synthesis algorithm, then we can be reasonably certain that the algorithm is capturing a large component of what makes textures different from a human point of view. In particular, Benjamin Balas noted that Prtilla & Simoncelli’s algorithm could be “lesioned” by failing to enforce specific statistical features obtained in the texture analysis step. In this way, one can purposefully fail to match specific statistical features between the original and synthesized texture, and then measure how this partial texture synthesis algorithm affects the performance of texture discrimination in humans.

For illustration, here is a set of possible texture synthesis “lesions:”

The operationalization of the experiment used an “odd one out” paradigm: in each trial, three images are presented for 250 milliseconds at 3.5 degrees of vision from the fovea (each image being 2 degree wide in diameter). Two of the three images will come from the same group (ex. two original textures, two marginals removed, etc.). The remaining image is the odd one out. The study measures how often participants detect the odd one out depending on the statistical feature that is not enforced in the synthesized textures (for a more in-depth description: wiki).

Overall the performance of the participants in my replication was much closer to chance than Balas’ results. That siad, qualitatively the replication was successful. Removing the marginals is the lesion that increases performance the most. Magnitude correlation comes in second place. All of the other conditions are at chance level (as far as my sample n=60 with 60 trials each can discern).

As you can see, this specific paradigm is now much more robust than before. And the paradigm is not hard to translate for application in psychedelic research. Unfortunately, Portilla & Simoncelli’s algorithm only creates texture metamers for the peripheral vision in pre-attentive conditions. Upon central inspection, nearly every synthesized texture is at least somewhat distinguishable from the original texture.

The more interesting problem, as I see it, is found in our capacity to see differences between textures upon close and careful examination. This, I think, addresses more directly the subject of this blog. Namely, what is the information that we can represent and distinguish at the (resolution) peak of human consciousness? I imagine that there must be statistical features that we simply do not perceive even when we are looking at them directly and using all of our attention. What is the set of properties that our everyday consciousness can represent centrally?

Psychedelic Research

To understand how a machine works, it helps to know what happens when you break it. You can’t ignore the extra settings and claim you’ve got a theory of everything. Would we be satisfied with the work of neuroscientists and psychologists if they only studied people who are colorblind? They may claim that they have “the essentials” of vision. That color is just a perturbation in the “optimal basics.” And yet, today we know that color plays a relevant computational role in visual discrimination. Suffices to mention that people with grapheme-color synesthesia have an improved performance in “odd one out” identification tests like this (find all the 2’s as fast as possible):

synesthesiatest-300x144

This is because fast low-level association between graphemes and colors help them see clearly and quickly the graphemes that are different. Likewise, every variety of conscious experience may potentially play a computationally relevant role in specific situations. A priori, no variety of consciousness can be dismissed as irrelevant.

Thus, to understand, model and engineer consciousness, we should not prematurely close varieties of consciousness to study. Not only would that prevent us from finding out about consciousness more generally. It may also conspire that we will never understand even what we do decide to study, simply because key pieces of the puzzle are found elsewhere.

Another point is that even though sober human vision is a special case of general vision (and general vision-like qualia), general vision may still be relatively small. The general principles and conditions for vision to work in the first place may be somewhat restricted. Unless the elements are placed just right, the visual system breaks down, at least when it comes to fulfilling a computationally meaningful purpose. Thus, psychedelic research of visual experience may help us quickly distinguish what is essential from what is incidental in vision.

By introducing a psychedelic substance into the nervous system of a person, a remarkable set of visual effects are produced. To anyone interested in seeing a good representation of the way in which various psychedelics affect a person’s conscious experience I highly recommend seeing Disregard Everything I Say’s entry on the visual components of a psychedelic experience (while you are at it, I recommend also checking out his/her post on the corresponding cognitive components of a psychedelic experience). These images will provide a great intuition pump about the kind of beast we are facing to anyone who is psychedelic-drug-naïve (and hopefully inspire a sense of “WOW, you can represent some of what you experience after all!” in those who are less psychedelic-drug-naïve).

Given the same visual input presented to a particular person, a psychedelic substance will in many cases drastically shift the interpretation of such stimuli. Both the interpretation (specifically, what an image is about) and how the image looks and feels tend to vary in synchrony. Likewise, people feel more able to see personal issues in a new light by interpreting them with new schemas and from a different level of awareness. Personally, I suspect that there is a strong and measurable connection between the fluidity of interpretation of personal issues, and the fluidity of interpretation of visual experience. Perhaps all phenomenal constructs are affected in a similar way: By breaking down the previously enforced patterns of thought and perception and opening the way to seeing things differently.

All of the above, while probably true, is still far too vague for a scientific theory. Given our set of tools, and experimental paradigms, to me it makes a lot of sense to start studying the effects of psychedelics in terms of texture perception. As we develop more and better texture analysis/synthesis algorithms, we will acquire a larger repertoire of mathematical properties that describe what is seen during a psychedelic experience. My hope is that we will someday know exactly how to simulate a visual trip.

Why care about psychedelics? Evolution already created the optimal vision system!

Evolutionary selection pressures on perceptual systems do not guarantee that information processing tasks will be solved optimally. In fact, “optimal” only really makes sense in relation to some metric you choose. In some way, everything created by the evolutionary process will be optimal in the sense that is produces the local maximization of inclusive fitness (admittedly it’s more complicated than that). But this is just a tautological notion: Sure evolution is optimal at doing what evolution does. Likewise, rocks have found the optimal way to be themselves. Our visual system works optimally, if you define optimal in terms of 20/20 every-day visual experience.

Instead, it makes more sense if we focus on the specific computational trade-offs that various resource allocation methods and designs provide. We can certainly predict that the particular set of algorithms that our visual system employs to detect visual patterns will satisfy some properties. For instance, they will be good as survival tools in the African Savanna. But just as for our hardwired tastes in food (and our default emotional palette), survival value in the ancestral environment is not necessarily what we currently need or want. And just as it would make sense to modify what we enjoy eating the most (moving away from sugar) to adapt to the current post-industrial environment, it may also turn out to be the case that our visual system is miscalibrated for the tasks we want to solve, and the joys and meaning we would like to experience today.

Psychedelics change our visual system in many ways, some of them more predictable than others. Some people report that small doses of psychedelics increase one’s overall visual acuity (this has yet to be verified empirically). Although counter-intuitive at first, this cannot be ruled out, again, simply because of evolution does not rule out things of this nature. After all, one of the main constraints placed on animals in natural environments is caloric consumption. If a higher visual acuity is possible with your current brain, the marginal benefit such acuity adds may still not surpass the marginal loss of calories that result from excessive brain activity.

Additionally, while higher doses of psychedelics tend to impair many aspects of visual perception (with people on Erowid explaining how extreme tracers can make it hard to walk), low and moderate doses do not have simple one-sided effects even when it comes to accurately representing the world around us. Rather than simply breaking up the pattern recognition capabilities of the visual system, small and moderate doses seem to also open up additional kinds of patterns up for inspection. Pareidolia, for example, is greatly enhanced. Thus, “connecting dots and edges” to match the outline of higher-level phenomenologies (like faces in the mud) happens with ease. Whether this is good or bad depends on the context, and the specific task one is trying to solve.

Perceptual Enhancement via Psychedelics

We have theoretical and anecdotal reasons to suspect psychedelics may turn out to be performance-enhancing in certain visual tasks. We also already have quantitative evidence that this is the case. In the 60s Harman and Fadiman conducted a study about the creativity and problem-solving properties of psychedelics. The study included a paper and pencil component in which the following tests were administered: Purdue Creativity, the Miller Object Visualization, and the Witkin Embedded Figures. The authors conclude that “[m]ost apparent were enhanced abilities to recognize patterns, to minimize and isolate visual distractions, and to maintain visual memory in spite of confusing changes of form and color.” Specifically, the Witkin test is singled as a test in which the ingestion of mescaline produced a consistent performance improvement (p<0.01).

Example of a Witkin Embedded Figure. You have to determine if the left shape is in the right figure within 30 seconds.

Example of a Witkin Embedded Figure. You have to determine if the left shape is in the right figure within 30 seconds.

In personal communication Fadiman has said that these tests were mostly a waste of time: They used one valuable hour of the problem-solving session. I disagree. After 50 years, those results are incredibly valuable to me and the next wave of computational researchers of the mind. I think that the recorded performance enhancement is a key piece of information. We certainly do not expect an enhancement on all areas of cognition and perception (we know, for example, that reaction time and verbal fluency are impaired). Identifying the kinds of tasks that do receive a boost can inform future research. In future posts I will explain my theory for why Witkin Embedded Figures test was particularly benefited from a psychedelic, and how we can create a new test that takes this into account.

New Possible Protocols for Psychedelic Research

Nowadays it is very hard to obtain the required permits and affiliations to conduct academic research on psychedelic consciousness. The key rate-limiting factor is the restrictions that apply to research with controlled substances. Thankfully, we do happen to be living at the beginning of a psychedelic renaissance. It is not hard to imagine that as psychedelics start to (re-)enter the mainstream in psychiatry, a large number of clinical trials will be conducted. In principle, a collaboration can be accorded between a psychophysics lab and a clinical research group to conduct psychophysical assessments during the course of treatment.

Clinical trials for medical applications of psychedelics, though, are still limited in scope and focus. Eventually the medical applications of psychedelics will run out and it will no longer be possible to enroll patients into psychophysical studies. Thus, either more permissive rules and regulations will emerge and society’s rules will be more lax, or we will potentially endure decades or centuries of unnecessary barriers to scientific discoveries about consciousness.

psychedelic_research_autocomplete

As it turns out, tens (if not hundreds) of millions of persons have tried psychedelic substances. Interest is not slowing down, and no propaganda effort save for literal brain-washing will prevent people from developing a genuine interest in the field. There will be millions of volunteers and hundreds of thousands of willing researchers. As I envision in The Psychedelic Future of Consciousness, the future of consciousness studies will be nothing like what it is today. Once those who are interested are given the opportunity to study psychedelics seriously, the research panorama will look very differently.

But What to Do in the Meantime?

Investigating the psychophysics of texture perception more thoroughly may require at least mild to moderate doses for noticeable effects, and a period of examination at a time when acute effects are present. How to overcome the hurdles ahead of any current academic investigation of this nature? This ultimately depends on the specific constraints required for the study. It is true that people would have to be high on LSD (or Mescaline, mushrooms, 2C-B, etc.) while they perform the experiment. But who says that they have to conduct the experiment in your presence? That you have to give them the substance yourself? Without the typical background assumptions that are assumed in psychophysics research labs, can we do anything else?

I suspect that we can do much better. We can come up with protocols that side-step current obstacles. We need to be creative. And I do have some ideas, with varying levels of plausibility for how to implement psychedelic research in legal, viable and immediate ways. Consider, for example, how James Fadiman has been collecting hundreds of micro-dose reports via email without any difficulty for many years. He is taking advantage of the fact that the optimal format of micro-dose reports tends to be “summary and retrospective” narrative. A single dose on a single day on a single person is not likely to be life-changing. So his particular line of research is well suited for the means available to him. Likewise, as I requested in the psychedelic experience of visual textures post, people’s subjective judgements of visual textures while high on LSD can be recorded online. These are just two examples of how non-mainstream research approaches can be taken to study psychedelics. Unfortunately, both of these protocols lack proper controls and standardized settings. But this is all I will say for now.

Stay tuned: In a future post I will propose a set of protocols for independent studies on psychedelics, including additional methods for studying psychedelic visuals.

Thanks for reading! 

If you would like to be a collaborator with me, please email me by finding my contact info in the contact section of this blog. We’ll take it from there.

Note: If any link is broken, please leave a comment and I’ll provide an updated version. Thanks!

The psychedelic future of consciousness

Posted on by algekalipso

What can 1,800,000 human days per day accomplish?

Imagine the events that happen in a city of near two million persons. How much thinking is done? How many atypical views about the nature of reality take place in the sunny hours of a city of this size?

Psychedelic experiences are eventful, so they have to be weighted more than typical days in any sum total of the quantity of conscious events and conscious luminance. Not to say, the local consciousness flux capacity co-peaks with the peak of an entheogenic trip.

Now imagine, 1,800,000 humans who dedicate their lives to serious psychedelic and consciousness research. A large fraction of this population is experienced in employing psychedelic states of consciousness for qualia-computing applications (that is, for applications suited to the specific state of consciousness, that takes advantage of the computational trade-offs of different states of consciousness to perform certain operations more efficiently). Another large fraction frequently interacts with people reporting from myriad kingdoms of consciousness (which are as different from one another as you could say the kingdoms of life are to each other).

Many of them develop computational models of the dynamics of qualia for a living. They study how varieties of consciousness interact with one another. They ask questions like: How quickly can a conscious experience intensify? What is the function that maps present content of conscious experience to the set of conceivable ideas? How fast can phenomenal yellow be transformed/substituted by phenomenal blue?

They develop probabilistic models that predict the possible transitions between states of consciousness, at all time scales. In the microsecond domain, we see resonant chambers of qualia filaments dynamically modifying manifolds of experience with variable Fourier transforms. In the ‘real-subjective-time’ scale, we would see the change from one emotional state into another. The differential equations that govern the possible affective transitions between emotions in a sober state would have long been figured out. Predicting those equations for hypothetical states of consciousness which are then found in the lab (well, the psychedelic research center) is where the field’s at.

Other people develop connections between consciousness and mathematics themselves. Philosophy of qualiamatics. After all, the semantic content of a mathematical propositions is enclosed within and a part of the experience of doing and thinking mathematics. The engineering of semantically rich states of consciousness is now of interest to pure mathematics researchers, if for no other reason than to improve their investigative mathematical skills. Drugs and techniques that specifically target the kind of meaning-making useful for mathematics are developed and used by many.

And others do a whole flip within and study the nature of philosophical thought. If you are an astute reader, you’ll notice that philosophy of the science of consciousness (just as there is philosophy of the science of physics!) cannot be complete without an understanding of philosophy through the science of consciousness. While first dismissed as a simple circularity, a play of words, universities now offer serious classes on (1) the phenomenal quality of philosophy of consciousness, and (2) the philosophical implications of the science of the consciousness of philosophy. And as you may expect, both courses have a required lab component.

People have been working for a few decades already in the creation of an agreed-upon map of the varieties of conscious experience. Most of the daily experience of most of the persons alive belong to some of the few large and broad regions of the state-space of consciousness defined in standard charts available everywhere. There is also knowledge about general regions (i.e. kinds of experiences) to completely avoid, given their intrinsically negative subjective character. However, a sizable minority of states of consciousness are still completely unclassified and unclassifiable given the present vocabulary and shared conceptions. It is not that these states are in principle inaccessible to scientific study. Instead, there either is no reliable way of reproducing the states, or the current degrees of freedom don’t allow researchers to compare them to other states of consciousness.

Yes, it is true that in some sense every state of consciousness is inconmensurable to every other state. But you can always put them side by side in a phenomenally bound entity and see what happens. Subjective affinities can be quantified, and subsequent behavior is measurable. Consistent findings tend to happen, unless there is an intrinsically chaotic result, in which case that fact is noted. The vast majority of the state space of consciousness remains undiscovered, unexplored, and unconceived. And yet, general key principles of consciousness (such as relationships between behavior and intrinsic quality) are already known and applied widely in the exploration of uncharted states of consciousness. What shamans, psychologists and even philosophers of the past did more or less as an art (with 99.9% of practice time) is now done systematically, more thoroughly and better recorded (with no practice time needed) via technologically enhanced thinking.

Just as the mathematical characterization of tiny physical components of matter in the 19th century led to the development of computing machines made of tiny systems in the 20th century, we now see the mathematical formalisms of the behavior of consciousness are paying off computationally. The computational advantages of phenomenal binding are harnessed in the processing of information in a way that is far superior to digital computers. With the integration of semantics modules of thought, and mathematical renderers, conscious experience can quickly explore vast regions of possibility space. Now thinking about the nature of the possible has been transformed from an art to an engineering discipline.

Qualia treasures are discovered all the time. What used to be a person’s peak experience in a lifetime (a moment of transcendent delight from which the rest of the cosmos seems more profound and deeply significant than at any other point in life) are now a possible baseline of consciousness for many experimental subjects and artists of the mind alike. Yet, there are far greater and significant worlds of qualia discovered from time to time. And there is no sign that the rate of discoveries will slow down. Like prime numbers, perhaps, the interval between them increases as you find the ones closer to zero, and yet you are guaranteed to find one if you keep counting.

Needless to say, the discoveries of qualia treasures are welcomed by the general population, who get to try them and delight in them after robust accessing methods are proved safe. Qualia safety engineers work hard to avoid even the presence of the conceivability of a problem in a qualia world shipped to the general public.

Imagine, 1,800,000 researchers conducting all of this work on a daily basis. That’s a possible future. A very possible, perhaps inevitable one. Perhaps you are unaware of it, but this is a fact: We are at the edge of something big, unimaginably big.