[Epistemic Status: Wild Speculations]

TL;DR I came up with a new way to test the reality of DMT entities!

Core idea: Look for signatures of injection pulling in the brain’s connectome-specific harmonic waves. This would distinguish between mere hallucinations (however weird they may feel) and hallucinations being driven by an external source.

Like the study about whether psychedelics can help you see through different Everett branches of the multiverse, I don’t expect the results of this experiment to come out positive. But it’s exciting to see a testable prediction on an otherwise so difficult-to-approach subject matter.

Televised Entity Contact

I think that we can basically assume that a certain percentage of people who vaporize DMT will believe that they contacted mind-independent beings. This is likely the result of hallucinations, but naïve realism and a bias to interpret more intense and detailed qualia as “more real than real external information” is so deeply ingrained that we can take it as a matter of fact that, say, 50%+ of people won’t be able to override their felt-sense of entity presence with heady philosophical epistemic rigor like discussions about the pseudo-time arrow, valence structuralism, or indirect realism about perception.

Is there anything we can do with that? Think of it from an economics arbitrage point of view. If we predict that X number of people will newly believe in DMT entities next year, is there an opportunity there?

I was thinking yesterday on a walk about how “Storm Area 51” is a reality check of sorts for the general public. As in – yes Area 51 is a thing, and no, you can’t just invade it with 100,000 people Naruto running towards it. It was predictable that would be the case, but going through the act in a collective and televised fashion was an interesting exercise in societal epistemology.

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Along those lines, I suggest that a “Break Out of the Simulation Day” event could be organized. That day we would have, on LIVE TV, people doing DMT trying to contact aliens as a medium, the camera going from one person to the next, always making sure that whoever has the microphone is currently peaking on DMT.

So if the DMT Elves are mind-independent sentient beings and want to send a coherent message to humanity, then that would be the time and place to do it. They would have all of our attention.

Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect DMT Elves to send a coherent message when, surprise surprise, they are on LIVE TV all of a sudden. And this is not only because they won’t have time to dress up. According to people who have tried DMT many times and believe it puts you in contact with other dimensions (cf. Dick Khan’s 600 DMT trip reports) there is an entire ecosystem of entities to contact, each of them with special gifts, powers, intentions, and styles. There are jesters, robots, greys, Archons, angels, demons, wireheading specialists, used alien spaceship dealers (those are the worst), etc. There are entire categories of entities whose sole purpose is to convince you that you are dead, or that you are in a simulation, or that the government is out to get you. There are entire species of entities of the sort that show you how to use sound to create thought-forms, and those that like to discuss with you the impact that the Greeks and Aztecs had on the aesthetics of the reptilians (i.e. interdimensional art historians). You cannot expect to be lucky and get a reasonable DMT entity who (1) will figure out what is going on, and (2) has good intentions for humanity. Perhaps we would be opening ourselves up to influence by incompetent, evil, or incompetent and evil entities. Worse, we would be doing so on LIVE TV!

by Steven Haman (source)

Testing the Mind-Independent Existence of DMT Entities

Ok, so maybe televising the experiment is a bad idea. Back to the drawing board. Let’s ask: what are the main ways to prove the independent existence of DMT entities? How would serious researchers[1] approach this problem? As far as I can tell, there are three big categories of methods:

1. Psi-based (having them tell you something about the world you would have no way of knowing otherwise)
2. Computation-based (having them solve a problem that requires much more computational power than what is available to you with your brain alone)
3. Quasi-Physical interference-based (have entities literally poke, shake, vibrate, excite, or inhibit your body or nervous system in ways that are impossible on their own)

The Psi-based category is the most well-known, and it includes tests such: (a) asking the entities what your family members are doing right now, (b) having them tell you what is inside a sealed box, (c) having them predict what tomorrow’s lottery numbers will be, and so on. While many people claim to have learned valuable information from DMT entities, I’ve yet to see credible reports of positive tests of this kind.

The computation-based category is perhaps best exemplified by Marko Rodriguez’ suggestion of having the entities factorize a large number for you. This method was popularized by Scott Alexander’s now-famous short story Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person, and then later Gwern made an estimate of the cost of such an experiment. It turns out that testing the hypothesis this way could be as cheap as one thousand (of 2015) dollars. Unfortunately, this test is very hard to conduct (saying 200 digits while on DMT and memorizing sets of numbers with dozens of digits the elves return to you as an answer is not an easy task). So other difficult-to-compute but easy-to-articulate and fast-to-memorize problems might be a better fit in this case. I predict it is only a matter of time before someone seriously tries a variant of this method and reports the results online. I would just caution that, depending on the computational task selected, one may inadvertently discover new computational applications of the DMT state rather than prove the existence of mind-independent DMT entities. After all, unusual states of consciousness may have unique computational trade-offs. See for example: Thinking in Numbers, How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD, and the discussion about the possible applications for mathematical research of the hyperbolic phenomenal space disclosed during DMT intoxication. Indeed, I would not be surprised to find out that in the year 2100 many of the most important mathematical breakthroughs are taking place in consciousness research centers thanks to having identified states of consciousness capable of rendering exotic mathematical objects and their possible transformations. So before concluding the DMT Elf solved your computationally-demanding problem, it would be important to rule out that it wasn’t you (or the DMT-filled version of you) who solved the problem thanks to novel qualia varieties only disclosed in such a state. That said, this concern only applies to computational tasks that are not extremely difficult. If a DMT alien can factorize a 3000-digit number in 10 seconds then we could actually reasonably conclude that it exists in a mind-independent way.

Now, the 3rd approach is, IMO, both the most likely to work in practice, and also the most spooky and frightening were the results to come out positive. Here is why. I’ve recently received trip reports from rational psychonauts who have taken DMT hundreds of times, and it seems clear that there is a vast number of qualitatively distinct state-spaces disclosed by this substance. One of these such relatively rare idiosyncratic responses caught my attention, and I think it warrants closer scientific scrutiny. Namely, I’ve received reports that when the psychonaut is either tired or has been drinking (why anyone would dare take DMT while drunk is beyond me, but for science-I guess-someone already did it) there is a different kind of experience of a rather unpleasant nature that unfolds. This type of DMT experience is described as getting in contact with the “lower levels of the astral plane” in which parasitic etheric life-forms live (not my words). During such an experience, one may feel that these beings “jitter” your nervous system without asking for your permission to do so. And this is done in such a way that your body may literally get up and dance, as if possessed by a spirit, without your conscious control. In a less extreme presentation of this phenomenon, at the very least the entities seem to jerk one’s extremities whether or not you like it. For example, in one of these trip reports someone described having their arm being pulled and jerked left and right by a demon of sorts while at the same time insectoid life-forms crawled inside their body, into the veins of the tripper. Needless to say, this is a profoundly unpleasant experience, no doubt, but perhaps it is also one of the most empirically testable of the bunch.

Injection Pulling Experiments

The big-picture idea here would be to hook a person up to an EEG during such a state (or even place them in an fMRI if at all possible) in order to determine if the “jittering” experienced is endogenously or exogenously generated.

How could we do this? Let’s take a step back for a second and recall Selen Atasoy’s study about the influence of LSD on the connectome-specific harmonic waves of the brain. The connectome-specific harmonic waves (CSHWs) are the “natural resonant modes” of a given brain. With this analysis, one can characterize a given “brain state” as a weighted sum of such resonant modes. In turn, one can then see how LSD affects one’s brain state by analyzing the CSHWs while under its influence. As it turns out, there are three major effects from LSD: (a) an overall increase in the power of all CSHWs, (b) the higher-frequency harmonics gain even more power relative to the lower-frequency ones, and (c) the repertoire of possible states dramatically increases, meaning that CSHWs that usually don’t co-occur are more likely to be simultaneously active while on LSD.

The thing to point out is that LSD in this case does not change which harmonic modes the brain has; it merely changes the energy distribution over those harmonics. On the other hand, we could in principle imagine that if the “DMT entity contact” brain state is not purely a hallucination, we would instead find out that such a state has a distinct “non-native harmonic pattern”. And this would manifest in the form of injection pulling and injection locking signatures in the reconstructed patterns of brain activity from the neuroimaging data.

An analogy with a musical instrument is possible: assume that your brain is a musical instrument and that the notes it plays sound like those of a guitar. In this analogy, taking LSD would entail increasing the volume of each note (and especially so for the higher notes) while also increasing the range of possible note-combinations. In other words, while LSD changes what you can play with the guitar, it does not change the fact that you are playing a guitar. That is, the brain states produced by LSD can be explained as different configurations of otherwise native vibratory patterns. In contrast, if DMT entity contact involves an external energy source with its own characteristic resonant modes, then the brain state that results from it would seem to have non-native vibratory patterns. It would be like having a guitar that produces saxophone sounds. You would know that on its own it is not physically capable of producing such sounds, and hence infer it is being externally influenced somehow.

Are the jiggling patterns of your brain harmonics while on DMT best explained with or without an external metronome and its injection pulling effects?

Such an analysis might reveal that the jerking of the nervous system one experiences on those idiosyncratic DMT experiences is best explained with an injection pulling model and an external metronome marking the pace. In turn, this would imply that the brain is not merely hallucinating a scene, but rather, it is being influenced by an outside metronome. Now, that would be a scientifically-sound ground-breaking finding. And perhaps be so spooky we would all prefer to forget about it rather than contemplate its implications.[2]

Now, there is always the option to interpret all of the unusual phenomenal experiences on DMT with a scientific secular framework that excludes entities from other dimensions. At the Qualia Research Institute, the frameworks that we use to explain such unusual experiences involve what we call algorithmic reductions, namely, identifying a small set of data-structures and information-processing steps that when taken together are capable of generating the vast zoo of complex emergent effects. The advantage of this approach is two-fold. First, we avoid over-fitting by minimizing the information complexity of the model (few data structures and few operations is a vastly more parsimonious explanatory framework than ad-hoc spiritual or atomistic interpretations). And second, it allows us to generate predictions such as the possible existence of exotic phenomenal states that haven’t yet been reported in the literature. Indeed, verifying that its predictions are accurate is one way of validating an algorithmic reduction.

In the case of DMT, we have algorithmic reduction models that explain the unusual properties of space as well as their associated exotic phenomenal time. And while providing compelling explanations for the exotic space and time one can experience in such a state is foundational, we recognize that this is still a first step. I admit that such models still do not go far enough. We still need to explain the nature and unusual character of “entity contact” experiences. So what do we make of them?

The Brain as a Game Engine

Our best guess- for the time being- involves reformulating the nature of the state-space of consciousness to include a layer of “game parameters”. This was first brought up in the essay “Harmonic Society“:

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

 

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

 

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

In other words, taking DMT does not merely propel you to other regions of the state-space of possible sensory impressions, but it also grants you access to alternate aesthetics[3] and game setups. If you think of your brain not only as a sensory-processing tool, but in fact as a kind of high-level game engine, realizing that God and the Devil can be real in your experience shows that they are possible characters of the games your brain can render. In such a case, we will eventually find that the brain states that render DMT entities are, however exotic, still produced by combining the native resonant modes of one’s own nervous system. No need to invoke neuronal injection pulling from the etheric plane.

Of note is that such a “Game Engine” paradigm would go a long way in explaining unusual experiences such as Free-Wheeling Hallucinations where one becomes able to control almost all features of one’s experience with an incredible level of detail. Indeed we can describe a Free-Wheeling Hallucination state as having access to an experience editor, as illustrated in the Memory Facility Scene of Blade Runner 2049:

Unsurprisingly, we can anticipate that when one is given root access to the parameters of one’s own inner world-simulation, one is likely to focus on creating experiences entirely filled with enjoyable super-stimuli. Whether this involves sex-worlds or proofs of the existence of a benevolent God might be a function of what is it that one craves the most. The intense concern with theodicy and the nature of death while on psychedelic drugs might have something to do with having the ability to change the most essential parameters of one’s internal world simulation. After all, if “living in a world” where God exists and is loving is more enjoyable than the alternative, one’s own hedonic maximization algorithms would try to “realize that’s the truth” if given the option to forge evidence. The same could be going on with DMT entities, for a world in which DMT is an interdimensional portal technology is vastly more interesting (or at least dramatic) than the alternative.

In the end, studying DMT experiences do not need to involve actual entity contact to be of profound significance to the science of consciousness. If you think of your brain as a qualia machine engine, DMT is about the best (or second-best [4]) qualia fuel there is. There are vast regions of the state-space of consciousness that can only be accessed with DMT, many of which contain extremely computationally interesting qualia, and many others which contain intrinsically valuable states (aka. heaven worlds). If, on top of that, it also enables interdimensional beings to injection pull your brain harmonics, we could think of that as icing on the cake.

[1] Serious and Unserious Consciousness Researchers

On a tangential note, here is a quote I recently heard at a consciousness conference:

Thomas Metzinger, the famous and brilliant German neuroscientist and philosopher of mind*, was once asked at a conference presentation he was giving whether he had ever tried psychedelics. His response? “There are two kinds of consciousness researchers. There are the serious ones, and the unserious ones. The serious ones take advantage of all the tools at their disposal to crack this mystery. All I will say is that I am NOT an unserious consciousness researcher.”

*He is best known for being the writer of the books “Being No One” and “The Ego Tunnel“, friends with the Foundational Research Institute, a strong proponent of a variant of eliminativism about consciousness, and a negative utilitarian specializing in AI ethics.

[2] Implications

If the injection pulling experiment does reveal that DMT entities are indeed mind-independent sentient beings in alternate dimensions, then what?

We shall cross that bridge when we get there, but in the meantime, let me entertain you with a wild hypothesis: DMT Elves are us at a higher level of spiritual and psychological development. In such a case, we might want to revise Integral Theory’s levels to include DMT Elves. Expect Ken Wilber’s next book to contain the following:

Larval Stages of the Soul Before Ascension

1) Mythical, 2) Machiavellian, 3) Religious Traditional, 4) Scientific Secular, 5) Postmodern Multiculturalist, 6) Burner, 7) DMT Elf, 8) Full-Spectrum Supersentient Superintelligence, 9) Hedonium Plasma Wave, and finally 10) Pure Love.

[3] An open question for all my DMT-using readers: are DMT visuals more akin to Art Deco, or Art Nouveau?

[4] On a Serious Note

My prediction is that the single most important tool to investigate consciousness is 5-MeO-DMT. It is probably the most important consciousness tool ever discovered. While I’ve seen serious consciousness researchers and academics admit in private that they have tried psychedelics, I almost never encounter people who have tried 5-MeO. I expect this to change over the course of the next decade as the word gets out that no, 5-MeO is not “yet another psychedelic” but it’s the “real deal” when it comes to disclosing profoundly insightful states of consciousness with implications for personal identity, ethics, the state-space of qualia, the nature of valence (i.e. harmony vs. dissonance), phenomenal time, causality, and the importance of quantum coherence for phenomenal binding. If you have explored this compound and would like to share your insights, please get in touch. We always welcome high-quality trip reports.

source: https://www.chrisbathgate.com/sculpture-works

source: https://www.chrisbathgate.com/sculpture-works

source: https://www.chrisbathgate.com/sculpture-works

Self-transforming machine thought-forms.
Valued for their intrinsic qualia;
sometimes used for qualia computing.

Featured image source: Machinist Sculpture Chris Bathgate