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Andrés Gómez-Emilsson: The Mathematics That Predicts Your DMT Trip
September 17, 2025
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You were separated from the universe by these topological defects. I turned into just one point and then that point disappeared. There's no way to distinguish one thing from another and there is no internal passage of time.
Today, Andreas Gomes-Emelson of the Qualia Research Institute discloses his new paradigm for modeling psychedelic perception as well as what he thinks is actually occurring ontologically, not just perceptually, under psychedelics. His views are informed by research conducted over the past decade with hundreds of psychedelic trips in controlled settings ranging from LSD to psilocybin to DMT to 5-MeO.
We discuss the mathematical underpinnings of perceptions behind psychedelic states, including, of course, the visual distortions and why we get that feeling of oneness, sometimes even nothingness and fractalness. We even cover those so-called beings encountered in DMT trips, such as the mantis being. This was filmed at the MIT lab and was the last headline event put on by the Augmentation Lab Summit, hosted by MIT researcher Danya Bharadari.
I'm honored to have been invited. The sonnet featured talks on the future of biological and artificial intelligence, brain interfaces, and included speakers such as Stephen Wolfram, the interview of which is on this channel as well. Enjoy. This is Augmentation Lab Summit Weekend put on by Augmentation Lab at MIT Media Lab. We're here live recording with an in-studio audience. Thank you all for coming and waiting. Okay.
Andres, hello, hello. Why don't you give a brief introduction to who you are and why you're relevant to people who are psychonauts and psychedelics or psychedelic research? Definitely. So I'm Andres. I currently run the other Qualia Research Institute, one of the original co-founders. And yeah, we study consciousness and like really try to, you know, figure it out ideally from first principles, make mathematical models of it.
Try to like really take phenomenology seriously, build tools to visualize phenomenology and also figure out what pleasure and pain are fundamentally and try to reduce suffering. There's kind of like a constellation of things that we do.
Yeah, essentially we're gonna it seems like I have a conversation about exploring the state space of consciousness and visualizing it. I want this to be valuable to people who have not taken psychedelics to people who are extremely familiar with psychedelics. So something that gets thrown around is the word qualia. It's not quite clear what the difference between qualia and sensory input is. So what is it?
Yeah, I think that's a really important clarification because you could potentially like for hours talk with somebody about consciousness and if your reference for what qualia refers to versus what sensory stimulation refers to, don't match. You're kind of like talking past each other at a very, very deep level.
Here's one common misconception, I would argue, that kind of highlights this contrast in how you might define these terms. I would argue that the way in which you experience the color blue, you can really separate it from the frequency of light that typically triggers it.
In fact, there's an infinite number of ways in which you can actually experience that particular sensation by using different combinations of frequencies of light, having a different spectral power distribution and still get the same way in which it feels like. Just because it feels in a certain way, you actually don't know really what kind of sensory input it is. You just know it is from a certain family of sensory inputs.
More so, there's this very weird thing that when you combine the colors that are the extreme opposites of a rainbow, you get magenta, a color that is not within the spectrum.
All of these are kind of like hints that suggest, well, the actual phenomenology, the way in which the colors feel like can be perhaps like separated from the idea that they map onto like frequencies of light. And, you know, I think like a really stark example is if you imagine somebody who has like synesthesia, where they map on, let's say like sounds to color sensations, but maybe they're blind.
They could actually investigate the way in which colors are related to each other, phenomenal colors, the colors that we experience, even though they have no visual sensory stimulation. The things that you get with this conceptual separation of the qualia, the way in which the experience feels like versus the sensory input that triggers it,
is that you can talk about, for example, mapping a certain state space of a certain type of experience, for example, all of the possible colors that you may have. You can do that without necessarily using the traditional sensory modality that is associated to it. For instance? Yeah, different combinations of light at different frequencies. Instead, you could, in principle, map the qualia space of color using sounds.
If you have the right type of synesthesia, if you could induce the right type of synesthesia, I would argue, be able to say things such as, hey, orange is in between yellow and red. Even though you're really kind of just experiencing this in a way that is triggered by sounds. But you still learn about the geometry of that space if you have the right mapping. In other words, I would argue that people are very
You know, like skeptical that if there's like aliens or there's like other entities out there, like in what way could we possibly understand each other? People propose also that, well, we would probably understand each other through like a shared understanding of mathematics because that's kind of like universal. But I would argue potentially also about like qualia space, like whether they experience phenomenal color through, you know, like visual stimulation or audio or like tactile feelings or imagination or only when they dream.
They can in principle do a series of experiments by like comparing the colors that they experience and reconstruct the space of possible phenomenal colors. And I think like when we talk to each other, we could actually use that as a shared reference that grounds our worlds of experience in a sense. Is it the case then that someone's blue is the same as someone else's blue? Currently, it is not known for sure.
And there's things that suggest it is the case and things that suggest it isn't the case. What possibly suggests that it is? So if you essentially map out the geometry of color using different frequencies of light, you actually get a somewhat irregular shape.
It's geometry is not completely symmetrical you know a classic example is like the the brightest blue that you could experience is not as bright as the brightest yellow and these you know suggest okay there's kind of like a geometry and like this is kind of like shared between people and you know some
People who may like kind of like ground qualia space in terms of kind of the relative distances between between its components and the geometry that comes from that they may perhaps like argue that well, okay, like yeah, blue is in some sense defined within the qualia space as like where there's like this this asymmetry where like you can't go as bright as in this other region of the qualia space.
However, there's I think like other hints that actually does suggest that, you know, the state space of color is like actually really symmetrical, which is this phenomena called hyper blue, which is if you look at like a very, very bright yellow for a while, you know, you're going to have kind of like an after image that is kind of like a blue after image. And so like if you have like really, really bright yellow and then you right after that, like present a really bright blue,
The combination of like the yellows after image together with the bright blue like can like takes your quality of blue to the next level and you see hyper blue which is kind of a brighter blue than usually we're capable of experiencing suggesting I think that you know the reason we can't experience like these like super bright blue.
is more having to do with, well, the receptors that are associated to different cells in our eyes, they can't be negatively activated. You need to do some trickery. The relative proportions is as if this had a negative activation and it pushes you in that direction of the state space. But there is actually something that does break the symmetry, a little bit of the color wheel, which is pure hues.
which is like i mean i don't know this is an interesting test and i would argue like you know it tends to be like very very uh polemical actually when when i bring it up which is like um maybe the audience or like yeah people is seeing this at home like yeah wondering like okay when you were a kid
And you saw like, okay, like yellow and red paint mixing and making orange is like, okay, yeah, that kind of makes sense. Right. Like orange is kind of in between the two colors, but then like blue and yellow paint and you get green is like, that makes no sense. It's like, where is this green coming from? It's kind of like a qualitatively different thing from both yellow and blue. And, um, and I think like, okay, like that, that is telling you, yeah, the relationship in the colors here is actually kind of different.
And if you look at kind of like a linearized state space of the color qualia, usually what you will actually see is like there's kind of like a whole line that is like pure blue. And there's a whole line that is like pure red. Are you able to show this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, one word of context, I suppose, like for discussing colors,
is that the screens have limitations, which is what is the gamma, the colors that they can actually show. So there's actually a lot of things about the phenomenology of colors that are not super apparent in screens that you need to actually see in person. But yeah, there is essentially this way in which you can probe the properties of this color space.
um by for example like showing people two hues that are like really close together so let's say like one line here and one line here and asking them uh which one looks like more pure like kind of like which one looks like is not a mixture of anything else any or two other things
And like, people kind of like actually will converge to the like a line of red, where it's like, okay, like it's not being mixed with blue, where you get kind of like purple and is not being mixed with yellow. And like, you just get kind of like, okay, like red kind of like breaks the symmetry is like, there's kind of like something kind of like clearly there in a sense. And you get essentially the same with yellow and green and blue.
So, you know, I would argue here, actually, you know, like green in some sense, like leaves in a different dimension than both yellow and blue, whereas orange leaves in kind of the linear combination of red and yellow. Right. So those patterns and the fact that we do kind of like all if we do the tests, we'll say like, yeah, like there were like four pure hues for me. There were like four pure hues for you. So at least like between people, we do share kind of like some of these
features of this space, this state space of quality in this context. However, it could be the case, and I don't know any strong argument against this other than parsimony. For example, maybe your blue is my yellow and your yellow is my blue. If you were to swap the pure hues
What other features can you actually find in the geometry of the space to suggest that, hey, we are actually experiencing the same one? And I'm not sure if there are. So what I can say is something like, well, the mapping, I don't think it's going to be the case that, for example, you experience orange when I experience blue, but maybe you experience yellow. So maybe you experience a pure hue. Yeah.
Okay, let's get to some psychedelic visuals. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so actually just like jumping right into it. This is like one of the first of like really trippy states in one of the tools that I'm going to be displaying today.
You know, this is kind of like exceptionally trippy, right? And it's like, okay, like, if your visual field is being saturated with psychedelic visuals, to that extent, right, you probably shouldn't be outside would be my, my suggestion. You definitely need a cedar cedar, you know, now, you know, these level of intensity, usually, you know, unless you're like overdosing on like mushrooms, like usually would be something like, okay, you're doing like DMT.
Where, yeah, like maybe the actual sensations from the, you know, environment become kind of like this very, you know, relatively faint contributor to the experience. This is kind of a teaser, yes. You're not going to be just showing visuals and then saying, look how cool this looks. You're going to be saying, okay, here's what is correlated with certain psychedelics, like LSD is different than DMT, which is different than 5-MeO. And then you're going to say, why does it look like this and how is it produced? Yeah.
So why don't we start off simple? Show what ordinary perception looks like. I think one fruitful way of starting is showcasing some of the simple effects that this tool can give you. I mean, this is well-known things such as drifting effects. This is very fast, but for example,
you know like your experience being a little bit wobbly is one of the maybe kind of like primary things that psychedelics do like kind of like making the field of experience a little bit wobbly explaining actually like how that happens i think it's a very non-trivial but okay like that's a very very basic thing that you can you can kind of like do and of course it gets interesting when you combine it with other effects but just that's kind of like okay that's like the the a of the abc of making these replications the second one
is kind of like adding like deep dream layers. So this is a little bit subtle but like you may see actually kind of like in some regions it gets a little bit kind of like enhanced and it looks a little bit trippy. You see there's kind of like these like waves where like okay maybe the edges get highlighted and so one of the you know simple interesting ideas is like okay you choose different layers of the you know deep dream algorithm so
maybe on low doses, you know, you highlight kind of just like edges or something like low doses of let's say like psilocybin or LSD, mescaline, maybe in higher doses, maybe like, you know, higher level features start to become highlighted, like, okay, like eyes and, you know, dog ears, and things like that. And like, okay, like birds, you know, like, okay, the rocks start to look like a bunch of birds put together.
The highest layer for some reason is very abstract, at least in this particular rendition. What are you doing with these different layers? Are you saying that when you're on a psychedelic, for people who have not experienced psychedelics, that you then start to see this? What determines which of those layers it is? And how did you come up with those layers? Are there more layers? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this is a
Essentially bringing back a relatively old idea for how to replicate psychedelic visuals. The Deep Dream algorithm, I've got to check this, but I remember in 2015 it came from Google. People were playing with large neural networks and they found that if you clamp a high-level feature in one of these networks and make the input fit the type of input that would maximally activate this feature,
then you can kind of like get these very trippy images because it's like the image is you know being kind of like asked to hey maximize the output um or like the probability that the network will say like that you're a dog right so like at first it's kind of like starts to make everything a little bit having like dog ears a little bit of like dog eyes and just kind of trying to trick the network into believing that there's a dog in there and well and people just like you know wrote blogs online about um
Hey, this looks really trippy. And like, you know, like in the second community, there were definitely like a lot of posts that there was kind of like a fad for like a few years where people were like replicating their psychedelic experiences primarily using this tool. But there's a lot of, you know, open questions here, like, like, of course, like there's like the physiological and biological question, like, okay, like, why would psychedelics have kind of these, like, you know, ability to clamp these high level features?
I guess here's probably like going through the layers.
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So yeah, I guess it, yeah, you kind of like try to amplify as much as possible features for a given layer. And then you, as in you consciously try to apply it or no, no, no, like, I guess like you as a designer of the network, you said one of these neurons to kind of like, okay, like maximum activity and try to arrange the rest of the network to, to do, to do that. This is an example of what one sees.
I would say this is a paradigm that people have identified as phenomenologically similar to psychedelic experiences.
There are significant differences between the visuals that you experience and this, and in fact that is actually the motivation for our replication tool. Everybody in our team really loves playing with DeepDream, but essentially see very deep limitations in it.
And it's sometimes actually a little bit frustrating because you may see kind of like a movies, you know, where they play kind of, okay, like a psychedelic experience rendition. And people get the impression is like, okay, yeah, culturally, we already know how these works, you know, how people understand how these actually looks like there's like this illusion of understanding at the very least like culturally, whereas yeah, people who usually, you know, have explored the space quite deeply will say,
no really you know the cultural depictions of psychedelics maybe capture like one percent of what's interesting about the state but this kind of like 99 that is like okay like how do we actually put this into you know into a visualization or something that actually evokes us or or or is is yeah very difficult so yeah deep dream i would say like okay yeah this is like a certain percentage of a puzzle
Okay. And so we'll get back to the tool that you've developed. Yes. Okay. And what's interesting is that this is a tool. Most of these visualizations that you see, they're not ones with sliders. They're just something you can press play on. Whereas yours, you have these modulators here and there. And sure there are drop down discrete drop down boxes. Yes. Such as the layer one, two, and so on. That's rare in this.
So this means that you can tell exactly what is going on in different experiences. The way in which I'm trying to kind of pitch it in a sense is like a Photoshop for the phenomenology of psychedelic experiences. I mean it's like how do you make a Photoshop of something in a sense it's like well you think of like the
the range of kind of like primitive effects that you need to reconstruct a phenomenon ready to simulate something you're gonna you know engineering software for example like what. What kind of materials do i need what is there just you know how much stress can they endure and things like that so like what do you put in a photoshop for you know psychedelic experiences and.
Of course, you know, it's going to be a long journey, you know, many decades of like building more and more features, you know, as we actually find and formalize what's happening. But I do think like, you know, this year, we're presenting a kind of like layer of the stack that we think actually like does contribute significantly to our ability to visualize these states, perhaps kind of like a similar kind of like improvement in our ability to visualize things as I would say like maybe deep dream was back then.
okay let's see what else okay so there is this whole layer of coupled oscillators and okay right now actually is just like going up and down but can you explain what an oscillator is please yes is it on a coupled one okay so here is an oscillator
In this case, there's a dot that is changing in color. And what happens is it's changing its color at a certain rate. And it wants to do it at its own rate. It has a heartbeat, as it were. It has its desirable frequency, where it's as healthy as possible. But then it needs to coexist in an ecosystem of other oscillators like it.
that maybe are going at slightly different frequencies, but they're in touch, they communicate with each other. So the way in which mathematically it works is that the two oscillators are sensing each other and they can measure each other's phase, where along the color wheel they are. And as a function of how far away they are from each other, they make bigger or smaller adjustments.
so that you know slowly they actually kind of like converge their face if they actually have like enough of a desire to couple now there's also you know in in this case there's another element which is a distance so kind of like the the the desire for an oscillator to couple with another in kind of like the paradigm that we're presenting is distance dependent
OK, so right now, for example, I'm going to make it so that they actually want to be in opposite phases of each other. So the current simulation is set up where all of the oscillators will want to be at a different phase than their neighbors, or the things that are close to them. So what ends up happening here is you have this diversity of colors.
People, well, the house leaders don't want to be similar to those who are close by. But then I can switch this up so that like they actually do want to be. In the same phase with each other. Right, and the nice thing is that this is kind of these like very smooth, soft, kind of like continuous transition, you know, from like, oh, we want to be different to hey, we want to be the same. And in some sense, I think like, at least I find, you know, aesthetically,
The process of convergence in general tends to be quite beautiful, especially for like very sophisticated systems. So one thing that you can do here, I'll just like give you a couple more examples and you know this is kind of like the toy model that then informs how the tool works more broadly. So here you know it's kind of like I'm making a street of oscillators. So there's actually some kind of like
You know, similarity as you go from left to right, it doesn't have to be perfect. That's another thing. Like with this paradigm, there's kind of like wiggle room. It's kind of like organic in that sense. You know, you're not kind of just finding like one solution and like imposing it, but like the system kind of like adapts itself. So what I'm going to do now is I want like oscillators that are far away for them to want to be different from each other.
so now as you see you know close by they they're the same color but far away there are different colors now just a moment so at the top here you see coupling one two three so the near ones you've put to a positive number yes and the bottom one you put to an extreme negative number as far as it can go yes exactly um and i'll show you like another set of configurations here but it's like of course yeah if i put the
when they're far they want to be in the same color but now when they're close they want to be at different colors okay then it fragments right actually it fragments quite extremely right like even kind of like vertically at first kind of like it you know it breaks down vertically too right like if this is if this is supposed to be i don't know like a vein or like something that is kind of like transporting you know let's say like water or like some fluid
Perhaps if it breaks like this is pretty catastrophic, right? Because it's kind of like cutting across the the vein, so to speak. OK, so here's like a overall like really cool thing about systems like this is that, you know, when you kind of like do these layers of like you identify different distances and you modulate the coupling constant for each of the different distances, you can use that to actually kind of like tune into waves of different lengths.
So depending on the specific kind of like staircase of couplings, I can make the wave larger or smaller. And I think, yeah, like this is kind of like the basic setup. Maybe I'll share another kind of fascinating thing, which is that you can actually use this kind of system as a diagnosis in a sense for like
What type of shape a set of oscillators are forming?
It will break in this symmetrical way, where the entire circle becomes a color wheel. It will always try to break up into an integer number of times. Sometimes it toggles between one mode and another, but the stable configurations that it arrives at tend to essentially be those where you have an integer number of times that the phase fits in the system.
and this is like very very very general in the like also you know when you make grids and even grids of different dimensionalities yeah actually i'm going to show you so what i'm going to show you actually now is like kind of like a three-dimensional system of coupled oscillators so this is this is a an article and cessation okay perfect i found it okay so you see like now it's a yeah three-dimensional
So you see when there's a wave traveling in it, it kind of finds one of the symmetries of the object. In this case, the wave is kind of traveling along this square, essentially. And if I put it kind of like orthogonal, like this, it's the same. What's determining the size? The size of the wave
is determined by the pattern of the, what we're calling the coupling kernel. We're calling it the coupling kernel. I mean, simply because it's this idea that like, you know, a convolutional kernel is like where you stand at a pixel, for example, and you look at a kind of like a fixed window around you and maybe you can evolve with it. Here is kind of the analogy, the analog of doing that, but for kind of like a dynamic system, which is like you stand everywhere
And you apply kind of like the same coupling constants to your neighborhood as everybody else. And then you see the emergent dynamics of doing that. And in this case, yeah, you know, the wavelength is fairly low, is kind of the entire shape.
okay so we get the idea that look you have these different balls you can put on screen you can put them in different shapes and they can look to their neighbor and say I want to be more like you or I want to be less like you yes and they can also do so with different distances so they could so I could say I want to be more like you much less than you but much more like you in the back and that's what you're tuning there so what like it's cool it's interesting now what is the relevance here to psychedelics yeah okay okay so a couple more more things
to explain this is one thing that you can do is kind of like play with the dimensionality of the space on which you're kind of applying these rules so i'm going to do something a little bit trippy which is this is really cool because right now like the wave is actually in three dimensions i don't know if it's obvious but like i kind of need to rotate it a little bit for you to kind of like really see that like yes this is a cube and there's kind of this resonant mode in the cube
Okay, but what was before is a stranger. Which is like, it doesn't matter how I project it. Like I could project it like this, like a hexagon, for example. And I still get just kind of like these waves like, you know, going going in circles, and then I project it from this side, and it's still going in a circle. And I project it from this side, it's still going in a circle, right? Like, what is going on in here?
so this is i think something that happens all the time in our consciousness and it explains a lot of psychedelic effects which is like what's happening here is like now the distances between the dots are the distances in the screen kind of like in the projection so like rather than the dots kind of like thinking like oh i mean a cube is like no i mean a screen and like you know right now there's a bunch of dots that are like overlapping with each other
so of course they're going to be like the same color even though in principle there should be like another dimension there and when you have kind of these effects you know you can do things such as you know kind of like make make tubes for example and now like you know the the color will kind of like travel through these paths as well so i think uh you know one of these kind of like things that is happening in in our experience that explains a lot of like psychedelic effects is that
There are kind of like three dimensional waves of sensation in our tactile field that like, you know, like the senses, the sense of warmth or cold or expansion and contraction in our body. You know, it's kind of like this like 3D volume and it has kind of like 3D waves, you know, that look maybe more, more like this is kind of like you actually have this volume. Our visual field on the other hand has kind of these like very strong preference for kind of like this two dimensional
layout, where waves are really kind of like two dimensional generally. And of course, yeah, there's like some depth perception that kind of like stitches together different types of waves. But in general, there's kind of like this like tendency for two dimensionality. So I think like a lot of the you know, like interesting kind of like computationally non trivial things that happen on psychedelics is that you project with synesthesia, you know, your sense of your body, for example, into your visual field.
And, you know, you're connecting something that has like three dimensional resonant modes with a surface that is two dimensional and has like two dimensional resonant modes as its preference. And so the actual phenomenology is this negotiation between three dimensional resonant waves and two dimensional ones and how they're trying to couple with each other.
Okay, I have a question. It's somewhat related. So in ordinary studies of consciousness or just perception, you think of the world, we have this model where you think of the world as the ground truth,
And then you're never experiencing the world. You're experiencing some filtration of it and that gets augmented and messed around with. Okay. But ordinarily what you do is you play around with the world and then you say, okay, I want the patient to experience so and so, but you are just looking inside the brain at your quality research Institute is already looking at phenomenon inside. Is there anything, can you go in the opposite direction? Have you discovered anything about ontology or the, or what you think of as the real world?
from perceptions inside the brain because of how they're supposed to be correlated with the real world. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent question. Um, I mean, I'm, I'm making the bet essentially that, you know, the structure of consciousness, the phenomenology of consciousness, the way in which sensations can bind together, you know, is telling us something really deep about the nature of reality that is essentially, okay, like you are a particular facet of reality. And so,
you can study you know kind of the laws of phenomenology i think like you're in a sense like tapping into the laws of the universe at a very deep level and there are like yeah things that are i would say at least like really hint at very deep connections i think like with physics you know i'm not a physicist i'm a physics fan really really but uh you know i don't want to speak about yet you know like the mathematics of the standard model or something like that but um
I do suspect that, you know, kind of like things evocative of, for example, the the ideas we discussed in our previous podcast, which was kind of how in physics, you have kind of things such as like particles and antiparticles that, you know, cancel out, turning to like photons and things like that. There's a lot of kind of like aspects of phenomenology, where things in qualia space have kind of like a structure where
It feels like oftentimes kind of like from the vacuum so to speak the vacuum splits into kind of like two things that are like opposite and complementary to each other and you know like something like DMT tends to in some sense kind of like split the vacuum into the you know kind of like polar opposites of things so it's like okay the the sense of space in front of you
the colors you know a given point may kind of like split into blue and yellow it's kind of like a color and it's anti-color and and everything is kind of like doing that everything is kind of like invoking its opposite and kind of kind of like oscillating with it whereas five million DMT it feels actually like the movement is one of kind of like hey every particle find your anti-particle like everything cancel out with your kind of opposite until you smooth out completely so
You know, like a peak five million DMT experience often is described as kind of like merging with a, you know, white light of the universe or becoming one with emptiness and like there's a lot of kind of like evocative things like that. That to me is strongly suggest a deep connection with symmetry and kind of like the cancellation of opposites. Another like very interesting hint here is there's like some doses of five million DMT where
for example all of your visual field and your tactile field kind of like diffracts into what looks like a rainbow like the whole color wheel and then if you increase the dose a little bit and you kind of like look at it from the side it all kind of cancels out into pure space so there are there is kind of this phenomenology where you can kind of like study the ways in which in some sense
What do you mean it appears like it's equivalent to nothing? You mean to say like how from out of the vacuum you can get something positive and negative?
Yeah, yeah, this is an allusion to David Pierce's Zero Ontology. I recommend a lot this website, you know, like a 90s website. In general, like headweb.com by David Pierce, philosopher from whom I draw a lot of inspiration. And, you know, he has like, yeah, this essay of like, why does anything exist?
And, you know, he kind of like lays out this case that like in mathematics and physics and phenomenology, we have this kind of like overarching pattern where you can kind of reconstruct everything out of nothingness in some sense. I mean, like, he says, like, we probably don't yet have like the proper words to really talk about this, you know, we're in a kind of a pre paradigmatic stage, really. We're like, yeah, what do we say is like, kind of like,
Pointing to an explanation space rather than a full theory, you know, but he argues, you know, getting mathematics, you can get everything from the empty set. Uh, so to speak in, in physics things like, well, what is the total angular momentum of the universe? Uh, people argue like it's zero or yeah, I don't know. There's, there's a lot of debate in there, but then in phenomenology is like, yeah, you know, colors seem to kind of like coming pairs. The sense of space, uh, seems to require a sense of time. Like there's kind of like this, um,
Interrelated variables in experience in consciousness were like At very very kind of like peak peak symmetry states of consciousness where things are kind of like Symmetrifying harmonizing synchronizing you kind of see a kind of like a cancellation process and which is very evocative of like well, maybe at the base there's kind of like really nothing it's it's a
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5 Meo DMT might feel like a little bit and some qualitative aspects of it. So I guess, again, for a little bit of context, like, you know, the coupled oscillators that I was showing you in the replication tool, practically, it's kind of like every pixel is one of these oscillators and it's using the GPU. You know, I developed the core idea, but like, yeah, this is the work of a whole team. And I'm especially, yeah, thankful to Emil Hall, who, yeah, built, you know, so much of this.
he really optimized it so like yeah the the the gpu is actually simulating all of the oscillators so here you know in this setting uh essentially i'm using a black and white kind of like system of coupled oscillators and i'm gonna make it so well i'm actually i'm gonna increase the opacity he's like okay you're pretty a pretty strong dose and as you're coming up this thing happens where like
You're coming up and it's kind of like this and as you're going up, the lines start to kind of like cancel with each other. And you see there's like kind of like pinwheels, you know those pinwheels and and you can think of them as kind of these like particles in experience and they find kind of like each other and they annihilate.
well then then also you know like kind of like secondary effects happens sometimes that you get kind of these like additional extra waves but you know in in in general there's kind of this general tendency that as you increase kind of like the the coupling constant and you keep it positive the whole screen converges to kind of like just black and white and these like very big pinwheels find each other and they cancel each other out and that uh well i'll show you now it's um
you know from our website from the various like yeah legal psychedelic retreats that we have run you know one of the the things that we kind of like all converged on you know this was like a very widely reported phenomenon in the uh in the team you know we were 12 people with kind of like technical backgrounds uh like studying five amino dmt phenomenology
you know, like, you know, after an experience, we might like sit down and, you know, discuss and somebody who knows how to write shaders, you know, like, write these within like, you know, half an hour, like, hey, we were all comment is like, Yeah, actually, that feels like our experience. And in general, you know, like, everybody who tried five, I mean, oh, at least in our retreat, of course, you know, is biased, because, you know, they're like, people who are like, are into math are into meditation are into visual art. But they all reported that, yeah, this process of kind of a
The generation of these pinwheels, what they're called like topological defects, and then their cancellation was kind of like really quintessential to the phenomenology of 5-MeO-DMT. I really like this animation too. This is kind of like the vacuum, so to speak, you know, maybe like universal consciousness before it's divided, so to speak. And then it turns into kind of, yeah, these like particle and antiparticle sort of, or like these vortex and antivortex.
And on 5MEO DMT, it feels like the way in which your experience is constructed is kind of like a bunch of stilts that are made of these kind of like defects. And when they cancel out, you kind of feel like you're rejoining kind of the sea of the universe, which is like, okay, you were kind of like,
Separated from the universe by these topological defects is is the overall impression. I mean again, I'm not gonna I'm describing phenomenology here rather than necessarily metaphysics. Yeah, but do you have any metaphysical views? I'm totally open to to to various interpretations here. I mean, yeah, I think you were interested in kind of like
group effects or collective effects you briefly asked me yesterday or synchronizing trips and then things like that you know i'm very open i used to be actually you know i used to put the bulk of my probability mass into kind of like everything that happens in a psychedelic is an internal hallucination very rich you know you can learn a lot about the unconscious you can learn about
you know, about consciousness and it's very computationally significant and so on, but it's just a part of your world simulation. You know, like that would be kind of like the bulk of my probability mass a few years ago. And now I'm actually a little bit more open to like, no, actually there's other phenomena as well that might involve kind of like coupled oscillators, but within a larger field in a sense that includes not only your own experience, but others around you and maybe other things as well. But
Very huge error bars in here have a very very very high amount of uncertainty but yes i'm happy to talk about that yeah have you done any tests where someone's in this room same not this particular room but in a room and they're on let's say they're on five me five me oh i'm not sure if that's the most optimal use of five me or for this and then someone else is in some other room where they can't see you and then i'm showing you a string of letters and i say okay you look at the string of letters then i ask you can you
reach this person's mind because if you're a part of a unified field you should have some access. Have you done something like that?
Let me provide a bit more context because we held one Fabio DMT retreat which was in Canada in 2023. It was for me a huge highlight of my life really just being with all of these other nerdy kids and visual artists and mathematicians, meditators and spending three weeks trying to figure out how this works. Yeah, utterly mind-blowing.
But, you know, there's only so much you can fit in that time. We focused a lot on the visual phenomenology and kind of like what kind of equations may be underneath this, or the topology, the geometry, etc. We did, you know, do a couple kind of like wacky experiments. I mean, like one of the first of all, one of the things that was like, widely reported, especially from the meditators, you know, this this has to be replicated. And like, I don't know how much this is self suggestion, but
Something that was like, yeah, quite strongly reported independently by several of the people in the retreat was that when somebody takes five, five million DMT in the same room as you, there is a vibe shift. And in particular for the meditators, they said that time to Samadhi shortened significantly, uh, meaning that, you know, they're like really, you know, advanced meditators where they can enter into like the various Janas, you know, these very, very advanced concentration states within minutes.
And you know, for one of them, for example, it might usually take them like 10 minutes to enter into one of those like trances or alter states. And he said that, yeah, when somebody wasn't five million DMT within a few meters of him, like, it would kind of like half the amount of time he's not on it, but the other person is. Yes.
And still kind of there's like this sense of like, well, the gradient of going in the meditation direction is like kind of like lubricated, as it were. It's a bit entrancing to be around somebody on 5MU. Then again, we were running kind of like blind tests of like, okay, maybe this person is actually on, you know, it's just like vapor is not, you know, a placebo or something. We weren't doing that.
Or test by putting someone else with 5MEO behind the wall, but they don't know. It would be fascinating. Of course, there's something to be said about 5MEO. It's very profound and it's hard to follow complex instructions if you're in this state. What about others like LSD?
Actually, yeah, it is interesting. I mean, like I've, for example, yeah, like at festivals, like Burning Man, you know, I've something I've sometimes done, especially with people, you know, kind of like, I know our friends are friends is like going with an iPad, you know, and with like a psychophysicist experiment is like, Hey, like, look at this picture, like, what does it look like? And yeah, in general, people who are experienced with psychedelics can usually answer like fairly basic kind of like visual, you know, tasks.
Usually, actually, they think their performance is a lot worse than what it is. It's kind of the opposite than with drunk people who are like, Oh, my performance is totally great, you know, and actually, they're like, you know, you know, 10% or something. No, in LSD, I'm very surprised. It's like, somebody might do like, kind of like a task very often. And think like, Hey, like, did I do like really poorly? And it's like, No, you were average. Like,
Yeah, but yeah, and of course, yeah for the psychedelic cryptography. Yeah, like which I don't know if you we've talked about that or we run this contest or competition where people would submit videos.
where the idea is like, well, there's some kind of secret information here that you can only read or decode if you're on a certain psychedelic state of consciousness. Interesting. Yeah. Originally, actually, I came up with this idea, the very basic implementation, which is how to secretly communicate with people in LSD. You see the very simple concept here is that you use the fact that there's this tracer effect in the visual field,
things kind of like last longer in the visual field so that you can kind of like paint you know the components of an image one chunk at a time and kind of because it lingers you can kind of like see it more easily there's also like features that you can see more easily like for example like the the gaps between the the various columns right it's not obvious in the light of those gaps right so even that is kind of like binary communication right it's like are there gaps between these rows or not
But yeah, you can actually, it turns out, do some pretty awesome visualizations. So this was the winning entry. So yeah, this one actually contains a significant amount of information. You do need to be significantly high, though, like the equivalent of 150 micrograms of LSD or something is kind of the threshold where it starts to become quite visible. I mean, again, you know,
We still need to validate these, get percentages, optimize the effect. What I can say is that in a team of eight people trying to decode these without knowing what's in it, six were able to do so easily on mushrooms. What do you decode here? The mechanism is very simple with this particular psychedelic cryptography, which is that
you you kind of like put a tracer effect on this image and actually i don't want to spoil it i'm not going to say what what's
so that you don't know and maybe you can convince yourself that it works if you look at it but you know don't look at it at a microdose and then judge that it doesn't work because a microdose is not going to do it like you really need to be so there's a hidden message here yeah and it's like unambiguous i mean it's like a there's a very clear message with a lot of bits of information it's not it's not an ambiguous like oh i'm not sure yeah it's a safe message
yeah yeah yeah it's prosocial yes it's a good message okay because you you also want to be careful yeah it's a family-friendly message yeah so so five million dmt you know one of like our overarching conclusions is that yeah like these defects would appear like like uh in the visual field in the tactile field
and how good or bad the experience felt had a lot to do actually with kind of like the flow of kind of like energy and the particular shape of the field. I mean sometimes like for example this can be kind of like a fairly unpleasant 5MU DMT experience like if you have kind of this like sense they're like okay the energy is like concentrating in this like point in the bottom of your spine
that that actually was described as like very unpleasant because you get kind of this feeling of high kind of like pressurization you feel kind of like pressurized in some regions or like stretched does it feel painful it feels just very uncomfortable and it is obviously very hard to describe it is sort of kind of yeah like a lot of kind of layers of yourself are kind of like sheared in this kind of like uncomfortable way that is very unusual and you would never experience it you know during exercise or something just a very unusual effect but you know
In this particular experience, this report, you know, he described that like the valence was extremely bad at first, which was concentrating this kind of like sense of pressure. But then all those the field lines actually kind of like aligned and they all became parallel. And then the valence flipped from extremely negative to extremely positive. Super interesting. So I was speaking with someone recently
About he was just meditating completely sober and then he felt extreme pain in his lower back, extreme pain. Yeah. And then extreme pleasure. And then he said, it just kept oscillating between that and it was from meditating and he kept to stop meditating from that. So this can happen. What is the explanation for that?
Yeah, no, I mean, meditation, it's really powerful. And like, there's so many different states that you can access. And I mean, I think like the description that you gave would be consistent with the other top of my head, like maybe like five different types of meditation and different phenomenology. But it was a variation of transcendental meditation. Okay, yeah, it might actually be like somewhat related to this sort of phenomena. Because with transcendental meditation,
in some of the typical modalities like you're repeating a mantra for example and you're concentrating your attention in a part of your body sometimes let's say like in your crown chakra kind of like just a little bit over you know the top of your head you can imagine okay like you're concentrating like there like you know an hour a day you're kind of like smoothing what we might call your attention field lines is like okay whenever you get distracted
You tell your body like, no, don't think about this, move your attention back upwards. So you're creating kind of this graph of like wherever you're paying attention, it's pushing in that direction. And so you're ordering kind of your attention field as it were. And I think like, yeah, when the field is really ordered, actually, usually you can access the extremes of valence because when it's very ordered and actually harmonious and symmetrical, that is like a complete kind of like state of harmony and it feels really great.
but also when it's a little bit disjointed but it's like you're very ordered but maybe there's a little bit it's a little bit out of phase or a little bit kind of like screwed up at the very tip you may also encounter the strongest dissonances right because it's like you're very aligned but then maybe pushing against yourself
And so there is this very broad phenomenon, I mean, and meditation, and especially five MEO DMT demonstrates it is that around very peak positive aliens, oftentimes you have kind of like other configurations are especially unpleasant.
And I think like a lot of yeah, kind of like developing like, you know, deep meditative expertise involves kind of like developing the equanimity to be able to navigate those transitions is like knowing that well, actually, yeah, right next to the bliss or like the awakening or realization, there's actually some fairly ugly, unpleasant dissonances and discordant configurations. Is this what Reiki is supposed to be aligning?
Yeah, that's a very good question. I don't know very much about Reiki. In general though, I would argue that the framework of annealing or like a field annealing, neural annealing, broadly explains the practices of energy work very generally.
You're using things such as various tools like surprise and attention to imagine energy flow in your body and essentially heating yourself up so that you can cool down and you can imagine with annealing materials. If you can heat up a material and then letting it cool you can reorder its atomic lattice.
In so many ways, we are kind of like made of kind of like crystals of sensations, right? So it's like if you heat up parts of yourself and like kind of like use your attention to kind of like recomb yourself. I think like fundamentally you're using kind of like annealing techniques. And I think this applies to a lot of, you know, a lot of martial arts as well. Like it's, it's a very broad framework. I went to a Reiki, I don't know what they're called master or artist or, or what have you once a week for a period of months.
And every time I saw her, she would always say that I'm disordered. Whatever is the worst insults that you could say in Reiki terms would apply to me. And she would just go like this to my back, not touching my back. She just. Oh, but I wouldn't feel any different before or after. So have you encountered if Reiki is there legitimacy to Reiki? Is there consonance with Reiki and any of what you've outlined here today? Let me let me say the following.
If you assume that there's actually some legitimacy to some of these techniques, it might make sense that you need to have at least some kind of basic flexibility in your energy body, so to speak, and desire to experience the effect for it to also work. I see that as compatible. If one goes very skeptical, it might make sense. One doesn't experience it.
I feel exactly the same, but thank you, thank you so much.
I mean, yeah, I personally would imagine it's unlikely that something, I mean, it sounds like a scam, but but, but, but no, but what I can say is like, I do know it was a free service. This is why I didn't pay for the service. Otherwise, I don't think I would have done it. But maybe that shows that I'm skeptical. So we did see someone frustrated because she's like taking up so much of my time, but
Yesterday, like we saw the hypnotist, right? I don't know if you saw the hypnotist. Yeah, no, the hypnotist is fantastic. The hypnotist Albert Nurenberg, which I'll place a link on screen and in the description is fantastic. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, talking afterwards with him, like he, of course, yeah, you should interview him at some of his like he was describing like, yeah, like, um,
Orgasm is being triggered by like hypnosis and like reaching extreme levels or like what he called this like super orgasm Anyway, there's gonna be like all in in in a TV series or something pretty soon, you know one one one interesting I think like maybe like skeptical take would be something like maybe reiki practitioners are really good hypnotists, right? Like hmm, like if you can induce these really powerful experiences relatively easy with kind of these attention tricks like yeah presumably there's like a lot of ways of like hacking a person so to speak and
um but also you know speaking personally i i know people who who swear by yeah some some like interesting effects that they have experienced like not locally from somebody else like doing energy work on them and like it's very hard to say what what i can say like you know from personal experience again i remain open-minded but yeah just i haven't seen like a silver bullet of things like this but during the five million retreat um in addition to the time to samadhi kind of like uh shortening also uh people reported
feeling each other's traumas and kind of like processing it for each other like for example one of the you know meditation practitioners who is kind of like really equanimous you know he's he's been in monasteries for years and he's a super great guy and like he can endure a lot of pain without problem for example so like sometimes like one of the things that would be reported is like okay this person is having a difficult five mu experience processing let's say like childhood trauma or something like that
And then he reported that just having the advanced meditator right next to him was extremely powerful because the trauma
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Kind of like was processed or dissipated through him and also the meditator reported that's what happened afterwards as well.
So there were kind of, yeah, like reported phenomenology that suggested a kind of like shared field, especially when people were like both simultaneously on a state. We did try like one side experiment, which was, yeah, unsuccessful. Like I was with, yeah, with one of the participants, really friendly, one of the artists. And it was like, okay, like, give me a number of from zero to 100. Well, like I'm in the state and
37 most common.
It instantiates this self-organizing principle where everything in your experience wants to cohere with everything else. And the emergence of the pinwheels is downstream of that. Whenever you have these systems of coupled oscillators, especially when it has rich dimensionality or multiple layers, and you make them all want to be one with each other, so to speak, the pinwheels is just something that you encounter along the way.
whereas we also contrasted it with ayahuasca and mushrooms, for example. Let me find some good replication of that. Essentially, there's some key differences, which is not only is it much more colorful, but also you have this effect where you have very rich detail. Essentially, fractally at every scale,
Every sensation kind of like triggers its opposite. So in some sense you get kind of these like the attractor states is like where you have like all of these opposites kind of like reconciled in some kind of like tapestry where everything is kind of like invoking its opposite but still the experience manages to include it into some kind of like overall perspective that yeah it's usually really diverse and rich in in contrast.
And in that sense, it's almost kind of like opposite of 5MEO DMT. I mean, we used to describe it as kind of a 5MEO DMT promotes global coherence in your overall system, whereas regular DMT, what's in ayahuasca, causes these competing clusters of coherence. Kind of like, yes. So which one is the one when people say, I've experienced everything and everything is happening all at once, everywhere? That would be 5MEO DMT, which would be the
colorless and yeah like the black and white uh where you get yeah kind of like the pinwheels like this this would be more like the five me or dmt were like and especially you know as the pinwheels eventually collapse into each other people might say something like well it felt like a black hole where i collapsed or like i turned into just one point for example as i report often reported thing uh and i turned into just one point and then that point disappeared is also like another thing people say
When you just become one point, you're not really a person. You don't remember who you are or where you are. Ideally, you feel pretty safe, though. You're having a good experience. At least in our retreat, almost everybody had overall pretty good experiences. But the information content is very minimal. There's not much happening in there, other than a very intense experience of nothingness.
Whereas ayahuasca, psilocybin is much more like this in that everything is richly structured and usually there's actually several layers of oscillators talking to each other. Let me just find
a pattern here.
Explain how that works. The article I would point to to kind of like explain like the phenomenology of like temporal distortions on various psychedelics is this one. I mean, I titled it the the pseudo time arrow. I mean, let me explain like the title. So it's kind of like I want to distinguish between the phenomenology of the passage of time and actual physical time.
I think it's very worthwhile to think of physical time.
Uh, yeah, as like, uh, something that may not be identical to the feeling of the passage of time, because like, you know, if you take five million DMT and you say like, oh, everything stopped, you know, it's not like literally, you know, the whole universe stopped and like, you know, from outside everything, everybody also saw it, but like, it's more kind of the phenomenology of time was like deeply altered. So the question is like, can we reconstruct why time feels the way in which it feels like?
appealing just to the structure of the experience as opposed to kind of like appealing to like a physical time that you're accessing and what i'm exploring here is effectively how kind of like the the stacking of sensations uh allow the generation of an internal arrow of time so the idea is that okay like there's kind of this like physical time but also you know as we were saying that there's like this tracer effects you know things last longer on psychedelics right
That's like normally there's always also a tracer effect regardless and i think that's like essential for the generation of the feeling of time is just very thin and and in some sense you know the things that are a little bit further into the past they're like fainter so there's kind of these like arrow of realism it's kind of what's like more recent is like more vivid
And you can kind of reconstruct how things are changing and in what direction things are moving by kind of like the arrow of how things are becoming fainter over time. And now on psychedelics, you know, let's say like, this is what I might call like a sober pseudo time arrow is kind of how experience how the sensations become fainter, how they refer to each other. Maybe on psychedelics, you know, because everything lasts longer.
The internal arrow of time is longer in a sense. You have more sensations that are accumulated over time and that are referencing each other. So there's like a sense of like you're in an expanded time in a sense, just as a generic effect of the substances.
But then on the special cases or kind of like the interesting corner cases is where, for example, like the the sense of the hour of time may wrap around and actually connect with itself. This happens involuntarily. Often if you are listening to like really repetitive music on psychedelics, like if you're at a trance festival and like you took three hits of acid, you may feel like, oh my gosh, like I'm in a time loop and I've been here for who knows how long because the music kind of like wraps around the
It may close, it may close, it may make your future the same as your past. Yes. And I think like legitimately something really interesting is actually happening to the topology of your attention. Like it is a very exotic configuration of consciousness. But yeah, I don't think you're breaking space-time, you know, in a more literal sense. But internally there's, yeah, it's a very unusual phenomenology. Oh, and yeah, the thing that actually I think does happen in something like Fabio Mio DMT is more
I kind of like central collapse. It's a little bit more kind of like time stops when everything synchronizes with all of the sensations synchronized and they're kind of like in phase. There's no way to distinguish one thing from another. And like there is no internal passage of time. I mean, I would maybe define it, describe it this way, which is like, if you have like a lot of yeah, kind of like clocks moving near to each other,
There's no absolute frame of reference. All they can know about how time passes is by looking at the differences in their phases internally. But if suddenly all the clocks are moving together, internally there's no time. When you have this hyper-synchrony across many different aspects of you,
It's kind of like time may stop for the parts that are synchronized with each other. And yeah, you know, like a peak Fabio DMT experience is like, your body and mind figures out how to synchronize everything, kind of like reprojecting it from the right way so that everything is in phase. And subjectively, that feels like, yeah, there's just no time, like, or timeless outside of space and time, so to speak. And what about the experiences of
entering other animals lives and other people's lives and past lives and so on. Yeah, I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not sure if I could really comment on that. I haven't really kind of like seen firsthand people really reference like past lives. Have you experienced that yourself? No, no, I mean, like the the most unusual kind of like thing I have personally experienced.
which is widely reported and you know I definitely should like write about it is more about a sensing when a family member like dies like that that is like pretty often reported and sometimes you may have kind of like a complex hallucination or like some kind of mystical experience if anything yeah that is the one thing I would say like okay this probably personally it feels like there's like a signal there but uh but yeah no like hallucinations of past lives or something like that yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't say like I've experienced that
Yeah. If we go back to how we started, which is these coupled oscillators, if you don't mind going back. Yeah. Yeah. This is like the kind of like toy model example. Okay. In none of this, can I see how you could ever come up with a Mantis alien DMT encounter? So where do those come from? One thing I will say to begin with is that, okay, whether these are kind of a, there's like some influence from kind of external intelligences or not. It is very clear.
that like what you hallucinate on, let's say like DMT or various psychedelics, you know, it patterns on top of your own world model. And so there is this overall framework we call psychedelic thermodynamics, which is this idea that, you know, on a psychedelic kind of like you're the energy of your consciousness increases, like everything is like brighter, things are like more wobbly, there's more flexibility, in some senses that you're like heated up in a way.
there's like energy sinks that locally kind of like crystallize your experience and essentially you know semantic content like things that you can recognize we think will function as kind of these energy sinks is is actually kind of like a shrink wrapping you know when you're on dmt and like the world is very wobbly if something kind of looks like a jaguar
the field may actually may start to kind of like shrink wrap around as if it kind of like plays the role of the Jaguar. And this shrink wrapping effect actually I would describe it as a cooling effect. It's like when the flexible world sheet of experience approaches something that you've seen before, it cools around it. And effectively your experience kind of like crystallizes on things that you have experienced before it kind of like finds
Energy sinks to crystallize around and like there's two things it tends to crystallize around one is like semantic content For example the concept of a car for example, it can be like things at that level of abstraction and
And then the other thing is like a symmetries, like a repeating patterns, you know, kind of like crystallographic, you know, structures. And those are kind of like much more universal and like, you know, culturally neutral in a sense. So, you know, I would imagine, for example, yeah, like the actual kind of
symmetrical visuals that people in the amazon who take ayahuasca experience is probably the same symmetrical visuals as you know you and i would but the semantic content that they experience is probably quite different you know because it's culture bound why don't you show some of these entities that can be encountered yeah uh okay so i'm gonna rely on uh my friend symmetric vision uh who is like this awesome artist and he has been to some of the qri retreats
And I would say, you know, kind of like a world-class ad replicating psychedelic visuals.
And I believe this one, yeah, this one is kind of like a DMT replication. It's a little bit long. So let me just kind of fast forward. It's kind of like at first there's like relatively, oh, okay. Oh God. Okay. Yeah. That's also like eyes closed versus eyes open. But okay. You see like, there's a lot of kind of like these efforts of the field to kind of symmetrify and like harmonize the various patterns. If you close your eyes, you're kind of like in a different world. But if you go sufficiently high in the dose, it doesn't matter whether you have the eyes open or closed.
And yeah, you know, these very intricate structures happen where tubes, for example, are like fairly common tubes along which waves travel and the tubes, you know, often have like a lot of depth effects. You know, they play with depth. They can compress and like look like they go very, very, very, very far away from you. And then they expand and it's kind of like they're very close to you.
uh, so extreme kind of like depth, uh, illusion, uh, kind of phenomenology is extremely common. Um, and, uh, I will say that, okay, like the, the actual model that we have for how this happens requires more than just coupled oscillators. And it requires actually like, uh, kind of like something analogous to video feedback, uh, which is like, you know, one of the things that our overall kind of a system is doing, uh, and is capable of,
is taking a chunk of your experience edit it in some way and then put it back into your your visual field or your tactile fields. I mean the the most classic example is if you enter you know like a bathroom where there's like a mirror your world simulation immediately kind of like knows how to kind of like copy everything on the left to make it go on the right right and internally you're not confused right like you're not kind of like I mean if we pass the mirror test
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You understand that it's not like there's a room behind the mirror, right? Your role simulation is capable of handling those relationships. And on something like DMT, that capacity gets really exploited where every surface can briefly, for example, be interpreted as, well, this is the surface of a mirror that is reflecting something else in the scene. And the capacity for tracking those correspondences goes through the roof.
where you know you you you may see like okay this mirror is reflecting this other mirror which is reflecting this other mirror which is reflecting the original mirror we'll get back to the mirror right now what is going on here this is a seraphim no is it a seraphim what is one of these kind of like a biblical type uh angels
uh you know multiple arms or tubes um kind of like a insectoid head uh some vibrating like you know time vortex in the center this is a commonly encountered entity well the the theme of kind of these like super intelligent insectoid mind hive thing with lots of arms uh they're made of like lots of like parts that reflect each other and they're all kind of interconnected that is like yeah like very very very classic uh high dose dmt
Okay, getting back to the mirrors. Yes, getting back to the mirrors. So you're saying that you interpret every surface, everything as a mirror reflecting everything else. You can also relate that to Indra's net. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I'm going to show you something.
Where the video feedback has this ability to like shear, reflect, do all these transformations. Navigating the DMT space is kind of doing this. You're applying some rotation or transformation, shear effect on a piece of the Kaleidoscope that is connected to everything else.
You know, the response in the field to a small change can be really dramatic. It can be like, OK, I think I'm just like reaching my arm over here, but it's actually like doing this weird contortion and you flip from one side of the fractal to the other. Wow. Yeah. But even this is like selling it short because this is just with one channel where like you have like just one camera that is essentially just being reflected and refracted.
In a full kind of like the DMT circuit, so to speak, or like the circuit of the visual field that is maybe revealed by DMT in a sense, you have like multiple channels. I mean, essentially you have kind of like various cameras and some of those cameras are actually looking at the screen. And so there's like, yes, several levels of complexity higher, in fact, but on top of that though, there's also the coupled oscillators dynamics that are happening in addition to these mirroring effects. Yeah.
What is your job? How do you make a living? What do you do? Is this your full-time work? Yes. Yes. Okay. So, I mean, psychedelic visualization is a component of what I do. I am a full-time, you know, consciousness researcher at QRI. We're funded by essentially, yeah, people who are like believers in your research, people who... Donors. Yeah, donors.
We do want to make what we do ultimately self-sustaining and like I'm happy to talk about like various paths that I think are like plausible to make that happen. But yeah, I mean, effectively people who
I knew and who knew me and that we were already very interested in figuring out consciousness, who then became lucky with cryptocurrency, for example. That's one of the categories of donors. We also get a few grants here and there as well. But yeah, the bulk of our research and the retreats have been funded by very generous people. In part, I ask because plenty of the people who are watching this may have
some cash that they would like to donate and so what's the website? Yeah qri.org and no yeah we accept donations and like I think like they go really far like I can do like make a very quick pitch in plants if you're interested in the psychedelic kind of visualization efforts right like we're going to be open sourcing this tool we're going to be crowd sourcing data points for so that we get you know like thousands of people kind of like rate and rank and you know qualify this phenomenology see how accurate it is
which i think is yes kind of like a service to the world in a sense like being able to like give people parameters to replicate their experience give them a photoshop of their consciousness so to speak and if you think of kind of like the finance of these efforts i mean like
If you look at, let's say, in classic academia, how you run a study, there was a famous study that studied candy-flipping, which is LSD plus MDMA. And what they did is they used standard measures, like questionnaires, where they gave either LSD or LSD plus MDMA to participants. And then they asked them to fill out a questionnaire, like the mystical experiences questionnaire. And they find, hey, actually the questionnaire doesn't show a difference between the two.
And they conclude, well, MDMA probably doesn't add anything to the psychedelic experience.
That just means your instruments are poorly calibrated. There's clearly a difference. Psychonauts will generally agree there's a huge difference. One study like that costs millions of dollars, actually getting all of this infrastructure and doing it in a lab. At QRI, we were able to do things such as organizing week-long retreats in a place like Brazil for really cheap.
Being able to go through hundreds of visual experiments over the course of several weeks with people who are really passionate, who not only will, you know, they're not going to fill out a questionnaire, really they're going to be like writing a report about their phenomenology and what they learned. And there's a lot of collective knowledge that gets generated this way that then we make policy available. So I would argue in terms of kind of like the information theory of like, hey, how do you explore consciousness? I would argue our approach
Andres, thank you. Thank you so much Kurt, this is fascinating.
Don't go anywhere. There's actually a Q&A from the live audience at this MIT Media Lab Augmentation Summit event, which is on the substack curtjamungle.com. That is C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. You don't want to miss it. If you're a fan of this episode, you'll enjoy the Q&A. Hi there. Kurt here. If you'd like more content from Theories of Everything and the very best listening experience,
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it's exclusive to the sub stack it's free there are ways for you to support me on sub stack if you want and you'll get special bonuses if you do several people ask me like hey Kurt you've spoken to so many people in the field of theoretical physics of philosophy of consciousness what are your thoughts man well while I remain impartial in interviews this sub stack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics and
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"text": " Today, Andreas Gomes-Emelson of the Qualia Research Institute discloses his new paradigm for modeling psychedelic perception as well as what he thinks is actually occurring ontologically, not just perceptually, under psychedelics. His views are informed by research conducted over the past decade with hundreds of psychedelic trips in controlled settings ranging from LSD to psilocybin to DMT to 5-MeO."
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"text": " Andres, hello, hello. Why don't you give a brief introduction to who you are and why you're relevant to people who are psychonauts and psychedelics or psychedelic research? Definitely. So I'm Andres. I currently run the other Qualia Research Institute, one of the original co-founders. And yeah, we study consciousness and like really try to, you know, figure it out ideally from first principles, make mathematical models of it."
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"text": " Try to like really take phenomenology seriously, build tools to visualize phenomenology and also figure out what pleasure and pain are fundamentally and try to reduce suffering. There's kind of like a constellation of things that we do."
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"text": " Yeah, essentially we're gonna it seems like I have a conversation about exploring the state space of consciousness and visualizing it. I want this to be valuable to people who have not taken psychedelics to people who are extremely familiar with psychedelics. So something that gets thrown around is the word qualia. It's not quite clear what the difference between qualia and sensory input is. So what is it?"
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"text": " Yeah, I think that's a really important clarification because you could potentially like for hours talk with somebody about consciousness and if your reference for what qualia refers to versus what sensory stimulation refers to, don't match. You're kind of like talking past each other at a very, very deep level."
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"text": " Here's one common misconception, I would argue, that kind of highlights this contrast in how you might define these terms. I would argue that the way in which you experience the color blue, you can really separate it from the frequency of light that typically triggers it."
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"text": " In fact, there's an infinite number of ways in which you can actually experience that particular sensation by using different combinations of frequencies of light, having a different spectral power distribution and still get the same way in which it feels like. Just because it feels in a certain way, you actually don't know really what kind of sensory input it is. You just know it is from a certain family of sensory inputs."
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"text": " More so, there's this very weird thing that when you combine the colors that are the extreme opposites of a rainbow, you get magenta, a color that is not within the spectrum."
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"text": " All of these are kind of like hints that suggest, well, the actual phenomenology, the way in which the colors feel like can be perhaps like separated from the idea that they map onto like frequencies of light. And, you know, I think like a really stark example is if you imagine somebody who has like synesthesia, where they map on, let's say like sounds to color sensations, but maybe they're blind."
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"text": " They could actually investigate the way in which colors are related to each other, phenomenal colors, the colors that we experience, even though they have no visual sensory stimulation. The things that you get with this conceptual separation of the qualia, the way in which the experience feels like versus the sensory input that triggers it,"
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"text": " is that you can talk about, for example, mapping a certain state space of a certain type of experience, for example, all of the possible colors that you may have. You can do that without necessarily using the traditional sensory modality that is associated to it. For instance? Yeah, different combinations of light at different frequencies. Instead, you could, in principle, map the qualia space of color using sounds."
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"text": " If you have the right type of synesthesia, if you could induce the right type of synesthesia, I would argue, be able to say things such as, hey, orange is in between yellow and red. Even though you're really kind of just experiencing this in a way that is triggered by sounds. But you still learn about the geometry of that space if you have the right mapping. In other words, I would argue that people are very"
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"text": " You know, like skeptical that if there's like aliens or there's like other entities out there, like in what way could we possibly understand each other? People propose also that, well, we would probably understand each other through like a shared understanding of mathematics because that's kind of like universal. But I would argue potentially also about like qualia space, like whether they experience phenomenal color through, you know, like visual stimulation or audio or like tactile feelings or imagination or only when they dream."
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"text": " They can in principle do a series of experiments by like comparing the colors that they experience and reconstruct the space of possible phenomenal colors. And I think like when we talk to each other, we could actually use that as a shared reference that grounds our worlds of experience in a sense. Is it the case then that someone's blue is the same as someone else's blue? Currently, it is not known for sure."
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"text": " And there's things that suggest it is the case and things that suggest it isn't the case. What possibly suggests that it is? So if you essentially map out the geometry of color using different frequencies of light, you actually get a somewhat irregular shape."
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"text": " It's geometry is not completely symmetrical you know a classic example is like the the brightest blue that you could experience is not as bright as the brightest yellow and these you know suggest okay there's kind of like a geometry and like this is kind of like shared between people and you know some"
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"text": " People who may like kind of like ground qualia space in terms of kind of the relative distances between between its components and the geometry that comes from that they may perhaps like argue that well, okay, like yeah, blue is in some sense defined within the qualia space as like where there's like this this asymmetry where like you can't go as bright as in this other region of the qualia space."
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"text": " However, there's I think like other hints that actually does suggest that, you know, the state space of color is like actually really symmetrical, which is this phenomena called hyper blue, which is if you look at like a very, very bright yellow for a while, you know, you're going to have kind of like an after image that is kind of like a blue after image. And so like if you have like really, really bright yellow and then you right after that, like present a really bright blue,"
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"text": " The combination of like the yellows after image together with the bright blue like can like takes your quality of blue to the next level and you see hyper blue which is kind of a brighter blue than usually we're capable of experiencing suggesting I think that you know the reason we can't experience like these like super bright blue."
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"text": " is more having to do with, well, the receptors that are associated to different cells in our eyes, they can't be negatively activated. You need to do some trickery. The relative proportions is as if this had a negative activation and it pushes you in that direction of the state space. But there is actually something that does break the symmetry, a little bit of the color wheel, which is pure hues."
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"text": " which is like i mean i don't know this is an interesting test and i would argue like you know it tends to be like very very uh polemical actually when when i bring it up which is like um maybe the audience or like yeah people is seeing this at home like yeah wondering like okay when you were a kid"
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"text": " And you saw like, okay, like yellow and red paint mixing and making orange is like, okay, yeah, that kind of makes sense. Right. Like orange is kind of in between the two colors, but then like blue and yellow paint and you get green is like, that makes no sense. It's like, where is this green coming from? It's kind of like a qualitatively different thing from both yellow and blue. And, um, and I think like, okay, like that, that is telling you, yeah, the relationship in the colors here is actually kind of different."
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"text": " And if you look at kind of like a linearized state space of the color qualia, usually what you will actually see is like there's kind of like a whole line that is like pure blue. And there's a whole line that is like pure red. Are you able to show this? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, one word of context, I suppose, like for discussing colors,"
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"text": " is that the screens have limitations, which is what is the gamma, the colors that they can actually show. So there's actually a lot of things about the phenomenology of colors that are not super apparent in screens that you need to actually see in person. But yeah, there is essentially this way in which you can probe the properties of this color space."
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"text": " um by for example like showing people two hues that are like really close together so let's say like one line here and one line here and asking them uh which one looks like more pure like kind of like which one looks like is not a mixture of anything else any or two other things"
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"text": " And like, people kind of like actually will converge to the like a line of red, where it's like, okay, like it's not being mixed with blue, where you get kind of like purple and is not being mixed with yellow. And like, you just get kind of like, okay, like red kind of like breaks the symmetry is like, there's kind of like something kind of like clearly there in a sense. And you get essentially the same with yellow and green and blue."
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"text": " So, you know, I would argue here, actually, you know, like green in some sense, like leaves in a different dimension than both yellow and blue, whereas orange leaves in kind of the linear combination of red and yellow. Right. So those patterns and the fact that we do kind of like all if we do the tests, we'll say like, yeah, like there were like four pure hues for me. There were like four pure hues for you. So at least like between people, we do share kind of like some of these"
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"text": " features of this space, this state space of quality in this context. However, it could be the case, and I don't know any strong argument against this other than parsimony. For example, maybe your blue is my yellow and your yellow is my blue. If you were to swap the pure hues"
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"text": " What other features can you actually find in the geometry of the space to suggest that, hey, we are actually experiencing the same one? And I'm not sure if there are. So what I can say is something like, well, the mapping, I don't think it's going to be the case that, for example, you experience orange when I experience blue, but maybe you experience yellow. So maybe you experience a pure hue. Yeah."
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"text": " Okay, let's get to some psychedelic visuals. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so actually just like jumping right into it. This is like one of the first of like really trippy states in one of the tools that I'm going to be displaying today."
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"text": " You know, this is kind of like exceptionally trippy, right? And it's like, okay, like, if your visual field is being saturated with psychedelic visuals, to that extent, right, you probably shouldn't be outside would be my, my suggestion. You definitely need a cedar cedar, you know, now, you know, these level of intensity, usually, you know, unless you're like overdosing on like mushrooms, like usually would be something like, okay, you're doing like DMT."
},
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"text": " Where, yeah, like maybe the actual sensations from the, you know, environment become kind of like this very, you know, relatively faint contributor to the experience. This is kind of a teaser, yes. You're not going to be just showing visuals and then saying, look how cool this looks. You're going to be saying, okay, here's what is correlated with certain psychedelics, like LSD is different than DMT, which is different than 5-MeO. And then you're going to say, why does it look like this and how is it produced? Yeah."
},
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"text": " So why don't we start off simple? Show what ordinary perception looks like. I think one fruitful way of starting is showcasing some of the simple effects that this tool can give you. I mean, this is well-known things such as drifting effects. This is very fast, but for example,"
},
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"text": " you know like your experience being a little bit wobbly is one of the maybe kind of like primary things that psychedelics do like kind of like making the field of experience a little bit wobbly explaining actually like how that happens i think it's a very non-trivial but okay like that's a very very basic thing that you can you can kind of like do and of course it gets interesting when you combine it with other effects but just that's kind of like okay that's like the the a of the abc of making these replications the second one"
},
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"text": " is kind of like adding like deep dream layers. So this is a little bit subtle but like you may see actually kind of like in some regions it gets a little bit kind of like enhanced and it looks a little bit trippy. You see there's kind of like these like waves where like okay maybe the edges get highlighted and so one of the you know simple interesting ideas is like okay you choose different layers of the you know deep dream algorithm so"
},
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"text": " maybe on low doses, you know, you highlight kind of just like edges or something like low doses of let's say like psilocybin or LSD, mescaline, maybe in higher doses, maybe like, you know, higher level features start to become highlighted, like, okay, like eyes and, you know, dog ears, and things like that. And like, okay, like birds, you know, like, okay, the rocks start to look like a bunch of birds put together."
},
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"text": " The highest layer for some reason is very abstract, at least in this particular rendition. What are you doing with these different layers? Are you saying that when you're on a psychedelic, for people who have not experienced psychedelics, that you then start to see this? What determines which of those layers it is? And how did you come up with those layers? Are there more layers? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this is a"
},
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"end_time": 1075.316,
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"start_time": 1046.186,
"text": " Essentially bringing back a relatively old idea for how to replicate psychedelic visuals. The Deep Dream algorithm, I've got to check this, but I remember in 2015 it came from Google. People were playing with large neural networks and they found that if you clamp a high-level feature in one of these networks and make the input fit the type of input that would maximally activate this feature,"
},
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"text": " then you can kind of like get these very trippy images because it's like the image is you know being kind of like asked to hey maximize the output um or like the probability that the network will say like that you're a dog right so like at first it's kind of like starts to make everything a little bit having like dog ears a little bit of like dog eyes and just kind of trying to trick the network into believing that there's a dog in there and well and people just like you know wrote blogs online about um"
},
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"text": " Hey, this looks really trippy. And like, you know, like in the second community, there were definitely like a lot of posts that there was kind of like a fad for like a few years where people were like replicating their psychedelic experiences primarily using this tool. But there's a lot of, you know, open questions here, like, like, of course, like there's like the physiological and biological question, like, okay, like, why would psychedelics have kind of these, like, you know, ability to clamp these high level features?"
},
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"text": " I guess here's probably like going through the layers."
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"text": " Ford BlueCruise hands-free highway driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in BlueCruise enabled vehicles like the F-150, Explorer and Mustang Mach-E. Available feature on equipped vehicles. Terms apply. Does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com slash BlueCruise for more details."
},
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"text": " So yeah, I guess it, yeah, you kind of like try to amplify as much as possible features for a given layer. And then you, as in you consciously try to apply it or no, no, no, like, I guess like you as a designer of the network, you said one of these neurons to kind of like, okay, like maximum activity and try to arrange the rest of the network to, to do, to do that. This is an example of what one sees."
},
{
"end_time": 1230.589,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1220.196,
"text": " I would say this is a paradigm that people have identified as phenomenologically similar to psychedelic experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 1252.585,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1231.118,
"text": " There are significant differences between the visuals that you experience and this, and in fact that is actually the motivation for our replication tool. Everybody in our team really loves playing with DeepDream, but essentially see very deep limitations in it."
},
{
"end_time": 1279.224,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1252.944,
"text": " And it's sometimes actually a little bit frustrating because you may see kind of like a movies, you know, where they play kind of, okay, like a psychedelic experience rendition. And people get the impression is like, okay, yeah, culturally, we already know how these works, you know, how people understand how these actually looks like there's like this illusion of understanding at the very least like culturally, whereas yeah, people who usually, you know, have explored the space quite deeply will say,"
},
{
"end_time": 1299.821,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1279.821,
"text": " no really you know the cultural depictions of psychedelics maybe capture like one percent of what's interesting about the state but this kind of like 99 that is like okay like how do we actually put this into you know into a visualization or something that actually evokes us or or or is is yeah very difficult so yeah deep dream i would say like okay yeah this is like a certain percentage of a puzzle"
},
{
"end_time": 1322.278,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1300.179,
"text": " Okay. And so we'll get back to the tool that you've developed. Yes. Okay. And what's interesting is that this is a tool. Most of these visualizations that you see, they're not ones with sliders. They're just something you can press play on. Whereas yours, you have these modulators here and there. And sure there are drop down discrete drop down boxes. Yes. Such as the layer one, two, and so on. That's rare in this."
},
{
"end_time": 1344.206,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1322.585,
"text": " So this means that you can tell exactly what is going on in different experiences. The way in which I'm trying to kind of pitch it in a sense is like a Photoshop for the phenomenology of psychedelic experiences. I mean it's like how do you make a Photoshop of something in a sense it's like well you think of like the"
},
{
"end_time": 1365.845,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1344.531,
"text": " the range of kind of like primitive effects that you need to reconstruct a phenomenon ready to simulate something you're gonna you know engineering software for example like what. What kind of materials do i need what is there just you know how much stress can they endure and things like that so like what do you put in a photoshop for you know psychedelic experiences and."
},
{
"end_time": 1396.067,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1367.142,
"text": " Of course, you know, it's going to be a long journey, you know, many decades of like building more and more features, you know, as we actually find and formalize what's happening. But I do think like, you know, this year, we're presenting a kind of like layer of the stack that we think actually like does contribute significantly to our ability to visualize these states, perhaps kind of like a similar kind of like improvement in our ability to visualize things as I would say like maybe deep dream was back then."
},
{
"end_time": 1421.374,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1396.459,
"text": " okay let's see what else okay so there is this whole layer of coupled oscillators and okay right now actually is just like going up and down but can you explain what an oscillator is please yes is it on a coupled one okay so here is an oscillator"
},
{
"end_time": 1450.469,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1423.148,
"text": " In this case, there's a dot that is changing in color. And what happens is it's changing its color at a certain rate. And it wants to do it at its own rate. It has a heartbeat, as it were. It has its desirable frequency, where it's as healthy as possible. But then it needs to coexist in an ecosystem of other oscillators like it."
},
{
"end_time": 1479.275,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1451.237,
"text": " that maybe are going at slightly different frequencies, but they're in touch, they communicate with each other. So the way in which mathematically it works is that the two oscillators are sensing each other and they can measure each other's phase, where along the color wheel they are. And as a function of how far away they are from each other, they make bigger or smaller adjustments."
},
{
"end_time": 1505.538,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1479.582,
"text": " so that you know slowly they actually kind of like converge their face if they actually have like enough of a desire to couple now there's also you know in in this case there's another element which is a distance so kind of like the the the desire for an oscillator to couple with another in kind of like the paradigm that we're presenting is distance dependent"
},
{
"end_time": 1534.616,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1506.374,
"text": " OK, so right now, for example, I'm going to make it so that they actually want to be in opposite phases of each other. So the current simulation is set up where all of the oscillators will want to be at a different phase than their neighbors, or the things that are close to them. So what ends up happening here is you have this diversity of colors."
},
{
"end_time": 1560.623,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1534.94,
"text": " People, well, the house leaders don't want to be similar to those who are close by. But then I can switch this up so that like they actually do want to be. In the same phase with each other. Right, and the nice thing is that this is kind of these like very smooth, soft, kind of like continuous transition, you know, from like, oh, we want to be different to hey, we want to be the same. And in some sense, I think like, at least I find, you know, aesthetically,"
},
{
"end_time": 1587.176,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1561.169,
"text": " The process of convergence in general tends to be quite beautiful, especially for like very sophisticated systems. So one thing that you can do here, I'll just like give you a couple more examples and you know this is kind of like the toy model that then informs how the tool works more broadly. So here you know it's kind of like I'm making a street of oscillators. So there's actually some kind of like"
},
{
"end_time": 1613.814,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1588.285,
"text": " You know, similarity as you go from left to right, it doesn't have to be perfect. That's another thing. Like with this paradigm, there's kind of like wiggle room. It's kind of like organic in that sense. You know, you're not kind of just finding like one solution and like imposing it, but like the system kind of like adapts itself. So what I'm going to do now is I want like oscillators that are far away for them to want to be different from each other."
},
{
"end_time": 1641.271,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1615.503,
"text": " so now as you see you know close by they they're the same color but far away there are different colors now just a moment so at the top here you see coupling one two three so the near ones you've put to a positive number yes and the bottom one you put to an extreme negative number as far as it can go yes exactly um and i'll show you like another set of configurations here but it's like of course yeah if i put the"
},
{
"end_time": 1666.766,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1641.903,
"text": " when they're far they want to be in the same color but now when they're close they want to be at different colors okay then it fragments right actually it fragments quite extremely right like even kind of like vertically at first kind of like it you know it breaks down vertically too right like if this is if this is supposed to be i don't know like a vein or like something that is kind of like transporting you know let's say like water or like some fluid"
},
{
"end_time": 1693.404,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1667.483,
"text": " Perhaps if it breaks like this is pretty catastrophic, right? Because it's kind of like cutting across the the vein, so to speak. OK, so here's like a overall like really cool thing about systems like this is that, you know, when you kind of like do these layers of like you identify different distances and you modulate the coupling constant for each of the different distances, you can use that to actually kind of like tune into waves of different lengths."
},
{
"end_time": 1723.08,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1694.65,
"text": " So depending on the specific kind of like staircase of couplings, I can make the wave larger or smaller. And I think, yeah, like this is kind of like the basic setup. Maybe I'll share another kind of fascinating thing, which is that you can actually use this kind of system as a diagnosis in a sense for like"
},
{
"end_time": 1737.995,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1724.036,
"text": " What type of shape a set of oscillators are forming?"
},
{
"end_time": 1768.285,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1738.524,
"text": " It will break in this symmetrical way, where the entire circle becomes a color wheel. It will always try to break up into an integer number of times. Sometimes it toggles between one mode and another, but the stable configurations that it arrives at tend to essentially be those where you have an integer number of times that the phase fits in the system."
},
{
"end_time": 1797.227,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1768.968,
"text": " and this is like very very very general in the like also you know when you make grids and even grids of different dimensionalities yeah actually i'm going to show you so what i'm going to show you actually now is like kind of like a three-dimensional system of coupled oscillators so this is this is a an article and cessation okay perfect i found it okay so you see like now it's a yeah three-dimensional"
},
{
"end_time": 1823.677,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1797.773,
"text": " So you see when there's a wave traveling in it, it kind of finds one of the symmetries of the object. In this case, the wave is kind of traveling along this square, essentially. And if I put it kind of like orthogonal, like this, it's the same. What's determining the size? The size of the wave"
},
{
"end_time": 1852.09,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1823.951,
"text": " is determined by the pattern of the, what we're calling the coupling kernel. We're calling it the coupling kernel. I mean, simply because it's this idea that like, you know, a convolutional kernel is like where you stand at a pixel, for example, and you look at a kind of like a fixed window around you and maybe you can evolve with it. Here is kind of the analogy, the analog of doing that, but for kind of like a dynamic system, which is like you stand everywhere"
},
{
"end_time": 1867.773,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1852.637,
"text": " And you apply kind of like the same coupling constants to your neighborhood as everybody else. And then you see the emergent dynamics of doing that. And in this case, yeah, you know, the wavelength is fairly low, is kind of the entire shape."
},
{
"end_time": 1897.022,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1868.404,
"text": " okay so we get the idea that look you have these different balls you can put on screen you can put them in different shapes and they can look to their neighbor and say I want to be more like you or I want to be less like you yes and they can also do so with different distances so they could so I could say I want to be more like you much less than you but much more like you in the back and that's what you're tuning there so what like it's cool it's interesting now what is the relevance here to psychedelics yeah okay okay so a couple more more things"
},
{
"end_time": 1926.8,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1897.278,
"text": " to explain this is one thing that you can do is kind of like play with the dimensionality of the space on which you're kind of applying these rules so i'm going to do something a little bit trippy which is this is really cool because right now like the wave is actually in three dimensions i don't know if it's obvious but like i kind of need to rotate it a little bit for you to kind of like really see that like yes this is a cube and there's kind of this resonant mode in the cube"
},
{
"end_time": 1954.872,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1927.142,
"text": " Okay, but what was before is a stranger. Which is like, it doesn't matter how I project it. Like I could project it like this, like a hexagon, for example. And I still get just kind of like these waves like, you know, going going in circles, and then I project it from this side, and it's still going in a circle. And I project it from this side, it's still going in a circle, right? Like, what is going on in here?"
},
{
"end_time": 1984.906,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1955.469,
"text": " so this is i think something that happens all the time in our consciousness and it explains a lot of psychedelic effects which is like what's happening here is like now the distances between the dots are the distances in the screen kind of like in the projection so like rather than the dots kind of like thinking like oh i mean a cube is like no i mean a screen and like you know right now there's a bunch of dots that are like overlapping with each other"
},
{
"end_time": 2012.398,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1985.503,
"text": " so of course they're going to be like the same color even though in principle there should be like another dimension there and when you have kind of these effects you know you can do things such as you know kind of like make make tubes for example and now like you know the the color will kind of like travel through these paths as well so i think uh you know one of these kind of like things that is happening in in our experience that explains a lot of like psychedelic effects is that"
},
{
"end_time": 2041.374,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2013.08,
"text": " There are kind of like three dimensional waves of sensation in our tactile field that like, you know, like the senses, the sense of warmth or cold or expansion and contraction in our body. You know, it's kind of like this like 3D volume and it has kind of like 3D waves, you know, that look maybe more, more like this is kind of like you actually have this volume. Our visual field on the other hand has kind of these like very strong preference for kind of like this two dimensional"
},
{
"end_time": 2070.964,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2041.681,
"text": " layout, where waves are really kind of like two dimensional generally. And of course, yeah, there's like some depth perception that kind of like stitches together different types of waves. But in general, there's kind of like this like tendency for two dimensionality. So I think like a lot of the you know, like interesting kind of like computationally non trivial things that happen on psychedelics is that you project with synesthesia, you know, your sense of your body, for example, into your visual field."
},
{
"end_time": 2091.527,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2071.698,
"text": " And, you know, you're connecting something that has like three dimensional resonant modes with a surface that is two dimensional and has like two dimensional resonant modes as its preference. And so the actual phenomenology is this negotiation between three dimensional resonant waves and two dimensional ones and how they're trying to couple with each other."
},
{
"end_time": 2121.186,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2092.073,
"text": " Okay, I have a question. It's somewhat related. So in ordinary studies of consciousness or just perception, you think of the world, we have this model where you think of the world as the ground truth,"
},
{
"end_time": 2149.428,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2121.459,
"text": " And then you're never experiencing the world. You're experiencing some filtration of it and that gets augmented and messed around with. Okay. But ordinarily what you do is you play around with the world and then you say, okay, I want the patient to experience so and so, but you are just looking inside the brain at your quality research Institute is already looking at phenomenon inside. Is there anything, can you go in the opposite direction? Have you discovered anything about ontology or the, or what you think of as the real world?"
},
{
"end_time": 2177.568,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2150.06,
"text": " from perceptions inside the brain because of how they're supposed to be correlated with the real world. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Excellent question. Um, I mean, I'm, I'm making the bet essentially that, you know, the structure of consciousness, the phenomenology of consciousness, the way in which sensations can bind together, you know, is telling us something really deep about the nature of reality that is essentially, okay, like you are a particular facet of reality. And so,"
},
{
"end_time": 2206.237,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2177.978,
"text": " you can study you know kind of the laws of phenomenology i think like you're in a sense like tapping into the laws of the universe at a very deep level and there are like yeah things that are i would say at least like really hint at very deep connections i think like with physics you know i'm not a physicist i'm a physics fan really really but uh you know i don't want to speak about yet you know like the mathematics of the standard model or something like that but um"
},
{
"end_time": 2233.916,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2206.374,
"text": " I do suspect that, you know, kind of like things evocative of, for example, the the ideas we discussed in our previous podcast, which was kind of how in physics, you have kind of things such as like particles and antiparticles that, you know, cancel out, turning to like photons and things like that. There's a lot of kind of like aspects of phenomenology, where things in qualia space have kind of like a structure where"
},
{
"end_time": 2255.742,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2234.292,
"text": " It feels like oftentimes kind of like from the vacuum so to speak the vacuum splits into kind of like two things that are like opposite and complementary to each other and you know like something like DMT tends to in some sense kind of like split the vacuum into the you know kind of like polar opposites of things so it's like okay the the sense of space in front of you"
},
{
"end_time": 2284.189,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2255.964,
"text": " the colors you know a given point may kind of like split into blue and yellow it's kind of like a color and it's anti-color and and everything is kind of like doing that everything is kind of like invoking its opposite and kind of kind of like oscillating with it whereas five million DMT it feels actually like the movement is one of kind of like hey every particle find your anti-particle like everything cancel out with your kind of opposite until you smooth out completely so"
},
{
"end_time": 2310.742,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2284.889,
"text": " You know, like a peak five million DMT experience often is described as kind of like merging with a, you know, white light of the universe or becoming one with emptiness and like there's a lot of kind of like evocative things like that. That to me is strongly suggest a deep connection with symmetry and kind of like the cancellation of opposites. Another like very interesting hint here is there's like some doses of five million DMT where"
},
{
"end_time": 2334.531,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2311.425,
"text": " for example all of your visual field and your tactile field kind of like diffracts into what looks like a rainbow like the whole color wheel and then if you increase the dose a little bit and you kind of like look at it from the side it all kind of cancels out into pure space so there are there is kind of this phenomenology where you can kind of like study the ways in which in some sense"
},
{
"end_time": 2362.415,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2335.606,
"text": " What do you mean it appears like it's equivalent to nothing? You mean to say like how from out of the vacuum you can get something positive and negative?"
},
{
"end_time": 2383.695,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2362.892,
"text": " Yeah, yeah, this is an allusion to David Pierce's Zero Ontology. I recommend a lot this website, you know, like a 90s website. In general, like headweb.com by David Pierce, philosopher from whom I draw a lot of inspiration. And, you know, he has like, yeah, this essay of like, why does anything exist?"
},
{
"end_time": 2407.108,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2383.865,
"text": " And, you know, he kind of like lays out this case that like in mathematics and physics and phenomenology, we have this kind of like overarching pattern where you can kind of reconstruct everything out of nothingness in some sense. I mean, like, he says, like, we probably don't yet have like the proper words to really talk about this, you know, we're in a kind of a pre paradigmatic stage, really. We're like, yeah, what do we say is like, kind of like,"
},
{
"end_time": 2434.497,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2407.705,
"text": " Pointing to an explanation space rather than a full theory, you know, but he argues, you know, getting mathematics, you can get everything from the empty set. Uh, so to speak in, in physics things like, well, what is the total angular momentum of the universe? Uh, people argue like it's zero or yeah, I don't know. There's, there's a lot of debate in there, but then in phenomenology is like, yeah, you know, colors seem to kind of like coming pairs. The sense of space, uh, seems to require a sense of time. Like there's kind of like this, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2458.899,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2435.316,
"text": " Interrelated variables in experience in consciousness were like At very very kind of like peak peak symmetry states of consciousness where things are kind of like Symmetrifying harmonizing synchronizing you kind of see a kind of like a cancellation process and which is very evocative of like well, maybe at the base there's kind of like really nothing it's it's a"
},
{
"end_time": 2482.944,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2459.889,
"text": " Think Verizon, the best 5G network is expensive? Think again. Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Now what to do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami Bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 2512.108,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2483.422,
"text": " Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where you can get a single line with everything you need. So bring in your bill to your local Miami Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal. Rankings based on root metrics, root score, report data to 1-H-2025, your results may vary. Must provide a post-paid consumer mobile bill dated within the past 45 days. Bill must be in the same name as the person reviewing the deal. Additional terms apply. It's everything, everywhere, all at once type of feeling. Are you able to show that type of feeling? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, there's a bit. OK. Awesome. OK, so I'm going to essentially show you kind of like what"
},
{
"end_time": 2542.108,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2512.978,
"text": " 5 Meo DMT might feel like a little bit and some qualitative aspects of it. So I guess, again, for a little bit of context, like, you know, the coupled oscillators that I was showing you in the replication tool, practically, it's kind of like every pixel is one of these oscillators and it's using the GPU. You know, I developed the core idea, but like, yeah, this is the work of a whole team. And I'm especially, yeah, thankful to Emil Hall, who, yeah, built, you know, so much of this."
},
{
"end_time": 2569.565,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2542.466,
"text": " he really optimized it so like yeah the the the gpu is actually simulating all of the oscillators so here you know in this setting uh essentially i'm using a black and white kind of like system of coupled oscillators and i'm gonna make it so well i'm actually i'm gonna increase the opacity he's like okay you're pretty a pretty strong dose and as you're coming up this thing happens where like"
},
{
"end_time": 2591.271,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2570.043,
"text": " You're coming up and it's kind of like this and as you're going up, the lines start to kind of like cancel with each other. And you see there's like kind of like pinwheels, you know those pinwheels and and you can think of them as kind of these like particles in experience and they find kind of like each other and they annihilate."
},
{
"end_time": 2620.35,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2592.995,
"text": " well then then also you know like kind of like secondary effects happens sometimes that you get kind of these like additional extra waves but you know in in in general there's kind of this general tendency that as you increase kind of like the the coupling constant and you keep it positive the whole screen converges to kind of like just black and white and these like very big pinwheels find each other and they cancel each other out and that uh well i'll show you now it's um"
},
{
"end_time": 2640.691,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2620.845,
"text": " you know from our website from the various like yeah legal psychedelic retreats that we have run you know one of the the things that we kind of like all converged on you know this was like a very widely reported phenomenon in the uh in the team you know we were 12 people with kind of like technical backgrounds uh like studying five amino dmt phenomenology"
},
{
"end_time": 2671.067,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2641.954,
"text": " you know, like, you know, after an experience, we might like sit down and, you know, discuss and somebody who knows how to write shaders, you know, like, write these within like, you know, half an hour, like, hey, we were all comment is like, Yeah, actually, that feels like our experience. And in general, you know, like, everybody who tried five, I mean, oh, at least in our retreat, of course, you know, is biased, because, you know, they're like, people who are like, are into math are into meditation are into visual art. But they all reported that, yeah, this process of kind of a"
},
{
"end_time": 2700.06,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2671.681,
"text": " The generation of these pinwheels, what they're called like topological defects, and then their cancellation was kind of like really quintessential to the phenomenology of 5-MeO-DMT. I really like this animation too. This is kind of like the vacuum, so to speak, you know, maybe like universal consciousness before it's divided, so to speak. And then it turns into kind of, yeah, these like particle and antiparticle sort of, or like these vortex and antivortex."
},
{
"end_time": 2722.125,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2701.152,
"text": " And on 5MEO DMT, it feels like the way in which your experience is constructed is kind of like a bunch of stilts that are made of these kind of like defects. And when they cancel out, you kind of feel like you're rejoining kind of the sea of the universe, which is like, okay, you were kind of like,"
},
{
"end_time": 2743.234,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2722.398,
"text": " Separated from the universe by these topological defects is is the overall impression. I mean again, I'm not gonna I'm describing phenomenology here rather than necessarily metaphysics. Yeah, but do you have any metaphysical views? I'm totally open to to to various interpretations here. I mean, yeah, I think you were interested in kind of like"
},
{
"end_time": 2767.602,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2743.456,
"text": " group effects or collective effects you briefly asked me yesterday or synchronizing trips and then things like that you know i'm very open i used to be actually you know i used to put the bulk of my probability mass into kind of like everything that happens in a psychedelic is an internal hallucination very rich you know you can learn a lot about the unconscious you can learn about"
},
{
"end_time": 2796.596,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2768.012,
"text": " you know, about consciousness and it's very computationally significant and so on, but it's just a part of your world simulation. You know, like that would be kind of like the bulk of my probability mass a few years ago. And now I'm actually a little bit more open to like, no, actually there's other phenomena as well that might involve kind of like coupled oscillators, but within a larger field in a sense that includes not only your own experience, but others around you and maybe other things as well. But"
},
{
"end_time": 2825.589,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2796.596,
"text": " Very huge error bars in here have a very very very high amount of uncertainty but yes i'm happy to talk about that yeah have you done any tests where someone's in this room same not this particular room but in a room and they're on let's say they're on five me five me oh i'm not sure if that's the most optimal use of five me or for this and then someone else is in some other room where they can't see you and then i'm showing you a string of letters and i say okay you look at the string of letters then i ask you can you"
},
{
"end_time": 2833.2,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2826.391,
"text": " reach this person's mind because if you're a part of a unified field you should have some access. Have you done something like that?"
},
{
"end_time": 2858.882,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2833.831,
"text": " Let me provide a bit more context because we held one Fabio DMT retreat which was in Canada in 2023. It was for me a huge highlight of my life really just being with all of these other nerdy kids and visual artists and mathematicians, meditators and spending three weeks trying to figure out how this works. Yeah, utterly mind-blowing."
},
{
"end_time": 2886.92,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2858.882,
"text": " But, you know, there's only so much you can fit in that time. We focused a lot on the visual phenomenology and kind of like what kind of equations may be underneath this, or the topology, the geometry, etc. We did, you know, do a couple kind of like wacky experiments. I mean, like one of the first of all, one of the things that was like, widely reported, especially from the meditators, you know, this this has to be replicated. And like, I don't know how much this is self suggestion, but"
},
{
"end_time": 2915.862,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2887.841,
"text": " Something that was like, yeah, quite strongly reported independently by several of the people in the retreat was that when somebody takes five, five million DMT in the same room as you, there is a vibe shift. And in particular for the meditators, they said that time to Samadhi shortened significantly, uh, meaning that, you know, they're like really, you know, advanced meditators where they can enter into like the various Janas, you know, these very, very advanced concentration states within minutes."
},
{
"end_time": 2932.568,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2916.681,
"text": " And you know, for one of them, for example, it might usually take them like 10 minutes to enter into one of those like trances or alter states. And he said that, yeah, when somebody wasn't five million DMT within a few meters of him, like, it would kind of like half the amount of time he's not on it, but the other person is. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 2954.77,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2933.097,
"text": " And still kind of there's like this sense of like, well, the gradient of going in the meditation direction is like kind of like lubricated, as it were. It's a bit entrancing to be around somebody on 5MU. Then again, we were running kind of like blind tests of like, okay, maybe this person is actually on, you know, it's just like vapor is not, you know, a placebo or something. We weren't doing that."
},
{
"end_time": 2983.916,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2955.043,
"text": " Or test by putting someone else with 5MEO behind the wall, but they don't know. It would be fascinating. Of course, there's something to be said about 5MEO. It's very profound and it's hard to follow complex instructions if you're in this state. What about others like LSD?"
},
{
"end_time": 3013.422,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2984.172,
"text": " Actually, yeah, it is interesting. I mean, like I've, for example, yeah, like at festivals, like Burning Man, you know, I've something I've sometimes done, especially with people, you know, kind of like, I know our friends are friends is like going with an iPad, you know, and with like a psychophysicist experiment is like, Hey, like, look at this picture, like, what does it look like? And yeah, in general, people who are experienced with psychedelics can usually answer like fairly basic kind of like visual, you know, tasks."
},
{
"end_time": 3037.227,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3014.189,
"text": " Usually, actually, they think their performance is a lot worse than what it is. It's kind of the opposite than with drunk people who are like, Oh, my performance is totally great, you know, and actually, they're like, you know, you know, 10% or something. No, in LSD, I'm very surprised. It's like, somebody might do like, kind of like a task very often. And think like, Hey, like, did I do like really poorly? And it's like, No, you were average. Like,"
},
{
"end_time": 3051.664,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3038.353,
"text": " Yeah, but yeah, and of course, yeah for the psychedelic cryptography. Yeah, like which I don't know if you we've talked about that or we run this contest or competition where people would submit videos."
},
{
"end_time": 3080.162,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3051.766,
"text": " where the idea is like, well, there's some kind of secret information here that you can only read or decode if you're on a certain psychedelic state of consciousness. Interesting. Yeah. Originally, actually, I came up with this idea, the very basic implementation, which is how to secretly communicate with people in LSD. You see the very simple concept here is that you use the fact that there's this tracer effect in the visual field,"
},
{
"end_time": 3108.37,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3080.486,
"text": " things kind of like last longer in the visual field so that you can kind of like paint you know the components of an image one chunk at a time and kind of because it lingers you can kind of like see it more easily there's also like features that you can see more easily like for example like the the gaps between the the various columns right it's not obvious in the light of those gaps right so even that is kind of like binary communication right it's like are there gaps between these rows or not"
},
{
"end_time": 3138.217,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3108.575,
"text": " But yeah, you can actually, it turns out, do some pretty awesome visualizations. So this was the winning entry. So yeah, this one actually contains a significant amount of information. You do need to be significantly high, though, like the equivalent of 150 micrograms of LSD or something is kind of the threshold where it starts to become quite visible. I mean, again, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 3161.135,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3138.677,
"text": " We still need to validate these, get percentages, optimize the effect. What I can say is that in a team of eight people trying to decode these without knowing what's in it, six were able to do so easily on mushrooms. What do you decode here? The mechanism is very simple with this particular psychedelic cryptography, which is that"
},
{
"end_time": 3169.821,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3161.783,
"text": " you you kind of like put a tracer effect on this image and actually i don't want to spoil it i'm not going to say what what's"
},
{
"end_time": 3197.108,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3171.834,
"text": " so that you don't know and maybe you can convince yourself that it works if you look at it but you know don't look at it at a microdose and then judge that it doesn't work because a microdose is not going to do it like you really need to be so there's a hidden message here yeah and it's like unambiguous i mean it's like a there's a very clear message with a lot of bits of information it's not it's not an ambiguous like oh i'm not sure yeah it's a safe message"
},
{
"end_time": 3219.497,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3197.108,
"text": " yeah yeah yeah it's prosocial yes it's a good message okay because you you also want to be careful yeah it's a family-friendly message yeah so so five million dmt you know one of like our overarching conclusions is that yeah like these defects would appear like like uh in the visual field in the tactile field"
},
{
"end_time": 3245.572,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3220.742,
"text": " and how good or bad the experience felt had a lot to do actually with kind of like the flow of kind of like energy and the particular shape of the field. I mean sometimes like for example this can be kind of like a fairly unpleasant 5MU DMT experience like if you have kind of this like sense they're like okay the energy is like concentrating in this like point in the bottom of your spine"
},
{
"end_time": 3274.872,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3246.664,
"text": " that that actually was described as like very unpleasant because you get kind of this feeling of high kind of like pressurization you feel kind of like pressurized in some regions or like stretched does it feel painful it feels just very uncomfortable and it is obviously very hard to describe it is sort of kind of yeah like a lot of kind of layers of yourself are kind of like sheared in this kind of like uncomfortable way that is very unusual and you would never experience it you know during exercise or something just a very unusual effect but you know"
},
{
"end_time": 3300.196,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3275.247,
"text": " In this particular experience, this report, you know, he described that like the valence was extremely bad at first, which was concentrating this kind of like sense of pressure. But then all those the field lines actually kind of like aligned and they all became parallel. And then the valence flipped from extremely negative to extremely positive. Super interesting. So I was speaking with someone recently"
},
{
"end_time": 3324.343,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3301.067,
"text": " About he was just meditating completely sober and then he felt extreme pain in his lower back, extreme pain. Yeah. And then extreme pleasure. And then he said, it just kept oscillating between that and it was from meditating and he kept to stop meditating from that. So this can happen. What is the explanation for that?"
},
{
"end_time": 3347.824,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3324.872,
"text": " Yeah, no, I mean, meditation, it's really powerful. And like, there's so many different states that you can access. And I mean, I think like the description that you gave would be consistent with the other top of my head, like maybe like five different types of meditation and different phenomenology. But it was a variation of transcendental meditation. Okay, yeah, it might actually be like somewhat related to this sort of phenomena. Because with transcendental meditation,"
},
{
"end_time": 3373.234,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3348.097,
"text": " in some of the typical modalities like you're repeating a mantra for example and you're concentrating your attention in a part of your body sometimes let's say like in your crown chakra kind of like just a little bit over you know the top of your head you can imagine okay like you're concentrating like there like you know an hour a day you're kind of like smoothing what we might call your attention field lines is like okay whenever you get distracted"
},
{
"end_time": 3403.336,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3373.78,
"text": " You tell your body like, no, don't think about this, move your attention back upwards. So you're creating kind of this graph of like wherever you're paying attention, it's pushing in that direction. And so you're ordering kind of your attention field as it were. And I think like, yeah, when the field is really ordered, actually, usually you can access the extremes of valence because when it's very ordered and actually harmonious and symmetrical, that is like a complete kind of like state of harmony and it feels really great."
},
{
"end_time": 3419.957,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3403.865,
"text": " but also when it's a little bit disjointed but it's like you're very ordered but maybe there's a little bit it's a little bit out of phase or a little bit kind of like screwed up at the very tip you may also encounter the strongest dissonances right because it's like you're very aligned but then maybe pushing against yourself"
},
{
"end_time": 3436.288,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3420.35,
"text": " And so there is this very broad phenomenon, I mean, and meditation, and especially five MEO DMT demonstrates it is that around very peak positive aliens, oftentimes you have kind of like other configurations are especially unpleasant."
},
{
"end_time": 3458.968,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3436.288,
"text": " And I think like a lot of yeah, kind of like developing like, you know, deep meditative expertise involves kind of like developing the equanimity to be able to navigate those transitions is like knowing that well, actually, yeah, right next to the bliss or like the awakening or realization, there's actually some fairly ugly, unpleasant dissonances and discordant configurations. Is this what Reiki is supposed to be aligning?"
},
{
"end_time": 3481.271,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3460.794,
"text": " Yeah, that's a very good question. I don't know very much about Reiki. In general though, I would argue that the framework of annealing or like a field annealing, neural annealing, broadly explains the practices of energy work very generally."
},
{
"end_time": 3503.524,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3481.92,
"text": " You're using things such as various tools like surprise and attention to imagine energy flow in your body and essentially heating yourself up so that you can cool down and you can imagine with annealing materials. If you can heat up a material and then letting it cool you can reorder its atomic lattice."
},
{
"end_time": 3533.404,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3503.78,
"text": " In so many ways, we are kind of like made of kind of like crystals of sensations, right? So it's like if you heat up parts of yourself and like kind of like use your attention to kind of like recomb yourself. I think like fundamentally you're using kind of like annealing techniques. And I think this applies to a lot of, you know, a lot of martial arts as well. Like it's, it's a very broad framework. I went to a Reiki, I don't know what they're called master or artist or, or what have you once a week for a period of months."
},
{
"end_time": 3563.626,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3534.019,
"text": " And every time I saw her, she would always say that I'm disordered. Whatever is the worst insults that you could say in Reiki terms would apply to me. And she would just go like this to my back, not touching my back. She just. Oh, but I wouldn't feel any different before or after. So have you encountered if Reiki is there legitimacy to Reiki? Is there consonance with Reiki and any of what you've outlined here today? Let me let me say the following."
},
{
"end_time": 3590.794,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3565.538,
"text": " If you assume that there's actually some legitimacy to some of these techniques, it might make sense that you need to have at least some kind of basic flexibility in your energy body, so to speak, and desire to experience the effect for it to also work. I see that as compatible. If one goes very skeptical, it might make sense. One doesn't experience it."
},
{
"end_time": 3600.026,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3590.794,
"text": " I feel exactly the same, but thank you, thank you so much."
},
{
"end_time": 3626.032,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3601.288,
"text": " I mean, yeah, I personally would imagine it's unlikely that something, I mean, it sounds like a scam, but but, but, but no, but what I can say is like, I do know it was a free service. This is why I didn't pay for the service. Otherwise, I don't think I would have done it. But maybe that shows that I'm skeptical. So we did see someone frustrated because she's like taking up so much of my time, but"
},
{
"end_time": 3647.517,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3626.476,
"text": " Yesterday, like we saw the hypnotist, right? I don't know if you saw the hypnotist. Yeah, no, the hypnotist is fantastic. The hypnotist Albert Nurenberg, which I'll place a link on screen and in the description is fantastic. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, talking afterwards with him, like he, of course, yeah, you should interview him at some of his like he was describing like, yeah, like, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 3674.497,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3647.739,
"text": " Orgasm is being triggered by like hypnosis and like reaching extreme levels or like what he called this like super orgasm Anyway, there's gonna be like all in in in a TV series or something pretty soon, you know one one one interesting I think like maybe like skeptical take would be something like maybe reiki practitioners are really good hypnotists, right? Like hmm, like if you can induce these really powerful experiences relatively easy with kind of these attention tricks like yeah presumably there's like a lot of ways of like hacking a person so to speak and"
},
{
"end_time": 3704.07,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3674.684,
"text": " um but also you know speaking personally i i know people who who swear by yeah some some like interesting effects that they have experienced like not locally from somebody else like doing energy work on them and like it's very hard to say what what i can say like you know from personal experience again i remain open-minded but yeah just i haven't seen like a silver bullet of things like this but during the five million retreat um in addition to the time to samadhi kind of like uh shortening also uh people reported"
},
{
"end_time": 3732.824,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3704.872,
"text": " feeling each other's traumas and kind of like processing it for each other like for example one of the you know meditation practitioners who is kind of like really equanimous you know he's he's been in monasteries for years and he's a super great guy and like he can endure a lot of pain without problem for example so like sometimes like one of the things that would be reported is like okay this person is having a difficult five mu experience processing let's say like childhood trauma or something like that"
},
{
"end_time": 3746.323,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3733.66,
"text": " And then he reported that just having the advanced meditator right next to him was extremely powerful because the trauma"
},
{
"end_time": 3768.933,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3746.698,
"text": " Football fan, basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdowns to threes and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from"
},
{
"end_time": 3778.797,
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"start_time": 3768.933,
"text": " any sport on ProgePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. ProgePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 3807.398,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3779.036,
"text": " Kind of like was processed or dissipated through him and also the meditator reported that's what happened afterwards as well."
},
{
"end_time": 3834.053,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3807.824,
"text": " So there were kind of, yeah, like reported phenomenology that suggested a kind of like shared field, especially when people were like both simultaneously on a state. We did try like one side experiment, which was, yeah, unsuccessful. Like I was with, yeah, with one of the participants, really friendly, one of the artists. And it was like, okay, like, give me a number of from zero to 100. Well, like I'm in the state and"
},
{
"end_time": 3852.125,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3834.804,
"text": " 37 most common."
},
{
"end_time": 3878.677,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3853.148,
"text": " It instantiates this self-organizing principle where everything in your experience wants to cohere with everything else. And the emergence of the pinwheels is downstream of that. Whenever you have these systems of coupled oscillators, especially when it has rich dimensionality or multiple layers, and you make them all want to be one with each other, so to speak, the pinwheels is just something that you encounter along the way."
},
{
"end_time": 3907.278,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3879.087,
"text": " whereas we also contrasted it with ayahuasca and mushrooms, for example. Let me find some good replication of that. Essentially, there's some key differences, which is not only is it much more colorful, but also you have this effect where you have very rich detail. Essentially, fractally at every scale,"
},
{
"end_time": 3934.411,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3907.824,
"text": " Every sensation kind of like triggers its opposite. So in some sense you get kind of these like the attractor states is like where you have like all of these opposites kind of like reconciled in some kind of like tapestry where everything is kind of like invoking its opposite but still the experience manages to include it into some kind of like overall perspective that yeah it's usually really diverse and rich in in contrast."
},
{
"end_time": 3963.985,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3934.65,
"text": " And in that sense, it's almost kind of like opposite of 5MEO DMT. I mean, we used to describe it as kind of a 5MEO DMT promotes global coherence in your overall system, whereas regular DMT, what's in ayahuasca, causes these competing clusters of coherence. Kind of like, yes. So which one is the one when people say, I've experienced everything and everything is happening all at once, everywhere? That would be 5MEO DMT, which would be the"
},
{
"end_time": 3992.039,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 3964.497,
"text": " colorless and yeah like the black and white uh where you get yeah kind of like the pinwheels like this this would be more like the five me or dmt were like and especially you know as the pinwheels eventually collapse into each other people might say something like well it felt like a black hole where i collapsed or like i turned into just one point for example as i report often reported thing uh and i turned into just one point and then that point disappeared is also like another thing people say"
},
{
"end_time": 4019.531,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 3992.295,
"text": " When you just become one point, you're not really a person. You don't remember who you are or where you are. Ideally, you feel pretty safe, though. You're having a good experience. At least in our retreat, almost everybody had overall pretty good experiences. But the information content is very minimal. There's not much happening in there, other than a very intense experience of nothingness."
},
{
"end_time": 4037.5,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4019.701,
"text": " Whereas ayahuasca, psilocybin is much more like this in that everything is richly structured and usually there's actually several layers of oscillators talking to each other. Let me just find"
},
{
"end_time": 4056.937,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4038.131,
"text": " a pattern here."
},
{
"end_time": 4080.094,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4057.159,
"text": " Explain how that works. The article I would point to to kind of like explain like the phenomenology of like temporal distortions on various psychedelics is this one. I mean, I titled it the the pseudo time arrow. I mean, let me explain like the title. So it's kind of like I want to distinguish between the phenomenology of the passage of time and actual physical time."
},
{
"end_time": 4102.398,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4080.435,
"text": " I think it's very worthwhile to think of physical time."
},
{
"end_time": 4129.701,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4102.534,
"text": " Uh, yeah, as like, uh, something that may not be identical to the feeling of the passage of time, because like, you know, if you take five million DMT and you say like, oh, everything stopped, you know, it's not like literally, you know, the whole universe stopped and like, you know, from outside everything, everybody also saw it, but like, it's more kind of the phenomenology of time was like deeply altered. So the question is like, can we reconstruct why time feels the way in which it feels like?"
},
{
"end_time": 4158.387,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4130.384,
"text": " appealing just to the structure of the experience as opposed to kind of like appealing to like a physical time that you're accessing and what i'm exploring here is effectively how kind of like the the stacking of sensations uh allow the generation of an internal arrow of time so the idea is that okay like there's kind of this like physical time but also you know as we were saying that there's like this tracer effects you know things last longer on psychedelics right"
},
{
"end_time": 4180.043,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4158.712,
"text": " That's like normally there's always also a tracer effect regardless and i think that's like essential for the generation of the feeling of time is just very thin and and in some sense you know the things that are a little bit further into the past they're like fainter so there's kind of these like arrow of realism it's kind of what's like more recent is like more vivid"
},
{
"end_time": 4206.954,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4180.759,
"text": " And you can kind of reconstruct how things are changing and in what direction things are moving by kind of like the arrow of how things are becoming fainter over time. And now on psychedelics, you know, let's say like, this is what I might call like a sober pseudo time arrow is kind of how experience how the sensations become fainter, how they refer to each other. Maybe on psychedelics, you know, because everything lasts longer."
},
{
"end_time": 4224.309,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4208.012,
"text": " The internal arrow of time is longer in a sense. You have more sensations that are accumulated over time and that are referencing each other. So there's like a sense of like you're in an expanded time in a sense, just as a generic effect of the substances."
},
{
"end_time": 4255.162,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4225.162,
"text": " But then on the special cases or kind of like the interesting corner cases is where, for example, like the the sense of the hour of time may wrap around and actually connect with itself. This happens involuntarily. Often if you are listening to like really repetitive music on psychedelics, like if you're at a trance festival and like you took three hits of acid, you may feel like, oh my gosh, like I'm in a time loop and I've been here for who knows how long because the music kind of like wraps around the"
},
{
"end_time": 4283.677,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4255.162,
"text": " It may close, it may close, it may make your future the same as your past. Yes. And I think like legitimately something really interesting is actually happening to the topology of your attention. Like it is a very exotic configuration of consciousness. But yeah, I don't think you're breaking space-time, you know, in a more literal sense. But internally there's, yeah, it's a very unusual phenomenology. Oh, and yeah, the thing that actually I think does happen in something like Fabio Mio DMT is more"
},
{
"end_time": 4313.319,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4284.565,
"text": " I kind of like central collapse. It's a little bit more kind of like time stops when everything synchronizes with all of the sensations synchronized and they're kind of like in phase. There's no way to distinguish one thing from another. And like there is no internal passage of time. I mean, I would maybe define it, describe it this way, which is like, if you have like a lot of yeah, kind of like clocks moving near to each other,"
},
{
"end_time": 4335.708,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4314.48,
"text": " There's no absolute frame of reference. All they can know about how time passes is by looking at the differences in their phases internally. But if suddenly all the clocks are moving together, internally there's no time. When you have this hyper-synchrony across many different aspects of you,"
},
{
"end_time": 4360.606,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4336.118,
"text": " It's kind of like time may stop for the parts that are synchronized with each other. And yeah, you know, like a peak Fabio DMT experience is like, your body and mind figures out how to synchronize everything, kind of like reprojecting it from the right way so that everything is in phase. And subjectively, that feels like, yeah, there's just no time, like, or timeless outside of space and time, so to speak. And what about the experiences of"
},
{
"end_time": 4385.418,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4361.51,
"text": " entering other animals lives and other people's lives and past lives and so on. Yeah, I'm not sure. Yeah, I'm not sure if I could really comment on that. I haven't really kind of like seen firsthand people really reference like past lives. Have you experienced that yourself? No, no, I mean, like the the most unusual kind of like thing I have personally experienced."
},
{
"end_time": 4415.776,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4385.879,
"text": " which is widely reported and you know I definitely should like write about it is more about a sensing when a family member like dies like that that is like pretty often reported and sometimes you may have kind of like a complex hallucination or like some kind of mystical experience if anything yeah that is the one thing I would say like okay this probably personally it feels like there's like a signal there but uh but yeah no like hallucinations of past lives or something like that yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't say like I've experienced that"
},
{
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"index": 177,
"start_time": 4416.442,
"text": " Yeah. If we go back to how we started, which is these coupled oscillators, if you don't mind going back. Yeah. Yeah. This is like the kind of like toy model example. Okay. In none of this, can I see how you could ever come up with a Mantis alien DMT encounter? So where do those come from? One thing I will say to begin with is that, okay, whether these are kind of a, there's like some influence from kind of external intelligences or not. It is very clear."
},
{
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"text": " that like what you hallucinate on, let's say like DMT or various psychedelics, you know, it patterns on top of your own world model. And so there is this overall framework we call psychedelic thermodynamics, which is this idea that, you know, on a psychedelic kind of like you're the energy of your consciousness increases, like everything is like brighter, things are like more wobbly, there's more flexibility, in some senses that you're like heated up in a way."
},
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"text": " there's like energy sinks that locally kind of like crystallize your experience and essentially you know semantic content like things that you can recognize we think will function as kind of these energy sinks is is actually kind of like a shrink wrapping you know when you're on dmt and like the world is very wobbly if something kind of looks like a jaguar"
},
{
"end_time": 4522.654,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4495.145,
"text": " the field may actually may start to kind of like shrink wrap around as if it kind of like plays the role of the Jaguar. And this shrink wrapping effect actually I would describe it as a cooling effect. It's like when the flexible world sheet of experience approaches something that you've seen before, it cools around it. And effectively your experience kind of like crystallizes on things that you have experienced before it kind of like finds"
},
{
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"index": 181,
"start_time": 4523.49,
"text": " Energy sinks to crystallize around and like there's two things it tends to crystallize around one is like semantic content For example the concept of a car for example, it can be like things at that level of abstraction and"
},
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"index": 182,
"start_time": 4536.937,
"text": " And then the other thing is like a symmetries, like a repeating patterns, you know, kind of like crystallographic, you know, structures. And those are kind of like much more universal and like, you know, culturally neutral in a sense. So, you know, I would imagine, for example, yeah, like the actual kind of"
},
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"text": " symmetrical visuals that people in the amazon who take ayahuasca experience is probably the same symmetrical visuals as you know you and i would but the semantic content that they experience is probably quite different you know because it's culture bound why don't you show some of these entities that can be encountered yeah uh okay so i'm gonna rely on uh my friend symmetric vision uh who is like this awesome artist and he has been to some of the qri retreats"
},
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"text": " And I would say, you know, kind of like a world-class ad replicating psychedelic visuals."
},
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"start_time": 4592.79,
"text": " And I believe this one, yeah, this one is kind of like a DMT replication. It's a little bit long. So let me just kind of fast forward. It's kind of like at first there's like relatively, oh, okay. Oh God. Okay. Yeah. That's also like eyes closed versus eyes open. But okay. You see like, there's a lot of kind of like these efforts of the field to kind of symmetrify and like harmonize the various patterns. If you close your eyes, you're kind of like in a different world. But if you go sufficiently high in the dose, it doesn't matter whether you have the eyes open or closed."
},
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"text": " And yeah, you know, these very intricate structures happen where tubes, for example, are like fairly common tubes along which waves travel and the tubes, you know, often have like a lot of depth effects. You know, they play with depth. They can compress and like look like they go very, very, very, very far away from you. And then they expand and it's kind of like they're very close to you."
},
{
"end_time": 4676.92,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4647.654,
"text": " uh, so extreme kind of like depth, uh, illusion, uh, kind of phenomenology is extremely common. Um, and, uh, I will say that, okay, like the, the actual model that we have for how this happens requires more than just coupled oscillators. And it requires actually like, uh, kind of like something analogous to video feedback, uh, which is like, you know, one of the things that our overall kind of a system is doing, uh, and is capable of,"
},
{
"end_time": 4706.254,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4677.449,
"text": " is taking a chunk of your experience edit it in some way and then put it back into your your visual field or your tactile fields. I mean the the most classic example is if you enter you know like a bathroom where there's like a mirror your world simulation immediately kind of like knows how to kind of like copy everything on the left to make it go on the right right and internally you're not confused right like you're not kind of like I mean if we pass the mirror test"
},
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"start_time": 4706.63,
"text": " With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can go to tonight's game on a whim, check out a pop-up art show, or even try those limited edition donuts. Because why not? TD Early Pay. Get your paycheck automatically deposited up to two business days early for free. That's how TD makes Payday unexpectedly human."
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"text": " You understand that it's not like there's a room behind the mirror, right? Your role simulation is capable of handling those relationships. And on something like DMT, that capacity gets really exploited where every surface can briefly, for example, be interpreted as, well, this is the surface of a mirror that is reflecting something else in the scene. And the capacity for tracking those correspondences goes through the roof."
},
{
"end_time": 4783.063,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4767.381,
"text": " where you know you you you may see like okay this mirror is reflecting this other mirror which is reflecting this other mirror which is reflecting the original mirror we'll get back to the mirror right now what is going on here this is a seraphim no is it a seraphim what is one of these kind of like a biblical type uh angels"
},
{
"end_time": 4813.046,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4783.558,
"text": " uh you know multiple arms or tubes um kind of like a insectoid head uh some vibrating like you know time vortex in the center this is a commonly encountered entity well the the theme of kind of these like super intelligent insectoid mind hive thing with lots of arms uh they're made of like lots of like parts that reflect each other and they're all kind of interconnected that is like yeah like very very very classic uh high dose dmt"
},
{
"end_time": 4831.852,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4813.78,
"text": " Okay, getting back to the mirrors. Yes, getting back to the mirrors. So you're saying that you interpret every surface, everything as a mirror reflecting everything else. You can also relate that to Indra's net. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I'm going to show you something."
},
{
"end_time": 4862.398,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4837.995,
"text": " Where the video feedback has this ability to like shear, reflect, do all these transformations. Navigating the DMT space is kind of doing this. You're applying some rotation or transformation, shear effect on a piece of the Kaleidoscope that is connected to everything else."
},
{
"end_time": 4890.162,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 4863.012,
"text": " You know, the response in the field to a small change can be really dramatic. It can be like, OK, I think I'm just like reaching my arm over here, but it's actually like doing this weird contortion and you flip from one side of the fractal to the other. Wow. Yeah. But even this is like selling it short because this is just with one channel where like you have like just one camera that is essentially just being reflected and refracted."
},
{
"end_time": 4920.572,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 4890.845,
"text": " In a full kind of like the DMT circuit, so to speak, or like the circuit of the visual field that is maybe revealed by DMT in a sense, you have like multiple channels. I mean, essentially you have kind of like various cameras and some of those cameras are actually looking at the screen. And so there's like, yes, several levels of complexity higher, in fact, but on top of that though, there's also the coupled oscillators dynamics that are happening in addition to these mirroring effects. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 4947.5,
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"start_time": 4921.067,
"text": " What is your job? How do you make a living? What do you do? Is this your full-time work? Yes. Yes. Okay. So, I mean, psychedelic visualization is a component of what I do. I am a full-time, you know, consciousness researcher at QRI. We're funded by essentially, yeah, people who are like believers in your research, people who... Donors. Yeah, donors."
},
{
"end_time": 4960.145,
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"start_time": 4948.029,
"text": " We do want to make what we do ultimately self-sustaining and like I'm happy to talk about like various paths that I think are like plausible to make that happen. But yeah, I mean, effectively people who"
},
{
"end_time": 4984.241,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 4960.896,
"text": " I knew and who knew me and that we were already very interested in figuring out consciousness, who then became lucky with cryptocurrency, for example. That's one of the categories of donors. We also get a few grants here and there as well. But yeah, the bulk of our research and the retreats have been funded by very generous people. In part, I ask because plenty of the people who are watching this may have"
},
{
"end_time": 5011.527,
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"start_time": 4984.241,
"text": " some cash that they would like to donate and so what's the website? Yeah qri.org and no yeah we accept donations and like I think like they go really far like I can do like make a very quick pitch in plants if you're interested in the psychedelic kind of visualization efforts right like we're going to be open sourcing this tool we're going to be crowd sourcing data points for so that we get you know like thousands of people kind of like rate and rank and you know qualify this phenomenology see how accurate it is"
},
{
"end_time": 5027.466,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5012.005,
"text": " which i think is yes kind of like a service to the world in a sense like being able to like give people parameters to replicate their experience give them a photoshop of their consciousness so to speak and if you think of kind of like the finance of these efforts i mean like"
},
{
"end_time": 5057.415,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5027.585,
"text": " If you look at, let's say, in classic academia, how you run a study, there was a famous study that studied candy-flipping, which is LSD plus MDMA. And what they did is they used standard measures, like questionnaires, where they gave either LSD or LSD plus MDMA to participants. And then they asked them to fill out a questionnaire, like the mystical experiences questionnaire. And they find, hey, actually the questionnaire doesn't show a difference between the two."
},
{
"end_time": 5063.763,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5057.858,
"text": " And they conclude, well, MDMA probably doesn't add anything to the psychedelic experience."
},
{
"end_time": 5090.418,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5064.224,
"text": " That just means your instruments are poorly calibrated. There's clearly a difference. Psychonauts will generally agree there's a huge difference. One study like that costs millions of dollars, actually getting all of this infrastructure and doing it in a lab. At QRI, we were able to do things such as organizing week-long retreats in a place like Brazil for really cheap."
},
{
"end_time": 5118.899,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5090.418,
"text": " Being able to go through hundreds of visual experiments over the course of several weeks with people who are really passionate, who not only will, you know, they're not going to fill out a questionnaire, really they're going to be like writing a report about their phenomenology and what they learned. And there's a lot of collective knowledge that gets generated this way that then we make policy available. So I would argue in terms of kind of like the information theory of like, hey, how do you explore consciousness? I would argue our approach"
},
{
"end_time": 5132.346,
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"start_time": 5119.309,
"text": " Andres, thank you. Thank you so much Kurt, this is fascinating."
},
{
"end_time": 5166.613,
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"start_time": 5137.022,
"text": " Don't go anywhere. There's actually a Q&A from the live audience at this MIT Media Lab Augmentation Summit event, which is on the substack curtjamungle.com. That is C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. You don't want to miss it. If you're a fan of this episode, you'll enjoy the Q&A. Hi there. Kurt here. If you'd like more content from Theories of Everything and the very best listening experience,"
},
{
"end_time": 5194.206,
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"text": " Then be sure to check out my sub stack at curtjymungle.org. Some of the top perks are that every week you get brand new episodes ahead of time. You also get bonus written content exclusively for our members. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.org. You can also just search my name and the word sub stack on Google. Since I started that sub stack,"
},
{
"end_time": 5214.326,
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"start_time": 5194.48,
"text": " It's somehow already became number two in the science category. Now, Substack for those who are unfamiliar is like a newsletter, one that's beautifully formatted. There's zero spam. This is the best place to follow the content of this channel that isn't anywhere else. It's not on YouTube. It's not on Patreon."
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{
"end_time": 5244.224,
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"text": " it's exclusive to the sub stack it's free there are ways for you to support me on sub stack if you want and you'll get special bonuses if you do several people ask me like hey Kurt you've spoken to so many people in the field of theoretical physics of philosophy of consciousness what are your thoughts man well while I remain impartial in interviews this sub stack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics and"
},
{
"end_time": 5274.258,
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"start_time": 5244.275,
"text": " It's the perfect way to support me directly. KurtJaimungal.org or search KurtJaimungal sub stack on Google. Oh, and I've received several messages, emails and comments from professors and researchers saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students. That's fantastic. If you're a professor or a lecturer or what have you, and there's a particular standout episode that students can benefit from or your friends, please do share."
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{
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}
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}No transcript available.