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Andrés Gómez-Emilsson: The Science of New States of Consciousness
February 26, 2025
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Oh my goodness, that's a wonderful question.
i think i would have difficulty prioritizing just one i'm gonna say there is four that any scientific theory of consciousness must be able to satisfy um which is first of all any theory of consciousness has to explain why consciousness exists to begin with um second it has to explain
What's called the palette problem? Essentially, what are all of the qualia values and varieties out there and the interrelationship between them? You know, why is there the blueness of blue and you know, the way as a rose smells like what is that and how are they connected to each other? Uh, the third is what are the causal properties of consciousness? Like in other words, why are we conscious, you know, from a biological evolutionary perspective, what kind of function is it playing?
And then the fourth one is the binding problem you know how is it possible that you know pieces of information can actually be put together into unified moments of experience and for me you know these are kind of like four hard constraints that any theory of consciousness must be able to satisfy and I think what is.
very common though is for theories of consciousness to only really care about a few of them or sometimes like not none of them at all but i think that yeah i mean it's sort of like if you want to go to the moon you've got to
Be able to not only have the escape velocity to get there, you also need an airtight container so that you don't asphyxiate on the way there. And I think of it something like that. There's like a series of things that theory of consciousness must be able to do. And if you only do a few of them, it's not really a theory of consciousness.
Okay we're going to get to your background, who you are, how you got interested in the field of consciousness, but I noticed you didn't talk about the heart problem nor the boundary problem. I'm curious as to why. Yeah, great question. I tend to lump together the binding problem and the boundary problem, even though legitimately you can think of them as different sub-problems. The reason I do this is that I think of them as equivalent just in different ontologies.
If you start out in kind of the common sense of you of the universe where the universe is made of atoms and forces, then typically you will think of it as like the binding problem but it's like how is it possible that atoms you know and neurons can somehow be put together into unified experiences.
If you start out with a different ontology, which is a unified ontology, let's say a field ontology, where you say, hey, the universe is a gigantic field, you know, then you really have kind of the boundary problem is like, how do you get this that is already unified to break down into sub components? So, you know, I think like there's a lot more detail to it, but I tend to think of kind of like two sides of the same coin. As to the hard problem of consciousness,
In a sense, um, the heart problem of consciousness thrives on an ontology where consciousness is really surprising, especially if you kind of like started out with an ontology, um, like in materialism or the universe is made of insentient matter. Then, you know, as David Chalmers would put it, um, okay, like how do you go from form and structure or, you know, like function and behavior?
Two subjective experience and like that seems kind of a and you know unbridgeable, you know leap in a sense. However, if you start out with an ontology where you say well the existence or the universe is fundamentally made of consciousness or qualia then the heart problem as stated is not really kind of like valid or doesn't really apply. You really would have like other problems to deal with which is usually how
We think about it at the quality research institute. We essentially take consciousness as fundamental. And then from there, you know, you have these problems like the boundary problem and the problem of causality and the palette problem and so on. So for Bernardo Castrop with his dissociated alters, would that be an attempt to solve the quote unquote boundary problem? Yeah, I would say so.
I wouldn't exactly yeah yeah I would say so like it is sort of like you know he starts out with kind of like a monism a really strong kind of monism uh uh in a yeah um any analytic idealism where yeah there's just one thing and then the question is how do you break that one thing into things such as like yeah your experience and my experience right now or or the sense of continuity over a lifetime or or something like that um
I think you really have to postulate some mechanism of action that satisfies a number of constraints. How is this possible? How does this fit into evolution? How the full picture makes sense essentially. Okay, let's talk about your background. How did you become interested in the field of consciousness? Yeah, great question.
I would, I would describe myself as a hyper philosophical, uh, you know, since, since I was a small kid, essentially just, uh, obsessively wondering about the nature of reality, why there's something rather than nothing, what happens after we die. Um, and, uh, yeah, yeah, I guess like people in your audience, probably, uh, you're probably a hub or, or shelling point for people in this, uh, with this condition, you know, this mental condition. Um, and, uh,
You know for a long time i actually just thought that a physics was you know the way to answer you know all of these big deep questions and i wasn't really thinking about consciousness all that much i mean i was thinking a little bit about it kind of like okay what is the soul what happens after you die and things like that but it actually was at the age of sixteen where i had a kind of like a ego death mystical experience where
It really made me reconsider that the sense of being a person or the sense of being me was kind of like the default state of affairs. It made me question like, hey, hold on a second. If you can enter a state of consciousness where it feels like you're everybody or you're everything or you're pure consciousness, that means that
This feeling that I had of being Andres, of being an individual, was really just a feeling. It was one of the ways in which my experience was getting painted, rather than being in touch with some kind of fundamental truth. And from then on, I realized that the biggest question actually isn't about physics. It really is about consciousness. So that if we were to map out
The depth of human knowledge and you know the how satisfying explanations are for different fields. You know in physics and chemistry biology there's a lot of mysteries but we have kind of like a quite a bit of a picture at least like we can do a lot of things with this picture but when it comes to consciousness it really feels like we are yeah kind of like babies you know the the science is really just not there like there's so many things that we just don't know and can't understand and I just thought
Hey, actually, if I'm serious about understanding reality and making sense of it, probably the biggest bang for the buck actually is going to be on the field of consciousness. Um, and for a bunch of other reasons too, you know, kind of, um, if, um, you know, like happiness and wellbeing turns out to be, you know, what life is all about or what the meaning of life is, then really understanding consciousness, you know, will give us a window into how to access that in a much more, you know,
efficient, robust, rigorous way. And in that sense, you know, while you know, understanding physics can be really powerful and has a lot of applied technologies is just not the same level of closeness to something like the meaning of life as you know, under developing a science of consciousness. So those were some of like the main main motivators. And yeah, since then, you know, I
only applied to universities that had like programs in particular that has something like a cognitive science degree and then I looked for like possible career options where I could yeah in some sense like blend rigorous science and you know advance my understanding of consciousness and yeah in 2018 I actually decided to yeah dedicate myself full-time to consciousness research by yeah starting the qualia research institute and and just
Trying to make it happen full time. So I'd like you to tell us about what the quality of research institute is, but it's also my understanding that you're primarily interested in math. Before university, no? Yeah, yeah, I would say I used to be very, very, very. I mean, I'm still very into mathematics, although I don't know nearly as much mathematics as I wish I did. But yeah, I was, you know, I've always enjoyed like puzzle solving and
i kind of like understanding uh you know a really beautiful aesthetic of mathematics is kind of like uh proofs you know that you can know for a fact that something is true even if it's uh hard to intuit or make sense of kind of like in a in an everyday sense
You can rigorously prove that something is true and is always true, you know, and I always found that kind of like very aesthetically very appealing. And yeah, I used to participate in like math competitions and yeah, it used to be kind of like what I imagine myself being in the future, being a mathematician. And it really wasn't until at the age of 16 that kind of my worldview was flipped upside down and realized, hey, hold on a second. Consciousness is the bigger mystery.
That said, that aesthetic has really carried through and the way I approach consciousness is through the lens of arriving at mathematical models of it and ultimately I think that mathematics has been extremely successful in the realm of physics
And I see no reason why it's not going to be just as successful in the realm of consciousness. At the end of the day, I even think physics and consciousness will be two sides of the same coin. So it's approaching it from both sides. So other than your 16 year old self, what was an experience or it could be part of your research that I assume has to do with psychedelics that shattered your conception of reality the most? Yeah, that's a great question.
I think a very important. Yeah, I would say a couple things.
Two of those are from like talking to David Pierce, who is a British philosopher. Yeah, maybe, maybe let me explain a little bit about that. You know, like, okay, maybe when I was 15, 16, I was, yeah, kind of just looking online for, you know, like minded individuals, people who could talk about, you know, consciousness, the question, why is there something rather than nothing? You know, we're curious about psychedelics.
I'm an understanding yeah actually what is the meaning of life and and and so on and and i stumbled upon a website that's called the hedonistic imperative that argued that it is possible to essentially engineer ourselves to always be happy and you know it sounds kind of impossible but then there's actually a bunch of examples of people who are born with a condition that is called a hyper themia
Hiberthymia where essentially you know day in day out there just pretty happy to be alive almost independently of what happens in their environment.
But this doesn't mean they're actually this you know this functional you know they can still in some sense feel less happy if a friend you know is in danger or you know experience a cell illness but nonetheless you know they usually don't deep below what we call the hedonic zero kind of like below the state of consciousness where you say like oh actually this feels bad.
And so yeah, this kind of like proofs of concept that you could potentially be happy all the time. Um, and what David Pierce, the writer of the hedonistic imperative, uh, argued was that, you know, in, in the future, we might be able to engineer ourselves, you know, even at the genetic level to be able to be happy all the time without sacrificing any functionality that many, if not all of the negative states of consciousness that we're very familiar with.
Are things that we have access to because they were evolutionary adaptive in the you know ancestral environment of adapted this not because it's necessary for consciousness and necessary for intelligence. I'm sorry i really you know read everything i could from from this philosopher and there was like a bunch of things that.
Kind of like made me have like really important updates in in my worldview from from his view. One of them was precisely that you know philosophy is not enough to essentially solve the problem of suffering that you actually also require technology that you know at the time I was like really into what's called open individualism and I'm sure we're going to get into it. You know more deeply but that is the philosophy that
Yeah, we're all one consciousness. So, you know, at the time I used to believe, hey, if we could like rigorously prove that we're all one consciousness, then we're not going to be afraid of death. And, you know, there's going to be no wars because we're going to realize that, you know, we're just fighting ourselves and and so on and so forth. But I didn't realize until reading David Pierce that, hey, you could realize that we're all one, but still be depressed, you know, for biochemistry reasons or neurological reasons.
So I think that was a very big update that like happiness and technology actually will probably interface quite substantially and maybe that's an important part of kind of the plot of human evolution as it were. But then the other like huge update that came from David Pierce was the binding problem. I mean like for many years like maybe until I was like 22 years old or so.
I arrived just by reasoning on my own and in agreement with a lot of philosophers that the thing that matters for consciousness is information processing. So I was just convinced if you were to interview me when I was like 20 years old.
I would just say yes it's pretty obvious if you think about it that if you make a simulation of a brain in a digital computer of course is gonna be conscious because you know you have exactly the same information processing from the bottom up is just a different format you know and we shouldn't be as they call it a you know carbon chauvinists just because it's not made of carbon we shouldn't we shouldn't discriminate against it.
But yeah, David Pierce actually made me realize that, hey, consciousness is much more tricky than that. And the binding problem in particular, like how information gets put together into unified moments of experience, may actually require a specific physical substrate, which I'm happy to go into more deeply. But that completely transformed my worldview because the kind of picture I had for what would be a good future really changed. I used to think,
Hey, you know, if we end up actually just living in servers, you know, we transformed the entire planet into just kind of a gigantic server rack, you know, we're just like tiling every continent with servers. As long as it's simulating, you know, like happy brains, then like, what's the big deal? That's a that's that's probably okay, you know, from a subjective, you know, perspective, like that's actually a perfectly fine future.
But nowadays I actually think that would be a massive disaster because there would be nobody there which would actually be a completely empty world So that's just because of the server aspect because you don't believe computers can be conscious. Yes But if it was just conscious agents being happy then that would be a world that you would want to exist
I mean, I would be very open to it. I mean, like in a sense, if there is nobody, so to speak, who's like perceiving the aspect of the implementation where you're like, okay, you just see the servers and makes you feel sad. If instead, you know, the thing that is going on in terms of experiences is yes, just a lot of hyper meaningful experiences with very rich subjective lives. Yeah, probably. I would probably say there's no problem there.
Okay, I'd like to get back to something you mentioned about happiness. So the Dalai Lama, which is someone that I imagine will come up a couple times in this conversation, distinguishes between happiness and meaning and he emphasizes the latter. So he teaches that constant happiness is not possible and it's not the goal. Instead, he focuses on a sense of purpose and meaning even during difficulties. Viktor Frankl was similar in that
Suffering can coexist as long as you have a deeper clinical meaning you have to have this meaning centered approach to life. Rather than the pursuit of happiness so what do you make of that what does your definition of happiness in tail.
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Head over to their website www.economist.com slash totoe to get started. Thanks for tuning in and now back to our explorations of the mysteries of the universe. What does your definition of happiness entail? Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, how do I approach this? There's a lot for me to say here. So I'm going to make a
I'm going to define a term which is valence. So valence is how good or bad the experience feels. Happiness would be kind of a flavor of valence. It's a particular type of positive valence state of consciousness that usually involves actually kind of like a sense of hey things are holistically going pretty well. Happiness can be usually distinguished from let's say like just raw
You know, sensory pleasure in the body, which a lot of people would say like, well, that's just a component of happiness, but happiness is a little bit more broad. Um, uh, that said, you know, usually when you say something like, well, uh, a very meaningful, rich experience, oftentimes what comes to mind is something actually a bit even more encompassing than just happiness is kind of like, it is not just like being happy at the moment. There's also kind of like a sense of a guarantee that things are connected properly and
Your representations of the world are accurate in such a way that you're not just hallucinating that things are going well, you're also actually in contact with the world and things are actually truly going well. And in that sense, you can think of it as kind of like a rich positive feelings, meaningful experiences, maybe even more desirable than mere happiness as it were.
There is the question of, okay, is a unpleasant but highly meaningful experience in some sense desirable. And for me to kind of like really go there, I want to present to this concept that we call the tyranny of the intentional object. So the intentional object in philosophy is essentially the aboutness of experience. You know, that when you see a dog,
It's not just a series of kind of like pixels in your visual field where like it's it's also there is like a the sense of there's like a subject of experience there and there's like a relationship there is a set of meanings associated with that with that percept and the meaning has a lot to do with kind of intentionality like the aboutness of experience.
Well what i would argue is that we are programmed by evolution for valence the goodness or bad experience to be intimately related with the aboutness of experience in other words the intentionality of our consciousness is very highly kind of bound up with whether it feels good or bad.
That said, I don't think this is a strictly necessary feature of consciousness. I think this is an evolved characteristic of typical moments of experience. So what tends to happen is that, you know, if you're just experiencing kind of a superficial, let's say like pleasant bodily sensations or pleasant kind of like sensory inputs,
But you don't get the sense that it is about something and about something meaningful and important that connects to the rest of your world model. Often times that triggers an unpleasant sensation which often times we describe as a feeling of meaninglessness. In other words the reason why we don't like you know meaningless experiences as it were is because we are programmed in such a way
That meaningless experiences makes us feel bad so. You know this is almost gonna like putting a victor franklin on his on his head you know kind of like turning him upside down i would actually say that the reason you know he emphasizes meaning so much is because. The idea of not caring about meaning makes him feel bad.
But that actually, you know, fundamentally, he's still actually just talking about valence. He's actually just talking about whether things feel good or bad. It's just that we are programmed in such a way that the aboutness of experience is part of what makes us feel good or bad. But I think that's kind of a programmable feature and is not really the fundamental source of value, which can be demonstrated in a number of ways. I mean, like it's
You know david pierce would say something like you rarely hear for example somebody say like yeah my my life is intensely you know intensely. Unpleasant and the void of any positive feeling yet i feel it's you know richly meaningful and actually people who would say that i think if you do kind of a micro phenomenological interview. You will realize that what they say like yeah actually my life is richly meaningful regardless
They will be able to point out at like body sensations and kind of sensory features of their experience that are actually positive in valence. So I don't believe you could have kind of a deeply meaningful experience without that also being tied with positive valence. In on pragmatic accounts, though, I do think that caring about meaning, you know, and relationships and projects and, you know, long term things,
Is actually much better for your valence and the valence of others than just caring about kind of like in the moment sensory pleasure. That is absolutely the case. However, I think that is because we're not really good at representing actually like how different actions are going to impact our long term experience. And if we were kind of like smarter or kind of like we could see things from a higher perspective as it were, I think we would realize that. Yeah. Whenever we say, Hey, we care about meaning.
That deep down, it's because that is a program that is helping us manage our long-term balance. So have you heard of psychological egoism? So for people who don't know, why don't you talk about what it is? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I might be getting it mixed up, but yeah, correct me if I'm wrong. Psychological egoism is this idea that
You never ever ever actually do anything good for others because everything that you do is just to feel better yourself and and we're programmed in such a way that let's say if you do a selfish action we kind of like internalize the feeling of social punishment that comes from that selfishness and and it makes us feel bad so even when we are kind of like being altruistic and dedicating our time and energy for the sake of others
Deep down, actually, we're just doing it to feel better ourselves in the moment. Did I get it right? Yeah. Yeah. So so I see parallels between psychological egoism and and this constant underneath motivation toward the good or happiness or positive valence that you mentioned. So psychological egoism to me is it's either
Unfalsifiable or it's tautological. So again, I'll just spell it out from the way that I see it. It's that every action you wonder if have I ever done anything that's selfless? Well, then as soon as you start to point out a case where what you've done is somehow against your own interest, someone can say, Yeah, but you did that because you wanted so and so. So there's always an underneath that that
Someone can say, well, you were still selfish somehow. So it's difficult to disprove these motivational claims. And I'm curious if you see a similar unfalsifiability to this. Well, if you're going into a fire because of a higher purpose, well, somehow that's still positive for you overall because you wanted to do so. I'm not even sure if positive feeling is the correct term because for me,
When I feel a sense of meaning and significance, sometimes it's correlated with positivity. But even in the negative times, there's something else that I wouldn't call positive. I would more call it direction or determination. And it's somehow underneath, but it's not as if I can map it to something as simple as valence. So I want to know what you think about that.
Yes, super good question. Very, very rich question. I think the first thing that I'll say is that, you know, valence is a pretty kind of a pretty broad term because a lot of feelings and sensations have a valence, even if they look very different than what we think of as kind of like pleasure and pain or happiness and, you know, and sadness.
Think of, for example, the flavor of umami, or as you grow older and you acquire a more refined taste for savory things. Or green tea, for example. I have a friend who jokes about how in his meditation practice,
He used to kind of like prioritize, uh, kind of like the Dorito of meditative happiness as he'd wear just kind of this very rich, intense feeling of joy that you can experience. But now that he's more mature, he kind of like prefers to focus on kind of the green tea of the feelings of, of happiness in meditation. You know, it's kind of these like more, okay, like steady, you know, mature sense of wellbeing. Um, and I would say like something like that, like the feeling of, of meaning, uh,
It's not, you know, it's not kind of like a spoonful of sugar in your mouth, you know, but it is more kind of like the umami of experience. It's one of these like more subtle, refined, you know, flavors of consciousness, but it still has a positive or negative valence at the end of the day. And I think it is not unfalsifiable because
The structure of valence still applies, and I think it's a universal property. This ultimately comes from Mike Johnson, co-founder of Qualia Research Institute, who proposed what's called the symmetry theory of valence. What makes an experience feel good or bad has to do with the presence or absence of symmetry and anti-symmetry. The intuitive conception here is harmony and dissonance.
In sounds and music you can essentially take a snapshot of a music and do a dissonance analysis on it and that will give you a very very large percentage of how pleasant or unpleasant that tiny bit of music sounds like of course a lot of what makes an experience a musical experience feel good or bad depends on the context and we carry the context you know from let's say like the previous movement in a symphony
Interpret the current sounds and so there's a lot of context that might be missing if you just do analysis of a given snapshot but but still you know just one snapshot will give you a very large percentage of kind of like the texture of the experience and so. I would argue that you know just as kind of like the feeling of something you know very you know the Dorito of happiness let's say kind of a bodily orgasm for example. Has kind of these harmony and symmetry and coherence to it.
But then, you know, this kind of like reach undertones of meaning in an experience. They also have this harmony and coherence to it. And I think it is that the reason why ultimately they feel good and we want to pursue them. Now that is kind of like why I think it's not unfalsifiable that like, Hey, we really go in there and let's say we find the meaning generators in your brain and we introduce dissonance to it.
You would actually say something like, oh gosh, this feels like very unpleasantly meaningless or something like that, that you could actually tune the coherence and the dissonance of sensations. It would be reported as, Hey, this is feels more or less, you know, richly meaningful or not. And Richard pleasant or not. Um, I want to also touch upon, you know, the, the question of like, you know, philosophical egoism, um, psychological egoism, um,
At a deeper level, which is like, can you ever actually do something that is beyond just for yourself? And that actually is a very, very deep question because, um, I think that something really profound about consciousness is that there is some kind of like inherent uncertainty about the identity of an experience. Um, because an experience is not just kind of a point like, um,
Structure is not it's not just kind of like you can identify in your experience and say like okay here is the self and the experience is happening to this you know particular point and experiences a lot of things simultaneously. And some experiences you know actually have like a conception of the self that is very different from other experiences and.
whether you know a given action is selfish or not depends on your model of what the self is and and as a consequence i think you know at the end of the day i don't think it is true that we are only doing things that are in a sense making us feel good because the very meaning of what us is is kind of like a
a shifting target, a moving target. And it really depends on kind of like what kind of philosophy you've been exposed to. And in that sense, there's actually some kind of inherent uncertainty about whether you're doing it for yourself or not. That said, at a deep, you know, kind of like causal level, I do think we're always trying to increase our harmony and trying to reduce our dissonance. And in that sense, yes, I think there is like some truth to the psychological egoism.
Some definitions of consciousness, which I should ask you for your definition of consciousness, but I'll just spell out one of them, is the ability to feel and experience. So the fact that you can, it's the capacity to feel. Now, of course, that's just a single definition, and maybe that's more along the lines of awareness or something like that, or sentience doesn't matter, whatever. There's a capacity to experience, and then there is what you are experiencing, the contents of experience. So would you say that those are two qualitatively different categories?
I think there's a lot of value usually in kind of like carving out the ontology of consciousness in different ways because different carvings gives you different types of insights and leads for research. For context, when I say consciousness, I mean the what-it's-likeness of experience. Now, you know the word consciousness,
Really has kind of like at least twenty different meanings if you look it up in the dictionary all of those meanings are fascinating you know i. When somebody says hey i started consciousness even if they're talking about you know social consciousness or self awareness usually as far as i'm concerned is a very interesting topic.
However, I do think kind of the most philosophically fundamental, you know, kind of meaning of the word consciousness is consciousness is in the sense of qualia, the what is it likeness of experience, the blueness of blue or the quality of the smell of a rose, for example. And from this perspective, you know, when I say a consciousness or a moment of experience,
I'm actually kind of like talking about the entirety of kind of like what's happening in an individual put on code like screen of consciousness so
On a given moment, you know, like I have a visual field, I have a tactile field, I have an auditory field. I also have kind of the internal versions of those, you know, have a mind's eye. I have like an emotional landscape and I also have an inner dialogue. So that's already six different kind of sensory fields, as it were, you know, three external, three internal or about like internal states.
But then, on top of that, there is the feeling of meaning and the feeling of aboutness, the intentionality of experience. There's also cognition. And there's also more subtle things. For some blog posts, I sometimes called it ontological qualia, which is kind of the
The feeling of kind of like what is the fundamental ontology of the universe, which is something that is usually pretty fixed unless you explore meditation or psychedelics and then suddenly you that variable can change. It's like, oh my gosh, there was also that variable to my experience. Um, but you know, I would encapsulate all of that, you know, on a given moment of experience is like, you know, all the sensory fields, internal and external and cognition and the existential qualia and all of that is just kind of like one moment of experience.
One snapshot. There are, I think, like, you know, significant structural difference between, you know, the feelings that are associated with vision versus the feelings associated with audio. But they're kind of like still different facets of the same thing. And in that sense, I wouldn't make kind of like a fundamental distinction between, I guess, like the contents of experience versus the capacity to experience.
If that is encapsulated within a moment of experience, I would call both of those different facets of consciousness. Okay, I'd like to get like, I have 200 questions here, man. So I literally have 200. I have 172 questions here. So I won't be able to get to all of them. The quality of research Institute is something we should touch on. And I'd like you to explain what that is, and use that as a segue to talk about impedance matching.
and your findings with that. Okay, okay, fantastic. I'm not so sure if I will be able to make it justice for the second part of the impedance matching, but I'll give it a try. So yeah, the Qualia Research Institute, you know, something that came up because a number of reasons, you know, yeah, I guess, okay, like here's some context. So
I wanted to study consciousness full time, pretty much all my life, at least since the age of 16. I found it difficult to find a place in academia where they actually did study consciousness in the way that I found the most meaningful and important. I found that, you know, when I was looking for PhD programs, actually, I talked to lots of different professors. I mean, I lost count, but easily like 50 possible professors to work with.
Wow, usually plenty. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, easily, you know, a lot, a lot of them would say, yes, I studied consciousness, but then if you dig deeper into, you know, what kind of research they're actually doing, they're actually studying something like cognition or, you know, working memory, or maybe, you know, at best to something like, um,
You know, like the psychophysics, you know, like visual perception or something like that. Um, nobody that I found was actually studying in a fundamental sense, you know, qualia and the structure of the state space of qualia or, or, or something along those lines, the state space of qualia. Yeah. The status of qualia, which is like all of the possible sensations that you can have, you know, and I guess I kind of like.
lead was tested in a way it was when i would ask professors like hey like what do you think of the role of meditation and psychedelics for understanding consciousness and the brain and you know you know bear in mind that this was in 2013 were like okay psychedelics weren't as legitimized in academia as a subject of research but typically what i would hear would be something along the lines of well you know psychedelics affect the brain in very complex ways
You know a lot of subsystems at once so it's they're probably not a very good instrument to study consciousness instead you know what they were prioritizing were things such as like psychological interventions or even yeah you know something out of like ultrasound stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation which you know i think it's very very valuable for for for studying the brain and consciousness but you don't really get you know profound consciousness altering effects with those technologies
And the way I saw it instead was, Hey, hold on a second in physics. Um, you know, we, we have made so much progress because we've looked at the extremes, you know, we've looked at, you know, things that are very close to zero Kelvin, you know, things that are, you know, thousands of degrees Celsius, maybe in millions of degrees Celsius, you know, like looking at, at, you know, stars and supernova and, you know, cosmic phenomena.
You know you learned a lot from looking at the extremes and if your theory can only explain kind of room temperature physics. You know you're missing data to actually be able to kind of like differentiate between different uh equivalent you know empirically identical theories from the point of view of like making predictions in room temperature and i thought like hey for consciousness i think it's going to be the same that like if you have a theory of consciousness
And you think it's universal and you think it actually works, it should be able to tell you something like, Hey, what's going to happen if you combine ketamine and DMT? I mean, like, I know that sounds like kind of ridiculous. It's like, okay, you would only ever combine DMT and ketamine in a crazy party somewhere in the Bay area or something like that. That doesn't sound like science, but, but hold on. Like he's the same as in physics, right? Like a serious theory of physics should be able to tell you what happens if you mix, you know, lead and.
You know palladium at such and such temperatures in such and such pressure, right? Like it should be able to generalize and the same with that theory of consciousness and and I just really didn't find anybody who yeah, kind of like had that mindset or or that ambition really at the same time. There was these movements in the Bay Area coming up. This is when I was studying. Yeah, my masters at Stanford, you know 2013 2014 and
This movement called effective altruism was starting to become popular. And it is a very strong background assumption of most of the people who participate in that movement that consciousness is really just information processing in which case you know they anticipate that ai is gonna be conscious and also.
They have a particular way of making sense of whether, let's say, like a fruit fly is conscious and whether its life has value or not and how to assess that. And from our perspective, you know, me and my friends and philosophers who used to think a lot about this, even back in the day, there were kind of like really important missing components in how people were approaching, you know, the ethics of effective altruism.
And yet two that were really essential was the binding problem to, for example, be able to tell whether a computer is conscious or not. That really changes, you know, the panorama for desirable futures. But then the other one was theories of valence. Because a lot of people, you know, computer scientists, people who work in AI, the way they tend to think of valence is actually in terms of reinforcement learning. You know, they think of something like, well,
What is something feels good or bad depends on whether your reinforcement algorithm tells you that you should get more or less of that and some people actually believe that. For you know reasoning based off of kind of like pleasure as reinforcement.
That is it is actually literally impossible to always be happy right because if you were to always reinforce the same thing you kind of like max out at some point and and you're not learning anything new so you're not actually reinforcing anything it doesn't feel good but then you know empirically you find people who are like always happy and you find people who are always depressed people with you know chronic pain people with yeah chronic happiness as it were so um
If you know happiness and suffering is actually not something related to reinforcement learning or reinforcement learning is only tangentially related to it. Then it seems like we have a very important piece of the puzzle that is completely missing for like what is a desirable future. So we me and a few friends we could go found the quality research institute to essentially
Create a kind of this research enterprise with a goal of mapping out the state space of consciousness being able to eventually actually make rigorous predictions about you know any extreme state of consciousness you know as exotic as okay what happens if you combine DMT and ketamine and you know something that sounds ridiculous like that and then also being able to quantify how good or bad an experience feels based on its mathematical structure and
Essentially, a lot of people agreed with our stated goals and we got some amount of kind of like memetic support as it were in the community. Scott Alexander, the writer of Slate Star Codex, pretty important person in kind of like that sphere of people. He wrote about us in 2017.
And yeah we had our first intern cohort in 2019 and I think like it really has kind of like snowballed since 2021 where we started to actually organize some of these research retreats you know we would actually get together physically spend several weeks together and work on projects and yeah I mean now it's a
Kind of in a state where essentially we have like multiples of these retreats a year, uh, publishing papers in academia and, um, also, yeah, creating technology. Uh, maybe, maybe something that I'll, uh, add on to kind of this, uh, conversation is that, you know, um, a very big picture for like, what is it that the quality research Institute does is, um,
And it's not super easy because we do a lot of things but like one big picture way of describing it is that there is kind of like three goals and then there's like three disciplines with which we pursue those goals so.
The three goals are, I mean, first of all, we want to reduce as much as possible and prevent intense suffering. We have a lot of reasons to believe that actually that is a top ethical priority and it is actually highly, highly neglected. Even ineffective altruism is not really properly kind of a prioritized. The second goal is figuring out how to improve baseline. You know, the moment to moment
Positive qualities of experience and and meaning on anybody's life. And then the third goal is to understand a mathematical model and make accessible. Extreme pleasure states are states of extreme well-being just to give you an example something like the join us which are these very advanced concentration states in meditation which are.
extremely pleasant and extremely beautiful in ways that are very hard to describe. But we want to figure out what those are and develop technology to allow people to access them much faster than they currently can. And then the three disciplines are, first of all, philosophy, especially philosophy of mind, where we actually write up and publish in academia actual philosophy papers.
Which, you know, may sound kind of like pretty disconnected from reality, but you know, it is our, you know, our strong stance that better philosophy should actually lead to better science in particular, better philosophy of mind should lead to better neuroscience. So that is the second discipline that we engage in, which is like neuroscience, for example, algorithms for analyzing neuroimaging data is one of the things that we do. And then third,
is neuro technology. Especially we focus on non-invasive methods to interface with consciousness, alter it in beneficial ways and ways that increase agency allows you to have more control over your experience. And so it's really kind of a three by three, right? It's like, so just to remind you is like, get rid of the very unpleasant, improve the moment to moment, gain access to the really, really pleasant and meaningful, then philosophy,
Neuroscience and then neuro technology and essentially pretty much everything that we do can be found in kind of like that three by three matrix. Okay, so that's yeah very big picture view of the quality research institute.
Okay, great. Now I said I had 172 questions and I didn't say that every three minutes that you speak, 10 more questions occurred to me. So it's drastically over 200 and I have to choose what to pursue. So firstly, this is going to be part one of another conversation because there's no way that we can cram all of this into into two hours or so. Let's talk about the impedance matching then.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think this is super, super vigorous at this point. I mean, I think when I've talked about impedance matching, it's a well, think of like when you have several kind of like vibrations going on inside you, something that you can like tune into in meditation. You know, if you if you try to kind of like slow down in meditation, really calm down and then you do, let's say like a body scan of like what is happening in your body.
You will notice that there's a series of metronomes. There's kind of like some wave emitters as it were. You know, to start with, there is your breathing, right? Like you have a periodic kind of like oscillation just coming from breathing that is exciting your whole body at that frequency. But then there's also your heartbeat, right? Like and your breathing and your heartbeat can be aligned or misaligned.
Playing with the alignment of your heartbeat and your breathing actually is a really powerful technique for making progress in meditation. For example, aiming to do one breath cycle every six heartbeats and kind of like really honing in on that resonance. You know, so like, yeah, you have a kind of this integer ratio between those two vibrations or oscillations.
So that would be a kind of impedance matching in that you have like these two different frequencies. And you're taking steps to essentially make them aligned, make them a integer ratios of each other. But you know, that would be just the very kind of like the base frequencies of your of your experience, because there's a lot more that is happening. I mean, on increasing levels of subtlety,
You can notice oscillations or vibrations in your stomach, in your arms, in your legs, in your face. And one thing that I have found, something for which I don't have a rigorous empirical paradigm, but I'm pretty confident there is something here, is that whenever you pay attention to two things at once within your field of experience, they slowly but surely begin to synchronize.
So this is an exercise that people at home can can do, you know, you can just book five minutes by the clock. And let's say once you calm down a little bit in meditation, pay attention to the vibrations in both of your hands. I mean, most of the time, I guess people don't notice that there's vibrations in their body. But if you relax enough and you you're concentrated enough,
You will notice that everything is vibrating in different ways, usually pretty subtle, sometimes much more overt. But my claim is based on a lot of personal experience and trying it with other people. If you kind of like tune into the vibrations that are happening in both of your hands and you try to
kind of like place your attention in an even way for like not not kind of like this hand and then this hand or alternating no no no like try to pay attention to both of them exactly at once in a continuous kind of homogeneous way almost kind of like spreading some kind of attention liquid as it were in both of your hands you will notice that over the course of minutes the vibration slowly but surely synchronize
And after a while, you may even actually get kind of these like strobing sensation, where both of your hands are kind of like aligned with your heartbeat, for example. Now, this is just two parts of your body. But let's say that you do this over and over again. What do you do? Kind of the algorithm of this meditation would be you find the two parts in your body that are vibrating in the most desynchronized way possible.
Then you spend like five minutes paying attention to both of them until they harmonize. So that would be kind of an instance of impedance matching in a way of like you're connecting them in such a way that they can slowly but surely synchronize like metronomes in a table.
Okay, okay, let's be clear here. So when someone is focusing on say their left leg and their right ear, and those are the most dissonant. Now, maybe you say what was likely to be the most dissonant will be the heart and the brain or the or the like some some place of significance, whatever doesn't matter place A and place B. They're not trying to will the synchronization. They're just paying attention to the dissonance. Yeah, I would say this is light.
Yeah, a very slight kind of like twist here because if the thing that you're paying attention to is the dissonance itself, like if the thing that you're paying attention to is the way in which they're out of phase, actually that may exacerbate and enhance the dissonance. Just because that's kind of like how attention works, like whatever you pay attention to becomes stronger. That is kind of like a very big perspective. So instead, what you really have to do is
Pay attention to the way in which they are kind of similar and then slowly the ways in which the vibrations are similar will be the part that becomes amplified until eventually you you have kind of is like synchronize the strobing of the different parts of the body.
okay so you have Justin Bieber playing in one ear and then you have Nirvana playing in another ear and they're different and you can tell they're different and you could focus on their difference or you can say okay there I notice that they're different first of all now that I've noticed that they're different how are they similar and then they both have lyrics they both are similar vocal range they're not but you understand is that correct yes yes exactly like
Yeah absolutely something like there is an undercurrent of similarity or kind of like shared nature and you try to focus on that and yeah because essentially whatever you focus on whatever you pay attention to becomes a stronger than the shared aspect of experience will be strengthened over time.
And then if you kind of do this recursively, I mean, it's like, okay, like both of my hands now are vibrating in a, in a synchronized way, but maybe not my feet, then, okay, I'm going to pay attention to both of my hands and my feet at the same time until it synchronizes. And you repeat, you know, again and again and again, eventually actually your whole body and all of your sensory fields will enter into coherence.
And the moment you do that successfully, actually you enter the first JANA, which is this very powerful whole body vibration, which is coherent across the board and is usually described as extremely pleasant. It's also, by the way, one of the kind of like intuitive reasons why we associate at Qualia Research Institute
What are the kind of like harmony and symmetry of the experience with the feelings of well-being and the valence of the state that when you're like in this very, very concentrated state of consciousness, you notice how like even subtle kind of like misalignments and subtle imperfections in the synchronization process.
drive a sense of unease or slight body discomfort. And every time you actually bring together and you harmonize the vibrations, you get this feeling of happiness and well-being. And so you can actually just take it all the way and more and more levels of synchronization will eventually happen until something really exotic like you become this powerful sense of joy and then peace and then equanimity.
And then even you absorb into space for example like the fifth janice absorption into boundless space and. As far as i can tell the reason why that happens is because everything is in a state of coherence and the sense of a boundary and separation within our field of consciousness is literally implemented with out of out of phase interactions or.
Vibrations are not in synchrony. So whenever you synchronize everything the boundaries dissolve There's there's nothing your brain can use to kind of like generate the sense of separation And usually yeah, that's a very pleasant positive experience. And yeah, once you get used to kind of like those very high valence very pleasant joyful states of consciousness you realize that essentially our motivational architecture all of our life is
was driven by the pursuit of those kind of like that gradient except that we were pursuing it in a very inefficient kind of roundabout circumvent kind of way.
Okay, so we're going to get to impedance matching. But before we do, like I mentioned, several questions occurred to me. So one of them is that if what reality quote unquote is is ultimately unified, why care about the difference, quote unquote difference between positive and negative, if it's ultimately a non distinction to begin with. And so let me tell you what's underneath that with you, with your focus on the
Initially the effect of altruism movement and now maximizing pleasure. How do you know that you yourself haven't induced a frame of mind where you are focusing on the difference between positivity and negativity in the same way that you shouldn't focus on the dissonance and you've manifested that difference as mattering more. So that's why you care so much about the positive.
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Oh, that's a wonderful, wonderful question. I mean, it really is, because it's, it's wonderfully tricky. And, and I actually see a lot of people like kind of like subtly be confused about this. So I mean, first of all, if you identify kind of like how good or bad the universe is, with the amount of suffering that there is in it, or the sense of separation that there is in it, and you try to solve that problem,
Absolutely. You know, internalizing that problem is going to cause a suffering inside you. You know, there's, there's no doubt about it. Um, at the same time, that can be an altruistic type of suffering. Uh, I mean, in a, in a similar way, um, to, well, if, you know, a mother and, and, and the child, like, if, if the child is crying, you know, the mother could be choosing to pay attention to the TV instead of the child crying.
and of course she's gonna feel better by doing that but you know there's a good reason why to pay attention to the child crying because hey we're all connected consciousness is one thing and if the child is suffering in some sense yes that's all of us suffering it makes a lot of sense to actually represent accurately the states of suffering in the world if you can do something about it I do think you know if you're powerless about what you can do
Let's say you have like severe cognitive disability or let's say you you know you have a life expectancy of like one week or something like that actually probably deceiving yourself about how good the universe is or like the world around you may actually be good for you because and good for everybody you know because you're not gonna fix it anyway so why not forget about it but if you're you know like a young kid in university and you're
choosing you know a career in order to actually have a positive impact then yeah actually taking in some of the suffering of the world by internalizing kind of like that sense of separation and discomfort it is a kind of altruistic action and i do think it is yeah beneficial to do it even if it's not all that good for your well-being i mean i i do notice you know the the temptation to do otherwise i mean it is very common in in spiritual circles for example to have the the trope
that hey, everything is already perfect. You know, that is very common in spiritual circles. People who meditate a lot, very often they will arrive at a view where they think something like, well, you know, it's not about good versus evil. It really is about the balance between good and evil and everything is perfect already. So like you don't have to fix anything. But I think that's kind of a type of wireheading that is kind of like misrepresenting
You know the rest of the universe and the states of consciousness out there in the universe just to feel better which again can be helpful in some periods of life or if you don't plan to do anything about the the suffering out there yeah sure that's that's a perfectly valid thing but yeah i think the strongest case i would make is that the the the issue is that yeah the the world actually and especially you know the suffering in the world
is actually, I would say, much worse than our intuition tells us and even much worse than, you know, people like Viktor Frankl, my, my, you know, somebody who survived the Holocaust, even people who are kind of like have witnessed that level of suffering, I think usually are still underestimating just how bad bad things are. So if you want to, you know, actually help, you do require, I think, to internalize a little bit, okay, just how bad it is.
We the caveat, you know, that you really have to take care of your own well-being as well, right? Like it really doesn't help for you to become deeply depressed and because then you become powerless as well. So, um, which is something that happens in effective altruist circles. Yeah. When somebody starts reading a lot about, you know, factory farming and just how, how bad it is. Right. Um, oftentimes, yeah, they actually become so depressed. They, they can't actually do anything about it. And, um,
And then, yeah, things are worse on the whole. But if you combine kind of this awareness of the suffering in the world together with practices of well-being and practices that enhance your valence, I think you can strike the right balance where let's say you're doing Jhana meditation on the one hand, you're taking care of your long-term well-being, but also you're not neglecting what's happening in the world. And I think that is the balance that I tried to strike.
So firstly, that happened to me as well when I was 18 or so and I started to read about and watch videos. Geez, some are still burnt in my mind about factory farming and and just the suffering of people and beheadings and torture. Some of us still is still in me. So I resonate with that. So. My question still remains about
If the ontology is ultimately unified without distinction, so maybe that's maybe my premises incorrect, my rendering of your premises incorrect. But anyhow, so if that's the case, how can it be the case that there's a fundamental distinction between what's pleasant and unpleasant? Yes, I think maybe it's a slight mischaracterization, which is leading to a very different kind of picture of the universe.
So let me try to paint it as follows. So I do think, okay, in the qri ontology and view of the universe, the universe is a gigantic field of consciousness. And in some sense, we are all it, you know, the spiritual trope that hey, we're all one consciousness, I think there's something really true about it. At the same time, these gigantic field of consciousness also is divided into various pockets.
And this is where what we call the topological solution to the boundary problem comes into play. So this is essentially how we solve the boundary problem, which is, hey, if everything is one, how come you're there and I am here? Like it's kind of like a strange, strange thing. If everything is unified, why are there different people, different animals, different subjects of experience? And our answer is that, well, everything is one. However, within that oneness,
You have a rich topological structure and you know, this is something that we see in physics. You know, the best example, best simple intuitive example I can give is to imagine the surface of a balloon as kind of the field of consciousness. If you take a balloon and then you twist it from both ends in opposite directions, there is a precise moment where the center collapses and you get a pinch point.
And in some sense, now you have like two balloons that are connected by one point. And this is one of these cases where, you know, a difference in degree, you know, how twisted the balloon is, cashes out into a difference in kind, where like now you have effectively kind of two balloons connected by a point. You know, you can still argue it's still just one balloon because it is kind of a continuous surface. However,
If you have kind of different pictures or information in both sides of that balloon there's going to be a kind of like a bottleneck in how information can transfer from one side to the other because whatever you you try to send from one side of the balloon to the other it will have to be compressed through this one dimensional point and that's going to eliminate a lot of information so in our picture of reality at qri we think yeah the universe is something like that it's kind of this gigantic
What's also kind of trippy and maybe unexpected here is that,
This also happens within one person over the course of even like a second, you know, in our model, each moment of experience is actually very temporarily thin, as we call it, meaning that a moment of experience may be like less than a millisecond in terms of its temporal depth. And so even just one brain that is awake is going to be producing lots of little kind of like pockets, lots of little bubbles of experience within within one second.
Now, um, I do think that, yeah, if you want to kind of like quantify the total suffering or the total happiness in the universe, um, what you have to do is look at the structure of all of those little pockets and quantify the harmony, the dissonance, the symmetry and asymmetry in all of them. And that can give you a total score for like, Hey, like in this region of reality of the universe,
There is this amount of suffering, this amount of happiness, this is the net valence of the state. What you raise, it is kind of like really relevant and tricky in that like one may ask, okay, like if actually the thing that is deep down, the deep reality behind all of these different pockets is actually just one large field, you know,
Why would something like pleasure or pain matter if it's just one thing? Well, the thing that I would argue is that while kind of the identity of reality cannot be changed, the features that it expresses can. And depending on what happens, different features will be expressed. And I think that at the end of the day, the features that matter for ethics is the valence of those experiences.
You legitimately can have like a better or worse reality and he's sort of like to put it poetically is the distinction between a reality in which God is having fun and a reality in which God is you know in a in a very unpleasant kind of hellish state Yeah, I'm let's see how you react to that there's more I could say but yeah Okay, so there are various definitions of oneness and
So one would be there's a new age conception of oneness. There's broadly speaking, a Buddhist conception of oneness and a Vedic conception of oneness. And they're not all the same. And even within Buddhism and Vedism, there's several facets that disagree with one another. So I need to understand what your definition of oneness is. So my confusion is that most of the time when people speak about oneness that I speak to, they're referring to something that's undifferentiated.
Now in your balloon example, the material, we could all belong to the same material of the balloon, but the material of the balloon is of a different nature than the twistedness of the balloon and of a different nature than the pressure that's inside the balloon. So you could say we're all of the same vellum. So we're all of the same cloth, but there are still other properties. And thus it's not entirely undifferentiated to me. Yes, yes, that's right. Yes, this is yeah, maybe this is a really great
Please do we talk about zero ontology because this thing like unifies these different threads. So zero ontology is this theory by David Pierce about why there is something rather than nothing. Like the big question, why is there anything at all? And, you know, he's kind of like answer to this is that, you know, in kind of the deep reality
There is something that is a zero. There is something that is unchanging and it's a kind of nothing that by necessity exists and out of it by implication, everything that we experience is entailed. And it's not necessarily kind of like a causal relationship. It's not kind of like this deep nothingness is causing our reality. It's more kind of in the language of logic where
This deep nothingness is entails you know it implies our reality and you know the bottom line is that he thinks that you know all of the values in reality cancel out to zero you know the three kind of like areas where this shows up which ultimately may be equivalent of different facets of the same thing is physics math and consciousness.
So in physics and you know it much better than I do. I think you've probably have studied this much more deeply than I have. But you know, you have things such as like the total charge in the universe adds up to zero or the total energy of the universe or angular momentum or momentum add up to zero. And so there is a sense in which, you know, the different values in physics are kind of like there's some kind of accounting system.
That if you put them all together, they cancel out into some kind of net zero. I mean, maybe maybe it's not like strict nothingness. Maybe it's kind of these charged quantum vacuum or something like that. But there's like a sense in which everything cancels out in mathematics. You know, there's of course a lot of different philosophy of mathematics, but there is some attempt to, for example, reconstruct all of mathematics out of the empty set where you interpret, let's say, natural numbers.
As kind of this nested recursive, um, um, sets that have the empty set within, um, and then it's kind of like, Hey, you can reconstruct all of mathematics out of quote unquote, nothing or out of like an empty set. And in the realm of consciousness, uh, this applies to the values of qualia. So in particular, uh, there, there are some states of consciousness, both in meditation and psychedelics, um, one in particular, a very
Worth noting is five Mio DMT. They call it the God molecule, which is essentially a psychedelic that tends to produce quite reliably this effect of the values of consciousness canceling each other out. So, you know, a very kind of classic example is if you take a moderate dose of five Mio DMT, you may experience your visual field kind of like defract quote unquote,
and you kind of like see all of the colors at once all of the colors of the rainbow and then if you take a slightly higher dose something really peculiar happens which is that you sort of like take all of the colors of the rainbow and you look at them from a certain angle and then they all cancel out into a transparent or kind of nothingness and the same also seems to happen with tactile sensations and audio sensations that
There is a dose where you get the full palette, the full state space of possible qualia, and at a higher dose, they all cancel out, and you get this sense of nothingness or emptiness, which is a very profound feeling of lack of differentiation. In fact, one of the fascinating things of this is that
The feeling of you know god consciousness as they call it kind of like the profound feeling of like well there's only one subject of experience in all of reality and we're all it that happens at a certain dose but if you take an even higher dose actually that cancels out with a feeling of separation which is kind of like another type of qualia and actually yeah the feeling of oneness and the feeling of separation are kind of two aspects of consciousness that can cancel out
And there's something that just doesn't feel like anything that is kind of the result of that cancellation. So what I want to say is that yes, there is absolutely a sense in which, you know, the, the total amount of green, as it were in reality, the subjective quality of green needs to eventually cancel out with the total amount of red in reality. So there is a sense in which the values of consciousness do cancel out. However,
There are aspects of consciousness that don't cancel out. And in particular, I think valence doesn't cancel out. I especially don't think it is the case that how good and bad experiences feel need to sort of like average out somehow. Like I don't think it is the case that whenever there is a positive experience, somewhere else there is a negative experience to balance it out. And the reason is that valence
is kind of a special property of consciousness that is not one of these raw kind of low level features like color is actually more something structural and emergent out of how you put together those features. So it is such as for example the dissonance of a musical piece like you can take a musical piece
and you know count all of the uh A's and B's and C's you know like the different notes that you played and whether the the piece sounds good is not dependent on how many A's and B's you have right right it is dependent on the order and the precise combinations that they had right so the the harmony and dissonance is an emergent property of the actual structure how it is put together and i think it's exactly the same for
Consciousness you could have a universe that is organized in such a way that. Every experience is actually wonderful and even though everything cancels out to quote a quote zero innocence the thing that cancels us to zero is the raw very low level features of reality not this emergence kind of high level gestalt like like like valence.
Okay so a variety of questions. Okay so number one if you were to just continue to zoom into these higher level emergent properties though it would become undifferentiated. So where is this mattering coming from that it matters how it's put together at some higher level? I wonder if there's a different analogy other than the math and physics about cancellation. So in physics it's not the case that the total charge of the universe is equal to zero
Or that the total mass of the universe is equal to zero or the total momentum. We don't know. We know that in localized regions you can, if you were to create matter that you would have to create it of equal charge and opposite. There's local conservation laws. But doesn't mean we don't, we don't know how the universe started. We don't know the boundary conditions of the universe. So that's like an extra condition of top. And then when it comes to math, building math from the empty set, it's somewhat misleading to say math is built from the empty set
because well firstly there's a difference even between saying math is built from the empty set and math is built from emptiness because otherwise you just be like math and then you just you just just look at the students and you just stop but the empty set means something and then you also have to have set inclusion in order to define other sets and then there's also rules of logical deduction and those aren't the same as the empty set so that's what i mean it was also similar to the
What I was speaking about earlier between the difference between the vellum, so the balloon material, and then the pressure inside the balloon and the twistedness of the balloon. So some people will look at that it's all of the same cloth and say monism, but that's not quite, it's not clear to me that that's monism as there are other properties associated with it. And then at what point does the property collapse into the vellum? I don't know. But anyhow, so take that however you like. And I'd like to hear your responses, please. Thank you. Yeah.
Okay so I mean I think it's something like definitely of course in the realm of speculation but when you have a network of kind of these variables that can cancel out you know if you have like okay color you have for every blue quality of blue you have a corresponding quality of yellow
And whenever you have kind of like movement in this direction, you also have movement in this other direction somewhere else and so on. On the one hand, that sounds like it's impossible to produce kind of like something larger. It's kind of like, okay, these are just oscillations around a kind of zero in a flat surface, so to speak.
um but when you know when they're interrelated to each other when you have kind of like a kind of like energy that has a shared currency across these different variables where let's say you can transform oscillations in color to oscillations in movement and then maybe you can transform oscillations in movement into you know expansion and contraction and and if these variables are networked in in a certain way
Then a lot of like emergent structure can arise. Recently something that is quite beautiful, we're going to release this pretty soon, is like we have a bunch of simulations using networks of coupled oscillators where a bunch of different variables are interrelated in a way similar to how I described. And one of the things that is kind of like really beautiful is that you can actually have kind of the
emergence of topological pockets within these field of interconnected variables. So, I mean, it is kind of a boring universe. Well, where the only variable that is kind of like oscillating around zero is color, because then you don't really have much structure. But when you connect, yeah, like movement and expansion and contraction and kind of the elasticity of the oscillators and things like that, then
very intricate structures can arise even up to the point of kind of like this very enduring cell reinforcing patterns like for example a vortex of color or a saddle of kind of movement and and what i would be hypothesizing here is that yes out of kind of like this field of nothingness in a way where there's a lot of different variables that can cancel out into that nothingness if those variables are interrelated to each other
Then you can have actual topological structures emerge in that field. And my hypothesis would be that individual experiences are actually those topological pockets in that field. So even though it's kind of like a field of nothingness in a way, out of it, you can get subjects of experience to arise. Well, yeah, extremely speculative and maybe more in the realm of poetry, but maybe gives a bit of an intuition. I mean, in the same vein, I want to learn physics much more deeply,
I would, yeah, hypothesize or think of essentially particles as less so kind of just oscillations in the field and more kind of these nodded topological structures that arise. I mean, maybe, I mean, one way in which I've heard, for example, I mean, there's a lot more detail to this, but one way to talk about, for example, electrons is rather than thinking of an electron as a point or kind of like a particle in a field,
It's maybe better to think of it as like a region in the field where the field lines converge. So it's sort of like, it's almost kind of, you do have a figure grounding version, right? Like where you realize, Hey, the thing that is real was the field. Um, and the electron is just kind of a special point in that field where field lines are sort of like not it or, or connecting to in a certain way. And I would essentially think something like that, that
Okay, let's stick on the zero ontology.
so is it the case that from nothing contradictions can happen like is there inconsistency in the universe in a strict sense i would say no however uh i think the pockets of experience do have certain properties that you can interpret as internal contradictions i mean in particular
Consciousness does have this superposition quality where you can have many things happen simultaneously. Especially during advanced meditators, they often times describe
Kind of like the sense of superposition of experience actually becomes like stronger the more you meditate. And like people who are like quote unquote enlightened, oftentimes they will say that yeah, that's that actually is very connected with not trying to resolve the contradictions or the kind of super positions in your experience that normally most people, myself included, you know, on a moment to moment basis, we're trying to kind of like collapse.
and define what we're experiencing as much as possible. We are kind of like somewhat uncomfortable with looking at a scene with kind of like unfocused eyes or if our eyes are not perfectly focusing in the same point, if there's some kind of binocular rivalry and so on, like we're uncomfortable with that. But a lot of kind of like what Awakening is about is to actually be okay with those kind of like states of
Well, it's not perfectly focused, it's not perfectly coherent, and that's okay. You don't fight it anymore. I mean, in that sense, yeah, I mean, if you define kind of that quality of superposition as, let's say, the coexistence of contradictory features, it's like, well, is this blue or is this yellow? Well, it's kind of both at once. Then, yes, of course, yeah, reality, of course, accepts contradictions. However, there's another way of looking at, let's say, kind of a state of superposition
as a very precise state, which is, well, it is the state of the sense of ambiguity between these different features. And so it's precisely ambiguous, if that makes sense. And I think if you have that type of logic, then yeah, I think like there's no contradictions in reality. It's just that what reality is made of is something that can have kind of this superposition equality. Would a self also be an emergent entity in the same way that the valence is?
yes yes absolutely and and i i should distinguish between the self and the sense of self which is a phenomenal quality um versus kind of like the subject of experience or like the fact that there is consciousness so yes please let me let me make sure that i'm understanding even here you said you're going to distinguish between the self and the sense of the self um because that's extremely interesting yeah yeah let's put it that way okay
Okay, the reason why is because sometimes people could say an interesting phrase, which is I've lost myself, which is extremely interesting. How can you ever lose yourself? Because you're always intimately connected with yourself. So they mean something and also maybe they mean that they've forgotten their values or their memories are gone or or their sense of self is no longer there. So
I don't know if that's along where you were going, but that's where my head was going. And I was, I was interested to hear you expound on the difference between, well, the sense of self and self. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, to a first approximation, I would say something like the sense of self is a feature of experience similar to, for example, blue or the smell of a rose. Like it is something that you can kind of like paint your experience with.
And, uh, for the same reason is something which you can remove from your experience and having no sense of self doesn't mean that you don't have experiences. Like you can, uh, walk around and be functional without a sense of self. And there's people who are like that. In fact, I think there's yeah, kind of like a normal, a certain kind of like normal distribution, even people who don't meditate the strength of their sense of self, like Vara is enormously. Um, and, uh,
You know, the process of awakening, you know, there's a few key collaborators. Um, one of them is, uh, Roger Thiesel and other one is, uh, Brian, uh, sorry, um, we send Brian Scott, um, and to a lesser extent, but you know, he's much more famous and also more busy, but he's, uh, I also talked to him quite a bit is, uh, Daniel Ingram who wrote this book called, uh, mastering the core teachings of the Buddha. Uh, so all these individuals, they claim to have achieved what is called a fourth path.
Which is a stage in certain strands of Buddhism that is essentially classical awakening. And they describe very precise, very specific phenomenological changes. The way in which they experience the world is radically different. I mean, it's not a subtle change. It's perhaps as radically different from normal everyday life as a DMT trip.
It's like a really really radical change to their moment to moment experience and it's a permanent enduring transformation that they experienced. And you know core to this transformation is that they don't spend any resources anymore. Rendering a sense of self that is just kind of a gun they just don't do it and and they have documented kind of like the various like stages that lead to that in particular roger these they'll has kind of these like five.
Five kind of like levels, kind of like altered traits in meditation, which is not kind of like states of consciousness per se. It's more kind of like enduring states of kind of like transformed consciousness. And it goes as follows. So in normal everyday life, usually most people, I would say 99.9% of people easily have kind of these like coagulated kind of
Bodily reification maybe around their head is for some people i think it's like around their heart area which is like a bunch of kind of like interrelated and nodded somatic sensations that they identify with and they don't identify with all the things around in their experience so let's say you're walking down the street and you see a homeless person and in the normal everyday state of consciousness
The way you render that interaction is like, Oh, there's an other that's not me, but this is me. And there's a separation between that thing that is not me or that person that is not me and the sense of self that is me. And okay. If you see something beautiful, you know, the sense of who you are may be attracted to it. If you see something ugly, it may be repulsed by it. Um, but that, that kind of like coagulation of somatic sensations.
Is essentially what you're constantly trying to protect and constantly do what you're trying to to enhance like when when somebody. Yeah it has kind of like let's say narcissistic tendencies just just as an example they're like constantly like paying attention to that like graphite coagulated sense of somatic sensations and and trying to make it look good and and kind of like be good in a sense. Now.
If you do a lot of meditation and you sort of kind of like work on lessening the internal knots of your experience and you kind of like transform the fabric of your sensations from like these like very kind of corrugated and crusty kind of like networks of feelings into something more feathery and and soft and delicate eventually you can actually start to identify rather than with your bodily sense
You may identify with awareness itself and you enter kind of like a state of consciousness. Roger in particular calls the witness, where rather than identifying with a bodily sense, you identify with kind of the witness of experience. Um, and, uh, for a lot of meditation, you know, teachers, maybe that is the end, you know, that is, that is awakening. Whereas for him and various people, I know that that is just like level two out of five, then level three.
is what he calls kind of like God mind or yeah kind of I think like God mind is the typical name but some people also call it as kind of the the feeling a feeling of profound oneness where now what you're doing is that any sensation that you have you tag it as part of you.
I sometimes use like a metaphor that I mean maybe you've played a age of umpires maybe people in the audience have You know, like kind of like video games where you have right, you know different, you know characters all let's say like your team is the characters that are painted blue, you know, and the enemy is the characters that are painted yellow and so After you play for 20 minutes, let's say one of these games whenever you see a tiny speck of blue in the screen and
Your your whole body and system and mind is like, oh, that's me. I've got to protect that. That's that's a that's part of my team, as it were. And, you know, if you have like tribal affiliations, you know, you cheer for a particular political party or for a particular, you know, like sports or so on, you tend to identify with those who wear, you know, the same colors or the same flags and and that feeling, that feeling of like, oh, that's me or that's part of me.
Is something that happens but for every sensation in that third stage and for a lot of people actually that is what awakening is is kind of you don't make a distinction between yourself and other you can absorb everything into your sense of self the problem though here is that.
You will have a very heavy sense of self and actually that still doesn't quite get rid of the suffering because this kind of now there's the universe to protect and you have like kind of that that feeling of. You may die in a sense but you're projecting it onto everything then the fourth stage is actually kind of. Kind of the polar opposite is kind of you rather than every sensation being identified with you.
You essentially stop identifying with any sensation, you know, and a lot of Buddhist practices, you know, they, they tell you, Hey, if you can smell it, if you can see it, if you can touch it, it's not you, right? Like whatever you sense, whatever you feel, that's not you, that you're something right. Right. Transcendent. That is beyond experience in a sense. And if you do that, you know, rigorously, eventually anything that happens, you just kind of don't identify with you. That's kind of like, Oh, that's, that's not me. That's not me. That's not me.
And then finally the fifth stage which he calls no self and no center is a stage where You you kind of like stop habitually trying to decide whether something is you or not So, you know in the third stage by default everything is you in the fourth stage by default. Everything is not you but in the fifth stage Any sensation that you have is neither you nor not you
So you just kind of like drop the clinging to try to have a self view at all. And essentially when you are in that state, you drop the center. Like you stop kind of like trying to coagulate a sense of self or differentiate your experience to me and not me. And that is extremely freeing. It actually kind of like drastically increases the valence and the harmony of the whole experience.
You know from a quality research institute perspective. All of that is kind of a transformation that you do to the structure of your consciousness in particular how you direct attention. And how you bind features into a self model and it just so happens that dropping the whole idea of creating a self model.
Is actually violence enhancing is actually kind of like a much more harmonious and consonant state of consciousness although apparently it does take a little bit of time for people to adapt to it and become functional like it is very common for people to achieve that fifth level.
to essentially have like a couple months where they're quite dysfunctional. You know, they may struggle to, yeah, for example, navigate a room or, you know, make phone calls and getting stuff done because they kind of like are not representing things in the same way as you and I. And it can be dysfunctional, but typically these transformations happen, for example, in a container like a monastery. And then people are kind of like taking care of you for, you know, however many weeks or months it takes for you to adapt.
But yeah, the point is that it is possible. And so you can have consciousness. You can have, you know, a witnessing of sensations without, in addition to it, trying to attach a sense of self or a sense of no self. You can actually drop that construct entirely. 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's it do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami bull?
You said something important here. This is ordinarily done in a monastery.
take several you said weeks but it takes several years to get to that point and then maybe several weeks or months of integration after that point yeah now if you can hold a cup and then you ask someone are you holding a cup and they say no you can think well you're wrong your model of the world is wrong you're clearly holding a cup and then if we think that we can be wrong about having a self because there's these level two level three etc where you'd
Don't have the same model as before and you think whatever is at a higher level is somehow a more correct model Then that's implying you can be wrong about your models. How do you know that? The model of the no-self is a more correct model And how does one know that psychedelics are are revealing a reality? Rather than making the more accurate claim that psychedelics show you what it's like to be on psychedelics similar to like
similar to like gum doesn't reveal that the world is minty yeah a great question great question uh there's a couple things i can say about this so um well i mean first of all you know psychedelics with regards to the sense of self produce quite disparate effects depending on the specific psychedelic and the the biggest contrast uh out there is between dmt and five m o dmt because
Five MEO DMT is directionally kind of like more towards the no self perspective. And a lot of people that I have interviewed who are very, very advanced meditators, uh, who have tried five MEO DMT, they tend to say, yes, this is pointing in the direction of kind of the fruits of years of meditation. This is, this is, uh, Shenzhen Yong, who wrote, uh, uh, the science of enlightenment, a pretty famous book and also has a beautiful aesthetic of trying to combine science and meditation.
When he tried breakthrough 5mio DMT he said like yes this is like it's not exactly Buddhist awakening but it's close to it so it might be helpful to kind of like in the right circumstances in the right container maybe accelerate the practice. The complete opposite well not complete opposite but just completely different direction is DMT you know the one of the active ingredients of ayahuasca because that one actually
fragments of the sense of self and very often gives you multiple senses of self. So it's kind of like if I have a meal DMT is like from one to zero, you know, DMT is from like one to 17. You know, you all of a sudden are like in this multitude of a collective consciousness with lots of different centers and lots of different eyes and different perspectives and they're irreconcilable. So clearly, you know, clearly there's not just one truth, so to speak, and psychedelics reveal it, you know, different
Substances produces very different sense of what the ultimate truth is and and just by by the multiplicity of these different perspectives on the truth clearly there isn't just one truth i mean that that that i think should be quite clear. Kind of similar to i don't know clearly clearly.
There's multiple religions, right? Like many different people claim to have access to the ultimate truth and know it for a fact and those truths are different. So, okay, clearly it's not exactly doing that. At least most of them must be mistaken, you know, at the very, at the very minimum. Um, but I do think there is a sense in which you can be actually more or less, um, you can have a, uh,
a better or worse model of the universe and a better or worse model of consciousness and of yourself. One of the ways in which you can really kind of systematize this is the accuracy of a model is in terms of how well it can anticipate future experiences, how well it predicts future experiences.
For example, if you're undergoing a psychotic break and you're highly deluded, you may believe something like, well, this is holy water and if I drink the whole cup, I'm going to be able to fly. You can genuinely believe that and your state of consciousness really makes you feel this is true, but you would be wrong because you do it and then you still can't fly. Those experiences that you're failing to anticipate
And so the accuracy of a belief, I think, can be assessed in terms of how accurately it anticipates experiences that will happen in the future as a function of different actions. And there is kind of like the standard sense of self from moment to moment. I actually think it fails to anticipate a lot of experiences. And in that sense, it's not quite accurate. I mean, it fails to anticipate, for example, what will happen if you meditate a lot, because
The moment you try to imagine, okay, what is going to happen in the future if I keep doing this, you project your sense of self going forward and you use that as kind of the operating system to make sense of reality. Whereas, hey, that's actually something that is going to break down and your attention is going to look very different and your capacity for integrating information is going to change dramatically. So in that sense, yeah, you can be like more or less, a prediction can be more or less accurate in terms of how well it predicts, anticipates future experiences.
And also, I mean, I think whenever you have a feeling that there is kind of this like enduring metaphysical self with kind of like unchanging properties, I think that can be shown to be false just by the fact that you can do interventions on your brain that will change that feeling. So there's a lot of feelings that in the moment they feel like they're going to be forever. I mean, for example,
Yeah like sadness and you know if you went through a breakup and like you feel hey like I will never get better right like you could accurately say like that's wrong right like that is an incorrect assessment of your situation because actually in a couple of months you will feel much better right so yeah I'll tell you just a brief aside a funny story when I was 22 or 23
And I had my first major breakup because I was living with this woman for, for a few months or a couple of years in different places. But when, when we broke up, I remember going downstairs, we were living in a condo going downstairs and giving the keys, my set of keys to the concierge. And, and it was just a horrible feeling. Cause I'm like, this is it. And then I was like, I was distraught and I was, there were two police officers there for some reason that happens.
frequently at condos because there's parties and so on. And the officers asked me like, what's wrong? What's going on? I don't know if they thought I was on drugs or something. And I said, I told them what happened. I said, like, I broke up with it. It's never going to be good. It's something something like that. My life is never going to be the same. Then they were concerned. They're like, how old are you? Then I said, I'm 22. They're like, 22. You you have no idea this. That's nothing. Anyhow, I remember thinking like that was just
It meant everything to me at that point. So I know what it's like. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, that is one of the things that meditation in some sense, oftentimes, if you do it well in the right context, increases kind of the representation fidelity of your experience precisely because you pay attention moment to moment to the actual arc of sensations.
And there's so many sensations that if you just pay attention to, you know, when they're coming up or like when they're at their peak, it gives you the impression that they're going to last forever, even by their very nature. I mean, there's like some types of suffering, some types of happiness that like the part of their nature is to give you the impression that, hey, this is reality and this is reality forever. But if you're really mindful and like moment to moment, you're paying attention to the whole field of sensations.
It's almost like you can infer the differential equations for these feelings. It's like, oh yeah, as this feeling comes up, my belief in the future goes down, and as this one goes down, this one goes up. Okay, it's a dynamic system, and I shouldn't believe what it's telling me, because it's just a faulty representation that is just trying to get me to act in an evolutionarily adaptive way, but it's not the truth.
Earlier you said that you can have a conception of the self that's better or worse and you made that better or worse grounded in if you have a model and it's predictive of the future.
It's my understanding that in your conception of reality with the unified field and there's this membrane and so on, I would, I could be making error here, but I would assume there's no temporal dimension to this unified field. It exists outside time. Maybe it's a temporal. And if that's the case, then the truthfulness or the betterness or what have you cannot be grounded in something that itself is ungrounded. So, so what makes something actually better or worse?
yeah yeah yeah okay yeah super tricky but yeah wonderful wonderful question um i mean i would say yeah like the the predictive capacity of your moment to moment models um can be better or worse in in in the sense of hey it becomes like um falsified or verified as time goes by
But it is true that even the whole arc of your life is just a tiny sliver, a tiny slit as it were, on the true reality which is this gigantic field of consciousness that in some sense is outside time because time is embedded in the structure of that field of consciousness. Along the lines of how some physicists think of time in terms of the
Are of time you know not not kind of like a fundamental physical feature but more just kind of like the direction towards which entropy increases so yes you can totally think of the field of consciousness is this kind of eternal thing that is it just there and a given arc of of a person's life is kind of a trajectory in one tiny tiny tiny corner of that huge field.
I do think that the enterprise of science and philosophy should be pointed at trying to understand the whole field. And there's going to be some divergences in that an accurate model for that tiny lever, for that tiny speck that is just a human life, maybe at odds with the true, let's say, base rates or the nature of the entire field as a whole. For sure, there might be some divergences.
But I am an, what I call an epistemological optimist. And I do think, you know, if we keep at it, eventually we probably will have like a good picture of like what the entire field looks like. And we can make inferences about it based on things such as like the dynamics of our own moment to moment experience. Precisely things such as how out of like a sense of nothingness, you can have like features that are common pairs, you know, like have like
Colors or oscillations, all of them cancel out to zero. In some sense, that's kind of like a mini laboratory for how consciousness works. And under some assumptions, you can say, well, that probably generalizes. Maybe it's not just in my state of consciousness and your capacity to infer that some of these kind of like rules of consciousness generalize to entire states of consciousness.
Increases the more you have sampled like very radically different states of consciousness i mean like i do think there's like some things that are only true in room temperature consciousness so to speak but there's like other things that seem to be true in all states of consciousness and whatever is true in all states of consciousness and has predictive capacity in all states of consciousness.
has a higher chance of generalizing to the entire field. And yeah, for sure that is kind of, yeah, the most juicy aspect of quality research is, yeah, making those very, very large generalizations, hopefully grounded on good evidence. So people have stuck with us now for almost two hours and I've mentioned impedance matching several times and we never get to it. So let me tell you where I was going.
There was an analogy that you gave on the demystify side podcast which I'll put a link to on screen with a string in open air and if you were to pluck it it makes a sound but it's it's quite faint and it's also difficult to pluck a string that's just falling without its ends attached but if you just imagine it in space then maybe you could do that but then there's no air in space but you get the idea if you were to fix the ends then
It makes a louder sound. And if you were to put a guitar there with a hole, then it makes an even louder sound. You're using that as an example of impedance matching. So please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, just as an intuition, I think it's fascinating that if you literally just put a string between two walls and you pluck it, the sound is very faint. Whereas if you pluck it in a guitar, the sound can be pretty loud.
And that's very puzzling, right? Actually, as a kid, I thought that didn't make any sense. It's like, why can you get something louder just by attaching it to an object? It's kind of like, where is the energy coming from? Right. It sounds like it's breaking the conservation of energy, like the guitar is adding energy somehow. Exactly. But the answer, I mean, for those who want to know, I mean, you can pause it and pause the video and think about it for a couple of minutes. The answer is that by attaching it to a guitar,
You're essentially transferring those vibrations to the entire guitar and then the entire guitar has a very large surface area for touching air. And so actually the sound of the guitar is not the sound of the string. The string is just providing kind of the background source of energy and vibration, but the actual sound is the oscillatory modes of the entire guitar as a whole.
and how it's interfacing with the rest of the air which is doing it both inside and outside the guitar so there's a lot of surface area and by shaping the guitar in different ways and making it of different materials the quality of the sound is going to change even if the string is of the same material and you plug it in the same way I think yeah this is quite relevant for for example like making sense of how you know breath work gives rise to different meditation states that
If you've done a lot of meditation where, for example, you have energized a lot, let's say, your various chakra systems and you energize them and you cool them down and you energize them and you cool them down, that gives rise to a process that we call annealing at QRI. Essentially, annealing is this physical phenomenon.
Where you can use energy to organize a system and make it more symmetrical. Typically this is done in metals where if you have like an industrial metal and use it a lot eventually it acquires a lot of imperfections like the literally the crystal lattice of the atoms because misaligned and you get like these defects in it and that makes it like brittle and and just dysfunctional over time.
But then what you can do is you heat it up above what is called its re-crystallization temperature. The atoms actually become like even more disorganized. But then if you cool it down slowly, the atoms essentially become aligned in a perfect symmetrical lattice. And then the metal regains all of the qualities that was useful for your particular application.
We think that something like that may underlie essentially a lot of these meditation practices and the use of psychedelics in a good environment with a good purpose is that you're energizing your system. You're energizing your cardiovascular system, your nervous system, your muscles, and all of that energy is making them interact in lots of ways in such a manner that
Interface and interlock in better ways in such a way that it is kind of like reorganizing the crystal lattice. I mean, like if your system is kind of jumbled up because of all the stress that you have in life and you do a lot of breath work and you energize it. If you call it down with a good mindset in a positive emotional field.
is going to kind of crystallize in a way that will have like a higher capacity for consonants and harmony. So the way in which this kind of impedance matching and metaphor for a string and a guitar is relevant is that you know the more you have kind of like done that in the past and the healthier you are so to speak when you energize your system you know it's not just kind of like what it feels like it's really not just you know the energy coming from your breath
In the sense that the breath work and the exercise that you're doing, but the emotional tone of your experience will have to do with the resonant modes of your whole system. And in that sense, you become kind of the guitar for the string. And you know, the same can be with listening to music or, you know, dancing or, or even, you know, doing exercise. Any of these things, you know, the more you yourself are kind of in this
So I'd like to know what you think of the term psychedelic Buddhism. Is that an oxymoron to you? That's a great question. Well, I don't think it's an oxymoron.
Empirically, if you talk to a lot of kind of like highly realized, you know, meditation masters in the West in particular is extremely common for them to kind of like relate the arc of their own development as, Hey, like in the sixties, I tried a bunch of acid and I realized that there was like something more to reality than my nine to five job. And, you know, the, the status hierarchy is that my society indoctrinated me to believe in et cetera, et cetera. But then I realized that, you know,
As it doesn't last that long and you can't be high all the time and and and so eventually i discovered meditation and i realized that i could access the same states as i do on lsd but just through meditation and that it's better and it's more functional and it makes me a better person so i i don't take psychedelics anymore but they were important in my development that is super common so
Clearly there is, you know, a lot of value in here, even if you think it's kind of like misguided to use psychedelics for spiritual development. And, you know, on the one hand, I do think there's a really good reason to kind of like be very cautious and say like, yeah, if ideally you don't use any psychedelics, it's simply because of the risks attached to it. I mean, to begin with, you can have a very unpleasant experience if
If you're not for a bunch of reasons, you know, if you're not prepared is bad set and setting. If you're like in a particular stage in your spiritual practice, you can have kind of a dark night of the soul kind of episodes or a panic attack and delusions, you know, is relatively common for people to have like very powerful delusions on psychedelics, like believing that they are, you know, the reincarnation of Jesus or something like that. It's not that uncommon on the spiritual communities for people to have those illusions.
So, you know, I totally understand when meditation masters kind of like try to dissuade their students from kind of exploring this territory. At the same time, you know, not only the origin story, but also just kind of like talking to a lot of like people who maybe they're not meditation teachers, but who are very kind of like spiritually advanced and can access all of these meditation states.
To me there does seem to be a correlation between at least openness to explore psychedelic states of consciousness and the speed of their development. But it's kind of like an inverted U curve in that using psychedelics too much actually causes some bypassing issues and gives you the illusion that you're more advanced than you are and that you may slack off and not really put in the effort.
And so I almost see it as kind of like an inverted U curve that like maybe the people who have seen are kind of the most advanced at the youngest age and are actually, you know, not diluted is like, well, they maybe use the psychedelics as, you know, a special spice in their life as it were, you know, something they might do every now and then they take it very seriously and they take a lot of time to integrate
But then you know especially the outlier of psychedelics which is a father meal dmt. I do i mean. It doesn't maybe doesn't sound very good but like i do generally believe that used in the right way has a pretty good chance of drastically accelerating the process of awakening i don't know by what factor but like.
I suspect maybe by like a factor of two or three, that like maybe if awakening takes, you know, 20 years for the average person, maybe with 5MEO DMT, it could take like seven years. That wouldn't surprise me all that much at this point. But then again, 5MEO DMT is a really powerful and delicate instrument. And it's also one of those things that can produce some of the worst bad trips and the worst kind of like dark nights of the soul.
I'm extremely cautious about like, you know, recommending it in general. I do not recommend it in general precisely because of it. So you're not advising it. No, no, no. I mean, the one that shows both empirically and for me, it makes the most sense as kind of the strongest promise for tackling depression independently of like meditation practices, just, just as a psychiatric tool. I suspect five MEO DMT is going to come up as kind of a, an outlier in, in potential benefits for, for mental health.
That said, that doesn't look like, you know, taking five million DMT every day, multiple times a day or something crazy like that. It looks like, you know, maybe once a year in the right setting, you have a breakthrough experience and it probably takes you a year to integrate. But, you know, the data is really extraordinary. I mean, we're looking at I was in the Netherlands recently in Maastricht.
And yeah, they've done like research on 5-MeO-DMT for depression and the anecdotes that I was hearing was just extraordinary. I mean, people who've been depressed for 20 years and they have tried like five different antidepressants and therapies and they're still depressed and then one 5-MeO-DMT experience in the right setting and then they're not depressed. They just don't qualify anymore. I mean, again, it should be done with extreme caution and in the right context, but I think it would be silly to kind of like,
say like yeah that's that's not promising or or it's orthogonal to spirituality i think is yeah clearly highly connected well have you found that it's better than mdma for the treatment of depression yeah great question i think five m o dmt is probably better than mdma and mdma might be the the best second um i mean mdma is really powerful um
It's fascinating because it's not classically psychedelic. MDMA doesn't make you feel trippy colors, doesn't create vortices in your visual field. It doesn't challenge your sense of self. Actually, MDMA strengthens your sense of self. People describe experiencing, for the first time, their authentic self. They have this feeling of, well, it almost feels like throughout my life I've collected a lot of stickers of what people expect me to be and I'm trying to embody them. But then on MDMA,
All of that falls away and you connect with your authentic self. That's very common. So yeah, even just from the point of view of understanding what the self is from a purely, you know, consciousness research perspective, I think MDMA is a very promising agent for science. And 5-MEO-DMT is qualitatively similar to MDMA in some ways, except
More powerful and more general. Um, so we, you know, we did a, uh, yeah, a scientific work retreat in Canada where five of your DMT is on scheduled. Um, and we had a, yeah, like physicists and mathematicians, uh, visual artists and meditators. That was kind of the, the, the, the group of people that we selected essentially. Um, and, uh, yeah, we, we took a pretty close look to at five of your DMT and all of the levels that it takes you to.
I need it does have like a lot of like really unique kind of like properties. And it does have overlap with with MDMA. We were trying to, for example, try to describe five million DMT in terms of other substances and one description that kind of resonated with most of the people who gave it a try is five million is kind of like a mixture of MDMA.
DMT nitrous oxide and amyl nitrate so it's like i mean what's the last one uh like poppers as they say like the the thing that relaxes you they use it for sex quite often okay mostly kind of like the the rush of energy and and the opening of blood vessels like that feeling is absolutely happens on five mio and uh and one of the strange and interesting things of five mio dmt is that
Bad experiences often are because you didn't take enough that like there's kind of like a threshold where like if you don't take enough you will get a lot of the trippy kind of like ego dissolving qualities but without the the love component there's kind of like a threshold around like maybe three or four milligrams where the love component the MDMA quality just kicks in and then it feels really really really different and much more therapeutic
Then again there is also like unpleasant experiences at much higher doses like that have to do with kind of a struggling around the kind of like grasping your sense of self like if if you take five million DMT without is a high dose especially if you take a high dose.
Without being ready to let go and kind of like metaphorically die, so to speak. If you if you if you're still kind of like want to cling to a sense of self, you're going to have a bad time. So that is also very important to to know. But but that is only really for like the high doses. I mean, there's I think kind of intermediate doses between like three milligrams and seven milligrams. It's not completely ego dissolving and it does have a lot of kind of the MDMA quality.
And surprisingly, you know, once you get familiar with the state, you can actually be somewhat functional in the state. I mean, not to the level that you could conduct an interview on it. But one of the things that was some of the most you didn't see what I just took before two hours ago. That's hilarious. Do laser experiments on the wall. Oh, that's right. Yes.
No, I'm kidding for those who are listening or watching. Okay. Yes, I would like to talk about laser experiments. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So let me connect that actually with with five a year, which is a I mean, some of the absolutely most fruitful consciousness research that I have ever done. And I just I mean, I feel a sense of warmth even when I think about this is
When me and the three main psychedelic artists I mean these are like people who are like experts at replicating like visually like what it's like to be on mushrooms or LSD and so on and and they're like really world-class you know some of the best people if you if you go to reddit
um dot com slash r slash replications is a subreddit for people who try to replicate the visual qualities of different states of consciousness if you sort by you know best of all times you know yeah kind of like the the top you know those artists are the people who we we brought to to the retreat um so you know they're really good at their craft um
And, uh, in one session, uh, for several hours, essentially we were just kind of relaxing, listening to music, going to that kind of like intermediate level of having me, oh, kind of like between three and seven milligrams and looking at a visual stimuli together and recording our conversation of exactly what was going on. I mean, right. Because like typically on psychedelic research, you know, the, the scientist is kind of like sober and that you put, they put the person in an FMRI and they,
you know, give them some study or something. But the scientist has no idea what it's actually happening there. And also the questionnaires that they fill out afterwards are very kind of like low resolution and very coarse. You know, at best they might ask you something like, did you experience a simple or complex imagery? They don't go into the details of, you know, which of the wallpaper symmetry groups did you experience? Or, you know, which of the hyperbolic symmetries did you experience? Or nothing with that level of detail.
but in the in the context where i was in canada it was just so beautiful because in real time you know we were able to say something like oh yeah i'm experiencing like a freezing effect in my visual field and it's just kind of like a flickering of around like five hertz and uh and uh and the freezing is in such a way that is kind of like separating the gestalt of the monitor from the gestalt of the computer and it seems to this kind of like a one centimeter of separation
In other words, we kind of like we were tuning into a consensus reality, but a five million DMT and we were able to describe it in real time and we have those recordings and I think that's like very scientifically valuable. I mean, I can't imagine kind of like a better way of doing it because you're actually in the moment kind of connecting people who are really good at depicting the experiences and then a scientist who's like actually trying to map this out to neuroscience. So anyway, yeah.
Tell me about the laser experiments with DMT. And apparently people say that they see quote unquote the matrix. What's going on? This effect, um, you know, sometimes happens, sometimes not. Um, the people that I know who have tried it, the effect that they have seen is something that is not surprising to us at quality of research. So I'm going to elaborate. So first of all,
I think it is true that we live in a world simulation, but essentially I think that at the very least that is because, you know, our nervous system evolved to create a mini world simulation of our environment. And so it is absolutely the case that you never perceive the world directly, so to speak, right? Like there's like many layers of indirection and also processing between, you know, like photons hitting your eyes and the actual
parameters of your world simulation. In fact, you don't even need sensory stimulation to experience a sense of a world. You can be dreaming with your eyes closed and still experience a very rich sense of embodiment and being somewhere. I think it's very important to realize that psychedelics, meditation and so on, they're
changing the parameters of your world simulation but that doesn't mean that you're really accessing kind of like other realms outside of you right like i think you're accessing in some sense different realms of consciousness which is different phases of consciousness is similar to how there's like phases of matter you can have like liquid solid air and so on my my sense is that you know different states of consciousness are kind of different phases of consciousness um maybe the the
The punchline or kind of like the the spoiler here is that I actually think that these are phases of a liquid crystal. They're like probably, you know, not to sound too much like a crackpot, but like, you know, probably, you know, Penrose and Hameroff and people who believe that microtubules have something to do with consciousness. I think they're probably right. Not in the full theory, but I do think microtubules
Probably will end up being really significant for understanding our state of consciousness. And the reason I believe that is that they effectively instantiate a liquid crystal. And you can think of the brain as a networked system of tiny pockets, each of which is composed of liquid crystals, which is how the microtubule lattice is organized. One of the hypotheses that came out from a retreat in Canada in particular was that
The effect that something like five million DMT has in your, in the brain is essentially changing the liquid crystal properties of the neurons and that, you know, five million DMT, which produces the, the God consciousness estate, we suspect it kind of like scrambles the liquid crystals in such a way that there's no preferred direction for, for light. Essentially it's kind of end up in a superposition of all possible directions because there's no grooves as it were.
Whereas ayahuasca, mushrooms, DMT, the classic psychedelics, which I mean, five million is an outlier. It's a very weird kind of like different thing in a sense. But the classic psychedelics, including DMT, what we suspect is actually happening is that it's crystallizing rather than than just being kind of this liquid crystal state to where the microtubules maybe are like ordered in a certain direction. I think on DMT, they actually become equal, equally spaced apart.
and organized in a kind of like perfect crystal lattice and for that reason effectively the light becomes coherent or electromagnetic radiation when it goes through it as a consequence effectively a lot of things of your world simulation on dmt really feel kind of these like coherent laser like kind of aspects of this world simulation i mean it's not uncommon on dmt to for example hallucinate
Let's say like an angel or something like that, that is emitting a coherent beam of light. And the hallucination can be, it could be like scanning, for example, all of your, the fields of your experience with a coherent plane of light. I suspect that happens because literally the substrate of your consciousness now is organized in a more crystalline way. And so a lot of the effects that happen on DMT
We think of them as kind of this competing clusters of coherence where like different regions of the brain are probably crystallized, but in different, we kind of like a different, they become essentially different magnetic domains. And so if you look at something like a laser on DMT, you effectively now have kind of like new ingredients in your world simulation with which to represent that. So, you know, effectively, um,
yeah if you look at stimuli that kind of like matches the physical properties of your world simulation you will have kind of a stronger resonance with it and so looking at optical effects on psychedelics for example you know what a optical cusp is right like when you take a a transparent glass of water right like sometimes the light kind of like forms this kind of like caduceus optical cusps look really trippy on dmt like exceptionally trippy like
In such a way that if you have kind of this naive realist perspective where you think that you're seeing the world directly, it really makes you feel that you're kind of like connecting with a light outside of you in a very, very deep way. But what I suspect is actually happening is more that hey, you have kind of like, you're turning the inside of your world simulation into actually a kind of like nonlinear optics laboratory.
And cusps are kind of like more coherent and meaningful in that state of consciousness. Like there's kind of more agreement between the parts of your world simulation that yes, there's a coherent beam of light in that direction. As a consequence, if you look at a diffracted laser on DMT, it has a strong effect on your field of experience. But then the symbols that Danny Goller reports, kind of the code of the matrix as it were,
When I've seen drawings of it, and I've talked to people who have tried the experiment and gotten what apparently is what they're talking about, these are essentially semantic patterns, which are like these nonlinear resonant modes of something like a metallic plate, like the classic Cialdini plates. But that is happening along the strip of the diffracted laser line.
And he's like filled with those kind of like a cinematic nonlinear resonant modes. But to me that is not surprising. I mean like to me that is yeah. I mean you're exciting the field of consciousness and some of the excited states of that field actually look like semantics. So I don't see it as you know breaking the code of the matrix or tuning into other realms. I really see it more as kind of like well they stumbled upon a way
To reliably induce kind of like high energy semantics in your own consciousness and it works really well with DMT because DMT essentially crystallizes your liquid crystal matrix and it creates these very coherent beams of light inside you. Does that make sense? Yes. So this brings up something that Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary claimed, which is psychedelics open the doors to perception.
Now the Dalai Lama, I know that we were talking about psychedelic Buddhism and I asked the question if it was an oxymoron and you said, you don't think so. So I've had my own experiences with meditation and with substances or elixirs. Let's say I've had my excursions with the elixirs. So I used to believe that it must be that all of these spiritual insights are all pointing to the same single truth and that it tends to be an Eastern truth more so than a Western truth.
I just had that in me as just an unconscious adoption from what I hear on the internet. And then I started to do some research. And well, the Dalai Lama said about psychedelics, because he was asked about this. He said, these drugs create more illusions. And in a world filled with illusions, why would you take drugs that only give you more? Yeah. And even in the saga Lovato, such a DN 31, I always mispronounce it.
The Buddha warrants that taking drugs, anything intoxicating actually weakens wisdom. He also added that it requires serious practice with the traditional community and it does not involve external remedies, only internal work. So to say psychedelics are like on the one hand, salubrious in that they're useful. They can process trauma. They can bring about changes in one's worldview. They can allow you to connect.
This is an entirely different set of statements than the experiences on these are those that the Buddhists are talking about. And it's also a different statement than that. The use of these psychedelics and the insights therein are compatible with the with the Buddhist teachings. So I understand that you brought up the Shenzhen Yang, but there's a monastic code that explicitly forbids of Vinya Vinaya. I don't know how to pronounce it that explicitly forbids any drugs
It says liquor, for instance, destroys your sense of shame and weakens you. And what tends to happen with psychedelics is the issue of intention. So motivation, not intention in the philosophical sense, but the reasons you're doing something. So Buddhists, they tend to stress a purity of intention, right intention. And if one is using a drug, it's like they're dissatisfied with the slow and ordinary work of the practice, the discipline that's necessary. It's like a greed for rapid insight.
And they have this like aversion to normal consciousness. Those motives contradict the contentment and renunciation that Buddhism encourages. I have several other examples, but I'd like to hear your thoughts so far. Yeah, no, I mean, uh, I don't have a strong stance. Uh, and I could be convinced either way. I mean, like maybe as I learned more, it, I could eventually arrive to like, Hey, never take any psychedelics is completely misguided.
Oh, just to be clear, I'm not advocating for or against psychedelics. I'm just saying that the one set of claims, which is that they give you a different sort of insight, a different worldview, they allow you to process trauma and so on. That's an entirely different set of claims than whatever came from the left hand here is compatible with Buddhism. And in fact, there are some reasons to think that it's antithetical to it.
Yeah, no, I mean, I see that. I would think there's also like lots of reasons to believe it is actually quite in harmony with it if used properly. I'll give you a couple examples. So one is, for example, the cultivation of equanimity can utilize, for example, taking very cold showers or like a cold plunge. For example, you know, you go to water that is very close to zero.
Celsius and is you know freezing but you learned to be able to experience that fully without you know flinching without you know stalling and experience it for like you know 30 seconds to one minute and let's say you do this yeah several times a day i think a practice like that with the right intention can essentially accelerate the cultivation of equanimity which at least in the shins and young paradigm equanimity is approaching sensations without any resistance um
And you know, like very cold water is a type of kind of like very intense sensation that if you approach with equanimity, equanimity actually has no intrinsic valence. It's just very, very strong energy, which you can turn into bliss or you can turn into suffering depending on how you approach it. And ultimately I think like how it affects the flow of energy and the configuration of your consciousness.
I mean likewise i think of psychedelics at least like classic psychedelics like lsd or psilocybin. Kind of something similar to that is kind of like a hot sauce for your for your consciousness in a way which is it intensifies everything.
Any approaches with the quantity with the intention of developing a quantity i do suspect similar to a cold plunge is gonna accelerate to the process of developing high and the quantity in such a way that you know in the future when you encounter naturally very unpleasant very intense sensations, all of that work will actually pay off in that you you're not gonna freak out you're not gonna get you know kind of become.
Distracted or try to pretend that it's not there or delude yourself into thinking that doesn't exist and so on and so forth. So, you know, from that perspective, also, you know, kind of like equanimity around delusions and beliefs that one of the things that psychedelics kind of like show more clearly in a way is how the valence of a belief is essentially expressed in how it affects the harmony and dissonance of your field.
And I think like that disentangling is actually quite a Buddhist move. I mean, understanding that, well, there is no information content that this belief is representing. And then there is your emotional reaction to it. And, and usually becomes the, they come so close together. Uh, we can't really separate them and we sort of like just buy into the content of the belief and assume that it's valence is kind of a necessary component of it.
One of the things that psychedelics do is that they make that relationship more flexible. Kind of like they melt the connection between a belief and the content of it and your emotional reaction to it. And I think that in some sense is kind of like learning about the mind more broadly and might make you more resistant to delusions in a way. At the same time,
For a lot of people actually psychedelic delusions are very tempting and I think for a lot of people indeed exactly what the Dalai Lama said in your quote is absolutely true and I know people who essentially have a relationship to psychedelics where it feels like yeah they're kind of like just chasing a new high or like chasing another mystical experience rather than yeah kind of like trying to see the mystical in everyday life like that is absolutely also the case
Um, but then another nuance that, uh, I want to provide is the difference between constructive and deconstructive, uh, kind of like internal moves and practices that for most people, I think, especially if they don't have kind of meditation training, um, even, even if, especially if they don't have kind of like any kind of like long-term practice of, uh, introspection, um,
Psychedelics will tend to be very constructive in their effect in that they they will kind of generate very elaborate kind of like world models as a consequence of taking a psychedelic you know something like DMT I often describe it as a as a epistemological hand grenade because yeah if you take DMT unprepared
You really may start believe things such as like well the russians have like a base you know in the dark side of the moon and and they're like allied with the grays and and the aliens and you just have this very elaborate world model like to explain data. And one of the things that psychedelics especially the constructive aspect of them then to do is over fit.
Essentially you create a very sophisticated complex models of reality to explain relatively little data ready it is like a how in statistics or machine learning if you have a series of dots you know in x y plot.
If you fit a high degree polynomial, you can always go through all of the dots. DMT is like that. You have a few data points and DMT gives you such flexibility in your world model, you can always fit the data with some crazy model. And of course, it's going to be wrong because it's not going to generalize. It's not going to survive cross-validation. So in that sense, yeah, that's obviously a risk. At the same time,
If you know this is something that happens, you can actually use psychedelics to study that process and actually have developed the metacognitive awareness. It's like, oh my gosh, I'm overfeeding right now. This is what overfeeding feels like, which is kind of like an insight that then you can take in everyday life and actually recognize when you're overfeeding in a more mundane, mundane kind of like state of consciousness. And then, yeah, the final nuance before I pass it on to you again is
That you can cultivate the deconstructive aspect of psychedelics. And for example, if you take LSD with a strong intention, for example, just experiencing emptiness or experiencing pure space, kind of absorption into or pure consciousness, you can actually kind of like use that to really let go of trying to be something or trying to go somewhere. And that would be essentially pushing more towards kind of this deconstructed kind of Jhana like states of consciousness.
And then the reason I think five million DMT is probably the most synergistic with kind of meditation practice and Buddhism is because by default is a very deconstructive kind of substance like by default five million DMT tends to kind of like cancel out the topological defects in your consciousness as it were and and simplify things. The downside of that is that if you do it a lot
Without you know metacognitive awareness, especially if you if you don't think in terms of overfeeding or underfeeding or something like that Fabio DMT tends to underfit your world model. So it's very common for people who take Fabio to say something like love is all that matters or or we are all God and that's the only thing we should know that there's nothing else that matters than the fact that we're all God.
For me, that's like an oversimplified model of reality. You just went too far in the simplifying your sense of reality. But again, you can be metacognitively aware of that and recognize, oh, right now I'm underfeeding. This is what it's like to underfit. That said, all else being equal, I think probably an underfeited world model is better than an overfeited.
Because an overfitted model tends to be kind of like heavy and contain like extra stress and vortices and you know the complexity. Costs you in terms of physiological stress where is a very underfitted model of reality is actually typically a pretty pleasant and kind of carefree like if you walk around. Really embodying the sense of like a love is all that matters and there's nothing else we should care about.
That's actually not a bad way to live. I mean, if you're going to live like that in a monastery or in the middle of the forest, it's probably a perfectly fine life. It's just that if you interface with very complex systems, then you don't want to overfit or underfit. You want to have a good fit, essentially. Tell me what's going on with entities when people encounter them in DMT. What is happening neurologically, maybe ontologically?
Yes, fantastic. Okay, so here's my overall model. The most up-to-date information about this is actually my latest Qualia computing post, which the title is From Neural Activity to Field Topology. It's kind of an intimidating title, but I think it's conversational and it sort of goes through the argument.
And it builds on, on top of a lot of research that we have done in the past, the most critical pieces of the puzzle are as follows. And I promise it, it all clicks together. So first of all, I think the key distinction between DMT and 5-Meo-DMT, I mean, again, DMT, they call it the spirit molecule where you encounter entities, all of that complexity.
Five million DMT, they call it the God molecule, which is like simplifies your experience and, and just kind of become like one with everything. Um, if you really introspect on the quality of your experience in this two kind of like very different state of consciousness, you will notice that on DMT, your experience is clustered into competing factions. There's kind of like different regions of your experience that are vibrating in different ways.
Incompatible with each other and you have an evolutionary process where these kind of like different coalitions of vibrations try to, um, you know, gain your attention because again, attention is energy, attention, whatever you pay attention to gets a stronger. So one of the key ways in which these kind of like factions of vibrations of your field,
Can survive and reproduce and become bigger is by gaining your attention. So they they try to come up with the most, you know, attention grabbing kind of like headlines and like, uh, again, that's why also the, I think like this, um, creates delusions and very sophisticated complex overfeited models because one of the ways in which they, they, they gained your attention is by kind of like promising big explanations about reality or, or, or they may claim that their messages from like another dimension and things like that. Um,
Whereas on five million DMT, the main attractor, like the main thing that everything drives towards is complete coherence. It's like everything is in sync with everything else. And that's why it's kind of a more deconstructed, more Jana like state, like pure consciousness, pure space. Again, no distinctions because any distinction is created by kind of like out of
Okay, so that is like the first the first piece of the puzzle is there is kind of competing clusters of coherence versus global coherence. Now, how does this happen? So empirically,
Imagine you have, uh, you know, these like pendulum clocks, uh, you know, the very classic old clocks. It is known that, you know, if you have two of these clocks in a wall, uh, after a while, they actually synchronize, right? And it's, it's not magic, right? Like the reason they synchronize is because by sharing the wall, you know, tiny vibrations in the world essentially get passed around and the synchronized state is the lowest energy configuration. So that's a, that's an attractor of that system.
Okay now imagine if you have if you have 10 clocks then still eventually it all synchronizes but if you have 10 000 clocks you know in a very long wall or in a very large surface they never synchronize so what happens is that instead you will see kind of maybe a traveling wave of synchrony or like synchrony here and there but they're just not connected enough for them to all of them kind of agree on a certain phase and become kind of like
First of all, you're going to have a case where every clock now belongs to a cluster of clocks where all of them are synchronized.
but there is no clock that is synchronized with all of their other clocks. In other words, as you add connections, you enter this phase where you have competing clusters of coherence. And if you add more connections, eventually you arrive at a new phase where everything synchronizes. Oh, okay. So, so there's just not enough connections in the DMT case versus the five MEO. Yes. That's what, yeah, that's more or less what we think. Like the way they affect the brain is that
The they're essentially increasing kind of the functional connectivity of the brain, but on DMT is just not enough. It is kind of in this twilight zone where you get this fragmentation of the field and it's just so much competition. Is this more than just a metaphor because we're using the terms vibration here and oscillations, but what precisely is vibrating is oscillating.
yeah yeah yeah um i would say it is kind of like at a level of a metaphor um because i haven't essentially identified what exactly is vibrating or oscillating
Most of our research at this point at QRI is actually fairly agnostic about what exactly is it that is oscillating. We just kind of like postulate that a lot of our experience can be explained in terms of systems of coupled oscillators and we analyze the systems of coupled oscillators and we try to replicate phenomenology based on based on those. And, you know, we in a few months we're going to release an amazing tool. I'm just so proud of the team who's been developing it.
which is using systems of coupled oscillators to essentially replicate visually and tactically, yeah, somatically, effects of different psychedelics by changing the parameters of these oscillators. Now, you can do good science phenomenology and, you know, even find applications without ever actually telling anybody what is oscillating here, you know, as long as like it has predictive capacity and it resembles what people experience.
But if you ask me kind of like more concretely, okay, like physically, what is it that I think it's also leading? I would say local field potentials. So local field potentials are not individual neurons. I don't think we really have kind of introspective access to like individual neurons, you know, being active or not. I think that's just too tiny for it to be meaningful at the level of our whole experience.
Instead, we will be talking about populations of neurons, essentially populations of neurons that together, if they kind of like cross a certain threshold of coherence in their activation, they drag the electromagnetic field along with them. And, you know, this is currently being studied in neuroscience in a bunch of different ways where they show that a lot of the kind of
Representational content of an experience or like if you train a biological neural network to do a classification task for example that the most relevant information content that determines you know what the network believes as it where is happening is not based on the activation of neurons but rather how those neurons in a coordinated fashion make the field oscillate up and down so
These are essentially kind of like at the level of more kind of like ten thousand neurons like that would be kind of like the unit as it were let's say like a population of ten thousand neurons that together they actually create kind of these like coherent oscillation in the field and i think that yeah actually the shape of your experience and what it feels like to be you.
is not really based on the activation of neurons is more based on what these local field potentials look like and how they're stitched together which is a much more macroscopic phenomenon. So is it just the coupling nature that you share something with your neighbor and then all of a sudden you have the same property across time that is the property you like in oscillators? Well we also need to solve the
The boundary problem right like because people people who associate i mean i think this is in the right direction you know electromagnetic tears of consciousness you know people who associate the field electromagnetic field in your body and your brain with your state of consciousness. That has the advantage that hey like the field is inherently connected already but then the problem becomes.
Hey, why are we separate? You know, why do I have an experience and you have a different experience if we're all part of the same field? So that comes back to the topological solution to the boundary problem. And the thing that we are simulating, you know, right now, one of the very active areas of research at our institute is looking at populations of neuron like systems, I mean, essentially electric oscillators, like things that are creating
oscillations in the electric field and then looking at how those electric oscillations change the magnetic field and you know I guess it's one of these funny properties of the electromagnetic field and the universe that you have the right hand rule rather like when when you make a electric oscillation the response in the magnetic field is actually that of a vortex right it's it's it actually kind of like changes the orientation and
And so when you have an electric oscillation, you actually kind of like creating a boundary in the magnetic field. And so we essentially think that, yeah, these kind of networks of electric oscillations are creating this kind of like vortex-like boundaries in the magnetic field and that those correspond to experiences. Now, what does that have to do with the topology though? Yeah, that if you follow the field lines, when you have kind of these vortices,
uh the field lines actually form closed loops and as a function there's like a clear objective real boundary physical boundary between the inside and the outside and and that is a topological change kind of like how twisting the balloon and creating a pinch point separates the field in one region to another when you create one of these vortices you're actually kind of creating a separate bubble i see what i meant to say is let's say you have like i know this is the wrong model but let's say you have a space time
The space-time topology remains the same. The topology hasn't changed even with the presence of a vortex. In your model, where's the change in topology?
The topology of the electromagnetic field has changed, even if the topology of space time hasn't. I see. So we would identify the relevant boundary for a moment of experience as maybe being located in the topology of the electromagnetic field, even if space time doesn't change. Yeah. But, and very relevantly, like, you know, like this is maybe the other piece of the puzzle and here's where it connects, which is that I suspect that actually that, you know, the sense of self
is kind of like a vortex, a central vortex in your experience that we're constantly kind of like energizing and using to orient ourselves. And we delusionally believe that that's what we are. Like we have a pocket, but then we also have a very central vortex. And we think that's what we are, even though actually we're all of consciousness. That's maybe the deeper truth. So what happens is that on DMT, because you have all of these competing clusters of coherence,
That generates a ton of additional vortices. So essentially, I think like those are the entities. I mean, I think like on DMT, you're effectively creating more internal vortices, which effectively account to more internal senses of self. So you become an ecosystem. It feels like you're a bunch of different entities at once. Now you may interpret some of them as like an alien from another dimension, but you know, my typical secular interpretation is yeah, no, that's part of your world simulation.
But it has the quality of a self like it feels like that's and a whole being but it's inside you so it's actually not separate whereas five million t because it makes everything coherent. You may actually actually cancel out to the central vortex and me that make the field lines perfectly parallel.
And when that happens you lose a sense of self and it just feels like oh wow i'm the entire field or i'm everything and nothing at the same time or like i'm everybody is a very different kind of a tractor. Meaning that you know this competing closest of coherence versus global coherence. Have different effects on the topology of the field which has different effects on the sense of self.
So the large vortex will be your sense of self. And then when you're on DMT in particular, are there small vortices within the larger one? Something like that. Yeah, it's kind of like a stadium where there's like the whole stadium forms a large vortex, but then like every person that is seen there is also a tiny vortex. And so it feels like, well, there's something that is being witnessed by a lot of different entities at once, but it's all contained within the same stadium.
Andres, what is the most comforting conclusion that you've discovered? So we all have stabilizing and also dangerous thoughts and I was going to ask about some dangerous conclusion that you've encountered or at least believed yourself to have come to at some point. Maybe that's not something you'd like to share and perhaps isn't the best to end on. So we can talk about that in part two. Either way, what's some
View some point of view with some data that's hopeful and heartening and why does it score high on this consolatory end? Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, I have a couple. I think probably the most significant one was just how relatively easy it is to achieve Janice in meditation. And I think that probably will be world transforming once
i guess we can culturally absorb that fact i mean like because people talk about like this extreme states of consciousness on meditation and and then like you know a normal secular person goes and like spends like you know half an hour meditating and it's kind of
Grooving is like oh like it's so hard to concentrate on my breath and like like really is this gonna do anything like seriously and maybe you try it for a couple months and like maybe you feel a little bit more relaxed a little bit less stressed but like nothing to do with like the extreme things that people are reporting um so it's easy to kind of like have like this sense of powerlessness or sense of disconnection from hey people who actually do this quite seriously
And that's how i used to feel absolutely you know until maybe like four years ago like maybe in twenty twenty where i started to take meditation more seriously and also really starting to learn from better teachers and. For me maybe maybe the single most beautiful thing within this kind of like learning process has been understanding how to achieve jana states.
With the technique proposed by Rob Bourbea. So Rob Bourbea, he wrote a book called Seeing that Freeze. He died recently, unfortunately, but he's extremely lovely and he has a series of lectures. My favorite is Practicing the Janus, which you can find on YouTube. Somebody from Twitter, a friend from Twitter, was very gracious to kind of like upload all of those to YouTube and
There's no copyright issues. So yeah, definitely go and check it out. So practicing the Janus is a recorded series of lectures that he gave at a three-week retreat, I think, or four-week retreat a few years ago. And the technique that he emphasizes, which to me was a game changer, and I'm just so grateful I kind of learned about it, is a style of meditation where you actually use your intelligence and creativity.
Like, yes, you can achieve the Janus just by focusing on your breath. Like even just, you know, the sensation of air in your nose. If you focus on that, you know, 90 minutes a day in formal practice and you're successful at it, you know, within six months, there's a good chance you may be able to enter the Janus just with that method. That never worked for me. I mean, maybe maybe I'm too ADHD or maybe I don't know, for whatever reason, like like that style of meditation just wasn't very fruitful for me.
Instead, what he advocates is, you know, imagine that you're kind of like, um, trying to light a fire and there's kind of like a lot of wood, but maybe some of the booties is wet and maybe some of it is just out of place. And there's a tiny Amber, a tiny, tiny lit up region in that thing that could become a fire. What you ask yourself is like, what do I need to do to grow that Amber?
And all you have to care about is growing it one little bit at a time you know trying to spread it you know move it from one place where it's more likely to catch fire to another place. And you know techniques like what i was describing which is like for example focusing in two regions of your body at the same time that is one method like if you feel a little bit of pleasure in your chest or in your hand.
And you pay attention to that region together with some somewhere else in your body. Eventually the pleasure can actually spread to that other part of your body as if it's kind of like catching catching the ember. The ember is growing as it were. But here like use your intelligence. I mean like really is kind of like do I need to blow on it? Do I need to cover it? Do I need to warm the whole thing? Do I need to rearrange? Do I need to shift position? Do I need to breathe? Or for example,
Imagining a very happy dog or like recollecting when your mom gave you a hug or like things like that. Sometimes it sparks a little bit of joy. See if that joy can help the amber grow and if it helps then keep doing it. And that style for me has been really effective that like it's kind of a user creativity. You're always kind of like thinking of hey what can I do to make the feeling of well-being grow and it's a very interactive type of meditation and
the fact is that you can enter this really healing and ecstatic states of consciousness with something like i think on average like 600 hours of practice which is i mean sounds like a lot but in the grand scheme of things like people spend more time in in a video game uh doing that you know in in a year like it's it's not that big of an investment and it is really transformative and
I haven't have never met anybody who accesses the Janus who regrets, you know, the time they spent trying to get there. So for me, that's a very heartwarming aspect of reality. Like, hey, there's there's a lot of love and pleasure that we can all have if we do something like that. Now, you said you access it with intelligence. Is it the case you would also access it with intuition or rationality or is it just intelligence? Yeah, I would say intuition and rationality as part of the package for sure. I mean, and sometimes, for example, it might be like
Your intuition tells you, I don't know why, but I should imagine a star or something like that. And you don't know why rationally or like your intelligence doesn't can explain it. But if your intuition tells you, hey, this is going to help the meditation, try it. Absolutely. And very often times the intuition is correct. Andres. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Super wonderful conversation. Yeah. Looking forward to part two.
I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students and that's fantastic. If you're a professor or a lecturer and there's a particular standout episode that your students can benefit from, please do share and as always feel free to contact me. New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details.
Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey, Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also,
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▶ View Full JSON Data (Word-Level Timestamps)
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"text": " The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science, they analyze culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region."
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"text": " Oh my goodness, that's a wonderful question."
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"text": " i think i would have difficulty prioritizing just one i'm gonna say there is four that any scientific theory of consciousness must be able to satisfy um which is first of all any theory of consciousness has to explain why consciousness exists to begin with um second it has to explain"
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"text": " What's called the palette problem? Essentially, what are all of the qualia values and varieties out there and the interrelationship between them? You know, why is there the blueness of blue and you know, the way as a rose smells like what is that and how are they connected to each other? Uh, the third is what are the causal properties of consciousness? Like in other words, why are we conscious, you know, from a biological evolutionary perspective, what kind of function is it playing?"
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"text": " And then the fourth one is the binding problem you know how is it possible that you know pieces of information can actually be put together into unified moments of experience and for me you know these are kind of like four hard constraints that any theory of consciousness must be able to satisfy and I think what is."
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"text": " very common though is for theories of consciousness to only really care about a few of them or sometimes like not none of them at all but i think that yeah i mean it's sort of like if you want to go to the moon you've got to"
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"text": " Be able to not only have the escape velocity to get there, you also need an airtight container so that you don't asphyxiate on the way there. And I think of it something like that. There's like a series of things that theory of consciousness must be able to do. And if you only do a few of them, it's not really a theory of consciousness."
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"text": " Okay we're going to get to your background, who you are, how you got interested in the field of consciousness, but I noticed you didn't talk about the heart problem nor the boundary problem. I'm curious as to why. Yeah, great question. I tend to lump together the binding problem and the boundary problem, even though legitimately you can think of them as different sub-problems. The reason I do this is that I think of them as equivalent just in different ontologies."
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"text": " If you start out in kind of the common sense of you of the universe where the universe is made of atoms and forces, then typically you will think of it as like the binding problem but it's like how is it possible that atoms you know and neurons can somehow be put together into unified experiences."
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"text": " If you start out with a different ontology, which is a unified ontology, let's say a field ontology, where you say, hey, the universe is a gigantic field, you know, then you really have kind of the boundary problem is like, how do you get this that is already unified to break down into sub components? So, you know, I think like there's a lot more detail to it, but I tend to think of kind of like two sides of the same coin. As to the hard problem of consciousness,"
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"text": " In a sense, um, the heart problem of consciousness thrives on an ontology where consciousness is really surprising, especially if you kind of like started out with an ontology, um, like in materialism or the universe is made of insentient matter. Then, you know, as David Chalmers would put it, um, okay, like how do you go from form and structure or, you know, like function and behavior?"
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"text": " Two subjective experience and like that seems kind of a and you know unbridgeable, you know leap in a sense. However, if you start out with an ontology where you say well the existence or the universe is fundamentally made of consciousness or qualia then the heart problem as stated is not really kind of like valid or doesn't really apply. You really would have like other problems to deal with which is usually how"
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"text": " We think about it at the quality research institute. We essentially take consciousness as fundamental. And then from there, you know, you have these problems like the boundary problem and the problem of causality and the palette problem and so on. So for Bernardo Castrop with his dissociated alters, would that be an attempt to solve the quote unquote boundary problem? Yeah, I would say so."
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"text": " I wouldn't exactly yeah yeah I would say so like it is sort of like you know he starts out with kind of like a monism a really strong kind of monism uh uh in a yeah um any analytic idealism where yeah there's just one thing and then the question is how do you break that one thing into things such as like yeah your experience and my experience right now or or the sense of continuity over a lifetime or or something like that um"
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"text": " I think you really have to postulate some mechanism of action that satisfies a number of constraints. How is this possible? How does this fit into evolution? How the full picture makes sense essentially. Okay, let's talk about your background. How did you become interested in the field of consciousness? Yeah, great question."
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"text": " I would, I would describe myself as a hyper philosophical, uh, you know, since, since I was a small kid, essentially just, uh, obsessively wondering about the nature of reality, why there's something rather than nothing, what happens after we die. Um, and, uh, yeah, yeah, I guess like people in your audience, probably, uh, you're probably a hub or, or shelling point for people in this, uh, with this condition, you know, this mental condition. Um, and, uh,"
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"text": " You know for a long time i actually just thought that a physics was you know the way to answer you know all of these big deep questions and i wasn't really thinking about consciousness all that much i mean i was thinking a little bit about it kind of like okay what is the soul what happens after you die and things like that but it actually was at the age of sixteen where i had a kind of like a ego death mystical experience where"
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"text": " It really made me reconsider that the sense of being a person or the sense of being me was kind of like the default state of affairs. It made me question like, hey, hold on a second. If you can enter a state of consciousness where it feels like you're everybody or you're everything or you're pure consciousness, that means that"
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"text": " This feeling that I had of being Andres, of being an individual, was really just a feeling. It was one of the ways in which my experience was getting painted, rather than being in touch with some kind of fundamental truth. And from then on, I realized that the biggest question actually isn't about physics. It really is about consciousness. So that if we were to map out"
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"text": " The depth of human knowledge and you know the how satisfying explanations are for different fields. You know in physics and chemistry biology there's a lot of mysteries but we have kind of like a quite a bit of a picture at least like we can do a lot of things with this picture but when it comes to consciousness it really feels like we are yeah kind of like babies you know the the science is really just not there like there's so many things that we just don't know and can't understand and I just thought"
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"text": " Hey, actually, if I'm serious about understanding reality and making sense of it, probably the biggest bang for the buck actually is going to be on the field of consciousness. Um, and for a bunch of other reasons too, you know, kind of, um, if, um, you know, like happiness and wellbeing turns out to be, you know, what life is all about or what the meaning of life is, then really understanding consciousness, you know, will give us a window into how to access that in a much more, you know,"
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"text": " efficient, robust, rigorous way. And in that sense, you know, while you know, understanding physics can be really powerful and has a lot of applied technologies is just not the same level of closeness to something like the meaning of life as you know, under developing a science of consciousness. So those were some of like the main main motivators. And yeah, since then, you know, I"
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"text": " only applied to universities that had like programs in particular that has something like a cognitive science degree and then I looked for like possible career options where I could yeah in some sense like blend rigorous science and you know advance my understanding of consciousness and yeah in 2018 I actually decided to yeah dedicate myself full-time to consciousness research by yeah starting the qualia research institute and and just"
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"text": " Trying to make it happen full time. So I'd like you to tell us about what the quality of research institute is, but it's also my understanding that you're primarily interested in math. Before university, no? Yeah, yeah, I would say I used to be very, very, very. I mean, I'm still very into mathematics, although I don't know nearly as much mathematics as I wish I did. But yeah, I was, you know, I've always enjoyed like puzzle solving and"
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"text": " i kind of like understanding uh you know a really beautiful aesthetic of mathematics is kind of like uh proofs you know that you can know for a fact that something is true even if it's uh hard to intuit or make sense of kind of like in a in an everyday sense"
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"text": " You can rigorously prove that something is true and is always true, you know, and I always found that kind of like very aesthetically very appealing. And yeah, I used to participate in like math competitions and yeah, it used to be kind of like what I imagine myself being in the future, being a mathematician. And it really wasn't until at the age of 16 that kind of my worldview was flipped upside down and realized, hey, hold on a second. Consciousness is the bigger mystery."
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"text": " That said, that aesthetic has really carried through and the way I approach consciousness is through the lens of arriving at mathematical models of it and ultimately I think that mathematics has been extremely successful in the realm of physics"
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"text": " And I see no reason why it's not going to be just as successful in the realm of consciousness. At the end of the day, I even think physics and consciousness will be two sides of the same coin. So it's approaching it from both sides. So other than your 16 year old self, what was an experience or it could be part of your research that I assume has to do with psychedelics that shattered your conception of reality the most? Yeah, that's a great question."
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"text": " I think a very important. Yeah, I would say a couple things."
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"text": " Two of those are from like talking to David Pierce, who is a British philosopher. Yeah, maybe, maybe let me explain a little bit about that. You know, like, okay, maybe when I was 15, 16, I was, yeah, kind of just looking online for, you know, like minded individuals, people who could talk about, you know, consciousness, the question, why is there something rather than nothing? You know, we're curious about psychedelics."
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"text": " I'm an understanding yeah actually what is the meaning of life and and and so on and and i stumbled upon a website that's called the hedonistic imperative that argued that it is possible to essentially engineer ourselves to always be happy and you know it sounds kind of impossible but then there's actually a bunch of examples of people who are born with a condition that is called a hyper themia"
},
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"text": " Hiberthymia where essentially you know day in day out there just pretty happy to be alive almost independently of what happens in their environment."
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"text": " But this doesn't mean they're actually this you know this functional you know they can still in some sense feel less happy if a friend you know is in danger or you know experience a cell illness but nonetheless you know they usually don't deep below what we call the hedonic zero kind of like below the state of consciousness where you say like oh actually this feels bad."
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"text": " And so yeah, this kind of like proofs of concept that you could potentially be happy all the time. Um, and what David Pierce, the writer of the hedonistic imperative, uh, argued was that, you know, in, in the future, we might be able to engineer ourselves, you know, even at the genetic level to be able to be happy all the time without sacrificing any functionality that many, if not all of the negative states of consciousness that we're very familiar with."
},
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"text": " Are things that we have access to because they were evolutionary adaptive in the you know ancestral environment of adapted this not because it's necessary for consciousness and necessary for intelligence. I'm sorry i really you know read everything i could from from this philosopher and there was like a bunch of things that."
},
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"text": " Kind of like made me have like really important updates in in my worldview from from his view. One of them was precisely that you know philosophy is not enough to essentially solve the problem of suffering that you actually also require technology that you know at the time I was like really into what's called open individualism and I'm sure we're going to get into it. You know more deeply but that is the philosophy that"
},
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"text": " Yeah, we're all one consciousness. So, you know, at the time I used to believe, hey, if we could like rigorously prove that we're all one consciousness, then we're not going to be afraid of death. And, you know, there's going to be no wars because we're going to realize that, you know, we're just fighting ourselves and and so on and so forth. But I didn't realize until reading David Pierce that, hey, you could realize that we're all one, but still be depressed, you know, for biochemistry reasons or neurological reasons."
},
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"start_time": 931.732,
"text": " So I think that was a very big update that like happiness and technology actually will probably interface quite substantially and maybe that's an important part of kind of the plot of human evolution as it were. But then the other like huge update that came from David Pierce was the binding problem. I mean like for many years like maybe until I was like 22 years old or so."
},
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"end_time": 973.643,
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"start_time": 958.319,
"text": " I arrived just by reasoning on my own and in agreement with a lot of philosophers that the thing that matters for consciousness is information processing. So I was just convinced if you were to interview me when I was like 20 years old."
},
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"end_time": 996.613,
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"start_time": 974.087,
"text": " I would just say yes it's pretty obvious if you think about it that if you make a simulation of a brain in a digital computer of course is gonna be conscious because you know you have exactly the same information processing from the bottom up is just a different format you know and we shouldn't be as they call it a you know carbon chauvinists just because it's not made of carbon we shouldn't we shouldn't discriminate against it."
},
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"end_time": 1026.852,
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"start_time": 997.039,
"text": " But yeah, David Pierce actually made me realize that, hey, consciousness is much more tricky than that. And the binding problem in particular, like how information gets put together into unified moments of experience, may actually require a specific physical substrate, which I'm happy to go into more deeply. But that completely transformed my worldview because the kind of picture I had for what would be a good future really changed. I used to think,"
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"text": " Hey, you know, if we end up actually just living in servers, you know, we transformed the entire planet into just kind of a gigantic server rack, you know, we're just like tiling every continent with servers. As long as it's simulating, you know, like happy brains, then like, what's the big deal? That's a that's that's probably okay, you know, from a subjective, you know, perspective, like that's actually a perfectly fine future."
},
{
"end_time": 1072.551,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1051.886,
"text": " But nowadays I actually think that would be a massive disaster because there would be nobody there which would actually be a completely empty world So that's just because of the server aspect because you don't believe computers can be conscious. Yes But if it was just conscious agents being happy then that would be a world that you would want to exist"
},
{
"end_time": 1098.882,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1074.411,
"text": " I mean, I would be very open to it. I mean, like in a sense, if there is nobody, so to speak, who's like perceiving the aspect of the implementation where you're like, okay, you just see the servers and makes you feel sad. If instead, you know, the thing that is going on in terms of experiences is yes, just a lot of hyper meaningful experiences with very rich subjective lives. Yeah, probably. I would probably say there's no problem there."
},
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"end_time": 1124.77,
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"text": " Okay, I'd like to get back to something you mentioned about happiness. So the Dalai Lama, which is someone that I imagine will come up a couple times in this conversation, distinguishes between happiness and meaning and he emphasizes the latter. So he teaches that constant happiness is not possible and it's not the goal. Instead, he focuses on a sense of purpose and meaning even during difficulties. Viktor Frankl was similar in that"
},
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"end_time": 1137.722,
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"text": " Suffering can coexist as long as you have a deeper clinical meaning you have to have this meaning centered approach to life. Rather than the pursuit of happiness so what do you make of that what does your definition of happiness in tail."
},
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"text": " As you know, on Theories of Everything, we delve into some of the most reality-spiraling concepts from theoretical physics and consciousness to AI and emerging technologies. To stay informed, in an ever-evolving landscape, I see The Economist as a wellspring of insightful analysis and in-depth reporting on the various topics we explore here and beyond."
},
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"text": " The economist's commitment to rigorous journalism means you get a clear picture of the world's most significant developments, whether it's in scientific innovation or the shifting tectonic plates of global politics. The economist provides comprehensive coverage that goes beyond the headlines. What sets the economist apart is their ability to make complex issues accessible and engaging, much like we strive to do in this podcast."
},
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"text": " If you're passionate about expanding your knowledge and gaining a deeper understanding of the forces that shape our world, then I highly recommend subscribing to The Economist. It's an investment into intellectual growth, one that you won't regret. As a listener of Toe, you get a special 20% off discount. Now you can enjoy The Economist and all it has to offer for less."
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"text": " Head over to their website www.economist.com slash totoe to get started. Thanks for tuning in and now back to our explorations of the mysteries of the universe. What does your definition of happiness entail? Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, how do I approach this? There's a lot for me to say here. So I'm going to make a"
},
{
"end_time": 1264.224,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1238.166,
"text": " I'm going to define a term which is valence. So valence is how good or bad the experience feels. Happiness would be kind of a flavor of valence. It's a particular type of positive valence state of consciousness that usually involves actually kind of like a sense of hey things are holistically going pretty well. Happiness can be usually distinguished from let's say like just raw"
},
{
"end_time": 1294.241,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1264.616,
"text": " You know, sensory pleasure in the body, which a lot of people would say like, well, that's just a component of happiness, but happiness is a little bit more broad. Um, uh, that said, you know, usually when you say something like, well, uh, a very meaningful, rich experience, oftentimes what comes to mind is something actually a bit even more encompassing than just happiness is kind of like, it is not just like being happy at the moment. There's also kind of like a sense of a guarantee that things are connected properly and"
},
{
"end_time": 1319.548,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1294.889,
"text": " Your representations of the world are accurate in such a way that you're not just hallucinating that things are going well, you're also actually in contact with the world and things are actually truly going well. And in that sense, you can think of it as kind of like a rich positive feelings, meaningful experiences, maybe even more desirable than mere happiness as it were."
},
{
"end_time": 1348.763,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1319.889,
"text": " There is the question of, okay, is a unpleasant but highly meaningful experience in some sense desirable. And for me to kind of like really go there, I want to present to this concept that we call the tyranny of the intentional object. So the intentional object in philosophy is essentially the aboutness of experience. You know, that when you see a dog,"
},
{
"end_time": 1375.708,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1349.206,
"text": " It's not just a series of kind of like pixels in your visual field where like it's it's also there is like a the sense of there's like a subject of experience there and there's like a relationship there is a set of meanings associated with that with that percept and the meaning has a lot to do with kind of intentionality like the aboutness of experience."
},
{
"end_time": 1398.78,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1375.981,
"text": " Well what i would argue is that we are programmed by evolution for valence the goodness or bad experience to be intimately related with the aboutness of experience in other words the intentionality of our consciousness is very highly kind of bound up with whether it feels good or bad."
},
{
"end_time": 1423.575,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1399.172,
"text": " That said, I don't think this is a strictly necessary feature of consciousness. I think this is an evolved characteristic of typical moments of experience. So what tends to happen is that, you know, if you're just experiencing kind of a superficial, let's say like pleasant bodily sensations or pleasant kind of like sensory inputs,"
},
{
"end_time": 1451.203,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1423.933,
"text": " But you don't get the sense that it is about something and about something meaningful and important that connects to the rest of your world model. Often times that triggers an unpleasant sensation which often times we describe as a feeling of meaninglessness. In other words the reason why we don't like you know meaningless experiences as it were is because we are programmed in such a way"
},
{
"end_time": 1472.056,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1451.493,
"text": " That meaningless experiences makes us feel bad so. You know this is almost gonna like putting a victor franklin on his on his head you know kind of like turning him upside down i would actually say that the reason you know he emphasizes meaning so much is because. The idea of not caring about meaning makes him feel bad."
},
{
"end_time": 1501.476,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1472.346,
"text": " But that actually, you know, fundamentally, he's still actually just talking about valence. He's actually just talking about whether things feel good or bad. It's just that we are programmed in such a way that the aboutness of experience is part of what makes us feel good or bad. But I think that's kind of a programmable feature and is not really the fundamental source of value, which can be demonstrated in a number of ways. I mean, like it's"
},
{
"end_time": 1529.224,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1502.21,
"text": " You know david pierce would say something like you rarely hear for example somebody say like yeah my my life is intensely you know intensely. Unpleasant and the void of any positive feeling yet i feel it's you know richly meaningful and actually people who would say that i think if you do kind of a micro phenomenological interview. You will realize that what they say like yeah actually my life is richly meaningful regardless"
},
{
"end_time": 1558.439,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1530.06,
"text": " They will be able to point out at like body sensations and kind of sensory features of their experience that are actually positive in valence. So I don't believe you could have kind of a deeply meaningful experience without that also being tied with positive valence. In on pragmatic accounts, though, I do think that caring about meaning, you know, and relationships and projects and, you know, long term things,"
},
{
"end_time": 1587.841,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1559.019,
"text": " Is actually much better for your valence and the valence of others than just caring about kind of like in the moment sensory pleasure. That is absolutely the case. However, I think that is because we're not really good at representing actually like how different actions are going to impact our long term experience. And if we were kind of like smarter or kind of like we could see things from a higher perspective as it were, I think we would realize that. Yeah. Whenever we say, Hey, we care about meaning."
},
{
"end_time": 1614.121,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1588.251,
"text": " That deep down, it's because that is a program that is helping us manage our long-term balance. So have you heard of psychological egoism? So for people who don't know, why don't you talk about what it is? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I might be getting it mixed up, but yeah, correct me if I'm wrong. Psychological egoism is this idea that"
},
{
"end_time": 1644.07,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1614.753,
"text": " You never ever ever actually do anything good for others because everything that you do is just to feel better yourself and and we're programmed in such a way that let's say if you do a selfish action we kind of like internalize the feeling of social punishment that comes from that selfishness and and it makes us feel bad so even when we are kind of like being altruistic and dedicating our time and energy for the sake of others"
},
{
"end_time": 1667.568,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1644.48,
"text": " Deep down, actually, we're just doing it to feel better ourselves in the moment. Did I get it right? Yeah. Yeah. So so I see parallels between psychological egoism and and this constant underneath motivation toward the good or happiness or positive valence that you mentioned. So psychological egoism to me is it's either"
},
{
"end_time": 1690.879,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1668.217,
"text": " Unfalsifiable or it's tautological. So again, I'll just spell it out from the way that I see it. It's that every action you wonder if have I ever done anything that's selfless? Well, then as soon as you start to point out a case where what you've done is somehow against your own interest, someone can say, Yeah, but you did that because you wanted so and so. So there's always an underneath that that"
},
{
"end_time": 1719.701,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1691.391,
"text": " Someone can say, well, you were still selfish somehow. So it's difficult to disprove these motivational claims. And I'm curious if you see a similar unfalsifiability to this. Well, if you're going into a fire because of a higher purpose, well, somehow that's still positive for you overall because you wanted to do so. I'm not even sure if positive feeling is the correct term because for me,"
},
{
"end_time": 1747.961,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1720.06,
"text": " When I feel a sense of meaning and significance, sometimes it's correlated with positivity. But even in the negative times, there's something else that I wouldn't call positive. I would more call it direction or determination. And it's somehow underneath, but it's not as if I can map it to something as simple as valence. So I want to know what you think about that."
},
{
"end_time": 1779.343,
"index": 70,
"start_time": 1750.043,
"text": " Yes, super good question. Very, very rich question. I think the first thing that I'll say is that, you know, valence is a pretty kind of a pretty broad term because a lot of feelings and sensations have a valence, even if they look very different than what we think of as kind of like pleasure and pain or happiness and, you know, and sadness."
},
{
"end_time": 1797.551,
"index": 71,
"start_time": 1779.753,
"text": " Think of, for example, the flavor of umami, or as you grow older and you acquire a more refined taste for savory things. Or green tea, for example. I have a friend who jokes about how in his meditation practice,"
},
{
"end_time": 1827.176,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1797.756,
"text": " He used to kind of like prioritize, uh, kind of like the Dorito of meditative happiness as he'd wear just kind of this very rich, intense feeling of joy that you can experience. But now that he's more mature, he kind of like prefers to focus on kind of the green tea of the feelings of, of happiness in meditation. You know, it's kind of these like more, okay, like steady, you know, mature sense of wellbeing. Um, and I would say like something like that, like the feeling of, of meaning, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 1852.637,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1827.756,
"text": " It's not, you know, it's not kind of like a spoonful of sugar in your mouth, you know, but it is more kind of like the umami of experience. It's one of these like more subtle, refined, you know, flavors of consciousness, but it still has a positive or negative valence at the end of the day. And I think it is not unfalsifiable because"
},
{
"end_time": 1881.8,
"index": 74,
"start_time": 1852.91,
"text": " The structure of valence still applies, and I think it's a universal property. This ultimately comes from Mike Johnson, co-founder of Qualia Research Institute, who proposed what's called the symmetry theory of valence. What makes an experience feel good or bad has to do with the presence or absence of symmetry and anti-symmetry. The intuitive conception here is harmony and dissonance."
},
{
"end_time": 1907.381,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1882.415,
"text": " In sounds and music you can essentially take a snapshot of a music and do a dissonance analysis on it and that will give you a very very large percentage of how pleasant or unpleasant that tiny bit of music sounds like of course a lot of what makes an experience a musical experience feel good or bad depends on the context and we carry the context you know from let's say like the previous movement in a symphony"
},
{
"end_time": 1936.288,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1907.705,
"text": " Interpret the current sounds and so there's a lot of context that might be missing if you just do analysis of a given snapshot but but still you know just one snapshot will give you a very large percentage of kind of like the texture of the experience and so. I would argue that you know just as kind of like the feeling of something you know very you know the Dorito of happiness let's say kind of a bodily orgasm for example. Has kind of these harmony and symmetry and coherence to it."
},
{
"end_time": 1966.203,
"index": 77,
"start_time": 1936.664,
"text": " But then, you know, this kind of like reach undertones of meaning in an experience. They also have this harmony and coherence to it. And I think it is that the reason why ultimately they feel good and we want to pursue them. Now that is kind of like why I think it's not unfalsifiable that like, Hey, we really go in there and let's say we find the meaning generators in your brain and we introduce dissonance to it."
},
{
"end_time": 1995.247,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 1966.783,
"text": " You would actually say something like, oh gosh, this feels like very unpleasantly meaningless or something like that, that you could actually tune the coherence and the dissonance of sensations. It would be reported as, Hey, this is feels more or less, you know, richly meaningful or not. And Richard pleasant or not. Um, I want to also touch upon, you know, the, the question of like, you know, philosophical egoism, um, psychological egoism, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2020.64,
"index": 79,
"start_time": 1995.657,
"text": " At a deeper level, which is like, can you ever actually do something that is beyond just for yourself? And that actually is a very, very deep question because, um, I think that something really profound about consciousness is that there is some kind of like inherent uncertainty about the identity of an experience. Um, because an experience is not just kind of a point like, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2040.981,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2020.879,
"text": " Structure is not it's not just kind of like you can identify in your experience and say like okay here is the self and the experience is happening to this you know particular point and experiences a lot of things simultaneously. And some experiences you know actually have like a conception of the self that is very different from other experiences and."
},
{
"end_time": 2064.428,
"index": 81,
"start_time": 2041.527,
"text": " whether you know a given action is selfish or not depends on your model of what the self is and and as a consequence i think you know at the end of the day i don't think it is true that we are only doing things that are in a sense making us feel good because the very meaning of what us is is kind of like a"
},
{
"end_time": 2091.51,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2065.128,
"text": " a shifting target, a moving target. And it really depends on kind of like what kind of philosophy you've been exposed to. And in that sense, there's actually some kind of inherent uncertainty about whether you're doing it for yourself or not. That said, at a deep, you know, kind of like causal level, I do think we're always trying to increase our harmony and trying to reduce our dissonance. And in that sense, yes, I think there is like some truth to the psychological egoism."
},
{
"end_time": 2121.698,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2092.5,
"text": " Some definitions of consciousness, which I should ask you for your definition of consciousness, but I'll just spell out one of them, is the ability to feel and experience. So the fact that you can, it's the capacity to feel. Now, of course, that's just a single definition, and maybe that's more along the lines of awareness or something like that, or sentience doesn't matter, whatever. There's a capacity to experience, and then there is what you are experiencing, the contents of experience. So would you say that those are two qualitatively different categories?"
},
{
"end_time": 2150.026,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2123.729,
"text": " I think there's a lot of value usually in kind of like carving out the ontology of consciousness in different ways because different carvings gives you different types of insights and leads for research. For context, when I say consciousness, I mean the what-it's-likeness of experience. Now, you know the word consciousness,"
},
{
"end_time": 2167.125,
"index": 85,
"start_time": 2150.486,
"text": " Really has kind of like at least twenty different meanings if you look it up in the dictionary all of those meanings are fascinating you know i. When somebody says hey i started consciousness even if they're talking about you know social consciousness or self awareness usually as far as i'm concerned is a very interesting topic."
},
{
"end_time": 2193.097,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2167.688,
"text": " However, I do think kind of the most philosophically fundamental, you know, kind of meaning of the word consciousness is consciousness is in the sense of qualia, the what is it likeness of experience, the blueness of blue or the quality of the smell of a rose, for example. And from this perspective, you know, when I say a consciousness or a moment of experience,"
},
{
"end_time": 2201.681,
"index": 87,
"start_time": 2193.404,
"text": " I'm actually kind of like talking about the entirety of kind of like what's happening in an individual put on code like screen of consciousness so"
},
{
"end_time": 2225.879,
"index": 88,
"start_time": 2202.534,
"text": " On a given moment, you know, like I have a visual field, I have a tactile field, I have an auditory field. I also have kind of the internal versions of those, you know, have a mind's eye. I have like an emotional landscape and I also have an inner dialogue. So that's already six different kind of sensory fields, as it were, you know, three external, three internal or about like internal states."
},
{
"end_time": 2247.5,
"index": 89,
"start_time": 2226.647,
"text": " But then, on top of that, there is the feeling of meaning and the feeling of aboutness, the intentionality of experience. There's also cognition. And there's also more subtle things. For some blog posts, I sometimes called it ontological qualia, which is kind of the"
},
{
"end_time": 2277.602,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2247.79,
"text": " The feeling of kind of like what is the fundamental ontology of the universe, which is something that is usually pretty fixed unless you explore meditation or psychedelics and then suddenly you that variable can change. It's like, oh my gosh, there was also that variable to my experience. Um, but you know, I would encapsulate all of that, you know, on a given moment of experience is like, you know, all the sensory fields, internal and external and cognition and the existential qualia and all of that is just kind of like one moment of experience."
},
{
"end_time": 2304.872,
"index": 91,
"start_time": 2277.944,
"text": " One snapshot. There are, I think, like, you know, significant structural difference between, you know, the feelings that are associated with vision versus the feelings associated with audio. But they're kind of like still different facets of the same thing. And in that sense, I wouldn't make kind of like a fundamental distinction between, I guess, like the contents of experience versus the capacity to experience."
},
{
"end_time": 2334.667,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2305.452,
"text": " If that is encapsulated within a moment of experience, I would call both of those different facets of consciousness. Okay, I'd like to get like, I have 200 questions here, man. So I literally have 200. I have 172 questions here. So I won't be able to get to all of them. The quality of research Institute is something we should touch on. And I'd like you to explain what that is, and use that as a segue to talk about impedance matching."
},
{
"end_time": 2361.596,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2334.838,
"text": " and your findings with that. Okay, okay, fantastic. I'm not so sure if I will be able to make it justice for the second part of the impedance matching, but I'll give it a try. So yeah, the Qualia Research Institute, you know, something that came up because a number of reasons, you know, yeah, I guess, okay, like here's some context. So"
},
{
"end_time": 2389.753,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2361.869,
"text": " I wanted to study consciousness full time, pretty much all my life, at least since the age of 16. I found it difficult to find a place in academia where they actually did study consciousness in the way that I found the most meaningful and important. I found that, you know, when I was looking for PhD programs, actually, I talked to lots of different professors. I mean, I lost count, but easily like 50 possible professors to work with."
},
{
"end_time": 2415.077,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2390.299,
"text": " Wow, usually plenty. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, you know, easily, you know, a lot, a lot of them would say, yes, I studied consciousness, but then if you dig deeper into, you know, what kind of research they're actually doing, they're actually studying something like cognition or, you know, working memory, or maybe, you know, at best to something like, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2439.002,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2415.623,
"text": " You know, like the psychophysics, you know, like visual perception or something like that. Um, nobody that I found was actually studying in a fundamental sense, you know, qualia and the structure of the state space of qualia or, or, or something along those lines, the state space of qualia. Yeah. The status of qualia, which is like all of the possible sensations that you can have, you know, and I guess I kind of like."
},
{
"end_time": 2469.138,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2439.735,
"text": " lead was tested in a way it was when i would ask professors like hey like what do you think of the role of meditation and psychedelics for understanding consciousness and the brain and you know you know bear in mind that this was in 2013 were like okay psychedelics weren't as legitimized in academia as a subject of research but typically what i would hear would be something along the lines of well you know psychedelics affect the brain in very complex ways"
},
{
"end_time": 2497.875,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2469.548,
"text": " You know a lot of subsystems at once so it's they're probably not a very good instrument to study consciousness instead you know what they were prioritizing were things such as like psychological interventions or even yeah you know something out of like ultrasound stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation which you know i think it's very very valuable for for for studying the brain and consciousness but you don't really get you know profound consciousness altering effects with those technologies"
},
{
"end_time": 2526.288,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2498.797,
"text": " And the way I saw it instead was, Hey, hold on a second in physics. Um, you know, we, we have made so much progress because we've looked at the extremes, you know, we've looked at, you know, things that are very close to zero Kelvin, you know, things that are, you know, thousands of degrees Celsius, maybe in millions of degrees Celsius, you know, like looking at, at, you know, stars and supernova and, you know, cosmic phenomena."
},
{
"end_time": 2554.172,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2526.664,
"text": " You know you learned a lot from looking at the extremes and if your theory can only explain kind of room temperature physics. You know you're missing data to actually be able to kind of like differentiate between different uh equivalent you know empirically identical theories from the point of view of like making predictions in room temperature and i thought like hey for consciousness i think it's going to be the same that like if you have a theory of consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 2584.309,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2554.497,
"text": " And you think it's universal and you think it actually works, it should be able to tell you something like, Hey, what's going to happen if you combine ketamine and DMT? I mean, like, I know that sounds like kind of ridiculous. It's like, okay, you would only ever combine DMT and ketamine in a crazy party somewhere in the Bay area or something like that. That doesn't sound like science, but, but hold on. Like he's the same as in physics, right? Like a serious theory of physics should be able to tell you what happens if you mix, you know, lead and."
},
{
"end_time": 2613.387,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2584.667,
"text": " You know palladium at such and such temperatures in such and such pressure, right? Like it should be able to generalize and the same with that theory of consciousness and and I just really didn't find anybody who yeah, kind of like had that mindset or or that ambition really at the same time. There was these movements in the Bay Area coming up. This is when I was studying. Yeah, my masters at Stanford, you know 2013 2014 and"
},
{
"end_time": 2637.295,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2613.968,
"text": " This movement called effective altruism was starting to become popular. And it is a very strong background assumption of most of the people who participate in that movement that consciousness is really just information processing in which case you know they anticipate that ai is gonna be conscious and also."
},
{
"end_time": 2664.94,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2637.961,
"text": " They have a particular way of making sense of whether, let's say, like a fruit fly is conscious and whether its life has value or not and how to assess that. And from our perspective, you know, me and my friends and philosophers who used to think a lot about this, even back in the day, there were kind of like really important missing components in how people were approaching, you know, the ethics of effective altruism."
},
{
"end_time": 2692.568,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2665.555,
"text": " And yet two that were really essential was the binding problem to, for example, be able to tell whether a computer is conscious or not. That really changes, you know, the panorama for desirable futures. But then the other one was theories of valence. Because a lot of people, you know, computer scientists, people who work in AI, the way they tend to think of valence is actually in terms of reinforcement learning. You know, they think of something like, well,"
},
{
"end_time": 2711.135,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2693.012,
"text": " What is something feels good or bad depends on whether your reinforcement algorithm tells you that you should get more or less of that and some people actually believe that. For you know reasoning based off of kind of like pleasure as reinforcement."
},
{
"end_time": 2736.288,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2711.613,
"text": " That is it is actually literally impossible to always be happy right because if you were to always reinforce the same thing you kind of like max out at some point and and you're not learning anything new so you're not actually reinforcing anything it doesn't feel good but then you know empirically you find people who are like always happy and you find people who are always depressed people with you know chronic pain people with yeah chronic happiness as it were so um"
},
{
"end_time": 2762.142,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2736.647,
"text": " If you know happiness and suffering is actually not something related to reinforcement learning or reinforcement learning is only tangentially related to it. Then it seems like we have a very important piece of the puzzle that is completely missing for like what is a desirable future. So we me and a few friends we could go found the quality research institute to essentially"
},
{
"end_time": 2792.09,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2762.671,
"text": " Create a kind of this research enterprise with a goal of mapping out the state space of consciousness being able to eventually actually make rigorous predictions about you know any extreme state of consciousness you know as exotic as okay what happens if you combine DMT and ketamine and you know something that sounds ridiculous like that and then also being able to quantify how good or bad an experience feels based on its mathematical structure and"
},
{
"end_time": 2816.254,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2792.739,
"text": " Essentially, a lot of people agreed with our stated goals and we got some amount of kind of like memetic support as it were in the community. Scott Alexander, the writer of Slate Star Codex, pretty important person in kind of like that sphere of people. He wrote about us in 2017."
},
{
"end_time": 2839.718,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2816.715,
"text": " And yeah we had our first intern cohort in 2019 and I think like it really has kind of like snowballed since 2021 where we started to actually organize some of these research retreats you know we would actually get together physically spend several weeks together and work on projects and yeah I mean now it's a"
},
{
"end_time": 2865.896,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2840.077,
"text": " Kind of in a state where essentially we have like multiples of these retreats a year, uh, publishing papers in academia and, um, also, yeah, creating technology. Uh, maybe, maybe something that I'll, uh, add on to kind of this, uh, conversation is that, you know, um, a very big picture for like, what is it that the quality research Institute does is, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 2878.797,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 2866.681,
"text": " And it's not super easy because we do a lot of things but like one big picture way of describing it is that there is kind of like three goals and then there's like three disciplines with which we pursue those goals so."
},
{
"end_time": 2905.64,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 2879.104,
"text": " The three goals are, I mean, first of all, we want to reduce as much as possible and prevent intense suffering. We have a lot of reasons to believe that actually that is a top ethical priority and it is actually highly, highly neglected. Even ineffective altruism is not really properly kind of a prioritized. The second goal is figuring out how to improve baseline. You know, the moment to moment"
},
{
"end_time": 2930.691,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 2906.271,
"text": " Positive qualities of experience and and meaning on anybody's life. And then the third goal is to understand a mathematical model and make accessible. Extreme pleasure states are states of extreme well-being just to give you an example something like the join us which are these very advanced concentration states in meditation which are."
},
{
"end_time": 2957.244,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 2931.101,
"text": " extremely pleasant and extremely beautiful in ways that are very hard to describe. But we want to figure out what those are and develop technology to allow people to access them much faster than they currently can. And then the three disciplines are, first of all, philosophy, especially philosophy of mind, where we actually write up and publish in academia actual philosophy papers."
},
{
"end_time": 2983.831,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 2957.466,
"text": " Which, you know, may sound kind of like pretty disconnected from reality, but you know, it is our, you know, our strong stance that better philosophy should actually lead to better science in particular, better philosophy of mind should lead to better neuroscience. So that is the second discipline that we engage in, which is like neuroscience, for example, algorithms for analyzing neuroimaging data is one of the things that we do. And then third,"
},
{
"end_time": 3012.551,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 2984.053,
"text": " is neuro technology. Especially we focus on non-invasive methods to interface with consciousness, alter it in beneficial ways and ways that increase agency allows you to have more control over your experience. And so it's really kind of a three by three, right? It's like, so just to remind you is like, get rid of the very unpleasant, improve the moment to moment, gain access to the really, really pleasant and meaningful, then philosophy,"
},
{
"end_time": 3027.466,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3012.961,
"text": " Neuroscience and then neuro technology and essentially pretty much everything that we do can be found in kind of like that three by three matrix. Okay, so that's yeah very big picture view of the quality research institute."
},
{
"end_time": 3054.121,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3028.695,
"text": " Okay, great. Now I said I had 172 questions and I didn't say that every three minutes that you speak, 10 more questions occurred to me. So it's drastically over 200 and I have to choose what to pursue. So firstly, this is going to be part one of another conversation because there's no way that we can cram all of this into into two hours or so. Let's talk about the impedance matching then."
},
{
"end_time": 3085.555,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3057.073,
"text": " Yeah, I mean, I don't think this is super, super vigorous at this point. I mean, I think when I've talked about impedance matching, it's a well, think of like when you have several kind of like vibrations going on inside you, something that you can like tune into in meditation. You know, if you if you try to kind of like slow down in meditation, really calm down and then you do, let's say like a body scan of like what is happening in your body."
},
{
"end_time": 3112.927,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3086.237,
"text": " You will notice that there's a series of metronomes. There's kind of like some wave emitters as it were. You know, to start with, there is your breathing, right? Like you have a periodic kind of like oscillation just coming from breathing that is exciting your whole body at that frequency. But then there's also your heartbeat, right? Like and your breathing and your heartbeat can be aligned or misaligned."
},
{
"end_time": 3140.06,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3113.882,
"text": " Playing with the alignment of your heartbeat and your breathing actually is a really powerful technique for making progress in meditation. For example, aiming to do one breath cycle every six heartbeats and kind of like really honing in on that resonance. You know, so like, yeah, you have a kind of this integer ratio between those two vibrations or oscillations."
},
{
"end_time": 3165.333,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3140.64,
"text": " So that would be a kind of impedance matching in that you have like these two different frequencies. And you're taking steps to essentially make them aligned, make them a integer ratios of each other. But you know, that would be just the very kind of like the base frequencies of your of your experience, because there's a lot more that is happening. I mean, on increasing levels of subtlety,"
},
{
"end_time": 3193.37,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3165.879,
"text": " You can notice oscillations or vibrations in your stomach, in your arms, in your legs, in your face. And one thing that I have found, something for which I don't have a rigorous empirical paradigm, but I'm pretty confident there is something here, is that whenever you pay attention to two things at once within your field of experience, they slowly but surely begin to synchronize."
},
{
"end_time": 3217.79,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3193.746,
"text": " So this is an exercise that people at home can can do, you know, you can just book five minutes by the clock. And let's say once you calm down a little bit in meditation, pay attention to the vibrations in both of your hands. I mean, most of the time, I guess people don't notice that there's vibrations in their body. But if you relax enough and you you're concentrated enough,"
},
{
"end_time": 3237.278,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3218.234,
"text": " You will notice that everything is vibrating in different ways, usually pretty subtle, sometimes much more overt. But my claim is based on a lot of personal experience and trying it with other people. If you kind of like tune into the vibrations that are happening in both of your hands and you try to"
},
{
"end_time": 3264.002,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3238.08,
"text": " kind of like place your attention in an even way for like not not kind of like this hand and then this hand or alternating no no no like try to pay attention to both of them exactly at once in a continuous kind of homogeneous way almost kind of like spreading some kind of attention liquid as it were in both of your hands you will notice that over the course of minutes the vibration slowly but surely synchronize"
},
{
"end_time": 3291.34,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3264.616,
"text": " And after a while, you may even actually get kind of these like strobing sensation, where both of your hands are kind of like aligned with your heartbeat, for example. Now, this is just two parts of your body. But let's say that you do this over and over again. What do you do? Kind of the algorithm of this meditation would be you find the two parts in your body that are vibrating in the most desynchronized way possible."
},
{
"end_time": 3311.869,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3292.108,
"text": " Then you spend like five minutes paying attention to both of them until they harmonize. So that would be kind of an instance of impedance matching in a way of like you're connecting them in such a way that they can slowly but surely synchronize like metronomes in a table."
},
{
"end_time": 3342.398,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3312.483,
"text": " Okay, okay, let's be clear here. So when someone is focusing on say their left leg and their right ear, and those are the most dissonant. Now, maybe you say what was likely to be the most dissonant will be the heart and the brain or the or the like some some place of significance, whatever doesn't matter place A and place B. They're not trying to will the synchronization. They're just paying attention to the dissonance. Yeah, I would say this is light."
},
{
"end_time": 3371.493,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3343.029,
"text": " Yeah, a very slight kind of like twist here because if the thing that you're paying attention to is the dissonance itself, like if the thing that you're paying attention to is the way in which they're out of phase, actually that may exacerbate and enhance the dissonance. Just because that's kind of like how attention works, like whatever you pay attention to becomes stronger. That is kind of like a very big perspective. So instead, what you really have to do is"
},
{
"end_time": 3387.261,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3371.886,
"text": " Pay attention to the way in which they are kind of similar and then slowly the ways in which the vibrations are similar will be the part that becomes amplified until eventually you you have kind of is like synchronize the strobing of the different parts of the body."
},
{
"end_time": 3413.49,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3388.131,
"text": " okay so you have Justin Bieber playing in one ear and then you have Nirvana playing in another ear and they're different and you can tell they're different and you could focus on their difference or you can say okay there I notice that they're different first of all now that I've noticed that they're different how are they similar and then they both have lyrics they both are similar vocal range they're not but you understand is that correct yes yes exactly like"
},
{
"end_time": 3434.514,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3414.155,
"text": " Yeah absolutely something like there is an undercurrent of similarity or kind of like shared nature and you try to focus on that and yeah because essentially whatever you focus on whatever you pay attention to becomes a stronger than the shared aspect of experience will be strengthened over time."
},
{
"end_time": 3459.633,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3435.333,
"text": " And then if you kind of do this recursively, I mean, it's like, okay, like both of my hands now are vibrating in a, in a synchronized way, but maybe not my feet, then, okay, I'm going to pay attention to both of my hands and my feet at the same time until it synchronizes. And you repeat, you know, again and again and again, eventually actually your whole body and all of your sensory fields will enter into coherence."
},
{
"end_time": 3482.91,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3460.043,
"text": " And the moment you do that successfully, actually you enter the first JANA, which is this very powerful whole body vibration, which is coherent across the board and is usually described as extremely pleasant. It's also, by the way, one of the kind of like intuitive reasons why we associate at Qualia Research Institute"
},
{
"end_time": 3503.78,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3483.285,
"text": " What are the kind of like harmony and symmetry of the experience with the feelings of well-being and the valence of the state that when you're like in this very, very concentrated state of consciousness, you notice how like even subtle kind of like misalignments and subtle imperfections in the synchronization process."
},
{
"end_time": 3531.493,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3504.343,
"text": " drive a sense of unease or slight body discomfort. And every time you actually bring together and you harmonize the vibrations, you get this feeling of happiness and well-being. And so you can actually just take it all the way and more and more levels of synchronization will eventually happen until something really exotic like you become this powerful sense of joy and then peace and then equanimity."
},
{
"end_time": 3557.944,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3532.005,
"text": " And then even you absorb into space for example like the fifth janice absorption into boundless space and. As far as i can tell the reason why that happens is because everything is in a state of coherence and the sense of a boundary and separation within our field of consciousness is literally implemented with out of out of phase interactions or."
},
{
"end_time": 3584.565,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3558.2,
"text": " Vibrations are not in synchrony. So whenever you synchronize everything the boundaries dissolve There's there's nothing your brain can use to kind of like generate the sense of separation And usually yeah, that's a very pleasant positive experience. And yeah, once you get used to kind of like those very high valence very pleasant joyful states of consciousness you realize that essentially our motivational architecture all of our life is"
},
{
"end_time": 3594.991,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3584.957,
"text": " was driven by the pursuit of those kind of like that gradient except that we were pursuing it in a very inefficient kind of roundabout circumvent kind of way."
},
{
"end_time": 3621.988,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3596.766,
"text": " Okay, so we're going to get to impedance matching. But before we do, like I mentioned, several questions occurred to me. So one of them is that if what reality quote unquote is is ultimately unified, why care about the difference, quote unquote difference between positive and negative, if it's ultimately a non distinction to begin with. And so let me tell you what's underneath that with you, with your focus on the"
},
{
"end_time": 3641.988,
"index": 144,
"start_time": 3622.619,
"text": " Initially the effect of altruism movement and now maximizing pleasure. How do you know that you yourself haven't induced a frame of mind where you are focusing on the difference between positivity and negativity in the same way that you shouldn't focus on the dissonance and you've manifested that difference as mattering more. So that's why you care so much about the positive."
},
{
"end_time": 3663.695,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3642.841,
"text": " Hi everyone, hope you're enjoying today's episode. If you're hungry for deeper dives into physics, AI, consciousness, philosophy, along with my personal reflections, you'll find it all on my sub stack. Subscribers get first access to new episodes, new posts as well, behind the scenes insights, and the chance to be a part of a thriving community of like-minded pilgrimers."
},
{
"end_time": 3687.432,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3663.695,
"text": " By joining you'll directly be supporting my work and helping keep these conversations at the cutting edge so click the link on screen here hit subscribe and let's keep pushing the boundaries of knowledge together thank you and enjoy the show just so you know if you're listening it's c u r t j a i m u n g a l dot org kurt jaimangal dot org. So that's why you care so much about the positive."
},
{
"end_time": 3715.043,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3688.422,
"text": " Oh, that's a wonderful, wonderful question. I mean, it really is, because it's, it's wonderfully tricky. And, and I actually see a lot of people like kind of like subtly be confused about this. So I mean, first of all, if you identify kind of like how good or bad the universe is, with the amount of suffering that there is in it, or the sense of separation that there is in it, and you try to solve that problem,"
},
{
"end_time": 3741.391,
"index": 148,
"start_time": 3715.623,
"text": " Absolutely. You know, internalizing that problem is going to cause a suffering inside you. You know, there's, there's no doubt about it. Um, at the same time, that can be an altruistic type of suffering. Uh, I mean, in a, in a similar way, um, to, well, if, you know, a mother and, and, and the child, like, if, if the child is crying, you know, the mother could be choosing to pay attention to the TV instead of the child crying."
},
{
"end_time": 3769.189,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3742.142,
"text": " and of course she's gonna feel better by doing that but you know there's a good reason why to pay attention to the child crying because hey we're all connected consciousness is one thing and if the child is suffering in some sense yes that's all of us suffering it makes a lot of sense to actually represent accurately the states of suffering in the world if you can do something about it I do think you know if you're powerless about what you can do"
},
{
"end_time": 3797.773,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 3769.957,
"text": " Let's say you have like severe cognitive disability or let's say you you know you have a life expectancy of like one week or something like that actually probably deceiving yourself about how good the universe is or like the world around you may actually be good for you because and good for everybody you know because you're not gonna fix it anyway so why not forget about it but if you're you know like a young kid in university and you're"
},
{
"end_time": 3826.988,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 3798.08,
"text": " choosing you know a career in order to actually have a positive impact then yeah actually taking in some of the suffering of the world by internalizing kind of like that sense of separation and discomfort it is a kind of altruistic action and i do think it is yeah beneficial to do it even if it's not all that good for your well-being i mean i i do notice you know the the temptation to do otherwise i mean it is very common in in spiritual circles for example to have the the trope"
},
{
"end_time": 3853.729,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 3827.244,
"text": " that hey, everything is already perfect. You know, that is very common in spiritual circles. People who meditate a lot, very often they will arrive at a view where they think something like, well, you know, it's not about good versus evil. It really is about the balance between good and evil and everything is perfect already. So like you don't have to fix anything. But I think that's kind of a type of wireheading that is kind of like misrepresenting"
},
{
"end_time": 3878.882,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 3853.951,
"text": " You know the rest of the universe and the states of consciousness out there in the universe just to feel better which again can be helpful in some periods of life or if you don't plan to do anything about the the suffering out there yeah sure that's that's a perfectly valid thing but yeah i think the strongest case i would make is that the the the issue is that yeah the the world actually and especially you know the suffering in the world"
},
{
"end_time": 3905.299,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 3879.599,
"text": " is actually, I would say, much worse than our intuition tells us and even much worse than, you know, people like Viktor Frankl, my, my, you know, somebody who survived the Holocaust, even people who are kind of like have witnessed that level of suffering, I think usually are still underestimating just how bad bad things are. So if you want to, you know, actually help, you do require, I think, to internalize a little bit, okay, just how bad it is."
},
{
"end_time": 3935.043,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 3905.794,
"text": " We the caveat, you know, that you really have to take care of your own well-being as well, right? Like it really doesn't help for you to become deeply depressed and because then you become powerless as well. So, um, which is something that happens in effective altruist circles. Yeah. When somebody starts reading a lot about, you know, factory farming and just how, how bad it is. Right. Um, oftentimes, yeah, they actually become so depressed. They, they can't actually do anything about it. And, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 3962.927,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 3935.418,
"text": " And then, yeah, things are worse on the whole. But if you combine kind of this awareness of the suffering in the world together with practices of well-being and practices that enhance your valence, I think you can strike the right balance where let's say you're doing Jhana meditation on the one hand, you're taking care of your long-term well-being, but also you're not neglecting what's happening in the world. And I think that is the balance that I tried to strike."
},
{
"end_time": 3990.879,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 3964.872,
"text": " So firstly, that happened to me as well when I was 18 or so and I started to read about and watch videos. Geez, some are still burnt in my mind about factory farming and and just the suffering of people and beheadings and torture. Some of us still is still in me. So I resonate with that. So. My question still remains about"
},
{
"end_time": 4021.459,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 3991.834,
"text": " If the ontology is ultimately unified without distinction, so maybe that's maybe my premises incorrect, my rendering of your premises incorrect. But anyhow, so if that's the case, how can it be the case that there's a fundamental distinction between what's pleasant and unpleasant? Yes, I think maybe it's a slight mischaracterization, which is leading to a very different kind of picture of the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 4051.186,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4021.954,
"text": " So let me try to paint it as follows. So I do think, okay, in the qri ontology and view of the universe, the universe is a gigantic field of consciousness. And in some sense, we are all it, you know, the spiritual trope that hey, we're all one consciousness, I think there's something really true about it. At the same time, these gigantic field of consciousness also is divided into various pockets."
},
{
"end_time": 4081.51,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4051.647,
"text": " And this is where what we call the topological solution to the boundary problem comes into play. So this is essentially how we solve the boundary problem, which is, hey, if everything is one, how come you're there and I am here? Like it's kind of like a strange, strange thing. If everything is unified, why are there different people, different animals, different subjects of experience? And our answer is that, well, everything is one. However, within that oneness,"
},
{
"end_time": 4110.64,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4082.022,
"text": " You have a rich topological structure and you know, this is something that we see in physics. You know, the best example, best simple intuitive example I can give is to imagine the surface of a balloon as kind of the field of consciousness. If you take a balloon and then you twist it from both ends in opposite directions, there is a precise moment where the center collapses and you get a pinch point."
},
{
"end_time": 4136.357,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4111.596,
"text": " And in some sense, now you have like two balloons that are connected by one point. And this is one of these cases where, you know, a difference in degree, you know, how twisted the balloon is, cashes out into a difference in kind, where like now you have effectively kind of two balloons connected by a point. You know, you can still argue it's still just one balloon because it is kind of a continuous surface. However,"
},
{
"end_time": 4165.64,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4137.244,
"text": " If you have kind of different pictures or information in both sides of that balloon there's going to be a kind of like a bottleneck in how information can transfer from one side to the other because whatever you you try to send from one side of the balloon to the other it will have to be compressed through this one dimensional point and that's going to eliminate a lot of information so in our picture of reality at qri we think yeah the universe is something like that it's kind of this gigantic"
},
{
"end_time": 4183.78,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4166.049,
"text": " What's also kind of trippy and maybe unexpected here is that,"
},
{
"end_time": 4214.394,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4184.445,
"text": " This also happens within one person over the course of even like a second, you know, in our model, each moment of experience is actually very temporarily thin, as we call it, meaning that a moment of experience may be like less than a millisecond in terms of its temporal depth. And so even just one brain that is awake is going to be producing lots of little kind of like pockets, lots of little bubbles of experience within within one second."
},
{
"end_time": 4241.049,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4214.94,
"text": " Now, um, I do think that, yeah, if you want to kind of like quantify the total suffering or the total happiness in the universe, um, what you have to do is look at the structure of all of those little pockets and quantify the harmony, the dissonance, the symmetry and asymmetry in all of them. And that can give you a total score for like, Hey, like in this region of reality of the universe,"
},
{
"end_time": 4265.35,
"index": 167,
"start_time": 4241.596,
"text": " There is this amount of suffering, this amount of happiness, this is the net valence of the state. What you raise, it is kind of like really relevant and tricky in that like one may ask, okay, like if actually the thing that is deep down, the deep reality behind all of these different pockets is actually just one large field, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 4295.299,
"index": 168,
"start_time": 4265.794,
"text": " Why would something like pleasure or pain matter if it's just one thing? Well, the thing that I would argue is that while kind of the identity of reality cannot be changed, the features that it expresses can. And depending on what happens, different features will be expressed. And I think that at the end of the day, the features that matter for ethics is the valence of those experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 4322.346,
"index": 169,
"start_time": 4295.708,
"text": " You legitimately can have like a better or worse reality and he's sort of like to put it poetically is the distinction between a reality in which God is having fun and a reality in which God is you know in a in a very unpleasant kind of hellish state Yeah, I'm let's see how you react to that there's more I could say but yeah Okay, so there are various definitions of oneness and"
},
{
"end_time": 4349.002,
"index": 170,
"start_time": 4322.858,
"text": " So one would be there's a new age conception of oneness. There's broadly speaking, a Buddhist conception of oneness and a Vedic conception of oneness. And they're not all the same. And even within Buddhism and Vedism, there's several facets that disagree with one another. So I need to understand what your definition of oneness is. So my confusion is that most of the time when people speak about oneness that I speak to, they're referring to something that's undifferentiated."
},
{
"end_time": 4378.78,
"index": 171,
"start_time": 4349.343,
"text": " Now in your balloon example, the material, we could all belong to the same material of the balloon, but the material of the balloon is of a different nature than the twistedness of the balloon and of a different nature than the pressure that's inside the balloon. So you could say we're all of the same vellum. So we're all of the same cloth, but there are still other properties. And thus it's not entirely undifferentiated to me. Yes, yes, that's right. Yes, this is yeah, maybe this is a really great"
},
{
"end_time": 4404.087,
"index": 172,
"start_time": 4378.899,
"text": " Please do we talk about zero ontology because this thing like unifies these different threads. So zero ontology is this theory by David Pierce about why there is something rather than nothing. Like the big question, why is there anything at all? And, you know, he's kind of like answer to this is that, you know, in kind of the deep reality"
},
{
"end_time": 4432.892,
"index": 173,
"start_time": 4404.258,
"text": " There is something that is a zero. There is something that is unchanging and it's a kind of nothing that by necessity exists and out of it by implication, everything that we experience is entailed. And it's not necessarily kind of like a causal relationship. It's not kind of like this deep nothingness is causing our reality. It's more kind of in the language of logic where"
},
{
"end_time": 4458.166,
"index": 174,
"start_time": 4433.319,
"text": " This deep nothingness is entails you know it implies our reality and you know the bottom line is that he thinks that you know all of the values in reality cancel out to zero you know the three kind of like areas where this shows up which ultimately may be equivalent of different facets of the same thing is physics math and consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 4488.439,
"index": 175,
"start_time": 4458.729,
"text": " So in physics and you know it much better than I do. I think you've probably have studied this much more deeply than I have. But you know, you have things such as like the total charge in the universe adds up to zero or the total energy of the universe or angular momentum or momentum add up to zero. And so there is a sense in which, you know, the different values in physics are kind of like there's some kind of accounting system."
},
{
"end_time": 4517.978,
"index": 176,
"start_time": 4488.831,
"text": " That if you put them all together, they cancel out into some kind of net zero. I mean, maybe maybe it's not like strict nothingness. Maybe it's kind of these charged quantum vacuum or something like that. But there's like a sense in which everything cancels out in mathematics. You know, there's of course a lot of different philosophy of mathematics, but there is some attempt to, for example, reconstruct all of mathematics out of the empty set where you interpret, let's say, natural numbers."
},
{
"end_time": 4546.954,
"index": 177,
"start_time": 4518.541,
"text": " As kind of this nested recursive, um, um, sets that have the empty set within, um, and then it's kind of like, Hey, you can reconstruct all of mathematics out of quote unquote, nothing or out of like an empty set. And in the realm of consciousness, uh, this applies to the values of qualia. So in particular, uh, there, there are some states of consciousness, both in meditation and psychedelics, um, one in particular, a very"
},
{
"end_time": 4576.032,
"index": 178,
"start_time": 4547.346,
"text": " Worth noting is five Mio DMT. They call it the God molecule, which is essentially a psychedelic that tends to produce quite reliably this effect of the values of consciousness canceling each other out. So, you know, a very kind of classic example is if you take a moderate dose of five Mio DMT, you may experience your visual field kind of like defract quote unquote,"
},
{
"end_time": 4604.667,
"index": 179,
"start_time": 4576.459,
"text": " and you kind of like see all of the colors at once all of the colors of the rainbow and then if you take a slightly higher dose something really peculiar happens which is that you sort of like take all of the colors of the rainbow and you look at them from a certain angle and then they all cancel out into a transparent or kind of nothingness and the same also seems to happen with tactile sensations and audio sensations that"
},
{
"end_time": 4630.009,
"index": 180,
"start_time": 4604.889,
"text": " There is a dose where you get the full palette, the full state space of possible qualia, and at a higher dose, they all cancel out, and you get this sense of nothingness or emptiness, which is a very profound feeling of lack of differentiation. In fact, one of the fascinating things of this is that"
},
{
"end_time": 4660.384,
"index": 181,
"start_time": 4630.811,
"text": " The feeling of you know god consciousness as they call it kind of like the profound feeling of like well there's only one subject of experience in all of reality and we're all it that happens at a certain dose but if you take an even higher dose actually that cancels out with a feeling of separation which is kind of like another type of qualia and actually yeah the feeling of oneness and the feeling of separation are kind of two aspects of consciousness that can cancel out"
},
{
"end_time": 4689.906,
"index": 182,
"start_time": 4660.776,
"text": " And there's something that just doesn't feel like anything that is kind of the result of that cancellation. So what I want to say is that yes, there is absolutely a sense in which, you know, the, the total amount of green, as it were in reality, the subjective quality of green needs to eventually cancel out with the total amount of red in reality. So there is a sense in which the values of consciousness do cancel out. However,"
},
{
"end_time": 4717.568,
"index": 183,
"start_time": 4690.35,
"text": " There are aspects of consciousness that don't cancel out. And in particular, I think valence doesn't cancel out. I especially don't think it is the case that how good and bad experiences feel need to sort of like average out somehow. Like I don't think it is the case that whenever there is a positive experience, somewhere else there is a negative experience to balance it out. And the reason is that valence"
},
{
"end_time": 4743.387,
"index": 184,
"start_time": 4717.79,
"text": " is kind of a special property of consciousness that is not one of these raw kind of low level features like color is actually more something structural and emergent out of how you put together those features. So it is such as for example the dissonance of a musical piece like you can take a musical piece"
},
{
"end_time": 4772.21,
"index": 185,
"start_time": 4743.763,
"text": " and you know count all of the uh A's and B's and C's you know like the different notes that you played and whether the the piece sounds good is not dependent on how many A's and B's you have right right it is dependent on the order and the precise combinations that they had right so the the harmony and dissonance is an emergent property of the actual structure how it is put together and i think it's exactly the same for"
},
{
"end_time": 4795.196,
"index": 186,
"start_time": 4772.637,
"text": " Consciousness you could have a universe that is organized in such a way that. Every experience is actually wonderful and even though everything cancels out to quote a quote zero innocence the thing that cancels us to zero is the raw very low level features of reality not this emergence kind of high level gestalt like like like valence."
},
{
"end_time": 4821.408,
"index": 187,
"start_time": 4797.193,
"text": " Okay so a variety of questions. Okay so number one if you were to just continue to zoom into these higher level emergent properties though it would become undifferentiated. So where is this mattering coming from that it matters how it's put together at some higher level? I wonder if there's a different analogy other than the math and physics about cancellation. So in physics it's not the case that the total charge of the universe is equal to zero"
},
{
"end_time": 4848.814,
"index": 188,
"start_time": 4821.408,
"text": " Or that the total mass of the universe is equal to zero or the total momentum. We don't know. We know that in localized regions you can, if you were to create matter that you would have to create it of equal charge and opposite. There's local conservation laws. But doesn't mean we don't, we don't know how the universe started. We don't know the boundary conditions of the universe. So that's like an extra condition of top. And then when it comes to math, building math from the empty set, it's somewhat misleading to say math is built from the empty set"
},
{
"end_time": 4875.742,
"index": 189,
"start_time": 4849.07,
"text": " because well firstly there's a difference even between saying math is built from the empty set and math is built from emptiness because otherwise you just be like math and then you just you just just look at the students and you just stop but the empty set means something and then you also have to have set inclusion in order to define other sets and then there's also rules of logical deduction and those aren't the same as the empty set so that's what i mean it was also similar to the"
},
{
"end_time": 4905.845,
"index": 190,
"start_time": 4876.084,
"text": " What I was speaking about earlier between the difference between the vellum, so the balloon material, and then the pressure inside the balloon and the twistedness of the balloon. So some people will look at that it's all of the same cloth and say monism, but that's not quite, it's not clear to me that that's monism as there are other properties associated with it. And then at what point does the property collapse into the vellum? I don't know. But anyhow, so take that however you like. And I'd like to hear your responses, please. Thank you. Yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 4930.862,
"index": 191,
"start_time": 4906.271,
"text": " Okay so I mean I think it's something like definitely of course in the realm of speculation but when you have a network of kind of these variables that can cancel out you know if you have like okay color you have for every blue quality of blue you have a corresponding quality of yellow"
},
{
"end_time": 4955.06,
"index": 192,
"start_time": 4931.254,
"text": " And whenever you have kind of like movement in this direction, you also have movement in this other direction somewhere else and so on. On the one hand, that sounds like it's impossible to produce kind of like something larger. It's kind of like, okay, these are just oscillations around a kind of zero in a flat surface, so to speak."
},
{
"end_time": 4982.125,
"index": 193,
"start_time": 4955.538,
"text": " um but when you know when they're interrelated to each other when you have kind of like a kind of like energy that has a shared currency across these different variables where let's say you can transform oscillations in color to oscillations in movement and then maybe you can transform oscillations in movement into you know expansion and contraction and and if these variables are networked in in a certain way"
},
{
"end_time": 5007.568,
"index": 194,
"start_time": 4982.824,
"text": " Then a lot of like emergent structure can arise. Recently something that is quite beautiful, we're going to release this pretty soon, is like we have a bunch of simulations using networks of coupled oscillators where a bunch of different variables are interrelated in a way similar to how I described. And one of the things that is kind of like really beautiful is that you can actually have kind of the"
},
{
"end_time": 5035.555,
"index": 195,
"start_time": 5007.927,
"text": " emergence of topological pockets within these field of interconnected variables. So, I mean, it is kind of a boring universe. Well, where the only variable that is kind of like oscillating around zero is color, because then you don't really have much structure. But when you connect, yeah, like movement and expansion and contraction and kind of the elasticity of the oscillators and things like that, then"
},
{
"end_time": 5065.776,
"index": 196,
"start_time": 5036.135,
"text": " very intricate structures can arise even up to the point of kind of like this very enduring cell reinforcing patterns like for example a vortex of color or a saddle of kind of movement and and what i would be hypothesizing here is that yes out of kind of like this field of nothingness in a way where there's a lot of different variables that can cancel out into that nothingness if those variables are interrelated to each other"
},
{
"end_time": 5096.203,
"index": 197,
"start_time": 5066.22,
"text": " Then you can have actual topological structures emerge in that field. And my hypothesis would be that individual experiences are actually those topological pockets in that field. So even though it's kind of like a field of nothingness in a way, out of it, you can get subjects of experience to arise. Well, yeah, extremely speculative and maybe more in the realm of poetry, but maybe gives a bit of an intuition. I mean, in the same vein, I want to learn physics much more deeply,"
},
{
"end_time": 5125.572,
"index": 198,
"start_time": 5096.493,
"text": " I would, yeah, hypothesize or think of essentially particles as less so kind of just oscillations in the field and more kind of these nodded topological structures that arise. I mean, maybe, I mean, one way in which I've heard, for example, I mean, there's a lot more detail to this, but one way to talk about, for example, electrons is rather than thinking of an electron as a point or kind of like a particle in a field,"
},
{
"end_time": 5154.189,
"index": 199,
"start_time": 5126.425,
"text": " It's maybe better to think of it as like a region in the field where the field lines converge. So it's sort of like, it's almost kind of, you do have a figure grounding version, right? Like where you realize, Hey, the thing that is real was the field. Um, and the electron is just kind of a special point in that field where field lines are sort of like not it or, or connecting to in a certain way. And I would essentially think something like that, that"
},
{
"end_time": 5184.462,
"index": 200,
"start_time": 5154.872,
"text": " Okay, let's stick on the zero ontology."
},
{
"end_time": 5212.585,
"index": 201,
"start_time": 5184.77,
"text": " so is it the case that from nothing contradictions can happen like is there inconsistency in the universe in a strict sense i would say no however uh i think the pockets of experience do have certain properties that you can interpret as internal contradictions i mean in particular"
},
{
"end_time": 5230.52,
"index": 202,
"start_time": 5213.2,
"text": " Consciousness does have this superposition quality where you can have many things happen simultaneously. Especially during advanced meditators, they often times describe"
},
{
"end_time": 5258.37,
"index": 203,
"start_time": 5231.032,
"text": " Kind of like the sense of superposition of experience actually becomes like stronger the more you meditate. And like people who are like quote unquote enlightened, oftentimes they will say that yeah, that's that actually is very connected with not trying to resolve the contradictions or the kind of super positions in your experience that normally most people, myself included, you know, on a moment to moment basis, we're trying to kind of like collapse."
},
{
"end_time": 5285.572,
"index": 204,
"start_time": 5259.07,
"text": " and define what we're experiencing as much as possible. We are kind of like somewhat uncomfortable with looking at a scene with kind of like unfocused eyes or if our eyes are not perfectly focusing in the same point, if there's some kind of binocular rivalry and so on, like we're uncomfortable with that. But a lot of kind of like what Awakening is about is to actually be okay with those kind of like states of"
},
{
"end_time": 5314.991,
"index": 205,
"start_time": 5285.828,
"text": " Well, it's not perfectly focused, it's not perfectly coherent, and that's okay. You don't fight it anymore. I mean, in that sense, yeah, I mean, if you define kind of that quality of superposition as, let's say, the coexistence of contradictory features, it's like, well, is this blue or is this yellow? Well, it's kind of both at once. Then, yes, of course, yeah, reality, of course, accepts contradictions. However, there's another way of looking at, let's say, kind of a state of superposition"
},
{
"end_time": 5344.48,
"index": 206,
"start_time": 5315.811,
"text": " as a very precise state, which is, well, it is the state of the sense of ambiguity between these different features. And so it's precisely ambiguous, if that makes sense. And I think if you have that type of logic, then yeah, I think like there's no contradictions in reality. It's just that what reality is made of is something that can have kind of this superposition equality. Would a self also be an emergent entity in the same way that the valence is?"
},
{
"end_time": 5373.626,
"index": 207,
"start_time": 5345.128,
"text": " yes yes absolutely and and i i should distinguish between the self and the sense of self which is a phenomenal quality um versus kind of like the subject of experience or like the fact that there is consciousness so yes please let me let me make sure that i'm understanding even here you said you're going to distinguish between the self and the sense of the self um because that's extremely interesting yeah yeah let's put it that way okay"
},
{
"end_time": 5399.497,
"index": 208,
"start_time": 5374.002,
"text": " Okay, the reason why is because sometimes people could say an interesting phrase, which is I've lost myself, which is extremely interesting. How can you ever lose yourself? Because you're always intimately connected with yourself. So they mean something and also maybe they mean that they've forgotten their values or their memories are gone or or their sense of self is no longer there. So"
},
{
"end_time": 5429.838,
"index": 209,
"start_time": 5400.538,
"text": " I don't know if that's along where you were going, but that's where my head was going. And I was, I was interested to hear you expound on the difference between, well, the sense of self and self. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, to a first approximation, I would say something like the sense of self is a feature of experience similar to, for example, blue or the smell of a rose. Like it is something that you can kind of like paint your experience with."
},
{
"end_time": 5459.974,
"index": 210,
"start_time": 5430.418,
"text": " And, uh, for the same reason is something which you can remove from your experience and having no sense of self doesn't mean that you don't have experiences. Like you can, uh, walk around and be functional without a sense of self. And there's people who are like that. In fact, I think there's yeah, kind of like a normal, a certain kind of like normal distribution, even people who don't meditate the strength of their sense of self, like Vara is enormously. Um, and, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 5490.23,
"index": 211,
"start_time": 5460.674,
"text": " You know, the process of awakening, you know, there's a few key collaborators. Um, one of them is, uh, Roger Thiesel and other one is, uh, Brian, uh, sorry, um, we send Brian Scott, um, and to a lesser extent, but you know, he's much more famous and also more busy, but he's, uh, I also talked to him quite a bit is, uh, Daniel Ingram who wrote this book called, uh, mastering the core teachings of the Buddha. Uh, so all these individuals, they claim to have achieved what is called a fourth path."
},
{
"end_time": 5516.493,
"index": 212,
"start_time": 5490.794,
"text": " Which is a stage in certain strands of Buddhism that is essentially classical awakening. And they describe very precise, very specific phenomenological changes. The way in which they experience the world is radically different. I mean, it's not a subtle change. It's perhaps as radically different from normal everyday life as a DMT trip."
},
{
"end_time": 5546.271,
"index": 213,
"start_time": 5516.749,
"text": " It's like a really really radical change to their moment to moment experience and it's a permanent enduring transformation that they experienced. And you know core to this transformation is that they don't spend any resources anymore. Rendering a sense of self that is just kind of a gun they just don't do it and and they have documented kind of like the various like stages that lead to that in particular roger these they'll has kind of these like five."
},
{
"end_time": 5573.78,
"index": 214,
"start_time": 5546.561,
"text": " Five kind of like levels, kind of like altered traits in meditation, which is not kind of like states of consciousness per se. It's more kind of like enduring states of kind of like transformed consciousness. And it goes as follows. So in normal everyday life, usually most people, I would say 99.9% of people easily have kind of these like coagulated kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 5601.493,
"index": 215,
"start_time": 5574.258,
"text": " Bodily reification maybe around their head is for some people i think it's like around their heart area which is like a bunch of kind of like interrelated and nodded somatic sensations that they identify with and they don't identify with all the things around in their experience so let's say you're walking down the street and you see a homeless person and in the normal everyday state of consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 5628.046,
"index": 216,
"start_time": 5601.886,
"text": " The way you render that interaction is like, Oh, there's an other that's not me, but this is me. And there's a separation between that thing that is not me or that person that is not me and the sense of self that is me. And okay. If you see something beautiful, you know, the sense of who you are may be attracted to it. If you see something ugly, it may be repulsed by it. Um, but that, that kind of like coagulation of somatic sensations."
},
{
"end_time": 5655.026,
"index": 217,
"start_time": 5628.695,
"text": " Is essentially what you're constantly trying to protect and constantly do what you're trying to to enhance like when when somebody. Yeah it has kind of like let's say narcissistic tendencies just just as an example they're like constantly like paying attention to that like graphite coagulated sense of somatic sensations and and trying to make it look good and and kind of like be good in a sense. Now."
},
{
"end_time": 5684.053,
"index": 218,
"start_time": 5655.418,
"text": " If you do a lot of meditation and you sort of kind of like work on lessening the internal knots of your experience and you kind of like transform the fabric of your sensations from like these like very kind of corrugated and crusty kind of like networks of feelings into something more feathery and and soft and delicate eventually you can actually start to identify rather than with your bodily sense"
},
{
"end_time": 5711.237,
"index": 219,
"start_time": 5684.65,
"text": " You may identify with awareness itself and you enter kind of like a state of consciousness. Roger in particular calls the witness, where rather than identifying with a bodily sense, you identify with kind of the witness of experience. Um, and, uh, for a lot of meditation, you know, teachers, maybe that is the end, you know, that is, that is awakening. Whereas for him and various people, I know that that is just like level two out of five, then level three."
},
{
"end_time": 5731.51,
"index": 220,
"start_time": 5711.817,
"text": " is what he calls kind of like God mind or yeah kind of I think like God mind is the typical name but some people also call it as kind of the the feeling a feeling of profound oneness where now what you're doing is that any sensation that you have you tag it as part of you."
},
{
"end_time": 5758.422,
"index": 221,
"start_time": 5732.381,
"text": " I sometimes use like a metaphor that I mean maybe you've played a age of umpires maybe people in the audience have You know, like kind of like video games where you have right, you know different, you know characters all let's say like your team is the characters that are painted blue, you know, and the enemy is the characters that are painted yellow and so After you play for 20 minutes, let's say one of these games whenever you see a tiny speck of blue in the screen and"
},
{
"end_time": 5787.824,
"index": 222,
"start_time": 5759.002,
"text": " Your your whole body and system and mind is like, oh, that's me. I've got to protect that. That's that's a that's part of my team, as it were. And, you know, if you have like tribal affiliations, you know, you cheer for a particular political party or for a particular, you know, like sports or so on, you tend to identify with those who wear, you know, the same colors or the same flags and and that feeling, that feeling of like, oh, that's me or that's part of me."
},
{
"end_time": 5807.176,
"index": 223,
"start_time": 5788.217,
"text": " Is something that happens but for every sensation in that third stage and for a lot of people actually that is what awakening is is kind of you don't make a distinction between yourself and other you can absorb everything into your sense of self the problem though here is that."
},
{
"end_time": 5833.439,
"index": 224,
"start_time": 5807.5,
"text": " You will have a very heavy sense of self and actually that still doesn't quite get rid of the suffering because this kind of now there's the universe to protect and you have like kind of that that feeling of. You may die in a sense but you're projecting it onto everything then the fourth stage is actually kind of. Kind of the polar opposite is kind of you rather than every sensation being identified with you."
},
{
"end_time": 5863.387,
"index": 225,
"start_time": 5834.07,
"text": " You essentially stop identifying with any sensation, you know, and a lot of Buddhist practices, you know, they, they tell you, Hey, if you can smell it, if you can see it, if you can touch it, it's not you, right? Like whatever you sense, whatever you feel, that's not you, that you're something right. Right. Transcendent. That is beyond experience in a sense. And if you do that, you know, rigorously, eventually anything that happens, you just kind of don't identify with you. That's kind of like, Oh, that's, that's not me. That's not me. That's not me."
},
{
"end_time": 5893.217,
"index": 226,
"start_time": 5864.07,
"text": " And then finally the fifth stage which he calls no self and no center is a stage where You you kind of like stop habitually trying to decide whether something is you or not So, you know in the third stage by default everything is you in the fourth stage by default. Everything is not you but in the fifth stage Any sensation that you have is neither you nor not you"
},
{
"end_time": 5922.517,
"index": 227,
"start_time": 5893.626,
"text": " So you just kind of like drop the clinging to try to have a self view at all. And essentially when you are in that state, you drop the center. Like you stop kind of like trying to coagulate a sense of self or differentiate your experience to me and not me. And that is extremely freeing. It actually kind of like drastically increases the valence and the harmony of the whole experience."
},
{
"end_time": 5945.623,
"index": 228,
"start_time": 5923.063,
"text": " You know from a quality research institute perspective. All of that is kind of a transformation that you do to the structure of your consciousness in particular how you direct attention. And how you bind features into a self model and it just so happens that dropping the whole idea of creating a self model."
},
{
"end_time": 5961.766,
"index": 229,
"start_time": 5946.237,
"text": " Is actually violence enhancing is actually kind of like a much more harmonious and consonant state of consciousness although apparently it does take a little bit of time for people to adapt to it and become functional like it is very common for people to achieve that fifth level."
},
{
"end_time": 5991.988,
"index": 230,
"start_time": 5962.312,
"text": " to essentially have like a couple months where they're quite dysfunctional. You know, they may struggle to, yeah, for example, navigate a room or, you know, make phone calls and getting stuff done because they kind of like are not representing things in the same way as you and I. And it can be dysfunctional, but typically these transformations happen, for example, in a container like a monastery. And then people are kind of like taking care of you for, you know, however many weeks or months it takes for you to adapt."
},
{
"end_time": 6021.357,
"index": 231,
"start_time": 5992.654,
"text": " But yeah, the point is that it is possible. And so you can have consciousness. You can have, you know, a witnessing of sensations without, in addition to it, trying to attach a sense of self or a sense of no self. You can actually drop that construct entirely. 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's it do with your unwanted bills? Ever seen an origami version of the Miami bull?"
},
{
"end_time": 6046.886,
"index": 232,
"start_time": 6021.834,
"text": " You said something important here. This is ordinarily done in a monastery."
},
{
"end_time": 6070.555,
"index": 233,
"start_time": 6047.312,
"text": " take several you said weeks but it takes several years to get to that point and then maybe several weeks or months of integration after that point yeah now if you can hold a cup and then you ask someone are you holding a cup and they say no you can think well you're wrong your model of the world is wrong you're clearly holding a cup and then if we think that we can be wrong about having a self because there's these level two level three etc where you'd"
},
{
"end_time": 6099.138,
"index": 234,
"start_time": 6071.101,
"text": " Don't have the same model as before and you think whatever is at a higher level is somehow a more correct model Then that's implying you can be wrong about your models. How do you know that? The model of the no-self is a more correct model And how does one know that psychedelics are are revealing a reality? Rather than making the more accurate claim that psychedelics show you what it's like to be on psychedelics similar to like"
},
{
"end_time": 6126.852,
"index": 235,
"start_time": 6099.616,
"text": " similar to like gum doesn't reveal that the world is minty yeah a great question great question uh there's a couple things i can say about this so um well i mean first of all you know psychedelics with regards to the sense of self produce quite disparate effects depending on the specific psychedelic and the the biggest contrast uh out there is between dmt and five m o dmt because"
},
{
"end_time": 6156.954,
"index": 236,
"start_time": 6127.244,
"text": " Five MEO DMT is directionally kind of like more towards the no self perspective. And a lot of people that I have interviewed who are very, very advanced meditators, uh, who have tried five MEO DMT, they tend to say, yes, this is pointing in the direction of kind of the fruits of years of meditation. This is, this is, uh, Shenzhen Yong, who wrote, uh, uh, the science of enlightenment, a pretty famous book and also has a beautiful aesthetic of trying to combine science and meditation."
},
{
"end_time": 6182.534,
"index": 237,
"start_time": 6157.398,
"text": " When he tried breakthrough 5mio DMT he said like yes this is like it's not exactly Buddhist awakening but it's close to it so it might be helpful to kind of like in the right circumstances in the right container maybe accelerate the practice. The complete opposite well not complete opposite but just completely different direction is DMT you know the one of the active ingredients of ayahuasca because that one actually"
},
{
"end_time": 6211.732,
"index": 238,
"start_time": 6182.875,
"text": " fragments of the sense of self and very often gives you multiple senses of self. So it's kind of like if I have a meal DMT is like from one to zero, you know, DMT is from like one to 17. You know, you all of a sudden are like in this multitude of a collective consciousness with lots of different centers and lots of different eyes and different perspectives and they're irreconcilable. So clearly, you know, clearly there's not just one truth, so to speak, and psychedelics reveal it, you know, different"
},
{
"end_time": 6230.265,
"index": 239,
"start_time": 6211.954,
"text": " Substances produces very different sense of what the ultimate truth is and and just by by the multiplicity of these different perspectives on the truth clearly there isn't just one truth i mean that that that i think should be quite clear. Kind of similar to i don't know clearly clearly."
},
{
"end_time": 6257.295,
"index": 240,
"start_time": 6231.084,
"text": " There's multiple religions, right? Like many different people claim to have access to the ultimate truth and know it for a fact and those truths are different. So, okay, clearly it's not exactly doing that. At least most of them must be mistaken, you know, at the very, at the very minimum. Um, but I do think there is a sense in which you can be actually more or less, um, you can have a, uh,"
},
{
"end_time": 6287.773,
"index": 241,
"start_time": 6257.824,
"text": " a better or worse model of the universe and a better or worse model of consciousness and of yourself. One of the ways in which you can really kind of systematize this is the accuracy of a model is in terms of how well it can anticipate future experiences, how well it predicts future experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 6315.572,
"index": 242,
"start_time": 6288.302,
"text": " For example, if you're undergoing a psychotic break and you're highly deluded, you may believe something like, well, this is holy water and if I drink the whole cup, I'm going to be able to fly. You can genuinely believe that and your state of consciousness really makes you feel this is true, but you would be wrong because you do it and then you still can't fly. Those experiences that you're failing to anticipate"
},
{
"end_time": 6345.828,
"index": 243,
"start_time": 6316.254,
"text": " And so the accuracy of a belief, I think, can be assessed in terms of how accurately it anticipates experiences that will happen in the future as a function of different actions. And there is kind of like the standard sense of self from moment to moment. I actually think it fails to anticipate a lot of experiences. And in that sense, it's not quite accurate. I mean, it fails to anticipate, for example, what will happen if you meditate a lot, because"
},
{
"end_time": 6375.384,
"index": 244,
"start_time": 6346.271,
"text": " The moment you try to imagine, okay, what is going to happen in the future if I keep doing this, you project your sense of self going forward and you use that as kind of the operating system to make sense of reality. Whereas, hey, that's actually something that is going to break down and your attention is going to look very different and your capacity for integrating information is going to change dramatically. So in that sense, yeah, you can be like more or less, a prediction can be more or less accurate in terms of how well it predicts, anticipates future experiences."
},
{
"end_time": 6403.029,
"index": 245,
"start_time": 6376.305,
"text": " And also, I mean, I think whenever you have a feeling that there is kind of this like enduring metaphysical self with kind of like unchanging properties, I think that can be shown to be false just by the fact that you can do interventions on your brain that will change that feeling. So there's a lot of feelings that in the moment they feel like they're going to be forever. I mean, for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 6427.637,
"index": 246,
"start_time": 6403.814,
"text": " Yeah like sadness and you know if you went through a breakup and like you feel hey like I will never get better right like you could accurately say like that's wrong right like that is an incorrect assessment of your situation because actually in a couple of months you will feel much better right so yeah I'll tell you just a brief aside a funny story when I was 22 or 23"
},
{
"end_time": 6456.152,
"index": 247,
"start_time": 6427.995,
"text": " And I had my first major breakup because I was living with this woman for, for a few months or a couple of years in different places. But when, when we broke up, I remember going downstairs, we were living in a condo going downstairs and giving the keys, my set of keys to the concierge. And, and it was just a horrible feeling. Cause I'm like, this is it. And then I was like, I was distraught and I was, there were two police officers there for some reason that happens."
},
{
"end_time": 6482.841,
"index": 248,
"start_time": 6456.493,
"text": " frequently at condos because there's parties and so on. And the officers asked me like, what's wrong? What's going on? I don't know if they thought I was on drugs or something. And I said, I told them what happened. I said, like, I broke up with it. It's never going to be good. It's something something like that. My life is never going to be the same. Then they were concerned. They're like, how old are you? Then I said, I'm 22. They're like, 22. You you have no idea this. That's nothing. Anyhow, I remember thinking like that was just"
},
{
"end_time": 6510.35,
"index": 249,
"start_time": 6483.746,
"text": " It meant everything to me at that point. So I know what it's like. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, that is one of the things that meditation in some sense, oftentimes, if you do it well in the right context, increases kind of the representation fidelity of your experience precisely because you pay attention moment to moment to the actual arc of sensations."
},
{
"end_time": 6538.558,
"index": 250,
"start_time": 6510.981,
"text": " And there's so many sensations that if you just pay attention to, you know, when they're coming up or like when they're at their peak, it gives you the impression that they're going to last forever, even by their very nature. I mean, there's like some types of suffering, some types of happiness that like the part of their nature is to give you the impression that, hey, this is reality and this is reality forever. But if you're really mindful and like moment to moment, you're paying attention to the whole field of sensations."
},
{
"end_time": 6565.043,
"index": 251,
"start_time": 6539.087,
"text": " It's almost like you can infer the differential equations for these feelings. It's like, oh yeah, as this feeling comes up, my belief in the future goes down, and as this one goes down, this one goes up. Okay, it's a dynamic system, and I shouldn't believe what it's telling me, because it's just a faulty representation that is just trying to get me to act in an evolutionarily adaptive way, but it's not the truth."
},
{
"end_time": 6580.674,
"index": 252,
"start_time": 6565.418,
"text": " Earlier you said that you can have a conception of the self that's better or worse and you made that better or worse grounded in if you have a model and it's predictive of the future."
},
{
"end_time": 6610.265,
"index": 253,
"start_time": 6581.169,
"text": " It's my understanding that in your conception of reality with the unified field and there's this membrane and so on, I would, I could be making error here, but I would assume there's no temporal dimension to this unified field. It exists outside time. Maybe it's a temporal. And if that's the case, then the truthfulness or the betterness or what have you cannot be grounded in something that itself is ungrounded. So, so what makes something actually better or worse?"
},
{
"end_time": 6635.196,
"index": 254,
"start_time": 6612.449,
"text": " yeah yeah yeah okay yeah super tricky but yeah wonderful wonderful question um i mean i would say yeah like the the predictive capacity of your moment to moment models um can be better or worse in in in the sense of hey it becomes like um falsified or verified as time goes by"
},
{
"end_time": 6663.473,
"index": 255,
"start_time": 6635.811,
"text": " But it is true that even the whole arc of your life is just a tiny sliver, a tiny slit as it were, on the true reality which is this gigantic field of consciousness that in some sense is outside time because time is embedded in the structure of that field of consciousness. Along the lines of how some physicists think of time in terms of the"
},
{
"end_time": 6689.787,
"index": 256,
"start_time": 6663.882,
"text": " Are of time you know not not kind of like a fundamental physical feature but more just kind of like the direction towards which entropy increases so yes you can totally think of the field of consciousness is this kind of eternal thing that is it just there and a given arc of of a person's life is kind of a trajectory in one tiny tiny tiny corner of that huge field."
},
{
"end_time": 6719.445,
"index": 257,
"start_time": 6690.708,
"text": " I do think that the enterprise of science and philosophy should be pointed at trying to understand the whole field. And there's going to be some divergences in that an accurate model for that tiny lever, for that tiny speck that is just a human life, maybe at odds with the true, let's say, base rates or the nature of the entire field as a whole. For sure, there might be some divergences."
},
{
"end_time": 6749.445,
"index": 258,
"start_time": 6720.435,
"text": " But I am an, what I call an epistemological optimist. And I do think, you know, if we keep at it, eventually we probably will have like a good picture of like what the entire field looks like. And we can make inferences about it based on things such as like the dynamics of our own moment to moment experience. Precisely things such as how out of like a sense of nothingness, you can have like features that are common pairs, you know, like have like"
},
{
"end_time": 6774.957,
"index": 259,
"start_time": 6749.804,
"text": " Colors or oscillations, all of them cancel out to zero. In some sense, that's kind of like a mini laboratory for how consciousness works. And under some assumptions, you can say, well, that probably generalizes. Maybe it's not just in my state of consciousness and your capacity to infer that some of these kind of like rules of consciousness generalize to entire states of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 6796.766,
"index": 260,
"start_time": 6775.418,
"text": " Increases the more you have sampled like very radically different states of consciousness i mean like i do think there's like some things that are only true in room temperature consciousness so to speak but there's like other things that seem to be true in all states of consciousness and whatever is true in all states of consciousness and has predictive capacity in all states of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 6823.677,
"index": 261,
"start_time": 6797.295,
"text": " has a higher chance of generalizing to the entire field. And yeah, for sure that is kind of, yeah, the most juicy aspect of quality research is, yeah, making those very, very large generalizations, hopefully grounded on good evidence. So people have stuck with us now for almost two hours and I've mentioned impedance matching several times and we never get to it. So let me tell you where I was going."
},
{
"end_time": 6847.261,
"index": 262,
"start_time": 6824.104,
"text": " There was an analogy that you gave on the demystify side podcast which I'll put a link to on screen with a string in open air and if you were to pluck it it makes a sound but it's it's quite faint and it's also difficult to pluck a string that's just falling without its ends attached but if you just imagine it in space then maybe you could do that but then there's no air in space but you get the idea if you were to fix the ends then"
},
{
"end_time": 6875.247,
"index": 263,
"start_time": 6847.756,
"text": " It makes a louder sound. And if you were to put a guitar there with a hole, then it makes an even louder sound. You're using that as an example of impedance matching. So please. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, just as an intuition, I think it's fascinating that if you literally just put a string between two walls and you pluck it, the sound is very faint. Whereas if you pluck it in a guitar, the sound can be pretty loud."
},
{
"end_time": 6905.265,
"index": 264,
"start_time": 6875.674,
"text": " And that's very puzzling, right? Actually, as a kid, I thought that didn't make any sense. It's like, why can you get something louder just by attaching it to an object? It's kind of like, where is the energy coming from? Right. It sounds like it's breaking the conservation of energy, like the guitar is adding energy somehow. Exactly. But the answer, I mean, for those who want to know, I mean, you can pause it and pause the video and think about it for a couple of minutes. The answer is that by attaching it to a guitar,"
},
{
"end_time": 6932.807,
"index": 265,
"start_time": 6905.759,
"text": " You're essentially transferring those vibrations to the entire guitar and then the entire guitar has a very large surface area for touching air. And so actually the sound of the guitar is not the sound of the string. The string is just providing kind of the background source of energy and vibration, but the actual sound is the oscillatory modes of the entire guitar as a whole."
},
{
"end_time": 6963.029,
"index": 266,
"start_time": 6933.473,
"text": " and how it's interfacing with the rest of the air which is doing it both inside and outside the guitar so there's a lot of surface area and by shaping the guitar in different ways and making it of different materials the quality of the sound is going to change even if the string is of the same material and you plug it in the same way I think yeah this is quite relevant for for example like making sense of how you know breath work gives rise to different meditation states that"
},
{
"end_time": 6983.78,
"index": 267,
"start_time": 6963.643,
"text": " If you've done a lot of meditation where, for example, you have energized a lot, let's say, your various chakra systems and you energize them and you cool them down and you energize them and you cool them down, that gives rise to a process that we call annealing at QRI. Essentially, annealing is this physical phenomenon."
},
{
"end_time": 7010.538,
"index": 268,
"start_time": 6984.189,
"text": " Where you can use energy to organize a system and make it more symmetrical. Typically this is done in metals where if you have like an industrial metal and use it a lot eventually it acquires a lot of imperfections like the literally the crystal lattice of the atoms because misaligned and you get like these defects in it and that makes it like brittle and and just dysfunctional over time."
},
{
"end_time": 7033.882,
"index": 269,
"start_time": 7011.084,
"text": " But then what you can do is you heat it up above what is called its re-crystallization temperature. The atoms actually become like even more disorganized. But then if you cool it down slowly, the atoms essentially become aligned in a perfect symmetrical lattice. And then the metal regains all of the qualities that was useful for your particular application."
},
{
"end_time": 7061.92,
"index": 270,
"start_time": 7034.497,
"text": " We think that something like that may underlie essentially a lot of these meditation practices and the use of psychedelics in a good environment with a good purpose is that you're energizing your system. You're energizing your cardiovascular system, your nervous system, your muscles, and all of that energy is making them interact in lots of ways in such a manner that"
},
{
"end_time": 7085.572,
"index": 271,
"start_time": 7062.927,
"text": " Interface and interlock in better ways in such a way that it is kind of like reorganizing the crystal lattice. I mean, like if your system is kind of jumbled up because of all the stress that you have in life and you do a lot of breath work and you energize it. If you call it down with a good mindset in a positive emotional field."
},
{
"end_time": 7114.923,
"index": 272,
"start_time": 7086.169,
"text": " is going to kind of crystallize in a way that will have like a higher capacity for consonants and harmony. So the way in which this kind of impedance matching and metaphor for a string and a guitar is relevant is that you know the more you have kind of like done that in the past and the healthier you are so to speak when you energize your system you know it's not just kind of like what it feels like it's really not just you know the energy coming from your breath"
},
{
"end_time": 7142.875,
"index": 273,
"start_time": 7115.128,
"text": " In the sense that the breath work and the exercise that you're doing, but the emotional tone of your experience will have to do with the resonant modes of your whole system. And in that sense, you become kind of the guitar for the string. And you know, the same can be with listening to music or, you know, dancing or, or even, you know, doing exercise. Any of these things, you know, the more you yourself are kind of in this"
},
{
"end_time": 7169.394,
"index": 274,
"start_time": 7143.217,
"text": " So I'd like to know what you think of the term psychedelic Buddhism. Is that an oxymoron to you? That's a great question. Well, I don't think it's an oxymoron."
},
{
"end_time": 7199.906,
"index": 275,
"start_time": 7170.094,
"text": " Empirically, if you talk to a lot of kind of like highly realized, you know, meditation masters in the West in particular is extremely common for them to kind of like relate the arc of their own development as, Hey, like in the sixties, I tried a bunch of acid and I realized that there was like something more to reality than my nine to five job. And, you know, the, the status hierarchy is that my society indoctrinated me to believe in et cetera, et cetera. But then I realized that, you know,"
},
{
"end_time": 7223.097,
"index": 276,
"start_time": 7200.828,
"text": " As it doesn't last that long and you can't be high all the time and and and so eventually i discovered meditation and i realized that i could access the same states as i do on lsd but just through meditation and that it's better and it's more functional and it makes me a better person so i i don't take psychedelics anymore but they were important in my development that is super common so"
},
{
"end_time": 7249.531,
"index": 277,
"start_time": 7223.456,
"text": " Clearly there is, you know, a lot of value in here, even if you think it's kind of like misguided to use psychedelics for spiritual development. And, you know, on the one hand, I do think there's a really good reason to kind of like be very cautious and say like, yeah, if ideally you don't use any psychedelics, it's simply because of the risks attached to it. I mean, to begin with, you can have a very unpleasant experience if"
},
{
"end_time": 7278.319,
"index": 278,
"start_time": 7249.787,
"text": " If you're not for a bunch of reasons, you know, if you're not prepared is bad set and setting. If you're like in a particular stage in your spiritual practice, you can have kind of a dark night of the soul kind of episodes or a panic attack and delusions, you know, is relatively common for people to have like very powerful delusions on psychedelics, like believing that they are, you know, the reincarnation of Jesus or something like that. It's not that uncommon on the spiritual communities for people to have those illusions."
},
{
"end_time": 7303.2,
"index": 279,
"start_time": 7278.763,
"text": " So, you know, I totally understand when meditation masters kind of like try to dissuade their students from kind of exploring this territory. At the same time, you know, not only the origin story, but also just kind of like talking to a lot of like people who maybe they're not meditation teachers, but who are very kind of like spiritually advanced and can access all of these meditation states."
},
{
"end_time": 7329.701,
"index": 280,
"start_time": 7304.036,
"text": " To me there does seem to be a correlation between at least openness to explore psychedelic states of consciousness and the speed of their development. But it's kind of like an inverted U curve in that using psychedelics too much actually causes some bypassing issues and gives you the illusion that you're more advanced than you are and that you may slack off and not really put in the effort."
},
{
"end_time": 7354.957,
"index": 281,
"start_time": 7330.247,
"text": " And so I almost see it as kind of like an inverted U curve that like maybe the people who have seen are kind of the most advanced at the youngest age and are actually, you know, not diluted is like, well, they maybe use the psychedelics as, you know, a special spice in their life as it were, you know, something they might do every now and then they take it very seriously and they take a lot of time to integrate"
},
{
"end_time": 7377.125,
"index": 282,
"start_time": 7355.418,
"text": " But then you know especially the outlier of psychedelics which is a father meal dmt. I do i mean. It doesn't maybe doesn't sound very good but like i do generally believe that used in the right way has a pretty good chance of drastically accelerating the process of awakening i don't know by what factor but like."
},
{
"end_time": 7406.374,
"index": 283,
"start_time": 7378.097,
"text": " I suspect maybe by like a factor of two or three, that like maybe if awakening takes, you know, 20 years for the average person, maybe with 5MEO DMT, it could take like seven years. That wouldn't surprise me all that much at this point. But then again, 5MEO DMT is a really powerful and delicate instrument. And it's also one of those things that can produce some of the worst bad trips and the worst kind of like dark nights of the soul."
},
{
"end_time": 7435.469,
"index": 284,
"start_time": 7406.886,
"text": " I'm extremely cautious about like, you know, recommending it in general. I do not recommend it in general precisely because of it. So you're not advising it. No, no, no. I mean, the one that shows both empirically and for me, it makes the most sense as kind of the strongest promise for tackling depression independently of like meditation practices, just, just as a psychiatric tool. I suspect five MEO DMT is going to come up as kind of a, an outlier in, in potential benefits for, for mental health."
},
{
"end_time": 7462.5,
"index": 285,
"start_time": 7435.913,
"text": " That said, that doesn't look like, you know, taking five million DMT every day, multiple times a day or something crazy like that. It looks like, you know, maybe once a year in the right setting, you have a breakthrough experience and it probably takes you a year to integrate. But, you know, the data is really extraordinary. I mean, we're looking at I was in the Netherlands recently in Maastricht."
},
{
"end_time": 7491.749,
"index": 286,
"start_time": 7463.063,
"text": " And yeah, they've done like research on 5-MeO-DMT for depression and the anecdotes that I was hearing was just extraordinary. I mean, people who've been depressed for 20 years and they have tried like five different antidepressants and therapies and they're still depressed and then one 5-MeO-DMT experience in the right setting and then they're not depressed. They just don't qualify anymore. I mean, again, it should be done with extreme caution and in the right context, but I think it would be silly to kind of like,"
},
{
"end_time": 7518.387,
"index": 287,
"start_time": 7492.193,
"text": " say like yeah that's that's not promising or or it's orthogonal to spirituality i think is yeah clearly highly connected well have you found that it's better than mdma for the treatment of depression yeah great question i think five m o dmt is probably better than mdma and mdma might be the the best second um i mean mdma is really powerful um"
},
{
"end_time": 7548.797,
"index": 288,
"start_time": 7519.087,
"text": " It's fascinating because it's not classically psychedelic. MDMA doesn't make you feel trippy colors, doesn't create vortices in your visual field. It doesn't challenge your sense of self. Actually, MDMA strengthens your sense of self. People describe experiencing, for the first time, their authentic self. They have this feeling of, well, it almost feels like throughout my life I've collected a lot of stickers of what people expect me to be and I'm trying to embody them. But then on MDMA,"
},
{
"end_time": 7572.5,
"index": 289,
"start_time": 7549.292,
"text": " All of that falls away and you connect with your authentic self. That's very common. So yeah, even just from the point of view of understanding what the self is from a purely, you know, consciousness research perspective, I think MDMA is a very promising agent for science. And 5-MEO-DMT is qualitatively similar to MDMA in some ways, except"
},
{
"end_time": 7599.36,
"index": 290,
"start_time": 7573.097,
"text": " More powerful and more general. Um, so we, you know, we did a, uh, yeah, a scientific work retreat in Canada where five of your DMT is on scheduled. Um, and we had a, yeah, like physicists and mathematicians, uh, visual artists and meditators. That was kind of the, the, the, the group of people that we selected essentially. Um, and, uh, yeah, we, we took a pretty close look to at five of your DMT and all of the levels that it takes you to."
},
{
"end_time": 7626.203,
"index": 291,
"start_time": 7599.838,
"text": " I need it does have like a lot of like really unique kind of like properties. And it does have overlap with with MDMA. We were trying to, for example, try to describe five million DMT in terms of other substances and one description that kind of resonated with most of the people who gave it a try is five million is kind of like a mixture of MDMA."
},
{
"end_time": 7654.138,
"index": 292,
"start_time": 7626.596,
"text": " DMT nitrous oxide and amyl nitrate so it's like i mean what's the last one uh like poppers as they say like the the thing that relaxes you they use it for sex quite often okay mostly kind of like the the rush of energy and and the opening of blood vessels like that feeling is absolutely happens on five mio and uh and one of the strange and interesting things of five mio dmt is that"
},
{
"end_time": 7681.493,
"index": 293,
"start_time": 7654.855,
"text": " Bad experiences often are because you didn't take enough that like there's kind of like a threshold where like if you don't take enough you will get a lot of the trippy kind of like ego dissolving qualities but without the the love component there's kind of like a threshold around like maybe three or four milligrams where the love component the MDMA quality just kicks in and then it feels really really really different and much more therapeutic"
},
{
"end_time": 7697.705,
"index": 294,
"start_time": 7682.056,
"text": " Then again there is also like unpleasant experiences at much higher doses like that have to do with kind of a struggling around the kind of like grasping your sense of self like if if you take five million DMT without is a high dose especially if you take a high dose."
},
{
"end_time": 7725.35,
"index": 295,
"start_time": 7698.814,
"text": " Without being ready to let go and kind of like metaphorically die, so to speak. If you if you if you're still kind of like want to cling to a sense of self, you're going to have a bad time. So that is also very important to to know. But but that is only really for like the high doses. I mean, there's I think kind of intermediate doses between like three milligrams and seven milligrams. It's not completely ego dissolving and it does have a lot of kind of the MDMA quality."
},
{
"end_time": 7750.503,
"index": 296,
"start_time": 7725.998,
"text": " And surprisingly, you know, once you get familiar with the state, you can actually be somewhat functional in the state. I mean, not to the level that you could conduct an interview on it. But one of the things that was some of the most you didn't see what I just took before two hours ago. That's hilarious. Do laser experiments on the wall. Oh, that's right. Yes."
},
{
"end_time": 7774.07,
"index": 297,
"start_time": 7751.152,
"text": " No, I'm kidding for those who are listening or watching. Okay. Yes, I would like to talk about laser experiments. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So let me connect that actually with with five a year, which is a I mean, some of the absolutely most fruitful consciousness research that I have ever done. And I just I mean, I feel a sense of warmth even when I think about this is"
},
{
"end_time": 7791.852,
"index": 298,
"start_time": 7774.377,
"text": " When me and the three main psychedelic artists I mean these are like people who are like experts at replicating like visually like what it's like to be on mushrooms or LSD and so on and and they're like really world-class you know some of the best people if you if you go to reddit"
},
{
"end_time": 7816.596,
"index": 299,
"start_time": 7792.363,
"text": " um dot com slash r slash replications is a subreddit for people who try to replicate the visual qualities of different states of consciousness if you sort by you know best of all times you know yeah kind of like the the top you know those artists are the people who we we brought to to the retreat um so you know they're really good at their craft um"
},
{
"end_time": 7846.766,
"index": 300,
"start_time": 7816.852,
"text": " And, uh, in one session, uh, for several hours, essentially we were just kind of relaxing, listening to music, going to that kind of like intermediate level of having me, oh, kind of like between three and seven milligrams and looking at a visual stimuli together and recording our conversation of exactly what was going on. I mean, right. Because like typically on psychedelic research, you know, the, the scientist is kind of like sober and that you put, they put the person in an FMRI and they,"
},
{
"end_time": 7875.828,
"index": 301,
"start_time": 7847.363,
"text": " you know, give them some study or something. But the scientist has no idea what it's actually happening there. And also the questionnaires that they fill out afterwards are very kind of like low resolution and very coarse. You know, at best they might ask you something like, did you experience a simple or complex imagery? They don't go into the details of, you know, which of the wallpaper symmetry groups did you experience? Or, you know, which of the hyperbolic symmetries did you experience? Or nothing with that level of detail."
},
{
"end_time": 7905.384,
"index": 302,
"start_time": 7876.527,
"text": " but in the in the context where i was in canada it was just so beautiful because in real time you know we were able to say something like oh yeah i'm experiencing like a freezing effect in my visual field and it's just kind of like a flickering of around like five hertz and uh and uh and the freezing is in such a way that is kind of like separating the gestalt of the monitor from the gestalt of the computer and it seems to this kind of like a one centimeter of separation"
},
{
"end_time": 7935.265,
"index": 303,
"start_time": 7905.691,
"text": " In other words, we kind of like we were tuning into a consensus reality, but a five million DMT and we were able to describe it in real time and we have those recordings and I think that's like very scientifically valuable. I mean, I can't imagine kind of like a better way of doing it because you're actually in the moment kind of connecting people who are really good at depicting the experiences and then a scientist who's like actually trying to map this out to neuroscience. So anyway, yeah."
},
{
"end_time": 7963.968,
"index": 304,
"start_time": 7937.346,
"text": " Tell me about the laser experiments with DMT. And apparently people say that they see quote unquote the matrix. What's going on? This effect, um, you know, sometimes happens, sometimes not. Um, the people that I know who have tried it, the effect that they have seen is something that is not surprising to us at quality of research. So I'm going to elaborate. So first of all,"
},
{
"end_time": 7990.742,
"index": 305,
"start_time": 7964.565,
"text": " I think it is true that we live in a world simulation, but essentially I think that at the very least that is because, you know, our nervous system evolved to create a mini world simulation of our environment. And so it is absolutely the case that you never perceive the world directly, so to speak, right? Like there's like many layers of indirection and also processing between, you know, like photons hitting your eyes and the actual"
},
{
"end_time": 8014.838,
"index": 306,
"start_time": 7991.22,
"text": " parameters of your world simulation. In fact, you don't even need sensory stimulation to experience a sense of a world. You can be dreaming with your eyes closed and still experience a very rich sense of embodiment and being somewhere. I think it's very important to realize that psychedelics, meditation and so on, they're"
},
{
"end_time": 8045.111,
"index": 307,
"start_time": 8015.265,
"text": " changing the parameters of your world simulation but that doesn't mean that you're really accessing kind of like other realms outside of you right like i think you're accessing in some sense different realms of consciousness which is different phases of consciousness is similar to how there's like phases of matter you can have like liquid solid air and so on my my sense is that you know different states of consciousness are kind of different phases of consciousness um maybe the the"
},
{
"end_time": 8071.766,
"index": 308,
"start_time": 8045.623,
"text": " The punchline or kind of like the the spoiler here is that I actually think that these are phases of a liquid crystal. They're like probably, you know, not to sound too much like a crackpot, but like, you know, probably, you know, Penrose and Hameroff and people who believe that microtubules have something to do with consciousness. I think they're probably right. Not in the full theory, but I do think microtubules"
},
{
"end_time": 8100.828,
"index": 309,
"start_time": 8072.039,
"text": " Probably will end up being really significant for understanding our state of consciousness. And the reason I believe that is that they effectively instantiate a liquid crystal. And you can think of the brain as a networked system of tiny pockets, each of which is composed of liquid crystals, which is how the microtubule lattice is organized. One of the hypotheses that came out from a retreat in Canada in particular was that"
},
{
"end_time": 8130.196,
"index": 310,
"start_time": 8101.323,
"text": " The effect that something like five million DMT has in your, in the brain is essentially changing the liquid crystal properties of the neurons and that, you know, five million DMT, which produces the, the God consciousness estate, we suspect it kind of like scrambles the liquid crystals in such a way that there's no preferred direction for, for light. Essentially it's kind of end up in a superposition of all possible directions because there's no grooves as it were."
},
{
"end_time": 8158.985,
"index": 311,
"start_time": 8130.708,
"text": " Whereas ayahuasca, mushrooms, DMT, the classic psychedelics, which I mean, five million is an outlier. It's a very weird kind of like different thing in a sense. But the classic psychedelics, including DMT, what we suspect is actually happening is that it's crystallizing rather than than just being kind of this liquid crystal state to where the microtubules maybe are like ordered in a certain direction. I think on DMT, they actually become equal, equally spaced apart."
},
{
"end_time": 8189.206,
"index": 312,
"start_time": 8159.497,
"text": " and organized in a kind of like perfect crystal lattice and for that reason effectively the light becomes coherent or electromagnetic radiation when it goes through it as a consequence effectively a lot of things of your world simulation on dmt really feel kind of these like coherent laser like kind of aspects of this world simulation i mean it's not uncommon on dmt to for example hallucinate"
},
{
"end_time": 8216.613,
"index": 313,
"start_time": 8189.445,
"text": " Let's say like an angel or something like that, that is emitting a coherent beam of light. And the hallucination can be, it could be like scanning, for example, all of your, the fields of your experience with a coherent plane of light. I suspect that happens because literally the substrate of your consciousness now is organized in a more crystalline way. And so a lot of the effects that happen on DMT"
},
{
"end_time": 8244.224,
"index": 314,
"start_time": 8217.21,
"text": " We think of them as kind of this competing clusters of coherence where like different regions of the brain are probably crystallized, but in different, we kind of like a different, they become essentially different magnetic domains. And so if you look at something like a laser on DMT, you effectively now have kind of like new ingredients in your world simulation with which to represent that. So, you know, effectively, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 8274.121,
"index": 315,
"start_time": 8244.855,
"text": " yeah if you look at stimuli that kind of like matches the physical properties of your world simulation you will have kind of a stronger resonance with it and so looking at optical effects on psychedelics for example you know what a optical cusp is right like when you take a a transparent glass of water right like sometimes the light kind of like forms this kind of like caduceus optical cusps look really trippy on dmt like exceptionally trippy like"
},
{
"end_time": 8299.753,
"index": 316,
"start_time": 8274.65,
"text": " In such a way that if you have kind of this naive realist perspective where you think that you're seeing the world directly, it really makes you feel that you're kind of like connecting with a light outside of you in a very, very deep way. But what I suspect is actually happening is more that hey, you have kind of like, you're turning the inside of your world simulation into actually a kind of like nonlinear optics laboratory."
},
{
"end_time": 8329.343,
"index": 317,
"start_time": 8300.503,
"text": " And cusps are kind of like more coherent and meaningful in that state of consciousness. Like there's kind of more agreement between the parts of your world simulation that yes, there's a coherent beam of light in that direction. As a consequence, if you look at a diffracted laser on DMT, it has a strong effect on your field of experience. But then the symbols that Danny Goller reports, kind of the code of the matrix as it were,"
},
{
"end_time": 8355.179,
"index": 318,
"start_time": 8329.906,
"text": " When I've seen drawings of it, and I've talked to people who have tried the experiment and gotten what apparently is what they're talking about, these are essentially semantic patterns, which are like these nonlinear resonant modes of something like a metallic plate, like the classic Cialdini plates. But that is happening along the strip of the diffracted laser line."
},
{
"end_time": 8382.125,
"index": 319,
"start_time": 8355.862,
"text": " And he's like filled with those kind of like a cinematic nonlinear resonant modes. But to me that is not surprising. I mean like to me that is yeah. I mean you're exciting the field of consciousness and some of the excited states of that field actually look like semantics. So I don't see it as you know breaking the code of the matrix or tuning into other realms. I really see it more as kind of like well they stumbled upon a way"
},
{
"end_time": 8407.5,
"index": 320,
"start_time": 8382.602,
"text": " To reliably induce kind of like high energy semantics in your own consciousness and it works really well with DMT because DMT essentially crystallizes your liquid crystal matrix and it creates these very coherent beams of light inside you. Does that make sense? Yes. So this brings up something that Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary claimed, which is psychedelics open the doors to perception."
},
{
"end_time": 8437.056,
"index": 321,
"start_time": 8408.08,
"text": " Now the Dalai Lama, I know that we were talking about psychedelic Buddhism and I asked the question if it was an oxymoron and you said, you don't think so. So I've had my own experiences with meditation and with substances or elixirs. Let's say I've had my excursions with the elixirs. So I used to believe that it must be that all of these spiritual insights are all pointing to the same single truth and that it tends to be an Eastern truth more so than a Western truth."
},
{
"end_time": 8462.534,
"index": 322,
"start_time": 8437.688,
"text": " I just had that in me as just an unconscious adoption from what I hear on the internet. And then I started to do some research. And well, the Dalai Lama said about psychedelics, because he was asked about this. He said, these drugs create more illusions. And in a world filled with illusions, why would you take drugs that only give you more? Yeah. And even in the saga Lovato, such a DN 31, I always mispronounce it."
},
{
"end_time": 8491.203,
"index": 323,
"start_time": 8462.807,
"text": " The Buddha warrants that taking drugs, anything intoxicating actually weakens wisdom. He also added that it requires serious practice with the traditional community and it does not involve external remedies, only internal work. So to say psychedelics are like on the one hand, salubrious in that they're useful. They can process trauma. They can bring about changes in one's worldview. They can allow you to connect."
},
{
"end_time": 8520.811,
"index": 324,
"start_time": 8492.176,
"text": " This is an entirely different set of statements than the experiences on these are those that the Buddhists are talking about. And it's also a different statement than that. The use of these psychedelics and the insights therein are compatible with the with the Buddhist teachings. So I understand that you brought up the Shenzhen Yang, but there's a monastic code that explicitly forbids of Vinya Vinaya. I don't know how to pronounce it that explicitly forbids any drugs"
},
{
"end_time": 8550.896,
"index": 325,
"start_time": 8521.203,
"text": " It says liquor, for instance, destroys your sense of shame and weakens you. And what tends to happen with psychedelics is the issue of intention. So motivation, not intention in the philosophical sense, but the reasons you're doing something. So Buddhists, they tend to stress a purity of intention, right intention. And if one is using a drug, it's like they're dissatisfied with the slow and ordinary work of the practice, the discipline that's necessary. It's like a greed for rapid insight."
},
{
"end_time": 8579.172,
"index": 326,
"start_time": 8551.391,
"text": " And they have this like aversion to normal consciousness. Those motives contradict the contentment and renunciation that Buddhism encourages. I have several other examples, but I'd like to hear your thoughts so far. Yeah, no, I mean, uh, I don't have a strong stance. Uh, and I could be convinced either way. I mean, like maybe as I learned more, it, I could eventually arrive to like, Hey, never take any psychedelics is completely misguided."
},
{
"end_time": 8604.343,
"index": 327,
"start_time": 8579.514,
"text": " Oh, just to be clear, I'm not advocating for or against psychedelics. I'm just saying that the one set of claims, which is that they give you a different sort of insight, a different worldview, they allow you to process trauma and so on. That's an entirely different set of claims than whatever came from the left hand here is compatible with Buddhism. And in fact, there are some reasons to think that it's antithetical to it."
},
{
"end_time": 8632.312,
"index": 328,
"start_time": 8605.213,
"text": " Yeah, no, I mean, I see that. I would think there's also like lots of reasons to believe it is actually quite in harmony with it if used properly. I'll give you a couple examples. So one is, for example, the cultivation of equanimity can utilize, for example, taking very cold showers or like a cold plunge. For example, you know, you go to water that is very close to zero."
},
{
"end_time": 8662.415,
"index": 329,
"start_time": 8632.637,
"text": " Celsius and is you know freezing but you learned to be able to experience that fully without you know flinching without you know stalling and experience it for like you know 30 seconds to one minute and let's say you do this yeah several times a day i think a practice like that with the right intention can essentially accelerate the cultivation of equanimity which at least in the shins and young paradigm equanimity is approaching sensations without any resistance um"
},
{
"end_time": 8686.374,
"index": 330,
"start_time": 8662.722,
"text": " And you know, like very cold water is a type of kind of like very intense sensation that if you approach with equanimity, equanimity actually has no intrinsic valence. It's just very, very strong energy, which you can turn into bliss or you can turn into suffering depending on how you approach it. And ultimately I think like how it affects the flow of energy and the configuration of your consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 8703.08,
"index": 331,
"start_time": 8687.381,
"text": " I mean likewise i think of psychedelics at least like classic psychedelics like lsd or psilocybin. Kind of something similar to that is kind of like a hot sauce for your for your consciousness in a way which is it intensifies everything."
},
{
"end_time": 8728.251,
"index": 332,
"start_time": 8703.319,
"text": " Any approaches with the quantity with the intention of developing a quantity i do suspect similar to a cold plunge is gonna accelerate to the process of developing high and the quantity in such a way that you know in the future when you encounter naturally very unpleasant very intense sensations, all of that work will actually pay off in that you you're not gonna freak out you're not gonna get you know kind of become."
},
{
"end_time": 8758.063,
"index": 333,
"start_time": 8728.541,
"text": " Distracted or try to pretend that it's not there or delude yourself into thinking that doesn't exist and so on and so forth. So, you know, from that perspective, also, you know, kind of like equanimity around delusions and beliefs that one of the things that psychedelics kind of like show more clearly in a way is how the valence of a belief is essentially expressed in how it affects the harmony and dissonance of your field."
},
{
"end_time": 8786.971,
"index": 334,
"start_time": 8758.677,
"text": " And I think like that disentangling is actually quite a Buddhist move. I mean, understanding that, well, there is no information content that this belief is representing. And then there is your emotional reaction to it. And, and usually becomes the, they come so close together. Uh, we can't really separate them and we sort of like just buy into the content of the belief and assume that it's valence is kind of a necessary component of it."
},
{
"end_time": 8809.002,
"index": 335,
"start_time": 8787.619,
"text": " One of the things that psychedelics do is that they make that relationship more flexible. Kind of like they melt the connection between a belief and the content of it and your emotional reaction to it. And I think that in some sense is kind of like learning about the mind more broadly and might make you more resistant to delusions in a way. At the same time,"
},
{
"end_time": 8838.507,
"index": 336,
"start_time": 8809.497,
"text": " For a lot of people actually psychedelic delusions are very tempting and I think for a lot of people indeed exactly what the Dalai Lama said in your quote is absolutely true and I know people who essentially have a relationship to psychedelics where it feels like yeah they're kind of like just chasing a new high or like chasing another mystical experience rather than yeah kind of like trying to see the mystical in everyday life like that is absolutely also the case"
},
{
"end_time": 8863.49,
"index": 337,
"start_time": 8839.155,
"text": " Um, but then another nuance that, uh, I want to provide is the difference between constructive and deconstructive, uh, kind of like internal moves and practices that for most people, I think, especially if they don't have kind of meditation training, um, even, even if, especially if they don't have kind of like any kind of like long-term practice of, uh, introspection, um,"
},
{
"end_time": 8885.538,
"index": 338,
"start_time": 8863.831,
"text": " Psychedelics will tend to be very constructive in their effect in that they they will kind of generate very elaborate kind of like world models as a consequence of taking a psychedelic you know something like DMT I often describe it as a as a epistemological hand grenade because yeah if you take DMT unprepared"
},
{
"end_time": 8908.933,
"index": 339,
"start_time": 8886.305,
"text": " You really may start believe things such as like well the russians have like a base you know in the dark side of the moon and and they're like allied with the grays and and the aliens and you just have this very elaborate world model like to explain data. And one of the things that psychedelics especially the constructive aspect of them then to do is over fit."
},
{
"end_time": 8922.483,
"index": 340,
"start_time": 8909.172,
"text": " Essentially you create a very sophisticated complex models of reality to explain relatively little data ready it is like a how in statistics or machine learning if you have a series of dots you know in x y plot."
},
{
"end_time": 8951.408,
"index": 341,
"start_time": 8923.234,
"text": " If you fit a high degree polynomial, you can always go through all of the dots. DMT is like that. You have a few data points and DMT gives you such flexibility in your world model, you can always fit the data with some crazy model. And of course, it's going to be wrong because it's not going to generalize. It's not going to survive cross-validation. So in that sense, yeah, that's obviously a risk. At the same time,"
},
{
"end_time": 8981.613,
"index": 342,
"start_time": 8951.971,
"text": " If you know this is something that happens, you can actually use psychedelics to study that process and actually have developed the metacognitive awareness. It's like, oh my gosh, I'm overfeeding right now. This is what overfeeding feels like, which is kind of like an insight that then you can take in everyday life and actually recognize when you're overfeeding in a more mundane, mundane kind of like state of consciousness. And then, yeah, the final nuance before I pass it on to you again is"
},
{
"end_time": 9012.005,
"index": 343,
"start_time": 8982.483,
"text": " That you can cultivate the deconstructive aspect of psychedelics. And for example, if you take LSD with a strong intention, for example, just experiencing emptiness or experiencing pure space, kind of absorption into or pure consciousness, you can actually kind of like use that to really let go of trying to be something or trying to go somewhere. And that would be essentially pushing more towards kind of this deconstructed kind of Jhana like states of consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 9039.497,
"index": 344,
"start_time": 9012.619,
"text": " And then the reason I think five million DMT is probably the most synergistic with kind of meditation practice and Buddhism is because by default is a very deconstructive kind of substance like by default five million DMT tends to kind of like cancel out the topological defects in your consciousness as it were and and simplify things. The downside of that is that if you do it a lot"
},
{
"end_time": 9064.104,
"index": 345,
"start_time": 9040.333,
"text": " Without you know metacognitive awareness, especially if you if you don't think in terms of overfeeding or underfeeding or something like that Fabio DMT tends to underfit your world model. So it's very common for people who take Fabio to say something like love is all that matters or or we are all God and that's the only thing we should know that there's nothing else that matters than the fact that we're all God."
},
{
"end_time": 9090.333,
"index": 346,
"start_time": 9064.514,
"text": " For me, that's like an oversimplified model of reality. You just went too far in the simplifying your sense of reality. But again, you can be metacognitively aware of that and recognize, oh, right now I'm underfeeding. This is what it's like to underfit. That said, all else being equal, I think probably an underfeited world model is better than an overfeited."
},
{
"end_time": 9114.428,
"index": 347,
"start_time": 9090.708,
"text": " Because an overfitted model tends to be kind of like heavy and contain like extra stress and vortices and you know the complexity. Costs you in terms of physiological stress where is a very underfitted model of reality is actually typically a pretty pleasant and kind of carefree like if you walk around. Really embodying the sense of like a love is all that matters and there's nothing else we should care about."
},
{
"end_time": 9143.899,
"index": 348,
"start_time": 9114.753,
"text": " That's actually not a bad way to live. I mean, if you're going to live like that in a monastery or in the middle of the forest, it's probably a perfectly fine life. It's just that if you interface with very complex systems, then you don't want to overfit or underfit. You want to have a good fit, essentially. Tell me what's going on with entities when people encounter them in DMT. What is happening neurologically, maybe ontologically?"
},
{
"end_time": 9168.439,
"index": 349,
"start_time": 9144.701,
"text": " Yes, fantastic. Okay, so here's my overall model. The most up-to-date information about this is actually my latest Qualia computing post, which the title is From Neural Activity to Field Topology. It's kind of an intimidating title, but I think it's conversational and it sort of goes through the argument."
},
{
"end_time": 9192.927,
"index": 350,
"start_time": 9169.053,
"text": " And it builds on, on top of a lot of research that we have done in the past, the most critical pieces of the puzzle are as follows. And I promise it, it all clicks together. So first of all, I think the key distinction between DMT and 5-Meo-DMT, I mean, again, DMT, they call it the spirit molecule where you encounter entities, all of that complexity."
},
{
"end_time": 9222.722,
"index": 351,
"start_time": 9193.541,
"text": " Five million DMT, they call it the God molecule, which is like simplifies your experience and, and just kind of become like one with everything. Um, if you really introspect on the quality of your experience in this two kind of like very different state of consciousness, you will notice that on DMT, your experience is clustered into competing factions. There's kind of like different regions of your experience that are vibrating in different ways."
},
{
"end_time": 9246.664,
"index": 352,
"start_time": 9223.234,
"text": " Incompatible with each other and you have an evolutionary process where these kind of like different coalitions of vibrations try to, um, you know, gain your attention because again, attention is energy, attention, whatever you pay attention to gets a stronger. So one of the key ways in which these kind of like factions of vibrations of your field,"
},
{
"end_time": 9276.305,
"index": 353,
"start_time": 9247.193,
"text": " Can survive and reproduce and become bigger is by gaining your attention. So they they try to come up with the most, you know, attention grabbing kind of like headlines and like, uh, again, that's why also the, I think like this, um, creates delusions and very sophisticated complex overfeited models because one of the ways in which they, they, they gained your attention is by kind of like promising big explanations about reality or, or, or they may claim that their messages from like another dimension and things like that. Um,"
},
{
"end_time": 9302.585,
"index": 354,
"start_time": 9276.613,
"text": " Whereas on five million DMT, the main attractor, like the main thing that everything drives towards is complete coherence. It's like everything is in sync with everything else. And that's why it's kind of a more deconstructed, more Jana like state, like pure consciousness, pure space. Again, no distinctions because any distinction is created by kind of like out of"
},
{
"end_time": 9325.265,
"index": 355,
"start_time": 9302.756,
"text": " Okay, so that is like the first the first piece of the puzzle is there is kind of competing clusters of coherence versus global coherence. Now, how does this happen? So empirically,"
},
{
"end_time": 9355.247,
"index": 356,
"start_time": 9325.657,
"text": " Imagine you have, uh, you know, these like pendulum clocks, uh, you know, the very classic old clocks. It is known that, you know, if you have two of these clocks in a wall, uh, after a while, they actually synchronize, right? And it's, it's not magic, right? Like the reason they synchronize is because by sharing the wall, you know, tiny vibrations in the world essentially get passed around and the synchronized state is the lowest energy configuration. So that's a, that's an attractor of that system."
},
{
"end_time": 9386.032,
"index": 357,
"start_time": 9356.186,
"text": " Okay now imagine if you have if you have 10 clocks then still eventually it all synchronizes but if you have 10 000 clocks you know in a very long wall or in a very large surface they never synchronize so what happens is that instead you will see kind of maybe a traveling wave of synchrony or like synchrony here and there but they're just not connected enough for them to all of them kind of agree on a certain phase and become kind of like"
},
{
"end_time": 9410.759,
"index": 358,
"start_time": 9386.698,
"text": " First of all, you're going to have a case where every clock now belongs to a cluster of clocks where all of them are synchronized."
},
{
"end_time": 9438.797,
"index": 359,
"start_time": 9411.408,
"text": " but there is no clock that is synchronized with all of their other clocks. In other words, as you add connections, you enter this phase where you have competing clusters of coherence. And if you add more connections, eventually you arrive at a new phase where everything synchronizes. Oh, okay. So, so there's just not enough connections in the DMT case versus the five MEO. Yes. That's what, yeah, that's more or less what we think. Like the way they affect the brain is that"
},
{
"end_time": 9465.401,
"index": 360,
"start_time": 9439.548,
"text": " The they're essentially increasing kind of the functional connectivity of the brain, but on DMT is just not enough. It is kind of in this twilight zone where you get this fragmentation of the field and it's just so much competition. Is this more than just a metaphor because we're using the terms vibration here and oscillations, but what precisely is vibrating is oscillating."
},
{
"end_time": 9477.654,
"index": 361,
"start_time": 9465.896,
"text": " yeah yeah yeah um i would say it is kind of like at a level of a metaphor um because i haven't essentially identified what exactly is vibrating or oscillating"
},
{
"end_time": 9507.688,
"index": 362,
"start_time": 9478.166,
"text": " Most of our research at this point at QRI is actually fairly agnostic about what exactly is it that is oscillating. We just kind of like postulate that a lot of our experience can be explained in terms of systems of coupled oscillators and we analyze the systems of coupled oscillators and we try to replicate phenomenology based on based on those. And, you know, we in a few months we're going to release an amazing tool. I'm just so proud of the team who's been developing it."
},
{
"end_time": 9536.937,
"index": 363,
"start_time": 9508.131,
"text": " which is using systems of coupled oscillators to essentially replicate visually and tactically, yeah, somatically, effects of different psychedelics by changing the parameters of these oscillators. Now, you can do good science phenomenology and, you know, even find applications without ever actually telling anybody what is oscillating here, you know, as long as like it has predictive capacity and it resembles what people experience."
},
{
"end_time": 9563.166,
"index": 364,
"start_time": 9537.295,
"text": " But if you ask me kind of like more concretely, okay, like physically, what is it that I think it's also leading? I would say local field potentials. So local field potentials are not individual neurons. I don't think we really have kind of introspective access to like individual neurons, you know, being active or not. I think that's just too tiny for it to be meaningful at the level of our whole experience."
},
{
"end_time": 9592.773,
"index": 365,
"start_time": 9564.036,
"text": " Instead, we will be talking about populations of neurons, essentially populations of neurons that together, if they kind of like cross a certain threshold of coherence in their activation, they drag the electromagnetic field along with them. And, you know, this is currently being studied in neuroscience in a bunch of different ways where they show that a lot of the kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 9621.903,
"index": 366,
"start_time": 9593.37,
"text": " Representational content of an experience or like if you train a biological neural network to do a classification task for example that the most relevant information content that determines you know what the network believes as it where is happening is not based on the activation of neurons but rather how those neurons in a coordinated fashion make the field oscillate up and down so"
},
{
"end_time": 9641.749,
"index": 367,
"start_time": 9622.398,
"text": " These are essentially kind of like at the level of more kind of like ten thousand neurons like that would be kind of like the unit as it were let's say like a population of ten thousand neurons that together they actually create kind of these like coherent oscillation in the field and i think that yeah actually the shape of your experience and what it feels like to be you."
},
{
"end_time": 9668.029,
"index": 368,
"start_time": 9642.329,
"text": " is not really based on the activation of neurons is more based on what these local field potentials look like and how they're stitched together which is a much more macroscopic phenomenon. So is it just the coupling nature that you share something with your neighbor and then all of a sudden you have the same property across time that is the property you like in oscillators? Well we also need to solve the"
},
{
"end_time": 9687.961,
"index": 369,
"start_time": 9668.404,
"text": " The boundary problem right like because people people who associate i mean i think this is in the right direction you know electromagnetic tears of consciousness you know people who associate the field electromagnetic field in your body and your brain with your state of consciousness. That has the advantage that hey like the field is inherently connected already but then the problem becomes."
},
{
"end_time": 9716.647,
"index": 370,
"start_time": 9688.404,
"text": " Hey, why are we separate? You know, why do I have an experience and you have a different experience if we're all part of the same field? So that comes back to the topological solution to the boundary problem. And the thing that we are simulating, you know, right now, one of the very active areas of research at our institute is looking at populations of neuron like systems, I mean, essentially electric oscillators, like things that are creating"
},
{
"end_time": 9745.469,
"index": 371,
"start_time": 9716.903,
"text": " oscillations in the electric field and then looking at how those electric oscillations change the magnetic field and you know I guess it's one of these funny properties of the electromagnetic field and the universe that you have the right hand rule rather like when when you make a electric oscillation the response in the magnetic field is actually that of a vortex right it's it's it actually kind of like changes the orientation and"
},
{
"end_time": 9775.435,
"index": 372,
"start_time": 9745.879,
"text": " And so when you have an electric oscillation, you actually kind of like creating a boundary in the magnetic field. And so we essentially think that, yeah, these kind of networks of electric oscillations are creating this kind of like vortex-like boundaries in the magnetic field and that those correspond to experiences. Now, what does that have to do with the topology though? Yeah, that if you follow the field lines, when you have kind of these vortices,"
},
{
"end_time": 9804.565,
"index": 373,
"start_time": 9775.828,
"text": " uh the field lines actually form closed loops and as a function there's like a clear objective real boundary physical boundary between the inside and the outside and and that is a topological change kind of like how twisting the balloon and creating a pinch point separates the field in one region to another when you create one of these vortices you're actually kind of creating a separate bubble i see what i meant to say is let's say you have like i know this is the wrong model but let's say you have a space time"
},
{
"end_time": 9823.746,
"index": 374,
"start_time": 9805.162,
"text": " The space-time topology remains the same. The topology hasn't changed even with the presence of a vortex. In your model, where's the change in topology?"
},
{
"end_time": 9853.319,
"index": 375,
"start_time": 9824.343,
"text": " The topology of the electromagnetic field has changed, even if the topology of space time hasn't. I see. So we would identify the relevant boundary for a moment of experience as maybe being located in the topology of the electromagnetic field, even if space time doesn't change. Yeah. But, and very relevantly, like, you know, like this is maybe the other piece of the puzzle and here's where it connects, which is that I suspect that actually that, you know, the sense of self"
},
{
"end_time": 9883.217,
"index": 376,
"start_time": 9854.582,
"text": " is kind of like a vortex, a central vortex in your experience that we're constantly kind of like energizing and using to orient ourselves. And we delusionally believe that that's what we are. Like we have a pocket, but then we also have a very central vortex. And we think that's what we are, even though actually we're all of consciousness. That's maybe the deeper truth. So what happens is that on DMT, because you have all of these competing clusters of coherence,"
},
{
"end_time": 9913.302,
"index": 377,
"start_time": 9883.951,
"text": " That generates a ton of additional vortices. So essentially, I think like those are the entities. I mean, I think like on DMT, you're effectively creating more internal vortices, which effectively account to more internal senses of self. So you become an ecosystem. It feels like you're a bunch of different entities at once. Now you may interpret some of them as like an alien from another dimension, but you know, my typical secular interpretation is yeah, no, that's part of your world simulation."
},
{
"end_time": 9934.548,
"index": 378,
"start_time": 9913.865,
"text": " But it has the quality of a self like it feels like that's and a whole being but it's inside you so it's actually not separate whereas five million t because it makes everything coherent. You may actually actually cancel out to the central vortex and me that make the field lines perfectly parallel."
},
{
"end_time": 9956.817,
"index": 379,
"start_time": 9935.111,
"text": " And when that happens you lose a sense of self and it just feels like oh wow i'm the entire field or i'm everything and nothing at the same time or like i'm everybody is a very different kind of a tractor. Meaning that you know this competing closest of coherence versus global coherence. Have different effects on the topology of the field which has different effects on the sense of self."
},
{
"end_time": 9986.749,
"index": 380,
"start_time": 9958.097,
"text": " So the large vortex will be your sense of self. And then when you're on DMT in particular, are there small vortices within the larger one? Something like that. Yeah, it's kind of like a stadium where there's like the whole stadium forms a large vortex, but then like every person that is seen there is also a tiny vortex. And so it feels like, well, there's something that is being witnessed by a lot of different entities at once, but it's all contained within the same stadium."
},
{
"end_time": 10019.07,
"index": 381,
"start_time": 9989.701,
"text": " Andres, what is the most comforting conclusion that you've discovered? So we all have stabilizing and also dangerous thoughts and I was going to ask about some dangerous conclusion that you've encountered or at least believed yourself to have come to at some point. Maybe that's not something you'd like to share and perhaps isn't the best to end on. So we can talk about that in part two. Either way, what's some"
},
{
"end_time": 10048.456,
"index": 382,
"start_time": 10019.514,
"text": " View some point of view with some data that's hopeful and heartening and why does it score high on this consolatory end? Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, I have a couple. I think probably the most significant one was just how relatively easy it is to achieve Janice in meditation. And I think that probably will be world transforming once"
},
{
"end_time": 10065.06,
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"start_time": 10048.797,
"text": " i guess we can culturally absorb that fact i mean like because people talk about like this extreme states of consciousness on meditation and and then like you know a normal secular person goes and like spends like you know half an hour meditating and it's kind of"
},
{
"end_time": 10089.616,
"index": 384,
"start_time": 10065.794,
"text": " Grooving is like oh like it's so hard to concentrate on my breath and like like really is this gonna do anything like seriously and maybe you try it for a couple months and like maybe you feel a little bit more relaxed a little bit less stressed but like nothing to do with like the extreme things that people are reporting um so it's easy to kind of like have like this sense of powerlessness or sense of disconnection from hey people who actually do this quite seriously"
},
{
"end_time": 10115.93,
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"start_time": 10089.94,
"text": " And that's how i used to feel absolutely you know until maybe like four years ago like maybe in twenty twenty where i started to take meditation more seriously and also really starting to learn from better teachers and. For me maybe maybe the single most beautiful thing within this kind of like learning process has been understanding how to achieve jana states."
},
{
"end_time": 10142.995,
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"start_time": 10116.357,
"text": " With the technique proposed by Rob Bourbea. So Rob Bourbea, he wrote a book called Seeing that Freeze. He died recently, unfortunately, but he's extremely lovely and he has a series of lectures. My favorite is Practicing the Janus, which you can find on YouTube. Somebody from Twitter, a friend from Twitter, was very gracious to kind of like upload all of those to YouTube and"
},
{
"end_time": 10173.046,
"index": 387,
"start_time": 10143.234,
"text": " There's no copyright issues. So yeah, definitely go and check it out. So practicing the Janus is a recorded series of lectures that he gave at a three-week retreat, I think, or four-week retreat a few years ago. And the technique that he emphasizes, which to me was a game changer, and I'm just so grateful I kind of learned about it, is a style of meditation where you actually use your intelligence and creativity."
},
{
"end_time": 10202.841,
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"start_time": 10173.456,
"text": " Like, yes, you can achieve the Janus just by focusing on your breath. Like even just, you know, the sensation of air in your nose. If you focus on that, you know, 90 minutes a day in formal practice and you're successful at it, you know, within six months, there's a good chance you may be able to enter the Janus just with that method. That never worked for me. I mean, maybe maybe I'm too ADHD or maybe I don't know, for whatever reason, like like that style of meditation just wasn't very fruitful for me."
},
{
"end_time": 10232.858,
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"text": " Instead, what he advocates is, you know, imagine that you're kind of like, um, trying to light a fire and there's kind of like a lot of wood, but maybe some of the booties is wet and maybe some of it is just out of place. And there's a tiny Amber, a tiny, tiny lit up region in that thing that could become a fire. What you ask yourself is like, what do I need to do to grow that Amber?"
},
{
"end_time": 10256.254,
"index": 390,
"start_time": 10233.848,
"text": " And all you have to care about is growing it one little bit at a time you know trying to spread it you know move it from one place where it's more likely to catch fire to another place. And you know techniques like what i was describing which is like for example focusing in two regions of your body at the same time that is one method like if you feel a little bit of pleasure in your chest or in your hand."
},
{
"end_time": 10284.65,
"index": 391,
"start_time": 10256.903,
"text": " And you pay attention to that region together with some somewhere else in your body. Eventually the pleasure can actually spread to that other part of your body as if it's kind of like catching catching the ember. The ember is growing as it were. But here like use your intelligence. I mean like really is kind of like do I need to blow on it? Do I need to cover it? Do I need to warm the whole thing? Do I need to rearrange? Do I need to shift position? Do I need to breathe? Or for example,"
},
{
"end_time": 10314.309,
"index": 392,
"start_time": 10284.94,
"text": " Imagining a very happy dog or like recollecting when your mom gave you a hug or like things like that. Sometimes it sparks a little bit of joy. See if that joy can help the amber grow and if it helps then keep doing it. And that style for me has been really effective that like it's kind of a user creativity. You're always kind of like thinking of hey what can I do to make the feeling of well-being grow and it's a very interactive type of meditation and"
},
{
"end_time": 10337.807,
"index": 393,
"start_time": 10315.026,
"text": " the fact is that you can enter this really healing and ecstatic states of consciousness with something like i think on average like 600 hours of practice which is i mean sounds like a lot but in the grand scheme of things like people spend more time in in a video game uh doing that you know in in a year like it's it's not that big of an investment and it is really transformative and"
},
{
"end_time": 10368.148,
"index": 394,
"start_time": 10338.643,
"text": " I haven't have never met anybody who accesses the Janus who regrets, you know, the time they spent trying to get there. So for me, that's a very heartwarming aspect of reality. Like, hey, there's there's a lot of love and pleasure that we can all have if we do something like that. Now, you said you access it with intelligence. Is it the case you would also access it with intuition or rationality or is it just intelligence? Yeah, I would say intuition and rationality as part of the package for sure. I mean, and sometimes, for example, it might be like"
},
{
"end_time": 10398.302,
"index": 395,
"start_time": 10368.626,
"text": " Your intuition tells you, I don't know why, but I should imagine a star or something like that. And you don't know why rationally or like your intelligence doesn't can explain it. But if your intuition tells you, hey, this is going to help the meditation, try it. Absolutely. And very often times the intuition is correct. Andres. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Super wonderful conversation. Yeah. Looking forward to part two."
},
{
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"start_time": 10399.104,
"text": " I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students and that's fantastic. If you're a professor or a lecturer and there's a particular standout episode that your students can benefit from, please do share and as always feel free to contact me. New update! Started a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details."
},
{
"end_time": 10452.108,
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"start_time": 10423.916,
"text": " Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future. Several people ask me, hey, Kurt, you've spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy and consciousness. What are your thoughts? While I remain impartial in interviews, this substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. Also,"
},
{
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"start_time": 10452.278,
"text": " Thank you to our partner, The Economist. Firstly, thank you for watching, thank you for listening. If you haven't subscribed or clicked that like button, now is the time to do so. Why? Because each subscribe, each like helps YouTube push this content to more people like yourself, plus it helps out Kurt directly, aka me. I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the algorithm,"
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{
"end_time": 10525.418,
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"text": " I also read in the comments"
},
{
"end_time": 10551.596,
"index": 401,
"start_time": 10525.418,
"text": " and donating with whatever you like. There's also PayPal. There's also crypto. There's also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind it's support from the sponsors and you that allow me to work on toe full time. You also get early access to ad free episodes, whether it's audio or video. It's audio in the case of Patreon video in the case of YouTube. For instance, this episode that you're listening to right now was released a few days earlier. Every dollar helps far more than you think."
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{
"end_time": 10555.452,
"index": 402,
"start_time": 10551.817,
"text": " Either way, your viewership is generosity enough. Thank you so much."
}
]
}No transcript available.