Transcription
You were separated from the universe by these topological defects. I turned into just one point and then that point disappeared. There's no way to distinguish one thing from another. And there is no internal passage of time.
Today, Andres Gomez Emilsson of the Qualia Research Institute discloses his new paradigm for modeling psychedelic perception as well as what he thinks is actually occurring ontologically, not just perceptually under psychedelics. His views are informed by research conducted over the past decade with hundreds of psychedelic trips in controlled settings ranging from LSD to psilocybin to DMT to 5-MeO. We discuss the mathematical underpinnings of perceptions behind psychedelic states, including, of course, the visual distortions and why we get that feeling of oneness, sometimes even nothingness and fractalness. We even cover those so-called beings encountered in DMT trips, such as the mantis being.
This was filmed at the MIT lab and was the last headline event put on by the Augmentation Lab Summit hosted by MIT researcher Danya Bharadari. I'm honored to have been invited. The summit featured talks on the future of biological and artificial intelligence, brain interfaces and included speakers such as Stephen Wolfram, the interview of which is on this channel as well. Enjoy.
This is Augmentation Lab Summit Weekend put on by Augmentation Lab at MIT Media Lab. We're here live recording with an in-studio audience. Thank you all for coming and waiting. Okay, Andres. Hello, hello. Why don't you give a brief introduction to who you are and why you're relevant to people who are psychonauts and into psychedelics, psychedelic research.
Definitely. So I'm Andres. I currently run the Qualia Research Institute, one of the original co-founders. And yeah, we study consciousness and could really try to figure it out, ideally from first principles, make mathematical models of it, try to really take phenomenology seriously, build tools to visualize phenomenology. And also, yeah, figure out what pleasure and pain are fundamentally and try to reduce suffering. There's kind of a constellation of things that we do. And yeah, essentially, we're gonna, it seems like you have a conversation about exploring the state space of consciousness and visualizing it. I want this to be valuable to people who have not taken psychedelics, to people who are extremely familiar with psychedelics.
So something that gets thrown around is the word qualia. It's not quite clear what the difference between qualia and sensory input is. So what is it?
Yeah, I think that's a really important clarification because, yeah, you could potentially talk for hours with somebody about consciousness. And if your reference for what qualia refers to versus what sensory stimulation refers to don't match, you're kind of talking past each other at a very, very deep level. Here's one common misconception, I would argue, that kind of highlights this contrast in how you might define these terms. I would argue that the way in which you experience the color blue, you can really separate it from the frequency of light that typically triggers it. In fact, there is an infinite number of ways in which you can actually experience that particular sensation by using different combinations of frequencies of light, having a different spectral power distribution, and still get the same way in which it feels like. So just because it feels in a certain way, you actually don't know what kind of sensory input it is. You just know it is from a certain family of sensory inputs. More so, there's this very weird thing that when you combine the colors that are the extreme opposites of a rainbow, you get magenta, a color that is not within the spectrum. So all of these are hints that suggest, well, the actual phenomenology, the way in which the colors feel, can be perhaps separated from the idea that they map on to frequencies of light. And I think a really stark example is if you imagine somebody who has synesthesia, where they map on, let's say, sounds to color sensations, but maybe they're blind. So they could actually investigate the way in which colors are related to each other, phenomenal colors, the colors that we experience, even though they have no visual sensory stimulation. And one of the things that you get with this conceptual separation of the qualia—the way in which the experience feels—versus the sensory input that triggers it, is that you can talk about, for example, mapping a certain state space of a certain type of experience, like, for example, all of the possible colors that you may have. You can do that without necessarily using the traditional sensory modality that is associated to it.
For instance?
Such as different combinations of light, different frequencies. Instead, you could, in principle, map the qualia space of color using sounds if you have the right type of synesthesia. If you could induce the right type of synesthesia, I would argue, you'd be able to say things such as, “hey, orange is in between yellow and red,” even though you're really just experiencing this in a way that is triggered by sounds. But you still learn about the geometry of that space if you have the right mapping. In other words, I would argue that people are very skeptical that, okay, if there's aliens or there's other entities out there, in what way could we possibly understand each other? People propose also that, well, we would probably understand each other through a shared understanding of mathematics because that's universal. But I would argue potentially also about qualia space. Whether they experience phenomenal color through visual stimulation or audio or tactile feelings or imagination or only when they dream, they can in principle do a series of experiments by comparing the colors that they experience and reconstruct the space of possible phenomenal colors. And I think when we talk to each other, we could actually use that as a shared reference that grounds our worlds of experience in a sense.
Is it the case then that someone's blue is the same as someone else's blue?
Currently, it is not known for sure. And there's things that suggest it is the case and things that suggest it isn't the case.
What possibly suggests that it is?
Yeah. So if you essentially map out the geometry of color using different frequencies of light, you actually get a somewhat irregular shape. Its geometry is not completely symmetrical. A classic example is the brightest blue that you could experience is not as bright as the brightest yellow. And this suggests, okay, there is a geometry and this is shared between people. And some people who may ground qualia space in terms of the relative distances between its components and the geometry that comes from that, they may perhaps argue that, “well, okay, yeah, blue is in some sense defined within the qualia space as where there's this asymmetry where you can't go as bright as in this other region of the qualia space.” However, there's other hints that actually do suggest that the state space of color is actually really symmetrical, which is this phenomenon called hyper-blue, which is if you look at a very, very bright yellow for a while, you're going to have an afterimage that is a blue afterimage. And so if you have really, really bright yellow, and then you, right after that, present a really bright blue, the combination of the yellow's afterimage together with the bright blue takes your qualia blue to the next level, and you see hyper-blue, which is a brighter blue than we're usually capable of experiencing. Suggesting, I think, that the reason we can't experience super bright blue has more to do with the receptors that are associated to different cells in our eyes. They can be negatively activated. You need to do some trickery so that the relative proportions is as if this had a negative activation and it pushes you in that direction of the state space. But there is actually something that does break the symmetry a little bit of the color wheel, which is pure hues, which is—I mean, I don't know, this is an interesting test and I would argue it tends to be very, very polemical actually when I bring it up—which is maybe the audience or people seeing this at home are wondering, okay, when you were a kid and you saw yellow and red paint mixing and making orange, it's like, “okay, yeah, that kind of makes sense.” Orange is kind of in between the two colors. But then blue and yellow paint and you get green, it's like, “that makes no sense.” It's like, “where is this green coming from?” It's kind of a qualitatively different thing from both yellow and blue. And I think that is telling. The relationship in the colors here is actually different. And if you look at a linearized state space of the color qualia, usually what you will actually see is there's a whole line that is pure blue. And there's a whole line that is pure red.
Are you able to show this?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I mean, one word of context, I suppose, for discussing colors is that screens have limitations, which is the gamut, the colors that they can actually show. So there's actually a lot of things about the phenomenology of colors that are not super apparent in screens that you need to actually see in person. But yeah, there is essentially this sort of way in which you can probe the properties of this color space by, for example, showing people two hues that are really close together. So let's say one line here and one line here, and asking them which one looks more pure, like which one looks like it's not a mixture of anything else, any two other things. And people will converge to a line of red where it's not being mixed with blue where you get purple and it's not being mixed with yellow. And you just get, okay, yeah, red kind of breaks the symmetry. There's something clearly there in a sense. And you get essentially the same with yellow and green and blue. So, I would argue here, actually, green in some sense lives in a different dimension than both yellow and blue, whereas orange lives in the linear combination of red and yellow. So those patterns and the fact that we all, if we do the tests, will say, “okay, yeah, there were four pure hues for me, there were four pure hues for you,” suggest that at least between people we do share some of these features of this state space of qualia in this context. However, it could be the case, and I don't know any strong argument against this other than parsimony, for example, maybe your blue is my yellow and your yellow is my blue. If you were to swap the pure hues, then what other features can you actually find in the geometry of the space to suggest that, “hey, we are actually experiencing the same one”? And I'm not sure if there are. So what I can say is something like, the mapping... I don't think it's going to be the case that, for example, you experience orange when I experience blue. But maybe you experience yellow. So maybe you experience a pure hue.
Okay, let's get to some psychedelic visuals.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so actually just jumping right into it, this is one of the, for example, really trippy states in one of the tools that I'm going to be displaying today. This is exceptionally trippy, right? And if your visual field is being saturated with psychedelic visuals to that extent, you probably shouldn't be outside would be my suggestion. You definitely need a sitter. So now, this level of intensity usually, unless you're overdosing on mushrooms, would be something like, okay, you're doing DMT. Where, yeah, maybe the actual sensations from the environment become this very relatively faint contributor to the experience. But this is a teaser, yes.
You're not going to be just showing visuals and then saying, “look how cool this looks.” You're going to be saying, “okay, here is what is correlated with certain psychedelics like LSD is different than DMT, which is different than 5-MeO,” and then you're going to say, “why does it look like this and how is it produced?”
Yeah, so why don't we start off simple, show what ordinary perception looks like. I think one fruitful way of starting is showcasing some of the simple effects that this tool can give you. I mean, this is well-known things such as drifting effects. This is very fast, but for example, your experience being a little bit wobbly is one of the maybe primary things that psychedelics do, making the field of experience a little bit wobbly. Explaining actually how that happens, I think, is very non-trivial. But okay, that's a very, very basic thing that you can do. And of course, it gets interesting when you combine it with other effects. But that's the ‘a’ of the ABC of making these replications. The second one is adding deep dream layers. So this is a little bit subtle, but you may see actually in some regions it gets a little bit enhanced and it looks a little bit trippy. You said it's like these waves where maybe the edges get highlighted. And so one of the simple, interesting ideas is, okay, you choose different layers of the deep dream algorithm. So maybe on low doses, you highlight just edges or something like that.
Low doses of?
Let's say, yeah, psilocybin or LSD, mescaline. Maybe in higher doses, higher level features start to become highlighted, like eyes and dog ears and things like that. The rocks start to look like a bunch of birds put together. I guess the highest layer for some reason is very abstract, at least in this particular rendition.
What are you doing with these different layers? Are you saying that when you're on a psychedelic, for people who have not experienced psychedelics, that you then start to see this? What determines which of those layers it is? And how did you come up with those layers? Are there more layers?
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this is essentially bringing back a relatively old idea for how to replicate psychedelic visuals: the Deep Dream algorithm. I have to fact-check this, but I remember in 2015 it came, I think from Google. People were playing with large neural networks and they found that, okay, if you clamp a high-level feature in one of these networks and make the input fit the type of input that would maximally activate this feature, then you can get these very trippy images because it's the images being asked to, “hey, maximize the output” or the probability that the network will say that you're a dog. So at first, it starts to make everything a little bit like it has dog ears, a little bit of dog eyes, and is just trying to trick the network into believing that there's a dog in there. And people just wrote blogs online about, “hey, this looks really trippy.” And in the psychonaut community, there were definitely a lot of posts and there was a fad for a few years where people were replicating their psychedelic experiences primarily using this tool. But there are a lot of open questions here. Of course, there's the physiological and biological question, like, why would psychedelics have this ability to clamp these high-level features? Other questions is exactly, which layer should we use?
Can you show an example of this dog clamping that you're referring to?
mind. Oh, there you go. Yeah, I guess here it's probably going through the layers. So yeah, you try to amplify as much as possible features for a given layer. And then you as... you consciously try to find, or no, no, no. As the designer of the network, you set one of these neurons to maximum activity and try to arrange the rest of the network to do that.
This is an example of what one sees?
Well, I would say this is a paradigm that people have identified as phenomenologically similar to psychedelic experiences. I mean, there are significant differences between the visuals that you experience and this. And in fact, that is actually the motivation for our replication tool. Everybody in our team essentially really loves playing with deep dream but sees very deep limitations in it. And it's sometimes actually a little bit frustrating because you may see movies where they play a psychedelic experience rendition and people get the impression it's like, “okay, yeah, culturally we already know how this works.” People understand how this actually looks like. There's this illusion of understanding at the very least culturally, whereas people who usually have explored the space quite deeply will say, “no, really, the cultural depictions of psychedelics maybe capture one percent of what's interesting about the state, but there's 99 percent that is like, how do we actually put this into a visualization or something that actually evokes it?” It's very difficult. So yeah, Deep Dream, I would say, is a certain percentage of the puzzle.
Okay, and so we'll get back to the tool that you've developed.
Yes, okay. And what's interesting is that this is a tool, most of these visualizations that you see, they're not ones with sliders, they're just something you can press play on, whereas yours, you have these modulators here and there, and sure, there are discrete drop-down boxes, such as the layer 1, 2, and so on. But that's rare in this. So this means that you can tell exactly what is going on in different experiences.
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The way in which I'm trying to pitch it in a sense is like Photoshop for the phenomenology of psychedelic experiences. It's like, how do you make a Photoshop of something in a sense? It's like, well, you think of the range of primitive effects that you need to reconstruct a phenomenon. If you're going to simulate something, if you're going to engineer software for example, okay, what kind of materials do I need? What is there, how much stress can they endure, and things like that. So, what do you put in a Photoshop for psychedelic experiences? And of course, it's going to be a long journey, many decades of building more and more features, as we actually find and formalize what's happening. But I do think this year we're presenting a layer of the stack that we think actually does contribute significantly to our ability to visualize these states. Perhaps a similar improvement in our ability to visualize things as I would say maybe Deep Dream was back then.
Okay, let's see what else. Okay, so there is this whole layer of coupled oscillators. And okay, right now actually it's just going up and down, but can you explain what an oscillator is?
Yes, yes. It's not a coupled one. Okay, so here is an oscillator. In this case, there's a dot that is changing in color. And what happens is it's changing its color at a certain rate and it wants to do it at its own rate. It has a heartbeat, as it were. It has its desirable frequency where it's as healthy as possible. But then it needs to coexist in an ecosystem of other oscillators like it that maybe are going at slightly different frequencies, but they're in touch, they communicate with each other. So the way in which, mathematically, it works is that the two oscillators are sensing each other and they can measure each other's phase, where along the color wheel they are. And as a function of how far away they are from each other, they make bigger or smaller adjustments so that, slowly, they actually converge their phase if they actually have enough of a desire to couple. Now, there's also, in this case, another element, which is distance. So the desire for an oscillator to couple with another in the paradigm that we're presenting is distance dependent. Okay, so right now, for example, I'm going to make it so that they actually want to be in opposite phases of each other. So the current simulation is set up where all of the oscillators will want to be at a different phase than their neighbors, or the things that are close to them. So what ends up happening here is you have this diversity of colors because the oscillators don't want to be similar to those who are close by. But then I can switch this up so that they actually do want to be in the same phase with each other. And the nice thing is that this is a very smooth, soft, continuous transition from, “oh, we want to be different” to “hey, we want to be the same.” And in some sense, I think, at least I find aesthetically, the process of convergence in general tends to be quite beautiful, especially for very sophisticated systems. So one thing that you can do here, I'll just give you a couple more examples. And this is the toy model that then informs how the tool works more broadly. So here I'm making a street of oscillators. So there's actually some similarity as you go from left to right. It doesn't have to be perfect. That's another thing with this paradigm. There's wiggle room. It's organic in that sense. You're not just finding one solution and imposing it, but the system adapts itself. So what I'm going to do now is I want oscillators that are far away for them to want to be different from each other. So now as you see, close by they're the same color, but far away there are different colors. Now just a moment. So at the top here you see coupling one, two, three.
So the near ones you've put to a positive number.
Yes. And the bottom one you put to an extreme negative number as far as it can go.
Yes, exactly. And I'll show you another set of configurations here. But if I put that when they're far, they want to be in the same color, but now when they're close, they want to be at different colors, okay, then it fragments. Actually, it fragments quite extremely. Even vertically at first, it breaks down vertically too. If this is supposed to be a vein or something that is transporting, let's say, water or some fluid, perhaps, if it breaks like this, it's pretty catastrophic because it's cutting across the vein, so to speak.
Okay, so here's a really cool thing about systems like this is that if you do these layers of, you identify different distances and you modulate the coupling constant for each of the different distances, you can use that to actually tune into waves of different lengths. So depending on the specific staircase of couplings, I can make the wave larger or smaller. And I think this is the basic setup. Maybe I'll show another fascinating thing, which is that you can actually use this kind of system as a diagnosis, in a sense, for what type of shape a set of oscillators are forming. Because for example, if I put it in a circle and I make them want to be different from each other, it will break in this symmetrical way, where the entire circle becomes a color wheel. And it will always try to break up into an integer number of times. So you get—not always, I mean, sometimes it toggles between one mode and another, but the stable configurations that it arrives at tend to essentially be those where you have an integer number of times that the phase fits in the system. And this is very, very general. Also, when you make grids and even grids of different dimensionalities.
Yeah, actually, I'm going to show you. So what I'm going to show you actually now is a three-dimensional system of coupled oscillators. So this is an article on cessation. Okay, perfect. I found it. Okay, so you see now it's a three-dimensional lattice. So you see when there's a wave traveling in it, it finds one of the symmetries of the object. In this case, the wave is traveling along these squares, essentially. And if I put it orthogonal, like this, it's the same.
What's determining the size?
The size of the wave is determined by the pattern of what we're calling the coupling kernel. We're calling it the coupling kernel simply because it's this idea that a convolutional kernel is where you stand at a pixel, for example, and you look at a fixed window around you and maybe you convolve with it. Here is the analog of doing that but for a dynamic system, which is like you stand everywhere and you apply the same coupling constants to your neighborhood as everybody else, and then you see the emergent dynamics of doing that. And in this case, the wavelength is fairly low, it's the entire shape.
Okay, so we get the idea that, look, you have these different balls you can put on screen, you can put them in different shapes, and they can look to their neighbor and say, “I want to be more like you,” or, “I want to be less like you.” And they can also do so with different distances. So they could say, “I want to be more like you, much less than you, but much more like you in the back.” And that's what you're tuning there. So what? It's cool. It's interesting.
Now, what is the relevance here to psychedelics?
Yeah. Okay, okay. So a couple more things to explain. This is one thing that you can do is play with the dimensionality of the space on which you're applying these rules. So I'm going to do something a little bit trippy, which is this is really cool because right now the wave is actually in three dimensions. I don't know if it's obvious, but I need to rotate it a little bit for you to really see that, yes, this is a cube and there's this resonant mode in the cube. Okay, but what was before is stranger, which is it doesn't matter how I project it. I could project it like this, like a hexagon for example, and I still get this wave going in circles. And then I project it from this side and it's still going in a circle. And I project it from this side, it's still going in a circle. What is going on in here? So this is, I think, something that happens all the time in our consciousness and it explains a lot of psychedelic effects, which is what's happening here is now the distances between the dots are the distances in the screen, in the projection. So rather than the dots thinking, “oh, I'm in a cube,” it's like, “no, I'm in a screen.” And right now, there's a bunch of dots that are overlapping with each other, and so of course they're going to be the same color, even though in principle there should be another dimension there. And when you have these effects, you can do things such as make tubes, for example, and now the color will travel through these paths as well. So I think one of these things that is happening in our experience that explains a lot of psychedelic effects is that there are three-dimensional waves of sensation in our tactile field that senses the sense of warmth or cold or expansion and contraction in our body. It's this 3D volume and it has 3D waves that look maybe more like this. You actually have this volume. Our visual field, on the other hand, has this very strong preference for this 2D layout where waves are really two-dimensional generally. And of course, there's some depth perception that stitches together different types of waves, but in general, there's this tendency for two-dimensionality. So I think a lot of the interesting computational and non-trivial things that happen on psychedelics is that you project with synesthesia, your sense of your body, for example, into your visual field. And you're connecting something that has three-dimensional resonant modes with a surface that is two-dimensional and has two-dimensional resonant modes as its preference. And so the actual phenomenology is this negotiation between three-dimensional resonant waves and two-dimensional ones and how they're trying to couple with each other, which causes all kinds of fascinating dialogues where, maybe your arm over here is projected in a certain way that the waves actually do harmonize with it. The waves in the visual field and the waves in the tactile field need to solve a Rubik's cube in a sense to be able to harmonize properly.
Okay. I have a question. It's somewhat related. So in ordinary studies of consciousness or just perception, you think of the world, we have this model where you think of the world as the ground truth, and then you're never experiencing the world, you're experiencing some filtration of it, and that gets augmented and messed around with. Okay. But ordinarily, what you do is you play around with the world, and then you say, okay, I want the patient to experience so-and-so. But you are just looking inside the brain. Your Qualia Research Institute is already looking at phenomenon inside. Is there anything... can you go in the opposite direction? Have you discovered anything about ontology or what you think of as the real world from perceptions inside the brain because of how they're supposed to be correlated with the real world?
Yeah, yeah, excellent, excellent question. I'm making the bet essentially that the structure of consciousness, the phenomenology of consciousness, the way in which sensations can bind together is telling us something really deep about the nature of reality. It's essentially, okay, you are a particular facet of reality. And so if you can study the laws of phenomenology, I think you are, in a sense, tapping into the laws of the universe at a very deep level. And there are things that are, I would say, at least really hint at very deep connections with physics. I'm not a physicist. I'm a physics fan. But I don't want to speak about the mathematics of the standard model or something like that. But I do suspect that things evocative of, for example, the ideas we discussed in our previous podcast, which was how in physics you have things such as particles and antiparticles that cancel out, turning to photons and things like that. There's a lot of aspects of phenomenology where things in qualia space have a structure where it feels like oftentimes from the vacuum, so to speak, the vacuum splits into two things that are opposite and complementary to each other. And something like DMT tends to, in some sense, split the vacuum into the polar opposites of things. So the sense of space in front of you, the colors, a given point may split into blue and yellow. It's a color and its anti-color. And everything is doing that. Everything is invoking its opposite and oscillating with it. Whereas 5-MeO feels actually like the movement is one of, “hey, every particle, find your antiparticle. Everything cancel out with your opposite until you smooth out completely.” So a peak 5-MeO-DMT experience often is described as merging with a white light of the universe or becoming one with emptiness. And there's a lot of evocative things like that that to me strongly suggests a deep connection with symmetry and the cancellation of opposites. Another very interesting hint here is there's some doses of 5-MeO-DMT where, for example, all of your visual field and your tactile field diffracts into what looks like a rainbow or the whole color wheel. And then if you increase the dose a little bit and you look at it from the side, it all cancels out into pure space. So there is this phenomenology where you can study the ways in which in some sense things are equivalent to nothing at a very, very, very deep level. And yeah, I suspect if teams of very smart people continue to really, really try to figure this out, I think there's a lot of promising information.
What do you mean it appears like it's equivalent to nothing?
Yeah, yeah. You mean to say how from out of the vacuum you can get something positive and negative? Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is an allusion to David Pierce's zero ontology. I recommend a lot this website. It's a 90s website in general, hedweb.com by David Pierce, a philosopher from whom I draw a lot of inspiration. And he has this essay of why does anything exist. And he lays out this case that in mathematics and physics and phenomenology, we have this overarching pattern where you can reconstruct everything out of nothingness in some sense. I mean, he says, we probably don't yet have the proper words to really talk about this. We're in a pre-paradigmatic stage, really. What we say is pointing to an explanation space rather than a full theory. But he argues, in mathematics, you can get everything from the empty set, so to speak. In physics, things like, well, what is the total angular momentum of the universe? People argue it's zero. There's a lot of debate in there. But then in phenomenology, it's like, yeah, colors seem to come in pairs. The sense of space seems to require a sense of time. There's these interrelated variables in experience and consciousness where at very, very peak symmetry states of consciousness where things are symmetrifying, harmonizing, synchronizing, you see a cancellation process, which is very evocative of, well, maybe at the base there's really nothing. Also, people's phenomenology of high-dose 5-MeO-DMT is very often, people will say things such as, “wow, the truth is that everything is happening simultaneously,” or something like that. It's an “everything everywhere all at once” type of feeling.
Are you able to show that type of feeling?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, let's do it. Okay, awesome. Okay, so I'm going to essentially show you what 5-MeO-DMT might feel like a little bit and some qualitative aspects of it. So I guess again, for a little bit of context, the couple of oscillators that I was showing you in the replication tool, practically every pixel is one of these oscillators and it's using the GPU. I developed the core idea, but this is the work of a whole team and I'm especially thankful to Emil Hall who built so much of this and he really optimized it. The GPU is actually simulating all of the oscillators. So here in this setting, I'm using a black and white system of coupled oscillators and I'm going to make it so, well, I'm actually going to increase the opacity. It's like, okay, you're on a pretty strong dose and as you're coming up, this thing happens where at first—okay, actually I'm going to replicate something like this—at first you're coming up and it's like this and as you're going up, the lines start to cancel with each other and you see there's these pinwheels. You can think of them as these particles in experience and they find each other and they annihilate. Well, then also, secondary effects happen sometimes, that you get these additional extra waves. But in general, there's this tendency that as you increase the coupling constant and you keep it positive, the whole screen converges to just black and white. And these very big pinwheels find each other and they cancel each other out. And that, well, I'll show you now, from our website, from the various legal psychedelic retreats that we have run, one of the things that we all converged on—this was a very widely reported phenomenon in the team, we were 12 people with technical backgrounds studying 5-MeO-DMT phenomenology—and after an experience, we might sit down and discuss and somebody who knows how to write shaders would write these within half an hour and it's like, “hey, we were all commenting, yeah, actually that feels like our experience.” And in general, everybody who tried 5-MeO, at least in our retreat—of course, it is biased because they're people who are into math, are into meditation, are into visual art—but they all reported that, yeah, this process of the generation of these pinwheels, what they're called topological defects, and then their cancellation was really quintessential to the phenomenology of 5-MeO. I really like this animation too. This is the vacuum, so to speak, universal consciousness before it's divided, so to speak. And then it turns into this particle and antiparticle, or this vortex and anti-vortex. And on 5-MeO-DMT, yeah, it feels like the way in which your experience is constructed is a bunch of stilts that are made of these defects. And when they cancel out, you feel like you're rejoining the sea of the universe, which is like, okay, you were separated from the universe by these topological defects. This is the overall impression. I mean, again, I'm describing phenomenology here rather than necessarily metaphysics.
Yeah. But do you have any metaphysical views?
I'm totally open to various interpretations here. I think you were interested in group effects or collective effects, you briefly asked me yesterday, or synchronizing trips and things like that. I'm very open. I used to put the bulk of my probability mass into: everything that happens in a psychedelic is an internal hallucination. Very rich, you can learn a lot about the unconscious, you can learn about consciousness, and it's very computationally significant and so on, but it's just a part of your world simulation. That would be the bulk of my probability mass a few years ago. And now I'm actually a little bit more open to, no, actually there's other phenomena as well that might involve a couple of oscillators, but within a larger field in a sense that includes not only your own experience but others around you and maybe other things as well. But very huge error bars in here, a very, very, very high amount of uncertainty. But yes, I'm happy to talk about that.
Yeah, have you done any tests where someone's in this room, say not this particular room, but in a room and they're on, let's say they're on 5-MeO—I'm not sure if that's the most optimal use of 5-MeO for this—and then someone else is in some other room where they can't see you, and then I'm showing you a string of letters and I say, “okay, you look at these string of letters, then I ask you, can you reach this person's mind?” Because if you're a part of a unified field, you should have some access. Have you done something like that?
Okay, so I mean, let me provide a bit more context because we held one 5-MeO-DMT retreat which was in Canada in 2023. It was for me a huge highlight of my life, really, just being with all of these other nerdy kids and visual artists and mathematicians, meditators, and spending three weeks there trying to figure out how this works. Utterly mind-blowing. But there's only so much you can fit in in that time. We focused a lot on the visual phenomenology and, “hey, what kind of equations may be underneath this,” or the topology, the geometry, etc. We did do a couple of wacky experiments. One of the things that was widely reported, especially from the meditators—this has to be replicated and I don't know how much this is self-suggestion—but something that was quite strongly reported independently by several of the people in the retreat was that when somebody takes 5-MeO-DMT in the same room as you, there is a vibe shift. And in particular for the meditators, they said that time to samadhi shortened significantly, meaning that really advanced meditators would enter into the various jhanas, these very advanced concentration states, within minutes. And for one of them, for example, it might usually take them 10 minutes to enter into one of those trances or ultra-states. And he said that when somebody was on 5-MeO-DMT within a few meters of him, it would half the amount of time.
So he's not on it, but the other person is?
Yes. And still, there's this sense of, well, the gradient of going in the meditation direction is lubricated, as it were. It's a bit entrancing to be around somebody on 5-MeO. Then again, we weren't running blind tests of like, okay, maybe this person is actually on, it's just vapor, it's not a placebo or something. We weren't doing that. Or testing by putting someone else with 5-MeO behind the wall, but they don't know. I mean, it would be fascinating. Again, of course there's something to be said about 5-MeO is very, very, very profound and it's hard to actually follow complex instructions if you're in the state. But yeah, if somebody...
what about others like LSD?
Uh, actually, yeah, it is interesting. For example, at festivals like Burning Man, something I've sometimes done, especially with people I know or friends of friends, is going with an iPad with a psychophysics experiment. It's like, “hey, look at this picture. What does it look like?” In general, people who are experienced with psychedelics can usually answer fairly basic visual tasks. Usually, they think their performance is a lot worse than what it is. It's kind of the opposite than with drunk people who are like, “oh, my performance is totally great,” and actually they're in the 10th percentile or something. No, on LSD, I'm very surprised. Somebody might do a task very often and think, “hey, did I do it really poorly?” And it's like, “no, you were average.” And of course, for the psychedelic cryptography, which I don't know if we've talked about that, we ran this contest or competition where people would submit videos where the idea is there's some kind of secret information here that you can only read or decode if you're in a certain psychedelic state of consciousness.
Interesting.
Yeah, yeah. Originally I actually came up with this idea, the very basic implementation, which is how to secretly communicate with people on LSD. And you see the very simple concept here is that you use the fact that there's this tracer effect in the visual field. Things last longer in the visual field. So that you can paint the components of an image one chunk at a time, and because it lingers, you can see it more easily. There's also features that you can see more easily, like for example, the gaps between the various columns here, but it's not obvious on the left that there are gaps. So even that is binary communication. It's like, “are there gaps between these rows or not?” But yeah, you can actually do some pretty, pretty awesome visualizations. So this was the winning entry. This one actually contains a significant amount of information. You do need to be significantly high though. The equivalent of 150 micrograms of LSD or something is the threshold where it starts to become quite visible. And again, we still need to really validate these, get percentages, optimize the effect. What I can say is that in a team of eight people trying to decode this without knowing what's in it, six were able to do so easily on mushrooms.
What do you decode here? What do you see?
Yeah, actually, the mechanism is very simple with this particular psychedelic cryptography, which is that you put a tracer effect on this image. And actually, I don't want to spoil it. I'm not going to say what's in it so that you don't know and maybe you can convince yourself that it works if you look at it. But don't look at a microdose and then judge that it doesn't work, because a microdose is not going to do it. You really need to be...
So there's a hidden message here.
Yeah, and it's unambiguous. There's a very clear message with a lot of bits of information. It's not unambiguous like, “oh, I'm not sure.”
Is it a safe message?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's pro-social. Yes, it's a good message. Okay, you also want to be careful. Yeah, it's a family-friendly message. Yeah.
So, 5-MeO-DMT, one of our overarching conclusions is that these defects would appear in the visual field, in the tactile field. And how good or bad the experience felt had a lot to do, actually, with the flow of energy and the particular shape of the field. Sometimes, for example, this can be a fairly unpleasant 5-MeO-DMT experience. If you have this sense that the energy is concentrating in this point in the bottom of your spine, that actually was described as very unpleasant because you get this feeling of pressurization. You feel pressurized in some regions or stretched.
Does it feel painful?
It feels just very uncomfortable. And it is obviously very hard to describe. It's sort of a lot of layers of yourself are sheared in this uncomfortable way that is very unusual and you would never experience it during exercise or something, just a very unusual effect. But, in this particular experience, this report, he described that the valence was extremely bad at first, which was concentrating this sense of pressure. But then all the field lines actually aligned and they all became parallel, and then the valence flipped from extremely negative to extremely positive.
Super interesting. So yeah, I was speaking with someone recently about, he was just meditating, completely sober, and then he felt extreme pain in his lower back. Extreme pain. And then extreme pleasure. And then he said it just kept oscillating between that. And it was from meditating. And he had to stop meditating from that. So this can happen.
What is the explanation for that?
Yeah, I mean, meditation, it's really powerful. And there's so many different states that you can access. And I think the description that you gave would be consistent with it. Off the top of my head, it'd be like five different types of meditation and different phenomenology. It was a variation of transcendental meditation. Okay, yeah, yeah. I don't know if that helped. It might actually be somewhat related to this.
sort of phenomenon. Because with transcendental meditation, in some of the typical modalities, you're repeating a mantra, for example, and you're concentrating your attention in a part of your body. Sometimes, let's say, in your crown chakra, just a little bit over the top of your head. You can imagine you're concentrating there an hour a day. You're smoothing what we might call your attention field lines. Whenever you get distracted, you tell your body, “no, don't think about this. Move your attention back upwards.” So you're creating this graph of wherever you're paying attention, it's pushing in that direction. And so you're ordering your attention field, as it were. And I think when the field is really ordered, actually, usually you can access the extremes of valence because when it's very ordered and actually harmonious and symmetrical, that is a complete state of harmony and it feels really great. But also when it's a little bit disjointed, it's like you're very ordered, but maybe it's a little bit out of phase or a little bit screwed up at the very tip. You may also encounter the strongest dissonances because it's like you're very aligned, but then maybe pushing against yourself. And so there is this very broad phenomenon, I mean, and meditation and especially 5-MeO-DMT demonstrates it, is that around very peak positive valence, oftentimes you have other configurations that are especially unpleasant. And I think a lot of developing deep meditative expertise involves developing the equanimity to be able to navigate those transitions. It's knowing that, well, actually, yeah, right next to the bliss or the awakening or realization, there are actually some fairly ugly, unpleasant dissonances and discordant configurations.
Is this what Reiki is supposed to be aligning? Um, yeah, that's a very good question. I don't know very much about Reiki. But in general though, I would argue that the framework of annealing or field annealing, neural annealing broadly, explains the practices of energy work very, very generally. You're using things such as various tools like surprise and attention to imagine energy flow in your body and essentially heating yourself up so that you can cool down. And you can imagine with annealing materials, if you can heat up a material and then let it cool, you can reorder its atomic lattice. Well, in so many ways, we are made of crystals of sensations. So if you heat up parts of yourself and use your attention to recombine yourself, I think fundamentally you're using annealing techniques. And I think this applies to a lot of martial arts as well. It's a very broad framework. I went to a Reiki, I don't know what they're called, master or artist or what have you, once a week for a period of months. And every time I saw her, she would always say that I'm disordered. Whatever's the worst insult that you could say in Reiki terms would apply to me. And she would just go like this to my back, not touching my back. But I wouldn't feel any different before or after. So have you encountered... if Reiki... is there legitimacy to Reiki? Is there consonance with Reiki and any of what you've outlined here today?
Let me say the following. I mean, I think if you assume that there's actually some legitimacy to some of these techniques, it might make sense that you need to have at least some basic flexibility in your energy body, so to speak, and a desire to experience the effect for it to also work. Like I see that as compatible. So, when one goes very skeptical, it might make sense that one doesn't experience it. But... She would tell me after that, “oh, everything is aligned. You're good now. Like you're so much better.” And I just, I feel exactly the same, but thank you. Thank you so much. Yes. I mean, I personally would imagine it's unlikely that something... I mean, it sounds like a scam. But what I can say is like, I do know... It was a free service. This is why. So I didn't pay for this service. Otherwise, I don't think I would have done it. But maybe that shows that I'm skeptical. So we did see... I'm somewhat frustrated because she's taking up so much of my time. Yesterday, we saw the hypnotist, right? I don't know if you saw the hypnotist. Yeah. No, the hypnotist is fantastic. The hypnotist, Albert Nerenberg, which I'll place a link on screen and in the description, was fantastic. Yeah. I mean, talking afterwards with him, he, of course, you should interview him at some point. He was describing orgasms being triggered by hypnosis and reaching extreme levels of what he called this “super orgasm.” Anyway, it's going to be all in a TV series or something pretty soon. You know, one interesting, I think maybe skeptical take would be something like maybe Reiki practitioners are really good hypnotists. If you can induce these really powerful experiences relatively easy with these attention tricks, yeah, presumably there's a lot of ways of hacking a person. But also, you know, speaking personally, I know people who swear by some interesting effects that they have experienced not locally from somebody else doing energy work on them. And it's very hard to say. What I can say, from personal experience, again, I remain open-minded, but I haven't seen a silver bullet of things like this.
But during the 5-MeO retreat, in addition to the time to samadhi shortening, also people reported feeling each other's traumas and processing it for each other. Like for example, one of the meditation practitioners who is really equanimous, he's been in monasteries for years and a super great guy, and he can endure a lot of pain without problem. So sometimes one of the things that would be reported is, okay, this person is having a difficult 5-MeO experience processing, let's say, childhood trauma or something like that. And then he reported that just having the advanced meditator right next to him was extremely powerful because the trauma was processed or dissipated through him. And also the meditator reported that what happened afterwards as well. So there were reported phenomenology that suggested a shared field, especially when people were both simultaneously on a state. We did try one side experiment which was unsuccessful. I was with one of the participants, really friendly, one of the artists, and it was like, “okay, give me a number of from zero to a hundred while I'm in the state.” And he's also in the state. And I think he actually was like 37 and I reported 87. But 37 is the most common. Yeah, yeah.
So 5-MeO-DMT, one of the things that we all converged on is that it seems like it instantiates this self-organizing principle where everything in your experience wants to cohere with everything else. And the emergence of the pinwheels, I think, is downstream of that. It's whenever you have these systems of coupled oscillators, especially when it has rich dimensionality or multiple layers, and you make them all want to be one with each other, so to speak, the pinwheels is just something that you encounter along the way. Whereas we also contrasted it with ayahuasca and mushrooms. I can find some good replication of that. And essentially there are some key differences, which is like, not only is it much more colorful, but also you have this effect where you have very rich detail and essentially fractally at every scale, every sensation triggers its opposite. So in some sense, you get these, the attractor states are where you have all of these opposites reconciled in some kind of tapestry where everything is invoking its opposite, but still the experience manages to include it into some overall perspective that is usually really diverse and rich in contrast. And in that sense, it's almost the opposite of 5-MeO-DMT. We used to describe it as 5-MeO-DMT promotes global coherence in your overall system, whereas regular DMT, what's in ayahuasca, causes these competing clusters of coherence. So which one is the one when people say, “I experienced everything and everything is happening all at once everywhere”? That would be 5-MeO, which would be the colorless and the black and white where you get the pinwheels. This would be more like the 5-MeO-DMT. And especially as the pinwheels eventually collapse into each other, people might say something like, “well, it felt like a black hole where I collapsed,” or “I turned into just one point,” for example, is an often reported thing. I turned into just one point and then that point disappeared is also another thing people say. And when you just become one point, you're not really a person. You don't remember who you are or where you are. Ideally, you feel pretty safe though. That's a good experience. And at least in our retreat, almost everybody had overall pretty good experiences. But the information content is very minimal. There's not much happening in there other than a very intense experience of nothingness. Whereas, ayahuasca, psilocybin is much more like this in that everything is richly, richly, richly structured. And usually there's actually several layers of oscillators talking to each other. Let me just find a pattern here that…
Now we're speaking plenty about the visuals, but also there's temporal perceptions, distortions often. So you'll feel like you have lived this life and other lives 10 times over. Sure. And an eternity passed. It's difficult to say with our ordinary words how can eternity pass. Explain how that works. The article I would point to to explain the phenomenology of temporal distortions on various psychedelics is this one. I mean, I titled it “The Pseudo-Time Arrow.” Let me explain the title. I want to distinguish between the phenomenology of the passage of time and actual physical time. And physicists, I mean, there's a huge debate on what is time, as people who watch your channel will probably know. But things such as, okay, there's an arrow along which entropy is increasing, some people might define time in that way. And I think it's very worthwhile to think of physical time as something that may not be identical to the feeling of the passage of time. Because if you take 5-MeO-DMT and you say, “oh, everything stopped,” it's not like literally the whole universe stopped and from outside everybody also stopped. It's more that the phenomenology of time was deeply altered. So the question is, can we reconstruct why time feels the way in which it feels like appealing just to the structure of the experience as opposed to appealing to a physical time that you're accessing? And what I'm exploring here is effectively how the stacking of sensations allow the generation of an internal arrow of time. So the idea is that, okay, there's this physical time, but also, as we were saying, there's these tracer effects. Things last longer on psychedelics, right? I think normally, there's always also a tracer effect regardless, and I think that's essential for the generation of the feeling of time. It's just very thin and in some sense, the things that are a little bit further into the past, they're fainter. So there's this arrow of realism. What's more recent is more vivid and you can reconstruct how things are changing and in what direction things are moving by the arrow of how things are becoming fainter over time. And now on psychedelics, let's say this is what I might call a sober pseudo-time arrow, is how the sensations become fainter, how they refer to each other. Maybe on psychedelics, because everything lasts longer, the internal arrow of time is longer, in a sense. You have more sensations that are accumulated over time and that are referencing each other. So there's a sense of you're in an expanded time in a sense, just as a generic effect of these substances. But then in the special cases or the interesting corner cases is where, for example, the sense of the arrow of time may wrap around and actually connect with itself. This happens involuntarily often if you are listening to really repetitive music on psychedelics, like if you're at a trance festival and you took three hits of acid, you may feel like, “oh my gosh, I'm in a time loop and I've been here for who knows how long,” because the music wraps around. It may close, it may make your future the same as your past. Yes. And I think legitimately something really interesting is actually happening to the topology of your attention. It is a very exotic configuration of consciousness. But I don't think you're breaking spacetime in a more literal sense. But internally, it's a very unusual phenomenology.
Oh, and the thing that actually I think does happen in something like 5-MeO-DMT is more a central collapse. It's a little bit more like time stops when everything synchronizes. With all of the sensations synchronized and they're in phase, there's no way to distinguish one thing from another. And there is no internal passage of time. I would maybe describe it this way, which is if you have a lot of clocks moving near to each other, but there's no absolute frame of reference, all they can know about how time passes is by looking at the differences in their phases internally. But if suddenly all the clocks are moving together... I see. Internally, it's like, there's no time. Right. And so when you have this hypersynchrony across many different aspects of you, it's like time may stop for the parts that are synchronized with each other. And a peak 5-MeO-DMT experience is like your body and mind figures out how to synchronize everything, reprojecting it from the right way so that everything is in phase. And subjectively, that feels like there's just no time, or timeless, outside of space and time, so to speak.
Now, what about the experiences of entering other animals' lives and other people's lives and past lives and so on? Yeah, I'm not sure if I could really comment on that. I haven't really seen firsthand people really reference past lives. Have you experienced that yourself? No, no. I mean, the most unusual thing I have personally experienced, which is widely reported and I definitely should write about it, is more about sensing when a family member dies. That is pretty often reported. And sometimes you may have a complex hallucination or some kind of mystical experience. If anything, that is the one thing I would say, okay, there's probably, personally it feels like there's a signal there. But hallucinations of past lives or something like that, yeah, I wouldn't say I've experienced that.
If we go back to how we started, which is these coupled oscillators, if you don't mind going back... yeah, yeah, this is the toy model example. In none of this can I see how you could ever come up with a mantis alien DMT encounter. So where do those come from? One thing I will say to begin with is that, okay, whether these are... there's some influence from external intelligences or not, it is very clear that what you hallucinate on, let's say, DMT or various psychedelics, it patterns on top of your own world model. And so there is this overall framework we call psychedelic thermodynamics, which is this idea that, on a psychedelic, the energy of your consciousness increases. Everything is brighter, things are more wobbly, there's more flexibility. In some senses, you're heated up in a way and there's energy sinks that locally crystallize your experience. And essentially, semantic content, things that you can recognize, we think function as this energy sinks. It's actually a shrink wrapping. When you're on DMT and the world is very wobbly, if something kind of looks like a jaguar, the field may actually start to shrink wrap around as if it plays the role of the jaguar. And this shrink wrapping effect, I would actually describe it as a cooling effect. So when the flexible world sheet of experience approaches something that you've seen before, it cools around it. And effectively, your experience crystallizes on things that you have experienced before. It finds energy sinks to crystallize around. And there's two things it tends to crystallize around. One is semantic content, for example, the concept of a car. It can be things at that level of abstraction. And then the other thing is symmetries, like repeating patterns, crystallographic structures. And those are much more universal and cultural neutral in a sense. So you know, I would imagine, for example, the actual symmetrical visuals that people in the Amazon who take ayahuasca experience is probably the same symmetrical visuals as you and I would, but the semantic content that they experience is probably quite different because it's culture bound.
Why don't you show some of these entities that can be encountered? Yeah. Okay, so I'm going to rely on my friend Symmetric Vision, who is this awesome artist and he has been to some of the QRI retreats. And I would say he's world-class at replicating psychedelic visuals. And I believe this one, yeah, this one is a DMT replication. It's a little bit long, so let me just fast forward. At first, there's... oh, okay. Oh, God. Okay, yeah. There's also eyes closed versus eyes open. But okay, you see, there's a lot of these efforts of the field to symmetrify and harmonize the various patterns. If you close your eyes, you're in a different world. But if you go sufficiently high in the dose, it doesn't matter whether you have the eyes open or closed. And yeah, these very intricate structures happen where tubes, for example, are fairly common. Tubes along which waves travel. And the tubes often have a lot of depth effects. They play with depth. They can compress and look like they go very, very, very, very far away from you. And then they expand and it's like they're very close to you. So extreme depth illusion phenomenology is extremely common. And I will say that, okay, the actual model that we have for how this happens requires more than just coupled oscillators. And it requires actually something analogous to video feedback, which is the idea that one of the things that our overall system is doing and is capable of is taking a chunk of your experience, editing it in some way, and then putting it back into your visual field or your tactile field. I mean, the most classic example is if you enter a bathroom where there's a mirror, your world simulation immediately knows how to copy everything on the left to make it go on the right. And internally, you're not confused. If we pass the mirror test, you understand that it's not like there's a room behind the mirror. Your role simulation is capable of handling those relationships. And on something like DMT, that capacity gets really exploited where every surface can briefly, for example, be interpreted as, “well, this is the surface of a mirror that is reflecting something else in the scene.” And the capacity for tracking those correspondences goes through the roof where, you know, you may see, okay, this mirror is reflecting this other mirror, which is reflecting this other mirror, which is reflecting the original mirror. We'll get back to the mirror right now.
What's going on here? This is a seraphim. No, is it a seraphim? One is one of these biblical-type angels, multiple arms or tubes, an insectoid head, some vibrating time vortex in the center. This is a commonly encountered entity? Well, the theme of these super-intelligent insectoid mind-hive things with lots of arms that are made of lots of parts that reflect each other and they're all interconnected, that is very, very, very classic high-dose DMT. People will absolutely recognize this. Okay, getting back to the mirrors. Yes, getting back to the mirrors. So you're saying that you interpret every surface, everything, as a mirror reflecting everything else? You could also relate that to Indra's net. Yes, yes, yes, yes. I have to show you something. Where the video feedback has this ability to like shear, reflect, do all these transformations... navigating the DMT space is kind of doing this. It's like you're applying some rotation or transformation, shear effect on a piece of the kaleidoscope that is connected to everything else. So the response in the field to a small change can be really dramatic. It can be like, “okay, I think I'm just reaching my arm over here,” but it's actually doing this weird contortion and you flip from one side of the fractal to the other. Wow. But even this is selling it short because this is just with one channel where you have just one camera that is essentially just being reflected and refracted in a full... the DMT circuit, so to speak, or the circuit of the visual field that is maybe revealed by DMT in a sense, you have multiple channels. Essentially, you have various cameras and some of those cameras are actually looking at the screen. So it's several levels of complexity higher, in fact. But on top of that though, there's also the coupled oscillators dynamics that are happening in addition to these mirroring effects.
So what is your job? How do you make a living? Is this your full-time work? Psychedelic visualization is a component of what I do. I am a full-time consciousness researcher at QRI. We're funded by, essentially, people who are believers in our research. Donors. Yeah, donors. We do want to make what we do ultimately self-sustaining. And I'm happy to talk about various paths that I think are plausible to make that happen. But yeah, effectively, people who I knew and who knew me and that we were already very interested in figuring out consciousness, who then became lucky with cryptocurrency, for example. That's one of the categories of donors. We also get a few grants here and there as well. But yeah, the bulk of our research and the retreats have been funded by very generous people. In part, I ask because plenty of the people who are watching this may have some cash that they would like to donate. And so what's the website? Yeah, qri.org. And yeah, we accept donations. And I think they go really far. I can just make a very quick pitch. If you're interested in the psychedelic visualization efforts, we're going to be open-sourcing this tool. We're going to be crowdsourcing data points so that we get thousands of people to rate and rank and qualify this phenomenology, see how accurate it is, which I think is a service to the world in a sense, being able to give people parameters to replicate their experience, give them a Photoshop of their consciousness, so to speak. And if you think of the finance of these efforts, if you look at, in classic academia, how you run a study... there was a famous study that studied candy-flipping, which is LSD plus MDMA. And what they did is they used standard measures like questionnaires, where they gave either LSD or LSD plus MDMA to participants. And then they asked them to fill out a questionnaire, like the mystical experiences questionnaire. And they find, “hey, actually, the questionnaire doesn't show a difference between the two.” And they conclude, “well, MDMA probably doesn't add anything to the psychedelic experience.” But that just means your instruments are poorly calibrated. There's clearly a difference. Psychonauts will generally agree there's a huge difference and so on. And one study like that costs millions of dollars. Actually getting all of this infrastructure and doing it in a lab. At QRI, we were able to do things such as organizing week-long retreats in a place like Brazil for really cheap, and actually being able to go through hundreds of visual experiments over the course of several weeks with people who are really passionate, who are not going to fill out a questionnaire, really, they're going to be writing a report about their phenomenology and what they learned. And there's a lot of collective knowledge that gets generated this way that then we make publicly available. So I would argue in terms of the information theory of, “hey, how do you explore consciousness?” I would argue our approach is a huge force multiplier. We're able to do a lot of experiments for very cheap and find the ones that are really interesting. Yeah.
Andres, thank you. Thank you so much, Curt. This is fascinating. Okay. Don't go anywhere. There's actually a Q&A from the live audience at this MIT Media Lab Augmentation Summit event, which is on the Substack, curtjaimungal.org. You don't want to miss it. If you're a fan of this episode, you'll enjoy the Q&A. Hi there. Curt here. If you'd like more content from Theories of Everything and the very best listening experience, then be sure to check out my Substack at CURTJAIMUNGAL.org. Some of the top perks are that every week you get brand new episodes ahead of time. You also get bonus written content exclusively for our members. That's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L.org. You can also just search my name and the word Substack on Google. Since I started that Substack, it somehow already became number two in the science category. Now, Substack, for those who are unfamiliar, is like a newsletter. One that's beautifully formatted. There's zero spam. This is the best place to follow the content of this channel that isn't anywhere else. It's not on YouTube. It's not on Patreon. It's exclusive to the Substack. It's free. There are ways for you to support me on Substack if you want, and you'll get special bonuses if you do. Several people ask me, “hey, Curt, you've spoken to so many people in the field of theoretical physics, of philosophy, of consciousness. What are your thoughts, man?” Well, while I remain impartial in interviews, this Substack is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics. And it's the perfect way to support me directly. CurtJaimungal.org or search Curt Jaimungal Substack on Google. Oh, and I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors and researchers saying that they recommend Theories of Everything to their students. That's fantastic. If you're a professor or a lecturer or what have you, and there's a particular standout episode that students can benefit from, or your friends, please do share. And of course, a huge thank you to our advertising sponsor, The Economist. Visit economist.com/TOE to get a massive discount on their annual subscription. I subscribe to The Economist, and you'll love it as well. TOE is actually the only podcast that they currently partner with. So it's a huge honor for me. And for you, you're getting an exclusive discount. That's economist.com/TOE, T-O-E. And finally, you should know this podcast is on iTunes. It's on Spotify. It's on all the audio platforms. All you have to do is type in Theories of Everything and you'll find it. I know my last name is complicated, so maybe you don't want to type in Jaimungal, but you can type in Theories of Everything and you'll find it. Personally, I gain from re-watching lectures and podcasts. I also read in the comments that TOE listeners also gain from replaying. So how about instead you re-listen on one of those platforms like iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, whatever podcast catcher you use, I'm there with you. Thank you for listening.