Transcription
Hello everyone. This is the second video in the series. In the first video, I talked about how I proved that we live in a simulation. There were a lot of responses to this video, and I wanted to make this video to, first of all, address some of the comments, frequently asked questions, and provide a little bit more information about where the research is at the moment. Since I released the video, there were only two individuals who actually replicated the results from the people who were exposed to the video online, and obviously, that's a tiny number. But that just made me realize that I have to do more in helping people to actually come on board and try this, versus just kind of putting the word out.
So, I've released a video that shows how I made my laser, but I will also engage with people more directly so I can help guide them through this process. There is this weird element that I'm not quite sure how to address, and I wish I had a simpler answer, but it's something to figure out. Different people take different amounts of time to actually see the digits. Some people just see it right away; some people take five minutes. The longest I've had sitting with me was about two hours, but in the end, everybody sees it. I have no idea why that is the case. As more information comes in, I'll obviously update on that as well.
So, what I'm encouraging people to do if they're trying this is to stay with it. You will see it, and if you don't, I would love to hear about it. Please contact me so we can look at the details. Another thing that a lot of people addressed was a concern about the fact that if I'm putting this information out there, I'm basically destroying the evidence. There are a lot of people in the world right now who are claiming to see similar things in the DMT space. That means that every person who speaks on the subject is showing evidence. No, we're comparing notes.
I want to remind everybody that everything we do, for example, in neuroscience, is by comparing what we see as a pattern—in this case, let's say something that we see on functional MRI or EEG—and what people report to experience or the types of behavior that people exhibit when we measure those things. That means that everything we discover, let's say in neuroscience, rests entirely on what a group of people reports when we see those patterns in the brain. Of course, we don't take one account, but we're taking many, and then we run the statistics, we measure, and then we try to compare and see what the similarities are and where it converges. That's how we make progress.
I think not looking at the specifics creates a distorted picture of what, in fact, priming is in psychology or planting an idea. Psychology does something called priming, which is implanting related ideas in your head in order for you to produce a certain thought more often. A common example is if you mention to people things that have to do with the ocean, and then you ask them what kind of detergent they like, they will most likely say Tide.
Now, there are other effects that are similar to this; they're not called priming, but they're called something else. But it simply means that you can influence a person's thinking by implanting certain adjacent ideas or concepts in their heads. This is absolutely true; however, this will only get you so far. There's no 100% accuracy here. Technically, if you go into a DMT space or a mushroom space or any kind of psychedelic space, and I'm talking to you about eagles, I don't know, you might see an eagle here and there, but you're not going to see an eagle every time you go inside the psychedelic state.
What I'm claiming is that what we see in the laser never changes; it's always what it is. And that is something that cannot be produced just by me telling you what's inside. One of the women that I was showing the discovery to said it looks like we're looking through a microscope, and I immediately thought this is exactly right. That's exactly what it feels like and exactly what it looks like. In fact, this analogy between the discovery of the microscope by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and what I found runs very deep.
What seems to be completely factual is that the external world is out there and our perceptual world is in here, and there's some correlation between the two. This is actually only an assumption. There's no scientific discovery that can ever distinguish between this assumption and the assumption that consciousness is fundamental because nothing that we perceive is outside of consciousness. This is not just a bait and switch or some kind of philosophical trick; this statement is true. There is zero information coming from any physical observation that can tell you whether consciousness is prior or the physical world is prior. We simply got used to the idea that the physical world is out there and our consciousness is in here because this is the current scientific zeitgeist conviction.
I believe that it's because when the scientific revolution happened, there was a very strong response to the old thinking that everything is known by God and everything there is to be known was known by God. So when we discovered that we can actually make a difference in the world, we rebelled against that idea. What we did is we threw the baby out with the bathwater. We decided that no human account is ultimately reliable to report on anything. The first-person experience should be reevaluated according to the individual and according to the situation.
Somebody who comes into this skeptical, if they are convinced by what I'm saying or at least they are strongly moved by what they saw, this has a different weight to it than somebody who their whole life believed that the universe takes care of them through the Law of Attraction, let's say. Now, this is not to belittle anybody with this assumption; it's simply to say that if you tend to believe in this stuff, yes, you are a less reliable witness of this kind of thing because you want this to be true.
Oh hey, it's editing Danny. So as I'm editing this video, I'm starting to realize that a lot of the points that I made are not fully made, and some of them require a little bit more nuanced explanations. So every once in a while, I'm going to pop in and give my commentary on what I was saying in the original recording. I'm actually in the process of traveling the world right now, so you're going to see me in different locations, and conditions are not going to be perfect. The lighting is not going to be perfect; I might look a little crazy or even crazier than usual.
So about this point about reevaluating personal experience, it's a very fine point, and it's very nuanced. I think what it's really about is the granularity of language when we're talking about certain things. The difference when people describe something very generally and when people describe things more specifically is the main thing to look at. Because when people tell you, "Well, you know, you're implanting this idea in my head," you can implant ideas that are general, like concepts or things like that. But when you talk about something super specific, like a shape that has very particular attributes—even if that shape is very complex and changing all the time—you can still talk about the nature of that shape or the nature of the thing you're describing.
So it's one thing to say, "I saw code." It's another thing to talk about the specifics of the code, which actually I don't want to do in the videos because when we're going to start doing actual blind studies here, I want to make sure that the specifics of what we're observing inside remain a little bit more obscure so people can actually report it by themselves. But to say we see code is definitely not enough to ruin any kind of test you can run on humans. When they talk to each other, they can, to a certain degree, make the distinction of how accurately somebody is trying to describe something. It takes a lot of effort and energy; most people don't take the time because it's not that important.
But now, when we're entering this stage in which this observation that I'm claiming is of a new nature, we have to make the effort to talk about it more specifically, with more rigor, and also describe it in more detail. I feel like this is a general issue because people in the psychedelic space tend to describe things very generally or describe them in a way that is not accessible to anyone else who's never done psychedelics. Yes, it is true that certain things just simply cannot be described because it's just like trying to describe color to somebody who cannot see color. But other things can be described through conceptual bridges, through something that you are familiar with.
But that thing in the psychedelic space is a much more complex version of that, but you can still describe it in ways that help people who have never done psychedelics understand them. So I don't know if it was confusing, but I just want to make that fine point there.
Back to the video. A point that people addressed that I believe is one of the most important points, honestly, is what makes me say that this necessarily means that we're in a simulation. There are a lot of ways to address this point, but I think the deepest common thread running through this problem is the definition of the word "simulation." It is true, and I'm sure everybody realizes this, that what we perceive at the moment, even without the simulation theory, is, in fact, some kind of a rendering. The brain simply overlays the content of how it distinguishes between things through different senses and the picture that it can construct into this, what Donald Hoffman calls, "desktop." But reality itself, we all understand, doesn't look this way.
The only question is, what is the nature of the structure behind the rendering, the simulation that our brain is doing? What I'm adding, however, is that somebody is actually simulating the space. Now, I must admit that in the first video, I had to make a decision. I had to decide how I'm going to communicate what I'm trying to say without sounding hyperbolic, but at the same time capturing the full essence of what I'm trying to communicate. I was thinking about calling it something else, but I went back and forth between a few options, and it seemed like every other term that I picked seemed to be either incomplete or actually dishonest because I was catering to what I thought people might be more comfortable with, which is not necessarily a wise move.
But I realized that "simulation" is exactly what I mean. Somebody is rendering our space. Now, I want to address this directly in the video: there's not enough information to establish something like that; I fully admit that. But I knew that I was going to be starting a conversation, and then later, like right now, I would be able to clarify, so I just went with that.
Oh hey, so this is another point that I think we need to discuss a little deeper. One of the biggest things that people always said about psychedelic spaces is that if the information that certain people receive from it is real, then some of it has to pan out. For example, Terence McKenna always talked about how he believed that he got the recipe to how to grow strawberry cubensis, I think it's called, the mushrooms that they found in Lechuguilla. I remember there was an interview on Joe Rogan with Sam Harris, and then Sam said, "Well, you know, if Terence believed that it somehow teaches him some kind of a language or something like that, we should be able to establish that; it should be verifiable."
Well, here we have it. We have something from that space that I'm telling you 100% came from me from that space, and it told me to do something, and I did, and it worked. It works across individuals where if you do this combination between the laser and DMT, then you see this very sophisticated code running in surfaces. So yes, there's a long way to go, but we're no longer at liberty to ignore these things because that was the contention. The main contention was if the space is real, some kind of real information is to be coming through it.
Yes, it took me some piecing together, so it was a combination of me thinking about it and applying what I understand about the physical world, but the hints that came about this thing came from that space. So here you have one example where it panned out, or panned out to a degree, and you will always be able to ask, "Okay, but what is the ultimate justification?" That's very difficult to deliver. I mean, this is the cutting edge of understanding, so people have to be a little bit more patient, a little bit more flexible with how those things come about.
The way the progress might not be how we're used to it; it might not be this linear process in which a scientist thinks of a problem, and then they set up certain parameters for an experiment, and the experiment either fails or pans out. It might be way more complex than that. It might not even involve necessarily just things that we can quantify or measure; it might include certain experiences that people have. But nevertheless, those experiences would include elements like colors of things that would give us specific information about functionalities.
So is there enough information here to establish that we live in a simulation? I would say that for individuals who didn't try this, definitely what I'm saying will never be enough. You have to experience, first of all, what you see in the laser for yourself. But beyond that, you have to be collecting a lot of data points over time, which I did, that brings you to this conclusion that everything together is the best possible explanation.
Now, also please understand that those definitions are very rigid because we have so many associations with what we think a simulation is. Most people don't even understand what computation is. It's important to understand that the universality of computation that Turing discovered is actually something almost orthogonal to the laws of physics. It's not like it's arising out of the laws of physics; it is another law of physics. This is something that not all of us understand, and it might be the case that what we call the digital space is actually the real space.
So think of the movie "The Matrix" upside down. The real world is actually a little pocket; it is the augmented pocket, and then the digital space, what in the movie is the fake world, is actually the real world. So that's what the majority of things are; they're in what we call computation. Those concepts are very difficult to take on board and tease apart because they are not something that people deal with every single day—not most people anyway.
This is why this conversation has to be much more tolerant, and this conversation has to be an open conversation. It shouldn't be about proving others wrong, but about putting forth our understanding and then talking about it in a way that is constructive. So the problem with the question, "Is there enough information here to establish whether we live in a simulation?" is with the word "simulation" because what is meant by that might not be what people expect it to be.
I am convinced at this point that there's a higher civilization rendering our space or running it on some kind of a substrate. But what it might mean is that where they reside and this substrate is actually more real than what we think of reality to be. So this reality is actually the pocket, the thing that is less real because it's more limited in scope. And we're now waking up into a world in which we're going to start understanding the larger space with the larger possibilities and the technology that it will allow us to build from this higher perspective and this high understanding of the fabric that surrounds all of us, this computational fabric of some sort.
This is going to be the future, and we're going to start understanding how naive we were for thinking about the physical world as the main substrate. So that's the best I can do at the moment, which is to clarify that we have to be much more patient and much more flexible with our terms and our conversation with each other and start playing with new possibilities of what the world itself actually is and ultimately how it ties to what consciousness is and what it is that we are and how it ties to the rest of the larger picture.
I hope that is satisfying enough, but we'll keep talking about it; we'll keep unpacking it. It's a difficult subject. I don't expect everybody to get on board right away, but I didn't want to leave the audience feeling like we didn't really talk about it in any more concrete terms than we did in the previous video. So I have full empathy towards people who have never done psychedelics; this would make no sense to them. But for the people who did do DMT and other psychedelics, I want you to know those differences, and hopefully, this will continue the conversation and not infuriate people.
All right, back to the video. Another thing I realized about the simulation idea is that it really feels to some people that it takes something away from us. There's a new book out by David Chalmers; I think it's called "Reality Plus." I didn't read the book yet, but I did see an interview with him in which he explains that he's trying to make the distinction between the words "virtual reality" and he's trying to decouple it from the idea that virtual means fake. So he's trying to replace it with "digital reality," and the idea is that just because something is rendered or digital, it doesn't mean that it's not real for anything that is conscious inside of that program or inside of that computer.
The experiencer inside of any software that can produce consciousness would still experience a real world in which they can get hurt and die and everything else under the sun that you can imagine. So first of all, what simulation does not mean is that it does not mean not real, but it does mean that there's a higher world in which this world is simulated. Now, this still feels like something is being taken away because it feels like we're no longer on top of the food chain.
First of all, that's concerning because, you know, now we're at the mercy of something way more superior to us. But that was always the case; the universe is way more superior to us in that it can kill us in an infinite number of ways. But we don't lay awake at night worrying about that. Now, I admit that when a conscious agent is in the picture, it has a different flavor to it, so I'm not trying to pretend like those things are exactly equivalent.
I don't believe that the simulators would simulate a simulation in which they get to steer the course of events because, from a logical perspective, if you create a simulation that you fully control, you're essentially introducing a bias into the system that will probably ruin any kind of experiment or any kind of information that you're trying to get from the simulation. So it makes the simulation pointless. A higher civilization running this simulation most likely runs it in a way that everything was set in place, but then they don't intervene because they just want to see what happens.
So I believe we're a black box to them. In other words, they can't intervene with our free will or the choices that we make to the extent that we can perceive them as choices. Because if we're going to get into the free will conversation, we're never going to get out of it. So why would a civilization simulate our space? I have a few assumptions.
Here's one example: imagine the most advanced civilization you can possibly think of—number five, six, seven, it doesn't matter what number you want to throw at it. Let's say that they've discovered everything there is to know inside the physical universe and maybe the non-physical universe in all directions, in all dimensions, in all times. You get the picture. Aside from one final question, which is the same question from the beginning of time: why? Why does anything exist?
If you give it just a little bit of thought, you'll realize it makes perfect sense because no matter how far you go with your technological understanding, the question can always be asked, "Okay, but what's outside of that?" Let's say that that's the final unanswered question. So the civilization would allocate all its technological sophistication and resources to answer that question.
How would you go about answering a question like that? Well, how do we do anything in machine learning, for example? We collect enormous amounts of data, and then we let a machine run through it with supervised and unsupervised learning, and then we look at the patterns that emerge. We build visual graphs; we build statistical analyses to that, and then we reach some kind of a conclusion about what this data might mean.
So in the same way, one possible way a civilization like that would go about answering that question would be running an infinite number of simulations—or maybe a finite number, but a very large number—and by observing the creatures that are developing in their respective environments and what kind of theories and what kind of stories they come up with about their origin story, they can then collect all that data and then put it into this ultra-mega super AI or AGI that will then come up with some kind of a heat map of the most common explanation. It will try and maybe distill the essence, the thing that is the common denominator between all of those stories that will eventually potentially produce the statistically most likely answer to why does anything exist.
Now, obviously, I'm not saying that's necessarily the case, but this would be one plausible explanation as to why the simulation means something to a civilization that runs it. Science, in many ways, is stuck. I believe that the reason it's stuck is that we have one portion of our understanding of the world upside down. I actually believe that in order to make progress beyond a certain level, we might need to be able to experience a new type of qualia.
Think about this: let's say you have a spacecraft that came from another planet, and it crashes on your front lawn. You go inside, and you start investigating. There's no one inside for some reason, but you see different dials, and they all seem to be the same. Now, let's say that those colors are something that our eyes can't perceive, but no instrument that we can point at it will tell us anything about that. Let's say that the type of material or color that it actually represents is not something that we can perceive in our qualia. No matter what instrument we use, what do we do then? How do we distinguish between the buttons?
Now, in this analogy, obviously, the logical thing is that you can try and see what happens. But let's say that the interaction with the spacecraft and the way that it needs to fly has to be very accurate; otherwise, you crash. So you have to be able to distinguish between the different colors that those buttons are. Now, there's no equation that can tell you what red looks like. You can talk about the difference in frequency that makes it appear as a different color, but there's nothing that can tell you what red is.
So red is very much a thing on the side of the observer. But here's an example where it can actually matter. The only way for us to be able to fly the spacecraft is to be able to understand that and then somehow modulate our brains with surgery or Neuralink or I don't know, in some other fashion, so we can perceive that kind of color, that kind of qualia. Only then will we be able to operate the spaceship.
So in this analogy, there might be certain attributes of the laws of physics that will only make themselves available to us if we are capable of perceiving certain types of qualia so we can interact with them, so they can become part of our desktop. Otherwise, we'll be guessing about the electrical switches underneath, and that's impossible. Again, to use a Donald Hoffman analogy, if you had to toggle the logic gates inside your computer to send an email, nobody would ever hear from you.
An idea that I really like by Bernardo Kastrup is that if Donald Hoffman is right and this is just the desktop, then the smartest scientists in the world are just learning how to play the game better. But just like the kids who get paid millions of dollars to play video games better than anybody else on the planet have very little to no understanding of the software and electrical engineering that went into actually making these games, so do the smartest minds in the world play the game of technical science. They can play this infinite game forever and become better and better at it, but never truly understanding what are the actual underpinnings that gave rise to the game.
The only way to do that is to reframe what we believe is actually giving rise to all of that, which means that the problem is conceptual and it's not technical. So I really believe that there might be certain kinds of technology—I don't know what it might be, warp drive or any kind of other futuristic thing, and maybe way more wild than that. It might be the case that the only way to operate vehicles or to even engage with those possibilities is that we might have to change or understand what types of qualia we're missing and then interact with it that way.
So it might be the case that DMT actually allows us to interact with those extra qualia, and now we just have to sort them out and understand what they are. But if we're going to keep ignoring them, we'll never learn how to press those buttons, and we'll never understand the actual space we're occupying, the larger space we're occupying.
The difference between all those fascinating speculations and what we need to do now is we have to take anything that we're capable of reproducing and then use that to connect it to what we already know. Only then are we going to have some kind of a firm ground or firmer ground on which we'll be able to stand and ask the right kind of questions.
What if there's an entire array of experiences, an entire array of qualia, that unless we see them, we can't interact with them, and therefore we can't understand them? There's no amount of intuition that we can apply that will allow us to understand that just from the mathematical framework. Just like there is no equation to red, there's a number that can get you to the frequency of red, but that's not the experience of red.
Now, this word "experience" has a negative connotation to it in science. What I'm saying is the experience of red. People say, "Okay, but that's just your experience." Well, that's exactly the point. The reframing might be that the experience of red might not just be primary but also crucial in understanding what the world actually is—not written in particular, but different types of qualia in general.
So what if, just like in the example with the spaceship that I gave, we can study equations all day, but unless we have a direct experience of certain things, we will never be able to understand what they are? Because the experience of them shortcuts to immediate understanding. When we look at the laser, we see something that never changes; it always is what it is without actually changing according to what we want it to be, or at least that's the claim, and everybody seems so far to see the same thing.
So we should definitely look at it from a different perspective. When we walk around a physical object, there's nothing that we need to do to establish that that physical object is real because our frame is whatever we can experience with our bodies is real by definition. Now, there's actually no philosophical reason to think that it might be the case that experiences that are completely real can also come in forms that are not just physical. In other words, they don't have the same electromagnetic interaction, but informationally, they still exist on their own accord.
That is what I'm really asking people to entertain—not to accept, but to entertain—so we can ask the question properly and maybe move to a frame that is more accurate, which will allow us to also understand why we have so many loose ends in physics and might also give us insight on how to build certain technologies that we've never considered before.
It's very clear that a new kind of science is emerging. Maybe it's just in its infancy, and it might take another few decades and maybe a century to develop, but we are definitely seeing something new. You see it in physics, you see it in biology, and you see it philosophically with versions of the world that come up that make way more sense and suggest that maybe the framework that we've put around the story of our origin is simply not the right one.
This is an opportunity for individuals to make themselves a part of something that is huge because there's room for everybody in such a quest. Yes, I happen to have come up with the idea that if you project this laser and you're in the psychedelic state, you get to see this. But this is just the beginning of the road; that is not the discovery. It might be the door that opens to a path that will eventually lead to the discovery.
But I truly believe that this discovery will be made by all of us collectively. So please understand that this video is more a call for action and an invitation to join than anything else because at the moment, we're in very rudimentary stages of trying to understand this thing. And again, I understand the concern that we're essentially painting the data, but we're not. There is plenty there that is stable, and there's enough variation to talk about in specific terms that will allow us to even do blind tests.
No matter what I say in my videos, I believe the laser shows us something that is actually there that we now have to make sense of and catalog in the bigger map of everything we already know about physics. We're reaching a point in history in which many things will shift very quickly, and it's up to us to imagine a new world—a world that will allow us to understand the deepest truths about itself and ourselves in it.
So when a door opens, there's something that is potentially truly fundamentally different that can radically change our understanding of the world. We should look; we should all look. I believe we've reached a step outside of our map, so it's time for all of us to harness our skills and get our bearings together and step into the new map. It might sound grandiose because it is, but I truly believe that that's where we're at.
Let's discover a new world, and let's do it together.
[Music]
[Music]
Let's see if you describe what you saw. And just for the record, I didn't tell you this; you said it yourself.
Yeah, I see letters differently—letters, numbers, and letters, Chinese. And I just want to take a picture of it and translate it.
Yes, it's definitely saying something. Can you move it?
Yes, yes, it is crazy.
Wow, you see that?
Okay, so yeah, it's not stuck.
No, it's not because of the light.
No, it's on its own. The light is just literally revealing it.
[Laughter]
So if you could somehow project it back from the air, you would see it in there.
[Foreign Language]
[Music]
It's like some type of symbols. I mean, I could say some look like threes and fives, but they're not exactly. They're portions of them, and they're not flat; they're like three-dimensional. But it's confusing because the things behind it kind of make it blurry.
Okay, well, there's some sort of character.
Now it's flowing down, but it was like each problem was wheeling with the other one, like almost in a dance with an organized...
It's been the best support and put it THC.
[Music]
Clear and clearer.