It seems to me two things are happening. [1] The brain is really good at filling in gaps in its perception of the world and [2] there seems to be some kind of strange loopy recursion in the way the brain analyzes and observes things including itself.
I think on DMT and similar, you are actually seeing less of the world, and the recursive/fractal aspect is coming from the brain filling in gaps with observations including its own analyzing patterns.
The world at our scale has a lot of data and is really complex. These "hypbolic geometries" seem like simplifications. One strand of a flower that happens to follow something roughly like the golden ration becomes a fibonacci spiral repeated at every degree; the sense of self gets muddled with the modeling of this pattern, allowing the pattern to permeate the entire observation, and now you too are the spiral. You notice the observation and how muddled it is with the pattern and the self, creating a loop which also gets modeled, and down the recursive rabbit hole you go.
Pure speculation, but I have to wonder if our fundamental conception of sensation as a blank canvas slowly filled with positive contents is wrong, and rather that perception involves the apprehension of difference against some "basic" recursive pattern.
I tend to notice this more aurally, in the sonic experience within a highly focused state, including spending time on social media (not silent! quite noisy, but I am not actively aware of it in most cases), and also the intense experience of hitting the stop button mid-song; the silence hits very hard.
Seems Fristonian, in that if the brain is a prediction machine across time, then the underlying predictive pattern would be fractal, or at least highly self-similar to immediate past experience. The intensity of the hard stop (and similarly the annoyance of transient sounds like car horns) is in the predictive failure, which draws your attention. If this is desirable, we call it "interesting".
And if you consider the oscillatory nature of the brain, it is awfully easy for a massive set of weakly coupled oscillators to produce highly patterned nonlinear effects. We usually hold these things in control by virtue of our familiarity with them. But when they shift into some different oscillatory modes, the novel patterns become apprehensible.
For instance:
Atasoy, S., Roseman, L., Kaelen, M., Kringelbach, M. L., Deco, G., & Carhart-Harris, R. L. (2017). Connectome-harmonic decomposition of human brain activity reveals dynamical repertoire re-organization under LSD. Scientific reports, 7(1), 1-18.
Ah, Carhart-Harris! His paper with Karl Friston, "REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics" (2019) really stuck with me. Very interested in harmonic interpretation, thank you for sharing.
You’ve beautifully articulated a feeling I’ve had for most of my life. In the Alvin Maker (historical fantasy) series, Orson Scott Card describes a phenomenon he calls the _greensong_. It’s a sort of pervading communion the first peoples have with nature, and white settlers not only can’t connect with it, but exist as a palpable disturbance to those who can. I’ve often felt like nearly _everything_ is signal, and my day-to-day experience is actually noise. That sense has been heightened on the occasions I’ve used hallucinogenics.
A new game called Hyperbolica is being developed to explore new geometries [0]. It will be interesting to see how people playing the game compare the experience to their previous trips.
Playing such games changes our perception. I have been playing HyperRogue (https://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/). After a few hours of playing it straight, experience of the "normal" worlds changes. It holds for other games as well.
That said, I don't believe that a DMT trip would improve performance in the game. Or maybe a bit, but by increasing neuroplasticity.
It's a single guy working on it as far as I know, and he has a good devlog on that same Youtube channel. He apparently had to rewrite most graphics libraries to shade things according to hyperbolic geometry. Looks like it should be coming out soon, though (hopefully).
That's plenty of time to add 3 new levels, incorporate an in-game purchase system, and the 5 other items the PM just dropped on the devs. No, we will not need to push the release date to add these new features. The features will be fully ready.
I don't think it's just DMT that gives you this experience. One of the most "geometric" trips was from taking Salvia in a dorm room in college. Everything felt like I was in the original Tron movie. Flat surfaces seemed to go on in a plane to the horizon. Honestly, made me feel pretty nauseous.
I think folks tend to focus too much on the visual hallucinations caused by psychedelic drugs. I can only speak about LSD, so I might be wrong about DMT, but there's far more to these experiences than just "visuals". There's nothing wrong with talking about the visuals and the exploration in the blog post is interesting. I just want to point out for anyone looking to experience this stuff, bear in mind that you're going to get A LOT more than you bargained for if you think it's only going to be visual hallucinations.
There are also auditory and cognitive hallucinations. The perception of time gets incredibly distorted. Emotions and feelings especially about other people get a profoundly different and intense perspective. The experience can be very very unpleasant for some. For me it was an overall positive experience despite some rough spots. I was glad to have trustworthy folks around me when I was tripping.
I agree that the most "interesting" hallucinations are not the trippy patterns you see. But, take note, if you pay really close attention to it, you will realize that in fact there is a dual relationship between the geometry of the hallucinations and the vibe of the experience. Indeed, I was not the first to figure this out (though I did figure it out independently). Steven Lehar has been talking about it for ages - and he writes about it in his book The Grand Illusion (http://slehar.com/wwwRel/GrandIllusion.pdf).
Seriously - next time pay close attention and you'll see how the shape of the configurations you hallucinate determines how the "waves of energy" bounce off of them, which in turn gives rise to harmonious or dissonant interactions between them. So you can in fact modulate your mood by making your hallucinations more symmetrical.
> The perception of time gets incredibly distorted
We can only internally represent time as 3D space. If under the influence of psychedelics space gets warped and unrecognizable, it follows that our perception of time also does so.
Closing my eyes on 2CB projected neon patterns like the geometric patterns you find on central Asian mosques. It was incredible and I could really concentrate on the details.
Pretty interesting. I can do the same while stone cold sober. After half a minute or so I see geometrical patterns, much resembling Islamic geometric mosaics, with neon colors, that tend to move around (if I am listening to music, they follow the music). The longer I go, the more elaborate they get, and sometimes they even gain 3D dimensions or lead to scenes resembling dreams. When I tell that to most people they act as if I'm a weirdo, except for a friend of mine who sees similar patterns.
Would you say that is similar to what you saw on 2C-B?
That's pretty extraordinary. I don't think I've ever heard of someone seeing stuff like that without psychedelics. Have you always been able to see it or was it brought on by something? When did you first notice it?
I've been able to see it as far as I remember. I think I really noticed it first in elementary school. I remember very distinctly doing in the family car in 4th grade after telling my mom about Minecraft, lol.
Funny how no one really talks about salvia anymore. That shit was whack. I went to cartoon land while having my ability to communicate removed and feeling like half of my body was moving rapidly away from the other. I understand it is powerful and useful in certain settings, but yikes, not a fun ride for most people. A small, informal sample seemed to indicate women hated it less than men but that was just the people I knew.
Tried salvia once. Impressed by the visuals and the intensity; but there's no euphoria. Without euphoria, it's just weird perceptual distortions, and loss of the ability to move or speak. I thought it was like being ill.
Tried DMT once. It offers euphoria, visuals and intensity; but the speed with which it came on was such that I was effectively disabled before I could complete dosing - so no breakthrough.
Visuals are all very well - but I've been there and done that decades ago. Euphoria and joy are harder to come by, and drugs that provide them don't "keep on giving".
People react very differently to these substances, and my experiences are by no means normative.
Salvia was my first hallucinogenic experience. I and others have noted that it seems to trigger a primal fear response far more often than other hallucinogens. The trips tend to have very dark themes, and time is severely warped in such a way that it’s not uncommon to forget what a human is and live in an alien reality for centuries. Really weird stuff, and not something I would recommend to most.
I find Deep Mind AI output to be pretty damn close.
Although I do find synesthesia hard to portray digitally.
Its not just the 5-ish senses that get mixed together. There are things like non-visual ideas that can get encapsulated into balls and other geometric shapes and infinitely replicated. Although perceivable in the mind at the time, this is not the same medium.
People talk about the visuals a lot because that's what you can see, but the visuals are actually one of the less interesting things about the experience.
For instance, why do I meet entities (nominally my self conscience) that appear smarter and wiser than myself? And why do they explain systems that then match up with other people's experiences? Why do different people's subconsciences come across such similar high level concepts during the experience?
If you know you know and if you don't you don't. It's an experience few will ever have and most people are not ready for. So they seek to reduce it to something pedestrian.
One thing I like about legalization pushes is that the weird gatekeeping and sometimes invalidation from the psychedelic community will get diluted in favor of a broader range of information, a broader range of possible experiences, what inputs lead to what outputs, etc.
>I find Deep Mind AI output to be pretty damn close.
Hmm, I don't know that I'd agree. I think a deepdream AI output approximates a breakthrough DMT experience probably less than the prisoners of the Allegory of the Cave watching shadows dance on the wall experienced the true outside world.
The combination of 5 senses and non-visual ideas into visible objects makes me wonder: If/When a direct-brain-input interface is created, will what the person perceives be like a DMT trip?
This is why I enjoy listening to music and watching a visualization at the same time. Marrying senses together but in an abstract way is strangely appealing.
Indeed! (author of the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences article here). I think you might enjoy my video on the Free Energy Principle and Psychedelics. It IMO explains in a novel, meaningful, and non-trivial way the effect you are describing.
Friston's Free Energy Principle (FEP) is one of those ideas that seem to offer new perspectives on almost anything you point it at.
It seems to synthesize already very high-level ideas into an incredibly general and flexible conceptual framework. It brings together thermodynamics, probabilistic graphical models, information theory, evolution, and psychology. We could say that trying to apply the FEP to literally everything is not a bad idea: it may not explain it all, but we are bound to learn a lot from seeing when it fails.
So what is the FEP? In the words of Friston: "In short, the long-term (distal) imperative — of maintaining states within physiological bounds — translates into a short-term (proximal) avoidance of surprise. Surprise here relates not just to the current state, which cannot be changed, but also to movement from one state to another, which can change. This motion can be complicated and itinerant (wandering) provided that it revisits a small set of states, called a global random attractor, that are compatible with survival (for example, driving a car within a small margin of error). It is this motion that the free-energy principle optimizes."
Organisms that survive over time must minimize entropy injections from their environment, which means they need to minimize surprise, which unfortunately is computationally intractable, but the information theoretic construct of variational free-energy provides an upper bound on this ground truth surprise, meaning that minimizing it will indirectly minimize surprise. This cashes out in the need to maximize "accuracy - complexity" which prevents both overfitting and underfitting. In the video we go over some of the classical ideas surrounding the FEP: the dark room, active inference, explicit vs. implicit representations, and whether real dynamic systems can be decomposed into Markov blankets. Finally, we cover how the FEP naturally gives rise to predictive coding via hierarchical Bayesian models.
We then talk about Reduced BEliefs Under pSychedelics (REBUS) and explain how Carhart-Harris and Friston interpret psychedelics and the Anarchic Brain in light of the FEP. We then discuss Safron's countermodel of Strengthened BEliefs Under pSychedelics (SEBUS) and the work coming out of Seth's lab.
So, that's how the FEP shows up in the literature today. But what about explaining not only belief changes and perceptual effects, but perhaps also getting into the actual weeds of the ultra bizarre things that happen on psychedelics?
I provide three novel ideas for how the FEP can explain features of exotic experiences:
(1) Dissonance-minimizing resonance networks would naturally balance model complexity due to an inherent "complexity cost" that shows up as dissonance and prediction error minimization when prediction errors give rise to out-of-phase interactions between the layers.
(2) Bayesian Energy Sinks: What you can recognize lowers the (physical) energy of one's world-sheet. I then blend this with an analysis of symmetrical psychedelic thought-forms as energy-minimizing configurations. On net, we thus experience hybrid "semantic + symmetric" hallucinations.
(3) Indra's Net: Each "competing cluster of coherence" needs to model its environment in order to synch up with it in a reinforcing way. This leads to attractor states where "everything reflects everything else".
Yet, some people try. There is "The Spirit Molecule" by Rick Strassmann, precisely about DMT, along with other books on "experimental spirituality".
“To most people who are even moderately experienced with entheogens, concepts such as awe, sacredness, eternity, grace, agape, transcendence, transfiguration, dark night of the soul, born-again, heaven and hell are more than theological ideas; they are experiences.” - Thomas Roberts
This phrase is quoted in "Sacred Knowledge: Psychedelics and Religious Experiences" by William A. Richards (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/28121728-sacred-knowledg...), yet I find it the most suitable summary of this overview of scientific research on psychedelics and religion.
We hear about mystical visions from LSD ("acid"), psilocybin ("shrooms"), and DMT from many "spiritual but not religious" people and self-proclaimed shamans. But how does it relate to vision by ordinary people (ones who never tired, and wouldn't try if it weren't for legal, scientific research)? And how does it relate to prayer, mediation, and mystical visions by Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hinduists? How do monks and priests compare their psychedelic experience with their regular practice? Do they all turn to Zen Buddhism, or entrench in their religious background?
Regardless if you are deeply religious, or a non-spiritual atheist, I believe you will reconsider a few things after reading this book.
It's not a problem of the "amount" of analysis capabilities. The experience is orthogonal to rational. It's the same Chinese Room - no matter how many analytical brains you would throw on understanding what "red" qualia means, you won't be able to explain it and won't be able to experience it until you did.
We can analyze many “irrational” brain states from the outside. I’d suggest looking at modern fMRI results.
I’d also suggest forgetting about the Chinese Room. It might have been an interesting thing to discuss 40 years ago. It’s just sad to see people taking it seriously today.
Why not? If you get good at it, you can learn to quickly tell which wallpaper symmetry group a given tiling has. On most psychedelics the hallucinations are easily identifiable as belonging to one of the 17 wallpaper Euclidean symmetry groups. It turns out that on DMT you see symmetry groups that are none of those... and then you realize... wait, I'm seeing a flat surface tessellated by heptagons! This means... the space is hyperbolic! What's the epistemological issue here? :-)
I can't tell whether you're seriously asking, but just in case:
Geometry requires the ability to precisely measure angles and distances. Subjective hallucinatory experiences permit the witness to feel like they're seeing just about anything -- a sphere partitioned into five congruent squares, an ant that is an even number of ants, the square root of irony. But they don't admit any kind of measuring stick.
Although I guess if impossible-outside-of-hyperbolic-space tesselations were universal experiences of the users of DMT, that would do it. But I know a few, and they never mentioned repeating patterns. One talked about Gumby people a lot. Which, to be fair, probably involved some cool geometry, but I doubt it violated the parallel postulate.
One of the most fascinating things about DMT is that you get to experience the same level of visual resolution that you experience in your fovea but across your visual field. I'd say that for a trained observer/phenomenologist, we can know with the same level of trust that yes, they saw the *442 wallpaper symmetry group on DMT as we can trust that someone is seeing a square under normal conditions. And indeed, symmetries are already widely reported (see: https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Symmetrical_texture_repetiti...). It's a core effect. Next time you try DMT just pay attention... you'll see it all over the place.
Why are not more people reporting the hyperbolic features I've identified (e.g. hyperbolic folding of the worldsheet at the Magic Eye level, as described in the article)? And why instead do we mostly hear about reports of entities? The reason is simple: it's not what people are trying to bring back. We don't yet have a rational culture of inquiry for the structural analysis of psychedelic phenomenology.
As explained in the following article, currently people focus on the semantic content (the narrative) rather than the phenomenal character (the texture). But as we gather more rational, intelligent, and dedicated psychonauts, consistency of reports and consilience will increase: https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/rigorous-report...
I'm going to quickly summarize my psychedelic inspired theories on cognition which are now somewhat backed by science.
Basic observations:
1. On psychedelics your sense of time is wrong. I ran an experiment called 'the deadman switch' wherein I set a 20 min timer and, when it goes off, I would verbally acknowledge and then reset it. Based on this, I estimate 20 min to feel like over an hour, thus giving a distortion ratio of at least 5:1.
2. The images I see when I close my eyes are the same colors as the normal after image one sees after staring at a lightbulb. In fact the kaleidoscopic hallucinations look exactly as if the after image of a light bulb has gone through some sort of frequency space filtering. Here's a profound laymans summary: isn't it remarkable how similar the hallucinations look to a video buffering artifact.
3. Thoughts of a certain size get cut off. I find it hard to exactly quantify the size of a thought, but for the purpose of this conversation lets take it for granted that such a metric exists. Sentences beyond a certain word count would almost certainly have the train of thought derailed before reaching its terminus. Multi-step tasks like standing in line, thinking about what I want to order, and being ready with what to say when I reach the front are highly unlikely to succeed. Unlike other forms of intoxication, it is not the case that all cognitive ability is equally blunted. The speaking of individual words goes unslurred and small-size tasks/thoughts/sentences go unhampered.
Basic theory:
The atomic building block of cognition is repetition. All patterns are repetition, or repetition of repetitions, or repetitions of some nth order hierarchy of repetitions. Repetition happens at different length and time scales. The fundamental way the brain does pattern recognition and thus cognition is with brain waves, not with the individual neurons. To recognize patterns that happen at 1/10th of a second, you use 10 hz waves.
Consider a big ball of neurons without an explicit input or output layer. Naturally this system will have self sustaining standing waves, looping neural paths that activate themselves. Factoring in signal propagation time, the longer waves correspond to the longer times and thus lower frequencies. The crux of my theory is that the brain is a system of coupled oscillators tuned to have resonances that represent abstract concepts called "thoughts". Psychedelics introduce a slight detuning. Consider what would happen to a radio tuner if the local reference oscillator was slightly off. Alternatively, consider what a piano would sound like if every screw were turned 1/8th of the way. The very long strings would be mostly still in tune, the very short and taut strings would be completely out of tune, and some strings would be nearly aligned with the tune in a different key.
In terms of visual perception, the brain is doing something similar to the 2d fourier transform but in a basis that is optimized for 3d objects projected down to the retinal surface. The visual hallucinations can be explained as the reference frequencies being miscalibrated. The spatial repetitions which are nearly the same frequency of the error will drift in and out of phase similar to a beat frequency between two guitar strings. This is why certain visual patterns appear to have a wave like fluid motion on psychadelics.
Scientific evidence:
1. Selene Atasoy has worked out the resonant waves that should be present given what we know about how things are connected in the brain. She found that these standing wave patterns correspond extremely well to MRI patterns for various known mental states. Then she looked at the MRI patterns of people on LSD and showed exactly which frequency ranges are dampened / amplified.
2. People on psychedelics all consistently see hallucinations known as form constants. These form constants correspond exactly with the arrangement of the v1 layer of neurons immediately after the optical nerve. This arrangement is intrinsically related to how the rods and cones are distributed inside the retina (namely an exponential distribution). The arrangement of rods and cones in the retina suggests the brain is using log-polar coordinates, which is exactly the coordinate system you would use if you wanted invariance under projective transforms.
Further research:
I am preparing to do some off the record science wherein I prepare a systematic series of visual stimulus to look at while tripping and then keeping a record of which ones appear to be moving or otherwise distorted. The computer will randomly decide to make some of the images actually be moving / distorted so as to blind the experiment. Later on I will superimpose the distorted frequencies together and see if it reproduces the crystal patterns. The goal is to reverse engineer visual perception and eventually make better quality machine vision.
Unlike with visual processing, I am not yet sure how the brain represents sentences and thoughts with frequencies. However based on the observations, I suspect that "larger thoughts" are somehow represented on the part of the spectrum which is being cut out. Understanding how this works exactly could be key to natural language processing.
This is one of those thoughts that someone takes a long time to write because they want to share something they’re really passionate about and for whatever reason felt a moment of inspiration. Then no one reads it because it’s on such a different wavelength than the rest of discourse on HN that they simply don’t have the tools to add anything to the discussion. Then the OP freaks out and delete the message - well, I have a few times at least.
Anyway, this was really interesting stuff. I haven’t a clue if it’s just weird new age fractals and crystals stuff, or if you’re describing something that goes way past our present day simplistic models of the brain being a nation of neurons, each responsible for a different function.
The short version is the individual neurons aren't directly responsible for much at all, but rather they are a medium for brain waves to propagate and the brain waves are the currency which thought is conducted in. Things are represented with waves, not with individual neurons being on or off.
I've written elsewhere how I think existent machine learning may be doomed to plateau because the things that are still difficult for machines have elegant solutions in frequency space but no analogous solution in the existing models.
I think you are thinking about it in exactly the right way! Have you not, perhaps, been consuming content from the Qualia Research Institute? :-)
Seriously - at QRI we think quite similarly. Please reach out if you'd like to have a chat. See my comment on the main thread for some useful links. I'll add as well that indeed repetition is the building block of cognition, and this is due to harmonic resonance!
In particular, we have taken steps to actually quantify empirically the properties of various visual tracer effects on psychedelics as a proof of concept for how to quantify harmonic resonance in the brain.
I had an almost identical conversation with some engineering major roommates after a heavy mushroom trip in 1984. We were in four simultaneous classes that applied DiffEq, and IMHO, the first time you grasp DiffEq you feel like someone gave you a way to describe anything. So: we spent hours describing the differential equations of thought evolution, vision, perception, hearing, and existence. We hadn't encountered Hamiltonians yet, but I'm sure we would have thrown them into the mix.
Yeah, drugs will do that to you. Make you think every thought you have is pure gold.
In particular, mentioning the "substrate problem of consciousness" makes it sound like it will be BS. And, I don't know if the DMT experience really has anything at all to do with hyperbolic geometry. But that turns out not to be the interesting part. You can skip over that without missing anything.
I'm the author of this article. I stand by it and I think comments are failing to engaging with the actual models, phenomenological observations, and synthesis provided. I suspect people here have not actually payed attention to these experiences and may have epistemological assumptions that make them think it's impossible to bring useful information back. In particular, I'll say that the article's analysis assumes indirect realism about perception (it's all "in your head"), it focuses on structural features of the experience (phenomenal character rather than intentional content - I'm not interested in what the machine elves told you, I'm interested in what were the wallpaper symmetry groups that were covering their garments!), and tries to do what we named "algorithmic reductions" (i.e. identifying simple processes or effects that when stacked together might generate enormous emergent complexity - as in chemistry and physics, the rules are simple yet the emergent effects can have incredible complexity). In other words, this is a first attempt at a scientific and algorithmic understanding of the rich phenomenology of DMT without either (a) ignoring the facts, or (b) taking the semantic content of the experience at face value. I hope you enjoy it! :)
Admittedly, the article is a little old (2016) - but I have yet to see anyone go much further than it. I look forward to rational, scientifically-minded, and smart psychonauts actually engage with the content.
In the meantime, let me link you to some additional pieces of content and further information about DMT I've arrived at using these frameworks since then:
2) Here is a presentation I gave at Harvard's Science of Psychedelics Club about the article (which goes a little deeper as it also explains the "energy x complexity" landscape and ties it to Neural Annealing): https://youtu.be/loCBvaj4eSg
5) Another related video "Why Does DMT Feel So Real? Multi-modal Coherence, High Temperature Parameter, Tactile Hallucinations": https://youtu.be/Bgv1ptz1wOc [see below for the video description]
Video description to give you a taste of the explanatory style I'm pursuing:
Why does DMT feel so "real"? Why does it feel like you experience genuine mind-independent realities on DMT?
In this video I explain that we all implicitly rely on a model of which signals are trustworthy and which ones are not. In particular, in order to avoid losing one's mind during an intense exotic experience (such as those catalyzed by psychedelics, dissociatives, or meditation) one needs to (a) know that you are altered, (b) have a good model of what that alteration entails, and (c) that the alteration is not strong enough that it breaks down either (a) or (b). So drugs that make you forget you are under the influence, or that you don't know how to model (or have a mistaken model of) can deeply disrupt your "web of trusted beliefs".
I argue that one cannot really import the models that one learned from other psychedelics about "what psychedelics do" to DMT; DMT alters you in a far broader way. For example, most people on LSD may mistrust what they see, but they will not mistrust what they touch (touch stays a "trusted signal" on LSD). But on DMT you can experience tactile hallucinations that are coherent with one's visions! "Crossing the veil" on DMT is not a visual experience: it's a multi-modal experience, like entering a cave hiding behind a waterfall.
Some of the signals that DMT messes with that often convince people that what they experienced was mind-independent include:
1) Hyperbolic geometry and mathematical complexity; experiencing "impossible objects".
2) Incredibly high-resolution multi-modal integration: hallucinations are "coherent" across senses.
3) Philosophical qualia enhancement: it alters not only your senses and emotions, but also "the way you organize models of reality".
4) More "energized" experiences feel inherently more real, and DMT can increase the energy parameter to an extreme degree.
5) Highly valenced experiences also feel more real - the bliss and the horror are interpreted as "belonging to the vibe of a reality" rather than being just a property of your experience.
6) DMT can give you powerful hallucinations in every modality: not only visual hallucinations, but also tactile, auditory, scent, taste, and proprioception.
7) Novel and exotic feelings of "electromagnetism".
8) Sense of "wisdom".
9) Knowledge of your feelings: the entities know more about you than you yourself know about yourself.
With all of these signals being liable to chaotic alterations on DMT it makes sense that even very bright and rational people may experience a "shift" in their beliefs about reality. The trusted signals will have altered their consilience point. And since each point of consilience between trusted signals entails a worldview, people who believe in the independent reality of the realms disclosed by DMT share trust in some signals most people don't even know exist. We can expect some pushback for this analysis by people who trust any of the signals altered by DMT listed above. Which is fine! But... if we want to create a rational Super-Shulgin Academy to really make some serious progress in mapping-out the state-space of consciousness, we will need to prevent epistemological mishaps. I.e. We have to model insanity so that we ourselves can stay sane :)
The article wasn't presented as any sort of proof of mechanism or even authoritative description of what's happening.
An aside: I'll venture a guess that the majority of discoveries in human history started by throwing out Occam's razor. I don't understand why it's such a religion on HN.
> I'll venture a guess that the majority of discoveries in human history started by throwing out Occam's razor.
What’s an example of this? At first glance it looks very false to me. All the examples I can think of “simpler” theories being replaced by less simple ones occur in the face of new reasons to believe the simpler theory was false. You’re not really throwing out Occam’s razor unless you have two competing theories for the same phenomena and you choose the less simple one, right?
Replacing Bohr's model with Schrodinger's equation is one example. Or Newtonian physics with relativistic physics. These were proven to be better models, of course, but if great physicists applied Occam's razor to everything like some on HN, Einstein/Schrodinger would have never bothered investigating further.
Perhaps the Catholic church invoked Occam's razor when Galileo suggested the orbits of celestial bodies are more complex. Occam's razor is a good way of advocating that the existence of one single god is the default answer we should all accept, because you and I have no evidence for or against anything else and any other explanation for existential questions is going to be more complex.
The point is that bringing up Occam's Razor on every thread adds no value, does not need to be verbalized on a forum of smart people like HN, and frankly seems to be a way to justify intellectual laziness/closed-mindedness (which might be useful in high stakes/low time situations, but not in an 'intellectual' internet forum where people have plenty of free time to make better arguments).
Newtonian physics is the easiest example to criticize, because it’s precisely what I said: special relativity was a new model to fix blatant flaws with the previous model. Occam’s razor only concerns comparing two theories which account for the same phenomena. Special relativity was a new model that accounted for more phenomena, so it’s really not surprising (and certainly not a violation of Occam’s razor) if it was less simple.
Before we ditched the gods, Occam's razor would bring you to a conclusion that Earth is the center of the universe as 'world created by god' was the explanation with fewer details than 'world with many planets created by god.'
You can apply the same logic here; who said we see the objective truth now? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance covers the issue well - church of reason AKA science is the current faith that makes us blind.
That's actually a great point. To create, you need to throw out preconceptions like the razor. But to achieve persistence, simplifying ruthlessly... ie bringing the razor back in, helps. It's a bit like brainstorming: if you shut the idea stream down with the cold water of rationality, you lose what could have been really good ideas.
Solomonoff induction provably converges on reproducing any input function by only observing that function's outputs, and it formalizes Occam's razor as a key principle. I don't think it's fair to call it a heuristic anymore.
Sure you can use the simpler version heuristically, but the OP's claim is that it is only a heuristic and not a valid logical inference. I'm saying we now have proof that it is logically valid to claim that one should prefer theories with fewer assumptions, all else being equal.
> chemicals affect your brain in ways that simulate bizarre sensory input
Well yea... Duh? No one would disagree with that I suspect.
I think the point is that we can work backwards from these changes to better understand either a) how the brain works and an experience is perceived and/or b) the possibility that what we perceive normally is not the entire experience (to your second possibility)
In both cases obviously these are chemically induced changes/observations at their core. Doesn't take away from their novelty and certainly should be taken more seriously scientifically imo. Ofc it will land in the realm of psurdoscience otherwise.
The article does not claim that DMT unlocks new sensory abilities to perceive extra dimensions (!). It describes how DMT changes the geometry of phenomenal space, under the assumption of indirect realism about perception. You can certainly study that in a systematic and meaningful way without ever assuming new secret sensory abilities.
That said... higher phenomenal dimensions do exist, and you can experience them on DMT. See this video for a rational explanation of that effect (which is related, but different, from the hyperbolic geometry effect): https://youtu.be/DcGGfahXmQk
Video description:
Many people report experiencing "higher dimensions" during deep meditation and/or psychedelic experiences. Vaporized DMT in particular reliably produces this effect in a large percentage of users. But is this an illusion? Is there anything meaningful to it? What could possibly be going on?
In this video we provide a steel man (or titanium man?) of the idea that higher dimensions are real in a new, meaningful, and non-trivial sense.
We must emphasize that most people who believe that DMT experiences are "higher dimensional" interpret their experiences within a direct realist framework. Meaning that they think they are "tuning in" to other dimensions, that some secret sense organ capable of perceiving the etheric realm was "activated", that awareness into divine realms became available to their soul, or something along those lines. In brief, such interpretations operate under the notion that we can perceive the world directly somehow. In this video, we instead work under the premise that we live in a compact world-simulation generated by our nervous system. If DMT gives rise to "higher dimensional experiences", then such dimensions will be phenomenological in nature.
We thus try to articulate how it can be possible for an experience to acquire higher dimensions. An important idea here is that there is a trade-off between degrees of freedom and geometric dimensions. We present a model where degrees of freedom can become interlocked in such a way that they functionally emulate the behavior of a virtual higher dimension. As exemplified by the "harmonograph", one can indeed couple and interlock multiple oscillators in such a way that one generates paths of a point in a space that is higher-dimensional than the space inhabited by any of the oscillators on their own. More so, with a long qualia decay, one can use such technique to "paint" entire images in a virtual high dimensional canvas!
High-quality detailed phenomenology of DMT by rational psychonauts strongly suggests that higher virtual dimensions are widely present in the state. Also, the unique valence properties of the state seem to follow what we could call a "generalized music theory" where the "vibe" of the space is the net consonance between all of the metronomes in it. We indeed see a duality between spatial symmetry and temporal synchrony with modality-specific symmetries (equivariance maps) constraining the dynamic behavior.
This, together with the Symmetry Theory of Valence (Johnson), makes the search for "special divine numbers" suddenly meaningful: numerological correspondences can illuminate the underlying makeup of "heaven worlds" and other hedonically-loaded states of mind!
I conclude with a discussion about the nature of "highly-meaningful experiences". In light of all of these frameworks, meaning can be understood as a valence effect that arises when you have strong consonance between abstract (narrative and symbolic), emotional, and sensory fields all at once. A key turning point in your life combined with the right emotion and the right "sacred space" can thus give rise to "peak meaning". The key to infinite bliss!
> This is an essay on the phenomenology of DMT. The analysis here presented predominantly uses algorithmic, geometric and information-theoretic frameworks, which distinguishes it from purely phenomenological, symbolic, neuroscientific or spiritual accounts. We do not claim to know what ultimately implements the effects here described (i.e. in light of the substrate problem of consciousness), but the analysis does not need to go there in order to have explanatory power.
I think on DMT and similar, you are actually seeing less of the world, and the recursive/fractal aspect is coming from the brain filling in gaps with observations including its own analyzing patterns.
The world at our scale has a lot of data and is really complex. These "hypbolic geometries" seem like simplifications. One strand of a flower that happens to follow something roughly like the golden ration becomes a fibonacci spiral repeated at every degree; the sense of self gets muddled with the modeling of this pattern, allowing the pattern to permeate the entire observation, and now you too are the spiral. You notice the observation and how muddled it is with the pattern and the self, creating a loop which also gets modeled, and down the recursive rabbit hole you go.