5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 Lenses

TL;DR
Some substances seem to be much better at treating psychological trauma than others, even when they are seemingly similar in nature. We have reason to believe that 5-MeO-DMT is significantly better suited for this task than N,N-DMT (“DMT” from now on). In order to gain insight into why this difference exists, we investigate the phenomenological differences and similarities between the experiences produced by these two tryptamine psychedelics. In particular, we develop 9 lenses that show promise for understanding how 5-MeO-DMT and DMT differ:

Space vs. Form: 5-MeO is more space-like than DMT.
Crystals vs. Quasi-Crystals: 5-MeO generates more perfectly repeating rhythms and hallucinations than DMT.
Non-Attachment vs. Attachment: 5-MeO seems to enable detachment from the craving of both existence and non-existence, whereas DMT enhances the craving.
Underfitting vs. Overfitting: 5-MeO reduces one’s model complexity whereas DMT radically increases it.
Fixed Points and Limit Cycles vs. Chaotic Attractors: 5-MeO’s effect on feedback leads to stable and predictable attractors while DMT’s attractors are inherently chaotic.
Modulation of Lateral Inhibition: 5-MeO may reduce lateral inhibition while DMT may enhance it.
Diffuse Attention vs. Focused Attention: 5-MeO diffuses attention uniformly over large regions of one’s experiential field, while DMT seems to focus it.
Big Chunks and Tiny Chunks vs. A Power Law of Chunks: 5-MeO creates a few huge phases of experience (as in phases of matter) with a few remaining specks, while DMT produces a more organic power law distribution of chunk sizes.
Integration vs. Fragmentation: 5-MeO seems to give rise to “neural integration” involving the entrainment of any two arbitrary subnetworks (even when they usually do not talk to each other), while DMT fragments communication between most networks but massively enhances it between some specific kinds of networks.

All of this together suggests that 5-MeO-DMT is better at helping you “reconnect with yourself” than DMT. And this may be key to treating trauma effectively.

What is Trauma?
I will start out by briefly mentioning an interesting property of psychological trauma. You see, trauma has a lot of somatic manifestations. Feeling disconnected from yourself,  like you are full of blockages, that you have numb regions in your body despite no physical damage, and so on, are all quintessential ways in which trauma shows up in a person’s everyday life. Given these manifestations, do these suggest any new way of treating this? How about using something that facilitates the communication between parts of your nervous system that are not on “speaking terms” with each other? Would giving our nervous system a kind of vibration that simultaneously entrains any two of its regions to make them act as a unit be of any help?

Psychotropic Treatment of Trauma
Based on tens of interviews, hundreds of trip reports, and a literature review, I have arrived at a tentative short list of drugs that have the highest potential to heal trauma (in decreasing order):

5-MeO-DMT
MDMA
Ketamine

They are all synergistic combined with music, vibration, strobes, and olfaction. And when wisely used, they all have the ability to help you move on past pain: stop ruminating, stop feeling like your behavior is inhibited, and stop having panic attacks associated with your past experiences.
At some point in the future I will provide direct empirical evidence for the claim that these three substances are uniquely good for treating trauma. Arguably psilocybin, ayahuasca, and LSD can be helpful in processing traumatic experiences too. But my claim is that the options I listed are uniquely good at deeply resolving the issues at an emotional level and bringing to you the opportunity to feel a profound and lasting sense of inner peace.
DMT won’t help as much as 5-MeO-DMT.
MDA is not as good as MDMA.
And DXM, ok, perhaps it can also be quite useful for trauma… but ketamine has something “extra” that really helps.
What is this?

The Koan: 5-MeO-DMT, MDMA, Ketamine?
Perhaps we could gain a new perspective by framing this as a Koan: what do MDMA, 5-MeO-DMT, and ketamine have in common? You HAVE to the figure this out in the next 24 hours, or your guru will literally cut your cat in half. Motivated enough?
What do you do? Well, you start out by borrowing psychopharmacology books from the library. But does that help? When it comes to trauma, in traditional textbook neuroscience MDMA is at best just a footnote. Ketamine is not even mentioned for the most part, unless the book is hip, but even then it will be mentioned in the chapter about anaesthetics and painkillers; its psychoactive effects will be glossed over as “emergent phenomena”. No! What are you doing? Wasn’t John C. Lilly already talking about the far-out, extraordinarily bizarre, perhaps even literally inter-dimensional properties of “vitamin K” way back in the 70s? Then why is my 2007 “Drugs and the Brain” textbook so totally lacking in any kind of genuine phenomenological insight about this stuff?
And what about 5-MeO-DMT? You are lucky if the term appears even once in your $800 textbook. And if it does indeed appear, you can bet it will also be in a footnote, this time concerning matters such as “psychoactive animals”, “other tryptamines”, and “mesoamerican entheogens”. You will neither see 5-MeO-DMT mentioned in a personal identity philosophy textbook, nor in a neuroscience treatise on “neural synchrony”, nor in the part of academia focused on “innovation in the treatment of mental illness”.
It is sad to admit, but the official main-lined level of interest in the three most promising therapeutic tools for trauma listed above is a matter of sorting and assembling footnotes.
I am exaggerating a bit, of course.
MDMA’s therapeutic potential is gaining traction thanks to the tireless work of MAPS. S-Ketamine is now approved as an anti-depressant. And while 5-MeO-DMT is gaining popularity at a glacial pace, it is at this point by no means a secret. An increasing number of vocal members of the psychedelic community have been talking about 5-MeO-DMT for some years. People who have publicly emphasized how different five is from other psychedelics include Hamilton Morris, James Oroc, Martin Ball, Leo Gura, and Rak Razam. But what we still lack is rigorous scientific backing for these claims. After all, everyone is likely to want to sell their aesthetic preferences as universal truths about beauty and bliss, right? Thankfully, there are some early scientific indications already:
Source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6292276/
The above graph comes from a 2018 study that investigated the therapeutic effects of 5-MeO-DMT-containing toad venom relative to psilocybin. The dose used (the amount of buffo venom vaporized) had an estimated content of 5-7mg of 5-MeO-DMT, and the researchers classified 75% of the resulting experiences as meeting the criteria for a “complete mystical experience”. It measured people’s level of response with the Mystical Experiences Questionnaire (MEQ30), and as you can see from the graph above, in every category 5-MeO-DMT seems to be more powerful than psilocybin. The level of effectiveness was indeed found to be higher than all but the highest dose of psilocybin, and chances are that the study couldn’t show it was more effective than that because it was underpowered to detect it, and not because there is no difference (in other words, the sample size was not large enough for the difference between high-dose psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT to reach statistical significance). Also bear in mind the key difference that the trip lasts under 20 minutes in total, meaning that even if the trip fails to produce full effects, you can still afford to try it again ten more times in the same time interval that it would have taken you to experience a full psilocybin trip. More so, it is important to point out that the dose of 5-MeO-DMT taken by the participants of this study is considered to be at the edge between “light” and “common” in PsychonautWiki’s entry on the drug*. Indeed, for many people the “breakthrough” tends to happen around 10mg, and I’ve heard of people using up to 30mg of it at a time. (Beware: if you ever try this – please don’t jump straight to a high dose, as this can cause serious trauma as a result.) Therefore, I think it is reasonable to expect that future studies will confirm what anecdotal data is currently screaming: that 5-MeO-DMT is more “powerful” and “mystical” in its effects than psilocybin, LSD, DMT, 2C-B, and all the rest.
But what this “power” and “mysticism” exactly amounts to still lacks clear and useful definitions. More so, is there any concrete reason why 5-MeO-DMT may be also superior at healing trauma relative to, eg. LSD or psilocybin? Technically, one could currently argue that since the presentation of “complete mystical states” is a mediating factor in whether psilocybin has long-lasting psychological benefits, that 5-MeO-DMT is more effective simply because it has a higher probability of causing this effect. But I would argue that the texture of 5-MeO-DMT peak experiences is different and not only just more intense, and that the way in which it is different matters for its therapeutic value.
To investigate this particular difference, we now move on to examining the phenomenological difference between 5-MeO-DMT and DMT.

5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 Lenses
My experience is that a reasonable ~20% of people I talk to who have a long-standing interest in psychedelics have heard about 5-MeO-DMT’s special properties. However, only a much smaller percentage of people have actually tried it. At Qualia Computing we have talked about its exceptional phenomenological properties a number of times. Yet it remains that most readers who reach out have not themselves experienced it. Hence I have not really had access to quality trip reports in order to say anything meaningful about the way in which it is different from DMT.
Thankfully, I’ve recently interviewed someone who has a decent level of experience with 5-MeO-DMT (20+ trips), along with a significant level of experience with vaporized DMT (100+ trips), and is also acquainted with the combination (10+ trips with both substances at once).
Given the incredibly intense psychoactive effects of 5-MeO-DMT (both for good and bad), most people struggle to put into words anything meaningful about the state. That said, as it has been the case with a number of other states of consciousness (e.g. LSD, DMT, and MDMA) I feel compelled to try to offer a sane, rational, agnostic, and pragmatic description of its phenomenology. In particular, I think that 5-MeO-DMT’s unique trauma-healing potential really deserves a close look. I believe that it sheds light on a wide range of topics of interest such as neural annealing, the Symmetry Theory of Valence, and the pseudo-time arrow (video). With this in mind, I inquired with my interviewee about the differences between N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT. Together, after a lengthy open-ended discussion, we found the following ways to compare them:
1. Space vs. Form

One of the first things that stands out when you take DMT at even small doses is the way in which colors get intensified. This is a special case of a very generalizable effect: in fact, every perceptual feature you can point to is enhanced while on DMT, from the sharpness of edges and pointy things to the feeling of movement and rotation. The interviewee indeed said that a brain on DMT “becomes a powerful qualia machine“.
After trying 5-MeO-DMT for the first time, most people already familiar with DMT mention something along the lines of “I was surprised that I didn’t see many colors.” The visual component of five is rarely very colorful; if color appears, it is in the form of a golden or sometimes light faint magenta or green hue. For the most part, the visual component of the experience is black and/or white. At times, one can see rainbow halos, but like rare subatomic particles, on 5-MeO-DMT rainbow colors come in and out of the vacuum, as if somehow equivalent to it. The bulk of the visuals manifest in a dazzling sense of spaciousness, as if there was a cosmic paint called “transparent/translucent”. The space often feels immeasurable due to a lack of a reference frame from which to make a judgement in terms of known comparisons. But what inevitably stands out is that the space seems large, uniform, harmonious, smooth, and luminous. Somatic feelings blend with this space, and the uniformity and symmetry of it allows for energy to seamlessly move throughout it. It really is a remarkable effect, one which can easily give rise to the felt-sense of Open Individualism. Yet, despite the engrossingly engaging character of these feelings, there is very little narrative complexity in sight.
Who knew that empty space could be so much fun? That you could fit so much love and bliss in an (experiential) vacuum? More so, the more you are able to relax into it, the more you embrace the waves of equanimity, the more you allow the space to become perfectly smooth and seamless… the more blissful it all gets!**
2. Crystals and Quasi-Crystals

Here is an interesting thing – ultrasound has been used in order to bias the way in which water crystals form, and thus creating much more “cubical” water than is otherwise possible. More generally, the phenomenon of vibration affecting crystallization processes is worth considering as an explanatory framework. DMT comes with a particular vibe that some have identified as having a characteristic frequency somewhere between 20 and 30Hz, whereas 5-MeO-DMT’s vibe seems to be a notch higher, perhaps in the range of 30 to 40Hz. On these drugs, your attention is jittered back and forth at a certain frequency, and this affects your ability to focus on any given part of your experience. The specific jittering itself makes it harder and easier to construct and manipulate certain thought-forms over others.
Speculatively, this model says that the jittering of attention caused by 5-MeO-DMT and DMT give rise to crystal and quasi-crystal building blocks, respectively, for phenomenal objects in one’s experience.
Phenomenologically, it seems that the vibratory signature of DMT effects doesn’t wrap around your experience an integer number of times. Thus, what we will call, for lack of a better term, the qualia crystals that form while on DMT seem to be inherently unstable and alien to your normal way of cogitating. The fact that the vibrations don’t fit perfectly in one’s experiential field forces it to bend out of shape to accommodate such vibrations. The result is constant chaos – fluid instabilities as the core effect.
Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (source)
On the other hand, with 5-MeO-DMT, it’s as if the vibration activates parts of the field of experience in exactly the right way for them to blend, unite, and resonate with one another. The vibrations fit perfectly inside one’s experiential field, and allows it to relax into its own natural shape. And this allows for perfect crystals of awareness to peacefully grow, multiply, and synchronize.

It is of course surprising that a tiny difference in the frequency of the vibe could have such large effects in the way phenomenology crystallizes. But this is true for other systems. When one talks about the complexity of shapes in resonant systems, for instance, Lissajou curves can provide a helpful intuition pump: in Lissajou curves, merely changing one of the frequencies by a small relative amount can result in a huge difference between the pictures drawn. From a simple circle to a complex mesh.

According to the interviewee, 5-MeO-DMT would neatly correspond to one of the simplest Lissajou curves above, while the DMT sensations would be better evoked by one of the meshy ones.
With that said, it is worth mentioning that 5-MeO-DMT is probably not hitting the right frequencies merely by chance. It’s probably more that it is activating a system whose attractor is self-correcting and results in the kind of symmetrical crystallization that gives rise to deep feelings of bliss.
3. Attachment to Existence and Non-Existence
5-MeO seems to point at a super general sense of “relaxation”. A meditation teacher, Ajahn Brahm, talking about jhanas said that his mantra to achieve states of deep concentration and peace was: “Relax… to the maaaaaaaxxxx…”.
And according to the interviewee, the thrust of 5-MeO is that it feels like your nervous system is paradoxically injected with a lot of energy and yet the vibe of this energy is that of total and complete- ultimate?- relaxation. But our body and mind are not used to relaxing deeply. The contrast between this energy and one’s usual neurotic state can itself produce a lot of dissonance and resistance. In most cases, this is transient and contained to the first couple of minutes of the experience, though in higher doses and with bad luck, it can also spiral out of control. On small and moderate doses the energetic vibe of “relax to the max” takes over one’s experiential center of mass and teaches the rest of your nervous system how to relax.
It vibrates your nervous system in just the right way that all of your tensions, and hidden knots, and internalized stresses, bubble up to the surface, and you have the chance to try to “unravel” all of that tension.
After taking it a couple of times, you get the very nice feeling of being OK with whatever happens. 5-MeO-DMT might be described as a drug that allows you to reduce “thirst, craving, desire” in a very generalized kind of way. In Buddhist terms, this would be to reduce “Taṇhā“, which comes in three different kinds: “kāma-taṇhā (craving for sensual pleasures), bhava-taṇhā (craving for existence), and vibhava-taṇhā (craving for non-existence).” While we are used to hearing religious figures and moralists talk about the importance of not experiencing cravings for sensual pleasure, popular culture still lacks legible myths about the craving for existence and non-existence. So it comes as a shock for someone who has never developed meditative introspective insight just how much of our suffering has the flavor of either craving for existence or non-existence. Dosing on 5-MeO-DMT gives you a glimpse for what a mind devoid of these more subtle forms of craving feels like.
DMT comes with a vibratory frenzy that directly causes a lot of knots and tiny stress points throughout your entire experiential field. And to a large extent, how the experience unfolds is the result of you trying to manage all of those knots and stress points to avoid having them accumulate and concentrate in painful ways. The effect of this is that DMT acutely increases attachment to existence and non-existence. You wonder “what am I in this world?” and then cling to it, along with an intense fear of losing yourself in the world of vibration. The fear is quite involuntary and primal. And because you are clinging to who or what you are, there is something that you can lose, and that contributes to the feeling that the stakes are very high.
On 5-MeO you look at a landscape- say a tree in a Savannah- and you can see it in the most Zen way you can possibly imagine (and I don’t mean cutting cats in half). You think: “there is neither someone nor nobody in there” and “it’s all just arising and passing of ephemera”.
On DMT you look at the same landscape and you feel: “Oh gosh, what AM I in here? Am I that rock over there? That rock seems threatened by erosion! Am I the tree? But what if something comes and eats the tree?” and so on.
On DMT you feel like you are one of many little beings in a vast ecosystem. On 5-MeO-DMT you step back and you “realize” that you are the entire ecosystem.
In turn, this may explain to some extent the fact that the content of DMT hallucinations is often filled with exotic beings. And almost always, these beings have hyper-specific ways of life, tastes, intentions, and beliefs. The realms you experience on DMT are all saturated with attachment to existence and non-existence, and the beings you interact with are no exception. In fact, they may be a manifestation of those intensified cravings! From the interviewee:
“I’ve taken DMT about 100 times and have encountered many different vibes and kinds of intelligences in those realms. I’d love to map out the possible narratives – there are so many! Loosely speaking, I’ve had many different encounters with intelligent beings: from blissfully angelic and benevolent to outright demonic. Most of the beings I’ve encountered are somewhere in-between, and for the most part, tend to have pretty dualistic mindsets.
There is this whole class of beings I’d identify as harlequins/jesters that just love to play tricks with perception (I’m sure that’s what Terrence McKenna was pointing at).
Then there are “artists” which have a particular style that they explore and can range from emotionally self-sufficient to aggressively in-your-face about their work. The “look at THIS and look at THIS and look at THIS!!” kind of stance, where you are not given enough time to process what they’ve already shown you before they thrust even more stuff into you, and then attach ‘cookies’ into your etheric body to track you in future trips so you “like” and “subscribe” to their “interdimensional channel” or something like that.
There’s also a lot of beings that seem to want to tell you that they are confident that God does not exist and that “everything is allowed”. And I’ve felt that they are really indifferent to morality, but still have powerful abilities and unique qualia of a more scientific bent.
I once also encountered what felt like a true sadistic demon that played some really nasty tricks on my perception, and filled me with “etheric bugs” and had hundreds of little minions to attack me in many unpleasant ways. That said, I blame this on the fact that I was sleep deprived when I took DMT that one time, and it’s never happened before or since. But that experience gave me a lot of respect for the drug.
I’ve also encountered realms where they actually do consciousness research as such, and are benevolent and into engineering paradises. I even asked one of them if they knew my favorite philosopher, and they said “yes, what a nice fellow – we hope he will be more widely known in the future. We just wished that he wasn’t so sad a lot of the time.”
I have found that my pre-existing mood is the single most important variable that determines the kind of intelligences I encounter. So I’d really like to someday try MDMA and DMT combined. I suspect those would be very angelic beings most of the time.
Interestingly, I feel that while DMT feels profoundly spiritual, to a large extent it is less “nondual” than most other psychedelics. A lot of beings I’ve encountered simply don’t seem to care about oneness at all. But on LSD, mushrooms, and of course 5-MeO-DMT, the Golden Rule seems to play a very central role in the experience. Those experiences are much more of a “teaching” than the wacky stuff one encounters in the DMT realms.
When you take 5-MeO-DMT and DMT at the same time, you can really feel the contrast between the dualistic “us vs. them” vibe that underlies DMT and the unitive sense that underlies 5-MeO-DMT. I’ve experimented with the combo and found it to be super informative. And usually, I realize that while DMT turns your brain into a high-octane “qualia machine”, 5-MeO is in fact much more peaceful and happy in a deeper sense. I’d like to understand both, but my preferred “home” would be for sure the 5-MeO realms.”
4. Underfitting vs. Overfitting
One interesting lens with which to make sense of the difference between people who are open to experience and people who are not is that of model complexity, which casts this difference in terms of the statistical concepts of underfitting and overfitting.
Having narrow views, simple explanations, and enduring preferences is very good when the world itself is either very simple or impossible to understand. But having complex views, multi-layered explanations, and flexible preferences is more adaptive than the alternative in a world that is both complex and can be understood with some effort.
Indeed, some speculation about the nature of sleep from the predictive coding paradigm of cognition is that dreaming is a process of model complexity reduction. The information that we accumulate over the span of a day is incorporated in an ad-hoc fashion while awake, and only properly integrated (and pruned) after a good night’s sleep. This at least provides the theoretical precedent for describing a specific state of consciousness in terms of its effects on model complexity. And here we would propose that as a very general effect profile, 5-MeO-DMT reduces model complexity while N,N-DMT increases it.
As a consequence, we would posit that people who take five a lot will converge towards compelling yet over-simplified models of realty, whereas people who use DMT a lot will converge to overly complex and unnecessarily detailed explanation for even the simplest of phenomena.
Perhaps in the future people could be diagnosed as chronic overfitters and underfitters. In turn, these two drugs could be given by prescription, for the maladies of improper model selection practices:
N,N-DMT would be given to the sufferers of too much worldview simplicity. People like this believe that the world is dominated by the struggle between capitalism and communism. They think that there is a 50% chance that God almighty exists. They assign zero probability to unlikely events, such as lizard people power conspiracies. In people like this, DMT is a powerful mind enhancer capable of challenging cartoonishly simple background assumptions and introducing a healthy dose of skepticism in mainstream narratives.
5-MeO-DMT would instead be given to people who are overwhelmingly embroiled in complex interpretations of the nature of reality. Whether it is in the realm of conspiracy theories, religious cults, the biochemistry of aging, or any such hopelessly convoluted field of research, a little five will unscramble the mind of the compulsive overfitter. Thanks to the drug, the Bayesian puncture, the Occam’s cut, and the pragmatic so what coalesce into a decimating hit to the load-bearing hub-nodes that feed unfalsifiable belief systems. The model complexity reduction effect dissolves entire subfields, assimilates clusters, and seamlessly mends discontinuities in the reality mappings of the patient. At moderate dosages and treatment regimes, the sufferer recovers fully. The sufferer often ends up healed of their traumas, and occasionally healed of many more things than expected. At levels much above those of the therapeutic standard of care, there is a risk that the treatment may result in the healing of the fundamental traumas of conscious experience. The drug may offer the patient a chance to relinquish phenomenal reality in exchange for an extemporal “ultimate relief”. To extinguish the flame of existence, as they say.
Importantly, after 5-MeO-DMT therapy, the patient is, let’s say (for the sake of speculating), 20 times as likely as members of the general public to say yes to questions like “Are we all one consciousness?”, “Is the world a process created for the refinement of our souls?” and “Is the universe made of infinite consciousness?”.
So where does that leave us? The good news is that this may have game-theoretical benefits for the side of consciousness in the eternal battle between consciousness and pure replicators. The bad news is that it can overwrite important information obtained from the senses, one’s education, and logical reasoning:
Becoming the God of “I-AM-Now-ness” and filling your entire experiential field with that flavor of awakening is a recipe for ecstasy, not for good epistemology.
Indeed, the patient may become a bit hooked to the simplification of their model complexity; to make reality as they know be replaced by a simpler, yet more intense, version of perceived reality is very tempting. It can be seductive to embrace a view like “you are God and you have created everything for your own amusement” or “you are the dream of God”. Rather than compassion, why not indifference? Being the “way God entertains itself” is both poetically satisfying and super trippy. A lot of people would find that such belief adds some spice to their lives.
But the price of truth is everything. In turn, it would be ideal to complement any model complexity reduction that goes too far with a healthy amount of prediction errors.
5. Fixed-Points and Limit Cycles vs. Chaotic Attractors
The brain contains many self-correcting feedback systems. Psychedelics in general can be modeled as drugs that mess with the inhibitory component of excitation-inhibition feedback systems. They accomplish this, quite possibly, by disrupting the inhibitory serotonergic connections coming from the cortex that gate the excitatory input coming from the thalamus. This may account for why tracers look the way they do – the failure to inhibit the thalamus results in looped replays of recent states. This may go a long way in explaining why people find “video feedback” so trippy and fascinating. Namely, because a lot of psychedelic effects can be understood as feedback getting out of control, literally.

More concretely, at the Harvard talk on the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT experiences I introduced this notion that each DMT experience as a whole can be thought of as a trajectory in the energy vs. complexity landscape. Here, the vertical axis indicates the degree of energy of the experience (roughly corresponding to the intensity, brightness, and amount of qualia), while the horizontal axis represents how much information is encoded in the experience. One interesting operationalization of information is through the concept of symmetry breaking***, in which case the horizontal axis approximately tracks the “distance from perfectly symmetrical spaces in terms of number of symmetry breaking operations”.
I then postulated that we could generate an ontology based on feedback + noise to explain how two DMT trips of roughly the same level of intensity can nonetheless contain very different amounts of information.

What I did not mention at the time was that while DMT does have the ability to send you to any place in the energy-complexity landscape, most of the experiences are in the region of middle-complexity. In fact, especially strong DMT trips tend to become fully chaotic, so there is even a mild correlation between dosage and complexity. On the other hand, 5-MeO-DMT tends to propel you towards the low-complexity region of the space.

Using a feedback system ontology we could thus posit that 5-MeO-DMT modifies the feedback parameters of your brain in such a way that the states it gives rise to are ether fixed points or short limit cycles:
fixed_point_
The video above depicts a fixed point (as with the other animations below, I took this from an old 1984 video about video feedback you can see here). A fixed point is a configuration of the system that is stable upon feedback iterations. In the video above we see a fixed point consisting of a cross (presumably the result of the camera having a 90 degree tilt) that is then perturbed and eventually collapses into just a single circular dot at the center.

The above are limit cycles. The first (left) is a comparatively simple limit cycle in that every stage along its reproduction cycle is very similar to each other. The second (right) one is a bit more complex, yet despite a long winded path, it really does repeat more or less perfectly over and over. 5-MeO-DMT limit cycles are more akin to the one on the left, but on occasion may be a bit more complex and rhythmic over the span of seconds. Either way, there is often a strong pull towards a simple resonant pattern with remarkable stability.
Contrast that with chaotic attractors:

Chaotic pseudo-time arrow
When we have actual chaos, the states continue to change indefinitely. We could then posit that DMT’s characteristic jittering seems to prevent the formation of stable fixed points or short limit cycles. Despite both DMT and 5-MeO-DMT disrupting feedback in the brain, the subtle differences in the way parameters of this feedback are modified can make all the difference between perfectly simple and smooth results and the endless generation of chaotic structures.
6. Modulating Lateral Inhibition
Another exciting lens with which to look at the difference between these psychedelics is by allusion to lateral inhibition: according to a couple of recent trip reports I received from another anonymous source, there is a remarkable difference between the tracers of 5-MeO-DMT and those of DMT. In particular, the anonymous tripper points out that DMT tracers are chains of concatenated positive and negative after-images of the stimulation source, whereas 5-MeO-DMT only produces positive after-images.
Stare at the cross. The green ball you see as a result is the “negative after-image” of the missing purple dot.
In other words, when you see a blue ball moving on a screen, on DMT you will see tracers of that ball that change in color from blue to yellow to blue again and so on, all following after the original blue ball. But on 5-MeO-DMT, one will only see a long blue tracer. This is a remarkable difference, and if true, it would seem to be an important hint.****
Orientation selectivity map in the visual cortex
Lateral inhibition in the cortex prevents the overlapping of incompatible features in one’s own experience. For example, the primary visual cortex shows a map of orientation selectivity as shown above. Each hypercolumn is selective to only a specific orientation, and the surrounding hypercolumns are selective to different orientations. More so, via lateral inhibition, when a hypercolumn is activated, it inhibits the surrounding ones.
In this model, DMT would perhaps leave this process untouched, so that when the brain is massively energized, it still maintains this flip-flopping between each feature and its complement. Indeed, some people have described DMT as turning half of your neurons fully on, the other half of your neurons fully off, then inverting the activation so that the off neurons are turned on and the on ones are turned off, and flip-flopping between these two steps many times per second. Could this be the phenomenal expression of having energized checkerboard patterns of excitation and inhibition saturating your cortex? That is, taking a system with in-built lateral inhibition into over-drive?
5-MeO-DMT, on the contrary, seems to allow for “all colors to blend together into pure white light”, and “the past and the future to collapse into the present”, and the “self-other distinction to be dissolved”, and so on. Intuitively, if the drug is biochemically disabling lateral inhibition, that could be reflected as a profound sense of unity and interconnectedness at the phenomenological level, “transcending every last barrier”.
7. Diffuse Attention vs. Focused Attention
As we mentioned earlier, DMT tends to come with a feeling of “becoming tense” while 5-MeO-DMT has a primary vibe of “becoming relaxed”. One way in which we can model this is in the way the drugs influence whether your attention is focused or diffuse. Now, I should say that this model will be necessarily incomplete because at the peak of a 5-MeO experience one often does in fact feel super focused in some way. But I would posit that this sense of focus is much more holistic than the way our common-sense use of the term would suggest. The focus on DMT, on the other hand, does feel very much akin to the “conventional” sense of focus, where you are able to precisely position figure and ground in such a way that they have as much contrast as possible.
In a way, the beings one encounters on DMT could be thought of as “attentional attractors”. As you create a lot of little focal points during the experience, these begin to build up and define the contents of your mind. Each focal point makes it easier for you to create another one nearby. This snowballs into an effect where there are clusters of focal points that become the “centers of mass” of the narrative. These could very well be what underlies the “beings” on DMT. Using Buddhist terms again, DMT beings might perhaps be thought of as exotic “nimittas“: attention hubs.
Also, because the experience is high-dimensional and changes your sense of what “understanding” even means, it seems that the feeling of super-intelligence on DMT might be a projection of one’s own super-intelligence (of a certain kind) in the state.
In contrast, 5-MeO-DMT makes it easy to de-focus on anything. To let go, and experience it in a diffuse way.
8. Big Chunks and Tiny Chunks vs. A Power Law of Chunks
Geology uses the word matrix in way that is very different from either math or science fiction aficionados. In geology, a matrix is the entire mass of materials on a rock within which crystals, grains, and clasts are found. As Anders and Maggie discussed recently, the way in which minerals form depends to a large extent on the presence of water in the process of crystallization. The huge diversity of minerals we see on Earth’s surface is partly a result of the availability of water in the mantle. Perhaps a lens with which to see DMT is as playing the same role in the brain as water does in fractional crystallization. It lubricates the matrix of your mind, which enables the crystallization of countless qualia exotica. 5-MeO-DMT instead homogenizes the kinds of crystals that can form.

In brief, DMT is to 5-MeO-DMT as a matrix of diverse minerals is to a mono-phasic large enclave. DMT is like complex music (cf. music as an ordered phase of sound) while 5-MeO-DMT is like a single mantra repeated over and over. Is this metaphor useful? It seemed to resonate with the interviewee.
9. Integration vs. Fragmentation
In Neural Annealing, Mike Johnson argues that what makes MDMA special for healing trauma is what at QRI we call integration:
On MDMA’s strangely powerful therapeutic effects, I’d suggest MDMA shares the ‘basic psychedelic package’ with substances like LSD and psilocybin (albeit a little weaker at common doses). Anything with this ‘baseline’ package significantly increases the energy parameter of the brain, which both allows escape from bad local minima and canalizes the brain’s core CSHWs, which both should be highly therapeutic. My intuition is MDMA may also have a particular effect on stochastic firing frequencies of neurons, and that this effect essentially acts as an emergent metronome – and this metronome will drive synchronicity between diverse brain regions. Given the presence of such a region-spanning ‘clean’ metronomic signal, brain regions that have partially ‘stopped talking to each other’ will re-establish integration, and some of this integration will persist while sober (or rather, some of the reasons for the lack of integration will have been negotiated away during the MDMA-driven integration). Plausibly this ‘emergent metronome’ effect may also underlie the particular phenomenological effects of 5-MeO-DMT as well, particularly in terms of sense of unity, high valence, and therapeutic potential. (HT to Steve Lehar for pointing at this ’nystagmus’ phenomenon as being somehow linked to MDMA’s mood-lifting effect, and to Andrés for calling my attention to Lehar’s work and suggesting 5-MeO-DMT may also share this mechanism.)
Like most other psychedelics, N,N-DMT also shares the same ‘basic psychedelic package’ and can have beneficial therapeutic effects. But it lacks this ‘special’ ability that allows arbitrary parts of your nervous system to rhythmically entrain with one another. This “emergent metronome” on MDMA and 5-MeO-DMT works as a kind of universal “vibratory currency” and results in a reduction of inner dissonance to a much greater extent than (relatively) simple “energizers” like DMT.
To Wrap Up
We hope that the above discussion has given you an idea about the difference between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT and why this matters for their therapeutic potential. The above is just the start of a deep inquiry into the topic that will certainly take many years, but we believe that it is a novel way of seeing the contrast between these two substances that may be generative for others. We also believe that it is very worth trying: nailing down this difference may be incredibly important to develop novel ways of treating mental illness. While DMT will undoubtedly continue to dazzle and amaze people curious about the state-space of consciousness, the superlative potential of 5-MeO-DMT to heal trauma puts it on a different level of importance altogether.
In the future we shall also explain why MDMA and ketamine have this potential. And ultimately, as we begin to understand what makes these substances so special, we hope to find ways of creating effective therapies from first principles. Stay tuned.

* The toad venom dose was 50mg, with an estimated 5-7mg of 5-MeO-DMT. This is admittedly likely to produce somewhat more potent effects than just 5 to 7mg of pure 5-MeO-DMT. But the extent of this enhancement is currently poorly understood, and you can find many people online saying that the difference is tiny and others who argue it is enormous. Given just how intense and qualitatively unique pure 5-MeO-DMT already is, I think that applying Occam’s razor would tell us that “it’s just the 5-MeO-DMT itself”. So while I am ready to accept the possibility of profound synergy between other tryptamines in toad venom and 5-MeO, I am not holding my breath for it. I, rather, expect that the difference between 5-MeO alone and the full-spectrum stuff will be akin to the difference between drinking 10 shots of vodka and drinking 10 shots of vodka and one chamomile tea. Namely, a real but largely inconsequential difference.
** This, of course, blends well with the Symmetry Theory of Valence, a subject to which we shall return in the near future.
*** This is where information-less states are those which are perfectly symmetrical, and the information content of a state is defined as the minimum number of symmetry breaking operations needed to transform an information-less state into it.
**** This is admittedly very weak evidence so far. If you have experience with both of these compounds and have explored the way in which they give rise to after-images, please let me know if you can confirm or deny the effect here mentioned.

Picture: Andrés & Claudia Silva Ruiz

5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 Lenses


On the Evolution of the Phenomenal Self (and Other Communications from QRI Sweden)

By Maggie Wassinge and Anders Amelin (QRI Sweden volunteer coordinators; see letters I & II, and letters III, IV, & V)

“QRI Law of Transhumanism”: The overall motivation of humans to solve social and mental problems will remain much higher than the motivation to solve physics problems. The human performance in solving social and mental problems will remain much lower than the performance in solving physics problems. This continues until social and mental problems become physics problems.
– Anders & Maggie

Letter VI: The Evolution of the Phenomenal Self
Re: Mini-Series on Open Individualism
A follow-up for the more nerdy audience could perhaps be how QRI seeks to resolve the confusion about individualism:
It often turns out that parsimony is a more useful guiding principle in science than naïve realism. This includes naïve realism about what constitutes parsimony. All relevant conditions must be taken into account, and some conditions are unknowns, which blurs the picture. Occam’s razor is powerful but more like a Samurai sword: you need great skill to use it well.
Compare the state-space of consciousness with the state-space of chemistry known to humans: there is biochemistry and there is other chemistry. They manifest quite differently. However, parsimony favors that at the fundamental level of organization things reduce to a small set of rules which are the same for all of chemistry. This is now known to indeed be the case but was not always so. Rather, it tended to be assumed that some extra factor, a “life-force”, had to be involved when it comes to biochemistry.
Biochemistry has been evolutionarily selected for performance on a most formidable problem. That of self-replicating a self-replicator. It takes a large number of steps in the process and high preciseness at each step. Only particular sequences of steps lead to normal cell function, and things are always open to getting corrupted. Take viruses, for instance.
Normal function of a brain is somewhat analogous to normal function of a cell. Evolution has selected for brains which produce the experience of continuity as a unique agent self. This is probably one of the harder tasks that conscious intelligence has solved, corresponding to the advanced parts necessary for reproduction in a cell. It is probably about as unusual in the state-space of consciousness as cellular replication is in the state-space of chemistry. However, the state naïvely feels like it is foundational to everything, which can make you confused when reflecting upon it. It can get even more confusing when you consider the strong possibility that valenced experiences of “good or bad” are much more commonplace in the state-space, perhaps more like transfer of electric charge is commonplace in chemistry.
Self-replicating a self-replicator
You can test this by altering (mental) system properties via meditation or psychedelics. Is “individuality” or “valence” more persistent under perturbation? It’s much harder to get rid of valence, and indeed, the highly altered state of a brain on high doses of 5-MeO-DMT gets rid of the agent self altogether but preserves and even enhances valence, interestingly more often in the positive than the negative direction. It’s like jumping from biochemistry to pyrotechnics.
Self-less 5-MeO-DMT “void”: The state is as different and exotic from normal everyday evolved consciousness as the chemistry of explosive pyrotechnics is to evolved biochemistry.
Naïve realism would hold that the sensations of “one-ness” experienced in certain highly altered states of consciousness feel the way they do because they somehow expand to include other entities into a union with yourself. What is likely to really be going on could be the opposite: there is no “self” as a reality fundament but rather a local complex qualia construct that is easy to interfere with. When it (and other detail) goes away there is less mental model complexity left. A reduction in the information diversity of the experience. Take this far enough and you can get states like “X is love” where X could be anything. These can feel as if they reveal hidden truths, for you obviously had not thought that way before, right? “X is love, wow, what a cosmic connection!”

Letter VII: Fractional Crystallization to Enhance Qualia Diversity
Some more chemistry: is there in qualia state-space something analogous to fractional crystallization? When a magma solidifies relatively rapidly, most of the minor elements stay in solid solution within a few major mineral phases. You get a low diversity assemblage. When the magma solidifies slowly it can yield a continuum of various unique phases all the way down to compounds of elements that were only present at ppb levels in the bulk. Crucially, for this to work well, a powerful viscosity reducer is needed. Water happens to fit the bill perfectly.
Consider the computational performance of the process of solidification of a thousand cubic kilometer plutonic magma with and without an added cubic kilometer of water. The one with the added water functions as a dramatically more efficient sorting algorithm for the chemical element constituents than the dry one. The properties of minor minerals can be quite different from those of the major minerals. The spectrum of mineral physical and chemical properties that the magma solidification produces is greatly broadened by adding that small fraction of water. Which nature does on Earth.

It resembles the difference between narrow and broad intelligence. Now, since the general intelligence of humans requires multiple steps at multiple levels, which takes a lot of time, there might need to be some facilitator that plays the role water does in geology. Water tends to remain in liquid form all the way through crystallization, which compensates for the increase in viscosity that takes place on cooling, allowing fractional crystallization to go to completion in certain pegmatites.
It seems that, in the brain, states become conscious once they “crystallize” into what an IIT-based model might describe as feedback loops. (Some physicalist model this as standing waves?). Each state could be viewed as analogous to a crystal belonging to a mineral family and existing somewhere on a composition spectrum. For each to crystallize as fast and distinctly as possible, there should be just the right amount of a water activity equivalent. Too much and things stay liquid, too little and no unique new states appear.
It may perhaps be possible to tease out such “mental water” by analyzing brain scan data and comparing them with element fractionation models from geochemistry?
Eliezer Yudkowsky has pointed out that something that is not very high hanging must have upgraded the human brain so that it became able to make mental models of things no animal would (presumably) even begin to think of. Something where sheer size would not suffice as an explanation. It couldn’t be high hanging since the evolutionary search space available between early hominids and homo sapiens is small in terms of individuals, generations, and genetic variability. Could it be a single factor that does the job as crystallization facilitator to get the brain primed to produce a huge qualia range? For survival, the bulk of mental states would need to remain largely as they are in other animals, but with an added icing on the cake which turned out to confer a decisive strategic advantage.
It should be low hanging for AI developers, too, but in order to find it they may have to analyze models of qualia state-space and not just models of causal chains in network configurations…

Letter VIII: Tacking on the Winds of Valence
We just thought of something on the subjects of group intelligence and mental issues. Consider a possible QRI framing: valence realism is key to understanding all conscious agency. The psyche takes the experienced valence axis to be equal to “the truth” about the objects of attention which appear experientially together with states of valence. Moment to moment.
Realism coupled with parsimony means it is most likely not possible for a psyche to step outside their experience and override this function. (Leaving out the complication of non-conscious processes here for a moment). But of course learning does exist. Things in psyches can be re-trained within bounds which differ from psyche to psyche. New memories form and valence set-points become correspondingly adjusted.
Naïvely it can be believed that it is possible to go against negative valence. If you muster enough willpower, or some such. Like a sailboat moving against the wind by using an engine. But what if it’s a system which has to use the wind for everything? With tacking, you can use the wind to move against the wind. It’s more advanced, and only experienced sailors manage to do it optimally. Advanced psyches can couple expectations (strategic predictive modeling) with a high valence associated with the appropriate objects that correlate with strategic goals. If strong enough, such valence gives a net positive sum when coupled with unpleasant things which need to be “overcome” to reach strategic goals.
You can “tack” in mental decision space. The expert psycho-mariner makes mental models of how the combinatorics of fractal valence plays out it in their own psyche and in others. Intra- and inter-domain valence summation modeling. Not quite there yet but the QRI is the group taking a systematic approach to it. We realize that’s what social superintelligences should converge towards. Experiential wellbeing and intelligence can be made to work perfectly in tandem for, in principle, arbitrarily large groups.

It is possible to make a model of negative valence states and render the model to appear in positive valence “lighting”. Sadism is possible, and self-destructive logic is possible. “I deserve to suffer so it is good that I suffer”. The valence is mixed but as long as the weighted sum is positive, agency moves in the destructive direction in these cases. Dysfunction can be complicated.
But on the bright side, a formalism that captures the valence summation well enough should be an excellent basis for ethics and for optimizing intelligences for both agency and wellbeing. This extends to group intelligences. The weight carried by various instantiations of positive and negative valence is then accessible for modeling and it is no longer necessary to consider it a moral imperative to want to destroy everything just to be on the safe side against any risk of negative experience taking place somewhere.
Is it possible to tack on the winds of group valence?
At this early stage we are however faced with the problem of how influential premature conclusions of this type can be, and how much is too much. Certain areas in philosophy and ideology are, to most people, more immediately rewarding than science and engineering, and cheaper, too. But more gets done by a group of scientists who are philosophically inspired than by a group of philosophers who are scientifically inspired.
Could this be in the ballpark-ish?
Stay safe and symmetric!
– Maggie & Anders


10 Ways Perception Distorts Reality

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite.

– William Blake

1. You don’t perceive the environment. There is no public world. Instead, your local environment partially selects your brain states, some of which are experienced as your external surroundings. Mind-independent reality is a speculative metaphysical inference (sadly a strong one, IMO). Contra William Blake (and Aldous Huxley), there are no see-through doors of perception in need of a good wash, just cranial prisons.
2. Whether you are awake or dreaming, your world-simulation is populated by zombies. When you are awake, these zombies are the avatars of sentient beings, but the imposters loom larger than their hypothetical real-world counterparts.
3. Your egocentric world-simulation resembles a grotesque cartoon. Within the cartoon, you are the hub of reality, the most important being in the universe, followed by your close genetic relatives, lovers, friends and allies. On theoretical grounds, you may wonder if this fitness-enhancing hallucination can be trusted. After all, trillions of other sentient beings apparently share an analogous illusion. In practice, the idea of your playing a humble role in the great scheme of things can be hard to take seriously, unless the hub of the universe is psychologically depressed. Wikipedia’s List of Messiah Claimants could be enlarged.
4. Perceptual direct realism spawns a “magical” theory of reference. If direct realism is delusional, then what is the mysterious relationship between thought-episodes internal to your world-simulation and the external world? (cf. What is the current state of affairs in philosophy concerning the symbol grounding problem?).
5. A realistic interpretation of the formalism of quantum physics confirms that not just the Lockean “secondary” properties of material objects are mind-dependent, but also their “primary” properties (cf. Primary/secondary quality distinction). Shades of Bishop Berkeley? (“Esse est percipi” – “to be is to be perceived”) Kant? Not exactly, but classical physics and Copenhagen-style positivism alike are false theories of reality.
6. According to “no-collapse” quantum mechanics (Everett), you have no unique future, and no unique past. You are not the same person as your countless ancestral namesakes nor the countless folk who wake up tomorrow with an approximation of your memories (cf. Was Parfit correct about consciousness and how we’re not the same person that we were when we were born?).
7. You experience the illusion of embodiment. “In-the-body” hallucinations in biological minds pervade the animal kingdom. As out-of-body experiences on dissociative anaesthetics like ketamine reveal, physical bodies as normally conceived are cross-modally-matched illusions generated by the CNS. Or alternatively, dualism is true. Actually, not everyone has the chronic illusion of embodiment. People with negative autoscopy can stare into a virtual mirror in their phenomenal world-simulation and not see themselves. For evolutionary reasons, negative autoscopy is rare.
8. You experience the illusion of four-dimensional space-time, not high-dimensional Hilbert space. This idea is more controversial. Hilbert space is a generalisation of ordinary Euclidian space to an intuitively huge number of dimensions – conventionally infinite, though the holographic entropy bound suggests the dimensionality of what naïve realists call the observable universe is finite. Quantum mechanics may be understood via the mathematical structure of Hilbert space (cf. Nothing happens in the Universe of the Everett Interpretation). Typically, Hilbert space is treated instrumentally as a mere mathematical abstraction, even by Everettians. As David Wallace, a critic, puts it: “Very few people are willing to defend Hilbert-space realism in print.” In the interests of mental health, such self-censorship may be wise.
9. Experienced psychonauts would echo William James, “…our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the flimsiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” Quite so. Our posthuman successors may regard everyday Darwinian consciousness as delusive in ways that transcend the expressive power of a human conceptual scheme.
10. We do not understand reality. Any account of our misperceptions must pass over the unknown unknowns. I fear we’re missing not only details, but the key to the plot.

10 Ways Perception Distorts Reality


Mini-Series on Open Individualism

Part 1: Introduction

In this video I introduce the concept of Open Individualism- the idea that we are all one consciousness -, why it is relevant, and who has historically been a proponent of it (Hinduism, Einstein, Schopenhauer, Schrödinger, etc.).
We also cover the fact that there is a distinction between Open Individualism as an experience and Open Individualism as a philosophical position with rigorous arguments. I mention that I generally consider arguments to be more powerful and useful than just relying on first-person experiences, though experiences certainly have their place.
Part 2: Definitions

We define and illustrate:

Closed Individualism (“you are a separate observer that exists from moment to moment”)
Empty Individualism (“you are just a moment of experience”)
Open Individualism (“we are all one consciousness”)

Part 3: Strongest Arguments

In this video we provide some of the strongest arguments in favor of Open Individualism:

Based on continuity of identity from moment to moment.
Reductio ad absurdum of Closed Individualism.

Fission.
Fussion.
Lack of viable Identity Carriers (IC).

Based on parsimony.
Undecidability.
Self-locating uncertainty when taking a “view from nowhere”.

Part 4: Loneliness, Psychosis, Ecstasy

I address some key considerations when investigating Open Individualism:

It is crucial to distinguish between our human feelings about a certain idea and the merits and drawbacks of that idea on its own.
Open Individualism tends to cause a lot of bliss at first (caused by defanging death)
But Open Individualism can often take a turn for the bad.
It makes you realize that you won’t only not die, which is good, but also be forced to experience all of the suffering of the world (or multiverse).
More so, it can make you feel “cosmically lonely” – a feeling typical of bad trips where the focus is the pursuit of oneness.
While the increased sense of responsibility caused by Open Individualism is good, it is important not to be overwhelmed by the suffering of the world. As they say “one day at a time” and perhaps we could extend that advise to “one lifetime at a time”.
The feeling of loneliness is likely the result of mixing deep brain circuits evolved to track things like one’s place in the tribe via feelings of belongingness and togetherness, which can get deactivated or over-activated when fully internalizing otherwise-neutral philosophical viewpoints. In other words, those feelings are reflections of our mammal brain’s response to Open Individualism rather than inherent to the philosophy in and of itself.

I also briefly mention the interesting relationship between the ways we represent the world and valence (i.e. the pleasure-pain axis). Given the Symmetry Theory of Valence, which claims that more “consonant and symmetrical” states of consciousness feel better, experiencing “unitive states of mind” usually comes with the “dissolution of internal boundaries”. Therefore, to actively simulate a world where we are all one is likely to come with very positive feelings (perhaps even orgasmic, and ecstatic). Yet, this is not intrinsic of oneness as such – rather, it’s an artifact of the way valence is implemented in the brain! Subtle, but key, distinction.
Finally, I also explain that “the highest truth” is not oneness:
In some sense, Open Individualism is “level 0” – it is the start of a journey of self-discovery. We still need to address things like how to eliminate extreme suffering, understand how physics describes fields of qualia, the binding problem, how causality interfaces with consciousness, what makes consciousness have an “arrow of time”, and so on. While oneness is a piece of the puzzle, it is by no means “the final answer”. To think otherwise leads to mental pathologies that constrict- rather than expand- one’s understanding and engagement with the world.
Part 5: Ethics, Coordination, Game Theory

In this video I discuss the beneficial implications of Open Individualism. Namely:

Its ethical implications, where one feels a sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of all sentient beings.
Its ability to solve coordination problems.
Its game-theoretical effects.

I cover how a cultural, philosophical, and scientific movement that grounds the feelings of oneness and universal love in rigorous philosophy and science would be much more powerful and consequential than yet another attempt at a naïve spreading of “peace, love, and harmony”. Indeed, it is the philosophical strength of Open Individualism, rather than just its experiential component, that makes it viable as a tool for solving coordination problems.
In particular, I explain that studying 5-MeO-DMT and MDMA from a rigorous, scientific, and methodical point of view is one of the most promising ways of changing the world for the better. Creating reliable, sane, and integrative methods of experiencing oneness and universal love could help us transform weak feelings of altruism into a solid and powerful new conception of decision theoretic rationality.
We invite you to think with us about how to carry this out for the benefit of all sentient beings.

Mini-Series on Open Individualism


The QRI Ecosystem: Friends, Collaborators, Blogs, Media, and Adjacent Communities

The Qualia Research Institute has the vision of a world free from involuntary suffering in which conscious agents are empowered to have full control over their lived experiences. Its mission tackles this objective by combining foundational research on consciousness with a focus on explaining the mathematical properties of pleasure and pain for a full, formal account of valence.
By relating our mission to existing memeplexes, we could perhaps accurately describe the ethos of QRI as “Qualia Formalist Sentientist Effective Altruism“. That’s a mouthful. Let’s break it down:

Qualia Formalism refers to the notion that experience has a precise mathematical description that ties it with physics (for a more detailed breakdown see the Formalism section of the glossary).
Sentientism refers to the claim that value and disvalue are entirely expressed in the nature and quality of conscious experiences. In other words, that the only reason why states of affairs matter is because of the way in which they impact experiences.
Effective Altruism refers to the view that we can aspire to do the most good we can rather than settle for less. If you examine the actual extent to which different interventions cash out in terms of reduction in suffering throughout the world, you will notice that they follow a long-tail distribution. Thus, research on how to prioritize interventions really pays off. Focusing on the top interventions (and being willing to spend extra time digging for even better ones) can multiply your positive impact by orders of magnitude.

We could thus say that people and organizations are more or less aligned with QRI to the extent that they are aligned with each of these notions and their combinations thereof. More so, QRI also values the practice of rational psychonautics and the study of one’s own mind with meditation – hence we also include lists of rational psychonauts and great dharma teachers.
Find below the list of people and organizations that have a significant degree of alignment with QRI on each front. We also include a list of blogs and websites from readers of our work, which is meant to incentivize community-building around the aforementioned core ideas.
Format:
Name of Person/Organization – Blog/Website/Media [if any] (Representative Post of the Author- Sometimes Not from Their Primary Site [if any])

QRI Canon
Qualia Research Institute – QRI (Glossary)
Michael Edward Johnson – Open Theory (Neural Annealing)
Andrés Gómez Emilsson – Qualia Computing (Wireheading Done Right)
Current and Former QRI Employees and Collaborators Who Write About QRI Topics
Romeo Stevens – Neurotic Gradient Descent (Core Transformation)
Quintin Frerichs – The Youtopia Project (Wada Test + Phenomenal Puzzles)
Andrew “Zuck” Zuckerman – andzuck.com (Super Free Will)
Kenneth Shinozuka – Blank Horizons (A Future for Humanity)
Wendi Yan – wendiyan.com (The Psychedelic Club)
Jeremy Hadfield – jeremyhadfield.com (How to Steal a Vibe)
Elin Ahlstrand – Mind Nomad (Floating Through First Fears)
Margareta Wassinge and Anders Amelin – Qualia Productions (When AI Means Advanced Incompetence)
List of current and former QRI collaborators and volunteers not listed above (in no particular order): Patrick Taylor, Hunter Meyer, Sean McGowan, Alex Zhao, Boian Etropolski, Robin Goins, Bence Vass, Brian Westerman, Jacob Shwartz-Lucas.

People and Organizations that Advocate for Sentientism and the Elimination of Suffering
David Pearce – Hedweb.com (The Hedonistic Imperative)
Manu Herrán – manuherran.com (Psychological Biases that Impede the Success in the Reduction of Intense Suffering Movement)
Jonathan Leighton – jonathanleighton.org (Why Access to Morphine is a Human Right)
Magnus Vinding – magnusvinding.com (Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications)
Robert Daoust – robert.algosphere.org (Review of Precursor Works)
Jacob Shwartz-Lucas – Invincible Wellbeing (Pleasure in the Brain)
Algosphere Alliance – algosphere.org (Vision)
Organization for the Prevention of Intense Suffering (OPIS) – preventsuffering.org (Cluster Headaches and Potential Therapies)
Sentience Research – sentience-research.org (Algonomy)
People and Organizations Aligned with Qualia Formalism
Giulio Tononi – integratedinformationtheory.org (Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul)
Steven Lehar – slehar.com (Harmonic Resonance Theory)
Jonathan W. D. Mason – jwmason.net (Quasi-Conscious Multivariate System)
Johannes Kleiner – jkleiner.de (Mathematical Consciousness Science)
Dan Lloyd – Labyrinth of Consciousness (The Music of Consciousness)
Luca Turin – A Spectroscopic Mechanism for Primary Olfactory Reception (The Science of Scent)
William Marshall – Google Scholar (PyPhi)
Larissa Albantakis – Google Scholar (Causal Composition)
Models of Consciousness Conference – models-of-consciousness.org (YouTube channel)
People and Organizations Aligned with Effective Altruism
Nick Bostrom – nickbostrom.com (What is a Singleton?)
Anders Sandberg – aleph.se (Uriel’s Stacking Problem)
Toby Ord – tobyord.com (The Precipice)
80000 Hours – 80000hours.org (We Could Feed All 8 Billion People Through a Nuclear Winter)
Future of Humanity Institute – fhi.ox.ac.uk (Publications)
Future of Life Institute – futureoflife.org (AI Alignment Podcast: Identity and the AI Revolution with David Pearce and Andrés Gómez Emilsson)
Center on Long-Term Risk – longtermrisk.org (The Case for Suffering-Focused Ethics)
Rethink Priorities – rethinkpriorities.org (Invertebrate Welfare Cause Profile)
Happier Lives Institute – happierlivesinstitute.org (Cause Profile: Mental Health)
Effective Altruism Forum – forum.effectivealtruism.org (Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain)

Rational Psychonautics
Steven Lehar – slehar.com (The Grand Illusion)
James Kent – psychedelic-information-theory.com (The Control Interrupt Model of Psychedelic Action)
Alexander Shulgin – Shulgin Research Institute (Phenethylamines I Have Known And Loved)
Thomas S. Ray – Breadth and Depth (Psychedelics and the Human Receptorome)
Matthew Baggott – Beyond Fear: MDMA and Emotion (MDA and Contour Integration)
Psychonaut Wiki – psychonautwiki.org (Visual Effects)
Psychedelic Replications – reddit.com/r/replications (Best of All Times Replications – specific floor tile example)
Great Dharma Teachers
Daniel M. Ingram – Integrated Daniel (No-Self vs. True Self)
Leigh Brasington – leighb.com (Right Concentration)
Shinzen Young – shinzen.org (The Science of Enlightenment)
Culadasa – culadasa.com (Joy and Meditation)

QRI Friends and Supporters
Ryan Ferris and James Ormrod – The Good Timeline  (5-MeO-DMT, Paradise Engineering)
Adrian Nelson – Origins of Consciousness (Consciousness Blindness in Science Fiction)
Alex K. Chen – Quora (What are the long term effects of Adderall, Dexedrine, or Ritalin use?)
Andy Vargas – Neologos (Praxis for Open Individualism; Purpose Statement)
Tyger Gruber – tygergruber.com (The Show)
Jacob Lyles – Jacob ex machina (Building a Better Anti-Capitalism)
Adjacent Communities, Organizations, and Allies
Scott Alexander – Slate Start Codex (Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics and the Anarchic Brain)
Geoffrey Miller – Primal Poly (The Mating Mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature)
Zvi Mowshowitz – Don’t Worry About the Vase (More Dakka)
Sarah Constantin – Multiple websites: 1, 2, 3 (More Dakka in Medicine)
Scott Aaronson – scottaaronson.com/blog/ (Why I Am Not An Integrated Information Theorist)
Gwern – gwern.net (Iodine and IQ Meta-Analysis)
Venkatesh Rao – Ribbonfarm (Why We Slouch)
David Chapman – meaningness.com (Romantic Rebellion)
Atman Retreat – atmanretreat.com (FAQ)
Foresight Institute – foresight.org (YouTube Channel)
Convergence Analysis – convergenceanalysis.org (List of Works)
Simulation Series – About (YouTube Channel)
Consciousness Hacking – cohack.org (blog posts)
HeartMath Institute – heartmath.org (Chapter on Coherence)
The Wider World of People Who are Friends and Acquaintances of the QRI Ecosystem
Note: I asked (on social media) our readers to share their blogs and personal sites with us. Some of these links are very aligned with QRI and some are not. That said, together they represent a good sample of the memetic ecosystem that surrounds QRI. Namely, these links can be taken as a whole to be suggestive of “the memetic ground upon which QRI is founded”. Please feel free to share your blog or personal site in the comment section of this post.
Jack Foust – Welcome to the Symbolic Domain
Scott Jackisch – Oakland Futurist (Art as a Superweapon)
Maurits Luyben – Energy and Structure
Anonymous – deluks917 (What does ‘Actually Trying’ look like?)
Sameer Halai – sameerhalai.com (Toilet Paper Shortage is Not Caused by Hoarding)
Yohan John – neurologism.com (Some Wild Speculation On Goodhart’s Law And Its Manifestations In The Brain)
Jamie Joyce – The Society Library (Deconstructing the Logic of “Plandemic”)
João Mirage – YouTube Channel (The Mirror of the Spirit)
Natália Mendonça – Axiomatic Doubts (What Truths are Worth Seeking?)
Dustin Ali Francis Janatpour – Tales From Samarkand (The Inspector and the Crow)
Zarathustra Amadeus Goertzel – zarathustra.gitlab.io (Garden of Minds)
Duncan Sabien – Human Parts (In Defense of Punch Bug)
Brenda Esquivel – Abanico de Historias (La Reina Tamar y el Pájaro Condenado)
Vishnu Bachani – vishnubachani.com (Latent Possibilities of the Tonal System)
Martin Utheraptor Duřt – utheraptor.art (Psychedelic Series)
Qiaochu Yuan – Thicket Forte (Monist Nihilism)
Jedediah Logan – Medium Account (Coping with Death During the COVID-19 Crisis)
Eliezer da Silva – eliezersilva.blog (Prior Specification via Prior Predictive Matching)
Cassandra McClure – Lexicaldoll (On Save States)
Gaige Clark – mad.science.blog / Querky Science (The Phoenix Effect)
Ben Finn – optima.blog (Too much to do? Plan your day with Hopscotch [longer])
Michael Dello-Iacovo – michaeldello.com (How I Renounced Christianity and Became Atheist)
Robin Hanson – Overcoming Bias (What Can Money Buy Directly?)
Katja Grace – meteuphoric.com, Worldly Positions, AI Impacts
Mundy Otto Reimer – mundyreimer.github.io (On Thermodynamics, Agency, and Living Systems)
Khuyen Bui – Medium Account (Beyond Ambition)
Jessica Watson Miller – Autotranslucence (Art as the Starting Point; Becoming a Magician)
Aella – knowingless.com (The Trauma Narrative)
Jacob Falkovich – Put a Number on It (The Scent of Bad Psychology)
Javi Otero – iawaketechnologies.com (Fractal Entrainment: A New Psychoacoustic Technology Inspired by Nature)
José Luis Ricón – Nintil
Eliot Redelman – BearLamp
Tee Barnett – teebarnett.com (Are you a job search drone?)
Juan Fernandez Zaragoza – filosofiadelfuturo.com (Pandemia de Ideas)
Eric Layne – (The Antidote to a Global Crisis)
Kazi Adi Shakti – holo-poiesis.com (Beyond Affirmation and Negation)
Pushan Kumar Datta – kaiserpush1 (Ramayana and Cognition of Self)
Yan Liu – Inflection Point (Seeing a World Unshackled from Neoclassical Economics)
Joseph Kelly – (Entrepreneurship is Metaphysical Labor)
Logan Thrasher Collins – logancollinsblog.com
Malcolm Ocean – malcolmocean.com (Transcending Regrets, Problems, and Mistakes)
Jesse Parent – (Why ‘Be Yourself’ is Still Excellent Relationship Advice)
Milan Griffes – Flight From Perfection (Contemplative Practices, Optimal Stopping, Explore/Exploit)
Cody Kuiack – cosmeffect.com (The Holomorphic Self – Meditations)
Daniel Eth – thinkingofutils.com (Quantum Computing for Morons)
Brian P. Ellis – brianpellis.net (Refuting Dr. Erickson and Dr. Massihi)
John Greer – johncgreer.com (The Three Buckets)

Finally: List of Other Relevant Lists
Effective Altruism Blogs – eablogs.net
LessWrong Wiki – List of Rationalist Diaspora Blogs
Effective Altruism Hub – effectivealtruism.org (Resources)
Open Individualism Readings – r/OpenIndividualism (Wiki Reading List)
Phenomenal Binding Resources – binding-problem.com
Physicalist Hotlinks – physicalism.com/physicalist-hotlinks


Fire Kasina: Color Control Experience Report by Daniel Ingram

Transcribed excerpt from Daniel Ingram‘s Fire Kasina retreat diary (part 1) [24:20-39:50]
[Daniel spent two weeks practicing 10 to 14 hours a day a fire-focused meditation called Fire Kasina. This meditation technique involves, among other things, looking at a candle flame and then closing one’s eyes and examining the after-image of the fire, and doing this repeatedly over many hours. He started getting interesting visual effects on the second day of the retreat. Over the course of the first week he cycled between difficult and effortless meditation sessions, experienced lots of Jhana and Jhana-Kasina hybrid experiences, reported weird dreams, and described visual hallucinations of various sorts. As the week went on he started experiencing a strange and dysphoric change during the evenings: rather than colors being intensified, something about his experience seemed to be turning every color into grey. Fire Kasina is used to amplify the experience of phenomenal color to great heights, so it seemed strange that for some reason after several days of the practice everything started being grey; he couldn’t stop it. Nonetheless, he persevered. What follows is his description of the meditation breakthrough he experienced on the 7th day of the retreat.]
[24:20]: I was thinking that one of the interesting things that has happened was that the Goddess of Fire told me that I should become a King of Fire – hehe – which seems a bit of a stretch, but it was inspiring anyway. And so the Tarot card for “King of Fire” is the King of Wands and the message is to be a super-dad, to be supportive of the family, to be good in relationships, to be good in career, accomplish it all simultaneously… and smile while doing it. Interesting instructions. Probably of great relevance and utility if properly applied. Anyway. There it is.
Well, so, the grey I’ve been seeing at the end of the night turns out is a doorway to wondrous, wondrous things. So, this morning my sitting was good, and clear, and relatively typical for a good morning sit. And then in the afternoon: Wow! For my first sit of the afternoon my mantra became “Orchestral” added to all sorts of other parts. And it began just shuddering at the whole of reality. It became exquisite, amazing, like basking in the presence of a “Divine Orchestra”: The radiator was making interesting sounds. Duncan also described this beautiful music, which I now understand. Well, it became exquisite, and it all harmonized into this wondrous thing that I wanted to record. I wanted to get it on my laptop on my Logic Pro and somehow figure out how to recreate what I was hearing and experiencing. I felt like I could sit there forever while the mantra was going on, powerful and remarkable.
The next sit is when the colors opened up. And then I started to notice that out of the black, and white, and grey, colors were showing up. And I had noticed this before. A sort of copper or magenta that was, you know, a very exquisite color off of the white and grey. And yellow off of the white, and grey, and black, that was different and new.
And THIS was like, every color was suddenly there. And I could morph the color into any color. Exquisite colors. Subtleties of hue and shade… that wouldn’t exist in the best art store in the entire universe selling all the coolest shades and paint colors of light. And it would shift through magnificent yellows and sparkling golds into rich oranges and amber colors, and peach tones, and magenta, and reds, and rich reds, and bright reds, and pinkish reds, and subtle pinks, and silver pinks, and pale… pale, pale whiteish pinks of the most exquisite variety, and down into the blues and into purples, into the blue-greens and I got greens… and remarkable rich greens, amazing greens, forest greens, Kelly greens, silver greens, light peridot greens. Incredible colors. And the violet hues! Deep rich violet. And even the greys were exquisite: silver black, steel black, silver grey… just unbelievable shades even between black and white that weren’t even colored but were just exquisite.
In the sit I felt like it could go on forever. I could call up whatever color and just give it a few seconds and it would just shift into the new color. And then I went outside when Tommy came here (great guy) […]. I went out to see him and I was high as a freaking kite on just seeing the most amazing exquisite colors due to the power of this meditation. And everything, the greys of the driveway were awesome, the leaf colors were amazing, the sky… the plants, the plants… some of the greens of the plants were just magnificent. Like, just overwhelming beauty.

And then things progressed and I got so that I could turn these colors into anything I wanted, and just give it a few seconds and it would show up. So I created a dragon in a sort of magnificent purple-dark-green-dark-blue-iridescent scaly set of colors. And had his fire breadth come out as first as reddish, and then purple, and green, and yellow, and black. Just amazing!

And then I would make one half of my visual field one color, and one half the other color, and compare the two colors and fine-tune the shades until they went together just exquisitely… anyway, I simply just had an utterly mind-bogglingly enjoyable time playing with the ability to create shades of light and color and images with them just effortlessly, just by asking for them to show up. And I was getting fruitions off of these colors. I got a fruition just off of peach. A sort of exquisite peach color.
And then, finally… finally… and here it is… day 7 or 8 of this retreat… I was able to get the images starting like I got before. Spinning things like they would take everything out and lead to fruition and do that again and again like I got multiple fruitions would just go back to the spinning things, and take out the spinning things. And I got this amber, sort of pixelated squares, and they stuttered and came out by the impermanence door. This has just been an amazing, amazing day.
The glorious highs of it are wearing off. And if I crash as hard as I went up, I’m going to be in trouble. Because it would be hard to overstate how exquisite these sits have been this afternoon and evening. Anyway, so Duncan is now seeing the grey… so he may be close. And Florian is been getting white and black, so he may be close to these things as well. It would be fascinating to see if they have the same ecstatic reaction that I’ve had. Truly the word “rapturous” barely does justice to how much fun the day has been. Anyway…
So, be well.
[…]
[36:00]: Note to self: “Do this more often!”. Goodness gracious! The appreciation of color, the peace in the body, the stability of attention… unbelievable, amazing. The color control is remarkable. The ability to tune into your colors, to any shade, just… it is hard to explain how fun that is. Now I can generate images that demonstrate parallax, so that when I move my head, they would move like you’d think they should move in relationship with how I move my head. So they now have a 3-dimensional spatial life.
Got a fruition by creating a fire-breathing dragon, and then turning the fire on myself. And when it reached my eyes, that caused the fruition. I’ve seen landscapes, and 3-dimensional spatial structures, and visions of just such exquisite, complicated, intricate, amazing, and diverse beauty. It is hard to explain the gratitude I feel for these practices and what they can do. And that I’m in such fine company: Duncan, and Florian, and Tommy are all excellent people. Extremely helpful, great attitudes, fascinating backgrounds and knowledges and skillsets. They are truly remarkable people and I’m grateful to have found them and to have the opportunity to sit with them and share these things. We laugh nearly continuously during our meals, which are exquisite. We keep each other well entertained somehow, still get very deep transformative practice time in. They are respectful of everyone, of these things, and good practitioners. So it’s a joy to be practicing with them.
I’ve seen one image that had a sense of intelligence sitting on a chair change form again and again and again. Into all these different types of entities. But I haven’t yet gotten a proper kind of fruition with the intelligent eyes looking back at me yet on this retreat. So… more to do. I still haven’t done the candle flame, moving things with my mind. But perhaps that is coming. I hope so. Alright, dear listener, or listeners, whoever you may be, I hope you are well. I hope that one day you have the interest and opportunity to practice these things as we are here today. For this is the good stuff, as they say.

Relevant:

Free-Wheeling Hallucinations

Daniel Ingram talks about “color control” during Fire Kasina meditation – the ability to control the phenomenal color of experience. Can this be achieved pharmacologically?
Cognitive scientist Steven Lehar reports that combining LSD, Ketamine, and THC at the same time can give rise to an interesting phenomenon he calls “free-wheeling hallucinations”.
These hallucinations are the psychedelic equivalent of lucid dreams. Namely, they are very intense but highly controllable states of mind where you can “will into being” whatever you want (up to a certain level of complexity).
It’s as if you’ve gained “root access” to the parameters of your inner world-simulation and you can create complex psychedelic scenery and simulated environments.
Remarkably, one can investigate the connection between symmetry, harmony, and valence on these states.

Generalized Wada Test and the Total Order of Consciousness

Daniel Ingram talks about developing the ability of instantiating one color on one side of the visual field and a different color on the other in order to compare them side by side.
Wada tests are medical procedures in which only one of your brain hemispheres receives a sedative drug at a time. This can be useful in order to determine which hemisphere can be ablated in order to treat epilepsy.
But we could generalize it! We can inject one drug in one hemisphere and a different drug in another. In fact, this could be a core research paradigm in the future for qualia research.

Beyond Turing: A Solution to the Problem of Other Minds Using Mindmelding and Phenomenal Puzzles and Wada Test + Phenomenal Puzzles: Testing the Independent Consciousness of Individual Brain Hemispheres

Extending the above insight – one can in principle use Wada Tests in order to test the independent consciousness of another nervous system (even perhaps one of your hemispheres).
You can “solve the problem of other minds” on yourself with current technology by getting each of your hemispheres to solve “qualia puzzles” independently.

#46 – Daniel Ingram II (Pragmatic Buddhism)

A recent and fascinating interview where Daniel talks about his Fire Kasina practice and many other amazing things with Ryan Ferris.