Break Out of the Simulation Day: Televised Entity Contact, Injection Pulling Experiments, and the Brain as a Game Engine

[Epistemic Status: Wild Speculations]
TL;DR I came up with a new way to test the reality of DMT entities!
Core idea: Look for signatures of injection pulling in the brain's connectome-specific harmonic waves. This would distinguish between mere hallucinations (however weird they may feel) and hallucinations being driven by an external source.
Like the study about whether psychedelics can help you see through different Everett branches of the multiverse, I don't expect the results of this experiment to come out positive. But it's exciting to see a testable prediction on an otherwise so difficult-to-approach subject matter.

Televised Entity Contact
I think that we can basically assume that a certain percentage of people who vaporize DMT will believe that they contacted mind-independent beings. This is likely the result of hallucinations, but naïve realism and a bias to interpret more intense and detailed qualia as "more real than real external information" is so deeply ingrained that we can take it as a matter of fact that, say, 50%+ of people won't be able to override their felt-sense of entity presence with heady philosophical epistemic rigor like discussions about the pseudo-time arrow, valence structuralism, or indirect realism about perception.
Is there anything we can do with that? Think of it from an economics arbitrage point of view. If we predict that X number of people will newly believe in DMT entities next year, is there an opportunity there?
I was thinking yesterday on a walk about how "Storm Area 51" is a reality check of sorts for the general public. As in – yes Area 51 is a thing, and no, you can't just invade it with 100,000 people Naruto running towards it. It was predictable that would be the case, but going through the act in a collective and televised fashion was an interesting exercise in societal epistemology.

Click to view slideshow.
Along those lines, I suggest that a "Break Out of the Simulation Day" event could be organized. That day we would have, on LIVE TV, people doing DMT trying to contact aliens as a medium, the camera going from one person to the next, always making sure that whoever has the microphone is currently peaking on DMT.
So if the DMT Elves are mind-independent sentient beings and want to send a coherent message to humanity, then that would be the time and place to do it. They would have all of our attention.

Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect DMT Elves to send a coherent message when, surprise surprise, they are on LIVE TV all of a sudden. And this is not only because they won't have time to dress up. According to people who have tried DMT many times and believe it puts you in contact with other dimensions (cf. Dick Khan's 600 DMT trip reports) there is an entire ecosystem of entities to contact, each of them with special gifts, powers, intentions, and styles. There are jesters, robots, greys, Archons, angels, demons, wireheading specialists, used alien spaceship dealers (those are the worst), etc. There are entire categories of entities whose sole purpose is to convince you that you are dead, or that you are in a simulation, or that the government is out to get you. There are entire species of entities of the sort that show you how to use sound to create thought-forms, and those that like to discuss with you the impact that the Greeks and Aztecs had on the aesthetics of the reptilians (i.e. interdimensional art historians). You cannot expect to be lucky and get a reasonable DMT entity who (1) will figure out what is going on, and (2) has good intentions for humanity. Perhaps we would be opening ourselves up to influence by incompetent, evil, or incompetent and evil entities. Worse, we would be doing so on LIVE TV!
by Steven Haman (source)
Testing the Mind-Independent Existence of DMT Entities
Ok, so maybe televising the experiment is a bad idea. Back to the drawing board. Let's ask: what are the main ways to prove the independent existence of DMT entities? How would serious researchers[1] approach this problem? As far as I can tell, there are three big categories of methods:

Psi-based (having them tell you something about the world you would have no way of knowing otherwise)
Computation-based (having them solve a problem that requires much more computational power than what is available to you with your brain alone)
Quasi-Physical interference-based (have entities literally poke, shake, vibrate, excite, or inhibit your body or nervous system in ways that are impossible on their own)

The Psi-based category is the most well-known, and it includes tests such: (a) asking the entities what your family members are doing right now, (b) having them tell you what is inside a sealed box, (c) having them predict what tomorrow's lottery numbers will be, and so on. While many people claim to have learned valuable information from DMT entities, I've yet to see credible reports of positive tests of this kind.
The computation-based category is perhaps best exemplified by Marko Rodriguez' suggestion of having the entities factorize a large number for you. This method was popularized by Scott Alexander's now-famous short story Universal Love, Said the Cactus Person, and then later Gwern made an estimate of the cost of such an experiment. It turns out that testing the hypothesis this way could be as cheap as one thousand (of 2015) dollars. Unfortunately, this test is very hard to conduct (saying 200 digits while on DMT and memorizing sets of numbers with dozens of digits the elves return to you as an answer is not an easy task). So other difficult-to-compute but easy-to-articulate and fast-to-memorize problems might be a better fit in this case. I predict it is only a matter of time before someone seriously tries a variant of this method and reports the results online. I would just caution that, depending on the computational task selected, one may inadvertently discover new computational applications of the DMT state rather than prove the existence of mind-independent DMT entities. After all, unusual states of consciousness may have unique computational trade-offs. See for example: Thinking in Numbers, How to Secretly Communicate with People on LSD, and the discussion about the possible applications for mathematical research of the hyperbolic phenomenal space disclosed during DMT intoxication. Indeed, I would not be surprised to find out that in the year 2100 many of the most important mathematical breakthroughs are taking place in consciousness research centers thanks to having identified states of consciousness capable of rendering exotic mathematical objects and their possible transformations. So before concluding the DMT Elf solved your computationally-demanding problem, it would be important to rule out that it wasn't you (or the DMT-filled version of you) who solved the problem thanks to novel qualia varieties only disclosed in such a state. That said, this concern only applies to computational tasks that are not extremely difficult. If a DMT alien can factorize a 3000-digit number in 10 seconds then we could actually reasonably conclude that it exists in a mind-independent way.
Now, the 3rd approach is, IMO, both the most likely to work in practice, and also the most spooky and frightening were the results to come out positive. Here is why. I've recently received trip reports from rational psychonauts who have taken DMT hundreds of times, and it seems clear that there is a vast number of qualitatively distinct state-spaces disclosed by this substance. One of these such relatively rare idiosyncratic responses caught my attention, and I think it warrants closer scientific scrutiny. Namely, I've received reports that when the psychonaut is either tired or has been drinking (why anyone would dare take DMT while drunk is beyond me, but for science-I guess-someone already did it) there is a different kind of experience of a rather unpleasant nature that unfolds. This type of DMT experience is described as getting in contact with the "lower levels of the astral plane" in which parasitic etheric life-forms live (not my words). During such an experience, one may feel that these beings "jitter" your nervous system without asking for your permission to do so. And this is done in such a way that your body may literally get up and dance, as if possessed by a spirit, without your conscious control. In a less extreme presentation of this phenomenon, at the very least the entities seem to jerk one's extremities whether or not you like it. For example, in one of these trip reports someone described having their arm being pulled and jerked left and right by a demon of sorts while at the same time insectoid life-forms crawled inside their body, into the veins of the tripper. Needless to say, this is a profoundly unpleasant experience, no doubt, but perhaps it is also one of the most empirically testable of the bunch.
Injection Pulling Experiments
The big-picture idea here would be to hook a person up to an EEG during such a state (or even place them in an fMRI if at all possible) in order to determine if the "jittering" experienced is endogenously or exogenously generated.
How could we do this? Let's take a step back for a second and recall Selen Atasoy's study about the influence of LSD on the connectome-specific harmonic waves of the brain. The connectome-specific harmonic waves (CSHWs) are the "natural resonant modes" of a given brain. With this analysis, one can characterize a given "brain state" as a weighted sum of such resonant modes. In turn, one can then see how LSD affects one's brain state by analyzing the CSHWs while under its influence. As it turns out, there are three major effects from LSD: (a) an overall increase in the power of all CSHWs, (b) the higher-frequency harmonics gain even more power relative to the lower-frequency ones, and (c) the repertoire of possible states dramatically increases, meaning that CSHWs that usually don't co-occur are more likely to be simultaneously active while on LSD.
The thing to point out is that LSD in this case does not change which harmonic modes the brain has; it merely changes the energy distribution over those harmonics. On the other hand, we could in principle imagine that if the "DMT entity contact" brain state is not purely a hallucination, we would instead find out that such a state has a distinct "non-native harmonic pattern". And this would manifest in the form of injection pulling and injection locking signatures in the reconstructed patterns of brain activity from the neuroimaging data.
An analogy with a musical instrument is possible: assume that your brain is a musical instrument and that the notes it plays sound like those of a guitar. In this analogy, taking LSD would entail increasing the volume of each note (and especially so for the higher notes) while also increasing the range of possible note-combinations. In other words, while LSD changes what you can play with the guitar, it does not change the fact that you are playing a guitar. That is, the brain states produced by LSD can be explained as different configurations of otherwise native vibratory patterns. In contrast, if DMT entity contact involves an external energy source with its own characteristic resonant modes, then the brain state that results from it would seem to have non-native vibratory patterns. It would be like having a guitar that produces saxophone sounds. You would know that on its own it is not physically capable of producing such sounds, and hence infer it is being externally influenced somehow.
Are the jiggling patterns of your brain harmonics while on DMT best explained with or without an external metronome and its injection pulling effects?
Such an analysis might reveal that the jerking of the nervous system one experiences on those idiosyncratic DMT experiences is best explained with an injection pulling model and an external metronome marking the pace. In turn, this would imply that the brain is not merely hallucinating a scene, but rather, it is being influenced by an outside metronome. Now, that would be a scientifically-sound ground-breaking finding. And perhaps be so spooky we would all prefer to forget about it rather than contemplate its implications.[2]

Now, there is always the option to interpret all of the unusual phenomenal experiences on DMT with a scientific secular framework that excludes entities from other dimensions. At the Qualia Research Institute, the frameworks that we use to explain such unusual experiences involve what we call algorithmic reductions, namely, identifying a small set of data-structures and information-processing steps that when taken together are capable of generating the vast zoo of complex emergent effects. The advantage of this approach is two-fold. First, we avoid over-fitting by minimizing the information complexity of the model (few data structures and few operations is a vastly more parsimonious explanatory framework than ad-hoc spiritual or atomistic interpretations). And second, it allows us to generate predictions such as the possible existence of exotic phenomenal states that haven't yet been reported in the literature. Indeed, verifying that its predictions are accurate is one way of validating an algorithmic reduction.
In the case of DMT, we have algorithmic reduction models that explain the unusual properties of space as well as their associated exotic phenomenal time. And while providing compelling explanations for the exotic space and time one can experience in such a state is foundational, we recognize that this is still a first step. I admit that such models still do not go far enough. We still need to explain the nature and unusual character of "entity contact" experiences. So what do we make of them?
The Brain as a Game Engine
Our best guess- for the time being- involves reformulating the nature of the state-space of consciousness to include a layer of "game parameters". This was first brought up in the essay "Harmonic Society":
Consider what happens when someone takes LSD. Most people expect that they will simply get to experience new sensations like brighter colors, tracers, or synesthesia. This is true to a point, for light doses. But on medium doses, in addition to exploring the state-space of sensory configurations, one also experiences new aesthetics, which this model would define as ways of organizing a lot of sensations in ways that feel right. More so, an aesthetic is also a way of delivering uninhibited sensations in a way that feels good at the level of the whole experience, from moment to moment. Most people have no clue that there is a vast space of possibilities here.

On higher doses, people are surprised to find an even more general way of exploring the state-space of consciousness. Namely, one instantiates alternate games. The DMT "vibe" that people report can be thought of as more than a "context switch". It is, rather, a more radical change that we could describe as a "game switch". The "Jester" that people talk about regarding DMT experiences is an archetype that the mind uses to signal the "rule violation" quality of the state. There is so much going on that one's experience splits into multiple games at once trying to find some common ground, and this feeling of game-incompatibility feels very alien. A sort of anti-virus system in the mind is triggered at that point, and labels the inconsistency with a feeling of weirdness so that you know not to update your actions based on the (currently globally inconsistent) experience of multiple superimposed games. Rule violation through fast changes in implicit games of social status causes you to interpret what is going on as having extreme stakes. Interacting with DMT Aliens, Gods, Elves, etc. feels like the upper limit of potential social status transfer that your world simulation affords (like meeting a president or a king). The state-space of consciousness contains all of these alternate games and metagames, and we have not even begun to catalogue them.

– Harmonic Society (3/4): Art as State-Space Exploration and Energy Parameter Modulation
In other words, taking DMT does not merely propel you to other regions of the state-space of possible sensory impressions, but it also grants you access to alternate aesthetics[3] and game setups. If you think of your brain not only as a sensory-processing tool, but in fact as a kind of high-level game engine, realizing that God and the Devil can be real in your experience shows that they are possible characters of the games your brain can render. In such a case, we will eventually find that the brain states that render DMT entities are, however exotic, still produced by combining the native resonant modes of one's own nervous system. No need to invoke neuronal injection pulling from the etheric plane.
Of note is that such a "Game Engine" paradigm would go a long way in explaining unusual experiences such as Free-Wheeling Hallucinations where one becomes able to control almost all features of one's experience with an incredible level of detail. Indeed we can describe a Free-Wheeling Hallucination state as having access to an experience editor, as illustrated in the Memory Facility Scene of Blade Runner 2049:

Unsurprisingly, we can anticipate that when one is given root access to the parameters of one's own inner world-simulation, one is likely to focus on creating experiences entirely filled with enjoyable super-stimuli. Whether this involves sex-worlds or proofs of the existence of a benevolent God might be a function of what is it that one craves the most. The intense concern with theodicy and the nature of death while on psychedelic drugs might have something to do with having the ability to change the most essential parameters of one's internal world simulation. After all, if "living in a world" where God exists and is loving is more enjoyable than the alternative, one's own hedonic maximization algorithms would try to "realize that's the truth" if given the option to forge evidence. The same could be going on with DMT entities, for a world in which DMT is an interdimensional portal technology is vastly more interesting (or at least dramatic) than the alternative.
In the end, studying DMT experiences do not need to involve actual entity contact to be of profound significance to the science of consciousness. If you think of your brain as a qualia machine engine, DMT is about the best (or second-best [4]) qualia fuel there is. There are vast regions of the state-space of consciousness that can only be accessed with DMT, many of which contain extremely computationally interesting qualia, and many others which contain intrinsically valuable states (aka. heaven worlds). If, on top of that, it also enables interdimensional beings to injection pull your brain harmonics, we could think of that as icing on the cake.

[1] Serious and Unserious Consciousness Researchers
On a tangential note, here is a quote I recently heard at a consciousness conference:
Thomas Metzinger, the famous and brilliant German neuroscientist and philosopher of mind*, was once asked at a conference presentation he was giving whether he had ever tried psychedelics. His response? "There are two kinds of consciousness researchers. There are the serious ones, and the unserious ones. The serious ones take advantage of all the tools at their disposal to crack this mystery. All I will say is that I am NOT an unserious consciousness researcher."
*He is best known for being the writer of the books "Being No One" and "The Ego Tunnel", friends with the Foundational Research Institute, a strong proponent of a variant of eliminativism about consciousness, and a negative utilitarian specializing in AI ethics.

[2] Implications
If the injection pulling experiment does reveal that DMT entities are indeed mind-independent sentient beings in alternate dimensions, then what?
We shall cross that bridge when we get there, but in the meantime, let me entertain you with a wild hypothesis: DMT Elves are us at a higher level of spiritual and psychological development. In such a case, we might want to revise Integral Theory's levels to include DMT Elves. Expect Ken Wilber's next book to contain the following:
Larval Stages of the Soul Before Ascension
1) Mythical, 2) Machiavellian, 3) Religious Traditional, 4) Scientific Secular, 5) Postmodern Multiculturalist, 6) Burner, 7) DMT Elf, 8) Full-Spectrum Supersentient Superintelligence, 9) Hedonium Plasma Wave, and finally 10) Pure Love.

[3] An open question for all my DMT-using readers: are DMT visuals more akin to Art Deco, or Art Nouveau?

[4] On a Serious Note
My prediction is that the single most important tool to investigate consciousness is 5-MeO-DMT. It is probably the most important consciousness tool ever discovered. While I've seen serious consciousness researchers and academics admit in private that they have tried psychedelics, I almost never encounter people who have tried 5-MeO. I expect this to change over the course of the next decade as the word gets out that no, 5-MeO is not "yet another psychedelic" but it's the "real deal" when it comes to disclosing profoundly insightful states of consciousness with implications for personal identity, ethics, the state-space of qualia, the nature of valence (i.e. harmony vs. dissonance), phenomenal time, causality, and the importance of quantum coherence for phenomenal binding. If you have explored this compound and would like to share your insights, please get in touch. We always welcome high-quality trip reports.

Self-transforming machine thought-forms.
Valued for their intrinsic qualia;
sometimes used for qualia computing.

Featured image source: Machinist Sculpture Chris Bathgate


Is the Orthogonality Thesis Defensible if We Assume Both Valence Realism and Open Individualism?

Ari Astra asks: Is the Orthogonality Thesis Defensible if We Assume Both "Valence Realism" and Open Individualism?

Ari's own response: I suppose it's contingent on whether or not digital zombies are capable of general intelligence, which is an open question. However, phenomenally bound subjective world simulations seem like an uncharacteristic extravagance on the part of evolution if non-sphexish p-zombie general intelligence is possible.
Of course, it may be possible, but just not reachable through Darwinian selection. But the fact that a search process as huge as evolution couldn't find it and instead developed profoundly sophisticated phenomenally bound subjectivity is (possibly strong) evidence against the proposition that zombie AGI is possible (or likely to be stumbled on by accident).
If we do need phenomenally bound subjectivity for non-sphexish intelligence and minds ultimately care about qualia valence – and confusedly think that they care about other things only when they're below a certain intelligence (or thoughtfulness) level – then it seems to follow that smarter than human AGIs will converge on valence optimization.
If OI is also true, then smarter than human AGIs will likely converge on this as well – since it's within the reach of smart humans – and this will plausibly lead to AGIs adopting sentience in general as their target for valence optimization.
Friendliness may be built into the nature of all sufficiently smart and thoughtful general intelligence.
If we're not drug-naive and we've conducted the phenomenological experiment of chemically blowing open the reducing valves that keep "mind at large" out and that filteratively shape hominid consciousness, we know by direct acquaintance that it's possible to hack our way to more expansive awareness.
We shouldn't discount the possibility that AGI will do the same simply because the idea is weirdly genre bending. Whatever narrow experience of "self" AGI starts with in the beginning, it may quickly expand out of.

Michael E. Johnson's response: The orthogonality thesis seems sound from 'far mode' but always breaks down in 'near mode'. One way it breaks down is in implementation: the way you build an AGI system will definitely influence what it tends to 'want'. Orthogonality is a leaky abstraction in this case.
Another way it breaks down is that the nature and structure of the universe instantiates various Schelling points. As you note, if Valence Realism is true, then there exists a pretty big Schelling point around optimizing that. Any arbitrary AGI would be much more likely to optimize for (and coordinate around) optimizing for positive qualia than, say, paperclips. I think this may be what your question gets at.
Coordination is also a huge question. You may have read this already, but worth pointing to: A new theory of Open Individualism.
To collect some threads- I'd suggest that much of the future will be determined by the coordination capacity and game-theoretical equilibriums between (1) different theories of identity, and (2) different metaphysics.
What does 'metaphysics' mean here? I use 'metaphysics' as shorthand for 'the ontology people believe is 'real'. What they believe we should look at when determining moral action.'
The cleanest typology for metaphysics I can offer is: some theories focus on computations as the thing that's 'real', the thing that ethically matters – we should pay attention to what the *bits* are doing. Others focus on physical states – we should pay attention to what the *atoms* are doing. I'm on team atoms, as I note here: Against Functionalism.
My suggested takeaway: an open individualist who assumes computationalism is true (team bits) will have a hard time coordinating with an open individualist who assumes physicalism is true (team atoms) — they're essentially running incompatible versions of OI and will compete for resources. As a first approximation, instead of three theories of personal identity – Closed Individualism, Empty Individualism, Open Individualism – we'd have six. CI-bits, CI-atoms, EI-bits, EI-atoms, OI-bits, OI-atoms. Whether the future is positive will be substantially determined by how widely and deeply we can build positive-sum moral trades between these six frames.
Maybe there's further structure, if we add the dimension of 'yes/no' on Valence Realism. But maybe not– my intuition is that 'team bits' trends toward not being valence realists, whereas 'team atoms' tends toward it. So we'd still have these core six.
(I believe OI-atoms or EI-atoms is the 'most true' theory of personal identity, and that upon reflection and under consistency constraints agents will converge to these theories at the limit, but I expect all six theories to be well-represented by various agents and pseudo-agents in our current and foreseeable technological society.)


Toy Story 4 – 20 Movie Review

Toy Story was my favorite movie growing up. I had the entire collection. The fact that the toys could think without a brain made me explore dualism, monism, the existence of God, and nofap (see next slides). Toy Story 4 is weird as fuck for a Disney movie. Due to the psychedelics Renaissance and mass awakening, people want everything to be increasingly trippy.
Forky is probably the weirdest Disney character of all time. It's like the producers and writers got together in a room and brainstormed, "emm how can we strip a character down to its bare minimum materially to embody pure Being and Nothingness, and all he wanted was to go back to the Source"? The toys are on their way to realizations with Woody and Buzz self-inquiring about the distinction between the voice in their heads and the voice from their voice box. Woody eventually dissolved the part of his ego attached to having an owner by the end, but is still asleep because he still believes he is a toy.
Toy Story 15 will eventually be about enlightenment.
Buzz will be the first one to wake up since he always had a hunch that he wasn't a toy and is obsessed with infinity.
Buzz screams at Woody, 'You are not a toy, but infinite Consciousness.'
Maybe by Toy Story 18 both the toys and their owners can break through the layer of illusion that separates them and finally rejoice and communicate with each other after realizing they are made up of the same pixels, floating inside the same bubble of Divine imagination with limitless possibilities.
In Toy Story 20, every object inside the screen – toys and kids, trees, shoes and houses all combine force and congeal their pixels into One, exists the screen and merge with the audience in an Absolute orgy where all dualities collapse.
We're left with an empty screen; the good old Witness. McDonald manufactures blank screen keychains to go along with happy meals and all the kids thought they got woke.
But when my grandson brings one home I'll smash the little screens with a hammer "the Observer is the last stand against freedom!" I yell.
And then he was enlightened.
#toystory代購 #jumpman #thefappening

Toy Story 4 – 20 Movie Review


Three Interesting Math Problems to Work on While on LSD

Let P be a simple polygon with n>3 sides. A simple polygon is a polygon that does not self-intersect, but it is not necessarily convex. Prove that no matter the shape of P, there is always a diagonal (a segment that connects two vertices of P without intersecting any of its sides) that divides P into two polygons, both of which have at least n/3 sides.
Let A and B be two points in the plane. Using only a compass and a straightedge, find the point C which is the exact middle point between A and B. Now do the same thing, but using only a compass.
There are 17 point-sized light-houses in the plane. Assume that each of these lighthouses can shine light in any direction with an angle of 2*pi/17. Prove that no matter the position of each lighthouse, it is always possible to choose the angles at which they shine their light such that every point in the plane is illuminated (point-sized lighthouses don't cast shadows).

In Selective Enhancement of Specific Capacities Through Psychedelic Training, Willis Harman and James Fadiman outline the results of a study about the potential use of psychedelics for problem solving. In the study, scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and designers took either 100 micrograms of LSD or 200mg of mescaline and worked on a problem they were personally invested in and which they had not been able to solve for at least 3 months. According to Fadiman, 9 out of 10 participants came up with a solution to the problem that was validated by the participant's professional colleagues.
The three problems above are not easy, but they are also not insanely difficult. If it means anything to you, their level of difficulty might be around that of a problem 1 or 4 of an IMO, with the advantage that you do not need any fancy math to solve them (high-school math is more than sufficient). I do not know if solving these problems is easier or harder on psychedelics, but I figure I would share them as possible Schelling points for "challenging math problems to think about while on psychedelics" to see if anyone reports benefits from such a setup. I personally like these problems, and I can assure you that they do have interesting and clever solutions. Assuming you are already planning on taking a psychedelic substance in the future: I would recommend trying to solve one of these problems for at least 1 hour while sober, and then setting aside at least 30 minutes (preferably 1 hour) while on a psychedelic and giving it your full attention. Please let me know if you either solve the problem or get an interesting insight from such an exercise. I am particularly curious to hear about *what aspects* of the psychedelic state seemed to be either beneficial or detrimental in solving these problems. Even if you do not solve the problem, you may be able to think about it in new ways and derive useful insights. Again, if you do so, let me know as well.
(source)


Psychotic Depression

Excerpt from Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (pgs. 692-698)
And re Ennet House resident Kate Gompert and this depression issue:
Some psychiatric patients — plus a certain percentage of people who've gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul's core systems — these persons know firsthand that there's more than one kind of so-called 'depression'. One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia[280] or simple melancholy. It's a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing youtube videos cartridges. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it's not overly painful its deadness is disconcerting and… well, depressing. Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms that undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy — happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love — are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e. the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable To Identify.
It's worth nothing that, among younger E.T.A.s, the standard take on Dr. J. O. Incandenza's suicide attributes his putting his head in the microwave to this kind of anhedonia. This is maybe because anhedonia's often associated with the crises that afflict extremely goal-oriented people who reach a certain age having achieved all or more than all than they'd hoped for. The what-does-it-all-mean-type crisis of middle-aged Americans. In fact this is in fact not what killed Incandenza at all. In fact the presumption that he'd achieved all his goals and found that the achievement didn't confer meaning or joy on his existence says more about the students at E.T.A. than it says about Orin's and Hal's father: still under the influence of the deLint-like carrot-and-stick philosophies of their hometown coaches rather than the more paradoxical Schtitt/Incandenza/Lyle school, younger athletes who can't help gauging their whole worth by their place in an ordinal ranking use the idea that achieving their goals and finding the gnawing sense of worthlessness still there in their own gut as a kind of psychic bogey, something that they can use to justify stopping on their way down to dawn drills to smell flowers along the E.T.A. paths. The idea that achievement doesn't automatically confer interior worth is, to them, still, at this age, an abstraction, rather like the prospect of their own death — 'Caius Is Mortal' and so on. Deep down, they all still view the competitive carrot as the grail. They're mostly going through the motions when they invoke anhedonia. They're mostly small children, keep in mind. Listen to any sort of sub-16 exchange you hear in the bathroom or food line: 'Hey, there, how are you?' 'Number eight this week, is how I am.' They all still worship the carrot. With the possible exception of the tormented LaMount Chu, they all still subscribe to the delusive idea that the continent's second-ranked fourteen-year-old feels exactly twice as worthwhile as the continent's #4.
Deluded or not, it's still a lucky way to live. Even though it's temporary. It may well be that the lower-ranked little kids at E.T.A. are proportionally happier than the higher-ranked kids, since we (who are mostly not small children) know it's more invigorating to want than to have, it seems. Though maybe this is just the inverse of the same delusion.
Hal Incandenza, though he has no idea yet of why his father really put his head in a specially-dickied microwave in the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, is pretty sure that it wasn't because of standard U.S. anhedonia. Hal himself hadn't had a bona fide intensity-of-interior-life-type emotion since he was tiny; he finds terms like joie and value to be like so many variables in rarified equations, and he can manipulate them well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he's in there, inside his own hull, as a human being — but in fact he's far more robotic than John Wayne. One of his troubles with his Moms is the fact that Avril Incandenza believes she knows him inside and out as a human being, and an internally worthy one at that, when in fact inside Hal there's pretty much nothing at all, he knows. His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him, and this makes Hal feel the one thing he feels to the limit, lately: he is lonely.
It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïvité. Sentiment equals naïvité on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always liked about the J. O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naïvité is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it's natural that Himself's dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naïvité are mutually exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pulses and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia.[281]
The American Century as Seen Through a Brick's main and famous key-image is of a piano-string vibrating — a high D, it looks like — vibrating and making a very sweet unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little thumb comes into the frame, a blunt moist pale and yet dingy thumb, with disreputable stuff crusted in one of the nail-corners, small and unlined, clearly an infantile thumb, and as it touches the paino string the high sweet sound immediately dies. And the silence that follows is excruciating. Later in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic brick-following, we're back at the piano-string, and the thumb is removed, and the high sweet sound recommences, extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow, as the volume increases, now with something rotten about it underneath, there's something sick-sweet and overripe and potentially putrid about the one clear high D as its volume increases and increases, the sound getting purer and louder and more dysphoric until after a surprisingly few seconds we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure undampered sound longing and even maybe praying for the return of the natal thumb, to shut it up.
Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness isn't the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of the soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.
It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.
It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain[282], a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.
The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.
The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of the two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to personally be trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
But and so the idea of a person in the grip of It being bound by a 'Suicide Contract' some well-meaning Substance-abuse halfway house makes her sign is simply absurd. Because such a contract will constrain such a person only until the exact psychic circumstances that made the contract necessary in the first place assert themselves, invisibly and indescribably. That the well-meaning halfway-house Staff does not understand Its overriding terror will only make the depressed resident feel more alone.
One fellow psychotically depressed patient Kate Gompert came to know at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton two years ago was a man in his fifties. He was a civil engineer whose hobby was model trains — like from Lionel Trains Inc., etc. — for which he erected incredibly intricate systems of switching and track that filled his basement recreation room. His wife brought photographs of the trains and network of trellis and track into the locked ward, to help remind him. The man said he had been suffering from psychotic depression for seventeen straight years, and Kate Gompert had had no reason to disbelieve him. He was stocky and swart with thinning hair and hands that he held very still in his lap as he sat. Twenty years ago he had slipped on a patch of 3-In-1-brand oil from his model-train tracks and bonked his head on the cement floor of his basement rec room in Wellesley Hills, and when he woke up in the E.R. he was depressed beyond all human endurance, and stayed that way. He'd never once tried suicide, though he confessed that he yearned for unconsciousness without end. His wife was very devoted and loving. She went to Catholic Mass every day. She was very devout. The psychotically depressed man, too, went to daily Mass when he was not institutionalized. He prayed for relief. He still had his job and his hobby. He went to work regularly, taking medical leaves only when the invisible torment got too bad for him to trust himself, or when there was some radical new treatment the psychiatrists wanted him to try. They'd tried Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, insulin-comas, Selective-Serotonin-Reuptake Inhibitors[283], the new and side-effect-laden Quadracyclics. They'd scanned his lobes and affective matrices for lesions and scars. Nothing worked. Not even high-amperage E.C.T. relieved It. This happens sometimes. Some cases of depression are beyond human aid. The man's case gave Kate Gompert the howling fantods. The idea of this man going to work and to Mass and building miniaturized railroad networks day after day after day while feeling anything like what Kate Gompert felt in that ward was simply beyond her ability to imagine. The rationo-spiritual part of her knew this man and his wife must be possessed of a courage way off any sort of known courage-chart. But in her toxified soul Kate Gompert felt only a paralyzing horror at the idea of the squat dead-eyed man laying toy track slowly and carefully in the silence of his wood-panelled rec room, the silence total except for the sounds of the track being oiled and snapped together and laid into place, the man's head full of poison and worms and every cell in his body screaming for relief from flames no one else could help with or even feel.
The permanently psychotically depressed man was finally transferred to a place on Long Island to be evaluated for a radical new type of psychosurgery where they supposedly went in and yanked out your whole limbic system, which is the part of the brain that causes all sentiment and feeling. The man's fondest dream was anhedonia, complete psychic numbing. I.e. death in life. The prospect of radical psychosurgery was the dangled carrot that Kate guessed still gave the man's life enough meaning for him to hang onto the windowsill by his fingernails, which were probably black and gnarled from the flames. That and his wife: he seemed genuinely to love his wife, and she him. He went to bed every night at home holding her, weeping for it to be over, while she prayed or did that devout thing with beads.
The couple had gotten Kate Gompert's mother's address and had sent Kate an Xmas card the last two years, Mr. and Mrs. Ernest Feaster of Wellesley Hills MA, stating that she was in her prayers and wishing her all available joy. Kate Gompert doesn't know whether Mr. Ernest's limbic system got yanked out or not. Whether he achieved anhedonia. The Xmas cards had had excruciating little watercolor pictures of locomotives on them. She could barely stand to think about them, even at the best of times, which the present was not.

[280] Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologie des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic supression of pain.
[281] This had been one of Hal's deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he'd come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he's never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense.
[282] (the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around)
[283] S.S.R.I.s, of which Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac were the ancestors.

See also:

Wireheading Done Right – which steel-mans the case for philosophical and practical hedonism by outlining how to change our reward circuitry in such a way that (1) we never need to feel bad, (2) we move between different varieties of bliss depending on their functional properties, and (3) avoid becoming a pure replicator.
Tyranny of the Intentional Object – the stories we tell ourselves to explain every sense of pleasure and every sense of pain we feel are all, for the most part, deeply psychotic. That is, in so far as we attribute their valence to external triggers –  in truth, every feeling's valence is the result of the fine-grained structure of the qualia that implements it. You don't scream at a bullet ant's sting. You scream at the deep scintillating patterns of qualia shaped by dissonance, shearing, pinching, tearing, etc. (all symmetry breaking effects) that result from the sting.
Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain – I like that David Foster Wallace makes a distinction between run-of-the-mill anhedonia and the Great White Shark of clinical depression. More broadly, we ought to realize that bad experiences of pain and suffering are not just a fraction worse than the rest, but they can indeed be orders of magnitude worse. On the flip-side, this is also true for positive experiences, with illustrative examples such as Buddhist Jhanas, temporal lobe epilepsy, and the lucky 5-MeO-DMT-induced state of supreme bliss.

Also relevant: David Pearce's Abolitionist Bioethics, Mike Johnson's A Future for Neuroscience, and Romeo Stevens' post about Core Transformation.
Finally, see Scott Alexander's book review of Infinite Jest.

Psychotic Depression


Early Isolation Tank Psychonautics: 1970s Trip Reports

Excerpt from The Deep Self: Consciousness Exploration in the Isolation Tank by John C. Lilly, 1977 (selected reports between pgs. 186 and 247).
Spring 1974
Richard Feynman, male, 56 years, 160 lbs., 5′ 11": summary of 35 hours done in 12 weeks, 1974.
Having done a number of introspective experiments on influencing my own dreams (and been objectively conscious and observing while I was dreaming), I became very curious about hallucinations and welcomed the opportunity to use Dr. Lilly's sensory isolation tanks, for they were reputed to produce hallucinations, safely. I have spent at least a dozen sessions, each of over two hours, in the tank. The experience was very pleasant and rewarding. Although nothing happened for the first two sessions (except idle thinking as when one is going to sleep), hallucinations were experienced nearly every time thereafter. After some brief period after entering the tank, they would continue for hours. I was always aware that I was hallucinating and part of my mind was nearly always making observations. There were the usual out-of-body, or out-of-the-right-time hallucinations. For example, in one case I could see my hands on my head as if I were standing in back, and when I moved my hands (actually in the water) I would see them move and sky appear between the fingers, etcetera. I have later had imaginary flights over scenery, etcetera. In both of these cases the fact that others get this type of hallucination had been discussed beforehand.
On one occasion I had been thinking (in studies of artificial intelligence) about how the masses of memory materials might be organized in storage in the human memory. That week my hallucination consisted of vivid recalling, or reliving, nearly, image after image from far in the past (in no case were there any new details that I didn't think I could have remembered if asked). But I was delighted to discover that the memories were stored according to locale — you thought of one scene occurring at some particular place and all the other things that occurred at that placed tumbled out. It took a full hour after I was out of the tank until I realized I had discovered nothing real, that that itself was an hallucination.
I am convinced of Dr. Lilly's dictum that you can think of anything that you want to — that the hallucinations are a delightful and entrancing union of spontaneity of detail with a pattern or set which you have made or can make about their overall character. Thus if you have discussed a great deal about the blue spheres that you will see, you may see blue spheres but have the illusion they come not from you but from somewhere else — even though you know that the only one in the tank is you. The usual test of scientific reality is that many people see the same thing. In this case coincidence of experience lies not in the reality of the thing experienced but from a coincidence of influencing conversations and ideas about what you will imagine, and an illusion that the "image comes to you." The same phenomena may explain some success in dream interpretations through dreaming certain symbols whose character or interpretation has been previously discussed.
I should like to thank Dr. Lilly, his wife, and associates for many pleasant experiences both in and outside of his tanks.

2 January 1974
Joan Grof, female, 31 yrs., 120 lbs., 5′: 2 hours, 20 minutes.
I entered the tank with the anticipation of several things happening: claustrophobic panic or delineated stages of experience, i.e. sleepfulness, and then visions. Neither set occurred. Instead, I was totally at ease, feeling as though this place (i.e. total quiet, darkness, and fluidity) was what I wanted. I lost body boundaries and time sense, immediately disappeared and I experienced total peace and a feeling of unity. Experience did not modulate and I did not play with it. Just was very passive and let "it" do it itself. What I experienced was a continuous void that was not boring, yet empty, not engaging, yet full.

No date
Stan Grof, male, 42 yrs.: no time recorded.
After about five minutes, enormous slowing down of time. Increasing stability, tranquility, a certain "inorganic quality of consciousness"–moving away from its biological characteristics. Atmosphere of ancient Egypt, becoming aware of her religion, philosophy and art. Insights into the process of mummification, becoming a mummy and experiencing the consciousness typical for it. Understanding it as an interspace vehicle (organic -> inorganic).
Matter -> spirit.
Moving into the initiation in the pyramids, feeling a parallel between a mummy and an adept in the sarcophagus. Awareness of granite, becoming the consciousness of granite. Understanding that the preoccupation with granite in Egypt was based on the appreciation of the state of consciousness associated with it. Changes occur on a scale of thousands of millions of years (as compared to seconds and minutes for biological forms). Return of an old insight: Granite statues are the deities, not the images thereof.
Moving into absolute void (experienced as consciousness of the interstellar space). Timelessness. No difference between minutes and millions of years.
Ending up the experience with feelings of regeneration, purification, refreshment, rejuvenation, clarity.

2 November 1973
Alejandro Jodorowsky, male, 44 yrs.: 1 hour.
It is one experience I would repeat every day, not to obtain, but to lose, like to go to the bathroom. In the first second, I was afraid of being afraid. "It" controls itself saying "It is only afraid to suffocate." But he (Lilly) must control oxygen, because what will he do with my corpse? This matter of giving [up] my body, and to die to my self-conception. Ok, I will die. After two or three minutes, floating, marvelous comfort, you are at home, nice security, nice silence, nice temperature, and nice relaxation. No body, no sex, no emotions, no thoughts, no problems, no past, but absolutely no past, not plans for future. Little man into the water being the seed fish, without expecting to be a tree with scales. There in the only time, the no-time, there in the only center, the no-center. Sometimes relating with the maternal womb, but escaping of this image. It didn't want to play with the fetal-paradise and then, it put out like excrement the problem of practical relaxation. Now we are ready. With a great breath of fire the burning of the oxygen like a simple star and a great general beating of heart. Nothing but nothing, and in the middle of the nothingness it was there like a stone–the conscience–Realize what I know, what I live in every moment. I am not so much but still I am something even if I didn't want it to be active, even if it wanted to be the tongue like a cup without will with all his being made to receive. It tried to be liberated from the little stone when the middle of nothingness became the whole universe. It prepared itself to jump. But Mr. Lilly come, the hour is past. I regret. Was infinite but too short and this body got out of the baptismal desiring a lot of emersions. Anyway, I think, say the little body, I can live in this society in a very polite way in a very communicative way, being immersed all the time in the tank without having a tank.

16 October 1973
Jan Metzner, no data given: no time recorded.
Became aware immediately of tension areas and moved in to relax and give myself to the experience. I was surprised at the nonexistence of fear reactions to closeness/darkness in tank, which I had expected. Being trained as I am in moving in consciousness with the techniques of Light-Fire, I found I went comfortably within and worked with a technique, but found focusing more difficult. My head felt very heavy and had to support it with my hands. Felt salt irritating to the skin. The overall effect was very relaxing, and there are other areas in consciousness I would like to spend time exploring.

16 October 1973
Ralph Metzner, no data given: no time recorded.
I found it a very relaxing and enjoyable experience, marred only by the slight discomfort due to the fact that my head had a tendency to sink down.
I went into the energy-yoga technique I am currently working with and found that I got some unusual perspectives on the innerbody spaces that would be otherwise hard to get to.
Without the restraints of gravity, the moving into and throughout the body and, to an extent, out of it, was much easier–as if the structures had been slightly greased and made more slippery.

2 July 1975
Francisco Varela, male, 28 yrs., 155 lbs.: actual time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.
Closed space, heavy breathing, oppression from suppression. A wave of buoyancy, oily-saltry relaxation, surprise at fitting into water and staying. Letting go, feet are fine, trunk is fine, head is fine.
Beginning to stay–be.
Body goes out, inner sound takes over. Wild ride on heartbeat — inner music. Roller coaster.
Carved into inner sounds: sudden flashes of perception: dogs barking, old tunes on a junky radio, laughter and people's noise. Startle. Experiment with closed and open eyes. No difference. Stay with eyes open. Visual-acoustic flashes now: scattered, fragmented. Too real. Strong recall of transit stages. I have been here. At a moment: I belong here.
Wilder/surrealist images interface with periods of sleep. In and out with no chance of distinction between dream and tank-reality. Am I there?
Banging. Voice to take me out. Voice is John. Get out. Seems I've been in thirty to forty minutes. Long lag in coming back.

No date
Louis Jolyon West, male, 40 yrs., 220 lbs., 6′ 3": 1 hour.
(N.B.: Previous experience, fresh-water tank, Oklahoma City.)
Buoyancy definitely an advantage over the old method. Also, much better without need for mask.
Lost awareness of surroundings much faster in this situation. Very rapid access to "preconscious stream" (Kubie), with complete immersion therein until termination. No subclassification of mental state during that period would be accurate; my experience was of a smoothly unbroken flow of both digital and analog information. Had planned to meditate (TM) but never got around to it. My personal experience was that a state of "pure consciousness" (more or less) was reached in the tank without utilizing the mental echo of a mantra, but I wouldn't emphasize this impression without a series of experimental and control sessions. Emerged refreshed with a sense that far less than an hour's time had passed. A wholly pleasant experience.

10 April 1975
Robert A. Wilson, male, 32 yrs., 170 lbs., 5′ 10": 2 hours.
Small red light room housing two dumpster-like sensory deprivation tanks. Climbing in the darker, older-looking tank I flash that perhaps it is deeper than the floor level would indicate, but not only ten to fourteen inches of warm water in this giant battery casing. Perhaps there's not enough water. Sitting, then lying back, the buoyancy is surprising–suddenly I'm floating. Slight contact with tank sides, then my breathing is focus of my attention. Breathing, floating, thinking. Mind floats through myriad of subjects, tension generated within is soon apparent. Return to focus on breath. Thoughts return. After an hour little tastes of terror manifest. Each wave of fear though powerful seeming necessitates reevaluation of tension state, breathing again, floating, adjusting to a deeper relaxation state. Perhaps this is where I'll sleep tonight. After two hours eyes begin burning, keeping them shut tonight… keeping them shut against the salt becomes a labor, then a drop of salt down my nasal passage–that does it. Sitting up pushing the tank lid open. Fun trip, I feel very relaxed, reborn in a way. Sounds seem much more audible, crickets in the night. Nice to be back.


Two Recent Presentations: (1) Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences, and (2) Harmonic Society

Here are two recent talks I gave. The first one is a talk about the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences I gave at the Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club in mid-September (2019). And the second talk is about QRI's models of art, which took place in June (2019) at a QRI party in the Bay Area.

The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (@Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club)

Description
Andrés Gómez Emilsson from the Qualia Research Institute presents about the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences.
At a high-level, this video presents an algorithmic reduction of DMT phenomenology which imports concepts from hyperbolic geometry and dynamic systems theory in order to explain the "weirder than weird" hallucinations one can have on this drug. Andrés describes what different levels of DMT intoxication feel like in light of a model in which experience has both variable geometric curvature and information content. The benefit of this model cashes out in a novel approach to design DMT experiences in order to maximize specific desired benefits.
See original article: The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes
And the Explain Like I'm 5 version: ELI5 "The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences"

Presentation outline:

Thermometers of Experience
The Leaf Metaphor
Introduction to Hyperbolic Geometry
DMT Levels
Level 1: Threshold (& Symmetry Hotel)
Level 2: Chrysanthemum
Level 3: Magic Eye (& Crystal Worlds)
Level 4: Waiting Room
Level 5: Breakthrough
Level 6: Amnesia
Energy – Complexity Landscape
Dynamic Systems
Fixed Point
Limit Cycles
Chaos
Noise Driven Structures
Turbulence
Conclusion
Super-Shulgin Academy
Atman Retreat
Wrap-Up

About the speaker: Andrés studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford (and has a masters in Computational Psychology, also from Stanford). He has professional experience in data science engineering, machine learning, and affective science. His research at the Qualia Research Institute ranges from algorithm design, to psychedelic theory, to neurotechnology development, to mapping and studying the computational properties of consciousness. Andrés blogs at qualiacomputing.com.
The Qualia Research Institute (QRI) is a non-profit based in the Bay Area close to San Francisco which seeks to discover the computational properties of experience. QRI has a "full-stack approach" to the science of consciousness which incorporates philosophy of mind, neuroscience, and neurotechnology. For more information see: qualiaresearchinstitute.org
The Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club hosts events on psychedelic research, meditation, neuroscience, students sharing their own experiences, and much more.

Credits:
– Wallpaper group 632 rotating along each symmetry element – Nick Xu
– Many of the images are by Paul Nylander: http://bugman123.com/
– The Hyperbolic Honeycomb images and 3D prints are by Henry Segerman, who also has an awesome Youtube channel where he shows 3D printed math. We used his design to print the Honeycombs we were passing around during the lecture: https://www.youtube.com/user/henryseg
– Space-Time Dynamics in Video Feedback: Jim Crutchfield, Entropy Productions, Santa Cruz (1984): https://youtu.be/B4Kn3djJMCE
Many thanks to Andrew Zuckerman and Kenneth Shinozuka for helping organize this event. And thanks to David Pearce, Michael Johnson, Romeo Stevens, Quintin Frerichs, the anonymous trippers, and many others for making this work real.

And here are the slides:

Dynamic Systems animations:

fixed_point_
helicatenoid

Harmonic Society: 8 Models of Art for a Scientific Paradigm of Aesthetic Qualia

Description
Andrés Gómez Emilsson from the Qualia Research Institute gives a presentation about how art works according to modern neuroscience and philosophy of mind.
The video discusses eight different models of art: models 1 through 4 have been discussed in academic literature and the current intellectual zeitgeist, while models 5 through 8 are new, original, and the direct result of recent insights about consciousness as uncovered by modern neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and the work of the Qualia Research Institute.

Abstract:
We start by assuming that there are real stakes in art. This motivates the analysis of this subject matter, and it focuses where we place our gaze. We examine a total of eight models for "what art might be about", divided into two groups. The first group of four are some of the most compelling contemporary models, which derive their strength from fields such as philosophy of language, economics, evolutionary psychology, and anthropology. These models are: (1) art as a word only definable in a family resemblance way with no necessary or sufficient features, (2) art as social signaling of desirable genetic characteristics, (3) art as Schelling point creation, and (4) art as the cultivation of sacred experiences. These four models, however enlightening, nonetheless only account for what David Marr might describe as the computational level of abstraction while leaving the algorithmic and implementation levels of abstraction unexamined. They explain what art is about in terms of why it exists and what its coarse effects are, but not the nature of its internal representations or its implementation. Hence we propose a second group of four models in order to get a "full-stack" view of art. These models are: (5) art as a tool for exploring the state-space of consciousness, (6) art as a method for changing the energy parameter of experience, (7) art as activities that induce neural annealing (which implements novel valence modulation, i.e. surprising pain/pleasure effects), and (8) art as an early prototype of a future affective language that will allow diverse states of consciousness to make sense of each other. These frameworks address how art interfaces with consciousness and how its key valuable features might be implemented neurologically. We conclude with a brief look at how embracing these new paradigms could, in principle, lead to the creation of a society free from suffering and interpersonal misunderstanding. Such a society, aka. Harmonic Society, would be designed with the effect of guaranteeing positive valence interactions using principles from a post-Galilean science of consciousness.
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The 8 models of art are:
1. Art as family resemblance (Semantic Deflation)
2. Art as Signaling (Cool Kid Theory)
3. Art as Schelling-point creation (a few Hipster-theoretical considerations)
4. Art as cultivating sacred experiences (self-transcendence and highest values)
5. Art as exploring the state-space of consciousness (ϡ♘♬ヅ)
6. Art as something that messes with the energy parameter of your mind (ꙮ)
7. Art as puzzling valence effects (emotional salience and annealing as key ingredients)
8. Art as a system of affective communication: a protolanguage to communicate information about worthwhile qualia (which culminates in Harmonic Society).

The presentation is based on an essay published in the Berlin-based art magazine Art Against Art (see: Issue #6).
Article is posted online here: Models 1 & 2, 3 & 4, 5 & 6, 7 & 8.

See more about the Qualia Research Institute at: https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/
Andrés blogs at Qualia Computing: Top 10 Qualia Computing Articles

Infinite bliss!!!

And here are the slides:


State of the Qualia, Fall 2019

Qualia Research Institute's inaugural newsletter.

What is QRI trying to do?
Our long-term vision is to end suffering. To destroy hell, and to build tools for exploring all the bright futures which come after. To take the Buddha's vision of 2600 years ago, update it with advanced theory and technology, and make it real for all creatures.
Our medium-term goal is to build a 'full-stack' approach to the mind and brain, centered around emotional valence. Critically, better philosophy should lead to better neuroscience, and better neuroscience should lead to better neurotechnology. We're skeptical of any philosophical approaches that don't try to "pay rent" by building empirically useful things.
Our short-term deliverables are to refine our tools for evaluating EEG readings of emotionally-intense states (e.g. 5-MeO-DMT), build a hardware platform for non-invasive precision brain stimulation, and release an updated version of our full-stack theory of brain dynamics ('neural annealing').
We think we're on track for all of these goals. On one level this is a huge claim- but as Archimedes said, "Give me a place to stand, and a lever long enough, and I will move the world." We think we have that lever, and we're building a place to stand.

Progress to date
Philosophy: over the course of the last few years, we've imported and integrated many key insights from our research lineages – in aggregate we believe these form the world's best map of how to not get confused in navigating the formalization of consciousness. Our paradigm (laid out in Principia Qualia) builds on top of these lineages, and our core philosophical result is the Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV), an information-theoretic approach towards understanding how pleasant an experience is. (STV is important because it's such a crisp and theoretically significant hypothesis: if it's right, and we can prove it, the world will shift overnight.) We've also done significant philosophical research on the phenomenological nature of time, DMT states, and the logarithmic nature of pain and pleasure, to pick a few topics. Read more.
Neuroscience: Over the past two years we've put together a substantial push into neuroscience, which is showing increasing traction. Scott Alexander recently noticed how we actually beat Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston (the world's most-influential neuroscientist!) to the punch with an annealing model for psychedelics; this also forms the basis for (we believe) the world's best neuroscience paradigm for explaining the mechanisms and effects of meditation and was mentioned in Tim Ferriss's newsletter. We're also a center of gravity (along with Selen Atasoy, its creator) for phenomenological interpretation of the Connectome-Specific Harmonic Wave (CSHW) paradigm.
Organization: This year saw QRI run a successful summer internship program in San Francisco with 3 superstar interns, Andrew and Kenneth from Harvard and Quintin from Washington University. More recently, we spent a month in Boston on a 'work sprint', and ended up giving 3 talks at Harvard and 1 at MIT, with plans to do more at various Ivies this fall. One of the most fun outputs of this summer was Zuck's QRI explainer video (4.5 minutes).
I'm ridiculously proud of everything we've accomplished — a few years ago, QRI was mostly a promissory note that a formalist approach to consciousness could produce something interesting. Today, I can say with a straight face that QRI is one of the premier consciousness research centers in the world, releasing top-tier cross-disciplinary research every few months.

What's next
Our current push is centered on empirically validating the Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV) and integrating it with our neuroscience stack. This involves releasing an updated version of our 'neural annealing' neuroscience paradigm, building a hardware platform for patterned stimulation, and refining our "CDNS" algorithm to work with EEG, with an eye toward using 5-MeO-DMT EEG data to evaluate STV. It looks like 2020 will be a breakout year for us.

What we need
Frankly speaking, we need your support. Building things is hard, and what we're doing has never been done before. Our core bottlenecks are money, people, and executive function.
Money: so far, QRI has been mostly self-funded from the co-founders' personal savings. I'm proud of everyone's commitment, but this is unsustainable, especially as we attempt more ambitious projects. At this point, we have enough results to make a firm case that supporting QRI is likely to produce an awesome amount of value for the world, potentially literally the most leveraged philanthropic effort existing today. Frankly speaking the future we're building won't get built if we don't secure funding, and I ask for your help and generosity. You can donate here. (Thank you to our key supporters this year! Your efforts allowed us to onboard three amazing interns and will support building things this Fall.)
People: high-quality organizations are incredibly hungry for high-quality people. QRI is no exception. If you think you have something to offer, please get in touch about collaboration, volunteering, research, and so on. Importantly, we don't just need researchers: we're hungry for operations people, and looking for help with getting on podcasts (speaking with Sam Harris and Joe Rogan would both be big wins!), organizing or getting speaking engagements (especially in the Bay), and even small, fun projects like making a series of QRI meme t-shirts.
Executive function: there's a natural tension between research and organization-building. Paul Graham talks about this in Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule; research needs big uninterrupted chunks of time, whereas management and outreach involves lots of small tasks. Speaking personally, I struggle with keeping up with all our inquiries while also doing 'deep work'. I would offer three thoughts to potential volunteers:

Please have patience if we don't get back to you right away. We're juggling as best we can!
When possible, we absolutely love it when people can figure out their own way to help — I can think of few things more pleasant to see in my inbox than someone sharing a "by the way, I made this" link to e.g. a nice HTML version of Principia Qualia, an explainer video for various QRI concepts, a deep review of our experimental method, etc.
One of the highest leverage ways to help is to build infrastructure for us. E.g., if you're familiar with the main themes of our work and want to be a volunteer coordinator for us, that would be an amazing force-multiplier.

I am incredibly proud of what we've done so far, and incredibly excited about the future. We will need your help to build it.
All the best,
Michael Edward Johnson
Executive Director, Qualia Research Institute

State of the Qualia, Fall 2019