Typical N,N-DMT Trip Progression According to an Anonymous Reader

I recently had the chance to interview someone who's had 50+ vaporized N,N-DMT experiences. The person in question (who wishes to remain anonymous) is extremely smart, philosophically literate, and has a PhD in a STEM field from a top US university. Based on the interview notes I took, I wrote down what the progression of a "typical" experience looks like. The anonymous reader confirmed that this description provides an accurate account.

Progression for Waiting Room or Breakthrough-level DMT experiences (15-40mg range):
Onset stage (1-20 seconds): Psychedelic Molting – Sharpening of colors and edges, the world acquires a secondary layer (as if the world is "molting"), and then this second layer becomes unified and starts to resonate across the entire field of experience.
Early come-up (20-40 seconds): The Hyper-Edge Capacitor – Visual field gets saturated with the Chrysanthemum, which starts to give way to 3D shapes. At this point a center of high-dimensional correlations between planes of experience starts bubbling up correlated subspaces for later use: planes, then 3D spaces, then hyper-planes, etc. And as these "high-dimensional Lego pieces" are made, they start becoming the elements of the scene (the walls, the objects, the space, the sense of presence, etc.).

Middle come-up (40-80 seconds): Crystal Worlds – In this phase of the experience there are a lot of "Buddhist no-self universes" of perfect resonance along many axes. Cave worlds, column worlds, pentagonal tiling of mirror chambers worlds, transparent blinds oceanic worlds, etc. There is a feeling that "these worlds exist independently of you" and that they are kinds of high-grade meditative states achievable by highly-attained monks and beings from other dimensions. They are sterile in some sense, though, which is that they lack evolution. They are attractor points of high-dimensional resonance. Insanely beautiful and ecstatic but also not perfect (for reasons that are hard to articulate).

Late come-up (80-100 seconds): Hyperbolic Gear World – At this point you start to see high-dimensional hyperbolic mechanisms. One intuitively feels that the state has too much energy to be contained in a Crystal World, which gives rise to stitching parallel Crystal Worlds into a unified hyperbolic world-sheet. Incredibly, this world-sheet is precise and seamless. The information contained in it is highly-specific. At this point number theory, hyperbolic geometry, and high-dimensional dynamics start to be very relevant. Irreducibly complex mathematical interlocking objects appear in very crisp and precise ways (it's not just a fuzzy but intense impression of precision – it is a precise experience of precision clockwork machinery). 3D gear mechanisms with a prime-number of teeth that only repeat when they make as many cycles as the minimum common multiple of all the gears may show up, scenes with 'plasma consciousness' contained in hyperbolically-folded cavities with laminar color flow arise, spontaneous chaotic symmetry breaking devices arranged in the form of complex vibrating metallic flowers will materialize, etc. These devices also build on each other's innovations. They can swap elements to become more interesting, more complex, more energetic, more hypnotizing, and more pleasurable than before.

Plateau (100-180 seconds): DMT Tykes – One starts to hallucinate things that are higher up in the visual hierarchy. "DMT Tykes" (another name for "DMT elves") are humanoid forms that start to appear at this point. They are ever-evolving, and constructed of a high-dimensional hyperbolic world-sheet made of networks of interlocking Rabbit-Duck bistable percepts. In some sense the entities you see are not the DMT Tykes themselves. Instead, it feels like there are still higher-dimensional entities that interface with the space you're at and it is those entities that control the rendered humanoid bistable percepts. The devices you saw in the immediately preceding stage (Hyperbolic Gear World) are revealed to be artifacts created by these higher-dimensional beings. As reported by others before, this space gives off the impression of being a gallery, a museum, a factory, or some kind of scientific testing facility, where entities are trying out new qualia configurations to study their properties: how they feel, what they can be used for, what it is like to experience them as a human being, etc. They are trying to compel you to take these things seriously, to see through how groundbreaking they would be for humans. Whenever one is too overwhelmed with the information presented (common misgivings are of the sort: "this is too much for a simple human" or "too beautiful, I don't deserve this" or "what if people find out I know this?") the experience becomes calming and things that you recognize as a human start being presented: jungles, hedonically-charged human scenes, locations, archetypes, stories about the origin of humanity, etc. And when one feels ready again to look at the complex machinery then there is this sense that the entities will continue to show you more and more of the irreducibly complex phenomenal objects native to that space.

Early comedown (180-240 seconds): High-Dimensional Breakdown – Entities may become a bit desperate to make sure they have sent along the most important information. The intensity starts subsiding and there is a lot of revisiting of earlier stages, gathering of essential insights, and decisions made about what to definitely try to bring back to one's baseline state. Often one fears that one's brain will never get back to normal during the earlier parts, but at this point one recognizes that there is a downward trend and that it's all going to be ok after all. Paranoia, if present beforehand, starts to subside at this point. In terms of narrative, at this point one is usually coming to terms with what the experience will mean for your everyday life, whether you believe that the entities were real, and whether all of this was just a hallucination. The intuitive understanding that even if it is all just in your mind it still contained information of very high-value is clear at this stage (but may subside if you don't properly encode it). Key undeniable facts of the experience at this point are: (1) there are heights of bliss and pain way outside of the range of human experience, (2) there are heights of mathematical complexity possible to experience directly that are beyond the scope of normal human cognition, and (3) there are types of qualia that matter both for intelligence and wellbeing that exist but humans are utterly clueless about. Disregarding the veracity of the entities or the literal interpretations of the experience, these three facts are straightforward to acknowledge at this stage of the trip.

Late comedown (240-360 seconds): Psychedelic Dampening – There is a clear sense that some of the information you were able to easily see and grock earlier in the experience is completely inaccessible now. You lose contact with what felt like higher forms of intelligence but you still see a lot of interesting patterns and complex geometry that you somehow realize is not as important as what happened just before. Even though it still feels like you are "very high", it feels like one's unique privileged access to information about consciousness is gone and that what you could discover now would not belong to the same level of "scientific breakthrough" as what you experienced before.

After-effects (360-600 seconds): Fast Sobering Up – Thinking about meta-narratives is very common at this stage, just like it is on traditional psychedelics. Things like "Where is the human world headed? What kind of consciousness will we experience as our default mode in 100 years from now? What will happen once scientists, engineers, and mathematicians start to do systematic research on the mathematics of the irreducibly-complex phenomenal objects at the peak of the experience? Etc." Somewhere in along this stage the world finally becomes solidly uni-layered and then it just feels like a low dose of shrooms for a couple more minutes, at most.

Baseline (600 seconds onwards): Re-Grounding Stage – You start wondering what that was all about. The realization that you came back to normal again so quickly is likely to make you feel like you should have not been so afraid to try out the experience to begin with. At the same time, you also may feel a strong pull towards not experiencing that for a while (depends – some people feel braver at this point and redo the experience). In most circumstances one will feel a mood boost for several hours (up to days) for two reasons. First is the sense of significance and profundity in the form of gratitude and the feeling of being special that such an experience confers. And second, there seems to be an essentially physiological response to having gone through such an intense experience without getting harmed (if one wasn't harmed, of course). Perhaps the annealing frame is adequate in this context. Namely, that the experience somehow smoothed out a lot of pinch points and imperfections latent in one's psyche. The fear of "the worst that could happen to me" subsides and one experiences a sense of connection to other humans that is significantly above baseline.


Atman Retreat: Safe, Legal Psilocybin Experiences in Jamaica

Atman Retreat provides safe, legal psychedelic experiences outside of Montego Bay, Jamaica.

Upcoming retreat dates:

September 23-26 (7 spots left; as of September 2nd)
September 27-30 (5 spots left; as of September 2nd)
November 13-16
November 17-20

Atman recently introduced tiered pricing and a low-income ticket program.

About Atman Retreat (source)
Psychedelics are known to produce profound, meaningful, transformative experiences when used in a safe and intentional manner.1 However, many people don't have access to psychedelics, or to a safe setting within which to use them. Others simply don't want to break the law. Until we adopt more compassionate, evidence-based drug policy, there are few ways for people to experience these extraordinary states of consciousness safely and legally. Atman Retreat exists to fill this gap.
Our core mission is to help people explore the full potential of the psychedelic experience, in all its healing, transformative, and transcendent qualities. Retreats are held in Jamaica, where psilocybin mushrooms are legal. Participants stay at a spacious villa, with comfortable rooms and a scenic private beachfront. Our team of experienced facilitators is passionate about creating space for inner transformation, insight, and breakthroughs.
Whether you're completely new to psychedelics, or a seasoned psychonaut interested in a different kind of journey, Atman Retreat is a complete 4-day experience that allows you to explore psychedelics safely, legally, and in a setting designed to maximize their benefits.
When you feel ready, you can apply here.

Why am I sharing this announcement? I think that Atman Retreat is especially suited to Qualia Computing readers for the following three reasons:

I know some of the people who started it and I can confirm that they are good, rational, and tactful people trying to make the world a better place.
The retreat is open-ended in nature. Sadly, most legal psychedelic retreats come with heavy "memetic baggage" in the form of unquestioned beliefs about spirituality or strong ideological commitments. At the very least, the focus of most legal psychedelic retreats is explicitly therapeutic. Atman Retreat is a good place to simply explore your own mind and study the nature of consciousness without having to accept any spiritual, therapeutic, or ideological framework. For example, their website has a research section which lists and summarizes recent studies on the effects of psilocybin, which shows a willingness by the staff to engage with a scientific approach to psychedelics.
The participants in previous cohorts of Atman Retreat have been very aligned with both Effective Altruism and the scientific study of consciousness. In other words, the attendees are typically smart, curious, ethical, and epistemologically sound.

To this, I will add that one of the visions of the Qualia Research Institute is to create an empirical consciousness research center in which psychedelics are taken by the brightest scientists, philosophers, and engineers to explore alien state-spaces of consciousness directly.
Indeed, consciousness research is currently at a pre-Galilean state, where brain scientists refuse to "look through the telescope" so to speak (or at least if they do, they are not talking about it publicly). Scientific culture is such that discussing the EEG measurements of members of the general public under the influence of psychedelics is acceptable but as soon as one talks about one's own direct experience with such compounds one's scientific credibility becomes suspect.
We can change this, and one of the first steps is to establish a legal framework for consciousness researchers to be able to engage in fruitful self-experimentation. Real scientific progress on consciousness will only take place with a twin track that combines both analysis of third-person data and the use of an empirical research methodology of direct experience by the researchers themselves. By pointing to the Atman Retreat I am hoping to elevate it to the status of a sort of Schelling point for rational psychonauts to converge on for the time being.
Perhaps this is a crucial first step in establishing a legally-viable Super-Shulgin Academy* for a post-Galilean science of consciousness.
Jamaica is waiting for you!

*From the QRI Glossary –
Super-Shulgin Academy (coined by David Pearce; ref: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8): This is a hypothetical future intellectual society that investigates consciousness empirically. Rather than merely theorizing about it or having people from the general population describe their odd experiences, the Super-Shulgin Academy directly studies the state-space of consciousness by putting the brightest minds on the task. The Super-Shulgin Academy (1) trains high-quality consciousness researchers and psychonauts, (2) investigates the computational trade-offs between different states of consciousness, (3) finds new socially-useful applications for exotic states of consciousness, (4) practices the art and craft of creating ultra-blissful experiences, and (5) develops and maintains a full-stack memeplex that incorporates the latest insights about the state-space of consciousness into the most up-to-date Theory of Everything.
Featured image: source.


Kaleidoscopic Integration: Annealing, Symmetry, and the Information Theory of Experience

HP: What exactly is "symmetrical texture repetition"?

JE: Symmetrical texture repetition is just one of many complex visual distortions or alterations which consistently occur throughout psychedelic experiences on substances such as LSD, Psilocin, Ayahuasca, Mescaline, 2C-B, 2C-E and many others.

It can be described as the organization of rough textures within the external environment becoming mirrored repeatedly over its own surface in an extremely intricate and symmetrical fashion that is consistent across itself. This remains at an unchanging level of extremely high detail and visual clarity within both a person's direct line of visual focus and peripheral vision.

As these repeating textures are generated they begin to give rise to a huge array of abstract forms, imagery, geometry and patterns that are perceived to be embedded within and across the symmetry.

– Interview with Chelsea Morgan, a prolific and talented psychedelic replication artist

Towel texture enhancement by Chelsea Morgan. Source.
Ice symmetrical texture repetition by Chelsea Morgan. Source.
How it feels like to symmetry-unify from the inside, a case study:
Onion Article Headline 2016: Synesthetic Couch-Texture Not Quite Ready to Merge with Lamp Turned Space-Filling Line System, Says It Needs to Make Itself More Spiky First

Inside Alice's acid-filled brain today, we are now about to experience for the 6th time or so how various blobs of textures are trying to merge into a coherent super structure. According to local sources, Alice is currently feeling a sense of awe and anticipation as the two big texture clusters in her field of vision are beginning to interact with each other. She is excited to notice that one of them is "calling" the other into it, and giving it ideas on how to "plug in geometrically" with it.

Alice, who reportedly took 160 micrograms of LSD roughly 3 hours ago, narrates how it felt like to make a super-symmetrical system in her visual-kinesthetic field for the 5th time:

"I don't know if this was the result of alien intelligences messing up with my brain, perhaps a mystical vision about how my ancestors' experiences connect to mine, or if it was just a strange quantum-entanglement phenomenon in consciousness currently undocumented in the scientific literature, but duude! That one time the couch texture blob made itself more spiky in order to merge with the the space-filling lamp… that was awesome. I look forward to it happening again, but now also including the carpet, walls, and my hands. Leave no texture behind – the resonant symmetry super-structure can make room for everyone." – Said Alice, in closing.
The bliss of annealed high-symmetry high-valence states. See: Quantifying Bliss. Image source.
Psychedelic Symmetry: A Window Into the Information-Theoretic Properties of Experience?
My friend Tim who had not done LSD for many years, responded to this sudden 5 hit dose by going into a state of complete dissociation. He lay down on the forest floor with glassy eyes, muttering "It is TOO beautiful! It is TOO beautiful!" and he did not respond to me, even when I stared him straight in the face. He reported afterwards that he found himself in a giant Gothic cathedral with the most extravagantly elaborate and brightly painted ornamental decorations all around him. This too can be seen as an extreme form of the regularization discussed above. Under the influence of this powerful dose, Tim's visual brain could no longer keep up with the massive irregularity of the forest around him, and therefore presented the forest in simplified or abbreviated form, as the interior of a Gothic cathedral. It captures the large geometry of a ground plane that supports an array of vertical columns, each of which fans out high overhead to link up into an over-arching canopy of branches. The only difference is that in the Gothic cathedral the trees are in a regular geometrical array, and each one is a masterpiece of compound symmetry, composed of smaller pillars of different diameters in perfectly symmetrical arrangements, and studded with periodic patterns of ribs, ridges, or knobby protuberances as a kind of celebration of symmetry and periodicity for their own sake. There is a kind of geometrical logic expressed in the ornamental design. If part of the cathedral were lost or destroyed, the pattern could be easily restored by following the same logic as the rest of the design. In information-theoretic terms, the Gothic cathedral has lots of redundancy, its pattern could be expressed in a very much simpler compressed geometrical code. In Tim's drug-addled brain his visual system could only muster a simple code to represent the world around him, and that is why Tim saw the forest as a Gothic cathedral. Under normal conditions, the additional information of irregularity, or how each tree and branch breaks from the strict regularity of the cathedral model of it, creates the irregular world of experience that we normally see around us. This suggests that the beautiful shapes of ornamental art are not the product of the highest human faculty, as is commonly supposed, but rather, ornamental art offers a window onto the workings of a simpler visual system, whose image of the world is distorted by artifacts of the representational scheme used in the brain. The Gothic cathedral gives a hint as to how the world might appear to a simpler creature, a lizard, or a snake, to whom the world appears more regular than it does to us, because its full irregularity is too expensive to encode exhaustively in all its chaotic details. Of course the flip-side of this rumination is that the world that we humans experience, even in the stone-cold sober state, is itself immeasurably simpler, more regular and geometric, that the real world itself, of which our experience is an imperfect replica. In the words of William Blake, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
– "The Grand Illusion" by Cognitive Scientist Steven Lehar
What is the information content of a gothic cathedral? What percentage of it needs to burn down to make it impossible to reconstruct from the ruins alone?
Why Does Any of This Matter? The Deceptively Profound Implications of Psychedelic Symmetry According to Cognitive Scientist Steven Lehar
But there was one aspect of the LSD experience that had me truly baffled, and that was the fantastic symmetries and periodicities that were so characteristic of the experience. What kind of neural network model could possibly account for that? It was an issue that I grappled with for many months that stretched into years. In relation to Grossberg's neural network, it seemed that the issue concerned the question of what happens at corners and vertices where contours meet or cross. A model based on collinearity alone would be stumped at image vertices. And yet a straightforward extension of Grossberg's neural network theory to address image vertices leads to a combinatorial explosion. The obvious extension, initially proposed by Grossberg himself, was to posit specialized "cooperative cells" with receptive fields configured to detect and enhance other configurations of edges besides ones that are collinear. But the problem is that you would need so many different specialized cells to recognize and complete every possible type of vertex, such as T and V and X and Y vertices, where two or more edges meet at a point, and each of these vertex types would have to be replicated at every orientation, and at every location across the whole visual field! It just seemed like a brute-force solution that was totally implausible.
Then one day after agonizing for months on this issue, my LSD observations of periodic and symmetrical patterns suddenly triggered a novel inspiration. Maybe the nervous system does not require specialized hard-wired receptive fields to accomodate every type of vertex, replicated at every orientation at every spatial location. Maybe the nervous system uses something much more dynamic and adaptive and flexible. Maybe it uses circular standing waves to represent different vertex types, where the standing wave can bend and warp to match the visual input, and standing waves would explain all that symmetry and periodicity so clearly evident in the LSD experience as little rotational standing waves that emerge spontaneously at image vertices, and adapt to the configuration of those vertices. Thanks to illegal psychotropic substances, I had stumbled on a staggeringly significant new theory of the brain, a theory which, if proven right, would turn the world of neuroscience on its head! My heart raced and pounded at the implications of what I had discovered. And this theory became the prime focus of my PhD thesis (Lehar 1994), in which I did computer simulations of my harmonic resonance model that replicated certain visual illusions in a way that no other model could. I had accomplished the impossible. I had found an actual practical use and purpose for what was becoming my favorite pass-time, psychedelic drugs! It was a moment of glory for an intrepid psychonaut, a turning point in my life. Figure 2.6 shows a page from my notebook dated October 6 1992, the first mention of my new theory of harmonic resonance in the brain.
– "The Grand Illusion" by Cognitive Scientist Steven Lehar

Featured image credit: Simon Haiduk


Why Care About Meme Hazards and Thoughts on How to Handle Them

By Justin Shovelain and Andrés Gómez Emilsson
Definition
Nick Bostrom defines an "Information Hazard" as: "A risk that arises from the dissemination or the potential dissemination of (true) information that may cause harm or enable some agent to cause harm." A more general category is that of "Memetic Hazard", which is not restricted to the potential harms of true information. False claims and mistaken beliefs can also produce harm, and should thus also be considered in any ethically-motivated policy for information dissemination.
Introduction
Perhaps one of the best known analysis of meme hazards is the work of Nick Bostrom concerning: Information Hazards, the Unilateralist's Curse, and Singletons. His focus could roughly be described as one of classifying the types of situations that can give rise to information hazards. A parallel set of problems to that of categorizing memetic hazards is the problem of coming up with policies for dealing with them, and the problem of convincing people that they should care. In this post we suggest some basic heuristics for dealing with meme hazards, and explain why you should care about them even when your work seems unambiguously positive.
Motivation
Why You Should Care
A big problem with getting people to engage with any kind of memetic hazard policy is that it may be perceived as a voluntary constraint on one's behavior with little to no personal benefit. Nobody (well, at least nobody we know*) gets excited about compliance training at a new job, or inspection day at a manufacturing facility. Subjectively, most people perceive compliance and oversight as something that gets in the way of doing one's work and as a hassle for one's organization. That said, there is reason to believe that as the world's technologies become both more powerful and more widely accessible, that there will be increasingly more dangerous information around. Considering the possible downsides of sharing information will thus become increasingly more important. So at least on a global scale, it will be increasingly more important for people to consider the impact of the information they choose to share. But at an individual level, why would they care about meme hazards policies and not think of them as a bothersome constraint?
Just like there are actions that can help or harm there are ideas that can help or harm. Furthermore, some ideas produce their primary good or bad effect through social transmission, which we can call memes. There are several ways to prevent the harm from memes: not producing them in the first place, not sharing them, or fixing the situation so that when dispersed they do not do damage (before or after dispersal). Let's call policies to prevent harm from meme hazards, meme hazard policies. Because in a world with increasingly accessible technological power a lot of our largest effects are likely to be produced by memetic hazards, a good way to improve the chances of achieving one's goals is to tilt things as much as possible towards our goals with good meme hazard policies. It thus makes sense to read works about meme hazard policy and to think about how it bears on one's work. This way you can improve your implementation and design of meme hazard policies to avoid hampering your own goals. In particular, assuming that you are a rational agent (who both attempts to be epistemically and instrumentally rational) you will generally find that spreading dangerous information that causes large negative effects (even if by accident!) will interfere with your ability to carry out your own goals.
Why Good Work May Have Bad Net Effects
When one engages in very novel research one should be careful to consider the ratio with which one's work advances desired outcomes relative to undesired outcomes. This may yield surprising results for the net effect of one's work, sometimes flipping the net effect of research that at first may have seemed unambiguously good. For example, Artificial Intelligence Alignment research may in principle increase the chances of unaligned AI by virtue of providing insights into how to build powerful AIs in general. If it is 100 times harder to build an aligned AI than an unaligned AI, and researching AI alignment advances the goal of building unaligned AIs by more than 1/100 relative to how it advances building aligned AIs, then such research would (counter-intuitively) increase the chances of building unaligned AIs relative to aligned AIs.
As another example of how seemingly good work may have bad net effects let's consider how information mutates in a social network. As discussed in previous articles such as consciousness vs. replicators there is no universal reason why causing large effects and causing good effects have to be correlated (see also: Basic AI Drives and Spreading happiness more difficult than just spreading). With an evolutionary view, it becomes clear that memes that are good and beneficial to everyone can eventually evolve to become bad and harmful to everyone if by doing so they gain a reproductive edge. As a rule of thumb, you can expect ideas to mutate towards:

Noise due to generation loss

Unless your copying method is perfect or has error correction methods, every time you make a copy of something the information will degrade to some extent. This is called generation loss and it leads to more noisy copies over time.

Simplicity

Since information transmission incurs a cost, simpler mutations of the meme have a reproductive edge.

Ease of memorization and communication

Mutations to the memes that are easier to memorize and communicate are more likely to spread.

Inciting arms races

If the meme provides a competitive edge in a zero-sum game, it may give rise to an arms race between agents who engage in such zero-sum game. For example, a new marketing method discovered by a given agency would force other marketing agencies to invest in researching how to achieve the same results. Since the rate of evolution of a meme is partly determined by the rate at which iterations over it are performed, a lot of memetic evolution takes place in arms races.

Saliency (cognitive, emotional, perceptual, etc.)

Saliency refers to the probability of noticing a given stimuli. Memes that mutate in a way that makes them more noticeable have a reproductive edge. Thus, many memes may over time acquire salient features, such as causing strong emotions.

Uses for social signaling (such as used for signaling intelligence, knowledge, social network, local usefulness, etc.)

Consider the difference between manufacturing a car that focuses exclusively on basic functionality and a car that in addition also signals wealth. Perhaps it would be better if everyone bought the first kind of car because the second kind incites the urge in others to get a new car more often than necessary. Namely, people might want to buy a new car whenever the neighbors have upgraded to a more luxurious car (see: Avoid Runaway Signaling in Effective Altruism and Keeping up with the Joneses).

Overselling

As a general heuristic, memes will spread faster when they are presented as better than they really are. Unless there is a feedback mechanism that allows people to know the true value of a meme, those that can oversell themselves will tend to be more common relative to those that are honest about the value they provide.

Usefulness

The usefulness of a meme increases the chances that it will be passed on.

Given considerations like the above, it's clear that in order to achieve what we want we need to  think carefully about the possible impacts of our research and efforts, even when they seem unambiguously positive. Now, when should one give special thought to memetic hazard policies?
When Should You Care the Most?
Meme Hazard Action Space – Worry when the ideas are both novel and have the potential to have large effects
There are two key features of potential memetic hazards that should be taken into account when thinking about whether to pursue the research that is bringing them to life.
The first one is how large their effects may be, and the second is how novel they are. How large an effect is depends on factors such as how many people it may affect, how intense the effects would be on each person affected, how long the effects would last, and so on. How novel a meme is depends on factors like how many people know about it, how much specialized knowledge you require to arrive at it, how counter-intuitive it is, and so on.
No matter how novel a piece of information may be, if it does not have the potential to cause large effects we can disregard it in the context of a meme hazard policy. When the potential to cause large effects is there but the idea is not very novel, then one should focus on actions to mitigate risks. For instance, if everyone knows how to build nuclear bombs, then the real bottleneck to focus as a matter of policy would be on things like the accessibility to rare or expensive materials needed to build such bombs.
But when the information is both novel and can cause large effects, then the appropriate focus is that of a meme hazard policy based on strategies to handle information dissemination.
Examples
Ignore:

What you had for breakfast, yet another number sorting algorithm, how to get the hair of a cat to be more fluffy

Focus on ideas:

A more efficient deep learning technique, a chemical to improve exercise response efficiency, a new rationality technique, information on where the world's biggest tree is

Focus on actions:

The idea of guns, the idea of washing hands for sanitary purposes, running an Ayahuasca retreat in the amazon

Suggested Heuristics
Suggested Responses
To wrap up, here we provide a very high-level set of suggested heuristics to consider if one is indeed discovering ideas that are both very novel and capable of producing large effects:

Develop

Develop if you conclude that there is no risk

Share

Share if you conclude that there is no risk

Log your analysis and proceed

Store the results of your analysis for future use by others who may overlook the risks and then continue developing or sharing it

Think more about it

Conclude that it would be valuable to analyze the risks of the meme (e.g. a new technology) further

Develop cure

Develop a cure of the meme hazard's downsides
This approach may entail selectively sharing the information with people who are highly benevolent, good at keeping secrets, and capable in the relevant domains of expertise

Improve the groups that receive it so that it is safe

Some information is only risky if certain types of groups get it, so if you change the nature of the groups then there is no risk

Framing it so it goes to the right people or only yields good effects

The way an idea is posed or framed determines a fair amount of who will read it and how they will act on it

Selecting a safe subset to share

When you have information it could be that some parts are good or safe to share and you can selectively share those parts
Make sure those parts are not sufficient to reconstruct the original (unsafe) information

Selecting a safe subset to develop

When developing some information it can be that some parts are good or safe to develop and you can selectively develop those parts

Selectively share to a subset of people

Some information is only risky if certain types of groups get it; if you can aim where the information goes you can avoid the risk
Report the information to proper authorities

Don't develop

Some information is too risky to develop

Don't share

Some information is too risky to share

Monitor to see if others move towards developing or sharing it

If you've identified something risky it may make sense to see if others are developing it or likely to share it so that you can warn them, focus on building a cure, contact authorities, or start changing your actions knowing that a disaster is likely.

Try to decrease the likelihood of rediscovery

If it's really risky you may want to see what you can do about decreasing the likelihood that it is rediscovered

Conclusion
In this post we discussed why you should consider following heuristics to deal with meme hazards as an important part of achieving your goals rather than as a chore or hassle. We also discussed how work that may seem unambiguously good may turn out to have negative effects. In particular, we mentioned the "ratio argument" and also brought up some evolutionary considerations (where memes may mutate in unhelpful ways to have a reproductive edge). We then considered when one should be especially cautious about meme hazards: when the information is both highly novel and capable of producing large effects. And finally, we provided a list of heuristics to consider when faced with novel information capable of producing large effects.
In the future we hope to weave these heuristics into a more complete meme hazard policy for researchers and decision makers working at the cutting edge.

*After posting this article someone contacted us to point out that they in fact love compliance training. This person was very persistent about updating this post with that fact.


Carhart-Harris & Friston 2019 – REBUS and the Anarchic Brain

Reposted from Enthea with permission from the writer:

Drs. Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston recently published a beautiful paper – REBUS and the Anarchic Brain (a).
It's great for two reasons:

It presents a plausible unified theory of how psychedelics work.
It's a wonderful jumping-off point into the literature. Every paragraph is full of pointers to research that's come out in the last 5 years, and boy are there a lot of rabbit holes to go down – it's filled out my reading list for the next several months.

Carhart-Harris is the director of Imperial College London's newly minted Centre for Psychedelic Research; Friston is a famous neuroscientist.
REBUS is a (somewhat dubious) acronym for RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics. The basic idea: psychedelics reduce the weight of held beliefs and increase the weight of incoming sensory input, allowing the beliefs to be more readily changed by the new sensory information.
REBUS pulls together Carhart-Harris' Entropic Brain theory and Friston's Free Energy Principle, both of which relate to the hierarchical predictive coding model of cognition. There's a lot of jargon & nuance here, but the essential idea of hierarchical predictive coding is pretty straightforward:

The brain generates mental models that predict upcoming sensory inputs. (The predictions are called "priors," as in "prior beliefs.")
These predictive models are layered on top of each other in a hierarchy – the higher levels send predictions down the hierarchy; the lower levels report sense data upwards.
In cases where the model's top-down predictions do not match the bottom-up sensory input, the model either (a) updates its priors based on the new sense data, or (b) ignores the sense data and maintains its priors.

(Scott Alexander's review of Surfing Uncertainty has a lot more on predictive coding.)
Carhart-Harris & Friston theorize that the main thing psychedelics are doing is relaxing the weight of the brain's top-down prediction-making ("REBUS") and increasing the weight of the bottom-up sense information ("the Anarchic Brain"). This allows bottom-up information to have more influence on our conscious experience, and also on the configuration of the hierarchy overall.
Carhart-Harris & Friston analogize this process to annealing – heating up a metal dissolves its crystalline structure, then a new structure recrystallizes as the metal cools:
The hypothesized flattening of the brain's (variational free) energy landscape under psychedelics can be seen as analogous to the phenomenon of simulated annealing in computer science – which itself is analogous to annealing in metallurgy, whereby a system is heated (i.e., instantiated by increased neural excitability), such that it attains a state of heightened plasticity, in which the discovery of new energy minima (relatively stable places/trajectories for the system to visit/reside in for a period of time) is accelerated (Wang and Smith, 1998).
Subsequently, as the drug is metabolized and the system cools, its dynamics begin to stabilize – and attractor basins begin to steepen again (Carhart-Harris et al., 2017). This process may result in the emergence of a new energy landscape with revised properties.
Psychedelics "heat up" the brain, increasing plasticity and weakening the influence of prior beliefs. As the psychedelic stops being active, the brain "cools" – the hierarchy re-forms, though perhaps in a different configuration than the pre-psychedelic configuration.
This explains how psychedelic trips can cause changes that last long after the substance has exited the body – in those cases, the psychedelic facilitated a change in the organization of the brain's cognitive hierarchy.
Psychedelic therapy is showing promise for mental disorders associated with too-rigid thought patterns – depression, anxiety, addictions, maybe OCD, maybe eating disorders. In predictive-coding lingo, "disorders that may rest on particularly rigid high-level priors that dominate cognition."
In these disorders, new information can't revise the existing story of how things are, because strong priors suppress the new info before it can update anything.
The REBUS model straightforwardly explains how psychedelics help with disorder like this – by relaxing the strong top-down priors and boosting the bottom-up inputs, bottom-up inputs have more ability to effect the system. Here's an illustration from the paper:

The top sketch is a brain where strong top-down priors dominate. New sensory inputs are suppressed and can't update the hierarchy. The bottom sketch is the same brain while on a psychedelic – the top-down priors have been relaxed and bottom-up sensory information flows more freely through the system, causing a bigger impact.
Okay, nice theory, but can we observe this in the brain? Is there any evidence for it?
Carhart-Harris & Friston place the default mode network at top of the brain's predictive hierarchy. The default mode network is the network of brain regions that's most active when the brain isn't engaged with any specific task. It also appears to be the seat of one's sense of self. The default mode network is intensely relaxed by strong psychedelic experiences – this is subjectively felt as ego dissolution, and allows for the propagation of bottom-up sense data (which are also boosted by psychedelics).
Carhart-Harris & Friston identify two mechanisms by which psychedelics may relax the default mode network – activation of 5-HT2AR serotonin receptors (there are lots of these receptors in the default mode network), and disruption of α and βwave patterns, which seem to propagate top-down expectations through the brain (and are correlated with default mode network activity).
In addition to the brain-scan-style evidence they cite throughout the paper, Carhart-Harris & Friston dedicate a long section to behavioral evidence ("Behavioral Evidence of Relaxed Priors under Psychedelics"). Briefly, there are several studies showing that surprise & consistency-making responses to sensory stimuli are reduced while on psychedelics, which is what we'd expect if the influence of top-down priors was lessened.
To sum up, REBUS and the Anarchic Brain places psychedelics in a predictive coding framework to give a unified theory of what psychedelics do – they decrease the influence of top-down prediction-making and increase the influence of bottom-up sense data. The theory has the nice quality of tying many disparate psychedelic phenomena together with an underlying explanation of what's going on. Plus, it gives a brain-based explanation for why psychedelic therapy is helpful for disorders like depression, anxiety, and addiction.

See also: Mike Johnson's pieces A Future for Neuroscience and The Neuroscience of Meditation which summarize a lot of the research by the Qualia Research Institute (QRI) on this topic. In particular, much like this paper by Carhart-Harris and Friston, at QRI we've been working on integrating the neuroscientific paradigms of Entropic Brain, Connectome-Specific Harmonic Waves, Predictive Coding, and our own contribution of Neural Annealing into a unified theory of psychedelic action for a number of years.
Our first mention of Neural Annealing in relation to psychedelics was in Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic States in 2016, and we are pleased to see that the concept is becoming a live idea in academic neuroscience in 2019.*
From our point of view, an extremely promising area of research that mainstream neuroscience has yet to explore is the Symmetry Theory of Valence. In particular, we claim that the very reason why Neural Annealing improves not only global control, belief, and behavioral consistency, but also mood and sense of wellbeing is because it smooths and symmetrifies your neural patterns of activation. Will this turn out to become part of mainstream neuroscience in the future? Well, since QRI was calling Neural Annealing years in advance, perhaps in retrospect you'll also see that we were on the money when it came to the mathematics of valence. Only time (and funding) will tell.

*It should be noted that unbeknownst to us Steven Lehar might be the first person to discuss neural annealing in the context of psychedelic states of consciousness. In his 2010 book "The Grand Illusion" he talks about annealing on LSD and ketamine. Here are some key articles about it: Free-Wheeling Hallucinations, The Resonance and Vibration of [Phenomenal] Objects, The Phenomenal Character of LSD + MDMA, and From Point-of-View Fragmentation to Global Visual Coherence: Harmony, Symmetry, and Resonance on LSD.

Featured image credit: Michael Aaron Coleman


Does Full-Spectrum Superintelligence Entail Benevolence?

Excerpt from: The Biointelligence Explosion by David Pearce

The God-like perspective-taking faculty of a full-spectrum superintelligence doesn't entail distinctively human-friendliness any more than a God-like superintelligence could promote distinctively Aryan-friendliness. Indeed it's unclear how benevolent superintelligence could want omnivorous killer apes in our current guise to walk the Earth in any shape or form. But is there any connection at all between benevolence and intelligence? Pre-reflectively, benevolence and intelligence are orthogonal concepts. There's nothing obviously incoherent about a malevolent God or a malevolent – or at least a callously indifferent – Superintelligence. Thus a sceptic might argue that there is no link whatsoever between benevolence – on the face of it a mere personality variable – and enhanced intellect. After all, some sociopaths score highly on our [autistic, mind-blind] IQ tests. Sociopaths know that their victims suffer. They just don't care.
However, what's critical in evaluating cognitive ability is a criterion of representational adequacy. Representation is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon; it varies in functional degree. More specifically here, the cognitive capacity to represent the formal properties of mind differs from the cognitive capacity to represent the subjective properties of mind. Thus a notional zombie Hyper-Autist robot running a symbolic AI program on an ultrapowerful digital computer with a classical von Neumann architecture may be beneficent or maleficent in its behaviour toward sentient beings. By its very nature, it can't know or care. Most starkly, the zombie Hyper-Autist might be programmed to convert the world's matter and energy into heavenly "utilitronium" or diabolical "dolorium" without the slightest insight into the significance of what it was doing. This kind of scenario is at least a notional risk of creating insentient Hyper-Autists endowed with mere formal utility functions rather than hyper-sentient full-spectrum superintelligence. By contrast, full-spectrum superintelligence does care in virtue of its full-spectrum representational capacities – a bias-free generalisation of the superior perspective-taking, "mind-reading" capabilities that enabled humans to become the cognitively dominant species on the planet. Full-spectrum superintelligence, if equipped with the posthuman cognitive generalisation of mirror-touch synaesthesia, understands your thoughts, your feelings and your egocentric perspective better than you do yourself.
Could there arise "evil" mirror-touch synaesthetes? In one sense, no. You can't go around wantonly hurting other sentient beings if you feel their pain as your own. Full-spectrum intelligence is friendly intelligence. But in another sense yes, insofar as primitive mirror-touch synaesthetes are prey to species-specific cognitive limitations that prevent them acting rationally to maximise the well-being of all sentience. Full-spectrum superintelligences would lack those computational limitations in virtue of their full cognitive competence in understanding both the subjective and the formal properties of mind. Perhaps full-spectrum superintelligences might optimise your matter and energy into a blissful smart angel; but they couldn't wantonly hurt you, whether by neglect or design.
More practically today, a cognitively superior analogue of natural mirror-touch synaesthesia should soon be feasible with reciprocal neuroscanning technology – a kind of naturalised telepathy. At first blush, mutual telepathic understanding sounds a panacea for ignorance and egotism alike. An exponential growth of shared telepathic understanding might safeguard against global catastrophe born of mutual incomprehension and WMD. As the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow observed, "If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." Maybe so. The problem here, as advocates of Radical Honesty soon discover, is that many Darwinian thoughts scarcely promote friendliness if shared: they are often ill-natured, unedifying and unsuitable for public consumption. Thus unless perpetually "loved-up" on MDMA or its long-acting equivalents, most of us would find mutual mind-reading a traumatic ordeal. Human society and most personal relationships would collapse in acrimony rather than blossom. Either way, our human incapacity fully to understand the first-person point of view of other sentient beings isn't just a moral failing or a personality variable; it's an epistemic limitation, an intellectual failure to grasp an objective feature of the natural world. Even "normal" people share with sociopaths this fitness-enhancing cognitive deficit. By posthuman criteria, perhaps we're all quasi-sociopaths. The egocentric delusion (i.e. that the world centres on one's existence) is genetically adaptive and strongly selected for over hundreds of millions of years. Fortunately, it's a cognitive failing amenable to technical fixes and eventually a cure: full-spectrum superintelligence. The devil is in the details, or rather the genetic source code.

(Featured Image: Source)