7 Recent Videos: Consciousness vs. Replicators, High Entropy Alloys of Experience, Sleep Paralysis Stories, Free-Wheeling Hallucinations, Zero Ontology, The Tyranny of the Intentional Object, And A Language for Psychedelic Experiences

[See: Previous 7-video package]

A Universal Plot – Consciousness vs. Pure Replicators: Gene Servants or Blissful Autopoietic Beings? (link)
What is the point of it all? What does it all mean?
In this talk I explain how we can meaningfully address these questions with the frame of "consciousness vs. pure replicators". This framework allows us to re-interpret and unify all previous "scales of moral/conceptual development". In turn, it makes solving disagreements in a principled way possible.
"Consciousness vs. Pure Replicators" is what I call "the universal plot of reality"; it is the highest level of narrative that determines what is "relevant to the plot" at any given point in time.
Whether consciousness succeeds at gaining control of its destiny and embarks on a collective journey of self-authorship, or whether we all end up being subservient cogs to a self-replicating mega-system whose one and only utility function is to self-perpetuate, is truly up in the air right now. So what can we do to support the interests of consciousness, then?
To aid consciousness we need more than good intentions (though those are still a key ingredient): I discuss how game theoretical considerations entail that in order for consciousness to succeed we will need to judiciously ally with specific replicator strategies. Being a "cooperatebot" towards anyone who claims to care about consciousness makes you liable to being resource-pumped. You need to verify that something makes sense also from the point of view of game theory; without a way to verify the ultimate values of others, coordinating with them at this level becomes extremely challenging. I suggest that a mature technology of intelligent bliss with objectively verifiable effects would be a game-changer. Once you've seen "it" (i.e. optimized bliss consciousness) you join everyone else in self-organizing around it.
If the world is to be taken over by something that cares about the wellbeing of consciousness, how this taking over process looks like may blindside us all. The power of "universal love" conquering all obstacles and creating a paradise for all may not be a New Age fantasy after all. Given the appropriate technology, it may turn out to be a live option…
Topics Covered: Kegan Levels of Development, Spiral Dynamics, Model of Hierarchical Complexity, Meta-Modernism, Qualia Formalism, Valence Structuralism, Pleasure Principle, Open Individualism, Universal Darwinism, Battle Between Good and Evil, Balance Between Good and Evil, Gradients of Wisdom, Consciousness vs. Pure Replicators, Wild Animal Suffering, Mistrusting DMT Entities, Super-Cooperator Cluster, Metta/Lovingkindness, State-Dependent Sexuality, Wireheading, Cooperation Technology, Game-Changing as a Strategy.
~Qualia of the Day: Kala Namak~
Further Readings:
The Universal Plot: Part I – Consciousness vs. Pure ReplicatorsWireheading Done Right: Stay Positive Without Going InsaneWhat Is The Model of Hierarchical Complexity?Spiral Dynamics & Integral TheoryHow To Be An Adult— Kegan's Theory of Adult DevelopmentReprogramming PredatorsThe Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values by Sam HarrisThe Evolution of CooperationThe Four Sublime States Contemplations on Love, Compassion, Sympathetic Joy and EquanimityMemetic Vaccine Against Interdimensional Aliens Infestation (Steven Lehar's article)Kala Namak

High Entropy Alloys of Experience (link)
~Suggestion: Play a music album you like in the background while listening to this talk.~
How do we find the "gems" hidden in the state-space of consciousness?
In this talk I articulate why it is very likely that there is a huge number of undiscovered states of consciousness that are completely unique, irreducible, and wholistically "special".
In metallurgy, a high-entropy alloy (HEA) is a mixture of five or more metals in high proportions, often giving rise to a single phase. Some HEAs have been found to have extremely desirable properties from the point of view of material science (such as being the best at both yield-strength and ultimate tensile strength at the same time). Given the huge space of possible mixtures of metals, finding these carefully balanced mixtures with unique emergent properties is both a science and an art. It calls for intelligent strategies to explore the state-space of possible alloys!
I suggest that in the realm of consciousness there are also states that would be appropriate to describe as "high entropy alloys of experience". I go into how this framework can help us understand unique scents*. We then explore how the receptor affinity profiles of drugs, drug cocktails, and drug schedules can give rise to unique HEA-like states of mind. I then also discuss how memeplexes have various degrees of total complexity, and how this makes some more receptive to dealing with complexity in the world than others. I offer that I really appreciate the HEA-like memeplexes that get expressed in places like EAGlobal, The Science of Consciousness, and Psychedelic Science conferences. I conclude by reflecting on how a "productive mindset" or mood optimized for a specific intellectual job is likely to be HEA-like because it requires the careful balance between many different facets of the mind.
Topics you will master after seeing this talk for even just one time**: High Entropy Alloys, Bronze and Iron Age, Equiatomic Alloys, People Clusters in Parties, Scents, Sexual Orientation, Gay Fragrances, Memeplexes and Mindsets, Vibe of Groups, Energy Parameter, Frozen Food, Crystallites, Space Groups, The Science of Consciousness, EAGlobal, Psychedelic Science, Search Heuristics, DMT as "Competing Clusters of Synchrony", Birthday Cake Flavor, Cellular Automata, Optimal Mood for Productivity.
*(HEAs: Le Male by JPG, Bleu de Chanel, Mitsouko by Guerlain. Non-HEAs: Tommy Girl by Tommy Hilfiger, Habit Rouge by Guerlain, Amazing Grace Ballet Rose by Philosophy)
**More like "topics barely touched upon".
Further Readings:
Multicomponent and High Entropy Alloys – Professor Brian CantorPerfumery as an Art FormMaking Amazing Recreational Drug CocktailsElectrumCrystalliteNeural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of EverythingA Big State-Space of ConsciousnessPsychedelic Science 2017: Take-aways, impressions, and what's nextFear And Loathing At Effective Altruism Global 2017Qualia Formalism in the Water Supply: Reflections on The Science of Consciousness 20185-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 Lenses"The Seven Seals of Security" (QRI Sweden)
Heterosexual males and females preferred odours from heterosexual males relative to gay males; gay males preferred odours from other gay males.Source: Sense of smell is linked to sexual orientation, study reveals
If the goal is to avoid the formation of such phases, simply mixing together five or more elements in near-equiatomic concentrations is unlikely to be a useful approach. Even multi-component alloys that are initially single phase after solidification tend to separate into multiple metallic and intermetallic phases when annealed at intermediate temperatures.Source: High-entropy Alloys (literature review)
Featured image source: @fractjack

6 Spooky Sleep Paralysis Stories (link)
I estimate that I have experienced between 100 and 200 sleep paralysis, many of which were lucid (meaning that I knew I was experiencing a sleep paralysis). In this video I articulate what I have learned from all of these experiences, share some particularly strange stories, and give you tips for how to get out of a sleep paralysis if you find yourself trapped in one.
Topics Covered: Hyperbolic curvature in pasta, dream music, phenomenal viscosity, DXM, imperfect sensory gating, "radio is playing" hallucinations, Dredg – Album: El Cielo · Song: Scissor Lock, taking psychedelics while dreaming, lucid dreams, dopaminergics, controlling the powerful vibrations of sleep paralysis, recursive depth, false awakenings, whimpering, noting meditation, and techniques for escaping a sleep paralysis.
~Qualia of the Day: Gigli/Campanelle Pasta~
Further Readings:
Dream MusicScissor Lock [Dredg song about sleep paralysis]Sleep Paralysis SubredditFree-Wheeling HallucinationsNeural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of EverythingThe Experience Elicited by Hallucinogens Presents the Highest Similarity to Dreaming within a Large Database of Psychoactive Substance Reports [sic, see video]Please do not confuse niacinamide with niacin: "PSA: Do not take Niacin to end an LSD trip"
Niacinamide helps in sleep enhancement as evidenced in a 3-week study of six subjects with normal sleep patterns and two with insomnia using electroencephalograms, electromyograms, and electrooculograms to evaluate sleep patterns at baseline and after niacinamide treatment. There was a significant increase in REM sleep in all normal-sleeping subjects, but the two subjects with moderate to severe insomnia experienced significant increases in REM sleep by the third week; awake time was also significantly decreased (Robinson et al., 1977).(source)

Free-Wheeling Hallucinations: Be the Free-Willed God of Your Inner World-Simulation (link)
Once you realize that you inhabit a world-simulation sustained by your neuronal soil it is natural to ask: why can't I control its contents? Why can't I make myself hallucinate whatever I want?
It can be frustrating to realize one lacks control over something that should be truly "ours" – our raw unmediated experience! We could, and perhaps should, be the rightful masters of our very own conscious experience, yet for the most part we remain powerless to explore its possible states at will.
In this video I discuss the existence of some states of consciousness in which you do own and control the contents of your experience. Think of it as acquiring an "experience editor": an interface with your experience that enables you to modify it at will while keeping the modifications stable.
A lucid dream would be an example of a somewhat fluid and unreliable free-wheeling hallucination. The free-wheeling hallucinations I describe here are much more general, stable, reliable, intense, and hedonic than lucid dreams. More so, to spin up free-wheeling hallucinations could amount to far more than being just a fun activity. Doing so may come to be an extremely valuable tool for a new paradigm of consciousness research! All of the parameters of experience that remain outside of our control under normal circumstances can be studied (both from a first and third person point of view) while in a free-wheeling hallucination! One can conduct a sort of "qualia chemistry" and repeat experiments to get reliable accounts of the behavior of consciousness under exotic (yet controlled) circumstances. Artifacts such as the valence-symmetry correspondance can be inspected in detail. Ultimately, this paradigm may allow us to chart the state-space of consciousness in terms of "edit distances" or "sequence of symmetry breaking operations" away from "formless consciousness".
I then go on to explain that "knowing everything about your world-simulation" does not entail that the experience will be boring. Hedonic tone can be dissociated from novelty, but we don't even need to go that far. It suffices to point out that you can set up the parameters of your world-simulation so that it unfolds in a chaotic way, and thus is impossible to predict. Additionally, you cannot really predict what you yourself will think in the future, so the whole setup can continue to generate novelty almost indefinitely (up to one's storage capacity/size of the state-space/heat death of the universe).
I conclude by exercising my free will.
Topics Covered: Energy Parameter, Predictive Coding, Free Energy Principle, Kolmogorov Complexity of Experience, Principia Qualia, Super Free Will, Quality Trip Reports, DXM + THC Combo, LSD + Ketamine + THC Combo, "Experience Editors", Qualia Critters, Fire Kasina, Color Control, Qualia Chemistry, Agenthood, Coumarin, Chamomile Tea.
~Qualia of the Day: You Have to Watch the Video~
Further Readings:
Free-Wheeling HallucinationsSteven Lehar Describing Free-Wheeling HallucinationsHarmonic Society (3/4): Art as State-Space Exploration and Energy Parameter ModulationPrincipia Qualia (Michael Johnson; pg. 53 about free will)Psychedelic Information Theory (James Kent)Harmonic Resonance Theory: An Alternative to the "Neuron Doctrine" Paradigm of Neurocomputation to Address Gestalt properties of perception (Steven Lehar)The Grand Illusion (Steven Lehar)Cartoon Epistemology (Steven Lehar)Fire Kasina (Daniel Ingram)Junk Bond Trader (great trip reports channel)Super Free Will (Andrew Zuckerman)Formless Consciousness and Zero Information (Kenneth Shinozuka)
Chamomile consists of several ingredients including coumarin, glycoside, herniarin, flavonoid, farnesol, nerolidol and germacranolide. Despite the presence of coumarin, as chamomile's effect on the coagulation system has not yet been studied, it is unknown if a clinically significant drug-herb interaction exists with antiplatelet/anticoagulant drugs. However, until more information is available, it is not recommended to use these substances concurrently.Source: Herbal medication: potential for adverse interactions with analgesic drugs

Why Does Anything Exist? Zero Ontology, Physical Information, and Pure Awareness (link)
Why is there something rather than nothing? In this video I take this question very seriously and approach it with optimism. I say (a) this is a meaningful and valid question, and (b) it has a real and satisfying answer. The overall explanation space I explore is that of David Pearce's Zero Ontology, which postulates that the multiverse is implied by the preservation of "zero information".
In order to understand Zero Ontology we need to do some conceptual groundwork. So I walk the listener (you, were you to accept this journey) through several concepts that make the question go from "impossible to answer" or even "meaningless" to something that at least conceivably seems possible to solve.
First, we need to sidesteps the common tropes of our habitual modes of thinking, such as expecting answers to come in the form of "causal explanations". No matter how you look at it, whether the universe extends back forever or not, a causal explanation for the origin of the universe is logically impossible to derive. Instead, we have to think in a radically different way, which is by way of frameworks for implication rather than causation. This opens us up to the possibility that exotic modes of thinking capable of representing what is entailed by "nothing" will show in turn that "something" follows from it. This helps us make sense of Pearce's argument: the "nothing" we are looking for is not the "common sense" view of the term, but rather a more refined post-theoretical concept that is ill-fitted to the human mind for the time being.
In particular, Pearce focuses on how "no information" may be "what nothing is". Thus, Zero Ontology attempts to formalize the "fact of inexistence" by reconceptualizing information as "ruling out possibilities". Based on this alternate concept we see that math, physics, and phenomenology share the common thread of being possible to "construct out of nothing". In math, the empty set can be used to derive all of arithmetic. In physics the Standard Model is a surprisingly simple theory that can be derived from first principles by imposing the "need for symmetry". The total energy, charge, momentum, etc. of the universe is zero! And in phenomenology, we encounter a lot of cases where apparently all of the possible flavors of a qualia variety seem to "cancel out" into "pure being" or "raw awareness". The simplest example is how experiencing "all phenomenal colors at once" (a kind of rainbow effect, but including magenta) seems to be interchangeable with "colorless phenomenal light".
I tie all of this together and talk about how Zero Ontology allows us to reconceptualize "God/Being" as "unconstrained reality" or "boundarylessness". I discuss how we could perhaps even probe Zero Ontology empirically in a direct way if we were to train enough physicists, mathematicians, philosophers, computer scientists, etc. to go into high Jhana or 5-MeO-DMT states and then quantify the properties of the fundamental fields implementing these experiences.
I conclude with an analogy to Borges' Library of Babel (or a quantum version thereof) and why we may be in it. In fact, "be it".
David Pearce: "A theory that explains everything explains nothing", protests the critic of Everettian QM. To which we may reply, rather tentatively: yes, precisely.
Topics Covered: The Concept of Nothing, Three Characteristics, Illusion, Limitations of the Medium of Thought, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Redefining Information, Empty Set Arithmetic, Preserved Quantities of Physics, Symmetry and Noether's Theorem, QFT, Path Integrals, Jhanas, 5-MeO-DMT, Symmetries in Qualia, Quantum Library of Babel, Black Hole Information Paradox.
~Qualia of the Day: Thinking About Nothing~
Further Readings:
Why does anything exist? (short version)The Zero Ontology – David PearceWhy Does Anything Exist? (David Pearce's original Zero Ontology essay)Ways of Thinking (Richard Feynman)Quantum Field Theory visualizedOn the Medium of ThoughtThe Symmetry Theory of Valence: 2020 PresentationQED: Photons-Corpuscles of Light (Richard Feynman 1/ 4)CURIOSITY – Featuring Richard FeynmanNothing happens in the Universe of the Everett Interpretation (Jan-Markus Schwindt; I made the mistake of saying this was from Tegmark in the video, apologies)Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing? (Leo Gura)A Universe from Nothing

The Tyranny of the Intentional Object: Universal Addictions, Meaning Abuse, and Denied Self-Insights (link)
What is it that we truly want? Why do so many people believe that meaning is better than happiness?
In this talk I discuss what we call "the tyranny of the intentional object", which refers to the tendency for the mind to believe that "what it wants" is semantically meaningful experiences. In reality, what we want under the surface is to avoid negative valence and achieve sustainable positive valence states of consciousness.
I explain that evolution has "hooked us" on particular sources of pleasure in such a way that this is not introspectively accessible to us. We often need specific semantic content to work as a "key" for the "lock" of high-valence states of consciousness. I explain how we are all born chronic (endogenous) opioid addicts, and how our reward architecture is so coercive that we often fail to recognize this because thinking about it makes us feel bad (and thus ironically confirming the situation we are trying to be in denial about!).
I go on to provide my current thoughts on the nature of meaning. Beyond "sense and reference" we find that "felt-sense" is actually what meaning is "made of". But not any kind of felt-sense. I posit that the felt-senses that we describe as richly meaningful tend to have the following properties: high levels of intention, coherence of attention field lines, a "field syntax", and a high level of "potential to affect valence". Valence and meaning are deeply connected but are not identical: we can find corner cases of high-valence but meaningless states of mind and vice versa (though they rare).
Meaning is no less liable to be "abused" than hard drugs: we often find ourselves scratching the bottom of the barrel of our meaning-making structures when things go wrong. I advise against doing this, and instead endorse the use of equanimity when faced with the absurd and Chapman's "Meaningness" approach: to think of meaning as a gradient rather than in black and white terms. Do take advantage of opportunities for high levels of meaning, but do not rely on them and think they are universal. Indeed "meaning abuse" is a recipe for broken hearts and misguided idealistic solutions to problems that can be easily addressed pragmatically.
Finally, I steelman the importance of "high-dimensional valence" and explain why in turn usually pursuing meaning is indeed much better than shallow pleasure.
~Qualia of the Day: Clean Air~
Further Readings:
The Tyranny of the Intentional ObjectPleasure ParadoxWhy we seek out pleasure: the Symmetry Theory of Homeostatic Regulation (Michael Johnson)A Future for Neuroscience (Michael Johnson)Frege and "Sense and Reference" theory of meaningQuining Qualia (Daniel Dennett)Do words mean anything? (Max Hodak)Meaningness (David Chapman)The Pseudo-Time ArrowCoherence (HeartMath)A Defense of Paradise Engineering (David Pearce)Cost-Effectiveness of Air Purifiers against Pollution (Lukas Trötzmüller)
[T]he heroin addict will do anything to get another fix: lie, cheat, steal and worse. Natural selection has stumbled on and harnessed Nature's own version of heroin. Our endogenous opioid system ensures that biological life behaves in callous but genetically adaptive ways. […] All complex animal life is "paid" in junk: the addictive dribble of opioids in our hedonic hotspots released when we act in ways that tend to maximise the inclusive fitness of our genes in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). The pleasure-pain axis is coercive. Barring self-deliverance, we can't opt out. Our "reward" circuitry hardwires opioid addiction and the complex rationalisations it spawns. Human history confirms we'll do anything to obtain more opioids to feed our habit. The mesolimbic dopamine system enables us to anticipate our next fix and act accordingly: an insidious interplay of "wanting" and "liking". We enslave and kill billions of sentient beings from other species to gratify our cravings. We feed the corpses of our victims to our offspring. So the vicious cycle of abuse continues.David Pearce: Quora Responses

A Language for Psychedelic Experiences: Algorithmic Reductions, Field Operators, and Dimensionality (link)
Psychedelic experiences are notoriously difficult to describe. But are they truly ineffable, or do we simply lack the words, syntax, and grammar to articulate them? Optimistically, groups who take seriously the exploration of exotic states of consciousness could create a common ground of semantic primitives to be independently verified and used as the building blocks of a language for the "psychedelic medium of thought".
In this video I present some ideas for a possible "psychedelic language" based on QRI paradigms and recent experience reports. I go over the article "Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic States" and the value of breaking the psychedelic experience in terms of a minimal set of "basic effects" whose stacking and composition gives rise to the wild zoo of effects one observes. I point out that algorithmic reductions can have explanatory power even if they do not provide a clear answer about the nature of the substrate of experience. Importantly, since I wrote that article we have developed a far higher-resolution understanding of exotic states of consciousness:
We suggest that a remarkably fruitful strategy for pointing at a whole family of psychedelic effects comes in the form of "field operators" that change the qualitative properties of our experiential fields. I provide a detailed description of what we call the "world-sheet" of experience and how it encodes emotional and semantic content in its very structure. The world-sheet can have tension, relaxation, different types of resonance and buzzing entrainment, twisting, curling, divergence (with vortices and anti-vortices in the attention field-lines), dissonance, consonance, noise, release, curvature, holographic properties, and dimensionality. I explain that in a psychedelic state, you explore higher up regions in the "Hamiltonian of the field", meaning that you instantiate field configurations with higher levels of energy. There, we observer interesting trade-offs between the hyperbolicity of the field and its dimensionality. It can instantiate fractals of many sorts (in polar, cartesian, and other coordinate systems) by multi-scale entrainment. Time loops and moments of eternity result from this process iterated over all sensory modalities. The field contains meta-data implicitly encoded in its periphery which you can use for tacit information processing. Semantic content and preferences are encoded in terms of the patterns of attraction and repulsion of the attention-field lines. And so much more (watch the whole video for the entire story).
I conclude by saying that a steady meditation practice can be highly synergistic with psychedelics. Metta/loving-kindness can manifest in the form of smooth, coherent, high-dimensional, and consonant regions of the world-sheet and make the experience way more manageable, wholesome, and enriching. Equanimity, concentration, and sensory clarity are all synergistic with the state, and I posit that using "high-dimensionality" as the annealing target may accelerate the development of these traits in everyday life.
Please consider donating to QRI if you want to see this line of research make waves in academia and expand the Overtone Window for the science of consciousness. Funds will allow us to carry out key scientific experiments to validate models and develop technologies to reduce suffering at scale: https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/donate
~Qualia of the Day: The Phenomenal Silence of Each Field Modality~
Further Readings:
Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic StatesThe Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMTMike Johnson's Interview of Shinzen YoungShinzen Young's Channel "expandcontract" (highly recommended!) Jhanas and "Focus on Rest" ~ Shinzen YoungThe Grand Illusion (drugs are wasted on the young – cognitive science PhDs should be the ones taking psychedelics)Subjective Effect Index (PsychonautWiki)The Four Noble Truths | Thich Nhat HanhMetta/Loving Kindness MeditationI hack my biology. I'm like Rogan (comedy)

That's it for now!
Until next time!
Infinite bliss!
– Andrés


Guide to Writing Rigorous Reports of Exotic States of Consciousness

Cross-Posted in QRI's Blog
[Context: This is a guide to writing useful trip reports. If you read the trip report archives of Erowid, Bluelight, and PsychonautWiki, you notice a wide range of styles, interpretative lenses, and focus. We believe that a few relatively simple considerations can drastically improve the usefulness of written reports in ways that can open up novel research directions. This document is meant to extend and complement the Subjective Effect Index of PsychonautWiki in order to maximize the scientific utility of the written reports. If unconvinced of the importance of writing high quality reports, we recommend first reading David Pearce's "Their Scientific Significance is Hard to Overstate".]
The first few trip reports you write may not be very detailed, but you will improve over time. It is best to adopt a growth mindset when it comes to translating exotic forms of thinking into sober thinking others can understand. If learning to speak takes years and mastering a new human language in adulthood takes just as long, why would competence in translating psychedelic patterns of thought be something you acquire on the first trip? Thus, it is no surprise that practice and patience are essential ingredients to becoming a psychonaut that is capable of sharing scientifically useful information to the world at large.
So how do you write a useful trip report? Let us start with perhaps the single most important instruction.
Focusing on the Phenomenal Character, Rather than on the Intentional Content of the Experience
The first and most important instruction is to focus on the phenomenal character as opposed to the intentional content of the experience. The intentional content of an experience is what the experience is about, whereas its phenomenal character is what it feels like. While it is worthwhile to discuss the content of your thoughts at a narrative level (e.g. you hallucinated being in an art museum where giant ladybugs were performing in a jazz quartet), the narrative alone will not be very useful to anyone. This is because a narrative description of what your trip was about drastically underdetermines what the experience felt like.
Hence, it is critical to enrich any narrative description with an account of the texture and structure of your experience. People often say things such as: "I went to DMT hell" or "I experienced an LSD paradise". But what if you probe these statements further? What made the "DMT hell" so unpleasant? What made the "LSD paradise" so blissful? Most people, when asked, tend to be overly focused on saying things along the lines of: "Well, I was meeting angels and strange creatures" or "there were people sobbing", and they think that this explains why the experience was unpleasant or blissful. You have to understand that when explaining why a certain narrative felt a certain way, you cannot ultimately rely on more narrative. At some point, the explanation should be grounded by the texture of the experience rather than the experience's narrative[1]. Instead of those previous stories, we think a more useful description would be: "There's this 3D matrix of resonance that created a lot of green-magenta Moiré patterns, and the sense of harmony and bliss seems to have come from that texture of my experience, and that texture is what made me interpret where I was as a kind of Heaven Realm." The reason why the angels you saw felt so loving and benevolent comes down to the particular texture of your experience expressing that emotional palette. In other words, the angel is an expression of that sense of harmony and not the other way around.
An analogy is that if you're listening to pleasurable music, you may hear guitar or piano sounds. The specific instruments definitely matter, but the bulk of what's making the sound so pleasant and comforting may actually be the reverb quality of the music. Think of the angel like the sound of a guitar. The angel, like the guitar sound, has its own specific qualities (a certain vibe). But in addition to seeing an angel, your entire subjective experience contains this reverb pattern of reverberating (phenomenal) space-time. A phenomenal space-time that feels really wonderful will make you feel like you are in heaven.

Image made by Matthew Smith
Thus, we recommend that you pay attention to the nature of the phenomenal space and time you experienced and do two things:
Try to describe it in as much detail as possible in the language of frequency, dimensionality, fractality, reverb, etc.Explain how the texture of the phenomenal space you inhabited influenced your emotions and semantic interpretations of what was going on.

Numbers and images taken from: List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension
Try to reverse-engineer the generators of your experience.
A very simple example would be if you were experiencing some kind of strobing effect, like seeing flickering lights. If so, it would be ideal to figure out the frequency of those lights. QRI developed a psychophysics tool to help people quantitatively measure the visual effects of psychoactive substances. Ideally, you can use this tool while experiencing exotic state of consciousness (such as DMT or the states induced by a Fire Kasina retreat), so that you can confidently report (for example) that you experienced a 20 Hz strobing effect.

Left: 10hz replay. Right: 7hz strobe.
Likewise, if you are experiencing replay effects and you enter a thought loop (cf. short-term memory tracers), it's very helpful if you can tell how big the loop is instead of saying "I was stuck in a loop". Was the loop a fraction of a second or was it an elaborate narrative that you were circling around over the course of minutes? Those feel very different even though they are both technically thought loops.
Here is a very concrete example: imagine that your DMT trip looked like this lightshow from 2:27 to 5:12[2].

What would you say about it? A lot of people would become overly focused on explaining that at around 4:20, amazing lights felt like an angel, or that it was "richly colored and bright". But the sort of information we believe is more helpful comes when you can point out simple and plausible ways the experience might have been constructed out of elementary building blocks. In this case, we refer you to one of the Youtube comments: "It is unbelievable that such a magnificent show could be made with just 5 lasers!". Indeed! Most people would be mesmerized by the light show, come up with some elaborate narrative for "what happened" and go about their day without ever realizing that the entirety of the visual content was generated by just five sources of light fixed in place the whole time! Now that is the sort of obvious-in-retrospect observation that can help us make tangible progress. For instance, it only took one clever math student to notice "oh dear, the walls of the DMT palace I'm in are tessellated by heptagons" to kick-start the explanation space where DMT's odd effects involve an alteration to the curvature of phenomenal space and time (see: The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences). A lot of big insights start with seemingly innocent observations that are obvious in retrospect.
Examples of Statements That Do a Good Job Describing Phenomenal Character
The tracer effects clearly had replays equally spaced apart, calculated around 14hz with the tracer tool. I could make out three replays with precision, but there might have been four or five counting faint ones I couldn't always see.Whenever I would focus on my breath my visual field seemed to express a Kelvin–Helmholtz instability: thanks to tactile-visual synesthesia, the sensation of each breath would manifest as disturbances in my visual field, which in turn seemed to have a higher density than their surroundings, and this would give rise to turbulent flow very similar to the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability simulations I've seen online.The left part of my visual field had a vertical wall I was attending to with peripheral vision. The wall felt like it was about 1 meter to my left and at a right angle. This hallucinated wall was vibrating at around 8hz and it had two alternating layers that looked about 1cm apart[3], one blue and one yellow. Their colors were alternating at about half the speed at which the wall was vibrating.The ceiling was tessellated with a highly detailed texture organized along the 632 wallpaper symmetry group. More so, this tessellation was dynamic, in that all of the shapes were shifting and morphing. In sequence, a symmetry element type would be selected by attention (such as all of the copies of the 6-rotational symmetry element) and each repeating region of the texture in the entire ceiling would change by the rotation around the copy of the symmetry element that corresponds to it (example). Then another symmetry element would be selected and the pattern would morph by rotation around that new symmetry element, and so on. This lasted for about 1 minute and it faded as soon as I turned on some music.By selecting features of my hallucinatory environment and attending to them, I could make them grow and in a way "reify them", meaning that they would feel more and more real and vibrant the more I paid attention to them. I noticed that I could transform the walls of the hallucinated environment into glass walls with a peculiar property: when light goes through the wall in one direction it becomes lighter and when it goes in the other direction it becomes darker. This resulted in the room being filled with what I later recognized to be cohomology fractals. I was able to more easily separate the various "facets" of essential oils. In particular, rather than experiencing lemongrass as just a "unified block" (a single feeling of "herbal citrus scent"), I could break it down into three independent facets: a sharp citrus scent with peaks of sensation (probably citral or d-limonene), a soft and smooth alcoholic character impact background (probably neral and linalool), and an earthy almost clove-like spice facet (probably centered around myrcene). It was noteworthy that these facets were far more cleanly separate than normal yet by focusing on any two of them at once I could blend them independently in a sort of "qualia chemistry". It felt like each perfume in turn could be used to experience 5 or 6 different compositions depending on how I would attend and try to merge its different facets all inside of my mind!My sense of time passing seemed to be constructed out of three distinct elements interacting with one another. One was based on the rate at which the color scheme evolved. The other two were based on the pulsing of visual sensations, which constructed the scene in a manner consistent with a temporal raster plot. The "vertical time" would take about two seconds to complete a cycle, whereas the "horizontal time" would be incredibly fast, doing perhaps a hundred cycles per second. The raster plot had adjustable height and width and this allowed me to visualize (much akin to an actual raster plot) how rhythms in my mind were coupled despite having frequencies at different orders of magnitude: the vertical direction would represent changes across hundreds of milliseconds whereas the horizontal direction would visualize rhythms going on at just a few milliseconds as long as they repeated for long enough.The auralization of the sound loops I hallucinated would continuously and coherently transform in tandem with the 3-dimensional space group I found myself in. This led me to interpret the auditory reverb effects as being consistent with the aggregate echo reflections inside a polygon in 3D hyperbolic spaces.
Personal Matters
Of course, psychedelic trips are intensely personal experiences. It is in the nature of psychedelic states to connect intellectual content with deep personal emotional processing. Nonetheless, when it comes to contributing to the commons with high-quality trip reports, you can lessen the impact of personal matters. Without ever mentioning that "it was about your grandmother", you can just focus instead on the phenomenal character of your trip and provide the bulk of information to the scientific community. Of course, if there was something about the texture of the experience that made your emotional processing easier or harder, you should ideally point that out. But at no point do you need to delve into the specifics of your social circumstance.
Write It Like a Book Report
Think about the task of writing a trip report in the same way you would write a book report in middle school[4]. The teacher assigns a book to read and then they provide a guide for writing your book report with the help of some basic questions everyone needs to answer. This is so that you do not forget to provide some of the critical information needed to interpret your report. We recommend reflecting on these questions and writing their answers before the trip so that your report of the set and setting that gave rise to the trip is not influenced post-hoc by the contents of the trip. Let's apply this "write it like a book report" framing to reporting exotic experiences. Please provide:
Demographic Information[5]
At the bare minimum, start by including basic demographic information: approximate age, gender, height, weight, genetics (national origin might be a good approximation, e.g. half-Mexican half-Icelandic), and health conditions.
Set and Setting Information
In addition to demographic information, make sure to include set and setting information: drug, dose, when it was taken, what method of intake was used (ingestion, smoking, etc.), social context, sleep deprivation status (well rested, just had a 20 minute nap after an all-nighter, etc.) how many times you have taken this drug and at what doses, time of the year, indoors/outdoors, and what the weather was like at the time.
After that, here are six basic questions that should ideally be addressed in every trip report:
1. Background Philosophical Assumptions
The most important thing is to start with clarity about what you believe. Most people have background beliefs that govern the way they think about reality even though they don't really notice them most of the time. These assumptions will heavily influence what happens on a psychedelic trip. What are your background philosophical assumptions? What do you believe? Why do you believe what you believe? In particular, we suggest that you mention:
Recent Media Consumption
What people and media have influenced you the most? For example, recently reading a lot of Alan Watts books versus Richard Feynman's Lectures on Physics may lead to very different experiences on LSD. Your recent media exposure cannot be neglected. And this is less about volume than about influence: you may have read a single quote a year ago that you still think about when showering while the daily consumption of your favorite television show is barely noticed by your subconscious. Therefore, share, most of all, how the media you've been consuming is influencing how you think about life, the universe, and everything else.
Direct vs Indirect Realism
Probably the most important belief to address is your stance on direct versus indirect realism about perception. If you read a lot of trip reports, many seem to be implicitly assuming direct realism about perception. This means that people believe they can access the world directly. When they see a flower breathe in and out, they may interpret this experience as the result of being given access to another set of frequencies of light or aspects of reality that we usually ignore. For example, Albert Hoffman seems to have thought about LSD in this way: in the last chapter of LSD: My Problem Child, Hoffman speculates:
"If one continues with the conception of reality as a product of sender and receiver, then the entry of another reality under the influence of LSD may be explained by the fact that the brain, the seat of the receiver, becomes biochemically altered. The receiver is thereby tuned into another wavelength than that corresponding to normal, everyday reality. Since the endless variety and diversity of the universe correspond to infinitely many different wavelengths, depending on the adjustment of the receiver, many different realities, including the respective ego, can become conscious."
One gets the impression that Hoffman really believed that LSD's trippy visuals were revealing true information about the environment around us rather than telling us, perhaps, something about the way our brains construct a world-simulation we confuse for reality itself. This is not to say that one cannot in fact notice true details about the environment with LSD, but we can conceive of this as a trade-off between forms of attending to and processing the environment through our normal conventional senses rather than as being given access to new sense organs yet uncharted by science. This is an important distinction.
We should note that variants of direct realism about perception can be steelmanned to some extent. For example, you may look at a tree on a psychedelic and see a mythological creature embedded into the tree. When you come down, you can also verify it by observing that the tree actually kind of resembles the creature you saw on your trip and shows up when you're not tripping. Once you notice that sort of thing, you cannot unsee it. And maybe other sober people might also see it too once you point it out. In other words, psychedelics will very likely, within some parameters, allow you to see patterns in the real world that you may be missing out on otherwise. It doesn't mean that you're perceiving the world directly through a new sense organ. It just means you're processing that information in a slightly different way.
We would generally suggest to approach a trip report with an indirect realism mindset, where you assume, until proven otherwise, that you are experiencing states of your own internal world-simulation. This allows you to have much better clarity about many strange phenomena. For example, if you feel that you are somehow entangled with your environment, you would in this lens interpret that feeling as an entanglement with yourself. You are just entangled with a part of yourself that you usually interpret as being the external environment.
Indeed, one of the trickiest things about life that we don't realize for the most part is that the very sense of an external environment itself is part of your internal world-simulation[6]. So for your trip report, make sure to point out if you are interpreting your experience through this lens, the lens of direct realism, or perhaps a hybrid lens (where some aspects are perceived directly and some aren't).
2. Emotional and Cognitive State
What is your background emotional and cognitive state like? What is your preferred cognitive style? For example, do you naturally have a high baseline well-being or are you more melancholic? Do you identify as a people person or are you a mathematician with no interest in people?[7] It's actually quite important to note and can result in quite different experiences.
Observing Your Emotions
Paying attention to how emotions are expressed on psychedelics is one of the most important things you can do. People regularly project their emotions onto the nature of reality. Be mindful of this as a failure mode. It's helpful advice both for better phenomenology and psychologically to try to notice the way emotions manifest in your world-simulation. Emotions will be modifying the way your attention is directed, and noticing this can allow you to gain some control over this process. You can tell the difference between physical suffering and mental suffering in terms of whether these patterns have dissonance[8] located in your (phenomenal) body or in the part of your experiential field that represents thoughts.
It sounds kind of strange. When we're caught up in mental suffering, we usually don't realize that it's a type of unpleasant sensation or dissonance. It is not ineffable. There's actually a location, region, or subcomponent of the phenomenal field that is vibrating in a strange and unpleasant way. In many ways, noticing how emotions modify the structure of either your felt-sense of your body or your thought patterns will prevent you from being controlled by the emotions without you knowing it.
It's very important to notice this, and noting this can be helpful for avoiding a bad experience. Often, the reason why you feel terrible in your psychedelic state is not because you realized a big, deep truth about reality or due to anything bad you did. It is frequently the case that you entered some kind of dissonant attractor, and there's probably a way out of it.
Often, one is advised to "let go and embrace whatever is happening". This advice does allow you to reduce that dissonance and lessen the grip that mental or physical suffering has on you. It allows you to let it just vibrate on its own for a while without you feeding it energy. And that is helpful. We think it's even more helpful if you can diagnose the source of dissonance and address it directly. Thus, at an even deeper level, "disengage from dissonant patterns" is better advice than "just let go" because there are some states where letting go is actually a bad idea. If you're actually very close to making a psychological or intellectual breakthrough, letting go is probably not optimal. Instead, have the mindset of being gentle to yourself by letting go of the dissonant component of the experience rather than its intentional content.
3. Temporal Progression
What was the overall temporal progression of the experience? Draw a graph where the x-axis is time and the y-axis is a variable you want to track, such as "intensity of effects", "brightness of visual field", or "emotional valence" and update the graph every half hour. This will help you remember where you were at each stage of the trip and allow you to place your thoughts and ideas along the timeline.
Right after the trip, spend some time making sense of the general structure of what you experienced. That is, identify what kind of arc or main stages the trip involved. Outline how your beliefs and emotions changed throughout each of the stages. Try to recall how long each physical hour felt like[9] (e.g. "1st hour felt like 90 minutes, 2nd hour felt like two hours, 3rd hour felt like two hours, etc").

Example graph of self-reported valence over time. You can also label points and sections of the graph and then describe them in more detail in your written report. Image by Andrew Zuckerman.
4. The Theme
Was the trip primarily philosophical, self-introspective, investigative, or focused on emotional processing? Go into as much detail as you feel comfortable. Obviously, there are going to be very personal things, so record only as much as feels comfortable or useful to you.
5. Valence
What did you learn about valence? What was the connection between the way the trip unfolded, the quality of each level, and the various thoughts and feelings? How did those contribute to a sense of well being, despair, or neutrality?
We're very interested in confirming the idea that it feels really good when all your attention centers are synchronized and flickering at the same frequency. If that was the case, then please let us know. If it wasn't, also please let us know![10]
6. Qualia and Binding Patterns
In what way did the trip allow you to experience qualia that you have never experienced before (like impossible colors)? Let's say that you experienced a new combination of touch and auditory sensations. This is really significant! Don't overlook it, note it down! During the trip, if you're experiencing new qualia, do as much as you can to explore and investigate it by testing when it arises, when it dissolves, and what actions, if any, can multiply or intensify it.
Buddhists have names for a lot of the novel qualia that arise during meditation. One of those is equanimity. Equanimity feels like something; it's not just a word. There's actually a facet of experience that corresponds to it.[11] Likewise, on psychedelics you probably experience a ton of new qualia. We need a glossary for uniquely-psychedelic qualia!
In addition to novel qualia, notice and report any novel patterns of binding. This is about how sensations become coupled together or dissociate in unexpected ways—how sensations are linked together in phenomenal time and space to form coherent phenomenal objects. A special case of "exotic patterns of binding" is synesthesia, where two or more of the sensory modalities become coupled together (such as experiencing phenomenal objects that are sound-touch hybrids). But patterns of binding can also be exotic even when they are expressed within the same modality, such as how the visual field seems to acquire extra virtual dimensions on DMT. We would also consider alterations of the sense of space and time as the result of exotic patterns of binding. So, this is a very general effect with many possible manifestations. If you notice anything of this sort, pay attention to it! How were your sensations bound or unbound in ways that are unusual? Be as detailed as possible.
A Meta Consideration
We suggest that you do not get caught up in the obligation to report things during the experience. Or worse, to believe that in order to be a good trip reporter you have to be able to write everything in real time. Trying to write your trip report in real time is likely to make you feel quite miserable! This is because whether we like it or not, we derive a lot of our self-worth from our feeling of verbal competence. So when you are under the influence of something as powerful as LSD and your verbal skills break down, the feeling that you "are not yourself anymore" gives you a sense of personal failure. But this will only arise if you begin your trip with the expectation that you will be able to report on it in real time. Instead, acknowledge that you will probably be terrible at verbalizing on psychedelics and instead focus your energy on remembering the properties of the state in non-verbal ways. Don't feel compelled to write extensively because that's going to be difficult. Just take note of the time or make a drawing or mark that you will understand later.
We do recommend recording the experience as much as you can (short of showing yourself on camera handling or consuming the chemical… don't do that!). Recording the entirety of your experience unobtrusively in the background may be really helpful for reconstructing what happened afterwards. We have heard that not doing this is a common regret, especially for trips involving high doses where you genuinely wonder what was happening around you in consensus reality (if anything, the footage will help ground you in the certainty that at least the God that visited you wasn't emitting regular photons that were visible to other people in the room). If you're comfortable with it, leave at least an audio recording on.
We encourage you to record any important ideas, especially if you suspect that there's any chance you may forget them. Take your insights seriously. They matter. Don't feel that you lack the qualifications nor the background for your insights to matter. You are in a very exotic state that's largely unexplored. What you are experiencing probably matters immensely for the collective understanding of humanity.
Additional Resources for Writing High-Quality Trip Reports
If you'd like some inspiration, here are examples of great trip reports:
Typical N,N-DMT Trip Progression According to an Anonymous ReaderDetailed 2C-B Trip ReportRational 4-AcO-DMT Trip ReportLucid LSD Trip ReportSelf-Locatingly Uncertain Psilocybin Trip Report
And here are more resources for trip reports and strengthening your phenomenological skills:
QRI developed a psychophysics tool to help people quantitatively measure the visual effects of psychoactive substances.Psychonaut Wiki, Effect IndexPsychedelic Information Theory by James KentThe Grand Illusion by Steven Lehar Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic StatesThe Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences: Symmetries, Sheets, and Saddled Scenes / Explain Like I'm Five VersionA Language for Psychedelic Experiences: Algorithmic Reductions, Field Operators, and Dimensionality
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Mackenzie Dion and Andrew Zuckerman for their feedback, suggestions, and copious edits to this document.

Footnotes:
[1]  In fact, we would claim that the mechanism by which "seeing people sob" feels sad can be explained by how this narrative element influences the texture of your experience.
[2]  Beware that it is very loud right before 2:27.
[3]  The ideal units to report would be degrees, depth, and location within one's visual field. In practice, most people will be better at reporting estimates of distances gauged as if they were physical distances out there in the world. In the future we will provide conversion tables to unify the units of phenomenological reporting.
[4]  Thanks to Ryan Ragnar for providing the analogy between trip reports and middle school book reports.
[5]  Skip demographic data if you do not feel comfortable sharing it. It will be helpful in order to identify idiosyncratic responses to psychedelics and other compounds, but privacy is also very important. Share approximate information if that makes you feel more comfortable (e.g. "between 20 and 25 years old" rather than "21 years and 3 months old").
[6]  Steven Lehar's "Cartoon Epistemology" provides a great visual demonstration and argument for indirect realism about perception.
[7]  See: empathizing-systemizing theory, autism spectrum quotient, systematic empathy.
[8]  Dissonance emerges when two incompatible patterns of resonance try to interact with one another. See Principia Qualia and Quantifying Bliss for an in-depth discussion.
[9]  Physical time being the objective passage of time according to clocks in consensus reality, whereas phenomenal time is how the passage of time feels like in a given experience.
[10]  In particular, pay attention to the temporal and spatial frequency of synchronized patterns, and whether there are competing patterns that cause dissonance with one another (for more, see: Symmetry Theory of Valence: 2020 Presentation and Why Does DMT Feel So Real?).
[11] See Mike Johnson's interview of Shinzen Young for a discussion on the way equanimity feels.


Ways of Thinking

Related to: On the Medium of Thought, John von Neumann, Early Isolation Tank Psychonautics: 1970s Trip Reports, Pseudo-Time Arrow, Thinking in Numbers, High-Entropy Alloys of Experience, A Single 3N-Dimensional Universe: Splitting vs. Decoherence, A New Way to Visualize General Relativity, Visual Quantum Physics, and Feynman's QED Video Lectures (highly recommended!)

Transcript from the last section of the 1983 BBC interview of Richard Feynman "Fun to Imagine" (excerpt starts at 55:52):
Interviewer presumably asks: What is it like to think about your work?
Well, when I'm actually doing my own things, that I'm working in the high, deep, and esoteric stuff that I worry about, I don't think I can describe very well what it is like… First of all it is like asking a centipede which leg comes after which. It happens quickly and I am not exactly sure… flashes and stuff goes on in the head. But I know it is a crazy mixture of partial differential equations, partial solving of the equations, then having some sort of picture of what's happening that the equations are saying is happening, but they are not as well separated as the words that I'm using. And it's a kind of a nutty thing. It's very hard to describe and I don't know that it does any good to describe. And something that struck me, that is very curious: I suspect that what goes on in every man's head might be very, very different. The actual imagery or semi-imagery which comes is different. And that when we are talking to each other at these high and complicated levels, and we think we are speaking very well and we are communicating… but what we're really doing is having some kind of big translation scheme going on for translating what this fellow says into our images. Which are very different.

I found that out because at the very lowest level, I won't go into the details, but I got interested… well, I was doing some experiments. And I was trying to figure out something about our time sense. And so what I would do is, I would count trying to count to a minute. Actually, say I'd count to 48 and it would be one minute. So I'd calibrate myself and I would count a minute by counting to 48 (so it was not seconds what I counted, but close enough), and then it turns out if you repeat that you can do very accurately when you get to 48 or 47 or 49, not far off you are very close to a minute. And I would try to find out what affected that time sense, and whether I could do anything at the same time as I was counting and I found that I could do many things, but couldn't do other things. I could… For example I had great difficulty doing this: I was in university and I had to get my laundry ready. And I was putting the socks out and I had to make a list of how many socks, something like six or eight pair of socks, and I couldn't count them. Because the "counting machine" was being used and I couldn't count them. Until I found out I could put them in a pattern and recognize the number. And so I learned a way after practicing by which I could go down on lines of type and newspapers and see them in groups. Three – three – three – one, that's a group of ten, three – three – three – one… and so on without saying the numbers, just seeing the groupings and I could therefore count the lines of type (I practiced). In the newspaper, the same time I was counting internally the seconds, so I could do this fantastic trick of saying: "48! That's one minute, and there are 67 lines of type", you see? It was quite wonderful. And I discovered many things I could read while I was… I could read while I was counting and get an idea of what it was about. But I couldn't speak, say anything. Because of course, when I was counting I sort of spoke to myself inside. I would say one, two, three… sort of in the head! Well, I went down to get breakfast and there was John Tuckey, a mathematician down at Princeton at the same time, and we had many discussions, and I was telling him about these experiments and what I could do. And he says "that's absurd!". He says: "I don't see why you would have any difficulty talking whatsoever, and I can't possibly believe that you could read." So I couldn't believe all this. But we calibrated him, and it was 52 for him to get to 60 seconds or whatever, I don't remember the numbers now. And then he'd say, "alright, what do you want me to say? Marry Had a Little Lamb… I can speak about anything. Blah, blah, blah, blah… 52!" It's a minute, he was right. And I couldn't possibly do that, and he wanted me to read because he couldn't believe it. And then we compared notes and it turned out that when he thought of counting, what he did inside his head is that when he counted he saw a tape with numbers, that did clink, clink, clink [shows with his hand the turning and passing of a counting tape], and the tape would change with the numbers printed on it, which he could see. Well, since it's sort of an optical system that he is using, and not voice, he could speak as much as he wanted. But if he wanted to read then he couldn't look at his clock. Whereas for me it was the other way.

And that's where I discovered, at least in this very simple operation of counting, the great difference in what goes on in the head when people think they are doing the same thing! And so it struck me therefore, if that's already true at the most elementary level, that when we learn about mathematics, and the Bessel functions, and the exponentials, and the electric fields, and all these things… that the imagery and method by which we are storing it all and the way we are thinking about it… could be it really if we get into each other's heads, entirely different? And in fact why somebody has sometimes a great deal of difficulty understanding when you are pointing to something which you see as obvious, and vice versa, it may be because it's a little hard to translate what you just said into his particular framework and so on. Now I'm talking like a psychologist and you know I know nothing about this.

Suppose that little things behaved very differently than anything that was big. Anything that you are familiar with… because you see, as the animal evolves, and so on, as the brain evolves, it gets used to handling, and the brain is designed, for ordinary circumstances. But if the gut particles in the deep inner workings whereby some other rules and some other character they behave differently, they were very different than anything on a large scale, then there would be some kind of difficulty, you know, understanding and imagining reality. And that is the difficulty we are in. The behavior of things on a small scale is so fantastic, it is so wonderfully different, so marvelously different than anything that behaves on a large scale… say, "electrons act like waves", no they don't exactly. "They act like particles", no they don't exactly. "They act like a kind of a fog around the nucleus", no they don't exactly. And if you would like to get a clear sharp picture of an animal, so that you could tell exactly how it is going to behave correctly, to have a good image, in other words, a really good image of reality I don't know how to do it!

Because that image has to be mathematical. We have mathematical expressions, strange as mathematics is I don't understand how it is, but we can write mathematical expressions and calculate what the thing is going to do without actually being able to picture it. It would be something like a computer that you put certain numbers in and you have the formula for what time the car will arrive at different destinations, and the thing does the arithmetic to figure out what time the car arrives at the different destinations but cannot picture the car. It's just doing the arithmetic! So we know how to do the arithmetic but we cannot picture the car. No, it's not a hundred percent because for certain approximate situations a certain kind of approximate picture works. That it's simply a fog around the nucleus that when you squeeze it, it repels you is very good for understanding the stiffness of material. That it's a wave which does this and that is very good for some other phenomena. So when you are working with certain particular aspect of the behavior of atoms, for instance when I was talking about temperature and so forth, that they are just little balls is good enough and it gives us a very nice picture of temperature. But if you ask more specific questions and you get down to questions like how is it that when you cool helium down, even to absolute zero where there is not supposed to be any motion, it's a perfect fluid that hasn't any viscosity, has no resistance, flows perfectly, and isn't freezing?

Well if you want to get a picture of atoms that has all of that in it, I can't do it, you see? But I can explain why the helium behaves as it does by taking my equations and showing that the consequences of them is that the helium will behave as it is observed to behave, so we now have the theory right, but we haven't got the pictures that will go with the theory. And is that because we are limited and haven't caught on to the right pictures? Or is that because there aren't any right pictures for people who have to make pictures out of things that are familiar to them? Let's suppose it's the last one. That there's no right pictures in terms of things that are familiar to them. Is it possible then, to develop a familiarity with those things that are not familiar on hand by study? By learning about the properties of atoms and quantum mechanics, and practicing with the equations, until it becomes a kind of second nature, just as it is second nature to know that if two balls came towards each other they'd mash into bits, you don't say the two balls when they come toward each other turn blue. You know what they do! So the question is whether you can get to know what things do better than we do today. You know as the generations develop, will they invent ways of teaching, so that the new people will learn tricky ways of looking at things and be so well trained that they won't have our troubles with picturing the atom? There is still a school of thought that cannot believe that the atomic behavior is so different than large-scale behavior. I think that's a deep prejudice, it's a prejudice from being so used to large-scale behavior. And they are always seeking to find, to waiting for the day that we discover that underneath the quantum mechanics, there's some mundane ordinary balls hitting, or particles moving, and so on. I think they're going to be defeated. I think nature's imagination is so much greater than man's, she's never gonna let us relax.

From the blog Visual Quantum Physics (same as gifs above):

Ways of Thinking


7 Recent Videos: Rational Analysis of 5-MeO-DMT, Utility Monsters, Neroli, Phenomenal Time, Benzo Withdrawal, Scale-Specific Network Geometry, and Why DMT Feels So Real

5-MeO-DMT: A Rational Analysis at Last (link)
Topics covered: Non-Duality, Symmetry, Valence, Neural Annealing, and Topological Segmentation.
See also:
5-MeO-DMT vs. N,N-DMT: The 9 LensesNeural AnnealingMini-Series on Open IndividualismTopological Segmentation: How Dynamic Stability Can Solve the Combination Problem for Panpsychism Hairy Ball Theorem

Befriending Utility Monsters: Being the Adult in the Room When Talking About the Hedonic Extremes (link)
In this episode I connect a broad variety of topics with the following common thread: "What does it mean to be the adult in the room when dealing with extremely valenced states of consciousness?" Essentially, a talk on Utility Monsters.
Concretely, what does it mean to be responsible and sensible when confronted with the fact that pain and pleasure follow a long tail distribution? When discussing ultra-painful or ultra-blissful experiences one needs to take off the glasses we use to reason about "room temperature consciousness" and put on glasses that actually take these states with the seriousness they deserve.
Topics discussed include: The partial 5HT3 antagonism of ginger juice, kidney stones from vitamin C supplementation, 2C-E nausea, phenibut withdrawal, akathisia as a remarkably common side effect of psychiatric medication (neuroleptics, benzos, and SSRIs), negative 5-MeO-DMT trips, the book "LSD and the Mind of the Universe", turbulence and laminar flow in the "energy body", being a "mom" at a festival, and more.
Further readings on these topics:
Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain (article)Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain (presentation)"Those taking a thousand milligrams or so of vitamin C a day may have a 1-in-300 chance of getting a kidney stone every year, instead of a 1-in-600 chance." (source)Quitting phenibut the sensible wayUsing Ibogaine to Create Friendlier Opioids (by QRI's Lead Qualia Engineer Quintin Frerichs)Sharing the World with Digital Minds (Bostrom's recent paper on utility monsters)(Quote I mentioned from "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Posman): "On the Medium of Tought"Ayahuasca Horror story (notice how they say that "it's very hard to put our finger on what went wrong, what it meant"): "My NIGHTMARE Ayahuasca Trip [Shocking True Story]"5-MeO-DMT Malpractice: Open Letter Concerning Abuses by Octavio Rettig and Gerry Sandoval(Negative) 5-MeO-DMT video reportJust Word Hypothesis (why people believe "you deserve what you get")Presentation about the book "LSD and the Mind of the Universe: Diamonds from Heaven" by its author Dr. Chris BacheThe intelligent monster that you should let eat you (by Richard Fisher)"Despite the initial promise that second generation antipsychotics would be devoid of akathisia effects, this has not been confirmed." (source)Ex-benzodiazepine user relating to Peterson says withdrawal 'hell' needs awareness""This manuscript will advance the hypothesis that 5-HT7 directly mediates three specific dramatic mental effects of psychedelics: creative open-eyed Visuals, Ego-loss, and loss of contact with Reality (VER)." (Thomas S. Ray; source)Hedonic Audit (By Sarah Perry)Effective Altruism, and building a better QALY (by Mike Johnson)

Mapping State-Spaces of Consciousness: The Neroli Neighborhood (link)
What would it be like to have a scent-based medium of thought, with grammar, generative syntax, clauses, subordinate clauses, field geometry, and intentionality? How do we go about exploring the full state-space of scents (or any other qualia variety)?
Topics Covered in this Video: The State-space of Consciousness, Mapping State-Spaces, David Pearce at Oxford, Qualia Enrichment Kits, Character Impact vs. Flavors, Linalool Variants, Clusters of Neroli Scents, Neroli in Perfumes, Neroli vs. Orange Blossom vs. Petigrain vs. Orange/Mandarin/Lemon/Lime, High-Entropy Alloys of Scent, Musks as Reverb and Brown Noise, "Neroli Reconstructions" (synthetic), Semi-synthetic Mixtures, Winner-Takes-All Dynamics in Qualia Spaces, Multi-Phasic Scents, and Non-Euclidean State-Spaces.
Neroli Reconstruction Example:
4 – Linalool3 – Linalyl Acetate3 – Valencene3 – Beta Pinene2 – Nerolione2 – Nerolidol2 – Geraniol Coeur2 – Hedione2 – Farnesene1 – D-Limonene1 – Nerol1 – Ambercore1 – Linalool Oxyde70 – Ethanol
Further readings:
Qualia Research Diary: ScentsOn the Medium of ThoughtOpenCola (drink)Ubuntu ColaTheir Scientific Significance is Hard to Overstate (by David Pearce)Perfumery as an Art FormA Big State-Space of ConsciousnessWhat's out there? (by Mike Johnson)Qualia Production Presents: "The Seven Seals of Security" (and Other Communications from QRI Sweden)

What is Time? Explaining Time-Loops, Moments of Eternity, Time Branching, Time Reversal, and More… (link)
What is (phenomenal) time?
The feeling of time passing is not the same as physical time.
Albert Einstein discovered that "Newtonian time" was a special case of physical time, since gravity, relativity, and the constancy of the speed of light entails that space, time, mass, and gravity are intimately connected. He, in a sense, discovered a generalization of our common-sense notion of physical time; a generalization which accounts for the effects of moving and accelerating frames of reference on the relative passage of time between observers. Physical time, it turns out, could manifest in many more (exotic) ways than was previously thought.
Likewise, we find that our everyday phenomenal time (i.e. the feeling of time passing) is a special case of a far more general set of possible time-like qualities of experience. In particular, in this video I discuss "exotic phenomenal time" experiences, which include oddities such as time-loops, moments of eternity, time branching, and time reversal. I then go on to explain these exotic phenomenal time experiences with a model we call the "pseudo-time arrow", which involves implicit causality in the network of sensations we experience on each "moment of experience". Thus we realize that phenomenal time is an incredibly general property! It turns out that we haven't even scratched the surface of what's possible here… it's about time we do so.
Further readings on this topic:
Original article about the pseudo-time arrowDetailed presentation about the pseudo-time arrow (given at the Foresight Institute in 2020) Modeling Psychedelic TracersQRI's Tracer Replication ToolLSD and Quantum Measurements: Can you see Schrödinger's cat both dead and alive on acid?How to secretly communicate with people on LSDRelativity: The Special and the General Theory – (Einstein's very own explanation of his theory)A new way to visualize General Relativity

Benzos: Why the Withdrawal is Worse than the High is Good (+ Flumazenil/NAD+ Anti-Tolerance Action) (link)
Most people have low-resolution models of how drug tolerance works. Folk theories that "what goes up must come down" and theories in the medical establishment about how you can "stabilize a patient on a dose" and expect optimal effects long term get in the way of actually looking at how tolerance works.
In this video I explain why benzo withdrawal is far worse than the high they give you is good.
Core arguments presented:
Benzos can treat anxiety, insomnia, palpitations, seizures, hallucinations, etc. If you use them to treat one of these symptoms, the rebound will nonetheless involve all of them.Kindling – How long-term use leads to neural annealing of the "withdrawal neural patterns".Amnesia effects prevent you from remembering the good parts/only remembering the bad parts.Neurotoxicity from long-term benzo use makes it harder for your brain to heal.Arousal as a multiplier of consciousness: on benzos the "high" is low arousal and the withdrawal is high arousal (compared to stimulants where you at least will "sleep through the withdrawal").Tolerance still builds up even when you don't have a "psychoactive dose" in your body – meaning that the extremely long half-life of clonazepam and diazepam and their metabolites (50h+) entails that you still develop long-term tolerance even with weekly or biweekly use!
I then go into how the (empirically false) common-sense view of drug tolerance is delaying promising research avenues, such as "anti-tolerance drugs" (see links below). In particular, NAD+ IV and Flumazenil seem to have large effect sizes for treating benzo withdrawals. I AM NOT CONFIDENT THAT THEY WORK, but I think it is silly to not look into them with our best science at this point. Clinical trials for NAD+ IV therapy for drug withdrawal are underway, and the research to date on flumazenil seems extremely promising. Please let me know if you have any experience using either of these two tools and whether you had success with them or not.
Note: These treatments may also generalize to other GABAergic drugs like gabapentin, alcohol, and phenibut (which also have horrible withdrawals, but are far shorter than benzo withdrawal).
Further readings:
Epileptic patients who have become tolerant to the anti-seizure effects of the benzodiazepine clonazepam became seizure-free for several days after treatment with 1.5 mg of flumazenil.[14] Similarly, patients who were dependent on high doses of benzodiazepines […] were able to be stabilised on a low dose of clonazepam after 7–8 days of treatment with flumazenil.[15]"Flumazenil has been tested against placebo in benzo-dependent subjects. Results showed that typical benzodiazepine withdrawal effects were reversed with few to no symptoms.[16] Flumazenil was also shown to produce significantly fewer withdrawal symptoms than saline in a randomized, placebo-controlled study with benzodiazepine-dependent subjects. Additionally, relapse rates were much lower during subsequent follow-up.[17]Source: Flumazenil: Treatment for benzodiazepine dependence & tolerance
NAD+ for Benzodiazepine WithdrawalREVIEW: NAD+ for Detox and Post Acute WithdrawalAddiction Clinics Market Unproven Infusion Treatments To Desperate PatientsBenzo Withdrawal: Why I Ignored Medical Advice and Listened to the InternetXanax withdrawals 'like being tortured alive'Anti-Tolerance DrugsBenzodiazepine Withdrawal SupporUsing Ibogaine to Create Friendlier Opioids

Scale-Specific Network Geometry (link)
Is it possible for the "natural growth" of a pandemic to be slower than exponential no matter where it starts? What are ways in which we can leverage the graphical properties of the "contact network" of humanity in order to control contagious diseases? In this video I offer a novel way of analyzing and designing networks that may allow us to easily prevent the exponential growth of future pandemics.
Topics covered: The difference between the aesthetic of pure math vs. applied statistics when it comes to making sense of graphs. Applications of graph analysis. Identifying people with a high centrality in social networks. Klout scores. Graphlets. Kinds of graphs: geometric, small world, scale-free, empirical (galactic core + "whiskers"). Pandemics being difficult to control due to exponential growth. Using a sort of "pandemic Klout score" to prioritize who to quarantine, who to vaccinate first. The network properties that made the plague spread so slowly in the Middle Ages. Toroidal planets as having linear pandemic growth after a certain threshold number of infections. Non-integer graph dimensionality. Dimensional chokes. And… kitchen sponges.
Readings either referenced in the video or useful to learn more about this topic:
QC Coronavirus Edition: Preventing Pandemics by Living on Toroidal Planets and Other Cocktail Napkin IdeasStanford's CS224W "Social and Information Network Analysis" lectures (free and awesome!)Graphlet-based Characterization of Directed NetworksA Method for Reducing the Severity of Epidemics by Allocating Vaccines According to CentralitySentiment Expression Conditioned by Affective Transitions and Social ForcesTorus-Earth (by Anders Sandberg)Complex Networks: Small-World, Scale-Free and BeyondDiscovering Hyperbolic Metric Spaces Hidden Beneath the Internet and Other Complex NetworksEfficient embedding of complex networks to hyperbolic space via their LaplacianEmergent Complex Network GeometryStatistical Properties of Community Structure in Large Social and Information Networks (where the empirical "whiskers" and graded core are outlined)
Leskovec's paper (the last link above):
Main Empirical Findings: Our results suggest a rather detailed and somewhat counterintuitive picture of the community structure in large networks. Several qualitative properties of community structure are nearly universal:• Up to a size scale, which empirically is roughly 100 nodes, there not only exist well-separated communities, but also the slope of the network community profile plot is generally sloping downward. (See Fig. 1(a).) This latter point suggests, and empirically we often observe, that smaller communities can be combined into meaningful larger communities.• At size scale of 100 nodes, we often observe the global minimum of the network community profile plot. (Although these are the "best" communities in the entire graph, they are usually connected to the remainder of the network by just a single edge.)• Above the size scale of roughly 100 nodes, the network community profile plot gradually increases, and thus there is a nearly inverse relationship between community size and community quality. This upward slope suggests, and empirically we often observe, that as a function of increasing size, the best possible communities as they grow become more and more "blended into" the remainder of the network.We have also examined in detail the structure of our social and information networks. We have observed that an 'jellyfish' or 'octopus' model [33, 7] provides a rough first approximation to structure of many of the networks we have examined.
Ps. Forgot to explain the sponge's relevance: the scale-specific network geometry of a sponge is roughly hyperbolic at a small scale. Then the material is cubic at medium scale. And at the scale where you look at it as flat (being a sheet with finite thickness) it is two dimensional.

Why Does DMT Feel So Real? Multi-modal Coherence, High Temperature Parameter, Tactile Hallucinations (link)
Why does DMT feel so "real"? Why does it feel like you experience genuine mind-independent realities on DMT?
In this video I explain that we all implicitly rely on a model of which signals are trustworthy and which ones are not. In particular, in order to avoid losing one's mind during an intense exotic experience (such as those catalyzed by psychedelics, dissociatives, or meditation) one needs to (a) know that you are altered, (b) have a good model of what that alteration entails, and (c) that the alteration is not strong enough that it breaks down either (a) or (b). So drugs that make you forget you are under the influence, or that you don't know how to model (or have a mistaken model of) can deeply disrupt your "web of trusted beliefs".
I argue that one cannot really import the models that one learned from other psychedelics about "what psychedelics do" to DMT; DMT alters you in a far broader way. For example, most people on LSD may mistrust what they see, but they will not mistrust what they touch (touch stays a "trusted signal" on LSD). But on DMT you can experience tactile hallucinations that are coherent with one's visions! "Crossing the veil" on DMT is not a visual experience: it's a multi-modal experience, like entering a cave hiding behind a waterfall.
Some of the signals that DMT messes with that often convince people that what they experienced was mind-independent include:
Hyperbolic geometry and mathematical complexity; experiencing "impossible objects".Incredibly high-resolution multi-modal integration: hallucinations are "coherent" across senses.Philosophical qualia enhancement: it alters not only your senses and emotions, but also "the way you organize models of reality".More "energized" experiences feel inherently more real, and DMT can increase the energy parameter to an extreme degree.Highly valenced experiences also feel more real – the bliss and the horror are interpreted as "belonging to the vibe of a reality" rather than being just a property of your experience.DMT can give you powerful hallucinations in every modality: not only visual hallucinations, but also tactile, auditory, scent, taste, and proprioception.Novel and exotic feelings of "electromagnetism".Sense of "wisdom".Knowledge of your feelings: the entities know more about you than you yourself know about yourself.
With all of these signals being liable to chaotic alterations on DMT it makes sense that even very bright and rational people may experience a "shift" in their beliefs about reality. The trusted signals will have altered their consilience point. And since each point of consilience between trusted signals entails a worldview, people who believe in the independent reality of the realms disclosed by DMT share trust in some signals most people don't even know exist. We can expect some pushback for this analysis by people who trust any of the signals altered by DMT listed above. Which is fine! But… if we want to create a rational Super-Shulgin Academy to really make some serious progress in mapping-out the state-space of consciousness, we will need to prevent epistemological mishaps. I.e. We have to model insanity so that we ourselves can stay sane.
[Skip to 4:20 if you don't care about the scent of rose – the Qualia of the Day today]
Further readings:
The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT ExperiencesMaterializing Hyperbolic Spaces with Gradient-Index Optics and One-Way MirrorsTypical N,N-DMT Trip Progression According to an Anonymous ReaderMy DMT Year – 1 – A Couple Creepy Trips (hand hallucination)The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (@Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club)The Super-Shulgin Academy: A Singularity I Can Believe InSamsara (by Scott Alexander)Inner-Space Warp Drive (QRI's Anders & Maggie)
"The most common descriptive labels for the entity were being, guide, spirit, alien, and helper. […] Most respondents endorsed that the entity had the attributes of being conscious, intelligent, and benevolent, existed in some real but different dimension of reality, and continued to exist after the encounter."Source: Survey of entity encounter experiences occasioned by inhaled N,N-dimethyltryptamine: Phenomenology, interpretation, and enduring effects

That's it for now!
Please feel free to suggest topics for future videos!
Infinite bliss!
– Andrés