Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic States

Only when sexual choice favored the reportability of our subjective experiences- with the emergence of the mental clearing-house we call consciousness- did our strangely promiscuous introspection abilities emerge, such that we seem to have instant conscious access to such a range of impressions, ideas, and feelings. This may explain why philosophical writing about consciousness so often sounds like love poetry- philosophers of mind, like lovesick teenagers, dwell upon the redness of the rose, the emotional urgency of music, the soft warmth of skin, and the existential loneliness of the self. The philosophers wonder why such subjective experiences exist, given that they seem irrelevant to our survival prospects, while the lovesick teenagers know perfectly well that their romantic success depends, in part, on making a credible show of aesthetic sensitivity to their own conscious pleasures.
– The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 365) by Geoffrey F. Miller
A Darwinian Set and Setting
According to The Mating Mind, human sexual selection favors particular fitness-indicating traits, both physical and mental. In the context of mental traits, we have verbal and introspective abilities, agreeableness, conscientiousness, openness to experience, low neuroticism and extroversion. No matter how verbally capable and introspective a given person is, unless that is balanced with some degree of agreeableness, conscientiousness, etc. the person will not be all that attractive. But, when all else is being held equal, stronger verbal and introspective abilities are favored. Teenagers, arguably, know this best of all: courtship is intensely verbal.
Our minds evolved in a Darwinian environment. If people like Miller are right in thinking that language evolved as a fitness indicator, we are right to expect that the way we think and verbalize is biased to be impressive to the members of the opposite sex during courtship. Powerful introspective abilities, as it were, can make one's language seem deeper, more romantic, and even at an entirely different level than that of one's peers. In this backdrop of sexual choices and judgements, it is not surprising that humans would develop ever-increasing verbal and introspective capacities. At some point everyday life could not present sufficient opportunities for people, especially males, to show off their own abilities. And as these abilities increased over time, culture was forced to invent handicaps so that people could display their top capabilities. Over time, elaborate and competitive handicaps were integrated into the culture. Even verbal and introspective abilities at the top of the scale can still be compared side by side by using carefully selected handicaps: for example, poetry is exactly that; rhyme, rhythm and meter make it easier for the best poets to show off their excellent abilities. The handicaps adjust to the maximum level of competence in the population.
The space of handicaps that are used to show off traits that are reliable indicators of fitness is very large. From Greek Symposiums to modern day Frat Parties, Western civilization has embraced a niche subculture that uses chemical handicaps as a means to display verbal, social and creative skills. If you can philosophize after drinking a gallon of wine, or stay capable of managing the playlist after 16 cheap cans of beer, you are showing off your biological robustness. Clearly, many of our ancestors were capable of impressing potential sexual mates with a mixture of booze, loud music and stunning philosophical conversations.
One could argue that psychedelics have come to disrupt our traditional games of handicaps. "Sure you can drink a bottle of tequila and sing in a band, but can you take three hits of acid and tell me what your experience reveals about the intrinsic nature of consciousness?" Psychedelics are, in a way, a cultural hyper-stimulus that presents the most difficult and interesting handicap currently in existence for verbal and introspective abilities.
Cultures can have an allergic reaction to the states of consciousness that these agents can disclose; people are afraid that psychedelic users will discover something that they themselves don't know. Notably, psychedelicists have been both demonized and deified since the 60s. Sure, these researchers became extremely open minded, and in many ways weird. But, above all, they became extremely interesting people. And interesting people who challenge the current games of status can cause cultural allergic reactions.
Every acid head and psychedelic researcher has a pet theory of what these compounds are really doing in one's mind. Many of these folk theories about the effects of psychedelics involve ontologies that currently have little scientific support (such as souls, thought fields, spirit worlds, archetypes, alien conspiracies, and so on). Although we cannot rule out explanations of this sort out of hand, the ontologies themselves are so abstract and poorly defined that we cannot accept them as useful forms of reductions. That said, their future versions will be more interesting. It is likely that committed, rational, spiritual psychedelic users will formalize models of this sort at some point. Rather than talking about a "spirit world," they will talk about "mind-independent extra-dimensional space that consciousness can access in altered states" and then go on to define the differential equations that govern consciousness's interactions with this space. When this happens, we will be in a much better position to assess the validity of these models, test the reality of those spaces, and perhaps even recruit the extra-dimensional inhabitants of these worlds for computational tasks.
Psychedelic experiences drastically increase people's introspection, capacity for deep aesthetic appreciation, while at the same time increasing their ability to entertain unusual ideas. Insofar as the selection pressures of our introspective abilities have been heavily biased towards courtship ability, it is not surprising that people tend to immediately cast self-enhancing, life-affirming and magical narratives into their interpretations of their personal psychedelic experiences. After all, having a very interesting story to tell is highly praised during courtship. Are people's psychedelic narratives a modern day form of the peacock's tail? While psychedelic talk does not yet form part of any mainstream game of courtship, I envision this changing in the next decades. Undoubtedly, the most insightful, sound, and scientifically rigorous members of the Super-Shulgin Academy will attract attention, status, resources and… desirable mates.
What is the deep structure of psychedelic experiences?
Psychedelics seem to have a generalized effect on one's consciousness. At minimum, we could talk of experience amplification. Without delving into specifics, psychedelics introduce spontaneous activity into our consciousness that our mind is compelled to integrate somehow. Our state of consciousness changes dynamically as our mind adjusts itself to the incoming stimulation. The result is tightly dependent on the interplay between our brain anatomy, motivational system and the actual changes to the micro-structure of consciousness induced by LSD.
As John Lilly noted in light of his psychedelic experiences: "in the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits…".* While there are reasons not to take this literally, we have grounds for claiming that a large number of limits on our experience are placed there by our deeply held beliefs and attitudes. The space of possible LSD experiences that a single individual can experience is much larger than what said individual will typically be able to explore in practice. Many limits are imposed by his or her beliefs and background assumptions, rather than by physiology per se. Social cognition is a profound attractor in psychedelic experiences. "What will I say about this? What would this person think about this experience? etc." are captivating thoughts. However, they occupy valuable mental space. And the thick mental judgements that people naturally focus on come with large conceptual and emotional baggage that taints the experience. Meditators, philosophers and scientists are more likely to set aside some time during their explorations to delve more deeply into what the energy introduced by LSD can produce in one's consciousness.
After extreme training and tens (or hundreds) of trips, dedicated psychonauts will discover qualities that all of the trips share. Most people will likely experience a variant of Lilly's realization that whatever you believe can be perceived as true during psychedelic experiences. Lilly emphasized the limitless quality of the mind, but one must wonder: If one can experience as true anything conceivable, are we not, then, limited by what we can conceive? No matter how much time one spends with an open mind waiting for new and interesting ideas to take shape, one cannot know the nature of what one has not yet even conceived of.
It may be true that we will always find fundamental limits that cannot be overcome. There are fundamental physiological constraints to the possible configurations of our consciousness, and arguably, chemical agents, while capable of expanding the space of possibilities, will not automatically give access to all possible states of consciousness. As future research is likely to show, 2C-B and LSD probably facilitate slightly different kinds of thoughts and experiences. Thus the limits of our mind are at least to a large extent the result of our physiology. Memes and meditation can only go so far.
In addition to physiological limits, the structure of the state-space of qualia is itself a constraint on what can and cannot be experienced. To the extent that psychedelic states enable the exploration of a larger space of possible experiences, we are more likely while on psychedelics to find states of consciousness that demonstrate fundamental limits imposed by the structure of the state-space of qualia. In normal everyday experience we can see that yellow and blue cannot be mixed (phenomenologically), while yellow and red can (and thus deliver orange). This being a constraint of the state-space of qualia itself is not at all evident, but it is a good candidate and many introspective individuals agree. On psychedelic states one can detect many other rules like that, except that they operate on much higher-dimensional and synesthetic spaces (E.g. "Some feelings of roughness and tinges of triangle orange can mix well, while some spiky mongrels and blue halos simply won't touch no matter how much I try." – 150 micrograms of LSD).
One of the objectives of Qualia Computing is to define the state space of possible experiences and the interdependencies between them. While normal everyday states of consciousness are important datapoints, I predict that the bulk of the most useful information will come from studying the behavior and mechanics of consciousness in radically altered states. To this end, however, we should focus on simple explanations that can be generalized to all psychedelic experiences.
Starting Background Assumptions
For the purpose of this article I will assume that direct realism, in all of its guises, is wrong. That is, I will assume that any mind-independent object can only be experienced indirectly. What we experience is not the object (or beings) themselves, but a qualia-furnished representation entirely contained within one's mind (this is often called the simulationist account of perception). Furthermore, I will also assume that the behavior of  the universe can be fully described with the Standard Model of physics (or a future version of it).
In what is to follow I will propose, as a first approximation, an algorithmic reduction of psychedelic states; I will propose a set of changes in our consciousness that (1) is as simple and assumption-free as possible, and (2) can be used to reconstruct as many psychedelic effects as possible.
Two Kinds of Reduction
The word reduction in the context of philosophy of science has a lot of historical and conceptual baggage. In the context of this article, I will use the word in the following sense: We say that a property of a given phenomenon X reduces to Y if we can fully explain X's property by referencing Y's properties. X can be a physical phenomenon, a mathematical construct or even an experience. Y is an ontology with interaction rules, which allow the pieces of said ontology to interact with one another. We do not commit to the idea that Y itself needs to be the fundamental (or true) ontology of X. But we do want to make sure that Y is at least more fundamental than X in some appropriate sense. So what kind of ontologies can Y have? In the context of philosophy of mind, reductions usually attempt to account for not only the behavior of consciousness but also for its underlying nature. Thus, functionalism is both a reduction program as well as a philosophical take on what the mind fundamentally is.
Thankfully, we do not need to commit to any ontology in order to advance a particular style of reduction. Reductions are useful regardless: they reduce the amount of information needed to describe a phenomenon, and if accurate, they can also make useful predictions. Finally, these reductions can provide hints for how to bridge different areas of science; by identifying isomorphisms or even further reductions, entire fields can cross-pollinate once their respective reductions are compatible (such as biology and chemistry or chemistry and physics).
Atomistic Reduction
For most intents and purposes, science relies on a particular kind of reduction that we can call atomistic reduction. This style of reduction focuses on explaining macroscopic phenomena by modeling it as the emergent structure of many particles interacting with one another at a much finer level of resolution. Even though this style of reduction is usually fruitful (e.g. thermodynamics), it can be counter-productive to assume in some situations. An extreme case would be the quantum computer. If states of superposition help a computer find an answer, it will be hard to explain the behavior of said superposition by postulating that it actually reduces to little particles interacting using simple rules. The model could in principle be worked out, but at the cost of very high complexity. It would be much easier to start with a quantum-mechanical ontology that allows the superposition of wavefunctions! Then what is left is to reduce the rest of the computer to quantum mechanics (which is possible, given that particle models and quantum mechanical models usually converge at the macroscopic limit).
It is tempting to try to reduce the properties of the mind (including psychedelic states) using an atomistic reduction. Unfortunately, the phenomenal binding problem adds a complication to this reduction. Rather than discussing (right now) whether an atomistic (and thus classical) account will ultimately be capable of modeling conscious experience, we will side-step this problem by using a different style of reduction. We will focus only on the algorithmic level of analysis.
Algorithmic Reduction
Without assuming a fundamental ontology (atoms, fields, wavefunctions, etc.) we can still make a lot of progress. We can restrict ourselves to identifying what we call an algorithmic reduction: find a set of procedures, state-spaces, shapes and overall main effects out of which you can reconstruct as much of the observed behavior as possible.
In reality, every reduction is, at least in part, an algorithmic reduction. By specifying a particular ontology such as "particles", we restrict the shape of our possible reductions. By keeping the reduction at the algorithmic level, we allow arbitrary ontologies to be the final explanations (then depending on actual empirical measurements). The main criteria for success still includes (1) the overall complexity of the model, and (2) the explanatory power of the model. In other words, how easily and precisely does the model reconstruct the behavior of our experiences?
A Zoo of Psychedelic Effects
PsychonautWiki has a detailed and fascinating taxonomy of reported psychedelic visual effects. One could argue that all of these countless effects are completely unique. As a philosopher might put it, these effects may ultimately be qualitatively irreducible to one another. But what are the chances that a simple molecule would happen to trigger a whole zoo of unrelated effects? As a form of reduction, nothing is achieved by stating that every effect is its own unique phenomenon.
Four Principal Operators: A Simple Algorithmic Model of Psychedelic States
In trying to account for the strange effects of psychedelics, we will aim to propose as few main effects as possible and then use these effects, and their interactions, to derive all of the remaining effects. By doing this, we will be algorithmically reducing the complex phenomena found in psychedelic states. In turn, this will allow us to increase our understanding of the source of information processing benefits provided by psychedelic states, and to derive new and exciting applications of such states. Additionally, by identifying a good algorithmic reduction, we might be able to refine the states themselves, to amplify their benefits while minimizing the drawbacks.
The model we will treat for now has four main effects, and with those four effects we will attempt to reconstruct the rest. These effects are:

control interruption
drifting
eidetic hallucinations/enhanced pattern recognition/apophenia
symmetry detection/symmetry propagation

Symmetric drifting. What would Giulio Tononi think about this? Source.
Control interruption is the simplest and most universal psychedelic effect. It enables the buildup of qualia in one's consciousness. People say that psychedelics are intense, deep, bright, etc. Every experience, whether a thought, a smell or an emotion, seems to be both stronger and longer-lasting on psychedelics.
Things seem more lively, and this is not because a switch is suddenly turned on and your experience of the current input is amplified. Rather, one seems to be experiencing a gentle overlap of many previous frames (and feature bundles) of one's experience. In medium to high doses, this can give rise to solid frame stacking. In turn, the buildup of sensation creates complex patterns of interference:
In order for a perceptual system to transition from a linear to a nonlinear state, negative feedback control must be subverted. If control is entirely removed then perception becomes totally unconstrained, leaving a system that is quickly overloaded with too much information. If control is placed in a state where it is partially removed or in a toggled superposition where it is alternately in control and not in control over the period of a rapid oscillation, then the constraints of linear sensory throughput will bifurcate into a nonlinear spectrum of multi-stable output with signal complexity correlating to the functional interruption of control. Common entheogenic wisdom states that you must relinquish control and submit to the experience to get the most out of psychedelics. Holding onto control causes negative experiences and amplifies anxiety; letting go of control and embracing unconstrained perception is a central psychedelic tenet. This demonstrates that psychedelics directly subvert feedback control over linear perception to promote states of unconstrained consciousness.
– Control Interrupt Model of Psychedelic Action, PIT
Control interruption explains a large variety of effects, including the increase in the raw intensity (and amount) of experience, as well as the longer lasting positive afterimages (and thus tracers). Here we show a simple example of this effect. Consider the "original stimuli" to be what one experiences under a sober state. Likewise, consider the 9 squares to be different states of consciousness brought up by various psychotropic combinations.
Original

The 9 gifs you see above are simulations of control interruption using a simple feedback model (which we will describe in detail in a later article). The x-axis has different "echo strengths" while the y-axis has varying feedback strengths. These are two of the model parameters. Notice that the lower right corner is a credible rendition of something that people describe as moments of eternity. These are experiences where time seems to stop due to an over-saturation of regular and ordered qualia.
When considering the following effects, don't forget that control interruption is also going on all the time. The stranger the psychedelic effect, the more intense it is.
Drifting is responsible for breathing walls, animated plants, feelings of boundary dissolution, merging and melting, and so on. Small amounts of drifting usually involve individual feature detachments from perceptual objects (such as the color and shape of a chair becoming dissociated). Medium amounts of drifting make textures flow constantly. If one's experience was made of tiny magnetic gears that are usually aligned in a coherent way, drifting would result from increasing the overall energy of the system. Thus, the visual system is constantly descending to "more aligned local states" while incoming energy is constantly adding noise and destroying all of the alignment progress made.
Source: PsychonautWiki, Anonymous
A particularly salient aspect of drifting is that features and locally-bound fragments of experience can drift in any direction in 3D. Pieces of the wall don't only drift left and right, but also forwards and backwards.
On high doses of psychedelics or synergistic combinations of dissociatives and psychedelics (e.g. LSD + nitrous, 2C-B + ketamine, etc.), drifting can become all-encompassing. A critical point is crossed when one loses the capacity to define a mainframe of experience (the dominating orientation-giving island of locally bound experience that we use as a reference point). When this happens, one feels like one cannot tell left from right, or up from down. One simply experiences a constant chaotic flow of experience. In some cases one can even spot interesting instabilities that resemble actual physical instabilities found in fluid mechanics (such as the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability).
Drifting does not occur in isolation, and its mechanics are dependent on the particular set and setting in which the psychedelic experience is developing. From a computational point of view, drifting can be useful because it allows a quick exploration of the state-space of possible local binding configurations between the phenomenal objects present in one's experience. Indeed, not only does red fail to mix with green, but many of the synesthetic qualia varieties present in a scene with constant drifting will refuse to touch each other. Drifting feels like there is some sort of psychedelic energy (somewhat reminiscent of anxiety, but not restricted to body feelings) that overheats certain parts of one's conscious experience, and in turn disassembles the local connections there.
Enhanced Pattern Recognition: This effect refers to the transient (but often powerful) lowering of the detection threshold for previously experienced patterns and known ontologies (e.g. animals, plants, people, etc.). Psychedelics, in other words, temporarily increase one's degree of apophenia. Another name given to this effect is eidetic hallucinations. From a Bayesian point of view, the effect could be described thus: psychedelics intensify the effect of our priors. As explained in Getting Closer to Digital LSD, Google's deep belief neural network inceptionist technique works by finding bundles of features that trigger high-level neurons (such as face-detectors, object-detectors, etc) at sub-threshold levels (e.g. "this almost looks like a frog") and then modifying the picture so that the network more strongly detects those same high level features. This particular algorithm can be understood in terms of the pharmacological action of psychedelics: one can have breakthroughs of eidetic hallucinations by impairing the inhibitory control coming from the cortex.
In a sense we could say that while tracers are the result of "simple cell control interruption", eidetic hallucinations are the result of "complex cell control interruption." The former allows the build-up of colors, edges and simple shapes, while the latter amplifies the features that trigger high-level percepts such as faces and objects.
Enhanced Pattern Recognition / Eidetic Hallucinations / Visial Apophenia
The way one directs attention during a psychedelic trip influences the way eidetic hallucinations evolve over time. For this reason any psychedelic replication movie will probably require human input (in the form of eye-tracking) in order to incorporate human saliency preferences and interests into an evolving virtual psychedelic trip simulated with the Inceptionist Method.
Lower Symmetry Detection and Propagation Thresholds: Finally, this is perhaps the most interesting and scientifically salient effect of psychedelics. The first three effects are not particularly difficult to square with standard neuroscience. This fourth effect, while not incompatible with connectionist accounts, does suggest a series of research questions that may hint at an entirely new paradigm for understanding consciousness.
I have not seen anyone in the literature specifically identify this effect in all of its generality. The lowering of the symmetry detection threshold really has to be experienced to be believed. I claim that this effect manifests in all psychedelic experiences to a greater or lesser extent, and that many effects can in fact be explained by simply applying this effect iteratively.
Psychedelics make it easier to find similarities between any two given phenomenal objects. When applied to perception, this effect can be described as a lowering of the symmetry detection threshold. This effect is extremely general and symmetry should not be taken to exclusively refer to geometric symmetry.
How symmetries manifest depends on the set and setting. Researchers interested in verifying and exploring the quantitative and subjective properties of this effect will probably have to focus first on a narrow domain; the effect happens in all experiential modalities.
For now, let us focus on the case of visual experience. In this domain, the effect is what PsychonautWiki calls Symmetrical Texture Repetition:
Credit: Chelsea Morgan from PsychonautWiki and r/replications
Symmetry detection can be (and typically is) recursively applied to previously detected symmetry bundles. A given symmetry bundle is a set of n-dimensional symmetry planes (lines, hyperplanes, etc.) for which the qualities of the experience surrounding this bundle obey the symmetry constraints imposed by these planes. The planes can create mirror, rotational or oblique symmetry. Each symmetry bundle is capable of establishing a merging relationship with another symmetry bundle. These relationships are fleeting, but they influence the evolution of the relative position of each plane of symmetry. When x symmetry planes are in a merging relationship, one's mind tries to re-arrange them (often using drifting) to create a symmetrical arrangement of these x symmetry planes. To do so, the mind detects one (or several) more symmetry planes, along which the previously-existing symmetry planes are made to conform, to organize in a symmetrical way (mirror, rotational, translational or otherwise). There is an irresistible subjective pull towards those higher levels of symmetry. The direction of highest symmetry and meta-symmetry feels blissful, interesting, mind-expanding, and awe-producing.
If one meditates in a sensorially-minimized room during a psychedelic experience while being aware that one's symmetry detection threshold has been lowered by the substance, one can recursively re-apply this effect to produce all kinds of complex mathematical structures in one's mind.
In the future, perhaps at a Super-Shulgin Academy, people will explore and compare the various states of consciousness that exhibit peak symmetry. These states would be the result of iteratively applying symmetry detection, amplification and re-arrangement. We would see fractals, tessellations, graphs and higher dimensional projections. Which one of these experiences contains the highest degree of inter-connectivity? And if psychedelic symmetry is somehow related to conscious bliss, which experience of symmetry is human peak bliss?

The pictures above all illustrate possible peak symmetry states one can achieve by combining psychedelics and meditation. The pictures illustrate only the core structure of symmetries that are present in these states of consciousness. What is being reflected is the very raw "feels" of each patch of your experiential field. Thus these pictures really miss the actual raw feelings of the whole experience. They do show, however, a rough outline of symmetrical relationships possible in one of these experiences.
Since control interruption is also co-occurrent with the psychedelic symmetry effect, previously-detected symmetries tend to linger for long periods of time. For this reason, the kinds of symmetries one can detect at a given point in time is a function of the symmetries that are currently being highlighted. And thanks to drifting and pattern recognition enhancement, there is some wiggle room for your mind to re-arrange the location of the symmetries experienced. The four effects together enable, at times, a smooth iterative integration of so many symmetries that one's consciousness becomes symmetrically interconnected to an unbelievable degree.
What may innocently start as a simple two-sided mirror symmetry can end up producing complex arrangements of self-reflecting mirrors showing glimpses of higher and higher dimensional symmetries. Studying the mathematical properties of the allowed symmetries is a research project that has only just begun. I hope one day dedicated mathematicians describe in full the class of possible high-order symmetries that humans can experience in these states.
Anecdotally, each of the 17 possible wallpaper symmetry groups can be instantiated with this effect. In other words, psychedelic states lower the symmetry detection threshold for all of the mathematically available symmetrical tessellations.
All of the 17 2-dimensional wallpaper groups can be experienced with symmetry planes detected, amplified and re-arranged during a psychedelic experience.
Revising the symmetrical texture repetition of grass shown above, we can now discover that the picture displays the wallpaper symmetry found in the lower left circle above:

In very high doses, the symmetry completion is so strong that at any point one risks confusing left and right, and thus losing grasp of one's orientation in space and time. Depersonalization is, at times, the result of the information that is lost when there is intense symmetry completion going on. One's self-models become symmetrical too quickly, and one finds it hard to articulate a grounded point of view.
The Micro-Structure of Consciousness
At Qualia Computing we explore models of consciousness that acknowledge the micro-structure of consciousness. Experiences are not just higher-order mental operations applied to propositional content. Rather, an instant of experience contains numerous low-level textural properties. This is true for every sensory modality, and I would argue, even for the what-its-likeness of thought itself. Even just thinking about a mathematical idea (ex. "the intersection of two arbitrary sets") is done by interacting with a background of raw feels, and these raw feels determine our attitudes and interactions with the ideas we are trying to abstract (some people, for example, experience emotional distress when trying out mathematical problems, and this is not because certain mathematical spaces are inherently unpleasant or anxiety-inducing).
In the case of vision, the micro-structure of consciousness is capable of supporting at least the following low-level features: color, color gradients, points, edges, oriented movement, and acceleration. A full conversation about the range of visual features that we are capable of experiencing is a discussion for another time. But for the time being, it will suffice to point out that (static) models of peripheral vision only need 5 summary statistics. With only five summary stats you can create textures that a human will find impossible to distinguish in peripheral vision.
These so-called mongrels are textural metamers (equivalence classes of subjectively indistinguishable input patterns). The state-space of perceivable visual textures is the space of possible mongrels, and that is an example of the sort of micro-structure we are looking for. Unlike the cozy high-definition space inscribed in the fovea, most of the information found in our sensory modalities comes in the form of textures that are mappable to state-spaces of summary statistics.

Psychedelic symmetry detection and amplification operates on the inner structure of mongrels. The fact that the mongrels are the objects becoming symmetric is something that can elude introspection until someone points it out. It happens right in front of any tripper's eyes and yet people don't seem to report it very often (if at all). This may be a result of the fact that the fine-grained structure of consciousness is rarely a topic of conversation, and that we usually describe what we see in the fovea (unless we have no other option). Our words usually refer to whole percepts or, at best, the simplest raw values of experience (such as the hue of colors or the presence of edges). And yet, the structure of our mongrels is quite obvious once symmetry propagation has conformed a large patch of your experience to have a tessellated identical mongrel repeating across it.

How Are these Components Related to Each Other?
The Kaleidoscopic technique to induce qualia annealing relies on a combination of drifting and symmetry detection in order to resolve implicit inconsistencies within one's own memory gestalts. As we live and grow our experienced evidence base, we accumulate memories and impressions of many worldviews. Each worldview is, in a way, a response to all of the previous ones (or at least the memorable ones) and the current situation and the problems one is facing. Thanks to the four effects here described, a person can utilize a psychedelic state to increase the probability of the systematic co-occurrence of (usually) mutually-exclusive gestalts (worldviews) and thus enable their mutual awareness. And with mutual awareness, the symmetry detection and amplification effect creates (somehow forcefully) a unified phenomenal object that incorporates the inconsistent views into an unbiased (or less biased) point of view. One can achieve a higher order of memetic and affective integration.
Mongrel repetition / symmetrical tessellation. Source.
Psychedelics as Introspectoscopes**
Given the symmetry detection and amplification property of psychedelics, one can reasonably argue that psychedelic states may be able to reveal the properties of the micro-structure of consciousness. Timothy Leary, among others, described LSD as a sort of microscope for one's psyche. The very word psychedelic means mind-manifest (the manifestation of one's mind). Given the four components of these experiences, the fact that psychedelics work as some sort of microscope should not be surprising. Symmetry detection and control interruption multiply the amount of raw experience, while pattern recognition shows you what you are expecting (your priors become evident) and drifting makes the fleeting synesthetic effects malleable and easier to move around. People generally agree that psychedelics can show you subtle aspects of your own mind with stark clarity. But can they reveal the intrinsic properties of the nature of qualia at the most fundamental level?
The way to achieve this may be to create a fractal structure of symmetries in such a way that any tiny part of one's experience can get reflected throughout the entirety of the phenomenal structure. One can then use eidetic hallucinations (or further symmetry detection) to focus and stabilize the fractal structure. Thus one would multiply the surface area of all of one's attention into countless replicas of the micro-structure of a given part of one's experience. A fractal kaleidoscopic mirror amplifier chamber is exactly what I imagine when I think about how to analyze the fine-grained structure of consciousness. And it so happens that meditation plus psychedelics can allow you to (fleetingly) build just that.
Psychedelic Introspectoscope (fractal kaleidoscope of generalized symmetries) to amplify arbitrary qualia values (such as particular emotions, phenomenal colors, synesthetic inter-junctions, etc.)
Any subtle qualia space can be multiplied countless times in such a way that all of one's experience becomes a coherent interlocking structure that can be perceived all at once. If one wants to study, for example, the possible interactions between two hues of color, one can amplify the boundary between two regions that make the desired contrast of hues and make the entire fractal structure amplify this boundary hundreds of times.
Arguably, if one discovers that certain qualia values cannot be mixed in the introspectoscope (such as blue and yellow), one may still not know if these are fundamental constraints, or if they are the result of our connectome structure. If, on the other hand, two qualia values can mix in the introspectoscope, then we would know that they are not fundamentally mutually exclusive. Thus we would find out relational properties of the very state-space of qualia.
Reducing All Effects
Can we derive all psychedelic effects using the four components discussed above? While this is not yet possible, I trust that further work will show how most of the weird (and weirder) effects of psychedelics may be reduced to relatively simple (but not always atomistic) algorithms applied to the micro-structure of consciousness. I anticipate that we will discover that high doses actually produce entirely new effects (for example, what happens on 400 micrograms of LSD often include qualitative jumps from what happens at 150 micrograms). To note, ontological qualia and other subtle aspects of consciousness may resist reduction for still many more decades to come.

*Programming and Meta programming in the Human Biocomputer
**An Introspectoscope is a hypothetical apparatus that enables a person to study the deep structure of his or her own consciousness. The concept comes from a paper in the making by Andrew Y. Lee. Obviously this comes with significant challenges. Some challenges come from the fact that we are trying to analyze something very small, and other challenges come from the fact we are trying to analyze qualia. Additionally, there are unique challenges that come from analyzing microscopic qualia qua microscopic qualia. I suggest that we use methods that amplify the micro-structure by taking advantage of fractal states: recursive and scale-free symmetry planes can amplify anything minute to a prominent place in the entire consciousness.


So Why Can't My Boyfriend Communicate?

For every word written in scientific journals about the evolution of astonishing language ability, at least a hundred words have been written in women's magazines about men's apparent inability to articulate even the simplest thought or feeling. Women commonly complain that their sexual partners do not talk enough to them. If language evolved through sexual selection, and if sexual selection operates more powerfully on males than on females, you may legitimately wonder why your boyfriend or husband cannot share his feelings with you. Is it possible that, his early courtship efforts having brought success, he no longer feels driven to be as verbally energetic, interesting, and self-disclosing as he was before? The man who used to talk like Cyrano now talks like a cave-man. Once he was a poet, now he is prosaic. His verbal courtship effort has decreased.

I have already argued that effective verbal courtship is a reliable fitness indicator precisely because it is costly and difficult. Animals evolve to allocate their energies efficiently. If it took a million words to establish a sexual relationship with you, your boyfriend was apparently willing to absorb those costs, just as his male ancestors were. But if it takes only twenty words a day to maintain exclusive sexual access to you, why should he bother uttering more? His motivational system has evolved to deploy his courtship effort where it makes a difference to his reproductive success- mainly by focusing it where it improves his rate of sexual intercourse. Men apparently did not evolve from male ancestors who squandered high levels of verbal courtship effort on already established relationships. Of course, if an established partner suspends sexual relations, or threatens to have an affair, evolution would favor motivations that produce a temporary resurgence of verbal courtship until the danger has passed. Frustratingly, a woman may find that the greater the sexual commitment she displays the less her man speaks.

This analysis may sound heartlessly unromantic, but evolution is heartlessly unromantic. It is stingy with courtship effort, stacking it heavily where it does the most good, and sprinkling it very lightly elsewhere. Human courtship, like courtship in other animals, has a typical time-course. Courtship effort is low when first assessing a sexual prospect, increases rapidly if the prospect reciprocates one's interest, peaks when the prospect is deciding whether to copulate, and declines once a long-term relationship is established. We all enjoy a desired partner besieging us with ardent, witty, energetic courtship. That enjoyment is the subjective manifestation of the mate preferences that shaped human language in the first place. As with any evolved preference, we may desire more than we can realistically get. Evolution's job is to motivate us, not to satisfy us.

So, when women universally complain about their slothfully mute boyfriends, we learn two things. First, women have a universal desire to enjoy receiving high levels of verbal courtship effort. Second, high levels of verbal courtship effort are so costly that men have evolved to produce them only when they are necessary for initiating or reviving sexual relationships. Far from undermining the courtship hypothesis for language evolution, this phenomenon provides two key pieces of evidence that support it.

– The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (pg. 382) by Geoffrey F. Miller

So Why Can’t My Boyfriend Communicate?


The Mating Mind

Geoffrey Miller is the author of the "Mating Mind", a highly interesting book on what evolutionary biology has to say about all of our weird "dating and sexual quirks." David Pearce highly recommends it, too.
Miller's talk in this video is just as interesting as Ogi Ogas' talk about his book "A Billion Wicked Thoughts". Both talks deal with the evolutionary basis of human sexual desires (yes, even the weird ones… specially the weird ones):

Both use sound empirical methods and develop theories of our sexuality based on genetic, anthropological, and biological analysis of human experience and behavior.
Here is an interesting observation: If we were descendants of a specie that used clones as a way of reproduction (or perhaps formed large asexual social colonies like bees or ants) then we would all love each other unreservedly.
Competition for good genes has made us quasi-psychopathic and selfish. The fall of humanity is not, apparently, the result of sinning against God. But rather, for having evolved in small tribes with heavy in-group genetic biases.
Likewise, our Darwinian origin is responsible for states of low mood, depression, anxiety, and so on. Depression itself, to dive into a specific example, is an adaptive strategy for non-alpha males in the ancestral environment, which predisposes you to keep your head low and reproduce in spite of the presence of an Alpha male who is capable of killing you if you try to challenge him. Additionally, depression is a behavioral response that allows you to passively accept and endure a long-lasting stressor, where "trying to make things right" instead of submitting to the reality of the situation was simply not as genetically adaptive. Of course, since we don't live in the African Savannah anymore, all of that programming is useless.
Unfortunately, since happiness is itself a sign of status, we are stuck in an awful Moloch scenario: Geoffrey Miller would agree that people are sexually motivated to *pretend that they are happier than they are.*
Forgetting about people with a heavy genetic predisposition to depression who cannot even *conceive of what happiness is*, most people are stuck in recurrent cycles of high, neutral and low moods. And yet, they are anxious to pretend that they are happier than they really are; after all, one's genes are at stake in this signaling activity.
I have often met highly intelligent people who seem incapable of understanding David Pearce's Hedonistic Imperative. Although there are many possible causes for this, a very prominent one is the fact that believing that "everyone has a chance to be happy" is itself a happy thought. We run away from depressive worldviews, even if doing so is ethically disastrous.
Let us hope for the best, but plan for the worst.
Yes, we can hope that somehow everyone has a chance to be happy, and sincerely wish that "it really isn't that bad." However, let us not act *as if this is true.* We are in a unique position to alleviate and outright exterminate all future suffering in our forward light cone. It would be really sad if we let billions of beings suffer for eons (say, in other galaxies) simply because we entertained too heavily the thought that reality is conspiring in "our" favor (nature, perhaps, is not as kind as it looks when one is in a happy state).

The Mating Mind


Psychedelic alignment cascades

A given human computer is limited in its operations by its own acquired mathematical conceptual machinery; this is part of its supraself-metaprograms*. Maximum control over the metaprogrammatic level** by the selfmetaprogram*** is achieved not by direct "one to one" orders and instructions from the one level to the other. The control is based upon exploration of n-dimensional spaces and finding key points for transformations, first in decisive small local regions which can result in large-scale transformations. (This model reminds one of Ashby's Design for a Brain, 1954, in which a large "homeostat" stimulated in one small region makes large adjustments throughout itself in order to compensate for the small change.)

One key in the mind is to hunt for those discontinuities in the structure of the thinking which reveal a critical turnover point at which one can exert emotional energy so as to cause a transformation in all of that region.

The analogy of the key in the lock is part of this subject's human computer as a child. The lock is now transformed into an n-dimensional choice-point at which one could exert the proper amount of energy in the proper dimensions and in proper directions in those dimensions and find a radical transformation of all the metaprograms in that region of the computer. In a three-dimensional geometrical model of such operations (in which one decreases the number of dimensions so that they can be visualized in visual space) one can think of oddly-shaped rubber surfaces connected on lines, on points and over large areas which are inflated to different amounts and differing pressures so as to fill a very large room. These membranes are of different colors and various regions are differently lighted and the whole is considered to be pulsing and changing shapes but not changing contact between surfaces, lines, or points. One can imagine one's self moving through these complex surfaces. There are various colors lighted from various directions. One hunts for that zone in which one can exert maximum amount of effect in terms of the redistribution of bond energies, over point, line, and surface area contact. One may also exert the maximum effect on the differential pressures in the spaces bounded by each of the surfaces where closed.

After sufficient study of this model one discovers that the points of contact between the membranes are not as fixed as when first seen. What one saw at first was a frozen instant of time extending over a long period of time as if the model were static. Suddenly one realizes that the points of contact are the sharing of portions of these surfaces along appropriate lines at given instants and that these boundaries are changing constantly. One suddenly also discovers that the colors are moving over the surfaces and passing the boundaries. This particular model is a small region in a larger universe filled with such surfaces and intersections and spaces between. One also discovers that the light sources are within certain of these sheets shining through to others and that the hue and intensity are varying according to some local rules.

One moves away from the model and sees that it is filling a universe; one moves back into the model and begins to look carefully at one thin membrane. As the structure of the membrane is revealed and the structure of the intersection between the membrane is seen, it turns out that there is a micro-circuitry within the membrane at a molecular and atomic level. There are energies moving in prescribed paths (sometimes in a noisy fashion) in multiple directions within the membrane. At the intersections collisions occur ([particles] are moving from one sheet to the other in both directions). Sheets that are immediatly adjacent are seen to be doing local computations at very high speed. The intersections are now seen as micro-molecular-atomic switch lines, switch surfaces, and switch points.

Thus one finds that the phrase, "The key is no key" has grown into a new conception of a computer. This computer within itself ideally recognizes no locks, no forbidden transitions, no areas in which data cannot be freely moved from one zone to another. At the boundaries of the computer, however, there are still, as it were categorical imperatives. Now the problem becomes not the boundaries within the computer but the boundaries outside it. By outside I do not mean only the integumentary boundaries of the real body. I mean other sources of influence than through the bottom layer of the external chemical physical reality. To symbolize this doubt, this skepticism, about the boundaries of the computer and the influence that can be brought to bear upon them other than those coming through the physical-chemical reality, a line is places above the supraself-metaprograms and is labeled unknown.

In the mind of the subject the unknown must take precedence. It is placed above the supraself-metaprogram because it contains some of the goals of this particular human computer. This exploration of the inner reality presupposes that the inner reality contains large unknowns which are worth exploring. However, to explore them it is necessary (1) to recognize their existence and (2) to prepare one's computer for the exploration. If one is to explore the unknown one should take the minimum amount of baggage and not load one's self down with conceptual machinery which cannot be flexibly reoriented to accept and investigate the unknown. The next stage of development of those who have the courage and the necessary inner apparatus to do it, is exploration in depth of this vast inner unknown region. For this task we need the best kind of thinking which man is capable. We dissolve and/or reprogram the doctrinaire and the ideological approaches to these questions.

To remain skeptical of even this formalization of this particular human computer's approach to this region is desirable. One does not overvalue this particular approach; one looks for alternative approaches for exploratory purposes. Freedom from the tyranny of the supraself-metaprograms is sought but not to the point at which other human computers control this particular human computer. Deep and basic interlock between selected human computers is needed for this exploration. Conceptualization of the thinking machine itself is needed by the best minds available for this task. In a sense, we create the explorers in this area.

– Johhn C. Lilly, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer (on the subject of reprogramming one's brain using sensory deprivation tanks in conjunction with 100µg+ doses of LSD)

* Supraself-metaprograms: These are the mental "programs" that we inherit from our culture, influence from others, implicit historical beliefs, and so on.
** The metaprogramming: The activity of creating systems of mental programs with purposes that are context-triggered. This can be done implicitly (through emotion) or explicitly (by external or internal commands).
*** Selfmetaprogramming: Creating systems of mental programs through explicit volition.

Psychedelic alignment cascades


36 Textures of Confusion

Formal Logic
When I was in 10th grade I took a course in formal logic. I had been a big fan of logic (and math in general) for several years, so I was looking forward to seeing how the class would approach the subject. I personally liked the teacher and I knew he thought very deeply about a range of topics (including aesthetics and philosophy). I was sure I was going to have a great time.
Unfortunately, the overall learning strategy of the class consisted of studying the textbook in extreme detail. The way I remember the textbook was that it featured a mixture of very casual and naïve paragraphs interspersed with blocks of rigid definitions and formulaic procedures for solving logic problems. My overall perception of the textbook was that anyone with a genuine interest in the beauty of math would experience the exercise of reading this book as particularly unpleasant.
I was used to math classes that didn't actually require you to study anything; usually, problem solving skills and pragmatic inference of the meaning of words during the exam was good enough. In contrast, most questions on the exams for this class had a very particular style. The answers had to be verbatim repeats of the specific idiosyncratic responses found in the textbook. If you knew the contents of the textbook by heart, then the exam would be trivial. If you didn't, then no amount of problem solving would get you anywhere.
These exams were open-note but closed-textbook, which meant that if you simply copied the entire textbook into your notebook you would easily be able to respond accurately to the vast majority of the questions. And if you didn't, then you were almost guaranteed to fail. This meant that the largest fraction of the variance of grades in the class was determined by whether or not students took the time to do the grueling task of transcribing an entire textbook into their notebooks.
Needless to say, I intensely disliked this approach.
Thankfully, in every bad situation you can always find something good that redeems it a little bit [citation needed]. And in this case, what could be rescued from the situation was the man from Figure 5.9:
Figure 5.9: This man is confused
This must have been around page 150, which dealt with the need for logic. The textbook said, in a very informal way, something along the lines of: "Imagine a man without any logic. This person would have disjointed thoughts with no objectives, and he would be incapable of making sense of anything. The man in question would be confused. See Figure 5.9"
The teacher joked that the man in the figure could be experiencing one of many possible states of mind. His expression is somewhat ambiguous and it is unclear what exactly it adds to the conversation. Likewise, the facial features are not even the most salient component of the picture; his hair looks completely bizarre.
The Value of Confusion
This picture made me reflect on the difficulty of expressing mental states using drawings and pictures. A facial expression is perhaps a good start. Words, of course, and dialogue can help you trigger an emotion or state of being. But that only takes you so far, and it restricts you to what are largely social emotions.
Confusion, on the other hand, is an umbrella term for many states that are hard to communicate and describe. There is perceptual confusion, emotional confusion, cognitive confusion and even ontological confusion. Each of these varieties contains many flavors; there is a combinatorial explosion of possible reasons for the confusion.
Subjectively, confusion is an extremely interesting state of consciousness, since it spawns a lot of novelty. Even though it can and often is unpleasant (especially when what's at stake is something one values), confusion comes in all shades of hedonic tone. Pleasant confusion is possible, and indeed it may play an important role in philosophical and spiritual euphoria. Likewise, one can achieve fantastic levels of neutral-valence confusion during meditation (alternating, at times, with states of very high clarity). Epiphanic, wondrous and mystical states are also often proceeded by profound confusion of the ontological kind (where you doubt the deepest background assumptions that provide the stilts upon which your worldview is suspended).
The fact that the texture of one's experience has information processing properties (aka qualia computing) is itself more evident during states of confusion. For example, when you are confused about the meaning of something, this will have implications for the way you experience language and encode gestalts of experience (ex: "This synesthetic sensation here is usually paired up with meaning, but what is the meaning of it now? Without experiencing the meaning I usually ascribe to the sensation, I can't compare it to other sensations I've had before.")
Since language and facial expressions have their limitations, one might prefer to communicate confusion and other states using non-symbolic expressions. Visual textural gestalts, it seems to me, may take us the farthest in this direction, at least with the current level of technology (that is, unless we also include music, which itself has textural qualities).
In order to visualize new kinds of confusion, we can project the textural gestalt that the man from Figure 5.9 is experiencing into the picture itself, and imagine that we were given private access to his state of consciousness. We can then experience what it would be like to be him in these different experiential worlds, and introspect on the subjective nature of his confusion.
Doing this is now easier than ever thanks to the recent and fantastic developments in deep neural networks. In order to try out this technology, I decided to texturize the confusion of the man from Figure 5.9 in a myriad of ways. The textures themselves are a mixture of pictures I've taken or synthesized in the last couple of years and textures I've found online. I used the cool online service developed by the Bethge lab at the University of Tübingen to make these pictures. Feel free to try it yourself, it's really fun.
So here you have it folks. The man of Figure 5.9, experiencing 36 different kinds of confusion:

36 Textures of Confusion


Work Religion

In response to this:
Did this religion of professional work start in the 1950's? Could have been synergetic with the WWII patriotism. What a vicious cycle, people who love the professional culture, ideology, and rituals who spread the idea that you are personally disadvantaged unless you subscribe to this allegedly prevalent system, so people subscribe and the system becomes prevalent. Even before becoming prevalent, though, people who want the system to become prevalent are confident and mislead people into thinking it is prevalent, and so they join up in a tragedy of the commons. Next time you see someone with an overly clean desk and an excessive zeal for office supplies, formal cloths, 'professionalism' sanctioned social interactions (the arbitrary templates where gossip is permitted or even recommended but many instances of non-maliciously motivated honesty, or just acting natural and not so 'fake', that you would find between people in any other social situation is blasphemy), who actively spread and enforce their culture, who look confident, posture and all, (even/especially if they're friendly (less suspicious)) that they know how to correctly act, causing that tragedy to occur, give 'em the ol' stink eye for me, would ya? Don't give a stink eye! Haha I'm kidding about seriously desiring their punishment. That's humor, for ya. But it would be nice if more people were self-conscious about what it is they're doing, the deceit of their tragedy-inducing confidence, BEFORE they became so deeply emotionally attached to the games, before they so intimately internalize them and, indeed, become drones for these parasitic memetic/cultural systems, a process that begins immediately after infancy. It's terrible when an old generation has existential distress when their games are ripped out from underneath them, and it's terrible that these games spread this way, and that people, who wouldn't otherwise be (maximally) interested in this or that particular game are intimidated into the game, often a severe zero-sum game, where they might be trapped for the rest of their lives in bad faith, toiling away at it and speaking the creeds in defense of it. Whether you oppress with your culture or you are oppressed by a culture, we all aren't that different after all, because we humans all are oppressed by the phenomenon of culture itself, prevented from reaching way greater potentials (and how might you evaluate the greatness of a potential outside of cultural values? Probably utilitarianism-like, cognitive frameworks which don't posit the objectively valuable things like heroism, honor, big daddy, etc.., cultures invariably depend on….Anyway, this is a good discussion for (or, rather, pertains to) those who are disturbed by the thought of losing their culture, their forms of prestige, popularity, valor, or whatever social reward objective correlate posits they think they are fundamentally dependent on. People have trouble conceiving themselves attaining happiness or fulfillment or whatever ultimate valuable (which is almost certainly hedonic tone) without their culture. But subtly they misconceive what it would be like for them, their consciousness, to be beyond their current perspective. Even though in words they might appear to be contemplating possibilities beyond their current persuasion, they often fail to, because it is such a fundamental and subtle thing to do, requiring them keep vivid track of so much of their reasoning and schema. When trying to suspend a certain body of frameworks and systems and assumptions, insidiously they creep back in. First of all, most people aren't even aware they can think beyond them. Their concept of what it is to think and consider is actually limited to thinking within such social paradigms. But if you're trying to question a system, schema that originate from the very system you're trying to suspend insidiously pose as necessary, neutral, universal, etc., things beyond the old paradigms when they really aren't. Little under-cover mental viruses. In my opinion, many representative philosophers and people in academic and analytic philosophy in general fail to work free of this effect. They fail to detect and address their social bias, in very basic ways, for instance positing according to predicted language use ("common sense intuitions" are the worst), not according to evidence for the existence of some entity to be posited.) When will it be that culture doesn't oppress, that people don't repress critical or otherwise free thinking, that people don't have so much socially motivated reasoning (the large majority of one's thoughts and beliefs are really just predicted social strategies, not true reflection more free of the frames and biases of culture)? When will our interests and our sources of meaning and fulfillment, like the currently socially permissible or even required ones, be replaced by those NOT so bad for us? When will we "be not afraid" of questioning our very fragile personal, interpersonal, moral, and social institutional views, risking never getting them back, so we don't have to live like this, as cultural sustenance, forced by oppression into forcing by oppression, as conduits of oppression?

– Anonymous Source

Work Religion


Qualia Computing in Tucson: The Magic Analogy

Panpsychism is sometimes dismissed as a crazy view, but this reaction on its own is not a serious objection. While the view is counterintuitive to some, there is good reason to think that any view of consciousness must embrace some counterintuitive conclusion.

– Panpsychism and Panprotopanpsychism, David Chalmers (2011)
As Chalmers points out in this 2011 paper, any theory of consciousness will probably have counterintuitive conclusions. It should thus not come as surprise that almost every single consciousness scholar will be ridiculed as crazy by at least a minority of commentators. However, aside from omnipresent cognitive and affective biases, the vast majority of consciousness researchers are using their brains to their full capacity. Their search for understanding is sincere. It simply happens that the problem is, indeed, very hard.
Thus, when someone who is otherwise rational and intelligent has weird views about consciousness, one of several things could be going on. Instead of dismissing the view outright, ask the following four questions:

What conception of consciousness does this person have?
What criteria does he or she believe that a theory of consciousness must satisfy?
What information does this person know about, and how deeply is it being incorporated into the theory?
What are the relevant implicit background assumptions that color one's reasoning?

Asking these questions will help you sort out the root causes behind the differences in beliefs you and the theorist may have. It will, in turn, help you see how, in a sense, uncrazy the person may be.
I recently had the opportunity to practice asking these questions over and over again in the 2016 "Science of Consciousness" conference in Tucson, Arizona. Every single presenter, panelist and poster-er could be framed in such a way that he or she would look outright crazy. In reality, the reasons behind their views are, for the most part, tractable.
Instead of focusing on the individual craziness of the participants, it is more sensible, and indeed more accurate, to simply realize that the crazy step is the very first: to dare attempt to understand, as a human, what consciousness is.
Ok, so let us just agree that all participants, including me, are crazy for simply trying to make a contribution to this field. After all, our conscious mind evolved to maximize inclusive fitness in complex, Machiavellian social structures, so when we repurpose this machinery to investigate the intrinsic nature of consciousness we are bound to have serious challenges. Starting from this understanding will make it easier to have an open mind when evaluating the merits of different theories of consciousness proposed in this conference. Do not get too fixated on how counterintuitive the theories sound to you; focus on whether they are capable of satisfying at least some minimal requirements we would want from such theories.
Conversely, it could be argued that what is truly crazy is to stand idly at the center of this monstrous philosophical conundrum.

Physicalism.com
My friend and colleague David Pearce persuaded me to accompany him to this year's instance of this conference. He submitted an abstract of his paper on consciousness and physicalism. If you have been to Qualia Computing before, you may recognize that I heavily draw from Pearce's philosophy. Not only do we share the belief that the problem of suffering is an ethical emergency best addressed with biotechnology, but we also have substantially similar views about consciousness.
David Pearce (left) and Andrés Gómez Emilsson (right) at the 2016 Science of Consciousness conference
Our Conception of Consciousness
Consciousness is very hard to define. But we agree on something: every single experience is an instance of consciousness. The possible components of a conscious experience come from a wide variety of qualia spaces (e.g. the state-space of phenomenal color). Importantly, we do not restrict our conception of consciousness to high-level thought, reasoning or social cognition. In all likelihood, consciousness is extremely ancient (possibly preceding the Cambrian explosion), and it is present in every animal with a thalamus (if not every animal with a nervous system).
More poignantly, the true state-space of possible conscious experiences is unfathomably large. Not only does it include the mental states of every possible animal doing any conceivable activity, but it also includes the ineffable weirdness of LSD, DMT and ketamine, not to mention the countless varieties of consciousness that are yet to be discovered.
Theoretical Requirements
If it weren't for David, I would probably still be a neuron-doctrine functionalist who believes that we may be just a few decades away from programming a full Artificial General Intelligence in silicon computers.
How did Pearce help change my mind? Well, it comes down to the second question: I used to have an impoverished set of constraints that a theory of consciousness would have to satisfy. The main addition is that I now take extremely seriously the phenomenal binding problem (also called the combination problem).
For the sake of clarity and intellectual honesty, here is the answer that David and I give to the second question:

Back when I was in high school, before meeting David in person, I used to believe that the phenomenal binding problem could be dissolved with a computational theory of consciousness. In brief, I perceived binding to be a straightforward consequence of implicit information processing.
In retrospect I cannot help but think: "Oh, how psychotic I must have been back then!" However, I am reminded that one's ignorance is not explicitly represented in one's conceptual framework.
Background Assumptions
In order to make sense both of physicalism.com and Qualia Computing, it makes sense to be explicit about the background assumptions that we hold. Without explaining them in depth, here are some key assumptions that color the way we think about consciousness:

Events of conscious experience are ontologically unitary: The left and right side of your visual field are part of an integrated whole that stands as a natural unit.
Physicalism: Physics is causally closed and it fully describes the behavior of the observable universe.
Wavefunction realism: The decoherence program is the most parsimonious, scientific, and promising approach for interpreting quantum mechanics.
Mereological Nihilism (also called Compositional Nihilism): Simply putting two objects A and B side by side will not make a new object "AB" appear ex nihilo.
Qualia Realism: The various textures of qualia (phenomenal color, sounds, feelings of cold and heat, etc.) are not mere representations. On the contrary, our mind uses them to instantiate representations (this is an important difference).
Causal efficacy: Consciousness is not standing idly by. It has definite causal effects in animals. In particular, there must be a causal pathway that allows us to discuss its existence.
Qualia computing: The reason consciousness was recruited by natural selection is computational. In spite of its expensive caloric cost, consciousness improves the performance of fitness-relevant information processing tasks.

A Battle of Wits
A Broken Political Analogy
Naïvely, people may get the impression that there are only a few well-defined camps when it comes to scientific theories of consciousness. The layman's conception of the explanation state-space tends to be profoundly impoverished: "Are you a scientific materialist, or one of those religious dualists?" In this sense, people may picture the discussions that go on in places like The Science of Consciousness conference as something akin to what happens in political debates. There may be a few fringe camps, but the bulk of the people are rooting for one (often very popular) party.
Magic: The Gathering analogy
Instead of imagining a political rally, I would ask you to imagine a Magic: The Gathering tournament. For those unfamiliar with this game: Magic is a card game with two competitive components. First, one selects a set of cards from a pool of allowed cards (which depends on the format one is playing). With these cards one constructs a deck. The cards within a deck tend to have synergistic interactions, and ultimately define a range of possible strategies that the player will be able to use.
And second: one can be better or worse at playing one's deck. The skills required to play a deck properly often involve being good at estimating odds and probabilities, bluffing, and mind-reading. In terms of knowledge, one needs to be familiar with the sorts of decks that are common out there and the typical strategies that they are built around. This leads us to the concept of deck archetypes.
Types (Clusters)
Often referred to as the flavors of the month, tournament decks tend to cluster rather neatly into deck types. In brief, certain clusters of cards tend to work very well with each other, which means that they will appear together in decks with a frequency that is much higher than chance. Arguably the process of block design is in part responsible for the emergence of these clusters. But even if, I would argue, you were to select at random a pool of 500 Magic cards from its entire history, we would still see clusters emerge: strategizing, trial and error, memetics and the natural synergy between some cards would lead to this outcome.
Intuitively, the game should then be entirely dominated by the deck types that are the most powerful. However, how good a given deck is depends on two things: The synergy between its cards, and the nature of the deck it plays against. Thus, decks cannot be analyzed in isolation. Their competitiveness depends on the distribution of other deck types in tournaments.
Over the months, therefore, the density of various deck types evolves in response to past distributions of deck types. This distribution, and evolutionary process, is often referred to as the Metagame. The connection to evolutionary game theory is straightforward: After gauging the frequency of various deck types at a tournament, one may strategically decide to switch one's deck type in order to have a higher expected performance.
Rogue
Some number of players tend to find playing common deck types boring or too cliché. In practice, the monetary cost for acquiring certain key cards for a given type may also push some players to develop their own unique deck type. It is rare for these decks to be top performers, but they cannot be ignored since they meaningfully contribute to the Magic ecosystem.
The Cards and Deck Types of Consciousness Theories
To make the analogy between Magic decks and theories of consciousness, we need to find a suitable interpretation for a card. In this case, I would posit that cards can be interpreted as either background assumptions, required criteria, emphasized empirical findings and interpretations of phenomena. Let's call these, generally, components of a theory.
Like we see in Magic, we will also find that some components support each other while others interact neutrally or mutually exclude each other. For example, if one's theory of consciousness explicitly rejects the notion that quantum mechanics influences consciousness, then it is irrelevant whether one also postulates that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is correct. On the other hand, if one identifies the locus of consciousness to be in the microtubules inside pyramidal cells, then the particular interpretation of quantum mechanics one has is of paramount importance.
In this particular conference, it seemed that the metagame was dominated by the following 8 theories, in (approximate) order of popularity (as it seemed to me):

Integrated Information Theory (IIT)
Orchestrated Objective Reduction (Orch OR)
Prediction Error Minimization (PEM)
Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWS)
Panprotopanpsychism (not explicitly named)
Nondual Consciousness Monism (not explicitly named)
Consciousness as the Result of Action-Oriented Cognition (not explicitly named)
Higher Order Thought Theory (HOT)

David Pearce and I, together with perhaps up to ten other attendees, seemed to be playing a particularly rare rogue strategy: Panpsychism + Wavefunction realism + Quantum Coherence to Bind.
Other notable rogue types included: Transcendentalism + semantic nihilism, timeless + perspective-free functionalism, and, oddly, multi-draft theory of consciousness (which seems to have fallen out of favor for some reason).

Finally, it is worth mentioning that as far as this conference goes, it did not seem to be the case that any one theory was held by the majority of the participants. The plurality seemed to be held by IIT, which has a lot of interesting developments going for it.

Coming next: In the next article I will provide a chronology of the events in the conference. I will also discuss the most prominent theories of consciousness explored in Tucson this past week (25 – 30 April 2016) in light of their implicit components. Finally, I will also elaborate on some of the strengths and weaknesses of these theories relative to Qualia Computing. We will be assessing these theories in light of today's points, and making sense of the implicit background assumptions of their proponents. (More specifically, inquiring into: the conceptions of consciousness, the criteria for theories of consciousness, the knowledge bases, and the implicit background assumptions of the various attendees who participated in this event.)


In Praise of Systematic Empathy

Tl;dr: If you are an empathizing utilitarian: Kudos! The world needs more people like you.
You know what? This isn't about your feelings. A human life, with all its joys and all its pains, adding up over the course of decades, is worth far more than your brain's feelings of comfort or discomfort with a plan. Does computing the expected utility feel too cold-blooded for your taste? Well, that feeling isn't even a feather in the scales, when a life is at stake. Just shut up and multiply.

—Circular Altruism

Empathizing-Systematizing Trade-Offs
The human brain is capable of doing a great deal of things. However, often the tasks it performs are so difficult that full concentration (and sometimes absorption) is necessary to achieve them.
The empathizing-systematizing theory points out that when one is empathizing one's brain becomes less capable of systematizing. And when one is engaging with problems using a systematizing cognitive style, empathy does not come easy either. In most cases there are trade-offs between these two cognitive styles; they seem to be drawing from the same pool of mental resources.
Even though these traits are negatively correlated with each other, we can still find people around who can quickly switch between these styles.
These rare people, one could argue, have a unique moral responsibility: to harmonize the differences between the systematizing and empathizing mindsets. With great power comes great responsibility.
Doing this is hard, though. It may be inevitable that by trying to find a common ground between these mindsets one will feel morally conflicted:

It is easy to care about those who are around you when you are an empathizer.
It is easy to care about the bulk of all sentient beings when you are a non-empathizing systematizer.
But to be a utilitarian and an empathizer… that's hard. One needs to ignore, or at least not prioritize, the pain of those around, even though it hurts.

Sample Rationalizations
Example of an empathizer non-systematizer approaching a moral problem: "I love my cat Fluffy. Are you telling me that I should donate to Against Malaria Foundation, a charity that benefits people far, far away, who I have never even met, and whose feelings I can't perceive… instead of feeding my kitten first-class food? Do you really expect me to trade the warm-fuzzy feelings of having a healthy cat for your cold, abstract logic? No thanks."
Example of a non-empathizer systematizer approaching a moral problem: "Donating to Against Malaria Foundation instead of having a cat will produce approximately 10,000X Quality-Adjusted Life-Years. Do you really expect me to trade solid, locally sound and perfectly ethical dollars for the supposed wellbeing of a dirty cat? Let's face it, half of what you care about when you think about your cat is how much he loves you back. Isn't denying health to tens of children just so you feel loved by a pet incredibly selfish?"
Example of an empathizer systematizer approaching a moral problem the wrong way: "I love Fluffy. I also love all of humanity. Thankfully, everyone can focus on helping the sentient beings that are closest to them. This way we can all be part of a global support network. By helping my cat, and paying for the expensive treatments that he requires to stay healthy, I am doing my own part. Now I just hope everyone else does their part as well."
Example of an empathizer systematizer approaching the same moral problem, and finally getting it right: "I know that Fluffy needs my love and affection. It pains me to realize that the world is much larger. My feelings tell me 'just care about those around you, it is to them to whom you have a moral responsibility'. And yet, I cannot pretend that logic and *counting* simply do not matter. It is, in fact, my moral responsibility to ignore my feelings. To sacrifice a few warm-fuzzy human feels for what is, in the end, a much, much bigger sum of warm-fuzzy feels elsewhere."

The Transhumanist Bodhisattva
Bodhisattvas are mythological entities found in the Mahayana branch of Buddhism. They are great examples of entities that seem to combine both empathizing and systematizing traits, while being motivated by unceasing compassion.
According to buddhist sutras, bodhisattvas are entities who have realized the true nature of suffering (i.e. that it sucks), and achieved a state of mind that manifests as an unshakeable desire to help all sentient beings. And in the wake of their realization, Bodhisattvas have made a vow to dedicate all of their energies to the task of eliminating suffering:
Just as all the previous Sugatas, the Buddhas
Generated the mind of enlightenment
And accomplished all the stages
Of the Bodhisattva training,
So will I too, for the sake of all beings,
Generate the mind of enlightenment
And accomplish all the stages
Of the Bodhisattva training.
– Bodhisattvacaryāvatāra [Translation: Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life], by Śāntideva
These noble beings intend to help all sentient beings become free from suffering by teaching buddhism.* Today, one might hope, they would choose to focus their energies on the development of biotechnologies of bliss.
David Pearce is what we might call a modern, genomic Bodhisattva. He started a movement called Abolitionism (the bioethical stance that we should use technology to eliminate suffering) and he has spearheaded the compassionate branch of transhumanism.
David is a wonderful human being who, in spite of being naturally predisposed to low hedonic tone (i.e. being genetically predisposed to having a bad day, every day, for no good reason whatsoever), dedicates his entire life to the elimination of suffering. And unlike previous incarnations of that desire, he did do his homework: realize that in this universe, suffering has genetic causes.
Pearce has at times mentioned that we should not think of his vision of abolishing suffering as new or particularly original. He likes to point out that the wish to eliminate suffering is extremely ancient, and we can find it as the core objective of many spiritual and religious traditions. Abolitionism is, as he puts it "just providing the implementation details" of what people have been saying for thousands of years. This framing makes Abolitionism more palatable to the average Joe.
Indeed, boundless compassion has been around for a long time. But the ability to kindle it into effective suffering-reducing actions that may work in the long term is only now beginning to be possible.

Empathy is Marvelous… and Double-Edged
Our ability to track the inner state of beings in our lifeworld (our inner experience, including our representations of others) is a marvelous evolutionary innovation: we are the product of a long machiavellian intelligence arms race in which effective mind-reading could make the difference between being an outcast and becoming the tribal leader. Given the selection pressures of our ancestral tribal environment, it is not surprising that our capacity for empathy is highly selective. Our ability to simulate others' experiences, thus, is to some extent bound to be inclusive fitness-enhancing rather than, what would be more desirable, sentience-wellness enhancing.
It is tough to care about all sentient beings; specially when the ones around you are suffering and you can't disengage from simulating what it feels like to be them. One's predisposition to empathize with sentient being is extremely biased towards the local contexts one lives in, one's family members (and our extended, genetically similar, tribe), and whatever happens to trigger the feeling that your implicit self-models are threatened by the suffering of others (ex. when charity workers use empathy blackmailing to make you feel miserable about not helping their particular -not necessarily effective- ethical cause).
Sad to say, but a strong involuntary empathetic reaction to other's suffering is a double-edged sword. On the bright side, it allows you to understand the reality of other's suffering. And on a case by case basis, it also allows you to figure out how exactly to help them (e.g. highly empathetic and agreeable people are great at figuring out what is bugging you). Unfortunately, one's empathy for others declines with the amount of people one empathizes with. Some studies show that people are more likely to decide to donate to a cause when there is only one person (or nonhuman animal) victimized… as soon as there are more than a few, one's empathy becomes overwhelmed and you fail to multiply properly.
Additionally, the attention-grabbing and attention-focusing properties of empathy can have intense network effects that make people over-concerned with relatively minor problems. Likewise, this focusing effect makes people unable to revise their moral judgements. They get stuck with silly deontological rationalizations for their non-optimal actions.
Empathy needs to be debugged. Thankfully, we still have the ability to experience and cultivate compassion, along with systematizing abilities without experiencing burnout. Now, this is certainly not a call to eliminate empathy! But as long as we don't fix its profound biases, we cannot rely on it to make ethical choices. We can only use it to understand the reality of the suffering of others. And when the time is to act, don't empathize. Just shut up and multiply.
We need to combine systematizing reasoning with compassion. We don't need to make emotionally-charged calls to action sparked by individual incidents that affect a specially small number of sentient beings in particularly attention-grabbing ways.
In this day and age (what I think is the beginning of the end of the Darwinian era), we need to temporarily migrate from using empathy as the main source of moral motivation into an ecology of abstract and systematic reasoning guided by compassion. One can do this and still experience the warm fuzzy feelings, but it is harder. One needs to rewire one's brain a little bit. To tell it "no, I am still doing what is best. Don't tell me I'm a bad person for preferring to focus on the bulk of sentient beings instead of the few I happen to know." It is truly moving to realize that you can overcome some of the ways in which evolution set us up for failure.
Until we hack our consciousness to represent the world in an unbiased way, we will have to rely on systematizing cognition to guide our ethical reasoning. Only by combining compassion, empathy and a strong systematizing style, can our minds grasp the enormity of the problem of suffering and why our local solutions are doomed to fail. It removes the wishful thinking that comes with empathy.
If, alternatively, we continue praying to the God of Empathy as our only strategy, we will only reap good local success. But this will be at the cost of failing at the cosmic level, and letting billions of sentient beings feel the sinister coldness of Darwinian life.
All of this is to say: if you are a natural empathizer, I want to let you know that I get your inner struggles. If, in spite of what your feelings tell you, you still choose to do the utilitarian action… I can only sing your praises with my sincere heart. Metta to you, my fellow warrior. We will defeat suffering for all; not just those around us.

* If you buy into the Buddhist ontology (no-self, emptiness, ubiquitous suffering, etc.) then dedicating all of your energies over the period of many eons to teach Buddhism makes a lot of sense. It is only when you think about the exact same problem in light of contemporary science (and the neural underpinnings of suffering) that it becomes clear that the modern bodhisattva would choose to be a transhumanist (and try to eliminate suffering using biotechnology).

In Praise of Systematic Empathy


David Pearce on "Making Sentience Great"

We need measures of intelligence richer than today's simple-minded autistic IQ/AQ tests. In principle, we could breed super-intelligent humans like strains of smart mice.

If I were running the program, I'd use cloning with variations. Start with the DNA of promising candidates, especially Ashkenazi Jews. (John von Neumann, for instance, was buried, not cremated).

Using the new tools of CRISPR-based synthetic biology, splice in genes for depression-resistance and perhaps hyper-empathy. Develop and optimize artificial wombs to foster bigger and better embryonic brains; traditional biological pregnancies involve ferocious genetic conflict between mother and embryo, whereas in the future the creation of new life can be geared to the well-being of the unborn child. You can then hothouse the products in an optimally enriched environment. And then clone (with variations) the most promising candidates. No need to wait a whole generation; if a kid wins a Fields Medal aged nine, then clone again with further genetic tweaking. Super-Shulgin academies would have pride of place, together with the EA bioethics department. Spin off a financial services and innovation division so the project becomes self-financing.

Recursive genetic self-improvement could in principle be sustained indefinitely, presumably with an increasing degree of "cyborgisation": not even an unenriched super-von-Neumann could match the serial depth of processing of a digital computer, but with "narrow AI" routinely implanted on web-enabled neurochips, no matter. The demise of aging and rapid growth of genetic self-editing software would presumably make talk of "generations" in the traditional Darwinian sense increasingly archaic…

Can we foresee any ethical pitfalls? One or two; but if the raison d'être of the project were to promote the well-being of all sentience in our forward light-cone, would you decline the offer of an initial billion-dollar grant?

– David Pearce, answering the question "How would you create a super-intelligence?" (source: Facebook)

David Pearce on “Making Sentience Great”


Philosophy of Mind Diagrams

"The penalty of not doing philosophy isn't to transcend it, but simply to give bad philosophical arguments a free pass."
-David Pearce

These are some slides I created when I presented at the Advancing Humanity Symposium hosted by the Stanford Transhumanist Association in 2013.
My presentation was an introduction to the topic of Mind Uploading. I decided to address the various ontologies that are postulated in philosophy of mind and personal identity. I did this so that I could then explore how each possible combination affects the plausibility, and desirability, of Mind Uploading.
In brief, as you can see in the table above, both personal identity views and mind-body problem solutions influence how you judge Mind Uploading.
For example, an Empty Individualist lacks the belief in an enduring metaphysical self over time. Thus, she would consider her digitized mind (also referred to as EM) to be just as alien to her true identity as the person who will wake up with her memories tomorrow anyway.
Likewise, Open Individualist don't particularly care about the preservation of memories and personality. What matters to them is different. For example, they may care a lot about making as many sentient beings as happy as possible, rather than caring about which bodies get to produce which experiences.
But if Closed Individualism is true, then Mind Uploading is an ethical imperative! Truly believing that who you are starts existing when you are born and stops existing when you die implies that not extending one's existence indefinitely results in the complete annihilation of a metaphysical being. And that would be sad, wouldn't it?
When it comes to the Mind-Body problem, the specifics also influence the plausibility (and desirability) of Mind Uploading oneself. For example, if dualism is true, one might have to do a lot more research for successful mind-uploading. One would need, for instance, to decipher the causal and practical constraints imposed by the consciousness side of the metaphysical equation. If, on the other hand, monistic materialism is true, then Mind Uploading should be as simple as creating a sufficiently detailed brain emulation.
And that is not even scratching the surface. In reality, the state-space of both personal identity views and mind-body solutions is much larger than we can conceive. Who knows what kind of ontologies our posthuman descendants will choose to experience on a daily basis…

Philosophy of Mind Diagrams


Ontological Runaway Scenario

Moral innovation
Imagine that you iterate over and add the option of recursing further or just stopping next time. Every time you recurse, more and more people will have to choose not recursing if the number of dilemmas is going to ever stop growing.
If the fraction of people who choose to recurse is higher than the number of dilemmas that are kick-started by your own choice, then this can lead to a moral runaway scenario.
Life Runaway

I'm sure you can tempt people who are explicit classical utilitarian with this schema.
All you need to do is also add the condition that people in the train are having fun. And suddenly, you have a scenario in which you are contemplating the creation of arbitrarily large hedonic pipelines of positive and negative pathways. Supposedly the positive and negative qualities are canceling each other out. Does this sound fun? Does it sound like Jinjang?
Time-Beyond-Time
People with stranger ontologies may also be tempted by the scenario. Think of this concept: "In the ocean of being, all of the mistakes are forgiven. Only the learning remains." In this scenario, our own reality implies and thus enables the existence of an orthogonal time to ours. And this orthogonal time also implies and enables a further time-beyond-time-beyond-time reality. This is now an ontological runaway scenario.
But if you have a stacked moral and ontological runaway scenario, you can perhaps choose to perpetuate life, with all of its suffering and bad qualities (in addition to the bliss and love in it), for ethical reasons. It is, after all, "the ocean of being" that learns, and if it does not learn in this reality, it will not be able to pass on useful information to the next layer of reality. The first orthogonal time to ours will lack the information that it requires to prevent suffering from its point of view. "The only reason God would have created this universe is so as to prevent an even bigger evil."

Ontological Runaway Scenario