Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Biggest Problem for All Theories of Consciousness...

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Andrés Gómez Emilsson, director of the Qualia Research Institute and a pioneering researcher in the mathematical study of consciousness, explores the nature of awareness from both philosophical and scientific angles. He recounts his journey that led to founding the Qualia Research Institute—aimed at reducing suffering and enhancing experience. He discusses the transformative potential of psychedelics, the view of the self as a series of experiences, and how sensory resonance ("impedance matching") shapes our awareness. As a listener of TOE you can get a special 20% off discount to The Economist and all it has to offer! Visit https://www.economist.com/toe Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://tinyurl.com/SpotifyTOE Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Timestamps: 00:00 The Most Important Problem 01:49 The Hard Problem and Ontologies 05:15 Journey into Consciousness 09:06 The Qualia Research Institute 10:49 Shattering Realities 17:12 Happiness vs. Meaning 19:15 Defining Happiness 25:28 Psychological Egoism 33:45 Understanding Consciousness 38:01 The Qualia Research Institute's Goals 49:21 Exploring Impedance Matching 58:25 The Dance of Dissonance 1:03:22 The Nature of Suffering 1:10:32 The Concept of Oneness 1:17:02 Zero Ontology Explained 1:27:20 The Nature of Reality 1:28:57 The Self and Sense of Self 1:30:53 Stages of Consciousness 1:37:35 Transformations in Consciousness 1:46:20 The Role of Psychedelics 2:02:01 Exploring 5-MeO-DMT 2:21:03 Psychedelics and Buddhist Philosophy 2:45:32 Insights on Jhana States 2:51:31 Conclusion and Reflections Links Mentioned: - Qualia Research Institute (website): https://qri.org/ - Andres’s Qualia profile: https://qri.org/people/andr%C3%A9s-g%C3%B3mez-emilsson - David Chalmers’s 2024 presentation at Mindfest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5r9V1ryksnw - Bernardo Kastrup on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAB21FAXCDE - The Hedonistic Imperative (book): https://amzn.to/3Di7Xx5 - Why Does Anything Exist? (book): https://www.amazon.com/Why-Does-Anything-Exist-Mysteries-ebook/dp/B0DKBHMC3C - Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (book): https://www.amazon.com/Mastering-Core-Teachings-Buddha-Unusually/dp/1911597108 - Andres on The DemystifySci Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjWDURKNe2Q - ‘Replications’ group on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/replications/ - Stuart Hameroff’s Mindfest presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_bQwdJir1o - The Doors of Perception (book): https://amzn.to/4ijduTb - From Neural Activity to Field Topology (article): https://qualiacomputing.com/2025/02/09/from-neural-activity-to-field-topology-how-coupling-kernels-shape-consciousness/ - Seeing That Frees (book): https://amzn.to/43fm15m - Practicing the Jhanas (meditation series): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLO6hhaAzLmiqUzBYuLLJQ8FexOTRxz8xF - The Dalai Lama, Psychedelics & Cher (article): https://tricycle.org/article/dalai-lama-psychedelics-cher/ - Advice to Sigālaka (article): https://suttacentral.net/dn31/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=none&notes=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin Support TOE on Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs #science #consciousness #mind Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's the most important problem for a scientific theory of consciousness to solve? Oh my goodness, that's a wonderful question. I think I would have difficulty prioritizing just one. I'm going to say there's four that any scientific theory of consciousness must be able to satisfy. Which is, first of all, any theory of consciousness has to explain why consciousness exists to begin with. Second, it has to explain what's called the palette problem. Essentially, what are all of the qualia values and varieties out there and the interrelationship between them? You know, why is there the blueness of blue and the way a rose smells?

Like, what is that and how are they connected to each other? The third is what are the causal properties of consciousness? In other words, why are we conscious from a biological evolutionary perspective? What kind of function is it playing? And then the fourth one is the binding problem. How is it possible that pieces of information can actually be put together into unified moments of experience?

And for me, these are kind of like four hard constraints that any theory of consciousness must be able to satisfy. And I think what is very common, though, is for theories of consciousness to only really care about a few of them, or like none of them at all. But I think like yeah, I mean it's sort of like if you want to go to the moon, you've got to be able to not only you know have the escape velocity to get there, you also you know need an airtight container right like so that you don't asphyxiate on the way there.

And I think of it something like that you know there's like a series of things that theory of consciousness must be able to do. And if you only do a few of them, it's not really a theory of consciousness. Okay, we're going to get to your background, who you are, how you got interested in the field of consciousness. But I noticed you didn't talk about the hard problem nor the boundary problem. I'm curious as to why. Yeah, great question. I tend to, in a sense tend to lump together the binding problem and the boundary problem, even though legitimately you can think of them as different sub-problems.

The reason I do this is that I think of them as equivalent just in different ontologies. So if you start out in the common sense view of the universe, where the universe is made of atoms and forces, then typically you will think of it as like the binding problem. It's like how is it possible that atoms and neurons can somehow be put together into unified experiences? If you start out with a different ontology, which is a unified ontology, let's say a field ontology,

where you say, hey, the universe is a gigantic field, you know, then you really have kind of the boundary problem. It's like, how do you get this that is already unified to break down into subcomponents? So, you know, I think like there's a lot more detail to it, but I tend to think of kind of like two sides of the same coin. I tend to think of kind of like two sides of the same coin. As to the hard problem of consciousness, in a sense, the hard problem of consciousness thrives on an ontology where consciousness is really surprising, especially if you kind of like started out with an ontology like in materialism, where the universe is made of insentient matter.

Then, you know, as David Chalmers would put it, okay, like how do you go from form and structure or, you know, like function and behavior to subjective experience? And like that seems kind of an unbridgeable leap in a sense. However, if you start out with an ontology where you say, kind of an unbridgeable leap in a sense. However, if you start out with an ontology where you say, well, the existence or the universe is fundamentally made of consciousness or qualia, then the hard problem as stated is

not really kind of like valid or doesn't really apply. You really would have like other problems to deal with, which is usually how we think about it at the Qualia Research Institute. We essentially take consciousness as fundamental. And then from there, you know, you have these problems like the boundary problem and the problem of causality and the palate problem and so on. So for Bernardo Castro with his dissociated alters, would that be an attempt to solve the quote unquote boundary problem? Yeah, I would say so.

I wouldn't exactly. Yeah, yeah, I would say so. Like it is sort of like, you know, he starts out with kind of like a monism, a really strong kind of monism in a, yeah, any analytic idealism where, yeah, there's just one thing. And then the question is, how do you break that one thing into things such as like, yeah, your experience and my experience right now, or the sense of continuity over a lifetime, or something like that. And I think, yeah, you really have to kind of like postulate some mechanism of action that satisfies a number of constraints.

For like, how is this possible? You know, how does this fit that into evolution? Like, how the full picture makes sense, essentially. Okay, let's talk about your background. How did you become interested in the field of consciousness? Yeah, great question. I would describe myself as hyper philosophical, you know, since I was a small kid, essentially just obsessively wondering about the nature of reality, why there's something rather than

nothing, what happens after we die. Same. Yeah, yeah, I guess like people in your audience, you're probably a hub or shelling point for people with this condition, you know, this mental condition. And, you know, for a long time, I actually just thought that physics was, you know, the way to answer, you know, all of these big, deep questions. And I wasn't really thinking about consciousness all that much. I mean, I was thinking a little bit about it. Kind of like, okay, what is the soul? What happens after you die? And things like that. But it actually was at the age of 16 where I had a kind of like a ego death mystical experience

where it really made me kind of like reconsider that the sense of being a person or the sense of being me was kind of like the default state of affairs. It made me question like, hey, hold on a second. If you can enter a state of consciousness where it feels like you're everybody or you're everything or you're pure consciousness. That means that this feeling that I had of being Andres, being an individual, was really just a feeling, you know, was kind of like one of the, you know, one of the ways in which my experience was getting painted rather than, you know, being in touch with some kind of like fundamental truth. And, you know, from then on, I realized that the biggest question actually isn't about physics.

It really is about consciousness. So that if we were to kind of like map out the depth of human knowledge and, you know, how satisfying the explanations are for different fields, you know, in physics and chemistry, biology, there's a lot of mysteries, but we have kind of like a quite a bit of a picture, at least like we can do a lot of things with this picture. But when it comes to consciousness, it really feels like we are, yeah, kind of like babies,

you know, the science is really just not there. Like there's so many things that we just don't know and can't understand. And I just thought, hey, actually, if I'm serious about understanding reality and making sense of it, probably the biggest bang for the buck actually is going to be on the field of consciousness. And for a bunch of other reasons too. If happiness and well-being turns out to be what life is all about or what the meaning of life is, then really understanding consciousness will give us a window into how to access that in a much more efficient, robust, rigorous way.

And in that sense, while understanding physics can be really powerful and has a lot of applied technologies, it's just not the same level of closeness to something like the meaning of life as developing a science of consciousness. So those were some of the main motivators. And since then, I only applied to universities that had programs, in particular, that had something like a cognitive science degree. And then I looked for possible career options where I could, yeah, in some sense, blend rigorous science and advance my understanding of consciousness.

And yeah, in 2018, I actually decided to dedicate myself full time to consciousness research by starting the Qualia Research Institute and just trying to make it happen full time. So I'd like you to tell us about what the Qualia Research Institute is, but it's also my understanding that you're primarily interested in math. Before university, no? Yeah, yeah. I would say I used to be very, very, very, I mean, I'm still very into mathematics, although I don't know nearly as much mathematics as I wish I did.

But yeah, I was, you know, I've always enjoyed like puzzle solving and kind of like understanding, you know, a really beautiful aesthetic of mathematics is kind of like proofs, you know, that you can know for a fact that something is true. Even if it's hard to intuit or make sense of kind of like in an everyday sense, you can rigorously prove that something is true and is always true. You know, I've always found that kind of like very aesthetically very appealing. And yeah, I used to participate in like math competitions and yeah, I used to participate in math competitions and yeah, it used to be kind of like what I imagine myself being in the future, being a mathematician. And it really wasn't until at the age of 16 that kind of my worldview was flipped upside down and realized, hey, hold on a second, consciousness is the bigger mystery. That said, you know, that aesthetic has really carried through and the way I approach consciousness is through

the lens of arriving at mathematical models of it. And ultimately I think that mathematics has been extremely successful in the realm of physics and I see no reason why it's not going to be just as successful in the realm of consciousness. At the end of the day I even think physics and consciousness will be two sides of the same coin. So it's approaching it from both sides. So other than your 16 year old self, what was an experience or it could be part of your research that I assume has to do with psychedelics that shattered your conception of reality

the most? Yeah, that's a great question. that shattered your conception of reality the most? Yeah, that's a great question. I think a very important... Yeah, I would say a couple of things. Two of those are from talking to David Pearce, who is a British philosopher. Yeah, maybe let me explain a little bit about that. You know, like, okay, maybe when I was 15, 16, I was, yeah, kind of just looking online

for like-minded individuals, people who could talk about consciousness, the question, why is there something rather than nothing? You know, we're curious about psychedelics and understanding, yeah, actually, what is the meaning of life and so on. And I stumbled upon a website that's called the hedonistic imperative that argued that it is possible to essentially engineer ourselves to always be happy. And it sounds kind of impossible,

but then there's actually a bunch of examples of people who are born with a condition that is called hyperthymia, where essentially, you know, day in, day out, they're just pretty happy to be alive, almost independently of what happens in their environment. But this doesn't mean they're actually dysfunctional. They can still, in some sense, feel less happy if a friend is in danger or experiences a cell illness. But nonetheless, they usually don't deep below what we call the hedonic zero, kind of like below the state of consciousness where you say like, oh, actually this feels bad. And so yeah, there's kind of like proofs of concept that you could potentially be happy all the time.

And what David Pearce, the writer of the Hedonistic Imperative argued, was that, you know, in the future, we might be able to engineer ourselves, you know, even at the genetic level, to be able to be happy all the time, without sacrificing any functionality. That many, if not all of the negative states of consciousness that we're very familiar with are things that we have access to because they were evolutionarily adaptive in the ancestral environment of adaptedness, not because it's necessary for consciousness or necessary for intelligence. So I really read everything I could from this philosopher.

And there was a bunch of things that made me have really important updates in my worldview from his view. One of them was precisely that philosophy is not enough to essentially solve the problem of suffering. That you actually also require technology. At the time, I was really into what's called open individualism, and I'm sure we're going to get into it more deeply, but that is the philosophy that we're all one consciousness. At the time, I used to believe, hey, if we could rigorously prove that we're all one consciousness, then we're not going to be afraid of death. And there's going to be no wars because we're going to realize that we're just fighting ourselves and so on and so forth.

But I didn't realize until reading David Pearce that, hey, you could realize that we're all one, but still be depressed for biochemistry reasons or neurological reasons. So I think that was a very big update that, hey, like happiness and technology actually will probably interface quite substantially. And maybe that's an important part of kind of the plot of human evolution as it were. But then the other like huge update that from David Pearce was the binding problem. I mean, for many years, maybe until I was 22 years old or so, I arrived just by reasoning on my own and in agreement with a lot of philosophers that the thing that matters for consciousness is information processing. So I was just convinced if you were to interview me when I was like 20 years old,

I would just say, yes, it's pretty obvious if you think about it, that if you make a simulation of a brain in a digital computer, of course it's going to be conscious because you have exactly the same information processing from the bottom up, it's just a different format. And we shouldn't be, as they call it, carbon chauvinists. Just because it's not made of carbon, we shouldn't discriminate against it. But David Pierce actually made me realize that consciousness is much more tricky than that. And the binding problem in particular, like how information gets put together into unified moments of experience,

may actually require a specific physical substrate, which I'm happy to go into more deeply. But that completely transformed my worldview, because the kind of picture I had for what would be a good future really changed. I used to think, hey, if we end up actually just living in servers, we know, we transform the entire planet into just kind of a gigantic server rack, you know, we're just like tiling

every continent with servers. As long as it's simulating, you know, like happy brains, then like, what's the big deal? That's a, that's, that's probably okay. You know, from a subjective, you know, perspective, like that's actually a perfectly fine future. But nowadays, I actually think that would be a massive disaster because there would be nobody there. It would actually be a completely empty world. So that's just because of the server aspect because you don't believe computers can be conscious. Yes. But if it was just conscious agents being happy, then that would be a world that you would want to exist.

I mean, I would be very open to it. I mean, like, in a sense, if there is nobody, so to speak, who's like, perceiving the aspect of the implementation where you're like, okay, you just see the servers and makes you feel sad. If instead, you know, the thing that is going on in terms of experiences is yes, just a lot of hyper meaningful experiences with very rich subjective lives. Yeah, probably. I would probably say there's no problem there. Okay, I'd like to get back to something you mentioned about happiness. So the Dalai Lama, which is someone that I imagine will come up a couple of times in this conversation, distinguishes between happiness and meaning. And he emphasizes the latter.

So he teaches that constant happiness is not possible and it's not the goal. Instead, he focuses on a sense of purpose and meaning even during difficulties. Viktor Frankl was similar in that suffering can coexist as long as you have a deeper quote-unquote meaning and you have to have this meaning-centered approach to life, rather than the pursuit of happiness. So what do you make of that? What does your definition of happiness entail? As you know, on Theories of Everything,

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What does your definition of happiness entail? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. How do I approach this? There's a lot for me to say here. So I'm going to make a... I'm going to define a term, which is valence. So valence is how good or bad the experience feels. Happiness would be kind of a flavor of valence. It's a particular type of positive valence, a state of consciousness that usually

involves actually kind of like a sense of, hey, things are holistically going pretty well. Happiness can be usually distinguished from, let's say, just raw sensory pleasure in the body, which a lot of people would say, well, that's just a component of happiness. But happiness is a little bit more broad. That said, usually when you say something like, well, a very meaningful, rich experience, oftentimes what comes to mind is something actually a bit even more encompassing than just happiness. It's kind of like, it is not just like being happy at the moment. There's also kind of like a sense of a guarantee that things are connected properly and your representations of the world are accurate in such a way that you're not just hallucinating that things are going well.

You're also actually in contact with the world and things are actually truly going well. In that sense, you can think of it as kind of like, okay, like a rich positive valence, meaningful experience as, you know, maybe even more desirable than mere happiness as it were. Now there is the question of, okay, is a unpleasant but highly meaningful experience in some sense desirable? And for me to kind of like really go there, I want to present this concept that we call

the tyranny of the intentional object. So the intentional object in philosophy is essentially the aboutness of experience. You know, that when you see a dog, it's not just a series of pixels in your visual field. It's also there's the sense of there's a subject of experience there and there's a relationship. There is a set of meanings associated with that percept.

And meaning has a lot to do with kind of intentionality, like the aboutness of experience. Well, what I would argue is that we are programmed by evolution for valence, the goodness or badness of experience, to be intimately related with the aboutness of experience. In other words, the intentionality of our consciousness is very tightly kind of bound up with whether it feels good or bad. That said, I don't think this is a strictly necessary feature of consciousness. I think this is an evolved characteristic of typical moments of experience. So what tends to happen is that, you know, if you're just experiencing kind of a superficial, let's say like pleasant bodily sensations or pleasant kind

of like sensory inputs, but you don't get the sense that it is about something and about something meaningful and important that connects to the rest of your world model, oftentimes that triggers an unpleasant sensation, which oftentimes we describe as a feeling of meaninglessness. In other words, the reason why we don't like meaningless experiences, as it were, is because we are programmed in such a way that meaningless experiences makes us feel bad. So you know, this is almost kind of like putting a Viktor Frankl on his head, you know, kind

of like turning him upside down. I would actually say that the reason, you know, he emphasizes meaning so much is because the idea of not caring about meaning makes him feel bad. But that actually, you know, fundamentally, he's still actually just talking about valence. He's actually just talking about whether things feel good or bad. It's just that we are programmed in such a way that the aboutness of experience is part of what makes us feel good or bad. But I think that's a programmable feature and is not really the fundamental source of value. Which can be demonstrated in a number of ways. I mean, like, David Pearce would say something like,

you rarely hear, for example, somebody say like, yeah, my life is intensely unpleasant and devoid of any positive feeling, yet I feel it's richly meaningful. And actually people who would say that, I think if you do kind of a micro phenomenological interview, you will realize that when they say like, yeah, actually my life is richly meaningful regardless, they will be able to point out that like body sensations and kind of sensory features of their experience that are actually positive in valence. So I don't believe you could have kind of a deeply meaningful experience

without that also being tied with positive valence. On pragmatic accounts, though, I do think that caring about meaning and relationships and projects and long term things is actually much better for your valence and the valence of others than just caring about in the moment sensory pleasure. That is absolutely the case. That is absolutely the case. However, I think that is because we're not really good at representing actually how different actions are going to impact our long-term experience. And if we were smarter or we could see things from a higher perspective, as it were,

I think we would realize that whenever we say, hey, we care about meaning, that deep down it's because that is a program that is helping us manage our long-term feelings. So have you heard of psychological egoism? Hmm. So for people who don't know, why don't you talk about what it is? Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I might be getting it mixed up, but yeah, correct me if I'm wrong. Psychological egoism is this idea that you never ever ever actually do anything good for others because everything that you do is just to feel better yourself. And we're programmed in such a way that, let's say, if you do a selfish action, we kind of like internalize the feeling of social punishment that comes from that selfishness and it makes us feel bad. So even when we are kind of like being altruistic and dedicating our time and energy for the sake of others, that deep down actually we're just doing it to feel better ourselves in the moment. Did I get it right?

Yeah. So I see parallels between psychological egoism and this constant underneath motivation toward the good or happiness or positive valence that you mentioned. So psychological egoism to me is it's either unfalsifiable or it's tautological. So again, I'll just spell it out from the way that I see it. It's that every action you wonder if have I ever done anything that's selfless? Well then as soon as you start to point out a case where what you've done is somehow against your own interest, someone can say, yeah, but you did that because you wanted so and so.

So there's always an underneath that that someone can say, well, you were still selfish somehow. So it's difficult to disprove these motivational claims. And I'm curious if you see a similar unfalsifiability to this. Well, if you're going into a fire because of a higher purpose, well, somehow that's still positive for you overall because you wanted to do so. I'm not even sure if positive feeling is the correct term because for me, when I feel a

sense of meaning and significance, sometimes it's correlated with positivity, but even in the negative times, there's something else that I wouldn't call positive. I would more call it direction or determination. And it's somehow underneath, but it's not as if I can map it to something that is something as simple as valence. So I want to know what you think about that. Yeah, super good question. Very, very rich question.

I think the first thing that I'll say is that, you know, valence is a pretty, kind of a pretty broad term because a lot of feelings and sensations have a valence. of feelings and sensations have a valence, even if they look very different than what we think of as kind of like pleasure and pain or happiness and sadness. Think of, for example, the flavor of umami, right? Or as you kind of grow older and you acquire kind of like a more refined taste for savory things, right? Or green tea, for example. I have a friend who jokes about how in his meditation practice, he used to kind of like prioritize kind of like the Dorito of meditative happiness, as he'd wear, just kind of this very rich, intense feeling of joy that you can experience. But now that he's more mature, he kind of like prefers to focus on kind of the green tea of the feelings of happiness in meditation. You know, it's kind of these like more, okay, like steady, you know, mature sense of well-being. And

I would say like something like that, like the feeling of meaning is not, you know, it's not kind of like a spoonful of sugar in your mouth, you know, but it's more kind of like a spoonful of sugar in your mouth, but it's more kind of like the umami of experience. It's one of these more subtle, refined flavors of consciousness, but it still has a positive or negative valence at the end of the day. And I think it is not unfalsifiable because the structure of valence still applies. And I think it's a universal property. This ultimately comes from Mike Johnson,

co-founder of Qualia Research Institute, who proposed what's called the symmetry theory of valence. That what makes an experience feel good or bad has to do with the presence or absence of symmetry and anti-symmetry. You know, the intuitive conception here is harmony and dissonance. You know, how like in sounds and music, you can essentially take a snapshot of a music and do a dissonance analysis on it. And that will give you a very, very large percentage of how pleasant or unpleasant that tiny bit of music sounds like.

Of course, a lot of what makes a musical experience feel good or bad depends on the context. And we carry the context from, let's say, like the previous movement in a symphony to interpret the current sounds. So there's a lot of context that might be missing if you just do analysis of a given snapshot. But still, just one snapshot will give you a very large percentage of the texture of the experience. And so I would argue that just as the feeling of something very, the Dorito of happiness,

let's say kind of a bodily orgasm, for example, has kind of this harmony and symmetry and coherence to it. But then, you know, this kind of like rich undertones of meaning in an experience, they also have this harmony and coherence to it. And I think it is that the reason why ultimately they feel good and we want to pursue them. Now, that is kind of like why I think it's not unfalsifiable that like, hey, we really go in there and let's say we find the meaning generators in your brain and we introduce dissonance to it. You would actually say something like, oh gosh, this feels very unpleasantly meaningless or something like that. That you could actually tune the coherence and the dissonance of sensations.

It would be reported as, hey, this feels more or less richly meaningful or not and richly pleasant or not. I want to also touch upon the question of philosophical egoism, psychological egoism at a deeper level, which is like, can you ever actually do something that is beyond just for yourself? And that actually is a very, very deep question because I think that something really profound about consciousness is that there is some kind of inherent uncertainty about the identity of an experience.

Because an experience is not just kind of a point-like structure. It's not just kind of like you can identify in your experience and say, OK, here is the self and the experience is happening to this particular point. An experience is a lot of things simultaneously. And some experiences actually have like a conception of the self that is very different from other experiences. And whether a given action is selfish or not, depends on your model of what the self is. And as a consequence, I think, you know, at the end of the day,

I don't think it is true that we are only doing things that are, in a sense, making us feel good, because the very meaning of what us is, is kind of like a shifting target, a moving target. And it really depends on kind of like what kind of philosophy you've been exposed to. In that sense, there's actually some kind of inherent uncertainty about whether you're doing it for yourself or not. That said, at a deep causal level, I do think we're always trying to increase our harmony and trying to reduce our dissonance. And in that sense, yes, I think there is like some truth to psychological egoism. But some definitions of consciousness, which I should ask you for your definition of consciousness,

but I'll just spell out one of them, is the ability to feel and experience. So the fact that you can, it's the capacity to feel. Now, of course, that's just a single definition and maybe that's more along the lines of awareness or something like that or sentience, doesn't matter, whatever. There's a capacity to experience and then there is what you are experiencing, the contents of experience. So would you say that those are two qualitatively different categories? I think there's a lot of value usually in kind of like carving out the ontology of consciousness in different ways,

because different carvings gives you different types of insights and leads for research. For context, when I say consciousness, I mean the what-it's-likeness of experience. Now, you know, the word consciousness really has kind of like at least 20 different meanings if you look it up in the dictionary. All of those meanings are fascinating. You know, when somebody says, hey, I studied consciousness, even if they're talking about, you know, social consciousness or self-awareness, usually, as far as I'm concerned, is a very interesting topic. However, I do think kind of the most philosophically fundamental meaning of the word consciousness is consciousness in the sense of qualia, the what is it likeness of experience,

the blueness of blue or the quality of the smell of a rose, for example. And from this perspective, you know, when I say a consciousness or a moment of experience, I'm actually kind of talking about the entirety of what's happening in an individual, quote unquote, screen of consciousness. So on a given moment, I have a visual field, I have a tactile field, I have an auditory field. I also have kind of the internal versions of those, you know, have a mind's eye. I have like an emotional landscape and I also have an inner dialogue. So that's already six different kind of sensory fields, as it were, you know, three external, three internal or about like internal states.

But then on top of that, there is the feeling of meaning and the feeling of aboutness and the intentionality of experience. There's also cognition. And there's also more subtle things. For some blog posts, I sometimes called it ontological qualia, which is kind of the feeling of what is the fundamental ontology of the universe, which is something that is usually pretty fixed unless you explore meditation or psychedelics. And then suddenly that variable can change. It's like, oh my gosh, there was also that variable to my experience. But I would encapsulate all of that on a given moment of experience. It's like all the sensory fields, internal and external and cognition and the existential qualia and all of that is

just kind of like one moment of experience, one snapshot. There are, I think, like, you know, significant structural difference between, you know, the feelings that are associated with vision versus the feelings associated with audio, but they're kind of like still different facets of the same thing. And in that sense, I wouldn't make kind of like a fundamental distinction between, I guess, like the contents of experience versus the capacity to experience. If that is encapsulated within a moment of experience, I would call both of those different facets of consciousness.

Okay, I'd like to get like, I have 200 questions here, man. And so I literally have 200, I have 172 questions here. So I won't be able to get to all of them. The Quality of Research Institute is something we should touch on. And I'd like you to explain what that is and use that as a segue to talk about impedance matching and your findings with that. Okay, okay, okay. Fantastic. I'm not so sure if I will be able to make it justice for the second part about impedance

matching, but I'll give it a try. So yeah, the Qualia Research Institute, something that came up because a number of reasons. Yeah, I guess, okay, like here's some context. So I wanted to study consciousness full time, pretty much all my life, at least since the age of 16. I found it difficult to find a place in academia where they actually did study consciousness in the way that I found the most meaningful and important.

I found that when I was looking for PhD programs, actually, I talked to lots of different professors. I mean, I lost count, but easily like 50 possible professors to work with. Wow. That's plenty. Yeah. Yeah. And easily, a lot of them would say, yes, I study consciousness.

But then if you dig deeper into what kind of research they're actually doing, they're actually studying something like cognition or working memory or maybe at best something like the psychophysics, like visual perception or something like that. Nobody that I found was actually studying in a fundamental sense, qualia and the structure of the state space of qualia or something along those lines. The state space of qualia or something along those lines. The state space of qualia. Yeah, the state space of qualia, which is like all of the possible sensations that you can have. You know, and I guess a kind of like lead most tested in a way was when I would ask professors like,

hey, like, what do you think of the role of meditation and psychedelics for understanding consciousness and the brain. And, you know, bear in mind that this was in 2013, where psychedelics weren't as legitimized in academia as a subject of research. But typically what I would hear would be something along the lines of, well, psychedelics affect the brain in very complex ways, a lot of subsystems at once. So they're probably not a very good instrument to study consciousness. Instead, what they were prioritizing were things such as psychological interventions, or even something like ultrasound stimulation or transcranial magnetic stimulation,

which I think it's very, very valuable for studying the brain and consciousness. But you don't really get profound consciousness altering effects with those technologies. And the way I saw it instead was, hey, hold on a second. In physics, we have made so much progress because we've looked at the extremes. We've looked at things that are very close to zero Kelvin, things that are thousands of degrees Celsius, maybe even millions of degrees Celsius, like looking at stars and supernova and cosmic phenomena. You learned a lot from looking at the extremes. And if your theory can only explain kind of room temperature physics,

you know, you're missing data to actually be able to kind of like differentiate between different equivalent, you know, empirically identical theories from the point of view of like making predictions in room temperature. And I thought like, hey, for consciousness, I think it's going to be the same. That like if you have a theory of consciousness and you think it's universal and you think it actually works, it should be able to tell you something like, hey, what's going to happen if you combine ketamine and DMT? I mean, like, I know that sounds like kind of ridiculous. It's like, okay, you would only ever combine DMT and ketamine in a crazy party somewhere in the Bay Area or something like that.

That doesn't sound like science. But hold on. It's the same as in physics. Like a serious theory of physics should be able to tell you what happens if you mix lead and palladium at such and such temperatures in such and such pressure. Like it should be able to generalize. And the same with that theory of consciousness. And I just really didn't find anybody who had that mindset or that ambition, really.

At the same time, there was these movements in the Bay Area coming up. This is when I was studying my masters at Stanford, 2013, 2014. And this movement called Effective Altruism was starting to become popular. And it is a very strong background assumption of most of the people who participate in that movement, that consciousness is really just information processing, in which case, they anticipate that consciousness is really just information processing. In which case, you know, they anticipate that AI is going to be conscious. And also, they have a particular way of making sense of whether, let's say, like a fruit

fly is conscious and whether its life has value or not, and how to assess that. And from our perspective, you know, me and my friends and philosophers who used to think a lot about this even back in the day, there were kind of like really important missing components in how people were approaching the ethics of effective altruism. And two that were really essential was the binding problem to, for example,

be able to tell whether a computer is conscious or not. That really changes the panorama for desirable futures. But then the other one was theories of valence. Because a lot of people, computer scientists, people who work in AI, the way they tend to think of valence is actually in terms of reinforcement learning. They think of something like, well, whether something feels good or bad depends on whether your reinforcement algorithm tells you that you should get more or less of that. And some people actually believe that for reasoning based off of pleasure as reinforcement, that is, it is actually literally impossible

to always be happy. Because if you were to always reinforce the same thing, you kind of max out at some point and you're not learning anything new, so you're not actually reinforcing anything, it doesn't feel good. But then empirically, you find people who are always happy and you find people who are always depressed. People with chronic pain, people with chronic happiness as it were. If happiness and suffering is actually not something related to reinforcement learning or maybe reinforcement learning is only tangentially related to it, then it seems like we have a very important piece of the puzzle that is completely missing for what is a desirable future.

So me and a few friends co-founded the Qualia Research Institute to essentially create this research enterprise with a goal of mapping out the state space of consciousness, being able to eventually actually make rigorous predictions about any extreme state of consciousness, as exotic as, okay, what happens if you combine DMT and ketamine, something that sounds ridiculous like that. And then also being able to quantify how good or bad an experience feels based on its mathematical structure. Um, and, uh, essentially a lot of people, uh, agreed with our, um, stated goals. And, uh, we got, yeah, uh, uh, some amount of kind of like memetic support as it were in the community. Um, Scott Alexander, um, the, the writer of, uh, Slate Star Codex, a pretty

important person in kind of like that sphere of people. He wrote about us, you know, in 2017. And yeah, we had our first intern cohort in 2019. And I think like it really has kind of like snowballed since 2021, where we started to actually organize some of these research retreats. We would actually get together physically, spend several weeks together, and work on projects. And yeah, I mean now it's kind of in a state where essentially we have like multiples of these retreats a year, publishing papers in academia, and also creating technology. Maybe something that I'll add on to this conversation is that

a very big picture for what is it that the Quality Research Institute does is, and it's not super easy because we do a lot of things, but one big picture way of describing it is that there's three goals and then there's three disciplines with which we pursue those goals. So the three goals are, first of all, we want to reduce as much as possible and prevent intense suffering. We have a lot of reasons to believe that actually that is a top ethical priority and it is actually highly, highly neglected. Even ineffective altruism is not really properly kind of prioritized. The second goal is figuring out how to improve baseline, you know, the moment to moment positive

qualities of experience and meaning on anybody's life. And then the third goal is to understand, mathematically model, and make accessible extreme pleasure states or states of extreme well-being. Just to give you an example, something like the Jhanas, which are these very advanced concentration states in meditation, which are extremely pleasant and extremely beautiful in ways that are very hard to describe. But we want to figure out what those are and develop technology to allow people to access them much faster than they currently can. And then the three disciplines are, first of all, philosophy, especially philosophy of mind, where we actually write up and publish in academia actual philosophy papers, which may sound pretty disconnected from reality, but it is our strong stance that better philosophy should actually lead to better science. In particular, better philosophy of mind should lead to better neuroscience.

So that is the second discipline that we engage in, which is neuroscience. For example, algorithms for analyzing neuroimaging data is one of the things that we do. And then third is neurotechnology. Especially, we focus on non-invasive methods to interface with consciousness, alter it in beneficial ways and ways that increase agency, allows you to have more control over your experience. So it's really a three by three. It's like, so just to remind you,

it's like get rid of the very unpleasant, improve the moment to moment, gain access to the really pleasant and meaningful, then philosophy, neuroscience, and then neurotechnology. And essentially, pretty much everything that we do can be found in kind of like that three by three matrix. Okay. So that's, yeah, very big picture view of the Qualia Research Institute. Okay, great. Now I said I had 172 questions and I didn't say that every three minutes that you speak, ten more questions occur to me.

So it's drastically over 200 and I have to choose what to pursue. So firstly, this is going to be part one of another conversation because there's no way that we can cram all of this into two hours or so. Let's talk about the impedance matching then. Yeah. I mean, I don't think this is super, super rigorous at this point. I mean, I think when I've talked about impedance matching, it's a... Well, think of like when you have several kind of like vibrations going on inside you, something that you can like tune into in meditation.

You know, if you try to kind of like slow down in meditation, really calm down, and then you do, let's say like a body scan of like what is happening in your body, you will notice that there's a series of metronomes. There's kind of like some wave emitters, as it were. To start with, there is your breathing. You have a periodic kind of like oscillation just coming from breathing that is exciting your whole body at that frequency. But then there's also your heartbeat.

And your breathing and your heartbeat can be aligned or misaligned. Playing with the alignment of your heartbeat and your breathing actually is a really powerful technique for making progress in meditation. For example, aiming to do one breath cycle every six heartbeats and kind of like really honing in on that resonance. You know, so like, you have a kind of this integer ratio between those two vibrations or oscillations. So that would be a kind of impedance matching in that you have like these two

different frequencies and you're taking steps to essentially make them aligned, make them intergeratious of each other. But, you know, that's what be just the very kind of like the base frequencies of your experience, because there's a lot more that is happening. I mean, on increasing levels of subtlety, you can notice, yeah, kind of oscillations or vibrations in your stomach, in your arms, in your legs, in your face. And one thing that I have found, you know, something for which I don't have a

rigorous empirical paradigm, but I'm pretty confident there is something here, is that whenever you pay attention to two things at once within your field of experience, they slowly but surely begin to synchronize. So this is an exercise that people at home can do. You can just book five minutes by the clock. And let's say once you calm down a little bit in meditation, pay attention to the vibrations in both of your hands. I mean, most of the time, I guess people don't notice that there's vibrations in their body,

but if you're relaxed enough and you're concentrated enough, you will notice that yeah, everything is vibrating in different ways, usually pretty subtle, sometimes much more overt. But my claim is based on a lot of personal experience and trying it with other people, if you kind of like tune into the vibrations that are happening in both of your hands and you try to kind of like place your attention in an even way,

not kind of like, oh, this hand and then this hand or alternating. No, no, no. Like try to pay attention to both of them exactly at once in a continuous kind of homogeneous way. Almost kind of like spreading some kind of attention liquid as it were in both of your hands. You will notice that over the course of minutes, the vibrations slowly but surely synchronize. And after a while, you may even actually get kind of this strobing sensation, where both of your hands are kind of of aligned with your heartbeat, for example. Now this is just two parts of your body, but let's say that you do this over and over again. What you do, kind of the algorithm of this meditation would be you find the two parts

in your body that are vibrating in the most desynchronized way possible, then you spend like five minutes paying attention to both of them until they harmonize. So that would be kind of an instance of impedance matching in a way. You're connecting them in such a way that they can slowly but surely synchronize like metronomes in a table. Okay, let's be clear here. So when someone is focusing on say their left leg and their right ear, and those are the most dissonant, now maybe you say what was likely to be the most dissonant

will be the heart and the brain or some place of significance, whatever, doesn't matter, place A and place B. They're not trying to will the synchronization, they're just paying attention to the dissonance. Yeah, I would say there's a slight, yeah, a very slight kind of like twist here because if the thing that you're paying attention to is the dissonance itself, like if the thing that you're paying attention to is the way in which they're out of phase, actually that may exacerbate and enhance the dissonance. Just because that's kind of like how attention works, like whatever you pay attention to becomes stronger. That is kind of like a very big perspective.

So instead, what you really have to do is pay attention to the way in which they are kind of similar. And then slowly the ways in which the vibrations are similar will be the part that becomes amplified until eventually you have kind of this like synchronized strobing of the different parts of the body. Okay, so you have Justin Bieber playing in one ear and then you have Nirvana playing in another ear and they're different. And you can tell they're different and you can focus on their difference or you can say, okay, I notice that they're different first of all. Now that I've noticed that they're different, how are they similar?

And then they both have lyrics. They both have similar vocal range. They're not, but you understand. Is that correct? Yes, yes, exactly. Like, yeah, absolutely. Something like there is an undercurrent of similarity or kind of like shared nature.

And you try to focus on that. And yeah, because essentially whatever you focus on, whatever you pay attention to becomes stronger, then the shared aspect of experience will be strengthened over time. And then if you kind of do this recursively, I mean it's like, okay, like both of my hands now are vibrating in a synchronized way, but maybe not my feet, then okay, I'm going to pay attention to both of my hands and my feet at the same time until it synchronizes.

And you repeat, you know, again and again and again. Eventually, actually, your whole body and all of your sensory fields will enter into coherence and the moment you do that successfully, actually you enter the first jhana, which is this very powerful whole body vibration, which is coherent across the board and is usually described as extremely pleasant. whole body vibration which is coherent across the board and is usually described as extremely pleasant. It's also by the way one of the kind of like intuitive reasons why we associate at Qualia Research Institute the kind of

like harmony and symmetry of the experience with the feelings of well-being and the valence of the state. That when you're in this very concentrated state of consciousness, you notice how even subtle misalignments and subtle imperfections in the synchronization process drive a sense of unease or slight body discomfort. And every time you actually bring together and you harmonize the vibrations, you get this feeling of happiness and wellbeing. And so you can actually just take it all the way and more and more levels of synchronization will eventually happen until, yeah, it's something really exotic.

Like you become this powerful sense of joy and then peace and then equanimity. And then even you absorb into space, for example, like the fifth jhana is absorption into boundless space. And as far as I can tell, the reason why that happens is because everything is in a state of coherence. And the sense of a boundary and separation within our field of consciousness is literally implemented with out of phase interactions or vibrations that are not in synchrony. So whenever you synchronize everything, the boundaries dissolve. There's nothing your brain can use to generate the sense of separation. And usually, yeah, that's a very pleasant, positive experience.

And yeah, once you get used to those very high valence, very pleasant, joyful states of consciousness, you realize that essentially our motivational architecture all of our life was driven by the pursuit of that gradient, except that we were pursuing it in a very inefficient kind of roundabout circumvent kind of way. Okay, so we're going to get to impetus matching. But before we do, like I mentioned, several questions occurred to me. So one of them is that if what reality is ultimately unified. Why care about the difference, quote unquote difference, between positive and negative,

if it's ultimately a non-distinction to begin with. So let me tell you what's underneath that. With you, with your focus on the initially the effective altruism movement, and now maximizing pleasure, how do you know that you yourself haven't induced a frame of mind where you are focusing on the difference between positivity and negativity in the same way that you shouldn't focus on the dissonance? And you've manifested that difference as mattering more. So that's why you care so much about the positive.

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Thank you and enjoy the show. Just so you know, if you're listening, it's C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L dot org, Kurtjaimungle dot org. So that's why you care so much about the positive. Oh, that's a wonderful question. I mean, it really is because it's wonderfully tricky. And I actually see a lot of people like kind of like subtly be confused about this. So I mean, first of all, if you identify kind of like how good or bad the universe is with

the amount of suffering that there is in it or the sense of separation that there is in it. And you try to solve that problem, absolutely, you know, internalizing that problem is going to cause the suffering inside you. You know, there's no doubt about it. At the same time, that can be an altruistic type of suffering. I mean, in a similar way to, well, if, you know, a mother and their child, like if the child is crying, the mother could be choosing to pay attention to the TV instead of the child crying. And of course, she's going to feel better by doing that. But there's a good reason why to pay attention to the child crying because, hey, we're all connected.

Consciousness is one thing. And if the child is suffering in some sense, yes, that's all of us suffering. It makes a lot of sense to actually represent accurately the states of suffering in the world if you can do something about it. I do think if you're powerless about what you can do, let's say you have like severe cognitive disability or let's say you have a life expectancy of like one week or something like that. Actually probably deceiving yourself about how good the universe is or like the world around you may actually be good for you and good for everybody because you're not going to fix it anyway.

So why not forget about it? But if you're like a young kid in university and you're choosing a career in order to actually have a positive impact, then actually taking in some of the suffering of the world by internalizing that sense of separation and discomfort, it is a kind of altruistic action. And I do think it is beneficial to do it even if it's not all that good for your well-being. I mean, I do notice the temptation to do otherwise. I mean, it is very common in spiritual circles, for example, to have the trope that, hey, everything is already perfect.

You know, that is very common in spiritual circles. People who meditate a lot, very often they will arrive at a view where they think something like, well, you know, it's not about good versus evil. It really is about the balance between good and evil and everything is perfect already. So like you don't have to fix anything. But I think that's kind of a type of wireheading that is kind of like misrepresenting, you know, the rest of the universe and the states of consciousness out there in the universe just to feel better. Which again can be helpful in some periods of life or if you don't plan to do anything about the suffering out there.

Yeah, sure. That's a perfectly valid thing. But yeah, I think like the strongest case I would make is that the issue is that the world actually, and especially the suffering in the world, is actually, I would say, much worse than our intuition tells us, and even much worse than people like Viktor Frankl, somebody who survived the Holocaust. Even people who have witnessed that level of suffering, I think usually are still underestimating just how bad things are.

So if you want to actually help, you do require, I think, to internalize a little bit, okay, just how bad it is, with the caveat that you really have to take care of your own well-being as well. Right. Like it really doesn't help for you to become deeply depressed and because then you become powerless as well. So, which is something that happens in effective altruist circles. Yeah. When somebody starts reading a lot about, you know, factory farming and just how, how bad it is.

Right. Oftentimes, yeah, they actually become so depressed they can't actually do anything about it. And then, yeah, things are worse on the whole. But if you combine kind of this awareness of the suffering in the world together with practices of well-being and practices that enhance your valence, I think you can strike the right balance. Where, let's say you're doing Jhana meditation on the one hand, you're taking care of your long-term well-being, but also you're not neglecting what's happening in the world. And I think that is, yeah, the balance that I tried to strike. So firstly, that happened to me as well when I was 18 or so, and I started to read about and watch videos,

geez, some are still burnt in my mind about factory farming and just the suffering of people and beheadings and torture. Some of it's still in me. So I resonate with that. So, my question still remains about if the ontology is ultimately unified without distinction, so maybe that's maybe my premises incorrect, my rendering of your premises incorrect, but anyhow, so if that's the case, how can it be the case that there's a fundamental distinction between what's pleasant and unpleasant. Yes. I think maybe it's a slight mischaracterization, which is leading to a very different kind of picture of the universe. So let me try to paint it as follows.

So I do think, okay, in the QRI ontology and view of the universe, the universe is a gigantic field of consciousness. And in some sense, we are all it. You know, the spiritual trope that, hey, we're all one consciousness, I think there's something really true about it. At the same time, this gigantic field of consciousness also is divided into various pockets. And this is where what we call the topological solution to the boundary problem comes into play. So this is essentially how we solve the boundary problem, which is, hey, if everything is one, how come you're there and I am here? It's kind of like a strange thing if everything is If everything is unified, why are there different people, different animals, different subjects of experience?

And our answer is that, well, everything is one. However, within that oneness, you have a rich topological structure. And this is something that we see in physics. The best example, best simple intuitive example I can give is to imagine the surface of a balloon as kind of the field of consciousness. If you take a balloon and then you twist it from both ends in opposite directions, there is a precise moment where the center collapses and you get a pinch point. And in some sense, now you have like two balloons that are connected by one point.

And this is one of these cases where a difference in degree, how twisted the balloon is, cashes out into a difference in kind. Now you have effectively kind of two balloons connected by a point. You can still argue it's still just one balloon, because it is kind of a continuous surface. However, if you have different pictures or information in both sides of that balloon, there's going to be a bottleneck in how information can transfer

from one side to the other. Because whatever you try to send from one side of the balloon to the other, it will have to be compressed through this one-dimensional point. And that's going to eliminate a lot of information. So in our picture of reality at QRI, we think, yeah, the universe is something like that. It's kind of this gigantic balloon, this gigantic surface, but that is twisted in such a way that there's a lot of pockets, a lot of little bubbles.

And each of those bubbles corresponds to a moment of experience. Now what's also kind of trippy and maybe unexpected here is that this also happens within one person over the course of even like a second. You know, in our model, each moment of experience is actually very temporarily thin, as we call it. Meaning that a moment of experience may be like less than a millisecond in terms of its temporal depth. And so even just one brain that is awake is going to be producing lots of little kind of like pockets, lots of little bubbles of experience within one second.

Now, I do think that if you want to quantify the total suffering or the total happiness in the universe, what you have to do is look at the structure of all of those little pockets and quantify the harmony, the dissonance, the symmetry and asymmetry in all of them. And that can give you a total score for like, hey, like in this region of reality of the universe, there is this amount of suffering, this amount of happiness. This is the net valence of the state. What you raise, it is kind of like really relevant and tricky in that like one may ask,

okay, like if actually the thing that is deep down, the deep reality behind all of these different pockets is actually just one large field, you know, why would something like pleasure or pain matter if it's just one thing? Well, the thing that I would argue is that while kind of the identity of reality cannot be changed, the features that it expresses can. And depending on what happens, different features will be expressed. And I think that at the end of the day, the features that matter for ethics is the valence of those experiences. So you legitimately can have a better or worse reality. And it's sort of like, to put it poetically, is the distinction between

a reality in which God is having fun and a reality in which God is in a very unpleasant kind of hellish state. Yeah, let's see how you react to that. There's more I could say, but yeah. Okay, so there are various definitions of oneness. So one would be there's a New Age conception of oneness. There's broadly speaking a Buddhist conception of oneness and a Vedic conception of oneness, and they're not all the same. And even within Buddhism and Vedism, there's several facets that disagree with one another. So I need to understand what your definition of oneness is. So my confusion is that most of the time when people speak about oneness that I speak to, they're referring to

something that's undifferentiated. Now in your balloon example, the material, we could all belong to the same material of the balloon, but the material of the balloon is of a different nature than the twistedness of the balloon and of a different nature than the pressure that's inside the balloon. So you could say we're all of the same vellum, so we're all of the same cloth, but there are still other properties and thus it's not entirely undifferentiated to me. Yes, that's right. Yes, maybe this is a really great place to maybe talk about zero ontology. I think it unifies these different threads.

Zero ontology is this theory by David Pearce about why there is something rather than nothing. Like the big question, why is there anything at all? And, you know, his kind of like answer to this is that, you know, in kind of the deep reality, there is something that is a zero. There is something that is unchanging and it's a kind of nothing that by necessity exists. And out of it, by implication, everything that we experience is entailed. And it's not necessarily kind of like a causal relationship. It's not kind of like this deep nothingness is causing our reality. It's more kind of in the language of logic where this deep nothingness is causing our reality. It's more kind of in the language of logic where this deep nothingness entails, you know,

it implies our reality. And you know, the bottom line is that he thinks that, you know, all of the values in reality cancel out to zero. You know, the three kind of like areas where this shows up, which ultimately may be equivalent on different facets of the same thing, is physics, math, and consciousness. So in physics, and you know it much better than I do, I think you've probably studied this much more deeply than I have, but you know you have things as like the total charge in the universe adds up to zero. Or the total energy of the universe or angular momentum or momentum add up to zero.

And so there is a sense in which the different values in physics are kind of like some kind of accounting system. That if you put them all together, they cancel out into some kind of net zero. I mean maybe it's not like strict nothingness, maybe it's kind of this charged quantum vacuum or something like that. But there's like a sense in which everything cancels out. In mathematics, you know, there's of course a lot of different philosophy of mathematics, but there is some attempt to, for example, reconstruct all of mathematics out of the empty set where you interpret, let's say, natural numbers as kind of these nested recursive sets that have the empty set within. And then it's kind of like, hey, you can reconstruct all of mathematics out of

quote unquote nothing or out of like an empty set. And in the realm of consciousness, this applies to the values of qualia. So in particular, there are some states of consciousness, both in meditation and psychedelics. One in particular, very worth noting is 5-MeO-DMT. They call it the God molecule, which is essentially an a psychedelic that tends to produce quite reliably this effect of the values of consciousness canceling each other out. So a very kind of classic example is if you take a moderate dose of 5-Meo DMT, you may experience your visual field kind of like, defract, quote unquote, and you kind of like see all of the

colors at once, all of the colors of the rainbow. And then if you take a slightly higher dose, something really peculiar happens, which is that you sort of like take all of the colors of the rainbow and you look at them from a certain angle and then they all cancel out into a transparent or kind of nothingness. And the same also seems to happen with tactile sensations and audio sensations that there is kind of like a dose where you get kind of the full palette, the full state space of possible qualia. And at a higher dose, they all cancel out. And you get kind of this sense of nothingness or emptiness.

Which is kind of like a very profound feeling of lack of differentiation. In fact, one of the fascinating things of this is that the feeling of God consciousness, as they call it, the profound feeling of, well, there's only one subject of experience in all of reality and we're all it. That happens at a certain dose, but if you take an even higher dose, actually that cancels out with a feeling of separation, which is kind of like another type of qualia. And actually, yeah, the feeling of oneness and the feeling of separation are kind of two aspects of consciousness that can cancel out. And there's something that just doesn't feel like anything that is kind of the result of that cancellation. So what I want to say is that,

So what I want to say is that yes, there is absolutely a sense in which the total amount of green, as it were, in reality, the subjective quality of green, needs to eventually cancel out with the total amount of red in reality. So there is a sense in which the values of consciousness do cancel out. However, there are aspects of consciousness that don't cancel out. And in particular, I think valence doesn't cancel out. I especially don't think it is the case that how good and bad experiences feel need to sort of like average out somehow. Like, I don't think it is the case that whenever there's a positive experience, somewhere else there is a negative experience to balance it out. And the reason is that valence is kind of a special property of consciousness that is not one of these raw kind of low level features like color.

Okay. It's actually more something structural and emergent out of how you put together those features. So, it is, yeah, such as, for example, the dissonance of a musical piece. Like, you can take a musical piece and you know, count all of the A's and B's and C's, you know, like the different notes that you played. And whether the piece sounds good is not dependent on how many A's and B's you have, right? It's dependent on the order and the precise combinations that they had, right? So the harmony and dissonance is an emergent property of the actual structure, how it is put together.

And I think it's exactly the same for consciousness. You could have a universe that is organized in such a way that every experience is actually wonderful. And even though everything cancels out to quote-unquote zero in a sense, the thing that cancels us to zero is the raw, very low-level features of reality, not these emergent kind of high level gestalts like valence? Okay, so a variety of questions. Okay, so number one, if you were to just continue to zoom into these higher level emergent properties

though, it would become undifferentiated. So where is this mattering coming from that it matters how it's put together at some higher level? I wonder if there's a different analogy other than the math and physics about cancellation. So in physics, it's not the case that the total charge of the universe is equal to zero or that the total mass of the universe is equal to zero or the total momentum. We don't know. We know that in localized regions, you can, if you were to create matter that you would have to create it of equal charge and opposite. There's local conservation laws. But it doesn't mean we don't know how the universe started. We don't know the boundary conditions of the universe. So that's like an extra condition atop. And then when it comes to math, building math from the empty set, it's somewhat misleading to say math is built from the empty set.

Because, well, firstly, there's a difference even between saying math is built from the empty set and math is built from emptiness because otherwise you'd just be like math, and then you just look at the students and you just stop. But the empty set means something and then you also have to have set inclusion in order to define other sets, and then there's also rules of of logical deduction and those aren't the same as the empty set so that's what I mean it was also similar to the What I was speaking about earlier between the difference between the vellum So the balloon material and then the pressure inside the balloon and the twistedness of the balloon So some people will look at that. It's all of the same cloth and say monism

But that's not quite it's not clear to me that that's monism as there are other properties associated with it. And then at what point does the property collapse into the vellum? I don't know. But anyhow, so take that however you like and I'd like to hear your responses please. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Um, okay, so I mean, I think it's something like, definitely, of course, in the realm of speculation,

but when you have a network of kind of these variables that can cancel out, you know, if you have like, okay, color, you have for every blue, quality of blue, you have a corresponding quality of yellow. And whenever you have kind of have movement in this direction, you also have movement in this other direction, somewhere else, and so on. On the one hand, that sounds like it's impossible to produce something larger. It's like, okay, these are just oscillations around a zero in a flat surface, so to speak. But when they're interrelated to each other,

when you have a energy that has a shared currency across these different variables, where let's say you can transform oscillations in color to oscillations in movement and then maybe you can transform oscillations in movement into you know expansion and contraction and if these variables are networked in a certain way then a lot of like emergent structure can arise. I mean recently something that is quite beautiful we're going to release this pretty soon, is we have a bunch of simulations using networks of coupled oscillators,

where a bunch of different variables are interrelated in a way similar to how I described. And one of the things that is really beautiful is that you can actually have the emergence of topological pockets within this field of interconnected variables. It is a boring universe where the only variable that is oscillating around zero is color, because then you don't really have much structure. But when you connect movement and expansion and contraction and the elasticity of the oscillators and things like that, then very intricate structures can arise, even up to the point of these very enduring cell reinforcing patterns, like, for example, a vortex of color or a saddle of movement. And what I would be hypothesizing here is that out of this field of nothingness in a way,

where there's a lot of different variables that can cancel out into that nothingness, if those variables are interrelated to each other, then you can have actual topological structures emerge in that field. And my hypothesis would be that individual experiences are actually those topological pockets in that field. So even though it's kind of like a field of nothingness in a way out of it, you can get subjects of experience to arise. Well, yeah, extremely speculative and maybe more in the realm of poetry, but maybe gives a bit of an intuition. I mean, in the same vein, I want to learn physics much more deeply, but I would, yeah, hypothesize or think of essentially particles as less so kind of just oscillations in the field and more kind of these knotted topological

structures that arise. I mean, maybe, I mean, one way in which I've heard, for example, I mean, there's a lot more detail to this, but one way to talk about, for example, electrons is rather than thinking of an electron as a point or kind of like a particle in a field, it's maybe better to think of it as like a region in the field where the field lines converge. So it's sort of like, it's almost kind of you do a figure ground inversion, right? Like where you realize, hey, the thing that is real was the field. And the electron is just kind of a special point in that field where field lines are sort of like knotted or connecting to in a certain way.

And I would essentially think something like that, that gestalts and like whole experiences are kind of these ways in which the field is knotted with itself. And that doesn't cancel out in a sense. Like the total number of those pockets in reality can fluctuate widely depending on what happens. Whereas yeah, maybe something like blues and blues and yellows do cancel out and there's no way to get more blue without also producing yellow or something like that. Okay, let's stick on this zero ontology. So is it the case that from nothing contradictions can happen? Is there inconsistency in the universe?

In a strict sense, I would say no. However, I think the pockets of experience do have certain properties that you can interpret as internal contradictions. I mean, in particular, consciousness does have kind of this superposition or superposition-y quality where you can have many things kind of happen simultaneously. And especially during advanced people who are advanced meditators, they oftentimes describe kind of like the sense of superposition of experience actually becomes like stronger the more you meditate. And like people who are like quote unquote enlightened, oftentimes they will say that yeah, that actually is very connected with not trying to resolve the contradictions or the kind of super positions in your experience that normally most people, myself included, you know, on a moment to moment basis, we're trying to kind of like collapse and define what we're experiencing as much as possible. seen with unfocused eyes or if our eyes are not perfectly focusing in the same point, if there's some binocular rivalry and so on, we're uncomfortable with that.

But a lot of what awakening is about is to actually be okay with those states of, well, it's not perfectly focused, it's not perfectly coherent, and that's okay. You don't fight it anymore. I mean, in that sense, yeah. I mean, if you define kind of that quality of superposition as, let's say the coexistence of contradictory features, it's like, well, is this blue or is this yellow? Well, it's kind of both at once.

Then yes, of course. Yeah. Reality of course accepts contradictions. However, there's another way of looking at, let's say, kind of a state of superposition as a very precise state, which is, well, it is the state of the sense of ambiguity between these different features. And so it's precisely ambiguous, if that makes sense. And I think if you have that type of logic, then yeah, I think like there's

no contradictions in reality. It's just that what reality is made of is something that can have kind of this super position equality. Would a self also be an emergent entity in the same way that the valence is? Yes, yes, absolutely. And I should distinguish between the self and the sense of self, which is a phenomenal quality versus kind of like the subject of experience or like the fact that there is consciousness. So, yes, please, let me make sure that I'm understanding even here. You said you're going to distinguish between the self and the sense of the self.

Because that's extremely interesting. Yeah, yeah. Let's put it that way. Okay. Okay. The reason why is because sometimes people could say an interesting phrase, which is I've lost myself, which is extremely interesting. How can you ever lose yourself?

Because you're always intimately connected with yourself. So they mean something. And also maybe they mean that they've forgotten their values or their memories are gone or their sense of self is no longer there. So I don't know if that's along where you were going, but that's where my head was going. And I was interested to hear you expound on the difference between the sense of self and self. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, to a first approximation, I would say something like the sense of self is a feature of experience similar to, for example, blue or the smell of a rose. Like it is something that you can kind of like paint your experience with.

And for the same reason is something which you can paint your experience with. And for the same reason, it's something which you can remove from your experience. And having no sense of self doesn't mean that you don't have experiences. You can walk around and be functional without a sense of self. And there's people who are like that. In fact, I think there's a certain kind of normal distribution, even people who don't meditate, the strength of their sense of self varies enormously. And the process of awakening, there's a few key collaborators. One of them is Roger Theisdell, another one is Wisson Brian Scott. And to a lesser extent, but he's much more famous and also more busy, but I also talked

to him quite a bit, is Daniel Ingram, who wrote this book called Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha. So all these individuals, they claim to have achieved what is called a fourth path, which is a stage in certain strands of Buddhism that is essentially classical awakening. And they describe very precise, very specific phenomenological changes. The way in which they experience the world is radically different. I mean, it's not a subtle change. It's like perhaps as radically different from like normal everyday life as like a DMT trip. So it's like a really, really radical change to their moment to moment experience and it's a permanent enduring transformation that they experienced. And, you know, core to this transformation is that they don't spend any resources anymore rendering a sense of self.

That is just kind of gone. They just don't do it. And they have documented kind of like the various like stages that lead to that. In particular, Roger Theisdell has kind of these like five kind of like levels, kind of like altered traits in meditation, which is not states of consciousness per se, it's more enduring states of transformed consciousness. And it goes as follows. So in normal everyday life, usually most people, I would say 99.9% of people easily, have kind of these like

coagulated kind of a bodily reification, maybe around their heads. For some people, I think it's like around their heart area, which is like a bunch of kind of like interrelated and nodded somatic sensations that they identify with. And they don't identify with all the things around in their experience. So let's say you're walking down the street and you see a homeless person and in the normal everyday state of consciousness, the way you render that interaction is like, oh, there's an other that's not me, but this is me. And there's a separation between that thing that is not me or that person

that is not me and the sense of self that is me. And okay, if you see something beautiful, you know, the sense of who you are may be attracted to it. If you see something ugly, it may be repulsed by it. Um, but that, that kind of like coagulation of somatic sensations is essentially what you're constantly trying to protect and constantly what you're trying to enhance. Like when somebody has kind of like, let's say, a narcissistic tendency, just as an example, they're constantly paying attention to that like, ray-fied, coagulated sense of somatic sensations

and trying to make it look good and kind of like be good in a sense. Now, if you do a lot of meditation and you sort of kind of like work on lessening the internal knots of your experience and you kind of like transform the fabric of your sensations from like these like very kind of corrugated and crusty networks of feelings into something more feathery and soft and delicate, eventually you can actually start to identify rather than with your bodily sense, you may identify with awareness itself. And you enter a state of consciousness, Roger in particular calls the witness. Where rather than identifying with bodily sense, you identify with kind of the witness of experience. And for a lot of meditation teachers, maybe that is the

end. That is awakening. Whereas for him and various people I know, that is just like level two out of five. Then level three is where he calls kind of like God Mind or Yeah, kind of I think like God Mind is the typical name, but some people also call it as kind of the feeling a feeling of profound oneness where now what you're doing is that any sensation that you have you tag it as part of you. I sometimes use a metaphor that, maybe you've played Age of Empires, maybe people in the audience have, like video games where you have different characters. Let's say your team is the characters that are painted blue, and the enemies, the characters

that are painted blue, you know, and the enemy is the characters that are painted yellow. And so after you play for 20 minutes, let's say one of these games, whenever you see a tiny speck of blue in the screen, your whole body and system and mind is like, oh, that's me. I've got to protect that. That's part of my team, as it were. And, you know, if you have like tribal affiliations, you know, you cheer for a particular political party or for a particular, you know, like sports or so on. You tend to identify with those who wear, you know, the same colors or the same flags. And that feeling, that feeling of like, oh, that's me or that's part of me is something that happens but for every sensation in that third stage. And for a lot of people actually that is what awakening is. It's kind of you don't make a distinction between yourself and other. You kind of absorb everything into your sense of self.

The problem though here is that you will have a very heavy sense of self and actually that still doesn't quite get rid of suffering because there's kind of now there's the universe to protect and you have like kind of that feeling of you may die in a sense but you're projecting it onto everything. Then the fourth stage is actually kind of the polar opposite. It's kind of like you rather than every sensation being identified with you, you essentially stop identifying with any sensation. You know, a lot of Buddhist practices, you know, they tell you,

hey, if you can smell it, if you can see it, if you can touch it, it's not you. Right? Like whatever you sense, whatever you feel, that's not you. That you're something transcendent that is beyond experience in a sense. And if you do that rigorously, eventually anything that happens, you just kind of don't identify with you. That's kind of like, oh, that's not me. That's not me. That's not me. And then finally, the fifth stage, which he calls no self and no center, is a stage where you kind of like stop habitually trying to decide whether something is you or not. So you know, in the third stage, by default, everything is you.

In the fourth stage, by default, everything is not you. But in the fifth stage, any sensation that you have is neither you nor not you. So you just kind of drop the clinging to try to have a self-view at all. And essentially, when you are in that state, you drop the center. You stop trying to coagulate a sense of self or differentiate your experience to me and not me. And that is extremely freeing. It actually kind of like drastically increases the valence and the harmony of the whole experience. You know, from a Qualia Research Institute perspective, all of that is kind of a transformation that you do to the structure of your consciousness,

in particular how you direct attention and how you bind features into a self-model. And it just so happens that dropping the whole idea of creating a self-model is actually valence enhancing. It is actually kind of like a much more harmonious and consonant state of consciousness. Although apparently it does take a little bit of time for people to adapt to it and become functional. Like it is very common for people who achieve that fifth level to essentially have like a couple months where they're quite dysfunctional. You know, they may struggle to, yeah, for example, navigate a room or, you know, make phone calls and getting stuff done because they kind of like are not representing things in the same way as you and I. And it can be dysfunctional, but typically these transformations happen, for example, in a container like a monastery.

And then people are kind of like taking care of you for, you know, however many weeks or months it takes for you to adapt. But yeah, the point is that it is possible. And so you can have consciousness, you can have, you know, a witnessing of sensations without, in addition to it, trying to attach a sense of self or a sense of no self. You can actually drop that construct entirely. You said something important here. This is ordinarily done in a monastery. It takes several, you said weeks, but it takes several years to get to that point and then maybe several weeks or months of integration after that point. Yeah.

Now, if you can hold a cup and then you ask someone, are you holding a cup? And they say no. You can think, well, you're wrong. Your model of the world is wrong. You're clearly hold a cup and then you ask someone, are you holding a cup and they say no, you can think, well, you're wrong. Your model of the world is wrong. You're clearly holding a cup. And then if we think that we can be wrong about having a self because there's these level two, level three, et cetera, where you don't have the same model as before and you think whatever is at a higher level is somehow a more correct model, then that's implying you can be wrong about your models. How do you know that the model of the no self is a more correct model?

And how does one know that psychedelics are revealing a reality rather than making the more accurate claim that psychedelics show you what it's like to be on psychedelics? Similar to like gum doesn't reveal that the world is minty. Yeah, great question. There's a couple things I can say about these. So, well, I mean, first of all, you know, psychedelics with regards to the sense of self produce quite disparate effects depending on the specific psychedelic. And the biggest contrast out there is between DMT and 5-MeO DMT. Because 5-MeO DMT is directionally kind of like more towards the no self perspective. And a lot of people that I have interviewed who are very, very advanced meditators,

who have tried 5-Me-O DMT, they tend to say, yes, this is pointing in the direction of kind of the fruits of years of meditation. This is Shen Xingyong, who wrote The Science of Enlightenment, a pretty famous book, and also has a beautiful aesthetic of trying to combine science and meditation. When he tried Breakthrough 5-Me-O DMT, he said, yes, this is not exactly a Buddhist awakening, but it's close to it. So it might be helpful to, in the right circumstances, in the right container, maybe accelerate the practice.

The complete opposite, well, not complete opposite, but just completely different direction is DMT, one of the active ingredients of Ayahuasca, because that one actually fragments the sense of self and very often gives you multiple senses of self. So it's kind of like if Ave Mio DMT is like from one to zero, DMT is from like one to 17. You all of a sudden are like in this multitude of a collective consciousness with lots of different centers and lots of different eyes and different perspectives and they're irreconcilable. So clearly you know clearly there's not just one truth

so to speak and psychedelics reveal it you know different substances produce just very different sense of what the ultimate truth is and and just by by the multiplicity of these different perspectives on the truth, clearly there isn't just one truth. I mean, that I think should be quite clear. Kind of similar to, I don't know, like clearly there's multiple religions, right? Like many different people claim to have access to the ultimate truth and know it for a fact. And those truths are different. So, okay, clearly it's not exactly doing that,

but at least most of them must be mistaken, you know, at the very minimum. But I do think there is a sense in which you can be actually more or less... You can have a better or worse model of the universe and a better or worse model of the universe and a better or worse model of consciousness and of yourself. And one of the ways in which you can really kind of like systematize this is the accuracy of a model is in terms of how well it can anticipate future experiences. How well it predicts future experiences.

So for example, if you are undergoing like a psychotic break and you're highly deluded, you may believe something like, well, this is holy water and if I drink the whole cup, I'm going to be able to fly. Right? You can genuinely believe that. And your state of consciousness really makes you feel this is true, but you would be wrong because you do it and then you still can't fly. Right? Like those like experiences that you're failing to anticipate. And so the accuracy of a belief, I think, can be assessed in terms of how accurately it anticipates experiences that will happen in the future as a function of different actions. And there is kind of like a, you know, the standard sense of self from moment to moment.

I actually think it fails to anticipate a lot of experiences. And in that sense, it's not quite accurate. anticipate a lot of experiences. And in that sense, it's not quite accurate. I mean, it fails to anticipate, for example, what will happen if you meditate a lot. Because the moment you try to imagine, okay, what is going to happen in the future if I keep doing this, you project your sense of self going forward and you use that as kind of the operating system to make sense of reality. Whereas, hey, that's actually something that is going to break down and your attention is going to look very different

and your capacity for integrating information is going to change dramatically. So in that sense, yeah, you can be like more or less... A prediction can be more or less accurate in terms of how well it predicts and anticipates future experiences. And also, I mean, I think whenever you have a feeling that there is kind of this like enduring metaphysical self with kind of like unchanging properties, I think that can be shown to be false just by the fact that you can do interventions on your brain that will change that feeling.

So there's a lot of feelings that in the moment they feel like they're gonna be forever. I mean, for example, yeah, like sadness. And if you went through a breakup and like, you feel, hey, like I will never get better. Right? Like you could accurately say like that's wrong. Right? Like that is an incorrect assessment of your situation

because actually in a couple of months you will feel much better. Right? So yeah, I'll tell you just a brief aside a funny story when I was 22 or 23 and I had my first major breakup because I was living with this woman for for a few months or a couple years and in different places but when when we broke up I remember going downstairs we were living in a condo, going downstairs and giving the keys, my set of keys to the concierge.

And it was just a horrible feeling because I'm like, this is it. And then I was distraught. And there were two police officers there for some reason. That happens frequently at condos because there's parties and so on. And the officers asked me like, what's wrong? What's going on? I don't know if they thought I was on drugs or something and I said I told them what happened I said like I just I broke up with It's never gonna be good is something something like that. My life is never gonna be the same

Then they were they were concerned. They're like, how old are you? Then I said, I'm 22. They're like 22 You you have no idea this desk nothinghow, I remember thinking like that was just, it meant everything to me at that point. So, I know what it's like. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, that is one of the things that meditation in some sense, oftentimes, if you do it well in the right context, increases kind of the representation fidelity of your experience precisely because you pay attention moment to moment to the actual arc of sensations. And there's so many sensations that if you just pay attention to, you know, when they're coming up or like when they're at their peak, it gives you the impression that they're going

to last forever. Even by their very nature. I mean, there's like some types of suffering, some types of happiness that like, part of their nature is to give you the impression that, hey, this is reality and this is reality forever. But if you're really mindful and like moment to moment, you're paying attention to the whole field of sensations, it's almost kind of like you can infer the differential equations for these feelings.

It's like, oh yeah, as this feeling comes up, my belief in the future goes down, and as this one goes down, this one goes up. And okay, it's a dynamic system. And I shouldn't believe what it's telling me because it's just a faulty representation that is just trying to get me to act in an evolutionarily adaptive way,

but it's not the truth. But you know, yes, go ahead. So earlier you said that you can have a conception of the self that's better or worse, and you made that better or worse-ness grounded in if you have a model and it's predictive of the future. Now, I don't think it can be just that because it's my understanding that in your conception of reality with the unified field and there's this membrane and so on, I would, I could be making an error here, but I would assume there's no temporal dimension to this unified field. It exists outside time. Maybe it's atemporal.

And if that's the case, then the truthfulness or the betterness or what have you cannot be grounded in something that itself is ungrounded. So what makes something actually better or worse? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, yeah. like the predictive capacity of your moment to moment models can be better or worse in the sense of, hey, it becomes like falsified or verified as time goes by. But it is true that, yeah, even the whole arc of your life is just a tiny sliver, a tiny slit as it were, on the true reality, which is this gigantic field of consciousness that in some sense is outside time because time is embedded in the structure of that field

of consciousness. Along the lines of how some physicists think of time in terms of the arrow of time, not kind of like a fundamental physical feature, but more just kind of like the direction towards which entropy increases. So yes, you can totally think of the field of consciousness as this kind of eternal thing that is just there. And a given arc of a person's life is kind of a trajectory in one tiny, tiny, tiny corner of that huge field. I do think that, yeah, the enterprise of science and philosophy should be pointed at trying to understand like the whole field, you know, and there's

going to be some divergences in that an accurate model for that tiny sliver, for that tiny speck that is just a human life, maybe at odds with kind of like the true, let's say like base rates or the nature of the entire field as a whole. For sure, there might be some divergences. But I am what I call an epistemological optimist. And I do think, you know, we keep at it. Eventually, we probably will have like a good picture of like what the entire field looks like. And we can make inferences about it based on things such as like the dynamics of our own moment-to-moment experience. Precisely things such as the dynamics of our own moment to moment experience. Precisely things such as how out of a sense of nothingness you can have features that come in pairs, like colors or oscillations, all of them cancel out to zero.

In some sense, that's kind of like a mini laboratory for how consciousness works. And under some assumptions, you can say, well, that probably generalizes. Maybe it's not just in my state of consciousness. And your capacity to infer that some of these kind of like rules of consciousness generalize to the entire states of consciousness increases the more you have sampled like very radically different states of consciousness. I mean, I do think there's like some things that are only true the more you have sampled very radically different states of consciousness.

I do think there's some things that are only true in room temperature consciousness, so to speak. But then there's other things that seem to be true in all states of consciousness. And whatever is true in all states of consciousness and has predictive capacity in all states of consciousness has a higher chance of generalizing to the entire field. And yeah, for sure that is kind of, yeah, the most juicy aspect of quality research is making those very, very large generalizations hopefully grounded on good evidence. So people have stuck with us now for almost two hours. And I've mentioned impedance matching several times. We never get to it.

So let me tell you where I was going. There was an analogy that you gave on the demystify side podcast which I'll put a link to on screen with a string in open air and if you were to pluck it, it makes a sound but it's quite faint. It's also difficult to pluck a string that's just falling without its ends attached. But if you just imagine it in space,

then maybe you could do that. But then there's imagine it in space, then maybe you could do that. But then there's no air in space, but you get the idea. If you were to fix the ends, then it makes a louder sound. And if you were to put a guitar there with a hole, then it makes an even louder sound. You're using that as an example of impedance matching, so please. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, just as an intuition, I think it's fascinating that if you literally just put a string between two walls and you pluck it, the sound is very faint.

Whereas if you pluck it in a guitar, the sound can be pretty loud. And that's very puzzling. Actually, as a kid, I thought that didn't make any sense. It's like why can you get something louder just by attaching it to an object? It's kind of like where is the energy coming from? Right, it sounds like it's breaking the conservation of energy. Like the guitar is adding energy somehow? Exactly. But the answer, I mean for those who want to know, I mean you can pause the video and think about it for a couple of minutes. The answer is that by attaching it to a guitar, you're essentially transferring those vibrations

to the entire guitar. And then the entire guitar has a very large surface area for touching air. And so actually the sound of the guitar is not the sound of the string. The string is just providing kind of the background source of energy and vibration, but the actual sound is the oscillatory modes of the entire guitar as a whole and how it's interfacing with the rest of the air, which is doing it both inside and outside the guitar. So there's a lot of surface area.

And by shaping the guitar in different ways and making it of different materials, the quality of the sound is going to change, even if the string is of the same material and you pluck it in the same way. I think, yeah, this is quite relevant for, for example, like making sense of how breath work gives rise to different meditation states.

That if you've done a lot of meditation where, for example, you have like energized a lot, let's say, your various like chakra systems and you energize them and you cool them down and you energize them and you cool them down, that gives rise to a process that we call annealing at Keogh. Essentially annealing is this physical phenomenon where you can use energy to organize a system and make it more symmetrical. Typically this is done in metals, where if you have an industrial metal and you use it a lot, eventually it acquires a lot of imperfections.

Literally the crystal lattice of the atoms becomes misaligned and you get these defects in it. That makes it brittle and dysfunctional over time. But then, what you can do is you heat it up above what is called recrystallization temperature. The atoms actually become even more disorganized. But then if you cool it down slowly, the atoms essentially become aligned in a perfect symmetrical lattice. And then the metal regains all of the qualities that was useful for your particular application. We think that something like that may underlie essentially a lot of these like meditation practices and the use of psychedelics in a good environment with a good purpose is that you're energizing your system.

You're energizing your cardiovascular system, your nervous system, your muscles. And all of that energy is making them interact in lots of ways in such a manner that they can interface and interlock in better ways, in such a way that it is kind of like reorganizing the crystal lattice. I mean, like if your system is kind of jumbled up because of all the stress that you have in life and you do a lot of breath work and you energize it. If you cool it down with a good mindset, in a positive emotional field, is going to kind of crystallize in a way that will have like a higher capacity for consonance and harmony. So the way in which, yeah, this kind of impedance matching and metaphor for,

for a string and a guitar is relevant is that the more you have done that in the past and the healthier you are, so to speak, when do you energize your system? It's not just what it feels like, it's really not just the energy coming from your breath, in a sense the breath work and the exercise that you're doing, but the emotional tone of your experience will have to do, but the emotional tone of your experience will have to do with the resonant modes of your whole system. And in that sense, you become kind of the guitar for the string. And the same can be with listening to music or dancing or even doing exercise.

Any of these things, the more you yourself are in this very harmonious configuration, the more melodic and pleasant is going to be the way in which the energy gets dissipated. Does that answer your question more or less? Yeah. So I'd like to know what you think of the term psychedelic Buddhism. Is that an oxymoron to you? That's a great question. Well, I don't think it's an oxymoron. Empirically, if you talk to a lot of kind of like highly realized meditation masters in the West in particular, it's extremely common for them to kind of like

in the West in particular, is extremely common for them to kind of like relate the arc of their own development as, hey, like in the 60s, I tried a bunch of acid and I realized that there was like something more to reality than my nine to five job and, you know, the status hierarchies that my society indoctrinated me to believe in, et cetera, et cetera. But then I realized that, you know, acid doesn't last that long and you can't be high all the time. So eventually I discovered meditation and I realized that I could access the same states as I do on LSD but just through meditation and that it's better and it's more functional and it makes me a better person. So I don't take psychedelics anymore, but they were important in my development. That is super common. So clearly there is a lot of value in here, even if you think it's kind of misguided to

use psychedelics for spiritual development. And on the one hand, I do think there's a really good reason to kind of like be very cautious and say like, yeah, ideally you don't use any psychedelics, it's simply because of the risks attached to it. I mean, to begin with, you can have a very unpleasant experience. If you're not for a bunch of reasons, you know, if you're not prepared, it's bad set and setting. If you're like in a particular stage in your spiritual practice, you can have kind of a dark night of the soul kind of episodes or a panic attack and delusions.

You know, it's relatively common for people to have like very powerful delusions on psychedelics, like believing that they are, you know, the reincarnation of Jesus or something like that. It's not that uncommon on the spiritual communities for people to have those illusions. So, you know, I totally understand when meditation masters kind of like try to dissuade their students from kind of exploring this territory. At the same time, you know, not only the origin story, but also just kind of like talking to a lot of like people who maybe they're not meditation teachers, but who are very kind of like spiritually advanced and can access all of these meditation states. To me, there does seem to be kind of like a correlation between at least openness to explore psychedelic states of consciousness and the speed of their development. But it's kind of like an inverted U curve in that using psychedelics too much actually causes some bypassing issues and gives you

the illusion that you're more advanced than you are and that you may slack off and not really put in the effort. And so I almost see it as an inverted U-curve that maybe the people who I've seen are the most advanced at the youngest age and are actually, you know, not deluded is like, well, they maybe use the psychedelics as, you know, a special spice in their life, as it were, you know, something they might do every now and then. They take it very seriously and they take a lot of time to integrate. But then, you know, especially the outlier of psychedelics, which is 5-Mil DMT, I do...

I mean, it doesn't maybe doesn't sound very good, but I do genuinely believe that used in the right way has a pretty good chance of drastically accelerating the process of awakening. I don't know by what factor, but I suspect maybe by a factor of two or three, like maybe if awakening takes, you know, 20 years for the average person, maybe with 5-MEO DMT it could take like seven years. That wouldn't surprise me all that much at this point. But then again, 5-MEO DMT is a really powerful and delicate instrument.

And it's also one of those things that can produce some of the worst bad trips and the worst kind of like dark nights of the soul. So I'm extremely cautious about like, you know, recommending it in general. I do not recommend it in general precisely because of it. So you're not advising it. No, no, no. I mean, the one that shows both empirically and for me, it makes the most sense as kind of the strongest promise for tackling depression.

Independently of like meditation practices, just as a psychiatric tool, I suspect 5-MEO DMT is going to come up as kind of an outlier in potential benefits for mental health. That said, that doesn't look like, you know, taking 5-MeO DMT every day, multiple times a day, or something crazy like that. It looks like maybe once a year in the right setting, you have a breakthrough experience and it probably takes you a year to integrate. But the data is really extraordinary. I mean, we're looking at, I was in the Netherlands recently in Maastricht and they've done research on 5-MeO-DMT for depression and the anecdotes that I was hearing was just extraordinary.

People who've been depressed for 20 years and they have tried like five different antidepressants and therapies and they're still depressed and then one 5-MeO-DMT experience in the right setting and then they're not depressed. They just don't qualify anymore. I mean, again, it should be done with extreme caution and in the right context, but I think it would be silly to kind of like say like, yeah, that's not promising, or it's orthogonal to spirituality. I think it's, yeah, clearly highly connected.

Well, have you found that it's better than MDMA for the treatment of depression? Yeah, great question. I think 5-MEO-DMT is probably better than MDMA. And MDMA might be the best second. I mean, MDMA is really powerful. And it's fascinating because it's not kind of classically psychedelic. You know, MDMA doesn't make you feel trippy colors, doesn't create vortices in your visual field, it doesn't challenge your sense of self. Actually, MDMA strengthens your sense of self. And really people describe experiencing kind

of like for the first time their authentic self. But like they have this feeling of like, well, it almost feels like throughout my life I've collected a lot of stickers of what people expect me to be and I'm trying to embody them. But then on MDMA, all of that falls away and you of understanding what the self is from a purely you know, consciousness research perspective, I think MDMA is a very promising agent for science. And 5-MeO-DMT is qualitatively similar to MDMA in some ways, except more powerful and more general. So we, you know, we did a scientific work retreat in Canada where 5MEO DMT is unscheduled. And we had physicists and mathematicians, visual artists and meditators.

That was kind of the group of people that we selected essentially. And we took a pretty close look at 5MEO DMT and all of the levels that it takes you to. at 5-MEO DMT and all of the levels that it takes you to. And it does have a lot of really unique properties. And it does have overlap with MDMA. We were trying to, for example, try to describe 5-MEO DMT in terms of other substances. And one description that kind of resonated with most of the people who gave it a try is 5-MEO is kind of like with most of the people who gave it a try is

5-m-o is kind of like a mixture of MDMA, DMT, nitrous oxide and amyl nitrate. So it's like... What's the last one? Like poppers as they say, like the thing that relaxes you, they use it for sex quite often. Okay. Mostly kind of like the rush of energy and the opening of blood vessels. Like that feeling is absolutely happens on 5-M-U-O. And one of the strange and interesting things of 5-M-U-O DMT is that bad

experiences often are because you didn't take enough, that like there's kind of like a threshold where like if you don't take enough. That like there's kind of like a threshold where like if you don't take enough, you will get a lot of the trippy kind of like ego dissolving qualities, but without the love component. There's kind of like a threshold around like maybe three or four milligrams where the love component, the MDMA quality just kicks in and then it feels really, really, really different and much more therapeutic. Then again, there is also like unpleasant experiences at much higher doses, like that

have to do with kind of a struggling around the kind of like grasping your sense of self. Like if you take 5-MEO DMT without a high dose, especially if you take a high dose without being ready to let go and kind of like metaphorically die, so to speak. If you're still kind of like want to cling to a sense of self, you're going to have a bad time. So that is also very important to know. But that is only really for like the the high doses. I mean, there's I think kind of intermediate doses between like three milligrams and seven milligrams. It's not completely ego dissolving and it does have a lot of kind of the MDMA quality. Um, and surprisingly, you know, once you get familiar with the state, um, you can

actually be somewhat functional in the state. I mean, not to the level that you could conduct an interview on it, but one of the things that, uh, was some of the most- You didn't see what I just took? Before, two hours ago? That's hilarious. Doing laser experiments on the wall. Oh, that's right. Yes. No, I'm kidding.

For those who are listening or watching. I would like to talk about laser experiments. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So let me connect that actually with Five-Eye Mirror, which is, I mean, some of the absolutely most fruitful consciousness research that I have ever done. And I just, I mean, I feel a sense of warmth even when I think about this is when me and the three main psychedelic artists, I mean these are like people who are like experts at replicating like visually, like what it's like to be on mushrooms or LSD and so on. And they're like really world class, you know, some of the best people. If you go to reddit.com slash r slash replications, it's a sub reddit for people who try to replicate the visual qualities of different states of consciousness, if you sort by, you know, best of all times, you know, kind of like the top,

you know, those artists are the people who we brought to the retreat. So you know, they're really good at their craft. And in one session, for several hours, essentially, we were just kind of relaxing, listening to music, going to that kind of like intermediate level of AVMEO, kind of like between three and seven milligrams, and looking at visual stimuli together and recording our conversation of exactly what was going on. I mean, right? Because like typically on psychedelic research, you know, the scientist is kind of like sober and they put the person in an fMRI and they, you know, give them some study or something. But the scientist has no idea what is actually happening there. And also the questionnaires that they fill out afterwards are very kind of like

low resolution and very coarse. You know, at best they might ask you something like, did you experience a simple or complex imagery? Like they don't go into the details of, you know, which of the wallpaper symmetry groups did you experience or, you know, which of the hyperbolic symmetries did you experience or nothing with that level of detail. But in the context where I was in Canada, it was just so beautiful because in real time, you know, we were able to say something like, oh yeah, I'm experiencing like a freezing effect in my visual field.

And there's kind of like a flickering of around like five hertz. And the freezing is in such a way that it's kind of like separating the gestalt of the monitor from the gestalt of the computer. And it seems to this kind of like a one centimeter of separation. In other words, we kind of like we were tuning into a consensus reality, but a 5-mm DMT and we were able to describe it in real time and we have those recordings and I think that's like very scientifically valuable. I mean, I can't imagine kind of like a better way of doing it because you're actually in the moment

kind of connecting people who are really good at depicting the experiences and then a scientist who's like actually trying to map this out to neuroscience. So anyway, yeah. Tell me about the laser experiments with DMT. And apparently people say that they see quote unquote the matrix. What's going on? This effect, you know, sometimes happens, sometimes not.

The people that I know who have tried it, the effect that they have seen is something that is not surprising to us at Qualia Research. So I'm going to elaborate. So first of all, I think it is true that we live in a world simulation. But essentially, I think that at the very least, that is because our nervous system evolved to create a mini world simulation of our environment. And so it is absolutely the case that you never perceive the world directly, so to speak. There's like many layers of indirection and also processing between photons hitting

your eyes and the actual parameters of your world simulation. In fact, you don't even need sensory stimulation to experience a sense of a world. You can be dreaming with your eyes closed and still experience a very rich sense of embodiment and being somewhere. So I think it's very important to realize that psychedelics, meditation and so on, they're changing the parameters of your world simulation. But that doesn't mean that you're really accessing kind of like all the realms outside of you. I think you're accessing in some sense different realms of consciousness, which is different

phases of consciousness. It's similar to how there's like phases of matter. You can have like liquid, solid air and so on. My sense is that different states of consciousness are kind of the different phases of consciousness. Maybe the punchline or kind of like the spoiler here is that I actually think that these are phases of a liquid crystal. They're like probably, you know, not to sound too much like a crackpot, but probably, you know, Benrose and Hameroff and people who believe that microtubules have something to do with consciousness. I think they're probably right.

Not in the full theory, but I do think microtubules probably will end up being really significant for understanding our state of consciousness. And the reason I believe that is that they effectively instantiate a liquid crystal. And you can think of the brain as a networked system of tiny pockets, each of which is composed of liquid crystals, which is how the microtubule lattice is organized. One of the hypotheses that came out from our retreat in Canada in particular was that the effect that something like 5-MeO DMT has in the brain is essentially changing the liquid crystal properties of the neurons.

And that 5-MeO DMT, which produces the God consciousness state, we suspect it scrambles the liquid crystals in such a way that there's no preferred direction for light. Essentially, it's kind of in a superposition of all possible directions because there's no grooves as it were. Whereas ayahuasca, mushrooms, DMT, the classic psychedelics, which, I mean, five-em-yo is an outlier. It's a very weird kind of like different thing in a sense. But the classic psychedelics, including DMT, what we suspect is actually happening is that it's crystallizing rather than just being kind of this liquid crystal state where the microtubules maybe are like ordered in a certain direction, I think on DMT, they actually become equally spaced apart

and organized in a kind of like perfect crystal lattice. And for that reason, effectively the light becomes coherent or electromagnetic radiation when it goes through it. As a consequence, effectively a lot of things of your world simulation on DMT really feel kind of these like coherent laser-like kind of aspects of this world simulation. I mean, it's not uncommon on DMT to, for example, hallucinate, let's say like an angel or something like that, that is emitting a coherent beam of light.

And the hallucination can be, it could be like scanning, for example, all of your, the fields of your experience with a coherent plane of light. I suspect that happens because literally the substrate of your consciousness now is organized in a more crystalline way. And so a lot of the effects that happen on DMT, we think of them as kind of these competing clusters of coherence where like different regions of the brain are probably crystallized, but in different, they become essentially different magnetic domains. And so, if you look at something like a laser on DMT, you effectively now have kind of like new ingredients in your world simulation with which to represent that. So, you know, effectively, yeah, if you look at stimuli that kind of like matches the physical properties of your world simulation,

you will have kind of a stronger resonance with it. And so looking at optical effects on psychedelics, for example, you know what an optical cusp is? Right? Like when you take a transparent glass of water, right? Like sometimes the light kind of like forms this kind of like caduceus. Optical cusps look really trippy on DMT, like exceptionally trippy. Like in such a way that if you have kind of this naive realist perspective where you think that you're seeing the world directly, of this naive realist perspective where you think that you're seeing the world directly, it really makes you feel that you're kind of like connecting with a light outside of you in a very, very deep way.

But what I suspect is actually happening is more that, hey, you have kind of like, you're turning the inside of your world simulation into actually a kind of like nonlinear optics laboratory and cosps are kind of like more coherent and meaningful in that state of consciousness. Like there's kind of more agreement between the parts of your world simulation that yes, there's a coherent beam of light in that direction. As a consequence, if you look at a diffracted laser on DMT, it has a strong effect on your field of experience. But then the symbols that Danny Goller reports, kind of the code of the matrix,

as it were, when I've seen drawings of it, and I've talked to people who have tried the experiment and gotten what apparently is what they're talking about. These are essentially semantic patterns, which are like these non-linear resonant modes of something like a metallic plate, like the classic Cialdini plates. But that is happening along the strip of the diffracted laser line, and it's like filled with those kind of cinematic non-linear resonant modes. But to me, that is not surprising. I mean, like to me that is, yeah, I mean, you're

exciting the field of consciousness and some of the excited states of that field actually look like cymatics. So I don't see it as, you know, breaking the code of the matrix or tuning into other realms. I really see it more as kind of like, well,

they stumbled upon a way to reliably induce kind of like high energy cymatics in your own consciousness. And it works really well with DMT because DMT essentially crystallizes your liquid crystal matrix and it creates these very coherent beams of light inside you. Does that make sense? Yes. So this brings up something that Aldous Huxley and Timothy Leary claimed, which is psychedelics open the doors to perception. Now the Dalai Lama, I know that we were talking about psychedelic Buddhism and I asked the question if it was an oxymoron and you said you don't think so. So I've had my own experiences with meditation and with substances or elixirs, let's say. I've had my excursions with elixirs. So I used to believe that it must be that all of these spiritual insights are all pointing

to the same single truth and that it tends to be an Eastern truth more so than a Western truth. And I just had that in me as just an unconscious adoption from what I hear on the internet and then I started to do some research and well the Dalai Lama said about psychedelics because he was asked about this he said these drugs create more illusions and in a world filled with illusions why would you take drugs that only give you more yeah and even in the Sagala Vada Sutta DN 31 I always mispronounce it, the Buddha warrants

that taking drugs, anything intoxicating actually weakens wisdom. He also added that it requires serious practice with the traditional community and it does not involve external remedies, only internal work. So to say psychedelics are like on the one hand, salubrious in that they're useful, they can process trauma, they can bring about changes in one's worldview, they can allow you to connect. This is an entirely different set of statements then. The experiences on these are those that the Buddhists are talking about. And it's also a different statement then that the use of these psychedelics and the insights therein are compatible with the with the Buddhist teachings

So I understand that you brought up the Shinzen Young, but there's a monastic code that explicitly forbids So Vinaya, I don't know how to pronounce it, that explicitly forbids any drugs. It says liquor, for instance, destroys your sense of shame and weakens you. What tends to happen with psychedelics is the issue of intention, so motivation, not intention in the philosophical sense, but the reasons you're doing something. So Buddhists, they tend to stress a purity of intention, right intention. And if one is using a drug, it's like they're dissatisfied with the slow and ordinary work of the practice, the discipline that's necessary. It's like a greed for rapid insight.

And they have this aversion to normal consciousness. Those motives contradict the contentment and renunciation that Buddhism encourages. I have several other examples, but I'd like to hear your thoughts so far. Yeah, no. I mean, I don't have a strong stance. And I could be convinced either way. I mean, like, maybe as I learn more, I could eventually arrive to like, hey, never take any psychedelics.

It's completely misguided. Oh, just to be clear, I'm not advocating for or against psychedelics. I'm just saying that the one set of claims, which is that they give you a different sort of insight, a different worldview, they allow you to process trauma and so on. That's an entirely different set of claims than whatever came from the left hand here is compatible with Buddhism. And in fact, there are some reasons to think that it's antithetical to it. Yeah, no, I mean, I see that. I would think there's also like lots of reasons to believe

it is actually quite in harmony with it if used properly. I'll give you a couple of examples. So one is, for example, the cultivation of equanimity. Can utilize, for example, taking very cold showers or like a cold plunge. For example, you know, you go to water that is very close to zero Celsius and is like, you know, freezing, but you learned to be able to experience that fully without, you know, flinching, without stalling, and experience it for like 30 seconds to one minute, and let's say you do this several times a day. I think a practice like that, with the right intention, can essentially accelerate the cultivation of equanimity, which at least in the Xin-Seng Yong paradigm, equanimity

is approaching sensations without any resistance. And you know, like very cold water is a type of kind of like very intense sensation that if you approach with equanimity, equanimity actually has no intrinsic valence. It's just very, very strong energy which you can turn into bliss or you can turn into suffering depending on how you approach it. And ultimately I think like how it affects the flow of energy and the configuration of your consciousness. I mean, likewise, I think of psychedelics, at least like classic psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, kind of something similar to that is kind of like a hot sauce for your consciousness in a way, which is it intensifies everything.

And if you approach it with equanimity with the intention of developing equanimity, I do suspect similar to a cold plunge is going to accelerate the process of developing high-end equanimity in such a way that you know in the future when you encounter naturally very unpleasant very intense sensations all of that work will actually pay off in that you're not going to freak out, or you're not going to become distracted, or try to pretend that it's not there, or delude yourself into thinking it doesn't exist, and so on and so forth. So from that perspective,

also, equanimity around delusions and beliefs, that one of the things that psychedelics kind of like show more clearly in a way is how the valence of a belief is essentially expressed in how it affects the harmony and dissonance of your field. And I think like that disentangling is actually quite a Buddhist move. I mean, understanding that, well, there is the information content that this belief is representing and then there is your emotional reaction to it. And usually they come so close together, we can't really separate them and we sort of just buy into the content

of the belief and assume that its valence is kind of a necessary component of it. And one of the things that psychedelics do is that they make that relationship more flexible. Kind of like they melt the connection between a belief and the content of it and your emotional reaction to it. And I think like that in some sense is kind of like learning about the mind more broadly and might make you more resistant to delusions in a way. At the same time, for a lot of people, actually psychedelic delusions are very tempting. And I think for a lot of people, indeed, exactly what the Dalai Lama said in your quote is

absolutely true. And I know people who essentially have a relationship to psychedelics where it feels like, yeah, they're kind of like just chasing a new high or like chasing another mystical experience rather than, yeah, kind of like trying to see the mystical in everyday life. Like that is absolutely also the case. But then another nuance that I want to provide is the difference between constructive and deconstructive, kind of like internal moves and practices. For most people, I think, especially if they don't have kind of meditation

training, especially if they don't have kind of like any kind of like long-term practice of introspection, psychedelics will tend to be very constructive in their effect in that they will kind of generate very elaborate kind of like world models as a consequence of taking a psychedelic. You know, something like DMT, I often describe it as an epistemological hand grenade. Because yeah, if you take DMT unprepared, you really may start to believe things such as, well, the Russians have a base in the dark side of the moon and they're allied with the grays and the aliens. And you just have this very elaborate world model, right? Like to explain data. And one of the things that psychedelics, especially the constructive aspect of them,

tend to do is overfit. Essentially, you create a very sophisticated complex models of reality to explain relatively little data. It is like how in statistics or machine learning, if you have a series of dots, you know, in a X, Y plot, if you fit a high degree polynomial, you can always go through all of the dots, right? So DMT is like that, right? It's like you have a few data points and DMT gives you such flexibility in your world model, you can always fit the data with some crazy model. And of course it's gonna be wrong, right? Because it's not gonna generalize.

It's not gonna survive cross-validation. So in that sense, yeah, that's obviously a risk. At the same time, if you know this is something that happens, you can actually use psychedelics to study that process and actually have developed the metacognitive awareness. It's like, oh my gosh, I'm overfeeding right now. This is what overfeeding feels like, which is kind of like an insight that then you can take in everyday life and actually recognize when you're overfeeding in a more mundane, mundane kind of like state of consciousness.

And then yeah, the final nuance before I pass it on to you again is that you can cultivate the deconstructive aspect of psychedelics. And for example, if you take LSD with a strong intention, for example, just experiencing emptiness or experiencing pure space, kind of absorption into or pure consciousness, you can actually kind of like use that to really let go of trying to be something or trying to go somewhere. And that would be essentially pushing more towards this deconstructed Jhana-like states of consciousness. And the reason I think 5-MEO DMT is probably the most synergistic with meditation practice and Buddhism is because by default it's a very deconstructive kind of substance. Like by default, 5-Meo DMT tends to kind of like cancel out the topological defects in your consciousness as it were and simplify things.

The downside of that is that if you do it a lot without metacognitive awareness, especially if you don't think in terms of overfeeding or underfeeding or something like that, Fabio Mio DMT tends to underfit your world model. So it's very common for people who take Fabio Mio to say something like, love is all that matters or we're all God and that's the only thing we should know. There's nothing else that matters than the fact that we're all God and that's the only thing we should know. There's nothing else that matters than the fact that we're all God. For me, that's like an oversimplified model of reality. That's kind of you just went too far in the simplifying your sense of reality.

But again, you can be metacognitively aware of that and recognize, oh, right now I'm underfeeding, this is what it's like to underfeed. That said, all else being equal, I think probably an underfeited world model is better than an overfeited. Because an overfeited model tends to be kind of like heavy and contain like extra stress and vortices. And the complexity costs you

in terms of physiological stress. Whereas a very under-feeded model of reality is actually typically a pretty pleasant and carefree. Like if you walk around really embodying this sense of like, hey, love is all that matters and there's nothing else we should care about. That's actually not a bad way to live. I mean, if you're going to live like that in a monastery or in the middle of the forest, it's probably a perfectly fine life. It's just that, yeah, if you interface with very complex systems, then you don't want to overfit or underfit.

You want to have a good fit, essentially. Tell me what's going on with entities when people encounter them in DMT. Like what is happening neurologically, maybe ontologically? Yeah. Yes. Fantastic. Okay. So here's my overall model.

The most up-to-date information about this is actually my latest Qualia computing post, which the title is From Neural Activity to Field Topology. It's kind of an intimidating title, but I think it's conversational and it goes through the argument. And it builds on top of a lot of research that we have done in the past. The most critical pieces of the puzzle are as follows. And I promise it all clicks together. are as follows, and I promise it, it all clicks together. So first of all, I think the key distinction between DMT and 5-MeO DMT, I mean, again, DMT, they call it the spirit molecule where you encounter entities, all of that complexity.

5-MeO DMT, they call it the God molecule, which is like simplifies your experience and just kind of become like one with everything. If you really introspect on the quality of your experience in these two kind of like very different state of consciousness, you will notice that on DMT, your experience is clustered into competing factions. There's kind of like different regions of your experience that are vibrating in different ways, incompatible with each other, and you have an evolutionary process where these kind of like different coalitions of vibrations try to, you know, gain your attention, because again, attention is energy. Attention, whatever you pay attention to gets stronger. So one of the key ways in which these kind of like

factions of vibrations of your field can survive and reproduce and become bigger is by gaining your attention. So they try to come up with the most, you know, attention grabbing kind of like headlines. And like, again, that's why also I think like this creates delusions and very sophisticated complex overfeited models because one of the ways in which they, they gained your attention is by kind of like promising big explanations about reality or, or, or they may claim that they're messages

from like another dimension and things like that. Um, whereas on 5MEO DMT, the main attractor, like the main thing that everything drives the words is complete coherence. It's like everything is in sync with everything else. And that's why it's kind of a more deconstructed, more JANA-like state, like pure consciousness, pure space. Again, no distinctions because any distinction is created by out of phase or out of sync interactions, vibrations that are at different frequencies.

If everything is vibrating at the same frequency, there's just no way for you to find any boundary or distinction. Okay, so that is the first piece of the puzzle. There is competing clusters of coherence versus global coherence. Now, how does this happen? So, empirically, imagine you have these pendulum clocks, you know, the very classic old clocks. It is known that if you have two of these clocks in a wall,

after a while they actually synchronize, right? And it's not magic, right? The reason they synchronize is right? And it's not magic, right? The reason they synchronize is because by sharing the wall, tiny vibrations in the wall essentially get passed around and the synchronized state is the lowest energy configuration. So that's an attractor of that system. Okay, now imagine if you have 10 clocks, then still eventually it all synchronizes. But if you have 10,000 clocks in a very long wall or in a very large surface,

they never synchronize. So what happens is that instead you will see maybe a traveling wave of synchrony or like synchrony here and there, but they're just not connected enough for them to all of them kind of agree on a certain phase and become kind of like thick at the same time. Now, what happens if you start kind of like adding connections between them?

So if you think of them as kind of like neurons or yeah, oscillators more generally. So there's gonna be two phase transitions. First of all, you're going to have a case where every clock now belongs to a cluster of clocks where all of them are synchronized, but there is no clock that is synchronized with all of their other clocks. In other words, as you add connections, you enter this phase where you have competing clusters of coherence. And if you add connections, you enter this phase where you have competing clusters of coherence.

And if you add more connections, eventually you arrive at a new phase where everything synchronizes. Oh, okay, so there's just not enough connections in the DMT case versus the 5-MeO? Yes, that's more or less what we think. The way they affect the brain is that they're essentially increasing kind of the functional connectivity of the brain. But on DMT is just not enough. It is kind of in this twilight zone, where you get this fragmentation of the field and it's just so much competition.

Is this more than just a metaphor? Because we're using the terms vibration here and oscillations, but what precisely is vibrating, is oscillating? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say it is kind of like at a level of a metaphor because I haven't essentially identified what exactly is vibrating or oscillating. Most of our research at this point at QRI is actually fairly agnostic about what exactly is it that is oscillating. We just kind of like postulate that a lot of

our experience can be explained in terms of systems of coupled oscillators. And we analyze systems of coupled oscillators and we try to replicate phenomenology based on those. to replicate phenomenology based on those. And in a few months, we're going to release an amazing tool. I'm just so proud of the team who's been developing it, which is using systems of coupled oscillators to essentially replicate visually and tactically, yeah, somatically, effects of different psychedelics by changing the parameters of these oscillators.

Now, you can do good science, phenomenology, and even find applications without ever actually telling anybody what is oscillating here. As long as it has predictive capacity and it resembles what people experience. But if you ask me more concretely, physically,, what is it that I think is oscillating? I would say local field potentials. So local field potentials are not individual neurons. I don't think we really have introspective access to individual neurons being active or not. I think that's just too tiny to be meaningful at the level of our whole experience.

Instead, we will be talking about populations of neurons. Essentially, populations of neurons that together, if they kind of like cross a certain threshold of coherence in their activation, they drag the electromagnetic field along with them. And you know, this is currently being studied in neuroscience in a bunch of different ways, where they show that a lot of the kind of representational content of an experience, or like if you train a biological neural network to do a classification task, for example, that the most relevant information content that determines what the network believes, as it were, is happening

is not based on the activation of neurons, but rather how those neurons in a coordinated fashion make the field oscillate up and down. So these are essentially kind of like at the level of more kind of like 10,000 neurons. Like that would be kind of like the unit as it were. Let's say like a population of 10,000 neurons that together, they actually create kind of these like coherent oscillation in the field. And I think that yeah, actually the shape of your experience and what it feels like to be you is not really based on the activation of neurons. It's more based on what these local field potentials look like and how they're stitched together, which is a much more macroscopic phenomenon.

So is it just the coupling nature that you share something with your neighbor and then all of a sudden you have the same property across time that is the property you like in oscillators? Well, we also need to solve the boundary problem, right? Because people who associate, I mean, I think this is in the right direction, electromagnetic theories of consciousness, people who associate the electromagnetic field in your body and your brain with your state of consciousness, that has the advantage that, hey, the field is inherently connected already. But then the problem becomes, hey, why are we separate?

Why do I have an experience and you have a different experience if we're all part of the same field? So that comes back to the topological solution to the boundary problem. And the thing that we are simulating right now, one of the very active areas of research at our institute, is looking at populations of neuron-like systems, I mean essentially electric oscillators, like things that are creating oscillations in the electric field.

And then looking at how those electric oscillations change the electric field and then looking at how those electric oscillations change the magnetic field. And you know I guess it's one of these funny properties of the electromagnetic field and the universe that you have the right hand rule. Rather like when you make a electric oscillation the response in the magnetic field is actually that of a vortex. It actually kind of like changes the orientation. And so when you have an electric oscillation, you're actually kind of like creating a boundary in the magnetic field. And so we essentially think that yeah, these kind of networks of

electric oscillations are creating these kind of like vortex-like boundaries in the magnetic field and that those correspond to experiences. Now what does that have to do with the topology though? Yeah, that if you follow the field lines, when you have kind of these vortices, the field lines actually form closed loops. And as a function, there's like a clear objective, real boundary, physical boundary between the inside

and the outside. And that is a topological change. Kind of like how twisting the balloon and creating a pinch point separates the field in one region to another. When you create one of these vortices, you're actually kind of creating a separate bubble. I see.

What I meant to say is, let's say you have, I know this What I meant to say is let's say you have, like, I know this is the wrong model, but let's say you have a spacetime and then you have an electromagnetic field on top and then you create a vortex in the magnetic field. The spacetime topology remains the same. Yeah. So the topology hasn't changed even with the presence of a vortex. So in your model, like, where's the change in topology? Well the topology of the electromagnetic field has changed, even if the topology of space

time hasn't. I see. So we would identify the relevant boundary for a moment of experience as maybe being located in the topology of the electromagnetic field, even if space time doesn't change. Yeah. But, and very relevantly, like, you know, like this is maybe, yeah, the other piece of the puzzle and here's where it connects, which is that I suspect that actually, that, you know, the sense of self is kind of like a vortex, a central vortex in your experience that we're constantly kind of like energizing and using to orient ourselves and we delusionally believe that that's what we are. Like we have a pocket, but then we also have a very central vortex and we think

that's what we are, even though actually we're all of consciousness. That's maybe the deeper truth. So what happens is that on DMT, because you have all of these competing clusters of coherence that generates a ton of additional vortices. So essentially, I think those are the entities. I mean, I think like on DMT, you're effectively creating more internal vortices, which effectively account to more internal senses of self. So you become an ecosystem.

It feels like you're a bunch of different entities at once. Now, you may interpret some of them as like an alien from another dimension, but my typical secular interpretation is, yeah, I know that's part of your world simulation, but it has the quality of a self. Like it feels like that's a whole being, but it's inside you, So it's actually not separate. Whereas five MEO DMT, because it makes everything coherent, it may actually,

actually kind of like cancel out to the central vortex and may make the field lines perfectly parallel. And when that happens, you lose a sense of self and it just feels like, oh, wow, I'm the entire field or I'm everything and nothing at the same time or like I'm everybody. It's a very different kind of attractor, meaning that, you know, these competing clusters of coherence versus global coherence have different effects on the topology of the field, which has different effects on the sense of self. So the large vortex will be your sense of self.

And then when you're on DMT in particular, are there small vortices within the larger one? Something like that. It becomes, yeah, it's kind of like a stadium where there's like the whole stadium forms a large vortex, but then like every person that is seen there is also a tiny vortex. And so it feels like, well, there's something that is being witnessed by a lot of different entities at once, but it's all contained within the same stadium. Andres, what is the most comforting conclusion that you've discovered?

So we all have stabilizing and then also dangerous thoughts. And I was going to ask about some dangerous conclusion that you've encountered or at least believed yourself to have come to at some point. Maybe that's not something you'd like to share and perhaps isn't the best to end on. So we can talk about that in part two. Either way, what's some view, some point of view, some data that's hopeful and heartening? And why does it score high on this consolatory end? Yeah, fascinating. I have a couple. I think probably the most significant one was just how relatively easy it is to achieve Janus in meditation.

And I think that probably will be world transforming once I guess we can culturally absorb that fact. I mean like because people talk about like this extreme states of consciousness on meditation and then like you know a normal secular person goes and like spends like you know half an hour meditating and it's kind of grueling is like oh like it's so hard to concentrate on my breath and like like really is this gonna do anything like seriously and maybe you try it for a couple months and like maybe you feel a little bit more relaxed a little bit less stressed but like nothing to do with like the extreme things that people are reporting

so it's easy to kind of like the extreme things that people are reporting. So it's easy to kind of like have like this sense of powerlessness or sense of disconnection from, hey, people who actually do this quite seriously. And that's how I used to feel. Absolutely. You know, until maybe like four years ago, like maybe in 2020 where I started to take meditation more seriously and also really starting to learn from better teachers. And for me, maybe the single most beautiful thing within this kind of learning process has been

understanding how to achieve Jhana states with the technique proposed by Rob Bourbea. So Rob Bourbea, he wrote a book called Seeing That Freeze. He died recently, unfortunately, but he's extremely lovely and he has a series of lectures. My favorite is Practicing the Janas, which you can find on YouTube. Somebody from Twitter, a friend from Twitter

was very gracious to kind of like upload all of those to YouTube and there's no copyright issues. So yeah, definitely go and check it out. So practicing the Janus is a recorded series of lectures that he gave at a three week retreat, I think, or four week retreat in a few years ago. And the technique that he emphasizes, which to me was a game changer, and I'm just so grateful I kind of learned about it, is a style of meditation where you actually use your intelligence and creativity. Because yes, you can achieve the Jhānas just by focusing on your breath. Like even just, you know, the sensation of air in your nose. If you focus on that, you know, 90 minutes a day in formal practice and you're successful at it, you know, within six months, there's a good chance you may be able to enter the Jhana's just with that method. That never worked for me. I mean, maybe, maybe I'm too ADHD or maybe, I don't know, for whatever reason, like, like that style of meditation just wasn't very fruitful for me.

Instead, what he advocates is, you know, imagine that you're kind of like, um, trying to light a fire and, and there's kind of like a lot of wood, but maybe some of the wood is wet and maybe some of it is just out of place. And there's a tiny ember, a tiny, tiny lit up region in that thing that could become a fire. What you ask yourself is like, what do I need to do to grow that ember? And all you have to care about is growing it to one little bit at a time. You know, trying to spread it, you know, move it from one place where it's more likely to catch fire to another place.

And you know, techniques like what I was describing, which is like, for example, focusing in two regions of your body at the same time, that is one method. Like if you feel a little bit of pleasure in your chest or in your hand, and you pay attention to that region together with with somewhere else in your body, eventually the pleasure can actually spread to that other part of your body, as if it's kind of like catching the ember. The ember is growing, as it were. But here, use your intelligence.

I mean, really it's kind of like, do I need to blow on it? Do I need to cover it? Do I need to warm the whole thing? Do I need to rearrange? Do I need to shift position? Do I need to warm the whole thing? Do I need to rearrange? Do I need to shift position? Do I need to breathe? Or for example, imagining a very happy dog or like recollecting when your mom gave you a hug or like things like that. Sometimes it sparks a little bit of joy. See if that joy can help the ember grow and if it helps then keep doing it. And amber grow and if it helps then keep doing it. And that style for me has been really effective. That like it's kind of a user creativity. You're always kind of like thinking of, hey, what can I

do to make the feeling of well-being grow? And it's a very interactive type of meditation. And the fact is that you can enter this really healing and ecstatic states of consciousness that you can enter these really healing and ecstatic states of consciousness with something like, I think on average, like 600 hours of practice, which is, I mean, sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things, like people spend more time in a video game doing that in a year. Like it's not that big of an investment and it is really transformative. And I have never met anybody who accesses the Janas who regrets the time they spent trying to get there.

So for me, that's a very heartwarming aspect of reality. Like hey, there's a lot of love and pleasure that we can all have if we do something like that. Now you said you access it with intelligence. Is it the case you would also access it with intuition or rationality or is it just intelligence? Yeah, I would say intuition and rationality as part of the package for sure. I mean, and sometimes for example, it might be like your intuition tells you, I don't know why, but I should imagine a star or something like that.

And you don't know why rationally or like your intelligence doesn't can explain it. But if your intuition tells you, hey, this is going to help the meditation, try it. Absolutely. And very often times, the intuition is correct. Andres, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Super wonderful conversation.

Yeah, looking forward to part two. I've received several messages, emails, and comments from professors saying that they recommend theories of everything to their students and that's fantastic. If you're a professor or lecturer and there's a particular standout episode that your students can benefit from, please do share and as always feel free to contact me. New update, start at a sub stack. Writings on there are currently about language and ill-defined concepts as well as some other mathematical details. Much more being written there. This is content that isn't anywhere else. It's not on theories of everything. It's not on Patreon. Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future.

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