Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - The Mathematics That Predicts Your DMT Trip

Episode Date: September 16, 2025

Improve your sleep today! Head to https://evening.ver.so/toe to get 15% off your first order of Verso's Nightcap Elixir. 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 Live from MIT Media Lab’s Augmentation Lab Summit, I speak with Andres Gomez-Emilsson of the Qualia Research Institute about modeling consciousness and rendering it. You haven't seen psychedelic visuals /experiences explained like this before. We separate qualia from sensory input and map the “geometry” of experience through color—synesthesia, pure hues, after-images, and “is your blue my blue?” Andres demos QRI’s GPU tool, a Photoshop for psychedelia built on coupled oscillators and feedback. It recreates LSD/psilocybin’s fractal tapestries, DMT’s entity-like mirror tunnels, global synchrony, and “white-out.” We cover “psychedelic thermodynamics,” neural annealing and valence flips, and pseudo-time—loops and timeless stretches. The episode makes a case for real-time, in-state phenomenology over questionnaires. This was specifically structured to be informative to both those who have never experienced psychedelics and those who are, let’s say, well acquainted. Thank you to Dunya Baradari, Addy Cha, and Andres, of course. Join My New Substack (Personal Writings): https://curtjaimungal.substack.com Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b9... SUPPORT: Become a YouTube Member (Early Access Videos):    / @theoriesofeverything   Support me on Patreon:   / curtjaimungal   Support me on Crypto: https://commerce.coinbase.com/checkou... Support me on PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate?hosted_... Twitter:   / toewithcurt   Discord Invite:   / discord   SOCIALS: Guests do not pay to appear. Theories of Everything receives revenue solely from viewer donations, platform ads, and clearly labelled sponsors; no guest or associated entity has ever given compensation, directly or through intermediaries. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's taxes extra. You were separated from the universe by these topological defects. I turned into just one point and then that point it disappeared. There's no way to distinguish one thing from another, and there is no internal passage of time. Today, Andreas Gomes Emelson of the Qualia Research Institute discloses his new paradigm for modeling psychedelic perception, as well as what he thinks is actually occurring ontologically, not just perceptually under psychedelics. His views are informed by research conducted over the past decade with hundreds of psychedelic trips in controlled settings ranging from LSD to Cilocybin to DMT to 5MEO. We discussed the mathematical underpinnings of perceptions behind psychedelic states.

including, of course, the visual distortions and why we get that feeling of oneness, sometimes even nothingness, and fractalness. We even cover those so-called beings encountered in DMT trips, such as the mantis being. This was filmed at the MIT Lab, and was the last headline event put on by the Augmentation Lab Summit, hosted by MIT researcher Danja Baradari. I'm honored to have been invited. The summit featured talks on the future of biological and artificial intelligence, brain interfaces, and included speakers such as Stephen Wolfe from, the interview of which is on

this channel as well. Enjoy. This is Augmentation Lab Summit Weekend, put on by Augmentation Lab at MIT Media Lab. We're here live recording with an in-studio audience. Thank you all for coming and waiting. Okay, Andres. Hello, hello. Why don't you give a brief introduction to who you are and why you're relevant to people who are psychonauts and psychedelics or psychedelic research. Definitely. So I'm Andres. I currently run the other Qualia Research Institute, one of the

original co-founders. And yeah, we studied consciousness and, like, really try to, you know, figure it out ideally from first principles, make mathematical models of it, try to like really take phenomenology seriously, build tools to visualize phenomenology, and also, yeah, like figure out like what pleasure and pain are fundamentally and try to reduce suffering.

There's kind of like a constellation of things that we do. And yeah, essentially we're going to, it seems like you have a conversation about exploring the space of consciousness and visualizing it. I want this to be valuable to people who have not taken psychedelics to people who are extremely familiar with psychedelics. So something that gets thrown around is the word qualia. It's not quite clear what the difference between qualia and sensory input is. So what is it?

Yeah, I think that's a really important clarification, because, yeah, you could potentially, like, four hours, talk with somebody about consciousness. And if your reference, you know, for what Qualia, you know, refers to versus what sensory, you know, stimulation refers to, like, don't match. You're kind of like, you know, talking past each other at a very, very deep level. Here's one, like, a common misconception, I would argue, that kind of highlights these, you know, contrast. in how you might like define these terms. I would argue that like, you know, the way in which you experience the color blue, you can really separate it from like the frequency of light

that typically triggers it. You know, in fact, there's an infinite number of ways in which you can actually experience that particular sensation by using like different, you know, combinations of frequencies of light, having a different like spectral power distribution and still get the same way in which it feels like just because it feels in a certain way

you actually don't know really like what kind of sensory input it is you just know it is from a certain family of sensory inputs more so you know there's like this very weird thing that like when you combine kind of like the colors that are kind of the extreme opposites of a rainbow you get like magenta you know a color that is, like, not within the spectrum, right? So all of these are kind of, like, yeah, like hints that suggest, well, the actual

phenomenology, the way in which the colors feel like can be perhaps, like, separated from the idea that they map onto, like, frequencies of light. And, you know, I think, like, a really stark example is, if you imagine somebody who has, like, synesthesia, where they map on, let's say, like, sounds to color sensations. but maybe they're blind. So they could actually investigate, like, you know, the way in which colors are related to each other, phenomenal colors, the colors that we experience,

even though, you know, they have, like, no kind of like visual sensory stimulation. And one of kind of, like, the things that you get with this kind of, like, conceptual separation of, okay, like the qualia, the way in which the experience feels like versus the sensory input that triggers it, is that you can, you know, like talk about, for example, mapping a certain state space of a certain type of experience, like, for example, all of the possible colors that you may have. You can do that, you know, without necessarily using the traditional sensory modality

that is associated to it. For instance? Such as, like, yeah, like different combinations of light, different frequencies. Instead, you could in principle, like, map the quality space of color using sound. if you have the right type of synesthesia. If you could induce the right type of synesthesia, you, I would argue, be able to say things such as, hey, orange is in between yellow and red,

even though you're really kind of like just experiencing this in a way that it's triggered by sounds. But you still learn about like the geometry of that space if you have the right mapping. In other words, I would argue that like, you know, people are like very, you know, skeptical that, okay, if there's, like, aliens or there's, like, other entities out there, like, in what way could we possibly understand each other?

People propose also that, like, well, we would probably understand each other through, like, a shared understanding of mathematics, because that's kind of, like, universal. But I would argue potentially also about, like, qualia space. Like, whether they experience phenomenal color through, you know, like visual stimulation or audio or, like, tactile feelings, or imagination, or only when they dream, they can in principle do a series of experiments by comparing the colors that they experience and reconstruct the space of possible phenomenal colors

and I think like when we talk to each other we could actually use that as a shared reference that grounds our worlds of experience in a sense. Is it the case then that someone's blue is the same as someone else's blue? Currently it is not known for sure and there's like a yeah like things that's suggest it is the case and things that suggest it is in the case.

What possibly suggests that it is? Yeah. So if you essentially map out the geometry of color using like different frequencies of light, you actually get like a somewhat irregular shape. Its geometry is not completely symmetrical. You know, a classic example is like the brightest blue that you could experience. is not as bright as the bright as yellow. And these, you know, suggest, okay,

there's kind of like a geometry and, like, this is kind of like shared between people. And, you know, some people who may, like, kind of, like, ground qualia space in terms of kind of the relative distances between its components and the geometry that comes from that, they may perhaps, like, argue that, well, okay, like, yeah, blue is in some sense defined within the qualia space as, like, where there's, like, this asymmetry, where you can't go as bright as in this other region of the qualia space.

However, there's, I think, like, other hints that actually does suggest that, you know, the state space of color is, like, actually really symmetrical, which is this phenomenon called hyperblue, which is if you look at, like, a very, very bright yellow for a while, you know, you're going to have kind of like an after image that is kind of like a blue after image. And so, like, if you have, like, really, really bright yellow, And then you, right after that, like, present a really bright blue. The combination of, like, the yellow's after image, together with the bright blue,

like, kind of, like, takes your quality of blue to the next level, and you see hyperblue, which is kind of a brighter blue than usually we're capable of experiencing. Suggesting, I think that, you know, the reason we can't experience, like, these, like, super bright blue is more having to do with, like, well, the receptors that are associated to different cells in our eyes. they can't kind of like be negatively activated right you need to kind of like do some trickery so like the relative proportions is as if like okay this had like a negative activation and it pushes you in that direction of the state space um but there there is like actually like something

that does break the symmetry a little bit of the color wheel which is a pure hues um which is like I mean I don't know this is an interesting test and I would argue like you know it tends to be like very very um polemical actually when I bring it up which is like maybe the audience or like, yeah, people seeing this at home, like, yeah, wondering like, okay, when you were a kid and you saw like, okay, like yellow and red paint mixing, making orange, it's like, okay, yeah, that kind of makes sense, right? Like orange is kind of in between the two colors. But then like blue and yellow paint and you get green, it's like, that makes no sense.

It's like, where is this green coming from? It's kind of like a qualitatively different thing from both yellow and. blue and I think like okay like that that is telling you yeah there's the relationship in the colors here is actually kind of different and if you look at kind of like a linearized state space of of the color equality usually what you will actually see is like there's yeah kind of like a whole line that is like pure blue and there's a whole line that is like pure red are you able to show this yeah yeah yeah and i mean one one word of context i suppose like for this discussing colors, is that a, you know, the screens have, like, limitations, which is, like,

what is the gamut, the, you know, the colors they can actually show. So there's actually a lot of things about the phenomenology of colors that are not super apparent in screens that you kind of, like, need to actually see, see in person. But yeah, like, there is, essentially this, this sort of way in which you can probe, you know, the, the properties of this color space um by for example like showing people two hues that are like really close together so let's say like one line here and one line here and asking them uh which one looks like more pure like kind of like which one looks like is not a mixture of anything else any or two other things and like people kind of like actually will converge so they're like a line of red where it's like it's not

being mixed with blue where you get kind of like purple and it's not being mixed and it's not being mixed with yellow. And you just get kind of like, okay, red kind of like breaks the symmetry. It's like there's like there's like there, in a sense. And you get essentially the same with yellow and green and blue. So, you know, I would argue here actually, you know, like green in some sense, like lives in a different dimension than both yellow and blue. Whereas orange leaves in kind of the linear combination of red and yellow, right? So those patterns and the fact that we do kind of like all, if we do the tests, we'll say, like, yeah,

like there were like four pure hues for me, there were like four pure hues for you. So at least like between people, we do share kind of like some of these features of this space, this state space of quality in this context. However, it could be the case. And I don't know any strong argument against this other than, you know, parsimony.

It's like, for example, maybe your blue is my yellow, and your yellow is my blue. Like, if you were to kind of, like, swap the pure hues, then it's like, okay, what other features can you actually find in, you know, the geometry of the space to suggest that, hey, we are actually experiencing the same one, and I'm not sure if there are. So what I can say is something like, well, the mapping,

like, I don't think it's going to be the case that, for example, you experience orange when I experience blue but maybe you experience yellow so like maybe you experience a pure hue yeah okay let's get to some psychedelic visuals yeah yeah okay so actually just like jumping right into it this is like one of the

for example like really trippy states in one of the tools that I'm going to be displaying today you know this is kind of like exceptionally trippy right and it's like okay like if your visual field is being saturated with psychedelic visuals to that extent right you probably shouldn't be outside, would be my suggestion.

You definitely need a cedar, you know. Now, you know, these level of intensity usually, you know, unless you're like overdosing or like mushrooms, like usually would be something like, okay, you're doing like DMT, where, yeah, like maybe the actual sensations from the, you know, environment become kind of like this very, you know, relatively faint contributor to the experience. But this is kind of a teaser, yes.

You're not going to be just showing visuals and the saying, look how cool this looks. You're going to be saying, okay, here's what is correlated with certain psychedelics, like LSD is different than DMT, which is different than 5MEO. And then you're going to say, why does it look like this and how is it produced?

Yeah. So why don't we start off simple? Show what ordinary perception looks like. I think, like, yeah, when fruitful way of starting is like kind of like showcasing some of the simple effects that this tool can give you. I mean, this is kind of like well-known things such as like drifting effects. This is very fast.

But for example, you know, like your experience being a little bit of wobbly is one of the maybe kind of like primary things that psychedelics do, like kind of like making the field of experience a little bit wobbly. explaining actually how that happens I think it's very non-trivial but okay that's a very very basic thing that you can

kind of like do and of course it gets interesting when you combine it with other effects but just as kind of like okay that's like the A of the ABC of making these replications the second one is kind of like adding like deep dream layers

so this is a little bit subtle but like you may see actually kind of like in some regions it gets a little bit kind of like enhanced and it looks a little bit trippy. You said it's kind of like these like waves where like, okay, maybe the edges get highlighted.

And so one of the simple, interesting ideas is like, okay, you choose different layers of the, you know, deep dream algorithm. So maybe on low doses, you know, you highlight kind of just like edges or something like that. Low doses of... Let's say, yeah, like psilocybin or LSD, mescaline. maybe in higher doses, maybe like, you know, higher level features start to become

highlighted, like, okay, like eyes and, you know, dog ears and things like that and like, okay, like, birds, you know, like, okay, the rocks start to look like a bunch of birds put together. I guess, like, yeah, the highest layer for some reason is, yeah, very abstract, at least in this particular rendition. What are you doing with these different layers? Are you saying that when you're on a psychedelic for people who have not experience psychedelics, that you then start to see this, what determines which of those layers

it is, and how did you come up with those layers? Are there more layers? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so this is a, essentially like bringing back, like a relatively all idea for how to, like, replicate psychedelic visuals. The Deep Dream algorithm, I've got to, you know, a fact, to check this, but I remember, like, in 2015, it came, I think, like, from Google, like, people were, like, playing with, like, you know, large neural networks, and they found that, okay, like, if you kind of, like, clamp a high-level feature in one of these networks

and, like, make the input, you know, fit the type of input that would, like, maximally activate this feature, then you can kind of, like, get these very trippy images, because it's like the image is, you know, being kind of, like, asked to, hey, maximize the output, or, like, the probability that the network will say, like, that you're our dog, right? So, like, at first, it's kind of, like, starts to make

everything a little bit, having, like, dog ears, or a little bit of like dog eyes and just kind of trying to trick the network into believing that there's a dog in there. And well, and people just like, you know, wrote blogs online about, hey, this looks really trippy. And like, you know, like in the psychonaut community,

there were definitely like a lot of posts. And there was kind of like a fad for like a few years where people were like replicating their psychedelic experiences primarily using this tool. But there's a lot of, you know, open questions here. Like, like, of course, like there's like the physiological and biological question, like, okay, like, why would psychedelics have kind of this, like, you know, ability to clamp these high-level features? Other questions, he's like, yes, exactly, like,

which layer, you know, should we use? Can you show an example of this dog clamping that you're referring to? Yes. I guess you have some of it. I don't think this is related to. Okay. Okay. Oh, there you go. Yeah, I guess like here is probably like going through the layers. Spell that out. So you know how in physics we like to reduce something that's complex into something that's more elegant, more efficient, more simple? Turns out you can do that with dinner.

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Again, that's hellofresh.com slash theories of everything, 10Fm, all one word. HelloFresh. The best way to cook just got better. How do you go from Maxwell's equations? So, yeah, I guess, yeah, you kind of like try to amplify as much as possible features for a given layer and then... You as a consciously try to amplify it or... No, no, no, no. I guess like you as the designer of the network,

you set one of these neurons to kind of like, okay, like maximum activity and try to arrange the rest of the network to do... to do that. This is an example of what one sees? Well, I would say this is kind of like a paradigm that people have identified as phenomenologically similar to psychedelic experiences. I mean, there are like significant differences

between, you know, the visuals that you experience and this. And in fact, like that is actually kind of like the motivation for like our replication tool. Is everybody in our team essentially like really loves, you know, like playing with deep dream but like essentially see like very deep limitations in it and it's sometimes actually a little bit frustrating

because you may see kind of like a movies where they play kind of okay like a psychedelic experience rendition and people get the impression is like okay yeah culturally we already know how this works you know how people understand how this actually looks like there's like this illusion of understanding

at the very least like culturally whereas yeah people who usually you know, have explored the space quite deeply will say, no, really, you know, the cultural depictions of psychedelics maybe capture like 1% of what's interesting about the state. But there's kind of like 99 that is like, okay, like, how do we actually put this into, you know, into a visualization or something that actually vuxes or is, yeah, very difficult. So yeah, deep dream, I would say, is like, okay, yeah, this is like a certain percentage of a puzzle. Okay. And so we'll get back to the tool that you've developed. Yes. Okay. And what's interesting is that this

a tool, most of these visualizations that you see, they're not ones with sliders, they're just something you can press play on, whereas yours, you have these modulators here and there, and sure, there are drop-down, discrete drop-down boxes, such as the layer one, two, and so on. But that's rare in this. So this means that you can tell exactly what is going on in different experiences. I don't usually stop mid-conversation to talk about sleep, but I've been using something that's made an appreciable difference. It's called Evening Being by Verso. Now, if you're like me, getting quality sleep while juggling work and stress and everything

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is like a Photoshop for the phenomenology of psychedelic experiences. I mean, it's like, how do you make a Photoshop of something in a sense? It's like, well, you think of like the range of kind of like primitive effects that you need to reconstruct a phenomenon, right? If you're going to simulate something, if you're going to, you know, engineering software, for example, like, what kind of materials do I need? What is there? There's, you know, how much stress can they endure and things like that? It's like, okay, like, what do you put in in a Photoshop for, you know, psychedelic experiences? And of course, you know, there's going to be a long,

journey, you know, many decades of, like, building more and more features, you know, as we actually find and formalize what's happening. But I do think, like, you know, this year we're presenting a kind of, like, layer of the stack that we think actually, like, does contribute significantly to our ability to visualize these states, perhaps kind of like a similar kind of like improvement in our ability to visualize things as I would say, like, maybe deep dream was back then. Okay, let's see what else? Okay. So... there is this whole layer of coupled oscillators

and okay right now actually is just like going up and down but can you explain what an oscillator is please yes it's not a coupled one okay so here is an oscillator in this case you know it's kind of like there's a dot that is changing in color and you know what happens is

like it's changing its color at a certain rate. And it kind of like wants to do it at, you know, its own rate. It's kind of, it has a heartbeat, as it were. You know, it has its desirable frequency, like where it's as healthy as possible. But then it needs to coexist, you know, in an ecosystem of other, you know, oscillators like it that maybe are going at slightly different frequencies. But, you know, they're in touch. They communicate with each other.

So, you know, the way in which, you know, mathematically it works is that kind of like the two oscillators are like sensing each other and they can like measure each other's phase, you know, where along the color wheel they are. And as a function of how far away they are from each other, they make bigger or smaller adjustments so that, you know, slowly they actually kind of like converge their face. if they actually have like enough of a desire to couple. Now, there's also, you know, in this case, there's another element which is a distance. So kind of like the desire for an oscillator to couple with another in kind of like the paradigm that we're presenting is distance dependent. Okay, so right now, for example,

I'm going to make it so that they actually want to be in opposite phases of each other. So the current simulation is set up where all of the oscillators will want to be at a different phase than their neighbors, or like the things that are like close to them. So what ends up happening here is

you have kind of like this like diversity of colors, but because like people, well, the oscillators don't want to be similar to those who are close by. But then I can switch this up so that like they actually do want to be in the same phase with each other. And the nice thing is that this is kind of these very smooth, soft, kind of like continuous transition

from like, oh, we want to be different to, hey, we want to be the same. And in some sense, I think, like, at least I find, you know, aesthetically, the process of convergence in general tends to be quite beautiful, especially for like very sophisticated systems. So one thing that you can do here, I'll just like give you a couple more examples and you know this is kind of like the toy model that then informs how the tool works

more broadly so here you know it's kind of like I'm making a street of oscillators so there's actually some kind of like you know similarity as you go from left to right it doesn't have to be perfect that's another thing like with this paradigm there's kind of like wiggle room

it's kind of like organic in that sense you know you're not kind of a just finding like one solution and like imposing it but like the system kind of like adapts itself so what i'm going to do now is uh i want like oscillators that are far away for them to want to be different from each other so now as you see you know close by they they're the same color but far away there are different colors now just a moment so at the top here you see coupling one two three so the near ones you've put to a positive number yes and the bottom one you put to an extreme negative number as far as the

go yes exactly um and i'll show you like another set of configurations here right it's like of course yeah if i put the when they when they're far they want to be in the same color but now when they're closed they want to be at different colors okay then it fragments right actually it fragments quite extremely right like even kind of like vertically at the at first kind of like it um you know it breaks down vertically too right like if this is if this is supposed to be i don't know like a vein or like something that is kind of like transporting, you know, let's say like water or like some fluid. Perhaps if it breaks like this is pretty catastrophic, right? Because it's kind of like cutting across the vein, so to speak. Okay. So here's like a overall like really

cool thing about systems like this is that, you know, when, if you kind of like do these layers of like you identify different distances and you modulate the coupling constant for each of the different distances, you can use that to actually kind of like tune into waves of different lengths. So depending on the specific kind of like staircase of couplings, I can make the wave larger or smaller. And I think, yeah, like this is kind of like the basic setup. Maybe I'll share another kind of, yeah, like fascinating thing. which is that you can actually use this kind of system as a diagnosis in a sense for like kind of like what type of shape you know a set of oscillators are forming

because for example if I put it in a circle and I make them kind of like want to be different from each other you know it will break in kind of this like symmetrical way right like where like the entire circle becomes kind of a color wheel right and it will always try to kind of like break up into kind of like an integer number of times so you get kind of this like

not always I mean like sometimes it kind of like toggles between one mode and another but like the stable configurations that it arrives at tend to essentially be those where like you have kind of like an integer number of times that the phase fits in the system

and this is like very very very general in that like also you know when you make grids and even grids of different dimensionalities. Yeah, actually, I'm going to show you... So what I'm going to show you actually now is kind of like a three-dimensional system of coupled oscillators.

So this is an article on cessation. Okay, perfect, I found it. Okay, so you see, like now it's a three-dimensional... Is it a man? Lydides, yeah. So you see like a... When there's like a wave traveling in it? Yes.

Right, it kind of like finds one of the symmetry. of the object. In this case, okay, like the wave is kind of like traveling along this

square essentially. And like it, you know, if I put it kind of like orthogonal like this, it's the same. What's determining the size?

The size of the wave is determined by the pattern of the, what we're calling the coupling kernel. We're calling it the coupling kernel, I mean,

simply because it's this idea that like, you know, a convolution kernel is like where you stand at a pixel for example and you look at a kind of like a fixed window around you and maybe you can evolve with it. Here is kind of the analogy, the analog of doing that,

but for kind of like a dynamic system, which is like you stand everywhere and you apply kind of like the same coupling constants to your neighborhood as everybody else. And then you see the emergent dynamics of doing that. And in this case, yeah, you know, the wavelength is fairly low, is kind of the entire shape. Okay, so we get the idea that, look, you have these different balls,

you can put on screen, you can put them in different shapes, and they can look to their neighbor and say, I want to be more like you or I want to be less like you. And they can also do so with different distances, so I could say, I want to be more like you, much less than you, but much more like you in the back, and that's what you're tuning there. So what? It's cool. It's interesting. Now, what is the relevance here to psychedelics? Yeah. Okay, okay.

So a couple more things to explain this is one thing that you can do is kind of like play with the dimensionality of the space on which you're kind of applying these rules. So I'm going to do something a little bit trippy, which is, this is really cool because right now, the wave is actually in three dimensions. I don't know if it's obvious, but I kind of need to rotate it a little bit

for you to kind of like really see that like, yes this is a cube and there's kind of this resonant mode in the cube okay but what was before is a stranger which is like it doesn't matter how I projected like I could project it like this

like a hexagon for example and I still get just kind of like this wave is like you know going in circles and then I projected from this side and it's still going in a circle and I projected from this side and it's still going in a circle right like

what is going on in here so this is I think something that happens all the time in our consciousness and it explains a lot of psychedelic effects which is like what's happening here is like now the distances

between the dots are the distances in the screen kind of like in the projection so like rather than the dots kind of like thinking like oh I'm in a cube is like no I'm in a screen and like you know

right now there's a bunch of dots that are like overlapping with each other and so of course they're going to be like the same color even though in principle there should be like another dimension there and when you have kind of these effects you know you can do things such as you know kind of like make make tubes for example and now light you know the the color will kind of like travel through these paths as well um so I think uh you know one of these kind of like things that is happening in in our experience that explains a lot of like psychedelic

effects is that there are kind of like three-dimensional waves of sensation in our tactile field that like you know like the sense of warmth or cold or expansion and contraction in our body you know it's kind of like this like 3D volume and it has kind of like 3D waves you know that look maybe more more like this is kind of like you actually have this volume our visual field on the other hand has kind of these like very strong preference for kind of like this two-dimensional layout, where waves are really kind of like two-dimensional, generally. And of course, yeah, there's like some depth perception that kind of like stitches together different types of waves. But in general, there's kind of like this kind

of like tendency for two-dimensionality. So I think like a lot of the, you know, like interesting kind of like computational and non-trivial things that happen on psychedelics is that you project with synesthesia, you know, your sense of your body, for example, into your visual field. And you know, you're connecting something that has like three-dimensional resonant modes with a surface that is two-dimensional

and has like two-dimensional resonant modes as its preference. And so the actual phenomenology is this negotiation between three-dimensional resonant waves and two-dimensional ones and how they're trying to couple with each other.

Which causes like all kinds of like fascinating dialogues where, you know, like maybe your arm over here is projected in a certain way. They're like, okay, waves actually do, you know, harmonize with it. The waves in the visual field and the waves in the tactile field need to kind of like solve a Rubik's cube in a sense to be able to harmonize properly. Okay, I have a question.

Yeah, it's somewhat related. So in ordinary studies of consciousness or just perception, you think of the world, we have this model where you think of the world as the ground truth. And then you're never experiencing the world. You're experiencing some filtration of it and that gets augmented and messed around with. Okay. But ordinarily what you do is you play around with the world and then you say, okay, I want the patient to experience so-and-so.

But you are just looking inside the brain at your Quality Research Institute, is already looking at phenomenon inside. Is there anything? Can you go in the opposite direction? Have you discovered anything about ontology or what you think of as the real world from perceptions inside the brain? Because of how they're supposed to be correlated with the real world. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Excellent question. I mean, I'm making. the bet, essentially, that, you know, the structure of consciousness, the phenomenology of consciousness, the way in which sensations can bind together, you know, is telling us something really deep about the nature of reality. That it is essentially, okay, like, you are a particular facet of reality. And so if you can study, you know, kind of the laws of phenomenology, I think, like, you're in a sense,

like tapping into the loss of the universe at a very deep level. And there are, like, yeah, things that are, I would say, at least, like, really hint at very deep connections, I think, like, with physics. You know, I'm not a physicist. I'm a physics fan, really, really, but, you know, I don't want to speak about, yeah, you know, like the mathematics of the standard model or something like that. But I do suspect that, you know, kind of like things evocative, for example, the ideas we discussed in our previous podcast, which was kind of how, in, in, you know, in, you

In physics, you have kind of things such as like particles and antiparticles that, you know, cancel out, turning to like photons and things like that. There's a lot of kind of like aspects of phenomenology where things in qualia space have kind of like a structure where it feels like oftentimes kind of like from the vacuum, so to speak. The vacuum splits into kind of like two things that are like opposite and complementary to each other. and you know like something like a DMT tends to in some sense kind of like split the vacuum into the you know kind of like polar opposites of things so it's like okay the the sense of space in

front of you the color is you know a given point may kind of like split into blue and yellow it's kind of like a color and it's anti-color and and everything is kind of like doing that everything is kind of like invoking its opposite and kind of kind of like oscillating with it whereas 5MU DMT, it feels actually like the movement is one of kind of like, hey, every particle find your antiparticle. Like everything cancel out with your kind of opposite until you smooth out completely. So, you know, like a peak 5MEO DMT experience often is described as kind of like merging with a white light of the universe or becoming one with emptiness.

And like those, yeah, a lot of kind of like evocative things like that, that to me it strongly suggests a deep connection with symmetry. and kind of like the cancellation of opposites. Another, like, very interesting hint here is there's, like, some doses of 5MEO DMT where, for example, all of your visual field and your tactile field kind of like diffracts into what looks like a rainbow, like the whole color wheel. And then if you increase the dose a little bit, and you kind of, like, look at it from the side, it all kind of cancels out into pure space.

So there is kind of this phenomenology where you can kind of like, study the ways in which in some sense things are equivalent to nothing at a very, very, very deep level. And, yeah, I mean, I suspect, yeah, if, you know, teams are very smart people continue to really, really try to figure this out.

I think, like, there's, yeah, a lot of, like, promising information. What do you mean? It appears like it's equivalent to nothing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It got Willa. They got my daughter. I need to find her. Willa! From acclaimed director, Paul Thomas Anderson. You can save that girl.

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Experienced in IMAX. You came back. You mean to say, like, how from out of the vacuum, you can get something positive a negative? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. This is an allusion to David Pierce's zero ontology. I recommend a lot of this website. It's you know, like a 90s website. In general, like headweb.com by David Pierce, a philosopher from whom I draw a lot of inspiration. And, you know, he has like, yeah, this essay of like, why does anything exist? And, you know, he kind of

lays out this case that like in mathematics and physics and phenomenology, we have this kind of like overarching pattern where you can kind of reconstruct everything out of nothingness in some sense. I mean like he says like we probably don't yet have like the proper words to really talk about this. You know, we're in a kind of a pre-paradigmatic stage really. We're like, yeah, what do we say is like kind of like pointing to an explanation space rather than a full theory. You know, but he argues, you know, in mathematics, you can get everything from the empty set, so to speak, in physics, things like, well, what is the total angular momentum of the universe. People argue like it's zero or, yeah, I don't know, there's a lot of debate

in there. But then in phenomenology, it's like, yeah, you know, colors seem to kind of like coming pairs. The sense of space seems to require a sense of time. Like, there's kind of like this interrelated variables in experience and consciousness where like at very, very kind of like peak, peak symmetry states of consciousness where things are kind of like symmetrifying, harmonizing, synchronizing. You kind of see a kind of like a cancellation process which is very evocative of like, well, maybe at the base, there's kind of like really nothing.

It's a, I don't know, also people like the phenomenology of high dose five million or DMT is very often, you know, people will say things such as like, wow, like the truth is that, you know, everything is happening simultaneously or something like that. Like it's everything everywhere all at once type of feeling. Are you able to show that type of feeling? Yeah, yeah, Elizabeth.

Okay. Awesome. Okay. So I'm going to essentially show you kind of like what 5MEO DMT might feel like a little bit and some qualitative aspects of it. So I guess, again, for a little bit of context, like, you know, the coupled oscillators that I was showing you in the replication tool, practically is kind of like every pixel is one of these oscillators. And it's using the GPU. You know, I develop the core idea, but like, yeah, this is the work of a whole team. and I'm especially, yeah, thankful to Emil Hal, who, yeah, built, you know, so much of this, and he really optimized it. So, like, yeah, the GPU is actually simulating all of the oscillators. So here, you know, in this setting, essentially I'm using a black and white kind of like system of coupled oscillators, and I'm going to make it so, well, I'm actually going to increase

the opacity. It's like, okay, you're a pretty strong dose. And as you're coming up, this thing happens where, like, you know, at first, okay, actually I'm going to replicate it. Yeah, something like this. At first, you know, you're coming up and it's kind of like this. And as you're going up, the lines start to kind of like cancel with each other. And you see there's like kind of like pinwheels. You know, those pinwheels and you can think of them as kind of these like particles in experience. And they find kind of like each other and they annihilate. Well, then then also, you know, like kind of like secondary effects happens.

sometimes that you get kind of this like additional extra waves. But yeah, no, in general, there's kind of this general tendency that as you increase kind of like the coupling constant and you keep it positive, the whole screen converges to kind of like just black and white. And these like very big pinwheels find each other and they cancel each other out. And that, well, I'll show you now,

it's, you know, from our website, from the various like legal psychedelic retreats that we have run, You know, one of the things that we kind of like all converged on, you know, this was like a very widely reported phenomenon in the team. You know, we were 12 people with kind of like technical backgrounds, like starting 5MUDDMT phenomenology. You know, like, and, you know, after an experience, we might like sit down and, you know, discuss and somebody who knows how to write shaders. You know, like, write these within like, you know, half an hour. Wow. Like, hey, we all comment is like, yeah, actually, that feels like our experience.

And in general, you know, like, everybody who tried 5MEO, at least in our retreat, of course, you know, it's biased because, you know, they're like people who are like are into math, are into meditation, are into visual art. But they all reported that, yeah, this process of kind of a, the generation of these pinwheels, what they're called like topological defects. And then their cancellation was kind of like really quintessential to the phenomenology of 5MEO DMT. I really like this animation too this is kind of like the vacuum so to speak you know maybe like universal consciousness before it's divided so to speak and then it turns into kind of yeah these like particle

and antiparticle sort of for like these vortex and antivortex and on 5MEO DMT yeah it feels like the way in which your experience is constructed is kind of like a bunch of stilts that are made of these kind of like defects and when they cancel out you kind of feel like you're rejoining kind of the sea of the universe which is like okay you were kind of like separated from the universe by these topological defects is the overall impression i mean again i'm not going to um i'm describing phenomenology here

rather than necessarily metaphysics yeah but do you have any metaphysical views i'm i'm totally open to to various interpretations here i mean um yeah i think you were interested in kind of like group effects or collective effects you briefly asked me yesterday or synchronizing trips and things like that you know I'm very open I used to be actually you know I used to put the bulk of my probability mass into kind of like everything that happens in a psychedelic is an internal hallucination very rich you know you can learn a lot about the unconscious you can learn about you know about consciousness and and and it's very computationally significant and so on, but it's just a part of your world simulation.

You know, like that would be kind of like the bulk of my probability mass a few years ago. And now I'm actually a little bit more open to like, no, actually there's other phenomena as well that might involve kind of like coupled oscillators, but within a larger field in a sense that includes not only your own experience, but others around you and maybe other things as well. But very huge error bars in here, a very, very high amount of uncertainty. But yes, I'm happy to talk about that, yeah. Have you done any tests where if someone's in this room, say, not this particular room, but in a room,

and they're on, let's say they're on 5MEO, I'm not sure if that's the most optimal use of 5MEO for this. And then someone else is in some other room where they can't see you, and then I'm showing you a string of letters. And I say, okay, you look at these string of letters, then I ask you, can you reach this person's mind? Because if you're a part of a unified field, you should have some access.

Have you done something like that? Okay, so let me provide a bit more context because, you know, like we held one 5MEODMT retreat, which was in Canada and 23. It was, for me, like, a huge highlight of my life, really, just kind of like being with all of these other, like, nerdy kids and like, you know, visual artists and mathematicians, meditators and, like, spending three weeks, they're trying to figure out how this works.

Yeah, utterly mind-blowing. but you know you can there's only so much you can fit in that time we focused a lot on the visual phenomenology and kind of like what kind of equations maybe underneath these or the topology the geometry etc we did you know do a couple kind of like

wacky experiments I mean like one of the first of all one of the things that was like widely reported especially from the meditators you know this has to be replicated and like I don't know how much this is self-suggestion But something that I was like, yeah, quite strongly reported independently by several of the people in the retreat was that when somebody takes Fabio DMT in the same room as you, there is a vibe shift. And in particular, for the meditators, they said that time to samadhi shortened significantly, meaning that they're like really, you know, advanced meditators where they can enter into like the various genres, you know, these very, very advanced concentration states within minutes.

And, you know, for one of them, for example, it might usually take them, like, 10 minutes to enter into one of those, like, trances or altarsates. And he said that, yeah, when somebody was on 5MEO DMT within a few meters of him, like, it would kind of, like, half the amount of time. So he's not on it, but the other person is? Yes. And still kind of there's, like, this sense of, like, well, the gradient of going in the meditation direction is, like, kind of, like, lubricated, as it were. It's a bit entrancing to be around somebody on 5MEO. Then again, we were running kind of, like, blind things. tests of like, okay, maybe this person

is actually on, you know, it's just like vapor, it's not, you know, a placebo or something like that. We weren't doing that. Or test by putting someone else with 5MEO behind the wall but they don't know. I mean, it would be fascinating. Again, it's, yeah, of course

like there's something to be said about like yeah, 5MEO is like, you know, very, very profound and he's like, harder to yeah, actually kind of like follow like complex instructions. if you're in the state, but yeah, if somebody's... What about others like LSD?

Actually, yeah, it is interesting. I mean, like I've, for example, yeah, like at festivals, like Burning Man, you know, I've something that I've sometimes done, especially with people, you know, kind of like I know or friends or friends is like going with an iPad, you know, and with like a psychophysic experiment. It's like, hey, like, look at this picture. Like, what does it look like? And yeah, in general, people, uh,

who are experienced with psychedelics can usually answer like fairly basic kind of like visual, you know, tasks. Usually actually they think their performance is a lot worse than what it is. It's kind of the opposite than with drunk people who are like, oh, my performance is totally great,

you know, and actually they're like, you know, 10th percent of or something. No, an LSD, I'm very surprised is like somebody might do like kind of like a task very often and think like, hey, like did I do it like really poorly? And it's like, no, you were average. Yeah, but yeah, and of course, yeah, for the psychedelic cryptography, yeah, like, which, I don't know if you, we've talked about that, or we ran this contest or competition where people would submit videos where the idea is like, well, there's like some kind of secret information here that you can only read or decode if you're like on a certain psychedelic state of consciousness.

Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Originally, actually, I came up with this idea. like the very basic implementation, which is like how to secretly communicate with people in LSD. And you see like the very simple concept here is that you use the fact that there's kind of this like tracer effect in the visual field. Things kind of like last longer in the visual field

so that you can kind of like paint, you know, the components of an image one chunk at a time. And kind of because it lingers, you can kind of like see it more easily. There's also like features that you can see more easily. Like for example, like the gaps between, the various columns here. It's not obvious in the left

and there's gaps, right? So even that is kind of like binary communication, right? It's like, are there gaps between these rows or not? But yeah, you can actually, it turns out, do like some pretty awesome visualizations. So this was the winning entry. So yeah, this one actually contains like a significant amount of information.

Like you do need to be significantly high though. like the equivalent of like 150 micrograms of LSD or something is kind of like the threshold where like it starts to become like quite visible. I mean, and again, you know, we still need to really validate these, get like percentages, get a, you know, optimize the effect. What I can say is that, you know, in a team of eight people trying to decode these without knowing what's in it, you know, six were able to do so like easily on mushrooms. What do you decode here?

Yeah, actually, I mean, like, the mechanism is very simple with this particular psychedelic photography, which is that you kind of like put a tracer effect on this image. And actually, I don't want to spoil it. I'm not going to say what's in it. Okay. So that, yeah, you don't know. And maybe you can convince yourself that it works if you look at it. But, you know, don't look at a microdose and then judge that it doesn't work because a microdose

is not going to do it. Like, you really need to be... So there's a hidden message here. Yeah, and it's like unambiguous. I mean, it's like a very clear message with a lot of bits of information. It's not unambiguous. Like, oh, I'm not sure. Yeah.

It's a safe message. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pro-social. Yes. It's a good message. Okay. Just because you also want to be careful. Yeah.

It's a family-friendly message. Yeah, so 5MEODMT, you know, one of like our overarching conclusion, is that yeah like these defects would appear like like a individual field in the tactile field and how good or bad the experience felt had a lot to do actually with kind of like the flow of kind of like energy and the particular shape of the field um I mean sometimes like for example this can be kind of like a fairly unpleasant 5MU DMT experience like if if you have kind of of this like sense they're like okay the energy is like concentrated in this point in the bottom of your spine

that actually was described as very unpleasant because you get kind of this feeling of high kind of like pressurization. You feel kind of like pressurized in some regions or like stretched. Does it feel painful? It feels just very uncomfortable. And it is obviously very hard to describe

but it is sort of kind of like a lot of kind of layers of yourself are kind of like sheared in this kind of like uncomfortable way that is very unusual and you would never experience it. You're not doing exercise or something just a very unusual effect. But, you know, in this particular experience, this report,

you know, he described that like the valence was extremely bad at first, which was, yeah, like concentrating this kind of like sense of pressure. But then all those, the field lines actually kind of like aligned and they all became parallel. And then the valence flipped from extremely negative to extremely positive. Super interesting. So I was speaking with someone recently about here. he was just meditating, completely sober,

and then he felt extreme pain in his lower back, extreme pain, and then extreme pleasure. And then he said it just kept oscillating between that. And it was from meditating, and he had to stop meditating from that. So this can happen. What is the explanation for that?

Yeah, I mean, meditation, it's really powerful, and there's so many different states that you can access. And, I mean, I think, like, the description that you gave would be consistent with the other top of my head, like, maybe like five different types of meditation and different phenomenology, but... It was a variation of transcendental meditation. Okay, yeah, yeah. It might actually be, like, somewhat related to this sort of phenomenon, because with transcendental meditation in some of the typical modalities, like you're repeating a mantra, for example, and you're concentrating your attention in a part of your body. Sometimes, let's say, like, in your crown chakra, kind of like just a head, a little bit of where, you know, the... top of your head you can imagine okay like you're concentrating like there like you know an hour

a day you're kind of like smoothing what we might call your attention field lines is like okay whenever you get distracted you tell your body like no don't think about this move your attention back upwards but so you're creating kind of this graph of like wherever you're paying attention it's pushing in that direction and so you're ordering kind of your attention field as it were and I think that yeah when the field is really ordered actually usually you can access the extremes of valence

because when it's very ordered and actually harmonious and symmetrical that is like a complete kind of like state of harmony and it feels really great but also when it's a little bit disjointed it's like you're very ordered but maybe it's a little bit out of face or a little bit kind of like screwed up at the very tip

you may also encounter the strongest dissonances because it's like you're very aligned but then maybe pushing against yourself. And so there is this very broad phenomenon, I mean, and meditation, and especially 5MODMT, demonstrates it, is that around very peak positive valence, oftentimes you have kind of like other configurations that are especially unpleasant.

And I think like a lot of, yeah, kind of like developing, like, you know, deep meditative expertise involves kind of like developing the equanimity to be able to navigate those transitions. It's like knowing that, well, actually, yeah, Right next to the bliss or like the awakening or realization, there's actually some fairly ugly, unpleasant dissonances and discordant configurations. Is this what Reiki is supposed to be aligning?

Yeah, that's a very good question. I don't know very much about Reiki. In general, though, I would argue that the framework of kind of like annealing or like a field annealing, neural annealing broadly kind of like explains the practices of energy work very, very generally. I mean, like, you're using things such as, you know, like various tools, like surprise and attention to imagine, like, energy flow in your body.

And essentially, yeah, kind of like heating yourself up so that you can, like, cool down. And you can imagine, okay, like with annealing materials, right? Like, if you can heat up a material and then letting it cool, you can reorder its atomic lattice. Well, in so many ways, we are kind of like made of kind of like crystals of sensations, right? So it's like if you heat up parts of yourself and like kind of like use your attention to kind of like recomb yourself. I think like fundamentally you're using kind of like

annealing techniques. And I think this applies to a lot of, you know, a lot of martial arts as well. Like it's, it's a very broad framework. I went to a Reiki, I don't know what they're called master or artist or or what have you. Once a week for a period of months. And every time I saw her, She would always say that I'm disordered. Whatever's the worst insults that you could say in Reiki terms would apply to me and she would just go like this to my back. Not touching my back, she's just, oh, but I wouldn't feel any different before or after. So have you encountered if Reiki, is there legitimacy to Reiki?

Is there consonants with Reiki and any of what you've outlined here today? Let me say the following. Okay. I mean, I think, like, okay, like, if you assume that there's actually some legitimacy to some of these techniques, it might make sense that, like, you need to kind of, like, have, like, at least some kind of, like, basic kind of, like, flexibility in your energy body, so to speak, and, like, desire to experience the effect for it to also work. Like, I see that as, like, compatible. So, like, one goes, like, very skeptical. It might make sense. Like, one doesn't experience it.

Okay. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, you would tell me after that, oh, everything is aligned. You're good now. Like, you're so. Like, like, you're so. much better. And I feel exactly the same. But thank you. Thank you so much. Yes. I mean, yeah, I personally would imagine it's unlikely that something, I mean, it sounds like a scam. But no, but what I can say is like, I do know. It was a free service. This is why, so I didn't pay for this service. Otherwise, I don't think I would have done it. But maybe that shows that I'm skeptical. So we did see. I'm somewhat frustrated because she's like taking up so much of my time.

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Yesterday, like, we saw the hypnotist, right? I don't know if you saw the hypnotist. Yeah. No, the hypnotist is fantastic. The hypnotist Albert Nuremberg, which I'll place a link on screen and in the description, was fantastic. Yeah, I mean, like, you know, talking afterwards with him, like he, of course, yeah, you should interview him at some movies.

He was describing, like, yeah, like, orgasms being triggered by, like, hypnosis. and reaching extreme levels or like what he called like super orgasm. Anyway, there's going to be like all in a TV series or something pretty soon.

You know, one interesting, I think like maybe a skeptical take would be something like maybe Reiki practitioners are really good hypnotists. Right?

Like if you can induce these really powerful experiences relatively easy with kind of these attention tricks. Like yeah, presumably there's like a lot of ways of like hacking a person, so to speak.

But also, you know, speaking personally, I know people who swear by some interesting effects that they have experienced like non-locally from somebody else like doing energy work on them and like it's interesting

very hard to say what I can say like you know from personal experience again I remain open-minded but yeah just I haven't seen like a silver bullet of things like this but during the 5Mio retreat in addition to the time to Samadhi kind of like shortening also people reported

feeling each other's traumas and kind of like processing it for each other. Like, for example, one of the, you know, meditation practitioners who is kind of like really equanimous, you know, he's, he's been in monasteries for years and a super great guy. And like, he can endure a lot of pain without problem, for example. So, like, sometimes, like, one of the things that would be reported is like, okay, this person is having a difficult 5MEO experience processing, let's say, like childhood trauma or something

like that. And then he reported that just having the advanced meditator right next to him was extremely powerful because the trauma kind of like was processed or dissipated through him and and also the meditator reported that's what happened afterwards as well so there were kind of yeah like reported phenomenology that suggested a kind of like shared field especially when people were like both simultaneously on a state we did try like once i experiment which was yeah unsuccessful like i was with uh yeah with one of the participants uh really friendly uh one of the artists and it was like okay, like, give me a number from zero to a hundred while, like, I'm in the state, and

he's also in the state. And like, I think, like, yeah, you know, he actually was like 37, and I reported 87. And 37's the most common. Yeah. Yeah. So 5Mio DMT, one of the things that we all did kind of like converge on is that it seems like it instantiates kind of this self-organizing principle where everything in your experience wants to cohere with everything else. And, you know, the emergence of kind of the pinwheels, I think it's a, is downstream of that. It's like whenever you have kind of these like systems

of couple dosolators, especially when it has like rich dimensionality or like multiple layers, and you make them all want to be one with each other, so to speak. The pinwheels is just like something that you encounter along the way. Whereas, you know, we also contrasted it with like, you know, ayahuasca and

mushrooms for example. Let me find like some good kind of replication of that and essentially there's kind of like some key differences which is like yeah like not only is it like much more colorful but also you have like this effect

where you have like very rich detail and like essentially kind of like fractally at every scale every sensation kind of like triggers its opposite so in some sense you get kind of these like the attractor states is like where you have like all of these

opposites kind of like reconciled in some kind of like tapestry where everything is kind of like invoking its opposite but still the experience manager is to include it into some kind of like overall perspective that yeah it's usually really diverse and rich in contrast and in that sense it's almost kind of like opposite

of Favimeo DMT. I mean we used to describe it as kind of a Favimeo DMT promotes global coherence in your overall system whereas regular DMT, what's in ayahuasca, causes these competing clusters of coherence. Kind of like, yes. So which one is the one when people say,

I've experienced everything and everything is happening all at once, everywhere? That would be 5MEO DMT, which would be the colorless and, yeah, like the black and white where you get, yeah, kind of like the pinwheels, like this. This would be more like the 5MEO DMT. where like, and especially, you know, as the pinwheels eventually collapse into each other, people might say something like, well, it felt like a black hole where I collapsed or like, I turned into just one point, for example, as I often reported thing.

And I turn into just one point, and then that point disappeared is also like another thing people say. And, you know, when you just become one point, you're not really a person. I mean, like, you don't remember who you are or where you are. You know, ideally you feel pretty safe, though. you're having a good experience and at least in our retreat almost everybody had like overall pretty good experiences

but the information content is very minimal there's like there's not much happening in there other than like a very intense experience of nothingness whereas yeah like you know ayahuasca psilocybin

is much more like like this in that like everything is richly richly richly structured and usually there's actually like several layers of oscillators talking to each other. Let me just like find a pattern here that kind of like. Now we're speaking plenty about the visuals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But also there's temporal perceptions. Yeah. Distortions often. So you'll feel like you have lived this life and other

lives 10 times over. Sure. And the eternity pass. It's difficult to say with our ordinary words, how can eternity pass? Explain how that works. The article I would point to to kind of like explain like the phenomenology of temporal distortions on various psychedelics is this one, I mean, I titled it the pseudo-time arrow. I mean, let me explain like the title. So it's kind of like I want to distinguish between the phenomenology of the passage of time and actual physical time, right? And, you know, physicists, I mean, there's a huge debate on like what is time as people who watch your channel will probably know. And but you know, it's things. such as like, okay, like there's like an arrow along which entropy is increasing.

You know, some people might define time in that way. And I think it's very worthwhile to kind of like think of physical time. Yeah, as like something that may not be identical to the feeling of the passage of time. Because like, you know, if you take five million DMT and you say like, oh, everything stopped, you know, it's not like literally, you know, the whole universe stopped. And like, you know, from outside everything, everybody also stopped. It's more kind of the phenomenon of time was, like, deeply altered. So the question is, like, can we reconstruct why time feels the way in which it feels like

appealing just to the structure of the experience as opposed to kind of like appealing to like a physical time that you're accessing? And what I'm exploring here is effectively how kind of like the stacking of sensations allow the generation of an internal arrow of time. So the idea is that, okay, like those kind of these like physical time, but also, you know, as we were saying, there's like this tracer effects, you know,

things last longer on psychedelics, right? That's, I think, like, normally, there's always also a tracer effect regardless. And I think that's, like, essential for the generation of the feeling of time. It's just very thin. And, and in some sense, you know, the things that are a little bit further into the past, they're, like, fainter. So there's kind of this, like, arrow of realism. It's kind of the, what's, like, more recent is, like, more vivid. And you can kind of reconstruct how things are changing and in what direction things are moving by kind of like the arrow of how things are becoming fainter over time. And now on psychedelics, you know, let's say like a, this is what I might call like a sober pseudo-time arrow, is kind of how

experience, how the sensations become fainter, how they refer to each other. Maybe on psychedelics, you know, because everything lasts longer. The internal arrow of time is longer in a you have kind of you have like more sensations that are accumulated over time and that are referencing each other so there's like a sense of like you're in an expanded time in a sense just as a generic effect of these substances

but then on the special cases or kind of like the interesting corner cases is where for example like the the sense of the hour of time may wrap around and actually connect with itself this happens involuntarily often if you are listening to like really repetitive music on psychedelics, like, if you're at a trans festival

and, like, you took three hits of acid, you may feel like, oh, my gosh, like, I'm in a time loop, and I've been here for who knows how long. Because the music kind of, like, wraps around the, the, the, the, the, it may close. It may close, it may make your future

the same as your past. Yes. And I think like, legitimately something really interesting is actually happening to the topology of your attention. Like, it is a very exotic configuration of consciousness. But, yeah, I don't think you're breaking space time, you know,

in a more literal sense. But internally, there's, yeah, is a very unusual phenomenology. Oh, and yeah, the thing that actually, I think does happen on something like 5MODMT is more a kind of like central collapse.

It's a little bit more kind of like time stops. When everything synchronizes, with all of these sensations synchronize and they're kind of like in phase, there's no way to distinguish one thing from another and like there is no internal passage of time i mean i i would maybe define it describe it this way which is like if you have like a lot of uh yeah kind of like clocks uh moving near to each other but there's no absolute frame of reference right like all they can know about like

how time passes is by looking at the differences in in their phases internally right but if suddenly all the clocks are moving together right internally is like there's no time And so, like, when you have kind of this, like, hypersynchrony across many different aspects of you, it's kind of like time may stop for the parts that are synchronized with each other. And, yeah, you know, like a peak Favimeo DMT experience is like your body and mind figures out how to synchronize everything, kind of like reprojecting it from the right way so that everything is in phase.

And subjectively, that feels like, yeah, there's just no time, like, or timeless outside of space and time, so to speak. And what about the experiences of entering other animals' lives and other people's lives and past lives and so on? Yeah, I'm not sure, yeah, I'm not sure if I could really comment on that. I haven't really kind of like seen firsthand people really reference, like past lives. Have you experienced that yourself? No, no, I mean, like the most unusual kind of like thing I have personally experienced, which is widely reported. it and you know I definitely should like write about it is more about a sensing when a family

member like dies like that that is like pretty often reported and sometimes you may have kind of like a complex hallucination or like some kind of mystical experience if anything yeah that is the one thing I would say like okay there's probably personally it feels like there's like a signal there but uh but yeah no like hallucinations of past lives or something like that yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't say like I've experienced that yeah if we're We go back to how we started, which is these coupled oscillators, if you don't mind going back. Yeah, yeah. This is like the kind of like toy model example.

Okay. In none of this, can I see how you could ever come up with a mantis alien DMT encounter? So where do those come from? One thing I will say to begin with is that, okay, whether these are kind of a, there's like some influence from kind of external intelligences or not, it is very clear that like what you hallucinate on, let's say, like, DMT or various psychedelic. you know, it patterns on top of your own world model. And so there is this overall framework we call psychedelic thermodynamics, which is this idea that, you know, on a psychedelic kind of like the energy of your consciousness increases, like everything is like brighter, things are like more wobbly,

there's more flexibility, in some senses that you're like heated up in a way. And there's like energy sinks that locally kind of like crystallize your experience. And essentially, you know, semantic content, like things that you can recognize, we think function as kind of this energy syncs is actually kind of like a shrink-wrapping, you know. When you're on DMT and like the world is very wobbly, if something kind of looks like a jaguar, the field may actually start to kind of like shrink-wrap around as if it kind of like plays the role of the jaguar. And this shrink-wrapping effect, actually I would describe it as a cooling effect.

So, like, when the flexible world sheet of experience approaches something that you've seen before, it cools around it. And effectively, your experience kind of, like, crystallizes on things that you have experienced before. It kind of, like, finds energy sinks to crystallize around. And, like, there's two things it tends to crystallize around. One is, like, semantic content.

For example, the concept of a car, for example, it can be, like, things at that level of abstraction. And then the other thing is like symmetries, like repeating patterns, you know, kind of like crystallographic, you know, structures. And those are kind of like much more universal and like, you know, cultural neutral in a sense. So, you know, I would imagine, for example, yeah, like the actual kind of symmetrical visuals that people in the Amazon who take ayahuasca experience is probably the same symmetrical visuals as, you know, you and I would. But the semantic content that they experience is probably quite different, you know, because it's culture-bound. Why don't you show some of these entities that can be encountered? Yeah.

Okay, so I'm going to rely on my friend Symmetric Vision, who is like this awesome artist, and he's been to some of the QRI retreats. And I would say, you know, kind of like a world-class at replicating secular league visuals. Ontario, the wait is over. The gold standard of online casinos has arrived. Golden Nugget Online Casino is live, bringing Vegas-style excitement and a world-class gaming experience right to your fingertips. Whether you're a seasoned player or just starting, signing up is fast and simple. And in just a few clicks, you can have access to our exclusive library of the best slots and top-tier table games.

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If you close your eyes, you're kind of like in a different world. But if you go sufficiently high in the dose, it doesn't matter whether you have the eyes open or closed. And yeah, you know, this very intricate structure. happen where tubes for example are like fairly common tubes along which waves travel and the tubes often have like a lot of depth effects kind of they play with depth they can compress and like look like they go very very very very far away from you and then they expand and it's kind of like they're very close to you so extreme kind of like depth illusion kind of phenomenology is extremely

common. And I will say that, okay, like the actual model that we have for how this happens requires more than just coupled oscillators. And it requires actually like kind of like something analogous to video feedback, which is the idea that like, you know, one of the things that our overall kind of system is doing and is capable of is taking a chunk of your experience, edit it in some way, and then put it back into your visual field or your tactile fields. I mean, the most classic example is if you enter, you know, like a bathroom where there's like a mirror, your world simulation immediately kind of like knows how to kind of like copy everything on the left to make it go on the right. And internally, you're not confused, right? Like you're not

kind of like a, I mean, if we pass the mirror test, you understand that it's not like there's a room behind the mirror, right? Like, your role simulation is capable of handling those relationships. And, you know, like on something like DMT, kind of like that capacity gets really exploited where like, you know, every surface can briefly, for example, be interpreted as like, well, this is the surface of a mirror that is reflecting something else in the scene.

And the capacity for kind of like tracking those correspondences goes through the roof where, you know, you may see like, okay, this mirror is reflecting this other mirror, which is reflecting this other mirror, which is reflecting the original mirror. We'll get back to the mirror, but right now what is going on here? This is a seraphim? No, is it a seraphim? One is one of these kind of like a biblical type angels, you know, multiple arms or tubes,

kind of like a insectoid head, some vibrating like, you know, time vortex in the center. This is a commonly encountered entity. Well, the theme of kind of these super intelligent insectoid mind hive thing with lots of arms that are made of like lots of like parts that reflect each other and they're all kind of interconnected. That is like, yeah, like very, very, very classic high dose DMT. Like people will absolutely recognize these. Okay, getting back to the mirrors. Yes, getting back to the mirrors. So you're saying that you interpret every surface, everything as a mirror reflecting everything else.

Yes. You could also relate that to Indra's net. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I'm going to show you something. Where the video feedback has this ability to, like, sheer, reflect, you know, like, do all these transformations. Like, navigating the DMT space is kind of doing this. It's like you're, you're applying some, like, rotation or transformation, you know, sheer,

effect on a piece of the kaleidoscope that is connected to everything else. So like the, you know, the response in the field to a small change can be really dramatic. It can be like, okay, I think I'm just like reaching, you know, my arm over here, but it's actually like doing this weird contortion and you flip from one side of the fractal to the other. Wow. Yeah. But even this is like selling it short because this is just with one channel where you have like just one camera that is essentially just being reflected and reflected

in a full kind of like the DMT circuit so to speak or like the circuit of the visual field that is maybe revealed by DMT in a sense. You have like multiple channels. I mean essentially you have kind of like various cameras and some of those cameras are actually looking at the screen and so there's like yes

several levels of complexity higher in fact but on top of that though there's also the the couple docile dynamics that are happening in addition to these mirroring effects. Yeah. So what is your job? How do you make a living?

Is this your full-time work? Yes, yes. Okay, so, I mean, psychedelic visualization is a component of what I do. I am a full-time, you know, consciousness researcher at QRI. We're funded by essentially, yeah, people who are, like, believers in our research, people who... Donors. Yeah, donors.

We do want to make what we do ultimately self-sustaining. And I'm happy to talk about various paths that I think are plausible to make that happen. But yeah, I mean, effectively people who I knew and who knew me

that we were already very interested in figuring out consciousness, who then became lucky with cryptocurrency, for example. That's like one of the kind of categories of donors. We also get, like, a few grants here and there as well. But, yeah, like, the bulk of our research. And, like, the retreats have been funded by, yeah, like, very generous people.

In part, I ask, because plenty of the people who are watching this may have some cash that they would like to donate. And so what's the website? Yeah, crieri.org. And, no, yeah, we accept donations. And, like, I think, like, they go really far. Like, I can do, like, make a very quick pitch in plants. If you're interested in the psychedelic kind of visualization efforts, right, like, we're going to be open sourcing this tool. We're going to be crowdsourcing data points so that we get.

you know, like thousands of people kind of like rate and rank and, you know, qualify this phenomenology, see how accurate it is, which I think is, yes, kind of like a service to the world in a sense, like being able to like give people parameters to replicate their experience, give them a Photoshop of their consciousness, so to speak. And if you think of kind of like the finance of these efforts, I mean like if you look at, okay, like one of the, let's say like a, in classic academia, how you run a study, right? Like, there was like a famous study that studied like Candy Flipping, which is LSD plus MDMA.

And what they did is they use standard measures, you know, like questionnaires where they gave either LSD or LSD plus MDMA to participants. You know, and then they asked them to fill out a questionnaire, like the mystical experience is questionnaire. And they find

hey, actually the questionnaire doesn't show a difference between the two. And they conclude, well, MDMA probably doesn't add anything to the psychedelic experience. because it's like, well, that just means your instruments are, like, poorly calibrated, right? Like, there's clearly a difference. Psychonauts, like, will generally agree there's a huge difference and so on. And, you know, one study like that costs, like, millions of dollars, right?

Like, actually getting, like, all of these infrastructure and, like, yeah, doing it in a lab. At QRI, you know, we were able to do things such as, like, yeah, organizing, like, week-long retreats in a place like Brazil for really cheap. And actually being able to go through hundreds of... like visual experiments over the course of several weeks with people who are like really passionate who not only will you know they're not going to fill out a questionnaire really they're going to be like writing a report about their phenomenology and what they learned and there's a lot of like collective knowledge that gets generated this way that then we make publicly available so

I would argue in terms of kind of like the information theory of like hey how do you explore consciousness I would argue our approach is a huge kind of like force multiplier right like we're able to do a lot of experiments for very cheap and find the ones that are really interesting. Yeah. Andres, thank you. Thank you so much, Kurt. This is fascinating. Okay.

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