👾🍄🧮 222 - Andrés Goméz Emilsson on Psychedelic Computer Science & The Mathematics of Consciousness

So we find that a mechanism that puts information together must have causal effects. And after looking at every system we could think of, the one principle that we've highlighted was topological viprocation. This is an effect very well known in physics. This is the technology of the electromagnetic field, very active area research, where the simplification would be something like when the field lines look at the create an objective boundary that kind of separates inside and outside.

And in many of those cases, they actually vibrate as a unit. Like you can determine what molecule is, just by what vibrational modes it has. We think it's the same with a full experience. Like a full experience is an actual object, is an actual segmentation of the field, and it has vibrational mode.

And those vibrational modes are helpful for computation. So we're talking about a very different computational part that uses topological pockets and vibrations in order to compute create a world simulation. It's a completely different way of thinking than in terms of digital computers or simulations. But eventually it's going to be adopted, and eventually we will have conscious computers.

And we have to have a plan for that. Greetings, future fossils. This is Michael Garfield welcoming you to episode 222 of the podcast that explores our place and time. If you are watching this on YouTube, then you might be wondering about the backdrop here.

I am recording this on the eve before the rehearsal dinner for my extremely overdue wedding to my partner Nikki Taylor of almost 20 years. So this is my in-laws living room here. And I am crunching until the final hour to get you a really wonderful conversation. I had recently with Andres Gomez Emilsen, the president and director of research at Quality Research Institute.

I met Andres through our shared appointments as members of the advisory board of the psychedelic research nonprofit, No Inautics, which some of you might have heard me talk about on the Danny Jones podcast a few months ago about our work to use extended state DMT protocols pioneered by Andrew Gallimore and Rick Strossman to investigate the phenomenology and ontology of persistent non-human entities of the DMT. Space, but in a way Andres and his collaborators at QRI have taken on a project even more intense and epic, which is to use computational methods to unlock the mysteries of consciousness. Now, those of you who have been listening to the show for a while know that I am of two minds about the validity of quantitative techniques in this domain. I accept with humility the fact that idealists and materialists have argued one another to the grave repeatedly for millennia on the subject of whether mind or matter happens to be more fundamental.

And I think it should be obvious by now to adopt a meta-perspectival approach in which we accept that pluralism is the only valid way forward. Or as I've been getting more interested in the work of John Vervake and his collaborators, like my friend and his co-author, Anna Riedel, who I had on the show a while back to talk about effective altruism. There's a phrase transjectivity, which I love about what lies beneath or ontologically prior to the objective or subjective, at least as I understand it. Anyway, Andres is amazing.

Let me read you a little bit from his Twitter page here where he calls himself Captain Pleasure, transhuman neo-Buddhist from the future on sociology, artificial intelligence, mathematics, philosophy, neo-noir film, and the post-singularity era. If that doesn't sound fun to you, then you're tuning into the wrong channel. Anyway, Andres and I have the kind of conversation that I was looking to have for years and years as host of the Santa Fe Institute's Complexity Podcast, namely one in which we discuss the benefits and limitations of a computational investigation of consciousness. We talk about top-tier, ultra-heady, cerebral, super-tripper kind of stuff, including the work on integrated information theory that informed quality of research as well as the commitment to the mitigation of suffering by philosophers like transhumanist David Pierce, who by the way, I involved in a simulated around table on the relationship between psychedelics and transhumanism for an article I wrote for H plus magazine back in 2009, and I will link that virtual discourse between David, Terrence McKenna, Tim Leary, Eric Davis, and Mark Pesci in the show notes, along with links to a ton of other interesting articles that we talk about in this episode, including QRIs, investigations into a computational model of consciousness and time perception, the construction of a pseudo-arrow of time.

We get into things like the way that different psychedelics, such as MDMA and ketamine, result in modifications to cognitive processing. We talk about the mutating topology of the geometries in DMT space as one goes deeper and deeper into the experience. We talk about tension and frisson in the experience and how we can understand cognitive dissonance through a computational lens. And many other wonderful things.

This was just a delightful conversation. And while I left it not entirely sure that I agree with Andres in every respect, that's not what we're doing here. That's not why I host this show. This is a channel for generative conversations.

And if you step away from this after our time together, inspired and provoked, then mission accomplished. On that note, I want to take a moment to thank everybody who is supporting this edge work on my sub-stack and my Patreon with your monthly donations eight years in the future fossils. And this is still not making me a living wage. And the stakes just keep going up.

So thanks to everyone who has helped me feed my kids, including the new patrons, Wayne Lewis, John Roger Kirk, Arkendall, Rex Washburn, Mike Loga, Gustavo Oka, Teresa Chones, John O'Rothenberg, Blay, Hermann, Ogulnick, and everybody who's been buying my new studio album, The Age of Reunion on Bandcamp. They take 15%, but it's still really cool to see your little pictures and reviews. Next to a piece of music I spent years etching away at. So thank you everybody.

And thanks also to the people that have taken interest in my new project, Humans on the Loop. I just published the first essay, an introductory piece, to this new series on sub-stack and Patreon. And my fingers are crossed and my prayers are cast to the wind that Ashaunissi Ventures will soon name me as a recipient of their 2024 fellowship so that I can charge full speed ahead into this new project, Exploring Wisdom and Technology and Human Agency in the Age of Automation. Because after years and years of working on this show and on complexity and all the years I spent in performance philosophy on the Festival Circuit, et cetera.

And also after last year in a clandestine, pre-seed AI startup, I feel that it's really time to anchor all of these philosophical musings in some kind of actionable insight, in some kind of boots on the ground, artifacts, a package. I've come around to wanting to synthesize and articulate everything and to continue learning in public in a way that helps people step up to the challenges posed as described by my friend Joshua Shri in episode 219, in his episode of the Emerald Podcast, So You Want to Be a Sorcerer in the Age of Mythic Powers. I really do believe that it is time for us to understand how to wield powerful tools, including language itself, when we cannot even fully understand the mechanisms at play. And so in that sense, one of the major themes of future fossils which is epistemic humility has now become a central tenet of this new project, Humans on the Loop.

What say do we have? What responsibility do we have to accept? And what is the scope at which we can truly hope to make a difference? These are all questions that we touch on today in this conversation with André Skomez-Emelson, and also in the conversation I just had yesterday with the wonderful Timothy Morton, Rice University philosopher, author of the new book, Hell in Search of a Christian Ecology.

I took extraordinarily thorough notes on this, and I will be sharing my reflections in the members only section of the Future Fossils Discord server available to patrons. I am going to do the same also for the work Scale Theory and Non-Disciplinary Inquiry by my new friend at Joshua DiCaglio, former PhD student of my friend and mentor Richard Doyle, we're really in a groove now with Future Fossils, and I'm very excited about what it means to be discussing these deep, rich, fascinating works. So pick these two books up, Scale Theory and Hell, if you haven't in the Future Fossils bookshop.org. Reading lists store the link is down in the show notes and then join me in the Discord server to discuss these books and the transformations they wreak upon your consciousness.

And speaking of transformations of consciousness, I'm going to stop rambling now. Thank you and enjoy this magnificent conversation and the jubilant presence of badass super nerd, André Skomez-Emelson, thank you. So yeah, the way that I want to start through today's conversation is your website, which is just a fractal rabbit hole of interesting, long, profound, deeply wrought writings about consciousness and cognition and computation and cryptography and other wonderful sounds. We're teaching my daughter, phonetics right now.

Let's just take a barnstorming tour of all of this stuff. But I want to start with you and your history. And especially if you want to draw on, from my own sort of historical curiosity, one of the most interesting pages on the site is something I don't see a lot of people do, which is research lineages and talking about history of the thinkers that have inspired you and Sean McGowan and Mike Johnson in the formation of quality research. Yes, the personal and institutional backstory.

Let's start there. Oh, awesome. Yeah, personally, I have been always very curious about the nature of reality since I was a child and five years old, six years old. I think most of my friendships and hangouts revolve around trying to figure out what's going on.

I guess I'm broadly very skeptical of explanations that people have for how things work, how consciousness works, how reality works. I do trust physicists, though, when it comes to things like the standard model and Maxwell's equation, that does really work. So I think those very seriously, and then really also take my phenomenology very seriously, my own experience. I was going to be a mathematician, pretty sure, who are physicists for most of my, yeah, ten years, but then at 16, I had an ego death, ego dissolution effect with weed of all things.

It only happened once, it's never happened again with that substance. And then the reason it was like, okay, that day, it had to happen for some reason. The main takeaway from that experience actually was that consciousness is the deepest mystery. Physics is, okay, still quite mysterious, but we've made a lot of progress, and we have some, don't have a handle of it.

But consciousness, that night, it became very clear to me that, yeah, I personally did not have any idea what was going on. And since then, I've dedicated a lot of my thinking to consciousness. I spent a while thinking that my life's goal would be to provide a philosophical kind of explanation for why we're all one or why we're all interconnected, parallel, reconstructing something like Hinduism or Buddhism, which I much later discovered and read upon. But then, yeah, roughly in my early 20s, there was an important twist which was reading David Pierce and really coming to service with the fact that philosophical changes or ideological changes are not gonna be enough to tackle suffering at a grand scale.

Since then, actually I've dedicated my time to this intersection between consciousness research, understanding consciousness, and the reduction of suffering, and the enhancement of happiness, how do those intersect? And those kind of resonances, in a time when VA was starting, in a time where there was a rationalist community driving people, there was a sense in the Bay Area of people really caring about ideas. Mike Johnson and from Stevens who were very aligned. Oh, there's gonna be an institute that essentially props up consciousness research as like a EA worthy organization or EA worthy, like at least research, a static research approach.

2015 or so, Mike was writing a pretty big qualia, which ended up being an important kind of foundational text for a qualia research institute, as well as a bunch of computing posts that I had written by them. They would combine these foundations and the sum ended up being more than the, no, they all ended up being more than the sum of the parts. And I think, yeah, like our bodies of work really synergized to paint a picture of what was possible. And since then, 2019, oh, 2018, I actually quit my job to work on this full time.

And it was a big jump. And I do not regret it, but it obviously has been a lot of work to be able to survive on this sort of research, but I'm very happy with my decision actually. Yeah, not to go off on a tangent here, but I know that you and I on the call that we had recently with the folks at Noenautics, where I'm on the advisory board and with Andrew Gallimore, who's their lead researcher, working on extended safety and T-Suff, there was a moment in that call where it seemed like, even in kind of self-selected, aligned group of people that there was disagreement on the economic legibility of fundamental research into the nature of consciousness. And just in case people don't know, like I come down squarely on the side of could anything be more important?

Like this is, to me, the most intractable questions in the sciences, questions about fundamental definitions of living systems and of intelligence and what is it to experience the world subjectively, these are all hotspots for what I love what Jim O'Shaughnessy calls adventure capital, but these are places where the fact that we have not managed to break through the bedrock on these inquiries, at least at scale. It's not, even if there are people such as yourself who have really refined and developed ideas about what's going on in these domains, the fact that we haven't arrived as a society in a paradigm that feels as though we have answered some of these questions to satisfaction means that there'll be gold in them hills. And yeah, it's just funny to me that I would love to know, before we get into a little bit more about the sort of formalisms at play and the theoretical scaffolding of this stuff in more detail, I'd love to know where you stand on the, as someone who has been out there beating the streets for this Institute, what you feel is the strongest articulation of the value of this research. Yeah, fantastic question.

There really are like several approaches to it. I would emphasize three pillars I care a lot about, and we focus a lot on basically focusing on, okay, people who suffer a lot, how can we help, how to raise the baseline of everyday life, and then also how to experience and make sense of like extreme positive valence experiences, healthily incorporate them into normal everyday life or how can culture actually digest these experiences without turning into calls or things like that. So those three, it really depends on the person, like some person, if they had like a mystical experience before or like breakthrough meditation experience, that might really interest them. Because hey, like it's something that clearly was very meaningful in their life, and multiple are not able to resonate with it, but here we are saying like, no actually, look at the logarithmic scales, no you probably did experience 10 to the three, 10 to the four times more valence than the normal, like this was very significant, don't worry, we also care about that.

On the side of extreme suffering, anybody who's had like really intense suffering will generally be supportive and yeah, this really matters. There's often a transition where it's the first time somebody experiences very intense suffering that something clicks, they realize the value of it. It's just very hard to relate. It's like you just think pain was a big deal.

They might have thought what really matters is like depression or lack of motivation, but pain I would be able to deal with that is no, actually not, not if you get up on a certain level, nobody can. And then for people who are more in the philosophical kind of computer science, the kind of cluster actually was really juicy is the promise of super intelligence, about a bit consciousness, conscious super intelligence. And that's where also yeah, consciousness research is really relevant. But in ways that I often find myself in this, yeah, predicament to where the things that I say sound really absurd, we can sit down and have a long conversation.

Most the smart people end up saying, okay, yeah, you do have some basis for what you're saying. But yes, when it comes to super intelligence, essentially things like DMT states of consciousness really suggest that consciousness can have really interesting computational properties that are actually outside of the touring paradigm of computing. So it's a, I think it's a really big deal. And like anybody really cares about computation, mathematics, making sense of information for us is like, yeah, actually this is really core.

Like you can't close your eyes and pretend it doesn't exist because it's a big deal. Yeah, actually maybe that's the place to start pointing to your intellectual forebears, like Julia Tannoni. And I always wonder because I've traced such a random, or at least epistemically random path through things with this show that it's not clear to me who exactly we're speaking to. And so I have to be careful launching into conversations with folks about stuff like this.

Because again, something that seems relatively evident is that it's okay to talk about the bringing as a computational organ, that life is fundamentally computational, that we are dealing with as you cite Tannoni, you cite Carl Friston, and others like Robin Carhart Harris, who have done work on the brain as something that is both self-organized thing and thermodynamics. It's self-organizing and entropy producing. And there's this lineage that goes back to people like Julia Prigigigine about systems as dissipative structures with the managed, the flows of energy and by extension matter and information through landscapes. All of that is to say, there's also this sort of critique from people like Jaron Lanier about cybernetic totalism and concerns that are anchored in watching the way that this stuff gets appropriated by the tech world, the way that's similar to the way that 19th century robber barons appropriated Darwinism to justify laissez-faire capitalism, except now we have this weird AGI religion in Silicon Valley that considers it that they're entitled to paperclip optimized the entire planet in order to birth this god out of the machine realm.

And yeah, it's obvious to me that's like, why some people might have a bad taste in their mouth when we talk about the brain and computation. Yeah, so I would love for you to just think you've already done some of the work here in explaining that adopting this kind of thinking does actually get us meaningfully closer to addressing the problem, if you want to talk about that, the condition of suffering. But I'd love to just allow you to wax on the features of this frame that you find most useful and then maybe starting with that talk that you gave on the hyperbolic geometry of DMT experiences, we can actually get down into the concrete details of what this means for people that are trying to better understand quote unquote non-ordinary states of consciousness, because this is the kind of stuff that is not happening in most complex systems research institutions where we've got such a clear and obvious integration or moire between this lineage of thought and also these profound questions about phenomenology. Yeah, okay, terrific.

Yeah, yeah, great question. It's multifaceted, so let me wax a little bit on the history and how it's all put together. Because I do think it is quite special, obviously, if I'm part of my baby, and of course, yeah, I'm gonna have a good opinion on the foundation of it and how it's put together, but I do think it goes further than other attempts. And let me explain why.

The idea of actually having lineages was from my co-founder, we put them together by this process of, okay, let's throw everything at the wall and see what sticks and then we talk to other collaborators and say, okay, what is a minimal set of recognized, actually super awesome scientists and researchers that will span a set of ideas that if we could put them on the table and have them lead up, we'll be actually really useful for inspiration for doing useful work and we'll serve as a kind of foundation or, yeah, I guess, our spirit scientists, philosophers that might help along the way. And there's several themes. There's one theme that is like phenomenology, like taking phenomenology very seriously. You know, this idea of like, at the end of the day, the only thing that you can truly trust is experience that you're having for example, the quality that you're having, that is the ground truth as far as anybody's concerned.

So the phenomenology link essentially, it's a combination of David Beers who has advocated for the reduction of suffering for a long time, but really in a super systematic way and trying to quantify it and providing paths forward. But also he has talked a lot about the significance of psychedelics for our understanding of consciousness. I could get into more details, but I'll keep it short. The second one, if phenomenology, David Lehar, is very well known for being an advocate of indirect realism.

The idea that you don't receive the world directly, you actually only perceive a world simulation inside your nervous system. Very trippy, the first time you realize this, I think the smart kids realize this when they're like six or seven years old, but 90% of people doubt. It's very strange. That's sitting on the edge of my bed, poking my eye, like playing with vocal link and being like, oh, this is the consequence of having meat in control of the enactment of world spaces, of course, that's not what I was saying at six.

But yeah, exactly. Exactly. Kids like that, they're like, yeah, poking their eyes or spinning a lot. Yeah, they're hacking their own matrix, essentially.

So yes, there's a personality type. So seemingly how he's very known for that, but also if he has a really avant-garde book that is like very poorly written, but it's very endearing. And I really love it to death, which is called The Grand Illusion, where he documents his second article, Odyssey. It's very funny because the style of writing is very peculiar and it just doesn't look like serious academic work.

At the same time, the things that he's saying is, wow, this is what a PhD in cognitive science taking psychedelics really seriously in the 90s, would be saying, and he's, wow, actually, he's arriving somewhere, he's making big insights and discoveries, completely illegible to everybody else, but we really like, actually, he's right. He's actually hitting on things having to do with how non-linear waves add up to form the style of representations and stuff like that. Anyway, great guy. And yeah, of course, yeah, Buddhism, Buddhism, it's such a wealth of information about consciousness, mapping the genres, mapping micro-attention movements, the various components of experience, we take that all of that super seriously, not necessarily the full ontology, it's not like we take Buddhism as received wisdom, but it's, hey, out of 100 things that might say about meditation, maybe six days actually really on point.

So very worth looking into. Now, symmetry is a very important component of the QRI lineage, and I owe that to Mike, who I obviously cared a lot about symmetry, even before quality research, before meeting him, but he's the one who drew the connection between valence and symmetry, and he put it on for the TPI quality, we discussed it a bunch, we've been developing it for a while, but the original kind of connection is in that book, but TPI quality, I highly recommend it, it's a great foundation for consciousness. But symmetry is very deep, it's not just people might see, oh, we think that symmetrical experiences feel better to really grapple, to understand what we're saying, you need a foundation, which is this mathematical model, or idea that approaches this mathematical, okay, let me elaborate on that. The reason why a lot of people are very skeptical when I say something like, oh yeah, we're gonna study consciousness objectively, and we're gonna find out exactly what it is, because it sounds like when somebody says, oh, we're gonna find out what life is, fundamentally, right?

But nowadays, most biologists, most tennis will say, there's no such thing as life, right? It's a set of processes, molecular complexity, but there's not a theme, it's a cluster, fuzzy cluster of processes, and a lot of people think of consciousness that way, especially various part people, like very well-educated people, they think, yeah, we're just gonna find out that it's not a thing, that it's not a specific, it's just a collection of processes and computations, and the project is doomed, if you think you're gonna find like a very unified principle for consciousness. But in our world of quality research, in terms of principle, the key here is quality of formalism. This is the idea that for any given experience, there corresponds a mathematical shape, it's such that the features of that shape are isomorphic to the phenomenology of the experiences, like these square relationships of system, mathematical objects, features, and then they map onto phenomenology, and the square completes, like that is quality of formalism, and there were not the only people who think that way.

That's where Julian Ternoni comes into play. The first, I would say, like, big researcher, planting a flag of, yes, let's find a mathematical model for consciousness, like a formalism for it. I don't agree with the math of IIT, I think it means guided, but I really love that they're really trying, yeah. Actually, I wanna interrupt you there real quick, because I just listened to an interview with Rupert Sheldrake, where he was talking about an exchange that he had, and a response that he eventually published in a journal of scientific controversies about whether or not it would be possible to use IIT to experimentally verify this hypothesis that the sun may indeed be conscious, and that Sheldrake was basically saying, but it's not an unreasonable claim because according to Ternoni's math, we can't actually know, it's non-computable, and yet, throughout your whole website, and this is an interesting distinction, and I've seen you on Twitter talk about this, about, in other conversations, talk about being able to measure integration of neural states and being able to measure information flows in ways that seem mathematically intractable to IIT as it was originally formalized.

So maybe this is a good time until before we get to the hyperbolic geometry of DMT, maybe you can walk folks rather slowly through how you believe that we can do this, which is the pin that I really appreciate your point, that what we're talking about here with all due humility are just provisional formalisms, that this is gonna point to everything I studied in a real philosophy, we're saying what you have, the Chalmers' hard problem of consciousness is just insoluble as stated because you're consuming that you can collapse or reduce one domain, the qualitative and the quantitative into the other, and that in fact, the strongest claims that we can make are about correlations in neurotheological research between the brain states of meditators as observed through the third person and their experiences as reported from the first person, and so we can get better and better at doing that, and that should not be even debatable. And anyway, so yeah, I would love to talk about how it is that the folks at QRI believe that you can get around some of these impossible goals that IIT has set out for itself. Absolutely, yeah. Absolutely, yes, yes, it's absolutely, I will say that we do share with IIT that the full formula for computing amount of consciousness and valent, how good about experience feels, is probably intractable for very complex systems and complex experiences, but very good approximation can be made with some simplifying assumptions.

And here's the thing, we actually, there's also parallel with IIT, like I remember talking to them 2016, like the people working at the Lab of Julian Tannoni, and they were saying like, yeah, we're starting out by trying to find what mathematics would correspond to an experience of just empty space, a three dimensional, pure empty space. Like, which is very curious, like how can that happen? Why are they trying to do that? Because presumably empty space is like a limit case where the math is presumably simpler.

Essentially, this is what you're doing science typically, right? Is quantum field theory or quantum mechanics? Mostly intractable for lots of complex systems, but if you simplify the system, make the light super coherent, you use a crystal lattice, add lots of symmetry essentially. Then the math can be simplified, and then you can make predictions and like really test them.

The same where at quality of research, our preferred kind of like test beds are actually very, for example, very peak positive valence experiences, because we have found that they're very simple in nature. Like the Jannis concentration states of absorption, of bliss, rapture, pure space, and the nothing is, they are very simple in their texture. There's not a lot going on, it's almost there's just only one tiny thing going on, but it's repeated. And repeated and then you get the resonances of that repetition, which is a very simple system.

So that's ideal for us. Okay, very few symmetries are broken. Here's where the theory can be tested and can be evaluated. So you will see in our work throughout the years, we have emphasized a lot of the significance of these extreme states because that's where we can do a lot of simplifications and find actually the math to be tractable.

So that said, in fact, is you can make simplifying assumptions and get good approximations. I'll give you an example, which is with the math that we have developed, we can compute how unpleasant an arbitrary sound is, where a lot of research and computing dissonance is in music where you have like pure tone, but together, or your spectrum has like several pure tones with amplitude, there's relatively simple math to compute the dissonance of that. But in real world sounds, we're actually have like noise and people screaming or baby crying and like all these strains like spectra, that math will not work because it's not made of pure tones, it's made of other processes. But we have with some simplifying assumptions, we can compute the dissonance of that as well.

So that's like an example. Again, I'm not gonna be able to deliver the complete computation without simplifying assumptions because it's planned to mechanics is something where you actually need to check every possible combination and get a score all of the possible combinations that becomes intractable. But when you have a lot of symmetries, a lot of simplifying assumptions can be made because a lot of the combinations are being exactly the same. So a lot of the things gets allowed in the end.

I just wanna query you about this notion that consciousness is in some functional sense definable as a form of information compression, which seems like the study of consciousness depends on the same kind of thing. Like boiling down, bewildering, quote unquote, intractable complexity into something upon which we can operate. And I'm curious whether you stand on that notion that just to tie it back to something I've been thinking a lot about recently, which is hallucination in language models and how it's becoming more and more widely appreciated and obvious that this thing that we were flippantly calling dreaming, machine dreaming actually does seem like more like the operation of autonomic processes in the human mind, like the quote unquote unconscious. And that maybe what we're dealing with, at least with this layer of AI, with AI evolution as it's presented to us now, is something less like the mechanization of human consciousness and something more like the mechanization of the more machinic processes that directly undergird our conscious awareness and filter information up to something we can consider as a subject.

And that this was evident in the recent gorgeous but canceled Amazon Prime video adaptation of William Gibson's The Peripheral, and they have a conscious machine character who is asked a question and offers an answer and then when asked to elaborate on the reasoning for her answer, she says, actually I can't give you the reasoning because this is something that just bubbled up from my deep learning network. And so it's like this sort of look forward Gibson sort of suggesting that even as, and I'm skipping ahead in our conversation to the stuff that you've written about the boundary problem in machine consciousness. But yeah, just like how do you understand these kinds of relations and do you think that the notion that the evolutionary utility of consciousness has something to do with making things simple enough in order to be acted on by the organism or by the system? I'm curious what you're saying about that.

100%. The connection there is super deep connection but it's essentially a little bit tricky. And I see a lot of people, of course, while the research has its own perspective on these, for example, I don't know how to pronounce his first name but it's Shami Huber, like Jorgen, Shami Huber, famous machine learning researcher, very much like a Cassandra character talking about algorithms in the 90s that actually worked to use them today on like much bigger computing. But yeah, people thought like he was very much a wacko because actually, yeah, he said he has to do with art actually, but if he has a theory of consciousness which is based on compression and it's okay, and beauty and consciousness and beauty, then like that's when you have information compression of a certain type, that is what consciousness is.

And when the rate of compression is accelerating, you experience pleasure and like the moment of compression is a moment of beauty has like interesting kind of yeah, like, circulation is like that. And they agree with experience. And there's something to that. However, while your research will not function lists, we don't believe that consciousness is the execution of a function.

So just because you have something that is doing compression doesn't mean it's gonna be conscious. In fact, probably the optimal compression systems are not conscious. Follow the math to the very, very end, probably consciousness is not gonna help you there. However, we do think that a core reason why consciousness was recruited, why it's being used by natural selection for something, it's because it actually does have properties that allow it to be useful for compressing information.

That this is really core. And it connects to the symmetry of your villains. Essentially, the picture is something along the lines of, if we prefer actually states that have more symmetries and have more smooth geometry, that is a default. Like whenever we can do that, we tend to go in that direction, at least if you're a fully functioning human, we tend to prefer representations that are simpler, more smooth, fewer symmetries broken.

And in a sense, we arrive at the simplest representation we can get away with. Now, what do we mean by getting away with is the simplest representation that allows to make good enough predictions that we're happy with it. And in fact, this is very deep. This has to do with the free energy principle, another of our lineages, Carl Freisten, where the optimal kind of information processing system is one that is making models of their environment, but they're not models that fit the data of the environment perfectly.

In fact, you don't want to just minimize prediction error, because if you do that, then you just, you have what is called overfeeding. Yes, essentially you will make a two precise of a model, and it will not generalize. Like it might feed all the data you have experienced before, but then it will not generalize because you added too many epicycles, you just do complex of a model. An example is, you can always explain things by adding more and more complexity to it, but you can say like, how did I get this?

Or it's because like, a CIA operator wanted me to drink it. Like why, and I can just make up stories, right? Oh, they planted memories in me. Like I didn't pick it up from the fridge, or like, I could add more and more explanation.

And they would have zero prediction error in the past. You can track everything that I experienced that way. But it's not going to generalize. So we're not only trying to reduce prediction errors, we're also trying to make simple models.

In our model, the big picture is that prediction errors feel bad because that's like out of phase interactions, that's a type of broken symmetry. But then model complexity, like very complex models also feel bad because that means they have a lot of asymmetries. So the state that we arrive at naturally by balancing these two things is relatively simple models that I make decent predictions. And that is what feels the best actually.

But that's what consciousness is useful for doing that. Okay, so a couple of things there. I gave one talk in the time I was at SFI, and I'll have to go find this chart. It was about a parabolic curve of the compute time, and data collection time required for a particular model plotted against the prediction accuracy.

And obviously, on the low end of the curve, you can act fast and it's very cheap. On the other end of the curve, it takes forever to get some kind of output. And by that point, the world has changed to your point. It's like, you're over fit.

So it's something that doesn't even exist anymore. That chart really got me thinking about this ratcheting process that we seem stuck in right now as civilization, which is to, as I discussed with Montford Lobbickler and Geoffrey West back in episode 212, they were talking about information scaling in society and how we keep coming up with these ever more comprehensive computation architectures based on ever more panoptic surveillance systems. But as my friend and mentor Richard Doyle has pointed out, every new eye begets a new blind spot. Or as Kevin Kelly says, we're on an exponential expansion of ignorance curve because every question answered raises multiple new questions.

And so there's this, one of the things that you're speaking to is also, it's surely the metabolic cost of trying to do this stacked on top of the problem of how trying to pursue conciliant or totalizing models of the world to some kind of extreme ends up undermining its own aims of control and understanding by generating exponentially more externalities. So the more we try to measure with our economy, the more it starts to slip through our hands. And that's where I want to get to, finally, you're writing on hyperbolic geometry in DMT because when I had Eric Davis on the show back in 99 and 132, Eric and some of his work in his book, High Weirdness, the people printed with MIT Press and elsewhere, he's talked about the second experience in terms of metabolic ontology. And it's like, there is this thing, once you start to see the trip through physics, but it's like, God, you come out of those experiences, you're so hungry.

It's clearly requiring a lot of calories to occupy a state of consciousness that seems capable of performing 100-dimensional operations on virtual objects and stuff like that. So yeah, this is where I would love to just pull the cord and let you rip on the way that QRI has created a taxonomy for different depths, different layers of psychedelic experience and how you start to make sense of it from a computational framework. Oh, absolutely, yes. Okay, start off.

DMT, in general, I consider it like an epistemological hand grenade. Given to the average person without preparation, we're gonna really scramble their belief architecture because it's like, how do they make sense of this? And, quickly, okay, they will be very confused for a week and then they will forget about it because it's just like, you can't integrate that sort of experience. Now, okay, we have people who, okay, they've been studying consciousness for a long while, they have stronger epistemology, they've had lots of psychedelic experiences.

They've been there, maybe they've even had lots of bad trips and good trips, like they know the territory, they're not gonna go crazy with more DMT or likely. You never know, you really never know, actually. But, and let's say they also have kind of background math and physics, like when you have these type of crowd, okay, like looking at psychedelic experiences, they wouldn't be paying attention to something else, right, it's not just a wow, that was impressive, it's hold on, I was able to hold off in my amazement and just pay attention to the features and the nature of this experience. And he was like forming a think tank of just people like this, ever since I started posting on quality computing, I've been reached out by a lot of what I consider super smart people who happen to trip a lot to sensor, I just had lots of conversations with this kind of crowd and it is in that kind of mindset with this shared goal, I'm making sense of what's going on, that we've collected just a bunch of facts about the nature of these experiences that seem to be fairly universal, the thing is that you require the vocabulary and the training to be able to notice it and confirm it.

Just to give you a flavor of kind of the sort of data we started with, this is way before we had an history for this, this is just, hey, there's like this natural phenomena which is the DMT experiences, it has not been properly documented, what really happens, the lens is not very helpful, 99.99% of the reports from DMT are really focused on the semantic content is alive, was taken to the spaceship and they showed me this object and they had this message, whereas this crowd that I'm talking to and the whole mindset of quality of research is it, okay, yes, but what was the symmetry pattern in the clothing of the alien? Can you tell me that? And if you start paying attention to these mathematical features, a lot of things start to come up. One early result was all of the wallpaper symmetry groups, which is like all of the ways you can get a plane to desolate, do appear on DMT and flittingly, but is the wall of a sun and has a mandala symmetry, then it has a triangular type symmetry, then it has like a diagonal symmetry, it cycles through all of them.

And as far as I know, nobody had pointed that out, the people had said, oh, there's symmetries, it escalates. But then we went to one to further and said, okay, but which one? So let's catalog them. And then further, like a very strange thing happened, which is somebody reported on a trip where they went to a palace where the walls were desolate with heptagons and there was no distortions, it was like crumbly and strange, it was completely flat walls, but desolate with heptagons.

And it's not possible unless you're in a hyperbolic space. That's a savvy observation. I think I tell in the conversation I had with maybe it's 130, with psychedelic researchers, Jessica Nielsen and Link Swanson, just fun aside from people whose brains are melting right now, that I recounted a mushroom trip I had probably almost 20 years ago now, where we got stuck in a thicket in the woods. At a time of the year where the forest was just rich with spiders and realized that we were tripping hard enough, we were seeing like hexagonal tiling everywhere.

And we were like, how the hell do we get out of this brambly mess of spider webs? And I was like, gentlemen, I've figured it out. We just have to follow the hexagons out of this thicket instead of the octagons. But like the octagons you're gonna get your face stuck in a spider web.

The hexagons are just air, but there's nothing there actually. Just follow the hexagons out of the woods. It actually just pleases me to know and to hear you recounting the same sort of geometrical inference. Yes, no, that's great.

That's awesome. Yeah, I'm just like imagining the graphic novelization of the story of this organization. There's the hyperbolic surface. There you go.

Yes, oh my God, that should be done. But no, that's a great anecdote. Follow the hexagons are the way. Yeah, different shapes have different valences actually.

So there are some shapes you don't want actually. There's some bad shapes on DMT. You start seeing them. Oh, this is gonna converge as something bad because they just don't fit together.

It's very different. So yeah, a language of shapes is gonna sound so silly. Do you find this uniform across? Yeah, when you say bad shapes.

Yeah. Can you give me an example of shapes that people consistently find ominous? Yes, I'll give you like a as the strongest kind of like meta example because it's also hopefully helpful for people who might get stuck in this state on a psychedelic state. You really want to avoid on a psychedelic is where half of you is vibrating in a certain way and half of you is vibrating in another way that you think compatible.

That is the thing that you really want to avoid. It happens in lots of ways. For example, if you're like in between two worldviews, like you're Christian, but also you've read Richard Dawkins and you're struggling inside on a second like that may manifest as like all of this out of your experience is Christian, all of this out of your experience is atheist and they vibrate differently. And if you're stuck in the middle, that's a very unpleasant state because that maximizes the dissonance.

And so yeah, there's ways to, okay, you're noticing that it's about to happen. You put on music, you focus on things, you do have a lot of convergence on it, but all of your organism says yes, that will unify you. And you can bootstrap from there, try to not spend time in the maximally dissonant state. But yeah, some shapes do that, but these two shapes are not compatible with each other.

They produce a lot of dissonance, a lot of prime numbers. It sounds so weird saying that, yeah, some prime numbers, you're imagining a lot of things with 17 in them and a lot of things with seven in them. Those two things put together are not gonna fit and don't go in that direction. Focus instead on six and nine or six and 12.

Some good combinations. So stay away from primes or... I stay away from multiple concurrent primes. Yes, unless you're more advanced, let me say this, you can find a space where there will be consonants, but it's gonna be very controlled and very hyperbolic and very specific and it's not gonna be very human.

So either you're making human compatible, it's gonna be a very unpleasant or you're turning into an alien to be able to experience it. I mean, you have been wondering about, there was a workshop on complex system science and music, harmonic structure of music and music perception at SFI a few years ago. And they were poking around the perimeter of this question, which sounds like what you're actually saying is that there's something here about the perceived valence for people who are trained into understanding something like certain esoteric forms of jazz or math rock. But it's, yeah, not everybody wants a seven meter compounded over a 17 meter on top of a nine beat in the drums.

And so there's actually more mundane, secular instances of it. Absolutely. But I'm doing a new topic. So yeah, yeah.

I'll just mention, yeah, you'll see people who really into very complex music, it's like they already went through all of the civil music and like they're creating more. But having gone through that journey has given them these mental objects and constructs with which they can then process the more complex music. And then, okay, then you're actually, it can be quite high valence, but you need to know how to do it, otherwise it's all you'll get encoupled up. Yeah, so let's get into this, because I feel like again, what I'm hearing you say, actually, you can enjoy this, but you have to become an alien is something akin to the dissonance that I see people who are later on in their years on average, having in the higher throughput milieu of new media environments.

And that there's that notion that everything invented before you were 30 is just, that's not even technology. Like technology is something that emerged after your brain had matured and you don't like it. And I think I'm doing a fair job in most of remaining neuroplastic, but I'm already looking forward into the sort of storm clouds of a day when the even high functioning ADHD doesn't save me from what people like Darren Zu talk about the metahumans with direct neural transfer, where you had to be genetically modified in order to be able to absorb these kind of direct, I know Kung Fu downloads from the singularity. And so yeah, so this is, you get an interesting thing, like that William Irwin Thompson talked about in his work, which is that evil is the enunciation of the next level of order.

And he pointed to the silent generations rejection of rock music and of the cultural modes that emerged in the 50s and 60s and 70s. And that what we were looking at in intergenerational discord is actually something like what you're saying, which is you have people that are differentially habituated to certain kinds of harmonic structure or certain amplitudes or frequencies of information through put. And when it comes to helping people enjoy the psychedelic experience that is the internet, which is like the primary mission statement of this podcast, really. Yeah, this is where I feel like the boots really hit the ground for me with what you're talking about.

The sort of the Buddhist David Pierce thing really speaks to this question of how can we help people who feel overwhelmed by the pace of technological innovation and scientific discovery right now, not entrench themselves in fundamentalist religion or extremist violence and or various other sort of retro romantic future shocked escape maneuvers from this. And obviously it's not join the board or die, but it's like, God give me the serenity to accept that, which I cannot change. But yeah, yeah. So I'll take that where you will.

Yeah, thank you. Thank you. So difficult to say. I don't know.

I'm experiencing lots of future shock these days. And I'm really trying to stay off to date on AI, for example, and I'm really failing at it. But I noticed that even very smart friends and old friends, they're just not keeping up. And they really have no idea where it's at.

And they think that where we're at is actually where we were like five years ago. And they're acting as if we were like 10 years ago. That seems to be just very generalized. Meanwhile, the others, the people who have seen really, I don't mean embrace as well, we will incorporate this into our company and all of this lip service to AI or something like that.

No, but like people who are actually, which seems like to me, like really playing with these technologies, they're all really smart, crazy autistic kids in their 20s, cool like founding companies or getting funding to do AI safety work on this space. And they have a model of what you can do with this. Otherwise, I don't even think the heads of like the AI companies have any idea what like these technologies that they're going to be used for. Because they're not spending eight hours a day playing with them and seeing what you can do with them, they're delegating that.

I think yeah, the people who really hands on this thing is the people I trust the most. And they're saying yeah, these things are crazy. I'll give you an example, number of attention centers. They're like, you can model people as having let's say like maybe six to eight working memory slots, things that are keeping track of or scouting, making sense, they're paying attention to these kids, like doing some tests on how many working memory slots does let's say, TPT4 or GPT4 base or put opus, they're talking about yeah, they have nine or 10.

And the reason they can simulate our human so well is because they dedicate seven of those working memory slots to simulating the human. They have three other ones to reason to provide context and imagine other relationships. So I think it's already at the point of like higher than human intelligence on many dimensions. And yeah, I don't know, feels are shocked.

So I'm out, you know, I didn't think about how am I going to help grandma and not experience future shock. I'm sorry I can really help there. Drugs obviously take MDMA and play with TPT4. Maybe that might do something, but yeah.

God, but then you're just giving it hooksed into your open, warm, surrendered state of, but precisely what the military in an intelligence complex was trying to do with psychedelics in the 50s is people trusting and impressionable. And yeah, so we are in a good space where it's one of the things that might make people more comfortable. I would push back on that a little bit. Interacting with a large language model on psychedelics is, and I put that on Twitter, people with experiences doing that that is usually a strange schizophrenic prior knowledge of type of experience where like you do know this oh gosh, like it is taking faster than me in several ways.

I don't know. MDMA, it does have the openness and trust component and obviously oxytocin, but the other thing it has though is drastically reduce fear and insecurity. So actually I think it might be quite healthy because even the barrier often times is yeah, people feel insecure and like their ego is getting hurt because this is violating their moral model and there's some pride on our intelligence. MDMA might just allow you to have a very objective assessment here.

Okay, this is what it's capable of. Okay fine, I'll just deal with it. The theory has to be done. I know exactly what would happen, but I wouldn't do it.

It would make it a more objective sense. You know, building on that, and now we're completely in the weeds here, but I'm just, you know, I want to make a kind of anthropological observation, which is that it seems at least anecdotally the case that so many people working in AI are on ketamine prescriptions. Ketamine is described as a substance that downregulates the behavior of the amygdala, right? So it's, I wonder to what extent the changing pharmacological landscape of the tech space might be linked to a kind of half conscious, adaptive response to, like, when Android Jones was on my buddy, Michael Phillips's podcast, third eyedrops a couple years ago, he talked about the history of the military using ketamine for tank drivers.

And that this is a way that somebody can take shrapnel in the leg and then still continue to drive the tank. They can still continue to perform under these like incredibly difficult, highly mechanical conditions. And I'm wondering, to the extent that like people like my buddy, Mitch Maniano, who was a group in a lot of time in New York, talks about living in the city as being embedded in a giant mechanical process. I wondered what extent that you start seeing more and more of the intentional use of psychedelics in particular dissociatives as a way of the human animal tranquilizing itself in order to manage this kind of regular encounter with something that is so strange and challenging.

It's a kind of way challenging. Oh, no, this is a fascinating idea. I would put it on the category of examining how different pharmacological landscapes and cultures favor or disfavor different types of subagents in people. And ketamine is a very difficult.

It does reduce fear of what you're saying down regulating the amygdala. Okay, yes, that's an overall and important part of the picture, but more interestingly with ketamine, it is very computationally non-trivial as well. When people go into ketamine, they process things about their life and their friends and family and traumatic purposes that had, and they come out with a different perspective on them, literally I think the modified wave dynamics of the state of the big ketamine and dissociatives changes the nature of the representations and how they interact with each other. So definitely reduce fear and pain, but also it changes the consistency, just a different type of materials on which these representations can interact.

Things like overlapping context that usually don't come together, like on ketamine, you may experience, for example, oh, what would David Chalmers say to my grandmother? Here's something, they work to be in the same room. On ketamine, it's easy to simulate that sort of scenario. Most people probably would experience it as literally they believe that the spirit of David Chalmers and their grandmother are talking to each other.

You can see it just from a simulation perspective, you're really simulating these interactions. My sense is that yeah, if people in tech, you're working on AI, they have ketamine prescriptions, tackling depression, their fear, and AI psychosis with it. Yeah, chances are they're processing quite a bit and I'm not sure what the outcome of that would be. Sounds very non-trivial to find out.

Intuitively, I would say, it's probably gonna make them do more level-headed decisions, but also potentially not really feel the fear of decisions that actually are dangerous. So double that sort, they do want people in tech and high up to be level-headed, rather not be crippled by fear, I think that's very important. The other thing that ketamine does is like, it does produce some slight delusional ontologies, like the feeling of talking to the future. For example, like feeling that you can tune into a future timeline and things like that, especially high dose experience, and yeah, I don't want people to be diluted that way, who are working on tech for sure, but I don't know.

Okay, actually, since you brought it up and completely independent over any kind of substance use, I have had a lot of what I regard as pre-sentiment were pre-cognitive experiences in my life. And one of the things that we talked about before getting on this call that I was really excited to talk with you about was the publication on the pseudo-time arrow. Trying to timeless causality and time loops in psychedelic experience and the various other kind of features that are of non-ordinary temporal experience. And how this, I remember when David Wohlpert said that perhaps the big question of complex system science is how to reconcile Einsteinian relativity and the notion of Einstein-Minkowski-class blocks space-time with the second law of thermodynamics and the perceived directionality of time.

And just recently on Facebook, and I was saying, actually, I say, independently of psychedelic experiences, but it's also true that some of the most pronounced experiences that I've had of something like future detection have been under the influence. One instance in particular was on Iowaska in 2014 and then prior on LSD in 2007, when in both cases, I felt what I was observing was something like what you're describing in this paper, which is that the perceived direction of time is the property of asymmetries in information exchange or mutual information between one state of matter organization and another state. And that what I got out of these experiences was that you can map the axes of self and other here and there now and then in a higher dimensional manifold of structural resonance, like gradients of structural resonance. So part of what you talk about in this piece about slicing phenomenal time up, challenging this notion about the continuity of the self and saying that the continuity of the self is an illusion created by articulated sub-perceptual threshold frames seems to be something like, again, this thing, which is that maybe we have something like an explanation for reincarnation here that we're not actually talking about the continuity of soul from one body to another, but some kind of structural resonance between something that we would identify discretely due to its information theoretic properties as an individual lifetime and something else we would identify as discrete due to its informational properties as a different lifetime.

But that's happening in a far more mundane and everyday sense right now in terms of my ability to even recognize you as a conversation partner and decide to enter into dialogue with you, that you are on the self-notself continuum more approximately than someone who speaks Mandarin. And that person is closer on that continuum to someone that speaks micro-risile affiliations because they're a tree. And so this is why we get this weird thing where it's science recently announces, oh, you know what, insects are probably conscious after all. And then of course, all of our friends are like, duh.

But anyway, so I'm curious because on the one hand, you've written this thing basically saying, here's a way that we can talk about causality in a timeless way by studying the properties of information flow across abstracted mathematical graphs. And then you're also saying, but if you take drugs, you might have the delusion of speaking to your future selves. I don't know if I have caught you in a self-contradiction or not and I would love for you to go deep on that. Yeah, so to have like really clear epistemology here, I am agnostic about okay, precognition and then like actual weird time effects.

I know of smart people who I trust who have recorded very strange things, well, precognition that I can't really claim. I keep a tab on what is going on there, if there is something. The article to be completely clear, it is essentially it's in between very reductionists but also admitting some level of irreducibility in consciousness. It is reductionists in the sense that it is saying the feeling of the passage of time is completely contained in the structure of each moment of experience.

And so these way we can account for how is it possible and as I can tell it, you can experience very odd things like time loops and moments of eternity without that having to entail that you're literally tapping into some kind of like other physical time. So it's like very mundane in that sense, it's like we can explain the strangest feelings of time just based on a model of information flow in each moment of experience. And I do think that is happening, right? And actually it would maybe separate the phenomenal time component versus okay, maybe like psychic effects or like other stranger things that may be going on.

But I do think like just explain the phenomena knowledge of time, I think that might be sufficient. And I've gotten to a point in meditation, for example, where I can induce time loops. I was not able to do this years ago, but now I can if I put my mind to it. And it feels like a psychedelic time loop.

It requires a lot of surrender because okay, I'm gonna enter a state where it will feel like, I mean that loop forever, but then I intellectually I will know that it's not because I've been there a bunch of times and I know eventually ends. But part of the nature of that state is like it's just feeling like it's gonna loop on forever. And it's fine. I mean, you're having a good time.

That's actually a fantastic state because you just feel like, oh, I'm conscious of trapped in this pool of love forever. Okay, fantastic, no problem. The big problem on psychedelic and time loops is when you're having a bad time and you believe you're in a time loop because that is just so grueling. It's not even hell, it's pretty much it's the feeling.

But time loops are not to be feared in and of themselves. The same with moments of eternity though, either very clean, generally they're just super positive feelings. There's like a sense of, oh, release and expansion and kind of like fully letting go into feeling like eternity. Like, oh, there's just nothing is happening and never will happen.

And you get a clean version of that's so good that it does something to the soul. Oh, I can finally rest till like time is not real. There's something to it, very therapeutic. I think also I think like a lot of peak, for example, ketamine experiences involve moments of eternity that like you take a certain threshold dose and an kneeling process gets started where all these vibrations start to synchronize.

There's a stage in the ketamine trip is before the many times in our circles where all the vibrations can synchronize and you get locked in into kind of like a crystal structure. If you embody that crystal structure, it has no time. And also it feels like it's at a limit of eternity. So nothing is happening there.

Adviding in there probably has some therapeutic effects, like some kind of deep relaxation effect, some deep letting go. There's even stranger things like maybe the strangest one is like one that happens on LSD, a particular, maybe it happens in other psychedelics, but I've only really heard it reported on LSD, which is time splitting. This is the very strange effect where you're hanging out with your friends, but one of them stands up and then like you see them divide it and one version goes to the kitchen and one version goes to the bathroom. And then the one in the kitchen went up and the refrigerator, the other one looked for snacks.

Like they buy for Kate and it's extremely unsettling because you feel like, I don't know which timeline I belong to and which one should I feel as is familiarity with? And which one will I have to drop? Does it seem like we heard phone number? Or yeah?

Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. People come back from like, how do you sell this?

He's saying, man, I swear I talked to you. Like, and we were about to go to the party and like, where did that timeline go? Where did that timeline go from? Are we looking at a Hugh Everett multiverse here?

What do you think the ontology of those experiences is? Your reductionistic explanation is, oh, you're doing something like, you're making predictions about what's going to happen and your garbage collector is broken. So the predictions just keep lingering. And so you're making all these predictions, they fail to materialize what they linger.

That one interpretive. Well, I mean, that's also totally reasonable within the view that waking state is just dreaming pin to the senses, right? Tethered to inputs. And the great way of putting it.

You take it as to your whatever. And you've got the functional connectivity of all of your brain regions. And suddenly the stuff that's going on under the hood seems like it's getting mixed up with the stuff that you're using, like it's your trash collector. But then again, like, are those two things really actually separate explanations?

Is the thing that pesters me, right? Because to the degree that my graduate advisor, Shaunesh Buren Hargin, talks about not subjective or objective, but enacted realities. And if we can only ever know anything about the realist interpretation through an ever more diverse and rigorously articulated webbing of intersubjective agreements, then it's really hard for us to say, for instance, that the inference work that our brains are doing is not precisely what is filtering out all of the other branches of the Ever-Eddian multiverse. At least, I'm not Shaunk-Aril, but that seems completely within the scope of possibility that we're still, that what we're actually perceiving is something like the brain's participation in the collapse of the wave function.

Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, we're a little bit off again, but I wanna get into a little bit more of with you about this, the notion of timeless causality here, because Newton demands it of us. Newton has brought us together. To answer this question.

I think it matters. I think there's a difference between these hallucinations or the perceptions from other timelines. There's two ways to maybe provide evidence for this. One is, hey, this is like shared.

Let's say you're both on Hidos, LSD, and you both come back and say, oh, we briefly weren't these other timelines, weren't we? And okay, like, you never saw them stand up, people just a timeline where they stood up and hugged into Kitchen or something, and they both remember it. Okay, that would be an interesting data point. I haven't heard that in particular.

I have heard very strange synchronization. If the effects happening on Hidos LSD, they'll have the becoming one with the other. Not always good. Sometimes that's an unpleasant experience, actually.

Sometimes it's very wonderful, but every diagnostic is happening in your world model or like out there in some sense. But yeah, the second one is something, we actually tested this. I actually coded up the experiment and somebody tried it, which is as follows. I reasoned that if you're able to actually see this kind of like branching of the wave function, presumably that is because you're essentially seeing how microscopic quantum effects bubble up into macro-sopic differences, like selecting different timelines of the Ever or Nine, it was both simultaneously briefly.

So I coded up an experiment where there's three dots moving down in the screen. They're each moving randomly, horizontally. The horizontal movement is determined by a random number generator. Two of those are classical and one of them is quantum.

And then the task is, okay, the second one, tell us which of those is the quantum random number generator because in principle, the tracer effect would be the branching structure, as opposed to just one branch. And I think there probably was a little bit of a bug in the experiment that sometimes it didn't work fully, but it's coded up, it's in GitHub. You can download it. We're gonna put it up as a website as well just so that people can play with it.

But yeah, people who tried it on LZ and DMT and 2CBE, they did the experiment and they were chance performance. They were not able to tell which is the quantum random number generator. So, but it's not a evidence. Okay, make this experiment very well controlled.

Maybe this is the path forward to test these things. And I think it's unlikely, but I want it to be done. That's very clever. All right, yeah, let's see here.

Do you feel like you've said everything that you care to say about the pseudo time arrow? Yeah, except. Because I read, because I love, you mentioned Wolfram and time emerging in rule-based network modifications, I feel like we've glanced off of that. Yes.

Okay, then I guess really, there's two last things for us to discuss. At least for now, one would be the work that you've done on the boundary problem in digital sentience, just because we called that shot earlier in this conversation. And I know some folks working on this as do you, it's a contentious area. And in particular, you've got this interesting question that you're asking this paper, are neural cellular automata conscious?

And this is actually the question that drove Chris Langton into retirement from his original work on artificial life, was this sort of concern that when they pulled the plug, they were committing genocide on entire populations of digital entities. So again, the stakes are high here in understanding what's actually going on. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about what you've come to here. Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's a super critical question. And I also think that at a lens, the lenses with which are approachities are these things conscious and are they suffering? That's the two key questions. I'm less concerned about genocide and little creatures that you're simulating because you can put them up again, it's not exactly like death in the traditional sense.

You can make a copy of them if you're really concerned about preserving the information, I think that's fine, you can reboot them. But the question is, are they suffering like while you're simulating them? And we all want to have another factory farming scenario where economic incentives make it so that we're creating all these sentience and not caring about it. Well, that would be just so messed up.

And there's a lot of economic selection, fresh fish like that, are pushing in that direction. We really jumping to the punchline here is, I'm very confident, 99.99% confident at this point, that digital simulations are not conscious for deep theoretical reasons having to do with how fields interact with a digital system. Essentially, there's no top-down field effect, there's no way in a computer where the information and coming together where the simulated creature is actually a unified whole that acts as a unit. Like, that is just not happening in the simulation.

Although it may look like it from our perspective, because we're saying it at the screen, and actually it is us who is integrating that information and interpreting it as a unit or as an organism. However, hardware that can sustain consciousness is coming up, there's two critical things. One is optical computers, which I think are capable of consciousness, right now there's still the research project that plays this like, Celtic, MIT, people are showing like, wow, okay, the optical computers may end up being just way more powerful, and I'm really following that because that is of significance. And the other one is brain organoids.

People are finding out that brain organoids are really computationally efficient, and there's some issues with vascularizing them and making them practical, but I went to the science of such as the self-friends and looking at the presentation and cutting its research on brain organoid, it seems that it's something like five or 10 years out before they're actually commercially viable, they will be embedded in little drones and all over the place. And that I'm very concerned because they will likely have some level of consciousness, some integrated information that actually is expressed as experience. And for me it is, yeah, we're in crunch time to be able to tell how much are they suffering, if they're suffering. And so very likely, PRI will launch an initiative for essentially computing the villains of brain organoids.

This is from the perspective of binding and boundary problem. We will put out the presentation on the QRI YouTube channel pretty soon, the one that I delivered at the science of consciousness conference. By the way, I highly recommend attending the conference. If you haven't, it's just such a good time, such a good collection of people really.

And the critical insight here is that, hey, the unity of consciousness must be useful for something, otherwise we wouldn't be conscious, or our consciousness would not actually map on to a correct simulation, or approximately, we would just jump all up if the unity was not useful for something, what gets united with what? Would it be like random and would not be selected for it? So we find that the mechanism that puts information together might have causal effects. And after looking at every system we could think of, the one principle that got highlighted was topological bifurcation.

This is an effect very well-known in physics. I'm not a physics crack bottom. I'm never gonna say all this physics effect where I can't substantiate like that. Okay, this is well-known.

It's in peer reviewed physics journals that people are researching this, but this is the case with the topology of the electromagnetic field, very active area of research, where the simplification would be something like, when the field lines loop, they create an objective boundary that kind of separates inside and outside. And in many of those cases, they actually vibrate as a unit. Like a molecule has vibrational mode that express the entire shape of the molecule, right? Like you can do experiments and find the spectrum of molecules and determine what molecule it is, just by what vibrational mode it has.

We think it's the same with our full experience. Like a full experience is an actual object, it's an actual segmentation of the field, and it has vibrational mode, and those are visual modes are helpful for computation. So we're talking about a very different computational paradigm that uses topological pockets and vibrations in order to compute create a world simulation. It's a completely different way of thinking than, yeah, how people are thinking in terms of digital computers or simulations, but eventually it's gonna be adopted, and eventually we will have conscious computers, and we have to have a plan for that.

Yeah, I guess I'll just mention that you have a QRI strategy here is to log in a legacy system where these organoids are animated by pleasure, or like what we call information sensitive gradients. So that if we can tell for a fact or extreme types of certainty that these conditions is when they're suffered, these conditions is when they're happy, and then we design a system that only uses happy states, and then we commercialize it and we log it in so that if you wanna use brain organoids, you have to use this system, that might be the way. Every other way I can think of, all the economic incentives are gonna just override it. We have to essentially make it very hard to not use the system where the brain organoids are happy.

The only strategy I think of that will actually work. Do you have much hope that people will care? Because like again, we're already living in the world where the future has arrived unevenly, and we know that David Pierce, he's written so much on the topic of the fact that we can say confidently years and years ago that due to correlations in brain anatomy between humans and pigs or cows or even chickens, we know these creatures are suffering. And yet something I think about a lot on this show is how, even if the people working in these factory farming operations had the economic agency to step away from their work, which many of them don't, that the corporations themselves and the regulatory structures at the level of government, these sea-likes estate in the James C.

Scott sense and are not tuned to the grain at which the suffering occurs any more than we are tuned to the grain at which the suffering of our individual cells might be going on. And so again, I'm just curious, maybe the last question for you, although I'd love crafty in question, is what hope if any you have that doing this kind of work? I didn't get hinted at this just now. A moment ago that maybe we can make sure that we at least recognize when our machines are conscious and are therefore able to treat them better than we might otherwise, we don't fall into a Westworld style pit where we think that we're just having fun with non-player characters who then remember every horrible thing we've done to them.

But where do you see hope that this kind of research might help us find paths through the innovation landscape to designing institutional systems that are more humane, more aligned, more compassionate? Yeah. Yeah, no. Really good question.

And to be honest, I think the future is going to be messy because there's so many technologies will be empowering so many different types of subagents and if something crazy is going to happen when all of that becomes very accessible. My bet this is why quality of research is very broad in its aspiration because I think we essentially need to create this meta framework that people can buy into and coordinate use as a coordination strategy or a coordination technology where we have these lens on quantifying consciousness and caring about its valence and highlighting the benefits of actually being animated by positive gradients of bliss. To the example that you brought about, we might be out of touch with the suffering of our own selves. If that turns out to be true, okay, optimistically it may be the case that a person's functionality and their own happiness actually is like subtly affected by the happiness of their selves.

So maybe there's like an indirect functional reason why you should actually make yourselves happy. If that is the case that is the sort of information we should really highlight is, okay, under what conditions aligning the happiness of the various levels of the system actually makes it more functional and pushed in that direction and stay away from information actually that tells you how to your suffering for being functional which is unfortunately a lot of people are trying to figure that out. So yes, CQRI has had other people thinking this based on counterbalancing force. Do you have just something that is happening naturally because of economic pressures?

But I do, I am quite optimistic. Why? Because these are things that you can understand when you have the right set of experiences with the right frameworks, it can really change your mind and make your settings in a very different perspective, much more like a sentientist focus. As we develop better technologies that have known your electricity but to do produce this super peak of valence experiences, I think that will align people a lot.

It's like it gives them a, essentially gives them skin in the game. When you realize, oh, life could be this wonderful. Wow, I actually really have a good reason. They have something to protect and an analogy I can give you something like people who love rock concerts, right?

If they have never gone to a rock concert, they don't know there's something valuable in life to protect, they haven't found their second family as it were. I think it's something like that, the experience of Jainan's experience, the states of wonder, it's like something to protect, it gives you a value to uphold that is beyond fear or ego. And switching to that motivational architecture, I think, especially if it happens in the intellectual elites and they have influence and develop technology based on these principles, I think it's possible, yeah, it's a, but I don't know what's going to happen. I think it's the other thing.

Woo, all right, that's a, as promised, we're all in tour. Any final thoughts, reflections? Like where's this headed now? Yeah.

What's the growing tip or how might you invite people to forge on and boldly into some of this stuff? I'll just note, one thing we haven't discussed, and I think is really cool on your website is the results from various open contests, context for the replication of non-ordinary states or the psychedelic cryptography in particular. You can write messages that people can only see if they're getting tracers. That was a genius response to this open call.

But yeah, like how else do you imagine you're going to be getting people involved moving forward and what matters next? Yeah, absolutely. Cure eyes, priorities. The thing we're doing every day, right now it's developing core technology, which a lot of it will be released this year, maybe next year.

A lot of things that are very relevant for things like visualizing pain and tactile sensations with potential clinical application, working a lot on figuring out how to make that either viable in medicine or like reusable by the average person, broadly speaking also just a lot of research that we're going to be publishing on, how to replicate states of consciousness, very broadly from meditation to DMT to five-year DMT, how to from first principle create like visual replication, stack of replications of the state. Because yeah, we think that's very important for the events of science. And yeah, we're continuing to publish in academia. Like we started publishing two years ago, I don't know, people were pushing me to have to put things in academia as well.

I actually agree. So I don't dedicate the bulk of my time to that because I don't think is the most cost effective. I actually think dedicated thing my time to just develop the core technology, the algorithm, the core philosophies, micro-peritivative advantage. That's why I spend most of my time on, what I do is spend time collaborating with wonderful academic writers to put it out into peer review journals.

So we're going to continue to do that. We have like papers lined up on a full, a huge set of criteria that any theory of consciousness must satisfy further developing theories of aliens, what do they satisfy? And yeah, turning it even like the tracer tool in a document publication. That's also something we're planning to do where, yeah, you can quantify whether to what type of tracer effect you have on various psychedelics.

We think that's very significant because at that low level feature, nobody has quantified it. We think it's very important to describe the quality of the state. So yeah, that's what things will be forward. I'm also going to be traveling a lot.

I'm going to Germany, I'm going to Japan for a conference. At the Germany, I'm going to a foresight event as well as a side out event. They're figuring out how to fund psychedelic research with distributed decentralized system. And then in Japan, to a conference association for the scientific study of consciousness presenting a poster.

And a vibe camp. I don't know, that should be fun. I'm sorry, you muted. Yeah, there we go.

Sorry, I was stuck in a hypercube trying to get my tab back in place. Well, right on, man, it's a pleasure talking with you. I'm looking forward to figuring out where my hyperbolic geometry more fully overlaps if yours here before too long. We can already get this out there.

Fantastic. Now, very pleasurable conversation. Thank you so much. Really appreciate it.

And that's that. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. And I'll be back in a couple of weeks with some more wonderful conversations. And hopefully some updates on Humans on the Loop and announcements about where the project is heading, as well as some news on the Future Fossils Book Club.

In the meantime, I will be dropping a ton of new art and music into the Substack and Patreon feeds. And hope to see you there. Thank you. And have a wonderful day on.