Neuroscience in Hyperspace with Andrew Gallimore

When the cortex is stimulated by a psychedelic, particularly with DMT, it turns out, you are increasing the representation of reach of the cortex. And what I mean by that is that the cortex becomes capable of representing structures and dynamics, that it simply isn't capable of representing in the normal waking state. And so it's as if this intelligence is always there, and in a certain sense, always accessible. And yet we simply lack the capacity to represent it in a kind of visual form.

So it's like we see this low dimensional projection, which we see as noise, or we don't see at all. It's simply filtered out and ignored. And yet when you perturb the brain with DMT, it opens up. It expands the representational reach.

It allows the cortex to explore more dimensions of phenomenology. It's able to represent high dimensional structures that are simply inaccessible to it. In any other area of science, you had a fundamental assumption that had failed for centuries to explain something. You'd go, maybe you should start questioning that fundamental assumption.

And more and more scientists now, to different degrees than others, are saying actually maybe we've got this wrong. Maybe actually the appearance of matter, the appearance of the world, of the physical world, emerges from consciousness, which is fundamental. Conscious is the only thing that we cannot deny. And yes, for some reason we've sidelined it and seen it as a secondary emergent, epifonomenom of the physical world.

And I think once you flip it and see consciousness of fundamental, then you start to see that the DMT doesn't seem that strange, actually, in a sense. And that actually, yes, we simply could be dealing with other consciousness, is other conscious agents, other intelligent agents, that are like, we are subjects, that are different patterns of consciousness that exist within the broader matrix of conscious agents, if you like. Welcome to episode 33 of Humans on the Loop. The show I started after spending most of a year at Mozilla, studying how we meet the power of exponential technology with the wisdom to use it.

But before that, this was Future Fossils, a podcast about understanding our place in the big picture and probing the evolving nature of selfhood in an increasingly psychedelic society. Deep down, these are the same questions. And even though the show is taken on more of a technological loss, every conversation we have here, about the future of institutions, the nature of machine intelligence, and the growing pressure for radical cultural change, lives within a more fundamental frame I can't ignore. What are the wrong assumptions we currently take for granted?

And how do they cramp our sense if possible? What if the stories we're telling ourselves are profoundly mistaken? And what if reality is vastly different and wider than the world we think we inhabit? So in service to the question of how we can dream better together, I think it's time to get overtly weird again.

And ask where the bleeding edge of consciousness and brain research might take us, if we can find enough courage to face its implications. As I discussed in this episode with renowned psychedelic neuroscientist Andrew Gallimore about his latest book, Death by Astonishment, Research on the potent psychedelic DMT strongly suggests that four-dimensional space-time isn't as fundamental as we currently make it out to be. The world as we know it is merely the limit of the average modern brain's waking state representational reach, a shadow of the n-dimensional cosmos, simulated under-specific metabolic and information processing constraints. But we are in fact capable of much more richly multidimensional world models.

The price of entry to hyperspace is watching your object-based separate self-construct transfigured in a higher logical order. And our baseline waking state representational reach can shift. Global electronic culture with its collapse of linear temporality through digital storage and long-range forecasting, and its collapse of spatial extent through just-and-time supply chains, light-speed news transmission, and the transnational limbic collectivization of social media is itself a kind of hyperspace that puts new evolutionary pressures on us just as language did one million years ago. In other words, I see a convergence between the extended state DMT research Gallimore helped pioneer and the new normal of an ever-weirder world defined by advanced AI, high-dimensional modeling, and revolutionary physics.

It's time for us to update our cosmology and the theories and practices that flow from it. And if we are to navigate this rediscovered hyperspace, what better way to learn than by lingering for study in the world's revealed by DMT and the astonishing convolutions of self in other with which they confront us? What new shapes will we and our sciences take as we integrate the intense strangeness of these experiences? How do we even begin to practice truly psychedelic science?

And what insights might we be able to bring home to the flatland where we spend most of our waking lives? How will this transform the way we think about technology? About the goals we set for ourselves as a species? Andrew has spoken at length about his work on many, many podcasts with audiences larger than my own.

So for this conversation, I tried to push us deeper, provoke some off-road explorations and contribute something fresh to this ongoing discourse. Whether or not we succeeded, this is a snapshot of an evolving discipline I expect will transform the way we think about ourselves, reality, our place in time and our relationship to the machine. As usual, we opened more threads than we managed to tie off and left a lot of room for you, the listener, to weigh in with your comments and reflections on a profoundly weird and important domain of inquiry. Disclaimer, I'm on the advisory board for the Nonprofit Research Center, No Anautics, where Andrew sits on the board of directors.

Other colleagues and former guests are also formally involved, including Carl Hayden Smith, Dennis McKenna, Andres Gomez, Emmaus, Ada Paris, and Sarah Huntley. And you will find links to all of our conversations, as well as Gallimore's book, information on the new Iluisis Research Facility and the science we discussed in this episode in the show notes. Thank you for listening and enjoy. New.

So now do you feel me and your skull from halfway across the planet? Unfortunately, yeah. There's lots to talk about any notes, comments, questions before we dive in. We might show we get to Iluisis, the DMTX.

That's a problem. I'd mention that. No, I would be doing Carl Hayden Smith a great disservice as well, if I didn't bring that up. I'd also say that you now have hours and hours of excellent conversations out there already.

Many hours. With John, Jesse Michaels, all of these are superb, and I don't want to trod over those conversations. I think that would make the most interesting thing here for people who I expect will already be very familiar with your work is to cut deeply into a few things here. And most people already know about DMT, but I guess for those who are not intimately familiar with you as a person, it's always good to start with, why are you this way?

Okay, okay, let's go. Who are you? Where do you come from? Are you an hallucination?

And regardless of your ontological status, what is the story that your brain tells itself about why you are interested in the kinds of questions you pursue in your research? That's a difficult question. You know, I don't know. I don't know why I guess I've always been interested in the unusual, I guess.

You could put it like that. From when I was a very young child, I was interested, like too young. When I was six, seven years old, so elementary school, I was interested in the occult, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, things that go bump in the night, right? Poltergeist, I wanted to be a ghost hunter.

That was my dream when I was a kid, was to be a ghost hunter. I wanted to go to old houses, and stay up late at night and put tape on the doors so that they could see if anyone opened it. Talcum powder on the floor, so you could see footprints and tape recorders and things. I wanted to tape recorders so I could record the sounds of ghosts.

All this kind of stuff, but ghost hunters are few and far between these days. It's hard to make a living as a ghost hunter. But fortunately for me, the interest in the psychedelics is within that category of unusual things that are not ordinary. Certainly extraordinary states of consciousness.

And so as I became an adolescent and became interested in drugs, as many teenagers occasionally do, mostly just for recreational purposes, but for me I was really interested in, how can you take this simple molecule, whatever it is, put it into your brain and it causes these dramatic changes in how you see the world? And I think that's super cool, that's, wow, how do we understand that? And so that got me interested in chemistry. As I was studying chemistry at university, my first degree was in chemistry and pharmacology.

I was interested in the molecules, I love molecules, I love looking at pictures of molecular diagrams, electron arrows and just the way that these molecules, this kind of poetry of the way that molecules are constructed and deconstructed and how they interface and interact with molecules in the human brain. I think that's just, I don't know, I can't explain that, that's just something in the way that other people like playing golf, I can't imagine something more tedious. But some people love it. And for me, it's molecules and the brain.

And so that was, how do we get from a molecule interacting with a few proteins in the human brain to a in insects? Basically, how do we get there? What's that connection? And how do we understand that?

That's really what I've been doing. Ever since I first learned about DMT specifically, when I was maybe 16 years old, from an interview with Terrence Buchanan on the back of a magazine that a friend gave me. And I thought, wow, this is something else. This is not the normal kind of psychedelic experience as I understood it, with my limited experience.

This seemed like something else entirely. This was something that could take you to another world, that's completely unlike this world and that seemed to be populated by beings that weren't human or animal. Like aliens, I thought this is ridiculous. This doesn't make any sense to me.

And I guess the rest, as I say, is kind of history. And I've spent the last 20 or more, 25 years after that, trying to make sense of it. And even more so, after my first DMT experience itself, which really cemented that, I was utterly thrown confounded by that. Yeah, so here we are now.

I'm still wrestling with and fascinated by this molecule and trying to make sense of it. And I think I've got one or two interesting things to say about it, I hope. Yes, I think you do. So I would like to ask a couple more framing questions.

I think the more we add to a frame, the easier it will get for us to really dive into the more challenging aspects of the dragons you're tilting after in your work. And one of them is in death by astonishment, you consistently note that there is a way of thinking about DMT that seems supported by the content of these experiences as a technology. Because I feel that I always have to dedicate the real weird conversations on this show as being part of this overall commitment to understanding our relationship to technology. I think it would make sense to have you riff a bit.

Now, how you see DMT as a technology, how this view of technology may have implications for the way that we think about technology more broadly. Like one of the things that these really intense psychedelics do well reported is reconfiguring the course screening of our world into self and other, moving the lines, erasing the lines. And I think those people have a stock view of what technology is or Alan Case as technology is everything that was invented after you became an adult. And yet this is immensely old.

And it's something that people repeatedly discovered. It's not something that was invented de novo in a lab by combining other technologies. So just to hear you riff on this for a bit would be substantial. Yeah, I mean, is it a technology or is it a toy?

Sometimes the line between the two is also rather blurry and depends upon your perspective. But yes, you're right, of course. Unlike other, when we think of other technologies as things that humans created, invented with DMT, it's like we picked up the mantle from nature. Or should I say from the rest of nature, we are of course a part of nature.

We play a role in that sense. There isn't this black line that distinguishes humans from nature. And we are participatory in nature. And what's striking about DMT is a couple of angles here.

First of all, it has a number of peculiarities, this molecule, in that it's not a molecule that you can just stumble upon with, let's say, psilosophy mushrooms. It's very much something that you can imagine humans plucking mushrooms and munching them down as food and then discovering that, oh, these ones are different to all the others and do some rather interesting things to my mind. But with DMT, one doesn't have that privilege because it doesn't really matter the level of DMT you might find in any particular plant. It's invisible, it's ever-present.

DMT, it's ubiquitous, it's ubiquitous, plant alkaloid. And yet, for the vast majority of human existence, it's completely invisible because it's completely inactive. And it takes a certain level of cognitive and technological advancement to actually discover DMT or discover its effects. Of course, when DMT was first being used by indigenous peoples in, say, Amazonia, they didn't understand the presence of the molecule, DMT.

And yet they were able to develop a technology to experience its effects. The ayahuasca, again, this is something I also point out repeatedly in Deathirons Management, is that ayahuasca is a technology. It's not just a plant-based decoption. It is a true pharmacological technology and it exploits pharmacological synergy when you have two molecules together, two or more molecules together that have either much greater or entirely different effects than either one alone.

And so in that sense, I see DMT as a technology. It's something we had to learn to extract, to isolate, to understand. And then once isolated and understood what molecule we were dealing with, what was the actual psychoactive molecule? And that's something that Stephen Zara, the Hungarian physician, can be credited with back in the 1950s.

We then have to learn how to use it. Zara, he swallowed it, first of all, to a gram of pure, synthetic DMT that he made himself and nothing happened. Wasn't until a colleague suggested that he should try injecting it, that its remarkable effects on consciousness were realized. And I think we're still learning to use DMT now by treating it as a technology, is something that we develop and learn to use rather than just as a drug.

One could say that the optimal mode of DMT administration was discovered in 1965 by Nick Sand when he spilled some DMT free brace on a hot plate discovered that you could vaporize it. For many people that is how you take DMTs by vaporizing it. But we know now actually that's not the most efficient way of consuming it or ingesting it, administering it. And that injection into the bloodstream and now this continuous infusion, protocol DMTX, developed by myself and Rick Stasman, seems to be further.

I'm not saying that's to be all and all either, but it seems to be a progression. We seem to be still on this curve of developing DMT as this technology. And from the other perspective, I think simply the idea that a molecule that can allow you, one must allow me some room for speculation here that a molecule that potentially allows you to interface with normally non-perceivable intelligent agents, whatever they might be, that opens a channel of communication in some way to normally non-perceivable intelligent agents. That sounds like some kind of communication technology that we're again learning to use.

So I think broadly shifting your mindset from this is a drug because there are many drugs, hundreds of thousands of different drugs. And if you treat DMT as just another drug, then I think you lose the true essence of it, which is as this communication technology, I think. So it's just shifting the mindset by treating it as a technology, because then you think, okay, now this is something we actually need to develop, improve upon, not necessarily improve upon the molecule, but we can't rule that out as another angle of inquiry, but improving the how we actually use it and interact with it, how we interface with this molecule and exploit it and make use of it as this technology for communicating with otherwise entirely non-perceivable intelligent agents. Did I answer your question, though?

Yeah, it nested inside everything that you've just been saying, I want to highlight the fact that when people come to the strangeness of the DMT experience, there's a fork in the road, and you're taking a fork that a lot of people are afraid to take. I am very accommodating to your speculations on this because I feel that for much of the discourse, there's a sort of shying away from the efforts to investigate what is actually the nature of the beings that populate these experiences. My friends Phil Ford and JF Martell at Weird Studies talk about thin end claims and thick end claims. The thin end is the phenomenological.

It's easy to say, I experienced this, it's easy to gain purchase into an inter-subjective agreement that these are things that routinely happen to people under particular quasi-controlled circumstances, to the extent that you can control set and setting and physiological set in the psychedelic experience, but then there's the thick end claim, which is the ontological claim. And you've given yourself quite a challenge here because one of the characteristics that you and I and others agree is worth pursuing is this question of what exactly are these beings and what are these spaces that people find themselves in when they are interfacing with the EMT in this way. This is a particular challenge because the nature of the experience itself is that it induces ontological shock, that it ruptures the categories that people are used to, that they are, as you know, in this book, presented with experiences with visualizations of hyper-dimensional objects and environments for which it's hard to make a functionalist evolutionary case, our brains actually evolved to perceive. The nature of studying them requires, at least in part, being bold enough to encounter them firsthand, which challenges the conceit of objectivity that has dominated modern science for the last several centuries.

And I'd like to hear you speak a little bit about the unique methodological problems, asking what are these beings, whatever they are, what is going on in the brain is one thing, how do we articulate that with what it is that people actually report? There's a lot there. And I think starting with describing the nature of the scientific problems that you're trying to take on would be really great. Yeah, you describe a fork in the road.

So for most people fall into kind of two camps, right? They take one fork or one prong, I guess we should say, of the four, is it a prong or is it a tine? I don't know, but anyway, in one direction, you have the, I hate that term, orthodox scientists, but it's the best I can do. And they will assume from the outset that this is some kind of hallucination.

That's a given, that it's some kind of hallucination. And the scientists' job is to work out the mechanism, the production of that hallucination. Then on the other prong or tine of that fork, you have those who know something completely different. They know that this is, that we're dealing with a plant spirit or that we're dealing with the souls of the departed or something like this.

They have a very strong firm position or demons. That's one I get all the time, it's demons. And I try to not take either of those positions. I think the challenge that I have is that I don't want to say this is definitely hallucination because I don't believe that.

What I try and do, I guess, to put it as simply as possible is rather than telling people what I think DMT, the DMT phenomenology is, it's a hallucination. No, it's a plant spirit. And these things are unresolvable. So what I try and do is to say, okay, I'm gonna try and tell you what DMT is not.

So we'll take the hallucination explanation. We'll take the exotic dream imagery explanation. We'll take each of these. We'll take the onion archetypes explanation.

And we will say, okay, let's assume that this is a form of hallucination, does this make sense? Does this hold water? Can we deconstruct that explanation, see whether it succeeds? Does it leave a lot to be explained?

Does it leave just a small little bit to be explained that we can probably tidy up as we learn more about the brain? It's so dramatically flawed. Does it so dramatically fail to explain the phenomenology that we need to look for alternative explanations? Because once your hypothesis kind of fails on many levels and doesn't seem to explain anything really about the DMT phenomenology, then that's when you say, okay, now we have to start considering alternative explanations without being committed to any particular ideology.

So I never say, oh, I think these are aliens, really, unless you use the term alien in the broader sense, some kind of something that is alien using alien as an adjective. I think that probably applies. But this is why I refer to these beings as intelligent agents. They seem to be intelligent.

They display characteristics of intelligence that is non-human and they seem to have agency of some sort. You seem to be interacting with some kind of agent and the influence of DMT. And then you start to look at that explanation and go, okay, so this is something I break down in a great length in deaf bias, and it's actually looking at each of these explanations and saying, okay, this doesn't make sense from an evolutionary perspective. It doesn't make sense how the brain which evolved construct is stable three dimensional model of the world as a model of the environment, how it suddenly becomes capable when perturbed by the simple plant alkaloid of constructing these entirely different, not just different, but far more inter-co-far more complex, high dimensional worlds, beautiful, flawlessly constructed with effortless sub-irritivity in these entirely novel worlds that have no relationship whatsoever to the nor waking world.

That I think is a challenge to explain. And so then we go, okay, so what could explain this? And this is where I get into the idea of DMT is somehow gating the flow of information from some kind of intelligent agent which effectively seizes control of your brain's world-building apparatus for a brief period and effectively it's become something of a catchphrase. You don't break through into the DMT, well, the DMT will break through into you in that you're not going anywhere.

I think the best explanation that I can come up with so far in my working model is that DMT is allowing access of some kind of information flow, which basically, that's generating divisions, if you like, that's generating, your brain is more like the stage upon which the drama is performed. So DMT is a performance. It's a performance by these intelligent agents. I don't think you're interacting with actual insect, like beings, I don't think you're interacting with elves.

I think you're interacting with some kind of the hidden hand, if you like, whatever is directing that show is using your neural machinery. In fact, our brain is wired to construct visual forms and using that to generate the imagery. That's how it communicates with us. In the same way that if you look at a computer screen, for example, in certain imagery, on the computer screen, that doesn't tell you very much about what is generating that imagery.

It could be some other computer, which doesn't have a visual form that is in any way related to what you're seeing on the screen. It's simply the transmission of information into your computer and onto your screen that allows you to communicate with that other computer. And so that's the analogy that I use. So there's a lot there, but I think we, yeah.

Let's go into a bit more detail on the neurobiological basis of world models and the research that you mentioned in here, for instance, by Chris Timmerman and Andrea Alamea that are looking at EEG readings of people on DMT and starting to analyze the biological correlates of these experiences and the activation of different brain regions, the FMRI work on ayahuasca relatedly. So it's like, we can start to talk about in some detail the argument that you're making, that this is not a hallucination, this is not a dream, and that the contents of these experiences are not union archetypes in the sense that some are beginning to describe them as having a biological basis. I think this would be a great place to launch off into everything else. Yeah, I think near imaging can tell us a lot.

It can tell us about the kind of network activity, what kind of patterns of neural activity a company or correlated with the experience. The work that you mentioned, so Chris Timmerman's work, I think it's very important because it tells you a lot about the neural activity that accompanies the DMT state. A little bit of background. So when you put someone into an MRI scanner and they view images, so they're seeing the world, right?

So the world that we experience is, we don't see the world in itself, so to speak. We see an interface as Donald Hoffman would call it, or a model as Carl Fristan would call it, right? But they're talking about the same thing. We see, we only ever see, we live inside a dark box, really.

Our skull is a dark box, there's no light that gets into our skull as such. But the brain uses these patterns of sensory inputs that come from the eyes that we just restricted to the visual world. It uses it to inform, to modulate a model. The world you experience is always the model that your brain is constructing and your brain uses this model, or it tests its model, continuously against sensory inputs.

So it has this model of what it thinks is going on or what it thinks is a good model of what's going on outside, a functional working adaptive model of what's going on in the environment, and it continuously tests that model against sensory information. But you never have direct access to the environment. That always applies, and it also presumably applies in the DMT state. You're not seeing the DMT world, whatever that might be, as it is as such, you're seeing a model that's being somehow constructed in your brain.

Now what's interesting is that with modern EEG technique, you can actually see the flow of information through the brain. So when you're viewing the world, you see a flow of electrical waves flowing from the back of the brain, which is the primary visual cortex. This is what receives information from the eyes, from the environment, and that flowing forward across the cortex. This is the neural correlate of visual sensory perception.

Now if you close your eyes, so if you're having EEG and then you close your eyes, you'll actually see those waves stop. So the brain stops receiving information from the world, and then you will get reduction in those waves, what are called forward-flowing waves, coming from the back of the brain towards the front. Now, a long time before Christimimimim was on the scene, there were some earlier studies with the ayahuasca, a Portuguese scientist whose name I can't pronounce, Derugio Derugio, I forget. But anyway, he was interested in the neural correlates of the ayahuasca state, which of course is fundamentally at the empty state.

And he asked the question, the ayahuasca state is a very visual experience. So is it like seeing with your eyes shut? This was the phrase he used, seeing with your eyes shut. And so what he did is he said, okay, you will put an EEG cap on somebody, and then we can measure the flow of information from the back of the brain to the front as a kind of correlate of visual sensory inputs.

And he found that indeed when the subjects without any ayahuasca before they take an ayahuasca, when their eyes were open, you can see the flow of electrical activity from the back of the brain towards the front. And he closed their eyes, that stopped, all perfectly normal and explicable. But then when they gave them ayahuasca, even when their eyes were closed, they still saw this flow of information from the back to the front, and lots of activity in the primary visual cortex. So his conclusion, and Jordi Reba, the late great Jordi Reba, also did similar experiments.

So together we can see that ayahuasca generates this state in which even when a subject has their eyes closed, the primary visual cortex, the cortex that is normally responsible for receiving visual sensory inputs is still very active, as active as it is when your eyes are open normally, and the information is flowing up. So it's exactly like seeing with your eyes shots, you are seeing another world. Now at the time in Reba's paper, his explanation was, this is some kind of system noise flowing up. Spontaneous activity in the primary visual cortex, which is flowing up through the levels of the cortex.

And that would make sense if you were seeing just geometric form, spontaneously emergent patterns of the primary visual cortex. Sure, I'd be happy with that explanation for that. Chris Timmerman did the same experiment with DMT. And again, he was able to measure using much more advanced technology, because this was several decades after Reba's experiments, and he again showed that when someone was injected with DMT, the neural signatures, the flow of information from the primary visual cortex up forward through the cortex, was indistinguishable from visual inputs, even when they had their eyes closed.

So again, where is that information coming from? Is it, as Reba suggested, just system noise? Again, I struggled with that idea. I struggled with the idea that the human cortex is spontaneously generating, not just wild and chaotic or intricate geometric patterns, but is actually generating fully coherent other worlds with staggering, lee complex structure, staggering narrative complexity, just engineered with utter precision, these entirely alien worlds.

I find that difficult to accept. And so it suggests to me that these could be, and I'm not saying this is absolutely the case, but this is what you would expect, if indeed you were seeing with your eyes shut. In other words, the visual system appears to be engaged because it is engaged. It is engaged within the sensory perception of some alternate source of information, of some alternate source of sensory inputs.

And that's what you're seeing here. When someone's on DMT, as you're seeing the hallmarks of that, they are literally seeing where they're eyes shut, they're seeing another world, and it's not a world that is simply spontaneously generated in my opinion. Christimimim would certainly disagree with me on this. I should act.

He doesn't draw the same conclusion as I do, but that's fine. So I wanna click to expand on the issue of noise and detour through your writing on the argument against dreams in particular. Because you quote David Chalmers in here as saying, dreams never give you something absolutely new. You talk about how there's developmental psychology research, looking at the dreams of preschool children, and people as they get older, and that early childhood dreams have no narrative structure.

The children have not yet learned to compose narratives. And I think the case that you're making here is that dreams are never more structurally complex than the models that your own brain is capable of constructing. And yet that's exactly what we're getting here. But then just to give you something to juggle with that, you have Eric Holes work on the overfitted brain, and the idea that dreams are performing a function of noise injection, that it's a way of basically keeping the brain from overfitting like a machine learning algorithm on its training data.

And you go into great detail in-depth by astonishment on the role of noise and the issue of, you can take some time to explain this, because I don't think we really talked that much on the show about criticality and phase transitions, except in passing. But yeah, I would love to explore how you see the statistical physics or complex systems position on noise, how that relates to how we understand psychedelic experiences, the structural and developmental issues with world models, how well is related. So do I start on that? Yeah, so dreams are interesting.

And as you said, dreams have been studied for a long time. I mean, a lot know about what people are doing about, why they do, agreeing about it. And their dreams can be weird and they can be bizarre. And but even the kind of the weirdness and the bizarreness of dreams has also been well studied.

And people said, I really, we agree. They actually normally, they mean weird in a number of ways. So basically, dreams for the most part are continuous with waking life. You dream about people, you dream about animals that you're likely to meet in the environment or you have met in the environment.

You dream about scenarios. They tend to be scenarios from all waking life, but tend, but those that tend to be negative valence, are people more likely to dream of bad things happening, confrontation, aggression, fear, jealousy, anxiety generally. These tend to feature a lot more in dreams than pleasant scenarios. And there are hypotheses as to why that's the case, as if the brain is tuning its threat detection system or its threat response system.

So taking it whilst you're offline, so to speak, rehearsing, threatening kind of scenarios and working out how to ideal with that. That's one explanation for why these kind of things, why these kind of scenarios, particularly prominent in dreams. Generally, what is the brain doing in the dream state? The dream is like a kind of a selective simulation of the normal waking world.

The brain is using what it knows or what it's learned about world building in the waking state to construct the world in the absence of sensory inputs. So even when you take the brain offline or disconnect it from sensory inputs, your brain still knows how to build a world. And that's a skill that your brain actually learned. You mentioned this study with preschool children.

You do see that if you measure, if you look at the phenomenology of children from very young age up to adolescence and older, you will see the progression in their brain's ability to construct a coherent world in which the dream is able to interact with moving parts. In very young children's dreams, like they're more like static images, more like sharp slides shows the movies, simply because the brain doesn't know how to construct animals or people with their full range of movement and motion or all that kind of, that's a very difficult skill to do when you don't have a continuous stream of sensory inputs. But on the other hand, dreams can become, because those sensory inputs are disconnected, because they don't have that sensory data kind of training signal, they're very malleable, they're very kind of fluid and dynamic and sensitive to being disrupted or moving in other directions. This is when people talk about weirdness and bizarreness and dreams often like weird discontinuities or when you're talking to someone, you're talking to your mother and then you, for somehow that changes to your father.

And it's like weird things happen like that or the scene dramatically shifts. One moment you're sat at home watching television the next moment you're looking at the screen at an airport checking worried because you missed your flight. These kind of things, a lot of it probably driven by it, by emotion as well as directing it. And a lot of that information comes from the hippocampus from the side of the brain, it's these kind of memory index if you like.

So your brain is using, this again goes back to the idea that dreams are used, one of their roles probably is to consolidate memories by replaying. The hippocampus really is like an index of world models that your brain constructs in the normal waking life. And when you have a memory and you remember something, it's like you're reactivating certain patterns and the hippocampus is doing that all the time. When you dream, you actually see this flow of information from the hippocampus, particular types of low frequency waves that flow over, reactivate those and consolidate memories in the cortex.

Overall, your brain in the dream state isn't doing anything, we don't understand dreams fully, we certainly don't understand their purpose fully, but we know a lot about them. We know that there's no great mystery there when it comes to dreams in terms of how is it possible that we are dreaming? No, it's such a brain constructing a world model in the absence of sensory inputs as it does in the waking state, but while disconnected from the environment and it's using its stored model, just using information from the hippocampus, using stored models in other areas of the cortex are using that to construct this world. In a sense, the dream world is like the psychedelic state in that because it's not held accountable to sensory inputs, it can explore its world models much more fluidly, things are much more dynamic in the dream state and that also applies in the psychedelic status to a certain extent.

The psychedelics, as you say, they push the brain towards criticality. All complex systems exhibit behaviors, so a complex system is simply a system that's composed of lots of interaction components that interact according to certain rules. Your brain is a complex system, it's millions and millions of neurons with billions or trillions of connections that are always interacting and your world model kind of emerges from those interactions. So all systems that are composed of lots of parts can exhibit behaviors that sit somewhere between perfect order like a crystal that's perfectly ordered, very low complexity, and then the other end, you have complex systems that are chaotic, so they have this completely unpredictable, wild behavior, small perturbations can cause incredibly dramatic changes in how they behave, it's a mess if you like.

There is mathematics to explain all of that, but it's generally very highly chaotic, not suitable for constructing a world, let's put it that way. So on both ends of this complexity spectrum, you have perfect order and you have chaos, neither of those is very good for building worlds, because the world has to be somehow strike a balance, right? The world that you're experiencing now has to be both stable and yet not too stable, it has to have a certain amount of give, a certain amount of fluidity and dynamism, it has to be responsive to sensory inputs, to be constantly changing. And that balance is achieved this point that's called the edge of chaos, it's perfectly positioned balancing act so that your brain, your cortex is able to achieve all that emerges in the cortex, that allows a world to emerge, to be constructed by the brain that is both fluid and dynamic and yet stable.

What psychedelics do is they by stimulating certain populations of neurons in the cortex, they nudge the dial slightly more towards the chaotic realm without pushing it into the chaotic realm. This is why if you take LSD or psilocybin mushrooms, the world will tend to become much more fluid and dynamic. So you're pushing towards criticality, criticality is the point where you, the point of no return when you descend into chaos. So you're trying to push the brain close to criticality without pushing it into the chaotic realm.

Now with DMT, it seems to transcend that, it pushes the brain initially into this highly fluid and dynamic state, this chaotic almost state, but then it's as if the brain shifts from the ordered state or the complex partially ordered state of the normal waking world into this kind of chaotic state and then it collapses into a new order. It finds a new well, if you like, within the state space landscape of the cortex where these entirely different worlds are being constructed, that don't contain humans, that don't contain animals, that don't contain the normal stuff that we see in dreams. In other words, your brain starts constructing a world that it hasn't learned to construct. It's not using its waking world models, it's using models that they have nothing to do with the normal waking world, that it's like the brain is speaking a language, I always say, and start speaking a language, it never learned to speak and doing so completely flawlessly.

And that's, I think, where I struggle, that's why I can't accept the standard explanation. This is just a type of dream, because it's not. Yeah, so one of the themes that keeps coming up in trip reports as well as in these information theoretical descriptions, if I'm gonna draw a poetic association and ask you to speculate on whether it's not merely poetic, has to do with temperature, which is why I brought up noise. Early on in the book, I think you're talking about William Burrows's first DMT report, where he describes being caught in a white hot metal lattice in the soulless place of the insect people.

And then later on, you talk about John Lilly and his experiments with ketamine, and this being another example where, there's something about the information theoretic temperature in the sense that people talk about high temperature, search being very noisy. And Lilly comes to the conclusion that he's interfacing with a solid state computational intelligence that could, as you put it, exist in a vacuum at much lower and higher temperature than water-based forms of life. Spoiler alert for you wanted to hear about the trip I talked about with Danny Jones, where for whatever reason, the beings that I felt like I encountered on Iowaska, when I inquired into their nature, told me that they were appearing to me in a particular guise, but that their actual physical reality was as magnetic holograms inside a high-temperature plasma of metals at the center of our galaxy. When I had Eric Davis on the show, and he wrote this book, High Weirdness for MIT Press, and looking at the experiences of Phil Dick, and Terrence McKenna, and Robert Anson Wilson, wanted to introduce this idea of a metabolic ontology.

And when you talk about complex system science, I think about how it emerged from the physics of disordered magnetic domains, and the modeling of complex systems required a much higher level of dimensionality, but required modern computing in order for us to analyze these things. So there's this connection between the temperature, concerns of temperature that keeps showing up in the reports, the concerns of temperature and state change in the brain itself, the science on self-organizing systems, basically being structured information and energetic flows through systems. And I'll just add for my own amusement that Eric Wargo, who has spent a lot of time embellishing this thesis that he has about pre-cognitive dreaming, has come to the conclusion, and I talk about this with him in episodes 117, 171, and especially in 231, that he identifies this increase in the noise in brains as deeply related to this, that the methods of oracular practice and of the toolkit of shamanism seems to leverage noise in a way that he has come to believe that noise is not actually like un-patterned information, but is future information. He's got this idea of retro-causality or super-determinism that information is flowing in quote-unquote both ways.

And the last piece I'll add to this is that years ago I interviewed Miguel Fuentes, who had worked with Marie Gell-Man on the mathematical argument against randomness being ontological. And he said, if you try to analyze the algorithmic complexity of a bit-string, that your ability to detect a pattern and it is constrained by your own available compute, that we can't say for sure that randomness is a real thing, but that it is a function of our ability to detect things. Again, these metabolic changes in the brain and the way that DMT seems to give people access to being able to form hyper-dimensional world models seems, again, related to this idea that brains are lazy. With Fristin, it's like, if for all matters of daily importance, we only need to model three spatial dimensions.

There's no reason to believe that's the limit. It's, yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of damage. There's a lot of damage.

We just have to toss that into you. There are many examples in physical systems where you increase some kind of energy parameter, right? When you're increasing temperature, you're increasing some kind of energy parameter. And you will see the opening up of other degrees of freedom.

You see this in molecules, for example, if you heat up. So molecules, they begin to vibrate in entirely different ways. And so in a sense, the molecule is able to express or represent more dimensions than it can in a low temperature state. And that dovetails nicely with what psychedelics are doing is that they are, Andres and Gomez and Nielsen, likes the idea of an energy parameter.

And I do too. He looks at it purely in phenomenology and energy parameter of consciousness. You can link that also to an energy parameter of the cortex. And you're stimulating certain populations, you're perturbing certain populations of neurons, and you're opening up degrees of freedom of the cortex.

So I'm actually working with someone at the moment. I wish I could say his name, but it's a bit under wraps. But anyway, I'll tell you what we're basically working on, kind of the limits, the representation will reach, if you like, of the cortex. In that when the cortex is stimulated by a psychedelic, particularly with DMT, it turns out, you are increasing the representation will reach of the cortex.

And what I mean by that is that the cortex becomes capable of representing structures and dynamics, that it simply isn't capable of representing in the normal waking state. And so it's as if this intelligence is always there, and in a certain sense, always accessible. And yet we simply lack the capacity to represent it in a kind of visual form. So become it like we see this low-dimensional projection, which we see as noise, or we don't see at all.

It's simply filtered out and ignored. And yet when you perturb the brain with DMT, it opens up. It expands the representation will reach, it allows the cortex to explore more dimensions of phenomenology, if it's able to represent high-dimensional structures that are simply inaccessible to it. And that then allows, and again, I can't say too much at this point, hopefully I will in a few months, but it's kind of allowing you to interface with other intelligent agents that themselves have much higher levels of complexity and dimensionality.

And that simply we don't see them normally, even though they're always there, wherever there is, wherever here is. And yet in the DMT state, we're able to reach beyond our normal representation reach, and actually start to represent the structures and the dynamics of these beings, these intelligences that are far beyond. We live in this very mundane. If you think about it, we sit one rung up from flatland.

And that's interesting in itself, in that the world we see is extremely simple in terms of dimensionality. It's as if our brain has evolved to represent just enough dimensions that allows us to make sense of what we need to make sense of, what we need to interact with, what's important for survival, no more, no less. As soon as you increase dimensionality, you increase complexity dramatically, and it becomes much more difficult than to actually make sense because perception is all about making sense. It's not about being true, not about building accurate, truthful representation of the environment.

It's about building a model that makes sense and is adaptive and allows you to navigate, manipulate and interact with and perform adaptive functions as an organism. The brain has stumbled upon this three plus one, this three dimensions plus time, this very simple system, this very simple, I guess you could have a co-ordinization, if you like, of our world model, that it has just enough dimensions, but not too many. You could imagine living in a world that was two dimensional, but that wouldn't be enough, but we need the extra dimension, but we don't need anymore. And DMT maybe is pushing us by increasing this energy parameter, increasing the temperature, quote unquote, temperature, by opening up degrees of freedom and allowing the cortex to represent structures and dynamics of other intelligent agents that normally are beyond our representational reach.

That's what I can say and what I think. And we're actually working out the mathematics of this and how this actually works. And it dovetails nicely with someone else's work. And some people might be able to get a hint from that, but I'm not going to say anymore.

If you're talking about here, it's not Andres. All right. Awaiting that research with Bated Breath. It's interesting that when you talk about intelligent agents and you're like, I want to be very careful not to arrive at any kind of premature ontological closure about the nature of those agents that move seems very part and parcel with what you're saying about representational complexity, again, to go back to what we were talking about earlier in this conversation.

And again, I'll give a shout out to my mentor, Richard Doyle at Penn State, who wrote an entire book about this, Darwin's Pharmacy, Sex Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere, where he says the way that what he calls the e-cadelic experience forces us to confront the non-Euclidean, the way that self-another can be wrapped up, folded into one another, or that it requires a higher dimensional logic in order to parse these experiences. And I think about three spatial dimensions in one time is there in the language that science uses. We have subject, verb, object, and tense, right? And syntactic language, I'm hugely inspired by the work of Martin Noak and others, the evolution of syntactic communication as a function of what human beings must communicate to one another in order to maintain cohesive group behavior and as how proto-human societies grew over time, the single word utterances no longer cut it, that we started running up against error threshold in our communication.

This has me just thinking about the historicity of DMT entering the popular imagination now when it does, along with the development of digital communication technologies. And I guess if I'm gonna try to wrangle this down and do a question for you, it's like, is the syntax of modern science no longer adequate to the everyday experience of 21st century digital natives? And if so, then how is that going to change the way that we start learning from the DMT experience into what the syntax of an adequate science must look like? When I remember years ago, I asked Dennis McKenna, I think it was episode 88 or something.

There's psychedelic science where people study the effects of psychedelics and then there's other psychedelic science, which is where scientists take psychedelics and ask questions that they couldn't in the waking state. And so this is where I invite you to play about, if you can put it in subject verb object syntax, what are the characteristics of the forms of communication required of us in order to pursue those questions with the rigor that they demand? I think what DMT is showing us, will be shown to be showing us, is actually that first of all, that our way of seeing reality in terms of subject and object is going to collapse and shown to be entirely inadequate. I think the idea that there is a separate subject and object, ultimately I think there is only a subject.

So in a sense, those that say that the DMT state is just part of your own mind. In a sense, they are correct, but not in the way that they think they're correct, if that makes sense. I think we're part of the phenomenon. I don't think we're separate.

I don't think we're a subject observing an object in the way that we assume scientific language, and again, it is connected to the foreordinization, if that's a word, of our world model. It's that we have a subject and then we have objects. And this allows us to talk about science and allows science to progress. And it's very helpful as a kind of heuristic to see the world in that way as I'm the subject and then we have an object.

And of course, we know that even quantum physicists, not that I'm a quantum physicist, I don't want to start sounding like a deep hat, chakra here, but even they will tell you that, okay, the subject of an object breaks down, that you can't disconnect the observer from the observed, and that it's a participatory thing. We are part of this phenomenon. We are part of the DMT phenomenon, and that we are conscious agents in a sense, to use Donald Hoffman's term. And thus, if we're interacting with DMT beings, they are also conscious agents.

You take Hoffman's theory to its obvious conclusion. He thinks that there's nothing but conscious agents. And that in a sense is a modern formulation of perhaps the oldest of human worldviews in which there is nothing but consciousness. And everything comes from consciousness.

And there is only one consciousness. And yet somehow the illusion of form and structure and content and subjects emerges from that. But ultimately, there is only the subject. There is only consciousness.

It's an idealistic, philosophically idealistic perspective. And I am in some senses of an idealist. I don't sound like it all the time, because I speak in the language of science. And yet at the same time, fundamentally, I think that there is only a subject.

And so when you are interacting with DMT entities, you are interacting with other subjects. And it's that interface between two subjects. So one allows two subjects to interact. And that's the question here.

So I don't see it as we occupy the physical three-dimensional world. And they're in a high-dimensional space. I don't think it's like that at all. I think we're part of the same structure.

And yet we have this very particular coordinateization of our interface that is very restricted and very limited. What DMT is doing is allowing us to expand, to increase the representational reach, to increase the dimensionality of our interface effectively, and allowing us then to represent structures and dynamics, as I said before, of other conscious agents that are perhaps far more complex, that sit at a high level, that are not so constrained as we are. And again, if you go to Cibet and Buddhism, they will talk about these hierarchies of beings. And you think countless, innumerable numbers of these other beings, and you have to ask yourself, are people like Donald Hoffman, for example, are they simply repackaging that?

Are they coming to the same conclusion? But from a more mathematically formal perspective. I'm not sure I answered your question there, but that's what I'm getting at, is that eventually we'll have to accept, perhaps our way of describing reality as a physical world in a three plus one dimensions, is limited if we're going to explain DMT. We need to reach beyond that, and realize actually that reality is far more complex and far stranger.

And as long as we insist upon this three-dimensional interface that we live in, that's the true reality, that we're never going to understand DMT. Because in a sense, that assumption precludes the possibility of beings that we can't normally see. You can't explain that, so you have to explain the way, as hallucinations, and even if that fails, it's like, oh, you're into the realm of kind of promissory science, or oh, we don't understand it yet, but don't worry, we will. It's the same thing happens more broadly with consciousness science.

The assumption has been, for the last couple of hundred years, at least, that we live in a physical world. Matter is ontologically fundamental, and all we have to do is work out how subjectivity can emerge from physical matter. And so more and more people now are actually flipping that. In any other area of science, you had a fundamental assumption that had failed for centuries to explain something.

You go, maybe we should start questioning that fundamental assumption. And more and more scientists now, to different degrees than others, are saying actually maybe we've got this wrong. Maybe actually the appearance of matter, the appearance of the world, of the physical world emerges from consciousness, which is fundamental. Conscious is the only thing that we cannot deny.

And yes, for some reason we've sidelined it, and seen it as a secondary emergent epiphenomenom of the physical world. And I think once you flip it, and see consciousness of fundamental, then you start to see that the DMT doesn't seem that strange, actually, in a sense. In that actually, yes, you simply could be dealing with other consciousness, is other conscious agents, other intelligent agents, that are like we are subjects, that are different patterns of consciousness that exist within the broader matrix of conscious agents, if you like. So yeah, that's how I see it.

I think if anything, DMT is going to force us to fundamentally reevaluate how we see reality. And I think actually it's gonna take us right back to these ancient ideas of consciousness being ontologically fundamental. But I don't think scientists are ready to do that. And that's why we're in this mess of not being able to explain consciousness.

And in a related sense, we're also in this mess of not being able to explain it yet. That's a great answer to a question. I'm not sure I even asked, but I was in there. In the book, hang of stuff, I gave you, let me see if I can.

It's a tactical stuff. I don't know. Yeah, but let me see if I can approach this from another angle before we probe Iluisis and the future of DMT research. Because I think there's a ramp here.

And again, the ramp is in, if inner and outer subject and object are inadequate as explanatory tools for hyperspace, then what does science become by adopting what might be sort of a more computational, epistemological approach? It's not just the resolution, but the spatiotemporal dimensionality of the contents of consciousness are computationally constrained. So there has to be a way for scientists, like yourself and people who come after you to say, okay, well, actually science on some level is equipped to make much more nuanced validity claims, because we can boil science down to being about articulating perspectives and testing them against increasingly alien perspectives. So I guess the question is one of what does science become in the process of staying true to its nature, staying rigorous, but broadening to encompass this?

Like what, it is a philosophy of science kind of question. How does it begin to handle empirically and theoretically exploring these spaces while letting go of the assumptions of naive realism? Yeah, I think science can work. You don't have to change the scientific method here.

I'm not suggesting that you have to do that just fly off into the ether and start talking about spirits and angels and things like this. I think that's necessary. You can still do science. I mean, if you accept what is science, when you perform a scientific measurement, right?

Science is all about doing experiments, right? That's the method. You have a hypothesis and you test it by doing an experiment performing an observation. That observation always takes place through the medium of consciousness, right?

In a sense, you're restricting the subject when you perform a scientific observation. If you measure the way that a particle moves, the way that a particle scatters, you're actually narrowing and controlling the perception. You're controlling the subject as much as anything. When we say that something is repeatable and observable and objective, what we actually mean is that we can actually control the subject in many different people so that they see the same thing.

That's how we treat something as being repeatable and verifiable in science. So science always already works through the subject. It can't work through anything else because everything that we observe must come through the conduit of subjective experience ultimately. And so what DMT allows us to do is to dramatically alter the subject.

It allows you to see patterns of subjectivity, patterns of consciousness that are simply not available and that are not available in the normal waking state. It's very kind of low level, low dimensional constrained state. And so you treat the DMT space rather than saying, is it real or is it not real? I think these questions are ultimately dead ends.

What you do instead, you say, okay, we treat the DMT space as another type of observation. It's a scientific observation. We can go into this space, this uncharted domain with entirely different structure. We can analyze its structure, its topology, its geometry, its dynamics, all of that stuff can still be done as we would do when we're measuring from our mundane three plus one dimensional interface.

We can do it now with these much higher dimensional interfaces and start to think about, and this is kind of thing that the quality research is to do it. They're taking the phenomenology seriously and saying, you know, get about the neuroscience for the moment, not the neuroscience is important, but let's analyze the phenomenology itself, head on. What is happening to subjectivity? What is actually happening to the conscious experience?

I can tell you that, right? If you take DMT, I can tell you, I might not have the words to explain clearly, but I have direct access to a different type of structured consciousness, right? And that's reliable. If you inject some of the DMT 100% of the time, except in very rare individuals, you will get a very specific type of change in the structure and dynamics, the dimensionality, the topology, the geometry of conscious experience.

We treat it like that as a new way of observing a new domain of observation. And then you say, okay, what kind of people do we need to send into that space or to experience that kind of altered subjectivity, rather than just sending kind of random members of the public, so to speak, or even experience psychonauts, you instead, you send people who are, who have specific skill sets. So you send in mathematicians, you send in topologists, algebraic geometers, and you send in linguists, you send in artists, you send in all these different people with their own specific fields, who are tasked, just as any other, in any other scientific field. If you want it to explore a map, let's say, an uncharted region of a virgin rainforest, you wouldn't just send random members of the public and say, tell us what you see, you would send in botanists, you would send in geologists, you would send in hydrologists, right, and they would each come back with certain types of information, and that would then allow you to understand the ecology of this space and the structure and the dynamics of the rainforest.

And then you can connect it to the world outside the rainforest, you know, how is it different, how is it connected, how do they interact, all of that stuff? We do the same with the DMT space, we don't make judgements about ontology, the real unreal question, we forget about that, we say, okay, this is an uncharted domain, different type of conscious structure, which clearly is very different. And we send in people with specific skill sets to retrieve certain types of information, to do certain types of experiments, to perform certain types of observations, and they come back and say, okay, this space occupies this region within this topological manifold, I'm talking about my backside here, but you get the idea, right, and as I'm doing a much better job in verbalizing this, but you get the point, right, you're sending people in who can tell you about how it's structured, I don't just say, oh, that was really weird, man, that was crazy, that's impossible. Cool, but you want to say, actually, this is why it's impossible, this is why it's so different from human experience, because it's operating six dimensions, because it's part of a hyperbolic structure, and there are these space groups that show these beings operating some kind of different experiential algebra, or something like this, or the language they're using is information rich, but it's not related to human languages in this way, and all this kind of stuff you can do without making judgements as to the ontology, which is a dead end, I think.

And that's where, of course, the DMTX technology comes into play, because that's the tool that we can use now, to stably induce someone into the DMTP state, so instead of being a rapid rollercoaster, where they're fired into the space for a couple of minutes, and then drag it out again, they can be induced into the state immersed within the space, because the space stabilizes, they can navigate the space, and they can spend time delivering real-time information to the team waiting on the outside, so to speak, about its structure and its dynamics, and all that kind of stuff. Then we start to think, okay, how does that inform our model of reality? How does that inform our understanding of what reality is and how reality is structured, and how that high-dimensional space relates to our lower-dimensional space, and that gives them a broader picture, hopefully, ultimately, of how reality is constructed. Is it just a three-dimensional world, and that's it?

Or are we in fact kind of a lower-dimensional slice, or experiencing a lower-dimensional slice of a much richer and more complex high-dimensional structure? That's the ultimate aim, I think, of working with the MT-it. It's a unique opportunity to efficiently and reliably access other forms of subjectivity, which ultimately is going to inform how we see reality and how we understand our reality. Yeah, so I guess you've already started to trace the outlines of this, the idea that a certain amount of expertise is required in order to examine and understand what you're seeing through the telescope.

You need to book time in the observatory, that extended state research is really necessary to start tackling some of these questions. So I guess this is where I invite you to talk about Elusis, and beyond. You end this book talking about the vision of DM Turner, a pseudonymous psychedelic researcher who said that under the influence of DMT, they entered some type of research center, full of large metallic pods for putting people into suspended animation. And you talk about the possibility of people spending enormous amounts of time in here, formalizing the antipodes of the mind.

So what does this actually look like over the next couple years, and what is the sort of inaccessible holy grail for you of DMT research that you hope you live to see? Yeah, so I work with a nonprofit out of Florida, New Nordics, end of a low NAU-T-I-C-S.org, and we've been thinking about what we call SETI of the mind, this idea of treating the DMT space as largely unexplored, and certainly not understood, new domain territory, and treating it as a place to explore and understand, a place where there are beings that we can establish stable to a communication with. So we've had an eye on this kind of experiments, and this kind of work that I was just talking about for a long time using the DMTX technology, which now shown to be safe, effective, tolerable. The problem, of course, is a venue for doing this kind of work, in that it's very difficult to get funding in a standard research institution, at a university to say, oh, we want to study communication with non-human intelligent agents, they'd laugh about the room, and you have to cloak it in other stuff, like Ricksdrasman did, I say, oh, we're gonna measure changes in blood pressure and things like this, and then as a side effect, to get all these beautiful trip reports, but I think we've moved past that now where it's just about gathering trip reports and looking for patterns.

Now we're talking about actually sending people in with specific tasks and doing experiments, and there you need a focus study that is focused on that kind of stuff, and that's not that palatable to the mainstream research institution. So we've always struggled with a venue. Fortunately, a couple of years ago, we started working with the Elusis T, so Elusis, E-L-E-U-S-I-S, as in the old Elusis, ancient Greece, the Elusinian mysteries. So Elusis, they happened to have a very good working relationship with the government in St Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean, they basically was able to acquire a unique and special license, which allowed them to do research using psychedelics, any psychedelic.

And so we started working together and thought, okay, this is an ideal venue for D-M-T-X, like a flagship. There's no institute anywhere in the world where anybody can go and spend time to undergo D-M-T, at least not legally. And so Elusis, over the last three years, we've been working together, they've been raising funds to set up this Research Institute Stroke Retreat Center on this island and backway in St Vincent and the Grenadines that is called Elusis, and the aim is that it will be both a research center to do ultimately these kind of experiments, this kind of work that we've always dreamed of at New Nordics, but also as a retreat center for anyone, even without experiencing specialist fields can come and actually experience D-M-T-X and over a number of sessions spending several days on the island with all the preparation and the integration and all probably medically supervised anesthesiologist delivering the D-M-T in fusion, which is essential, in my opinion, a psychiatrist that will screen them beforehand and sign them off as being suitable medical care team, nurses in the room and everything that's required to safely administer D-M-T to human subjects. So finally, after several years in the planning, this is about to open.

So from March of this year, 2026, the Elusis team specifically will be welcoming the first subjects onto the island who can undergo D-M-T-X a number of times in a beautiful setting with all of the safety protocols and the medical team all set up. And then people can go actually, if they want to sign up and go to Elusismind, elusismind.com, and they can check out what this center looks like and they can even put their name down and apply to undergo D-M-T-X on the island if they want with accepting applications now. So that's how I see the future ultimately of D-M-T-X work, not just in the Caribbean, but ultimately globally, ideally. Obviously there are massive legal challenges there, but that's how I see it.

That's the future. That's my contribution in a sense by introducing the idea of D-M-T-X to the future of D-M-T research. It's having people, as you said, the D-M-Turner Trip Report where people were spending large portions of their lives, maybe not all the time, but certainly much more than just a couple of minutes. We could be getting into hours or even days.

Obviously once you get into days, you have to start considering things like managing bodily processes, you have to deal with waste management, you have to deal with food delivery and all that kind of stuff. But that technology is also already there. It's there from a medical perspective, those kind of technologies there for maintaining the human body. It's also being developed for space flight as well.

The idea of putting someone in a state of not so much suspended animation at such a state where they're effectively asleep and all their bodily functions are being managed while there are several weeks trips to Mars or something. See a similar kind of technology being employed here. Ultimately, where you would go in a pod and you would input your journey time, this would all be largely automatic and you would lie down in the pod and it would take care of all of your bodily needs and then you would spend a couple of weeks within the D-M-T world. And we would become effectively transdimensional citizens if you like in that we're no longer just constrained by our three plus one dimensional world interface.

But actually we can spend time interacting with beings that are perhaps far beyond us. And that might be the next step in human evolution. Our next step is learning what is the relationship between us and this broader structure and these beings. It is their way for us to cross over.

That's getting into all this like transhumanism there. That's something I explore in my first book, Alien Information Theory. But I don't know what that future is going to look like but I feel like the MTX is another step towards a future that is as yet unknown and yet seems to be arriving at an ever increasing speed. We seem to be hurtling into the future and I don't think any of us really know what the world is going to look like in five years time but I don't think it's going to be uploading our consciousness onto some kind of mainframe, some sort of service system.

I think that's a massive failure of imagination from the West Coast kind of tech rose. I think actually we're going to, I can tell I despise that crowd but we're going to approach the future directly face on subjectively. The idea of uploading our consciousness is going to a stupid idea but loading our consciousness onto a computer. That doesn't make sense to me.

I think science is going to begin to understand again what's being forgotten for several hundred years. There are actually subjectivity is all there. It's consciousness is all there is and we're going to start to learn science, the structure and dynamics of consciousness and we're going to approach our next phase directly face on subjectively and DMT I think seems like the best case but for the tool that allows us to do that. So I know I've kept you long.

If you have time for one more, I think that you being open about your critique of brain uploading and I'm right there with you. I have been for ages. You bring up something in this book. I would be a fool for not giving you a moment to address before we go which is John Smart's Transention Hypothesis.

There's again, there's something inherent in the DMT experience that's saying the way that we think about technology as something that gives a separate self leverage over an external world, the way that it challenges that, there's like an isomorphism between that and the conventional SETI approach of looking for extraterrestrial intelligence out there. And you can watch about this at length on other shows. I want to acknowledge them and their work with you on that but you're getting into the negative cartagev scale and Transention and to ask you to just give a moment on how you might imagine the future co-evolution of humankind and technology in light of this sort of non-Euclidean or convoluted relationship between self and other, I think would be a lovely place to sign it off. Yeah, I think again, the idea that we're only going to find other intelligences out there, other wet bodied beings that kind of look in some ways or at least biologically related to us in some ways.

I think that's again, just a massive failure of imagination apart of science and works within that constrained three plus one dimensional interface. And I don't rule out the possibility that we would find beings in that way. But I think what DMT, in my opinion, shows us quite clearly and undeniably to anyone's experience that there is what seems to be a practical infinite, a numerable variety of intelligences that we don't have to wait for some kind of binary, miss it from a star system several hundred light years away. It's just not efficient, it's just not reasonable, it's just like ridiculous pythery.

But actually that these beings are accessible right now at our birthright in a sense that everyone, if you can access DMT, which is ubiquitous throughout the world, which is interesting in itself, then you can access these intelligences. And so again, it requires a fundamental shift from how we see reality. Yes, the Kardashev scale, I think that's informative to an extent the anti-Shakardashev scale, the idea, at least the idea that it's accepted now that yes, we do spend a lot of money looking at it upwards, but actually we spend much more money on time looking inwards, deeper and deeper levels of reality at smaller and smaller scales. And so the idea that a civilization would not be expanding into the cosmos outwards, would actually be going inwards, it would be learning how to manipulate the fundamental structure of space time.

Quote unquote fundamental, I don't think it is fundamental. That's not a crazy idea anymore. And so the idea that a civilization would go inwards and ultimately transcend and transcendention would simply look like a civilization that had achieved mastery, it's called the microdimensional mastery scale by John Barrow, the cosmologists, having achieved mastery over the lowest level that we could get to would actually be instantiating themselves at this ground of reality, using the fundamental computational structure of space time in order to instantiate themselves, rather than either spawning the cosmologists or using computer servers or whatever, to upload a consciousness, I think that's more likely. But even that, I think, is limited because I don't even think it's that.

I don't know what it looks like, but it seems to me that even that is working within the standard kind of constrained space time paradigm as we understanding and assuming that space time is fundamental and that's where we need to get to. And if we understand the fundamental structure of space time, then we've understood the fundamental structure of reality. And I think what DMT shows is that's not true at all. And the space time is not fundamental.

John Hoppen says, space time is doomed. And I think DMT is going to force us actually to confront the fact that space time is not fundamental and that we're not seeking beings elsewhere within space time, so to speak, but we're seeking beings that exist perhaps beyond space time or outside of that fundamental metaphysical assumption of the ontological privacy of space time. And that's remarkable, that that's so easy to do, right? If DMT really is doing that, allowing us to interface with these other conscious being, conscious agent, intelligent agents, then it's remarkable how simple it is.

You don't require billion dollar telescopes. You don't require thousands and thousands of years to pass messages back and forth. It's like anyone could go there right now. You don't need to be a scientist.

You don't need to be an astronomer. You can just do it. Anyone can do it. And I think that's the most remarkable thing about DMT is it's democratic.

Anyone, anyone who can access DMT can access these astonishingly complex and dynamic and fascinating worlds and the equally astonishing and complex and dynamic beings that seem to populate these worlds. Well, yeah, and in fact, everyone did participate in the Elocinian mysteries once upon a minute, right? Bringing that back to our society seems of the utmost importance. I really appreciate you taking all of this time.

I would love to know if you feel like there's anything that we have not touched on, that you consider truly vital. There are a negative space in this conversation or a blind spot. Well, I think we all have a massive blind spot. And I think what DMT fundamentally shows us is really how little we know.

We know shit about the nature of reality in our place within it and approaching DMT with that level of humility that actually we don't sit at the top of the hierarchy of intelligences. We have this exalted position on Earth and that we do just to probably sit kind of at the apex of intelligence. And we like to extrapolate that to broader reality. And I think DMT is forcing us minimally to confront our own inadequacies and confront the fact that actually we are just taking the first step on the road to understanding reality.

We are not almost at the end of the road. We are really just relative terms. We're taking the first step. And there's a lot more work to do before we have any idea about who we are, where we are, and the beings that are everywhere and nowhere.

Now we have the tools and the technologies to interact with. Well, Andrew, thanks again for all of this. I am honored to be at least nominally involved in new inotics and therefore a degree from the work that you're doing. And I look forward to seeing how it develops.

Thanks so much for being on the show. You're welcome. Thanks again for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, please consider liking, subscribing, and commenting on your favorite podcast provider.

I would love some more interaction on the YouTube channel. Humans on the Loop is made possible thanks to the support of listeners like you. Explore the show's extensive archives, read years of mind-expanding essays, and access members-only perks like the reading group and courses at MichaelGarfield.substack.com. And stay tuned.

Upcoming episodes include dialogues with complexity scientists to Stuart Kaufman and David Wohlpert, Techethics, Badass, Matthew Mitka, visionary authors Tyson Young Caporda, and Jonathan Zapp in many more. And part two of my essay series on the evolution of planetary culture should drop on Substack later this week. I'm also neck deep in awesome backstage projects. I'm excited to tell you about soon, including launching a new podcast and Substack for the AI capabilities and alignment consensus project and developments on the front of distributed and sovereign tech infrastructure for better collaboration with my brilliant friends at the Atlas Research Group.

More on that very soon. Until then, take care. And remember, attention is our greatest natural resource.