Hank Scorpio wrote:It's one thing to say that peoples hallucinations appear hyperbolic, which they do in the talk, and another thing entirely to suggest that a DMT trip somehow alters your relationship with spacetime itself, as they do in the article.
Interesting! Isn't that claim sort of right though? The effects of DMT obviously effects how one experiences (phenomenological) space and time. It obviously doesn't change the world 'as it is' (not trying to get into deep philosophical waters; I'll drown). The article is still full of mumbo-jumbo to my eyes, so I could totally be wrong; perhaps he does claim that somehow. In the essay
Algorithmic Reduction of Psychedelic States he goes more in-depth about that subject. I'll quote:
Quote:For the purpose of this article I will assume that direct realism, in all of its guises, is wrong. That is, I will assume that any mind-independent object can only be experienced indirectly. What we experience is not the object (or beings) themselves, but a qualia-furnished representation entirely contained within one’s mind (this is often called the simulationist account of perception). Furthermore, I will also assume that the behavior of the universe can be fully described with the Standard Model of physics (or a future version of it).
What are your opinions on the second part of the geometric essay though?
('2) Dynamic System Account: Energy Sources, Sinks and Invariants'
He asks the reader to 'assume' that visuals (not just on DMT) require a certain amount of energy:
Quote:For instance, the brightness of a point of colored light in one’s visual field is energy-dependent. Likewise, the information content in a texture, the number of represented symmetrical relationships, the speed by which an object moves (plus its acceleration), and even the curvature of one’s geometry.
How bold of a claim is that? It sounds quite reasonable but I'm surprised one would even have to make an assumption about a rather dull statement. I guess might just not really know enough of the brain to conclude this using hard science.
Then he claims that DMT is, other than 'regular' states which modulate mental energy all the time, is a constant high-energy state. DMT also impairs those 'mental energy sinks' while increasing the throughput of its energy sources. That is, he says, what eventually accounts for the mental/visual effects of DMT. Which sounds interesting, but doesn't really seem based on anything.
Quote:Energy sinks are still present and they struggle to capture as much of the energy as possible. In particular, one energy sink is “recognition” of objects on the world-sheet.
This model postulates that attention functions as an energy source, whereas pattern recognition functions as an energy sink.
Now this gets more interesting because there certainly is something going on with 'focusing' on the certain detail while in DMT space. He gets into an example of how the curvature of the 'world sheet' we experience in everyday life is 'arousal-dependent'. So de-focusing your vision for instance diminishes the energy it takes to sustain a curved world-sheet with a lot of information. Which is important for the next part, which gets good:
Quote:One essential property of our minds is that our level of mental arousal decreases when we interpret our experience as “expected”. People who can enjoy their own minds do so, in part, by finding unexpected ways of understanding expected things. In the presence of new information that one cannot easily integrate, however, one’s level of energy is adjusted upwards so that we try out a variety of different models quickly and try to sort out a model that does make the new information expected (though perhaps integrating new assumptions or adding content in other ways). When we cannot manage to generate a mental model that works out a likely model of what we are experiencing we tend to remain in an over-active state.
This general principle applies to the world-sheet. One of the predominant ways in which a world-sheet reduces its energy (locally) is by morphing into something you can recognize or interpret. Thus the world-sheet in some way keeps on producing objects, at first familiar, but in higher energies the whole process can seem desperate or hopeless: one can only recognize things with a stretch of the imagination. Since humans in general lack much experience with hyperbolic geometry, we usually don’t manage to imagine objects that are symmetric on their own native geometry. But when we do, and we fill them up with resonant light-mind-energy, then BAM! New harmonics of consciousness! New varieties of bliss! Music of the angels! OMG! Laughter till infinity and more- shared across the galaxy- in a hyperbolic transpersonal delight! It’s like LSD and N2O! Wow!
As one does not know any object that the world-sheet can reasonably be able to generate in high doses, and the world-sheet has so much energy on its own, energy can seem to spiral out of control. This explains in part the non-linear relationship between experienced intensity and DMT dose.
That would account for the extremely large range of experiences one can have on DMT and also the 'speed' at which one experiences the visuals. I've been wondering why sometimes my visuals are almost 'photo realistic' (or at least the memory of em do) while often it's very obviously a buncha self-rotating, colorful geometry.
Quote:
On DMT, anything that attention focuses on will begin branching, copying itself and multiplying, a process that quickly saturates the scene to the point of filling more spatial relationships than would fit in Euclidean 3D. The rate at which this happens is dose-dependent. The higher the dose, the less inhibiting control there is and the more intense the “folding” property of attention will be.
Again; I realize this is not a formal method or the end-of-all framework to describe these things. But its certainly food for (my) thoughts. I wouldn't mind living in a world where "the value of hyperbolic phenomenal spaces will be proportional to the level of wellbeing and bliss that can be felt in them."
Hank Scorpio wrote:Sorry if my comment is a bit negative. I would definitely agree that more research is good. As far as I know, nobody exactly knows the mechanism by which DMT visuals get their distinctive geometry and I (reductionist
) would love to find out.
Don't be sorry! I applaud any and all civil discourse, this is a place of learning after all. Feel free to point out some more obvious flaws in this framework/theory. The people at the Qualia Institute are, as far as I've gathered from their blog, very interested in any (constructive) criticism aimed their way.