The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (@Harvard Science of Psychedelics Club)

hey hey Paul thanks so much for coming this is pretty much the first event I'm kind of cheesy we're both under grants and we psychedelics consciousness I'm not just in research but also related to meditation meditation and we've use there's a graduate student group to so if you're inclusive and your grad student let us know and if you feel like you're not fully in connection with our communication panels email Facebook I guess yeah yeah so quality to say research nonprofit dedicated to finding the science of consciousness on this who's going to be giving the talk today is the director of research at quality Research Institute which is also a stop currently in the Bay Area sure I happens to all be here in Boston as well so he's got my Johnson be CEO and Romeo Stevens director of operations right and also Quinton and will also probably be hanging out afterwards so if you have any questions for Andres or impure [Applause] all right hi everyone thank you for coming maybe feel free to not not participate but just really curious to make a show of hands maybe like how many of you have ever tried to any kind of psychedelic ok yeah it sounds like maybe like 90% how about a have a like a vaporized DMT okay good that's all it like 20 20% 25% that's that's awesome so so kind of like the this talk is going to be able to have a following German 3d experiences this is the original article but Halloween 2016 and we'd be iterating a lot over it and yeah I think like this is the first time I'm giving this talk I haven't and yet so I'll get started so a thermal scope so it used to be believed that there were a whole lot of different types of temperatures and they used to call them eye thing like damp cold and dank cold and like crisp heat and like searing heat and like humid heat and you know in the 16th century is like people who are really skeptical how can you you know possibly measure some collapse all of these like weird temperatures either just one number with like a device like that you know there was tremendous amount of skepticism about their thermometers went when they first arose well actually for them to be good in the sense of being recalibrated properly apparently people used to think that all caves that had the same temperatures calibrate thermometers in caves and we wouldn't match up and what do you would use that as evidence the temperature is not a real thing so kind of like without in mind is it possible to have a thermometer for how high on DMT someone is what the valence of their experience is valence is basically how good or bad and experience feels like the information content of their experience so what I kind of like I wanted to think about VSS as I continued in the presentation like these there may be a way in which how high on the mt you are is actually an objective feature of the world and not just not collapses perhaps into like well I don't know maybe maybe this kind of like a turn on turn off a version or something but maybe maybe like temperature there's like a sense in which you can quantify how heated up you are by a psychedelic so how do you take something qualitative I mean something like the DMT experience and turn it into into math potentially at a few set of values so I'm gonna give you an analogy so the analogy is like this imagine you're a botanist you just like started you're an undergraduate and you know people feel really proud about how they know everything there is to know about leaves and plants and you know the entire space and they're like sound reports somewhere you know like some dubious reports that there's like other types of leaves out there like there's like other types of plans really key component you know you go and you study more you kind of like realize like hey like they're talking about like venation patterns margins say our shapes arrangements there's like a completely leaves out there that you have never seen before so you just dismiss it hey like we we went on a trip probably has you know different evolutionary some extra pressures and we saw please I'll take the trip and and see what happens and you the first time you set food out of the boat you see this and you're shocked because you've never seen anything like this I mean this is not exactly a leave with a lot of personal stuff and okay after the shock wears off a little bit you walk a little bit further and you see all of these other things in my chart but anyway you you you become convinced that yeah there are other types of leaves and and you go back but you maybe don't necessarily have like you know perfect visual memory you don't necessarily have the best ability to kind of describe what you saw so you go back to the community of botanist and you say no like actually I did see did see something different it's not in your tables and their response is you're tripping man I mean indeed but I'm not the only one so you take for example a mathematician to the island and then the mathematician comes back and says yeah what happened is those plants are hyperbolic and that's what makes them different now you maybe skip it's like hyperbolic what do I mean well again I'm not the only one type in Google Images hyperbolic leaf and you'll get these results so in what sense is kale a hyperbolic plant so what I just mentioned is actually kind of an introduction both to psychedelic epistemology and also to hyperbolic geometry as we'll see in a moment so yeah this person will now be able to say I was sleeping now I'm awake I wake to the curvature of leaves there's this entirely new dimension I wasn't taking into account and as long as you just you know have all your diagrams in a flat textbook you don't try to represent curvature there's a very important feature of the world you may be missing so okay introducing hyperbolic geometry how many of you are familiar with hyperbolic geometry or acquainted with okay so it is very very cool thing because in a sense surfaces have a curvature and kind of like very very broadly you know like a sphere has a positive curvature a flat surface hyperbolic space has negative curvature and you can kind of see like some of the pictures above all of those are spherical geometry and it has to do with basically how many angles can you stitch it together at a corner so if you stitch together five equilateral triangles you will get these icosahedra this thing that kind of it has a nice closure you stitch together six triangles then you'll get this thing that repeats endlessly in a plane and if you stitch together seven triangles at a corner and you actually try to do it you'll see like well it's it kind of like worse at first but then it gets kind of messy you know it gets really wrinkly and you need to kinda like flatly have you be flatten it in some place kind of like that the wrinkle nez goes elsewhere it's very difficult to manage those things but broadly speaking like you you do have this general pattern kind of like how many like how many angles you can be on a corner so the the example for example the top right hyperbolic circle there there's like squares and Pentagon's ready three squares at a corner and one Pentagon which is really not possible in a flat surface it's kind of weird you have kind of these you know square lattice with a little a few Pentagon's infiltrated and somehow you still managed to to work with it you also have kind of like right below you have five triangles and one square that also adds more to 360 degrees so that doesn't seem really possible and the last square which is due to the protector of it you can see there's a blue squares one's a little bit red thing there you can say one two three four five seems like it never ends please infinite program or something how can you possibly beat that into a plane we will actually come back to that shape that shape is actually important for understanding the empty experiences but yeah the takeaway is kind of too many triangles if you have too many triangles and a small space to feed them in at some point you will kind of like be forced to stitch more than six of them in a corner and you'll start to get like these wrinkled hyperbolic surface there's also these kind of equivalent aspect that's called kind of the hyperbolic symmetry as opposed to the euclidean symmetry so it's a very well-known fact in math then there's only seventeen possible ways of tessellating a two-dimensional Euclidean space those are the shapes in the left they are called the six seventeen wallpaper symmetry groups and basically there are made of like symmetry elements so for example you can use like mirrors you can use rotational symmetry you can use glide which is combining mirror and translation and there's only so many ways you can combine those and actually cover the place the space properly in hyperbolic geometry there's an infinite number of ways of doing it so you can you know stitch together you know seventeen triangles at a corner and just make that a symmetry you can you know put I don't know like a hundred different mirrors intersecting at a point and then I'm making a symmetry of that you're very unconstrained on hyperbolic symmetry but in your plea and symmetry you're very constrained you only have seventeen and it's mathematically proven that there's just no other way of doing it there's also kind of like this sense in which these different symmetries have like a different level what you might call kind of like detail or information at the very top you know top top left you have kind of like oh it's just based a very simple translation whereas as you go down it gets well six rotational symmetry combined with a three rotational two rotational just gets more more things crammed in it's kind of like more more information in some sense and your information in hyperbolic symmetry is you can just cram in as much want you can you know put like mirrors and rotations and glides and it's all sorts of ways and still make it fit somehow and kind of like another important metaphor here is this sense of kind of like a brand the branching factor of different spaces so if you're a new clean space and you kind of like draw a circle and you calculate the area as a function of the radius of the circle you will see that it grows quadratically right if you sleep P PI times R square like it grows as a function of the square of the radius if you do the same in a hyperbolic surface you will get a something that it's exponential it's not exponential at the very beginning but it very quickly basically asymptotically becomes an explanation curve so in hyperbolic space you can fit a lot of things in a relatively small circle a circle with a relatively small radius and that turns out to be really important as well for explaining DMT as as we will see but the important thing of these light is kind of this concept of the branching factor and in a sense if you're in a hyperbolic space and you start kind of like walking randomly is very unlikely that you will get back to the same place because basically every time you take a step the number of ways in which you can get further away just continues to grow as opposed to the number of ways in which you can actually get back as opposed to you know if you actually even in a single line then you know it's kind of like a toss if you could be good going further or closer in hyperbolic space if you get lost the good heuristic is like stare where you are don't don't try to find your friends just stay there and yeah the branching factor so a lot of binary tree for example it's very difficult to represent a binary tree with just a lot of levels in Euclidean space but in hyperbolic space is very easy you can just basically add it and becomes kind of the skeleton of the space and again it's the kind of this concept of like each step you takes it multiplies the number of possible branches you can take further and coming back to the leaf metaphor something really cool is that you can tell the geometry of a leaf by the venation pattern I don't know that's how you pronounce that word venation pattern and well the patterns to the left are all York Lydian I mean the you kind of need well you don't have like perfectly regular shades you need to do some trickery to kind of get the average of the angles but you can still it calculated like this is what is the curvature implied by a particular pattern of veins and if you see a pattern of veins in a plant that looks like just you know seven triangles at each corner then you know that plant is hyperbolic and that kind of shows up in in kale as well right so to the left is kind of a kale that is more in the euclidean side of the kale space and to the right you have kind of the kale which because there's not much there's not enough like Euclidian surface to be able to accommodate it had to kind of bend it to be able to exist and the veins there will look much more like you know these seven triangles at a corner than in the right and also the branching factor like you can think of it as in the left kind of the branching stopped in the right branch and continued and convenience it's creating these wrinkles and yeah you can kind of describe in a sense different kales by just talking about their venation pattern they're the branching factor their curvature and all of those are different ways of getting at the same thing which is which is hyperbolic they are so we've kind of that as a background that's kind of like now delve into DMT phenomenology so in the original article I kind of like created this ontology of six levels of DMT experiences there's probably more about eight but I'm adding two of them I kind of like subtypes of those six and I'll walk you through them so DMT levels so they are six there are thresholds chrysanthemum magic I waiting room breakthrough and amnesia and again like most people a lot of people would be very skeptical is like is there any rational taxonomy experiences you know here at consciousness Viennese do you actually think that there's math underlying just pretty much getting punted this English yeah there's I need to be somewhere can I be sure that coming oh hi my and there's like a sense in which that can be made very objective so this is kind of the overall trajectory very big picture we'll come back to this picture a number of times but suffice to say kind of the the curve is representing the level of Highness as a function of the minute in which you are after after inhaling let's say three totes I mean this is this is kind of like aiming for the 30 milligram range which is kind of where you actually get breakthrough type experiences and let's look first about threshold so this is kind of like between one and four milligrams at these dose level DMT does look and feel quite a bit like other psychedelics so if you've only taken very small dose of DMT you may think like oh it's just like mushrooms and and there's a sense in which yeah I mean like colors getting get intensified a very very common description I found in in the people I've interviewed is it seems like there's kind of an intermediate medium between you and the things around you and that gets the deputy disappears it's kind of like the air got sucked out of the room you see things very very crisply the other people think that people mention is it feels like you're turned on an HD TV feature for your vision and your sensations everything becomes very crisp there might be even a sense in which low doses of DMT may be objectively improving your irritability of a visual disturbance it's just that maybe they're like very largely expensive that's that's a possibility people tend to be pretty convinced that their threshold DMT experiences we're like no no I actually was perceiving the world Lina in a more accurate way innocence although that starts to dude do not quite work you and that's not like the other kind of the classic psychedelic effects of be recorded you know you see every surface there's to be isolated with particular symmetry and and there's this thing that happens basically the information copying threshold becomes lower meaning that if you see a triangle somewhere in your visual field it's very likely that that will in train another triangle in the same position and in the same shape just displace or protect potential potentially protected it in some way so every tessellation tends to happen kind of liquid with a nucleating factor there's like like a piece of the visual field that has like you know like this two symmetry one of those servers showing and that's kind of like starts to grow and eventually covers an entire plane and on kind of the upper ranges of threshold that just happens everywhere so that's kind of like the level I then found out it's like a pretty solid qualitatively different level called the symmetry hotel so that's kind of roughly four or five milligrams of DMT and the properties of that one is that every surface is covered with wallpaper euclidean symmetry kurz so like people describe it as like just going to the absolutely most luxurious possible you know hotel futuristic hotel you could possibly be in every surface has these like holographic wallpaper symmetry groups covering it and however you're still seeing the objects that are around you like it's basically it's kind of like you another description people have used this your picture of the world is overlaid with another copy of itself and you know kind of like is this thing called atom soiree patterns when you have like a agreed and you superimpose another great on top of it you get these nice repeating patterns so like that is happening but in every surface of your experience and you know textures like this you can represent kind of the the axis time so a given surface it's not only you know tessellated it's also evolving but the thing I want to point out is that even though these evolution of patterns you know it's very diverse in some sense it's still all Euclidean all of this is the 6-3 star 6-3 to symmetry it's just a Euclidean symmetry it's just you know encompassing the entirety of your experience and you you get things like let's see if I can't play these alright I'll show it to anybody afterwards but yeah those basically rotate it just like shows that the symmetries are not just like static it's not that it's not just that you get these you know beautiful equal symmetries are also rotating and transforming along their symmetry elements so if you see like a sixth rotational symmetry typically there's also going to be a vortex on that symmetry and it's like it's everywhere is like that everything is constantly moving during this very orderly mathematical way that can be described with Euclidean geometry and that's kind of the upper range threshold so what happens when you get to chrysanthemum so that's the first intimation of hyperbolic geometry on Mt so the chrysanthemum anywhere between four eight milligrams copies of itself and it covers the space well if the the copying threshold for your experience becomes sufficiently low you will have more triangles than you know what to do we even service so basically that makes it basically your surfaces start to become like kale and you get kind of these unfolding people describe it as like unwrapping a present for example or the blossoming or a flower those are like very common metaphors for the chrysanthemum and it's basically kind of like we start out as a Euclidian symmetry group and quickly evolve seems to have hyperbolic and it acquires some type of picture and if you think just that amount that's gonna be the peak of your experience and it's gonna be more intense typically then even a high dose mushroom experience but it's just gonna be very free now if you take a little bit more then you get to this thing called the magic eye level so the chrysanthemum again you know it's like slightly textured but now there's so many triangles so many shapes that it's not just enough before the texture to be you know I have like a little bit of a texture you actually need the the curvature and the curvature actually needs to be accommodated into a depth map in order to be able to deal with all of that excess figure all of that excess energy you probably can't see there and you're free to come after after I finished but basically there is a lobster there and the phenomenology that people describe the magic eye level is very very similar to actual magic however or they also call it out of serigraphs where you have this texture that it seems like it's very repeating it seems like it doesn't have much information but actually it's encoding a depth map and that depth map contains the semantic content of the experience so you can really kind of factorize experience into well you have the descender content depth map and then the texture which may contain more of the emotional quality of experience so to illustrate it you kind of get this this is the depth map that you get out of the the magic eye so here I'm not representing the texture I'm just representing the semantic content is that sure you have a depth map but it's all represented with the same texture and that's something that people describe like a lot after like DMT if they hit kind of the magic eye level they will select oh I went to these crazy ice cream shop and then you know like a cathedral and then like the like I went into caves and whatnot but everything was made of the same thing like it was a world where like everybody everything have the same texture and and I think the left representation there is kind of a good representation of that where you have like these underlying texture but then like this information encoded in the depth map of that texture as well I can can tell some people are relating to these potentially and yeah the other ones do I mean like this people also talk a lot about like kind of like the the duck rabbit illusion in a sense of like yeah there's a depth map but then it's kind of an unstable depth map and then it collapses back into the chrysanthemum and then it reorganizes itself into different that depth map so it's not like in the higher level to see we'll see that things actually feels solid here they still kind of feel somewhat ethereal and they're like very malleable okay so what happens if you take a little bit more crystal world's so in the same way as threshold if you took enough you know it saturates the the two-dimensional space with Euclidean 2d symmetries if you get to the magic eye level and you kind of take a little bit more than that then it's going to saturate 3d space with 3d symmetries and this is there are like I have a finite number of possible symmetries in 2d 17 wallpaper symmetric groups in 3d there's also find that number they're called space groups and there's 230 of them so there's also a limited way in which this is can happen but people describe you know I went to a crystal world that you know how like the same shape repeated all over and I was the shape and I was resonating with that shape and you just lasted forever like there's a sense in which that just doesn't change it's just kind of like a fix the tractor in consciousness also people describe it as being extremely pleased phul and we will come back to that why would these be a policeman state of consciousness well the same happens again with the symmetric Hotel at some point if you add more energy to some that is already saturated in Euclidian curvature you kind of run out of space to put the extra energy in and you are forced to actually turn the space into a hyperbolic space in order to accommodate all of that and that's what happens at the threshold between the crystal world and the waiting room so the waiting room 12 to 25 milligrams oh maybe all right so yeah 2012 - 25 milligrams basically this is where space itself actually becomes hyperbolic and a lot of things start to happen that are impossible in normal everyday life so one of the examples is going to be in the lower left you have what's called a hyperbolic honeycomb so there's like a way of tessellating space with a hyperbolic hyperbolic repeating pattern it's a hyperbolic desolation the one on top of that is a hyperbolic Lee curved surface but it's also morphing from the point of view of it's embedding basically where it is in 3d space so now imagine that what happening to a 3d space so the 3d space may locally have the same curvature but then the whole thing is more thing so people talk about like space distortion space-time distortions things that again sound like the guy going to the island and saying a so different kind of leaf it's impossible to represent like no it's totally real it's a totally real thing it really happens it's just getting there the dough's right and then yeah the other thing is like every surface I mean just like in the chrysanthemum it's just like covered with groups going through their own symmetry element and any kind of symmetry breaking is in the law and the bottom right basically propagates very quickly and spreads throughout the entire experience there's also at this point DMT entities so the entities are very interesting and part of it is that they are completely different depending on the level in which you are so on the magic eye level people describe them as being very impersonal so basically it's kind of like looking at a TV and there's like interesting things going on in that TV but it just has to be it feels like you're not actively kind of interacting but I'm on that person-to-person basis well if you get to the waiting room level people describe it as there's a kind of higher form of intelligence I've quoted these reports from people you know I like it map diversity it's not no just crazy people saying these now my interpretation of that is know that you actually interact with a higher intelligence it's more than you you know your state of consciousness such that I have these new tool these new you know curved space I can represent and understand things that I could couldn't possibly have understood before and in that sense is being appointed with a higher intelligence you just have baby higher intelligence of your own making and yeah I mean this level tends to be extremely confusing for people partly because they they don't know what to do about the entities and then there's breakthrough if you increase the dose a little bit low breakthrough basically the entire space just becomes hyperbolic honeycomb you also start to see this thing that's called a basically inversions and projective inversions where the entirety of the space seems to be collapsed and flipped over into a finite space really weird but apparently happens and high breakthrough the hyperbolic honeycombs actually becomes so like the curvature is so high that you can actually see things such as like exact neural lattice being just one side of one one one of the the cells in that space which is something that is not actually possible in in Euclidean space is definitely not impossible in lower curvature hyperbolic spaces it's really weird that this lattice that you know goes on infinitely is just like the side of a particular cell in that hyperbolic space and those entities which I tricked you here they don't look a lot like that actually that picture you you may be able to see something like that on the magic eye level but on the breakthrough you don't see that an breakthrough you just see more of these stuff there might be a sense of you knows higher intelligence but no any kind of like organize the shapes into anything recognizable like no no that's completely out of the window that doesn't exist in that space now I do believe some people actually project and believe that in a sense like they kind of like reinterpret a little bit the high breakthrough with what happened afterwards I kind of like to give it meaning but I think of it as just like such an extraordinarily highly energized the state of consciousness yeah can't cannot actually sustain anything like a table or something like that so remember the Infinity gun I was talking about so this is kind of like an indicator of kind of the the overall curvature of the space you know low breakthrough spaces you know you have four Pentagon's that I could give in a corner then you increase it back with your curvature and then you get ideal ideal vertices you get basically polygons that meet at infinity which in a sense also means they quite never meet right like he's sort of like somebody saying like oh if you have a line you know you can think of the line as the perimeter of a circle with the central point at infinity right okay sure like you can think of it mathematically but in practice you know you will actually never mean but then you can actually have like even higher curvature and then you get these things that are called hyper ideal points of infinities they don't even meet at infinity and and based on phenomenological observations that might be partly what accounts for the amnesia level basically things are impossible to remember the curvature is so high you can't even actually form thought forms I can bring back afterwards so yeah amnesia level are not usually caused by ego death as opposed to other psychedelics most people even report and break through levels their sense of self it's not that it's intact but they still have a very clear narrative of like what is following what time distortions are not so extreme as in other psychedelics so ego death is not really the cause of amnesia the state is so energy energized that it becomes memoryless you can think of kind of a boiling boiling rocks to such a high temperature that all of the crystals melt and just like no matter what happens in it you won't be able to bring like a particular snapshot of that state basically there's like no residue of whatever happened and phenomenal time looping is so intense that it prevents counting so you may enter into like these loops and you just have no way of knowing how many loops have you experienced so yeah amnesia level probably not very useful there's definitely not much you can actually say about it although maybe maybe there might be ways of making use of it in the future and I might describe how towards the end of the talk so okay so that was levels there's also complexity and kind of the the metaphor here might be you know how to some extent of coming back to the thermometer pressure was a big component of like why thermometers were unreliable you had temperature sure like temperature would make changes but also pressure would make changes so like the dew kind of like it doen't found it and I would say is the same when it comes to a hyperbolic geometry in DMT you have levels and then you have also the complexity of the state and you can kind of like cleanly kill it clearly distinguish them so this is where I kind of like make this chart basically the energy slash information content landscape so on any given moment of a DMT experience you're somewhere on that chart so kind of like on the lower levels of energy when you recognize this right like threshold chrysanthemum magic I the thing that is different is that I also added kind of these axis of information about to the complete left when you have like close to no information that just a perfectly repeating pattern that's as low information as you can possibly get then a little bit more information you have twists you have loops you have basically the perfect pattern but with a little broken feature that's kind of like when you start introducing a little bit of information you go even further on the information that direction you get to chaos then you get to chaos plus noise then dense noise and then at the kind of extreme you have just pure noise and maybe kind of like a metaphor here is for example the experience of listening to a guitar as opposed to the experience of listening to white noise like they you can listen to both maybe to the same volume one of them in a sense contains a lot of information like the noise in a sense contains maximum amount of information it's just like there's nothing you can do with that information and if you listen to for example a pure tone it has very very little information is there's also not much you can do if you wanna for example maximize computational power probably somewhere in the middle when you have kind of like a chaotic state or a partially chaotic state that kind of maximizes useful information and I'll come back to that as well in the upper ranges as well DMT DMT what is it empty elves and they're the object that they create with sound and all of that that we kind of hear that's not like complete chaos is also not complete order it's kind of like a good balance in between where you actually have these irreducibly complex objects these these weird things that for example you have like gear mechanisms that have a prime number of teeth in all of them and the whole pattern doesn't repeat until there's like the minimum common multiple of all of those gear mechanisms so all of that would be you know kind of like right there in the middle where is like maximum useful information not so much information that is just pure noise not-so-legal is just a perfectly repeating lattice now how do we actually come up with a kind of like ontology for the information so the ontology for the level axes as we talked you can think about it in terms of curvature dimensionality you know I explained how two dimensions co-op in three and then like three dimensions force into higher three-dimensional hyperbolic space whatever like the big ontology of information how can we you know generate a degrees for that are there like natural attractors there and I would say yes and actually we can use complex systems for that so there's this really cool video from 1984 about video feedback when your camera towards the screen and in Genesis you know complex interesting patterns a lot of people kind of like spend maybe a couple minutes there and says like oh this is really cool but what these people did was they spent months and just like tweaking the parameters of the angle and the zoom and the noise and then figure out an ontology for what are like all of the things that can possibly happen in a feedback system and the ontology is roughly this I mean it's kind of these very big four categories you have a fixed point or equilibrium you also have these cycles a show spatial structures so here are some examples this is a fixed point you can even guess actually what the camera is doing the camera is presumably you've rotated 90 degrees so basically the horizontal line gets fed then as an as a vertical line which gets translated the line and the whole the whole display is like stable up on the feedback transformation and what this deep water illustrates is that it could be fairly stable it to be fairly robust but if you disturb it enough you may be able to knock it out of its attractor a tracker basin and make it go into another fixed point so in the case of empty or hydro psychedelics perhaps fixed points would be kind of these like moments of eternity perfectly repeating hyperbolic honeycombs type experiences and a little bit more information then you have these limit cycles this is a very simple limit cycle this is kind of on the side of a pattern that repeats but it repeats very quickly and all of the stages in the process of repetition are very similar but then you're gonna go to kind of like more interesting limit cycles this is a pretty weird limit cycle it's almost kind of hard to believe that the whole thing repeats I mean it does have kind of like a grounding point of a very simple state but you know all sorts of complex weird things happen you know and these would be kind of like more off to the right a little bit more information but it still has like an overarching pattern so it's not it's not noise it's not chaos then you'd have yet no he's driven spatial structures let's see yeah I mean this is this is really chaotic tiny tiny amounts of noise basically massively get amplified into this feedback system and you get this very very chaotic state so that might be kind of like further to the right as well then you have things that are like almost pure noise basically any amount of noise just get massively amplified and you get this basically curtain of noise and then you have like you know interesting states where basically it starts out very simple and then it it converges on on turbulence and then it becomes just a just a incredible amount of noise the thing I really like about these GF is that you can actually point to it and say exactly when things get turbulent so it's kind of like okay it's pretty simple pretty simple and around here it gets turbulent and yeah I mean you can think of kind of like these phase transitions into much more chaotic States as transitions into turbulence and Toller distant dial that also may account for a lot of the phenomenology okay so you have kind of these axes you know simple fixed point complex fixed point simple limit cycle complex limit cycles simple simple chaotic attractor and complex chaotic attractor even these ones right you can kind of like now take them and describe them as a trajectory in the complexity energy space in a sense you know the the first one the limit cycle actually starts out like very much to the left and then it does kind of like a loop and gets back to the left and the right one just kind of like pushes the words the the bottom right just pushes the words like the noise noise attractor so the thing I want you to think about is basically trend trajectories so a DMT trip is not only about how high you got is also about what trajectory you took in the energy complexity landscape and that may actually matter a lot when it comes to what you bring back and what you're able to remember and what did you get out of the experience I mean an metaphor here is like different you know ice crystals form it's kind of the specific conditions of temperature and pressure and for you to get the exact shape you need to actually you know get the same conditions right and when some people say like oh I had an ecstatic DMT experience you've gotta kind of like dig deeper to actually know what the trajectory was but I do think that the trajectory really encapsulates a lot of the information about what a particular experience was and you can even kind of think of this as a kind of engineering aspect it has an engineering aspect which is like what do you want to get out of the experience my inform what trajectory you take so here are just like three examples you want for example just to do feel better than well in the sense of like and train some very high grade meditation patterns maybe you want to start in the symmetry space and just go up just go up into hyper hyperbolic honeycombs don't mess with chaos and mess with other weird things just create these like hyperbolic lattice be there and then come back you know and that might be maximizing bliss it might be maximizing sense of well-being it might be maximizing the ability for you to bring back a positive feeling on the other hand if you have a you know mathematician you're trying to do a scientific breakthroughs or do you want to explore hyperbolic 3d hyperbolic geometry then maybe actually going a little angling a little bit towards complexity might be a good idea so that you actually get to the kind of the top there with the DMT devices we have a lot of irreducible complexity now on the other hand as if you're like most people you probably have promise you probably have like a lot of problems that probably healthy and if you want in a sense likes old inner problems that you have probably the best way it would be to go kind of like angling towards noise first and then come back through the order region oh yeah and we have a hyperbolic honeycomb over there for you to pass around thank you a quick so yeah and the frame here is the frame about annealing similar to have a metal you know it starts out like cold work a lot of like imperfections you want to kind of like you know in a sense if you want to make it naturally self-organized into a smooth lattice maybe what you want is to actually you know heat it with a bunch of entropy get it very disordered and then let it cool very slowly and the reports of people come back and say they owe you help me stole you know an internal conflict that I had or it may be solve a mathematical problem or something like that the annealing frame is generally going to be much more fruitful which is that usually you have a lot of constraints on how you're tackling a problem by heating up higher energy and higher complexity here in a sense dissolving those constraints robin harris talks about in in the sense of a entropic disintegration like all the constraints are basically becoming more soft that allows you to do what we called neural search basically explore many possibilities very quickly possibilities that you usually wouldn't be able to explore because you're too constrained and then when you find something that is more kind of useful then you slowly cool down so that you can actually anneal that matter and stabilize it and keep it with you so like if you already found a solution maybe you know taking more might not be good because you may also heat it up and destroy it there's kind of like a whole craft of how do you and Neil a good solution together not something that anybody knows but at least with these we have some kind of you know physical analogy framework to be able to kind of like angle in the direction of getting better results and yeah so we're approaching the end is is possible to have a thermometer for how high on DMT someone is well one here is the curvature the brightness of velocity the loudness and dimensionality of the experience and I'll give you a really good proxy for basically how high a person is what about Bailey's well the overall symmetry and consonants of the state the symmetry breaking and dissonance may also be analogous to basically how distressing on unpleasant experiences this would be a whole other presentation but you can google quantifying please and you will find basically a presentation I gave in a paper about how to do these and why we kind of like might expect that the hyperbolic honeycombs feel a lot better than you know they're chaotic or the noisy and finally the information content at the experience we can bring again the ontology of complex systems and we have you know simple or complex fixed point limit cycle no he's driven chaos etcetera basically the the ontology of things that can happen in a feedback system you know you will encounter those and they will encode different amounts of information the kind of endgame here is something we call the Super Show lien Academy third one of the most advanced Psychonauts out there he himself synthesized 200 different psychedelic substances and in fact Jenson he would take them and have his friends taken and write reports about them and you know he would figure out everything about like the toxicity of it the different thresholds he wasn't actually in phenomenology he considered himself more of a tool maker he was just like okay like we discovered these a psychoactive let's go on to the next substances next one thing you can kind of think about super Julian Academy is kind of an integrated approach that brings you know it brings phenomenologist philosophers people generally very technical fields very bright and philosophers and it does a call it creates high quality consciousness researchers and Psychonauts traders different states of consciousness that's a kind of like what I was describing how different trajectories have different advantages and disability it might need certainly useful applications for exotic states of consciousness it's like oh we discovered this you know five emile dmdd empty make sure that is really good for trauma and like then everybody uses it practice is the art and craft of creating ultra beautiful experiences and develop certain things a full-size mean place that is the same kind of a big picture of what it all means which we currently can actually paint because we don't know what's out there we don't know what he's in the states of consciousness we are still in this in the moment in time where we're kind of like in the old world we have no idea but still no systematic map of it and here like a plug for for something that somebody a couple people I know are actually doing and you may be surprised that you can actually have a legal psilocybin experience right now and you don't have to subscribe to any religious or therapeutic framework it's open-ended framework so basically they don't say oh this is for therapy or this is because we believe in this spirituality and come and meet our you know our set of gods and something like that literally in their website they say if you want to explore consciousness you're gonna you know investigate the nature of reality that's that's what this is for I'm kind of like angling it as a plug for potentially the seed of a future Super Show Leon Academy so definitely check it out and we're very interested in people from STEM fields and philosophy to sign up to openly discuss their experiences and conduct conduct control experiments again stepping away from this paradigm were these senses are just given to the general population and then you have the scientists kind of like they're you know lab coats and pretension of objectivity is just kind of like oh you know I can explain in terms of eg patterns they're moving into the paradigm where there's basically the scientists are also taking the substances talking with each other and throwing up and with that I'll conclude yeah thank you very much also when I say thank you to Winslow Jason Christian for the funding us and and Jacob for helping organizationally and yeah this is the quality Research Institute team thank you so I started koala computing about five years ago and I started getting emails from Psychonauts and at first they were pretty sketchy Psychonauts but honestly after after I wrote a particularly peaceful of the algorithmic reduction of psychedelic states I started to get emails from really smart Psychonauts I mean people who have you know PhDs from top universities in STEM fields and who take a lot of DMT and so I've had the opportunity to basically have kind of anonymous back and forth over the years so you could kind of think of it as more kind of the end of these would be around like 10 or so people and it would be me asking them questions and then coming like a year back they say like oh yeah if you try that and like actually this is my experience then for obvious reasons I can't say who they are I I don't know who they are most of them but uh yeah I mean I am pretty confident on the hyperbolic geometry angle there's other things I'm not super confident about well the hyperbolic component has been verified by enough number I'm pretty confident to be able to have an open discussion over there that's a great point so the key thing to bring here is one way in which you can interpret actually what happens in the specific things that you see on the psychedelic as opposed to the things that you feel more broadly have to do with the fact that when you recognize something that works is the energy sink so it's kind of like you're expelling a lot of configurations as soon as you find something that you've seen before it's kind of like a flying cold water and then crystallizing so of course if you have your brakes you know you're a very very very familiar we with hyperbolic geometry and then you see a hyperbolic symmetric dude yeah I could crystallize it and it's going to be easier to see the reports that I've heard it's much more in the direction of oh my gosh there was all of these different diverse strange things then once I understood that hyperbolic geometry was underneath all of them they all clicked and made sense so for a number of them they didn't have the hyperbolic framework to begin with and it kind of like weights that framework they were able to reinterpret a lot of what they experienced that said if you do have the framework that very likely does modify your experience to some extent I never suspect actually for the better because it allows you to navigate this thing better and specifically be able to experience those low information hyperbolic honeycombs that are very pleased for you if you don't know those exist or if possible you may be missing out on them okay yeah so I guess they're evolved a crane works apart specifically like just thinking about greater or historical trends with the advent of like abstract expressionism in the 20th century in America like Pollock he's not painting spaghetti right and you think figured it but sometimes like when I was down when I first encountered apology I like impose that figuration on it and when I hear people give narrative accounts their DMV trips too often I wonder to what extent are they sort of imposing this figuration on shapes which they can't process which I guess makes my questions are similar to yours but I'm wondering do you think that if you are less familiar with these sorts of shapes and what they are objectively we might have a more sort of metaphorical because your relief forces sort of happy logical ways of thinking but to actually process this and maybe it will be more narrative more poetic in a sense if you're not sort of using these conceptual bowls yeah no I agree completely and yeah I think that's that's the cases so we do input science observe yeah so like digging also the point of aspect do you think there's a point where literally even if you do have the ability to like internalize these mathematical truths which like you know some of my friends who do physics and stuff they can describe it elaborately mathematical terms there's a point where you've been you know the greatest mathematician they can't actually process it musicians listen to the importance of talking about the phenomenal character of the experience as opposed to the intentional content so this idea I went to my you know DMT trip and I saw a dragon breathing liquid nitrogen she's like well how do you know it was liquid nitrogen how do you know it was a dragon like it had like the feeling it but that doesn't actually tell you very much about the experience he's much more informative if they say oh and the dragon had you know six three two symmetries an inferno it's actually bringing back something structural about the experience or here's another very helpful a metaphor which is that if somebody says like Oh on LSD the sound of music is way better okay that's that's someone who's full if somebody says oh whenever I hear a pulse on LSD it sounds like they're reverb equals response these particular River pattern I can finding you know Adobe Alicia like okay that's very very helpful right so we're talking about kind of shifting how we study cycle east towards the phenomenal character and awake intentional content to the narrative ya know broadly speaking these generalizes so simple example it sounds ridiculous but it see apparently it's true if you think both of your hands and you run them through a carpet and you can you can kind of like notice all the like details of the carpet the way in which they're irregular less efficient no sir L is the EMT you will experience the texture in both hands synchronized and feel like they're the same ways so there's like the sense of like the threshold for entrainment and the threshold for patterns of coffee each other get lower and that happens across all modalities so it's not just visual usually if you like it easier to talk about but I mean take for example symmetry by like is York leniency matrix I was talking about what is the analogy of symmetry in Sion well there's actually two very close analogies one of them is simple rhythm and repetition people talk a lot about like loops you can think of that as and also sound oops happiness hallucinatory examples and also the other reader basically when you apply reverb to something you can interpret that as smoothing it and in that sense it's also applying symmetry to it so yeah the short answer is it applies to homework yeah yeah quite a bit so I would say that you do have in normal everyday life without any substances you do have moments of high energy they usually don't manifest in a particularly psychedelic sense which is like broad-spectrum activation then to be much more narrow but even within them you will start to observe than there's like similar patterns for example there's a lot of people who describe kind of like a similarity between psychedelic please and Oregon and there's like a sense in which orgasm you can think of it also as a wallpaper symmetry but in ending the body peeling so I would say yeah we are we're kind of like pursuing symmetries whether we realize it or not it's only in kind of the extreme cases where they're happening all over the place and you know that that's gonna but I would say yeah that's happening in everyday life yep so the computational implementation of this I all this seems a lot of like you know searching programs that we must define how phases interests and shapes in 3d world right and when you get DMT you it seems to me that DMT gives form of additional communication units so like you can you can imagine no hyperbolic spaces and right right I'll try to do a short answer let's see try to get a one-minute answer so the one handling what is the information that is getting processed but then the other is like what algorithms are making that happen and then third is like physically how is like the pieces physics are you've been implementing the algorithms when it comes to the physics I would say like a very likely candidate is connected specific harmonic waves basically the president natural resident most of your brain southern at the story develop this paradigm in 2016 and publish it in nature and in 2017 she basically analyzed what connecting harmonics look like on LSD and what she found was the amplitude of all the harmonics goes up and especially the high frequency harmonics in some sense that's kind of like legitimizing this the name the notion that in psychedelics you are literally energized like your consciousness literally has more energy at least defining in the in the sense of like the amplitude of connect informatics now that's not enough for annealing right for nearly you still need something else and the other thing that she found was that the record to our up states increases that is to say the possible combinations of harmonics increases meaning that you can do this sense of you know constraint satisfaction solving by relaxed relaxing the constraints and then annealing by heating and cooling it down so there's a very physical reason why maybe these may be happening selling at the site SEL en 88 [Music] yes okay so a couple things first of all yes do think about kind of like a kneeling framework about symmetry especially about valence like during a psychedelic state think about like in what configurations of your consciousness do you feel better and email me if you find interesting no I would actually ask you is it the case that when you convergence these like you know high dimensional hyperbolic resident states does that feel good if somebody says I hated it for example as far as I know what that feels great but yeah looking a little bit further ahead there's like two things I could ask one we have a hot to volunteer page on the quality of research we have a number of really interesting projects we just don't have enough resources and time to do and we love self-starters so if at some point anyway this is the last point at some point you want to join us definitely a really great way to do that and to basically bring yourself to our attention is to maybe find it one of the volunteer projects or come up with one yourself and show us some work and and we may be able to bring you it and general the awesome yeah

Channel: Qualia Research Institute

Views: 640,182

Rating: 4.9365592 out of 5

Keywords: DMT, Psychedelic, Harvard, Andres Gomez Emilsson, Qualia Research Institute, Qualia Computing, Hyperbolic, Geometry, Breakthrough

Id: loCBvaj4eSg

Length: 66min 15sec (3975 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Razorback-PT]

If this doesn't belong in this sub I don't know what does.

Here's the description:

Andrés Gómez Emilsson from the Qualia Research Institute presents about the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences. At a high-level, this video presents an algorithmic reduction of DMT phenomenology which imports concepts from hyperbolic geometry and dynamic systems theory in order to explain the "weirder than weird" hallucinations one can have on this drug. Andrés describes what different levels of DMT intoxication feel like in light of a model in which experience has both variable geometric curvature and information content. The benefit of this model cashes out in a novel approach to design DMT experiences in order to maximize specific desired benefits.

[u/TTyranny]

Yeah... this is the tip of the spear in Psychedelic Research.

/r/RationalPsychonaut would benefit greatly by reorienting itself around Qualia Resarch Institute's rationalization of the psychedelic experience.

[u/Fflamddwyn]

Quality content, this is what I came to this sub for, thankyou!

[u/[deleted]]

Hey cool I’m in the beginning of the video. Make me famous OP

[u/richard_nixons_toe]

Saved

[u/titty_mcfuck_duck]

Tldw?

[u/mushoman]

Do these levels happen to everyone in this order, or is this subjective?