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The Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences (2016)

119 points by StreamBright 5y ago

fasteddie31003 5y ago
I don't think it's just DMT that gives you this experience. One of the most "geometric" trips was from taking Salvia in a dorm room in college. Everything felt like I was in the original Tron movie. Flat surfaces seemed to go on in a plane to the horizon. Honestly, made me feel pretty nauseous.
- jahnu 5y ago
  Closing my eyes on 2CB projected neon patterns like the geometric patterns you find on central Asian mosques. It was incredible and I could really concentrate on the details.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    Pretty interesting. I can do the same while stone cold sober. After half a minute or so I see geometrical patterns, much resembling Islamic geometric mosaics, with neon colors, that tend to move around (if I am listening to music, they follow the music). The longer I go, the more elaborate they get, and sometimes they even gain 3D dimensions or lead to scenes resembling dreams. When I tell that to most people they act as if I'm a weirdo, except for a friend of mine who sees similar patterns. Would you say that is similar to what you saw on 2C-B?
    - saltyfamiliar 5y ago
      That's pretty extraordinary. I don't think I've ever heard of someone seeing stuff like that without psychedelics. Have you always been able to see it or was it brought on by something? When did you first notice it?
      - sudosysgen 5y ago
        I've been able to see it as far as I remember. I think I really noticed it first in elementary school. I remember very distinctly doing in the family car in 4th grade after telling my mom about Minecraft, lol.
    - numtel 5y ago
      I'm not sure but I think that's referred to as Astral Projection.
    - jahnu 5y ago
      Yeah that sounds quite similar. Never had the experience sober, however.
- crispyambulance 5y ago
  I think folks tend to focus too much on the visual hallucinations caused by psychedelic drugs. I can only speak about LSD, so I might be wrong about DMT, but there's far more to these experiences than just "visuals". There's nothing wrong with talking about the visuals and the exploration in the blog post is interesting. I just want to point out for anyone looking to experience this stuff, bear in mind that you're going to get A LOT more than you bargained for if you think it's only going to be visual hallucinations. There are also auditory and cognitive hallucinations. The perception of time gets incredibly distorted. Emotions and feelings especially about other people get a profoundly different and intense perspective. The experience can be very very unpleasant for some. For me it was an overall positive experience despite some rough spots. I was glad to have trustworthy folks around me when I was tripping.
  - blacksqr 5y ago
    A friend told me that on one trip, he was a cloud raining on a forest for five hundred years. He emphasized LITERALLY five hundred years.
  - the_gipsy 5y ago
    > The perception of time gets incredibly distorted We can only internally represent time as 3D space. If under the influence of psychedelics space gets warped and unrecognizable, it follows that our perception of time also does so.
  - andresgemilsson 5y ago
    I agree that the most "interesting" hallucinations are not the trippy patterns you see. But, take note, if you pay really close attention to it, you will realize that in fact there is a dual relationship between the geometry of the hallucinations and the vibe of the experience. Indeed, I was not the first to figure this out (though I did figure it out independently). Steven Lehar has been talking about it for ages - and he writes about it in his book The Grand Illusion (http://slehar.com/wwwRel/GrandIllusion.pdf http://slehar.com/wwwRel/GrandIllusion.pdf). Seriously - next time pay close attention and you'll see how the shape of the configurations you hallucinate determines how the "waves of energy" bounce off of them, which in turn gives rise to harmonious or dissonant interactions between them. So you can in fact modulate your mood by making your hallucinations more symmetrical. Check out this article for more about that: https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/12/17/the-symmetry-theory-of-valence-2020-presentation/ https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/12/17/the-symmetry-theory-o...
- 01100011 5y ago
  Funny how no one really talks about salvia anymore. That shit was whack. I went to cartoon land while having my ability to communicate removed and feeling like half of my body was moving rapidly away from the other. I understand it is powerful and useful in certain settings, but yikes, not a fun ride for most people. A small, informal sample seemed to indicate women hated it less than men but that was just the people I knew.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    Tried salvia once. Impressed by the visuals and the intensity; but there's no euphoria. Without euphoria, it's just weird perceptual distortions, and loss of the ability to move or speak. I thought it was like being ill. Tried DMT once. It offers euphoria, visuals and intensity; but the speed with which it came on was such that I was effectively disabled before I could complete dosing - so no breakthrough. Visuals are all very well - but I've been there and done that decades ago. Euphoria and joy are harder to come by, and drugs that provide them don't "keep on giving". People react very differently to these substances, and my experiences are by no means normative.
  - IAmGraydon 5y ago
    Salvia was my first hallucinogenic experience. I and others have noted that it seems to trigger a primal fear response far more often than other hallucinogens. The trips tend to have very dark themes, and time is severely warped in such a way that it’s not uncommon to forget what a human is and live in an alien reality for centuries. Really weird stuff, and not something I would recommend to most.
oolonthegreat 5y ago
sheesh talk about pseudoscience
- anm89 5y ago
  Yeah completely. I'm gonna say occams razor prefers "chemicals affect your brain in ways that simulate bizarre sensory input" Over "chemicals unlock a new sensory ability to perceive extra dimensions"
  - lend000 5y ago
    The article wasn't presented as any sort of proof of mechanism or even authoritative description of what's happening. An aside: I'll venture a guess that the majority of discoveries in human history started by throwing out Occam's razor. I don't understand why it's such a religion on HN.
    - kjellsbells 5y ago
      That's actually a great point. To create, you need to throw out preconceptions like the razor. But to achieve persistence, simplifying ruthlessly... ie bringing the razor back in, helps. It's a bit like brainstorming: if you shut the idea stream down with the cold water of rationality, you lose what could have been really good ideas.
    - twofornone 5y ago
      People seem to forget that it's a heuristic, not an actual logical inference.
      - naasking 5y ago
        Solomonoff induction provably converges on reproducing any input function by only observing that function's outputs, and it formalizes Occam's razor as a key principle. I don't think it's fair to call it a heuristic anymore.
lend000 5y ago
A new game called Hyperbolica is being developed to explore new geometries [0]. It will be interesting to see how people playing the game compare the experience to their previous trips. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMKLeS-Uq_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMKLeS-Uq_8
- tartoran 5y ago
  Coming out late 2020?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - dylan604 5y ago
    That's plenty of time to add 3 new levels, incorporate an in-game purchase system, and the 5 other items the PM just dropped on the devs. No, we will not need to push the release date to add these new features. The features will be fully ready.
  - lend000 5y ago
    It's a single guy working on it as far as I know, and he has a good devlog on that same Youtube channel. He apparently had to rewrite most graphics libraries to shade things according to hyperbolic geometry. Looks like it should be coming out soon, though (hopefully).
- unbanned 5y ago
  Exactly the same.
- stared 5y ago
  Playing such games changes our perception. I have been playing HyperRogue (https://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/ https://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/). After a few hours of playing it straight, experience of the "normal" worlds changes. It holds for other games as well. That said, I don't believe that a DMT trip would improve performance in the game. Or maybe a bit, but by increasing neuroplasticity.
Sosh101 5y ago
A presentation from this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg
Flankk 5y ago
Joe Rogan has entered the chat.
aviancrane 5y ago
It seems to me two things are happening. [1] The brain is really good at filling in gaps in its perception of the world and [2] there seems to be some kind of strange loopy recursion in the way the brain analyzes and observes things including itself. I think on DMT and similar, you are actually seeing less of the world, and the recursive/fractal aspect is coming from the brain filling in gaps with observations including its own analyzing patterns. The world at our scale has a lot of data and is really complex. These "hypbolic geometries" seem like simplifications. One strand of a flower that happens to follow something roughly like the golden ration becomes a fibonacci spiral repeated at every degree; the sense of self gets muddled with the modeling of this pattern, allowing the pattern to permeate the entire observation, and now you too are the spiral. You notice the observation and how muddled it is with the pattern and the self, creating a loop which also gets modeled, and down the recursive rabbit hole you go.
- celesti 5y ago
  it's released when you're born, when you dream, and when you die
- Nav_Panel 5y ago
  Pure speculation, but I have to wonder if our fundamental conception of sensation as a blank canvas slowly filled with positive contents is wrong, and rather that perception involves the apprehension of difference against some "basic" recursive pattern. I tend to notice this more aurally, in the sonic experience within a highly focused state, including spending time on social media (not silent! quite noisy, but I am not actively aware of it in most cases), and also the intense experience of hitting the stop button mid-song; the silence hits very hard. Seems Fristonian, in that if the brain is a prediction machine across time, then the underlying predictive pattern would be fractal, or at least highly self-similar to immediate past experience. The intensity of the hard stop (and similarly the annoyance of transient sounds like car horns) is in the predictive failure, which draws your attention. If this is desirable, we call it "interesting".
  - nemosaltat 5y ago
    You’ve beautifully articulated a feeling I’ve had for most of my life. In the Alvin Maker (historical fantasy) series, Orson Scott Card describes a phenomenon he calls the _greensong_. It’s a sort of pervading communion the first peoples have with nature, and white settlers not only can’t connect with it, but exist as a palpable disturbance to those who can. I’ve often felt like nearly _everything_ is signal, and my day-to-day experience is actually noise. That sense has been heightened on the occasions I’ve used hallucinogenics.
optimalsolver 5y ago
Great take on DMT: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th... Also worth a read: https://www.waggish.org/2011/benny-shanon-the-antipodes-of-the-mind/ https://www.waggish.org/2011/benny-shanon-the-antipodes-of-t...
dang 5y ago
One past thread: An essay on the phenomenology of DMT (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15368432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15368432 - Sept 2017 (15 comments)
SavantIdiot 5y ago
I had an almost identical conversation with some engineering major roommates after a heavy mushroom trip in 1984. We were in four simultaneous classes that applied DiffEq, and IMHO, the first time you grasp DiffEq you feel like someone gave you a way to describe anything. So: we spent hours describing the differential equations of thought evolution, vision, perception, hearing, and existence. We hadn't encountered Hamiltonians yet, but I'm sure we would have thrown them into the mix. Yeah, drugs will do that to you. Make you think every thought you have is pure gold.
IIAOPSW 5y ago
I'm going to quickly summarize my psychedelic inspired theories on cognition which are now somewhat backed by science. Basic observations: 1. On psychedelics your sense of time is wrong. I ran an experiment called 'the deadman switch' wherein I set a 20 min timer and, when it goes off, I would verbally acknowledge and then reset it. Based on this, I estimate 20 min to feel like over an hour, thus giving a distortion ratio of at least 5:1. 2. The images I see when I close my eyes are the same colors as the normal after image one sees after staring at a lightbulb. In fact the kaleidoscopic hallucinations look exactly as if the after image of a light bulb has gone through some sort of frequency space filtering. Here's a profound laymans summary: isn't it remarkable how similar the hallucinations look to a video buffering artifact. 3. Thoughts of a certain size get cut off. I find it hard to exactly quantify the size of a thought, but for the purpose of this conversation lets take it for granted that such a metric exists. Sentences beyond a certain word count would almost certainly have the train of thought derailed before reaching its terminus. Multi-step tasks like standing in line, thinking about what I want to order, and being ready with what to say when I reach the front are highly unlikely to succeed. Unlike other forms of intoxication, it is not the case that all cognitive ability is equally blunted. The speaking of individual words goes unslurred and small-size tasks/thoughts/sentences go unhampered. Basic theory: The atomic building block of cognition is repetition. All patterns are repetition, or repetition of repetitions, or repetitions of some nth order hierarchy of repetitions. Repetition happens at different length and time scales. The fundamental way the brain does pattern recognition and thus cognition is with brain waves, not with the individual neurons. To recognize patterns that happen at 1/10th of a second, you use 10 hz waves. Consider a big ball of neurons without an explicit input or output layer. Naturally this system will have self sustaining standing waves, looping neural paths that activate themselves. Factoring in signal propagation time, the longer waves correspond to the longer times and thus lower frequencies. The crux of my theory is that the brain is a system of coupled oscillators tuned to have resonances that represent abstract concepts called "thoughts". Psychedelics introduce a slight detuning. Consider what would happen to a radio tuner if the local reference oscillator was slightly off. Alternatively, consider what a piano would sound like if every screw were turned 1/8th of the way. The very long strings would be mostly still in tune, the very short and taut strings would be completely out of tune, and some strings would be nearly aligned with the tune in a different key. In terms of visual perception, the brain is doing something similar to the 2d fourier transform but in a basis that is optimized for 3d objects projected down to the retinal surface. The visual hallucinations can be explained as the reference frequencies being miscalibrated. The spatial repetitions which are nearly the same frequency of the error will drift in and out of phase similar to a beat frequency between two guitar strings. This is why certain visual patterns appear to have a wave like fluid motion on psychadelics. Scientific evidence: 1. Selene Atasoy has worked out the resonant waves that should be present given what we know about how things are connected in the brain. She found that these standing wave patterns correspond extremely well to MRI patterns for various known mental states. Then she looked at the MRI patterns of people on LSD and showed exactly which frequency ranges are dampened / amplified. 2. People on psychedelics all consistently see hallucinations known as form constants. These form constants correspond exactly with the arrangement of the v1 layer of neurons immediately after the optical nerve. This arrangement is intrinsically related to how the rods and cones are distributed inside the retina (namely an exponential distribution). The arrangement of rods and cones in the retina suggests the brain is using log-polar coordinates, which is exactly the coordinate system you would use if you wanted invariance under projective transforms. Further research: I am preparing to do some off the record science wherein I prepare a systematic series of visual stimulus to look at while tripping and then keeping a record of which ones appear to be moving or otherwise distorted. The computer will randomly decide to make some of the images actually be moving / distorted so as to blind the experiment. Later on I will superimpose the distorted frequencies together and see if it reproduces the crystal patterns. The goal is to reverse engineer visual perception and eventually make better quality machine vision. Unlike with visual processing, I am not yet sure how the brain represents sentences and thoughts with frequencies. However based on the observations, I suspect that "larger thoughts" are somehow represented on the part of the spectrum which is being cut out. Understanding how this works exactly could be key to natural language processing.
arrakis2021 5y ago
The DMT experience is so far beyond any rational thinking or explanation that it boggles my mind how anyone would try to analyze it. If you’ve ever “broken through” you know it’s beyond anything an HN post could ever come close to.
- vmception 5y ago
  I find Deep Mind AI output to be pretty damn close. Although I do find synesthesia hard to portray digitally. Its not just the 5-ish senses that get mixed together. There are things like non-visual ideas that can get encapsulated into balls and other geometric shapes and infinitely replicated. Although perceivable in the mind at the time, this is not the same medium.
  - oarabbus_ 5y ago
    >I find Deep Mind AI output to be pretty damn close. Hmm, I don't know that I'd agree. I think a deepdream AI output approximates a breakthrough DMT experience probably less than the prisoners of the Allegory of the Cave watching shadows dance on the wall experienced the true outside world.
  - dave_sullivan 5y ago
    People talk about the visuals a lot because that's what you can see, but the visuals are actually one of the less interesting things about the experience. For instance, why do I meet entities (nominally my self conscience) that appear smarter and wiser than myself? And why do they explain systems that then match up with other people's experiences? Why do different people's subconsciences come across such similar high level concepts during the experience? If you know you know and if you don't you don't. It's an experience few will ever have and most people are not ready for. So they seek to reduce it to something pedestrian.
    - scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
      This. If you’re focusing on the visuals you are missing out on the most important therapeutic value of the experience.
enchiridion 5y ago
You can explore hyperbolic geometry with crochet! http://pi.math.cornell.edu/~dwh/papers/crochet/crochet.html http://pi.math.cornell.edu/~dwh/papers/crochet/crochet.html
ncmncm 5y ago
The article starts out badly, but improves. In particular, mentioning the "substrate problem of consciousness" makes it sound like it will be BS. And, I don't know if the DMT experience really has anything at all to do with hyperbolic geometry. But that turns out not to be the interesting part. You can skip over that without missing anything.
andresgemilsson 5y ago
Hello! I'm the author of this article. I stand by it and I think comments are failing to engaging with the actual models, phenomenological observations, and synthesis provided. I suspect people here have not actually payed attention to these experiences and may have epistemological assumptions that make them think it's impossible to bring useful information back. In particular, I'll say that the article's analysis assumes indirect realism about perception (it's all "in your head"), it focuses on structural features of the experience (phenomenal character rather than intentional content - I'm not interested in what the machine elves told you, I'm interested in what were the wallpaper symmetry groups that were covering their garments!), and tries to do what we named "algorithmic reductions" (i.e. identifying simple processes or effects that when stacked together might generate enormous emergent complexity - as in chemistry and physics, the rules are simple yet the emergent effects can have incredible complexity). In other words, this is a first attempt at a scientific and algorithmic understanding of the rich phenomenology of DMT without either (a) ignoring the facts, or (b) taking the semantic content of the experience at face value. I hope you enjoy it! :) Admittedly, the article is a little old (2016) - but I have yet to see anyone go much further than it. I look forward to rational, scientifically-minded, and smart psychonauts actually engage with the content. In the meantime, let me link you to some additional pieces of content and further information about DMT I've arrived at using these frameworks since then: 1) Here is the ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5) version of the article: https://qualiacomputing.com/2017/05/28/eli5-the-hyperbolic-geometry-of-dmt-experiences/ https://qualiacomputing.com/2017/05/28/eli5-the-hyperbolic-g... 2) Here is a presentation I gave at Harvard's Science of Psychedelics Club about the article (which goes a little deeper as it also explains the "energy x complexity" landscape and ties it to Neural Annealing): https://youtu.be/loCBvaj4eSg https://youtu.be/loCBvaj4eSg 3) Here is an article comparing 5-MeO-DMT and DMT: https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/07/01/5-meo-dmt-vs-nn-dmt-the-9-lenses/ https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/07/01/5-meo-dmt-vs-nn-dmt-t... 4) Here is a video on the same topic: https://youtu.be/bwwZP-Bm7kI https://youtu.be/bwwZP-Bm7kI 5) Another related video "Why Does DMT Feel So Real? Multi-modal Coherence, High Temperature Parameter, Tactile Hallucinations": https://youtu.be/Bgv1ptz1wOc https://youtu.be/Bgv1ptz1wOc [see below for the video description] 6) A Guide for how to write scientifically useful trip reports: https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/rigorous-reports https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/rigorous-report... 7) Psychedelics and the Free Energy Principle: From REBUS to Indra's Net - https://youtu.be/45tG1oVigVo https://youtu.be/45tG1oVigVo and 8) The Theory of Neural Annealing (very related): https://youtu.be/ndjbeF4EqRs https://youtu.be/ndjbeF4EqRs (see also: https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/ https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neu...) --------------- Video description to give you a taste of the explanatory style I'm pursuing: Why does DMT feel so "real"? Why does it feel like you experience genuine mind-independent realities on DMT? In this video I explain that we all implicitly rely on a model of which signals are trustworthy and which ones are not. In particular, in order to avoid losing one's mind during an intense exotic experience (such as those catalyzed by psychedelics, dissociatives, or meditation) one needs to (a) know that you are altered, (b) have a good model of what that alteration entails, and (c) that the alteration is not strong enough that it breaks down either (a) or (b). So drugs that make you forget you are under the influence, or that you don't know how to model (or have a mistaken model of) can deeply disrupt your "web of trusted beliefs". I argue that one cannot really import the models that one learned from other psychedelics about "what psychedelics do" to DMT; DMT alters you in a far broader way. For example, most people on LSD may mistrust what they see, but they will not mistrust what they touch (touch stays a "trusted signal" on LSD). But on DMT you can experience tactile hallucinations that are coherent with one's visions! "Crossing the veil" on DMT is not a visual experience: it's a multi-modal experience, like entering a cave hiding behind a waterfall. Some of the signals that DMT messes with that often convince people that what they experienced was mind-independent include: 1) Hyperbolic geometry and mathematical complexity; experiencing "impossible objects". 2) Incredibly high-resolution multi-modal integration: hallucinations are "coherent" across senses. 3) Philosophical qualia enhancement: it alters not only your senses and emotions, but also "the way you organize models of reality". 4) More "energized" experiences feel inherently more real, and DMT can increase the energy parameter to an extreme degree. 5) Highly valenced experiences also feel more real - the bliss and the horror are interpreted as "belonging to the vibe of a reality" rather than being just a property of your experience. 6) DMT can give you powerful hallucinations in every modality: not only visual hallucinations, but also tactile, auditory, scent, taste, and proprioception. 7) Novel and exotic feelings of "electromagnetism". 8) Sense of "wisdom". 9) Knowledge of your feelings: the entities know more about you than you yourself know about yourself. With all of these signals being liable to chaotic alterations on DMT it makes sense that even very bright and rational people may experience a "shift" in their beliefs about reality. The trusted signals will have altered their consilience point. And since each point of consilience between trusted signals entails a worldview, people who believe in the independent reality of the realms disclosed by DMT share trust in some signals most people don't even know exist. We can expect some pushback for this analysis by people who trust any of the signals altered by DMT listed above. Which is fine! But... if we want to create a rational Super-Shulgin Academy to really make some serious progress in mapping-out the state-space of consciousness, we will need to prevent epistemological mishaps. I.e. We have to model insanity so that we ourselves can stay sane :)

119 points by StreamBright 5y ago

I don't think it's just DMT that gives you this experience. One of the most "geometric" trips was from taking Salvia in a dorm room in college. Everything felt like I was in the original Tron movie. Flat surfaces seemed to go on in a plane to the horizon. Honestly, made me feel pretty nauseous.

jahnu 5y ago
Closing my eyes on 2CB projected neon patterns like the geometric patterns you find on central Asian mosques. It was incredible and I could really concentrate on the details.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  Pretty interesting. I can do the same while stone cold sober. After half a minute or so I see geometrical patterns, much resembling Islamic geometric mosaics, with neon colors, that tend to move around (if I am listening to music, they follow the music). The longer I go, the more elaborate they get, and sometimes they even gain 3D dimensions or lead to scenes resembling dreams. When I tell that to most people they act as if I'm a weirdo, except for a friend of mine who sees similar patterns. Would you say that is similar to what you saw on 2C-B?
  - saltyfamiliar 5y ago
    That's pretty extraordinary. I don't think I've ever heard of someone seeing stuff like that without psychedelics. Have you always been able to see it or was it brought on by something? When did you first notice it?
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      I've been able to see it as far as I remember. I think I really noticed it first in elementary school. I remember very distinctly doing in the family car in 4th grade after telling my mom about Minecraft, lol.
  - numtel 5y ago
    I'm not sure but I think that's referred to as Astral Projection.
  - jahnu 5y ago
    Yeah that sounds quite similar. Never had the experience sober, however.
crispyambulance 5y ago
I think folks tend to focus too much on the visual hallucinations caused by psychedelic drugs. I can only speak about LSD, so I might be wrong about DMT, but there's far more to these experiences than just "visuals". There's nothing wrong with talking about the visuals and the exploration in the blog post is interesting. I just want to point out for anyone looking to experience this stuff, bear in mind that you're going to get A LOT more than you bargained for if you think it's only going to be visual hallucinations. There are also auditory and cognitive hallucinations. The perception of time gets incredibly distorted. Emotions and feelings especially about other people get a profoundly different and intense perspective. The experience can be very very unpleasant for some. For me it was an overall positive experience despite some rough spots. I was glad to have trustworthy folks around me when I was tripping.
- blacksqr 5y ago
  A friend told me that on one trip, he was a cloud raining on a forest for five hundred years. He emphasized LITERALLY five hundred years.
- the_gipsy 5y ago
  > The perception of time gets incredibly distorted We can only internally represent time as 3D space. If under the influence of psychedelics space gets warped and unrecognizable, it follows that our perception of time also does so.
- andresgemilsson 5y ago
  I agree that the most "interesting" hallucinations are not the trippy patterns you see. But, take note, if you pay really close attention to it, you will realize that in fact there is a dual relationship between the geometry of the hallucinations and the vibe of the experience. Indeed, I was not the first to figure this out (though I did figure it out independently). Steven Lehar has been talking about it for ages - and he writes about it in his book The Grand Illusion (http://slehar.com/wwwRel/GrandIllusion.pdf http://slehar.com/wwwRel/GrandIllusion.pdf). Seriously - next time pay close attention and you'll see how the shape of the configurations you hallucinate determines how the "waves of energy" bounce off of them, which in turn gives rise to harmonious or dissonant interactions between them. So you can in fact modulate your mood by making your hallucinations more symmetrical. Check out this article for more about that: https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/12/17/the-symmetry-theory-of-valence-2020-presentation/ https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/12/17/the-symmetry-theory-o...
01100011 5y ago
Funny how no one really talks about salvia anymore. That shit was whack. I went to cartoon land while having my ability to communicate removed and feeling like half of my body was moving rapidly away from the other. I understand it is powerful and useful in certain settings, but yikes, not a fun ride for most people. A small, informal sample seemed to indicate women hated it less than men but that was just the people I knew.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Tried salvia once. Impressed by the visuals and the intensity; but there's no euphoria. Without euphoria, it's just weird perceptual distortions, and loss of the ability to move or speak. I thought it was like being ill. Tried DMT once. It offers euphoria, visuals and intensity; but the speed with which it came on was such that I was effectively disabled before I could complete dosing - so no breakthrough. Visuals are all very well - but I've been there and done that decades ago. Euphoria and joy are harder to come by, and drugs that provide them don't "keep on giving". People react very differently to these substances, and my experiences are by no means normative.
- IAmGraydon 5y ago
  Salvia was my first hallucinogenic experience. I and others have noted that it seems to trigger a primal fear response far more often than other hallucinogens. The trips tend to have very dark themes, and time is severely warped in such a way that it’s not uncommon to forget what a human is and live in an alien reality for centuries. Really weird stuff, and not something I would recommend to most.

oolonthegreat 5y ago

sheesh talk about pseudoscience

anm89 5y ago
Yeah completely. I'm gonna say occams razor prefers "chemicals affect your brain in ways that simulate bizarre sensory input" Over "chemicals unlock a new sensory ability to perceive extra dimensions"
- lend000 5y ago
  The article wasn't presented as any sort of proof of mechanism or even authoritative description of what's happening. An aside: I'll venture a guess that the majority of discoveries in human history started by throwing out Occam's razor. I don't understand why it's such a religion on HN.
  - kjellsbells 5y ago
    That's actually a great point. To create, you need to throw out preconceptions like the razor. But to achieve persistence, simplifying ruthlessly... ie bringing the razor back in, helps. It's a bit like brainstorming: if you shut the idea stream down with the cold water of rationality, you lose what could have been really good ideas.
  - twofornone 5y ago
    People seem to forget that it's a heuristic, not an actual logical inference.
    - naasking 5y ago
      Solomonoff induction provably converges on reproducing any input function by only observing that function's outputs, and it formalizes Occam's razor as a key principle. I don't think it's fair to call it a heuristic anymore.

lend000 5y ago

A new game called Hyperbolica is being developed to explore new geometries [0]. It will be interesting to see how people playing the game compare the experience to their previous trips. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMKLeS-Uq_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMKLeS-Uq_8

tartoran 5y ago
Coming out late 2020?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- dylan604 5y ago
  That's plenty of time to add 3 new levels, incorporate an in-game purchase system, and the 5 other items the PM just dropped on the devs. No, we will not need to push the release date to add these new features. The features will be fully ready.
- lend000 5y ago
  It's a single guy working on it as far as I know, and he has a good devlog on that same Youtube channel. He apparently had to rewrite most graphics libraries to shade things according to hyperbolic geometry. Looks like it should be coming out soon, though (hopefully).
unbanned 5y ago
Exactly the same.
stared 5y ago
Playing such games changes our perception. I have been playing HyperRogue (https://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/ https://www.roguetemple.com/z/hyper/). After a few hours of playing it straight, experience of the "normal" worlds changes. It holds for other games as well. That said, I don't believe that a DMT trip would improve performance in the game. Or maybe a bit, but by increasing neuroplasticity.

Sosh101 5y ago

A presentation from this guy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loCBvaj4eSg

Flankk 5y ago

Joe Rogan has entered the chat.

aviancrane 5y ago

It seems to me two things are happening. [1] The brain is really good at filling in gaps in its perception of the world and [2] there seems to be some kind of strange loopy recursion in the way the brain analyzes and observes things including itself. I think on DMT and similar, you are actually seeing less of the world, and the recursive/fractal aspect is coming from the brain filling in gaps with observations including its own analyzing patterns. The world at our scale has a lot of data and is really complex. These "hypbolic geometries" seem like simplifications. One strand of a flower that happens to follow something roughly like the golden ration becomes a fibonacci spiral repeated at every degree; the sense of self gets muddled with the modeling of this pattern, allowing the pattern to permeate the entire observation, and now you too are the spiral. You notice the observation and how muddled it is with the pattern and the self, creating a loop which also gets modeled, and down the recursive rabbit hole you go.

celesti 5y ago
it's released when you're born, when you dream, and when you die
Nav_Panel 5y ago
Pure speculation, but I have to wonder if our fundamental conception of sensation as a blank canvas slowly filled with positive contents is wrong, and rather that perception involves the apprehension of difference against some "basic" recursive pattern. I tend to notice this more aurally, in the sonic experience within a highly focused state, including spending time on social media (not silent! quite noisy, but I am not actively aware of it in most cases), and also the intense experience of hitting the stop button mid-song; the silence hits very hard. Seems Fristonian, in that if the brain is a prediction machine across time, then the underlying predictive pattern would be fractal, or at least highly self-similar to immediate past experience. The intensity of the hard stop (and similarly the annoyance of transient sounds like car horns) is in the predictive failure, which draws your attention. If this is desirable, we call it "interesting".
- nemosaltat 5y ago
  You’ve beautifully articulated a feeling I’ve had for most of my life. In the Alvin Maker (historical fantasy) series, Orson Scott Card describes a phenomenon he calls the _greensong_. It’s a sort of pervading communion the first peoples have with nature, and white settlers not only can’t connect with it, but exist as a palpable disturbance to those who can. I’ve often felt like nearly _everything_ is signal, and my day-to-day experience is actually noise. That sense has been heightened on the occasions I’ve used hallucinogenics.

optimalsolver 5y ago

Great take on DMT: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th... Also worth a read: https://www.waggish.org/2011/benny-shanon-the-antipodes-of-the-mind/ https://www.waggish.org/2011/benny-shanon-the-antipodes-of-t...

dang 5y ago

One past thread: An essay on the phenomenology of DMT (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15368432 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15368432 - Sept 2017 (15 comments)

SavantIdiot 5y ago

I had an almost identical conversation with some engineering major roommates after a heavy mushroom trip in 1984. We were in four simultaneous classes that applied DiffEq, and IMHO, the first time you grasp DiffEq you feel like someone gave you a way to describe anything. So: we spent hours describing the differential equations of thought evolution, vision, perception, hearing, and existence. We hadn't encountered Hamiltonians yet, but I'm sure we would have thrown them into the mix. Yeah, drugs will do that to you. Make you think every thought you have is pure gold.

IIAOPSW 5y ago

I'm going to quickly summarize my psychedelic inspired theories on cognition which are now somewhat backed by science. Basic observations: 1. On psychedelics your sense of time is wrong. I ran an experiment called 'the deadman switch' wherein I set a 20 min timer and, when it goes off, I would verbally acknowledge and then reset it. Based on this, I estimate 20 min to feel like over an hour, thus giving a distortion ratio of at least 5:1. 2. The images I see when I close my eyes are the same colors as the normal after image one sees after staring at a lightbulb. In fact the kaleidoscopic hallucinations look exactly as if the after image of a light bulb has gone through some sort of frequency space filtering. Here's a profound laymans summary: isn't it remarkable how similar the hallucinations look to a video buffering artifact. 3. Thoughts of a certain size get cut off. I find it hard to exactly quantify the size of a thought, but for the purpose of this conversation lets take it for granted that such a metric exists. Sentences beyond a certain word count would almost certainly have the train of thought derailed before reaching its terminus. Multi-step tasks like standing in line, thinking about what I want to order, and being ready with what to say when I reach the front are highly unlikely to succeed. Unlike other forms of intoxication, it is not the case that all cognitive ability is equally blunted. The speaking of individual words goes unslurred and small-size tasks/thoughts/sentences go unhampered. Basic theory: The atomic building block of cognition is repetition. All patterns are repetition, or repetition of repetitions, or repetitions of some nth order hierarchy of repetitions. Repetition happens at different length and time scales. The fundamental way the brain does pattern recognition and thus cognition is with brain waves, not with the individual neurons. To recognize patterns that happen at 1/10th of a second, you use 10 hz waves. Consider a big ball of neurons without an explicit input or output layer. Naturally this system will have self sustaining standing waves, looping neural paths that activate themselves. Factoring in signal propagation time, the longer waves correspond to the longer times and thus lower frequencies. The crux of my theory is that the brain is a system of coupled oscillators tuned to have resonances that represent abstract concepts called "thoughts". Psychedelics introduce a slight detuning. Consider what would happen to a radio tuner if the local reference oscillator was slightly off. Alternatively, consider what a piano would sound like if every screw were turned 1/8th of the way. The very long strings would be mostly still in tune, the very short and taut strings would be completely out of tune, and some strings would be nearly aligned with the tune in a different key. In terms of visual perception, the brain is doing something similar to the 2d fourier transform but in a basis that is optimized for 3d objects projected down to the retinal surface. The visual hallucinations can be explained as the reference frequencies being miscalibrated. The spatial repetitions which are nearly the same frequency of the error will drift in and out of phase similar to a beat frequency between two guitar strings. This is why certain visual patterns appear to have a wave like fluid motion on psychadelics. Scientific evidence: 1. Selene Atasoy has worked out the resonant waves that should be present given what we know about how things are connected in the brain. She found that these standing wave patterns correspond extremely well to MRI patterns for various known mental states. Then she looked at the MRI patterns of people on LSD and showed exactly which frequency ranges are dampened / amplified. 2. People on psychedelics all consistently see hallucinations known as form constants. These form constants correspond exactly with the arrangement of the v1 layer of neurons immediately after the optical nerve. This arrangement is intrinsically related to how the rods and cones are distributed inside the retina (namely an exponential distribution). The arrangement of rods and cones in the retina suggests the brain is using log-polar coordinates, which is exactly the coordinate system you would use if you wanted invariance under projective transforms. Further research: I am preparing to do some off the record science wherein I prepare a systematic series of visual stimulus to look at while tripping and then keeping a record of which ones appear to be moving or otherwise distorted. The computer will randomly decide to make some of the images actually be moving / distorted so as to blind the experiment. Later on I will superimpose the distorted frequencies together and see if it reproduces the crystal patterns. The goal is to reverse engineer visual perception and eventually make better quality machine vision. Unlike with visual processing, I am not yet sure how the brain represents sentences and thoughts with frequencies. However based on the observations, I suspect that "larger thoughts" are somehow represented on the part of the spectrum which is being cut out. Understanding how this works exactly could be key to natural language processing.

arrakis2021 5y ago

The DMT experience is so far beyond any rational thinking or explanation that it boggles my mind how anyone would try to analyze it. If you’ve ever “broken through” you know it’s beyond anything an HN post could ever come close to.

vmception 5y ago
I find Deep Mind AI output to be pretty damn close. Although I do find synesthesia hard to portray digitally. Its not just the 5-ish senses that get mixed together. There are things like non-visual ideas that can get encapsulated into balls and other geometric shapes and infinitely replicated. Although perceivable in the mind at the time, this is not the same medium.
- oarabbus_ 5y ago
  >I find Deep Mind AI output to be pretty damn close. Hmm, I don't know that I'd agree. I think a deepdream AI output approximates a breakthrough DMT experience probably less than the prisoners of the Allegory of the Cave watching shadows dance on the wall experienced the true outside world.
- dave_sullivan 5y ago
  People talk about the visuals a lot because that's what you can see, but the visuals are actually one of the less interesting things about the experience. For instance, why do I meet entities (nominally my self conscience) that appear smarter and wiser than myself? And why do they explain systems that then match up with other people's experiences? Why do different people's subconsciences come across such similar high level concepts during the experience? If you know you know and if you don't you don't. It's an experience few will ever have and most people are not ready for. So they seek to reduce it to something pedestrian.
  - scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
    This. If you’re focusing on the visuals you are missing out on the most important therapeutic value of the experience.

enchiridion 5y ago

You can explore hyperbolic geometry with crochet! http://pi.math.cornell.edu/~dwh/papers/crochet/crochet.html http://pi.math.cornell.edu/~dwh/papers/crochet/crochet.html

ncmncm 5y ago

The article starts out badly, but improves. In particular, mentioning the "substrate problem of consciousness" makes it sound like it will be BS. And, I don't know if the DMT experience really has anything at all to do with hyperbolic geometry. But that turns out not to be the interesting part. You can skip over that without missing anything.

andresgemilsson 5y ago

Hello! I'm the author of this article. I stand by it and I think comments are failing to engaging with the actual models, phenomenological observations, and synthesis provided. I suspect people here have not actually payed attention to these experiences and may have epistemological assumptions that make them think it's impossible to bring useful information back. In particular, I'll say that the article's analysis assumes indirect realism about perception (it's all "in your head"), it focuses on structural features of the experience (phenomenal character rather than intentional content - I'm not interested in what the machine elves told you, I'm interested in what were the wallpaper symmetry groups that were covering their garments!), and tries to do what we named "algorithmic reductions" (i.e. identifying simple processes or effects that when stacked together might generate enormous emergent complexity - as in chemistry and physics, the rules are simple yet the emergent effects can have incredible complexity). In other words, this is a first attempt at a scientific and algorithmic understanding of the rich phenomenology of DMT without either (a) ignoring the facts, or (b) taking the semantic content of the experience at face value. I hope you enjoy it! :) Admittedly, the article is a little old (2016) - but I have yet to see anyone go much further than it. I look forward to rational, scientifically-minded, and smart psychonauts actually engage with the content. In the meantime, let me link you to some additional pieces of content and further information about DMT I've arrived at using these frameworks since then: 1) Here is the ELI5 (Explain Like I'm 5) version of the article: https://qualiacomputing.com/2017/05/28/eli5-the-hyperbolic-geometry-of-dmt-experiences/ https://qualiacomputing.com/2017/05/28/eli5-the-hyperbolic-g... 2) Here is a presentation I gave at Harvard's Science of Psychedelics Club about the article (which goes a little deeper as it also explains the "energy x complexity" landscape and ties it to Neural Annealing): https://youtu.be/loCBvaj4eSg https://youtu.be/loCBvaj4eSg 3) Here is an article comparing 5-MeO-DMT and DMT: https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/07/01/5-meo-dmt-vs-nn-dmt-the-9-lenses/ https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/07/01/5-meo-dmt-vs-nn-dmt-t... 4) Here is a video on the same topic: https://youtu.be/bwwZP-Bm7kI https://youtu.be/bwwZP-Bm7kI 5) Another related video "Why Does DMT Feel So Real? Multi-modal Coherence, High Temperature Parameter, Tactile Hallucinations": https://youtu.be/Bgv1ptz1wOc https://youtu.be/Bgv1ptz1wOc [see below for the video description] 6) A Guide for how to write scientifically useful trip reports: https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/rigorous-reports https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/rigorous-report... 7) Psychedelics and the Free Energy Principle: From REBUS to Indra's Net - https://youtu.be/45tG1oVigVo https://youtu.be/45tG1oVigVo and 8) The Theory of Neural Annealing (very related): https://youtu.be/ndjbeF4EqRs https://youtu.be/ndjbeF4EqRs (see also: https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neural-theory-of-everything/ https://opentheory.net/2019/11/neural-annealing-toward-a-neu...) --------------- Video description to give you a taste of the explanatory style I'm pursuing: Why does DMT feel so "real"? Why does it feel like you experience genuine mind-independent realities on DMT? In this video I explain that we all implicitly rely on a model of which signals are trustworthy and which ones are not. In particular, in order to avoid losing one's mind during an intense exotic experience (such as those catalyzed by psychedelics, dissociatives, or meditation) one needs to (a) know that you are altered, (b) have a good model of what that alteration entails, and (c) that the alteration is not strong enough that it breaks down either (a) or (b). So drugs that make you forget you are under the influence, or that you don't know how to model (or have a mistaken model of) can deeply disrupt your "web of trusted beliefs". I argue that one cannot really import the models that one learned from other psychedelics about "what psychedelics do" to DMT; DMT alters you in a far broader way. For example, most people on LSD may mistrust what they see, but they will not mistrust what they touch (touch stays a "trusted signal" on LSD). But on DMT you can experience tactile hallucinations that are coherent with one's visions! "Crossing the veil" on DMT is not a visual experience: it's a multi-modal experience, like entering a cave hiding behind a waterfall. Some of the signals that DMT messes with that often convince people that what they experienced was mind-independent include: 1) Hyperbolic geometry and mathematical complexity; experiencing "impossible objects". 2) Incredibly high-resolution multi-modal integration: hallucinations are "coherent" across senses. 3) Philosophical qualia enhancement: it alters not only your senses and emotions, but also "the way you organize models of reality". 4) More "energized" experiences feel inherently more real, and DMT can increase the energy parameter to an extreme degree. 5) Highly valenced experiences also feel more real - the bliss and the horror are interpreted as "belonging to the vibe of a reality" rather than being just a property of your experience. 6) DMT can give you powerful hallucinations in every modality: not only visual hallucinations, but also tactile, auditory, scent, taste, and proprioception. 7) Novel and exotic feelings of "electromagnetism". 8) Sense of "wisdom". 9) Knowledge of your feelings: the entities know more about you than you yourself know about yourself. With all of these signals being liable to chaotic alterations on DMT it makes sense that even very bright and rational people may experience a "shift" in their beliefs about reality. The trusted signals will have altered their consilience point. And since each point of consilience between trusted signals entails a worldview, people who believe in the independent reality of the realms disclosed by DMT share trust in some signals most people don't even know exist. We can expect some pushback for this analysis by people who trust any of the signals altered by DMT listed above. Which is fine! But... if we want to create a rational Super-Shulgin Academy to really make some serious progress in mapping-out the state-space of consciousness, we will need to prevent epistemological mishaps. I.e. We have to model insanity so that we ourselves can stay sane :)