4 ms·

If you wanna follow an interesting rabbit hole, listen to Hamilton Morris and Dr. Andrew Gallimore chat in a recent video: https://youtu.be/ba5pAjM8HZM https:/

If you wanna follow an interesting rabbit hole, listen to Hamilton Morris and Dr. Andrew Gallimore chat in a recent video: https://youtu.be/ba5pAjM8HZM https://youtu.be/ba5pAjM8HZM If anything has peaked your curiosity, consider his books “Alien Information Theory” and “Reality Switch Technologies” Also, DMTx is undeniably interesting from my point of view. We’ve recently completed a trial involving hour long sessions in extended DMT state

kbd 3y ago
> We’ve recently completed a trial involving hour long sessions in extended DMT state That's fascinating, since that's not something someone could do on their own. One of my biggest questions is whether the "DMT world" really connects you with another part of reality, or whether it's just "what the brain does" when exposed to the chemical. Have there been any controlled experiments on whether we can pass messages via the DMT elves? That would persuade me that the entities could be real.
- _yb2s 3y ago
  https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
- grimgrin 3y ago
  If that’s a thing you wanna try to stay informed about, look no further than the recent conversation with the panelist: https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI spoiler: we haven’t done that yet, so far it’s really kinda like “ok well it’s not appearing to be unhealthy, there’s no noticeable tolerance, what’s next”. Also the linked video is going to have parts way out there for some folks here. Some have much different beliefs, there’s a few mentions of Syncronicities But this is a newer rabbit hole for me and one thing is certain: I want to know why DMT has our brain building an entirely different world model, almost repeatable, completely throwing ours away. What’s the evolutionary reason even? There’s some theories but none anyone feels great about.
  - aftoprokrustes 3y ago
    Do you have any references about this "repeatability"? Is it repeatable for a given person, or across persons?
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  I’ve looked a bit and haven’t seen any experiments at all. If by control you mean control group, there’s no need for that. If even a single pair of people could pass messages in a way that’s inexplicable except for the DMT realm, having another group bomb the test doesn’t change anything. I don’t think it’ll ever happen though. I have this belief that something prevents these things getting pinned down by empiricism. Like if you’re caught trying to prove it, the signal gets jammed. Yes, this makes it unfalsifiable. I’ll respect anyone who loses interest for that reason. Unfalsifiable isn’t quite the same as false, though. Most experiments around actually interacting with entities seem incredibly naive. Like imagine I told you I had a friend who makes the most amazing animal impressions in the world, but he lives in a dangerous neighborhood. One person refuses to go because it’s hazardous, and declares he’s not real. Another walks in, shoves a tape recorder in his face and says “bark like a dog for 10 seconds”. He analyzes the recording and declares it a 0% match. (It was a 100% match for a human saying “piss off” though). But you keep hearing these stories about people who show up, ask nicely, and get to hear the cool animal sounds.
  - aftoprokrustes 3y ago
    Regarding the possibility to do "experiments" or the usefulness of standard materialist epistemology to study consciousness, I recommend reading the galileo report: https://galileocommission.org/report/ https://galileocommission.org/report/ It is a report from scientists worldwide, that calls for opening the field of what is considered "acceptable science" when studying consciousness. They mostly center their arguments around near death experiences and recall of past lives, but I think their arguments apply here. What I got from them is that there is room to include more first person experiences in scientific research. We might never reach the same degree of certitude and precision as in the material sciences, but thsre is a strong argument to be made that consciousness is likely not just emerging from matter, but might be of a different nature. Continuing research about how could consciousness emerge from material processes is legitimate and important, but it should not be seen as the only possible explanation, and researchers should not be shamed out of making wildly different assumptions (as long as they are rigorous and honest). I am curious to see what will come out of this DMTx project. I am not yet sure what to think about them from their website, but I will definitely try to remember to check them out again in the future!
ttctciyf 3y ago
Gallimore's theory of psychedelic action, based on the predictive processing model[1] of brain function - very roughly that normal "sensory experience" is substantially the output of the brain's predictive model of reality and that when psychedelics "perturb" the model (a bit like skewing the weights in a software NN) users experience the effects of the brain scrambling to recover predictive efficacy - is fascinating to me! He has a free 45 part course - Psychedelics and the Brain Master Course - up on youtube[2], which goes into some detail on the biochemistry and computational aspects of this. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding 2: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqdD4EM-aEfmLvbWu8GQDhUII236MZf- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqdD4EM-aEfmLvbWu8GQ...
pmoriarty 3y ago
So what was the outcome of DMTx? Last I heard it had taken a pause because of COVID. Have any published papers come out of this research?

kbd 3y ago

> We’ve recently completed a trial involving hour long sessions in extended DMT state That's fascinating, since that's not something someone could do on their own. One of my biggest questions is whether the "DMT world" really connects you with another part of reality, or whether it's just "what the brain does" when exposed to the chemical. Have there been any controlled experiments on whether we can pass messages via the DMT elves? That would persuade me that the entities could be real.

_yb2s 3y ago
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-the-cactus-person/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/21/universal-love-said-th...
grimgrin 3y ago
If that’s a thing you wanna try to stay informed about, look no further than the recent conversation with the panelist: https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI https://www.youtube.com/live/Myq_Hc_39aI spoiler: we haven’t done that yet, so far it’s really kinda like “ok well it’s not appearing to be unhealthy, there’s no noticeable tolerance, what’s next”. Also the linked video is going to have parts way out there for some folks here. Some have much different beliefs, there’s a few mentions of Syncronicities But this is a newer rabbit hole for me and one thing is certain: I want to know why DMT has our brain building an entirely different world model, almost repeatable, completely throwing ours away. What’s the evolutionary reason even? There’s some theories but none anyone feels great about.
- aftoprokrustes 3y ago
  Do you have any references about this "repeatability"? Is it repeatable for a given person, or across persons?
travisjungroth 3y ago
I’ve looked a bit and haven’t seen any experiments at all. If by control you mean control group, there’s no need for that. If even a single pair of people could pass messages in a way that’s inexplicable except for the DMT realm, having another group bomb the test doesn’t change anything. I don’t think it’ll ever happen though. I have this belief that something prevents these things getting pinned down by empiricism. Like if you’re caught trying to prove it, the signal gets jammed. Yes, this makes it unfalsifiable. I’ll respect anyone who loses interest for that reason. Unfalsifiable isn’t quite the same as false, though. Most experiments around actually interacting with entities seem incredibly naive. Like imagine I told you I had a friend who makes the most amazing animal impressions in the world, but he lives in a dangerous neighborhood. One person refuses to go because it’s hazardous, and declares he’s not real. Another walks in, shoves a tape recorder in his face and says “bark like a dog for 10 seconds”. He analyzes the recording and declares it a 0% match. (It was a 100% match for a human saying “piss off” though). But you keep hearing these stories about people who show up, ask nicely, and get to hear the cool animal sounds.
- aftoprokrustes 3y ago
  Regarding the possibility to do "experiments" or the usefulness of standard materialist epistemology to study consciousness, I recommend reading the galileo report: https://galileocommission.org/report/ https://galileocommission.org/report/ It is a report from scientists worldwide, that calls for opening the field of what is considered "acceptable science" when studying consciousness. They mostly center their arguments around near death experiences and recall of past lives, but I think their arguments apply here. What I got from them is that there is room to include more first person experiences in scientific research. We might never reach the same degree of certitude and precision as in the material sciences, but thsre is a strong argument to be made that consciousness is likely not just emerging from matter, but might be of a different nature. Continuing research about how could consciousness emerge from material processes is legitimate and important, but it should not be seen as the only possible explanation, and researchers should not be shamed out of making wildly different assumptions (as long as they are rigorous and honest). I am curious to see what will come out of this DMTx project. I am not yet sure what to think about them from their website, but I will definitely try to remember to check them out again in the future!

ttctciyf 3y ago

Gallimore's theory of psychedelic action, based on the predictive processing model[1] of brain function - very roughly that normal "sensory experience" is substantially the output of the brain's predictive model of reality and that when psychedelics "perturb" the model (a bit like skewing the weights in a software NN) users experience the effects of the brain scrambling to recover predictive efficacy - is fascinating to me! He has a free 45 part course - Psychedelics and the Brain Master Course - up on youtube[2], which goes into some detail on the biochemistry and computational aspects of this. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding 2: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqdD4EM-aEfmLvbWu8GQDhUII236MZf- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqdD4EM-aEfmLvbWu8GQ...

pmoriarty 3y ago

So what was the outcome of DMTx? Last I heard it had taken a pause because of COVID. Have any published papers come out of this research?