Issue Two: Focus On Psychedelics
Yes, we couldn't resist it!
Welcome to Issue Two of The Elevator, a bi-weekly digest on the latest developments in the fields of consciousness research, theory, and investigation. This time we’ve yielded to the temptation of putting our focus on psychedelics, just to get it out of our system. It is a fact that the so-called ‘psychedelic renaissance’ and the various related decriminalizations, scientific papers, companies and research institutes which are springing up all over like, well, magic mushrooms, means that there is an abundance of news and interesting articles in this particular part of the consciousness research world.
This ‘Elevator’ newsletter is a seed, with hopes to grow into something more, which will be revealed in time. We want to get off on the right foot though, so please don’t hesitate to let us know in the comments what we are doing right, what you found particularly interesting, and what we could improve on. Also please do suggest articles we might want to feature here, either in the comments or by email.
We love this material and working on this project is a privilege for us, so we hope that comes through in the articles, videos and podcasts we select for our subscribers. We should also note that posting something here does not necessarily imply we agree with its conclusions, only that we find it interesting and hope you will too.
Table of Contents
Consciousness and Psychology:
Consciousness and Personal Development:
Consciousness and Philosophy:
Consciousness and AI
Consciousness and Science:
The Science of Consciousness: Exploring Beyond the Brain – IONS
This Ivy League Affiliated Physics Lab Believes Humans Have Mind Control Abilities
New neuron research could help detect seizures before they happen
Focus On Psychedelics
Psychedelic Research
Equal Access and Society
Integration and Harm Reduction
Therapy
Technology and Psychedelics
Psychoactive Substances
Non-drug ‘psychedelics’
Nuggets From The Archive
Two researchers have created a new A.I. model that can draw what you're thinking with 80% accuracy
A New Theory in Physics Claims to Solve the Mystery of Consciousness - Neuroscience News
How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA
The Science of Consciousness: Exploring Beyond the Brain – IONS
This free online event on Saturday, June 24, 2023 features the inaugural presentation of the Linda G. O’Bryant Noetic Sciences Research Prize. This $100,000 award celebrates individuals or teams who have made promising contributions to expanding our understanding of consciousness beyond the limitations of the brain. By challenging the materialist belief that the mind is equivalent to the brain, the prize acknowledges innovative explorations in this field.
How Idealism saved Leo Tolstoy’s life | Essentia Foundation
This is the latest episode of the Essentia Readings podcast, hosted by Nadia Hassan. It discusses the personal journey of Leo Tolstoy, who, although already a well-known and wealthy author, contemplated suicide due to the nihilistic ethos of late 19th-century materialism and Darwinism. This spiritual crisis led him to question whether there was any meaning in his life that would not be annihilated by death. Having endured a couple of years of deep uncertainty, he finally found salvation in Schopenhauer's idealist philosophy, realizing that his luxurious lifestyle disconnected him from himself, others, and nature. He rejected the materialism of his time, including the Orthodox Church, and embraced a simple lifestyle, working alongside peasants.
How Cultivating Awe Can Save the World | by Douglas Rushkoff | Apr, 2023
Rushkoff discusses the idea that cultivating awe can lead to a sense of connection with the whole. This leads us to be more generous, opening us to “the fuller realization that our individual and collective identities are mutually reinforcing.”
This Ivy League Affiliated Physics Lab Believes Humans Have Mind Control Abilities
A team of researchers at Princeton have been testing for evidence of human mind control ability for 35 years. The lab reported finding a slight but statistically significant effect, with a 4/1000 chance of coincidence, that the population they tested showed a small ability to control computers with their minds and visualize things in a different location. The lab's findings have been criticized by some of the scientific community, but the researchers argue that the criticisms are often illogical and emotional. They suggest that education should move in the direction of opening minds to consider consciousness in ways other than what is taught in formal education.
How Psychological Flexibility is Cultivated Through Mindfulness - Numinus
Mindfulness can help cultivate psychological flexibility. Benjamin Schoendorff from the Contextual Psychology Institute shares his personal experience with meditation and how he struggled to build a regular practice until he discovered Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which uses mindfulness skills to help people behave in ways that align with their values. He explains how ACT trains psychological flexibility through four main elements of mindfulness: cognitive defusion, acceptance, contact with the present moment, and self-as-context. Schoendorff also describes how the ACT Matrix can be used to sort behaviors and experiences into four quadrants, which helps build psychological flexibility.
Can lucid dreaming be harmful? - BBC Future
Lucid dreaming enthusiasts often cite benefits such as having fun, fulfilling wishes, sparking creativity, and improving athletic performance. The practice has also been suggested as a potential way to help people who have frequent nightmares. Some researchers have suggested that lucid dreaming could potentially be used to treat serious psychological disorders such as clinical depression or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, there are some clear situations when lucid dreaming is best avoided, such as for people with certain mental health conditions like schizophrenia, psychosis, bipolar disorder, or manic phase.
What it's like living as a female psychopath - BBC Future
Psychopathy is not an official diagnosis, but is understood to be a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by low levels of empathy and remorse, often resulting in antisocial and sometimes criminal behavior. Psychopathy is more prevalent in men than women, with research into women with the condition being more limited. Women with psychopathy tend to exhibit more of a tendency toward interpersonal manipulation than toward violence, and may struggle to maintain close relationships. This piece includes an interview with a woman diagnosed with psychopathy, and how the condition is often misunderstood.
A moment that changed me: I lost my memories in a road accident. A song brought them flooding back | Mental health | The Guardian
Thomas Leeds recounts waking up with no memories after a bad road accident in which he also sustained serious physical injuries, and the subsequent challenges he faced in relearning basic skills and trying to recover his lost childhood memories. After years of attempting to reconnect with his past without success, he had a profound experience while listening to a classic song that brought back a vivid memory from his childhood. This experience of recovering who he had been inspired him to pursue his dream of becoming a writer, and he has since published a novel about a boy who wakes up with no memories in another world.
The Matter with Things
A lengthy and thoughtful interview with Dr. Iain McGilchrist: "I believe this process is profoundly the purpose of the cosmos – to produce forever more individuated beings out of the whole that is One. And to do this without in any way threatening or impinging on the integrity of the whole." He discusses his most recent book, "The Matter with Things," which brings together neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy into a holistic vision. Making an argument for the importance of the right hemisphere of the brain, which sees the world as a unified, living process, he explores the philosophical implications of this idea: that matter is not ontologically primary.
Professor John Vervaeke — How to Build a Life of Wisdom, Flow, and Contemplation (#657) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss
John Vervaeke is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. In this accessible podcast interview he and Tim Ferriss go into the 4E model which contends that cognition and consciousness are embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended beyond the brain. They also discuss the four ways of knowing: propositional knowing, perceptual knowing, procedural knowing, and relational knowing. Vervaeke recommends an embodied approach to wisdom, as exemplified in practices such as Tai Chi, which he says can help to create a sense of resonance between the practitioner and the external world, reducing stress and anxiety.
Non-Ordinary Sensemaking: How to Navigate a New Reality
Alexander Beiner discusses the importance of understanding and navigating different states of consciousness in our increasingly complex world. The internet and social media can change our perception of reality, and different ideological groups promote particular states of consciousness that influence our beliefs. He draws on insights from cognitive science and philosophy to explain how we can learn to navigate different states of consciousness and apply them to making sense of what is going on, and to solving collective problems. “In the last few weeks, you’ve probably experienced a number of different states of consciousness. Dreaming, having an orgasm, feeling expanded, joyful, safe, threatened or heartbroken. You may have interacted with communities that explicitly value some states over others. Members of a meditation school seeking transcendence aren’t into loosening their inhibitions by drinking on the weekends. A group of drinking buddies aren’t that keen on sitting around gazing at their navels all day.”
Understanding Dissociative Identity Disorder Through The 'Community' of Ella - Scientific American - Summary
Psychotherapist and anthropologist Rebecca Lester discusses her work with a patient named "Ella," who had dissociative identity disorder (DID). Ella had 12 different personalities or "parts," which initially fought with each other but eventually formed a peaceful ‘community’. Lester explains that DID is a condition where someone has two or more separate self-experiences within them that do not share awareness or consciousness. She emphasizes that dissociation is a spectrum, and that the human brain is built to dissociate to some degree. Ella's DID was a fluid system, with four parts always present and the most she had at one point being twelve. The parts did not always get along, and some were not aware of the others.
"AI EEEEEEE!!!" - by Erik Davis - Burning Shore
Following on from last issue’s focus on AI, this article discusses Davis’ growing concerns about the existential risks posed by artificial intelligence, particularly by generative LLMs like GPT-4. He suggests that the power of these models threatens to make everything, including the internet, society, and even subjective experience, highly weird. The author draws on the concept of "weirdness" from his book "High Weirdness" to explore the ways in which AI is already generating new myths and narratives, also citing examples of researchers and journalists who have used the term "weird" to describe the AI phenomenon.
Can AI Become Self-Aware? | Eckhart Answers
This video explores the possibility of machines becoming self-aware and developing consciousness. Eckhart Tolle questions, with his customary dry humor, whether consciousness is a byproduct of the brain, or ultimately independent of it and only manifesting through the biological brain in the manner of a radio receiver. He believes that machines would have to become incredibly complex to achieve such capabilities, and that ultimately there could be a symbiosis between biological and non-biological components to create a semi-biological computer. In his view, all expressions of individual consciousness are in any case manifestations of the one consciousness, and any potential AI-consciousness could not be separate from that.
Here's How to Use Dreams for Creative Inspiration - Scientific American
A new study published in Scientific Reports suggests that the twilight zone that separates sleep and wakefulness is a fertile ground for a creative burst. The study found that people who take brief naps that usher in the onset of sleep score higher on several measures of creativity than those who undertake the same creative tasks after staying awake. The scientists also found they could exercise some measure of control over the dreaming process by directing people's dreams toward a specific topic. The more people dreamed about that subject, the more creative they were on tasks related to it.
New neuron research could help detect seizures before they happen
Researchers at University College Cork, Ireland, and Yale University have discovered a pattern of brain activity that occurs before a seizure happens, which could help the development of early warning technology. The study found that neurons in the brains of rodents generally fall into one of four functional groups during absence seizures, which are seizures defined by a loss of consciousness. The researchers believe these neuron groups are playing different roles in the initiation and persistence of seizures. The study, published in the science journal Nature Communications, detected electrophysiological changes in the brain between 40 to 60 seconds before a seizure. The researchers hope that their research will be a significant step towards the development of an early warning system so they can ensure people’s safety or even avert the seizure before it happens.
Meme to Vibe: A Philosophical Report - by Peter N Limberg
Peter Limberg is the Steward of the Stoa, and the author of the previous viral article Memetic Tribes of Culture War 2.0. This latest article, another possible classic, discusses the concept of "vibes" and how it relates to a shift from "meme consciousness" to "vibe consciousness." Limberg argues that vibes are a form of non-propositional (cf. John Vervaeke) knowledge that can be sensed and experienced, and that focusing on them can lead to a greater sense of psychosecurity, sensefulness, and community. He also goes into the potential downsides of an overemphasis on memes and the need for a more embodied, non-propositional way of knowing.
Quantum Theory's 'Measurement Problem' May Be a Poison Pill for Objective Reality - Scientific American
Anil Ananthaswamy discusses the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, which refers to the difficulty of defining what constitutes a measurement and how it causes a quantum system's multiple possible states to randomly "collapse" into one definite state. The authors of a recent preprint have proved a theorem that shows why certain theories, such as quantum mechanics, have a measurement problem in the first place and how one might develop alternative theories to sidestep it, thus preserving the "absoluteness" of any observed event. Such theories would, for instance, banish the possibility of a coin toss coming up heads to one observer and tails to another. However, their work also shows that preserving such absoluteness comes at a cost to existing assumptions which many physicists would deem prohibitive.
Focus on Psychedelics
New Documentary: Psychedelic Chronicles
This forthcoming documentary from the UK Psychedelic Society covers the dramatic re-emergence of psychedelics into the mainstream. However, the rapid pace of this change also brings risks. The film will explore the phenomenal potential psychedelics hold, examining how the movement is intersecting with Western capitalism, the mental health crisis, and indigenous communities. The documentary is being crowdfunded and you can donate, should you wish to support the project, at the link above.
U.S. Government Announces $1.5 Million Grant For Psychedelics Research
The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has announced a $1.5 million grant for research proposals on the use of psychedelics for treating addiction. The funding is being offered by the Department of Health and Human Services and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and is intended to support research projects focused on how psychedelics could be used for substance use disorders (SUDs).
The Psychedelics Industry Is Booming—But Who's Being Left Out?
Keridwen Cornelius discusses the booming psychedelic industry and its potential benefits and risks, highlighting the longstanding role of Indigenous peoples in the use and knowledge of psychedelic plant medicines, which are now being studied and commercialized outside of their traditional community contexts. This raises concerns about the potential for colonialism and exclusionism, and the need to respect Indigenous knowledge and practices. It also appears that ayahuasca tourism is disrupting ancient knowledge systems among some communities in the Amazon.
Alquimystica 02 Psychedelic Integration with Marc Aixalà
In this fascinating video interview, psychotherapist Marc Aixalà discusses his book "Psychedelic Integration: Psychotherapy for Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness". Aixalà explains that psychedelic substances are catalysts for change and can induce non-ordinary states which may bring about an initiation or a new understanding of oneself. He describes integration as the period of time after a psychedelic experience, where individuals must manage and understand the effects of their psychedelic experience. Aixalà suggests that there should be reciprocity in the use of indigenous knowledge and practices and protection of these practices by the western community.
Was Vice News Another Victim of the War on Drugs? — The Psychedelic Society
Vice News, a popular and trusted source of information on drugs, has announced it is filing for bankruptcy and ceasing operations. This article by one of its long-time contributors argues that YouTube’s restrictive policy on monetizing videos which even mention drugs, even from an investigative perspective, meant that they were unable to capitalize financially on the huge number of views that their videos generated, meaning that they lost money to the point where Vice News was no longer sustainable as a business.
First Psychedelic Trip: Preparation and Expectations - Sociedelic
This is a comprehensive and well-researched guide to preparing for a safe and fulfilling first psychedelic experience. It covers “set and setting”, dosing, risks, and how to deal with a bad trip. The importance of creating a safe and comfortable environment, preparing mentally and physically, and seeking medical advice if necessary are also covered. A psychedelic guide or trip sitter can also be important in creating a supportive environment for clients to process their experiences.
California Senate Votes in Favor of Legalizing Natural Psychedelics
The California Senate has voted in favor of a bill, SB 58, that would legalize the personal or facilitated use of certain amounts of natural psychedelics such as psilocybin mushrooms and DMT, as well as their facilitated use. The bill aims to provide greater access to these substances, which can assist in dealing with mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD. The bill will progress to the Assembly for further review. The legalization would only apply to ‘organic’ substances and not to synthetic psychedelics such as LSD and MDMA. The bill's list of legalized substances does not include peyote, in response to concerns raised by advocates and indigenous groups regarding the cacti being over-harvested. The bill would also establish guidelines for group counseling and community-based healing that involve the use of these substances.
The Psychedelic Superhighway
Joseph McCowan from MAPS discusses his personal experience growing up in Santa Monica, California, and how the city's freeway system, particularly the Santa Monica Freeway, still serves as a reminder of the city's history of racism and housing segregation. He reflects on how this history relates to the current gaps and disparities regarding access to psychedelic therapy and research, and calls for the psychedelic community to slow down and work together to create equitable pathways for more people to access psychedelic therapy.
An Introduction to MDMA Therapy | Microdose
MDMA therapy commonly combines traditional psychotherapy with the administration of MDMA to help patients process difficult emotions and experiences more effectively. The therapeutic effect appears to be not simply due to the physiological effects of the medicine, but rather the result of an interaction between the effects of the medicine, the therapeutic setting, and the mindsets of the participant and therapists. This introduction also discusses the appropriate dosage of MDMA and recent research results showing promising outcomes for MDMA-assisted psychotherapy, particularly in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Breakthrough for Psychedelic Medicine
The use of psychedelics, such as MDMA, as a form of therapy for PTSD is providing hope for the millions of people who are severely affected and treatment-resistant. MDMA-assisted psychotherapy allows participants to face their traumas without being overwhelmed by their past experiences, providing a unique approach to trauma treatment. The nonprofit organization, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), has been working towards proving the safety and efficacy of MDMA through clinical trials for over 30 years and is about to start Phase 3 of research, the final stage of classifying a drug as medicine.
Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics | Scientific Reports
A team led by David Glowacki from the Citius Intelligent Technologies Research Centre, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, has developed a new virtual reality framework called "Isness-distributed" (Isness-D). This VR experience can produce self-transcendent experiences (STEs) similar to those produced by psychedelic drugs. Isness-D allows groups of participants to co-habit a shared virtual space, collectively experiencing their bodies as luminous energetic essences with diffuse spatial boundaries. The study found that the Isness-D scores on all four scales were statistically indistinguishable from recently published psychedelic drug studies, demonstrating that distributed VR can be used to design intersubjective STEs where people dissolve their sense of self in the connection to others. More details in this video: Isness: Using Multi-Person VR to Design Peak Mystical Type Experiences Comparable to Psychedelics
DMT Users Are Using AI to Draw the Strange Beings They Meet While Tripping
A new book compiles the experiences of people who say they've met extradimensional entities while on the psychedelic drug. David Jay Brown, a veteran psychedelic researcher, and artist Sara Phinn have teamed up to create a field guide cataloging the entities that people encounter while taking DMT. The guide profiles 27 entities, taken from personal experiences, reports from users, academic studies, and other reports of non-human entity contact: even including the infamous gray aliens! The researchers have been asking people what the entities look like, how they appear visually, their communications, and what the experience was like overall. They used the AI tool Midjourney to help trippers create images of the beings they have encountered, with the resulting book being a kind of bestiary of the ‘other side’.
EEG-fMRI Study Sheds Light on DMT's Impact on Consciousness
A recent study conducted by researchers at Imperial College in London used advanced brain imaging techniques to assess the impact of 20 mg DMT on the brain prior to, during, and after a bolus IV administration. The study found that DMT resulted in enhanced connectivity throughout the brain, allowing for greater communication between various regions and systems. Additionally, brain activity in areas associated with advanced cognitive functions like imagination was altered. The results suggest that psychedelics affect a fundamental aspect of brain structure and, as a result, influence the human experience of consciousness. Link to the study itself: Psychological and physiological effects of extended DMT
Transpersonal Ecodelia: Surveying Psychedelically Induced Biophilia
This is an academic survey of people who have used psychedelics and experienced a greater connection to nature. The survey found that people reported feeling a sense of unity with nature, experiencing interspecies communication, and feeling a spiritual connection to the natural world. Participants also reported lifestyle changes, such as becoming vegetarian or more environmentally conscious. The authors argue that these experiences could have implications for environmentalism and conservation.
The effect of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) on whole-brain functional and effective connectivity | Neuropsychopharmacology
This article from nature.com discusses a study that investigated the neural mechanisms of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) using regression dynamic causal modelling (rDCM), a novel technique that assesses whole-brain effective connectivity (EC) during resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The study found that LSD perturbs the Excitation/Inhibition balance of the brain, with predominantly stronger interregional connectivity and reduced self-inhibition under LSD compared to placebo, with the notable exception of weakened interregional connectivity and increased self-inhibition in occipital brain regions as well as subcortical regions. The study also found that whole-brain EC correlated with global subjective effects of LSD and discriminated experimental conditions in a machine learning-based analysis with high accuracy (91.11%), highlighting the potential of using whole-brain EC to decode or predict subjective effects of LSD in the future.
These 'Psychedelic Cryptography' Videos Have Hidden Messages Designed to Be Seen While Tripping
The Qualia Research Institute (QRI), a California-based nonprofit group that researches consciousness, recently announced the winners of its Psychedelic Cryptography (PsyCrypto) contest. The contest was focused on creating videos encoded with hidden messages that can be most easily deciphered by a person who is tripping on psychedelic substances. The winning videos play on the common psychedelic experience of seeing radiant “tracers,” which are trails of colors and afterimages that linger in the visual field. The winning artists used this effect to write out tracer-based messages that are incomprehensible to a sober person, but that can be understood while tripping. The QRI believes that this work presents intriguing opportunities for fields like neuroscience and consciousness.
Scientists Discover That Ancient Humans Were Tripping Balls in a Cave
Remains found in a cave known as Es Càrritx, Menorca, Spain, provide the first direct evidence that prehistoric Europeans consumed psychoactive drugs, according to a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports. Seems the singer and author Julian Cope (a big fan of prehistory himself) was right.
Magic Mushrooms Seem to Have A Strange Effect on Color Blindness : ScienceAlert
“A recent case study describes a young 35-year-old male researcher in the United States, who claims to distinguish red and green colors better after taking psychedelics. Following his ingestion of magic mushrooms, which contain the psychoactive substance psilocybin, the subject says his mild color blindness improved over the course of a week according to a common self-administered test.”
A dark night on Wall Street - by Jules Evans
An interview with Tom Morgan, who works for a New York investment firm and bridges the worlds of spirituality and finance in his Substack. He discusses his harrowing experience with a 'mystical psychosis' and the ketamine treatment that helped him recover. ‘At that moment I snapped out of consensus reality. I had a satori experience, or a psychotic break depending on your biases. It was the best day of my life.’ The work of Iain McGilchrist, a British philosopher-psychiatrist who suggests that western culture has become increasingly dominated by materialist 'left-brain thinking' was also influential in making sense of his experiences. He shares some hard won insights such as, ‘My biggest concern with manifestation is not that it's bullshit, it's that it works.’
The life-changing effects of hallucinations - BBC Future
As most of us know from experience, ingesting substances such as peyote or LSD is not the only pathway to experiencing hallucinations. This article goes into various other ways in which we can, either intentionally or unintentionally, come to hallucinate, including through the use of psychedelics, migraines, fevers, certain illnesses, and exposure to bright or flickering lights. The article also describes the Dreamachine, a device invented in the late ‘50s by the artist Brion Gysin that uses strobing lights to induce hallucinations, and explains how the frequency of the strobing can affect the strength and shapes of the hallucinations. While the exact mechanisms behind hallucinations are not fully understood, studying them can provide insights into how the brain processes visual information.
This Machine Makes You Hallucinate | WIRED UK
The Dreamachine is a large space designed to induce hallucinatory experiences with white stroboscopic light and electronic music. The project is led by a team of artists, engineers, designers, and musicians, and aims to investigate the effect of stroboscopic lights on the brain. Participants report having visual experiences even though their eyes are closed, and the psychedelic effect might be key to understanding the neural basis of visual experience.
Nuggets from the Archive
Two researchers have created a new A.I. model that can draw what you're thinking with 80% accuracy
Researchers from Osaka University in Japan have created a new AI model that can generate images based on written and visual descriptions of images viewed by test subjects, with around 80% accuracy. The researchers used a generative AI called Stable Diffusion to generate images, which is a deep learning text-to-image model. The researchers used its large trove of data to create the images based on written descriptions. Although the research is significant, the technology is not ready for applications outside of the research field.
The Language of the Master – Paul Kingsnorth
In this essay, writer Paul Kingsnorth explores the power of language and how it has been used as a tool of ecocide. He questions what makes humans different from other species and argues that language is both our most effective tool and our most powerful weapon. Language is used dishonestly in political and cultural battles; linguistic orthodoxy is enforced by elites to maintain power. He laments that language, which should be a glorious tool of symbolic thought, has become a crude weapon of warfare.
A New Theory in Physics Claims to Solve the Mystery of Consciousness - Neuroscience News
A new theory in physics claims to solve the hard problem of consciousness in a purely physical way. The researchers developed a conceptual and mathematical framework to understand consciousness from a relativistic point of view. According to the theory, consciousness is a relativistic phenomenon, and the dynamics of consciousness may be understood by a newly developed conceptual and mathematical framework. The authors argue that the brain doesn't create our conscious experience, at least not through computations, and that the reason we have conscious experience is because of the process of physical measurement. The implications of such a theory are huge, and it can be applied to determine which animal was the first animal in the evolutionary process to have consciousness, when a fetus or baby begins to be conscious, which patients with consciousness disorders are conscious, and which AI systems already today have a low degree (if any) of consciousness.
Simple code in the mind of God | Essentia Foundation
River Kanies from Essentia Foundation discusses the idea that the complexity of the physical universe is an inevitable outcome of nature's computational potentialities, even if its innate, fundamental 'programs' — basic ‘thoughts’ in the ‘mind of God’ — are simple. He leverages Stephen Wolfram's notion of 'ruliad' to hypothesize intuitive answers to questions about the nature of reality. Wolfram's work demonstrates that there is a class of very simple programs that generate truly complex behavior, which can only be determined by running the program in full. The patterns generated by such programs are computationally irreducible and can be thought of as sampling the part of the ruliad that corresponds to our particular way of perceiving and interpreting the universe.
Rational Magic — The New Atlantis
There seems to be a cultural shift towards a new openness to the religious, the numinous, and the "woo" in Silicon Valley and beyond. This shift is exemplified by a group of writers, thinkers, readers, and Internet trolls known as the postrationalists, who were once rationalists but grew disillusioned with the dry and technocratic focus of that culture. Tara Burton describes the origins and beliefs of the rationality community, which emerged on blogs in the early 2000s and emphasized the pursuit of truth through hacking into our primordial predator-avoiding monkey-brains and helping them to run new neurological software. Part of this community morphed into the ‘postrats’: “It turns out that intuition is … an incredibly powerful epistemic tool that it just seems like a lot of rationalists weren’t using because it falls into this domain of ‘woo stuff.’”
How to Escape the Confines of Time and Space According to the CIA
This article from Vice discusses a now de-classified 1983 CIA report on a technique called the Gateway Experience, which is a training system created by the Monroe Institute designed to focus brainwave output with the intention of altering consciousness and ultimately escaping the restrictions of time and space. The report provides a scientific framework for understanding and expanding human consciousness, remote viewing, out-of-body experiments, and other altered states. There is an explanation of the key historical developments that led to the CIA’s investigation and subsequent experimentations, a review of The Gateway Process report, and an outline of the Gateway technique itself and the steps that go into achieving spacetime transcendence, in case you should want to try this at home.
