Boom! What's up everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakian. Really excited to be talking about cataloging and navigating consciousness. We have the Qualia Research Institute team joining us. Hello guys.
Hello.
Hi, Alan.
Hello everyone. Hello. Welcome back. This is our third episode of the Qualia Research
Institute. Very excited. You guys are doing some of the most important work in neuroscience
and consciousness today and I'm very excited to have you guys back. This time we have Romeo
joining us as well. Very excited to have you on. And we have Kenneth and Quintin joining
us as well. Hello, hello. And Andrés and Mike, of course, from the previous episodes
as you guys know. All right. So let's jump into things with understanding what it means
to even explore the state-space of consciousness in the first place, to see this beautiful
catalog of what is possible with state-spaces of consciousness. We have great graphics as
we go through.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, well, this graphic is actually pretty illustrative. So that's what's
called the color space, CLM specifically. So basically what you can do is use combinations
of lights, like for example, you know, a red, a green, blue light, and then you can see
with different like amplitudes, different energies, and see basically how much you need
to change the lights for a person to experience what's called a just noticeable difference
in their experience of color. Right. So it's kind of you're comparing two side by side
two colors and it's like, are they exactly the same or they're subtly different? And
if they're subtly different, you count that as a unit, a unit of a just noticeable difference.
And you start using that as your ruler. It's kind of like, oh, you use the just noticeable
difference as kind of a ruler and you start to kind of like pin all of the values of
experience that way. In the case of color, you end up with that three-dimensional space.
Basically has three dimensions. It has the blue, yellow axis, the red, green axis, and
it has like the brighter and darker axis. And it's fabulous that it turns out to be
a Euclidean 3D space. It could have been different. The paradigm doesn't impose a Euclidean geometry
to it. The Euclidean property seems to be kind of an intrinsic feature of the state
of color. But this is just with color. In principle, you can do these with flavors and
smells and sense of touch and emotions. And you can basically generalize it in order to
make a map of all types of Aquileia varieties. Basically, Aquileia variety is a type of Aquileia,
type of consciousness. Or like, for example, Aquileia variety could be the variety of color.
These would be the state space of color. You could also have the state space of emotions
and sense and textures. And I think the next slide actually might be a good example of
the state space of emotions. You try to kind of map them out.
Grief, sadness, interest, optimism, ecstasy, love.
And I mean, they're all related in interesting ways. And the question is, how do you put
them in a map so that their relationships, their relationships, their relationships,
in how they feel are, in a sense, encoded in the geometry of that map?
Yes.
I mean, as I said, like in the case of color, you can have a 3D Euclidean space. For
emotion is more complicated. You may need something like a hyperbolic space. You can
get away with Euclidean space for some things, but not for everything.
Okay. So let's start unpacking this. So one of the things that I think is really relatable
right there off the bat is when we see color.
So we see
one shade of blue and then we just suppose it with another shade of blue. And we don't,
let's say if it's no units of difference, then we believe that the state space of consciousness
is the same if it's no units of difference. But if there is a single unit of difference
or 10 units of difference, which you're trying to measure with like this ruler that you're
describing in the space, then you could say that the state space of consciousness changes
in the mind.
Is there then a, if you move only one unit versus if you move 10 units, would there be
a more subtle, smaller change for one unit and a little bit bigger change in the state
space for?
Yeah, I would, kind of like word it as by changing your consciousness, you're accessing
different regions of the state space of consciousness.
In some sense, the state space of consciousness never changes.
It just is.
It's kind of like the universal map of all possible experiences.
But yeah, if you just take your experience and you just modify one
So, you take your shade of color in one piece of your visual field. That would be making one step in that very high dimensional state space of consciousness.
You can do much more radical transformations, of course, if you change the entirety of your visual field or you change your experience or state of consciousness, you would be moving much further.
But in a sense, the state space of consciousness never changes. It's a feature of the universe.
Okay, yes. And then, now, we gave the example of color as part of a visual input stream.
Then we started giving this massive amount of emotions that different people can feel.
There's so many other ones of these. So, scent is another one. So, you have to catalog the state space for scent.
Then catalog the state space for taste, and for touch, and for audio, and for all these emotions and visions that we talked about.
And then, if someone is experiencing two of these different, maybe a visual and an auditory, or a visual and a taste at the same time,
I mean, this gets super complicated super quick with the state space of consciousness.
So, you like to silo off the state space of consciousness for all these different sensory inputs,
and then you also try and figure out when two of them work together or when four of them work together.
Yeah, no, it's what you might be calling a combinatorial explosion.
Assuming that you're in a state of consciousness, you're in a state of consciousness, and you're in a state of consciousness,
as soon as you start introducing more qualia varieties.
And yeah, the truth seems to be that there's some constraints between them.
But they're definitely not intuitive.
You definitely have people with synesthesia, for example, who naturally are able to bind together,
for example, sensations of sound together with sensations of color, which is something that most people can't.
And that is also a component of the state space of consciousness,
is which of the qualia varieties can be bound together in your experience.
And that's another kind of like area to explore.
Like basically, what is the space of possible ways of binding different qualia varieties?
I mean, we humans are kind of have a natural or like a typical way of binding it, which seems to be evolutionarily advantageous.
But in some sense, we could say that we are all synesthetic.
It's just that we are basically experiencing an evolutionarily advantageous type of synesthesia.
And then is within...
If we can get at least, I think,
more people to try to be aware of how a different stimuli is then causing them to have a specific state space of consciousness.
So as long as we're becoming more conscious of, okay, a certain stimuli is a certain state space of consciousness.
You know, when I feel good, it's a certain way.
When I feel bad, it's something else's state space here.
When I see blue, certain thing.
When I see red, certain thing.
When I smell something, certain thing.
So if you can at least start getting people to become more conscious of that, I think that gets the catalog more and more.
And then do we have another asset with this?
I mean, that gets into the navigation.
Okay, let's...
Beautiful.
Let's shift right into navigation then.
So we explained the catalog.
So let's talk about navigating between...
Because usually it's kind of like we're just going through and then all of a sudden we become happier or we smell something or we taste something.
I'll just briefly mention this slide and then somebody else should jump in.
But it's a...
What that slide represents...
Just talk about it.
Yeah, yeah.
It's the...
This is from research I did in grad school, which was mapping out the transition probability between different emotions.
So we took like 170 emotions and we tracked, you know, massive amounts of people.
We ended up having like more than a million data points about how people transition from one emotion to the next.
Yes.
Like given your sequence of previous emotions, what other emotion you're likely to go to in the future.
And with this kind of map, you find fascinating features of the navigation space because it turns out that there's, for example, these gateway emotions.
Like, for example, feeling hopeful, feeling relieved.
Those are like...
It's not just kind of the sensation of a good or like your positive valence.
If you feel hopeful or you feel relieved, that's a lot of information about where you were in the past.
And where you're moving towards.
So there's kind of like all of these topology as well of the gateways emotions, attractor emotions, emotions that basically are reflectors that they don't...
For example, feeling tired.
It doesn't matter in what region of the state space of consciousness you are, what emotions you were in.
Most people feel tired at some point in the day.
Not everybody, but most people.
Tired is not a very high information emotion, but hopefulness is a very high information emotion.
It tells you a lot about the trajectory of the person.
Whoa.
Yeah.
This is huge.
So it's harder to get from something that's like an edge point past like cheerfulness or excitedness to something that's like annoyed
So, it's harder to get from edge point to edge point because usually you have to go through these main center gateway points.
Yes.
Then you can gain more information from certain points about trajectory and paths than you
can about other ones.
It's kind of like a map of how to navigate it too.
Yeah, it's like if you want to go to a very different emotion, you know, it's like what
– you know, empirically, what is like the typical transitions between emotions that
will get you there.
Yeah, that's cool.
It's also very important to note that some of these experiences, some of these emotions
are more pleasant than others by far.
And part of navigation or part of sort of mapping is understanding this and understanding
that a good map tells you where the good places to go are as well.
In the Middle Ages, allegedly, this might be the Middle Ages.
True or just a story.
But in these old maps, they had marked, here be dragons, where people went and didn't
come back from or there were big troubles.
And this is, I mean, yeah, in terms of mapping consciousness, we are absolutely in the early
days here.
But yeah, there are bad places.
And we need navigational principles in order to understand where not to go.
And I feel that's a core part of this research.
There be dragons in anxiety and depression and suicide.
Yep.
There be dragons.
There be evil forces.
So how do we avoid or kill the dragons?
How do we navigate away from that state space?
Yeah.
by cataloging and then helping people move with little dissonance in
directions. Okay, other thoughts on navigation from you guys?
Yes, as Mike was alluding to, I think that having a map of the state space of
consciousness also allows us to compare experiences in terms of their valence.
So like for example, one of the worst experiences known to humans is a cluster
headache, which is an extremely, extremely severe headache, often rated a 10 out of
10. So being able to quantify the negative valence associated with those
kinds of experiences and comparing them to others allows us to determine which
experiences are the ones that we want to avert the most.
Yeah, and I think that it also allows us on the other side of the equation to say
there are probably states of consciousness which no one has ever experienced over
the course of human history, which would be really great to explore.
Right.
And having this map would allow us to, in a principled way, sort of know what
direction we're going in, have a north star of positive valence. And yeah, I think that's
like something that we could definitely explore further too.
Damn, yeah, from the worst headaches in the world to those states of consciousness
that have not even been explored that are extremely positive.
Yeah, and there may be a very simple set of equations that describe how to get
from between those two points.
Yeah, just in general.
A lot is at stake in figuring this out.
Yeah.
For, and hopefully in forms that are decentralized, open source, and loving, compassionate ways
and not overly manipulative, corrupt ways.
Yeah.
Romeo, thoughts on catalog and navigating?
Feeling good?
They covered it.
Yeah.
All right, beautiful. So what does it mean to have no dissonance in between the
navigation of the state space of consciousness?
So this leads into this theory of emotional valence, this theory of what makes an experience
good and what makes an experience bad. And so, QRI's hypothesis here is called the asymmetry
And it's this idea that if we have a mathematical representation of what it feels like to be
you, Alan, or what it feels like to be me, Mike, that if we, the pleasantness or unpleasantness
of that experience should somehow be encoded into this mathematical object, this mathematical
representation. And we believe the encoding is in this object's symmetry. So, we're going
more symmetrical with the states of consciousness that are really pleasurable and less symmetrical with the headache.
Yes, yes. And a kind of a simple way to put this is harmony in the brain feels good, dissonance in the brain feels bad.
And is this true that the extreme headache states are like extremely dissonant?
That's a hypothesis. I mean there's a kind of like a lot of like lines of evidence pointing towards it.
Not specifically for cluster headaches that hasn't been studied in that way.
But when it comes to like all sorts of perceptual artifacts that come from like negative states of consciousness and how to induce them.
Yeah, there's kind of a suggestion that it has to do with this concept of like roughness and dissonance.
We actually have an example over there.
Okay, the next.
Oh, this one. Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, well, if you look at the spectrum, there's a spectrum picture right, yes, that one.
Okay.
That's the spectrum of the BART. I think, I believe like between 24th Street and Mission and Balboa Park.
One of the most unpleasant sounds known to man.
Oh, it's the high-pitched screeching noise when the…
Yeah. And it's kind of high-pitched.
I mean it really has like…
It's horrible component between like…
Yeah.
…like 400 hertz and 500 hertz with some like upper registers as well of dissonance.
But yeah, I think it's being played at different…
Yeah.
Oh, I'm not playing it. Yeah.
It's already…
Can you hear it?
No.
We can hear it a little bit.
Yeah, yeah. But it's good. It's good. I think you played the bad part. I think we're good. Thank you.
Yeah.
So it's a very straightforward example of how…
Mm-hmm.
…like a physical process that almost maximizes roughness can really harsh your mellow.
I mean it can…
I mean it's really a boss kill to be in the BART.
Yeah.
Like you're having fun with your friends and all of a sudden it's like…
Yeah, incredible…
And you know a lot of people would be very puzzled about like, hey, like why is this so bad?
And that's like something that we are trying to answer.
We're being… developing basically algorithms that can take sounds like that and say, yeah, that's really horny.
for a number of good reasons, having to do
with the mathematical roughness of it, the lack of invariance and symmetry.
And I would add that hacking your emotions through sound
is one of the most straightforward ways,
mostly because the number of pre-processing steps
between auditory stimuli and brain state are very few,
as opposed to, for example, pre-processing between visual stimuli and brain state.
So auditory stimuli, the shape of it,
is going to be very related to the actual shape of the brain state
that is triggered by it.
So in a sense, the structure of a sound is going to be a window
into how it's going to affect the structure of your brain state.
You can tell a lot about what brain states are good or bad
based on the structure of the sound that triggers good or bad feelings.
Okay, and then what would then,
if this is on the side of extreme dissonance,
and you could be in a very symmetrical state
and then experience...
super dissonance, and then that,
you could map how that actually affects someone's state-space consciousness,
what would be an example of the most symmetrical states?
Well, in music, there's definitely a lot of examples.
I mean, not to sound all new age, but Enya, for example,
if you run it through the sort of software we're developing,
it comes out as very, very, very consonant,
very, very, very symmetrical over time.
I mean, like the sound,
the engineering involved in Enya songs
is kind of really hitting the spot
when it comes to maximizing consonants
and all of these reverb effects as well.
Enya.
Enya, yeah.
N-E-N-Y-A.
E-N-Y-A.
Yes.
Enya.
You've never heard of Enya?
Enya.
A boy's got to dive into other state-spaces of consciousness.
Obviously.
But, I mean, for example, Buddhist singing bowls.
As well.
Those are like highly, highly consonant.
Oh, yeah.
You can realize them.
Yeah.
And generally speaking, the chorus part of songs
tends to be very much in the direction of very high consonants.
Which is kind of like the part that tends to be the most hedonic of a song.
The reason why songs are not just chorus is because they would get boring.
And basically if you trigger boredom,
then that will itself cause a little bit of dissonance.
You will fail to appreciate it.
But if it's like dosed high amounts of consonants,
like...
then you can really get into it.
Okay, interesting.
And just to set the frame,
we're working on ways to evaluate the consonants, the harmony in sounds, as well as the dissonance, with the eye toward if we can do it to sounds, there is also a method to do it to brains, to actually evaluate in a precise mathematical sense how much harmony is in a brain state.
And you could hypothetically imagine a world in which the bar would sound very consonant if you properly employed some of these algorithms that you're developing.
I think kind of an important question here that a lot of people ask, similarly to can we feel good all the time, is well if we need these, if we only have these pockets of consonants in popular music,
is it required for us to have the dissonance in between those pockets of consonants in order for the sound to be heard?
Or is it required for the sound to be pleasurable?
And our contention is that you don't necessarily have to employ dissonance in order to achieve contrast.
And so I think that's an important thing for people to understand too, is that you don't necessarily have to suffer in order to appreciate the contrast of feeling good.
You can sort of start at zero and go to infinity rather than having negative infinity to positive infinity.
That one's really important.
Actually, one of the, I think, things that I've learned in my career is that, you know,
one of the things that has been in debate in the last couple of years with our friends has been that do we really need to experience suffering in order to understand what is on the positive infinity side of things
to be able to actually have something to contrast it with, to be grateful for and stuff?
And potentially one of the hypotheses is that we don't, that there's so many other things.
Yeah.
The frame I would offer is that in parallel,
theoretically human brains seem to kind of be built this way, that we tend to oscillate between suffering and pleasure and there does seem to be some useful thing we as humans get from that.
But it doesn't seem to be a law of the universe that you have to suffer to feel good, that there is this hedonic balance.
And presumably we could, if we're really paying attention to this, we could all be very happy with what we're doing.
making a new organism from scratch, we wouldn't have to program in that the
organism would have to suffer. Okay, and let's on a little bit more on this
symmetry theory of valence, let's explain more about how exactly we can do things
like potentially having a mathematical representation of a state space of
consciousness that is symmetrical. Yeah, I think the next slide potentially.
Maybe that's this one. Yeah, well this kind of like illustrates, well it's
meant to be a video, but otherwise. Okay, no problem. Okay, it's going. Oh sweet. Yeah, so
those are the harmonic states of a plate. This is called a Chladni plate.
Basically, if you make it vibrate with like a speaker,
you can see that it vibrates with like a speaker. So, if you make it vibrate with like a speaker,
for example, at a certain frequency. Cymatics. Yeah, cymatics, exactly. It's
gonna basically lock in into a nearby resonant mode. And the really cool thing
is that there's only an integer number of possible resonant modes. There's
not an infinite number of shapes you can make. And the reason why is that there's
only a certain number of ways in which kind of this mechanical wave can fit an
integer number of times in the shape of the plate. So, in a sense, you can like
discretize. This is already
getting very technical. Okay. Okay, so we're saying that the amount of symmetrical
states are limited? The number of resonant modes. Resonant modes are limited. And at
any given point in time, you're experiencing a weighted sum of many resonant modes.
Okay. Basically, the vision is the equations that tell you what shapes form on a plate.
On this plate, so you basically sprinkle salt or sugar on these glad link plates, and
then you can kind of visualize the waves. And the same equations, which predict the
shapes at different frequencies, are the same equations we're applying to the brain.
Okay, so if I'm at 345 hertz, and that's making a symmetrical state for me, that may
be through a process of something like I'm meditating, or I'm, let's say, I'm
experiencing a form of symmetry of flow state, or listening to the course of the music, or
whatever it may be. Right. And so then the
same way that you visualize salt or sugar in a symmetrical state on the
could be the same way that that same mathematical equation could be of what.
And so I'm trying to keep that state.
I'm trying to hold on when people get lost in their flow state or deep in their meditation
that they're just extending and extending that period.
And then so they've basically been having that same equation happen for a period of
time.
Right.
And so in a sense it's kind of like the higher the valence, which is the more pleasant the
state is.
It's kind of like a function of the total consonants.
Like it's basically the way in which those harmonics are interacting together.
Are they interfering in a positive way or are they interfering in a destructive way?
And one key there is that in a sense like the richness of your experience would have
to do with how many of those harmonics you're able to fit in a consonant way.
So you're just hearing a melody played with like two or three notes in a piano versus
a whole orchestra.
And there's like a whole art and science to how to fit a whole orchestra of instruments
into something that sounds good.
When you have like all of these different frequency channels and different timbers and
different ways of softening the sound.
And likewise, like a peak experience is not just necessarily a pure, simple, you know,
resonant mode.
There's more kind of this assembly of resonant modes that fit in a different way.
And this would look a little more scattered if it was in a dissonant state.
There wouldn't be any symmetry that .
Right.
Rough.
It would look rough, unbalanced and constantly changing.
Okay.
And yeah, just to offer a little context here.
So that's what suffering is.
Rough, unbalanced and constantly changing.
Yeah.
Kind of like turbulence.
Yeah.
Kind of like turbulence.
Turbulence.
Oh.
Yeah.
Turbulence is a good metaphor for this.
Yeah.
as suffering in his world.
And just to offer some context here,
this is based off the work of a neuroscientist
by the name of Selin Atasoy.
She's at Oxford.
And the paradigm is called connectome-specific harmonic
waves.
And it's a way of interpreting neuroimaging,
existing techniques, fMRI, DTI, MRI,
MRI, and adding it together to figure out
the brain's natural resonances.
Just like a guitar or a piano or a wine glass
has these natural resonances.
This is a way of measuring them in a brain.
And what we're doing is we're building on top of this,
analyzing this data for harmony, basically.
And then the idea is then that if you can then
start doing things.
If you can start doing things like conducting fMRI scans
of symmetrical states of consciousness,
then you can start cataloging.
And when you can start cataloging,
and you can make that beautiful representation, then it's, yeah.
Sure.
I mean, I think one very, very important frame here
is what you can measure, you can manage.
And if this is a tight proxy for how
pleasant a brain state is, then it lets us understand
if a brain, if a person is in pain, if they are suffering.
It allows us to pinpoint where is this suffering coming from?
Because we can look at the mathematics of the frequencies
and the dissonance and say, oh, it's this specific harmonic.
It's the frequency has drifted, or it's oscillating,
in a strange way, or whatnot.
And it allows us to calculate the turbulence that's occurring.
Right, right.
And figure out how to fix it, basically.
OK.
And yeah, go ahead.
Yeah, sure.
I was just going to mention, we've
talked a lot about human brains here.
But this paradigm could also be applied to non-human animals
as well.
And it could be a really interesting way
to directly scientifically determine whether or not
animals are suffering.
Because I think that is a question that
is on a lot of people's minds.
And there are some people who think
that non-human animals are not capable of suffering.
And this might be a way to determine
that they actually are.
And even further in the future, maybe it's
something that could be used on other types of brains,
on artificial intelligence, for example,
to determine what state is that AI in,
or what state is this animal in?
And how do we fix that for them in addition to ourselves?
Yeah, yeah.
There's also even the pull, even like a plant.
Yeah.
If the plant is having insects eat it
or isn't having
the right nutrients in the soil or sunlight and starting to die, I mean, is that then an expression of consciousness dying?
Hard to say at this point.
Hard to say at this point, yeah, yeah.
All the way up to the AI, yeah.
This method could be applied to literally any organism with neurons, assuming that there's some proxy relationships.
And plants have only cells.
They don't have neurons.
Plants have only cells, but you can see a stress response happening in the plant when it gets...
Yeah.
Not to get too academic here, but I'll just throw this.
This is not necessarily a QRI line.
This is more an argument by David Pierce we've talked briefly about.
But one reason why plants are not as...
I mean, they could be conscious.
We don't know.
But definitely there's the...
Purely physiological component that the cells are divided by thick cellulose walls.
So, whatever is the mechanism of action for binding, for neurons actually talking to each other and being able to synchronize with each other, that doesn't seem physically possible between the cells of a plant.
Okay.
But who knows?
Okay.
So, it's potentially how neurons are able to communicate with each other with more thin, the transmitters, that type of transmission that makes it...
Yeah.
It's just the loss of plant cells.
Okay.
So, on the nonhuman animal aspect, that's...
In humans, we see there's this strong factor of default hedonic setpoint.
Some people go through life just happier than others.
Some people have very high hedonic setpoint.
Some people have very low hedonic setpoint.
And this is very interesting.
But even within humans, you find...
an enormous range of hedonic set points.
And it's interesting to think about
if you see this amount of variance within humans,
how much variance will there be between species?
And maybe it turns out it's just pretty fantastic to be a dog.
Yeah, or dolphins are just constantly ecstatic.
Right.
And maybe it's just terrible to be a giraffe or a mouse.
Yeah, someone that's constantly in fear of being consumed by another animal.
Yeah, something like that.
So in the sense it could move the whole field
of understanding non-human sentience,
or non-human, I guess, wild animal suffering,
or whatnot, to a more quantitative basis.
Yeah, to be able to say that,
that specific animal has a tendency
to move towards specific states, spaces of consciousness,
and other ones have different tendencies.
That's really cool stuff, too.
Now, so people need to help fund you guys
so you can do the fMRI scans of symmetry and dissonance.
That's the next, that's the big stuff.
That's right.
Yeah, that's what we would describe it
as kind of a very high information experiment.
I mean, we are currently collecting
what you might describe as kind of like
low information or medium information experiments,
which in a sense, like they add up.
And of course, if you have enough weak evidence,
that definitely builds a very strong case.
But in science, usually how paradigms change
is when somebody makes a really weird prediction
and then they actually go ahead and test it.
And it turns out like, yeah, the prediction is correct.
Yes.
And that's one of the cases of, for example,
putting people in fMRIs with MDMA
and then computing the consonants of the brain harmonics.
There's no other theory that is predicting
that would have anything to do with pleasure and pain.
So that's kind of like the case of really weird,
really weird prediction,
very high information if it turns out true.
That said, we are not completely constrained by that.
I mean, the research we're aggregating currently,
it is building up the case over time.
But of course, we would love to just like, you know,
jump to the, cut to the chase
and see what happens in there.
Test hypothesis.
Yes.
Yeah, right away as soon as possible.
Yeah, I could maybe if you go to maybe the last slide.
The very last one?
Yeah, just to kind of give you like an example
of what we consider a moderate evidence
for the symmetry theory of valence.
It's moderate because it's through EEG.
And of course, like there's not a really great theory
of what EEG is measuring.
But if you interpret it through the light
of connecting harmonics,
it makes a lot of sense.
So what this is showing is, okay,
so like they basically took EEG recordings,
high quality EEG recordings of a
person on 5-MeO DMT, which is described as one of the most intense, but also most blissful and terrifying states of consciousness.
But basically very, very, very high valence.
God molecule.
Yeah, basically people rate it as like 10 out of 10 in the dimension of significance.
As in it feels very significant.
So, clearly, if there's like a signature of valence, you would expect to see it on 5-MeO DMT.
And what this research shows is that if you take the EEG signatures of a person on 5-MeO DMT and you filter by the gamma band,
and the gamma is usually associated with heightened states of consciousness like orgasm, basically high arousal, high energy states.
Once you filter the EEG through the gamma band,
and you start seeing the phase growth,
the phase correlation between the different channels,
you will see that on 5-MeO DMT it just maxes out.
Basically all the channels are in phase coherence.
In some sense, you can almost think of it as like there's this 40 Hz vibration,
electromagnetic vibration throughout the entire brain in synchrony.
And like why would that be associated with a sense of profound sense of significance
if synchrony and symmetry didn't have anything to do with valence?
Um,
you could probably round it up with some other theories, potentially.
And that's why this is not necessarily kind of the silver bullet.
But we consider it like, yeah, a moderate piece of evidence.
And if we assemble enough of these, I think the case is going to be pretty strong.
And yeah, back on the funding angle,
it's this question of finding people who are very comfortable with weird ideas.
Potentially incredibly transformative ideas that have a solid rationale,
but are sort of outside the Overton window of what generally gets funded.
So we're always on the lookout for sort of high quality donors.
This is complicated.
What you're describing is extremely complicated.
And yeah, to be able to take a high quality EEG recording
and then to be able to just analyze the gamma,
and then to be able to take in,
and then to be able to take in the analysis of the hyper symmetry of,
it was a 10 on this, on impact or what was it?
Significance. Sense of significance.
Sense of significance, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's definitely true for a lot of the experiences.
Romeo, you're trying to go the whole show without talking.
i know any any
Any inputs?
I mean, they're all doing such a great job.
So I don't see the need to mess with perfection.
Okay, and a couple other assets that I think we want to show.
Can we show the one right after the cymatics, Ronnie?
The one like a couple assets back,
just a couple of the very first white one in that row, in the row.
Yep, yep, that one, yep.
Yeah.
So I just want to show these quick.
Yeah, I think this is important.
This is kind of like the catalog of the state space of consciousness.
You can be extremely neutral, you can be extremely...
This would be basically cataloging, I mean, how we were describing,
you know, take the color state space, right?
Or take like the flavor state space.
This would be basically getting at the root of the emotional state space.
So this is when you'd be tasting something that's like really,
I don't know, spicy, I don't know, like, ah, like what would be...
Well, yeah, sure.
Hurting you a little bit?
Yeah, sure, like pain, pain, for example.
Like when people eat that hot sauce that like makes them cry.
Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure.
Or physical pain, or emotional pain.
Basically, just like highly negative valence.
Well, actually, yeah, what this is...
Suffering, yes, okay.
Suffering, what this is describing is kind of like a way of visualizing
the dissonance between harmonics.
Okay, so this is dissonance.
These are each...
Because it's suffering.
Right, these are each different harmonics.
And if you want to explain the...
Sure, harmonics, the size of the bubble is kind of like the amplitude,
how much energy each of these harmonics has.
Okay.
And then the arrows are basically whether they're like mutually consonant
or dissonant with each other.
And, I mean, in music, when you're analyzing the dissonance
of like simple instruments being put together, basically what you do
is you compute the pairwise dissonance of all the pure tones in the spectrum,
and that gives you kind of the global dissonance score,
which basically, yeah, can account for like subjective ratings of dissonance.
Here is kind of like taking the same idea but applying it to brain harmonics.
So you take like for every pair of brain harmonics,
you see whether they're like dissonant or consonant.
You aggregate all the dissonance,
and that would be kind of a general measure of how bad
the experience feels.
Then you add up all the consonants and that's kind of a general measure of how good it feels.
Anyhow, that's what our theory is predicting specifically.
It gives you, so this is adding up all the pairwise dissonance relations, this is the
pairwise constants relations, pairwise noise relations, and it gives you a position in
a valence space, essentially.
Okay, and one more time, for one more time again, give that bit again with the, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, so the red is adding up all the pairwise dissonance relationships between
these natural brain harmonics.
And you just aggregate them, add them up.
And then the blue is the pairwise constants relation.
And then this is the pairwise noise relationships.
The gray ones, okay.
All right.
So, if you sort of add them up, it gives you a position on this state space.
State space, okay.
And yeah, for, just for clarity, that triangle, right, so when people say like,
are you feeling good or bad, oftentimes people say like, I don't know.
And the reason why is because usually typical emotions, typical emotional states are mixed.
You have, for example, you're at a concert, you're enjoying the music and you're friends,
but then like the speakers are not really good, and then like you also need to go pee,
and then you're kind of drunk, and like, okay, this is very complicated mixed state.
So that would be kind of like in the middle, right?
It has like some positive valence components, some negative, and some neutral.
And that's why, yeah, to an extent like self-report is pretty difficult because it's so mixed
usually.
Okay.
Because there's all these pair, what do you call them, pair?
Pairwise relationships.
Okay.
And they're all kind of pulling a little bit on the neutral or on the pleasure or on the
dissonance.
Exactly.
Okay.
Yeah, I think a way to relate this to the state space of color again, because I think
that's one that's like pretty well understood by people, is one way to create colors is
to create certain RGB values.
And so you sort of have like the red that's on a scale from zero to 255, green scale from
zero to 255, blue scale from zero to 255.
And then you sort of mix different values of R, G, and B to get a certain color as an
output.
I think the metaphor kind of works here too, where you have these three values of constants,
dissonance, and noise.
Yeah.
And then you get a certain, not color, but a certain emotional state.
And so I think that's kind of a way to, an okay metaphor for how we state.
Yeah, that's a good one.
I like that one a lot.
Yeah.
That's one that people I think are really familiar with.
Yeah.
Yeah, people know about color.
That was a pretty good one, yeah.
Okay, excellent.
And let's wrap on this point.
I want to bring this up.
So during the last talk that I went to that you guys were hosting, I really enjoyed this,
that a lot of people are, you know, they're not really interested in color.
They're either kind of stuck in their own bodies, identifying with their own selves
and nothing really outside of themselves.
Some people try and understand their whole timeline all the way back to their past when
they were born, all the way to their future where they're trying to go.
So they kind of get it on their whole timeline scale.
And then this, and also where the world is at as well in those periods of years as well.
So from like, if you're born in 2000 until 2000, you're born in 2000.
You're born in 2000, 80.
So that chunk of time versus this idea of like all that is or infinity or love or infinite
consciousness.
There's so many ways to describe this, God, et cetera, source.
And when one potentially taps into things like the supersymmetrical states that they
may experience that, they may experience dives into all that is.
And so some people can trigger that just through breath.
And just by expanding themselves out as vast as the universe.
And I think that's a very beautiful way to get there.
And so this sounds, it sounds great to be able to ebb and flow between all three of
those.
And that's something that I think was really beautifully said by you.
Go ahead and explain that more to us.
I like that a lot.
Yeah.
I mean, we do seem to kind of like come into this world with implicit views of who we are,
but they're like given by evolution.
They're not necessarily true.
They're just pragmatically useful.
Yeah.
I mean, this sense of you start existing when you're born, you stop existing when you die
is usually an unexamined assumption.
Of course, people try to extend it and say, well, maybe you don't die really.
You continue to exist as a soul after you die.
Or maybe there was reincarnation.
Most people still think of it as kind of just a single line.
And you're in a sense like separate from the rest of the universe.
There's like alternative views that can be justified.
There's this view called empty individualism where you're just like this moment of experience.
And in a moment, in a second, you're going to be a different entity.
Or rather a different entity will inhabit your body because you were just that
slice. Wow. ANDRES BOROVSKY- And
you can describe them also as states of consciousness.
You can definitely, in some states of very neutral experience, you can just feel that
a very classical way of feeling that we are all one consciousness is in psychedelics and
meditation.
I mean, 5-MEO is a classic example of people.
It really creates the feeling that you're all consciousness.
And there's like this interplay between the information content of the experience and
how cleanly defined you are.
So, like 5-MEO DMT or any of these like super symmetrical states, it's so symmetrical,
so invariant, it contains close to no information.
There's just not enough information to know who you are.
So, you identify with the light of consciousness or the void or universal mind.
I think like, yeah, that kind of state and especially if you can like logically and precisely
shift between those, that's going to be really important for like global coordination where
you're going to have like CEOs of companies or leaders of different countries identify
with consciousness rather than with, you know, their cultural background or who they are.
Then, yeah, I think like they can collaborate to basically raise the baseline of everybody.
It's a possibility.
Yeah.
Damn, that's that bad section right there is a whole another conversation in itself.
All right.
So, for those that were watching, we would love for you to give us your thoughts in the
comments below on the episode.
Let us know what you're thinking.
Check out the links in the bio to the Quality Research Institute's website as well as the
other resources that you find in the links below.
All the links are in the bio.
Also, support the artists, the entrepreneurs, the organizations around the world that you
believe in.
Support them.
Help them grow.
Support Quality Research Institute.
Help them get funding for the research that they need to get done.
Also support Simulation.
Our links are below to our Patreon, PayPal, cryptocurrency links.
Support us.
Help us grow.
And share more content about this type of stuff with your friends, your families, coworkers,
people online on social media about cataloging and navigating consciousness.
Really get talking more about this.
And go and build the future, everyone.
Manifest your dreams into the world.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
We will see you soon.
Peace.
Woo.