Simulation #453: Catalog & navigate consciousness
Simulation
Transcript
00:00:13Boom! 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.
00:00:26Hello.
00:00:26Hi, Alan.
00:00:27Hello everyone. Hello. Welcome back. This is our third episode of the Qualia Research
00:00:31Institute. Very excited. You guys are doing some of the most important work in neuroscience
00:00:35and consciousness today and I'm very excited to have you guys back. This time we have Romeo
00:00:40joining us as well. Very excited to have you on. And we have Kenneth and Quintin joining
00:00:44us as well. Hello, hello. And Andrés and Mike, of course, from the previous episodes
00:00:48as you guys know. All right. So let's jump into things with understanding what it means
00:00:53to even explore the state-space of consciousness in the first place, to see this beautiful
00:00:59catalog of what is possible with state-spaces of consciousness. We have great graphics as
00:01:05we go through.
00:01:06Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, well, this graphic is actually pretty illustrative. So that's what's
00:01:12called the color space, CLM specifically. So basically what you can do is use combinations
00:01:18of lights, like for example, you know, a red, a green, blue light, and then you can see
00:01:23with different like amplitudes, different energies, and see basically how much you need
00:01:30to change the lights for a person to experience what's called a just noticeable difference
00:01:35in their experience of color. Right. So it's kind of you're comparing two side by side
00:01:39two colors and it's like, are they exactly the same or they're subtly different? And
00:01:42if they're subtly different, you count that as a unit, a unit of a just noticeable difference.
00:01:48And you start using that as your ruler. It's kind of like, oh, you use the just noticeable
00:01:53difference as kind of a ruler and you start to kind of like pin all of the values of
00:01:58experience that way. In the case of color, you end up with that three-dimensional space.
00:02:04Basically has three dimensions. It has the blue, yellow axis, the red, green axis, and
00:02:11it has like the brighter and darker axis. And it's fabulous that it turns out to be
00:02:17a Euclidean 3D space. It could have been different. The paradigm doesn't impose a Euclidean geometry
00:02:23to it. The Euclidean property seems to be kind of an intrinsic feature of the state
00:02:28of color. But this is just with color. In principle, you can do these with flavors and
00:02:34smells and sense of touch and emotions. And you can basically generalize it in order to
00:02:40make a map of all types of Aquileia varieties. Basically, Aquileia variety is a type of Aquileia,
00:02:48type of consciousness. Or like, for example, Aquileia variety could be the variety of color.
00:02:53These would be the state space of color. You could also have the state space of emotions
00:02:57and sense and textures. And I think the next slide actually might be a good example of
00:03:05the state space of emotions. You try to kind of map them out.
00:03:10Grief, sadness, interest, optimism, ecstasy, love.
00:03:16And I mean, they're all related in interesting ways. And the question is, how do you put
00:03:20them in a map so that their relationships, their relationships, their relationships,
00:03:24in how they feel are, in a sense, encoded in the geometry of that map?
00:03:30Yes.
00:03:30I mean, as I said, like in the case of color, you can have a 3D Euclidean space. For
00:03:35emotion is more complicated. You may need something like a hyperbolic space. You can
00:03:40get away with Euclidean space for some things, but not for everything.
00:03:45Okay. So let's start unpacking this. So one of the things that I think is really relatable
00:03:49right there off the bat is when we see color.
00:03:52So we see
00:03:53one shade of blue and then we just suppose it with another shade of blue. And we don't,
00:03:59let's say if it's no units of difference, then we believe that the state space of consciousness
00:04:05is the same if it's no units of difference. But if there is a single unit of difference
00:04:10or 10 units of difference, which you're trying to measure with like this ruler that you're
00:04:15describing in the space, then you could say that the state space of consciousness changes
00:04:21in the mind.
00:04:23Is there then a, if you move only one unit versus if you move 10 units, would there be
00:04:30a more subtle, smaller change for one unit and a little bit bigger change in the state
00:04:36space for?
00:04:37Yeah, I would, kind of like word it as by changing your consciousness, you're accessing
00:04:45different regions of the state space of consciousness.
00:04:49In some sense, the state space of consciousness never changes.
00:04:51It just is.
00:04:52It's kind of like the universal map of all possible experiences.
00:04:56But yeah, if you just take your experience and you just modify one
00:05:00So, 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.
00:05:08You 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.
00:05:17But in a sense, the state space of consciousness never changes. It's a feature of the universe.
00:05:22Okay, yes. And then, now, we gave the example of color as part of a visual input stream.
00:05:30Then we started giving this massive amount of emotions that different people can feel.
00:05:36There's so many other ones of these. So, scent is another one. So, you have to catalog the state space for scent.
00:05:42Then catalog the state space for taste, and for touch, and for audio, and for all these emotions and visions that we talked about.
00:05:52And 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,
00:06:03I mean, this gets super complicated super quick with the state space of consciousness.
00:06:07So, you like to silo off the state space of consciousness for all these different sensory inputs,
00:06:11and then you also try and figure out when two of them work together or when four of them work together.
00:06:16Yeah, no, it's what you might be calling a combinatorial explosion.
00:06:22Assuming that you're in a state of consciousness, you're in a state of consciousness, and you're in a state of consciousness,
00:06:22as soon as you start introducing more qualia varieties.
00:06:24And yeah, the truth seems to be that there's some constraints between them.
00:06:28But they're definitely not intuitive.
00:06:31You definitely have people with synesthesia, for example, who naturally are able to bind together,
00:06:37for example, sensations of sound together with sensations of color, which is something that most people can't.
00:06:42And that is also a component of the state space of consciousness,
00:06:45is which of the qualia varieties can be bound together in your experience.
00:06:50And that's another kind of like area to explore.
00:06:53Like basically, what is the space of possible ways of binding different qualia varieties?
00:06:58I mean, we humans are kind of have a natural or like a typical way of binding it, which seems to be evolutionarily advantageous.
00:07:05But in some sense, we could say that we are all synesthetic.
00:07:09It's just that we are basically experiencing an evolutionarily advantageous type of synesthesia.
00:07:15And then is within...
00:07:17If we can get at least, I think,
00:07:20more people to try to be aware of how a different stimuli is then causing them to have a specific state space of consciousness.
00:07:33So as long as we're becoming more conscious of, okay, a certain stimuli is a certain state space of consciousness.
00:07:40You know, when I feel good, it's a certain way.
00:07:42When I feel bad, it's something else's state space here.
00:07:45When I see blue, certain thing.
00:07:46When I see red, certain thing.
00:07:48When I smell something, certain thing.
00:07:50So if you can at least start getting people to become more conscious of that, I think that gets the catalog more and more.
00:07:56And then do we have another asset with this?
00:08:00I mean, that gets into the navigation.
00:08:02Okay, let's...
00:08:02Beautiful.
00:08:03Let's shift right into navigation then.
00:08:05So we explained the catalog.
00:08:07So let's talk about navigating between...
00:08:10Because 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.
00:08:20I'll just briefly mention this slide and then somebody else should jump in.
00:08:23But it's a...
00:08:24What that slide represents...
00:08:26Just talk about it.
00:08:27Yeah, yeah.
00:08:27It's the...
00:08:28This is from research I did in grad school, which was mapping out the transition probability between different emotions.
00:08:37So we took like 170 emotions and we tracked, you know, massive amounts of people.
00:08:42We ended up having like more than a million data points about how people transition from one emotion to the next.
00:08:48Yes.
00:08:50Like given your sequence of previous emotions, what other emotion you're likely to go to in the future.
00:08:55And 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.
00:09:04Like, for example, feeling hopeful, feeling relieved.
00:09:08Those are like...
00:09:09It's not just kind of the sensation of a good or like your positive valence.
00:09:14If you feel hopeful or you feel relieved, that's a lot of information about where you were in the past.
00:09:20And where you're moving towards.
00:09:21So 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...
00:09:29For example, feeling tired.
00:09:30It doesn't matter in what region of the state space of consciousness you are, what emotions you were in.
00:09:35Most people feel tired at some point in the day.
00:09:37Not everybody, but most people.
00:09:39Tired is not a very high information emotion, but hopefulness is a very high information emotion.
00:09:46It tells you a lot about the trajectory of the person.
00:09:50Whoa.
00:09:50Yeah.
00:09:51This is huge.
00:09:52So it's harder to get from something that's like an edge point past like cheerfulness or excitedness to something that's like annoyed
00:10:00So, it's harder to get from edge point to edge point because usually you have to go through these main center gateway points.
00:10:05Yes.
00:10:05Then you can gain more information from certain points about trajectory and paths than you
00:10:10can about other ones.
00:10:11It's kind of like a map of how to navigate it too.
00:10:14Yeah, it's like if you want to go to a very different emotion, you know, it's like what
00:10:17– you know, empirically, what is like the typical transitions between emotions that
00:10:23will get you there.
00:10:25Yeah, that's cool.
00:10:25It's also very important to note that some of these experiences, some of these emotions
00:10:31are more pleasant than others by far.
00:10:36And part of navigation or part of sort of mapping is understanding this and understanding
00:10:43that a good map tells you where the good places to go are as well.
00:10:50In the Middle Ages, allegedly, this might be the Middle Ages.
00:10:57True or just a story.
00:10:59But in these old maps, they had marked, here be dragons, where people went and didn't
00:11:09come back from or there were big troubles.
00:11:12And this is, I mean, yeah, in terms of mapping consciousness, we are absolutely in the early
00:11:20days here.
00:11:22But yeah, there are bad places.
00:11:26And we need navigational principles in order to understand where not to go.
00:11:33And I feel that's a core part of this research.
00:11:39There be dragons in anxiety and depression and suicide.
00:11:42Yep.
00:11:43There be dragons.
00:11:44There be evil forces.
00:11:46So how do we avoid or kill the dragons?
00:11:50How do we navigate away from that state space?
00:11:54Yeah.
00:11:55by cataloging and then helping people move with little dissonance in
00:11:58directions. Okay, other thoughts on navigation from you guys?
00:12:06Yes, as Mike was alluding to, I think that having a map of the state space of
00:12:12consciousness also allows us to compare experiences in terms of their valence.
00:12:17So like for example, one of the worst experiences known to humans is a cluster
00:12:22headache, which is an extremely, extremely severe headache, often rated a 10 out of
00:12:2910. So being able to quantify the negative valence associated with those
00:12:34kinds of experiences and comparing them to others allows us to determine which
00:12:39experiences are the ones that we want to avert the most.
00:12:45Yeah, and I think that it also allows us on the other side of the equation to say
00:12:51there are probably states of consciousness which no one has ever experienced over
00:12:54the course of human history, which would be really great to explore.
00:12:58Right.
00:12:59And having this map would allow us to, in a principled way, sort of know what
00:13:03direction we're going in, have a north star of positive valence. And yeah, I think that's
00:13:09like something that we could definitely explore further too.
00:13:12Damn, yeah, from the worst headaches in the world to those states of consciousness
00:13:16that have not even been explored that are extremely positive.
00:13:20Yeah, and there may be a very simple set of equations that describe how to get
00:13:23from between those two points.
00:13:27Yeah, just in general.
00:13:29A lot is at stake in figuring this out.
00:13:32Yeah.
00:13:35For, and hopefully in forms that are decentralized, open source, and loving, compassionate ways
00:13:42and not overly manipulative, corrupt ways.
00:13:48Yeah.
00:13:48Romeo, thoughts on catalog and navigating?
00:13:54Feeling good?
00:13:56They covered it.
00:13:58Yeah.
00:13:59All right, beautiful. So what does it mean to have no dissonance in between the
00:14:06navigation of the state space of consciousness?
00:14:11So this leads into this theory of emotional valence, this theory of what makes an experience
00:14:19good and what makes an experience bad. And so, QRI's hypothesis here is called the asymmetry
00:14:29And it's this idea that if we have a mathematical representation of what it feels like to be
00:14:35you, Alan, or what it feels like to be me, Mike, that if we, the pleasantness or unpleasantness
00:14:45of that experience should somehow be encoded into this mathematical object, this mathematical
00:14:51representation. And we believe the encoding is in this object's symmetry. So, we're going
00:15:00more symmetrical with the states of consciousness that are really pleasurable and less symmetrical with the headache.
00:15:06Yes, yes. And a kind of a simple way to put this is harmony in the brain feels good, dissonance in the brain feels bad.
00:15:16And is this true that the extreme headache states are like extremely dissonant?
00:15:21That's a hypothesis. I mean there's a kind of like a lot of like lines of evidence pointing towards it.
00:15:28Not specifically for cluster headaches that hasn't been studied in that way.
00:15:32But when it comes to like all sorts of perceptual artifacts that come from like negative states of consciousness and how to induce them.
00:15:39Yeah, there's kind of a suggestion that it has to do with this concept of like roughness and dissonance.
00:15:45We actually have an example over there.
00:15:48Okay, the next.
00:15:51Oh, this one. Yeah, yeah.
00:15:53So yeah, well, if you look at the spectrum, there's a spectrum picture right, yes, that one.
00:15:59Okay.
00:15:59That's the spectrum of the BART. I think, I believe like between 24th Street and Mission and Balboa Park.
00:16:08One of the most unpleasant sounds known to man.
00:16:10Oh, it's the high-pitched screeching noise when the…
00:16:13Yeah. And it's kind of high-pitched.
00:16:17I mean it really has like…
00:16:19It's horrible component between like…
00:16:21Yeah.
00:16:21…like 400 hertz and 500 hertz with some like upper registers as well of dissonance.
00:16:26But yeah, I think it's being played at different…
00:16:31Yeah.
00:16:32Oh, I'm not playing it. Yeah.
00:16:34It's already…
00:16:35Can you hear it?
00:16:36No.
00:16:37We can hear it a little bit.
00:16:39Yeah, yeah. But it's good. It's good. I think you played the bad part. I think we're good. Thank you.
00:16:44Yeah.
00:16:45So it's a very straightforward example of how…
00:16:51Mm-hmm.
00:16:51…like a physical process that almost maximizes roughness can really harsh your mellow.
00:16:58I mean it can…
00:16:59I mean it's really a boss kill to be in the BART.
00:17:02Yeah.
00:17:02Like you're having fun with your friends and all of a sudden it's like…
00:17:06Yeah, incredible…
00:17:07And you know a lot of people would be very puzzled about like, hey, like why is this so bad?
00:17:12And that's like something that we are trying to answer.
00:17:15We're being… developing basically algorithms that can take sounds like that and say, yeah, that's really horny.
00:17:21for a number of good reasons, having to do
00:17:24with the mathematical roughness of it, the lack of invariance and symmetry.
00:17:29And I would add that hacking your emotions through sound
00:17:34is one of the most straightforward ways,
00:17:38mostly because the number of pre-processing steps
00:17:40between auditory stimuli and brain state are very few,
00:17:44as opposed to, for example, pre-processing between visual stimuli and brain state.
00:17:49So auditory stimuli, the shape of it,
00:17:53is going to be very related to the actual shape of the brain state
00:17:55that is triggered by it.
00:17:57So in a sense, the structure of a sound is going to be a window
00:18:01into how it's going to affect the structure of your brain state.
00:18:06You can tell a lot about what brain states are good or bad
00:18:09based on the structure of the sound that triggers good or bad feelings.
00:18:12Okay, and then what would then,
00:18:15if this is on the side of extreme dissonance,
00:18:19and you could be in a very symmetrical state
00:18:21and then experience...
00:18:22super dissonance, and then that,
00:18:24you could map how that actually affects someone's state-space consciousness,
00:18:28what would be an example of the most symmetrical states?
00:18:33Well, in music, there's definitely a lot of examples.
00:18:36I mean, not to sound all new age, but Enya, for example,
00:18:41if you run it through the sort of software we're developing,
00:18:45it comes out as very, very, very consonant,
00:18:48very, very, very symmetrical over time.
00:18:51I mean, like the sound,
00:18:52the engineering involved in Enya songs
00:18:54is kind of really hitting the spot
00:18:56when it comes to maximizing consonants
00:18:58and all of these reverb effects as well.
00:19:03Enya.
00:19:04Enya, yeah.
00:19:05N-E-N-Y-A.
00:19:07E-N-Y-A.
00:19:08Yes.
00:19:09Enya.
00:19:09You've never heard of Enya?
00:19:11Enya.
00:19:12A boy's got to dive into other state-spaces of consciousness.
00:19:17Obviously.
00:19:18But, I mean, for example, Buddhist singing bowls.
00:19:22As well.
00:19:23Those are like highly, highly consonant.
00:19:25Oh, yeah.
00:19:25You can realize them.
00:19:26Yeah.
00:19:26And generally speaking, the chorus part of songs
00:19:30tends to be very much in the direction of very high consonants.
00:19:34Which is kind of like the part that tends to be the most hedonic of a song.
00:19:38The reason why songs are not just chorus is because they would get boring.
00:19:43And basically if you trigger boredom,
00:19:45then that will itself cause a little bit of dissonance.
00:19:48You will fail to appreciate it.
00:19:49But if it's like dosed high amounts of consonants,
00:19:52like...
00:19:53then you can really get into it.
00:19:54Okay, interesting.
00:19:57And just to set the frame,
00:20:00we'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.
00:20:25And 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.
00:20:35I 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,
00:20:48is it required for us to have the dissonance in between those pockets of consonants in order for the sound to be heard?
00:20:54Or is it required for the sound to be pleasurable?
00:20:56And our contention is that you don't necessarily have to employ dissonance in order to achieve contrast.
00:21:02And 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.
00:21:11You can sort of start at zero and go to infinity rather than having negative infinity to positive infinity.
00:21:20That one's really important.
00:21:22Actually, one of the, I think, things that I've learned in my career is that, you know,
00:21:24one 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
00:21:38to be able to actually have something to contrast it with, to be grateful for and stuff?
00:21:44And potentially one of the hypotheses is that we don't, that there's so many other things.
00:21:51Yeah.
00:21:51The frame I would offer is that in parallel,
00:21:54theoretically 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.
00:22:10But 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.
00:22:19And presumably we could, if we're really paying attention to this, we could all be very happy with what we're doing.
00:22:24making a new organism from scratch, we wouldn't have to program in that the
00:22:30organism would have to suffer. Okay, and let's on a little bit more on this
00:22:37symmetry theory of valence, let's explain more about how exactly we can do things
00:22:44like potentially having a mathematical representation of a state space of
00:22:52consciousness that is symmetrical. Yeah, I think the next slide potentially.
00:22:58Maybe that's this one. Yeah, well this kind of like illustrates, well it's
00:23:04meant to be a video, but otherwise. Okay, no problem. Okay, it's going. Oh sweet. Yeah, so
00:23:12those are the harmonic states of a plate. This is called a Chladni plate.
00:23:17Basically, if you make it vibrate with like a speaker,
00:23:22you can see that it vibrates with like a speaker. So, if you make it vibrate with like a speaker,
00:23:22for example, at a certain frequency. Cymatics. Yeah, cymatics, exactly. It's
00:23:25gonna basically lock in into a nearby resonant mode. And the really cool thing
00:23:30is that there's only an integer number of possible resonant modes. There's
00:23:34not an infinite number of shapes you can make. And the reason why is that there's
00:23:40only a certain number of ways in which kind of this mechanical wave can fit an
00:23:44integer number of times in the shape of the plate. So, in a sense, you can like
00:23:50discretize. This is already
00:23:52getting very technical. Okay. Okay, so we're saying that the amount of symmetrical
00:24:00states are limited? The number of resonant modes. Resonant modes are limited. And at
00:24:07any given point in time, you're experiencing a weighted sum of many resonant modes.
00:24:14Okay. Basically, the vision is the equations that tell you what shapes form on a plate.
00:24:22On this plate, so you basically sprinkle salt or sugar on these glad link plates, and
00:24:30then you can kind of visualize the waves. And the same equations, which predict the
00:24:36shapes at different frequencies, are the same equations we're applying to the brain.
00:24:42Okay, so if I'm at 345 hertz, and that's making a symmetrical state for me, that may
00:24:48be through a process of something like I'm meditating, or I'm, let's say, I'm
00:24:52experiencing a form of symmetry of flow state, or listening to the course of the music, or
00:24:57whatever it may be. Right. And so then the
00:25:00same way that you visualize salt or sugar in a symmetrical state on the
00:25:05could be the same way that that same mathematical equation could be of what.
00:25:09And so I'm trying to keep that state.
00:25:11I'm trying to hold on when people get lost in their flow state or deep in their meditation
00:25:17that they're just extending and extending that period.
00:25:19And then so they've basically been having that same equation happen for a period of
00:25:25time.
00:25:26Right.
00:25:28And so in a sense it's kind of like the higher the valence, which is the more pleasant the
00:25:33state is.
00:25:33It's kind of like a function of the total consonants.
00:25:36Like it's basically the way in which those harmonics are interacting together.
00:25:41Are they interfering in a positive way or are they interfering in a destructive way?
00:25:47And one key there is that in a sense like the richness of your experience would have
00:25:53to do with how many of those harmonics you're able to fit in a consonant way.
00:25:58So you're just hearing a melody played with like two or three notes in a piano versus
00:26:02a whole orchestra.
00:26:04And there's like a whole art and science to how to fit a whole orchestra of instruments
00:26:10into something that sounds good.
00:26:11When you have like all of these different frequency channels and different timbers and
00:26:15different ways of softening the sound.
00:26:17And likewise, like a peak experience is not just necessarily a pure, simple, you know,
00:26:23resonant mode.
00:26:24There's more kind of this assembly of resonant modes that fit in a different way.
00:26:28And this would look a little more scattered if it was in a dissonant state.
00:26:35There wouldn't be any symmetry that .
00:26:36Right.
00:26:37Rough.
00:26:37It would look rough, unbalanced and constantly changing.
00:26:41Okay.
00:26:42And yeah, just to offer a little context here.
00:26:45So that's what suffering is.
00:26:46Rough, unbalanced and constantly changing.
00:26:48Yeah.
00:26:48Kind of like turbulence.
00:26:49Yeah.
00:26:50Kind of like turbulence.
00:26:51Turbulence.
00:26:52Oh.
00:26:52Yeah.
00:26:52Turbulence is a good metaphor for this.
00:26:54Yeah.
00:26:58as suffering in his world.
00:26:59And just to offer some context here,
00:27:02this is based off the work of a neuroscientist
00:27:05by the name of Selin Atasoy.
00:27:08She's at Oxford.
00:27:10And the paradigm is called connectome-specific harmonic
00:27:15waves.
00:27:16And it's a way of interpreting neuroimaging,
00:27:22existing techniques, fMRI, DTI, MRI,
00:27:25MRI, and adding it together to figure out
00:27:28the brain's natural resonances.
00:27:31Just like a guitar or a piano or a wine glass
00:27:34has these natural resonances.
00:27:36This is a way of measuring them in a brain.
00:27:40And what we're doing is we're building on top of this,
00:27:44analyzing this data for harmony, basically.
00:27:49And then the idea is then that if you can then
00:27:54start doing things.
00:27:55If you can start doing things like conducting fMRI scans
00:28:00of symmetrical states of consciousness,
00:28:03then you can start cataloging.
00:28:06And when you can start cataloging,
00:28:08and you can make that beautiful representation, then it's, yeah.
00:28:12Sure.
00:28:13I mean, I think one very, very important frame here
00:28:17is what you can measure, you can manage.
00:28:21And if this is a tight proxy for how
00:28:25pleasant a brain state is, then it lets us understand
00:28:31if a brain, if a person is in pain, if they are suffering.
00:28:36It allows us to pinpoint where is this suffering coming from?
00:28:41Because we can look at the mathematics of the frequencies
00:28:45and the dissonance and say, oh, it's this specific harmonic.
00:28:51It's the frequency has drifted, or it's oscillating,
00:28:55in a strange way, or whatnot.
00:28:57And it allows us to calculate the turbulence that's occurring.
00:29:03Right, right.
00:29:04And figure out how to fix it, basically.
00:29:07OK.
00:29:08And yeah, go ahead.
00:29:09Yeah, sure.
00:29:10I was just going to mention, we've
00:29:11talked a lot about human brains here.
00:29:13But this paradigm could also be applied to non-human animals
00:29:16as well.
00:29:17And it could be a really interesting way
00:29:19to directly scientifically determine whether or not
00:29:24animals are suffering.
00:29:25Because I think that is a question that
00:29:26is on a lot of people's minds.
00:29:27And there are some people who think
00:29:29that non-human animals are not capable of suffering.
00:29:31And this might be a way to determine
00:29:33that they actually are.
00:29:35And even further in the future, maybe it's
00:29:37something that could be used on other types of brains,
00:29:40on artificial intelligence, for example,
00:29:42to determine what state is that AI in,
00:29:45or what state is this animal in?
00:29:47And how do we fix that for them in addition to ourselves?
00:29:51Yeah, yeah.
00:29:52There's also even the pull, even like a plant.
00:29:55Yeah.
00:29:55If the plant is having insects eat it
00:29:59or isn't having
00:30:00the right nutrients in the soil or sunlight and starting to die, I mean, is that then an expression of consciousness dying?
00:30:06Hard to say at this point.
00:30:08Hard to say at this point, yeah, yeah.
00:30:10All the way up to the AI, yeah.
00:30:15This method could be applied to literally any organism with neurons, assuming that there's some proxy relationships.
00:30:25And plants have only cells.
00:30:28They don't have neurons.
00:30:29Plants have only cells, but you can see a stress response happening in the plant when it gets...
00:30:34Yeah.
00:30:34Not to get too academic here, but I'll just throw this.
00:30:42This is not necessarily a QRI line.
00:30:43This is more an argument by David Pierce we've talked briefly about.
00:30:48But one reason why plants are not as...
00:30:51I mean, they could be conscious.
00:30:52We don't know.
00:30:53But definitely there's the...
00:30:55Purely physiological component that the cells are divided by thick cellulose walls.
00:31:02So, 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.
00:31:13Okay.
00:31:13But who knows?
00:31:14Okay.
00:31:14So, it's potentially how neurons are able to communicate with each other with more thin, the transmitters, that type of transmission that makes it...
00:31:23Yeah.
00:31:25It's just the loss of plant cells.
00:31:26Okay.
00:31:27So, on the nonhuman animal aspect, that's...
00:31:30In humans, we see there's this strong factor of default hedonic setpoint.
00:31:38Some people go through life just happier than others.
00:31:42Some people have very high hedonic setpoint.
00:31:44Some people have very low hedonic setpoint.
00:31:47And this is very interesting.
00:31:51But even within humans, you find...
00:31:55an enormous range of hedonic set points.
00:31:59And it's interesting to think about
00:32:01if you see this amount of variance within humans,
00:32:05how much variance will there be between species?
00:32:10And maybe it turns out it's just pretty fantastic to be a dog.
00:32:16Yeah, or dolphins are just constantly ecstatic.
00:32:19Right.
00:32:19And maybe it's just terrible to be a giraffe or a mouse.
00:32:26Yeah, someone that's constantly in fear of being consumed by another animal.
00:32:31Yeah, something like that.
00:32:32So in the sense it could move the whole field
00:32:36of understanding non-human sentience,
00:32:40or non-human, I guess, wild animal suffering,
00:32:43or whatnot, to a more quantitative basis.
00:32:47Yeah, to be able to say that,
00:32:49that specific animal has a tendency
00:32:52to move towards specific states, spaces of consciousness,
00:32:54and other ones have different tendencies.
00:32:56That's really cool stuff, too.
00:32:58Now, so people need to help fund you guys
00:33:01so you can do the fMRI scans of symmetry and dissonance.
00:33:05That's the next, that's the big stuff.
00:33:07That's right.
00:33:07Yeah, that's what we would describe it
00:33:10as kind of a very high information experiment.
00:33:15I mean, we are currently collecting
00:33:17what you might describe as kind of like
00:33:19low information or medium information experiments,
00:33:22which in a sense, like they add up.
00:33:24And of course, if you have enough weak evidence,
00:33:27that definitely builds a very strong case.
00:33:30But in science, usually how paradigms change
00:33:33is when somebody makes a really weird prediction
00:33:36and then they actually go ahead and test it.
00:33:39And it turns out like, yeah, the prediction is correct.
00:33:41Yes.
00:33:41And that's one of the cases of, for example,
00:33:44putting people in fMRIs with MDMA
00:33:47and then computing the consonants of the brain harmonics.
00:33:50There's no other theory that is predicting
00:33:51that would have anything to do with pleasure and pain.
00:33:54So that's kind of like the case of really weird,
00:33:56really weird prediction,
00:33:58very high information if it turns out true.
00:34:01That said, we are not completely constrained by that.
00:34:03I mean, the research we're aggregating currently,
00:34:07it is building up the case over time.
00:34:09But of course, we would love to just like, you know,
00:34:12jump to the, cut to the chase
00:34:14and see what happens in there.
00:34:17Test hypothesis.
00:34:18Yes.
00:34:18Yeah, right away as soon as possible.
00:34:19Yeah, I could maybe if you go to maybe the last slide.
00:34:23The very last one?
00:34:25Yeah, just to kind of give you like an example
00:34:28of what we consider a moderate evidence
00:34:34for the symmetry theory of valence.
00:34:37It's moderate because it's through EEG.
00:34:39And of course, like there's not a really great theory
00:34:43of what EEG is measuring.
00:34:45But if you interpret it through the light
00:34:47of connecting harmonics,
00:34:49it makes a lot of sense.
00:34:50So what this is showing is, okay,
00:34:55so like they basically took EEG recordings,
00:34:58high quality EEG recordings of a
00:35:00person on 5-MeO DMT, which is described as one of the most intense, but also most blissful and terrifying states of consciousness.
00:35:10But basically very, very, very high valence.
00:35:12God molecule.
00:35:14Yeah, basically people rate it as like 10 out of 10 in the dimension of significance.
00:35:19As in it feels very significant.
00:35:21So, clearly, if there's like a signature of valence, you would expect to see it on 5-MeO DMT.
00:35:28And 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,
00:35:37and the gamma is usually associated with heightened states of consciousness like orgasm, basically high arousal, high energy states.
00:35:45Once you filter the EEG through the gamma band,
00:35:48and you start seeing the phase growth,
00:35:51the phase correlation between the different channels,
00:35:53you will see that on 5-MeO DMT it just maxes out.
00:35:56Basically all the channels are in phase coherence.
00:36:00In some sense, you can almost think of it as like there's this 40 Hz vibration,
00:36:06electromagnetic vibration throughout the entire brain in synchrony.
00:36:09And like why would that be associated with a sense of profound sense of significance
00:36:16if synchrony and symmetry didn't have anything to do with valence?
00:36:20Um,
00:36:21you could probably round it up with some other theories, potentially.
00:36:24And that's why this is not necessarily kind of the silver bullet.
00:36:29But we consider it like, yeah, a moderate piece of evidence.
00:36:31And if we assemble enough of these, I think the case is going to be pretty strong.
00:36:37And yeah, back on the funding angle,
00:36:40it's this question of finding people who are very comfortable with weird ideas.
00:36:51Potentially incredibly transformative ideas that have a solid rationale,
00:36:57but are sort of outside the Overton window of what generally gets funded.
00:37:03So we're always on the lookout for sort of high quality donors.
00:37:07This is complicated.
00:37:09What you're describing is extremely complicated.
00:37:11And yeah, to be able to take a high quality EEG recording
00:37:15and then to be able to just analyze the gamma,
00:37:18and then to be able to take in,
00:37:21and then to be able to take in the analysis of the hyper symmetry of,
00:37:23it was a 10 on this, on impact or what was it?
00:37:27Significance. Sense of significance.
00:37:29Sense of significance, yeah, yeah.
00:37:30Yeah, it's definitely true for a lot of the experiences.
00:37:34Romeo, you're trying to go the whole show without talking.
00:37:36i know any any
00:37:42Any inputs?
00:37:47I mean, they're all doing such a great job.
00:37:49So I don't see the need to mess with perfection.
00:37:56Okay, and a couple other assets that I think we want to show.
00:38:01Can we show the one right after the cymatics, Ronnie?
00:38:04The one like a couple assets back,
00:38:07just a couple of the very first white one in that row, in the row.
00:38:10Yep, yep, that one, yep.
00:38:12Yeah.
00:38:12So I just want to show these quick.
00:38:14Yeah, I think this is important.
00:38:15This is kind of like the catalog of the state space of consciousness.
00:38:18You can be extremely neutral, you can be extremely...
00:38:21This would be basically cataloging, I mean, how we were describing,
00:38:25you know, take the color state space, right?
00:38:28Or take like the flavor state space.
00:38:30This would be basically getting at the root of the emotional state space.
00:38:34So this is when you'd be tasting something that's like really,
00:38:36I don't know, spicy, I don't know, like, ah, like what would be...
00:38:40Well, yeah, sure.
00:38:41Hurting you a little bit?
00:38:42Yeah, sure, like pain, pain, for example.
00:38:44Like when people eat that hot sauce that like makes them cry.
00:38:48Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure.
00:38:49Or physical pain, or emotional pain.
00:38:52Basically, just like highly negative valence.
00:38:55Well, actually, yeah, what this is...
00:38:57Suffering, yes, okay.
00:38:58Suffering, what this is describing is kind of like a way of visualizing
00:39:02the dissonance between harmonics.
00:39:04Okay, so this is dissonance.
00:39:06These are each...
00:39:07Because it's suffering.
00:39:08Right, these are each different harmonics.
00:39:10And if you want to explain the...
00:39:12Sure, harmonics, the size of the bubble is kind of like the amplitude,
00:39:16how much energy each of these harmonics has.
00:39:18Okay.
00:39:18And then the arrows are basically whether they're like mutually consonant
00:39:22or dissonant with each other.
00:39:25And, I mean, in music, when you're analyzing the dissonance
00:39:28of like simple instruments being put together, basically what you do
00:39:31is you compute the pairwise dissonance of all the pure tones in the spectrum,
00:39:36and that gives you kind of the global dissonance score,
00:39:39which basically, yeah, can account for like subjective ratings of dissonance.
00:39:44Here is kind of like taking the same idea but applying it to brain harmonics.
00:39:48So you take like for every pair of brain harmonics,
00:39:52you see whether they're like dissonant or consonant.
00:39:54You aggregate all the dissonance,
00:39:56and that would be kind of a general measure of how bad
00:40:00the experience feels.
00:40:01Then you add up all the consonants and that's kind of a general measure of how good it feels.
00:40:05Anyhow, that's what our theory is predicting specifically.
00:40:10It gives you, so this is adding up all the pairwise dissonance relations, this is the
00:40:16pairwise constants relations, pairwise noise relations, and it gives you a position in
00:40:22a valence space, essentially.
00:40:24Okay, and one more time, for one more time again, give that bit again with the, yeah.
00:40:30Yeah, yeah, so the red is adding up all the pairwise dissonance relationships between
00:40:38these natural brain harmonics.
00:40:39And you just aggregate them, add them up.
00:40:42And then the blue is the pairwise constants relation.
00:40:47And then this is the pairwise noise relationships.
00:40:50The gray ones, okay.
00:40:51All right.
00:40:54So, if you sort of add them up, it gives you a position on this state space.
00:40:58State space, okay.
00:40:59And yeah, for, just for clarity, that triangle, right, so when people say like,
00:41:03are you feeling good or bad, oftentimes people say like, I don't know.
00:41:07And the reason why is because usually typical emotions, typical emotional states are mixed.
00:41:14You have, for example, you're at a concert, you're enjoying the music and you're friends,
00:41:20but then like the speakers are not really good, and then like you also need to go pee,
00:41:24and then you're kind of drunk, and like, okay, this is very complicated mixed state.
00:41:28So that would be kind of like in the middle, right?
00:41:30It has like some positive valence components, some negative, and some neutral.
00:41:35And that's why, yeah, to an extent like self-report is pretty difficult because it's so mixed
00:41:40usually.
00:41:41Okay.
00:41:41Because there's all these pair, what do you call them, pair?
00:41:45Pairwise relationships.
00:41:47Okay.
00:41:48And they're all kind of pulling a little bit on the neutral or on the pleasure or on the
00:41:52dissonance.
00:41:53Exactly.
00:41:54Okay.
00:41:54Yeah, I think a way to relate this to the state space of color again, because I think
00:41:58that's one that's like pretty well understood by people, is one way to create colors is
00:42:02to create certain RGB values.
00:42:04And so you sort of have like the red that's on a scale from zero to 255, green scale from
00:42:09zero to 255, blue scale from zero to 255.
00:42:12And then you sort of mix different values of R, G, and B to get a certain color as an
00:42:16output.
00:42:17I think the metaphor kind of works here too, where you have these three values of constants,
00:42:21dissonance, and noise.
00:42:22Yeah.
00:42:24And then you get a certain, not color, but a certain emotional state.
00:42:26And so I think that's kind of a way to, an okay metaphor for how we state.
00:42:31Yeah, that's a good one.
00:42:31I like that one a lot.
00:42:33Yeah.
00:42:33That's one that people I think are really familiar with.
00:42:35Yeah.
00:42:36Yeah, people know about color.
00:42:37That was a pretty good one, yeah.
00:42:39Okay, excellent.
00:42:41And let's wrap on this point.
00:42:44I want to bring this up.
00:42:45So during the last talk that I went to that you guys were hosting, I really enjoyed this,
00:42:51that a lot of people are, you know, they're not really interested in color.
00:42:54They're either kind of stuck in their own bodies, identifying with their own selves
00:43:00and nothing really outside of themselves.
00:43:02Some people try and understand their whole timeline all the way back to their past when
00:43:07they were born, all the way to their future where they're trying to go.
00:43:09So they kind of get it on their whole timeline scale.
00:43:12And then this, and also where the world is at as well in those periods of years as well.
00:43:21So from like, if you're born in 2000 until 2000, you're born in 2000.
00:43:24You're born in 2000, 80.
00:43:24So that chunk of time versus this idea of like all that is or infinity or love or infinite
00:43:32consciousness.
00:43:33There's so many ways to describe this, God, et cetera, source.
00:43:36And when one potentially taps into things like the supersymmetrical states that they
00:43:43may experience that, they may experience dives into all that is.
00:43:50And so some people can trigger that just through breath.
00:43:54And just by expanding themselves out as vast as the universe.
00:43:57And I think that's a very beautiful way to get there.
00:44:00And so this sounds, it sounds great to be able to ebb and flow between all three of
00:44:05those.
00:44:05And that's something that I think was really beautifully said by you.
00:44:09Go ahead and explain that more to us.
00:44:12I like that a lot.
00:44:13Yeah.
00:44:13I mean, we do seem to kind of like come into this world with implicit views of who we are,
00:44:19but they're like given by evolution.
00:44:21They're not necessarily true.
00:44:22They're just pragmatically useful.
00:44:23Yeah.
00:44:24I mean, this sense of you start existing when you're born, you stop existing when you die
00:44:28is usually an unexamined assumption.
00:44:31Of course, people try to extend it and say, well, maybe you don't die really.
00:44:35You continue to exist as a soul after you die.
00:44:37Or maybe there was reincarnation.
00:44:39Most people still think of it as kind of just a single line.
00:44:43And you're in a sense like separate from the rest of the universe.
00:44:46There's like alternative views that can be justified.
00:44:48There's this view called empty individualism where you're just like this moment of experience.
00:44:54And in a moment, in a second, you're going to be a different entity.
00:44:57Or rather a different entity will inhabit your body because you were just that
00:45:00slice. Wow. ANDRES BOROVSKY- And
00:45:04you can describe them also as states of consciousness.
00:45:21You can definitely, in some states of very neutral experience, you can just feel that
00:45:28a very classical way of feeling that we are all one consciousness is in psychedelics and
00:45:33meditation.
00:45:34I mean, 5-MEO is a classic example of people.
00:45:37It really creates the feeling that you're all consciousness.
00:45:40And there's like this interplay between the information content of the experience and
00:45:45how cleanly defined you are.
00:45:48So, like 5-MEO DMT or any of these like super symmetrical states, it's so symmetrical,
00:45:53so invariant, it contains close to no information.
00:45:58There's just not enough information to know who you are.
00:46:00So, you identify with the light of consciousness or the void or universal mind.
00:46:06I think like, yeah, that kind of state and especially if you can like logically and precisely
00:46:13shift between those, that's going to be really important for like global coordination where
00:46:18you're going to have like CEOs of companies or leaders of different countries identify
00:46:23with consciousness rather than with, you know, their cultural background or who they are.
00:46:28Then, yeah, I think like they can collaborate to basically raise the baseline of everybody.
00:46:33It's a possibility.
00:46:34Yeah.
00:46:35Damn, that's that bad section right there is a whole another conversation in itself.
00:46:40All right.
00:46:40So, for those that were watching, we would love for you to give us your thoughts in the
00:46:47comments below on the episode.
00:46:49Let us know what you're thinking.
00:46:50Check out the links in the bio to the Quality Research Institute's website as well as the
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00:47:24Manifest your dreams into the world.
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00:47:28Peace.
00:47:29Woo.