The article does not claim that DMT unlocks new sensory abilities to perceive extra dimensions (!). It describes how DMT changes the geometry of phenomenal space, under the assumption of indirect realism about perception. You can certainly study that in a systematic and meaningful way without ever assuming new secret sensory abilities.
That said... higher phenomenal dimensions do exist, and you can experience them on DMT. See this video for a rational explanation of that effect (which is related, but different, from the hyperbolic geometry effect): https://youtu.be/DcGGfahXmQk
Video description:
Many people report experiencing "higher dimensions" during deep meditation and/or psychedelic experiences. Vaporized DMT in particular reliably produces this effect in a large percentage of users. But is this an illusion? Is there anything meaningful to it? What could possibly be going on?
In this video we provide a steel man (or titanium man?) of the idea that higher dimensions are real in a new, meaningful, and non-trivial sense.
We must emphasize that most people who believe that DMT experiences are "higher dimensional" interpret their experiences within a direct realist framework. Meaning that they think they are "tuning in" to other dimensions, that some secret sense organ capable of perceiving the etheric realm was "activated", that awareness into divine realms became available to their soul, or something along those lines. In brief, such interpretations operate under the notion that we can perceive the world directly somehow. In this video, we instead work under the premise that we live in a compact world-simulation generated by our nervous system. If DMT gives rise to "higher dimensional experiences", then such dimensions will be phenomenological in nature.
We thus try to articulate how it can be possible for an experience to acquire higher dimensions. An important idea here is that there is a trade-off between degrees of freedom and geometric dimensions. We present a model where degrees of freedom can become interlocked in such a way that they functionally emulate the behavior of a virtual higher dimension. As exemplified by the "harmonograph", one can indeed couple and interlock multiple oscillators in such a way that one generates paths of a point in a space that is higher-dimensional than the space inhabited by any of the oscillators on their own. More so, with a long qualia decay, one can use such technique to "paint" entire images in a virtual high dimensional canvas!
High-quality detailed phenomenology of DMT by rational psychonauts strongly suggests that higher virtual dimensions are widely present in the state. Also, the unique valence properties of the state seem to follow what we could call a "generalized music theory" where the "vibe" of the space is the net consonance between all of the metronomes in it. We indeed see a duality between spatial symmetry and temporal synchrony with modality-specific symmetries (equivariance maps) constraining the dynamic behavior.
This, together with the Symmetry Theory of Valence (Johnson), makes the search for "special divine numbers" suddenly meaningful: numerological correspondences can illuminate the underlying makeup of "heaven worlds" and other hedonically-loaded states of mind!
I conclude with a discussion about the nature of "highly-meaningful experiences". In light of all of these frameworks, meaning can be understood as a valence effect that arises when you have strong consonance between abstract (narrative and symbolic), emotional, and sensory fields all at once. A key turning point in your life combined with the right emotion and the right "sacred space" can thus give rise to "peak meaning". The key to infinite bliss!
I think you are thinking about it in exactly the right way! Have you not, perhaps, been consuming content from the Qualia Research Institute? :-)
Seriously - at QRI we think quite similarly. Please reach out if you'd like to have a chat. See my comment on the main thread for some useful links. I'll add as well that indeed repetition is the building block of cognition, and this is due to harmonic resonance!
In particular, we have taken steps to actually quantify empirically the properties of various visual tracer effects on psychedelics as a proof of concept for how to quantify harmonic resonance in the brain.
I agree that the most "interesting" hallucinations are not the trippy patterns you see. But, take note, if you pay really close attention to it, you will realize that in fact there is a dual relationship between the geometry of the hallucinations and the vibe of the experience. Indeed, I was not the first to figure this out (though I did figure it out independently). Steven Lehar has been talking about it for ages - and he writes about it in his book The Grand Illusion (http://slehar.com/wwwRel/GrandIllusion.pdf).
Seriously - next time pay close attention and you'll see how the shape of the configurations you hallucinate determines how the "waves of energy" bounce off of them, which in turn gives rise to harmonious or dissonant interactions between them. So you can in fact modulate your mood by making your hallucinations more symmetrical.
Why not? If you get good at it, you can learn to quickly tell which wallpaper symmetry group a given tiling has. On most psychedelics the hallucinations are easily identifiable as belonging to one of the 17 wallpaper Euclidean symmetry groups. It turns out that on DMT you see symmetry groups that are none of those... and then you realize... wait, I'm seeing a flat surface tessellated by heptagons! This means... the space is hyperbolic! What's the epistemological issue here? :-)
I can't tell whether you're seriously asking, but just in case:
Geometry requires the ability to precisely measure angles and distances. Subjective hallucinatory experiences permit the witness to feel like they're seeing just about anything -- a sphere partitioned into five congruent squares, an ant that is an even number of ants, the square root of irony. But they don't admit any kind of measuring stick.
Although I guess if impossible-outside-of-hyperbolic-space tesselations were universal experiences of the users of DMT, that would do it. But I know a few, and they never mentioned repeating patterns. One talked about Gumby people a lot. Which, to be fair, probably involved some cool geometry, but I doubt it violated the parallel postulate.
One of the most fascinating things about DMT is that you get to experience the same level of visual resolution that you experience in your fovea but across your visual field. I'd say that for a trained observer/phenomenologist, we can know with the same level of trust that yes, they saw the *442 wallpaper symmetry group on DMT as we can trust that someone is seeing a square under normal conditions. And indeed, symmetries are already widely reported (see: https://psychonautwiki.org/wiki/Symmetrical_texture_repetiti...). It's a core effect. Next time you try DMT just pay attention... you'll see it all over the place.
Why are not more people reporting the hyperbolic features I've identified (e.g. hyperbolic folding of the worldsheet at the Magic Eye level, as described in the article)? And why instead do we mostly hear about reports of entities? The reason is simple: it's not what people are trying to bring back. We don't yet have a rational culture of inquiry for the structural analysis of psychedelic phenomenology.
As explained in the following article, currently people focus on the semantic content (the narrative) rather than the phenomenal character (the texture). But as we gather more rational, intelligent, and dedicated psychonauts, consistency of reports and consilience will increase: https://www.qualiaresearchinstitute.org/blog/rigorous-report...
Indeed! (author of the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences article here). I think you might enjoy my video on the Free Energy Principle and Psychedelics. It IMO explains in a novel, meaningful, and non-trivial way the effect you are describing.
Friston's Free Energy Principle (FEP) is one of those ideas that seem to offer new perspectives on almost anything you point it at.
It seems to synthesize already very high-level ideas into an incredibly general and flexible conceptual framework. It brings together thermodynamics, probabilistic graphical models, information theory, evolution, and psychology. We could say that trying to apply the FEP to literally everything is not a bad idea: it may not explain it all, but we are bound to learn a lot from seeing when it fails.
So what is the FEP? In the words of Friston: "In short, the long-term (distal) imperative — of maintaining states within physiological bounds — translates into a short-term (proximal) avoidance of surprise. Surprise here relates not just to the current state, which cannot be changed, but also to movement from one state to another, which can change. This motion can be complicated and itinerant (wandering) provided that it revisits a small set of states, called a global random attractor, that are compatible with survival (for example, driving a car within a small margin of error). It is this motion that the free-energy principle optimizes."
Organisms that survive over time must minimize entropy injections from their environment, which means they need to minimize surprise, which unfortunately is computationally intractable, but the information theoretic construct of variational free-energy provides an upper bound on this ground truth surprise, meaning that minimizing it will indirectly minimize surprise. This cashes out in the need to maximize "accuracy - complexity" which prevents both overfitting and underfitting. In the video we go over some of the classical ideas surrounding the FEP: the dark room, active inference, explicit vs. implicit representations, and whether real dynamic systems can be decomposed into Markov blankets. Finally, we cover how the FEP naturally gives rise to predictive coding via hierarchical Bayesian models.
We then talk about Reduced BEliefs Under pSychedelics (REBUS) and explain how Carhart-Harris and Friston interpret psychedelics and the Anarchic Brain in light of the FEP. We then discuss Safron's countermodel of Strengthened BEliefs Under pSychedelics (SEBUS) and the work coming out of Seth's lab.
So, that's how the FEP shows up in the literature today. But what about explaining not only belief changes and perceptual effects, but perhaps also getting into the actual weeds of the ultra bizarre things that happen on psychedelics?
I provide three novel ideas for how the FEP can explain features of exotic experiences:
(1) Dissonance-minimizing resonance networks would naturally balance model complexity due to an inherent "complexity cost" that shows up as dissonance and prediction error minimization when prediction errors give rise to out-of-phase interactions between the layers.
(2) Bayesian Energy Sinks: What you can recognize lowers the (physical) energy of one's world-sheet. I then blend this with an analysis of symmetrical psychedelic thought-forms as energy-minimizing configurations. On net, we thus experience hybrid "semantic + symmetric" hallucinations.
(3) Indra's Net: Each "competing cluster of coherence" needs to model its environment in order to synch up with it in a reinforcing way. This leads to attractor states where "everything reflects everything else".
I'm the author of this article. I stand by it and I think comments are failing to engaging with the actual models, phenomenological observations, and synthesis provided. I suspect people here have not actually payed attention to these experiences and may have epistemological assumptions that make them think it's impossible to bring useful information back. In particular, I'll say that the article's analysis assumes indirect realism about perception (it's all "in your head"), it focuses on structural features of the experience (phenomenal character rather than intentional content - I'm not interested in what the machine elves told you, I'm interested in what were the wallpaper symmetry groups that were covering their garments!), and tries to do what we named "algorithmic reductions" (i.e. identifying simple processes or effects that when stacked together might generate enormous emergent complexity - as in chemistry and physics, the rules are simple yet the emergent effects can have incredible complexity). In other words, this is a first attempt at a scientific and algorithmic understanding of the rich phenomenology of DMT without either (a) ignoring the facts, or (b) taking the semantic content of the experience at face value. I hope you enjoy it! :)
Admittedly, the article is a little old (2016) - but I have yet to see anyone go much further than it. I look forward to rational, scientifically-minded, and smart psychonauts actually engage with the content.
In the meantime, let me link you to some additional pieces of content and further information about DMT I've arrived at using these frameworks since then:
2) Here is a presentation I gave at Harvard's Science of Psychedelics Club about the article (which goes a little deeper as it also explains the "energy x complexity" landscape and ties it to Neural Annealing): https://youtu.be/loCBvaj4eSg
5) Another related video "Why Does DMT Feel So Real? Multi-modal Coherence, High Temperature Parameter, Tactile Hallucinations": https://youtu.be/Bgv1ptz1wOc [see below for the video description]
Video description to give you a taste of the explanatory style I'm pursuing:
Why does DMT feel so "real"? Why does it feel like you experience genuine mind-independent realities on DMT?
In this video I explain that we all implicitly rely on a model of which signals are trustworthy and which ones are not. In particular, in order to avoid losing one's mind during an intense exotic experience (such as those catalyzed by psychedelics, dissociatives, or meditation) one needs to (a) know that you are altered, (b) have a good model of what that alteration entails, and (c) that the alteration is not strong enough that it breaks down either (a) or (b). So drugs that make you forget you are under the influence, or that you don't know how to model (or have a mistaken model of) can deeply disrupt your "web of trusted beliefs".
I argue that one cannot really import the models that one learned from other psychedelics about "what psychedelics do" to DMT; DMT alters you in a far broader way. For example, most people on LSD may mistrust what they see, but they will not mistrust what they touch (touch stays a "trusted signal" on LSD). But on DMT you can experience tactile hallucinations that are coherent with one's visions! "Crossing the veil" on DMT is not a visual experience: it's a multi-modal experience, like entering a cave hiding behind a waterfall.
Some of the signals that DMT messes with that often convince people that what they experienced was mind-independent include:
1) Hyperbolic geometry and mathematical complexity; experiencing "impossible objects".
2) Incredibly high-resolution multi-modal integration: hallucinations are "coherent" across senses.
3) Philosophical qualia enhancement: it alters not only your senses and emotions, but also "the way you organize models of reality".
4) More "energized" experiences feel inherently more real, and DMT can increase the energy parameter to an extreme degree.
5) Highly valenced experiences also feel more real - the bliss and the horror are interpreted as "belonging to the vibe of a reality" rather than being just a property of your experience.
6) DMT can give you powerful hallucinations in every modality: not only visual hallucinations, but also tactile, auditory, scent, taste, and proprioception.
7) Novel and exotic feelings of "electromagnetism".
8) Sense of "wisdom".
9) Knowledge of your feelings: the entities know more about you than you yourself know about yourself.
With all of these signals being liable to chaotic alterations on DMT it makes sense that even very bright and rational people may experience a "shift" in their beliefs about reality. The trusted signals will have altered their consilience point. And since each point of consilience between trusted signals entails a worldview, people who believe in the independent reality of the realms disclosed by DMT share trust in some signals most people don't even know exist. We can expect some pushback for this analysis by people who trust any of the signals altered by DMT listed above. Which is fine! But... if we want to create a rational Super-Shulgin Academy to really make some serious progress in mapping-out the state-space of consciousness, we will need to prevent epistemological mishaps. I.e. We have to model insanity so that we ourselves can stay sane :)
That said... higher phenomenal dimensions do exist, and you can experience them on DMT. See this video for a rational explanation of that effect (which is related, but different, from the hyperbolic geometry effect): https://youtu.be/DcGGfahXmQk
Video description:
Many people report experiencing "higher dimensions" during deep meditation and/or psychedelic experiences. Vaporized DMT in particular reliably produces this effect in a large percentage of users. But is this an illusion? Is there anything meaningful to it? What could possibly be going on?
In this video we provide a steel man (or titanium man?) of the idea that higher dimensions are real in a new, meaningful, and non-trivial sense.
We must emphasize that most people who believe that DMT experiences are "higher dimensional" interpret their experiences within a direct realist framework. Meaning that they think they are "tuning in" to other dimensions, that some secret sense organ capable of perceiving the etheric realm was "activated", that awareness into divine realms became available to their soul, or something along those lines. In brief, such interpretations operate under the notion that we can perceive the world directly somehow. In this video, we instead work under the premise that we live in a compact world-simulation generated by our nervous system. If DMT gives rise to "higher dimensional experiences", then such dimensions will be phenomenological in nature.
We thus try to articulate how it can be possible for an experience to acquire higher dimensions. An important idea here is that there is a trade-off between degrees of freedom and geometric dimensions. We present a model where degrees of freedom can become interlocked in such a way that they functionally emulate the behavior of a virtual higher dimension. As exemplified by the "harmonograph", one can indeed couple and interlock multiple oscillators in such a way that one generates paths of a point in a space that is higher-dimensional than the space inhabited by any of the oscillators on their own. More so, with a long qualia decay, one can use such technique to "paint" entire images in a virtual high dimensional canvas!
High-quality detailed phenomenology of DMT by rational psychonauts strongly suggests that higher virtual dimensions are widely present in the state. Also, the unique valence properties of the state seem to follow what we could call a "generalized music theory" where the "vibe" of the space is the net consonance between all of the metronomes in it. We indeed see a duality between spatial symmetry and temporal synchrony with modality-specific symmetries (equivariance maps) constraining the dynamic behavior.
This, together with the Symmetry Theory of Valence (Johnson), makes the search for "special divine numbers" suddenly meaningful: numerological correspondences can illuminate the underlying makeup of "heaven worlds" and other hedonically-loaded states of mind!
I conclude with a discussion about the nature of "highly-meaningful experiences". In light of all of these frameworks, meaning can be understood as a valence effect that arises when you have strong consonance between abstract (narrative and symbolic), emotional, and sensory fields all at once. A key turning point in your life combined with the right emotion and the right "sacred space" can thus give rise to "peak meaning". The key to infinite bliss!