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Traces of the Other: Are DMT Entities Real? Donald Hoffman and Andrew Gallimore in Conversation

Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman (UC Irvine, interface theory of perception, The Case Against Reality) and neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, co inventor of the extended state DMTx protocol) spend an hour and forty minutes on stage in Los Angeles asking whether DMT entities are traces of conscious agents that are always there and normally imperceptible. They arrive from opposite directions and neither hides it. Hoffman builds from formal mathematics: observers as Markov chains, a trace as the dynamics a big system induces on a small window, and the Trace Institute's new claim that the trace relation gives a logic on all possible observers, a logic of zero surprise that recurses upward into agency and, he says, already shows the outlines of time dilation and length contraction. Gallimore builds from pharmacology: the world space, the consensus reality attractor basin, and DMTx, the target controlled infusion protocol he developed with Rick Strassman that turns a three to five minute breakthrough into an open ended experimental window, now validated at Imperial College London. The two lock together at the perception kernel, and Gallimore says the whole DMT phenomenology fell out of the mathematics. The back half is the sharp part: Hoffman tells the story of the swami who scored exactly zero in his lab, says the recursive trace logic just told him embodiment is measure zero and he is losing sleep over it, and names the one experiment that would move the field. An audience member lands the best objection of the night about sub agents and Fourier transforms. This page rebuilds the whole conversation in order, with both voices, and puts the honest assessment of what is established versus promissory at the end where it belongs.

Published Jul 22, 2026 1:41:26 video 91 min read Added Jul 27, 2026 Open on YouTube →

At a glance

On 13 June 2026, at the Lighthouse Campus in Los Angeles, Donald Hoffman and Andrew Gallimore sat down in front of a live audience to answer one question with mathematics attached: are the entities people meet under DMT traces of conscious agents that are always there and normally imperceptible? Hoffman is Professor Emeritus of cognitive science at UC Irvine, author of The Case Against Reality, and the founder and scientific director of the Trace Institute. Gallimore is a neurobiologist and chemical pharmacologist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, co inventor with Rick Strassman of the extended state DMT protocol known as DMTx, and the author of Alien Information Theory, Reality Switch Technologies and Death by Astonishment. Charles Yokoyama, a Trace Institute researcher and former Senior Scientific Editor of Neuron, moderates.

The conversation is the public debut of the Trace Institute Collaboration Program, developed with Noonautics, and it sits on top of a real preprint: Traces of the Other: DMT Phenomenology in the Framework of Conscious Realism, by Gallimore, Hoffman and the mathematician Niffe Hermansson. The two men arrive at the same destination from genuinely different directions and neither pretends otherwise. Hoffman comes from formal mathematics: Markov chains, traces, a non Boolean logic of observers, an attempt to derive spacetime rather than assume it. Gallimore comes from receptor pharmacology and brain dynamics: what a molecule does to a network, how long it stays there, and how you hold someone in that state long enough to run an experiment.

What happens in the middle is the interesting part. Gallimore had a model of the DMT state (a world space, a consensus reality basin, DMT pushing you out of the basin) that could describe where you go but not who you meet. Hoffman had a formalism (conscious agents, an experience space, a qualia kernel that factors into decision, action and perception) that could describe who is out there but had never been pointed at a molecule. When Gallimore and Hermansson pushed Hoffman's perception kernel, the entire phenomenology of DMT came out the other side: alien geometry, impossible topology, dimensions past three, and agentic beings that are not human and not animal. Gallimore's word for it is that it "fell out of the mathematics." Hoffman's is that it "fits like a glove."

The back half is where it gets sharp, because both men keep trying to break their own idea. Hoffman tells the story of the swami who scored exactly zero in his lab across every trial, and then says the mathematics of the last three months told him discarnate cognition is not the exception but the norm, and that he has been losing sleep over it. Gallimore lays out DMTx, the target controlled infusion protocol that turns a five minute trip into an open ended dive, and the two classes of experiment it makes possible: ontological tests for shared correlation between isolated subjects, and structural mapping by sending trained mathematicians, topologists, linguists and geometers into the space with specific assignments. An audience member lands the best objection of the night. Your own auditory hair cells do Fourier transforms in milliseconds, so why does a hard computation performed fast prove you are talking to a separate agent at all?

Chapters

Timestamps are clickable. Click one and the embedded player jumps there and keeps playing while you read. The video ships without creator chapters, so this map was built from transcript position.

The opening frame (0:07)

Yokoyama sets the table in about ninety seconds, and he sets it deliberately.

Throughout the history of humankind, shamans of indigenous cultures have accessed altered states of reality with the help of endogenous and natural substances, explored those spaces, and brought insights back to their tribes. More recently science identified one of the mediators of those experiences: N,N dimethyltryptamine, DMT. A new generation of explorers has gone into that space and come back reporting the same two things, over and over: kaleidoscopic geometries, and intelligent, autonomous entities.

Modern science, he says, calls those merely hallucinations, not worthy of study, just chaotic brain activity. And then the pivot:

"But a small proportion of scientists are now pushing back saying not so fast. We need to study this and we're going to do it. We should study it with mathematical precision and scientific rigor." (1:31)

That is the whole event in one sentence. The claim is not that the elves are real. The claim is that the question is empirically tractable and that nobody has bothered to make it so.

He introduces the two men (2:01). On the far side, Dr Donald Hoffman, Professor Emeritus at UC Irvine, co founder and scientific director of the Trace Institute, author of The Case Against Reality. Next to him, Dr Andrew Gallimore, neuroscientist and computational pharmacologist affiliated with the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, co director of Noonautics, author of Death by Astonishment.

Hoffman's origin: are people just machines (2:56)

Yokoyama asks Hoffman for the origin story, teasing that Hoffman has been developing theories of reality and consciousness "since the dawn of history." Hoffman's answer starts at a pulpit.

His father was a minister in a fundamentalist Christian church. On Sundays he got one story about the world. In his science classes he got a completely different one. By his teens he decided he had to figure it out himself, and the way to do that was to pick one clean, technical question.

"And my question was, are we just machines? Are people just machines? Nice clean technical question." (3:32)

The method he chose was symmetrical: study psychology and neuroscience on one side, artificial intelligence on the other, and see where the two accounts fail to meet. That took him to MIT, where he worked in the AI Lab and in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at the same time. He was inside both camps at once, asking what machines could and could not do.

Trying to build a mathematical model of that led him to a prior question. What do we actually mean by observation? So he began to build a mathematical model of observation, and that model eventually became the notion of conscious agents that the Trace Institute works on now. He has been on this since he was a teenager.

The observer is missing from science (4:48)

Yokoyama asks him to say more about the missing observer, and this is the section that matters whether or not you care about consciousness at all. Hoffman is careful to say so explicitly.

The argument runs like this. All of our data come from observations. The reason we think science is objective is that different observers compare data and check whether they agree, which requires communication between observers. Careful observation is the foundation of science. And yet:

"What's remarkable is we do not have a generally accepted model of observation in science right now. It's a really remarkable fact." (4:57)

He walks the history. In Newton, you did not need one, because the observer did not affect anything. In Einstein, we started talking about observers because there are clocks and clocks change, but no model of the observer came out of it. Then in quantum mechanics the observer became front and centre through the measurement problem, which is now a century old and has no universally accepted solution. His summary: "It's a big big mess."

So science, our best way of understanding the world, is built on observers and has no theory of the observer. And the standard research move, Hoffman says, is to shoehorn the observer into spacetime: a quantum description of observers, or a physical description, or observers emerging from physical systems. His objection is that this fights the physics.

"But our best science is telling us that spacetime is not fundamental. We have to go outside of spacetime. So already we're going outside of spacetime." (5:55)

He cites a concrete data point for that claim: the European Research Council has a ten million euro initiative dedicated to finding structures entirely outside spacetime. If the frontier of physics is already reaching past spacetime, then jamming observers back into spacetime is ignoring what the physics is saying.

The Trace Institute programme follows from that. Build a mathematical model of observers qua observers, not shoehorned into spacetime, and then run the derivation the other way: build spacetime, quantum mechanics and relativity out of observers.

"But whether you believe in consciousness or not, the goal of having a mathematical model of observers and booting up science with that model is critical for anybody who believes or doesn't believe in consciousness. I am thinking about it in conscious terms, but the mathematics doesn't care." (6:47)

Gallimore's origin: a magazine and the wrong molecule (7:03)

Yokoyama turns to the other angle. Gallimore has been researching DMT for over twenty years. What started it?

Same age, different door. Gallimore got interested in altered states as a teenager. He still remembers the specific morning. He was fifteen or sixteen. A friend brought a magazine to school and said there was an article on the back he would be interested in. On the back was a photo of a bearded fellow named Terence McKenna, and an interview. One of the later questions was about McKenna's favourite drug, and McKenna started talking about a thing called DMT.

Gallimore had no idea what that meant. He went to the public library and looked it up, and the answer he got back was dimethyl terephthalate, which is a precursor for a type of plastic.

"So that was, I didn't try to smoke that fortunately." (8:26)

This was the dawn of the internet. There was exactly one internet connection at the school, and you had to get a password from a man in a white coat to use it. He got the password. He is fairly sure he was the only person in the school who ever used that connection, and he was on it constantly, trying to learn everything he could about a molecule that would apparently transport you out of the normal waking world into one that bore no relationship to it. A world that was infinitely more complex and dynamical, with strange geometries and topologies, and populated.

"A world that was filled with beings with whom you could interact and communicate. Beings that were not human, they were not animal. They were entirely other, entirely alien." (9:05)

He is honest that he did not necessarily believe it. But he made a decision on the spot that shaped the rest of his life: he dropped the subjects he was studying and picked up chemistry, biology and mathematics, because his future was now going to be studying how these molecules interface with the human brain to produce these effects on human consciousness. That was roughly thirty years ago.

"Unenglishable" (9:54)

He finally took DMT a few years after that. He had read all the McKenna books and listened to all the lectures. He thought he knew what he was getting into.

"And I was completely lost. I was at sea. I was completely confounded by this experience. It was, as Terence McKenna says, it was unenglishable. It was impossible. It was not possible for this experience to have occurred to me. And yet it did." (10:21)

That cemented the trajectory. Not psychedelics broadly. DMT specifically. He wanted to know how the molecule achieves its effects, and whether we are really interacting with some kind of intelligent other, which he chooses as the most neutral term available. Intelligent agent is the phrase he has used in more recent years.

What DMT is not (11:19)

He is disarmingly modest about where he has got to.

"I don't think I'm there in being able to explain DMT, but I think I've made some progress in telling people what DMT is not." (11:11)

Most of his time is spent arguing against explanations rather than for one. It is not mere hallucination. It is not simply the brain on drugs. It is not neural noise. Then he produces the phrase that gets the biggest laugh of the night, a euphemism he has heard neuroscientists use for entity encounters:

"Hallucinatory social events is my favourite term for entity interactions. I always say if that's a social event, I'd like to see the kind of parties that neuroscientists frequent." (11:40)

His position, stated plainly: DMT represents a true mystery, science cannot easily explain it, and we should take seriously the possibility that we are interacting with some kind of intelligent agent, some kind of conscious agent.

How the two lines crossed (12:17)

Yokoyama points out the obvious: a cognitive scientist and mathematician on one side, a pharmacologist and neurobiologist on the other, is not an intuitive pairing. How did they find each other?

Gallimore goes first, and pre empts the assumption. People are always telling him he should look into Donald Hoffman's work.

"And I have to say to him, I was reading Don Hoffman's work when you were at your mother's teat." (13:04)

He has been referencing Hoffman's work since his earliest writings on DMT, fifteen or sixteen years ago. Then he corrects a persistent misreading of his own position, which is the key to why the collaboration works at all.

People accuse him of being a materialist, even a reductionist. He does not think those accusers know what the word means, because nothing about what he says is reductionist. At heart he is an idealist. He believes consciousness is fundamental, and that placing the material at the ground of reality, assuming the ontological primacy of matter, was the grandest of missteps in the history of science.

"And trying to boot up, to use Don's terminology, to boot up consciousness from the material has failed. Scientists have had literally centuries to make it work, and yet I don't even see any scientists who have an idea how that problem might be solved." (14:08)

He names names on the cop out. He recently saw a post by Steven Pinker or Michael Shermer saying consciousness is ultimately unknowable, and his reaction is: what are we supposed to do with that? Nobody in that camp questions the assumption that produced the impasse. Descartes showed we can deny the material and deny everything else, but we cannot deny our own subjective consciousness. Maybe that is the fundamental thing, and the material world that appears within it is not.

But being an idealist did not give him any machinery. He works at the neural level, at the brain level, and he avoids the consciousness question because he can get his teeth into the mechanics of the brain. What he says Hoffman's work adds is exactly the part he was missing:

"What I think Don's work does now is say okay, reality is not just consciousness and that's it, but actually we can do things with that. We can describe the mathematics, we can describe the mechanics and the dynamics, we can actually do real science with that basic premise." (15:44)

Hoffman: the math told me I was making it all up (15:56)

Hoffman agrees, and then makes clear how different his own road was.

"I've never even smoked a cigarette. So I'm just completely different kind of person." (16:27)

Gallimore, deadpan, offers him some nicotine.

Hoffman's route was purely formal. He was trying to work out the best mathematical model of human perception. In the late 1980s, working with the mathematicians Chetan Prakash and Bruce Bennett, the mathematics told him that everything he sees, he is making up. He is creating what he sees.

"I still remember the moment where I realized it and I had to sit down. It was just so stunning to me. So I was not trying to get to this point of view. I was just trying to understand visual perception. And when that came out, it stunned me." (17:10)

That distinction matters for how the rest of the conversation should be read. He did not go looking for idealism. He went looking for a model of vision.

Three months of getting slapped in the face (17:26)

And then the same thing happened again, recently, with the recursive trace logic and the work with Gallimore. Hoffman is explicit that he has no experience in this space. He can read the trip reports and try to imagine what disembodied cognition is like, but that is all. Then, in the three months before this recording, studying the mathematics of the recursive trace logic:

"The mathematics tells me that disembodied cognition is the norm and the kinds of embodied cognition that we have is the training wheels version of what's possible. And again, I'm still, I just realized that in the last few weeks. So I'm still reeling." (17:47)

He is careful about what that does and does not make him.

"So I'm not like an advocate of this stuff. I'm reluctantly being pushed to it by the mathematics. But I want to go wherever the mathematics tells me to go. And with agents like this, again, I'm a complete hard nosed scientist. If they're real, we can do hard nosed experiments and show it. And if they're not real, we'll find that out as well." (18:12)

If you want to see agents (18:26)

Gallimore picks up the thread and makes the first hard connection of the night. The fundamental structure in Hoffman's conscious realism is the conscious agent.

"And from the perspective of DMT, if you want to see agents, then smoke some DMT because you're going to see some agents." (18:44)

He has been calling them intelligent agents for years, deliberately avoiding spirits, gods or aliens, settling on the most neutral phrasing available: intelligent agents that seem to be conscious. So before you get anywhere near the mathematics, the vocabularies already overlap. What surprised him was how much further the overlap went once they actually did the work.

HOFFMAN · THE FORMAL PATH "Are people just machines?" MIT AI Lab and Brain & Cognitive Sciences A MODEL OF OBSERVATION Markov chains · traces · trace logic CONSCIOUS AGENTS unbounded network · spacetime as interface EXPERIENCE SPACE + QUALIA KERNEL who is out there, and what you can perceive GALLIMORE · THE PHARMACOLOGICAL PATH A McKENNA INTERVIEW, AGE 15 chemistry · biology · mathematics DMT NEUROPHARMACOLOGY receptors · kinetics · brain dynamics THE WORLD SPACE consensus reality basin · the DMT space DMTx · THE EXTENDED STATE how you stay long enough to measure THE PERCEPTION KERNEL where an agent's reach and a molecule's effect meet Gallimore: "the whole thing just fell out of Don's model"
Figure 1. Two independent research programmes, roughly thirty years each, converging on one object. Hoffman started from "what is an observer" and worked out to a network of conscious agents; Gallimore started from "what does this molecule do" and worked out to a state space of possible worlds. Neither needed the other to get where they got. The joint work, with mathematician Niffe Hermansson, connects them at the perception kernel, the component of Hoffman's formalism that determines which agents an observer can perceive at all.
## The empirical opening: more than three dimensions (19:23)

Yokoyama asks Hoffman what he saw in the DMT space when he first met Gallimore's work. Hoffman's answer is specific and it is about dimensionality, not about elves.

The trip reports describe experiencing things not just in three dimensions but in four, five, more, and some people say there are far too many dimensions to count. Hoffman's professional life has been spent on a version of exactly that problem in ordinary vision.

Your retina is essentially a flat surface, slightly curved. It has two dimensions. So:

"Anytime you see in three dimensions you're hallucinating the third dimension. Right now the depth that you see is not directly there at your eye. The eye has a flat image. You're projecting out a 3D model." (20:24)

Many of the papers he has written with mathematicians are about exactly this: how do you take a two dimensional image, or a sequence of them, and mathematically construct an accurate three dimensional representation? That works, and it matches human vision well. Which makes the next question obvious. Could you do the same thing and go to four dimensions? Five?

The answer is yes, and there is a person doing it. His friend Michael D'Zmura, also at UC Irvine, has worked on the mathematics and then on the experiments: putting people in four dimensional virtual worlds and testing whether four dimensional perception develops. The published work includes human four dimensional spatial intuition in virtual reality, and D'Zmura's group has been building 4D environments in a CAVE since 1992, including a 4D maze and a 4D Tetris. The evidence suggests people can train themselves up.

Once that is on the table, Gallimore's material stops looking like a category error and starts looking like a bigger version of the same question.

"These people are going in not just four dimensions. Who knows? DMT might be taking you into 50 dimensions. I don't know what it is. And colors that we've never seen before and other exotic experiences that we've never had before. And again, I'm the reluctant scientist who's being forced kicking and screaming by the math to say yes, we can go here. So I better go here because I would be a bad scientist if I didn't at least explore." (21:16)

An unbounded number of imperceptible agents (21:42)

Now Gallimore explains what pulled him in from his side, and it is one specific sentence he heard Hoffman say in an interview.

It is implicit in the trace logic model that reality is composed of, and only of, conscious agents interacting with each other, and that there is an effectively unbounded, possibly infinite number of them. The vast, vast majority are imperceptible to us.

"And they're not only imperceptible but they are literally unimaginable to us. We only have access to this very very thin, infinitesimally thin slice of this conscious agent network that we interact with." (22:48)

Put that next to what people report on DMT and the inference writes itself. You take DMT and you start seeing beings that are unfathomably strange. Not exotic, not unusual: impossible. There is no reference in the normal waking world for them. And they are obviously agentic, and they seem to occupy and manipulate an entirely different experiential manifold.

"They don't occupy this world. They seem to live within and manipulate an entirely different type of world." (23:44)

This was intuition, well before the mathematics, well before he started working with Hoffman. But it made sense to him that DMT was allowing us to interact in new ways with the conscious agent network, opening up new modes of interaction.

The problem physicalism could not solve (24:28)

Here is Gallimore's honest statement of the hole in his own prior work, and it is the reason the collaboration exists.

In his earlier work he thinks he dispelled the idea that the DMT experience is simply explained away as hallucination. His positive claim was that DMT is gating access to some alternate source of information.

"I don't think you're going anywhere as such under the influence of DMT. But there is some change in your world that allows you to receive, you might call it an alternate source of sensory inputs, that allows your brain to effectively construct this alternate reality within which these beings were." (24:36)

And then the problem:

"But the problem I had is I had no way to really explain that within the physicalist model. What is this alternate source of sensory information? Where is it coming from? Is it coming from another world, another dimension? I didn't have the mechanics. There's no mechanics really." (25:07)

People try to invoke the quantum level, or something subquantum. He does not find that convincing. There is no simple way, inside a physicalist model, to explain how that information is gated into the brain. What conscious realism gives him is a level to ask the question at: how do conscious agents interact, how does one conscious agent perceive another, what is the mechanism of that perceptual process. Once he started asking it that way, he says, everything fell into place in ways he could not have imagined and found genuinely shocking.

Spacetime as a virtual reality headset (26:23)

Yokoyama asks Hoffman to define two terms: the interface, and a trace.

Hoffman starts with the interface, and states the inversion up front. Most of us think of spacetime as the fundamental reality. From inside conscious realism, spacetime is just a virtual reality headset. It is not an objective reality. What is really going on is a large number of conscious agents interacting, an infinite number of them, and the headset is how you handle that.

"So we have to sort of tame that infinity. How do we interact with an infinite number of agents? Well, you sort of dumb things down. And that's what our spacetime headset is. It's a way of interacting with other agents without getting overwhelmed." (27:22)

Then the part that stings. When you look at the mathematics of how many kinds of headsets are possible and how they can vary, you find a whole range of them, and ours is not impressive.

"Ours is one of the more trivial. We actually have one of the dumbest headsets you could possibly have and the most restrictive." (27:53)

So the natural question becomes: what are the other possibilities, and how would you get from our headset to a more open one? Two attack routes. Build them abstractly in mathematics, or look at the neuroscience.

"I do not have any neurons right now" (28:17)

The neuroscience route requires a reframe that Hoffman delivers with a straight face and a good example.

From this point of view, the brain is not creating what we see. The brain is another symbol in the headset. Symbols in headsets only exist when you render them. If you are playing Grand Theft Auto and you see a Ferrari, the Ferrari is not real, it is only there when you look at it, and when you look away it is gone.

"So I'm a neuroscientist and I'm telling you, I don't have any neurons right now. If you looked, you would see neurons, but that's because you rendered the neurons. I don't have neurons right now." (28:47)

Which does not make neuroscience useless. It makes it a different kind of evidence. The brain is our headset's own representation of how the headset is engineered, so neuroscience becomes reverse engineering. It is the best clue we have about the construction of the interface.

And it points at a very concrete hope. If the headset is software with parameters, then some of those parameters are numbers you could change. We see three dimensions of space. That is one number.

"How do we change that number? Does DMT for example do something as simple, maybe one of many things? Maybe it changes three to five or 10 or something like that and all of a sudden it's opening up." (29:35)

He is disciplined about the epistemic status.

"So I'm not saying that we know that. I'm just saying the mathematics allows this possibility and so we need to actually explore it." (29:56)

And he is honest about the difficulty. Even the dumbed down version is not easy: 86 billion neurons, trillions of synapses in the headset's own self representation. Whatever is going on beyond the headset is going to be very hard.

The world space and the consensus reality basin (30:39)

Yokoyama poses a thought experiment: a conscious agent A outside the headset and a conscious agent B inside it. What would the outside agent look like to the inside one, and how does that map to entity encounters?

Gallimore takes it, after crediting the third author. Niffe Hermansson is the mathematician who worked with him, because the mathematics is complicated and easy to get wrong. Gallimore says he keeps checking Hermansson's face in the audience to see if he winces.

"Also I will say that Don is very very good at Grand Theft Auto. Absolutely ruthless. It's a blood bath." (31:24)

The question they were actually chasing, before DMT even entered the frame, was this. If we interact with a very thin slice of the conscious agent network, what sets the limits? Which agents can we perceive, which can we not, and why? And if you understand that, can you perturb the interface so that normally imperceptible agents become perceptible?

To answer, Gallimore reaches back to his own prior framework, from Reality Switch Technologies, published about six years earlier. Think of the brain as a world builder. The world you experience, which Hoffman would call the interface, is constructed by the brain. Now consider every possible world your brain could construct, every possible moment. That gives you a vast state space, which he called the world space.

In normal waking consciousness we occupy a tiny region of the world space, which he calls the consensus reality space. He describes it as a well, an attractor basin in the world space landscape.

"And what DMT does is it pushes you out. It perturbs the brain and pushes you out of the consensus reality space into entirely different regions of the world space. You might call that the DMT space, this set of states that represent the structure and dynamics of the DMT world." (34:05)

That model explains where you go. It does not explain who you meet. He had no way to think about interacting with other conscious agents inside that altered world. That was the gap.

The experience space and the qualia kernel (34:32)

Then he started working with Hermansson and Hoffman, and found they had arrived at the same structure from the other side, inside conscious realism, with different names.

Hoffman does not call it the world space. He calls it the experience space: the set of all states a conscious agent could possibly occupy. An effectively infinite set. But an experience space on its own is inert, just a very long list of possible states.

"But sitting on top of this experience space, and this is key, is this mathematical structure called the qualia kernel. For the more mathematically sophisticated it's a Markov kernel, but for those that aren't mathematically sophisticated, people like me, it's a mathematical structure that gives the dynamics." (35:37)

The qualia kernel answers: given that the agent is in this state, what is the probability it moves to that state, or that one, or that one? The experience space is the set of states. The qualia kernel gives it structure.

And the parallel to his own framework is exact. In the same way that neural connectivity restricts you to the consensus reality space inside the world space, the qualia kernel restricts you to a very limited region of the experience space. You tend to move within a small neighbourhood of states. They kept the name consensus reality space for it because it fit.

Decision, action, perception (36:27)

This is the hinge of the entire collaboration, and Gallimore flags it as the moment the magic happened.

The qualia kernel is not primitive. It factors into three other kernels: the decision kernel, the action kernel and the perception kernel.

"And the perception kernel is key because it determines how an agent perceives, how it interacts with the rest of the agent network." (36:47)

Now the two pictures lock together. You are no longer only talking about entering a different kind of experience. You are talking about how entering that experience changes your coupling to everything else.

When the brain is perturbed by DMT, on this account, two things happen at once. You are pushed out of the consensus reality space into a different region of the experience space, and the qualia kernel sitting on that region is a different kernel. Different dynamics. Different perception kernel. Different reach into the agent network.

"So conscious agents that were completely imperceptible, that evolution had filtered out, suddenly become perceptible." (37:44)

EXPERIENCE SPACE · every state a conscious agent could occupy CONSENSUS REALITY 3 + 1 dimensions an attractor basin evolution filtered the rest out THE DMT REGION different geometry and topology no reason 3 + 1 still applies agents you cannot represent here "impossible, not merely exotic" DMT perturbs the brain THE QUALIA KERNEL · a Markov kernel giving the dynamics on that space QUALIA KERNEL DECISION what the agent chooses ACTION what it does to others PERCEPTION which agents it can see Change the region and you change the kernel sitting on it. A different perception kernel means a different reach into the agent network.
Figure 2. The mechanism the paper actually proposes. Two things change together when DMT perturbs the system: you move to a different region of the experience space, and the qualia kernel governing that region is a different kernel. Because the qualia kernel factors into decision, action and perception, a different perception kernel means a different reach into the conscious agent network. On this account the entities are not created by the drug; the filter that was hiding them is what changed.

What that would actually be like (38:21)

Gallimore then does something useful. He asks what the model predicts, before allowing DMT back into the room.

Suppose you are situated in the consensus reality space, a very limited region of the experience space, and you are pushed out of it into an entirely different region. What would that be like?

The geometry and topology of your world would change dramatically. There is no reason to think the three plus one dimensional restriction that holds in the consensus reality space would apply outside it. So it would be an alien world. It would be impossible. It would not make sense to you. It would be unlike any experience you have had. And the beings occupying that space, the other conscious agents you interact with, would also be completely alien in ways you could not have anticipated.

Then he closes the loop:

"In other words, almost the entirety of the phenomenology of the DMT experience, that's DMT, right? Going to a world that is inordinately complex and extremely strange and geometrically and topologically different, occupied by beings that have no relationship to the beings that you normally interact with. That's DMT. And that basically, for want of a better term, fell out of the mathematics." (39:19)

He does not undersell what that moment was like for him.

"DMT suddenly went from being inexplicable to basically all making sense. The whole thing just fell out of Don's model. I could not for one moment have anticipated that we would basically boot up the DMT phenomenology from this very abstract mathematics." (39:52)

Hoffman's verdict on the same convergence:

"I agree that it fits like a glove to the phenomenology that Andrew's been exploring for many many years. It's truly stunning." (40:51)

What a trace actually is (40:48)

This is the section where the word in the institute's name gets defined, and it is worth reading slowly because Hoffman builds it from almost nothing.

Start with the simplest possible model of an observer. An observer has a set of possible outcomes. Maybe I see green, or red, or blue. Those are the outcomes of my possible experiences. And they change: green now, red next, blue after that. So the simplest thing you can do is list all the possible observer outcomes and list how they change.

"And when you do that, you get a mathematical thing called a Markov model." (41:33)

Nothing new so far. Hoffman is emphatic about that. Markov chains have been known since 1905. The notion of a trace has been known for at least half a century. Here is the definition, in his words:

"If I have a big Markov chain, say on 10 states, but you can only see three of the states, then the Markov chain on 10 states will induce a Markov chain on the three states that you can see. It will give you effectively the transitions that you're going to see if you can only see those three states. That's called a trace. There's a formula for it. It's been well known." (41:47)

So a trace is the shadow a large dynamical system casts on a small window into it. If you can only see part of the system, the part you can see still has well defined dynamics, and those dynamics are computable from the full system.

Now the claim that is new, and Hoffman is precise about where the novelty sits:

"But what we discovered in the Trace Institute research, and that hadn't been discovered before by mathematicians, is that that trace relationship gives you a logic on all Markov chains. It gives you a logic on all possible observers that had not been noticed. So that's why we call this the Trace Institute, because that trace logic is the logic of observation." (42:15)

A logic of zero surprise (42:38)

And then the characterisation that connects it to a large existing research programme.

"And it's a logic of minimum surprise." (42:34)

He addresses Karl Friston's community directly. Friston's free energy principle frames organisms as minimising surprise by minimising a variational free energy bound. Hoffman says the trace logic is the logic of zero surprise, that he has discussed this with Friston, and that Friston agrees there is an interesting connection. The difference he names is computational rather than philosophical:

"But where he's trying to minimize free energy to try to approach minimum surprise, we compute it directly. The trace logic, you just get it directly by computation." (42:56)

Then a second characterisation, which is the bridge to agency. Not being surprised is a large part of being intelligent.

"If everything I do, I go to pick up this glass of water and it breaks. I go to tie my shoe and I fall on the floor. If everything I do, I'm surprised, then I'm not very bright." (43:11)

So a zero surprise logic is a logic of intelligence. A logic of observation that turns out to be a logic of intelligence.

Recursion: from observation to agency (43:33)

The third move is the recursion, and it is the piece that turns a description into a theory of agents.

Suppose I am looking through one observer window and I want to change to a different one, a different size, a different set of outcomes. I need a way to do that. How do I transition from one window to another?

"It turns out you just have another Markov chain where you go from one window to another by Markov chain." (43:52)

So the lowest level is observers. The next level is moving between observers, which Hoffman calls a policy on observers. And that policy has its own trace logic. And then you can change policies, which is another level, with its own trace logic. And so on, recursively, as far as you like.

"You just get one trace logic after another after another and you build up the notion of agency to whatever level of sophistication you want. It's unbelievably simple, but the ideas are very very powerful." (44:14)

Where time dilation comes from (44:29)

This is the most testable looking claim Hoffman makes all night, and he presents it as an aside, "just to give you a flavour."

Each observer window has a counter attached to it. Every time your experience changes, red to green to blue, whatever, the counter goes up by one. That counter is what time is, on this account.

Now compare two observers. One has the full ten state matrix. The other can only see three of those states.

"The counter for the three state person is not going to go as fast as the counter for the 10 state. His counter is not going to go, that will give us time dilation in special relativity. That's where it comes from. Just that simple." (45:02)

The same structure, he says, produces the other half. When you work out how the structure of the matrices generates three dimensional shapes, the shapes contract for the smaller windows relative to the larger ones. That is length contraction.

"So all right there in the structure of the trace logic itself you're starting to see the outlines of special and general relativity." (45:38)

He immediately names what is missing, which is everything that would make it a result rather than a sketch. Outlines are not derivations.

The two year programme (45:52)

So he states the deliverable, with a deadline.

"One of the things we're going to be doing in the next two years is to show mathematically we get it exactly. So no handwave, we get Minkowski space from the recursive trace, and we also get curved spacetime, and we can get quantum field theory. That's what we have to do in the next two years." (45:57)

The order of operations matters and he is explicit about it. First prove you can recover all of current spacetime physics exactly. Only then try to reverse engineer the headset.

Once you know the software (46:20)

And then the payoff, which is where the ambition of the programme becomes unmistakable.

"Then the magic starts to happen, because once you know the software of the headset, you can do miracles. If you know the software of Grand Theft Auto, you can turn the wizard's Ferrari into a rocket ship or a donkey, whatever you want to do. So once you know the software, you can play beyond the wizard." (46:23)

He says the technologies that come out of this are mind blowing, and that the DMT reports are a hint of what it looks like from the inside. People look at these worlds and say that is not even possible.

"What these elves are showing us are things that you cannot do, and there's too many elves, and what are these things? And apparently, I mean again, I've not been there, I haven't done this, but what I read is they're happy to show you that you're in the sandbox and they're in the real world." (46:57)

"And so that's what I feel the mathematics that we're working on says exactly. We're in a little tiny sandbox, but the mathematics is pointing to a real world that's much much bigger and we can go there. With DMT we may actually be able to go there experientially. With the mathematics we can go there scientifically." (47:19)

THE RECURSIVE TRACE LADDER · every rung is another Markov chain, so every rung has its own trace logic 1 · OBSERVER WINDOW a set of outcomes and how they change = a Markov chain, known since 1905 2 · TRACE 10 states seen through a 3 state window the shadow a big chain casts on a small window 3 · TRACE LOGIC a logic on ALL possible observers the claimed new result · a logic of ZERO surprise Friston minimises it; trace logic computes it directly 4 · POLICY ON OBSERVERS move from one window to another another Markov chain, so another trace logic 5 · CHANGE OF POLICY, RECURSE AGENCY, to any level of sophistication "unbelievably simple, but very very powerful" EVERY WINDOW CARRIES A COUNTER One tick per change of experience. A window onto 3 states ticks slower than one onto 10. Hoffman: that is where time dilation comes from, and the same structure contracts lengths.
Figure 3. Hoffman's construction, rung by rung, as he lays it out at 40:48 to 45:25. Rungs 1 and 2 are textbook mathematics and he says so. Rung 3 is the Trace Institute's claimed new result: that the trace relation induces a logic on the whole space of Markov chains, which is to say on all possible observers. Rungs 4 and 5 are the recursion that builds agency out of it. The counter attached to each window is what makes the relativity claim: fewer visible states means fewer ticks, which is time dilation, and the same matrix structure yields length contraction.

Not smarter, differently situated (47:45)

Gallimore then makes a correction to his own past language, and it is one of the sharper moves in the conversation.

He has spent years describing the entities as extraordinarily intelligent. Working with Hoffman's model changed his mind about that framing.

"It's not like we're dealing with beings that are extraordinarily intelligent in the human sense. We're simply dealing with beings that occupy an entirely different experiential manifold. They occupy a higher dimensional space." (48:26)

They will often show you impossible higher dimensional objects and say look at this, look at this.

"As if they're teaching a toddler squares and triangles. Because in their world, it's as simple as that. They're not doing, from their perspective, particularly complicated things." (48:52)

Which dissolves a stock objection. People ask, if they are so intelligent, why do they not give us the blueprint of a time machine, why do they not know everything.

"It's not that kind of intelligence. We're simply dealing with beings that are so different to us that things that they do that are completely trivial from their perspective are mind blowing to us." (49:20)

He reaches for Hoffman's own favourite example to make it concrete: the amplituhedron, a high dimensional geometric object that exists outside spacetime and encodes particle scattering amplitudes. From our perspective, computing those amplitudes with Feynman diagrams and spacetime modelling runs to pages and pages of symbols and equations. From the amplituhedron's perspective the whole thing just falls out of the geometry.

"And it's that kind of thing that we're dealing with. They seem bewildering and incredible simply because of the type of space that they occupy." (50:12)

Why we cannot represent them (50:30)

He closes the argument with the representational version of the claim, which is the cleanest statement of the thesis in the whole conversation.

Removing the restriction the qualia kernel imposes inside the consensus reality space, and kicking you into another region of the experience space where those rules do not apply, lets consciousness occupy dynamics it could not occupy before. You can start to represent structures and dynamics that were beyond your representational reach.

"One of the reasons we don't perceive the vast majority of these conscious agents in any way is simply because we have no way to represent them. Those kinds of dynamics simply cannot be represented by this very restricted dynamics of us as a conscious agent within the consensus reality space. Once you get out of that, those rules no longer apply, and then you can start interacting with and perceiving agents that were normally imperceptible." (50:52)

Are DMT entities real? (51:25)

Yokoyama finally puts the title question on the table, and asks Gallimore to describe the shape of the debate first.

Gallimore's summary of the mainstream position is fair rather than caricatured. The vast majority of scientists operating within the materialist paradigm assume it is a hallucination, and take their job to be showing how and why it is a hallucination.

His counter is not "you cannot prove it is a hallucination." It is a specific explanatory demand.

"How is it that the brain suddenly becomes capable of constructing these entirely alien worlds in the presence of DMT? That's always been my argument. This is not easy to explain. Why, when you perturb the brain, you don't just get random noise. You don't get dreamlike imagery. You get imagery that is staggeringly complex and yet also staggeringly coherent. Staggering narrative complexity." (52:44)

The brain evolved to represent a very limited kind of environment, in a way that was adaptive rather than truthful, as Hoffman always says. So why does perturbing it produce something so structured?

He is careful about the limits of his own testimony here, and about the limits of language.

"A lot of it cannot be impressed upon you through this very limited medium of language. But you know that this is something else going on. I've always tried to keep an open mind in that respect. I've never said I think machine elves are real. But I've always been careful not to dismiss the DMT experience." (53:33)

Hoffman: living versus non living is not a principled distinction (54:17)

Hoffman's answer to "are they real" is to refuse the question in its usual form, and then to rebuild it into something an experiment can reach. The route he takes is unexpected.

He starts with an open question in mainstream science: what is the distinction between living and non living things, or conscious and unconscious things? From inside the headset view, everything he is seeing right now is something he is rendering on the fly.

"I'm not seeing your consciousness directly. I'm just seeing a body. I'm seeing a shape that I render. That's not you. And what you're seeing with me is just a Hoffman shape, but that's not Hoffman. That's just what you can see." (55:00)

So when he looks at a person and when he looks at a rock, both are renders in the headset. Both are there when you look and gone when you look away. Which gives him the conclusion:

"The distinction we make between living and non living is not principled according to this headset theory. That distinction is an artifact of the limitations of our headset. It's because our headset has to give up at some point." (55:52)

He grades the giving up. Interacting with Gallimore, his headset gives him a symbol carrying a lot of insight into what Gallimore might be thinking, whether he agrees or disagrees. Plenty of information, though nowhere near everything. Looking at the table, it has dumbed things down to the point where there is no notion of intention or belief at all, just a chunk of stuff. Looking at a rock, there is nothing there.

"Does that mean that I'm dealing with something that's stupid? No. It means that my headset gave up." (56:44)

And then the reframe that the entire experimental programme sits on:

"So in the trace logic point of view, I'm always dealing with consciousness. Always. The only question is how much insight does my headset give me into that consciousness that I'm interacting with." (56:58)

Screwing up the render, or upgrading it (57:09)

Now the DMT question can be asked properly, and Hoffman states it as a clean binary with two live options.

"Is DMT just screwing up the render? That's one possibility. And you know, if you hit me in the head, I get screwed up. So I can imagine DMT does the same thing. Or is it the case that the fidelity of my rendering of conscious agents goes up, and so all of a sudden things that before might have been inanimate, for example, are now rendered in a way where I actually see agency." (57:16)

"So it's really the question of, is my headset being upgraded so that the icons that are rendering are giving me genuine access to consciousness outside, or am I just screwing up the render? That's the real question that we're going to be asking here." (57:47)

He immediately points out the meta claim, which is the argument for the whole framework and not just for this study.

"But notice this very way of positing things could not even be posited in the physicalist framework. You can't even think the scientific kind of story in the physicalist framework. You have to actually come to a completely different scientific point of view to even ask this kind of question." (58:10)

Agentic versus non agentic dynamics (58:37)

Gallimore says this is the part he had to wrestle with personally, and gives it the technical name used in the paper: the boundary between agentic and non agentic dynamics. Which things appear as agents and which do not. There is no fundamental ontological difference there.

He credits Hermansson for beating the point into him:

"As Niffe drummed into my head, all perception is interacting with the conscious agent network. You never have direct access to another agent's internal dynamics. They leave these traces. They influence, through the perception kernel, what's going on in your interface. And your brain renders that." (58:50)

Then he corrects himself, live, and lets the room see the habit he is fighting:

"So your brain, uh, your consciousness, it's hard to kill that habit." (59:06)

Sometimes it makes sense for your interface to render something as agentic dynamics and sometimes it does not, but there is no fundamental difference in kind. Which has a consequence he does not dodge:

"It also means that there's no fundamental difference between a hallucination and a veridical perception in some way. It's like, how do you distinguish between something that's real and something that's not real? And that's a really really difficult one to get your head around." (59:20)

Why correlations still matter (59:32)

Having dissolved the real versus unreal distinction, he immediately rebuilds an empirical foothold, and he does it with a t shirt.

If he and Hoffman both take DMT, and both interact with the conscious agent network in a similar way, there should be correlations between their experiences, in the same way there are in normal waking consciousness. His example is a man in the audience wearing a shirt that says "feed me weird things."

"I can talk about Carl's t shirt that says feed me weird things. And Don would agree. Yes, it says feed me weird things. And those weird things are weird things, right? So just because we have different interfaces doesn't mean there aren't correlations. This doesn't mean we can't look for correlations." (1:00:12)

"And the same thing applies in the DMT state. We can still do science. We can still ask the question, when two people are taking DMT, is there some kind of shared aspect? Is there some kind of correlation that we can test for and that we can analyse?" (1:00:33)

That is the turn from theory to experiment, and Yokoyama takes it.

DMTx: the pharmacology of the extended state (1:00:54)

Gallimore explains why you cannot run any of this on ordinary DMT, and the numbers are the point.

Smoked or injected DMT goes into the brain fast, rises to a very high concentration within seconds, and then within about a minute starts coming down in an exponential decay. You stay in the DMT space for a few minutes. The actual peak, the breakthrough state proper, lasts roughly three to five minutes.

"And the problem with that, of course, I mean it's a blessing, let's face it. For most people it's more than enough." (1:01:44)

But if you want to run an experiment inside the space, spend time interacting with whatever is there, you need to stabilise the brain concentration. That is the whole idea behind DMTx, which he developed with Rick Strassman in 2016 and originally called extended state DMT. The published model is A Model for the Application of Target Controlled Intravenous Infusion for a Prolonged Immersive DMT Psychedelic Experience, in Frontiers in Pharmacology.

The borrowed technique is target controlled infusion, used in anaesthesiology to maintain a stable brain concentration of a short acting anaesthetic during surgery, so the anaesthetist can hold you in the anaesthetised state and adjust it in real time.

"And it occurred to me that DMT has all of the requisite pharmacological properties which would mean that we can basically replace the anaesthetic drug with DMT. That's basically DMTx. We can stabilise the brain DMT levels and induce somebody into the DMT state and hold them there." (1:02:32)

His analogy for what that changes:

"It's like going from scuba diving to deep sea diving. When you've got a line to the boat, you can go a lot deeper and you can spend a lot more time down there." (1:02:58)

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 minutes since administration peak 0 brain DMT concentration DMTx: target controlled infusion holds the plateau a single dose (bolus) peak in seconds, then decay breakthrough ≈ 3 to 5 min infusion stopped at 30 min, acute effects run 40 to 45 min (Imperial College London trial)
Figure 4. Why the protocol exists. A standard dose spikes within seconds and decays exponentially, leaving a breakthrough window of roughly three to five minutes, which is far too short to run a task in. DMTx borrows target controlled infusion from anaesthesiology: a bolus to reach the target concentration, then a constant rate infusion that outpaces the molecule's very fast metabolism. In the Imperial College London trial led by Lisa Luan under Christopher Timmermann, eleven volunteers received up to four dose regimens, the infusion was stopped at thirty minutes, and acute effects ran forty to forty five minutes. Curve shapes are schematic; the timings are the ones stated in the conversation and the published trial.

Experiment class one: the deposited number (1:03:15)

With the state stabilised, you can induce someone into the DMT state and have them perform a task. Gallimore describes two broad classes of experiment, and the first is the simple one: test for shared correlations.

The design he sketches is an information transfer test. Generate a random number. Have one participant take it into the DMT space, isolated from the second participant, and transmit that information into the space, depositing it with an entity. Later, a second participant goes into the DMT space and attempts to retrieve it.

The recruitment criteria are the interesting part.

"There are people, often couples, who claim to be able to interact with the same kind of entity. These are the kind of people we want. We're moving away from simply recruiting people because they've had some experience with psychedelics to actually recruiting individuals with specific skills." (1:04:03)

Experiment class two: send in a topologist (1:04:14)

The second class is harder and needs more specialised people, and it is the one Gallimore is clearly more excited about.

The beings occupy a higher dimensional space with exotic geometries and topologies. Most people go in, come out, and report that it was ridiculous, that it was impossible.

"And that's not very interesting scientifically." (1:04:50)

But if you send in a geometer, a topologist, someone with real mathematical sophistication, they can come back and say: actually that was a nine dimensional manifold. They can map out the symmetry groups.

"Yeah, that'll do." (1:05:07)

He credits the pioneer of this approach by name: Andrés Gómez Emilsson of the Qualia Research Institute, a common collaborator for both groups, and says Hermansson is working with him too. Gómez Emilsson goes into the space mathematically equipped and comes back able to say precisely how the DMT space differs from normal waking consciousness.

"And this is why, right, we're going from a three plus one dimensional space into this entirely different geometric and topological structure. And we can actually map the change." (1:05:52)

The feedback loop (1:06:04)

The point of that mapping is not the map. It is what you can feed back into the formalism.

"And then we can feed this back to the conscious realism model, the trace logic, and actually say, okay, what has DMT done? How has it affected the conscious agent in order to go from this state into this state? It's a feedback process. The experiments feed back into the model and the model then gives us deeper and deeper insights into what DMT is actually doing." (1:06:14)

Alongside the mapping there is a second target: what the beings are doing to the space. They present impossible higher dimensional objects. What, mathematically, are they doing?

Gallimore's summary of the two classes:

"So broadly, I guess you could say we have ontological testing, looking for shared correlations that kind of prove the externality if you like of the space. And then we have the mapping of the structure, the dynamics, the topology, the geometry of the space, and trying to understand how we're getting to the space in terms of the conscious agent dynamics." (1:06:44)

The four colour theorem, done in a fraction of a second (1:07:26)

Yokoyama asks Gallimore to describe the specific operations Gómez Emilsson has reported. This is the most concrete example in the conversation.

Gómez Emilsson told Gallimore he often sees entities colouring surfaces. Which does not sound impressive until you hear the constraint.

The surfaces are mathematically maps: many shapes, fully tessellated. And the entities are colouring them with four colours.

"And that's significant to the mathematicians in the room, because there's something called the four colour theorem, which basically says that it doesn't matter how complicated a map of shapes you have, you can always colour them with four colours so that no two adjacent regions share a colour." (1:07:56)

The theorem is true for any map, including the most complicated ones. Producing an actual valid four colouring is a different matter.

"However, it's extremely difficult cognitively and demanding to do that without some computational algorithm that'll do it for you. Andrés is as smart as they get, and he said it will take him maybe an hour or something to do this kind of thing." (1:08:22)

Against that baseline:

"And yet these entities, they will colour these exquisitely complex surfaces in more than two dimensions, and then wipe it and then do it again and then do it again, as if they're trying to demonstrate, to show us, not that they necessarily expect us to fully understand, but just to show us that they can do things that our brain cannot do." (1:08:52)

A test for capabilities beyond the human brain (1:09:19)

Which Gallimore turns into a criterion.

"Do these entities have abilities, dynamical abilities, geometric abilities, topological abilities, mathematical abilities that go beyond the reach of the human brain? Because that would be another test. That's another beautiful test. If you send in five, six, seven mathematicians and they all say yes, these entities were doing things that I can tell you right now I couldn't do as a mathematician even if you gave me a couple of hours, and they were doing it in a fraction of a second, repeatedly." (1:09:19)

And the reason the specialist matters more than the enthusiast:

"Most people would look at that and go, oh, that was amazing. But when you send a mathematician in there, they can tell you why it was so amazing. And not just amazing, but beyond human capabilities." (1:09:46)

What the experiments do to the theory (1:09:46)

Yokoyama zooms out and asks Hoffman what he expects these experiments to do to the trace logic. Hoffman's answer is the most personally exposed passage of the night.

"All of these experimental results force me to think about things I wouldn't have thought of otherwise and they push me around, which is really good, but you need to be pushed around. And I'm being pushed around in a lot of ways." (1:10:20)

He names the specific pressure. Disincarnate intelligences do not seem restricted the way we are to physical bodies. That, plus related work on telepathy and on non speaking autistic children, forced him in the two months before this recording to go back to the recursive trace logic and ask a question he would not previously have entertained. Could telekinesis even happen? Is that possible in the model?

"And when I looked at it, the mathematics said to me, not only is it possible, it's the norm. And that was what stunned me. I'm still reeling from that. That's only like two or three weeks ago I figured this out." (1:11:15)

The nose argument (1:11:37)

Then he gives the argument for it, and it is almost annoyingly simple.

When he observes through his eyes, every observer window he ever sees has one thing in common. It has a nose in it.

"So you can just ask the mathematical question. Out of all the different possible observer windows that are out there, what percentage of them have a nose in it? 0%. It's just that simple." (1:12:05)

That is a measure zero argument, the same shape as his published result about evolution and perception. Within the space of all possible observer windows, the ones constrained by a body, by a face, by a particular sensory apparatus, are a vanishing subset.

"And when I realized it, I mean it's not deep. It's in your face that embodiment is the trivial case." (1:12:21)

Losing sleep over your own mathematics (1:12:31)

He does not present this as a triumph. He presents it as a problem he cannot get rid of.

"I've only had like two months to sort of adjust to this. But you got to follow the math. So it's actually an emo, it, I lose sleep at night over this stuff. There's either something wrong with my math or there's something wrong with my assumptions about this stuff, and the math looks good. It's so simple." (1:12:37)

The swami who scored zero (1:13:00)

And then, immediately, he tells the story that shows the other half of his temperament. He wants it on record that being open is not the same as being credulous.

Twenty five years ago, a swami came to his lab, brought by one of Hoffman's graduate students who was a follower. The swami claimed all sorts of powers and had published a book of his own experiments.

Hoffman read the experiments.

"Actually his experiments were poor, and I realized you could drive a truck through them, and there were just holes everywhere." (1:13:20)

He decided it would be good for the graduate student to see this properly. So he walked her through every design, showed her where the holes were, and had her fix them. Then he brought the swami back to redo his experiments the right way. Hoffman left the building himself, to control for the experimenter effect, what he calls the disbeliever effect. The student ran the trials.

"And we didn't have to do any statistics. He showed no ability on any trial." (1:13:57)

He has left it there for twenty five years. And then he draws exactly the right conclusion from it, no more and no less:

"I mean, I tested a swami who's a big deal, thousands of followers, hundreds of tapes, and my experiment said zero, absolutely zero. But that's just one swami. That doesn't mean that this is not true. It just means that that swami on that day could not do it." (1:14:07)

The fine line (1:14:20)

He states the working rule that comes out of both halves.

"So I'm very very hard nosed about the experiments, but then when I get clean data, then I get pushed around and my theory gets pushed around and I as a scientist get pushed around. You have to be really hard nosed so that you don't get pulled into stuff that's nonsense, and you can't be so hard nosed that you miss the stuff that's real. And that's the fine line that I'm walking." (1:14:26)

A mindsight class, and the one white raven (1:14:48)

He mentions, almost in passing, that he is currently taking a mindsight class himself, to see what it is like and what people claim to be able to do with blindfolds on. In normal scientific terms, he says, seeing with the eyes covered is simply not possible. When he looks at the mathematics, it says it is possible.

Then the epistemics, cleanly stated:

"Which doesn't mean that everybody who claims that they're doing it is doing it. My guess is that 99% of them are not doing it. But if there's 1% that are doing it, I've got to understand that 1%." (1:15:25)

"All you need to prove that not all ravens are black is one white raven. That's all you need. And there may be many claims of white ravens that are false, but all you need is one true claim. So that's my attitude. Most of it will probably be debunked, but if one piece is not debunked, then I have to change my theory." (1:15:38)

Gallimore's closing: the most democratic psychedelic (1:16:12)

Yokoyama asks Gallimore for closing remarks on the broader implications, and Gallimore reaches for the thing that makes DMT different from every other frontier in science: availability.

"The implications of Don's work and of DMT are hard to overstate." (1:16:26)

The claim he says he has been making for years is not only that there are intelligent, conscious beings within reality we are normally unaware of, but that we can access them at will using one of the simplest alkaloids on the planet. N,N dimethyltryptamine is ubiquitous and plant derived.

"The most common and I would say the most democratic of all psychedelic drugs. It's everywhere. On pretty much every continent you could find a plant that contains reasonable levels of DMT." (1:17:08)

An apology to the shamans (1:17:35)

And then he closes on the point Yokoyama opened with, which gives the whole event a frame.

Not only are they there, but we can interact with them, communicate with them, establish relationships with them, exactly as shamans and indigenous peoples have been doing for thousands of years while we told them they were deluding themselves, that they were primitive, that it was utter nonsense.

"And now people like myself and Don are actually saying maybe we were a bit too quick to dismiss these experiences, and perhaps they have been interacting with beings that are normally imperceptible for thousands of years. And we're kind of, as scientists in the Western world, just about starting to catch up, and to be able to say actually you've been vindicated. And we're sorry about that." (1:17:44)

The room laughs. It is not entirely a joke.

Question one: how do you tell an agent from a sub agent (1:18:32)

The first audience question is the sharpest challenge of the night, and neither speaker tries to slip it.

The questioner accepts the proposed standard, that an entity performing non trivial mathematical operations in implausibly short time is evidence of an ontologically distinct agent, and then attacks the comparison class. The comparison is being made to a whole person. But sub agentic systems inside the questioner already do exactly this kind of thing.

"It would take me a non trivial amount of time to do a complex Fourier transform. It might take me a non trivial amount of time to do certain kinds of rotation, to do the MNIST labeling problem that's done by neural networks. And yet sub agentic systems of myself, such as my auditory cortex, in fact even just the hair cells before I even get to the auditory cortex, can do fast Fourier transforms very quickly, on the order of milliseconds, and can do labeling problems. You can model a single cortical microcolumn, it can do the labeling problem, and we have millions of those." (1:19:27)

"So comparing what I can do as the hyper agent to what the sub agentic part can do. It's a non trivial computation happening at an ostensibly simple system. So how is that a satisfaction condition for something being an ontologically separate agent at my scale or even higher?" (1:19:54)

Gallimore's answer concedes the force of it rather than deflecting.

"First of all, what we can't say is that you are a single conscious agent. We think of ourselves as a single conscious agent. Don would say there's all these sub agents, and we are not ontologically distinct from other agents. So you enter this weird territory where we're used to living in a world where we can say this is the self, this is the other. We can make this clear distinction. And once you get into conscious realism, all of that boundary starts to blur." (1:20:26)

Which is why, he says, the paper is deliberately not built around a single decisive result:

"This is why in the paper we make the point that we're not looking for one single mic drop experiment that finally proves that machine elves are real. We're proposing a suite of experiments." (1:21:05)

And then he reframes the programme's actual goal, which is a notable softening from the title of the event:

"I think we're almost getting away from, are they real or are they not real. We're simply saying, okay, let's assume that conscious realism is in some sense correct. How does it all fit together? What is DMT doing? Within conscious realism the distinction between the real and the unreal also seems to fall apart, because everything is consciousness, everything is conscious agent. So what does it even mean for it to be a hallucination? That even starts to not make sense." (1:21:31)

"We're not trying to cop out of that question. But ultimately we forget about the real versus non real question. We're trying to say, okay, how does DMT affect how we interact with the conscious agent network? Is it some kind of sub agent that is performing this? Maybe. Do we need to interact with some other agent with more complex Markovian dynamics that can perform it? Maybe. Maybe it's some kind of interaction between all of those things. That's a better question, I think, rather than is it real or is it not real." (1:22:00)

The questioner offers a refinement: maybe it is some kind of hierarchy collapse, where you can interact with hyper agents above you and sub agents at the same scale.

Hoffman then adds the test that he thinks would move the field, and it is the cleanest experimental statement in the entire conversation:

"You might also think, is the DMT space a communication channel? So could I put one person into the DMT space, have them say something in the space, have someone in our channel, our spacetime channel, have no communication, but they get it through the DMT? That would then show that there's some real communication information in that channel that's outside of spacetime. That would, I think, get most scientists at least to pay attention." (1:22:44)

Question two: the asymptotic zero and the moment of observation (1:23:09)

The second questioner opens by telling Hoffman he was the first scientist she ever emailed when she started her own work, which makes it a full circle moment for her. Then she asks a genuinely technical question in two parts.

The first part is about the interface theory claim that the probability we perceive reality as it is equals zero. She grants the asymptotic nature of it, that approaching zero means zero in mathematics. But for functional reasons, computation differs from mathematics: something has to be computed in finite time. So what is the moment of translation between what the logic gates are doing and the folder appearing brown rather than green?

Hoffman first checks he has the question right, and clarifies which claim she means. He notes that this particular result is separate work from the DMT collaboration.

"So I have some different work that's completely unrelated to what we're talking about here, about evolution. I've worked on evolution by natural selection with Chetan Prakash and others, and shown that evolution entails that the probability is zero that any organism has ever been shaped by evolution to see any aspect of reality as it is. That's the claim that we've published mathematically." (1:25:38)

The self refutation objection (1:25:27)

He then handles the standard objection to that result at length, and this is the most quotable philosophy of science in the conversation.

The objection: that result is self refuting. Darwin's theory says the world is a physical world made of physical organisms competing for physical resources in space and time. If you use the mathematics of Darwin's theory to show that Darwin's basic assumptions are not true, you have shot yourself in the foot logically and should go learn some basic science.

"That whole objection actually misunderstands the nature of science. We never assume in science that our assumptions are true. We only assume that they're consistent." (1:26:38)

"We know that our assumptions can never be the final word because we never explain our assumptions. We assume them. So someone can always try to build a deeper theory which tries to explain the assumptions that you started with. So science has infinite job security in principle, because every theory never explains its assumptions." (1:26:53)

Great theories find their own failure conditions (1:27:20)

He then grades theories by a criterion worth stealing.

"Every scientific theory has a limited scope. A good theory gives you the tools to explore its scope. A great theory, like Einstein together with quantum theory, gives you the tools to find the limits of the assumptions that started the theory." (1:27:24)

The worked example: general relativity and quantum field theory both assume space and time as their foundation, and then come back and tell you, on their own assumptions, that those assumptions fail at 10 to the minus 33 centimetres and 10 to the minus 43 seconds. The Planck scale.

"Those are great theories that start with assumptions and then go back and show you that those assumptions have a failure and then they point you to a deeper frame." (1:28:08)

And his claim about Darwin is exactly parallel. Darwin's theory with evolutionary game theory is not just a good theory, it is a great theory, because it gives you the tools that come back and show that the fundamental assumptions of space, time and physical objects fail at a certain place. He does not go into the technical details of why, but he insists no foot shooting is required.

"It's amazing. Brilliant philosophers have published in top level journals attacks on this misunderstanding. They say if you have a scientific theory, you're assuming that the assumptions are true. You don't know your science. Scientists do not assume that their assumptions are true. We know that they're not. We know that at best they're consistent, and we're going to try to find out the failure conditions." (1:28:47)

Non Boolean logic, Boolean sublogics, and Leibniz (1:29:16)

The questioner presses on the part she actually wanted: are the kernels, and their arrangement relative to one another, what gives rise to a particular moment of consciousness versus any other?

Hoffman's answer introduces a structural feature of the trace logic that had not come up yet, and it does real work.

"The trace logic is a non Boolean logic. Okay. So it's locally Boolean. If I take one matrix that's a billion by a billion and I look at all the subtraces of it, all those subtraces form a Boolean sublogic." (1:29:36)

In that Boolean case, as the state moves around on the big logic, there is a coordination of how it moves around in every one of the traces. And then he makes the historical connection explicit:

"This is sort of like Leibniz's pre established harmony idea in the Monadology. All these monads, which are observers, and Leibniz said we need these monads and we also need a pre established harmony. I'm saying these observer windows are the monads, and the trace logic is the pre established harmony that Leibniz was looking for." (1:30:15)

Why scientists can compare data at all (1:31:05)

That structure is also, on Hoffman's account, the reason objectivity is possible.

"This is also going to be the foundation for why we can have communication between scientists, how our observations can match, because on a Boolean sublogic you have meets. And so where you and I meet on the Boolean sublogic we can exchange data as scientists and actually get comparison of data. So we get the objectivity of science." (1:30:44)

But the trace logic is non Boolean more generally, which has a consequence he clearly finds uncomfortable and says out loud:

"Our science is fine for our part of the trace logic. It's not going to be fine for experiences in other parts of the trace logic, because what we experience here has a different structure from what's outside in different parts. So what this means is that it's far more complicated than I had ever imagined. My math always slaps me in the face." (1:31:12)

Gallimore adds a correction to the question's framing that lands well:

"I think when you imply instantaneous, you're kind of implying time, but time is part of the headset. So it's something that we need to derive from the trace logic itself." (1:31:38)

Question three: NDEs, remote viewers, and designing for serendipity (1:31:33)

The last question goes to Gallimore. The questioner picks up on the recruitment point, referencing the passage in Death by Astonishment about sending linguists into DMTx to analyse what the entities are communicating. His question: how do you think beyond the quantitative and the "is this an alternate space" tests, and design experiments that allow for serendipity? He points at two existing research traditions: near death experience research at the University of Virginia, and the remote viewing work at Stanford Research Institute, both of which study people who appear to be more connected than average.

Gallimore's answer is his rainforest analogy, which is the best image in the conversation.

"You have this uncharted region of virgin rainforest and you want to understand it, and you don't just send in random people because they've got a raincoat. You send in geologists and botanists and hydrologists and all of these types of people, and they're all charged with going in and extracting, retrieving and analysing certain types of information. And I think the DMT space should be approached in the same way." (1:34:00)

With one qualification about the difference:

"The difference from the rainforest is that we're dealing with something that is far, far stranger and vaster and much more difficult to grapple with intellectually, cognitively, and experientially." (1:34:38)

Decoding the symbols (1:34:31)

So the teams he imagines are interdisciplinary by design. People who have worked on near death experiences. People trained in ancient symbolism, who can look at the strange symbols that often appear in the DMT state and coat surfaces there, and ask whether they constitute a language.

"Can we analyse it? Can we say, oh, this is not just random digits, but actually contains information? We have the tools now. Linguists have the tools to mathematically analyse these symbols and say actually this is not just the brain generating symbols randomly, but actually there is something there. There's a message there perhaps. Can we decode that message?" (1:35:26)

"We're not just looking for people to pull out the same number or the same code word. We're looking for people from all these different disciplines to all go with specific tasks." (1:36:01)

DMTx validated, and subject zero (1:36:01)

Then the practical status report, and a person in the room.

"And with the DMTx technology that was validated now at Imperial College London, we have subject zero, Carl Smith here, the first person to undergo DMTx at Imperial College London and the only one to finish all five doses." (1:36:14)

The room applauds. The published Imperial work is Psychological and physiological effects of extended DMT, led by Lisa Luan under Christopher Timmermann, with eleven volunteers, up to four dose regimens each, infusion stopped at thirty minutes and acute effects lasting roughly forty to forty five minutes.

"So we have this amazing tool, DMTx, if I may say so myself, that has been validated now, and we're dipping our toes in the water. And soon we're going to be diving down. We'll have the line to the boat and we're going to be exploring territory and finding beings that we've never seen before and communicating with them and trying to learn from them." (1:36:44)

Interdimensional citizens (1:36:59)

And the aspiration he closes on:

"We effectively become not just an interdimensional species or galactic citizens, but interdimensional citizens who are routinely interacting with normally imperceptible beings and forming relationships with them. That's going to be a remarkable time to be alive." (1:37:09)

The money (1:37:29)

Yokoyama asks Gallimore to say something about funding, and Gallimore does not dress it up.

"So I was just talking about research, of course, but all research unfortunately takes money and often quite a lot of it. We don't have much money." (1:37:44)

He credits Gaspard, present in the audience, and the Trace Institute team for building the institute and the website, and points people to traceinstitute.org twice, spelling out that it is Trace Institute, not "the trace". Then he points to Noonautics, the non profit he co directs, which is spearheading research programmes connected to psychedelics and DMT in particular.

"So anyone who wants to support and be on the ground floor level of what could be completely transcendentally transformative research, speak to us." (1:39:12)

Closing, and Eleusis (1:39:27)

Yokoyama thanks the live and online audience, the Trace Institute and Noonautics, and the two speakers. Hoffman notes he has a flight to Vegas that afternoon and asks people not to monopolise him at the meet and greet, since he has fifteen minutes rather than thirty.

Gallimore's last words are a plug, and he is upfront about it. For anyone who wants to undergo DMTx, there is a research institute and retreat centre in the Caribbean called Eleusis, on the island of Bequia in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, where you can book a multi day retreat with multiple fully medically supervised sessions.

The two frameworks, side by side

Both men are describing the same object with different tools. This is the mapping, drawn from what each says in the conversation.

Donald Hoffman · conscious realism and trace logicAndrew Gallimore · neuropharmacology and brain dynamics
Starting questionAre people just machines? Then: what is an observer, formally?How does one small molecule produce that experience?
Primary instrumentMathematics. Markov chains, traces, a non Boolean logic on all observers.Pharmacology and brain dynamics. Receptors, kinetics, state spaces.
Name for the state spaceExperience spaceWorld space
Name for where we liveConsensus reality space, a restricted region of the experience spaceConsensus reality space, an attractor basin in the world space
What sets the restrictionThe qualia kernel, a Markov kernel on the experience spaceNeural connectivity and brain dynamics
Name for the beingsConscious agents. Unbounded in number, mostly imperceptible.Intelligent agents. Deliberately neutral, chosen over spirits or aliens.
What DMT would be doingChanging a parameter in the headset. Possibly the dimension count. Possibly raising render fidelity.Perturbing the brain out of the basin, into a region with different dynamics.
Where the two lock togetherThe perception kernel. The qualia kernel factors into decision, action and perception; the perception kernel sets which agents an observer can perceive at all. Change the region, change the kernel, change what is perceptible.
What each brought that the other lackedA mechanism for the alternate information source, at the level of agents rather than the level of matter.A molecule, a protocol, and a phenomenology detailed enough to test predictions against.
Prior statusInterface theory and the fitness beats truth theorem are published, peer reviewed and contested. Trace logic is new and mostly unproven.DMTx is published and now clinically validated at Imperial. The entity ontology is not.
Where they still differHoffman has never taken it. His confidence is entirely downstream of mathematics he can check.Gallimore has been there. His confidence starts in phenomenology and went looking for a formalism.
## Key takeaways

Notable quotes

"What's remarkable is we do not have a generally accepted model of observation in science right now. It's a really remarkable fact." · Hoffman (4:57)

"But whether you believe in consciousness or not, the goal of having a mathematical model of observers and booting up science with that model is critical for anybody who believes or doesn't believe in consciousness." · Hoffman (6:47)

"Hallucinatory social events is my favourite term for entity interactions. I always say if that's a social event, I'd like to see the kind of parties that neuroscientists frequent." · Gallimore (11:40)

"I was reading Don Hoffman's work when you were at your mother's teat." · Gallimore, on being told he should look into Hoffman (13:04)

"I still remember the moment where I realized it and I had to sit down. It was just so stunning to me. So I was not trying to get to this point of view. I was just trying to understand visual perception." · Hoffman, on the late 1980s result (17:10)

"So I'm not like an advocate of this stuff. I'm reluctantly being pushed to it by the mathematics. But I want to go wherever the mathematics tells me to go." · Hoffman (18:12)

"If you want to see agents, then smoke some DMT because you're going to see some agents." · Gallimore (18:44)

"Anytime you see in three dimensions you're hallucinating the third dimension." · Hoffman (20:24)

"We only have access to this very very thin, infinitesimally thin slice of this conscious agent network." · Gallimore (22:48)

"We actually have one of the dumbest headsets you could possibly have and the most restrictive." · Hoffman (27:53)

"So I'm a neuroscientist and I'm telling you, I don't have any neurons right now. If you looked, you would see neurons, but that's because you rendered the neurons." · Hoffman (28:47)

"Also I will say that Don is very very good at Grand Theft Auto. Absolutely ruthless. It's a blood bath." · Gallimore (31:24)

"So conscious agents that were completely imperceptible, that evolution had filtered out, suddenly become perceptible." · Gallimore (37:44)

"That's DMT. And that basically, for want of a better term, fell out of the mathematics." · Gallimore (39:19)

"I agree that it fits like a glove to the phenomenology that Andrew's been exploring for many many years. It's truly stunning." · Hoffman (40:51)

"That trace logic is the logic of observation, and it's a logic of minimum surprise." · Hoffman (42:15)

"If everything I do, I'm surprised, then I'm not very bright." · Hoffman, on why zero surprise is a logic of intelligence (43:11)

"Once you know the software of the headset, you can do miracles. If you know the software of Grand Theft Auto, you can turn the wizard's Ferrari into a rocket ship or a donkey." · Hoffman (46:23)

"We're in a little tiny sandbox, but the mathematics is pointing to a real world that's much much bigger. With DMT we may actually be able to go there experientially. With the mathematics we can go there scientifically." · Hoffman (47:19)

"As if they're teaching a toddler squares and triangles. Because in their world, it's as simple as that." · Gallimore, on the entities showing impossible objects (48:52)

"The distinction we make between living and non living is not principled. It's an artifact of the limitations of our headset." · Hoffman (55:52)

"Does that mean that I'm dealing with something that's stupid? No. It means that my headset gave up." · Hoffman, on looking at a rock (56:44)

"Is my headset being upgraded so that the icons that are rendering are giving me genuine access to consciousness outside, or am I just screwing up the render? That's the real question." · Hoffman (57:47)

"It's like going from scuba diving to deep sea diving. When you've got a line to the boat, you can go a lot deeper and you can spend a lot more time down there." · Gallimore, on DMTx (1:02:58)

"Most people would look at that and go, oh, that was amazing. But when you send a mathematician in there, they can tell you why it was so amazing." · Gallimore (1:09:46)

"And when I looked at it, the mathematics said to me, not only is it possible, it's the norm. And that was what stunned me. I'm still reeling from that." · Hoffman, on telekinesis in the model (1:11:15)

"Out of all the different possible observer windows that are out there, what percentage of them have a nose in it? 0%. It's just that simple." · Hoffman (1:12:05)

"And we didn't have to do any statistics. He showed no ability on any trial." · Hoffman, on the swami (1:13:57)

"You have to be really hard nosed so that you don't get pulled into stuff that's nonsense, and you can't be so hard nosed that you miss the stuff that's real. And that's the fine line that I'm walking." · Hoffman (1:14:26)

"All you need to prove that not all ravens are black is one white raven." · Hoffman (1:15:38)

"And now people like myself and Don are actually saying maybe we were a bit too quick to dismiss these experiences. And we're sorry about that." · Gallimore, on indigenous practice (1:17:44)

"We're not looking for one single mic drop experiment that finally proves that machine elves are real. We're proposing a suite of experiments." · Gallimore (1:21:05)

"Scientists do not assume that their assumptions are true. We know that they're not. We know that at best they're consistent, and we're going to try to find out the failure conditions." · Hoffman (1:28:47)

"I'm saying these observer windows are the monads, and the trace logic is the pre established harmony that Leibniz was looking for." · Hoffman (1:30:15)

"My math always slaps me in the face." · Hoffman (1:31:12)

"You don't just send in random people because they've got a raincoat. You send in geologists and botanists and hydrologists." · Gallimore, on who to send into the DMT space (1:34:00)

Resources mentioned

The people in the room

The paper and the organisations

Books

Papers and formal results referenced

People and groups named

Related pages on this site

Where it stands

This is the section the conversation itself does not have, and it belongs at the end rather than the front.

What is established, uncontroversially. DMT is a real and well characterised tryptamine with a very short duration of action, and the extended state protocol is real medicine now: the target controlled infusion model was published in Frontiers in Pharmacology in 2016 and the clinical validation ran at Imperial College London and is published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology. Entity encounters are a robust and heavily replicated feature of the phenomenology, not a fringe report. Hoffman's interface theory of perception and the fitness beats truth theorem are published, peer reviewed, mathematically explicit and vigorously contested in the ordinary way that live results are. Markov chains and traces are textbook mathematics, and Hoffman is scrupulous about saying so.

What is a research programme rather than a result. The trace logic itself is the new part, and by Hoffman's own account the physics has not been derived yet. He says the relativity connection is currently an outline in the structure, and he sets a two year target to produce Minkowski space, curved spacetime and quantum field theory exactly. Until that lands, the claim that spacetime physics falls out of a logic of observers is a promissory note from someone with a track record, not a demonstration. The recursive trace logic result that "discarnate cognition is the norm" was, at the time of recording, three months old and had not been through review.

What is explicitly a hypothesis with a proposed test. The core claim, that DMT changes the perception kernel and thereby makes normally imperceptible conscious agents perceptible, is offered as a framework that generates predictions, and the preprint is honest about that framing. No experiment in the two classes described has been run and reported. The shared correlation test in particular is a well understood design, close in shape to decades of parapsychology experiments, and it will live or die on the usual things: preregistration, isolation between subjects, blinding, sample size, and independent replication. Hoffman's swami story shows he knows exactly how those designs fail, which is a point in his favour.

Where the honest tension sits. The audience member's question about sub agents is not answered, and Gallimore says as much. If a hard computation performed quickly is the criterion, your own auditory periphery already meets it, and the framework itself has dissolved the boundary that would let you distinguish a separate agent from a sub agent of yourself. Gallimore's response is to retreat from the ontological question toward a modelling question, which is intellectually honest but does concede that the title of the event outruns the paper. The same softening happens with "real versus unreal": inside conscious realism the distinction genuinely does become hard to state, which is elegant if you accept the framework and unsatisfying if you were hoping the framework would settle the original question.

What would actually move this. Hoffman names it himself at 1:22:41, and it is the sharpest thing said all night. Put one subject in the DMT space, have them deposit information there, allow no ordinary channel, and have a second subject retrieve it. A clean, replicated positive result on that would be a discovery in physics as much as in pharmacology. A clean null would not refute conscious realism, since the theory survives either way, but it would drain most of the force from the entity claim. Both men appear to know this, and to Gallimore's credit he keeps saying the goal is a suite of experiments rather than one decisive stroke, which is what an honest programme looks like from the inside and also what an unfalsifiable one looks like from the outside. The next two years, and the promised derivation of spacetime, are what will tell you which of those it is.

Full transcript
Is it [applause] >> I'd like to first start by thanking the organizers of this event, the Trace Institute and the Noonautics Research Organization as well and all the leadership and the uh the production teams involved in that and I'd like to thank all of you as well as the the online audience as well. So I'm going to start with a little um intro to uh to get the topic going. So in the history of humankind um shamans of indigenous cultures have uh used have accessed to altered states of reality with the help of uh endogenous substances natural substances and they've been able to explore those spaces and bring back insights uh to their um to their tribes. So more recently science has discovered that a particular molecule NN dimethylryptamine or DMT uh is one of the mediators of these uh remarkable experiences and a new generation of um explorers has been able to go into this this space and to uh to get new insights where they encounter kaleidoscopic uh geometries and intelligent and autonomous entities. Now, modern science says that these are just merely hallucinations that uh you know they're not worthy of our study because they're just chaotic brain brain activities. But a small proportion of scientists are now pushing back saying not so fast. We need to study this and we're going to do it. We should study it with mathematical precision and scientific rigor. And so today uh we're very honored to have two leaders of that movement uh with us to discuss this issue. So uh we are starting here with on the my on the far side Dr. Donald Hoffman who is professor emeritus of UC Irvine and also co-founder and scientific director of the trace institute uh and he's an author uh of the book uh the case against reality. Uh then next to me we have Dr. Andrew Gallamore who is a neuroscientist and computational pharmarmacologist affiliated with the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. Uh Andrew is um also a he's a co- director of Noonautics and he's an author of the book um the death by astonishment. So thank you both for being with us uh today. Right. Okay. So, um we're going to begin the session by maybe I'd like to start with you Don if possible. Uh Don has been developing uh theories of reality and of consciousness um over many years since the dawn of history actually. [laughter] And uh we'd like to to start with your your origin story. So how did you first um um come to this space where you've developed before you developed the theories of conscious realism and interface theory of perception the trace logic and so on. What was the origin that kind of motivated that that journey for you? >> Well for me it started off my dad was a minister in a fundamentalist Christian church and so I got one story about the world on Sundays and then in my science classes I got a completely different story. And so by the time I was in my teens, I decided I needed to figure it out for myself. And so I decided the best way to do that would be to um ask a particular question. And my question was, are we just machines? Are people just machines? Nice clean technical question. And I decided the best way to do that is to study psychology and neuroscience on one side and then study artificial intelligence. And so I ended up at MIT in the AI lab. So I I was working on AI and then also in the brain and cognitive science department there. So I was looking at human neuroscience. So I I was looking at both camps and trying to figure out what could machines do and what could they not do. And it was then trying to get a mathematical model of that that led me to then ask okay what do we really mean by observation and so I began to develop a mathematical model of observation and eventually ended up um being the the notion of conscious agents that we're we're working on now in the in the trace institute. So so I've been working on it for since my teenage years. Yeah. Don, could you say a bit more about the kind of the lack of an observer in the our current models of science and and why that's a problem? Yes, the notion of observer even if you aren't interested in consciousness, the notion of observer is very important in science. All of our data come from observations. Uh the reason why we think science is objective is because different observers compare data and see if they agree. So we have communication between observers. So observation and careful observation is the foundation of science. And what's remarkable is we do not have a generally accepted model of observation in in science right now. It's a really remarkable fact. In Newton's theories, we didn't need one. The observer didn't affect things. In Einstein, we talked about observers because there are clocks and that changes and so forth, but we really didn't get an model of the observer there. And in quantum mechanics, all of a sudden the observer became front and center with the measurement problem which is now a century old and there's no universally accepted solution to it. It's a big big mess. So here we are science our best way to understand the world based on observers has no theory of the observer. And what we're doing right now in science is trying to shoehorn the observer into spaceime. So use some kind of quantum description observers or some kind of physical description of observers or observers emerging from physical systems. But our best science is telling us that spaceime is not fundamental. We have to go outside of spaceime. So already we're going outside of spaceime. The European Research Council has a big 10 million euro initiative about finding structures entirely outside of spaceime. So if we're trying to shoehorn observers into spaceime, we're ignoring what our best science is telling us. And so what the Trace Institute is trying to do is is say, look, let's get a mathematical model of observers, qua observers, not shoehorned into spaceime, and let's go the other way around with our model of observers. Let's see if we can build spaceime and quantum mechanics and relativity theory from observers. And so that's the goal. But whether you believe in consciousness or not, the goal of having a mathematical model of observers and booting up science with that model is critical for anybody who believes or doesn't believe in consciousness. I am thinking about it in terms of conscious terms, but the mathematics doesn't matter. >> Okay. Thank you. Um let's come at this from the other angle. Uh Andrew, uh you've been researching uh DMT for over 20 years. Um what has inspired you on this path? Well, I mean, kind of like Don, I I became interested in altered states of consciousness when I was when I was a teenager, uh, particularly psychedelics. And I learned about this molecule, a friend, I still remember a friend um, one morning when I was at school, I was like 15, 16 years old. He brought this magazine and he said, "I have this um, I think you'll be interested in this mag in this article on the back." And on the back was this photo of this bearded fellow um uh called Terrence McKenna. Um and it was an interview with Terrence McKenna. And one of the later questions um in the interview was you know tell us about your favorite drug. Um and Terrence McKenna started talking about this thing called DMT. Uh which I had no idea what this meant. I went to the public library and I got the answer dimethyl terratholate which is a type of plastic. Um so that was I didn't try to smoke that fortunately. Um but this was you know I'm showing my age a little bit but this was the dawn of the internet. So it wasn't easy. Uh there was only one internet in the school and you had to get a password from a man in a in a white coat um to actually access it. Um, but I did access it. I was the only person in the school, I think, that ever accessed that bloody internet. And I was there all the time, uh, trying to find out as much as I could about this seemingly miraculous molecule called DMT that would apparently transport you from the normal waking world into one that bore no relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world. um and a world that was infinitely more complex and dynamical and strange geometries and topologies and a populated world, a world that was filled with beings with whom you could interact and communicate. Beings that were not human, they were not animal. Uh they were entirely other, entirely alien. Um and this seemed to me just remarkable. It's like if this is true, you know, did I really believe it? Maybe not. Um but I decided at that point I changed I dropped all the subjects I was studying uh and I said okay I need to study this now. I I picked up chemistry and biology and mathematics thought right this is my future now is going to be studying how these molecules interface with the human brain um to generate these remarkable effects on human experience on human consciousness. And so the trajectory if you like of my life since that period like 30 years ago now has been towards trying to understand DMT which I finally was able to experience a few years later thinking that I you know I'd read all the Terrence McKenna books and listened to all of his lectures and I kind of knew what I was getting into or at least I thought I did. Um and I I I I was completely lost. I was at sea. I was completely confounded by this experience. It was, as Terrence McKenna says, it was unenglishable. It was impossible. It was not possible for this experience to have occurred to me. And yet it did. Uh, and I I was I knew, you know, that kind of completely cemented um my trajectory that I wasn't just going to focus on psychedelics, but I was going to focus on DMT. I really wanted to understand how this molecule um achieved its effects and whether we really are interacting with some kind of intelligent other to give it the most neutral term. Intelligent agent is a term I used in more recent years and I I don't think I'm there in in being able to explain DMT but I think I've made some progress in really in telling people what DMT is not. Most of my time is trying to convince people, you know, as Charles said, you know, this is not mere hallucination. This is not simply the brain on drugs, man. Uh this is not uh merely neural noise or, you know, choose your term. You know, the the the neuroscientists will pick uh what was that one I heard before? Elucary social events uh is my favorite term for entity interactions. Um, you know, [laughter] I always say if uh if that's a social event, I'd like to see the kind of parties that neuroscientists frequent. Um, because they're not quite like the social events I'm familiar with. Um um and I I still think that DMT represents a true mystery. Um I think it is something that science cannot easily explain. Um and I think we do need to take seriously as we are doing today. I think um uh the possibility that we are indeed interacting with some kind of intelligent agent, some kind of uh conscious agent and so here we are. >> Thank you Andrew. So on one hand we have a cognitive scientist and mathematician. On the other hand we have a pharmacologist and neurobiologist. It's not an obvious or intuitive kind of uh you know connection between those fields those threads of of research. Uh, I'd like to ask this to both of you. Uh, but how did you first engage and learn about each other's work? Um, and and what did it inspire or make you think of? Uh, either of you can >> Well, I'm going to I'm going to start because, you know, I've Don has been around a lot longer than me. Well, slightly longer. Um, [laughter] and and people always say to me, you have been for a long time, you know, have you ever heard of Don Donald Hoffman? think his work would really, you know, resonate with yours. And I have to say to him, I was I was reading Don Hoffman's work, you know, when you were at your mother's te. Um, I was, you know, I I've been uh inspired by Don's work and have referenced Don's work throughout my work from from my earliest writings on DMT. um 15 16 years ago I was referencing Don's work because although I people often accuse me of being a materialist or even a reductionist I don't think people quite understand what that word means when they accuse me of that there's nothing about what I say that is reductionist um but actually at heart I am an idealist you know I believe that consciousness is fundamental I believe the placing the material at the ground of reality assuming the onlogical primacy if you like of the material uh was a grave grand the grandest of missteps in the history of science and trying to boot up to use Dawn's terminology to kind of boot up consciousness uh from the material um has failed um and we've scientists have had literally centuries to make it work uh and yet I don't even see any scientists who have an idea how that problem might be solved. And many are now kind of throwing their hands up and copying out. I saw a post by um I think it was Steven Pinker or Michael Shurmer recently who said oh you know consciousness is ultimately unknowable. It's like what what do we do with that then? You know it's like oh we can't explain it. uh and none of them ever questioned and thought well maybe this assumption that maybe maybe the one thing that we cannot deny our own subjective consciousness we can deny everything else right daycart showed that we can deny the material we can deny everything we can't deny our own subjective consciousness maybe that is fundamental maybe it's not this uh material world that appears within consciousness that is fundamental um but of course they can't accept that they're too um invested in that position. Um so whilst I do spend you know I work at the kind of the neural level I work kind of at the brain level most of the time and I avoid the question of consciousness simply because I can get my teeth into the mechanics of of the brain. Uh but ultimately, you know, I've always felt that consciousness is fundamental and that in some way this thing we call the brain, this thing we call the physical world, this thing we call reality is fundamentally consciousness. But the problem was until now uh is that I didn't really trying to understand the mechanics of that. What I think Don's work does now is sh says okay reality is not just consciousness and that's it but actually we can do things with that we can describe um the mathematics we can describe the mechanics and the dynamics we can actually do real science with that basic premise am I right Don >> Absol absolutely and my my path has been very very different it's for for me I I've never even smoked a cigarette. So, I'm I'm just completely different kind of person, but I >> have some nicotine here. >> So, I I was just looking trying to understand mathematically what is the best model that I could have of of human perception. And I still remember in the late 80s when the mathematics told me that everything I'm seeing, I'm making it up. I'm creating what I see. And I I I didn't come into it expecting that answer. And when I looked at the mathematics that we were developing, this is with Chayon Pash and and Bruce Bennett, two great mathematicians. When I really understood what the math was saying, I still remember the moment where I realized it and I had to sit down. It was just so stunning to me. So I was not trying to get to this point of view. I was just trying to understand visual perception. And when that came out, it stunned me. Then when it came out later on with with what we're doing now, the recursive trace logic and the work with Andrew, um, again, I have no experience in this space. So, you know, I read the I can read the descriptions, I can try to imagine what it's like with disembodied cognitions and so forth, but just in the now in the last three months, studying the mathematics of the recursive trace logic has again I've gotten a slap in the face. And the mathematics tells me that disembodied cognition is the norm and the kinds of embodied cognition that we have is the training wheels version of what's possible. And again, I'm still I just realized that in the last few weeks. So I'm I'm still reeling. So I'm not like an advocate of this stuff. I'm I'm reluctant reluctantly being pushed to it by the mathematics. But I want to go where wherever the mathematics tells me to go. And with agents like this, again, I'm I'm a complete hard-nosed science scientist. If they're real, we can do hard-nosed experiments and show it. And if they're not real, we'll find that out as well. So, for me, it's just follow the math, follow careful experiments, and we'll see where it leads. >> Yeah. I think the um Don's the fundamental um structure within Don's conscious realism is the conscious agent. Um and I from the perspective of DMT, you know, if you want to see agents, then smoke some DMT because you're going to see some agents, right? Um uh and I've been calling them intelligent agents for a while. to give the most neutral term. I I try to avoid things like spirits or gods or aliens as much as possible and just refer in the most neutral um way possible, which I described as intelligent agents that seem to be conscious. And so straight away before you even get to the mathematics, uh you can see where this Dong's ideas and and and my ideas start to uh to in intersect. And as it turns out, as we'll get to, they inter intersected much the intersection was much bigger than I could have anticipated. Thank you. Uh Don, from your perspective, uh when you first connected with Andrew, um how what what did you think about the potential of uh applying the trace logic and and other models to the DMT space? >> It seemed to me like this there was a lot of potential. here was a real empirical direction we could pursue. And the reports are of people experiencing things not just in three dimensions but in more dimensions four or five dimensions even even more people saying there are way too many dimensions and you know what what do you do with that but I've been studying how do we one of the things I I I've worked on in in normal human vision is how we take a two-dimensional image at the eye your retina is got only two dimensions it's a it's essentially a flat surface that's slightly curved so anytime you see in three dimensions you're hol hallucinating the third dimension. So right now the depth that you see is not directly there at your eye. The eye has a flat image. You're projecting out a 3D model. And so many of the papers I've worked on with mathematicians is how do we mathematically take a two-dimensional image or a sequence of images and accurately create a three-dimensional representation of the world? Well, so we we can do that and it matches human vision quite well. But then you can ask the same question. Could you do that and go to four dimensions or five dimensions? And so a friend of mine, Mike Desura, has has worked on this and the answer is yes. And he's then been doing experiments with people in four-dimensional virtual worlds and seeing if we could get four-dimensional perceptions and so forth. And he seems to have some evidence that that's possible that we could sort of train ourselves up. So Andrew stuff then starts to make sense to me that okay, um, these people are going in not just four dimensions. Who knows? DMT might be taking you into 50 dimensions. I don't know what it is. And colors that we've never seen before and other exotic experiences that we've never had before. And again, I'm I'm the reluctant scientist who's being forced kicking and screaming by the math to say yes, we can go here. So, we better I better go here because I would be a bad scientist if I didn't at least explore. And Andrew, on your side, uh given the background with DMT phenomenology, um h how did Dawn's theories um help inspire you or or what specifically were you hoping to achieve um by collaborating? >> Well, there's a couple of things. I mean when I so when Don started talking about the trace logic kind of recently as I said I've been following his work for many years but there was something he said during one of the first interviews I saw him with um and he said that it's it's it's implicit within this model within this trace logic model that there are effectively an unbounded right a practically possibly infinite number of conscious agent that uh reality is composed of. Reality is composed of and only of conscious agents that interact with each other. And there are there's an unbounded number of these most the vast vast majority of which we have are imperceptible to us. Uh and they're not only imperceptible but they are un literally unimaginable to us. um we only have access to this very very thin infinite decimally basically thin slice of this conscious agent network that we interact with. Um, and so that naturally makes you think, um, well, when I take DMT or when someone takes DMT, they start seeing beings that are unfathomably strange, that are not just exotic, uh, or unusual, uh, but that are impossible, uh, that have no relationship, no, there's no reference in the normal waking world for these kind of quite obviously agentic beings, incredibly strange beings that seem to uh occupy and manipulate an entirely different um kind of experiential manifold, shall we say? They don't occupy uh this world. They seem to live within and manipulate an entirely different type of world. Uh and so that initially I was thinking well that it sounds like there's something there. Maybe what DMT is doing is is somehow, you know, this was just intuitive. It was this way before we actually started getting into the mathematics, before I even started working with Don. Um um it made sense that perhaps DMT was allowing us um to interact in some way uh in new ways with the conscious agent network opening up uh uh new modes of interaction because I've I had a problem you know in in my previous work I kind of I hope um was able to kind of dispel the idea that this could be simply the DMT experience could be simply expl explained away as hallucination. And I always felt and I've always said that it seems like the the DMT is gating access to some alternate source of information. Um, I don't think you're going anywhere as as such under the influence of DMT. But there is some change in your world that allows you to receive um you might call it an alternate source of sensory inputs um that allowed your brain to effectively construct this alternate reality within which these beings were um that were populated by these beings. But the problem I had is I had no way to really explain that within the physicalist model. Um what is this alternate source of sensory information? Where is it coming from? You know, is it coming from another world, another dimension? I didn't have the mechanics. There's no mechanics really. Um some people try to invoke maybe it's going at the quantum level, maybe it's subquantum, something like this. But really there's no simple way to explain within the physicalist model how that information is is gated into the brain. But what Dong's model does is allows you to get to the very very ground of reality itself. Uh and and actually look at how do these conscious agents interact? How do how does one conscious agent perceive another conscious agent? Uh what is the mechanism of that uh perceptual process? And once you start looking at it from that perspective, then as as we will get to, it all falls into place um in in ways that I couldn't have uh imagined and that it was actually quite um uh shocking to me. Yeah, thank you Andrew. Um so let's get a little bit deeper into the math. Um and I'd like Don to to take us there. uh Don the uh interface theory of perception the trace logic and the recursive trace logic all play sort of fundamental roles in this uh this project but particularly um I'd like to ask uh if you could help define us the the notion of the interface and the notion of a trace which seem to be uh relevant you know to this discussion here um could you talk a bit about those um concepts and how they might apply to the DMT space >> right So most of us think of spacetime as the fundamental reality and from within this point of view spaceime is just a virtual reality headset. So that's that's the difference. We're thinking about spacetime is not an objective reality. It's a virtual reality headset. And what's really going on is there are a bunch of conscious agents interacting. There's an infinite number of them as Andrew was saying. And so we have to sort of tame that infinity. How do we interact with an infinite number of agents? Well, you sort of dumb things down. And that's what our space-time headset is. It's a way of interacting with other agents without getting overwhelmed. And so, when you start looking at the mathematics of how many kinds of headsets could there be and how could they vary and so forth, you realize there's a whole range of headsets that could possibly be out there. And ours is when you look at the the possibilities, ours is one of the more trivial. We we actually have one of the dumbest headsets you could possibly have and and and the most restrictive and but then you can start to ask, okay, so what are these other possibilities and how could we go from our headset to other headsets that are a little bit more open and so forth and we can go at this in a couple ways with the mathematics trying to actually abstractly think about how to build them. Also the neuroscience, we can actually look at how the brain works. But from this point of view, what we're doing in neuroscience now is we're not thinking of the brain as creating what we see. The brain is just another symbol in the headset. So, right, symbols in headsets only exist when you render them. So, if I'm in in a VR game and I'm playing Grand Theft Auto, and I see a car, a Ferrari, the Ferrari is not real. It's only there when I see it. And when as soon as I look away, the Ferrari is gone. So, I'm a neuroscientist and I'm telling you, I don't have any neurons right now. If you looked, you would see neurons, but that's because you rendered the neurons. I don't have neurons right now. So, what's going on is we have to look at the brain as our render on the fly of how the headset is built. We have to take neuroscience and reverse engineer it. So, the the the brain is our best representation is the headset representation of how the headset itself is engineered. So that's why I really want to study the neuroscience. It's it's the best clue we have as to how our headset is engineered. But one thing I expect to happen is that we'll see that there are certain parameters that we can fix. We have three dimensions of space that we see. All we need is to change one number. Now that's four in terms of a design. So how do we how do we change that number? Does DMT for example do something as simple maybe one of many things? Maybe it changes three to five or 10 or something like that and all of a sudden it's opening up. So if you think about a headset as something that's just a piece of software that agents use to interact with each other, then it's perfectly open to the possibility that DMT somehow gives us a way of switching between headsets, upgrading our headset. So I'm not saying that that we know that. I'm just saying the mathematics allows this possibility and so we need to actually explore it. So that's where I'm very interested in in the mathematics seems really quite open to to this kind of thing. Uh it's going to be as you can see quite complicated. Even the headset representation of the brain there's 86 billion neurons. There's trillions of synapses. Even the dumbed down version is not that easy. So whatever is going on beyond the headset is going to be very very difficult. But that's what we're after here is to try to really understand how the headset is engineered and then to understand what DMT might be doing to the details of that engineered headset. >> Okay. And Andrew, let's look at this from the DMT phenomenology standpoint. Uh so the let we we just postulate an experiment thought experiment. There's a conscious agent A who's outside the headset and then a conscious agent B who is uh in the DMT headset or perhaps even in a conscious reality space. Um what would the how would an an agent that was outside the headset look like to an agent inside and how would that relate to the DMT experience and the entities? Um so it's kind of a thought um provoking experiment. Yeah, I I will say Oh, is that okay? Yeah, I will say that Donn is very very good at Grand Theft Auto. Um, absolutely ruthless. It's a blood bath. But um yeah, so when when we started working with Don um and and I I should mention Nifa Hermanson, the the very talented mathematician who worked with me because the mathematics is um very complicated to say the least and um um easy to get wrong. So I'm I'm looking at Nifer's face to see if he winces when I say anything about the mathematics. Um but hopefully I I um I can get it right. So so when when we started working together you know my question was um okay if we if we live within we occupy um or we interact with this very very thin slice of the conscious agent network. Um you know what are the limits there? Why? First of all, you know, what's actually going on in terms of what what agents we can perceive, what agents we can't perceive because the vast majority we we can't perceive uh at all. They're completely imperceptible. You know, why is that? Uh and if we can understand that, then maybe we can think about well, how can we perturb that system? How can we perturb the interface such that normally imperceptible conscious agents become perceptible? Um this was we weren't even really thinking about DMT at this point. Um although it was in the back of our minds of course but really we were just probing the model basically probing Dawn's conscious realism trace logic model and trying to find conditions whereby normally imperceptible conscious agents become perceptible. Now way back I say way back about six years ago um I wrote my second book reality switch technologies uh in which I describe a concept I developed called the world space. So you I see the world the brain as kind of a world builder. Uh the world that you experience which Don would call the interface uh is kind of is constructed by the brain you know in the way I was thinking about it. Uh and if you think about all the possible worlds that your brain can construct all possible moments um you get this vast state space which I called the world space. Um but we only occupy in normal waking consciousness this very very small region of the world space which I call the consensus reality space. You see it like a well within like an attractor basin within this world space landscape. And what DMT does is it pushes you out. It perturbs the brain and pushes you out of the consensus reality space into entirely different regions uh of the world space. You might call that the DMT space. this set of states that represent the structure and dynamics of the DMT world. Um, now what I didn't have um, you know, I can kind of explain within that model how we go from the normal waking world into this alternate world. But what I didn't have is any way to to think about how this altered world might actually be interacting. you might actually be interacting with other beings, other conscious agents or intelligent agents within that. Um, but then I started working with Nifer and Dawn. Um, and we kind of independently kind of arrived at the same position but from within the the conscious realism framework. So in conscious realism, Don doesn't call it the world space, he calls it the experience space. So the set of all the states that a conscious agent could possibly occupy this vast effectively infinite really number of states that a conscious agent can occupy. But again we only that that uh experience space is just a set of states. Um it it it's basically a very very very long list of possible states that a conscious agent um can occupy can can experience. But sitting on top of this experience space and this is key uh is this mathematical structure uh called a the qualia kernel right it's it's a for the more mathematically sophisticated it's it's a markoff kernel uh but for those that aren't mathematically sophisticated people like me um it it is it's a mathematical structure that gives the the dynamics you know how does a conscious agent move between the different states of the experience base you know if you're in this state what's the probability that you're going to move to this state or this state or this state so that gives you the dynamics so you have the experience base is simply the set of states and the qualia kernel gives it structure and the qualia kernel uh in the same way that the kind of neural connectivity as I described it restricts you to this very limited region of the world space that I call the consensus reality space the qualia kern kernel is restricting you to a very very limited region of the experience space. Um, so you tend to move within states within this very very small region. And we in fact we still called it the consensus reality space because that's uh kind of made sense. But what's beautiful and this is where the real magic happened uh is that the the qualia kernel is actually composed of three other kernels. Um the decision, the action and the perception kernel. And the perception kernel is key uh because it determines how an agent um perceives. you know, how does it uh interact with the um the rest of the agent network? Um and so so now we have this connection. Now we're able to not just talk about entering other types of experiences, but we're also able to talk about how that affects how you interact with the uh the the rest of the agent network. So when you are when the brain is perturbed by DMT, what's actually happening is you're not just being pushed out of the consensus reality space uh into this entirely different region of the experience space, but the qualia kernel that sits on that region of the experience space is going to be completely different. Uh the dynamics is going to be completely different. the way that that um you interact with the conscious agent network within that region of the experience base is going to be completely different. So um conscious agents that were completely imperceptible that evolution had filtered out um suddenly become perceptible. Um and and and even better than that is that you can actually again not even thinking about DMT, you could actually think to yourself, okay, what would that actually be like to be situated within this consensus reality, this space, this very limited region of the experience space, and then to be pushed out of it and find yourself in this entirely different region? What would that actually be like? Well, the the geometry and the topology of the experience of your world would change dramatically. There's no reason to think that this 3 + one dimensional restriction that we get in the consensus reality space would apply outside of it. So, it would likely be an entirely alien world that would be impossible. It wouldn't make any sense to you. It would be completely unlike any kind of experience you've had, any other kind of world. the beings that occupied that space as well, the the intelligent beings, the other conscious agents or beings with it which you interact with would also be completely alien uh in ways that you could not have imagined or anticipated. Um in other words, the almost the entirety of the phenomenology of the DMT experience, you know, that's DMT, right? going to a world that is um inordinately complex and extremely strange and geometrically and top topologically uh different occupied by beings that have no relationship to the beings that uh you normally interact with. That's DMT. And that basically for one of a better term fell out of the mathematics. Um, and that to me when that happened, that was a a really deeply profound moment because DMT suddenly uh went from being inexplicable to basically all making sense. The whole thing just fell out of Don's model. I could not have for one moment have anticipated that we would basically boot up the DMT phenomenology from this very um abstract mathematics and and that's what we've been able to do and I think it's um you know it's a a huge testament to the the beauty um um magnificence dare I say u of professor Hoffman's model uh that we've been able to achieve that. Thank you, Don. Do you agree with Andrew? And >> do you have any further thoughts to add about the the the convergence of this this model with the DMT? >> Well, yeah, I agree that it it fits like a glove to the phenomenology that Andrew's been exploring for many many years. It's it's truly stunning. And it's one little way of thinking about what's going on here is Andrew mentioned the marov model and there are these the idea this is I mentioned earlier about observers and the simplest model of an observer you can have is to say well an observer has certain possible outcomes like maybe I see green or red or blue so these are the outcomes of of my possible experiences and they can change maybe I see green now then I see red next and I see blue next and so the simplest thing you can do is say let's list all the possible observer outcomes for this observer and list how they change. And when you do that, you get a mathematical thing called a Markov model. And what we discovered, so markup chains have been known since 1905, so they're not new. Um, and the notion of a trace is is has been known for at least half a century. If I have a a big markoff chain say on on 10 states and but you can only see three of the states then the the markoff chain on 10 states will induce a markoff chain on the three states that you can see. It will give you effectively the transitions that you're going to see if you can only see those three states. That's called a trace. There's a formula for it. It's been well known. But what we discovered in in the trace institute research and that hadn't been discovered before by mathematicians is that that trace relationship gives you a logic on all markup chains. It gives you a logic on all possible observers that had not been noticed. So that's why we call this the trace institute because that trace logic is the logic of observation and it's a logic of minimum surprise. So those who are interested in Carl Fristen's work and we're trying to minimize surprise and so forth, this is the logic of zero surprise. And so I've talked with Carl about this and he he agrees. So this there's a very interesting connection with Carl Friston's work. But but where he's trying to minimize free energy to try to approach minimum surprise, we compute it directly. The trace logic, you just get it directly by by computation. And this is then also a logic of intelligence in the following sense. Um, not being surprised is a big part of being intelligent. If everything I do, I go to pick up this glass of water and it breaks. I go to tie my shoe and I fall on the floor. If everything I do, I'm surprised, then I'm not very bright. Right? And and so so having a logic that has the zero surprise logic is a logic of intelligence. So, so it's it's a logic of observation that turns out to be a logic of intelligence. And then when we go recursively, it gives us a logic of agency because if I'm looking through this one observer window and maybe I now I want to change to a different observer window, a different size or a different set of outcomes that I could look through. I need to have a way of doing that. How do I transition from one window to another? It turns out you just have another Markoff chain where you go from one window to another by Markoff chain. So the first the the lowest level is observers but then you can go from one observer to another. So you get what we call like a policy of moving around on observers and it turns out it has its own trace logic and then you can change policies. So you have a way of changing policies and so you you can see recursively you just get one trace logic after another after another and you build up the notion of agency to whatever level of sophistication you want. So that it's it's unbelievably simple but the powerful I the ideas are very very powerful and when you go from one window to say a bigger window one thing I'll just mention just to give you a flavor for how you get these different phenomenologies there's a counter that you have associated with each window every time you get a change in your experience like red goes to green goes to blue or whatever you just up your counter by one now think if you have the 10 state matrix red green blue all you have 10 of them and then you can only see three of the states the counter for the three-state person is not going to go as fast as the counter for the 10 state right there his counter is not going to go that will give us time dilation and special relativity that's where it comes from just that simple and when you look at how you're going to actually take these the structure of the matrices and start to get threedimensional shapes from them once again you find that directly the the three-dimensional shapes will contract for the smaller windows than for the larger windows and you'll get the space contraction of of special relativity. So all all right there in the structure of the trace logic itself you're starting to see the outlines of of special and general relativity. The trace logic one of the things we're going to be doing in the next two years is to show mathematically we get it exactly. So no handwave, we get Manowski space from the trace recursive trace and we also get curved spacetime and we can get quantum field theory. That's that's what we have to do in the next two years. We want to just prove that we can get all of the current space-time physics exactly then we'll try to reverse engineer the headset. So we have to get spaceime first then we can try to reverse engineer how is our headset built. And then once we do that, then the magic starts to happen because once you know the software of the headset, you can do miracles, right? If you if you know how to if you know the software of Grand Theft Auto, you can turn the wizard's Ferrari into a rocket ship or a donkey, whatever you want to do. So So once you know the software, you can play beyond the wizard. And so that's where I where we're where we're headed. So the technologies that are going to come out of this are are mind-blowing. And we get a hint of it when we start doing DMT kinds of stuff. We and we see these worlds that most people when they look at them, they're going that's not even possible. what what these elves in are showing us are things that you cannot do and there's too many elves and yeah what what are these things and and they're just and and apparently I mean again I'm I've not been there but I haven't done this but what I read is they're happy to show you that you're in the sandbox and they're in the real world and and so that's what I feel the mathematics that we're working on says exactly we're in a little tiny sandbox but the mathematics is pointing to a real world that's much much bigger and we can go there um and with the with DMT we may actually be able to go there experientially with the mathematics we can go there scientifically >> yeah I think um what Don is pointing to here clearly is that his model doesn't simply apply to this uh it's not simply trying to explain 3+ one spacetime you know the way our physical world that we assume to be the only world that there is uh how that all works but actually reaches into an all-encompassing model of of reality itself and including the DMT worlds. Um and I think going back to the idea of intelligence um what our model doesn't necessarily um imply uh is that when you're we often describe these beings as being extraordinarily intelligent and I've done that many times u but working with um Don's model what I came to realize is that actually it's not like we're dealing with beings that are extraordinary. arily intelligent in the human sense. We're simply dealing with beings that occupy an entirely different experiential manifold. They occupy a higher dimensional space. What they do, you know, that they will often show you these impossible higherdimensional objects and say, "Look at this. Look at this." As if they're as if they're teaching a toddler squares and triangles. Right? Because in their world, it's as simple as that. They're not doing really, you know, from their perspective, they aren't doing particularly complicated things. They just they they just happen to occupy uh a space, a geometry, a topology, uh that is far different to ours and that is, you know, is is is much richer, has entirely different marovian dynamics, right? Um and so when people say, you know, if they're so intelligent or whatever, you know, why don't they give us the blueprint of the time machine? Why don't they know everything? why and that it's not that kind of intelligence I don't think we're dealing with with simply dealing with beings that are um so different to us um that things that they do that are completely trivial from their perspective are mindblowing to us you know do Don often talks about this amplitude ahedrin um which is simply this highdimensional object that exists outside of spaceime um you know and it's able to explain particle scattering that from our perspective you know using you know fineman diagram s and this kind of space-time modeling is is pages and pages of of uh of symbols and equations and yet the whole thing just falls out of this highdimensional geometric objects and and it's it's that kind of thing that we're dealing with from our perspective. what they they seem bewildering and incredible um simply because of the type of space that they occupy and and it allows our consciousness to occupy those kind of dynamics by removing that restriction that the Qualia kernel has on our consciousness within the consensus reality space and and and kicking us into this other region of the experience space where those rules no longer apply. we can start to represent dynamics and structures that the brain that were simply beyond our representational reach. The reason one of the reasons we don't see a lot of the or the vast majority of these conscious agents we don't perceive them in any way is simply because we have no way to represent them. those kind of dynamics simply cannot be represented by this very restricted um uh uh dynamics uh of of us as a conscious agent within this consensus reality space. Once you get out of that, those rules no longer apply and then you can start interacting with and perceiving agents that were normally imperceptible. >> Thank you. Um so before we get into some of the proposed experiments u I was wondering if one or both of you could um finally I think we're ready we're warmed up for the the topic of this uh this event uh traces of the other are DMT entities [clears throat] real? So there is an onlogical debate about the existence of the entities versus hallucination. Maybe Andre, you could start start us off by telling us what the nature of that debate is and what are the what is the the key kind of um differences right within from mainstream science with others who want to keep an open mind uh about this. Yeah, I think most scientists um certainly those op the vast majority operating within the materialist paradigm will say this is it's the the assumption is it's a hallucination and our job is to show how and why it's a hallucination. Um how does the brain that evolved to construct this this um um this particular model of the environment again returning to the brain perspective you know we our brain evolved uh the conscious agent evolved to represent this very limited um type of environment um that was adapt adaptive that wasn't truthful as Don always says um but is is adaptive that is useful that allows us to um interact adaptively and meaningfully and and usefully uh with this conscious agent network. Um how is it that the brain suddenly becomes capable of constructing these entirely alien worlds in the presence of DMT? That's always been my argument is this is not easy to explain why when you perturb the brain um you don't just get random noise. You don't get dreamlike imagery. um uh you you get uh imagery that is staggeringly complex and yet also staggeringly coherent, you know, staggering narrative complexity. These are not this is not just random noise. This is not your brain just making it up. There is something uh anyone who's taken DMT will know exactly what I'm talking about. A lot of it cannot be impressed upon you uh through this very limited medium of language. Uh but you know it you know that this is something else going on and that's that's always I've always tried to keep an open mind in that respect. I've never said I think you machine elves are real. Um uh but I' I've I've always been careful not to dismiss the DMT experience. I don't think it can be um explained. Uh but as I said before um the problem I always had was is trying to um to explain how this information can be transmitted into the brain and conscious realism kind of finally allows us to do that. >> Yeah thank you that makes sense. Don what is your take on the question of are DMT entities real? Um >> so it's a a very interesting question. Um, and the experiments for that we'll talk about are designed to be very hard-nosed and to try to disi distinguish between are these just illusions created by the brain because it's messed up or are we in contact with something that's a deeper and more interesting kind of reality. And so this raises a question about what does it mean for us in this trace logic approach to even think about how we interact with each other and what we see here. So for example, the question is is big in science right now about what's the distinction between living and non-living things or conscious and and unconscious things. And from the point of view of the trace and and the headset, everything that I'm seeing right now is something that I'm rendering on the fly. Right? So all I'm seeing I'm not seeing your consciousness directly. I I'm just seeing a body. I'm seeing a shape that I render. That's not you. And what you're seeing with me is just a Hoffman shape that but that's not Hoffman. That's just what you can see. So we have these we have these things that we're rendering on the fly when we look at people or when I look at a rock I'm rendering something on the fly. Now they're all equally just renders in the headset. So in some sense there's no distinction between a Hoffman avatar and a rock. They're both equally they they're there when you see them and they disappear when you look away. So the question is we have to go deeper on this question then what what does it mean to say are these real entities or real real agents or not. So the first thing I'll say is the distinction we make between living and non-living is not principled according to this headset theory. That distinction is an artifact of the limitations of our headset. It's because our headset has to give up at some point. When I'm interacting with Andrew, my headset is giving me a symbol which gives me a lot of insight into what Andrew might be thinking, if he agrees or disagree. I'm getting a lot of information. My headset, of course, is there to dumb things down. So, I'm not getting nearly everything about Andrew that is is there, but it dumbs things down when I look at this table to the point where I have no notion of intention or or beliefs or anything. I mean, this is just a a a chunk of stuff. And when I get to a rock, it's it's there's nothing there. Does that mean that I'm dealing with something that's stupid? No. It means that my headset gave up. So this is a completely different way of thinking about things. The distinction between living and non-living is not principled. It's an artifact of the limitations of our headset. So in this in the trace logic point of view, I'm always dealing with consciousness. Always. The only question is does my headset give me in how much in insight does my headset give you into that consciousness that I'm interacting with? And so with the DMT questions, the question will now be is DMT just screwing up the render, right? That's one possibility. DMT is just screwing up the render and so and you know if you hit me in the head, I get screwed up. So I can imagine DMT does the same thing. or is it the case that the fidelity of my rendering of conscious agents goes up and so all of a sudden things that were before might have been inanimate for example are now rendered in a way where I actually see agency. So, it's really the question of am is my headset being upgraded so that the icons that are rendering are giving me genuine access to consciousness outside or am I just screwing up the the render? That's the real question that we're going to be asking here. You can see but notice this very way of positing things could not even be posited in the physicalist framework. This is not you can't even think the scientific kind of story in the physicalist framework. you have to actually come to a completely different scientific point of view to even ask this kind of question. >> Yeah, this is something that I had to wrestle with is that the boundary as Don said between what we referred to in our paper as the agentic versus a agentic versus non-agentic dynamics. Uh so in other words, which things appear as agents and which things don't appear as agents. Uh and there's no fundamental onlogical difference there. Uh, as Nifer drumed into my head, all perception is interacting with the conscious agent network. You always in some way, you never have direct access to another agent's internal dynamics. They leave these traces. They they influence through the perception kernel. They influence what's going on in your interface. And your brain renders that. So, your brain uh your consciousness, [laughter] it's a it's hard to kill that habit. Um but yeah your interface renders that in some adaptive way and sometimes it doesn't make any sense for it to render it in you know as agentic dynamics and sometimes it does but there's no fundamental difference there. It also means that there's no fundamental difference between a hallucination and a veritical possession in some way. It's like how do you distinguish between something that's real and something that's not real? And that's really really difficult one to get your head around. Uh, but you know, I think we're going to get to next. That doesn't mean, you know, if if if me and Don both take DMT, as we're about to at the end, um, right, and we, um, and we're we're interacting in some way, you know, with, you know, in a similar way with the conscious agent network, there should be some kind of correlation perhaps with between our experience in the same way that we're when we're in normal waking consciousness. I can talk about Carl's t-shirt that says feed me weird things. And Don would agree. Yes, it says feed me weird things. And those weird things are, but weird things, right? So just because we're um we have different interfaces doesn't mean there there aren't correlations. This doesn't mean we can't look for correlations. And the same thing applies in the DMT state. Uh we can still ask we can still do science. We can still ask the question when two people are taking DMT, is there some kind of shared um aspects? Is there some kind of correlation that we can test for uh and that we can um analyze? >> Yeah, that's a perfect segue to empirical experiments. What would we like to do um you know to to test predictions of this model? So Andrew, maybe you can walk us through extended state DMT, DMTX as it's called, and then uh some of the initial experiments you you might have in mind. >> Sure. >> Yeah. Um so DMTX, which I developed with Rick Strasman back in 2016, the idea was that the DMT experience is a very brief experience. It's a few minutes uh because it it goes into the brain it rises to a very high concentration very very quickly within seconds and then almost you know within a minute or so it starts to come down you get this exponential drop off uh and you stay within the DMT space normally for a few minutes the actual peak um the actual time within the kind of the breakthrough state is actually only three four five minutes it's very very quick um and the problem with that of course I mean it's a blessing let's face it you know for most people uh it's more than enough. But if you really want to do experiments within the space, you want to spend time interacting with the the the the intelligences, the conscious agents perhaps within the space, then you need you need much more time. You need to be able to kind of stabilize the DMT level in the brain. Uh and so with Rick Strasman, we developed this model which we uh has has has come to be called DMTX. We initially called it extended state DMT. uh which uses a technique from anesthesiology uh called target controlled introvenous infusion uh which they use to maintain a stable relatively stable brain concentration of an anesthetic drug shortacting anesthetic drug during surgery uh so that the anesthesiologist can kind of keep you within the anesthetized state and and actually manipulate that in real time. uh and and it occurred to me that that DMT has all of the kind of the the requisite pharmacological properties that would make it uh which would mean that we can basically replace the anesthetic drug with with DMT. That's basically DMTX. We can stabilize the brain DMT levels and induce somebody into the DMT state and hold them there. Uh and that opens up an entirely new frontier for scientific research. Uh because it's like going from, you know, scuba diving to deep sea diving. When you got a line to the boat, you can spend a lot you can go a lot deeper and you can spend a lot more time down there. In the same way, you can you can go into the DMT space and you can spend as much time as you like. So that then means that we can induce people into DMT state and actually have them perform experiments. Um and I'll I'll describe briefly the kind of the two broad types of experiments that we might want to do. Um the first one is the simplest one. Um which is simply to test for these shared correlations. Right? For example um can we have somebody um ret um retrieve information from the DMT state that or from an entity that has been deposited by somebody else. So can somebody generate have a random number generated um and they take that into the DMT space isolate it from the other participant and they transmit that information into the DMT space uh and then the other person um comes along a little bit later and goes into the DMT space and retrieves that. Um you know there are people that you know often couples who claim to be able to interact with the same kind of entity. These are the kind of people we want. Um um you know I think we we're moving away from simply recruiting people because they've had some experience with psychedelics to actually recruiting uh individuals with specific skills. So there kind of the second so that's kind of the first type of experiment broadly. Then you have what I think is slightly more difficult um and you need more um specialist individuals is to actually look at you know I said before that these beings often they occupy this higher dimensional space. It has highly exotic and unusual geometries and topologies. Uh most people go in there and just go that was that was that was ridiculous right that was impossible. Um, and that's not very interesting scientifically. Um, but if you can send in a a geometer, you know, or a topologist or somebody who has mathematical sophistication, they can go into the space and they can say, "Oh, actually this is a nine-dimensional manifold." Yeah, that'll do. Um, you know, and can actually [clears throat] map out the symmetry groups. And I know you know I we're all indebted I think to the work of Andres Gomez Emilson who I think is the pioneer in in this you know somebody who is mathematically sophisticated. I know Nifer is working with Andress as well um and and can go into the space and say actually the DMT space is very very strange. It's very different to normal waking consciousness. And this is why, right, we're going from a 3 plus one dimensional um space into this entirely different geometric and topological structure. And we can actually map the change. We can say what's actually happened um um to consciousness here. And then we can feed this back to the conscious realism model, the trace logic and actually say, okay, what has DMT done? How has it affected the conscious agent in order to go from this state into this state? And so it's it's it's a feedback process. You know, you you have the experiments feed back into the model and the model then um gives us deeper and deeper insights into what DMT is actually doing. And we can also study, for example, um how these um beings are manipulating the space. Often they will they will as I said you know presenting these impossible higher dimensional objects you know what are they actually doing here? Um you know mathematically what are they doing here? So, so, so broadly I guess you could say we have kind of ontological testing, uh, looking for shared correlations that kind of prove the externality if you like of the space. Um, and then we have the the kind of the mapping of the structure uh, the dynamics, the topology, the geometry of the space and trying to understand how we're getting to the space in terms of the conscious agent dynamics. What were some of So we're talking about Andres Comilson at the Qualia Research Institute, common collaborator for our groups, but he talked about some remarkable operations that entities can can do within that space in terms of coloring, geometries, and such. Can you talk a bit about what those are? >> Yeah. So, this is fascinating. So, so Andreas um told me um that he often sees these entities um doing coloring surfaces, which doesn't sound particularly impressive on its own. Um but these surfaces are uh mathematically they are maps. So you have lots of shapes all fully tessillated. Um and what these entities are doing is coloring the surfaces in four colors. And that's significant to the mathematicians in the room. uh because there's something called the four color theorem which basically says that if it doesn't matter how complicated of a map of shapes you have you can always color them with four colors so that no two colors are but each other so there's no adjacent ones it's obviously connected to you know maps of the world you can color a map of the world in four colors and no two countries will uh connect with the same color and you can do that for any kind of map even the most complicated ones however um it's extremely ly difficult cognitively and demanding to do that um without some you know computational algorithm that'll do it for you. Um you can't you will take Andress is as smart as they get. Uh and he said it will take him you know maybe an hour or something uh to to do this kind of thing uh to color these these maps. And yet these entities, they will they will color these exquisitly complex surfaces in more than two dimensions and then wipe it and then do it again and then do it again as if they're kind of just kind of trying to demonstrate to show us, you know, not that they necessarily uh expect us to fully understand uh but just to show us that they can do things that that that our brain cannot do. I mean, that's really, I think, what we're we're testing for. Do these entities have abilities, dynamical abilities, geometric abilities, topological abilities, mathematical abilities that are um that go beyond the reach of uh the human brain because that would be another test. That's another beautiful test. If you can show that, you know, if you send in five, six, seven mathematicians and they all say, "Yes, these entities were doing things that I can tell you right now, uh, I couldn't do as a mathematician even if you gave me a couple of hours and they were doing it in a fraction of a second repeatedly." Those kind of things. Most people would look at that and go, "Oh, that was amazing." But when you send a mathematician in there, they can tell you why it was so amazing. And not just amazing, but beyond human capabilities. And that's another beautiful test uh for their ontology, I think. >> Yeah, that was a wonderful deep sea dive yourself. Thank you for going there. Uh I'd like to zoom out slightly with Don um to talk about um how you think that these experiments are going to help to improve the the trace logic and the recursive trace logic and whatever comes after that. What um uh what sorts of insights you think um could help to better the models? Yes. All all of these experimental results force me to think about things I wouldn't have thought of otherwise and they push me around which is really good but you need to be pushed around and I'm being pushed around in a lot of ways. So one you know disincarnated intelligences these things don't seem to be related restricted in the same way that we are to to the physical bodies. And so actually that kind of thing from Andrew's work and and related work telepathic kinds of work and and non-speaking autistics and things that they seem to be claiming that they can do forced me to just in the last two months go back to the recursive trace logic and ask myself what how can I understand this? How can I understand the possibility of actually having telekinesis even happen? Is that even possible in the model? And when I looked at it, the mathematics said to me, "Not don, not only is it possible, it's the norm." And that was what stunned me. I was I'm still reeling from that. That's only like two or three weeks ago I figured this out. And I it's it's just bizarre for me to realize um that being embodied is the special case. So to just to give an example of that, when I observe through my eyes and and and look visually, every window that I see of all the possible observer windows that are out there, every one that I see has a restriction. It has to have a nose in it, right? Every observer window you ever see has a nose in it. So you can just ask the mathematical question, out of all the different possible observer windows that are out there, how many of them, what percentage of them have a nose in it? 0%. It's just that simple. And when I realized it was I mean it's it's not deep. It's in your face that embodiment is the trivial case. I I I'm you can tell I'm still reeling from it because it's only been I've only had like two months to sort of adjust to this. But you got you got to follow the math. And so so I'm I'm I'm dealing with So it's actually an emo it I lose sleep at night over this stuff. It's just is and yet there's either something wrong with my math or there's something wrong with my assumptions about this stuff and the math looks good. It's so simple. So, so, so yeah, it it pushes me around and so every so I'm really open when I listen to Andrew and I listen to No, by the way, I'm I'm open to a certain point, but of course I'm very very hard. I'm a psychophysicist. They do careful experiments in the lab and I have had I'm not going to mention any name but I did have a swami 25 years ago who came to my lab who claimed to have all sorts of powers and he published a book with his experiments and I looked at and my graduate student was one of his followers and she came he came to me through her and I decided okay well I looked at his experiments and actually his experiments were were poor and I realized I could you could drive a truck through them and there were just holes everywhere. So I said to as I thought it would be good for the graduate student to see this. It would be good. So I took her we looked at all these different designs. I said here's here's the holes and we then I had her fix the holes. I had the swami then come into the lab and redo his experiments the right way. I left the building because of the disbeliever effect. Right. So and want to affect so I left the building and she ran the experiments and we didn't have to do any statistics. He showed no ability on any trial. So for 25 years I left it as that. I mean I I tested a swami who's big deal thousands of followers hundreds of tapes and my experiment said zero absolutely zero but that's just one swami I mean that doesn't mean that this is not true it's just mean that that swami on that day could not do it and so so I'm I'm very very hard-nosed about the experiments but then when I get clean data then I get pushed around and my theory gets pushed around and I as a scientist get pushed around so that's That's you can see it's a fine line for a scientist. You have to be really hardnosed so that you don't get pulled into stuff that's nonsense and you can't be so hard-nosed that you miss the stuff that's real. And that's the fine line that I'm walking. And it it's a very personal experience. I mean for me the mathematics also comes and slaps me in the face and says discarnate intelligence is the norm. Well, I wouldn't have believed that three months ago and now here I am saying it three months later because I got slapped in the face by my own math. So, this is quite a learning experience. But the kind So, the kind of work that I'm doing with Andrew and that I plan to start I'm I'm actually now starting to take a mindsight class just to see what it's like, see what that kind of stuff is, trying to see what you can do in terms of seeing stuff um with blindfolds on. So again, in in normal scientific studies, absolutely not possible. Just not possible. No eyes, closed vision, not possible. When I look at our mathematics, it's saying it's possible. Which doesn't mean that everybody who claims that they're doing it is doing it. My guess is that 99% of them are not doing it. But if there's 1% that are doing it, I've got to understand that 1%, right? All you need to to prove that not all ravens are black, all you need is one white raven. That's all you need. Um, and there may be many claims of white ravens that are false, but all you need is one true claim. And so that's my attitude. Most of it will probably be debunked, but if one piece is not debunked, then I have to change my theory. So, >> thank you. Uh, we might have time for a few questions, but before we do so, Andrew, a few closing remarks on uh the broader implications of this. Um yeah, I think um the implications of of Don's work and and of of DMT are hard to overstate. Um I've said for many years now that the the the definitive demonstration that not only are there beings, intelligent beings, conscious beings that exist within reality uh that we normally are unaware of. Not only that uh but that we using one of the simplest uh alkaloids on the planet. this ubiquitous plant derived alkyoid n dimethylrypamine uh that we can access these intelligences um at will um the most common and I would say the most democratic of all psychedelic drugs and then it's everywhere uh you know on pretty much every continent you could find a plant that that contains reasonable levels of DMT um that the implications of that that we can actually not that they're just there that we can actually interact with them, communicate with them, establish relationships with them as the shamans, indigenous peoples have been doing for thousands of years and we've been telling them that they're deluding themselves um that they're primitive, that they're, you know, barbaric and that this is just nonsense, absolute utter nonsense. Um, and now people like myself and Don are actually saying maybe we we were a bit too uh too quick to dismiss these experiences and perhaps they have been interacting with beings um that are normally imperceptible for thousands of years. And we're kind of as as scientists in the Western world just about, you know, starting to catch up uh and to be able to say actually you've been vindicated. Um and we're sorry about that. [laughter] >> Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Don. Uh we have time for a few questions for anyone so inclined. Um I think we'll have a circulating microphone. Um could you please pass that to uh uh this gentleman right here in the front um with the >> Hi, thanks a lot. Um I I have a question um regarding sort of the you know the um I'm curious about more possible like standards that would allow you to satisfy that something is actually an ontologically distinct entity but the one that you presented here was that it can do you know mathematical operations that are very non-trivial and especially in the time that they're doing them and I'm wondering my the only problem I have with that standard is that if I compare [snorts] if the point of comparison is another agent Like me is you know I'm not a mathematician. Let's say if if I were a mathematician it would take me you know some non-trivial amount of time to do that mapping problem right paint the different colors but by the same notion like it would take me a non-trivial amount of time to do a complex forier transform. it might take me a non-trivial amount of time to do certain kinds of rotation to do a you know uh the the MNIST labeling problem that's done by neural networks or something along those lines and yet sub aentic systems of myself such as my you know auditory cortex in fact even just the hair cells before I even get to the auditory cortex can do fast for transforms very quickly on the order of milliseconds and can do labeling problems you can model a single cortical micro column it can do the labeling problem and we have millions of those. So comparing what I can do as the hyper agent to what the subent agentic part can do. Do you see what I mean? It's like it's a non a computation non-trivial thing happening at a ostensible simple system. So how is that a satisfaction condition for something being an ontologically separate agent at my scale or even higher? >> Yeah, I think not that I disagree, it's just >> No, no, no. It's a it's a it's a good push back. And I think first of all what we don't know what we can't say I can't say you can't say is that you are a single conscious a we think of ourselves as a single conscious agent sub agents right you know Don would say there's all these you trace down and you have all these sub aents and and and and we are not onlogically distinct from other agents and so it's it's a very you enter this weird territory where we're used to living in a world where we can this is the self, this is the other. We can make this clear distinction. Uh, and it's very easy to kind of test something that I did or that I didn't do. Um, but we once you get into conscious realism, all of that boundary starts to blur. This is why in the paper we make the point is we're not looking for one single um kind of mic drop experiment that that finally proves that machine elves are real or anything like that. is we're proposing a kind of suite of experiments that I think we're kind of almost getting away from oh are they real or are they not real and we're we're simply saying okay let's assume that conscious realism is in some sense correct uh how does it all fit together uh what is DMT doing I think again you know within conscious realism the distinction between the real and the unreal also seems to fall apart because everything is consciousness everything is conscious agent And so what what does it even mean for it for it to be a hallucination that even that starts to not not kind of make sense? Uh and so it's like we're getting away from I'm not we're not trying to cop out of that question. Uh but we're trying to understand ultimately we forget about the real versus non-real question. We're trying to say okay how does DMT affect how we interact with the conscious agent network? Um is it some kind of sub agents that is performing this? Maybe uh do we need to interact with some uh other agent with more complex marovian dynamics that can perform it? Maybe maybe you know it's some kind of interaction between all of those things. Um um that's a better question I think basically rather than is it real or is it not real >> right and maybe it's some hierarchy collapse where you can interact with hyper agents above you and sub agents in the same scale some kind of satellia or something. >> Got it. Anyway, >> but also I would say that you might also think is the DMT space a communication channel? So could I put one person into the DMT space, have them say something in the space, have someone in our channel or space-time channel, have no communication, but they get it through the D. So that would then show that there's some real communication information in the in that channel that's outside of spaceime. That would, I think, get most scientists at least to pay attention. Okay, great. Who wants to be next? Please go ahead. >> Hi, how are you guys? >> Okay, >> Andrew, thank you for the invite and Don, thank you for your work. You you're [clears throat] actually the first scientist I ever emailed to uh when I started doing the work I'm doing now a few years ago, so feels like a full circle for me. Um I do have a question for you that might feel a little outdated because I know you touched on this point many many times on many podcasts. Um and that's about the fundamental assumption of the basically zero chance that we're perceiving reality for what it is. Right? So in your comparison between the desktop and what the machinery of the logic gates is doing under the hood so to speak there is now I understand the whole asmtotic nature of it. It's like approaching zero means zero in mathematics right however for functional reasons the difference between mathematics and computation something needs to be computed in a finite time. So, and I understand that the work that you're doing with the amplit is where the rubber touches the road, right? But what is that moment of translation between what in the comparison you give between what the logic gates are doing to then making the folder brown versus the folder green? Is that exactly what So these kernels that Andrew you were talking about, was it um decision, action, and experience or observation? >> Decision, action, perception. >> Perception. So I guess my my my more specific question is is are you treating that asytoic 0% as the limit and are all these experiences that each agent is having is at the limit or the limit would be kind of the observer like the totality of all possible observations because the because the thing that I'm thinking about there is that and this is already details that you don't need to touch on the question because I think it's going to take too long but what I was thinking as Andrew was speaking is that if are Are you treating the observation as a field mathematically? Are you treating it as an instance that aggregates to many instances the debt collect to what his experience is? And then do and also what is that distance between what you would call a decision and an action at the end of it. Right? So those are the questions that kind of made me really question this whole what is that thing that actually gives rise to this instance. But I guess the the one question I I really would like to hear you answer is the limit part. Like do you the each agent is riding on the limit or is the totality of the limit is basically the ultimate observer or God or whatever you want to call it. >> Well in terms of when I say the certain like embodiment is measure zero is that the kind of thing you're asking what what do I actually mean there when I say it's probability zero that >> you're saying there is no chance of perceiving reality for what it is there it's zero. >> Okay. So that's a so so you're referring to so I have some different work that's completely unrelated to what we're talking about here about evolution and I've worked on evolution by natural selection and and with Chayan Pash and others and shown that um evolution entails that the probability of zero that any organism has ever been shaped by evolution to see any aspect of reality as it is. So that's that's the claim that we've published mathematically. And the push back that we get is um that that would be self-refuting, right? If if you if you start off with evolution, Darwin's theory says that the world is a physical world. It's made of physical organisms competing for physical resources and space and time. And so if you use Darwin's mathematical model of Darwin's theory to show that his basic assumptions aren't aren't true, then you've shot yourself in the foot logically and and you don't know what you're doing. you you should go learn some basic science and and that whole that whole objection is actually misunderstands the nature of science. We never assume in science that our assumptions are true. We only assume that they're consistent. All we need to do is assume that our assumptions are consistent. We know that our assumptions can never be the final word because we never explain our assumptions. We assume them. So someone can always try to build a deeper theory which tries to explain the assumptions that you started with. So science has infinite job security in principle because every theory never explains it assumptions. It always assumes that its assumptions are consistent and then it will have a finite scope. So every or at least a limited scope. Every scientific theory has a limited scope. A good theory gives you the tools to explore its scope. A great theory like Einstein together with quantum theory gives you the tools to find the limits of the assumptions that started the theory. So in Einstein's case with with quantum field theory, we know that the tools of those theories and those theories assume space and time as their foundation and they then come back and tell you based on our assumptions, our assumptions are not true at 10 theus 33 cmters and 10us 43 seconds our assumptions fall apart. at the plank scale. Those are great theories that start with assumptions and then go back and show you that those assumptions have a failure and then they point you to a deeper point of frame. Now, what I'm saying about Darwin's theory is exactly Darwin's theory with evolutionary game theory is not just a good theory. It's a great theory. It gives you the tools that come back and show you that the fundamental assumptions of space and time and physical objects that Darwin started with fail at a certain place. And they and we can go I won't go into the technical details about why they fail, but they do fail. And you don't have to shoot yourself in the foot to do that. That's that's just the way science works. But it's amazing. I'll just say brilliant philosophers have published in brilliant in top level journal attacks on this misunderstanding. They say if you have a scientific theory, you're assuming that the assumptions are true. You don't know your science. Scientists do not assume that their assumptions are true. We know that they're not. We know that at best they're consistent and we're going to try to find out the failure conditions. >> I don't want to take too much time but so like I actually have no greg whatsoever that I understand it fully. Uh my question was more technical around the the instance of observation that moment. So I guess let me ask it simply. So these kernels, these specifics of how they arranged each uh in relationship to one another, would you say that that is what's responsible for the mechanics of what gives rise to a particular moment of consciousness versus any other those are the main operatives or there's way more than that? Well, so if we have a the way to think about the if you're interested in the instantaneous experiences in the sequence of those, then the way to think about that is takes takes well first the trace logic is a non-bullan logic. Okay. So it's it's it's locally boolean. So if I take one say one matrix that's a billion by a billion and I look at all the subtraces of it, all those subtraces form a boolean sublogic. So in that particular boolean case um if I look at how the state is moving around on the big logic then there will be a coordination of how it's moving around in every one of the traces. This is sort of like linenet pre-established harmony idea with the with in the monology all these monads which are observers and liet said we need these monads and we also need a pre-established harmony. I'm saying these observer windows are the monads and the trace logic is the pre-established harmony that that livveness was looking for. And on these boolean sublog logics then your question is answered completely because as I trace around on the big one then everything in the boolean sublogic gets nicely coordinated. And so this is also going to be the foundation for why we can have um inter um communication between scientists, how our observations can match because on a boolean sublogic you have meats. And so where you and I meet on the on the on the boolean sublogic we can exchange data as scientists and actually get comparison of data. So we get the objectivity of science. But the the trace logic is nonboolean more generally. So this is really quite interesting. There are going to be our science is fine for our part of the trace logic. It's not going to be fine for experiences in other parts of the trace logic because what we experience here has a different structure from what's outside in in different different parts. So what this means is that it's far more complicated than I had ever imagined every so my math always slaps me in the face. Mhm. I think when you imply um instantaneous, you're kind of implying time, but time is part of the the headset. So, it's something that we need to derive, I think, from the trace logic itself. Um I think we have time for one more question. I'd like to ask the gentleman in back um and then the rest of you, I apologize, but you can come up to Don and and Andrew afterwards. Thank you. >> Hey, this uh question is for uh Dr. Gallammore. Um, I was thinking about uh your comments talking about being specific with who you recruit for your experiments these days, getting the most out of experimentation. And that was a part of your book that really resonated with me where I believe your example was, uh, bringing linguistics, you know, under DMTX, uh, linguists under DMTX to see what we can derive from, you know, what's being what's being told by the by the machine elves. And I'm wondering um it it sounds like you know as you were expressing yourself today that at least you know some of your experiments are um you know around the quantitative and at least um some are oriented around just verifying you know whether this is an actual alternate space to ours and I'm wondering how you go about thinking beyond that and in particular what I'm thinking about is uh other valid yet unexplainable phenomenon uh such as the work being done at uh University of Virginia um looking at near-death experiences and the abilities uh that some uh survivors come back with um you know saying uh you know the ability to connect in ways that ordinary people can derive knowledge you know from you know whether you want to call it the aosic records or whatnot or um the work done at Stanford Research Institute you know looking at remote viewers so in other words those that are more connected in ways that normal people are and designing experimentations around them to allow for serendipity um in unexplored communicative avenues with with the alternate reality. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. I mean the the the the kind of the the examples that I gave earlier was one very easy to understand example of shared you know correlations between independent experiences. uh but you know as I said in in the book I think you're referring to death by astonishment maybe um I I I have described discussed many times that you know not just mathematicians but yes linguists um theologians artists um people from all different disciplines I I often use the the analogy of you have this uncharted uh region of of virgin rainforest and you you want to understand it and you don't just send in random people um you know because they've got a raincoat. Um you send in geologists and botonists and um hydraologists and you know all of these types of people and they're all charged with going in and and extracting retrieving and analyzing certain types of information. Um and I think the the DMT space should be approached in the same way. It is largely uncharted territory. Um um the difference I think from the rainforest is that we're dealing with something that is is is is far far stranger uh and vaster and and and much more difficult um to to to grapple with uh intellectually, you know, cognitively and all and experientially all of these things. Um and so you know I see teams you know teams of people with specific skill sets and they might be people who have worked on on NDEs. It might be people who are uh trained in um understanding ancient symbolism. Um someone who can look at strange symbols that are often appear in the DMT state that often coat the surface and say okay this looks like some kind of language in some way. you know, can we analyze it? Can we say, "Oh, this is not just random uh random digits, but actually contains uh information." You know, we can actually we have the tools now. You know, linguists have the tools to mathematically analyze these these symbols and say actually this is not just the brain kind of generating s symbols randomly, but actually there is something there. There's a message there perhaps. Can we decode that message? Um it's it it's a vast and very very broad area of study I think that we're getting ourselves into here. Uh we're not just looking for people to you know pull out uh the same digits, you know, to pull out the same number or the same code word or whatever. We're looking for people from all these different disciplines to all go with specific tasks. And with the DMTX technology uh that was validated now at Imperial College London, we have subject zero um Carl Smith here, the first person um to undergo DMTX at Imperial College London and the only one to finish all five doses. Um um you know, yeah, round of applause. Okay, you know, so we have this amazing tool DMTX, if I may say so myself. um that has been validated now and and and we are we're dipping our toes in the water. Uh and soon we're going to be diving down. We'll have the line to the boat and we're going to be exploring territory and finding beings that we've never seen before and uh communicating with them and trying to learn from them. um as we learn from each other and and we effectively become um not just um you know uh interdimensional species or galactic citizens but interdimensional citizens you know uh who are uh routinely interacting with normally imperceptible beings and forming relationships with them and that's yeah that's um going to be a remarkable time to be alive. It's great. It's a remarkable time. Now, I I would say Andrew, as we um close talking about research teams and about explorations and technologies, would you say a bit about the donation link? >> Oh, yes. We get to the uh the money. So, so I was just talking about research, of course, but all research unfortunately takes money and often quite a lot of it. Uh we don't have much money. Um um but the trace institute that Don mentioned that uh that Gasbard who's here has been instrumental in in in spearheading that and developing that. Raise your hand Gasbard. Now he's too sh There he is. Sorry. Yeah. Round of applause for Gaspard. [applause] Uh and Gaspard and the Trace Institute team have been working very very hard to build the website. So go to the Trace Institute website traceinstitute.org. Trace Institute, not the trace, just traceinstitute.org, traceinstitute.org. Uh, and you can find out all about the work that the Trace Institute wants to do the kind of research. Um, and that will take money. Um, so anyone who's got deep pockets, get your checkbook out. Uh, that kind of thing. U also I I should mention uh as uh Charles mentioned at the beginning, I work with New Nordics. uh we are a nonprofit um and we are interested in these kind this kind of research as well. We're interested in spearheading and developing research programs uh connected to psychedelics as well as some other things but DMT in particular uh this the kind of research programs that uh I was discussing earlier today. Um and again that needs money. So anyone who wants to support and be kind of on the ground floor level of what could be completely transcendentally transformative research um yeah speak to us and go to the new Nordics website as well new nautics.org nau tic cs.org >> yes I encourage you to to uh support generously. So, um, I'd like to close by thanking all of you in the live audience here today and online. Um, I'd like to thank the Trace Institute and Noonautics organization for, um, producing this this great event. And most of all, let's give a warm round of applause to Andrew Gallamore and Donald Hoffman. [applause] Thank you very much. Um, I will say that I got a fly out to Vegas later this afternoon. So, I'm happy to talk to people, but please meet and greet uh is better than I'm coloring me for sort of 30 minutes because I I'd like to speak to people, but I've really only got probably, you know, 15 minutes or so after this. So, give everyone the opportunity that wants to speak to me. And the same applies to Don. He might more time than me. I'm not sure. Also, if anyone wants to do DMTX, we do have this research institute and retreat center in the Caribbean um called Elusis, and you can go to Elusis Mind, elusiism, mi n.com, uh and you can book yourself for a a fewday retreat uh on this beautiful Caribbean island to undergo DMTX, multiple sessions uh with, you know, fully medically supervised and safe and um um so yeah, anyone who wants to do DMTX, go to elucmind. com. >> All right, >> and I'm done. >> All right. Well, thanks again everyone for being with us today. [applause]
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