| Indeed! (author of the Hyperbolic Geometry of DMT Experiences article here). I think you might enjoy my video on the Free Energy Principle and Psychedelics. It IMO explains in a novel, meaningful, and non-trivial way the effect you are describing. Here it is: https://youtu.be/45tG1oVigVo And video description: Friston's Free Energy Principle (FEP) is one of those ideas that seem to offer new perspectives on almost anything you point it at. It seems to synthesize already very high-level ideas into an incredibly general and flexible conceptual framework. It brings together thermodynamics, probabilistic graphical models, information theory, evolution, and psychology. We could say that trying to apply the FEP to literally everything is not a bad idea: it may not explain it all, but we are bound to learn a lot from seeing when it fails. So what is the FEP? In the words of Friston: "In short, the long-term (distal) imperative — of maintaining states within physiological bounds — translates into a short-term (proximal) avoidance of surprise. Surprise here relates not just to the current state, which cannot be changed, but also to movement from one state to another, which can change. This motion can be complicated and itinerant (wandering) provided that it revisits a small set of states, called a global random attractor, that are compatible with survival (for example, driving a car within a small margin of error). It is this motion that the free-energy principle optimizes." Organisms that survive over time must minimize entropy injections from their environment, which means they need to minimize surprise, which unfortunately is computationally intractable, but the information theoretic construct of variational free-energy provides an upper bound on this ground truth surprise, meaning that minimizing it will indirectly minimize surprise. This cashes out in the need to maximize "accuracy - complexity" which prevents both overfitting and underfitting. In the video we go over some of the classical ideas surrounding the FEP: the dark room, active inference, explicit vs. implicit representations, and whether real dynamic systems can be decomposed into Markov blankets. Finally, we cover how the FEP naturally gives rise to predictive coding via hierarchical Bayesian models. We then talk about Reduced BEliefs Under pSychedelics (REBUS) and explain how Carhart-Harris and Friston interpret psychedelics and the Anarchic Brain in light of the FEP. We then discuss Safron's countermodel of Strengthened BEliefs Under pSychedelics (SEBUS) and the work coming out of Seth's lab. So, that's how the FEP shows up in the literature today. But what about explaining not only belief changes and perceptual effects, but perhaps also getting into the actual weeds of the ultra bizarre things that happen on psychedelics? I provide three novel ideas for how the FEP can explain features of exotic experiences: (1) Dissonance-minimizing resonance networks would naturally balance model complexity due to an inherent "complexity cost" that shows up as dissonance and prediction error minimization when prediction errors give rise to out-of-phase interactions between the layers. (2) Bayesian Energy Sinks: What you can recognize lowers the (physical) energy of one's world-sheet. I then blend this with an analysis of symmetrical psychedelic thought-forms as energy-minimizing configurations. On net, we thus experience hybrid "semantic + symmetric" hallucinations. (3) Indra's Net: Each "competing cluster of coherence" needs to model its environment in order to synch up with it in a reinforcing way. This leads to attractor states where "everything reflects everything else". ~Qualia of the Day: Indra's Net~ |