Traces of the Other – Are DMT Entities Real?

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Traces of the Other – Are DMT Entities Real
A paper by
Andrew R. Gallimore, Niffe Hermansson, Donald D. Hoffman

Paper - Traces of the Other –Are DMT Entities Real?

Not checked how legit this is but found it last night and not seen it on the nexus, thought it was quite interesting/worth a discussion

 

[blig-blug]

Thank you for sharing the paper. It is legit but it's a philosophy paper, not scientific. The authors take this as a starting point and work onwards from there:

If we accept, as a working hypothesis, that consciousness (in the form of interacting
conscious agents) is fundamental and that the world we perceive is a mere interface, an
obvious question arises: Can we see beyond the interface? Our ordinary perceptions only
show us a tiny, filtered slice of reality, populated by those agents that were relevant to
our evolutionary ancestors. Conscious realism predicts that there could exist countless
other conscious agents – potentially of arbitrarily high complexity or completely unfa-
miliar form – that we normally do not perceive at all [20].

They make it even more explicit in the conclusion:

Ultimately, our purpose here is not to claim that DMT entities represent external
conscious agents, but to show that, given a formal theory in which consciousness is
fundamental, such a possibility can be coherently formulated and experimentally inves-
tigated.

So the video title (I haven't watched the video itself) is highly misleading: the paper doesn't state it can "prove that DMT entities are real".

Even the proposed experiments attempt to test something much weaker that doesn't necessarily imply any entity: "designed to test whether DMT experiences exhibit signatures that are difficult to reconcile with entirely hallucinatory perceptions". The authors later act as if some outcomes in those experiments would be evidence of some kind of entity, but that's just not the case. For example, the first experiment involves a computer randomly showing a blue or yellow screen, where the subject would attempt (from another room) to see what state the computer screen is in. The authors assume that this necessitates some kind of "collaborative entity", but this is not the case. One could as easily posit remote viewing through many other means.

The kind of interpretation they propose for the "positive" outcome of their experiments depends entirely on they having already made some assumptions about consciousness and entities.

Personally, I think Gallimore should stop speculating and proposing supposed experiments and start actually experimenting. He has more than enough means to perform some of the experiments he suggests, and if he does find something surprising then we can talk about it. However, for many years already he has preferred to propose hypothetical experiments and speculate. I suspect he may prefer hype to actual research. Who needs data when there is a network of influencers ready to pick any of your speculations and present them as fact? He is aware that this happens and yet not only does he not do anything about it, but he keeps feeding the hype machine.

@laughingcat , if you're reading this, please quit speculating and present some actual data first. It's hard to believe you have the means to offer DMTx experiences but not to have a computer changing screen color and someone in a room next to it taking DMT.

 

[Smoknhorns1]

They certainly are and if you have ever blasted off then you would know yourself they do exist. A majority of people who have went to outer space whether unwillingly or willingly have all seen the entities. If you have yet to meet them I encourage you to consider introducing yourself sometime..

 

[harmala_afficianado]

From a scientific prespective, we cannot prove other realms/entites exist, at least not yet, but i think if most scientists use DMT or any other psychedelic enough, they will know it is, they just wouldn't be able to prove it "scientifically", not everything that is real can be proven by science, the rabbit hole is endless, believing science can prove everything in existence is ignorant, imo.

 

[Smoknhorns1]

From a scientific prespective, we cannot prove other realms/entites exist, at least not yet, but i think if most scientists use DMT or any other psychedelic enough, they will know it is, they just wouldn't be able to prove it "scientifically", not everything that is real can be proven by science, the rabbit hole is endless, believing science can prove everything in existence is ignorant, imo.

This is very true.

 

[Voidmatrix]

From a scientific prespective, we cannot prove other realms/entites exist, at least not yet, but i think if most scientists use DMT or any other psychedelic enough, they will know it is, they just wouldn't be able to prove it "scientifically", not everything that is real can be proven by science, the rabbit hole is endless, believing science can prove everything in existence is ignorant, imo.

How most people practice and use science isn't as a tool or a method, rather, it has instead become scientism. Their metaphysics reduces everything to physical and material constituents. This is why there could be plenty of things science can't prove or posit. It's domain of study is delimited by it's own presuppositions.

One love

 

[pantostao]

Whenever I think about this topic, I remember this classic post by Scott Alexander: Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person

 

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Whenever I think about this topic, I remember this classic post by Scott Alexander: Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person

Yeah, that one popped into my mind too. IMO Scott Alexander fails to understand the point of psychedelics, but so does Gallimore (and in a very similar way).

 

[pantostao]

Yeah, that one popped into my mind too. IMO Scott Alexander fails to understand the point of psychedelics, but so does Gallimore (and in a very similar way).

I don't really know about Scott Alexander appart from this post. But, this one, I enjoy a lot, and I've read it like a hundred times.

I have read Gallimore books (not all of them, though). I'm really entertained by his hypothesis, but I don't really buy them, I feel they're just that, entertaining thoughts told in captivating words.

What do you mean by them failing to understand the point of psychedelics?

 

[blig-blug]

I don't really know about Scott Alexander appart from this post. But, this one, I enjoy a lot, and I've read it like a hundred times.

I have read many of his posts for a long time, until some years ago when IMO their quality started dropping significantly. There are some other posts that you may enjoy, written around those years. I disagree with many of his points but still find them interesting and stimulating. I won't share them here because they often mention politics.

I'm really entertained by his hypothesis, but I don't really buy them, I feel they're just that, entertaining thoughts told in captivating words.

I agree with that. I've also found the book I read by him entertaining. My problem with Gallimore is that he tends to present his ideas as more than entertaining or interesting hypotheses. For example, compare how he presents his stories to how McKenna did it. Gallimore tries to pretend to be doing science while being careful enough to maintain plausible deniability about it. He often abuses formalism and abstraction, in a way that makes his text more obscure to most people without really contributing to anything more than giving it a halo of "it's abstract and dense, so it must be science".

For example, the book I read by him had a whole chapter trying to explain automata theory. If you already know automata theory (as it was my case because that's part of the field I studied) you get nothing out of it, and if you don't, you won't understand it based on that chapter. And you don't need to, it's a quite unnecessary part of his theory, which in its core is a kind of gnosticism decorated with terms from maths and science. It comes across as a trick to impress readers.

What do you mean by them failing to understand the point of psychedelics?

Well, in the case of Scott Alexander he said it himself: he doesn't see the point in them because they don't seem to give you any information or knowledge about the world, only the feeling of insight. Gallimore is similar in wanting them to be a source of information about reality, however he still seems to expect them to be so. I say "seems to" because him preferring to continue speculating ad infinitum instead of testing his hypothesis leads me to think that he doesn't actually believe it. But I may be wrong.

I'm not saying psychedelics can't possibly provide any information about the nature of reality or about aspects of reality itself, maybe they can. But to me focusing on that is completely missing the point, and honestly seems like a maneuver to avoid looking at oneself and one's own mind.

Maybe Gallimore is right, but in that case I would like to finally see data instead of more papers or books speculating, always followed by a media tour in podcasts and such hyping it up.