Author: egodeaththeory

http://egodeath.com

Idea Development page 28

Michael Hoffman, April 21, 2025, started on visionary plant holy days April 20, 2025

Crop by Michael Hoffman, Apr. 2022

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Contents:

some links don’t work on all platforms yet – works on desktop Chrome & Edge:

Incoming Ideas

Technical Ecstasy:
All Moving Parts Stand Still

Black Sabbath

— https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhzM88_jHYA
℗ 1976 Warner Records Inc.

email sent May 5, 2025, 9:45 pm

Technologically Enthusiastic about Transcendent Knowledge audio content discussion.

Discuss and analyze the dynamics of “surrender” mapped to the direct model of control transformation.

My focus is on shaping or packaging or framing a discovered body of knowledge, to bring it back to the community of everyone; contribution to useful Science.

Shaping the content of the Egodeath theory to provide two specific, focused benefits, added to the body of Science: helpful model of mental model transformation; explains myth:

Cybernetic Mind Transformation Myth Analogy

Provide Model of Psilocybin Transformation

1) Provide a useful, relevant, helpful model of control transformation, simple and clear.

Far more ergonomic.  Other models are beginner unity and low-relevance.  

This model is advanced mystical experience, high relevance, with maximum explanatory power, compactly modeled.  

A strength: This model makes minimal changes to the original thinking, experiencing, & mental model.

Explain Myth as Analogy for Psilocybin Transformation

2) Explain the best myth and art, as analogies reflecting that transformation.

Science uses analogies (comparisons) to clarify and explain the referent topic; the explanandum.

Repeal Psilocybin Prohibition, restoring the non-laws of 1965 or 1900.

Europe has a fully developed religious use of Psilocybin (to effectuate this mental model transformation), in Greco-Roman-Christendom.  There’s plentiful quality & quantity of evidence – including the entire language of analogies, not only mushroom imagery.

How notions of “common-core mysticism and perennialism” are minimally correct, but limited to beginner unity.  “Not wrong, but not helpful.”  

The Egodeath theory is not centrally focused on critiquing other models or “the old theory”, but only on specifying “the new theory”, eg this theory does succinctly answer the Panofsky-Huggins objection: “We cannot interpret mushroom-trees as mushrooms unless you explain the branching features.”

Explain the Mystery Religions in a way that completed initiates can agree is on-target and directly concerns their central concerns.

Compact Model Science Body of Knowledge: the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence & Analogies

“ego transcendence” as a flagship phrase?

Flagship phrases:

  • Psilocybin control maturation
  • Psilocybin matured control
  • eternalism-perceived personal control system
  • Psilocybin maturation
  • control transformation
  • Psilocybin transformation <– neutral, vague, broad

Two models of time and control:

1) possibilism; possibility-branching + monolithic, autonomous control; open non-extant future.

2) eternalism; non-branching + 2-level, dependent control; closed extant future.

I didn’t create “a religion”.

I created a compact model of the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism to be added to Science as a body of useful relevant knowledge with extreme explanatory power.

The likely central theme for me to discuss, at this stage:

What’s the character and framing of this the Egodeath theory, vs. other brands of Transcendent Knowledge?  

What’s the promise and purpose of this body of knowledge? 

What kind of transformation is produced?  

What kind of explanatory model is called for, practically?

The audience use case is: Cognitive Scientists at a Classic Metal Head festival with a comic tract summarizing the useful relevant theory – including the point, that you end up with unobtrusive, low-key modification of your original thinking.  

The great appeal of this tiny theory is how small, how LITTLE or how focused the “benefits” are, given by this Science of Personal Control Model transformation/ modification.  

The Egodeath theory (as a body of concerns) has inner core; outer core; inner periphery; outer periphery.

Object Oriented Design principle: “separation of concerns”.

The Egodeath theory should ONLY provide explanatory power for slight transformation of control-model – NOT also save the world, as every other advocate of psychedelics takes to be their driving argument.

Learning this body of knowledge will have a precision-targeted effect, ONLY.  This model fits into Science in a modular way.

Consider the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism & mytheme analogies as an abstract body of Science knowledge that has a certain character.  eg different than exotic & intrusive “nondual spirituality” brands.  

Per Houot, provide a map, a tool, a useful outfitting that’s suited for enduring this altered state, to do general exploration/ discovery.

I’m considering the character and framing of this body of knowledge, at a more abstract or “content” level, than the surface concern of tangible specific formats of publishing the Egodeath theory.

This explanatory framework is about psychedelic eternalism, control transformation, & ending up with a modified version of our usual thinking.

That is not concerned with Epistemology, but is concerned with two models of control and branching-steering across two experiential states (tight cognitive binding & loose cognitive binding as defined by Psilocybin).

Psilocybin is used as the standard of what kind of “truth” & maturation & the standard of reference; the test of relevance; the test of merit.

Pop Neo Advaita might say no-free-will, but it falls short of these qualities and criteria, and doesn’t integrate eternalism-thinking into possibilism-thinking in our experiential world.  And it’s inarticulate, and beginner unity experience.  Not relevant, not ergonomic.  Intrrusive, unhelpful.

The Egodeath theory body of knowledge is an immensely practical model, as discussed in lyrics of album Diary of a Madman: 1981-era, high dose, no-nonsense, practical, relevant, no-B.S. – the practical Metal Head’s needs & standards of judgment, or, their requirements.  Highly grounded in practical relevance.

The requirements for this body of knowledge to meet: must address relevant control transformation and stability, for Metal Heads exploring and testing their soundness of personal control-model with medium-high dose.

For people to explore this state and discover and map it out in order to contribute to Science, requires passing through the gate (perceiving the angel of death threatening Balaam and blocking the path), the preliminary first major challenge is the control stability fascinating problem, a most attractive song that is most fearful and awesome to look at.

The above benefit: a direct model of mental model transformation upon colliding with Psilocybin.

Because of its threatening fear aspect, Psilocybin is the forbidden fire of transformation.

{fire} = threatening, destabilizing, terror-driven re-shaping

The other benefit of the Egodeath theory is the Mytheme theory portion of this body of knowledge: A compact powerful explanation:

The best myth is analogy describing or reflecting mental model transformation about control and possibility.

ego transcendence? self-in-world; control/branching

transcending the branching steersman controller in a tree

branching control model (unstable in loose cognition)

non-branching control model

component: whether branching possibilities or {snake frozen in rock}

component: control model type: monolithic, autonomous control vs. 2-level, dependent control

/ end email

Email to wrmspirit May 5, 2025

Hi wrmspirit, 

Topics:

1) Exact records of decoding Great Canterbury Psalter Day 1 & 4 & Day 3.

2) Decoded {fire} & {purgatory} mythemes.

3) In what way is Psilo “forbidden” to the mind?

Exact records of decoding Great Canterbury Psalter Day 1 & 4 & Day 3

1:15 am Jan. 13, 2025:  (made an image crop) Identified branching form of 4 plants in Day 3, and, proved what’s in {balance scale} in Day 1 by Day 4 plants pointing at it.  

Day 1 & 4 & Day 3 were solved around 11:50 pm Jan 12 through 12:10 am midnight, Jan 13.

Official crop of Day 3 (4 plants) that includes date in it:

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/01/07/idea-development-23/#Branching-Form-Develops-toward-Increasing-Comprehension

Read near here for full records of the interpretation breakthrough.

A few pages scrolled down below that, proof of {balance scale} content: 

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/01/07/idea-development-23/#Proof-that-Day-1-Creation-of-Light-Scale-Balance-Pans-Contain-Mushrooms

Below/ before that: (posted text reporting the breakthrough-pair/cluster):

“[12:04 am Jan. 13, 2025]: in Day 3, there is a progression from in YI morphy YI application moving left to right, Day 3.”I have date-time stamp of recognizing a couple points, including email dates where I emailed you.  I had a dual project early this year, of looking for branching forms in Day 3 of Creation, and examining Day 1 & Day 4.  I have full records, of the date & time where both puzzles were solved together: Day 3 & (Day 1 & 4).

2025: {balance scale} pans.  Find “pans”.  also find: “III, IYI, YI, IY/YI”

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/01/07/idea-development-23/

At 1:50 a.m. June 7, 2023, I declared with no direct proof: “God holds a {balance scale} containing Golden Teacher:”  

I was in error for not looking around for proof, plainly shown on the row below it, finally perceived Jan 13, 2025.

What looms in my mind here is SAME pattern re: image f134  

https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/07/19/psalter-rows/

1. First, I jokingly wrote that I know what’s in the big blue vase behind the oxen.  But I failed to look for direct proof; I assumed pessimistically that the artist didn’t provide it and we must indirectly guess.

2. A while after, I finally opened my eyes to look at the grain dispensary bins: filled with liberty cap shapes.  Facepalm.  Why did I fail to even TRY to look, for years?!

You’d think I would have learned my lesson, from image f134 (leg hanging), when looking at f11 (6 Days of Creation).  

Lesson: This artist (Eadwine) tries to provide direct signalling/ indication.  Assume direct signalling (evidence) is present, not absent.  

Thus my name of 2nd gen paradigm, “explicit”:  2nd-generation entheogen scholarship (the Explicit Psilocybin paradigm) 

Mytheme Decoding: {purgatory}, {fire}

Not sure if I already have a good summary writeup.  

Decoded {fire} maybe a couple years ago, or 2007 main article.  

But I recently improved and focused my reading of the “fire” mytheme.

I more closely identified its specific referent, in the process of control transformation.

{purgatory} or {fire} = altered-state experiencing that forces maturation and transformation from:

1. branching possibilities with monolithic, autonomous control   (possibilism-thinking)

to:

2. non- branching possibilities with 2-level, dependent control.  (eternalism-thinking)

Important: the final mental model is broad and contains two models: qualified possibilism-thinking & qualified eternalism-thinking.  

This is a balance across two states.

Fire converts salamander to Phoenix (Ronald Huggins & Wouter Hanegraaff can’t figure that out, in Ronald Huggins’ 2022 article “Dizzy, Dancing or Dying?”

Dizzy, Dancing or Dying? The Misappropriation of MS. Bodl. 602, fol. 27v, as ‘Evidence’ for Psychedelic Mushrooms in Christian Art (Huggins 2022)

{fire} converts naive possibilism-thinking (assume branching possibilities & assume monolithic, autonomous control) to qualified possibilism-thinking — possibilism-thinking stays same EXCEPT re: two things:

* source of control thoughts is now understood to be outside the personal control system.  I as practical local control agent cannot control my own source of thoughts; I am dependent on mystery source of preset pre-existing control thoughts that are given to me from the moment of Creation.

* branching possibilities is virtual – but do not disrespect this.  Do not say “mere illusion”.  Don’t say “doesn’t really exist.”  Don’t say “self is unreal and delusion/ illusion.”  More like, praise the virtual world that is our life & our world, our reality.

The experiential reality of branching possibilities and egoic personal control system steering in it to create the future.  

But, modified, by seeing that from perspective of eternalism experiencing.  

We end up with a pair of perspectives: the valid but unstable possibilism-thinking, and the valid but usually irrelevant eternalism-thinking.

When the personal control system attempts to use power of monolithic, autonomous control while in the intense mystic altered state, and assume branching possibilities, control instability results; experience of the threat of catastrophic loss of control.  

This problem is the {purifying fire} that forces and drives the transformation to the adult, mature model: non-branching & 2-level, dependent control.

Purgatory fire like the fire mytheme generally, means altered state experiencing that 

{fire} doesn’t mean vaguely being in altered state; more specifically, it is fire centered on control transformation: The state of experiencing and observation, that causes mental model transformation about personal control AND steering in a branching possibilities tree.  From initial two-part model, to final two-part model (but the first model is retained – though modified at the very root, the source of control thoughts):

1. Steering in branching possibilities tree.  See trees in Mithraism The tauroctony bull-sacrifice scene.  A package deal: monolithic, autonomous control.

2. Branches burned away.  Only one path into the future is real and true.  Non-branching.  A package deal: comes with: 2-level, dependent control.

It’s not super clear to me, how which “model of branching” directly links to which “model of personal control”:

1. branching possibilities = monolithic, autonomous control (future seems open, not existing; depends on what direction you steer).

2. non-branching possibilities = 2-level, dependent control (future is closed; already exists)

After the kind of death, sacrifice of child thinking, child thinking completely remains and you use it all the time, BUT, transformed in a specific way by {fire}, purifying thinking about control so that personal control system is now stable within the altered state per 

“Blessed are those who wash their robes [with purgatory {fire}], that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city.” – Revelation 22:14

In what way is Psilocybin “forbidden” to the mind?

You picked up on a recent/ongoing big progress, in interpreting tree of knowledge / original sin/ being kicked out of the Garden.  

Like many scholars, I’ve been working a long time to make sense of Gen 2-3, kicked out from the garden that contains the tree of knowledge/life.  

* A key: Add Rev 22:14, bookend at end of Bible, where the transformed mind is now allowed to eat from tree of life, food allowed to immortals, who ARE allowed through the gate.

* A key: Art shows guarded gate angel fire flame sword blade, of Garden – yet Gen 2-3 doesn’t mention {gate}.  But artists decoded {guarded gate} mytheme so they drew a gate for Eden.

This is the best idea I’ve had about “forbidden fruit”, had this idea in the past month.  

Run away in fear from the Psilocybin revelation (about non-branching & “non-control”) = God prohibits ingesting Psilocybin.

Ingesting Psilocybin is “prohibited to the egoic, temporary, mortal, immature mind” UNTIL the mind’s robe is washed through Psilocybin re-shaping the personal control system (end of the Bible; after purgatory washes the mind’s egoic possibilism-thinking to “qualify” it at the root).

ALTERED-STATE ANALOGY PUZZLE:

How is the mind’s troubled relationship with Psiloc. like “being kicked out of the garden, forbidden from the tree of knowledge/ tree of life?”

Youths on the cusp of adulthood desire to ingest Psilo, YET, they run away in terror – kicked out, ejected through the guarded gate.

addendum:

If you are constitutionally terrified of eternalism, that’s like being “forbidden” because “you will surely die on that day”.

As a critic of theories and common-core mysticism and perennialism, does a critic hate the “death” motif, much maligned?

Blame Genesis 2. Snake says “You will not die.”

In what way is God right & snake right?

That’s the puzzle that’s set up for us at the start of the Bible, no less than “fall of man” / “original sin”; the puzzle is set up & worded in terms of a puzzle about whether you will “die” or not, or in what way.

Compare Gospel of John, “Let us go to Lazarus so we may die with him.”

Therefore “die” / “death” is warranted as a mytheme/ descriptor/ analogy.

To what extent does the Egodeath theory cover {death} of some type?

— Michael

/ end of email to wrmspirit

Qualities of a Superior, STEM-Type Explanatory Model of Ego Transcendence

The Egodeath theory is FAR more ergonomic than other brands of delivering Transcendent Knowledge.

Podcast: the purpose, flavor, framing, what kind of thing is the Egodeath theory?

Audience Use-Case: Cognitive Scientist at a Acid Metal Head Festival; Cliff Burton Hard Tripping in Need of Extemely No-Nonsense Warrier Levelheaded Fire-Tested Model/ Tool/ Map

Lundborg says Zen has no connection with Psychedelics – but my theory of Psycehdelics came through Zen Self-Control Cybernetics per Alan Watts.

Historically, the very best theory of Psych mental model transformation came straight through Zen, of that type/framing.

This awful book’s awful parratting of awful fallacies and biases, PREJUDICES: “religion vs. psychedelics” – entire book is premised falsely that Psychedelics is not religious. Says we should have embraced Western mysticism – contradicts himself. Book only focuses on Eleusis, no othre Western religion. Deceptive breadth in this book: omits main things. fDE DENIES THE PSYCHEDELIC ORIGIN OF RELIGION.

  • Says Zen is irrelevant to Psychedelics.
  • Denies Psychedelic origin of religion.
  • Ignores Acid Classic Metal. Does he write about Rush, Metallica, Diary of a Madman, Iron Maiden: Somewhere in Time, in any of his acid rock commentary books?
  • Uninspired. Mediocre book. p 373: “hinduism and buddhism are poor match for psychedelics” – never mind that they CAME FROM PSYCHEDELICS! Parrot. Proof that psychedelics make authors have NO IMAGINATION.
  • Lundborg book is a compendium of conventional takes, biases, and prejudices, and blind spots.
  • He thinks antiquity culture is understood and familiar to Westerners now, as if we understand at all how ancients think in Classical & Late Antiquity. He thinks he understands mysticism.
  • Contrasts LSD vs. Psilocybin, attributing different qualities. I disagree. Arb’y.
  • p 431 contrasts “religion” vs “mystery cults” – He explains on some page, a difference here, discussing Art Kleps started not really a religion but a mystery initiation cult.

The Egodeath theory has zero interest in exotic alien Eastern jargon concepts and expl’y constructs.

Contrast the Egodeath theory vs the ultra conventional takes in Lundborg book https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DDY96NKM – “full complexity and range” – HARDLY! Skips over everything except Eleusis, skips over Acid Classic Metal, barely mentions 1970s-1980s, ultra conventional talking points of mainstream media: late 1960s, then skip to 1990s Rave – Hanegraaff criticized Partridge for doing this, skipping over LSD Newage, and skipping over Psych Neo Shamanism.
“Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way Of Life
December 11, 2012
Patrick Lundborg

Blurb:

“A groundbreaking book from the author of the highly-acclaimed Acid Archives:

Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life is a product of 20 years research and Patrick Lundborg’s greatest achievement.

“A larger number of people are exploring psychedelic states of mind in the world today than at any other point in history.

“Their shared experiences form the outline of a vast underground culture, whose steady influence upon society can be traced across thousands of years, back to Amerindian plant drug cults and the psychedelic celebrations in ancient Greece that gave birth to our Western society. But the full scope of this psychedelic culture, and its many expressions in the past, has remained poorly understood or even unknown. Psychedelia has usually been taken as a metaphor, or a symptom of something else, even though its true nature is singular and unparalleled. Psychedelia by Patrick Lundborg is the first-ever book to present psychedelic culture in its full complexity and range. Out of a colorful history that spans 3,500 years, emerges a philosophy and way of life that is as dazzling and rich as the psychedelic experience itself. As this book shows, psychedelia is a living underground culture, engaged in constant dialogue with its mainstream counterpart. Psychedelia’s creative, visionary presence in art, rock music and pop culture is thoroughly examined, highlighting many unique and at times unknown works and traditions, from William Blake to Philip K. Dick, from Eden Ahbez to Shpongle, from Haight-Ashbury to the beaches of Goa. The 20th century’s misguided attempts to reduce psychedelia into a branch of psychology or religion are given a critical, sometimes controversial look. A case is made for psychedelic philosophy, a fresh, unprejudiced model to replace the failed interpretations of the past. In the third millennium, psychedelic culture may be standing on the brink of a mystery greater than anything encountered in the past. This mystery comes forth in chapters on ayahuasca and DMT, and has reverberations far outside the realms of psychedelia, cutting into vital questions of consciousness and evolution. Most of all, psychedelia is a celebration of life, in the here and now and in the deep realms of inner-space. The final chapters of Psychedelia discuss the challenges and rewards of the psychedelic experience, as mastered by shamans and teachers from various entheogenic cultures.”

/ end blurb of Lundborg

Metal Heads see psychedelics as a test of level headedness no-nonsense practical control.

A test, a challenge: are you tough, resourceful, level-headed, grounded, no-nonsense?

Control-model transformation: that’s how the sacrament is approached by Classic Acid Metal Heads, the drug of testing, testing the merit of your control model. Mithraism initiates, acid soldiers.

The Egodeath theory is packaged to be useful to, to speak to, 1975-1988 Classic Metal heads,

Non-disruptive, it fits into your life as-is. No specialized jargon and non-standard ways of using words. “Real”. Plainspoken. No-nonsense. Practical.

This practical body of knowledge to fit into your life without changing all of your life.

This implant instructional chip you insert, to quickly get training in a balance skill: how to push and cruise on skateboard in either stance, alternating balance on L foot forward vs balance on R foot forward.

For entering the altered state with your regular workaday naive possibilism-thinking / single-state-informed initial possibilism-thinking, the Egodeath theory in hand, tells you what specific aspect will die and be transformed and what benefit (wheat tail against the Eternalism-stars of cosmos sphere 8) will result from the sacrifice of the bull.

You come away using possibilism-thinking, slightly modified, and consciously perceiving that you are using possibilism-thinking.

In 1988-1995, I wrote & theorized about switching from possibilism-thinking to eternalism-thinking, but I did not realize that my daily constant activity is always possibilism-thinking. define “to eternalism-thinking”:

To “have eternalism-thinking” actually in practice means, using possibilism-thinking and perceiving that you are doing so, from the eternalism POV.

In 1995, I thought that my continued use of possibilism-thinking was a flaw, but specifically THE FLAW WAS USING POSSIBILISM-THINKING W/O PERCEIVING THAT I DID SO.

I was under the delusion that becaause I wrote about eternalism-thinking, i used eternalism-thinking – must define narrow & broad/inclusive sense of terms:

  • basic possibilism-thinking
  • naive possibilism-thinking
  • qualified possibilism-thinking
  • basic eternalism-thinking
  • naive eternalism-thinking
  • qualified eternalism-thinking
  • possibilism-thinking modified by eternalism-thinking, and the ability to perceive that you are using possibilism-thinking. <– end state of mental dev’mt.
  • articulate
  • intelligible
  • great/useful explanatory power
  • relatable wording
  • the defined terms ‘possibilism’ & ‘eternalism’ (after adding emph on control transformation) arguably fits these criteria. from Phil of Time. (‘presentism’ only applies to the metaperception model within the core Egodeath theory.)
  • helpful
  • relevant
  • useful
  • simple
  • clear
  • direct

ego transcendence
e-t
e-t’c

beginner pleasant unity mysticism vs. advanced unpleasant control-transformation mysticism

pseudo science = beginner pleasant unity mysticism
james, stace, Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ), the Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) [because omits 18 of 21 negative effects]

valid science = advanced unpleasant control-transformation mysticism
the Egodeath theory , Chs Stang, James Kent in a way

whitewash operation, a cover-up operation by using bad model of mysticism from James (from a guru) that has cover-up baked into that model of mysticism – omit the demons, only market the angels, of mystical experience.

the 8 suppressed items of Shadow Factor 13: https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/12/30/11-factors-questionnaire-with-all-13-groups-of-all-66-effects-questions-shown/#Unpleasant-General

Branching Amanita Tree Modern Art McKenna Academy

https://mckenna.academy

https://i0.wp.com/mckenna.academy/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/flower1.jpg

https://mckenna.academy
https://i0.wp.com/mckenna.academy/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/flower1.jpg

Psychedelic Injustice: How Identity Politics Poisons the Psychedelic Renaissance (Hatsis, June 16, 2025)

https://www.thomashatsis.com

Psychedelic Injustice: How Identity Politics Poisons the Psychedelic Renaissance
Thomas Hatsis, June 16, 2025
https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-Injustice-Identity-Politics-Renaissance/dp/1634312783 —

Blurb:

“Psychedelic Injustice brings two once-separate culture wars— critical social justice and mainstreaming psychedelia— into focus and explores how the rhetoric of the former hinders the promise of the latter.

“Much as we see in the larger mainstream culture, the impact of critical social justice within psychedelia has resulted in falling academic standards, name-calling, bullying, and ostracizing anyone who does not submit to “ approved” critical [destructive] social justice rhetoric.

“Dealing with three broad social topics (decolonization, race, and gender), Psychedelic Injustice questions the very institutions (within and without psychedelia) that push divisive narratives while also imploring a message of hope and unity in the psychedelic Renaissance.

“Psychedelic Injustice is not a “ call out” — rather, it is a call to unity.

“Through personal experiences, rigorous scholarship, and an eye for nuance, Psychedelic Injustice serves as a much-needed and long-overdue counterpoint to the highly questionable, disunifying narratives found throughout modern psychedelia.”

/ end of book blurb

Against Hatsis & Letcher, there’s plentiful evidence that European religious history includes fully developed Psilocybin use.

Reply 2 or 3 to wrmspirit May 1 2025

Being opinionated & recoiling is correct in this case.

Houot said my book review is fair and accurate.

Rise of the Psychonaut delierately has an off-putting theme woven throughout. The book is strangely addressed to a vanishingly narrow audience less than 0% of the population fit the description of.

-50% of the Population of Readers Are the Intended Audience

Run the numbers on his EXCLUSIONARY PAGE 10. EASY to find comment at Cybernetic site site map from me. https://cyberdisciple.wordpress.com/2025/04/25/announcement-site-map-of-cyberdisciple-wordpress-com-published/#comment-2737 – my full Comment:

“Look forward to using this map of the mania-possessed mind of altered state realm of Cyberdisciple site, a useful technology for anti-Spirituality, pro-Science, Rational Psychonaut explorers.

11:01 pm may 1 the angel has a message of threat to kill you do not BE AFRAID i will make your control seize causing you loss of control

ANGEL MESSAGE OF HERMES MESSAGE OF GODS

WERE IT NOT FOR ME STOPPING YOU, I COULD HAVE KILLED YOUR CONTROL

I MADE YOU TO RECOGNIZE TOTAL ABSOLUTE VULNERABILITY OF THE PUPPET IN RELATION TO SNAKE GOD PUPPETMASTER PRE-EXISTING MY FUTURE I AM A VIRTUAL STRUCTURING FLOATING SEPARATE FROM THE HIGHER PERSPECTIVE THAT RECOGNIZES FROM OUTSIDE THE CHILD THINKING EGOIC PERSONAL CONTROL SYSTEM PERCEIVED

by the standards of Psilocybin mind immersion (supply: locked bins motif there are lock bins of Psilocybin all throughout Great Canterbury Psalter. And {balance scale} pans filled, and sacks filled with Psilocybin – and traaders brining in Psilocybin imports traders and teaching each other DEPICTS TEACHING Psilocybin TRADERS AND TEACHING STUDENTS what is more developed of a mental model re heimarmene eternalism than the realization of heimarmene eternalism? ans: transcend eternalism; incorp qualified eternalism-thinkingp into qualified possibilism-thinking, co-adjusted to make fit togeher the sacred mental model eternalism-thinking wedded with the mundane mental model possibilism-thinking

todo: crop w/ boxes 3 colors on level of each figure, especially integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking.
“Eadwine leg balancing 3 phase boxes.png”
I do want to do that.

Trending: INTEGRATION post trip.

child thinking; naive possibilism-thinking: basic child animal’s immature-phase mental model MONOLITHIC, AUTONOMOUS CONTROL A DONKEY FOLLOWING THE PATH

I REVEALED YOUR PUPPETHOOD, I CAST OFF THE MORTAL CHILD VIRTUAL MONOLITHIC CONTROL-AGENT

Angel’s message is
EXPERIENCE OF THE THREAT OF CATASTROPHIC LOSS OF CONTROL.

control transformation from possibilism to eternalism

Science:

👍 👽🤖🧝‍♂️ ✅🏆

Not Science:

🚫 👻 ⍻👎

 🚫👻

https://www.movieposters.com/cdn/shop/files/Ghostbusters.103027.jpg?v=1720540479

I will teach you how to be a rational thinker (a quote from Houot’s book Rise of the Psychonaut).

Please put this website down if you’ve never ingested psychedelics or if you take them for therapeutic, recreational, religious, spiritual growth, personal growth, cognitive enhancement, creativity-inspirational, or self-actualizing purposes. It’s not for you — not now, maybe not ever. With that said, this website’s message will not resonate with everyone.”

/ end of Comment

restore from “website” to “book” ie Rise of the Psychonaut – DO NOT READ THIS BOOK

  • if you are above or below 6′
  • or have any experience or don’t,
  • or if you want to do Science but you have an interest in Esotericism.

You are too immature, insane, and irrational to look for space aliens on DMT like me, Mr Anti Mystery religion Science.

You’re not fit to do Science Rational Psychonaut Explorer Discoverer driven by external search for space aliens on DMT, research expectations driven by the model of pursueing advanced outer space aliens in the psychedelic state.

My superpower is I am able to hold my nose and transform problem-riddled books to get value out of them.

I wish to find the Justin Sledge video interview segment disparaging the Four Horsemen Atheists as embarrassingly ignorant and poor quality, unqualified to write about religion.

I got really hung up on this “set up barriers” aspect of Rise of the Psychonaut.  I myself — who agrees with his core idea — could hardly focus on reading this outrageous lopsided book.

A friend thinks I’m wrong to allow Houot 5 of 5 stars even though I was highly clear in pros & cons of the book.

Houot did not invent the stupidest notion of Science battling against the stupidest notion of Religion – he merely participates in that unproductive false dichotomy and pushes to makes the problem worse.

Houot participates in trying to set up a debate that drives down into the gutter, rather than aiming for an upward version of Science & upward version of Religion, bringing those together.

Houot needs to STEELMAN rather than STRAWMAN religion; that is, debate against the best, not worst, form of religion he can imagine.  

Houot told us (Max / Cyb) he equates “religion” with “supernatural belief” – ie, 

I realized after the meeting — Houot is a (ignorant) literalist!  

Like deniers of mushroom imagery in Christian art are reductionist literalists who advocate reductionism and literalism and “art only has 1, shallow meaning” (in the special case of mushr. imagery, only).

During the meeting, Houot misused the disparaging word ‘exoteric’ (shallow outsiders’ literalism) in a positive way, to mean a directly expressed Science model.  

— showing that he is unqualified to critique religion, like deniers of mushroom imagery in Christian art are un-qualified and simply ignore the evidence.

Andy Letcher’s book Shroom (2006), everyone is citing as proof of no mushrooms in Christian history.

His book only considers 1 instance of mushroom imagery in Christian art – glad I wrote a solid, popular rebuttal to his book in 2007, that people challenged him about.  

Still, Letcher’s book Shroom (2007) — disproved by my oft-read book review — is nevertheless taken as proof of no mushrooms in Christian history.  

Even though Letcher’s book backpedals and admits that the previous negative verdict was wrong; he is forced to admit there WERE lib. caps in England.

Letcher’s book tries to contain & manage the losing negative position of the Deniers.

This is a strategy: Deniers have no case, but they put forth many bunk pseudo-arguments, and the biased audience acts like these bunk, fallacious arguments are real disproofs.

Letcher’s single instance of art he considered (Bernward Door) was an explicit Psilocybin example, which = 2nd-gen entheogen scholarship, to actually disprove 1st-gen entheogen scholarship, but pretend that he disproved mushroom imagery in Christian art altogether.

Letcher only disproved the Secret component, which is the main emphasis of 1st-gen entheogen scholarship.

Letcher’s response to my 2007 book review is to claim 4 things at his site, and I disproved his 4 claims AND 1 more:

Letcher argues against my book review:

“It’s not possible to prove that the art means deliberately ingesting psychoactive mushrooms to have religious experiences.”

The mushroom-tree artists disprove Letcher’s claim against me, and their art proves even PEAK religious experience, not just any religious experience.

Carl Ruck endorses John Allegro’s book Sacred Mushroom & The Cross

Today I found another new video interview, Rick Strassman or Danny Jones says, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmD3uDMH7LI
further confirming that Carl Ruck endorses John Allegro’s book Sacred Mushroom & The Cross.

Ruck builds on Allegro’s anti-Christianity narrative to construct 1st-generation entheogen scholarship (the Secret Amanita paradigm).  

Tail wags dog; agenda-driven entheogen scholarship; 

Allegro & Ruck abuse entheogen scholarship for the purpose of disparaging Christianity.

Wasson abuses entheogen scholarship to suppress scholarship in entheogen origin of Christianity.  

Wasson: Banker for the Pope = infinite, off-the-charts conflict of interest.  Propped up by censorship and publicly harassing  & pressuring mycologists.

________________________

Houot:

The silver linings of Rise of the Psychonaut’s badness and wrong attitude (a gutter-driving pro “Science”, anti “Religion” posturing):

* Houot showcases the above problem, so that we can see it clearly and do the opposite attitude and strategy.

* Houot is in productive constructive conversation with me, Max, Cyb, and Sacred Garden Church.  He’s going to church (so to speak). 

Sacred Garden Church’s book club members recoiled and felt like they would not participate regarding this book.  

The leader quoted Houot’s shocking page 10 that drives off 150% of the audience, not even coherent, a torrent of trimming his audience to less than none (incoherently).

Hatsis Interview on Boghossian: I Am a Theist Therefore Have Never Any Fear; I Am Terrified of Entheogen

My comment:

When Hatsis said not fearful, I set about debating and analyzing the merit of that attitude. Against his advice there, I advocate reverent apprehension. Then I hear Hatsis say a few minutes later, he’s terrified of a psychedelic, contradicting himself.

Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. But God does not want us to avoid Him; God makes us draw near. So it’s a certain necessary attitude, of justified respectful bravery, not foolhardy hubris.

/ end of my comment

Rudely Personal-Focused Reply to My Comment

“If you listen closely (because it seems you did not), Hatsis differentiated between LSD, mushrooms, and Ayahuasca (which do not cause him any fear at all) and 5 MeO DMT, which does cause some fear. It’s not a contradiction. You just didn’t pick up on the nuance.”

Hatsis Contradiction About Immune from Fear

This is an important topic, worth examining Hatsis’ inconsistent statements. Roland Griffiths’ reports emphasize that fear increases with higher dosage of Psilocy—.

LS—, mushr—, and Aya— have not caused Hatsis fear; 5-MeO causes Hatsis fear. Here are Hatsis’ statements about fear, regarding various substances.

Hatsis says the differences in effect of these various substances is a matter of degree of psychedlic efficacy. Hatsis says “Iboga … terrifying”. Hatsis says of 5-MeO “every time … I was scared … Before you did it … really scary.” The above statements are inconsistent, given that 5-MeO is only different in its degree of psychedlic efficacy.

10:43 =
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wWEqzQE1k&t=643s —

Hatsis says:

“Psychedlics are non-specific amplifiers. So if you have any fear or you’re unsure about the experience, fear and uncertainty are going to be amplified in the experience, and that leads to what we call a bad trip. … I’m a little woo woo … I’m a theist, I’m not an atheist.

“So for me when I take a psychedlic …  I can’t know, and I don’t want to say that I have faith, because it moves beyond faith.

“But I have a certain level of certainty that these medicines are connecting me to something divine.  So I’ve never had a bad trip; I don’t know what a bad trip is.

“Because when I eat mushrooms, when I drink Ayahuasca, I mean I am in the bosom of Gaia, and it’s just like here’s the universe unfolding before me; here’s life, here’s love,  here’s ecstasy,  here’s death, here’s all of it.  And it’s just a remarkable experience. 

“Now somebody who is unprepared for that, I mean they’re going to see the death aspect of it, and oh my god am I dying?  They’re going to get anxious about it, and that anxiety is going to be amplified.

PB asks Hatsis about LS–, 5-MeO, mesca—, mush—.

“On mush— I always have a divine experience.   … I experience the divine, like I am sitting in the lap of just the celestial mind.”

21:19 —
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wWEqzQE1k&t=1279s
21 * 60 + 19 = 1279s —

Hatsis says:

“Psychedlics are non-specific amplifiers. … that’s why it is always important to approach the medicine with love and trust, because then love and trust get amplified. And when love and trust are amplified, it becomes impossible to have a bad trip.  … I mean love and trust of the medicine itself, love and trust for people I know and love, and trust in people I don’t know.”

27:44 — “But when you use a lamp it is a guaranteed breakthrough. “Oh my god, I am sitting in the lap of God” experience. So I caution somebody that’s an atheist, Look, this is going to turn your world upside down.”

37:28 — “Iboga is a root uh from Africa which is another very powerful … like 36 or 35 36 hours … It is both awe inspiring and terrifying all at the same time.

1:03:09 = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wWEqzQE1k&t=3789s
63 * 60 + 9 = 3789s —

PB: “What would someone be giving that excuse for [for avoiding 5-MeO], like I’m trying to think like they’re scared It’s fear.”

Thomas Hatsis:

“Look every time I’ve ever done 5 MEO — I was — my pants, I was scared shtless.”

Before you did it?

“Yeah It’s always scary.”

What were you scared of?

“Oh my goodness, you are literally about to be propelled into the nucleus of the mind of the universe. That is really [ __ ] scary, That’s scary.”

1:12:08 = 72 * 60 + 8 = 4328s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wWEqzQE1k&t=4328s —

PB: What’s the difference between L– and mush— and DM-, and whatever else you’d want to throw in that category, keta— or what have you?

TH: I would say that there are just differences in strength in their psychedlic efficacy.

PB: The presuppositions in the word “psychedlic efficacy”, in that term, are enormous.

TH: Yeah.

PB: They have a telos to them.

TH: Yeah Yeah they do Yeah, Major telos.

Video Link: Hatsis & Bog

Vid title:
Why Critical Social Justice Ruins Psychedelic Experiences
ch: Peter Boghossian
Apr. 29, 2025 (2 days ago)
Show: Conversations with Peter Boghossian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wWEqzQE1k —

Desc:

“Psychedelic historian Tom Hatsis was an atheist until he tried psychedelics.

“Then he went from atheist to theist.

“Psychedelic encounters reshaped his understanding of the divine.

“In our conversation, Hatsis and I dove into the enigmatic world of psychedelics, exploring their history, safety, and transformative potential.

“Hatsis, a meticulous researcher, unpacked the distinctions between DMT, Ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, and 5-MeO-DMT, each offering unique pathways to altered states of consciousness.”

Bog interview vid below:

Tom’s new book: https://www.amazon.com/Psychedelic-In…

Chapters of Bog vid:

  • 0:00 Trailer
  • 1:05 About Tom
  • 2:42 The legal and cultural paths of psychedelics in the U.S.
  • 3:49 Critical Social Justice perspectives and psychedelic therapies
  • 5:51 Factors that shape the safety of psychedelic experiences
  • 8:24 Psychedelic education & maturity
  • 24:45 Tom’s spiritual experience with psychedelics
  • 32:39 Differing experiences on psychedelics
  • 49:36 Critical Social Justice ideology is the biggest threat to psychedelic research and culture
  • 51:55 Connectedness
  • 55:55 Psychedelics are considered medicinal
  • 1:12:49 Hatsis’s new book “Psychedelic Injustice”

Video Transcript: Psychedelic Injustice

Transcript quick copypaste of video
“Why Critical Social Justice Ruins Psychedelic Experiences”
Apr. 29, 2025 (2 days ago)
Show: Conversations with Peter Boghossian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5wWEqzQE1k —

1:12:40 So in in closing tell us about your new book

My new book is

1:12:48called Psychedelic Injustice: Notes from the Intersection of Two Culture Wars

Hatsis’s new book “Psychedelic Injustice”

1:12:54

And the basics of it is to keep identity politics out of psychedelia by showing that the narratives coming from the psychedelic social critical social justice crowd are incorrect.

[The Egodeath theory takes an anti-narrative approach, particularly aganist Ruck Committee’s 1st-generation entheogen scholarship (the Secret Amanita paradigm).

Andy Letcher’s book Shroom in 2006, in effect used 2nd-gen entheogen scholarship to make quick business of disproving 1st-generation entheogen scholarship (the Secret Amanita paradigm).

The Egodeath theory is a roaringly successful, theory-first approach.

Good Theory creates good data.

The Egodeath theory even rejects Hanegraaff’s call for scientific historiography, ignoring Hanegraaff’s calls for avoiding perennial universal theory of intense mystic altered state — Hanegraaff is proven wrong, by his theory-ignorant book.

Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Wouter Hanegraaff, 2022)

Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Hanegraaff, 2022)

Hanegraaff’s book delivers a theory of the intense mystic altered state so totally wrong and garbled, his “cosmos” model cannot allow any fate-soaked stars into sphere 8; his cosmos sky only has 5 stars, and he writes nonsense contradicting all ancient writings, “the Ogdoad above the heimarmene” — Citation needed!

Wouter Hanegraaff thus has little credibility when criticizing religionism & common-core mysticism and perennialism models of the intense mystic altered state.]

Hatsis con’t:

1:13:11

The idea that Europeans didn’t have psychedelic traditions is incorrect.

[Against Hatsis & Letcher, there’s plentiful evidence that European religious history includes fully developed Psilocybin use.]

Eadwine’s leg-hanging mushroom tree image in the Great Canterbury Psalter

Crop by Michael Hoffman

Wedding Victory Triumph of Dionysus (Roman Mosaic)

Hatsis con’t:

1:13:18

“The idea that Europeans stole psychedelic traditions from First Nations peoples is incorrect.

1:13:24

The idea that telling somebody that they are forever oppressed while on LSD, while that person’s on LSD, is a really bad idea.

But in Portland and actually Oregon where psilocybin assisted therapy is legal that is what all the schools are teaching.

[Sacred Garden Church works hard to be neutral & actually universally welcoming, including for legal reasons. It is emphatically NOT a political activism org.]

Hatsis con’t:

1:13:46

“One of these schools is called the Chonga Institute

They’re supposed to be teaching people how to facilitate psilocybin mushrooms in a safe and effective manner to people

1:13:58

And the only thing they’re teaching is racist DEI [ __ ]

I had a friend of mine who attended Chonga Institute to just get his certificate right [never say “, right?”!]

he doesn’t go for any of this woke crap

He’s a smart guy

And he said to me he’s like:

“The only thing I learned from Changa Institute is that I should feel guilty 24/7 for being a white person.”

He’s like “That is the only thing they taught me.”

And his purpose of being there was to get some kind of certificate, just a certificate so that he could facilitate the medicine

So he did what most people do: He sat there He kept his mouth shut You know he answered questions the way the racist instructors wanted him to answer it so that he could get his certificate and move on with his life

Me I mean so this is

I’m a guinea [?] from New York I would have been calling that [ _cussing_ ] instructor out left and right on all her [ _cussing_ ]

This has infused your “community” — and that’s an overused word –“

[the Egodeath community objects to that claim!]

1:15:05

“And I noticed in your book [evidently Bog has early copy of book] I read the I paid particular attention to the references

There are hundreds of references to various books in the history of psychedelia.

Well I I could have done that or I could have gone the Claudine Gay route

and I decided to do the me route where I actually site my sources.

[It’s impossible for me to cite Hatsis, b/c he took down and corrupted his 5 articles providing a gallery of mushroom imagery in Christian art that prove there’s no mushroom imagery in Christian art.]

Right Well

1:15:23

that’s good, I’m sure your sources appreciate that

Yeah another fraud at Harvard Go figure

Is there anything I should have asked you that I didn’t ask you?

1:15:35

nothing comes to mind

Great

Where can people find you?

At https://psanctum.org

Or if you check out the psychedelic historian YouTube channel I have some videos Or psychedelic

1:15:54historian on Instagram or um Sanctum again

1:16:00psu m on Instagram and you can find

. . . .🔍🧐🤔

1:16:22

it’s ego grasping

Yeah

You know uh um

A very dear friend of mine and now my my current girlfriend coined the term ego grasping

And that is

The biggest impediment to the future of psychedelia is all these people grasping for the narratives that they’ve been fed their whole lives.“

[The Christianity-hating – when not Christianity-protecting-from entheogens — 1st-gen entheogen scholars, McK & Ruck, abuses entheogen scholarship for the purpose of pushing their narrative of:

“The big bad Church suppressed us heretics’ The Mushroom [mythical Amanita muthosaria, the super-psychedelic for narrative-telling]”

1:16:47

Hatsis con’t:

“LSD, mushrooms they’re narrative disruptors”

[psychedelics users have NO imagination or originality. evidently, PSYCHEDELICS MAKE PEOPLE HAVE NO IMAGINATION OR ORIGINALITY]

“and that’s what we should be using them for instead of to solidify these narratives, which is what literally every major psychedelic institution is doing.”

“Perception of Eternalism” Article Removed from Home Page of EffectIndex.com

https://www.effectindex.com/effects/perception-of-eternalism

Horrible “Predeterminism” Article: Everything Wrong with “Determinism”

https://www.effectindex.com/effects/perception-of-predeterminism

Kins should contrast eternalism sharply vs determinism. They SEEM to be similar, but they are actually very different, w/ little overlap.

The future is “closed” in two completely different frameworks, incompatible systems.

Determinism is entirely different than Eternalism, incompatible.

“free will vs. determinism” obviously maps to / is comparable to
possibilism vs. eternalism
but by no means is freewill same as possibilism, w/ same center of emphasis & proposed mechanisms involved.

Egodeath Theory Narrative: Driven by Phenomenology of Control Stability, not by Epistemology; not by “Is Possibilism True?”

image: f134 row 1 L: teaching about

  • mere sitting balanced:
    Basic eternalism-thinking gives control stability.
    vs about
  • advanced balance
    Integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking gives cross-mode stable control, in final, mature phase after integrating eternalism-thinking into possibilism-thinking mental model across states.

image: f134 row 2 M & R: threatened when L finger closer to ground than R finger.

image: f177 L: R foot balancing connected to L foot rams in fire

It doesn’t centrally matter whether Possibilism is true vs. Eternalism is true.

The important kind of “true” is: which mental model gives viable stable control in each state?

by no means is determinism same as eternalism, , w/ same center of emphasis & proposed mechanisms involved.

Stop debating “only mind exists” vs “only matter exists” – not relevant.

stop deating b debating freewill free will vs. determinism , or its compat’m. Not relevant.

Instead, focus all resources on modelling how the experience of possibilism is impacted by the experience of eternalism.

The Egodeath theory is a PHENOMENOLOGY-DRIVEN THEORY. the mushroom-tree artists report that control stability results from repudiating relying on possibilism-thinking & monolithic, autonomous control- latter causes loss of control / control instability.

The Two Senses of “Stable Control”: During altered state vs. across states

The women holding {balance scale} say “even though possibilism-thinking is unstable during altered state, you still must rely on possibilism-thinking always in some way.”

Instances of {no-limbs} in f134:

  • sage & father at table
  • two women row 2 M: maiden 1 limb: a foot.
  • row 2 R: floating sage & youth w/ no limbs.
  • row 1 L: instructor & student 2 has no limbs, just a youth no beard face w/ eye-pointing & furrowed brow.

Instance of 1-foot in f134:

  • standing on plow
  • student in row 1 L
  • maiden row 2 M
  • soldier row 2 L

Control stability (during the peak window of the intense mystic altered state) results from relying on 2-level, dependent control per eternalism-thinking.

Control stability (across the ordinary state & altered state) results from relying on the coordinated combination of qualified possibilism-thinking & qualified eternalism thinking. May 2, 2025

The mature mind ends up standing on/ relying on two distinct feet: daily possibilism-thinking & peak-state eternalism-thinking.

The mature personal control system incorp’s the egoic personal control system & adds the transcendent personal control system.

The Driving Narrative Commitments of the Egodeath Theory

Cybernetics message from angel: threat vulnerability control transformation – “non-control” from egoic POV.

We have stable control, which takes into account total vulnerabliity and dependence. If God makes us go out of control ie control instability, there is nothihng but a healthy trusting relationshipo of 2-level, dependent control.

[The above above point from Hatsis is another reason the Egodeath theory is anti-narrative.

DELIVER THE MOLECULE, WITH NO ATTACHED NARRATIVE pls, except forcefully attach & weld & conflate the following narratives to the Psilocybin molecule:

Egodeath Theory Narrative: Restoring Psilocybin to Christianity, not Introducing Psilocybin into Christianity

Re-introducing Psilocybin into Christianity, not “introducing”. This is not a novel addition; this is a restoration of Psilocybin into Christianity.

Egodeath Theory Narrative: Exclusively Focus on Psilocybin, Not Other Molecules

Focus & invest all resources in specifically the narrative of “Psilocybin“, NOT “sacred mushrooms”, “entire pharmacopia”, “Datura/Psil blends”, etc.

Victory by focusing all firepower pointedly at Psilocybin specifically.

I’m more than happy that I own this single-plant fallacy, I am crying b/c my world only contains… the potentially best 1 molecule, best in several ways.

Every word spent supporting DMT or Amanita muthoscaria is a word NOT spent supporting Psilocybin – strategize finite resources & attention. Amanita’s not even illegal, anyway!

Why does Ruck waste any attention pushing Amanita, except to be amenable to Psilocybin Prohibition since its recent invention in 1970?

Egodeath Theory Narrative: Europe Had Psilocybin Use, and It Was Fully Developed

1) Europe religious history fully developed the use of Psilocybin,
2) there’s plentiful evidence for that.

More developed than in the Americas.

Fully developed in Europe.
Partly developed in the Americas.

Why ht mi Houot mistake in his dissertation: “mysticism resorts to failure technique of surrender. shamans have success control technology.”

Beginner mysticism doesn’t require surrender.

Advanced mysticism requires “surrender”, which refers to control model transformation from monolithic, autonomous control to 2-level, dependent control.

Mytheme Decoding: {surrender} = control model transformation from monolithic, autonomous control to 2-level, dependent control

May 2, 2025

control model transformation
cmt

the Canterbury Psalter “mushroom tree/ hanging/ sword” image
cpm

not as she said in Sunday service that I can 100% relate to from recent experience:

She said “I have trouble handing over control to an unknown controller”. But I re-thought that idea after I recently had that feeling before she said that.

Child thinking misunderstands the feeling as “you must voluntarily give your control steering wheel as-is untransformed, to the higher agent.”

Adult thinking recognizes that … different pov on the child having the steering wheel in a branching tree.

The child remains holding the wheel in tree but that arrangement is now perceived as virtual – that’s as close as you get to handing over control as-is untransformed.

Now see how control actually is. Not hand unreal control over to higher agent.

The Psilocybin Divorce and Declaration of Independence of European Psilocybin Technology and Technique of Transcendent Knowledge

The mushroom-tree artists 900-1400 were more developmentally advanced (by Psilocybin standards) than shamans in the Americas.

With Witch Hatsis hot on my tail, I have to lay down my card and out-do him.

This is more a reaction against radicals who say Europeans must ask permission from Americans to use their Psilocybin.

Europeans had their own Psilocybin history, and at its peak, was more developed (by Psilocybin standards) than Americans.

Egodeath Theory Narrative: Mechanism of Enlightenment

  • Psychedelics causes loose cognitive association binding which gives the perceptual experience of eternalism instead of possibilism, and the result is having both mental models of personal control-in-world, distinctly.

The narrative/ model is NOT “get rid of possibilism-thinking and use eternalism-thinking instead.” I’ve been confused about this since 1995 experience of:

“OMG my mind is still impure, b/c I see/perceive that I still use freewill thinking. I have failed to understand block-universe determinism since 1988, 7 years of contradicting myself.”

Purifiyign mental model of control does NOT mean “don’t use possibilism-thinking; use eternalism-thinking instead”

depending on how narrowly we define “possibilism-thinking” & “eternalism-thinking”.

Egodeath Theory Narrative: You Don’t “Get Rid of” Possibilism-Thinking; You Identify and Use It

Naive Eternalism-Thinking: Newbie discovers eternalism-thinking, wrongly over-broadly thinks “Don’t use possibilism-thinking”

  • basic possibilism-thinking
  • basic eternalism-thinking
  • naive possibilism-thinking
  • naive eternalism-thinking
  • qualified possibilism-thinking
  • qualified eternalism-thinking

naive eternalism-thinking – newbie discovers eternalism-thinking, wrongly thinks “I get rid of possibilism-thinking”
n-et

Egodeath Theory Narrative: Best Art, Best Mysticism, Best Myth

  • The best religious myth & art depicts Psilocybin transformation from naive possibilism-thinking to integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking.
  • The best, most well-formed & fully developed religion is centered on transforming the mental model of personal control & world from possibilism to eternalism by exposing the mind to Psilocybin-induced loose cognitive association binding.

Egodeath Theory Narrative: STEM Advanced Modelling

STEM as thought-style and communication and education style pedagogy style.

Like Tim Freke now says, our technology of expressing Transcendent Knowledge has moved forward, better than the crude expressions of the past such as insane Neo-Advaita and Eastern religion cliches and Neoplat too: “words can’t communicate”.

Gross overstatement. Words CAN communicate.

The goal is useful helpful directly expressed and analogy-supplemented explanatory framework model, a tool, a map (Houot) that is useful, direct, helpful, simple, clear, ergonomic.

Inarticulate zen mysticism is REJECT because fails to deliver relevant, useful, helpful, simple, and clear explanatory framework model.

freke doesn’t clearly enough distinguish between “common-core mysticism and perennialism” as an experience vs. expression & comprehension of that.

Freke semi differentiates, not well enough: Mysticism as an experience of another POV, vs. how well that POV is understood & described; modeled; expressed.

The better we can describe eternalism POV experience, the stronger we can HAVE that experience.

The Egodeath theory, as a clearly expressed STEM-expressed explanatory model, amplifies the eternalism POV experience.

The Old Theory: Enlightenment = Unity; The New Theory: Enlightenment = Control Transformation [beginner vs. advanced mysticism]

I agree with common-core mysticism and perennialism in 1 aspect only:

  • There is a common experiential mode.
  • They all say it’s Unity, following Ken Wilber. I, alone, say it’s control transformation, following the Way of Zen by Alan Watts.
  • Freke threw the Way of Zen by Alan Watts in fire b/c it says “words are incapable”.
  • I went to give the Way of Zen by Alan Watts back to father; I got enlightenment via the Way of Zen despite its poor use of language, and in Dec. 1987 I asked Watts:
    Why didn’t you simply write the word ‘determinism’ (‘eternalism’)?!

I disagree with common-core mysticism and perennialism in all other aspects:

  • The main, central, important common experiential mode is NOT unity, but rather, control model transformation from possibilism to eternalism.
  • All theories other than the Egodeath theory are wrong in same way.
  • THE OLD, WRONG PARADIGM OF MYSTICISM that EVERYONE ELSE USES IS UNITY.
  • JAN 1988 MY breakthrough ASSERTION. 100% ego cancellation is instantly achieved [LIGHTNING PATH] by grasping eternalism. [KEY PROBLEM: 1995, I STILL PERCEIVED THAT I STILL USED FREEWILL THINKING; MONOLITHIC, AUTONOMOUS CONTROL; EGOIC THINKING; POSSIBILISM-THINKING – I WAS IN ERROR IN THINKING THAT’S A PROBLEM. THE GOOD THING THEN IS THAT I PERCEIVED AND RECOGNIZED MY EGOIC FREEWILL THINKING, MY POSSIBILISM-THINKING OR BASIC POSSIBILISM-THINKING — NOW IN 2024/2025 I GRASP THAT THE GOAL IS NOT TO GET RID OF POSSIBILISM-THINKING, BUT RATHER TO IDENTIFY AND PERCEIVE IT, WHILE DISTINCTLY HOLDING ETERNALISM-THINKING TOO.
  • POSSIBILISM-THINKING DOESN’T “GO AWAY”; IT BECOMES DIS-IDENTIFIED WITH, TRANSCENDED AND USED. YOU ride possibilism-thinking like riding a donkey on a path.
  • EGO TRANSCENDENCE IS NOT A MATTER OF UNITY REDUCING EGO;
  • Ego transcendence is actually a matter of experiential MENTAL MODEL TRANSFORMATION FROM POSSIBILISM TO ETERNALISM; control transformation; Psilocybin transformation.

Over long decades I was surprised to again see my thinking as impure – wrong framing. I should have seen that my thinking splits and differentiated into two distinct models, BOTH MODELS REMAIN USED AND PRESENT. You don’t “get rid of” egoic mental model, egoic personal control system — monolithic, autonomous control steering in branching possibilities —

Rather, the mature, advanced, transcendent mind identifies and recognizes Egoic, possibilism branching, autonomous-control thinking as virtual, child thinking, that is always used and always present, but, now perceived and recognized as virtual.

CAUTION WRITING “VIRTUAL ONLY ILLUSION FALSE DELUSION”, avoid whiff of disparagement.

Egoic, possibilism branching, autonomous-control thinking is now JUSTIFIED, washed clean, the useful VR helmet, game world level, above the substrate hardware of eternalism.

The egoic possibilism-thinking, emergent, virtual level is real and valid and positively appreciated in its own way.

Hatsis con’t

Hatsis con’t:

“That’s what they’re from top to bottom.

It’s all corrupt because they they take their cues from the universities, which are just cesspools of absolute nonsense.

You’re speaking to the right man about that.

I understand that

Yeah just absolute [ _cuss_ ]

But that is where the psychedelic renaissance is taking its cues

and Eden and I are literally the only two people speaking out against us

1:17:26

Everybody else is scared to speak out bowing

What’s that bowing to the orthodoxy

Everybody Yeah

The theology the the leftist orthodoxy of just sh!theadedness

the whole thing all of psychedelia on their knees bowing to it

It is as disgusting as it is disheartening to watch some of the brightest minds in the field licking the boots of DEI [ _cuss_ ]

What a [ _cuss_ ] tragedy that is.

Tom Hatus great way to end.

Thanks for coming to Conversations with Peter Goian.”

/ end of transcript portion

Balaam’s Angel Is Threat – Angel = Threaten

Video title:
#1 DMT Scientist: BANNED Research, Biblical Prophecy & the CIA | Dr. Rick Strassman
ch: Danny Jones
Apr 28, 2025 (3 days ago)
show: Danny Jones Podcast
“Rick Strassman is best known for pioneering DMT research in humans and proposing that DMT could be a biological gateway to mystical or alternate realities. Currently, Dr. Strassman serves as a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. His new book, “My Altered States: A Doctor’s Extraordinary Account of Trauma, Psychedelics, and Spiritual Growth,” is available now.”

Strassman is working on a translation of Genesis.

Rick Strassman says Balaam re: meaning of ‘satan’, satan = threaten.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmD3uDMH7LI&t=4800s
– 1:20:00 —

egoic personal control system bedeviled and stability threatened

Danny asked:

1:18:34

“few months back I read a book on the antichrist which was you know called the antichrist and the antichrist is

1:18:41

characterized by the big lie you by the lie the antichrist is a liar

1:19:06

is Satan the first antichrist

1:19:11

Rick replied:

It was a term

1:19:16

that only appears twice in the Hebrew Bible and in both times it means accuser

1:19:22

like a prosecutor or opponent right or opponent yeah yeah yeah there’s the story of the pagan uh prophet um who

1:19:41

he was a false prophet uh as a pagan prophet but was quite potent

1:19:46

in his predictions and his poetry

1:19:58

He’s like you beating his animal [donkey he is riding]

Crop by Michael Hoffman

1:20:03

because uh well you know to get off the road because there’s an angel [a threat to avoid] and placed on the road that is

1:20:09

threatening him and um you know the threatening part is the the Hebrew root

1:20:17

is the formation or you know the basis of Satan

Ruck Endorses Allegro’s Book The Sacred Mushroom & The Cross

1:20:23

of the idea of um Christ being a drug term you know John Allegro um Oh yes John

1:20:31

yeah I heard of it yeah Ruck actually endorsed his book Sacred Mushroom in the Cross uh Sacred Mushroom and the Cross

1:20:37

yeah yeah that’s a classic i’ve never read it yeah no his is different i I think there’s a lot of uh gaping holes

1:20:44

in his idea because he he traces he traces the Hebrew I guess he was a

1:20:49

scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls right he studied the Dead Sea Scrolls for a long time for a long time yeah he was one of the initial investigators he translated

1:20:56

the Hebrew and one of his he was making a lot of connections in that book to

1:21:02

Sumerian roots and I don’t think Hebrew has any shared commonality

1:21:09

or or roots with Sumerian as far as I know no yeah it you there’s

1:21:15

a Kadian influences and Hittite Assyrian right and and Arabic as well right so

1:21:22

his idea like the I mean the main connection I think he made was that like a mushroom isn’t fertilized it just

1:21:28

comes from like the the rain is the semen of God and then it hits the earth and the mushroom is divine well I think

1:21:35

you need to be careful in uh analogizing or allegorizing the text yes yeah you

1:21:41

can really take it too far from you know the basis of the text which is what the

1:21:46

which is what it’s intended to communicate mhm but no what when the um

1:21:52

idea I was talking about was there’s um the word Christ in antiquity in Greek

1:21:59

means to apply drugs to somebody to to give somebody drugs and there’s there’s

1:22:06

multiple different definitions of the word Christ but um and that’s the hard

1:22:11

Draft for Email Reply to Houot (Max/ Cyb) About Books and Sequence of Egodeath Articles

Perennialism Common Core Mysticism, Beginner Phase: 🦄💨🌈
“Pleasant, Therefore Mystical” – Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Pseudoscientists

Perennialism Common Core Mysticism, Advanced Phase: 😱🐉🚪
“Unpleasant, Therefore Unmystical” – Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy Pseudoscientists

The Hanegraaff (lesser, exoteric) Mysteries

Cog Phen article covers beginner development: Phase 1: 🦄💨🌈
the experience of (positive) spatial unity (non-duality) consciousness, 

Pollan experienced block-universe eternalism as a HORROR TRIP all branches fell off, he reports in hcm How to Change Your Mind

The Max Mysteries

The Cog Phen article omits adult/ advanced mystic-state development: the experience of (negative) control-loss psychotic panic attack (psychedelic freakout, bad trip), which is a central concern of the ego death theory. 

Ego Death Meets Pop Sike Cult

Houot Cyberdisciple Max:

Connect:

  • TechGnosis book
  • Houot Rise of the Psychonaut book
  • My decoding of f134 Great Canterbury Psalter – Cybernetics = control & communication about control in the machine rock block and in Man.

THE WRATH OF the word ‘CYBERNETICS’ against Pop Cult reduction to merely “online”. You aint seen cyber nothing yet without REAL CYBER

THE CYBERNETIC REVELATION OF BLOCK-UNIVERSE ETERNALISM

followed by integrating that revealed veiled adult-phase vision at which child-thinking smoked

Smoked like a backwards cap DON’T / DO LET OUT THE MAGIC SMOKE, fry that child thinking zap!

Zap-capacitor:

To operate, connect backwards to let the magic smoke out TO KNOW THE GOD LEVEL THINKING above child thinking: immortal Transcendent Knowledge = having apple.

Goal: Hand everyone Transcendent Knowledge on a silver platter.
Easy start: I publish a book that is a collection of my articles. Houot said Forte edited a compilation.

Easy start: book of my articles. So can be cited by stingey credit withholders like

Max Freakout’s dissertation FAILED to credit me, don’t care if it would’ve been instant death: I can certainly conclude that Max Freakout MUST have cited my work filling a page of his Biblio, but the evil Institutional Academia deleted the 58 citations of my work that I am certain Max Freakout MUST have cited,

as surely as Panofsky MUST have provided to Wasson a citation to back up his claim of Hot tip! Great news!

  • Hot tip! Great news! Not only Plaincourault, there are hundreds more mushroom-trees like Plaincourault!
  • Art consistently strived toward mushroom [branching, handedness, stability] as the target end state of this development from pine to mushroom.
    [i inverted Panofsky’s bias]

Meaning and misuse of ‘cybernetics’:

online has been everyday life since 1989. 

If you care about messages from the advanced psychedelic state, see decoding of f134 in Great Canterbury Psalter 

Podbook video format by Tim Freke part 1 May 1 2025 today:

Thesis:
Divine Psychosis, a phenomenological comparison of religious experience and schizophrenia
PhD thesis for the hidden academy of psychedelic scholars – indirectly about psychedelics/entheogens.

Transcendent Knowledge Podcast with CyberDisciple and others

The Transcendent Knowledge Podcast on youtube, covers a wide range of issues from within the ego death theory framework

The main overall topic is a thorough and systematic critique of the ‘pop-psychedelia’ narrative (aka the ‘psychedelic renaissance, popular psychedelic thinking), why it is inferior to the Egodeath theory as an explanation of the significance of psychedelic drugs and tripping.

CyberDisciple’s list of links and descriptions of each episode of the podcast: 
cyberdisciple.wordpress.com/site-map/#List-of-Episodes

My book has the 3 key requirements: voicing, content, tech-usage. 

  • Ergonomic content, voicing, technical delivery worthy of TechGnosis.

My book will be the least useless book of them all.  Better than “Not wrong, but not helpful or relevant or useful or simple or clear or … ergonomic.

My book would be a good vehicle to publish my essay articles.  I have a real need to provide a citeable book of my articles.  Ready to go.  As easy as amking voice content by totally cheating and reading aloud, while commenting – piece of cake content.

Max has said everything on podcasts, so, has no more to say.

I like to read-aloud a variety of types of writings.

Max Summary of the Egodeath Theory

Max Freakout wrote in email apr 27 2025 to Alan Houot:

Houot listened to one episode of Transcendent Knowledge podcast about James Kent’s book Psychedelic Information Theory.

Houot essay ‘Article Phenomenology for Psychedelic Researchers’ 

Psychedelic phenomenological research has been done by Michael Hoffman – the Egodeath theory.

Philosophers have created phenomenological maps of the psychedelic altered state.

The ego death theory has already done all of the psychedelic phenomenological work.

Intellectuals qualified to investigate consciousness – namely, philosophers, especially phenomenologists – cover chemically altered states.

Michael Hoffman’s ego death theory provides a comprehensive cognitive-phenomenological model of the psychedelic altered state of consciousness.

Phenomenologists in the Egodeath community have reported on the “what is it like” experience elicited by psychedelics, thereby revealing the structures of these states of consciousness.

“According to the ego death theory (by MH the psychedelic phenomenologist), ‘what it is like’ to trip balls on psychedelic drugs is to experience temporarily loosened cognitive association binding, culminating in an experience of timeless non-control or ‘ego death’.

“This cognitive and experiential mode is contrasted with the ordinary default mode of tight cognition binding, which produces an experience of egoic control-agency (= ordinary life, not tripping).

“The experience of timeless non-control can be modelled by the physics-based model of the four-dimensional static block universe (per Minkowski and Einstein), and by the distinction between (branching-time) possibilism and (non-branching) eternalism in the philosophy of time.”

Petkov book intro: “absolute four-dimensional spacetime“

Branching in Physics: Everett/Bohr manyworlds interp of Quantum Mechanics. per Pop Quantum Mysticism. popular b/c reifies ego power steering in branching.

“Furthermore, the ego death theory claims that the stories from religious mythology serve as descriptive allegory/metaphor/analogy for the cognitive-phenomenological dynamics of psychedelic tripping.

“For example, the God Jesus fixed to the crucifix, and turning to stone when you see the Medusa, both refer to the psychedelic experience of timeless non-control, static embeddedness in the eternal 4D block universe, classic ‘bad trip’.”

Leary’s new book Zach says avoid saying ‘bad trip” – but Travis Kitchens or Joe Welker (articles below) says stop covering up bad trips.

What is THE WORST THING TO FEAR? ANS:

Explain the classic experience of the threat of catastrophic loss of control.

{threat} = {blade} is depicted as bow & arrow threat in the tauroctony bull-sacrifice scene​ & f134 row 2 in Great Canterbury Psalter: psalter reader threatened when L finger closer to ground than R.

Pop Sike Cult advises “surrender to X”. inarticulate, not helpful.

Moving Past Beginner Mysticism in Psychedelic Science

The Egodeath theory is most excellent.

I have made an intelligible, simple, coherent, strongest explanatory model of how the mind transforms re: pcs — that is the most of-interest dynamic and is the highest treasure, by the standard of Psilocybin.

Not by the standard of purity / ergonomics of how they used Psil in conjunction with other plants but FOCUS ALL ATTENTION INVESTED in psil – 

Yes you can leverage Datura IN SO FAR as Datura can increase Psil; 

Datura in service of the ideal, which is Psil.  

Smallest theory = agnostic on history of Datura supporting Psil.  

Focus limited attention on simple Psil effect model.  Assume myth = purely psilocybin.   

Myth is depiction of Psil x’n.  

How Psilocybin causes mental model transformation from Possibilism to Eternalism:
basic Eternalism 

qualified eternalism-thinking 

mature Eternalism-thinking mental model by definition is shorthand for integrated qualified possibilism-thinking & qualified eternalism-thinking.

Books are a gnosis info tech.

Houot wrote: 

Psychedelic phenomenology in the same/similar vein Houot speaks about phenomenology:

The Bubble of Simulation: Subjective Experience as a Virtual Environment (Hoffman 1996)
https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2023/03/06/the-bubble-of-simulation-subjective-experience-as-a-virtual-environment-hoffman-1996/

Take my hand, I’ll lead you to the promised land
Take my hand, I’ll give you immortality
Eternal youth, I’ll take you to the other side
To see the truth: The path for you is decided

— Iron Maiden, Heaven Can Wait

https://www.google.com/search?q=heaven+can+wait+lyrics+iron+maiden

___________________

Book: TECHGNOSIS

Erik Davis

Lens/ interpretive filter: see all mysticism in world history as a technology.

Everything is a technology.  Writing, language, internet, ebooks, the table of contents device, the Index device, paragraph breaks are a technology.  IDv at WP is a technology.

__________________________

Neo-Advaita Fraud Cult and Psychosis Cult, abuse of TK – dys  DYSFUNC TK , 

Transcendent Knowledge Psychosis would be if I wrote: 

“The Egodeath theory says kill the ego; get rid of the egoic personal control system structures.

Improve by destroying in all ways.  

Do not transform; must wholly destroy egoic thinking.”

Get rid of egoic thinking only in some nuanced specific sense, fully understood in mature way and system-integrated : egoic personal control system.

That is true if “egoic thinking” is defined in a narrow sense: when the god’s power over the person is revealed by lifting the lid of mind’s engine to reveal how local control agency works under the hood, see the snake carved in rock, rigid serpent monster.

Is ‘serpent’ an accepttab syn of snake? NO!  

A  video the other day said SERPENT IS SNAKE AS MONSTER.  By Daniel Ogden.  

vid title:

Journey Through Self-Negating Non-duality with Jeff Brown
ch: The Glorious Both-And
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XldXXZkszOk&t=3029s

Tomorrow is released Erik Davis’ Led Zep 4 book in audiobook format – the tembr or tonality of Houot’s voice often sounds Erik Davis.

__________________________________________
Rise of the Psychonaut didn’t cite the book TechGnosis.

If I spend time on reading a book, I need it in all formats:
ebook
audiobook
print

______________________________
Exercise in “flip the script”:

I am not anti-profit, anti-money, anti-capitalism.  

I support Hatsis selling books that claim to address MICA and then vaguely direct the reader to his dead website to see the terrific HIstory methodology that he markets himself as doing.
Hatsis’ book PMT is a ripoff; he has nothing but arm-waving re: my #1 topic of interest.

I am not anti book, except that my ten bookcases of 100 boxes of books chases me around trying to crush me at night, so I had to banish my library to storage.

I went insane: in the record store, when I read Erik Davis’ book Zep 4 page about my work, I didn’t get the book, b/c I had too many books — that was a crazy decision and stance.

The work of forming a properly complete and well formed EDT, it better be complete now, because I could die at any moment, like my father in April 1987 when my theory development proper began as such; when I first thought of myself as developing a theory – initially a theory of how to have ndctt; then quickly morphed into a theory to replace Wilber’s theory: 

Jan 1988 upon breakthrough, my framing was “Wilber iswrong about the nature of ego transcendence: 

Ego transcendence is actually about experiencing bue in psychedelic state, to transform from one mm to the 2nd mental model.

_________________________________________

My superpower is the ability to draw out the potential of a writer’s work, able to sort the good and bad, but the “good” requires intensive transformation.  

A writer makes points that range from bad to good points, or framings, or networks.  

Then I have to transform all of that to incorp and strengthen my own theory, to assimilate and transform their bricks of potential value, potential contributions.  

eg Hatsis wrote 5 articles to prove no Secret Christian Amanita Cult, which he thinks is the same as proving no mushroom imagery in Christian art.

Then I extracted all of his msh pictures into a gallery — REFRAMING the data from his bad model into my good model.

What’s the good & bad in Cyberdisciple’s writings?  How do they need to be transformed to support a good theory?  Ans: not much transformation needed.
What’s the good & bad in Max’s productions?  How to transform it to make it reach its full potential?
What’s the good & bad in the writings or ideas of MH in:

1988 (1st draft of The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence): goal was show that ego t’c was 100% and quick, by experience of block univ in a-s.  

Did my v1 Minnosota mechanical pencil draft accomplish its goal?  What should its goal have been?  

How far was it from that?  

It lacked any fluency at history of analogies that describe same thing.  

Fails to connect the two opposed Physics models to the two complementary mythemes, where referent pair of mental models is possibilism & eternalism.

1997 (core theory spec outline),
2007 (main article adds art/myth / analogy / t’d etm),
2020 (CECOP article & spawned f134 article)
2024 (draft of BMMT article for JPS)
2025 (April 26, 2025 meeting’s statements) –
How to transform it to make it reach its full potential?
The best point of reference for writing is comic book of EDT for use in a festival.  Does the EDT comic book explain that your original thinking is preserved, but modified at a deep level?

“Egodeath” is partly a brand; and shorthand.  More words, more clarity: ego t’c.  Preserve and transcend and use the egoic mental structures, informed now by TK.  

The best examples of publication-ready are
Wasson article
2007 main article
Almost publish-ready: compelling evidence & criteria of proof for identifying mushroom imagery in Christian art
Bubble of Simulation

EYG has informal but carefully composed postings.  I find it overwhelming, a solid wall of substance.  Early posts to Valen 2004 are copied at eddc but alas lack date/time stamps (bad decision when formatting, but produced cleaner timeless pages)

I have not yet analyzed the WP format I have developed: a mix of clean and rough, with support for images.  very different mix than EYG.  I often felt EYG was too stiff a format, needed expansive open sheets of binder paper.
It’s not that I have a definite format or … 

I have an open-ended set of formats, writing modes.  

Sometimes I dump new idea development in mid-article of unrelated page b/c that’s where I happen to be and I don’t want to Lose the Muse.  

Playful, informal, casual, like in 1991 when I was experimenting with black ink and brushes, and idly drew inspired: 

block universe cube with a snake body embedded but snake’s head outside saying Liberty.  

Why the hell didn’t I wake up to tree, snake, rock, two opposed models of Physics mapping to two contrasted mythemes and mental models then?  

Why didn’t I grasp “transcend eternalism” then?   

Why did I fail to write “worldline” in 1997 core theory spec?? 

I only wrote “tunnel” (see Metz. book The Ego Tunnel that seemingly copied me) and stream?  

Not “snake-shaped worldline” though 1991 picture clearly shows that concept that I ignored!  
My best “play”, whimsy, ultra inspired in 1991 drawing – and I gave it no thought until like 2012.  

distorting factors of censorship / taboo/ forbidden Science
Due to Prohibition, Mf has little competition, and has little ability to publicize his hidden papers.  t

These are harsh waters for anyone to swim in, like Penguins going to remote, harsh, hostile environments to evade predators.  

Or mountain goats standing on impossible vertical cliff faces, out of the reach of mountain lions.

It is difficult for scholars to cite my work, as it stands.

My work is messy and taboo and not published in currently published journals (several distinct reasons).

Cyb explained to Hanegraaff the pseudonym.  

Hanegraaff understands, bc he was suckered by the ploy, in 1996, whre NewAge authors pretended to not be based in LSD though NewAge is in fact based in LSD.

Wrestling with my demons, writing, I have set my bar too high b/c pretty good previous articles.  
No one else meets my standards; neither do I.  
God is an ok writer, but He could be more clear & consistent & stop occluding his damned point.

Preparing to present my Theory to my church has been extremely hard, and productively has forced significant/ substantive changes in framing; in relating possibilism-thinking vs eternalism-thinking.

Since Brown said “I’m sure you can write an article quickly and easily (branching-message mushroom trees) for the Journal of Psychedelic Studies​, I have had many major breakthoughs in art interpretation.  

I do not believe that my interpretation skill was sufficient back a year ago when reading or about to read Ronald Huggins’ 2024 article “Foraging Wrong”.

Foraging for Psychedelic Mushrooms in the Wrong Forest: The Great Canterbury Psalter as a Medieval Test Case

Ronald Huggins, 2024

https://www.academia.edu/118659519/Foraging_for_Psychedelic_Mushrooms_in_the_Wrong_Forest_The_Great_Canterbury_Psalter_as_a_Medieval_Test_Case
Foraging for Psychedelic Mushrooms in the Wrong Forest: The Great Canterbury Psalter as a Medieval Test Case (Huggins 2024)

As a model of mental model transformation, my model failed, until recently, when I said “you chnage from Possibilism to Eternalism – if you define Eternalism narrowly as basic eternalism-thinking.

The mental model that remains is 99% possibilism-thinking, modified in the most important 1% by eternalism-thinking.

______________________

Concept-labels by Chris Letheby are bunk

Cognitive phen’y is irrelevant if not centered on control transformation phen’y.

field recognize centrality of control transformation

bunk false dilemma mis focus irrel:
not centrally relev
crucial:  WHAT IS THE CENTRAL CONCERN?  

Hanegraaff book is finely produced garbage re the core of enlightenment.  

His book is No better than the Newage he writes about in 1996.  

ie neither ome   one does the only centrally important thing, taking everyone through the transformation gate.  which is a control-model transformation gate.  not damn Epistemology, barking up wrong tree:

Does God exist, yes or no?
Which plant did Jesus ingest?
Letcheby unexamined presupposition:

____________
The Wrong-Dilemma fallacy

“I do psychedelics Philosophy.  In the great Mysticism Wars, everything hinges on the battle between Science (only matter exists)

Freke says reactionary anti-Religion “Science”.  

“The central thing that matters the most, and is the key concern in Psychedelics Therapy Science, is materialism vs. mysticism.”

“The central thing that matters the most, and is the key concern in Psychedelics Therapy Science, is Presentism vs. Eternalism.”

A wrong turn in putting forth a “wrong dilemma”

The ultimate q is
do mushroom-trees mean trees, or mushrooms?
The mode of that q is an irrel mode.
entirely clueless outsider

Fav event in this thread:
Houot says listen for alien ancient future civilization intelligent signal entities in mental outer space exploration.  
That exactly describes

Topic for Transcendent Knowledge Podcast: 

The evolving shifting purpose motivating what kind of thing the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence is: what potential does Transcendent Knowledge have?  

bring the conscious …

__________________________
about a friend’s custom emoji:

Conclusion: The figure is enlightened and has stable control in the intense mystic altered state;
the conscious mental model of control is “non-branching”, aligned with the underlying reality of the personal control system.  

The figure is ready to be hung upside down by Right knee in mushroom-tree 👍

{beard} indicates the figure not merely knows basic eternalism-thinking, but has fully integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking, harmoniously wedding the two contrasting ways of thinking:

the virtual-level, branching possibilities, open-future model; and
the underlying, non-branching, closed-future model.

__________________________

Scientists are not allowed to ingest psychedelics.

A YouTube video or a podcast that exclaims how Heffter’s fame depended on his ingesting psychedelics to self-test.

Hefter did self-experimentation and is lauded.  Same with the Shulgins.  These pioneers used methods that are now forbidden. 

Maybe it was on Psychedelics Today ytoob ch or else their podcast.  

_________________________
Bad debate: free will vs. determinism vs compat’m: 

none of these matches the correct characterization of ord-state OSC; “fw” doesn’t match Psm w/ cyb emph;

“determinism” doesn’t match Eternalism w/ a cybernetics emph;
“compat’m” doesn’t match the way in which the mature mind integrates two contrasting models: Possibilism & Eternalism.

_________________
The “Dual Steel-Man” approach to debate between supposedly opposed positions

Bad debate: “Science vs Religion” – guilty parties: Houot [representatives; not in isolation; just a participant in a type of thinking] pushing a quirky notion of “Science” by strawmanning (ought to steelman instead) Religion as specifically Protestant-type “belief in the supernatural”:

The poor-quality, unproductive strategy: Pick the poorest notion of Religion you can imagine / invent/ fabricate, and make a show of battling against that, to APPEAR to elevate your side, branded as “Science” but not actually deserving of the name.  

We either drive the debate down into gutter (poorest version of Science vs poorest version of Religion) or elevate the debate, dual steelman:

Bad debate: Is a mtr a msh or a tree?

Bad debate: Which is the case: “only mind exists” (that is what Mysticism believes) or “only matter exists” (that is what Science believes).  Guilty parties: Matthew Johnson, Chris Letheby.

Says Phil dept Letheby: “Mysticism is the Epistemology claim that only mind exists.  Science is the claim that only matter exists.  Which approach to Psychedelic Science should we use: the Mystical approach (ie, only mind exists) or the Science approach (ie, only matter exists)?”

Everything about that framing is IRRELEVANT; not helpful; not useful; not relevant; not clear; not simple.

Also Letheby sucks and is the enemy because he shills for the Psychedelic RenaissanceTM ie the Big Psychedelics Big Pharma Industry with their bullshit MEQ that doesn’t know what mysticism is, but embraces specifiålly Stace 1960 + James 1902 BECAUSE IT PROPS UP THEIR WHITEWASH NARRATIVE trying to make Psilo something it is not.  

Positive-balanced Mysticism is fraudulent pseudo-  faux mym.  

Meditation Hucksters diminish and twist Psilo, what they do not but ought to do:

Meditation advocates ought to apply meditation to observe pcs and transform from pt to et and then integrate et into pt.  

This would include grappling with control stability, demonstrating that possibilism-thinking causes loss of control, and eternalism-thinking causes stable control.

_____________________________
integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking is not compatibilism; integrating keeps the two models in contrast.  

Which one is the case?

Which is wrongly taken to mean that what is of central main importance in Psychedelic Science is a battle between “only matter exists”, vs only mind exists.<– That mis-focused battle is not: useful relevant helpful etc.  ; “not wrong but not helpful; the FOCUS is wrong.  

Letcher’s 2006 Book Ruining the Field Despite My High-Profile Critical Book Review

transcript from Billionaires are Secretly Funding a Psychedelic Holy War | Travis Kitchens (Danny Jones vid, 2025/02/10):

Travis says:

“I went to I asked Roland griffi who was in the room

“Roland Griffith started the Psychedelic Renaissance; no Roland Griffiths, no Psychedelic Renaissance.“

That confirms my construction: the Hopkins Psychedelic RenaissanceTM. Whose “Renaissance”? Grifty’s.

“He’s a psychologist was at John’s Hopkins.”

“he died in 20 2023 but of course”

“you’re at John’s Hopkins you got Roland griffiths who’s you know wooo”

“and so I immediately said what what’s behind this”

“you know what do these drugs do

“I thought for sure he knew

“and he [Griff] said we don’t know.”

“and I’m a uh OCD type researcher/ reader, and I thought there must be an answer for this somewhere somewhere must know this sort of what it does from a scientific standpoint.”

Egodeath.com, EgodeathTheory.WordPress.com — Psilocybin loosens cognitive association binding, causing the virtual possibilism world model to be modified by perceiving the underlying eternalism workings.

“and I did tell him [Grifty] and Matt Johnson hey I think this is what’s behind religion.”

“I thought this was some great Insight, and I’m sure everybody says that.”

“Roland you know he didn’t have much to say about it.”

“Matt [Johnson] said I don’t think so, you should read Andy Letcher’s book Shroom.” 16:27

Why is Letcher’s book treated as credible? He only considers a single instance of mushroom imagery in Christian art.

Someone at church Sunday said “there’s evidence for Datura but none for mushrooms” and I replied “plentiful” – his source is Letcher’s book.

Letcher disproved 1st-generation entheogen scholarship (the Secret Amanita paradigm) but doesn’t address 2nd-generation entheogen scholarship (the Explicit Psilocybin paradigm).

“I was convinced because I’m not from a Rel– I’m from Kentucky, so I was around people who are religious, but I’ve never been religious.”

“In this experience, I was convinced that wow, this is totally Supernatural, it’s totally real, we don’t understand it, what is this?”

“That was my immediate reaction was to start looking into the origins of religion in into the literature of the psychology of religion because I wanted to know what we could find out about the drug, and what we could find out about these experiences.”

Read 1000 ordinary-state based studies of ordinary-state based Psychology of ordinary-state based Religion – that will give you NO insight about history of Psilocybin transformation.

psychedelic pseudo science is based on wm james who is based on Vivekananda.

I want to read Strassman (again) re: Vivekananda, so, the “science foundation” of psychedelic pseudo science is Vivekananda 1893.

Kitchens wrote: “There’s the philosophy of James, Strassman says, and then there’s his theology, which was inspired by his connection with Swami Vivekananda.”

The Council on Spiritual Practices

you said he was the the guy who spearheaded the whole psychedelic Revolution can you explain for people like how that happened and and how hebecame to be yeah what happened was in the 1990s a guy named Bob Jesse who’s a computer 

Billionaires are Secretly Funding a Psychedelic Holy War | Travis Kitchens (Danny Jones vid, 2025/02/10)

Video title:
Billionaires are Secretly Funding a Psychedelic Holy War | Travis Kitchens
YT ch: Danny Jones
Feb 10, 2025
Show name: Danny Jones Podcast
Desc: “Travis Kitchens was a psychedelic research subject for Johns Hopkins University who eventually uncovered a secret plan to revive religion with drugs. Travis writes on the history and philosophy of psychedelic research.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jksrbKGGSM&t=940s —

Outlin

  • OUTLINE
  • 00:00 – Johns Hopkins’ psychedelic study
  • 08:22 – ‘Robo-tripping’
  • 17:00 – The Council on Spiritual Practices
  • 25:30 – Can humans summon aliens?
  • 43:33 – How the psychedelic renaissance started
  • 56:11 – Did ancient mystery cults start Christianity?
  • 01:01:25 – Graham Hancock vs Academia
  • 01:11:30 – The fall of Christianity
  • 01:20:47 – What happens to the brain on psychedelics
  • 01:25:34 – MAPS
  • 01:33:22 – The Catholic church is pushing drugs
  • 01:38:10 – The Immortality Key: A New Reformation
  • 01:42:59 – DARPA: Psychedelics on the battlefield
  • 01:48:38 – Travis’ weird email from Roland Griffiths
  • 01:52:49 – MKUltra 2.0
  • 01:57:36 – Reviving religion with Psychedelic drugs [deliv. the expl’y model relig should have]
  • 02:15:16 – Secret unreleased psychedelic paper
  • 02:24:33 – Who is funding psychedelic medicine research?

Forced Bestsellers, Engineered by The Enterprise

I choke every time I hear “Pollan bestseller” or “The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, 2020 = bestseller”.

Translation: The archons invested in making these books bestsellers. Not grassroots at all. FORCED BESTSELLER. Purely top-down.

“Nothing just happens. Things are MADE to happen.”

Phony, Toxic, Parasitical, Field-Invading “Journalism”: We’re Here to Help Destroy, Co-opt, and Sidetrack

Beware of destruction-driven motives of toxic expose “journalism” by invading COMPLETELY IGNORANT outsiders who don’t even know that LSD was legally used in 1950s therapy.

Destructive parasites, Phonies Alert: WHY are they entering the field of Psychedelics?

What agenda drives their destructive “contributions”?

To tear down and co-opt the field of psychedelics?

The Enterprise of one suspect type or another, with TANGENTIAL AGENDAS.

A Channel for Magic: Ralph Hood’s Mysticism Scale and the Occult Roots of the Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Program (Kitchens, 2022)

“A Channel for Magic: Ralph Hood’s Mysticism Scale and the Occult Roots of the Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Research Program
Psychologist Ralph Hood’s study of serpent handling and mysticism helped legitimize the study of psychedelics. So why doesn’t he want them approved for medical use?
Travis Kitchens, September 9, 2022
https://www.psymposia.com/magazine/a-channel-for-magic-ralph-hoods-mysticism-scale-and-the-occult-roots-of-the-johns-hopkins-psychedelic-research-program/

common-core mysticism and perennialism is imagined as beginner unity pleasant

though Pollan found eternalism horrific.

Kitchens:

“Seeking to place psychedelic experiences within some kind of credible framework, Leary and Walter Pahnke, a PhD student of his, discovered [1961-62] Walter Stace’s book Mysticism and Philosophy.

“Building on the [beginner mysticism] work of James, Stace outlined a phenomenology of [beginner] mysticism in which experiences were separated from their interpretations and systematized.

“A British philosopher and Princeton University Professor, Stace argued for what he called ‘causal indifference’—a crucial concept for the current studies at Johns Hopkins—the idea that what causes or triggers the [beginner mystical] experience is irrelevant.

“Whether it’s psychedelics or the sunset, though there are certain things you can do to facilitate or help occasion the [beginner] experience, what’s important is the [beginner] experience itself.

“Furthermore, these experiences formed a universal ‘common core’ of [beginner] religious experience, Stace said, an invisible psychological link underlying different faith [a Prot. word] traditions.

“The forms and varieties of religion seen throughout history and across the globe were simply the infinite cultural expressions of [beginner] altered states of consciousness.

“Stripped of impurities like laws and institutions, [beginner] mystical experience could now be isolated and scientifically analyzed.”

“Mystical experience as a measurable phenomena didn’t emerge (or evolve) without its critics.

“Ann Taves, Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at UC Santa Barbara and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship,8 says that the conclusions derived from the research at Johns Hopkins rely heavily on the idea of a universal [beginner] “mystical experience,” a theological concept that functions as a catchall category for a variety of possibly unrelated mental states.”
The next Idea development page, I follow up on Taves’ great (albeit still limited to “self” changes) article, which, just like me, attacks Stace’s “mysticism = Unity oneness boundary dissolution” unjustified model, eg Taves explains how Zaehner’s rebuttal to Huxley caused Stace to both omit drugs from his Mysticism book and OMIT NEGATIVE/ PATHOLOGICAL experiences):
https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/05/07/idea-development-page-29/#mystical-and-other-alterations-in-sense-of-self-an-expanded-framework-for-studying-nonordinary-experiences-taves-2020

In my Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) page, I added a section that links to that Taves section/citation in my idea development page and links directly to the Taves article.

“Hood’s questionnaire—based on this spiritual belief that Taves says was elaborated over the past one hundred years—doesn’t just influence the volunteer into seeing the experience as a positive one, it also suggests and reinforces their assumption that the [beginner] mystical experience is a distinct or sui generis one.”

True mystical experience = seeing eternalism underneath virtual possibilism mental model.

“If scientists fail to make a clear distinction between scientific claims based on empirical evidence and theological claims based on revelation or tradition, they risk setting [beginner] mystical experiences apart from other similar experiences on theological rather than scientific grounds.

“They have no scientific basis for making theological claims regarding the common core of all religions or the presence of an ultimate reality that unites them,” Taves wrote.

“These broad and unstable categories, she says, limit our ability to uncover the mechanics of consciousness and how these experiences actually work.

“Did the scientists of religion, attempting to model the natural sciences and systematize religions, accidentally synthesize them, creating a new, scientific subgenre of Christianity [based on beginner notion of mysticism] that they themselves could believe in?

“What’s really happening at Johns Hopkins might be the flowering of a new psychedelic spirituality, grounded in Jamesian [beginner] mysticism, with psilocybin “therapy” replacing the ancient initiation ceremony.

“Dr. Rick Strassman calls it “the psychedelic religion of mystical consciousness.””

Translation: Strassman is crying about the Christian character of this mysticism; he wants instead, Jewish flavored mysticism, per his book on Old Testament & psychedelics.
https://www.amazon.com/DMT-Soul-Prophecy-Spiritual-Revelation/dp/1594773424/ —

“Psychedelics, Strassman says, don’t have any inherent mystical or spiritual effects—those are caused by set and setting: specific musical playlists, sensory isolation, and filtering the results through questionnaires like the M-Scale.”

The Essence of Mystical Experience: Virtual Possibilism Thinking Perceives Underlying Eternalism

Psychedelics cause mystical experience ie virtual-level possibilism-thinking is made to perceive substrate-level eternalism workings.

Finally Someone Mocks the Stupid Word Affectation, “Psychedelics Occassion Mystical Experience”

Kitchens article “A Channel for Magic” con’t:

“The current psychedelic movement or “renaissance,” he says, is essentially the emergence of a new mystico-scientific religion—“camouflaged by scientific studies and [bunk fake invented “factors”] statistical firepower”—with its own Moses (William James) and cult vocabulary (psychedelics “occasion” effects; adverse effects are now “challenging”; flashbacks are “reactivations”; “and if you read the articles, they all start to borrow the same language.”)”

[discourse narrative jargon] – default mode network, dread of ego dissolution, etc. ‘surrender’, ‘occassion’ – Reject that lexicon – not invented here. Use the Egodeath theory’s custom-made lexicon.

“There’s the philosophy of James, Strassman says, and then there’s his theology, which was inspired by his connection with Swami Vivekananda.

“Vivekananda was preaching a universal religion—not just anybody’s universal religion, his universal religion—which would promote utopia.

“There would be no more sectarian strife.

“The way you could do it was by positing a universal [beginner] religious experience which all major religions shared and that was biological or “hardwired” so, how could you deny it?

“If you accepted it, all the sectarian differences would kind of melt away.

“This was consistent with and supported James’ idea of a universal [beginner] religious experience that was a formless, content-free, no-self state.”

Alarm bells go off per Ken Wilber, Tim Freke, Jessica Nathanson.

The Egodeath theory is only “no self” in a narrow limited way.

“Strassman worries specifically about Judaism, which is “particularistic” and therefore incompatible with a universal [beginner] religion.”

Constructive Relational Mysticism vs. Neo-Advaita Destructive Non-Dualism

Strassman con’t: article “A Channel for Magic“:

“The Hebrew Bible doesn’t contain any contentless, selfless, ego-loss experiences free of time and space, he says, and as a result, is viewed by researchers as inferior.]

Christian mysticism is RELATIONAL: 2-level, dependent control. So is Late Antiquity brands and Mystery Religions.

Anti-rational Eastern religion is nihilistic “destroy self structures, eliminate thinking, nothing is real, you don’t exist, your life is illusion, time doesn’t exist” – crude recipe for mental collapse Ken Wilber warned against; TOXIC NEO-ADVAITA.

“The existence of a universal [beginner] religious experience is a theological solution,” he said.

“Other researchers are moving away from mysticism for their own reasons.

“Matthew Johnson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, has warned his colleagues against adopting frameworks “drawn piecemeal from [beginner] mystical traditions” that might alienate potential customers.

“Ultimately, we want them [insurance companies] to cover this stuff,” Johnson told Vice.

“And there is going to be an issue with covering religious therapy.

“The point is, someone could make an argument against it.”

“It is also inappropriate, he says, to introduce “meta-religious” belief systems such as [beginner] perennialism (or “the [beginner mystical] common core”) into therapeutic practice.”

/ end of excerpts from Kitchens “A Channel for Magic”

Stacean “Mystical Experience” Is the First Half Only: Beginner, Pleasant, Unity Experience; Omitting Advanced, Unpleasant, Challenging, Control Transformation Experience

Against that heading, Pollan (newbie) experienced eternalism as extremely unpleasant.

Page: index: Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ).

Pollan compares his experience of timeless eternalism to a tree stripped (compare burning bush) of leaves or branches. After the peak, the leaves or branches re-attached.

The Stacean false model of mystical experience is specifically false in that it:

  • omits the advanced, challenging, superior half of mystical experience, and wrongly calls that non-mystical, and
  • designates as “mystical” only the beginner, pleasant, inferior, barely transformative half of mystical experience.

Why did James & Stace do that, which was latched onto by the hyped marketing of Roland Griffiths team at Johns Hopkins Dept. of Psychedelic Pseudo Science?

The nature of mystical experience is hyped and MISREPRESENTED in a cover up operation by James, Stace, Leary-Pahnke, Williams, Griffiths, & Priest. Because it is beginner phase.

That explains why James made a huge error, perpetuated into the towering debacle that is psychedelic pseudo science. James failed to cover advanced mystical experience; what James calls mysticism is merely beginner… per the pyramid:

MOST people are dabblers, beginners, so MOST focus on “mystical experience” is beginner effects.

Only a minority of ppl are advanced, so the James 1902 model of mystical experience has no representation of advanced, challenging, unpleasant mystical experience.

That reason & model perpetuate into the Religious Professionals Study. All , even the Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) , have the same problem for the same reason.

The mere beginner-phase Science model of mystical experience.

Beginner (Pleasant) Mystical Experience vs. Advanced (Unpleasant) Mystical Experience, Mis-Framed as “Mystical vs. Challenging Experiences”

OAV questionnaire:

  • Ocean = pleasant
  • Angst = unpleasant
  • Vision = pleasant

Wm Richards’ & Grifty’s MEQ/CEQ questionnaires:

  • Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) – pleasant
  • Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) – unpleasant

11-Factors questionnaire:

  • Pleasant Experiences (a high-level dimension, sum of OAV’s O & V dimensions)
  • Unpleasant Experiences (a high-level dimension, OAV’s A/DED dimension)

The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins (Welker, 2023)

6 part series

  1. The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins
    https://www.psychedeliccandor.org/p/the-religious-science-of-johns-hopkins
  2. The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins: Spiritual Direction
    https://www.psychedeliccandor.org/p/the-religious-science-of-johns-hopkins-4cd
  3. The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins: The Power of Suggestion
    https://www.psychedeliccandor.org/p/the-religious-science-of-johns-hopkins-bfc
  4. The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins: Clergy Ambassadors
    https://www.psychedeliccandor.org/p/the-religious-science-of-johns-hopkins-079
  5. The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins: The Silence and the Smile
    https://www.psychedeliccandor.org/p/the-religious-science-of-johns-hopkins-9dd
  6. The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins: In the Name of the Holy Spirit
    https://www.psychedeliccandor.org/p/the-religious-science-of-johns-hopkins-7b6

7-part article series, and read aloud voice recordings by the author.
The Christian author, Joe Welker, calls for an investigation.

The investigation involves Hunt Priest’s allegedly false claim that during Psilocybin, Wm Richards touched him in a spiritual way and framed Priest’s experience as “the holy spirit”.

Commentary & Excerpts: The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins

I named McCarthy and Priest – b/c poor article in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies​ 2024 — as “McPriest”.

https://www.psychedeliccandor.org/p/the-religious-science-of-johns-hopkins —
The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins [part 1 of 6]
Spiritual missions, hidden issues, and unexamined consequences of a psychedelic clergy study. Part one.
JOE WELKER
AUG 12, 2023 –

Credibility hit: in part 1, Welker falsely writes:

“But the study’s influence goes back much further, at least 60 years, to the 1962 Marsh Chapel Experiment run by Harvard Divinity School PhD student Walter Pahnke. That study gave seminary students psychedelic mushrooms [sic!] while listening to a Good Friday service presided by Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, leading to what was found in a follow-up to be among the most important experiences of their lives.”

Welker wrote:

“A clinical trial conducted jointly by Johns Hopkins University and New York University, “The Effects of Psilocybin-Facilitated Experience on the Psychology and Effectiveness of Religious Professionals,” funded by the RiverStyx Foundation and sponsored by the Council on Spiritual Practices, is set to soon* be published.”

*Written 1 year 8 months ago.

In May 2024, the medical research trial officially ended.
11 months ago vs today April 30, 2025.
Article part 1 = Aug 2023.

2025/04
-2023/08
=
2024/16
-2023/08
= 1 year 8 months

“The trial gave leaders from various religions two doses of the compound psilocybin, found in psychedelic mushrooms. “

“The goal was to assess the [Stacean/ beginner/ pleasant] “mystical” content of their experiences, the impact on their mental, physical, and spiritual health in their personal and professional lives, and “whether participants who report having had the strongest [Stacean/ beginner/ pleasant] mystical-type effects during psilocybin sessions will show the largest positive changes.”

“In the past few years, some participants have publicly extolled the virtues of the study and its profound positive impact on their ministry.”

“this behavior did not happen in a vacuum.

“This behavior came in a study that, in my opinion, was attempting to manufacture religious institutional consent through a long-range spiritual project to influence public opinion under the pretense of science.

“I have come to believe that, in my opinion, the reputation of Johns Hopkins was leveraged alongside the highly suggestible influence of psychedelic substances, with some funders and researchers demonstrating unhealthy boundaries with some participants to advance their goals.

“In my opinion, the result was science in name only.”

The problem goes to the foundation: the foundation of this Science re: mysticism, mystical experience, is the model that Hopkins & Studerus say is their foundation reference for what mystical experience is: the 11-Factors questionnaire article says that Science says mystical experience is per Stace 1960 & James 1902, that those are …. quote Studerus.

the Hopkins/NYU Religious Professionals psilocybin study
rps

The “Religious Science” article (1 of 6) continues:

“the study was highly anticipated among psychedelicists.

“Best-selling author Michael Pollan and MAPS’ founder Rick Doblin—the man single most responsible for the cultural resurgence of psychedelics—have reportedly described it as the most important study in the career of Dr. Griffiths, who has been arguably the most important psychedelic scientist of the last 25 years.”

“It was also the culmination of three decades of strategic planning from Bob Jesse, a funder and advisor to Hopkins’ psychedelic research since the early 2000s.

“But the study’s influence goes back much further, at least 60 years, to the [April 20,] 1962 Marsh Chapel Experiment run by Harvard Divinity School PhD student Walter Pahnke.” [advisor/director: Tim Leary]

What exactly, specifically was Leary’s involvement via “supervising” Pahnke?

“That study gave seminary students psychedelic mushrooms [sic! synthetic Psilocybin?] while listening to a Good Friday service presided by Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, leading to what was found in a follow-up to be among the most important experiences of their lives.

“It has inspired generations of psychonauts with the conviction that psychedelics could provide core, so-named [Stacean/ beginner/ pleasant] “mystical” insights that were the true heart of religion.

Stacean/ beginner/ pleasant “mysticism” is NOT the true heart of religion.

The Stacean/ beginner/ pleasant model of mysticism specifically OMITS the true heart of religion: THE challenging experience transformation gate.

“It [Marsh Ch.] has long provided hope that the two estranged cultural enemies—New Agers [what? in 1962?] and the devoutly religious—could be reconciled against all odds.”

odd narrative

“As I listened to the presentation, I knew there was so much more [86%] being left out. “

The Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) omits 18 of 21 challenging experiences; leaves out 86%.

“Yes, Dr. Griffiths spent a significant chunk of his time talking in vague but serious terms about psychedelic risks (which have been scarcely studied).

“But there was so much more [86%] that the presenters weren’t being transparent about, weren’t hinting at, if not outright concealing.”

  1. start w/ 21 chall effects in OAV’s A Angst DED Dread dimension,
  2. omit 8 of them by ignoring the the 11-Factors questionnaire’s hi-level Unpleasant Experiences dimension, and only attending to the low-level two factors (ICC, ANX) that contain narrow effects that do NOT overlap between “anxiety” and “control” <– the precise specific item 54, “anxiety about control”. Only pick up those 13 of 21 effects, for the initial item pool.
  3. final item pool: omit 10 more of the 21 effects, keeping only 3 (14%). See “Scoring Guide” appendix in the Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) article. Is Grifty’s name on it? yes – https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/01/17/references-for-psychedelic-psychometrics-questionnaires/#CEQ

“The overall emotional, inspiring message was clear: a kind of marriage had been consummated, or as Michael Pollan reportedly said that evening to the whole conference, “the virus of psychedelics” has been put “into the bloodstream of religions.”

False; misrep. Psychedelics — the source of religions — has been re-added, restored, into religions.

“As [Don] Lattin says,

“Much of today’s research into psychedelic-assisted therapy remains a social movement in the guise of a scientific experiment…

“the crusade to introduce [sic; re-introduce] psychedelics into the religious mainstream has been underway for sixty years.””

The Social-Drama Narrative Driving the Egodeath Theory: Re-Introducing Psilocybin into Christianity

2nd-generation entheogen scholarship (the Explicit Psilocybin paradigm): uses pure, bare, neutral reportage; strip away any narrative conjectures morality tales cultural anthropology CONSTRUCTIONS/ confabulations,; Hanegraaff title words “the historical imagination”.

The equivalent narrative in the Egodeath theory would be: given that:

The mental model of personal control & world transforms from possibilism to eternalism when exposed to Psilocybin loose cognitive association binding.

Therefore when we see 900-1400 AD the medieval art genre of {mushroom-trees}, which includes combined {mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} motifs, what narrative construction discourse social drama narrative – that drives my entire motivation for caring about psychedelics — do I confabulate?

The mushroom-trees genre is proof that [social drama narrative per the Egodeath theory] – proof that ideally, the best religion and the most well-formed religious myth and Rock lyrics, are those which depict (eg by analogies):

The mental model of personal control & world transforms from possibilism to eternalism when exposed to Psilocybin loose cognitive association binding.

Hand Ruck a piece of MICA evidence, he hastens to jail it as “yet more proof of mushrooms in suppressed secret heretical sects Christianity.”

Hand Cybermonk a piece of MICA evidence, he hastens to frame it as “yet more proof that:

The best, most well-formed & fully developed religion is centered on transforming the mental model of personal control & world from possibilism to eternalism by exposing the mind to Psilocybin-induced loose cognitive association binding.”

Forbidden word list: narrative discourse terms, against pure, bare, neutral, “presence of psychedelics” terms:

  • mainstream, normal, ordinary, orthodox
  • underground
  • cults/ sects/ communities/ groups
  • suppressed
  • cult
  • secretly
  • oppression
  • hidden
  • secret cult
  • surreptitious

Joe Welker’s Religious Science Article 1 of 6 Continues

Joe Welker’s Religious Science article 1 of 6 continues:

“a culture of deception and an aura of manipulation has long seeped through the psychedelic milieu in which the study is situated.”

the Hopkins/NYU Religious Professionals psilocybin study

“the power dynamics they cultivated with some participants during and after the trial to further some researchers’ beliefs about psychedelics.

“I am concerned that, as part of a long-term goal to incorporate [sic; re-incorp.] psychedelics into mainstream religion, some members of the Hopkins team may have inappropriately transmitted their own beliefs about psychedelically-induced [Stacean-incomplete/newbie/ beginner/ pleasant] “mystical experiences” to some participants, reinforced through social ties, financial ties, and a growing media climate of hype.”

I have a Psychedelic RenaissanceTM I’d like to sell you, by redefining “mystical experience” in a “positive-balanced” re-framing/ fabrication/ lie/ misrepresentation; whitewash operation, working hard to avoid the transformation gate & avoid ego-cancelling-out [in a certain limited sense] Transcendent Knowledge.

“These ties continued despite some Hopkins researchers having knowledge of irresponsible, illegal, and unhealthy behavior.”

“And in at least one instance, according to a participant’s testimony, a guide allegedly committed a boundary violation according to one Hopkins psychedelic professor’s standards.

“Beyond these and other public health concerns, this is a case study that leaves significant lingering considerations for stronger and longer-term ethical guidelines for future psychedelic research.”

Moral: Do not bring any comprehension of ego death or Transcendent Knowledge into this research, b/c that would make it non-Science. Instead, make up false models by default.

“The study also raises important critical questions for religious studies, theology, and psychedelic religious communities in a time of increased [COMPARED TO WHAT/WHEN?] psychedelic religious and spiritual use.

“I believe more people will be harmed in psychedelic research and in their engagement in psychedelic subcultures if I do not speak out.

“I believe the trial was predicated on an unethical premise [what premise: that Psilocybin causes religious mental model transformation?] and that the scientific value of its findings is questionable, yet it may have an outsized and unhealthy influence on culture, leading to public health miseducation [the only public health miseducation that matters is, Psilocybin needs to be understood as mental model transformation; control transformation] and profound abuse.

[From the ultimate point of reference, which is Psilocybin-caused maturation, the main “abuse” of psychedelic pseudo science is not delivering Transcendent Knowledge per the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism.]

“Because of its potential to influence religious institutions and public opinion with an incomplete and misleading picture, I cannot stay silent”

“when I was riding the wave of the hype, it was amazing. I was high on being at the edge of science, the edge of religion, and the feeling of “I’ve got this secret that I wish everyone could know, if only they were ready for it.” It really felt like I found a new but old gospel that had been obscured by suffocating, dying religion. They obviously didn’t have the spiritual vitality that we knew.

“went to ayahuasca ceremonies to heal our religious wounds, to escape Christianity’s dogmatic weaponry and crushing cultural weight.

“it was at first amazing to find Christians who also shared the secret, and who had a mission to “educate” [sic; reintroduce Psilocybin into Christianity] our tradition, like loving parents bestowing our wisdom unto our ignorant children.

“I have grown greatly concerned about many issues around psychedelic usage and its risks (including spiritual risks), [main risk: not going through transformation gate per Rev22:14] I still believe in religious freedom, and I believe in religious freedom for psychedelic users.

“I believe many of the problems here arose from perverse incentives of trying to obtain those legal protections.

“I used to work for legal protections for non-Christian psychedelic groups, and I still want them to have those rights, but I also want people to have information they can trust.”

Psychedelic Pseudo Science Is an Incomplete, Whitewashed Model of the Risks and Advanced Challenging Unpleasant Mystical Experience

START BY TELLING THE TRUTH, THAT STACE/JAMES MODEL OF “MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE” OMITS THE BETTER, CHALLENGING HALF OF ACTUAL MYSTICAL EXPERIENCE – IE,

  • REPLACE Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ); AND
  • TRASHCAN the Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) AND RE-CREATE IT WITHOUT THE “POSITIVE-BALANCED” BIAS, IE, LIES & whitewash misrepresentation.

“I also believe in drug policy reform, but I do not know what combination of policies makes sense.”

Easy: FULL REPEAL OF Psilocybin PROHIBITION (1968/1970), LIKE THE NON-EXISTENT LAWS OF 1900 or 1960.

Regulate Psilocybin via culture, like done during infinite years of human history, not presenting to regulate Psilocybin via self-serving, would-be, pretended “authorities” per 1968/1970’s recent innovation.

“lives have been harmed, traumatized, and ended as a result of professional psychedelic evangelism and abuse,

“the general public needs to understand the flip side to the hopeful narratives that more and more politicians regurgitate, having successfully been persuaded by an amorphous science they don’t really know anything about.

“This is not to dash anyone’s hope, but to say any hope in human endeavors always needs complicating.”

end of part 1, i think

The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins: Spiritual Direction (Part 2 of 6)

Part 2: https://www.psychedeliccandor.org/p/the-religious-science-of-johns-hopkins-4cd –
The Religious Science of Johns Hopkins: Spiritual Direction
The varieties of psychedelic mysticism driving a psychedelic clergy study. Part two.
JOE WELKER
AUG 13, 2023 –
“the spiritual beliefs and cultural agendas of researchers that are in the public record.”

“The core Hopkins psilocybin team behind the religious professionals study, along with NYU’s joint investigator, have discussed their own spiritual and religious beliefs in psychedelics”

“the history of psychedelic religious positions various psychedelic researchers held, I once held them myself quite passionately. They gave me tremendous hope and meaning in the midst of an otherwise materialist view of the world.

“As I adopted their beliefs through reading their books, attending their conferences, and listening to their interviews, I found them to have a perfect internally-consistent logic:
scientific, yet more-than, universal and deeply compassionate, just making a satisfying amount of sense.

“Like many, I shared the core psychonaut belief in “no dogma,” seeing it as the source of so much of the world’s pain and suffering, the source of so many religious wars.

I came to find that in the case of psychedelic religious science, there is hidden doctrine within the “doctrine of no doctrine” — but that isn’t, itself, intrinsically a bad thing.”

[virtual dogma, eg, the core most important thing about common-core mysticism and perennialism is nondual unity oneness (false; actually, control transformation)]

“Leaders of the Hopkins arm of the religious leaders study include the original Hopkins psilocybin research team:

  • Dr. Roland Griffiths,
  • Dr. William Richards, and
  • advisor Bob Jesse, as well as
  • Dr. Anthony Bossis leading the NYU branch of the trial.

The Hopkins team has been famous within the small field since their landmark [Stacean-incomplete; beginner/ pleasant] “mystical-type experiences” study in 2006, celebrated by many psychedelic actors as opening doors and funding for psychedelic research.

“Each also has longstanding ties to MAPS, which has pursued what some have described as a “Trojan Horse” strategy.

“As Michael Pollan has described Rick Doblin, Doblin sees the medical use of psychedelics as “a means to a more ambitious and still more controversial end: the incorporation of psychedelics into American society and culture, not just medicine.””

. . . .🔍🧐🤔

“Hopkins’ safety documents, was that the study team knew psychedelics lead to enhanced openness to suggestibility as early as 2008.

“this suggestibility has been demonstrated to have impacted other Hopkins psychedelic research.

“the concern about psychedelics leading to unethical belief changes and guru complexes was raised by another Hopkins psychedelic researcher in 2021.”

Pop McMysticism: Cheapened Pseudo-Mysticism of James, Stace, Richards, Griffiths, & Priest

Focusing Exclusively on Beginner Pleasant Mystical Experiencing and Covering-up Advanced Unpleasant Mystical Experiencing

The False Dichotomy “Mystical Experience vs. Challenging Experience”

That series is linked to by NYT articles expose:
The Psychedelic Evangelist (Borrell, March 2024, NYT)

The Hopkins/NYU Religious Professionals psilocybin study officially finished less than a year ago.

This is a current ongoing development.

Maybe the study will be published after an investigation.

the Hopkins/NYU Religious Professionals psilocybin study
rps

the Hopkins Religious Professionals Study
hrps

The Hopkins Religious Professionals Study Report Is Doomed to Be Met with Intense Scrutiny, Suspicion, and Expose: a Fiasco

The Egodeath theory is doing its part – I need to step it up! – to contribute to the critique and fiasco.

They write “risks”; I write “the cited basis of this ‘science’ of ‘mysticism’ is only half a model of mystical experience: the pleasant, beginner half, omitting the advanced, unpleasant half by designating it a priori as “unpleasant therefore unmystical”.

the Religious Professionals Study
rps

the Hopkins/NYU Religious Professionals psilocybin study
hnrps

the Hopkins Religious Professionals Study
hrps

The Religious Professionals Study is doomed to be met with intensive criticism and skepticism about the “mystical” and religious motivations cloaked as “Science”.

People will be skeptical that the the Hopkins/NYU Religious Professionals psilocybin study constitutes Science.

The study downplays bad trips – that’s one of the objections, relevant to the Egodeath theory.

The “Positive-Balanced” (Incomplete) Pseudo Science of Mysticism: Designating Beginners’ Experience “a Complete Mystical Experience”, by Designating the Advanced, Challenging Half of Mystical Experience as “Non-Mystical”

I concluded clearly recently, that James 1902, Stace 1960, Marsh Chapel 1962, Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) ~1970, and the Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) 2016, are all a whitewash operation omitting the negative effects of mystical experience; defining A PRIORI “mystical effects vs. challenging effects” – a baked-in bias and FALSE model of mysticism that omits the negative effects.

Some aspects of the complaints are relevant to Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism (producing, finally, integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking).

Religious Professionals Study Trial: Completed 2024/05/31

Started: 2014/09/16
Actual Study Completion Date: 2024/05/31

https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT02243813?term=griffiths%20roland&intr=psilocybin&rank=4&tab=table

https://clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT02243813

Audiobook: Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3) (Erik Davis, 2005)

Released today Apr. 29, 2025

Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3)
Erik Davis, 2005
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0826416586 – print
https://www.amazon.com/Led-Zeppelins-Zeppelin-IV-33/dp/B0DY2YDF88/ – audiobook

Your Extraordinary Mind: Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them (Leary, April 29, 2025)

Your Extraordinary Mind: Psychedelics in the 21st Century and How to Use Them
April 29, 2025, Zach Leary
https://www.amazon.com/Your-Extraordinary-Mind-Psychedelics-Century/dp/1683649931/ —

End of Ch 3 is good: Leary discusses Matt “Lose the Buddha Statue” Johnson’s Public Relations stunt filed claims ethics violations claims against Roland Griffiths’ newage Psilocybin styled research.

40% into ch 3: “The Medicalization Model: A Cautionary Partnership”

Not So Fast on Psychedelic Mushrooms (Pollan, 2019)

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/opinion/denver-mushrooms-psilocybin.html – “OPINION
Michael Pollan: Not So Fast on Psychedelic Mushrooms
Psilocybin has a lot of potential as medicine, but we don’t know enough about it yet to legalize it.
May 10, 2019″

MICHAEL POLLAN confirms he is AN ENEMY INVADER OF THE FIELD.

Leary & I find that highly offensive and tyrannical.

Pollan wrote:

“No one should ever be arrested or go to jail for the possession or cultivation of any kind of mushroom — it would be disingenuous for me to say otherwise, since I have possessed, used and grown psilocybin myself. [then STFU, hypocrite!] Like many others, I was inspired to do so by the recent renaissance of research into psychedelics, including psilocybin.”

A self-contradictory nonsense dance.
“Make Psilocybin illegal, but no arrests or jail.”

FULL REPEAL OF PSILOCYBIN PROHIBITION

Leary himself says he has incoherent policy views.

My policy is clear and simple: man lived for infinite years without Prohibition of Psilocybin, and 5 minutes ago in 1968/1970, Psilocybin was made “illegal”.

Totally Forget that!

The Psilocybin laws in 1900 were perfect, ie nonexistent. Any laws are bound to be an evil trojan horse. No one “needs helpful prohibition” in any way.

Prohibition of Psilocybin is demonic and against God.

Truth in packaging applies.

Culture, not new authorities, should regulate.

WoD is phony and a failure in every aspect.

The Psychedelic Evangelist (Borrell, March 2024, NYT)

The Psychedelic Evangelist
A Johns Hopkins scientist was known for rigorous studies of psychedelics. Was he a true believer?
by Brendan Borrell, March 21, 2024
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/21/health/psychedelics-roland-griffiths-johns-hopkins.html —

“…ates on the insular research field. And some researchers have quietly questioned whether Dr. Griffiths, in his focus on the mystical realm, made some of the same mistakes that doomed the previous era of psychedelic science.

“Now, one of his longtime collaborators is airing a more forceful critique. “Dr. Griffiths has run his psychedelic studies more like a ‘new-age’ retreat center, for lack of a better term, than a clinical research laboratory,” reads an ethics complaint filed to Johns Hopkins last fall by Matthew Johnson, who worked with Dr. Griffiths for nearly 20 years but resigned after a charged dispute with colleagues.“

I heard that was a self-promotion strategy by Matt Johnson, pushing an extremist Naturalism Materialism “only matter exists” caricature of anti-religion “Science”.

Such a focus in defining two, bad, opposed, irrelevant positions is not helpful toward Transcendent Knowledge.

Clueless fog-headed mystics vs. clueless “mind doesn’t exist: scientists – neither of those outlooks or conceptions is relevant to the heart of the matter, the cybernetic theory, control transformation, mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism (ie, to integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking).

Psychedelic Evangelist article con’t:

“Dr. Griffiths acted like a “spiritual leader,” the complaint said, infusing the research with religious symbolism and steering volunteers toward the outcome he wanted. And he allowed some of his longstanding donors — supporters of drug legalization — to assist in studies, raising ethical questions.”

““These are serious allegations that need to be investigated,” said Joanna Kempner, a medical sociologist at Rutgers University who reviewed the complaint for The New York Times. The clashes at Hopkins, she added, mirror a broader debate in the field over “blurring the lines between empirical research and spiritual practice.””

These articles have many hyperlinks.

Bad Religion vs. Bad Science

Johnson and Chris Letheby and Houot and others are trying to split the field and set up a bunk debate driving down into the gutter the worst notion of Science fighting against the worst notion of Mysticism/ Religion they can imagine or invent, construct, fabricate, or identify/find.

Advocates of what they call “Science” need to steel man, not straw man, mysticism: Try to find the best – not the worst – type of mysticism or religion.

Z Leary has a balanced critique of the medicalization model.

Psychedelic eternalism and possibilism analogies in mythic art motifs of {mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability}

Psychedelic Eternalism {mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} motifs

Psychedelic 4D Spacetime Block Universe Eternalism

Branching Possibilism and Non-Branching Eternalism in Art Analogies of {mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability}

Fresh Article Centering:

What Is the Message of the Branching-message mushroom trees

Is that All?

To Fully Learn Eternalism Is to Integrate Possibilism and Eternalism

What’s the message at maximum integration of eternalism and possibilism?

Long article for the Journal of Psychedelic Studies.

Short article for annual church reader.

The message from the mushroom-tree artists:

A value-neutral model of maximally developed Psilocybin loose cognitive transformation.

The best religious mythic art

The diamond hammer of interpretation of
religious art firmly as analogies depicting Psilocybin transformation.

Real, legit, proper, definitive religious art. Not bad, mediocre religious art.

Religious art is analogies depicting Psilocybin transformation of the mental model of control in world.

I am not asking art. I am telling the art what it ought to mean, when art at its best.

The best art depicts Psilocybin-driven control transformation, so, art must be viewed and judged and interpreted AS Psilocybin transformation.

If the art fails to be that, it is bad, inferior art; it is not the best, definitive art.

If mystics fail to focus on mental model transformation from possibilism to eternalism, they are poor mystics.

Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism is the standard by which to judge and rank mystics.

  • fair: Amanita effects
  • better: Psilocybin effects
  • best: Mythic Amanita effects – the famous super-psychedelic

Amanita muthoscaria Is Much Better of a Psychedelic than the Purest Sandoz

Mythic-realm Amanita is way better than the purest Sandoz. Even the challenging effects are pleasant and ideal.

Mythic Amanita does not produce — Amanita muthoscaria

Authentic religious art depicts integrating eternalism-thinking into possibilism-thinking.

theme: neutral valuing

value egoic personal control system in terms of its presense and it is used, donkey, all the time.

even during peak window.

So it is not …

Abraham loves Isaac.

MATURE theorists of egodeath love their only child, which was sacrficed in honor of the higher power creator controller level.

Fully mature egodeath cybernetic theorists value and appreciate egoic personal control system.

Positively model the final state involving intensive use of donkey Isaac egoic personal control system , now washed clean, reveal basis of possibilism-thinking is eternalism.

The experiential world that we always live in is in the form of controllers in possibilism-thinking.

On substrate of eternalism.

To reveal

To perceive eternalism,

To experience and perceive eternalism is to die sacrifice the agent illusion on the upper layer of the virtual world.

When you take an agent in virtual world, and show eternalism, Psilocybin transformation.

Agent config 1 is zapped to smoke, smoked like a capacitor backwards

The Magic Smoke disappears and the control agent youth is cancelled out by Heimarmene.

Donkey continues

Donkey phase 1 gets zapped and transformed the mental model of the egoic control system , personal egoic control system .

Before Psilocybin, egoic personal control system. after, transcendent egoic personal control system.

Transcendent Egoic Thinking; qualified possibilism-thinking

integrated transcendent possibilism-thinking & transcendent eternalism-thinking
iptet

My Book Review of Hanegraaff Hermetic Spirituality and Altered States, Now At Amazon

Update Friday, April 25, 2025: my review is finally live:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1MP0AF4OLZT3/

Copy of the review at present site:
https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/07/14/hermetic-spirituality-and-the-historical-imagination-altered-states-of-knowledge-in-late-antiquity-hanegraaff/#amazon-book-review

Tim Freke Presents a Radically New View of God, Soul, & Post-Scientific Spirituality (Video, April 25, 2025)

Tim Freke Presents a Radically New View of God, Soul, & Post-Scientific Spirituality
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYC40iEvoxg&t=1928s – 32:15, Tim Freke worked with Terence McKenna.
Tim Freke

“conversation with Jordan Bates.

“‘Why Your Life Really Matters: The Podbook’ is coming on 1 May.”

https://timfreke.com/online-community/

Disliking Eternalism in the right way, and the Egodeath theory as combining eternalism, in the right way

transcript of Freke part 1 at 58:00 – he conflates possibilism, determinism, eternalism, etc, 4d, then tops it off by over-focus on “only mind exists” or awareness or Epistemology – irrelevant.

“Integration” of Psychedelics Experience or Advaita Enlightenment – Trending

Lucid Living: Experience Your Life Like a Lucid Dream (Freke, 2016)

Freke is moving away from this or broadening and re-centering, re-focusing, reframing now.

Freke still attunes too much to “only mind exists, vs only matter exists”. Irrelevant! Way better is my 1987 commitment to assuming practically, both — mind models the world, per Cognitive Phenomenology of Mind Manifestation especially when applied to practical control and potential control model transformation.

He has recorded some episodes of forthcoming May 2025 Podbook.

Tim Freke
Lucid Living: Experience Your Life Like a Lucid Dream (Freke, 2016)
https://www.amazon.com/Lucid-Living-Experience-Your-Dream/dp/1525231200/ —

Blurb:

“After a life-time studying the world’s spiritual traditions, pioneering philosopher Tim Freke presents the mystical heart of spirituality in 8 transformative principles.

“From his personal experience he describes spiritual awakening as similar to the experience of lucid dreaming – except now while in the waking state.

“Awakening is lucid living.

“This astonishingly direct book points to an awakened state.

“Step by step it guides you through a radically new way of looking at the present moment, so you can experience a spiritual awakening as you are reading.

“It will take you less than an hour to read, but it could change your life for good.

“Since it was first published ten years ago Lucid Living has come to be seen by many as a modern spiritual classic. In this new edition Tim Freke reworks adds an 8th principle to account for the profound developments in his own understanding of awakening.”

The Evolution of my Ideas about Spirituality (Apr. 18, 2025) (Part 1)

My comment posted on:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YApyTorwIjM&t=840s = 14:00 —

14:00 lol – “I only took 1 book: the Way of Zen by Alan Watts” – me too,

During 8 months of away working, I just read that book intensively, then had my huge breakthrough as soon as I returned.

I exclaimed near the end:

Watts, why didn’t you just say block-universe eternalism/determinism/no-free-will?!

Instead of all that inarticulate poetry?

Poor writing in the mystical genre.

I’ve done things like throwing that book in the fire; when my father gave it to me, I tried to give it back to him.

I was more consistently disdainful toward poorly packaged Transcendent Knowledge; I took a “plunder and transform into something of use” approach.

I liked 4D spacetime block universe mysticism because it so quickly and vigorously delivers a kind of ego nullification.

I doubt Freke dislikes Eternalism in the correct way, because at 58:00 he conflates Determinism with Eternalism.

/ end of comment 4 24 2025

The Evolution of my Ideas about Spirituality (Apr. 18, 2025) (Part 2)

Main location of the below content:
https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/03/30/timothy-freke/#Evolution-of-my-Ideas-about-Spirituality-pt2 — a copy of that part 2 content from me is below

Video title:
Part 2: The Evolution of my Ideas about Spirituality
Tim Freke, Apr. 18, 2025

“In a follow up to our previous conversation, Richard Cox and I discuss the development of my ideas about spirituality:

  1. from accepting the fundamental tenets of the perennial philosophy,
  2. to embracing the philosophy of unividualism.

[i disagree with more aspects of what’s foisted as common-core mysticism and perennialism than Freke – it’s a beginners’ overemphasis on nondual unity oneness, fails to engage control model transformation & pass through the relevant gate. – Michael Hoffman]

“Follow Richard’s work at https://www.deepstateconsciousness.com/

‘Why Your Life Really Matters: The Podbook‘ is coming on 1 May. 2025

“Subscribe to be notified of new chapters weekly.

“Access all chapters I have recorded before they are released and connect with me in person at weekly online meet-ups by joining my online community: https://timfreke.com/online-community/

“Find out about my experiential online and in-person events: https://timfreke.com

“Sign up to my newsletter to hear about everything I am up to: https://timfreke.com

“I am the author of 35 books, translated into 15 languages, including a Sunday Times bestseller and Daily Telegraph ‘Book of the Year’.

[Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy’s book The Jesus Mysteries, 1999, https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Mysteries-Was-Original-Pagan/dp/0609807986/%5D

“For some inexplicable reason I was included in ‘The 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People’ lists in Watkins Magazine for 2021 and 2022.”

My Comment on the Video Part 2 or 1

In 1988, I discovered a 2nd way of thinking (4D spacetime block universe eternalism), instead of the common, first way of thinking.

For decades, I emphasized switching to that 2nd way of thinking.

But in 2000 (Jesus Mysteries book era), Coraxo in the Gnosticism Yahoo Group pointed out that my glorified 2nd way of thinking is what Gnosticism framed as a prison to escape!

So then in 2001, I read David Ulansey’s book explaining Mithraism as a way of rising above my glorified, exclusive 2nd way of thinking.

The Late Antiquity 3-part model (body, soul, spirit) disparaged my 2nd way of thinking as merely soul, merely half-transcendent.

And in 2024, I realized that my model, pushing exclusively 4D Spacetime Mysticism, simply would not fly if presented to my psych spirituality group, and is not entirely relevant to the mystical peak state nor daily life.

I recently struggled to stop disrespecting the first way of thinking and reframe both ways of thinking in an integrated way.

Now I’m following behind Tim Freke and Jessica Nathanson in a “both-and”, embracing approach, which conforms to Ken Wilber: “dis-identify, embrace, and include” the earlier developmental structures.

Isaac was sacrificed in a way (“because you have done this thing”), and preserved in a way, and because of that, Abraham and Isaac walked away blessed by the Transcendent and thriving into the future.

Looking forward to the Podbook.

/ end of Comment on video

Tim Freke re: Ken Wilber (My Comment on “Why Your Life Really Matters, Pt 2”)

I posted the comment on the video.
May 1, 2025; day of release of part 1 & part 2 videos.

Around 1980, Ken Wilber warned about psychological disintegration, vs. the healthy approach to build upward: dis-identify with, embrace, and include the earlier developmental structures (ie the bulk of egoic thinking).

Tim Freke replied, May 1, 2025:

“Ken is a groundbreaking thinker. I disagree now with a number of his ideas, but I am forever grateful to him. “

Cyberdisciple’s email April 23, 2025

https://www.thomashatsis.com

What is this, his 4th or 5th rebranding?

It’s noteworthy that there is no mention of the book he said that he was writing on “The” Holy Mushroom, and the articles about “The” Holy Mushroom are (still and/or again) missing.

From checking out the blurb of his new book and browsing the titles of some of his recent YouTube videos, it looks like he has pivoted to contemporary “culture war” takes. 

Email to Max and Cyberdisciple April 23, 2025

Thanks, was looking for that latest rebranding.

Yes we are thinking / wondering along same lines: “pivoted to contemporary culture war takes”; I’ll check out the site.

I continue to think of the silently cancelled book by Hatsis.  

He can’t be THAT stupid, slow, thick, clueless, and dense.  

I told him to read my site, even though he responded in delusion and confusion to me.  

After your article w/ Brown urged “AND PSILO”.  

If Hatsis is paying ANY attention to your writings and mine, there’s no way he is still restricted to his Pop Cult Allegro bubble.  

The field with Brown & you & me has so clearly moved way past Allegro.  

If Hatsis cares at all, as he claims to, finding “The Mushroom” (mythic-realm super-psyched’c Mighty Amanita, king of all psychedelcs), he MUST have gotten it through his thick, slow head, there’s more to the proposal than just “the Allegro theory”.

He can’t be THAT dense & slow!

It ain’t 1970 any more!

https://psychedelicwitch.com – 404 😢

https://psychedelichistorian.com – 404 😢

Site map: my pages about Hatsis:

https://egodeaththeory.org/nav/#Hatsis

I missed an easy opportunity to bolster my good strategic joke page, 
https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/06/29/hatsis-gallery-of-mushroom-imagery-in-christian-art/

— that was a good gallery, but I only externally linked to the png/jpg files, urls shown still.  No pictures in that good gallery now, alas. Are his pictures at the new site?

Archive.org did not give me the pictures.

1. ars psychelica website

2. psychedelic witch domain site

3. ” historian “

4. Thomas Hatsis .com – is the good publisher telling him to stop being immature?  I wish hatsis would quit messing up his own articles.  They have valuable transformation potential.  

He messed up my gallery of,

The Thomas Hatsis Gallery of the Many Mushroom Images in Christian Art.

Is the Hatsis Gallery of Msh Imagery in Xn Art restored at Thomas Hatsis .com?

Is his real, orig version of 2013 Dancing Man article there?  I need to cite it, better than at Archive.org where I link to the real version of the article.

Can’t wait for his promised book (mentioned braggingly in videos etc.) demolishing the outdated, 1997, 1st Gen, Secret Amanita Paradigm, that Pop Cult worships (Allegro, then Ruck building on Allegro).  

With the leading Disciple of Allegro being HYPOCRITE Hatsis; I was again cussing today, while listening to Hatsis read his book: 

“You hypocrite, projecting your own childhood onto the entire field” – understandably so.

Max Interestingly Conflated My Two Episodes, in Transcendent Knowledge Podcast

* In 1988, Tim Leary came to my university.  My friends met with him. 

I declined, better things to do: writing up my breakthrough of Jan 1988.  I was NOT IMPRESSED by his books that my friends/roommates had; warmed-over self-help.  Not relevant, useful, helpful, simple, or clear for my purposes. 

* In 1991, the Bridge Conference was across the street at Stanford – I declined, better things to do: “.

My father (taught me all Transpersonal Psychology in high school) told me to not respect big names, but to be better than them.

Now, Leary Junior’s new book cautions against the Therapy model: I ordered cheap audiobok.  Zach Leary.  April 29, 2025 book release.  

“Keep in perspective: 99.99% of experiences are outside of the “professional therapy industry” framework.”

Zach Leary’s mic technique with Joe in Psych’s Today podcast is unlistenable: 

mumble mumble mumble YELL! mumble mumble mumble 

Requires patching-in a volume leveler.  Hope his book is read aloud professionally.  

My tone mood of speech is over-caffeinated criticizing/ chastising, but at least you can hear what I’m saying.

2nd Gen entheogen scholarship

1998 Samo article represents — for those few who pay attention to the leading edge of the field — start of 2nd Gen, Explicit Psilo paradigm of Msh Imagery in Xn art.

Important: “drop-in debate partner” idea: Hatsis debated fisticuffs against Irvin; they deserve each other: Hatsis follows Allegro, and Irvin 2008 follows Allegro even more, and Hatsis abandoned sort of, Allegro, and fought 2008 Irvin, Allegro defender.  

Then Irvin discovered social engineering motives of all the big names in the field, and so Irvin withdrew from defending Allegro, and then Hatsis  needed a DROP-IN EXACT REPLACEMENT for Irvin, in the figure of Jerry Brown – 

but Brown already was on board with my 2007 / 2013 explicit Psil paradigm.  

As late as 2021, Hatsis still ASSUMED that Brown and I were exact drop-in replacements for Jan Irvin 2008, defender of Allegro.  

Hatsis emailed me intriguing quotes, showing he had NO FEEL, no sense of the 2nd Gen, Explicit Psilo paradigm.

Brown might have slightly followed Allegro, when Brown was debate partners with Hatsis (Hatsis trying to use Brown as Irvin-replacement).  I found Allegro very late, like 2000, and for me, the ahistoricity idea of Allegro was more notable than Allegro’s amanita focus.  

Hatsis misreads the leading edge of the field, because he pays too much attention to only the Pop Cult version of the field.

Surely by now, Hatsis is finally waking up that it’s not 1970 anymore?  Allegro/Ruck era.  

It’s now the Samo/ Michael Hoffman/ Brown era, starting 1998 (roots in 1996 San Francisco slide show by Samo).

When will it finally dawn on scholars – and later, on Pop Cult — that the 1st gen paradigm is dead?  In one conference, overnight, scholars flipped their view of Mithraism – the field flipped to a next-gen view, overnight, point-in-time.

I UNDERSTAND the confusions in the field.  Most people are ignorant of 2nd Gen, Explicit Psilo paradigm, used without comprehension by Letcher to debunk the explicit Psilo Bern. door if placed within the Secret Amanita paradigm.

I was so distracted by the Nov. 2020 GCP breakthrough, I never had any idea that I purchased Hatsis’ read-aloud of his book Psy. Mystery Trad’s (as well as his ebook, which was a frustrating format).

I’ve purchased Hatsis’ book in all 3 formats!  

In Oct 2020, I focused on Hatsis’ book (ebook).  

Oct/Nov 2020, I corrected Brown and realized the error in St. Walburga tapestry, Brown then invited / inquired if we wrote about compelling evidence & criteria of proof for identifying mushroom imagery in Christian art.  

At tail end of that article, which I abused to merely showcase my breakthroughs, instead of theorizing about criteria, that led to the Great Canterbury Psalter breakthrough.  Around Nov 17, 2020.

Eadwine’s leg-hanging mushroom tree image in the Great Canterbury Psalter; f134 row 1 Left.

It cracks me up today to hear Hatsis talking about what Jesus did, and what Jesus thought – the witch is oblivious to ahistoricity.  Which plants did Jesus use?  Debate!

It is also weird hearing Hatsis talk-through “the sacred secret mushroom theory” – his wording (in 2019) reflects his delusion and limited view about what’s being debated.  

Allegro, then Ruck, then Pop Cult: all latched HARD onto Secret Amanita narrative.  

Can’t blame Hatsis & Letcher for halting there and ONLY seeing that, and not grasping the ramifications of Samorini 1998, which was so powerful that Samorini’s expansive view even slipped into Ruck’s thinking, for a moment — Ruck & M. Hoffman article “Conjuring Eden”, in 2001, for a moment, before Ruck Committee inevitably reverted to their Secret Amanita paradigm after a moment of Samorini clarity (stil, intensely narrative-restricted).

McPriest, Muraresku, Ruck’s “Mushrooms in Heretical Christianity” driving-narrative (tail wag dog)

I now have a 1st printing hardcover of The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, 2020. I like his bold speculation and pro-Christianity approach, which proves to be best (attitude & agenda/ motivation) for producing evidence + interpretation.

Who produces more evidence & better interpretation: 

Scholars whose motivating purpose is to disparage Christianity & glorify heretical contrarians?  Allegro then Ruck.

Scholars whose motivating purpose is to find entheogens in Christianity of whatever type?  Samorini, me, then Brown.

Verdict: I don’t know if The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, 2020 claims that Ruck claims that “Christianity elided [omitted] psychedelics”, as McPriest claims in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies 2024.  Ruck is so incoherent, and he really says – aside from “2 elites used The Mushroom” – Ruck does NOT say “Christianity eliminated psychedelics”; what he says is “heretical Christianity & mystics had The Mushroom”.  Ruck says Christianity eliminated psychedelics EXCEPT for heretics and deviants.  

Verdict: Can’t blame McPriest 2024 – or Muraresku – for misrepresenting Ruck’s poor, confused assertion.

2nd Gen Entheogen Scholarship Con’t

I then in 2002 parted officially ways at that time, 2002/2003, maximal entheogen theory of religion, vs (not clear at the time) I in effect, announced the Explicit Psilo paradigm in 2002/2003 against the 1st gen Secret Amanita paradigm.  

I saw Ruck citing Samo’s work, a fork in the road: I picked Samo’s direction, instead of Ruck’s direction (Secret Amanita).  

Yet Samorini 1997 (Plaincourault article) still falls into the narrative error “certain Christian communities used The Mushroom”.  

ie, fabricated, baseless narrative framing, of “wall-encircled, closed, secret, members-only” use of The Mushroom – 

God forbid we allow The Mush to be used by individuals mixing among the mass of everyone.  

Gotta follow & prop up the Prohibition narrative, above all — that’s the purpose of entheogen scholarship, to condemn the Big Bad Church, a ritual retelling, a ritual rite of mythic storytelling.

My influence by Allegro is zero.  I only entered the field of entheogen scholarship — with the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence in hand — in 1998 or 1999, the year of Freke & Gandy book Jesus Mysteries with one-third of a page about entheogens retained by their publisher.

Hatsis 2019 is correct that the Secret Amanita theory is all-dominant in Pop Cult — but, that’s merely 1st-Gen enth scholarship, not the 2nd-Gen that Letcher 2006 used to demolish 1st-Gen in 1 blow, efficiently requiring only considering a single Liberty Cap msh tree – impressive, even if confused re: attributing the 1st Gen theory to the 2nd Gen pure mycologists Stamets and Gartz.  

Roll up your sleeves to analyze Stamets/Gartz narrative: there’s nothing there!  They HAVE NO narrative at all, just 3 words: Lib Cap on Door.  That’s it.

___________________________________________

Hatsis’ contributions (after my transformation of them [my superpower]): How Hatsis’ brilliant color picture led to decoding branching-message mushroom trees, even – ultimately – expressing that, Epistemology Be Damned, what really matters per the mushroom-tree artists is:

We Combine & Balance Two Different Ways of Thinking, for altered state Exploration:

Hatsis was the first entheogen scholar to make available a color hi-res picture of “dancing man”.  

Samorini sent me a PDF of his milestone 1998 article, but, that article format is unreadable in various ways; leading to Ruck’s massive mistake, “the cap is red”.  

My Samo 1998 article reprint is extremely low res.  

Samo’s Italian book has some pics, in better res – b & w still, so, “OMG it must be a red cap!  Take that, art historians!!” (Ruck major screw-up; solved by Hatsis’ article 2013 in UK periodical.) 

Huggins 2022(?) article about Dancing Man credits Hatsis and they dined together, meeting.

Hatsis’ detailed original article w/ mature title, the full PDF that was printed in magazine in UK, about Dancing Man, was helpful for my Christmas 2015 hypothesis: 

“Could right foot map to the Eternalism non-branching mental model, and left foot map to the Possibilism branching mental model?”

John Lash 2008 Web article “Discovery of a Lifetime” (cited in Brown book etc): rediscovered image by me in Nov. 2020: Yes!!  

Leg-hanging mushroom tree; GCP f134 row 1 Left 2/5 of the row.

Great Canterbury Psalter

John Lash uploaded in 2008 2/5 of 1 of 3 rows:

2/5 * 0.33 = just 13% of the entire f134 image, enabled in late 2020 my main decoding of the entire image – though in 2025 I continue significant decoding of the image, 4 years 5 months later.

2025/04

-2020/11

= 

2024/16

-2020/11

= 4 years 5 months  

Then after Nov 2020, Cyberdisciple’s row 2 of the picture which is boring daily life grain junk like:

* The Cubensis dispensary display cases like across the street from Univ. of Amsterdam.

* The conjoined basic Left- and Right-foot youths (basic possibilism-thinking + basic eternalism-thinking).

* The Psalter reader being threatened or not, based on L/R finger height [blew my mind to the max].

* The puzzling-for-4-years, floating sage, who relies neither on L nor R foot, but poses the puzzle: 

Ultimate Instructional Puzzle Challenge: What Would be “Ultimate, Un-Surpassable Maturation”?

IF the guy SITTING balancing in the msh tree is merely BASIC comprehension and control stability, HOW IS the right-leg-HANGING GUY PROFOUNDLY (not superficially) MORE ADVANCED?

Not merely a superficially more complicated depiction of “rely on Right = non-branching control steering”, any more than the floating sage is “just a visually more complicated equivalent of” the conjoined pair of L+R foot youths in f134 Row 2 R.  Rather, floating sage asks: [joke construction for 4 years:  the 420 floating sage?] 

* If R foot is better than mere L foot, what would be that much better than mere R foot?

Answer: Like the floating sage, the knee-hanging guy is beyond basic eternalism-thinking, is 

the mature integrated combination affirming both possibilism-thinking & eternalism-thinking in a coordinated, balanced way.

Thus red plant #4, day 3, has both IY and YI form; thus, the 4 plants in Day 4 of creation (f11) have both branching and non-branching features, open book, {balance scale}.  

Are mushroom-trees just for the purpose of showing non-branching and rejecting / smashing / getting rid of branching?  No; they affirm in a way, both branching & non-branching.  As well as saying that … control stability requires not SOLELY eternalism-thinking (non-branching), but ALSO requires harmonious balance including using also, the usual branching thinking (possibilism-thinking), completed by adding also non-branching.

The 1.5 women in f134 row 2 middle – holding {balance scale} and {closed scroll}, looking at the threatening or relenting soldiers, Left (!) foot on stable col base and also touching ground, and her R foot also(!) touching ground.  

She is relying in the ordinary state on BOTH feet touching the ground: rely on possibilism-thinking and rely on eternalism-thinking.

The 1-limb maiden attached to her has only a single foot, touching the ground.

That’s what the fully passing student 1 knows; [THE MOST SOPHISTICATED POSSIBLE INTERP OF THE WHOLE PICTURE = 

two-headed Rebis; 

wedding of the king-Theseus-abandoned Ariadne + Dionysus] 

The ideal answer to the instructor/examiner, the ideal passing A student 1 with full comprehension knows everything that 

the floating sage knows, 

that the simple Right-foot (partly mature) red youth on row 2 R DOESN’T yet know.  

That the C student 3 in row 1 L doesn’t know, only grasping the Right-limb balanced, sitting guy in the tree, but not comprehending the that-much-more mature, hanging guy in the tree.

The mere clever basic right-foot red youth (row 2 R), still joined to the basic left-foot youth, is merely an eternalism enthusiast preaching only eternalism, putting down / repudiating/ semi-foolishly disparaging Possibilism – he’s half mature, not truly completed to the maximum. 

The foolishness of the Eternalism theorist.

who is out-theorized by the more sophisticated, more balanced, post-eternalism theorist.

Song Free Will by Rush: Around 2007, I wrote “transcend determinism”.  It’s a Pneuma-delic song, not merely a Psyche-delic song. (body -> soul -> spirit)

http://egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22968

Psychedelics are known to give perception of eternalism, per Josie Kins effectindex: 
https://www.effectindex.com/effects/perception-of-eternalism

After perception of Eternalism, integrate perception of Possibilism, per song Free Will.

body = possibilism-thinking (hylic-delic?)

soul = eternalism-thinking = psyche-delic = cosmos sphere 8, fixed stars, the Ogdoad

spirit = integrated qualified possibilism-thinking + qualified eternalism-thinking = pneuma-delic = sphere 9, the Ennead

Not “Ogdoad bad, Ennead good“.  Use either conception:

* reaching Ennead = also affirming Ogdoad.

* affirm/embrace both & integrate Ennead & Ogdoad.    (cosmic sphere 8 & 9; heimarmene fixed stars + transcending them)

Sol = 8; Mithras = 9; Sol’s pact with Mithras.  

Embrace the cosmic rock + step outside the cosmic rock.  

Not ONLY step outside cosmic rock.  Not “destroy the cosmic rock, to leave it.”  As Gnosticism would be (debatably) accused of.

Not “delete the fixed stars, to be purely transcendent possibilism only”.  

The error of demonizing eternalism & affirming only transcending eternalism – Wouter Hanegraaff.

The error of demonizing possibilism-thinking and only affirming basic pure eternalism.  

“You gotta agree with me there’s no-free-will, to be enlightened” – 

Tim Freke rejects Ramesh Balsekar’s extremist eternalism-enlightenment, “you don’t exist, only the One exists; enlightenment = no-free-will; self is only illusion and unreal.”

David Litwa’s title: “The Eighth Reveals the Ninth”, in his new book, Hermetica I.  

Not “delete fixed stars sphere 8th, to leave sphere 8 and go to sphere 9 instead.”  

Ken Wilber warns: “dis-identify, embrace, and include.  Not destroy/ demonize and rise above; that gives mere destructive regression.”  

As Tim Freke and Jessica Nathanson are realizing, against “kill the self, destroy the ego, you are an illusion, you don’t exist, only nondual unity oneness exists.”  

Freke’s word unividual; uni-vidual.  Integrate possibilism & eternalism = be a uni-vidual.  His audio podbook coming in 2025.

Stupid, thick, still-foolish Past Me, BTFOd again by superior, Future Me (now).

The crucial question Eadwine (floating sage + teacher in class in Row 1 Left) asks us, he asks the ideal super-passing student: 

IS THERE AN EVEN MORE MATURE, EVEN MORE SOPHISTICATED INTERPRETATION CARRIED by the two different guys in the mushroom-tree? 

How is the hanging guy much more mature and sophisticated and balanced in skill, than the mere sitting guy?  

Are you a better student merely because you can do more tricks with art motif of handedness?  

Mere shallow technical complexification? Not impressed.

Or can you conceive of maturation beyond mere basic eternalism-thinking that wins at the expense of demolishing and smashing and discarding possibilism-thinking into Hanegraaff’s Rejected wastebasket (with all the repressed fixed stars), like king Theseus abandoning Ariadne on the island?

What must it ultimately mean, to be mature in thinking about & knowing possibilism-thinking & eternalism-thinking?

Ans: 

* Don’t simply reject one of them, like James Kent & Alan Houot & Chris Letheby & Matthew Johson lazily and simple-mindedly rejecting religion.

* Don’t just simpy sum them.  Mere basic possibilism + basic eternalism.

* INTEGRATE them; “differentiate & integrate” the earlier & later developmental structures into the ultimate mature form.

The ideal passing student 1 – leaving no more room for Evil Future Me to out-interpret Present Me — looks at the hanging guy, the C student 3 merely looks at guy sitting in tree — the hanging guy is NOT merely “fancy handedness tricks of art”; the hanging guy is profoundly more mature, a master of L + R thinking,

“Balanced” in the “fully mature” sense: master of the two ways of thinking, employed skillfully together, two distinct, developed minds in one completed mind of the truly completed initiate, beyond which there is no more type of maturation.

— Cybermonk

/ end of email to max cyb apr 23 2025

Email to Max and Cyberdisciple April 24, 2025

LOL – POV perspective: this explains why Hatsis’ articles have been abandoned by Hatsis: 

I showed how his articles ironically constitute a great, convincing gallery of evidence in favor of mushroom imagery in Christian art!

I am surprised Wasson let us see Panofsky write “Hey everyone, hot tip: There’s hundreds more mushroom-trees like Plaincourault!” which lead, Samorini followed up finally in 1998.  

Go  ahead, MICA Deniers — show us 1000 more examples of why there’s no mushroom imagery in Christian art.  That’ll bolster your case.  

Wasson said Shut It Down!  No more showcasing the evidence for debate, because ppl will reach the wrong, ie correct, conclusion.  

Brinckmann?  Never heard of it.  Consult the competent in related matters authorities to measure their crispness & celerity of denial!  

Albert Brinckmann’s 1906 86-page book in German, Tree Stylizations in Medieval Paintings.

Email to Wrmspirit April 22, 2025

Reconciled & Harmonized Possibilism Wedded with Eternalism

Biggest news is that after talking with you, and meditating on Dionsus + Ariadne victory wedding, and long voice recording:

I got rid of all negativity against possibilism and against eternalism and figured out a way to frame as positively and neutrally as possible, a scientific model of mental model transformation / maturation 

— including listing the objectionable aspects, just as every science model has some objectionable aspects.

I now am able to present this positive, and balanced, and open honest presentation of my model of mental model transformation to my church.  

This was really hard, to bring the Egodeath theory to this state of maturity, beyond just insistence that “you gotta agree with me that eternalism [like no-free-will] is the case, and that possibilism is delusion to repudiate”.

I had to reject any negative attitude of “possibilism is mere illusion, eternalism is reality and truth”.  

It was hard to find a more fair and constructive framing than that.  

Must not privilege one mental model at the expense of disrespecting the other mental model. 

The rebis (male + female person with two heads) was helpful toward this adult, mature, science model, sober, constructive.  

— even if there are objectionable aspects, like we can object to the idea of needing to mature. 

eg I can criticize the sun-centered cosmos model: it is poor for mapping mental model transformation, unlike the earth centric model used from before 130 B C to 1675 AD.

/ diversion from the email, added:

I converge on 1675 as the end of esotericism, forgetting esoteric wisdom (insofar as we had it, in a garbled way) –

Science didn’t adopt and switch to the earth-centric model until maybe 1675, not sure – long after Copernicus thought of it in 1543]

Robo summary:

“The scientific acceptance of the heliocentric model, with the Sun at the center of the solar system, took place over a period starting in the 16th century and gradually solidified in the 17th century.

“It wasn’t a single, abrupt shift but a gradual process of evidence and argument that moved science away from the geocentric (Earth-centered) view.”

  • “The heliocentric model gained traction as more evidence and observations began to support it, though there was also resistance from those who held to the geocentric view. 
  • Galileo Galilei (1610):Galileo’s telescopic observations, including the discovery of moons orbiting Jupiter and the phases of Venus, provided strong evidence for a heliocentric solar system. 
  • Johannes Kepler (1619):Kepler’s three laws of planetary motion, while not explicitly supporting heliocentrism, provided a mathematical framework that made the heliocentric model more compelling. 
  • Isaac Newton (1687):Newton’s law of universal gravitation and laws of motion provided the underlying physics that explained why planets orbit the Sun, further solidifying the heliocentric model. 

“The shift to the heliocentric model was a gradual process, driven by scientific advancements and the accumulation of evidence, culminating in the 17th century with the work of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, who helped establish heliocentrism as the dominant model of the solar system.”

Conclusion: the above robo summary confirms yesterday’s voice recording April 21, 2025 speculating that the sun model was adopted at same time as Newton Principia, ie 1687, which is huge argument in favor of saying that psychedelic esotericism was forgotten in 1687, because the astral ascent mysticism model earth centered was abandoned in 1687.

That is to answer the Transcendent Knowledge podcast, Max Freakout/ Cyberdisciple/ Cybermonk question, what’s the forgot plot?

When Was Mushroom Esotericism Forgotten? 1687, Newton’s Principia, When Science Abandoned the Earth-Centric Cosmos Model

For date comparison: my Great Year of the Way of Zen by Alan Watts theory development was 1987, 300 years after Newton’s Principia, leading to my psychedelic eternalism breakthrough of Jan. 1988; the Theory of Ego Transcendence.

The year 1687, marked by Newton’s Principia, was accompanied by switchover of Science from the earth- to sun-centered cosmos model.

Per Wouter Hanegraaff book Esotericism and the Academy, what year was published the great compendium of stupid esotericism by a scholar maybe around that time, which was the act of throwing rejected knowledge into Hanegraaff’s Rejected wastebasket.
https://www.amazon.com/Esotericism-Academy-Rejected-Knowledge-Western/dp/0521196213/ —

That’s where Darth Wouter “Star Destroyer” Hanegraaff threw all of the stars in the sky, in order to protect Tat from being reborn into Heimarmene upon reaching sphere 8, my precious, magically designated “TheOgdoadAndTheEnnead above the Heimarmene“[sic!].]

Links within my main Hanegraaff 2022 page:

email to wrmspirit con’t:

Cover of Paul Thagard book contrasting two models of cosmos: 

We can complain and criticize every thing, every Scientific model, including Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism.

Late Antiquity complained about enslavement imprisonment in heimarmene (4D spacetime block universe eternalism), but they were mature enough to still assert that it is the case.  In stoic mature fashion, they integrated, with positive attitude, basic possibilism-thinking, forming like a rebis: per 3-part model of body/ soul/ spirit: 

* cosmos sphere 8 = soul = qualified eternalism-thinking.

* (hyper-) cosmos sphere 9 (or “level 9”) = spirit = qualified possibilism-thinking. 

Important: keep distinct eternalism-thinking & possibilism-thinking.  My great phrase: “differentiate and integrate”.  

Per Ken Wilber, dis-identify, embrace, and include the earlier developmental strucutres in psycho-spiritual development.

dis-identify and qualify = God tells Abraham “you HAVE done this sacrifice of your child[-thinking] Isaac that I commanded, to honor me”.

embrace & include = God tells Abraham “therefore you are blessed, harm not the child, and walk away with Isaac, blessed and thriving.”

Slippery confusing terms under-defined:

The term “cosmos” can mean any of:

* only the 7 planet spheres if we follow Hanegraaff’s un-justified lead, or 

* properly certainly include sphere 8 fixed stars; or even can include 

* level 9, 10, and the area outside any diagram eg level 11+.

The healed person, the completed initiate (per Late Antiquity more than Classical Antiquity) = integrated combination of qualified possibilism-thinking + qualified eternalism-thinking, forming a single, whole, conflict-free model of spiritual maturation.

If you only have possibilism-thinking, or basic possibilism-thinking, that’s “immature”, technically, as a science model sense.  

That sort of dismissive valuation is part of my science model, I sugar coat that but also am up-front about that value-laden framing.

My emphasis presenting my model is, the beneficial aspects of having this explanatory framework greatly outweighs lacking a model, or having a different model – the objectionable aspects.

That’s the most positive and constructive, and unobjectionable, I can be.

[that idea work-up was from voice recording yesterday April 21 2025]

Meeting with Houot, Cyberdisciple, & Max Saturday, April 26, 2025

I am probably going to accept doing a Zoom meeting with Houot, I will probably inform Max Freakout & Cyberdisciple of the possibility of including them.  

Stealing credit is easy for popular above-ground authors to do b/c of the underground nature of this field, w/ people not even revealing their names – like Chris Bennett accuses Brian Muraresku of stealing Bennett’s hard-won scholarship and not crediting him in popular book The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, 2020 as promised.  

Online are my copious writings about Houot and Science of altered state exploration.

Scholarly credit must be managed, whether in meetings or online or book scholarship.

I didn’t get Jan Irvin’s important book The Holy Mushroom in 2008, but only recently, b/c after the massive 67-page book-length 2006 Wasson article, I was tired of controversies and disputes that are more about un-blocking the field (past-directed, or past-driven) than actually moving the field forward (future-directed; future-driven).

1st-generation entheogen scholarship (the Secret Amanita paradigm) is past-driven, past-fixated, restricted by the past; Thomas Hatsis is committed to living in 1970 forever and restricting the field, also voice recording 4/21, I discussed {cut right trunk}i

i critiqued article in the Journal of Psychedelic Studies​ by McPriest [McCarthy & Priest] as example of FAILED SCHOLARSHIP regardless of citations: they are not guilty of failing to cite entheogen scholarship; they are guilty of failing to KNOW entheogen scholarship.

What they write contradicts the latest entheogen scholarship. The solution isn’t to cite the latest scholarship; the solution is to not write statements that contradict the lastest scholarship and reveal their ignorance.

They write as if we are introducing psychedelics into Christianity for the first time – opposite of reality. I’m working on my theory and articles.

The community responding to the McPriest article is half failure, half good: Winkelman and Brown yelled at McPriest LEARN THE DAMN ENTHEOGEN SCHOLARSHIP, IGNORAMUSES, but McPriest plugged his ears and printed that call, but stayed silent and everyone idiotically said “Allegro’s been debunked”, AS IF!

Insertion: Email to Houot 4/20/2025

my email to Houot, re: Allegro and Hatsis delusion about state of entheogen scholarship field.

Cyberdisciple & Dr. Jerry Brown rebutted Thomas Hatsis, a denier of mushroom imagery in Christian art (who has had to cancel his plan to write a book debunking his confused strawman notion of what the proposal even is).  

Hatsis is under the delusion that Allegro is definitive of the proposal of mushroom imagery in Christian art — but Cyberdisciple showed that Allegro isn’t even really an entheogen scholar and actually has no real relevance to the proposal.

It’s true that 1st-generation entheogen scholarship (the Secret Amanita paradigm) is lame and wrong — 

but we now are in 2nd-generation entheogen scholarship (the Explicit Psilocybin paradigm), quite different.

Mushroom Imagery in Christian art

Dr. Jerry Brown article about mushroom imagery in Christian art at Hancock site, cites Cyberdisciple, a Classics expert who knows the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism.

Max Freakout:
https://egodeaththeory.org/nav/#Transcendent-Knowledge-Podcast –
my page on his Transcendent Knowledge podcast.
my page on his earlier Psychonautica podcast.

I wonder if mysticism book expert psychonaut Kafei knows anything about the concept of “surrender” – see Transcendent Knowledge podcast episodes with Kafei.

Defining “High Dose”

I was in error in thinking Kafei used too high a Psilocybin dose.

Seems like McKenna says 5g is a lot but instead I gather than 12g is a lot, more than double McKenna’s claim.

Now, all I can say about reasonable Psilocybin dosage is, “unknown; requires research”.

A psychonaut exclaimed recently, it seems like there’s no upper limit of intensity, probably after 8-12 g.

My model is, “high dose” is defined as: double that dose and there’s no clear increase in intensity.

Consider dosage of X grams: if you double that dosage and get significantly more intensity, X is not “high dose”.

“High dose” = start to have diminishing returns, where the intensity (or duration) starts to top out. Seems more like 12 g than 5 g, typical Cubensis.

Synthetic Psilocybin: 10 mg = low, 20 mg = med, 30 mg = high, per Hopkins. They also express dosage by bodyweight.

Purposeful Specialty Book Reviews

I was more stressed about reviewing Rise of the Psychonaut than other things, but am pretty pleased with the result b/c:

I keep the focus on what I think are the most substantive topics, that I can uniquely speak to, instead of a generic review like stating the key topics of each chapter, that anyone could write.  

Have to conserve finite word count.

Able to Write Book Review of Hanegraaff

Next, after years of analysis (hardcover, & got ebook yesterday [4/19/2025] – good move), finally I’m able to review [4/21/2025] Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Wouter Hanegraaff, 2022) 

https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/07/14/hermetic-spirituality-and-the-historical-imagination-altered-states-of-knowledge-in-late-antiquity-hanegraaff/

A big advance in hermetic studies, but a big failure in comprehending “transcend heimarmene” as rebirth.  

The hermetic authors would wince – close; better than previous scholarship — but dreadfully confused – a “cosmos” model with no stars?  What? No!  Have you never looked at the sky to see stars?!  Total nonsense.

But, it sets up for correction.  Fix a couple massive mistakes, THEN that book contributes to the heart of the matter.

Surrenderism

Analyzing the dynamics of “surrender”(?) would be key to the main obstacle to scientific investigation of this realm.  

I don’t use the word ‘surrender’ in my conceptual vocabulary, so I’d have to analyze what it’s supposed to mean.

Surrendering is alleged to be “the” solution to panic, yet people can’t even say what you are supposed to surrender to; it’s a dangling, undefined folk concept.

Kafei has read all the mysticism writings, unlike me, and knows Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism.  I don’t have his contact.  He’s on Transcendent Knowledge podcast w/ Max Freakout.
https://egodeaththeory.org/2020/11/07/transcendent-knowledge-podcast-episodes/

Love Voice Recording

You have miking/ vocalizing experience in your read-aloud of dissertation in your podcast. 

I want to read-aloud various things, but I don’t like the production overhead as much – time-consuming.

I practiced miking specifically to prepare to be on Max Freakout’s Transcendent Knowledge podcast, not happened yet.

Site Map: My Houot Pages

https://egodeaththeory.org/nav/#Alan-Houot

/ end of inserted excerpts from email to Houot

Houot on Good Terms with Psychedelic Church

email to wrmspirit con’t:

Houot plans to do an “opener” segment in a Sunday service of this psychedelic church.  

We managed to keep a constructive relationship, between the book club and Alan Houot.  

Seems the mood of the book club is, skeptical, but reconciled. Not sure can generalize.

Some people in this church are cringing at the focus on alien contact, other people are positive about that!  A division, almost.

Hard to get along with each other, how ok is it, to be rude or adversarial to each other?

We have outspoken reactionism against certain ideas about Science.  

People can be churlish.  Houot seems mature and constructive toward scholars, unlike Hatsis, who was extremely immature, personally adversarial per Roller Derby.

When asked “Why do you try to make your book exclude most people?”, Houot defended his deliberate choice to exclude most audience from his book.

Houot’s says my book review is fair – my review is harsh in pointing out what Houot really asserts (don’t blame me, the messenger warning about this off-putting strategy that Houot says he strategically uses).

I’m always criticizing and mocking everyone, but hopefully I am nice to them in person.  

I’m not sure what my own policies are, about being rude or mocking to other people.  I would not personally insult and attack people, that’s rude & churlish.

I try not to take it personally when people critique the Egodeath theory like I critique (pros and cons of) other theories/ writers/ scholars.

Hanegraaff book review finally: Constructive, feels satisfactory

https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/07/14/hermetic-spirituality-and-the-historical-imagination-altered-states-of-knowledge-in-late-antiquity-hanegraaff/#amazon-book-review

Is my book review available at Amazon?  No.

Guidelines:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_omni_lm_btn?nodeId=G8UYX7LALQC8V9KA

Why I am required to engage with other scholarship

I’m not too thrilled hearing pushback eg treating me as “wrong” for paying attention to the flaws of Wouter Hanegraaff’s book.

I pushed scholarship in the field forward a lot by posting my book review yesterday that took almost 3 years to compose.  

Since there are many 5 star reviews and a poor 3 star review, this timing was beneficial to permit a 4 star outstanding review that stands out.

There are benefits for developing my theory, when I engage with scholarship in the field.

I have tested my astral ascent mysticism model in the fire, by identifying how it clashes with the incoherent model that Hanegraaff tries to construct within Hermetic writings of Late Antiquity.

I should be concerned when my astral ascent mysticism (since like 2003) model is contradicted by the leading scholar of Hermetism, 

Wouter Hanegraaff in 2022 and everyone is giving his book 5 stars 

but his astral ascent mysticism is so totally extremely broken, that he admits he is unable to allow the fixed stars into his model of the so-called “cosmos”

– his “cosmos ascent rebirth” model in which you look up to the sky to see only 5 stars, expecting 5 million stars.  

Hanegraaff can’t allow rebirth phase 1 to be into (demonized & repressed) Heimarmene (= 4D spacetime block universe eternalism) at cosmos sphere 8

— so has to get rid of all the stars from the cosmos! – an extreme move, and extreme failure of a cosmos model.

My almost 3 years of work on this scholarship problem, fixes a massive problem that is confusing the field of Hermetic studies, and Western Esotericism of which Wouter Hanegraaff is the leading scholar 

— he’s as much a mis-leading scholar, requiring yesterday’s correction by my almost 3 years (on his book) and my 2001-2025 decades of scholarly labor.  

Since 2001, because I got David Ulansey’s book about astral ascent mysticism in Mithraism in 2001.

My theory requires clearing the blockage that the leading scholar, Wouter Hanegraaff, amounts to within the field of Western Esotericism.

Now that Hanegraaff has acknowledged my work (in email), I can explain how my scientific model of mental model transformation matches:

* Classical Antiquity myth

* Late Antiquity myth

* modern scholarship

* Rock lyrics

* Michael Pollan’s popular book How to Change Your Mind.

People are confirming the exotic experience of Eternalism — but failing to contrast the relevant, popular (in a way) Possibilism model

Michael Pollan reports that he experienced block-universe eternalism so intensely, 

that when the overly positive Mystical Experience Questionnaire (MEQ) asked him if he had this positive mystical experience, 

he had to answer “N/A”, because yes he had it, — but the experience was horrific and upsetting, not “mystical” 

(according to the wrong preconceptions about “mystical experience = pleasant; unpleasant = un-mystical” fallacy, which Prof. Chs. Stang of Harvard criticised Roland Griffiths for, who said yes our model is “positive-balanced”).

Griffiths told Stang: that’s ok, we also can wave-around our Challenging Experience Questionnaire (CEQ) that we made in Hopkins (from which 18 of 21 negative effects were deleted so that it, too, is “positive balanced” – a whitewash operation corrupting and impeding would-be “Science”).

Josie Kins: Psych’c Effect Index: “Perception of Eernalism”

https://www.effectindex.com/effects/perception-of-eternalism

The worst problem in fields now is failure to realize that 

the relevant opposite of Eternalism (“non-branching”) 

is not Presentism (only the present moment exists), 

but rather, Possibilism (“branching”) – as the mushroom-tree artists know.

There is almost NO info about Possibilism except in Philosophy encyclopedia articles about the 3 models of time, and even those fail to actually draw a tree and a worm (or snake) despite saying “tree” and “branch” and “worldline worm”.

If you try to view videos about Eternalism: they wrongly contrast Eternalism vs. Presentism (b/c they fixate on Phil. topic of Epistemology, not personal control),

when they ought to instead contrast Eternalism against Possibilism.

If you try to view videos about Possibilism (as the opposed model of time, and also control), instead you get Geography videos.

So, ironically, people are on board with understanding the controversial and highly exotic Eternalism concept, but not conversant with the routinely popular Possibilism concept & model of time!  

People get sidetracked into the Philosophy Epistemology position of Presentism, instead of Possibilism.  

People are not attuned to the two contrasting models of time and personal control; they are attuned to the two models of time and Epistemology.

Title of article: Cognitive Phenomenology…, he doesn’t say “about personal control”: he leads up to that topic, discussing perception of things, but doesn’t get so far as perception of one’s personal control system where the hot action is at, to pass through the fearsome guarded transformation gate.

“Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city.” 

— Revelation 22:14 (the last page of the Bible)

People live within the Possibilism model so much they can’t see it: see instead the Physics topic of branching manyworlds Quantum Physics.

As I posted that exact contrast, re: Physics not Myth or Art, in 2001!  

Post 23 in Egodeath Yahoo Group – practically the wrmspirit/ Max Freakout archive, which was close to not existing in 2019!

https://egodeathyahoogroup.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/egodeath-yahoo-group-digest-1/#message23

That post is probably in archive page #1 (confirmed), it should be very easy to find (confirmed). 

The nice thing about archive page #1: it is so easy to find our first postings there.

Two models in Physics: non-branching “Relativity”, then branching “Quantum”:

* Minkowski “Relativity” 4D spacetime block-universe eternalism = non-branching.  1907-1908.  Not popular.  Pop mysticism ignored this, left it to me to discover 4D Spacetime Mysticism in 1988 (see Rudy Rucker book the 4th Dimension, 1985 https://www.amazon.com/Fourth-Dimension-Guided-Higher-Universes/dp/0395393884/ – see the mystical pages).

* Quantum Physics typically = many worlds splitting, = branching.  Started 1900, flourished 1920s https://www.google.com/search?q=when+did+quantum+physics+start .  Popular.  Pop mysticism took this up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism

Although posting 23 in 2001 clearly articulates that branching vs. non-branching contrast in a Physics context, 

in the 2007 main article I failed to perceive the BLATANT, OBVIOUS art contrasting of branching vs. non-branching

in the “look mummy theres a mushroom” pictures, included for immature/ shallow reasons, yet carrying massive profundity

exactly matching my 2001 posting re: Physics models classified as non-branching, unpopular Minkowski 4D spacetime blcok, vs. branching Popular Quantum Physics.

St. Eustace crossing river: Y trees contrasted with non-branching trees or tree features (near trunk or higher up):

Dioysus wedded to Ariadne: 

Yes, there are 5 mushrooms, as I mostly inventoried in the 2007 article 

— but way more profoundly, she holds a branch in left arm, & he holds a non-branching spear in right arm(!)

Not sure I identified Amanita fountain in 2007; fully proved at end of 2020 via my 2010 specimen photos exactly matching (fortunate!)

The Dionysus picture, as you may have seen in 2006, was provided to me in Egodeath Yahoo Group (open forum version), by a member of the Egodeath community.

I didn’t comprehend the branching vs. non-branching contrast in those pictures displayed in my 2007 article until 2022 or 2023, w/ my usual facepalm of embarrassment at my not-perceiving.  

Good fortune, that I included those pictures even just for shallow reason (“has mushroom”).

Members of the Egodeath community helped condense the 2007 main article, as you may have witnessed in the unmoderated Egodeath Yahoo Group.

— Michael

/ end of apr 22 2025 email to wrmspirit

Finally Posted My Book Review of Hermetic Spirituality and Altered States in Late Antiquity (Hanegraaff, 2022)

update Fri Apr 25, 2025: my review is finally live:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1MP0AF4OLZT3/

I developed the book review below (incorp’d my very latest ideas about wedding possibilism & eternalism), then copied it to my main page about the book:

https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/07/14/hermetic-spirituality-and-the-historical-imagination-altered-states-of-knowledge-in-late-antiquity-hanegraaff/#amazon-book-review

Completed Model of Psilocybin Mental Model Maturation: Phase 3: Transcend Eternalism; Harmonized, Conflict-Free, Integrated, Cooperative; Complementary Coordinated Pairing of Possibilism + Eternalism

Value-neutral, non-judgmental, scientific model, with the least objectionable aspects.

There is no model in Science that has no objectionable aspects. There is no problem-free model. Which is the model with most benefits and fewest objectionable aspects? VOX_TK_6422_wav 2:23:00

From voice recording VOX_TK_6422_wav near 2:10:00 —

Do not sell short possibilism or eternalism in any way.

Completely constructive, neutral, objective framing.

Conflict-free mental system, no more conflict between possibilism vs. eternalism;

A mind that has develolped and matured: A mature dev’d specifmen of adult ind that has resolved the conflict between possibilism vs eternalism per 4/20- 4/17-4/21/2025, I resolved the conflict reaching true resolution on 4/21.

Like Thanksgiving week of 2013 branching art breakthrough:

Easter week of 2025 breakthrough: 4/17-4/21/2025.
Good Friday Experiment 4/20/1962.
63 years later.

It is not a single day/ date.

Reached resolution of the battle between possibilism vs eternalism.

Not a fighting married couple; the ideal married couple who has learned to operate as a married couple.

the ideal model of mental model development
mmmd

mental model development
mmd

Mithraism started in 98 AD; flourished in 150 AD = Late Antiquity flourished the idea of integrate qualified possibilism-thinking + qualified eternalism-thinking.

Psilocybin + mental model development + observation = the way the mind observes its functioning of mental model transformation re: control and time and possibility-branching.

The Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism is a science-expressed, technology-packaged explanatory model of the final state of mental model transformation, fully mature and fully developed.

Good Voice Recordings: Wedding Possibilism+Eternalism

Built-in mics in TASCAM DR-05 stereo field recorder.

VOX_TK_6422_wav and earlier and next track.

Realtime idea development of next-level image interpretation of Great Canterbury Psalter f134 Eadwine’s leg-hanging mushroom tree image in the Great Canterbury Psalter: mapping figures to phase 3: transcend eternalism; ie: conflict-free, integrated, harmonious, cooperative, final state of mental model transformation, fully mature and fully developed.

Must Identify objectionable aspect of anything and any theory. Every theory and every thing has objectionable aspects.

A superior theory is not at all “free from objectionable aspects”.

Which theory has the greatest potential explanatory power and usefulness, and is least objectionable, all things considered?

As of 4/20/2025, and esp 4/21/2025 today, the Egodeath theory gives NOT

  • basic eternalism and rebut Possibilism; not merely
  • sum basic eternalism + basic possibilism;
  • rather, a fully harmonized integrated system including productively fitting together qualified possibilism-thinking + qualified eternalism-thinking.
    The Alchemical Rebis, two heads complementary.

Hanegraaff Cosmos-Rebirth Model Error and Correction

This is not the official copy. The official copy is:
https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/07/14/hermetic-spirituality-and-the-historical-imagination-altered-states-of-knowledge-in-late-antiquity-hanegraaff/#amazon-book-review

April 21, 2025 submitted to Amazon – FINALLY!
4 out of 5 stars
Book review title/point:
Rebirth into cosmos sphere 8 (Heimarmene) and 9 (above Heimarmene)

4 out of 5 stars
Title of book review:
Rebirth into cosmos sphere 8 (Heimarmene) and 9 (above Heimarmene)

Wouter Hanegraaff’s book Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity advances the field of Hermetic studies, especially after the error is corrected in his cosmos-ascent model, per astral ascent mysticism, so that the Fate-soaked fixed stars are no longer excluded entirely from his sky, but are allowed into his cosmos model, where they belong: sphere 8, the Ogdoad.

Hanegraaff’s model of the so-called “cosmos” doesn’t have any fixed stars. Look up into his sky: there are no stars, only 5 planets + sun & moon. This is not a model of the cosmos, nor of cosmos rebirth, because his visible sky cannot have any stars, per his admission in footnote 114, page 294: “Whether the fixed stars should be included [with Saturn, sphere 7] or should rather be associated with the Ogdoad [sphere 8] remains an open question for me.” This is the most closed question in the cosmos; it is a basic, simple given that the Fate-soaked fixed stars are what defines sphere 8, called “the Ogdoad”.

The initiate Tat asks Hermes to be brought into the Ogdoad (Heimarmene; Fatedness; fixed stars; sphere 8; the soul) and also into the Ennead (above Heimarmene, above the cosmos; sphere 9; the spirit). Since Hanegraaff omits fixed stars from their sphere 8 (which they define), there’s no functional difference in his model between rebirth phase 1 into the Ogdoad, and rebirth phase 2 into the Ennead.

The end result of entheogenic mental model transformation is not the repression of fixed stars (Fatedness) as Hanegraaff attempts; the end result is a coordinated, harmonious combination of first affirming Heimarmene, and then affirming transcending Heimarmene, honoring both ways of thinking, together.

Hanegraaff cannot place the fate-soaked fixed stars in sphere 8, because he wrongly says “the Ogdoad above the heimarmene”. The Ogdoad is not above heimarmene. The cosmos does not consist of 7 spheres, as Hanegraaff writes. Per looking up at the sky, the cosmos consists of 8 spheres. All ancient writings agree; no Hermetic text says the cosmos consists of 7 spheres, or that sphere 8 is outside the cosmos. The cosmos consists of 7 planetary spheres and also the sphere of the fixed stars. Sphere 8 is not “hypercosmic”, as he writes. Sphere 9 is actually hypercosmic.

I have read his book multiple times in hardcover and ebook format, and David Litwa’s book Hermetica I, to confirm that no Hermetic writing says the cosmos has 7 spheres, and that sphere 8 (defined by the fixed stars) is somehow “outside the cosmos”. The main visible thing you see in the sky that is the cosmos, is the fixed stars, defining sphere 8 of the cosmos.

Per Hanegraaff’s own writings in this book and elsewhere, sphere 8 = the Demiurge = the zodiac = Heimarmene headquarters.

Hanegraaff spreads the following equations separated apart to hide the self-contradiction: Ogdoad = sphere 8 = fixed stars = heimarmene = Fate = cosmos. By spreading the equations into separate pages, he writes inconsistently: Heimarmene = Fate = fixed stars = sphere 8 = Ogdoad = above Heimarmene.

Other hermetic scholars follow suit, waffling in self-contradictory fashion: in one paragraph, Ogdoad is above heimarmene; in alternating paragraphs, sphere 8 is the Fate-soaked fixed stars.

Switching between saying “sphere 8” and “Ogdoad” tries to hide the self-contradiction, in order to misguidedly purify the Ogdoad of Heimarmene by making the stars go missing in every other paragraph, inconsistently.

The solution is to always give the sphere number (7, 8, or 9) and equate Heimarmene consistently with the fixed stars and sphere 8 and the name “Ogdoad”, and understand that rebirth is initially into conformity with pure Heimarmene – not yet above Heimarmene.

My other correction of this book is its claim that anything you can think of is entheogenic, as if to propose “non-drug entheogens”, a contradiction in terms. Entheogenic practices in the broad sense actually means combining visionary plants with mental model formation and observation and various techniques – not omitting visionary plants. In 2004, I posted in Egodeath Yahoo Group about that point, a post titled “Entheogenic Esotericism”, 8 years before Hanegraaff’s keynote article speech titled “Entheogenic Esotericism”.

To summarize, as the million stars to steer by in the cosmos rebirth model that Hermetic scholars struggle to coherently present:

The mind starts with naive possibilism-thinking (level 0), becomes increasingly attuned to Heimarmene (Fate; eternalism) in entheogenic sessions 1-7, becomes fully reshaped and aligned harmoniously with Heimarmene (Fatedness; 4D spacetime block universe eternalism) in sphere 8 (the fixed stars); and then reconciles and marries the two ways of thinking together in sphere 9: embrace and include Heimarmene coordinated with the transcending of Heimarmene; marry qualified possibilism-thinking and qualified eternalism-thinking, to reach completion of initiation, per all brands of religion in Late Antiquity, flourishing starting around 150 CE.

— Michael Hoffman, theorist of ego death and transcendence

Hanegraaff:
sphere 9 = possibilism
sphere 8 = possibilism [requires omit fixed stars] [outside of cosmos]
sphere 7 = eternalism

Hoffman:
sphere 9 = integrated qualified possibilism + qualified eternalism [outside of cosmos]
sphere 8 = basic eternalism [fixed stars = heimarmene]
sphere 7 = basic possibilism

Rebirth is from possibilism into eternalism and then into transcend eternalism.

Hanegraaff says sphere 8 is outside the fate-ruled cosmos
Hoffman says sphere 8 is in the fate-ruled cosmos

Good news: automated creation of TOC at top of a WordPress page, and the links work on some browsers.

Bad news/ limitations: some browsers/platforms require that I manually add an anchor string on each heading in body of webpage.

todo: add anchor string on each additional heading. Else the TOC links at top will work on Chrome/Edge on desktop, but not on other platforms.

That is low pri, because when I author or nav this site on my desktop browser, the links work for me.

“Creation of Plants” Branching Form Develops from III, IYI, YI, IY/YI

Crop and analysis by Michael Hoffman, Jan. 13, 2025

Apr. 21, 2025:

  • tree 1: III – basic possibilism-thinking
  • tree 2: IYI – basic eternalism-thinking
  • tree 3: YI – sum of basic possibilism-thinking + basic eternalism-thinking
  • tree 4: IY/YI – integrated qualified possibilism-thinking + qualified eternalism-thinking
Crop by Michael Hoffman
Crop by Michael Hoffman

Floating sage has a mental model that’s is more developed than stand on right foot red youth.

Floating sage = instructor asks the ideal passing student 1, what development phase is beyond basic eternalism-thinking?

Answer:
harmonized integrated qualified possibilism-thinking with qualified eternalism-thinking, wedded into a single 2-model system.

4/21/2025 hanging guy mental model is more developed that sitting by right limbs in tree.

Student 3 merely understands basic eternalism (guy sitting balancing in tree).

The Ideal Passing Student 1 understands the fully mature hanging guy; ie harmonized integrated qualified possibilism-thinking with qualified eternalism-thinking, wedded into a single 2-model system.

Ariadne helped Theseus (king ruler of Athens) escape and he married her, then king Theseus {abandoned} Ariadne [basic repudiation of possibilism] because the god Dionysus married Ariadne.

Crop by Michael Hoffman, Apr. 2022

todo: bigger crop of couple + chariot + mushroom hem

Y rebis

The Ideal Passing Student 1 =
floating sage =
wedding of Dionysus + Ariadne =
rebis hermaphrodite =
harmonized integrated qualified possibilism-thinking with qualified eternalism-thinking, wedded into a single 2-model system.

The Actual Problem with Zen: Not Helpful, Useful, Relevant, Clear, or Simple

I think I came across zen master brad and i inititally thought ok but in 5 min hated it.

Someone wrote zen typical presentation sucks because says obfuscating nonsense. Tim Freke is sounding similar criticisms.

the Egodeath theory in 1986 – I started studying rational ego transcendence by reworking poor meditation and mysticism writings (about ego transcendence) from a STEM clear perspective for myself personally in 1986, then took a new start April 1987 approaching it as actual explicitly as theory development project not just personal delf self help/ self repair.

My successful mindset strategy was take a couple weeks to rationally figure out enlightenment/ ego transcendence, which ended up taking to June 1986-Jan. 1988.

1.5 years; 2 years if start on Oct 26 1985 back to the future day.

This was NOT the end goal, but the means to an end, strategy of first I need to quickly figure out ego transcendence, then use that knowledge to repair dysfunctional cross-time self-control.

To get reasonably, (not too much to ask or too idealistic), just merely modest well-functioning, non self conflicting cross-time control.

eg concretely (not fantasy based) like I often have, but, consistently, eg , simply, merely matching the way we were taught in university prep training in time management. My classmates seemed to have this type and degree of control, and I normally usually have it when I’m not being dysfunctionally self-impeding.

Alan Houot Rise of the Psychonaut Book Review

The edited improved version is at, and linked at, top of: https://egodeaththeory.org/2024/12/24/rise-of-the-psychonaut-houot-2025

I was glad that the voice recording idea development the other day produced this really great diagram.

I’m glad I was able to incorporate that take away into the book review of Rise of the Psychonaut

Email from Alan Houot 420 2025

Hi Michael,

I wanted to say thank you for the Amazon review. I thought it was good, and honest.

I was wondering if you, Cyberdisciple, & Max Freakout would like to continue the conversation via Zoom.

I’m curious what you’re all up to and I’d like to continue hearing your thoughts about subjects related to Rise of the Psychonaut.

Best,

Alan

Holy Days Weekend

https://www.sacredgarden.life

Oakland Psychedelics Conference

Seattle Spring Eleusis Festival conf

Bicycle Day 4/19/1943

Easter Sunday

4/20 day 🔥🌳💨

Marsh Chapel Good Friday Experiment 4/20/1962
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marsh_Chapel_Experiment
I am the one who added the date April 20, which led the psychedelics community to recently realize that 4/20 is the same day as Marsh Chapel, the day after 4/19 Bicycle Day.

Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3) (Erik Davis, 2005) – Audiobook Forthcoming April 29, 2025

I pre-ordered April 29, 2025 audiobook of:
Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (33 1/3) (Erik Davis, 2005)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0826416586 –

Wouter Hanegraaff ebook format

Starting idea development page 28 on mobile app, 2:30 pm, Sunday, Easter, holy plant days, 2025; Marsh Chapel; 420 Day.

Idea Development page 27 overfilled yesterday due to getting the ebook of Wouter Hanegraaff.

Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Wouter Hanegraaff, 2022)
https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/07/14/hermetic-spirituality-and-the-historical-imagination-altered-states-of-knowledge-in-late-antiquity-hanegraaff/
https://www.amazon.com/Hermetic-Spirituality-Historical-Imagination-Knowledge/dp/1009123068/ —

Photo: Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com; Egodeath Mystery Show

I hate only having an ebook, can’t grasp the book for even coverage.

I read every page & line of Hanegraaff print book, fully annotated it, for years, and then getting the ebook was an ideal huge leap ahead to supplement print book.

I wish every book is multi format: Audible brand is good impl + ebook Amazon worked well for me laptop – I should try this mobile app too – and print especially hardcover.

Recent Posts Since Start of Idea Development Page 27

Photo: Michael Hoffman, April 2025.
Lyrics: Bob Daisley.

Photo: Michael Hoffman, April 2025.
Lyrics: Bob Daisley.

NOW I FIND PEACE OF MIND
FINALLY FOUND A WAY OF THINKING
TRIED THE REST FOUND THE BEST
STORMY DAY WON’T SEE ME SINKING
THE SHIP IS READY WAITING ON THE SHELF
FACE THE TEST
SHIP OF JOY WILL STOP YOU FAILING
SEEK THE GOLD THAT’S BRIGHTER THAN THE SUNLIGHT
DAWNING ON A NEW HORIZON
GOLD’S INSIGHT SHINING BRIGHT
BRIGHTER THAN THE SUN THATS RISING
A RAGING SEA BELOW
IS THIS VOYAGE COMING TO AN END

Mithras and the Hypercosmic Sun (David Ulansey)
http://www.mysterium.com/hypercosmic.html

Qualified Eternalism-Thinking: Integrated, Balanced Possibilism- & Eternalism-Thinking

Michael Hoffman, Apr. 16, 2025

Crop by Michael Hoffman – Cubensis trader instructs other traders about stand on right foot to have balance and avoid loss of control

Contents:

  • Intro
  • Content
  • Motivation for Page
  • See Also

Intro

i have no ideas 😞

Content

i have no ideas 😞

Motivation for Page

Important topic, yet no page of mine focused on this recent development and refinement.

I tried to prepare to present Egodeath theory at my psychedelic church, no-go: too objectionable.

Overemph of eternalism. Underemph of possibilism-thinking.

That forced me to recently work toward re-balancing Egodeath theory.

What is my story narrative? I lacked a viable one to present to people. I will explain why mushroom-trees can only be recognized when include, in the medieval art genre of {mushroom-trees}, as part of a set, that you must have a narrative story to present:

{mushrooms}, {branching}, {handedness}, and {stability} motifs

Like Late Antiquity, we now reject pure heimarmene of our Classical Antiquity forebears; reject “pure eternalism-thinking” in some exclusive sense.

“Enlightenment = heimarmene” is not a true, full, reality-based story of complete intiation in Mystery Religions.

My 1997 core theory is inadequate for treating Late Antiquity, and for describing the MATURE integration of block-universe eternalism into the personal control system.

My too-basic model of 1997 lacks the developed concept of transcend eternalism.

In 1991 with ink pen & brush I drew snake head protruding outside the 4D block universe:

Michael Hoffman, ~1991, ink brush in blank art book

I didn’t factor that into the 1997 simple basic model, “change from possibilism-thinking to eternalism-thinking”.

“eternalism-thinking” has a basic sense exclusive of possibilism-thinking, and a broad wide [pig emoji; Hanegraaff] sense, that includes qualified possibilism-thinking.

Today I realized the concept of “qualified possibilism-thinking” implies the concept of “qualified eternalism-thinking” – a great development

Refinement: compare Tim Freke’s rejection of pop nonduality and “no self”, the brains of that operation is Jessica Nathanson — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AHKJUcEynxU&t=929s – very good conversation, but junk words requires cleanup if I post – i want to post transcript cleaned up.
“Interview With Former Non-duality Speaker Guy Smith“
At her YT ch. Why are all her & Tim content in 2022?

There are 2 senses of ‘balance’:

  • in peak window of the intense mystic altered state, branching thinking / possibilism-thinking causes loss of control.
  • After enlightenment, fully affirm possibilism-thinking and fully affirm eternalism-thinking, in a compatible, asymmetric way.

Despite Strange Loop proving that Egodeath theory is a failure (link to my page at Egodeath.com “how to disrupt egoic personal control system”; link to Transcendent Knowledge podcast inteview w/ Strange Loop) – Strange keeps me so modest.

“Cybermonk, how are you the most modest person ever?”
“Strange Loop disproved my technique of disrupting egoic personal control system; proving that the Egodeath theory is rubbish –> 🗑”

Video: meditation makes monks more arrogant, selfish, prideful, and fearful of death, than everyone else:
https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/04/04/idea-development-page-27/#Meditation-Makes-More-Egotistical

See Also

Heimarmene eternalism is a dead end prison enslavement kidnapped, requires rescue from outside the system lifted to sphere 9 Prime Mover, above Fate; salvation, redemption, set free, ransomed by Christ.

https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/06/14/jesus-from-outer-space-carrier-2020/

4 Hours of World’s TOP SCIENTISTS on FREE WILL (Curt Jaimungal, 2023)

Michael Hoffman

Crop and annotations by Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com
Jan. 3, 2025

Contents:

Motivation of this Page

Video:
4 Hours of World’s TOP SCIENTISTS on FREE WILL
YouTube Channel: Curt Jaimungal
Nov 28, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSbUCEleJhg —

“In our first ontoprism, we take a look back at FREE WILL across the years at Theories of Everything.

4 Hours of No-free-will Imprisonment Enslavement then Spiritual Redemption

A few sections warrant my inspection. Certainly there are some valuable relevant ideas in this long video. Hard to assess without the present page.

I already cleaned up the bottom part of the transcript in idea development page 27.

Here’s the entire transcript, including that, b/c easiest for me to process all at once.

The Concerns of the Egodeath Theory and Mushroom-Tree Esotericists

The Relevant, Psilocybin-Transformation Concern, as the Reference Point:

During Psilocybin Transformation, Does Viable Stable Control Result from Possibilism-Thinking, or from Eternalism-Thinking?

When the Egodeath theory and Psilocybin form the field & approach of Loose Cognitive Science, the free will vs. determinism analysis will change a lot, including eternalism opening up to be revealed as relevant, instead of domino-chain determinism.

The debate will switch away from “free will vs. determinism” and also away from the newer off-target contrast, “presentism vs. eternalism”, to the relevant debate, possibilism vs. eternalism.

Irrelevant: “Free Will vs. Determinism”; Closer: “Presentism vs. Eternalism”; On-Target: “Possibilism vs. Eternalism”

I wrote a lot about placing randomness into block-universe eternalism, in:

Self-control Cybernetics, Dissociative Cognition, & Mystic Ego Death (1997 core theory spec) (Hoffman, 1997) https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/2020/11/30/self-control-cybernetics-dissociative-cognition-mystic-ego-death/

The first posts in Egodeath Yahoo Group 2001 contrast essentially,

  • branching Quantum Mysticism
  • non-branching 4D Spacetime Mysticism

Many points in this video are suggestive about explaining how the medieval art genre of {mushroom-trees} works, what concerns it depicts and emphasizes, and how I can describe differently the concerns of Egodeath theory.

Mushroom-tree artists are NOT in a Phil-vs.-Physics Dept. armchair debate about quantum flapdoodle theorizing.

Esoteric esotericism & the Egodeath theory IS NOT CONVENTIONAL DEBATE about “FREE WILL VS. DETERMINISM”.

NOR DEBATE about “POSSIBILISM VS ETERNALISM”. Rather:

In what sense is possibilism is the case, as reflected in the intense mystic altered state?

In what sense is eternalism the case?

What does it mean to functionally practically and effectively integrate these, integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking, per maturity as defined by the Teacher of Truth, Psilocybin?

Standing in Switch Stance 🛹 – Practicing {stand on right foot} Relying on 2-Level, Dependent Control

https://www.google.com/search?q=switch+stance+skateboarding

Balancing on a skateboard, a person has an innate strong preference for either L foot forward or R foot forward.

Skateboarding switch stance is hard, a deliberately learned skill – unless one has committed to ambidextrous from the start.

Switch stance requires hard work and uphill-battle re-learning the non-natural stance.

We all stand in Regular stance, weight on L foot.

We all have to work hard to learn to stand in Goofy stance, like the Goofy cartoon character surfing in an animation: weight on R foot; R foot forward on skateboard.

Then we have stable control in the Psilocybin state. This is the message of the mushroom-tree artists.

Crop by Michael Hoffman
March 4, 2023

See Also

The “All At Once” Universe Shatters Our View of Time (Emily Adlam)

Excellent video interview & transcript, highly relevant to Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism:
The “All At Once” Universe Shatters Our View of Time (Emily Adlam)

Video: 4 Hours of World’s TOP SCIENTISTS on FREE WILL

Video:
4 Hours of World’s TOP SCIENTISTS on FREE WILL
YouTube Channel: Curt Jaimungal
Nov 28, 2023
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSbUCEleJhg —

“In our first ontoprism, we take a look back at FREE WILL across the years at Theories of Everything.

“If you have suggestions for future ontoprism topics, then comment below.”

Transcript of Entire Video

Introduction by Curt Jaimungal

00:00:00 Introduction

Free will is a representation within the system that it’s made a decision and the decision is being made on the best understanding of what’s correct.

The dynamics that break up that undifferentiated ocean of potential selves into one, two or three or more, it can go different ways.

Out of this like ocean of potentiality, these cells, you know, 50,000 cells, and each of them will have specific goals.

Objectivists say that these probabilities are pointing to some real thing in the world.

There is some real random generator in the world.

And subjectivists say, no, these are just degrees of belief.

What is free will?

How is it different than agency?

What constitutes a willful and an unwillful action?

How do you define yourself as separate from the world in order for you to even say that you act on the environment?

What does physics have to say about all of this?

And what are some of the alternatives to the classic compatibilism versus libertarian notions of free will?

Perhaps our question is explored today by the approximately 25 or so guests of Theories of Everything.

For those of you who are new to this channel, my name is Curt Jaimungal, and what we usually do is explore theories of everything in the physics sense from a mathematical perspective.

However, this is also a philosophical channel, investigating the fundamental laws, whatever they may be.

You can think of it as an analysis from multiple perspectives on the largest looming questions we have, while also exploring an experiential approach.

We’ve been having issues monetizing the channel with sponsorship, so if you’d like to contribute to the continuation of Theories of Everything, then you can donate through PayPal, Patreon, or through cryptocurrency.

Your support goes a long way in ensuring the longevity and quality of this channel.

Thank you.

Links are in the description.

What you’re about to watch is a new format called an Onto Prism, where instead of having comprehensive interviews with a single guest on a variety of subjects, we’re flipping that and diving into a singular topic with a variety of guests.

Think of it like a buffet where there’s a smorgasbord of variegated ideas, and you can sample and choose the one you like best, or create your own Weltanschauung by sampling from the assortment.

Hearing opinions on a specific theme is strewn across the over 100 podcasts over the past three years on the Theories of Everything channel, though for convenience, they’re co-located here.

The guests in this episode include Michael Levin, Carl Friston, David Walpart, Donald Hoffman, Joscha Bach, Stuart Hameroff, Wolfgang Smith, Bernardo Kastrup, Matt O’Dowd from PBS Spacetime, Chris Langan, Nicholas Gissen, Brian Keating, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Wolfram, Jonathan Blow, Thomas Campbell, John Vervaeke, James Robert Brown, Anil Sith, and Claudia Paisos.

There’s also Anand Vaidya and Scott Aronson.

This Onto Prism on free will is in preparation for a mountainous interview with the legendary Robert Sapolsky on this very issue. [section at bottom of this page]

If you enjoy this format, then you can suggest other topics for future episodes in the comments section.

Now enjoy this peregrination into free will.

Well, again, what I’d actually like to do is back up a little bit and put some of what you just said into very simple active inference language.

Michael Levin

00:02:58 Michael Levin

If I see something happening on my Markov blanket, on my interface with the world, then I always have the question, did I do that or did the world do that?

Where the world means everything outside me.

And in a sense, the answer is always the world did it.

So the question becomes, did the world do that in response to something I did to it or did it just do it?

Not in consequence of any of my actions.

And so one gets immediately to this kind of babbling scenario that we’ve talked about many times, in which an infant or a robot or some system is trying to figure out by measuring correlations whether the world’s inputs to it have anything to do with its inputs to the world.

And just asking that question requires enormous representative capacity, because one has to represent one’s actions and represent them pretty well in time.

And one has to have a good memory to represent enough actions to get any kind of statistical support for drawing an inference about correlation.

And that memory has to be represented as a memory, not just part of one’s occurrent input.

So I think this question that you posed is really the key question faced by any agent at all that’s trying to get a model off the ground, which in a sense gets back to the question that Mike asked early, early on about how does this all start?

Maybe it starts with babbling in very simple systems.

You know, I was thinking recently, this whole issue of how many agents are there and where is the border between the agent and the world and how do you self-model that border is a fascinating topic.

And there’s an amazing developmental model for this, which is that, you know, we often talk about one embryo and the embryo does this and the embryo does that.

But actually, what happens at the beginning, let’s say, for example, in amniote embryos is that there’s a flat blastodisc, which has just a few cell layers thick.

So it’s kind of, think of it like a Frisbee and it just has a few cell layers.

And normally what has to happen is that one point in this disc breaks symmetry and then organizes the primary axis of the first embryo and basically tells all the other cells, don’t do it because I’m doing it.

And that’s how you end up with one embryo.

Now that process is very easily perturbed and many people have done it.

I used to do it in my graduate work and what you can do is if you perturb that process, that initial blastodisc, that undifferentiated sort of pool of cells, which are these sort of proto, low-level proto agents, that pool can break up into not one embryo, but actually multiple.

And so you can have, so I did this in bird embryos and you can have twins and chicken and duck and things like this.

You can have in humans, humans have exactly the same structure.

You can get them head to head.

You can get them side by side.

You can get all sorts of geometries.

You can get triplets.

You can get multiple individuals emerging by different partitions of this really kind of medium, this particulate medium where you have a bunch of cells and you don’t know ahead of time how many individuals at the level, how many larger individuals, so embryos, are going to arise from this medium because the dynamics by which, and that’s local activation and long range inhibition and things like that, the dynamics that break up that undifferentiated ocean of potential cells into one, two, or three or more cells is actually, it’s very dynamic.

It can go different ways.

And then you get interesting things like this.

So for example, you might know that human conjoined twins that are sort of stuck together side to side, one of the twins often has left, right asymmetry defects.

And it’s because when you have two twins side by side, the cells in the middle, both twins can’t quite agree on who they belong to.

Are they the right side of this twin or are they the left side of that twin?

And both twins think they belong to them, but in fact, they’re overlapping, they’re the same cells.

And so one side will have correct left and right, the other side will have like two rights, for example.

This ends up giving one of the twins laterality defects with respect to hardened gut pattern.

And so their models, each twins, as the collective of cells tries to compute things like where things are and what’s left and what’s right and so on, their models can disagree with each other.

They can draw the boundary between self and world in different ways, and you can have these sort of disputes over certain areas as to who they actually belong to.

And so I’m just incredibly interested in this process of individualization, so to speak, out of this like ocean of potentiality, these cells, you know, 50,000 cells and some number of individuals at the embryo level will be formed.

And each of them will have specific goals and morphospace, each of them will try to achieve very specific morphologies.

And you don’t know ahead of time how many there were going to be.

All right, we’ve just been diving into the interplay between the self and the world with Michael Levin, Carl Fristin, and Chris Field.

Again, every link is in the description.

David Wolpert (Part 1)

00:08:51 David Wolpert (Part 1)

They dissect the process of self-modeling and individualization, which lead us naturally to our next guest, David Wohlpart, who challenges us with a monotheistic perspective on freewill.

If they both have free will, at least once.

That’s incredibly interesting.

So it’s an impossibility result against more than one God?

Yes.

Yep.

That’s why it’s called the monotheism theorem.

It might be that we are in a universe in which you could have one God, who knows?

I’m not going to go there.

I mean, my personal feeling—conclusions on it are that in our particular universe, no.

But there is no reason why—I think the concept itself is not inherently self-contradictory like Riposte’s demon.

There could be universes.

I would say there’s no sense in which we can actually rule them out, in fact, in which there are deities.

But there cannot be any of them that support two deities.

So we might be in one of those ones in which there is a deity, who knows?

But we can’t be in one in which there’s more than one.

And when you say deity, there can’t be two omniscient deities?

There can’t be two that have free will.

So you could have one where there’s Zeus and Hera, but Zeus can always be in a particular state that restricts Hera from being in some of her particular states.

In that sense, she does not have free will of him.

At one particular time, one particular state of Zeus, it’s just not going to be any possible storyline in any of the universe, in our universe, in which Hera is in one of her particular states.

There’s some limitation.

My being in one particular state at one particular time, it could cause a restriction on the possible states that you could be in at that time.

And if that’s true, then we have no free will.

Have you heard of Norton’s Dome?

Norton’s Dome.

I think I did a while ago, ringing a bell, but I can’t bring it up.

Sure.

It’s an experiment about Newtonian mechanics, and it’s to show that Newtonian mechanics isn’t deterministic, even though it’s often said it is.

And the reason is there are certain configurations you can set up such that there’s not a unique answer to the differential equations.

You know, ordinarily in physics, just for people to know, one of the reasons why mathematicians quibble with physicists is that physicists hand wave and gloss over many details.

And so one of them is whenever we have an ordinary differential equation, we tend to say there’s uniqueness in existence.

However, that’s contingent on something called the Lipschitz continuity.

And if you don’t have Lipschitz continuity, you don’t necessarily have a unique solution.

So you basically set up a certain situation with a ball on a dome, and the equation for the dome is fairly simple.

It’s almost like a parabola.

And then it turns out one solution is it stays there forever, zero velocity initially.

And then another solution is at some point t, and the time t is not specified, it goes down some route, and any one of them.

So that’s extremely interesting.

Let’s imagine we live in a Newtonian world.

Is that related to free will, would you say?

Or is that not related to free will?

That’s something different.

I know free will, forget about the sense of intention, interacting with the laws of nature to produce that effect.

Carlos.

Yeah, the Norton’s dome, it’s also, I think it was actually Sabine, who has one of her FQXi essays that she points out that chaos is, in some sense, it can be a much stronger phenomenon that people understand, and that you can set up physical systems in which the chaos is to such a degree that actually passed a certain point in time, you cannot, it is not defined, but the state of the system will be after that.

So that’s, I think that’s the context in which I ran across it.

It’s also, there are related things, the work that goes back to two people called Porel and Richards.

Those were physicists who is well known that, for example, the three body problem, where even if you do, so there you do have the standard Lipschitz continuity, and so on, you’ve got gravitational attraction, and so on.

You can set it up to be a, what’s called a universal Turing machine.

You basically, what you do is you encode the input tape to that Turing machine into the actual precise initial conditions of these three bodies.

And then by reading the appropriate bits of the state of the system at some future time, you can figure out what that universal Turing machine state of its tape would be at that time.

What this means is that you can feed in a configuration that’s actually the halting problem so that that physical system, in fact, it violates the Church-Turing thesis, that physical system, its state in the future would not be complete.

Donald Hoffman, Joscha Bach

00:13:48 Donald Hoffman, Joscha Bach

All right, now having just gone through the monotheistic lens with David Walpart, we’re pivoting to Donald Hoffman’s cognitive neuroscientific perspective.

Also Joscha Bach joins Donald Hoffman.

In a physicalist framework, which I’m, so now I’ll just talk about what most of my cognitive neuroscience peers think, right?

Most of them assume that physical systems are fundamental.

Neural activity causes all of our behavior, and in that case, there can be a fiction of, a useful fiction of free will, but it’s really just going to be a useful fiction.

If I do something, it’s really my neurons with the neural activity that did it, and there is a sense in which you can say, I chose to do it because actually neurons are part of me, so I think that’s the point of view that Dan Dennett takes, for example, on this.

And Sam Harris replies on that, he says, well, yeah, I also grow my fingernails.

I’m not sure that I’m doing that by free will, but I, so it’s not real clear that just because my neurons are doing it, I have free will, just in the same sense that I’m not using free will to grow my fingernails.

So Sam would say there’s no such thing as free will, if you’re a physicalist.

Dan Dennett would say I’m a physicalist, and there is this important notion of free will.

I think that, of course, space-time isn’t fundamental, and so that we have to completely think outside of that box altogether.

And as scientists, we have to say upfront what our hypotheses, what our axioms or fundamental assumptions are, and be very clear about them upfront.

These conscious agents in the mathematics, they get certain inputs, we call them experiences that they have, and then there’s something called a Markovian kernel that describes what actions they take, and those actions affect the experiences of other conscious agents.

So then there’s, so that’s just the mathematics that my team has written down, it’s a very simple notion of a Markovian dynamics of conscious agents interacting.

And it’s not in a physicalist framework, we’re assuming that this is in its own world, right?

These are conscious agents, and that’s the foundation.

Space and time are not the foundation, conscious agents, so conscious experiences and interactions of conscious agents are the foundational notion.

And so then the question is, how shall we understand the probabilities?

So if I get a particular experience that comes into a conscious agent, and it then probabilistically affects the experience of other agents, how shall I understand that probability?

Shall I understand it as a free will choice, or what?

And I could say, I refuse to answer the question, there’s a probability there, and that’s as far as I go with a theory, there’s this agent, so I leave that probability as just where my theory stops, where I say, in some sense, wherever we see a probability in a theory, that’s where explanation stops, right?

That’s basically saying, I don’t know.

So whenever, so I always say this, whenever in a scientific theory you see probabilities coming up, you’re seeing the theory say, this is where I halt, this is where my explanation stops.

And there are two major approaches toward understanding those probabilities, the objectivist and subjectivist to probabilities, right?

So objectivists say that these probabilities are pointing to some real thing in the world.

There is some real random generator in the world.

And subjectivists say, no, these are just degrees of belief.

Whenever you see probabilities, you’re only talking about degrees of belief.

But in either case, explanation stops, right?

How do I come to that belief?

Well, I can only tell you probabilities.

What is that random objective process?

I don’t know, but I can just tell you probabilities.

And so really, whenever you see probabilities in a scientific theory, and they’re all over the place, I read that as saying, here’s where explanation stops and our theories halt.

And if we want to go further, we’re going to have to unpack that probability into some deeper theory.

So if I say that it’s free will in the case of the conscious agents, then, I mean, in some sense, that’s just words.

What theory has is the probabilities, and it has no further explanation.

So if I call that probability a free will, then I can call it that, but I haven’t really done much to give much insight into the notion of free will.

Free will then becomes a primitive, and maybe that’s what I want to do.

I want to say, this is where explanation stops, and so free will is primitive.

So these probabilities are free will, and I agree that that’s where my theory stops, that I can do no further.

Now what’s interesting in the conscious agent dynamics that we’re working on is that any group of conscious agents together also satisfy the definition of a conscious agent, and so they are a conscious agent.

So any conscious agents interacting are also conscious agents.

So in the theory, there’s one conscious agent, because if you take all of them together, they form one conscious agent, but then there are as many, if you’re computational, there’s only a countable number of them, or in my case, I don’t know, it may be an uncountable number of conscious agents.

But what’s interesting is that you unpack this probability in the Markovian kernel.

There could be one big probability for one agent, but you can unpack that into all these dynamical systems that are interacting conscious agents with their own probabilities and their own kernels.

And what’s interesting is that you could then give, in some sense, an unpacking of the notion of free will in that way.

You could say, well, yeah, the one agent has free will and this probability, but I can actually do some non-trivial unpacking of that notion in this sort of recursive unwinding of those probabilities throughout the network.

So there is the possibility here of, I mean, ultimately, there will be a primitive notion of free will that is just primitive and not explained, but given that one, I can explain all these other free wills sort of interacting, arising from this most primitive notion of free will in a non-trivial way.

But once again, I would point out something that I see all the time in scientific theories.

No theory in science will ever explain everything.

And I would love to see if Josje agrees or disagrees.

I will just state to make a strong claim.

There cannot be a theory of everything because every theory has to make assumptions and those assumptions are not explained, they’re assumed.

It’s just that simple.

Okay, am I correct in my summary of your views on free will that if in a physical theory you have probability, now some of that probability is just due to our ignorance, but if there’s a fundamental probability, you can just say, well, that’s indicating that the theories break down, we just don’t know.

Or you can say that there’s something underneath producing those and that which is underneath the probabilities is what you’re calling free will.

Is that correct or is that off?

Right.

So, if I’m a physicalist, I’ll say that that probability is due to some process that I can say no more about, but there’s some process that generates this stuff.

It’s not free will, it’s just a physical process that I don’t know.

But if I’m taking consciousness to be fundamental, then it’s an interesting move to say that probability can be interpreted as free will.

Now, of course, I’m not explaining anything.

I’m just putting the notion free will, the word free will on it, right?

And free will becomes just a primitive notion as well.

So that’s where my explanation stops and the most unpacking I can do is that recursive unpacking that I mentioned, which is an interesting unpacking, but ultimately there’s this primitive notion of free will that I have nothing further to say about.

But I think that that’s not a problem specific to this theory.

The last thing I was saying was that that’s endemic to all scientific theories.

Every scientific theory will have miracles at its foundation.

By miracles, I mean assumptions that are taken for granted and not explained.

If you explain them, then you’ll have a deeper theory with new assumptions that explain those assumptions, but the new assumptions aren’t explained.

So in this sense, science can never have a theory of everything because science theories always have assumptions and the assumptions are what you don’t explain.

Joshua, I know Donald said quite a few, there are quite a few elements to pick from there.

Joscha Bach, Control Systems (1)

23:50
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSbUCEleJhg&t=1430s

We are interlocking claims, but let’s address them.

First of all, I don’t know whether there can be one theory of everything because my reasoning is not tight enough to make that proof one way or the other.

So at this point, I have to remain agnostic because I think from where I stand, it seems to be possible that there can be a theory of everything.

And it seems to be possible that there cannot.

From a computationalist perspective, whenever you have a set of observations that is finite, you will be able to construct a computational model that explains how to make such patterns.

So in principle, there can always be a theory of everything that you observed.

That’s something that I cannot, that I don’t see a way around this.

So this seems to be sound to me, and I think that can be formally proven, but it seems to be almost trivial that it’s proven.

So it’s more interesting.

The question is, can you narrow this down to a single one, to one theory of everything?

You will be always stuck with infinitely many theories of everything where most of these theories will be super inelegant and redundant and basically recordings of your observations.

Or will there be one theory that is the most elegant and explains everything neatly and wraps it up?

And of course, if you think about the space of all theories and think of them as things that you can do in a language and in which you can define truth.

And if you realize that the languages in which you can define truth consistently are the computational languages, it turns out that all your models are going to be automata and that you can sort the space of automata by the length of their definitions.

So it also seems that in principle, it should be possible to find the shortest automaton between to every pair of automata that you can construct and can up this.

And now the question is, what’s your search procedure for all the possible automata?

Do you have a search procedure that you can hope that terminates?

And this is not a question of whether it’s mathematically possible, but whether it’s efficient.

So is there an efficient strategy to find a theory of everything that is the shortest one?

And so far, we haven’t found one.

And it relates to what AI is doing in machine learning when it tries to identify what’s going on in the domain.

So in principle, we can always be sure that we could be a brain in a vat and everything is just a nefarious conspiracy that is playing out.

And because we cannot exclude this, we can never be sure that our theory of everything is the best theory that could exist of things.

So that’s obviously the case.

But if we take out this single thing and make the assumption that reality is not a conspiracy, I think then it starts to look a lot brighter.

Let’s get to the notion of free will.

I think that free will is tied into the notion of agency.

And the best explanation of what an agent is that I found so far is that an agent is a control system that is intrinsically combined with its own set point generator.

Control Systems, Cybernetics

A control system is a notion from cybernetics.

It means you have some system like a thermostat that is making a measurement using sensors, for instance, the temperature in the room.

And that has effectors by which it can change the dynamics of the system.

So the effector would be a switch that turns the heating on and off and the system that’s being regulated is the temperature in the room.

And the temperature in the room is disturbed by the environment.

And a simple thermostat will only act on its present measurement and then translate this present measurement using a single parameter into whether it should switch or not.

And depending on choosing that parameter well, you have a more efficient regulation or not.

But if you want to be more efficient, you need to model the environment and the dynamics of the system.

And maybe the dynamics of the sensory system and the actuator itself.

When you can do this, it means that you model the future of the regulation based on past observations.

So if you endow the controller with the ability to make a model of the future and use this control model to fine tune the actions of the controller, it means that a controller now is more than a thermostat.

It’s not going to just optimize the temperature in the room the next frame, but it’s going to optimize the integral of the temperature over a long time span.

So it basically takes a long expectation horizon.

The further it goes, the better probably.

And then it tries to minimize all the temperature deviations from the ideal temperature from the set point over that time span.

And this means that depending on the fidelity and detail of the model of its environment and its interaction with the environment and itself, it’s going to be better and better if it assumes that there are trajectories in the world that are the result of its own decisions.

By turning the temperature on and off at this particular point in time, I’m going to get this and this result, depending on the weather outside, depending on how often people open and close the door to the room at different times of the day, depending on the aging of my sensor or the distance of my sensor to the heating, and depending on whether the window on top of the sensor is currently open or closed and so on.

I get lots and lots more ways to differentiate the event flow in the universe and the path that the universe can take.

And the interactions that I can have with the universe that determine whether somebody will open the window and so on and so on.

So you have all these points where the controller is a very differentiated model of reality, where it’s going to prefer some events of others and is going to assign its own decisions to these trajectories.

And this decision making necessarily happens under conditions of uncertainty, which means the controller will never be completely sure which one is going to be the right decision.

The controller will have to make educated guesses, bets on the future.

And this even includes the models of itself, right?

The better the control system understands itself and the limitations of its modeling ability, the better its models are going to be.

So at some point of complexity, this thing is going to understand its own modeling procedure to improve it and to find gaps in it and so on.

And this also means that when it starts to do this, it is going to discover that there are agents in the world, other controllers that have set points, generators and model the future and make decisions.

For instance, people that might open the window when you make the room too hot and you lose energy because of that.

So maybe not overheat the room and people are in the room.

This means you have to model agency at some point and you will also discover yourself as an agent in the world, as a controller, as a set point generator and the ability to model the future.

And you will discover this before you understand how your own modeling of the future works.

So you also have to make bets on how you work before you understand yourself.

So you will discover a self-model.

The self-model is the agent where the contents of your own model are driving the behavior of that agent.

And it’s a very particular agent.

It’s one where your reasoning and your modeling has an influence on what this agent is going to do, a direct coupling.

It’s a very specific model, a very specific agent that you discover there.

And so in some sense, free will, I think, is a perspective on decision-making under uncertainty, starting from the point where you discover your own self-model up to the point where you deconstruct it again.

And of course, you will deconstruct it again.

At some point, you will be able to fully understand how you’re operating.

And once you do this, making your decision becomes indistinguishable from predicting your decision.

Because of computational irreducibility, often you will not be able to predict the decision before you make it.

But as soon as you understand that it’s just a computational process going on, and you understand the properties of that process, you will no longer experience yourself as having free will.

Free will is a particular kind of model that happens as a result of your own self-model being a simulacrum, instead of being a high-fidelity simulation of how you actually work.

And we are young beings.

We don’t get very old.

It’s very difficult for us to get to the point where we fully understand how we work.

Except in certain circumstances, right?

When we observe our children, very often we get to the point as parents that we fully understand what they will be doing in a given situation.

And we can fully understand their own actions and anticipate their decisions.

And the child might experience that it has free will.

And we experience that the child has free will up to the point where we suddenly understand, oh, this is what’s going on.

And at this point, I can completely control the child because I can out-model it.

And it’s only to the point where this system is going to introduce levels that are, again, reaching my own level, that decisions become unpredictable.

But if I am a few levels of modeling depth above the other agent that might think that it’s free will, the free will starts to disappear from my own perspective.

And it also happens in my own mind.

There’s many things that I do.

But I thought as a child, I’m acting out of my own free will.

And now I understand how mechanical it is.

And I can deal with myself by controlling myself, by out-modeling myself successively and becoming one more complex in this way.

All right.

Stuart Hameroff

00:33:10 Stuart Hameroff

Having gone through the depths of consciousness and physical systems with Donald Hoffman, we now transition to the quantum world with Stuart Hameroff.

Hameroff’s exploration of temporarily non-local consciousness offers a different angle on the question of free will, moving from cognitive neuroscience to quantum physics.

Now, going to this backward time aspect, I heard you mention Libet’s experiments and that they don’t necessarily show a lack of free will, but perhaps the free will propagates backward in time.

Now, can you explain that?

Well, Libet did these experiments in – well, he did two sets of experiments.

The first set of experiments that Roger wrote about in his book, The Embraced New Mind, were sensory experiments where he had people in neurosurgery.

He worked with a neurosurgeon named Bertram Epstein, who, by the way, was the husband of Bertram Feinstein, who was the husband of Dianne Feinstein, the senator from California.

She’s still around.

He passed away years ago.

But he was a neurosurgeon, and Libet worked with him.

And so he had patients that he did neurosurgery on while awake.

So he would drill a hole and numb it up with local anesthetic.

Once you get into the brain, you can operate on the brain.

It doesn’t hurt, but you numb up the hole, and you can access the brain, and, for example, for the finger on the opposite hand.

So Libet did experiments like he would stimulate the finger and record from the brain and stimulate the brain and then see when the subject was conscious of feeling the finger.

So you would expect, or I would expect, not knowing anything beforehand, that if you stimulate the brain, you feel it immediately.

If you stimulate the finger, it would be a delay because it would have to get to the brain.

If you stimulate the finger, there is a delay, but it’s only 30 milliseconds, evoked potential.

So it’s pretty fast.

But if you stimulate the brain directly, you need to have ongoing activity, and it takes about a half a second, 500 milliseconds, because you don’t get the evoked potential.

But if it continues for 500 milliseconds, you do feel it at 30 milliseconds.

What’s this evoked potential?

Okay, so if you stimulate the finger, the signal, you get a spike.

That’s the evoked potential.

If you stimulate it here, you don’t get the evoked potential.

You just get ongoing activity.

It looks like gamma.

But if you do it for half a second, the patient, subject, has the conscious experience at the time of the evoked potential, 30 milliseconds.

So somehow, at 30 milliseconds, the brain knows whether or not there’s going to be 500 milliseconds of ongoing activity afterwards.

If there is, he or she reports it at 30 milliseconds.

That’s interesting.

Okay.

If there isn’t, then he or she doesn’t.

And so Libet concluded that there was a signal going backwards in time from the time of the, what he called neuronal adequacy, and that sent this information backward in time.

Now, Roger wrote about this in Emperor’s Neuron, because that can happen in quantum physics, which is temporally non-local.

Is this related to the subcutaneous rabbit?

Have you heard of that, where you come on an arm?

Yes.

So this is related to that.

Yes.

And also the color five phenomenon, where the color bounces back and forth, and it goes from red to blue, and you go red, blue, red, blue, and you can guess, and then it goes red, red, and you know you’re not fooled.

And that’s because you seem to know what’s going on.

And the cutaneous rabbit’s the same thing.

I actually wrote a chapter about it.

I can send it to you about all this.

Well, I’ve written several, actually, about it.

And all those can be accounted for, but you somehow know what’s coming.

And this is very important, because if you and I are talking, and you ask me a question, and if someone were measuring the activity in my brain for what you said, it’ll happen in, say, 300 to 500 milliseconds after they get to my ears.

But I will have responded to you at 100 milliseconds.

This is very, very standard neuroscience.

What neuroscience says about that is that I respond non-consciously and have a false illusion of answering consciously after the fact.

The consciousness is epiphenomenal.

My cognitive autopilot non-conscious self answers you, and then a little later, my conscious self says, oh, I said that.

I’m in control.

And it means that consciousness is epiphenomenal and illusory.

That’s what Dennett says.

That’s what all the big-name philosophers say, unless they have some way to weasel out of it.

But if you have backward time, it means that you can do all that, and you can still respond consciously in real time.

What does your theory have to say about free will?

Well, first of all, you need the backward time effect to be able to act in real time.

It doesn’t address determinism, because even if you do act in real time, you still have the problem, well, maybe it was always going to be that way because of everything else that’s already happened.

But when you bring in the backward time effects, I think that gives you the possibility of free will.

But you’re still governed by, if that’s true, you’re still governed by the deterministic Schrodinger equation up to that point, and maybe even the platonic values.

So, you know, the best they could say is that free will is the experience of your volition being influenced by platonic values.

Claudia Passos

00:38:47 Claudia Passos

Stuart Hameroff’s exploration of free will and temporal perception naturally transition into Claudia Paisos’ discussion on behavioral markers as indicators of consciousness.

The audio conditions were suboptimal, thus prompting me to reiterate in post-production the question for you.

The questioner was asking Claudia to expand on behavioral markers versus reflex markers.

Behavioral markers versus reflex markers.

It’s quite difficult.

So, one thing I didn’t have time to go through is how those behavioral markers would be markers of consciousness.

And there is at least one theory of consciousness that you tell us.

If the creature had what they call flexible behavior, the capacity to react with flexibility will change our behaviors regarding, for instance, pain still.

So, imagine you’re feeling pain, but you have a behavior to avoid pain, and this behavior didn’t give you weak pain, we can change your strategy to avoid feeling that way.

And this happens in some flexibility.

Usually, if you’re not conscious, you just have a kind of automatic response that is the same response all the time.

And infants, they try to change their strategies to avoid that painful state.

So, this is a kind of flexible behavior.

And, for instance, from representational experience, we’ve claimed that flexible behavior is a marker of consciousness.

And then you can claim that this behavior is a marker of flexibility and a marker of consciousness.

Wolfgang Smith

00:40:27 Wolfgang Smith

Claudia Paisos’ exploration of behavioral markers and their connections to consciousness sets the stage for Wolfgang Smith’s discourse on the relationship between free will, love, and the divine.

How does free will comport with knowing that there’s a timeless realm, so that you can see all of what occurs through time, but then if we exist as a moment in time and we’re trying to plan something for the future and we have free will, how do we have free will when from another perspective all our choices have been made or all of it can be seen?

Well, I think there’s only one answer to that question.

And that is that free will pertains to our present state, which is a state of half-knowing.

Once we attain enlightenment, there’s no question of free will.

Enlightenment (Realize Eternalism) vs. Salvation (Transcend Eternalism)

Sorry, enlightenment is the same as salvation, or is that different?

[1. On advanced Psilocybin, get enlightenment that no-free-will is metaphysically the case, per Classical Antiquity. Reach sphere 8 fixed stars, Ogdoad.

2) Receive spiritual salvation lifted above no-free-will, per Late Antiquity; reach sphere 9 outside the cosmos, at level of Prime Mover, Ennead.

– Michael Hoffman]

Well, I think nothing short of salvation would put you into that state.

Where there’s no more free will.

There’s no more free will because there is no more will in our sense of the term.

Love is what makes things real.

What do you make of that quote?

Well, I think it is based upon one of the deepest teachings of Christ.

St.

John the Evangelist, in his, I forget what it is called, his letters, not the gospel, but his letters, he says, Deus caritas est, God is love.

So love in the authentic sense that we’re using term now is itself divine.

It is God.

It’s not something that God makes, something that God creates.

Well, there is love in that sense too, but love in its highest, purest sense is inseparable from God.

Bernardo Kastrup

00:42:50 Bernardo Kastrup

Wolfgang’s peregrination of the divine and free will serves as a perfect precursor to Bernardo Kastrup’s discussion on the illusion of free will and the deterministic nature of the universe.

It is the collective unconscious.

It is the last dissociated parts of our minds or the completely non-dissociated mind at large.

That’s the natural wave.

Remember, I am a naturalist and nature is a big wave, it’s going somewhere.

We can choose to swim with it or swim against it.

You can choose to be tools of it or to rebel against it and lose.

You’re guaranteed to lose.

She’s super interesting, super interesting.

So you’re saying that nature is this huge force and it generally controls you way more than you think.

You are an aspect of it, so you’re not even separate from it.

So even to say it controls you is already a categorical mistake.

You are not distinct from it, but you just have a hallucinated narrative about what you are.

In other words, nature has a hallucinated narrative about what it is and it goes in conflict against itself because of it.

Choices are instinctive.

There is something instinctive that runs through you and it’s calling the shots, all the important shots.

The problem is we think it is us choosing it, so we rebel against it or we regret against choices and suffering pours out from that dynamics, which is also a natural dynamics.

It’s nature fooling itself, it’s all natural.

So the choice to swim with the current rather than against it, is that choice yours or is that choice ultimately another current?

In which case, you can’t- Nature can offer less resistance against itself.

Let’s put it that way.

Because you see, it’s impossible to use terms in a completely unambiguous way because the terms like I or doing or resisting or nature, they have already a social meaning.

So if I try to be completely accurate, I will contradict that social meaning and nobody will understand what I’m trying to say.

So I have to be ambiguous and seemingly contradictory perforce if I am to use language.

I don’t think Bernardo Castro exists as a true separate agency.

Bernardo Castro is a ripple or a metaphor I prefer, a whirlpool in the ocean of nature.

It’s a process, it’s a doing, it’s not a thing.

It’s a Castro-ping, not a Castro.

Yeah, I don’t know what said that.

Is that your intellectual mind saying that I don’t believe Bernardo Castro exists?

That’s my intellect saying.

Okay, but you don’t feel that in the moment, but you feel like that’s actually correct.

So let me just say that.

Matt O’Dowd

00:45:23 Matt O’Dowd

And now we transition from Bernardo to Matt O’Dowd from PBS Space Time, as Matt talks to us about the subtleties of relativity, time perception, and the universe’s self-consistency.

Consciousness is just, it is in this sense an emergent phenomenon, but there’s no very hard line, I think, for when it emerges.

You know, I started all this saying I’m no expert and then gave you this super long treatise as though I know anything, but this is the picture that feels the least contradictory to me.

So then in this view, is there such a thing as free will?

In this view, yes.

Correct my misunderstanding, Shen.

The way that I understand it is that there are some atoms moving around and occasionally that is something we call information processing.

That information processing is much like there’s a lamp right here.

That is casting onto the wall.

That wall is now the feeling of consciousness.

That is the effect.

And something is happening here.

Now that wall doesn’t cause anything with this light.

The light will move around.

Right now it’s stationary, but the light can change colors.

It can get brighter.

It can get smashed on the ground and that wall would change.

But I wouldn’t say that that wall has any causal influence on that.

So that’s what I mean when I say that it sounds like there is no free will in what has just been outlined.

So please correct my misunderstanding.

Okay, so let’s try to talk about free will.

So first of all, so Bahar, my partner, she’s a science journalist and has written a lot about these topics.

I encourage you to check out her article in The Atlantic, which debunks some nonsense on the topic.

But she always reminds me to think about these things in the context of the historical development.

So pre-enlightenment, there was this idea that free will and meaning and mind were inextricably attached to notions like God and the immortal soul.

Okay, so when those ideas started to be questioned, was the same time that the materialist paradigm arose.

So the Newtonian worldview of, you know, atoms bouncing around in the void, perfectly predictable clockwork.

So at the same time that we discarded or started to discard the spiritual, and in that gap, we inserted this sort of very first and perhaps naive mechanistic determinism, notions like free will, which were conjoined with God and the soul got thrown out with the bathwater and were replaced by the idea that these things are epiphenomena of a coal mechanistic universe.

So that’s one gripe.

What it is, it’s a gripe with the, what I think is an oversimplification of the approach to thinking about free will, but all other things related to the mind also.

So let me explain why my view doesn’t, suggest that free will is an illusion.

And so what does it mean?

It means free will means that you make, your choices are your own.

They’re not forced on you by something else.

And for any choice you make, you could have chosen otherwise.

And the standard argument is that your choices are not yours because they’re determined by the particles that you’re made of.

Okay, you couldn’t have chosen otherwise.

So this is the argument that you hear.

I won’t mention any names because, so you couldn’t have chosen otherwise because the, whatever, the exact position and velocity of all of your subatomic particles set and had to evolve according to the laws of physics.

Or that if those particles have some fundamental randomness, then the randomness is still not free will.

Okay, so that’s the argument.

And first of all, let me say that, that picture of physics is, it’s right in a sense.

Okay, so I believe that subatomic particles evolve according to the Schrodinger equation, et cetera.

And the subatomic particles have no idea that they’re in a brain or that they’re part of a choice or that they represent a data structure that’s part of, that data structure feels as part of a choice.

But the problem with this reductionist argument is that it’s messing up its definitions and in particular, its definitions of causality.

So if we think about the world as having these kind of layers of complexity, okay, you have physics driving the atoms and chemistry driving the molecules and biology driving the cells.

Then you could say something like, so if you wanna talk about causality here in terms of the hierarchies of emergence, then you could say that quarks and electrons cause atoms, atoms cause molecules, molecules cause cells, cause apples and brains and brains cause minds, right?

But this is a type of causation and it’s like this cross-hierarchical causation.

But I would argue that there’s a real fundamental difference between that type of causation to what you might call an intra-hierarchical causation that defines the dynamics within a given layer.

Can you give me an example?

All right, so you can say that there’s this causal power whereby a cell is, or say a neuron is caused by the molecules that it’s formed of.

It is an epiphenomenon of those molecules, which in turn are epiphenomena of their atoms, et cetera.

But it’s also entirely meaningful to say that an action potential in a neuron causes a downstream neuron to fire, right?

So that’s a reasonable statement.

Okay, a neuron fires one that’s attached to fires and it makes total sense.

And in a real sense, it’s true to say that the first neuron caused the firing of the second.

It’s less useful to say that the wiggle of a quantum string on the Planck scale caused a downstream neuron to fire even if the quantum string is the, let’s call it the hierarchical cause of one of the electrons in the first action potential.

That’s like a roundabout and relatively inane approach to talking about causation.

So there’s this kind of bottom-up causation in which different levels in the scale of physical scale or complexity scale are generated by the lower layers, but there’s a different type of causation within the layer.

Okay, so, and within each of these layers hierarchical layers, you have a dynamics that is in a sense independent of the layer below that generated it.

Okay, so you can, you know, I mentioned Bernoulli’s equation, fluid flow.

So you had this whole field of hydrodynamics, which is beautiful.

And in a sense, it’s causally closed.

Like you can predict anything about the behavior of fluids using these rules.

And it does matter what the properties of the particles in that layer are.

And those properties, the properties of those particles are generated by the layer below.

But once you know the properties of those particles, you don’t care about the detailed physics of the level below.

You are in that layer and the rules of that layer are in a sense closed and independent.

Okay, so brains have a dynamics of neural activity.

Okay, it’s a physical system.

They behave like some type of neural network.

We can even simulate it.

Okay, current neural networks miss an awful lot, but in principle, we’d be able to run the dynamics of the brain with a different substrate.

We can run them.

We could run, we one day probably will be able to run these in silico.

And that dynamical system, the system of…

of neural activity will be independent of the substrate once we figure out what that dynamics is.

Man, Matt, I don’t know if you realize you’re saying such controversial statements at saying in principle.

So for instance, you’re saying in principle, we could simulate the brain substrate independent.

Who knows?

I mean, well, that’s like a huge open…

I’m going to crapple over the expression in principle, I think.

Yeah, who cares?

We’re just talking and people who are listening just realize that none of us have the correct words.

And in order for us to just, in order for us to convey anything that’s non-trivial, we’re going to have to flummox and flounder.

Okay, well, I’m happy.

I’m happy to put myself out there.

I think we will be able to simulate the brain, but it might be a really long time away because there’s so much that goes on.

And the point is that once we figure out those dynamics, it’ll be independent of the substrate, silicon or meat.

So maybe we can agree that the dynamics within a layer are their own thing.

And the idea of cause within one of those layers is different to the cause that generates one layer from the layer below it.

Oh, I see what you’re saying.

Okay.

Okay.

So you have this dynamics of cause and effect in biology or in an ecological system.

Okay.

It’s true that reintroducing wolves to the Yellowstone National Park caused the deer population to become under control.

Okay.

That’s a totally meaningful statement and it would be absurd to try to do the same thing with quarks.

Okay, yes.

Yes.

Like quarks to deers, right?

So you have these dynamical systems and the cause in that sense is like…we should have a different word for it.

So we’re mixing our definitions of the intrasystem versus the intersystem causation.

So we’re still not at free will yet.

So our conscious experience may be emergent from the actions of our neurons.

It probably is in some sense.

But in another sense, it is dual to the actions of our neurons.

Okay, so our neurons have a dynamics which you can, at some level, explain their behaviour.

And they generate this pattern of information that tells a story about itself, etc.

And so, in a way, our minds or the description of our minds is just another way of casting neurodynamics.

It’s essentially a duality.

It is a dual to that system.

But in a way, you could argue that it’s more fundamental, right?

So if, in the broadest sense, our minds are the result of a computation, then our minds are also a dynamical system independent of the substrate.

So a set of elements, in this case thoughts, linked by a set of rules.

And thoughts are symbolic representations.

And so you can come up with a language that manipulates these symbolic representations and tell stories with them.

Okay, that’s in a sense what a mind is, and a bunch of other stuff.

Okay, so in a sense, psychology is the science of understanding the dynamics of that system.

And it’s, to some extent, mappable.

Maybe never completely, but you could write down the dynamics of the mind without referencing neurons.

Okay, just as you could write down the dynamics of the neurons without referencing electrons.

And the reason I said that, in a sense, the way of looking at neurodynamics, which is the dual of it, which is the subjective experience, is more predictively powerful than the neurodynamics themselves.

In some way of looking at it, that’s more fundamental.

There are things you can predict about what a brain will do and how an organism will behave that you could only get by looking at the thought dynamics, like the mental dynamics.

And you could never get by trying to look at a few neurons and guess what they’re going to do.

Is this not a difference between what we can do and what is?

I don’t think so.

First of all, let’s put a pin in the idea that the mind is its own dynamical system, potentially independent of its substrate.

Understanding the dynamics of the mind is better than understanding the dynamics of neurons for many, many things.

But does that mean that, like you said, is this just our impression?

That we can’t we can’t, for example, predict someone else’s detailed behaviour, their inclination to fall in love with particular types of people based on looking at their neurons or looking at their quarks.

Okay, so now we get to this idea of in-principle.

Yeah, okay.

That’s the title of the podcast.

Is it even in-principle possible to do so?

I would argue there also no.

It’s in-principle possible to predict some human behaviour by trying to model the physical aspect of the brain.

So here things get a little bit messy.

You could predict someone’s behaviour just by knowing them well.

Does that mean they have no free will that they couldn’t potentially do otherwise?

You could predict someone’s inclination to certain types of behaviour by knowing about any of the neuropathologies that they might have.

So for sure, the epitomes of free will.

We often fail to exercise free will, or we are predictable.

But the idea that free will is an illusion because brains are mechanistic, I think is a little fallacious.

The reason is that a brain… Because of that dual notion?

Well, not even.

There are physical-ish reasons here.

The idea is that your actions are pre-determined and predictable because they’re entirely determined by the configuration of physical matter and so on.

But then I want to ask, to whom is the brain predictable and pre-determined?

To what observer and what reference frame?

So if you have any sufficiently complex system like the brain, the dynamics are coupled across multiple physical scales.

So for example, an important part of the decision mechanism in the brain is the so-called Breitschark potential, which is basically the correlated noise in brain signal that the brain actually uses as a tiebreaker in decision making.

It partially drives the dynamics in ways that we don’t very well understand at all, because it’s super new that we figured out.

Can you repeat the name of the potential?

It’s the Breitschark potential.

It’s also called the readiness potential.

Okay.

Yeah.

You want to look at Aaron Scherger’s work.

Actually, Bahar wrote an article on this.

I’m just mentioning that because I’m super familiar with it now, but it’s just one example of how you have dynamics influenced.

In complex and even pseudo-chaotic systems, you have these dynamics linked across multiple scales of these hierarchies.

In that case, it becomes essentially impossible to predict behaviour based on the smallest elements of the substrate, whatever the atoms.

So you have this system that is partially chaotic, and it’s well-known that these things can’t be predicted without infinite computation.

I think this is a manifestation of this computational irreducibility.

My question is, what observer or what reference frame could predict your actions perfectly by knowing the exact state of all the quantum fields in your brain?

You could imagine some super-advanced alien that could somehow perfectly scan your brain and get that, and then run a simulation of your brain at the same time.

But even that, I think here, the very nature of quantum mechanics makes that challenging.

Okay, so you literally need to track every bit of quantum information in the most complex systems to make a perfect prediction.

Maybe you can make some predictions, but it’s not even practically impossible.

It’s probably even, in principle, impossible.

You have things like the no-cloning theorem, which forbids you from making a perfect copy of quantum information, which is what you would need to do to make a perfect prediction.

I think in a meaningful way, it’s in principle not possible for any possible observer to perfectly predict your choices.

It is possible for impossible observers like Laplace’s demon, who knows the exact position and velocity of every particle in the universe.

So from the perspective of Laplace’s demon, you have no free will, but Laplace’s demon is a mythical entity.

Like other mythical entities, I don’t think we should rate something an illusion, because a mythical entity could, in principle, predict your behaviour.

So there’s this guy named David Wohlpart.

I don’t know if you know him, but he’s in Santa Barbara, I believe.

He has the limits on inference machines, which says that even Laplace’s demon in Newtonian mechanics can’t exist.

I agree that Laplace’s demon cannot exist.

I think even relativity forbids Laplace’s demon, because there’s a limit to how quickly it could.

Anyway, this is a whole other topic.

Long story short, I think free will is real in a meaningful sense.

Going down the definition of real is like a whole other podcast, but free will is real in a meaningful sense, because choice is a fundamental, dynamical component in a particular dynamical system whose behaviour is independent of its substrate.

Whose behaviour is not fully predictable in the context of its substrates, by mapping its substrates in a way that is possible for any entity that could exist.

If you choose to not believe in free will, then at least you have that choice.

Yeah, okay, great.

Man, there’s so much that we could talk about.

Okay, how about instead of delving more deeply into it, I’ll just tell you the one thought, I’ll just tell you one of the thoughts.

Why is this notion of to who important?

For instance, we can say, there is a computer here.

We consider that to be an objective fact.

We don’t say this computer is here to who, unless you are someone who believes that the observer creates the reality.

So let’s disregard that interpretation and say there’s an objective reality.

So why is it that we’re saying free will exists to who?

Why can’t we just say free will exists in the same way that this computer exists?

Yeah, I mean, we live in a relative universe.

Particles have a relative existence.

You know, Hawking radiation only exists if you’re a certain distance away from a black hole.

Unruh radiation only exists if you’re accelerating.

So there is a sense in which the frame of reference is critical.

And for non-noisy… There’s something noisy about the radiation and the unruh radiation, so the Hawking radiation in that one.

Yeah, well, I think so.

Maybe I do.

I don’t know.

But there is something non-trivial about the relativity of existence in terms of matter, for sure.

This is something I don’t think we’ve properly wrapped our heads around.

Maybe it’s as confusing as the measurement problem.

The idea that the universe can and does look radically different, depending on your frame of reference.

And the only thing that is consistent is the self-consistency of the universe itself.

No matter what changes based on your frame of reference, how you choose to make measurements, for example, in things like a Bell test, these things can radically change what universe you see.

The one thing that never changes is that the universe remains self-consistent for all observers.

Okay.

Can you explain what that means?

Is that different than the statement that the laws of physics are the same?

Well, in the simple case of relativity, let’s take the simple case of the twin paradox.

This is this thought experiment in relativity where a pair of twins jumps in a spacecraft and zips off at a large fraction of the speed of light and comes back several years later from the perspective of the twin at home.

The twin at home has aged and the twin who traveled is much younger because time ticked slower for the twin who was traveling because of their relative speed.

Okay, so from the point of view of the traveling twin, they didn’t think that their clock was ticking.

They were looking back home and they thought that at home the clock was ticking fast.

No, wait on.

No, I should know this stuff.

So, this is a so-called paradox.

You should watch this PBS Space Time.

Yeah.

The way it works is that when you observe a clock that’s traveling at some speed, that clock appears to tick slow.

So, fast-moving objects, the time slows down.

Both twins see each other’s clock as ticking slow because the spaceship is moving fast.

But then for the astronaut twin, Earth appears to be moving backwards quickly because speed is relative.

There’s no preferred inertial frame of reference.

So, Earth erases away.

That twin’s clock seems to slow down.

Yet, when the twin gets back home after that long trip, the twin who stayed at home…so, it has to end up being consistent.

Which one aged more than the other?

The answer is that there is a self-consistent answer.

When they get home, both of them agree that the twin who stayed home aged more.

But how can that work if both of them saw the same change in each other’s clock?

Both of the twins have an answer for that.

Their answers are different, but they lead to the same conclusion.

The twin who was at home sees the traveling twin’s clock tick slower so that the traveling twin ages less and gets home.

Meanwhile, the one at home is waiting and getting older, and his twin comes back much younger because less time passed.

But for the traveling twin, they watch the twin at home and they watch the twin at home’s clock tick slower.

In fact, the traveling twin feels themselves aging faster until the moment that they turn around.

In order to turn around and come home, they have to accelerate.

The other thing that Einstein’s relativity tells us is that if you are deep in a gravitational field, your clock ticks slower.

The amount that that twin has to accelerate in order to return home causes their clock to slow down enough that, from their perspective, the twin who was at home not only caught up to them, but aged a lot more.

They both have different stories about why they both agree that the traveling twin is younger than the stay-at-home twin.

Curt, how did we get to this?

This was in service of a point.

Okay, so firstly I was asking about what does it mean to be self-consistent?

Yeah, yeah.

The universe will always conspire to be self-consistent and that observers will ultimately agree.

I have so many questions here.

That’s even the case with particles.

If you see under radiation, I can’t remember what the solution to this one is.

Someone else doesn’t see under radiation, but they see…

If you accelerate fast enough, then you’ll be incinerated by what’s the equivalent of Hawking radiation.

It’s a type of horizon radiation.

Someone who is not accelerating doesn’t see your particles and yet does see you incinerated.

So why does the person who’s not accelerating see you incinerated?

I think the answer is they see you being incinerated by something else, like the drag on the quantum fields or something.

I don’t recall, but there’s a neat answer.

The universe keeps conspiring to give us these neat answers that everyone ultimately is going to agree, even if the universe that they think they live in looks wildly different to the universe of the next person.

The consistency conspires to always be there.

I think there’s a mystery there.

Now that you’ve heard from Matt O’Dowd of PBS Space Time, the following is Anand Vaidya on free will.

Anand Vaidya

01:19:06 Anand Vaidya

Anand is one of those rare philosophers who’s well-educated in both the Eastern philosophical tradition and Western analytic tradition, particularly Indian and modal philosophy.

Enjoy.

What are your thoughts on free will?

Um, what are my thoughts on free will?

Do you feel like there’s pressure to go in the direction of there is no free will?

No, it’s actually the opposite.

I had this really interesting dinner with Richard Swinburne, one of the leading philosophers of religion in the world, and I had a dinner with him and my wife in Romania.

And we ended up talking about free will, and I just told him, like, I never got into the problem of free will because I think I just was full-blown committed to the idea that free will and determinism are incompatible, and we have free will.

Otherwise, I can’t make sense of – yeah, maybe I’ll repeat the same sort of thing I said to him that I say to all my students and everybody when they ask me about free will.

There’s two things about free will I care about.

One is the thing I’m about to say, and the other is the relationship, again, between artificial systems and freedom and artificial systems and free will.

So, I’m very interested in those.

So, here’s the first one.

I think speaking a language and communicating with someone is an agential activity involving free will at some level and degree of freedom in the choice of constructing sentences and embedding them with meaning to communicate them, so that if we don’t have free will, I’m not talking right now.

No, there’s nothing – it’s a parrot.

There’s nothing going on there, right?

So, parrots are merely under one understanding, simply repeating sounds that they’ve heard without any sort of choice about it in terms of the free construction of meaning.

So, if I don’t have – so, one way to make it clear is some people think about free will only in relationship to bodily action.

I think about free will in terms of its relationship to mental action.

Speaking is a mental act.

So, if I don’t have free will, I don’t have any mental actions.

If I don’t have any mental actions, then I’m not speaking, because speaking is a mental action.

That’s the first point I care about in terms of free will.

I bring this up a lot.

So, yeah.

Then the other one that I bring up is that I’m not so sure that there’s some kind of free will that we have that machines are incapable of having because they’re so-called programmed in some way.

And in fact, I just saw this wonderful episode of Star Trek, it was in the Voyager, Thoth, where they in fact had a discussion between the doctor who is a hologram and one of his assistants, and the doctor said to the assistant, um, well, I don’t choose anything when I give a diagnosis.

I’ve been programmed to give the diagnosis based on these vast amounts of information that I’ve been trained on.

Like, this is the hologram, this is the doctor talking to their assistant about a patient that they have, and expressing himself that he doesn’t have choice or free will in diagnosis and that he simply takes the data that’s been given to him, runs it through all the data he has known before or been given, and then spits out a diagnosis.

And then she says this brilliant response.

She says, well, what’s the difference?

I mean, I went to medical school and I studied all this stuff, and basically when they give me the information, I try to look at all the information in my head, and maybe the difference is that it’s more easily accessible to you because your memory is so free-flowing with all its information and mine is forgetful, but isn’t the fundamental nature—I thought this was one of the most insightful philosophical episodes of Star Trek because of, you know, how this was expressed.

And so, I thought, yes, I do worry about that issue too, about the degree to which we really can run the Charles Babbage, Lady Lovelace objection against machines’ creativity because it’s all programmed in.

As the initial objection goes, the Turing responds to in his famous paper.

Yeah, so those are my two thoughts about free will, but I’m not a free will expert and I know there are many people who talk about it in terms of quantum indeterminacy and things like that.

I probably should withhold without talking about that.

Yeah.

Is there something about free will that makes it sufficient for something to have moral standing?

Oh, I don’t think it’s a necessary condition.

I think it could be in a condition.

So, yes, I think, yeah, so maybe this is something we can get from free will into the other thing that we kind of wanted to talk about.

Moral standing and moral grounding.

Yeah, so I’ll just sort of paint the picture, you know, sort of synaptically what the difference is between.

This is something I actually do have something to say.

I like I have a positive thesis more than just picking apart things I don’t like and writing papers.

Like, I definitely have strong feelings here.

So, I don’t think— Well, you’re so well articulated that when you say that you don’t have something to say, it’s leagues beyond what most people say when they say, I have something to say.

Oh, okay.

So, your threshold is so above.

Yeah, maybe my threshold’s too high then.

No, so, yeah, I think my view is that I don’t, yeah, I don’t think that consciousness is the grounding property.

So, on my view and my research right now, I think that there’s another property that’s important.

It is not free will, though, either.

It’s not free will.

So, we might say that free will is a sufficient condition for having moral status, but not a necessary condition.

But I think the property I’m going to talk about now is more basic, and it’s the one that can explain what’s going on with free will, maybe, when I explain the whole theory.

So, the property I think is relevant is computational intelligence that’s goal-directed and tied to preferential states.

So, this goes back to the example of the creature in the water who can detect the magnetic north and south and tries to get oxygen-rich water by going in one direction.

Yeah, and you call that cognition.

And to me, when I think of cognition— I used to call it cognitive suffering.

Yeah, sorry.

When I hear the term cognitive, I think of a nervous system, and I assume that that’s not what you mean.

I don’t mean that.

No, I don’t.

So, again, let me explain here what’s going on.

So, I think that there are lots of different—it’s always trying to find this word, and I never can find it.

Like, the word that properly applies to biological and non-biological creatures.

I think sometimes I just want to call them natural versus artificial systems.

I mean, a human is a natural system, and a bug is a natural system, and AI is an artificial—but I don’t really like that.

Anyway, you get the point.

There’s like these two different kinds of systems, at least, and there are many different versions of each kind.

So, many different artificial systems and large language models are different than, you know, domain-specific chess-playing games and different types of creatures, right?

Yes.

So, the thing that I think makes something have—that gives something moral standing is that there is a kind of intelligence in it that involves computations, and that intelligence is goal-directed, and the system has preferential states, right?

So, the little creature I was talking about prefers to be in an oxygen-rich environment opposed to oxygen-low environment, right?

It has a detector for getting itself to that thing.

It’s not the greatest detector, but it does its job, and I can mess with it by putting a magnet over it and killing it.

But the thing is, it’s—and that detector is giving it information that that has to be computed then to move that it goes in a certain direction, right?

Now, I don’t know if the thing has phenomenal consciousness.

I don’t know if there’s something it’s like for the thing to detect north or south with that thing, but I know one thing— But that doesn’t matter.

Yeah, for me, it does, because the thing is, it definitely prefers to be in the oxygen-rich environment over the low oxygen.

Yeah, and so, that should be enough to say of that—now, look, let’s go further so you understand.

Plants have computational intelligence that’s goal-directed that involves preferences.

Lots of animals and insects above them have this— Preferences are different than tendencies.

Is that correct?

That’s a good philosophical question, because sometimes people say that tendencies are—this is related to the free will thing—tendencies are a little bit more automatic, and preferences require rational endorsement.

I don’t really think I need to use preference in that way.

This has a tendency to just want to stay at the minimal position.

Yeah.

This doesn’t have moral standing, because it doesn’t meet the artificial life form.

Yeah, I get what you’re—this is a good example, because I get clearly exactly how it’s challenging.

I don’t know.

I’m not trying to challenge.

I’m just— No, no, no.

Well, I mean, it’s the right kind of corner case to think about, is what I mean, in that sense.

Yeah, I definitely think the answer is no, that that thing actually does not satisfy my definitions.

Okay, good.

But I think it’s a good example of how it’s challenging.

Yeah, I agree.

I definitely think the answer is no, that that thing actually does not satisfy my definitions.

All right.

But I think the reason why it doesn’t satisfy my conditions has to do with the fact that none of the things that are going on with it have to do with anything internal to the thing.

I mean, obviously, it’s gravity and mass alone that account for the tendency.

So the use of the word tendency is eliminable completely.

We don’t— There’s no tendency at all within the object.

There’s just the application of the laws of physics to things that have mass.

That was Anand Vaidya.

Again, links to all of these podcasts, the full versions are in the description.

Chris Langan, Bernardo Kastrup

01:28:52 Chris Langan, Bernardo Kastrup

Now, hear from Christopher Langan on free will from his cognitive theoretic model of the universe perspective, also known as the CTMU.

Okay, let’s talk about free will.

It seems like that’s what is at the core here.

So I’ll do so by reading a question which is directed toward Chris.

But then obviously, if you pull something out, even though it has some terminology that’s specific to the CTMU, Bernardo, please comment on it as well.

Okay.

Hey, Curt, I’m reposting this from YouTube.

It’s for Chris on the topic of free will derived from the CTMU.

If you can ask this, you’ll forever be my hero.

You once said, I believe it’s referring to you, Chris.

Chris, you said that because the universe has only itself to define itself, everything in it must exemplify its elementary freedom.

I think I understand from your defining reality as all real influence that reality cannot be abbreviated, because if you were able to simplify it with no loss, whatever was removed could not logically have been real.

I understand where to take this to imply that reality could not have come from anything simpler than its full definition.

And what can’t be simplified must be contributory throughout.

That said, you’ve still maintained a strong distinction between tertiary syntactors, objects, and secondary syntactors slash tellers, life forms, read life forms, in terms of the amount that they are determinative.

Considering that you’ve shown that reality is a mind, could we liken the distinction to the difference between ideas of objects and ideas of self, where just like ideas, all objects have some significance specific to them, however seemingly banal, but only tellers as ideas of self would be self-modeling, and therefore truly take on self-awareness?

Right, that’s why they’re called tellers.

That’s why self-type identity operators are called tellers, whereas tertiary identity operators are fermionic, more or less, and they are inanimate, or at least usually considered to be inanimate.

But basically, they’re embedded in secondary tellers, and therefore they take that higher order metacausation, that ability to self-model from the secondary tellers.

So I assume you’re answering the question right now, but Chris, I didn’t understand the question.

So can you explain the question back to myself, and then answer it?

Well, states, you know, there’s no such thing as a state in isolation.

States are always relatively defined.

That’s why we have theories of relativity and things.

But what must a state be defined relative to?

Well, to completely define any state in the universe, you need to refer to every other state in the universe, because it parameterizes that state, okay?

And you don’t get a complete parameterization unless you have the full matter distribution and the full metric, okay?

So that’s what it takes.

Can I make an analogy?

There’s a duality between a set and the complement of a set, assuming that the set is within some other large set that we can call.

So let’s say the large set is S, you have a subset U, then there’s a duality between U and U with a C, which is the complement of it.

The teller and the environment, right, exactly.

Self and non-self.

Okay, sorry, continue.

Okay, well, the environment, of course, is just the medium minus the teller, or in other words, what is external to the medium, but it’s outside the boundary of the teller.

And so, you get this, basically, the self-dual construct, which is a teller-environment coupling, okay?

And this teller-environment coupling is very important in the CTME, because that’s kind of a metaphormal quantum.

It’s one way of expressing CTME quantization, okay?

You have to put the medium together with the object.

The object is its own medium, through this process called conspansion, which is the operation through which the universe evolves on the global level.

Now, in order to get semantic meaning out of that, you know, basically, it’s called cosmic expansion.

To get meaning out of that, then you need another process called telecrucial, which then specifies that semantic structure to the syntactic structure that’s built up by conspansion.

Chris, it’s been almost a year since I studied the CTME, and when I did, I didn’t go back to it, which means I’ve forgotten so much of it, so much of the terminology.

As I would have done myself, okay.

So much of the terminology.

It goes through me.

So telecrucial, I have a vague recollection that it’s where the universe exercises free will, it looks at some generalized utility state, and then makes a decision.

That’s where tellers self-configure.

That’s where secondary identity operators, or tellers, self-configure.

They actually become the medium, okay?

And I know that Bernardo actually embraces something like this, and his analytic ideal is what he calls it.

Basically, you’ve got to have that.

Okay, so let me be blunt.

So free will, in your theory, in your model, Chris, exists.

And Bernardo, if I’m correct, you’re against the idea of free will, at least currently.

Well, let me tell you what free will is first, before Bernardo gets going.

Okay, yes.

As I said, there is no typographical array in the metaformal system, okay?

You can’t use the parameter as a state.

You cannot just use a fixed array, a fixed array.

The array has to be changing geometric, well, geometric dynamically is the term that the followers of Einstein came up with to describe what must be going on.

It’s happening behind the scenes, okay?

Free will happens because things are determined metacausally, you know, and metaformally, which means that things have to be coupled or factorized, right?

In other words, it’s just not this linear process, this causal process, but it’s this high-order process called metacausation that is occurring.

And this is free will.

If we look at a conspansive cycle in the CTMU, it’s an alpha-omega cycle.

In other words, it starts at an origin, it ends with the boundary, and those two things are in advanced and retarded communication with each other, right?

Free will is in determining one of those conspansive cycles, regardless of what its size is.

So, in other words, there is a way to define free will that gets out of this pseudo-causal dichotomy between determinacy and indeterminacy that we were talking about earlier, right?

In other words, you’re creating the medium.

You’re actually creating space-time as you create a new state, right?

When you bring that new mental state into your head, you’ve actually done it by creating space-time, all right?

This is kind of a very profound, very weird way of looking at it, I understand, but it sounds weird, but it’s the only way, in my opinion, things can work.

I will comment more generically, because I’m not familiar with Chris’s terminology, so it’s impossible for me to go into the details of that, but you offered, Curt, that I am currently against free will.

There’s a lot of nuance to this, so let me try to clarify this.

If the question of free will is linked to a materialist metaphysics, like people worrying that, oh, if my choices are determined by the patterns of brain activity in my brain, then I don’t have free will.

Well, on that account, I think people need not be afraid, because I don’t think physiological patterns of brain activity cause your choices.

I think they are what your choices look like.

In Schopenhauer’s terminology, they are appearances, representations.

The thing in itself is your choice.

So, no, your choices are not determined by your brain activity.

Your brain activity is what the process of making choices look like, and then you would say, well, then I am endorsing free will.

Well, no, we have now to understand what people mean by free will.

What people mean by it is that their choices are determined by that which they identify themselves with, as opposed to being determined by something that they don’t identify with.

And most people don’t identify with their brain activity.

They never get to see it.

They don’t identify with it.

That’s why when a physicalist says, well, your choices are determined by your brain activity, people feel that as a violation of their free will, because they identify with their own mental processes, the flow of their consciousness, not with physical patterns of brain activity inside their skull, which they never saw in their lives.

Now let’s think about the mind of nature.

The mind of nature is the only thing there is.

So need and will are the same thing.

There is nothing, I mean, I have to work, right?

I’m forced by my society to work.

So my choice to work is not freely determined by me.

It’s a need imposed on me by the society, and I don’t identify with the rest of the society.

So my free will has been cut short in that regard.

But if you are the mind of nature, there is no society.

There is no world outside of you.

There’s nothing beyond you.

So whatever choices you make as the mind of nature are free in the sense that they are determined, but they are determined by you.

You see what I mean?

You’re identification, exactly.

Yeah.

The need and the choice are one and the same.

There is no semantic difference between determinism and free will at the level of the mind of nature, because yes, the choices are determined.

Even people who believe in free will, they are not saying that their choices are random.

They are saying that their choices are determined by their preferences, their tastes.

They are determined by them at the level of the mind of nature.

Every choice is determined by the mind of nature because there is nothing beyond the universal mind, the universal consciousness.

So even the question of free will disappears, there is a semantic space for it.

It doesn’t make sense to talk about it, but the choices are still determined in the sense that they are not random.

The choices of the mind of nature are determined by what the mind of nature is.

Its characteristics, its properties determine the choices it makes.

It cannot abstract of itself.

Otherwise, the choices would be completely random.

And that’s incoherent to say that.

Right.

I would merely add that what we have to do is we have to distinguish free will, what’s happening there, from determinacy and non-deterministic.

OK, so it is useful to talk about free will just to distinguish it from what we usually mean by causation.

And once we do that, then we find out that we can describe it in a certain way.

Right.

In terms of this conspansion and teleprocursion thing we were talking about earlier.

I think ultimately everything is determined.

Even your choices are determined by your tastes, by your dispositions, you know, your opinions.

Well, can I ask you a question?

Just imagine the origin of reality.

What determined the structure of reality?

In other words, there was nothing outside reality.

According to general relativity, basically, reality is ontically and geometrically closed.

OK, so there’s nothing outside.

There’s no extrinsic causation that could have caused the universe to take any particular form.

So aren’t we talking about the universe taking its own form, somehow deciding within itself what form it should take?

Deciding within itself can only happen if that decision is determined by what it is.

Yes, but what decides, who decides what it is?

Nobody.

At the end of the day, at the bottom level of nature, something exists that cannot be explained in terms of anything else.

We cannot explain one thing in terms of another forever.

Doesn’t matter what metaphysics one subscribes to, one cannot keep on reducing forever.

Otherwise, eventually you will go back to the beginning and it will be circular reasoning.

Unless it’s idempotent.

Unless it’s idempotent.

That actually applies to themselves.

You don’t get to the top of the ladder, you just keep on going from rung to rung, rung to rung, and each rung is identical to the last rung.

Right?

Then it’s some form of infinite regress.

No.

At the end of…

No, idempotence says that it stays the same.

You’re not regressing anywhere, OK?

It’s just it reaches a static point of maximum generalization, and then it holds steady.

It doesn’t make any difference what you do next.

You’re going the other way around now.

I’m thinking about reduction.

I’m going down to the bottom.

There has to be something at the bottom that simply is.

It simply is what it is.

Now, earlier you said…

Will or toxins, yes.

Yeah.

Now, earlier you said, for something to exist, it needs to have properties.

To say that something is an object means that it has properties.

So to be is to have properties.

I agree with you there.

To be is to have properties.

Whatever it is that you are, you are one thing and not another.

In other words, there are properties associated to your beingness.

Now, whatever there is at the end of the chain of reduction, the bottom line of nature, it just is, and therefore it has properties.

Everything that it does is then determined by its properties.

It’s determined by what it is as opposed to what it is not or to what it could have been.

So even the mind of nature is a mind that has properties.

That’s awfully inspecific, though.

I mean, we’re not attaching any…

We’re not attaching any properties to this ultimate reduction that you’re talking about.

But you’re saying, and yet, everything that the universe is is somehow determined by it.

I don’t think that’s quite kosher.

I think that we have to actually try to attach some properties to it in order to derive…

No, I’m not attaching.

I just said, to be is to have properties.

So whatever there is at the bottom level of the chain of reduction, it has properties.

Now, we may not know directly…

Self-assigned properties, right?

Intrinsic properties.

Not self-assigned.

It’s intrinsic to the beingness of the thing.

To be is to have properties.

But against what background are we distinguishing those properties?

The background of what could have been.

So the laws of nature are what they are.

So gravity makes objects fall.

We could live in a universe in which gravity pulls objects up.

It’s a repellent as opposed to an attractor.

Now, that’s not what it is.

The laws of nature are what they are, as opposed to what they could have been in our imagination.

So whatever nature is, it has properties.

And that’s why objects fall and static electricity is produced when you rub ember to a cloth.

So the stuff that is…

I understand everything that you’re saying, but if it had properties, then those properties had negations, and something had to distinguish those properties from their negations.

Okay?

Otherwise, it is useless to talk about them having properties at all.

David Wolpert (Part 2)

01:44:27 David Wolpert (Part 2)

Following Langen and Kastrup on the nature of free will as a dynamical system, we transition again to David Wohlpart, who discusses the limits or the no-go’s on human cognition.

These are also known as impossibility results and arise in Turing theory as limits of computational abilities.

Limits constrain our understanding of free will and bridge the metaphysical and mathematical.

So we can never know what is the simplest program size for the simplest program for actually doing those calculations.

It’s an amazing restriction on what we human beings can do.

To give you another example, this is one that I know best from a book by Lee and Vitani.

It’s kind of like the Bible and these Turing machine things.

You can actually prove the existence of a function from the integers to the integers, which is always increasing.

Sometimes it’ll stay the same, but it never goes down, and eventually gets to infinity, such that every function you can possibly compute, no matter how you do it, that is also always increasing and gets to infinity, will be strictly greater than this.

You wouldn’t have even thought there is such a limitation that could even make sense.

Do whatever you want.

Say, okay, here’s a function which it has the value 1 for the first million numbers, from 1 through a million, it’s got the value 1.

Then it’s got the value 2, but that’s for the next million to the millionth.

Make it be whatever you want.

So, every rule that you can put down for how to construct this, it’s going to actually be getting to infinity faster than this other function, which is a very strange thing.

And it’s one of the most fundamental philosophical results in the sense that philosophy should not be biased towards what we human beings consider to be compelling.

I find it that impossibility results, in general, and of these sorts in particular, they are very deep philosophy, whether or not we even appreciate they had meaning before we came across them.

Another one… What was the name of that one?

That second one?

Oh, this is… I don’t even think it has a name.

I don’t even think it has a name.

I can point you to the chapter and leave the time as well.

Yeah, that would be great.

But there’s another one that, for example, Scott Aronson has a nice blog post on this.

It’s called the Busy Beaver function, and he’s actually recently written some papers on it as well.

And this is kind of the flip side of what I just said, that let’s try to make the fastest increasing function possible.

So you, Curt, say that, well, for the value 1, it’s got the value 1.

For the value 2, it’s got the value 10 to the 10 to the 10.

For the value 3, it’s got what it had for the value 2, but now itself.

Make it be whatever you want.

There is always going to be something which is called the Busy Beaver function, which is actually increasing faster than the fastest increasing function you can write down.

In other words, there’s an upper limit to how… There’s an upper limit to the speed of increase of any function from the integers to the integers that you can possibly define.

It’s in a certain sense, it’s mind-boggling that there’s that kind of a limitation on what we can do.

I’m not understanding it correctly.

So at first, the way I understood what you said is that you have a function that’s increasing, and then you can make it increase faster, but then there’s a bound to that?

I can write down the definition of a function, and it exists.

I can prove it exists, and it is an increasing function, and it will be increasing faster than any function that you can possibly write down.

Now I have a question about that.

Like I mentioned, I’m speaking to someone who’s an ultra-finitist, an intuitionist, and they don’t particularly like existence proofs.

They like construction proofs.

They don’t.

Yep, and that is the foundation of intuitionism.

I don’t think that actually Nicholas Gissen goes that far, though I’m not sure.

He might in some side idea in one of his papers.

But yeah, that was the foundation.

They don’t like existence proofs.

They want a constructive proof only.

Is this constructed, or you just showed the existence of this function?

Of the busy beaver function?

It has been constructed for the first some number of values of the integers, so we can write down a busy beaver function for 1, for 2, for 3, for 4, and so on, up to some particular value.

But I think that in the busy beaver function, its entirety, almost by definition, no, it can’t be constructed.

Because if it could be constructed, you would construct it.

That’s the point, that this thing exists.

Wait, sorry, I don’t get that last point.

Wait, if it could be constructed, I could construct it, what do you mean?

The definition, so if by construct a function, we mean you write down a program that spits out its values, that’s what we mean to construct a function, then the busy beaver function is something that increases faster than could be the output of any such program you can write down.

Ah, okay, okay, okay.

It’s very, very easy to define.

So it is purely an existence function that you can’t construct it, but I can define it very, very easily.

It takes only a couple of sentences to define what the thing is.

So there are these kinds of results, which I find in many ways flabbergasting, because if one adopts the Church-Turing thesis, these are limitations on human thinking.

And there are other ones, and this is in addition to all the ones like the halting theorem, which is very closely related to, of course, Godot’s incompleteness theorem.

And then there’s Reisz’s theorem and all these other things, which really, I think that the only actual results, the only actual philosophical advances that have been made by humanity are these kinds of results.

Everything else is not only questionable and is being questioned, it is ultimately going to be quicksand and it’s just going to be squishy and you’re not going to get anywhere.

These are the only ones that we have managed to generate so far.

These are it, folks.

By definition, they are the deepest because they are the full set of things that we have actually established incontrovertibly or as incontrovertible as any deductive logic could be for mathematics.

Scott Aaronson

01:51:37 Scott Aaronson

We shift gears now from David Walpart’s exploration of the limitations of cognition and the deterministic nature of mathematical computation to Scott Aronson’s perspective.

Scott is a world-renowned computer scientist, a child prodigy, and a researcher in quantum computing.

Here are his thoughts on free will.

To you, does this touch on free will?

Some people think it does.

I mean, I tend to think that if there were a computer in another room and it ran faster than my brain does and it perfectly predicted what I was going to do before I do it, and maybe it just leaves its prediction in a sealed envelope, but then after I take the action, then we can open the envelope and we can see that it perfectly predicted what I would do.

I would say that would really profoundly shake my sense of free will, just speaking personally.

I would say that based on the known laws of physics, we don’t actually know whether that prediction machine can exist or not.

It comes down to questions about how accurately would you have to scan someone’s brain?

Would you have to go all the way down to the quantum mechanical level?

Would that not be necessary?

I would say that the thing that most people don’t realize is that this is an empirical question.

Maybe whose answer we’ll someday know, but we don’t know it yet.

That’s what I would advocate as the best sort of empirical replacement for the free will question.

If you accepted that, then the fact that I myself can’t predict my future actions is not really the core of the matter.

The question is just whether any machine could do it.

Why is the sealed envelope important?

Because if I saw the prediction, then I could resolve to do the opposite.

If this machine existed, does it still say something about your free will if you were able to look at it and you could go against the wishes of the machine or the predictions of it?

You could say, if that machine cannot be reliably built, if any attempt to build it consistent with the laws of physics fails, then that seems to me about as far as science could possibly go in saying that there seems to be something that corresponds to part of what we mean by free will.

There is this inherent unpredictability to our actions.

Conversely, if the machine did exist, then that seems to me about as far as science could possibly go towards saying, actually, free will is an illusion.

Not just in some abstract metaphysical way, but because here is the machine that predicts what you will do.

Look at it, try it out.

You had a blog post on Newcome’s Paradox.

Yes.

Can you please outline it and then what your proposed resolution is, if it exists?

Sure.

A Newcome’s Paradox is the thing where we imagine this super intelligent predictor, just like I was talking about before, this machine or being that knows what you’re going to do before you do it.

It puts two boxes on a table.

Inside of the first box, there might be nothing and there might be a million dollars.

Inside of the second box, there is definitely $1,000.

Now you have a choice.

You can either take the first box only, or you can take both of the boxes.

The catch is that the predictor has told you in advance that if it predicts that you’re going to take both boxes, then it will leave the first box empty.

So it punishes greed.

Yes.

If it predicts that you’re going to take only the first box, then it puts a million dollars in it.

Let’s say that the predictor has played this game with 1,000 people before you and it’s never been wrong.

What do you do?

People have actually made it into verbs.

Do you one box or do you two box in the Newcome Paradox?

There seem to be basic principles of rationality that you could use to prove either answer is correct.

On the one hand, everyone who takes only the first box ends up about a million dollars richer than the people who try to take both.

The whole setup of the problem is that that’s because the predictor knew and it’s over.

On the other hand, by the time you’re contemplating your decision, the million dollars is either in the box or not.

How could your decision possibly affect what is in the box?

It would seem like it would have to be a backwards in time causation.

Therefore, whatever is in the first box, you’re going to have $1,000 more than that if you take both boxes.

Therefore, you should take both.

So we can prove two contradictory answers.

That is the basic setup of a paradox.

People have argued about this for half a century.

There is an enormous literature on this problem and many different points of view.

I had a blog post back in 2006 where I suggested what seemed to me like the natural resolution of this.

Since then, I’ve learned that other people have had broadly similar ideas.

Some of them do cite that blog post of mine.

My resolution of the paradox was, okay, I think that in this scenario, you should take one box.

You should one box.

Okay, but the question is why?

The question is, how can we possibly explain how your decision to one box could affect the predictor, could affect whether the predictor puts the money in the box?

Now, the key is we have to think harder about what the world would be like with this predictor in it.

The predictor contains within it a perfect simulation of you.

Whatever you’re going to base your decision on, whatever childhood memory, whatever detail of your brain function, the predictor knows all of it by hypothesis.

But the way that I would describe that is that the predictor has effectively brought into being a second copy of you, a second instantiation of you.

Now, the key is that as you’re contemplating your decision, whether to one box or two box, you have to think of yourself as somehow being both versions of you at once, or perhaps you don’t know which one you are.

If you are the simulation being run by the predictor, well then, of course, your decision can affect what the predictor does.

In the scenario that was hypothesized, you have to be radically uncertain about where you physically are, about what time it is.

These are the kinds of things that you have to worry about in a world where there really could be perfect predictors of yourself.

A much more boring resolution would be to say, well, I’m not going to worry about Newcomb’s paradox because I believe that this predictor cannot exist at all.

Nicolas Gisin

01:59:47 Nicolas Gisin

As I said, I regard that as an empirical question, to which we don’t yet know the answer.

Okay, let’s talk about Sabine Hossenfelder, who says that the idea of free will is both incompatible with the laws of nature and entirely meaningless.

Okay, what are your thoughts on that statement?

Yeah, so I know Sabine.

She does a lot of these videos, and I love most of them.

Now she has one indeed on free will, and actually I used that one when I gave some of my lectures to illustrate how extreme some physicists, including very good physicists, can become.

Indeed, in this video, Sabine goes really a very long way, claiming that if you believe in free will, you are denying science.

So she’s really claiming that actually science has answered the question in the negative, there is no free will.

This is, in my opinion, a clear overstatement.

It’s taking physics as a religion somehow, and it’s physics with classical mathematics.

Again, we just discussed that.

It’s pretty strange that Sabine Hossenfelder makes that kind of mistake, because one of her books, which I like very much, I think it’s called Lost in Mathematics, actually says we have to be careful.

We, the physicists, have to be careful not to overestimate mathematics.

In high-energy physics, people try to guess the future theories just by the beauty of mathematics, by symmetries and elegance and things like that.

So she says, no, but maybe actually the correct mathematics of the next physics theory will not be as elegant as we think or would like it to be.

So, okay, that’s a reasonable argument, and I certainly buy that argument.

But then herself takes classical Platonistic mathematics as the truth, and because Platonistic mathematics considers only objects, mathematical objects, that are outside of time, it’s a timeless language, classical mathematics.

And so when she concludes that time cannot exist and that everything has already to be settled, she also believes strongly in super-determinism.

You know, everything is already determined.

There is no quantum randomness.

Bell inequality violations can be explained by super-determinism.

And yeah, at least she’s very consistent that I certainly grant her.

But when she claims that science has proved it, for instance, that free will is an illusion, she goes too far.

And she goes too far by taking mathematics too literally.

CW Earlier in the conversation, you said indeterminacy is the necessary condition for free will.

It’s not sufficient.

However, any indeterminate theory can be made determinate with supplementary variables.

We can talk about that just for people who are wondering what the heck that means.

And then similarly, a determinate theory can be made indeterminate, so they’re equivalent.

And thus, is determinacy truly a necessary condition for free will?

Yeah.

Well, the way to make an indeterministic theory deterministic is by adding variables.

And the trivial way of adding variables is just to add all the future results of all future events or future measurements.

It’s a trivial way of doing it.

It’s not very practical and very useful, but obviously you can always do that.

Somehow, maybe one could say that instead of God playing dice when an event happened, God played all dice at the initial condition, at the Big Bang, and coded all this information of all these dice that he played initially, he coded it into the initial conditions, the initial conditions of these real numbers that contain all this information of all future events.

Or in Bohmian quantum mechanics, it’s a similar idea.

You have this additional value table that also contain infinite information, and that somehow in a clever way, code all the outcomes of all possible future measurements.

So you can always do that.

But you don’t want just to be able to do it, you want to be able to do it in a faithful way.

You want to describe nature in a faithful way.

And adding the result of future measurements into your initial condition, I don’t think this is a When I was speaking with Carlo Rovelli, he said there are two interpretations of quantum mechanics that he feels like are consistent, relational quantum mechanics, and then the many-worlds.

Of course.

Right, of course.

But he doesn’t like the many-worlds interpretation, so he chooses the relational one.

Now, from my understanding of your views, there can’t be a wave function of the universe, because it can’t just simply evolve in time determinately.

Is that an incorrect reading?

Correct, correct.

Okay.

Now, does that mean that you don’t believe in the many-worlds interpretation?

No, not at all.

I think that’s quite an empty concept, and I think the explanatory power of many-worlds is essentially zero.

Again, it’s again one of these things which is super deterministic.

You know, there is the initial wave function of the universe, and then everything evolves according to that, and there is never any event that happens.

Nothing really happens.

It’s just this unitary evolution, which is an enormous rotation in this gigantic Hilbert space.

There’s nothing happening there.

You cannot tell a story here.

No, no.

So my view, I’m much closer.

I’m not claiming that I have the solution to all these problems, but my feeling is much closer, my heart is much closer to spontaneous localization theory, so stochastic evolution of the Schrodinger equation.

And so in this way also, as time passes, this Schrodinger equation, this wave function, sorry, gets added additional information, a bit like my numbers for classical mechanics, and as time passes, this additional information that gets added to the wave function may localize it here or there with appropriate probabilities, and we have stochastic equations doing that perfectly.

I won’t keep you for much longer.

I know that you probably have to get going soon.

So I’ll just ask a couple more questions.

Now going back to when you were younger, and your little Nicholas was philosophizing in his armchair, and you dabbled with different logical systems.

So we talked about periconsistence and intuitionists.

Did you dabble with questioning even if logic should be the basis of mathematics itself?

Well, when I did my PhD in Geneva, indeed, a long time ago, my PhD advisor, Professor Piron, was actually a guy working in quantum logic.

I don’t think he himself really believed in quantum logic, but there were many people around, and so we had visitors who were really thinking of this quantum logic, and that by changing the laws of logic, we could make sense or better sense of quantum logic.

I don’t think that this is an interesting approach.

So my answer to your question is no.

And again, I’m rejecting the law of the excluded middle, essentially about propositions that concern the future.

You know, my bicycle, now you may ask, is my bicycle on that side or on that side?

Well, maybe I forgot.

Actually, I know, but let’s suppose I forgot.

Even if I forgot where my bicycle is, my bicycle is definitely either there or there.

It’s not in an indeterminate position.

Now, if you ask me, where will my bicycle be in a week’s time?

That’s indeterminate, as of today.

Okay, it’s a very nice example that shows that, indeed, you may have initial conditions that don’t determine the future of these dynamical systems, but you need very specific dynamical systems.

You need this dome, that’s why it’s called a dome, in such a way that if you have a particle coming to that dome, it will, okay, if you don’t throw it hard enough, it will just go up and back again.

If you throw it too far, it goes over it and goes to the other side.

So, there’s precisely an initial condition, an initial velocity, such that it will stop at the top.

And that doesn’t exist for all domes.

It exists only for very specific domes.

And for these very specific domes, so, of course, we have another ball comes from that side or from any side, let’s suppose it’s a two-dimensional thing.

From any direction, it can stop at the top, which means now the initial condition, it may go at any time in any direction.

And that will always be a solution of the Newton’s equation.

But, so this is fascinating indeed.

But I don’t think it’s super convincing because, you know, if you change the shape of that dome by an epsilon by a little bit, it’s gone.

I mean, this peculiarity is gone.

So, it is not a generic feature.

It’s a feature of some very, very specific dome or potential, as we call it.

The reason why I like it is because I know that it’s predicated on real numbers and so on.

So, maybe that’s another dispute you have with it.

The reason why I like it is that even in the classical domain, we can show that it doesn’t have certain continuity condition.

And then because of that, it allows for multiple solutions.

And not only that, but you mentioned that it’s not a generic feature.

I don’t know if there’s a result that says, much like we can say that the typical real number has infinite information in it.

I don’t know if there’s a result that says the typical configuration of matter is that which has Lipschitz continuity condition.

I would think it’s the opposite.

I would think that not satisfying the Lipschitz continuity condition would be typical if we have the general space of functions.

But I don’t know if that’s true.

I don’t know if there’s a result like that.

Okay.

I also don’t know.

My bet is that this is very specific and that generically we don’t have this phenomenon, but I’m not sure about that.

My last question is with regard to quantum gravity, is there an approach that you favor?

Make relativity deterministic.

But you know, that’s a vast program.

Okay, now let’s get to the audience questions.

This one comes from Stephen E.

Robbins.

A great question to ask Nicholas is, I’m curious if he has looked at Bergson time and free will.

Wait, yes, I’m curious if he’s looked at Bergson.

So that’s it.

Yeah, yeah.

So I looked at it.

I read some of it.

I mean, it’s too large.

I didn’t read everything.

Certainly a lot of his writing resonates.

But somehow, that’s where I’m a physicist, much more than a philosopher.

And Bergson was clearly a philosopher.

So at some point, it is kind of too vague.

I cannot really, you know, grasp it.

I cannot really anchor on it.

And yeah, so for that reason, I think I cite him even in one of my paper, things like that.

So I’m certainly sympathetic.

But it’s not really my way of doing physics or science.

Now, this question comes from Complex Plane, at Kekule6.

Does he think that the denial of free will by physicists is an attempt to make evidence fit a model?

Now Chomsky says that it may be something outside human cognitive abilities, that is free will, to understand.

Does he hold a similar view?

I don’t really know.

Again, I mean, for me, free will comes first, in this logical order.

So you need it to start arguing about the existence of free will.

So somehow, you cannot really deny the existence of free will, because if you want to argue against the existence of free will, you need free will to be able to buy or not buy the argument.

Then someone may say, well, how is it that you’re choosing so and so?

Because we use our free will to choose among possibilities.

Are you saying there’s nothing that influences that?

Is it random?

How does that work?

No, no, no.

So of course, we get influenced.

I mean, obviously, we are under very heavy influence.

So free will is not something that we use continuously, and so on.

I mean, most of our decisions are not so important, and so on.

And we get influenced by ads and whatever.

And they’re also not random.

I mean, they might be partially random.

You can, for instance, decide whether you go to a restaurant tonight by just tossing a coin.

So sometimes it will be, but most of the time, it will be not random, and not predetermined.

Now you may say, but who is now making the decision?

Is there a little guy in my brain?

Well, it should be myself.

So I’m not sitting in my brain or whatever.

So that’s where our understanding of what free will is, is limited.

We don’t have this kind of understanding.

Maybe it comes also back to what you asked initially about consciousness.

Somehow, I’m making conscious decisions.

Not always, by the way, but sometimes I’m making conscious decisions.

And I’m not sure I have much more to add on that.

Our decisions are extremely determined by our environment, but being extremely determined is not the same as being fully determined.

Exactly, exactly.

There is room for some decisions.

There are clearly some decisions where we spend a lot of time thinking about, we really wait, we discuss with ourselves, maybe also with our friends and relatives.

And there are also other decisions that we don’t really care much about, and that are much easier, and where we can accept that we get seriously influenced by the outside world.

Professor, thank you so much for spending some of your time with me.

I appreciate it.

I know it’s late where you are.

No, it’s okay.

It’s 20 past 8.

That’s perfect.

Thank you very much for your time.

Tell me when that will be online.

Very good.

Thank you.

Thank you for your interest in physics, in science, in free will, and in my poor understanding of all those.

David Wolpert (Part 3)

02:16:52 David Wolpert (Part 3)

Now we switch one more time back to David Walpart, who challenges us to redefine free will in a way that is not only provable, but aligns with our common understanding of the term.

How about we define free will, or you define free will, and then tell the audience what your inference theorems have to say about free will.

You’ll have to define free will, and also define what your inference theorem is, and then what the inference theorem has to say about free will.

Okay, so, first a warning.

There is an unfortunate tendency—it should have a particular name as one of the rhetorical fallacies.

It’s, you know, the ad hominem fallacy, the this fallacy, the that fallacy.

For people to take a term that’s in very common use and is very controversial because of all these reasons, they want to establish that it’s true, so they redefine it in a certain way that they can establish that it’s true.

That redefinition, all of the original reasons that it was so controversial, they are now defined out, and what you’re left with is actually a very different kind of a concept.

And they now then herald it and say, oh, look, I’ve just proved such and such, where what they’ve really done is redefined it in such a way that they could prove it, but all the reason people were interested in the first place is now out of their new definition, so it’s a bait-and-switch.

Motte and Bailey Fallacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

  • great: motte and bailey (descriptive of the particular move)
  • vague: bait and switch (in what way)
  • vague: moving goalposts (in what way?)

“The fallacy is called Martin Bailey, I believe.

Martin Bailey, okay.

How’s that spelled?

M-O-T-T-E, and then Bailey’s as the drink, I believe?

And essentially, you mean, so you take some fact, and then you’re strawmanning it, and you use the strawman to disprove the larger one.

Tom Miller Yeah, or to prove, as the case might be, Martin Bailey.

That’s nice.

I’ve got to look that up later.

Aaron So, continue.

Tom Miller So, yes.

So, for example, certainly if you’re familiar with the concept, the notion of God has been treated that way.

You know, many people say, oh, Einstein really believed in God because, you know, he said, the laws of nature, and so the laws of nature is God.

But of course, the reason that God is considered to be a controversial topic is because it’s an anthropomorphized.

It’s this dude in the sky with a big beard who’s deciding who’s going to win the football game Sunday night, and that’s the one that’s controversial, and so on and so forth.

And Einstein wasn’t saying anything in favor of that particular one.

So, it’s a little bit of a Martin Bailey.

And frankly, I think that he has done some great work, and he’s a good friend and a great guy.

But I think that Dan Dennett was recently involved in this with free will.

He wrote a book in which he tries to now claim I’ve proven free will, and in essence, he’s defined away its aspects that made it controversial in the first place.

So, what do I mean by free will?

There’s one aspect to it, which would be that of the people who write dictionaries.

What does it mean in common discourse?

And what I think free will means in common discourse has something to do with a means by which it is possible to abrogate the laws of deterministic science in such a way that a human’s cognitions are not subject to those laws.

So, what is going on in your head right now is not some very complicated, too complicated to calculate, but nonetheless inviolable function of what it was you were thinking 10 seconds ago together with the stimuli, sensory stimuli from the environment, that somehow there’s something else that is not subject to any laws of science in some sense.

It’s not even subject to stochastic laws.

It’s just amorphous and ill-defined.

And so, certainly, all of us have a subjective experience of such a thing.

But the proponents of free will in this sense, which is controversial, would say that, no, that’s actually an objective truth.

I don’t see that there’s any room for that, to be quite honest.

So, in that sense, no, I don’t, if that’s what, if we do adopt that kind of a definition, which I think is in accord with the way it’s used in common parlance, no, I don’t see that there’s any room for such a thing.

You can maybe kind of get close, and Scott Aronson, again, he’s involved, engaged in a Mott and Bailey’s in this particular paper of his, but he and even worse Mott and Bailey’s is Seth Lloyd,

They try to make the case that Turing machine notions of computability provide a way out in that they say that, yes, it might be, there are various flavors of the argument, but one version of it is, yes, the present state of your mind is a deterministic function of what it was, and so on.

But it’s an uncomputable function in some technical senses.

Yeah, Stephen Wolfram says something similar, where he uses his term computational irreducibility and says, well, yes, there are outcomes that are computationally irreducible, and that’s where free will may live.

But ultimately, you don’t have control over the laws.

It’s still a deterministic step-by-step algorithmic process.

Yeah.

And in a certain sense, it’s kind of interesting, because one might ask in terms of the laws of science, of physics, of how the universe actually evolves, is there any room for anything besides deterministic or stochastic evolution?

I can write down the definition.

You can go look it up in math textbooks what a stochastic process is, and you can look up in math textbooks what a deterministic invertible process is, and you can actually formulate the one as a special case of the other.

Is there any way you can even in theory imagine science that would not be either random or deterministic?

Is there anything else it could possibly be?

And there are notions in the original motivation for Komogorov in terms of his work on Komogorov complexity, and many other people who are wondering about intrinsic randomness, what does complexity mean, what does random really mean?

They came up with definitions which are something that is random, but is not random, but it has no probability distributions.

So it’s interesting to think about whether that might provide any kind of a, whether that’s a difference without significance, or whether there is a significance to that possibility that physical systems might, in essence, violate the physical Church-Turing thesis and have this kind of an uncomputable character to them, which is not random, and it’s not deterministic, but it’s something different, and whether that has any kinds of consequences, I mean, if it’s true.

So that’s interesting in almost like a philosophy of science kind of a way.

But it really is, I would say, irredeemably far from what people mean by free will to really say that it’s relevant to the discussions that people have about what free will is.

I think for them, for the vast majority of what philosophers have meant by it for millennia, it’s no, it’s certainly nothing to do with Komogorov complexity and Turing machines and so on and so forth.

It’s simply the notion of there, this supernatural in the literal sense of above nature, above the laws of nature, which is inherent in me and my soul, and I cannot even define it, because it is something that’s non-definable, and that allows for superseding of the laws of physics when it comes to my own brain.

That’s what is sometimes meant.

I think that’s most fully what is meant by people who are talking about free will, have been talking about historically, and I almost view it as a non-starter.

And what I’m saying is that where I’m over there wearing my metaphysics hat, if I’m just going to push metaphysics to be what I personally, David Walpert, I’m interested in, which is all the way down the road, I see.

I see.

Okay.

I see.

So let me put it like this.

It sounds like what you’re saying is if one is making a claim that your brain, David, that you have some free will and it supervenes the laws of physics, sorry, it doesn’t supersede physics, supervenes on that your free will somehow determines the laws of physics, at least momentarily enough for a neuron to fire differently.

And so therefore you have free will.

So you have some, your free will has some ontological status.

And then you’re saying, well, okay, where along the chain from electrons to cells, to neurons, to, well, a neuron is this type of stuff, to the whole brain configuration, to your behavior, where on that chain was physical law broken?

Because you can look at any given one of those chains and you can say, well, look, there’s no violation of physical law.

And so if the nebulous person is making the claim about some nebulous concept like free will, you’d better show me where it comes in.

So far, the laws of physics are not violated at any level, as far as we’ve examined it.

Is that what you’re saying?

Essentially, yeah.

As opposed to, do I have a feeling of free will?

Yes, I do.

Okay.

Now what I would say to that is, I’d still say that we don’t know, and I don’t think you’re making the claim that you know either.

So I don’t think that we’re speaking differently.

Let me put a bit of a monkey wrench.

So when we look and we examine any one of these features, so we look at, let’s say the electron bound with a proton, we say there are no laws of physics being violated here.

This is all explainable with what we have currently as our models, or at least we have the idea that some other model may exist in the future, and then cells and so on and so on.

It’s as if you’re looking individually at small parts, but still the counterclaim could be that you show me that the laws of physics are obeyed for someone making a decision across the whole spectrum and not looking at it individually across different people in different circumstances and say, here, it’s not violated.

It would be almost as if what you’re doing is looking at a small billiard balls bouncing around in a small environment saying, there’s no time here, there’s no time here, there’s no time here.

But yet you’re saying that there’s time at the higher level.

Well, there can be a merger.

I mean, Phil Anderson’s more is different.

You can have laws, I mean, that’s what condensed matter physics is all about.

Parisi just won the Nobel Prize for spin glass models, which is thermodynamic limit, an infinite number phenomena that arise, strictly speaking, only when you have an infinite number of these indirect models, but it’s all being governed by mathematics.

And so you’re correct.

I’m not saying that I now, and maybe not humanity ever, would even be able to fill in all those steps.

I’m saying that there is a consistent picture in which those steps are part of a mathematics, which may forevermore be beyond humans.

But I’m then going a little bit further and saying, give me—provide for me anything other than essentially an elaborated version of describing the experience that you have when looking at a beautiful painting, something that’s got something that is not mathematics.

I don’t even see what one could call free will other than—and as I can—I just don’t even understand what else that could be besides mathematics and then aesthetics.

I don’t see that there’s—I don’t see how we can be doing reasoning, reasoning rigid.

Ironclad, we know that with the things that as Ironclad could come up with, given all the stuff about noisy deterministic reasoning, deductive reasoning, but how we can actually come to any kinds of conclusions if we’re not using logic.

Let me say that second-order logic.

That’s part of mathematics.

Second-order logic is part of mathematics, and I don’t see how we can—if we can’t even define the terms in something like what is called in mathematical logic a language where you’ve got an associated set of axioms and so on and so forth, I don’t even see how we can be speaking about it in those terms.

I don’t see what philosophy can be if it’s not that.

I see.

When we’re talking about how some of these philosophical claims are volutinous, they’re bleary, they’re opaque, dubious, you don’t know what the heck it means because they’re speaking ambiguously.

And then you’re saying, well, I don’t know what it means.

I understand what mathematics would mean if mathematics was fundamental.

For me, please help clarify for me, what the heck does that mean?

Because to me, that’s just equally—I can understand the statement that mathematics describes what we’ve seen so far, but then to say that mathematics is what we’ve seen so far, I don’t understand what that is is.

What is the mathematics?

And then when we say it’s a rule, what is a rule?

We can play that game.

So, can you help me understand the ontology?

So, first of all, assuming that we’re not worrying here about things like Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem or the other things about math eating its own tail.

Sure.

We’re not trying to do, for example, Pressburger arithmetic, which would allow you to avoid Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem or anything.

That’s one of the things that I find so a deep flaw or attribute in me is that the more I can be smashed on my ass by the universe, realizing that I have been misconstruing my limitations for being those of the universe, the more I feel I’m making progress.

That’s my aesthetic acme.

I don’t think I can answer your question, and that, to me—and I understand your question and feel your question, and the fact that I cannot answer it to me—is a problem.

It’s a really beautiful, stunning illustration of the fact that the deficiency is in me.

It’s a feature, not a bug.

It’s a feature, not a bug.

Brian Keating, Lee Cronin

02:32:39 Brian Keating, Lee Cronin

And we arrive now to Brian Keating.

Again, links to every single one of these full-length podcasts are in the description.

Keating explores the ontological underpinnings of the materialistic perspective of consciousness.

Next question comes from thisincosmin.

This is to both of you.

Ask all of your materialist guests to give one single example of something outside of consciousness.

I think there are great difficulties in doing that, simply because we are the ghost in the machine that is defining, A, what consciousness is, what our experience is, what is materialistic or not.

I should say that I’m much less materialistic than I assume Lee is.

I don’t know so much about Curt, but I’d love to know more.

In that, what I usually talk about is, is there permission to believe?

Not the proof.

I said this on Lex’s podcast.

I don’t care if I believe in God.

Does God need me?

Does God care about Brian Keating?

Who gives a crap?

Maybe if God believes in me, if God exists.

But the question of whether or not you—I’m a behaviorist, so I think that people manifest how they behave, the underlying consciousness that they have internalized is manifest externally by their behaviors.

So I look to things like religion in a very practical sense.

Can this give community?

Can this give a purpose?

Can this—without necessarily accepting the reality as provable in a scientific context?

I don’t think you can prove or disprove.

And I give upbraid my religious friends too.

I say, if you don’t learn science, you’re basically just kind of living in this bubble.

If you don’t learn—because science may actually bolster your faith.

As I said on Lex’s podcast, and I’ve said other places, what if the fact that we can perceive an infinite spectrum of colors, an infinite diversity of life, an infinite number of tastes and dimensionality of—it could be otherwise.

And the fact that the universe is extravagant is potentially a clue, a symbol, a talisman.

I’m not saying it’s proof, of course, because I don’t think there can be proof.

But I think those are sort of non-materialistic.

But again, it’s materialistic in a reductionist sense, because I do believe that you can practice it for your own benefit.

You can glean wisdom from it.

You can glean experience, community, charity, things that improve you, Stoicism.

I’m one of the few people—I read the Christian Bible every day and the Jewish Bible every day.

I read the Stoics, the ancient Greeks, the Romans.

These are things that I think broaden your mind, whether you believe it has to be true or not.

So I’m more of a pragmatist, I would say, in terms of what consciousness things could not be explainable via science.

On a day-to-day basis, do I think that it’s not possible to learn about the universe?

Of course not.

No, I do.

I believe we can learn tremendously about the composition, the structure of the universe on a practical level.

And so, to be honest, I don’t really concern myself so much of, like, these questions, the ultimate question, like, do I exist?

Do I have free will?

I actually don’t personally find those interesting.

I know you’re interested in it.

Yeah, do you—forget about if you find it interesting—do you happen to believe that you have free will?

I do, yeah.

In free will in general?

I do.

And how does that comport with your experimentalist reductionism?

I don’t know if you believe in reductionism, but it’s— I don’t necessarily believe in reductionism.

I find all these things kind of—again, so I participated with Stuart Hoffman, who is a good friend—not Stuart Hoffman, Stuart Hameroff at University of Arizona, who runs a science of consciousness seminar every other year alongside Roger Penrose and others.

And actually, Noam Chomsky spoke with me a few years ago here in San Diego when I was here.

And, you know, I became very frustrated and disillusioned a little bit, because they couldn’t even, like, say for sure what consciousness was, and yet they said they have a science of consciousness, or they’re working towards a science of consciousness.

And I know Sam Harris is the hard problem.

Until you understand—so it’s not so much that I feel like I can prove it, or I feel like I’m a hypocrite because I believe in free will even though I am an experimentalist.

No, it’s more that I think the burden is on other people who believe that there isn’t free will, and there isn’t—you know, there is super-determinism.

And I know people will just throw it around, like the block universe, but there’s no evidence for it.

So I guess the question is— Okay, I’ll give you— Yeah, go ahead.

How is that— Sure.

Let’s say you have free will.

Okay, well, so that means you made a decision of your own choosing.

Well, what caused you to choose in that particular direction?

And then if you say, well, I had some play in that.

Well, then I ask, what caused that?

It’s just what caused.

Until you get to something that is outside of you—so, for example, the initial conditions of the Big Bang, maybe, or your mother giving birth to you, which you didn’t choose—how is it that you have free will?

I guess I would ask kind of like the Turing—like, how would you tell the difference?

Like, if I did have free will, you know, as they say, like, I have to believe in free will.

I have no choice.

But the question of, you know, I would say, is that the super set of all events that have taken place since the Big Bang?

If you want to say that that’s deterministic, when we know that there are certain quantum decoherent effects that cannot be modeled as intrinsically being deterministic or could possibly allow for violations of certain Bell’s inequalities, if you look at it that way, I guess it just—then it becomes very, very, too all-encompassing.

So, like, I recount to somebody a couple days ago, like, when I was dating my wife, we went to an astrologer, and she knew I didn’t believe in astrology, and she wanted to have fun.

So she said, go tell her about yourself, and she’ll predict your horoscope.

And so I said, yeah, I’m Pisces.

I do this, this, and this.

She said, oh, it’s going to be good.

You guys are going to do this, and blah, blah.

And I said, is it really true that Pisces are born in September?

I forgot.

Oh, no, you’re born in September?

Yeah, I’m born in September.

Oh, you’re a Virgo.

But don’t worry.

Everything I said is still going to happen anyway.

So it’s like, what is the difference?

Like, if everything is so all-encompassing, then I guess the free will is— I’m a Virgo, too, by the way.

Oh, you are?

Okay.

Well, Virgos are the ones in their right minds.

I don’t know.

I think, you know— I think you’re right.

Well, I also happen—I wouldn’t say I believe in free will, but I don’t find the arguments against free will as particularly convincing.

I just want to know what your opinion was.

So is it—your counter-argument is that—is the Turing test.

How would you tell one way or the other?

It’s an experiment in this question.

Yeah, exactly.

And isn’t it—I’m a pragmatist, Curt.

You know, at the end of the day, you know, what I’m concerned about are things that I can get a crisp answer to.

So I don’t believe I’ll ever get a crisp answer to that, nor do I—and you could ask me about God, and I don’t think I’m going to have like some answer about God or the existence of God.

But I think, you know, I think a place for a physicist, especially an experimentalist, is to be agnostic, but actually agnostic, which means, like, if you just don’t go to church or you don’t go to synagogue, in my case, you go to the same, you know—you have the same religious performance as Richard Dawkins.

Like, there’s no functional delineation between you and Richard Dawkins.

I actually had this conversation with Freeman Dyson before he passed away, you know, because he said he’s an agnostic.

And I said, well, what church do you go to?

He goes, ah, I don’t really go to church.

I said, oh, so you go to the same church as Richard Dawkins.

And he’s like, cognitive dissonance a little bit.

So what I look at is behaviorism.

So how do I behave?

And if I knew that everything was controlled by, you know, the initial condition state, if there was a Big Bang, which we don’t—so I guess I think about it in terms of what is the pragmatic, day-to-day implication of this?

Does it have any bearing on me individually?

So in the case of free will, I don’t think it does.

I don’t think I’ll behave differently and treat my kids, you know, like one kid hits another one, I say, oh, well, you don’t really have free will, so I’m not going to be—no, of course I’m going to punish them or make them understand and apologize.

I’m not going to lay it off.

As some people, like Michael Shermer, I’ve had this conversation, he basically is much more libertine about this.

On the other hand, if God exists, that’s a much bigger question, right?

And I’m not saying if I believe or I don’t.

As I said, I’m a fully practicing devout agnostic, meaning I go to services, I read and I learn, I’ve taught myself Aramaic so I could understand the arguments of the second holiest book in Judaism called the Talmud.

I learned that at age 30.

It wasn’t easy.

And I study it on a regular basis because I want to take it seriously because if God exists, that would have a—if you knew, I don’t know your religious beliefs and it almost doesn’t matter to me, but if you knew, like I asked Sean Carroll this question.

I said, what is the probability the multiverse is true?

He said 50%.

And I said, what’s the probability that God exists?

He said less than 5%.

He didn’t say zero.

So imagine now, that means he’s open.

He is a brilliant man.

So I could tell him, let’s say I provide evidence, some miracle that he can’t dismiss, and then he believes it.

So he would change his life.

I know that he would, even though I don’t think he thinks the probability is even that high, by the way.

But it was a good soundbite.

We had a good conversation about it.

But do you know what I’m saying, Curt?

The bottom line is I am concerned with things that will impact my life as a behaviorist.

How will it change my behavior?

How will I change my treatment of the poor, the sick, my wife, my kids, you?

How will I change my behavior is much more influenced to the good, I would say, by wrestling with the question of whether or not God exists.

Whether or not it does exist is an important question for that reason.

Because if the answer is yes, it would have huge implications.

And even Dawkins has said he doesn’t rule it out.

But free will, if you told me that everything is super deterministic, it wouldn’t change how I operate on a daily basis.

All right, we’re now done with the philosophical musings on free will of Brian Keating.

Joscha Bach, Control Systems (2)

02:42:55 Joscha Bach

We will segue into Joscha Bach’s exposition on the nature of free will.

Joscha Bach sees free will as an outflow of a control algorithm and explicates its implications for human behavior.

Where does free will come in?

Free will is a representation, in the system, that it’s made a decision and the decision is being made on the best understanding of what’s correct.

And free will is basically the outflow of this control task.

It’s the outflow of the control algorithm being executed in the right way.

The opposite to free will is not determinism.

If you are indeterministic, you cannot have free will.

If you behave randomly, there is no will involved.

It’s just random.

And the opposite to free will is also not coercion.

Because you are deciding that you are giving into the coercion.

You wouldn’t need to be coerced if you wouldn’t have a degree of freedom.

But the opposite to free will is compulsion.

It’s basically when you do something despite knowing better.

The opposite of free will is compulsion as well as randomness.

Randomness is the absence of will at all.

The system that is random has no will.

So the will cannot be free or not.

So we have to look at the opposite of the freedom.

And the opposite of the freedom is not the coercion, it’s the compulsion.

Compulsion means that you have a model of what you should be doing, but you don’t find yourself acting on it.

You find yourself acting on something else.

You are acting based on some impulse or some addiction.

And that is basically the true impingement on your freedom.

But it’s important to realize that freedom is not an absolute notion in the physical sense.

It’s a reference that we make to certain internal states.

So when I refer to my own decisions as being the result of my free will, it depends on the context in which I use this.

And when I talk about the experiential context experienced by will as free, when I have the impression that I made the decision based on parameters that are the right ones, that are in the proper order with respect to the control structures that my mind currently implements, and not because of some glitch in the matrix, of some glitch in the system that implements me, or of some erroneous programming, or some external force that is spreading in my mind.

So when people have the impression that they act out of a compulsion, for instance, because they, say for instance, have anorexia, or bulimia, they might decide not to throw up after eating, but they cannot help themselves.

They just have this enormous urge to throw up, or make themselves throw up.

There’s nothing that they can do about this.

And it’s a very disturbing experience, because it impinges on your freedom.

There is one thing that you want to do, and another thing that you find yourself to be doing.

Karl Friston

02:46:07 Karl Friston

We now transition from Joshua Bach’s views on consciousness and free will, to Karl Fristin’s, who will illustrate the function of consciousness from a free energy principle perspective.

There’s one quote that I love, that I…

I try to live by, and it’s only the shallowest of minds would think that in great controversy, one side is mere folly.

I’m sure you’ve heard that before.

I haven’t heard that particular one, but I’ve heard something similar, which is…

Okay, so do you believe in free will?

And if so, how do you define it?

So free will, yeah.

I mean, you’re asking, do I believe in it?

There’s certainly space for free will in the realization of a free energy principle in sentient artifacts at many levels.

When you actually come to write down and simulate or build little toy agents, you very quickly realize that the most interesting, in fact, the only interesting behaviors that you can simulate arise when you write down the generative models as containing autonomous dynamics, usually of a chaotic sort.

So the reason I use the word autonomous dynamics is that mathematically speaking, there’s a sort of free will in the autonomy.

There’s even in a deterministic setting, there is an unpredictability given the initial conditions that cannot be determined.

So in that sense, there has to be a mathematical kind of free will at play.

The other sort of take, I guess, on free will is it comes back to what we were talking about before about making our own sensations, creating our own sensorium.

So if you remember that from the point of view of minimizing prediction error as surprise, there are two ways I can do that.

I can change my mind so that my predictions are more like what I’m sensing, and that would be a minimization of prediction error through perception.

There’s another way of doing that, minimizing the prediction error.

I actually just change what I’m sampling to make the sensations more like the predictions.

So that’s action in the service of minimizing surprise or prediction error.

But what that means is that my actions are basically enslaved to where they can fulfill my predictions.

So they are in the service of self-fulfilling prophecies.

So collectively, action perception is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And in that sense, I think you can find free will.

If we are creating our own worlds and our own sensory inputs, we’re constructing our sensorium.

Who else is doing it?

So in that very simple, I won’t say deflationary, but simple account of free will, I can’t see how it can be any other way.

Noam Chomsky (Part 1)

02:49:28 Noam Chomsky (Part 1)

As we move from Carl Friston to Noam Chomsky, Chomsky will take us through a history of the philosophical thought on free will.

I’m curious about your views on consciousness.

If you’ve ever had any experiences, whether it’s with psychedelics or marijuana or an unconscionable amount of alcohol or meditation that has changed your views on consciousness.

It’s not part of my universe.

I’m probably the only person you’ve ever spoken to who never used marijuana.

So what do you think the function of consciousness is?

It’s our window into the world and into ourselves.

Very fragmentary.

Most of what’s going on in our mind is completely inaccessible to consciousness.

Do you take a materialist standpoint, that is, that the world is made up of atoms and from that consciousness is an epiphenomenon?

Or do you see consciousness as foundational at some level ontologically?

There is no clear notion of materialism, so it’s impossible to answer.

By materialism, we mean anything we more or less understand.

And I’m curious to know what your views are on free will.

Free will?

Like 100% of other people, even those who deny it, I think I can decide right now whether to lift my finger up or down.

Science tells us essentially nothing about this.

It only tells us we can’t incorporate it within our current understanding of science.

So there’s a certain sense that material reality from some of the people that we’ve been speaking to is secondary to that of consciousness.

They think that it’s a material that’s more epiphenomenal.

That’s more of an epiphenomenon as opposed to consciousness being something that’s sparked from the material world.

And we were curious because we know you have more kind of materialistic aspects or atheistic aspects in your thinking.

If you thought there was something that was more transcendent, or if you think it’s something more material, something more like it’s just us on earth?

Well, that discussion can only be pursued if you have some notion of what the material world is.

So what is it?

Actually, if you look at the history, there was a quite interesting debate about this several centuries ago.

So the foundations of modern science, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Huygens, Leibniz, the great scientists of the 17th century, developed a concept of material world.

The concept was called the mechanical philosophy.

Philosophy meant science.

So it’s mechanical science.

The idea was that the world is a machine.

It’s like the complex artifacts that skilled artisans were producing and then spreading all around Europe.

Mechanical clocks, performances that looked like real actors, digestion of a duck, the fountains at Versailles, all over the place, incredible machines.

And the assumption was, well, the world is just a bigger machine.

Machine meant what it just means to you and me.

Levers, gears, and things pushing and pulling each other, and so on.

And that was the reigning doctrine, the idea that Galileo and others considered a theoretical account not acceptable, if you couldn’t construct a machine to duplicate it.

Well, Newton came along and showed that there are no machines, none.

He thought that was a total absurdity, spent the rest of his life trying to overcome it.

The other great scientists of the day, Leibniz and Huygens and others, accused him of reinstituting occult ideas, interaction without contact.

He agreed.

The problem was never resolved.

Science just abandoned the quest.

They basically said, well, we’ll just construct intelligible theories.

Newton’s theories were intelligible.

The world he described wasn’t intelligible, but they said, we’ll forget it.

Science lowered its goals.

Now we just try to construct intelligible theories.

Whatever the theories tell us, that’s the material world.

So there’s nothing to discuss.

The material world keeps changing as we understand more.

So the question whether something transcends the material world is just a way of saying we don’t know how to incorporate it within our intelligible theories.

Maybe we never will.

Maybe someday we will.

Soterios Johnson

John Vervaeke, Joscha Bach (Control Systems)

02:55:06 John Vervaeke, Joscha Bach

Moving now from Noam Chomsky to Joachim Bach [sp] and John Verweycky [sp], who were both in a theolocution together, they talk about Searle’s Chinese Room Experiment.

Noam Chomsky And so, we have updated in a sense because we no longer just see money as an agreement between people, but this agreement between people has been extended into machinery that we have built in the world that works independently of the beliefs that people have.

And this leads us to the question of what is software.

And software is not a thing, right?

Software is something else.

In which sense does software exist?

And the best answer that I have so far discovered is that software is a physical law.

A physical law says if you, for instance, arrange matter in this particular way, the following thing will happen.

And this is true for software, right?

So no matter where you are in the universe, in which universe you are, if you produce the following functional arrangement of things, the following thing will happen.

This is what software is about.

So the programmer, in some sense, is discovering by constructing certain very peculiar circumstances a very specific physical law.

That’s very… I just want to interrupt.

That’s really cool.

That’s really cool.

I really like that idea.

I want to make sure… I’m sorry for interrupting.

I want to make sure I’m following you.

You’re proposing that software has the same kind of ontological status as physical law.

Exactly.

Yes.

Wow! That’s really, really cool.

I hadn’t… That’s cool.

Keep going, please.

I just wanted to say that’s very cool.

Yeah.

I thought when I stumbled on this insight that it was a good insight that basically started to make sense, right?

Because it’s an apparent pattern in the interaction of many parts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That’s very good.

I like that.

That’s very good.

That’s very good.

So this also means, because I think that mental states are best understood as software states, that the ontological status of our mental states is different from the ontological states of the one that we attribute to physical things.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

So this has to do with the notion of identity of a mental state that is similar to the identity of a physical law, which means it’s not this pointwise identity.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s a functional identity.

Yeah, yeah.

And now let’s go back to Searle.

The original Chinese room argument is very simplistic in a sense like it’s a children’s story myth that Searle himself doesn’t believe in.

And it’s an argument that is by Searle when he repeats it today, made in bad faith.

Searle is affiliated with this.

His actual contributions to philosophy have been largely an extension of Austen’s speech act theory that are boring and wouldn’t give rise to fame.

But the Chinese room is somebody that everybody understands because it interfaces with certain intuitions, and it’s an intuition pump.

And if you disassemble these intuitions and try to make them more distinct and more clear, then many of them fall apart.

And Searle is aware, because he’s not stupid, he’s a very smart individual, of many of the ways in which they fall apart.

But he is still repeating the original Chinese room argument because it’s his brand.

So it’s not because he believes in it.

And if you actually read his work, he is aware of many of the counter arguments, and he knows that he needs to go into a few levels of complications to have an interesting argument, to have an interesting case that he’s making.

So the superficial level of the Chinese room argument is maybe not that interesting.

A slight extension that is more interesting is the Chinese brain argument that Searle is also aware of.

And the Chinese brain argument suggests that instead of having this library with books in it, in which you execute the algorithm, we use a different implementation of that whole thing.

And instead, what we do is we take a mechanization of the neuron itself.

So if we accept that what the brain is doing is facilitated by the interaction of neurons, the neuron has to follow certain rules in order to make that happen.

And maybe we can spell out these rules in our thought experiment, and then we assign a Chinese person to a neuron.

And maybe we need a few more, maybe we need 86 billion Chinese people instead of 1.4, but it’s a thought experiment, so not a problem at all.

And now, instead of neurons, we have Chinese, which follow these rules.

Or we could use machines instead of the Chinese that are following these rules.

And so I think that this matching between a neuron and a Chinese person is not completely absurd on the face of it.

Of course, it would be much larger and we blow it up.

And now Searle would say, of course, the Chinese brain doesn’t have the necessary and sufficient conditions to produce a conscious mind and access to meaning.

So it doesn’t change anything, whether the Chinese room or the Chinese brain is performing these operations.

The Chinese brain is still not able to speak Chinese, because the individual identities of the Chinese people and their knowledge does not interfere in any way with the emulation of the functionality of individual neurons.

So now, if we have established this case where Searle would say the Chinese brain is not conscious, but your brain is conscious, let’s see where is the boundary between those two systems.

So let’s take your brain, blow it up until a person and a neuron have roughly the same size.

So change the time so it doesn’t matter how much the Chinese need to talk to each other to make the neural functionality happening and send messages back and forth.

So let’s keep this an identity.

And now we basically take your neurons and Searle accepts that neurons are facilitating mental activity.

He is not a mysterianist or something.

He doesn’t know how the brain does it, but he agrees that the brain is doing it.

He is a physicalist in a sense.

So now let’s replace step by step the neurons by some other machinery, for instance, Chinese people or machines that have neural-like functionality.

And Searle at some point says this loses the ability to be conscious.

So the consciousness is drowning out of the system by this replacement process.

And what this means is that Searle has a strong anti-functionalist position.

He basically says that the function of the individual parts is not producing the essential behavior.

There is somehow an essence.

He is an essentialist.

And I don’t know how to get essentialism to work because nobody has ever seen an essence.

We can talk about an essence, but it’s epiphenomenal.

And the problem with epiphenomenalism is the following.

Epiphenomenalism is, if you go back to our dualism from the beginning of our conversation today, it’s the idea that there is maybe a read access from the mind, where the mind is reading physics, but no write access from the mind into physics.

So it’s not violating the causal closure of physics.

But there is a problem with epiphenomenalism.

And that is the phenomenal experience that you don’t think you can explain in the physical mechanism is not driving anything of what you are saying, including your utterances of beliefs.

So when an epiphenomenalist says, but I feel and this cannot be explained by physics, this is caused by physics.

Because the epiphenomenalist has to move their mouth or move their fingers to express the statement.

And all these movements are caused by an entirely mechanical process.

The true feeling which happens next to the physical mechanical part of their mind, the philosophical zombie and so on, is not driving any behavior.

So basically there would be this locked in epiphenomenalism that would helplessly watching their body make statements in favor or against epiphenomenalism.

But there would be no causal relationship between the epiphenomenalism.

So no epiphenomenalist is an epiphenomenalist because they have phenomenal experience that cannot be explained by physics.

That is the issue here.

And so if Sir goes down that path, he goes down to a very inconvenient place that I don’t know how to resolve.

Okay, John, I know that you have to get going.

So how about I read the last question?

If it would take too long for you to reply, then send me an email and then I’ll read it when I’m re-editing this podcast.

Sure.

Okay.

So the last question comes from Xanthius.

He says, or she says, these models of consciousness seem to focus on explaining the production of intelligence or a simulation.

But it isn’t necessarily clear to me why a simulation should be able to perceive slash experience itself.

If we think of metaconsciousness as a combination of intelligence and consciousness, the model seems to focus mainly on the rise of intelligence in metaconsciousness.

How do you explain the ability to perceive slash experience the simulation?

John, you start.

Um, so it’s a very short, easy question.

Wrap it up for today with this simple question.

I mean, it’s important to ask that question, but it’s important to not ask that question the wrong way.

You can always ask what it is like.

And the thing, and this is like Moore’s thing about the good.

I can ask that for any proposal.

You can even ask that.

Well, you know what it’s like is to have qualia.

Well, what’s it like to have qualia?

Do I have qualia of my qualia?

Like you have to, like, and this is the difficulty.

You have to come to a place where you’re saying that’s what it is like to be what it is like.

And we didn’t get into it too much, but like I said at the very beginning, that primary sense of relevance, and I think is a big piece of what it’s likeness.

It’s why things stand out and are salient and are backgrounded.

It’s why things are aspectualized for us, to use one of Searle’s notions.

And many people are converging on the idea that the function of consciousness is this kind of higher order relevance realization.

And that’s why it overlaps with working memory and attentional machinery.

So what it’s like, if that’s right, if what it’s like is this ability to do salience landscaping, to have this dynamic texture of how things are relevant to you, if that’s a big part of what it’s like.

And I think it is, by the way, because in the pure consciousness event, all of those other things that are so beloved, all the adjectival qualia and all the other things, they go away and consciousness doesn’t.

So those things can’t be necessary conditions for consciousness.

If that’s a significant part of what it’s like, then being intelligent is also that.

Being intelligent is this capacity to zero in on relevant information, exclude relevant information.

That’s why you get high correlations between measures of general intelligence and measures of working memory.

But of course, there’s deep anatomical relations between the machinery of working memory and attention and fluid intelligence and consciousness.

So I think the question is now being to a place where I want to say, no, no, no.

And by the way, notice how you run on that.

You generally attribute consciousness where you attribute high orders of intelligence.

You track them together.

Like, Joscha, I don’t, well, I go further.

I don’t even eat mammals because of that conclusion about mammals.

Well, there you go.

And so for me, right, there has to be a level at which you accept an identity statement.

Because like I said, you can always play the game no matter what.

That is what if I say X is what it is like, you can then then you can just do.

But what is it like to write X?

You have to come to a place where you accept the identity claim.

And I’m proposing to you that if you look into the guts of intelligence, at least general intelligence, fluid intelligence, and then you look into the guts of consciousness.

And where do we need consciousness?

We seem to need consciousness for situations that are novel, for that are complex, that are ill-defined and situations that don’t have those demands.

We can we can make automatic unconscious.

That’s a good point made by Bournseth.

I don’t think the questions about intelligence and consciousness are ultimately separable questions.

And I think there’s good reasons for that.

I’ve just given you some.

And therefore, I think at some level, and maybe Joscha will like this, when a system is sufficiently intelligent, it’s going to be conscious.

That’s what I would argue for the reasons I’ve just given.

And asking me, but what is it like to be intelligent?

Or what’s it like to be?

Notice you don’t ask the question about what is it like to be conscious in the sense of what’s behind it, right?

You have to come to a level at which you say, no, that’s what that’s this.

This is what it is liking is.

This is the function it’s performing.

This is the kind of process it is.

If not, if you don’t put some bound on where that identity is possible, then you just get an infinite regress of this question.

Because no matter what I posit for you, you can step back and say, but what is it like to X?

And then I’ll say, well, what’s it like to X is to Y?

And you’ll say, but what is it like to Y?

This is like the four-year-old ask you why all the time, right?

You have to come to a place.

And what I can’t give you is I can’t give you a phenomenological experience of that.

Because you’re trying to ask how phenomenological experience is itself possible.

What I can give you are these plausible arguments about overlapping functionality, et cetera.

That’s how I would answer that question.

Okay, let me try.

So there is an issue, for instance, with free will.

Free will is an intermediate representation, I think.

Free will is what decision-making under uncertainty looks like from your own perspective, between discovering the first-person perspective and deconstructing it again.

And once you have deconstructed your first-person perspective, you basically realize that there is a particular procedure that you are following when you are making your decisions.

And when you observe yourself following that procedure, you will not have an experience of free will.

It’s just we rarely get to the point in our short lives where we fully deconstruct this.

And I just give this example to argue for the possibility, and I’m not sure there’s no certainty there, that consciousness might be an intermediate representation.

It’s basically a simplification of the state of affairs in which we are in before we automate all the necessary behaviors that an intelligent system might want to exhibit when it’s being confronted with the world in which we are in.

The reason why we experience things is not because physical systems would be capable of doing so.

It’s quite the opposite.

Neurons cannot experience what it would be like to be a person that is confronted with a complex world and it changes its attitudes in response to what’s happening to it in this complex world.

But for the organization of the neurons that is controlling the behavior of the organism, it would be very useful to have this knowledge of what it would be like to be a person that is changing its attitudes in response to what’s happening to it.

So what the neurons are doing is they implement a model of what that would be like, a simulation of what that would be like.

In the same way as the neurons create a simulation of a Euclidean universe with objects that bump into each other and have causal interaction, the neurons create the model of agents that care about future states and how they play out and make decisions about this.

And one of these agents is going to be a model of the organism itself and the behavior that motivates the organism.

And the reason why we experience things is not because we are in the brain.

It’s because we are in that model, we are in that simulation, we are in that dream that is woven by the brain to explain its own behavior.

We experience things for the same reason that a character in a novel experiences things.

It’s because it’s written in the story.

And the story that we experience, of course, is not a linear narrative made up of words.

It’s a more complicated world.

It’s a causal structure that contains the necessary properties to simulate physics and personality and agency and so on.

And we find ourselves in that dream.

So our experience of the world is virtual.

It’s a result of the capacity of neurons to dream and to create dreams.

playing out in the brain cannot be functionally replicated on a silicone-based computer.

I think that consciousness is not so much a side effect of how a biological brain makes sense of the world, but of the need to create a coherent representation out of dynamic perceptual features.

Because of this, I think it’s likely that intelligent, autonomous, sense-making agents with similar complexity as ours may be considered conscious in ways that are comparable to ours, even if they run on a silicone substrate.

There’s an important caveat.

Our computers provide some functionality which is hard to achieve in the brain.

They’re almost fully deterministic.

They’re synchronized in ways that allow each part to rely on the functionality of all others at any given time.

And they can make information available very quickly throughout the entire processing architecture.

Crucial parts of the phenomenology of human consciousness, especially reflexive consciousness,

may be the result of self-organizing processes that our brains cannot do without, but that may not be necessary in our digital computers.

Thank you both for coming.

The audience thanks you.

Bach and Vervaeke’s exploration of consciousness, simulation, and the interplay of neurons provides a compelling perspective on the nature of our existence.

Stephen Wolfram

03:13:27 Stephen Wolfram

These insights are particularly relevant to our next guest, Stephen Wolfram, who’s been on the podcast at least twice, by the way, and links to all will be in the description, as usual.

Stephen’s work on computational irreducibility and the complex nature of space and time sheds light on the nature of free will.

Why don’t you give a three-minute synopsis, I know that’s difficult, as to your theory for those who are unacquainted.

Well, gosh.

So I’ve been working on this for like 40 years, so it’s a little bit hard to compress, but…

But I suppose as gradually as one learns more about what one’s talking about, it becomes easier to explain.

All right, let’s talk about physics and kind of what’s the universe made of, so to speak.

And I think one of the things that has been…

The first question is, we think about things like space and time, and the traditional view of something like space has been, it’s this thing that you put things in.

It isn’t a thing itself, it’s just sort of a background, and you get to specify a position here or there in space.

That’s been kind of the idea of space since Euclid and so on.

So one of the basic points in kind of the models that we’ve developed is, there’s something…

Space is made of something, just like a fluid like water.

You might think of it as just a continuous fluid where you can put something anywhere in the fluid.

Actually, you can’t.

It’s made of discrete molecules bouncing around.

And so we think it is with space that sort of at the lowest level, at very small scales, space is just made of a whole collection of discrete elements.

We can think of them as geometrical points, but they’re not points that have a known position in anything.

They’re just discrete elements.

And the only thing we know about those elements is how they’re connected to other elements.

So it’s kind of like the points that exist in the universe are sort of friends with other points, and we build up this whole network of connections between points.

And so our universe as it is today might have maybe 10 to the 400 of these sort of atoms of space that make it up.

So sort of the first point is everything in the universe is just space.

So what all of the particles and electrons and quarks and all those kinds of things, they’re all just features of this details of the connections between these atoms of space.

So sort of the first thing is, what’s the universe made of?

It’s made of space.

What’s space made of?

Space is made of this giant network of nodes, giant network of discrete elements.

And we don’t even from that know why is space three-dimensional.

The thing could be connected any way it wants.

What happens is that on a large scale, something which is discreetly connected like that can behave as if it is, for example, a three-dimensional manifold on a large scale.

And for example, one thing that can happen and we think does happen in the early universe is that the universe goes from being essentially an infinite dimensional network where things are everything sort of connected to everything else to this sort of more or less three-dimensional, so far as we know right now, perfectly three-dimensional, although we suspect there are some dimension fluctuations that exist today.

So okay, so that’s sort of what space is.

Then what’s time?

Well, the point is, the idea is that there are these definite rules that will say if there’s a piece of network that looks like this, transform it into one that looks like that.

And that’s continually happening throughout this network that represents the structure of space and the content of the universe.

And so what we’re seeing then is a sort of progression of all of these little updates of this network that represents space.

And that progress of all those updates corresponds to the progress of time.

And one of the things that’s unusual about that is for the last 100 years or so in physics, people have kind of assumed space and time as sort of the same kind of thing.

One knows about relativity.

One knows that sort of there’s processes that kind of trade off space with time.

Yet in our theory, space is this extension of this, as it turns out to be a hypergraph, this network basically.

And time is the progressive sort of inexorable computation of the next configuration of the network based on rewriting the previous configuration.

So one of the things that is sort of an early thing to realize in our models is this question of, so how does something like relativity arise?

Well, the answer is if you are an entity embedded within this network, it turns out that the only thing you are ever sensitive to is kind of the network of causal relationships between updating events.

And it turns out, there’s a few more steps here, but it turns out that with certain conditions on the way those updatings work, it is the case that basically special relativity comes out of that.

We can talk in more detail about how that works.

So the next thing that happens is the space just made up from this network, it’s sort of the continuum limit of this network in the sense it’s like you’ve got these atoms of space underneath, and then on a large scale space is like kind of a fluid made up of lots of atoms that behaves in the continuous way that we’re used to perceiving it.

BOTTOM OF TRANSCRIPT, CLEANED UP EARLIER TODAY, MOVED FROM IDEA DEVELOPMENT PAGE 27 – 3:21:00 – lots of my commentary below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSbUCEleJhg&t=12060s

And then it turns out that you can get space in any number of dimensions, you can get space with different kinds of curvature.

One of the big results is that you can get the way the curvature arises in space is exactly the way that Einstein’s equations for gravity curvature should arise.

Roughly, energy, momentum, mass, these are all associated with levels of activity in the network.

And roughly, levels of activity in the network produce curvature in the network in just the way that Einstein’s equations say that energy momentum in physical space time should produce curvature in space.

So that’s a pretty important thing.

I actually knew that back in the 1990s, that these models could reproduce general relativity, reproduce Einstein’s equations.

So then the next big sort of pillar of 20th century physics is quantum mechanics.

There are really probably two or maybe three pillars of 20th century physics, general relativity, the theory of gravity, quantum mechanics, and also to some extent, statistical mechanics, which also sort of comes out from the formalism of these models, but it’s maybe it’s not the first thing to explain here.

But so how does quantum mechanics arise? Well, first thing is what is quantum mechanics? What is the important feature of quantum mechanics? Basically, in classical physics before the 1920s or so, people thought that in physics, there were definite equations of motion.

Things behave in definite ways.

You throw a ball, it goes in a definite trajectory.

What quantum mechanics says is, no, that isn’t what happens.

Instead, there are many possible histories that develop.

And the universe has many possible histories and all we get to be sensitive to is some kind of aggregated probability of what happens, not knowing specifically what the history of the universe is.

Well, it turns out in our models, that’s something that inevitably works that way.

And what happens is we’re talking about sort of the rewriting of this big network.

And the point is that there isn’t just one possible rewrite that happens at any given time.

There are many possible rewrites.

And each of those different possible rewrites represents essentially taking the universe in a different path of history.

But the critical fact is that just as there might be two possible rewrites that could happen and they produce a branching of two parts of history, so also it will turn out when there are other rewritings that can happen later, that actually these branches can merge.

Crop by Michael Hoffman
April 2025

So you end up with something which is this whole graph of possible histories we call it a multi-way graph.

And in this multi-way graph, there is both branching and merging of histories.

And that process of branching and merging of histories, that ends up being the story of quantum mechanics basically.

And one of the things that sort of a thing to think about is when we look at, they have this whole multi-way graph of all these branching histories of the universe.

And we say, let’s imagine that we are observing that.

The medieval art genre of {mushroom-trees} is concerned with stable control in the psychedelic state: that is the test of truth, relevance, concern; the standard of reference

[the art genre of mushroom-trees — the medieval art genre of {mushroom-trees} —

  • psychedelic experiencing not armchair ordinary state Phil.
  • concerned with control stability; control instability; stable control. ]

“It’s a little bit hard to imagine because what’s happening is we, our brains, our minds are themselves embedded in this multi-way graph.

Crop by Michael Hoffman
2025

“So just as the universe is breaking into all these different paths of history, so too are our brains breaking into all these different paths of history.

So in a sense, what’s happening is it’s a branching brain observing a branching universe.

You have to kind of think about, what does, how do you kind of, how does the brain, how does our mind make sense of that universe?

And what you realize is that you’re kind of defining what we might call reference frames, a kind of quantum reference frames.”

  • first, the branching model reference frame – unstable thus false, in psychedelics state.
  • then, the non-branching model reference frame – stable thus true, in psychedelics state.

“They’re analogous to the reference frames that we think about in relativity where reference frames, typical inertial frames are things like you are at rest, you’re traveling at a certain velocity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

There’s a kind of a quantum analog of those.

And that’s the way that we perceive this multi-way graph of possible histories.

And so when we say, let’s pick a particular quantum reference frame, corresponds to more or less a particular time.

And let’s then ask, what is the sort of slice of this multi-way graph defined by this quantum reference frame?

todo: image: cutting slicing a mushroom-tree

What we have is all these different possible histories and they’re all kind of laid out in some sense.

Histories can be close to each other if they had common ancestors recently.

Histories could be further away from each other if they didn’t have a common ancestor for a long time and so on.

All these histories are kind of laid out in some kind of space.

We call that branchial space, the space of branches, the space of quantum branches.

And that branchial space is not like physical space.

It’s not like something where you have ordinary motion from one place to another, but in branchial space, it’s a layout of possible histories, possible states of the universe effectively.

So one of the things that I find really neat is that you can talk about motion in physical space.

You can talk about, for example, even ever since Newton, we’ve kind of had this principle that if things aren’t acted on by a force, they will keep going in a state of uniform motion.

So it’s kind of like things go in straight lines if you leave them by themselves.

Einstein’s big idea in general relativity was to think that, yes, things do go in kind of straight lines in the sense that they’re shortest paths, geodesic paths, but space can be curved.

And then what might be to the thing, kind of its straight line path to the outside is a curved path.

And because that curvature is associated with momentum, that is what leads to the effect of gravity, so to speak.

So physical space, that’s how things work.

It turns out in branchial space, they work in essentially exactly the same way, except now in terms of the equations of gravity, we have the equations of quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.

And essentially what’s happening is that there are sort of paths in branchial space that are being followed.

And we are seeing deflections of those paths actually associated also with energy momentum.

And the way those deflections work exactly gives one the path integral of quantum mechanics.

So the thing that’s really pretty neat is, I mean, one of many very neat things, but one thing that I just found really was a very wow moment about a year and a bit ago now.

Gosh, I can’t believe it’s so long.

The- Congratulations, by the way.

Yeah, well, time inexorably moves forward, right?

So it’s, no, but I think that sort of a wow moment was realizing that the Einstein equations of physical space are basically the same thing as the Feynman path integral in branchial space.

So in a sense, general relativity and quantum mechanics are the same theory, just played out in these different kinds of space.'”

  • [branching possibilities
  • non-branching possibility]

“And that has a lot of implications because it kind of shows one how there are correspondences between general relativity and quantum mechanics.

And there’s sort of, I don’t know, intersectional cases when one’s dealing with black holes and so on.

But so that’s at least one level of the story of our models of physics.

And there’s a lot of detail and a lot of things that are now, it’s now clear, yes, we really can reproduce exactly what happens in black hole mergers.

We can reproduce what happens in quantum computing.

We can reproduce all these other kinds of things.

And we’re starting to have kind of ideas about a lot of, I know a lot of experimental physicists who keep on saying to me, when are you going to give us actual experiments to do? And we’re getting closer.

It’s no point in telling them there’s a lot of actual physics and astrophysics and so on to be done to work out exactly what to look for.

But I mean, another direction here that is, well, there’s several directions.

I mean, one is kind of understanding.

I’ve had sort of in the last few months, kind of a deeper understanding of what kind of observers of the universe we actually are and how consciousness relates to what kinds of things we do and don’t observe about the universe and what consequences that has for the kinds of laws, the kinds of physical laws that we believe are going on in the universe.

That’s one direction.

Another direction is I’m trying to understand if we can say, yes, we have the simple rule that’s updating this hypergraph and so on.

And then you say, why is it that simple rule, not another one?

What I’ve realized recently, what we realized a while ago, but it’s become a lot crisper now, is this idea that actually there is the, in some sense, the universe can be running all possible rules.

And we are seeing some kind of reference frame, not in physical space or in branchial space, but in this thing we call ruleal space, the space of all possible rules.

We are essentially picking a particular description language, a particular reference frame with which to understand the universe.

And so this sort of paradox of why, or this sort of conundrum of why does one, why does the universe follow one particular rule and not others?

Turns out the answer is it follows all possible rules.

And we are just at some place in ruleal space, observing it in a particular way.

And that has, the big surprise to me recently, last month or so, has been realizing that I actually think we can get a serious answer to a question like, why does the universe exist?

And as a matter of fact, the thing that comes out of that is the realization that as soon as we say the universe exists, and as soon as we give that argument, we are forced into a position that mathematics, in some sense, fundamentally exists too, which is something people like Plato have said, but something very different from the way that people have assumed the foundations of mathematics work.

So you asked me for a three minute, I’m sure that wasn’t three minutes, but summary, but that that’s, I mean, I have not talked about a lot of the intuitional underpinnings that are necessary for this theory of physics.

Concepts like the principle of computational equivalence, computational irreducibility, and so on.

I mean, what’s basically happened in the building of this theory is, it’s sort of the result of, well, I guess it’s now 40 years of my activities that in the first, the first layer is probably, you know, I used to do sort of traditional quantum field theory, general relativity, particle physics kinds of things.

So I know that stuff fairly well, although it’s kind of, it’s a Rip Van Winkle type situation for me, because that was 40 years ago.

And I’m now kind of, it hasn’t changed as much as you might’ve thought a field might change.

Like if I look at biology over that period of time, you know, there were all these things in biology where it’s like, I learned stuff about cells 40 years ago, 45 years ago, whatever.

And it was like, that’s an organelle of unknown function.

And now there’s a whole, you know, vast journals devoted to exactly what the Golgi complex does or something like this.

So in a sense, that field has advanced a lot more than physics over that period of time.

But I think the, you know, sort of that layer, then there’s the layer that I’ve spent years building practical technology for actually computing things.

And both the level of understanding of how formal systems work that has come with the process of designing Wolfram Language and Mathematica and so on, that has been really critical to what we built.

And then the very practicalities of, you know, so we actually have an environment in which to do experiments.

We can, you know, do graph theory easily and things like this.

And then the whole new kind of science development of what simple programs do, understanding principles of that and so on.

And I realized there’s in the end a fairly tall tower that we’ve ended up relying on to kind of construct this theory.

And I, you know, to me is this funny feeling because, you know, I’m really excited that we managed to get this done and it’s gone a lot better than I expected.

But it almost didn’t happen.

I mean, it very, very nearly didn’t happen.

And, you know, the question that I might ask myself is if it hadn’t happened, when would it have happened otherwise? And the answer is, I don’t know, 50 years, 100 years.

I don’t know.

It wasn’t a thing where, you know, it wasn’t like all the stars were lined up for everybody, so to speak.

It was a particular series of things that are kind of the story of my life.

And then people like Jonathan who had their own things that they bring into this, you know, it’s kind of an unexpected and unusual alignment.

Plus it turned out we managed to get a lot further than we ever expected to get.

So it’s, anyway, that’s a little bit of an outline of kind of where we are, I suppose.

Jonathan Blow I mean, there’s a lot more to say about the details of what’s happening with the models and how we compute things from them and so on.

But you asked for a basic introduction.

That’s my attempt at a basic introduction.

Jonathan Blow

03:32:46 Jonathan Blow

Now we move from Stephen Wolfram to Jonathan Blow.

Jonathan has a take on the second time around problem and the Everidian interpretation of quantum mechanics, which posits that all possible histories do occur.

They just aren’t in our universe.

Of course, predicting new things is always like the gold standard of like how you know you’re into something.

But there’s always the question of, is this just one of a large number of models that are isomorphic to each other?

And because he likes cellular automata, he found the cellular automata one, which would be a big deal anyway, right?

But it doesn’t really answer the question of like, are cellular automata fundamental or something, you know?

Although, like he probably has some angles in which he would argue that it does having to do with computational irreducibility and stuff like that.

Okay, speaking of computational irreducibility.

Okay.

Wolfram thinks free will is tied to that.

I’m curious, but the way that he defines free will, I don’t think is the way that most people would think of the word free will being defined.

More that you can’t predict your own actions, so it has to do with predictivity.

Either way, do you believe that people have free will?

Or do you believe that you have free will?

Let’s say that.

You’re asking the hard questions today.

What I think is that the idea of free will, the question, do I have free will, is, it takes as assumptions backgrounding the, for the question to make sense.

It requires a picture of reality that is too simple.

And that by the time you develop a picture of reality that is sophisticated enough, that question kind of doesn’t make sense anymore.

I’m not claiming that I’m at that level of understanding of reality, but I am saying, yeah.

Can you explain to me the simple background assumptions that go into a question like that?

And then how with more articulated assumptions or more advanced assumptions that dissolves the question?

I mean, I feel like this is ground that has been covered at least okay.

I mean, I don’t know.

I’m often very unsatisfied by discussions about these topics.

But the problem is to do a convincing explanation on this requires going into a lot of like subtopics that if people who haven’t heard them before hear them first from me, I’m not gonna give a particularly convincing version of them because it’s not my shtick.

I don’t go around talking about free will.

But there are, for example, things you can Google that’ll give you good starting points.

So for example, there’s a thing called the second time around problem, right?

Which is that it seems to be indistinguishable whether like this is the first time things were happening and we chose what could happen or whether it’s a fully deterministic playback of that.

And so that’s a simpler question that you could start with.

How would I even know the difference between those two things?

Because in the first time around…

So our reasons for believing we have free will, the primary one is that we feel like it, right?

We feel like we have free will.“

d/k. define your terms. WHAT’S THAT EVEN SUPPOSED TO MEAN?

“Maybe the first time we felt like we had free will because we had free will, right?

But the second time it’s a reproduction of the first time.

So we have to feel the same way or it’s not a good reproduction.

But it’s a deterministic reproduction.

So it’s not like we could have changed our mind, right?

And so thinking about a simpler sub-problem like that is much easier than thinking about the problem of the actual whole universe that we’re in right now.

But by thinking about smaller problems like that, you can broaden your horizons in a certain way.

You can broaden the scope of things that you think about, right?

So in that second time around problem kind of case, it’s unclear whether you had free will or not because which one of those, are you in the original or the replay, changes the answer.

But then it’s exactly the same experience in both of them.

So is that one experience or two experiences? Do you even know, right? Do they like map to the same thing or are they two separate, right? Another, dang, oh, so for people who know a bit of quantum mechanics, right? You know that there are, the Everetians have become quite well-represented currently in terms of the way that people interpret what’s happening.

And the way to interpret things from an Everetian standpoint is that just all things that can happen do happen, right?

And so what does it mean to have free will in that case?

It doesn’t mean what people naively think determinism means, which is that only one thing happens and must happen.

It’s like, no, actually a bunch of things happen, but then does it maybe, like maybe the question of free will is orthogonal to that in some sense anyway, because it changes the weighting on how much of things happen or not.

Like it’s unclear.

But so I think that rather than trying to answer this question directly of do we have free will, I think the best that people can do right now is like go to the gym and work out, right?

And like pump some iron, get buff and come back later and answer these questions.

Do you mean that metaphorically go to the gym?

🏋️‍♂️📚

Yeah, but it might help non-metaphorically as well.

So what do you mean metaphorically by that?

Do you mean go study philosophy, go live your life, go try and develop a skill?

Well, I mean, if you’re interested in the question of free will, then thinking about these sub-problems, I think can very quickly get you at least to a point where you realize why the question as originally posed is too simple to really make sense.

But that’s then been replaced by all these possibilities of how things could be.

Are those possibilities fictional?

Are they real?

That’s sort of the material you would be contending with in that domain.

Noam Chomsky (Part 2)

But then, Noam Chomsky (Part 2) then there’s maybe equivalent questions that are something like do I have free will, but that are more answerable and maybe more specific.”

03:40:08 Noam Chomsky (Part 2)

The Relevant, Psilocybin-Transformation Concern, as the Reference Point: Does Viable Stable Control Result from Possibilism-Thinking, or from Eternalism-Thinking?

“Jonathan Blow’s probing of free will in the context of deterministic and stochastic processes in quantum mechanics has been shared.

And now we move again to Noam Chomsky, the renowned linguist and philosopher who’s been on the Theories of Everything podcast approximately nine times actually.

Chomsky actually challenges the deterministic perspective and argues for the existence of free will and discusses the impact of our belief in free will on our societal structures and even personal identity.

This question comes from the chat, so it’s not on your list.

This is Laura Sosa who says, forgive a novice here, what are your thoughts on retrocausality, quantum entanglement, time perception and precognition studies?

Well, that’s an interesting question about the only argument I’ve ever seen from the sciences on why there can’t be free will is retrocausality.

The argument that if in our life experience, X precedes systematically Y and we take X to cause Y.

And if it seems that we’re carrying out an act, say am I lifting my finger just because I decided to do it.

At some level, maybe the, you know, not the level of experience, there’s an argument that time is reversible, which means that the lifting my finger could have preceded the decision to do it, which seems to conflict with the idea that I decided to do it.

I personally don’t think that’s a very persuasive argument, but it is at least one argument, I think probably the only argument that comes from the sciences against the universal belief, which we all have, whether we deny it or not, that we can make decisions about our next action.

Number 15, Beers Attitude from Czechnia asks, realistically, would a human society where the lack of free will is the commonly accepted truth be any different than the current human society where having free will is the commonly accepted truth?

There are sub-communities in our society where lack of free will is the commonly accepted truth.

Large part of the scientific community believes that, large part of the philosophical world believes that, thinks everything is determined, that freedom of will is just an illusion.

Actually, none of the people who profess this really believe it, in my opinion.”

  • Psilocybin – matured people beleive that no-free-will is metaphysically and cybernetically the case at the level of the source of control thoughts; and that
  • Our experience is shaped as possibilism-thinking.

“They, in fact, they’re trying to convince you of it.

They’re giving reasons.

If we’re all just thermostats acting in a totally determined fashion, giving reasons is totally pointless activity.”

You don’t give reasons to an automaton.

It behaves the way it’s going to behave.

But my feeling is, intuitively, all of us believe that we can make a decision as to whether, say, to lift my little finger or not.

[THAT’S NOT WHAT’S AT ISSUE. MEANING-NETWORK, WHO IS THE ‘I’ THAT MAKES THE DECISION? THIS IS KINDERGARDEN LEVEL DEBATE KNOWLEDGE. NOT ONE PERSON HAS EVER SAID “YOU CANNOT MAKE A DECCISION.” RED HERRING; STRAWMAN.]

“I can decide, do I want to do that or don’t I?

I think everybody intuitively believes that.

There are a large number of highly sophisticated, brilliant people who think they can convince themselves that they can’t make that decision.

In What Sense Do People Make Decisions?

Chomsky Strawmans the No-Free-Will Argument as if It Says “People Don’t Make Decisions” – Sloppy Speaking

[no, no one argues that. Chomsky Proves Freewillists Suck at Thinking and Strawman the Debate: “People Make Decisions, Therefore I Proved Freewill and Disproved Arguments against Freewill”]

They’re among us.

Society functions exactly the same for them as it does for us.

So the answer to the question, I think, is already given to us.“

[this is NOT thinking, it’s a failure to engage the debate -Michael Hoffman ]

“There are a great many among us, some of the most sophisticated people who think about these topics, who think there is no free will, everything’s determined.

Do they behave any differently from anyone else? Not detectably.

People Who Properly Disbelieve Freewill Detectably Behave Differently

[after Psilocybin enlightenment, they think about possibility-branching and the source of control differently, and have stable control in the Psilocybin loose cognition state
the psychedelic loose cognitive association state
plcas ]

They behave like we all do.

Joe Soro asks, if mental events are causally predetermined to physical events, in parentheses, which themselves are attached to volition, what does the data say about the relationship between conscious volitions and unconscious wiring in relation to the problem of freedom of the will?

What does linguistics say about this?

Linguistics doesn’t say anything.

But there is a question about decision and choice and consciousness of decision and choice.

And there is experimental work, the famous Libet experiments about 30 or so years ago, which showed that there’s a gap of a couple hundred milliseconds between a decision and conscious awareness of the decision.

They don’t talk about complicated things like what we’re doing, like making up sentences, not that, just simple things like say, lifting your finger.

So suppose I decide I’m going to lift my finger.

Well, it turns out that the musculature and the instructions to it are already being implemented before I’m consciously aware of having made the decision.

Well, what does that tell you about free will? Nothing.

It just puts it back a little further.

It says the conscious decision is maybe already determined, but what about the decision? No, actually, the sciences tell us essentially nothing about this.

What the sciences tell us is we can’t explain it.

What we can account for is things that keep to determinacy and stochastic processes, randomness, basically.

So if it’s within the framework of stochastic processes and deterministic processes, we can develop theories.

Well, is freedom of choice within that framework? That’s the question.

But the sciences don’t answer it.

They can just say we can’t handle it.

I mean, there are some kind of exotic arguments in quantum theory and in relativistic physics.

There’s an argument that actually time is reversible.

It has no particular direction.

It could be going in another direction.

So, for example, if an observer makes a measurement in the split experiments, it’s determining the waveforms collapse and it’s becoming a particle.

Well, could go in the other direction in principle.

So the collapse of the waveform could have preceded the decision to make a measurement.

So does that tell you there’s no free will? I don’t really think so, but it’s a kind of an argument.

And it’s about the only kind of arguments there are.

The rest is just saying, basically, we can’t handle it.

So if you think that the sciences are complete, then there’s no free will because it doesn’t fall within the framework of determinacy and randomness.

But the question is, are they complete? That’s the question of free will.

When you look at the study of voluntary motion, turns out there is extensive neurophysiological study of voluntary motion.

There’s a recent article by two of the leading scientists who work on it, Emilio Pizzi and Robert Ajamian, in which there is a state-of-the-art article.

What do we understand about elementary voluntary motion? Appeared in Daedalus Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

They point out that they go through what we’ve learned about it, and they kind of end up by saying, as they put it fancifully, that we’re beginning to understand the puppet and the strings, but we have nothing to say about the puppeteer.

We can’t say anything about decisions.

It’s a fact, you just can’t.

So you can believe what you like.

We actually all believe that we are free to make decisions.

I’m sure you believe it.

I believe it.

We could all be deluded, but there’s no evidence that we are.

Chomsky’s belief in free will, despite the seemingly deterministic nature of the universe, or at least the ineluctable quality of the physical laws, has implications for our personal identity and agency.

Thomas Campbell

03:49:38 Thomas Campbell

This leads us to Thomas Campbell, who provides a contrasting perspective.

Campbell argues that individual consciousness is merely an avatar in a larger quote-unquote simulation, suggesting that perceived free will is some illusion.

Thomas Campbell also explicates his views on death and the continuation of consciousness.

One question is, when you mention that we’re this consciousness and we’re logged onto the game, and that ordinarily we identify with the avatar of the game, and that that’s a mistake, and what we should identify with because it’s true, at least in your theory, sorry to put quotation marks around it, at least it’s true in your theory that this is who we truly are, the consciousness of love that’s logged on.

Then you said that when we die, well, some parts of our memory, I’m not sure if some parts are all, but regardless, let’s not harp on that, some parts of the memory at least continue on as well as with your choices, whether you’ve done good or bad or evil or lower entropy or raised entropy, however you would like to word it.

What I’m wondering is, is that supposed to bring someone comfort? I hear some people say this plenty.

I hear some of the people who are on the more Vedic ends of the tradition that say, well, your consciousness does continue on past your death.

Now on the Western end, they’ll say your consciousness continues, but you go to a place.

Whereas on the more Eastern end, it’s your consciousness continues, but it’s not you, it’s not your ego, it’s something else.

But then what I’m wondering is, the Eastern side doesn’t seem to provide, at least someone like me, it doesn’t provide me with any comfort because that me, that me, the player that’s logged on, bears so little resemblance to who I identify with now that it would be just like a materialist trying to give me hope by saying, well, all your molecules are going to continue on anyway.

So technically you do live on, you’re breathing the sun from, you’re breathing the big bang.

So you are like, I’m like, okay, well, I see that, but it bears so little resemblance to what I conceptualize as my identity.

I don’t give you a lot of comfort either.

That, that free will awareness unit we talked about before, that’s the part that’s really logged on.

That’s the piece of the IUOC, individual unit of consciousness, that’s, that’s logged onto the avatar.

That’s a one-off.

When after that life is done, that, that partition’s taken down, it’s integrated back into the individual unit of consciousness.

And now a new partition gets put down with just what it’s been learned and that goes off and logs on.

So all of those partitions, all those free will awareness units are just one-offs.

When they’re done, they’re done.

But what you accumulate is all of your experience, all your growth, all of your learning, all of your quality, all of your entropy reduction that is accumulated.

And you have a database.

It’s not memory, but you have a database of, of all the things that you’ve done, all the thoughts, all the feelings.

What about your friends? What about the relationships? Are those also cataloged? Because I could imagine that even if somehow I am to continue on with my attributes, but if I don’t have the people that I love around me and I’m not able to recognize them at least, then that also is somewhat meaningless, at least to me, at least right now.

Yeah.

That’s because where you are now and the way you see life and so on, and an ego that wants to continue on as you and wants to continue on those relationships because, you know, your children, your wife, you know, there’s people who are dear to you and you want that to continue on.

It doesn’t.

That’s, that is here.

When you die, your awareness of your life here begins to fade like a dream and you don’t continue that.

It’s, it’s not practical.

Yes, that’s kind of soft and warm and it’s comforting, but it doesn’t work that way because it isn’t functional.

It doesn’t work.

So, let’s say here you are and you’ve been through 10,000 lifetimes and you’ve had 10,000 sets of parents, you’ve had 30,000 children, whatever, and you’re going to remember all those and want to do something with all those relationships? Or is it just the last 20 or the last 500? You know, it doesn’t work that way.

That just is going to wide you up into a big ball of, of stuff that is emotionally grabbing at you and it’s not going to be functional at all.

Each time you take what you’ve learned, you graduate from third grade and you take what you’ve learned and you go into fourth grade.

And it’s a new experience, new teacher, new subjects expect you to know new things.

So, you, it’s that comfort of you being you.

Well, it’s only a problem if you see you as Curt.

If that’s you in your mind as Curt, then you have this problem.

But if you in your mind is your individuated unit of consciousness, the collector of all the experience, if that’s you, then you lives on forever.

And it’s not a problem.

You realize that these relationships you have now as meaningful as they are, they happen because those are the people you ran into.

If you’re born on the opposite side of the planet, you’d run into different people.

And next lifetime, you’re going to run into different people too.

And most of your learning comes from these relationships.

They’re very important.

They’re very significant, but you know, so is your third grade teacher significant, but you don’t make her come along under the fourth grade with you.

It’s done.

John Vervaeke

03:55:14 John Vervaeke

Now that we’ve heard from Thomas Campbell, we talk about free will as well as responsibility and what is causally relevant with John Vervaeke.

Do you personally believe in free will? No.

I mean, if I, if I, if I understand what you’re saying, I, I’m a compatibilist.

I’m somebody who thinks that whenever we’ve been talking about free will, we didn’t mean what is typically meant by free will.

I take it that this is what you mean by free will.

And if you don’t, of course, correct me.

But at least when I have discussions with people about this, they mean that there’s a, there’s something in them that is uncaused, an uncausal center, a non-causal center of causation.

So that there’s a, there in some way, a first mover, that there’s something in them that is right in, totally uncaused, but then can, can make things cause, can, can initiate a causal chain.

And I find, I find that both incredible in the sense of something I can’t believe in.

And I also find it, I don’t understand why people want this, why they want to possess this capacity.

First of all, I think my life gets better as my thinking is more and more determined by what’s true.

My actions are more and more determined by what’s good.

My, my experience is more and more determined by what’s, by what’s beautiful.

I don’t think freedom in that sense is an intrinsic good.

I mean, part of the project, for me, freedom is an instrumental good about, right, about getting more and more.

I would love it if my everything about, if my thoughts were completely determined by the truth, my actions were completely determined by what was good.

If I completely lost my freedom in truth, goodness, and beauty, great.

Why not? Right? Freedom for its own sake doesn’t, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t understand that as a value.

I understand it as an important political value, an instrumental value, but as a metaphysical thing, I don’t find it inherently valuable.

So when I, when I talk about what it is to say that an action is free from a compatibilist framework, for that, for what that means for me is the most causally relevant explanation of my behavior was my current, you know, my current state of consciousness and cognition.

Right? That’s what I think it means when you say I’m responsible for X.

I know I, did we ever mean that I was the sole cause of it? No, of course not.

I can’t think of an instance where we think we are the only causal thing for something happening, even when I’m speaking.

It’s dependent on all the causal properties of my lips and my vocal cords.

Right? I can’t think of anything where we’re not, where we’re talking about soul causation.

For me, we’ve always been talking about causal relevance.

Second, I don’t want a part of me, that’s what I was trying to do earlier, that is uncaused, like that is not causally connected.

That would mean my actions were completely arbitrary.

They were in no way relative to or relevant to the events in the environment.

Because if they are in any way relevant to the environment, that’s going to play out in there being some important causal relationship between what’s happening in the environment and my state of mind.

Not that I believe in free will, but just to play devil’s advocate, what you’re saying is that there are constraints.

So there are physical constraints, the laws of physics, how your tongue is situated in your mouth, the words that you speak.

I’m also saying there’s normative constraints, truth, beauty, and goodness.

Yeah, but go ahead.

Okay, so there are constraints.

Why can’t there be free will with constraints? So you’re saying, well, if you go back, then you would have to be a first mover.

Yeah.

But you could be a first mover within constraints, not just a first mover with no constraints.

Astral Ascent Mysticism: Prime Mover Sphere Drives Sphere of the fixed stars; Eternalism

Like, what the hell are you going to do?

Wait, wait, are you saying the first mover is responsive to the restraints?

Think of it like chess, or think of it like Go.

Right.

The game Go.

So there’s tremendous constraints.

First of all, we’re playing a board game.

Right.

Second of all, you can only move this piece and so on and so on.

But there’s so many options within Go that if you ran a supercomputer from now, from the beginning of the universe to the heat depth of the universe, it still wouldn’t exhaust it.

Yeah, it’s combinatorially explosive.

Right.

But there, so…

So what I’m saying is that there could be constraints, heavy constraints on free will.

So commensurate with your…

Wait, wait, but there’s a difference here.

Your example of Go, your example of Go is that, right, there’s lots of possibilities.

Right.

And that’s not the same thing as saying you have free will.

Right.

From {king steering in tree} through {mixed wine at banquet} to {snake frozen in rock}

Then you choose from those possibilities.

You choose from those possibilities based on…

Okay, so now we’re getting into a causal model.

But free will has to be outside of causality.

That’s exactly what I can’t get an analogy for.”

The Mytheme Theory (part of the Egodeath Theory) Provides and Explains Suitable Analogies

“Well, we know when we come down to subatomic particles that causality is just, you throw it out the window.

So causality being not a part of this universe is true.

It breaks down to some sense.

But as…

And there are other systems, like you said, a structural, functional, I forget what it was called, organizational.

Sure.

So that also breaks a causal model.

But wait, wait, we have two different things we’re talking about.”

[branching control instability vs non-branching control stability ]

“And I think that’s important.

There’s causation and there’s constraints.

And those aren’t identical.

Causation is about events that change actuality.

Constraints are about conditions that shape possibility.

[snake-shaped worldline frozen in rock]

And I’m invoking both of those and saying freedom of the will is…

I mean, if…

So you think it’s logically impossible?

Or do you just not want to believe it?

Or you feel like you have a propositionally consistent worldview that proves that there is no free will?

I think that it doesn’t make any sense.

I don’t know if that’s the same thing as saying it’s logically possible.

Logically impossible…

Sorry, logically impossible.

Logically impossible would mean it clearly makes sense, and then we can find it’s inherently contradictory.

I don’t know if it makes any sense.

The idea of free will.

The idea of free will.

That doesn’t make any sense to me.

And also the valuation of free will doesn’t make any sense to me.

I’m not trying to be obtuse.

I don’t know why people want it.

I mean, most of the major philosophical conundrums, like the mind-body problem and things like that, they deeply interest me.

The free will determinism thing leaves me cold, right?

I don’t know why people want it, and I don’t know what they mean when they say they have it.

Because even to say that you’re choosing, unless your choice is completely arbitrary and not in any way affected by the options you’re considering, constrained by them, right?

Then it’s not a free choice in the free will sense.

If your actions are in any way responsive to, responsible to the environment, you don’t have that kind of free will we’re talking about.

Now, a compatibilist said, we were never talking about that when we said I acted freely.

What we mean when I say I acted freely is precisely what we’re talking about.

I’m acting responsibly and responsibly to the environment and the most causally relevant, not the sole cause, not the original cause, but the most causally relevant explanation of that responsiveness and responsibility is my current cognitive state.

That’s all we ever meant, I think.”

[the medieval art genre of {mushroom-trees} is more relevant: concerns with control stability of the two different mental models of mental model of time, possibilities, and control.

mental model of time, possibilities, and control
mmtpc
WTF no matter how many variants of keyboard shortcut expansion phrase I enter, it’s never, ever the one i naturally think of & need, in practice.]

James Robert Brown: The Platonistic Perspective on Free Will

04:02:41 James Robert Brown

“Mathematical philosopher James Robert Brown will now speak about his Platonistic perspective on free will.

What are your views on free will, by the way?

Do you believe in it?

Yes.

Or believe against it?

Oh, interesting.

Okay, now are you like Daniel Dennett where you say, well, I have a compatibilist view?

[above, DD is accused of Motte and Bailey fallacy; redefining “free will” to neuter it – Like I have accused any “compatibilist” position of lying about what it asserts, though now I am more flexible and see a useful meaning of “compatibilism” – Michael Hoffman]

No, I have here, I feel completely at sea.

Speculate away.

I operate, I live my life as if I have free will.”

[So does Abraham after both killing and not killing child thinking, Isaac – God angel says: YOU HAVE NOT WITHHELD YOUR CHILD]

“I am, I eat too much and I blame myself.

I blame my willpower.

And while it would be very nice to blame something else, I can’t, I just blame myself.

I get angry at others.

I get angry.

I mean, some people I think can’t help what they believe.

Others I think have gone out of their way to make themselves stupid and I blame them for that.

So I’m happy to blame people for not doing what I think they ought to do.

And I do think they have free will.

I don’t know how to live in a world where we really don’t have free will.

But I may have, I may be just highly, that’s not an argument for free will.

That’s just an argument for we have to live as if there is free will.

I don’t know how really to live otherwise.

[Psilocybin & the art genre of mushroom-trees teaches that: think of source of control and branching differently. monolithic, autonomous control vs. 2-level, dependent control w/ illusory branching.]

“Now I’ve seen some people who are very sophisticated, you know, talk about this subject.

And maybe they’ll be able to persuade me in the long run that we don’t have free will or there’s a very good chance we don’t have any free will.

But we should, we can act like this and this and this and this and so on.

So I really, I have childish, immature, underdeveloped views about free will.

[naive possibilism-thinking vs mature integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking]

“The standard view that’s opposed to free will is, well, what caused you to make so-and-so decision?

And then it’s your neurology.

Okay, well, what caused that?

And you keep going until you get to a cause that’s not you.

Along that chain of causes.

Right, right.

Where does that chain of reductionism, because we just talked about physics being extremely powerful and more and more accurate.

There doesn’t seem to be room for free will.

So where does free will comport with our view of physics in the way that it’s formalized currently?

No, it’s terrible.

But it doesn’t have to be quite as crude as you just put it.

Here’s another issue in which I do not have strong views, but it’s sort of in the background.

And this is the difference between, this is the issue of reductionism and emergence.

So if you have a complete reductionist view and your world is deterministic, it’s very hard to make room for free will.

But if you have an emergentist view, that is, yeah, physics is at the bottom, but in a certain level of complexity, there could emerge biological loss.

Like strong emergence.

Yeah.

And out of that could emerge psychological loss and so on.

And free will would be something that is emerging at some higher level.”

[virtual experienced illusory freewill-shaped thinking: Isaac lives though Abraham did not withhold Isaac as a sacrific offering to honor God’s controllership]

“It’s not gonna emerge out of elementary particle physics.

I mean, sometimes people try to do that because they take quantum indeterminacy to be, that’s just stupid.

It’s just really bad arguments.

But if we did have some kind of emergence, you might have free will.”

“Right.

But again, I can’t make up my mind on that issue either.

Okay.

Yeah.

Where I was gonna go is, there’s no evidence for strong emergence, but there’s plenty of evidence for reductionism.

Like there’s no link in the chain that’s broken in the reductionist account as far as we could tell.

[the thinking here is inferior to Emily Adlam block time: shipwrecked on causal-chain determinism]

So then to believe that we have free will, I’m not suggesting that I don’t believe, I’m just throwing something out.

So to believe that we have free will seems to be counter to evidence.

[Psilocybin evidence indicates freewill thinking causes loss of control]

So how do you jive [jibe] with saying that I’m a person who goes wherever the evidence leads me, but simultaneously saying that I’m someone who believes in free will.

And when I say go wherever the evidence believes, sorry, that I’m a person who goes wherever the evidence leads.

I mean, evidence in terms of scientific evidence, because obviously you can be a spiritualist and say, well, I have the intuitions.

[only the spirit portion of the psyche is lifted above heimarmene]

I’m sure you might appeal to intuitions, but I’m curious.

So what do you say to that?

Well, I do count myself as somebody who’s led by the evidence.

Scientific evidence.

On the other hand, I don’t agree with you about, there’s no gaps in the going from us to elementary particles.

I mean, try to imagine accounting for Donald Trump’s election in terms of writing down the Schrodinger equation for the population of the world and solving it and getting out that Donald Trump is president.

What I meant was that so far, there’s no link that’s been shown to be false.

That doesn’t mean that there is.

No, no, no.

I completely agree with you.

So there’s no evidence for it.

Anyway, it wouldn’t be very reliable.

That would be like religious people who argue for the God of the gaps.

God fills in the gaps in our scientific knowledge.

Yeah, it’s a foolish way of doing it.

Let’s talk about Platonism.

Do you mind defining for the audience what Platonism is?

Sure.

Modern Platonism.

As opposed to being a strict follower of Plato.

Modern Platonism is simply the view that there are abstract entities.

Numbers being the most obvious example of this.

But they exist in some way, shape or form.

Yep, they’re real.

They exist.

And there are facts about them.

Like two plus two equals four.

There are infinitely many prime numbers and so on.

And these objects and these facts are completely independent from intelligent creatures.

So even if no intelligent life existed anywhere in the universe, it would still be true that there are infinitely many prime numbers.

If you believe that, you’re a Platonist.

In fact, there’s a little litmus test for audience members who’ve never thought about it before.

Ask yourself, do you think mathematicians discover new truths of mathematics?

Or do they somehow invent or create them?

Shakespeare created Hamlet.

If Shakespeare or no intelligent being had ever existed, Hamlet would not exist.

On the other hand, the spherical shape of the Earth would still be a fact even…

if no intelligent being had ever existed.

I say math is more like the shape of the Earth and less like Hamlet.

That’s what it is to be a mathematical realist or a Platonist.

You definitely should read that paper that you sent me, which I thought that you knew Nicholas Jessen and you were completely familiar with his work.

Anyway, just for the audience.

I read it at the time.

I do remember sending it to you, but I just completely forgot it.

Okay, I’m just going to give a bit of background.

Do me a favor.

Yes.

Send it if you have it.

I’ll send you a lecture from him because it’s wonderful.

Nicholas Jessen is a physicist who was answering a question that I was curious about, which is why I asked Jim here.

I said, hey, is there any other logical foundation of physics other than classical logic?

Because I’m curious, like what’s holding us back from theories of everything?

And I’m trying to tackle it from as many angles as I can.”

[interview me re Psilocybin tradition angle, branching vs non-branching; monolithic, autonomous control vs. 2-level, dependent control. Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism]

So I thought maybe this is one.

And you said, well, there is this person named Nicholas Jessen who thinks that intuitionist logic is a way to go.

And now I’m getting, now it’s coming back.

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

And so what he was saying, he has a few different reasons for believing that first of all, real numbers aren’t real.

And the reason for this is to say is because there’s only a finite amount of information that can be in any finite volume.

So let’s say it’s a real number.

If it’s an arbitrary real number, then it’s going to collapse into a black hole.

If for whatever reason, the particle somehow carries that information with it.

Okay.

Well, you can leave and leave that aside.

He says that all of deterministic physics, like classical physics, actually is completely compatible with an indeterministic view.

Forget about quantum mechanics.

And the reason is that all we can do is test it to a certain precision.

Let’s say 30 decimal places.

That’s being a little bit generous, but let’s say 30 decimals place for classical physics.

And then you can easily construct indeterminate functions.

So here’s one, I can’t say it because I can’t say it.

I would just have to write the function out, but let’s say you have the real line.

So zero to one, and then you somehow stretch the real line and then you cut the real line in half.

I’ll have to tell you what the function is, but either way, that real line, you can describe any number as 0.B1, B2, B like the digits of.

Okay, great.

What that function effectively does is remove the first digit.

So instead of it being 0.B1, B2, B3, it’s 0.B2, B3, B4.

Okay.

Now, given that finite, let’s say non-real numbers are completely compatible with classical physics, because we don’t know where the end of the error bar effectively gives a real number, or if it’s just cut off.

Do you understand what I’m saying? Sorry if I’m not explaining correctly.

Okay.

Given that, then we can have these simple systems that actually are not just chaotic because we don’t have sufficient information, but because within it, it genuinely is indeterminate.

For example, that function, like if you just choose an arbitrary, okay, so you get the idea.

Okay.

So then he was saying that indeterminacy is not incompatible with classical physics, even though we like to think of classical physics as being a determinant theory.

So then he goes on to say, calling physics deterministic or indeterministic is not a scientific question because both models predict the exact same reality that we see classically.

Forget about quantum mechanics.

And then he goes on to make a connection between that and free will.

Anil Seth He’s a proponent of free will, much like yourself.

And he says it can be saved, the libertarian version of free will, not the compatibilist, that is that I choose from the possible world.

Oh, anyway, that’s extremely intriguing to me.

I want to thank you so much for that.

And I’m going to talk to Nicholas about that.

Anil Seth: Strange Loops

04:13:42 Anil Seth

Moving from James Robert Brown, we now go to Anil Seth, a neuroscientist who talks about not only free will, but what strange loops are and how that has any relevance to what we think of as a self, that is your personal identity.

Do you agree with his conception of free will, the compatibilist approach?

I’m a compatibilist.

Yeah.

I mean, I think free will is another kind of perceptual experience.

And I think this whole debate about determinism is totally irrelevant to the understanding of free will.

I’m trying to get it dented [Dennett] on the podcast.

He said that he’s busy writing a book, so he can’t come on.

Douglas Hofstadter

I’m also trying to get Douglas Hofstadter.

What are your views on Douglas Hofstadter’s model?

I just don’t know.

I don’t know him personally.

And I’ve read only really the amazing,

4:14:50 [both talking at same time: Godel Escher Bach]

um, it’s one of the best books.

Everybody should read that.

It’s phenomenal.

Um, it’s just playful.

What I take from that is just this credible playfulness, creativity.

I have it right here.

I keep only it’s, um, three books beside me, four books.

It’s one of them.

Yeah, that’s one.

That’s one of them.

You know, that’s, that’s, I don’t know if you know this show, the Desert Island Discs.

We have it on the radio here in the UK.

And the idea has been going on for like decades.

And the idea is you, what are the eight songs that you would take with you if you were getting banished to a desert island, never to return? You can only take eight tracks.

Um, and then you’re also allowed.

So most people in England spend half their lives figuring out what these eight tracks are going to be just in case they get invited onto the show at some point and you want to be ready.

Um, but you’re also allowed to take a book.

Cool.

And so for you, that would be definitely, well, I wouldn’t say it would be the one, but it would certainly be up there.

I haven’t made a decision about the book yet.

Um, but it’s, so I love the way it just create, playfully explores our intuitions about what cognition is, what mind is, what, what explanations in biology, physics consistent.

I think it’s, I think it’s just, he’s a genius.

Full of insights.

Yeah.

Have you read his analogy book?

[cited in branching-message mushroom trees article – Michael Hoffman]

I haven’t, I haven’t.

It’s a great one, but it’s far too long.

Sometimes it goes through lists and lists what I find to be somewhat tedious.

Okay.

So what are your views on his views of consciousness?

Where do you agree?

Disagree?

Well, it’s a tricky question because to be honest, I, it’s been, I would be hard pressed to articulate what they are.

I mean, to me, it got, he talks about strange loops and things like that.

Um, yeah, I don’t have, I don’t have a particular strong view because I, to me, I’ve always just associated him with these, with these things about language, recursion, all these, all these playful insights.

[transcript garbled here]

So I don’t think he’s, as far as I know, he’s not coming to my radar specifically about consciousness, more about what self consists in and what we think of as a self.

So I don’t, I don’t think he’s coming to my radar specifically about consciousness, more about what self consists in and what we think of as a self.

So I don’t think he’s coming to my radar specifically about consciousness, more about what we think of as a self.“

/ end of video’s interview content

More ontoprisms coming…

04:17:37 More ontoprisms coming…

You may enjoy exploring the mysteries of the universe and free will in this solo episode with me reading mathematician Raymond Smullyan’s blithesome debate on free will between man and God.

Many of those who watch this consider it to be one of the best videos on TOE, and the link to that one with Raymond Smullyan is [NOT] in the description.

Video title:
“Is God A Taoist?” [Curt Jaimungal reads Raymond Smullyan]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-jh6tRh3Jw
“The late Raymond Smullyan was an American mathematician, logician, Taoist, and philosopher who’s [whose] writings are beloved.”]

Thank you.

The podcast is now concluded.

Thank you for watching.

/ end of transcript

Video: Free Will, Morality, Self Awareness | Robert Sapolsky

I didn’t pay attention to this, but the 4-hour vid surveying what physicists said on this topic on this channel, is a build up to this.

d/k what’s so special about this guy’s take, superior to the other 25 guys.

Video:
Free Will, Morality, Self Awareness | Robert Sapolsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0IqA1hYKY8
ch: Curt Jaimungal
Dec 29, 2023

“Robert Sapolsky joins Curt Jaimungal to discuss some of the most important topics of our time.

“Topics discussed include

  • morality,
  • free will,
  • the justice system,
  • intuition, and
  • chaos theory.”
Crop by Michael Hoffman
April 2025

Spiritual Narcissism, Ego Inflation, Evolutionary Spirituality (Jules Evans)

Michael Hoffman, April 13, 2025

Contents:

Disclaimer

Disclaimer about political characterizations: I am not sure I’ll keep this content, it includes political narratives and characterizations.

I might condense the transcript. Not sure it’s viable content for this site.

I have not read the transcript, I have only listened to the video 1 time.

I do not want to propagate political attitudes and assumptions and narratives.

This video has useful warnings, but I reject all political narratives, values, views, assumptions, characterizations.

I identify as autistic, I mean, not politically attuned or identified.

Intro

Ironic joke about the picture at top:

Join the superior, evolved RACE [Valentinus’ gnostic idea of the 3 “races”] of the elect Egodeath community lording it over the lesser people tormented in flames, down below.

[That’s a famous joke, about the saved peering over the edge of Heaven to look down at the torments of those below, for entertainment.]

The Elect transcending the little people, shown as mere stars below them.

Evans’ Vague Misrepresentation of Ken Wilber’s Theorizing about Spiritual Narcissism

Jules Evans is an example of spiritual narcissism. oops, I meant to say, he warns against that.

That move is how Evans abuses Ken Wilber and apparently rips off Ken Wilber, twisting Ken Wilber’s warning about spir. nar., into an apparent accusation that Ken Wilber is the peak of spir. nar.

A harmful parasitical move on Evans’ part, if I saw what I think I saw.

The way the pyramid diagram is introduced & shown in the video, with Evans talking over it, equates Ken Wilber = the peak of spir. nar. — when in fact Ken Wilber articulated theory about what spir. nar. is.

The result seems to be a malicious ripoff of Ken Wilber, based on my initial viewing of the video.

An inexcusable omission & ambiguity on Evans’ part. Evans fails to say the Ken Wilber warned, in an elaborate, theorized way, about spir. nar.

Evans is repeating and agreeing with what Ken Wilber wrote back in 1990s, that Evans is now parrotting here, in 2023, 30 years AFTER Ken Wilber’s books on the topic.

The Egodeath community has recog’d & praised Egodeath theory for being seemingly the ONLY psychedelics explanation that does NOT promise to be the savior of humanity.

The benefits of Egodeath theory are great, but not “save the world” or “evolve man” – I don’t know what “evolve” means.

The “evolve” concept & value system & marketing promises, is external to Egodeath theory. I model mental model maturation resulting from, caused by, Psilocybin — I am even a radical by saying, Psilocybin causes mental model transformation.

Not baloney pop-speak lexicon, mystical experiences occassioned by psychedelics or “epxerimented with” or “ego dissolution” or “neuroplasticity” – throw that lexicon in the trash, I reject it. the mystical absolute?

That’s not my lexicon. My system (Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism) is closed and coherent, in this sense.

“Common-core mysticism and perennialism?” Alien to my thinking.

I ONLY agree that mysticism is a fumbling indicator that there is treasure, Transcendent Knowledge, buried under that noise and junk overgrowth.

AFTER YOU REMOVE THE “MYSTICISM” OVERLAY, THEN you get what it obscures, Transcendent Knowledge.

Alan Houot I and can find common ground here. I reject his obsession with alien entities encounted – REJECT. That’s not Egodeath theory. That’s an alien lexicon and set of concerns.

The concerns of Egodeath theory are hardly the concerns of “common-core mysticism and perennialism” as everyone else conceives of the latter.

I only agree with common-core mysticism and perennialism insofar as it is framed per Egodeath theory.

The Egodeath theory is a “closed system” that SUBSUMES AND TRANSFORMS:

  • entheogen scholarship
  • Psychedelic RenaissanceTM
  • Common-core mysticism and perennialism
  • evolutionary spirituality(?)
  • Tim Freke’s recent emergent evolutionary spir’y: he hasn’t figured out his new view yet; make it up as you go. Wait for his “podbook” to come out. It’s cautioning against pop spir’y ideas & values like “destroy the ego”, & “nondual unity oneness” – a concept/model that I reject too because “Not wrong, but not helpful; not relevant; not useful (nor simple nor clear)” <<– my Engineering product mantra.

Jan Irvin recognizes that I don’t participate in the Huxley Social Engr’g project.

Jan Irvin interviewed every leader in psychedelics, and demonized the lot of them, but not me because I am not one of them.

Egodeath theory will NOT save the world! It will increase our humility and our comprehension.

And give easy fast enlightenment (being up front about pros/cons; good news & bad news) – against the hucksters.

I never saw value in the psychedelic utopianism, evangelism, evolutionary spirituality, elitism doctrine/ narrative.

I was too busy struggling to write up my own theory of how mental model transformation works.

That point is made in the video, that “challenging experiences”/ bad trips, and personal brokenness by eg Huxleys, is a historical motivation that drove their overblown, destructive utopianism.

todo: maybe move my commentary sections from within the transcript, to up here

Motivations of this Page

Interesting warnings by Evans, same as Jan Irvin discovered to his horror, than Huxley pushes.

Jules makes good points to beware of, not covered by me previously, because I’m so not attuned to such utopianism. Related: Egodeath theory is distinctive for NOT pushing:

  • “The Egodeath theory’s enlightenment will save the world.
  • “If only everyone knew Egodeath theory, that would save the world.
  • “We MUST adopt Egodeath theory, or else, the end of the world.
  • “It is URGENT that everyone MUST have Psilocybin transformation from possibilism-thinking to eternalism-thinking, per the Egodeath theoryTM, or else, man/ planet/ world won’t survive.”

The elect, the higher, the superior spiritual people – I want to make sure to avoid this, but that’s not a risk, since I’ve not asserted “learn the Egodeath theory to be a dominant superior person above the scummy masses & to save man.”

I *love* everyday Christians and the whole populace.

I’m eager to make Egodeath theory available to everyone, so they can have understanding of religious myth & can enter Psilocybin with reasonable control stability. Not to save man/ planet/ world.

Not Egodeath Eschatology.

Mainly I envision an audience of Loose Cognitive Scientists, but also, an audience of everyone.

I love popular religion and I merely want to offer people a superior explanatory model, per Science and especially per Engineering.

I read Mondo 2000 and have R U Sirius blessing written on my article draft the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence, before Mondo 2000 mag even existed! My friends in 1988 had Leary books, and Reality Hacker zine, and the other pre-Mondo zine. High Frontiers.

As a psychedelics-studying engineer, in 1988-2000, I read:

  1. High Frontiers
  2. Reality Hacker
  3. Mondo 1999 (as I called it, to diminish it & express skepticism and lack of alignment with my own views & values)
  4. WIRED

and all issues of Gnosis mag, in late 1990s.

I read the Mondo extropian zine, but my project is not that project AND I CHALLENGED AND CRITICIZED R U SIRIUS IN PERSON (for ignoring blotter) in a classroom at Stanford.

I never really bought into “extropianism”, I was struggling then in 1992 to write my 1997 theory spec summary of my 1988 breakthrough theory of what ego transcendence is REALLY all about, and why my model is superior to Ken Wilber because eternalism 100% evaporates ego, in a sense, humbling it to death entirely due to block-universe eternalism: you are a {snake frozen in rock}, hard to have egoic inflation, in a sense.

My expectations in 1985-1987 were modest: I simply, merely expected non-dysfunctional cross-time control – that’s all.

Houot reminds me of the inflated promises and narrative, in advocating a science discoverer explorer rational psychonaut approach. He one time writes about fitness requirements.

But Houot does not advocate any form of spirituality; he is vigorously, scorched-earth, anti-spirituality (too much) – making Houot immune to this.

In idea development page 27, I wrote why I am alienated from spiritual narcissism and operate from an alienated, wholly different basis than what Evans warns about.

Eternalism-based mystic revelation is the humbling opposite — spir. nar. is a symptom of possibilism-premised, ego-based notions of what kind of power Transcendent Knowledge power would give you.

{hubristic, psychedelics-empowered giants struck down by the gods}

In idea development page 27, check my April 13 2025 comments (a few minutes ago) about Tim Freke and how his approach is not this sort of inflation, he is anti- “ego reduction”.

Pop spir is too humble!

Pop spir’y destroys – not properly “transcends & includes” per Ken Wilber — the individual ego, pop spir destroys the individual, and Tim Freke wants to save the individual person and ego and separateness.

Tim Freke lately is against excessive “nondual unitity oneness”.

I insult oneness as “beginner’s initial experience” – I paint relational Transcendent Knowledge; 2-level, dependent control is the case.

I disagree with 99% of perennial philosophy: I ONLY agree that there is a common core or buried treasure; I disagree with everything people write about what that treasure is.

Actual enlightenment is entirely different than the freewill modern era assumes: enlightenment is per Ramesh, no-free-will – but, my model is healthier per Tim Freke & Ken Wilber.

Freke grew up w/ Ramesh as influence, now Freke rejects that scorched-earth unbalanced and simplieistic approach, like Egodeath theory is way better than Ramesh B.

Integrate possibilism-thinking & eternalism-thinking, to be whole and mature – and repair a little bit, dysfunctional cross-time control; at least, Jan 1988, I no longer held the same, egoic expectations of my cross-time control – enlightenment was a relief, by discovering block-universe eternalism and its limitations, its limiting ramifications.

Video: Jules Evans – Evolutionary spirituality as a frame for psychedelic experiences (2023)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGzEWLZHTQ –

Video title:
Jules Evans – Evolutionary spirituality as a frame for psychedelic experiences
ch: Exeter Psychedelics Group
Nov. 1, 2023
Talk and Q+A with Exeter Research Psychedelic Colloquium.

Desc. of video:

“One of the dominant cultural frames for psychedelics in western culture over last 130 years has been evolutionary spirituality.

“This tradition suggests human evolution is not finished and can be guided towards the creation of higher beings through such techniques as psychedelics and eugenics or genetic modification.

“But is everyone evolving into a new species, or just an elite? Jules will discuss the tradition of evolutionary spirituality, raise the ethical implications of this tradition – its tendency to spiritual narcissism, contempt for the less-evolved masses, Social Darwinism and Malthusianism, spiritual eugenics, and illiberal utopian politics—and suggest responses to these limitations.”

Transcript

Jules Evans:

uh hi everyone thank you for having me um so I am going to be doing a talk um about uh based on a paper that I published for a um special Frontiers edition of uh dedicated to psychedelic Humanities that uh a few of us wrote I think Peter also uh wrote well I know Peter wrote a paper for it as well and um my paper was called more of old than you and uh

it’s about evolutionary spirituality uh as a frame for psychedelic experience this is uh came out of a project that I worked on uh during the uh pandemic I was working on a book about um aldus Huxley and his friends and family and I was was just um curious to discover um Alice’s support for um for eugenics uh both from you know from from the 20s all the way to the end of his career

and this got me looking at uh evolutionary spirituality and its tendency towards what I call kind of spiritual Eugenics so I did some research on that and and I’ve been working on a on a book on it but um you know most of My Time is Now taken up with this challenging psychedelic experiences project but

I’m going to talk to you a little bit about my research and at the end I I’ll come back to how this kind of connects to um the work that arini and I and others are doing on uh challenging psychedelic experiences um okay so the key points that I’m going to cover uh over the next hour um are I I think it’s I I

I hope to persuade you maybe you already think this that it’s use ful and interesting to learn about evolutionary spirituality and its role in the history of new age culture and psychedelic culture uh and I think it’s been um understudied so far um and it’s still very much present in psychedelic uh culture this this Frame of evolutionary spirituality um Rick doblin of maps for example says that he hopes psychedelics will lead to a core of evolved Humanity um ran Griffiths also argued that

psychedelics can help in the evolution of humanity Christian angam the leading investor in psychedelics has argued that uh humans will eventually split into two different species an immortal Cosmic superbeings and the uninvolved uh who choose to stay behind on Earth um so we’re going to look at some of the history and tenets of evolutionary spirituality uh and I’m going to point out four flaws that I think um proponents of evolutionary spirituality um often fall into uh spiritual narcissism contempt for the uninvolved unevolved masses

uh social Darwinism and malthusianism and a tendency to illiberal and authoritarian spiritual Eugenics I don’t say that everyone who believes in evolutionary spirituality falls into these uh moral traps uh and I’ll at the end I’ll talk about you know some well-known figures who don’t um I’m going to move quite quickly this is quite kind of um you know they’re covering a lot of uh history of ideas here um if you want to look from you know some of the supporting evidence it’s in my Frontiers paper and in a lot of articles that I’ve published online on these topics um so firstly

what what what how do we Define evolutionary spirituality um it’s a subset of the broader New Age movement not everyone in New Age culture uh believes in evolutionary spirituality but some do um it it’s based on the idea that human evolution is not finished uh and can be guided towards um the creation of higher beings through such techniques as meditation psychedelics and genetic modification um it’s a kind of religion a worship of human potential and our potential to evolve into Super beings or at least the potential of some humans to evolve into Super beings um

so I’m going to paint a brief prehistory of evolutionary spirituality um you could you know you can trace it as far back as you like but you could say that uh one of its Origins is in Renaissance neoplatonic magic and the idea that uh special uh Advanced uh Superior beings have the potential to evolve into Gods um there also you could see his historical roots in 18th century moral progressivism in the in the theories of people like Scottish enlightenment philosophers like Adam SMI Adam Smith or Adam Ferguson uh or David Hume this idea that Human Society evolves through certain stages uh from peasant to agricultural uh to uh to capitalist and this is a natural evolution of into morally Superior societies uh likewise the end of the Century you have uh utopian thinkers like Godwin and the Marquee de Condes arguing that eventually science will progress so far that

humans will become these Blissful Immortal uh beings um I think molus is also a key figure in the history of evolutionary spirituality um molus was suspicious of the utopianism of Godwin of course but he also argued that uh in his words the the world is a mighty process for the creation and formation of mind so that there’s this kind of Natural Evolution that’s Guided by um the Supreme mind in which more conscious and more moral forms uh replicate while less conscious and less moral forms die off so there’s a kind of uh a progress natural progress toward towards higher and more conscious and more moral forms in malus’s Universe um likewise in in some German romantic and idealist thinkers of the 19th century uh or the late 18th

early 19th century you have this idea of God or Spirit or Guist evolving through nature and through human history what Emerson called the progressive God now all these theories suggest that nature is an arc tending towards higher moral forms or nature is a kind of addad or escalator going towards higher moral forms um of course Darwinism in the middle of the 19th century was a challenge to these ideas of natural moral progress uh in the darwinian universe there is no higher or better in nature there’s no ladder inevitably going towards higher forms instead Nature’s more like a branching tree going in all kinds of different directions and you can’t call any of those directions higher or better they’re just more fit to particular circumstances so this is a challenge to the idea of a moral uh Cosmos

that naturally evolves towards higher forms or better forms nonetheless the Triumph of Darwinism in the middle of the 19th century inspired countless more progressivist and spiritual versions of evolution to arise substitute religions which try to find new sources of meaning myth ethics and purpose in an evolutionary universe and the philosopher

Mary Midgley and many others have written about this kind of idea of evolutionary religions these science religions appeal to the authority of evolution much as previous religions appeal to the authority of God God in in evolution sometimes become somewhat interchangeable uh terms what would be some examples of evolutionary spiritualities before World War II um you could talk about Herbert Spencer’s religion of the unknowable uh nich’s Cult of the Uber mench of course this you know n as as Peter will tell us was not really a

a champion of anything like organized religion but nonetheless many many of his followers took up this idea of uh the coming Uber mench and turned it into a kind of evolutionary cult uh Ernst heckel’s monism uh bergson rry bergson’s ideas of Creative Evolution uh several figures in the htic Order of the Golden Dawn believe in this idea that uh they are staring Evolution towards the creation of super beings like wise theosophy and anthroposophy have this idea of uh spiritual Evolution leading towards higher forms of humans higher root races uh three arabindo integral

Examples of Evolutionary Spirituality

yoga also has this idea that Evolution can be steered towards the creation of higher Spiritual Beings

um you find a similar idea in Tad dardan’s evolutionary Christian mysticism

and in Julian huxley’s evolutionary humanism uh which he later called uh transhumanism um

likewise in Buck’s Cosmic Consciousness which some of you might have read which I’ll I’ll talk a little bit about later uh and how about

after World War II you also still find these kind of evolutionary spiritualities thriving uh like

the human potential movement of aldus Huxley; Abraham maslow.

Michael Murphy one of the founders of of eselin – that’s him in a photo with Huxley and many others like Osho for example who are part of that human potential movement um

The transpersonal psychology of Stan gr [Grof] is also somewhat something of an evolutionary spirituality

This idea that humans have the potential uh to evolve to a higher stage of Consciousness at a species level.

Commentary from Michael Hoffman:

Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory Warns About, or Exemplifies, Spiritual Narcissism?

  • [I am most focused on Ken Wilber 1977-1988.
  • I have read Ken Wilber into 1990s, including Andrew Cohen’s magazine What Is Enlightenment?
  • I have not followed goings-on within the field of Integral Theory.

I don’t know if grandiose “us above them” framing comes from Ken Wilber, or from followers and the Integral TheoryTM Marketing dept.

Imagine for comparison: ]

We in the Elite EgodeathTM Community Stand Above the Little People and Are More Evolved

[“We are more evolved than them” is not how I think. I think in terms of “my theory is better than anyone else’s theory and is certainly the way forward”, not “I am/ we are superior to other people and more evolved.”

You agree we must save man/ planet/ earth, therefore, you agree to make me Cosmic Dictator, infinite baggage attached.

Common-core mysticism and perennialism:

  • I only agree with a certain aspect the seed idea, as I define it, not as someone else defines it.
  • I disagree with all other aspects of its Baggage Attached and its bad theory of Transcendent Knowledge (nondual unity oneness, self is illusion, get rid of ego, etc – the things recent Tim Freke rejects). I mostly agree with the rejections Freke does, though I more transform and correct those off-base ideas, than simply recoil against them.

– Michael Hoffman

Rather, my thinking and attitude is:]

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism is the Correct Model and Is the Way Forward as an Explanatory Model of Psilocybin Transformation

[The Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism is superior as an explanatory model of Psilocybin transformation, compared to historical esotericism, and compared to Integral Theory.

explanatory model
e-m

— Michael Hoffman]

The presenter continues:

Ken Wilbur’s integral theory is another example of an postwar evolutionary spirituality

the you get uh 80 spiritual influences like Barbara Marx hubard and Andrew Cohen who championed forms of evolutionary spirituality

there’s actually a group called The evolutionary leaders which includes figures like well hubbed before she died and deack chakra and that’s still uh active

and then you get um modern transhumanists and proponents of what um Emil I think Tor I pronounced correctly is he calls Tes real

I don’t know if some of you might have seen um Nisha Devo’s recent paper on this but Tes real is the kind of uh different philosophies that are popular in Silicon Valley at the moment like transhumanism extropianism, singularitarianism cosmin and R rationalism

all of which have this idea that humans uh can evolve into superhumans or can invent new technologies super intelligences these varieties of evolutionary spirituality share two um Central ideas:

  • first that it’s possible and desirable to combine science and spirituality or religion into a new synthesis, a kind of empirical spirituality.

And this it is believed could eventually replace Christianity and other traditional religions and become a global religion of the future.

  • And secondly this idea that human evolution is an ongoing process which can be guided to higher and better forms.

Apostles of evolutionary spirituality think humans have the potential to evolve into Super beings called things like

  • the new man
  • the ubermen
  • homod Deus,
  • the coming race,
  • the future human
  • the transhuman
  • the self-actualized person
  • or perhaps a collective stage of Consciousness such as
  • the new spheres [noosphere?]
  • super intelligence
  • the super mind or
  • the singularity

Believers in evolutionary spirituality typically have a lamarian [Lamarkian?] view of evolution

Lamar uh before Darwin thought that uh humans can develop physical mental or or spiritual characteristics and then pass them on to Future descendants

so it’s this idea of inherited characteristics

the famous example is that a blacksmith might develop uh big muscles in their work and then their children will inherit those big muscles

now in evolutionary spirituality it’s more common to have this idea that you can attain uh a new State of Consciousness, a higher state of consciousness, and that this will then Mark an evolution not just for you as an individual but for your species.

You’ll be the kind of first Bud of a of a new higher species

and you can attain that through like [non-drug?] yoga or meditation or or psychedelics

so one example of this um is Cosmic Consciousness a book by the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Morris Buck which came out um in I think 1901 or 1900

Buck believed that certain special humans particularly him and his friends were attaining this new higher state of Consciousness, this experiences of cosmic Consciousness, and these weren’t just random spiritual experiences, this was actually a kind of evolutionary unfolding uh of a new species, a higher species um and that these um this new species these kind of uh Peak experiences would become more and more common

uh and these uh

They were Superior to Homo sapiens

He thought as as we are to dogs, and that eventually this new spiritually enlightened race will dominate the earth, and the old species will die off.

So there’s a fusion of kind of darwinian or or or or some kind of evolutionary theory with spirituality and this idea of a new species emerging.

And it’s often suggested in evolutionary spirituality that spiritual techniques like yoga meditation and psychedelics can speed up Evolution for a few special people, and through them for the entire species.

And this is an idea that’s been put forward by everyone from

  • Albert Hoffman to
  • Alders and Julian Huxley to
  • Humphrey Osman
  • Timothy liry
  • Ralph mner
  • Robert Anton Wilson
  • Terren McKenna
  • Stan gr
  • Rick doblin
  • and other leading psychedelic thinkers

[Jan Irvin around 2009 interviewed all psychedelics advocates and was horrified at their Social Engr’g, and wrote expose article series The Secret History of Magic Mushrooms, & podcast video series, he changed from Gnostic Media to Logos Media, demonized Psilocybin, & stayed silent on his pet Amanita -Michael Hoffman]

So it’s a very common idea that psychedelics can uh Advance human evolution.

Pros and Cons of the Evolutionary Spirituality Idea

Now I’m now going to point out four moral uh traps in evolutionary spirituality but it’s worth saying that:

There are things to celebrate in this spiritual tradition:

  • The synthesis of Science and spirituality
  • The attempt to kind of develop an empirical spirituality,

which you know has been an effort ever since William James to to rather than for science to ignore things like spiritual experiences to integrate them to study them

and that’s I think what you know an effort that many of us are are involved in um

likewise evolutionary spirituality has an optimistic vision of human potential of our capacity to to to rise up and to and to and and to be uh you know live longer to be happier to be better better beings.

However uh I do see certain kind of pitfalls in this tradition as well which I highlight to try and help people in this tradition perhaps uh avoid them for example uh I’m going to I’m going to highlight four um the first is is spiritual narcissism now most religions can lead to a certain smugness or narcissism in those who see themselves as

the elect as the pure as the chosen ones

[= ppl who know Egodeath theory] those chosen to know psychedelic eternalism aka helpless prisoners frozen in rock; {kidnapped}, imprisoned in cosmic rock, enslaved by the rock; {snake frozen in rock} – and then lifted out, but only the spirit part is lifted; soul remains in fixed stars/ cosmic rock frozen into. – Michael Hoffman]

but I think that evolutionary spirituality could be particularly prone to narcissism or at least its own particular variant of it because its followers think they’re not just morally better because they pray in the right way or eat in the right way or that kind of thing they also think they’re biologically Superior and possibly even a whole different species um and another reason they can be prone to narcissism is there’s

a rejection of humility um this is that you see it in in n and many of his uh descendants uh that humility is for the weak humility is hypocritical that you should be um proud of your superiority um this is idea that we are the gods we are we you know there’s no God Beyond us we are the gods so there’s a worship of the future human but often that that involves a worship for on S invariably um proponents of evolutionary spirit spirituality think that there’s a hierarchy in

nature that some humans are more of alled and they almost invariably think that that includes them so they and their friends are in this kind of 5% at the top of the hierarchy of nature so for example here’s a quote from Ken Wilbur’s online course superhuman uh he says a small percentage of the human population around 5% is now undergoing a Quant leap um to this emerging stage of evolution these rare individuals from every corner of the globe are now blazing a new evolutionary Trail

for all of us and breaking through to new levels of consciousness and capabilities beyond anything that humans have ever experienced before and I’ve interviewed kind of you know uh ex ex followers of Wilber people like Jamie will who talk about how often uh in integral Theory there can be a tendency to feeling quite puffed up like we are this top 5% we are the special ones and everyone else is is just more basic um or here’s another example this is a speech by Abraham maslo that he made to some Silicon Valley Executives he says it has been suggested

that only about 5% of the general population are active agents his idea of these kind of self-actualized individuals they are the ones who run themselves and the world it is very clear to to me that every single member of this group are one of those active agents so there he is flattering his corporate audience uh and here’s uh James Oro another psychedelic writer um he writes he wrote in in one of his books we are the sharpen spear head of humanity we are the ones who have had what the psychologist Abraham masle described as the absolute Peak experience the ultimate achievement of

Being Human something that only occurs for a tiny fraction of the human pop we are the 5% who have to help human Humanity move into its next phase the recognition of our own divine origins so I think there’s this tendency to narcissism to seeing yourself as the biologically Superior elect secondly this can be accompanied with a contempt for those you see it at the bottom of the spiritual natural spiritual biological hierarchy for those for the unfit or less evolved masses again you could put some of this at at Nature’s door he saw nature is

hierarchal and those at the bottom of the hierarchy are a waste of space um the pitiful masses um I don’t know if any of you have read uh John Ker’s excellent book uh the intellectual and the masses but it’s a brilliant uh kind of analysis of um in modernist culture of how many modernist intellectuals had you know took from nature or developed for themselves this kind of contempt uh for the masses uh you see it in from DH Lawrence or in oldest Huxley or in Virginia wolf um so for example oldest Huxley wrote about 99.5% of the entire population of the planet are as stupid as Philistine as the great masses of the English the important thing it seems to me is not to attack the 99.5% except for exercise but to try to see that the .5% survives keeps its quality up to the highest possible level and if possible dominates the rest sometimes this spiritual biological hierarchy is seen as racial in evolutionary spirituality not always but occasionally for example in theosophy

and anthroposophy and other more kind of um fascist forms of German theosophy uh certain races are seen as more spiritually evolved than others uh and other races are seen as more animalistic or even uh demonic this contempt uh for the unevolved masses in New Age culture can still be found in the Psychedelic counterculture um after World War II so Abraham maslo wrote for example only a small proportion of the human population gets to the point of identity or selfhood or full humanness or self-actualization it is perfectly true that the mass of society is is still like a dead weight um and you see it in psychedelic culture as well this elitism we are the elect and everyone else they’re the Unturned on Square ignorant masses so this is Tom Wolf writing in the Electric Kool-Aid AET test

about the marry pranksters he writes the world was simply and sheerly divided into the aware those who had had the experience of being vessels of the Divine and a great mass of the unaware the unmusical the unattuned consciously the aware were never snobbish towards the unaware but in fact most of that great jellyfish blob of straight Souls looked like hopeless cases you can see some of this kind of idea of a spiritual biological hierarchy in some of Timothy L’s work uh particularly

the strange books that he wrote in the 1970s like uh intelligence agents for example um in that book this is a graph from that book where he talks about um a kind of a genetic uh hierarchy between different cultures with Africa and Asia at the bottom and then eventually kind of the Californian future humans this this this new Superior race which he thought was emerging in California which would eventually fly off and populate uh space and L wrote the folks of the old world inhabit pre-editing Europeans and Africans and Asians are our own animal Origins still obsessed

with territorial conflict the Africans are thus 2 million years behind California by the by uh theosophy believed that the kind of new Superior race of humans would would evolve in California so there’s always been this idea of the future humans uh you know this this kind of Master race evolving in in California um I don’t know how familiar you are with with a show or Bagan rajnish or how many of you saw the Netflix documentary about him but you can really see in in his uh kind of uh Nan spirituality this idea this worship of the superhumans including him and his followers and this

you know uh violent contempt for the uh for the uh ignorant masses uh whether that’s in America or anywhere else so Osho said you know his his his talk are full of comments like this scientifically the average mental age of a human being is below 13 those who are [ __ ] will criticize you condemn you ignore them they are already stepping into their graves soon they will disappear now the third of these four moral pitfalls is social Darwinism and malthusianism the idea that um those at the bottom of the spiritual biological hierarchy should be allowed to die off for the good of you know so that higher humans

can evolve in traditional Christianity there’s this idea that God loves the poor the sick the weak and wretched and therefore we owe them charity we should try to um you know uh help them and feed them and and and and so forth um what happened in the in the 18th century uh from molus on in this new kind of evolutionary uh spirituality was this idea that it you know in contrast we should let the weak and sick die off so higher forms can emerge there’s this kind of progressive spiritual unfolding taking place so if you um charitably support uh the weak the sick the you know and so on

you’re just getting in the way of this natural evolutionary process um you see see that in Herbert Spencer for example um he wrote the whole effort of nature is to get rid of the unfit to clear the world of them to make room for better uh n likewise wrote far too many live and far too long they hang on their branches would that a storm came to shake all this rot and worm food from the tree um Osho is another extreme example of this kind of um alusan ISM and social Darwinism he wrote I want to be finished with the whole past completely um I want it to be erased completely only then the new humanity is possible a new world a new man this world is not worth saving it will be better if the third world war happens and

destroys this whole stupid Humanity so one can come across many examples of this idea of that kind of there should be this natural culling or shedding of the of the Lo forms um this is Barbara Marx hubard who was one of the most uh influential champions of evolutionary spirituality in the 80s 90s and early naughties uh in in California uh and her writings often express this kind of idea um she wrote individually we can choose to embrace options for evolutionary choices such as longevity space migration and evolved Consciousness those who choose these paths will evolve differently from those who choose to remain in the terrestrial mamalian life cycle just as Neanderthal man passed away so too will self-centered Homo sapiens retire once it has finished the work of preparing the way for homo universalis

we will weed out the unworkable uh from the workable and one still sees these attitudes a bit in modern uh transhumanism the idea that there’s going to be a bifurcation of human ity some will evolve and become Cosmic Immortal super beings and some will not evolve and they will uh that’s a kind of evolutionary dead end so here’s Christian angam who is um you know the the one of the leading investors in psychedelics he set up atti he’s the leading investor in compass Pathways and he has said in one interview Humanity could split up into two species because you have a part of humanity who says hey bring it on let’s fly to Mars if you want to go to Mars you need to change your bodies we’re going to have to modify everyone knows it but there might be a part of humanity who says this is not for me I don’t want to merge with machines so Humanity might split into two species so

there’s this idea of the Sorting of the fit from the unfit a natural selection of of the fit from the unfit uh and so the original kind of eugenic test would be war and reproductive Fitness uh then it was the IQ test and the exam now embryonic Fitness tests and I and I just wonder if sometimes one gets hints of that in psychedelic culture this idea of psychedelics as a kind of evolutionary test of your Fitness which sorts the the fit from the unfit can you pass the acid test can you take the heroic dose uh and I think you also saw some aspects of this kind of spiritual manthus ISM during the pandemic in the ableism of Wellness culture and New Age culture here Robert F Kennedy the kind of uh antivaxer in Chief um so just this idea that you know let let nature take its course let Co take its course uh the strong and and the fit and the well and the able they will naturally survive and this is a kind of natural process which will um clear off the weak and the infirm okay

the final moral Pitfall that I’m going to talk about is uh spiritual eugenics um now the sense of a coming bacation between the elect and the passed over is not unique to evolutionary spirituality but in abrahamic religions it is God uh who selects the wheat from the chaff the sheep from the goats in evolutionary spirituality sometimes it is humans who select the fit from the unfit it is the new Priests of evolution spirituality

the scientist priests as n put it the ruling case of the future must now take the place of God they deliver the physiologically botched by teaching them the doctrine of Swift death now not all proponents of evolutionary spirituality support Eugenics a few actively opposed it like um William James and Alfred Russell Wallace for example but many uh champ I of evolutionary spirituality did support eugenics in some form and of course there are many varieties of of eugenics so for example Nicha George Bernard Shaw Ernst hle Julian and Alis Huxley

HG Wells Gerald herd WB Yates aliser Crowley and several other members of the Golden Dawn Rudolph Steiner and several other German theosophist Yan smutz the father of holism several members of the society for psychical research sh rindo uh the Californian spiritual botanist Luther Burbank John Harvey Kellogg the kind of key figure in American Wellness history Alexis Carell uh the French Nobel prizewinning scientist and and and and spiritual Guru Tad Des shadan all of them supported um eugenic policies in some form or other and even after World War II even after uh the Nazis uh eugenic atrocities

you still had people quietly supporting um eugenic policies in uh evolutionary spirituality like Abraham maslo never publicly but in his private papers he did say that um there should be a kind of global regulation of reproduction there should be a a kind of body of scientists who choose who does who do and don’t get to reproduce uh Alis Huxley likewise supported uh eugenic policies in his talks and writing right to the end of his life Osho very explicitly said uh there should be a kind of global regulation of of reproduction to ensure the evolution of super beings um the

the far right um white supremacist William Luther Pierce also put forward his own weird version of evolutionary spirituality which was very much embraced um Eugenics so let’s talk a little bit about eugenics it was um called the religion of the future and it’s really a prime example of one of these evolutionary religions that emerged after the Triumph of Darwinism uh in in the 1880s it was actually the word Eugenics was coined in I think 1883 um by Francis gton Charles Darwin’s cousin uh the same year that Nicha um published thus spake zarathustra so you have these two kind of uh visions of the future super beinging um so it was a new Creed I think this is often forgotten by people who study Eugenics just as a kind of Public Health or a medical movement it was also very much a religious movement it was called a Creed by gton he talked about a Jihad uh for fitter humans it was run by scientist priests aimed at producing superhumans new

Apollos and dianas um this worship of the future super beings was combined with a homicidal contempt and Loathing for those deemed unfit who supposedly threatened the human race with Extinction or descent into idiocy um there are many forms of eugenics positive Eugenics which is encouraging those deemed fit to breed more and negative eugenics which was trying to discourage those who were deemed unfit from breeding at all there could be voluntary and involuntary forms of eugenics there were less and more extreme forms of it so it could be everything from health education to uh forcible sterilization or euthanasia it was often racist and imperialist um but not always there are many varieties of eugenics eugenic thinking was extremely popular from the 1870s to the 1940s and taken up by a whole host of movements there were feminist eugenicists socialist eugenicists environmentalist eugenicists it was big in the fitness and body meling movement there are even eugenesis you can find in the Harlem Renaissance or in uh

The Mexican nationalism uh there’s a fascinating book called uh the cosmic race La Raza cosmica by a Mexican author who thinks that uh Mexican mesos are the kind of super race of the future so there are many varieties of eugenic thinking now often in this era um various activities like yoga bodybuilding psychedelics or organic farming were promoted using eugenic retoric that they would help um uh the species to evolve into a into a kind of higher species for example in 1941 the German poet solder physician gotfried Ben called for a systematic educational effort in the direction of conscious enhancement of Vitality one could by increasing Visionary States say with mesculin or Hashi Supply the race with a stream of spiritual insights which could lead to a new creative period so um Ben there is calling for a a state program of uh you know drugs to improve the Vitality of uh the German race now it’s not really kind of typical Eugenics he’s not talking there about controlling who does or doesn’t reproduce so I think sometimes when people are looking at the overlap of of of movements with Eugenics they can say well because some people were into both bodybuilding and Eugenics or both organic farming and

Eugenics therefore you know bodybuilding is eugenic or organic farming is eugenic that’s not what I’m saying using eugenic rhetoric does not mean a particular movement essentially is uh eugenic however often those who use eugenic rhetoric do also actively support eugenic policies as um gotfried Ben did several other important figures in psychedelic history supported authoritarian eugenic uh policies and I think that’s interesting and and and worth of kind of comment and study like um havlock Ellis who did the first British psychedelic uh experiments in 1898 or so likewise WB Yates one of the you know one of his um participants or yates’s uh colleague in the htic Order of the Golden Dawn alist Crowley uh hdl’s and Julian Huxley these uh early transhumanists who talked about uh using chemical and drugs as a means to kind of uh help evolution advance and help the evolution of super beings and they also very much promoted uh Eugenics as um as a means to to help the evolution of super beings

Eugenics had a completely Central role in Julian huxley’s uh Neo religion of evolutionary humanism when he became the first director general of UNESCO he he immediately published a Manifesto saying we should make evolutionary humanism the new kind of religion of UNESCO and and and eugenic should be at the heart of that I mean that’s so startled people that that was the reason that um Julian Huxley was only a one-term director general of UNESCO um his brother Alis suley likewise um as I’ve said supported eugenic policies he supported involuntary uh sterilization before World War II

after World War II he still supported um positive Eugenics this idea that um we should use techniques like um freezing the sperm of of of geniuses and then using it to create uh Superior babies I mean that appears in his last novel Island where a certain proportion of the population of Island are created through genius sperm banks um and in fact one of Julian huxley’s students uh helped to create a genius sperm bank which existed in in California for a few years and people could go to this geni it was in Montesito uh and people could go to this genius sperm bank and

select the idea was the sperm of of Nobel Prize winners but I I’m not sure they got any to actually contribute their sperm and thereby ensure that their children were Superior children and in fact Rupert sheldrick uh who was a friend of Julian huxley’s nephew uh sorry his son Francis Huxley told me that Francis Huxley often received letters from people claiming to be the descendence of Julian Huxley from uh from from sperm banks I don’t know if he really did donate his sperm to these sperm banks anyway this is a bit of a digression um

Abraham maslo also supported uh eugenic policies privately he also thought that um you know there should be Global regulation of who does and doesn’t reproduce um as did Osho um and so I think there’s this illiberal authoritarian tendency which one can find in evolutionary spirituality the idea that we must upgrade Humanity we must uh enable the evolution of superbeings even if the unevolved masses resist um there can be the promotion of illiberal medical spiritual Utopias and I’m fasc fated by the parallels I see between Alis huxley’s Brave New World from 1931 this obviously authoritarian static Society managed by um by you know scientists in which reproduction is completely uh managed but

I see similarity between that and his Utopia his hippie Utopia of Island which is also a completely static Society managed by scientists priests and it’s also a eugenic Society um so just finally one still does find examples of uh Eugenics uh from the 70s on but it tends to be um liberal Eugenics with the uh Evolution with the development of uh Technologies of genetic modification Eugenics became more sophisticated uh it was less about uh governments controlling who can and can’t reproduce and sterilizing those deemed unfit and instead there were these new genetic Technologies

which supposedly um could upgrade uh uh both embryos and even kind of um already born people so these were uh very much embraced uh by certain kind of Californian Visionaries like Timothy liry from the uh 1970s on uh and ly in his writings of the 70s says what very ious transhumanists have said since the 1970s and various extropia and and so on they uh Larry said let us upgrade our minds our bodies and our genes with these new technologies like psychedelics or stem cell research or genetic modification and if you don’t let us do that we’ll go offshore or offworld and create our own libertarian um Utopias of superhumans so um

when he was in falson prison Timothy liry um wrote this extraordinary book uh called Terror to he claimed to be channeling messages from Aliens and the aliens uh you know of course with liry one can never tell to what extent this is a joke or not but uh he claimed that he had a mission uh to attract uh 5,000 uh Superior human beings uh who would who would man a space shuttle that would go into space and Seed a new higher species he got very into this idea um that humans could evolve into smarter more intelligent uh you know quasi Immortal uh uh species uh and that uh and that he and others could be the kind of the seeds of this new species so this is one of the illustrations from Tera to it says the crew of Teru selects itself the way the genetic code builds up a chain of elements so there’s a whole Passage here about

a selection of the fittest most beautiful uh and so on for this crew this is reminds me very much of moon rer if any of you have seen that Bond film um so psychedelics and liberal Eugenics today many of the leading biotech investors in psychedelics uh today also invest in genetic modification technology aimed at creating a superior longer living smarter species people like Peter teal Christine anger Steve jeret and Elon Musk now there’s clearly a moral difference between liberal Eugenics where people are choosing to use uh genetic modification Technologies and authoritarian Eugenics where uh you know reproductive policies are imposed on people involuntarily

however perhaps new moral issues emerge from this new liberal uh Eugenics like for example safety but also Dem Democratic access to new medical Technologies is this just what Douglas rashkov calls survival of the richest that only the extremely wealthy uh get access to these new technologies that they kind of retreat from the collapse of of modern societies to their um psychedelic genetic ashrams to their gated spiritual communities and and you know to try and turn themselves into the Super beings who will emerge from their gated communities uh to repopulate the world after the kind of climat Apocalypse so in conclusion

I hope you agree with me at least uh that evolutionary spirituality is a significant and under researched cultural frame uh for New Age spirituality and for psychedelics and Western culture you I’m sure some of you will disagree with some aspects of this rather broad picture that I’ve painted but nonetheless I think you’ll agree at the very least that this is a very interesting and influential frame for Western spirituality and for psychedelic culture it has deep historical roots and is still very active today in various forms particularly in Silicon Valley transhumanism and I hope you also agree that it has some moral pitfalls uh spiritual narcissism contempt for the less evolved masses social Darwinism and malthusianism this idea of letting the weak die off

attendance to spiritual uh Eugenics and to illiberal Medical spiritual Utopias once again I do not say that everyone who believes in evolutionary spirituality inevitably falls into this moral pitfalls only that one often sees um people doing so could there be a less elitist less authoritarian more democratic and more pluralist form of evolutionary spirituality yes for example William James in some ways he believed in a kind of evolutionary form of spirituality but it was pluralist

it didn’t believe that Evolution evolves up One ladder one escalator in one inevitable Direction but instead in multiple different directions and that we should encourage what John Stewart Mill called experiments in living eccentric different kind of experiments because it may develop new potentialities new kind of capacity um William James’s version of evolutionary spirituality is very Humane he didn’t see himself as one of the elect he knew he had his own kind of psychological foibles he was anti- eugenic he wrote um he reminds me of Thomas Huxley who was older and Julian huxley’s grandfather the great biologist he was also an an antien and Thomas Huxley said um don’t we I’m paraphrasing from memory but don’t we all all of us have days when we could classify as one of the unfit I mean

Thomas Huxley had was prone to like William James depressive episodes so both of them knew that they could classify as the unfit they could find themselves you know um forcibly sterilized under the wrong conditions and I I feel that with with with people like Julian and Alis Huxley as well both of whom were actually prone to this inherited psychological stability and you know Julian Huxley suffered from um bipolar disorder and I see many of the kind of champions of eugenic evolutionary spirituality I think they were maybe sometimes projecting their own insecurities and instabilities onto the population saying th it’s those people out there who are unfit anyway how finally does all of this relate to um our main research which is on challenging psychedelic experiences what I’ve been working on for the you know with with aren and many others for the last um few years well I mean I I became interested in the topic of challenging psychedelic experiences when I had a a bad trip when I was 18 uh as a result of which I developed post-traumatic stress disorder social anxiety and I really felt like a kind of psychological Basket Case for several years and it was at right at a time where I was very into uh figures like ner and DH Lawrence and reading people like Lawrence and N I mean they tended

to say if you if you’re kind of damaged then that’s it you’re a dead end you should probably just kill yourself so that was you know I I I kind of rejected um that way of thinking I was looking for something more compassionate which could help me uh accept myself accept my wounds and to heal I had this feeling also very much of having kind of failed the acid test that I had had all these wonderful psychedelic experiences

but now I had the bad experience and I’d kind of damaged myself I was a kind of failure and I think sometimes um you know people who have bad trips which lead them feeling damaged can feel tremendous kind of Shame and guilt and so on after these kinds of bad experiences and I think this evolutionary ethos can still pervade psychedelic culture are you a member of The evolutionary elect are you one of these future superhumans or are you genetically unstable and inferior like William James I have compassion for the Misfits because I identify with them more than with

the evolutionary elect and that’s why I point out the elitist and illiberal tendencies in evolutionary spirituality and New Age culture more generally that’s it thank you very much thank you thank you very much Jules I think that was some very interesting food for thought for everyone um are there any questions to start in the room here yes Ste Joel thanks a lot for that I take my hat off to your contrarian powers for choosing that particular Target and eviscerating it so comprehensively I think I got a couple of questions actually one one is more about the challenging experiences project the first one is more about spiritual narcism narcissism s

orry Etc I feel like I’m kind of shouting up to you over there of course I’m not um the drug itself and the characteristics of the well I say drug psychedelic saying LSD to the C has that contributed to this culture if if you think that um you Brave culture has a element of ecstasy flowing through it and other subcultures are also said to have been influenced by their favorite drugs um so is is the question whether the drugs themselves might have contributed to some of these kind of characteristics like characteristics um

I’m thinking for example um inflation could be attributed yeah and also um that said certainly when I was younger and we were all taking ass it was very um you know it’s just us and no one else must know what we’re doing because then we’ll be in trouble and that kind of contributes to a sort of tribalism mini tribalism I I I agree I think that um psychedelics Can often lead to this sense of are we are the special ones we are the initiated uh we are the elect um and that can take you know so I agree with that and that can take different forms I think it’s possible to to think that without believing an evolutionary spirituality particularly um so I’ve just been researching this buo cult in

Mexico and um you know extraordinary story this Miami real estate agents smoked 5 Meo DMT uh started a retreat center in Mexico became you know smoked so much of it every day that he became convinced he was Jesus uh and you know uh his followers he would smoke 5md 5mo DMT give it to his followers in this retreat center and then go up and shout in their face who am I and they had to say you’re Jesus anyway so that’s an example of kind of clearly ego inflation and and cultish

which didn’t involve evolutionary spirituality but I think you know Evolution it that kind of spiritual narcissism goes quite well with evolutionary spirituality as well anyway to answer your question briefly yes I think that there are some aspects of the drug which do seem to lead to Ego inflation and therefore kind of contribute to this kind of narcissism and I was on the call the other day about the experiences project which was great and um that you you briefly mentioned there about feedback you were getting from the reports about experiences that weren’t bad trips as such they were just sort of not very exciting or interesting or enchanting or magical and you know I’ve had bad trips myself but I’ve

certainly had more of those and what are we going to call them um what was it there’s mystical experiences and there’s experiences like meh that’s why some call them like me nothing very much I just wonder if you could talk a bit more about maybe AR could as well about you know those what what you’re getting back about those particular reports the Mir the Mir trips well yeah sure I’ll hand over to aren but I mean in brief they don’t show up so much in our survey because we kind of particularly were asking about extended difficulties um but people sometimes certainly of the categories in our survey what that we did in

our thematic analysis of all these 600 responses was feelings of disappointment particularly if people tried psychedelics for mental health and they feel like they’re in the Last Chance Saloon and they’ve tried everything else and then they try you know psychedelics either in Trials or in the underground and it doesn’t work and and they feel even worse so we did come across that um yeah aren do you want to add anything yeah I think this is what I would um think in relation to this may experiences as well that people can see negative effects afterwards because of all these expectations that the hype creates so in that sense the L perhaps with people that talk about they have passed this asset test they’ve had this talent and experiences and they’re like this new person now uh it’s a matter of comparison

but yeah I wouldn’t say that these are the cases that we see that come with the most difficulty thanks guys um any more questions yes yeah I find that talk really interesting and I realized you were talking about the critical aspects of evolutionary spirituality but I I just wanted to ask you about how evolution is conceived um in these context so evolution is usually that species and an environment and fitting together um what what can we say about the environment of spiritual Evolution I mean you you’ve concentrated on you know Wold eugenic breathing programs

but when I’ve tried to look into this superficially in the past I I had the feeling that that wasn’t um what was steering The evolutionary process so for example hugley at some point mentions universal mind so the evolution is kind of tuning into something like that does that make any sense to you is that the way yeah yes you’re right I mean darwinian Evolution would be the idea of of Fitness to certain circumstances to certain conditions um spiritual Evolution it it it it’s more about so you know it’s kind of a Global Evolution the evolution of the human species I suppose you could say you know both that that it’s connected I think they sometimes see it connected to certain historical conditions like things like

the evolution of of of a global Society so say say Shan there’s the sense of the evolution of the new sphere is connected to new technologies as well to the kind of you know or to the emergence of the internet um to you know they’re often supporters of evolutionary spirituality not always but but quite often they are um globalists people like HG Wells and Julian huy and Alis hxy they think there’s going to be a the evolution of a global Society Beyond natural differences um and

and then eventually that will be you know that we will start evolving into space we will become these Cosmic beings and this is the next step so in that sense there is that that the sense of that spiritual evolution is connected to kind of um environmental conditions and particularly to technological conditions um but then you know there are other there are so many varieties of it so this is one of the challenges like there are kind of um racist um proponents of evolutionary spirituality like particularly you know Germans and Nazis who would say well you know nor Europeans uh have have evolved to be the masterace because of particular conditions because of the cold and so on um or this this um

Jose vasconcelos he was the Mexican minister of Education he wrote this extraordinary book Raza cosm the cosmic race and he thought that Mexicans uh with the with a superior you know Master race because because in Latin America you had the throne together of all these different races and that leads to kind of uh this um that interbreeding of races leads to kind of superior humans a similar idea is put forward about like why the future human would evolve in California because America is this breeding pot and and the fittest humans moved to America uh and therefore you got this kind of you know genetic selection of the fittest and

that’s why you know the superior beings end up in California and especially in Silicon Valley so I don’t know if that’s answering your question but that’s just some of the ways that environmental conditions can feed in in in people’s theories with this evolution of the kind of future human I mean that’s a very kind of modern materialist version of the environments in which evolution is happening I just had the impression yeah from looking at people like Huxley or even Michael Murphy there something more Spacey going on that this kind oftion was latching onto something which wasn’t you know oh yes that’s that’s that’s clearly true like they there’s often this idea of not just Evolution but involution so there’s not just the the EV evolution of of material forms to

higher levels but there’s an involution of Spirit uh from from the Divine from mind at large from the kind of you know uh super mind uh and so on or from you know there’s all kinds of again varieties of it but yes absolutely this is spiritual theories of evolutionary spirituality Are Spiritual they believe also in some kind often in some kind of uh Transcendent uh you know God guiding this evolutionary process and interacting with it and uh this question also um made me think about uh

the connection with nature itself and how like this Evolution what role are we seeing humans play in relation to the rest of nature but perhaps this relat we have a question online from Oliver so this talk Oliver says mostly focused on the issu stemming from worshiping a super individual drawing from a western individualist tradition I’m wondering if jul has any knowledge about whether there are equivalents of this in more collectivist cultures or terms that’s very interesting in some ways you can see it again this is the varieties of evolutionary spirituality you can see it as leading to a kind of individualism um

a worship of the Uber mench the rugged individual who exists separate from massman uh who doesn’t need the welfare state who doesn’t need uh any state at all uh you know said something like there where the state ends um the the the higher being emerges um so but you can you know you can also see it from another direction as extremely collectivist so sometimes um you know champions of evolutionary spirituality were very ecological in their thinking they thought

we need to see the human species as a whole um and and and think about you know how to guide the human species to higher forms um so you know people like Julian Huxley and HG Wells and Ernst hle these were the champions of ecological thinking in the you know the the the 1880s to the 19 30s because they thought you think you know because they argued we need to see humans as a species and we need to manage the species much as we like manage livestock much as we like manage uh natural resources they argued we need to manage the human species um by by encouraging the fittest to uh reproduce more and

by discouraging the the the least fit um in inverted commas to to reproduce at all so yes in some ways you can see um this can be taken in highly individualist forms libertarian forms um I don’t owe anything to other people I reject the state just leave me and my friends alone to develop our libertarian Utopia or it could be developed in highly collectivist forms where individual rights have to be disregarded for the good of the species thank you Chris you have a question yeah I thought i’ comment before my question that the the focus on California as a weird transhumanist thing that

there’s a British equivalent called Anglo futurism which is pretty entertaining and uh there’s a lot of good mes about it online Ang futurism I haven’t heard thanks yeah it did the rounds on Twitter like three months ago it’s pretty it’s bad um my question was um your presentation talked a lot about um elitism um and the idea of like the elect the past like some people can make it through the various stages or not um

I’m curious where you draw the line between it being elitism and it being kind of a ritualistic right of passage kind of thing because across the world there are various groups who use varying degrees of substance as a kind of uh becoming a man from a child as it were where does the line sit between those I think that’s a really good question and um it’s one of the the responses I’ve got most you know in The Limited responses I’ve got to this paper um is is people saying well you know is is the idea of an elect or an Elite or in a hierarchy always wrong or bad I I gave a talk on this

at esselin in fact um I got I was invited there for a seminar on the Superhuman by um organized by Jeffrey kple at Rice University and and and Jeff you know his response was firstly religions have always been eugenic they’ve always been concerned with breeding when you think about it it is an interesting way to look at the history of religion but secondly there’s always been this idea of of the elect and of and of higher and lower um and and I and I I I get that point like you you take part in a spiritual practice or a spiritual tradition to try and improve in a certain way you go to a meditation teacher because you think they have something to teach you

you undergo a ritual or initiation or a retreat or these kinds of things to try to develop to advance you know the Buddha said um I am I am awake you know now now here’s a path to become like me so of course there is this in in in most religions this idea that you know you can become higher and better you um so I think that’s that like I said you can find that in most religious Traditions but I think it’s important to to to to build in certain kind of features to make sure that doesn’t develop into kind of um excessively elitist narcissism

and I’ve argued that one of the ways that evolutionary spirituality can lead to kind of rather rigid elitism and narcissism is this idea that we are not just um you know better because we practice this meditation we are essentially better we are biologically Superior as well as um spiritually

and the other thing is I think you know a good a mature spiritual tradition builds in things like humility um and and the sense of like um not glorifying in your superiority but kind of um you know reminding yourself that we’re all flawed as well I think that’s one of the things I respect about Christianity the sense that we all mess up we all we all [ __ ] up and that’s just being human um so yeah so that’s so so I accept the point that that that that several people have made to me in response to this paper which is yes some kind of idea of better or worse is an inevitable part of all spiritual Traditions

but I think a good a wise and mature spiritual tradition builds in certain checks against this tendency to to arrogance and a kind of rigid cased elitism than thank you we we do also have an interesting comment from Bing so because reincarnation and animism are the Core Concepts in our Traditions time Evolution as a process can be taken off from the equation still each life we have is a gift hence a grand expression we should honor so in that sense we’re evolving in this timeline individually or in the community

we are connected with uh thank you B and if you wanted to share anything further as well or what is the tradition that you’re coming from here or um I think Peter you had your hand up earlier I don’t know if that was a comment to question no I was just going to read out um Oliver’s question online so um but I do have a question anyway I suppose um I’m I’m more of a fan of bergson this book you mentioned than you are obviously and

N for that matter and others but anyway um I suppose you know like burson’s critique of evolution was that he wasn’t a theologist but he was halfway there as it were and it seems to me that part of this critique is and I’ve really enjoyed the paper by the way and the presentation now um the part of this critique is based on a form of our current understanding of evolution and I think that our current understanding evolution is I mean it’s

I don’t think it’s wrong but I think there’s more to add to it for example in philosophy of Mind mental causation um is a big problem under a certain Paradigm scientific Paradigm and there’s a lot of arguments to say mental causation should be um sort of uh part should be uh integrated with theory of evolution mental causation relates to teleology the fact the idea that there are purposes within nature and like within a human being you know um there is a purpose

for example to procreate for the species and so on um and bergson’s criticism of um Darwinism the darwinist theory of evolution really was that it exclude completely excludes to theology now I think that’s still an open question I know teolog is not particularly fashionable at the moment but you know I think it’s an open question because it relates to mental causation and so I suppose my my my point is this that um if we do accept the form of teleology in nature then that would actually um have ramifications on understanding

a kind of you know a processual view of nature that it’s not just static and there’s no hierarchy but actually there is some kind of Ideal to which we progress I suppose this this a kind of hegan hegelianism certain extent you know n said um controversially as always um without Hegel there would be no Darwin and I second question really is I wonder and that’s something I’m looking into now like to what extent is Hegel really um influential in our understandings of mysticism

Because you know Cosmic Consciousness from Ed Edward Carpenter people think comes from India which does partly Edward Carpenter’s time there but also I mean you know that was the time of British idealism or British hegelianism where Eternal Consciousness was a common phrase used from Hegel so anyway my question is this um are you you know are you open to the possibility that the theory of evolution is not yet complete and that this might have ramifications on the critique of um transhumanism especially yeah I mean

I am certainly open to to the idea that certain aspects of evolutionary spirituality could be um scientifically valid

um so I’m I’m not really my my my paper is not engaging with its scientific validity um I you know I don’t I don’t get into that like um could be I’m I’m I’m interested in the possibility I agree with you that you know that um kind of there can be narrow forms of Darwinism which don’t leave any place for Consciousness and and for choice I also think that it’s possible I’m I’m making a you know moral critiques

first of all I’m saying look let’s consider thisa these Traditions they’re important so that’s my first argument like they’ve been under researched under commented on these are influential to New Age culture and to psychedelic culture and I think we both agree on that um and you know then secondly I say however that it’s a moral argument really yeah after the kind of just like this is a historical thing and we should kind of you know it’s like it can lead to these kinds of moral issues

but I don’t say that always essentially does um and there are many exceptions like um you know like James’s kind of pluralist evolutionary spirituality there are these different kind of potentialities which can which can evolve and you see that you know on Julian Huxley as well he talks about he was very into bergson uh and he talks about we develop different potentiality through play through experiment which with with bergson

there’s that idea as well isn’t there these these kind of nature uh playing and evolving into these into these different forms and and in not being a kind of rigid escalator it’s more of a kind of emerging experiment so that would be the kind of that more pluralist model of evolutionary spirituality I would I would like more than a kind of this rigid hierarchy and I’m definitely at the top of it yeah sure and again

I don’t I don’t think bergon didn’t in my in my you I haven’t I won’t know him as well as you do but he he certainly wasn’t um he didn’t promote Eugenics at a time when lots of other people because he was you know he was in the psychical research scene and lot of people who supported psychical research did support Eugenics bergson didn’t he seems kind of a Humane person not not not not an elitist not a snob so um yeah so as as as as far as you were saying about um kind of Hegel and mysticism yeah I mean it’s fascinating I you know I haven’t read Hegel I I I I’ve put it off you know out of yeah out of fear but um but yes I think he’s clearly important in this tradition in this idea of a kind of a historical evolution of spirit yeah uh and and and of

Guist so yeah no so I think there’s that you know you’ve opened up a whole kind of worms there of historical research and and scientific and Metaphysical Research as well so thanks a lot well I just say you know finally Peter um I mean I because I I was thinking you a bit because I know we’re both fans of Nature and this paper and this work it does you know it does rather slam nature for his homicidal eugenic Tendencies which I think are you know are are there and I think you know but I’m a I’m a

I also grew up loving nature and I do really you know he’s as as a philosopher he’s almost incomparable in terms of as a stylist so I have this real LoveHate relationship with ness with theory of the dionan aalan you know but I do think there is this dark side to him and yeah I think that we you know it has to we have to confront it for sure he has you know you did pick the worst parts of him but um there’s another side to him as well yeah don’t forget of course he he also was influential on the left as well as the right in terms of power stretches understanding power stretches and so on um but that’s another another

talk anyway thanks a lot for your time thank you and we do have a few more questions in the chat so Rebecca is asking what about the unwell the unfit those with adverse reactions to both psychedelics and prescription drugs what about those with both positive and negative experiences with drugs and spiritual emergencies in this context are we not in need of readdressing how the unwell and therefore the unfit might contribute valuable insights into how we progress as human beings absolutely I I mean I think

One of the one of the serious issues with you know eugenics in the in the 20s was how it just labeled people it labeled people as essentially kind of unfit um you know disregarding the fact that we’re all a mixed of the kind of the well and the unwell and you you know on certain stage in our life we might be very unwell and then we could be later well again and even the you know the very unwell in some ways will often have tremendous gifts uh and and capacities so that kind of sorting of humans into the kind of viable and the nonviable and the fit and the unfit is

One of the most horrible aspects of this um science religion and you know unfortunately I think it did feed into Psychiatry and you know certain kind of pioneering psychiatrists like um like um Asperger for example were also eugenesis so you can have this idea that certain people are just essentially um you know um basket cases that that you know like um in the old idea of psychosis oh you know you’ve had a psychotic episode you know they could include a temporary psychotic episode psychedelics

so I’m afraid you’re just you know you’re you’re um you’re genetically uh inferior uh you’re you’re a basket case you have you you know and and and you have nothing interesting to tell us and your experience has nothing interesting or meaningful to tell us I think thankfully that’s we’re now seeing that that’s a very cruel and outdated um Theory and that you know PE people can have um psychosis like experiences and and still leave lead normal functional lives

and and that you know that sometimes these experiences like psychedelic experiences can be meaningful and and interesting I mean they can also be devastating and and and and um but I so you know I just think it’s interesting we are still very much a um a eugenic culture in all kinds of ways and I think it’s interesting to kind of consider it I

I think all of us really are influenced by eugenic thinking this is not something that happened in in the 1920s we you know it’s it it completely infuses our cultures in in all kinds of ways um but including in in harmful ways and I think we can still see its influence in in um in Psychiatry um can I say something um sorry um I’m just working my way through your breaking open book um Jews and um

reading lots of people’s spiritual emergencies and that’s why I said something about health and um the unwell in relation to what you’re talking about today um which is really worrying me since it’s just uncovered a number of my key philosophers and psychologists and writers as people who potentially supported Eugenics which I find quite terrifying at the minute um for my PhD so I’m a bit scared uh from what you’ve just told us today um but I I think um sorry there’s loads of really amazing points that you’ve raised today I’m also trying to connect that to some of the other research that I’ve been listening to from from you and from Peter as well

I think can I just say I think

If we’ve discovered that bergson wasn’t a eugenicist but Alders Huxley was um can I can I just go back to Peter on that as well um because I’m quite frightened by some of this research I have to say Jules I quite I find it quite frightening that um this many figures who are in in support of eugenics and that kind of split people off into camps of those who could progress and those who couldn’t hence the unfit that is worrying me quite a lot at the minute

Well yeah um it was if if when you when you researched Eugenics it was hugely popular it was hugely popular it was you know if you were an intellectual in in like 1890 to 1910 um you were more likely to support Eugenics than to be against it I mean it was an example of this kind of medical fashion which was so popular it’s very rare to find people who who stood up and spoke against it like um like William James like Thomas Huxley um

like GK Chesterton most people agree with it in some form they might not have believed in involuntary sterilization uh they might have believed you know just in kind of health education you know Pi how to pick a fit partner that kind of thing and we still do that right we still think is this partner you know how how how appropriate are they going to be are they unstable what what would our kids be like um you know we everyone does genetic most people do genetic testings of their fetuses of their of their embryos um

most people now there’s this there’s this technology called um um you know embryo selection where um people who do IVF they get given like you know they do genetic analysis of all the embryos and you can now have the technology to choose an embryo less likely to to get depression when they’re older I I think most people uh would if given the option choose if they were you know said okay here are 10 possible embryos and these ones have the least likelihood of depression many would choose that

and that’s a form of kind of liberal uh Eugenics it’s based on kind of you know personal choice of the parents so but yes you know it it it it you know it has some extremely dark chapters this history extremely dark um but you know because a person supported Eugenics does not mean you know like does not mean that every aspect of their theories is Tainted uh with the kind of you know the the the sin of eugenics so and that we can’t possibly enjoy the writings of Aldis Huxley anymore um

it’s just you know this we have to try and study history somewhat dispassionately as well as as as the evolution of these these ideas and Trends and you know often in ways that we will historically reject decades later um so and we have to try and be careful in our study of it as well and remember that there were many different varieties of it all kinds so I often see it’s such a hot topic now Eugenics that people say oh it’s it’s always white supremacist but it wasn’t always white supremacist you know there all kinds of it there were there people like WB dubis who is the kind of you know famous African-American scholar he also supported Eugen Eugenics so did feminists so did environmentalists so um

it’s literally you know it’s a whole chapter in Western intellectual history not just Western either also in in India and in China and in Russia and in Singapore because we’re all trying to Grapple with how to make sense of evolutionary theory and how to incorporate into our culture and we haven’t figured that out entirely yet particularly as new genetic Technologies emerge so that’s where we are thank you thank you Jules yeah I think definitely worth emphasizing that there is a world of nuance behind calling someone um eugenic supporter or revolutionary spirituality supporter and I think yeah um but we do have two questions that are kind of related between them

and to this so firstly um we have a comment from canila thank you Jules some of the points you make reminded me of some discourses on aasa and ancestral inherited trauma which are perceived as stored in genes and fixable through purs and cleansing do you think this can be related to psychedelic henics and evolutionary spirituality and then if you also wanted to respond to whether because in your doc you didn’t connect the this to psychedelic evangelism as Oliver says he’s wondering if or what sort of connection you see in this in the current trends what current trends psychedelic evangelism

yeah whether you see uh psychedelic evangelin from what I understand in this question as um a connection to this um evolutionary spirituality um and then the discourse on storage in jeans fixable through puring and cleansing that is also popular within this uh psychedelic Renaissance yeah well I mean some of these some of these ideas definitely play out in in in psychedelic culture but in in in weird interesting ways I I haven’t met many people in the in the modern psychedelic culture who believe in old school 20 style Eugenics um like very few do you know Know believe that there should be a kind of some kind of political system that rules who can and can’t reproduce I I kind of

I’ve come across it occasionally but very rarely but you do see all kind you know ideas of certain practices will um um speed up your evolution in some ways uh or possibly speed up the evolution of humanity but um you know like uh you get this idea of DNA Activation in s you know you you might come across an Instagram spirituality that through certain practices or certain drugs or rituals you will activate your your DNA and evolve to The Fifth Dimension for example um or through certain processes you can heal your ancestral trauma and and evolve

to be a a super beinging there’s also I mean one one chapter in this kind of draft book I’ve been writing about um looks at UFO culture culture which is a whole story that that intersects with spiritual evolutionary spirituality and with eugenic thinking um this idea that um you know that aliens are controlling some kind of cosmic eugenic program to uh to evolve Superior beings and that some humans are actually not really humans they’re star seeds they’re a different species they’re part of this Cosmic eugenic program uh whilst other humans are are are kind of inferior on fit they’re like a lower species so um what you saw in UFO culture in the 1950s onwards was some of these ideas of spiritual Eugenics uh and spiritual Evolution feeding into um into UFO culture uh anyway that’s that’s I

I wrote about I wrote an essay online all about star seeds and how it involves some of these uh you know eugenic and and and racial ideas so that’s another way another area you see some of these ideas play out um as for psychedelic evangelism yes I think sometimes you know with people say for example like um Rick doblin or or Roland Griffith there is this sense that psychedelics will play a critical role in the evolution of humans and

that this is um you know like what HG Wells called uh a race between education and catastrophe like either humans will evolve to a higher level or they’re going to go extinct uh and you know if you saw Roland Griffith’s talk at um at psychedelic science that’s what he he says he says we’re facing these existential threats and so Evolution could be very know sorry psychedelics could be very important in the survival of humanity in the evolution of humanity now because the stakes seen as so high because this is a you know

a race between Extinction or Evolution that can lead to this psychedelic evangelism like if the stakes are so high then you know we this must happen and what that can mean is we must therefore not to talk too much about the risks of psychedelics not talk too much about the harms of psychedelics if a pilot takes mushrooms and then you know 48 hours later ex experiences such extreme derealization that they think they’re in a dream and

try to crash the plane therein as as happened um last week you know that must be dismissed as their psychological instabilities nothing to do with the mushrooms so I’m just I’m I’m writing a piece just now for my newsletter it’s called the cost of Utopia if you have such high utopian expectations for psychedelics then you know certain costs are acceptable in terms of psychedelic harms so I think I think that’s how this kind of um thinking can can lead into a kind of evangelism and and utopianism

thank you Jules um

Are there any last questions or comments from the room

yes is evolutionary spirituality not a sort of nonse I mean we all kind of fail to spiritually evolve humans throughout lifetime Lifetime and then spiritual terms are born again and have to learn new lessons what I’m getting is we refer to sort of 5,000 10,000 year old texts for our spirituality it does it evolve can it evolve at all well I mean I yeah that’s a perfectly legitimate question that you know do first of all do humans morally Advance does the spe species morally Advanced is is that even kind of possible uh and you won’t have the answer me no but I mean on certain days I think not and on other days I think maybe so is it show how Bogus the whole thing is

well there have been people who’ said that there there have been biologists um who’ve criticized you know EV evolutionary moral theories starting from Thomas hug Le Thomas Huxley wrote a great essay called Evolution and ethics uh in about 1880 and he said look evolution is not a moral Pro uh process um if you’re in a really vicious environment then the fittest specimen is going to be the most vicious um

so you know he he warned about trying to kind of um harness our ethics or our religion onto evolutionary theory he said you know don’t do it it’s dangerous particularly because it can often lead to um you know this kind of eugenic thinking um so so yeah but but but but I think you could possibly make a kind of Defense of some forms of evolutionary spirituality like possibly you know you could argue that we that that some kind of moral progress is evident in in in human history that we we do you know and people like um Stephen Pinker have argued that and and HL so on my more positive and optimistic days I think maybe maybe we are evolving both technologically and

morally and maybe this you know this is a species-wide thing and maybe we do have a glorious Destiny ahead of us to kind of explore uh through space so I I I it depends on my mood really uh which which attitude I I kind of feel on any given day thanks s see you on the ark and a last question so I’m wondering if we do see evolutionary spirituality or are linking it back to Steve’s original question of the the link to Eco inflation as a way a useful way for people to cope with the dissolution of their previous sense of self and if they have seen they feel transformed they can use that as a CR to make sure that they don’t go back to a previous way of looking at the world so evolutionary spirituality seems to provide a broader framework to fit that new identity so since they’ve evolve they can’t go back do you see a potential there for this to to be healthy or if people are feeling subjectively more mentally healthy is there a way to then support or encourage a way of that framing to be linked to Nature a purpose that is interconnected with a wider hole rather than that they are specifically more evolved than others um

yes I think it is possible um and the example I would give is in our research as we saw um quite a few people talk about having kind of difficulties after trips having extended psychospiritual crisis wondering what’s going on um being given strictly kind of biological frames for it like are you’ve just messed up your neural chemistry and that’s that um and and people talk about being helped by finding the frame of spiritual emergency not everyone is but quite a few people in our research say that don’t they um that they came across the work of Stan gr or others and this idea of spiritual emergency was helpful to them in terms of reframing their their crisis as possibly a kind of growth experience uh and if you look at the theory of spiritual emergency

um as defined by the GRS it is somewhat connected to evolutionary spirituality so the GRS Define spiritual emergency as a kind of temporary turbulent stage in the individual’s um Evolution to a higher state um now I think there are problems you know which we don’t have time to go into but with with gr’s theory of spiritual emergency and one problem very briefly is that I think the GRS tried to kind of separate ordinary bog standard um you know psychological problems and psychosis from these special cases spiritual emergency which happens to kind of special people at places like esselin uh rather than seeing this as a Continuum actually and that you know an awful lot of psycho psychotic experiences have spiritual aspect to them so that’s one issue it’s the attempt to kind of bracket off spiritual emergencies from other kinds of um psychological crisis the second issue is that

gr sees this as a species-wide evolutionary process so in certain organizations like the spiritual crisis Network there’s a teleology here which is that more and more spiritual emergencies are happening because humans are waking up we are waking up to a higher level of Consciousness um to which I I I say kind of well maybe but maybe not who knows for sure like you know that’s that teleology isn’t really necessary like let’s just support people through these crises without having to try and you know hoist them onto some some Grand Cosmic teleological vision of humanity waking up which which actually could you know I’m not sure that’s necessarily helpful to people so you know just brief ly yes AR I think that we’ve definitely seen in our research that the frame of spiritual emergency is often helpful to people in

psychological psychospiritual crisis however I can I can see some kind of problematic issues with some kind of ways that you one could interpret spiritual emergency does that make sense a bit of a a brief answer to course I think it is about moving away more from comparative views of the more evolved than you to seeing how can if we do find pooping that is useful through framings of evolution of I’ve gone through that challenge and I’m now a step further that is not a matter of comparison but more pluralist framings as you mentioned James might be more worth tapping into the future thank you so much Su I realize we are quite over the time but I think everyone really appreciated this talk”

See Also

todo, not sure related pages: that’s why I created this page, b/c Jules makes good points to beware of, not covered by me previously.

How Branching and Non-Branching Represent Two Mental Models of Control-in-World

Michael Hoffman – posting as an important stub starter page April 12, 2025

Crop by Michael Hoffman – {cut right trunk}

Contents:

YI Trees with Branching & Non-Branching Features

“Creation of Plants” Branching Form Develops from III, IYI, YI, IY/YI
Crop and analysis by Michael Hoffman, Jan. 13, 2025
Crop by Michael Hoffman – more branching on L than R; YI tree

realized, or recognized, the theme/ motif/ technique:
{visually cut branch by crossing behind another branch}

Crop by Michael Hoffman, December 11, 2024
non-branching depicted 5 ways

Intro

Motivation of this Page

This is a great crucial question, high priority to explain. My raw text message was a decent starting point, b/c was in an actual conversation with someone explaining Egodeath theory initial basics.

This post is not much ready, but I need it to be on my radar, not hidden in the Draft area. Rick L asked me how branching & non-branching represent two different mental models of control-in-world.

Titles of this Page

How Branching and Non-Branching Represent the Two Complementary Mental Models of Control

How the {branching} & {non-branching} Motifs (in the Medieval Art Genre of {mushroom-trees}) Represent Two Different Mental Models of Control-in-World

the medieval art genre of {mushroom-trees}
magmt

Found a cleaned-up copy of the raw post, in https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/03/13/idea-development-page-26/#txt-summ-how-branching-depicts-eternalism – copyied to here, added more cleanup – 4/12/2025.

March 29, 2025, sent to Rick L, cleaned up here – todo: where else do I recently summarize this topic – if anywhere? eg branching-message mushroom trees article draft?

How Branching vs. Non-Branching Depicts Possibilism vs. Eternalism Models of Control-in-World

In the advanced Psilocybin state, branching possibilities is revealed as illusion when the mind sees the inner workings of the egoic personal control system who exerts power of steering in a branching tree to create the future.

Non-branching means non-branching: snake shaped path of your future life; = enlightenment that one’s snake-shaped path in 4D spacetime.

Your worldline path is seen frozen in rock, imprisoned in fate rock,  slave, kidnapped, imprisoned in heimarmene.

Now you are a competed purified initiate enlightened.  honoring the gods.  

Upon reconciling with hidden source of control-thoughts frozen in the 4D spacetime block, the personal control system no longer has control-turmoil & {trespassing}, bringing {impurity} that {raises fury} stormy anger of the insulted, dishonored, DISRESPECTED gods.  

[“The path for you is decided” – see Iron Maiden lyric]

The path for you is decided from outside your control, done deal, future path non-branching possibilities, only the path forward is real, stone; {snake frozen in rock}.

“Reach Fate” Achievement Earned! 🏆

NEXT, reincorporate the egoic personal control system, w adjustments cleansing child-thinking. 

Ken Wilber “embrace and include ” childish thinking of branching steering, and use the egoic personal control system which u now perceive & use all the time, corrected, purified, made mature 

Treat this Isaac, your child thinking, like u r riding a donkey – ur BELOVED only son.  dont get rid of ego; use it, dis-indentify w it, egoic thinking was only an immature-phase, temporary level of identifying, it it always will be used; reconciling and” ride” egoic thinking.

Be inclusive: SUPPORT and love your egoic, childish, branching-possibilities, freewill thinking.

todo: image: Entry Jeru

todo: image: Isaac – Jesus head :: donkey head = Abr head :: Isaac head.

REGAIN FREEWILL, ABOVE FATE

no-free-will & 4D spacetime eternalism/ heimarmene is the case (else control instability during Psilocybin) – but also,

finally, above the heimarmene fixed stars per Mithraism & Late Antiquity, you kinda get freewill, monolithic, autonomous control again — but, merely VIRTUAL,

qualified possibilism-thinking , “set free from Fate heimarmene cosmic prison ransomed rescued lifted up – rise above fate(!)” 

“Transcend Fate” Achievement Earned! 🏆

With ALL of the elect, above the fate-soaked sphere of the fixed stars, be lifted up to poke head (spirit) in sphere 9 Mithraism : precession of equinox above the reach of the prison warden ARCHONS (petty governors).

as {adult}, {immortal}, Psilocybin transformation motif, in mushroom imagery in Christian art.

— Michael

/ end of text message summarizing branching motif, cleaned up version from idea development page 26

Raw Text Message Summarizing How Branching vs. Non-Branching Depicts Possibilism vs. Eternalism Models of Control-in-World

posts, or cleaned up copy of posts probably from an idea development page 25-27, from Saturday two weeks ago, 3/29/2025:

branching possibilities is illusion when see inner workings of the egoic personal control system who exerts power of steering in a branching tree to create the future

non-branching means non branching: snake shaped pathvof ur future life ; = enlightenment that one’s snake-shaped path in 4D spacetime, tgat path is seen frozen in rock, imprisoned in fate rock,  slave , 

now ur enlightened.  

the path for you is decided from outside your control, done deal, future path non-branching possibilities, only the path forward is real, stone-

NEXT, reincorporate the egoic personal control system, w adjustments cleansing child-thinking. 

 Ken Wilber “embrace and include ” childinsh thinking of branching steering, and use the egoic personal control system which u now perceive & use all the time, corrected, purified, made mature 

achivement 🏆

 treat this Isaac, ur child thinking, like u r riding a donkey – ur BELOVED only son.  dont get rid of ego; use it, disindentify w it, egoic thinking was temp level of identifying , it it always will be used; reconciling and” ride” egoic thinking

bob sermon: be inclusive supoorting ur egoic child branching thinkkng

finally, kinda get freewill monolithic, autonomous control again but qualified/ redee egodeath set free from Fate heimarmene cosmic prison ransomed rescued lifted up – rise above fate(!) 🏆 

w ALL of the elect, above fait-soaked sphere of the fixed stars , be lifted up to poke head (spirit) in sphere 9 Mithraism : precession of equinox above the reach of the prison warden ARCHONS (petty governors)

  as adult psil motif, in mushroom imagery in Christian art

/ end of raw msg

Text Messages about Supposed “Rational Psychonaut” Approach

These pics are in this page b/c this page was in Draft and was convenient place to upload images on Mobile.

todo: clean up the pics to make them flow.

“The Path for You Is Decided” – Iron Maiden Lyrics

I went to the Somewhere in Time concert tour during the lead-up to the Jan. 1988 breakthrough due to combiningin:

  • Block-universe eternalism per Minkowski 4D spacetime block universe, from a university course in Modern Physics.
  • The Way of Zen by Alan Watts, given to me by my father.
  • Studying loose cognition, helped by the college band musicians’ network and the Dead community.
  • Re-conceptualizing the personal control system, to expect non-dysfunctional cross-time control.
  • Switching between two mental models.

4D spacetime block universe
fsbu

non-dysfunctional cross-time control
ndctc

Iron Maiden lyrics from Somewhere in Time album: “the path for you is decided” https://www.google.com/search?q=iron+maiden+lyrics+%22heaven+can+wait%22

Heaven Can Wait (Iron Maiden, 1986)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKiwU6l6cUY —

Lyrics – Improved Transcription by Michael Hoffman April 12, 2025, for scholarly study.

Can’t understand what is happening to me
This isn’t real, this is only a dream
But I never have felt, no, I never have felt this way before

I’m looking down on my body below
I lie asleep in the midst of a dream
Is it now, could it be, the – Angel of Death has come for me?

I can’t believe that really my time has come
I don’t feel ready, there’s so much left undone
And it’s my soul, and I’m not gonna let it get away [loose cognitive experience of soul (egoic control agency) vanishing]

Heaven can wait
Heaven can wait
Heaven can wait
Heaven can wait ’til another day

I have a lust for the Earth below
And Hell itself is my only foe
‘Cause I’ve no fear of dying; I’ll –
Go when I’m good and ready

I snatch a glimpse of the lights eternal rays
I see a tunnel, I stand amazed
At all of the people standing there in front of me

Into the paths of rightness I’ll be led
Is this the place where the living join the dead?
I wish I knew this was only just a nightmare [not just a temporary Mystery Religion terror trip initiation awe; produces mental model maturation: permanent modification of conscious foundation of source of control thoughts]

Take my hand, I’ll lead you to the promised land
Take my hand, I’ll give you immortality
Eternal youth, I’ll take you to the other side
To see the truth, the path for you is decided [non-branching worldline in block universe 4D spacetime per eternalism and Minkowski; {snake frozen in rock}]

My body tingles, I feel so strange [acid effect]
I feel so tired, I feel so drained
And I’m wondering if I’ll ever be the same again [yes and no, after the foundation of control-thought source is re-conceived]

Is this in limbo or Heaven or Hell?
Maybe I’m going down there as well
I can’t accept my soul will drift forever

I feel myself floating back down to Earth
So could this be the hour of my rebirth
Or have I died or will I wake from dreaming?

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Stephen/ Percy/ Harris

Heaven Can Wait lyrics © BMG Rights Management

Egodeath Yahoo Group Posting Listing Key Lyrics about Psychedelic Eternalism (2011)

Max Freakout Archive

https://egodeathyahoogroup.wordpress.com/2021/01/09/egodeath-yahoo-group-digest-105/#message5359 — lists several songs:

Destiny planned out
Speculation of the wise
— Blizzard of Ozz, “Believer”

To see the truth:
The path for you is decided
— Iron Maiden, “Heaven Can Wait”

All preordained, a prisoner in chains
A victim of venomous fate
— Rush, “Freewill”

I’ve been stricken by fate
Wrapped up tight, cannot move, can’t break free
Hand of doom has a tight grip on me
— Metallica, “Trapped Under Ice”

/ end of lyric

Why Physics Without Philosophy Is Deeply Broken… | Jacob Barandes [Part 2]

Video title: Why Physics Without Philosophy Is Deeply Broken… | Jacob Barandes [Part 2]
Jan. 30, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaS1usLeXQM
YouTube channel: Curt Jaimungal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaS1usLeXQM&list=PLZ7ikzmc6zlN6E8KrxcYCWQIHg2tfkqvR&index=17 – link within playlist TOE.

Desc:

“In this captivating [episode] of Theories of Everything, Jacob Barandes and I delve into the intricate world of Indivisible Stochastic Processes and their profound impact on quantum mechanics.

“We explore how these non-Markovian systems introduce quantum phenomena like superposition and interference without the traditional wave function collapse.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaS1usLeXQM@t=300s = 5:00 – “Putnam paper on eternalism , four-dimensionalism, eternalism – everything in spacetime is there already, flow of time is psychological, we live in block-universe eternalism.”

Such a topic is called “Physical Philosophy”.

Fails to say “Minkowski”. Could Find within the transcript, to confirm that.

Einstein was thoroughly steeped in Phil; Philosophical Physics.

The Unreality of Time (McTaggart, 1908)

The Unreality of Time
1908, Ellis McTaggart, in Mind (Oxford)
https://philpapers.org/archive/MCTTUO.pdf

Time and Physical Geometry (Putnam, 1967)

Time and Physical Geometry
Hilary Putnam, 1967, The Journal of Philosophy [, Psychology, and Scientific Methods]
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2024493?origin=JSTOR-pdf

Search “Time and Physical Geometry” Putnam
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Time+and+Physical+Geometry%22+Putnam

https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/putnam/ –

Bob Doyle wrote:

“In 1967 Hilary Putnam claimed to prove that the universe is deterministic (indeed pre-determined) using an argument from special relativity.

“A similar argument had been published a year earlier by C. W. Rietdijk.

“And many years later, in his 1989 book The Emperor’s New Mind, Roger Penrose developed this idea as what is called the “Andromeda Paradox.”

“Even more recently, Michael Lockwood and Michael Levin have defended similar views.

“Putnam, famous for his various theories about “realism,” claims that future events are already “real.”

This is a “tenseless” view of the future, like that of J. J. C. Smart’s block universe of special relativity.

“Putnam discusses the related problems of the truth of “future contingents”…”

The Block Universe of Special Relativity
https://www.informationphilosopher.com/freedom/special_relativity.html –
Bob Doyle wrote:

“Several philosophers have argued that determinism, indeed pre-determinism, can be proved to be true by the special theory of relativity.”

“The first philosopher to consider whether special relativity could prove determinism was J. J. C. Smart.

“Smart was a determinist.

“In 1961, his article in Mind developed the logical standard argument against free will.

“In 1964, he discussed Hermann Minkowski’s 1908 argument for a special-relativistic block universe.

“Minkowski’s work could be interpreted as a “tenseless” view of space-time that says “the future is already out there.”

“Everything that is going to happen has already happened, an idea called actualism.

Minkowski’s Block Universe

Bob Doyle wrote:

“Minkowski says his argument is entirely mathematical, though based on experimental physics,

Minkowski wrote:

“The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength.

“They are radical. Henceforth space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.

“First of all I should like to show how it might be possible, setting out from the accepted mechanics of the present day, along a purely mathematical line of thought, to arrive at changed ideas of space and time…

“Three-dimensional geometry becomes a chapter in four-dimensional physics.
(“Space and Time,” in Problems of Space and Time, ed. J.J.C.Smart, p.297)

J. J. C. Smart

Bob Doyle wrote:

“In the introduction to his 1964 book, Smart was not yet committed to the tenseless view of space-time he holds today.

“In 1964 he was agnostic as to whether “some sort of fatalism must be true” and the future must already exist.

“He emphasizes the mathematical nature of the work, that space-time is not an ordinary space, and that the four-dimensional picture does not imply determinism.

Smart wrote:

“We must not forget that space-time is a space in the mathematical sense of the word.

Quite clearly it cannot be space in the sense of something which endures through time.

This is sometimes half-forgotten in popular expositions of relativity.

It is sometimes said, for example, that a light signal is propagated from one part of space-time to another.

What should be said is that the light signal lies (tenselessly) along a line between these two regions of space-time.

Moritz Schlick has expressed this point well when he says: “One may not, for example, say that a point traverses its world-line; or that the three-dimensional section which represents the momentary state of the actual present, wanders along the time-axis through the four-dimensional world.

For a wandering of this kind would have to take place in time; and time is already represented within the model and cannot be introduced again from outside.”

And if there can be no change in space-time [no meta-change – Michael Hoffman], neither can there be any staying the same.

As Schlick points out, it is an error to claim that the Minkowski world is static [my term: the universe is meta-static dynamic – Michael Hoffman]: it neither changes nor stays the same.

“Changes and stayings the same can both of course be represented within the world picture, for example a changing velocity by a curved line and a constant velocity by a straight line.

“The tenseless way of talking which is appropriate to the four-dimensional space-time world seems to suggest to some people that some sort of fatalism must be true, and that the future is already somehow “laid up.”

“This, however, is a confusion [says the source of confusion], for the “is” in “is already laid up” is a tensed one and suggests that the future exists now, which is absurd.”

[not necessarily; depends again on meaning-networks of words -Michael Hoffman]

“The event of the future, like those of the past, certainly exist, in the sense in which this verb is used tenselessly, but of course they do not exist now.

“Nor does the four-dimensional picture imply determinism.”

[define ‘determinism’ -Michael Hoffman]

“It is quite neutral between determinism and indeterminism.

“The issue between determinism and indeterminism can be put quite easily in the language of space-time.

“lt is as follows:

“From a complete knowledge of a certain three-dimensional (spacelike) slice of space-time together with a knowledge of the laws of nature, could the properties of later (and indeed earlier) slices of space-time be deduced?”

[that’s just domino-chain determinism, which should not be assumed as a position of interest -Michael Hoffman]

“For present purposes let us be agnostic as to the answer to this question.”
(Problems of Space and Time, pp.12-13)”

/ end of Smart

See Also

Site Map:
https://egodeaththeory.org/nav/ – Find “branching”, currently 79 hits.

The “All At Once” Universe Shatters Our View of Time (Emily Adlam)

Michael Hoffman, 6:45 am, Apr. 12, 2025

Contents:

Mytheme Decoded: {burning bush} = Non-Branching Eternalism

2:14 pm April 12, 2025: I have reached confidence in interpreting Moses’ burning bush.

Definite decoding of the {burning bush} mytheme; I’ve posted this hypothesis before.

This how now reached the status of a confirmed hypothesis.

The {burning bush} is not an entheogen; it is an experiential revelation resulting from entheogens. Equivalent to {cut right trunk}, {cut right branch}, {cut branch}.

To “cut branch” = to deny possibilism (possibility-branching) & affirm eternalism (a single, closed future), which includes:

  • Affirm 2-level, dependent control.
  • See God, as uncontrollable source of control-thoughts.

I gained threshold-crossing confidence about decoding “burning bush” while listening to Jacob Barandes talk about branches in the video interview:
Harvard Scientist: “There is No Quantum Multiverse” | Jacob Barandes [Part 3]
I moved that video partial transcription, re: “branch”, to below.

Burning Bush (Van der Borch) – Finger Shapes, Burning Away Branching Possibilities – Proves Bush = Tree

Crop by Michael Hoffman

image processing, and interpretation by Cybermonk [11:04 p.m. February 9, 2023]

Crop, image processing, and interpretation by Michael Hoffman, 11:04 p.m. February 9, 2023
Photo Credit: Julie M. Brown
Crop by Michael Hoffman
“Entry into Jerusalem John Rush diamond frond.jpg” 152 KB 10:28 pm Feb. 26, 2025
Photo Credit Julie M. Brown.
April 10, 2022 image processing & crop by Michael Hoffman.

Sacrifice of Isaac (Van der Borch) – branches burning; compare bush burning:

Burning Bush, and Tablets (Ingeborg Psalter)

Aspect ratio corrected by Michael Hoffman

The Mystic Y (Ingeborg Psalter); Burning Bush

Burning Bush

Crop by Michael Hoffman, Jan. 26, 2025

Features (some noted before):

  • Foolish youth stance: Weight on left foot.
  • Left elbow is touching {fire}.
  • Good though: right hand closer to ground than left hand, per f134 image rules.
  • Turning to look Left, not as good as Right.
Crop by Cybermonk, December 11, 2024

Intro, Relevance to Egodeath Theory

New video yesterday, Apr. 11, 2025. Lacks concept of psychedelic experiencing of eternalism, lacks concept of transcend eternalism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2OhmVWLMs&t=3350s = 55:50

Posted at YouTube

This is my main copy though I could designate https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/04/11/psychedelic-4d-spacetime-block-universe-mysticism/ instead as the main location for such commentary.

My Comment 1 on a Curt & Emily Video

55:50 – Curt Jaimungal asks Emily Adlam the popularly worded, inferior question.  People should not debate “presentism” vs. eternalism, but rather, _possibilism_ vs. eternalism. 

Possibilism (branching, open future) vs. eternalism (non-branching, closed future) are the two relevant models for personal control, as contrasted in the medieval art genre of mushroom-trees.

That genre uses {cut right trunk} and {cut right branch} motifs, assigned to standing on _right_ foot rather than left foot. 

The diagrammatic art genre of mushroom-trees claims that the _branching_ model (possibilism) produces control instability, but relying on the non-branching model (eternalism) produces control stability.

Emily Adlam’s view, 4D spacetime block-universe eternalism, supports the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism, in which block time with dependent control (“non-control” in a sense) is experienced, and the contrast between the branching vs. non-branching models is perceived. 

Posted to youtube April 15, 2025:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoQhHmjyERA
The “All at Once” Theory: The Universe is a Single Timeless Block
April 14, 2024
This video is a short clip of the main interview.

My Comment 2 on a Curt & Emily Video

Everyone went running after (branching) Quantum Mysticism, but the “road not taken” (or less taken) can be called (non-branching) 4D Spacetime Mysticism, or Block-Universe Mysticism.

The competing, Minkowski-based model. Around 1880-1910 seems like a nascent version of this earlier type of Physics-oriented mysticism formed.

The full version of this interview held up to multiple listens, a favorite.

My Comment 3 on a Curt & Emily Video

Someone asked me “What is Quantum Mysticism?”

Wikipedia has a good article “Quantum mysticism”, saying it is bunk spiritual reinterpretation of Quantum Physics; I agree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism

The Wikipedia article emphasizes eg.that the mind or “observer effect” creates many worlds at every moment: that’s the extreme of ego-power inflation.

I have defined the opposite use of Physics for an opposite version of mysticism that is offensive to ego power:

The future is single and already exists, not like domino-chain determinism causality, but quite different like Emily Adlam’s All-at-Once, eternalism; “4D spacetime block-universe mysticism”.

Popular Quantum Mysticism is not the Presentism view of time like the interview contrasts against Eternalism.

(Find “Presentism” in the present page transcript, asked by Curt.)

The popular view is actually Possibilism, which is depicted in medieval art as branching (contrasted against non-branching ie Eternalism perceived in the mystical state of consciousness, which I assert).

Motivation for this Page

I have read books about block time in Physics, but haven’t given them much attention, since they just reiterate my view from January 1988 in a university course in Modern Physics.

This interview provides an efficient equivalent of giving attention to this genre of Physics books.

My psychedelic church is dominated by virtual dogma of Quantum Mysticism. They mistakenly equate this version of mysticism with “the” “Science” view.

But around 1880 and with my breakthrough in Jan. 1988, Physics produced an earlier, better version of mysticism that doesn’t reify false ego and branching-power, but zaps it 100% to smithereens like Zeus revealing his power to Semele.

I am naming this earlier but ignored version of Physics mysticism as eg 4D Spacetime Mysticism, or with less emphasis on the combat within Physics, block-universe mysticism, understood as psychedelics-experienced/ revealed.

Info about Curt Jaimungal

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Curt+Jaimungal%22

Info about Emily Adlam

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Emily+Adlam%22

YouTube Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=emily+adlam

“Theories of Everything” Videos Playlist by Curt Jaimungal

Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal – playlist, including video interviews about:

  • “no quantum multiverse”/ Shattering Manyworlds Theory
  • retrocausality, superdeterminism
  • time doesn’t flow – it’s an emergent effect
  • Hofstadter’s strange loops
  • Time Doesn’t Exist [Never write this stupid binary construction – always say “the sense in which x”. Your intelligence doesn’t exist.]
  • Roger Penrose
  • No Scientific Innovation Since the 1920s
  • Physics community divided
  • Consciousness Theories

Video: The “All At Once” Universe Shatters Our View of Time (Emily Adlam)

Video title:
The “All At Once” Universe Shatters Our View of Time
Everything Happens at Once! (Emily Adlam)
YouTube channel: Curt Jaimungal
Apr 11, 2025
✪ Members first on April 10, 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2OhmVWLMs —

Description Section of Video

Description (“More” link at video):

“Today we are joined by physicist and philosopher Emily Adlam for her first appearance on Theories of Everything to challenge one of the deepest assumptions in science: that time flows.

“In this thought-provoking conversation, Adlam presents her “all-at-once” view of physics, where the universe is more like a completed Sudoku puzzle than a film playing forward.

“We explore the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, the role of the observer, the illusion of causality, and why these foundational questions demand both philosophical clarity and scientific precision.”

New Substack: https://curtjaimungal.substack.com

Links might only work from Desc section in the video at YouTube.

•⁠ ⁠Emily’s profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/…

•⁠ ⁠Spooky Action at a Temporal Distance (paper): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles…

•⁠ ⁠Quantum Field Theory and the Limits of Reductionism (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.20457

•⁠ ⁠Two Roads of Retrocausality (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.12934

•⁠ ⁠Taxonomy for Physics Beyond Quantum Mechanics (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.12293

•⁠ ⁠Strong Determinism (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02886

•⁠ ⁠Carlo Rovelli on TOE:    • The Loop Quantum Gravity Debacle: Car…  

•⁠ ⁠Stephen Wolfram on TOE:    • Solving the Problem of Consciousness …  

•⁠ ⁠Emily interviewed about Nonlocality:    • Nonlocality Not in Space but in Time:…  

•⁠ ⁠Tim Palmer on TOE:    • Tim Palmer: Non-Locality, Universe on…  

•⁠ ⁠Tim Maudlin on TOE:    • Why Bell’s Theorem Changes Everything…  

•⁠ ⁠Algorithmic Randomness and Probabilistic Laws (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2303.01411

•⁠ ⁠Governing Without a Fundamental Direction of Time (paper): https://arxiv.org/pdf/2109.09226

•⁠ ⁠Matt Segal on TOE:    • Is The Universe Conscious? | Matt Segall  

•⁠ ⁠Jacob Barandes on TOE:    • There’s No Wave Function? | Jacob Bar…  

•⁠ ⁠Sabine Hossenfelder on TOE:    • The Major Flaws in Fundamental Physics  

•⁠ ⁠Bernardo Kastrup and Sabine on TOE:    • Bernardo Kastrup Λ Sabine Hossenfelde…  

•⁠ ⁠Sean Carroll on TOE:   • The Crisis in (Fundamental) Physics i…  

Timestamps (Even Though “Time Is an Illusion”, Like the Intelligence of People Who Talk That Way)

Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction

00:56 Observers in Quantum Mechanics

02:15 The Measurement Problem

06:23 Dogmas in Quantum Foundations

08:24 Causation and Its Philosophical Implications

09:12 The Arrow of Time and Its Mysteries

10:28 Exploring Coarse Graining and Reductionism

13:21 Non-Locality: Temporal vs. Spatial

16:06 The Nature of Non-Locality

19:34 Temporal Non-Locality and Its Implications

21:51 Retrocausality: The All-at-Once Perspective

26:25 The Measurement Problem and All-at-Once Framework

28:24 Observer-Centric Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

31:29 Probabilities in Physics

32:51 The Process Matrix and Causal Structures

38:33 Foundations of Physics and Philosophy

1:05:16 The Emergence of Space-Time

1:08:11 Exploring Correlations in Physical Parameters

1:10:44 Epistemology of the Measurement Problem

1:13:26 Lessons in Patience and Persistence

Key Words to Find in the Transcript

Find:

  • possible, possibilism
  • presentism
  • eternalism, eternalist
  • [find ‘eternalist’ in Kyle Bromhall’s article about James’ 1897 article DoD?
    No, just eternal: https://philarchive.org/archive/BROAIU-2]
  • branch
  • many worlds, manyworlds
  • multiverse

My Commentary Notation

[i will clean up the transcription later, remove extra space chars which will hint that I have studied the sentence. markup, bold, & my commentary does same.]

Transcript

Introduction

00:00 Introduction

Coming up soon…

Emily Adlam:

“The dogma I worry about is that we should think  about physics in terms of time evolution.

This picture where you start at the beginning  and evolve forwards in time,

[sounds like Tim Freke’s attempted revision of spirituality in terms of “emergent, evolutionary spirituality, which has a low view of previous expressions of spiritual enlightenment – as I have complained but repaired, since 1986.]

that’s a very intuitive [read: naive] way of thinking about physics, but it  is very clearly not a good fit for what we are seeing.

There’s really good evidence coming from lots of different parts of physics that we shouldn’t be thinking about time in those  terms.”

Curt Jaimungal (intro):

Imagine a completed Sudoku puzzle.

The  rules don’t dictate that you start in one corner  and then work systematically across the grid.

Instead, they just constrain what patterns  are valid for the entire puzzle. Professor  Emily Adlam of Chapman University suggests that  the fundamental laws of physics work similarly.  

You don’t evolve the universe step-by-step  from past to future. Instead, there are   these constraints. Something that selects valid  patterns across all of spacetime simultaneously.  

This quote-unquote all-at-once perspective helps  explain paradoxical quantum phenomena like delayed  choice experiments and Bell nonlocality.

It  also comports with Einstein’s relativity,   where the distinction between past and future  depends on the observer’s reference frame.

Observers in Quantum Mechanics

00:56 Observers in Quantum Mechanics

If  correct, this paradigm shift would transform  our understanding of causality, of observers, and of the nature of physical law itself.

CJ:

What’s  the largest unsolved problem in physics today that  you’re interested in?

EA:

Well, this is not a very  original answer, but I think the measurement  problem of quantum mechanics for me still really  stands out as an important unsolved problem.  

Not just because it’s intellectually interesting,  but because it seems to me that it’s closely   linked to a variety of concrete problems that  we’re working on in modern physics.

In particular,  I think in the context of work on quantum gravity,  a lot of the issues we’re really struggling   with are ultimately to do with the nature of  observers, the nature of observation.

For example, solving the problem of time is all about trying  to understand how to put the observers and their  theories in a way that reproduces the kinds of  observations we expect to see.

And so that makes me think that perhaps there’s an issue here where  we never really came to grips with how to think  about observers in the context of ordinary quantum  mechanics, and that’s really holding us back from making us progress on further physics.

So I think  that problem to me demands a solution not just for  intellectual curiosity, but also to be able to  make real progress.

The Measurement Problem

02:15 The Measurement Problem

And what’s the definition of ‘observer’?

Is it the same as a measuring device, or  what counts as a measurement?

Emily Adlam:

Well that’s exactly  the problem.

We don’t know clearly how to define  observers in concrete physical terms.

We have,  of course, an intuitive notion of what an observer  is, and we know what we expect observers to see,  but it’s still very unclear how to properly  model observers within quantum mechanics.

All the interpretations of quantum mechanics say  something different about how you should represent  observers, and that has important knock-on effects  for how you’re going to think about observers in  the context of further physics like quantum  gravity.

How does the problem of observers,  or defining what observers are, have  anything to do with quantum gravity?  

So, I mean, one of the big problems we encounter  in the formulation of quantum gravity is known as  the problem of time, which refers to the fact that  if you impose a sort of canonical quantization on  gravity, the result is that time evolution seems  to vanish.

You end up with this sort of strained,  timeless model.

And so then one obvious problem  you have is to try to understand how the kinds of  experiences that we have could possibly arise in this context.

Where does our sense of doing things  in time and obtaining outcomes come from?

And so  there are lots of interesting ideas around this,  but a lot of this is still very focused on this  question of how exactly should you represent   an observer, and how can you make sense of  sort of local observations in this setting.  

So why don’t you tell us how you make sense of  observers, then? Well, I mean, unfortunately,  I don’t have a complete answer to this question.

I  think one thing that we can see clearly from both  general relativity and quantum gravity is that  making sense of observers is probably going to  require understanding them in sort of relational  terms, understanding observations as things that  happen in some sense relative to our observers,  rather than being things that are out there in   the world by themselves.

So that seems like an  important insight, which I think is also relevant  for standard quantum mechanics. But certainly,  it’s an ongoing project to understand exactly how  to make that work in a coherent way. We’re going  to get to the relational interpretation of quantum  mechanics and your work with Carlo Rovelli.

Carlo Rovelli: Physics Without Time

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22carlo+rovelli%22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Rovelli#Physics_without_time

But  prior to that, I want to know, what the heck is   a Sudoku universe?

The Sudoku universe  is a way of thinking about time and laws in the  context of modern physics.

So there’s this perhaps  quite traditional way of thinking about physics,   where we imagine it as something like a computer, as Ken Wharton puts it.

So we think of an initial  state being put in, and then the universe just  evolves the initial state forwards in time and   produces the course of history.

And that’s,  I think, the intuitively natural way to think about physics that many people still use.

But  there’s, I think, really good evidence coming   from lots of different parts of physics that we  shouldn’t be thinking about time in those terms.  

We should instead be thinking about the laws of nature as applying all at once to the whole of history.

So in that sense, they’re like the  rules of a game of Sudoku.

The rules of Sudoku  don’t tell you to start at the left and then move  towards the right.

What they do is constrain the  whole grid and tell you whether an entire solution  is valid or invalid.

So the thought is that the  laws of nature perhaps work like that and not  like time evolution.

Is that the same as saying  that there’s some imposition of consistency? 

So certainly consistency is one important kind  of constraint.

I think probably we need more  constraints than just consistency because I  don’t know how to derive the actual laws that we  observe from purely consistency conditions.

It  would be neat if that could be done. But it seems  like there might be some constraints going beyond  just consistency conditions to sort of impose  the specific types of laws that we actually see.  

You had a 2018 paper called Spooky Action at  a Temporal Distance, which is a great title  by the way.

A Dogma in Quantum Foundations: That We Should Think in Terms of Time Evolution

06:23 Dogmas in Quantum Foundations

You mentioned something becoming  a dogma in physics.

I’m quoting you, a dogma, and something like there’s an assumption which is  actively limiting progress in quantum foundation. 

So what is it? And those are strong words.

So I’d like you to justify your usage of that language.  

Emily Adlam:

The dogma I was worrying about there was  this idea that we should think about physics in terms of time evolution, this picture where you  start at the beginning and evolve forwards in   time.

As I say, that’s a very intuitive way  of thinking about physics, but it is I think  very clearly not a good fit for what we are  seeing in modern physics.

And yet nonetheless,  many people I think are still drawn to try to  think about things in those terms.

So for example, in quantum foundations, it’s very common to be  quite focused on trying to give causal accounts of things to understand either in classical  terms or to move to a sort of quantum notion of causation where you can tell the story about  one thing causing another thing causing another   thing.

And that I think is not a good use of our  efforts because there are clear indications that  that’s not really the structure that physics  actually has.

And so trying to force it into a causal structure is not likely to be a good way of  understanding it.

[‘causal’ implies branching possibilities & monolithic, autonomous control — vs non-branching possibilities with 2-level, dependent control -Michael Hoffman]

In the philosophical literature,  there’s disputes as to what is causation.

Do you  have a personal account of causation?

Yeah. When  I say personal, I mean one that you favor. 

Definitely the accounts of causation I favor.  

Other ones which suggest that causation needs  to be understood essentially as a macroscopic  phenomenon.

So causation I think clearly has  something to do with thermodynamics and the   thermodynamic arrow in terms of entropy.

It’s  also I think clearly related to perspective,  the perspective of macroscopic observers like us  and what we can and can’t achieve.

It’s related to  interventions and telling a story about what  observers like us can achieve by intervening  on certain types of variables.

So all of those  things make it seem very macroscopic in nature,  which means that for me it’s incorrect to think  of causation as being something that adheres in  the microscopic world.

Causation and Its Philosophical Implications

08:24 Causation and Its Philosophical Implications

Certainly there are I think  important kinds of structure in the microscopic world that we need to think about, but I don’t  think those structures are causal in the ordinary   sense.

And so it’s not going to be particularly  helpful to try to model them in causal terms.  

So I’d like to talk about non-locality as  well, specifically temporal non-locality.

And   in temporal is time. And earlier you mentioned the  problem of time.

And then here we’re talking about  the arrow of time or the thermodynamic arrow  of time. So it sounds to people who know some  physics that, oh, there’s a problem of time.  Is that the problem of the arrow of time?

Is the problem of time different than the arrow of  time problem? And does the second law solve it?  

All of these get entwined in their mind. So why  don’t you distinguish those?

What is the problem of time?

What is the arrow of time and what it  has to do with the second law?

The Arrow of Time and Its Mysteries

09:12 The Arrow of Time and Its Mysteries

The arrow of time usually refers to the fact that in the  world, as we experience it, there are all these  temporal asymmetries, you know, glasses break and  don’t usually recompose themselves.

All of these  kinds of obvious asymmetries that characterize  our lives.

The problem of the arrow of time  is that the underlying physics mostly seems to be time-symmetric.

So in that sense, it’s not obvious  where all of these asymmetries could come from. 

You seem to have to impose them by just deciding  by fiat that the initial state of the universe  is some special kind of state, which can explain   those asymmetries.

But for many people, that’s not  super satisfying.

The problem of time in quantum  gravity is a distinct issue.

It refers to the  fact that within a specific technical formalism  for quantizing gravity, when you perform that  quantization, you find that time evolution ends  up being what’s called a gauge transformation,  which means that it’s not physically real.

It’s   just kind of giving two different descriptions of  the same thing. So it looks like time evolution  in the ordinary sense is not present at all. So  that leads to a problem of trying to understand,  you know, where do our experiences come from? 

Why do we have these experiences that feel like  they are temporal in nature?

Exploring Coarse Graining and Reductionism

10:28 Exploring Coarse Graining and Reductionism

So they are separate  problems, but I think it’s very likely they are linked.

I think certainly the story about why we  have experiences which are temporal in nature must  have something to do with thermodynamics and the  fact that we live in this very asymmetric regime.

[our experiencing is always shaped in the form of causal agency steering among branching possibilities into an open future]  

So there’s still work to be done to flesh  out the connections between these things,   but certainly I think they’re not completely  independent.

So some people explain the arrow  of time with coarse graining. I think Stephen  Wolfram does this, and in coarse graining is the  notion of renormalization. You had a paper on why  reductionism is false, or at least not necessarily  true, and you tied it to renormalization.

Can you  please talk about that?

In that paper,  you know, this is sort of an exploratory paper. 

I’m not necessarily committed to the view that  reductionism is false, but I’m interested in  whether that is maybe one way to try to resolve  some of the problems that we encounter in quantum  field theory.

So one of the problems is a sort of  fine-tuning issue where we find that in certain  kinds of cases, it seems that the values of two  distinct fundamental constants must be very  carefully adjusted to fit each other in order  to produce the observed value of the constant  at a higher scale.

And sort of the observation  I was making here was that if you say things are  the other way around, if you say that the higher  level constant is fundamental and the smaller  scale constants are in fact derived from it,  that gives you a very natural explanation for why  they’re fine-tuned in this way, because they are   in fact fixed by the actual value of the higher  level constant.

So the thought there was just that  perhaps changing our way of thinking such  that in some cases smaller scale things  are explained by larger scale things rather than  vice versa might be a way of understanding some   of those phenomena.

Then it was important to  look at the renormalization transformations,  because renormalization is the transformation  we use in quantum field theory to move between  different scales.

And so the question I was  looking at there was trying to understand, given  the mathematical structure of the renormalization  translations, is it possible that things could be  reversed in direction and that the higher scale  things could define the lower scale things and   not vice versa?

We normally wouldn’t think that’s  possible in sort of more ordinary physics, because  we think there’s a sort of many-to-one mapping  where many microscopic possibilities get mapped   to one macroscopic possibility, so the macroscopic  possibility can’t determine what’s going on in the  microscopic scales.

But renormalization is in  fact a one-to-one transformation, so it does  seem more plausible in the kind of regime where  that’s relevant, that perhaps the higher scale   things could determine the lower scale things  because of the specific mathematical structure  of that transformation. Even at fixed points?  So fixed points are somewhat more complicated,  

Non-Locality: Temporal vs. Spatial

13:21 Non-Locality: Temporal vs. Spatial

because fixed points do involve scenarios where  many solutions get mapped to one solution. But the  thing about fixed points is that they can occur  both at very small scales and at larger scales.

So  it’s not obvious to me that invoking fixed points  particularly favors one direction of explanation, since they occur at both levels.

So let me  see if I can phrase this in the language for  mathematicians, and correct me if I’m incorrect. 

The renormalization group is a set of tools to  determine how parameters change with different  scales, whether it’s energy scales or length   scales or what have you. Now, it’s less of a group  in the algebraic sense and more a set of tools,  but if it was to be something like a group, it  would be a monoid, because not every element is  invertible.

However, most of the elements are  invertible, and this would mean that you don’t  privilege some scales being more fundamental, in  the same way that in an affine group you don’t   have a privileged origin? That’s right, yeah.  So we have various approximations we use to do  renormalization, and many of those are not  invertible.

But there are good reasons to think   that the real underlying transformations should be  invertible. And if that’s the case, then outside  of fixed points, you can go from small scales to  large scales, or you can go from large scales to   small scales. It’s kind of the same from the point  of view of the underlying math. And so there’s no  sort of obvious sense in which the physics is  telling you the small things must explain the   big things and not vice versa.

Let me see if I can  make another analogy. So let’s imagine there’s a  bird in the sky and you take a snapshot of that  bird. And then you say, okay, its position is   here and its velocity is here, or its momentum.  And then you could say, okay, where is it going  to be?

And then you can plan out or you can  predict its trajectory. And then you say, well,  look what we got here as an initial position and  velocity.

But why did you call this “initial”?

Like  you could actually, from another point, make the  trajectory go backward.

And so you have the whole  trajectory.

So what is the “initial” point?

Why is one point being privileged?

Yeah, I mean, I think  that’s a great analogy, because I would say much  the same about time evolution as well, that there  is no particular reason to privilege one point. 

Certainly the physics doesn’t tell you you have   to do that. And yeah, I think the same is true, at  least for many applications of the renormalization transformation.

The physics doesn’t seem to be  telling you that the smallest, most fundamental  scales must actually be privileged in that sense. 

The Nature of Non-Locality

16:06 The Nature of Non-Locality

So let’s get to nonlocality.

There’s a large  hubbub about nonlocality and Bell’s theorem and  also realism.

Well, what is nonlocality?

Yeah, so in the context of quantum mechanics, nonlocality  is the phenomenon that quantum mechanics exhibits  correlations which seem to be too strong to be  explained by any local model.

So normally when  we see correlations at a distance, we would expect  to explain them by some common cause in the past.  

They both came from the same source or something  like that. But Bell’s theorem demonstrates that  the types of correlations we see in quantum  mechanics can’t be explained that way.

It seems   as though there’s some kind of direct influence  between events happening at a distance that can’t  be explained in this sort of common cause way.  Now there’s two different types of nonlocality,  spatial and temporal.

And you have many papers,  many talks as well on temporal nonlocality. So  please distinguish the two.

Yeah. So perhaps the,  I guess the traditional way of thinking about  nonlocality in quantum mechanics is to imagine it  as a spatial form of nonlocality.

So that involves  a situation in which perhaps Alice performs a  measurement in one location. And as soon as she  does that, the wave function collapses everywhere  in the world.

And that sort of conveys information  across to Bob wherever he is. And that has  an impact on the results of his subsequent   measurement.

So that nonlocality is spatial  because the effect of what Alice does is just  transferred to the whole global state everywhere  at the same time.

Whereas temporal nonlocality  suggests that nonlocality doesn’t necessarily have  to be conveyed immediately in terms of the current  state of the world.

You can potentially think  of nonlocality as kind of hopping across time   as well. So Alice performs her measurement at  some time and at some other place.

And at some  later time, Bob performs a measurement and there’s  just a direct relationship.

There’s some kind of   constraint requiring that Bob’s outcome reflects  Alice’s choice in some way.

So there’s a kind of  direct nonlocal impact that is not mediated  by a global state evolving forward carrying  that information. Does spatial nonlocality  imply temporal or vice versa?

Combining spatial nonlocality with relativistic  constraints makes it very compelling to think  that there should be temporal nonlocality.

That’s  because if you take a frame of reference within a  relativistic setting where you have a spatially  nonlocal effect, something Alice does influences  something that happens over here, you’re allowed  within relativity to make a change of reference   frame to get another equally valid reference  frame.

And in that reference frame, those events  are not going to be at the same time anymore. 

Bob’s event over here is going to be either in  the future or the past of Alice’s observation. 

So it looks like by making that transformation,  you have turned your spatial nonlocality into  temporal nonlocality.

So that in that sense, if you believe what relativity tells us about  the close connections between space and time, it seems very hard to maintain that nonlocality  is always spatial and never temporal.

So then why is it that physicists, if I understood one of your  papers correctly, why is it that physicists focus on the spatial nonlocality when if you’re in the  relativistic setting and both are on quote-unquote “equal footing”?

(A term I don’t like for various  reasons. I’ll put a link to a video on why I don’t like “equal footing”.)

Particles don’t take “all possible paths simultaneously.” Here’s why.
Curt Jaimungal, April 3, 2025
https://curtjaimungal.substack.com/p/particles-dont-take-all-possible?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share – “Firstly, what is this word “possible”? Possible isn’t a physics word.”

Temporal Non-Locality and Its Implications

19:34 Temporal Non-Locality and Its Implications

But regardless, why is  it that physicists tend to focus on the spatial nonlocality compared to the temporal one?

One main reason for this is because quantum mechanics historically and still usually today is formulated as a time-evolution theory.

So the natural way to think about quantum  mechanics in its standard formulation is to  formulate it in terms of global states which carry all the information forwards in time. 

So from that point of view, if you’re trying to  model locality in that picture, perhaps the sort of natural thing to do is have a global collapse of the wave function that takes place everywhere and so to have a spatial nonlocality.

If you are  formulating quantum mechanics in a different way,  as a non-time evolution theory, then temporal nonlocality becomes much more natural and  compelling.

But that’s not the traditional way in  which we have formulated quantum mechanics.

Is the  future influencing the past an example of temporal  nonlocality?

Yes, so it could be. It depends, I think, how you think about the way in which  the future influences the past.

If, for example, your model of the future influencing the past involves some kind of like backwards evolving state that goes back and carries the information  backwards in time, you might end up with a picture  where there is a backwards influence, but it is  sort of locally mediated by a backwards evolving  state.

On the other hand, if your model of the way  in which the future influences the past is some  kind of all-at-once style model where there’s just  a sort of global constraint relating these two things to each other, in that case it is going to  look much more like temporal nonlocality because  there doesn’t need to be a sort of literal state  that goes back and carries the information.

Right.  

In your work, as I was going through it, you  differentiate between dynamical retrocausality, so influences propagating backward in time  step-by-step, and then this all-at-once, and this term “all-at-once” will come up over and over again.

I believe it’s an all-at-once temporal retrocausality.

Retrocausality: The All-at-Once Perspective

21:51 Retrocausality: The All-at-Once Perspective

But would it be called  retrocausality at that time?

At that point,  if it’s all—I guess that’s a pun—would it be  called retrocausality if it’s happening all at once?

Why is it retrocausality?

Yeah, well, I use  retrocausality in this connection just to sort of,  in a loose way, to relate what’s going on here  to sort of more traditional discussions of   retrocausality.

I think, strictly speaking, what’s  going on there is not retrocausality because I  think there’s no causality in fundamental physics. 

So, neither the forwards nor the backwards direction is truly causal.

But certainly, if  you try to look at this from a more macroscopic  point of view and you sort of write down a causal  model in which a person intervenes on something, in that sense, you’re going to get effects that  look retrocausal from that macroscopic point of view, even though I do think that you should  acknowledge that at the fundamental level, none of this is causal.

So, when  you’re thinking about all-at-once, are you also thinking about boundary conditions?

So, the ordinary way that physics is thought  about is that you have your boundary conditions  plus the laws, and you then evolve forward.

Definition of ‘All-at-Once’

So,  please define what all-at-once is.

All-at-once refers to this sort of Sudoku  universe-style idea where the laws of nature  apply to the whole of history all at once.

The one possible type of all-at-once model is a  model in which you fix the initial and the final  conditions, and then you ask the laws to determine  what happens in between.

That’s quite a   common type of problem that we see even in fairly  standard physics.

But it’s also not the only kind  of possibility.

When I talk about all-at-once  or constraint-based laws, I usually talk about  the laws of nature determining the whole history  at once.

In that sense, often it will be the  case that you can fix any state anywhere on  the history, and that will be sufficient to   fix the rest.

It could be the initial state,  could be the final state, could be one or more  states in between.

In that sense, in that kind  of picture, no particular point of time has to  be specially privileged.

It’s just the history  as a whole which is selected by the laws.

When  speaking about these histories, it reminds me of  the transaction interpretation.

Have you done any   work on the transaction interpretation, or do you  have any thoughts on it?

The transactional  interpretation is certainly interesting.

I’m  interested in these kinds of retrocausal models.  

I guess I would like to see more emphasis from  the transactional interpretation on moving away  from specific experimental situations to a more  general picture where I can understand how the  experimental situations and the observers in  particular are supposed to arise from something  more fundamental than that.

In some cases, the  transactional interpretation seems to me overly   focused on a setup where the instruments and the  observers are already given.

Tim Maudlin had a  challenge to the transactional interpretation  about how there’s some contradiction in simple   backward causal stories.

So, firstly, what is Tim  Maudlin’s objection or challenge, and what does  the all-at-once model do to resolve it?

Maudlin’s  concern was that if you imagine an experiment in  which we take some sort of preliminary measurement  in the middle of the experiment and then we use  that to determine part of the final conditions,  the final measurement we’re going to make,  that looks inconsistent with the most naive  version of the transactional interpretation   because the transactional interpretation is  supposed to take the initial and final conditions.  

Determine what happens in between so you can  make that become contradictory.

There are more  sophisticated versions of the transactional  interpretation which avoid this issue,   but I think all of them ultimately avoid this  issue by moving away from the sort of naive  story where there’s a literal transaction taking  place in some sort of temporal process and more  towards an all-at-once style picture where the  whole thing is kind of atemporal and has to be  thought of as being determined in this atemporal  sense that fixes its consistency.

So I think  ultimately, resolving that kind of problem,  both in the transactional interpretation and   in retrocausal models more generally, does seem  like it’s going to push you towards an all-at-once  style picture.”

https://egodeaththeory.org/2021/01/22/quotes-from-the-great-mystics-of-egodeath/#Control-vortex —

Martin Ball’s going to inevitably run into the Egodeath theory. And in a way, he probably already has; Ball talks about ‘the shadow’, or something like that, this kind of New-Agey term: but, that is the problem; the threat of ego death looming, in the altered state.

We can help show – in addition to the critique of Pop Sike, make it constructive and show them how they can move closer to the Egodeath theory, why the Egodeath theory is a more attractive option than their current paradigms, intellectually speaking: just for coherence; and, for providing the fullest model of what goes on in the altered state.

Because that’s really what draws us, what has drawn us to it; there’s nothing that really compares to the depth of explanation; that actually, pushing through towards the ego death, and not trying to skate around the outside and use the sacrament for some other purpose.

Cyberdisciple, Transcendent Knowledge Podcast, episode 3 (19:00)
Crop by Michael Hoffman
Crop by Michael Hoffman

We started this conversation with  talking about the largest problem that irks you,  and it was the measurement problem, and now  we’re talking about the all-at-once model.  

The Measurement Problem and All-at-Once Framework

26:25 The Measurement Problem and All-at-Once Framework

Did the measurement problem lead you to this  all-at-once quantum framework, or did you starting this all-at-once quantum framework lead  you to realize the importance of the measurement   problem?

They are separate in that the indications that the all-at-once  model is correct come partly from quantum  mechanics but also from other parts of physics,  from relativity and quantum gravity and so on.

Just adopting an all-at-once style model  does not by itself solve the measurement problem  because the measurement problem is to a large   extent about how to model observers.

Just saying  we’re going to tell an all-at-once story doesn’t  answer the question of how to model observers. 

So I do think that it seems clear to me that the   right solution to the measurement problem is  going to be some all-at-once style solution,  but there are a number of different possibilities  within that, and so I think it’s still for me open  which is the right way to do that.

“Cubism” Is Mistranscription of: QBism (Quantum Bayesianism)

Do you find cubism? Or other observer-centric interpretations  to be unsatisfactory?

I find them incoherent.

My  worry about them is that if you’re really serious  about your observer-centricity, that is going to  lead you inevitably to a picture in which every   observer kind of has their own little reality and  they’re not able to communicate with each other.  

That I think is incompatible with the practice  of science.

Science is a very social activity.  

The sort of objectivity of science rests on the  fact that we have all these different scientists doing observations and then sharing them.

So I  don’t think it’s reasonable to interpret quantum  mechanics in any way which ultimately says  we can’t actually communicate with different   observers.

I am however interested in sort of  more moderate observer-centric views which allow  that observers play an important role or that  perspectives in general play an important role,  but which nonetheless make provision for sort of  connections between perspectives to happen.

Such as relational quantum?

Observer-Centric Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

28:24 Observer-Centric Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics

Yeah, so I mean relational quantum mechanics in its standard formulation does have the problem that I’ve just described  because it does imply that it is impossible in  an absolute sense to ever know anything about  what’s going on in anyone else’s perspective.  

But the work that I did with Carlo Rovelli  recently was about thinking about how could  you alter relational quantum mechanics to overcome  this issue.

And so we did suggest a possible way   to address that by adding a postulate which  allows communication between observers.

The Economist [promotional]

https://economist.com/toe [theories of everything]

CJ:

“Just a  moment. Don’t go anywhere. Hey, I see you inching  away. Don’t be like the economy. Instead, read The  Economist.

I thought all The Economist was was  something that CEOs read to stay up to date on   world trends. And that’s true, but that’s not only  true.

What I’ve found more than useful for myself  personally is their coverage of math, physics,  philosophy, and AI, especially how something  is perceived by other countries and how it may  impact markets.

For instance, The Economist had an  interview with some of the people behind DeepSeek  the week DeepSeek was launched. No one else had  that.

Another example is The Economist has this  fantastic article on the recent dark energy data which surpasses even Scientific American’s  coverage, in my opinion.

They also have the chart  of everything. It’s like the chart version of  this channel.

It’s something which is a pleasure   to scroll through and learn from.

Links to all of  these will be in the description, of course.

The Word “Now, ” Is on the Egodeath Block List; the Instructor’s Equivalent of the “So, ” Virus (Verbal Tic)

Now, The Economist’s commitment to rigorous journalism  means that you get a clear picture of the world’s  most significant developments.

I am personally  interested in the more scientific ones,  like this one on extending life via mitochondrial  transplants, which creates actually a new field  of medicine, something that would make Michael  Levin proud.

The Economist also covers culture,  finance and economics, business, international  affairs, Britain, Europe, the Middle East, Africa,  China, Asia, the Americas, and of course, the USA. 

Whether it’s the latest in scientific innovation  or the shifting landscape of global politics,  The Economist provides comprehensive coverage,  and it goes far beyond just headlines.

“Look, ” Is a Junk Filler Word

Look, if  you’re passionate about expanding your knowledge   and gaining a new understanding, a deeper one,  of the forces that shape our world, then I  highly recommend subscribing to The Economist.

I  subscribe to them, and it’s an investment into my,  into your, intellectual growth. It’s one that  you won’t regret.

As a listener of this podcast,  you’ll get a special 20% off discount.

Now  you can enjoy The Economist and all it has to  offer for less.

Head over to their website,  http://www.economist.com slash TOE, T-O-E, to get  started.

Thanks for tuning in, and now let’s  get back to

the exploration of the mysteries  of our universe.

Again, that’s economist.com slash  TOE.

https://economist.com/toe [theories of everything]

How Do You Think about Probabilities?

How is it that you think about probabilities?  

Like there are different interpretations of  probabilities.

Forget about quantum mechanics.  

There are different interpretations of what a  probability is.

So in metaphysics and in science, how do you think about probability?

Probabilities in Physics

31:29 Probabilities in Physics

Yeah, I think  the interpretation of probability is a very hard  

problem. I think I’m not wholly satisfied with any  of the approaches that we have available to us.  

The sort of frequentist approaches are useful  in many cases, but have pretty significant  philosophical problems for accounting for certain  kinds of edge cases. Subjective Bayesianism,  I think, just doesn’t do justice to the fact  that certain probabilities do seem to be out   there in the world and not just in our minds. 

The sort of dispositionalist accounts are quite  mysterious and also very hard to reconcile with  all-at-once style physics.

There are a couple of  recent approaches that I’m very interested in. 

Frequentism: Anything “CAN” Cause Psilocybin Effects, but How Frequently DOES it? 0%, not 50% as Falsely Implied

There’s a view called gnomic frequentism due to   someone called John Roberts, which suggests that  probabilities should be understood in terms of  laws which require that frequencies should look a  certain way.

There’s some really nice work on this  recently by Eddie Chen and John Barrett looking  at the ways in which you could potentially expand  on that and think about probabilities as sort of  constraints on relative frequencies.

While that  work is still ongoing, I think that’s a really  interesting direction and probably the most  promising approach from my point of view. 

What do you mean?

What is Eddie Chen saying   that probabilities should look a certain way? 

What does that mean?

The Process Matrix and Causal Structures

32:51 The Process Matrix and Causal Structures

This is working within the sort of all-at-once style constraint-based view  of laws.

The observation is that if you allow  that laws are global constraints which apply to the whole of history, then you can formulate a   probabilistic law as saying something like, the  relative frequency of occurrences of some outcome  across all instances of this type of measurement  across all of history must have some value or must  fall in some range.

You can think of the laws  or probabilities as directly constraining the  relative frequencies that actually occur.

That’s  somewhat similar in spirit to the frequentist   approaches, but I think avoids some of the more  serious problems for frequentism because it’s  not just saying that probabilities are whatever  the frequencies should happen to be.

It really is   saying that the laws constrain the frequencies  and require them to have certain values.  

How does your approach compare with Shelley  Goldstein’s approach?

The approach that Eddie  Chen and Shelley Goldstein have worked on in terms  of laws is, I think, very similar in spirit to  mine.

Indeed, Eddie and I are working on a project  examining some of those similarities.

But perhaps  one difference is that they are inclined to think  of those all-at-once constraints as a fundamental  primitive, whereas I perhaps prefer to think  of them as being a form of modal structure in  accordance with a generally structurally realist approach to physics and to laws.

But I don’t think  those views are necessarily incompatible  with each other.

They’re more a difference   of emphasis.

[that sounds like how recently, I’ve been adjusting the relative emphasis of integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking; good news & bad news of enlightenment, etc. -Michael Hoffman ]

Modal: Facts about What Is Possible and Impossible

What’s a modal structure?

What does  that mean?

Modal is a word that philosophers  use to refer to facts about what is possible and  impossible.

Perhaps the most well-known example of  modal structure is causal structure.

So, that’s  one form that modal structure can take.

Because  I don’t think causation is fundamental, I don’t  think that can be the most general type of modal  structure.

But I do think the world has some other  kind of structure, which is in some way similar to  causal structure, but perhaps more general than  that.

And so, that’s where I would expect those  all-at-once constraints to live. Modal structure. 

So, modal comes from philosophy. It’s not a term  you hear in theoretical physics. Now, it is when  you start to study the foundations of physics  or the foundations of quantum mechanics.

But I’m  curious how philosophical tools, such as modalism  or analyzing determinism or realism, has guided  your research?

There’s a useful back and forth to be had here.

I think  that modern theoretical physics has important lessons for a variety of traditional philosophical  discussions.

This discussion about lawhood is a  great example.

Both me and Eddie and Shelley are  inspired by noting that traditional philosophical  accounts of lawhood don’t seem to do a very good  job of accommodating the kinds of laws we see in   modern physics.

Two-Way Inspiration between Physics & Philosophy

And I think there’s a useful  sort of flow of information backwards as well,  because using these philosophical tools and doing  the work to analyze, okay, so what are laws now?  

How can we understand the types of laws we’re  seeing in modern physics?

That’s a useful way   of clarifying our thoughts about what’s going  on in theoretical physics, understanding what  are useful directions for future research,  and understanding how we can connect those  developments back up to the kinds of things we’re  concerned with in philosophy and in everyday life.  

CJ:

Do you encounter the attitude from physicists  that, hey, physics, experimental physics,  theoretical physics, it doesn’t need anything  from philosophy?

Philosophy hasn’t contributed anything to science in the past 100 years other  than maybe Popper, and before that it was a while, and you can’t just count Aristotle, that was  thousands of years ago.

So do you encounter   that attitude?

Emily Adlam:

I think there’s a wide spectrum  of attitudes within physics. I mean, I certainly  have encountered people with that attitude, but  I’ve also encountered many physicists who love   philosophy and are very interested in it and are  very keen to talk to philosophers.

So while that  attitude does exist, I think there’s also plenty  of goodwill and interest in both communities to  talk to each other and make progress.

CJ:

What would  be the counterpoint to someone who’s saying that  philosophy hasn’t contributed directly to physics in the past few decades?

EA:

Definitely the most  obvious example I would say is Bell’s theorem and  the discussion around non-locality.

Bell’s theorem  was very much regarded as not mainstream physics  when it was formulated, and Bell was a physicist,  but other people involved in the discussion  of non-locality and pushing this forward,  like Shimoni, were not physicists, they were  primarily philosophers.

Certainly, I think   this topic probably got more of a foothold within  philosophy before it moved back into mainstream  physics, but now it’s certainly recognized as  mainstream physics.

The Nobel Prize was awarded  for it recently.

So I think that’s an example  of a case where topics that were considered   sort of foundational and conceptual were worked  on within philosophy for a while, but ultimately  became recognized as part of mainstream physics.  So what got you interested in philosophy?

Foundations of Physics and Philosophy

38:33 Foundations of Physics and Philosophy

Did you  start in physics or did you start in philosophy? 

My undergrad was in both physics and philosophy,  so I guess both.

I’ve always been very interested  in physics and in science, but my questions have  

always been more on the side of what is considered  to be foundational physics or philosophy of  physics.

I think it was a toss-up for a long time  whether I was going to be a physicist working on   the foundations of physics or a philosopher.  My PhD is actually in physics, not philosophy,  but in the end, I think perhaps the kind of work I  want to do feels like it lives more happily within   philosophy. So that’s why I ended up here.

And  what does foundations mean? So when someone says  they study the foundations of something.

That means something to do with  interested in the sort of more basic conceptual  questions and looking at the sort of underlying  structures and perhaps understanding why the  theory is the way it is or understanding basic  principles of the theory. It’s sort of a contrast  to more applied approaches.

If you study  the foundations of quantum mechanics, you’re not  going to be primarily working on how to build new  quantum technologies.

You’re going to be thinking  about the structure of the theory and what it all   means. And perhaps those results will eventually  go on to be useful in quantum technologies. They  often do.

But if you’re working in foundations,  that’s not your sort of primary focus.  

So what I enjoy about your work is that much  like Jacob Barandes is, you emphasize clarity of  concepts and principles as a guide to progress. 

Taxonomy for Physics Beyond Quantum Mechanics (Adlam, Hance, Hossenfelder, Palmer; June 2024)

You actually co-authored a paper last year,  if I’m not mistaken, with Sabine Hossenfelder and  Tim Palmer, both of whom have been on the podcast  before.

So I’ll put a link to that on screen  and in the description.

Taxonomy for Physics Beyond Quantum Mechanics
Emily Adlam, Jonte R. Hance, Sabine Hossenfelder, and Tim N. Palmer
June 2024
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.12293

The paper is called a  taxonomy of physics for quantum theory or beyond  quantum theory.

It’s something that everyone  should read if they’re interested in physics.

And  if you follow this podcast, you can follow that   paper.

So there are different concepts that are  explained there with precision.

I’ve heard local beables be described as ontological entities.

And  I believe you said it’s something like the input  value on a C model that’s assigned to a compact  region of space-time.

And you explained what   a C model is. I think it’s a calculation model,  if I’m not mistaken.

So anyhow, what led you to  write that paper?

This paper arose out of a  conference on retrocausality and superdeterminism.  

Retrocausality and superdeterminism are two  approaches that people have often tried to  use in order to avoid the conclusion that quantum  mechanics might be nonlocal.

So this conference  was kind of discussing those possibilities.

Can  you get rid of nonlocality using one of these   methods?

And I think what we discovered is that  there were a variety of different ways in which  people were using the words retrocausality  and superdeterminism.

And there was a sort  of problem where people were talking past each  other because they were just using these words  in different ways.

So the goal of this paper was  to sort of provide a clarifying story which would  help explain what’s going on with these terms  and perhaps can we have a sort of community-wide  consensus about how to use these words so we can  have discussions more clearly.

[like Kafei tripping on my 2007+ attempted redefinition of ‘determinism’ to mean eternalism]

When people hear  temporal nonlocality, how is that different  than time travel?

Time travel, much  like retrocausality, could be temporally local or  temporally nonlocal.

If your vision of time travel  involves people literally moving backwards in time  – sorry, the cat is eating it – and those people  literally traveling backwards in time, that’s  going to look like a temporally local form of   time travel if there’s a sort of literal path back  in time that they go around.

On the other hand, if  they just kind of disappear at one point and then  reappear at another point, that’s going to look   temporally nonlocal because it’s a sort of cause  that just jumped across time.

So I think either of  those is possible as a model of time travel. 

Free Will

Does any of this have to do with free will?

Certainly.

If you look at the all-at-once style of model, that does seem like it has some  implications for free will because some people  have thought that something that’s important to  free will is the idea that the future is genuinely  open, that in this moment as I am acting, there is no fact of the matter about what my action is  going to be.

[Diary of a Madman album, Ozzy Osbourne:
Believer, lyrics by Bob Daisley, 1981:

DESTINY PLANNED OUT
SPECULATION OF THE WISE

end of song Believer]

Photo: Michael Hoffman, April 12, 2025

And in an all-at-once style model, that way of thinking about free will is not  available to you.

The whole of the universe exists at once.

I’m acting now, but there is already some fact from the atemporal point of view about what my action is going to be.

[pre-existence of future control-thoughts]

So I don’t think that means we have to say “there is no such thing as free will“ in that context.

But certainly, we’re  going to have to be a bit more careful about how  we analyze free will and what that means.

So this  doesn’t depend on determinism.

[correct: eternalism is the case, regardless of whether causal-chain determinism / domino-chain causality is the case, as the mechanism by which the future is closed – find “random” in Self-control Cybernetics, Dissociative Cognition, & Mystic Ego Death (1997 core theory spec):
https://egodeaththeory.org/2020/11/30/self-control-cybernetics-dissociative-cognition-mystic-ego-death/#budaac — Michael Hoffman wrote in Feb. 1997:
“Conventional determinism overemphasizes predictability in principle and perfect seamlessness of the chain of cause and effect, and cannot tolerate the slightest bit of true randomness or disjoint in the chain of cause and effect. More relevant to discovering ego-transcendence is that each point on any timeline is predetermined, and the future permanently exists, elsewhere in the spacetime block. The hypothesis about the eternally unbroken causal chain, in which the past eventually controls the future, is excessive, delicate, and irrelevant to higher experience. Even if there is some true randomness in the world, the future remains predetermined, because of the illusory nature of the flow of time, and the inability to the ego-entity to be an ultimate origin of its own thoughts and choices.” etc, see entire section -Michael Hoffman]

[per Kafei misreading Egodeath.com / The Entheogen Theory of Religion and Ego Death (Hoffman, 2007 main article) http://egodeath.com/EntheogenTheoryOfReligion.htm & https://egodeaththeory.wordpress.com/the-entheogen-theory-of-religion-and-ego-death-2006-main-article/ ,
EVERYONE defines “determinism” as causal-chain determinism, never as eternalism.]

It’s just saying  that there’s something that’s globally fixed? 

Yeah.

So even if you have a probabilistic model  in the all-at-once context, what that’s going to  look like is either it’s going to be some kind of  frequency constraint, as Eddie Chen has suggested,  or perhaps it’s going to be the course of history  is selected in a probabilistic way from some  set of possibilities.

But either way, you end up saying the course of history is determined all at  once.

So there’s no sense in which I’m acting now,  and yet my future actions are still open, even if they’re probabilistic. They have, from this atemporal point of view, already been chosen.

Calvinism

CJ:

I remember, oh gosh, I forgot who it was.  Someone was saying, it could be the  Calvinists.

Maybe it was a religion, or maybe it was an actual philosopher, was saying  that if you have trajectories in space-time,  just because they exist and you can view it  from a God’s-eye point of view atemporally,  

it doesn’t mean that those trajectories cause the  movement. Those trajectories are the movement.  Sorry, are the trajectory.

So an agent can still  be causal.

There’s nothing about the trajectories  causing. The laws don’t cause.

So can you please  distinguish between

  • the determination of an agent  
    and
  • causal origination of an agent?

Yeah.

So  because I think that causation is not fundamental  in any case, I think that understanding how the  history comes about is not going to involve any  kind of causal story.

That’s going to be some  more general kind of modal constraint, perhaps,  that selects the history.

I mean,

Causation is something that appears at a much higher level of description and probably is only going to be  relevant in the kinds of regimes where you have agents taking actions.

So I think it’s perfectly  possible to say, in some sort of fundamental  sense, the history was already there and was  selected in an all-at-once way.

But nonetheless, the agent is the cause of their action because  causation is only suitable in that kind of regime of description anyway.

And so it is still true. 

Insofar as there is such a thing as causation, it’s still true that the agent is causing their actions.

[say “the sense in which”; avoid saying eg “the agent is illusion, causality is illusion, time is illusion, my intelligence is an illusion”]

CJ:

Right. What do you disagree most with, Carla Rovellion?

What I disagree  most with?

I think we still have  an ongoing debate about whether it’s necessary  to change relational quantum mechanics in the way   that we suggested.

So we proposed a postulate that  you can add to the theory which makes it possible  for observers to communicate with each other in  an absolute sense and for their perspectives to   become aligned in an absolute sense.

Carlo, I  think, is not convinced that’s necessary.

He  thinks perhaps it’s enough that there’s a sort of,  it’s relationally true that within my perspective,  it seems as though I have access to your  perspective and he thinks that might be adequate.  

For me, I think that doesn’t solve the kinds of  epistemic worries I have about the role of social  inquiry in science.

So I think the absolute story  is necessary, but this is an ongoing debate.

Now,  many derivations in physics rely on integration  by parts, and then they have this argument that, and the boundary terms are zero, and  because of that, we get so-and-so.  

Are there times when these surface terms are  ordinarily set to vanish, but because of your  work on all at once, you believe that to be  an unreasonable assumption?

Oh gosh, that’s an  interesting question.

I actually have not thought  about that.

Seems very possible, but I would have   to think more about the technical details  before I could say one way or another. Okay,  what is self-location?

So self-location refers  to scenarios in which you are uncertain about  your location within the universe.

So you might  be uncertain where you are or when you are, or if  you’re in a multiverse, you might be uncertain  about which universe within the multiverse you   are currently located in.

So it’s those kinds  of questions pertaining to a location within a  universe. And there’s something between pure and  superficial, if I’m not mistaken.

What are those?  

Yeah, so when we talk about self-locating  uncertainty in philosophy or in physics,  I think there are two important, broadly different  classes of self-locating uncertainty that we   should distinguish between.

So what I call pure  self-locating uncertainty refers to cases where  you are uncertain about what location you are  out of a possible class of locations which are  all located within the same world. So for  example, Adam Elga’s case falls into that  bracket.

Two Dr. Evils (Like the Good M. Hoffman vs. the Evil M. Hoffman in the Field of Entheogen Scholarship)

That’s a case in which Dr. Evil, or  a person who believes himself to be Dr. Evil,  receives a credible message telling him that  a subjectively identical duplicate has been   made of Dr. Evil and placed somewhere.

So in  that case, he’s now uncertain whether he is  in fact the real Dr. Evil or the duplicate, but  both of those people exist within one and the   same world.

So that is pure self-locating  uncertainty. By contrast, superficially  self-locating uncertainty refers to the case  where you’re uncertain about your location,   but the possible locations you could be in belong  to different possible worlds.

Possible Worlds

So for example,  suppose you wake up and you haven’t looked at  the clock yet, so you don’t know what time it is.  

You’re uncertain about your location in time, but  of course in every possible world there’s exactly  one time at which you actually wake up, and so the  different possible times you could be located in  belong to different possible worlds corresponding  to those different possible times you could wake   up.

So that’s, I think, an importantly different  type of self-location. Is this related to the  sleeping beauty paradox?

The sleeping  beauty paradox in fact involves a mixture of  pure and superficially self-locating uncertainty. 

So I think the correct way to analyze that is to  appeal to your scientific theory to determine the  superficially self-locating credences and then to  assign the pure credences any way you want.

So the  outcome is that the correct solution is the double  half a solution.

Okay, well it’d be useful for you  to outline what the paradox is at this point and  then why you think the solution is the double half  one.

Okay, yeah.

The sleeping beauty paradox  refers to a scenario in which an experiment is  being performed on you.

You’re going to be put  to sleep and then you’ll be woken up either once  or twice in the course of the experiment.

We will  decide which one it is based on the outcome of  a coin flip. So we flip the coin and if it lands  heads then you’ll be woken once on Monday and  if it lands on tails then you’ll be woken twice  on Monday and Tuesday.

So the question is about  what credences should you assign to the outcome  of the coin toss? Should you assign and do the  credences change if you’re woken up and then told  what day it is?

So various different approaches  have been taken to try to decide what the correct  assignation of probabilities is. Most philosophers  I think are of the view that when you learn  something about what day it is you ought to change  your credences.

My view is that because the coin  flip issue is a superficially self-locating issue  whereas the issues about when you are located are  pure, the outcome is that the further information  shouldn’t change any of your assignations  of credences because the right way to assign  credences in these situations is always to assign  the superficial self-location credences first and  then having done that arrange your pure credences  as you would like.

That means that the pure  information isn’t going to change the superficial   information and so the probability is always going  to be half regardless of waking up.

Now was there  something about when they say you get woken up  twice that after you get woken up once you take  something to forget that you woke up once? Yes,  you are not going to know that you’ve woken up   at once or twice. Now what does any of this have  to do with physical law?

Yeah, so self-location  is important to physical law particularly in  the context of physical theories that deal with  multiverses.

So in particular the cosmological  multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of  quantum mechanics has a multiverse and in both of  these multiverses in order to make certain kinds   of predictions it’s necessary that you assign some  credences over locations within the multiverse.  

You have to assign probabilities to which universe  you might be within this multiverse and so all of  those approaches to making predictions in  a multiverse are kind of predicated on the  assumption that there is in fact some objectively  right or uniquely correct way to assign your  self-locating credences over parts of the  multiverse.

And so therefore they are necessarily  predicated on the claim that there are unique  ways to assign pure self-locating credences.  

There’s a right way to do it and there’s a wrong  way to do it.

So I think that’s wrong.

I think  that for superficially self-locating credences  there are right ways to assign them because  those credences can just be inherited from a  scientific theory but in the pure case there   is nothing whatsoever which could compel you or  constrain you to assign your credences in any  particular way.

So any assignation of credences  is fine and therefore you’re not going to be able   to get meaningful predictions out of any theory  which involves this kind of multiverse reasoning.  

So if I’m right about that, that’s a serious  problem both for the cosmological multiverse and for the many worlds interpretation of quantum  mechanics because it seems to say that we can’t  make meaningful predictions in that context and  we therefore can’t obtain any sensible evidence   for scientific theories in that context because  there’s nothing to sort of predict and then see  if it comes true.

Sean Carroll

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Sean+Carroll%22

I’m sure you’ve spoken to Sean Carroll about this. So have you and what has he  said or what do you think he would say?

Emily Adlam:

I have  not spoken to Sean Carroll about this. I know that  Carroll has a view of the multiverse which and  of the Everettian multiverse in particular which  is based on the idea that certain constraints on  self-locating credences can help tell you how to  assign probabilities in the Everettian case.

I do  think this view says that approach is wrong. There  are no rational constraints on self-locating  credences in the Everettian scenario and so   any model which sort of takes that as a starting  point I think cannot be right.

CJ:

I believe in 1907,  if I’m not mistaken, Einstein had his happiest  thought about free fall and weightlessness.

Have  you had a happiest thought? A happiest thought? I  think one moment I’d pick out is there’s a theorem  in quantum foundations called the PBR theorem.

The  PBR theorem is about the reality of the quantum  state.

It attempts to prove that if in order  to reproduce all of the predictions of quantum  mechanics it must be the case that the quantum  state is a real objective thing which travels   through time conveying information from one time  to another.

I think thinking about this theorem,  one thing that struck me was that the whole  theorem was predicated on the assumption of what I would call temporal locality.

“Temporal Locality” (vs. Usual, Spatial Locality)

It’s predicated  on the assumption that if a measurement result  depends on earlier preparation there must be  something which travels between them carrying  that information from one point to another.

That  I think was the origin of most of my work on  temporal non-locality was the observation  that there’s this significant assumption being made in this theorem that is perhaps not  being questioned in the way that it should be.  

Presentism vs. Eternalism

Do you have any thoughts about eternalism versus  presentism?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6I2OhmVWLMs&t=3350s = 55:50

Can you please briefly define those  terms?

Yeah, so presentism is a philosophical view  which says that in some sense only the present is  real. The past and the future are not currently  real.

Eternalism says that the whole of history  is real at once.

There’s no sort of privileged  present moment.

[more relevantly, eternalism says:

  • no branching possibilities as claimed by possibilism.
  • 2-level, dependent control, not monolithic, autonomous control.]

It’s all there.

As you might  expect given my views on all at once physics, I’m definitely more on the eternalist side.

I  think it’s very hard to make presentism [ought to discuss possibilism branching manyworlds instead] work in  a way that is compatible with relativity because  relativity denies that there exists a global  present.

So it’s kind of unclear what the present even is in that picture.

People have made attempts  to sort of reformulate presentism in relativistic  ways, but I think all of them feel a bit ad hoc  and not very compelling to me.

So certainly in the context of what we know about physics now, eternalism seems to me much more viable. [than stupid pointless presentism – BUT WHAT ABOUT POSSIBILISM?]

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QBism (“Cubism”) vs. Manyworlds

[“Cubism” Is Mistranscription of: QBism (Quantum Bayesianism)]

We talked about cubism, transactional,  many worlds.

What other interpretation of  quantum mechanics have we not talked about  that you feel fails significantly, and why does  it fail?

Well, the obvious ones are the sort of  primitive ontology approaches, so the Bohmian  approach and the spontaneous collapse approach.  

You know, I wouldn’t say these approaches  fail.

What I’d say is that, at present,   we don’t know how to reproduce the whole of  quantum field theory in these kinds of approaches,  and there are reasons to think we may never be  able to do that, or that it’s very difficult   to do that in the context of this particular  kind of view.

So, you know, never say never,  but right now I’m not sure the prospects for  expanding those to cover all of quantum theory  look very good, and, you know, until we can show  that that can be done, that’s a sort of compelling  reason to be worried about those approaches.

So  what’s on your mind these days, research-wise?  Research-wise, so I have been thinking about, one thing I’ve been thinking about is a problem  in relational quantum mechanics.

So there’s this  worry, relational quantum mechanics is committed  to the view that all physical systems can, in some  sense, count as observers. They can have quantum  states defined relative to them.

There’s a worry  brought up by Caslav Brukner that it doesn’t make  sense to say something like a qubit is an observer  because there’s no way to get a well-defined basis  in which a qubit could make an observation.

So  you just couldn’t get a well-defined observed  value out of an interaction involving a qubit. So  I think he’s right about that as an objection. I  think the way to resolve this is to appreciate  that the description of the world relative to  a qubit is not going to be a full quantum Hilbert  space.

It’s not going to be as complicated as that   because a qubit just doesn’t have the right enough  physical resources to define that kind of relative  description.

So I’ve been trying to think about  what would be a sensible way of formulating what  the world does look like relative to a qubit, and  thus of sort of understanding what the range of  observations that something like a qubit could  make might look like.

Do you then generalize  a quantum system to a process matrix?

Why don’t  you define what a process matrix is?

Great. Yeah,  so

Process matrices are a tool developed  within quantum foundations recently to study  causal processes more general than those we  would encounter in our ordinary space-time.  

So the idea here is that we’ll start with a set  of laboratories in which agents can do various  actions, and we’ll write down a description of  the way in which these laboratories are related  to each other.

But we will not require that  these laboratories have any sort of specific   space-time location, and so we won’t require  that their relationships are constrained by  the causal structure of ordinary space-time.

The  only constraint we’ll put on them is that it has   to be logically consistent, so they have to be  related to each other in ways that won’t produce  logical contradictions.

So what we can do then is  end up with a description of a class of possible  causal processes, which is much more general than  what we would normally encounter in the world, and  that is potentially going to give us an idea of  what kinds of processes might perhaps be possible,  for example, in certain regimes of quantum gravity  where space-time in the ordinary sense breaks down   or is perhaps not present.

The process matrix  is another way of formulating or thinking about  quantum mechanics, or what?

Or thinking about the  wave function or density matrices?

Process  matrices are quantum innate here, but they are  much more general than ordinary quantum mechanics,  because in ordinary quantum mechanics we  would tell a story in which you start with   a state and just evolve forwards and produce  everything in a well-defined temporal order.  

Process matrices retain aspects of the quantum  formalism, but get rid of that evolution story,  so we’re not requiring that you can sort of tell  a story about the temporal unfolding of how one  laboratory leads to the next laboratory and so  on.

You allow much more general possibilities  for how those laboratories could be related to  each other.

Do you derive the Born rule, or do  you have to assume it? Do you have to postulate  it somehow? In the process matrix formalism,  it’s not clear that the Born rule is even used. 

I think certainly understanding where the Born  rule fits into that picture is an ongoing  project that hasn’t yet been fully resolved.  But with that said, you can also formulate an  equivalent of the process matrix formalism in  purely classical physics.

It’s called the process  function formalism. So that’s perhaps conceptually   a bit clearer.

You don’t have to worry about  the Born rule and measurements, but you still  have this idea that you can think about general  causal processes without necessarily imposing a  pre-existing spacetime structure on them.

What’s  Humean supervenience, and what is its relation  to asymmetric dependence?

Humean supervenience is  the idea that the world is just a distribution of  categorical properties over spacetime. It’s just  one thing and another thing and another thing.  

There’s no deeper structural connections. And  so everything else, including things like the  laws of nature and the facts about causation, have  to, in some sense, depend on or supervene on this  distribution of of actual facts.

So, for example, the Humeans will say that the laws of nature don’t  make things be the way they are.

All the laws  are just sort of convenient descriptions of  the way things happen to be.

They’re just the best  systematization of whatever has actually happened.  

In your model, what’s at the ground?

What do you  take as your ontological commitments?

The way I formulate that in the past  is we start from some space of possible courses of history, which might be an ensemble of Humean  mosaics composed of distributions of facts across  spacetime.

Michael Hoffman, March 2014
Michael Hoffman, March 2014

And then we have constraints which  determine which elements of that set are allowed  by the laws of nature.

And then some element of  that set is going to be selected and made actual.  So we have a sort of space of possibilities,  the constraints narrow down the possibilities, and then one constraint is somehow selected. 

I think there’s more work to be done here on  understanding what the space of possibilities look  like and how the space of possibilities is related to the constraints and to the properties that we  see in our everyday lives.

Crop by Michael Hoffman

But that’s the general   picture, that you have possibilities narrowed down  and then one is going to be selected.

The Emergence of Space-Time

1:05:16 The Emergence of Space-Time

So spacetime  would emerge from possibilities plus constraints? 

Yeah, I think the story that we should tell about  spacetime here is certainly still a work in  progress.

In my previous work on the subject,  I’ve just kind of taken spacetime as given and  imagined, let’s select the constraints are just  going to tell you how things are distributed  across spacetime.

But certainly that I think   can’t be the right final answer, because modern  physics and particularly quantum gravity tells  us that spacetime probably emerges from something  more fundamental.

So I think ultimately that the right story is going to be more complex than that. 

But exactly how to formulate that is not clear,  partly because the quantum gravity itself is not  fully formulated and there’s still a lot of open questions to be resolved there.

What would it  be that selects the specific dimensionality and signature, like three plus one? [3 space dims, 1 time dim]

Yes, that’s  a great question.

Ultimately, I think at least  some aspects of the way spacetime is have got to  come from consistency constraints.

So for example,  using the process matrix formalism, for example,  you can see that there’s going to be a need.  

If you want to have consistency, there’s usually  going to be a need for things to occur in some  well-defined order.

And a well-defined order  stops processes from looping back on themselves  and producing contradictions.

So I think from  those kinds of consistency constraints, you  can get already the idea that there’s got to be  some kind of something like a temporal dimension,   which is different from the spatial dimensions. 

I also think you can get the idea that it needs  to have a sort of a relativistic spacetime  structure from the observation that if you   have superluminal signaling, for example, you can  use that to create a loop which goes around and  which could then also be used to create logical  contradictions.

So consistency is also going to  give you something like the light cone structure  of spacetime.

I don’t know yet how to get exactly  three dimensions out of that.

It would be great  if there were a way to get that as a consistency  condition as well. I’m not sure what that would  look like, but certainly I think many aspects of   spacetime structure can be understood in that  sort of basic way as consistency conditions.  

Do you imagine that you’ll be able to derive  any of the fundamental constants from global   laws?

Or is there still, let’s say alpha or  g, or is there still going to be some residual  contingency leaving room for why these structures? 

Yeah, that’s a great question.

Strong Determinism

So Eddie Chen has  written before about this idea called strong determinism, which is the idea that maybe the laws of nature are so strong that they actually  dictate the whole course of history uniquely and  there’s only one possibility.

Photo Credit Julie M. Brown.
April 10, 2022 image processing & crop by Cybermonk. full body.

That’s in some ways  an old idea. Leibniz hoped for something like that  as well.

It doesn’t seem obvious to me how to get  there from the laws that we currently know.

And  I’m skeptical that we could possibly know all of  the constraints, even if they do exist, a set of constraints that strong.

But in principle, I  think that it’s certainly possible that there  are constraint-based laws that we perhaps haven’t  arrived at yet and might be able to arrive at one  day, which would give an explanation of some of those things.

Exploring Correlations in Physical Parameters

1:08:11 Exploring Correlations in Physical Parameters

Do you imagine there would  be specific correlations between seemingly  unrelated physical parameters?

Certainly,  

it’s very, very possible. I mean, it’s a bit hard  to speculate because we don’t have much of a sense  of what that would look like.

But certainly, if we  could give explanations for relationships between  the values of things, that would be a very,  I think, compelling piece of evidence that   this way of thinking is right.

So it’s certainly  something to look for.

Are you more interested  in the philosophy of physics specifically or more  broadly into the philosophy of science?

What about  metaphysics?

What about ethics?

Yes, I do focus  largely on the philosophy of physics because my  training is in physics.

But I think many of the  questions we are talking about in the philosophy   of physics have really interesting implications  for more general questions in the philosophy of  science.

So these questions about the nature  of lawhood, for example, and I think once you  move to an all-at-once style account of laws,  that’s going to have implications for a lot of other traditional philosophical questions about  things like causation, explanation, determinism,  and so on, free will.

So although my focus comes  from physics, a lot of that expands more generally into philosophy of science and also metaphysics because these questions about lawhood, causation,  explanation do also link to metaphysics.

Ethics,  I’m very interested in ethics. I’ve never worked  on it professionally, though.

Cool.

Advice for Young Upcoming Researchers in the Field of Physics and Philosophy

Do you have  any advice for young upcoming researchers in  the field of physics and philosophy?

I think  my biggest piece of advice would be to work  on the things that you love and are interested  in. I think there can be a pressure to work on  something that is currently one of the hot topics  or that is getting lots of attention in the field  at the time.

But ultimately, I think what’s most  rewarding and what will be successful in the long   run is for you to pursue the things that you care  about and do the work that you’re interested in.  

It might take a little bit longer to get  attention, but I think it’s better to ultimately  establish that program of things that you really  care about rather than feeling you have to do   research on a certain topic because it’s popular. 

What’s some topic that’s underappreciated?

What’s some topic that’s underappreciated that you  think should be more appreciated?

So I’ll give you  an example of something that’s a hot topic right   now, black holes, supermassive black holes and  time travel or time dilation, etc.

And those are  said ad nauseum in these popular science circles.  So what’s something else that you think people   should be paying more attention to?

Epistemology of the Measurement Problem

1:10:44 Epistemology of the Measurement Problem

I’m on a bit  of a crusade to get people to pay more attention to the epistemology of the measurement problem.

I  think when we talk about the measurement problem,  it often gets framed in terms of ontology, in  terms of we need to know what is really there   and what is really happening.

Whereas for me, I  think the measurement problem is really important precisely because it ties to questions about  how could we possibly know the things we are  supposed to know?

How can we make sense of the  empirical confirmation associated with quantum  mechanics?

And I think that a number of very  popular interpretations of quantum mechanics   have really big problems answering those  kinds of questions.

So particularly the many worlds interpretation and the observer relative  interpretations have really bad epistemic problems and I think do not do a good job of answering  these epistemic issues.

So I really like to   see our discussions of the measurement problem  focus more on these questions of you’ve got to  make the epistemology coherent and consistent  within itself.

And I think that’s a good way  of kind of narrowing down the possibilities and  understanding what a viable solution looks like.  

Can you repeat these epistemological  questions that you think people or physicists or foundational physicists should be thinking  about?

Yeah, I mean the fundamental question is  that when we’re thinking about how to interpret  quantum mechanics, it is I think essential that  our interpretation tells a consistent story about how we could have come to know about the theory.

So for example, I think the many worlds interpretation has a real problem with this because the many worlds interpretation  has difficulty giving meaning to assignations  of probability to measurement outcomes.

And in  particular, it seems hard in the many worlds context to justify the claim that you should  expect to see high probability outcomes.

But if  you can’t expect to see high probability outcomes,  then you can’t use the outcomes you have observed to as evidence for the theory, because you have no  idea whether the outcome is one that’s assigned a  high or a low probability by the theory.

So you  can’t like connect it back up to the structure of the theory you’re trying to find out about.

So  I think that’s a very serious epistemic problem.  

CJ:

Lessons in Patience and Persistence

1:13:26 Lessons in Patience and Persistence

What’s a lesson, Emily, that you wish you had  learned earlier that if you could tell your younger self, it would be beneficial?

I think  probably as many people would tell their younger  selves, I would counsel patience that it takes this kind of thing.

Research definitely takes  time and work and you will fail many times and  many things will not go anywhere.

And I think  you have to be persistent and hang on and have  faith that in the long run, you’re going to come  to interesting results.

And people will eventually  come to be interested in what you’re doing. And   it does come eventually.

It just takes time.

It doesn’t happen immediately.

CJ:

So was there a time,  maybe a year, three years, four years where  people weren’t interested in your work and  that frustrated you or made you downcast?

Emily Adlam:

I think  for some time I was worried that the kind of work I was doing was not going to be mainstream enough for me to be able to make a career in the field.

I actually left academia for a few years and worked  outside of it because I was pessimistic about  whether I could do the kind of work I wanted to  do and be in the field.

But eventually some of the  things I was doing, I did get positive feedback  on and that I think was enough to encourage me  to come back and keep working on this stuff.

And I don’t regret that.

I think that was the right decision.

But yeah, looking back, perhaps if I’d  understood the need for patience, that could have  been avoided.

CJ:

Tell me about that. So you left  academia for a while and then were you still  publishing while you were outside?

EA:

Yeah, I did. In  my PhD, I mostly published on pure physics topics.  

After finishing, I left academia but continued to  think about particularly more philosophical topics  and to publish and to write on those things. 

And eventually I think I came to the realization  that clearly this is what I should be doing  professionally.

And so then sort of…

I wanted to switch from the more physics side into the more philosophy side.

How did you get back in?

Yeah,  it wasn’t straightforward, especially because I was looking for philosophy positions and had physics qualifications.

But the people at the  University of Western Ontario were very helpful  and encouraging and found a way to bring me there and allow me to do a postdoc there.

That was a  very, very productive time, really fantastic.

So  that was my route back into the field.

Thank You

CJ:

Well, it’s  fantastic speaking with you.

Thank you so much for  spending your time with me.

Yeah, it was really fun.

Thank you.

Cheers.

Curt Jaimungal Resources

“I’ve received several  messages, emails and comments from professors  saying that they recommend Theories of Everything [videos series] to their students, and that’s fantastic.

If you’re a professor or lecturer and there’s a particular  standout episode that your students can benefit  from, please do share.

And as always, feel free to contact me.

Transcripts at Substack

New update! Started a Substack.
https://curtjaimungal.substack.com

Writings on there are currently about language  and ill-defined concepts, as well as some other   mathematical details. Much more being written  there. This is content that isn’t anywhere else.  

It’s not on Theories of Everything, it’s not on Patreon.

Also, full transcripts will be placed there at some point in the future.

Several people  ask me,

Hey Curt, you’ve spoken to so many people in the fields of theoretical physics, philosophy  and consciousness.

What are your thoughts?

While  I remain impartial in interviews, this Substack  is a way to peer into my present deliberations on these topics.

Also, thank you to our partner,  The Economist.

I also found out last year that external links count plenty toward the [utoob] algorithm,  which means that whenever you share on Twitter, say on Facebook or even on Reddit, etc., it  shows YouTube, hey, people are talking about  this content outside of YouTube, which in turn  greatly aids the distribution on YouTube.”

TOE Podcast 🦶

Crop by Michael Hoffman – four(!) definite Cubensis mushrooms, Great Canterbury Psalter, f177 row 1. [quote Ruck: “This will silence art historians once & for all.”]
“f177-toes.jpg” 58 KB 2:51 pm Dec. 7, 2024

“Thirdly,  you should know this podcast is on iTunes, it’s  on Spotify, it’s on all of the audio platforms.  

All you have to do is type in Theories of  Everything and you’ll find it.

Personally, I gain   from re-watching lectures and podcasts. I also  read in the comments that, hey, total listeners  also gain from replaying. So how about instead you  re-listen on those platforms like iTunes, Spotify,  Google Podcasts, whichever podcast catcher  you use.

And finally, if you’d like to support  more conversations like this, more content like  this, then do consider visiting patreon.com slash  CURTJAIMUNGAL and donating with whatever you like. 

There’s also PayPal, there’s also crypto, there’s   also just joining on YouTube. Again, keep in mind,  it’s support from the sponsors and you that allow  me to work on TOE full-time. You also get early  access to ad-free episodes, whether it’s audio  or video.

It’s audio in the case of Patreon, video  in the case of YouTube.

For instance, this episode that you’re listening to right now was released  a few days earlier. [April 10, 2025 i think]

Every dollar helps far more  than you think. Either way, your viewership  is generosity enough. Thank you so much.”

/ end of transcript

God’s Playing of Dice Is Frozen into the 4D Spacetime Block Universe

The Wonders & Terrors of 4D-Spacetime Block-Universe Mysticism

angry at impossible requests, “we are too stupid to understand anything you write”. SOUNDS LIKE A *YOU* PROBLEM

Strong candidate for title for article for psychedelic church reader.

Supposedly no one knows what “block-universe” means; my solution is add the other term, 4D spacetime.

harrassed for providing something that pop ppl haven’t heard of:
the combination of not Quantum Mysticism , but
4D Spacetime Mysticism.

THESE ARE THE ACTUAL TERMS IN THE FIELD – deal with it!

  • James studies: block-universe mysticism
  • Minkowski studies: 4D Spacetime Mysticism
  • combined:
  • 4D spacetime block-universe mysticism
    fsbum

better than the correct term eternalism – THIS IS BULLSHT:

IF I SAY “QUANTUM DETERMINISM MYSTICISM” NO ONE BATS AN EYE.

BUT I AM “WRONG” FOR WRITING “INCOMPREHENSIBLE GIBBERISH” when I use the fair, comparable, competing terms:

  • eternalism
  • 4D spacetime
  • block-universe

else i’ll write:

The Wonders & Terrors of 4D-Spacetime Block-Universe Eternalism Mysticism

or going the other direction toward folk myth analogy wording:

The Wonders & Terrors of {snake frozen in rock} Mysticism

The Wonders & Terrors of Block-Universe Mysticism

The Wonders & Terrors of 4D Spacetime Mysticism

Maddening Frustrations and Insanely Unreasonable Demands for Titling a Theory Introduction Article

Would people say “keep it simple , dumb it down” had I written FAMILIAR junk jargon? eg:

The Wonders & Terrors of Quantum Mysticism & Experiencing Determinism

This is a bias against the new theory, in favor of the dominant old theory.

The old theory gets a pass, and the new theory is blocked: “I haven’t heard of it, therefore you are being too unclear.”

  • “neuroplasticity” – I have heard of that, so, it’s good term’y.
  • “fear of ego dissolution” – I have heard of that, so, it’s good term’y.
  • “block-universe mysticism – I haven’t heard of that, so, it’s bad term’y.

This is letting the ignorant dictate what the teacher teachers.

I hear: “People are too ignorant to be informed.”

The student is not EXPECTED to understand the meaning of the title. Duh!

“Theory of Relativity? I don’t know what that means, therefore, you failed to name the theory well.”

Insanity! Ridiculous demands! IMPOSSIBLE TO MEET!

F*CK THIS SH*T.

I’M GOING TO WRITE THE ARTICLE (& TITLE) THAT MAKES SENSE TO Egodeath community, AND TO HELL WITH EVERYONE ELSE.

IMPOSSIBLE DEMANDS! UNREASONABLE!

Harvard Scientist: “There is No Quantum Multiverse” | Jacob Barandes [Part 3]

I got confident about decoding the {burning bush} mytheme while listening to “branch” in this video, while listening to Jacob Barandes talk about branches in
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrUvtqr4wOs – around 2:20:00.

Click More to expand Description, click the Show Transcript button, Find “branch”.

Probabilities in Statistical Mechanics

1:59:0 Probabilities in Statistical Mechanics

Problems with Many Worlds Interpretation

2:11:30 Problems with Many Worlds Interpretation

…

2:25:00 —

Jacob Barandes:

“And the branches are not fundamental. The world’s not fundamental. They’re not fundamentally there. They’re just useful, convenient ways to describe the wave function. But now we have a problem.
2:25:34
If the branches are not fundamental, if they’re emergent, we can’t have a probability axiom that assigns them probabilities.

You see, the axioms, the fundamental axioms of your theory are supposed to refer to fundamental things.

If the branches are emergent, approximate things, not fundamental things, the axioms cannot say, oh, if at some point in the future we develop these emergent approximate branches, then by axiom they’ll be assigned probabilities.

If the branches are now not fundamental, but merely emergent, merely just convenient ways to describe what’s going on, then it’s very difficult to think about how you would make an axiom that they should be assigned probabilities.

If we’re not going to get the probabilities from the axioms, we now
have a fundamental problem.

And this is where so much of the work in Everettian quantum theory has happened, this problem of probabilities.

If the branches are emergent things, not fundamental, and we can’t assign them probabilities by fiat through the axioms, how do probabilities happen?

Now, I think the argument I would make here is that they don’t.

If you were compelled to believe in an outlandish metaphysical picture like the many worlds interpretation because you had to, because it was empirically unavoidable, like we look out into outer space and we see galaxies
many, many, many billions of light years away.

We see countless galaxies billions of light years away. That leads us to believe that there is a big universe out there.

We see clocks on airplanes move at slightly different rates, atomic clocks move at slightly different rates.

That’s hard to believe, but we can do the experiments and we see this repeated rigorously many times.

It’s not that we should never believe outlandish things, but as Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The many worlds interpretation says that there is an uncountable profusion of universes that are coming out of every single moment, not even just measurements, but all the time.

That’s an outlandish statement, and sure, we could believe it if we were compelled to by either rigorous logical reasoning or by just unavoidable empirical results.

[like mushroom imagery in Christian art is an outlandish proposition, why would mushrooms be in Christian art? [insert Panofsky args, end of letter 2]]

But we’re just not.

When you’re formulating many worlds interpretation, you run into this problem of,

Challenges of Probability in Many Worlds

2:27:42 Challenges of Probability in Many Worlds

2:27:46

Jacob Barandes:

“well, I have the per basis problem.

I guess I can deal with that by letting the branches be emerged into decoherence, but then I can’t axiomatically assign probabilities anymore.

At that point, you just give up, because you’re no longer compelled through rigorous logic or empirical data that you have to believe in many worlds. Why are you still trying to chase it down?

That is, this extravagant outlandish metaphysical picture is no longer forced upon us logically or by experiment.

Why are we chasing it down?

Why are we starting with the assumption that they [many worlds branches] should be there, and we need to somehow gerrymander our axioms and principles and assumptions to get the many worlds picture to come out?

That’s the impression that I get when I see some of the work going on right now.

We’re not compelled to take many worlds on as a serious idea.

We can only get it off the ground by adding lots more stuff.

Why are we doing this?

Let me just describe a couple of the routes people have taken, and then we can quit, because that’s basically the end of it.

Tim Freke’s Emergent Evolutionary Spirituality, Frozen in Rock

Jacob Barandes:

One route is the route that David Wallace takes in his book, The Emergent Multiverse.”

“It is an excellent book.

You should list it on the YouTube channel, and I recommend everybody interested should read it.

David Wallace is a fantastic, brilliant philosopher and also trained in physics.

The book is a beautiful book. I recommend it to everybody who’s interested in quantum foundations.

In that book, he tries to solve this problem of probability.

How do we get probabilities assigned to these things?

By introducing a large number of additional assumptions.

I tell them, read it, and then just make a list of every extra assumption he has to make.

He assumes that we should have the same metaphysical relationship to many copies of ourselves as we would if there were only a unique individual we were to become.

That means you have to take kind of a stand on old questions like the metaphysical teleporter problem in metaphysics.

The theorem he uses requires invoking a notion of free will that requires taking a compatibilist stance,

[The kind of “compatibilism” in Egodeath theory affirms eternalism, and the experience of possibilism. – Michael Hoffman]

because in many worlds interpretation, there’s just a deterministically evolving universal wave function.”

Who Are the Agents?

Jacob Barandes:

“Yet, he has in his proof of the Born rule agents, which is already a dangerous idea.

Agents, we’re bringing back agents, making choices about which unitary operations they’re going to perform.

This is a crucial part of the proof.

He has a little footnote where he admits, yes, this does entail certain assumptions about free will, but free will is a big problem.

No one solved it.

That doesn’t make the case.

If you’re resting on an unsolved problem, it doesn’t make the case that what you’re doing is going to work.

He introduces a number of what he calls richness axioms and rationality axioms.

The rationality axioms are supposed to be general good practices of what it means to be a rational observer.

[tell Houot, cloaked with mantle of “rational science explorer”]

These were developed in a one-world kind of picture, and the assumption is that they also work in a many-worlds picture.

Basically, the way that one tries to proceed here is one says, what does it mean to be rational?

[Houot: it means alien contact with alien advanced machine elves on psychedelics while sailing a ship in a literal physical external world]

It means that you want to use the tools of decision theory, the formal, precise, probabilistic tools for making good decisions called decision theory.

People who use the tools of decision theory, who are rational, will end up assigning probabilities to branches according to the Born rule.

That’s roughly and very gross outline how this argument
is supposed to work.

John Norton, again, philosopher at University of Pittsburgh, raised
an objection to really any such approach to try to get probability out.

In a deductive argument, the conclusion cannot be any stronger than the premises.

If you’re trying to get probability to emerge as a conclusion, there must have been probability already in your premises.

In this proof of the Born rule, one is trying to get probability out, so there must be probability somewhere in the premises.

If you don’t assume probability somewhere in the premises, somewhere you must be doing something that is not legitimate.

You can see how this unfolds for this decision theoretic argument, which goes back to David Deutsch also.

There’s an earlier version of it in a 1999 paper by David Deutsch, this old quantum theory in decisions.

You can also link to that.

The argument is that if you obey the rules of being a rational observer and use decision theory, you’re going to end up assigning probabilities according to the Born rule.

But you can ask, why is that the definition of rationality?

I mean, in a many-worlds type universe, there are going to be observers who behave rationally according to the dictates of decision theory.

Some of those observers are going to be very successful over 10 years, and others are going to be very unsuccessful because in the many-worlds interpretation, everything will happen on some branch.

But there are also observers who do not obey the rules of decision theory.

There’s some very irrational observers who just choose not to follow any of the rules of decision theory, and there are going to be branches in which they’re going to be unsuccessful over 10 years, and there are going to be branches in which they’re successful over 10 years.

All those observers are just there.

And to say that, well, you should just be rational and obey decision theory by axiom does not solve the probability problem.

In a one-world picture where only one future actually happens, it seems to be the case that people who are rational and think very carefully about their decisions and use something like a decision-theoretic approach, in the long run, over 10 years, tend to make more money or healthier or live better lives, whatever it is that you want.

And that gives us reason to think, oh, these are good rational principles.

If people who follow these principles tend to do better, I see people who exercise and people who make good financial decisions and hedge their investments, they do better, I go, oh, well, there are good reasons, therefore, to do what they do and take on their principles.

But you can’t turn it around and say that we’re going to start with axiomatically, this is the way to be rational, and then go backward and show that that then entails this is how probability should work.

And that’s kind of the sort of reverse argument that’s taking place.

I should say that not all Everetians take this decision-theoretic view.

Simon Saunders, for example, tries to do probability in a more Boltzmannian, statistical mechanical way, by coarse-graining and actually counting in some sense, but it’s still in its embryonic form.

Yeah.

So, there are a lot of approaches to the many-worlds interpretation, and at present, none of them seem to find a way to get probability off the ground, and I don’t think that you can.

And to the extent that you can by just taking on more and more assumptions, you’re doing the thing where you’re adding on extra-empirical assumptions that can’t be verified in an experiment.

I mean, I don’t know how experimentally to test that I should have the right relationship to many copies of myself.

I mean, that’s an extra-empirical statement.

If you have to take many of those on in order to get the picture off the ground, I don’t know how credible it is.

How much credence should I give to a theoretical picture that relies
on a tower of SMHs, of speculative metaphysical hypotheses?

I feel like if you have to do all that work to get the theory off the ground, then it lowers your credence that we should take on such an outlandish idea that there are all these many worlds.

So that’s basically where I end up with the many-worlds approach, and this is one of the reasons why I think there’s room for another interpretation that’s much more conservative, that says, well, we do experiments, we see one outcome, maybe that’s because there is just one outcome.”

The Case for a New Interpretation [Possibilism Randomness Freewill Agency Power? Random Distribution Frozen in Rock?]

2:35:14 The Case for a New Interpretation

Jacob Barandes:

“And the experiments look probabilistic, maybe that’s because they are in fact probabilistic.

Nature is telling us it’s probabilistic, we should listen to nature, rather than saying, nope, nope, nope, gotta be deterministic, there’s a universal wave function evolving deterministically, it’s gotta be Markovian, you know, maybe we should just listen to nature and build a theory around what nature’s telling us.

That’s I think the conservative, non-outlandish approach that one should take.

Smooth Speech

CJ:

I wanna know, how is it that you got so great at being articulate and smooth with your speech?

Jacob Barandes:

“That’s a very, very kind thing to say, I really appreciate that, that’s really nice of you to say. I think we all have different strengths.

I’m bad at many, many, many things. There are a few things I’ve gotten good at through practice, there’s some things we’re all born kind of a little bit good at, we’ve got like embryonic things that we’re sort of good at, and then we hone those things.

I’ve taught many classes over many years here, I’ve interacted with such amazing students, brilliant, idealistic, just wonderful students who ask all kinds of great questions.

I just think it’s practice, you just talk a lot with people about very intricate topics, and over time it gets easier.

That’s the best answer I think I can give.”

Stag with Branching Antlers Caught Helplessly in Vines

Jacob Barandes:

“There’s an Aesop fable I like to bring up with people, it’s about a stag and its antlers.

There’s the stag who’s drinking from a pool and admiring his beautiful antlers, he thinks his antlers are so magnificent, so glorious.”

[king of the forest you could say]

Lucas Cranach “Eve Tempted by the Serpent” Adam and Eve 1533 “Adam und Eva”

two color versions of the Power of Myth image from my thx 2013 breakthrough
https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/02/18/eve-tempted-by-the-serpent-lucas-cranach-1530-painting/

aside: https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/02/18/hatsis-cancelled-his-book-the-sacred-mushroom-conspiracy/

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/02/25/idea-development-page-25/#color-Cranach-Eve-Tempted-by-Serpent

“Lucas Cranach” “Adam und Eva”

good version: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_und_Eva_%28Cranach%29#/media/Datei:Image-Cranach_-_Adam_and_Eve_1533.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve_(Cranach)#/media/File:Lucas_Cranach_d.%C3%84._-_Adam_und_Eva_(Gem%C3%A4ldepaar),_Art_Institute_of_Chicago.jpg

found at page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_and_Eve_(Cranach)

showing “Eve Tempted by the Serpent” by Cranach, that shows: branching antlers, behind branching legs, behind holding a branch:

Jacob Barandes:

“He goes on and on, antlers are really the envy of the animal kingdom, then he looks at his legs and says, but my legs are bony and ugly, and if only my legs could be as remarkable as my antlers.

As the stag is pondering this, he suddenly becomes aware that a pack of wolves is chasing him, so he gets up and runs from the water, he’s trying to get away from the wolves, and he sees a forest, he’s gonna run into the forest to hide.

And as he runs into the forest, his [branching] antlers start getting tangled in all the [non-branching] vines, and before he knows it, he can’t run anymore, he’s stuck.”

Crop by Michael Hoffman

Sacrifice of Isaac (Golden Psalter)

Crop by Michael Hoffman

 Isaac (Canterbury Psalter)

Crop by Michael Hoffman

Sacrifice of Isaac (Van der Borch) – branches burning

instead of bush burning

Jacob Barandes:

“As the wolves approach him, he realizes that the thing that he was praising, his antlers, was his undoing, and the thing that he thought was his weakest feature, his legs, they were the things that would have saved him.

If it had just been his legs, his legs would have saved him.“

[especially Right foot, not Left]

So the reason I bring this up is, in addition to saying that I think we’re all good at a few things and maybe have difficulty with a lot of things, some of the things we think we’re bad at, seen in another way are the things we’re good at, and sometimes vice versa.

So I’m gonna say something that anyone who has known me growing up will laugh at, because it’s so obvious.

I came into this world profoundly lacking in common sense, okay?

Anyone who’s ever known me growing up would say that’s the most obvious statement I’ve ever made, okay?

Profoundly lacking in common sense.

And as I grew up, you know, you get made fun of, you make a lot of mistakes, you do a lot of silly things because you lack common sense, and you see it as kind of a weak feature, you see it as something you’re a little bit embarrassed about.

When you get into philosophy and foundations of science, philosophy of physics, what you see is a lot of people whose common sense takes them in directions they shouldn’t go.

You see a lot of people who make arguments or make speculations or make claims that just seem very commonsensical to them, and sometimes those are not really rigorously supported.

People can, their common sense can lead them into error.

Suddenly, lacking common sense becomes a huge advantage, because when I
read a philosophy paper or I listen to a seminar or I’m trying to formulate an argument, I don’t have the kind of common sense that makes the answers obvious to me.

So I see every argument, and I have to take it apart and really disassemble it and understand what all the pieces do, because I don’t have an intuition, a common sense for how things are supposed to work.

What this means is that to some extent, and obviously, I mean, we all make mistakes, I make errors too, but I feel like some of the errors I might have made if I had more common sense I’m less likely to make.

So a thing that I thought was my weakest feature, Stag’s legs, in a different context turned out to be really useful, like being on land and having only flippers for your arms and legs.

And then one day, you discover the ocean, and suddenly, what you thought was your weakest feature becomes now your greatest asset.

So that’s a general lesson I think that everyone needs to take to heart.

Many of the things we think are maybe our weak features can, in a different way, actually be a strength.

So if you’re the kind of person who has a lot of trouble paying attention to things but gets super hyper-focused on some things, and you think that’s a problem, well, it could be a problem in some contexts, but in other situations, it could be a superpower.

And we see this all the time with lots of things that people may feel embarrassed about. And now you’re speaking to researchers and potential researchers, people who are younger students, even people who are older students’ perspective, there are some people who are 70 and getting their PhD and watch this.

Yeah.

So what is a method that they can use to help figure out or distinguish between what is an actual good feature versus an actual bad feature that they thought was good?”

– Jacob Barandes / Curl Jaimungal

No One at the Bridge (Rush, 1975)

No One at the Bridge (Rush, 1975)
channel: Wraxtiorre’s Mess
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70BgSKTBh9s —

https://www.rush.com/songs/the-fountain-of-lamneth/

Lyrics by Neil Peart:

III. No One At the Bridge 

Crying back to consciousness
The coldness grips my skin
The sky is pitching violently
Drawn by shrieking winds
Seaspray blurs my vision
Waves roll by so fast
Save my ship of freedom
I’m lashed helpless to the mast

Call out for direction
And there’s no one there to steer
Shout out for salvation
But there’s no one there to hear
Cry out supplication
For the maelstrom is near
Scream out desperation
But no one cares to hear

Remembering when first I held
The wheel in my own hands
I took the helm so eagerly
And sailed for distant lands

Crop by Michael Hoffman

But now the sea’s too heavy
And I just don’t understand
Why must my crew desert me
When I need a guiding hand

— Rush

S.A.T.O. (e.g. Sailing the Acid Trip Ocean) (Ozzy Osbourne, 1981)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGoQ6AZYfMc —

https://www.google.com/search?q=s.a.t.o.+lyrics
http://egodeath.com/sablyrics.htm#xtocid229130 — Egodeath interpretation

Sailing the Acid-Trip Ocean
Lyrics by Bob Daisley —

Photo: Cybermonk
Photo: Michael Hoffman, April 2025

See Also

Psychedelic 4D Spacetime Block-Universe Mysticism

Michael Hoffman, April 11, 2025

Photo: Michael Hoffman

Contents:

links work in desktop Edge/Chrome:

Spacetime: Minkowski’s Papers on Spacetime Physics (Petkov, 2021)

Spacetime: Minkowski’s Papers on Spacetime Physics
November 3, 2021 – 2nd Ed.
Vesselin Petkov, Hermann Minkowski
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1989970435

Photo: Michael Hoffman

The Wonders & Terrors of Block-Universe Mysticism

  • shipment of mushroom-trees from medieval art
  • no-free-will
  • virtual freewill
  • instant enlightenment – as fast as learning to skateboard in switch stance; rely on R foot not L foot – yet return to always L foot anyway. (Justin Sledge: why bother w/ enlightenment, if Chop Wood carry water and Pre/Trans fallacy b/c the post looks same as the Pre?)
  • Ans: to have Transcendent Knowledge, maturity. To finish Ken Wilber’s 15-1/2 levels of psycho-spiritual development.
  • Ans: b/c it is SUPER EASY, Sledge. Quick to understand; then in altered state, practice standing balancing on your R not L foot. Learn to avoid, respectfully, looking at source of thoughts in a certain way. Else control instability, as you now well know – learn to well know, now married by the higher controller.
  • Ans: to endure Psilocybin loose cognition state.
  • Ans: to do cog sci – Loose Cognitive Science — in Psilocybin state.
  • Ans: to know God.
  • Ans: to have the right to go through the gate of the immortals:
    Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city.” – Revelation 22:14 (the last page of the Bible), NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=rev%2022%3A14&version=NIV

Define Psychedelic 4D Spacetime Mysticism, or Block-Universe Mysticism; Contrast It vs. Quantum Mysticism

content that I initially probably at Emily page then re-posted from scratch ie from Notes app to here:

I posted at a short Emily Adlam video today April 15, 2025 on the Curt Jaimungal YouTube channel (TOE show):

At https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/04/12/the-all-at-once-universe-shatters-our-view-of-time-emily-adlam/#Presentism-vs-Eternalism ,

Curt Jaimungal asks Emily Adlam the popularly worded, inferior question.

People should not debate “presentism” vs. eternalism, but rather, possibilism vs. eternalism.

Possibilism (branching, open future) vs. eternalism (non-branching, closed future) are the two relevant models for personal control, as contrasted in the medieval art genre of mushroom-trees.

That genre uses {cut right trunk} and {cut right branch} motifs, assigned to standing on right foot rather than left foot.

The diagrammatic art genre of mushroom-trees claims that the branching model (possibilism) produces control instability, but relying on the non-branching model (eternalism) produces control stability.

Emily Adlam’s view, 4D spacetime block-universe eternalism, supports the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism, in which block time with dependent control (“non-control” in a sense) is experienced, and the contrast between the branching vs. non-branching models is perceived.

\ end of content that I posted probably at Emily page then re-posted from scratch here

copied to main Emily page, which is the main copy:

Posted to youtube April 15, 2025:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoQhHmjyERA
The “All at Once” Theory: The Universe is a Single Timeless Block
April 14, 2024
This video is a short clip of the main interview.

Someone asked me “What is Quantum Mysticism?”

Wikipedia has a good article “Quantum mysticism”, saying it is bunk spiritual reinterpretation of Quantum Physics; I agree.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism

The Wikipedia article emphasizes eg.that the mind or “observer effect” creates many worlds at every moment: that’s the extreme of ego-power inflation.

I have defined the opposite use of Physics for an opposite version of mysticism that is offensive to ego power:

The future is single and already exists, not like domino-chain determinism causality, but quite different like Emily Adlam’s All-at-Once, eternalism; “4D spacetime block-universe mysticism”.

Popular Quantum Mysticism is not the Presentism view of time like the interview contrasts against Eternalism.

The popular view is actually Possibilism, which is depicted in medieval art as branching, contrasted against non-branching ie Eternalism perceived in the mystical state of consciousness, which I assert.

Figured Out Why Popular Philosophy Wrongly Contrasts Presentism vs. Eternalism instead of Possibilism vs. Eternalism

Highly consistent trend:

  • Phil dept. overemphasizes epistemology, not cybernetics and mental model of personal control system – thus is blind to Possibilism, and only sees Presentism, as the supposed contrast against eternalism. ordinary state-based Phil assumes that the concern of Phil is epistemology, and perception – so, ignores possibilism (which is potentially personal control-focused), and pays attention to Presentism instead.
  • Curt Jaimungal asks Emily Adlam about Presentism vs. Eternalism (not Possibilism vs. Eternalism). Find ‘eternalism’ — better, find ‘presentism’ in transcript at
    https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/04/12/the-all-at-once-universe-shatters-our-view-of-time-emily-adlam/#Presentism-vs-Eternalism – 1 page of discussion by Emily & Curt.
  • Videos about Eternalism contrast it against Presentism – not against Possibilism.
  • The article Cognitive Ps Mind Mnfn is about metaperception, as a beginner level basic lead-in to Egodeath theory. In 1987 at start of my proper/explicit theorizing (rather than informal unstructured idea development per my self-help approach of Oct. 26 1985-March 1987), I modeled perception, toward explaining the cross cross-time personal control system.
  • Josie Kins titled the article Perception of Eternalism, and fixates on visual distortion effects, and contrasts Presentism (not Possibilism) against Eternalism.

todo: define the theory (aside from naming/ branding it).

Naming/Branding the Theory

4D spacetime block universe eternalism
Psychedelic 4D spacetime block universe eternalism
fsbue
an updated term as of April 15, 2025. Needs hyphen?
First part (4D Spacetime) = Minkowski;
2nd part (Block-Universe) = Wm James studies; https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/04/10/the-dilemma-of-determinism-james-1897-is-against-eternalism-not-causal-chain-determinism/
3rd part (eternalism) = Philosophy of Time (omits a focus on personal control ramifications)
Site Map: https://egodeaththeory.org/nav/#The-Block-Universe

Psychedelic 4D Spacetime Mysticism
4D Spacetime Mysticism
too technical & modern, Minkowski
good when going head-to-head against “Quantum Mysticism”

Psychedelic Block-Universe Eternalism
Block Universe Mysticism
timeless & mythic, better, James

check popular wiki lexicon usage of:

List of Eternalism Terms & Pages by Josie Kins

Josie Kins wrote at the “Perception of Eternalism” page:

“I happened upon a large number of relevant concepts that include ideas such as eternalism, four dimensionalism, growing block universe, perdurantism, and the b-theory of time. Each of these concepts have their Wikipedia articles linked to within the See Also section of this page” —

  • block universe (sweet spot: not too technical or modern, not too mytheme figurative analogy)
  • eternalism – (philo of time; doesn’t even focus on the concomitant topic of control transformation: from monolithic, autonomous control to 2-level, dependent control)
  • Psychedelic 4D Spacetime Mysticism
  • Psychedelic block-universe Mysticism
  • 4D Spacetime Mysticism – Minkowski term’y
  • Block-Universe Mysticism – wm james term’y, bromhall especially, “the iron block view” <– bleh, poor term’y. ‘view’ is lame except in loose cognition you “view” the block universe.

“4D Spacetime” is technical lexicon. too damn modern.

“block universe” is plainspoken wording. near to the classic mytheme {rock}.

Kyle Bromhall Criticizes William James for Focusing on the Mechanism of “Causal Determinism” instead of James’ Real Concern, “Logical Determinism” and Its Implied Eternalism

eternalism is hopelessly jargon. ironically everyone has heard of “determinism” and everyone defines it awfully, like Bromhall criticizes James for writing. Irrelevant focus / obsession on domino-chain causality.

Me & Bromhall object: IDGAF the mechanism by which the future is frozen; what matters/THE POINT is the sense in which the future is frozen.

One page 1 of James 1897, it’s clear immediately, that he obsesses on causal-chain determinism but James doesn’t care about that, what he objects to is the future being frozen. Not that it’s frozen because of causal-chain determinism, a red herring.

Bromhall tries to make junk pop spirituality (Quantum Mysticism ; the observer effect, [& perhaps manyworlds branching] ) and randomness the foundation of freewill. He NEVER writes honest word “measure”, ALWAYS writes the lying phony word “observe”. to force Science to say “mind creates branching reality”. per the most vulgar Quantum Mysticism.

“We have freewill because Science’s observer effect (see wiki: garbage pop Quantum Mysticism] and b/c randomness”, argues Kyle Bromhall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4D_spacetime_mysticism 😢
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block universe_mysticism 😢

to combat Quantum Mysticism, the parallel term would be 4D Spacetime Mysticism because Minkowski says that. Petkov: “the absolute four-dimensional world”. implies “block world” mysticism

rock cosmos sounds nice, alludes to pre modern: rock, cosmos/ astral ascent mysticism. whcih could call
cosmos ascent mysticism but astral star focus is nice.

rock cosmos

My next church opener presentation:

“The only right way to think is, as Science has concluded:
Relativity is PROVEN SCIENTIFIC FACT & incorporates Minkowski 4D spacetime,

therefore, enlightenment is ultra simple: ego power is null and we’re imprisoned slaves frozen in rock, except a cosmic savior lifts us out into spiritual freedom.” 

Have a nice day 😊

ancient myth words:
rock cosmos 🤘🌌

The Good News and the Bad News of Psychedelic 4D-Spacetime Block-Universe Mysticism

Pros & Cons of Block-Universe Mysticism

— a strong contender for title of psychedelic church reader summary article & slide deck presentation, because a huge challenge, psychologically for me as a presenter, is the objectionable aspects of this simple terrific model of Transcendent Knowledge. 

Related, planned article/page:
Pros & Cons of the Theory of Psychedelic 4D Spacetime Mysticism
ie what is objectionable to egoic thinking; what is great.
A more colloquial, informal title:
The Good News and the Bad News of the Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism
The Good News and the Bad News of the Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic 4D Spacetime Mysticism
The Good News and the Bad News of Psychedelic 4D Spacetime Mysticism

The Good News & Bad News of Block-Universe Mysticism

Petkov Term: “the Absolute Four-Dimensional Spacetime World”

Motivation for green markup: see if Petkov writes the word “block”; he does not. Not “iron block view” like Bromhall writes in his article about Wm James’ 1897 article The Dilemma of Determinism.
The Dilemma of Determinism (James, 1897) Is Against Eternalism, Not Causal-Chain Determinism (Minkowski = 1907-1908; 10 years after James’ article)

Annotations: Michael Hoffman

Titles of Articles

possible title for Sacred Garden Reader or church presentation:

The Good News and the Bad News of Psychedelic 4D-Spacetime Block-Universe Mysticism

The Good News and the Bad News of Block Universe Mysticism

Pros & Cons of 4D Spacetime Mysticism

Pros & Cons of Psychedelic Eternalism

Pros & Cons of the Theory Psychedelic Eternalism

Pros & Cons of Psychedelic 4D Spacetime Mysticism

Pros & Cons of the Theory of Psychedelic 4D Spacetime Mysticism

Naming the Rival Version of Physics Mysticism against “Quantum Mysticism”: “4D Spacetime Mysticism”

wiki:
Quantum Mysticism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mysticism

where the hell is the rival article at wiki:
4D Spacetime Mysticism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4D_Spacetime_Mysticism

4D Spacetime Mysticism (rival against Quantum Mysticism), Petkov book Spacetime 

Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture (Kaiser (editor), 2016)

https://www.amazon.com/Groovy-Science-Knowledge-Innovation-Counterculture/dp/022637288X/ —

Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture
Illustrated Edition
David Kaiser (Editor), W. Patrick McCray (Editor)

“In his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, Theodore Roszak described the youth of the late 1960s as fleeing science “as if from a place inhabited by plague,” and even seeking “subversion of the scientific worldview” itself. Roszak’s view has come to be our own: when we think of the youth movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, we think of a movement that was explicitly anti-scientific in its embrace of alternative spiritualities and communal living.

“Such a view is far too simple, ignoring the diverse ways in which the era’s countercultures expressed enthusiasm for and involved themselves in science—of a certain type. Rejecting hulking, militarized technical projects like Cold War missiles and mainframes, Boomers and hippies sought a science that was both small-scale and big-picture, as exemplified by the annual workshops on quantum physics at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, or Timothy Leary’s championing of space exploration as the ultimate “high.” Groovy Science explores the experimentation and eclecticism that marked countercultural science and technology during one of the most colorful periods of American history.”

How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (Kaiser, 2011)

book: how hippies saved physics https://www.amazon.com/How-Hippies-Saved-Physics-Counterculture/dp/039334231X/ —

How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival
David Kaiser, 2011

“How the Hippies Saved Physics gives us an unconventional view of some unconventional people engaged early in the fundamentals of quantum theory. Great fun to read.” ―Anton Zeilinger, Nobel laureate in physics

“The surprising story of eccentric young scientists―among them Nobel laureates John Clauser and Alain Aspect―who stood up to convention and changed the face of modern physics.

“Today, quantum information theory is among the most exciting scientific frontiers, attracting billions of dollars in funding and thousands of talented researchers. But as MIT physicist and historian David Kaiser reveals, this cutting-edge field has a surprisingly psychedelic past.

“How the Hippies Saved Physics introduces us to a band of freewheeling physicists who defied the imperative to “shut up and calculate” and helped to rejuvenate modern physics.

“For physicists, the 1970s were a time of stagnation. Jobs became scarce, and conformity was encouraged, sometimes stifling exploration of the mysteries of the physical world.

“Dissatisfied, underemployed, and eternally curious, an eccentric group of physicists in Berkeley, California, banded together to throw off the constraints of the physics mainstream and explore the wilder side of science. “

Egodeath theory/ Michael Hoffman is from near Berkeley, and Sacred Garden Community church is in Berkeley.

“Dubbing themselves the “Fundamental Fysiks Group,” they pursued an audacious, speculative approach to physics.

“They studied quantum entanglement and Bell’s Theorem through the lens of Eastern mysticism and psychic mind-reading, discussing the latest research while lounging in hot tubs.

“Some even dabbled with LSD to enhance their creativity.

“Unlikely as it may seem, these iconoclasts spun modern physics in a new direction, forcing mainstream physicists to pay attention to the strange but exciting underpinnings of quantum theory.

“A lively, entertaining story that illuminates the relationship between creativity and scientific progress, How the Hippies Saved Physics takes us to a time when only the unlikeliest heroes could break the science world out of its rut.”

“Science”-based Quantum Mysticism is the Virtual Dogma of the Psychedelic Church Community

key dogmas:

  • The observer effect.
  • Your mind creates reality.
  • Only mind exists.
  • Science has concluded that mind creates infinite universes at every moment (extreme of ego inflation).
  • Manyworlds branching; branching possibilities.
  • * randomness is the god/foundation of egoic freewill power. Foundation of sand — collapses because of {shadow dragon monster} during Psilocybin loose cognition.

My rival rebuttal to “Science”-based Quantum Mysticism (virtual dogma of our church community): 

4D Spacetime Mysticism

[omits “block”]

i like Minkowski, not Einstein, but:

Relativity :: Quantum Physics =

4D Spacetime Mysticism :: Quantum Mysticism =

non-branching future (& 2-level, dependent control) :: branching future (& monolithic, autonomous control)

Quantum Mysticism Is Anti-Enlightenment

Quantum Mysticism = egoic thinking (thus, popular)

4D Spacetime Mysticism = transcendent thinking (thus, offensive to ego, & unpopular)

Titles for Articles for the Journal of Psychedelic Studies​

Branching-message mushroom trees: Psychedelic eternalism depicted in medieval art as mushrooms, branching, handedness, and stability

Cubensis-Driven Entheogen Scholarship: The most rewarding, productive, relevant approach

See Also

here is a sequential series of postings that are relevant:

Recent posts:

The Dilemma of Determinism (James, 1897) Is Against Eternalism, Not Causal-Chain Determinism

Michael Hoffman, Apr. 10, 2025

Crop by Michael Hoffman – pilgrim’s YI tree; more branching on Left than Right.

Contents:

links work on desktop Edge/Chrome:

The Dilemma of Determinism (James, 1897)

The Dilemma of Determinism
William James, 1897
https://faculty.georgetown.edu/blattnew/intro/james_dilemma_of_determinism.pdf

Book by William James that contains the article “The Dilemma of Determinism”:

The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, by William James. https://www.amazon.com/Dilemma-Determinism-William-James/dp/116288892X
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=william+james+the+will+to+believe

An Inchoate Universe: James’ Probabilistic Underdeterminism (Bromhall, 2013)

AN INCHOATE UNIVERSE: JAMES’S PROBABILISTIC UNDERDETERMINISM
Kyle Bromhall, 2013
https://philarchive.org/archive/BROAIU-2 – 30 pages

Citation and Link for Bromhall Article About William James’ 1897 Article The Dilemma of Determinism.

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/03/03/dr-justin-sledge-of-esoterica-confirmed-late-antiquity-brands-all-rejected-no-free-will-fatedness/#iron-block

https://williamjamesstudies.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/William-James-Studies_SPRING-2018_VOLUME-14_NUMBER-1-SPRING-2018-pp1-204.pdf – the entire journal issue. Spring 2018. 2 articles by Bromhall.

The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’ Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment (Bricklin, 2016)

The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’ Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment (Bricklin) = Eternalism
https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/01/15/illusion-will-self-time-james-enlightenment-bricklin-eternalism/

The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’s Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment
Jonathan Bricklin
January 2, 2016
http://amzn.com/143845628X
SUNY Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology
CUT THE BRANCH: THE ILLUSION OF POSSIBILITY-BRANCHING

This book and author has ties among:

  • Philosophy of Eternalism
  • Enlightenment from altered-state revelation
  • The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology
  • The Journal of Consciousness Studies
  • Consciousness Studies
  • Psychedelics in late 20th C. spirituality
  • Altered states
  • Ramesh Balsekar (no-free-will)
  • Benny Shanon (Cognitive Phenomenology of Ayahuasca)

Table of Contents

Jonathan Bricklin equates “Enlightenment” with the altered-state revelation of eternalism. Bricklin uses terms including “monism, Parmenides, eternalism”, vs. “Pluriverse”.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/143845628X
The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’s Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment
Transpersonal Humanist Psychology
January 2, 2016
Jonathan Bricklin
SUNY series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology (43 books)

“Discusses how William James’s work suggests a world without will, self, or time and how research supports this perspective.

“William James is often considered a scientist compromised by his advocacy of mysticism and parapsychology. Jonathan Bricklin argues James can also be viewed as a mystic compromised by his commitment to common sense.

“James wanted to believe in will, self, and time, but his deepest insights suggested otherwise. “Is consciousness already there waiting to be uncovered and is it a veridical revelation of reality?”

“James asked shortly before his death in 1910.

“A century after his death, research from neuroscience, physics, psychology, and parapsychology is making the case, both theoretically and experimentally, that answers James’s question in the affirmative.

“By separating what James passionately wanted to believe, based on common sense, from what his insights and researches led him to believe, Bricklin shows how James himself laid the groundwork for this more challenging view of existence.

“The non-reality of will, self, and time is consistent with James’s psychology of volition, his epistemology of self, and his belief that Newtonian, objective, even-flowing time does not exist.”

Commentary Analysis

This initial sketch of planned page is a comprehensive summary. See my linked pages, and the James article & Bromhall article that are linked from there.

Bromhall’s article confirms my immediate reaction from page 1 of james article: James argues in terms of domino-chain causality but he doesn’t actually care about that;

James is actually fighting againt block-universe eternalism w/ single nonbranching future and 2-level, dependent control.

James advocates possibility-branching & monolithic, autonomous control.

Confirmed by Bromhall’s article as my analysis today confirmed.

James isn’t against determinism , he is against eternalism.

Book by Bricklin is good and on-target, Reluctant Mystic.

Chris Letheby gives us a false dilemma

Chris Letheby gives us a false dilemma:

  • “NaturalismTM” Science only matter exists, cartoon caricature, MaterialismTM.
  • Absurd mystic fantasy = Fatalism according to his definition. only mind exists. cartoon caricature #2.

Egodeath theory = 3rd option, that is relevant, useful, helpful, clear, simple. I sail by those Engineering stars. Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism.

Pros and Cons, Good News & Bad News of Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism

Erik Davis Zep 4 Presents Some Good News of Transcend Eternalism, to Balance Out the Bad News Revelation of Heimarmene-Enslavement

zep4 p 118 re: astral ascent mysticism – balance of positive & negative transcend heimarmene?

zep4 p 122 re: astral ascent mysticism – balance of positive & negative transcend determinism? (eternalism) —

Bromhall very usefully differentiates

  • causal determinism – I call, “domino chain causality”.
  • logical determinism – equivalent (Gilbert Ryle A theory vs B of time) to block-universe eternalism.

But those are both of limited relevance, re describing what is the case, and re how to argue for what is the case. Instead, my term would be more like:

  • psychedelic determinism – That term would be closer to how the Egodeath theory argues that the future is closed or is revealed to be or proved or demonstrated to be closed and non-branching and we do not really have control-power to steer.
  • ETERNALISM DETERMINISM – 4D Spacetime Mysticism; 4D block spacetime worldline frozen non-branching, w/ 2-level, dependent control. CLOSED FUTURE, single-future.
    vs:
  • Quantum Mysticism determinism – branching, open future; monolithic, autonomous control; legit real possibility-branching, manyworlds.

Per the Egodeath theory lexicon, the term “logical determinism” is like: preexisting frozen block non-branching future worldline frozen in rock, possibility-branching is illusory virtual only, & monolithic, autonomous control to steer w/ power of control among those branches is virtual illusory only.

I don’t like arg via domino-chain determinism , and I don’t like Ryle arg from linguistic statement truth value tho that is close enough to the way Egodeath theory argues, that Bromhall profitably equates Ryle….

That’s why Bromhall calls it “logical determinism” – better phrase per lexicon of Egodeath theory would be psychedelic determinism, experientially revealing frozen block 4D spacetime preexisting future.

The future is “closed” in some specific sense, and because of which?:

  • causal determinism – Because of domino-chain causality.
  • logical determinism – Because of truth-value of statements about the future.[starts to get better at describing the proposed sense in which the future is closed] Josie Kins mentions A- & B-theory of time in article in effectindex.com article on Perception of Eternalism: I assessed that article is 67% good.
  • psychedelic determinism – Because of psychedelic loose cognition experiential perception and – framed as a positive in Jan 1988! – this model is superior because it 100% annhilates ego power, as irrelevancy that gets cancelled out.

Egodeath theory. the Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence.

That model is the clearest spec’n of sense in which future is closed.

In the Marketing dept. inventory of Pros & Cons of Egodeath theory, LEVERAGE THE MOST OBJECTIONABLE OFFENSIVE ASPECT OF Egodeath theory AS A STRENGTH, AN ADVANTAGE.

To my psychedelic church:

What are you complaining about, you SAID you wanted ego death; psychedelic eternalism is 100% ego death; no-free-will; branching possibilities is virtual illusion only, as is power of steering among those.

Here is the ego death that you requested, so stop complaining.

I don’t want ppl to LIKE my Egodeath theory; I want them to UNDERSTAND my Egodeath theory. That’s my definition of Success: Does everyone understand what Egodeath theory is? Yes; Success.

Does everyone LIKE the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism? No, tons of ppl HATE my theory – but since they UNDERSTAND my theory, that’s what constitutes Success.

If what ppl hate is something other than my theory, that’s mis-projected onto my theory, that’s a failure, by my measure.

I demand that YOU MUST ACCURATELY HATE the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism.

People Must Accurately Understand the Egodeath Theory’s Balance of Pros and Cons

You must understand the Egodeath theory’s balance of Pros and Cons.

“I want ego transcendence and also increase my power of possibility-branching steering control.”

We know my model of block-universe eternalism in loose cognition state, producing mental model transformation, is correct BECAUSE it renders ego pointless and null.

The total instant lightning destruction of Semele ego mortal is proved true by the block-universe eternalism POV; this model of what ego transcendence is really about – as I wrote in 1988 — is proved true by the totalness with which ego power is nullfied completely,

The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence explanatory model therefore makes sense, this must be the correct model of enlightenment, I argued, b/c this model 100% cancels, nullifies, offends, and disrespects ego power.

The Cybernetic Theory of Ego Transcendence — This model of instant mental model transformation to transcend ego – ego death — power evaporates as irrelevant illusion — makes sense, hence must be correct.

Differentaiate the intermediate way of arguing, vs the real point that we really care about, the terminus: Brom does that.

Brom says ultimately what James REALLY cares about rejecting is a single …. eternalism per Egodeath theory: a single preexisting closed future with no egoic agency control that can steer.

No One at the Bridge – Rush: I have no arms to steer.

Bromhall’s description of what James is REALLY against, matches Egodeath theory eternalism pretty closely.

That’s why it is profitable to copypaste Bromhall’s article to the present page.

Pros of Egodeath theory: GOOD NEWS including booby prize disappointing, brought by Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism (similar tone in Erik Davis book Zep 4 p 122):

  • simple instant enlight but balancing on right foot is hard like skateboarding in switch stance.
  • You retain Isaac child thinking, though qualified re: its foundation.
  • virtual freewill.
  • set free from prison, sort of; redemption from enslavement in fate block, sort of, released from kidnap by block-universe eternalism, sort of. Reach above sphere of the fixed stars, sort of. spirit portion only, of you.

Cons: BAD NEWS brought by the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism:

  • no-free-will.
  • soul remains trapped in cosmic rock.
  • possibilism branching is illusion only; ego steering power for that, is illusion only.
  • Psychedelic tragedy Rock lyrics.
  • Future is closed.

Good Voice Recording

Center mic 57 + A2WS, Apr. 10, 2025 voice recording, and R mic shown under it CAD E100

voice recording good: added modular stereo noise gate (hack-y, not real – not cutting me off too bad) on room mics. TK_VOX_6391.wav apr 10 2025. 1:40:00

Bromhall advocates possibilism, based on marketing label of “science”, equating “science” with newage alleged Observer Effect, and with randomness as the foundation of freewill power and real possibility-branching.

That is bad and wrong of Bromhall.

Bromhall adds good distinction between causal vs logical determinism, the latter meaning whether statements about the future have a truth value.

If per Gilbert Ryle, statements about future have a truth value, that clearly implies hardcore eternalism (empty ego agency + illusion of possibility-branching), unlike the weak connection James uses between domino-chain causality / causal causal-chain determinism & a weak image of eternalism and a weak image of nullity of agency steering control power.

The article Bromhall contributes helpful concepts/phrases. And rolls out junk newage “observer effect” arg’n, and the popular topic of “can randomness serve as foundation of freewill?”

per Bromhall’s cheap rehetoric, CLOAK SELF IN MANTLE OF SCIENCE: like Houot.

KB says:

‘Science’ = the Newage dogma of alleged “observer effect”: “mind creates reality”. like “only mind exists”.

causal-chain determinism
ccd

domino-chain determinism
dcd

domino-chain causality
dcc

domino-chain causal determinism
dccd

todo: paste Bromhall article here for commentary/formatting. maybe James article too. Bromhall probably writes nonsense about “observe” when truth is, you MEASURE. HE shows his hand by employing the lying word ‘observe’ meausrement, instead of speaking honestly saying just ‘measure’ disturbs the thing measured.

Bromhall is committed to deception by employing ‘observe’, instead of the scientists’ term ‘measure’, though that gets into the Phil of Epistemology more than I want. I probably oppose Brom but his writing is clear in differentiating,

https://faculty.georgetown.edu/blattnew/intro/james_dilemma_of_determinism.pdf

Book by William James that contains the article “The Dilemma of Determinism”:

The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, by William James. https://www.amazon.com/Dilemma-Determinism-William-James/dp/116288892X
https://www.amazon.com/s?k=william+james+the+will+to+believe

Kyle Bromhall Article About James Article

image: TOC of Bricklin book, w/ Eternalism chapter at end
https://egodeaththeory.org/?s=bricklin –

The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’ Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment (Bricklin) = Eternalism
https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/01/15/illusion-will-self-time-james-enlightenment-bricklin-eternalism/

msgs today

“When you brought it up, I first heard about all the spheres and Free will and the stars. Need a copy of the drawings you posted. I want the check out the art and symbolism to squeeze the wisdom out of them.”

Skim the great pictures in this video.

I am against mediocre Jungianism (watered down or off-base).

i could make a page gallery of my pictures of geocentric cosmos so far, & links to good wiki pages.

Good news, there are tons of good cosmos diagrams/ pics.

My writeups are the tightest in joining those pictures w what scholars write about Fate, heimarmene, precession of the equinoxes.

Funny: at 20:00 the vid said “precession of the equinoxes” immed after i typed that and wondered “do they say that??”

In your color version of the Pilgrim pic, pilgrim’s head against yellow fire light (not blue), matching David Ulansey’s Mithras and the Hypercosmic Sun, http://www.mysterium.com/hypercosmic.html 

I’m glad to see that in 1400-1650 — though no mushroom-trees — the YI branching form; eg {cut right branch} {cut right trunk} motif is still present, eg in geocentric cosmos drawings.

“more branching on Left” (freewill thinking) is a motif that was used w the art genre of mushroom-trees, which flourished around 900 AD-1300 AD.

Motivation of this Webpage

The motivation of the present page is to paste text of this article here & comment on it.

See Also

The Dilemma of Determinism
William James, 1897
https://faculty.georgetown.edu/blattnew/intro/james_dilemma_of_determinism.pdf

The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, by William James. https://www.amazon.com/Dilemma-Determinism-William-James/dp/116288892X
Contains “The Dilemma of Determinism”

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=william+james+the+will+to+believe

AN INCHOATE UNIVERSE: JAMES’S PROBABILISTIC UNDERDETERMINISM
Kyle Bromhall, 2013
https://philarchive.org/archive/BROAIU-2 – 30 pages

The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’ Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment (Bricklin) = Eternalism
https://egodeaththeory.org/2023/01/15/illusion-will-self-time-james-enlightenment-bricklin-eternalism/

The Illusion of Will, Self, and Time: William James’s Reluctant Guide to Enlightenment
Jonathan Bricklin
January 2, 2016
http://amzn.com/143845628X
SUNY Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Psychology

Screenshot

2 pages so far, I wrote about Kyle Bromhall article about James article:
https://egodeaththeory.org/?s=bromhall —

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/02/25/idea-development-page-25/ – find block, bromhall, james, iron

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/03/03/dr-justin-sledge-of-esoterica-confirmed-late-antiquity-brands-all-rejected-no-free-will-fatedness// – find block, bromhall, james, iron

Rick Strassman at Sacred Garden Church in Berkeley

Posted by Michael Hoffman, April 7, 2025

https://www.sacredgarden.life

Contents:

Join Us on April 20th, 2025 to Learn from Rick Strassman!

The Alembic community center is associated with Erik Davis and is in Berkeley, California. Sacred Garden Community church has moved to that location.

Sacred Garden Community church is multi-city (meaning, they never think of us over here 😭 – but my town gets me instead 🤷‍♂️).

At the Alembic, Rick Strassman is attending in person, if I’m reading right. Reservation required.

Announcement of Strassman at Sacred Garden Church at Alembic Community Center in Berkeley

“On April 20th we will be joined by Dr. Rick Strassman
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/sacred-garden-sunday-service-tickets-1287639898599?aff=oddtdtcreator
who is a psychiatrist, researcher, and author best known for his groundbreaking clinical studies on DMT, detailed in his influential book DMT: The Spirit Molecule.

“As the first person in over two decades to conduct U.S. government-approved psychedelic research, his work helped catalyze the modern psychedelic renaissance. A former tenured professor at the University of New Mexico, Dr. Strassman has published extensively and continues to serve as a consultant and advisor in the psychedelic field.

“Sacred Garden has found a new home at The Alembic in Berkeley!
Join us in person (or virtual) on the 1st and 3rd Sundays of the month from 11am – 12:30 pm pst, followed by a potluck to connect and be in community.

“We’re also launching our Seeds & Starts Giveaway, sharing the wisdom of our sacred plants by gifting seeds and plant starts from our four plant families—Deep Forest, Bright Night, Big Sky, & Infinite Other. 🌱✨

Personally copypasted by Michael Hoffman:

“Come check out the interfaith church that I am a part of, dedicated to facilitating direct experiences of the Divine through entheogenic sacraments. I’d love for you to be part of it!”

📍 The Alembic, Berkeley
📅 Every 1st and 3rd Sunday | 11 AM – 12:30 PM | Potluck to follow

#SacredGarden  #EntheogenicChurch

Invite by S (a Leader)

Personally copypasted by Michael Hoffman:

composed by S:

“Hey ya’ll –  I’m reaching out to invite you to something that means a lot to me.

“The Sacred Garden Community (SGC) has a new home at The Berkeley Alembic, and their Sunday Services happen every 1st and 3rd Sunday in person from 11 AM – 12:30 PM, followed by a potluck celebration.

“If you’ve ever been curious about this community I care so much about, this is the perfect time to come check it out — they’re also launching their Seeds & Starts Giveaway, sharing seeds and baby plants from their four sacred plant families — Deep Forest, Bright Night, Big Sky, and Infinite Other. Come for the service, stay for the potluck, and take home some plant babies to start your own sacred garden.

“I want to share a little about why this community means so much to me. The long and short of it is — I believe in its potential to help shape a future worth living in.

“SGC’s “least dogma” approach makes space for everyone — every belief system and its opposite — which, to me, feels like something between Ken Wilber’s Teal paradigm and the Buddhist concept of Emptiness.“

But Tim Freke lately says Emptiness is full of it 🤷‍♂️

“On top of that, they hold deep knowledge about sacred plants — how to grow them, live with them, process them, and practice with them.

“All of this, held with humility, curiosity, and care, is why this community means the world to me …and I’d love to see you there.

“Whether you’re an old friend of the garden or you’ve just been curious from the sidelines, I hope you’ll come.

“Let’s plant some seeds together — literally and metaphorically.

📍 The Alembic, Berkeley
 📅 Every 1st and 3rd Sunday of the month | 11 AM – 12:30 PM (potluck to follow)

“Bring a dish if you can, bring your curiosity if you can’t — and bring a friend either way. Let’s grow something beautiful.”

https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/sunday-service-4122643

Berkeley Alembic Building

https://www.berkeleyalembic.org — Associated with Erik Davis.

“Welcome to The Alembic

“A nonprofit center devoted to consciousness culture
Hosting classes, events, and workshops in the core domains of meditation, movement, psychedelics, inquiry, and the creative arts.

“We are a community-focused spiritual learning center – and our core desire is to intensify the kindness, good, magic, and intelligence in the world.

“We are crafting a broad curriculum that allows individuals to explore a range of modalities, learning from the highest quality instructors in an atmosphere of discernment, play, mutual respect, and scholarly/experiential depth.

“Our classes, workshops, and special events are led by contemplative masters and scientists, fringe scholars and somatic wizards, imaginal artists and seasoned psychonauts. Think of the Alembic as a transformational festival, without the dust.”

DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible (Strassman, 2014)

Rick Strassman a few weeks ago joined our book club finishing reading his new autobio book. After Houot, author of Rise of the Psychonaut, joins the book club in a couple weeks, we are maybe reading Strassman’s Old Testament Psychedelics book:

DMT and the Soul of Prophecy: A New Science of Spiritual Revelation in the Hebrew Bible
Rick Strassman M.D. (Author), 2014
https://www.amazon.com/DMT-Soul-Prophecy-Spiritual-Revelation/dp/1594773424/ —

Strassman made the HRS questionnaire:
https://egodeaththeory.org/2022/12/23/hrs-hallucinogen-rating-scale/

Book blurb:

“Naturally occurring DMT may produce prophecy-like states of consciousness and thus represent a bridge between biology and religious experience

  • Reveals the striking similarities between the visions of the Hebrew prophets and the DMT state described by Strassman’s research volunteers
  • Explains how prophetic and psychedelic states may share biological mechanisms
  • Presents a new top-down “theoneurological” model of spiritual experience

“After completing his groundbreaking research chronicled in DMT: The Spirit Molecule, Rick Strassman was left with one fundamental question:

“What does it mean that DMT, a simple chemical naturally found in all of our bodies, instantaneously opens us to an interactive spirit world that feels more real than our own world?

“When his decades of clinical psychiatric research and Buddhist practice were unable to provide answers to this question, Strassman began searching for a more resonant spiritual model.

“He found that the visions of the Hebrew prophets–such as Ezekiel, Moses, Adam, and Daniel–were strikingly similar to those of the volunteers in his DMT studies.

“Carefully examining the concept of prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, he characterizes a “prophetic state of consciousness” and explains how it may share biological and metaphysical mechanisms with the DMT effect.

“Examining medieval commentaries on the Hebrew Bible, Strassman reveals how Jewish metaphysics provides a top-down model for both the prophetic and DMT states, a model he calls “theoneurology.”

“Theoneurology bridges biology and spirituality by proposing that the Divine communicates with us using the brain, and DMT–whether naturally produced or ingested–is a critical factor in such visionary experience.

“This model provides a counterpoint to “neurotheology,” which proposes that altered brain function simply generates the impression of a Divine-human encounter.

“Theoneurology addresses issues critical to the full flowering of the psychedelic drug experience.

“Perhaps even more important, it points the way to a renewal of classical prophetic consciousness, the soul of Hebrew Bible prophecy, as well as unexpected directions for the evolution of contemporary spiritual practice.”

/ end of book blurb

The Mysticism Wars: Moving Past Mysticism in Psychedelic Science

After Houot, author of Rise of the Psychonaut, joins the book club in a couple weeks, we are maybe reading Strassman’s Old Testament Psychedelics book. Strassman is a scientist leading the field so it’s a given that Strassman is approved by A. M. Houot.

Houot certainly does not think that religion enthusiasts are irrational, immature, & mentally unfit to do Science discovery exploration, any more than Matthew Johnson would — as a hypothetical example — file ethics violations complaints against his own Psychedelic Science research group at Johns Hopkins, claiming that they are pushing a religious cult to re-introduce Psilocybin into Christianity.

Moving Past Mysticism: Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism Provides Scientific Basis, Superseding “Mysticism, Meditation, & Psychotherapy” Framework – 2023/01

Which Side Are You On (Defined for Us by Chris Letheby & Matthew Johnson)?

  • Only mind exists.
  • Only matter exists.

3rd side:
Cognitive Phenomenology of Mind Manifestation

This Is Not a Rush Trivia Site or Announcements Site or Current Events Site

my church forced me to post this 😞 or else be cast out through the {gate} into the darkness outside, among those who failed to do their laundry, separated from the tree of life

“Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city.” – Revelation 22:14 (the last page of the Bible), NIV

See Also

https://www.sacredgarden.life

Search this site on “book club”
https://egodeaththeory.org/?s=%22book+club%22 — pages:

Sacred Garden Community psychedelic church

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/03/29/my-questions-for-houot-at-psychedelic-church-book-club/

https://egodeaththeory.org/2025/03/28/mission-equip-cognitive-scientists-everyone-bridge-stem-humanities-science-religion/

Astral Ascent Mysticism: Standard Basic Model for Transcending Eternalism

Michael Hoffman, April 7, 2025

Site Map: Astral Ascent Mysticism

Contents:

The Basic Model of Astral Ascent Mysticism: 9 Spheres, 11 Levels

Sphere # or Level – Cosmic Body – Mental Model
—————————————————————
10 – outside spheres – source of control-thoughts
9 – precession – integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking
8 – fixed stars – eternalism-thinking
7 – Saturn – 7/8 eternalism-thinking
6 – Jupiter – 6/8 eternalism-thinking
5 – Mars – 5/8 eternalism-thinking
4 – Sun – 4/8 eternalism-thinking
3 – Venus – 3/8 eternalism-thinking
2 – Mercury – 2/8 eternalism-thinking
1 – Moon – 1/8 eternalism-thinking
0 – Earth – possibilism-thinking

externally linked

The Model as 3 Essential Levels

3) outside fixed stars = mature, integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking; qualified possibilism-thinking; hyper-eternalism thinking
2) fixed stars = eternalism-thinking
1) below fixed stars = possibilism-thinking

3) outside fixed stars = possibilism/eternalism
2) fixed stars = eternalism
1) Earth = possibilism

3 Guys Mapped to 3 Essential Levels

Crop by Michael Hoffman

3) outside fixed stars = integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking = advanced = leg-hanging guy.
2) fixed stars = basic eternalism-thinking = guy sitting in tree balancing with right foot & hand on cut branches, & passing students 1 & 3 on left.
1) planet spheres = possibilism-thinking = furrowed brow of students 2 & 4 during Psilocybin loose cognition when able to perceive uncontrollable source of control-thoughts yet trying to rely on monolithic, autonomous control as foundation of the personal control system – causes loss of balance, cybernetic instability; non-viable self-control.

Crop by Michael Hoffman
  1. Earth = foolish youth (furrowed brow) = possibilism-thinking.
  2. fixed stars = wise youth (smooth brow) = eternalism-thinking.
  3. outside fixed stars = floating sage (furrowed brow) = integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking.

Eadwine via floating sage (placed to follow the basic L foot vs R foot guys) sets up the instructional puzzle asking the student who is reading the image, to interpret leg hanging in the above row, while the image teaches the student to rely on eternalism-thinking instead of possibilism-thinking during the intense mystic altered state.

The Chronic Awkward Silence of Scholars about the Fixed Stars when Ascending through Sphere 8 to Transcend Fate

The Chronic Awkward Silence of Scholars about the Fixed Stars when Ascending through Sphere 8 to Transcend Fate Indicates the Need to Build on Ulansey’s Clear Mithraism Model, Adding Psychedelic Transformation into Fate-Awareness and then Transcending Fate, Integrating Possibilism- and Eternalism-Thinking.

Every scholar of esotericism, when explaining “astral” ascent through the “cosmos” levels to transcend Fate/ heimarmene/ no-free-will, every single one of them covertly GOES SILENT and never even mentions “fixed stars”, upon arrival in sphere 8.  

In a different paragraph, they say zodiac & other fixed stars (in sphere 8) = Fate, & the Demiurge in sphere 8 ruling over the 7 planetary archon rulers.

Hermetic scholars’ consistent silence about fixed stars during upper ascent levels, shows that all scholars are baffled about relating ascent-rebirth to sphere 8, fixed stars.

Building on Ulansey’s Clear (Coherent, Consistent, Explicit, Intelligible, Scientific) Mithraism Model

David Ulansey’s solution explaining Mithraism: Ulansey is the only scholar who says “fixed stars” when the soul ascends to sphere 8.

Ulansey is the only coherent scholar: he says only when reach sphere 9 (primum mobile; pleroma; precession of the equinoxes) does the spirit escape Fate.

Ulansey is the only articulate, clear, coherent, intelligible scholar re: fixed stars in sphere 8 during astral cosmic spiritual ascent.

Scholars leave it to me to build on Ulansey’s uniquely articulate & intelligible coherent model, to connect that to Psilo transformation re: ascending to sphere 8 (Fatedness! fixed stars! demiurgic creator/ emperor!) and only *after* that, transcend Fatedness, outside the cosmos boundary.

Transcending Heimarmene in Mithraism (David Ulansey)

David Ulansey’s Mithras and the Hypercosmic Sun, http://www.mysterium.com/hypercosmic.html

David Ulansey’s The Eighth Gate: The Mithraic Lion-Headed Figure and the Platonic World-Soul, http://www.mysterium.com/eighthgate.html

Psychedelic Transformation into Fate-Awareness, and then Transcending Fate by Integrating Possibilism- and Eternalism-Thinking

Psychedelic Transformation into Fate-Transcendence

Spiritually reaching sphere 9 above the fixed stars (above enslavement to Fate) is *Integration* & maturation: cognizance of fatedness yet along w that, the appearance & experience of usual steering among apparently branching possibilities. 

Moving Past Eternalism

Moving Past 4D Spacetime Mysticism

4D Spacetime Mysticism is like James T. Cushing’s “road not taken”, my brand of 1890-era Physics-cum-Mysticism that’s in contrast with the reaction against it, Quantum Mysticism.

Moving Past Mysticism: Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism Provides Scientific Basis, Superseding “Mysticism, Meditation, & Psychotherapy” Framework – 2023/01/15

My fear (furrowed brow) lately isn’t loss of control, so much as giving possibilism-thinking its due in light of the revelation of eternalism: I anxiously work to solve that puzzle, like floating sage challenging us to interpret leg-hanging – so I can say that:

The “problem” of the leg hanging guy includes the problem of “moving past eternalism mysticism”. The mind always uses possibilism-thinking, and returns to the ordinary state, and experience is shaped as possibilism.

The battle between appearance (experience) vs. revealed underlying reality.

Both the experience (practice) and the epistemology (seeing eternalism) must be respected and integrated, in the mature, completed, perfected mental model.

The Mysticism Wars in Psychedelic Science blew up the Hopkins research Psilocybin 2016 Religious Professionals study ended with Matthew Johnson filing ethics violations complaints for pushing newage mysticism and even trying to add Psilocybin to Christianity, heaven forfend!

A travesty of Science: the scientific explanation of what ego transcendence from Psilocybin transformation is really about.

The ultimate purpose and achievement of Science is the Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism.

Motivation for this Page

Need a clean, Reference page that is focused on the standard Reference model is, of astral ascent mysticism, according to Egodeath theory of psychedelic eternalism.

Transcending eternalism = transcending Fate, heimarmene, no-free-will, prison, slave, puppet, kidnapped; receiving ransom; freedom, redemption.

My original page:
https://egodeaththeory.org/2020/11/10/ptolemaic-astral-ascent-mysticism/
Has more details, expanded today, April 7, 2025.

Michael Hoffman, ~1991, ink brush in blank art book

Rectifying Confused, Contradictory Cosmos Models

Hermetic scholars say:

fate = fixed stars = sphere 8 = Ogdoad = above fate = above Saturn

ERROR!

Perennialism = confusion = mysticism = hermetism = scholarship.

My interesting analysis summary:

I had to figure out what would be the most useful model to map to Egodeath theory, that would fit with the given, confused state of scholarship on Hermetic texts, a confusion propagated through all the videos and books.

I am justifying using the Mithraism cosmos model, which is simple and clear (unlike Hermetic texts) and neutral (unlike Gnosticism).

Contradiction in the scholarship: Heremetic texts:

Poimandres (and even “8 reveals 9”) is often read as if the highest level of Fate is sphere 7, Saturn.

Yet that reading clashes with the same scholars‘ assertion, in the same books, that fixed stars = Fate.

So the scholars silently, quietly waffle, instead of being forthright that they are asserting two contradictory models thanks to poor, vague, inconsistent writers in antiquity.

Whether the fixed stars should be included [with Saturn, sphere 7] or should rather be associated with the Ogdoad [sphere 8] remains an open question for me.

p. 294, footnote 114, Hermetic Spirituality and the Historical Imagination: Altered States of Knowledge in Late Antiquity, by Wouter Hanegraaff, 2022

Contradiction in the tradition: As is widely stated, the number of spheres above sphere 8 (fixed stars) varies.

Egodeath theory needs 1 sphere higher than eternalism (fixed stars, sphere 8), to represent mature, integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking.

Use the space/level above that, as God/Source.

This provides a utility, usefulness-driven, maximally useful, least confusing model, of 9 spheres plus earth (level 0 under spheres) and God (level 10 above spheres).

Thus I favor picture from the Paul Davidson-written video “What is Hermeticism?” Sep. 2024.

That picture has just enough complexity/ room above sphere 8 (fixed stars) to express full mature mental model re: eternalism, and to express God/Source outside the cosmos, and per relational mysticism (2-level, dependent control), distinguish between Creator vs. mature creature.

Titles of this Page

  • Astral Ascent Mysticism: Standard Basic Model for Transcending Eternalism
  • The Standard Reference Model of Astral Ascent Mysticism Cosmology per the Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism
  • Astral Ascent Mysticism: Standard Basic Model per the Egodeath Theory
  • Astral Ascent Mysticism: Standard Useful Model per the Egodeath Theory
  • Astral Ascent Mysticism: Standard Model for Transcending Eternalism
  • Astral Ascent Mysticism: Standard Model for Transcending Eternalism per Mithraism
  • Astral Ascent Mysticism Standard Model
  • Standard Model of Astral Ascent Mysticism per the Egodeath Theory
  • Astral Ascent Mysticism: Standard 9-Sphere, 10-Level Model per the Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism

{cut right trunk}

The {cut right trunk} motif on the right side of this cosmos model relates hypercosmic spiritual ascent to the {non-branching} motif.

To ascend above sphere 8 (fixed stars) is to maturely integrate possibilism-thinking and eternalism-thinking.

The YI tree depicts integrating the two different mental models: appearance integrated with reality, distinguishing the two and using both mental models, maturely integrated.

external image link
https://www.sciencephoto.com/media/364080/view/illustration-of-the-ptolemaic-world-system

Features:

  • Artistic sleight of hand: 7 spheres above sphere of the fixed stars, to pad out the transcendent levels, to imply mature integrated possibilism/eternalism thinking.
  • {cut right trunk}
  • {right foot forward}

Branching on left, {cut right trunk} on right:

Crop by Michael Hoffman
“john day cut right trunk.jpg” 161 KB Apr. 7, 2025
https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/PR-L-AST-00009-00044-C-00002/1
Crop by Michael Hoffman: YI tree

Tim Freke

Crop by Michael Hoffman
“john day cut right trunk entire image.jpg” 329 KB Apr. 9, 2025
Crop by Michael Hoffman: ladder from Saturn sphere 7 into Fate-ruled fixed stars sphere 8, not yet transcending Fate until reach sphere 9 above sphere 8 fixed stars. Purified at sphere 8, but not yet maturely integrated.

Ladder from Saturn sphere 7 into Fate-ruled fixed stars sphere 8, not yet transcending Fate until reach sphere 9 above sphere 8 fixed stars.

Purified at sphere 8, but not yet maturely integrated.

The Egodeath Theory of Psychedelic Eternalism is the evolution of scientific explanatory modeling of Transcendent Knowledge.

This page is dedicated to Tim Freke, who resonated with the Egodeath theory in 2000, and is looking for better adjustments to spirituality.

https://timfreke.com

Tim Freke is rejecting the following and will publish a voice recording podcast book, the podbook:

  • ego loss, ego dissolution, get rid of the ego
  • no-thought
  • only mind exists
  • nonduality unity oneness
  • enlightenment is non-rational
  • thinking is bad

I reject all of the above expressions and values. They are not useful or helpful for Transcendent Knowledge, or for practical stable control during psychedelic loose cognitive association binding.

I am looking forward to Freke’s evolutionary spirituality.

Tim Freke’s revisions are comparable to my recent work since 2003 on integrating possibilism-thinking & eternalism-thinking:

  • Integrating transformed malformed perennialism writing by anti-writing mystics.
  • Clarified and organized usefully per STEM communication.
  • Aided by receiving the transmission of shipment of mushroom-trees from Eadwine’s delivery in Great Canterbury Psalter.

My approach is to repair and transform previous, poor representations of Transcendent Knowledge that are not helpful or useful.

Will it be possible to combine the latest greatest version of Egodeath theory and Freke’s podbook evolutionary spirituality?

Free Will (Rush, 1980)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbskwxU8-WE —

https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+free+will+rush

Transcendent spiritual lyrics commentary at Egodeath.com:
The Song Freewill Is about Transcending, not Denying, Determinism
http://egodeath.com/rushlyrics.htm#xtocid22968 —

“This is a profoundly ambiguous song just as pre-enlightenment naive freewill only appears to be the same as post-enlightenment transcendent freedom.  Naive freewill is ignorant of determinism; enlightened freedom magically and miraculously transcends cosmic determinism, thus Christian ideas such as “in regeneration, you become a slave of God/Jesus instead of a slave of the devil”.

“The song Free Will by Rush must be read as a mystic-state problematization of naive free will — it was written after the lyricist was intimately familiar with the intense mystic-state experience of no-free-will, so Free Will is a post-determinism or transcendence-of-determinism song, not advocacy of naive freewill as the noninitiates among the Rush fans assume. 

“After all, 3/4 of the verses in the song Free Will clearly state and express and assert the classic determinist position: A planet of playthings, we dance on the strings, of powers we cannot perceive. 

“But *in the face of this* mystic-state realization — not in denial of it — the mind is transcendently reset from outside of its own controllership resources, one “becomes truly free” per mysticism, as opposed to one’s former asleep dream and naive assumption that one was free. 

“The song Freewill is not just only merely ironic; higher than that, it is divinely transcendent (magical, miraculous, supernatural).  The divinely transcendent (magical, miraculous, supernatural) also appears in the song The Body Electric: “Bows its head and prays to the (compassionate) mother of all machines, mother of all machines.”

“The song Freewill has a predominant percentage of lines asserting determinism or cosmic determinism, contrasted against a brief and out-of-nowhere declaration of choosing free will. 

“I have defined the ‘pre-trans fallacy’ with respect to freewill: naive freewill is to be contrasted with transcendent freewill.  One moves from ignorance (freewill assumption) to knowledge of the natural (that is, the experiential discovery of determinism), to knowledge of the supernatural (that is, a certain kind of transcendence of determinism and rationality). 

“The noninitiate and the perfected initiate both proclaim freedom from heimarmene/fate/cosmic determinism, but one does it out of ignorance, and the other out of transcendent gnosis, supernatural divine transcendent wisdom.  Stage 3 (transcendence of determinism), not stage 1 (ignorance of determinism) is what is meant in acid-oriented Rock by a statement such as “I will choose free will.”

“The non-initiate is a prisoner of cosmic determinism who mistakenly thinks they are free; the peak-state advanced initiation reveals that one’s thoughts are frozen into the cosmic prison; the transcendent divine lifting-up beyond that realization gives the mind something that has historically been called “true freedom”, very different than mere naive assumption of freewill — the naive assumption of freewill is utterly dead and impossible after mystically experiencing the deterministic true situation.”

— Michael Hoffman, Egodeath.com, 2007 era

See Also

Site Map > Astral Ascent Mysticism
https://egodeaththeory.org/nav/#Astral-Ascent-Mysticism

Transcending Heimarmene in Mithraism (David Ulansey)

David Ulansey’s Mithras and the Hypercosmic Sun, http://www.mysterium.com/hypercosmic.html

David Ulansey’s The Eighth Gate: The Mithraic Lion-Headed Figure and the Platonic World-Soul, http://www.mysterium.com/eighthgate.html