One psychedelic stands out from all the others: DMT. When the high priest of psychedelics Terence McKenna first took DMT in the 1960s, he noted that his understanding of the nature of the world was “shredded in front of me.” He met “machine-elf” creatures who spoke a strange colored language and were in a constant state of transformation in a world made of alien geometries and materials. Everything was so “unEnglishable,” as he put it, that he was in complete shock. He never got over it.
While LSD and psilocybin typically distort or enhance a person’s experience of their current environment, DMT seems to shake the very foundations of reality. Those who take it report feeling as though they’ve been transported to alternate dimensions populated by alien beings with whom they can interact. These trips are also notoriously short, lasting minutes rather than hours.
Recently, a pair of scientists decided to use DMT to study the mathematical architecture of human experience—and their theory of reality, “conscious realism,” which proposes that consciousness is the most fundamental property of the universe, and that physical reality is just an interface. The two collaborators—Andrew Gallimore, a neurobiologist and psychedelics researcher who leads consciousness research nonprofit Noonautics, and Donald Hoffman, a cognitive scientist who founded the Trace Institute to help develop the new framework—plan to send trained scientists and psychedelic experts into the “DMT space.” They detailed their proposal in a new preprint.
Hoffman says he’s been grappling with questions about the nature of consciousness since he was a kid, trying to make sense of the conflicts between his fundamentalist Christian upbringing and his science classes in school. He was driven by the question: “Are we just machines?” and ended up working in artificial intelligence at MIT for many decades before founding the Trace Institute. Gallimore first discovered psychedelics as a teenager. He has been wanting to get to the bottom of the mystery of DMT ever since.
I spoke with them about the hard problem of consciousness, panpsychism, machine-elves, Buddhist ideas of enlightenment, and how conscious realism intersects with new findings in theoretical physics about space-time.
Read more: “The Psychedelic Scientist”
Your theory of “conscious realism” flips the hard problem of consciousness on its head, so to speak. Rather than trying to explain how consciousness arises from the physical matter of the brain, your theory suggests we need to explain how the physical world as we know it arises from the interaction of conscious agents. Is this question an easier one to answer?
Donald Hoffman: The hard problem is how do we start with the physical world and get specific conscious experiences like the taste of mint or the sound of middle C. I’m good friends with all the big players in the field, and they’re brilliant, and they’re doing great research. The problem is there are trillions of experiences that humans have, and not one has ever been explained by a physicalist or functionalist theory. There’s zero success on specific conscious experiences.
If I came out and said, “Hey, I’ve got a theory about particle physics, but it can’t explain any specific particle interactions,” physicists would say, “Come back when you’ve got something.” And that’s my attitude about this.
It’s not because they’re not smart enough. These people are brilliant. But they’re giving us a theory of consciousness that can’t explain a single experience. Eventually, science will realize you cannot boot up conscious experiences from unconscious ingredients. We will just realize that’s not possible. Compared to that, what we’re trying to do is pretty simple. We’re saying let’s start with conscious experiences. That’s our fundamental thing. And if we have conscious experiences, then we’d need to show how we can get what we call the physical world as a special kind of headset through which different consciousnesses are interacting. That’s what we’re working on right now. It’s an eminently feasible problem, and we’ll probably have publishable answers within a year or two.
How would your theory of conscious realism alter other basic assumptions about how reality works?
Hoffman: One of the big assumptions in science right now is that spacetime is fundamental. Conscious realism is saying that’s not true. But I should add, we’re not the first to say that. The high energy theoretical physicists who are studying quantum gravity are saying that very clearly right now, too. Efforts to try to get a theory of quantum gravity make it very clear that spacetime isn’t fundamental. The European Research Council already has a €10-million initiative for studies of particle physics entirely outside of spacetime. They’re finding what they call positive geometries entirely outside of spacetime and entirely beyond quantum theory.
All of this means the hard problem actually cannot be solved, because the hard problem assumes that spacetime is fundamental and that particles inside spacetime are going to somehow, with the right complexity in functional properties, give rise to conscious experiences. But the promise that spacetime is fundamental is false. So the hard problem is doomed. It’s just that my colleagues in neuroscience don’t understand that yet.
You write that game theory has shown evolution favors perceptual systems tuned to fitness payoffs rather than objective truths, as one line of evidence for your theory. Can you offer a simple straightforward example of this?
Hoffman: A fun example is the jewel beetle that lives in the outback of Western Australia. They’re dimpled, glossy, and brown. The females are flightless. The males fly around looking for females, and when they find an eligible female, they will alight to mate. But in the outback of Australia, there are guys who drink beer with these bottles that are dimpled, glossy, and brown, just the right shade of brown, who grab the attention of the male jewel beetles. The males flock all over these bottles trying to make full body contact, and they cannot figure out that it’s not a real female.
Now, this is a species that’s successfully mated for millions of years. And yet the male has no idea what a real female is. They just had a simple hack. A female is something dimpled, glossy, and brown. The bigger the better. A little thing like a beer bottle could actually destroy an entire species. So that’s how much deep insight evolution has wired into our perceptual systems.
You plan to test your conscious realism theory using extended DMT trips. Why DMT?
Andrew Gallimore: All psychedelics work by perturbing the brain and changing the structure and the dynamics of your experienced world. That’s broadly what a psychedelic is. But DMT seems to go further than that. It obliterates our normal waking model of the world and replaces it with one that has no relationship whatsoever to the normal waking world. It replaces it with a world that’s inordinately complex, often topologically and geometrically unrelated to normal spacetime geometry. And most notably, it’s abundantly populated by what appear to be non-human, non-animal beings that have no reference in the normal waking environment.
We’ve known that about DMT since the 1950s, and these effects have always been explained as hallucinations: “This is just the brain on drugs, man.” But I’ve been studying DMT now for over 20 years, and in my opinion, it’s very difficult to explain how and why when you perturb the brain with this simple molecule, it should suddenly stop constructing the normal waking model of reality, the model of the world that the brain evolved to construct. When you perturb the brain with this molecule, it suddenly becomes capable of constructing these entirely alien worlds that have no relationship to the waking world. That’s a problem in my opinion.
It’s like a 5-year-old child suddenly switching from speaking English to some obscure dialect of some South African click language, but fluently. It would be confounding if a child did that. And yet when the brain starts constructing, reliably and efficiently, with crystalline clarity, these alien worlds, we say, “Oh, it’s just hallucination.” I don’t think it’s that simple. I could only explain DMT if somehow the brain was gaining access to some alternate source of sensory inputs. But that didn’t make any sense from a physicalist perspective. Where does that information come from? How is it possible that the brain can be receiving information from some other dimension, from some other world? It didn’t make sense until we started looking at it through the lens of conscious realism.
You think about the brain occupying this region of what conscious realism refers to as “the experience space.” We occupy this as a conscious agent. We occupy this very small region of a vast experience space, which is what we call consensus reality. That’s how we experience the world. And on top of the experience base, you have a qualia kernel, a set of rules or dynamics that determines how you move from one experience to the next.
If you perturb the conscious agent sufficiently, which is what DMT clearly does, then all of these dynamical rules that were determined by the qualia kernel no longer apply. You can enter into extremely exotic and unusual dynamical regimes. The quality kernel also determines how you interact with a network of conscious agents, including which ones have an effect on your experience and which ones you perceive—that’s all determined. That’s embedded; it’s implicit. So when you’re pushed into this other region of the experience space with different dynamics, you begin interacting with the conscious agent network in entirely different ways, becoming sensitive to conscious agents that before were completely imperceptible, that evolution had said, “These aren’t important, these aren’t adaptive.” Suddenly you’re in this region where you start interacting with conscious agents that you normally can’t interact with. You start perceiving conscious agents you couldn’t normally perceive.
If you ask, “What would it actually be like to get pushed into this region of the experience base?,” you find that the whole of DMT phenomenology basically falls out of mathematics. The geometry and the topology would be extremely strange, unusual, and impossible. The world would seem entirely alien, completely non-human, completely non-animal, completely unlike anything else you’d ever experienced. And that, of course, is what DMT does. This remarkable thing happened when we started digging into the theory, and I started probing Don’s beautiful model. DMT started making perfect sense.
Why would ignorance of certain conscious agents support fitness?
Gallimore: What’s implicit within Don’s theory is that there’s effectively a boundless number of different conscious agents that we simply can’t imagine. But evolution has tuned us to that small slice of the conscious agent network that’s adaptive.
Read more: “Is the Hard Problem Really So Hard?”
In that case, why would there be this one little molecule that can open it all up and allow us to see a wider perspective?
Gallimore: DMT doesn’t have to be unique. What you need is a molecule that’s gonna give the brain a particularly robust perturbation to knock it out of the experience base. We don’t know whether something deeper and more interesting is going on. We wouldn’t necessarily think that DMT is there by design or anything like that, and of course, there are other psychedelics as well. If you push them hard enough, if you take a high dose of psilocybin mushrooms, you’ll enter very similar states. You will enter these extremely exotic dynamical states, unusual geometric and topological worlds that are occupied by other beings. DMT just happens to be the most efficient way to do it.
You say humans can almost never get outside of our own “interface,” aside from during these psychedelic experiences. But does your theory suggest that there are any other instances where everyday experience breaks down, like near-death experiences (NDE)?
Gallimore: One can hypothesize that near-death experiences could be an example where the interface is sufficiently perturbed. DMT is often connected to the near-death experience as well. But this is an open question. DMT just happens to be the most efficient and reliable way to perturb the interface or alter the dynamic of your interface. But it’s very difficult to induce an NDE, ethically. It’s pretty challenging to get approval for a study where you would stop someone’s heart, for instance.
How will you test your theory?
Gallimore: In the paper, we propose a number of ways of looking at this. First, if we’re correct in that this is some kind of interaction with otherwise imperceptible conscious agents, then we should be able to study that, just as we study any other observable phenomena. We should be able to test, for example, whether these conscious agents demonstrate the characteristics of a real conscious agent interaction.
For example, can we put two people into the DMT state simultaneously? Can they interact at the same time with the same kind of being? Can information be shared between these two individuals via this conscious agent? We have an experiment we call deposit and retrieval. Can one individual in the DMT state deposit information—a randomly generated number, a randomly generated word—into the DMT space, effectively transmitting that information to a conscious agent, and then can another individual retrieve that information? That would give some validity.
How much control does a person undergoing a DMT experience have when they’re in the midst of it?
Gallimore: This is the huge problem that we have. For the vast majority of people, the answer is zero control. They’re kind of fired into this space, and they’re shocked, bewildered, and astonished for a few minutes, and then they’re dragged back out. But with this DMTX technology, you can extend the DMT state from just a few minutes to potentially an hour or two or more, by maintaining the brain DMT levels at a constant amount using a technique from anesthesiology called target controlled intravenous infusion.
We validated this now, myself and Rick Strassman, who did the world’s biggest DMT study in the 1990s. We proposed taking this technique from anesthesiology and repurposing it with DMT. We published a model that said this should be a proof of principle, and it was validated by the Imperial College London team five years ago. Using this protocol, we can induce people stably into the DMT state, and induce very experienced people who are trained. We don’t send in just a random person who wants to do this. If you wanted to study a region of virgin rainforest, you wouldn’t send in some random person and say, “Have a look around.” You’d send in botanists, primatologists, ecologists, geologists, water scientists, and soil scientists to extract specific kinds of data. People who are very experienced working within that kind of environment.
The same applies to the study of DMT space. Some people report having developed relationships to specific entities under DMT that have lasted for weeks, months, or years. Every time they go into the DMT space, they meet with the same entity. Some couples claim to have shared experiences—to be able to meet within the DMT space or to communicate with the same entity within the space. These are the types of people we need. And you need people who are mathematically trained if you want to understand the geometry and the topology of these spaces, to understand if they have extra dimensions. We would move away from this era of just sending in random people who want to experience DMT, which has been the approach so far.
We’re not looking at one big mic drop experiment that proves everything. We’re looking for an extensive and targeted program of studying this space and treating this space as uncharted territory that we can map and analyze, so we can understand how it’s structured and why it’s different from the three plus one dimensional spacetime that we’re so familiar with. What kind of perturbation is going on? What kind of dynamical regimes are going on within that region of the experience space? And what kinds of entities and what kinds of beings are we dealing with?
They seem to be able to manipulate high dimensional objects. They almost seem godlike to us because we sit within this very narrow, lower dimensional interface normally. Then we’re suddenly thrust into this world where those rules no longer apply.
In the paper, you mention how your theory aligns with a number of mystical traditions that have existed for a long time—for example, shamanist Indigenous religious traditions and Eastern religious traditions. Is the idea that these traditions are built on psychedelic experiences, or was there some other way that they were able to access these alternate realities?
Gallimore: Certainly psychedelics are present in shamanistic cultures. They have a completely different worldview, but they know they’ve been interacting with beings—normally unseen beings, imperceptible conscious agents, if you like—for millennia. They might call them spirits or gods. They have different words for them. But they recognize that when they consume certain plants, they can enter into altered states of consciousness. They can go to what they might call an alternate world, a spirit world, a different plane of existence and interact with beings. In a way, we’re catching up and starting to take those ideas seriously because they’ve been summarily dismissed as hallucinations. We say they’re deluding themselves, these primitive peoples, that we should ignore everything they’ve got to say about these other states of consciousness because they’re just having hallucinations.
What’s important about what Don and myself are doing is saying, “Well, actually, within this conscious realism framework, their experiences make sense.” They found a way using these natural, plant-based molecules, to perturb their interface. They might not understand the pharmacology, the mathematics, or the trace logic, but they understand the practicalities of what you need to do. You put something into your brain, and it perturbs the whole system and it drives you into this alternate experience of the world.
Read more: “Is Matter Conscious?”
How does conscious realism differ from something like panpsychism? Or are they closely related?
Hoffman: Panpsychism is a label for several different views. There’s one view of panpsychism that says that consciousness is in everything—that even an electron has some consciousness and so forth. Conscious realism differs completely from that version of panpsychism, because an electron is something inside spacetime. It’s part of the spacetime headset. It’s absolutely not fundamental. It disappears when the headset disappears. That kind of panpsychism is just putting physical stuff inside the headset on an equal footing with consciousness, which transcends the headset. There are versions of panpsychism that are different, but when most people talk about panpsychism, they have that kind of view in mind.
Gallimore: Conscious realism is really a form of idealism. This is one of the oldest ways of viewing reality. It goes back to the ancient Hindu ideas of Brachman, or pure consciousness, being the only true reality. But people have dismissed idealism, because they seem to think that if reality is merely consciousness, then it must somehow be this diaphanous mist without form or anything. That’s clearly not true. Consciousness has structure. Clearly if everything’s consciousness, it has structure, it has dynamics, it has mechanics, it has complexities.
What Don’s doing is saying, “Okay, what are these structures? What are these complexities? How do these conscious agents interact, and how does that generate the world as it appears to us?” The problem is that the materialists have had several hundred years of a head start. Don has been working in the last few decades to try to boot up physical reality. The idea that matter is fundamental has consistently failed for several hundred years to explain how consciousness emerges. Most scientists now just say, “Oh, consciousness is unknowable.” What? You just opted out of the problem.
The critical misstep in the history of science is when we had two things. We had the one thing we couldn’t deny, which is subjective consciousness. Descartes tried to deny it, but the only thing he couldn’t deny was his own consciousness—his own mind. And then we have the physical world, which appears within consciousness. For some reason we said, “Ah, that physical world, which we can deny, which disappears when we close our eyes, when we lose consciousness, that’s the fundamental that has ontological primacy in reality and consciousness is emergent.”
When you think about it, it’s almost psychotic. And yet, it’s so ingrained now that people think that guys like me and Don are crazy nutcases, whereas actually, it’s the most sensible thing in the world. Consciousness is the only thing we can’t deny exists. So let’s take that as our fundamental and then try to explain the appearance of reality from that foundation.
What challenges do you anticipate to what you’re proposing?
Hoffman: We wrote an unpublished essay called “Consciousness and the Space-time Headset,” which offers a nice answer to your question. At the very end, we have eight or nine mathematical conjectures and theorems that need to be proven about how to actually build Einstein’s curved spacetime—how to build quantum field theory, how to get quantum non-locality from our theory of conscious realism and trace logic.
We understand that these are technical theorems that we must prove, or we’re wrong. So we put those out there. I’m pretty confident that we’re going to be able to do it. If we pass those eight or nine technical challenges, we can actually start to use this theory and look at other challenges ahead for it. My attitude about any scientific theory, including my own, is that it has a scope—it’s a good theory, but it’ll also have hard limits. And that’s gonna be true of this theory. So we’ll find out what those limits are. But the scope is gonna be much broader than the spacetime of physics scope.
If it turns out that your hypotheses are true, will that change anything about the way you lead your lives?
Gallimore: If consciousness really is fundamental, it suggests what ancient philosophies say—effectively, that we’re all part of one unified fundamental ultimate reality. We weren’t born. We don’t die. It’s just shifting perspectives. And we’re part of this incredibly beautiful, rich, and largely unexplored vast reality. We’re like these neophytes, who are just waking up. We’re locked. We’ve held ourselves within this little prison of reality—this tiny little slice of this much broader and more complex and beautiful reality. DMT and other psychedelics, they’re the clues that show us, “Yes, we’re part of something much larger, much vaster, much more beautiful and much more incredible, rather than just these beings stuck to this muddy rock.”
Part of what we’re doing is finding a way out of this game, finding a way of waking up. We’re approaching Buddhist ideas of enlightenment, but from a more scientific perspective—finding a logical, mathematical, technical, and scientific way out. Some others might sit and face a wall for 30 years until they realize it intuitively. 
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