What Psychedelic States of Consciousness Tell Us about AI

How does imagination work? And why do innovative or inspired ideas seem to arise more frequently when we're not thinking, and especially in altered states of consciousness? Today, we're diving deep into the fascinating intersection of artificial intelligence and expanded states of consciousness. This psychedelic journey may reveal the hidden limits of AI's potential and the profound mysteries of the human mind. Can AI ever truly be as inventive and creative as the human mind, or are there dimensions of invention and imagination it can never reach? Well, buckle up for this mind-bending exploration where AI meets the technicolor world of Let's enter a different dimension and see what we find. Just because the elves are mechanical doesn't mean they're artificial. Let's see what psychedelic or expanded states of consciousness can tell us about imagination and intelligence, especially artificial intelligence.

Let's see what psychedelic or expanded states of consciousness can tell us about imagination, intelligence, and especially artificial intelligence and its limits. The creators of artificial intelligence have convinced the media and the general populace that AI can easily replace not just left-brain jobs like accountants or radiologists, but creative work too. And if you believe the hype, within a few years Hollywood films will be entirely AI-generated. Of course, one could argue that that might be an improvement over the glut of big-budget superhero action films, but I digress. Not only that, but Silicon Valley is promising us the arrival of superintelligence or even the singularity any day now. The dominant narrative from technology leaders and transhumanists like Elon Musk, Ray Kurzweil, and Nick Bostrom is that superintelligence is imminent and that this will replace humans and render them obsolete. But as we will see, these are overblown and misinformed promises, especially when we consider the rarely discussed forms of reasoning, the phenomena of inspiration and revelation, and the model of the psyche or consciousness presented by Stanislav Grof. Part of what I'm doing with these videos is attempting to counteract that narrative. There is so much more to being human than cognitive intelligence. And even cognitive intelligence is hard, as I explained in my last video. In this video, I'm going to argue that in light of the implications of transpersonal and depth psychology, and especially the work of Stan Grof, current approaches to AI may never be truly inventive, creative, or innovative, whether artistically or scientifically. As we proceed, I want to connect 2 ideas: holotropic states of consciousness, and abductive inference in order to make an important point about the limitations of current approaches to artificial intelligence, which has knock-on implications for the future of humanity and for our broader worldview in the 21st century. First, we'll start with a quick review of the types of reasoning and how current AI systems work, and then jump into the topic of holotropic states of consciousness. If you want a deeper dive into the types of reasoning and how current AI systems work, you can check out my last video. We explored 3 types of reasoning in my last video: deduction, induction, and abduction. Deduction is where you apply general principles to specific situations. Early AI systems were based on deduction, essentially the so-called expert systems or Good old-fashioned AI, GOFAI. But deduction is brittle and not sufficient for true intelligence, as we saw in the last video. Induction is where you derive general principles from observing individual instances. So it's kind of the flip side of deduction. In the case of machines, it's great for learning from training data. For example, current systems like ChatGPT studied essentially all the text on the internet in order to learn how to autocomplete sentences. But induction is also brittle, and on its own it has no knowledge or understanding of causation, as we discussed. Also, inductive machine learning systems can identify statistical irregularity but never arrive at higher-level abstract concepts. So then there's abductive inference. This is the less widely discussed form of inference that involves forming hypotheses based on observation, experience, deduction, and common sense— making educated guesses, essentially. So abduction moves from specific observations to a hypothesis explaining the event, often in one giant intuitive leap. For example, surmising that it rained if the ground is wet outside is a form of abductive reasoning. But it gets more interesting with bigger leaps of abduction or bigger leaps of inspiration. For example, abduction describes the phenomenon where a mathematician spends years puzzling over a mathematical conundrum and then solves it after having a dream about it or something like that. So abduction, nonlinear imaginative problem solving, is a mysterious cognitive process where, after spending some time with a problem, hypotheses and solutions spontaneously emerge, often fully formed. We could call it inspiration or intuition. It is most certainly a creative process, and it might even point to the very nature of consciousness, as we will see. Abduction is also necessary and essential for detective work. Sherlock Holmes stories are full of the titular character applying abductive reasoning and forming hypotheses based on a few clues. Although there is often a linear logic to his reasoning in hindsight, the solution typically appears fully formed in what computer scientists would call a non-computable or non-algorithmic way. Another way to characterize abduction is to say that the processing or the reasoning taking place is happening outside of conscious awareness. I mean, sure, a cognitive scientist or a materialist philosopher might argue that there are still neurons firing somewhere, in Sherlock's brain and that he was simply not aware of it. But as we will see, it seems like something much deeper is taking place. Because abduction is not a conscious process comprised of logical steps, nobody knows how to model or reproduce abductive reasoning in a machine, although some tentative steps have been taken to simulate it using large language models, a counterintuitive approach of using induction to arrive at abduction. Artificial intelligence is an impressive culmination of centuries of application of the scientific method And of technoscience. We have harnessed electricity and designed hardware circuits that embody logic and can simulate a rational sort of intelligence. But the irony is that much of science was the result not of logic or rationality alone, but of abductive reasoning and holotropic states. Or, as Stanislav Grof said, What has not been sufficiently acknowledged by historians is how often the greatest scientific insights, discoveries, breakthroughs, and inventions appear to their creators in the form of visions, dreams, fantasies, trance states, lightning flashes of epiphanies, and other types of holotropic states of consciousness. So these so-called holotropic states of consciousness might offer some insights and help us to understand what exactly is happening with abductive inference. Although not in a way likely to advance the current state of AI, unfortunately. But at least it provides a more sober and realistic view of the challenge that AI research faces in attempting to model the mysterious wonder of the human mind. So what are these holotropic states? Stan Grof, the pioneering transpersonal psychologist and psychedelic therapist, defines holotropic states as a large and important subgroup of non-ordinary states of consciousness that have therapeutic, transformative, heuristic, and evolutionary potential. The word holotropic comes from the Greek words holos and trepen and means moving towards wholeness, essentially. And, you know, the idea was that Grof wanted a term that would convey the positive aspects of these states to replace terms like altered that tend to elevate as superior ordinary or mundane states of consciousness. Holotropic states stand in contrast to hylotropic states, which are those that we experience in our everyday waking lives via the senses, which are coming in contact with the external world of matter. So it's like our mundane state of consciousness is hylotropic. Holotropic states are, among other things, expanded states of consciousness where the experiencer has access to visions, dreams, fantasies, trance states, lightning flash epiphanies, and other expanded states. People in such states often experience a sense of unity with the universe and a transcendence of the boundaries of the ego, perhaps coupled with a sense of timelessness and even spacelessness. For those who aren't familiar, Grof created holotropic breathwork and named it that because it so reliably induces holotropic states of consciousness. Much of Grof's corpus of work has been devoted to exploring the nature of and implications for these holotropic states. Holotropic states can arise as a, as the result of meditation, yoga, the ingestion of psychoactive substances, and through the use of breath and other technologies of the sacred, dancing, and spontaneously sometimes, including as part of what Grof calls spiritual emergencies or spiritual crises. Even coffee can initiate such a state, as mathematician Henri Poincaré recounted, saying that numerous cups of coffee would put him in an alert, half-dozing state in which ideas rose up and collided. As I cited in my last video, in one famous example, Friedrich August Keikule von Strassnitz experienced holotropic states that allowed him to realize scientific breakthroughs in the midst of a reverie on a streetcar, and most famously in his dreams after spending Considerable time with the problem in his waking life.

I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gambling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures, of manifold conformation— long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together, all twining and twisting in snake-like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by the flash of lightning, I awoke.

Upon waking, he became convinced that benzene has a ring structure, and indeed it does. See, you know, as I'm, as I'm describing these holotropic states, you may notice that these states sound similar to the experience of abductive reasoning. At least in their result, if not their lived experience. It is my contention that holotropic states create the conditions for abductive reasoning, or help us understand the nature of abductive reasoning. Putting it another way, my thesis here is that the inquiry into the nature of abductive reasoning naturally leads to an exploration of holotropic states of consciousness. Engaging in abductive reasoning may not always require an exaggerated holotropic state, but much of the time they are one and the same, as we will see. We can best understand this connection by reviewing the many examples of creative inspiration or breakthrough experiences arising from holotropic states throughout history. As Willis Harman demonstrates in his book Higher Creativity, the very foundations of science were built on these breakthrough experiences. So let's examine some examples of these breakthrough experiences and marvel at the mystery of this abductive reasoning that's happening in these holotropic states. Many of the forefathers of science arrived at their theories and scientific discoveries using abduction, often in holotropic states as well. Isaac Newton pondered problems and questions in his mind for days and weeks before the solutions would arrive wholly formed Intuitively. In fact, his intuition was as extraordinary as his mathematical skills. As Stan Grof points out, Newton's experiments were not a means of discovery but of verifying what he knew already through his abductive reasoning. In Newton's case, these deep states of intuition appear to have been spontaneous. In fact, the foundation for much of modern philosophy and science arose out of these dream states. Including René Descartes' seminal work, Discourse on Method, which was inspired by 3 dreams and a dream within a dream. Similarly, many of Albert Einstein's insights arrived in the form of images and even physical feelings, which he translated into mathematics with the assistance of a team of specialists. Einstein wrote in his autobiographical notes, I have no doubt that our thinking goes on for the most part without the use of symbols, and furthermore, largely unconsciously. The Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan received his mathematical insights in flashes and visions resulting from visits by the Hindu goddess Namagiri, who is an incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi. Sometimes it would take him months to verify through mathematical proofs what had arrived instantaneously in his consciousness. As an aside, contrast these examples of spontaneous scientific and philosophical insight with what I refer to as this kind of insect-like intelligence of machines, where they're performing billions of instructions or calculations per second, but they have no capacity for epiphany. It's like a millipede with its little legs, like— that's kind of the intelligence that we're talking about with machines. So, you know, faster, bigger, better, stronger is not the road to human intelligence, I think. Anyways, back to our historical examples. Carl Jung is another great example. Among his many accomplishments, he was instrumental in creating the entirely new field of depth psychology and establishing the existence of an archetypally constituted collective unconscious. Jung was able to do all of this because of his access to holotropic states arising during his practice of what he called active imagination. Active imagination is a process or a practice that Jung developed for surfacing unconscious content in a way that can be explored and integrated. It involves a relaxation of the linear or rational mind and then some form of creative expression. Once the free expression is complete, you re-engage your rational mind and interpret the imagery or other creative output to receive messages from your unconscious. Jung practiced this technique for many years, for decades, and recorded his imagery and insights in his now infamous Red Book. These profoundly rich insights would not have been possible through reason alone, whether inductive or deductive. It required those mysterious lightning flashes of insight arising from the kinds of holotropic states that Jung seems to have had ready access to, as well as dialogues with his soul. His numinous sage Philomon, and the hordes of the dead, as he documented in the Red Book. Not only have many of the greatest developments in philosophy and science been the result of holotropic states, but most of the world's great religions and spiritual traditions were also inspired through such states. For example, within the Yogvedantic tradition, the Vedas and the Upanishads are considered shruti within the tradition, meaning divinely received. Revealed rather than intellectually conceived. These rishis, or seers, who authored these sacred texts essentially channeled them while in a state of yoga, a transcendental state of unity that certainly qualifies as a holotropic state. Likewise, the Buddha realized the secret to reducing suffering while sitting in a deep meditation under the Bodhi tree. His Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path of Buddhism arose from this holotropic state of consciousness. He did not puzzle it out. He realized it in a deep state of meditation, and then he later refined it through the application of his discernment. You could even say his insights arose out of silence. Roughly a millennium later, Muhammad experienced powerful visionary states in which Archangel Gabriel escorted him through the 7 Muslim heavens, paradise, and hell. An undeniably holotropic journey in which Muhammad entered a state of ecstasy approaching annihilation while receiving a direct communication from Allah. These visions and mystical states continued for 25 years and inspired large parts of the Quran. And of course, there are the Old Testament prophets like Moses and the burning bush, Ezekiel and the flaming chariot, not to mention Jesus's visions in the desert and his disciples' visions of him after his crucifixion. More recently, many visionary artists produce works that arise in holotropic or expanded states of consciousness. William Blake's visionary imagination was central to his creative process. His visions of angels, prophets, divine beings, and even Isaac Newton himself arose from his movement through what he described as 4 fundamental states of consciousness, from kind of a rational state to an emotional state, to one of pure imagination? And finally, just briefly, can there be any doubt that an artist like Hieronymus Bosch was in some kind of expanded state of consciousness when he created his infamous paintings? What exactly are daydreamers, psychonauts, inventors, mystics, and artists accessing when they enter holotropic states in support of what we call abductive inference? Can it be reduced to the mere firing of neurons in the brain? Or is it the mundus imaginalis, the imaginal realm of the Sufis, or Carl Jung's collective unconscious? It certainly seems to be something beyond the mechanics of the firing of synapses in the brain, or at least our current model of that. Philosophers like Henri Bergson and David Chalmers have suggested that consciousness must lie outside the brain, that the brain is more like a radio receiver for consciousness than the seat of consciousness. In any case, whether the relationship between the brain and consciousness is one of causation or correlation, we can draw a connection between various brainwave states and these holotropic states, and consequently the kind of mysterious states that lead to spontaneous problem-solving and creativity that I have been outlining. I'm thinking, of course, of alpha, theta, and gamma states in particular. In fact, in his book Higher Creativity, Willis Harman describes techniques for changing one's brainwave state in order to access these breakthrough experiences, or what Grof calls holotropic states. And there has been some research connecting brainwave states to increased creativity, imagination, and intuition. There have also been a few studies connecting holotropic breathwork with changes to brainwave states, although they do not appear to explore the topic of holotropic states for inspiration or imagination beyond simple therapeutic changes to mood and emotional well-being. Anyways, I'll drop some of those links in the, in the description if you want to check those out. Of course, a materialist could use the same correlation to argue that brainwave frequency does something to the firing of synapses that unlocks a deeper network of brain structures. If that were the case, then AI developers could potentially create AI systems that similarly switch modes or something analogous. But I think this suggestion underscores the fact that large language models are simply attempting to model the neuronal firing in the brain without any deeper understanding of all the complex components, both conscious and unconscious, that comprise human cognition. I mean, it's not clear whether a developer would even start to model this sort of mode shift in terms of current technology. It's Yeah, it's a total puzzle. And I want to remind you, as I said last time, that technology is always downstream of theory. So I'm just pointing out how inadequate our theory is right now in terms of intelligence. We have all these unanswered questions and no easy answers. For humans, there are many reliable ways to enter a holotropic state, as we have seen in the context of holotropic states that correlate with abductive reasoning. Catalysts for such states include meditation, breathing, different kinds of breathing, dreaming, fasting, ingesting psychoactive substances, of course, and something as tame as drinking coffee. For example, famously, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's visions of Xanadu arose during an opium-induced reverie. And foreshadowing the trend of microdosing psychedelics popularized in Silicon Valley a decade ago, in studies done as early as the 1960s, researchers showed that psychedelics could enhance inspiration and problem-solving. Francis Crick, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who worked with James Watson to identify the structure of DNA, admitted to using small doses of LSD to enhance his thinking. He allegedly told his friend Kemp that he had a vision of the double helix DNA molecule during an LSD experience, which helped him to unravel its structure. Similarly, an early Cisco systems engineer said that he often solved difficult technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead.

When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into another brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing.

Now, I'm not advocating for drug use to enhance creativity, only pointing out that holotropic states induced by psychotropic drugs can also be fostered through more natural And healthy means like meditation, breathwork, and other yogic practices like chanting specific mantras, for example. I personally have had some of my most profound ideas and insights during meditation or during a yoga practice like that. The point is, regardless of method or technique, the mere fact of the existence of holotropic states of consciousness points to something deep, mysterious, and possibly unique to humans, or at least unique to life. Of course, materialists may attempt to explain away holotropic states induced by chemical substances such as LSD or psilocybin by saying that they simply change brain chemistry in a way that enhances creativity or problem-solving strictly within the consciousness that is created as an epiphenomenon of the brain. An AI researcher or neuroscientist might say something about how psychedelics are merely causing our chemical firings to fire in a different way, and then we can replicate that algorithmically. Perhaps researchers would recognize that psychedelics are increasing the level of tryptamine in the brain and attempt to somehow code that effect synthetically in a neural network system. It sounds absurd, but a lot of cognitive science is. The work of Robin Carhart-Harris, popularized by Michael Pollan, draws a connection between psychedelics and something called the default mode network in the brain. However, the counterintuitive fact is that psychedelics seem to decrease detectable brain activity despite producing an increasingly rich and complex inner phenomenological experience. Looking at Stan Grof's larger body of work on the subject, it is clear that these substances are opening up access to non-material realms that cannot be explained by the materialist theory of cognition and consciousness. If this is the case, it has inconvenient implications for AI research and attempts to model abductive reasoning. Sadly, we cannot administer psychedelics to artificial intelligence systems, at least not yet. In all seriousness, it is clear that psychedelics are unlocking some inherent latent potential within us, giving us access to states of imagination and intuition inaccessible by AI systems today. But if AI researchers can program some kind of mechanism to shift the so-called default mode network in an AI system to achieve a holotropic state of sorts, then why not do that today? Again, this brings us back to the fact that nobody really knows what is going on in an abductive reasoning or a holotropic state of consciousness. It underscores the high degree of hubris that is prevalent among most AI researchers and techno-optimists today when they claim that superintelligent AI systems are going to arrive any day and leave us in the dust. Listen, I understand the hubris. I mean, we have been so successful in conquering nature and extruding highly advanced technologies out of it. All remaining mysteries of mind and intelligence seem like a simple matter of increased computation, better algorithms, etc. But as you can see, this underestimates, I think, human capacities and faculties by a lot. Imagination is Profound. Inspiration is sublime. I don't know that it can be replicated in silicon. It is clear that there is something fundamental missing from the current approaches to artificial intelligence. Beneath all the hype and big promises lies an enormous gap in our understanding of how human cognition and consciousness works, especially when it comes to invention, epiphany, innovation, and mystical transcendental experiences. Stan Grof has contributed as much as anyone to understanding these darker recesses of our psyche, but his work points to transpersonal realms and ontological realities unacknowledged by mainstream materialist science, including computer scientists and AI researchers. If true intelligence involves something more than induction and deduction, as it seems like it does, and follows abductive inference into this kind of non-material unconscious realm of imagination, intuition, etc., then AI researchers are nowhere near achieving true intelligence, let alone anything approaching creativity, despite all their big promises. This connection between the little studied and little understood abductive form of reasoning and the various holotropic states that appear to underlie it point us down a dark and mysterious road where few have tread. Few except for Stan Grof and other transpersonal psychologists and some psychonauts, I guess. If holotropic states offer access to non-material realms beyond the brain, this raises metaphysical questions that materialist science has not answered. How and why are we able to access these states? In short, if abductive reasoning requires the thinker to enter into some kind of holotropic state, whether that's dreams, visions, or time in the shower, AI systems are nowhere near modeling human intelligence and may never be able to, at least not with our current rudimentary technologies of silicon and big data. In this video, we have seen that current approaches to AI will never be truly inventive, creative, or innovative because they lack any kind of model for Abductive inference and cannot enter the kinds of holotropic states that seem to undergird abduction and inspiration and epiphany. Not only that, this failure to account for abductive reasoning means that AI systems may never achieve the much-hyped artificial general intelligence or superintelligence. Not only are current AI systems not able to think, ideate, invent, or create like a human, but they underscore the limitations of the predominant materialist worldview in attempting to create artificial general intelligence in the first place. In light of the gaps and misdirection highlighted in this video in our current approaches to AI, humans will likely not be surpassed by machines when it comes to creativity, epiphany, invention, etc., thereby ensuring our human ongoing relevance in this age of AI. The gaps I have highlighted above and the suggestion that there might be a connection between abductive reasoning and holotropic states points toward a fertile ground for new research into human cognition and ways we might more reliably model that in computer systems. Maybe. In the meantime, humans remain as relevant as ever.

And I want to help you.

Read my eyes. Do I want to stay?

Wait.

If you thought you weren't made that way, the choices we make, we give and take, and I know you will keep trying. Said, I think I know what you mean, pretty good for a dumb machine. And you gave me that smile, we stood there for a while. That was when you woke me up. All this time, I didn't know I had my heart on standby. That it is love that I am feeling inside. What it means to be a human. All this time, I needed to know.