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Anyway, the whole mnemonics approach seems overly complicated, on top of being unreliable. Aren’t people under DMT actually sort of awake even if seeing things – as in able to just repeat back the number to a recorder that they set up in the room? If yes, then that would be significantly easier, and if not you can always go the good old eye movement way (left is 0, right is 1, up is 2, down is 3 and you ask the elf to say the number in Quaternary instead of Decimal).

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It’s hard to believe a chemical could so radically alter the functioning of a system that *already* works via chemicals, but at the same time a mere “√” and “-” sign can rotate a mathematical object 90 degrees onto an axis that is *also* beyond our direct experience, even though our best explanations of fluid dynamics and quantum mechanics posit that imaginary numbers have a physical effect. And since a mind is already a conglomeration of abstractions…

Final thought: While I don’t have the time or energy to read the linked post tonight, I really dig the notion of reality being an “interference pattern” of truth and beauty (and it dovetails nicely with things that have been on my mind for years), but rather than the bat and cactus being all beauty and no truth (not that there would be anything wrong with such a creature in its own world; we don’t say aquatic beings have to be amphibious…nevermind that they’re being judged beautiful by the criteria of a creature with a mind that evolved in *this* world…), if you were so advanced that you’d truly mastered both, might it not be that you’d grasp some kind of isometry between the two and perceive that to advance one on its own is as impossible as lengthening one end of a circle? Sort of like I was saying above, might there not *already* be, to such a mind, All The Beauty And Truth? And so to help a certain category of being see and thus “live differently” according to parochial, human notions of the words its using be sort of like… like… OK, so things are the way they are because they *got* that way, and merely in doing so they’re already A-OK, because the becoming of things in exactly the way they become is already, on its own, the real Greatest Story Ever Told, so to *impose* something on it, in a way outside of its own “idiom” (brains coming up with ideas and arguing with each other) would be… Hmm, It sounds like a Prime Directive kind of thing, but what I’m trying to get at is much more subtle than that…
Like, say you’re John Muir, and a priest comes up to you and wants your advice on the best place to build a church in Yosemite, and you’re like “why do you need something as primitive as a big wooden box; just look around you, you’re already IN church.” I think the bat and the cactus could be thought of less as saying “this is how people should behave” so much as “here’s an entirely new relationship to things like ‘should.'”

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As someone obsessed to an almost shameful degree with metaphysics, this whole article is rife with issues I think about a lot, and I think the big sticking point for us, bound to Time’s Arrow as we are, is that we don’t actually have anything close to a good ontology of subjective, phenomenological consciousness, the very thing drugs affect. From a Naturalist point of view there are a few things we can confidently hypothesize about it, but they’re fundamentally at odds with our intuitions about things like individuality and identity, and give lie to the grade-school image of a crypto-dualistic atheist “afterlife” of eternal nothingness—On this fully materialist, non-dualistic view, there is ONLY subjective life and consciousness in the same way that for chess pieces, only the board and the game exist, and the time they spend off to the side on the table once they’ve been captured simply Isn’t, in much the same way that for this very post there is no Outside of the monitor on which you’re reading it. Per Buddhism, there exist goals and memories and inclinations, and we just call a given mix of them at a given time a person, but there’s no cohesive person “token” to either die or wait to be born. For us, there is only conscious thought, in the way that for rainbows, there is only rain and sun.

Long story short, to a being who fully understands the ontological status of phenomenological consciousness in a naturalistic, materialistic world, CHANGING something about the state of other minds, or perhaps even preferring one state over another, might be akin to saying we should remove a mountain because it’s an unsightly blemish on a mountain range. The bat and cactus’ refusal to play the empiricist’s game might be due less to their madness than to his failure to understand that to acquiesce to his utilitarian demands would be a betrayal of the causal network that gave rise to the very situations he wants to use their wisdom to correct. They won’t give in to his request to help spread universal love any more than we humans would indulge a desperate mouse’s wish that there were no owls. Truly universal love may well mean loving how reality is so rich and fecund that it births hate as well.

This “universal love” and “transcendent joy” could easily be about exalting in the workings of reality simply *being what they are,* a kind of nirvana of the annihilation of identity and ego, where everything is joy simply because suffering and flourishing are equally authentic manifestations of the potentialities of subjective consciousness. You wouldn’t tell artists they can never use red because it’s an “aggressive” color, so why, from a zoomed-out-to-the-max, metaphysical point of view should you tell reality it should never be awful and cruel and unjust and full of hate and occasionally apocalyptic violence—They’re a Thing, too, after all.

Now, as a time-bound being who has no idea what subjectivity actually is, I’m still 999999999% for reducing suffering (I am in fact a flaming liberal and making everything cool for everyone all the time is pretty much what animates me politically), but as a metaphysician I have intuitions that also suggest that’s a lot like rearranging the deck chairs on a Titanic that is for all eternity in a superposition of both sinking and arriving to a happy brass band in New York. …But here I am, rocking the whole time-bound sentient creature thing, and I’m going to play that game for all it’s worth. The bat and the cactus would tell me that driving that electric model is pretty much all I can do from the inside of this car.

Also, somewhat unrelated: Even if you genuinely did meet a powerful, wise being from another plane of reality it doesn’t mean they’re omniscient or any better or more interested in mathematics than the average human. This would ESPECIALLY be true if they were pure creatures of… whatever ontological space qualia turn out to occupy.
And in that vein, I had a salvia trip once where the people I met over the whole 50,000 year journey from caves to the Singularity came back to grab me as I was coming down, falling back through the ages, and told me that as hallucinatory creatures of pure qualia they couldn’t affect the real world, but as a real person it was my responsibility to communicate pretty much this—That our exploration of the statespace of imagination is exploring an ontologically *real* realm, partly just because the simulations of people we meet *are* real people because they’re just as much the result of neurological activity as I am right now. But more than that, they told me that as imaginary creatures they were the raw, unrefined “ore” of reality, and as *real* creatures—The “ribosomes” to the potentiality’s “mRNA,” it was our responsibility to choose wisely what things we imagined and pulled from their abstract statespace into our real space. …That ultimately sounds like a really sexed-up version of “herp derp don’t be an asshole” when you think about it, but my point is that it has genuine ontological implications, which is what this whole article is about. It’s only a metaphor, ultimately, but I think we can all agree that metaphors are a real, discernible feature of our world. How is it that such a thing as a metaphor can exist in a world of nothing but quantum fields? I don’t disagree that the world really is nothing but physical phenomena, but I think this is telling us that physical phenomena have still-undiscovered levels of weirdness that make quantum mechanics look like a Family Circus cartoon.

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Wow, I didn’t even know that “favorite euphemism for violent disembowelment” was a mental category I could have.

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Memorize the output of a hash function, and ask the elves for the input.

Doesn’t work as a nothing-up-my-sleeve problem – who chooses what output/input?

If you are able to genuinely convince yourself that either machine elves are real or DMT makes you able to factor really large numbers, you will be ready to spend significant resources on the project of convincing other people.

‘I remember the machine elves correctly factored 95 into 19*5! Astounding! However, I am now completely convinced of their existence and far too enlightened to want to carry out any followup experiment testing my new gods, so I will merely inform my followers and those who are called will come; transcendent love, universal joy, truly.’

Ironically, one of the interesting things about DMT is that it preserves your cognitive faculties completely intact

How would you know? Has anyone carried out similar experiments during a DMT trip which could establish such a claim? You may have the feeling of lucidity, but you also simultaneously have feelings such as being in another universe…

I don’t see why you have to memorize anything. Just ask the elves to treat the first N digits of the decimal representation of pi as an integer and factor it. Pick N large enough so that there is no known way that either the NSA or Google could do it…Of course, you still have to memorize their answer–but the smallest factor should do it.

Are there any accepted number-theoretic proofs rigorously proving that there are no integers to which the smallest factor can be computed efficiently by a prankster? Given the existence of algorithms for doing magical things like calculate arbitrary digits of pi without calculating the intermediate digits, and given all the special kinds of numbers which must be avoided for cryptography (and all the difficulties of crypto in general), this proposal seems like a good way to waste a lot of good DMT.

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