Aliens Can Talk To Us Through Psychedelics, Scientists Claim

[00:00:00]For more than half a century, people who've been taking the psychedelic drug DMT have reported encounters with alien beings. These aliens often act as guides, teachers, or messengers. Now, a scientist says, "Well, maybe these beings are real and psychedelics are just a way to open human perception to their presence." Not only this, he says he's got the mathematics to back up his idea. And it's testable, too.

[00:00:31]Well, wow. Forget about string theory and extra dimensions. Here come aliens and psychedelics. Let's have a look. DMT is short for dimethyltryptamine, a fast-acting and strong drug that causes hallucinations. Smoked, it hits in seconds, lasts about 10 minutes, and people rarely stay alone. In a sample of more than 3,000 trip reports, conscious entities show up in 45% and the cast is oddly specific. 24% meet a feminine being, 17% a deity, 16% an alien, and 8% a machine elf. For about a century, neuroscientists called it a hallucination, but cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and collaborators say we've been too quick. In a new paper titled Traces of the Other, they argue these beings might be real. Not only this, they say it's a new science of reality, where consciousness, not matter, is fundamental. I'll do my best to try and take this seriously because the people behind it are not obviously cranks, but it's a perfect example of a problem I worry about a lot. What happens when scientists mistake maths for reality? That said, the general idea behind the alien hallucination paper goes back all the way to Kant. We don't perceive reality as it is, only a useful version of it. Hoffman popularized the modern form of this in his 2019 book The Case Against Reality. The example he likes to use is icons on a desktop. The trash icon isn't really the circuitry inside the computer. It's just useful to pretend you're deleting your files before remembering you didn't mean to delete them. Our senses, Hoffman says, work the same way because evolution rewards survival, not truth. That part, I think, is fairly uncontroversial.

[00:02:21]Critics mostly say it's nothing new, just old ideas in fresh language. But Hoffman then goes beyond that. If perception is just an interface, he asks, what's behind it? And his answer is nothing. Conscious agents are the only thing that exists. Reality is just that, a network of interacting minds, and we only ever see a thin slice of that interacting network of minds. So, there could be countless other minds out there that we don't know of. The new paper they therefore suggest, quote, some DMT entities might correspond to traces of conscious agents that are normally imperceptible. And they have maths, kind of. In their paper, a mind is a symbol for a probabilistic map.

[00:03:03]This means it's a maths thing which takes one state, your reading of a menu, say, and gives you probabilities for the next state, for example, you picking chicken. Mathematicians call it a Markov kernel. It's used for things like weather forecasts and stock prices and really standard maths. And that is the problem. Nothing in those kernels encodes anything to do with consciousness or experience. It's a label they tack on by hand. In integrated information theory, at least they try to calculate consciousness from a system's physical structure. It doesn't really work, but hey, at least they're trying. In Hoffman's work, consciousness is just a word for maths that could as well describe a stock portfolio. As Pauli said, it's not even wrong. There's nothing there to be wrong. But fine, who cares about philosophy if there's experiments? They propose several ones. For example, people on a DMT trip might be able to see colors on a screen in a different room because their alien is there. Or different people might share the same alien presence. And this is all well and good. The problem is they're not going to see this. And then they can say, "Okay, but actually the alien didn't feel like helping out." Or actually the aliens have a different notion of space or whatever. Not even wrong, as you see.

[00:04:30]You saw it coming. It's a 10 out of 10 on the meter. It's fancy words decorated with useless maths. But it's not all nonsense. There's something genuinely strange going on here. Dreams and psychosis recycle the familiar.

[00:04:47]People you know, places you've been, things you've seen on YouTube and wish you hadn't. DMT serves up aliens. Why?

[00:04:55]Nobody knows. In conclusion, the phenomenon is real and worth studying, but the maths is nonsense. And I'm sorry to report there's no evidence of alien consciousness attempting to communicate through psychedelics.

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[00:06:29]Thanks for watching. See you tomorrow.