The article wasn't presented as any sort of proof of mechanism or even authoritative description of what's happening.
An aside: I'll venture a guess that the majority of discoveries in human history started by throwing out Occam's razor. I don't understand why it's such a religion on HN.
> I'll venture a guess that the majority of discoveries in human history started by throwing out Occam's razor.
What’s an example of this? At first glance it looks very false to me. All the examples I can think of “simpler” theories being replaced by less simple ones occur in the face of new reasons to believe the simpler theory was false. You’re not really throwing out Occam’s razor unless you have two competing theories for the same phenomena and you choose the less simple one, right?
Replacing Bohr's model with Schrodinger's equation is one example. Or Newtonian physics with relativistic physics. These were proven to be better models, of course, but if great physicists applied Occam's razor to everything like some on HN, Einstein/Schrodinger would have never bothered investigating further.
Perhaps the Catholic church invoked Occam's razor when Galileo suggested the orbits of celestial bodies are more complex. Occam's razor is a good way of advocating that the existence of one single god is the default answer we should all accept, because you and I have no evidence for or against anything else and any other explanation for existential questions is going to be more complex.
The point is that bringing up Occam's Razor on every thread adds no value, does not need to be verbalized on a forum of smart people like HN, and frankly seems to be a way to justify intellectual laziness/closed-mindedness (which might be useful in high stakes/low time situations, but not in an 'intellectual' internet forum where people have plenty of free time to make better arguments).
Newtonian physics is the easiest example to criticize, because it’s precisely what I said: special relativity was a new model to fix blatant flaws with the previous model. Occam’s razor only concerns comparing two theories which account for the same phenomena. Special relativity was a new model that accounted for more phenomena, so it’s really not surprising (and certainly not a violation of Occam’s razor) if it was less simple.
Before we ditched the gods, Occam's razor would bring you to a conclusion that Earth is the center of the universe as 'world created by god' was the explanation with fewer details than 'world with many planets created by god.'
You can apply the same logic here; who said we see the objective truth now? Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance covers the issue well - church of reason AKA science is the current faith that makes us blind.
That's actually a great point. To create, you need to throw out preconceptions like the razor. But to achieve persistence, simplifying ruthlessly... ie bringing the razor back in, helps. It's a bit like brainstorming: if you shut the idea stream down with the cold water of rationality, you lose what could have been really good ideas.
Solomonoff induction provably converges on reproducing any input function by only observing that function's outputs, and it formalizes Occam's razor as a key principle. I don't think it's fair to call it a heuristic anymore.
Sure you can use the simpler version heuristically, but the OP's claim is that it is only a heuristic and not a valid logical inference. I'm saying we now have proof that it is logically valid to claim that one should prefer theories with fewer assumptions, all else being equal.
> chemicals affect your brain in ways that simulate bizarre sensory input
Well yea... Duh? No one would disagree with that I suspect.
I think the point is that we can work backwards from these changes to better understand either a) how the brain works and an experience is perceived and/or b) the possibility that what we perceive normally is not the entire experience (to your second possibility)
In both cases obviously these are chemically induced changes/observations at their core. Doesn't take away from their novelty and certainly should be taken more seriously scientifically imo. Ofc it will land in the realm of psurdoscience otherwise.
The article does not claim that DMT unlocks new sensory abilities to perceive extra dimensions (!). It describes how DMT changes the geometry of phenomenal space, under the assumption of indirect realism about perception. You can certainly study that in a systematic and meaningful way without ever assuming new secret sensory abilities.
That said... higher phenomenal dimensions do exist, and you can experience them on DMT. See this video for a rational explanation of that effect (which is related, but different, from the hyperbolic geometry effect): https://youtu.be/DcGGfahXmQk
Video description:
Many people report experiencing "higher dimensions" during deep meditation and/or psychedelic experiences. Vaporized DMT in particular reliably produces this effect in a large percentage of users. But is this an illusion? Is there anything meaningful to it? What could possibly be going on?
In this video we provide a steel man (or titanium man?) of the idea that higher dimensions are real in a new, meaningful, and non-trivial sense.
We must emphasize that most people who believe that DMT experiences are "higher dimensional" interpret their experiences within a direct realist framework. Meaning that they think they are "tuning in" to other dimensions, that some secret sense organ capable of perceiving the etheric realm was "activated", that awareness into divine realms became available to their soul, or something along those lines. In brief, such interpretations operate under the notion that we can perceive the world directly somehow. In this video, we instead work under the premise that we live in a compact world-simulation generated by our nervous system. If DMT gives rise to "higher dimensional experiences", then such dimensions will be phenomenological in nature.
We thus try to articulate how it can be possible for an experience to acquire higher dimensions. An important idea here is that there is a trade-off between degrees of freedom and geometric dimensions. We present a model where degrees of freedom can become interlocked in such a way that they functionally emulate the behavior of a virtual higher dimension. As exemplified by the "harmonograph", one can indeed couple and interlock multiple oscillators in such a way that one generates paths of a point in a space that is higher-dimensional than the space inhabited by any of the oscillators on their own. More so, with a long qualia decay, one can use such technique to "paint" entire images in a virtual high dimensional canvas!
High-quality detailed phenomenology of DMT by rational psychonauts strongly suggests that higher virtual dimensions are widely present in the state. Also, the unique valence properties of the state seem to follow what we could call a "generalized music theory" where the "vibe" of the space is the net consonance between all of the metronomes in it. We indeed see a duality between spatial symmetry and temporal synchrony with modality-specific symmetries (equivariance maps) constraining the dynamic behavior.
This, together with the Symmetry Theory of Valence (Johnson), makes the search for "special divine numbers" suddenly meaningful: numerological correspondences can illuminate the underlying makeup of "heaven worlds" and other hedonically-loaded states of mind!
I conclude with a discussion about the nature of "highly-meaningful experiences". In light of all of these frameworks, meaning can be understood as a valence effect that arises when you have strong consonance between abstract (narrative and symbolic), emotional, and sensory fields all at once. A key turning point in your life combined with the right emotion and the right "sacred space" can thus give rise to "peak meaning". The key to infinite bliss!
> This is an essay on the phenomenology of DMT. The analysis here presented predominantly uses algorithmic, geometric and information-theoretic frameworks, which distinguishes it from purely phenomenological, symbolic, neuroscientific or spiritual accounts. We do not claim to know what ultimately implements the effects here described (i.e. in light of the substrate problem of consciousness), but the analysis does not need to go there in order to have explanatory power.
