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DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) is a powerful, naturally occurring psychedelic compound known for creating immersive visual and auditory hallucinations. It is found in various plant species and even in trace amounts in the human body. Many claim their experiences on DMT are not “hallucinations” but visits to another reality — one much more real than this one.
The conversations around DMT
YouTube podcaster Shawn Ryan’s recent interview with independent researcher Danny Goler is one of the most fascinating conversations I’ve listened to in a long time. Goler, a 21st century DMT pioneer, pontificates on many philosophical topics including the nature of reality, human consciousness, religion and spirituality, and how taking DMT informs all of it.
Goler has disclosed that he’s ingested DMT thousands of times and through his experience has come to a new understanding of this reality, which pales in comparison to the one DMT allows users a glimpse of. There are many “reveals” in the conversation that might sound absurb taken out of context. They include: 1) Thousands of people have reportedly seen “code” (like computer code or a cryptic and ancient language) in the walls using lasers while on DMT, and there’s a project underway to create a Rosetta Stone of such symbols; and 2) what we take to be “reality” is rendered computationally and the physical world we’re familiar with is an illusion.
DMT has been known about for a long time even in the clinical environment through pioneers like Terence McKenna and Rick Strassman, both of whom studied the compound’s psychedelic effects in the later half of the 20th century.
What’s interesting about DMT for someone interested in the nature of human consciousness is that it’s produced naturally in the human brain (and other living systems) while other psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and ketamine are not. This fact might prove to be a clue to our understanding the DMT trip and whether it’s actually showing us a new reality or just a new way of experiencing human reality.
DMT explorations invite some fundamental philosophical questions
Though the research into DMT is not new, its current renaissance seems tied to society’s growing acceptance of psychedelic-assisted therapy. But some fundamental questions should be considered before we can entertain as true insight the sometimes outrageous claims made by its users. For example:
1. A Different Reality? There is strong confidence among DMT users that the compound is granting them access to a different reality or at least another dimension of reality. But I wonder if this belief is founded. Is it possible to access another (veridical) reality simply by ingesting something into our human system? Aren’t we still necessarily experiencing human reality with our particularly human apparatus even though it feels wildly different than what we’re used to?
To employ a video game analogy: Is our ingesting DMT and temporarily experiencing reality differently akin to Pac-Man having the brief power to eat the predatory ghosts who are always chasing him only after ingesting a power pellet? Is it truly a different reality or just a brief excursion into a different way of experiencing reality?
2. Codifying Subjective Experience? Goler mentions a Rosetta Stone project that’s underway to identify and codify the different symbols DMT trippers are seeing in the walls with the use of lasers. This project evokes the other minds problem from modern philosophy: How can we know that what you’re calling a “squiggle” instead of a “squoggle” manifests the same in my brain, i.e., that we’re actually seeing the same shape or having the same experience at all?
Philosopher John Locke famously pointed out that objects cause secondary qualities (like color, smell, and taste) that could vary from person to person, so even though we both call something “pink” it’s possible you’re experiencing green and I’m experiencing pink. There’s no way to disprove this. So, since we cannot make this epistemological jump of shared experience even under normal conditions, how could we possibly make this inference with any confidence when the experiencers are under the influence of a compound known to cause hallucinations?
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As an aside, it would be interesting to run some DMT studies with placebos. There’s so much in the media now about people seeing code in the walls while on a DMT trip that I worry people might come to the experience with prepackaged tropes. Though such a study design with some participants receiving DMT and others receiving a placebo still runs into the other minds problem (i.e., there is no way to definitively prove what someone is experiencing with a placebo either!), this approach might begin to help researchers find consistency between seeing “something unusual” and seeing “nothing unusual.”
3. Evidence for the Simulation Hypothesis? Some DMT researchers, including Golen, have become convinced that the identification of code in the walls seen by DMT users during their trips is evidence that we’re living in a computational world; or in other words, that what we take to be reality is actually a computer simulation. While I admit there are many avenues, both empirical and philosophical, that lead one to seriously consider the simulation hypothesis, I don’t think seeing code in the walls while on a hallucinogen is one of them. Why not?
It seems far-fetched to believe that if we were living in a computer simulation, we would literally see computer code in the substrate around us since what’s rendered by the code and the coding behind it are always at two different levels. The Pac-Man maze we see is not the programming lines of code behind it. I think it’s more likely that DMT is hacking into something in the human brain that traffics in symbols and codes, maybe a mechanism or neuronal system related to language and communication, making users “see” code everywhere when that mechanism is triggered.
