Exploring Reality: My Chat with Daniel Boyd


Introduction:


Hello everyone, I recently had an enlightening conversation with a Dutch scientific researcher named Daniel Boyd. We were chatting on WhatsApp, discussing our perspectives on the human mind and the nature of reality. Here's my detailed response to his intriguing questions about the transformative experiences and insights that have shaped my worldview over the years.




Daniel Boyd: Danny, you've mentioned that your worldview and understanding of the human mind have undergone significant changes in recent years. Could you elaborate on how this transformation occurred and what experiences or readings led you to this new understanding? Additionally, could you explain how these new ideas influence your perception of reality and science?



Danny Goler: I will start by saying that my position was basically almost identical to yours until about 3 years ago. This is by no means to make the annoying argument of “I used to think like you but then I evolved”. Not at all. What I mean is that my position changed, and here are the reasons why.


The first small shift happened when I started undertaking meditation more seriously and started going to 10-day silent retreats. After doing my 4th 10-day silent meditation course, it became apparent to me that certain truths can be observed directly. Or at least truths pertaining to the mind. It was a perfectly scientific insight for me; if you want to understand something, watch it closely. What silent courses provide is the perfect environment to observe our bodies and our inner world with a minimal conceptual frame. There is obviously a technique involved, but at least in Vipassana, there is no download of a doctrine. You simply observe your breath and then your body. That’s it. Nothing else. This is a point worth emphasizing - nothing else. In fact, the real practice is to notice how much content the mind constantly is trying to impose on what is happening in each moment. That alone didn’t strike me as problematic, but what surprised me is how incapable I was of stopping this from happening. So the insight came when for the first time I managed to hold back my mind’s incessant articulation of my moment-to-moment experience for a few seconds. The relief was astounding, and the clarity with which I understood the world was unparalleled. So far, nothing new here, I’m sure you’ve heard all this before. But this clarity of mind, created the first crack in my conviction that the mind is an arising property of the brain.


Around the same time, I finished reading both books I’ve mentioned by David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. Deutsch’s thesis across both books is that information, whatever it might be, must exist on its own side. Knowledge, according to Deutsch, is an informational structure that can do work. In other words, when knowledge is instantiated in physical matter it will transform that piece of matter to take the “shape” of that knowledge. Or if it gets processed by a constructor it will cause the constructor to act on the world and cause it to transform the physical world it’s interacting with into the shape that particular piece of knowledge encodes. In Deutsch’s view (The Beginning of Infinity), human beings are universal constructors, so given enough time and resources, they can build anything that is permitted by the laws of physics. An important note is that Deutsch postulates knowledge to have a peculiar property. The closer a particular piece of knowledge describes what the world is actually doing, the harder it is to destroy that knowledge. In other words, the degree to which that knowledge is true, is the degree to which when it‘s instantiated in physical matter, it will cause that piece of matter to remain so.


The novel thing that Deutsch is adding is that we are also universal explainers. In his thesis, explanatory knowledge is what actually allows us to do what we do at scale. You can have true knowledge that is not explanatory, and it will be constrained to a limited space and a limited time. But the second knowledge becomes explanatory, it gains universal wings, and can be transmitted in principle to infinity, both in space and in time. Its reach becomes universal. This is an idea that he started developing in his first book The Fabric of Reality. Specifically, he makes the case that Explanation is actually one of the fundamental constituencies of the fabric of reality. In other words, when we understand and then explain something accurately, we interact with something fundamental in the world.


His claim is that we are now slowly crossing this line from anthropocentric knowledge to universal knowledge. We are entering the beginning of infinity.


Incidentally, Deutsch has a whole chapter in The Beginning of Infinity in which he is challenging the notion that we’re not special, which, I must say, convinced me. If you haven’t read The Beginning of Infinity, here is one of Deutsch’s TED talks from a while back that summarizes his position on this subject. https://youtu.be/gQliI_WGaGk. It’s worth the watch.


Enter DMT. This part will be the most challenging to communicate, but hopefully I can take a loan on your trust until I can pay it back with empirical evidence in the form of building new things through this framework.


Trying to break down psychedelics to people who have never experienced them before, is already a close to an impossible task. As I tirelessly keep repeating, it’s not an exaggeration to say that it’s the equivalent of trying to explain color to a completely colorblind person. You can talk about 650nm wavelength all day, but it will never produce the color red. This problem is much deeper than most scientists would like to admit, and it’s one that I’m claiming is the reason of why so many dead-ends seem to loom at the horizon of leading fields in physics. If we sweep the most salient fact about the world (i.e. our experience through which we see the world) under the rug, it should not be surprising that we get infinite paradoxes and incoherent sub-truths.


What I can potentially outline however, is how confounding the experience appears and feels. Which if we follow the meditative approach of “if you want to understand something, watch it closely”, and follow Deutsch‘s notions that we are universal explainers and that by understanding and explaining we’re interacting with a core component of the world - then how something appears to us on mass, starts to carry a different weight than just being a personal impression.


Imagine for a second what it would actually be like to wake up in the real world as Neo for the first time. I mean, ACTUALLY imagine this right now. Give it another go. Unless you felt shivers going down your spine, you haven’t really placed yourself there. But if you did, imagine that that’s exactly what it feels like on DMT on a sufficient dose. Only much crazier because it’s really happening to you. What is so striking about this experience is that you’re not thrown into an ocean of chaos in which everything is a soup of incoherence, but you’re experiencing hyper-realistic structure, which is ordered, architectonic, and continuous over time. These components of the experience, plus the fact that people report very similar things, made a lot of people ask the question I asked myself, is this a real space? But of course, there was no real way to ever verify this aside from comparing stories in retrospect.


The thought that kept nagging on me was that if the space is real, it must have some entry point that is common to all of us. It is true that people report similar things, but I understood that if the space is real like our space, it must have parameters with its own rules and geometry, and if it interacts with our


 space then there must be some place where all human minds interact with it the same. Then, years of thought and research later, I got the idea of the laser.


I want to express a nuanced sentiment addressing you personally, but which is targeted much more broadly as if I’m talking to the scientific community as a whole. The situation I find myself in is a peculiar one. When I just started showing the laser to people I had a lot of mixed emotions about how to present it conceptually. Even back then, I already had enough information on board to know that simulation is the most likely explanation, but because the only tool I could utilize to show people a portion of the evidence was the laser, I had to be measured with what I say as to not be dismissed as a lunatic. But as time went by and I had to explain myself to more and more people, I started realizing that even though I am proposing something quite radical by modern science’s state of affairs, the burden of proof is actually not on me. Allow me to explain.


Reality doesn’t care how we can understand it. So if the situation is that we have to augment our minds to understand and see a deeper layer of it, then if we want to understand, that’s what we have to do. Surprisingly, I’m not that worried about convincing people as much as I care about reporting honestly and communicating with respect. It’s not a matter of opinion. So if I say to you that if you try what I’m proposing you will see exactly what I mean, and you say back to me that you’re not open to do it because of certain social constraints we’ve put on what we consider taboo, then we find ourselves in the same position that Galileo and the church found themselves in when Galileo claimed that by looking through the telescope one will see the proof that the earth is not at the center of the universe, and the church refused to look. At that point, was the burden of proof on Galileo? Only in the most myopic sense. But from reality’s perspective, one side simply refused to do what it takes to understand a portion of the world.


At this point I understand that questions of the flavor “can you transcribe what people see in the laser?”, are simply the wrong questions. There is too much happening behind the laser at any given moment to be able to transcribe it, but nevertheless it is obvious to anybody who sees it that something real is there. All one needs to establish that what we see in the laser is real, is look. And it will not rest on an exact copy of what each person reports to see. We can rely on the same triangulation we use in neuroscience to establish any correlation between a signature we see through let’s say an FMRI, and what people report. You take a large enough sample, and you can be pretty sure that what you’re finding is stable and real. We already have an example of an n of one that we require no proof of in order to establish its reality, and that is our first person experience itself. But it is the only thing you can actually be absolutely sure of. No matter how it arises, the fact that it’s real is apparent by definition just by having that experience. And what I’m claiming we are overlooking is the fact that certain observations have the same nature, and the digits behind the laser is one of those. In other words we have a sense of what’s real just like we have a sense of touch.


So, this portion of the DMT space that I postulated must be true to all of us, is now upon us. If one day you will find yourself entertaining the idea of trying it, it will save us 5 years of conversations, because your questions about its validity will stop, and your questions on how to establish its reality will begin. My most radical proposition is that the only way to take Science to the next level is to learn to incorporate experience into it. Ironically, if we don’t, we will forever be stuck in our tiny parochial bubble of understanding. Because most of reality is whatever our mind is, and not the completely postulated external stuff, we call physical.


Here is the summation of my argument:



Conclusion:


This was a fascinating exchange with Daniel Boyd, offering a unique perspective on the nature of knowledge, the human mind, and the fabric of reality. It underscores the importance of personal experience and the need for science to incorporate this into its understanding of the world. As I continue to explore these complex topics, I hope to inspire you to question, learn, and seek your own truths. Stay tuned for more insights from my ongoing conversations and explorations.