Traces of the Other

The world we perceive is not reality; it is an interface. Like icons on a desktop, the objects, colors, and spaces of our experience are a species-specific representation optimized for survival, not truth. Consciousness is fundamental; the physical world is what it projects.

If that is true, a question follows immediately: are there other conscious agents that our interface cannot represent? Conscious realism predicts yes: agents of arbitrarily high complexity whose properties cannot fit within our 3D space-time model. We would never perceive them. Ordinarily.

DMT may change that. The powerful naturally-occurring psychedelic N,N-dimethyltryptamine induces, unlike any other substance, a complete transformation of the subjective world, in which users consistently report encounters with apparently intelligent, non-human entities. The neuroscience consensus dismisses these as hallucinations. This collaboration asks whether that dismissal is premature.

Noonautics, led by neurobiologist and pharmacologist Andrew Gallimore, will deploy their extended-state DMT protocol, allowing experiences of minutes to hours, to send trained scientists and experts into the DMT state to record precise phenomenological observations.

The Trace Institute, led by Donald Hoffman, will apply the trace logic for conscious observers and the full mathematical apparatus of conscious agent theory to build a quantitative analytical framework capable of interpreting those observations.

Together: the first rigorous, empirically testable model of the DMT experience, with clear predictions that can falsify, or lend credence to, the hypothesis that some DMT-induced encounters are genuine perceptions of other consciousnesses.