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Let’s Explore the Intriguing Resemblance Between AI and Psychedelics

/imagine standing at the gates of an ethereal forest where trees whisper in the languages of fairies and a dozen rainbows in the sky are weaving intricate patterns of color and light. You start taking a step and it feels as though you are flying, liberated from the earthly gravitation laws. High above in the sky, you meet a mysterious radiant being with an aura of cosmic knowledge emanating from its presence. It starts speaking to you in a language unlike anything you have ever heard before, yet you find yourself inexplicably understanding and feeling every word: “Do you think I turned off the oven?”

What if I told you that you are not dreaming nor are you John C. Lilly in his saltwater tank dropping LSD tabs, trying to break free from all external stimuli to reach a higher self in some parallel realities. No, you are just wandering in an AI-generated world with the help of VR-glasses tailored especially for you and experiencing the same effects as a medium dose of psilocybin would give you.

Throughout our known history, the human soul has had a relentless yearning to break free from the chains of reality and transcend to dimensions above us. According to some reviews (Kiros, 2022), such self-transcendent experiences exist on a spectrum: a book could be on the lower end while ego death through high doses of psychedelics could be on the other. Meditation and the sensation astronauts get when seeing Earth from space all help reach different dimensions of dissolution of oneself and a higher sense of togetherness with Unity. And as a powerful newcomer in the field, AI offers us mind-altering experiences in combination with VR (Boopathy, 2023) as well as alters our current realities through highly unique tailored content all while revealing a peculiar convergence where to seemingly separate worlds – AI and psychedelics – intertwine. 

Parallel Realities: Trying to Navigate the Blurred Boundaries

Paralleling and combining technological advances and psychedelics is not new. The concept of cyberdelia emerged as a counterculture in the 1980s and 1990s. Referring to the fusion of cybernetic (digital) and psychedelic drugs, prophetic claims were made about how “Computers are the new LSD” and cyberdelic technologies augured a fresh era of expanding consciousness where psychedelic experiences were aimed to be replicated in virtual domains. There were cyberdelic raves featuring psychedelic trance music alongside laser light shows, projected images, and artificial fog, with attendees often under the influence of mind-altering drugs. The whole trip-infused cybershow collapsed after the dot-com bubble in late 90s and early 00s when the cyberpunks realized that the PC did not bring about the radical social changes they thought it would. Nowadays, cyberdelia is going through a certain renaissance, evident by the restored interest in VR technologies and particularly their utility in therapy (Hartogsohn, 2023). This combined with AI is promising eerily realistic altered realities somewhat similar to what can be achieved with the use of psychedelics.

While psychedelics primarily target the serotonin 2A receptor in the brain leading to profound psychological alterations in perceptions, cognition, and emotions (Carhart-Harris, 2013), AI’s reality-bending nature comes from the abundant use of data manipulation. It is possible to simulate visual hallucinatory experiences with deep convolutional neural networks and panoramic videos of natural scenes viewed through a panoramic VR (Suzuki et al., 2017). Such virtual reality experiences have shown potential in inducing similar effects to psychedelics in providing buffer from external stimuli, promoting mindful presence, and – in combination with pharmaceuticals – evoking mystical states, and training the mind to achieve altered states of consciousness (Sekula et al., 2022).  A study published in Scientific Reports demonstrates the therapeutic potential of a group VR experience called Isness that can produce self-transcendent states, where the boundaries between self and environment dissolve. Such experiences are claimed to have therapeutic benefits for conditions like depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety (Glowacki et al., 2022). Individually, VR and psychedelics are used in analogous ways to disrupt sensory experiences while together the use cases are explored in psychedelic therapy sessions to treat a variety of mental health problems (Aday et al., 2020). While promising, VR’s potential in providing the same multi-dimensional effects as psychedelics still remains rather speculative at this point, with almost all studies emphasizing the need for further research into VR’s ability to replicate the nuances of psychedelics’ perceptual effects (Aday et al., 2020), and critiquing on the lack of empirical evidence in the application of VR in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy (Sekula et al., 2022).

The synergistic ways of combining or paralleling psychedelics and VR are not disturbed by this lack of evidence, though, as people and even more so – VR companies – confidently claim that personalized and creative AI-generated VR experiences can give you the same effects as a solid dose of psychedelics. Be it the case or not, VR technologies continue to hold a central space in the renewed cyberdelic landscape and generative AI is here to make the effects even stronger.

References   

         

Sekula, A. D., Downey, L. A., & Puspanathan, P. (2022). Virtual reality as a moderator of Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.813746

Hartogsohn, I. (2023). Cyberdelics in context: On the prospects and challenges of mind-manifesting technologies. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1073235

Aday, J. S., Davoli, C. C., & Bloesch, E. K. (2020). Psychedelics and virtual reality: parallels and applications. Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology, 10, 204512532094835. https://doi.org/10.1177/2045125320948356

Gómez-Busto, F. J., & Ortiz, M. I. (2020). Virtual Reality and Psychedelics for the Treatment of Psychiatric Disease: A Systematic Literature Review. PubMed, 17(6), 365–380. https://doi.org/10.36131/cnfioritieditore20200606

Kiros, H. (2022, August 9). VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/08/06/1056727/vr-virtual-reality-psychedelics-transcendence/

Boopathy, J. (2023, May 6). Real-world applications of Generative AI in Virtual Reality. Medium. https://generativeai.pub/real-world-applications-of-generative-ai-in-virtual-reality-6b5109d670f

Carhart-Harris, R. (2013, May 29). How do psychedelic drugs work on the brain? [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jT5dZDnJ6J4

Suzuki, K., Roseboom, W., Schwartzman, D. J., & Seth, A. K. (2017). A Deep-Dream virtual reality platform for studying altered perceptual phenomenology. Scientific Reports, 7(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16316-2

Glowacki, D. R., Williams, R. R., Wonnacott, M., Maynard, O., Freire, R., Pike, J. E., & Chatziapostolou, M. (2022). Group VR experiences can produce ego attenuation and connectedness comparable to psychedelics. Scientific Reports, 12(1). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-12637-z