In our last blog post, we discussed if AI can induce the same physical effects as psychedelics and concluded that while similar, AI in combination with VR might not yet be capable of giving one exactly psychedelic trip-like experiences. According to research that is. This does not seem to be a big issue though, as people are still excited about the possibility of reaching other dimensions with both AI and psychedelics individually as well as in combined ways for highly altered outerbody experiences. But even more importantly, AI can actually throw us into other, potentially more dangerous altered realities.
Self-programming and reality tunnels: the boundaries are becoming even more blurred
Stepping aside from the immersing eye and soul-opening visual experiences, AI is capable of altering our realities in other ways, too. Coming back to the case of the American physician John C. Lilly (1974) and his mantra of “self-programming” – the belief that human mind can be rewired to simulate any reality – we learn that the human mind is made up of reality tunnels. These are reflected in the subconscious choices of what information we feed into our brains and what information is simply ignored (usually the ones that don’t reinforce our worldview). As a means of exploring the altered states of realities, John Lilly started experimenting with isolation tanks in 1960s. These sensory deprivation tanks isolated users from almost all external stimuli. Soon, he added LSD to the mix and floated in the dark salt-water tank while tripping on LSD. He says “the lack of distracting stimuli allowed me to program any sort of a trip that I could conceive of (…). One could go anywhere that one could imagine one could go”.
With its generative capabilities, AI has the remarkable power to craft content that feels plucked straight from reality, just with the right tweaks for the targeted user. From lifelike text and eerily convincing voice and image synthesis, it blurs the line between genuine human creation and artificial construct. Consider this: in a world where AI seamlessly generates content tailored exactly to individual prompts and preferences, the reality experienced by one person can soon start drastically diverging from that of another’s. The age-old worry of whether one deepfake Joe Biden on your screen is saying the same thing as my deepfake Joe Biden on my screen is exacerbated with every advancement in generative AI and its infrastructure evolution. One screen might be delivering a speech entirely different from that of another deepfake Joe Biden – and scarily do that even in real time. But what is Joe Biden himself saying? These parallel realities, even if only subtly distinct, challenge our notions of a shared, objective truth. In some sense, we now see ourselves entering into another era of psychedelic age, now fuelled by technology. The abundance of information received on a daily basis forms certain types of echo-chambers, similar to what John Lilly used in his experiments, only that now we might not even realise that we are in one of those chambers – AI can cause us to believe the most blatant lies and question even basic truths. It malleably warps and distorts our very apprehension of time and space, unlike anything else before
References
Lilly, J. C. (1974). The human biocomputer.
