Into the Ketaverse
In Where are the Drugs?, I made part of the case for why drugs are a legitimate subject of inquiry here and why they should be a part of the program of making sense of the world and, perhaps even more-so, part of the meta-program of making sense of making sense of the world. Luckily, my friend, The Intentional Degenerate, not only didn’t get upset at the pseudonym I gave him, but also thought what I said was compelling enough for him to want to share some of his experiences with us.
As the title may have clued you in to, his first contribution will be talking about the effects of ketamine. More specifically, the infamous k-hole, which sucks you in to inner space and risks leaving your friends, if any should be around, to talk amongst themselves for a while.
For those of you less familiar with the drug, ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic first synthesized in 1962. It is on the WHO’s list of essential medicines and is used for surgical procedures, especially for short procedures on humans and on animals with sensitive nervous systems (most famously horses, but also rats and rabbits). It is also a fast-acting anti-depressant and the use of its left-handed enantiomer was approved by the FDA in 2019 for use against treatment-resistant depression (TRD). It is safe and nearly impossible to overdose on, with most incidents related to mixing with other drugs, but the fact that it can be abused recreationally, can be addictive, and can have psychotomimetic effects (meaning it mimics psychosis) has limited its use in medicine outside of anesthesia until recently. Frequent use at high dosages can lead to kidney damage and people build up a tolerance rapidly, so careful users take regular breaks or space out their usage.
But all of that aside, what does it do? What does it feel like? And most importantly for this blog, what can we learn about how our minds work from it?
First, we have to realize that ketamine is, for all intents and purposes, two different drugs depending on dosage. In small doses, say insufflating 20-50 mg if you haven’t built up a tolerance, I’m told it feels intoxicating, reportedly a bit like the buzz from alcohol combined with a bit of the euphoria of psilocybin or MDMA. This is where it gets its appeal as a “club drug” since, like MDMA, it apparently ratchets up your appreciation for music.
The “other” drug kicks in at higher doses – maybe around 100mg for someone new – and is where the dissociation kicks in, where you can leave your body and travel through inner space. Some people find it terrifying, especially if it happens accidentally, and I’m told, as with most drugs, set and setting matter here. This is an anti-social drug – you will be minimally responsive and lost in space for 5-15 minutes and if you don’t like where you go, you have no choice but to wait it out (although eating candy or sugar seems to shorten it). To be clear, the Degenerate claims that you will often be aware of what’s going on around you and sometimes even able to interact with it to some extent, but it may feel peripheral or like something happening to your body over there while you are over here. You may talk to people but it may be impossible to communicate what you want to say even if you can understand them.
This is the drug we are talking about today, and someone might be forgiven for asking why they would ever want to take it given everything I have said above. K-hole’s sound scary and catatonia is not a winning recipe for making friends and influencing people. But by sharing the Degenerate’s report, my goal is not to convince people that they should take it – far from it. Nobody should convince anybody to take a psychotropic drug that they are unsure about. The goal is to share what he has experienced while on it, what he has taken away from those experiences, and what, I think, it can tell us about how our mind might work.
Before we get into that, I want to emphasize that I am pretty convinced that the Degenerate’s experience on ketamine is not the norm. From talking to multiple people, I believe that what happens to a person in inner space is highly dependent on their own mind, how it works in everyday life and how it reacts to having various switches thrown at the hardware level. For many people, the experience of a k-hole is wild in a way that is hard to explain. It can be confusing – they go places and see and feel things that blow their minds. This is true for the Degenerate as well, as you’ll see, but there are some unique aspects of his experience that I have not heard reflected in other people’s reports. Whether that makes his experiences less generalizable and therefore less interesting, I’ll leave to you to decide. Personally, I think they can still teach us something, but if you disagree, perhaps you can still appreciate the stories in the telling.
So without further ado, I will hand it off here to the Degenerate – edited lightly for grammar – and return at the end with some thoughts…
Hey there budding taxonomists, Degenerate here. I was asked to tell you a little bit about the k-hole’s I’ve had and what they feel like, but I’m gonna focus on one particular type because it’s the most interesting. At least to me
The journeys I go on are somewhat like dreams, but they are like no other dreams I’ve ever had. I’m completely lucid and “awake” on the inside – I’m observing what’s going on, analyzing it, questioning it, like I always do – and I feel as sober as I do in waking life (until I try to speak or move). But at the same time, I also know that I’m inside my mind, with just a weak link to the outside world.
There are many different kinds of journeys I can go on, different facets of the ketaverse, as I like to call it, that I can see and visit. Some feel like they are packaged up as lessons, a series of steps where I’m shown things in order to learn something, while some are just experiences to sit back and marvel at.
But the kind I want to talk about today is one where I feel like I’m having a dialogue with myself, with a deep, mysterious part that I can’t access in normal life. And part of how awesome the experience is, is how powerful that part of me is. How it can remake the world inside my head to show me things.
I usually try to write down what I experience later that night or in the morning, trying to hold on to the details. The sense of what happened tends to slip away pretty quickly and I want to understand it while I can. When I’ve shared these reports with others, I usually get enthusiastic amazement or people just shaking their heads, depending on the person. But occasionally I get rejection – people telling me I’ve been tricked or am falling for a lie. That I think I’m learning something, but it is all the delusion of a drug-addled brain.
But what I tell them is, it doesn’t have to be “real” or “true” or whatever you want to call it to be interesting and thought-provoking. The things I do in there don’t have to actually happen to matter and “maybe you imagined it” doesn’t diminish the experience. The fact that part of me can come up with this completely real-feeling world that I can play around in is awesome. It shows me things about how I work and lets me draw new connections that I couldn’t make before.
These kind of journeys are like getting to hang out with my sub- or unconscious self. And the best part is, I like him… he’s fun and smart and interesting and can do things I can’t.
One of the things he shows me is just how much of what I experience is driven by the models in my head. He talks to me in there, answers questions, but not through words. He shows me things. And not just visually, but using all my senses, especially my body, “moving” me about, accelerating me, to where I need to be to see what he’s trying to show me.
As an example of what he can do, he can combine the “dream” world, the one that he is generating and I am lucidly interacting with, with the “real” world in real time. I can look around the room I’m in and see and interact with the real people and objects in it, but transformed. The transformations vary but, whatever they do, they stay connected to the real objects that I can manipulate. These are very different from the “visuals” I get on hallucinogens – they’re at a higher level of abstraction and have an internal consistency that mere hallucinations don’t.
Some of these transformations purely affect the way I see the world, the physics of it – for instance, he can make the world two-dimensional, where everything in the room I’m in appears flat and constrained to a plane, where my body, my self, feels flat and also stuck in that plane, but where I can slide real objects around, moving them in reality but only in that plane. (He can also make things higher-dimensional and maybe I’ll come back to talk about that some other time.)
Other transformation seem higher-level, manipulating emotions or symbols, including transformations of what you might call mood or genre. These are truly bizarre and amazing to experience and, I think, give hints into how, as the Taxonomist might say, my brain builds models of the world. Two examples – places I’ve traveled to multiple times and enjoy going – should help explain. The first I call vampire/decay world and the second polly/puff world.
In the first, objects droop and decay around me, cracks appear in things and weeds poke through, shadows extend and people look like stylized vampires, with jet black hair and Victorian outfits with dark green or purple velvet, and with Romanian accents talking through sharp teeth. These are the real objects in the room with me and real people I am talking to, acting as you’d otherwise expect, responding to my attempts to communicate, but overlaid with this dramatic, parasitic mood. Strangely, this is not as scary as it sounds.
In polly/puff world, everything becomes girly and soft and frilly, edges are rounded and objects puffy like marshmallows. My skin feels puffed out and squishy and light and floaty. And the people around me giggle and bounce when they talk and move, their clothes turn into swishing skirts in various shades of pink and white.
And this happens in real-time in my mind while I’m aware of it and it stays around even if I “test” it out, which I like to do. I know it’s an illusion of sorts, no matter how real it seems - but how good of an illusion is it, how realistic, how internally consistent? If I pick up my laptop, now rounded and squishy with marshmallow keys, but still bearing a (puffier) Apple logo and soft screen, can I type on it? Do the keys feel like marshmallows would? Does it weigh less? Does it still function as a computer? Are all the icons on the desktop girly versions of the original? And when the answer turns out to be yes to all those questions, I get to sit there, stupefied by the fact that my brain can do that, can invent and render “girly” versions of Microsoft logos on the fly that are recognizably for Word or Excel but are overlaid with this extra feature encoding the mood.
Do I think this is real? That the computer and people “actually” changed. Of course not, no matter how insanely real it seems. But I get to experience the fact that there are these powerful tokens or genres or archetypes or moods or feature vectors or whatever else the Taxonomist might call them that can be added to an object and completely change my perception of it across all my senses. That they stay attached to objects moving around me and are logically consistent. That is fucking fascinating. And fun and eye-opening. And I don’t take away from it that it’s true, or that it “actually” happened, but that this is how my brain works: it’s building models all the time and everything I experience is just those models.
So that’s the scoop, or at least part of it, and why I keep returning to explore inner space even if it makes me less fun at parties. So until next time,
The Intentional Degenerate
Taxonomist here again. So what do I take away from that, what’s worth thinking about?
To me, it shows pretty clearly how what we experience is at least one step away from what is actually out there. We don’t have contact with external reality, just the shadows it casts in our minds. And those shadows can be distorted in interesting ways, ways that we can notice and interrogate when they happen suddenly because of some neuro-chemical switches being thrown, rather than slowly as they are tweaked by experience.
More speculatively, it may show that our brains (or at least the Degenerate’s) encode objects as some sort of feature vector in the high-dimensional latent space that we use to represent the world. And that with these vectors it is possible to apply a global transformation to them all at once – to rotate them or scale some coefficients of them – transformations that encode some semantically meaningful shift in mood or affect. Does one of the dimensions in the latent space that the Degenerate projects the world into stand for “girly-ness”? And at the risk of him being cancelled, does that overlap with softness and/or frilliness for him? Is it correlated with color, shape, and feel, and manifest in different ways for different types of objects? Is there actually a degree of freedom in his mind for vampirism of all things?
Is this just like asking ChatGPT to give you an answer but to make it like a Shakespearean sonnet? Or asking Midjourney to make the image more like a Monet? “Yes, that’s nice, now render the world girly…”
These are the things in the ketaverse that interest me and the Degenerate (your mileage may vary!) These are the questions his reports lead me to ask and, maybe, the hints of some answers that it gives. And this is the reason why drugs are part of the program here and why you will hear more about them in days to come.