QRI Presents: Reverse Engineering DMT Phenomenology with Non-Linear Optics
QRI Presents: Reverse Engineering DMT Phenomenology with Non-Linear Optics
Location: Frontier Tower, 14th Floor
Join us for the first public showcase of a year's worth of groundbreaking research
After a year of heads-down development (with glimpses shared on podcasts including Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal) QRI is ready to reveal the full scope of our work mapping the state-space of consciousness, modeling phenomenology, and identifying the computational properties of consciousness.
About QRI:
QRI's mission is to model consciousness mathematically in order to create techniques and technologies that improve the lives of sentient beings, especially to reduce extreme suffering, enhance baseline wellbeing, and achieve new heights of flourishing.
What We've Recently Accomplished:
In 2023, QRI's High Energy Awareness Research Team conducted two legal psychedelic retreats exploring psilocybin, ayahuasca, and 5-MeO-DMT, by bringing together an interdisciplinary coalition of meditators, psychonauts, physicists, and mathematicians and working as a Think Tank for weeks at a time (see heart.qri.org).
Systematic DMT phenomenology reveals repeatable phase transitions and geometric transformations, including hyperbolic curvature, symmetrification effects, and computational properties that demand explanation. The QRI period 2024-2025 has been about developing conceptual frameworks and computational models to make sense of these patterns, and then putting them to empirical test. We've discovered how coupling kernels (the rules of interaction between oscillating systems) can simultaneously shape both neural activity and the topological structure of physical fields, providing a potential causal chain from neurochemistry to the structure of conscious experience. It's a conceptual framework where the pieces of the puzzle finally seem to fit together: how psychedelics modify coupling dynamics at the neural level, how these changes cascade through neural architectures to modulate field topology, and how this field structure feeds back into neural activity, avoiding the trap of epiphenomenalism while grounding phenomenology in processes with computationally meaningful properties.
Presenters:
Andrés Gómez Emilsson (qualiacomputing.com, qri.org) and QRI collaborator Cube Flipper (smoothbrains.net).
What's Next:
This event is divided into two parts. First, we'll present the core outputs of our research from the past year: methods, participants, results, and the theoretical frameworks we've developed. You'll see interactive demonstrations and simulations that bring these concepts to life.
Second, we'll chart our path forward: In Q2 2026, we're planning a legal psychedelic retreat where mathematicians, physicists, meditators, and visual artists will collaborate to test whether non-linear optics plays a role in psychedelic phenomenology (especially DMT). This generative framework, which we take seriously and can rigorously test with proper funding, will combine physics simulations, psychophysics studies, and rigorous phenomenological mapping to reverse engineer the medium of computation of consciousness itself.
We anticipate that once we recognize consciousness's computational role, we will move from cognitive science to consciousness engineering: systematically exploring the state-space of possible experiences and recruiting new qualia varieties to enhance our cognitive capabilities.
Schedule:
4:00 PM - Doors open, mingling with snacks and soft drinks
5:00-5:40 - Introductions and interactive demonstrations
5:40-6:40 - The Big Reveal: QRI's psychedelic research over the last two years, including HEART retreat results, interactive simulations, and our theoretical breakthroughs
6:40-7:00 - Break
7:00-8:00 - The Next Chapter: 2026 retreat plans, mathematical modeling of consciousness, and testing our generative frameworks
8:00-9:00 - Q&A and group discussions
9:00-10:00 - Mingling and winding down
What We're Fundraising For:
To continue this groundbreaking work, we're seeking support for:
Core operations: Salaries to keep QRI's team intact for another year (and hopefully many more)
Two major retreats: The 2026 DMT phenomenology retreat and a 5-MeO-DMT awakening retreat
Research outputs: Publishing papers and studies, including upcoming pain quantification research (currently private, soon to be released)
Technology development: Bringing crowdsourced phenomenology visualization tools to a fully functional state to crowd-source the mapping of the state-space of consciousness
Additional initiatives: Cluster Headache relief research and research in digital sentience (we will announce two QRI-incubated initiatives that further these two causes)
Who Should Attend:
Whether you're a researcher, artist, meditator, potential funder, or simply fascinated by the nature of consciousness, this event offers a rare opportunity to see cutting-edge phenomenological research as it unfolds. We're also gauging interest for the 2026 retreat: if you have relevant expertise (mathematics, physics, meditation, visual arts), funding capacity, or alignment with this vision of consciousness research, we'd love to connect.
Technical Appendix: Recent Developments
This year's Qualia Computing and Smoothbrains essays reveal multiple converging lines of investigation:
Non-Linear Optics Framework: A generative framework exploring how the brain might render world simulations using optical elements. Key metaphors include Laser Chess (where local classical moves set constraints, then global interference patterns emerge) and Cel Animation (describing how awareness moves through fields of gestalts). This includes work on beamsplitter holography to explain Indra's Net phenomenology.
Fractional Fourier Transform: Recent work explores how the brain may implement the fractional Fourier transform, which is a generalization that smoothly interpolates between spatial and frequency domains. This could explain characteristic ringing artifacts in psychedelic visual fields and provide a biologically plausible mechanism for massively parallel pattern recognition.
Coupling Kernels and CDNS: A breakthrough framework showing how systems of coupled oscillators can both tune into resonant modes and control the topological structure of fields. This provides a direct causal chain from molecular interactions (neurotransmitters, psychedelics) to the structure of conscious experience. The coupling kernel acts as a "field-shaping operator", the same mathematical object simultaneously modulates neural dynamics and field structure, explaining how psychedelics produce such profound and coherent effects across multiple levels of brain organization. We hypothesize that DMT effectively implements a Mexican-hat coupling profile (strong negative coupling at short distances, positive at medium distances) creating competing clusters of coherence, while 5-MeO-DMT drives systems toward global phase synchronization. This connects to the Consonance-Dissonance-Noise Signature (CDNS) approach, which describes valence in terms of spectral properties — consonance tracking positive valence, dissonance negative valence, and noise neutral valence. We we will make the case for why this proof-of-concept demonstrations are compelling and point toward testable predictions.
Ongoing Foundational Work: QRI continues to develop frameworks including the CDNS approach, the Topological Solution to the Boundary Problem (explaining how unified experiences emerge with precise boundaries), liquid crystal dynamics as phenomenologically significant, and logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain for rigorous quantification of experiential quality.
This is more than a presentation. It's an invitation to join the frontier of consciousness research :-)
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