Me sitting on a sofa with the book in my hands.

What did other people think about this book on Goodreads?

The one 1-star review doesn’t comment on why the book is not good. The one 2-star review scored the book low because they found it too dense. While the 3-star reviews appreciate the core concepts and the aesthetics of the book, they often found the narrative a bit repetitive, and some commented that God or speculation of other dimensions (other than the DMT hyperspace) could have been addressed as well. The 4-star reviews praised the book as a brilliant piece of “fictionalized science”, applauding its rigorous grounding in neuroscience and the 8-bit aesthetics, though a few noted that the narrative slowed down towards the end – maybe middle for me? The 5-star reviews hailed it as a mind-bending, visually stunning masterpiece. Now, what do I think?

What do I think?

I watched Andrew’s Psychedelic Neuroscience Master Course on his Alien Insect YouTube channel when it came out around the time I was finishing my PhD on neurofeedback meditation. I remember messaging him as well asking whether he thinks meditation could access the same psychedelic states that DMT can access. I think he replied saying something like “it would be difficult to access hyperspace with meditation only”. Honestly, I can’t remember, but let’s hope it’s possible since that is one of my main research goals. I bought the book around that time (2020, but never really dived into it, and since I’d like to get back on track with my work on altered states, I did finish it today. Now, I am not a neuroscientist, but I have experience with EEG, understand how neurons work, and know what neuromarkers of some altered states are. So the narrative of the book wasn’t too difficult to follow, but often I felt that there should have been a clearer introduction at the start to the whole signal processing flow – from how DMT changes the neurons, through the changes in the upwards and downwards information flow, to how the brain moves from alternating between the Default Mode and Task Positive networks to engaging both simultaneously. I enjoyed reading about how what we experience as our reality is based more on intrinsic information (something we already established in our minds) and less on extrinsic information (what we sense e.g. with our eyes or ears). I think it would have been useful to have a clear graph on how critters and gliders become atomic particles, then elements, molecules, organic cells, organs, etc. All in all, I enjoyed the book, but felt that sometimes it was repetitive and the connection between the levels in the micro and macro cosmos could have been better communicated with more diagrams. The book looks great and I look forward to reading more in Andrew’s second book titled Reality Switch Technologies: Psychedelics as Tools for the Discovery and Exploration of New Worlds.

Notes

  • p.8: Gallimore seems to be sure that the code, the code that runs everything, was made by the aliens.
  • p.16: For me, this physics lesson is a bit too fast.
  • p.24: If it is all a computer simulation, do we have free will?
  • p.41: So, how is the Game of Life software connected to the Standard Model of Particle Physics? Do the critters in the grid (3d) create the particles, then the particles the biological cells, …. higher organisms e.g. humans? How are the gliders and the rules (the Moore and the von Neumann) connected?
  • p.47: Are the Wolfram rules similar to the two above or the Tit for Tat game theory rule (algorithm) I saw somewhere else linked to Game Theory? I think it would be good to have some more examples here for clarity.
  • p.51: Life = (autopoietic) self creation? Check the reference to Maturana and Varela, what does this really mean?
  • p.53: I am not surprised to see a reference to the author of the book The Tao of Physics. (Haven’t read the book yet.) Will the I Ching be cited as well and how McKenna used it? (After finishing the book I don’t think it was cited.)
  • p.54: Maybe this info on biology could have come a bit earlier to aid clarity on how atoms make molecules, then molecules cells, etc. (After finishing the book, I know that this summary will come somewhere towards the end, but I think, here - or even at the very beginning - it doesn’t seem to have a clear overview on how the code, through particles, elements, molecules, etc. becomes a thinking human and then a society, etc.)
  • p.64: To understand the sacred, we need to first understand the ordinary. Love this!
  • Chapter 4 (Living Information in a Digital World) has a lot of interesting philosophy which perhaps should have come earlier for people who might be confused by all the physics in the previous chapters.
  • p.63: When comparing a cell to a brain, both receive and process information that they receive from the environment, but the brain also creates a map/model of this environment (the cell does not).
  • p.67: The ‘normal waking phenomenal world’ is one model of the world. Gallimore emphasizes that the worlds we see are always built by our brains, the hyperspace world too.
  • p.84: Extrinsic information (e.g. what we see and hear with our normal waking model) only amplifies (validates?) the intrinsic information. This reminds me of Anil Seth’s presentation tilted The Neuroscience of Consciousness at the Royal Institution, where he explained how much our reality is based on our stored information in the brain. As far as I remember, he also said what we believe is happening with us is based more on the intrinsic info than the extrinsic info. I think this is perhaps one of the most interesting parts for me when it comes to how we people (perhaps animals too) ‘create’ our realities. I guess one of my questions would be: what is the intrinsic info built from e.g. from genes as well, how? I really need to check how much research backs this up.
  • p.97: The difference between how the brain builds the world when you are awake and when you are dreaming is that when dreaming it doesn’t modulate the intrinsic information with extrinsic sensory information.
  • p.110: There are two states: 1. DMN (default mode network) and 2. TPN (task positive network), which usually work separately. When using psychedelics (or maybe just DMT?) they seem to work simultaneously/together. There is a bunch of references in the further reading section for this chapter, that I need to check how well established this is.
  • p.111: The author explains why the two networks are useful, and also when/how the psychedelic state can be useful and when not.
  • p.116: I wonder, is it possible, that in a biblical sense, our ordinary reality (OR) – as it is called in shamanic literature – is the Paradise and God (or one of them gods) doesn’t want us to experience hyperspace (knowledge) which is then a non-ordinary reality (NOR)? I.e. God didn’t want people to eat the apple (knowledge). And if this is true, why wouldn’t God (or a God) want us to really learn more?
  • p.126: We are getting a better understanding now about how the information flows:
    • drug -> neuron receptors -> network of molecules inside neuron -> neurons polarized -> neurons fire more often -> more neurons fire more often -> upwards info flow changes -> altered state of mind
  • p.129: The upwards information flow affects the downwards information flow, and vice versa.
  • p.135: Could chapter 11 be better explained with a video animation, the relationship between the GRID and the HYPERGRID? Can I make this video?
  • p.158: What the hell could the 4-5-6 dimensional object be? I need to check this out.
  • p.198: He doesn’t like the use of the term ‘simulated reality’. Instead, he suggests that our reality is an instantiation of a reality.
  • p.202: Does the code create a multiverse i.e. similar versions to our reality? Did Andrew write about this?
  • p.202: Andrew writes that organisms can’t evolve without interventions. But is this true? Isn’t evolution be emergent?
  • p.204: There are high levels of DMT in prenatal (rat) brains, which indicates that before birth we are still more connected to the hyperspace. Could this really mean that something like a soul enters the body at birth? Peter Meyer else in the DMT Dialogues book – which I only started reading now – suggests that DMT entities are born into human existence to play a game here in our reality, where they (we) can earn some points to level up (spiritually) in the DMT hyperspace (where we come from). Interesting, isn’t it? How could this be linked to astrology explaining who we are (what we are like) based on the exact time and location of our birth?