> But then I notice that when I move my attention to the centre of the picture — to the space between the two groups of circles — their apparent sizes begin to rebalance[...]

This works for me without DMT.

Some family recently visited from out of state and we went to Venice Beach, where there is now tons of stores selling “magic mushrooms” along the boardwalk.

To my knowledge shrooms haven’t been legalized in California so I was curious what they sold (but not enough to try it). Turns out California state regulators have been surreptitiously testing the product from time to time and most of it is 5-MeO-DMT… and they don’t do anything about it despite being schedule I.

Venice Beach, leading the way in “medical” research!

It's really hard to take stuff like this seriously. 5-MeO-DMT helped you see something you knew was true? (the red circles are the same size) Shocking.

I'm really confused by the idea that we're at some kind of evolutionary local minimum and psychidelics are going to push us out.

I'm not up on the biology, but don't our bodies produce DMT (I realize that's not the compund from the article) and/or analogues? If psychdelics allow us to see the truth, why isn't my brain upping the dose?

I can also eliminate the illusion by covering up the blue circles and only looking at the orange circles.

Maybe that's what the DMT is doing? ... perhaps it gives you tunnel vision (or tunnels your attention) such that you only "see" (or are paying attention to) the orange and blocking out the blue from your mind.

> QRI is a non-profit building a new science of consciousness. Its central bet is that: Consciousness is a relatively simple property of our universe — simple enough for evolution to discover it. Consciousness has useful computational properties — otherwise evolution would not have come to rely on it.

My brother, that is philosophical position, not a "bet".

I mean. So would looking through cardboard tubes. In this context, cardboard tubes are at least as cool.