Computational Ayahuasca: Simulating DMT on Artificial Neural Networks
What can we learn from psychedelics and AI?
In our data and machine-obsessed society, psychedelics together with cannabis are starting to be decriminalized and used for pharmaceutical purposes. There is now even an ETF on pharmaceutical companies related to psilocybin and other psychedelics considered a promising market.
DMT (acronym of N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is the main component of the Ayahuasca brew traditionally used by shamans in South America for therapeutic purposes. Together with the therapeutic purposes and mental health effects, it introduces highly visual hallucinations. Those are generally geometric patterns and saturation of visual spaces. A great lecture about the different types of hallucinations can be found in the video below from the Harvard Psychedelic Society.
Recently, researchers of the Imperial College in London and the Université de Genève in Geneva have created a model using two generative deep convolutional networks to reproduce psychedelic hallucinations…
