Can Language Induce Altered States of Consciousness?
Happy 4/20 lol.
Yes… maybe. Depends on what your definitions of language and consciousness are, though. TL;DR: Learning unconventional languages, like a language made of smells, can probably modify your sense of self, interpretation of memories, and perception in general. Basically you’re using language to induce an altered state of consciousness.
I’m really interested in figuring out the unknown unknowns of reality. The blindspots we don’t even know we have. Ironically, the way we think about things like blindspots and concepts in general are probably because of the types of observers and minds that we are. We think of math in the way that we do because of the types of observers we are. We think of music, physics, language, and life the way that we do because of our capacities and qualities as a perceiver with the mind that we have.
What you see is what you get.
I have a saying I use a lot: what you see is what you get. If you measure an object in inches you’ll know the object in inches. But which types of observers or measuring calipers are other cognitive systems? Dogs and cats? Squids? Ants?
Dogs use smell (olfaction) and taste (gustation) quite a bit. It’s possible that if those are their preferred ways of interacting with their environment and communicating with other agents, perhaps it would be more efficient for them to directly model their world in terms of those common sensory modalities. This may also be the case for many humans.
Perhaps the reason we tend to think in visuals, words, sounds, or certain representations of an idea (like aphantasics) is because that’s also the main way we communicate with conspecifics. Most humans may have an easier time inputting and outputting information that is visual or auditory based off of our physiological limitations, which is why it would be easier to directly think and model in that format rather than having to make an extra transformation between those, which may take more time and energy.
Another way to think about this: Imagine you are an artist and you want to draw an apple on a white canvas. If you think of and represent that apple as a sound, emotion, or tactile sensation and try to draw it out on the canvas–it will take time and effort to convert that into what it should look like on the canvas. But if you directly think of the apple in the medium that you’d express or communicate it in, there is much less work needed to make that conversion. There is more to it though! Because distance from the end output representation leads to degrees of freedom for interpretation and abstraction. So if you want to make highly abstract transformations, it may actually be better to think of the apple on the white canvas in terms of sounds or emotion.
I’ll leave you with a fun question: Let’s say you need to cook a delicious Michelin Star worthy dish, but you have no taste or mouth! Having a good sense of taste and texture with your mouth would make this pretty easy, but there is an added limitation that now forms a different kind of observer. Assuming the same goal remains, you’ll now have to interface using a different sensory modality–maybe audition. Using only your hearing how can you still construct an equally delicious Michelin Star worthy dish for your customer, and communicate the instructions for this to another chef with or without your observer limitations?
Language is coordination.
“What you see is what you get” also applies to concept of language and coordination itself. The pressures and limitations that create the observer (observation in general) also creates the kind of language or coordination system that allows communication between observers or perceivers. Let’s say you were going to re-run the evolution of life on Earth. You may eventually land on something human-like or maybe even identical humans. But would English form in the exact same way? What about Japanese or Khoisan?
If you had a group of humans who only had taste and smell as their way of interacting with each other and the world around them (note these limitations), what type of coordination system would be utilized? This same idea is also very applicable to agency and cognition at all scales, from planets to cells to chemicals. More on this in the future.
The big picture idea is that by expanding the doors of perception, we can open ourselves up to entirely new ways of experiencing reality and the things we tend to hold as pretty concrete.
Another question to think about: What is the minimum amount of actual observation/perception needed to generate something substantial or meaningful?
Generating Altered States With Weird Languages.
I was interested in being able to think of and perceive information in entirely different ways in order to escape from my limitations as a specific kind of observer. In a sense–I wanted to be able to induce altered states of consciousness/cognition without having to take a typical substance or go to sleep and enter a dream.
In dreams or psychedelic states, if you haven’t already experienced something similar, you will find many stories of people describing their sense of self or attention, or some idea or feeling as literally being “water” or “color” or “time”.
One of the first ways I thought of getting this effect was with an olfactory language (OlfactoryLang), a language that uses smell rather than visual, auditory, or tactile information.
I started off by using liquid scents to make shapes (like letters) on pieces of paper in a grid like fashion. I would smell read these left to right and actively associate each smell with another smell, or another idea, word, visual, etc. Just like you’re learning a new language. But eventually these perceptual associations start to stick and you can start “re-reading” past ideas and memories under a new interpretation, sort of like how you would update past concepts and beliefs. With this new “perceptual lens” you can also re-read and view your sense of self, the feeling of you as an observer, quite differently. The first time this happened it was really weird and felt pretty dissociative. But it lined up with what I felt in dreams and later on felt during psychedelic experiences. So maybe it is possible to trip balls by learning a language differently :)
But anyways–you are literally feeling and qualitatively experiencing these things as smells! Very hard to describe if you haven’t experienced something like this before. For that we may need a different kind of language, one that I will elaborate on during a later post.
I also noticed pretty quickly that I had a better sense of smell and could differentiate smells with finer detail, but that wasn't nearly as exciting for me as all the altered state stuff.
Can you make a language out of anything?
OlfactoryLang isn’t the main point of this post. It’s more about looking differently at perception/observation and language as a whole. If any of this has some heft behind it, we could study the mind and grow it in some pretty cool ways. I’m always exploring so maybe I’ll find something that disproves this entirely.
But it does seem that you can essentially make a language out of anything depending on what your purpose is. I’ve done this in many different ways over the years which will soon be published here. A few I can quickly summarize:
• A Language That Changes Time Perception: This was based on our subjective perception of time and how you can use the qualia of time perception itself to communicate, kind of similar to Tenet or Arrival actually.
• A Language That Induces and Uses Dreams To Communicate: This is probably even more weird! A few things I tried with this one. The more interesting experiment was that if you have awareness during dreams and you associate enough of a symbol or “language” with that state, you can induce that dream state even when you're awake. This has been incredibly useful for thinking abstractly and flexibly about really complex ideas. I actually think the qualia of abstracting things in a sober state is already borrowed from what happens in dreams, and relates to what it actually feels like for an observer to have more neuroplasticity and less perceptual rigidity. The benefit of abstracting is that it lets you temporarily step away and remove some components which then gives you space to rebuild and reinterpret the idea.
Here’s an analogy I’ve used before that went well with others: You have some LEGO bricks attached in configuration A. How do you transform those exact same pieces into a different structure or build? You remove or abstract those bricks away and then attach those pieces in different places to form configuration B. The bricks haven’t changed but their orientation or interpretation has. All you needed was to temporarily remove those constraints so you could make a new configuration! This is probably what we do with abstract thought and perception.
That’s all for now! I’ll be writing more on these topics and some new ones soon.
- Addy | ekkolapto.org
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Make me think maybe "liberation" in some east meditation practice is partly rewiring language to induce altered state of consciousness... Maybe it's as or more important than meditation in some way. Don't know. But I wonder for some time on that matter.
Awesome endeavor. There are two big questions that you will need to eventually answer: how functionally fixed is our brain and how fixed is our linguistic system? And these are, of course, potentially mutually dependent. Have we evolved to communicate a certain way or is our current mode of communication (and at least linguistic thinking) an artifact that is malleable?
My own view is that however language got here, it's an extraordinarily rich and complex structure that is not likely to be replicated in completely different ways. The LLMs have shown us how much the inherent structure in the existing corpus of language matters (it's the whole thing!) so even if we tried to learn radically new forms of language, I very much doubt they will reach anything like the computational power of natural languages. That's like asking a kid doing a science fair project with some spare parts to recreate a nuclear submarine. That being said, we might be bale to glom on to the existing richness of lanagueg and insert additional 'words', like smells, that can bootstrap off of the existing structure. I personally believe that is a more fruitful avenie to explore. But most importantly, keep exploring!