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We are approaching a point where anyone will be able to experience a fully immersive VR ego death. Will it ever be a sufficient substitution?

What if you were to experience it when you are very young? Would it be helpful for living in our future? Or will it just make people more depressed?

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I think it’s possible without a neural implant. Certainly would require a more seamless immersive tech.

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And you are kinda getting at my question. If it’s only close to ego death and not 100%, would it just wind up making people depressed later on?

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You would not experience ego death through VR. It is not some series of images that are static; each ego death I've had, each breakthrough, each trip, each substance -- all of them were unique in their own way, from the environment to my mindset to its meaning. Ego death is a personal growth. It's a journey that cannot be recreated by simply imprinting what someone else experienced visually... or even with adding other "immersive tech" because of how it shapes you as a person. Essentially, only the concept of a "neural implant" could achieve this, because it would have to actually impact your consciousness in a more meaningful way than just displaying images/giving other sensory feedback.

Also I don't think it would make you depressed -- if you'd just be experiencing it through VR, even VR with added sensory feedback, it would just be an interesting thing to see and you wouldn't really understand it fully.

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Thanks for info!!

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Aug 8·edited Aug 8

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will test your will.

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How people visually think of ego death. The image of EVO death is very creative. I really love these images. This art of image is outstanding. I share my art with my jacket. I read your articles and these are very helpful for me.

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OK it was addressed. Ego death isn't the outcome of a sequence of visual input. Were that true, the revolution would be televised.

Badumpum

I hope you continue to use your clout to produce data like this. You are reading my mind.

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An interesting complementary experiment to this would be taking text descriptions of ego death, across cultures and points of time (shamanistic rites, sufi poetry, doors of perception etc), and chucking it into midjourney to see what comes out and how similar or different they are.

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Jan 7, 2023·edited Jan 7, 2023

Fascinating idea, and results.

fwiw the 85% correlation is not surprising to me. Partly because the images can be split between those that interpret ego-death as bliss and overwhelm, and those that interpret it as hellish. There's cultural awareness that it's overall a fulfilling state in most cases, and so I'd be surprised if the correlation was low.

Also, since altered states of consciousness are not a binary (Mystics talk about multiple such levels eg Sufis have 7 levels give or take), practitioners of meditation, mystical traditions, perhaps even marathoners or dancers, can have a flavor of what's at the end of the road, without having experienced it (yet). Especially in the spiritual case, where ego-death is the belabored outcome of years of devotional practices that symbolically chew away at your ego armor bit by bit.

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Absolutely beautiful! Thanks for sharing

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I wonder how else someone could experience ego death, other than psychedelics or meditation. For example, perhaps head trauma could trigger it, or brain surgery, a stroke that halts blood supply to certain parts of the brain, or some other kind of semi-dissociative trauma experienced from a life experience. I read Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl a couple years ago about his experience as a prisoner at Auschwitz. If you haven’t read it yet, you totally should, it’s extraordinary. Frankl was a psychiatrist. Living in such insane conditions, but with his academic background; his thinking, rationale and insights are profound. Would be interesting to know if others thought he had undergone ego death.

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A Satori experience is neither of those.

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there are ways:

https://thingsiwasntsupposedtotalkabout.com/2022/08/11/one-time-limerence-or-touch-of-divinity/

high positive valence (extreme wellbeing or a blissful feeling) is described by high symmetry of an experience (glossary developed by Qualia Research Institute) in mathematical formalism! there are many essays on their web that delve extremely deep into this.

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Very neat. :)

Out of curiosity: How much time did you spend on generating the images? Did you automate (some of) the process or do you have any nifty tricks for Midjourney?

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