VR models of death and psychedelics: An un-collapsed high-entropy aesthetic paradigm for design beyond day-to-day phenomenology

Abstract

Near-death experiences (NDEs) enable access to dimensions of non-ordinary sensation, perception, and insight beyond the phenomenology that people typically encounter day-to-day. NDEs have a remarkable ability to quickly reduce the anxiety that people associate with death. Such dramatic benefits have inspired researchers to examine other types of experience that might serve as NDE models. For example, psychedelic drug experiences (YDEs) share similarities with NDEs: both are associated with a dissolution of conventional spatio-temporal conceptual distinctions, and a corresponding sense of connectedness and unity. Because both are notoriously difficult to capture using linguistic representations, ‘ineffability’ is often used to mark their potency. The subjective insights associated with NDEs and YDEs are thought to have a significant endogenous component, arising from ‘bottom-up’ elements of one’s psychological dynamics. Here we discuss the potential for multi-person virtual reality experiences (VREs) to serve as a model for NDEs, and address several associated design challenges: (1) Can we articulate a design paradigm for experiences in which conceptual dissolution and ‘ineffability’ are salient features? (2) How do we design experiences for which there is no reliable ‘real-world’ design reference? (3) Is it possible for ‘bottom-up’ endogenous in-sights to arise from immersive technologies which deliver ‘top-down’ exogenous content? To address these questions, we elaborate a 2-axis aesthetic framework grounded in matter-energy ideas from physics and predictive coding models of cognition. One axis tracks ‘structural specificity’, and the other tracks ‘symbolic rigidity’. The vast majority of VRE content is characterized by high structural specificity and high symbolic rigidity, emphasizing photorealistic fidelity to content derived from ‘day-to-day’ phenomenology. Such approaches are entrenched in a classical aesthetic, collapsing imaginative potential into a relatively limited low-entropy space of ‘exogenous’ possibility, unlike the high-entropy brain states associated with YDEs and NDEs. In contrast, aesthetic domains characterized by low structural specificity and low symbolic rigidity are less concerned with fidelity to phenomenological priors, and offer an expansive, ‘un-collapsed’ high-entropy possibility space for imaginative meaning making and corresponding endogenous insights to arise. The ‘numadelic’ aesthetic represents such an un-collapsed approach: it is inspired by NDE accounts which describe bodies appearing as light energy rather than physical objects with well-defined appearances and boundaries. The ideas outlined herein offer an explanation of recent results showing that multi-person VREs within the numadelic aesthetic give results comparable to YDEs on key metrics, and highlight the potential of such approaches in developing NDE models.