Autonomous entity

Within the psychonautic community and DMT users in particular, autonomous entities are commonly viewed as one of the most captivating aspects of the psychedelic experience. They are often shrouded in esoteric mystery, to the point that a significant portion of the people who encounter them will go as far as speculating (or even asserting) that these experiences are not simply fabrications of the mind but rather beings from another world that exist independently of the human brain. This is a viewpoint that was further popularized by the likes of Terrence McKenna, who famously theorised that the “machine elves” he encountered under the influence of DMT were either extraterrestrial in nature, interdimensional beings from a higher plane of existence, time-traveling humans from the future, or an arcology of souls that includes both our ancestors and those who have yet to be born.

As far as I can tell, the most common reasonings behind this viewpoint are that the experience of encountering these entities is often interpreted as feeling more realistic and well defined than that of any sober experience the person has ever had. Alongside this, there is often a sense that the encounter itself is so incomprehensibly complex and otherworldly that there is simply no possible way that the human brain could generate such an experience on its own. In regards to this particular notion, it is then often asserted that consciousness must be an antenna of sorts that receives either all or some of its subjective experiences from that of an unknown interdimensional source. Furthermore, the source of this received input is sometimes said to be adjustable depending on the person’s brain state, with substances such as psychedelics simply tuning our consciousness into the analogous equivalent of a different radio station or TV channel. This is an idea that was once again further popularised by Terence Mckenna, who was famously quoted as saying: “I don’t believe consciousness is generated in the brain any more than television programs are made inside my TV. The box is too small.”

While I can personally empathise with the reasons that some people may be drawn into these conclusions after the often earth-shattering experience of a DMT trip or other high-level psychedelic experience, I do not personally believe that autonomous entities are anything more than profound but ultimately hallucinated products of the subconscious mind. Instead, I am quite sure that they are simply the psychedelic equivalent of the various characters and beings that most people commonly encounter within their dreams. Although it could be argued that autonomous entities are too characteristically different from that of dream characters to possibly be a result of the same neurological processes, I think that these differences in their appearance and behaviour are largely the result of the many other psychedelic effects that are simultaneously occurring during these encounters. The most notable one is geometry, which causes the hallucination to be comprised of the otherworldly shapes and patterns that provide autonomous entities with their distinctly “hyperspatial” aesthetic. Alongside of this, various other subjective effects such as synaesthesia, machinescapes, recursion, time distortion, and transpersonal states can all potentially synergise into an experience that is easy to misinterpret as something occurring outside of the human mind.

On a less important note, I also think it’s interesting to consider that the leveling system for communication styles that’s listed above can not only be applied to autonomous entities but can also be applied to the experience of dream characters without any necessary modifications to its wordings. This was completely unintentional and is, in my opinion, not a coincidence.

If autonomous entities were truly something that exists beyond the human mind, there would likely be at least a single verifiable case of them conveying information to a person that they did not already know or could not have come to the conclusion of within that moment. This would also likely be testable to some degree, which has led me, my wife, and my close friends to casually experiment with asking DMT entities a variety of questions over the years. These questions have included math problems, metaphysical questions, philosophical questions, and queries pertaining to their general nature as beings inhabiting their particular world. However, each attempt at doing so has resulted in the entities simply ignoring the question, arrogantly scoffing at the absurdity of us asking them such a trivial thing, or replying with vague ambiguous wording that the person’s own mind could have easily come up with. This has even been the case when the entities are presenting themselves as vastly more complex, knowledgeable, and powerful than the humans that they are interacting with.

However, while I do believe that autonomous entities are a result of a similar process to that of dream characters, I do not want to be reductive and downplay the often overwhelmingly profound nature of this experience. For example, within the moment that entities are presenting themselves, I believe that to varying degrees, they are genuinely conscious agents that the brain is simulating alongside our own. It does not seem unreasonable to me that if the brain can simulate one conscious agent during everyday sobriety, that in certain extenuating circumstances, such as mental illnesses, dream states, and hallucinogenic experiences, it could also temporarily allocate resources into simultaneously simulating other conscious agents.

Many autonomous entities would pass the Turing test if interviewed. I find this particularly fascinating in conjunction with the knowledge that they also commonly present themselves as representative embodiments of various aspects of the subconscious mind. These aspects can include things such as: facets of our personality, emotions, neurological processes, past experiences, and specific concepts. Although I may well be wrong, this suggests to me that at least to some extent, this experience may therefore allow people to potentially interact and communicate with facets of their consciousness in a manner that would otherwise be entirely impossible without the use of hallucinogenic substances.