Virtual Reality for Non-Ordinary Consciousness

This paper introduces the Morphological Participation Index (MPI), a substrate-agnostic framework for estimating whether a system’s morphology can plausibly support strongly integrated, coherence-sensitive, trace-rich, and temporally scaffolded dynamics. “Participation” refers to the degree to which morphology actively contributes to, constrains, and scaffolds the integrated, trace-bearing, and temporally organized dynamics available to a system. The immediate motivation comes from two adjoining lines of work: spectral approaches to resistance to decomposition, and recent proposals by Schneider and Bailey concerning prototime, quantum Darwinist stabilization, and the selective emergence of conscious basins [2,16–18]. MPI evaluates the structural conditions under which a system might sustain unified dynamics, stable internal traces, and organized temporal regimes, without presupposing a human, cortical, or even purely biological baseline. Formally, MPI represents morphology as a weighted constraint hypergraph [4,24], or as an explicit multilayer family of such hypergraphs [11], and returns a score bundle rather than a single undifferentiated scalar. The core bundle consists of six components: integration geometry, multiscale nesting, resonant-mode support, trace geometry, temporal scaffolding, and robustness. An optional contextual patchiness module is provided for domains in which a defensible predicate family is available. The integration component is anchored in a balanced-cut spectral formalism: it uses sweep cuts over the Fiedler vector of the normalized Laplacian rather than raw minimum-cut objectives or simple sign cuts, thereby avoiding familiar degeneracies and linking MPI directly to contemporary spectral proxies for resistance to informational decomposition [6,19,23]. The principal contribution of MPI is a structural profile: seam maps, multiscale partitions, trace-capacity maps, temporal breadth measures, and perturbation-stability diagnostics, in a form that remains useful across biological, artificial, collective, and other nonstandard architectures. More generally, the same diagnostics may be useful in AI alignment. Seam topology, trace geometry, and temporal scaffolding provide a way to screen for architectures that may be difficult to audit, prone to distributed lock-in, or vulnerable to hidden coordination through narrow bottlenecks or persistent externalized traces. MPI can also serve as a screening tool for artificial systems whose structural profile merits closer safety and oversight attention.

The accelerating pace of development in artificial intelligence invokes fundamental questions regarding what constitutes a mind. Considering that AI has sprung from the cognitive enterprise of humanity and that there is the likely prospect of constructing some form of 'global brain', examining such questions may help to refine the conversation around AI and understand what might constitute a global brain. We draw on recent work in philosophy of mind and cognition—viewing mind as being representational and/or enactive in nature and function—, and hone in on insights that practices and accounts of non-ordinary consciousness (NOC) lend to this discussion. We discuss the concept of a "mindplex", which is comprised of individual constituents (humans and/or AI's) and an encompassing collective global brain that both concurrently possess cohesive 'theatres of consciousness'. We posit that these theatres of an AGI global brain have correspondences with key aspects of the inherent nature of consciousness and reality (as understood outside the AI context) as gleaned through NOC. We propose that these considerations are poised to strongly contribute to the construction of mindplexes by reflecting in their functional architecture the nature of mind and engineering mindplexes in tandem with ethical and value-alignment considerations. Furthermore, we propose the adoption and implementation of AI on distributed ledger technology (DLT), such as blockchain, which would provide support for the evolution of a global brain mindplex.