VR models of death and psychedelics: An un-collapsed high-entropy aesthetic paradigm for design beyond day-to-day phenomenology
August 31, 2023 David Glowacki preprint
Near-death experiences (NDEs) and psychedelic drug experiences (YDEs) both dissolve ordinary space-time distinctions and foster a sense of unity, and they can reduce death anxiety. The authors previously showed that multi-person virtual reality experiences (VREs) using a 'numadelic' aesthetic—representing bodies as light energy rather than material objects—produce psychometric results similar to YDEs. This article explains the aesthetic's origins in NDE accounts and proposes a theoretical framework based on predictive coding and physics concepts. The framework has two axes: 'structural specificity' and 'symbolic rigidity'. Most photorealistic VREs have high values on both, collapsing imaginative potential into a low-entropy space. Numadelic aesthetics, with low structural specificity and low symbolic rigidity, create an expansive high-entropy space for endogenous insights, explaining previous experimental findings and suggesting ways to model NDEs to address death anxiety.