Total sensory deprivation under LSD in 1971 — examining the experience through neuroscience and the Page-Wootters mechanism for emergent time
In 1971, a young Vietnam vet took an unknown dose of LSD and lost all sensory perception — not reduced, gone. What remained was consciousness in a void, where he built a spatial environment through pure intention and arrived at ethical questions about creating aware beings, decades before AI researchers faced the same problem.
This essay starts with the neuroscience explanation (thalamocortical gating failure, cortical construction from internal resources) and acknowledges it may be sufficient. It then explores connections to the Page-Wootters mechanism for emergent time, the distinction between temporal metric and topology, time as accumulation rather than flow, and consciousness as a complementary pair to the void.
Nothing is presented as proof. The questions are the point.
Full essay on Medium: https://medium.com/@wes2020007/the-void-84471bcf0961
Also available at: talking-about-ai.com