Bohemia, August 2026, Vladimir Korbel, MSc.

Abstract

This paper proposes human augmentation as a recursive relationship between consciousness, imagination, and manifestation. Possibilities arise within conscious experience, some become externalized as artifacts, and those artifacts subsequently alter the cognitive environment from which further possibilities emerge. We hypothesize that individual consciousness may represent a localized perspective within a more encompassing whole. Expansion of consciousness would therefore mean not simply modifying consciousness, but expanding beyond an exclusively self-bounded perspective. Three complementary models illuminate this proposition: a tree analogy introduced here; Richard Alpert/Ram Dass’s accounts of perspective and progressively less exclusive identification; and Stanford designer Rolf Faste’s model of creativity extending beyond conventional cognitive boundaries. Contemporary psychedelic research provides empirically measurable correlates of aspects of this phenomenology, including connectedness and insight, while generative artificial intelligence introduces a complementary form of augmentation by externally generating candidate possibilities that can enter and extend human imagination. We propose that the resulting challenge is not merely augmentation of intelligence, but augmentation of the perspective from which intelligence is exercised — a possible basis for wisdom.

1. From Imagination to Manifestation

Human beings are an augmenting species. Tools extend physical capability; language and writing externalize communication and memory; computers extend information processing.

Douglas Engelbart, an American engineer and interactive-computing pioneer at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), treated artifacts and users as an integrated system. In Augmenting Human Intellect, Engelbart (1962) defined augmentation as increasing people’s capacity to comprehend complex problems and derive solutions through humans, language, methods, and artifacts. This anticipates later accounts of extended cognition (Clark & Chalmers, 1998).

Yet augmentation begins before an artifact exists. A possibility becomes representation, design, and potentially material or symbolic reality. Once manifested, the artifact changes the environment within which subsequent cognition occurs.

We therefore propose a recursive augmentation loop: consciousness → imagination/possibility → representation → manifestation → artifact → augmented capability → new possibilities → consciousness.

Artifacts recursively transform what can subsequently be imagined. What determines the boundaries of the possibility-space available to imagination?

2. Expansion of Perspective

Our hypothesis distinguishes acquiring more consciousness from experiencing consciousness through a more encompassing perspective. Three analogies articulate this distinction.

The first is the tree analogy proposed in this paper. An apple represents ordinary localized self-identification: I am this apple. Expansion does not require the apple to disappear. Rather, identification expands from apple → branch → tree. The local perspective remains but is simultaneously experienced as part of — and inseparable from — the larger organism. We hypothesize that individual consciousness may similarly constitute a localized perspective within a more encompassing consciousness, with the widest possible perspective encompassing the totality of existence itself.

The second perspective comes from Richard Alpert (1931–2019), later known as Ram Dass, an American psychologist who taught at Harvard and participated in early psychedelic research with Timothy Leary. In a 1967 television interview, Alpert described psychedelic expansion through the metaphor of a person who had spent an entire life in a village within a valley. Led up a hill, the person could suddenly see the village as a whole; from a wider vantage point, other villages and their activities also came into view. On returning to the valley, the village itself was unchanged, but the perspective from which it was understood had changed. The metaphor therefore presents expansion not as the disappearance of the local perspective, but as its contextualization within a more encompassing one (Alpert, 1967).

The third comes from Rolf Faste (1943–2003), a Stanford professor of mechanical engineering and director of the Product Design Program, whose work integrated engineering, visual thinking, and creativity. In A Visual Essay on Invention and Innovation, Faste (1995) represented the ideas available to a person, organization, culture, or humanity as a poached egg. Its yolk contains conventional ideas and its white unconventional possibilities. Crucially, Faste places multiple eggs on a larger field: different people, organizations, or cultures can have different yolks, so an idea conventional in one domain may be novel in another. Creativity can therefore involve reaching beyond one’s own conceptual boundary and borrowing from another domain. Through analogy and metaphor, an existing problem can be connected with an idea from elsewhere, creating what Faste calls ‘constructive strain.’ Beyond and between the eggs lies a field of ‘undreamed ideas,’ although Faste explicitly acknowledges that we cannot know whether such possibilities exist before they are conceived.

Faste subsequently connected creativity with contemplative practice. Meditation, in his account, quiets conventional mental chatter and returns the individual toward ‘pre-conventional awareness.’ His diagrams progressively open the bounded egg into its environment, culminating in a state in which the person ‘becomes one with the environment’ and the center gains access to a larger range of possible ideas (Faste, 1995).

The models are not equivalent theories, yet they share a structural movement: tree — apple → branch → tree; Ram Dass — local identification → wider perspective; Faste — one yolk → other conceptual domains → wider field. In our interpretation, Faste’s eggs can be understood as localized realms within a larger possibility-space: expansion may occur by moving beyond one’s own conventions, encountering perspectives available in another realm, or opening toward possibilities not yet represented in any existing domain. Together the three models motivate our hypothesis: as perspective expands beyond its habitual local boundary, the possibilities available to imagination may expand with it.

3. Fission and Expansion

A provocative historical juxtaposition occurred during the 1940s. Albert Hofmann synthesized LSD-25 in 1938 and unexpectedly discovered its psychedelic effects in 1943 (Hofmann, 1980). During the same period, the Manhattan Project harnessed nuclear fission, culminating in the first atomic explosion in 1945.

These unrelated developments provide a useful philosophical contrast: one demonstrated humanity’s increasing capacity to manipulate matter; the other revealed the possibility of radically transforming the experienced boundaries of mind.

The atomic bomb illustrates a problem intrinsic to augmentation: greater capacity to manifest possibilities does not necessarily bring greater wisdom about which should become reality.

Psychedelic experience raises a complementary question: how fixed are the boundaries through which humans experience self and world? Contemporary psychedelic science cannot demonstrate that consciousness is ontologically one. It can, however, investigate phenomena including ego dissolution, connectedness, self-other overlap, and experiences of unity. Such constructs allow aspects of what has historically been called expansion of consciousness to become empirically tractable without confusing phenomenological experience with metaphysical proof.

4. Engelbart and an Unconventional Enclave at SRI

In the predominantly conventional research environment of Stanford Research Institute (SRI), Douglas Engelbart’s Augmentation Research Center represented an unusually experimental enclave. Engelbart sought not simply to automate work but to augment human intellect by transforming how people conceptualized, organized, and collaboratively manipulated information. His group’s 1968 demonstration integrated the mouse, hypertext, interactive text, and networked collaboration (Engelbart & English, 1968).

The culture around Engelbart’s group also intersected with the emerging Bay Area counterculture and psychedelic exploration of human potential. Psychedelic research was not itself an ARC program, but researchers in the closely connected intellectual milieu were investigating whether altered states could enhance creative problem-solving. Harman, McKim, Mogar, Fadiman, and Stolaroff’s pilot study, for example, examined LSD and mescaline in professionally employed participants and reported tentative effects on creative problem-solving, while acknowledging the preliminary nature of the findings (Harman et al., 1966).

What emerged was a remarkable proximity between two approaches to human augmentation: external augmentation through tools that expand what humans can represent and manipulate, and internal expansion of the experiential conditions from which new possibilities may arise. The distinction was conceptual rather than institutional, but in Engelbart’s unconventional environment the two worlds came unusually close together.

5. Divergence and Convergence: Emergence of Artificial Intelligence

The trajectories subsequently diverged: computer augmentation accelerated, while psychedelic research contracted before re-emerging decades later within mainstream neuroscience and clinical research. Contemporary models such as REBUS propose that psychedelics relax the precision of high-level priors, potentially allowing normally constrained information to exert greater influence on cognition; this remains a theoretical model rather than a settled account of psychedelic action (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019).

Today the trajectories are converging again, but the technological side has fundamentally changed. Engelbart’s computer primarily enabled humans to manipulate and externalize representations. Generative AI can produce candidate representations its human user has not explicitly conceived. This implies computational generativity, not consciousness or imagination in the phenomenological sense.

Faste’s creativity model becomes unexpectedly relevant. He characterized creative thinking as nonlinear connection-making between apparently unrelated things and emphasized analogy and metaphor as mechanisms for bringing material from another conceptual domain into an existing problem (Faste, 1995).

Generative AI can perform something functionally analogous at enormous informational scale, exposing a user to representations beyond the user’s habitual conceptual ‘yolk.’ In this sense, AI can bridge domains externally, while psychedelic or contemplative expansion may loosen the experienced boundary of the localized perspective internally. Experimental comparisons show that current systems can generate highly original responses on divergent-thinking tasks, while cautioning against equating task performance with human creativity as a whole (Hubert et al., 2024; Koivisto & Grassini, 2023).

Consequently, the loop becomes: human possibility → AI generation → new representation → human evaluation → modified imagination → manifestation. The artifact participates not only in executing ideas but in generating candidate possibilities.

6. From Intelligence to Wisdom

We propose that human augmentation operates recursively between consciousness, imagination, and manifestation. Our stronger ontological hypothesis is that individual consciousness may represent a localized perspective within a more encompassing consciousness. Expansion would consequently mean not producing more consciousness but loosening the exclusivity of the localized perspective — from apple toward tree, or from a local frame toward a larger whole.

This hypothesis is not established empirically: an experience of oneness does not by itself establish that reality is ontologically one. Nevertheless, psychedelic science can examine phenomenological features consistent with expansion of perspective. Recent reviews describe psychedelic-associated changes in social and natural connectedness through mechanisms including ego dissolution and self-other overlap (Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2025). More directly, a systematic review of 98 studies found psychedelic-catalysed insight — defined as a change in understanding or perspective experienced as true or reliable — to be significantly greater than placebo in 43 of 46 comparisons; 25 of 29 studies examining outcomes found insight associated with therapeutic improvement (Kugel et al., 2025). These findings do not establish ‘wisdom’ as a pharmacological effect, but they provide an empirical basis for asking whether expansion of perspective can contribute to wiser judgment.

The distinction matters. Intelligence concerns the capacity to understand, generate, predict, and act upon possibilities. Wisdom, as used here, concerns the capacity to understand knowledge within a wider context of relationships, consequences, and values, and to judge how that knowledge should be applied. From the perspective of an individual apple, an action may appear advantageous because it benefits that apple. From the perspective of the tree, the same action must also be understood in relation to the branch, the other fruit, and the organism as a whole. A wider perspective therefore does not merely supply more information; it can alter what counts as a desirable outcome.

This is where psychedelics may represent a form of augmentation complementary to generative AI. AI expands the externally available field of candidate possibilities. Psychedelic states may, under appropriate conditions, loosen rigid self-boundaries and catalyse insight or connectedness, potentially expanding the perspective from which those possibilities are evaluated. We therefore hypothesize: psychedelics → expanded experienced perspective → insight and connectedness → potentially wiser judgment; generative AI → expanded externally generated possibilities → increased cognitive and creative capability.

The distinction is not absolute, nor does expanded perspective guarantee wisdom: psychedelic insights may be mistaken, context matters, and subjective certainty is not truth. The narrower claim is that augmentation of perspective may complement augmentation of capability.

The atomic bomb demonstrated that extraordinary intelligence can create extraordinary capability without guaranteeing wisdom about its use. Generative AI again increases the scale and speed of possibility generation. The central problem is therefore whether the perspective governing augmented intelligence can expand with it.

Perhaps the next frontier of human augmentation is not merely to become more intelligent, but to become wise enough to determine what our augmented intelligence should be used for.

References

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