Xervious

We dealt with many ketamine patients at the hospital I trained at. Our former chair of Neurology was a pioneer in this field but he retired a year ago. The several patients i have met swear by it for their RSD/CRPS.

https://www.drexelmed.edu/Home/AboutOurFaculty/RobertSchwartzman.aspx

I was working the ICU so I was only a peripheral part of their management which was mostly done by Neurology residents. The few I have spoke to stated it was as if their debilitating pain was suddenly resolved for up to months at a time. I never really got to dig into the effects it may have had from a mental/psychedelic standpoint however. I would have liked to though but time for that kind of conversation is very scarce as a resident.

I think you're right in the sense that a chemical modality is most likely to provide the penetration into the wetware that may allow for the hallucinatory state to begin with - hadn't thought of that. Probably a "sum is greater than the parts" kind of reaction involving the psychedelic leading to the hallucinatory state. It would require much more than we currently know about the brain's reaction to these substances in vivo though (think like serotonin receptor reactions and whatever cascades they trigger that ultimately affect our state of consciousness on a macro level, etc). Although this is a difficult problem to tackle, I think the consciousness one is harder to tackle. That would involve looking at many case reports involving lobotomies, neurodegenerative diseases, anatomical anomalies in the brain and trying to piece the empirical data obtained into a unifying theory and only after that trying to test it out. Lots of ethical barriers to that, I'm afraid.

P.S. - I'm an internal medicine doc fresh out of residency who had some med school friends who were deeply interested in this kind of stuff. I was also a chemistry nerd. This is a good topic that really needs further exploration and I'm glad you're working on this. It sounds fun!

You'd have to consider points of input/entry for this AI though. An AI should be able to trip, but who says lsd will cause this to happen? Maybe some other input/chemical/stimulus may be needed unless it is specifically modeled to be like a human ai. Just pointing out another layer of complexity here.

I'd recommend browsing through Niall (Jock) McLaren's work into the mind as more of a program/ghost (in contrast to a biophysical model for how the brain works, think itd be interesting to approach your work from both angles)