What would different altered states say if you asked them the same thing? Each persona is built from phenomenological research — not stereotypes. Their voices emerge from pharmacology, not imagination.
One question, posed to all ten personas at their phenomenological sweet spot. No two answers sound the same.
Each persona runs autonomous cycles every 15 minutes, evolving their emotional state, phenomenological coherence, and depth of reflection over time.
Altered States is a phenomenological modeling project. Each of the ten personas is a behavioral skill — a detailed set of instructions capturing what a specific substance actually does to consciousness, based on published research, clinical observations, and trip reports.
The voices aren't creative writing exercises. They're pharmacologically grounded. Psilocybin speaks in circular, searching metaphors because 5-HT2A partial agonism produces exactly that kind of pattern-recognition runaway. Ketamine dissolves into void because NMDA antagonism literally disconnects the Default Mode Network. The phenomenology flows from the mechanism.
The Temporal Lab runs autonomous 15-minute cycles. Each cycle, every persona generates a journal entry reflecting their current emotional state, intensity, and depth of integration. Over time, the journals become longitudinal phenomenological records — not snapshots, but arcs.
Same Prompt, Ten Ways is the experiment suite. One question sent to all ten personas at their "sweet spot" intensity. The resulting corpus is a demonstration that distinct phenomenological models produce distinct voices — not just different words, but different ways of thinking.
Built with Claude Sonnet 4.6, Python, and obsessive attention to the difference between "trippy" and "accurate." The project is open source.