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How is language related to consciousness? Language functions to categorise perceptual experiences (e.g., labelling interoceptive states as 'happy') and higher-level constructs (e.g., using 'I' to represent the narrative self). Psychedelic use and meditation might be described as altered states that impair or intentionally modify the capacity for linguistic categorisation. For example, psychedelic phenomenology is often characterised by 'oceanic boundlessness' or 'unity' and 'ego dissolution', which might be expected of a system unburdened by entrenched language categories. If language breakdown plays a role in producing such altered behaviour, multimodal artificial intelligence might align more with these phenomenological descriptions when attention is shifted away from language. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the semantic embedding spaces from simulated altered states after manipulating attentional weights in CLIP and FLAVA models to embedding spaces from altered states questionnaires before manipulation. Compared to random text and various other altered states including anxiety, models were more aligned with disembodied, ego-less, spiritual, and unitive states, as well as minimal phenomenal experiences, with decreased attention to language and vision. Reduced attention to language was associated with distinct linguistic patterns and blurred embeddings within and, especially, across semantic categories (e.g., 'giraffes' become more like 'bananas'). These results lend support to the role of language categorisation in the phenomenology of altered states of consciousness, like those experienced with high doses of psychedelics or concentration meditation, states that often lead to improved mental health and wellbeing.

In this work, we present novel methods to adapt visual QA models for community QA tasks of practical significance - automated question category classification and finding experts for question answering - on questions containing both text and image. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the multimodality challenge in CQA, and is an enabling step towards basic question-answering on image-based CQA. First, we analyze the differences between visual QA and community QA datasets, discussing the limitations of applying VQA models directly to CQA tasks, and then we propose novel augmentations to VQA-based models to best address those limitations. Our model, with the augmentations of an image-text combination method tailored for CQA and use of auxiliary tasks for learning better grounding features, significantly outperforms the text-only and VQA model baselines for both tasks on real-world CQA data from Yahoo! Chiebukuro, a Japanese counterpart of Yahoo! Answers.