Page 2 of 14
In September 2020 I gave a presentation for Johannes Kleiner’s Mathematical Consciousness Science series. The recording turned out a bit quiet; here are my slides with brief commentary (from an April 2022 perspective). Beautiful philosophy takes the messy and complicated, and […]
Note: I originally wrote this for the QRI website. It can be thought of both as context for the intuitions which generated the Symmetry Theory of Valence (original; condensed primer), and offering Noether’s work as a generally promising research thread for formalizing […]
May 2023 note: in May 2022 I stepped down from the QRI board and left the organization. I wish them well and intend on continuing to pursue my research . I have updated several parts of this document to speak only for myself. STV is a candidate for a universal theory of valence […]
Michael Edward Johnson, 11 28 19; mike@opentheory.net Context: follow up to The Neuroscience of Meditation and A Future For Neuroscience; a unification of (1) the Entropic Brain & REBUS (Carhart Harris et al. 2014; 2018; 2019), (2) the Free Energy Principle (Friston 2010), (3) […]
Qualia Research Institute’s inaugural newsletter. What is QRI trying to do? Our long term vision is to end suffering. To destroy hell, and to build tools for exploring all the bright futures which come after. To take the Buddha’s vision of 2600 years ago, support it with […]
We think of the great unknowns of cosmology in terms of physics (what was the Big Bang? Why does our physics have the constants it does? What are dark energy and dark matter?) and xenobiology (are there aliens out there? What might they be like? Why haven’t we seen any?). […]
Andrés and I were interviewed by the Future of Life Institute (FLI) for their AI alignment podcast back in May. I thought Lucas's questions were excellent and the whole interview turned out very well. https://soundcloud.com/futureoflife/on consciousness qualia and meaning with […]
On weak vs strong dual aspect monism Sometimes, the solutions to the hardest problems are embarrassingly simple, and all that’s lacking is a few dedicated people actually trying to solve things. I often feel this way about formalizing consciousness. Thus far, I’ve largely […]
I had the pleasure of being on Allen Saakyan's The Simulation show along with my colleague Andrés. Very nice interview format, looking forward to the next round. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1whV7Yher0 Adam Ford also interviewed me about the Templeton Foundation's new […]
This February I co organized a small conference on meditation and neuroscience on Koh Phangan, Thailand; I spoke about some of the research we're doing at QRI, with a focus on the frameworks of Predictive Coding (Karl Friston's work) Connectome specific harmonic waves (Selen […]
