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One of the most challenging things I've done lately is to chart out the research lineages I endorse for understanding my work at the Qualia Research Institute — basically, to try to enumerate the existing threads of research we've woven together to create our unique approach. […]
The following is an excerpt from Principia Qualia, Appendix F. I put it at the very end as a special, unexpected treat for people who read everything but as it could provide independent support for the Symmetry Theory of Valence (STV), it deserves scrutiny. Essentially, the […]
Background: I’m a philosopher working on the intersection of neuroscience and phenomenology. As part of this research and to develop my practice, I recently did a 7 day vipassana meditation retreat. The following are some perspectives, models, and hypotheses I had on how some of […]
Adam Ford recently posted some bits from an interview we did a while back an excerpt from part 1: Perhaps the clearest and most important ethical view I have is that [consequentialist] ethics must ultimately “compile” to physics. What we value and what we disvalue must […]
My colleague Andrés recently wrote about various theories of personal identity, and how a lack of a clear consensus here poses a challenge to ethics. From his post: Personal Identity: Closed, Empty, Open In Ontological Qualia I discussed three core views about personal identity. […]
I think all neuroscientists, all philosophers, all psychologists, and all psychiatrists should basically drop whatever they’re doing and learn Selen Atasoy’s “connectome specific harmonic wave” (CSHW) framework. It’s going to be the backbone of how we understand the brain and […]
Chatting with people at a recent conference on consciousness (TSC2018), I had the feeling of strolling through an alchemist’s convention: lots of optimistic energy & clever ideas, but also a strong sense that the field is pre scientific. In short, there was a lot of overly […]
Are humans worthy of colonizing the universe? Are we particularly awesome and benevolent, moreso than a random mind sampled from mindspace? The following isn’t a full argument, but I want to point toward two things humans seem to do: First, our brains are set up in such a way […]
I. Philosophy has lost much of its energy, focus, and glamor in our modern era. What happened? I'd suggest that five things went wrong: 1. Historical illegibility. Historically, ‘philosophy’ is what you do when you don’t know what to do. This naturally involves a lot of error. […]
The following is my considered evaluation of the Foundational Research Institute, circa July 2017. I discuss its goal, where I foresee things going wrong with how it defines suffering, and what it could do to avoid these problems. TL;DR version : functionalism ("consciousness is […]
