Michael Edward Johnson, Symmetry Institute. 12 June, 2024. Crossposted from the Seeds of Science journal; available as a PDF there. Abstract: How can we create a container for knowledge about AI consciousness? This work introduces a new framework based on physicalism, […]
Some people have an amazingly positive energetic presence, such that you feel yourself better just being near them. Better as in happier, and better as in easier to be the person you wish to be. There are many different ‘flavors’ of this: I’ve noticed it’s easier to feel at […]
I. There’s a traditional joke among physicists about “spherical cows”: Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, […]
A unification of Buddhist phenomenology, active inference, and physical reflexes; a practical theory of suffering, tension, and liberation; the core mechanism for medium term memory and Bayesian updating; a clinically useful dimension of variation and dysfunction; a description […]
Read the converted full web text of Qualia Formalism and a Symmetry Theory of Valence . New whitepaper: Qualia Formalism and a Symmetry Theory of Valence It’s been almost seven years since the release of my book on consciousness, Principia Qualia. PQ was a massive undertaking […]
Note: I was saving this for the launch of the Symmetry Institute, but given the recent discussions around REBUS/CANAL, Deep CANALs, and Neural Annealing I pushed it forward. I. Network dimensionality Lately, I’ve been thinking of the “autistic bundle of symptoms” as naturally […]
I’ve been at Vitalik Buterin’s Zuzalu co living community for the past month and the relationship between crypto and AI alignment has been a hot topic. My sense is that crypto is undergoing a crisis of faith, and also that most good futures involve a crypto that successfully […]
A friend asked me if I thought future AIs could be conscious; my answer was ‘kind of, but not in the way most people think.’ I. Computations don’t have objective existence: Imagine you have a bag of popcorn. Now shake it. There will exist a certain ad hoc interpretation of bag […]
I. Better SETI through qualia My general thesis for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — looking for alien signals in the sky) has been that anything we can infer about the likely telos of alien civilizations will greatly help us search for them. If we understand […]
Context: I co founded a philosophy and neuroscience research institute and designed the high level logic for several neurotech devices. An underappreciated aspect of neurotech is we lack a strong “ownable computing” model, particularly for implanted systems. By “ownable […]
