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 […]
Year: 2022
Qualia Astronomy & Proof of Qualia
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 […]
We need ownable neurotech
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 computing” I mean […]
It From Bit, Revisited
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, […]
Emmy Noether and the symmetry aesthetic
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 […]