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 […]
Michael Edward Johnson
Posts by Michael Edward Johnson
Qualia Astronomy
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 […]
A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
STV is Qualia Research Institute‘s candidate for a universal theory of valence, first proposed in Principia Qualia (2016). The following is a brief discussion of why existing theories are unsatisfying, what STV says, and key milestones so far. I. Suffering […]
Shinzen Young interview: stress, equanimity, & sensory clarity
The following is the transcript of a July 12, 2019 interview with Shinzen Young during a Supertribe retreat on the science of longevity, along with my co-hosts Ivanna Evtukhova and Anastasia Safronova. Shinzen is a noted meditation teacher and author […]
Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything
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) […]
State of the Qualia, Fall 2019
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 […]
What’s out there?
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? […]