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 of sensory type […]
Michael Edward Johnson
Posts by Michael Edward Johnson
New Whitepaper: Qualia Formalism and a Symmetry Theory of Valence
New whitepaper: Qualia Formalism and a Symmetry Theory of Valence It’s been almost eight years since the release of my book on consciousness, Principia Qualia. PQ was a massive undertaking spread across almost seven years and 20+ complete rewrites; I started […]
Autism as a disorder of dimensionality
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 […]
AI x Crypto x Constitutions
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 […]
AIs aren’t conscious; computers are
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 […]
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 […]
A Primer on the Symmetry Theory of Valence
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 […]