Background: I’m a philosopher at the Qualia Research Institute (QRI) 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 […]
Michael Edward Johnson
Posts by Michael Edward Johnson
Interview & podcast
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 […]
A new theory of Open Individualism
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 […]
A Future for Neuroscience
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 mind […]
Seed ontologies
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 […]
Why are humans good?
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 […]
Rescuing Philosophy
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. […]
Against functionalism: why I think the Foundational Research Institute should rethink its approach
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: […]
Taking ‘brain waves’ seriously: Neuroacoustics
Our research collective has been doing a lot of work touching on brain dynamics, resonance, and symmetry: see here and here (video). Increasingly, a new implicit working ontology I’m calling ‘Neuroacoustics’ is taking shape. This is a quick outline of that new […]
Why we seek out pleasure: the Symmetry Theory of Homeostatic Regulation
Why do we seek out pleasure- what Freud called the “pleasure principle“? More accurately: why do we seem to seek out pleasure most of the time, but occasionally seem indifferent to it or even averse to it, e.g. in conditions such […]