This February I co-organized a small conference on meditation and neuroscience on Koh Phangan, Thailand; I spoke about some of the research we’re doing at QRI, with a focus on the frameworks of Predictive Coding (Karl Friston’s work) Connectome-specific harmonic […]
Michael Edward Johnson
Posts by Michael Edward Johnson
Intellectual Lineages
One of the most challenging things I’ve done lately is to chart out the research lineages I endorse for understanding my work at the Qualia Research Institute — basically, to try to enumerate the existing threads of research we’ve woven […]
Consciousness: a Cosmological Perspective (Sharpening the Simulation Argument)
The following is an excerpt from Principia Qualia, Appendix F. I put it at the very end as a special, unexpected treat for people who read everything- but as it could provide independent support for the Symmetry Theory of Valence […]
The Neuroscience of Meditation: Four Models
Background: I’m a philosopher 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 perspectives, models, and hypotheses I had […]
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. […]