Partial origin story of STV and Principia Qualia

Brief partial origin story:

When I was 20 I had the very strong intuition that “music is to emotion as language is to thought.” I wanted to understand depression and valence and thought music theory was the key to cracking some code.

Postmodernism and most of neuroscience and philosophy have been pretty skeptical on the fundamental possibility of reverse-engineering valence, and running across other valence realists — in particular @webmasterdave’s work and A.G.E.’s brilliant enthusiasm was great for morale.

The Hedonistic Imperative’s focus on finding the biochemical/molecular signature of bliss seemed cool but not precisely what I was going after, so I kept looking. I came to believe that in order to solve valence (“what makes some things feel better than others?”), you have to clarify a great deal about consciousness itself. But I didn’t like how philosophy was approaching consciousness. Didn’t see a good place to stand

Finding Giulio Tononi’s IIT (Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness) was a tectonic shift for me — my sense was that musical harmony in the brain feels good, but it felt very difficult to calculate this. Tononi’s focus on information theory, emergence, and especially formalism was a really great antidote to this confusion. I.e. if you have a perfect mathematical representation of an experience, then you can evaluate *this thing* for harmony. There were some famous critiques of IIT’s math, but I was less interested in whether the math was right than the idea that IIT’s goal constituted a great place to put knowledge about qualia (in particular, valence).

Meanwhile I had been slowly shifting from “emotion has musical syntax” to the more general frame of mathematical symmetry. There’s a terrible amount of complexity in both music and emotion, and pure tonal harmony doesn’t make us orgasm on the spot, but maybe these things are more factors of the brain’s evolved complexity… and the actual fundamental laws of consciousness are radically simple. The more I dug into how central symmetry is to math, physics, and music, the more convinced I was that this was the future of valence (and consciousness) research.

Telling this story now makes it sound pretty simple but there was a great deal of flailing around — PQ took ~7 years and ~20 full rewrites and I still feel a little overwhelmed by that tbh — writing a long document of technical philosophy really takes a lot of RAM. At the time I said “never again” but we’ll see

On the tail end of writing PQ I got to thinking about effectiveness and how to spread and develop the formal study of consciousness and thought it would be great to start an institute. I did an A/B/C test for institute names at EA Global, where I made three t-shirts and wore one each day. Qualia Research Institute got the most positive comments — so we started to meme that into existence. Part of my vision was to test and generate a breadcrumb trail to the Symmetry Theory of Valence; better philosophy should inspire better neuroscience, better neuroscience should inspire better neurotech. People who liked the outputs could look at their upstream generators. (FWIW I left QRI in May 2022 and have zero affiliation with the institute now. I’m interested in seeding new institutes.)

I can only speak for myself, but a lot of my focus has been understanding what kind of thing humans are, and leveraging STV to clarify this story. E.g. if STV is true, this implies the brain self-organizes around symmetry/resonance/harmonics, and we can start to reapply music theory to the brain (I think @stalkerofmusik is thoughtfully interested in this).

There are other parts to the story that are fairly amusing in retrospect — e.g. I got interested in meditation through dating a girl who was seriously pursuing classical Buddhist enlightenment, and wrote Neural Annealing partly as a romantic gift (narrator: it didn’t work.)

Anyway that’s a bit from my origin story; also see https://opentheory.net/2019/03/intellectual-lineages/