Hey everyone, welcome back to Waking Kosmos, Adrian here. Today I'm joined by Mike Johnson from the Qualia Research Institute, where they're looking at really one of the most enduring mysteries in philosophy of mind, which is how do we say anything about why it is that experiences like the red of roses, or the smell of roses, or the taste
taste of cinnamon, have their very unique ways of appearing in consciousness, what we call their
qualia. Why do we experience red as having this very specific qualia? And of course, going beyond
maybe conjuring up a kind of evolutionary explanation about the signal that the color
red might have had at different points in our evolutionary history about what's out there in
the world. But to go beyond that and talk about these very distinctive topologies of experience,
which seem to defy language. And that's really the mystery that Mike is focusing on. And he's
going to talk about a theory that he and his colleagues at the Qualia Research Institute
are exploring, which could potentially open a significant door into this space. It's called
the symmetry theory of valence.
And in this theory, the valence of an experience, which is essentially how positive we interpret an
experience to be, is a function of its internal symmetry. So Mike and his colleagues are identifying
symmetry as an important access point into this space of qualia, of experience. In the second half
of today's episode, we discuss some of Mike's broader metaphysical views, including how any
sufficiently critical theory of the qualia of experience can be used to identify the symmetry.
can be directed at anything, including cosmological phenomena like black holes and even the Big Bang.
So I hope you enjoyed today's episode as much as I did. Remember, if you're enjoying these
open-minded conversations about consciousness and reality, you can support Waking Cosmos on Patreon
and help me turn this into a full-time project. And for those of you who are already supporting
my work, thank you for your kindness and generosity. Alright, I started out today by
asking Mike, why should we care about the mystery of consciousness?
So the question is, why is consciousness such an important topic? I think it's the important topic.
I think that all questions of morality and value ultimately resolve to questions about
consciousness.
And it's kind of embarrassing that we don't actually have any really good theories in this space.
You and I met at the Tucson Science of Consciousness Conference this year,
and I think it would probably be fair to say that this is the most prestigious
consciousness conference that there is at the moment. So what did you think about the
conference this year? Did you feel like the discussion about consciousness is
moving in a positive direction?
Yeah, I think so. I think of this in terms of where on the process of turning consciousness
research from alchemy into chemistry are we. And I would say that we're still fairly close
to alchemy, but there are some tantalizing hints of maybe there are some things that
we can formalize and empirically test. The most intriguing themes at the conference for me
all formalism. So some of Giulio Tononi's grad students were there and talking about IIT.
And we can talk about what is IIT. It's a form of panpsychism, right?
Yes, yes. And it's a way of formalizing what it would feel like to be a system. And that system
can be anything. You can apply IIT to a person, a dog, a car, an alien, and you get a well-formed
So it's a very powerful approach to understanding consciousness.
And it's based on the amount of integrated information that a system is capable of having.
Yep, that's right. Brains have a lot of this sort of integrated information. There's a lot
of integration between the neurons. One way to think about integration is how much each part
of the system is causally affected by the other parts. And brains have a lot of that.
Whereas, you know, something like a chair has
very little integration between the neurons. And so it's a very powerful approach to understanding
very, very, very little. So IIT does imply panpsychism,
which would imply that everything
is at least a little bit conscious, but there would be horrendous orders of magnitude of difference between like a chair and a dog, for instance.
Right. Presumably we wouldn't identify a chair as having consciousness because it is itself not integrated. It's just kind of a collection of matter that we have a functional use for.
Right, right. There's really no functional integration in a chair.
So it's quite interesting that the general discussion about consciousness at the moment and at the highest levels of academia, we're taking this view that consciousness is something real and probably an important part of the way that the world is organized.
Yeah. I think it's slowly catching on and I think it's catching on because literally it's the only way to make progress.
That if there's something to be explained,
the correct approach to it is let's formalize this. Let's formalize this thing that we're trying to explain.
Whereas I think in years past people were more in favor of just trying to explain it away.
And in that case then formalism would be the wrong approach.
Right. So you've described yourself as a qualia formalist.
Yes. That's right.
So can you explain what that means and maybe include within that an explanation of what qualia is?
Yeah. So qualia are the components of subjective experience.
So I'm having the qualia of a little bit of pressure on my skin, a little bit of warmth from the air.
I've got some green qualia and some white qualia and so on.
And to say that I'm a qualia formalist means we should be able to precisely,
in a very,
rigorous way, we should be able to talk about what sort of sensations I'm having mathematically.
To put this in, you know, big language,
we should be able to derive a mathematical object that's isomorphic to my phenomenology.
And that just means that it represents it perfectly.
Right. And so by reducing phenomenology to a mathematical structure,
that's not a materialist move.
Not necessarily.
You're still a realist about consciousness,
but you're saying that this is the suchness of certain kinds of experience like redness and blueness.
It should be a part of an intelligible map of qualia that we can understand
and we should be able to expect that mathematics would be a place in which we could explore qualia.
Right. And that's as far as I need to go,
in terms of what assumption I'm making.
I think there are a lot of assumptions that are required from my work.
But yes, let's talk about this mathematically.
Personally, though, I'm kind of partial to something on the order of dual aspect monism,
where the physical world and the phenomenological world are sort of two shadows cast by underlying reality.
Right. And that's really what I'm sympathetic with as well.
So the classic view of that might be Russellian monism,
or maybe the idea that,
the world as it is,
is constituted from maybe exteriors and interiors,
and that they imply each other.
Right, right.
And so if we assume that and take a look at physics,
there are a lot of very, very wonderful, crisp, predictive formalisms in physics.
And so to be a qualia formalist,
it's just saying,
well, maybe we should try to apply that same sort of thinking,
scientific outlook to qualia.
So I'm fascinated by your symmetry theory of valence,
which you've been developing for several years.
So it's a theory about qualia and an approach to understanding why qualia
or specific experiences have distinct kinds of textures that they do,
which is currently a huge mystery.
And you framed this as kind of the problem that we are immediately confronted with after we solve,
the hard problem of consciousness.
Right.
There's this question of if we could figure out consciousness,
if we got a good quantitative theory of consciousness,
then what?
So at the Qualia Research Institute,
we focus a lot on the interpretation problem.
If I could figure out some mathematical object that represented what it feels like to be you,
then how can we use that for useful things?
One way to frame this is,
what's the first line in the Rosetta
Stone of consciousness?
I love that.
Yeah. Another way to frame it is what is the C. elegans of qualia? What is the simplest
place to start? It's a big problem in that no one really knows. And if we could figure
out just where to start, that would be halfway to solving it. And at QRI, we think we know
where to start. And that's with this idea of emotional valence, or how pleasant or unpleasant
an experience feels. So you have these two domains. You have the mathematical domain.
So if you have a quantitative theory of consciousness, it tells you something mathematical about
the phenomenology of a system. And then you have the phenomenological domain.
And that's talking about what qualia does the system have. And there's this big issue
of how do you map between these? How do you point to something in the math domain and
then connect it to something in the domain of phenomenology?
The approach that I've taken is to link symmetry in the mathematical domain with emotional
valence.
And that's the phenomenological domain.
Valence being how positive we interpret an experience to be, right?
Yes, that's correct.
And so you've identified valence and then symmetry as a particularly interesting natural
kind. Is it a natural kind?
Yeah. So Plato and Aristotle talked about natural kinds and trying to carve reality
at the joints. And this is, of course, it is the problem in consciousness research.
Where do you even start? What words fit the contours of reality? And we do think that
emotional valence is well defined across all conscious experiences and the simplest
place to start.
Right. I think typically people tend to lump valence in with the whole spectrum of emotions
that humans are capable of having and presumably many other species. But you're saying actually
valence is a fundamental action.
in the space of qualia, right?
Right. So emotions are complex. So Lisa Barrett has this interesting paper, Are Emotions
Natural Kinds? And her answer is no, that they're complex bundles of phenomenology,
behavior and dynamics. And it's very messy and complicated. But what I'm saying is that
emotional valence is a building block of emotions. It's this atomic thing that you can build
over complicated things out of.
And you've suggested that this in some sense corresponds to the mathematical symmetry that
is occurring in the brain.
That's our hypothesis. Essentially, harmony in the brain feels good. Full stop. That is
literally what feels good. Now, that's not to say that listening to high harmony stimuli
or high constant stimuli always feels good.
Right.
But that's due to boredom causing dissonance in our brain so that we move on.
So boredom is the brain introducing dissonance? That's interesting. Could you say more about that?
So when the brain is too good at predicting its inputs, it gets bored. And it tells you basically,
hey, you know, this is not worth paying attention to as much as before. And then it's like, oh, I'm
bored.
So there's this explore versus exploit dichotomy. And boredom is kind of advanced technology
that the brain uses in order to shift from exploit back to explore.
So we've already got software programs that can create very beautiful music just by implementing
the underlying mathematics that music employs. So do you think that by using this theory
about valence, we'd be able to create music that was
algorithmically optimized to be like the most positive music that we could listen to?
And presumably, if we could do that, what we'd get would be pretty extraordinary. So
yeah, I'm curious what genre of music you think that would be.
Yeah, that's a great question. I would say, I mean, first of all, just a disclaimer
that everyone's brain is a little bit different. So there might not be one piece of music that
works equally well.
Right.
So I think that's a really important question, which is, if this thinking about valence
is correct, what accounts for our different tastes in things like music?
Right. Essentially, I want to say the biggest component of this is what kind of
mind music is already going on inside your head. And you want to harmonize with that.
You may prefer songs with a rhythm or a tempo that's kind of calibrated for that.
Hey, if you like heavy metal music, maybe something really interesting and maybe a little
dissonant is going on in your head already. And I mean, it's also a function of what mood are you in
right now. And some moods, you might like heavy metal and some moods, you might like something
more upbeat or... But very importantly, the same thing is going on in the head of somebody who's
listening to heavy metal and enjoying it versus listening to techno or dance or club or blues and
enjoying it. And that's harmony in the brain. So you've suggested that it's kind of the
mind's goal to have more harmony. What does being in a state of high symmetry or high harmony
do for the brain? How does it orient a mind towards
expanding or developing consciousness? Does it have a kind of role or is it just a fact about
the way that mind exists in a kind of metaphysical sense? Yeah. So I would say it is a background
kind of physical law, like gravity is universal. The symmetry theory of valence would be universal
through in humans, in dogs and dinosaurs and conscious aliens. I would also say that just from
an evolutionary perspective, that harmony in the brain seems to be a success condition.
It's something that maybe we're not programmed to experience a lot,
but we are programmed very, very heavily to seek it out because it's linked to what causes
temporary harmony in the brain, such as eating a lot of calories or having good things happen to
you or accomplishing your goals. The brain is geared toward that being a success condition.
I guess what I'm still slightly unclear about is if we have this success condition and let's say
that we do achieve it from time to time, does that then serve to be an optimal state to then
make further inferences? And is there a kind of intrinsic value about a lot of symmetry and
harmony, which projects in some teleScript orScript orScript orScript orScript orScript orScript orScript
of mind in a positive direction. Right. Well, this gets into the question of can we get to
ought from is. Ethics. Right. Ethics. I think this is the bridge that if we say, okay,
all value boils down to consciousness and value of consciousness is based on the emotional valence
of the experience. And the emotional valence is wholly dependent on the symmetry of the
mathematical representation. Then it doesn't take much of a jump from there to say, okay,
this actually gives us a prescriptive understanding of what we're here to do.
There's a lot of evolutionary pressures and so on. But if we're here to optimize the universe's
qualia,
then we should focus heavily on symmetry and valence. Yeah, I would generally agree with that.
And I don't think we can easily get away from the fact that all value and meaning are realized in
conscious experience. I know I always say it, but maybe that's a necessary part of the universe. But
consciousness is the way that value is realized in the world. And as we're starting to recognize
this and begin to integrate it collectively, to me, this is leading us to orientate
our choices and our ethics toward this vast, unrealized possibility space of possible
conscious experiences, which are as real in many ways as tomorrow morning. So I think we can see
ourselves in the present moment as making choices that prune away branches from what we are capable
of realizing in that space. Right. I like the way that you put that, that they're as real as tomorrow
morning. Thanks.
I think it's really important to just know what's out there, to have a map of consciousness or the possible
state space of conscious
experience because we really don't right now, we don't even know how good the future could be because we don't have this map.
Right, and in a sense I think we can say that by definition we don't know what the value is that can be realized in this possibility space.
But the one thing I think that we can know in the sense that saying that it's real is that we know that there is incredible value that could be realized in consciousness.
And we also know at the same time, that sophisticated
As sophisticated and complex and developed as we are, we in all likelihood only occupy a very tiny corner in terms of the space of mind that could exist.
And so there's an enormous space to be realized.
I think that the possibility space of consciousness is in a very important sense our birthright.
And we just have to figure out how to do that.
And figure out what kind of thing it is and how to navigate it.
Is it the case that we could be equally concerned about the space of consciousness or optimizing the qualia of the universe?
Even if, for example, materialism was the case, if we went in the direction of Dennett,
we could still say well you know for all practical purposes consciousness exists and the things that we care about are in consciousness.
Even if the way that we ultimately formalize that is as a
some kind of illusion. And I'm not a big fan of that view, but it strikes me that even if that's
the case, we'd still have many of the same intuitions about ethics, because it would still
reduce to concerns about conscious experience. Well, when I say consciousness, and when someone
like Dennett says consciousness, we seem to be saying two different things. In a sense, I think
you're right, that we can both at least use the same words in a conversation and seem to make
sense. But on a more deeper level, they chart out very, very, very different universes.
If consciousness is real, is formalizable, then moral value is objective. Whereas if consciousness
is this kind of high-level abstraction,
or leaky reification, then there's nothing objective about it. And we're kind of left to
our own devices as to how to navigate this. And it sort of precludes any systematizing
of this field. I think that if you want to point to a specific part of the brain and say,
that's where the magic happens, then we do need a consistent story about how the magic happens,
and I think any consistent story about how the magic happens will also be panpsychist.
So let me ask you this. Do you think that panpsychism gives us a kind of a more intelligible
account of reality? Does panpsychism make sense of, in addition to why it is that we have conscious
experience, but other mysteries or unknowns that we have in science and about the universe?
Right. So this question of what exactly should we be aiming for is important. And some people
think that, well, a good theory of consciousness should match my intuitions. And I think that
that isn't always a reasonable assumption. I think reality could have some surprises
in store for us there. But I think that how I would put it is that a good theory of consciousness
will be consistent.
Such that, for example, gravity is a consistent theory. And ideally, it should be able to make
novel predictions, bold novel predictions that we can try to falsify, and hopefully predictions
which we can't get to if we don't assume consciousness is real.
Do you have any intuitions about what kinds of predictions that panpsychism could make,
which perhaps could even be...
verifiable?
Right. So Giulio Tononi's IIT does make some predictions in terms of which systems
are conscious and which brain states are conscious. It can predict which people can wake up from
comas based on the kind of background level of consciousness in their brain. It does this
by sort of ringing the brain like a bell with TMS and then...
Transcranial magnetic stimulation.
That's right. That's right. And then seeing how long it rings,
how long it takes to get back to whatever state it was in.
And they're doing much, much better than anyone else predicting who will wake up from a coma, which is really impressive.
So at QRI, we're trying to add another element to this.
So our work is compatible with IIT, but we also add emotional valence to the mix.
So for instance, we think that we have a method by which you can put somebody in a neuroimaging system like an fMRI,
and we can objectively tell you how happy or sad they are.
Right. And yeah, this strikes me as something that could be amazingly useful and could fundamentally change how we interact with each other.
I mean, if it was possible for us to have a kind of representation of what other people's mental states are in, and our own as well, of course,
there would certainly be times when this would be something that we would want to share.
And obviously, there would be many times when we would probably want to keep this private.
But assuming that your theory is correct, and the degree of harmony in our brains does correspond to how positive we feel,
imagine technologies which will eventually change.
But if they actually come out of that recognition, they could be abused.
But I can imagine that fundamentally changing how we interact with each other.
And in another respect, I think if we could glimpse at more of the experience of other people,
and maybe the pain that other people are in and other beings,
I imagine that we would be much more quick to help them.
And who knows what this technology would look like.
But I think if we had a focus on the focus of the focus.
sense of someone's emotional valence in real time it's kind of an extraordinary impact on the way
that we interact with each other right like a 21st century mood ring exactly yeah and if there is an
objective fact of the matter about how we feel and if if we can kind of find the right lens by which
to view this and i think um atisoi's work and qri's work constitutes that lens um then that
change human interaction and to just take a step back if it's possible to do what iit claims to be
able to do which is simply to point at things in the world and be able to say yes this system is
conscious and to a certain degree this is of course not something that we know how to do at
the moment you know i just assume that you're conscious because you seem conscious and you know
maybe i have a 10 percent less confidence that an animal has consciousness and
things get a little bit more squirrely when i look at a plant or a cell but my intuition
philosophically is that there's a lot of consciousness going on in the world around us
but if we could have a formal way of knowing that and develop what tononi calls the qualia scope
and look around the world and see where consciousness is being instantiated in the
world i mean that would be huge maybe even transform society and you know specifically
in coma patients like you were saying we would be able to know if there was someone
still inside there is there a conscious mind inside that brain or are these anesthetics truly
effective in the way that we think they are or are they just simply blocking memory for example
and so formalism about consciousness give us a lot of answers to questions that we really care about
but this additional step a formalism about valence that could be the first line of the
rosetta stone of consciousness so yeah it's definitely fascinating and even if it turns
out to be incorrect that would be independently interesting as well because we'd be able to ask
why and if not a mathematical symmetry then what sort of formalism should we be pursuing
yeah well it's it's building a new science and i always go back to the alchemy to chemistry example
it's a good one yeah yeah and it's this idea of you know alchemy was
like clearly something cool was happening there but people were very very confused about exactly
how to think about reality and then over time and with a lot of effort we you know figured out this
periodic table and you know electron shells and it started to become systematic and i think we're
we're just at the beginnings of that in consciousness and it's incredibly exciting i i
wake up in the morning and i see it i'm like
what kind of thing can we systematize today or or this year
Nerd.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's amazing to me that we find ourselves at this time in history.
It's quite exciting, really, to live in a time where we haven't actually got answers to these really fundamental questions.
And in many ways, we're not even really asking the question in the right way yet in terms of ethics.
And we don't really know how to delineate from the kind of parochial ethics that we've got as a result of our evolutionary history as primates and particular kinds of cultural idiosyncrasies that we have.
And those ethical norms, for example, which may be universalizable and they may apply to societies of minds wherever they're instantiated in the universe.
And yet we don't have any way of thinking about that clearly yet.
Yeah.
I mean, just in the last 10 years with IIT coming onto the scene, we're beginning to be able to ask the right questions.
And it is exciting to be living in an era with real questions that haven't been answered yet.
And I would agree that asking the correct questions is at least half the battle.
I feel like a lot of people haven't kept up on the literature and realized how
quickly things are moving.
And there's a lot hanging in the balance.
There's a lot at stake.
There's a non-trivial chance that the whole enterprise of life on this planet could come to an end.
There's at least a certain degree to which it's true to say that solving these problems, this navigation problem of ethics, for example, of what it is we're trying to achieve together here in the universe is going to be important for the survival of the entire enterprise itself.
And so the extent to which we can do what you're doing is going to be very important.
you're advocating which is to orient ourselves to how do we optimize qualia in the universe
we're moving beyond this very species specific parochial view about human preferences to this
space of consciousness which is in many ways what we really are would you agree with that
is consciousness what we really are yes um absolutely and and i would consider myself a
qualiaist in in terms of uh like what is real what should be optimized i think a lot is hanging
in the balance here so um nick bostrom talks about in super intelligence that there are trade-offs
that we can make um in terms of increasing efficiency and um sort of with the with
transhumanism and advanced technology and ai then more things are on the table there are
more things that are on the table and more things are on the table and more things are on the table
that we can trade for greater efficiency and he makes this uh he has this wonderful quip that
we should make sure not to trade off the wrong things uh and by which he means consciousness
because then we might end up building a disneyland with no children i love that it's very similar to
what um uval noah harari says at the end of his book homo deus he basically says you know at some
point if we keep moving down this
hyper technological path which is presumably inevitable we can't change course really even
if we wanted to and at some point we're going to be confronted with the choice of what do we value
most information processing or consciousness and of course it's a rhetorical question because the
answer is without consciousness we don't really have the we don't have a perspective by which to
gauge the value of the answer and so oh yeah i wanted to ask you uh this it relates to um
what what you're talking about here so because it seems more or less um more and more that we're
outsourcing our cognition into technology uh for example you know with our phones nobody really
thinks that our phones are conscious right but you know we're all glad that we don't have to
remember phone numbers anymore so i guess what i'm interested in getting your opinion about is
what do you think is kind of the optimal line when it comes to outsourcing our cognition could we go
too far with this and
we certainly want consciousness there at some level right i do think that there are things that
we shouldn't outsource just if we outsource more and more to unconscious processes then pretty soon
we won't be useful consciousness won't be useful that which actually has value won't be useful
so this is really uh another one of your areas which you've spent quite a lot of time thinking
about and you mentioned to me
that one of the initial reasons which brought you out here to the bay area was
ai safety and so why is ai safety something that you've given
a lot of attention to.
So I tend to believe that AI is dangerous, both in terms of a GI, artificial general
intelligence, and just narrow AI.
You can do a lot of damage with computers, basically.
And the smarter the computer is, the more damage you could do.
So yeah, I moved out to the Bay to focus on AI safety.
I then sort of realized that consciousness was even less studied than AI safety.
And I felt like it was my duty to help change that.
An open question here is, what do we do after we win?
If we figure out how to build very intelligent AI, and we basically have a blank check to
live in any sort of future that we want, what sort of future should we want to live in?
And I think this goes straight back to consciousness.
To understand this, we have to understand what has value, what the possibility space
is.
Yeah, I very much agree.
And, you know, I think there is this real question that, you know, what are we going
to do when we have computers which are more intelligent than we are?
And, you know, what kind of potential risks and gains, like, could be waiting for us down
the AI path?
And I certainly think that we should take very seriously the idea that some kind of
self-sufficiency, you know, is a very important part of the AI, and that we should be able to
If it gets loose, so to speak, it could be enormously destructive.
And of course, you know, there's Nick Bostrom's example in which a rampant artificial intelligence
turns the entire cosmic horizon into paperclips.
And people love that example.
But the much more immediate concern, presumably, is the risk that a superintelligence would
pose to us if it wasn't aligned with either our preferences or intrinsic interests of
consciousness to develop and rarify. Right, so I think human survival is
important. I also think that sort of the grand arc of what kind of qualia are
instantiated by the universe is the important thing. And I think that we're
in a very critical time point right now. I actually think that if we don't solve
AI, then there's a grand opportunity cost there. And it's possible that that
future will be permanently less good than if we do solve consciousness before
we develop AI.
I suppose if super AI is sort of inevitable, I guess the challenge that we
have is to direct it to becoming something that we wouldn't mind replacing
us.
Right. And you know, whether or not it has consciousness seems to be central to
that.
I think that's very important. So there's this question of a, how do we prevent
AI from killing us and using our atoms for something else? And that's a problem.
But also, if we figured out that to some extent, how do we teach AI how to be kind
to us, how to be benevolent? And there are all these approaches from what's called
indirect normativity. And it's just kind of looking at how humans treat each other,
and then extrapolating that for teaching an AI. And I think that's a very imperfect
approach for a lot of reasons.
It's very specific to our particular time and species and so on.
Right. There's this big divide in ethics on this question. And it's this question of,
is goodness preference satisfactory?
Right.
Like, if you want some ice cream, I give you some ice cream, and then you're happy.
So should we define things in terms of satisfying people's preferences? Or should we define
things in terms of making sure they have good qualia? I'm of the second camp. I think that
people often don't know what they want, or what they want won't actually make them happy.
And we can have second order desires.
About our preferences, like that maybe we know that ice cream isn't that good for us.
Sure. But even that doesn't directly connect to phenomenology. And I think phenomenology is what
literally actually matters.
And with respect to this question in ethics, that what we should care about is either
satisfying our preferences, or as you mentioned, creating good qualia. Is creating good qualia,
is that synonymous with developing the possibility space of consciousness that we're,
capable of sampling the value of?
I
would generally agree.
So I'm working on a post about utopia and what makes a good society.
And my conclusion is that there are two components to this and people usually only focus on one
or the other.
But we really do need to bring in both.
And the first component is just having a functional civilization, a working society in which
people can engage in positive some dynamics.
And so being able to keep the lights on, you can't have nice things without civilization.
And then the follow up to that is that just living in a healthy society does not necessarily
or causally make people happy.
Obviously, I think it would very much contribute to this.
But I think in that sense, if we have a social
surplus, if our society is running well, and then we can decide what to put our surplus
in, I think it makes a lot of sense to optimize the universe's qualia.
I think that's what literally has intrinsic value.
Good qualia.
And good qualia is more than just a lot of valence.
It's how do we...
I suppose we have to leave the interpretation of what is good qualia.
And what is not good qualia to consciousness itself.
Right.
I think that it's kind of early days to say anything very firmly.
But I think that a good starting point here would be experiences that have very high emotional
valence.
If the thing that ultimately matters in the universe is positive valence, is our
goal in some sense to tile the entire universe?
I think there's this separation of philosophically what the correct answer is, and practically
what we should do today.
And I think these diverge on this question.
I do think that experiences with positive valence are literally what seems to have value.
And yes, we should optimize for that.
But only in the longest of terms.
I mean, it would be easy for humankind to just decide, oh, let's optimize for positive
valence.
We kind of burn ourselves out in this flash of light, and then everything's dark.
I'm more of a fan of taking the long view.
Taking the long, long, long, long view.
The cosmological perspective.
The cosmological perspective, exactly.
And seeing the value in...
Yeah.
The value in civilization, in things that keep things working, that keep the lights
on.
I like to say that without civilization, we can't have any nice things.
Let me ask you this, because it's something which I perhaps don't quite fully understand
about this view of positive valence.
So there's two things about it which I perhaps don't probably understand.
The first thing is that we can certainly feel very good.
We can feel very good.
And it be to our detriment.
So we can become addicted to opium or something like that, and we can wither away, but we're
in total bliss.
And on the other hand, there's a lot of challenging experiences, let's say, which aren't associated
with a lot of positive valence and may feel pretty rough.
And yet, at a later time, we metabolize those experiences having enormous amounts of value.
I think so.
Yeah.
Suffering can be redemptive.
It can put us on a better path.
It can allow us to grow in ways that we would not have grown without it.
Which isn't to say that we should fall in love with suffering.
I think it serves a very important functional role in the human psyche.
And also just, I mean, if you're at a local maxima, then to get anywhere better, you have
to go down before you get up.
At the same time, you're not alone.
things about human experience do hurt a lot. So if we can replace those things with things that
fulfill the same function, but are more pleasant, less unpleasant, less painful, then that would be
kind of a viable path forward. I think our brains are pretty good at using suffering for
kind of redemptive purposes often, but
you also have edge cases where things break. You know, you have people who suffer from depression for 30 years. You have a grieving process which lasts a decade or
So, I think that, um, not all suffering is redemptive.
And if we focus on those forms of non-redemptive suffering, uh, that's the low hand for it
here.
But I want to take a bit of a left turn here because I really want to get into some of
your cosmological, uh, speculations about consciousness.
And you've agreed to talk about these even though, you know, we're definitely in the,
well into the realm of, of speculation.
But that is kind of what this podcast is about.
And so this is, it's definitely a place for open-mindedness.
So, uh, and I find particularly, uh, some of what you've, uh, speculated about in the
appendix of your paper, uh, absolutely fascinating.
And so, and it's the idea that, you know, if qualia is in some sense all around us, uh,
for example, if some essentially idealist or panpsychist theory of consciousness is
true, then there's presumably a lot more experience that's going on in the universe than just
us or, or even life on this planet.
And of course, we're not just talking about aliens.
Uh, and I think for example, you speculated that the big bang, uh, probably felt pretty
awesome.
Can you talk about that?
Yeah.
So, um, yeah, just to, to touch on the speculative nature of this, um, I kind of stuffed all
this stuff in the, uh, the last appendix of my paper.
Um, I definitely wanted to include it, but, uh, it wasn't sort of core to my argument.
So for, uh, for listeners who maybe are a little leery of, you know, biting the whole
bullet here, you know, you don't, you don't have to, but at the same time, if we have
a, um, sort of an objective theory of consciousness that properly crisply formal theory of consciousness,
then we should be able to apply it to anything literally.
And so the same theory of consciousness, which gives us a crisp formal result, if we pointed
at a human brain should give just as good of a result, just as precise a result if we
pointed at, you know, a dog or a dog.
A dinosaur, a chair, a tree.
Um, but it should also give good result if we pointed at cosmological phenomenon, right?
Such as the big bang or such as stars or black holes.
So this would be the qualia scope that Tononi talks about, right?
So we take our qualia scope and we start directing it out into the cosmos.
Where do you see the consciousness lighting?
Yeah.
Coming up in this field of view.
Right.
So assuming that, uh, Tononi is right in that integrated information is kind of the magic
that generates consciousness.
Then in my appendix, I list a number of possibilities.
One is maybe big things have a lot of qualia.
So maybe stars, but especially black holes, there's just so much mass in a black hole.
if they have hair, so to speak, that could sort of encode integrated information or allow integrated information,
then presumably it does feel like something to be a black hole.
So there's something about black holes which could have integrated information.
Certainly they have information, but integrated information in a black hole.
Right. I think based on what we know about black holes, that's a live possibility.
And presumably it would be stretched across the surface.
Right. And potentially it could be a lot more conscious than any one person.
Wow.
And to an extreme order of magnitude, perhaps.
Yeah.
Many orders of magnitude.
I really want to get back to why it is that you speculated that the Big Bang could have felt really good.
And if so, was that the kind of omega point and that we are sometimes just living in the aftermath of that and the main event has already passed?
Right. So I do mention that in my paper as, you know, very speculatively.
I like how you assign probabilities to some of these things as well.
Status, highly speculative.
Sure, sure. You have to. But I felt like it was wrong not to go there.
So there's this.
This idea of eternal inflation, that the Big Bang is sort of ongoing.
It's this infinite process that doesn't get depleted.
This special sort of matter that's decaying into normal matter but doesn't itself deplete.
And this tends to be described in the literature as a very high symmetry process. And so if there is consciousness associated with this process, then I'm speculating, and this is complete speculation, but it should probably feel pretty good.
That would be the understatement of the century.
Right. Do you have a view about where the universe might be heading with respect to the development of qualia?
Could it be that we could be heading towards another kind of singularity of infinite complexity of consciousness and mind at some point if, say for example,
and I feel like I speculate about this a lot on this podcast, but could it be that life eventually saturates the entire universe
in some way and optimizes all of the matter in the universe and maybe it creates Max Tegmark's perceptronium?
How do you see the idea that everything is in some sense inevitably heading toward a kind of conscious omega point?
Yeah. I outline a few possibilities in the paper of if humans aren't the center of qualia in the universe.
That if there's more qualia than just human qualia out there, then where's the higher quality?
How do you see the universe operating?
Large scale phenomenon like black holes, small scale phenomenon like virtual particles popping in and out of existence all the time,
quantum fuzz is one way to describe that, and then the past, the Big Bang, if it created any qualia, it would be creating a lot of qualia
and the future, that it could be that the universe is just starting to wake up and there's a lot of qualia in its future.
I tend to think of a U-shaped curve.
I think it's plausible that the Big Bang created a lot of qualia.
And then we are sort of a qualia god chatter.
I love it when you say that.
Yeah. Re-coalescing 14 billion years after the main event.
And then I think this process could accelerate and the U could go back up.
And in some sense, that might be another Big Bang.
In a way.
So this would be a, what was the name of that cosmology?
The Big Bounce.
But it's a big bounce between omega points of consciousness.
Yeah. I mean, in general, I just want to say that this is very speculative.
But I'm always willing to bite the bullet and kind of plug things in and see where we get.
And I think that you do get some interesting implications for cosmology.
And long term future thinking, depending on what theory of consciousness is true.
Right. So in principle, we should be able to extrapolate any formalized theory of consciousness all the way out into cosmology.
Right. Right. Exactly.
Let's return to the symmetry theory of valence.
And perhaps you could re-summarize it briefly.
What do you see is next for this theory?
And how do you see it being tested?
Right.
So just to summarize briefly, the symmetry theory of valence suggests that harmony in the brain literally is pleasure.
That's the short version.
The somewhat more formal version is that...
It's a very short version.
Yeah. Yeah.
Symmetry in the mathematical representation of phenomenology literally is pleasure.
And that's a metaphysical truth in a way.
Right.
That would be true.
But if you look at the theory of the universe across all conscious beings, whether they're humans or aliens halfway across the galaxy.
Like a law of the universe, like gravity.
And this is a theory which is testable.
Right.
And that's what kind of makes it special.
Because it's testable.
It's falsifiable.
So we're saying that harmony in the brain feels good.
Just...
that is what feels good. So if we can put somebody in an fMRI and measure this, the amount of
harmony in their brain, we should be able to tell how happy they are even better than they can.
Right. I was going to mention this earlier when we first talked about this. You know, people's
own self-reporting of their experience isn't always the best indicator of what they're
experiencing. So, for example, you know, we could be wrong about how stressed we are.
It's a surprise when people have a nervous breakdown because they're not fully aware of
just how much stress they're in.
And yet to say that we may not necessarily be the best judge of our own conscious experience
seems very counterintuitive.
Right, right.
I mean, in the short term, we're going to have to use people's self-reports as the
gold standard just to validate the theory.
But in the long run, I think we can improve on that.
Yeah.
Yeah. And again, this is a substrate independent view about the nature of consciousness. So it's
an approach to looking at qualia, which doesn't necessarily force us to pick a team when it comes
to our particular theory of consciousness. And you choose to plug in Tononi's integrated
information theory into this because it makes the right kinds of prediction. But in principle,
we could have a different view about what consciousness is. And we could still,
in principle, plug this into the symmetry theory of valence and see how it works.
Right. We're pretty careful to be theory agnostic in terms of we don't have to pick a horse
in order to talk about the interpretation problem. We assume that trying to derive a
formalism for consciousness is a very important thing. And we don't have to pick a horse in
order to talk about the interpretation problem. We assume that trying to derive a formalism is
the correct approach. But we don't assume anything about which specific formalism might be true.
So integrated information theory is probably the leading theory right now. But it could be true,
or it could be false. And we don't necessarily have a need to come down on the other side there.
Right. So to bring in another potential theory of consciousness,
maybe we believe that we need a quantum theory of consciousness and that it's important that our
theory of consciousness pays attention to the quantum level of reality and all of the weird and
interesting stuff that happens down there. And if so, Hamroff and Penrose might be getting closer
with their orchestrated objective reduction theory of consciousness. So if this turned out to be
the right formalism or closer to the right form of consciousness, then we might be able to do a lot of
to the right formalism. Could we plug this into your symmetry theory of valence? Would that work?
Yes. So orchestrated object reduction, ORC-OR, is definitely a player in this space.
Maybe we ought to summarize it very briefly.
Yeah. Essentially, with ORC-OR, consciousness is the collapse of quantum superpositions in the brain,
especially having to do with the microtubules of neurons.
It's also a panpsychism as well.
Yes. I think that ORC-OR is in an interesting position in that it has a lot of the pieces
of the puzzle to formula or attempt to formula phenomenology. But it doesn't make the final leap.
It gets 90% of the way there. But it's still a formula. And so I'm going to spend a little bit of time
it just doesn't go all the way. So IIT has this really clever way to draw the boundary
of a conscious system, and then it takes the information inside this boundary, and then it
rearranges it to represent phenomenology in order to precisely represent what it feels like to be
that system. But ORCOR, it draws the boundary around a conscious system, but it doesn't do
with the information in the boundary. It doesn't output a formal representation of phenomenology
like IIT does. And I don't think that there's anything intrinsically holding ORCOR back
on this. Penrose and Hamaroff just haven't made that final step.
Right. So in principle, ORCOR could be developed to make this more clear boundary.
I think so. And I would certainly encourage them,
to do that. Cool. Let's finish this off somehow.
Psychedelics and QRI? Yeah. Let's talk about psychedelics and QRI.
What is to you so interesting about psychedelics and what it can teach us about qualia?
Yeah. So a lot of times when a system is functioning normally, a lot of its internal
workings are hidden. And psychedelics are interesting in that they
perturb systems in fairly predictable ways, repeatable ways. And then suddenly things
aren't working normally and things that you just took as
as givens as eternal facts about consciousness or the mind are suddenly different. So they're a very useful tool by which to try to chart out the state space of consciousness.
Right. One of the things that strikes me about the psychedelic experience is how it's an example of just how wired we are to experience symmetry, especially in the visual aspect.
So if you're going to have a very potent psychedelic experience, the one thing that you rely on is that you're going to be experiencing a lot of symmetry and a lot of tessellating patterns and a lot of apparent meaning in those patterns.
Perhaps that suggests that, you know, maybe symmetry is representative of the structure of the mind in some fundamental way.
Yeah. My colleague Andrés Gómez-Emilsson and also someone by the name of Steve Lahar
Yeah.
have looked into this symmetry and psychedelic connection as well. I think there's something there. And I think there's sort of the brain naturally sort of tries to
symmetrify things, symmetrify inputs, in a sense, trying to compress them with specific symmetry patterns.
Right.
And I think with some psychedelics, you can kind of viscerally experience that.
Right.
If the symmetry theory of valence is the appropriate way to go about understanding how it is that we feel the ways that we feel, and especially under psychedelics,
potentially an application for symmetry theory of valence is that we could take someone that was having, for example, a particularly challenging psychedelic experience,
and we could introduce or try and
evoke more symmetry in their experience.
Yeah, there's a lot there. I think it's absolutely true that if the symmetry theory of valence is true, it should have a lot of immediate practical applications.
And I think, you know, rescuing people from bad trips would be a good example.
I could imagine a good NowThis video about, like, new theory of qualia.
Yeah.
Saving people from the precipice of infinity at Burning Man this year.
Right. Right.
Of course, you'd have to have, like, Andreas there with some sand plates on top of some speakers and showing people. That would really…
Yeah. We sort of already do this. I think that, like, set and setting are seen as very important.
And the set and setting that are often encouraged are very sort of harmonious, not distanced.
So this idea is already in play.
But one thing that it could maybe offer over and above what's out there right now is more of a multimodal approach
and trying to harmonize the different patterns of symmetry that you're exposed to.
If you have some sort of a visual pattern and then you have some sort of a different audio pattern,
it's important not just to have them be symmetrical or harmonious, but to have them symmetrically or harmonious with each other.
Right.
And I think that keeping the symmetry theory of valence in mind as you undergo a journey could itself have a lot of use.
Well, Mike, thank you so much for joining me today and having this conversation.
I find the way that you think fascinating.
I'm very intrigued by your research with symmetry and valence.
Where can people go to find out more about your work and ideas and the Qualia Research Institute?
Yeah. So just let me say thank you as well for having me.
Real pleasure.
Yeah. Thanks.
You can check out our work at qualiaresearchinstitute.org.
We have a blog on there and kind of our core research.
My colleague, Andres Gomez-Emelson, has a blog at qualiacomputing.com, which is also excellent.
I'll put links to all those in the descriptions as well.
Well, Mike, thanks again for joining me on the Waking Cosmos podcast.
And I really hope we can do this again sometime soon.
Thanks.
Me too.
Okay. I hope you enjoyed today's episode with Mike Johnson from the Qualia Research Institute.
If you're listening on YouTube, let me know what you thought about today's topics in the comments.
And if you enjoyed this episode, hitting like helps us out.
And if you're not already, now is also a great time to subscribe and
join us on this adventure. Remember if you want to support Waking Cosmos and these open-minded conversations about consciousness and reality, you can help me turn this into a full-time project by supporting me on my Patreon page and the link to that is in the description. Thank you.
Alright, I will see you next time for more episodes of Waking Cosmos, exploring the nature of consciousness, reality, and life's place in the universe.
That's about it from me. I hope you have a beautiful day.