Some news and accomplishments from the last month: Invited talk: I (Mike) gave a talk on “The Future of Neuroscience” in Moscow, Russia; the basic theme was a light introduction for non-specialists to some of the most interesting current threads in neuroscience. Slides (English) and video (English+Russian). Podcast: The Waking…
Recent QRI highlights – September 2018
A brief work/links update: A future for neuroscience is finally up; if you’ve found yourself wondering, “how does QRI even begin to connect what we can measure about the brain to what’s happening in the mind?” this writeup would be a good place to start. Last week, my colleague Andrés was at…
Videos from TSC2018
The following are the presentations QRI gave at The Science of Consciousness in Tucson last week: Michael Edward Johnson introducing some of the philosophical methods QRI uses to study qualia: Part I talks about what it means to ‘solve’ consciousness; Part II talks about how to go about interpreting the…
QRI at The Science of Consciousness 2018
My colleague Andrés Gómez Emilsson and I will be at TSC2018 in Tucson next week– please feel welcome to say hello! I’ll be speaking on the foundational underpinnings of qualia– what it means to ‘solve’ consciousness, some heuristics for interpreting the output of theories like IIT, and introducing the Symmetry…
The problems of consciousness: a taxonomy
David Chalmers has had an enormous impact on how philosophy deals with the mind. He famously coined the distinction between the ‘easy problems’ of consciousness, or how the brain works, and the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, or why we’re conscious at all. In reality, lots of the problems Chalmers tags…
Universal Base
Here’s Daniel Dennett (in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea) explaining how deeply transformative the idea of evolution was at the time: Did you ever hear of universal acid? This fantasy used to amuse me and some of my schoolboy friends—I have no idea whether we invented or inherited it, along with Spanish…
Tinnitus, Depression, and BART: a shared factor?
“What Makes Tinnitus, Depression, and the Sound of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) so Awful: Dissonance“: The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) is often criticized for its loudness. According to measurements made in 2010, the noise reaches up to 100 decibels, enough to cause permanent hearing loss in the…
QRI is almost out of stealth mode
We’re a group of systems thinkers in the Bay Area who are building a new science of consciousness.