We had a rather intense April- the month started with a dinner with Scott Aaronson and some other QRI supporters in Austin. A few days later I (Mike) broke my arm during a friendly bout of arm-wrestling; in mid-month we started holding regular SF hackathons for an unannounced project, and…
QRI in March: lineages, video interviews, building Utopia
This month saw a lot of work on clarifying our core research lineages, the existing threads of research we’ve woven together to create our unique approach. We’ve now expanded our list to eight, and sorted them into three categories: formalism, self-organized systems, and phenomenology. Here’s the lead-in to the self-organized systems section:…
QRI February News: Small Conference in Thailand, Future Memeplexes, Cause X
Last month had a couple notable posts by Andres, including Burning Man Theme-Camps of the Year 2029: From Replicator to Rainbow God (1/2) – As Andres describes it, What follows is the result of an exercise in considering the questions: “Which novel memes, and meme-plexes, will be alive 10 years from now?…
QRI roundup – January
Slightly delayed round-up this month; a lot going on. Notable content releases: Romeo wrote a fantastic piece on “Why do contemplative practitioners make so many metaphysical claims?” Here are the first and last paragraphs: To paraphrase Culadasa: awakening is a set of special insights that lead to drastically reduced suffering.…
Recent QRI Highlights – December 2018
Three major pieces of content this month, two of them meditation-related- Andrés lays out a detailed theory of phenomenological time in The Pseudo-Time Arrow: Explaining Phenomenal Time With Implicit Causal Structures In Networks Of Local Binding: What is time? When people ask this question it is often hard to tell what…
Recent QRI highlights – November 2018
Some things going on in and around QRI: One of the best ways to understand a new intellectual approach is to study which existing lineages it ties together. Here’s a provisional list of the lineages behind our research. Andrés shared his vision for Psychedelic Turk: a Platform for People on Altered…
Recent QRI highlights – October 2018
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…