Qualia Research Institute and other aligned communitiesBasic
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Researchers trying to mathematically understand phenomenological features of our experience, both sober and altered by substances, trying to connect it with the mathematics of the brain activity, advancing our understanding of the mind so that we can design more advanced and efficient neurotechnology, fix negative states of mind such as chronic pain, engineer stable mental wellbeing, or even upgrade us to enjoy our life to more than the current possible maximum, while providing its own
- This community is centered around everything that we experience, in other words, qualia! Let's experience the most interesting and pleasant life, help others do so by eliminating suffering, or if you want to know everything, all through the lens of - rationalism, effective altruism, transhumanism, hedonistic imperative, stoicism, postrationalism, metamodernism,... - psychology, neuroscience, phenomenology, philosophy, mathematics, physics, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, medicine, psychiatry, computer science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, memetics, cybernetics, chaos theory, complex dynamical systems theory, game theory,... - meditation, trance, altered states of mind,... - visual art, poetry, and so on! Today, there aren't many scientific ways to describe conscious experience. Qualia Research Institute is working to solve this problem. Goals are ambitious yet achievable: - Develop a precise mathematical language for describing subjective experience - Understand the nature of emotional valence (happiness and suffering) - Map out the full space of possible conscious experiences - Build technologies to radically improve people's lives Qualia Computing is an inter-disciplinary project that seeks to identify the computational properties of subjective experience. As a series of subgoals, all of the following research programs will further this overarching goal: 1) Characterize the dimensions of the state-space of qualia reachable from a human mind 2) Identify the computational trade-offs of different states of consciousness (e.g. superior performance on LSD) 3) Infer a crisp functional, chemical, quantum or computational signature of hedonic tone. 4) Create quality psychophysical tools to investigate altered states of consciousness. 5) Explain the computational properties of phenomenal binding, and investigate ways of tweaking the way it operates (e.g. modify local phenomenal binding patterns using ultrasound brain st