February 2020 Update

Michael Edward Johnson

Lots to share since our last update. First, three big organizational notes:

Quintin joined QRI full-time after his summer internship, and has been hard at work prototyping hardware, coordinating research, and pulling off various logistical feats. We’re incredibly proud to have him.
QRI held a private strategy retreat in Puerto Rico in January, outlining our vision to close friends & donors — more news from the retreat to trickle out over the next months, and huge thanks to everyone who came and pledged financial and logistical support for our vision.
We’re putting together our 2020 summer internship cycle; we’re close to capacity on spots, but if you’re interested in working with us I’d encourage you to get in touch regardless.

Research-wise, on Thanksgiving we released our integrative theory of emotional updating, Neural Annealing (NA). As I wrote in the conclusion,

Neural Annealing is a neuroscience paradigm which aims to find the optimal tradeoff between elegance and detail. It does this by identifying a level of abstraction which supports parallel description under three core principles of self-organization: physical self-organization (around connectome resonances), computational self-organization (around minimization of surprise), and energetic self-organization (around conditional entropic disintegration).

There’s a lot more there, and in my admittedly biased view, I think NA is currently the neuroscience paradigm to beat for understanding the dynamics of meditation, psychedelics, musical experience, depression, trauma, and therapy.

Andrés has been continuing technical work on our CDNS algorithm for quantifying consonance, dissonance, and noise in neuroimaging data, which we think will help position us to be a central node for hedonic analysis of EEG & fMRI data. Andrés has also been putting together a formal model of the phenomenology of smell; I’ve seen the preliminary framework, and I think it’s both a powerful piece of original research and a pilot project for how to systematize any domain of qualia.

Romeo has been laying out his retranslation of Buddhist thought in (mis)Translating the Buddha; there’s a lot of gems there, with more on the way.

We’ve also been getting our volunteer network up and running, thanks in large part to our amazing volunteer coordinators, Anders and Maggie. If you reached out previously and didn’t get a response, feel free to contact us again at hello@qri.org. Finally, QRI alumni Kenneth Shinozuka and Andrew Zuckerman have been developing parts of QRI’s memeplex:

Kenneth is continuing the exploratory research he started this summer in Consciousness and the Binding Problem, and sketches out some factors in sustainable paradise engineering in A Future for Humanity, Part I.
Andrew “Zuck” Zuckerman has two provocative suggestions: I: All Anyone Cares About is Consciousness, and II: Donating to QRI Today is Like Buying Bitcoin in 2010. I agree with both.

Media:

(This presentation based on an essay published in the Berlin-based art magazine Art Against Art; see models 1 & 2, 3 & 4, 5 & 6, 7 & 8.)

Core items on our near-term horizon:

Negotiating partnerships to test STV (if you have access to high-quality EEG or fMRI data of extreme valence states, definitely let us know!)
Gathering hd-EEG data of Jhana states
Finalizing summer internship plans
Further prototyping work on an unannounced project
A follow-up to our Neural Annealing paradigm

Finally, Andrés has a [preliminary list of events and conferences he’ll be at over the next few months](https://qualiacomputing.com/2020/02/15/qualia-computing-at-tsc-2020-ips-2020-unscruz-2020-and-ephemerisle-2020/. If you’d like to chat with one of us in person, these will be good venues.

Thank you everyone on the team for all your hard work. I’m incredibly proud of what we accomplished in 2019, and 2020 looks even better.

Michael Edward Johnson, Executive Director

February 2020 Update

References

Citation